Then He Wakes Up

this Or get Annish Kapoor’s ass for me. fuck that guy

if i’m ever brutally murdered and everyone feels like they need to do something productive in my memory, all i want is for you to pass legislation banning LED headlights in my name. regardless of how irrelevant it is to my murder. it’s relevant to my heart.

Never actually posted a full version. The Light Dragon and the Twilight beast are two sides of the same ill fated coin.

About ten, fifteen years ago I wrote a story about a guy living in a Capitalist dystopia. His walls, furniture, and tableware are all covered in smart displays. Basically animated wallpaper. It's sold as being able to turn your room or objects into anything - A nice forest view, outer space, a fantasy realm... but the companies that run this stuff keep sneaking ads in.

It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.

So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.

So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.

Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.

The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.

... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.

Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.

Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.

And google's going around freaking out about ad-blockers.

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

It amazes me how the National Park Service is the most vocal department against Fascism. Even the Democrats are a mumble when compared to these park rangers' adamant denouncement and exposing of this administration. Support our bravest federal workers who keep our world one worth living in.

Headcanon, when Ekko came out as a boy, Vander’s kids wanted to be extra loving and supportive. That’s where “Little Man” came from. It stuck because he was so little

Tfw when you specifically told that naked guy not to jump off the cliff and the second you turn around you see that not only has he jumped off the cliff, but he’s laughing at you too.

My absolute favorite official Cyberpunk 2077 art from CDPR is this piece by Łukasz Poller

Not just for the old school Edward Hopper style and Syd Mead vibes that's used, but just because there's something very simple and easy about it. I feel like the plot moves so fast that it never seems like V can catch a break within the story. But in this piece, they're just chilling, shooting the shit, like it's a lazy day in. The air looks still, the conversation seems lazy. V's not even dressed.

I can't even explain it. Guess there's just something comforting about the world as you know it crumbling around you and still being able to find a moment to breathe during it.