This… Is BGNN

Things you might want to know, for Mar 23, 2023:

• ‘Choke Me Daddy:’ The Dangerous Truth About Breath Play Memes — If this were a “how to do breath play safely” piece —or even a “can breath play be done safely?” piece— it would be unremarkable. But it’s really just a carefully phrased clutching or pearls, with its journalistic sensibility established in its opening anecdote about how people don’t always mean the things they say online. That’s some keen insight, folks.
• Low-rise denim shorts a poor choice for early spring wear — Depends on who’s wearing them.
• Ai Weiwei’s Lego Version of Monet’s Water Lilies
• Sex Worker-Led Payment Platform Shuts Down After Being Cut Off by Processor — If cryptocurrency can’t work for sex workers and erotica creators, then it’s utterly pointless.
• Sex on the beach: pressures of extreme polygamy may be driving southern elephant seals to early death — It’s tough out there for an elephant seal pimp.

• David Lynch knew how to make moments go viral before ‘going viral’ was a thing — He’s always known that art makes the biggest impact when it has a life outside the frame… when it infects the viewer and turns them into a semi-conscious collaborator. So… yeah.
• Feral Hogs Are the Worst Invasive Species You’ve Never Thought About — You don’t have to convince me, buddy.
• You’re Thinking About ‘Life’ All Wrong
• Are Roblox’s new AI coding and art tools the future of game development? — This is genius on the part of the Roblox people. They’ve already made great strides toward turning game development into a casual activity, and generative AI will smooth the process even more.
• Adobe made an AI image generator — and says it didn’t steal artists’ work to do it — The good: Adobe has trained their model using rights-cleared sources, so you can’t be sued for using their generated images. The less-good: I feel like the results should be viewed more like customizable clip art than some kind of human/machine collaborative painting… ultimately, Adobe owns the copyright to anything the model spits out. Even if they choose not to assert those rights… they have them.

• Nick Lachey Ordered to Attend Alcoholics Anonymous, Anger Management After Altercation — Love is blind, like Nick’s rage.
• How the Cinematography in ‘It Follows’ Trains You To Be Paranoid — We need to watch this on the stream… it’s a remarkable film.
• Giant whale sinks 44-foot boat, sailors rescued — Whales are assholes.
• ‘Pretty Baby’ docuseries looks at Brooke Shields’ controversial young fame — My older cousin somehow managed to get me into Blue Lagoon with her when I was a pre-teen… no telling how much flirting she had to do with the ticket-taker to pull that off.
• ChatGPT comes for radio — Radio’s been dead for a long, long time, and ChatGPT is made up of the lifeless, stitched-together scraps of human existence. So it’s Frankenstein’s monster coming for a zombie.

• Butters from South Park is getting the hero edit on TikTok — Let’s get this straight, motherfuckers: Butters is a hero everywhere, not just on TikTok.
• ★ It’s Game Over on Vocal Deepfakes — Yeah, as of now, audio recordings are no more reliable than signatures on a piece of paper or a pinky-promise.
• Dancers Sue 7M Films Claiming Owner Runs a ‘Cult’ — I’ve gotta tell you, this feels like the least-fun sort of cult I can imagine. And I can imagine a lot of things about cults.
• Amazon layoffs will shut down camera review site DPReview.com after 25 years — Amazon is demonstrating a shocking disregard here for an irreplaceable source of information.