Tastes Like Shrimp

The billions of cicadas in Brood X will crawl out of the ground soon, possibly sooner than expected, and I’m sure you’re wondering: are they delicious? I don’t know why but the angle everyone’s taking with cicada coverage is “you can eat them!” What you can’t eat is Jensen Karp’s Cinnamon Toast Crunch. (Content warning: bottomless horror)

Also crawling out of a hole is the last remnant of the Trump administration’s “take over an agency specifically to ruin it” approach to public service, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who has released his ten year plan to make the Postal Service slower and more expensive. He’s just LARPing how conservatives think government works at this point. At press time, the Biden administration was trying to solve the set of fiendishly difficult riddles that determine who gets to be Postmaster General.

Kyle Chayka profiled Beeple for the New Yorker in a story that masterfully avoids the phrase “complex mathematical puzzles” and brings art knowledge to what has mainly been covered as a tech story so far. NFT is now an abbreviation for “unfortunately,” like: Unfortunately, someone paid the artist Krista Kim over $500,000 for a “digital house” rendered in Unreal Engine that looks like a seapunk aquarium. Or, unfortunately Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold for $2,915,835.47.

Dean Takahashi reported yesterday in VentureBeat that Discord, a chat app where groups of gamers yell at each other, is in acquisition talks with someone for over $10 billion. Andy Baio spun the Wheel of Disappointment and by late evening, Blooomberg‘s Dina Bass and Katie Roof were reporting that the hungry hippo is Microsoft. Presumably this was all a managed effort by Discord to start a bidding war if there is one to be had, but it looks like the Teams documentation group jumped the gun a bit.

Yes, you can tell the pandemic is waning because the mass shootings have started again. From the tabs vault, here are the only two stories you really need about this. First, we have known since 2017 that America has so many mass shootings because we have so many guns, and there is no other reason. Second, as Alex Pareene wrote in 2015, this won’t stop until a lot of people are willing to stand outside gun stores holding giant signs with gruesome pictures of murdered children on them. Meanwhile Rep. Lauren Boebert (R., Gun) just can’t make any sense of it.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine is cursed. Happy GameStop Earnings Day. British man takes new pretend job. Back home in ol’ Blighty, Freddie the seal was mauled to death by a dog. The Pentagon took 22 days and produced a 20 page report to create this tweet, reports Matthew Gault in Motherboard. Emily VanDerWerff wrote about fan over-identification, or “the loop.” Burn, Casey, burn: The Dispo Inferno. New Saddam Hussein discovered hijacking vaccine shipment in West Texas. Selected cyberpunk attacks. Bill Kristol annexes Cuba:

Today’s Song: Ugly Casanova, “Smoke Like Ribbons”

~ As if this earth in fast thick tabs were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced ~

The Tabs Intern Program returns next month! There is currently one sponsor slot remaining and I am accepting intern applications right now. All the info you need is right here. It Only Tuesday.