I constantly get ads about horny milfs in my town but horny milfs are an invasive species where I live and we’re not allowed to have them as pets. I don’t even live in a town. I live in a grand duchy.

I have a running joke with a friend about “what Jeff wants to sell me today”.

(Jeff being Jeff Bezos, i.e. Amazon recommendations.)

Strange things Jeff has wanted to sell me recently:

• falconry equipment
• a gallon of molasses
• a quern-stone
• veterinary surgical adhesives

After playing a bit of Baldur’s Gate 3, I now imagine Jeff Bezos as a deep gnome merchant with an astonishingly random assortment of products …

So it isn’t a strange item, but the length of time I got targeted ads was absurd.

In 2018 I had to buy a new mattress. I Googled directions to the nearest mattress store and got a mattress. For the next 3 years every single video ad I got anywhere was for mattresses. Do y’all know how many people decided to just start making mattresses… I didn’t think the ads would end…

Around 2010 I was going through a traditional Irish music phase. I remember listening to Pandora while eating my lunch and after the song “Finnegans Wake” I got an advertisement for “Funerals starting at $900 in the {where I lived} area”.

I understand why it was suggested, most people listening to The Dubliners are probably 30-40 years older than me. It also made me laugh to imagine some sales guy going to a funeral home and pitching advertising as a way to drum up more business.

Few years ago I got an “ad” that was just some dudes really bad call of duty black ops 2 sniping montage.

I mean full on some of the most meh trickshots and quickscopes I think I’ve ever seen, against the built in AI opponents that you can enable in custom games, something like 5 or so years after the game was actually relevant to pop culture.

Oh my algorithm is FUCKED because I’m so insanely curious.

So first of all I’m always googling stuff from medical procedures to culture and liguistics. That’s part of how I found out that apparently black Americans will sometimes get a nose job to confirm better to western beauty standards.

Second of all, I will click on everything that I can’t identify, which often turn out to be kitchen implements or specialized hobby equipment. One time I clicked on some weird looking shoes, shortly followed by some bizarre looking amorphous plastic things which turned out to be special climbing shoes and screw-in footholds, respectively.

So anyway, that’s the story of how Google adsense thinks I’m an African American woman who hates her nose but is also extremely passionate about indoor climbing (none of this is even remotely true).

I never see any online ads.

Back in the day, my shaver broke so I looked online for a new one. Bought one, and afterwards I had ads for nothing but electric shavers. It was so friggin bizarre, like reading some random article and getting 6 ads for shavers. That’s when I finally started using adblock.

YouTube gave me an ad for an organisation to deradicalize islamic terrorists.

The night before a terror bombing very close to my house, organised and readied in a house a few blocks from me that I walk past to get the bus.

I should check my ad vault to see what ads Adnausem is blocking for me.

youtube hit me with an ad for a company that makes those little outlet boxes that go in walls. so of course my ass watched the full video, liked it, left a comment, shared the url, the whole nine yards.

For duvets, the day after I bought a duvet, from the retailer that sold me the duvet. You have all the data in the world, steal all my data to target me personally, and that is the best you can come up with?

For [acronym] the day after I was emailing someone about a completely different thing that used the same acronym. That one was more creepy than strange, tbf.

Helped my parents get treatment for $old_people_health_complications. I used my phone for contact. I had barely started using that number in particular.

Next week I received a call asking if I wanted to “reserve a place in the town cemetery in case of the unfortunate” (it wasn’t in the US, words might be different).

It wasn’t me, it was my parents, and the fuckers tried to manipulate potentially grieving people.

I block all possible ads so I haven’t been getting any random ones in ages, but my email provider has an ad for “Moorhuhn” on their page that always slips through the filter somehow so whenever I check my emails I’m asked to shoot virtual chickens.

American football fans probably remember the crazy wildcard playoff game between the Colts and Chiefs during the 2013 season’s playoffs. The Chiefs built up a big lead, but Andrew Luck led the Colts to an insane comeback victory.

I am a Chiefs fan. At the time, the Chiefs had not won a playoff game since 1993. After a devastating 2012 season, the team cleaned house and brought in a new regime, led by Andy Reid. It worked well and the Chiefs had one of the biggest record improvements year-to-year in NFL history. My optimism was at an all time high. This was the year the playoff curse would end.

I spent the week leading up to the game just absorbed in the hype, reading, listening, and watching every bit of analysis I could find.

When the game finally ended, I was absolutely devastated. It’s probably the hardest I’ve ever taken a loss as a fan.

…and then, I started getting targeted ads for Colts merch, including a cardboard Andrew Luck mask (which was just a cutout of his face with the eyes cut out stuck to a popsicle stick.) Everywhere I went on the internet, I was haunted by a grinning, eyeless, Andrew Luck reminding me that the Chiefs would never win a playoff game. This went on for several weeks.