The reason I always bring up obscure Vertigo comics and shit every time the topic of superhero "deconstruction" comes up isn't because I'm playing gotcha. It's because I'm trying to illustrate that if you think you've got something clever to say, but your critique of the medium fails to rise even to the level of self-directed criticism that fucking DC Comics is willing to put their name to, you need to reexamine your premises.
it’s a pretty well-known phenomenon that you only get a couple seconds with your horror creature fully visible onscreen before it gets “chuckied,” a term coined by yours truly referring to the shift between the first and second acts of child’s play (1988) as the audience gets used to seeing the little chucky puppet moving around and consequently can no longer buy into the film’s serious slasher tone in the absence of the horror of the unknown. the tuunbaq in the terror and the dogomorph in alien 3 (1992) are also famous victims of chuckying—just like how lovecraftian horror usually falls flat on the screen, too much visibility and your scary, amorphous creature will become a very morphous puppet or cgi’d in picture. the easiest way to combat this is of course to keep the creature obscured for as much of the piece as possible; for instance, despite their oppressive presence throughout their respective works, the beast in over the garden wall is shown for less than six frames and the eponymous kaiju of cloverfield (2008) is never properly shown, allowing each to retain their mystery and danger. another route is to simply lean into the campiness of it, like the later child’s play franchise and alien resurrection (1997). in the case of the blob (1958) a mere satirical title sequence song is enough to completely transform a fairly standard creature feature into an enduring masterpiece of hokey fun. the third option to combat chuckying is for the horror creature to constantly transform—the thing (1982), the fly (1986), and aliens (1986) show their creatures in loving detail, but there is always something the audience hasn’t seen yet, something they don’t know to brace themselves for. it’s a fine line to walk, of course, but that’s the nature of the game when you want to turn the concept of the unknown into something knowable enough to bite you
I like when Obama releases his summer reading list because I like to imagine if we had a single journalist with the cojones to ask Trump to release a reading list.
With everything else about Obama getting under his skin, I am actually impressed that Trump doesn't release a fake reading list of books he totally read. Doesn't even pretend to be literate. He knows who voted for him, he knows Republicans don't read, he isn't even going to pretend otherwise.
I feel like tumblr should be bigger fans of The Blues Brothers. It's a movie that has everything we value as a community. Attention and respect to pioneering black musicians, open hostility to nazis, open defiance to police, Carrie Fisher with a rocket launcher and flamethrower, a soundtrack that goes hard as hell, John Belushi so blasted on cocaine that he continues to do somersaults despite having a broken ankle. It's got it all!
Frank Oz is the jail's discharge clerk when Belushi gets out of jail at the beginning.
Not getting into ending spoilers but Steven Spielberg plays a character who is pivotal to the climax of the film.
Ray Charles fires a warning shot from a pistol at a shoplifter.
They did location filming in a mall that had closed the previous year in 1978. The production fucked that mall up so bad that it remained abandoned until it was finally demolished in 2012.
A total of 60 cop cars are fucking destroyed in the movie.
It’s got Aretha Franklin as a sarcastic diner owner with her own back-up dancers. Chaka Khan is a soloist in the choir. And the whole scene set to Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher is so spectacular I won’t ruin it for you.
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).
I feel like simply calling JK Rowling a transphobe isn't strong enough anymore. Like. This is not your grandpa calling you by your deadname at a restaurant kind of transphobic. This is her wanting to eradicate all trans people (with an extra special hatred towards trans women specifically). This is her trying just that by personally funding transphobic hate groups with millions to push around laws in the UK. It is not hyperbolic to call her a dangerous, genocidal maniac.
It's not about cancelling a problematic writer. It's about literally trying to save lives by denying her as much money and power as possible.
A lot of cis people are treating her like an actress who pushes diet culture or a singer who is too sex forward for their tastes. Like she's an inconvenience to their moral comfort instead of the existential threat she is.
She is not that.
She is Elon Musk. She is Trump. She is a powerful monster with the money to end lives.
Giving her money and creating a demand for her books by engaging in fandom should be seen the same way owning a cybertruck is seen. Harry Potter gear is in the same category as MAGA gear.
I need to see the same disgust and outright hatred of her that I see about all the evil men in her category. I don't know if people see her as less dangerous because she's a woman or if people are worried that hating on a woman will get their feminist card revoked, but she needs to be taken more seriously by a lot of people. She's a big name heavy hitter with more money than anyone should be allowed to have.
My mom always taught me yell or fight back. Boys would be mean and I would yell back. I would get my ass pinched and I would smack them as hard as I could.
Who alway got in trouble? Me.
They would call my mother and she always came in and lectures my teachers and threatened to sue for making her miss work and treating me poorly.
She always taught my brothers to respect women. The only fights my brothers ever got in was defending women from someone else.
The school tried to call my father once instead of my mother on us. He came in in his full preacher outfit (being a preacher and all) and gave them an entire sermon on what would Jesus day of he was called in. They decided dealing with my mom was better.
I think my favorite story of this is when some kid snapped my bra and I turned around, didn’t even think about it, and punched that little motherfucker right in the nose.
So naturally, I end up in the principal’s office, refusing to apologize.
“He shouldn’t have put his hands on me and I wouldn’t have hit him!” That’s the only thing I was saying.
These people had the unfortunate luck of catching my dad at home, instead of my mom. So he comes fucking sauntering in there, like he’s Clint fucking Eastwood in some western movie and looks at me.
“Melissa, did you punch him?”
“Yes.” I said.
“Why?”
“Because he snapped my bra strap.”
And he turns his squinty eyed glare to the principal and says, “You’re telling me my daughter is in trouble because that squirrely looking kid put his hands on her and she chose to defend herself? That’s what you are saying to me.”
“Well, sir-” The man kind of stuttered because my dad is kind of intimidating in the quiet sort of way that kind of whispers in the back of your mind that this person could be dangerous. “Melissa did make it physical.”
“No. That kid put his hands on my daughter. Are you saying my daughter cannot defend herself when some boy decides to put hands on her? Is that what you are teaching my girl?”
It was a party organized for the end of the school year, and I was helping in the kitchen to prepare stuff with a nun and a bunch of little girls. There was one of the girls’ little brother who was there.
There was a little girl who was carrying a bowl of tomato sauce and was going outside, but the boy was just in front of her and he slammed the door in her face. She dropped the bowl on the floor and got all messy.
So what happened?
The nun went outside, took the boy by the arm, and gave him an epic speech going around the lines of: “Would you treat the Virgin Mary like that, young man?” “Nnnnno…” “Then treat every girl like she’s the Virgin Mary.” Not only the boy had to apologize to the little girl, but he also had to clean up and he was put on kitchen duty for the rest of the day.
Then another day, in catechism class (I was a in a girls’ school, mind you), the nun was there telling us: “If a guy touches you in a way you don’t like, punch him in the face. It’s not a sin against charity. On the contrary, you’re being charitable by showing him he’s sinning by impurity and you’ll save him from going to hell.”
So I was at my desk during class looking like this:
Jesus said if guys hands were causing them sin-problems, they should cut them off. Face-punching seems like a good pre-amputation steps, to prevent it getting that far.
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romaincrisis
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