reading Wikipedia plot summaries of Sliders episodes is way more entertaining than the show itself could possibly be
The sliders are separated on a world where in every public place, there is a television set showing a talk show called Lipschitz Live! Quinn becomes a guest on the show to announce his location to the others.
A tabloid newspaper spreads a rumor that U.S. President Jefferson Williams is having an affair with Maggie, as a plot to cover up a germ warfare plot concerning Switzerland.
On a world where gas powered vehicles are outlawed due to the pollution that they generate, Mallory becomes friends with a group of motorcycle riders, and becomes intimately involved with their leader.
A wizard wants to capture Quinn on a world where the Mallory family has magical powers. Rembrandt gets affected by a love potion and starts to proclaim love for Wade. Can they all survive the wrath of The Dragon?
The sliders land on a world where America is a Monarchy and men get pregnant. Rembrandt is mistakenly confused for his double and is impregnated with his double's son, who is the heir to the throne.
On a world where Clerical workers are everywhere, Arturo is brainwashed into believing he is a great literary detective named Reginald Doyle (this world's equivalent of Sherlock Holmes). after being deemed as over stressed. A situation deemed serious after someone begins to murder women for real in the style of Jack The Ripper)
The sliders land on a world where a giant worm eats people and leaves behind the secret to eternal life. After the Professor disappears the group discovers how extensive the nightmare of the cove is about to become.
not my pic but this is the cleanest Storrowing i've ever seen. hats and roofs off to this unknown rental truck driver for full sending it with 0 hesitation
ohhhh shit. target is recalling their up & up baby wipes (fragrance free & fresh cucumber scented) because they're contaminated with Burkholderia cepacia complex and Burkholderia gladioli, multiple people are reporting discoloration & infections. i just got a call about it cuz i had purchased those but i've already gone through them 😅 so no refund for me. but im fine. if you have these they're saying you need to immediately stop using them and bring them back to target for a full refund. this bacteria can cause life threatening infections in children/infants and people with compromises immune systems (ESPECIALLY cystic fibrosis!!) and i know lots of other chronically ill people follow me!!!!
Clive Barker: guys, i have some exciting news
Barker: sarah gailey is going to be writing the new hellraiser comic
Barker: they've got some exciting new ideas for the series
Gailey: i've got some exciting new ideas for the series
Barker: remember the important thing about hellraiser
Barker: is that it is extremely horny
Bram Stoker: oh gross
Barker: shut up bram
Barker: remember, extremely horny
Gailey: extremely horny, got it
Barker: no
Barker: i cannot emphasize this enough
Barker: EXTREMELY horny
Barker: i cannot stress this enough
Barker: hellraiser is REAL FUCKIN HORNY
Gailey: right
Barker: that is non-negotiable
Gailey: right
Barker: that's my one stipulation
Gailey: right
Gailey: so i was thinking
Gailey: the original hellraiser drew a lot on leather daddy gimp s & m club aesthetics
Barker: hell yeah
Gailey: but
Gailey: perhaps you'd be open to a different but equally horny direction?
Gailey: what if pinhead was a hippopotomus
Barker: pinhead as a hippopotomus
Gailey: yes
Gailey: because i mean think about it
Gailey: what other animal in the entire animal kingdom so perfectly straddles the line between pleasure and pain
Gailey: in many ways, the hippopotomus is the quintessential explorer in the outer realms of experience
Gailey: and after all
Gailey: what's sexier than a big strapping hippopotomus, nature's ultimate dad bod
Barker:
Frank Belknap Long: [muffled, inside fursuit head] DO IT
Gailey: if you need convincing, perhaps a little visit to furaffinity dot com
Barker: please
Barker: i am well acquainted with furaffinity dot com
Barker: i know all the meats of our cultural stew
brazilians, imagine you’re a famous futebol player and are about to hit the winning penalty kick at the world cup finals. accidentally, the referee tosses a christian baby at you. would you still kick the baby to the goal and win the hexa championship, and sacrifice the christian baby?
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Douglas Adams wrote, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I think about this quote whenever I get angry at the technology around me. When I rail against the Great Enshittening, am I simply committing the sin of nostalgia ("Nostalgia is a toxic impulse" -J. Hodgman)? I am, after all, old.
I've written before how conservatives' yearning for "simpler times" is really just a wish to be a child again. The reason times seemed simpler during your childhood is that you were a child, and if your parents did their job, they shielded you from a lot of the complexity of their adulthood so you could enjoy your childhood:
That's where the "National Customer Rage Survey" comes in. It's been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents' attitudes towards the businesses they deal with, and as of 2025, it's fair to say, customers are pissed:
We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off.
So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.
The latest Customer Rage Survey inspired The Guardian's Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how fucked up everything is. Her inaugural installment is very good, and it's drawn a massive reader response:
I spoke with Timmons this week about the series. She told me she's been deluged with emails from readers who feel that the world is different now – and many of them cite my work on enshittification. Timmons wanted to know what advice I had for her readers. I told her that I don't think you can solve this as a consumer, because this isn't a market problem, it's a political problem, and shopping isn't politics:
Later, Timmons forwarded one of those emails to me. It gave an eloquent and evocative account of just how rancid the vibe is these days. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, quoting the oft-repeated phrase from that series: "The world has moved on."
At this point, I should warn you that the following contains some Dark Tower spoilers, so if you're planning to read a decades-old (but very good) dystopian western/science fiction crossover series, and if spoilers bug you, this might not be the essay for you.
Spoiler alert!
Still with me? OK, then.
In the Dark Tower novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren. An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.
It wasn't always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn't golden – there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars – but life was good.
And then the world moved on.
For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn't be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics – an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration – has collapsed. The world has moved on.
The Dark Tower series is a long, long, long Bildungsroman, with many detours through the life-stories of the characters in the ensemble cast, as well as the biographies of many of the figures they meet along the road. It's mostly an adventure novel, as road-trip tales tend to be, but those character studies and the lore that they surface – from our world and theirs – creates an overwhelming, many-layered, richly textured sense of loss and worse, of despair. For the world has moved on, and despite the love and care and bravery of many of the people in that world, the world cannot be redeemed. Each terrible day of those people's lives is the best day of the rest of their lives. From here on in, it only gets worse.
When Timmons' reader and their spouse greet every fresh depredation in modern life – hours on the phone with customer service to resolve a billing error that the company repeats every month, say – with "the world has moved on," they are invoking something heavy. This isn't just a rancid vibe, it's the fucking end-times.
For all that the Dark Tower novels are a series of cracking adventures and thoughtful character studies, they are also a mystery. Over and over again, we are made to ask ourselves, why has the world moved on? Was it John Farson and his army? Was it the Man in Black, the evil wizard whom the book's protagonist has pursued across time and space? Was it the Crimson King, the evil force whom the Man in Black serves?
Well, yes – and no.
Midway through the novels, we learn that the Crimson King and his evil minions have laid siege to "the beams," vast ley-lines that span the universe and provide the force that pushes away entropy, creating breathing room where repair and care can live. "All things serve the beams," we're told. The beams are the organizing force of the universe, the answer to the riddle of how such pitiful things as we could have fought back remorseless entropy for so long. By attacking the beams, the villains of the series have all but snuffed out that force, and so the world has moved on.
When I read that email and the invocation of the Dark Tower, I was immediately struck by how apt this comparison is. Because, as I've written many times, there were always enshittifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt:
There were always enshittifiers, but those enshittifiers faced external forces that checked their wreckers' urge. They were held in check by competition, and regulation, and workers' sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects they deliberately introduced into their products by enshittifying them.
And the foundation – the Dark Tower upon which all the beams converged- was antitrust enforcement, grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company – not a "good" company, nor a "bad" company – get so large that it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become "autocrats of trade":
The same people who laid siege to antitrust law would later come after all forms of checks and balances. These are the people who gave us the "unitary executive" and Project 2025, and the collapse of accountability that has allowed the worst people to commit the gravest sins they could imagine and still reap vast fortunes. These beam-breakers wanted kings, and they got them.
I collect definitions of "conservatism," and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robins's book, The Reactionary Mind. Robinson asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – "conservative"? What binds all these views together?
Robin's answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.
That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That's why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.
If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that "diversity hires," promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that's just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn't prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.
For conservatives, virtue is "whatever the people who are born to rule desire." Hence Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism, "exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." It's not a crime if the president does it. It's also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It's not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. "Taxes are for the little people":
The attack on antitrust law was part of the attack on the rule of law, the campaign to put everyone back in the their place. It's a piece of the effort to establish a new hereditary aristocracy, and every hereditary aristocracy requires heredity serfs (that would be us):
The ideology of economism – which says that market outcomes are the only way to govern a society – cashes out to "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." If we interfere with mergers, or labor practices, or commercial conduct, we "distort the market," which is literally going against nature:
That's why Trump dismantled the consumer protection agencies, the antitrust agencies, the labor protection agencies, the environmental protection agencies. When someone in power cheats the system, that's not a crime, no matter how many people they rob, maim or kill. As Trump told us on the debate stage in 2016, that kind of cheating "makes me smart":
That's why Elon Musk (almost) got to force every pension saver in America to bail out his money-incinerating AI business and his failed social media takeover – because the rules that protect everyday investors are "for the little people." Musk's mistake was trying to get a bunch of billionaires to hold the bag, too. The one form of systemic violence our society will not tolerate is trillionaire-on-billionaire violence:
The world has moved on. 50 years of neoliberal rule has weakened and snapped the beams – the rule of law, consumer and labor rights, civil rights – that radiated from our Dark Tower – antitrust law, which blocked the emergence of the "autocrats of trade." The people who besieged these beams had the same motives as the Crimson King and John Farson and the Man in Black: they were willing to pay any price for a world free from consequences for people like them. They knew they were born to rule, and that the rules were "for the little people," that breaking those rules "made them smart."
They wanted "bossism." Or, as rendered in the original Afrikaans, "baasskap," which means, "the social, political and economic domination of South Africa by its minority white population":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baasskap
Not for nothing, baasskap is the foundation of Muskism, the ideology that Elon Musk epitomizes, even if he can't articulate it:
In "The Utopia of Rules," the late David Graeber described how neoliberal deregulation produced exactly the kind of state that we were warned we'd get under communism. Thanks to monopolies, all the stores were the same and they all sold the same goods. Thanks to the dismantling of labor protection and unions, no one had enough money to get by. Thanks to elite impunity, we were ruled by monsters who committed crimes in the open and thrived as a result. Thanks to unchecked greed, we paid everything we had for healthcare, only to be denied treatment when we needed it. Thanks to the dismantling of the welfare state, more and more of us had to wait in long lines to fill out absurdly long forms in triplicate. Thanks to the intrinsic instability of such a terrible system, more and more of us ended up in prison, and protest became more and more illegal:
Graeber pointed out that the rise of the web made it seductively easy for people in authority to force us to fill in forms. When analog bureaucracies impose paperwork costs on us, they also impose paperwork costs on themselves, because processing and filing those forms requires substantial effort, even if filling in those forms requires even more effort from us.
When it comes to virtual paperwork, the asymmetry is even more pronounced. Sure, it takes some admin to set up an online form and write the scripts to process its outputs, but that's a one-off. The form-giver can perform a very little admin and still impose a giant, repeated admin burden on the rest of us.
AI has only made this worse. Now, thanks to vibe coding, everyone can produce a form and its associated processing and analytics back-end with prompts, which creates a grave moral hazard. The kinds of activities that I used to fill in a single short form to accomplish now requires ten lengthy forms, created by different people in the same organization, all asking for variations on the same information. Through AI, we have democratized bureaucracy. It's Kafka-as-a-service.
What's more, when you're dealing with a monopoly, you have no choice but to complete whatever paperwork they throw at you. And when the vibe-coded back-end scripts shit the bed and lose or misinterpret your data, you have no choice but to endure an infinite telephone hold queue (if you're lucky) or get shunted to a customer service bot (if you're unlucky):
It's entirely possible to build webforms that are thoughtful, fast, respectful of our time, and well-processed. The problem is that fielding these forms requires that the form-giver undertake some intensive, moderately expensive work (once), while skipping this step merely requires that we all perform intensive, time-consuming work (over and over and over again):
https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/
This is how we end up with government forms that require you to list every trip you have ever taken to the USA, since your infancy, with every flight number, which you can only get help with by talking to a chatbot that emails you an out-of-date PDF no matter what question you ask of it:
This is how we end up with massive customer service queues, long lines at tills, and no one at the gate to answer your questions when your flight is canceled. Understaffing is a form of enshittification, one that shifts value from shoppers to owners, and shifts consequences from owners to workers:
This is how we end up with broken machines that no one can fix. Firing workers and replacing them with chatbots or contractors means incinerating their process knowledge – the precious, inchoate, unrecorded understanding that keeps everything working:
This is how companies that make products we love suddenly decide to wreck those products: when the only consequences for shitty products is angry customers with nowhere to go and no one to vent their rage upon except workers who have no labor rights and can't afford to quit, why not do a mafia bust-out for every business?
The world has moved on. Nothing works. Everything costs too much. No one can help. No one knows how to fix anything. The beams were broken by the Crimson King and his economism-crazed minions. The Dark Tower might fall.
So what consumer advice do I have for people who are angry about this? I don't have any consumer advice, I'm afraid. You can't shop your way out of a monopoly. Once again, shopping is not politics.
What I have for you is political advice. To restore the beams and beat back entropy again, we need a better system, not more virtuous individuals. If you feel – as I do – that "the world has moved on," then to wrench it back, you will have to join a polity. Support activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group I've been at for the past 25 years:
https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff
Join a union. If there's no union at your jobsite, start a union. If you work in tech, you start this process by talking to techsolidarity.org and the techworkerscoalition.org. In the UK, get in touch with United Tech and Allied Workers:
https://utaw.tech/
Get involved in party politics. Find a political party whose local organization supports your values (even if the national version of that party sucks) and then work with your fellow grassroots activists to drag or replace the party leaders. Get involved in local politics: if there's one thing Moms For Liberty has taught us, it's that unregarded, seemingly unimportant local offices have enormous potential to change facts on the ground for the people where you live. Those changes don't have to be change for the worse.
Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that's not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can't save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it's so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must. All things serve the beams.
NPS opened public comment for the dumb fuck Trump Triumphal Arch. I know there’s no stopping it from happening because Americans were stupid enough to choose this monster over sense and the safety of the vulnerable, but leave a comment about how much you don’t want this so that at least posterity registers you hated this man. Also I live in DC and am SO TIRED of him rearranging the landscape of this city for vanity projects.
ParkPlanning - Triumphal Arch - Section 106 Assessment of Effect and Draft Programmatic Agreement
I couldn’t resist starting another Luminous once I saw this line of fabric. It’s called Color Collage by Shelley Davies from Northcott and it’s been in the back of my mind for ages.
I’m using six colours in the piecing, which should make it 92”x109” (unless I mess with the pattern even more and take one of the rows out completely) which will technically be a king size LOL The seventh colour pink is gonna be used on the binding so I get to use alllll the colours we had in stock in the shop 🎉
Someone please stop me, I can’t stop making these fucking things lmao 😭😭😭😂😂😂 I had a plan to do something else but I couldn’t help it!
I did take one row out of the centre so there are only two red centre blocks instead of three. 109” is too big for my queen bed, but I can work with 101” LOL
Technically this will still fit a king at 92”x101”, but I am a blanket hog and that feels like a really skinny king to me.
ALSO??
Because I altered the amount of rows (downsizing) but did not alter the amount of blocks I made, I ended up with just enough left over to make two matching pillow cases! They are even on point like the quilt.
Not as big as the greyscale king for my brother, but still. It feels big.
As you can see a little from the roll on the back of the long arm, I found a fun rainbow universe print to put on it with all the colours on the front.
I’m quilting the pillowcases too, though in a tighter pattern so they can handle more washing.
I love it so much. My favourite Luminous, I swear.
The pillow cases look so good too. As I mentioned, I quilted them much tighter than the quilt so they can be thrown in the wash a lot more. Same pattern, just smaller design.
It’s so busy, I could stare at it for hours finding things in the prints.
Also? I love the pink binding. I really did want to use every colour, so this was a nice compromise to having to resize everything LOL
The backing is also so busy LOL You can hide a lot of pet fur on both sides of this thing.
The pillowcases turned out great. I used the leftover from the backing to back the pillow cases so that everything matches. And they’re envelope style so the pillows won’t slip out. Hate it when the pillowcase slips off my pillow.
I had to sew three 45” wide strips of fabric together for the backing to fit on the long arm. Since the quilt was only 101” at its widest, I had a whole 30” strip that was usable and perfect for this.
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