Culture encompasses books, movies, television, music, video games, internet memes, and thousands of branches of art. And sure, culture includes the latest entertainment news too. At The Verge, we construct entry points both into the mainstream and the niche, the tentpoles and the hidden gems, to help make the most notable and discussed parts of the cultural conversation understandable and accessible to everyone.
We haven’t updated this timeline of ill-fated celebrity “creative directors” for tech companies in several years, but something about today’s calorie-free Paris Hilton / X announcement really cements my belief that we’re just reliving 2015 on the internet in every way.
In a galaxy far, far, away, jazz doesn’t exist. Instead, when you want to really blow on that horn you’re jizzing or jatzing. As AVClub recently noted, both words have technically been used to describe the musical stylings of the Star Wars universe over the years, with jizz gaining in popularity for extremely obvious reasons.
But in a recent short story collection based around Return of the Jedi characters, Max Rebo, the blue alien front man for the band that plays at Jabba the Hutt’s palace thinks back to other times he’s performed “jatz standards”. That means jatz is the official Disney-approved name for the music.
Wookiepedia, meanwhile, continues to embrace jizz.
Consumers, states, and the FTC are taking marketing claims from wellness companies more seriously — and, increasingly, there are legal consequences.
The lawsuits come as online promoters move from endorsing other companies’ products to creating and pushing their own. Meanwhile regulators are looking more closely at influencer marketing, which is expected to exceed $21 billion this year, according to an industry report.
Perhaps you’ve seen them: two girls, one wordlessly mixing a drink while the other one snacks. Why don’t they talk?
Honestly, the internet is too loud. The feed is too loud. TikTok is too loud. I’m scrolling and I just want everyone to shut the fuck up.
Turns out it’s still possible to have mystique on social media.
[The Face]
The iconic Phil Collins song has been reworked with “football centric verses” from Snoop; the all-important drums are being played by legendary touring drummer Cindy Blackman Santana. Incredible quotes from the USA Today story about the project as well:
— “Collins gave his blessing to the project once he had assurances it would not replace the “MNF” theme song – “the four notes,” as those on the creative content team call it.”
— “Snoop was responsible for seven different rap sections that take about 17 seconds total.”
— “The anthem will play before every ESPN game aside from the Week 4 London game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Atlanta Falcons (on ESPN+) because kickoff is at 9:30 a.m. ET.”
I cannot wait to hear the 17 seconds of football raps that are too hot for the AM.
Wild times on the playa.
For two decades, Google Search was the invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question.
and wondered how an unlicensed two hour film could exist when even Disney had to negotiate with Sony to use the character in films. Sony, Disney, and Marvel are all very protective of the character so it’s a surprise to see this film still live. It’s also super unusual to see a fan film of this scope outside of the Star Trek fan film community, especially as the last time a Star Trek fan film attempted a project of this high a production quality level Paramount sued the creator.
Spider-Man: Lotus’s other major problem is it was funded by a non-profit more than two years ago and immediately faced challenges after the VFX team quit due to racist remarks previously made, separately, by the lead actor and the director.
[Yahoo Entertainment]
The Internet Archive’s Great 78 project launched in 2017 and streams thousands of digitized 78rpm discs and cylinder recordings for free. Now music labels, including Universal, Sony, and Concord, are suing, citing 2,749 sound-recording copyrights they say it’s infringed and pointing to the Music Modernization Act of 2018 (via Reuters).
They’re pursuing damages of up to $412 million, while the Archive is also battling book publishers in court over its National Emergency Library program.
For more information on the Music Modernization Act, check out this episode of The Vergecast.
In this episode of Andscape’s Rap Stories podcast series, David Dennis and Curren$y recap the “blog era” of rap music that existed in the late ‘00s by pinpointing exactly why it was so relatable.
There are other podcasts specifically dedicated to this period, but the Smoking Section alum and Pilot Talk artist are more qualified than most to talk about what it was like.
Apollo app developer Christian Selig dropped new wallpaper art of a cute hybrid of Clippy and the Reddit alien today.
Selig has been hawking fun wallpapers for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS via the Apollo app since Reddit started down a dark path of hostile changes earlier this year and Selig shuttered the popular third-party Reddit client. He’s also selling the wallpapers outside the app.
And the German flag apparently expanded to fill the new space within under three minutes. How did they do it? According to Redditor HellsOnWheels45, a Discord server with 50,000 users in active coordination.
Also, protest messages have made a comeback on r/place after largely disappearing by Friday evening, with more “fuck spez’ messages near the center of the canvas.
What if we made the Internet Archive the real internet and let the machines have Google?
This wouldn’t solve the online shopping problem, and it would make it hard to read the newspapers. But if you wanted to learn about something by looking it up online, you could do it just like you used to. The browser would have a search engine that actually searched its contents, and if you clicked on a result from it, it would take you to the earliest version of the page. A little slider, like on Google Earth, could move you through subsequent versions.
[indignity.substack.com]
Wiby, a search engine that only indexes the most basic of webpages, gives you something Google is almost completely unwilling to these days: websites made by regular people.
Wiby’s “surprise me” page redirects you to a random web 1.0-style site (via Hacker News). So far, among others, I’ve encountered a site devoted to retro tech, a shareware capture the flag game, and Sixties City, which proudly proclaims it’s a British website.
Perhaps reacting to Threads’ 100 million user milestone, Elon Musk tweeted today that “cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime... may hit an all-time record this week.” He noted that stat, “as reported by iOS & Android, is hardest to game.”
Anyway, here’s a probably-unrelated video.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted a graph to both Threads and Twitter today (Cloudflare’s communications VP Daniella Vallurupalli confirmed it was him) showing what he says is Twitter’s DNS ranking from January to now.
It’s, uh, not a great story!
Twitter alternative Threads, meanwhile, has been growing explosively — it’s less than three million from the 100 million user mark. It debuted on Wednesday.
Windows Central shows you how to get the Threads app installed using Windows Subsystem for Android, a feature that allows you to install and use Android apps on your Windows 11 machine.
Threads, sort of a spin-off of Instagram that wants to be the new Twitter, reached 95 million users overnight after less than a week, wildly outpacing other, similar clones.
