Would you happily drink a glass of milk? 🥛
➕ Ticketmaster blames bots for disrupting Taylor Swift tour sale, another mass shooting in California, & Channing Tatum and Roxanne Gay are writing a romance novel together 📚💘
Another ENORMOUS hi and virtual hug/ high five/ elbow touch to MORE hotties who are joining us from Instagram this morning!!! Lemme just quickly copy and paste how I intro’d myself yesterday for all our new besties (working smarter not harder eh?):
“Welcome to the best offshoot of the SYSCA universe (in my humble opinion) - the daily newsy. I’m Luce, I’ve been writing this thing every weekday for over a year now, trying to bring you the news without giving you the blues (and hopefully succeeding thus far.) This is the cutest and most wholesome community, and the biggest thing you need to know is that you can reply to this email and I’ll DEFINITELY read it and MOST PROBABLY reply to you - so please never hesitate to send me your thoughts/ feelings/ cute recs.”
Yesterday was another big work day, made infinitely better by finishing ‘The Man Who Died Twice,’ going for a walk and seeing some sheep, and topping off with a chilled red 🍷 and then a slightly tipsy 9pm zoom call with someone about something very exciting (god I’m getting insufferable with all my bread-crumbing aren’t I???)
A quick admin note from me - a BUNCH of you have emailed me to say that for some reason your card stopped being charged/ you got knocked off our paying subscriber list and have stopped receiving all your special bonuses! And we can’t have that!! If you think that might have happened to you, hit the button below to check that everything is all good (or flick me an email and I’ll check it out on my end.) Love you all!
New episode of Culture Vulture: all about CRINGE
Another mass shooting in California
Channing Tatum and Roxanne Gay are writing a romance novel together
Ticketmaster blames bots for disrupting Taylor Swift tour sale
Would you happily drink a glass of milk?
New episode of Culture Vulture: all about CRINGE
This week: An update on the Rust shooting, Kylie Jenner's baby name reveal, and a deep dive into cringing. What makes us cringe? Why do we cringe? Why should we embrace it? We even have some live cringing on mic - you don't wanna miss this episode!!
Another mass shooting in California
Content warning: gun violence.
California is reeling as it’s just had its third mass shooting in eight days. A man - suspected to be 67-year-old Zhao Chunli - shot dead seven former co-workers in the south of San Francisco, all of whom are reported to be Chinese-American farm workers.
I’m aware that the last three newsies have been super gun-focused, so to look after you (and me) I’m gonna stop here on this story, BUT, if you want more info, you can read it here.
Channing Tatum and Roxanne Gay are writing a romance novel together
Not the news we expected to hear on a normal Wednesday but the news we probably deserved.
It seems that Ruush took the words right outta my mouth with this paragraph:
“Naturally, this news has sent our brains into the stratosphere. Imagining Roxane Gay and Channing Tatum in a room together is especially fun, considering that in 2015 the Bad Feminist author very publicly noted for The Toast how she wanted to "hug every part of him with my mouth". Which is exactly the kind of smutty and unfiltered storytelling we want in a romance novel from the pair.”
Turns out Gay and Tatum became friends because of that very line, and decided that naturally, they should write a romance novel together (duh.) This is about all we know:
“She has almost a roughed-out outline of a story that we both love,” he says. “We just got to find time to do it. She’s the busiest, she’s way busier than I am.””
Anyway, Harry Styles, if you need a cool cultural commentator to write a novel with you at any point, you know where I am!
Ticketmaster blames bots for disrupting Taylor Swift tour sale
🎶Don’t blame me, cyber-attacks made me crazy🎶
When in doubt blame the bots eh??? Right now the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing “about the state of competition the ticketing industry.” What to expect?
“The panel is likely to focus on whether Ticketmaster has such a dominant position in the market that it did not feel the need to spend money on the sort of technological innovations that might have handled the surge of demand for Swift tickets, an assertion the company denies. The sale, in November, had widespread issues and left millions of fans angry.”
Joe Berchtold, the president and chief financial officer of Live Nation Entertainment (Ticketmaster's parent company) said (in his written testimony): “in hindsight there are several things we could have done better,” and that the biggest problem they faced was the onslaught of bots that “crowded out real fans and attacked Ticketmaster’s servers, forcing the company to pause its sales.”
He went on to say that they KNEW there would be bots, and they did plan accordingly, but this attack still resulted in them having to slow down/ pause sales. It’s a very Elon-esque thing to do, to blame the bots here, and while I have no doubt in the world that there were bots involved, it’s kinda… not the point of the anti-competitiveness trial. He did comment on that though:
“As to the larger questions of competition in the ticketing marketplace, Mr. Berchtold argued that it was greater than ever, and said that Ticketmaster had to fight to retain its business.”
This is an updating story - more on it here!
Today’s mundane poll:
As I was reading ‘The Man Who Died Twice’ yesterday, there was a bit where two of the ladies went to Antwerp (normal) and when they got there they were offered a big glass of milk (not normal.) My brothers have always loved gulping down a big glass of cow’s milk (ew) and I’ve always been grossed out by it, so I thought I’d ask you (Instagram saw it first, sorry!)
To get a whole week’s worth of final thoughts on a Friday, become a paying supporter 👀
Does chocolate milk count? 🥰
Drinking milk straight is gross and I stand by that❤️