Mossy Character sends in:

An account on X, called "Government of East Africa", complete with a grey tick suggesting it was the real deal, released an image of a specimen note worth five sheafras, featuring a coat of arms and a space for a signature from a central bank governor.

The name sheafra was coined by combining shilling of East Africa and franc - currencies in use in the region.

The original posts from last Sunday were viewed more than a million times, going viral after being picked up by major blogs and at least one popular online media outlet in Kenya. It was reported as a launch.

The truth was still putting its shoes on as the apparent news of the single currency spread.

It turns out it was just some rando shmuck, making shit up:

Ugandan Moses Haabwa told the BBC that he wanted to offer hope to people in the region.

He is the self-styled overseer of what he calls the "Federal Republic of East Africa Government", which does not exist.

Whoopsie-daisy!

1. Sorry to be on an IG kick lately, but this is a delight:

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2. Also is anyone drowning in cicadas? I saw a wild post with photos of cicada swarms from Chicago, but I had thought it was an east coast event.

We always have cicadas, but not like the swarms in the photos I saw. What we have are LOUD and mostly out of sight. I find the noise soothing, so it's a feature and a bug.

1. Having a Rafah thread is so grim and I don't know what to say about it anyway.

2. Trump's trial is sort of boring and I hope we get a conviction, but I'm feeling very nihilistic about the effect of a conviction.

3. I'm working really hard to not let myself get stressed about the election until it's actually the fall.

Here's a collection of examples where AI search engine answers were extremely wrong.

Outside of search engine crap, I heard someone phrase it as, "AI is great at signaling genre." So much of it reads as mush. A month or so ago someone linked to an article about how the internet has become polluted with bots producing mush for other bots to consume, and I think that's a good way of putting it.

I don't doubt AI is really helpful at cranking out code and helping us trouble-shoot problems around the house. But I'm annoyed at how poorly it's getting shoved down our throats.

(On the other hand, I love learning via Instagram. I've gotten the algorithm to show me home inspection accounts, where they're pointing out what shitty construction looks like, and it's super helpful to me! Same with sewing accounts. I know roughly what I'm doing, but seeing a quick video of why someone irons at this point in garment construction is helpful.)

You know when there's a really beautiful article that does a great job pairing some visuals with the article, in a way that feels a little like a new genre? I feel like there's room for a brilliant graphic novelist to do that kind of thing with a narrative arc.

I'm picturing something halfway in between a novel and a graphic novel - my gripe with graphic novels is that you can zoom through them too quickly, and I want this to be more on a reading scale of a regular novel.

In some sense, kind of like a silent movie - interspersing footage and text - but with a couple key differences:

1. the pace must be reader-driven. The pace of a video is not reader driven. There can be scripted bits, but it would need to be very brief and cleverly done to feel seamless. My instinct is that it should be silent. (Maybe a musical score could work? I can't really read when there's music playing, though.)

2. it should be more in the category of something you curl up and read, over multiple settings, like a novel, with a narrative arc, as opposed to a TV show with extra prose, (although that might be cool, too.) A TV show or movie could be enjoyed in a group setting or individually, whereas a novel is really just an individual thing. (Maybe this is connected to the point in 1.)

3. It shouldn't be too gimmicky - if there's an interactive graphic of some sort, it should be so integral to the narrative that it's not jarring or showing off.

One problem is the number of people involved. I want a brilliant person who can be both director and writer to command a whole team into creating a brilliant new genre, and who has a genius novel/script worth carrying out.