Our way of life—the freedom, prosperity and security that we enjoy as Americans—is not a gift that’s simply handed to us. It has to be earned—by every generation. And no one sacrifices more to preserve our blessings than our extraordinary men and women in uniform.
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#bullshit #motherfucking bullshitMy conduct this year landed me on Santa Claus's fabled and controversial "Kill-at-all-Costs" List. Turns out the reason the big man and his people don't exercise that option more often is that they really aren't good at following through on it. Well outside their core competency. He's delegated to the elves, and they've got this ingrained assembly-line mindset that doesn't translate at all to the adaptable and fluid mindset needed for siege breaking. They just haven't adjusted their playbook at all from when they're doing rote deliveries. Armed Elves have been rappelling down my chimney one at a time into the roaring fire I've kept going nonstop for the last week. They haven't even thought to try my front door yet. Whole house smells like peppermint, which it turns out is what burnt elf meat smells like. Thought I was being super clever putting cyanide-laced almond milk out with the cookies as a last line of defense, but none of them have made it even the scant few feet to the side table where that's sitting. At the rate things are going the real danger is that I'm gonna forget what I did with that and accidentally drink it myself while I'm watching the show
me and the girls vibing to this guy using a stick and a bunch of our hair to entertain us
This has been driving me insane.
I used to be *good* at search. It was a whole thing - I found people's "lost songs" or their unknown-source childhood stuffed toy or whatever from Google.
Now, you can't search for the exact brand/design name of something and get accurate answers. It drives me spare on Amazon - if I search for XYZ and you don't have any, or you only have 2, tell me that.
I wouldn't mind if it said "Here are 2 XYZ. Shoppers also searched for..." Instead it'll just throw a random, barely-linked pile of results and you have to wade through every single one to see if the thing you want exists.
THIS. For ages I used to say that I had "high Google-Fu". I could find *anything* because I knew how to use strings to enhance searches. The string commands haven't even worked for well over a year or more, far before they put in this infernal (and often wrong!) AI BS on top.
I used to be able to search for recipes and easily eliminate unwanted ingredients with a -. For example I'd look for low-carb desserts but without the zillions that use peanut butter simply by searching for something like:
low carb chocolate dessert recipe -peanut
And I'd get a slew of on-point suggestions. For some time now if you do -peanut Google ignores the - and assumes you want recipes stuffed with peanuts.
Where it's even worse now is now you get directed to sites full of bogus AI recipes that don't even make sense. But they have peanuts in them.
I used to be able to use reverse image searches to find out who made that awesome art so I could give credit in my share. They've removed that ability entirely and replaced it with Lens, which is AI BS just showing you more like what you looked for. (Rebecca Watson complained about this in her recent video about JD Vance jizz cup rumours and I apologise for that sentence but...yeah. Watson is great, go find her on Youtube and subscribe because she went into detail about how Google has become less and less useful for debunking.)
This isn't just about Google inserting shopping ads instead of what you wanted to learn about. That's bad. But the results now are just *broken*. The tools we used to have to make searches better have been removed. Google no longer wants us to find the answers we seek, but the answers they want us to have, and that's super creepy and dangerous.
And the alternatives are either using Google in the back end or have other significant barriers to use.
This sucks.
Duckduckgo and all the other alternatives work this way too, now.
Verbatim search, guys!! Go to "Tools," and enable "Verbatim."
It's a pain in the ass, but it still works!
1) yay, thank you
2) WHAT THE FUCK WHY DID THEY HIDE IT
For all you Firefox users, here's an addon that forces verbatim mode to always be on:
oh so now the ancient sumerian is gonna preach to us
You can't be talking like that, White Gilgamesh
tbh I’ve always found it very funny that Elrond is like “there’s no point bringing Glorfindel on the quest, even though he’s a balrog-slayer. You won’t need balrog-slayers” and then thirty pages later they run into a balrog
#and they could’ve really benefited from having a glow in the dark elf in moria (via @emyn-arnens)
obsessed by the implication that glorfindel is bioluminescent
#most elves aren’t #just glorfindel #dwarves on the other hand ARE bioluminescent #but it’s in a spectrum that elves and men and orcs can’t see in #hobbits can see in that spectrum fine #for better mushroom hunting #but they think it’s rude to point out that one of their party members is glowing #and so the dwarves have no idea the hobbits notice (via @mandaloriandy)
The first night Bilbo camped with the company he very nearly said something about it, but, having no idea what dwarves are and thinking it might be rude, he kept the observation to himself and decided that dwarves must be some kind of fungus. It improved his estimation of them most incredibly, and was, in fact, one of the observations he was most keen to pass on when he got back, seeing as how—even if it didn’t quite make him respectable, per se—it at least provided a valuable new addition to hobbits’ mushroom-lore, which no one (not even a certain few silver-spoon possessing relatives) could fault him for.
#anyways it’s common knowledge in the shire that dwarves are actually just a kind of mushroom#but no one says anything#because they think (seeing as how the dwarves haven’t brought it up themselves) it would be rude (via @willowcrowned)
My partner, reading this over my shoulder: “It never ceases to amaze me when Tolkein fans write meta that goes off in really bizarre directions”
Me: “These books are 70 years old, everything normal to say about them has been said; if you’re gonna say anything new about it, it’s gonna have to be weird”
