PicoBlog

Hey. Couple quick things this week. For starters, I just wanted to make sure you were aware that this year’s big Summer of Turtles has officially kicked off. TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES ALPHA hit comic stores this week, featuring a couple stories that preview a lot of the goodness that’s to come in IDW’s new slate of TURTLE titles, including a prelude to TMNT #1 by me and the amazing art wildman Chris Burnham.

In my last post I warned readers of Drezner’s World that Twitter-That-Was had proven itself to be a shitty source of information during the last real-time international crisis, and that it was likely to be even worse with the Israel/Hamas war: “I anticipate the continued enshittification of information flows… [So] check the sources of any information about this war.” It is legitimately impressive, therefore, that Elon Musk’s flaming dung pile actually managed to prove even more toxic than I had expected.

I know I would have loved the Manet/Degas exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum if only I had been able to view the art. And I could have learned something about the dynamic—personal and artistic—between the two painters if I could have stopped to read the text on the gallery walls. Alas, though it was a late Monday morning (when I called them, the time advised by the Met itself as the best chance to avoid the crowds), the shoulder-to-shoulder sea of humans prevented both.

If you want to know something that really irritates me, it’s that Peloton, the at-home spin class company, got way more coverage for its market ups and downs after Mr. Big dropped dead on one of its bikes than Revlon did when it filed for bankruptcy protection a couple years ago. I saw this Revlon bankruptcy news maybe once on the news crawl, and never again.  Revlon, the drugstore makeup brand from the 1930s is not sexy (anymore), and because it’s not in any way associated with youthful Silicon Valley start-up culture (ahem, Peloton), it does not capture our cultural obsession.

Hi friends 👋 Welcome to Health & Wealth — your weekly source of the latest health research and biotech trends. Many of you are new here, after reading my piece on MaxCyte. Thank you so much for joining! 🤗 If you are new, you can join here and share within your network — word-of-mouth is how I grow. Feedback is encouraged and welcome. Happy reading! Continuous glucose monitors, unlike traditional blood tests like HbA1c, tell you what your glucose levels are in real-time.

O que fazer quando não conseguimos mais acompanhar o ritmo das redes sociais? Como lidar com a chuva de conteúdos e não enlouquecer no meio de tantos estímulos em forma de vídeos de poucos minutos? Não sabemos ainda qual a melhor resposta, mas decidimos escrever para organizar os pensamentos no meio desses incômodos e dividir com quem também quer construir reflexões num tempo mais lento. Antes de qualquer coisa, você precisa saber que somos três mulheres cis bastante diferentes, porém viramos amigas pois somos viciadas em pensar.

Imagine that you have won the lottery. A vast prize is yours for the claiming; a life-changing sum, ready to be deployed as you see fit. Now imagine that as you reach out for the cheque, the lottery official suddenly pulls it back. There is a catch: you have to spend the prize on housing. In fact, you have to spend it all on one particular house. You can’t sell it or rent it out, you have to live in it.

GASLIGHT, GATEKEEP, GIRLBOSS I hate the term ‘girlboss’. It feels patronising and overly simplistic. In my career, a few people have described me as a ‘girlboss’ and every time it felt like something sticky I needed to brush off before it left a stain. There’s a perception that a girlboss is something noble, a woman who has overcome the odds so she can finally tell people what to do. However, whenever I hear it, I think of the meme where Eric Andre asks Mel B if Margaret Thatcher had ‘girl power’ and, when she replies in the affirmative, responds with “do you think she effectively utilised girl power by funneling money into illegal paramilitary death squads in Northern Ireland?

Okay! Here’s my guide to social media and which of them I’m on: TWITTER Go here to be angry. If you’re not angry, don’t panic. Twitter is literally designed to show you things that will make you angry. Once you’re angry, post about your anger. It’s the only way they’ll make money! I am no longer here. FACEBOOK Same, but make sure your angry posts revolve around a lo-res meme containing wild misinformation that’s been shared way too much.