Much like the word “woke,” MAGA conservatives have stripped DEI of its original meaning. As conservatives use it now it’s basically just a socially acceptable stand-in for the N-word (or the F-word, depending on context). Like just a couple of days ago I was at a burrito place and the guy a couple spots ahead of me in line said, “This DEI cashier better not fuck up my order again.” It was very clear what he meant was, “This N-word better not piss me off.”

Any time you hear conservatives say “woke” or “DEI,” you can almost always mentally swap it with the N-word or the F-word and what they’re saying will make a lot more sense.

I keep getting served some supremely mediocre eastern European hip-hop in Release Radar and other Spotify-generated playlists because of some guy who performs as Devo. Same with guys performing as Slayer, Poe, etc.

A lot of the time they’re listed on the track along with two or three other people, so I go to the pages of those associated acts and tap the “don’t play this artist” option in the three dots menu, and that usually cuts down on how much I see them in my feeds. At least until they do a new collab.

And while we’re on the subject, if Spotify could also stop lumping several artists of the same name together on the same profile, that’d be great. There’s an old surf-rock band called the Astronauts that I listen to sometimes, and at one point there were albums from at least four different bands included on their discography page. There’s still at least two.

Yeah, the saltpeter (potassium nitrate) is really the key ingredient here. It’s the rapid oxidizer compound that gives your anti-Gorn cannon its boom boom. Without that, mixing all the other stuff together is just going to be smelly and disappointing.

I mean specifically a cloud storage account. Setting up the computer required me to supply an email address and set a password for microsoft.com. There was nothing in that process that I recall mentioning OneDrive, or that would have suggested every file on my C drive was about to be indiscriminately uploaded to a Microsoft server somewhere. I didn’t even know OneDrive was a thing until I had to google how to stop it.

Thankfully I noticed what was going on before it got to that point, but when they start vacuuming up all your files and data like that without telling you and without giving you control over it, you kind of have to assume that whatever is going on is not being done for your benefit.

This bullshit was basically my first experience with Windows 11 when I got a new PC last year. Literally, “Why is my internet so slow? What’s this OneDrive thing? Oh, holy shit fucking stop Jesus Christ!”

Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn’t set up, without even a prompt telling me it was happening, and no obvious way to make it stop. I didn’t even know Windows had added a cloud storage option. I actually had to completely uninstall OneDrive to finally make it stop.

I might have liked having a native backup service in Windows if it was like, “Hey look at this handy cloud storage tool we’ve added to Windows! Would you like to pick some files to save?” But as it is, it might as well just be another piece of spyware.

There’s a big long list of reasons why I hate Windows 11, but this OneDrive shit is the thing that’s making me think maybe it’s time to ditch Windows for good.

The headline is slightly misleading. 2.8 million searches were halted, but according to the article they didn’t attempt to figure out how many of those searches came from the same users. So thankfully the number of secret pedophiles in the UK is probably much lower than the headline might suggest.

Oh, well, if the film studios say so then by all means…

The state of science reporting has been absolute dog shit for decades. The vast majority of the time when you track down the study an article is based on, the claims of the article are either massively exaggerated, or sometimes even completely different than what the article claims. It seems like a whole industry of taking fairly mundane studies and punching them up into some exciting pieces of short fiction. So many years of garbage reporting has me immediately skeptical of any article with a bold claim, or which mentions any kind of significant breakthrough.

So the guy who notoriously despises public transit failed to come through on his promise to revolutionize public transit?

Wow.

I mean, who could have seen that coming?

Pyrophoric (adj) – Liable to ignite spontaneously on exposure to air.

Just in case you weren’t entirely sure what that word meant either.

So… 16%?

Now I’m imagining Scruffy as Zorg.

I don’t think it’s from anything, but it has kind of a similar look to Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, so maybe that’s why it looks familiar.

Is it too late to bring back the lettuce?

I for real thought it was from the dad jokes sub. I was super relieved when I realized it was a link to a news story about an actual bear, and not that the punchline was supposed to be that the bear was black and stole something.

Row (pronounced like wow) is another word for argument or disagreement. It’s most commonly used in the UK. A “political row” just means politicians are bickering with each other.

On the one hand, finding out the openly fascist rich kid from apartheid South Africa shaped a company into a place where bigotry and racial discrimination are rampant is one of the least surprising things I’ve ever read.

On the other hand, that is an absolutely shocking level of racism for any kind of modern workplace. Like, fucking wow.

What was it actually supposed to accomplish? I mean, I’m an American who mostly followed the whole thing via UK chat and panel shows so I’m sure I missed a ton of detail, but I don’t remember there being an over-arching goal, just a lot of little nebulous promises like somehow generating an extra 350 million a week for the NHS, but with no actual plan for how any of that was actually going to happen. It seemed like the whole point was to let xenophobic shit disturbers flick the Vs at Europe, and the vague notion that once Brexit was done it’d finally be open season on “those bloody immigrants.”