Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[Bookman 4638]

Are they auctioning off shaggybevo?

[Brisketexan 105053]

6 minutes ago, Bookman said:

Are they auctioning off shaggybevo?

Is the twitter handle "scatsite" taken?

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

10 hours ago, 27-25 said:

That's how my wife pronounces the name.

Do you punch her when she does?

[Covri 6244]

The stupid anyone can have a blue check mark and their tweets follow as first replies is going to fully end twitter in the long run. I know it's been talked about briefly in between door dings, but it's super fucking annoying to see the first reply to a tweet form a major news source or the fucking President followed by some asshat with 61 followers contradicting it like they know what the fuck the are talking about.

[Sawbonz 27533]

On 1/11/2023 at 1:00 PM, Gene Parmesan said:

I'm surprised that so many surlyites don't give a shit about someone damaging their car.  I'll quit telling my kids to be careful with their doors from now on.

[Francisco 2.0 32386]

Last night around 10, all of the high-end 3rd party Twitter apps quit working simultaneously.  The lesser known apps still can access Twitter just fine.  Seems obvious that someone pointed out to Elon that people like myself who use Tweetbot were denying him ad revenue, so Order 66 was executed.

Also, this:

 

https://defector.com/i-was-almost-elon-musks-twitter-voice/

 

Quote

In 2018 a recruiter reached out to me about a possible position running Tesla’s social media channels, with an emphasis on Twitter. I came to realize that this was either an audition or rung on the ladder to likely help Elon Musk with his personal social media strategy. This was years before Musk bought and then wrecked the site, although his ravenous need to be considered a true poster and his soul-deep inability to post were already plain to see. Given that he was trying to hire someone to do his posting for him, it seems like that ineptitude was obvious even to him, although he’s clearly gotten past all that. My pursuit of the job was a disaster—a mix of clueless directives and underlings, a commonly lame interviewing process, and the brand of chaos that I brought to the entire ordeal (think of Mad Men advertising cliches w/r/t to alcohol but replace Hilton with Tesla and bourbon with heroin).

 

 

Quote

This being nearly five years ago, it was almost unheard of to have an in-house creative team dedicated to the real-time social strategy of a single celebrity. Now it’s quite common—Guy Fieri’s social team is deft, nimble, and stays true in strategy to the essence of Fieri; the late James Caan distilled his trademark cool into a sharp, repeatable execution; Ryan Reynolds basically hired a personal creative director to flirt with Hugh Jackman on his behalf. Of course, one of the sweet ironies here, among many, is that the richest man on Earth can’t buy a fucking bucket on Twitter. It’s rare for a famous person to possess the faculties required to be a true Poster, to be fair. It happens sometimes, but more often than not the conditions of their primary vocation and weird hothouse lives erases the possibility. It always comes out uncanny.

 

Spoiler

And so they hire someone to do it for them. Often to marginal success! But it seems pretty obvious that Elon has toggled back and forth between trying to do it himself and utilizing a creative team. Judging by the results, that team must be the most depressing, MCU-obsessed, bizarro world National Lampoon-but-cool-with-apartheid group of Funko Pop writers ever assembled. 

What we have here is just classic ad writers’ room stuff, like it was probably a fourth or fifth idea thrown out, the first three being too spicy, and maybe had legs to begin with, but then it went through seven channels and came out like this. It’s like when Chevy Chase hires a sketch comedy team to write his jokes for off-the-cuff movie riffing in Community, and it’s easy to spot relative to, say, the Facebook-grade meme posts that otherwise fill out his feed lately. So wack that they could only have come from the man himself.

None of those overworked posts have been more obvious than one from the day Musk finally entered the Twitter offices, which he did while grimacing and carrying a porcelain sink in his arms. It was a lot of work, physically, to close the circuit on a hackneyed piece of shit “let that sink in” joke. There was strain in every element of it, but also there is absolutely no way Musk came up with that gag on his own. I know this because it’s convoluted in a way that reeks of someone trying to shoehorn an organic use of a meme into a non-organic self-promoting moment. I know that’s what it is because we already have a name for just that type of thing, which is brand social.

What makes it even worse, and demonstrates how and why he doesn’t have the sauce for shitposting, is the extent to which Musk can’t even fucking commit to the bit in the video. At the last moment he breaks, embarrassed, turns from camera like, tee hee, was that enough? You gotta follow through, my man. You gotta get in there and really fuck it up. That’s another thing that every poster knows.

---

It began with an in-house recruiter contacting me. They never disclosed why, but I can assume it was because they had heard I was behind one of the first Weird Twitter Brand Accounts. I’ve built a career on this, but what’s funny is how many people think something like the Denny’s Twitter was some strategic initiative of seven creative directors in Allbirds and not just a dunce like me—in this case, literally me—who had been given the keys to a legacy brand’s Twitter account while whacked out on drugs, and who was simply trying to have some fun at work and see what he could get away with. 

After a while it did turn into capital-letter Brand Twitter and a collaboration with other talented goofs at my agency, with strategic initiatives and a board of directors watching over us—I was once this close to getting the ax after using the term “bun in the oven” when Beyonce got pregnant; the board claimed I was inferring she may eat her child. The point is, most of that stuff started in a Wild West era of zero approvals or oversight. Once people started paying attention it all got clogged up with upper management and turned into a whole other thing, brands saying “bae,” et al.

Anyway my relationship with Elon Musk and his quest for approval online starts like this, with an email from a Recruiting Coordinator at Tesla:

Hey Alan—

Reaching out to extend a ‘hello’ from our VP of Communications, and her stellar Social Team.

I’m confidentially searching with our Comms VP for a creative who can partner with the Team to develop content for our social channels (namely Twitter)

To be safe, I quickly scrub a meme I made about the face Musk might make when coming from my posts, and then reply. Thus began a months-long process of telephone. Nobody in the company was seemingly capable of handling any task themselves, everything always passed off, on behalf of, and so on. It was cumbersome and involved several rounds of email chains, phone interviews, and a writing test, of course—rewriting already existing Tesla tweets to sound hipper and more fresh, finding non-Tesla tweets that Tesla could wittily respond to, yadda yadda. Things get a bit more interesting once I suspect this may be an audition for something else, or that they’re at least tapping me for insights that might be used elsewhere. That happens when I get this directive from the recruiter:

Ah yes, let’s Pickle Rick this bitch! I just have to revel in this rich irony once again, delivered here in double. There is the fact that one of Musk’s bastions of comedy is a show heralded as genius that lost all its cred thanks to the behavior of its most toxic fanboys, and that he finally got to be a part of it once it had already gone downhill. And then there’s his admiration for The Onion, which is one of the few outlets that’s just hammering his dork ass on the daily. Just as with Twitter, those Musk most wants to emulate just absolutely fucking hate the guy. You gotta love it.

But a job is a job, and so I attempt to write some tweets. Polish up their simplistic, production-line offerings. How do you Rick and Morty-fy a brand whose current strategy is more about sustainable energy than cars that want to kill you? Also, isn’t there a Rick and Morty episode about a car that kills people? (Calm down, no, I know the one, with Summer, whatever.) The thing is, and I’ve experienced this many times over, brands will say when hiring me all the goddamn time that they want edgy or subversive or ~game-changing~ content. And then you get there and start pitching, and 12 people in another building start filing down your ideas until they’re about as sharp as a basketball. It’s something like the opposite of “the creative process.” 

More than that, how do you get in the mind of Elon Musk? Or, more specifically, the mind he wishes to inhabit? Do I Method Act as a billionaire who lives amid a deafening chorus of Yes Men and has successfully sucked out and assimilated the soul of a 20-year-old SomethingAwful top poster? Do I create a mood board that’s just like … Private Jet x Reddit? Every brand strategy is clearer than this mission, I think, at least in my career, and as a result it’s making me try. Hard. And trying hard is the opposite of this goal, the diametric opponent to the Poster’s Way. 

But I write some schlock, straddle the line of quirk and quaint, obscene and obscure, funny and “funny.” At this point things seem to be progressing well, so they fly me out to San Jose to interview in person. This was during a time I was pretty heavily addicted to heroin, or to a wonderful amalgam that was at the time called China White—and not the China White you may be thinking of from the 1980s. This was a super-fine powder of mostly synthetic Chinese opiates and a version of fentanyl unlike the one currently in American circulation. It was fire, bro, as my dealer at the Echo Park 7-Eleven in his mother’s Mercedes with the handicap parking pass told me. I’ve been mostly clean for almost four years now, save some pandemic pressure relapses, but I don’t mind being honest about this time in my life because stigma is a Satan and also 80 percent of people who look down on opiate users are usually the same type of trendsetter to be shoveling coke up their nose in some gentrified bar. 

Mostly I mention this because I think it’s important you’re aware of both my mindset and coping mechanism throughout this ordeal. As with any writer who considers themselves an artist, especially those afflicted with the need to write poetry like myself, for Christ’s sake, I am often sick to my stomach while working in advertising and debasing myself for brand tweets. On the other hand, and this was an argument that was especially compelling to me at the time, it sure does pay the fucking bills. If I can take money from Tesla’s pockets and put it in mine, I’m down to clown. This gets me to the headquarters.

After leveling out in the bathroom a bit and waiting for my handler to retrieve me, I try to discern any signs of drug use in my lanyard photo-ID visitor pass. I didn’t see anything, although to be fair I was also high. In this personal era of opiates, particularly with this version’s ability to dole out precision doses, I was pretty good at keeping an even keel, using it to my advantage and often to no one’s knowledge. Once they come and get me, we rise a few more floors and enter a conference room. As with many tech or start-up companies at this time, the conference rooms all have “fun” names, usually of a theme. This one happens to be named after The Doobie Brothers. Yes, right. Ridiculous. Insert image of Elon blazing with Joe Rogan. 

I joke that the Allman Brothers room must have been booked. It goes over like a self-driving car creating grease stains out of pedestrians. It’s the crystallization of everything up to and after this point—these people, this man, are begging to be let in on a joke they don’t get. Over the course of the interview, this joke reveals itself as the only one I have the capacity or care to tell.

---

The point is, Elon Musk has been angling to become a beloved poster for a minimum of five years now. Since my brush with this want of this, the man had to buy the entire goddamn website just to win status as a poster of note, only to instantly become one for all the wrong reasons. He bought the spotlight, pointed it at himself, and almost immediately became the consensus pick for the worst user in the site’s history. It had to sting, and now everyone has seen how well he’s handling that experience:

Unbanning Ye then banning Ye. Destroying the basic functionality of the site. Firing most of the staff and brutalizing what remained. Crashing Tesla stock and their board members’ patience. Twitter Blue. His self-own polls. Hyping the Twitter Files and then getting cucked by Bari Weiss, of all people. Having his literal mommy step in to defend him like a private school kid who got a well-deserved sock to the nose on the playground. It’s everything, and everything else, and everything that’ll happen tomorrow.

I don’t imagine that I need to tell you I didn’t get the job. But I don’t think it was because I had just ripped fent off a square of foil in the Tesla offices. In fact that probably helped me not roll my eyes from their sockets or simply walk out of the terrible interview. I never really wanted it anyway. It was a free trip into the nascent land of the demented, and I curiously came and went.

But, like most everyone else on Twitter, I’m still there. There’s something kind of magical in getting to see the seed of this, at Tesla HQ—wrecked on a great bag, flown in on their dime—even if I didn’t get the job (literally who cares). And now I get to watch it die, sitting here on the site he’s wrecking, watching him somehow fail to rise in posting status some $44 billion later, using worse and worser memes by the methamphetamine minute, promising to step down as CEO and then looking for ways to renege while basically getting BOFA’d left and right every single day, committing LIGMA Violations openly. He got what he wanted, or at least what he paid for.

He may still get to curl up with his money at the end of the day. But a poor shitposter like myself can revel in his embarrassment. And I fucking will. My only lament before this fiscal quarter was not getting in on the ground floor of tanking Tesla’s stock. But in a way, now, aren’t we all?

That’s the end, no moral.

 

Edited January 13, 2023 by Francisco 2.0

['stache 21792]

14 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Is the twitter handle "scatsite" taken?

@scattybevo 

[Pig Bellmont 8712]

Haven’t squatters been selling prime Twitter handles since the beginning? Is the difference now that Elon wants a piece? Pretty sure as long as companies can get verified, there’s no benefit to owning @chipotle . I just don’t see corporations lining up and authorizing thousands of dollars to purchase dormant twitter accounts. They will just tweet using whatever handle they’ve used for the last decade 

Also, this won’t generate more users. I mean, how many people are saying “I don’t use Twitter, but if only a sweet handle like @justin were available. I’d not only start using Twitter but I’d pay lots of money for the privilege.”

[atomheartbevo 89621]

Tesla stock down for some reason.

 

 

[NoName 16350]

2 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Last night around 10, all of the high-end 3rd party Twitter apps quit working simultaneously.  The lesser known apps still can access Twitter just fine.  Seems obvious that someone pointed out to Elon that people like myself who use Tweetbot were denying him ad revenue, so Order 66 was executed.

Also, this:

 

https://defector.com/i-was-almost-elon-musks-twitter-voice/

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

And so they hire someone to do it for them. Often to marginal success! But it seems pretty obvious that Elon has toggled back and forth between trying to do it himself and utilizing a creative team. Judging by the results, that team must be the most depressing, MCU-obsessed, bizarro world National Lampoon-but-cool-with-apartheid group of Funko Pop writers ever assembled. 

What we have here is just classic ad writers’ room stuff, like it was probably a fourth or fifth idea thrown out, the first three being too spicy, and maybe had legs to begin with, but then it went through seven channels and came out like this. It’s like when Chevy Chase hires a sketch comedy team to write his jokes for off-the-cuff movie riffing in Community, and it’s easy to spot relative to, say, the Facebook-grade meme posts that otherwise fill out his feed lately. So wack that they could only have come from the man himself.

None of those overworked posts have been more obvious than one from the day Musk finally entered the Twitter offices, which he did while grimacing and carrying a porcelain sink in his arms. It was a lot of work, physically, to close the circuit on a hackneyed piece of shit “let that sink in” joke. There was strain in every element of it, but also there is absolutely no way Musk came up with that gag on his own. I know this because it’s convoluted in a way that reeks of someone trying to shoehorn an organic use of a meme into a non-organic self-promoting moment. I know that’s what it is because we already have a name for just that type of thing, which is brand social.

What makes it even worse, and demonstrates how and why he doesn’t have the sauce for shitposting, is the extent to which Musk can’t even fucking commit to the bit in the video. At the last moment he breaks, embarrassed, turns from camera like, tee hee, was that enough? You gotta follow through, my man. You gotta get in there and really fuck it up. That’s another thing that every poster knows.

---

It began with an in-house recruiter contacting me. They never disclosed why, but I can assume it was because they had heard I was behind one of the first Weird Twitter Brand Accounts. I’ve built a career on this, but what’s funny is how many people think something like the Denny’s Twitter was some strategic initiative of seven creative directors in Allbirds and not just a dunce like me—in this case, literally me—who had been given the keys to a legacy brand’s Twitter account while whacked out on drugs, and who was simply trying to have some fun at work and see what he could get away with. 

After a while it did turn into capital-letter Brand Twitter and a collaboration with other talented goofs at my agency, with strategic initiatives and a board of directors watching over us—I was once this close to getting the ax after using the term “bun in the oven” when Beyonce got pregnant; the board claimed I was inferring she may eat her child. The point is, most of that stuff started in a Wild West era of zero approvals or oversight. Once people started paying attention it all got clogged up with upper management and turned into a whole other thing, brands saying “bae,” et al.

Anyway my relationship with Elon Musk and his quest for approval online starts like this, with an email from a Recruiting Coordinator at Tesla:

Hey Alan—

Reaching out to extend a ‘hello’ from our VP of Communications, and her stellar Social Team.

I’m confidentially searching with our Comms VP for a creative who can partner with the Team to develop content for our social channels (namely Twitter)

To be safe, I quickly scrub a meme I made about the face Musk might make when coming from my posts, and then reply. Thus began a months-long process of telephone. Nobody in the company was seemingly capable of handling any task themselves, everything always passed off, on behalf of, and so on. It was cumbersome and involved several rounds of email chains, phone interviews, and a writing test, of course—rewriting already existing Tesla tweets to sound hipper and more fresh, finding non-Tesla tweets that Tesla could wittily respond to, yadda yadda. Things get a bit more interesting once I suspect this may be an audition for something else, or that they’re at least tapping me for insights that might be used elsewhere. That happens when I get this directive from the recruiter:

Ah yes, let’s Pickle Rick this bitch! I just have to revel in this rich irony once again, delivered here in double. There is the fact that one of Musk’s bastions of comedy is a show heralded as genius that lost all its cred thanks to the behavior of its most toxic fanboys, and that he finally got to be a part of it once it had already gone downhill. And then there’s his admiration for The Onion, which is one of the few outlets that’s just hammering his dork ass on the daily. Just as with Twitter, those Musk most wants to emulate just absolutely fucking hate the guy. You gotta love it.

But a job is a job, and so I attempt to write some tweets. Polish up their simplistic, production-line offerings. How do you Rick and Morty-fy a brand whose current strategy is more about sustainable energy than cars that want to kill you? Also, isn’t there a Rick and Morty episode about a car that kills people? (Calm down, no, I know the one, with Summer, whatever.) The thing is, and I’ve experienced this many times over, brands will say when hiring me all the goddamn time that they want edgy or subversive or ~game-changing~ content. And then you get there and start pitching, and 12 people in another building start filing down your ideas until they’re about as sharp as a basketball. It’s something like the opposite of “the creative process.” 

More than that, how do you get in the mind of Elon Musk? Or, more specifically, the mind he wishes to inhabit? Do I Method Act as a billionaire who lives amid a deafening chorus of Yes Men and has successfully sucked out and assimilated the soul of a 20-year-old SomethingAwful top poster? Do I create a mood board that’s just like … Private Jet x Reddit? Every brand strategy is clearer than this mission, I think, at least in my career, and as a result it’s making me try. Hard. And trying hard is the opposite of this goal, the diametric opponent to the Poster’s Way. 

But I write some schlock, straddle the line of quirk and quaint, obscene and obscure, funny and “funny.” At this point things seem to be progressing well, so they fly me out to San Jose to interview in person. This was during a time I was pretty heavily addicted to heroin, or to a wonderful amalgam that was at the time called China White—and not the China White you may be thinking of from the 1980s. This was a super-fine powder of mostly synthetic Chinese opiates and a version of fentanyl unlike the one currently in American circulation. It was fire, bro, as my dealer at the Echo Park 7-Eleven in his mother’s Mercedes with the handicap parking pass told me. I’ve been mostly clean for almost four years now, save some pandemic pressure relapses, but I don’t mind being honest about this time in my life because stigma is a Satan and also 80 percent of people who look down on opiate users are usually the same type of trendsetter to be shoveling coke up their nose in some gentrified bar. 

Mostly I mention this because I think it’s important you’re aware of both my mindset and coping mechanism throughout this ordeal. As with any writer who considers themselves an artist, especially those afflicted with the need to write poetry like myself, for Christ’s sake, I am often sick to my stomach while working in advertising and debasing myself for brand tweets. On the other hand, and this was an argument that was especially compelling to me at the time, it sure does pay the fucking bills. If I can take money from Tesla’s pockets and put it in mine, I’m down to clown. This gets me to the headquarters.

After leveling out in the bathroom a bit and waiting for my handler to retrieve me, I try to discern any signs of drug use in my lanyard photo-ID visitor pass. I didn’t see anything, although to be fair I was also high. In this personal era of opiates, particularly with this version’s ability to dole out precision doses, I was pretty good at keeping an even keel, using it to my advantage and often to no one’s knowledge. Once they come and get me, we rise a few more floors and enter a conference room. As with many tech or start-up companies at this time, the conference rooms all have “fun” names, usually of a theme. This one happens to be named after The Doobie Brothers. Yes, right. Ridiculous. Insert image of Elon blazing with Joe Rogan. 

I joke that the Allman Brothers room must have been booked. It goes over like a self-driving car creating grease stains out of pedestrians. It’s the crystallization of everything up to and after this point—these people, this man, are begging to be let in on a joke they don’t get. Over the course of the interview, this joke reveals itself as the only one I have the capacity or care to tell.

---

The point is, Elon Musk has been angling to become a beloved poster for a minimum of five years now. Since my brush with this want of this, the man had to buy the entire goddamn website just to win status as a poster of note, only to instantly become one for all the wrong reasons. He bought the spotlight, pointed it at himself, and almost immediately became the consensus pick for the worst user in the site’s history. It had to sting, and now everyone has seen how well he’s handling that experience:

Unbanning Ye then banning Ye. Destroying the basic functionality of the site. Firing most of the staff and brutalizing what remained. Crashing Tesla stock and their board members’ patience. Twitter Blue. His self-own polls. Hyping the Twitter Files and then getting cucked by Bari Weiss, of all people. Having his literal mommy step in to defend him like a private school kid who got a well-deserved sock to the nose on the playground. It’s everything, and everything else, and everything that’ll happen tomorrow.

I don’t imagine that I need to tell you I didn’t get the job. But I don’t think it was because I had just ripped fent off a square of foil in the Tesla offices. In fact that probably helped me not roll my eyes from their sockets or simply walk out of the terrible interview. I never really wanted it anyway. It was a free trip into the nascent land of the demented, and I curiously came and went.

But, like most everyone else on Twitter, I’m still there. There’s something kind of magical in getting to see the seed of this, at Tesla HQ—wrecked on a great bag, flown in on their dime—even if I didn’t get the job (literally who cares). And now I get to watch it die, sitting here on the site he’s wrecking, watching him somehow fail to rise in posting status some $44 billion later, using worse and worser memes by the methamphetamine minute, promising to step down as CEO and then looking for ways to renege while basically getting BOFA’d left and right every single day, committing LIGMA Violations openly. He got what he wanted, or at least what he paid for.

He may still get to curl up with his money at the end of the day. But a poor shitposter like myself can revel in his embarrassment. And I fucking will. My only lament before this fiscal quarter was not getting in on the ground floor of tanking Tesla’s stock. But in a way, now, aren’t we all?

That’s the end, no moral.

 

Killing third party apps is so dumb. That's what will drive people to leave twitter.

So you run off advertisers, reduce ways for people to see your product and eyeballs you need to bring said advertisers back...and think you are making good decisions?

 

Also you don't even do it right and still allow a bunch of smaller apps to still use the API, which is absolutely par for that course.

[Aqua Buddha 14581]

21 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Tesla stock down for some reason.

 

 

Everyone who bought a Peloton says hi.

[Homercles 10205]

Damnit

[Celery Man 20931]

Hahaha get fucked Marianne

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

1 minute ago, Celery Man said:

Hahaha get fucked Marianne

No shit. That brought a ray of sunshine to my cold, dead heart.

[crash_davis 23096]

Elon's having a fire sale on Teslas to offset the Twitter loss. You love to see it.

[crash_davis 23096]

Elon's upcoming autobiography.

"How I Tanked Two Companies to Prove I'm the Smartest Guy in the Room"

[Francisco 2.0 32386]

41 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

Everyone who bought a Peloton says hi.

Now hold on there....

😄

(Actually, the Bike +, which I purchased a year ago, is the same price today as it was then)

 

[Biff Tannen 45663]

57 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

Everyone who bought a Peloton says hi.

I own a peloton and a Tesla and love them both. Both well worth what I paid for them. Prices fluctuate. 

[Chopper 17230]

45 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

Elon's having a fire sale on Teslas to offset the Twitter loss. You love to see it.

Is the twitter handle scatcar taken?

 

[atomheartbevo 89621]

[Chopper 17230]

[NoName 16350]

I assume that 12 hours later if this was a policy change they would have announced it somewhere or someone would have made a snark comment or elon would have liked some shit posting tweet about it.

...So this means they screwed something big up, and 12 hours later still can't fix it?

[Chopper 17230]

40 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I own a peloton and a Tesla and love them both. Both well worth what I paid for them. Prices fluctuate. 

[HenryJames 66035]

54 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I own a peloton and a Tesla and love them both. Both well worth what I paid for them. Prices fluctuate. 

[Chopper 17230]

Used tesla prices were collapsing even before the new tesla price cut. This data, for example, is through 12/31.

 

[Samson's Wig 3190]

5 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Last night around 10, all of the high-end 3rd party Twitter apps quit working simultaneously.  The lesser known apps still can access Twitter just fine.  Seems obvious that someone pointed out to Elon that people like myself who use Tweetbot were denying him ad revenue, so Order 66 was executed.

Also, this:

 

https://defector.com/i-was-almost-elon-musks-twitter-voice/

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

And so they hire someone to do it for them. Often to marginal success! But it seems pretty obvious that Elon has toggled back and forth between trying to do it himself and utilizing a creative team. Judging by the results, that team must be the most depressing, MCU-obsessed, bizarro world National Lampoon-but-cool-with-apartheid group of Funko Pop writers ever assembled. 

What we have here is just classic ad writers’ room stuff, like it was probably a fourth or fifth idea thrown out, the first three being too spicy, and maybe had legs to begin with, but then it went through seven channels and came out like this. It’s like when Chevy Chase hires a sketch comedy team to write his jokes for off-the-cuff movie riffing in Community, and it’s easy to spot relative to, say, the Facebook-grade meme posts that otherwise fill out his feed lately. So wack that they could only have come from the man himself.

None of those overworked posts have been more obvious than one from the day Musk finally entered the Twitter offices, which he did while grimacing and carrying a porcelain sink in his arms. It was a lot of work, physically, to close the circuit on a hackneyed piece of shit “let that sink in” joke. There was strain in every element of it, but also there is absolutely no way Musk came up with that gag on his own. I know this because it’s convoluted in a way that reeks of someone trying to shoehorn an organic use of a meme into a non-organic self-promoting moment. I know that’s what it is because we already have a name for just that type of thing, which is brand social.

What makes it even worse, and demonstrates how and why he doesn’t have the sauce for shitposting, is the extent to which Musk can’t even fucking commit to the bit in the video. At the last moment he breaks, embarrassed, turns from camera like, tee hee, was that enough? You gotta follow through, my man. You gotta get in there and really fuck it up. That’s another thing that every poster knows.

---

It began with an in-house recruiter contacting me. They never disclosed why, but I can assume it was because they had heard I was behind one of the first Weird Twitter Brand Accounts. I’ve built a career on this, but what’s funny is how many people think something like the Denny’s Twitter was some strategic initiative of seven creative directors in Allbirds and not just a dunce like me—in this case, literally me—who had been given the keys to a legacy brand’s Twitter account while whacked out on drugs, and who was simply trying to have some fun at work and see what he could get away with. 

After a while it did turn into capital-letter Brand Twitter and a collaboration with other talented goofs at my agency, with strategic initiatives and a board of directors watching over us—I was once this close to getting the ax after using the term “bun in the oven” when Beyonce got pregnant; the board claimed I was inferring she may eat her child. The point is, most of that stuff started in a Wild West era of zero approvals or oversight. Once people started paying attention it all got clogged up with upper management and turned into a whole other thing, brands saying “bae,” et al.

Anyway my relationship with Elon Musk and his quest for approval online starts like this, with an email from a Recruiting Coordinator at Tesla:

Hey Alan—

Reaching out to extend a ‘hello’ from our VP of Communications, and her stellar Social Team.

I’m confidentially searching with our Comms VP for a creative who can partner with the Team to develop content for our social channels (namely Twitter)

To be safe, I quickly scrub a meme I made about the face Musk might make when coming from my posts, and then reply. Thus began a months-long process of telephone. Nobody in the company was seemingly capable of handling any task themselves, everything always passed off, on behalf of, and so on. It was cumbersome and involved several rounds of email chains, phone interviews, and a writing test, of course—rewriting already existing Tesla tweets to sound hipper and more fresh, finding non-Tesla tweets that Tesla could wittily respond to, yadda yadda. Things get a bit more interesting once I suspect this may be an audition for something else, or that they’re at least tapping me for insights that might be used elsewhere. That happens when I get this directive from the recruiter:

Ah yes, let’s Pickle Rick this bitch! I just have to revel in this rich irony once again, delivered here in double. There is the fact that one of Musk’s bastions of comedy is a show heralded as genius that lost all its cred thanks to the behavior of its most toxic fanboys, and that he finally got to be a part of it once it had already gone downhill. And then there’s his admiration for The Onion, which is one of the few outlets that’s just hammering his dork ass on the daily. Just as with Twitter, those Musk most wants to emulate just absolutely fucking hate the guy. You gotta love it.

But a job is a job, and so I attempt to write some tweets. Polish up their simplistic, production-line offerings. How do you Rick and Morty-fy a brand whose current strategy is more about sustainable energy than cars that want to kill you? Also, isn’t there a Rick and Morty episode about a car that kills people? (Calm down, no, I know the one, with Summer, whatever.) The thing is, and I’ve experienced this many times over, brands will say when hiring me all the goddamn time that they want edgy or subversive or ~game-changing~ content. And then you get there and start pitching, and 12 people in another building start filing down your ideas until they’re about as sharp as a basketball. It’s something like the opposite of “the creative process.” 

More than that, how do you get in the mind of Elon Musk? Or, more specifically, the mind he wishes to inhabit? Do I Method Act as a billionaire who lives amid a deafening chorus of Yes Men and has successfully sucked out and assimilated the soul of a 20-year-old SomethingAwful top poster? Do I create a mood board that’s just like … Private Jet x Reddit? Every brand strategy is clearer than this mission, I think, at least in my career, and as a result it’s making me try. Hard. And trying hard is the opposite of this goal, the diametric opponent to the Poster’s Way. 

But I write some schlock, straddle the line of quirk and quaint, obscene and obscure, funny and “funny.” At this point things seem to be progressing well, so they fly me out to San Jose to interview in person. This was during a time I was pretty heavily addicted to heroin, or to a wonderful amalgam that was at the time called China White—and not the China White you may be thinking of from the 1980s. This was a super-fine powder of mostly synthetic Chinese opiates and a version of fentanyl unlike the one currently in American circulation. It was fire, bro, as my dealer at the Echo Park 7-Eleven in his mother’s Mercedes with the handicap parking pass told me. I’ve been mostly clean for almost four years now, save some pandemic pressure relapses, but I don’t mind being honest about this time in my life because stigma is a Satan and also 80 percent of people who look down on opiate users are usually the same type of trendsetter to be shoveling coke up their nose in some gentrified bar. 

Mostly I mention this because I think it’s important you’re aware of both my mindset and coping mechanism throughout this ordeal. As with any writer who considers themselves an artist, especially those afflicted with the need to write poetry like myself, for Christ’s sake, I am often sick to my stomach while working in advertising and debasing myself for brand tweets. On the other hand, and this was an argument that was especially compelling to me at the time, it sure does pay the fucking bills. If I can take money from Tesla’s pockets and put it in mine, I’m down to clown. This gets me to the headquarters.

After leveling out in the bathroom a bit and waiting for my handler to retrieve me, I try to discern any signs of drug use in my lanyard photo-ID visitor pass. I didn’t see anything, although to be fair I was also high. In this personal era of opiates, particularly with this version’s ability to dole out precision doses, I was pretty good at keeping an even keel, using it to my advantage and often to no one’s knowledge. Once they come and get me, we rise a few more floors and enter a conference room. As with many tech or start-up companies at this time, the conference rooms all have “fun” names, usually of a theme. This one happens to be named after The Doobie Brothers. Yes, right. Ridiculous. Insert image of Elon blazing with Joe Rogan. 

I joke that the Allman Brothers room must have been booked. It goes over like a self-driving car creating grease stains out of pedestrians. It’s the crystallization of everything up to and after this point—these people, this man, are begging to be let in on a joke they don’t get. Over the course of the interview, this joke reveals itself as the only one I have the capacity or care to tell.

---

The point is, Elon Musk has been angling to become a beloved poster for a minimum of five years now. Since my brush with this want of this, the man had to buy the entire goddamn website just to win status as a poster of note, only to instantly become one for all the wrong reasons. He bought the spotlight, pointed it at himself, and almost immediately became the consensus pick for the worst user in the site’s history. It had to sting, and now everyone has seen how well he’s handling that experience:

Unbanning Ye then banning Ye. Destroying the basic functionality of the site. Firing most of the staff and brutalizing what remained. Crashing Tesla stock and their board members’ patience. Twitter Blue. His self-own polls. Hyping the Twitter Files and then getting cucked by Bari Weiss, of all people. Having his literal mommy step in to defend him like a private school kid who got a well-deserved sock to the nose on the playground. It’s everything, and everything else, and everything that’ll happen tomorrow.

I don’t imagine that I need to tell you I didn’t get the job. But I don’t think it was because I had just ripped fent off a square of foil in the Tesla offices. In fact that probably helped me not roll my eyes from their sockets or simply walk out of the terrible interview. I never really wanted it anyway. It was a free trip into the nascent land of the demented, and I curiously came and went.

But, like most everyone else on Twitter, I’m still there. There’s something kind of magical in getting to see the seed of this, at Tesla HQ—wrecked on a great bag, flown in on their dime—even if I didn’t get the job (literally who cares). And now I get to watch it die, sitting here on the site he’s wrecking, watching him somehow fail to rise in posting status some $44 billion later, using worse and worser memes by the methamphetamine minute, promising to step down as CEO and then looking for ways to renege while basically getting BOFA’d left and right every single day, committing LIGMA Violations openly. He got what he wanted, or at least what he paid for.

He may still get to curl up with his money at the end of the day. But a poor shitposter like myself can revel in his embarrassment. And I fucking will. My only lament before this fiscal quarter was not getting in on the ground floor of tanking Tesla’s stock. But in a way, now, aren’t we all?

That’s the end, no moral.

 

That's some of the saddest shit I've ever read, and not the parts about how pathetic Elon is, which is now well established. That posting on social media has become something discussed as if it's an art form or special skill may be the most depressing thing I've run across lately.   How does someone who has dedicated their career to such a thing look themselves in the mirror?  There are plenty of inane jobs out there, but holy shit.  If you asked me this morning what the most pointless job on earth is I would have said real estate agent.   But now...

[Francisco 2.0 32386]

1 hour ago, HenryJames said:

 

Counterpoint:

 

[Celery Man 20931]

was it from this thread where I ran across this excellent use of twitter - parodying peloton placement from advertisements?

 

[tbone_ 14106]

That’s funny shit

[fluff 87]

Hate to be the bearer of good news, but I can guarantee that Tesla isn't the only one dropping vehicle prices.

[Chopper 17230]

15 minutes ago, fluff said:

Hate to be the bearer of good news, but I can guarantee that Tesla isn't the only one dropping vehicle prices.

And an example would be?

[Hefeweizen 5310]

17 minutes ago, fluff said:

Hate to be the bearer of good news, but I can guarantee that Tesla isn't the only one dropping vehicle prices.

Which other used cars are crashing in price?  I want to buy one but haven’t seen it happen yet.

[Chopper 17230]

That $300k car is now on sale for $50k plus $15k for the vaporware. Great deal! Buy now!!

 

[Biff Tannen 45663]

6 hours ago, Chopper said:

 

6 hours ago, HenryJames said:

I’m clearly missing the joke. Explain it to me like I’m 5. 

[Chopper 17230]

39 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I’m clearly missing the joke. Explain it to me like I’m 5. 

I don't know the target age for Business Insider readers. It's probably more like 12 yo. But I have confidence in you, Biff.

https://www.businessinsider.com/peloton-holiday-commercial-is-sparking-hate-confusion-from-watchers-2019-12

In the case of the "one thing is not like the others" I am pretty sure that speaks for itself. In your defense (edit : and to my discredit) I didn't notice that Peloton was mentioned in an earlier post. Had I noticed I may not have responded. However, I think shrugging your shoulders at telsa's demand problems by comparing it to peloton, which is basically a disposable purchase, makes zero sense. 

Edited January 13, 2023 by Chopper

[BearSchlong 8083]

Elon's having a fire sale on Teslas to offset the Twitter loss. You love to see it.

Can I just get the WSJ to abbreviate their alerts to “Musk announces latest bad decision”

Haha just realized it’s Friday the 13th.

[Fudge Nuggets 19186]

12 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Last night around 10, all of the high-end 3rd party Twitter apps quit working simultaneously.  The lesser known apps still can access Twitter just fine.  Seems obvious that someone pointed out to Elon that people like myself who use Tweetbot were denying him ad revenue, so Order 66 was executed.

Also, this:

 

https://defector.com/i-was-almost-elon-musks-twitter-voice/

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

And so they hire someone to do it for them. Often to marginal success! But it seems pretty obvious that Elon has toggled back and forth between trying to do it himself and utilizing a creative team. Judging by the results, that team must be the most depressing, MCU-obsessed, bizarro world National Lampoon-but-cool-with-apartheid group of Funko Pop writers ever assembled. 

What we have here is just classic ad writers’ room stuff, like it was probably a fourth or fifth idea thrown out, the first three being too spicy, and maybe had legs to begin with, but then it went through seven channels and came out like this. It’s like when Chevy Chase hires a sketch comedy team to write his jokes for off-the-cuff movie riffing in Community, and it’s easy to spot relative to, say, the Facebook-grade meme posts that otherwise fill out his feed lately. So wack that they could only have come from the man himself.

None of those overworked posts have been more obvious than one from the day Musk finally entered the Twitter offices, which he did while grimacing and carrying a porcelain sink in his arms. It was a lot of work, physically, to close the circuit on a hackneyed piece of shit “let that sink in” joke. There was strain in every element of it, but also there is absolutely no way Musk came up with that gag on his own. I know this because it’s convoluted in a way that reeks of someone trying to shoehorn an organic use of a meme into a non-organic self-promoting moment. I know that’s what it is because we already have a name for just that type of thing, which is brand social.

What makes it even worse, and demonstrates how and why he doesn’t have the sauce for shitposting, is the extent to which Musk can’t even fucking commit to the bit in the video. At the last moment he breaks, embarrassed, turns from camera like, tee hee, was that enough? You gotta follow through, my man. You gotta get in there and really fuck it up. That’s another thing that every poster knows.

---

It began with an in-house recruiter contacting me. They never disclosed why, but I can assume it was because they had heard I was behind one of the first Weird Twitter Brand Accounts. I’ve built a career on this, but what’s funny is how many people think something like the Denny’s Twitter was some strategic initiative of seven creative directors in Allbirds and not just a dunce like me—in this case, literally me—who had been given the keys to a legacy brand’s Twitter account while whacked out on drugs, and who was simply trying to have some fun at work and see what he could get away with. 

After a while it did turn into capital-letter Brand Twitter and a collaboration with other talented goofs at my agency, with strategic initiatives and a board of directors watching over us—I was once this close to getting the ax after using the term “bun in the oven” when Beyonce got pregnant; the board claimed I was inferring she may eat her child. The point is, most of that stuff started in a Wild West era of zero approvals or oversight. Once people started paying attention it all got clogged up with upper management and turned into a whole other thing, brands saying “bae,” et al.

Anyway my relationship with Elon Musk and his quest for approval online starts like this, with an email from a Recruiting Coordinator at Tesla:

Hey Alan—

Reaching out to extend a ‘hello’ from our VP of Communications, and her stellar Social Team.

I’m confidentially searching with our Comms VP for a creative who can partner with the Team to develop content for our social channels (namely Twitter)

To be safe, I quickly scrub a meme I made about the face Musk might make when coming from my posts, and then reply. Thus began a months-long process of telephone. Nobody in the company was seemingly capable of handling any task themselves, everything always passed off, on behalf of, and so on. It was cumbersome and involved several rounds of email chains, phone interviews, and a writing test, of course—rewriting already existing Tesla tweets to sound hipper and more fresh, finding non-Tesla tweets that Tesla could wittily respond to, yadda yadda. Things get a bit more interesting once I suspect this may be an audition for something else, or that they’re at least tapping me for insights that might be used elsewhere. That happens when I get this directive from the recruiter:

Ah yes, let’s Pickle Rick this bitch! I just have to revel in this rich irony once again, delivered here in double. There is the fact that one of Musk’s bastions of comedy is a show heralded as genius that lost all its cred thanks to the behavior of its most toxic fanboys, and that he finally got to be a part of it once it had already gone downhill. And then there’s his admiration for The Onion, which is one of the few outlets that’s just hammering his dork ass on the daily. Just as with Twitter, those Musk most wants to emulate just absolutely fucking hate the guy. You gotta love it.

But a job is a job, and so I attempt to write some tweets. Polish up their simplistic, production-line offerings. How do you Rick and Morty-fy a brand whose current strategy is more about sustainable energy than cars that want to kill you? Also, isn’t there a Rick and Morty episode about a car that kills people? (Calm down, no, I know the one, with Summer, whatever.) The thing is, and I’ve experienced this many times over, brands will say when hiring me all the goddamn time that they want edgy or subversive or ~game-changing~ content. And then you get there and start pitching, and 12 people in another building start filing down your ideas until they’re about as sharp as a basketball. It’s something like the opposite of “the creative process.” 

More than that, how do you get in the mind of Elon Musk? Or, more specifically, the mind he wishes to inhabit? Do I Method Act as a billionaire who lives amid a deafening chorus of Yes Men and has successfully sucked out and assimilated the soul of a 20-year-old SomethingAwful top poster? Do I create a mood board that’s just like … Private Jet x Reddit? Every brand strategy is clearer than this mission, I think, at least in my career, and as a result it’s making me try. Hard. And trying hard is the opposite of this goal, the diametric opponent to the Poster’s Way. 

But I write some schlock, straddle the line of quirk and quaint, obscene and obscure, funny and “funny.” At this point things seem to be progressing well, so they fly me out to San Jose to interview in person. This was during a time I was pretty heavily addicted to heroin, or to a wonderful amalgam that was at the time called China White—and not the China White you may be thinking of from the 1980s. This was a super-fine powder of mostly synthetic Chinese opiates and a version of fentanyl unlike the one currently in American circulation. It was fire, bro, as my dealer at the Echo Park 7-Eleven in his mother’s Mercedes with the handicap parking pass told me. I’ve been mostly clean for almost four years now, save some pandemic pressure relapses, but I don’t mind being honest about this time in my life because stigma is a Satan and also 80 percent of people who look down on opiate users are usually the same type of trendsetter to be shoveling coke up their nose in some gentrified bar. 

Mostly I mention this because I think it’s important you’re aware of both my mindset and coping mechanism throughout this ordeal. As with any writer who considers themselves an artist, especially those afflicted with the need to write poetry like myself, for Christ’s sake, I am often sick to my stomach while working in advertising and debasing myself for brand tweets. On the other hand, and this was an argument that was especially compelling to me at the time, it sure does pay the fucking bills. If I can take money from Tesla’s pockets and put it in mine, I’m down to clown. This gets me to the headquarters.

After leveling out in the bathroom a bit and waiting for my handler to retrieve me, I try to discern any signs of drug use in my lanyard photo-ID visitor pass. I didn’t see anything, although to be fair I was also high. In this personal era of opiates, particularly with this version’s ability to dole out precision doses, I was pretty good at keeping an even keel, using it to my advantage and often to no one’s knowledge. Once they come and get me, we rise a few more floors and enter a conference room. As with many tech or start-up companies at this time, the conference rooms all have “fun” names, usually of a theme. This one happens to be named after The Doobie Brothers. Yes, right. Ridiculous. Insert image of Elon blazing with Joe Rogan. 

I joke that the Allman Brothers room must have been booked. It goes over like a self-driving car creating grease stains out of pedestrians. It’s the crystallization of everything up to and after this point—these people, this man, are begging to be let in on a joke they don’t get. Over the course of the interview, this joke reveals itself as the only one I have the capacity or care to tell.

---

The point is, Elon Musk has been angling to become a beloved poster for a minimum of five years now. Since my brush with this want of this, the man had to buy the entire goddamn website just to win status as a poster of note, only to instantly become one for all the wrong reasons. He bought the spotlight, pointed it at himself, and almost immediately became the consensus pick for the worst user in the site’s history. It had to sting, and now everyone has seen how well he’s handling that experience:

Unbanning Ye then banning Ye. Destroying the basic functionality of the site. Firing most of the staff and brutalizing what remained. Crashing Tesla stock and their board members’ patience. Twitter Blue. His self-own polls. Hyping the Twitter Files and then getting cucked by Bari Weiss, of all people. Having his literal mommy step in to defend him like a private school kid who got a well-deserved sock to the nose on the playground. It’s everything, and everything else, and everything that’ll happen tomorrow.

I don’t imagine that I need to tell you I didn’t get the job. But I don’t think it was because I had just ripped fent off a square of foil in the Tesla offices. In fact that probably helped me not roll my eyes from their sockets or simply walk out of the terrible interview. I never really wanted it anyway. It was a free trip into the nascent land of the demented, and I curiously came and went.

But, like most everyone else on Twitter, I’m still there. There’s something kind of magical in getting to see the seed of this, at Tesla HQ—wrecked on a great bag, flown in on their dime—even if I didn’t get the job (literally who cares). And now I get to watch it die, sitting here on the site he’s wrecking, watching him somehow fail to rise in posting status some $44 billion later, using worse and worser memes by the methamphetamine minute, promising to step down as CEO and then looking for ways to renege while basically getting BOFA’d left and right every single day, committing LIGMA Violations openly. He got what he wanted, or at least what he paid for.

He may still get to curl up with his money at the end of the day. But a poor shitposter like myself can revel in his embarrassment. And I fucking will. My only lament before this fiscal quarter was not getting in on the ground floor of tanking Tesla’s stock. But in a way, now, aren’t we all?

That’s the end, no moral.

 

Next time, tell the last part first.  Jeesh, that fucker has a high opinion of themself.

[F250 28762]

1 hour ago, Chopper said:

I don't know the target age for Business Insider readers. It's probably more like 12 yo. But I have confidence in you, Biff.

https://www.businessinsider.com/peloton-holiday-commercial-is-sparking-hate-confusion-from-watchers-2019-12

In the case of the "one thing is not like the others" I am pretty sure that speaks for itself. In your defense (edit : and to my discredit) I didn't notice that Peloton was mentioned in an earlier post. Had I noticed I may not have responded. However, I think shrugging your shoulders at telsa's demand problems by comparing it to peloton, which is basically a disposable purchase, makes zero sense. 

 

[Chopper 17230]

1 hour ago, F250 said:

 

He asked for an explanation in the language of a child. I answered.

[Baboontyme 2809]

Count me as one of those who will probably be done if they truly cut off 3rd party APIs. I don't like the interface on the native app. Talon and Tweetcaster both went down. Tweetdeck still works great on desktop but it's not great on a mobile browser and I'm on desktop less and less these days. I did find an app that seems to skin tweetdeck better for mobile for the time being (Marin Deck) so I guess that will work for now. 

[Captainant 27625]

Funny enough with elon's TwItTeR FiLeS, Techdirt just put out some excellent reporting putting the lie to elmo's narrative of twitter unfairly censoring certain people, based on the documents and sworn testimonies collected by the Jan6 committee

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/13/the-anti-twitter-files-january-6th-committee-report-shows-how-twitter-leaned-over-backwards-to-protect-trump-conservatives/

[Covri 6244]

Anybody else have their feed get broken up into these two categories recently? It's super annoying as it keeps defaulting to for you which seems to be some of my content plus way more suggested shit. And the little icon on the top right is gone so I have no idea how to change it off this view.

 

[Francisco 2.0 32386]

5 hours ago, Baboontyme said:

Count me as one of those who will probably be done if they truly cut off 3rd party APIs. I don't like the interface on the native app. Talon and Tweetcaster both went down. Tweetdeck still works great on desktop but it's not great on a mobile browser and I'm on desktop less and less these days. I did find an app that seems to skin tweetdeck better for mobile for the time being (Marin Deck) so I guess that will work for now. 

 

 

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-intentionally-suspended-tweet-bot-third-party-apps-messages-show

 

Quote

In the day and a half since users started reporting problems with the apps, neither Twitter’s official account nor the Twitter support account have explained what caused the outage, including whether it was deliberate or accidental. Musk also hasn’t commented on his Twitter account.

But a senior software engineer wrote Thursday night that “Third-party app suspensions are intentional,” in an internal Twitter command center Slack channel, used by employees to handle outages and interruptions to Twitter’s services. The engineer declined to comment when contacted by The Information on Saturday afternoon.

 

Quote

The internal messages seen by The Information also show that Twitter employees have been discussing when the decision would be announced publicly. A Twitter employee working on product partnerships asked on Friday morning when employees could expect a list of “approved talking points” for questions from partners related to “3party clients revoked access.”

A product marketing manager responded on Slack that morning that the company had “started to work on comms” but that there was no estimate as to when it would be ready, the messages show.

 

[NoName 16350]

12 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

 

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-intentionally-suspended-tweet-bot-third-party-apps-messages-show

 

 

 

Elon Musk is the ultimate pussy. Say one thing and do another. He shit posts about everything but can't post about anything important to twitter users like this? 

Fuck off clown.

Kill third party apps at your own risk. And if you are going to do it...do it and own it. Do it across the board not just the tip ten ish apps. And own it. Tell them and their users.

[cactusflinthead 27598]

This seems bad. Thread 

 

[Fudge Nuggets 19186]

Yawn.  I bet that guy knows plenty about ODD.  He’s lying to keep his ass out of jail and knows nothing will happen to him for lying.

[Celery Man 20931]

he thought they said OPP and was mounting a shaggy defense

[Francisco 2.0 32386]

CES was the biggest event to happen in Vegas since Elon built his little underground racetrack at the convention center.  So, there were hoards of people to actually try out the highly touted Vegas Loop.  Our friends in Australia have some words:

 

https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/inventions/elon-musks-teslafilled-vegas-loop-transport-system-divides-riders/news-story/dcfabc1b2d9f74f2556ae529bbf801f2

 

Quote

It’s Elon Musk’s multimillion-dollar and very glitzy vision of how we’ll travel in the future. 

Last week, almost 100,000 people got to have their first ride on the Vegas Loop underground transport system.

But a big problem has led to criticism of what one industry watcher has dismissed as Elon Musk’s “vanity project”.

In fact, while many visiting Las Vegas were dazzled by this neon-drenched travel solution, some have questioned if it’s anything that new at all or if it really is better than, say, a bus.

 

Quote

One person, after taking their first ride, told news.com.au in Las Vegas that it was “pointless” – at least in its current form. 

But backers of the Vegas Loop have branded critics as “clueless” while the city of Las Vegas is doubling down, clearing the way for a 55km extension beneath the casino city that could cost more than $US2 billion ($A2.9 billion).

 

Quote

Alongside Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX, Mr Musk also owns the majority of The Boring Company (TBC).

As the firm’s name suggests, it’s chiefly into boring tunnels. 

Mr Musk formed the company in 2016 after complaining traffic in Los Angeles was driving him “nuts”. 

“Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging,” he memorably said.

 

Spoiler

His vision was for a network of easy to dig tunnels where autonomous pod vehicles would hurtle passengers at 240km/h around the city on some form of tracks or guideway.

What has opened in Las Vegas is not even close to that.

The Vegas Loop is 2.7km in length and connects one end of the Convention Centre with the other, with a branch leading off to a casino. 

Rather than pods, there are cars – Telsas, of course. And while they are electric, they’re not autonomous with each one requiring a driver. Rather than travelling at 240km/h the Teslas go at a more sedate 55km/h. 

It’s possible that one day the original ambitions will be met, but many remain sceptical that cars, or pods, going that fast will ever be allowed beneath city streets.

Yet even in its current, pared-down form, the relatively low cost of the Loop – the initial Vegas tunnels cost $US75 million ($A107 million) – has other cities salivating at the prospect of a bargain basement banishment of their transport woes. 

The Vegas Loop opened in 2021 and only operates during conferences. Early January’sCES technology show, which saw scores of people descend to Nevada to see the latest consumer electronics, was its biggest test yet. 

When news.com.au visited, a steady stream of conference-goers were eagerly descending the escalator at the Loop’s Central Station – the only truly underground station on the small network – to see what all the fuss was about. 

On first glance, it looked impressive. A concrete canyon opens up below lit by an ever-changing swirl of vivid light: First a searing blue and then a sunrise orange before an intense magenta. Hits by Celine Dion echoed through the chamber.

At one side of a platform, Telsas drive out of tunnels and head towards one of 10 parking bays. Staff direct passengers to queue up for the next car, not unlike a funfair ride. 

The sheer amount of people checking out the Loop saw staff encourage strangers to share vehicles – which was ironic because Mr Musk has railed against public transport precisely because you ride with a “bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer”.

With a possible serial killer in the back seat, the driver headed into one of the equally vividly lit tunnels.

They’re small, almost claustrophobically so, and barely wide enough for the car. 

The journey, twisting and turning, almost feels like you’re slicing through some neon Alpine mountain.

And then suddenly you’re disgorged up a ramp and into the bright daylight of Nevada and a far less glamorous grey parking station.

The journey should take two minutes, but the 80 or so cars that had been sequestered for CES meant there were mini jams to exit the system. It perhaps added another minute to the journey, although TBC said the average CES ride was indeed sub two minutes. 

It’s certainly snazzy. But the feeling is less like the transportation of the future and more like a disco taxi in an underpass. 

And that's the big problem. All the Kmart-style LED lights in the world can’t hide the fact the Vegas Loop is just a road tunnel. And there’s nothing new about that.

Riders news.com.au spoke too had mixed views on the Vegas Loop. 

“It was great. It was a comfortable experience, the service was good,” rider Alex said. 

“But it was a little pointless as it doesn’t cover a lot of distance.

“It gets you where you’re going and it has LEDs. It’s literally lit. It’s like a roller coaster,” Alex said.

Conference-goer Shike said it was fun, but was still just a road tunnel.

“Public transportation would move more people for sure.”

If you measure the success of the Vegas Loop by capacity, it can struggle.

TBC claims it can carry up to 4400 people an hour, but that’s probably with all those strangers riding together. A more likely outcome is people see it as a taxi and keep each Tesla to themselves. 

The firm said 94,000 rides were taken during CES which works out at about 3000 per hour, still below its claimed capacity. 

In contrast, a single line of the New York Subway can transport 27,000 people per hour in one direction over the same distance as the Vegas Loop. 

Some have said the tunnelling technology from TBC is admirable but it should be trains or trams, not Teslas, going underground.

Staffing is another issue for the Loop. Right now, it needs loads of them. News.com.au spotted about 15 staff at the two stations helping passengers and making sure they got in and out of the Teslas safely. And if there were 80 vehicles, that’s 80 drivers.

In contrast two or fewer staff can operate a train, with stations usually only having a handful of staff each. 

TBC points out that in the future driverless cars may take over. And it says those cars can zoom through stations en route that passengers aren’t embarking at rather than stopping at every one. Which is a bit like an express train.

Many US city mayors have gazed enviously at the Vegas Loop, keen on a cheap transport solution with that touch of Musk magic. 

But the company has struggled to expand beyond Las Vegas. Projects announced in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Baltimore in Maryland have quietly been dropped.

“I think there was an expectation from Tesla that, ‘We will start digging a hole and when something gets in our way we’ll deal with it and we’ll keep digging,’” former secretary of transportation for Maryland Pete Rahn told NBC News. 

“That’s just not how the system works in the public environment.”

Editor of industry magazine Tunnelling Journal Tris Thomas said the low costs of Mr Musk’s tunnels was likely due to the relative simplicity of the first example.

Longer tunnels, however, have to go through lengthy planning and environmental processes, utilities like sewers have to be moved or avoided, and a huge number of different land owners become involved. The actual digging can be the easy bit.

“With the transport method being a small fleet of his own Teslas it screams ‘vanity project’,” Thomas said.

But others says the naysayers are whingers. 

Scott Roeben, publisher of website Vital Vegas, said critics were “clueless”. 

“The Vegas Loop isn’t mass transit, it’s a public relations tool. Las Vegas is about creating a splash, and the Vegas Loop already has.”

A massive extension has been approved for the Vegas Loop connecting casinos and the airport. Even with TBC’s claims of cheap digging, it’s still likely to cost billions. 

If the expanded Loop does get off the ground, then the world will see if this really is the future of transport. Or if it’s just a small, low-capacity, high-staffed road tunnel with cool lights.

 

[Chopper 17230]

12 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Scott Roeben, publisher of website Vital Vegas, said critics were “clueless”. 

“The Vegas Loop isn’t mass transit, it’s a public relations tool. Las Vegas is about creating a splash, and the Vegas Loop already has.”

[NoName 16350]

On 1/15/2023 at 9:18 AM, NoName said:

Elon Musk is the ultimate pussy. Say one thing and do another. He shit posts about everything but can't post about anything important to twitter users like this? 

Fuck off clown.

Kill third party apps at your own risk. And if you are going to do it...do it and own it. Do it across the board not just the tip ten ish apps. And own it. Tell them and their users.

already seeing people talk about how 3rd party apps are "sapping twitter's ad revenue" - meanwhile the last time something like this happened, Twitter said it happened because it was only a tiny percent of users worldwide.

so let's say it's a free API. let's say that the user count is at about 1%. are we saying that 1% of users seeing more ads would make a difference to the bottom line in any tangible way? are we saying that that 1% of users is requiring an inordinate % of twitter resources to keep up to date the API specifically?

a normal company, even if it is 1% of end users, would have a plan to get people from 3rd party app --> 1st party app. that can be done a number of ways - implement ideas that others have into your core app or concepts (Apple way), acquire and kill or acqui-hire and kill apps to get the concepts they have and devs, offer better features and bring over users that way. instead this company, due to the CEO of course, instead of even just breaking the API or depreciating it instead delists the API keys that the larger apps have, don't say shit, and still have yet to figure out how to announce it or let people know that they are changing policy. this includes to the developers themselves or the users.

a direct "fuck you" to 1% of your users is a bad business policy. breaking the way that 1% of your users access your content, not giving them any info, not giving them a reason to come back (everyone i know that uses tweetbot or another app that isn't the official ones has a reason for it), and assuming they will come back to what is easily the worst of the largest social media platforms in the US* is one more bad decision in the last 12 months full of bad decisions by that dumb fuck.

*off the top of my head, TikTok, YT, Snapchat, Facebook, Insta, Reddit. I would maybe say that Reddit is almost as bad but it's not worse because i can use it the same way i use the 3rd party app i use today and still read what i want/how i want/post/etc.

Twitterrific dev posts his thoughts: https://furbo.org/2023/01/15/the-shit-show/

The Shit Show

Quote

 

What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in their ongoing shit show.

But I guess that’s what you should expect from a shitty person.

 

full text:

Spoiler

Well, it happened.

We knew it was coming.

A prick pulled the plug. And what bothers me most about it is how Space Karen did it.

My mom passed away just before Christmas. Her decline was something everyone in the family saw coming and we prepared for her demise. It still hurts like hell, but she left with love and dignity. That makes all the difference when it comes to coping with loss.

Twitterrific is something that we’ve all poured our love into for the past 16 years. I’m not usually one to toot my own horn, but we literally crafted the early experience on the service. We often hear that folks joined up because of our app. Our work was definitive and groundbreaking. We loved this app like I loved my mom.

(Note today’s date and the one on our announcement – the fuckwads missed our 16th anniversary by a couple of days! King Shithead probably thought Friday the 13th was lol. I’d love some proof that the API went down at 04:20 in UTC +1.)

Like my mom, the API has been declining for awhile. Endpoints were removed, new features were unavailable to third parties, and rate limiting restricted what we could do. And like my mom, we struggled on and did the best we could, trying to stay upbeat about it all.

What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in their ongoing shit show.

But I guess that’s what you should expect from a shitty person.

Personally, I’m done. And with a vengeance.

First, arrogant bastards love seeing their names on tweets and other media. I want to starve him of the things that money can’t buy: respect and attention. Do the same by simply ignoring him and his kingdom.

Secondly, for the past several months I’ve been thinking about where we go from here. When you see decline, you plan for a demise. It was the last thing mom taught me.

I’ve been active on Mastodon since the billionaire bozo took over. And it makes me think.

One thing I’ve noticed is that everyone is going to great lengths to make something that replaces the clients we’ve known for years. That’s an excellent goal that eases a transition in the short-term, but ignores how a new open standard (ActivityPub) can be leveraged in new and different ways.

Federation exposes a lot of different data sources that you’d want to follow. Not all of these sources will be Mastodon instances: you may want to stay up-to-date with someone’s Micro.blog, or maybe another person’s Tumblr, or someone else’s photo feed. There are many apps and servers for you to choose from.

It feels like the time is right for a truly universal timeline. That notion excites me like the first time I posted XML status to an endpoint.

One thing I remember from these early days: no one had any idea what they were doing. It was all new and things like @screen_name,  #hashtags, or RT hadn’t been invented yet. Heck, we didn’t even call them “tweets” or use a bird icon at first! The best ideas came from people using the service: all of the things mentioned above grew organically from a need.

That’s where I want to be in the future. Exploring unknown territory that empowers others and adapts to the needs of a community.

There’s no sense in clinging to the personal whims of a clown leading a shit show. Especially when his circus will end up being a $44 billion version of MySpace.

 

Edited January 16, 2023 by NoName