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.

On the total stranger thing: last time I moved we got everything in except for a mattress. There were three of us and we couldn’t get it up the stairs. Some random man was walking by and saw us, offered to help and then just hauled the mattress up the stairs by himself and was like “have a good one” and carried on with his day lol.

This is pretty much how it works in Canada too. It can be a bit of a pain (especially if someone is moving in winter) but it’s just one of those camaraderie things you do. If you’re gonna move you let your friend group know, and you can pretty much rely on about 60-75% of them showing up to help, and in return you feed and beer them. Then when someone else is moving you do the same for them.

If you have a good excuse you can sometimes skip one, but if you never show up (especially if other people have already helped you move) that’s very bad. Nobody will say anything, but the group remembers.

I have Arch (btw) on my laptop which is the tinkering machine that only I use, and a Win10/Linux dual-boot desktop which is the one other people use that I’m not allowed to break. I had Fedora Silverblue on there originally because I figured it would be pretty stable, but it honestly gave me nothing but trouble. I switched that one over to CachyOS and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

I don’t know how many years I was on there but I was pretty active. The combo of killing 3rd party apps and selling everyone’s comments to AI was what made me nuke my account.

Elon Musk’s father said publicly that Elon was a bad parent, and at least one of his children seems to openly despise him.

Humanity’s relationship with producing energy continually blows my mind, and it’s one of the main things that makes me think that maybe we do live in a simulation.

We discovered fossil fuel energy, which was fine for a bit to kick off the industrial revolution, but obviously is super harmful in the long term. Then just as it was starting to become a problem, the universe went “okay, here’s this magic rock that just gives off energy, you can use that to generate massive amounts of power with no carbon.” And we just went “nah.”

So then, the universe is like, “alright then, how about this: you can just get it from the sun, the air and water. Again no carbon and it’s infinite free energy forever, you’re welcome.” And again, we were like “no we want to just burn fossils.” Even now at the ecosystem is visibly collapsing around us we’re adopting it somewhat, but still dragging ass on it like crazy.

It’s like whoever’s running the simulation keeps dropping the difficulty level to help us not die, and we just won’t accept it. I fully expect in the next century or so we’ll figure out cold fusion, build like two plants and humanity will just collectively go “BORING” and dig up more coal again.

No, it’s not entirely awful. There are awful things in it for sure, but there are also amazing things, which is how it’s always been.

People growing up today live under the threat of climate change, fascism, rampant inequality etc. These threats are real. But there’s a lot of good stuff happening too - crime rates are falling constantly, and we’re on the verge of some big medical breakthroughs such as being able to treat cancer with CRISPR and Oncolytic viruses to give a couple of examples. We might be about to double the lifespan of cats.

Every generation grows up under some sort of threat - nuclear annihilation in the 80s, WW2 before that, WW1 before that etc. Mad kings, dictators, plagues, wars… you’re dealt the hand you’re dealt. But everything is cyclical - fascism flares up and then gets squashed, the economy booms and busts, politics swings right, then left again. Because of that, sometimes the cycles line up so that a few things suck at once. But nothing is permanent.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

• Ursula Le Guin

That’s not to say everything will be fine, or that we’re doomed. Most likely some people who don’t deserve it will suffer and die, some people who don’t deserve it will live charmed and privileged lives and learn nothing, and some people will just be fine. As it has always been.