Aw, fuck.

Presumably at some point a human being was involved in the decision making process to try and use this image to convey… some kind of message to other human beings, and at least one human being in that process couldn’t be bothered to give the AI slop more than the most cursory glance.

Unless of course one could design a fully-automated system of generating pseudo-scientific clickbait factoid garbage accompanied by AI-generated illustrations, entirely dedicated to producing as much vaguely plausible-seeming garbage as possible, 24 hours a day, just spewing out the opposite of useful knowledge at an unfathomable rate.

But what kind of monster would deploy that weapon on humanity?

Commentary tracks are the underappreciated treasures of physical media. Lord of the Rings gets a lot of deserved praise, but The Matrix has a philosophers commentary track which is awesome, and the 1989 Batman has Tim Burton geeking out over his own movie in a delightful fashion. Also, Jonathan Frakes does a hilarious commentary on Star Trek: First Contact where he sounds simultaneously like a popular high school jock and a gigantic Star Trek dweeb, and I adore him for it.

I worked at a used media store 10+ years ago, and I remember worrying about what would happen when everything was conveniently available on good ol’ reliable Netflix, which at the time seemed like the logical thing that everyone would eventually sign up for, and then what would I do?

Fast forward to today, and streaming has certainly changed the market. Huge TV show box sets are almost impossible to sell, though it’s not a totally dead market. DVDs and Blu-rays sell about as well as they ever did, if not better. Maybe everything is on a service somewhere, but most households aren’t going to sign up for every service, so as a result of all the streaming services fighting like dogs for library rights, there’s almost always someone looking to get a cheap, used, physical copy of a movie they can’t get elsewhere.

If anything, I feel more secure about the future of physical media today than I did ten years ago.

I just got into tying knots! It’s a useful skill. You can pick it up in a couple of minutes and then improve continuously. There are a lot of books on the subject. It’s cheap. You can use cord you might already have lying around the house, or you can get paracord at the hardware store, or you can go somewhere fancy like Paracord Galaxy if you want some extra special colors or patterns. It’s soothing and leaves you with something tangible at the end.

Here’s a monkey’s fist knot I just finished! I’ve been giving them to friends to use as keychains.

I heard an interview with the costumer who designed Elvis Presley’s rhinestone-studded jumpsuits. They kept on not paying him, but he was having so much fun that he didn’t really want to stop, so instead of quitting he just kept making each jumpsuit more elaborate and more expensive. “Yes, this new suit requires $15,000 worth of genuine Alsatian rhinestones.” Not exactly win-win, but I’m glad he was having fun and spending a ton of Elvis’ money.

At first I thought it was FHQWHGADS.

Yes, but also:

I think of it being like how a pro golfer does like a dozen things in the split second it takes them to swing a gold club, and they all have to be perfectly coordinated, but they really don’t think of each and every little movement in sequence as it happens.

Gotta lower the power setting and increase the cook time. One minute at 100%? No! One and a half minutes at 80%!

Harrumph

Ia, Shub Niggurath!

The cassowary was the only thing in the zoo that Steve Irwin seemed a little bit scared of. There’s an episode where the cassowary got loose and he immediately stopped joking around and told all the keepers to go get the shields to corral it back into its pen. I wouldn’t dream of fucking around with a cassowary.

Fuck that, I’ve been in close proximity to ostriches and emus and they one hundred percent seem like dinosaurs.

Cor blimey

You can’t bring the time travel souvenir back with you in the time machine. You’ve got to store it in a safe cave or storage unit or something so that it’ll be at least plausibly aged by the time it reaches the future, even if surprisingly well-preserved.

I went through a handful of devices, and none of them ticked off all the boxes for me.

Now I use a Unihertz Jelly Star. It’s tiny, it has Bluetooth, Wifi, expandable memory, headphone jack, and in a pinch it’s also a phone with a camera and flashlight and so forth. The battery charges very fast, and it’s got a halfway decent external speaker. More dedicated audiophiles than me would have to weigh in on if it’s pumping out audio signal in all the right bass and treble frequencies at appropriate levels, but it does everything I wanted from a digital audio player.

Kira: Captain Boday? You want me to bring Captain Boday to your quarters for dinner?

Dax: It’s just a suggestion.

Kira: Well, it’s a bad suggestion! Number one, you used to go out with Captain Boday, number two, Worf hates him, and number three, and we’ve discussed this many times, Captain Boday has a transparent skull.

Dax: And you don’t like to see a man’s brains?