Amanda Palmer, the Goth Ghislaine.

If she was complicit, then the existing allegations of unethical conduct (asking artists to work for free for her and such) start looking like the Al Capone effect (that someone who is unethical in big ways will also be unethical in small ways).

I wonder how Herr und Frau Rosenzweig are doing in their new life in Madagascar

The second flight will just strap parachutes to the deportees and airdrop them over the foreign country.

In a global free market, superheroes end up standing for Truth, Justice and Xi Jinping Thought

I loved the original and the Ezio titles, found the American Revolution one ran a little too much on rails (here you ride with Paul Revere, and here’s an unskippable ghost-train ride of a sequence where you have to shoot some goons; meh), and found the Victorian London one a bit dull. I haven’t yet played Black Flag, but may do so next, given that people rate it, though am not excited by any more recent ones.

They’ll just have to traditional-values harder

He probably commissioned it specifically to transform the appearance of his flabby-old-rich-guy torso into the very form of high-tech postapocalyptic hypermasculinity or some similar nonsense.

Also, water is wet

The worthwhile Assassin’s Creed games can be bought for a few bucks for the PS3/Xbox 360. Everything after Ezio is just an inessential sequel.

You’re not paying for the original banana (well, you are, but you’ll have to replace it with a banana of your own sourcing every few days), and presumably the duct tape is ordinary as well, and there’s no special secret trick to correctly arranging it, so anyone reading this could perfectly recreate the artwork at home. You’re paying for the receipt certifying you to be the one person who paid for the concept. In other words, it’s like a NFT, only more ecologically sound.

His need for approval knows no bounds.

The village on Lunt near Liverpool considered changing its name to “Launt”, because vandals kept adding a top stroke to the L in signs.

The love song as a genre always felt vaguely religious, like hymns singing the praises of an awesome, terrible god, beseeching them to favour and not smite one, only in this case, the god being romantic love.

Coulsdon is the new Scunthorpe, it seems

We’re probably more likely to see Europe paying reparations to Russia to normalise relations and get cheap gas again.

True, though BlueSky is a temporary redoubt at best, though one which, through switching costs, will trap people just as Xitter did. They accepted venture capital funds, and so when the time comes, will have to somehow recoup that from their users. At the moment, they’re in the glue-trap phase, attracting their users with promises to be open and not screw them over (see also: the early days of Facebook). Once enough are there, and have brought their friends and built personally meaningful networks dependent on BlueSky, the trap will close: third-party APIs will be restricted to the point of not providing an escape (as happened with Reddit and Xitter), the user-configurable algorithms will get unremovable additions that gradually increase the amount of ads, influencer content, AI pink-slime and whatever else they want in your feed, and then you’ll lose the ability to see all the content you selected, all the better to keep you refreshing and scrambling for anything you may have missed. And then, since all your friends and the cool people you follow are there, your choices will be to stay and suck it up, or effectively become a hermit.

and apparently Nazis are following suit.

Someone should perhaps spin up a Mastodon/Misskey/something instance named swifties.social and bring them into the fediverse.

The new Horst Wessel Lied will be performed by Kid Rock.

A miserable little pile of secrets, but only if it’s featherless and bipedal

They made some shitty tap-the-screen game with collectibles for the iPhone maybe 10 years ago, though the less said about it the better. My guess is that it was a fuck-you to Takahashi-san.