I hope you enjoy it.

Bnet 24q4

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This belatedly concludes the BNet 2024 experiment of a quarterly zine. It might not have been what I initially envisioned, but you cannot say I delivered four quarterly zines (on a less-than-quarterly basis).

Maybe we’ll be back soon. Maybe not. I love to keep ‘em guessing.

Another self-promotional thing I’d like to announce: I am open to freelance editorial work, in its many forms.

This is 98% because I like writing and editing, and want to do it more — and 2% because have you seen what weddings cost now?

If you have not been following my work for the decade-plus that I’ve been putting it out, you should, first and foremost, stop and ask yourself why that is. Maybe reflect on what you could have done differently. I’m enough of a thought leader that The New York Times recently sought me out for input on why Elon Musk is really lame.

But in case you are unfamiliar, I have written for many publications including The New York Times, nymag, Defector, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vice, GQ, and Logic magazine. Blogs, Q&As, reported features, profiles, multimedia packages — the whole spectrum. I would generally describe my work as “the stupidest ideas executed at the highest level.”

Here are some of the things I’ve covered.

• How technology effects society

  • How Minions Destroyed The Internet [The Awl, 2015]

  • The Triumphant Rise of the Shitpic [The Awl, 2014]

  • Facebook Has Always Been Right-Wing Media [Vice, 2020]

  • Turning Every Rooftop into Content [Logic, 2022]

  • The Real Story Behind the Viral ‘Poo Flip’ [nymag, 2019]

  • Before ‘Old Town Road,’ Lil Nas X Was a Tweetdecker [nymag, 2019]

  • mysteries of the Scatman [BNet, 2020]

  • good thing [BNet, 2020]

  • Shingy, the Digital Prophet, Reflects on His Time at AOL and What’s Next [nymag, 2019]

  • ‘None Pizza With Left Beef,’ 10 Years Later [nymag, 2017]

  • Talking to the Man Behind ‘Loss,’ the Internet’s Longest-Running Miscarriage ‘Joke’ [nymag, 2015]

  • How ‘Come to Brazil’ Came to the Internet [nymag, 2016]

  • whatshappening.online [2022]

• Mysteries

  • deuxmoi's digital trail [BNet, 2022]

  • At The Turtle Club In The Shadow Of 9/11 [Defector]

  • The Misremembered History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater [Defector]

  • The Untold Story of What Happened After ‘Back at It Again at Krispy Kreme,’ the Best Vine of All Time [nymag, 2016]

  • lifestyles of the rich and famous [BNet, 2020]

  • Constable-Frozen, the Internet's Most Famous Frozen Fan, Denies That His Tumblr Is Secretly a Fetish Blog [nymag, 2017]

• Video games

  • How Gamers Beat NFTs [Bloomberg Businessweek, 2022]

  • The Most Important Video Game on the Planet [nymag, 2018]

  • With Melodrama and Memes, a Yakuza Game Series Charms America [New York Times, 2024]

  • ‘I'm Han Solo’: The Story Behind Star Wars Kinect and the Most Infamous Jason Derulo Parody of All Time [nymag, 2018]

  • How the Mystery of Freeware Inspired the Kaleidoscopic UFO 50 [New York Times, 2024]

I am available to write or edit on all of these topics and more. I like writing about most things in the pop culture sphere, even without a computer angle. Except for music — who am I kidding; I can’t write about that.

I also have a wealth of experience copywriting/editing and ghostwriting. Press releases, marketing blogs, etc. Are you a corporate VP who is somehow too lazy to write your own stuff, but not lazy enough to ask ChatGPT? Maybe I can help! I would love to get paid to write a book with someone else’s name on it that’s called something like The Friend-Foe Paradigm: How Engaging Your Enemies Can Unlock Value And Drive Impact. I am not joking.

The only deadlines I don’t meet are self-imposed. My copy is clean and comes in on time. My rates are modest because I do not like myself. If any of this interests you or even if you have a germ of an idea you’d like to bat around, feel free to reach out at brian[at]feldmanbrian.com.

This issue has been a labor of love for me. I’ve spent the recent months trying to figure out how I could best use my platform to make readers more informed about the issues of the day. This autumn, we all must seize the opportunity to use our voices, to stand up and be counted.

BNet is often about silly stuff that I love about technology. But sometimes, what might seem like harmless internet fun can have devastating real-world consequences. To that end, this issue of BNet goes long on a complicated issue that has fascinated me for weeks, and that I thought deserved a thorough examination.

Bnet Special Issue

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I hope that you take the time to read it. As always, brian@peeingandpoop.ing is the place to send feedback. I’m looking forward to a constructive dialogue.

Thank you,

Brian

If you know where to look right now, you can watch people who play video games discover the ancient concept of parody.

Last week, South Korean video game developer Pocket Pair released a new video game called Palworld. In the game, the player catches cute little monsters called Pals using a device called a Pal Sphere and is able to command them to do things like fight other Pals or gather resources. A list of Pals you meet is compiled in a Paldeck.

The game looks like this:

“whoa. Whoa. WHOA. WHOA!!!!” you’re yelling. “This looks just like Pokémon! Pal Sphere = Pokéball and Paldeck = Pokédex. The monsters designs look a lot like Pokémon. Are you seeing this??” Great job, dude. You’ve cracked this case wide open.

However: eagle-eyed viewers will note that some things in Palworld are different. You and the Pal can wield guns? You can force the pals to work manual labor? You can fully kill the Pals instead of just making them faint? And then you can use their organic material in food recipes? That’s so sick and twisted. Not rated E for Everyone by a long shot. Many gamers are asking: Can you believe Nintendo would even allow this to happen without taking legal action? This has led to a slew of agonizing discourse about corporate intellectual property rights. Pocket Pair’s CEO said that it has received death threats and abuse over plagiarism allegations.

Here’s an image I grabbed from a Twitter account that has since locked down:

Plus another thread of infringement allegations (38,000+ likes so far):

Even Hard Drive, a site that is literally an Onion-style parodies of video game news, can’t seem to parse this situation. I’m not sure if they realize the irony.

Again I gotta say: Yeah, we know. Everyone with eyes knows. This isn’t a particularly big “gotcha.”

I can’t believe I am defending a very superficial parody but it seems worth pointing out that you can do parody without anyone’s permission. That’s the beauty of parody. It can be brazen and explicit and it doesn’t even have to be a good spoof. It can be hacky and shoddy and it doesn’t need to announce itself. Imagine if someone became incensed because the Weird Al song “Fat” sounds just like Michael Jackson’s “Bad” and has similar album art. Are you going to ding Weird Al for not writing the melody? Of course they’re similar — that’s the point. It’s commentary through imitation. Palworld doesn’t have to open with a big splash screen that says “This IS a parody of Game Freak and Nintendo Corporation’s Pokémon intellectual property, just to be clear.”

I think this is all is just one more illustration of how online discourse has distorted the act of evaluating creative works. Everything now is framed as a struggle between successful IPs, measured in financial metrics rather than artistic merit, and cataloged in ill-fitting formats like reaction videos and terse tweets. I guess this situation is also a result of a large swath of people who engage with one specific medium (video games) without thinking about how it might relate to other sections of the arts. If one’s first instinct upon seeing Palworld is to seek comment from Pokémon’s legal counsel instead of its creative team, I’d say something has gone terribly wrong.

Arguably, the worst one could say about Palworld is that it’s lazy commentary. “What if Pokémon had guns?” is middle-school fan-theory stuff. Palworld simply makes manifest what people have been debating about Pokemon for decades in countless schoolyard debates and forum threads. Dorkly is up to part 70-something of “ If PokeDex Entries Were Literal.” Thousands have wondered if Pokémon are edible. They’ve also asked whether the creatures can die and whether their captivity counts as animal abuse or enslavement. On that last point, PETA put out multiple Flash games more than a decade ago, and another developer published a game called Ojimon in 2015. (A synopsis in this YouTube video’s description says, “Catch the weird ojisan monsters and force them to mine stuff to pay for your infrastructure projects. Or something. Give it a look and enslave them all!” Forcing Pokémon to work on infrastructure is basically Palworld’s main gimmick.)

There shouldn’t even be a debate on this. Parody — even the lazy stuff — is permissible. I remain adamant that parody does not need to be insightful. I know this because for many years I was a reader of MAD Magazine, whose many crude, cheap shots were most of its charm. Let’s check out MAD Magazine #386, from October 1999, which was presumably before many of the people getting mad online this week were born.

What are our friends — Ass, Musty, and Crock — up to?

Can you believe Nintendo would just allow this blatant IP infringement to happen? Mods? Mods???

Thank you for reading BNet. Sometimes it’s fun to go off.

I’ll pass on that, even if I don’t disagree with the underlying sentiment. Nobody has ever accused me of being too optimistic. But I don’t have a narrative arc for this year, or big thoughts about computers, and I am unimpressed with what passes for “memes” right now, which continue to be infinite lazy variations on roughly three ideas. As far as I can tell, this year’s major innovation was hypercharging the willful misinterpretation videos from TikTok, along with the old standby of making generalizations about Gen Z and Millennials that are, at best, so overly broad as to be useless. Aren’t you guys tired?

I don’t have any notable writing to plug and I don’t have any broad proclamations to make. Instead, here’s a just bunch of stuff from this year that I experienced, in no particular order.

social media became genuinely useful again

Alright, let’s get the big one out of the way.

I no longer have social media apps on my phone, and I don’t log into any of them on my work computer either. It kept feeling bad to use them and I don’t have any professional justification for it. For most of this year, I’ve easily managed to not spend a ton of time flipping through endless social-media feeds. I check my RSS reader a couple times a day and that keeps me well-informed enough. Except in one very particular case…

A big part of the Hebrew School experience for me was constantly being reminded that the Holocaust was terrible and that it’s important to be able to recognize and speak out when you see the signs. “Being against genocide, always” is a core value of modern Judaism, as far as I can tell. For the past three months or so, social media has become essential again because that’s where I am most informed about what is happening in Gaza.

The stuff I’ve been seeing out of Gaza has been truly horrifying and edifying. I’ve seen more dead bodies this year probably than during my entire lifetime of stumbling around the sicker parts of the internet. The words “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “genocide” currently apply to what Israel is doing to Palestine, and have for years. An immediate, permanent ceasefire and adequate humanitarian aid are the absolute bare-minimum needed here.

A relatively small aspect of the atrocities being committed is that the gulf between what I’m seeing on social media and what I’m seeing from standard news outlets is the widest it has ever been in my adult lifetime. This is not just a case of the same thing being framed as good in one place and bad in another; I’m seeing completely different things. A near-total omission of the suffering of Palestinians (and knock-on effects like stateside Islamophobia) in larger news outlets.

You’ve got tens of thousands of dead civilians, scores of targeted journalists and medical professionals; the deliberate, repeated bombings of hospitals and refugee camps; the killing of hostages who are waving white flags of surrender, borne out of justification for treating any civilian as a combatant; the Israeli military ordering people to seek protection in territory it decides to target anyway, the wanton destruction of historic and culturally important sites, the list goes on — and it’s all with the substantial monetary and military backing of the U.S. government. I find out most of this stuff from social media platforms and independent outlets first because all the big newspapers are too busy swarming Ivy League campuses or transcribing IDF press conferences in passive-voice cop-speak.

Here are just a few things I’ve read over the past few months that have stuck with me.

• Palestinian Suffering Is Never As Urgent As The Counterfactual:

  “The nature of Zionism treats Palestinians not as humans but as part of an amorphous pestilence capable of anything, shifted to fit any reason. When they are alive, they are a potential threat; when they are dead, they are a victim of their own circumstance. There is always some impossible counterfactual, some exonerating hypothetical. This process is how a child’s death can be blamed not on the Israeli soldier who fired the rocket, but on the imagined Palestinians who failed to put the child out of harm’s way.”

• ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza
  
  As the A.I. thought leaders in the U.S. wrestled with its hypothetical and overstated ability to destroy civilization this year, this sort of technology is already being deployed in Gaza to accelerate killing to an inconceivable pace.

  According to the sources, the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.

• There Can Be No Critique and Masha Gessen on Israel, Gaza, and Holocaust Analogies
  
  I found Judith Butler’s piece helpful for cutting through the distracting hair-splitting of the campus-speech debate, and Gessen is admirably more clear-eyed and articulate on the issue when many (myself included) are not.

100 gecs

At the top of my Spotify Wrapped in 2023. I also saw them live twice and they were great both times. Cannot stress enough how much they rule. I hope they make one zillion more stupid albums that make me feel like if I play it loud enough I’ll be able to vibrate through solid objects — but also if it’s just the two, that’s fine.

The Power Broker, Robert Moses

It was really nice when, in September, I got to take a break from having a personality for a month. My personality became “guy who is reading The Power Broker” and then “guy who understands exactly why New York is messed up because he just finished The Power Broker.” WHY doesn’t the SUBWAY go to the AIRPORT?? Please congratulate me on reading The Power Broker. It’s a very big book and it’s not even on Kindle.

Killers of the Flower Moon

Marty has done it again! The three and a half hours fly right by. Gladstone great, and you gotta give it up to Leo for wearing the bad teeth — but the unexpected MVP for me was De Niro. Crazy how good he can still be when paired with the right director, his best friend for like 600 years.

(I also enjoyed Scorsese appearing in his daughter’s TikToks. He’s always curious about stuff, always willing to lift up younger filmmakers. One of our best. And I’m glad he squashed his beef with The Pope.)

manga

Manga, like MMORPGs, has long been one of those things I’ve completely avoided because I knew that I’d just go down a rabbit hole and lose a lot of my precious time on this earth to the interest. Anyway, I started reading manga this fall after finding Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life on a friend’s shelf. That memoir was great, and I’ve liked some of his other work but from my perspective, that work also has a bit of an “angry incel” vibe.

I’ve mostly been reading Osamu Tezuka stuff, though the one Yoshiharu Tsuge collection I read, The Swamp, was really good and I’ve been meaning to get back to the other volumes. Dororo was great, and I got real Jeff Smith’s Bone vibes from it. The epic scope of his eight-volume Buddha was really astounding to me as well.

Plus, Melody of Iron has one of the goofiest comics panels I’ve ever seen. It’s a cheesy revenge drama about a guy who has his arms cut off by mobsters and so he acquires prosthetics that he controls with psychokinesis, but at night, his subconscious sends the arms out on their own… to kill!

404 Media

I don’t think it’s a secret that (as a petty and jealous loser) I find most internet culture writing to be… lacking. A lot of reaching via generalizations. A lot of doomsaying and a lack of curiosity. A lot of assumptions that the internet that the writer is experiencing is the internet that everyone is experiencing. If this frustrates you as well, I cannot recommend 404 Media enough.

404 Media, since it launched earlier this year, has put out something almost every day that I want to read. Stories about weird, and funny, and terrifying stuff happening thanks to modern technology, with a focus on specific people and specific events and specific technical mechanisms. A refreshing change of pace from the bland and broad proclamations about “what the internet is doing to our brains” and TikTok writeups or whatever. They published the only article I wanted to read about Sam Altman getting fired.

Subscribe! I really can’t recommend it enough.

Hell Gate

Look, if you live in New York, you’ve gotta subscribe to Hell Gate. We have this incredibly stupid mayor who says some of the dumbest stuff, and does some of the cruelest and stupidest things that make the city worse, and the only publication up to the task of demonstrating plainly that Eric Adams is a corrupt buffoon is Hell Gate. Plus, $20 Dinner is a food feature made for me, a guy who loves counter service.

May December

Haynes has done it again! He’s so funny. It’s in the little details. Nora’s Ark is an incredible name for a bad network television show. The ghost tour in the background of that one shot. The guy who plays the son is really unsettling. The ending is such a good payoff.

Hi-Fi RUSH

An incredible surprise at the start of the year, a rhythm-combat game that looks great too. One of a few things this year where I was like, “How’d they get it to look like that?”

But I do want to point out something important and infuriating: all of the marketing for this game mentioned Zwan being on the soundtrack. They licensed Zwan.

So I went through this entire wonderful game eagerly anticipating the Zwan sequence. “WHEN do I get to hit robots with my guitar to the rhythm of a Zwan song?” It never happened because the only time you hear “Honestly” by Zwan is over the end credits. It’s not really in the game. Disrespectful — to me and to Zwan.

everything by Charles Portis

Right now my current ranking is:

1. The Dog of the South

2. True Grit

3. Masters of Atlantis

4. Norwood

5. Gringos

but those top 3 could shift around depending on how I’m feeling that day and they’re all pretty excellent.

I also recommend Escape Velocity, a collection of highlights from his brief journalism career, as well short fiction and appreciations from other writers. There’s an old piece by Ron Rosenbaum in there about how everyone who reads Portis becomes a fanatic who recommends him to everyone and I guess now I’m one of those guys. Do you like good books? Check these out.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part 1

I saw this in true IMAX and every time there was a close-up on Vanessa Kirby, I thought she was gonna pop out of the screen like a monster in a 3-D movie in the 1950s and eat me. The behind-the-scenes mini-doc on Tom Cruise jumping off that cliff is the best film of 2022.

The Holdovers

Universally excellent performances all around and what seems like a solid script. (People like complimenting scripts but does anyone actually read them? I don’t.) What I really want to highlight is the liquor store clerk who says “Here you go, killer.” to Paul Giamatti. He really makes that line — one of only two — his own. A great, extremely brief performance.

Bruce Springsteen @ the Barclays Center

I got to WALK to a Bruce Springsteen concert. Didn’t even have to take the subway. An incredible luxury. Thank you, Bruce!

City of Quartz / Planet of Slums / The Monster Enters / Buda’s Wagon / Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis

This guy rocks. I’m mad it took me so long to read his stuff. All of it is deeply researched, clear-eyed, gracefully presented, and every paragraph has some wild fact or anecdote that makes mad or surprises me. He’s such a good writer. He could just do really good research and be a mediocre writer and it’d still be great but he’s also a great writer. He’s constantly flexing on everyone.

the final season of Reservation Dogs

Unsurprisingly, they stuck the landing. A perfect three seasons of television.

the final season of The Other Two

The episode set at the AIDS play was one of the best eps of the year. Unfortunately, that strain also meant the writers were too tired to put any jokes in the series finale. :(

the final season of Succession

A great show that could never quite overcome how annoying its fans are.

the final season of Barry

Very bold of them to just not write any jokes this season. It didn’t quite work, because it made the season suck, but I respect that they tried.

the final season of Winning Time

The second season of Winning Time ends with the Lakers losing to the Celtics in '84 and Magic Johnson crying in the shower, clearly setting up a redemption arc for the next season. But the show got cancelled and so Winning Time ends with this impromptu coda — a tonally bizarre ending montage that explains “Actually, the Lakers ended up being really good.” The funniest finale of the year.

Tom Scharpling’s Ant-Man saga

I’ve listened to a lot of The Best Show over the past few years and I laugh every time Scharpling tells the story of getting cut out of all three Ant-Man movies. Really funny that he finally made it — into one of the worst movies I saw this year even before Jonathan Majors’s IRL heel turn.

Godzilla Minus One

What a great, fun movie! You know a movie is gonna be good when a scientist with unkempt hairs shows up with one of the dumbest schemes you’ve ever heard in your life: sinking Godzilla to the bottom of the sea and then raising him really fast so he gets the bends. And you’ve gotta respect that they stick with this Godzilla design that has those silly little beady eyes.

the following exchange at my screening of Wonka as the WB logo appeared while people were still talking

Guy at front: Shhhh stop talking.

Guy several rows back: Movie hasn’t started yet.

Guy at front: Doesn’t matter.

Guy several rows back: Word.

The Righteous Gemstones, season 3

The Steve Zahn-aissance shows no signs of abating.

Sharper

A twisty, heist thriller that seems like it was made in 2008, which I mean as a compliment. Annoying that this got buried on Apple TV+ early in the year. “Check out Sharper” —Brian

The Burial

Similarly buried on Amazon Prime this fall, it’s a feel-good legal drama starring Tommy Lee Jones and Jamie Foxx. Another sort of movie they barely make anymore and they should make more of. “Check out The Burial” —Brian

Vanderpump Rules, season 10

I have a couple of rules about this show.

1. It is the only one of these shows that I will watch.

2. I will not follow anything outside of the show. I only want to learn about these people through the events of the show’s episodes.

These rules have mostly paid off and kept me sane for the last few years, especially given recent events. I was already hyped on this season as a rebuilding year given a renewed focus on the core squad of freaks and Tom Schwartz and Katie’s long-gestating divorce. But the latter half of the season was so fun to watch because the Toms are freaks.

Also, good for Scheana! She seems to have figured it out.

Essays Two, Lydia Davis

I spent a lot of this year having to listen to countless executives and managers talk about how AI was going to supercharge everything and do a bunch of our work for us. Translation is one of those things that a lot of technologists see as a simple problem to solve with AI: a word or expression in one language has an equivalent in another, and more robust systems powered by LLMs can account for context or multiple meanings.

I found an enlightening and unintentional counter to this idea in Davis’s collection of essays about her translation work. In reality, or at least in Davis’s work, a lot more effort than one might think goes into it. It requires a lot of consideration and historical research that helps frame translation not as a logic problem to be solved but as an art like any other form. There’s no replacement for people who actually care about something enough to do a good job.

the shorter books of David Graeber

I read a few Graeber books this year, and while I appreciate the titanic scope of The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow) and Debt: The First 5,000 Years, I found myself more drawn in by Bullshit Jobs and The Utopia of Rules. Short, pithy, books about why work sucks and why nobody makes anything cool anymore. Easy recommendations for anyone in your life who works anywhere.

The Morning Show

I cheered when, after alluding to it in the premiere, they showed a flashback of Reese Witherspoon at the capitol riot. AI will never be able to write this stuff.

Yakuza 5, Yakuza 0, Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

The Yakuza series is a towering achievement in storytelling and worldbuilding. It has more personality in its pinky than most games have in their whole body. One of the best things I saw this year was in Yakuza 6 when, if Kiryu gets in a fight while carrying around an infant child, he just hands the baby to a random pedestrian before the raising his fists. (Also, this.) The attention to detail is killer. The final cutscene of Like A Dragon Gaiden made me lose my mind (compliment).

“103 fever,” Conner O’Malley

One of my more annoying periods of this year was the week that I spent doing the bad Drake impression, saying “I heard you got a 103 fever for the past six months… I just wanted to say… me too.”

Tim (Let It Bleed Edition), The Replacements

Fans of Tim were feasting this year. The new mix sounds great. The vinyl set I got came with a hat that, bewilderingly, says “The Replacements” on the front and “Tim” in the Tim font on the back. They should’ve put “Tim” on the front of the hat instead. As for the album itself, I have no issues.

Fortnite

They recently added a LEGO mode and a Rock Band mode to this game, making it the virtual equivalent of my parents’ basement.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

One of the best moments of the year was when I went down to The Depths for the first time and spent 20 minutes says “Oh wow, I hate this, oh wow what the hell is that?” over and over again. That’s a sensation only video games can deliver. Loved the li’l mushroom town too.

Chants of Sennaar

I love feeling like a genius and Chants of Sennaar makes that happen. Really smartly designed and a great little ditty to play on my Steam Deck. I do wish the guy walked a little bit faster but other than that, I loved everything about it. I even went back and did the optional stuff.

The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen

Read this one on vacation in like three days, which is pretty quick for me. Lives up to the hype. (The sequel is take-it-or-leave-it.)

The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu

Similarly devoured this one in a weekend. It’s been a while since I read something that really puts the “sci” in “sci-fi.” Can’t wait to see the terrible Netflix show that the Game of Thrones bozos are making out of this. I’ll keep drinking that garbage.

the Daily Mail article about the woman who took Prince Harry’s virginity

The Daily Mail tracked down the woman who Prince Harry lost his virginity to and it featured this MS Paint-annotated photo that I think speaks for itself.

The Creator

A mostly competent sci-fi movie that I enjoyed simply because it’s so rare now to see a big-budget movie not based on existing intellectual property. And it’s not even big-budget really, they made it for like $80 million with a camera that costs $4,000 and it looks better than anything Marvel has put out in the past three years. Exciting!

The Wager, David Grann

I’m already a member of the Grann-ary, but I also love books about maritime disasters. He’s done it again! Not nearly as long as the big prestige hardback format implies. A breezy, easy read. Where does he even find this stuff?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

I saw this the way all childless adults should see animated movies: alone in a completely empty theater on a Sunday morning. All eyes are on Spider-Verse but this is the movie that made me spend the most time asking “Damn, how did they get it to look like that?” Jackie Chan as Splinter has a line reading that made me ijbol, which is extremely rare for me, especially when I’m by myself.

Cocoon

A great puzzle game and a nice way to spend three hours. Meticulously designed aside from some initally confusing internal logic on how the orbs work towards the end. I guess I also didn’t like the boss fights that much, now that I think about it. Still, an easy recommendation.

“Between a Ring and a Hardass,” American Dad!

Possibly recency bias, but this could be the single funniest episode of television I saw this year. Really good sitcom hijinks happening here. I don’t know what else to say except it came along at exactly the right time and I spent all 21 minutes in awe of how funny I found everything happening in it. Just trust me on this.

Starfield

It is kinda exhilarating to load up a game that you are eagerly anticipating and then immediately realize, “Haha wow this sucks!” They spent eight years on this? Good grief! It’s tough to know if I’ve changed in that time or if Todd Howard bit off more than he could chew or both. Anyway, I think I played it for like 40 or 60 hours.

GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo

Just a great album. I was worried that “get him back!” was going to be at the top of my Spotify Wrapped because I listened to it on a loop so much the first week but it was only #2.

The Gilded Age, season 2

Julian Fellows knows exactly what he’s doing. He walked into the writers room and scribbled “boy invents clock” in big red marker on the whiteboard and walked back out. Special shout out to Robert Sean Leonard’s Boston accent work this season. And of course, the line reading of the year:

“Soup??! At luncheon????” —Christine Baranski

Great stuff.

Thank you for reading BNet.

There are two things I remember about Grinch 2000, as it is sometimes called. They are:

1. Busta Rhymes recorded a song for the soundtrack called “Grinch 2000,” which begins with Jim Carrey — as the Grinch — saying, “This is a Flipmode Squad/Jim Carrey collabo.” It’s one of my favorite crossovers in all of musical history.

2. It has a Baby Grinch:

So now — thanks in part to filmic works of Sofia Coppola — I’ve got Baby Grinch on the brain. I’ve contracted Baby Grinch Fever, and the only prescription is more Baby Grinch. “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my Baby Grinch,” etc. What if the Grinch was a Baby? Funny to think about, and a bit profound.

This past weekend, I decided to look at pictures of Baby Grinch again, and because I am nothing if not generous, I shared my phone screen on the TV so that my girlfriend could also experience what it’s like to search “baby grnich” [sic] on Google Images. After I’d exhausted those results, I went to Etsy, where I also spent an hour browsing Baby Grinch-related wares.

Here are my favorite Baby Grinch gifts for dads, grads, mothers-in-law, second cousins, or your child in 2023.

Baby Grinch silicone doll 10,5 in. -MADE TO ORDER by CreaturesInMyBag

This high-ticket item is for real Baby Grinch-heads who have always wanted to know what it would be like to hold the Baby Grinch in their arms. As a longtime fan of the Baby Grinch’s whole deal, I can safely say that this is one of the most accurate Baby-sized Grinches I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot. Move quickly; there’s only one left and five people have him in their cart!

Price: $557.01

What the reviews are saying: “We love our baby Grinch! He is very well done, taking great care of the details and he came very comfortable in his basket, he looks so real!”

Baby grinch prop 40 cm by Fxstudios1

If a premium Baby Grinch at over $500 is a little out of your budget (thanks a lot, inflation), try this Baby Grinch at a more wallet-friendly price of just under $200. It’s got all the features you could want in a Baby Grinch doll, including that face, as well as the hairy chest that we all know of as a classic Baby Grinch feature.

Price: $190

What the reviews are saying: No reviews yet. You could be the first!

Baby grinch doll,mini fantasy green baby doll 1,7" polymer clay figurine, by Hadasycasitas

Need a tiny Baby Grinch to keep in your purse or breast pocket during the holidays? We’ve all been there! Check out this little guy.

Price: $40.92

What the reviews are saying: “This little grinch is the cutest ever!! Well made and good quality. I would highly recommend this Etsy store because the transaction was simple and communication was great. I will definitely be buying from this store again 🥰”

Grinch Baby Reborn Doll Jingles by Bearysweethearts

One of the best parts of Baby Grinch is that the character can be a blank canvas for amazing artistry. If a stock Baby Grinch won’t do, consider this Christmas Baker Baby Grinch, with his little whisk. So cute! He’s cooking; you gotta let him cook!

Price: $695.00

What the reviews are saying: Nothing — so far.

Silicone Baby 7.5" Grinch Baby (Several Options) by BabiesbyLori

Two things jump out at me about this Baby Grinch. The first is that it’s extremely customizable. You can order a Grinch in green or beige (not sure why, but you do you!) and the hair is optional. The other thing is that this Baby Grinch has a shvantz — if that’s been your main issue with the other Grinch dolls, there’s no need to worry here.

Price: $180 (regularly $200; currently 10% off)

What the reviews are saying: “He is a cute little grinch and I can't wait to get some time off from homeschooling grandkids so I can paint him.”

Baby Grinch, Full body silicone baby grinch 8.5cm (3.4 in) by Hadasycasitas

A lot of people have been texting me, demanding to see the Baby Grinch’s diaper. Well, you’re in luck. This particular Baby Grinch, which fits in the palm of your hand, has a big mohawk and a diap to match. And at this price, you’d be pulling off a greater robbery than the Grinch himself, who famously stole Christmas.

Price: $105.72

What the reviews are saying: “Love this little guy. I have him in a zen pose.”

Baby grinch boy doll miniature, mini fantasy green baby doll 3,3" polymer clay figurine, by Hadasycasitas

Let’s be real: Nobody is killing it in the Etsy Grinch game more than Hadasycasitas, who we’ve featured multiple times in the list. You want a Grinch, they’ve probably got one for you: a Grinch for all seasons, you might say. (Haha I’m just playing. A Grinch for Christmas, specifically!) For the budget-conscious, you should consider this Baby Grinch in a Santa hat.

Price: $82.98

What the reviews are saying: Nothing yet.

Grinch Boy Reborn Baby Doll, by MindiasBabyDolls

For those who want a Baby Grinch that looks like an old man, consider this Grinch. He’s got grey hair, a big bow tie and a festive sweater — and he looks to be suffering from the Benjamin Button disease. “Why are his eyebrows like this?” you ask. I do not know, but therein lies the captivating mystery.

Price: $280

What the reviews are saying: N/A.

Baby Grinch Sticker by WistfulAndPugs

I have a few stickers on my work laptop, to let people know that I have good taste (nobody has mentioned them). With this Baby Grinch sticker, you can let everyone know that you have good taste in Baby Grinch without needing to say a single word. At this low price point, why not buy multiple for each of your personal devices and also your car and your front door?

Price: $4

What the reviews are saying: “Such a great interpretation of Baby Grinch! High quality, thick, glossy sticker and magnet. So happy with this purchase!”

Baby Grinch - 8x10 & 11x14 Print by HappyGoLuckyArtistry

For the Baby Grinch fan who has everything — why not get them a nice picture of the Baby Grinch himself?

Price: starting at $12.00

What the reviews are saying: “It is beautiful . using for a Grinch baby shower in Dec 2023”

2-Sided Grinchmas Eras Tour Sweatshirt, Grinch Christmas Sweatshirt, The Eras Tour Christmas Shirt, Grinch Tour Sweatshirt, Christmas Shirt by Dullfreedom

I literally purchased this for someone special in my life.

Price: starting at $25.99

What the reviews are saying: “I literally purchased this for someone special in my life.”

Thank you for reading BNet. When you buy through our links, I do not earn a commission. All proceeds go to the amazing Baby Grinch artists.

Readers of BNet know that I am sick and damaged in many ways. One of my most acute maladies is that I enjoy playing video games. This is not as much of a problem as it used to be, but it's still an ever-present challenge. It twists your brain in disgusting ways; I cannot in good conscience recommend this hobby to anyone.

I am being a silly, li’l scamp and doing a bit here. But there are risks associated with the hobby. For instance, a thing that comes up a lot if you bear the awful burden of enjoying video games is the issue of price. This manifests in odd ways. For instance, discussions of price have distorted the critical apparatus around games in odd ways. Price matters in regards to video games in a way that it doesn't for other forms of media. Nobody (who is serious) would define a movie, or a book, or an album primarily on whether it is worth the price of entry. But because games have been, historically, relatively more expensive and targeted at children, the price tag is given greater weight. The concept of "bang for your buck" is more common in technology reviews than it is art criticism, and so it makes some sense that the conversation around games has come to include it.

This thinking can infect basic thought processes. For instance, in high school, when I had no income other than an allowance or a summer job, I broke down large costs by video games (which then cost roughly $60). Something that might have cost "150 dollars American" to a normal, functional person would cost "Two and a half Xbox games" to me. $20 was "10 Rock Band DLC songs," which cost $2 a pop. Right now, I assume you are perplexed, squinting at your screen and shaking your head.

In an effort to roleplay being fiscally responsible, I started paying a lot of attention to sales and deals. In college, that basically meant buying a bunch of physical media from Amazon on Black Friday. Over the course of the last decade, games have shifted to digital distribution, meaning that the platforms themselves are also the marketplace, and its easier than ever to check what's on sale any given week. For a certain type of guy, Steam sales are basically holidays, and sites like IsThereanyDeal.com track prices across merchants to tell prospective buyers when a game is at a "historic low." On top of this, the increasing prevalence of e-commerce referral links means that there is now a professional category of people who track deals and post about them on social media (or the homepage of the New York Times, lmao) and take a cut of the proceeds.

My point is that merely monitoring video game prices can be a hobby (or a profession) in and of itself. A pathetic and sad pastime but one that, well, I participate in. As I developed a habit of checking video game sale prices on a regular basis, I became attuned to the different pricing patterns: A game's price will drop lower and lower with each sale appearance before leveling out (Far Cry 4 on Xbox has hovered just out of my "sure, what the hell" threshold for about a decade). Or a sale will coincide with a big update for the game, but the price drop is static, like how every new No Man's Sky patch brings a precisely 50% price cut.

Sometimes, weirder stuff happens. The Dark Souls series was regularly on sale until its sequel in all but name, Elden Ring, became an enormous hit in early 2022. The series didn't go on sale again until this past summer, more than a year after Elden Ring spurred increased interest in the developer’s back catalog. It was a rare instance of a new game driving up the price of an older game, which was digitally available and thus, not even in limited supply. And when the Dark Souls games finally did go on sale again, I bought them because who knows when or if I'd get another chance? Mark behavior.

It should be abundantly clear that the way game sales work is a dark alchemy that I spend too much time thinking about. All of this crucial context brings me to:

Thief Simulator.

Thief Simulator is, from what I can tell, a game about simulating thievery. The player breaks into houses and steals things, and for some reason, it is very intense about simulating car engines? It is available on a number of platforms, but I first became aware of it during regular scans of the Nintendo Switch eShop sales page. What seemed like sporadic discounts eventually developed into a clear pattern. Under the section "Great Deals," I'd regularly find Thief Simulator, which normally goes for $20, on sale at a whopping 90% off. Thief Simulator for just $2? A “steal”! haha.

Here is the price-change pattern visualized over time, compiled by the Switch marketplace tracker, Deku Deals. It is a line graph (not a bar graph) depicting how Thief Simulator has dropped to $2 with admirable consistency over the last 3 years.

Odd, right? This pricing strategy plays on general expectations of quality. Whereas $20 might get you a decently made indie game, $2 is the price of cruddy mobile ports, exploitative (near-)free-to-play titles, and shovelware crap. One could argue that, because Thief Simulator spends about as much time on sale for 90% off as it does at full sticker price, $2 is effectively its real price, and the $20 price is little more than a marketing trick, a mirage.

That's just a hunch, but sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. In addition to the pricing shenanigans, this is what the website of developer Noble Muffins looks like:

I don't mean to be a web design snob. I really don't! But something about barebones Wordpress themes and a set of share buttons that still includes the Digg, StumbleUpon, and MySpace logos sets off my spidey-sense. These are not exactly signs of a company with an eye for detail.

I say all of this having not played Thief Simulator. But, like, come on… does this look like a good game?

“Who on earth could possibly be falling for this trick?” I wondered to myself.

So imagine my surprise a few months ago, when my friend, Ashley Feinberg, revealed that she is a Thief Simulator sicko and plays it regularly. According to the Switch’s time tracker, she has logged 35 hours in the game, though she disputes that statistic: “That can't possibly be right. There's no way I haven’t played this game for at least like 80 hours.”

"Huge news everyone," she announced to the gamer group chat last month. "Thief Simulator 2 comes out on Steam on October 4. Mark your calendars. This is the one we've been waiting for." (She also cautioned us against mistakenly acquiring The Thief Simulator 2023 - From Crook to Boss, which is a completely different game from a different developer and which apparently sucks. Her market research is second to none.)

Ashley, author of the gone-too-soon Trashberg newsletter, later called Thief Simulator "maybe the only perfect game in existence" while recalling an in-game Halloween event in which the player gets to rob a haunted house. Her review: "Very spooky."

After I defamed her as "the only living Thief Simulator player," she quickly corrected me by linking to a Thief Simulator 2 trailer from 2021, pointing to the many comments excited for a follow-up:

• "i loved this game so much and i happy to finally have something to play over and over again"

• "i like the first thief simulator so much! i cant wait till next year when this comes out!"

• "I literally bought thief stimulator on sale & I got so addicted lmao 😂 now I passed it and I can’t wait for this 😫"

• "won't lie, it's pretty funny that the 'master thief' is wearing fingerless gloves. you'd think the one thing you would want to cover would be you fingertips."

Joke's on me, I guess! To find out more, Ashley graciously agreed to answer a few questions about her love of Thief Simulator.

When did you first download Thief Simulator and how much did you pay for it?

February 12, 2020, a fateful day, for $2.17.

Wow, pre-Covid!

I’m no fair-weather fan

Did you buy it in part because it was 2 dollars?

I'd imagine the price played at least some factor into my decision, but on the other hand, I'm extremely irresponsible with money and I probably would have gotten it anyway. My favorite part of any game is A) collecting as much shit as I can and B) stealing things as much as possible, and I couldn't imagine anything hinging on those two things not being the absolute perfect game. And guess what? It is.

What is the structure of Thief Simulator? Is a level a house?

So basically how it starts is, you're a thief that's indebted to this guy Vinny for unclear reasons, and in order to pay him back, you've been relegated to a life of crime. Vinny will call you on your cell phone and give you story missions, starting off on Greenview St., which is where the first set of houses you can rob are.

You start off nabbing stuff from shitty houses, and then as you get more experience thievin’ and get enough money to buy more tools (different kinds of lockpicks, safe cracking tools, portable laptops to hack into cameras) you can start hitting richer houses. The richer houses have security cameras and harder locks or hired security. Eventually, Vinny will you send to Richie R. Street. And you might not guess this, but Richie R. Street is full of rich houses.

Oh! And you can steal cars and take them apart and sell the parts. I've learned a lot about cars from this game, I think.

Anyway, eventually you do all this shit for Vinny, and there’s one final job. And then (spoilers) the job is actually a bomb and Vinny kills you — but you’re not actually dead, and the rest of the game is about getting revenge on Vinny.

Wait, I want to know more about the cars. What did you “learn about cars”?

Well, “learn about cars” is maybe an overstatement but I do think that if you put a car in front of me I could probably figure out how to take it apart. I learned that if you get the tenant schedules wrong and someone goes into a garage and you go sit in the car to hide, it doesn't actually hide you and they might shoot you if they have a gun.

That sounds like a problem. Do you consider the game difficult?

I hate to say anything negative about the game because REALLY the negatives are just more positives but, sometimes it is hard to tell whether something is actually hard or if the game is just buggy.

For instance, to steal a nicer car, you have to use a signal cloner to copy the tenant’s car key. And you’re supposed to be able to do it from a room away. But for some reason it doesn’t work unless you're directly on top of this bitch. So you have to wait for the single hour in the day that she's asleep, and it's a 50/50 chance whether she hears you and wakes up with no real rhyme or reason as to why. But personally, I think that's good. Life is full of unexplained mysteries and our games should reflect that.

That’s really profound. On that note, has the game taught you anything about yourself?

For sure, it's taught me that before you go to sell your goods to a pawn shop, you should check the dark web because maybe someone is looking for a broken microwave and they'll pay you an insane amount of money for it.

What’s the Thief Simulator community like? Have they taught you any important strats?

I will periodically check on Reddit if there's something I get stuck on, usually there's someone that's posted something semi-related but, admittedly, it is not SUPER vibrant. So I must believe that most of them are like me, quiet but devoted. Much like God. [Editor’s note: ???????]

What’s on your wishlist for Thief Simulator 2?

Well, one thing I am excited about is that you'll be able to knock out cops. I don’t think you can fully kill them, but you can whack them with crowbars, which I feel like will be cathartic and healing for us as a nation. I do wish there was a way to disguise yourself as someone's family member and infiltrate their home fully, but I realize that's probably not realistic.

Okay, last question: do you think I have unfairly judged Thief Simulator based on the fact that it’s always on sale for 90% off?

I respect you as a person, as a journalist, and as a gamer, which is why it always shocks me to see you repeatedly slander a game that, yes, may regularly cost like $1.18 FOR 10 DAYS ONLY considering it would regularly go to the top of the charts for MONTHS. There has to be hundreds and hundreds of games that are constantly on sale and yet, they never grace the best sellers. Why is that, Brian? Do you have an answer for that?

I don’t… Damn.

That's right.

Thank you for opening my eyes.

Thief Simulator 2 — out now for PC!

Shortly after our conversation, I logged on to the Nintendo eShop…

Thank you for reading BNet, which is priced at what it’s worth ($0).

Two large entertainment unions, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are on strike. These unions represent writers (the W in WGA) and the screen actors (the SA in SAG-AFTRA). They are on strike because the economics of film and television production have changed, largely due to streaming, and as a result the profession of screenwriting and screen acting has become financially untenable for a large majority of those who do it.

They're right to be on strike. That's not tough to understand. What is, supposedly, tough to understand is how this rare perfect storm of entertainment unions affects content creators and influencers, who also produce what some call "entertainment." (I'm dubious.) The Verge puts together "An influencer’s guide to the writers and actors strikes." "Influencers Navigate Strike Minefield," declares the Hollywood Reporter. The New York Times reports that "Hollywood Strike Leaves Influencers Sidelined and Confused."

Luckily, I've put together this handy flowchart to help influencers navigate this real once-in-a-lifetime humdinger of a sticky wicket.

The WGA and SAG-AFTRA are large unions with a number of different contracts, so for clarity’s sake, you could also ask yourself a question like, “Has my WGA/SAG bargaining agreement expired?” (WGA newsrooms with their own separate collective bargaining agreements are not on strike, for example. The same goes for actors on soap operas, because they are covered by a different agreement.)

Alright, so we’ve figured out who is on strike. Great! We’re making progress. If you’re not a member of these unions, you’re not on strike. If you are in either union (and work under the CBAs being negotiated) you are on strike. You probably got an email about it.

The next step is defining “struck work,” which is the work not being performed during the strike. There’s nuance here, but in broad terms, it’s pretty simple: the two big areas are 1) writing for or acting in any work produced by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, and 2) promoting any such production. Performing these tasks — which would otherwise be done by union members — is scabbing, which is very, very bad.

Okay, I’ll pause to take some questions now.

Is writing about Hollywood productions in a journalistic capacity also scabbing?

It’s obviously not. Reporting on an industry is not the same as being in that industry. The “fandom is so important” mode of coverage that has come to dominate all pop-culture journalism is one of the worst trends of the 21st century because now everyone thinks they are a participant instead of an observer. Actors and writers often do interviews to promote their work, for instance, but a journalist interviewing them is independent and under no obligation to frame that work in any particular way. Anyone who can’t discern journalism and critical analysis from promotional work, or get clarity about this distinction from a superior who should know the answer, should probably find a different job.

Does doing promo on social media, or attending a premiere, as a content creator or influencer count as scabbing?

Yes. This is because that sort of work is usually done by members of the production. If a studio cannot get actors to walk their red carpet, and they hire an influencer to do so instead, that influencer is effectively replacing the actors in promoting the movie. Performing work that would otherwise be performed by union members — in other words, allowing employers to proceed with business as usual while their workers strike — is scabbing.

What about ‘rewatch’ or ‘companion’ podcasts?

Great question. This might be the only actually grey area in the bunch. For instance, SAG-AFTRA says, “Yes, they are considered promotional. Rewatch and companion shows drive people to the struck companies’ platforms to watch the shows promoted by your podcast.” Some of these podcasts are produced by struck companies, some are produced independently. How does the latter category differ from, say, a positive film review?

A good way to reframe this question to get a clear answer is: “Am I coming at this material as a fan, first and foremost?” If you are making or listening to a podcast because you love something so much that you want to spur other people to watch it too, and are not really doing independent reporting or critical engagement, maybe take a break. Or rewatch something that’s not from a struck company. Or find a real hobby. There are many options.

On a side note, my personal read is that SAG has it backwards. Rewatch podcasts exist to ride the economic coattails of heavy streaming activity. Someone watches the show, and then they listen to people talk about it. I don’t think the cast of The Office launched one thousand different rewatch shows to spur interest; they did so because that enormous interest already existed. They’re like those fish that suction-cup themselves to sharks. Every time I see that HBO post-roll podcast ad, all I can see is, “We produced 10 hours of homework based on the show you’re watching.” Rewatch/companion podcasts are for the people who are already watching. A weird, new form of audience brand activation is still promo though.

What can be done in the meantime?

Productions that are “truly” independent can still go on. During the 2007 writers’ strike, that’s how we ended up with Joss Whedon bankrolling Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. We are now facing dire conditions that might produce a second Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which would be catastrophic. This looming threat is why we must get the writers and actors a fair deal, and back to work as soon as possible.

What’s so bad about scabbing?

For one thing, it’s morally repugnant to undermine workers who are going without pay and stability to fight for livable working conditions. But in more tangible terms, if you scab, you will never be able to join that union. You will be shut out because you cannot be trusted to stand in solidarity with other members. It is an unforgivable act.

There is an unstated, heavily implied question surrounding all of this that kinda gets to the heart of the current confusion for influencers. That unstated question is: “Would going scab mode really be so bad?” Again, I have boiled this down to an easy-to-use flowchart to help you make your decision.

Again, this does not seem that complicated. If one is an influencer or content creator hoping to make it in the mainstream Hollywood system, no scabbo. Simple!

Consider Logan Winter, from the Hollywood Reporter write-up:

“They want us to stop certain things and for us to lose money to show support, but if the roles were reversed, would they do the same?” wonders Emanuel Rodriguez, whose 8-year-old son Logan Winter is a superhero-centered content creator who frequently does partnerships with Marvel and DC.
…
“It’s like putting you in an against-a-wall thing — it’s kind of an ultimatum,” says Rodriguez, who admits he’s scared that what he decides now could impact his son if he eventually decides to join SAG.

First of all, Logan, blink twice if you need help. Secondly, it sure seems like there’s a clear answer on whether this guy should force his child/employee to scab. Third: Yes, duh-doyee, this conundrum is intentional. The whole point is disruption. That some are framing this as some sort of legitimate catch-22 is making me nutso? It feels like people complaining that they were late to work because protests have shut down a freeway instead of, you know, considering why there’s a protest in the first place. There is no way to effectively strike or protest in such a way that it does not cause inconvenience or collateral damage to outside groups. A good labor action should be clarifying, and force everyone to figure out what side they’re on. Some of the content creators understand this. The Times spoke with a number of people who do spon who have stopped doing promo work. Turning down thousands in an act of both solidarity and self-preservation seems like a good idea to me.

But I have been thinking about the quadrant that does not want to be in the WGA or SAG, and just wants to do brand deals, and which is pretending to be caught between a rock and a hard place. I can’t help but ask, Wasn’t this the big promise of the internet, and specifically social media? That you can run around incumbents and larger players? That you can go straight the studios (or their contracted PR firms) and ask for a check in exchange for gramming your Barbie fits? If one is the type of person who likes being an influencer or content creator because of all of the libertarian promises of the form — total autonomy, a direct relationship with audience and patrons, less red tape preventing bringing an idea to fruition — then it’s tough for me to figure out who those influencers and content creators are scared of running afoul of. The studios, which are cutting the checks, aren’t the bodies enforcing the strike rules; the studios couldn’t care less about making sure workers adhere to those rules.

A lot of the posturing reminds me of the way people talk about cancel culture. “Oh me oh my, the rules are arbitrary and ever-changing and I just can’t figure them out! And if I violate these Calvinball rules, my career is over!” Except… the rules are pretty clear about what one can and cannot do. And if one isn’t sure, just ask the WGA or SAG, and they’ll have an answer.

“Is it going to come down to, ‘I saw somebody do this,’ like a tattletale thing, or are they checking profiles? How are they putting this in place?” one influencer wondered to the Hollywood Reporter. This is an extremely funny thing for someone whose job is being highly visible on the internet and who is legally required to disclose paid endorsements to ask.

I suspect influencers and content creators might really be frustrated with having to confront how hollow their work really is — and who they’re really working for. The content creators, as much as they might like to think otherwise, are not neutral here. The strikes have laid bare that many of the people whose business is posting online are not working in collaboration with the artists who make the stuff they cut reaction videos for or get paid to endorse, but are instead working in collaboration with The Man. Where do the influencers think that the thousands of dollars they get for posting dead-eyed #spon is coming from? Studio executives replacing celebrity promo work with non-union influencers and content creators, and replacing independent press with rosy companion podcasts can be seen as pieces of a larger puzzle that also includes: depriving writers and actors of their fair share of the profits, using large language models to generate scripts, contracting non-union VFX houses to recreate likenesses with CGI instead of hiring an actual actor, and mining for pre-existing IP instead of investing in the creation of something original.

For people who have a problem with any of that stuff, I don’t think the situation is particularly confusing.

Around 1993, the internet entered a period known as Eternal September. The flipside (Temporary September?) refers to an annual spike in new internet users gaining access via their colleges at the start of the fall semester, and subsequently not knowing how to behave. But starting around September 1993, people started coming online all year round, similarly not knowing how to behave — a year-round influx of newbies of all ages and myriad backgrounds. This period of constantly having to deal with new users who don’t know what they’re doing or who they’re talking to has been ongoing for the last three decades.

I am reminded of this “Eternal” concept because earlier this year, I read Jimmy McDonough's Shakey, a really amazing biography of Neil Young. Pretty much every part of it is wildly illuminating and funny and sad, and you really get the impression that Neil Young is one of the great weirdos of all time. There are a bazillion interesting details in the book. One of my favorites is a passage about Woodstock, which Young played as part of CSNY:

“A bunch of dopes in the mud not even paying attention,” said Richard Meltzer of Woodstock. He left on the first day. “Woodstock was just the first time the middle class got hip to the whole rock scene. By the time you had that many people doing it in one place, it was closer to an Alan Freed show … it was minus the sixties consciousness. It was just entertainment value.” Ken Viola, also present, was similarly disenchanted. “As a communal event it was a big success. But I remember being at Woodstock and saying, ‘It’s over.’”

And The New York Times’s Jon Pareles on the occasion of Woodstock’s 50th anniversary:

Most importantly, the scale of Woodstock showed people who had considered themselves “freaks” that they weren’t as small a minority as they had thought. Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band paused during a tuning break to marvel, “The thing that surprises me is, like, how many of us there are. And it makes me fantastically happy.”

For those who were coldbloodedly watching numbers, even in 1969, Woodstock simply identified a big, promising segment of the youth market, ready for the commercial exploitation that would ensue almost immediately. “Woodstock Nation,” despite Abbie Hoffman’s hopes when he coined the term, turned out to be a demographic rather than a political force.

Huh! That's kinda interesting to me, as someone who was not able to attend Woodstock (was not born yet; I'm very youthful) and who only really knows of it through cultural osmosis as the ultimate hippie event. All the rock stars showed up to play some cool songs for flower-crowned, mud-covered hippies, and nobody got beaten to death by a motorcycle gang. Woodstock, I had previously thought, was in the elite tier of cool sixties events.

And yet, here's guys who were there, quite literally proclaiming that, "It's over."

I’ll get back to Woodstock in a second.

Yesterday, Meta launched Threads, which is a feed-based social media service where users type text into a box, and then see the text they typed as a post on their screen. Posts can be viewed in a scrollable “feed.” This may sound familiar to you. It is, at least, the sixth Twitter-like thing that people have tried to use to recreate Twitter since that company started its slow descent into really funny incompetence.

Previously there was:

• Mastodon. Like Twitter, but just as cumbersome in different ways. Made people start using the term "fediverse" even though none of them could define it if their life was at stake.

• Cohost. Kinda like a combination of Twitter and Tumblr. I like it overall, but it was never gonna replace Twitter no matter how badly anyone wanted it to. This may be intentional.

• Post.News. Nothing much to say except it’s lame and sucks and will die soon.

• Hive. Built by just a couple of guys. Shut down briefly, shortly after a debilitating influx of users, to address a security issue. Haven't heard about it since.

• Substack Notes. Like Twitter, but only for heterodox freakos and media expats with PTSD (and me — the one cool, normal guy). Substack’s leadership is somehow unable to say "We don't condone racism" in a way that seems like a child has afflicted them with some sort of Liar Liar-type birthday wish. This is not not concerning.

• Bluesky. Maybe the most viable of these simply based on buzz alone. Much like TikTok, it got a lot of attention for its “good vibes” even though it seems to have quickly given way to niche drama infighting. "Thank you for making this thing that's like Twitter but without the problems!" the users tell the very small team making Bluesky, "but we are now going to speedrun reinventing those very problems." Also, you need an invite to join. As for whether the invite-gating tactic will be successful in the long run, I’ll just note that I have not read an article on Medium in at least two years and Clubhouse laid off half of its employees earlier this year. (I think the coolest part of Bluesky is the way that it uses domain names as handles. It's a novel way to apply open web standards and one of the true ways of owning a part of the internet to more modern social-media use cases.)

As people keep trying to make Twitter 2 happen, we are now in a period that I'm calling Eternal Woodstock — every few weeks, users flock en masse to new platforms, rolling around in the mud, getting high on Like-dopamine, hoping that they can keep the transgressive, off-kilter meme magic going just a little longer, even though social-media culture already been fully hollowed out and commercialized.

In addition to Woodstock, the other historical event that this moment in internet history reminds me of is the Land Rush of 1889. On April 22 of that year, the U.S. government (after clearing Native Americans out of the territory that would eventually become Oklahoma City) held a “first come, first serve” event for settlers. A gun went off at noon, and then settlers rushed in to claim their own patch of land in a chaotic, unorganized, and sometimes violent squabble. In half a day, a city of thousands suddenly sprang into existence.

A similar event is happening on the Twitter-alikes, but the “land rush” is not really about claiming a username, as has been the case in the past. Instead, it’s about maintaining a presence in the feed.

On Bluesky, the land rush is in a feed called What’s Hot, whose determining algorithm has changed over time. For a while, getting 12 likes on a post would earn it placement in What’s Hot, and so users intent on being early and appearing like a big account flooded the zone. They followed a zillion people and posted recycled memes so that getting 12 likes became trivial, or they made sure they built an affinity circle to achieve the same result. The implied idea seemed to be that a new user would look at the feed and think, “This user must be important if they’re on What’s Hot. I simply must follow!” (The determining factors for What constitutes Hot have since changed, and Bluesky has since rolled out the ability for users to create their own algorithmic ranking systems.)

The same phenomenon is happening on Meta’s Threads Similar to What’s Hot and Tiktok’s For You, fighting for real estate on the feed at a platform’s moment of inception is crucial. On Threads, an opaquely ranked algorithmic feed full of “verified” (meaning “blue-check’d”) celebrities and public figures, and — very, very occasionally — posts from people you actually follow and want to see. Threads gives you the illusion of control and then shovels you pretty much exclusively crap. This is by design, because Meta gave the big verified accounts access before anybody else and allows users to import their Instagram follows, in effect producing a brand-friendly Big Bang. This is a remarkably craven move, and most indicative of where this is all heading. Anyone loading up Threads for the first time will be greeted with an illusory barrage of empty engagement-bait garbage from celebrities, influencers, and Tequila-hawking meme accounts they follow; accounts that do not actually care to hear from the riff-raff. Threads is not a platform full of ads, but something far more terrifying: a platform full of users who have voluntarily sold out.

Luckily, it won’t last. Ultimately, the pressure of being “Twitter-like platform that’s not actually Twitter and has learned from Twitter’s mistakes” comes with an implied assumption that this activity will allow Threads or Bluesky or Mastodon to scale up with minimal issues. The sense I get from the chatter of Bluesky’s What’s Hot and Threads’s day-one glurge is that people want all of the benefits of Twitter (cool stuff user didn’t even know they wanted, funny jokes, someone they don’t like getting insulted) with none of the downside (stuff a user doesn’t want, bad jokes, getting insulted oneself), despite the fact that both of these poles are made possible from one thing: the sheer size of the userbase. The Threads ethos right now — much like the other Twitter 2 land rushes before it — is a contradictory mixture of earnest online community building and craven creator-brained growth hacking. Based on the events of the last decade, we already know which of those competing impulses will win out.

“Look at how ideologically aligned and positive this platform feels! Let’s keep it that way forever as we feverishly try to scale up and get billions of other users on board. It’s never worked for any other online platform… but it might work for us.”

A few weeks ago, I wrote about AI1, the convenience of which still supersedes the growing litany of objections to it. The works produced by generative AI should be viewed as "good enough" or "merely sufficient," rather than the next frontier in art or expression or innovation. This is just my personal opinion on the matter.

AI has a number of tradeoffs. The work it creates is bland and utilitarian, useful for a corporate email, but not the next great novel. In addition to quality level itself, the models that form the core of an AI program are based on vast amounts of scraped web data, generated by users who have not explicitly consented to contributing to these projects. That second reason is part of why large parts of Reddit have gone dark this week.

For a very long time, Reddit has provided an API through which developers can access the raw data on Reddit. An API (Application Programming Interface) is a virtual tube for siphoning digital gasoline. At the same time, a provider often hopes that by offering access to the API, they are also making it easier for people to put data into their system. Developer enablement tools like these are a great way to harness unpaid labor, in the same way that giving someone a text box that they can use to blast out their thoughts free of charge, and then putting ads next to those thoughts, is a great way to benefit from unpaid labor.

Reddit, the company, now wants to charge money for access to its API, which it used to offer for free, in large part because its API is currently a great, free way to get a gigantic corpus of text for training an AI model. According to my back-of-the-envelope math, if you go from charging $0 for API access to charging more than $0 for it, you are charging infinity times more money. Most people do not like price hikes of infinity percent. The best software for browsing (and moderating) Reddit is apparently a mobile app called Apollo, which will shut down at the end of the month absent a sustainable path forward. Thousands of subreddits, not happy about this situation, went dark this week. In effect, Reddit the community is withholding value from Reddit the company.

This is where I admit that I think Reddit sucks, though my justification for this stance is woefully outdated. Reddit is a Digg ripoff whose early userbase was angry, young, tech-enthusiast men who were often also perverts. In the 2000s, Reddit is where memes went to die. A meme would start on a message board, or a chat room, and works its way through various online communities until you eventually saw that same meme on Reddit and instantly, the meme was toast2. The last stage in the meme life cycle is currently a writeup in any legacy media publication. A decade ago, it was an appearance on a daytime talk show, SNL, or the local news. Before either of those stages, however, memes would go kaput when they reached Reddit.

Reddit is cemented in my mind as the site people go to when they have no original thoughts or ideas and don’t know how to construct a joke. Don’t have a personality? Mention something you saw on Reddit. “The narwhal bacons at midnight,” etc. Looking for fodder for your blog or social media presence, but also, you are lazy? Just use Reddit.com, my guy.

To illustrate: In the summer of 2010, I was an editorial intern at the pre-journalism and pre-”no haters” BuzzFeed, where my mandate was to post funny/weird/cool/interesting/viral stuff. I made a rule for myself to never source anything from Reddit, because it was almost never a primary source for anything. It was an aggregator; a centralized, poorly curated repository of internet junk no different from Facebook or Twitter — just harder to browse. (Ironically, the new Digg now spends a lot of space aggregating evergreen filler from Reddit threads.) If a day was really slow and I went to Reddit, even to browse, I’d failed. This rule remains in place in the Brian Feldman editorial guidelines3.

I realize this is a very uncharitable stance, given that I formulated it half a lifetime ago and have not seen fit reassess in the time since. There are Reddit users younger than my opinion of Reddit. I hear that Reddit is a good way to find crowdsourced information now, especially since many are saying that leading search engines are sucking more and more4. One time, a comment did help me fix my mesh router though.

I guess I’m trying to say that I have no dog in the fight between Reddit, the company that permitted creepshot forums for many years, and Reddit, the community of users that spun up creepshot forums in the first place. It’ll end how it ends, and my life will not be changed in any way. It is crazy to me, however, that Serena Williams married that guy.

But I do want to talk about the economics for a second.

One big reason that Reddit can seem like an altruistic force online is that, as far as I can tell, users don’t make money from posting on Reddit. And Reddit the company is historically unprofitable, so it’s also not monetizing these posts for significant direct gain. The product has been relatively stable in part because the company is not publicly traded and not chasing short-term profit growth by constantly rolling out a shiny, new thing. (It did try NFTs, however.) Most subreddits are run by community volunteers, even the most active and populous ones. In effect, Reddit can feel like an amazing crowdsourced knowledge share much in the same way that Wikipedia can.

To crib from Alex Pareene at Defector:

The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.

So there are a couple of overlapping ways to perceive this week’s protest:

• Redditors are mad that their preferred, API-based ways of browsing Reddit, or moderating large forums, are disappearing on short notice

• Redditors are mad that someone is trying to make money off of their posting

Reddit is not a social media platform. It is a vast, seemingly infinite message board, and for all of its faults, Redditors do seem to have largely avoided the pitfalls of the so-called “creator economy.” Reddit is, for better or worse, composed of people who have very specific interests and are very enthusiastic about them, and they post for no reason other than that they care about those topics.

Redditors, at the very least, understand that posting is charity. Facilitating posting is also charity. And charity is good, actually.

A pivotal and incredibly harmful mistake of the past decade has been taking anyone who calls themselves a creator, and the concept of the “creator economy,” seriously. Facebook and Instagram have been hollowed out by recycled, evergreen garbage; Twitter has been run into the ground by a cohort of tech dudes who got obsessed with Sneetch stars; TikTok has funneled an entire generation into a paint-by-numbers approach to creativity; why the hell are individual Bluesky users so instantly focused on “growing” and “scaling” “the platform”? I think I abandoned my last shred of benefit of the doubt for creators around the time totally unrelated YouTube channels pivoted to covering the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial to boost metrics.

The pursuit of likes, followers, attention, fame, and money is framed as inherently good, or a noble struggle. To criticize one’s attempt to earn a living on social media is implied to be punching down and unspeakably rude. This discussion is often couched in vaguely populist, technical, and legalistic terms. A platform user’s “unpaid labor” and “intellectual property” is being “monetized” and “exploited” by the forces of “late capitalism,” and users are at the whims of “the algorithm” which “lacks transparency” — but if the participants in the platform’s “economy” were to band together, they could exert pressure through “collective action” in order to access the “profits” held in “creator funds” that are rightfully theirs. This is, when you think about it for like half a second, a myopic and stupid way to think about interacting with or informing other human beings, and yet it is the dominant mode.

The framing of posting as “unpaid labor” carries this malignant idea that people should be getting compensated for it, when that assertion is transparently wrong. Posting, like every other social transaction, does not in fact need to be profitable for the individual user. Here’s an analogy: let’s say I invite a friend to the bar. I buy the first round and we shoot the shit. Then, my friend buys the second round and we continue shooting the shit. Then, I buy the third round and we shoot the shit a bit more, and then we both call it a night and go home. Only a real weirdo would object to the fact that I voluntarily paid for more drinks than my friend, and that the bar keeps all the money, and that nobody else heard the funny comments I was making, so I didn’t even grow my audience. Who cares? I had a nice evening and a nice conversation even if I ended the night in the red financially. All of life — online and off — is about understanding how to accept certain operating losses5. Lost time, lost attention, lost money are all actually fine if you end up having a good time.

Reddit, the userbase, seems to understand this concept, and appears inoculated against creator-like impulses. As I do with every large online platform, I object to the skeevy, hateful, misogynistic, and/or racist tenor of a considerable amount of the activity on Reddit. But crucially, I also don’t think those users are disingenuous. Analyzed collectively, Redditors grok that posting is charity, and that internet culture is sustained by the permissive, unprofitable flow of information.

Perhaps this is because the site (and for a long time, its literal design and user interface) predates the social media age. Perhaps it’s because the core feature of Reddit is sharing a hyperlink, pushing curious people outside of a walled garden to other parts of the internet, as opposed to platform-native videos and pictures. Perhaps it’s because the site is structured around shared interests, instead of individual cults of personality. Perhaps it’s because the community moderators are participants in the subreddits that they moderate.

I guess another way to put it is like this: I can see the twisted appeal of using generative AI for tedious work like email writing, and asset generation, and content creation. But I cannot find any significant upside to using that same tech to automate posting and commenting on Reddit.

This coming Saturday, I’m going to the Jersey Shore to bike 50 miles. I am not simply doing this for funsies, but as part of a charity ride to raise money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. I am riding as a member of the Park Pedalers, an elite team of top cyclists* that has over the past 24 years, raised more than $415,000 towards the cause of researching, treating, and maybe one day soon, curing MS. This is a cause that I, unfortunately, have a personal interest in.

$415,000 is a lot of cash… but what if it was $416,000? If that sounds appealing to you, please feel free to make a contribution to the cause by donating here.

Look, I don’t want to guilt-trip anyone but: BNet is free. The 100+ articles have always been freely available and always will be. Nothing is paywalled — and even when readers could pay for it in the past, I like to think I didn’t hawk it too loudly. Hell, even my one solicitation in three years, the one you’re reading, is coming alongside some exclusive, original reporting.

As such, I invite you to imagine how much you would, theoretically, have paid for something like BNet — and apply it to something like (just spitballing here) a worthy charitable cause.

Thank you.

okay, so: apple store lady

Hey, reader, did you skip past the section above, straight to the subhed mentioning the thing you want to know about? Go back and start at the beginning!!

…

Great, you’re back.

For a long time, I have been interested in the tale of Apple Store Lady. If you are damaged enough to have found your way to BNet, you probably are already saying the line:

“I was told by Apple Care! That I could walk in the store — and get the part!”

We love her. She needs that dang part so bad. This person was filmed yelling at the Apple Store nearly ten years ago, on June 22, 2013. She’s there with a baby, who is now old enough to be mad at Apple Care themselves… isn’t time crazy? It was posted on Vine, and everyone went bananas for it. We didn’t have a name for this phenomenon (Karenism) yet.

I’ll get out ahead of this: I do not know who Apple Store Lady is. But years ago, I did try to find out. I messaged someone on Reddit who said that they had ties to an employee at the Apple Store in question, and here is the long message that they sent, way back in 2016. I have no idea if it’s true, but I hope you enjoy.

Woah, talk about blast from the past!

The person I know was a former co-worker of mine from the Apple Store I worked at who moved across country and within a few weeks was dealing with said crazy lady in the store he transferred to.

I would love to give you his contact but out of respect of privacy I have messaged him with your info if he wants to talk. He's no longer an Apple Employee but he does work in Media and I'm not sure if he really wants to be associated with the Vine heard Round the World.

Seeing as I am no longer an Apple Employee either, I can tell you what I know. I do ask that you do NOT use my current reddit handle if you use any of this in your article, I'll make up a throw-away just for you! (Basically, I was really lazy and super stupid when I made my username what it is, and I might have an email with the same username. At this point in the game it's too late to change and I usually don't care, but because someone else's privacy is in hand, I do.) This information was obtained via a conversation we had on a mutual friends private Facebook page who was also an employee at the store I worked at. Since I left the company in 2011, it's my understanding that Apple Retail has kind of cracked down on this sort of social media posting, the friends I have that still currently work there usually don't flat out say anything about the store anymore.

While my friend was working at that particular store, (Let's call him Sir Drogon of the Macintosh) he was working as a Genius Admin. While Sir Drogon was out on the floor, much of his job consisted of assisting/answer customer questions, setting up Genius Bar appointments, check on/coordinate repairs for customers, and generally directing people where to go. At the time the Vine came out, all of us back home knew it was his particular store that it was filmed at . From what he relayed to us, Sir Drogon of the Macintosh was actually one of the first people in the store to attempt to assist the Vine Lady. From the start it was fairly evident that this was not going to be a run of the mill customer interaction - she was agitated and stressed out to begin with....and hey, lets face it... anyone that has ever worked retail has run into customers like this. I certainly have had my fair share of being screamed at! I was an assistant manager at a movie theater for a while and a customer screamed in my face when I told them they couldn't use their Gift Certificates to a Different Movie Chain at my theater. That person swore that one of my employees sold her the wrong chain gift certificates. It took "promising" her to go through all 1,440 hours of holiday season footage for her to realize she bought them across the street.

Anyway, back to Sir Drogon - as he attempted to solve her issue - the part needed to fix her device wasn't in the store and needed to be ordered. She continued to become more agitated and abrasive towards him to the point where he had to "pass her off" (aka...walk away) from her. The beautiful, calm, lovely Apple Specialist you see Vine Lady in the video with is the other Genius Bar Admin, who calmly told the customer that she would have to wait for an appointment. And the rest is history.

To be perfectly honest though, this sort of interaction wasn't entirely unheard of in the Apple Store...it's just not everyone had the Operatic Vocal Qualities that this woman has. While I was working as a specialist, I had interactions where customers who were in other specialist's faces yelling at them were passed off to me and by the end of dealing with them, they would hug me.

I think the important thing to remember about this whole situation is that people are very attached to their devices these days. Think about it...when was the last time you were more than an arms length from your cell phone? How often do people bring their computers and iPads into the bathroom with them when they're at home? If your phone/computer/tablet goes down, for some people, it's almost like being disconnected from society for a bit. And for Vine Lady, well...let's look at her. She clearly just had a baby. Maybe she was freaking out about not being able to contact people. Maybe she didn't get enough sleep. Maybe she was postpartum and prone to outbursts like this through no fault of her own. I can't imagine she's exactly proud of her outburst being caught on video. We don't know what the hell was going on in her head that day. Which is what makes Apple Customer service so great for the most part-empathy. It's amazing the difference it makes when people treat people like people. On the same token, there are limits. Retail and Service Industry workers will always go above and beyond to help customers with issues as long as they are curious and email rational. As the great Wil Wheaton once said, "Don't be a dick."

Okay! Definitely a message written by someone who posts on Reddit (he said without any connotation).

Thanks for reading; don’t forget to donate.

Here's my fuzzy understanding of where things are at: everyone thought Twitter was going to vanish instantly shortly after half the company got laid off, but what's actually been happening is it's kinda like the site's brakes got cut and it's just coasting along trying not to run anyone over. Elon Musk wanted people to pay $8 for a Sneetch star/actually useful indicator of authenticity without realizing that these two ideas are kind of opposed to each other. So he introduced a yellow icon and square avatars for some accounts, and also made it so that everyone had to see his dumb posts in the feed. Meanwhile, the site is less reliable and more unstable than ever. Last week, he tried to remove "legacy verified" status from accounts. I logged in on my supposed last day as a Verified to share important ideas, like some funny guys I came up with named "3M Dog Night Shyamalan" and "BABÁR" — but apparently the culling didn't work because removing verified status from accounts is more complex than it seems. For April Fools' Day, he changed the bird icon to the doge dog, only he did it two days later because... who knows. Also, he open-sourced the Twitter ranking algorithm that revealed he had an explicit carveout for himself. Internally, he's saying the company is worth less than half of the $44 billion he bought it for. Earlier this week, Substack introduced a feature that allowed users to publish things they had typed into boxes, which Twitter thinks is dangerous competition, I guess. So now it's doing a basic string-match for "substack.com" and limiting the ability to share links with that string on Twitter. I can't say definitively whether this guy is dumb as a brick, but based on the last six-ish months, the data paints a picture.

And yet: this is kinda how the web should be, no? I don't really think there should only be three big sites where all of the people on earth go to freak out about videos culled from a fourth site. I prefer the web most when it's kinda messy and janky, and things move quickly inter-platform as opposed to intra. And I do think we'd all benefit a little from continued awareness that our websites are made by a few guys who may or may not suck. My current theory of Musk is that he's a guy who did a lot of coding many, many years ago and it made him very rich and confident, and so nobody who still works at Twitter has the energy to correct him when assumes, "If we go into the <img> tag and change twitterbird.png to doge.png, we'll have ourselves an epic prank." I mean, if you need to create a carveout on your service for one person not just on Earth currently, but ever in human history forward or backward, why not just hard-code that thing at the source? It's not like the value of "user who is precisely Elon Musk" is going to change dynamically any time soon.

Being able to sense someone messing with a website in real-time, moving the menu items around and forgetting to close an HTML tag here and there, is a neat feeling. It feels scrappy. I don't mean to excuse any of this and I feel kinda bad for people who still rely on Twitter. But as someone with no skin in the game, I am enjoying the process, if not the result. I honestly prefer the dynamism of a guy who keeps changing the layout of the world's most expensive MySpace page to sites of comparable scale promising me a new, inconsequential feature.

OTHER LARGE PLATFORM: We will be making the button a little rounder. It's currently in beta-testing and then we will test it for 6 months in New Zealand before introducing it in Brussels. American users may or may not ever see it in 2026, pending local rules and regulations.

TWITTER: All Tweets now feature the Domino's Pizza Tracker. We pushed this feature directly to prod 6 days ago.

It's kinda fun to see someone mucking up a website for any reason other than delivering value to the most users and/or shareholders. Or at least, doing it for that reason in the stupidest, most roundabout way.

Very much in the abstract, I'm sorta aligned with him (IN THE ABSTRACT) on the idea that if I have a website, I should just be able to change something and see that change manifested on next refresh. Are my users talking about a website I don't like? Run a simple .replace() on all posts. Want to change the logo for a fun, li'l prank? I would simply go into index.html and change the file name. Need to removed verified status from an account? I change is_verified from TRUE to FALSE.

But that's not really how it works anymore. The way the web works now is: You have to compile your Node.js bundles into the dockerized Kubernetes, and once the Redis caches are asynchronously flooberized into your AWS Red Hat instances with optimized SQL queries, you can start distributing JWTs, interpolating string literals, and distributing content over CDNs with performative grombulations at 10x, assuming you've A/B tested correctly and the user doesn't have AdBlock enabled. This ever-growing heap is why software engineers are paid $1,000,000 per annum and get 180 days of vacation (with rollover).

Fundamentally, I think people are mad and freaking out about this because they have spent the last decade slowly ceding all of their creative power and infrastructure to some other guy. Everything's moved a layer or two up in terms of abstraction. Whereas a web user could once change an <img> tag, and font size, and page layout, and what happens when you click a button, they can now only get the instant gratification of changing the web by updating their profile pic on someone else's thing. Makes you think. Okay bye.

here’s how to think about a hot new trend

One of the more formative, clarifying pieces I've ever read was a 2009 WIRED article about "The Good Enough Revolution," which made a compelling case that — when it comes to technology — we're always willing to compromise. The thesis was loosely based on the principle that 80% of a user's needs could be delivered with 20% of the effort or "input", as opposed to expending 100% effort to meet 100% of those needs. Basically, the Pareto Princriple. "Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere,” Robert Capps wrote. “We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs." He was mostly talking about consumer technology but the idea now applies to the art and culture created with that technology as well.

Landing on "good enough" is usually done by compromising. We do this a bazillion times a day. If you use the internet in an even remotely normal capacity, you're committing mostly benign, occasionally serious violations of all shapes and sizes. All of these transgressions I am going to lump under the label of "crime" for simplicity's sake.

Screenshotting a JPEG? Crime. Using an ad blocker that might break a web page? Crime. Sandwiching a giant blockquote of someone else's writing between two sentences of your own? Crime. Reuploading someone else's video? Crime. Streaming a game on Twitch? Crime. Sharing, knowingly or not, information that's inaccurate? Crime. Banning someone? Crime. Circumventing a ban? Crime. Using a profile picture of yourself from 10 years ago? Crime. Posting a picture of someone without their permission? Crime. Embedding someone else’s post from social media on another website? Crime. Violating copyright and then saying "no copyright intended"? Crime. Watching Tenet on a phone? Crime. Snitch-tagging? Crime. Sending a LinkedIn request to a guy you don't know just to get an internal referral? Crime. Deepfake? Crime. Sharing a Netflix password? Crime. Forwarding an email that contains the sentence "Confidential: Do not forward to unintended recipients." at the bottom? Crime. Dropshipping nebula lights at a 600% markup? Crime. Reblogging? Crime. Retweeting? Crime. Regramming? Crime. Screenshotting a big passage of someone's work for Twitter but not providing the link? Crime. Buying Steam keys on grey markets? Crime. Using one of those websites that lets you watch Instagram Stories without sending a read receipt? Crime. Selling shirts of someone else's art on Redbubble? Crime. Buying those shirts? Crime. Posting your private chats from a dating app for likes? Crime. Entering your birthday as January 1, 1900 on an age gate? Crime. Using a VPN to access content in another country? Crime. Listing your job on Facebook as "CEO at Me"? Crime. Softblocking? Crime. Starting a flame war? Crime. Using a retro game emulator even though none of those games are available via legal means? Crime. Barely functional MySpace profile that was a garish, unnavigable mess? Crime.

All of these are “crimes” to me because, conceivably, someone could raise a halfway-reasonable objection to them. They are actions that are deceptive, or unauthorized, or socially disagreeable, or make tasks ever so slightly more difficult for someone else, or may take earnings away from someone else who arguably deserves them. And yet all of this stuff is commonplace because the friction-light technology of the internet makes the ease of doing crimes outweigh the objections. Internet culture is borne out of the fact that — regardless of what specific scale of right versus wrong you use — it's way, way easier to do the slightly wrong thing than it is to do the fully right thing. Every day, you wake up, and log on, and cut some corners in a way that would bug someone else.

The process of internet culture iterates rapidly because people rip each other off and violate boundaries every day in service of “good enough,” not in spite of that fact. It's constantly evolving because for every person with a novel, fun, great idea, there are a thousand others willing to copy that idea and do it 50% worse but 500% faster (stats approximate). Algorithmic ranking incentivizes this — “This was popular. Try doing it again.” Being creative on the internet means, if you have any sense of shame, constantly having to come up with new ideas because the low(er)-quality bootlegs are only a few steps behind.

The newest internet crime in service of a “good enough” product: generating text or images from one the ever-increasing number of “AI” text and image generators out there.

Are there plenty of valid objections for machine-generated texts and images? Absolutely. Can any of them overcome the fact that these works are already "good enough"? I don't think so. A couple of weeks ago, Ted Chiang wrote a piece for the New Yorker about the kind of text generated by large language models, comparing it to a blurry JPEG.

Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.

It's a useful point of comparison. Even if machine-generated text puts out something partially or entirely false, it does so in a way that is grammatically correct and scans as highly authoritative — which is good enough to make people believe that it's true. It’s certainly good enough for SEO or algorithm chum.1 If I ask DALL·E to give me the Minions in the style of Van Gogh, it's probably going to get most of the way there.

This has led to a lot of handwringing. Some questions I've seen recently: What does this kind of text mean for the nature of truth? What does generated art mean for the future of creative fields? Will this change academia forever? Is Bing sentient? Will this technology eliminate the few journalism jobs left in the twenty-first century?

Here's my question: Who cares? I mean, I care in that the topic interests me, and I think writing is fun, and learning new stuff is easier for me when I read things that are distinctive (and accurate). But all of these questions are asking "Should we let the horse leave the barn?" while the people asking stand in front of an empty barn. If years of collective online activity is anything to go by, this stuff is good enough for everyone else. If ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG, it's worth pointing out that the vast majority of web users are totally fine with blurry JPEGs. I see them all over the place. (Sometimes, as I wrote in 2014, the blurriness is the point.) We love parlor tricks like SmartChild and Akinator. Whether or not machine-text and -art is "good" or “convincing” is not the relevant issue. The issue is whether it is “good enough.”

Clearly, to many people, it is good enough! Internet users are really skilled at convincing themselves that the convenient thing in front of them is the thing they want, whether that’s a barely coherent machine-generated article about what time the Super Bowl is or dubious footage a preferred/reviled political candidate. As someone who used to get paid full-time to write whatever I wanted, I get how people can be exceedingly precious and protective of their role as writer, or fact-purveyor. And I can similarly see how a computer popping out images of Donald Trump as Popeye the Sailor has sent a whole generation of boardwalk t-shirt hawkers into an existential crisis. At the same time, the pessimist in me doesn't think arts patronage is going to come back in a big way any time soon. The people claiming that machine-work utilizers would've otherwise hired a professional artist or writer sound a lot like the Hollywood execs who think every media pirate would've otherwise bought the movie or the album.

One thing I've been reminded of recently, in a line of work where the only writing I do is code comments, commit messages, emails, proposal documents, and slide decks, is that originality is not necessary. In fact, it might even be detrimental. Writing, for most people, is not a job; it's just a thing you have to do in the course of a different, actual job. Boilerplates exist for a reason2. Sure, I wince a little when I see a reply-all in the vein of, "Thanks for sharing these learnings! It's so important to amplify our impact when connecting with our partners and stakeholders" — but I also understand that coming up with unique text is almost always wasted effort. Exponentially more of this type of writing is done manually by people all over the world on a daily basis than is, say, a longform narrative investigation or a funny blog post.

In the same way that memes provide ready-made templates, shortcuts to sounding witty and relevant, machine-generated works provide a shortcut to competent writing for people who only write as a means to an end. Or who need art for a PowerPoint and not a gallery showing. Should we instead address the systemic and structural issues that have created a corporate culture of tedious or redundant works, rather than inventing robots to produce even more of said works? Yeah, probably3. There’s few things more on-the-nose than a story like “School apologizes for using ChatGPT to write email about mass shooting.” But I’m only one dude with an occasional newsletter, and catalyzing broad societal shifts is not my wheelhouse.

Plus, it would be too easy to throw some terms like “late capitalism,” “billionaires,” “profits,” “clickbait,” and “engagement” into my bingo cage4, spin it around, and attribute the current wave of chatbot fever to whatever sentence falls out. Blaming a small cabal of powerful figures for forcing AI on the unwilling masses feels like, at the very least, a rhetorical cop out, and at most, outright wrong. The Midjourney Discord server has 13 million members. I’d wager that relatively few are titans of industry, or get-rich-quick guys, and that most just think it’s really funny to put “Naruto at Yalta” into a magic box and see it conjured into existence.

I just think it’s worth reiterating that the story of internet culture recently has not been one of austerity or moderation. It’s about taking the easy route and flooding the zone with the same meme templates and TikTok sounds everyone else is using at a regular interval — as opposed to things that are creative and unique and, well, good. This has been true for years: consistency over quality is a winning strategy in terms of audience growth. All of the stories I read about content creator burnout are about how exhausting and awful it is to have to post so often, rather than about what most artists have traditionally struggled with throughout most of human history: being in a creative rut. To me, that's extremely telling.5 A flywheel system that encourages this type of brainless output incentivizes the proliferation of automated systems that let people continue to pump out at-best-mediocre stuff while shirking responsibility for what's actually generated. So I see the twisted appeal of the shortcuts, and am not more aghast about it than anything else I’ve seen over the last decade. The posters have been sleepwalking for a very long time.6

So this stuff bugs me, but in a steady, evolutionary way, and not a cataclysmic, revolutionary one. Professional writers aren't the only people who have to write; they teach everyone the three-point essay in elementary school. A machine-generated creation, even if it's a little blurry, even if it's a little awkward or formulaic, even if it’s inaccurate, has progressed to a good-enough fidelity that can get the larger point or feeling across. This stuff is “good enough” in a work context and a play context. I’d wager that for pretty much everyone who doesn’t write or paint for a living, that’s totally fine.

As for what we/you/I/society should do about this, if anything? Beats me.

with that out of the way, does anyone know where *my friend* can find a rip of the Neil Young bootleg tape, Catalytic Reaction?

But.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that you are currently reading… BNet. Or at the very least, you are reading something published on the “bnet” subdomain of substack.com. The simple fact is that old habits die hard. The habit in this case is: I’ve got a BIIIIIIIIIG MOOOOUUUUTTTHH, as Ralph Kramden might say.

This past May, I drafted a story that I quickly realized could only be self-published. It used online investigation techniques that, while totally sound, I did not feel like having to simultaneously pitch and explain to editors at stodgy legacy publications. And online media mostly pays crap and I’d probably have to give up ownership, so that was out too. And quite frankly, it was a really good story and I wanted to put it out into the world entirely on my own and receive all the credit. So I had to put it on BNet.

I thought about taking the email list and moving it over to some other, new newsletter. But that would be superficial, since it’s all just me anyway. Plus, I hate when I give someone my email and then they give it to someone else. A great way to get me to ditch a newsletter over the past couple years has been to announce, “I have sold my subscriber list to [insert large company].” On principle, I’m out. I cannot get over the mental hump that if someone gave me their email for BNet, that is the only thing that they gave it to me for. Hence, stuff started appearing on BNet again. A loophole!

So maybe it’s back, I dunno. I’m using this space however I see fit, mostly to self-publish or to flog links. My general attitude towards writing now is “all killer, no filler.” Nobody needs more vague thinkpieces about algorithms, or content moderation, or platform power, or the way we live now. Everyone acted like they’d finally figured out how to cover Trump and now they’re pushing out an embarrassing amount of copy for every Elon Musk tweet. Luckily, I don’t need to do “one for them, one for me” anymore. (Plus, due to certain professional developments this year, I should absolutely shut the fuck up and refrain from commenting publicly on how large technology companies conduct their business.)

My basic guiding principle for BNet is to not put out anything that you’d see anywhere else. I try not to write something unless I’m introducing new facts (or more rarely, a distinct perspective) to the record. I think that, by and large, I stuck to that rule in 2022. All of the stuff I put out this year was stuff that I could take my time with, because I was never in a race with anyone else trying to say the same thing. That leeway has allowed me to produce some of my favorite, most distinctive work ever.

In case you forgot, here are those pieces.

A Brief And Fruitful Quest To Find Neil, Who Banged Out The Tunes, Defector

Every year on April 13, people on Tumblr celebrate a picture of a rat taken on that day in 2006. But its origin remained a mystery to me until I sat down one morning and decided to find it. I found it — it was a lady who trained rats to do stuff. Not particularly exciting on its own, but cathartic for a niche of Tumblr users and certainly a useful piece of info (that is still missing from Know Your Meme, just an observation). Thank you to Defector for letting me go long on a rat playing the piano.

deuxmoi’s digital trail, BNet

This rocked. What a good piece! I think what I liked most about this is that I held my research to an unnecessarily high standard: I only cited sources that were intended for public consumption. That’s different than, for example, looking up corporate registrations, or voting records, or dubious scraped LinkedIn info — stuff that’s only technically public. I wanted to solve a mystery by presenting data that was willfully offered up, and I did.

Thorough, studious, diligent reporting, fact-checking and editing all done by one person: me. I’m not kidding when I say that one evening I was bored and I told my girlfriend, “I’m gonna figure out who Deuxmoi is” and then an hour later I basically had it all. God, can you imagine working as a full-time journalist and not figuring this out? Pretty embarrassing…

The Secret History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater, Defector

+

The Misremembered History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater, Defector

The first one of these feels like a trademark “me” kind of piece: an overly thorough investigation of a piece of internet ephemera so old it can drink. You get the process walkthrough, and you get the catharsis of detail. Names, dates, places. The college newspaper article is particularly funny to me. What a good detail!

And then it all went sideways in a really incredible way. My editor and I spent a couple of months just talking about how nutso the turn here was, and trying to figure out if I’d truly boned this one or if the stars had aligned for an extremely weird case of collective false memory. (My attitude is: both.) The day that used DVD showed up in the mail was the most exciting day of my year.

A friend of mine remarked that the first of this pair of stories didn’t have “a point” (though in fairness, they meant this as a compliment). I understand where they’re coming from, in that you don’t read the piece and then apply the lessons of the piece to, like, scrolling Instagram more smartly — but I do think there is a point. The point of the piece is that an interesting, well-known thing happened but there were some factual blanks to fill in. Not every article about internet culture needs to end with a moral or action items for the reader. I trust you to find the value! More than 6,000 words about a stupid 9-second video, and I’d gladly write 6,000 more.

How Gamers Beat NFTs, Businessweek

Every so often, legacy media will publish something clumsy about video games, and then the gaming writers and readers moan and get all huffy on Twitter like, “Why, oh why, won’t they take us seriously? 😡 Video games make a lot of money!!!!”

And then when you go to the gaming/tech sites and try to read their non-gaming/tech coverage, it’s all about comic books, or films adaptation of comic books, or television adaptations of comic books, and also some sci-fi and maybe a TikTok meme or two. The legacy side can’t stop referencing Pac-Man and the enthusiast side refuses to engage with broader culture in a substantive way. Neither side here is really trying to meet in the middle (and honestly the gamers are way more annoying about it).

I, foolishly, enjoy the middle. It’s very fun to look at video games and see how the industry’s history and player behavior serve as an early-warning system for basically everything outside it. So it was fun to work on this feature-length history of the atomization and assetization of games and how the conditions have changed such that the consumers and developers now wield genuine power against the business interests.

I will note: this was technically my first print feature, though it will never make it to print (I have the proofs of the print layout, I swear. Sometimes things get bumped!) I enjoyed writing a print feature — especially on a topic that suffers from a surplus of writers catering to enthusiasts and a dearth of writers interested in making the topic legible to the layman. I also enjoyed getting paid a print-feature rate. I’d love to do both again.

whatshappening.online

One of those projects that’s really only possible through brute force, but man, when you look at these things in aggregate it makes spending so much time on social media seem even stupider than we already know it to be.

This was also useful as a technical exercise. I got familiar with a new React component library and I taught myself how to use Firebase. Plus, I got to buy a really good domain name. I said I was gonna do this at the beginning of the year and I held myself to it. I’d like to thank macOS’s OCR functionality for helping me log all of my screenshots. You can read some nice articles about it at NPR and Wired.

An update on Catherine

People who paid for BNet received pictures of my dog. But since I don’t charge for BNet anymore, everyone gets a pic. Here she is.

Alright, that’s it. Smell you later!

As 2022 draws to a close, I am thrilled to finally unveil a project I’ve been working on all year:

whatshappening.online

This is an archive of all 450+ trending topics I logged from Twitter’s “What’s happening” section this year. You can experience the whole thing as a calendar to poke around in, or as a timeline that will test your patience, and there’s a considered and thoughtful note about why I took on this project on the site’s front page.

But you are somehow still a BNet subscriber, and because of this, I know that you don’t want exhaustive and nuanced studies of the technology that shapes our lives. You just want the good shit — the raw, uncut, brain-frying muck.

So here are some of my favorite* internet moments of 2022.

This is less than 10% of the overall collection, so I encourage you to go to whatshappening.online and mess around with it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip down memory lane!

Thank you for reading BNet. I’m obviously never doing this again.

Last week, the television show Atlanta aired a mockumentary about the making of A Goofy Movie, "The Goof Who Sat By The Door." The episode casts the 1995 film as a passion project of the fictional Thomas Washington, an animator who accidentally becomes Disney's first black CEO and sought to work that background into his work. Like many people who have asserted such in real life, Washington argues that Goofy is undeniably black, and the episode declares the film "the blackest movie of all time." (Others agree.) The whole episode is well-done, and is somewhat audacious given that FX, the network on which Atlanta airs, is now owned by Disney.

I will admit that I have also been looking forward to this episode for months, without even knowing its contents. This was because of an email I received this past June from a Legal Clearance Specialist at Disney, looking to contact a source I’d spoken to for a story I’d written in 2018.

In 2018, I interviewed Tiara Seddens, an artist specializing in fan art, who drew cartoon characters from TV shows and movies in different, more culturally specific contexts. Her most enduring image was one of Max from A Goofy Movie, dressed in streetwear, complimenting Roxanne, also in streetwear, which the now famous line "Wow Queen, you're so beautiful" (seen above). The sketch is earnest and not exactly professional quality, making it easy to make fun of or, at least, riff on. Many did. At some point, an altered version featuring the characters in a disheveled apartment appeared. In this one, Max says, "Damn, bitch, you live like this?"

Because I am the only journalist who has ever interviewed Seddens about the picture, Atlanta's production team had turned to me. (Getting in touch with her the first time was a little complicated as well: when Instagram DMs failed, I found her mother in the comments, and sent her a Facebook message to the effect of "I swear I'm not a total freak, I just want to ask your daughter about her art.") There is, obviously, something clearly funny about a company as large and protective of its works as Disney seeking permission to use fan art of characters it otherwise owns. Especially in a TV episode critical of Disney.

So I dug through the email archive I had from my old job1, found Seddens's contact info, got her permission, and then shared that contact info with the Atlanta team. I also noted diplomatically that I hoped Disney was prepared to compensate her fairly. One producer, thankful for the assist, said that, "Her work is a big inspiration for what we're doing."

And that was the end of the interaction. I don’t know what came of it and I didn’t ask for more info, since I was simply a go-between. I just kinda assumed that a show like Atlanta, attuned to how people actually use the internet in practice, would throw the image up on a character's phone in the course of some surreal romp and that would be that. But the Goofy episode is something stranger and better.

Seddens's drawing, in its "Damn, bitch, you live like this?" variant (author unknown), appears right at the end of the episode. The fictitious son of Thomas Washington, Max, references it as a descendant of A Goofy Movie, its explicit blackness, and his father's mission. "You know that 'Damn, you live like this?' meme?" he asks. "It's so funny to me because the essence of it is those drawings he did in college. Black folks living their lives, being funny, being free, being real."

The episode mocks up a couple of the drawings Washington did in college, in a series called, “Goofy, Please.” I have a guess as to at least one reference point that might have inspired them.

What's interesting here, to me at least, is how the episode flips chronology on its head. In the episode's fiction, Seddens’s meme is a result of A Goofy Movie being an explicitly black production, as opposed to the meme being what it is an real life: an expression of something only implicit in the film and only expanded on through subsequent critical interpretation.

In other words, in the episode, Thomas Washington inspires the meme; in reality, the meme clearly inspired the episode's alternate history. To rephrase this scenario even more simply: Tiara Seddens's drawing eventually led to an entire episode of critically acclaimed, prestige television. I think that's really cool on both ends — that someone's sketches could travel so far across the internet, and that someone on the receiving end could engage with that work so comprehensively.

I figured I'd write this up because it's a cool, neat little pop culture story. I'm also writing this for posterity because, as far as I can tell, Tiara Seddens isn't listed anywhere in the credits.

Thank you for reading BNet.

• new article

• my most astounding fuckup yet (also a new article)

• a third article?? (sorta)

• a resolution to the Mystery of The Scatman

• i know who The Mole is?

an article about video games

(and, full disclosure, web3)

Here's a little secret: it's easy to tell what's going to happen on the internet broadly if you pay attention to video games specifically. If you want to know how technology, business, and culture all feed off each other to form new trends, you just gotta play (or read about) video games and watch how players respond to them. Each one is like an isolated beta test for new forms of interactivity in digital society, leading to the development of everything, from the technological and social innovations of livestreaming on Twitch (very cool) to the rhetorical and behavioral innovations of Gamergate (less cool).

“Oh, how convenient!” you say. “All of the internet is explained via a formative interest you developed as a child.” Fair point. However, I’d counter with “video games literally combine technological progress with interactivity and creative expression.” Not sure what else to say here other than that every video game is the experience of using the internet in microcosm!

In 2018, I wrote a piece explaining the success of Fortnite, positioning it more as a social platform than a deathmatch. I wrote all of this not just before people started throwing the term "metaverse" around, but also before Fortnite itself started doing a lot of the things it’s now well-known for: doing tie-in events with popular entertainment franchises; selling skins of pro athletes; hosting concerts and movie screenings; putting TikTok dances in as emotes; and overall, fashioning itself less as a competitive shooter and more as a game where its fun to just hang in the (cyber)space. That article remains probably my greatest called shot. How many pieces about Fortnite written in 2018 reflect the game's scope and function as it exists today? I'd bet very few.

You can consider this new piece for Businessweek a sequel of sorts: a thing happened in gaming, and it served as a very clear forecast of broader trends. At the end of 2021 and the start of 2022, something really funny kept happening. Video game companies and gaming public figures would announce that they were going to sell NFTs, interest in which had exploded months earlier, and then, almost every time, enough people yelled at them online that the efforts were immediately scrapped. A few months later, all of the publicly traded companies who were initially like, Yeah, NFTs seem rad were like, Haha just to be clear, we're looking at NFTs very cautiously and we did NOT say we're doing them.

If there is anyone conditioned to spend real money on silly virtual trinkets, it's gamers — they’re already doing this in large quantities. So why did they reject the pitch of NFTs (true ownership! worth real money!) so completely? Again, the answer is obvious if you play these things, but it is kinda interesting and seemed worth articulating explicitly. Hence, article.

The short answer is that over the last decade and a half, video game companies have figured out how to commodify every goddamn inch of a piece of software. If you want to see everything a title has to offer, you can't put in a cheat code — the only cheat codes now are "having a lot of money" or "having a lot of free time." Now imagine if, as web3 proponents hope, that same model of commodification, masked by the consumer-friendly sales pitch of “true ownership,” could be applied to every other mode of expression and interaction on the internet. Doesn't that sound fun? (IMO, it does not.) Complicating this, most games operate as live services now, which means they need to retain players and get them to spend repeatedly, rather than sell a single product once and call it a day. This makes game companies more vulnerable than ever to angry people yelling at them online.

Take last week's big story: Mark Zuckerberg faked the legs. His legs were a motion-captured, as opposed to being animated in real-time. It's very telling that someone even thought to ask this! Someone asked this because virtual reality's earliest adopters are the same people who got burned by the Killzone 2 trailer in 2005, and not VC-backed startup founders and futurist cheerleaders. The question "Hey, are the legs real?" is a direct product of years of game-marketing sleight of hand. Stuff moves faster now, and I can’t shake the sense that arc of the next 5 years of metaverse discourse is going to look a lot like the arc of the last 20 years of video-game discourse.

Anyway, that's some supplementary context for the piece I wrote which is out this week. (I won’t make you scroll back up; here’s another link.) I pitched it back in January, based on the general idea that “gamers being instant skeptics of this stuff does not bode well.” As I worked on various drafts over the course of 2022, crypto value and interest in NFTs cratered. Did gamers cause that? No, but they were a useful canary in the coal mine.

Like I said, studying this game stuff makes it pretty easy to see where the internet is probably headed. In fact, you might’ve first heard about NFTs from this newsletter months before they exploded, after I discovered them while investigating why some Among Us meme had extremely detailed sneaker models. Unfortunately, when it comes to explaining the cultural impact of video games (as opposed to, say, the business), games/tech media is talking to people who already get it, and generalist publications still think their articles need to explain the concept of a jump button. There is, believe it or not, a useful middle ground.

I've got a list of a dozen or so of these scenarios at this point, in which the behavior of gamers and game makers has served as a clear preview of technological and societal trends more broadly. Maybe I'll write that book proposal at some point. In the meantime, feel free to share this mainstream attempt at describing video games in your Discords with a note like "this is so cringe." Hatereads count too.

a gigantic correction

Even though I mostly write about silly, obscure, and superfluous internet bullshit, I still try to do my due diligence, check my facts, and get things right. I fucked up recently.

Back in July, I sent you all a link to a piece I’d written for Defector. The piece concerned a viral video filmed at a basketball game in the ‘90s. It was — I thought — exhaustively researched, and I felt very good about the particulars. A few weeks after its publication, however, some readers alerted me to the fact that I’d gotten one part of the story very, very wrong.

I have never seen a piece of reporting go awry in quite the way that this one did. I’d love to sweep my mistakes under the rug and pretend they don’t exist, but that’s a luxury only afforded to New York Times columnists covering crypto.

So now I have this follow-up report, “The Misremembered History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater.” If nothing else, I hope that even my screwup and this new attempt to make good can provide some worthwhile entertainment. Again, I sincerely regret the error.

oh, one more article

I wrote about the social utility of Zillow for Logic (you might recognize the gist of it from an old issue of BNet but sssshhhh don’t tell anyone). You can also buy it in print. Personally, I think you should just subscribe.

mystery of the Scatman — solved!

In May 2020, I wrote about the mysteries of the Scatman. Specifically, about a popular quote attributed to Scatman John that seemed to have appeared out of thin air on his Wikipedia page. Macklemore, what was that quote again?

Right. After I published my findings, the quote was removed from his Wikipedia page.

I eventually heard back from Joni Rush, an editor I’d contacted who had done some vital work on the Scatman John entry, in January 2021. She told me that she definitely remembered seeing the quote on scatmanjohn.com, his official website, though archived snapshots only contain the first parts of the quote, “Whatever God wants is fine by me.” The second half was added by someone with a UK IP address, and are that IP’s only contribution to Wikipedia.

At the very least, Rush said, “I wouldn’t joke about him, I stutter and he’s one of my heroes. Glad people are still reading about him and from my teenage wiki edits from 15 years ago.” She also offered to put me in touch with Gina Wag, a friend of the Scatman’s who ran scatmanjohn.com before the domain registration expired and it went offline for a bit.

And then… well, I’ll be totally honest: I just did not pursue this line of inquiry. Who knows why? I was busy! Luckily, Ms. Wag reached out to me earlier this month after somehow discovering my original post.

She sent along this message:

Back in the late 90s, I used to run Scatman John's official site. John was a friend and mentor to me during my teenage years (I also struggled with stuttering). He said that quote, verbatim, to me after he'd been diagnosed with cancer.

I first mentioned a paraphrased version of it on the site after John had died (link here to the Archived page). Unfortunately, the website expired soon after, got turned into spam, and the content disappeared.

A fellow fan you mentioned, Joni Rush, kept some of the material and I think she wrote the bulk of the original Wikipedia entry using old bits of the site. I still recognise a few sentences as originally mine, and the sole UK user who corrected the quote was almost certainly me.

It looks like it's taken on a life of its own, sometimes wrongly said to be his 'last words'. I found your take on Wikipedia's propensity to self-reference really interesting. You make a good point.

Anyway, that's the story. Incidentally, I just got scatmanjohn.com back after all this time, and the record company and I plan to relaunch it. Maybe I should include that quote, so it can go back on Wikipedia in a legit way :)

I hope this helps. Above all, I'm just happy you liked the quote, and even happier to share that John did in fact say it!

Mystery solved — Thank you, Gina! We can now put the Scatman quote back on his Wikipedia page.

i’m like 99% sure i know who The Mole is

I swear this is about the internet. There’s a new season of The Mole on Netflix and it rocks. It’s got everything you want from a The Mole: convoluted challenges forcing people to betray each other, an impish cable TV host who pops up to mess with players at the worst time, impossible puzzles that you watch and are like oh, I would solve that no sweat even though you definitely would not. Episodes were released in batches over the last couple of weeks, and the last 2 are out this Friday.

A really cool and stupid thing about The Mole is each episode has a hidden clue, for the audience, as to The Mole’s identity. Historically speaking, these clues suck. There are two that I remember. One is, in the season premiere of the first season, The Mole arrived fourth — and “mole” has four letters (Anderson Cooper literally explained this on national TV). The second clue is, in one of the second-season episodes, no stars were visible at night, except for one shot where they digitally added The Mole’s astrological sign.

The clues are dumb, and with the Netflix batch, I tried very hard to not look for them. A seemingly random string of letters and numbers on the side of a treasure chest? I will not be hitting pause. I honestly don’t know if they’re even putting clues in the reboot episodes — but I think I found one. From episode 5, where there’s a very real block of C4 on a table:

The batch number on this fake C4 is 42276. I didn’t even have to pause the episode to catch this. That’s five digits, so I thought to myself “I wonder what zip code that is.” If this were the early 2000s, when The Mole originally aired, I’d ignore this impulse and move on with my life, rather than heading over to my Dell tower running Windows XP.

Unfortunately, we’ve got internet all the time now, so I plugged “42276” into Google on my iPhone, and got this.

Woo-hoo. Again, if this were the early 2000s, I’d give up. But because every Netflix Original is grist for the content mill, it is very easy to type something like “the mole 2022 cast” into Google and get a lot of information from a bunch of real sites that look like fake sites from Law & Order. Like this article from Reality Titbit, which tells me that contestant Kesi Neblett “grew up with four brothers and sisters in the backcountry of Kentucky.”

That’s pretty close, but maybe that’s a coincidence. Can we go deeper? Yes, because though LinkedIn didn’t exist when the original The Mole aired in 2001 and 2002, it sure as hell exists now. Let’s check out Kesi’s LinkedIn page, specifically what’s in the Organizations section of her profile.

Wow, that’s sooooo interesting! What an odd coincidence! The C4 brick had the zip code of Logan County on it, and Kesi — who has been messing up in challenges constantly, but sorta believably — used to live in Logan County? What are the odds?

I went to Netflix’s first-party content mill, Tudum, and took their online version of the elimination quiz contestants take each episode, armed with this knowledge.

I sure hope ubiquitous, instant internet access hasn’t ruined the new The Mole for me!!!!!!

(For posterity, I also locked in this prediction on Github before episodes 6-8 aired last week.)

Thank you for reading BNet. I’d implore you to “like” and “share,” but I get to do all of this entirely for fun now so: the choice is yours.

One of the most boring, and oft-repeated, narratives of the last couple of years is that of the "pandemic breakout." You're probably familiar with it by now. Someone was stuck in lockdown in the spring of 2020, and they just started posting, and suddenly they were very famous. You know, because we were all bored, and we couldn't see our friends, and were yearning for human connection, yada yada yada.

One of the many breakouts of the pandemic is the popular Instagram account and nascent media brand known as Deuxmoi. The property launched in the 2010s as a blog run by two anonymous women working in the fashion industry. Then it went dormant for a bit. Then the pandemic struck, and one of the account holders was bored, and started soliciting gossip from Deuxmoi's roughly 45,000 followers. The rest, as they say, is history.

Deuxmoi — which translates to "two me" from French — now has more than 1.5 million Instagram followers. They've done this largely by popularizing a type of extremely mundane gossip. A large amount of Deuxmoi’s blind items are about how a follower ran into a celeb a few years ago and they were so nice. Or they weren’t nice. Or it describes what they ordered for lunch. One emblematic tip stuck in my head is when someone wrote in to report seeing Joe Biden in Washington D.C., the capital city of the United States, where he currently serves as President, served as Vice President from 2009 to 2017, and served as a Senator in Congress from 1973 to 2009.

A recent example: Dylan O’Brien was spotted walking with a pretty girl.

(In case you need this clarification: Dylan O’Brien is an actor and not just some guy.) (Actually, if you needed that clarification, he is just some guy.)

Whoever is behind Deuxmoi is very quick to remind followers that the account holder(s) cannot possibly verify everything they post and that Deuxmoi is merely relaying the message. This is an information presentation strategy and punting of responsibility that definitely hasn't caused any widespread public anxiety over the last six years or so.

In recent months, however, the pseudonymous figure known as Deuxmoi has branched out into building a full-fledged media company. Deuxmoi now hosts multiple podcasts, Deux U and Deux Me After Dark (initially featuring substantial use of a voice changer). In March, HarperCollins announced Anon Pls, Deuxmoi's debut novel, a fictionalized memoir about a fashion worker who skyrockets to pseudonymous fame with a Deuxmoi-like social media account. (“Anon pls” is a standard, mostly unnecessary request from Deuxmoi tippers to not be named. Most supply fake, jokey email addresses.) Earlier this month, HBO Max ordered the novel to series, despite the fact that the network already has an actual Gossip Girl reboot which has itself namedropped Deuxmoi.

And yet, even with a podcast, book deal, television show, and regular interviews with media outlets, nobody seems to know who Deuxmoi is. Which I guess I find kind of weird, because it was not difficult to figure out who Deuxmoi is.

“why?”

The current media climate — and the fact that I’m an independent blog freak and have no institutional reputational authority to lean on — necessitates that I explain at some length why I’m even writing this post.

One reason is that I like solving a mystery, and I think that there is a decent amount of public interest in this one. If they were just an Instagram mod, I probably wouldn’t have an interest in Deuxmoi’s identity. But Deuxmoi repeatedly and willingly puts themselves and their personal perspective on display for 1.5 million followers as a “curator of pop culture.” They are a podcast host, and they frequently give interviews to media outlets. They’re also co-authoring a book that is supposedly inspired by real-life experiences, and which already has a TV adaptation in the works.

Deuxmoi has chosen to tie their individual identity to their increasingly public line of work. I support people telling their own story — which is not mutually exclusive from also believing that, at this point, the identity of whoever is telling that story is, in itself, newsworthy. Deuxmoi is a public figure.

The other reason I am publishing this is because, quite honestly, attempting to answer the question of “Who is Deuxmoi?” did not require any muckraking. I want to stress that, in my experience compiling this report, Deuxmoi does not seem particularly interested in protecting their own anonymity beyond saying, “I’d prefer to be anonymous.”

I developed a solid sense of its history in the course of some web surfing while I ate lunch last week. The information compiled here comes from publicly accessible records of intended-for-public-consumption online activity. Looking at old posts in which Deuxmoi was tagged, public comments they’d made, and a YouTube video that they voluntarily appeared in, and then drawing conclusions from that corpus of evidence does not constitute a violation of privacy.

This post contains no addresses, phone numbers, current employers, or non-public biographical info. I have spent the last week following up on gleaned information, collating data, and reaching out to people who might know more — including the creators of Deuxmoi — and offering them the chance to comment. I’m just gonna spell it out: I take this work seriously, I have pored over the details, and I have given a lot of consideration as to the structure and contents of this piece.

(If you have a clarification or correction, please don’t hesitate to email me at brian@feldmanbrian.com.)

let’s do a brief FAQ

• “Why are you trying to cancel Deuxmoi?” I’m not.

• “Isn’t this doxxing?” Doxxing is by and large defined as “the publication of private or sensitive information,” none of which you’ll find here.

• “But won’t this have a chilling effect on the journalism that Deuxmoi publishes?” Deuxmoi self-describes as ‘entertainment’ and stresses that blinds may not be accurate, so no, I’m not particularly worried.

• “Won’t this reduce my ability to enjoy Deuxmoi?” Maybe; stop reading if so.

• “Well, I still want to yell at you about it.” My email’s right up there.

If you believe that Deuxmoi — who has an online audience in the millions, who has sold a version of their own life to publishers and producers, who regularly makes media appearances promoting their company, and perhaps most importantly, whose media brand is based on a belief that the actions of even mildly notable people constitute info worth sharing widely and with abandon — should not even have so much as their name published, you are welcome to make that argument. I simply disagree, for the reasons stated above.

into the archives

Let’s establish a baseline. Deuxmoi was a fashion blog run by two anonymous women from roughly 2013 to 2016. In an interview with The Daily Front Row in 2015, Deuxmoi's co-founders explained the anonymity as a product of not wanting the site to be about them, and about wanting to be able to speak critically and freely. "We also wanted to be able to say ‘f*ck’ and ‘sh*t’ without our parents feeling embarrassed," they added. "Since we are anonymous, it seems easier to be more liberal with our writing and images. No judgement, because this is a judgy-wudgy f*cking world."

They also say that the site was launched two years prior, in 2013. This is important because in numerous interviews, such as with the YouTube channel Hollywood Raw in 2020, Deuxmoi says that they started the Instagram account with a friend seven years prior, which is also 2013. The point being: someone who was running Deuxmoi as a blog is also responsible for its current iteration as an Instagram gossip account.

This is helpful to know, because while the Deuxmoi blog (a period I'll refer to as Deuxmoi 1.0) is now online accessible through the Internet Archive, references to it are all over social media. Supermodel Doutzen Kroes, for instance, had a nice meeting with them in 2013.

Deuxmoi 1.0 was popular back during a golden age of social media interoperability, when people regularly linked their Instagram account to their Twitter account. That means that even as handles change and posts get deleted on Instagram, the Twitter crossposts are frozen in time, like the mosquito that drank dinosaur blood from Jurassic Park. This is a tortured metaphor, but you get the idea.

The remnants of Deuxmoi 1.0 are scattered all over Instagram and Twitter, and relatively easy to piece together. In a July 2013 Instagram post, for example, model Kristina Romanova tags both @deuxmoi and someone who goes by @mkempsyo. @mkempsyo is mentioned frequently alongside the Deuxmoi account.

Just a little more searching confirms that @mkempsyo is a fashion entrepreneur named Meggie Kempner (the handle has since been changed and the account is now private). Here's a corresponding Pinterest page linking the handle to the civilian name, for example, complete with a pinboard dedicated to her grandmother, famed New York socialite Nan Kempner. The Deuxmoi 1.0 Pinterest page, circa 2014, also featured a pinboard dedicated to Nan.

And just to clear up any ambiguity, there’s the dormant Facebook page of Coco Deuxmoi, who describes herself as “1/2 of the deuxmoi gals at deuxmoi.com” and “co-founder of fashion, beauty and lifestyle website deuxmoi.com” on her profile. In 2014, Coco posted a link to a Vanity Fair write-up of the Kempner brand launch, and commented under it, “so proud of the deuxmoi gals girl Meggie Kempner,” tagging her Facebook profile.

Kempner did not respond to emails asking about her relationship to Deuxmoi, though according to tracking pixels included in them, they were opened at least once.

Figuring out the other half of the Deuxmoi equation requires some deductive reasoning, because the other Deuxmoi gal has been much more effective at sweeping her online presence under the rug. But it’s not too tough to pull the details together.

Here’s model Emily DiDonato complimenting a Twitter user named @gizroc75 on their blog, deuxmoi.com.

But who is @gizroc75? They’re certainly not @mkempsyo, but they also seem to have disappeared from the web. Luckily, we still have old tweets, like this one from model and Deuxmoi collaborator Valentina Zelyaeva.

“Melisss.” I’d guess that’s a first name like Melissa. In another tweet, it’s clear that someone named Melissa was conducting interviews for Deuxmoi.

In this tweet, however, a hair stylist named Louis Angelo refers to @gizroc75 as “Lovallo.” Deuxmoi and Angelo clearly know each other: the pair wholeheartedly endorsed his salon work in a 2015 blog post and featured him in a video they orchestrated in 2013 (more below).

So now we have a full name: Melissa Lovallo. But there’s not much else to go on here, because many of the online accounts tied to this name are now dead ends. The @gizroc75 Twitter account has been deleted, and the corresponding Facebook page and LinkedIn profile have disappeared as well (links to all three, tied to the name, still exist in at least one automated service that crawls the web, scraping and collating personal info). This person has done a great job of keeping a low profile online over the past couple of years.

That’s not to say there’s nothing, however. In posts that tag both Deuxmoi and/or Kempner, another handle shows up with some regularity: @mlovallo12. The account has since been deleted, but tags remain. Luckily, our model friend Kristina Romanova has also linked Deuxmoi to Lovallo on Instagram.

“Miss ya @mkempsyo @mlovallo12 @deuxmoi #ralphlaurenteam #pinkpony #support,” the model Anastassia Khozissova captioned a 2013 photograph, when both appear to have worked at Ralph Lauren. This broadly tracks with a description of Deuxmoi on the now-defunct blog Helpsy, which describes the gals as “veteran fashion industry insiders, a stylist & fashion designer duo.”

A 2013 post on the model-tracking forum Bellazon has archived a couple of Instagrams from @mlovallo12 — the only existing partial archives of anything related to the account as far as I know — including one in which Zelyaeva sports a Deuxmoi t-shirt. Lovallo captioned it, “everyone should follow @deuxmoi,” and tagged Kempner as well.

found footage

Confirming that these two women actually were Deuxmoi (as opposed to simply always being tagged alongside the account) might be a difficult task, but luckily, they also appeared in a 2013 YouTube video for a series called “At Home With Sam Jones.” As of publication, the video has a little over 2,300 views. In the video, they give host Sam Jones a makeover by taking her to see aforementioned hair stylist Louis Angelo.

I contacted Jones over Instagram DM to see if I could find out more about the video, and before I’d actually asked anything, she replied, “I never saw the girl’s faces and have no idea what their actual identities are. ❤️.” Jones did not respond to follow-up questions, instead blocking me shortly after I tried to jog her memory by asking if either might have gone by “Meggie” or “Melissa.” (Jones is also one of three ‘likes’ on the aforementioned 2014 Coco Deuxmoi post that explicitly IDs Kempner as one half of the pair.)

Though the Deuxmoi Gals appear in hats, sunglasses, large coats, and scarves, a few miscalculated camera angles provide the data I was looking for. The people in disguise certainly seem to be Lovallo and Kempner, especially when cross-referenced with other existing photos that remain on social media and on-camera promotional work.

The audio is crucial too. It’s helpful that this video does not feature any voice filtering, making it easy to determine which person is currently in charge of (or at least, the voice of) the growing Deuxmoi operation: Melissa Lovallo. I’d say she sounds the same here as she does throughout her podcast and in interviews. There is a very small chance Deuxmoi could now be someone else entirely, but that doesn’t line up with Deuxmoi’s own statements that they are one of the brand’s original co-creators.

Emails sent to Lovallo and the Deuxmoi contact address, summarizing my findings and requesting an interview, were opened, but were not replied to.

Anyhow, that’s what I managed to find sitting in plain sight.

Is this an earth-shattering revelation that will change the course of anything? No, not at all. 

Does it totally recontextualize everything you thought you knew about Deuxmoi? Nope.

But did you learn something very anodyne about a public figure? Sure.

And, honestly, what could be more Deuxmoi than that?

Thank you for reading BNet.