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Things you might want to know, for Apr 6, 2023:

• We can build immortal celebrities from ChatGPT and their existing back catalogs — All of you should go watch The Congress. Right now. It was arguably the best film of 2013, unquestionably the best work of Robin Wright’s career, and a shockingly prescient look at where the worlds of art and tech were heading. We will be living The Congress in ten years time… get ready.
• Cheaper Xbox expandable storage cards are on the way — ‘Bout time.
• Artificial Wombs Will Change Abortion Rights Forever
• ASUS’ ROG Ally is yet another Steam Deck competitor — Being a real competitor with the Steam Deck will require beating it in both performance and price. Otherwise, I’d rather just give Valve my money.

• ‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’ Turned a Children’s Icon Into a Murderer. Good
• Nintendo promises unlimited repairs for “drifting” Joy-Cons throughout Europe — Just do it worldwide, Nintendo. The JoyCons are flaky and you don’t want to change the design… just agree to fix ‘em on demand and make it a non-issue.
• There Are Too Many Cons in Contraception
• In the war on bacteria, it’s time to call in the phages

• Adobe Podcast’s text-based editing turns limitation into liberation — If Adobe wanted to get me to pay for some sort of subscription, this is pretty much the only way to do it.
• Canadian statistics professor games Tim Hortons contest for 80-98% win rates
• Why Halt AI Research When We Already Know How To Make It Safer
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the new gold standard for video game films — The wave of glowing reviews is making me nervous. I might actually end up watching this shit.
• Kobo’s all-you-can-read subscription coming to the US could challenge Amazon

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Things you might want to know, for Apr 1, 2023:

• Andrew Tate Fires Back After ‘South Park’ Implies He is “Romanian Sex Trafficker” — I didn’t know Andrew Tate existed before mainstream media started reporting on him… he’s never been recommended to me by YouTube, TikTok, or anything else. Now, that could mean that my —frankly Trey Parker-ish— stew of conflicting perspectives keeps such crap at bay because the sites can only glean enough of my worldview to know that Man Strong, Woman Dumb isn’t gonna fly with me. Or maybe —disturbingly— it’s not that the algorithms know my politics at all… maybe they just know I’m not a teenaged boy, and only teenaged boys are in the market for this shit. Which is another thing… what the fuck, teen boys? The absolutely LAST person I would have looked up to as a kid was a shithead douchenozzle like Tate. I can see why incels love Jordan Peterson —someone else that’s never been recommended to me— but for the life of me, I can’t fathom the appeal of this nothingburger of a man. He’s not clever, he’s not learned… he’s just an asshole.
• MAFS’ raunchiest season ever sends sales of sex toys soaring — “Raunchiest season”? Huh? This is the season of The Narcissistic Gaslighting Dickhead, not sexy fun times.
• ‘This is not a zoo’ – Why sex workers are protesting in Amsterdam
• How to tell when an investigation is politicized — I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, it’s arguable the hush-money case is politicized, unlike the rest of the pending cases. On the other, his minions will claim any prosecution is politicized, so the opposition can’t be engaged with in good faith. It’s a pickle, basically.

• Penny Arcade: Stygia
• How this Canadian doctor became the ‘Wayne Gretzky of vasectomies’ — and why he stopped
• [GOG] XCOM 2 ($2.99/95%) — A great price on a great game, particularly if you’re primarily interested in the single player experience.
• Marvel’s Secret Invasion series actually sounds kind of fascinating — The Skrulls give Feige & Co. a threat they can weave into the MCU that won’t loom as large as the universe-threatening forces of Thanos or Kang. The menaces can’t just keep escalating… they need to be subtle now and then. Let’s face it, if they’re not careful, Marvel will end up going full-on Galactus in a few years, and while he’s technically less dangerous than either Thanos or Kang, I’m not sure how they’ll ever top the visual of a building-sized space god trying to eat the Earth.
• Hackers exploit WordPress plugin flaw that gives full control of millions of sites

• Marilyn Monroe’s Psychoanalysis Notes — She’s been dead far longer than she was alive, so I guess this kind of thing is ok. But it still feels like an unnecessary invasion. Marilyn wasn’t a great thinker or author, so it’s hard to see how we need to know the intimate details of her psychoanalytic journey.

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Things you might want to know, for Mar 31, 2023:

• ‘Scott Pilgrim’ is coming back as a cartoon with the film’s entire cast — I want to say “GREAT NEWS!!!” but I’m still waiting for that long-promised King of the Hill restart, so it’s better not to get my hopes up.
• Burrito snares suspected bomber of anti-abortion group — I’m glad they busted the little prick. I don’t want terrorists on my side.
• Drew Carey made a radio show with AI. Fans weren’t pleased. — If he’d waited a year to try his little on-air experiment, it’s possible no one would have noticed.
• A Carl Sagan documentary is coming from Nat Geo & Seth MacFarlane — It’s depressing to know that the leading light in broadcast science information these days is the guy whose heretofore greatest cultural contribution has been a murderous talking baby.
• ‘Lust, Desire, and Excess’: New Doc Explores the Everlasting Legacy of Yello’s ‘Oh Yeah’ — I can’t tell you how omnipresent that song became for a few years in the ‘80s. Or maybe I can. Just think of how many times you’ve heard Hans Zimmer’s Inception “BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM”… it was overused to a similar extent.

• Scientists May Have Found an ‘Ultramassive Black Hole’ With a Mass of 30 Billion Suns
• I Tested 13 Bidets. I’m a Convert. — I’ve never used a bidet, but the day one of them arrives in my bathroom, I will use it without hesitation. If my butt is gonna be wiped, it should be done with a girl’s tongue, not Charmin.
• Disney: 1, Ron DeSantis: 0 — Another depressing blessing… corporate power is now one of the few checks-and-balances still functioning in our national system.
• Love in Paradise Season 3 Cast Revealed! Lidia Looks for Love — Whatever poor bastard has decided to hitch his wagon to Lidia’s star is in for a helluva ride.
• One in ten Britons pull their own teeth, fill cavities, or do other DIY dental work on themselves — This would be weirdly impressive if they were actually good at it.

• Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening Announced for PC, PS4 and Nintendo Switch — The NES versions of Nobunaga’s Ambition, Genghis Khan, and Bandit Kings of Ancient China consumed more hours of my teenaged life than anything but Ultima during the ‘80s. But I’m not sure I have the patience for the whole thing now.
• Swarm isn’t a love letter to Black women. It’s hate mail. — I have no coherent opinions about Donald Glover at this point. I loved him on Community, hated his attempts at stand-up, was disappointed by his Lando, and found Childish Gambino’s music to be good but not great. So I’m content to let everyone else judge him.
• Cup Noodles’ new ramen flavor puts your breakfast cravings into a cup — No. Nope. Nah.
• Why are movies so dark these days? — TL;DR: because DPs are lighting and shooting for reference monitors, while actual LCD TVs in the wild are routinely set to make a mess of all those careful decisions.

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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.

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Things you might want to know, for Mar 28, 2023:

• I Ate Aphrodisiac ‘Sex Dust’ for a Month, and Now I’m a Poet
• Texas scientists name newly discovered ancient beaver after Buc-ee’s, the state’s wildly popular rest stop
• Want to Raise Kind, Generous Kids? Take Them to an Art Museum | Inc.com
• Uber Eats is shutting down thousands of virtual restaurants to make the app less spammy
• They Posted Porn on Twitter. German Authorities Called the Cops

• I Could Play ‘Disney Dreamlight Valley’ Until the End of Time
• Get Ready For A Twitter Feed Of Assholes Only
• Apple Explains Why It Launched an iPhone App Dedicated to Classical Music
• Amy Jo Johnson Pushes Back on Claims That She Turned Down Power Rangers Reunion Over Money
• News anchor removed from air after quoting Snoop Dogg

• Would building a Dyson sphere be worth it? We ran the numbers.
• Slay The Spire Downfall mod developers are making their own tabletop fantasy roguelike
• Fallout Writer Chris Avellone’s Accusers Settle Libel Case For Seven Figures
• Air Review
• Captain America 4 Will See Liv Tyler Return to MCU After a 15-Year Absence

• Uh-Oh, The Super Mario Bros. x Lush Bath Bombs Look Like Pee
• Apple Releases iOS and iPadOS 16.4 with New Emoji, Notifications for Web Apps on the Home Screen, Voice Isolation for Cellular Calls, New Shortcuts Actions, and More
• Truck tire sends Kia Soul flying
• She Escaped Scientology in the Trunk of a Car. Her Nightmare Is Far From Over.
• Is Lana Del Rey Really a Pop Star?

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Things you might want to know, for Mar 27, 2023:

• ‘Abuse, Grooming, Drugs, and Sexual Coercion’: The Scandal Wrestling Buried — Wait, are you suggesting that Vince McMahon’s corporate freak show is the perfect place for assholes, scumbags, and sociopaths to set up camp? I mean, surely not! Surely!
• The A.D.H.D. Medication Shortage Reflects Bad Drug Policy
• Being a “Discord Kitten” Has Some Weird Implications on the Messaging App — Girls are debasing themselves for something as petty as a Discord upgrade. So Discord is now a sweat shop for sluts.
• Lady Gaga steps out as Harley Quinn in Joker 2 set photos — I’m going to keep an open mind about this, but Joker 2 is a tough sell for me. The first one was a soulless exercise in style, and I don’t see Gaga changing that.
• Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, author of ‘Moore’s Law,’ dies at 94 — I’ve known about Moore’s Law since I was a little kid, and watched the “Is This The End of Moore’s Law?” stories written year after year. An impressive life.

• Pervert caught with ‘degrading and vile’ video of human having sex with turtle — Back in 1994, a mother is cheerfully giving her child a Renaissance painter action figure and setting in motion a chain of events that will lead to multiple people in jail and one turtle very confused and uncomfortable.
• AMC Reveals New Footage for Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: Dead City
• Jonathan Majors Arrested in New York City on Strangulation, Assault, and Harassment Charges — Um. Yeah. If this doesn’t fall apart under scrutiny, wow… Marvel now has it’s own Ezra Miller Situation.
• ‘Dad said: We’re going to follow Captain Cook’: how an endless round-the-world voyage stole my childhood — When I read stories like this as a kid —usually written from the parents’ POV— I never felt myself gripped by a sense of adventure. I felt dread. I sensed doom.

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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.