August 17, 2025

Shit.

Sheeyit.

Sheeeiiii…f-fuuuuh…

Out of everything I prepared for this update, writing this text was the hardest part of it. I kept starting, stopping, and restarting. If you get me on a rant about the past eight months of absolute panic and despair, I won’t be able to stop. My paragraphs will reflect that with incoherency and a lack of adherence to their topic sentences.

I’ll pick just one, then. Watching the Internet go into complete lockdown mode in terms of censorship, AI, and this ID law shit has been especially bad. The Internet used to be a kind of therapeutic safe haven for me.

Where do I even begin there?

There was a moment where, while I was trying not to pay attention to the news, it sounded like England might be a safe refuge. You know, if I had the money to do it. As if anybody has money for anything anymore. It would be akin to sailing toward Valinor. The Shire was scoured to ashes and would never be innocent again, and my only hope was to relocate my mortally wounded Hobbit ass to Westminster. Hypothetically. With money.

Except Parliament went ahead and—you know the rest. If that weren’t alarming enough, some eldritch horror escaped its Australian confines. With an aggregate bellow, it pressured our primary means of commerce into purging games from Steam.

Alright, fine. Gaming is under attack, too. While I’m worried about that on top of everything else, I’ll just watch some YouTube.

Except Google has also hopped aboard the ‘check ID’ bandwagon. They’re going to flag your account if they suspect you are under 18 and lying about your age. To make YouTube tolerable again, you will have to dox yourself with a scanned driver’s license. Hilariously enough, they’re using AI to do this.

Because when a considerable number of people are still ambivalent about AI, but all the tech companies insist on embracing it for their platforms, what’s the best way to convince the masses? Oh, right, of course! Use it to inconvenience them. If you’re already too big to fail, what are Internet users going to do? Not use a platform Google owns? As if that were an option?

I’m getting heated again. I’m about to start slamming more tangents into my keyboard, so I’ll move onto updates. I wrote about Clerks, Fallout 2, and Slayers: The Motion Picture. I also switched my rating system over from letter grades to stars. I have a letter grade/star rating equivalency table on my hard drive, and I got tired of referring to it. Stars make more sense. We’re doing stars now.