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The Independent Variable

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Channel 5 Gave Hunter Biden a List of Its Subscribers’ Emails for Some Reason

Channel 5, the YouTube channel hosted by Andrew Callaghan, said it gave a list of its email subscribers to Hunter Biden, the former president’s son, who went on to promote his new memecoin, a move that a data privacy expert told 404 Media is likely illegal in some jurisdictions.

Callaghan and Channel 5 have surprisingly done some good reporting and interesting interviews—much to my surprise—and I was starting to respect it, but this is just dumb. And I was also enjoying the spicy takes from Hunter Biden and then to turn around and launch a memecoin? What are we doing people?!

Meat proxy

A person who forwards AI-generated text, code, or other output without reading, understanding, or validating it. The person acts only as a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient.

A little late on this one as it’s travelled across the interwebs and back already, but I felt like it needed to be preserved here as well.

South Park Shares a Cheeky, Trump-Inspired Name Change Ahead of Season 29

“Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of ‘South Park’ to ‘South America,’” Parker and Stone said in a statement. “We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount — a Skydance Capitulation.”

South America is some Grade-A marketing, which is no surprise from these guys. I know they’ve always pushed boundaries, but I absolutely love that they’ve ratcheted things up over the last few years.

Sources page

Been working on some small refinements around here despite the fact it has been a ghost town for the last month or so as we pushed out a couple print books at Foofaraw.

Colors, interactions, and more have been updated along with the linked Sources page that shows a grid of all the places we've linked to.

I have a few more ideas I still want to get to, but I'll save those until I'm actually a bit more active around these parts.