e.g. see how ancient Egyptian architecture compares to Greek - both stone, but marble's superior strength allows for thinner, more widely spaced columns, giving more light and elegance. What forms might we build with Martian bricks, and Martian gravity?

The UK's immigration policy hinges on putting very desperate people in even more danger. In case you forgot, this is what the end result of that looks like.

OED operating at levels of meta we can't aspire to

Very frustrating that subtitling is treated as an afterthought (if it is thought of at all - looking at you, Amazon Prime) and often left to the distributor/licensor, instead of the filmmaker (who might actually put some effort into it)

i was kinda tempted to set up some fake "join-ice-dot-com" pages and profile the kind of people who signed up

Always struck me as odd that sunflowers managed to get named gira-sol, when they're an example of a flower that *doesn't* turn to face the sun!

Will be interesting to see if the widespread national pushes for digital ID / online verification (eg UK porn block) will provide the necessary architecture for a strictly human web.
Captchas, sim- and email-based 2FA, no longer fit for purpose

And where it gets really interesting is when these aren't directed by a human any more. Like a computer virus or a worm, just a scrap of code endlessly building online presences, posting, pitching, emailing, arguing. Worse than the dead internet (which is ultimately governed) - a zombie internet.

I think it's very likely that in the future we'll discover entire journals, publications, offshored legal and IT departments, campaign groups, etc are AI fabrications.