The Leather And Lace Expanded Hanky Code, Distributed By Leather And Lace (a Women's Club Founded In

The Leather and Lace Expanded Hanky Code, distributed by Leather and Lace (a women's club founded in 1983) and preserved by the Leather History Museum.

Like most women's lists of the era, Leather & Lace's list is based off the Samois code: a half dozen colors make its origins unmistakable. What makes this list so significant is how long it is - and how (unlike the Eagle's list ten years earlier) many of its colors still feature in the online master lists you can find online today.

The influence is, honestly, outsized, and leaves me with more questions than answers. Was there a third-party list that Leather & Lace drew off of? Or did the online master lists drawing heavily on L&L? Either way, this list feels like it casts a long historic shadow.

Dark pink (tit torture), fuschia (spanking), leopard (inked), charcoal (latex), and gold (threesomes) are all listed with their now-standard meanings. Dark pink is especially significant to me, because its coexistence with pink (breast fondling) complicates my theory that it evolved out of the Samois code.

Light green (humiliation/verbal abuse) is also listed with what I understand to be its modern meaning, which is impressive because it isn't included in most big online lists. I have no idea where you'd find a light green bandana, but if you want to flag (or be made to flag, you disgusting little freaks) for your degradation kink in public, you know what to shop for.

Dark red (dildos), listed here for the first time, fills an obvious hole (ahem) in the Samois list. At some point dark red shifted in meaning to double fisting and dildos were assigned to pink, but it apparently wasn't until after 1983.

As is often the case in early lists, L&L includes a number of flags that didn't take off. Silver lamé (psychological dominance), black lace (branding), gold lamé (cutting), enema nozzles (take a wild guess), chamois (bikers), black and white stripes (in an open relationship), saran wrap (voyeur/exhibitionist), and teddy bears (cuddles) are all unique to Leather & Lace, but it's interesting that several of those colors have since been repurposed and now have different meanings attached. Again, no idea if L&L introduced these themselves or adapted them from an already existing list.

While we're talking hapax legomena, red and black stripes makes Leather and Lace the first list I've seen to include something repeatedly reinvented by women, never codified (I flag it with red paisley on black), and very hot: vampire kink. Stay winning, ladies!

What’s better than a vampire? What’s better than a horse. A Vampire Horse, of course. I made this comic a few months ago.

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.

ITS LIZARD FASHION MONDAY

ancient greek word of the day: κακοθερής (kakotherēs), unfitted to endure summer heat

“…You had to be able to show too much of yourself. You had to be just a little bit more honest than you were comfortable with. And if people judged you, if they felt they knew who you were, that was just something that you were going to have to live with. And what was strange is, once I started doing that, and I was expecting to be judged, or shunned, or people’s opinions or to have to deal with things, what I discovered was, actually, their opinions were, we really like this. We love this story. That’s a good story. It felt huge. It felt personal. And I realized that’s because I was being honest about me.“ —Neil Gaiman