There’s an achievement for shooting Hitler in the balls IIRC.

I saw a Curly Wurly in a shop the other day, and they’re now a pale imitation of what they were.

It’s a weird thing to think about, but in a ship-of-Theseus sort of way a lot of the products we grew up with don’t really exist anymore. By that I mean, if it’s half the size and made of different ingredients then the Mars Bar as it was introduced has effectively been discontinued. There’s just some other, crappier knock-off being sold under the same name now.

As an introverted night person I really feel this lol. Also society absolutely does not respect any deviation from this. I actually tried it once a few years ago, I was out of work temporarily but I had enough savings that I was okay for a few months, so for the first month I just decided to recharge. Part of that was keeping to my natural sleep cycle, which is to wake up sort of late-morning-early afternoon and then stay up late to like 4-5 in the morning.

I had no work pressure to be up early, so it was only social. I told all my close friends I was doing this, and I was putting my phone on Do Not Disturb while I was asleep, so in the mornings I was essentially unreachable. Almost every single one of them said “Oh yeah no worries” and almost every single one of them ignored it completely and I’d wake up with a bunch of missed calls and texts. Some of them got properly mad. Someone called me and I didn’t answer so they came over and started knocking on the door. None of it was for anything important, all of them were told I was going to be asleep.

It’s the same for working from home. People just show up wanting to hang out as if you have the day off, or ask you to watch their kid or whatever. Same thing, you can say to them “I am working at my job, if I was in an office would you show up there for this?” And they’ll say they understand, then a week or so later it’s back to the same thing.

I realize this makes my friends sound horrible lol. They’re not, I just meant to illustrate that society in general is really weird about anything that doesn’t fit in the normal boundaries.

I remember saying at the time that the lockdown was basically the world flipping from Extrovert World to Introvert World temporarily, and as an introvert who essentially has to live permanently in Extrovert World it was wild to see how quickly and utterly the extroverts fell apart when they had to exist in Introvert World even for a short while. And it wasn’t just like “oh they’re unhappy.” It felt legit dangerous, they were ready to burn it all to the ground.

Or alternatively, not pay £85,000 to wash some paint off a brick wall?

That’s good to know! It could also be because I just switched over, so it doesn’t have enough reference yet for what I’m listening to.

Not to be a doomer, but I don’t really expect it to ever fully recover. I can’t really think of any other times in history when an Empire started to nose-dive like this and managed to fully get back to where it was TBH.

Kimberly-Clark apparently.

In November 2025, Kimberly-Clark announced it would buy Tylenol producer Kenvue for $48.7 billion. The deal would add the Aveeno, Band-Aid, Benadryl, Benylin, Calpol, Carefree, Clean & Clear, Combantrin, Imodium, Listerine, Motrin, Mylanta, Neutrogena, Nicorette, Johnson’s Baby, Sudafed, Visine, and Zyrtec brands to the company’s portfolio.

But also…

Kimberly-Clark shares are mainly held by institutional investors (The Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street Corporation, and others).

So make of that what you will.

I bailed on YouTube a few years ago. I had a video with a very clearly public domain piece of music (both the song and the performance) in it, which I didn’t monetize just because I hate ads and the channel wasn’t very popular anyway. Some bot flagged the public domain song for copyright and YouTube not only gave me a copyright strike but also added paid ads into my video without my consent so they could send the ad money to whoever it was that flagged it.

I didn’t even bother to contest that one, I just deleted my entire channel and sent them a very angry message telling them to go fuck themselves lol.

I will never use them again because of that, and I’m so glad I got out before AI became a thing. Fuck YouTube.

I wonder if it could be that the AI trains on popular content, meaning AI slop sometimes looks like Kurzgesagt because it’s ripping it off, which means the slop filter learns to recognize the original content that got ripped off as slop…?

Yeah I switched over to Tidal and I like it so far. The music quality is good and there’s just a simple toggle in settings to turn off anything to do with AI.

The recommendations aren’t as good as Spotify’s but I’d rather deal with that than a barrage of AI bullshit.

That was my thought too lol, this is essentially my job but with better pay and benefits.

I always think it’s weird when they say nobody could write 10 pages or whatever without AI. I write for a living and grew up before all of this (I didn’t have the internet until I was a teenager) and under the right conditions (IE a good amount of caffeine and people leave me alone) I can write 10,000 words in a single sitting lol.

I’ve been saying for a while that having AI make art for you is basically the same as a commission. When you commission a painting, you describe what you want, someone else paints it for you and gives it to you for money. Same sort of thing here, except shittier because no artist gets paid. But the same end result - you might own the end result, but you didn’t create it.

“Who’s up for some gaslighting tonight!”

It also kind of made the villains seem a bit daft. The rule seemed to be red sun = no powers, green sun = kills her, yellow sun = super powers and the main villain seemed to be pretty powerful no matter where he was, and they establish early on that there are lots of red sun planets where people live, so literally just hide out anywhere without a yellow sun and you’re 100% safe?

I think that’s kind of the main issue with any character that has Superman-level powers, they’re so OP that it sort of limits what you can do to keep the story interesting. You basically have:

• Try to make the powers irrelevant and embroil them in a complicated psychological/moral issue (great if it works but difficult to pull off and not especially visually interesting for a superhero movie.)

• Create an enemy with the same power level as them (then you just basically have two invincible characters bouncing off each other and smashing everything around them (visually interesting but essentially no stakes.)

• Have them lose their powers in some convoluted way and then get them back at the climax of the movie to do an ass-kicking scene (which seems to be the default.)

I think it’s the same problem that The Boys TV show had - at first there was kind of a tension about them just being normal people and Homelander being so powerful that he could hear their heartbeats from half a mile away and level the entire city they were hiding in if he knew they were there, but the longer it went on the more preposterous it got that he hadn’t just squished them yet. Especially when the show has them meet face-to-face multiple times and he either lets them go because reasons or they escape somehow.

It was a weird one I thought. It has all the good elements I like - a sort of grungy vibe, ass-kicking woman protagonist, kill-all-sex-traffickers central theme - but somehow it was also kind of boring? I’m not entirely sure how they managed to pull that off TBH.

I genuinely don’t understand why printers are so shit. Like we have a 3D printer that looks like a pile of bolts put together by a drunk person (which is was) that creates pretty much any object you tell it to with seemingly no trouble at all. And those are a relatively recent invention. Meanwhile, the 2D printer has decades of advanced technology behind it and looks like a sleek white sci-fi cube, it’s only job is to put words on a fixed-size sheet of paper (the thing that the Gutenberg press was doing in the 1400s) and it fucks it up about 60% of the time.