NATHAN

we all complain about seeing Easter eggs in shops in the first week of January (who is buying them? who is really feeling a lack of festive chocolate at this time?), Christmas in the summer, and so on, but it’s obvious that the shops have some designated space that they insist on filling with the ‘next’ holiday. the solution is therefore to have more food-based holidays. preferably one per month. let’s get to work.

a guy can come up with one cool line fifty years ago, and to this day it is still regularly repeated, in numerous different variations, and has influenced many works of science and fiction with consequences across the globe. call that the butterfly effect effect.

adhoption:

they say that eyes are the windows to the soul. I also say that windows are the eyes of the house. ergo, the house and the soul are opposites. this makes sense because the house is on your outside and the soul is on your inside. they are therefore natural counterparts; mirror images of each other. I feel there is much to ponder here.

this is a long-winded way of saying no, your housemate is not your soulmate, jessica.

happilyhadesbound:

oneheadtoanother:

(via teaboot)

• contrary to what people said on here, twitter used to be a fun place to go. it had a lot of funny people riffing off each other. it had its own viral jokes and shitposts but also a more flexible nestled reply system where people were always joking with each other in the comments.
• it also had a couple of advantages over tumblr. firstly, it was much quicker on the uptake, so when something happened in the world I would see the commentary and satire on twitter immediately, and then on tumblr a few days later.
• secondly, it had a lot of real celebrities or politicians or brands who would often tweet something unexpected or misguided or get into an argument they shouldn’t, which fuelled a lot of entertainment as people then had fun with that.
• it was also (sort of) a meritocracy. the algorithm would push the most viral posts onto your timeline, and when you looked at the replies the most liked would appear at the top. there were some bots, but they were easily identified and pushed to the bottom of these pages so you could just look at the top five comments, get the funniest takes, and ignore the rest.
• that changed with the blue ticks. all of a sudden, as well as no longer functioning to verify real accounts of famous people, you could pay to have a special tick by your name that pushed you up the rankings. blue-tick responses would appear first. that meant that now, when you went to look at the funny replies on a popular posts, you had to scroll through hundreds of people who weren’t funny but thought they could pay to jump the queue and force you to look at their bad takes instead.
• one of the early signs of disease was the invasion of the onlyfans girls, who took that corruption of the meritocracy as a business opportunity. they bought blue ticks, and replied under every single popular post with some sort of bait to tempt you to pay for their nudges. in fairness, at least they always tried to somehow connect it to the topic at hand with some contrived innuendo. those were then the most popular blue tick posts, and for a while all you would see in the replies were a horde of capitalist sirens trying to seduce you for profit.
• the second major change was to monetise interactions for people with blue ticks, which completely destroyed whatever was left. suddenly, every blue-ticker was following in the onlyfans footsteps in realising they could make money by replying something inane under every single post.
• the most popular posts themselves also became nothing but engagement bait: vague statements like ‘I know something about x but I shouldn’t say’ 'I can’t believe she did that to him’ to lure in replies asking for clarity, pointless questions to encourage the egotistical to respond 'what’s the lore behind your username’ 'what’s the story behind your header’ which just repeated again and again.
• the third major change has been the arrival and widespread adoption of generative AI. not only does X’s in-house AI now feature in many replies ('Grok what does this mean?’ 'Grok is this true?’ under every post) but the blue-tick engagement spammers are now not even writing their own slop. under every successful post the legions of blue-tick responses are now obviously taken directly from an AI directed to come up with a comment on the post, typically just rewriting the post in a different way. 'wow, it looks like x really did that - but y isn’t happy’. zero additional content. it’s nauseating to scroll through.
• there’s a sort of irony that Musk announced some of these measures in a bid to remove the bots, but now the human users are indistinguishable from bots. they have adopted the exact behaviour of spambots due to the incentives he has set, and are even letting a robot come up with the text.
• as one final sting in the tale, the few human-written posts that do appear on my timeline, contributing some sort of original opinion or joke rather than just serving as hollow engagement bait, tend to be extremely right-wing. this was not previously the case, but it seems that the algorithm is now specifically promoting what were previously fringe opinions, either because these are the only people who are left, these are the posts that are getting engagement, or because it has been specifically directed to. given that Musk clearly agrees with these takes, has repeatedly re-engineered Grok to be more right-wing (including briefly breaking it so that every question you asked would receive a response about white genocide), and is now trying to replace Wikipedia with his worldview, the latter would not be unexpected.

• We’re The Millers (2013)
• Millers in Marriage (2024)
• Miller’s Crossing (1990)

they say that eyes are the windows to the soul. I also say that windows are the eyes of the house. ergo, the house and the soul are opposites. this makes sense because the house is on your outside and the soul is on your inside. they are therefore natural counterparts; mirror images of each other. there is much to ponder here.

mortalityplays:

today at the grocery store a man asked if I knew where the broccoli was and I said damn no I haven’t seen it, and he said I need broccoli I can’t find the broccoli, and I said I don’t know where it is either but I’ll keep my eye out, and then we both went our separate ways. when I passed him again I asked if he found the broccoli and he said no!! I still can’t find the broccoli!! and I said oh no. maybe there isn’t any. maybe they’re all out. and we commiserated. but then later as I was walking around in circles like a dazed housefly looking for hot sauce I saw a secret additional vegetable bay behind the magazines and there was the broccoli!! but by then I couldn’t see the man any more. he must have left, imagining there to be no broccoli. perhaps because I suggested they were all out. I reflected upon my part in the tragedy. I should have told him not to give up, to keep looking, to search every corner and perhaps he would find his prize behind the magazines. but it was too late. my defeatism had instilled the certainty of failure in him, even though I was just as ignorant of the truth as he. and I did not buy the broccoli because I don’t like it very much.

(via in-bituin-the-stars)

currentlycryingaboutlancelot:

just a friendly new year’s eve reminder that if you accepted a challenge from a green knight this time last year you’re due tomorrow at the green chapel to get beheaded. time to get a move on

(via ladywithalamp)

cephalopodvictorious:

modern Snow White where instead of a magic mirror it’s just an AI chatbot driving the stepmother insane because it’s programmed to agree with her and confirm her fears

(via awordchemist)