Tab Clearing...

• Oops. It looks like half of all global seaborne sulphur shipments transit the Strait of Hormuz.


• Papyrus containing part of The Iliad found in tomb with Egyptian mummy.


• Meta to add facial recognition to its creeper glasses, to make being stalked even easier!

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Meme Dump!

Midweek Memes!

Rising Sun

Japan, like other democracies in the region, realizes that, despite the US talking about a "strategic pivot to Asia" for something like a decade now, it might well be on its own against China. (You know things are tense in the region if Japan and South Korea are speaking to each other.)

The latest step it's taking is legalizing arms exports, which should be an important source of income for the country, as well as making advanced arms available to nations like the Philippines.

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Manic Pixel Dream Girl...

That twenty-something blonde EMT chick who's a big MAGA fan and who runs an OnlyFans account on the side that you follow?

She's actually a dude who's a med student in northern India running a side hustle looking to build up enough cash to emigrate.

This is just the latest version of the Macedonian Social Media Political Rage Bait Hustle.

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Meme Dump!

The Start of the Killing Season...

If you read this blog, you almost certainly know that yesterday marked the 251st anniversary of the clashes between trained bands of militia and the Crown's regulars at the towns of Lexington and Concord.

Other notable events on the 19th of April include the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, the fiery denouement of the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco back in 1993, and the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

This week also contains a number of notable anniversaries, and if there's anything both unhinged weirdos and terrorists both like, it's doing their mass casualty events on historically significant dates.

Keep an eye out and think about where you want to be for the next few days.

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Tab Clearing...

• High-resolution sonar images of the USS Monitor wreck.


• Russia's hacker unit known as Fancy Bear is behind the hacking of wi-fi routers.


• Panopticon-like surveillance isn't any better just because it's not the government doing it.

Memes to Kick Off the Week!

Tab Clearing...

• When you click that opt-out button on a website, have you really opted out? A new audit thinks not. That audit looked at web traffic associated with Microsoft, Meta, and Google and found they all failed to honor such requests.


• "How a Navy photographer snapped an iconic Artemis II astronaut photo" (As a fan of candid portraiture, that photo slaps.)


• The only ones qualified enough to shoot their partners.

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Meme Dump!

Remember...

“Beware that, when hating on assholes, you yourself do not become an asshole... for when you shitpoast long into the abyss, the abyss shitpoasts also into you.”

This message brought to you by Nietzsche Cheese Doritos, food for thought.

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Meme Dump!

QotD: Ticktockification Edition...

In a post on the lingering death of some of the bigger social media sites, I came across this deliciously laugh-out-loud paragraph:

"For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn't give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms)."

Remember that a social media site's entire business model is based on keeping you engaged on their site, not sending you away to follow links to blog posts or magazine articles. Every outgoing link you post on, say, Facebook lowers your hidden internal "social credit score" and causes your posts to be de-prioritized in other people's feeds, even if they specifically follow you because they want to see your stuff.

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Meme Dump!