When Statler And Waldorf Go After You For Your Life Choices, You Seriously Need To Sit Down And Have

When Statler and Waldorf go after you for your life choices, you seriously need to sit down and have a rethink.

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.

Ask a community organiser: can you organise with Fran Drescher as president of SAG-AFTRA even though she's an antivaxxer? On broad based organising versus issue based organising.

Good afternoon!

With all of the strikes happening, I had a question about audio books. Spotify is suggesting the full cast audio book version of Good Omens to me. In regards to paying you as a writer and everyone who provided their voice, are there certain streaming services fans should use/avoid?

As long as you're paying for the service, writers get compensated on Audible or Spotify or Scribd or Libby. And nobody is on strike against audiobooks.

just a reminder that you do not know the names of most of the people in SAG-AFTRA. They are not multi-millionaire A-Listers, not even beloved D-listers with a cult following. They are ordinary people struggling to make a living, living paycheck to paycheck just like the majority of WGA members. The push for SAG to strike was from the bottom up and that is who we have to thank for this moment of entertainment labor solidarity.

Donate to the Entertainment Community Fund to support those striking, as well as teamsters and IATSE members affected by the strikes

“We can’t find any work orders done for this particular tree trimming, which is problematic because in Southern California we have a lot of laws governing trees,” he said. “Normally, you don’t trim until October, and in fact, the exact same style and type of tree about 200 feet this way are not trimmed. But those aren’t providing shade to the picketers, are they?” [said]  Konstantine Anthony, a SAG-AFTRA member and the Democratic mayor of nearby Burbank.

Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman, whose district includes Universal City, said in a statement that no permits had been issued for tree trimming at the site. City Controller Kenneth Mejia said his office was investigating the issue.

source: Associated Press via The Canadian Press