Tech News and Issues

Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! (A guide to getting started)

by Major Major Major Major| February 6, 20243:16 pm| 63 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News & Issues, Tech News and Issues, Technology

Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! I’ve been writing posts keeping track of Bluesky development for you all. If you haven’t been following along, Bluesky is a social network, roughly in the style of Twitter. It was hip and new last year. Maybe it will be hip and new again now! Why? Because you can finally sign up without an invite. While it lacks some of the features that more mature services have, like video uploads, it is also not thoroughly saturated with nazis and crypto scam bots, and does not promote the posts by the biggest dumbasses in the world everywhere you go. I think that’s an acceptable trade-off.

More importantly, it has what I think is a true killer feature–custom feeds. Anybody can make one, and you can subscribe to them and have them live natively in the app, and have their posts inserted into your chronological feed. At their most basic they’re just posts from a list of users, but more advanced ones surface content via hashtag or emoji, or an AI recognizing pictures of cats or flowers, etc. There are even several good algorithmic recommendation feeds to choose from, in addition to the default one run by Bluesky itself.

It’s also allegedly going to open to federation this month; click the link at the top of this post for details on how that will work.

There’s a lot more great stuff in the pipeline. Composability will be the name of the game–choose your algorithms, choose your moderation services, choose your host, choose whatever you want. Here’s what WaPo has to say:

That system is a work in progress. So far, Bluesky is the only social network using its protocol. But it already has some features that set it apart. […] For instance, users can subscribe to feeds where algorithms prioritize the most popular posts overall or the posts most popular among the people they follow. There are also options for feeds geared to their specific areas of interest, such as science or art. And users can toggle personal moderation settings that either “hide,” “warn” or “show” categories of content such as nudity, violence, spam and hate-group iconography.

Along with today’s public launch of Bluesky, the company said it will roll out in the coming weeks a step toward its broader vision, inviting some outside developers to host servers that plug in to the main Bluesky network. It also announced a new feature that will let users and organizations begin todevelop their own content moderation services, which other users can then subscribe to. For instance, a fact-checking organization could apply “false” or “misleading” labels to certain posts, which would then be seen by users who opt in to seeing them.

With that out of the way…

A guide to getting started at Bluesky

Sign up at bsky.app!
Give yourself a profile picture and bio. Anything will do, really; it helps set you apart from other users and makes you more approachable.
Find some custom feeds. It’s in the left column on desktop, or the hashtag icon on the bottom on mobile. I recommend:
- For You, a third-party recommendation algorithm
- Discover, the official recommendation algorithm
- Popular with Friends, an official feed of… things that are popular with your friends.
- Gardening
- Food
- Science
- Cats and Cat Pics
- A few dozen folks are reading A Wizard of Earthsea for book club this month, you can see some posts about it here, and add your own thoughts by posting about Earthsea, #bskybc, or Gontishmen.
- And, of course, Newskies, where you can see the first post by every new user in real time.
Under Moderation -> Content Filtering, you can set your preferences for showing/warning/hiding NSFW stuff, hate group iconography, gore, etc.
1. Note that they’re still working out the, ah, kinks, and you might see some NSFW stuff slip through the filters.
2. If you signed up on iOS, all mature content is removed from your feed by default; this cannot be changed from your iPhone. Log in at bsky.app and change your preferences there.
Speaking of changing your preferences: I recommend this at Settings -> Basics -> Home Feed Preferences. It will show all posts by people you follow, including when they’re replying to somebody. The one at the bottom is important too–it inserts select posts from your feeds into your chronological following timeline. I also recommend Threaded Mode at Settings -> Basics -> Thread Preferences.
Almost everything you do is public on Bluesky, but you can set it so that people have to be logged in to see your posts under Moderation (not in preferences) -> Logged-out visibility, which includes some important caveats in the description.
I maintain a large moderation list of authoritarian communists, Russia simps, etc. I recommend subscribing to it, which will block or mute everybody on it.
Post, post, post! And reply to people, politely of course. It’s the recommended way to get noticed.

You can find me at @thearchduke.bsky.social. Many other jackals are there, please share in the comments. Plus:

Happy posting!

Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! (A guide to getting started)Post + Comments (63)

Bluesky Update

by Major Major Major Major| November 17, 20237:18 pm| 108 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology, Tech News & Issues, Tech News and Issues, Technology

There have been some big developments at Bluesky lately, so I figured I’d drop an update on it, since there’s a good chance you’ll start seeing a lot from there soon. (For those who don’t know, Bluesky is a hip new federated social network in the style of Twitter. I wrote an explainer about it in July here, which is rather long but nothing in it is inaccurate. The project began in-house at Twitter intended as a way to open-source the network, then spun off into their own company.)

I’ve been excited about Bluesky for a while now because it is in many ways a piece of technology I’d been waiting for for years. They’ve learned from the failings of prior attempts at big decentralized social networks, such as Mastodon, and are focusing on meeting users where they’re at, which makes sense since its origin is literally a Twitter-built Twitter replacement. Why should you care? Well–we all know the harms that can be caused by centralized social networks run by billionaires. Some of those may be endemic to large networks, but others, such as what Musk has done to Twitter, and the very real problems this may cause in the world, are caused by centralized control. If you’re worried about Zuck or Musk or whoever having a stranglehold on communication, decentralization may be for you! People can’t own something that cannot be purchased. And while Bluesky is a company, the free and open-source software they have developed is not; “the company is a future adversary” is their motto. (See my post linked above for some key details on how Bluesky is not Mastodon.)

Bluesky offers exciting features like a free and open API, custom algorithms and feeds, multiple third-party apps and websites, account self-verification, and the overall online experience we’ve come to take for granted from a service that isn’t owned by a fascist. Still no gifs yet though.

So: recent developments!

Just yesterday was the anniversary of the first post, and they recently hit two million users, more than 200,000 of whom are active on any given day, which is pretty good.

More importantly: they’ll soon be releasing a public website for viewing posts, allegedly around the end of November. It will still be an invite-only service (although those are fairly easy to come by these days), but once that releases, it will be easily accessible to people who aren’t dweebs. I say “people who aren’t dweebs” because almost everything you do there has been public the entire time, via API. For example, here are all posts about cats in real-time. But a public website will still be a big deal. It will greatly expand the visibility of the network, presumably letting you embed posts in articles and the like. The lack of this feature has been a barrier to adoption for many people (as well as a comfort to others), so this will change the world’s relationship with Bluesky in, hopefully, a big and good way.

The second bit of important (to me, haha) news is that they’ve basically finalized the federation architecture, and plan to open the network up to third parties early next year, once they’ve released their moderation software. What will this mean for the users of bsky.social? Nothing, if the team has done their jobs correctly. For everyone else, it offers some exciting possibilities. You’d be able to run your own service, or hop onto a service run by somebody else, which integrates with bsky.social and offers an experience that is, if you want it to be, indistinguishable from being on bsky.social. Or, it could offer a totally different experience. It’s customizable on so many different layers that with any luck there will be something for everyone. They accomplish this with some interesting architectural decisions. Let’s dive into that below the fold.

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There are three primary services that make up the ATProto ecosystem.

The first is simple enough–your Personal Data Server, or PDS. This is the database where all your actions live–posts, follows, likes, blocks, etc.* Everybody has one. They are meant to be as lightweight as possible.

The second is the Relay, aka BGS, aka Aggregator. This is a large and complex machine that receives notifications from PDS’s and preprocesses them for distribution. So if I make a post, my client sends it to my PDS, which signs it and stores it. Then, my PDS notifies the Relay about this post once (there is only one Relay right now, and will probably only be one for a while). The Relay updates its internals accordingly. If I’ve included an image, the Relay stores it in its Content Delivery Network for efficient distribution. Etc.

The third service is the App View. This is what provides the user experience. When I load the Bluesky app or website, it tells the App View, okay, get me what I need. The App View reads from the Relay stream and manages its own cache of user timelines; it deals with all the performance concerns and is the most complex machine in the ecosystem. (In some circumstances, a handful of requests may make it all the way back to my PDS.) Then it applies various app-level rules, for example, removing all posts by people who have blocked me. Finally it sends them to my phone or browser, which displays them to me. (Muted words, filtering of NSFW content, etc. happen on my device.)

This architecture addresses many of the problems with things like Mastodon and Nostr, which rely heavily on node-to-node communication. By making efficient aggregator Relays the centerpiece of the network, they’ve struck a fine compromise between distributability and usability, in my opinion. The downside is that only people with money can run a Relay, though this is in some ways its own form of protection against petty drama.

Another method for minimizing petty drama is that it is/will be very frictionless to change your host. Your PDS’s data is certified by two cryptographic keys–the one that the host service has, and the one that overrides it, which you have. If you don’t like your host, you can just move your data by signing a message to that effect with your recovery key. Presumably there will be an easy-to-use service that provides this functionality by the time they launch federation. Contrast with Mastodon, where moving your data requires the consent of your former host and your new host, and only moves your followers, not your posts. When you migrate a PDS, you migrate everything, more or less instantly.

And what will federation look like? The main Relay will begin processing messages from PDS’s that are not owned by bsky.social. By default, I suspect, you will log into the same website, read from the same Relay, and pass through the same AppView, as everybody else. But this is all completely client-configurable. If bsky.social starts serving ads, you can switch to an AppView or client that blocks them. Don’t want to see content from fascism.net? AppView or client, assuming the Relay even accepts their posts. Don’t want to see pictures of hedgehogs? The protocol currently supports freeform labeling of posts and users, though to my knowledge it’s only used for NSFW, spam, etc. In the future, there will be labeling services you can subscribe to, that might say “oh this picture is of a hedgehog” or “this person is a hedgehog enthusiast”. At the AppView or client layers, the labelers you’ve subscribed to, and your rules about those labels, will be applied.

And the cool thing is, as of this week, it’s all been released to production. Everybody has their own PDS database that lives in one of ten bsky.social-managed hosts. The PDS’s were migrated out of a monolithic database via the recovery keys. Each PDS broadcasts user events to the bsky.social Relay. The bsky.social AppView reads from the Relay and sends things to your phone. Turning on federation might be as simple as flipping a switch. And that’s where the rubber will hit the road (or the shit and the fan), and Bluesky will sink or swim.

The bsky.social PDS hosts are all named after mushrooms. I ended up on shiitake, which is the least-cool one (I was hoping for puffball or inkcap), but what’re you going to do? Word on the street is that this naming scheme is a reference to a nonsensical viral tumblr post where a mushroom, when threatened, says, “you cannot kill me in a way that matters.” That is the hope for this network. The technology is out there; it’s free; it’s running right now; they’re opening it to everyone soon. It won’t matter who owns Bluesky PBLLC or whether Jack sits on the board. No one person, we hope, can ruin this thing in a way that matters. It’s billionaire-proof by design, after all.

Stay tuned!

—

*PDS records are stored in a single Merkle tree, a self-certifying data structure that theoretically makes distributing updates easy.

Bluesky UpdatePost + Comments (108)

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Checking In On Twitter’s ‘God Emperor’

by Anne Laurie| June 20, 20238:06 pm| 67 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Open Threads, Tech News and Issues, Assholes, Schadenfreude

“The Twitter buyout may be one of the worst acquisitions in the history of Wall Street, with something like $37 billion in value flushed pretty much as soon as the deal closed.”

— Via @WilliamCohan https://t.co/DkZkvM8dE7

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) June 19, 2023

Since Puck is distinctly a niche publication, thought I’d share this piece from ‘former restructuring and bankruptcy advisor at Lazard’ William Cohan, “Will Elon Lose Control of Twitter?”.

(Bad news first, probably not, assuming he still wants to keep it… )

Oh dear, what is going on these days with Elon Musk at Twitter? Let’s see: Twitter is being kicked out of its office in Boulder because—wait for it—Elon decided to stop paying the rent. He’s stopped paying the bills for Twitter’s use of Google Cloud and, according to my partner Eriq Gardner, for JAMS, the arbitration administrator that is adjudicating many of Musk’s legal disputes with his ex-employees. He’s also facing a lawsuit from the Wall Street P.R. firm, Joele Frank, which claims it’s owed more than $830,000 in fees for advice it provided during Musk’s campaign to buy Twitter last year.

As a former restructuring and bankruptcy advisor at Lazard, I can recognize the signs of a company in distress. After all, it’s a pretty obvious tell that there’s financial trouble brewing when a company stops paying its bills as they become due. That’s a recipe for financial disaster, or bankruptcy, or both. Last time I checked, if a company has more than 12 creditors—as Twitter does—then any three of them can join together to put a company into an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding. And Elon is in danger here. At some point, the creditors he is mindlessly stiffing on a regular basis are going to get sufficiently pissed to throw Twitter into bankruptcy.

But I don’t get it, dude. Elon is the world’s richest man, with a net worth of some $233 billion, according to Bloomberg, up an astounding $100 billion so far in 2023. Why is he not paying the people he owes money to? Why is he risking an involuntary bankruptcy filing? And then, of course, there is the upcoming interest payment of around $300 million due to the group of seven or so banks that still hold Twitter’s $13 billion of debt used to pay a portion of the $44 billion Twitter purchase price. I know Elon made the interest payments owed in January and in May. But will he make the next one, due in September? I suppose not paying those (metaphorical) nickels and dimes is one thing. But if he doesn’t pay the banks the $300 million he owes them in September, he will be asking for trouble in the form of a financial restructuring, or worse, a bankruptcy filing…

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What’s as clear today as it was on October 27, when the $44 billion changed hands and Elon took control of Twitter, is that the $31 billion of equity that Elon ($24 billion) and his friends ($7 billion) put into the leveraged buyout of Twitter is gone. It’s a zero. In fact, the Twitter buyout may be one of the very worst acquisitions in the history of Wall Street, with something like $37 billion in value flushed—the $31 billion of equity and about half of the value of the $13 billion of debt, or another $6 billion—pretty much as soon as the deal closed.

Unfortunately for Elon, and his fellow equity holders and the banks still holding on to the $13 billion of debt (which should have been syndicated long ago), he has done nothing in the eight months since he’s owned Twitter to create value for his partners; in fact, just the opposite. He’s destroyed value for the equity and made it virtually impossible for the big Wall Street banks that still own the $13 billion of senior debt to sell it to other investors, unless they are willing to take a huge writedown—on the order of 50 percent—to move the debt off their balance sheets. At some point, the Federal Reserve, the banks’ prudential regulator, is going to force them to sell the debt, perfect their losses, or to take a serious impairment charge against the debt and perfect that loss…

So what is Elon’s game here? Perhaps, as I have written before, he is essentially cosplaying as a bankrupt entity—by not paying his bills as they become due—so that he can scare the big Wall Street banks that own Twitter’s $13 billion of debt to sell it to him at a steep discount, perhaps at a price even lower than the 50 cents on the dollar it would probably trade for now, if marketed to investors. Not that Elon necessarily wants to buy the debt, even at a big discount. But this may be the path of least resistance if he wants to prevent the company from falling into the hands of the voracious distressed debt community on Wall Street who are in the “loan-to-own” business.

Once that bank debt starts to trade, the Twitter fireworks will really begin. If Elon buys the debt, then he can keep control of Twitter for whatever perverse reasons he has for still wanting to own this pig. If the debt gets bought by the likes of DoubleLine Capital, or Apollo, or Oaktree Capital, then all bets are off for Elon and he will lose control of Twitter.

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Checking In On Twitter’s ‘God Emperor’Post + Comments (67)

“I’m a Brown Person. Do You think People on Substack Should Say I Should Get Kicked Out of the Country?”

by John Cole| April 15, 202311:32 am| 139 Comments

This post is in: Tech News and Issues

This is the most damning interview I have seen to date with a glibertarian techbro, and it is shocking:

This week, @decoderpod host @reckless asked Substack CEO Chris Best the tough questions about whether racist speech should be allowed in their new consumer product, Substack Notes. pic.twitter.com/sErJUPoL9s

— The Verge (@verge) April 13, 2023

Mike Masnick at TechDirt breaks it down:

I get it. I totally get it. Every tech dude comes along and has this thought: “hey, we’ll be the free speech social media site. We won’t do any moderation beyond what’s required.” Even Twitter initially thought this. But then everyone discovers reality. Some discover it faster than others, but everyone discovers it. First, you realize that there’s spam. Or illegal content such as child sexual abuse material. And if that doesn’t do it for you, the copyright police will.

But, then you realize that beyond spam and content that breaks the rules, you end up with malicious users who cause trouble. And trouble drives away users, advertisers, or both. And if you don’t deal with the malicious users, the malicious users define you. It’s the “oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now” problem.

And, look, sure, in the US, you can run the Nazi bar, thanks to the 1st Amendment. But running a Nazi bar is not winning any free speech awards. It’s not standing up for free speech. It’s building your own brand as the Nazi bar and abdicating your own free speech rights of association to kick Nazis out of your private property, and to craft a different kind of community. Let the Nazis build their own bar, or everyone will just assume you’re a Nazi too.

It was understandable a decade ago, before the idea of “trust & safety” was a thing, that not everyone would understand all this. But it is unacceptable for the CEO of a social media site today to not realize this.

Enter Substack CEO Chris Best.

***

And your reputation when you refuse to moderate is not “the grand enabler of free speech.” Because it’s the internet itself that is the grand enabler of free speech. When you’re a private centralized company and you don’t deal with hateful content on your site, you’re the Nazi bar.

Most companies that want to get large enough recognize that playing to the grifters and the nonsense peddlers works for a limited amount of time, before you get the Nazi bar reputation, and your growth is limited. And, in the US, you’re legally allowed to become the Nazi bar, but you should at least embrace that, and not pretend you have some grand principled strategy.

This is what Nilay was getting at. When you’re not the government, you can set whatever rules you want, and the rules you set are the rules that will define what you are as a service. Chris Best wants to pretend that Substack isn’t the Nazi bar, while he’s eagerly making it clear that it is.

It’s stupidly short-sighted, and no, it won’t support free speech. Because people who don’t want to hang out at the Nazi bar will just go elsewhere.

Personally, I would add that in addition to calling it the Nazi Bar, we should call it what it is- a safe space for hate speech.

“I’m a Brown Person. Do You think People on Substack Should Say I Should Get Kicked Out of the Country?”Post + Comments (139)

OpenAI’s Latest Image Generator is Pretty Damn Impressive

by Major Major Major Major| April 27, 20223:28 pm| 70 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues

I wrote about text-to-image AIs here last summer. Well, the latest bleeding-edge model is out; it is way more interesting, so I thought I’d drop an update.

It’s called DALL-E 2, and it’s made by OpenAI, which also produces the GPT text generation AIs I’ve written about. They’ve given early access to a bunch of people who have been posting the results on Twitter. It’s not super surprising that the shared images are impressive; AI enthusiasts aren’t going to be sharing the failures, which I assume are frequent. Still–the successes are very, very successful.

Here’s one, and then we can move below the fold so the blog doesn’t drown in tweets.

As we lead up to #MicrosoftBuild, I’m getting excited with “30 days of DALL-E 2”! Send me your (respectful) prompts, and every day from April 24-May 24, I’ll post an AI-generated #dalle2 image. #30DaysOfDalle2

“Oil painting of a sad girl looking out the window of a school bus” pic.twitter.com/NApsb1kOmi

— Jennifer Marsman (@jennifermarsman) April 22, 2022

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OpenAI’s Latest Image Generator is Pretty Damn ImpressivePost + Comments (70)

Late Night Open Thread: Tweeters Review Twitter Buy (Proposal)

by Anne Laurie| April 26, 20221:24 am| 75 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Tech News and Issues, Assholes, social media

musk’s “i will fix twitter” has big “kyiv in three days” energy

— Seva (@SevaUT) April 15, 2022

Translation: if his worst critics leave, Twitter will be as worthless as Gab, Gettr (lol) and Truth Social. He needs y'all to stay on here so his "free speech" people can harass you for fun. Because dude does not ALWAYS believe in free speech… https://t.co/k21qu1QXwT https://t.co/Z2UNJs8LU6

— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid ?? (@JoyAnnReid) April 25, 2022

As the business media have been careful to point out, any deal of this size takes six months or more to finalize. And, the unspoken subtext runs, many highly publicized megadeals never come to fruition, especially when the bid is led by a guy renowned for ideas about child-sized rescue submarines and brain implants. So it’s a little early yet to panic, not that logic ever stopped Twitter users…

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Who can we get to explain that Musk doesn't want Twitter for any logical reason and just wants to wat- https://t.co/3WFuw1kOFF

— zeddy (@Zeddary) April 25, 2022

(Reference: Some men just want to watch the world burn)

What will change is that in the one or two cases a year that make news that Musk reads (Trump, Babylon Bee) he’ll personally intervene. The rest of the moderation decisions will be made as before.

— Noah Snyder (@NoahJSnyder) April 25, 2022

Whereas up until now you were doing this for a slightly less weird rich guy. https://t.co/82Uq9YDmWM

— The Substack of Boba Fett (@agraybee) April 25, 2022

there’s not exactly a surplus of talented software engineers right now and if you’re winnowing the field to “talented software engineers who are willing to enable alex jones” you’ve got a real who-does-the-work challenge

— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 25, 2022

This is why no blue check is going anywhere. This place is a combination of Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram and OnlyFans.

— The Substack of Boba Fett (@agraybee) April 25, 2022

i mean it cannot get any clearer that the people seeking to destabilize society are perfectly happy to do so under their real names and in fact benefit from doing so

— Seva (@SevaUT) April 25, 2022

i mean, sure, if what you want out of twitter is a bunch of elon musk fanboi crypto degenerates, great, that's what he wants, too, but that's not the majority of people *on twitter*, nor is it what people come here for.

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) April 25, 2022

on the other hand, we may not have to worry about leaving if twitter leaves us https://t.co/dua0SY57qe

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) April 25, 2022

OLD: Applauding magnates for using their unfathomable wealth to improve material conditions for millions of people.

NEW: Applauding magnates for using their unfathomable wealth to persecute ordinary people who anger them.

— Fred of Fred Hall (@LesserFrederick) April 25, 2022

Late Night Open Thread: Tweeters Review Twitter Buy (Proposal)Post + Comments (75)

C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: Hail to the Chief (Sh*tposter)

by Anne Laurie| April 17, 20228:23 pm| 91 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Open Threads, Tech News and Issues, Assholes

Twitter adopted a 'poison pill' – a limited-duration shareholder rights plan – to protect itself from billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's $43 billion cash takeover offer https://t.co/l2YPMRcdZZ $TWTR pic.twitter.com/aAsq52dKQd

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 16, 2022

A November 2021 post from Roy Edroso, professional Cassandra, is being recirculated around Twitter — “Operation Overlord: Why Elon Musk will run for President”:

Predictions are a mug’s game, as we all know, but I’ll lay one down right now: I think there will be a serious push over the next twelve years (assuming the nation lasts that long) to nominate Elon Musk as a Republican candidate for President of the United States. Since he’s not a native-born American this would require amendment of Article II of the Constitution, so I expect that to happen as well.

You may wonder why the Republicans would bother to elevate someone whose nomination would require all that extra groundwork. First of all, amending the Constitution would not be that big a deal; it’s not as if they respect the thing any more than they do the other instruments of government they’re always fucking with, and they might even enjoy the perverse challenge to put their shit-stains on the old parchment just as a flex; they might make “Let’s Go Brandon” the National Anthem while they’re at it.

My contention is that, from what we know about Republicans, policy no longer has anything to do with their decisions, and they mainly want be represented by someone who fits their idea of American greatness — which, as we see from their current avatar Trump, means their champion must be vicious and boorish and, above all, project a winning air. In my view Musk laps the field…

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Musk acts as if the rules don’t apply to him — and he’s right. He was born into huge wealth and his feet have never touched the ground. Thus he goes through life in a way that would be called “blundering,” were it not for the fact that his extreme wealth — far beyond what Trump even pretends to have — insulates him from any possible consequences…

And thanks to his connection with futuristic-libertarian enterprises such as Space X and Tesla, Musk appeals not only to the current Republican base of brute-worshippers, but also to a burgeoning Republican constituency of crypto and NFT dorks. The “weird nerd” defenses of Musk that pop up on the internet whenever their hero is denigrated are at least as voluminous and ludicrously impassioned as that of any pop star “hive.” These are the kind of guys who, when they see a story about a human getting hurt or killed by a self-driving car, side with the car.

And, I believe, these dorks represent a growing cult of young men who have been rattling around incel-pickup artist territory awhile, but have matured — not enough to start making rational, adult decisions, perhaps, but enough to turn away from these childish forms of anti-social behavior toward other, more adult-seeming forms of anti-social behavior that make them feel less pathetic.

And who is better equipped to represent them than the guy who comes at dorkdom from the totally opposite direction — one who is incompetent to observe society’s rules, not because he was bullied in school or fucked up by feckless parents, but because he has never had to bother. He is as dysfunctional as they are, but rich and famous. No wonder they worship him…

pic.twitter.com/Nz6kTUf0IM

— Jort-Michel Connard ?? (@torriangray) April 15, 2022

Proposed 28th Amendment pic.twitter.com/zFRPWdqEfb

— USankMyBattleshipHat (@Popehat) April 16, 2022

/3 And I picked 35 years for parity — any person would have to be a citizen for 35 years to be eligible.

As for concerns that we might foolishly elect some horrific anti-American tyrant who hates our values and kowtows to some foreign potentate . . . . well.

— USankMyBattleshipHat (@Popehat) April 16, 2022

I dunno, have you seen the replies to his tweets

— Snopp Doog (@chrispossible) April 16, 2022

C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: Hail to the Chief (Sh*tposter)Post + Comments (91)

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself. We’re allowed to grow past that.

Can we lighten up on the doomsday scenarios?

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Cole, when it comes to calico cats, restraint is overrated.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

T R E 4 5 O N

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

The jury literally has a bell they can ring to force Trump to show up on command. Greatest thing ever!

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! (A guide to getting started)

A guide to getting started at Bluesky

Bluesky Update

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Checking In On Twitter’s ‘God Emperor’

“I’m a Brown Person. Do You think People on Substack Should Say I Should Get Kicked Out of the Country?”

OpenAI’s Latest Image Generator is Pretty Damn Impressive

C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: Hail to the Chief (Sh*tposter)