Ex-X: After only 3 nights, the 'X' sign on top of Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco that pulsated light right into nearby apartments has been taken down. https://t.co/Mg2qXwkqyX pic.twitter.com/nYsVWsUc7c
— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) July 31, 2023
It was supposed to earn him a ton of free media this week… and then Jack Smith set everyone talking about some boring political crap that no real Master of the Universe would ever even notice. Tough week, Elon!
it basically served its function to distract the press from the fact he coddled a right winger who shared child abuse imagery https://t.co/fhEpLTeoGF
— Karl Bode (@KarlBode) July 31, 2023
looks like the X logo that was erected above X / Twitter HQ has been removed
the SF Department of Buildings just uploaded nearly two dozens more complaints it received about it re: unsafe strobes, sandbags holding it up, lighting starting to "droop" off https://t.co/KEntuAzSM9 pic.twitter.com/oGrgTaZ7Hw
— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) July 31, 2023
Yeah? Well, we can’t *make* him go away!…
— Paul Leigh -Some Rascal on the Internet ?????????? (@Pleightx) July 31, 2023
Speaking of failed branding exercises…
I've heard/read multiple anecdotes from Tesla and SpaceX employees who say those companies have firm systems in place to make sure none of Musk's decisions are enacted, and I 100% believe them. https://t.co/nN3behvMnl
— Now on Threads! (@agraybee) July 31, 2023
But it’s a dope joke! Are you saying dope jokes aren’t automatically funny?!?
One striking thing about Elon is that he's bumblingly inept at using one of the first human technologies, language. He just apes what he thinks the kool kidz are saying, and in his case, he thinks Nazi nudniks are cool. Words turn to slimy garbage in his mouth. https://t.co/ptQ2zaTfQG
— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) July 31, 2023
Blaze your glory! pic.twitter.com/lmGZefVccG
— Daily Trix (@DailyTrix) August 1, 2023
Weird hunch it'll be back to Twitter in eighteen months.
— Mike Stuchbery ???? (@MikeStuchbery_) July 31, 2023
mvr
He does seem to be really killing the platform. And the language problem accusation seems on point. Did he not think about what verb form would be used with X to describe what posting on the format would be called.? “Tweet” becomes what exactly? All I can think of is “excreet” for its replacement. And it doesn’t have the same ring to it.
HumboldtBlue
Who cares about Musk on a party Saturday night?
The South Africa v Netherlands match is a helluva contest and the Banyana Banyana have given the Dutch all they can handle, but the Dutch lead at half, 1-0.
Also, the Savannah Bananas are also a lot more fun on a Saturday night. Here they do the Ms. Maisel Pink Shoelaces dance challenge.
dmsilev
I dunno, both the Tesla Cybertruck and the SpaceX Starship feel like projects that kicked off because Musk got high and said âwouldnât it be cool if?’.
Sister Golden Bear
X.com as an “everything you need to do” app has been his great white whale, ever since he tried to do at PayPal 25 years ago and the board pushed out for that. Well that, and signing up people for an online banking play without doing credit checks, which nearly bankrupted the company.
And yes, from people I know who work at Tesla, there was a whole layer of senior executives whose job were to manage Elon and make sure
nonewell most of his drug fueled, whacked out ideas got implemented.Ken
You just know that “blaze your glory” will turn out to be from some neo-Nazi manifesto, or possibly a slogan used by some revanchist Afrikaner group.
Jackie
I laugh every time I click on a tweet posted here. There is a big X facing you before you see the actual post, but the url at the top still says Twitter lol
And the âxâ in the upper left corner makes me want to click to close.
Matt McIrvin
@dmsilev: I had a working hypothesis that Starship was the project that SpaceX used to keep Elon Musk busy so they could do the real work. And that still may be the case, but NASA’s Artemis project choosing a Starship-derived design for their lunar lander is a problem. I guess they’re starting to hedge that bet.
LAO
I saw the best bumper sticker, it basically said âI bought it before I knew musk was an asshole.â Â Iâm thinking of buying it for my brother.
Ken
@dmsilev: You’ll notice Cybertruck remains “in development”. Starship is a bit further along, but it’s possible they decided the easiest way to kill that project was to let Musk be in charge of launch operations.
HumboldtBlue
SA very fortunate after a second Dutch goal, from some excellent interplay, was ruled offside.
dmsilev
@Ken: The truck allegedly is supposed to go on sale this year. Allegedly.
dmsilev
@Matt McIrvin: Given how cautious NASA is, or perhaps conservative in the older sense of the word is better, that decision was a surprise. Â Starship is enormously ambitious, but thereâs a lot of stuff that have to be made to work before itâs useful for things like Moon landings.
Tehanu
I think we’ll all be happy when it becomes the ex-X. Personally it pisses me off that he’s slobbered all over the name of my favorite band.
HumboldtBlue
Ohhhhh noooooo… South Africa’s goalie has the ball squirt through her arms on a pretty routine save, and the Dutch now lead 2-0. That’s heartbreaking for SA.
Swart, the goalie, has played so well, and she just let that slip through.
Great save by the Dutch goalie and a great shot from SA.
Matt McIrvin
@dmsilev: I always thought it was questionable as hell and I have serious doubts about Artemis actually landing astronauts on the Moon because the lander bit seems insufficiently thought out. But I think the current plan is to go with a different design from another vendor for the second landing?
TheOtherHank
@Tehanu: X has the perfect song title for Elon: Anyone Can Fill Your Shoes Lyrics
Kent
@Sister Golden Bear: Tesla is a public company. Â The HAVE to do that because millions of peopleâs investments are at stake and the SEC will be on their ass if he fucks around too much.
Twitter is Elonâs privately-owned toy. Â He can whatever the fuck he wants with it.
I think that is the big difference.
Kent
@dmsilev: Anyone who actually uses real trucks for a living will tell you how absolutely stupid the Cybertruck design is. Â It is basically useless for most actual truck purposes.
By contrast, Rivian is making actual useful trucks and selling them as fast as they can make them.
sdhays
@dmsilev: Yeah, itâs definitely not true those companies have an effective way of keeping him meddling. Just recently – the destruction of SpaceXâs launchpad was partially due to an Elon order to cut corners and launch on the âhilariousâ 4/20.
And heâs the reason Teslaâs are getting (already have) stupid and dangerous yoke steering wheel. Not to mention the shitty work culture (at least at Tesla – I donât know about SpaceX) comes from Elon on down.
J R in WV
Musk is a loon!!
Unintentionally hilarious at every turn. Lucked into great wealth, spending it ever since.
sdhays
@Kent: I wonder if CyberTruck bombs in the market if the other investors will get fed up enough to chuck him over the rails, just like they did at PayPal.
dmsilev
@sdhays:
SpaceX is notorious for working its employees to the point of burnout and beyond. Their turnover is massive, but thereâs a steady stream of (mostly young, just starting out) people who want to work there.
Matt McIrvin
@Kent: I’ve just been noticing Rivians (and Polestars!) on the road over the past few days
The electric that actually makes me drool is the Hyundai Ioniq 6. The one that looks kind of like a mutant Porsche instead of being a crossover SUV.
HumboldtBlue
Lindsey Graham really is the worst of the worst, ain’t he?
sdhays
@dmsilev: Not surprised at all.
dmsilev
@Kent: Ford as well. Reviews Iâve seen of the electric F-150 are basically âitâs an F-150. That runs off a battery. If you know the F-150, you know this’, which makes an awful lot of sense given how popular the model line has been for decades.
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue:
The Savannah Bananas are always more fun.
The Oracle of Solace
Just going to say I had a very good day today: I got to hang out with some of my writing acquaintances while I was in full goth-girl mode. I hadn’t seen most of them in person since the Before-Time. They were glad to see me, and wanted to know if I’d be writing again anytime soon; one even asked when my next video would be out. In fact, a novelist acquaintance, as she was leaving, ran up to me to tell me how great my outfit was, and to check on my pronouns. I love these people.
mrmoshpotato
@The Oracle of Solace: đ„° That’s great to hear!
Edmund dantes
@sdhays: ehhh shitty work culture doesnât need to rely on Musk. Plenty of CEOâs and others induce that type of shitty work culture.
Citizen Alan
@HumboldtBlue: Can someone summarize since the sound of his voice makes me want to vomit?
ColoradoGuy
This guy has to be high as a kite … with the difference he’s in a Howard Hughes corporate isolation bubble, sealed off from the physical world, with only a noisy data connection to the fantasies of MAGA-world.
Kent
@dmsilev: Every single aftermarket pickup truck accessory from recreational camper boxes and bike racks like tool boxes to industrial uses such as these Knapheide https://www.knapheide.com beds are based on two things: (1) level flat truck bed so you mount things on it, and (2) ladder and frame construction so you can swap out beds.
There are bazillions of aftermarket truck accessories out there that will fit on any pickup with a standard bed but not the cybertruck with its bizarro slanted bed sides that look like something from a 1980s video game.
They are basically just weird looking commuting machines. Â No one is going to redesign their assembly lines to make after market stuff for them until they reach some critical market share that they wonât ever reach.
HumboldtBlue
@Citizen Alan:
Just blatant Trump ass-kissing. Shameless stoogery, embarrassing sycophancy.
cope
@Matt McIrvin: Iâve been coveting the about-to-be available Fisker Ocean.
Kent
@Matt McIrvin: The Ioniq 6 looks exceedingly sweet. Â Plus it has an 800 volt charging system so will charge 2x faster in the ultra high speed public chargers that are coming. Â Tesla and most other companies are still making 400 volt systems or worse.
If you are shopping for a new EV in the intermediate future, look for 800 volt charging. Â It will be a game changer for long road trips. Â No one will pay to have one put into their home, but at home you donât need fast charging anyway
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1140166_these-evs-have-800v-charging-why-its-better-with-or-without-teslas-nacs
Alison Rose
“Blaze your glory” sounds more like the slogan for a cannabis dispensary.
Sebastian
@mvr:
He obviously did not communicate his plans with anyone or think them through.
Twitter Movies has not been renamed yet because, you know, there is already a website xmovies haha
Alison Rose
@Citizen Alan: “You know, people ask, ‘What happened with you and Trump?’ I say, ‘Well, he beat me like a drum and I acknowledge that he did. He sorta liked hearing that. But, we found something in common. I’ve come to like him, and he likes him, and that gets us through 18 holes of golf.'”
Pathetic doesn’t begin to describe Lindsey.
RaflW
I mostly don’t care about Muskkker any more. I ‘participated’ in the 24 hour boycott, just by having somewhere to go that was interesting, and people to converse with. Wasn’t till my nightly stop at BJ that I found out I’d contributed to the non-event.
I still look most days, but I’d say my time spent is down 80% or more, and while I would have missed cool content a year or more ago, now it’s just not very serendipitous or much fun.
Pretty amazing accomplishment, Elongated Bowl. I was so heavily hooked a few years ago that a one day suspension got me sweaty and anxious back then.
HumboldtBlue
An extraordinary letter from Niels Bohr to Churchill.
RaflW
@cope: Yeah if that really has the range in AWD that they’re claiming, and the wherewithal to be around in three years, I’ll be interested then. We just don’t need a new vehicle at the moment, and I want the industry to shake out a bit.
RaflW
@HumboldtBlue: He needs a man to love him. But since his Southern closet is permanently nailed shut, he gets these man crushes that drive his life.
When it was McCain, it wasn’t so toxic. But latching onto Donald has really, fully destroyed Lindsey. I feel bad for him, in that removed, literary way I might feel about a Tennessee Williams character.
NotMax
@Kent
The Fisker Alaska looks to be sort of intriguing.
Sebastian
@Matt McIrvin:
StarShip is the âsolutionâ to keep Space X alive. The orbital launch is business is not profitable and their market share is due to investor money being burned. The prognosis of a miraculously expanding launch market never came to bear and thatâs why Elno came up with Starlink, which isnât profitable either and cannot scale with the current v1 of satellites.
The v2 Starlink satellites however cannot be launched via Falcon/Heavy Falcon and thatâs where StarShip comes in. If they cannot get StarShip to work and launch a few times per month, the company is toast.
Sebastian
@Kent:
I am sorry but the SEC has been completely incompetent regarding Musk and Tesla.
Tesla is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, security fraud stories of this century, and I am including Enron in the list.
Sebastian
@sdhays:
Musk has complete control over the board of directors and his elaborate, and impressive, propaganda network of shills (and the call buying program out of Curacao and Singapore) keeps the stock price afloat due to an unprecedented amount of retail investors.
HumboldtBlue
Here is Lindsey Graham speaking about Joe Biden in 2015.
Now compare that with the soulless, empty shell he is now.
HumboldtBlue
These songs all turned 50 years old in 2023.
Also, all of youse are old.
JWR
Oops, he did it again! (From NBC):
He hasn’t decided what to do with it, but hey, it sounds cool, man!
Alison Rose
@HumboldtBlue: Jim Croce kind of looks like if a muppet wished to be a real boy.
eldorado
what’s left of twitter 3 sales from now will still get posted daily on the front page here, though
HumboldtBlue
@Alison Rose:
Hah! That’s good.
Now meet the humor of Alfredo Rivera.
Kent
@HumboldtBlue: When I was my daughterâs age in HS and obsessed with music back in the early 1980s, a 50 year old song would have been some sort of big band thing from Glenn Miller or Bing Crosby that would only have ever gotten play on Lawrence Welk.
John S.
@Alison Rose:
You donât tug on Supermanâs cape. You donât spit in the wind. You donât pull the mask of that old Lone Ranger, and you donât mess around with Jim!
HumboldtBlue
@Kent:
I graduated in 1983, here’s the top hits of 1933, coincidentally, the year my mother was born.
HeleninEire
@HumboldtBlue: Holy Shit. I am OLD.
Sebastian
@JWR:
The question that comes to mind immediately: âwhy @music and not @xmusic?â
Kent
@HumboldtBlue: Wow, a whole bunch of them recorded âStormy Weatherâ
It is a good song though.
Edmund dantes
@Kent: Toyota finally going hybrid on the Tacoma for 2024 has peaked my interest.
NotMax
@>a href=”https://balloon-juice.com/2023/08/05/late-night-open-thread-x-tinguished-last-weekends-musk-diversion/#comment-8920411″>Kent
Vintage parody, sung to the same tune.
Don’t know why
There’s no buttons on my fly
Lousy laundry
.
NotMax
Grr. Fix.
@Kent
Vintage parody, sung to the same tune.
Donât know why
Thereâs no buttons on my fly
Lousy laundry
.
Ruckus
@RaflW:
I used to be on twitter very regular. I now check when I see a good whatever you call them now, usually seen here. All totaled I’ve been on twit/x less since he bought it than I use do in one day. I thought I’d miss it. I was wrong.
HumboldtBlue
@HeleninEire:
I made a comment on a family thread that you know you’re getting into middle age when the ad music you hear on TV and radio is the soundtrack of your youth.
@NotMax:
Your link is funky
@Kent:
It’s a great song.
kalakal
@HumboldtBlue: Well thanks for reminding me I’m a wrinkly :)
Sadly that made me old over 30 years ago. Here’s a UK Levis ad from 1990
Levis
Probably should be filed under “He’d never have got that bike past reception”
Alison Rose
@HumboldtBlue: Or when it starts showing up on “oldies” stations or lists.
Or there’s the bookish version, where the era you grew up in starts getting labeled in book genres as “historical fiction”. First time I noticed that label on a book set in the 80s, I could practically feel myself decaying in the grave.
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue: Oh look. A list of songs that’re 10 years older than me. đ
NotMax
@HumboldtBlue
Fixed above. Reply link, not a link to a version of the parody (which I first heard almost 60 years ago, and undoubtedly predated that).
Part of a series of parody lyrics of varying age which burrowed their way into the gray matter. Also remember, to the tune of “They Tried to Tell Us We’re Too Young” –
They tried
To serve us
Egg foo yung
;
kalakal
Bogle, Bargle & Hegarty did a great job using the soundtrack of my youth to sell Levis in the UK in the 90s. They were great videos, here’s John Hegarty telling a good story about how they also revived boxer shorts by accident in the process
Grapevine
NotMax
@kalakal
Did someone say Levi’s ad?
Honorable mention runner-up.
:)
NotMax
@kalakal
Heh. I see we’re grooving on the same wavelength. Your comment wasn’t yet there whilst I was typing.
:)
NotMax
@Alison Rose
50 old?
Pish-tush. Barely dry behind the ears.
kalakal
@NotMax: Heh indeed.
One of my all time favourite “soundtrack of my youth” bits is in Witness*Â
McGillis Ford
*Film not an ad but it’s wonderful
Also McGillis was absolutely robbed, she didn’t even get an Oscar nomination
NotMax
@kalakal
A British ad earworm.
;)
Sister Golden Bear
@The Oracle of Solace: Congratulations, that’s wonderful!
HumboldtBlue
@The Oracle of Solace:Â â
This why we read this blog.
Sister Golden Bear
@dmsilev: My brother, who runs a roofing company, bought the F150-EV for that very reason. It’s familiar, does the job, and the EV is saving him money since he has to drive a lot to meet clients, and check on job sites.
MattF
OT. 21 Trump election lies (Daniel Dale, via CNN).
kalakal
@NotMax: aaarrrrggghhh!!!
I’d forgotten that
Ruckus
@HumboldtBlue:
I’m not old, I’m seasoned.
OK I am old. Not that old but old none the less.
HumboldtBlue
Goldie Hawn. And the Vietnam War.
Splitting Image
@Kent:
To be fair, in the ’80s Linda Ronstadt recorded three hit albums of material from the ’30s and ’40s with Nelson Riddle. What’s New actually went to #3 on the Billboard chart behind Thriller and Can’t Slow Down.
Not bad for 50-year-old music.
Barbra Streisand hit #1 a couple of years later with The Broadway Album. So there was definitely a market for that kind of music in the ’80s.
Splitting Image
@HumboldtBlue:
There is an oldies radio station in my area running ads with Jessica Simpson.
HumboldtBlue
Sweet Jesus beating Betsy Ross with a flag pole, the coverage from Fox Sports is absolutely dreadful.
Jingoistic, childish, fake enthusiasm garbage.
Fuck off all day.
sdhays
@Edmund dantes: True. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Shalimar
Musk’s insistence on staying in San Francisco is a bit weird for a company that doesn’t own it’s own building and reportedly also stopped paying rent 8 months ago.
Also, weed jokes are fine, but potheads aren’t the customers who made him rich. And it seems like limiting his influence to neo-nazi potheads in particular is a really niche market.
sdhays
@Sebastian: Yeah, I know he’s pretty wedged in there at Tesla, so no one’s probably going to be able to organize sufficiently to oust him until it’s far too late (if ever).
Baud
@HumboldtBlue:
They’ll probably blame Biden if we lose.
WereBear
@RaflW: Tennessee Williams knew the South.
We both fled.
David đ âThe Establishmentâđ Koch
@Splitting Image: Her voice and rendition on “What’s New” is incredible. I still have the album.
evodevo
@Ken:Â â
Well, Glenn Beck’s site is called The Blaze…
Tony G
@Sister Golden Bear: Unlike Elon I am not a super-genius — but I don’t understand why anyone would want or need an “everything app” in 2023. Â I open my laptop or phone and I open browser window. Â If I want to go to a “social media” app then I use my browser to go there. Â If I want to hear music I go to Pandora or Spotify. Â If I’m interested in political opinion then I go. to a political blog. Â For my bank balance I go to my bank’s website. Â Etc., Etc. Â Why would I want to go to “X”, or any other”everything app” so that everything is neatly packaged for me? Â Who cares? Â Is this something else for the idiotic Elon Musk fan-boys?
Tony G
@Splitting Image: That’s true. Â In the seventies and eighties there was a revival of music from thirties and forties. Â (Bette Midler was part of that trend.). But I feel like, in a real sense, the rock music from the sixties and seventies has never gone away. Â Maybe the influence of the Boomers? Â I don’t know. Â Yesterday I was at a family gathering and chatting with a couple of my son’s Millennial friends, who are young guitar players in a rock band. Â We ended up talking about the pros and cons of different songs by Jimi Hendrix — a guy who’s been dead for more than 53 years. Â Maybe it’s the way that the internet facilitates listening to old music. Â If a kid wants to hear the “Band of Gypsies” album he can just do a search without leaving his chair.
Anne Laurie
It’s popularly believed that WeChat, the one-platform-for-everything, mints money for the Chinese government. Musk has been convinced for the last twenty years that the only thing preventing him from ‘inventing’ the American / global version of WeChat is his partners’ lack of BOLD VISION, and also sometimes the ORWELLIAN GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRATS.
People keep trying to tell him that WeChat started with two irreplaceable advantages — a lack of competition and a government strong enough to suppress any aspiring contenders — but THAT’S JUST YOUR OPINION, MAAAN!
Tony G
@Anne Laurie: That sounds about right to me.  Boy, is that guy dumb.  I “think” that a lot of the success of WeChat is due to the company being a crony capitalist company in alliance with the corrupt, authoritarian Chinese government.  For Chinese users of WeChat, it represents a “safe” place on the internet — which will be free of overt government censorship because it self-censors due to its close relationship with the government.  It’s like a speakeasy during Prohibition that is “safe” to go to because it’s already  bribed the cops.  (I’m making this up, but that’s my impression.).  Elon, being a narcissistic dummy, seems to think that he can recreate that particular lucrative arrangement just by the force of this “brilliant” mind.  I can’t decide whether his narcissism or his sheer stupidity is his most prominent characteristic!
Tony G
@Anne Laurie: I knew kids like Elon when I was sixteen years old in 1972. Â Then I grew up. Â He didn’t.
Bill Arnold
@Tehanu:
I’ve read the Musk-history material about how he was pushing the name “X” for decades.
In the context of the current time, It is also probably a response to Facebook’s shift to “Meta”, which was roughly a (stupid and annoying) name change to “About [Facebook]”.
“X” is similar, in the sense that X is, among various meanings, also a symbolic variable.
Bupalos
@RaflW: my motto is if my current vehicle can only get me around by burning fossil fuel, I need a new vehicle.
Bupalos
I don’t think musk is dumb exactly. Nor is he the kind of inventive genius his fans want to believe in.
I think he’s a very unique combination. He has the personal emotional IQ and profile of a volatile 6 year old, but somehow has the discipline to operate towards long-range big-picture visions. It’s a very odd mix that in some ways complement each other effectively. He scares me.
mvr
I think two things happened at once. On the one hand from the late 60s onward there was a valorization of writing one’s own songs. Whereas many of the early 60s bands were covering older music at the beginnings of their careers (when they mostly covered the 50s) where the Beatles & Stones kind of set the standard. But this was alongside of exploration of older music with roots in folk music. And even the bands known for their own songs would slip in blues songs which were even older. (Crossroads is a great example, but the Stones did this on nearly every album – Prodigal Son, Terraplane Blues, Love in Vain, etc.)
What started to happen somewhat later in the late 70s and 80s was covering Jazz of the sort that was commercially more popular and which had often been done with white singers the first time around.
Late to this thread, but the topic interests me.
NotMax
@mvr
To boil it down to the nub: Good music stays good.
Jinchi
@Jackie: And the âxâ in the upper left corner makes me want to click to close.
Exactly. His whole X branding is moronic because the letter is used generically in so many different ways.
mvr
@NotMax:Â â
Yep. But it is fun to pay attention to the details of how popular music has worked and does work.
VOR
@Tony G:Â Several years ago I saw a presentation at a conference by a major US automaker. Their idea was apps running in the vehicle’s onboard screens. You could pay for gas from the car’s apps, order fast food, or order things in stores. I kept thinking “why would I have these apps running in my car instead of my phone?”