The Muscle Rice

Please read in immersive locations, like Yosemite or on the moon.

Author

Rusty Foster
February 15th, 2024

According to John Scalzi, February 15th is Grover Appreciation Day so let’s take a moment to appreciate Grover serving John Everett Millais in a koi pond:

@appalachian__angel

god i wish that was me

While we’re Scalzing, here’s Scalzi on what happened at the 2023 Hugos. Apparently a group of American and Canadian Hugo administrators decided to do a Chinese government censorship LARP and rule some works “ineligible” for the science fiction awards, such as R.F. Kuang’s “Babel” because, as Kat Jones wrote, it “has a lot about China.” She went on to clarify: “I haven’t read it, and am not up on Chinese politics, so cannot say whether it would be viewed as ‘negatives of China’” but it got the boot anyway. I realize this sounds extremely stupid, but that’s only because it is extremely stupid.

And speaking of extremely stupid, here’s The Cut’s financial advice columnist Charlotte Cowles with the story of how she found herself giving $50,000 in cash in a taped-up shoebox to scammers she was at the time convinced were FTC and CIA agents investigating her for financial crimes. Like all scams, it sounds unbelievably dumb and obvious when you know it’s a scam, but I promise there is a scam out there that would fool every one of us. None are without sin! Being taken in like this could have been particularly embarrassing given her specialty, but a freelance writer with $50,000 in cash saved? Kind of a flex, tbh. I would like to sign up for her correspondence course on how to achieve tha—

Part of it was money I had received from my grandfather, an inheritance he took great pains to set up for his grandchildren before his death.

Ah, well. Nevertheless.

Remembrance of Scammers Past: "Rachel Dolezal, who now goes by Nkechi Diallo, lost her job with the Catalina Foothills School District” for having an OnlyFans.

Today is also both Gentleman’s Friday and the last day of Tabs Season Nine. What should I do over the hiatus? Maybe I’ll go on a cruise? Or maybe not. Perhaps a flight somewhere? Although Ian Bogost is right, the whole luggage situation is such a pain. Uh, sorry, I mean: the whole luggage situation is such a pain. Not to mention the maggots.

Travis posted: “*being tased by TSA* I was told I could bring one carrion”

An innocent Bluesky user being bonked with the curse of prophecy while trying to make a goofy pun on Monday.

Ok: no boat, no plane. What if I went for a ride in one of those cool self-driving taxis? Brian Merchant, is that a good idea?

The Waymo car was barely recognizable by the time the firemen extinguished the flames. And the firsthand accounts seem to indicate this was a spontaneous event: The desire to tear this thing apart was in the air. It was not a freak, isolated act of vandalism. It started from a shared sentiment among different people in a crowd, and rapidly turned into a charged, participatory dismantling of one of Silicon Valley’s biggest products.

Sounds like a no. Well, at least I’d be perfectly safe taking a nice walk outside. It’s not like Russia is developing a space-based nuclear weapon or anything.

FF title from NBC news segment that reads “RUSSIA IS DEVELOPING A SPACE-BASED NUCLEAR WEAPON DESIGNED TO TARGET…”

Yes I know it’s meant to target *satellites,* just let me tell my little jokes Poindexter.

Maybe I’ll just stay indoors and scroll TikTok on my PDF Goggles Pro the whole time.

The app lets you watch TikTok videos in immersive locations, like in Yosemite or on the moon.

Say what you will about the future, but these truly are boom times for despair. Eventually when I start to feel the malnutrition kicking in, I could have a snack with my friend Molly. I’ve got a big bag of microbeef rice that I got from a gang of feral scientists who claim they only broke into my garage to steal “proteins and statistics,” whatever that means. Apparently they:

…created an edible coating for rice grains from fish gelatin; that gave cow muscle and fat cells something to stick to. Then, they incubated the grains with each type of cell. [T]he muscle rice [has] beefy and smoky notes.

Mm-mm! Human food: for people.

An AI generated CGI style otter surfs, wearing a yellow lifejacket that says “OTER”

OTER

And speaking of nauseating horrors, Sora is OpenAI’s new text to video model. “Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.” Thanks OpenAI, this sucks and I wish it didn’t exist!

Techcrunch wrote “Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media” and Anil Dash replied “No they’re not.”

That’s it, Season Nine is done! I’ll be back on March 4th for historic Season X, which you may experience via email in immersive locations, like Yosemite or on the moon.

Thanks once again to Season Nine interns Meggie Gates and Kira Deshler. Thanks to Senior Correspondent Allegra Rosenberg. Thanks to the Tabs graphics team: Senior Managing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley and Senior Junior Graphics Intern Garrett Miller. Thanks eternally to our Discord Moderation Intern Jane Davis, and please subscribe to join the Discord if you haven’t already. Thanks also to everyone in the Discord, who contribute to the newsletter every single day. They know what they’ve done, and I hope they’re proud of themselves.

And thanks to Music Intern Sam Gavin, who didn’t pick today’s song but did pick most of the rest of the season. I’ll get the Season Nine playlist up to date today, and now that it’s done it will also be added to the All Tabs mega playlist, which will make that something crazy like thirty one hours of songs of the day.

Today’s Song: Lola Young, “Conceited”

Thanks for reading! See you in March. ❤️