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

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

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)

I mean that was more-or-less Werner Herzog’s natural delivery, they just had him go in and read a buncha lines; somebody decided that Basically Werner Herzog was the right fit for that character and then they went out and got him to do it.

(I imagine this is how Stephen Tobolowsky gets many of his acting jobs too)

I wouldn’t discount Harris’ innate advantages there too; he was 10 years older than Gambon, aged more poorly (having been an alcoholic hellraiser in his younger years), and his natural delivery - even when he was much younger - had that sort-of wizened wheezing sound to it; “old and physically frail but with incredible magic power” was sort of baked in even before he added any actual acting to the mix.

But I don’t know if there’s an alternative who would have been better in that regard; the three I’m aware of them talking about were Christopher Lee, Ian McKellen, and Peter O’Toole, but the latter two would have played him very much like Gambon did, and I’m not sure if Lee could have pulled off “frail” either given his voice + physical stature.

One of the few non-Avengers in the list of all-time highest grossing actors.

One of Chief O’Brien’s more elaborate holodeck simulations

With him, Richard Harris, Robbie Coltrane, and Alan Rickman all gone, the only members of the Hogwarts Professor Tontine left are Maggie Smith and Warwick Davis.

The good news is that Iceland won’t have to go around apologizing for its name anymore.

Can’t wait until my King Arthur AI-Generated Flour turns out to be a 5 pound bag of uncut cocaine.

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.

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.

“All right, you look like a future pedophile in this picture, number 1. Number 2, it doesn’t even have a first name, it just says AppLovin!”.

Yeah, Bribercutter has really gone downhill since the NYT acquisition

It’s about ads. The great thing about putting videos on YouTube is that Google does the work of selling ad slots for you, the not-so-great thing is that because those advertisers are actually Google’s customers, if they think they might be upset to see their ad running in your video, they’ll err on the side of pulling it.

But I daresay if Russell Brand had advertisers working with him directly, most of them would also be suspending their relationships with him right now; nobody wants anything to do with this sort of allegation.

“Hammerskins” sounds like a bunch of guys who hang around smashing each other’s genitals with hammers

So this is why Elon is suddenly more upset than usual about bots

I don’t work for anybody, and I don’t know what list of talking points you think I’m repeating other than the specific assertion that Germany shouldn’t have shut down its nuclear plants.

I could just as well accuse you of astroturfing for the coal power lobby.

But since you’re accusing me of being a shill anyway: yes, nuclear power is clean and safe and our refusal to embrace it has cost us decades of progress in reducing carbon emissions + is continuing to do so now. The anti-nuclear lobby has a tremendous amount of blood on its hands and I’m not the least bit ashamed to be on the opposing side to them.