IcedRaktajino

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who does not like ranch flavoring. To a lesser degree, I don't like apple pie either. Like, if I was served a slice of apple pie and courtesy required me to at least eat a few bites, I would. But I would absolutely not if it was a dish, say, covered in ranch dressing.

The industry keeps echoing ideas from bleak satires and cyberpunk stories as if they were exciting possibilities, not grim warnings.

In a recent article published in the New York Times, author Casey Michael Henry argues that today's tech industry keeps borrowing dystopian sci-fi aesthetics and ideas -- often the parts that were meant as warnings -- and repackages them as exciting products without recognizing that they were originally cautionary tales to avoid. "The tech industry is delivering on some of the futuristic notions of late-20th-century science fiction," writes Henry. "Yet it seems, at times, bizarrely unaware that many of those notions were meant to be dystopian or satirical -- dismal visions of where our worst and dumbest habits could lead us."

You worry that someone in today's tech world might watch "Gattaca" -- a film that features a eugenicist future in which people with ordinary DNA are relegated to menial jobs -- and see it as an inspirational launching point for a collaboration between 23andMe and a charter school. The material on Sora, for instance, can feel oddly similar to the jokes about crass entertainment embedded in dystopian films and postmodern novels. In the movie "Idiocracy," America loved a show called "Ow! My Balls!" in which a man is hit in the testicles in increasingly florid ways. "Robocop" imagined a show about a goggle-eyed pervert with an inane catchphrase. "The Running Man" had a game show in which contestants desperately collected dollar bills and climbed a rope to escape ravenous dogs. That Sora could be prompted to imagine a game show in which Michel Foucault chokeslams Ronald Reagan, or Prince battles an anaconda, doesn't feel new; it feels like a gag from a 1990s writer or a film about social decay.

The echoes aren't all accidental. Modern design has been influenced by our old techno-dystopias -- particularly the cyberpunk variety, with its neon-noir gloss and "high tech, low life" allure. From William Gibson novels to films like "The Matrix," the culture has taken in countless ruined cityscapes, all-controlling megacorporations, high-tech body modifications, V.R.-induced illnesses, deceptive A.I. paramours, mechanical assassins and leather-clad hacker antiheroes, navigating a dissociative cyberspace with savvily repurposed junk-tech. This was not a world many people wanted to live in, but its style and ethos seem to reverberate in the tech industry's boldest visions of the future.

The Black Eyed Peas can sing us a song but chickpeas can only humus one.

The latest must-have accessory is a "stop-scrolling bag" -- a tote packed with analog activities like watercolors and crossword puzzles. We spend hours glued to our screens. "Analog bags," as they're also called, are one way millennials and Gen Zers are reclaiming that time. "I basically just put everything I could grab for instead of my phone into a bag," including knitting, a scrapbook and a Polaroid camera, says Sierra Campbell, the content creator behind the trend.

The 31-year-old keeps one bag at home in Northern California, carrying it from room to room, and another in her car. The trend has quickly spread on social media, part of a bigger shift to unplug. Roughly 1,600 TikTok posts were tagged #AnalogLife during the first nine months of 2025 -- up over 330% from the same period last year, according to TikTok data shared with Axios.

"It speaks to an incredible desperation and desire for experiences that return our attention to us, that fight brain-rotting, that are tactile ... that involve creating over scrolling," says Beth McGroarty, vice president of research at the Global Wellness Institute.

In case you thought I was joking...

mplayer handles filesystem wildcards beautifully. This is playing anything by STP in any subfolder of my main "Music" directory. I use wildcards between words because it's lazier than escaping the spaces.

Raktajino@laptop:~$ ssh rak@media-pc

rak@media-pc:~$ mplayer -shuffle /media/Music/*/Stone*Temple*Pilots*
MPlayer 1.5+svn38446-1build5 (Debian)
Playing Acoustics/Stone Temple Pilots - Plush (Acoustic).mp3.
Clip info:
 Title: Plush
 Artist: Stone Temple Pilots
 Album: Simply Acoustic
 Track: 10
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [mpg123] MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400)
Selected audio codec: [mpg123] afm: mpg123 (MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III)
==========================================================================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
A: 233.8 (03:53.7) of 234.0 (03:54.0)  4.5% 

Playing Rock/Stone Temple Pilots - Dead and Bloated.mp3.
Clip info:
 Title: Dead & Bloated
 Artist: Stone Temple Pilots
 Album: The Best Of Stone Temple Pilot
 Track: 7
 Genre: Grunge
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [mpg123] MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400)
Selected audio codec: [mpg123] afm: mpg123 (MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III)
==========================================================================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
A:   9.1 (09.1) of 310.0 (05:10.0)  4.5% 

This has lived rent-free in my head since this episode originally aired back in the stone ages.

Congratulations, the bank gave you a credit card. That doesn't make you better than me. But, you see, nobody gives me credit because I'm a bad risk and I don't pay my bills on time. SO I HAVE TO WORK FOR WHAT I HAVE!