I need to sleep I can’t get no sleep

I’ve not bought anything from Amazon for close to 3 years when I was handed a gift card out of the blue. It took me no less than three hours to shop for 5 pretty standard items because on every page I clicked, my screen was entirely filled with ridiculously trashy products, annoyingly unrelated products, upselling BS and useless AI-generated reviews. And then I had to uncheck the fucking subscriptions they snuck in. How does anyone bear with this, I wonder?

♫ It’s true that all the men you knew were dealers who said they were through

being dealers every time you gave them shelter

I know that kind of man, it’s hard to hold the hand of anyone

who’s reaching for the sky just to surrender ♪

(originally by Leonard Cohen, of course)

I have a feeling that a few steps are missing between trololo and Monty Python… right? guys? Geez, I’m getting old.

It’s all in a day’s work for… bicycle repair man. <snort>

That’s just the way it is.

When Reddit was new, it mentioned Digg a lot.
When Digg was new, it mentioned /. a lot.
When /. was new (yes, I was there, too), it mentioned Usenet a lot.

At some points in time, the likes of The WELL, the Facepunch forums and Metafilter got their own mentions, prompting me to check them out.

The Weather Man… Cobra Verde… Even though the latter could have hardly ever been called mainstream.

Yeah, the 90s were a good time for movies that could not have been mainstream in any other decade. I’d place Judge Dredd, Demolition Man and Total Recall in the same “corny, but excellent” league as the 5th Element.
Then you had unofficial double features of sorts: Smoke/ Blue In The Face, Casino/ Goodfellas.
12 Monkeys needs to be mentioned as well, it’s probably the most palatable movie on my list.
In the “disconcerting, but unforgettable” league, I’d place As Good As It Gets, The Crossing Guard and, of course, the grisly “8 mm.”

Oh, yeah. It unofficially spawned “Friends,” too. Also, if you watch the music videos of the OST songs, you’ll find many (all?) of them have a “Singles” movie poster hanging somewhere. What an amazing level of coordination.

The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?

Normative nihilism is going to get us all.

Is anyone else reminded of this?

I once took my bike to the Burger King drive-thru. It was late at night, no cars in sight. Yet the next time I went there, about two weeks later, they had already put up a sign explicitly banning bicycles.

Needs more “amazing.” Seriously, screw these corporate ass monkeys.

Far more often than not, even bloody revolutions do not achieve their goals, or lead to merely cosmetic and/ or short-lived changes. E.g. Kent Gang Deng investigated 269 major peasant rebellions over 2106 years of Chinese history. Guess how many of these actually rewrote history in any way, shape or form.
Recently, I’ve been reading several interesting pieces on the “Occupy” movement, the related G20 and other protests in the Western world, dating back as far as the 1960s. The bottom line being: asking nicely for some minimum demands that even conservative politicians can get behind, like capping CEOs’ wages, will not get the job done. In fact, some of the powers that be can use it for their internal power struggles and to show it off as a sort of legitimization folklore. “See how democratic we are? We even have protesters in little tents! Don’t worry, they aren’t hurting anyone.”
All hope is not lost, though, if new protest modalities can be found.

Take that, Kirkpatrick Sale.

During the times of Caesar, Belgica started just north of Paris.

“The Black Hole” is such an interesting case, I really loved watching it as a kid. Reruns were shown on TV every other year or so when I was little. Once I bought the DVD, I realized just how corny it was… up until the point where Maximilian Schell made his Wagnerian entrance. From then on, it became a very different movie, something I could neither understand nor appreciate as a kid.