ninety-nine

tumblr: actively removing functionality and bloating the interface with things nobody uses

discord: being retooled by ex-Meta management who don't understand the appeal of the platform

youtube: neutered by advertisers and algorithms and also tiktokification

reddit: half of the site is down due to protests about the outrageous monetization of third-party API support

Then the scientist said: “You know I worked on one of these, right?”

“What, one of the Jurassic Park movies?”

“No, like an actual Jurassic Park. Real ‘man destroys god, man creates dinosaurs’ stuff. We were going to open an actual theme park with actual dinosaurs.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’re fucking with me.”

“I’m dead serious.” Ice cubes clinked together as she flourished the glass. “Some billionaire saw the movie in the nineties and immediately started privately developing his own dinosaur theme park. It actually got pretty far into development.”

She looked into the depths of the drink. “Didn’t end well.”

On the screen, Bob Peck was talking about lysine.

“Was it velociraptors?”

She looked up, blinking away the vision she saw in the glass. “Hm?”

“Did it go bad because velociraptors?”

“Oh, no, the velociraptors actually turned out to be very sweet. If you can imagine a penguin mixed with a hawk, that’s a velociraptor. And all the tyrannosaurus wanted to do was sleep and seduce her handler.

“The problem was the brachiosaurus.”

On the screen, Samuel L. Jackson was talking about butts.

The ice cubes clinked together as she tipped her head back and finished the drink too quickly. She stared at the ice cubes as they rattled against each other.

“Did you know that cows kill an average of twenty people a year?” she asked.

“Deliberately, too. A predator will kill for food, or if it thinks you’re a threat, but mostly they don’t care about people.

“But a cow? A cow will trample you because it’s a big, dumb, territorial thing and it’s genetically designed to protect itself from predators.