Season Five Finale

We have finally reached the end of season five, and back in October I wrote that “in the good old days… everything was a hoax, now everything is a grift, which is just a hoax that wants your money.” This season in grifts we had Elizabeth Holmes (and her dad), Gryften Sinema, Carlos Watson, Trump’s Media & Technology Grift (Truth Social still hasn’t launched, lol), Ian Urbina's music career, the whole premise of the Ethereum network, and the Bitfinex launderers. Not to mention the rest of crypto, which I called "the only innovative comedy right now,” and for proof of that you can open literally any link in the archive but some highlights this season were the Constitution DAO fiasco, Olive Garden on the blockchain, the fart jar NFTs and the even less plausible Cryptoland. I also explained what a DAO is so no one ever has to do that again. If you want one good crypto tab to take away from this season, it’s Dan Olson’s “Line Goes Up.”

This season “even if it’s fake it’s real” became “it is not just unknown but in a terrifying way unknowable,” so we studied Baudrillard and Wittgenstein, we tried to figure out how much milk is enough, we created the torment nexus and ate “frozen air” at a Michelin-starred restaurant that asked us “what is a man on a horse?” and we found we could not answer. We do not know.

At least there were some recurring segments we could count on. We visited the Kiwi Korner in September, September again, October, November, November again, and December. Today in Crabs: Clock, amber, chair, flight, hugs. And the Take Tree returned to bring us terrible takes from Megan McArdle and Nate Silver.

A lot of things appeared, only to immediately disappear, like Jon Stewart’s new show, The Smiths dot news, a Needle in a Timestack, Bari Weiss’s clown college, Jack Dorsey, Chris Cuomo (I hope), Jad Abumrad and Stephen Breyer, John Foley, and The Belieber Magazine. Some randos went to space, while others were weed. Elmo beefed with a rock. Sometimes we had to fight zebras with zebras.

A distant relative of Pete Wentz died, but still not Henry Kissinger, somehow.

The Bad Art Friend discourse made wreckage of media twitter and still went on after that. OZY Media collapsed gradually for nearly a whole ass month. And then collapsed some more. It is still collapsing, and will continue collapsing forever. Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend had a problem with his balls and we all got the media variant and joined the 😷🦠Hot Girl Covid✌️💞 group chat. Norman Mailer (still dead) got cancelled (again). Andrea Long Chu roasted Hanya Yanagihara, but Brian Cox was “too old, too tired and too talented for any of that shit.”

But it wasn’t all bad! Sure, we started 2022 with PBR telling us to eat ass, but we also got Wordle (© New York Times). We met Jorts the cat, who hasn’t disappointed us yet. We had a dreamy Thanksgiving dinner together. It was Franzen Season and Jaya went to Margaritaville. We had Sally Rooney discourse, and Delia got the merch. Intern Linda did a Guest Tabs, and a bunch of Interns came back all at once. I walked a marathon and you contributed an incredible $7,445 to help domestic violence survivors. TikTok made this song, which still slaps:

This Season in Transparent Shilling: If you were a paid subscriber this season, you also learned about our first openly omega pop star, childhood media microclimates, Tim Rogers's 10 hour Cyberpunk 2077 Review, recent accidents in North American mountaineering, the blood robot, my favorite newsletters, the Great Red Dragon, and the new president of cats. We also made a mixtape and a game, not to even mention Today in Polly! To unlock the extras:

The Facebook Papers dropped but no one cared except Zuck, who went Meta. Substack got in trouble for antivax misinfo, but then Spotify got in much bigger trouble for antivax misinfo, and Daniel Ek apologized every day since. Good thing we identified what Spotify’s real problem is, long before anyone else was paying attention.

Unfortunately, we are still waiting for the new Gawker’s first good post.

This Season’s Song: Petey, “Don’t Tell the Boys” (hon. mention: Wet Leg’s “Chaise Longue”)

~ Thank you I love you Season 6 starts March first goodbye! ~