Where's My Giant Robot Car?

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.  Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:

“It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.  

I'm seriously thinking: web rings. And following personal blogs that talk about what you are interested in and suggest things to you. Like oh, Livejournal. Or any of its many many clones.

Verily, we are heading back to the 90s, folks!

Fast forward to six weeks ago—I receive an email from her husband, explaining he broke the mug (lol) and asking if I’d be willing to take on a commission to replace it. He reiterates how she has arthritis but also shares she used to make pottery, herself, but can only really paint, now. I say of course! Come to find out, he wants a WHOLE SET of mugs to replace the broken one. Even better! I end up making the whole set twice (I wasn’t satisfied with the first attempt), but finally get them packed up and sent off across the country.

I just received the kindest message from the husband, saying “It is not often in today's world that someone does 100% of what they have promised,” thanking me profusely, and sharing that his wife is already happily using the new mugs.

anyway if you get a comment like this, chances are that they are bot and their goal is to do whatever it takes to get you to delete your work, most certainly (from what I’ve heard) it’s because they want to “safely” steal your work, use it to train their ai without you being able to rightfully claim ownership of your work since “there’s no proof that the work was stolen/was posted elsewhere first by you” because the original source has already been deleted.

THEY ARE ALL BOTS. at first it was “ao3 is deleting fics and your entire account will be affected unless you delete the fics yourself” then it was “this work contains contents that are illegal and they have already reported you and your fic to the police” (yes, that’s how desperate these bots are), and now it’s this.

report their comments to ao3 for spam—in this case, specifically, I think you may be able to report them for harassment too—and don’t pay attention to them, most importantly don’t delete your works, don’t feel discouraged by their comments. remember that they are bots and they mass comment something like this on people’s works at random to get people to delete their works. (or even if they’re not bot, they are still pathetic bullies who don’t deserve your time or attention.)

Painted Tree Rat Callistomys pictus

A rodent from the state of Bahia, Brazil. The painted tree-rat is found in the Atlantic forest. It also occurs in cocoa plantations where some native trees remain. As far as known, it is nocturnal.

Endangered

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

Theres this thing that happens with a few too many franchises, where the constant need to one-up and raise stakes makes each entry slightly more unhinged than the last. Until you reach a point where what started as a fairly simple/grounded concept has become completely ridiculous(see Dragonball, Fast and Furious).

Any of the big programs will have a million youtube tutorials on the technical aspects. We no longer need to rely on fandom tutorials for that.

As for aesthetics... That gets tricky since there are a lot of different fannish communities that have diametrically opposed views on what makes a good vid. If you want to go oldschool, there's a vidding discord with a bunch of fans from the LJ era. Some of the extant fancons have vidshows and vidding panels or even run vidding courses. Escapade, DC Slash, etc.

Some parts of vidding aesthetics are just film aesthetics. When I got interested, I wandered over to the local university bookstore and got myself a copy of In the Blink of an Eye, which is just about the only thing film schools ever manage to assign unless you're specializing in editing. I also think The Eye is Quicker and The Visual Story are worth a look. You certainly don't need to know film nerd shit, but those kinds of books can give you some vocabulary should you want it.

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The thing is, you already know aesthetics.

Forty years ago, Media Fandom vidders were learning from vids. You see meta from long after this was true still saying that you have to watch good vids to make good vids.

But in fact, any person in the 2020s (and, frankly, long before) has watched a lifetime of short-form video with vid-like aesthetics long before they ever think of doing any kind of fannish remix video.

Trailers, commercials, music videos, short films, plenty of youtube content: it's all relevant to one type of vidding or another.

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If you want to do very oldschool Media Fandom vidding that is highly narrative but doesn't use any show audio, your best bet is to look at the visual grammar of film. The character with the closeup is the important one, the person looking near the camera's emotions are more accessible than the emotions of the character we see in profile, etc. etc.

I've made a couple of videos about visual grammar aimed at fans.

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In general, I would ignore any vidding meta about music choice. Everyone is a coward with bad taste, whether that's an entire community that only edits to Linkin Park or an entire community that only vids to Sarah McLachlan. Down with 4/4! Down with only top 40s pop! Unless you like it, of course.

Just pick something you're willing to listen to eight billion times if you're doing a song without show audio. If you're doing a more trailer-y vid, pick something that works well as a short, punchy backdrop to dialogue. Don't play dialogue and song lyrics at the same time. Again, this is basic shit from every commercial trailer and ad ever.

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That linked guide seems fine. It's full of things that will vary by person, of course. "(compared to phone) It’s not portable unless you have a beast of a laptop." is cracking me up. For ages, I did all my editing on a macbook pro, which is indeed a beast.

Don't use After Effects. That guide is right that it's super popular, but unless you are primarily interested in heavy effects, it's a worse choice than a program aimed at editing, IMO. Vegas is insanely popular with vidders who use Windows. I'm not as familiar with it, but it seems to be popular at least in part because a lot of vidders have released presets and effects packs and such that work with it.

You can use any program, really. I know a Linux vidder who used Blender because it was what was available. I once was an idiot and could not figure out how I'd fucked up Premiere right before a big deadline, so I made my vid in Avid. (Don't use Avid. Nobody vids on Avid and for good reason.)

That guide's comments about the Ken Burns effect are... sort of right, but I think they're glossing over the fact that it really depends on the type of footage. If you're vidding a sitcom or most anime, you may well want to add motion. If you're vidding a single film that is shot well, it probably already has a lot of beautiful camera motion, and adding different motion requires a deft hand. Ditto Pixar, which spends huge amounts of time and money on imitating live action camera styles.

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I use 4K Video Downloader+ to get footage, music, etc. It works on many sites and is good at keeping up with Youtube's constant attempts to thwart it.

Generally, I think you should just grab some footage and some music and go play around.

There's nothing wrong with wearing polos. Or keeping your house clean. Or shaving, or 'politeness', or whatever. But.

... A very important test of someone's character is how they deal with things that Society (TM) in general, and their social circle in particular, thinks are Not Okay. If society says it's Not Okay to be gay, are you capable of being decent to gay people? If society says you Have to like drinking, and you can't stand the taste or effects of alcohol, are you gonna let people pressure you into drinking anyway, to get along with others? If your social circle says that it's Not Okay to listen to certain music, are you going to listen to that music anyway? If your social circle says that people with Political View A are all evil bastards, are you able to be decent to someone with Political View A? (Or someone with Political View C or Religion Q that vaguely looks like Political View A, if you squint?) Things like that.

If you see someone who has stripped their life of anything that society disapproves of, that's not a great sign. If you see someone who has stripped their life of anything their social circle disapproves of, even if they're alt and anti-government, that's also a bad sign.

You need to have something in your life that is yours, that is not dictated by someone outside you, that no one is going to take away from you. You need to have some part of your life that you will defend and hold onto, even if everyone else is telling you that it's wrong. Even if everyone you know thinks you're dangerously bad and stupid for it.