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

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)

The good news is that Iceland won’t have to go around apologizing for its name anymore.

Mostly in the northwest but yeah - 95 sightings this year, you can even track them on a map on the DEEP website.

They mentioning Maine up in here

A Møøse once bit my sister…

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.

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.

Aren’t those supposed to be surprisingly tasty + a potential new industry if we can get restaurants to start serving them?

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

It’s like in Good Will Hunting when Matt Damon tells Robin Williams he thinks he’s one step from cutting his ear off and Williams responds by asking if he should move to the south of France and change his name to Vincent, because obviously most moviegoers are too dumb to get the original joke.

Wasn’t that the hospital?

Uh, you ever see the movie Misery?

Actually, no.

Then this’ll all be new to you.

I don’t work for anybody, and I don’t know what list of talking points you think I’m repeating other than the specific assertion that Germany shouldn’t have shut down its nuclear plants.

I could just as well accuse you of astroturfing for the coal power lobby.

But since you’re accusing me of being a shill anyway: yes, nuclear power is clean and safe and our refusal to embrace it has cost us decades of progress in reducing carbon emissions + is continuing to do so now. The anti-nuclear lobby has a tremendous amount of blood on its hands and I’m not the least bit ashamed to be on the opposing side to them.

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”