rich_27's recent activity
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Comment on Movie fatigue in ~movies
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Comment on Woman covertly filmed for 'humiliating' social media content - then told to pay for removal in ~tech
rich_27 Link ParentThat's a really interesting point actually, commercial use. You bringing that up got me thinking through how I'd feel if a company filmed me and used me in a central role in an advert without my...That's a really interesting point actually, commercial use. You bringing that up got me thinking through how I'd feel if a company filmed me and used me in a central role in an advert without my awareness or consent, and that did leave a bad taste in my mouth. Content creators are somewhere between a person and a corporate entity, so I guess for me being filmed without my knowledge and posted online should cause me some upset if I'm to be internally consistent - interesting stuff, I hadn't thought about it like that before.
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Comment on Woman covertly filmed for 'humiliating' social media content - then told to pay for removal in ~tech
rich_27 Link ParentI think this is a bit of a being used to our own perspective thing: I don't think I'd particularly mind if I was the starring, unknowing central subject of a recording that was posted. Perhaps my...I think this is a bit of a being used to our own perspective thing: I don't think I'd particularly mind if I was the starring, unknowing central subject of a recording that was posted. Perhaps my perspective on the issue as a whole is biased by me having that perspective, but I genuinely don't think I have an expectation of not being filmed in public.
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Comment on Woman covertly filmed for 'humiliating' social media content - then told to pay for removal in ~tech
rich_27 Link ParentSentiment analysis in written text is a pretty well established technology, and my understanding is that it's used all the time by data brokers/advertisers to automatically interpret gathered data...Sentiment analysis in written text is a pretty well established technology, and my understanding is that it's used all the time by data brokers/advertisers to automatically interpret gathered data as part of building a profile on people to better market towards them.
It may well not catch everything, but from what I have picked up on between stories like this and stories about kids being bullied online and the like - and I may well be wrong, I'm just commenting on what I've seen - it's the overwhelming barrage of negative comments and hate that make these situations really harmful to people.
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Comment on Valve has released CAD files for the Steam Controller in ~games
rich_27 Link ParentI wonder if they took a smaller cut whether they'd be beaten out of the market by a more profitable competitor (Epic, etc.) that took a higher cut. Would Valve have the power they did today if...I wonder if they took a smaller cut whether they'd be beaten out of the market by a more profitable competitor (Epic, etc.) that took a higher cut. Would Valve have the power they did today if they didn't have the money to be able to act in the way they choose?
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Comment on Woman covertly filmed for 'humiliating' social media content - then told to pay for removal in ~tech
rich_27 (edited )LinkThis may be a controversial statement, but I'm surprised the BBC didn't consider whether posting a video like this of someone was harmful content or not, and didn't consider where the harm...This may be a controversial statement, but I'm surprised the BBC didn't consider whether posting a video like this of someone was harmful content or not, and didn't consider where the harm experienced by the people being filmed stemmed from. I should say, I'm not a woman and there may well be part of the experience of being filmed and having that shared that I don't understand as a result.
My understanding is that in a public place we don't have an expectation of privacy. By going out in public, there is an implicit consent to be seen by others and to potentially feature in photos or video taken by others. Obviously that's not carte blanche: there's not implicit consent for someone to take explicit or compromising photos of you just because you're in public, but I do wonder if the description of feeling exploited or powerless stems from an unreasonable expectation of privacy in public that has become seen as normal nowadays.
To me the harmful part of situations like this seems to be the flood of toxic comments that social media encourages, rather than videos like this themselves. We have the technology for social media companies to identify and remove comments that say degrading things about people featured in a video like this. If videos like this were posted and didn't have a sea of hateful and derogatory comments attached to them, would there be the same harm caused to people featured in a video like this or cause a feeling of being exploited and powerless?
I think in a lot of situations like this, social media and the culture it creates and encourages is the harm causing thing, and, societally, we are not identifying and challenging that.
It would not not be seen as okay to spout toxic and hateful things about a person who can hear them in public, so why is that seen as okay when on a public platform where that effect can be amplified hundreds or thousands of times and cause huge harm to people that come across it? If you're going to have a business where you host a platform that enables (and encourages) this type of behaviour, I think it is reasonable that the prevention of this behaviour is a cost of doing business.
Imagine if someone took a slot in a shopping centre and started a business around patrons sitting at tables overlooking passers by and encouraged yelling toxic and harmful things at them. There is no way we'd consider that okay societally, and we would hold a business like that accountable if it were actively encouraging that kind of behaviour, so why do we tolerate social media companies with algorithms specifically designed to maximise engagement even when it is harmful?
I think that articles, reporting, and investigations that cover situations like this should call out social media and the companies behind it for the role they play in creating these toxic environments. We should be directing outrage towards the platforms designed to encourage all profitable behaviour, harmful or otherwise.
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Comment on What's something that you missed out on? in ~talk
rich_27 Link ParentThis feels so familiar, I think I had quite a similar experience (though from quite different triggers - religion mainly). I pushed myself so hard when I got to the world of work and had...This feels so familiar, I think I had quite a similar experience (though from quite different triggers - religion mainly). I pushed myself so hard when I got to the world of work and had internalised that not being able to do 'normal' things like keep up with an insanely demanding work was a personal flaw, and so didn't think to straight up quit when it got way too much for me and broke me, making me very ill for quite a while.
I don't know if you were referring to that kind of thing when describing yourself as being a burnout or if I'm just projecting a lot here, but I feel like I was 15-20 years late on understanding who I was as a person and be ready to start living a fulfilling life as a result.
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Comment on What's something that you missed out on? in ~talk
rich_27 Link ParentI feel this one, I also missed out on the common romantic development experience. I grew up religious and internalised it even after I decided I didn't have (or particularly want) a relationship...I feel this one, I also missed out on the common romantic development experience. I grew up religious and internalised it even after I decided I didn't have (or particularly want) a relationship with God, and as a result didn't really start dating until I was 25 (right before getting really ill), and didn't really find myself or know what I wanted until I was in my 30s.
Our of interest, do you find that - even if you don't feel like you'd wish you had those experiences - you find yourself naturally drawn to seeking them a bit more than your peers do now? I've been wondering about this for a while, whether there's a causal link between my delayed romantic development and my tendency to lean towards atypical romantic structures - open relationships, kink that overlaps with promiscuity, etc. Apologies if this is oversharing or too personal a question, I find the topic interesting and don't personally know many others who've had social/romantic development delay in my life.
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Comment on Is British English actually better than American English? in ~humanities.languages
rich_27 Link ParentI find negative concord fascinating in English, because in a lot of cases in common usage negative concordance has a completely different tone to straight positive. For instance, usage in my...I find negative concord fascinating in English, because in a lot of cases in common usage negative concordance has a completely different tone to straight positive. For instance, usage in my circles of something like "I could do this" generally has a pretty lackadaisical vibe, like "I don't really care about this one way or the other" compared to "I couldn't not do that" which has the vibe of almost a strong magnetism or compulsion that the person felt towards doing the thing. Thinking about that more has made me realise how silly my prior argument was in a way, because of how much unsaid meaning and context is in encoded in the common usage of those phrases despite how that extra layer of meaning is in no way implied by the constituent parts of either phrase, interesting stuff!
Yeah, I think it wouldn't be controversial to say non-compositional phrases are more linguistically complex than compositional ones. I guess I was going "well, if you think about it in terms of does this linguistic complexity serve a purpose" which looks at it assuming that linguistic complexity is inherently a bad thing. I see now that you were trying to point out that assumption I had made - I hadn't even picked up on the fact that I was making an assumption there! I think something does feel inherently different and weird to me about a phrase morphing/evolving from compositional to non-compositional (as opposed to a new non-compositional phrase coming about), but I see now that that might just be unacknowledged bias on my part. I guess part of it is phrases like "bob's your uncle" feel like they add character and charm to a language, whilst a shift from couldn't to could in "I could care less" feels like an error, similar to "could've" -> "could of". I guess I was trying to set aside the preference bit to see if I could find an objective measure that explained why it felt different and bad to me, but perhaps it genuinely is just a preference thing.
Gendered language and why it is so prevalent is such an interesting one. I'd be really interested to hear you expand on that - do you know of any purpose it does serve? Coming from a language broadly without grammatical gender, I hated it as a kid learning French and Spanish, it seemed so useless and unnecessary, adding a bunch of complexity for zero benefit - who cares is the table is female, it just means I have to remember an arbitrary flag for every noun, which seemed insane to me. I guess there's got to be some merit to it, or languages with it would have trended towards using the dominant/easier to say gender for everything? I guess in French and Spanish words often sound better when paired with the appropriate article ("la mesa" has a much nicer flow than "el mesa") would. Hm, maybe that is because 'el' sounds a bit clunky in certain phrases more than 'la'? As a counterexample to the previous, "la dinero" sounds no worse than "el dinero" to my ear.
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Comment on Is British English actually better than American English? in ~humanities.languages
rich_27 Link ParentI think you made a really interesting point here with the example of I find that incredibly hard to parse, I'm sure in large part from unfamiliarity. Mentally I'm expanding it to Interpretation...I think you made a really interesting point here with the example of
frfr i dont fw that shi mks me sick al
I find that incredibly hard to parse, I'm sure in large part from unfamiliarity. Mentally I'm expanding it to
for real for real I don't fuck with that shit makes me sick ???
Interpretation aside, I think it's such a significant linguistic change that I wonder whether - if this standardises as modern English or if it splits off as a dialect - it would be as significant a shift as from something like Middle English to what I think of as modern English (the English I grew up with, basically).
Already English has significantly shifted for me over the course of my lifetime: both in terms of specific usage like me having broadly dropped trailing full stops when not writing in full paragraphs as they feel implied and therefore not useful, with the use of them having become something of a tone signifier, and in my general approach to language development. As a teenager I was pretty set in my ways about the English I'd been taught being correct and endeavouring to resist the slide away from that, but in my 20s I transitioned from seeing language as descriptive rather than proscriptive: the change in the ascribed meaning of a word or term signifying the shifting of the definition of the word rather than the incorrect usage of the word, for instance.
I've seen my own views and usage shift even more within the past five years: I now often lean in to what feels right even if it would be seen by others as incorrect and I often reach for the term, phrase, or grammatical construction that feels like it fits rather than is commonly used. For instance, if I were writing dialogue between characters speaking in British English, I would probably spell lieutenant leftenant, because that would communicate what I was hearing in my head better, especially to an audience unfamiliar with that British idiosyncrasy. I think this has been exacerbated for me with the rise of LLM usage and the loss of personality in a lot of written English I see: news articles, website pages, etc. I find I now often lean into something that has the vibe of what I want to say even if it isn't the norm as a way of holding on to expressiveness, and often lean into metaphor. I stopped reading for many years due to life and illness, having only just got back to it in the last year or so, and I've found it so refreshing hearing characterful, poetic language again (Bronte's beautiful language in Wuthering Heights, for example). I think it's something I enjoy about conversing with people here on Tildes too, picking up on the stylistic patterns of people who you begin to recognise.
For reference, as I'm writing this autocorrect is peppering it with red squiggles, trying to suppress British spelling (perhaps I could change that, I don't know. It becomes wearisome to do that for every new program I use).
I'm definitely rambling a lot here, I guess I just find language a really interesting topic and want to talk about it more than I have things of interest to say!
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Comment on Is British English actually better than American English? in ~humanities.languages
rich_27 (edited )Link ParentI think the tone I picked up on from your responses was "you are wrong" and a hint of "and you should feel bad for seeing it this way", when my intent was "is this the case, does this line of...I think the tone I picked up on from your responses was "you are wrong" and a hint of "and you should feel bad for seeing it this way", when my intent was "is this the case, does this line of enquiry hold any merit" rather than "this is objective truth".
For instance, I think I had a good stab at explaining the concept I used intuitive as shorthand for, for want of a better term, (being able to work out meaning from knowing the meaning of composing parts), and I feel like you didn't really acknowledge or explore that at all.
With language learning, it makes sense that complexity and sensical rules only really come in to play with learning second languages with how language immersion and learning how to communicate by observation work. I wonder if there is a component of linguistic complexity making a language harder to learn irrespective of the language you come from, even if primary language similarity is the dominant indicator of ease to learn. My personal experience is having studied French and Spanish at the same time at school. I might be wrong on this, but they feel very similar and about equally close to English in form and construction (stuff like gendered words, standardised patterns of declension, etc.), but French was so much harder for me to try and learn because of its complexity and having more rules with exceptions and special cases. For instance, one of the things I really liked about Spanish and that made it far easier to learn for me was that sounds and written language has a 1:1 mapping - whenever you see something written you will know how to pronounce it (and similarly be able to transcribe anything you hear) if you know the mapping between sound and written syllables, which certainly isn't true of English and I don't believe is true of French. In that case, it was something that was less similar to my native language but made the language far easier for me to pick up.
Disclaimer: I am going off my memory of what my French and Spanish teachers told me 20 years ago, it might be completely wrong!
My line of reasoning has been that if there is a measure of objective complexity making a language harder to learn (even if it's a secondary factor), it wouldn't be intellectually rigourous to ignore that when discussing whether there is any ability to classify one language as better than another, even if it is a minor factor and overall not indicative of the 'worth' or 'merit' of a language.
The examples that we have used have been trivial and by no means evidential of complexity or communicative ability of the language or dialects as a whole, but I was using them to illustrate a pattern I had observed in the language (that may or may not be accurate).
I appreciate your response and further explanation here - the bits I haven't responded to are the ones that were informative and have shaped my understanding of the topic more, rather than me ignoring or dismissing them.
Edit: I've just read a bit about null/zero copula, and it's applicability to English in its various forms, casual slang, newspaper headlines, sports commentary, and AAVE phraseology, and to me that feels like it's a bit different from the discussion we've had - when I read those examples on Wikipedia, none of the changes from the phrase with copula to phrase without feel like they make the term any harder to understand. Perhaps this is just my familiarity with such construction and so it doesn't read as different or confusing, but something like "how you doing" as opposed to "how are you doing" doesn't convey less information; as far as I'm aware, there is no other interpretation that could be extrapolated from "how you doing", and the 'are' is a bit of a linguistic appendix, with it's usage or omission not actually changing the meaning of concepts communicated by the individual elements of the phrase, which is not the same with the omission of a negator like in "could care less". Perhaps this is more ignorance on my part and there are times where copula removal has lead to the constituent parts not conveying the same meaning as the whole when they used to? None come to mind for me - do you know of any?
I get that this feels like a bit of a dangerous line of intellectual curiosity because of the similarity of the argument I've been making to preferential aggrandising of one dialect over another - from what I understand, particularly when it comes to AAVE - but I feel like unfamiliarity doesn't explain friction with difference here in the same way it does there - is there something I'm missing here?
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Comment on Is British English actually better than American English? in ~humanities.languages
rich_27 Link ParentI was being somewhat facetious here, it might just be me that has no idea which word we use and hence uses both interchangeably - I think technically the UK does have a correct spelling for græy,...I was being somewhat facetious here, it might just be me that has no idea which word we use and hence uses both interchangeably - I think technically the UK does have a correct spelling for græy, but to be honest British English is basically Britican English at this point given how the internet and word processing applications default to American English.
I still put a 'u' in all my words because it feels correct and I like how it looks, but grey and gray are fundamentally interchangeable in my head and to me declaring one as correct feels like a fools errand, adding an unnecessary thing to remember for no gain.
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Comment on Is British English actually better than American English? in ~humanities.languages
rich_27 Link ParentI'll be honest, I was half asleep when I wrote the original comment I made (and clearly when I read your response) because it wasn't until just now that I realised I had written degregation rather...I'll be honest, I was half asleep when I wrote the original comment I made (and clearly when I read your response) because it wasn't until just now that I realised I had written degregation rather than degradation in that first comment!
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Comment on Is British English actually better than American English? in ~humanities.languages
rich_27 Link ParentAs someone from the UK, I can confirm that the UK (or at least one person there) uses both grey and gray and can never remember which one they are 'supposed' to use, hence them having become...As someone from the UK, I can confirm that the UK (or at least one person there) uses both grey and gray and can never remember which one they are 'supposed' to use, hence them having become completely interchangeable in modern British English also (or at least, in the very specific dialect spoken by at least one person in the UK).
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Comment on Is British English actually better than American English? in ~humanities.languages
rich_27 Link ParentThanks, I appreciate the insight. I guess I was thinking about it from the perspective of communication between groups that use one form vs the other, and the disjoint that can cause. I remember...Thanks, I appreciate the insight. I guess I was thinking about it from the perspective of communication between groups that use one form vs the other, and the disjoint that can cause. I remember frequently seeing people not understand what someone was trying to say when they said "I could care less" maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I suspect because it's not intuitive to someone who hadn't heard that form before that it was a contraction/morphing of "I couldn't care less". When that change occured originally, I'd classify that as a degradation because it reduced the ability to communicate with people unfamiliar with the new form of that phrase.
I think its ubiquity now is does mean it's continued usage is just a dialect choice rather than better or worse, because it is widely understood to mean the same thing.
When "fat chance" first came about, if people hadn't said it with a sarcastic tone I imagine it would have caused confusion, because the only reason we understand what it means is due to familiarity with it - it's not something you can understand from the meaning of the constituent parts.
I think the thing that sets "I could care less" a bit apart from other examples you mentioned, however, is that to someone unfamiliar with it as a phrase, it is not nonsensical if you try to parse it from its constituent parts and therefore does not flag to the unfamiliar reader as something that shouldn't be parsed as constituent parts, hence why it could be (and was) a source of confusion to people unfamiliar with it as a phrase. When a phrase shifts from something parsable from constituent parts to not being so, I would say that's a pretty clear degradation - it's not the addition of a new phrase like "fat chance", it is the morphing of an existing one, and the morphed one requires familiarity with the phrase as a whole whilst the non-morphed one doesn't.
Personally the existence of contranyms feels like a bad thing, linguistic baggage that we carry that makes English as a whole a worse language. I'd say that if a new meaning to an existing word was adopted today that meant the opposite to its existing meaning, that would be a degradation of the language. Similarly phrasal verbs seem like an artifact of a misshapen, lumbering language, and to me feel like something that makes the language worse as a whole. I think the crux of my point was that shifts in the language that add more unintuitive idiosyncrasies feel like they make the language worse, and I was exploring if American English has added idiosyncrasies that make the language harder to use.
On sodder, your guess at what I meant is correct, and Fae informed me where my understanding/assumption was wrong, which I appreciated. Knowing the term in my dialect as solder, sodder sounds like the 'sod' is the stub that the word is formed from, much like maker from make. In British English, sod can mean the top layer of turf or a general pejorative term derived from the biblical association with Sodom (used in phrases like "you sod", "doing sod all", "sod off", etc., hence the association I drew with anal sex).
I think it is commonplace to try and parse a word or phrase you don't understand from the meaning of it's constituent parts when it feels like it might be a composite term or phrase, and so it is natural for someone who doesn't know a word or phrase to draw associations between it and known understanding of constituent parts of the word or phrase. I think this is the case with something like sod-der or sold-er, but not with something like bar-k.
To address your question about quantifying degradation, I would say that a change in language that makes it make less intuitive sense and makes it harder to learn for someone trying to pick up the language is a degradation of the language. I get that's a narrow viewpoint and language is about a lot more than just ease of learning, but English is notoriously hard to learn when it comes to similar languages because of how many complexities and nuances it has, and the amount of things governed by arcane rules that don't seem to make sense. I think something that makes that harder quantifiably makes the language worse from that perspective, which is what I was originally trying to examine - clearly you are knowledgeable in linguistics, I was interested in your perspective on changes in language that appear to make it more obfuscated, especially where those are differences between British and American English.
I found your first long comment on the subject interesting and insightful, but the points you made didn't seem to cover this part of change in language, hence my question. In contrast, I found both Fae's and your responses to my question felt pretty combative and/or hostile. I have no clue if that was intended, or if my question came across as combative and/or hostile and hence warranted such a reaction - that was not my intention if it did.
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Comment on Is British English actually better than American English? in ~humanities.languages
rich_27 Link ParentInteresting, thanks for the insight, I didn't know about that. I guess the thing that confused me about that one was pronouncing it sodder when it was spelt solder, but that might have been...Interesting, thanks for the insight, I didn't know about that. I guess the thing that confused me about that one was pronouncing it sodder when it was spelt solder, but that might have been ignorance on my part too.
I think when language shifts such that the meaning of words or phrases does not align with what the speaker is trying to express I'd call it a degradation. It reduces the effectiveness or ability to communicate, which is the whole point of language.
I don't know whether there are other examples of this in American English when compared to British English, or, in fact, British English when compared to American English - none spring to mind - so it might just be that one phrase.
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Comment on Gothenburg promised to optimise school admissions with a piece of code. The resulting chaos showed how unaccountable systems are ruining lives. in ~tech
rich_27 LinkI wonder if the author took her loss in court and the injustice she felt that was and reported it through Sweden's political structure - took it to her government representative and showed them...I wonder if the author took her loss in court and the injustice she felt that was and reported it through Sweden's political structure - took it to her government representative and showed them why she thought it was wrong. If the law fails you, you should take it up with the lawmakers. I wonder if she did and what the result of that was.
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Comment on Is British English actually better than American English? in ~humanities.languages
rich_27 (edited )Link ParentI'm interested in your perspective on one part of American English and whether you'd consider it part of the language itself or not: American English has seen the widespread use of terms that do...I'm interested in your perspective on one part of American English and whether you'd consider it part of the language itself or not:
American English has seen the widespread use of terms that do not mean what the speaker intends to say, the big one being "I could care less". When someone says that, they are trying to say that there is no way they could care less, that they don't care at all, i.e. that they couldn't care any less, but it has been misused so much that the phrase a lot of people use means the direct opposite of what they're trying to say.
Another one is "sodder" instead of "solder". Joining two metal pieces by liquifying metal has nothing to do with clumps of grass or anal sex, but the pronunciation and/or spelling has shifted away from from the original term.
To me, these feel like a quantifiable degregation of the language (albeit minor and niche), and I wonder if you'd consider them relevant or whether you think your points cover them. -
Comment on "Why was I invited to Beast Studios?" - A comprehensive investigative analysis of YouTube's biggest channel in ~tech
rich_27 (edited )Link ParentThat's cool, thanks for the info! I know my previous comment didn't quite capture this side of it, but I think for me the issue is the type of content YouTube fosters rather than just the...That's cool, thanks for the info! I know my previous comment didn't quite capture this side of it, but I think for me the issue is the type of content YouTube fosters rather than just the experience of the platform/recommendations/etc. I already use ublock and sponsor block (perhaps? The one I use highlights sponsor sections and you can press enter to skip) and that blocks the annoyance of YouTube effectively for me.
I've just grown weary in regard content made for the sake of making content, which YouTube as a medium and the financial motivation there strongly encourages, and too high a proportion of videos I've watched on YouTube (even only considering videos from channels that I actively like the content of) feel like content made to pay the bills rather than content madeout of passion or to enrich the life of the viewer.
I have a suspicion that even with a "hobbled" YouTube where the platform issues were completely removed, I still would run into the same issues; some of my favourite YouTubers making passionate content have had too many videos of the type I describe above for me to want to continue watching their stuff habitually.
I appreciate you suggesting the above though :)
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Comment on Nostr: a simple open spec for passing notes to friends in ~comp
rich_27 Link ParentHaha, I enjoy those examples being the ones you picked, because with email I used hotmail because that's what all my peers used back then and switched to gmail decades ago because it was strictly...Haha, I enjoy those examples being the ones you picked, because with email I used hotmail because that's what all my peers used back then and switched to gmail decades ago because it was strictly better (and have never thought about switching since, there could be way better options for all I know!) and with RSS my dislike of picking a client has prevented me from ever adopting it!
I tell you what, Amazon Prime decided to start recommending me 70s erotic cinema about six months ago, and I've been really enjoying exploring the genre. I think it's a combination of the fatigue of commercialisation I get with most modern media and the wildly different expectations for what's going to happen. Some are absolute dross, but some have surprisingly compelling narrative and a really interesting view into life in the 70s
Some highlights:
Candy Stripe Nurses (1974)
Felicity (1979)
What? (1972)
The Sensuous Nurse (1975) (just The Nurse on Amazon Prime)