The Onion will probably be making up new fake iOS services until the end of time, and I’ll chuckle at every one.
[theonion.com]
If not, make sure to click through — ideally several times — for the full effect (no Bluesky account required). While salvagers have recovered deeper ships, even a feat like raising the Vasa was done from 32 meters. We’ll have to stick to lowering the Atlantic instead.
Washington Post journalist Will Oremus reports that it advanced out of the House Energy & Commerce Committee today after a Republican majority rejected amendments proposed to mitigate its significant speech problems. It now awaits a vote on the House floor.
It’s one of numerous bills being taken up by the House Energy & Commerce Committee starting at 10AM ET — a well-intentioned proposal that, as I wrote last month and discussed on Decoder, is a dead end for fighting nonconsensual sexual imagery and a threat to free speech. Fight for the Future is currently running a petition against it and has a tool for finding your representative (if you live in the US) too.
Kottke directed me toward a website posing a question I have never, ever asked myself: which of two chickens is more frolicsome? Which is more optimistic? More aberrant? Creator Erika Hall will take suggestions for new adjectives, too.
[clickens.chicken.pics]
Whatever the opposite of coolhunting is, Max Read’s analytical prediction of an accursed new internet trend does it:
The high-alpha nature of committed, political “smoking is actually good” arguments, combined with existing coalitions for developing annoyance at people with public-health masters degrees into ideological position, is likely to create a solid pro-smoking bloc, especially as we enter summer and face down a fertile period for stupid discourse.
[maxread.substack.com]
The Body Scout author Lincoln Michel has a thoughtful literary analysis of Sam Altman’s AI-written “metafictional literary short story” — which, like a lot of AI text, scans well without exactly adding up:
“I haven’t actually seen anyone praise the story as a story. No one is lauding the memorable characters or marveling at the vivid setting. Instead, the praise has focused on “good lines.” The purple prose. And the prose is the worst part.”
[countercraft.substack.com]
