Dabitch.net - Everything is so random there must be a pattern

But what we really really want, is flags next to usernames - so I wrote a plugin for chrome that shows just that. You can download the zip above.

At first Nikita showed only users their own about page, where everyone could double-check that things were correct. This was even open for a full hour for anyone to see anyone else, but I think I was asleep when that happened. My profile stated correctly how old the account is, and where it was created in the "Date joined" part. Like so:

This is accurate, and not a secret, so I had no problem with that - but a lot of people did. People who bought accounts would obviously want to hide if that account was created in a country they've never been to, for example.
Nikita claimed in a Xeet that this field showed inaccurate data for a lot of users, so they simply removed it.

But what we all really wanted was a simpler way to identify where people are Xeeting from - like a flag by their usernames. So I made one, and this is what it looks like on my account. The US flag before my name. Now when I scroll X using my Chrome browser, I see flags next almost everyones user name.

If you want to use this, simply download these files, X-flag-verified.zip and open it somewhere on your computer.

Then load up chrome://extensions/ in your browser and toggle on "developer mode". Then "Load unpacked" and select the directory x-flag-verified and Bob's your uncle.

UPDATE: Shoutout to @bashildy on X who helped me fix this for Windows!

Optionally you can remove all the other annoying flags that people put in their profiles, if you simply uncomment the line in content.js below :

Optional: prevent double flags if user already has one in their name

I'm still working on this to see if there are any other fun things that I can add, since the government ID verification doesn't quite work yet, but I'm just too impatient not to share this right now. A lot of caching issues on the X "about page" currently is slowing down my bugtesting. Check back in a day or so and there might be more features.

If you find this useful, I like ko-fi, I like coffee, and I like subscribers!

For most of my life I've had a habit of taking "beauty shots" of really incredible moments that I want to remember - in my head. I'll even blink, as if I am taking a photo. "I will remember this."

This way I have shot the tower bridge in London, lit up at night, while riding on the back of BMW motorcycle. I've clipped the frosted eyelashes and balaclava after a early morning dogsleigh ride in Jukkasjärvi. I've clipped "footage" of myself running downhill through the clouds from twin peaks in San Francisco with my arms spread wide, literally pulling the clouds with me, as I ran to the bus stop from where I would commute to work.
Beauty shots that, maybe a bit morbidly, I thought could show up in that fabeled film that will flash before your eyes when you die that you hear so much about. All of this happened pre-instagram, of course. Memories that I will never find in any photo archive, anywhere, or even recreated in AI.

Post Instagram, everyone began making beauty-shots out of everything. Suddenly, the most mundane latte was something that needed recording. I found myself doing this as well, mainly photographing advertising, and eventually offspring threw herself in the way of the posters that I kept photographing as a form of fun sabotage. Offspring, being so adorable all day every day was so tempting to post everywhere on the internet, but I needed to protect her privacy - and her face.

So I deleted my then Instagram account, and later buckets of Google photos that I had shared with family to avoid the future. I deleted Facebook too, because all the photos there could be used for ads. She, as a young girl roaming the internet, thought deleting the apps themselves was enough to "delete" things. Alas. It was all too little too late.

As many young adults of her generation, she's returned to the analog world of button phones, social game nights, tangible skills and they have largely deserted "social media", except for Snapchat. The recent advertising campaign "Less social media. More Snapchat." understood this phenomenon completely and leaned into it. Good strategy. Well positioned.

The developers of Snapchat, however, have not understood why their users are using snapchat. Suddenly, Snapchat is pushing AI on the users. Without their consent. To a generation that hates AI.

So, suddenly my daughter is getting bad AI renditions of herself, suggested as 'content' to share with her friends. Not only is this insulting to a person who truly and passionatly hates AI - they're also making her look awful. And I'm not just saying this as her mother who thinks she is the most beautiful girl in the world - there is something very uncanny awful about these renditions. In this odd photo below, they seem to have cobbled together some headphone photographs of her with some photographs of her in Gamla Stan in Stockholm, and added a random pigeon. Not sure if this is a new detective series concept - but the body and clothes are certainly not hers and it's all coming off as very creepy. Especially as this popped up after she had made sure to turn off the "AI snaps" new features that had been turned on by default. As new features always do. (Sidenote - this is very uncool when people - like I am - are still connected to now dead friends)

As the internet grows, I recall how different it was when it began. Way back in 1997, I was at HIP97 in Almere Buiten, the Netherlands. In a giant circus tent, a guy from the Chaos Computer club told us to "screw with the data at all times", so at every opportunity that we were presented with, we should mess it up on purpose. He offered an example, that made us all laugh "when I check into a hotel, I rent the porn film, even though I don't watch porn." Sure Jan!

But his point is still correct - with messed up data, AI could not make a good copy of Perl. Better still, with NO data, AI could not make a copy of Perl. Her generation that are logging off and rekindling their "analog" skills are doing the right thing.

I know that I keep harping on about Adland, but as one of the very few websites that lasted that long on the internet, it was a source of data that happened as it was. Most of the internet from that era has vanished, and now AI is training on new internet - meaning it is training on newer articles, newer photographs, newer ideas and newer lies. Even new AI. It already has become the modern Ouroboros.

I read "Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick" when it came out and Tsutomu Shimomura described studying the log files as if looking for footprints in sand, because every step you take disturbs the sand. The current internet is being flooded by new AI bullshit and social media crap that is treated like gospel by increasingly powerful AI tools, who are using other AI tools as sources - the dead internet is not only here. It's farming the third world and idiots while a new generation are using this opportunity to learn crafts and log off, while waiting for the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb. That will bring us together.

We should probably all take Perl's generation's advice and log off a bit more, and ignore AI - because the only thing it can give us is regurgitation of misleading, faulty, and glimpses of missing information that once existed on the internet. These days, a lot of the old internet is gone.

So by now you've probably heard that Adland is back, it's just not run by me.

To quote snippets from Adage, which announced that Adland is now owned and operated by marketing media company Marketecture in April;

Ari Paparo, CEO of Marketecture, jumped at the chance to keep the machine running.

“There’s no better inspiration than seeing what’s been done over the last 30-plus years,” Paparo told Ad Age.

Wäppling will not be involved in AdLand’s operations going forward. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

“I’m glad that AdLand is in Marketecture’s more than capable hands,” said Wäppling in a press statement. “And I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.”

Paparo wants the new AdLand to stay focused on highlighting creative, with the goal of publishing multiple new ads per week; commentary, which Wäppling often included in her posts, will not be included.

I for one think all of this is great! I do wish Ari and the Marketecture crew the best in their expansion where they are now also manning the creative commercial "digital museum" of sorts. I also think its wise of them to not spend time reviewing the ads like I often did, that became a difficult and time-consuming chore.

So go here to submit your ads, and do subscribe to the new Adland newsletters. Support them by subscribing now, and stick with them as they try out their business models, unlike me they won't be doing it for free like a crazy person. There are expenses involved (don't I know it!) so if they decide to go ad-supported or charge a small fee for the archives, do stick with them. The world's longest running advertising archive is an idea that should keep going, regardless of who runs it.

This way, the museum of ads lives on - as it should.

Advertising might just be a 30-second blip on tv, but it launches pop culture that we repeat for decades. Where's the beef? Whassup? Saying "Aaron Burr" with your mouth full of peanut butter. It takes a licking but keeps on ticking! Our collective advertising history deserves a home in Adland, so keep supporting it.

Thank you.

Last night at dinner, I found it amusing that the only advertisements I had heard about for the upcoming Super Bowl were related to mayonnaise and avocados from Mexico. In fact, I will be missing the entire event this year because I'll be on a flight to Sweden. I have no concerns about balancing servers to handle traffic spikes, no worries about MySQL queries locking up, no checklists to track when I’m allowed to publish which ads—just no stress at all.

"It's such a relief," I said to my husband. "It's such a huge workload; people have no idea what goes into it." He replied, "To be fair, you never told anyone that you literally run the whole thing."

"I did too!" I retorted.

"No, you may think you have," he continued, "but it was probably more of a Swedish passive-aggressive quip. People really didn’t understand that you were the server administrator, the programmer, and the editor-in-chief all at once. Nobody knew that Adland was run by one single person."

I've mentioned this countless times and even advertised my willingness to sell it for years, but perhaps I was too busy running Adland for anyone to notice. Regardless, I can now confidently say that Super Bowl ads are a complete waste of a brand's time.

Think about it. What Super Bowl ads do you remember from last year—without consulting a cheat sheet? How about from the last five years? Can you name your top ten Super Bowl ads from the past decade? If you find it difficult to recall any without searching online, you're not alone. Even I have trouble recalling any ads from last year. It's all a blur to me.

Nowadays, Super Bowl ads are promoted weeks in advance of the game. The "teaser" ad has been replaced by the 90-second version, which is essentially the Super Bowl ad, just not the one that will actually air during the event. The "pregame" hype is louder than the commercial during the game, which airs during the big flush.

The media, 30 seconds during the big game, costs millions of dollars and this price goes up every year. Then the brand pours even more money into production, and celebrities, and hot-shot directors. This ad now becomes "the ad with Meg Ryan", or "the ad with Ben Affleck", and if your celebrity stars in more than one superbowl ad like Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart or Missy Elliot who seems to make a constant cameo, well your brand is SOOL in being remembered. Nobody will recall your brand over the celebrity.

Now imagine, just imagine, if your brand had spent all of these millions of dollars on aggressive PR, a strategic media spend, and one consistent branding idea on several well executed, well directed commercials over the span of an entire year. I could bet you a superbowl ad budget that would give your brand better sales in the end.

The superbowl ads are too often middle-of-the-road, unfunny, unsurprising, unmoving bland and boring these days, they all blend into one another. A good ad is a good ad, no matter when it airs. A bad ad is a bad ad, no matter what celebrity and movie-reference it borrows from.

For the first time in 28 years I'll be seeing this as an outsider, as the person who has ignored the press releases in my inbox (an auto-reply is handling that right now), and I will see what the regular consumer sees. It'll be interesting to see if I'll recall any superbowl ads at all.