A random assortment of fandom shit, dank memes, and political rambling. Occasionally sharks. Not exactly a NSFW blog, but I do post NSFW things occasionally, so please don't follow if you're not a legal adult in your country. Like my nonsense? Buy me a coffee!
would you look at that, fandom.com has started adding completely content-blocking popups to their page that totally prevent you from using the site unless you turn ad block off.
it sure would be a shame if people went to their URL bar and typed "anti" in front of "fandom.com" in order to go to the antifandom.com mirror of the page they were trying to reach, which shows all the same content but without any ads,
Every so often online you’ll hear about a woman who spilled McDonald’s coffee on her lap that sued McDonald’s. It’s touted as the prime example of a frivolous lawsuit, and McDonald’s have put in a lot of money to spin the case that way.
I'm sick of seeing that lie peddled by clickbait news sites and popular accounts trying to ridicule her with "Oh you didn't expect coffee to be hot?".
What actually happened should radicalise you.
In 1994, Stella Liebeck, who was 79 years old, spilled coffee on her lap while in the passengers seat of the car. The coffee was dangerously hot and caused third-degree burns over 16% of her body including her inner thighs and genitals.
*Warning - Very graphic images of the burns*
Image 1.
Image 2.
Stella originally tried to settle with McDonald's for the cost of her medical care - $20,000. They only offered her $800.
Throughout the case it was discovered that McDonald's were selling coffee between 30-40 degrees higher than other places. That change in temperature causes third-degree burns much faster, if it had been from somewhere else she would have had roughly 20 seconds to wipe away the coffee and avoid third-degree burns.
McDonald's were behind the smear campaign against her, so whenever you see anyone spread their misinformation, you can now correct them.
The median artery is an artery that is occasionally found in humans and other animals. [1] It is present in 35% of individuals born in the late 20th century. [2]
occasionally I'm reminded that biology just sucks to think about
patients often experience disruptions to splenic development during embryogenesis, resulting in an overall lack a spleen (asplenia) or development of many spleens (polysplenia)
people are like 'aspects of biology and human anatomy need to be nearly delineated and sorted into distinct boxes' and then actual biology is like 'roll 2d3+2 to determine how many artery branches your cerebrum has'
In my degree (Human Anatomy), in our final year we had an entire module dedicated to human variation.
We learned that some humans are born mirrored. Their heart is on the right, their liver in their left, etc. Sometimes only a few organs are flipped which can present problems. Other times the person might have no idea until they seek medical advice for unrelated issues.
We learned that only a very small amount of blood vessels are genetically programmed to grow where they're meant to, and the rest get built as your body grows from embryo-size, blood vessels form where blood vessels are needed. Everyone's vein patterns are really different as a result, more individual than fingerprints.
We learned that kidneys and spleens have a high amount of variation.
We learned that pelvic bone structure is at most an indication of what sex/gender the person might have been, with at least 4 different types of pelvic shape, and none of them confined to only biologically male or female people.
The year before we had already seen this in action during dissection classes, where no two bodies looked the same, and none of them looked like the pictures in the textbooks.
The real world is messy. Science is messy, biology is messy, anatomy is messy. You learn about statistical averages in school and if you keep getting educated after school you'll learn that it is never that simple.
The grand theme of biology is "it depends" depends on what? Everything. Bugger to work with as a field of study. We did a dissection in college where we got 5 sharks in. One had all the organs flipped, one was intersex, and one was pregnant. Vastly different anatomy situations everywhere.
A huge blocklist of manually curated sites that contain AI generated imagery for uBlock Origin & uBlacklist. - laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-A
Install this blocklist using the instructions on the GitHub page. For Firefox, you will need to install uBlockOrigin for this. Google Chrome no longer allows the uBlockOrigin extension, so I'm assuming you're at least primarily a Firefox user - or about to be (see browser alternatives below).
For Google Chrome or mobile browsers, this will work with uBlacklist. See the GitHub page for full details on compatibility.
Remove AI Widgets:
If you go to your uBlockOrigin Filter lists page, you can select to filter out AI Widgets - this should completely remove the 'AI Mode' widget/button from your Google search page, in addition to the work done by the Huge AI Blocklist.
Using the uBlockOrigin Huge AI Blocklist filter has made my Google searches look like they used to, and gives me genuine search results.
Look at this. It's beautiful. It's informative. It's not a heap of burning trash bloated with fake information made up by a hallucinating chat bot.
We can go even further: return to the old school search results.
Now, the above results are great and should be free of generative AI junk, but some people would rather not see any of the summary widgets or 'people also ask' box at all. Fear not! You can remove all that by using the 'Web' mode in the Google search bar. Click the 'More' drop down menu and select 'Web'.
Huzzah! Incredible. It's like a functional search engine again.
You can make this the default Google search mode in Google Chrome using Method 1 from this page (https://allthings.how/how-to-turn-off-ai-mode-in-google-chrome/). Unfortunately, I don't know if there's a way to do this in Firefox too. This is why for the most part I still use DuckDuckGo (see below) as my default search engine, and only use Google to supplement my searches on the rare occasion I'm just missing something.
Remember, if you clear your cookies, your search engine preferences will reset, including any settings you enabled/disabled to avoid AI. This applies to DuckDuckGo as well; check your settings every time you clear your browser!
Extra filters (optional):
I've also added four filters (their order doesn't matter) to the My Filters page. Full disclosure: I'm not sure they still work, or may only work on Chrome, but I'm keeping them anyway, just in case.
From https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1i7kg83/comment/m8lllwr/: see which solution in the list works for you, it seems to be different for everybody.
From https://allthings.how/how-to-turn-off-ai-mode-in-google-chrome/:
www.google.com##.Beswgc
www.google.com##.olrp5b
www.google.com##.hdzaWe
Make sure you hit the apply changes button when you add filters.
Browser alternatives: escaping Google Chrome.
If you haven't jumped ship from Chrome yet, I'd recommend doing so. Sometimes Chrome outperforms Firefox for niche purposes or because a website doesn't bother to fully support non-Chrome browsers, but the days of Chrome being the superior browser are long gone — by about 10 years. If you're trying to escape Chromium browsers, beware that a lot of the popular Chrome alternatives are just Chrome in a different hat.
Firefox has been the most popular non-Chromium browser for years, and for good reason. However, the company running Mozilla Firefox has annoyed their users, me included, by refusing to take an anti- generative-ai stance, and even included AI features in the Mozilla Firefox browser. Most Firefox users specifically use it because they hate Google's enshittification and want a privacy-focused, clean browser that doesn't hog their RAM and CPU for no reason. So, you can imagine that Mozilla's attitude has pissed us all off recently. You can turn off the AI features in Firefox with the built-in settings, but the company has recently steered straight into the burning garbage heap by saying they want to make the browser based on AI.
Waterfox and LibreWolf:
There are really good alternatives based on Firefox (open-source) which are not affiliated with Mozilla (the company), if you don't like how it operates. Waterfox and LibreWolf are even more trimmed down and privacy-focused than Mozilla's Firefox, and don't use AI. Anti-ai statements: Waterfox and LibreWolf.
From this page: https://programming.dev/post/42546774
In short: LibreWolf is for those who want a “locked-down” fortress out of the box, while Waterfox is for those who want a privacy-conscious browser that still feels like a normal, convenient daily driver.
Choose LibreWolf if: You want the highest level of privacy without having to manually edit config files, and you don’t mind occasionally “fixing” a broken website or re-logging into accounts.
Choose Waterfox if: You want a privacy-respecting browser that supports Firefox Sync, has an Android counterpart, and handles streaming sites/logins without any extra friction (it supports WideWine out of the box, which lets you stream DRM protected content (netflix, hulu, disney, etc).
— [email protected]
I've heard good things about both of these browsers and will investigate them further to decide whether to personally switch from Mozilla Firefox.
DuckDuckGo:
I would also recommend installing the DuckDuckGo extension to your browsers and setting it to be your default search engine.
I've had DuckDuckGo installed on my browsers, Chrome or Firefox, for like 10 years now. It is a good search engine, it's unobtrusive, and blocks trackers, cookies, and does not save any data about you. I've also used it as my default mobile browser for years, along with Firefox mobile, which you can add the AI Blocklist to (see again the GitHub page). I haven't tried the DuckDuckGo desktop browser yet, but I imagine it works just fine like the mobile version. I think DuckDuckGo's browser is also Chromium-based, at least indirectly. I use Firefox with the DuckDuckGo extension so I can have a widely-supported, non-Chromium browser, but include all of DuckDuckGo's anti-tracking features.
Note: DuckDuckGo has included AI in its browser product, however you can opt-out of all AI features with the built-in settings and they will not push it on you like Google does. I hope they remove AI features entirely in the future, but for now I am comfortable with the barriers in place to keep AI out of my face. Firefox also has AI features like Chrome does, which you can turn off with the built-in settings.
There's also noai.duckduckgo search, an alternative version of its normal search engine which removes AI-generated images and turns off AI results/assists by default. Even though DuckDuckGo's inclusion of any AI features annoys me, its policy to make these features 100% optional builds trust with this browser/extension/search engine.
You can always use Google search if you need to, but with uBlockOrigin and the AI Blocklist filter added on, at least you shouldn't have AI-altered search results or the AI overview anymore.
Other browsers exist, probably:
There are certainly more non-Chromium alternatives out there, but Firefox, Waterfox, and LibreWolf are the top three recommended to me. That link to alternatives, plus this ComputerCity page are the best lists I could find in a brief search. If you google "non-Chromium browsers" you'll get a lot of mixed results which require a bit of digging to realise they're not really recommending you what you looked for at all.
I've heard about Ecosia over the years, and while I like the idea of a search engine that plants a tree for each query, I don't think that's actually what happens — at least, that's what they used to be reputed to do, but I believe that's an unsustainable business model which has likely changed. In 2026, Ecosia says it uses 100% of its profits for the planet and runs its search engine off clean energy. That's cool! It's still Chromium-based. And it also uses generative AI for chat bots, so I don't trust its principles on environmentalism. I need to do more reading on this to form a stronger opinion about it.
I hope this post has helped at least some of you have a better experience browsing the web and googling your questions.
The Huge AI Blocklist really has been an amazing tool to keep my internet life free and clear of a lot of generative AI rubbish. I'm not a tech expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm savvy enough to understand what genAI is and does, and that the more I learn about it, it's even worse than I thought. I truly hate it, and I hate the enshittification of all our experiences, even those as simple and innocent as googling "snow leopard" or "how to cook pasta" or "what is a phascogale" (go ahead and test your freshly-cleaned search engines out with that one hehe).
Instead of duckduckgo use noai.duckduckgo! They offer an alternative because the AI aversion got through to them, so please honour it, lest they scrap it.
isnt it maddening how one day ur 9 and u go to middle school and cub scouts and all the kids are cursing and making dirty jokes and drawing dicks and repeating offensive shit they got from watching south park and family guy on their bedroom tv after their parents have gone to bed (on the same channel that shows kids cartoons during the day) and playing horrifically violent games on newgrounds and a handful of the kids u know have straight up told u they do coke, then next thing u know ur an adult and the ppl around u expect u to act like even the slightest exposure to potentially objectionable content or depictions of the human body will instantly and irreversibly shatter any childs fragile innocent mind
and theyre like "prove to me this wont traumatize my children!" and even the ppl who agree w u go "well u see, in other cultures, and in the ancient past, and if u look at this study-" but like. my source is every child whos ever grown up at any point in human history. open ur eyes. we have never been able to stop kids from seeing and repeating adult stuff and we never will, and its always just been fine
Look, I realize that the whole Schrodinger's Mitch thing has real political consequences on a national level, but since I'm not from Kentucky and have no say whatsoever in the outcome of the situation, I'm honestly just finding the entire thing grimly hilarious. Has Horrible Turtle Man died? We don't fucking know! Turns out senators can just not show up to work indefinitely and there are no consequences! What fun!
Having seen some births now i can say that dog birth is amazing cos they just slip n slide out one after the other like a little conveyor belt. And theyre so little and unformed. And then UNGULATE BIRTHS ... are amazing for the opposite reason which is that 10mins after being born they are filing their taxes. Unless they are goats, in which case they are committing tax fraud instead
Goats are what is called a precocial species, which means that shortly after birth they are able to do many thimgs on their own, such as standing, walking, eating, and embezzlement
It's important to note that Chekhov's Gun was not originally about foreshadowing, but a piece of advice to playwrights about how every element in a play should have narrative relevance. The corollary to Chekhov's Gun is that if a gun mounted on the wall in act 1 is never used at all in the entirety of the play, then it should be omitted from the play entirely.
Very funny example of writing advice that is very specific to its medium getting overapplied outside its scope. Can you imagine how awful set design would be if people tried to apply this to movies. 60 minute post credits scene in the Matrix where Neo has to fire every gun that appears in the "lots of guns" scene
this reminds me of a computer system we had at my previous job, which allowed an optional "medical condition" to be recorded against each person in the database. if one was entered, you needed to specify whether that condition was stable, worsening, or improving.
however, the list of possible "conditions" was rather broad, and included pregnancy; i was never sure whether "worsening" or "improving" was the correct choice in that case.
for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.
Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.
And so on.
The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.
But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.
If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.
But they wouldn't understand any of it.
That's ChatGPT.
And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.
But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.
I know that, as Americans, we live awash in a sea of anti-China propaganda and as such a lot of us on the left want to course correct and cut through the lies to stop seeing China as some great evil, and that is definitely a good instinct and desire, but in the process of unfucking ourselves from US propaganda it's important to not then immediately walk into supporting Chinese propaganda. I feel like I've seen more and more folks in my communities jump on the rather concerning trend of uncritically accepting Chinese news and the word of the Chinese government as the antithesis of Americas lies about the country, but the truth is that both the US and China are massive imperialist nations with major skeletons in the closet, whom have committed atrocities to attain and sustain their power, and who continue to exert their influence on the global stage in pursuit of their own ends, and who are constantly attempting to shape narratives about their own countries, their governments actions, and the world at large. Please apply the same critical thinking skills, skepticism, and standards you would hold US news to when talking about other large and influential nations, China very much included.
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