5434a
2d ago
White fish + white flour + white potatoes, all cooked in neutral flavour vegetable oil. If anything warrants the reputation for bland beige British food it's fish and chips. It's not even cheap, it's practically the same price as a takeaway chicken curry with rice.
5434a
2d ago
It's been a while since I re-read it but I think it was in Robert Pirsig's Lila (good book, not too long. I think you'd like it) that floated an idea along the lines that when progress becomes unstable the pursuit of progress will in faltering fall back to the last stable/secure state.
Do you foresee your fictional world of Minecraft Tidus slipping back to and re-stabilising at the level (if not the same location) of the last stable state upon its slopes, or as you seem to hint see it tipping over into ruinous decline back into the ocean?
5434a
10d ago
Avant garde art is all about the meta. It's not about painting an object, it's about exploring the idea of what a painting can be (by making a painting). Ditto music, sculpture, dance, photography, cinema, fashion, design etc etc etc.
The problem in my eyes is that it's experimental and by their nature a lot of experiments fail, but people laud them for their sheer experimental-ness and stop short of judging quality. The number one thing is to do something that nobody has done before and worry about if it's any good later if at all. People neglect that at this point being challenging and shocking is ironically nearly as boring and stale as the sacred cows it once aimed at. We've had an entire century of this. We've even meta'd the meta and had silence-as-music, blank canvas-as-painting, and empty room-as-sculpture. The navel has been well and truly plumbed.
It's funny that you bring up beer because I think that cooking is one area where there's a natural limit on how far the boundaries can be pushed before people literally won't swallow it ("It's rat poison on rusty screws. Go on, try it!"). It's where taste runs up against physiology and not mere cerebral semantics.
5434a
10d ago
The aerial photos looked like a lot of people, but then consider that Glastonbury Festival is supposed to be 100-200,000 attendees. Using that as a comparison I'd say ~100k is a lot more credible than 1 million, and 3 million (Glastonbury x >10) is total bollocks. Even the anti Iraq war march only claims 1 million.
Re political discourse, there seems to be an ongoing process of the window shifting to encompass more right leaning views and less left leaning/woke views. I'd say it started with the BBC dropping Stonewall in 2021 and the ruling on Maya Forstater's case in the same period. Now it's moving beyond trans scepticism to include anti immigration and the sort of birth rate discourse I've been reading here for years.
5434a
14d ago
To me everything looks like crap or scam. So I wonder - who buys it, for them to make any money
There's a world of people out there with more money than brains. And to avoid uncharitability some of those people have a lot of brains but they have even more money, and so they don't see a problem with spending money to try something out quickly and easily instead of spending brain power to get there slowly.
5434a
15d ago
Very nice. Are you a cross-stretchers-for-legs sceptic? I have no position, just curious.
I finished my headphones, they turned out surprisingly okay. Not great, could certainly make a better and quicker job if I did it again, but more than serviceable enough to not want to do a better job and better than I had any reason to expect given it was my first attempt at an experiment made with leftovers. Unfortunately I've lost all my photos after my phone decided that booting up was no longer to its tastes.
5434a
17d ago
I've heard people recommend Citymapper here in UK/Europe. Their website says they're partnered with Via in the US.
5434a
19d ago
For practical purposes, lower middle. My family background spans doctors and engineers at the upper end to car mechanics and carpenters at the lower end.
5434a
27d ago
If we're both using broadly the same kind of bio-neurological substrate (ie not colour-blind, no drugs, no pathologic photosensitivity, etc) I don't see why we would have a grossly different experience. I think there are subtle differences in processing and interpretation (some people might have visual snow, some cultures don't clearly distinguish blue from green) but nothing so different as experiencing the other person's blue qualia.
It's an interesting idea and I used to ponder it myself when I was a kid, but now I'm older I take the other side and ask why wouldn't we share similar qualia.
Naming it Really Simple Syndication was a disaster by emphasising publishing instead of consuming. Meanwhile semi-nonsense names like Digg, Tumblr and D.e.Lic....iO.u..s ate its lunch.
If they'd just named it Really Simple Subscription instead...
More options
Context Copy link