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The argument about demand and supply economics is totally convincing, the [implied] argument about the sinister influence of modernism is tedious. And echoes anti-modernist and illiberal arguments about ‘beauty’ you used to see by Twitter accounts with Greek statue heads.

In the 20thC ornamentation shifted decisively away from buildings (and the article makes mention of filigree ironwork on Sydney and Melbourne houses, which have their own story). The article’s correct… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:47 PM on May 17, 2024

I own, because I am an idiot who likes old cars, a 1999 Land Rover Defender. It was then and remains a very large car; it’s designed for 4WD and we take it camping as often as we can. You could easily live out of it for weeks.

I had occasion to drive a ‘new’ four seater cross-over SUV and had a moment of shock when I realised that this new Ordinary Car was longer, wider, and nearly 2x as heavy in GVM as a truck from the 90s.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:47 PM on May 16, 2024

FWIW one of the most in-demand 4WDs in the Australian market? The Suzuki Jimny, the size of a generous fridge, manual transmission, with a pants-tearing 1.5L engine capacity. And a towball. When good cars are offered, people take the opportunity...
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:52 PM on May 16, 2024

Topological is one way to look at it but the functionality and cultural significance is another. The Earl Sandwich's premise was that he wanted a snack that he could eat while drinking and gambling that wouldn't require a sit-down service meal. It's continued in the UK/Australia in the grand tradition of the kebab (the between-beers meal or hangover cure of champions) and grilled meat or felafel in flatbread is, no question, a sandwich. Kebab shops are also almost always dry, based on… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:05 PM on May 14, 2024

fondue is a sandwich

You're still thinking topologically. Fondue in the form of meats or bread dipped in cheese is neither easily portable nor prepared quickly. Can't imagine popping down the street from the pub at kick out time for a quick fondue. It clearly belongs in a category of sit down shared meals, the functional opposite to sandwichhood.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:57 PM on May 14, 2024

I mean the thing about liberalism is that even when all of the criticisms of it are true---and all the criticisms come down to its failure to live up to its own promise---looking around at the other options, there are still very many things worse to be. If you dislike liberalism you're going to hate its only viable competitors.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:46 PM on May 9, 2024

The problem with the word "liberal" is that it means many different things

Yes but no, I think. There's a core of liberal thought that's common to all the political traditions you've described, and a few others too (including many strains of socialism, and especially 'democratic' socialism, though they deny their parentage in a 'you're not my real Dad' way). They're to do with an individual's relationship with the State and with who constitutes a society, and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:21 AM on May 10, 2024

I bet if you're to do a screening of Office Space it'll go over like gang busters

I think that's absolutely right and revealing about what's going on in China. Office Space was a story about the pointlessness and arbitrary power of a corporation, and the absurdity of rules in a culture where nobody has access to power, and there's no point to any of it. I suspect a Chinese Office Space would go over so well it would be banned.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:24 AM on May 10, 2024

I am going to use the term "liberal" loosely in the classic sense, not American left-of-center. My hot take is "liberal" norms evolved in a very different milieu, namely between tightly networked landed nobles and other elites

Well taken historically, 'liberalism' was formed almost exactly in opposition to these people, and posited nations composed of peoples, with universal rights, and laws, and certain freedoms like speech and religious worship, so… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 1:19 AM on May 13, 2024

The most New Zealand Thing is that the approved kiwi-holding technique looks to be exactly the same technique as catching a football, preparatory to running through the defence and scoring a try
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:05 PM on May 12, 2024

Imagine being an American, in a country and society that was established as a revolution against monarchy, which created the notion of the people being sovereign, which derives its political identity literally in opposition to absolutist kingship, and being like this. Why? These people are—I don’t say this lightly—freaks.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:39 PM on May 10, 2024

They are certainly a particular type of Catholic

America, where even the Catholics are Evangelical
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:35 PM on May 10, 2024

Heritage professional here; installation of solar panels on roofs of culturally significant buildings is a very controversial subject and there isn’t an easy answer. There are as many ways to do it badly as to do it well. But it’s only ever a matter of degree, since, remember, the electric lights inside the building are also an intrusive accretion that affects the way the public experiences the traditional structure.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:51 AM on May 9, 2024

So it’s also the distinction between history and heritage; pure historians aren’t necessarily trained to appreciate that conservation efforts and the heritage movement (going back to the Athens Charter in 1931, or earlier) are almost exactly virtue signalling, an active effort by societies to preserve elements of their world which are significant to culture. Virtue signalling can be a good and admirable thing.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:00 AM on May 9, 2024

ARE WE NOT MEN? / WE ARE PRINTERS
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:58 AM on May 6, 2024

This has a way to go before it reaches the levels of the most grotesque and cruel diss track of them all; Jarvis Cocker absolutely annihilating a Greek girl he went to art school with
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:51 PM on May 5, 2024

Also Jarvis Cocker, in calling out nonces: mooning Michael Jackson on stage and getting arrested for it.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:56 PM on May 5, 2024

There’s no way for laypeople to tell, but I don’t think it’s out of the bounds of possibility for these algorithm relationships (gender roles —> political conspiracism) on an opaque platform to have a State intelligence operation basis. If you wanted to run an op destabilising the US, that funded itself, this would be something it’d look like.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:25 PM on May 3, 2024

‘Oh Australia is so dangerous you have spiders’! You know what you can probably just brush off your clothes? A spider.

But in Soviet Canada, mountain brushes you off
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:20 AM on May 2, 2024

It's an extraordinarily eerie museum, by the way. I'm a huge fan of nautical and maritime museums wherever I go---my partner despairs at my keenness to go and look at lobster pots and lamps and ship models and paintings of wrecks---but this one is honestly like nothing else I've seen anywhere.

It bills itself as a killer whale museum, and the Old Tom skeleton (with the story of the combined human-orca hunting) is the outstanding highlight of the collection, but overall… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:50 PM on May 1, 2024

If we take the area of Port Jackson as 55km^2 and the size of a rugby league field as 7,480m^2 then the size of the reclamation, 187,000m^2 or 0.187km^2, is approximately 0.3% of a Sydney Harbour, the correct Australian Standard Unit.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:08 PM on April 30, 2024

In modern terms Blazing Saddles has an extraordinarily white-dominated cast, probably intolerably so. The only reason it’s still watchable in the contemporary era is that the viewpoint about the West is shifted drastically, right into the fourth wall, into a sound stage fistfight, and beyond.

One of its underappreciated small jokes, that I think goes over the heads of people who aren’t aware of the context, is Mel Brooks casting… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:53 PM on April 30, 2024

Related: I found, and find, The Death Of Stalin entirely unwatchable. The period details and costumes are right, the casting nails the characters, it’s historically erudite, it has a deep sense of self-parody, and there’s Iannucci and the cast defiantly having fun being English-accented Soviet monsters. The problem is that it’s in such poor taste: it gestures at, but barely scratches the level of monstrosities those men actually were. If it were full pantomime (in the tone… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:11 PM on April 30, 2024

It's not necessarily about education so much as realism; one of the better though not perfect educational shows I mentioned before (Horrible Histories) is written by people with a very careful sense of history and research, silliness turned up to 11, and absolutely no sense of realism in casting at all.

You can put a sideways hat on any actor you please, whatever their skin colour or gender or age, tell them to stick their chin… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:46 PM on April 30, 2024

Also sometimes contemporaneity catches up with fiction. When it was first in theatres Gone With The Wind was praised both as realistic historical fiction, and a compelling historical romance. Nowadays we recognise it properly as a very well-produced set of grotesque lies about American history. Most of all, it comes across to a modern viewer as being in bad taste.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:42 PM on April 30, 2024

I feel like the news outlet missed a trick by failing STRIPPERS COVERED as the headline though
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:48 PM on April 28, 2024

[Strine intensifies] would you just get a fucken load of this arsehole
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:55 PM on April 27, 2024

For a director he compiles a powerful soundtrack album, that’s what I’ll say for Tarantino
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:29 PM on April 26, 2024

Kiwis! Whimsical champions of deadpan humour! What could be more irony-laden than building tunnels as transport nodes in one of the most geologically active places on the planet? Now that’s John Clarke level humour IMO
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:33 PM on April 22, 2024

When Davis tries to live as a tradwife, she imagines “taking over the cooking from my husband” and “cleaning way more than I normally would”: dutiful little projects that don’t matter very much. Men’s role in this fantasy seems hazy, and indeed, men are largely absent from Davis’s book.

I've always thought that these crypto-Catholic 'trads' don't want to be wives, what they in fact describe as the most desirable lifestyle is a kind of monasticism-without-the-church---and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:39 PM on April 9, 2024

I guess the male equivalent of an fantasy economic system

I was thinking about just this question, implied in the whole discussion. What does this look like for men, and indeed why don't any men want to be tradwives? When I asked myself why I didn't want it, I ran into a barrier of contempt and revulsion, just at the notion that I could be, which is usually a pointer towards some kind of revealing truth. Ahh, but this is the thing about tradwives isn't it; they're a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:23 AM on April 22, 2024

The thing about film isn't just that it's an endpoint to a complex industrial infrastructure (though it definitely is, an extraordinary one, maybe one of the most interesting of the 20thC). It's also that the use case for film has completely altered in the past two decades: before digital photography became possible at the level of ordinary professionals, film was part of commercial and amateur processes that had to be standard and reliable. Take photographs of your products for sale, photograph… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 12:38 AM on April 18, 2024

It's not just because their coffee sucks (though it does). The other reason why Starbucks has been a failure in Australia is because our economy of retail commercial rent is incredibly marginal, especially in the centre of our [few] major cities, and have been since the early 1990s. The rents are extraordinarily high, and commercial landlords are generally willing to accept vacancy over lowering rent, especially in centres of high pedestrian traffic like the centre of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:46 PM on April 14, 2024

He recommends that struggling navigators ask themselves which way is north 10 times a day,

This is the thing though the article identifies that people from cities with complex/irregular layouts have different core assumptions to people from grid cities. I'm from Sydney, which is a directional shambles. Nobody here thinks about cardinal points, even when locations have the names (north shore, eastern suburbs). Where's Parramatta Road? Which side of the railway line are we… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:55 PM on April 14, 2024

The bizarre thing is that as instantly recognisable and culturally important as this bus is, it’s not even the most famous bus from a movie in 1994
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:34 PM on April 11, 2024

it's pretty effective to deter a crime to punish it by putting someone in prison for a few years, but increasing that punishment doesn't do much to deter the crime any more

There's a distinction between deterrence and denunciation, both principles of sentencing. It's impossible to deter people like this child, by prison or by any punishment, for reasons that are grimly clear. But denouncing his crime, and the real crimes of his parents, is important… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:47 PM on April 9, 2024

‘Viva Cristo Rey’ was a slogan of the Carlists (who were monarchist absolutists, and opposed to liberal parliamentary democracy and communism both, and of course, to Jews) who fought, most recently, in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War on the Francoist side, and who participated in war crimes, but I would bet any number of pesetas or Euros that nobody in the American right who’s using the phrase knows that. Strange ideas have a way of surviving and metastasising
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:42 PM on April 8, 2024

Re. Ray Bradbury. He belongs IMO with a much earlier generation of American literature of writing about frontier and anxiety about expansion. He’s far closer than anyone realises to Jack London, who has really compelling stories about sled dogs and the Yukon, which appeal when you’re a kid, because they’re about animals and adventure, and you only realise the turned-up eugenic racism is there when you’re aware as an adult of the context. Ray Bradbury is Call Of The Wild In Space and it makes… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:14 PM on April 8, 2024

Drunk -> very drunk -> extremely drunk -> Rugby League Drunk
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:25 PM on April 6, 2024

Came for the oysters, note the inevitable Star Trek joke. In another alternative universe Gene Roddenberry, instead of writing a series with a Captain Cook figure, chooses Captain Arthur Phillip instead and comes up with a gritty space prison drama about first contact.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:55 PM on April 6, 2024

5/5 and I expected nothing less. In fact I have a [correct] cup of tea just like this in front of me right now; a hot drink made strong with a mild stimulant, and milk to provide sugars and fats. It's the workplace drug of the Industrial Revolution and I can almost hear generations of my ancestors complaining about boring jobs.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:06 PM on April 2, 2024

Keep your water bottle antiseptic by adding 1:25 hand sanitiser in it. Adds a certain zing to the work morning.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:07 PM on April 2, 2024

My mother had a t-shirt, in the 1980s, with the slogan 'it will be a great day when the air force has to hold a cake sale to buy a bomber'. Since February 2022 I've often been thinking of that t-shirt.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:27 PM on March 26, 2024

I am begging you, Americans, please stop doing this. When Ukraine-supportive watchers (as I am, and as there are a lot of in this thread) express concern about the fucking Azov, please don't jump in to say 'but actually America does this too'. At the moment there is no equivalent to a hard-right ultranationalist militia fully integrated on its own terms into the US Army, nor has any military arm of the United States---probably since the Civil War---had such an overt political affiliation of the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:57 PM on March 27, 2024

This is all set for a years-long playoffs-style knockout tournament to find the Best Rougon-Macquart novel of them all. (It’s Germinal FWIW)
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:54 PM on March 25, 2024

who owns the 'land' rights to the moon?

There is a Moon Agreement, which is in force with power given by the United Nations, but neither the USA nor China (nor any other country that would realistically be engaged in moon rail) is a signatory.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:27 PM on March 21, 2024

Elsewhere a friend suggested that the lunar environment (low gravity, no wind) would make aerial ropeways and gondolas a viable technology for this. So what we’re really talking about is spies fighting Lunar Nazis on top of a cable car; Where Eagles Dare On The Moon. And that’s awesome.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:53 PM on March 21, 2024

Everyone wants to reintroduce koalas. Real heads want to reintroduce diprotodon.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:06 PM on March 19, 2024

This is all extremely silly. To the comparison that the US had slavery which retains profound effects, you can easily say that Alexander III emancipated the serfs, and wind up in favour of Tsarism. This kind of relentless comparisonism robs any conversation about what is right and what should be done of any power.

If you want to talk about American exceptionalism, I’d offer as an observation that it’s very frustrating, as a citizen of neither the US nor Russia, for… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:54 PM on March 19, 2024

Even then the comparisonism of prison to prison society fails, and serves to elude the genuine differences. The US has an extensive prison industrial complex. It does not yet offer pardons at a mass scale, to inmates willing to join storm-Z units for meat infantry attacks. The rest of the world really does draw a distinction here.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:20 PM on March 19, 2024