This… Is BGNN

Things you might want to know, for Mar 29, 2023:

• House of the Dragon Season 2 Will Be 2 Episodes Shorter Than Season 1 — Hm. In the context of cost-cutting and write-offs at Warner Brothers, this is kind of alarming. GoT was arguably drawn out more than it should have been, but HotD has rocketed through years of history already… I’m not sure anyone but the bean-counters benefit from an increased pace.
• Reddit cracked down on revenge porn, creepshots with twofold spike in permabans
• This Uncensored Chatbot Shows What Happens When AI Is Programmed To Disregard Human Decency — I feel like we need to stop calling these things “chatbots”. This stuff is to human conversation what Google was to Yahoo’s search index… a bigger, faster, friendlier way to search the exact same content-swamp. The only new thing here is that unlike every other search tool ever built, these things don’t automatically cite their sources —something Bing is working on, to their credit— and make it clear that you’re simply looking at a smartly arranged regurgitation of the unbridled web.
• Man in Alabama steps out of car to watch cracks forming on ground — then bridge collapses (video)
• The fantasy of Ted Lasso and the reality of Jason Sudeikis — GASP! Are you saying —hold on, I need a second to recover from the thought— that actors are not the characters they portray?!?!

• Stop Using Celebrities to Talk About Age Gap Relationships — This is actually one of the more useful pieces I’ve seen on the subject in some time. There is a world of difference between Bradley Cooper and your weird uncle who hits on your friends when you bring them home for Thanksgiving… the former exists in a permanent state of constrained supply and unlimited demand, while the latter is desperate for any young ass he sees and still has candied yam stains on his shirt.
• Disney Lays Off Ike Perlmutter, Chairman of Marvel Entertainment — About fucking time. That Trump-loving cretin is directly responsible for the semi-failure of ABC’s Agents of SHIELD and Inhumans, not to mention the lack of growth and innovation at Ye Olde Marvel Comics over the last twenty years. (Turns out trying to engineer a corporate coup at Disney was the line he couldn’t cross.) Good goddamned riddance, Ike.
• Ex-Sims Dev Says Men Lie About How They Play Game Out Of Embarrassment — When I was a little boy watching Saturday morning cartoons, I would get uncomfortable and avert my eyes whenever Barbie or other “girly” ads appeared. Now imagine an entire generation of boys, twenty years younger, who never grew out of that…
• Narcan is now FDA approved for over-the-counter distribution. Here’s how to use it.
• Remembering Euell Gibbons’ Grape Nuts commercials — Those spots are certainly memorable to those of us Of A Certain Age, but I’m pretty sure almost none of us ever consumed the food they were trying to sell. Grape Nuts were nasty.

• How Two Jewish Kids in 1930s Cleveland Altered the Course of American Pop Culture — I’ve read this story 100 times since I was a kid, and I never get tired of it.
• How to test what an AI model can — and shouldn’t — do
• Is TikTok Actually Creating More One-Hit Wonders? — I think the internet in general is doing that, not TikTok in particular.
• Marvel at Penn & Teller’s unique take on ye olde donut-on-the-ribbon magic trick (video)
• How to End Bias and Taboos in Women’s Health Care — An important discussion to be had… I’ve had an up-close-and-personal look at how ill-equipped the medical profession can be when faced with women whose symptoms and consequences don’t track with the default male “norms”.

• Asteroid City’s first trailer is the most Wes Anderson thing you’ll see today — Wes is a genius, whose work never ceases to delight even as it occasionally perplexes. And he infuses everything he touches with his aesthetic… unlike a Tarantino film, which always looks like whatever movie or genre Quentin is referencing at the time, all of Anderson’s movies look like Wes Anderson movies.
• How Good Smile, a Major Toy Company, Kept 4chan Online