We Hunted The Mammoth
It’s been a shit year for trans people and LGBTQ folks more generally, with a massive and violent backlash that has targeted everyone from drag queens to providers of trans healthcare; meanwhile, laws in numerous states have begun to chip away at fundamental trans rights.
So it’s no secret that I’m a bit obsessed with AI, as many people are these days. The AI art bots, mainly, which I have used to generate graphics for this blog on more than a few occasions. But also ChatGPT, a chatbot that offers a shockingly convincing impersonation of an actual human. It’s miles ahead of the glorified web search bots that power digital assistants like Alexa and Google Home.
Life is tough for nice guys in our cold, hard world. Consider this poor fellow I found posting on Incels.is.
Last week, Donald Trump introduced a set of NFTs in the form of “Digital Trading Cards” that were all badly photoshopped pictures of him, with the body of an especially buff Adonis, in a variety of different costumes, looking as heroic and resolute as the clearly underpaid graphic designers could make him. He was dressed up as, among other things, a superhero, a cowboy, an astronaut, and … a golfer. He took in $4.5 million selling the things.
Today, for no real reason, let’s look at some fun facts about the majestic Mastodon, one of my very favorite proboscideans.
Bowing to public pressure, and perhaps also cognizant of the latest plunge in Tesla’s stock price, Elon Musk has restored the accounts of the journalists he impetuously banned on Thursday night. Well, most of them. He’s left behind several smaller lefty outlets, including It’s Going Down. And he’s newly banned the account of another journalist, Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, evidently for no other crime than writing critically about Musk.
Twitter suspended some journalists. You may have heard. On the off chance you haven’t already read one of the dozens of pieces on the subject, let me fill in a few of the main components of the whole sordid story before moving on to the right-wingers and their collective orgasm over the media bans.
A new report finds that many police officers in England and Wales think that most rape accusations reflect “regretful sex” and stand in the way of proper investigations.
Artificial wombs are in the news again, not because they’re an actual thing for humans but because some guy made a video suggesting that soon they will be. Filmmaker and biotechnologist Hashem Al-Ghaili has put together a CGI-heavy fake ad for an imaginary “birthing facility” in which 30,000 fetuses could be simultaneously gestated in spiffy plastic pods.
When you define what your political enemy does as violence, then any violence you inflict on them can be redefined as “self-defense.” That’s why it’s more than a bit ominous to see Daily Wire host and professional transphobe Matt Walsh declaring that an innocent action that trans women do every day–going to the restroom–is “an act of violence in and of itself.”
