New York magazine’s Senior Men's Style Editor Sam Hine unlocked the Louboutin Configuration and summoned this cursed sentence from the hellish depths of a fashion-obsessed parallel universe: “‘Ball hog’ is essentially the deep-fried zoomer equivalent of the millennial hypebeast aesthetic.” Meanwhile in the hellish depths of our own universe Mr. Beast is hogging Ball 2, investing two hundred fifty thousand beastable bucks into the A.I.-powered sequel to ball. You know, for kids. Mr. Beast also makes a cameo in The Chocolate Conspiracy, Rachel Handler’s magnificent and delirious Grub Street investigation into the ongoing debasement of chocolate and everything else which, as Pinhead said about an eternity of pain and suffering, is long but I wished it were longer. Here’s one exemplary sentence:
“‘I just think chocolate should be chocolate! That’s a crazy idea,’ said MrBeast, who last year trapped a man inside a burning building.”
Now imagine a dozen more sentences at least that good sprinkled throughout the You Can See Everything of food industry investigations. Handler has such sights to show you. Also today in good sentences is this one from Sam Thielman’s New York Times review of cracked genius cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt’s new memoir I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex:
“Early on, Lisa’s boyfriend Adam confesses that he wants to sleep with other people; quickly, a polyamory-positive community assembles itself around the couple like a Spirit Halloween in a vacant storefront.”
Today in Crabs: The Playstacean.
Did you like that? “Playstacean.” Good stuff, right? There’s a lot more of that in the Tabs subscriber Discord, which you can join now for the low low price of your immortal soul $6 a month or $35 for the first year.
It’s a big week for music naturalists, as Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock and sensitive folkster Noah Kahan have both been filmed for the first time in their native habitats. These charismatic but elusive mammals have been very difficult to study except in the artificial setting of large stadium shows, so this new footage offers a wealth of potential revelations to science.
What a beautiful creature. Wish him luck, boys.
If you want to be mad about something today, you could do worse than look at Emo Kids Anonymous’s list of Top 200 Emo Albums of All Time. First place is The Hotelier’s 2014 “Home, Like Noplace Is There” which… I guess? It wouldn’t have been my top pick but what’s fun about this list is that it has a sort of particle/wave duality: if you want to be mad about the choices or their ordering you’ll find plenty to be mad about (Modern Baseball’s “Sports” is only number 89? And isn’t even MB’s top album in the list??), but if you want to find some good stuff to listen to there’s also plenty of that. Anyway, as always, don’t forget that My Chemical Romance isn’t even officially emo.
This post is about Kelly Clarkson but you know who else was obsessed with mechanical birds? It all ties together, the same way Colin Fraser tied six L.L.M.s together to create “Frankenmodel,” an exquisite corpse machine where each model generates one token at a time in every response. Fraser tried to interrogate its alleged interiority but Frankenmodel just claimed that it was Claude, and who among us can really say it isn’t? Although technically none of the six models were actually Claude, in a literal sense. Meanwhile the raving loonies at Anthropic released new terms of service that prohibit “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.” In response Dan Davies invented Roko’s Uno Reverse Card:
“…for the benefit of any future Roko’s Basilisk, I would just like to make it clear that I genuinely don’t care about the fate of any digital replica of me, I don’t care about digital simulations of pain, and this belief is sufficiently central to my personality that it is not possible to make an accurate simulation of me which cares about the fate of simulations.”
Add making fantasy maps to the long list of things Ross Douthat sucks at. Ayo Omolewa explained how Block Blast is carefully programmed to psychologically manipulate you. “Kiwibank is desperately trying to stop people saying they want to fuck its sheep mascot.” Paul Ford released Tiny Little Office, a suite of apps that store all their data in the URL. And speaking of emo, in Ravenous Niko Stratis wrote about the Wendy’s emo record, “Songs To Listen To In A Wendy’s Parking Lot.” You knew there was a Wendy’s emo record, right? Of course you did. Niko says “it’s an admirable record that sounds exactly as good as it should” which, having listened to it, is a very polite way of saying it sounds bad.
Department of Corrections: In my last post I alluded to an online theory that bot traffic had declined after Ukrainian strikes on a Russian data center. This was not true, reported Anna Merlan in Mother Jones. “[T]he original claim doesn't really make sense if you think about it,” posted Kevin Collier, which may be correct but in my defense: I did not think about it. Nevertheless I regret the error.
And Finally: The New England Review of Boats Issue 1, including a story by me about a boat who wouldn’t float, is available now for pre-order. 80 pages, union printed. They also have hats! If you’re in Providence, Rhode Island this Saturday, October 24th, stop by Captain Seaweed’s around 6:30 PM and say hello. I’ll be reading, along with others.
Today’s Song: Modern Baseball, “@chl03k”
Today in Tabs is brought to you by this town and an eternity of delicious suffering.
