How far apart were those two episodes? Like, production date? Futurama is a long-running show with a big gap in the middle, they did topical episodes about Napster and the iPhone.

I’ve done that by car, motorcycle and airplane. Did two 3-hour legs on a motorcycle in the same day, out and back.

Didn’t some Scions come with no radio? The idea being they were targeted at younger folks who were more likely to customize their stereo, so “no stereo, but all the speaker grilles and mount points for one” is a bit like the “no operating system -$211” option on a Laptop. Happy Linux user noises.

You could maybe interest me in a compact pickup truck that has a bed designed to hold plywood flat on a sort of shelf around the perimeter at the height of the top of the wheel wells, maybe with some kind of support that can span the space between the wheel wells, leaving space beneath for studs. But with a 5 foot bed…yeah remember the Geo Tracker?

I do have a concern about that; a lot of pickup truck missions are go-and-get-it. The best lumber yard in my area just happens to be about 75 miles away. Not a problem for my S10, right on the cusp of what this thing can do.

That would make sense for the era. The particular font scrolling effect most of them started with is likely also a built-in effect? I never once played with Windows Movie Maker.

I mean, there was a particular format of them, I think they were made in Youtube’s old built-in editor, there’s a distinctive style that is extremely 2007.

Hell I still sometimes find those old “lyrics” videos. Remember those? They all had that bluish teal background? Some of them survive to this day.

I’ve driven a pickup truck for 20 years and never once had anything stolen out of it. “Safest big city” as a phrase strikes me similarly to “most comfortable chest wound.”

Check my understanding here: It’s not that they’re scarce, but there’s no geological process that concentrates them like copper or gold. There aren’t any neodymium seams the way there are gold seams, there’s a very little amount everywhere. So you might as well sift the entire Mojave.

So…the one that ran for those 90 days is the original?

Does the phrase “vote with your wallet” mean anything to you?

I also haven’t bought a game made by EA since 1992. I don’t like their behavior as a company so I have completely stopped buying anything from them. This you label “insane.”

Movie trailers playing before a movie made sense to me. You like movies? Here’s some that are coming up, in case you’re interested.

It was a movie trailer that made me go all-in on adblockers. One of the Mission Impossible movies, I forget which one, I lost count after the third. This trailer had that annoying “Ready or not, here I come” “song” in the background. And it played ahead of every single Youtube video I watched for a week.

I will never watch a Mission Impossible movie ever again, old or new. I will never watch another Tom Cruise movie ever again. Old or new. I might avoid the spy/action/thriller genre entirely for the rest of my life. I won’t go see James Bond ever again because of Mission Impossible’s marketing. There’s a strong and growing possibility I’ll never walk into a movie theater ever again. And I aggressively block ads now.

They went from letting me know what movies were going to be released soon to trying to beat my personality out.

I used to be a movie buff. I grew up in a house with a lot of VHS tapes, movies were important to my social life in my teens and early twenties, I went to work for a couple years basically living at the airport and sleeping at home, and when I came up for air it was all a cancerous mass, a tumor of its former self.

I would rather watch RedLetterMedia make fun of 40 year old movies than go watch a new one.

Honestly that particular business model already pretty much works the way I’d want it to.

The T-shirts are made in tremendous quantities by the likes of Hanes or Gildan with a tag in the collar that shows the company name/logo and country of origin. Quite often the artist or IP owner of the printed art will include a trademark or copyright symbol as appropriate into the artwork. The printing company often goes uncredited.

| but you should need to disclose what you did and didn’t design/build.

A specific example I have in mind: James Wright of youtube channel Wood By Wright did a video comparing like 24 hand planes, from a bunch of different brands and sources from Ace Hardware to fucking AmazonBasics. He noticed that there were basically 3 manufacturers; Jorgensen seems to offer a unique product, and then everyone else were offering slight variations on the same two designs. So there’s a manufacturer somewhere in China that churns these out, and will stamp your brand on them plus you have the option of plastic handles, aluminum or brass thrust wheel, etc. to fine tune the price point you want to hit.

That’s what I want to kill. In this case, if it’s made by Happy Clappy Fun Time Shenzhen Co. Ltd. it needs to be branded as such. Jury’s still out if I’ll allow things like the iPhone that are “Designed in Cupertino California, Made In China.” A product that is designed by a company for that company but then they contract out the manufacture.

Product segmentation? I’m fine getting rid of a lot if not all of that. All cars are luxury cars now. And what good does it do us allowing SB&D to have DeWalt and Craftsman? “We have two brands (actually four, with Porter Cable and Black & Decker) of cordless tools with very similar yet mutually incompatible battery standards and not quite equivalent product lineups, for no reason that benefits the customer.” Perfect, yeah, get on the hobbling wheel, you can explain why we should let you keep doing this between screams.

| I’m not confused when I buy a ATHEOTS or whatever BS brand they come up, I know I’m buying cheap knock-off stuff.

There’s one of two possibilities here:

1. Happy Clappy Fun Time Shenzhen Co. Ltd. is doing it themselves, registering trademarks, selling goods with that brand just long enough for the public to catch on, and then dropping that brand and coming out with another. This should be illegal and impossible. Like the mechanism by which the trademark system works should not be able to function this way.

2. Some Fuck In His Apartment is ordering out of Happy Clappy’s Shit We’ll Rebrand For You catalog. So Reginald Q. Flybynight registers APOWEDG and sells mousepads and shit for a few weeks on Amazon. This…doesn’t need to be a business model me allow. If Happy Clappy wants their shit sold on Amazon, they can list it there themselves. We don’t need the illusion of competition or market choice, we don’t need prices elevated by Some Fuck Who’s Also There…Trademark law is there to guarantee the source of goods. Reginald Q. Flybynight isn’t the source of the goods so he has no need or right to brand the goods. All that does is obfuscate who to sue if the goods are faulty or dangerous.

I’m sick of living in a world of “Someone somewhere made this I think.”

I would still keep patents at about 20 years. There’s some nuance that needs to change to prevent, say, Nintendo from retroactively patenting Pokemon after Palworld comes out, but yeah patent law needs a colonic.

I’d be okay with 20 or even 30 year copyright terms on complete works, but I would be more open on derivative works and fair use.

I want stricter trademark law. Trademark should be about knowing where your products come from. A manufacturer gets right of way over a mark so that they can defend their own reputation, and I’ll help them defend that mark because I want to know where the goods I buy come from.

It should not be legal to buy a commodity item and slap your brand on it. I see this a lot in the tool market. There seems to be two 6" jointers in production in the world today, the one JET makes, and the one everyone else sells. Wen, Craftsman and Porter Cable among many others sell the same 6" jointer. Speaking of Craftsman, that brand is now owned by Stanley Black & Decker, who also owns Porter Cable, DeWalt, and several others. Most of what they use this for is to sell mutually incompatible yet functionally similar power tools so you have to buy more batteries. They might design or build some of their tools in-house, but many of them they buy from some other company and just put their stickers on. Is it, or is it not, a “Craftsman”?

Then you’ve got Amazon, Temu, AliExpress and other Chinese dropshipping platforms. They make a whole bunch of shit and then register nineteen or twenty bullshit trademarks to sell the same thing under. I would make that illegal; if you have a brand that is suitable for selling a given item, you’re not allowed another for that purpose. Trademarks are supposed to reduce consumer confusion, you’re using them to increase consumer confusion. If I am elected dictator, that kind of behavior will earn you a public trepanning.

I noticed Youtube try to push one about Trump petting a cat. Reported it for abuse.

Antidisenshittificationism.

It’s like the polar opposite of “Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.”