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Corvos
1d ago
The Piccadilly area is pretty nice for shopping: it’s got a couple of good, big bookshops (Hatchard’s especially), Fortnum & Mason’s for food, and Jermyn street etc. for top-end clothes, jackets etc. (I think you were quite interested in fashion but maybe not that kind?)
Very crowded and expensive obviously, but nice.
Or there’s the historical stuff: go to Bank and see the old City of London, or to Westminster/St. James’ Park.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
I armchair psychologize that many girls who are more well-endowed here (not simply big) develop a kind of hunched-over posture to de-emphasize their tits. Onsen (hot springs) and public bathing are not uncommon here, and a girl who develops breasts larger than the norm will 100 % have this commented on by other girls. While this is also true back in the states (or used to be, I've no idea now) there is a cultural tendency in Japan to avoid standing out. What you describe is not that surprising.
How.
A few weeks back, I'd gotten in touch with an old buddy of mine living down in London. We hadn't met for ages, and I offered to come visit during the last dying days of what passes as a summer around these parts.
You can see below that my experience catching a red-eye flight (one that threatened to give me pink-eye to boot) didn't go so well. A small price to pay, I told myself, as I landed at the airport an hour or so back, and caught the train towards where my friend lives. I dropped him a text letting him know I was on my way, and looking forward to seeing him in a few hours.
At which point came back a rather incredulous message. "self_made_human, you were supposed to be come visit next weekend."
Well. Shit. I have no valid explanation, barring chronic severe deprivation brought on by too many night shifts and dissolute living. He'd been very clear on the dates, I just ended up mixing them up, only remembering that I was supposed to see him the last weekend of this month.
He called to figure out what on earth had happened, and I was in the process of explaining the above when the train went through a tunnel and lost network. I made small talk with my fellow passengers, and took to heart their advice to make a picnic out of my misfortune. Call it self_made_human's most spontaneous (and first) solo day trip. Not kidding about that, I'm not one for travel, and I never go any significant distances unless it's on some kind of vacation or to visit someone. This is quite literally the first time I've found myself in a different city with no plans or fixed agenda.
I'm furiously asking ChatGPT for advice on how to kill the time until I hear back from my friend regarding his ability to accommodate my stupidity. I've already promised to come visit again next weekend, as he'd already made time and spent money booking things for us to do.
So uh, what do I do now? Any suggestions? Tottenham looks profoundly uninspiring, and I don't even know what sport the local team, the Tottenham Hotspurs, even play. Worst case I go to a pub. Or maybe I wander around Central London, with far more discretionary spending potential than the last time I was here.
(My family is never going to let me live this down)
Edit:
If it wasn't Anita Sarkeesian I saw at the Tate Modern, then this lady is her long lost twin. I should have said hi.
Edit 2:
Brother, they're playing a film where a bunch of clean-shaven Asian twinks are jerking off with/to plants. Modern and postmodern art outdoes itself.
comfortable
1d ago
The first Gundam I watched was probably SEED, but my personal favorite was Gundam 00. Wing was okay, and I won't recommend Iron-Blooded Orphans because I really didn't like the ending.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
This 1000 times is why I despise social media. Nobody is getting real conversation on social media because it’s curated to funnel your mind down a path leading to the pre-approved opinion. I mean propaganda is so pervasive in the modern west that I think we’re as bad or worse in terms of propaganda and psychological manipulation than the worst totalitarian regimes of the last century. Stalin put out propaganda, sure, but it wasn’t nearly as pervasive as what we have. He had radio, newspapers, and posters. He couldn’t steer private conversations, he couldn’t delete crime-think from social consciousness. He could chill things by arresting obvious and loud dissenters, but that is much more limited than what social media does via AI and deletion. Our propaganda machine hides and people are lead to believe that they are having neutral conversations.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I, uh, fucked up. I was supposed to be here next weekend. Now I'm in London, and unsure what to do with myself.
(I'd like to blame this on Ryanair too, but that's a stretch. It's probably chronic sleep deprivation and forgetting how to use a calendar)
I'll take your advice to heart, and if I come back again next week, it'll be on a carrier that isn't going to nickel and dime me to hell and back.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
I don't have a creative bone in my body, but I can read the codes well enough to put together crushingly boring designs in infinite variety. Presumably a person capable of reading the DSM would fare no worse.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
That's a little bit reductive; there are a lot of things on that "or" list, some of which are perfectly fine. Deducing that I have one of the traits on that "or" list from my significant walks to the supermarket would be correct (specifically, I don't have a driver's licence; I'm absent-minded and don't think I'd make a great driver).
2rafa
1d ago
Ryanair is a meme. Their CEO, O’Leary, is a kind of pantomime villain, always willing to bait the press in a symbiotic relationship because, as he knows, the passengers always come back.
It is never worth flying a budget airline in Europe unless it’s a last minute flight (when the legacy carriers jack up prices to accommodate urgent and unplanned business or personal travel; in part this is because of the unusual way intra-European business class works where the seats stay the same, they just don’t sell the middle seat, which means that they can sell as many business class seats as they want up to the day of departure).
Book in advance and regular airlines (which are bad enough) are barely more expensive once you account for all the fees, the fact that you’re going to a normal airport instead of some dump 90 minutes away from the city with cheap landing fees, the psychological burden of encountering one’s fellow passengers etc.
2rafa
1d ago
When it was founded all of the main founders were either libertarians or techno-anarchist types. The ideological evolution of Huffman, Ohanian and so on happened later.
2rafa
1d ago
Reddit’s financial history is pretty interesting. Yes, it lost money for 20 years, but Condé Nast (or rather AP, the parent company) kept selling off small pieces to VC firms and other investors, which meant that both (a) they didn’t lose any money on it and (b) the book value of their stake kept increasing.
When the company webt public in 2024 they made $2bn from the IPO; they still own about 25% of the company. And throughout their 18 year ownership, even though Reddit didn’t make money, Condé Nast’s losses on it were minimal as they slowly sold the company off piecemeal.
roche
1d ago
Has anyone here toyed with the idea that they may be too weird to belong to any community?
So far as my personality goes, it's a mish-mash of everything, and it's spread so thin that I generally only have one narrow means of connection with any given person. Back in school for example, I had a reputation for being the quiet kid who'd chime in out of nowhere and tell a great joke. This won me enough reputation that people would invite me to hang out, and I'd have absolutely nothing to say because I couldn't relate to them on a fundamental level. Actually, in the 6th grade when I was placed in a Spanish class full of hispanics and blacks, that was the first time I felt that socializing at school was easy. Before long I was even making race jokes and had my whole table cracking up. I'm half-Anglo half-Italian genetically, but I can never socialize with other whites unless they're stupid. Yet even that fails once you get beyond jokes.
It's strange. I feel like a genetic experiment. I have all the emotions of a person, the same interests, the desire to contribute and belong. But it's like a machine where all the wires are hopelessly crossed. And I'm turning 27 so this is a pressing concern. A life of isolated achievement or idleness isn't necessarily a nightmare, but I'd dearly appreciate knowing what's going on and whether or not it's even necessary. Perhaps it's some strange childhood trauma, who knows? My uniqueness once seemed to be a blessing, but now it feels very much like a curse.
BahRamYou
1d ago
I've heard from anonymous sources that there's a whole service economy for the ultrarich, based around this sort of thing. The basic idea is that their time is very valuable, so they'll pay astronomical prices to avoid ever having to wait or be distracted by petty bullshit. The extreme example might be having a private jet/helicopter to help them travel faster, but it exists for all sorts of minor things too. So they might have a personal assistant who's job is to cue up just one episode of their favorite TV show, then slowly turn down the lights and help them sleep. or whatever else they want.
Obviously some of that is a privilege that only the very wealthy can afford. But it does seem like, to some extent, we should be able to pay for services that help middle class folks do that too. it's odd that we can't. If anything, it seems to be going the opposite direction, where like, even if you pay for premium, it will still insist on showing us adds and doing that sort of attention-grabbing addictive bullshit. It feels like I'm going to a restaurant and the owner is telling us "yeah I don't care how much you pay, you must sit in the smoking section and smoke at least one cigarette. i'm not letting you enjoy my food without a little nicotine on the side."
Ok so you're an employer and you see an employee of yours on the internet in front of millions saying things that you view as disgusting and horrible and that you don't want in your business. Are you only allowed to fire them if they mention your company during it?
That's how it currently works. If I find homosexuality, transgenderism or Islam disgusting or horrible, I still can't fire a worker for that. I don't know if I could even fire them for activism in favor of surrogacy, even though that's not a protected class.
I never said that, but yes from the perspective of the business owner they do lose some rights from anti discrimination laws. That is just a fact.
Ok, so I'm saying we already live in an authoritarian society, and that it's odd to criticize someone as "authoritarian", when they claim authority should be wielded in a different way.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
Really? Based on the recent ACX alpha school review, I was under the impression that cash for books does work.
As far as I know Fryer has not done any super-long-term studies of the impact of his experiments, but he did look at the mid-term effects. After the “read books for $$s” study ended he followed the test and control group for what happened to their reading habits when they were not getting paid. He found, in contradiction to concerns about loss of internal motivation, that the test group continued to read more than the control group.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school
Which studies do you mean?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
But America is widely diversified. There is not a single corporate/religious/etc other private entity with that power.
America is a highly centralized modern managerial nation.
Try living your life after having been deemed a politically liability whom no bank will touch and come back to me.
But you don't even need society wide nets to ruin a person, just industry wide. Remember when James Damore got fired and people tried to prevent him even getting any job back? Because I remember.
People always do this dance of pointing to some Emmanuel Goldstein that survived cancellation because they can't actually name the ones that were successfully ruined, since they disappeared from the internet since.
I personally know half a dozen such people. The modern world and its secular Cathedral does have excommunication. I know so.
phailyoor
1d ago
Kind of shocking how hands off Reddit was given how much of an SJW the founder is right now. I guess he was willing to shut up when he had to, but once he got the network effects, he was ready to push the agenda.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
even the mystic needs to “crucify his flesh” and “make no provision for the flesh”
I guess it must be acknowledged that there is strong (and historically violent) disagreement on this question, I align more with Orthodox teachings and the concept of theosis, whose associated ascetic practice is not a rejection of the flesh but specifically a transformation and integration of the body as a temple.
humans are not as innately reasonable as they are innately animal
Again I do not see these as opposites as you do. Reason is but the conscious manifestation and structuration of our wants.
Humans aren’t designed to plot out in their mind how they will feel in five years if they continue to smoke and then imagine it saliently with excellent theory of mind and then decide to ignore the urge to have the sugar because they remember this mental image they developed.
I wholly disagree. Humans are designed specifically to do that, imperfectly. And my evidence is that they do in fact do this and have done so for as long as we can tell.
I do not believe as you do that culture is an innovation. Only that it's technological manifestations have evolved over time.
We always told stories and always made society.
phailyoor
1d ago
How to overcome Reddit’s massive network effect?
Convince Elon to buy Reddit and merge it with X. Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak and if you wanted to compete with them it would be a viscous fight for a shrinking pie.
phailyoor
1d ago
Instead, I'm probably going to have to give in and start joining discord voicechats.
I'm quite surprised. Discord voicechat is just something so different from Reddit that I can't imagine it as the first replacement.
aldomilyar
1d ago
I feel like optimization culture has pushed into hobbies, though. There's way more concern around 'performing' at even casual activities
aldomilyar
1d ago
Also the impulse to add professional/monetary incentives to everything mean that the second you stop heading upwards in the rankings it's kind of depressing.
I was a pretty good Rugby player growing up, got into the professional academy system and ultimately washed out at 20. I then stopped playing Rugby since just kinda hanging around being an amateur felt depressing as hell. This trend's happened a lot with the guys who went through the process, compared to previous generations where really the entire 'pinnacle' of the sport for the vast majority of people was just playing for the suburb's best team and a career would be ping-ponging between grades for 10-15 years until injury or life got in the way.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1d ago
And that makes me a little sad. Discord is fine, but I can't help but notice that I'm going dow the same path that so many repressed 3rd worlders do and resorting to discussion on unsearcheable, ungovernable silos. For all the sins of social media, it really does-- or at least did serve as a modern public square. And I'll miss the idea (if not necessarily the reality) that the debates I participated in could be found, and heard, by a truly public audience.
I want to feel sympathy for you, because I know how demoralising it is to lose a source like that - but that's because I went through it a decade ago. Social media has not represented the public since, it has been a variety of attempts to control the public. I guess I can appreciate that you finally see the problem.
I'd be very leery about calling myself interested in fashion. I buy two, maybe three, articles of clothing a year, but I do try to make sure I look good in them.
Visiting the book shops might not hurt, but I haven't bought a dead tree book (that wasn't a textbook) in almost a decade. Libgen rules.
Thanks!
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