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Royal Oil
It's Season Eight! You've got this babe!
Elon Musk celebrated the start of Tabs Season Eight by trying to kill Twitter but he failed, as he has in so much else. You’ll get ‘em next time, buddy. The BBC’s Marianna Spring reports that according to a current Twitter engineer Musk is protected by guards around the clock, even in the sanctuary of his most private memeing chamber:
"Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards - very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie-[style] bodyguards. Even when [he goes] to the restroom," he tells me.
Just imagine the musk. Naturally Platformer has the scoop about what happened today outside of Elon’s impregnable posting cube.
Insider reports that the BBC reports important news out of England, a normal country with normal vegetables:
The holy anointing oil used at the coronation of King Charles III will be animal-cruelty free, the BBC reports.
The sacred "chrism oil" has previously contained oil from the glands of small mammals such as civets and ambergris, a waxy substance from the intestines of sperm whales.
Despite speculation in the Tabs Discord that “chrism” is short for “Christening jism,” Wikipedia claims the word derives from the Greek “khrîsma,” and later was ”conflated with cramum (‘cream’), developing into cresme, which was also borrowed into Middle English around 1300 as creme…” So it’s more like a magic Oreo filling meant to concentrate the entire power of God to impart Charles III with enough khrîsma to be King. You’ve got this babe!
Today in the States: Kelsey Weekman reports that state of Texas is suing Brittany Dawn Davis, a fitness influencer turned Christian influencer (“chrisnfluencer”) over customer complaints about her allegedly “personalized online health and fitness plans:”
Rather than providing individual coaching, the lawsuit says, Davis simply gave “generic and non-substantive” feedback, such as “THAT’S MY GIRL! You’re killing it!” and “you’ve got this babe!”
And in Tennessee, alcoholic whiskey fungus (“whisngus”) is coating trees and homes near Jack Daniel’s barrelhouses in Lincoln County, and the angels are suing for their share.
Today in Difficult Collections of Words: A pseudonymous fascist accelerationist and former dildo saleswoman was unmasked by carefully tracing her history of Nazi-themed anime drawing on DeviantArt and LiveJournal, as well as her distinctive cat Fluffies, reports Christopher Mathias for Huffpost. And no matter how many times I read this tweet, each word is a surprise:
A Musical Interlude:
This honestly slaps.
Today in Tabs: Arr, Bing Chat was turned into a pirate-talking personal information exfiltrator via prompt injection from a completely different tab:
If allowed by the user, Bing Chat can see currently open websites. We show that an attacker can plant an injection in a website the user is visiting, which silently turns Bing Chat into a Social Engineer who seeks out and exfiltrates personal information. The user doesn't have to ask about the website or do anything except interact with Bing Chat while the website is opened in the browser.
Tom Scocca has issued a correction to his estimate that The New York Times recently devoted “more than 15,000 words” to throwing doubt on the wisdom or necessity of treating trans people like human beings, admitting that further investigation has revised that down to a mere 13,945 words, not even three times as many as were devoted to “migrant children being illegally put to work making popular American consumer products in dangerous factory conditions.” The editors of Indignity regret the error. Defector’s Laura Wagner convened “A Roundtable On The Free Speech Implications Of The New York Times Trans Letter Debate,” featuring Matthew Yglesias, Jonathan Chait, Yascha Mounk, Caitlin Flanagan, Jonathan Haidt, Bari Weiss, and Steven Pinker, and I think it highlighted some crucial points about “what they see as a pervasive culture of intolerance to opposing viewpoints, and hostility to open debate.”
Casey Johnston on “the yassification of Ozempic” and The Cut’s breathless “everyone’s taking it!” story. My new sleep stack is unstoppable. Jessica Grose: ”Why Are Ketamine Ads Following Me Around the Internet?” The definitive Chinese spy balloon explainer, from Stratocat’s Luis Eduardo Pacheco. Would You Date a Podcast Bro? I’m not a podcast bro, I‘m a podcast, bro.
Today’s Song: Neutral Milk Hotel, “My Dream Girl Don’t Exist”1
Defector did an (actual) round table on whether “Aeroplane” holds up (which it does) and today I discovered that the EP “Ferris Wheel on Fire” is on Spotify now.
Hey welcome to Season Eight! Season Seven ended more suddenly than I meant it to, because I was tired. Am I still tired? Yes I am. But I disappeared into the woods for large parts of the last three weeks and I’ve emerged ready to engage with the Discourse again. Please subscribe if you missed me. Coming this season: a new crop of Interns, a new pack of stickers, and probably a lot of cursed new phrases.
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