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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Don’t worry. Time is a flat circle. What is old, is new again. Smart glasses will get smaller and more discreet packages and the kids will forget the original chunky look that meant “potential invasion of privacy”. I like what I like and I’m content to remain true to that until the merry-go-round of fashion comes back around again. Sometimes I may hop on a new trend and take the ride a bit, but it’s always my choice. Nostalgia is often used as a derogatory term by trendy/edgy people to feel superior about picking some style that is new to them. That fashion is almost always someone else’s “nostalgia”. Fashion is all just picking and choosing which spot on the nostalgia merry-go-round feels right for us in this moment.



  • Admiring artistic fashion choices by people that often make other kinds of popular art and denouncing the reactions of misogynists attempting to demean and dehumanize those artists simply because they are women are two VERY different things. What’s sadder is your “both sides” reaction to a clearly toxic attitude vs. people exhibiting art through fashion.


  • The song wasn’t worried that the drink would make you sick. The song is about common items being used to treat a variety of aliments. Scurvy? Eat a lime. Headache, probably from dehydration or low electrolytes? Coconut water will fix that. Hungover? Coconut water and lime is actually a great tasting way to start feeling a little better. This song is like the saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” with a catchy island beat.

    Also, if you’re not already familiar with Harry Nilsson. Go check out his stuff. Great singer and song writer. His music in the movie “The Point” absolutely shaped my perspective on the world as a child and it’s themes continued to resonate throughout my life.


  • Difficult to do it in a way that is physically consistent with a camera lens/sensor.

    That’s really not true at all. Lots of photo software has precise metrics on a multitude of actual camera lenses specifically to compensate (remove) for the inherent optical properties of said lenses. Using those same metrics to mimic the optical properties of those lenses, rather that remove them, is also fairly common. The optical properties of the sensors are obviously also well known, otherwise digital photography simply wouldn’t work. This photo may or may not be AI, but the existence of blurring neither proves nor excludes either possibility.







  • Does your Dubai chocolate hate have to do with the arguments made in this opinion article, which basically boils down to the popularity of foods and culture being exploited as propaganda, obscuring atrocities committed by authoritarian regimes? If so, that was not at all clear from your post. (I’m still unclear what the ethnicity of the chef has to do with anything.) Any cultural artifact or pastiche is free game for the propaganda machines of the powerful and elite. But those same associations are a double edged sword, hanging a lantern on the same atrocities the regime wishes to obscure. In the end, I feel it is more productive to embrace the fad, eat the chocolate (sourced as ethically as possible), and exploit the popularity as an opportunity to illuminate rather than add to the hate.

    Dubai chocolate is really one ethically questionable imperialist exploitation food wrapped around another. The metaphor is delicious. So is the chocolate. Let’s eat and discuss instead of hating it.

    I hate hate. Retail is hell. That was a great episode. Archer is the best captain. I actually grew to like the theme song a bit. I’m out. Mic drop.





  • The 1900s would still only be like 1909 at the latest. You’ve got too much precision and called out the wrong decade. This floppy form factor was invented in 1981, peaked in popularity and was replaced by CDs by 2000. Spanning 2 decades in the late twentieth (20th) century, not the late 1900s. See the difference in the number of digits? That difference in the number of stated digits is significant.



  • It was happening long before TMNT. Transformers, He-man, Teddy Ruxbin, Gummie Bears, She-ra, Care Bears, etc. I’m no expert on which was the first, but I’m sure that the kids that watched it would be too old to really get into TMNT once that IP hit the market. TMNT wasn’t even really inspired by toys, the comic was first, they just heavy exploited the toy market later. Shows like Care Bears and transformers were created specifically to sell toys as opposed to designing toys to sell a show.



  • I’d like to see ideas like this make a comeback, hopefully with some modifications this time around to protect our privacy and resist corporate exploitation.

    We used to use del.icio.us and other variants to do exactly this before browsers had profiles. Back then, its primary draw was that you could take your bookmarks with you anywhere to any machine (this being before that function was baked into browsers and before web browsers could be carried in your pocket). The secondary effect was that you’d share and tag those websites with your own categories/descriptors, thus crowdsourcing a new version of the old web’s link directories using Web 2.0. You could browse through symantic tag clouds to discover new things. Del.icio.us was for websites, but people were tagging and logging all of their favorite stuff and sharing it online so that like minded strangers could filled the gaps in their cultural awareness. We tagged our books with librarything. We tagged recipes with recipe thing. Audioscrobbler (later known as last.fm) logged our music listening to automate the tagging, not by direct symantic tagging, but by relational/temporal coincidence. If other people that listened to a lot of the stuff you listened to and they also listened to some other stuff you didn’t, those became recommendations for you. That kind of relational algorithm would survive the slow death of Web2.0 to become the backbone of recommendation services like Spotify and probably even TikTok.