Friday Ephemera
“I’m a vegetarian. It was self-defence.” // Fun with projection mapping. // Pause. (h/t, Damian) // AI attempts portraiture, does pretty well. // Peacock in a liquor store. // “A scientific meta-analysis of whisky flavours and quality.” // Rejection. // Undulations. // Most hated online advertising. // A burglar’s mishap. (h/t, Obo.) // Meanwhile, in Mozambique. // Always respect the media. // Museum of Teletext. // Multi-pass. // Inner peace. // Irony. // These ladies go hardcore. (h/t, dicentra) // I hope they don’t screw this up with identity politics. // Initiative. // Bookshop of note. // How British teachers voted. // Today’s word is touché. // And finally, “Sadomasochist swingers club with a dungeon and torture chamber has been shut down over health and safety concerns.”
Noted in the article about the S/M club with emphasis supplied:
“Owner Katherine High pleaded guilty to five counts of breaching the rules.”
What a marvelously generic crime, suitable for any occasion!
“Fun with projection mapping.”
Holy freakin’ crap, that’s bloody awesome.
“AI attempts portraiture, does pretty well.”
Hmm. At first glance. It all goes a bit uncanny valley when you look more closely though.
“Most hated online advertising.”
Vaguely related.
“Museum of Teletext.”
Oh, man. I remember when I was a kid and our flash neighbour bought a teletext TV. Must have been quite early, maybe about 1976-’77; we’d only recently got colour. I was only 5 or 6, but so green with envy I probably glowed in the dark. Reading stuff on a screen… this was The Future! (And sure enough, it was.)
Robots make pretty dud humans. I wonder what sort of robots humans make?
“Which one of you —holes is the gay?”
Fun with projection mapping.
Holodeck 1.0
A burglar’s mishap.
Social justice! 🙂
Multi-pass.
A friend’s one word variety of review; Ah yes, Boron.
Bookshop of note.
Hmmm. The architecture does seem slightly reminiscent . . .
“Which one of you —holes is the gay?”
As if he were dealing with wayward livestock. Creatures that he owned.
Today’s word is touché.
Here, have some more book covers . .
Most hated online advertising.
Just reading it made me angry. 🙂
On TV, Putin Plays the Role He Likes Best: Russia’s Mr. Fix-It
Oh, dear. Not really the best sort of historic record, doing that . . .
From the most hated advertising thing:
I’ve bought guitars online, and I keep getting ads for guitar shops, which is reasonable, because the ideal number of guitars to own is just one more. But my dad bought a chainsaw online once, and is still getting ads for more chainsaws. Do chainsaw owners get Gear Acquisition Syndrome too?
Just reading it made me angry. 🙂
The people responsible for auto-play videos should be hunted down for sport, especially the ones that, when manually paused, simply shrink a little and move elsewhere on the page to continue being irrelevant but thoroughly distracting. (For several months, Den Of Geek seemed determined to aggravate its own readership to the point of mutiny, such that almost every comment thread, whatever the ostensible subject, ended up derailed by heated complaints.) And those goddamn things that are timed to slide in and obstruct the item you’re trying to read just as you’re getting immersed, thereby spoiling the experience and making you lose your place, all to remind you of something in which you had absolutely no interest and now, thanks to the intrusion, actively despise.
because the ideal number of guitars to own is just one more.
Heh. Also shoes, I’m told.
I don’t much mind the retargeted stuff, provided it’s not intrusive. What I dislike, to an irrational degree, is crap that actively thwarts the experience of reading a site. Like a bored younger brother amusing himself by standing in front of the end-of-season cliff-hanger you’re trying to watch, and being as annoying as possible while making fart noises.
Incidentally, I’m sometimes approached by small agencies that want to clutter this place up with apparently random, low-rent advertising. So far, none of the products – insofar as I’d have any say in what they are – seem likely to entice the kind of people that I imagine visit this blog. It’s just ugly visual noise that would bog down the site. That such approaches aren’t overly lucrative has made it easier to decline them.
You’re all welcome to bear this in mind – my heroic high-mindedness – next time I do a fundraiser.
Speaking of ads, next to the picture of a burnt out tower block on Breitbart, I get “Now is the ideal time to invest in London property.”
There are many things wrong with the Forbes website, but the bloody annoying auto-play videos are pretty much the most bloody annoying. If not actually the most awful.
Also, I’m currently getting banner and side ads on many sites for dodgy* Islamist charities. Working on my Mac because the HP notebook work give me is crap has opportunity costs.
* As in high-risk of funding armed insurgents.
Fun collection of ephemera.
Some random observations:
1. You ladies may be hardcore, but you’ll never be killing-a-rabid-racoon-with-your-bare-hands-hardcore!
1a. Rocket!!!!!!!
2. No wonder lefties rail against “The 1%” if a hardcore Marxist’s earnings puts him in the top 2%.
3. ‘Black Panther?’ Let’s just hope it’s awesome.
4. How teachers voted: why am I not surprised. -sigh-
5. To end on a positive: yep, that’s abookshop!
Sadomasochist swingers club with a dungeon and torture chamber has been shut down over health and safety concerns.
Tim Newman will probably be able to relate to this story.
A lady friend once invited me to a BDSM sex club; I took her up on it for a lark. At one point in the evening she caught me staring rather intently at the sex swing and asked mockingly if I was “freaked out”.
“Damn right I am. They’ve attached that thing by drilling up into the underside of that beam, and you can see the stress fractures already starting. Given the weight of the people in here, that whole mess is going to come down soon, and God help me I think that’s load-bearing, too.”
Sadomasochist swingers club with a dungeon and torture chamber has been shut down over health and safety concerns.
Silly me, I was thinking it might have been because of rampant STDs and physical injuries from the “equipment”.
Meanwhile, in the department of things I would never confuse with a lady’s naughty bits:
In other quarters, fighting words and a looming civil war ? transgender activist makes bold claim.
For fairly obvious reasons this went over like a cement cloud, but his whole premise is based on his N=1 of himself being a gay man who wants to be a woman. However, if he wants to be a woman, but have sex with men, I would have thought that would have made him actually straight, or a trans-cis man, as I think the term is.
Being a toothless, sister shagging, trailer dwelling, knuckle dragger in South Flyoverlandia I am, of course, bigoted and _____________phobic (please fill in the blank), but this makes my two neurons connected by a spirochete hurt, and I would like to go back to that old timey way of a couple of years ago when there were only two sexes who were either just gay or straight.
‘Black Panther?’ Let’s just hope it’s awesome.
I’ve seen several ‘progressive’ writers pre-emptively declare that if the film doesn’t do as well as expected, this can only be because every single white person is seething with racial animus. The irony being that the thing most likely to put me off seeing it is the prospect of it being ruined in much the same way that the comic book was, thanks to the ham-fisted dogmatism of ‘progressive’ writers.
things I would never confuse with a lady’s naughty bits
Don’t tell me you never listened to the B-52s.
Ah, schooldays.
What I dislike, to an irrational degree, is crap that actively thwarts the experience of reading a site.
There’s a new tactic, or new to me, that i’ve noticed just in the last week or so on certain news/web magazine sites. Seems I get five or six paragraphs into an article, sometimes after disposing of the initial popups and such, and a subscription request or something similar from the site itself descends almost like some slapstick comic prop into the screen, totally disrupting whatever train of thought I was well into and causing me to lose place of where I was reading.
Don’t tell me you never listened to the B-52s.
Actually no, but I am guessing their lyricist and/or singer missed a class or two on human anatomy and. They understood these things better in the olden days…
“Nobody in town can bake a sweet jelly roll like mine, like mine
No other one in town can bake a sweet jelly roll so fine, so fine
It’s worth lots of dough, the boys tell me so
It’s fresh every day, you’ll hear ’em all say”
Meanwhile, in Mozambique.
Bald privilege. I’ll go ahead and mark it off of my list of places to visit one day.
Or would if it had ever been there to begin with.
“There are many things wrong with the Forbes website, but the bloody annoying auto-play videos are pretty much the most bloody annoying. If not actually the most awful.”
Ugh. Forbes. That’s the one whose HTML is so mangled (as far as I recall, the body text is in the header) that you’re basically left with two options:
a) Turn your quad-core 64-bit desktop gaming rig into a space heater so you can read a page of text, or
b) don’t bother.
Seriously, if you have the time (it’s almost an hour), watch the video I linked. Bloke’s numbers might be dodgy, but he’s right, dammit. The Web took a disastrously wrong turn somewhere back there.
Ugh. Forbes.
I think I previously mentioned following a link to something at the International Business Times, which wouldn’t allow me to read anything unless I disabled my adblocker. Which, for once, I did. Even with a fast internet connection, the site took 22 seconds to load all of the auto-play horseshit, the Facebook extensions, and all the distracting and irrelevant crap that no-one wants to look at. In internet time, 22 seconds is an eternity.
As you say, I now just don’t bother with such sites.
Transgender advocate, Attitude columnist and author Juno Dawson is convinced that there are a lot of gay people who are actually transgender but too chicken to come out and admit it, accepting a gay lifestyle as a “consolation prize”
In Canada, a 30-year-running clinic to deal with children’s gender issues was closed because the psychologist, Dr. Ken Zucker, was still counseling caution and a thoughtful approach to kids gender confusion – that many times wanting to be ‘trans’ was really a coping mechanism for realizing they were gay. If the child was truly trans (very tiny minority) there was time post-puberty for the radical and risky steps of physical transition.
As he is now a heretic to the accepted Settled Science, he had to be destroyed.
Oh, Forbes (if it is Forbes) is worse than that, David. I’ve mentioned before that my go-to tactic for dealing with stupid websites is to turn off javascript entirely, or use a text browser. Doesn’t help there. Because the text is rendered by encapsulated javascript in the header, those methods won’t show anything at all. “Like it or lump it” really are the only options.
No doubt Forbes reason that their target demographic can afford to throw money at the problem. (“Hey, you there! Underling! My computer is slow. Procure a new one! And light my cigar. I can’t reach the other end.”) But some of us remember when displaying 2 kilobytes of text didn’t require half a gigabyte of RAM and a gajillion CPU cycles.
The irony being that the thing most likely to put me off seeing it is the prospect of it being ruined in much the same way that the comic book was, thanks to the ham-fisted dogmatism of ‘progressive’ writers.
Check out Larry Elder… 🙂
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/30091-For-Fathers-Day-Week-The-Moment-LARRY-ELDER-changed-DAVE-RUBINS-Mind-Forever.html
…but the bloody annoying auto-play videos are pretty much the most bloody annoying. If not actually the most awful.
I would submit the the prize for most awful goes to the sites with the auto-play that, even if you stop the damn video, as you scroll down the page move the video to a smaller version (which is also autoplay and has to be stopped) on the right side of the page and follows you as you scroll further.
Following this are the sites that say they won’t open unless I have the latest version of Chrome, IE, Firefox, or Safari and which refuse to recognize the open source versions of either Chrome or Firefox.
I think I’ve found out why, despite online advertising being so offputting to viewers, companies persist in throwing money at it: “Advertising and promotional costs are deductible because they are part of the cost of doing business”.
You’re all welcome to bear this in mind – my heroic high-mindedness – next time I do a fundraiser.
Will do. 😉
Larry Elder has been driving Leftists nuts for years.
Check out Larry Elder… 🙂
Game, set and match.
Larry Elder has been driving Leftists nuts for years.
That is not a drive so much as an extremely short putt.
A little too dedicated to finding the truth?
[…] the prospect of it being ruined in much the same way that the comic book was, thanks to the ham-fisted dogmatism of ‘progressive’ writers.
I’m cautiously optimistic. There’s signs that MarDisVelNey has a close eye on what the market’s rewarding, and WB avoided social justice in the Wonder Woman movie despite the character being a magnet for feminist loons.
The comics and the movies are two completely different sets of management, and I guarantee it was Disney that laid down the malleus dei over at Marvel Comics Group and told them to lay off the propagandizing.
Every time we order from Amazon it tries to sell us more of whatever we just bought.
Let’s hope the story of the raccoon drowner helps discourage the idiots who try to “tame” wildlife. She didn’t, but there are plenty of those who do.
Daniel Ream:
You must be my long lost twin
I’m cautiously optimistic.
Same here. I just wonder if the professionally aggrieved ever entertain the possibility that the smell of their own preferences being indulged is what would repel a sizeable chunk of the film’s potential audience.
Let’s hope the story of the raccoon drowner helps discourage the idiots who try to “tame” wildlife.
A couple of foxes that live in some adjacent woodland have taken up sitting on the lawn waiting for us to feed them. They’re entertaining to watch, but I wouldn’t want to get too close, or comb their fur, or make them little dresses.
Racoon?
Try a stare-down with a wild badger sometime.
“Look, dad, it’s smiling at us!”
” No, honey. Keep moving. “
In light of the announcement that Amazon intends to buy Whole Foods, I think you should know that my Amazon Kindle auto corrected “stare-down” as “state-run” .
My grandmother used to feed the raccoons (and thought the little babies were so darn cute) – until they ate her neighbors’ kittens.
Let’s hope the story of the raccoon drowner helps discourage the idiots who try to “tame” wildlife.
The number of otherwise reasonably intelligent people who have an anthropomorphic view of Nature is astounding. Nature is not an “effing” petting zoo, but I cannot count the number of idiots I’ve observed trying to get up close and personal with bison or elk or bears. How there are not more deaths is unclear to me other than the fact that God must protect idiots. Walt Disney and the Bambi story writers have a lot to answer for.
Damn ‘coon took our dear duck Duck. OK, not so dear. Ornery bastard really. But we will miss him just the same.
http://luckyslakeswim.net/luckyslakeswimblog/2017/06/12/a-fond-final-farewell-to-our-friend-duck-r-i-p/
Life in the natural world is nasty, brutal and short. I believe it was Tennyson who wrote something along the lines of “Nature red in tooth and claw”.
The reason the ads (mobile interstitials) now pop up just when you’ve gotten engrossed is because Google recently changed their algorithm to apply a search penalty to sites that have the interstitial straight away.
I know this, ironically, because Google’s algorithm imagines I want SEO news in my Google Now page because I searched it once.
Nature is not an “effing” petting zoo
And the wilderness is not a city park.
Summer is here and a lot of people who have no outdoor skills will be heading to camp grounds with the belief they or their kids can just wander off for a quick ‘walk in the woods’ and never worry about getting lost.