Castle Magus

"In Angry Video Game Nerd 223, The Nerd takes a look back at some of his favorite retro video game commercials after referencing them for years."

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He mentioned the rapping Zelda commercial, but not that really weird one.

Anyway, several here that I'd never heard of before, like the ones with Jack Black and Paul Rudd in them.

"Hi. There sure are a lot of media layoffs happening! Let's look at how and why that happened and what we can do to make sure quality journalism doesn't get phased out like National Geographic and Sports Illustrated."

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I almost immediately nope'd out of this episode when I saw that it was going to be yet another one that involved Warmbo (which the video's own captions repeatedly misspelled as "Worm Bow"), but I decided to stick it out, regardless.

The basic gist (or, at least, my own personal interpretation of the basic gist): advertising, marketing, capitalism, and just, like, the greedy pursuit of unsustainable and ever increasing amounts of money is deathly poison to journalismthe Internetthe world as a whole, in general. Also, I typed that previous sentence when I was literally only maybe two minutes into watching the video. Now that I have actually finished watching the whole video, I see absolutely no need to go back and change that prior sentence in any way, because that pretty much was the actual gist of the video. It was, pretty much, a fifty-five minutes and twenty-eight seconds long restatement of the phrase "the love of money is the root of all evil."

Also, all that shit makes this seem like an even more impossible task than I already imagined it to be.

(Really, though, whoever did the captions for this particular episode did a rather piss poor job of it. Did they, perhaps, use an "AI chatbot" to write them or something? Oh well, tangentially speaking, at least Worm BowWarmbo didn't play much of a role in this ep. The fact that he played any role at all wasn't great, but it could've been far, far worse, I suppose.)

(I thought I'd already made an entry about this a couple days ago, but apparently, I forgot to actually, you know, post the fucking thing.)

Over the past three or four days or so, I've started seeing this god damned dumbfuckery popping up when I load a Youtube video page. I'm not watching your fucking ads, Youtube, and I'm sure as shit not going to pay you for the privilege of not watching your fucking ads, Youtube. Right now, the shit-licking pop-up can be dismissed and ignored (at least until it pops up again later) (EDIT now it starts with a little circle in place of the X that slowly fills up before it changes to the X and lets you click it to get it the fuck off of your screen /EDIT), and it's also not as outright threatening (for now) as it apparently was when they first started rolling out this horseshit, but the moment they make it actually do something more troublesome, I think I'm out for good. In other words, this is getting very close to the last straw with me, concerning Youtube's bullshit. Between this and a bunch of other Youtube bullshit, I'm this close to just saying fuck it all, entirely, and stop using the site altogether, which will suck, but I'll survive. If I can't use an ad blocker on Youtube or if I'm not allowed to watch videos on Youtube if I'm using an ad blocker, then Youtube can suck rancid diarrhea from a pustulous asshole and drown to death forever.

Fuck Youtube. Fuck Google. And, most of all, fuck advertising. Advertising (and, more specifically, the disgusting stranglehold that advertisers increasingly seem to have on creators and providers, and the ever more asinine, obnoxious, fucked up hoops that creators and providers are jumping through in order to get their hands on that ad money) is one of the absolute worst things to have ever been inflicted upon Youtubethe Internetthe world as a whole.

Find less invidious ways to make money. That goes for Youtube users/creators as well as for Youtube/Google itself, and, hell, for anything else that would ostensibly die without advertising money. If your business can't survive without you shilling for something and being paid for it, then your business is shit and, frankly, needs to die, for the overall good of humankind.

Capitalism sucks.

(EDIT 2) So, as it apparently turns out, the simplest way to get around this shit is to just log out of Youtube entirely, delete all Youtube cookies from your browser, and set your browser to block Youtube cookies to prevent yourself from accidentally logging back in, and that will (at least for now) stop that shitty pop-up from popping-up, while also not preventing you from watching Youtube videos without ads and without being nagged about it. Only problem is you can't comment or rate comments (and who really gives a fuck about that; I just reinstalled the comment blocker add-on as well), and you have to remember to turn off auto-play and to change the video quality (since it apparently defaults to whatever is the absolute lowest available for anyone not logged in). But beyond all of that, and until Youtube finds a way around even this, you can watch Youtube videos without being bothered by shitty ads or Youtube nagging you about blocking their shitty ads. Granted, all Youtube will have to do is make it so that you can't watch videos at all without having a Youtube account and being logged in to said Youtube account, though. That, of course, would just be yet another nail in Youtube's coffin if they do that, but whatever. (/EDIT 2)

A more appropriate headline for this article would be "A good reason to stop using Chrome entirely in 2023."

Welp, time to go back to uBlock Origin, I guess. Even though it wasn't (EDIT) and isn't (/EDIT) as good. *sigh*

I honestly don't blame the advertisers. There are some incredibly shitty dudes out there (for example) putting out some incredibly shitty videos on Youtube, and if I had something to advertise, I certainly wouldn't want it being associated with that kind of horseshit, either. Google isn't stupid. Lazy, maybe, but not stupid. I think they'll (eventually) work it all out, whether it's through allowing more control over targeting of advertising or by removing the offensive content or whatever.

(Of course, the entire topic is completely academic as far as I am concerned, because I use uBlock Origin and NoScript and FB Purity and such to block all ads, everywhere, for a multitude of reasons I've stated in the past that I won't be going into at this time [and if you don't like that, tough fucking shit].)

I just switched from Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin (not to be confused with just uBlock). I'm going to give that one a shot for a while. Reason: I was on a site that popped up one of those annoying, fullscreen "hey, you're using an adblocker, so we're going to fill your screen with shit until you turn off the adblocker" things. Adblock Plus wasn't blocking it, and I couldn't find a way to get it to do so. However, after switching to uBlock Origin, and then enabling the Anti-Adblock Killer in the 3rd-party filters (and after installing associated scripts for Firefox and Chrome), when I went back to that page, it worked normally, without the "fuck you" fullscreen blocker popping up.

So... yeah. If you're someone who currently uses AdBlock Plus, you may want to consider giving uBlock Origin a look.