2026 Golden State Valkyries
114 · 2026-05-15 · medium
"Tunisian Spotify?" I asked incredulously. "What in the damn hell is that?" He smiled, adjusted the espresso cup in its saucer, then spread his hands wide as if holding an invisible globe. "It's Spotify." A skilled comedian's beat, exactly 2.156 seconds long. "But it's Tunisian." First, my friend explained, you send your credentials and twenty USDC stablecoins to some guy's WhatsApp. When the stranger accesses your Spotify account, you'll receive a login alert that's all in Arabic. While you're changing your password, you'll notice you've been credited with a full prepaid year of Premium. I was extremely suspicious of everything about this, just as you'd be. On the other hand, I had nothing to lose except for a decade of curated playlists and relevant algorithmic suggestions... but I was planning on dropping the service anyway, because they just raised the monthly price by 33 percent and pulled all annual gift certificates off the market. Okay bro, count me in. All I had to do was convince my partner, because it's a Duo account. "What's Tunisian Spotify?" she asked incredulously. "It's Spotify," I replied, trying to sound street-confident. "But it's Tunisian." We had another one of our arguments. She reminded me that our radio station's weekly rotation playlist is attached to it, but I finally convinced her that this was an okay, low-risk idea. (Most last-place teams win one out of three.) I drew a deep breath, blockchained the coinz, zapped over the username and password, and waited patient. Three hours later, the login alert email arrived in RTL text, and I didn't know how to read it. While I was changing the password, there it was. Your Premium access expires in May 2027. As I began to explore Tunisian Spotify, I immediately noticed what was no longer there. No autoplay video podcasts. No "X the DJ", no "Your Morning Daylist" with a fake morning zoo, no "Prompted Playlist (Beta)". No popup recommendations for Joe Rogan or Taylor Swift, even though I've clicked on the "not interested" thumbs-down icon at least five hundred times. But most surprisingly – most refreshingly, shockingly, thankfully – all the auto-generated, auto-tuned, zero-royalty songs in My Favorite Genres that Liz Pelly explains in Mood Machine had vanished due to region restrictions. Gone baby gone. Anyway, basketball. The 30th season of the Women's National Basketball Association has begun, and it's time to get excited. There was no free weeklong preview of WNBA League Pass this year, but that meant there was no giant CarMax bug in the upper right corner. While I was watching Phoenix play Golden State the other night, I noticed that over half of Ballhalla's in-arena ads were for artificial intelligence bubble products, because Bay Area duh. The Valkyries have an official AI legal services partner, but I'm sure they'll solve that caselaw hallucination problem by 2050 or so, amirite? If my life depended on getting into an autonomous taxi, I would take the gunman's weapon from out of their hand, and then I'd shoot myself with it. The AI garbage generated by Silicon Valley is made especially for American audiences, that's who's going to pay the data center bills, and that's who's going to get a faceful of AI-dvertising in their sports for the foreseeable future. If you're among the 80 percent of TMM readers who currently reside in the United States, you're the lab rat. "Did Spotify just get better all of a sudden?" she asked me yesterday. "Yes, dear," I replied. "It's Tunisian now."
