The Daily Dad — Feb 23, 2024

Things you might want to know:

• Alan Cumming plays a character on Traitors, but season 2’s surprises snapped him back to reality
  ❝ “Do you mean you want it to be sort of like a James Bond villain?”
• Here are the full dimensions of the 2024 iPad Air and iPad Pro
  💭 A 12.9” iPad Air will be a very compelling device. I’d miss FaceID, and the iPad Pro’s Mini LED screen is frequently gorgeous, but other than that… a big-ass M3 Air with TouchID would be the sweet spot for a lot of people.
• Vice Media to halt publishing to namesake site, cut ‘several hundred’ jobs in restructuring | CBC News
  ❝ The head of Vice Media Group has informed employees that the company will stop publishing content on Vice.com and will be cutting several hundred positions.
• ‘Community’ Movie Script Is ‘Almost Done,’ Says Dan Harmon (EXCLUSIVE)
  ❝ Show creator and the film’s writer Dan Harmon confirmed to Variety that work on the “Community” film is “almost done.”
• Bluesky starts letting users host their own servers
  ❝ The decentralized social network is rolling out the initial phase of self-hosting, letting users host their own data and run their own servers on the AT Protocol.

• Scheana Shay Granted Sole Ownership of New Home With Husband Brock Davies
  ❝ Scheana Shay’s husband Brock Davies has agreed to grant Scheana with sole ownership of their new $2.5 million home.
• 90 Day Fiance’s Mary Clarifies Colon Cancer Claim: ‘I Made a Mistake’
  💭 Even accounting for the language barrier, this is a bizarre “mistake”. But given Mary’s history of panic attacks, I can actually see her hearing “your colon” and immediately jumping to a cancerous conclusion. And her idiot husband would buy whatever she said without asking for details. So I can believe the whole thing was the work of two nervous nitwits, not a couple grifters.
• A little US company makes history by landing on the Moon
  ❝ “We’re not dead yet.“
• ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Review: Ethan Coen’s Queer Crime Joyride
  ❝ It’s the first solo Coen film suffused with personality, thanks mostly to Margaret Qualley’s free-spirited queer horndog.
• Katy Perry’s ‘American Idol’ Exit: Son of 84-Year-Old Vet Says Pop Star Should Be ‘Run Out’ of Showbiz as Vicious Court Battle Rages on
  💭 It’s hard for me to give a shit when the 84-year old vet in question is a rich fucker whose kid is pissed that his drug-addled daddy sold a piece of his inheritance.

• Avengers: The Kang Dynasty Reportedly Getting a New Title – IGN
  💭 I have never understood why anyone liked Kang. The prize of my teenaged comic collection was Avengers #11 —I paid $10 for a tattered copy in 1981– which featured Kang as the villain, and I thought he was boring and pointless even at the height of my enthusiasm for such things. I get why Feige didn’t want to do Doom, Galactus, or Dark Phoenix at this point, especially when this whole phase has been devoted to establishing the norms of the multiverse. But still… Kang is a bad visual with zero gravitas.
• Apple’s iMessage Is Getting Post-Quantum Encryption
  ❝ Useful quantum computers aren’t a reality—yet. But in one of the biggest deployments of post-quantum encryption so far, Apple is bringing the technology to iMessage.
• Can I Tell You a Secret? review – this superb documentary perfectly evokes the horror of cyberstalking
  ❝ Detailed, personal, terrifying … this excellent two-parter follows a Guardian investigation into the recipient of the longest ever sentence for online stalking – by focusing on the victims
• Frozen embryos are “children,” according to Alabama’s Supreme Court
  💭 What I’ve learned from this: we’re all six to nine months older than we thought. And we’re going to have twenty-six year olds with baby teeth starting grade school. And Alabama is ruled by morons. (That last one isn’t a new observation.)
• Signal will soon let you share a username instead of your phone number
  ❝ Signal is rolling out a new feature that will let you create and share a username to connect with other users in the app instead of revealing your phone number.

• Another wall crumbles in the console exclusivity war: Sony is bringing official PSVR2 support to PC
  💭 This is very interesting. Meta needs competition, and Sony needs a reason to manufacture more headsets.
• Newly spotted black hole has mass of 17 billion Suns, adding another daily
  ❝ An accretion disk 7 light-years across powers an exceptionally bright galaxy.
• The top streamed shows are almost all old. Why?
  💭 For starters: twenty episode seasons. Continuity Lite. Old school filler scenes/episodes and the rhythms of dip-to-black breaks are actually as good for multitasking viewers as they were for pause-free households. And every single broadcast episode was an on-boarding opportunity, not a piece in a narrative puzzle.
• Babs Reunites Crossed Creators Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows – IGN
  ❝ Crossed creators Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows are reuniting for Babs, a new series that puts an irreverent spin on sword and sorcery comics like Conan and Red Sonja.
• Micheal Keaton Refused to Let ‘Beetlejuice 2’ Use Green Screens
  ❝ Michael Keaton said the only way to make ‘Beetlejuice 2’ was for it to be handmade and not rely on too much technology.