The Daily Dad — Feb 20, 2024

Things you might want to know:

• ‘Everything is hairless’: what 100 women taught me about porn and body confidence
  💭 I feel like anyone seriously researching porn’s influence on women’s self-image in the 2020s has to be old as fuck, ‘cause no one under fifty thinks that porn is having a meaningful impact on modern self-image in the era of Instagram. When it comes to generating insecurity, a bruised-up, bored porn slut being impaled by a sketchy cock has got nothin’ on a perfect size 0 lounging —toned and smooth— in an microscopic bikini next to an infinity pool overlooking Santorini while eating an improbable pizza.
• Legendary Publisher EC Comics Rises From the Grave – IGN
  ❝ Oni has become the official home of the EC Comics brand, via a partnership with William M. Gaines Agent, Inc. The new line will be overseen by Oni Press President & Publisher Hunter Gorinson and Editor-in-Chief Sierra Hahn in partnership with Cathy Gaines Mifsud and Corey Mifsud, the administrators of William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.
• Reddit has a new AI training deal to sell user content
  💭 I just nuked a handful of my stories from Reddit. It probably won’t achieve much… they’ll probably let their scraping-buddy —coughOpenAIcough— go through the deleted content too. But it was a small price to pay for the chance to say “fuck you” to our imminent overlords.
• The Text File That Runs the Internet
  ❝ “For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.”
• New FDA-approved drug makes severe food allergies less life-threatening
  💭 Before long I won’t be able to count on a peanut perimeter to protect me from a full-on snuggle assault… which we in the business call a ‘Blossom Blitz’.

• ‘Life Is Strange’ and ‘Life Is Strange: Before the Storm’ Have Been Updated for Modern iOS Device and OS Support
  💭 Okay, so Life Is Strange’s writing is hella whack, yo. And the expression-challenged character models tend to make it feel like a department store mannequin production of an off-off-Broadway play about loss, death, and Polaroids. But the “rewind” mechanic elevates the material, and I’m glad we’ve been playing it on the stream. If you want a mobile version of it, here ya go…
• New York archdiocese calls funeral for trans activist at cathedral ‘scandalous’
  ❝ Pastor of St Patrick’s Cathedral condemns service for Cecilia Gentili after she was celebrated as being ‘mother of all whores’
• After a decade and $1.2 billion, NASA reveals its booty from Bennu: 121 grams
  💭 It saddens me when stories like this —which should be presented as the exciting developments they are— lead with angerbait bullshit along the lines of ‘See how much they spent to get so little?! Here are some paragraphs explaining why this is actually cool, but we couldn’t get you to read without pissing you off first.’ Human beings do something amazing, and it ends up serving random economic grievances.
• Asgard’s Wrath 2 Review – IGN
  💭 I’m tempted to buy this for my Quest 2, but I haven’t gotten into a VR game since Half-Life: Alyx, and I’m not sure I want to spend 90 hours spinning in circles and trying not to fall into the TV.
• ChatGPT vs. Gemini: Which AI Chatbot Subscription Is Right for You?
  ❝ Everyone wants your $20 per month for access to their best AI chatbot. Who gets it depends on what features are important to you.

• OpenAI collapses media reality with Sora, a photorealistic AI video generator
  💭 I recently read a pretty convincing argument that the nature of this generation of generative AI is self-limiting… the nature of the models will lead to most machine-created media looking uncannily similar, and thus boring. It won’t look bad, but those who consume enough of it will start to spot the seams. Which is good… in the short term. Hopefully, society will have time to prepare itself for the seamless shit we’ll see in 2040.
• For Hundreds of Years, People Thought California Was an Island
  ❝ Dozens of maps show cartography’s most persistent mistake.
• How to get on ‘Survivor’: Behind the scenes of casting season 45
  ❝ How do you get on ‘Survivor’? Read the incredible stories and watch the audition videos of contestants that made in onto season 45.
• Nvidia CEO calls for “Sovereign AI” as his firm overtakes Amazon in market value
  💭 I’m not saying that there’s nothing to his argument. I’m just not sure that the dudes who stand to make billions —trillions?— from machine learning hardware are the right ones to be calling for what will essentially become a post-nuclear, multi-polar Cold War.
• Walmart might buy Vizio to win the fight over cheap TVs
  ❝ Walmart is in talks to buy Vizio for $2 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The deal could put Walmart in a position to compete with smart TVs from Roku and Amazon.