You Have The Most Beautiful Fangs I've Ever Seen
🌋 Weird weekend energy, pickup lines from the posthuman future, and a lot of forum drama
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15 years ago yesterday Jack Dorsey founded Twitter by texting Evan Williams the single word: poopin’. The energy online was equally weird this weekend. Ross Douthat went horny on main. They ate a cat in the TikTok commune. Grandpa Joe’s White House turned down anyone who smoked the wacky tobaccy. In Australia there was a spider flood, but at least there’s also a jobs site for Scenic Rim residents. A volcano erupted in Iceland and some maniac immediately flew a drone through it. Everybody watched the Snyder cut. Everybody spent their stimmy on meme stonks. Elon Musk reset the “this fuckin’ guy” board back to zero. Choire reviewed Lauren Oyler’s novel “Fake Accounts,” and though he said he liked the book, the review implies you will not like it, or perhaps that you will not like the world it describes, which is the one we all live in right now, so: fair. Incoming Teen Vogue EIC Alexi McCammond gave up the job, and Liz Spiers wrote the only thing worth reading about why: “Alexi McCammond was fired because Condé Nast can’t fire Anna Wintour.”
Big Tabs News: The world-famous Tabs Intern program returns next month, assuming prospective interns apply and prospective sponsors pay for it! All the info you need about applying or sponsoring is right here, but briefly: the intern writes a short segment in each day’s newsletter for a month, and I pay them $1500 to do it. It was my favorite part of Tabs in the before-times, and I can’t wait to bring it back.
Do you like...pancakes?
Janelle Shane had four variants of the neural net GPT-3 write pickup lines, which is where the title came from today, and I’m going to use some more of them as section headers because they’re funny and you can’t stop me.
I love you. I don't care if you're a doggo in a trenchcoat.
NFTs are now a cross between a flea market and the lottery, where every seller is hoping some idiot will pay millions for their worthless junk. Here: do you want these boring Time Magazine covers? How about digital marijuana? A screenshot of a self-referential news story? Scammers are selling NFTs for works they don’t even own, wrote Tabs Senior Contributing Editor Bijan Stephen in The Verge. It’s hard to even determine what counts as “a scam” in a market where the most high-profile transaction was an insider trade with the buyer and seller conspiring to pump up the value of a related fund they both have equity in. It’s so dreadful that Chuck Tingle denounced NFTs and canceled his own forthcoming Non-Fungible Tingler “Pounded in the Butt By My Non-Fungible Tingler That Is Literally This NFT.” None of this will matter and in a couple years ETH will be worth more than every other currency combined, consume more energy than the EU, and we’ll still be just about to switch to the new sustainable proof-of-stake branch. If you want to spend real money on dumb digital art, buy one of Jordan Scales’s eco-friendly Fibonacci-priced alert boxes instead. If you want to make your own dumb digital art by accident, use this git hook to mine your commit messages for Amulets.
You look like a stealth assassin from the clouds.
Are we still fighting about Our Regrettable Platform, Substack? Of course we are. Anne Helen Petersen posted that she took a Substack Pro advance and makes a lot less from it than she would have on her own. Jude Ellison Doyle wrote that Substack is now a platform for anti-trans writing. In recode, Peter Kafka promised us “the newsletter startup’s new controversy, explained,” which is no longer possible in my opinion, but he does reveal that former Vox co-founder and take fountain Matt Yglesias is generating about $860,000 in subscription income, and keeping very little of it. Ben Thompson also took a shot at explaining it all in Stratechery with even more numbers and words but equally questionable success. My one-sentence summary is: Substack managed to step on every media beef and forum drama rake at once, and combine that inept growth with inept public communication and an inept business strategy that looks unfair to the losers and feels unfair to the winners. For a view of what thoughtful community management looks like, and how hard it is, Carrie Battan has an excellent feature on the web’s biggest knitting community Ravelry in The New Yorker.
Your eyes are like two rainbows and a rainbow of eyes. I can't help but stare.
Here’s a video game written in a font. I’ve read the explanation of this so many times and I still have no idea how it works. Instagram: you know, for kids. Absolutely do not use free research paper website Sci-Hub, warns the London police. You are at extreme risk of finding thousands of scientific research papers free of charge. Again the website you should not visit for free access to scientific research is: Sci-Hub. PBS’s “Asian Americans” film series is streaming for free. Netflix is getting slightly salty about everyone sharing the same account so we’re all gonna have to cool it. Someone sign up for a second account. D&D party on the catwalk. Poop-Theranos founders indicted.
Today’s Song: Machine Gun Kelly and someone named Corpse released a song called “Daywalker” that dares to ask “what if the Joker was in Limp Bizkit?”
~ I have exactly 4 tabs. I need you to be the 5th. ~
Please spread the word about the Tabs Internship and do get in touch if you want to sponsor an intern. Can you believe it’s still March? Subscriptions are still on sale. I tweet @fka_tabs and @TodayinTabs and if you want to buy a classified ad for Wednesday you can do that right here. That’s a lot of business. Business hours are over.