Are you up for some depressing fun?
I often spend much of the week saving things I’ve read, thinking about things that have struck me during the week, and trying to tease out threads for a coherent Morning File.
Maybe you have noticed that lately there is a lot of depressing stuff going on, locally, nationally, and globally. Kind of a stressful time!
So, I thought, maybe we could use a bit of a break and have some fun today. And, in service of that, dear reader, I made a sacrifice for you. I logged into Facebook, and made my horrendous algorithmic feed worse. Much worse. I don’t know if it will ever recover.
I started looking up and saving AI-generated cartoons from nostalgia and “kids these days” accounts. This was prompted in part by my seeing folks dunking on terrible AI images from a Facebook account called Looney Tunes Fan Club, featuring things like Yosemite Sam going off to work at a factory, holding a ceramic cup, while Elmer Fudd stood in the doorway seeing him off, with two miniature Bugs Bunnies at his side.
Angry factory-worker Yosemite Sam says:
Anxiety wasn’t an excuse to stay home. You woke up tired, drank a cup of black coffee, and went to work anyway because your faily had to eat.
Yes, it says “faily.”
I was curious about what else lay out there in the toxic world of faux nostalgia. I mean, you call yourselves Looney Tunes Fan Club, but then generate horrendous images featuring Looney Tunes characters that any fan ought to be embarrassed by.
Most of the images don’t have the slightest bit of humour to them. The Looney Tunes characters are just vessels for retrograde messages.
Bugs and the gang have opinions on retirement.
This image came with a post urging people to comment “yes” if they agree, and so below it was a sea of one-word posts: “Yes.”
(I know I promised some fun, and I fear I may be failing in that regard, but to be fair I also said it would be depressing.)
Oh, note the “ACME” on the truck in the background. Many of these fake Looney Tunes images are filled with items plastered with “ACME.”
Here’s another, bringing back that old classic, “You can’t say anything without offending someone these days”:
Lots of legs missing here, and Wile E has again broken through the fourth wall.
As Iris notes in the caption here, Sylvester, Daffy, and Porky Pig don’t have legs. Not sure why Wile E. Coyote is emerging from a broken window and window frame, as the Road Runner scampers off in the background.
Again, not the slightest bit of humour here. Just laughable. The platonic ideal of boomer slop.
Also, isn’t part of Bugs Bunny’s appeal that he absolutely delights in offending the other characters?
Many of these nostalgia pages, which have names like Driftwood Days, Grandma’s Cookie Tin, and the Nostalgia Loop, lean right into their image, posting things like, they call us boomers but we know we’re the best (that’s a paraphrase).
Many of them are completely nonsensical. Just some random thing from the past that’s supposed to be meaningful: “The overhead projector era was unforgettable.”
Really? Why? What about the Gestetner era? The whiteboard era? The LCD projector era?
There are also the posts that encourage you to nostalgically remember something that has never stopped existing. Do you remember pressed cotton? How about record stores? Bologna?
Sometimes the thing you are supposed to remember is paired with an inane bit of commentary. Like this one:
Real driving.
Real driving includes high beams coming out of your mirror, not wearing a seatbelt, driving an American car with the steering wheel on the right, and driving at right angles to the road and into a fence.
But let’s leave our AI-generated nostalgia-monger in her car wreck and get back to the Looney Tunes characters for a minute.
Don’t anyone tell them Bugs is a vegetarian.
Noted rule-followers Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, the Tasmanian Devil, the Road Runner, and Yosemite Sam want to make sure you know the rules. They are standing by a country road, which you can identify because it has the words “country road.”
Also, just to be on the safe side, there is a second Bugs Bunny in the background. As Iris notes in the caption here, Bugs is a rabbit. Why are people making him their vessel for whatever hateful message they want to spew?
Also: Wow. What an impoverished view of your culture.
The Merriam-Webster definition of nostalgia is as follows:
A sad pleasure experienced in recalling what no longer exists: a wistful or sentimental yearning for a return to or the return of some real or romanticized past period or some irrecoverable past condition or setting.
These nostalgia pages and their AI slop images don’t really reflect that though. They are not expressing sad pleasure, but anger. I mean, the drink beer and eat meat one is pretty nasty.
I want to get into a few more of these slop images that take a pretty dark turn, but first, one more Looney Tunes one — this time featuring our heroes in more anthropomorphized poses:
Weird humanoid Looney Tunes characters shopping.
Here we have humanoid Bugs and Lola Bunny at the grocery store. Lola is in Stepford Wife gear, while Bugs seems to be ogling her butt. In the gold old days, she would not be offended. Tweety Bird looks like he was crossed with Angus Young of AC/DC in his schoolboy outfit. He might also be ogling Lola. The figures have holes in the backs of their pants for their tails. Self-respect.
Let’s leave the Looney Tunes gang behind, though really we could stay with them all day. It is such a rich source of material. Maybe I should sign up to do a Ph.D.
Back to the depressing part of depressing fun, (the fun keeps receding, I know), there are so many AI-generated posts of people being angry at… everything.
Old man eats sandwich at window.
Why is buddy’s hand going through the curtain? Who writes time this way? “They came at four fifty.” Did you really have to eat your sandwich while standing at the window? Do you not have a doorbell? Or maybe a door someone could knock on? It’s 4:49 right now, so they apparently haven’t come yet?
I think the moral of this one should be, if you are waiting for a delivery or service call, don’t be an idiot who gives up his whole day waiting instead of just going about your business and answering the door when the person turns up.
But some of these go beyond angry into really dark.
There are images that show kids riding bikes on the road while a car fogging for mosquitoes drives by, completely drowning them in toxic gases. This is supposed to be a good thing.
And peanut allergies? Hell, in my day we just let kids die!
Dystopian school cafeteria.
My God, this is dark. Many of the kids look sad. One dude looks completely manic. The angry lunch lady thinks some of the kids should die. And note that it is the sad-looking Black girl who is about to go into anaphylaxis for eating a peanut butter sandwich.
Grim, grim, grim. And, sadly, in the era of RFK and ever-more open eugenic approaches, even more terrifying.
(Fun, remember Philip? You promised the readers fun.)
This next one is grim too, but so absurd it did make me laugh.
Dad has a time machine, and this is what he brings the kids back to see?
Who needs benzos or therapy when you have a shag carpet? As the perceptive Iris once again notes in the caption, the dad is speaking from the present day, but he and his kids are in the past. Did they travel with a time machine?
And women. Ha! Those silly creatures. Let them get their anger out on housework and then things will be OK. Just stay out of the way! Don’t worry about whatever is making them mad. It’ll pass.
Also, what’s all this about anxiety meds being handed out like candy today? Wasn’t there a Rolling Stones song called “Mother’s Little Helper?” Wasn’t there a novel called Valley of the Dolls?
Note also this history of benzodiazepines:
Medical professionals greeted benzodiazepines enthusiastically at first, skyrocketing their popularity and patient demand. In the mid-to-late 1970s, benzodiazepines topped all “most frequently prescribed” lists.
You mean they were handing them out like candy?
(Years ago, I was given a benzodiazepine while waiting for day surgery. I was sitting in the waiting room with a few other people. I felt fantastic. One of the women sitting across from me said, “I can see why my sister is on these all the time.”)
Of course Looney Tunes are not the only classic characters to get the slop treatment.
If I gave you the following text, what image would you imagine accompanying it?
Some days I feel broken and tired. I carry pain I don’t always talk about. Memories still ache when I’m alone. I still fall apart in quiet moments and miss what once meant everything to me. But every day, I wake up and try again. I may be broken, but I haven’t given up.
Would it be this one, with a smiling Mickey Mouse?
Depressed Mickey Mouse is still smiling.
At first, I thought most of these AI nostalgia images were funny/laughable/ridiculous/stupid. Then I started to think about what it must be like to be just swimming in this slop all day long. Much has been written about the effects on kids and teens of being online all the time, but surely there are great harms to anyone marinating in this stuff.
There is a recent story in New York magazine by Jessica Lucas on “75-year-old screenagers.”
It is depressing as hell, filled with stories of adult kids worried about how their parents’ world has narrowed as they spend their days scrolling often AI-generated videos, living in fear, and losing their ability to enjoy the types of activities that once engaged them.
Sometimes, the kids have to take drastic action.
Lucas writes:
Americans over 60 now spend more than half their leisure hours in front of screens…
For a generation that often struggled to contextualize much of what it saw online, AI created a hyperpersonalized fantasyland. When Sandy, a 29-year-old part-time teacher, moved from her native Pennsylvania to live with her husband’s family in Canada, she knew she was signing up for caregiving. Her husband’s mother, Nora, had suffered a series of strokes; Sandy considers her a second mother and was more than happy to help. She did not, however, anticipate the role YouTube would play in her days. At any given hour, Nora can be found listening to AI-generated 1950s music that “sounds like someone singing in a tin can,” Sandy tells me. There are also 40-minute AI prayer videos — “This AI Jesus with a fake glow behind him just constantly going,” Sandy says.
The etiquette of parenting one’s parents is difficult. Not wanting to slight her mother-in-law, Sandy decided to gently steer Nora instead. At first, she spent hours with her husband on her mother-in-law’s YouTube, clicking DO NOT RECOMMEND on each slop-seeming video… She sows Nora’s feed with accounts she thinks her mother-in-law will like: a channel that uploads old Turner Classic movies or travel vloggers from the Philippines, which Nora can no longer fly to. One by one, Sandy saves them in Nora’s watch-later list and waits. When her mother-in-law appears delighted — “Look, I’m watching this movie. I forgot about it. It’s so good ” — Sandy says only “You found that? That’s so great.”
The article is filled with interviews with adult kids whose parents whip out their phones or iPads and can’t stop scrolling, whose lives have shrunk as they begin to fear their surroundings, or who are susceptible to whatever scams people are currently running on Facebook and targeting them with.
I imagine a constant feed (like I now have) of stuff reinforcing that the world has gone to hell, your generation was the best, and the good old days meant kids with peanut allergies died would really start to skew your worldview over time. It probably doesn’t even take that long.
My travels in slop-land led me to various fake Calvin & Hobbes comics. This is particularly depressing, in that Bill Watterson was adamant about not licencing his creation. No plush Hobbes dolls, no Calvin action figures, no decals featuring Calvin pissing on whichever brand of pickup truck you don’t like.
Most of the comics just feature bad puns, and then Calvin and Hobbes laughing, but this one stood out:
So wait, is Hobbes Calvin’s dad?
This may not be grim and angry, but it’s making me feel grim and angry about a beloved artist’s work being mined and desecrated for this stuff.
(Special shoutout today to Iris, for wading through all this slop and making sure it’s properly identified and categorized in our media library, and having some creative fun with it along the way.)
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VIEWS/NOTICED/NEWS
1. Slopifying Halloween fear-mongering
Oh good, bogus Halloween danger goes AI.
I noticed this awful map and warning recently. So this serves as our annual reminder that tampered candy reports are bullshit.
As Tim Bousquet wrote last Halloween, repeating himself from a previous Halloween:
Some kids will soon pretend to have received Halloween candy that has been tampered with. This will perhaps start as a silly inside joke for an Instagram post between kids, but an adult will learn of it and it’ll explode to the point where local media start reporting the story in alarming tones, and then other children will see those reports and pretend to also have received candy that has been tampered with.
Then, police will pretend to conduct investigations into the tampered candy — they can’t, after all, accuse the kids of being little shits, even though they know the kids actually are little shits. I mean, if the police really took these accounts seriously, they’d map out trick-or-treating routes, flood the neighbourhoods with cops, issue search warrants, call in suspects and witnesses, and so forth, but since they don’t do any of that, well, we can assume they don’t take the reports seriously.
None of the reports of tampered candy in the past have ever resulted in criminal charges. And they won’t this year either.
It’s all a sort of moral panic, a public profession of angst from our collective soul. “The world is going to hell,” someone will say on Twitter, linking to a report, and that tweet will be retweeted and liked and people will be concerned. But it happens every year, and there’s still no salvation. No one will thrown in jail. There won’t be any public floggings. We won’t have a target for our rage, no cleansing of our soul. We’ll just be stuck with the same bullshit we had the day before, and with the same shitty kids.
I like the disclaimer that not every house in, say, Cole Harbour is unsafe.
Also, can we talk about being warned off trick-or-treating in a neighbourhood because a pin was supposedly found in candy there 12 years ago? Do we think the perpetrator has just been sitting on a stack of pins for the last dozen years, waiting to strike again?’
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2. Don’t fall in love with your tech services
I finally switched from Spotify to Tidal (to which I had briefly subscribed in the past). No regrets.
I know all the horrible things about Spotify, but the final straw was the feeling of anxiety induced by opening up the ever-more overcrowded app. Clearly the powers that be at Spotify wanted you to spend as much time as possible on the app, and what had been a straightforward music listening experience now became an ADHD nightmare home page crammed with audiobooks for you, magazine articles for you, podcasts for you, and, the thing that pushed me over the edge, just random videos. (I was served one of a guy doing Tai Chi.)
The “podcasts for you” was pretty funny, given that I never listen to podcasts on Spotify, preferring instead to use the more privacy-oriented and open source Antenna Pod.
Tidal feels much more like it’s made by and for people who actually care about music. We’ll see how long it lasts. One thing I have learned is to never become a fanboy of any tech service or brand. Tidal is owned by Block, which, hilariously, used to be Square. I guess Cube will be the next iteration. It could all go to shit at any time!
We got a handy reminder to not fall in love with whatever tech you adopt yesterday, when 404 Media broke the story that Proton is planning to re-interview employees about AI, presumably to keep only those incorporating as much of it as possible into their work.
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RECENTLY IN THE HALIFAX EXAMINER:
1. Municipality of Richmond County Warden Lois Landry on EverWind’s AI data centre
Municipality of the County of Richmond Warden Lois Landry at the Port Hawkesbury Civic Centre on Oct. 21, 2026. Credit: Suzanne Rent
Suzanne Rent’s series profiling Nova Scotia’s mayors and wardens continues. Today’s instalment features Municipality of Richmond County Warden Lois Landry, a former teacher and school principal.
Point Tupper, where the proposed EverWind AI data centre is to be located, is in the area, so that’s an important part of the interview.
Landry was not totally taken by surprise by the data centre announcement, but she didn’t have a whole lot of information in the days leading up to it either.
From the interview:
We’ve been communicating with EverWind because the community is going to expect some engagement. That’s been going back since September some time.
They sent to us an email on Thanksgiving weekend that said they were going to have community engagement. We reported that at our council meeting [story here].
They did flag to us that they were going to announce their intentions so that they would have something to talk about at the community engagement. They asked me to speak at the announcement.
I said, “Well, how am I supposed to speak if you’re not specifically giving me the information?”…
I’m also going to say here, at my house, the VCR still says 12 o’clock. [Tech] is not my strongest area. On the difference between data centres and AI data centres specifically, I had to do a whole lot more reading.
On Wednesday, two days before the announcement, I said I need to have a sense [of what the proposal would be]. I never go anywhere unprepared. For my speech, I said I need to see some things that make me optimistic or that I still have reservations. [Landry published her full speech on the municipality’s website here.]
Here’s what Landry said, in part, when Rent asked her what happens if the data centre doesn’t get built:
That would be just like every other thing that didn’t happen in the Strait area.
Click or tap here to read “Municipality of Richmond County Warden Lois Landry on EverWind’s AI data centre.”
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2. Nova Scotia offshore drilling dream dashed for now
The Sable Offshore Energy Project was abandoned in 2018. Credit: Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Energy Regulator
Jennifer Henderson reports:
The only successful bidder interested in drilling for methane (natural gas) offshore Nova Scotia has failed to come up with the money.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I am shocked. Completely shocked.
Inceptio, the successful (and only) bidder had previously failed to come up with the required funds, but the deadline was extended. However, that doesn’t seem to have helped.
Henderson writes:
Inceptio Oil and Gas, led by Nova Scotia-born James Edens, needed a $52.5 million downpayment by midnight last night in order to explore two prospective areas near Sable Island…
Edens, an engineer who spent much of his career working in the North Sea off Scotland, founded Inceptio Oil and Gas about four years ago. The company bid $210,130,000 to lease two parcels of land offshore Nova Scotia, and the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Energy Regulator (CNSOER) made the award on April 28, 2026…
The news is disappointing for [Nova Scotia Premier Tim] Houston. As we reported here, when asked by reporters in June if he was concerned about Inceptio missing the first deadline to put up the money, Houston said he was not.
“I’m excited by Inceptio. They are a good company with good people,” he said
Click or tap here to read “Nova Scotia offshore drilling dream dashed for now.”
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3. Nova Scotia Power’s $1 billion mortgage under scrutiny as CEO steps down
Coal beside Nova Scotia Power’s Point Tupper generating station on Oct. 6, 2025. Credit: Joan Baxter
Nova Scotia Power president and CEO Vivek Sood is stepping down, and Jennifer Henderson reports on the timing and the challenges currently facing the utility:
The leadership change comes at a stressful time for the company and ratepayers.
Nova Scotia Power has until Thursday to respond to questions posed by intervenors about its proposed plan to convert $1 billion of costs tied to transitioning the grid from coal to renewable fuels into a 30-year mortgage…
The fuel cost problem has been exacerbated by delays in building wind farms among developers who have purchase agreements with Nova Scotia Power.
In hindsight, had more renewable energy been added to the provincial grid earlier, ratepayers wouldn’t be stuck with paying huge fuel bills tied to the volatility affecting fossil fuels caused by wars in Ukraine and Iran. The province has recently issued another call looking for an additional 350 megawatts of wind generation to be built.
Click or tap here to read “Nova Scotia Power’s $1 billion mortgage under scrutiny as CEO steps down.”
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IN OTHER NEWS
Grain Elevator fire
Grain Elevator fire, October 26, 2026. Credit: Mark Harvey
There was a fire at the Halifax Grain Elevator last night.
At CBC news, Anjuli Patil reports:
On Monday night, Halifax Fire said the fire was located more than 40 metres above the ground in the grain elevator’s dust management system, “presenting significant access and tactical operations.”
“HRFE firefighters are operating deliberately and aggressively, supported by aerial and drone operations.”…
The city said a 911 call about “visible flames” at the grain elevator was made around 7:15 p.m.
Residents were asked to avoid the area.
“At its peak, the incident required a three-alarm response. On-site resources have since been reduced as the risk has decreased,” the city said in a news release Monday night.
The fire is now under control.
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Government
City
Tuesday
Halifax Regional Council (Tuesday, 10am, details)
Wednesday
Board of Police Commissioners (Wednesday, 1pm, hybrid)
Heritage Advisory Committee (Wednesday, 3pm, virtual)
Province
Natural Resources and Economic Development Committee (Tuesday, 1pm, One Government Place and online) — The Proposed Data Centre in Point Tupper; with representatives from the Department of Energy; Department of Environment and Climate Change; The Municipality of the County of Richmond; EverWind Fuels
Note from Iris: The legislature’s website has been down since last Thursday’s global PHP incident. Legislative library staff are aware of the problem, but it may take some time to fix. Meanwhile, I’ll add meetings as they send them to me.
On campus
Dalhousie
Tuesday
No events
Wednesday
Noonish Hour Free Live Music (Wednesday, 11:45am, details)
King’s
Films and Conversation—cultural preservation through material culture (Tuesday, 6:30pm, details) — screening of two films, followed by a conversation between Mi’kmaw Elder and filmmaker Catherine Martin and scholar Dorota Glowacka
Literary Events
Tuesday
Poetry, Place, and the Sea (Tuesday, 12pm, Halifax) — Sue Goyette reads from Ocean
Book launch (Tuesday, 6:30pm, Halifax) — Elder Doreen Bernard: Upon A Wishing Moon
Wednesday
Book discussion (Wednesday, 12pm, Halifax) — Tatjana Takševa: Unforgetting and the Politics of Representation: Voices from Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina
Book launch (Wednesday, 7pm, Halifax) — Stephen Kimber: Traitor’s Game
In the harbour
Halifax
06:00: Norwegian Breakaway, cruise ship with up to 4,819 passengers, arrives at Pier 22 from Boston, on a seven-day roundtrip cruise out of Boston
07:00: Discovery, research/survey ship, sails from BIO for sea
10:00: CSL Tacoma, bulker, sails from Gold Bond for sea
12:30: MSC Eleni, container ship, sails from Pier 41 for sea
13:00: AlgoLuna, oil tanker, sails from Pier 9 for sea
15:30: Contship Cup, container ship, sails from Fairview Cove for sea
16:00: Norwegian Breakaway sails for Kings Wharf, Bermuda
22:00: Algoma East Coast, oil tanker, arrives at Irving Oil from Saint John
Cape Breton
06:00: Sapphire Princess, cruise ship with you to 3,214 passengers, arrives at Liberty Pier (Sydney) from Charlottetown, on a 14-day cruise from Ville de Québec to Fort Lauderdale
16:00: Sapphire Princess sails for Halifax
Footnotes
Cheap Laffs, by Mark Newgarden Credit: Toy Tales
I came across the book Cheap Laffs last night while looking for something else, and of course I immediately ordered a copy. Here’s the opening paragraph of a review from the Toy Tales website:
If you enjoy harmless pranksterism – either perpetrating it or consuming it – Cheap Laffs: The Art of the Novelty Item will be right up your alley. From joy buzzers to whoopie cushions, fake dog poop, snake nut cans, and much more, author Mark Newgarden provides a smart look at the corny heyday of gagdom.
It will be the perfect book to read once I finish Ben Katchor’s Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay.