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Do you prefer the extended summer thread format? This poll is closed. |
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126 | 44.21% |
| No |
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39 | 13.68% |
| I'm Scottish |
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120 | 42.11% |
| Total: | 285 votes | ||
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Gyro Zeppeli posted:Welcome to London, 47. Ah you beat me to it. I'm in Mumbai right now about to blow somebody off a roof with a large fan. After that I might play video games 
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Jun 1, 2021 20:27
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The Question IRL posted:If you do that, the method recorded for their death will be Wind*. God, yes. The most unpleasant target so far (I'm rationing the levels because exploring a new one is the most fun bit, so I've only just got to Mumbai).
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Jun 1, 2021 21:39
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^^ Hmm I dunno, doesn't end in bunchofnumbers, probably not a bot ducks twisto wrathGuavanaut posted:What about those facebook puzzles with all the different kinds of fruits? Was it this thread where we talked about one that looked super simple, but was actually insanely hard and required super advanced maths to solve, and the integer solutions were crazy long numbers? That was fun.
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Jun 3, 2021 08:30
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The "why didn't they teach us X life skills" people are silly, but maybe schools should teach tax brackets. It would avoid people turning down pay rises so they don't get stung for thousands of pounds by being "pushed into the next tax bracket".
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Jun 3, 2021 09:48
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thespaceinvader posted:WHy are they silly? I was too unspecific, the "silliness" is the second half of the sentence: "why didn't they teach us X life skills instead of this useless trigonometry crap" - there is room for both. Though I do enjoy hearing from actual teachers like Sad Panda, because we're all experts on education because we went to school, but in reality I like to hear what's actually going on, and what schools are expected to do these days. Like, in my harrumph-schools mode, I wonder why they're not teaching 2 foreign languages in early primary school, what else are they doing with their time at that age, which is the perfect language learning age. But I assume it's not that simple.
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Jun 3, 2021 13:38
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I just came across this article, which is a fairly banal "Brexit and Covid are making it hard to find hospitality staff" piece, but I enjoyed this linequote:“It’s hot, and it’s long hours. For the amount of skill you need, the pay has never been great, so these jobs have always suited migrant workers,” Cobb said. Increasing the hourly pay offered for a chef by a quarter to £12 any hour hasn’t brought in any more suitable applicants. “That’s how I know the staff don’t exist.” Ah yes, an unpleasant skilled job with long hours in the southeast, but he went all the way up to £12, the highest wage there is, so obviously the laws of supply and demand no longer apply. Probably a bit like the speed of light. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jun/05/brexit-and-covid-plunge-hospitality-into-crisis
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Jun 5, 2021 18:45
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Roblox roblox roblox Rotherhithe! (ok wrong side of the river, but still)
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Jun 9, 2021 07:23
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Wolfsbane posted:One of the things about living abroad for a few years is that it gives you some perspective on the country you grew up in. The biggest things that struck me about the UK after living in Germany were how lovely our drinking culture is, and how much this country loving despises its children. Just incredible amounts of fear and hatred. Definitely this. Although through a constant shifting of rhetorical focus*, the children are both to be feared and despised, and over-protected and used as an excuse why progress is impossible. Like, the "kids these days" moans never acknowledge who's in charge of letting the kids roam free, climb trees, build character in the fresh air. *Actually it's just by dividing them into precious children (mine and those of people I know and like), and youths, whose hoodie pockets are sagging from the weight of knives and drugs.
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Jun 11, 2021 11:26
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Pablo Bluth posted:The problem isn't a lack of policies, it's a lack of beliefs, values and convictions. Not having those makes coming up with policies hard... It is this I think. Taking Corbyn as a person, his existing values make it possible to predict, or at least guess at, his views on any given subject. Let's say he's never heard of trans people, or GTR people - once you explain their existence to him, it's unlikely he'll turn out to be a raging bigot about just those people. This becomes a bit harder with the wider party - it can end up with people projecting their own views onto the institution based on its other pronouncements, or the qualities of its top people, as I believe happened during Corbyn's leadership. I know ronya's always quick to jump in with a "well actually" about the specific manifesto policies, but the overall impression projected was one of being much more left-wing and progressive than any Labour in young people's lifetimes - and that's what got the enthusiasm going. Even some very broad-strokes expressions of values would go a long way towards arresting the current freefall of Starmailurebour - not vague waffle (which they're already doing), but specific pronouncements in enough areas that they create a force-field of progressiveness. Kick out the TERFs, hammer home that everything Patel says is terrible, big up both the NHS success and the government failure in the pandemic, stuff like that. The problem being, they don't agree with those things I just said. So they can't. E: ^^^ Snap  And yes, Brexit fits too, in that Corbyn's view of the EU can be intuited from his explicit statements (7/10) and his past words and actions, and neither the Brexiters nor the Fubpees liked what they saw.
Bobstar fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Jun 15, 2021 |
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Jun 15, 2021 14:31
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Ms Adequate posted:What does surprise me is that their production values are just so bad. Studio lighting is awful. Sound is echoey. Graphic design is laughable. I know it's a grift but you'd think they could have spent a modest amount of money on the people needed for production values that at least match your average YouTuber, because I can name any number of channels from people who discuss politics, to ASMR, to Let's Players, to folks that do sciencey stuff like Kurgesagt or history channels from the Mongolian Horde to Super Mario Bros speedruns that do a far far better job. As thread lighting guy I should be commenting on that, but it's very obviously terrible to anyone with eyes. Instead I'm baffled by lack of visual hook in the big bar at the bottom. When people share screenshots or videos-with-thumbnails of BBC or Sky News, it's immediately clear what channel it's from. This is just a mess of blah with a tiny gbnews uk at the bottom, below what looks like the corner of the FLAG that was dropped in some bleach. Are they relying on people recognizing it from the murky white people instead?
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Jun 16, 2021 08:08
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Guavanaut posted:Looking at everything from intentional communities to fugitive slave groups to the pre-drainage Fenlands to 'wild' Irish families in West Ulster, I figure ~20ish is the bare minimum where you have enough labor surplus to do things like dig irrigation ditches and make permanent structures and have people making soap and bread and stuff without risking collapsing the fundamentals, so you're no longer just surviving, and 50-100 is about the point where the proto-society can start seriously investing that surplus into structural improvements. That and there are enough people that you can go and talk to some different people and not always be with the same people. This post randomly reminded me of this bizarre article I stumbled across on a Wiki rabbit hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 A massive biosphere habitat built in Arizona in the 80s/90s to test a completely sealed-off system for doing stuff in space. On the first mission, the small crew split into two factions that hated each other. I feel like that effect would be less pronounced the more people you had. The thing that made me do a double-take when I first read the article: the first mission didn't go so well, so they hired Steve Bannon to run it.
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Jun 16, 2021 19:23
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Passive income hustlers are hilarious, like that landlord who made the video of her two cars parked outside her rental property. They go on to proselytise about it as if the scam is possible for everyone to be doing. It's not, especially when most people are too busy getting hosed by rent rates higher than a mortgage, utilities and employers cutting their wages. Landlording always requires an exploited underclass, and those motherfuckers love glossing over that fact. The entire system of "look they did it why can't you" is built wholly on eliding the difference between anyone and everyone. "The perfect meritocracy, where anyone has an equal chance at making it!" "Sounds great. Is there room for everyone to make it?" "Erm, mumble mumble" Though I do remember one of the FYGM trolls in this thread being confronted many years ago, with that fact that his vision of society necessarily required 90+% of people not to "make it". His response: FT;GM - more honest than most!
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Jun 17, 2021 12:56
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NoneMoreNegative posted:On my doormat today; hey I tell you I'd not have been happy if I'd got all the way to the depot before realising. Your house buying agent is agent Steve [Grabowski]
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Jun 17, 2021 20:00
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Guavanaut posted:Reminds me of a thing I scrolled past on Facebook about how Enid Blyton has been CANCELLED because English Heritage said that some of her books were called racist and xenophobic and lacking in any literary merit by her publishers back in 1960, and the ones that read like that Michael Richards rant probably shouldn't be on display, and all of the loving comments were "but it's history, it's part of our history." Statues are the only way to learn about people. If we don't recommemberate them, we'll forgetcombate them. Or something.
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Jun 18, 2021 20:32
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The reverse euphemism treadmill. The pejoratives used to denigrate the socially conscious keep picking up positive associations along the way, and must be discarded.
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Jun 18, 2021 22:29
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Jeeves: My mother thought me intelligent, Sir. Bertie: Well, you can't go by that! My mother thought me intelligent!
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Jun 19, 2021 15:27
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OwlFancier posted:Why does everyone keep calling her leadbetter, it's leadbeater isn't it? As in like, a job description, one who beats lead. Been watching too much The Good Life?
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Jun 19, 2021 22:10
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goddamnedtwisto posted:There is a perfectly sensible way to do it - massively improve wages, reinstate (and raise) the bursary for nursing students so they're not being forced to pay to get their job, and just generally stop treating the NHS like poo poo so the pool of available candidates is large enough we don't have to poach talent from less-developed nations. And as the People Who Know These Things are pointing out on Twitter today, the lead time on these home-grown medical staff is measured in (appreciable fractions of) decades, and involves far more than just creating some bigger lecture halls at universities. As you say, one of those weird ones where the actual goal is ok (both from the poaching aspect, and the why-not aspect, since there are so many more presumably qualified applicants than places), but it's so clearly being approached from the evil side that it's going to be useless and/or harmful.
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Jun 20, 2021 13:21
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When did Labour's electoral base crumble? - Just now - 18 months ago - I'm Scottish
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Jun 21, 2021 20:13
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I was going to mention the medial one too. There's different registers of weird language I think. You've got headlinese which is horrible and there's no excuse for it. If your headlines are confusing, misleading, clickbaity, ambiguous (crash blossoms), or full of weird words nobody uses, then they are doing a bad job of what headlines are (should be) for and you have failed. Then you have plain-English medical, which is cool and good because as mentioned, it removes ambiguity and makes things accessible. What good is an NHS page on a set of symptoms if people (inc native English speakers) read "if you have tenderness or nodules in your abdomen when you palpate it, do not worry, it's probably idiopathic abdominal cystitis media, but if you notice haematuria or loose stool, see your GP", and think "well that's fine, I don't have any of those body parts and my chairs are all tightly screwed together". That's dangerous. Then you have brands trying to talk normal, like Barclays (?) writing "hole in the wall" on their cash machines. To paraphrase Homer in a less homophobic context, "that's our word for making fun of you!" - it's cringey and weird when they use it. You're a bank, talk like a bank - clearly but formally. I believe the anti-"jab" people feel it falls into the last of these, rather than the medical one.
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Jun 22, 2021 16:12
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Guavanaut posted:It is good, but managing that inclusively is challenging though, and that's before you get the people who claim that "people who menstruate" is a plot to eradicate all women with Jewish space lasers or whatever. Oh yes, totally that too. And this is a situation where simplification and education need to meet in the middle (which is, after all, where the truth is located). People need to be taught to refer to their body parts accurately. Reminds me of a story I've seen in a couple of permutations, (spoilered for child sexual abuse) where a young girl reports her her uncle doing something with her cookie, and the teacher laughs it off, then later the child refers to her vulva as her cookie and the teacher has an "oh poo poo" moment. One of those horrible stories that's probably both an urban legend and has also happened 
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Jun 22, 2021 16:59
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Ugh yes that. "Sex ed teaches 5 year olds about anal sex!!!!" - reality: there is a new sex ed program, that starts at age 5 with consent and touching and names for things, and also includes education on anal sex much later. Especially bad because teaching 5 year olds that if adults do XYZ that's bad and you should tell person A, who will believe you and take you seriously, must be much more effective at preventing paedophiles than keeping kids inside because of ~~stranger danger~~. --- Random word use that annoys me*: "drop(ped)". If I read "GamesCompany just dropped their latest FPS", I'm not thinking "woohoo it's released", I'm thinking "oh no what went wrong?". Very confusing. Phrased as "new type of koala just dropped" is at least less ambiguous. *I'm wary of being an old man yelling at a cloud on language, because so often it's an African American word/phrase that's been nicked and run into the ground by white people. No idea if that's the case here.
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Jun 22, 2021 17:10
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Jun 25, 2021 11:03
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Dabir posted:Is Giles Fraser the dangerous weirdo who wrote that revolting article about going on holiday with his three year old daughter and it being "the sexiest holiday ever" or was that some other Giles Giles Fraser got famous for resigning from St Paul's at their handling of the Occupy protests on their doorstep, which sounds cool and good, and then turned out to be a complete weirdo with terrible views on most things. I worked on a play about it, where he was portrayed as a very earnest, principled man going up against the stuffy cathedral hierarchy. This may have been...an oversimplification. -- Re houses, the solution is to raze all of Britain's housing stock and replace it with beautifully engineered Passivhäuser, with amazing soundproofing, and reversible heat pumps and ventilation systems so good you'll never need to open a window.
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Jun 27, 2021 09:33
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Brendan Rodgers posted:Cambridge Five trying to do a dead drop. I don't remember that Enid Blyton book. Was it CANCELLED before I was born???
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Jun 27, 2021 12:37
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At least now the 90s are over, and it is approximately the year 2000, meaning we live in the future and Tonty Blair's ended history so things can only get same
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Jun 29, 2021 08:53
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I've previously mentioned that I don't really "do" video content (e.g. I have no idea what Kieth sounds like, sorry crispix), but I have been building my little RSS list of interesting Youtubers. It's definitely nice to see things outside of a highly regimented, gatekept context, with the freedom of just doing what you want (subject to their funding setup - the people lucky enough to have sufficient Patreon income have more freedom than the ones who "monetize" their videos, or are sponsored by the same 4 companies for some reason). I do wonder what will happen as the people who default to the BBC etc die off, and aren't replaced by younger people with their Netteflicks and U-Bahns. I'm going to guess: something like the horrendous desperate flailing currently happening in print media? A vicious circle of clickbait (or whatever the TV version of that is - eyebait?) which people hate which makes them switch off which makes the media more desperate, forever into a corncob, amen. Also I have realised that my Youtube list is almost all men and 100% white, so any tips on people who aren't those things, who have interesting things to say in video form, gratefully received!
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Jun 29, 2021 16:41
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OwlFancier posted:I still think that black pudding sounds basically like something that would be invented by a guy on twitter specifically trying to annoy muslims and jews. 
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Jun 29, 2021 19:23
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I got some lovely expensive headphones for my 40th and have been listening to a lot of music daily, but I am reluctant to say I like any music because as soon as you say you like anything, a whole cadre of people slide out from under rocks to tell you why you're wrong to like it, and why you should be listening to guatemalan steel pipe funk on wax cylinders. This is true. There is no band/performer/type of music in existence which, when mentioned, won't cause someone to laugh at you and call you an idiot for liking it. I have no idea why anyone would do that, but it's a thing, so I keep all that to myself. A bit sad, but there you go. E: linked to this, people who say "I have terrible taste in music" - surely this either means "The music I like, I don't like" or "The music I like subjectively, I'm aware that it's actually bad when measured by some mysterious objective standard". Just own it!
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Jun 30, 2021 15:16
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Best opera is the execution scene in Tosca, as performed in Hitman Blood Money, in which the target, who is playing a character who thinks he's being shot with blanks but they actually use real bullets, thinks he's being shot with blanks but you can swap in a gun with real bullets.
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Jun 30, 2021 15:48
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Pistol_Pete posted:A long and extremely flattering profile of Andy Burnham in the New Statesman: My brain was still in comedian-chat mode, and I read/pictured this as a long an extremely flattering profile of Andy Parsons...
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Jun 30, 2021 16:38
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I really struggle with lyrics, sometimes my mind just latches onto them and they distract me from the rest of the song. So i tend to go for ambient/instrumental post-rock stuff (Mogwai seems to be a goon fave, Helios, Tycho), stuff that's in a different language (Sigur Ros) or pretentious poo poo that's borderline incomprehensible (Everything Everything) See, I have the opposite problem. My brain basically doesn't process lyrics as language, but rather as convenient-shaped sounds to go with/be the music. All music pretty much sounds like this to me https://www.facebook.com/choirx3/videos/1497401513790707/ (Sorry for facebook link, couldn't find it anywhere else) This links up with the possibility for mockery, from people who judge a band's lyrics, and I just go "lyrics  "fuctifino I've seen you express similar sentiments on bring fixated on the technical aspects of the music above all else. Makes music super awesome, but I'm definitely not listening for the lovely word poetry or the verbal message (if any).
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Jun 30, 2021 20:31
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happyhippy posted:Do what the people who hated your mother want to Harry. 
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Jul 1, 2021 20:39
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Guavanaut posted:I'm imagining them doing this in the manner of dickhead schoolchildren, because that's what I imagine the British press doing everything as.  Guavanaut posted:Bonar Law Now there's a Round the Horne joke that went over my head when my parents used to play that in the car.
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Jul 2, 2021 20:10
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OwlFancier posted:I assume it must be just tea concentrate. Teapuccino E: Dutch way of making tea: - Take Lipton or Pickwick brand tea bag - Touch gently on surface of hot water for 2 seconds - THROW IT AWAY BEFORE IT IMPARTS TOO MUCH FLAVOUR! (I'm only exaggerating slightly) Bobstar fucked around with this message at 10:39 on Jul 3, 2021 |
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Jul 3, 2021 10:37
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Miftan posted:I had this excuse at my school where our uniform was just a t shirt with the school logo on, but our school it was ONLY the top half. Kids are gonna get picked on for their phones or shoes or haircut or the car their parents pick them up in, so I don't buy that at all unless the uniform is, as you said, all free and gender neutral and applies to EVERYTHING, which it never is and never does. School uniforms that cost money is an extra expense which is somehow worse than the stated purpose. Also it sounds a bit Centrist Rally: Better Things Aren't Possible to me (very Sensibile voice): Well, given as we know, huge income and class divisions are inevitable in any proper society, we should make everyone shell out equal amounts of money to paper over these differences to
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Jul 3, 2021 13:52
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Hah, that reminded me of my schoolmates (expat British and Irish) arguing in PE class about whether it was pronounced Seltic or Keltic. But then I also remember them arguing about whether Marylin Manson was the name of the band, or the name of the woman from the band. Kids argue about silly things.
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Jul 3, 2021 14:11
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OwlFancier posted:It was a woman who was in charge of it, though I think the name michael reminded me that I think it was called the michaeaela academy or something? I think you're thinking of Katharine Birbalsingh of Michaela Community School, who became known for ultra-strict pointless rules, including silence in corridors and no excuses for anything ever, even if you're ill. Or abuse, as one might also call it. See also: https://twitter.com/orridge_anna/status/1411281224308559878?s=21 vvvv I'm thinking the confusion comes from "casual" being the least-formal extreme of things that have a dress code, rather than actual casual clothing worn by normal people. Like, I might end up in that Ted-Mosby-looking-guy "casual" outfit when manning a trade show booth, but for me that's "uncomfortably smart, can't wait to change back into my jeans/cargo shorts and t-shirt". Bobstar fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Jul 3, 2021 |
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Jul 3, 2021 14:19
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 goddamnedtwisto posted:*Hot* water? You've obviously got access to a better class of Dutch person than I have, because at best I've been offered a glass of lukewarm water and one of those wooden boxes of teabags and a look of dull surprise if I ask for boiling water, as if I'd asked for a fish finger to stir it with or something. TBH I'm basing this off the office kitchen, where they use hot water because that's what comes out of the kettle. Now that you mention it though, I do remember the glass mug? cup? thing of tepid water at cafes, from the beforetimes. And yes, the Wooden Box of Choice. Bobstar fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Jul 3, 2021 |
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Jul 3, 2021 16:23
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 13:36 |
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Josef bugman posted:It's just not for me. I like that other people do enjoy it though! It's nice to see people happy. Just maybe not at 1 am when your trying to sleep, that's all. Yeah this. I don't dislike football because it's working class or because some of the fans are horrible. I just find that, out of all the codes of football that exist, and the theoretical codes that could exist, this particular combination of pitch size, player count, ball and goal size, and rules, produces a game that's quite boring. A view shared, at times, by some of the sport's most ardent fans, who often complain that a match was terrible and boring. But unlike me, they enjoy watching it for the times that it isn't. Also it's very fitting for the British love of disapoinment and complaining And it's not hard to avoid except at times like this. And I was always happy for the beeb to be taken over by tennis for 2 weeks every year, so I just keep quiet and let people enjoy things. Except now. I shall resume.
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Jul 4, 2021 09:16
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