The Perfect Crime

From Defector:

The Justice Department announced today they’d arrested the two people behind the 2016 Bitfinex hack and recovered 94,636 of the 119,754 bitcoins stolen in the heist. That haul is currently valued at more than $3.6 billion, making it the largest financial seizure in United States history.

One of the actual crimes the pair of alleged masterminds are accused of committing is money laundering, which is somewhat redundant given, again, that we are dealing with cryptocurrency. In this case, the feds say Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan successfully laundered 21 percent of their bitcoin plunder through a number of labyrinthine pathways, including setting up fake accounts, swapping BTC for gold, and buying a bunch of PlayStation and WalMart gift cards. The feds found the unlaundered 79 percent just, uh, sitting in Lichtenstein’s cloud storage account, which they pretty easily recovered after getting a search warrant.

Morgan bills herself as a “Surrealist Artist, Rapper” and “Forbes writer” performing under the stage name Razzlekhan. 

“Just like her fearless entrepreneurial spirit and hacker mindset, Razz shamelessly explores new frontiers of art, pushing the limit of what’s possible. Whether that leads to something wonderful or terrible is unclear; the only thing that’s certain is it won’t be boring or mediocre.”

Um… right. The interwebs are having a field day with her terrible rapping. You were warned.

Still One Of The Funniest Things I’ve Ever Seen

As usual, I rely on Wikipedia to fill in the gaps …

Korgoth of Barbaria is a pilot episode for what was originally planned as an American adult animated television series created by Aaron Springer, a storyboard artist, writer and director for Dexter’s Laboratory, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Samurai Jack, and SpongeBob SquarePants, who previously created another failed pilot at Cartoon Network Studios called Periwinkle Around the World. He would later go on to produce Billy Dilley’s Super-Duper Subterranean Summer for Disney XD. Genndy Tartakovsky, creator of Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack, directed the animation for the pilot. This was not the only time he worked on a pilot created by Springer, as Tartakovsky also produced and directed Periwinkle Around the World.

It was first aired in the United States on June 3, 2006, at 12:30 AM (EST) on Adult Swim. On June 18, Adult Swim ran a bumper announcing that Korgoth of Barbaria was officially picked up as a series, because of its critical and commercial success with garnering high ratings. Later events, including a formal petition to revive the show and an Adult Swim bumper announcement mentioning its cancellation, indicate that it was dropped before production began due to high production costs.

I’m Not Your Crypto Tool You Tool

Hopefully no one here watches the sportsballs, as recently you would have seen this ad ad nauseum.

Periodically I enjoy trying to make sense of speculative digital currency, most of it not even underpinned by scarcity. It makes my brain hurt.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFT – sounds like electronica I’m too old to fathom.

And apparently it’s terrible for the environment: a single Bitcoin transaction consumes the same amount of power that an average American home uses in a month.

Twitter, please roast this clown:

I can just not stop laughing that Matt Damon’s pitch for crypto is “Be like a brave explorer, invest your life savings in crypto.”

This commercial where Matt Damon compares buying $5 in ElonAssCoin to the Wright Brothers inventing flight or astronauts exploring space really hypes me up!

Shit

ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill has hopped the twig at 72.

And holy cow, I don’t think I’ve seen this video in 35 years.

New (Old) Descendents!

According to an excellent Rolling Stone article from May …

Last year, in the middle of pandemic lockdown, Milo Aukerman got a unique opportunity: the chance to sing a handful of songs that he never even knew existed from the back catalog of the Descendents, the pioneering California punk outfit he’s fronted on and off for more than 40 years.

Dating from the first few years after the band’s 1977 formation, the songs — along with many that Aukerman did perform after he joined in 1980 — will finally see release this summer on 9th & Walnut, a newly completed album named after the Long Beach intersection where they practiced early on. A history lesson for Aukerman, the project will be even more so for fans, who have never before had the chance to chart how the Descendents progressed from the jangly, New Wave–influenced sound of their 1979 debut single (“Ride the Wild” b/w “It’s a Hectic World,” recorded by the trio of guitarist Frank Navetta, bassist Tony Lombardo, and drummer Bill Stevenson) to the caffeinated melodic hardcore of their first releases with Aukerman, 1981’s Fat EP and 1982’s Milo Goes to College.

Full article here. Full album, which just came out yesterday, is embedded above as a playlist. Happy Friday, bastards!