gooby woobies

utilising the gift of imagination to hallucinate moments of tenderness between fictional people

They’re about to break so many laws it’s not even funny, I can feel it in my bones

Finding out that Elon Musk was forced out as CEO of PayPal in favor of noted vampire Peter Thiel bc Elon Musk was adamant they keep it named "X dot com" instead of Paypal unlocks so much. His space company, his literal child, and now Twitter: it's the world's most inane Rosebud. He actually bought back the URL, like a cherished childhood sled (owning the right to name a website the letter "X")

Some people told him it made more sense to have their banking company have a indicative name instead of generically being called "X" with vague allusions to being The Site For Everything, and he'll prove those fools WRONG by getting the same things yelled at him over a different website's name twenty years later

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

• Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
• The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
• The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
• The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
• Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
• The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
• Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
• He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Edit to add further developments:

• Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
• Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
• The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
• The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
• The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.
• TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
• This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".
• This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")
• X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
• Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
• The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
• One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
• Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.

adobe is actively pushing to make art styles intellectual property covered under copyright law and artists online are doing shit like this

you guys are all so fucked like you dont even understand what youre doing do you seriously think this is in your favour for the love of god hello am i alone in this world. youre leading yourself to the slaughter

CGI animators should unionize next. normally, their jobs would be too precarious to strike, since studios would replace them without a second thought, but if it's part of this larger general film strike, they might finally have meaningful power to better their working conditions

the switch successor will be as powerful as 2 switches duct-taped together

They’re about to break so many laws it’s not even funny, I can feel it in my bones

🚨⚠️ATTENTION FELLOW WRITERS⚠️🚨

If you use Google Docs for your writing, I highly encourage you to download your work, delete it from Google Docs, and transfer it to a different program/site, unless you want AI to start leeching off your hard work!!!

I personally have switched to Libre Office, but there are many different options. I recommend checking out r/degoogle for options.

Please reblog to spread the word!!

MY GOD WHAT HAVE I FOUND XD

I'm not sorry for having you know this exists XD

You know that study that found when doing a blind taste test the majority of people prefer pepsi over coca cola so coke changed their recipe to taste more like pepsi, and people actually liked the new coke a lot less because the people who were buying coke didn't want it to taste like pepsi they wanted their coke to taste like coke. That's what a lot of the new changes tumblr is working on feel like.

seeing people casually talking about spending $30,000 on a wedding makes me feel a special kind of nauseous when every single person i know has to debate if $40 on ordering pizza is worth it

"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.