♫ It's true that all the men you knew were dealers who said they were through

being dealers every time you gave them shelter

I know that kind of man, it's hard to hold the hand of anyone

who's reaching for the sky just to surrender ♪

(originally by Leonard Cohen, of course)

The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it's no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let's all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it'll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement... right?

Normative nihilism is going to get us all.

I once took my bike to the Burger King drive-thru. It was late at night, no cars in sight. Yet the next time I went there, about two weeks later, they had already put up a sign explicitly banning bicycles.

What in the world is going on with Elsie's hand in the "second of the five photographs?"

* weɖɖing

Cobb: "I've come back for you... to remind you of something. Something you once knew. That this world is not real."

• I once joked about getting a divorce, in a conference call. At work. On the company-provided laptop. Minutes later, my own phone's social media feed started showing ads for divorce lawyers. I wasn't married at that time, nor had I ever gotten a divorce.
• Got diagnosed with something I'd hever heard about before. Not a particularly serious condition, but very rare for people my age. Returning home, nothing but ads for medication, self-help groups and what have you.

First picture looks like a Borg cube.

After I had turned off the webcam in my system settings, my boss twice commented on the shirt I was wearing while WFH. So then I glued two layers of duct tape over the entire upper rim of the laptop, and it never happened again. They did, however, seem inexplicably distraught when we had the next Teams call.

Once they touch the factory floor's floor, plastics become filthy and cannot be used for high-quality applications - food wrappers, anything with body contact. Oils and heavy metals are the biggest contaminants, a plastics-producing company I used to work for concluded. They either sent it all to a recycling factory or used it for very low-quality stuff like trash bags.
Now with post-consumer plastics, not only are they extremely heterogeneous, they will also have even worse contaminants like mold which proved to be very resistant to cleaning, a EU study concluded. So you might want to pyrolyze them like you do with crude oil, but there's just too much O, N, S and halogens, so the output will be too corrosive, but also too heterogeneous for it to make economic sense.