Effective Onanism

Cronus at the drive thru.

Jake Eberts, previously known for live-tweeting his dysentery smoothie experience (for science!), is back in quarantine, infected with Zika1 and jacking off for the cure. Jake is already answering questions I didn’t know I had, like “how long does it take to produce six milliliters of saliva?”

Diagram of the vaccine test process, illustrated with bathroom-sign type figures. The steps read: Step 1) Carefully selected volunteers are given an experimental vaccine or a placebo. Step 2) Later, volunteers are infected with the disease in controlled conditions. Step 3) Volunteers are monitored by nurses and doctors, who gather data and make sure volunteers don‘t get too sick. Step 4) After a while, volunteers are provided free treatment. Step 5) Scientists analyze the data to see if the vaccine was effective.

Getting infected with exotic diseases isn’t my personal idea of a good time, but my idea of a good time is at least as horrifying to most people. For example Tabs has been off since last week because I was doing this:

A granite cliff edge with a backdrop of Maine coast. Ropes run through a large tripod, and two helmeted edge attendants vector ropes down over the cliff to a rescue litter with a (mock) patient strapped in. A rescuer (the author) in an orange helmet guides the litter down the cliff from a low-seated position.

If you’d like to see even scarier pictures of me dangling off a cliff please consider becoming a paid subscriber and joining the Discord, where I post that sort of thing.

Intern Meggie has some scary celebrity news today about the spiral-eyed sex symbol who’s finally emerging into the limelight nearly two decades after we first Saw him on the silver screen.

I Want to Play a Game

Billy the Puppet is proving he’s THAT bitch this Halloween season. From showing off his new whip on Hollywood Boulevard to spoofing Nicole Kidman’s AMC commercial, the little demon figurine is slaying celebrity society with threats of violence on the local news.

Recently, Billy landed himself in hot water publicly beefing with Taylor Swift’s fandom. The feud unfolded after a fan account called Billy “this thing” when he appeared at the Eras tour movie, to which Billy snapped back with the Swift lyric ”you have pointed out my flaws again as if I don't already see them.” Slappy from Goosebumps could never.

Screenshot from a live hit by KTLA TV’s Kimberly Cheng where Billy pedals his tricycle past in the near background just as Cheng signs off.

Mainly known for his stint as a child actor on the Saw series, Billy the Puppet has been in the public eye for almost two decades, though usually not this extensively. His work in the horror film franchise as serial killer Jigsaw’s subservient doll catapulted him into fame in 2004 and he’s grown up in the limelight ever since, amassing a sea of fans who cannot help but thirst over him. We reached out to this hot pop culture icon for comment, but unfortunately he would not stop threatening to kill us. “Mother is mothering!” as Gen Z would say. 

—Look what you made Meggie Gates do.

Speaking of games, new Zach Gage joint Puzzmo just dropped, aimed squarely at the New York Times’ profit center.

Elon Musk claimed he would give Wikipedia “a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia,” which I would dismiss as a stupid joke if it weren’t for Musk’s record of stupid jokes that suddenly turn into the destruction of culturally significant websites. Musk’s Twitter is so bad that even venture capital’s mopey harry potter Benedict Evans can’t stand it anymore. It’s just a shame that everyone who would have celebrated this has also left Twitter. Reached for comment, Musk told Today in Tabs “boo hoo, waaaah, Elon wanna binky.”

hannah@posts.rat.pictures posted: “Average mastodon bio” with a screenshot of the opening of Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” which reads: “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

Icelandic women are on strike today, because even in the 14-time World Economic Forum gender gap leader: “in some industries and professions, women earn at least 20% less than Icelandic men…” For The Handbasket Marisa Kabas talked to women who worked at all-time World Economic Forum gender gap loser, Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, about the pervasive misogyny they experienced there:

[Former website editor Lauren] Gitlin described a “sort of false notion of a meritocracy,” under Wenner. It's not that he was a misogynist, she said, but rather that he truly just believed that the women weren’t good enough.” She said Wenner’s recent comments about women epitomized the culture when she was there. “I think I must have internalized that to some degree. I just was like, yeah, I guess I'm just not good enough, and I was early enough in my career that I didn't question that.” When she was let go in 2007, she never pursued a media job again.

“As we're talking about it, I'm feeling angrier and angrier that I was done a disservice by him and by that place,” Gitlin said, just now processing what the experience of working at Rolling Stone was like for a woman in her early twenties. “You know, like, I could have done more. I could have been better. And I don't think it really dawned on me until we started having this conversation that there were other forces at work besides my own ability that prevented me from excelling in that position.”

In a delightfully shady parenthetical Kabas also drops the fact that Wenner’s dumb book about Bono “reportedly sold just 800 copies in its first week and is currently ranked #37,357 on Amazon.” Lol.

Woodrow Peel: “Cronus at the drive thru: ’tell me about your kids meal.’”

If you had forgotten the password to a USB drive with the keys to $235 million in Bitcoin locked on it and someone told you they could unlock it, wouldn’t you want them to do that? You might not if the whole thing was a hoax to get attention with a too perfect to fact-check crypto-boom-era tale about a Mission: Impossible style self-destructing thumb drive. Not that anyone is saying that’s what’s going on in this Wired story, but I am totally saying that’s what’s going on in this story.

“I am not OK,” Emerson said during the flight after he had been casually engaging the two pilots in conversation, according to the complaint.

Relatable!

Today’s Song: Pink Pantheress, “Capable of Love”

Molly said: “So much of writing is trying to get back on your bullshit after a break” and I’m feeling this pretty hard today! I am back on my bullshit on Bluesky @rusty.todayintabs.com. It’s Intern Meggie’s last week, I can’t believe it. It might also be Music Intern Sam’s last week if he doesn’t stop trying to push 80’s flavored neo-synth bleep bloop music on me. Jk jk he’s doing great. We’re all doing great. Everything is great.

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