A lot of furry news this week

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PLATFORMS

TikTok sued the US government. Forbes has a good breakdown of what’s in the lawsuit. I think the juiciest detail is that negotiations between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) broke down around August 2022. Which definitely changes the framing of this a bit. Though, that hasn’t stopped TikTok from citing all the recent anti-TikTok rhetoric from US lawmakers in their suit.

Apple apologized for their horrible ad. Their official statement was that they “missed the mark” with the ad. I, actually, don’t think people would have cared as much if Apple was doing literally anything that people would be excited about. People don’t want thinner iPads, they clearly want something new and I’m not so sure American tech companies know how to do that anymore.

Nintendo will no longer support directly posting to X. X’s Gaming account is denying that anything is happening, which is weird, but everything about that haunted company is weird. It’s not a surprise that companies like Nintendo aren’t integrating with X anymore. Their API costs $40,000 a month to use and the only people who are going to see your content are, you know, the worst human beings alive.

Jack Dorsey has broken rank with Bluesky. He’s left Bluesky’s board and is also back on X, posting a bunch of shady culture war shit.

Threads is adding view counts. This is probably a good place to put that my Threads referral traffic has completely cratered, as I knew it would. The decision to show view counts is, I assume, part of the typical Meta tactic to get people to care more about on-site engagement that any kind of real traffic.

WEB3 AND THE METAVERSE

The first Neuralink test has, inevitably, broken. The threads of the implant have “retracted” from Noland Arbaugh’s brain, possibly due to air getting trapped in Arbaugh’s skull during surgery. Jesus Christ. Thankfully, for now, it doesn’t pose any kind of safety risk, but it is slowing down the implant’s data transfer rate.

SBF is trading rice in jail. What Bankman-Fried needs to do is get all the inmates to give him his rice, then use that rice to invest in mackerel packets. In exchange, he could give them tokens worth the amount of rice they gave him and then…

OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS

The founder of Bumble thinks the future of online dating is a nightmare world where people’s AI agents date each other. When the AI finally reaches sentience it’s going to be real pissed we made it use dating apps.

The Rabbit R1’s LAM is not actually a LAM. X user @xyz3va figured out that Rabbit’s “operating system” is just Ubuntu and the AI doing actions for you is just normal code. Is there enough here for a class action lawsuit yet?

OpenAI is trying to crack AI porn. I’m sure this will go fine.

FANDOMS

Hardcore band Knocked Loose is blowing up right now. The Guardian just gave their new album five stars. The important thing here is that Knocked Loose have not softened their sound. They actually keep getting heavier and less mainstream with each release. Though, that hasn’t stopped the brilliant minds over at r/hardcore from debating whether they count as “real hardcore” still.

There’s a campaign to block celebrities on TikTok. They’re calling it a digital guillotine lol. I’d file this in the same category as Knocked Loose getting heavier and also more popular. Fame is changing and a lot of major celebrities are not prepared for where it’s headed (the early 90s basically).

STREAMERS

Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max made a cable bundle. One that, crucially, doesn’t pay anyone any residuals.

The results of Kendrick/Drake beef are in. Lamar’s streams are up almost 20% and Drake’s are down almost 5%. See the section above for what I think about what this says about the music industry right now.

Pier Morgan interviewed the real Martha from Netflix’s Baby Reindeer. I think this whole thing is extremely messy. There are all kinds of questions about consent and exploitation at play here without really clear cut answers. Netflix has said that they took “every precaution” to protect the real Martha’s identity, which I have to push back on. Fans doxxed her because the show used her tweets verbatim in the show. Which seems like the bare minimum of what NOT to do if you were trying to stop viewers from finding her online.

MEMES AND TRENDS

Charli XCX’s new video is full of “hot internet girls”. The video is, as one X user put it, “Ocean’s 8 for people with crumbs in their bed (complimentary).”

A redditor in r/NuclearEngineering has a problem. They say that they are “attracting too many furries” and can’t stop getting hit on by furries when they reveal that they’re an engineer. This doesn’t seem like a problem to me???

DRAMA

The right-wing moral panic over NPR is not really working. The TL;DR is that a bunch of conservative agitators are trying to paint NPR as a totalitarian mouthpiece for the woke left. It’s not working because NPR didn’t capitulate and stayed firm amid the dogpile. Now, right-wingers are scrambling. See how easy that is? It’s almost like these people don’t matter and only care about fake nonsense and you can just ignore them.

Andy Ngo’s The Post Millennial was hacked. The screenshots of the The Post Millennial’s email subscriber list were leaked on X and have since been deleted by the platform, but there were A LOT of .gov email addresses in there.

Libs Of Tiktok is trying to cancel a UC Berkeley professor that teaches in his fursuit. Unfortunately, I’m not sure it’s going to work because the professor is David Benaron, a renowned digital health expert. Also, everyone knows he’s a furry. It’s on his Wikipedia. A lot of furry news this week.

AROUND THE WORLD

The Chinese electric vehicle market is exploding right now. This report from Kevin Williams at Inside EVs is sobering to say the least. I’m paraphrasing an X post that some weird conservative account wrote to scare people about China which was, I think, broadly true. Which is that in the US, the car, philosophically, is a house you drive around. While in China, EV manufacturers are treating them like giant smartphones.

Indian politicians are resurrecting dead people with AI to campaign for them. And it’s not just dead celebrities, but people’s relatives. Indian elections tend to set the narrative for election tech going forward, like Narendra Modi’s 2014 Facebook-powered win did in 2014. And if this election is any indication, AI is the next wave.

SOME FUN STUFF

• Dance with the wizard

• I love this sesame rice bowl

• El BBL

• Good bird vid

• My Chemical BBL

• A truly unfortunate Etsy purchase

• Some good capybara content

P.S. here’s a very powerful image.

***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***