Perfect timing.

(And yes, Quiet Posters is excellent!)

Can confirm re Tokyo. Your best bet is to look for areas that are 2-4 blocks from a major train station; that’s where all the most interesting and varied aesthetics are.

(Closer, it’ll be too efficient and tidy; farther, it settles into a homogeneous offices-and-konbini wasteland.)

Man, I should find one of those. I have a phone interview that I did with Timothy Leary for my college newspaper, trapped on microcassette, from … ‘87? ‘88? During the period when the PC had replaced LSD as his vision for how we’d all expand our minds. Wonder if it would still play.

Unexpected Nemesis sighting woke me right up. Would’ve thought that that ambiguous neck/mouth thing would be cartooning-resistant, but there it is!

Especially refried-beans-and-Spanish-rice Mexican. You can find black-beans-and-white-rice Mexican anywhere in the world now, but it doesn’t scratch the same itch.

I thought you were supposed to be *mitigating* hazards, not disseminating them

The all-time champion for this. Bonus points for the way the vocals start as just disappointing and build to a crescendo of badness, before the instrumental line gets repeated just to taunt us.

youtu.be/A314hV_a5Jo?...

(There was also a really interesting and unexpected shift in the vibe of random-pedestrian conversations on 9/11, but that’s a story for another day …)

As a former Dupont resident, all I can say is that on heavy snow days there was a perceptible jump in the quality of the cafe conversations.

This was IMO the most useful mantra that Visa repeated back on the old site: focus your attention on the things that you want to see more of in the world!

(A similar ethos has always served me well, tho I can’t say for sure whether it’s learned or just characterological.)

a) Wayyy too many alternative readings available, entertaining though they may be. Even “crankholed” would be better!

b) Possible to focus on opportunity cost? Your writing aimed at non-cranks is very good, and has more durable utility. So why not do that instead?

Wasn’t “generated at scale” always part of the concept though? To me the more striking drift is from “bulk content meant to fool only robots or the elderly” to now including one-off works by humans who took pains to pass the work off as purely handmade.

Yeah, I’ve just recently had to start training my 10yo out of it in RL. Common behavior, probably exacerbated whenever someone is on the margins of a social group.

Basically, along with “just block and move on” for bad behavior, I don’t understand why people find it so hard to adopt “just ignore and move on” for redundant or tedious behavior. It clearly is hard, since there are so many laments! But I genuinely don’t understand why.

I don’t mean this as a defense of the behavior; it’s still low-social-skill and/or thoughtless. But the *annoyance* that regular posters show at it seems misplaced, or at least futile. You can’t impose such subtle norms on an ever-changing population of noobs and casuals posting w/divided attention.

I think part of the problem is that regular posters can’t understand the lurker mindset. Lurkers are thinking “OMG a thought occurred to me, I have something to add to this, for once I can post!” This is not a regular occurrence for them, and so not part of a routine of eg checking replies first.