THE ORB is Operational

If the week has a butt, it’s Wednesday. Also I have the cold everyone has, now that the schools aren’t masking anymore, so instead of trying to paint a magical word picture with my… words (?) here are the things I bookmarked in the order they appear in my Tabs folder. Let’s see if any greater theme emerges via a sort of Eisenstein montage effect:

Former WNYC Race & Justice Unit head Jami Floyd held a press conference yesterday in the wake of allegations that she copied from Wikipedia and other sources in forty five articles. Allegations which she absolutely did not mention, instead announcing a plan to sue WNYC for an array of alleged hostile working conditions. I’m sure no one will bring up the p-word again.

Dan Stone from “roasting Commentary Magazine’s 990” analyzed the publication times of Matt Levine’s Money Stuff since 2014, and found that it has arrived later by an average of 12 seconds every business day, almost linearly, which is very weird.

He also proved that Money Stuff is way too long, expanding from an average of 3k words in earlier years to 4k-5k today. I blame Elon.

Trading on the LooksRare NFT marketplace is 95% fake, reports Olga Kharif in Bloomberg. You know what looks rare? Actual buyers in this ponzi scheme. Also Rare: the /wtch/ custom URL on YouTube. “Go and replace “watch” in any YouTube video URL with “wtch” and see what happens,” wrote Joseph Cox. It’s an interesting story for nerds with the moral “old platforms have weird dusty corners.”

THE ORB collects eyeballs. THE ORB does not owe coins. (What did you do with our eyes.) THE ORB decides what data to store, and for how long. THE ORB prefers a cool German conference room to the blazing Kenyan sun. THE ORB may be illegal in your jurisdiction. THE ORB knows your face. THE ORB feels your warmth. You give to THE ORB. (What did you do with our eyes.) THE ORB may receive, or it may not. Your role is to help us evaluate THE ORB. We are providing THE ORB to you for experimental purposes. (What did you do with—

The full 90 minute Windows ‘95 launch is finally online for the first time, and Jay Leno is just a whole lot worse to listen to than I remembered.

What Did I Learn? The Eve Six Guy’s first advice column dropped. Is it as good as Today in Polly? No. But it’s pretty good! I learned that “if you ever get attacked by a dog, you should let it bite your weak arm and punch it in the head with your strong one till it lets go.” Can Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon DJ? Financial Times’s Bryce Elder investigated. I learned that I don’t know what “DJ-ing” is, actually, as a skill. Peter Kafka started a media column in Recode, and found that older white Democrats are primarily who’s funding the New York Times. I learned that buying The Athletic is The Times’ attempt to expand its subscriber base by further hollowing out local news.

It’s the end of the world, and we’re sewing (and I feel fine).

Twitter changed the way tweet embeds work so that when a tweet is deleted, now it embeds a big blank square instead of turning into a blockquote of text, as it used to. Verge editor Nilay Patel explained why this is a big problem for journalism:

And Nitasha Tiku reported on Gwyneth Paltrow, Mila Kunis and the new crypto girlbosses finally bringing a little 💅gender diversity💃 into the effort to separate marks from their money. Hell yeah, you go girls! It’s so good to see Brit Morin still scamming after all these years.

Today’s Song: LMFAO, “Shots (ft. Lil Jon)” in honor of dysentery guy.

~ Tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs, tabs everybody ~

I’m going back to bed. Wake me up when it’s Thursday.