Do you remember NFTs? I remember NFTs. They exploded onto the scene in 2020 and were *everywhere* in the public discourse. At their peak in 2021, there were something like $25 billion in NFT sales globally. There were NFT Super Bowl ads. Jimmy Fallon had Paris Hilton on his show to awkwardly shill for NFTs.

And then, by 2022, 2023 at the latest, the bubble had burst and NFT market had lost up to 99% of its value.

Blessedly, I never have to think about those fucking Bored Apes ever again.

I remember thinking, when NFTs first appeared, that they were so obviously a scam, but also a vague sense of surprise that such an obvious scam was proliferating while we were still living through the previous blockchain-related scam, cryptocurrency. And since the NFT bubble burst, we moved on absurdly quickly to the next tech scam-bubble, AI.

1/

The most depressing lesson of the Trump era is that scandals don’t matter if the perpetrator and their supporters don’t feel shame.

Shamelessness is now a political superpower.

- Copilot was forced to nearly every MS user without their consent
- Gemini starts each time an Android user touch their smartphone main button
- Whatsapp users suddenly interact with an AI they can’t disable
- Firefox will soon have its own AI
- Even myself, as a @protonprivacy and @kagihq user, I received access to multiple chatbots I never asked for

But remember: statistics show that "people are using AI tools !"

If you trust those statistics, you are deep into the delusion bubble.

Rebecca Heineman is a goddamn legend among women. She did SO much great stuff, from getting Another World to run on 16-bit consoles not in the least bit designed to handle it, to making sure that the Kinect works when you're wearing a skirt, to tirelessly keeping the mac gaming scene alive, to making the worst version of DOOM kinda glorious in its own way.

And she did so much to boost trans visibility. By being so unapolagetically loud and proud as herself there's absolutely no goddamn way of counting how many of us she helped clear a path for.

She will be missed so goddamn hard!