“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship. Thank you to our customers, Cameron County, and the wider community for the continued support and encouragement. And congratulations to the entire Space team on an exciting first flight test of Starship!”
— SpaceX statement 04.20.2023

“Where’s the KABOOM?
There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering KABOOM!”
— Marvin The Martian

So, I was hitting some sativa bud and banging my head on the table the other day trying to shake loose a decent France uprising cartoon, and THIS weirdness fell out. I’d given up on a France cartoon at the moment and was just doing my daily space geekery, reading about the spectacular SpaceX launch failure and the attendant “hah, I MEANT to do that” spin from SpaceX, when I found my train of thought wandering to the Twitter valuation crash and the Paid Blue Check shitshow and was suddenly, like…

…like, yeah; Musk was really laughing off the Twitter valuation and the hot mess about the paid Blue Check accounts that’s been all over the news lately, and then a day or two later another one of his goddamn Starship tests goes sideways on him and the SpaceX PAO flacks are babbling a bunch of balloon juice about how much they learned today, and it was one of those moments of inspiration and serendipity that screamed “quit twisting your panties trying to think of a France cartoon for a moment and jump on THIS shit, man! Here it is!” Like, yeah — crashing and burning, in metaphor and reality.

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After Elon Musk bought Twitter, declared it a “free speech zone”, started letting all the fascists back in and shutting down the Left, there was some understandable online rioting this week, and the predictable calls from America’s boutique anarchist media to join an exodus to Mastodon. Oh, how I laughed.

So, late last week, Apple and Google finally got off their goddamn duffs and declared that Twitter would be shut out of the Google Play and Apple App stores if the enabling of fascist hate speech and harassment was allowed to continue. Musk, at his very Muskmost, announced that he would develop his own brand of smartphone whose App Shoppe would allow Twitter.

…which basically leaves Gab and Parler in a spot, when you think about it. Now, you don’t have to go to some seedy, fringey fascist social-media site to spew your shit; you can just go to Twitter.

Sometimes these gags draw themselves.

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Continue reading "Elon Musk’s FashFone™ by PhoneX" »

So… after a week or two of stomping his little feet and threatening to hold his breath until he turned blue, spoiled rotten rich punk Elon Musk re-opened his Tesla plant in California in defiance of that state’s “stay-at-home” order, because he couldn’t stand to lose a penny of profit on his overpriced electric hot rods.

Subsequently, this past Tuesday, Sputnik International published this report on the situation headlined Tesla Workers Faced With Tough Decisions as Elon Musk Re-Opens California Factory…

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