æ Is A Visually Stunning Pseudohorror Exploration Game Where You Venture Into Surreal Noisecore Purgatories

Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose

Google, Amazon, Meta, and other big tech companies are making their core products worse and ruining everything from apps to the internet.

In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can’t find any answers. A simple search for “best pc for gaming” leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy. Meanwhile, the actual results are chock-full of low-quality, search-engine-optimized affiliate content designed to generate money for the publisher rather than provide high-quality answers. As a result, users have resorted to work-arounds and hacks to try and find useful information among the ads and low-quality chum. In short, Google’s flagship service now sucks.

And Google isn’t the only tech giant with a slowly deteriorating core product. Facebook, a website ostensibly for finding and connecting with your friends, constantly floods users’ feeds with sponsored (or “recommended”) content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant. And as journalist John Herrman wrote earlier this year, the “junkification of Amazon” has made it nearly impossible for users to find a high-quality product they want — instead diverting people to ad-riddled result pages filled with low-quality products from sellers who know how to game the system.

All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user’s experience has become subordinate to the company’s stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users. And instead of trying to meaningfully innovate and improve the useful services they provide, these companies have instead chased short-term fads or attempted to totally overhaul their businesses in a desperate attempt to win the favor of Wall Street investors. As a result, our collective online experience is getting worse — it’s harder to buy the things you want to buy, more convoluted to search for info

rat patootie (bless my soul)

Yes, like in the movie Ratatouille, the recipe so good it makes the evil food critic cry tears of joy. 

I swear this stuff has magical properties but ANYWAY. I’m not about to be that person with the 8 paragraph personal essay before the recipe so here it is

4-6 cloves garlic 1 onion olive oil 1 28oz can crushed or petite diced tomatoes fresh basil and parsley. Like 1/3 of a cup each? 1 eggplant 1-2 zucchini 1-2 yellow squash 5-6 roma tomatoes salt and pepper

1. Get food. Tricky part: make sure the eggplant, zucchini, squash and tomatoes are all roughly the same thiccness.

I finally figured it out: for a 10″ cast iron pan, you want 8-10″ apiece of each kind of tube veggie.

2. chop veggies. This is a fun recipe to make if you like to stab things a lot. Slice the tube veggies as thinly as you can. I can reliably do about 1/8th inch.

3. Preheat oven to 350 and put your pan over medium heat. If you have dried herbes de provence, throw 1-2 tablespoons in the pan and let them toast until you can smell them. If not don’t worry about it.

I put in extra lavender just ‘cause I could.

4. Add 1-2 tablespoons olive oil and plenty of garlic. Never let some catfish tell you how much garlic is too much. Feel it in your heart.

Anyway let that saute for about 2 minutes.

5. Add onions and saute until translucent, about 8 minutes. 

6. Add the crushed tomatoes, half the parsley and basil, 1-2 tsp black pepper and a pinch of salt. Let that simmer for, I don’t know, 5-10 minutes?

7. While that’s happening, mix like ¼ cup of olive oil with another teaspoon of garlic, black pepper, salt, and the rest of the parsley and basil. Set that aside.

8. Turn off the stove burner and start putting the veggies in the pan. Don’t know if it matters but I usually alternate soft with hard, so I do eggplant-zucchini-tomato-yellow squash. 

Keep doing that

I usually do a ring of veggies around the outside of the pan and then fill in the center however works. Most versions of this recipe lay the veggies down on top of the sauce. I’ve always stuck them straight up and down in the pan. Is this better? Who knows, man.

Ratatouille ready to go in the oven

9. Bake for about an hour and 15 minutes. It’s done when the zucchini and squash in the center are fork tender.

10. Spoon the olive oil/herb/garlic sauce over the top while it’s bubbling hot

Ways to stretch it out: Ratatouille is awesome on top of pasta. I usually get 4 meals out of one pan like this. Also, you will have leftover tube veg. I buy frozen pizza crusts and throw the veggies on top with some pizza sauce or olive oil, seasonings, and some goat cheese crumbles or mozzarella.

Anyway, that’s my current “happy place” recipe. It’s never cost me more than $10 in raw materials to make (including fresh herbs and bourgie canned tomatoes!) and is always a crowd-pleaser.

Nom on that

some dracula / other vampire story related articles on jstor (for my own reference but the rest of u can see them too i GUESS 🙄)

- feminism, sex role exchanges, and other subliminal fantasies in bram stoker’s ‘dracula’

- brides of dracula: from novel to film

- repossessing the body: transgressive desire in ‘carmilla’ and ‘dracula’

- ‘dracula’: stoker’s response to the new woman

- vampiric seduction and vicissitudes of masculine identity in bram stoker’s ‘dracula’

- vampiric typewriting: dracula and its media

- racialization, capitalism, and aesthetics in stoker’s ‘dracula’

- the narrative method of dracula

- canines, women, and deceptive docility in bram stoker’s ‘dracula’

- the novel as nightmare: decentering of the self in bram stoker’s ‘dracula’

- the face of evil: phrenology, physiognomy, and the gothic villain

- gender and the struggle for narrative authority in dracula

- pollution and redemption in ‘dracula’

- a century of draculas

- gender and inversion in bram stoker’s ‘dracula’

- the ambiguous nature of violence in ‘dracula’

- bisexuality, homoerotic deside, and self-expression in bram stoker’s ‘dracula’

- attention, predation, counterintuition: why dracula won’t die

- being there: gothic violence in frankenstein, dracula, and strange days

- voiceless outsiders: count dracula as bram stoker

i was linked to this absolutely wild thread from 14 years ago on a forum for aquarium enthusiasts from michigan: a guy has a 90 lb rock in his aquarium that was infested with a bobbit worm (the penis thing is a misconception) that poses a threat to the rest of his fish and solicits help on how to kill it. but because he can't feed the worm poison without risking the decomposing body killing the other fish, he's doing looney tunes shit to it

Michigan Reefers

The Bobbit Worm Chronicles

So I have discovered that I have a Bobbit Worm. He is through my main piece of lace rock (90 lbs dry) so I can not remove the rock. He has p

warning for occasional pictures of scary worms that looks like jrpg bosses

Sex ed from a douyin account

English added by me :)

INTERVIEW: @nyancrimew on online privacy and operational security

Our interview series about practical tactics to keep yourself and your community safe from the rising tide of fascism continues this week as Josh talks with maia arson crimew (it/she), a hacktivist and past guest on the show. Topics include:

The mechanics of how corporations and governments identify and track you across virtual and real-world spaces

Common ways that your devices give away information without your knowledge and how to disable those features

What encryption is and why it matters, especially when it comes to law enforcement

Tools that you can use to anonymize your usage online

Bad Space Comics: The Suit

People don't like to admit it bcs cringe or w/e but Homestuck really did revolutionize the webcomic as a storytelling medium and I am endlessly frustrated that before webcomic artists could really stretch our legs fucking webtoonz swooped in, set a new, more restrictive standard, and then monetized and monopolized the ever living fuck out of the concept of The Webcomic until it drove away anyone who couldn't be a professional quality manga artist for free, and now the only webcomics that actually feel like spiritual successors to Homestuck are so obscure they're basically cult classics that you have to beg people to read.

Like it's just so wild to be in high school and see Homestuck be like "we're using like fifteen different artistic mediums to tell this story bcs we can" and be really fucking inspired by that, only to grow up and see basically every webcomic ever have to conform to One Single Standard or fucking perish.

hello google chrome refugees

don't use any of these browsers, they're also chrome

Here are my favorite firefox plugins for security/anti-tracking/anti-ad that I recommend you get

please get off chrome google is currently being investigated for being an Illegal Monopoly so get outta there okay love you bye

Since we’re coming to the last month of the year, here are the Top 10 Tumblr Controversies This Year

1. Popular blogger who was paid $120 by their followers to eat all the little fish out of their aquarium

2. Misha Collins tries to do an AMA but staff forgot to promote it on the top of the site like usual so he didn’t get any questions

3. Staff accidentally brings back post editing for a total of 5 minutes and John Green is immediately harassed and he is forced to delete all his posts.

4. Popular user starts rumor that baby was born and in dashcon ballpit but it comes out that there actually was a baby born in one of the dashcon bathrooms.

5. Disney claims copyright on 17 different users who had references to baby yoda in their URL and staff deletes all 17 of their blogs.

6. Voice actor of Dobby, Patrick Stewart, is sent massive amounts of anonymous harassment after declairing Dobby “deserved what he got in the end.”

7. Communismkills reveals that she eats her pizza without any sauce or toppings and also later reveals that she has scurvy

8. Sixpencee tries to bring back sixpenceeheals and copy pasted the old post about it but then deleted it 10 mins after posting

9. Popular rat blog dedicated to “letting her rats type the posts” “accidentally” posts a homophobic slur in all caps

10. Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary tried to sue the person behind the “I just want to get dicked down again =/“ post but they lose and the blog remains up