I will be 70 years old and I still will never have gotten over the time the Mythbusters used a rocket powered steel wall to - and I use this word as literally as possible - vaporize an entire car into red mist
If you haven’t seen this episode of Mythbusters I feel so bad for you because “What car?” remains to this day as a defining moment of my adolescence and my entire life
That was a near-religious experience
I made a gif of it for those of you who cant watch the video in your country. Or if you know you just want to stare at it mesmerized like me
Oh wow they sure did vaporise that car into red mist
So this was the unanswered messages in my ask box a couple of days ago:
ALT
and this is the unanswered messages in my ask box today,
ALT
and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has said such nice things about the season, and I’m sorry to everyone who had emotions they weren’t expecting, and I’m impressed that so many of you have theories and don’t plan to answer, validate or really even comment on any of them, but mostly I’m just sorry because I probably won’t read whatever you’ve sent, not because I don’t want to but because if I was doing nothing but reading Tumblr asks as a full time job I still wouldn’t catch up with the thousands of asks coming in.
our new head chef Barbecue Pistol is going to rock your world with his brand new fry sauce which is a mix of ketchup and mayonnaise and a little sriracha for that pistol kick
they ask how you want your burger patty cooked, like that matters, and you say “medium well” just to provide an answer. it comes back “paleo rare” with a sniff of salt, pepper, and just a pinch of paprika, for style. $32.55
I cannot stress enough to Tumblr staff that they do not need to change the site. Do not try to be like Twitter. Do not try to be like Reddit. Do not alter how this site works.
Tumblr will be the most popular social media site if they continue letting all these other sites implode
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.