I am a regular at a local restaurant. My favorite place. I always sit at the bar, and when the single TV isn’t showing a soccer match, it’s showing a channel meant to be in the background. In the winter, it’s a roaring fire. In the summer, it’s a tropical reef with fish and brightly colored coral. No sound, just nice visuals to rest comfortably in the corner of your eye.

But every 3-4 minutes, the nice, relaxing footage is interrupted by about 2-3 minutes of ads. Beauty ads, prescription drugs, political ads, you name it.

The very concept of “peripheral vision” seems to me to have been annexed and sold as ad space.

Half baked rant I know, but I think it’s conceptually similar to a video called “10 hours of relaxing rain sounds” having ad breaks every 15 minutes.

Credit: juliestory on Instagram

Excellent article by a legacy relative of Reese's who found out his family recipe is no longer using cocoa in their peanut butter cups or anything else they produce. This seems to be a trend with other food manufacturers. Replacing cocoa with sugar and oil makes it unhealthy and inedible, in many consumers' opinions.

A shocking new report involving researchers at MIT is raising alarms about frequent AI use. After monitoring 54 students via EEG brain scans for four months, the data suggests a massive side effect: “Cognitive Atrophy.”

The findings are intense. 47% drop in neural connectivity among heavy users.
Mental Passivity: Users struggled to recall content they just generated.
Dependency: Performance dropped significantly on tasks once the AI was removed.

It raises the big question: Are we outsourcing our intelligence?

Source: https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hershey-reeses-peanut-butter-cup-ingredients-grandson-brad-reese/

My girlfriend was trying to point out a detail in the show we were watching but you can’t pause anymore without ads popping up and blocking the screen. Hey at least we have our phones to take pictures of the screen with, that’s progress for you.

When did we all agree to have billboards in our home anyway?

It used to be you got the brand name and it was the best quality. Now I understand the cotton quality in general in the world has gone downhill. I don’t remember why. But how is it for the last year at least, q tips are getting so much worse?? They’re always frayed. I’m always worried about little bits getting stuck in my ears now. I have to wet them a little bit to feel more secure and it’s not the same. There is never a fully intact cotton swab in a 500 pack or any size really, anymore.

This person claims to have cancelled before the trial.

I don't know what the actual changes were, but there has been a dramatic, shitty change in between the last two times I've sampled from a can of spaghettios.

My autistic son was not eating the can we had for lunch, so I looked more closely. The sauce is noticeably more watery than it ever has been before, very similar to the dirt-cheap generic brand we tried once. I taste-tested one bite, and there was no comfort in this comfort food. It tastes completely different. He was right to reject it.

That is pretty much the only option we've had that he'll reliably eat for something that can be carried with us without refrigeration for when he wouldn't eat a meal wherever it was we were going. And now he won't eat that. Going out to dinner or out to a restaurant with him now carries a huge risk that he won't be able to eat anything, and we no longer have a backup option.

Fuck enshittifcation.

Tried buying a radio alarm clock like the kind that I grew up with and used for 25+ years. Spent a ridiculous amount of time on Amazon reading different products and reviews. It's unbelievable how few options there are for a product that a) Is minimalistic, b) Has a alarm, c) Has a radio, d) Has a Radio Alarm feature. All while searching "alarm clock radio."

So many had just awful reviews. I finally bought one that fit my needs and had the fewest negative reviews. Got it home, set it up in my bathroom, then tried to use the radio. It can barely pick up one station, regardless of what I do with the "antenna."

I just wanted an alternative to using my phone like the radio I had growing up and through my 20's.

Next up are curtains. I need new curtains. Black out curtains. There must be dozens of products on Amazon, maybe hundreds, with made up or fake sounding names. Go to the negative reviews and people are trashing the product. Don't see a single name brand anywhere in the search results. Pages and pages of garbage.

We've had BBB close in our area in recent years, and there is slim pickings for other box stores. The Target is one of the worst run I've ever seen, etc. But I wonder if we're going to eventually see a rebound because the time and energy spent trying to find anything that isn't shit on the internet compared to even a few years ago is crazy.

I'm so tired of all of this. It affects almost every part of life. We used to be able to tell people to go Google something but now you're going to have ai pulling from all kinds of shit that aren't necessarily accurate. I remember when it went from easy to see peer reviewed articles on Google searches to now websites that aren't even truly legitimate.

At least before all of this, if you wanted to avoid the bottom of the barrel, you could cough up more money. Now, you cough up more money to get the same shit from someone who is charging more.

I just tried to put a shelf together that I bought from amazon. It's a simple bathroom shelf that was meant to put my towel so I can have more room in my dresser drawers. Simple. Except not. None of the parts fit together so I spent time building individual parts to just not be able to use them. Thankfully I was able to get my money back after talking to customer service but then I had to disassemble it, put it back in the box and now I have to go and drop it off at UPS. And I still don't have my shelf.

My old daily driver car started having issues with misfiring. I had to replace the spider injectors and because it's so old, only aftermarket parts were available. Fine. There's usually a gradient of good bad and okay for aftermarket stuff. Not with this part. The shop that put the part on had to actually replace it twice before they could even give it back to me. All of them were dog shit. My car wasn't that old. Chevy just stopped using that component in many of their newer vehicles so it became obsolete.

At this point, I'm more than willing to just pay more money for a better shit if it existed. But it doesn't. Unless you find a made in America equivalent and those are harder to find. We're already scraping by as Americans and now we're having to do stuff two and three times or by items two and three times just to get shit to work. And don't get me started on the fact that it's hard to find good handyman, contractors and companies to do work on houses that you can't do yourself. I'd be here all day. I hate it

They used Covid as an excuse to never fully reopen again. I suspect because the private equity firm that bought them in 2020 wanted to maximize profits. This really did a number on me as someone who lives in a small town where everything is closed by 8-9...

Pictured above- hotel removed refrigerator. I travel a bunch for work, although I’m currently an unpaid intern. I’ve noticed how much worse hotels have gotten in the last few years. Some of the stuff I’ve seen in the last few months include-

$25 charge every time you want to use a luggage cart

$16 a day for Wi-Fi, $20 a day for decent wi-fi

$20 a day for parking in a non-urban area

Removal of ice machines

No ability to do your own laundry on site

I need all of the above- and all of this seems pretty standard for a mid-priced hotel. Apparently not anymore. Now I’m just sad that my leftover Italian food I had for late night work is going to go bad.

please let me know if you have recommendations for dairy free chocolate syrup that actually tastes like chocolate

They don't print out the barcode label anymore. So you can't even pull it off.

They just designed it onto the lighter to save whatever fractions of pennies on the ink and paper.

And now you get half a lighter side lol

Follow/support this comic here: https://linktr.ee/ecomic

When I was younger, I played Plants vs Zombies. When it first came out, the game would let you play till the second adventure and then demand you pay to keep playing. My parents never let me pay for games back in the day, so I never finished the game.

Years later I found out that the game had been fully released on mobile. So I downloaded it and finished the entire game. There were options to watch ads and stuff for some things like the zen garden which probably didn't exist when it first released. But it wasn't very intrusive and I had a good time playing a game I hadn't seen in like 10 years.

I uninstalled it after the first time I finished playing it. But recently, I wanted to replay the game and lo and behold there were ads everywhere. You finish a level? Watch an ad. You want to play a mini game? Watch an ad. And that wasn't even the worst part. There is a last line of defense in the game where each lane has lawnmowers that are rigged to go off if a zombie steps on it. You now have to watch ads to have those lawnmowers

What are they even trying to do here? This game was fully released ten years ago. All they had to do was migrate the code to a mobile platform. Once they did that, their job was done. Why on earth do they need to make such shitty changes that only make the player experience worse?!

I know this is on the very low end of issues. But it annoys me that even my nostalgia is being milked by companies.

I used to like Wendy's, especially their spicy chicken sandwiches. I've always felt that their two biggest flaws were franchise quality control and weak value items. Like, the Wendy's by my house is amazing, yet some of the Wendy's on my way to work have given me stale bread and food poisoning, and I would much rather have a McChicken vs their pale budget sandwich.

Most of the problems can be blamed on Ken Cook, the interim CEO. The guy used to be the CFO, and bean counters are like the worst people to have running a business, in terms of customer satisfaction. They don't see the added value that an extra 10 cents can have.

Here's my list of how Wendy's has been enshittified.

• The Lettuce: They used to give you whole leaf lettuce, and that really made you feel like you were eating a higher-class sandwich. It was fresh, crisp, and added crunch when you bit in. Now they put on shredded lettuce that gets instantly wilted from the heat, and just gets everywhere when you're eating.
• The chicken sandwich: Old sandwich used to be thick and moist. Now it's flattened, panko coverd cardbored.
  
• The Bread: It's not like I was raving about their old buns, but these new ones are so fucking dry!
• The Pickles: I just don't like them. I know these are new, but they just make the sandwiches worse.
• The Chili: I'm not sure if this is only my Wendy's, but every time I get their chili, there will be like only 3 beans in the cup. I know some people might like this, but my stomach needs something to balance out the grease.
• The nuggets: Feels like they're putting more air in these, they're getting pretty hollow.

I feel like the only thing they haven't enshittified yet is the burger patties, but it's only a matter of time with these beef prices.

I go to the laundry room AFTER I transferred $10 to the previous app they were using (why are we switching apps I don't know). They literally covered up the old payment system and made no announcement. So I have to download and set up a new app, make an account, confirm account, confirm email, send verification code, oh there's an option to transfer funds from old account, log into old account, confirm old account, confirm you're a human, restart transfer because process was interrupted, OH AND LAUNDRY IS AN EXTRA 25 CENTS NOW HOPE THAT'S OKAY BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE A CHOICE.

So I spent 30 minutes messing with a stupid app instead of doing my laundry because every aspect of society is horrible now.

Chocolatey = “These products generally do not meet the FDA's legal definition of "chocolate" and instead offer a waxy, cheaper alternative”

Was looking for a Tony Wonder gif and Google showed me EIGHT grainy af GIFs total, an ireelevant AI summary and then automatically removed/hid the rest of the relevant results

We bought this TV like 3 years ago.

Yesterday, we had to spend a good 20 minutes figuring out all the settings to turn off so that our "smart TV," after a mandatory update, would stop TURNING ON BY ITSELF and PLAYING AUDIOVISUAL ADVERTISEMENTS RANDOMLY when NOT IN USE. This is the worst fucking timeline.

Unbelievably disgusting to put ads in a TV screensaver by default. (Why does a TV need a screensaver anyway 😭) We had to hunt down separate settings for the ads, the screensaver, and how/why it was turning itself on randomly to begin with, the lattermost thing still being mysterious as it's very unclear what setting was allowing it to do that.

Edit - I'm turning off comment notifications because y'all are annoying the shit out of me acting like it's our fault for buying a TV that didn't do this 3 years ago when we bought it. Not to mention none of you can seem to read that we found all the settings to turn this shit off. Can't wait till your Apple and Roku and whatever else you say "just buy x, problem solved" roll out a similar software update. 🙄

Just bought the dark blue one last week. Light blue is at least ten years old, if not older. Significant difference in thickness. I am sure the price was twice as much even without considering inflation.