For me, it was the simple recognition that concentrating power and control over online communication behind a small handful of corporations and their billionaire overlords is extremely unhealthy for society.
AI bubble pops as investors begin to realize that nobody is willing to pay for this stuff that they're sinking their money into.
China invades Taiwan. It's brutal and bloody. The US destroys TSMC and other key technologically significany global infrastructure.
As a result, the global economy again collapses as the bottom drops out of the stock market and multiple high profile companies go bankrupt. Executives get golden parachute on the way out.
Venezuela is going to turn ugly as a power struggle ramps up among rival entities.
The US will invade Columbia and Panama, but not Greenland.
Ukraine will continue fighting against Russia, the stalemate will continue.
Interest rates are going to be ramped up too fast in a effort to juice the economy before the midterm elections. Only to make inflation worse. We will continue to see prices increase.
Trump and the Republicans are going to hype up another racist fear tactic as red meat for their base.
Trump's mental and physical health problems get worse, his deterioration is very obvious but nobody will say or do anything about it.
ICEs violence will increase, as will anger of protestors. We will see riots and mass unrest.
The Republicans lose the midterm in a landslide, Trump whines about it on truth social, calling it rigged.
Wildfires in the west, hurricanes in the east.
The internet gets even more dead and useless as more and more AI slop fills up every nook and cranny of all mainstream sites. Subculture sites and the Fediverse remain mostly fine.
Red-liiiiiiine, red-liiiiiiine, directed by Takeshi Koike wiki-wikiwiki-wiki.
Technically a movie and not a show, but also one of my all-time favorites. :)
I love Trigun, and I think the characters and world-building hold up today, but the show definitely gets a little shoddy just before the end. Tsuneo Imahori's soundtrack for Trigun is incredible.
I think Gurren Lagann also holds up. There's a couple lulls in the show for sure, but overall it's got great action and drama and some amazing animation set-pieces. (I never liked Kill La KIll that much.)
Going back to Outlaw Star is tough, imo, it's waaaay cheesier than I remembered it being.
I verge on calling it my favorite, but I feel like Bebop or Eva could also take that spot pretty easily.
(edit: I hate to feel the need to clarify that I mean the ORIGINAL 6-episode show FLCL, and not the 4 extra seasons of tacked-on bullshit that Adult Swim cooked up.)
You got me! 😅 Well... Was there really a better time for anime?
I am quite fond of some of the 80s (Gunbuster and Z Gundam are cool!) and 70s (Lupin the 3rd and Galaxy Express 999) shows.
Other honorable mentions from my favorites: Ghost in the Shell SAC+2nd gig, Diebuster, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Tatami Galaxy, Ping Pong, Kaiba, Trigun, Trava First Planet, Space Patrol Luluco... too many more to name.
Last year was pretty great too, with GQuuuuuuX, New Panty and Stocking, and CITY!
Is there actually any evidence of a "massive crime being committed" other than a right-wing youtube video?
The department had not confirmed Shirley's allegations of fraud at the time of this writing, nor could Snopes independently verify the figures his report used. Snopes also could not independently verify Shirley's claims that the daycares committing fraud were run or owned by Somali Americans. https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/12/30/nick-shirley-minnesota-daycare-fraud/
And, even starting on the assumption that this fraud was happening, why on Earth would that be Tim Walz fault? Is anyone claiming that he was in on it somehow? Was he running a fraudulent daycare? Or are gonna pretend like he's to blame for something happening "on his watch" as if he's some kind of omniscient deity?
It's not the Governors job to prosecute crimes, let alone somehow prevent them from happening in the first place.
If a massive fraud was being committed, it would be up to the Minnesota or US AG to prosecute based on available evidence.
Man, what a bad move... what a terrible fucking move...
Tim Walz was an incredible disappointment who didn't live up to the hype in a slightest. His "aww gee shucks" nice guy football coach routine was just embarrassing, he performed god damn terribly in the debate against JD Vance, and now he's dropping out over some bullshit that nobody with a brain is paying attention to right now?
All he has done here is show that he is weak, imply that he was somehow culpable for the daycare fraud, and proven once again to the Republicans that they can just harass our spineless politicians out of office by making up some nonsense whenever it's convenient to them.
Whether it's hardware or software, I like technology that enables me to do things. Playing fun and impressive games, painting, animating, sculpting, making music, making my own video games, and so on...
One of the simple reasons I really dislike AI slop is that it removes humanity from the process. In fact, there isn't much of a process at all. It's all about plopping out an end product and there's no "art" to it. As someone who values my own creativity, loves the process of making things, and doesn't believe in exploiting others for my own gain, generative AI is the last thing I want out of technology.
Of course, a lot of technology is "fascinating":
The complex and intricate boards with even more complex and intricate chips and parts on them.
Storing data with electrons in RAM cells or on magnetic, optical and audio media.
How chips are basically printed on to wafers.
How we turn high level ideas into source code, compile it down to machine code, which is then interpreted as a series of numerical CPU instructions.
And even though I hate how AI is being used and humans are being abused, how "machine learning" works by essentially biasing a data structute a certain way is also fascinating.
How fast and small all of this has become over the last 100 years.
How we power all of this stuff by harnessing river currents and the sun, and by splitting the atom, is also fascinating.
There's a lot about technology to enjoy and find interesting. We just have to remember that it should be there to make life better, not worse.
Entering my closet: all the time. (My mom would do my laundry, even as I started getting older and asking her not to. 😂 That would involve sometimes opening drawers, and it wasn't very private, but it wasn't what I would consider a search.)
Searching my drawers: practically never, to my knowledge. (Usually only if they had an actual reason to. They weren't doing monthly random searches like a drill sergeant or anything like that.)
Backpack: Rarely. Only if I got in trouble at school when I was younger.
Electronics: never, to my knowledge. Having said that, today's younger parents are probably more aware of the internet and technology risks.
I think that sounds pretty solid to me. Realistically you should count on having 3x drives for your important data:
The main data drive(s)
Drive(s) for redundancy, mirroring the data drives. (I use btrfs RAID1 for this.).
Offline local hard drive(s) that you keep somewhere relatively safe that you occasionally backup to.
(Optionally) Some kind of offsite backup.
So if you plan on having 2TB of data, you'll ideally want 3x 2TB drives. 2 in the PC mirroring eachother, and 1 in a closet or safe that you plug in and backup to a few times per year. (With bonus points if you can get another 2TB of off site or cloud storage to also backup to, in case of catastrophy.)
As for how you build it, I think it doesn't matter too much. Its possible to use whatever random spare PC parts you have to make a decent home server, imo. A lot of people on YouTube and Reddit have all kinds of fancy servers in a rack, but an old repurposed desktop can be fine. ( I would probably use new, decent quality drives though.)
For me, it was the simple recognition that concentrating power and control over online communication behind a small handful of corporations and their billionaire overlords is extremely unhealthy for society.