Interesting Links for 01-10-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Anyone want to be our neighbours?

(tags:housing Edinburgh )

2. Many men are simply incapable of being around attractive women

I officially apologise to any woman I've made uncomfortable. And I'm absolutely sure I have.
(tags:men beauty OhForFucksSake jobs )

3. Porn on Tumblr is a complicated

(tags:porn tumblr business censorship Apple Android )

4. Goblin cats are the best cats

(tags:cats funny )

5. Just how insidious is K-Pop?

(tags:music Korea )

6. Too... Many... Unusual... Laughs!

(tags:laughter funny video viaPatrickHadfield )

7. Some examples of languages younger than Scots

(tags:language history )

8. This house definitely has "unorthodox" design choices

(tags:design housing EpicWTF )

9. Elon Musk's Texts Shatter the Myth of the Tech Genius

(tags:Twitter sms ElonMusk )

10. Dredging the river Tees has released contaminants that killed crabs for miles around

(tags:crabs death pollution )

11. The lack of Third Places is definitely one of the major issues in modern cities

(tags:community cities video )

Comments

Many men are simply incapable of being around attractive women

[jack]

Yeah :(

Porn on Tumblr is a complicated

[jack]

It's weird. It definitely makes sense that porn bans are driven by payment processors and others with complicated clashing interests. But I still feel like I only understand part of the story.

Twitter seems to have human nudity, cartoon nudity, even cartoon hardcore porn. I keep seeing articles about "mastercard and visa suspend payment processing for pornhub" but I'm pretty sure pornhub are still around, and that there's lots of other internet pornography sites. So it's more varied than just impossible, but I don't know how. E.g. some sites are more driven by advertising not payments, some are more web not app, some *are* porn sites and are happy to pay the higher payment processing fees for "higher risk of chargeback". A lot of the concern is about very illegal content like nonconsensual videos or videos of children :( But a lot of the specific examples are more about vague moralising, it can't look "adult-adjacent".

I think some of these things are good. Having places you can go and be guaranteed a generally SFW experience is good. But it shouldn't be mandatory everywhere. And there should be some ways of people to share stuff on a smaller scale without the same checks. And payment protections are good. But there should be ways of spending smaller amounts where you can just DO it without having to go through The Man.

Some things are genuinely different with Big Data platforms. A phone book can do reverse look-ups so slowly it's not a problem, a website can be a privacy violation. Something similar for medical records or surveillance, it wasn't needed to ban abusing something if doing it was incredibly inconvenient and obvious, but if it can be automated at high speed then it is. So I can see where large platforms do reach a point where "people do what they do, we're just a carrier" doesn't work and they have a responsibility to winnow abusive content. But it always seems to be done *really* inconsistently.

Re: Porn on Tumblr is a complicated

[altamira16]

The line about Android in that article still has me cracking up.

I think because phones are portable, it makes sense that they are stricter. No one wants to be on the train next to that person who is watching porn on the way to work.

Re: Porn on Tumblr is a complicated

[andrewducker]

As someone with an Android phone I can assure you that it can display porn trivially.

Re: Porn on Tumblr is a complicated

[altamira16]

FOR SCIENCE, of course.

I found it funny because I am an Android app developer.

Just how insidious is K-Pop?

[jack]

There's so many things where I'm like, "this is really good, can I read/watch/see something like this, but just a bit more so", and then when that DOES come along, and iterates a few times, we reach, "wait, this is what I thought I wanted but now it seems really bland and not as interesting". Like finding the webfic which is the PERFECT combination of character and premise I thought I wanted, but just feels blah and I want to read something different.

Re: Just how insidious is K-Pop?

[altamira16]

I remember someone explaining this once when it came to books.

"Oh look, a cool new vampire book."
"Oh, look, so many cool new vampire books."
"Oh, the market is completely saturated with crappy vampire books."

Re: Just how insidious is K-Pop?

[andrewducker]

Were at least 1% of them any good?

Re: Just how insidious is K-Pop?

[altamira16]

I am not a reliable judge of this topic. Interview with a Vampire came out as a movie when I was in high school, so I will always have a fondness for Anne Rice books from that period, when my friends were reading the horniest ones while our brains were soaked in hormones.

I also read a bunch of the Sookie Stackhouse books when the "True Blood" television series was a thing. Some of them were entertaining. Should I have been a completionist about it? Also, why does Urban Dictionary think the word "completionist" only applies to video games?

Re: Just how insidious is K-Pop?

[andrewducker]

That seems a very odd thing to only apply it to!

Re: Just how insidious is K-Pop?

[bens_dad]

Also, why does Urban Dictionary think the word "completionist" only applies to video games?

You aren't "completionist" if you finish a book;
you are completionist if you read every book in the series
but you are completionist if you play every option in a video game !

[but]
... what if you stay to see the end credits of a movie ?

[ninetydegrees]

"Many men are simply incapable of being around attractive women"

I had a friend in uni who was quite pretty. She couldn't walk 50 meters in Paris without one guy, generally (way) older, staring at her, asking for her number, making comments about her, etc. It was horrifying to witness. She tried to be nice (because you get insulted or worse when you're not nice) but it made her so uncomfortable and none of these men ever saw it or cared.

And I'd say many men are also simply incapable of being around women, period. Their misogynistic mindset is always there. It just manifests in different ways, some more obvious than others.

[anef]

Yes, when I was a student I spent two weeks in Paris staying with my French penfriend. She was retaking some exams so had to study during the day, so I wandered around by myself. I didn't get attention in the streets so much as in the public parks. I was in fact happy to chat to the guys who looked about my age, though I thought it best not to accept the invitations for a drink, but there were definitely some creepy older guys.

Thinking about it, though, my worst experiences have actually been in the UK, though as I spend nearly all of my time here that shouldn't be surprising.

It was so lovely when I reached middle age and became invisible.

[fub]

I had the links for 1 and 8 mixed up, and I was thoroughly confused.

[andrewducker]

Hah!

[calimac]

I was away from home when I first read this post, and trying to read it on my tablet. Amazing how many twitter, reddit, etc. threads the tablet simply will not display properly.

2) Yeah. The newspaper columnist Bob Greene wrote in his memoir about when he was an intern in 1964 and accompanied a woman from the editorial dept when she had an errand that caused them to pass through the compositors' room. All the guys then started hooting and howling and cavorting around, and generally acting (Greene does not make this comparison) like Tex Avery characters. Greene was aghast, but the woman ignored it. "They act this way to all women," she said.

7) I've never seen Scots criticized for being new or (in the sense meant here) artificial, only for being a low-class dialect. Which of course is the origin of many now-respected languages (Norwegian from Danish is cited in the article; Dutch from German, though of older origin, is another obvious European example, and for that matter Afrikaans from Dutch), thus illustrating the truth of the maxim I learned in elementary linguistics, a language is a dialect with an army.

[andrewducker]

Twitter is a pain in the neck for long-form writing, and I wish that people used blogs/journals more!

(2) Sounds entirely, sadly, normal. And basically the kind of thing that (some) men do to establish dominance. "Look how we can easily make the lesser people feel uncomfortable." I'm glad that it's harder to get away with nowadays.