Isn't It Ironic?

The Field of Dreams game, played in the iconic ball field in the middle of the Iowa corn, featured advertising on the outfield walls for Fanduel Sports and BetMGM.

Which, I mean... were they trying to torment Shoeless Joe's ghost, or what?

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There's a reason I refer to it as "Karens-Dot-Com".

The official yard sign of NextDoor and every neighborhood Facebook group ever.

NextDoor is largely populated by the Ladies Auxiliary of these guys...

Incredibly Bad Idea

Using Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform, they made bets on the fires — how they would grow, how long they would last and how much they would destroy.

Using online prediction markets to place bets on wildfires is basically incentivizing arson. This is like the literal definition of a moral hazard.

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The Panopticon...

This sounds horrible and dystopian...

BusPatrol plans to scan the license plates of all vehicles the buses drive past, and then let law enforcement search that data. The plan would essentially turn school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles.

Basically turning your local Anytown School District's bus fleet into mobile Flock cameras.

They've already drawn scrutiny from Florida to Pennsylvania.

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Antisocial Media

Not only is Meta the company itself ontologically evil, but they also push new frontiers in Awful User Experience and Hostile Interface Design.

And when I say "ontologically evil", I am not being flippant or hyperbolic.

Never used Threads, stopped updating Instagram when the schoolgirl scandal broke, deleted the apps from all my devices... but I more or less have to keep at least a token toehold on FB and it grates me.

The single thing I hate most on the entire internet now is Facebook automatically sending me to my Feed if I leave a browser tab open to a post for too long.

I never use the feed. The feed is ass cancer. It is the throbbing heart of the terrible user experience on FB.

Tab Clearing...

• Mimetic v. Agentic: The weird new mutation of grind culture.


• Gulf allies frustrated by lack of warning.


• Microsoft files for a patent on an AI agent to play video games for you.

"At least it's an ethos..."

Employees at the surveillance company Palantir are apparently uneasy about one of the company's high profile clients:

In a Saturday thread on Slack discussing Pretti’s killing, Palantir workers questioned both the ethics and the business logic of continuing the company’s work with ICE.

I mean, given the company's entire portfolio is creepy-ass panopticon data mining stuff, it feels a little weird that this is the bridge too far.

“I mean, I’m proud to serve the White Hand,” said Ugluk the Uruk Hai, “The pay’s good and we get double rations of hafling tenderloin on Fridays, but nobody said anything about doing contract work for Sauron.”

If I rolled my eyes any harder they might get stuck...

At a party in the nation’s capital last night, a group of Republican lawmakers dined on a cake shaped like Greenland and frosted with an American flag.

The dessert — an apparent nod to President Donald Trump’s attempt to acquire the Arctic territory — was served up at the Kennedy Center during an event hosted by Republicans for National Renewal, a right-wing group that has pushed the president to seek an unconstitutional third term.

“Come over here, take a picture and cut the cake,” the host appears to say at one point, video footage shows, describing the elaborate dessert as the “51st state.”

As partygoers gathered around the Stars-and-Stripes-draped cake, one person could be heard saying “It’s gonna be an international incident,” while another questioned: “Is it like prom?”

These edgelord dorks who got elected to congress to further their social media careers have made being cartoonishly evil into the GOP's party brand.

This is government by /pol/ and Right Wing social media influencers.

The edginess is the point. Life is a shitpost. “Are you triggered, lib?” is the GOP motto. 

“Is it like prom?” Jesus wept, these are fundamentally unserious people.

You keep using that word...

...I do not think it means what you think it means.

“Globalization of the intifada“? In Jackson, Mississippi?

If you handed that Pittman kid a Zippo and a jerry can and positioned him in the center of a quadrangle equidistant from a synagogue, a mosque, a Black church, and a gay bar, he’d be as effectively pinned in place as if there were a force field. He’d starve.

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Tab Clearing...

• Why did they used to dye pistachios red?


• The internet is full of sick fucks.


• FBI warns of crooks posing as feds.

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Tab Clearing...

• What the hell is wrong with people?


• This idea that conservatives were forced to adopt cancel culture because the liberals doing it forced them to is just flat-out counterfactual. It's been a universally used bipartisan tool in the culture wars forever, dating back to the Red Scare. Just ask the Dixie... er, the Chicks. Heck, I'm old enough to remember the totally bogus Procter & Gamble allegations and the preacher telling us to boycott them.


• It's that time again...


• Wait, wait... They want your work logins? How is that even ethical?

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Tab Clearing...

• The Southernification of America.


• The life of a pro retro video game streamer.


• "Cheapfake" AI ragebait videos keep meemaw and pawpaw all riled up.

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Signifying Nothing

So, apparently a digital services company that used to have a contract with the Indiana state government got hacked, and this resulted in some scam ring getting a whole trove of Hoosier phone numbers.

Folks have been getting a pretty steady trickle of texts like this one:

Now, a reasonably well-informed person would glance at this, notice immediately that that's not an actual government URL (notice that the ".gov" is in the middle of it and it actually ends in ".vip") and would also know that the Indiana state government does not dun citizens via text message under any circumstance anyway, and send this straight to the spam file.

However enough people apparently fell for this that it made the news.

And everyone who saw it on the news immediately ran to NextDoor (or, as I call it, "Karens-dot-com"), where they temporarily paused their incessant monitoring of their Ring doorbell cameras for people walking through the neighborhood while Black and breathlessly reported to everyone that "THOSE TOLL MESSAGES ARE A SCAM PHISHING TEXT!!!ONE!"

There must have been fifty or a hundred more or identical posts by semiliterate people who apparently couldn't be arsed to check first and see if someone had already posted on the topic.

I don't know what the actual lowest common denominator social media site is... normally I'd be inclined to say Facebook or TikTok ...but NextDoor has got to be in the running.

Meta Is Evil

The maxim "If something's free, you aren't the customer, you're the product" has been around for a while. What companies like Meta and Google sell is your attention, and they can ask a fairly high price for it because they can target it so precisely, thanks to the volumes of data they collect on you.

"And as the data trade expands, so too does the tech behind it. What were once chintzy if endearing tabloid-style popups — "Doctors hate him! See how he reversed his age with one weird trick" — have now become hyper-personalized ads crafted and delivered for very specific groups of users, a system called "social media targeting."

Targeted ads on social media are made possible by analyzing four key metrics: your personal info, like gender and age; your interests, like the music you listen to or the comedians you follow; your "off app" behavior, like what websites you browse after watching a YouTube video; and your "psychographics," meaning general trends glossed from your behavior over time, like your social values and lifestyle habits."

Lately Meta got caught deliberately targeting beauty ads to teen girls who had recently deleted selfies, which is tap dancing on the borderline between advertising and psychoengineering.

If you haven't read Careless People, it's worth your while.

About the only place I ever go on Facebook anymore is my own personal timeline, especially because the feed has become a morass of ads interspersed with ragebait arguments. I'm the FB equivalent of the antisocial introverted homebody who doesn't like going to parties, but doesn't mind having friends over to chill.

I tend to leave a browser tab open to my own page. Now, if I leave that tab unattended for any length of time, when I click back on it, it automatically...and without any input from me...pops over to the feed, causing me to have to manually click the back button to get back to my own page. That's dirty pool.

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These are the people who call other people "snowflakes"

Imagine being assmad about the sign language person. “Show me on the Binky doll where the mean disabled person hurt you…”

"That person is doing sign language to make me feel powerless" is such a fricking bonkers take.

Lady, you need to go touch some grass, stat. You've been hittin' the culture war sauce a little too hard lately it seems.

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Sickos.

Weirdos on the internet are using AI to edit various well-known snuff videos to make them look like they were filmed using animated characters from Minions movies instead of the actual, you know, human beings who died or were maimed.

The future is terrible and the internet was a mistake, Exhibit #4,291,870

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"Are your glasses doxxing me?"

The pace of technological change comes at you fast, and it has a lot of implications that may not be immediately apparent.

Take these seemingly unrelated facts:

• High-resolution digital cameras are tiny and ubiquitous.
• Bluetooth, WiFi, and 5G connectivity is portable and everywhere.
• Facial recognition technology continues to advance by leaps and bounds.
• Everybody's in some sort of database these days.

Now, this caused a stink recently when people were using Meta's smart glasses to doxx random people via facial recognition, but there's no need to be using funky prototype smart glasses when your phone has a camera and the ability to locate and lock on to faces and you could theoretically, I dunno, just carry it backwards in your shirt pocket...

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What in the wide, wide world of sports?

So, a little after seven AM on Saturday morning, a dude here in Indianapolis wanders out to his truck with three kids in tow. He unlocks the truck, retrieves the pistol that he'd had in the cab, cranks a round off into the air, and then hands it to one of the kids, who proceeds to do likewise. The kids then pass it around, each of them popping a few rounds into the sky... at a 45 degree angle, you know, ensuring the bullet will travel as far as possible ...before handing the pistol back to its owner who then empties most of the rest of the mag into the clouds.

It's all on video.

The dude got arrested and, you know what? Good. Lock his ass up for a bit. And he better have to forfeit the blaster, too. Clip a corner off my lolbertarian card or whatever, but maybe gun ownership isn't for him.

Does this look like there's a safe direction in any direction?

Tab Clearing...

• Felon down! (I wonder if you can see the exposed screws on those things from orbit?)


• I was assured this kind of racist crap only happened in the past.


• The Atlantic seems to be worried that cancellation is losing its clout.

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Bad Info Drives Out Good

Greg Ellifritz put up an informative post on social media regarding the (in)efficacy of birdshot in a home defense role recently.

It was shared widely on the internet with predictable results, as the legions of shambling mouth-breathers tried to set Greg straight.

He's had about enough of that.

"I got my first shotgun instructor certification in 1999. I’ve been teaching shotgun skills longer than some of these commentators have been alive. I carried a shotgun every day in a 25-year police career and used those shotguns to convince some very bad men to submit to arrest. I’ve seen, treated, and investigated gunshot wounds from birdshot, buckshot, and slugs. I’ve killed lots of critters with shotguns in the hunting fields. I’ve attended countless shotgun ballistic gelatin shooting demonstrations and autopsies of victims killed with shotgun pellets. I’ve written 162 different articles on using the shotgun for self defense as well as producing the largest firearms stopping power research study in the last two decades.

I might know a thing or two about what shotgun pellets do to human bodies.

But when I try to share that knowledge with the general public, I get shit upon from the anonymous population of uneducated internet trolls who gain self esteem from insulting other people."

Bad info drives out good. I definitely know the feeling, as it's why I rarely discuss gun stuff in GenPop-accessible places myself these days.

Save the birdshot for birds.