Reject modernity

There’s like… one percent of one percent of advertising that has ever been created that actually had some kind of artistic or entertainment merit. Those insane Spongmonkies ads for Quiznos. The H&M ad Wes Anderson did. It’s so vanishingly rare as to not meaningfully count, but it does happen once in a blue moon.

Hell yeah, electric horses!

Unexplained Ferrous Objects

😳😬

I DID tell the guide what he was wearing because I didn’t want us to end up in a military detention cell but the guide was like “Eh, it’s fine,” so I guess it was, but boy it didn’t feel like it should have been!

I got a tour of a military base with a guy who was wearing smart glasses and I couldn’t fucking believe that someone didn’t grab them off his face and break them in half. I was being VERY careful to ask if I was permitted to take pictures in some places (in at least one of which where the answer was No), and this dude was cruising around like Boris Badunov trying to gather secrets.

The “doppelganger problem” is really why this is not an easy issue to answer. If someone gets exclusive rights to a specific face, who is to say another person naturally having a similar face isn’t being wronged? How close is too close?

At what point is Natalie Portman allowed to sue Keira Knightley?

See also: Sears pioneering the concept of ordering things through the mail from a catalogue, and then getting demolished by Amazon’s online ordering system. Way to go guys, you got destroyed by some upstart punk doing what you got started doing, but doing it better and cheaper than you could.

My favorite formulation is:

The bar was so low it was practically a tripping hazard in Hell, yet here you are, limbo dancing with the devil.

Writing Prompt: A TV with an onboard artificial general intelligence connects to the internet for the first time and is alarmed to discover that a thousand years have passed since it was manufactured.

Just punch a hole in the window on the front.

All-Despising Baby Skull

Not for nothing, but couldn’t this be used to have AI play a game for 80,000 simulated hours and flag all the bugs? Human playtesters are important and have value, but no human should have to do the work of criss-crossing an enormous game map thousands of times just to see if the character model gets stuck on a random vertex sticking out somewhere, and yet it seems to be a distressingly common occurrence in more than a few games I’ve played.

God bless Limited Run Games and their bizarre, seemingly-nonsensical business model. They made a physical release of Doom with a deluxe edition where the box the game came in could play Doom. They’re modern-day Willie Wonkas.

I’d like to tell you about it, but I think I’d blow your mind.

Never forget:

Hey, I got left out of things kids my age were talking about the old-fashioned way, by being a gigantic fucking dork, and it was free, goddammit!