I live within bus distance of the Universal picket line for the writer’s strike, so I like to go down there when I can to march with em in solidarity. They are all extremely cool people, and since many of them are older than me, I have been treated to a lot of free advice on Adult Life from more experienced adults. 10/10.
It’s also extremely funny to hear them talk shit about studios/executives that they’ve had to put up with, because they’re no longer required to pretend Oh, They’re All Such Lovely People, We’re So Lucky To Work For Them.
- “Dick Wolf insists on having an a personal office at every studio where his shows are worked on. He never goes to half of them, and when he does, he’s not usually there long. It’s just supposed to be left empty for him in case he MIGHT show up.”
“I took a bunch of coffee creamers from there just before we called the strike.”
“Honestly, that sounds fair?”
“I like to think of it as payment for all the extra work I had to do for free.”
- “Never work for Netflix if you can avoid it.”
“Oh my God, RIGHT? It’s a nightmare!”
“That is the most exploited I’ve ever been, and I’ve been doing this for a while so that says a LOT.”
- “Do they ever acknowledge how many laws the cops break during a single episode of any of those SVU spinoffs?”
“We’re not even allowed to use the phrase ‘Bad apples’ because it makes them uncomfortable.”
- “Humor does not exist in the Dick Wolf-verse, so we’re only allowed to include one joke per episode. Sometimes I like to play a little game where I see if I can get away with sneaking in a second.”
I’m gonna start talking about shit like Honor™ and Reputation™ now because every time I try to suggest we maybe stop saying horrible things to people for no good reason, somebody always hits back with a complex consequentialist argument for why it’s actually totally morally justified when they tell sexual minorities to kill themselves, so how about this: Every time you DM someone “kys” you are doing incalculable damage to your kleos, and if we’re mutuals then that’s going to damage my kleos, and kleos is the only immortality available to we who dwell not upon Olympus. Girl your shifgrethor is in shambles.
I slept in and just woke up, so here’s what I’ve been able to figure out while sipping coffee:
Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
The official branding is that a tweet is now called “an X”, for which there are too many jokes to make.
The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn’t reclaim the username first.
The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name “X” in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for “X” in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term “X Japan” is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
Elon had workers taking down the “Twitter” name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says “er”.
He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as “Xvideo”. Nobody tell him.
This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.
Edit to add further developments:
Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
The act of sending a tweet is now known as “Xeet”. They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words “tweet” and “Twitter” are still all over the place on the site.
TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it’s because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to “X-Paypal” and eventually just to “X”.
This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to “pay online” (as in “I’ll paypal you the money”)
X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I’m not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he’s hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn’t be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won’t be enough to pay the debt (since it’s worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
Sesame Street’s official accounts mocked the rebranding.
oh! I have to tell you guys a great story one of my professors told me. So he has a friend who is involved in these Shakespeare outreach programs where they try to bring Shakespeare and live theatre to poor and underprivileged groups and teach them about English literature and performing arts and such. On one of their tours they stopped at a young offenders institute for women and they put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet for a group of 16-17 year old girls. It was all going really well and the girls were enjoying and laughing through the first half - because really, the first half is pretty much a comedy - but as the play went on, things started to get quiet. Real quiet. Then it got up to the suicide scene and mutterings broke out and all the girls were nudging each other and looking distressed, and as this teacher observed them, he realised - they didn’t know how the play ended. These girls had never been exposed to the story of Romeo and Juliet before, something which he thought was impossible given how ubiquitous it is in our culture. I mean, the prologue even gives the ending away, but of course it doesn’t specify exactly how the whole “take their life” thing goes down, so these poor girls had no idea what to expect and were sitting there clinging to hope that Romeo would maybe sit down for a damn minute instead of murdering Paris and chugging poison - but BAM he died and they all cried out - and then Juliet WOKE UP and they SCREAMED and by the end of the play they were so upset that a brawl nearly broke out, and that’s the story of how Shakespeare nearly started a riot at a juvenile detention centre
Apparently something similar happened during a production of Much Ado at Rikers Island because a bunch of inmates wanted to beat the shit out of Claudio, which is more than fair tbh
honestly Shakespeare would be so pleased to know his plays were nearly starting brawls centuries into the future
I played Claudio once and I fully support this
“When we took Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” into a maximum security woman’s prison on the West Side…there’s a scene there where a young woman is told by a very powerful official that “If you sleep with me, I will pardon your brother. And if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll execute him.” And he leaves the stage. And this character, Isabel, turned out to the audience and said: “To whom should I complain?” And a woman in the audience shouted: “The Police!” And then she looked right at that woman and said: “If I did relate this, who would believe me?” And the woman answered back, “No one, girl.” And it was astonishing because not only was it an amazing sense of connection between the audience and the actress, but you also realized that this was a kind of an historical lesson in theater reception. That’s what must have happened at The Globe. These soliloquies were not simply monologues that people spoke, they were call and response to the audience. And you realized that vibrancy, that that sense of connectedness is not only what makes theater great in prisons, it’s what makes theater great, period.”
One day, someone will ask me what my greatest accomplishment in life has been, and I will look back on the many things I’ve done, and reflect on those things I am most proud of. Then I will gesture to my dog and answer, “I was loved unconditionally and been allowed to love in return.”
Do you love reading sapphic books? Feel like talking about them at least once a month? Want to be buried in an insurmountable pile of free sapphic ebooks? Join the Lesbrary!
Wait wait you can't just drop that off and not elaborate. What do you mean is there a mafia presence in Wales?? Please spill, what things did you notice??
Okay so bearing in mind that I have ADHD and Chronic Terrible Observational Skills:
I am in Cardiff
For a concert I am attending solo
Doors open at 5
4:15 ish I go ‘hmm I should eat something’
Cardiff is - unsurprisingly, being tiny and yet home to FOUR concert venues - Very Busy
Find McDonald’s
McDonald’s is very full. I recall my last concert related McDick’s experience, and promptly bounce
Directly across the street
Is an Italian restaurant
It looks closed but fuckit maybe I can beg for like. Bread or some shit
Go over
Am immediately pounced upon by the hitherto unnoticed chain-smoking woman hanging out by the door mostly hidden by a potted ficus(?)
“I was wondering if you were open and if-” “yes yes we are open what would you like?” (strongish Italian accent)
Inside restaurant is Deserted
Explain that I’m sort of in a rush, am assured it’s fine
Order chicken milanese which is generally a pasta dish with a breaded chicken component
Am led to seat nearish the front and promptly provided with a pint of coke in a glass tankard
Am then provided with a front row seat to an absolutely incomprehensible series of people entering and exiting (and in one case walking directly into) the door to what I can only presume is the kitchen
Starting with the guy who had been sitting at a table chain-smoking over a pile of papers
I counted at least three people exiting at least twice without actually entering in between
Am finally brought food
It is a breaded, butterflied chicken breast approximately the size of my face and a small pile of pasta approximately the size of my fist
It is all delicious
Chain-smoking papers man reappears, now wearing a chef’s apron labcoat thing
Go up to pay, chain-smoking ficus lady is now having a very loud argument in a language I did not recognise but was not Italian Welsh English French russian Gaelic or Spanish
She sees me, says, and I quote 'ah little girl lost, one moment’ and promptly hangs up
I am 27 and only nominally female
I am not remotely lost
She charges me for the pint of coke but not the food
I try to point out that she hasn’t charged me for the food
'do you want to pay for the food?’
’…. Not if I don’t have to?’
'good’
I leave. The door is now full of half a dozen very tall very Italian men and one absolutely adorable cocker spaniel
I ask if I can pet the dog (I have my priorities straight okay)
I am allowed to pet the dog. The dog and I are now best friends
The dog lead holder asks me in extremely accented but impeccably correct English if I had enjoyed the food
'yeah it was great!’
Everyone laughs a bit
I smile and pet the dog and realise I’m now late for the concert and hurry off
I see a post on Tumblr about mob fronts and several connections are made in my brain all at once
Everyone I’ve mentioned this to has gone ‘was the food really good?’ as a like initial litmus test for front-likelihood so I’m glad to see we’re all on the same page here
One of the most requested historical mermaid designs was a Pre-colonial Filipino mermaid. Of course as a collection of islands there is a huge amount of variation to choose from, and I eventually decided on Visaya fashion with some classic-inspired tattoo designs.
I am the artist! Do not post without permission & credit! Thank you! Come visit me over on: instagram.com/ellenartistic or tiktok: @ellenartistic
Ahhhhhhh!!! Go read it! Go read it!! The cording was plied by Neanderthals!!! The article talks about how we can’t keep thinking about them as being stupid it’s so delightful! In these trying times, let’s read about some joyful anthropological and archaeological discoveries!!!
Read it! The fact that it’s plied is so exciting! For plied cord, you first spin your fibers in one direction (they did it clockwise) and then take that collection of singles and twist them in the opposite direction (in this case counterclockwise). So it’s a process that requires planning and experience. You spin your first bit, you set it aside, you spin your second and third, you ply them. You can’t do it all in one go. And unless this piece happens to be the work of the very first person to spin fibers, and that person was a super genius who not only invented the idea of spinning but the technique for plying, it shows that the Neanderthals were communicating technological skills amongst each other. Which I mean isn’t news in and of itself, but this is just one more piece of evidence.
FERAL FROTHING IN FIBER ARTS THIS SHIT IS SO COOL
Holy shit this is incredible! The puts textile technology at 40,000 - 50,000 years old; the earliest previous evidence we had was 20,000 - 25,000 years.
And also, like the poster above said, this is evidence of *planning*. I was going into the article thinking “hmmm, extremely cool but probably thigh-spun two ply which is a single stage process…?” but no! This is three ply cord! I guess it might be possible to do thigh-spun three ply (be bloody tricky though which would be evidence of skill in itself), but more likely this was a highly skilled multi-stage process.
the wildest thing about the stolen throne is that it’s not even a dragon age novel it has nothing to do with dragon age. the howes aren’t there the couslands aren’t there the mac eanraigs aren’t there. literally loghain’s there and nobody else who appears in the entire game. nearly all of the most important battles in ferelden’s history take place entirely off-screen. it’s just four bisexuals being insane at each other for 400 pages and then suddenly it ends.
it’s bad, btw
the point isn’t even really the characters or whether or not unnamed cryptic swamp witch and unnamed smashy stone statue were there for approx three pages, it’s that the story does not interact with the setting in ANY way. it could be literally any shitty fantasy novel in the entire world about some idiot king and his stupid, stupid lionhearts. if you filed off the serial numbers nobody would EVER even think to themselves “huh! this shitty fantasy novel kind of reads like dragon age fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off.” it is THAT generic.
ALT
ALT
