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Who Created the Froossy
Read books, throw away your phone, learn to sew, be weird.
If you’ve been in a coma since October, Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner, Sarah Frier, and Brad Stone recapped everything that’s happened at Twitter, which will make you yearn for the soothing hiss of the ventilator and the dreamless void of an unconsciousness you could have chosen never to wake up from. I’m sorry everything is like this now. David Roth took a shot at explaining Musk’s politics, since Jeremy Peters just couldn’t crack the code:
Even by the miserable standards of mushing-two-recognizable-things-into-one gags that has long defined Twitter’s Mendoza Line, [Musk’s “pronouns” tweet] only barely scans as a joke. It’s Left Shark saying “Covfefe,” or a meme of Jennifer Coolidge in The White Lotus with the words BEAN WIFE over it in Impact font. It is, as the worst posts tend to be, not just embarrassing but somehow implicating to read.
“Implicating to read” is exactly the problem with the latest crop of Musk-splainers. Mostly what the Bloomberg recap adds is reporting on the specific circumstances of some of Musk’s recent tweets, and reading it feels implicating the same way that reporting on the specific color and consistency of Musk’s recent bowel movements would feel implicating. Roth continues:
There’s no principle to find here beyond spite and distaste; the speech is just noise cast out into the chaos by someone eager to mistake the echo for an answer. And then, even though the fact of it is so plain—and, again, so embarrassing and so implicating in its thudding overage—the mistake gets made anyway.
Max Read also poked through Musk’s public feces and concluded that:
The only thing he knows how to do -- the only way he knows how to make money, but also the way he has been conditioned to respond to any kind of adversity or challenge -- is to create chaos and drama around himself in search of new opportunity.
And while we’re regrettably thinking about it, Brad Johnson remembered another time that far-right politics allied with technological fetishism and the love of violence: the proto-fascist Italian Futurist movement. Meanwhile, the doddering grandpa of creating chaos and drama around himself just launched an NFT collection. At least he knows that the secret to comedy is timing.
Just when you thought this grifter couldn't humiliate himself any more than he already has, there's this. THIS is what the big announcement was.
— John Kiriakou (@JohnKiriakou)
4:12 PM • Dec 15, 2022
The kids from NY’s Luddite Club are absolutely nailing their “being a teen in the early 2000s” LARP:
“Lots of us have read this book called ‘Into the Wild,’” said Lola Shub, a senior at Essex Street Academy, referring to Jon Krakauer’s 1996 nonfiction book about the nomad Chris McCandless, who died while trying to live off the land in the Alaskan wilderness. “We’ve all got this theory that we’re not just meant to be confined to buildings and work. And that guy was experiencing life. Real life. Social media and phones are not real life.”
Yeah! For sure, man, for sure. Can’t wait till they get to the end of the book. I love these kids though. Read books, throw away your phone, learn to sew, be weird.
I would love to throw away my phone too but then I wouldn’t be able to tell you that MSCHF created the Froossy:
Is The Artist Ok? Absolutely! 😉
It’s been a delight having HAL-MART join us this week as sponsor-in-residence. We thought today, rather than promote a product, we’d give you a little behind the scenes look at the patented HAL-MART Creative Production Studio:
So there you have it! As always, get 20% off everything with top-secret code “TABS.” HAL-MART: The Artist Is Just Fine!1
Tom Scocca has brought back the spirit of Choire’s morning Awlcast for Popula in the Populacast. New TikTok-famous emu bird flu conspiracy thread just dropped. Christina Cauterucci scoop: Is Kyrsten Sinema spending most of her time selling secondhand clothes and sporting goods on Facebook Marketplace? (Yes.) The new Avatar movie is a “soggy trillion-dollar screensaver.” DoNotPay will let their chatbot argue with your cable company’s chatbot, and also has a very bad idea about a thing you could try in court. Apple will allow third-party app stores. Kitschy private street art sucks: Madrid Edition. Gizmodo fired Matt Novak. Who is even left there? Anyway hire Matt.
Finally: Binance head Changpeng Zhao says everything is fine, so get out your lettuces everyone. We’ll see if Binance survived the holidays on January 2nd, because I am on vacation until then as of right…
Today’s Song: Lorde, “Supercut” (El-P Remix)
…now. 👋🎄
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