Nancy Pelosi has more Pride wristbands than she knows what to do with

While Cydney is on a well-earned vacation, the rest of the Gazetteer SF team was around this week, mainlining IRL events and URL content to bring you the latest trends, rumors, spottings, and discourse from the internet and beyond. This week: Peter Thiel’s Chess.com account leaks, Nancy Pelosi’s old merch resurfaces, and Meta attempts (yet again) to make their surveillance glasses chic.

The bots are based

Despite all the doom and gloom about chatbots’ willingness to inject extremist rot into our collective brain, another study has found that AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and even Elon Musk’s Grok on average cite “left-leaning arguments” more frequently than “right-leaning” positions on hot-topic political issues. A new Washington Post report suggests that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the most lefty of the offerings (welcome to the revolution, Comrade Altman), whereas Google’s Gemini usually offers takes from “both sides” despite leaning liberal overall. The results affirmed previous research but again ignited discourse on social media and in the media (see: the New York Post hyperventilating about chatbots being in the Democratic Socialists of America). Back in 2023, Elon Musk pledged to take “immediate action” to change Grok’s outputs after research found its left bias. So much for that! —Eddie Kim

Pelosi’s old Pride merch is new again

The annual Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ annual pride breakfast distributed free rainbow colored wristbands with Nancy Pelosi’s signature stenciled in white. They were neatly stacked on each table, presumably enough for all 550 guests. It is unclear how old the bands are, but they’ve been in circulation since at least 2017. (Pelosi famously wore them when she made a cameo on RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2018, and then again at a Washington Nationals Pride night in 2023.) Pelosi, who spoke at the event, didn’t mention the merch, which proved oddly unpopular. Most guests left them untouched. Maybe audience members were too absorbed by the lineup of electeds who spoke at the breakfast, a list that included Xavier Becerra, Alex Padilla, and Daniel Lurie. Perhaps rainbow wristbands are passé. Pelosi, after all, was wearing them a decade ago. Either way, as staff members at the Hyatt Regency on the Embarcadero cleaned up after the breakfast, the wristbands represented a missed opportunity: Someone is currently selling one on eBay for $25. —Joel Rosenblatt

A gay blast from the past

The incredibly named Pride party Bitch Planet: Barbazon was this weekend, and in a sea of chic techno and house DJs was a beacon of delightfully tacky ‘90s kitsch: The Vengaboys have come to San Francisco!!! Yes, the Vengaboys of “We Like to Party! (The Vengabus)” and “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!” and at least a half-dozen other songs that have gathered dust in your mind palace were the headlining act. The Dutch four-piece, dressed in outfits themed like the A-Team if they slayed, said that they hadn’t performed in San Francisco since 1999. They were a blast, a mix of pep-rally motivational speaker and wedding party-starter. If Pelosi’s merch was a pre-Trump relic, consider this a dispatch from the pre-Dubya era. —Joshua Bote

HBD, I guess

Happy birthday to Elon Musk, who turned 55. His choice of cake — shaped like a rocket and a moon base — makes him the coolest kid in the fifth grade. (Also, kind of sad that his mom made an AI-generated photo of him blowing out his candles instead of just taking a photo.) —Joshua Bote

A tastemaker sweetens up to Zuck 

In related douchey cake news, stylist and chef Laila Gohar made a large cake installation for the recent Meta event on Friday at Manhattan’s Terminal Warehouse, once the home to legendary ‘90s nightclub Tunnel. (It seems this once-cool venue for sex, drugs, and live music has met a similarly corporatized fate as San Francisco’s Armory.) Gohar, an Egyptian-born New Yorker, has made a career out of her good taste, which she articulates through regular contributions to the Financial Times and in her recently-opened Lower East Side storefront, Gohar World. At Gohar’s installation, dubbed the “cherry galaxy room,” guests donned the latest surveillance technology and recorded their own hands shakily decorating small cakes. Fans were disappointed to see the dynamic artist collecting a paycheck from Evil Incorporated. (Did Gucci not pay enough?) —Olivia Peluso

Peter Thiel’s not getting any better at chess

Two weeks ago, an intrepid chess player checkmated Peter Thiel on a Chess.com match, then analyzed Thiel’s history of tactical habits stretching back into the 1990s. What Tuck Gessner discovered was that Thiel, dubbed a former “chess prodigy” in credulous media profiles, had been playing the same crappy amateur moves for decades. Thiel is a specialist in blitz chess, a popular timed game mode, with a sturdy Elo rating of 2158. However, a Gazetteer investigation (okay, I opened my Chess.com app) discovered that he is just 8-12 in his last 20 games. Shocking stuff! In a 2007 interview with Fortune, Thiel claimed that he chose to not become a stronger player due to the “alternate reality” of chess creating “massive tradeoffs with success in other domains in life.” Oh brother, just learn how to counter the Stafford gambit! —Eddie Kim

The week ahead: Elon Musk learns to bake out of desperation for a more aesthetic layer cake