RE:

Toot Café

Baldur Bjarnason (@baldur@toot.cafe)

Challenging fate with goodwill (and a holiday sale): https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/challenging-fate/

As a consequence of the situation I described in this blog post (most of the existing blogs in my feed reader turning to either "AI" boosterism, becoming outright bad writing, ignorant, or all of the above) I'm slowly going through my feed reader and unsubscribing from hundreds of blogs. This is delayed by the fact that NetNewsWire has very quickly become incredibly buggy. Unsubscribing is incredibly laggy and often removes the WRONG feed for some reason. View quoted note →

RE:

Toot Café

Baldur Bjarnason (@baldur@toot.cafe)

The YouTube gambling ad bombardment has started again. Reported six today. Technically it was all the same ad routed through six different advertis...

About a dozen gambling ads in this lot. And, despite the fact that the ad has the same script as before, pointing to the same service, just with a different brand name, all of the reports are coming back saying that the ads don't violate Google's policies. Before 90% came back saying they did. This is how it ended the last time I did this and is the reason why I basically have to recommend to all relatives that they all install ad blockers. Google is deliberately letting harmful ads through View quoted note →

So, Iceland has a tradition of airing a parody sketch show on New Year's Eve, Skaupið, that mocks the past year. It's almost always quite dire, largely because Icelandic TV and pop music is generally quite dire. But it is a decent gauge of what's getting normalised in Icelandic society each year.

One of the downsides to sitting down and attempting an end-of-year review, with a forward outlook, is that things genuinely look worse than I expected, and I say that as somebody people routinely label as a pessimist. We're going to need much better coping mechanisms.

A foggy respite:

A foggy respite

Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

I uploaded recently a couple of shorts-style videos where Brynhildur Jenný describes the approach she took to drawing the graphic novel "The Cat and I" (Kötturinn og ég). In Icelandic but with English subtitles. The first is on the tools and styles

These are probably the spookiest from the foggy walk the other day #photos #iceland #hveragerði #blackandwhite