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"I wanted to hear the forbidden blood song"
So Twitter is ruined, and one obvious consequence is that CCP government influence ops are going hog-wild flooding out searches about China’s spreading Covid lockdown protests with porn spam. But this is Tabs and in this house we believe that dumb internet nonsense matters too, so here’s another victim of the hellsite turning into Dante’s Abandoned Nine Level Galleria: the Big Hat Discourse.
I saw some version of this picture a dozen times before I realized it was an actual photograph from our consensus reality. This is Washington Commanders (fka “The Washington Football Team,” fka “The Washington Racists”) rookie running back Brian Robinson wearing a Big Hat. Maybe you follow better people than I do, but did I see a thousand hilarious Big Hat dunks when I gritted my teeth and logged on this morning? No, I saw Elon Musk’s disgusting bedside table, where he apparently guzzles his nightly forty-eight ounces of brown fizzy nothing and passes out alone next to his plastic video game gun and his Franklin Mint George Washington flintlock replica box set. I hate this. We could be talking about the Big Hat! Look, the Big Hat guys went on Shark Tank and the sharks went apeshit for the Big Hat:
They were fighting each other to invest in the Big Hat. Everybody loves the Big Hat! But instead of a delightful and ridiculous day of dunking on/admiring the Big Hat, we all have to grapple with the world’s most divorced man’s accelerating slide into open Nazism. The Big Hat is for sale by Noggin Boss (not a sponsor) and costs an outrageous $75.
Today in Leaving
Trent Reznor left Twitter to continue being handsome and cool elsewhere. Adam Davidson left his DAO to start what will surely be an equally successful Mastodon server. Trevor Noah left “The Daily Show” to not host “The Daily Show” anymore. Peter Thiel’s anti-woke bank Glorifi left finance to be a failure. Reporter James LaPorta left the AP after being fired for what certainly appear to be decisions his editors made, according to Max Tani. Jelani Cobb left Twitter to blog on The New Yorker dot com. Séamas O'Reilly left Twitter to be old on TikTok. Tim Bray left Twitter to reluctantly endorse Mastodon. If you plan to leave Twitter, JWZ would like you to consider not making the same mistake again, and the staff of Dirt would like to recommend some good Discords.
Today in Science
As a wise person once said, “scientists are weird little freaks who are always scurrying around finding things out, whether anyone wants them to or not.” For example, what would make a better binder for Martian concrete: farmed spiders or human blood and urine? I don’t know, and why were you even wondering that? Sergey Alexashenko thinks that “we are very close to being able to create digital life,” an idea that famously always works out great. Squirrel sperm and feet tell a different climate change story: “When a canary stops singing, recognize the danger. So too when ground squirrels shoot blanks and develop bigger feet.” And a study from Japan’s National Institute of Biomedical Innovation found that “the common suggestion that we should all be drinking eight glasses of water—or around two litres a day—is probably too high for most people in most situations,” which arid Guardian columnist and headache enthusiast Emma Beddington took as an endorsement of her chronically dehydrated lifestyle.
Welcome to the Bog
Please click through to play this video. I don’t know anything else about it, nor do I want to. Dudes rock.
Reyhan wrote about 🫡 for the Times. TayLo landed an interview with @dril, who is optimistic that Musk can succeed with Twitter just like he did with the Hyperloop, and Nick Farruggia is preserving every @dril tweet chronologically. TikTok is playing “Dabloons” in the latest refutation of everything NFTs were supposedly necessary for. And Caity Weaver spent three pleasant hours in the quietest (or second quietest) place on earth.
Much of the lore about the chamber’s propensity for mind-annihilation centers on the concept of blood sounds. It is an oft-reported experience, in anechoic chambers, for visitors to become aware of the sound of blood pumping in their heads, or sloshing through veins. Hearing the movement of blood through the body is supposedly something like an absolute taboo, akin to witnessing the fabrication of Chicken McNuggets — an ordeal after which placid existence is irreparably shattered…
I wanted to hear the forbidden blood song.
Finally: My whole family is recovering from Covid, so I have a ton of sympathy for Jason O. Gilbert’s family, who just caught the Woke Mind Virus.
Family is doing fine but the toddler keeps referring to bedtime as "Colonialist." We gave him 30 minutes of timeout during which we are making him read Ann Coulter’s memoir. Hate to see my little guy like this!
My wife is miserable. All she wants to do is watch the trailer for the new Little Mermaid.
Today’s Song: Ovlov, “Really Bees”
The actual song of the day today was The Disintegration Loops which I listened to while writing, but I’m not gonna put that on the Season Seven playlist. Don’t forget:
