Gipsy Danger, Cherno Alpha, Time Warner

The Kaiju are humping again, dumb pipes desperately coupling and uncoupling under shaggy heaps of content in the shadow of the FAANGed tech behemoths they both revere and dread. AT&T, having spent two years fighting regulators to merge with Time Warner and three years discovering it was a dumb idea, will reëxtrude its media assets like a pulsating egg sac, and mate them with Discovery Inc. in the hope of creating some new beast that can stand tall enough and gush streams powerful enough to battle The Terrible Mouse or the great NETFLIX. After barely a year on the job, soon to be ex-WarnerMedia head Jason Kilar, hastily re-checking his parachute straps, sent a memo to staff:

“He added a smiley face emoticon.”

Meanwhile, Amazon wants your blood. “pRiVaCy Is A hUmAn RiGhT.” IGN employees demand answers about the Palestine info post that company management removed, contrary to even the most basic concept of editorial independence. Bill Gates has torched his carefully laundered reputation. There are no good billionaires and there never will be. Speaking of which, Medium is hiring a full-time editor misclassified as a part-time editor to run the publications where it just fired all the staff, so go apply for that if you’re an idiot. Also today in idiots: thousands of crypto enthusiasts are buying stock in a furniture company. Thank god PPP loans were able to save Ocean County, NJ fake farming icons “Beefy King,” “Deely Nuts,” and “Tomato Cramber,” report ProPublica’s charmingly rhyming combo of Derek Willis and Lydia DePillis. And Galápagos-based geographic juggernaut Darwin’s Arch spun off its horizontal assets to merge them with the sea.

I didn’t mean to hire her just to report on bugs but nevertheless here we are again, with Intern Tess Lynch and another:

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Having spent a long time in a dark hole eating sap and molting (“working from home! 👩‍💻”) I have a newfound fondness for cicadas, who have also recently emerged from their underground lairs to scream and cavort in the city streets. Bloomberg’s Sarah Holder spoke to a handful of cicadaphobes who, like this Kansas reporter before them, are not ready to welcome these thicc boys back in town. I like bugs, as you already know, but my FOMO has been tempered by the thought of the “300 Olympic-sized swimming pools of poop a day” that they leave behind, and the behinds they leave behind. 

If you aren’t down to clown with the new brood in town, it’s time to sign off for a while because, as the portents foretold, the discourse has now turned to cicada cuisine. Although I’ve eaten crickets, no problem (well slight problem, just thinking about the legs and wings and the head and the eyes), even I struggle with the image of cicada cookies baked to resemble insects “emerging out of a little pile of chunky mud!” And I think eight courses of anything would be challenging, so why go there? There are many other fun ways to make use of cicadas, as the clearly cicada-run website Cicada Mania demonstrates. I like the wreath. Not really, I hate the wreath, but I wish I liked the wreath. I do like the image of a pair of cicadas wearing Santa hats, though. 

Also emerging from a dormant state: it’s not a bug, but someday it might become a feature! Gawker 2.0 is now accepting tips.  

Also today in bugs is a great story by Eric Boodman in Undark about trends in science and the whip spider, not technically a spider but “a minor order of arachnids“ called amblypygids, which is pronounced like this, or maybe like this, or take your pick from any of these I guess? If any arachnologist would like to tell me how to pronounce “amblypygid” I would appreciate it, is what I’m saying here.

On the Media co-host Bob Garfield was fired for “a pattern of behavior that violated New York Public Radio’s anti-bullying policy” after two investigations, “a warning about the potential consequences if the behavior continued, and a meaningful opportunity to correct it.” Garfield’s defense so far appears to be: yes, I yelled in meetings, but it was because I really wanted to. “In time, the story will emerge,” he tweeted, so we can look forward to a boring Medium post from him in the near future, I guess.

Today’s Song: MF DOOM “Untitled A.K.A. Change the Beat.” Put on headphones, close your eyes, and visit a summer thunderstorm.

~ At the edge of our hope, at the end of our tabs, we have chosen not only to believe in ourselves, but in each other. ~