Interesting Links for 14-07-2022

[andrewducker]

1. TANK - a very short film in the style of classic vector graphics game Battlezone

(tags:games video movie )

2. Men once again shocked and disgusted to discover that women have bodies

(tags:models women society breasts )

3. Penny Mordaunt: Tory leadership hopeful repeatedly said 'c**k' in Commons speech after losing Navy bet

(tags:Conservatives funny penis )

4. Tory members support net zero and aren't impressed by tax cuts

(tags:Conservatives globalwarming tax polls )

5. My friend Patrick takes photos. Mostly around Scotland. Many of them beautiful.

(tags:photos scotland )

6. Shakespeare North unveils rival to London's Globe Theatre

(tags:shakespeare uk viaDanielDWilliam )

7. How did explorers in the 7th century BC sail the oceans?

(tags:ocean exploration ships archeology prehistory history viaDanielDWilliam )

8. Crypto Winter, or Crypto Ice Age?

(tags:blockchain epicfail )

Comments

[mountainkiss]

+1 #5

[rhythmaning]

Appreciated!

BTW I've just spammed your twitter account with pictures of St Paul's...

[mountainkiss]

That is splendid news thank you.

[dewline]

3. That person is...something else. Right? :-/

4. Leaves me with some small degree of hope for the future not being a total hellscape.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it's less awful than I thought!

[mtbc]

A pleasant surprise to me too!

[rhythmaning]

How nice of you to say! Thank you!

[cmcmck]

2. Who knew?

[rhythmaning]

Can I just say I sincerely hope this is not the only outing for the tag combination "Conservatives funny penis".

Also, why did the Indie feel the to asterisk the "o" in cock? I wonder if they only blank it out when referring to male organs rather than male birds?!

[andrewducker]

I do find the need to blank out "rude" words pretty silly and immature, to be honest.

[rhythmaning]

F*cking right!!!

[simont]

I occasionally wonder if it's actually counterproductive. Supposing that you're one of the prudes who thinks it's a good idea, probably one of your thoughts about swearwords is that you don't want children learning them. So the children of such people, of course, are avidly keen to do so, and it becomes a problem of game theory.

But if a child in that mindset sees something like "c*ck", the asterisk signals that hidden under it is a word worth learning! Their attention will be drawn to that word even if it's in the middle of a paragraph they'd otherwise have skipped over. And now they know what to look up in the dictionary :-)

The redeeming feature of the practice is that you can abuse it to indicate that you consider some other word to be rude. For extra points, include an unexpurgated ordinary swearword alongside, to make it totally clear which one you think is worse.

For example, some years ago, there was a suggestion of a T-shirt containing the slogan "BOLLOCKS TO BL**R". (Don't think anyone ever made it, though.)

[haggis]

I saw a video of the Count from Sesame Street counting something like flowers but the word flower was bleeped out. My mind filled in a rude word, even though I knew it was innocuous and the Count's laugh started sounding dirtier and dirtier!

[andrewducker]

https://youtu.be/B-Wd-Q3F8KM

[andrewducker]

It's the Streisand Effect for swearing!

[calimac]

There are systems which flag "naughty" sequences of letters wherever they occur: not just bleeping them out but marking the whole post as unacceptable. In such a regime, for instance, you can't say you served a cocktail or visited the town of Cockermouth (the latter of which I have, btw: there's a pub called the Fletcher Christian, which reminded me that he came from there). I've seen hilarious stories of accidental letter-sequences in the middle of words that have been caught up in that.

[cmcmck]

A billycock hat would no doubt break the system! :o)

[andrewducker]

I wasn't allowed to use my real name as a username the other day. Turned out they'd banned anything with "ucker"in it!

[andrewducker]

The Scunthorpe Problem!

[calimac]

That was it, that's the one I was thinking of but couldn't remember specifically.

[simont]

I remember drswirly telling me about a message board on which the automated censor had rejected a post saying that somebody was going to do something "in June". I stared at the allegedly offending sentence for ages before spotting the included word "injun", and when I found it, I was left with the feeling that the author of that software ought to quit censorship and go into automated crossword solving.

[drswirly]

SPOOKY.

I was just about to write to you on Mono to mention that GameFaqs censors "Silent Hill: Shattered Memories" to say "s***tered", and then I saw this thread.

Regarding your BL**R thing, there were BOLLOCKS TO BR*XIT things, I think.

[andrewducker]

Good Lord. Nobody mentions Mono for years, and then two people in a month! (I was on there back in 92-95, as samael).

And it took me a moment to realise that Gamefaqs are probably not censoring "Hat".

[drswirly]

Mono is pretty deserted these days. I use it to chat to simont during the day, either about maths or just saying "snooze".

[andrewducker]

I can understand the talker being the bit that retains the most value. Shame that DW doesn't have an equivalent!

[drswirly]

Oh, no-one uses the talker. Simon and I just witter in messages.

Although several of us have been using IRC a lot since all this Covid stuff started, since it's not easy to meet in person.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, if I didn't have two small kids to chase after I'd probably have set up (or found) something similar for me and a few friends to talk to each other on.

[calimac]

That's pretty amazing.

Then there was the news service which disapproved of the word "gay" and would automatically change it, as a result of which they ran articles about a champion sprint runner named Tyson Homosexual.

[simont]

I've seen the same phenomenon in actual print with that well-known New Zealand rugby team, the "All African-Americans."

[marahmarie]

Bored Panda is one of the most flagrant examples of this sort of censorship - they asterisk out curse words and merely suggestive words in *images* and in the comments. And TikTok unaliving everyone's another example, I suppose.

[bens_dad]

There is a scene in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" where a tv news report bleeps out many of the innocuous words and leaves in the swear words to put a very slanted view of the sherrif's speach.

[marahmarie]

the asterisk signals that hidden under it is a word worth learning

See, this is my mindset and I'm far from a child *flashes AARP card* but there is internet lingo I'll come across all asterisked out and I'll not know wtf it is, so will go look it up as I can't resist learning what the term might be (thinking process is like: "That looks like a senseless jumble of letters so what does it mean?" A lot of times it'll be an acronym so then I have to go learn the meaning of the acronym and decide why they bleeped out the "bad" letter within it - really).

[calimac]

6) "But when you walk inside, you are hit by the smell of wood." Yes! This is what most struck me when I visited the reconstructed Globe in London when it had just been built: it smelled like a lumberyard.

It's a useful reminder that these things we think of as old, old, old, when people were actually using them they were new, new, new.

[marahmarie]

Men once again shocked and disgusted to discover that women have bodies

Until they realize they want to control said bodies, then they are f*cking delighted.

[myka]

oh my goodness I really loved battlezone <3

[andrewducker]

It was very much its own aesthetic. I'm not sure much else has been done in that style.

(The only other games I can think of are parts of Rez, the original Elite on the BBC, and an early Star Wars arcade game.)

[bens_dad]

Asteroids had a 2D vector style.

[andrewducker]

Good point!