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

There’s legitimately not enough space for everyone to bring a carry-on, especially on smaller planes; until that changes, carry-on fees are as good a way to allocate that space as any.

This is great + well-deserved, plus it has the side benefit of making some of the world’s worst people really, really mad.

Vonnegut wasn’t a Too Good For This recluse like Pynchon or Salinger or whoever, and the content of his books made him fairly well insulated against charges of being a sellout; they probably offered him a bunch of money and he shrugged and said sure.

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)

And one of them married Meghan Markle

This Friday or last Friday?

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’

Lord Asriel: “eh, close enough”

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.

The Stardewification of everything continues - can’t wait until Half-Life 3 finally comes out and it turns out that Black Mesa has purchased a dilapidated farm in the countryside that they’ve taken Gordon Freeman out of stasis to restore for them.

This would be funnier if it were a sentence where a : would also change the meaning.

I hope they make it - snow leopards seem to be in the gray area in between endangered species which humans can + will spare no expense to keep alive, like pandas and kakapo, and endangered species that are almost certainly done for, like the Vaquita and the Javan rhinoceros.