The Random Thread Of Randomosity

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Yeah, weird weather, all of this.

Watching the Chess World Championship games and it is all tied now. It’s all played in Singapore. I can watch it live for 5 hours starting at almost 4am, but I just wake up normally and check out the 20 minute recaps.🤣

It’s strange though. There are fundamentals you learn as a beginner and still do at the intermediate level, but these guys playing at their level make moves that go against most of what a newcomer learns. Like experts on TV say “Kids. Don’t try this at home.”

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Todd

I have been seeing Black Friday deals start since last week .  Stores aren’t waiting for the day after Thanksgiving to start. Depending on the year, since Thanksgiving is not a set date, the days between Black Friday and Xmas vary.

I already bought game consoles, smart TV etc. already. I don’t see the need to buy a new one every year. So maybe go easy on electronics stuff and get coats, jackets etc.

Al-x wrote:

I have been seeing Black Friday deals start since last week .  Stores aren’t waiting for the day after Thanksgiving to start. Depending on the year, since Thanksgiving is not a set date, the days between Black Friday and Xmas vary.

I already bought game consoles, smart TV etc. already. I don’t see the need to buy a new one every year. So maybe go easy on electronics stuff and get coats, jackets etc.

I genuinely thought Thanksgiving was last week, given all the Black Friday promotions I saw then.

I did some Christmas shopping yesterday and have come to the conclusion that nothing costs a tenner any more. There’s a few people I’d set a £10 budget for and everything I saw I thought might be ok for them was £11. Which obviously isn’t a huge monetary issue, but it’s odd. It breaks a psychological barrier.

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Todd

So the chess world has a new world champion. Gukesh wins and he is 18 years old. He is the youngest to win, beating Kasparov who won it at 22 in 1985. I doubt a 16 or 17 year old will win it all in the future.

Gukesh isn’t even of drinking age in the States. I can only think of teens being highly ranked is in sports like tennis and gymnastics.

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Todd

Judging from my social media, it seems to be becoming a thing that Keira Knightley was only 17 when she was doing Love Actually and playing a girl being somewhat creepily wooed by then-thirty-year-old Andrew Lincoln.

On the other hand, this also shows again just how crazily fast she blew up after Bend It Like Beckham (and before that, The Hole which I’ll proudly tell you I saw at the time and thought she was very good in it). Pirates of the Caribbean came out in the same year. She’s got ten film credits for 2002-2003. She was nineteen when she was doing Pride and Prejudice and Domino. Jesus Christ.

What were you doing when you were nineteen?

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Todd, Sean Robinson

Christian wrote:

On the other hand, this also shows again just how crazily fast she blew up after Bend It Like Beckham (and before that, The Hole which I’ll proudly tell you I saw at the time and thought she was very good in it).

I can beat that – two years earlier than The Hole, I saw her in this little indie arthouse film called The Phantom Menace.

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Todd

Highly recommended is The Jacket – 2005
Adrian Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and I see Daniel Craig on the list but don’t remember so it’s time for a rewatch.

Part Slaughterhouse Five, part 12 Monkeys, part Jacob’s Ladder.
Time travel via straight jacket.

Flew under a lot of people’s radar.
If you haven’t seen, rectify that soon.

Christian wrote:

Judging from my social media, it seems to be becoming a thing that Keira Knightley was only 17 when she was doing Love Actually and playing a girl being somewhat creepily wooed by then-thirty-year-old Andrew Lincoln.

On the other hand, this also shows again just how crazily fast she blew up after Bend It Like Beckham (and before that, The Hole which I’ll proudly tell you I saw at the time and thought she was very good in it). Pirates of the Caribbean came out in the same year. She’s got ten film credits for 2002-2003. She was nineteen when she was doing Pride and Prejudice and Domino. Jesus Christ.

What were you doing when you were nineteen?

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Christian

Dave wrote:

I can beat that – two years earlier than The Hole, I saw her in this little indie arthouse film called The Phantom Menace.

Nah you didn’t, you just saw somebody in Natalie Portman makeup.

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Dave

Todd wrote:

Christian wrote:

Judging from my social media, it seems to be becoming a thing that Keira Knightley was only 17 when she was doing Love Actually and playing a girl being somewhat creepily wooed by then-thirty-year-old Andrew Lincoln.

On the other hand, this also shows again just how crazily fast she blew up after Bend It Like Beckham (and before that, The Hole which I’ll proudly tell you I saw at the time and thought she was very good in it). Pirates of the Caribbean came out in the same year. She’s got ten film credits for 2002-2003. She was nineteen when she was doing Pride and Prejudice and Domino. Jesus Christ.

What were you doing when you were nineteen?

Great as always!

Now I kinda want to rewatch Love Actually and play a drinking game where you take a shot every time somebody says something that would get them sued in real life today. (I only saw it the once, really, when it came out.)

There’s something disturbing that happens on twitter (and I guess bluesky would be the same) when you follow a lot of animal accounts, for the cute animal pictures: you start seeing lots of sad tweets about people’s pets and animals dying. I guess those tweets get a lot of engagement, so twitter algorhitm puts it on everybody’s timeline. It’s sad when you just want to see a cute bunny.

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Christian

Huh. Yeah, that’s weird.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

There’s something disturbing that happens on twitter (and I guess bluesky would be the same) when you follow a lot of animal accounts, for the cute animal pictures: you start seeing lots of sad tweets about people’s pets and animals dying. I guess those tweets get a lot of engagement, so twitter algorhitm puts it on everybody’s timeline. It’s sad when you just want to see a cute bunny.

There’s no algorithmic feed on BlueSky so it wouldn’t happen there.

Well I think it’s understandable, you just have a lot of people responding to the tweet to give their condolences. So the algorithms sees, well this is a popular tweet, and pushes it on the timeline of a lot of people who follow animal accounts. But the effect is pretty depressing.

I upgraded the ios and now I have the Apple Intelligence attached to Siri and so Siri is now “smarter”. I already have Copilot, ChatGPT and barely use them. Windows PCs have Copilot. I’ll go back to figure it all out when I have the time.

I want to find out what database/source they are all attached to. I want the strongest source. (Skynet 🤣)

I play chess and the chessboard program is attached to the strongest chess program for non professionals Stockfish

 

 

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Todd

I’m reading a book about the period after WW2 in the Netherlands and it’s pretty crazy. Queen Wilhelmina wanted to abolish political parties and install a theocratic protestant government.

Got some complaints to building management. A few neighbors said their  Amazon packages left in the lobby section got stolen so now cameras will be installed and the building doors will be double locked.

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Todd

Al-x wrote:

Got some complaints to building management. A few neighbors said their  Amazon packages left in the lobby section got stolen so now cameras will be installed and the building doors will be double locked.

Sounds like you’d better quit while you’re ahead Al.

It’s crazy how animals brains work. We think they are “dumb” compared to use, lacking things like speech, or the ability to do something like math, but birds build nests, spiders make spider-webs, bees build entire colonies….it’s by “instinct”, but what is instinct? How does that work in their brains?

That’s a big question, innit?

The craziest and most impressive instinct that we as humans have is the language instinct. At an age when he can’t even count to ten, my kid is forming sentences that if you decode them would show a nightmarish complexity. It’s really insane. There’s a software installed in our brains that allows us to learn languages at a crazy speed while we’re very small, and at some point that software self-destructs and we can’t do it anymore.

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Arjan Dirkse

Speech as an instinct, that is an interesting thought.

[Al-x]

Dave wrote:

Al-x wrote:

Got some complaints to building management. A few neighbors said their  Amazon packages left in the lobby section got stolen so now cameras will be installed and the building doors will be double locked.

Sounds like you’d better quit while you’re ahead Al.

There were some reports in the block about a few food delivery and Doordash guys who sneak around the lobbies after they make the delivery and take a package on their way out. It’s all being looked into.

I know in buildings with a doorman and security front desk, the delivery guys aren’t allowed to go by themselves throughout the building.

——

Mega Million at 944M now.

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Being sick with a bad cold and cough sucks during the holidays

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Congestion pricing starting in NYC. Makes me wonder how is it working out in the European cities

• This reply was modified 4 months ago by Al-x.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

Speech as an instinct, that is an interesting thought.

The Language Instinct is what Steven Pinker called his book in which he talks about this. (And mostly explains Chomsky’s decades-old theories in a way that’s easier for laypeople to understand, I think.)

I saw one of these birds today, for the first time. The great egret is rare in the Netherlands but starting to be more common.

 

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Christian

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

I saw one of these birds today, for the first time. The great egret is rare in the Netherlands but starting to be more common.

 

Yeah, the algorithm on Egret Facebook leans heavily toward the Netherlands as a popular destination.

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Arjan Dirkse, Christian

I really love this guy’s videos, one of the best things on youtube. He takes you all across the US, showing the people and the cities and landscapes etc

 

Musk now calls himself “Kekius Maximus” on twitter and he has a pepe the frog avatar. That place looks a lot like 4chan now.

It’s astonishing how successful – and presumably brilliant in some areas – and how dumb a person can be at the same time.

He’s definitely eccentric and not in a good way.

 

Maybe he was radicalized to some extent by social media. I think I was too but at least I am somewhat aware of it.

Yeah, that’s what happens these days, unfortunately. He probably had some of these tendencies before, but there’s little doubt that social media brought out the worst in him. Plus, I mean, he also seems like a bit of a narcissist, and aquiring your own social medium in which you make yourself the most important person is a pure ego machine that’ll blow you up like nothing else. It’s quite an impressive example really.

Christian wrote:

It’s astonishing how successful – and presumably brilliant in some areas – and how dumb a person can be at the same time.

Musk is a great example of how there is no correlation between talent, skill and success. But also how you can obfuscate the lack of talent and skill.  Like, his family’s wealth got him into a prestigous school, and enabled him to stick it out at Paypal when it was a startup and people were foregoing corporate-level pay in return for stock options.  He stuck around long enough to get to a senior position, and reportedly he tried to insist on using Windows 2000 as the backbone for their website despite Linux being the industry standard – which is equal measures stupid and insane.  It got to the point where shortly after he was promoted to CEO, he was such a disaster that the board couped him when he was on honeymoon.  But the golden parachute was basically enough that he had fuck you money.  And once you have that level of money you can just fling significant chunks of it at stupid projects and make it all back even if they fail, just like Trump.

And apparently he’s made similar stupid decisions around tech in other companies.  I saw a whistleblower claim’s around the setup delivering updates to Tesla cars and I’m not at all surprised about all the stories of cars bricking recently.  Tesla had a rep for expensive but quality cars and that seems to have fallen off due to Musk’s direct involvement in the company, while traditional car manafacturers are getting cheaper EVs to market with better performance and features.  Apparently SpaceX has a huge apparateus of functionaires designed to keep Musk away from any serious decisions.

Now, all that said Musk’s business ventures haven’t failed yet and it’s pretty clear that he’s clued in to a lot of the tricks used to ameliorate loss – Tesla was profitable for a long time on account of selling carbon offsets (which is just a way letting businesses pollute) and some shady deals around solar panels and batteries for developments in California that were owned by friends and family members, for example.  And even though he’s lost almost 30 billion in Twitter, he’s still worth more today just by the value of his investments increasing overall.

Ultimately, Musk’s biggest problem is that the adulation the public gives a “good” CEO stopped being enough for him.  He began sticking his oar in on topics well outside his wheelhouse – like the kids caught in the cave, or promising to build ventilators and they turned out to be junk he bought.  And that alienated a lot of the liberals and progressives who would have looked up to him, or at least would have been indifferent.  And ended up getting him the adulation of the kinds of people who reflexively like what liberals and progressives dislike.

But the thing is, he’s always been an awful weirdo.  He’s been a long-time adherent of longtermism, a bizarre philosophy that states the elites are basically justified in doing anything if it’s done in the name of fostering human survival in the distant future, and also they should have lots of children to ensure their “superior” genes are passed down to the future.  Most, if not all of his children are from IVF where he’s specifically selected male offspring – which helps to explain why he got so angry when one of them turned out to be trans.  If anything, him turning Twitter into a cesspool has just enabled him to be the person he’s always wanted to be.

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Dave, Christian, Todd

A cybertruck just blew up right in front of the Trump tower in Vegas…

Police are investigating after a Tesla Cybertruck filled with fuel canisters and firework mortars exploded outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The driver was killed and seven people were injured, police said without naming any of the individuals involved. Officials said all injuries were minor.

The truck was rented in Colorado and arrived in the city on Wednesday morning, less than two hours before the detonation, police said. Parked in front of the hotel near a glass entrance, the vehicle started to smoke, then exploded.

Jesus. Looks like we’re in for a violent year.

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lorcan_nagle

If someone wrote into a script a Cybertruck exploding in front of a Trump hotel in Vegas, it would be rejected as being far too on-the-nose.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle, Christian

Christian wrote:

Plus, I mean, [Musk] also seems like a bit of a narcissist,

This is like describing Nigel Farage as “a bit of a racist”.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle, Christian

Dave wrote:

If someone wrote into a script a Cybertruck exploding in front of a Trump hotel in Vegas, it would be rejected as being far too on-the-nose.

The comment I’ve seen is that the idea of a Cybertruck exploding seems like something you would expect to happen at some point.

I’ve struck gold on youtube, an old documentary from local tv about a working class cafe in Rotterdam, where a bunch of characters do crazy shit. It’s absolutely great

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Christian

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

I’ve struck gold on youtube, an old documentary from local tv about a working class cafe in Rotterdam, where a bunch of characters do crazy shit. It’s absolutely great

Post the link!

 

It’s in 5 parts, there are no English subtitles though. I think this must have aired in the 90s.

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Todd

That could be Rotterdam, or anywhere. Liverpool, or Rome.

It’s hilarious. (I love it especially for the accents and the crazy things they say so I’m nt sure how much an Anglophone gets out of it!)Unfortunately a lot of these places disappeared.

I noticed many substacks now have paywalls…who is going to pay money for  your little bla bla article?

 

It makes me wonder if there is a market for magazines on things like art, philosophy etc. The magazines I see in the supermarket are mostly gossip stuff and lifestyle magazines clearly targeting a female audience.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

I noticed many substacks now have paywalls…who is going to pay money for  your little bla bla article?

 

It makes me wonder if there is a market for magazines on things like art, philosophy etc. The magazines I see in the supermarket are mostly gossip stuff and lifestyle magazines clearly targeting a female audience.

There are magazines for those topics. I think the issue is that as they tend to be very niche with low circulation. Cover prices tend to be quite high, as well as the subscription rates. Their websites may be heavily restricted where only subscribers can access articles and other features.

I don’t have an issue with people charging for their Substacks. Free editions of ones I receive are very well researched and written. Many are quite niche and due to the frequency of publication; they are very timely and current. A magazine requires a large and costly infrastructure to produce the product. Sadly, they are also a product that is thrown away in many cases after they have been read. There’s less heartache to deleting an email than throwing out a magazine that cost $10 that you will never read again. That is something that is killing the print industry: high cover prices for something that is essentially disposable. Even discounted subscription rates are still pricey.

As I said, I subscribe to a few Substacks. I also follow channels on YouTube who have Patreon pages. Those subscriptions and Patreons fund their ability to produce their work. If it weren’t for that, I think 99% of them would never have their work published anywhere, or at least heavily edited by editorial if it were published.

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Arjan Dirkse

Todd wrote:

There are magazines for those topics. I think the issue is that as they tend to be very niche with low circulation. Cover prices tend to be quite high, as well as the subscription rates. Their websites may be heavily restricted where only subscribers can access articles and other features.

Yeah; when I was in college for my degree in architecture, we had to subscribe to Architectural Record, the bimonthly bible of that field. Back in the late 70s/early 80s the cover price was something like $5, which was outrageous compared to mags like People, Good Housekeeping, even Playboy. Niche publications aren’t going to get advertisers from the automotive, cigarette or alcohol industries to offset the costs of publication, so they typically have to charge a higher rate than mainstream publications.

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Todd

njerry wrote:

Todd wrote:

There are magazines for those topics. I think the issue is that as they tend to be very niche with low circulation. Cover prices tend to be quite high, as well as the subscription rates. Their websites may be heavily restricted where only subscribers can access articles and other features.

Yeah; when I was in college for my degree in architecture, we had to subscribe to Architectural Record, the bimonthly bible of that field. Back in the late 70s/early 80s the cover price was something like $5, which was outrageous compared to mags like People, Good Housekeeping, even Playboy. Niche publications aren’t going to get advertisers from the automotive, cigarette or alcohol industries to offset the costs of publication, so they typically have to charge a higher rate than mainstream publications.

There are industry trades that give free subscriptions to their magazines. The mags do have ads, but they are associated with the trade the mag is about. You may have to fill out a questionnaire so they can determine if you qualify.

I don’t think these are necessarily the kind of magazines Arjan thinking about, though.

I haven’t painted any miniatures in ages – years at this point – but I was just hit with the urge to check out how the indy miniature companies I used to shop with are doing these days. I guess whoever it was that had the official Dr Who miniatures license (Warlord, I think – who put out awful 30mm pieces) has lost it/let it lapse, because all the Definitely Not Dr Who minis are back at Heresy and, better, Crooked Dice.

I was really annoyed when they went because I’d got all of Crooked Dice’s except Sarah Jane (I was leaving it for later, as I had loads to work on at the time) and then they all disappeared. But now it’s back, along with some new ones. And they’re selling STLs of the newer ones, which I might go for, as I have a resin printer now.

 

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Christian, Todd

The granddaughter of my friend is being raised bilingually and it’s very cool to see. She is 3 and a half and she can translate Dutch to English and vice versa.

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Christian, Todd

pic.twitter.com/ENmMMHWQE9

— Out of Context Birds (@ContextBirds) January 19, 2025

BSG – when Baltar won the election. Adama said “May the gods help us all”

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Christian, Todd

The expression “sit down and shut up” became popular a while back. I’m seeing it in a lot of places.

 

Typical of an inhumane culture. Regressing to barbarism.

Something mildly weird: I ordered a shirt online the other day (Edinburgh Woollen Mill – I am quite middle-aged now) and opted for click and collect rather than delivery, to delude myself into thinking I’d saved some money, as C&C is free (but it’ll cost to get into town to pick it up). I assumed that the shirt going to my local branch was just an internal process. Bit of stock moves from their depot or online fulfilment centre to my local branch via their usual stock delivery process, hence it being free. But nope, turns out it’s actually been sent via Evri to me but with my local branch’s address instead of mine. Which is just so weird in several regards, not least: why is that free? Surely they’re having to pay for that, probably the same amount they would to send it directly to my house. Why are they subsidising it being posted to their own store?

Presumably because they’ll have a corporate account with Evri on the basis of grouped deliveries to their stores, at much cheaper rates than individual domestic deliveries would cost.

On sites like Facebook, it is surreal to look up your name and see all the others who also have your same name.

Sometimes when I see a video of someone who does some amazing feat like balancing something, skating/riding or whatever, I am amazed but I also say they have a little bit too much free time on their hands. 🤣

This video is very wholesome and shows the good side of the US.

 

So, this was a thing:

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

I think it’s fascinating how this city where I live is always changing. In the 70s much was destroyed and replaced by soulless shitty architecture, but since the 90s things started to become better, and interesting buildings were built. There are a few nice places now with cafes and restaurants where you can sit outside by the water in summer. The city center has become much more appealing.

 

They’re now planning to redevelop the main shopping mall in the city center. It’s going to be a huge job, and hopefully they’ll start this year. The plans have been worked on for years.

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Christian, Todd

There was a recent chess tournament, and the current world champion Gukesh (18yo. not even drinking age) lost to Magnus Carlsen and also lost to a top GM Caruana. The world champion used to mean the best player, but that is no longer the case. It is just a title now.

My nephew is going to be a DJ in a pretty well known club in Amsterdam…which is awesome.

 

edit: yikes…looks like the place has many bad reviews.

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Todd

I read there’s another cold wave coming to the US…stay warm guys.

 

Winter here has been pretty nice the last few weeks. A bit cold but sunny. Beautiful days.

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Todd

The bookshop i  my local mall here is closing…too bad. Sad to see shops going. It was a good shop, their books weren’t very special but they always had handy stuff, like pens and pencils, writing pads etc

It’s hard to find a bookstore or a music/movie store in American malls in the 21st century. Probably because we don’t read print anymore and we stream our entertainment.

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Todd

We do still have one really good bookstore in town, they have a great used book section. Bought some gems there.

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Todd

There’s a great bookstore in my town, but in order to survive it has evolved into a “Books, Coffee, Beer” store that also displays local artists’ creations on their walls, and has live music or other events almost every night. Apparently just selling books is not enough.

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Todd

There is a bookstore in Houston called Murder By The Book. It has been around since 1980. They focus on mystery and crime books. They have a ton of author signings every year.

It has probably survived because it is very niche and the staff is very knowledgeable.

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Arjan Dirkse

Next weekend is supposed to be very nice, about 16 degrees and sunny. We’ve had a very dry winter this year. Completely the opposite of last year’s winter which was soaking wet. I hope the difference is reflected in the numbers of bugs we get this summer.

Mosquitoes have already hatched over here, the little motherfuckers.

Spring is here. I had a cup of tea in the park today and there was a stork sitting on top of a bare tree, throwing his head back and making that clacking sound they make.

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Todd

[Al-x]

Time traveler from the future, where are you?

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I was downtown and it gets to me seeing the Palladium is now an NYU dorm, the Limelight is now a pizza store, Webster Hall is more about shows, and the Tunnel is gone. Those days are over and done.

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Daylight savings time!

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Al-x.

Funny thing with English names is that they’re so common that if you google someone you get many results for completely different people. Like you want to google something about the philosopher Mark Fisher and most results will be for different Mark Fishers.

Beware the ides of March

but Spring is a few days away.

 

A very nice look at Saudi’s NEOM concept.

Thursday at 5:01 am – the first minute of Spring 🤣

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I can’t stand that Seal commercial

So WH Smith is selling off all its high street stores to the owners of HobbyCraft, keeping only the ones in airports and train stations (which are the profitable ones, apparently. I can kind of see that, them being profitable in areas where there’s limited other choices and people expect to be ripped off). The high street stores aren’t keeping the name though and are being rebranded TG Jones. Which is exactly the kind of name you’d used in a story if you wanted to make thinly veiled criticism of WH Smith without getting sued. Which I suppose makes it the perfect replacement name.

Anyway, I give it about 8 years before either a) the shops are all sold on to someone else/back to WH Smith or b) the remnants of WH Smith decide to start re-establishing a high street presence and start opening new WH Smith stores in competition with TG Jones.

I forsee TG Jones merging with TK Maxx

If it merges with the American branch of TK Maxx and an angling shop, maybe it can eventually end up as TJ Hooker?

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Todd, Sean Robinson

I see on Facebook feed these nostalgic pictures of the 60s, 70s, ie. old tv shows and movies, favorite old stores at the time, music… and there is always in the comment section like “those were the days”. But they leave out Vietnam, protests, riots, assassinations, Watergate, OPEC. Only the comfortable memories count.

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Uncle Retrospective, njerry

Martin Smith wrote:

So WH Smith is selling off all its high street stores to the owners of HobbyCraft, keeping only the ones in airports and train stations (which are the profitable ones, apparently. I can kind of see that, them being profitable in areas where there’s limited other choices and people expect to be ripped off). The high street stores aren’t keeping the name though and are being rebranded TG Jones. Which is exactly the kind of name you’d used in a story if you wanted to make thinly veiled criticism of WH Smith without getting sued. Which I suppose makes it the perfect replacement name.

Anyway, I give it about 8 years before either a) the shops are all sold on to someone else/back to WH Smith or b) the remnants of WH Smith decide to start re-establishing a high street presence and start opening new WH Smith stores in competition with TG Jones.

I’ll miss them. Browsing WH Smith stores has always been just part of being in the UK, for me.

There used to be a WH Smith store in Amsterdam. Not quite sure if it’s still there as I haven’t been there in a while. It was a phenomenal bookstore. Probably my second favorite in Amsterdam.

 

edit: what the hell, I just googled it and apparently at that location there was a Waterstones, not a WH SMith. Bit of a Mandela effect

[Christian]

Makes more sense though, Waterstones are actually very good book stores, whereas WH Smith are mainly places where you get books and toys cheaply.

Speaking of books stores and the Netherlands, one of my favourite bookstores that I ever saw in my life is a church that’s been converted into a book store in Maastricht. Just such a beautiful place.

I wish they’d convert more churches already in Germany. There’s one in Cologne that’s a cultural event place now (I saw Henry Rollins, Lambchop and Neal Stephenson there), but it’s very much an exception, where in the UK you get the impression that every second church has been turned into a pub already (special mention to the wonderful The Church pub in Dublin, where I met up with our former member Wayne a thousand years ago.)

• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 6 days ago by Christian.

Christian wrote:

(I saw Henry Rollins, Lambchop and Neal Stephenson there),

That’s one hell of a lineup for a show.

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Christian, njerry, Todd

Christian wrote:

Makes more sense though, Waterstones are actually very good book stores, whereas WH Smith are mainly places where you get books and toys cheaply.

Waterstones are good shops, though I think their reputation as the last bastion of high street book-selling and bigging up the importance of booksellers as individuals who their own ability to make recommendations and foster a community etc is a bit unfortunate because they treat their staff really shittily. I interviewed there for a part time job a few years back. Instead of just being employed by the one branch, you’re associated to a “cell” of stores and expected to work across all of them at any time, on a zero hours contract with no advance notice of when you’d need to travel. For someone like me who doesn’t drive, with the stores across a 40 mile or so area, that was less than convenient.

WH Smith is weird because it’s always done a lot of things, but never been the best at most of them. They’re ok for stationery, I guess, and the magazine section is probably the best around, but the decline of the magazine industry makes that increasingly moot, imo. But for most other things you’re better off going to a specialist shop. I think they’d have done well to stick with video games, DVD/Blu-ray and music given the death of specialist shops for those, they’d have had a niche as the half-decent omnipresent option.

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Christian

[Christian]

Christian wrote:

Makes more sense though, Waterstones are actually very good book stores, whereas WH Smith are mainly places where you get books and toys cheaply.

Speaking of books stores and the Netherlands, one of my favourite bookstores that I ever saw in my life is a church that’s been converted into a book store in Maastricht. Just such a beautiful place.

I wish they’d convert more churches already in Germany. There’s one in Cologne that’s a cultural event place now (I saw Henry Rollins, Lambchop and Neal Stephenson there), but it’s very much an exception, where in the UK you get the impression that every second church has been turned into a pub already (special mention to the wonderful The Church pub in Dublin, where I met up with our former member Wayne a thousand years ago.)

• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 6 days ago by Christian.

 

Damn, I need to go to Limburg some time. Maastricht must be a nice city.

 

I’ve put off traveling for a while because I’m not very mobile. The covid kilos gave me achy knees so walking long distances which tends to happen when I travel is impossible. I’m currently trying to lsoe weight but not quite there yet

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Martin Smith wrote:

WH Smith is weird because it’s always done a lot of things, but never been the best at most of them. They’re ok for stationery, I guess, and the magazine section is probably the best around, but the decline of the magazine industry makes that increasingly moot, imo. But for most other things you’re better off going to a specialist shop. I think they’d have done well to stick with video games, DVD/Blu-ray and music given the death of specialist shops for those, they’d have had a niche as the half-decent omnipresent option.

Reminds me very much of Woolworths which I think you could have said the same about. I think a lot of these kinds of shops are dying out now as they try to do a bit of everything but don’t really specialise in anything.

they're so goofy sometimes 😭 pic.twitter.com/zLWk5nfU9q

— 🐻 Bears Daily 🐻 (@bearsdaily_) April 1, 2025

The video is blurry, but I’m pretty sure that’s my cousin.

The air humidity here is now about 35 %. That is extraordinarily dry for the Netherlands. Usually it doesn’t even get under 70.

 

This year has been very dry so far. (I’m not complaining tho)

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Arjan Dirkse wrote:

The air humidity here is now about 35 %. That is extraordinarily dry for the Netherlands. Usually it doesn’t even get under 70.

 

This year has been very dry so far. (I’m not complaining tho)

Yeah, personally I’m loving the warmth, but the plants are already struggling. Could become another bad drought year (after one year of relief). It’s already getting dangerous for the forests in particular.

Why the Ultrarich Are Unplugging From “Smart Homes”

“They could not find a single light switch in the entire home,” says Beverly Hills-based interior designer Carrie Livingston about a sprawling penthouse she was hired to renovate. Her clients had inherited the previous owner’s Crestron automation system, which controlled all overhead, wall and table lighting in response to movement within rooms. “The wife complained that every time she got up at night, her husband would see her path illuminated as she made her way from bed to bathroom,” says Livingston, who has worked with clients including Ralph Lauren, Gwyneth Paltrow and Dasha Zhukova. “Other times, she’d enter a darkened room where the lights wouldn’t go on no matter how much she flapped her arms.” Result: Livingston took out the entire system and installed manual switches throughout, an intricate overhaul that cost more than $100,000. Similarly, Bush recounts a recent renovation involving “a kitchen with a built-in dining table that rises and lowers from counter to dining height with hydraulics. But to do so, you need a passcode. Otherwise, the table will not move.”

Also, criminal that the article mentions this

She designed a media room loaded with books, board games and a vintage Corvette that she converted into a pool table.

without showing pictures. Because that pool table is either amazing or a glorious abomination.

 

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Martin Smith wrote:

Because that pool table is either amazing or a glorious abomination.

I think we know which.

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Todd

Christian wrote:

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

The air humidity here is now about 35 %. That is extraordinarily dry for the Netherlands. Usually it doesn’t even get under 70.

 

This year has been very dry so far. (I’m not complaining tho)

Yeah, personally I’m loving the warmth, but the plants are already struggling. Could become another bad drought year (after one year of relief). It’s already getting dangerous for the forests in particular.

I find myself longing for a good old thunderstorm! Haven’t had one of those in a long time. Lst summer there were quite a lot of them I think

There is a Brazilian store in my area where I frequent. I will have to ask them next time how the tariffs will affect them.

Man, weather forecasters here suck at their job. They predicted 16 degrees for today, it isn’t even 12 degrees. I don’t know what the fuck these morons are doing. They only talk about climate change.

 

The BBC is much better at predicting the weather in the Netherlands.

 

edit:  Looks like it is much warmer in the South East of the country, pretty big differences for such a small country

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

Man, weather forecasters here suck at their job. They predicted 16 degrees for today, it isn’t even 12 degrees. I don’t know what the fuck these morons are doing. They only talk about climate change.

Everyone’s always complaining about the weather, but nobody does anything about it!!

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Universal are building a theme park in Bedford, planned to open in 2031: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz95n2837vgo

They better do the Mario bit so I don’t have to go to America to experience it.

There’s a NATO conference in the Hague in June and the government is literally telling people to “avoid the Randstad” during that time because of the disturbances it will cause, to traffic etc. Motherfucker I live in the Randstad.

I used to post a “real life” Homer Simpson in the picture thread. It was creepy then. Imagine now with AI…

———

The All State Insurance “Bateman” commercials… 🤣