xkcd still has the best approach to this; four random common words

This is great + well-deserved, plus it has the side benefit of making some of the world’s worst people really, really mad.

Vonnegut wasn’t a Too Good For This recluse like Pynchon or Salinger or whoever, and the content of his books made him fairly well insulated against charges of being a sellout; they probably offered him a bunch of money and he shrugged and said sure.

The tourist-y parts of it are pretty much all newly rebuilt anyway; there’s not much of the original wall left at Mutianyu or Simatai or wherever.

Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don’t forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.

Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.

I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.

(I think the reality is that they’re mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)

And one of them married Meghan Markle

Can I get a ‘fuck spez’

Can’t wait until my King Arthur AI-Generated Flour turns out to be a 5 pound bag of uncut cocaine.

This is wonderful. Churches are one place where the 1st Amendment is so mighty that even the current Supreme Court would be reluctant to weaken it for the sake of politics; they can teach whatever they like and Ron DeSantis can’t do a damn thing about it, and I hope they take full advantage of that.

(Perhaps some progressive white churches might join them in teaching about Black history and gender issues and other stuff students are no longer allowed to learn about in school)

One thing that would go a long way in helping with that would be if we improved the quality of urban schools / parks to the point where fewer people felt like they had to move to the suburbs to start families.

This would be funnier if it were a sentence where a : would also change the meaning.

I hope they make it - snow leopards seem to be in the gray area in between endangered species which humans can + will spare no expense to keep alive, like pandas and kakapo, and endangered species that are almost certainly done for, like the Vaquita and the Javan rhinoceros.

Yeah, Bribercutter has really gone downhill since the NYT acquisition

That moment in Hades when after innumerable long-ass treks through the underworld you think you’ve finally beaten Hades and then it turns out now you have to beat super-Hades…

It’s about ads. The great thing about putting videos on YouTube is that Google does the work of selling ad slots for you, the not-so-great thing is that because those advertisers are actually Google’s customers, if they think they might be upset to see their ad running in your video, they’ll err on the side of pulling it.

But I daresay if Russell Brand had advertisers working with him directly, most of them would also be suspending their relationships with him right now; nobody wants anything to do with this sort of allegation.

“Hammerskins” sounds like a bunch of guys who hang around smashing each other’s genitals with hammers

So this is why Elon is suddenly more upset than usual about bots

So we’re currently at the ‘apology that actually makes things worse’ phase, which means just a few more days until ‘unconditional surrender but even so nobody will ever trust you again’

Sure, but nevertheless they’re burning a lot more coal than they would be if they hadn’t pointlessly shut down their nuclear plants.

“We were able to grow enough soybeans to replace half of the whale meat we were eating, but we can’t replace the other half yet because even though we have plenty of lentils, we hate lentils and don’t want to eat them anymore”