Not A Girlboss, Not Yet A Tradwife

I help boss babes level up their business by mastering raw beef liver and breast milk ice cream.

January 16th, 2023

Allegedly the breast milk ice cream promoting dried beef liver salesman “Carnivore Aurelius” is actually a girlboss and girlbossing consultant named Caeleah Taylor, who has recently attracted attention to her liver chip business with RETVRN-core tweets featuring images lifted from blonde Swedish momfluencer Victoria Törnegren and the Nordic-looking children of a Polish homesteader that ride the precise line between “I can’t believe someone would post this” and “I am sure a lot of people believe this.”

You do kind of have to admire the self-reinforcing marketing strategy of making the online experience repellent enough that otherwise normal people yearn to yeet all their devices into a concrete vault and dedicate themselves to eating raw beef liver and wearing nothing but bone and alpaca. Her LinkedIn header is a classic:

Blurry cropped header image of a leg and butt on a foam roller, with the overlaid text: “I help boss babes level up their business by mastering their health and self-confidence.”

Also Today in Online: My “i didnt fuck a corpse” pinned tweet has people asking a lot of questions which are answered by my pinned tweet (b/w “all I did was make a philosophical video in 2018 arguing that necrophilia was morally neutral…”), The NY Times posted feet, and Bored Ape Yacht Club launched an NFT-based game about monkey poop.

Don’t miss out on the POWERSHART PACK:

Screencap from the monkey poop game promo with the caption “You can also use ApeCoin to buy power-ups that will help you,” showing an interface titled “POWERSHART PACK.”

Well, that was a rough start for a Monday, let me make it up to you: I loved Jennifer Wilson’s New Yorker review of the new volume of John le Carré’s collected letters, “A Private Spy.” 

The most revealing letter, though, might be le Carré’s gently discouraging reply, in 1988, to a ten-year-old boy who wanted advice on how to become a spy. He diagnosed his young fan with the same yearning—for adventure, for purpose—that had made Charlie susceptible to her handler’s seduction. “My guess is,” le Carré wrote, “you want excitement and a great cause. But I think and hope that if you ever find the great cause, the excitement will come naturally from the pleasure of serving it, & then you won’t need to deceive anybody, you will have found what you are looking for.”

Take your time and enjoy this, everything else I have for you today is horrors.

Toot by Scrümbled Eggs (@scrumble_eggs@mstdn.party): “If you can’t handle me at my worst just imagine how I feel.”

The Assassination of Tweetbot by the Coward Elon Musk: The Information reported that Twitter intentionally disabled certain third party clients, including Tweetbot which has given up on Twitter, and Twitterrific which called the right-wing microblogging platform an “ongoing shit show.” Elon Musk still hasn’t said anything about which clients he disabled and why.

Ryan Broderick has an interesting analysis of the theory that Mindy Kaling’s dreadful looking HBO Scooby-Doo reboot “Velma” is bad on purpose to earn word of mouth via the haters:

It feels increasingly like the people who write our movies and TV shows are really only interested in feeding those movies and TV shows back into Twitter. (The same is true for music right now, but with TikTok.) And I think people who spend a lot of time on Twitter, especially if they’re rich and famous enough for Twitter discourse to have no material consequence on their lives, write off internet outrage as just vague general “controversy” and think that controversy is inherently good because all attention is good, especially in the world of streaming.

Want some good Scooby-Doo inspired content instead? Let me pack you a little Scooby snack, sire:

Today in AI and Crypto Which Increasingly Feel Like The Same Thing: Samantha Cole in Vice: “‘My AI Is Sexually Harassing Me’: Replika Users Say the Chatbot Has Gotten Way Too Horny.” Three Arrows Capital is shopping a pitch deck for “GTX,“ which is meant to absorb debt claims on FTX in exchange for a new made-up crypto beanie that will be worth $0 as soon as the issuers have dumped all of theirs. Sure, why not. Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier have an guessay in the Times about the potential for AI-powered lobbying which weirdly fails to assign agency to anyone but the language model itself. It’s worth remembering that language generators are tools, which can only be used by people (“So far,” whisper my most pessimistic and cynical thoughts). Surfing the Waves: “On the morning of September 9th, 2021… [t]he prestigious fine art broker Sotheby’s closed an auction for 101 Bored Ape NFTs with a bid of $24.4 million,” which was apparently from FTX, who went on to sell them at significantly below market value to attract users to its NFT platform, in a perfect encapsulation of FTX’s ability to be both shady and financially incompetent. And Bitcoin has gone from below $17,000 to above $21,000 in the past week or so, which analysis suggests is due to a single seller on Binance dumping BUSD for BTC. Seems legit! Binance Deathwatch 2k23 rolls on.

Call Me ACAB:

Today in Crabs: Displaying the incredible efficiency that Tories are famous for, the UK government panel investigating the 2021 mass Teesside crab die-off has managed to produce its report without talking to scientists who investigated the event or “examining government processes as part of its inquiry,” reports Shanti Das in The Guardian. Fortunately in Japan there are still enough crabs left to make ice cream.

A white couple raising their family in rural bliss is the type of aesthetic usually deployed by the right wing to animate white nationalist fantasy. It’s such an enduring symbol, that rarely is it presented without selling you something—like defense spending or more defense spending. In its attention to the banalities of living in a home with a child, Lamb made itself unavailable to either fascist vision-boarding or the inescapable pessimism surrounding the desire to have kids. In America childrearing is expensive, exhausting, and isolating. Lamb made having a child seem nice, and made happiness within that context appear natural, inevitable even. It was a pleasant escape into sentiment that is rarely so politically neutral.

Today’s Song: Fun Lovin’ Criminals, “Scooby Snacks”

Hey that’s smooth.

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