Officiále with Cheese

The brief and wondrous life of the gray check

INT. '74 CHEVY (MOVING) – MORNING

An old, gas guzzling, dirty, white 1974 Chevy Nova BARRELS down a street in San Francisco littered with the shells of burning Teslas. In the front seat are two young fellas – one white, one Black – both wearing cheap black suits with thin black ties under long green dusters. Their names are VINCENT VEGA and JULES WINNFIELD. Jules is behind the wheel.

JULES
So, tell me again about the checkmarks?

VINCENT
Ok what you want to know?

JULES
Blue check means “verified,” right?

VINCENT
Yeah it’s verified but it ain’t 100% verified. Maybe you’re AOC or the Prime Minister of Malaysia, but maybe you just worked at BuzzFeed for a couple months in 2015, or some random SRE owed you a favor.

JULES
And those are “the elites?”

VINCENT
Yeah, it breaks down like this: the blue check used to mean “verified,” but now it means they “verified” your credit card number and your ass is paying Elon Musk $8 a month. The gray check means “Official,” but get this, no one knows who gives those out or why. Finding out why anyone has a gray check is actually a right the users don’t have.

JULES
Oh man, I’m leaving. That’s all there is to it, I’m fucking leaving.

VINCENT
I know baby, you hate it the most. But you know what the funniest thing about the new Twitter is?

JULES
What?

VINCENT
It’s the little differences. They got the same nonsense on there now as they used to, but it’s just all a little different.

JULES
Example?

VINCENT
Well, John Green and Hank Green are both verified, but only John Green is “official.”

JULES
Official what? The official John Green? Does that mean Hank Green’s unofficial now?

VINCENT
Yeah, Elon’s too old for TikTok, he don’t know who the fuck Hank Green is. And get this: Lil Wayne is official, but Birdman isn’t.

JULES
“Unofficial Birdman.” Ha ha! How they handle this on Facebook?

VINCENT
I don’t know, I never went on Facebook.

---

Didn’t we almost have it all…

That was fun but unfortunately before I even finished writing this little parody, Elon Musk had already scrapped the idiotic new gray check system, because he reads all of his mentions and gets red and mad when everyone dunks on his dumb ideas. I can only imagine the Twitter dev floor looks like the Captain’s Log from the Event Horizon right now.

¹

After cheerfully explaining the gray check system, urban camping enthusiast and Elon’s most accommodating new acolyte at Twitter Esther Crawford cheerfully explained that it was a dumb idea all along and then returned to her charging pod until it’s time to cheerfully explain the next dumb idea. Meanwhile Elon shoveled another $4 billion worth of Tesla stock into this cash furnace.

Dave Itzkoff @ditzkoff

But they were, all of them, deceived, for another Check Mark was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, a master Check Mark was forged in secret to control all others. And into this Check Mark he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life.

Also Today in Whoopsies: Coindesk reported this morning that Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao got a peek at the FTX books and physically recoiled, as if they also contained the Captain’s Log from the Event Horizon, and is now reconsidering his offer to pay what Matt Levine yesterday guessed was “roughly speaking, zero” dollars to acquire the “eviscerated” wreckage of “Sam Bankman-Fried’s $16 Billion Fortune.” That is Bloomberg News saying “eviscerated,” not me. Considering that just yesterday, FT reported that CZ was telling his staff the collapse of FTX had “‘severely’ eroded confidence in crypto industry,” it’s hard to imagine the sort of legal and financial horrors that would prompt him to decline to provide an orderly windup now, if only to calm his own depositors. This fourteen thousand word Sequoia Capital hagiography of Bankman-Fried is aging like a soft cheese on the car dashboard in July. I wonder if they let you wear shorts in jail?

bongcapital.fiat @BongCapital

Even Elon had the courtesy to wait a couple of weeks before putting the TWTR deal “temporarily on hold”.

Intern Linda wanted you to be aware of the Wikipedia page for Andy
(goose), just one member of the List of Individual Birds:

Andy (1987 – October 19, 1991) was a goose born without feet. He was well known for wearing sneakers to help him stand and walk. Andy was killed in 1991 by an unknown perpetrator.

Andy the goose (left) with his friend Gene Fleming, who is not a goose.

ᴉpᴉǝH 🐐💕 @summer__heidi

Gannett is printing fake “pink slime” newspapers at its actual Des Moines Register printing plant, reports Bleeding Heartland:

The Des Moines Register's executive editor, Carol Hunter, had no comment beyond confirming in a November 4 email that "these are commercial print clients."

This is like funding a hospital by selling smokes and liquor out the back door. There’s a second NYT review for the new Katherine Dunn book, “Toad.” Zuck took advantage of the election news cycle and the Twitter chaos to competently fire 11,000 people. I hope none of them were responsible for legs. Meanwhile, in Ol’ Knifey: King Egged At York. Horses, Men Urgently Summoned. Did you ever wonder where the Cool S came from? Julie Beck on childlore.

femb✦t @__femb0t

Someone submitted this to the new kanji contest .__.

It’s Laggard’s Tuesday, the election isn’t even close to over, and the omni-meltdown is far exceeding my ability to chronicle it in real time, so let’s call it a day and see where everything stands tomorrow.

Today’s Song: Dick Dale and His Del-Tones, “Misirlou”

~ any of you fucking pricks move and I’ll tab every last one of you ~

I love you, honey bunnies.

1. If you’re not 100% sure you recognize this reference and really want to revisit it, probably don’t click that link.