The Beaver Disbeliever

Don't eat the forbidden meatball.

“Cultured meat firm resurrects woolly mammoth in lab-grown meatball” announces TechCrunch in today’s best headline. “And …not a single animal needed to die to produce the mammoth meatball,” says the company’s chief science officer James Ryall which is technically true, since it was the entire species that died. Anyway, the meatball is probably toxic.

…Professor Ernst Wolvetang, from the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland which worked with Vow in this project, suggested that it’s probably not safe to try the meatball just now, even if regulators permitted it.

“We haven’t seen this protein for thousands of years,” Wolvetang said. “So we have no idea how our immune system would react when we eat it.

Mama mia, that meatball? Too a-spicy.

Also Today in Spicy Meatballs: It’s a-pee, Mario!

Ok, Look…

I don’t want to spend a lot of time in this profoundly cursèd discourse cul-de-sac but for better or for (a lot) worse, this sort of thing is why Tabs exists and every link in the following paragraph is one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen, so let’s don our gloves and safety glasses and take a look at this, for science.

After a botched labiaplasty left her with damaged clitoral nerves, Jessica Pin decided to dedicate her life to her dual passions of encouraging medical study of the female sexual anatomy and posting through it.1 On March 23rd, Pin wrote a thread about an art project showing casts of diverse human vulvas in which she wrote “I have a big problem with trans post ops being included in a ‘vulva diversity’ video.” There were Pepe Silvia style diagrams with vulvas circled in red and a whole exchange where she persistently pressed a porn performer to provide pictures of her privates for Pin to peruse, all of which was somehow in service of her belief that “post op trans vulvas… look mutilated.” Pin has now earned the nicknamed “the pussy phrenologist” and proven that there’s always a Dril tweet not just once but twice. At press time Pin continues to insist that anyone who doubts her trans-dowsing abilities should google up some vagina pictures online and send them to her. 10 out of 10, deeply normal stuff, just the kind of thing Elon Musk’s internet homepage is best suited for.

Speaking of Elon‘s subreddit, the divorced tycoon’s latest software larp idea is that only Twitter Blue subscribers will appear on the website’s reviled For You page and you’ll have to pay to vote in polls, a thing everyone cares about doing. Like virtually all of the changes Elon announces from the toilet, this probably won’t happen, but many people will talk about what it would mean if it did happen and some people will act like it already has happened. Currently the For You page consists of, according to Zoë Schiffer, a carefully curated list of “around 35 VIP users” such as Joe Biden, Mr. Beast, and Catturd2 and, according to my personal experience, whoever in my following list still posts more than average.

After failing to raise last year, O.R.P. Substack is now offering YOU the incredible opportunity to give THEM $100 for rent. In the first of today’s Lizzes Lopatto, The Verge blogger asks “How much money do we think Substack lost last year?”

In lieu of a pitch deck, we have flattery. Writers are notoriously bad at math — and even more notoriously bad at managing their own money. Shit, if we were good at this kind of thing, we would be doing something lucrative, probably.

So far Substack looks like it will make it to the $5 million total that it’s seeking, so I guess that’s our remaining runway.2 Does anyone have Marc Benioff’s phone number?

Today in The Crab Zone:

#Newsbiz: “Scoop: Grid News' website to shutter” —Sara Fischer, Axios

5 Minutes Later... | SpongeBob Time Card #64 - YouTube

Every Grid.news link now redirects to https://themessenger.com/grid.html, so The Messenger has started by un-publishing fifteen months worth of content. Also today in media: The Texas Observer is closing, the New York Times “hauled the staffers who signed an open letter criticizing the paper into ‘tongue-lashing’ sessions” (gross), and that Wall St. Journal/NORC poll graphic you may have seen is nonsense.

2 Liz 2 Lopatto is back with more questions, this time for the Google Docs redesign team: “Is there a holy war between oval and square devotees and this was the compromise?”

Sabrina Imbler finally got the real story behind Melania Trump’s most famous tweet, in “What Was She Thinking? An Investigation.”

Finally: CatGPT.

Today’s Song: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood”

Now that everybody’s here, could we please have your attention? Thank you for approving my PTO yesterday, I needed to take a personal day from expressing what must be everyone's opinion.

[standup impressionist voice] Have you ever wondered what if Today in Tabs had a subscribe button? I bet it would look a little something like this…

PS: Please don’t invest in Substack. 😘

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