Currently reading Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser

The thesis of the book is basically that environmental pollution, particularly lead, might be the thing that caused so many serial killers to pop up during the period of the late '60s to the late '70s. Only half way through it so far, and not quite convinced by the theory yet. Although it’s indisputable that such pollution can damage brains to a severe degree, I’m just not sure how you get from “damaged” to “I’d better serial kill some women”. Random violence and anger management issues, sure. But the highly specific and MO-driven criminality of serials killers seems like something else entirely. We’ll see what evidence comes in later chapters!

EDIT: Finished. Yeah, sounds like complete bullshit to me. She was even attributing the existence of the Bloods and the Crips to smog, for fuck’s sake. It’s as though she’s genuinely unable to imagine any reason for any violence other than pollution-induced brain damage.

That any government or public figure would subject the public to X’s cesspool in order to contact or keep up with them is as fucked up as the platform itself. It’d be less fucked up to paste government news bulletins onto the walls of a crackhouse.

I think I blocked a couple of accounts years ago that were just reposting ancient memes from reddit in bot-like numbers. But it seems like the majority of content here falls under that category, so blocking seems futile. Can’t even use downvoting to correct the issue because our votes aren’t private/anonymous here and I don’t need a large account seeing that I downvote their content every time I come across it. It would have to feel personal at that point 😆

I don’t mind big accounts in principle, I just don’t want to see memes from 2018 being reposted every day with the same titles, and for there to be no other content from those accounts.

Whatever replaces Tenor needs to allow for more specificity in searching. If I search “lemur” and I see 3 orangutans, a chimp and a 12 gibbons, and maybe 1 actual lemur, I’m still happy to have simians, but I really needed a lemur, man. I was quite fucking specific in my search term. Had I written “monkey” but it showed me a series of apes, I wouldn’t mind that so much.

Also, “cat on skateboard” has fuck all to do with a poorly staged video of a dog playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with a set of gaming bongos. Again, glad to see it, but where’s my skateboarding cat??

I had a hilarious dream just last night! Remember recently when Quentin Tarantino was talking shit about the acting skills of Paul Dano? I dreamt that Paul was in a new movie, and was acting hard, like, really giving it insane levels of energy, and after every line he delivered he’d glance at the camera with an expression of exasperation on his face, as if to say “is THAT good enough for you, ya cunt??” directly to Tarantino.

Some early shock/gore site discussion below, spoilered in case you don’t wanna read about such things.

When the internet was first introduced to me in around '97 or so, in IT class in high school, the only thing I really did was look for URLs on products around the class or in my pockets. For example, Pepsi had a website, Peperami had one too. I also created an email account on Hotmail.com, and I believe we did some chat room stuff in IRC or ICQ or one of those things.

One day during a lunch break at the same school, I looked up porn and actually found some, although I have no memory of what the site was called. I got scared though, and closed the browser as soon as I saw nudey ladies. I’m sure the teacher checked the browsing history (something I had no idea about back then) and saw what I was looking at, but he never said anything to me about it. Legend 🫡

I’m sure the obvious picks are already mentioned, so I’ll try to think of some stuff that might not be well-known:

Shane Meadows has produced 2 TV series worth watching. One is the This is England collection. It starts with This is England (2006), which is a film, then 3 miniseries (This is England '86, This is England '88 and This is England '90) that continue the story. All of it together is about as good as TV gets. Might wanna check for triggers before watching on something like doesthedogdie.com.

He made a second miniseries called The Virtues. It’s a difficult watch at times, but it’s a masterpiece. And it’s another one you might wanna look into before watching.

There’s a show that was very popular in the UK and Ireland back in the '90s called Cracker. It stars the late great Robbie Coltrane (you probably know him better as Hagrid from Harry Potter). He plays a psychologist who works with the police to find and interrogate various kinds of pathological killers and sex offenders. It’s really, really good. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s ever been released on anything but DVD, so you’ll be stuck with SD quality.

Say Nothing is a recent show that does a really nice job of dealing with ‘the troubles’ in N. Ireland. It’s based on real events, the most central of which is the abduction, murder and ‘disappearing’ of a widowed mother of 10 children by the IRA. Jean McConville is one of 17 people who were disappeared in this way, and is by far the most notorious given her circumstances. The story - based on the book by Patrick Radden Keef - follows Dolours Price, a female IRA member who was a significant figure in the conflict and who was involved in Jean McConville’s abduction. One of the better shows I’ve seen generally, and probably the best bit of media on the N. Irish troubles (there’s so much junk about this place, it’s refreshing to see something half-decent for once). If you need a palate cleanser after watching it, Derry Girls should do the trick!

I agree about Ricky Gervais. I actually liked him in The Office, but in everything else - before and after - he is just fucking awful. Talk shows, stand-up, speeches, podcasting, he is a desperate, strained and insecure performer. When he’s telling a joke, it’s like every word has had to be pressed out of a gland with a clenched fist before the next word can be milked free; it’s clear he’s just saying the words in the correct order, and not performing it. He is never present and ‘in the moment’, and seems to be in a perpetual state of panic about his own inadequacy. If he were actually a decent person instead of whatever the fuck he has become, I wouldn’t be saying this about him. But he’s a cunt, so, yeah. His imposter syndrome (which is entirely deserved in his case) makes the media he’s in unbearable to consume.

To see just how truly awful the man is, watch that Talking Funny documentary. It’s him, Jerry Seinfeld (the least-funny paedophile in the world), Chris Rock and Louie CK all in a room together talking about comedy. Ricky is obviously feeling the full force of his imposter syndrome throughout. It’s probably the most glaring example of what I’m talking about.

I simply don’t get his success. Like, I can understand the success of paedophile rings, but I can’t fathom how Ricky has made it so big. One of life’s great mysteries, I guess.

My girlfriend-at-the-time’s dirty, dirty ass. Thought it would be like in my fantasies, where it tastes like candyfloss and smells like a Yankee candle. Nope. Shit. Just shit.

If you’re curious, shit tastes exactly as it smells. I wish I didn’t know that. Although I’m happy that now you, too, know that.

And she had the nerve to dump me later. I deserve a Nobel peace prize for not recoiling in horror and instead just powering through in silence like a fucking GENTLEMAN.

On the bright side, it became a great way to ensure future partners were cognisant of the issue. I’d drop it into the usual “what was your ex like?” gossip sessions that come with new relationships. It’s like saying “please wash your various holes if I’m gonna go rooting around in them like an ant-fiending aardvark” without actually saying it. A cautionary fable from days of yore to guide the next generation.

P.S. I’m still pro-anilingus. Just… clean the fuckin’ thing first. I don’t need to be picking dingleberries from between my teeth, thanks.

I read his “contributions” to the Gaza genocide article’s talk page, along with the equally mealy-mouthed hand-wringing of Jimmy Wales. Total bellends both, although for different reasons. Jimmy is pressured into being an annoying grandstanding dickhead by Israeli interests, whereas Larry’s pressured into being an annoying grandstanding dickhead by his childhood.

Was there ever a time when PC Gamer wasn’t utter shit? Like, what the fuck is this article even saying? And what justification do they have to tag the end of Sjoerd’s LinkedIn quote with info about UE’s move into AI slop?

Is this what games journalism is now? Stalking LinkedIn pages and reporting when 2 lines of text are edited? And then drawing conclusions not at all supported by said text? 😒

c/NoStupidQuestions style question:

Why is making enough RAM to go around so hard now? I know the cause of it - AI cunts - but what is the actual bottleneck in the production of RAM that means it can’t be pumped out fast enough to meet demand?

Low hanging fruit, but “The next president of the United States is Donald J. Trump”. And I heard that shit twice. The second time was definitely the dumber of the two, but the drop off from 2nd to 3rd dumbest thing is about as wide as the known universe. It’s cartoonish in its absurdity.

But the dumbest thing I’ve heard personally from an individual is that unbaptised babies who die go straight to hell. I was told this by a woman who liked to preach Jesus’ eternal unconditional love in my town centre. I’m atheist, but by default. Like, I didn’t read my way into it or anything, I just completely lack any impulse to believe despite being made to go to Catholic mass every week for 17 years. All that’s to say that I don’t have particular animosity towards believers, but that kind of believer can suck a dirty dog dick.

Apart from it being insanely unfair to babies - roasting away like a rotisserie chicken without even the consciousness to know what’s going on - it’s also beyond evil to tell that to believers who’ve lost children soon after birth due to disease before they even leave the hospital, or have miscarried through no fault of their own, etc. Strangely, I never hear that argument from the anti-abortion religious fanatics. That is, “don’t abort the baby, or it’ll be sent straight into Satan’s Big Green Egg!”

Imagine being Satan, and having a daily influx of humans too young and unformed to even walk when prodded by a demon’s pitchfork. Even a supremely evil entity like he’s alleged to be would have to wonder just what the fuck is going on with heavenly bureaucracy for this to be the way things are done.

2026 is gonna be the year I finally move to Linux. I have huge concerns about many aspects of switching, but they’re being overtaken by concerns about staying with Windows. I don’t even mind if my overall user experience is a bit worse on Linux (I am trying to have reasonable expectations that it won’t be the walk in the park Linux advocates on Lemmy like to claim), I just have much more faith in its security, privacy, customisability and - most importantly - the motivations and intentions of its developers.

It’s literally the most unstable, buggy, crash-prone piece of software I’ve ever used. I completed the game and got 100% of the cheevos, but it took me about 400% longer than it should have because I was having to relaunch the game every 5-10 minutes (not exaggerating, that’s how often it crashed).

Great info/ideas! 👍

I use an add-on that has similar functionality (kinda). It’s called Search from Popup or ContextMenu:

• Firefox Add-ons
• GitHub

I use RSS Guard on my PC (works on Mac, Linux and Windows). Comes with powerful regex filtering, so I can really curate my feeds.

RSS seems kinda oldschool, but it’s still the best way I’ve found of keeping track of the things I care about. No fuss or social media bullshit, just information.

I don’t understand why, when a specific product or company is accused by scientists and others of being harmful, we give any airtime whatsoever to said product or company. Did we not learn from the tobacco industry and oil industry and pharmaceutical industry that this is either a colossal waste of everyone’s time, or allows them to muddy the waters sufficiently to continue doing more harm in the interim? Why do I need to hear from sociopathic techbros that their products are fine actually?

I liked Starfield (I even 100%ed the achievements on Steam). I also loved No Man’s Sky long before the shift in pubic sentiment towards it, so maybe I’m just weird. But if you’re reading this and thinking “this guy wouldn’t know a good game if it shat a voxel-based turd onto his chest”, you’re WRONG. I also loved MindsEye. So there.

Even the freebies that I want to play, I almost never play through Epic, and usually wait until I get another copy on Steam. The overall experience of playing a game through Epic is just… bleugh.

I think I’ve only completed one game on Epic, Layers of Fear 2. The other stuff I’ve played has essentially been like playing a demo, to see if it’s worth adding to my Steam wishlist. That’s how subtractive to the enjoyment of gaming Epic is.

I also just dislike their practice of exclusivity and feel uncomfortable supporting it with my wallet. At least with Ubisoft, EA and Rockstar, it’s only their own games they wall off like that, and they almost always have a Steam-connected version so there’s at least the illusion of having everything in one place. Epic is a black hole. I don’t even remember the games that have been or are still exclusive there, because I just never encounter any information about them apart from occasional news articles about how unprofitable they’ve been even after X-number of years. It’s kinda sad, for the devs who work hard on something for years and 8 people play the fucker.