The Daily Dad — Feb 23, 2024

Things you might want to know:

• Alan Cumming plays a character on Traitors, but season 2’s surprises snapped him back to reality
  ❝ “Do you mean you want it to be sort of like a James Bond villain?”
• Here are the full dimensions of the 2024 iPad Air and iPad Pro
  💭 A 12.9” iPad Air will be a very compelling device. I’d miss FaceID, and the iPad Pro’s Mini LED screen is frequently gorgeous, but other than that… a big-ass M3 Air with TouchID would be the sweet spot for a lot of people.
• Vice Media to halt publishing to namesake site, cut ‘several hundred’ jobs in restructuring | CBC News
  ❝ The head of Vice Media Group has informed employees that the company will stop publishing content on Vice.com and will be cutting several hundred positions.
• ‘Community’ Movie Script Is ‘Almost Done,’ Says Dan Harmon (EXCLUSIVE)
  ❝ Show creator and the film’s writer Dan Harmon confirmed to Variety that work on the “Community” film is “almost done.”
• Bluesky starts letting users host their own servers
  ❝ The decentralized social network is rolling out the initial phase of self-hosting, letting users host their own data and run their own servers on the AT Protocol.

• Scheana Shay Granted Sole Ownership of New Home With Husband Brock Davies
  ❝ Scheana Shay’s husband Brock Davies has agreed to grant Scheana with sole ownership of their new $2.5 million home.
• 90 Day Fiance’s Mary Clarifies Colon Cancer Claim: ‘I Made a Mistake’
  💭 Even accounting for the language barrier, this is a bizarre “mistake”. But given Mary’s history of panic attacks, I can actually see her hearing “your colon” and immediately jumping to a cancerous conclusion. And her idiot husband would buy whatever she said without asking for details. So I can believe the whole thing was the work of two nervous nitwits, not a couple grifters.
• A little US company makes history by landing on the Moon
  ❝ “We’re not dead yet.“
• ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Review: Ethan Coen’s Queer Crime Joyride
  ❝ It’s the first solo Coen film suffused with personality, thanks mostly to Margaret Qualley’s free-spirited queer horndog.
• Katy Perry’s ‘American Idol’ Exit: Son of 84-Year-Old Vet Says Pop Star Should Be ‘Run Out’ of Showbiz as Vicious Court Battle Rages on
  💭 It’s hard for me to give a shit when the 84-year old vet in question is a rich fucker whose kid is pissed that his drug-addled daddy sold a piece of his inheritance.

• Avengers: The Kang Dynasty Reportedly Getting a New Title – IGN
  💭 I have never understood why anyone liked Kang. The prize of my teenaged comic collection was Avengers #11 —I paid $10 for a tattered copy in 1981– which featured Kang as the villain, and I thought he was boring and pointless even at the height of my enthusiasm for such things. I get why Feige didn’t want to do Doom, Galactus, or Dark Phoenix at this point, especially when this whole phase has been devoted to establishing the norms of the multiverse. But still… Kang is a bad visual with zero gravitas.
• Apple’s iMessage Is Getting Post-Quantum Encryption
  ❝ Useful quantum computers aren’t a reality—yet. But in one of the biggest deployments of post-quantum encryption so far, Apple is bringing the technology to iMessage.
• Can I Tell You a Secret? review – this superb documentary perfectly evokes the horror of cyberstalking
  ❝ Detailed, personal, terrifying … this excellent two-parter follows a Guardian investigation into the recipient of the longest ever sentence for online stalking – by focusing on the victims
• Frozen embryos are “children,” according to Alabama’s Supreme Court
  💭 What I’ve learned from this: we’re all six to nine months older than we thought. And we’re going to have twenty-six year olds with baby teeth starting grade school. And Alabama is ruled by morons. (That last one isn’t a new observation.)
• Signal will soon let you share a username instead of your phone number
  ❝ Signal is rolling out a new feature that will let you create and share a username to connect with other users in the app instead of revealing your phone number.

• Another wall crumbles in the console exclusivity war: Sony is bringing official PSVR2 support to PC
  💭 This is very interesting. Meta needs competition, and Sony needs a reason to manufacture more headsets.
• Newly spotted black hole has mass of 17 billion Suns, adding another daily
  ❝ An accretion disk 7 light-years across powers an exceptionally bright galaxy.
• The top streamed shows are almost all old. Why?
  💭 For starters: twenty episode seasons. Continuity Lite. Old school filler scenes/episodes and the rhythms of dip-to-black breaks are actually as good for multitasking viewers as they were for pause-free households. And every single broadcast episode was an on-boarding opportunity, not a piece in a narrative puzzle.
• Babs Reunites Crossed Creators Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows – IGN
  ❝ Crossed creators Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows are reuniting for Babs, a new series that puts an irreverent spin on sword and sorcery comics like Conan and Red Sonja.
• Micheal Keaton Refused to Let ‘Beetlejuice 2’ Use Green Screens
  ❝ Michael Keaton said the only way to make ‘Beetlejuice 2’ was for it to be handmade and not rely on too much technology.

The Daily Dad — Feb 20, 2024

Things you might want to know:

• ‘Everything is hairless’: what 100 women taught me about porn and body confidence
  💭 I feel like anyone seriously researching porn’s influence on women’s self-image in the 2020s has to be old as fuck, ‘cause no one under fifty thinks that porn is having a meaningful impact on modern self-image in the era of Instagram. When it comes to generating insecurity, a bruised-up, bored porn slut being impaled by a sketchy cock has got nothin’ on a perfect size 0 lounging —toned and smooth— in an microscopic bikini next to an infinity pool overlooking Santorini while eating an improbable pizza.
• Legendary Publisher EC Comics Rises From the Grave – IGN
  ❝ Oni has become the official home of the EC Comics brand, via a partnership with William M. Gaines Agent, Inc. The new line will be overseen by Oni Press President & Publisher Hunter Gorinson and Editor-in-Chief Sierra Hahn in partnership with Cathy Gaines Mifsud and Corey Mifsud, the administrators of William M. Gaines Agent, Inc.
• Reddit has a new AI training deal to sell user content
  💭 I just nuked a handful of my stories from Reddit. It probably won’t achieve much… they’ll probably let their scraping-buddy —coughOpenAIcough— go through the deleted content too. But it was a small price to pay for the chance to say “fuck you” to our imminent overlords.
• The Text File That Runs the Internet
  ❝ “For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.”
• New FDA-approved drug makes severe food allergies less life-threatening
  💭 Before long I won’t be able to count on a peanut perimeter to protect me from a full-on snuggle assault… which we in the business call a ‘Blossom Blitz’.

• ‘Life Is Strange’ and ‘Life Is Strange: Before the Storm’ Have Been Updated for Modern iOS Device and OS Support
  💭 Okay, so Life Is Strange’s writing is hella whack, yo. And the expression-challenged character models tend to make it feel like a department store mannequin production of an off-off-Broadway play about loss, death, and Polaroids. But the “rewind” mechanic elevates the material, and I’m glad we’ve been playing it on the stream. If you want a mobile version of it, here ya go…
• New York archdiocese calls funeral for trans activist at cathedral ‘scandalous’
  ❝ Pastor of St Patrick’s Cathedral condemns service for Cecilia Gentili after she was celebrated as being ‘mother of all whores’
• After a decade and $1.2 billion, NASA reveals its booty from Bennu: 121 grams
  💭 It saddens me when stories like this —which should be presented as the exciting developments they are— lead with angerbait bullshit along the lines of ‘See how much they spent to get so little?! Here are some paragraphs explaining why this is actually cool, but we couldn’t get you to read without pissing you off first.’ Human beings do something amazing, and it ends up serving random economic grievances.
• Asgard’s Wrath 2 Review – IGN
  💭 I’m tempted to buy this for my Quest 2, but I haven’t gotten into a VR game since Half-Life: Alyx, and I’m not sure I want to spend 90 hours spinning in circles and trying not to fall into the TV.
• ChatGPT vs. Gemini: Which AI Chatbot Subscription Is Right for You?
  ❝ Everyone wants your $20 per month for access to their best AI chatbot. Who gets it depends on what features are important to you.

• OpenAI collapses media reality with Sora, a photorealistic AI video generator
  💭 I recently read a pretty convincing argument that the nature of this generation of generative AI is self-limiting… the nature of the models will lead to most machine-created media looking uncannily similar, and thus boring. It won’t look bad, but those who consume enough of it will start to spot the seams. Which is good… in the short term. Hopefully, society will have time to prepare itself for the seamless shit we’ll see in 2040.
• For Hundreds of Years, People Thought California Was an Island
  ❝ Dozens of maps show cartography’s most persistent mistake.
• How to get on ‘Survivor’: Behind the scenes of casting season 45
  ❝ How do you get on ‘Survivor’? Read the incredible stories and watch the audition videos of contestants that made in onto season 45.
• Nvidia CEO calls for “Sovereign AI” as his firm overtakes Amazon in market value
  💭 I’m not saying that there’s nothing to his argument. I’m just not sure that the dudes who stand to make billions —trillions?— from machine learning hardware are the right ones to be calling for what will essentially become a post-nuclear, multi-polar Cold War.
• Walmart might buy Vizio to win the fight over cheap TVs
  ❝ Walmart is in talks to buy Vizio for $2 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The deal could put Walmart in a position to compete with smart TVs from Roku and Amazon.