This… Is BGNN

Things you might want to know, for Mar 30, 2023:

• Christina Aguilera joins Playground lube: ‘Always loved talking about sex’ — It’s been a long time since Christina’s made me think about sex, so now she has me feeling all sentimental about lube.
• Replika Erotic Roleplay Mode Returns!
• Female spiders play dead during sex so males don’t have to worry about being eaten — It’s erotic roleplay. Just call ‘em what they are: dirty little spider pervs.
• Dominate Me, but Not Like That
• Porn ID Laws: Your State or Country May Soon Require Age Verification — The feds need to bring their many “interstate commerce” powers to bear here and put a stop to this dumb shit, at least within the US.

• Dave McKean makes a case for AI as an “evolutionary step” for art — As a multimedia artist, I’m not surprised McKean is conflicted about stuff like MidJourney. The problem is that these tools are at the “let’s destroy the old norms and invent the new ones later” stage of development, and artists can’t function without a well-known and understood set of constraints and expectations to embrace/violate.
• This tactics game is going all-in on pulp classics, mashing up Indiana Jones, The Mummy, and XCOM to make something surprisingly original
• A huge boost to stream quality is headed our way very soon thanks to AV1 on YouTube via OBS — I’m not holding my breath on AV1 coming to Telegram anytime soon, but it’d be nice.
• Fox News CEO Panicked That Election Fraud Fact-Checking Was ‘Bad For Business’ — The thing about the Dominion case is that it establishes as fact everything that we’ve always suspected about the inner workings of Murdochland.
• Microsoft’s Surface Hub 2S is finally getting an upgrade — I can’t imagine ever owning one of these things, but I’d love to play with one for a while.

• Here’s 10 minutes of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gameplay — I’ve barely started Breath of the Wild, so I should get to Tears of the Kingdom sometime around, oh, I dunno… 2026?
• Add The Last of Us Part 1 to the list of bad PC ports — A pity, ‘cause I was seriously thinking about playing it on the stream. I’ve sat our the last few generations of Sony consoles, so TLOU is virgin territory to me. Hopefully it’ll be cleaned up after a few point releases.
• Microsoft’s ‘Security Copilot’ Sics ChatGPT on Security Breaches
• Jeremy Renner Uses Anti-Gravity Treadmill to Walk in New Video — He’s not a fave of mine —The Town is really the only thing he’s done that I admired— but I hope he gets better soon.
• Amazon starts flagging ‘frequently returned’ products that you maybe shouldn’t buy — Considering this is a metric they could have exposed a decade ago, I’d call this an appropriate time to say “Finally.”

• ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ season 2 premieres June 15th — My favorite still-on-the-air version of Trek. Yes, I’m including Picard: The Next Generation… Anson Mount —that fucking name, man— uses the pre-Kirk Captain Pike to bring a little bit of Shatner’s sensibility into the 21st century, and the alien-of-the-week format helps an otherwise very modern-looking production stay connected to its 1960s roots.
• Producers defend animal sex scenes in David Attenborough’s Wild Isles — Oh for fuck’s sake. Look, did I want to know how hermaphroditic slugs pass sperm through their entwined vaginadicks? Not really. But the natural world is a weird place, and it’s important to be reminded of that from time to time.
• Netflix shares Obsession trailer starring Charlie Murphy & Richard Armitage — It’s been over a decade, and I still can’t think of a Netflix production that I found arousing. Nothing about this seems likely to change things for me.
• 11 Tips to Take Your ChatGPT Prompts to the Next Level
• Elon Musk reportedly values Twitter at $20 billion — We all need a little good news to brighten our days, and this was mine.