Morhek's Adventures through Time and Space

"And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." ~ William Shakespeare

[bagel-bird-ainsor]

My current Homestar Runner obsession made me remember Poker Night at the Inventory exists so I doodled this

[70sscifiart]

Here's Phil Foglio's 1983 cover for Hit or Myth, by Robert Asprin.

The model for the demon was Foglio's friend Greg Ketter, owner of Dreamhaven Books in Minneapolis, who was recently photographed walking through tear gas while protesting the ongoing ICE invasion at age 70.

[beardedmrbean]

[dailycatsblog]

[the-composite-doll]

Wait is that THIS cat?

IT IS

[robotdwarf]

Turns out the scheming eunuch's love for you is genuine

[ralfmaximus]

Some users report Firefox scoffing CPU power

: You guessed it: looks like it's a so-called AI

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

[a-for-effort-f-for-execution]

if you want to turn off as much ai crap in firefox as possible, from this post on mozilla's connect forum, you should also set all these to false using about:config:

browser.ml.enable

extensions.ml.enabled

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

to get rid of the revamped sidebar, which is also trying to incorporate ai:

sidebar.revamp

unrelated anyone got browser recommendations for when we have to jump ship from firefox

[mckitterick]

and now keep in mind that all the other browsers are doing this shit, too, but you can't reconfigure them as with Firefox

on A for Effort's last point, is there any browser that offers users even half as much control as Firefox? if so, I'd like to try it as a backup

[mckitterick]

irritatingly, the list of AI settings in Firefox has grown. to kill them all as of today (Nov 20, 2025), go into about:config and set all of these to false (yes, you'll have to copy and paste them one by one):

browser.ml.enable

browser.ml.chat.enabled

browser.ml.chat.menu

browser.ml.chat.page

browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge

browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled

browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

extensions.ml.enabled

browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate

in addition to nuking AI, it'll also speed up your browsing

[squirrelstothenuts]

you don't have to copy and paste them one by one, you can create a user.js file that should be located at:

(if you're unsure, go to about:support and check the path at "Profile Directory")

(also for linux users: firefox 147 will finally respect the xdg base directory specification so you won't have a .mozilla folder on your home directory and it will be located in your .config and/or .local /share)

and paste these lines

// ai bullshit user_pref("browser.ml.chat.enabled", false); user_pref("browser.ml.chat.hideFromLabs", true); user_pref("browser.ml.chat.hideLabsShortcuts", true); user_pref("browser.ml.chat.menu", false); user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page", false); user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge", false); user_pref("browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge", false); user_pref("browser.ml.chat.shortcuts", false); user_pref("browser.ml.chat.sidebar", false); user_pref("browser.ml.checkForMemory", false); user_pref("browser.ml.enable", false); user_pref("browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled", false); user_pref("browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled", false); user_pref("browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate", false); user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled", false); user_pref("browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnable", false); user_pref("extensions.ml.enabled", false);

(some settings are redundant and mozilla tweaks things from time to time so if you don't want to bother, grab the user.js file from https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox and update this file every 2 months)

[mckitterick]

shortcut for the more-advanced user. which we're all going to need to become, real quick now

[skipppppy]

I was cooking on twitter today

[freddie-mercuryy]

Queen performing Rock ‘n’ Roll Medley, Live at Earls Coult, 7th June 1977

[atopfourthwall]

We now go live to Andrew Cuomo's concession speech.

[targetedknowledge]

[arachnofiend]

I love underdogs

I love smashing narratives and ruining dynasties

I love reminding the titans of an era that they are mortal and they can bleed

[tsinavar]

The Prey

I got in my head the idea of doing a tapestry-inspired painting based on this quest, so here it is! Among the flowers on the ground there are dandelions, st. john’s wort, and valerian, as they’re the ones you can find in the Talmberg Woods.

Looking forward to painting Henry in an armour at some point, because after trotting so long beside Hans like a dog here, he very much deserves to look like a knight next.

[theonion]

“That’s so unfair. If these were issues Democrats truly cared about, then we’d fight the Republicans tooth and nail on them. We’d even have the guts to risk the lucrative relationships we’ve formed with powerful corporations, defense contractors, and billionaire donors. But for something like an eviction moratorium, Medicare for all, or a fracking ban? No fucking way.” Reached for comment, the hundreds of handsomely paid former Congress members now working as lobbyists and sitting on corporate boards were happy to acknowledge their utter cowardice.

Full Story

[peteandpetegifs]

♫ “Marmalade Cream… so sweet in between" ♫ ♫ "Marmalade Cream… it’s a tangerine dream" ♫ ♫ "Ah, just give me some sugar!" ♫

[senatortedcruz]

Triple the obese lynx budget

[artistcurrentlyknownasfrogger]

[caffeinesam]

Obese Lynx Not Bombs

[gogomrbrown]

[thesuperheroesnetwork]

Feels like a good time to bring these back around.

[contact-guy]

Did you know that JRR Tolkien wrote an unpublished epilogue to Lord of the Rings? It's achingly, beautifully wistful in the way that only Lord of the Rings is. I revisited it recently because I'm guesting on my friends' LOTR podcast, and THAT reminded me that I drew a comic of the epilogue back in 2021 (all text is entirely canon). Anyway I thought folks on this website might enjoy it!

[uss-edsall]

I think my favourite example of technology changing, therefore making the meaning of a story harder to understand for younger generations, is in H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds

The book was written with the effect colonisation and imperialism had on Tasmania in mind, a critique of imperialism. The Black War (one of the deadliest-per-capita wars in history) functionally obliterated the native Aboriginal Tasmanians in a way that would be recognised as genocide today.

In the book there is a something described as having “a stand like a theodolite” (which itself is a surveying tool), which the narrator is informed is a heliograph, also called a sun-telegraph. The British Army used it to reflect light over large distances to send signal messages. This was used widely in the late-19th century but has essentially disappeared from use today.

Every so often Wells brings up the heliograph at work, used as warning of the martians' movements by "devoted scouts." At one point a panicking man asks the narrator "what is that flicker in the sky?" and the narrator responds with "heliograph signaling--that it was the sign of human help and effort in the sky." The narrator had never seen a heliograph before its use to signal against the martians' invasion.

The thing about the heliograph? In real life, it was used primarily in regions that were not heavily built up; that did not have the infrastructure for faster signaling methods, such as an actual telegraph machine. In other words, for the British, it was a tool near-exclusively used in colonial regions. The narrator having never seen it before is because it had no use in "civilised" Britain - until the Martians came - and it has no use in conquered regions, where the infrastructure for telegraph had been built. This technology, perhaps more than any other, literally signaled the presence of the late British Empire.

The heliograph was used solely within the realm of conquest (or resistance as the Boers used it against the British in the Boer Wars). The use of it in Wells' The War of the Worlds is therefore an explicit assertion that Britain was now a colonised space; that the home of empire was now considered the colonial far reaches of another invader, and they are doing to the Britons what the Britons did to the Tasmanian.

But, ah, technology has marched on - the radio replaced the telegram and the heliograph alike, the phone as well, the computer, the television, the livestream. The only offshoot used today is heliotropes for land surveying. So, a technology fell out of even uncommon use and is now practically unheard of, and with it, the implied message of its use in what is now a classic book.