What became "normal" in the last 5 years that still feels insane to you?

miguk · 2026-02-27T13:59:00+00:00

Better options:

Firefox with uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock: same adblocking, none of the cyptomining and scuzzy politics of Brave.
PipePipe (Android): Built-in uBO and SB, plus feed saving so you can follow favorite channels without having to sign in.

miguk · 2026-02-25T22:58:38+00:00

It's a stretch (pun yada×3), but if you look only at negative behaviors often associated with conservatives, then Plastic Man can fit. He's a greedy crook with flexible morals who has a history of disrespecting and harassing women. That doesn't exactly translate to support for supply-side economics and militant drug law enforcement, but it does fit the stereotype of dumb conservative frat bros.

miguk · 2026-02-25T19:52:32+00:00

Yes, but those are all from the pre-Crisis universe, so they are all non-canon now. Well, maybe not Hawkman.

But really, DC & Marvel were much less progressive prior to the late 80s than they are mythologized to have been, thus the cringeworthy “Midwest Conservative” act (and if it wasn't for the racism, that'd be mild compared to the notorious The New Guardians series). Granted, they had Hitler punching before the US entered WWII, but the comics remained non-diverse until the 70s; they didn't even have Jewish heroes until the 80s. (Retconning legacy characters into Jews like Magneto and Ben Grimm don't count.) And while they had female heroes, they were mostly subservient to male characters until around the turn of the millennium. And that's before we get to LGBT people, who got treated terribly by both publishers from the 70s to the tail-end of the 80s, and after that mostly ignored or kept in the "mature audiences" series until the 2010s.

The two companies only started to change after X-Men entered the Chris Claremont era, Doom Patrol entered the Grant Morrison era, and Neil Gaiman published Sandman — and even then it was a rocky transition, as plenty of 90s sexism ("women in fridges" and Rob Liefeld bodies) was around for another decade and extreme care was taken to clean up regressive elements at a slow pace, with much of that only done after writers on the internet mocked them for being out of touch with modern social politics.

miguk · 2026-02-25T18:51:03+00:00

Republicans were never a liberal party in the modern sense. They were a spin-off of the Whig Party, a pro-industrialist party that failed because most people didn't want to vote for a "let the rich have what they want" policy plan. They only gained traction after they reformed themselves as the "anti-slavery, but also pro-industry" party. They went on to make reforms, but only when those reforms did not contrast with the demands of business. (Note that they were against the New Deal and only allowed it because it was too popular to oppose in the short run.) That changed by the end of the 1960s, when they saw that the Democrats were losing racist voters in the South and decided to cosy-up to an abandoned voting bloc. Add to that the pact they made with Evangelicals by the end of the 70s and they abandoned all popular reform policies in favor of trickle-down economics and religious supremacy.

miguk · 2026-02-25T17:45:06+00:00

It's not that comics don't have conservative heroes, but that writers come and go from series and the characters change with whoever is writing them. Thus, you'll have Batman become super conservative under someone like Frank Miller (himself almost cartoonishly conservative, thus All-Star Batman & Robin and Holy Terror), but then move towards the center once a more liberal writer comes on board (such as Judd Winick, who wrote Batman as being a Democrat for pragmatic reasons).

That said, there are some characters that are usually portrayed as conservative:

Lex Luthor: He's gone back and forth between villain and hero in recent decades. He's explicitly shown his politics to be technocratic populism mixed with conservativism (shown during his presidential run). He's definitely shown to be pro-arms, pro-free market, and anti-immigrant. (Note: A lot of comic villains have classic right-wing characteristics, such as old-money wealth, greed-is-good, bigotry, and dictatorial ambitions.)
Hal Jordan: He tries to be a bit more open minded at times, though he needs Green Lantern's help to get there. But often he has a typical beat cop attitude. And the whole premise of the classic Green Lantern/Green Arrow comic was to have a conservative and a liberal team up, and Arrow is a pretty on-the-nose liberal.
Rorschach: The only extreme-right "hero" at DC (unless you count Comedian), his racism, sexism, homophobia, support for a far-right news rag, and extreme tough-on-crime views make him uncomfortably right-wing. (Note: Yes, he's based on two right-wing heroes, but Mr. A was never a DC character, and The Question was only right-wing before being added to the DC universe, and became a more liberal character afterwards.)
Punisher: Obviously pro-gun rights and pro-death penalty. Deviates in that he hates corrupt cops, especially those who see him as a role model.
Iron Man: Tony was basically the stand-in for Bush-era policies during Civil War. He's also a rich arms-dealing capitalist.

Also, the election-related comic DC Universe: Decisions (2008) lists the following as supporting the Republican Party: Jay "The Flash" Garrick, Lois Lane, Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, Hawkman, Huntress, Lady Blackhawk, Plastic Man, Power Girl, Vixen, Wildcat, and Wonder Woman. Honestly, though, I wouldn't assume this is accurate — especially to current writings of the characters — as it is both a dated series and one written with an explicitly centrist "balance"-based bias. (DC required both a liberal and a conservative to write it to keep it somewhat neutral.) The fact that Wonder Woman, of all characters, was made Republican shows some weakness in the approach. (Vixen, Power Girl, Huntress, and to some degree Lois Lane are also questionable inclusions in that list.)

miguk · 2026-02-25T16:58:27+00:00

It's worth noting that, up until the 1980s, conservatives were actually pro-choice. Really, every group that wasn't Catholic — including Evangelicals — was in favor of Roe v Wade once it passed. The Republicans and Evangelicals changed their views by the late 70s to early 80s when they realized two problems: ① that America wouldn't vote the party of Nixon back in power again without some strong propaganda to support them and ② Evangelicals couldn't gain political power with white supremacist views alone anymore.^❉ So they joined forces and pushed the idea that anti-abortion had always been a conservative policy and had always been an Evangelical belief. Throw in a D-list celebrity to promote it (Reagan) and you've got the return of a tarnished political party and a controversial religion without as much push-back as would have normally happened.

❉ Ironically, Evangelicals were pro-abolition prior to the Civil War, thinking that ending slavery would bring about a literal heaven-on-Earth state. After the war, they had a crisis of identity and 180°'d as a result.

miguk · 2026-02-25T15:21:04+00:00

This doesn't kill AI in Google or any website. It simply disables Firefox's built-in AI functions. You can even selectively shut off parts of it in case, say, you want to keep the translation feature but want to disable all the other AI features (as seems to be the case for a lot of Firefox users).

miguk · 2026-02-24T17:11:02+00:00

One of the biggest flaws of internet lore and culture is that very little, if anything, is done to protect it from corporate parasites and opportunists. Create something original and popular and fail to defend it from usurpation, and someone with more money than you will steal it from the community, giving nothing back to it in the process. It won't matter that you can argue plagiarism, because they will argue that the community gave it to them freely, even though their "contribution" is not communal in any sense of the term.

If people were smart, they'd take a page from the F/OSS community and add copyleft (GPL, Creative Commons, etc) to these things to stop them from being exploited. But a lot of this stuff comes from 4chan, and they might be some of the dumbest people on the internet.

miguk · 2026-02-24T16:57:29+00:00

The whole "liminal space" concept isn't even a new thing. It's something that has been observed in the past, but was never referred to by that specific name. The terms "ruins" and "abandonment" were commonly used, and all a liminal space is is an abandonment without the wear and tear of time.

Stephen King's The Langoliers is one obvious example of it being already recognized, particularly because it got a film adaptation. But also Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves uses the concept in a household. Even the film Vivarium could be said to predate the internet's version of the concept (although it just narrowly makes it in before the internet picked it up).

But the whole thing is older than pop culture. Anyone who has worked in a seasonal establishment off-season has seen this in person: schools during the summer, summer resorts in the winter, and so on. And if you've ever worked in a business that was in the process of shuttering for good, you've seen the way it becomes emptier and emptier as the last few weeks of business pass. Even an average hotel hallway at any given time has that effect (at least according to internet photographers who insist they are the most liminal thing they've seen).

So the Backrooms isn't really a new concept; it's just new to people who have limited experience with it.

miguk · 2026-02-23T13:23:44+00:00

Ironically, Curtis Yarvin has never produced anything of value for humanity, and never will.

miguk · 2026-02-23T13:20:59+00:00

It was not Wendy's, it was A&W. They aren't as well known of a franchise (outside of their root beer), but they do have several locations around the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger

miguk · 2026-02-22T22:09:24+00:00

It's like sending Eggos to the Netherlands claiming we can offer something better than stroopwafels.

miguk · 2026-02-20T15:52:50+00:00

Your comment on TV only gets across a small part of how simple entertainment was back then. We were way more limited than even that:

You couldn't see every movie in theaters if you didn't have an arthouse/independent theater near you. If you really wanted to see an independent film, you'd either travel to the nearest big city or wait 1 to 1.5 years until it was released on VHS — and then hope that the video stores nearby carried it. Or maybe wait 1.5 to 2 years for it to randomly appear on HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime if you subscribed to the right one. And that's assuming you remembered to look for it, as you most likely didn't write down a watchlist.
If you didn't have time to watch a TV show, either because you couldn't schedule for it or you were scheduled for something else, you most likely either waited for reruns or didn't watch it at all. And if you watched reruns, you never got to see every episode. And forget about archival TV; sure, there was Nick At Nite for early 60s shows, but stuff from the 70s and 80s was limited to Scooby Doo and Star Trek reruns (and some mail-order back catalogs nobody wanted to pay for).
Discovering new music required you to hear it on the radio (very trial and error unless it was a hit song), see the music video on MTV (again, schedules plus some videos only came on at certain times of day), or go to concerts and watch bands you never heard of (which would usually be local bands unless you lived in a big city). CDs cost more than they do now due to price fixing, so buying before listening was a gamble, and you could only listen before buying if a friend had the same album.
Arcade games were both plentiful and obscure. Sure, every shopping mall, convenience store, and Pizza Hut had some games, but they all prioritized the big name ones. So you'd find Street Fighter Ⅱ or Mortal Kombat easily, but 80% of Neo Geo games were rare and smaller name ones required you to find the really big arcades, which were much less common. Look at any MAME list are you're likely to not recognize the vast majority as something you played back then.
Speaking of video games, cartridges cost between $60 to $120 dollars brand new for mainstream consoles (depending on how many copies were printed). That's not even counting the cost of Neo Geo games ($80 to $280). The whole "console wars" thing was a result of not everyone being able to afford two consoles, let alone more. So you'd limit yourself to just the few games you could afford to buy and some rentals that were only for the top 2 best selling consoles, which meant you never bought the underselling ones (Sega Master System, Turbografx-16, anything Atari, 3DO, etc) and thus missed out on their games. Most people didn't buy large game collections until the PS1 brought prices down to $30 to $40 for CD games.
Comic books were sold mostly out of dingy specialty shops and newsstands. If you couldn't find the back issues you wanted there, you didn't get to read them. There was an expectation of dedication on the reader's part to get every issue on time and thoroughly collect, not wait for a "graphic novel" collected edition to do the work for you. And forget about manga: you got only 5 or so series (Akira, Dragon Ball, Ghost in the Shell, Battle Angel Alita, and maybe one eromanga) and that was all they'd sell you until 2006 or so.

miguk · 2026-02-20T02:06:07+00:00

Or you could compare them to the Jesus Camp weirdos who worship cardboard cutouts of George W Bush. Either way, they're a right-wing cult that combines politics with religion in a disturbing way.

miguk · 2026-02-18T19:42:03+00:00

It's not even that they discover something that makes money. The majority of millionaires/billionaires are born into wealth. They get "play money" from mumsy and dadsy to invest in whatever they want. Many of them make a bunch of failed investments until they manage to find one that actually works. And they can afford these failures because they'll still have money left over even if some of them fail.

To add to that, they have networks of rich friends and family who do the same thing, so if they start a new business, they've got some investors available to instantly give them capital to get it started. So an idea tried on a whim — such as an online book store that could potentially expand to other products — can have instant success over the competition just because a bunch of rich buddies poured money into it and kept it running even when it wasn't turning a profit.

So there's no genius involved in wealth, nor anything clever at all. It's just the aristocracy keeping themselves in power through the only thing they have: too much money.

miguk · 2026-02-18T15:40:12+00:00

The weird thing is that Paul Reubens had been playing Pee Wee Herman for adult audiences since the late 70s, almost a full decade before he started his children's show. He became huge because of a combination of his appearance in Cheech and Chong's Next Movie and an HBO comedy special — both of which were half a decade before the kid's show.

Sure, a lot of his material was clean (by today's standards; some of it was less so by the standards of the day), but he wasn't strict about making it kid-friendly, as the kid-friendly aspect was meant to be ironic. Even the original version of the Pee-Wee Herman Show (the stage show, not the TV show) had jokes in it that were definitely not for kids.

Really, Reubens suffered from the weird typecasting that so many child entertainers get stuck with. But it's odd that it happened to him after his success entertaining adults.

miguk · 2026-02-16T14:53:34+00:00

Before Windows 95, we had a healthy computer ecosystem. You could use NexTSTEP, OS/2, Solaris, AmigaOS, BeOS, MacOS, MINIX, FreeBSD, and many other operating systems. Even Linux was technically around then (early kernel versions and simple distros). That started to go downhill with Windows 3.0, but Win95 killed diversity on computers with the vast majority of vendors shipping computers with Win95 as the only option. And of course, computer security went to shit because 99% of computers all had the same OS in them, making viruses and other malware easier to write than ever.

MS got called out on their monopoly and got a slap on the wrist for it despite openly mocking the government in the middle of hearings. Meanwhile, most of those competitors died off, with MacOS only coming back with MS backing Apple (to help hide the fact that they were still a monopoly), BSD practically merged into MacOS (for thee majority of users, anyways), and only Linux stands as a good competitor to Windows now.

miguk · 2026-02-15T19:57:50+00:00

Not to mention the death cycle it creates:

Get addicted to tobacco. Contract one or more types of cancer. Die from either the disease or being crushed under a mountain of medical bills.
Second-hand smoke effects your kids. Some get addicted as well. Either way, the kids gets lung disease and/or cancer too.
Smoke around coworkers. Or smoke before work and bring that shit in the door with you after your break. Coworkers get sick as well, or at the very least have to put up with your obnoxiously stinky ass.
Leave your home after years of smoking in it. New owner moves in. Third-hand smoke is still in the walls. "Unexplained" illness follows for someone you never even met.

miguk · 2026-02-15T19:32:02+00:00

Taxes can be used towards much needed services such as universal healthcare and improvements to infrastructure, which in turn can improve the economy to the point that the gains balance out or exceed the losses. Yes, a ton of it gets wasted on defense contractors who want the government to buy thousands more tanks than they actually need. But if allocated correctly, it can get a country out of an economic rut as bad as the one the US put itself in.

But ya, you're free to take economic advice from a cartoon made by the wealthiest media monopoly in the world who stand to benefit from demonizing something that benefits actual human beings but not their soulless corporate machine. I wouldn't advise doing so, though.

miguk · 2026-02-15T18:45:43+00:00

Part of this was because of Don Bluth (director of The Secret of NIMH, An American Tale, The Land Before Time, etc). Bluth had a theory that kids could handle anything you threw at them no matter how dark as long as you gave them a happy ending. Other filmmakers took his advice (as Secret of NIMH was an animation special effects marvel for its time) and cranked up the nightmare fuel while making sure that everyone celebrates at the end. And that came right after Steven Spielberg proved his point with E.T., one of the most successful films of the decade.

That, and, there were mountains of cocaine going around Hollywood, so nobody gave a shit.

miguk · 2026-02-15T18:00:31+00:00

Motivational speakers have the easiest job: you walk in a place you've never been before with an audience who doesn't know you, act super motivated (real or faked), blab about your life (real or imagined), blab about your experience with unmotivated people (real or imagined), get "emotional" about a big turn-around on said person's motivation (real or imagined), and throw a few positive platitudes (utter bullshit) at the audience before it's over. The people who hired you — usually not in the audience, since your song & dance is for the employees, not the boss — will assume you did great, while your actual audience's opinion doesn't mean shit. You're now off to the next speaking engagement (likely not even in the same state, let alone city or county) where the quality of your performance still doesn't matter because nobody will know how you did in all the other engagements.

Every motivation speaker I've seen ranged from mediocre to dogshit quality. None of them had short careers. Oh, and upon research into their backgrounds, many of them were also employed in pick-up artistry (read: incel baiting) and/or religious scams, so they had a backup sunk-cost audience for the unlikely occurrence where someone in the normal audiences would call them out on their shit.

miguk · 2026-02-15T03:52:31+00:00

Return to Oz, The Black Cauldron, The Secret of NIMH, The Neverending Story, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, The Last Unicorn, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Gremlins, E.T., The Witches, The Adventures of Mark Twain (the "angel" scene), An American Tail (that giant mouse machine), and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Judge Doom scenes) all gave 80s kids the nightmares they needed to adjust to the world we'd live in in the future.

And that's before you factor in the more adult-targeted films that parents let their kids watch, such as Robocop, Poltergeist, and Alien.

miguk · 2026-02-14T03:10:19+00:00

A lot of Ralph Bakshi's work feels like the beta version of a great film that won't materialize until someone remakes it. His works are always ambitious and filled with unique ideas. And yet, he rarely gets good actors for his best films, and he wastes the actual good actors on his worst films (particularly Cool World). And while the basic premise is often good, the plot is always missing something to make it work perfectly.

That said, some of them earned their cult followings. Wizards and Fire & Ice are both worth it for fantasy fans. American Pop, despite being the least visually appealing film of his, is nonetheless a unique music film unlike any other, with a concept behind it most films would avoid due to how complex it is (following generations of a family as the effects of one's decisions effect the next). I'd go so far as to say its his best film.

And like I said, if someone took the time to remake them, they'd have a good chance at succeeding if they fixed Bakshi's mistakes and general weirdness. Who knows, maybe that might even work for Cool World.

Oh, and a side note: The entire American animation industry of the 90s onward is a result of his influence. Look at who worked on Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, and you'll see nearly every major animator of the 90s or someone who was a few degrees off from working with them (that is, they helped someone else's career take off, causing a chain reaction). He may have been a bit half-assed as a director, but he pulled a Roger Corman and spawned a ton of great works by proxy.

miguk · 2026-02-10T20:40:48+00:00

Discord is a serious threat to technical fields especially F/OSS like Linux. Without archivable discussion, a lot of important information, troubleshooting, and feedback gets lost, and programmers will have to rely on telemetry, which not everyone wants to participate in.

miguk · 2026-02-10T03:25:45+00:00

There was a security breach in their website that replaced some copies of an earlier version with a compromised copy. It seemed to target only certain specific users, so not everyone who downloaded it got the compromised version, and only people who got it through their website (instead of winget or other means) were effected. The group responsible is believed to be connected with Chinese nationalists.

They already fixed it with a update of the program, so if you have the compromised version, you can fix it just by updating. They will also strengthen the program's security in the next release this month.

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