Officiále with Cheese

INT. '74 CHEVY (MOVING) – MORNING

An old, gas guzzling, dirty, white 1974 Chevy Nova BARRELS down a street in San Francisco littered with the shells of burning Teslas. In the front seat are two young fellas – one white, one Black – both wearing cheap black suits with thin black ties under long green dusters. Their names are VINCENT VEGA and JULES WINNFIELD. Jules is behind the wheel.

JULESSo, tell me again about the checkmarks?

VINCENTOk what you want to know?

JULESBlue check means “verified,” right?

VINCENTYeah it’s verified but it ain’t 100% verified. Maybe you’re AOC or the Prime Minister of Malaysia, but maybe you just worked at BuzzFeed for a couple months in 2015, or some random SRE owed you a favor.

JULESAnd those are “the elites?”

VINCENTYeah, it breaks down like this: the blue check used to mean “verified,” but now it means they “verified” your credit card number and your ass is paying Elon Musk $8 a month. The gray check means “Official,” but get this, no one knows who gives those out or why. Finding out why anyone has a gray check is actually a right the users don’t have.

JULESOh man, I’m leaving. That’s all there is to it, I’m fucking leaving.

VINCENTI know baby, you hate it the most. But you know what the funniest thing about the new Twitter is?

JULESWhat?

VINCENTIt’s the little differences. They got the same nonsense on there now as they used to, but it’s just all a little different.

JULESExample?

VINCENTWell, John Green and Hank Green are both verified, but only John Green is “official.” 

JULESOfficial what? The official John Green? Does that mean Hank Green’s unofficial now?

VINCENTYeah, Elon’s too old for TikTok, he don’t know who the fuck Hank Green is. And get this: Lil Wayne is official, but Birdman isn’t.

JULES“Unofficial Birdman.” Ha ha! How they handle this on Facebook?

VINCENTI don’t know, I never went on Facebook.

That was fun but unfortunately before I even finished writing this little parody, Elon Musk had already scrapped the idiotic new gray check system, because he reads all of his mentions and gets red and mad when everyone dunks on his dumb ideas. I can only imagine the Twitter dev floor looks like the Captain’s Log from the Event Horizon right now.1 After cheerfully explaining the gray check system, urban camping enthusiast and Elon’s most accommodating new acolyte at Twitter Esther Crawford cheerfully explained that it was a dumb idea all along and then returned to her charging pod until it’s time to cheerfully explain the next dumb idea. Meanwhile Elon shoveled another $4 billion worth of Tesla stock into this cash furnace.

Also Today in Whoopsies: Coindesk reported this morning that Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao got a peek at the FTX books and physically recoiled, as if they also contained the Captain’s Log from the Event Horizon, and is now reconsidering his offer to pay what Matt Levine yesterday guessed was “roughly speaking, zero” dollars to acquire the “eviscerated” wreckage of “Sam Bankman-Fried’s $16 Billion Fortune.” That is Bloomberg News saying “eviscerated,” not me. Considering that just yesterday, FT reported that CZ was telling his staff the collapse of FTX had “‘severely’ eroded confidence in crypto industry,” it’s hard to imagine the sort of legal and financial horrors that would prompt him to decline to provide an orderly windup now, if only to calm his own depositors. This fourteen thousand word Sequoia Capital hagiography of Bankman-Fried is aging like a soft cheese on the car dashboard in July. I wonder if they let you wear shorts in jail?

Intern Linda wanted you to be aware of the Wikipedia page for Andy (goose), just one member of the List of Individual Birds:

Gannett is printing fake “pink slime” newspapers at its actual Des Moines Register printing plant, reports Bleeding Heartland:

This is like funding a hospital by selling smokes and liquor out the back door. There’s a second NYT review for the new Katherine Dunn book, “Toad.” Zuck took advantage of the election news cycle and the Twitter chaos to competently fire 11,000 people. I hope none of them were responsible for legs. Meanwhile, in Ol’ Knifey: King Egged At York. Horses, Men Urgently Summoned. Did you ever wonder where the Cool S came from? Julie Beck on childlore.

It’s Laggard’s Tuesday, the election isn’t even close to over, and the omni-meltdown is far exceeding my ability to chronicle it in real time, so let’s call it a day and see where everything stands tomorrow.

Today’s Song: Dick Dale and His Del-Tones, “Misirlou”

~ any of you fucking pricks move and I’ll tab every last one of you ~

I love you, honey bunnies.