Who needs pride when you have nationalism // What's Good: Jul. 1, 2022
Getting medieval, ratios, and fish.
Hello, good afternoon, happy Friday. Sorry about the delayed edition today, I had business to take care of this morning and I am live on Twitch at this very moment. My stream is in fact listening to me pound away on my keyboard as Matt Murdank attends a Department of Commerce and Labor meeting teaching business owners how to use their new systems. It’s all very exciting.
Hear ye, hear ye
I said “fuck yeah” out loud when I first saw this article:
Working at the famous dinner-theater chain Medieval Times comes with some unique occupational hazards. For instance, sometimes a guest who has emptied one too many goblets of booze starts banging the Middle Ages-style plates and bowls together.
Clanging the heavy dinnerware can spook the horses in the arena, endangering the knights as they joust for the queen’s honor. It often falls to the queen herself — a mic’d-up actor on a throne above the pit — or her chancellor, Lord Cedric, to gently admonish the overzealous crowd, all while keeping in character: Please, m’lord, don’t bang the plates.
I hope they win their union. Solidarity forever!
I have always wanted to ratio [subject]
All hail Keffals, our ratio queen:
For over a year after she first joined Twitch, Clara Sorrenti used the streaming platform like most of its users: to broadcast herself playing video games for a handful of viewers.
But when Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, launched a campaign against gender-affirming care for young people, it struck a nerve with Sorrenti, who transitioned as a teenager. The 28-year-old took to Twitch, talking openly about her experience in hours-long streams.
Now, Sorrenti is one of the most popular openly trans streamers on Twitch, amassing over 3,000 subscribers as of May, who pay $4.99 per month to support her streams. She is part of a new class of stars who have abandoned the platform’s traditional game-stream format to talk about news and politics. This cohort of creators, who have embraced the Just Chatting category, have emerged as pundits for a generation disconnected from cable news.
SPACtacular
Wow, it is almost like these investment vehicles are designed to lead to profits for some and losses for others:
Earlier this month, the staggeringly bad market performance of BuzzFeed managed to get even worse. Shares of the media company fell more than 40 percent on June 6, just days after the expiration of a lockup preventing company insiders from selling their stock.
BuzzFeed is now trading at just $1.68 — a decline of nearly 85 percent since the moment it went public on December 6 by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. It’s a startlingly poor return even by the low standards of SPACs, which have recently crashed en masse. Other media companies that had been planning similar maneuvers, from Vice to Forbes to Bustle, have abandoned their plans. Under pressure to be more profitable, the award-winning BuzzFeed newsroom — it won a 2021 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on mass detention camps in China — is shrinking via layoffs and buyouts.
Tale as old as time
Song as old as rhyme, getting scammed online:
It’s an age-old tale: love gone wrong, a jilted partner left in the lurch. Only now, the story is colliding with the very modern phenomenon of online fraud.
Digital romance scams have surged over the past two years, leading to millions of dollars in losses for people who were wooed and then duped out of money. While con artists have long been a part of life on the internet, experts say the trend exploded as Covid-19 lockdowns created the perfect opportunity for swindlers seeking lonely targets.
Upcycling
I mean, sure, why not:
“NEWBrew” is no ordinary beer. The new Singapore blond ale is made with recycled sewage.
The alcoholic beverage is a collaboration between the country’s national water agency, PUB, and local craft brewery Brewerkz. First unveiled at a water conference in 2018, NEWBrew went on sale in supermarkets and at Brewerkz outlets in April.
Fishy
What:
Fish are falling from the sky in parts of San Francisco, and a boom in coastal anchovy populations is to blame.
Reddit user sanfrannie posted earlier this month that about a dozen 8-inch silver fish “rained down from the sky” onto their friend’s roof and back deck in the Outer Richmond. Several other users commented with similar experiences — one person said they “heard a whoosh sound behind me and heard a massive splat” before seeing fish scattered on a nearby driveway. Another commented that they “almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus” in the Castro, and a third person said they assumed “a band of roving kids were doing a Tik Tok sardine-throwing challenge on a roof somewhere” after seeing several fish fall onto an Outer Richmond sidewalk.
Surprise! The algorithm sucks
Who could have possibly predicted:
ON MAY 3, shortly after the draft US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, Bleu Grano noticed something strange. Gano, who runs the Instagram account Fund Abortion Not Police, had posted a guide to abortion services, including information about how to obtain abortion pills by mail, and images with web addresses to organizations like Aid Access and PlanC. The post was removed for violating Instagram’s community guidelines on the “sale of illegal or regulated goods.”
“I got really stressed that they were going to suspend the account,” says Gano. “I started to think it was specific to abortion, and stopped using the word ‘pills’ and only said ‘abortion by mail.’”
Like a cool mom
Yes yes very good I support this:
With the electronic dance music scene largely on hold because of the pandemic, Joanna Yanetti spent much of the last two years posting TikTok videos of her dancing to EDM in her bedroom, modeling a seemingly endless parade of flamboyant outfits.
“Festivals are really such a huge part of my personality and who I am,” says Yanetti, a 24-year-old production assistant from California whose @sunshinesparkles420 account has more than 50,000 followers. “Posting on TikTok was such a great way for me and these other creators to connect with one another, and feel that community spirit we have in our festival lives, when we didn't have it at all,” she says.
Minion fever
Okay, finally, here’s this incredible fever dream:
nIn the Web3 internet age, Marshall McLuhan’s supposition that “the medium is the message” proves itself to be exponentially true. The platforms upon which pieces of content are presented to the public are increasingly inextricable from the creation, interpretation and synthesis of said content. Indeed, most tech giants make it quite plain that, were it up to them, their platforms would be the only message — if the public is to consume, it must do so at the pleasure of The Medium.
Within that medium, the modern Minion enjoys a rarefied level of shitposting dominance. So ubiquitous are our goggled friends, and so synonymous are they with a certain brand of online behavior, that it’s easy to forget the shallow roots from which they grew. In the tumult of the late 2010s, Facebook normie meme groups saw an explosion of Minion memes — a typically softball shareable wherein a Minion (short, yellow, overall-wearing pill-shaped animated characters from the 2010 film Despicable Me) is presented alongside an inoffensive bon mot.
“Why Minions?” you weep. Well, why not Minions, first off. Second, good normie memes require a certain visual shorthand — pictures that are Keaton-esque in mood simply play better. An argument can be made that the memes grew as fast as they did in their heyday because Minions themselves are basically emojis with arms.
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
Putin: Western leaders would look ‘disgusting’ topless. How bad can $15 wireless earbuds from the gas station really be? The best video games of 2022 so far. Meditation App Headspace Relieved Stress for Everyone but Its Own Employees, Say Former Staff. YouTube’s ‘Minecraft’ community is mourning the death of Technoblade. Herbal Abortions Are Going Viral on TikTok. They Could Kill You. How to keep your nudes safe on iPhone. Inside the legal risks of offering travel reimbursement for reproductive care.