There is one benefit, at least for now. You aren't locked into long term contracts like cable has/had.

I love eldricth horror precisely because of this. Imagination will almost always be scarier than something that can be put into words. Descriptions give handles to hold onto for your understanding, boundaries and walls for the horror to fit in.

Give me more vagueness about how, gazing at it, the room could not have possibly contained its size. The feeling of the split second while tripping before you connect with the ground, stretched into an interminable constant in the back of your mind.

Realistically, however long it took for someone else to notice you were doing it and call them.

Source: had the cops called on my friends and I multiple times for having foam sword fights in parking lots at college. Apparently people from a distance thought actual fighting was going on. Not sure if that's a testament to our acting or their poor eye sight.

Looks like it's just a partnership with an existing brand, Popcorn Indiana, zooming into the picture. So just a cheap marketing stunt for them.

Giving me flashbacks to the game Space Station 13. It was never "the clowns", just "The Clown". And it absolutely was a threat.

More often than not, the person who picked the singular clown role on the station (or who mugged the person who did and stole the costume), would be someone who was highly skilled with the game who wanted to get up to shenanigans.

I've watched a clown armed with nothing but two banana peels single handedly take out an entire security force, steal their gear, disappear while the station gets wrecked by a changeling, then pop back out and lure the changeling into a carefully built conveyor belt system that traps them in an inescapable loop of being knocked over forever, trapped, forced to listen to infinite bicycle horns and a farting robot made out of their own cut off butt.

The clown then used the opportunity to set the station's black hole engine loose, destroyed the end of the hall to the escape shuttle, and lubed the floor. The survivors, rushing to escape, slip, and glide out into the void. More bicycle horn honks are the last sound they hear.

Honka honka honka honka honka honka...

You can also toggle it on precompiled binaries with the right tool (or a hex editor if you're insane), which was my main use case. Lots of old games that never got 64-bit releases that benefit from having access to the extra RAM, especially if you're modding them. It's a great way to avoid out of memory crashes.

There must be a way to stop this feeling.

Been there. I'll keep it short. The way is to get professional help. Therapy and/or medication.

Since you have no job, first step is to get on whatever low/no income insurance is available to you locally.

Same, but surely you realize that ads have only gotten worse in the intervening time. I also don't truly believe that we'll ever reach critical mass on adblocker users. You're asking people who don't care, who don't use the internet the same way we do, to suddenly care enough to take manual action outside of their knowledgebase amd comfort zone.

The only way the adblocker user numbers get pumped up to critical mass for a change is if a popular default browser makes adblocking an opt-out default.

As well as predatory/not, there's also a trend with attention grabbing/not.

There was a period of time where Google AdWords ruled the online ad space, and most ads were pure text in a box with a border making the border between content and ads visually distinct.

Kind of like having small portions of the newspaper classified section cut out and slapped around the webpage.

I still disliked them, but they were fairly easy to look past, and you didn't have to worry about the ad itself carrying a malware payload (just whatever they linked to).

Companies found that those style ads get less clickthrough than flashier ones, and that there's no quantifiable incentive to not make their ads as obnoxious as possible. So they optimized for the wrong metric: clickthrough vs sales by ad.

More recently, companies have stepped up their tracking game so they can target sales by ad more effectively, but old habits die hard, and predatory ads that just want you to click have no incentive to care and "de-escalate" the obnoxiousness.

I'm pretty sure they've had almost this exact exchange in the Clone Wars show.

... not really though.

The one big law about lending out digital copies of books you own is that you only lend out as many as you physically own. They uncapped that restriction, openly, and they admitted to it.

This is an incredibly open and shut case.

It's stupid as hell, and that law needs to die, but there was no corporations doing people dirty here. This could have ended so, so much worse for IA.

Off the absolute top of my head there's the redcap. Depending on the material it can be depicted as a gnome, goblin, or kobold with a jaunty looking red hat (generally long and pointy like a gnome hat or like Link's hat in Legend of Zelda).

It keeps the hat red by dying and regularly re-dying it with its victims' blood.

There's also a number of depictions of pixies as essentially flying piranha.

But this sort of mythology isn't some deep secret, it's everywhere outside of the kid friendly/disney filtered stuff. I'm sure a simple search will net you tons of content.