Search Engine Optimization. Basically gaming search engine indexing algorithms so that your content appears more “relevant” (read: crammed full of as many keywords as possible) and thus higher up on search results, usually at the expense of having, you know, actual content worth reading.

I use uBlacklist with this filter and that generally keeps the repeat offenders at least out of image search, but clearing out every SEO-spam print-on-demand mimc-site was already a game of whack-a-mole before consumer LLMs became a thing; I imagine now it’d be like playing whack-a-mole with a hydra. Still, it does at least help.

Alright, so you probably can’t get rid of it, but you can make it look like it’s defective. Make it look like it’s sending way too many false positives. Find somewhere where you can get away with making obvious mistakes and then make like fifty of them in a row. “Why would I, an intelligent human being, just sit in the middle of an empty street doing donuts in an 18-wheeler for 10 straight minutes? I have a job to do,” you say. If you got one of those “constantly monitoring everything you say” things Amazon tried rolling out, just start spouting random gibberish. Some pencil-pusher at HQ sees a transcript come back that just says “reptile shoestring meridian front sawdust henway ball Amtrak septuagint ladder correct horse battery staple java thorpe 2 Chainz” over and over for like 40 pages, worst-case scenario he’s not gonna read it, best-case scenario he’s gonna think the company’s paying way too much for shit that don’t work.

My class was set to graduate right around the time the pandemic hit and a lot of people ended up graduating late because the school literally couldn’t offer the classes they needed to finish their degree. Anyone to whom your date of graduation is actually relevant likely isn’t going to bat an eye at anyone who was in college within the last 5 years graduating a couple months late.

And, of course, there’s that old stand-by moral of “the only reason it seems like all your peers are doing better is because the ones in the same situation as you aren’t going on social media to brag about it.” So don’t rely on that as a metric too heavily.

How much food and what is it?

…Did we mention it doubles as a convenient dumping ground for mob snitches?

in case you want to self-host your own algae, I guess

And try very hard to let the door hit you on the way out!

I suppose, to be fair, I would also probably strive to do the exact opposite of anything the Heritage Foundation told me to do.

if anything they’ve reopened their account with Master Don

“You there, on the motorcycle! Sell me one of your melons!”

Fine, you take it off the shelves and I’ll just torrent it. Nobody should be able to stop me from doing that as long as I don’t seed it, right Meta?

At least they’re taking credit for something that actually happened this time, I guess.

“If these devices were, as previously believed, implements in some sort of ancient ‘throwing game’, I can only assume this to be the result of a misguided attempt to play the sport on horseback or, heaven forbid, to teach the horse to play the game itself. Truly, our ancestors were a primitive people.”

Horseshoes would probably be pretty confusing, actually. Figuring out sans context that this weird metal crescent was supposed to be nailed onto an animal’s hoof would be a feat on its own, but add on people hanging them up as decoration out of superstition or just, like, throwing them, especially in places where there aren’t any damn horses, that’s really gonna muddy the waters.

My vote’s for either vacuum cleaner attachments or old batteries. I barely know the appropriate uses and contexts for all these vacuum cleaner attachments, some future guy with presumably no foreknowledge of our culture or lifestyle doesn’t stand a chance. And if we’re far enough in the future that no record of our way of life remains, I don’t care how much they keep going and going, those Energizers are gonna be dead, and these archaeologists are gonna all be scratching their heads trying to figure out why we have so many random metal cylinders in all different sizes that are, at best, completely inert, and at worst leaking caustic sludge.

This has happened enough times that the euphemism for piracy in my household has become “renting a film from my man in Bangladesh”

Bingo. That is literally how the people (term used loosely) currently dismantling government DEI programs have been spinning it — “These programs divided Americans by race […] and resulted in shameful discrimination” — the fault is more in the assumption that this is something unique to DEI programs, and not that any program could be doomed from the start so long as a sufficiently-motivated demagogue is willing to lie through his teeth to see it dismantled. Or that the ones opposed to such a program need to be lied to in the first place. They could probably just say “we’re ending DEI 'cause fuck 'em” and get near-identical results.

Yeah, it’s called taking out the competition. If you wanna win a race you gotta know where to throw the banana peels.

Counteroffer: We’ll take Nunavut in exchange for Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

One, you’ll have us nearly surrounded; two, they’re far enough away that you don’t have to risk any of the pre-existing populace actually coming into your country, and three, you get a whole stretch of oceanfront property, and we don’t have to let them muck up our electoral college anymore. And all we want in exchange is a nigh-uninhabitable stretch of ice and bragging rights that we’re indisputably bigger than China, which is for some reason the only thing the incoming administration cares about anyway. If that’s not enough we’re willing to throw in a couple of the Virgin Islands.

Lisan al Haribo!