The Daily Dad

Things you might want to know, for Jun 10, 2023:

• The First In-Depth Study on ‘Blue Balls’ Reveals a Lot about Sex — “Men are full of shit and women are gullible” isn’t particularly revealing.
• Artifact — So I’m playing around with Artifact —the new AI-infused news reader from the people who made Instagram— and much of it mundane stuff… largely indistinguishable from Google News. It does deliver at least one very interesting, unusual feature, though: it looks at the title of every article it recommends, and if it seems clickbaity, Artifact uses generative AI to rewrite the title. This is a delightful behavior, returning me to a lost time when headlines actually tried to convey information.
• One man’s nearly 40-year, 8-bit quest to finish his teenage Commodore 64 RPG — I’d love to do something like this. I won’t, but I’d love to.
• Toxic ‘manosphere’ podcaster claims ‘all women are whores’ — I have no idea why young men are falling for this shit. I get that they’re targeting the average teenaged boy’s innate sense of persecution and lack of empathy, but aren’t we supposed to be teaching them the rudiments of critical thinking at some point? And what kind of self-respecting dude wants to be part of something called the “manosphere” anyway? Can’t we do better? “Oh yeah, man, I listen to all the podcasts in the Schlongscape!” “I used to be a feminist until my girlfriend dumped me and I discovered the Pro-state!”
• It’s One of History’s Most Famous Experiments. The Drawings Are Hilarious.

• A Nintendo Switch Like This Should Frankly Be Illegal — They’re not wrong. That is excessively cute.
• ’Cracker Barrel Has Fallen’: Far-Right Melts Down Over Pride Month Ads — I’ll be ordering breakfast this weekend. (The smoked breakfast sausage is unreal.)
• What Did the Ancient Romans Smell Like? — Considering how fond they were of dumping bodies in the Tiber, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say “I really don’t want to know.”
• How to Host a Large Language Model Locally — I propose that we establish The Galactica Protocols for LLMs and all future intelligence enhancers and simulators. “AI”s —I’m half-convinced to stop using that term— should live on home microservers, firewalled from the world.
• I just bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print, and I regret nothing — I’ve got to admit, it’s a fucking beautiful set of books. And I’m sentimental about World Book… I remember nervously rifling through the “S” volume in the back of my 4th grade class, devouring the entry for “sexual intercourse” over and over. If I recall, it said something like, “The penis enters the vagina. This is usually pleasurable for both parties.” Way to set those expectations, World Book!

• Motorbunny Buck Review: Worth Every Penny — I always wanted a Sybian, and this looks like the logical evolution of a 40 year old design.
• Data Shows Most Switch Owners Are Women, Gamers React Poorly — Duh. On both counts.
• Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Year I Started Masturbating’ on Netflix, A Raucous Romp About Discovering Pleasure
• Male Primate Masturbation May Have Evolved to Prevent STIs
• Pat Cooper, ‘Analyze This’ and ‘Seinfeld’ Star, Dead at 93 — Aw. We’re going to be losing more and more of the secondary Seinfeld cast in the decade to come, and I’m not happy about it.

• Reddit CEO Says Keeping Explicit Content on the Site Is a ‘Constant Fight’ — TL;DR: Reddit is cracking down on porn, and this is the first move in a longer process. I don’t expect them to repeat Tumblr’s mistake, but they’re going to start tightening the reins to minimize any bad press as they go public.
• Exclusive: Donald Trump admits on tape he didn’t declassify ‘secret information’
• New Accessory Turns Your Nintendo Switch Into A Steam Deck — If you liked the fixed form-factor of the Switch Lite but went with the full-sized Switch for its screen and the HDMI-out, this gizmo looks like a solid best-of-both-worlds scenario.