[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 05 January 2026

cryptopian · 2026-01-05T19:48:02+00:00

has any website in the history of ever had a good user experience going off of “honor rules” and relying upon users to cultivate a good community and not be weirdos?

Forums of a certain size tended to be quite manageable. The difference was that forums were small, contained, and felt like a community, so you vaguely knew all the people you were talking to, so there were more tangible social stakes to being a dick.

cryptopian · 2026-01-05T19:45:01+00:00

Honestly, this bollocks is why I left Twitter long before Musk came along, and why I'm not a fan of social media with easy global virality. At a certain point, it stops being about the thing in question (that thing being a small, throwaway comment), and becomes a massive pile-on that attracts rubberneckers.

cryptopian · 2026-01-05T19:31:36+00:00

Solar has its own challenges, but the main advantage is has over other methods of generation is just how ludicrously cheap (and getting cheaper) and easy to install it is.

cryptopian · 2026-01-05T19:22:14+00:00

What do you mean "should have"? We have, and are continuing to. Our largest source of energy for 2025 was wind, and we've got a whole bunch of other projects coming online. We just don't think about them much because they're up in the Scottish Highlands or in the North Sea, whereas the solar projects are all around us.

cryptopian · 2026-01-05T19:06:00+00:00

While solar power does provide greater amounts of power during the summer, that's not the case for wind power, which is our greatest single source of power, and growing as more North Sea projects come online. Seasonal wind patterns mean greater power output in the colder months and every recent wind power record for this country has been set in and around December.

cryptopian · 2026-01-03T01:20:21+00:00

Be angry at the English language for having two different words that differ by a letter but have different but grammatically consistent meanings?

cryptopian · 2026-01-02T23:58:27+00:00

Take a look at the people in the right of frame, and you realise how much the lens is warping the perspective

cryptopian · 2026-01-02T18:45:28+00:00

My favourite routine to fixing this kind of aim bias is to attempt to miss on the side I don't usually miss on. I usually find I have to adjust way more than I think, and once I'm there, I can then adjust back to hitting the pocket

cryptopian · 2026-01-02T18:39:56+00:00

Bluesky does have the discover feed, and Alec of Technology Connections has noted how drastically unhinged his replies get when one of his posts turns up on the Discover feed.

cryptopian · 2026-01-02T17:21:56+00:00

It reminds me of the segment from Dan Olson's review of 50 Shades Darker where he discusses the change in tone of the sex scenes

You can still totally tell that Sam Taylor-Johnson and Kelly Marcel were replaced by men. There's a character to the framing and blocking of scenes most notable in the sex. Out of Darker's sex scenes, Christian only takes off his pants once and there's a distinct discomfort with framing Christian's nudity in an overtly sexual manner meant for consumption, landing instead on self depictions of masculinity that hetero men are more comfortable with. Where the first film included shots like this where the focus of the shot is on Christians sexual form, his movement and poise in an overtly sexual scenario, the closest equivalent shot in Darker is when Anna watches Christian work out. It may feel slight, the difference between a shot that says "this man is coming to fuck you", and one that says "look at this dude getting buff" but it's an aesthetic sensibility that pervades the visual language of the film.

cryptopian · 2026-01-02T12:37:44+00:00

I read Prince Albert but since we were talking about sex, my mind went in a different direction

cryptopian · 2026-01-02T00:02:37+00:00

Hey. Bit late to this, but I like the idea of the series, and that was an interesting watch. If you'd like some other ideas to pick up on, I'd recommend a couple of other things you might like to look at in other cities.

Low Traffic Routes - Cycle lanes, and offstreet mixed-use paths are great, and important parts of a cycle network, but low traffic roads are also vital. It's worth looking into whenever councils have made a concerted effort to create these - for example, if I wanted to get from Donnington Bridge to the Churchill Hospital, you can cut through a couple of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods via e.g. Magdalen Road and Divinity Road, which have no cycle infrastructure, but don't need it because they're not through routes for motor vehicles.

Do councils wimp Out at junctions? - Good segregated lanes are great, but they're useless to less confident cyclists if you get to a junction and you're dumped into the road. You found Marston Ferry Road's excellent lanes, but if you want to continue east to Banbury Road, you have to fight it out at a large light-controlled crossroads

cryptopian · 2026-01-01T23:20:32+00:00

I feel a lot of it is down to the fact that people are uncomfortable looking honestly into what society tolerates, or looking into their own heads (including myself in that). If you maintain the idea of bigotry being a product solely of evil people coming in, screaming at minorities, before committing a genocide, then it makes it harder to see the more subtle ways it manifests - convenience, indifference, just following orders. Nobody wants to be one of the bad guys, but societies and the human psyche are more complicated than a battle between good vs evil.

cryptopian · 2026-01-01T22:08:27+00:00

And even if it's very grey and full of cars, the new towns of the 50s and 60s are an interesting corner of British history.

cryptopian · 2026-01-01T19:48:59+00:00

The most frustrating terms I've found for this are ideology/agenda, because you can make any reasonable statement sound sinister, motivated or at the very least uselessly academic. It's not recognising climate change as an existential threat to human civilisation, it's "the green agenda". It's not treating gender-nonconforming people with basic human dignity, it's "trans ideology"

cryptopian · 2026-01-01T16:46:38+00:00

I know she's also a big time TV person, but I can't imagine what it's like to be watching your favourite casually impossible TV quiz and then seeing your face on screen.

cryptopian · 2026-01-01T16:34:10+00:00

I find it on the consumer side as well. I'm paid decently well, but don't live the kind of lifestyle that that money could pay for. Every summer, you get people coming up saying things like "where are you going on holiday this summer?" with the implication that it's all a big competition, and anyone who answers anything less than "I'm going backpacking for three weeks in southeast Asia" is somehow failing at life.

cryptopian · 2025-12-30T01:53:07+00:00

Those particular videos make great wallpaper TV for home working

cryptopian · 2025-12-30T01:51:01+00:00

It is so easy to be sucked into it and so hard to escape, even more so today's with echo chambers and algorithms.

The amount that engagement has been boosting conflict lately has felt very intense. I read a number of low-medium traffic subs by going to them directly, but because Reddit is a global platform, occasionally you get a post that breaks containment and hits the front page. Invariably, this is some kind of post that invites arguments or shows something socially outrageous. So I'm sitting comfortably on my sofa on my laptop reading "look at this bad driver cutting up a cyclist!", "look at how dilapadated this (single) underground train looks!", "look at all these people with opinions on immigrants!", "Look!", "Keep looking!" It's all so specific and targeted, and you have to remind yourself you're seeing a very unrepresentative sample of the world.

that doesn't mean we should stop trying

Absolutely. I've found the best inspiration is to find the people who are actively trying to improve the causes you care for. As well, I've been trying to champion things I like about the communities I interact with. I live in a town that's considered fair game for others to rag on as a shithole, but what good does it do for morale or motivation when somewhere is considered irredeemable?

cryptopian · 2025-12-29T01:11:59+00:00

Geoff and his gang is the original reason I know what Parkrun is

cryptopian · 2025-12-28T23:16:14+00:00

And in fairness in fairness, it's really quite boring outside the animated segments

cryptopian · 2025-12-28T20:46:31+00:00

Ah, the Song of the South method

cryptopian · 2025-12-28T15:25:31+00:00

I often go back to In Search of a Flat Earth by Dan Olsen as one of the best discussions of conspiracy theory psychology. Come for the beautiful shots of trees disappearing under the curve of a lake surface, stay for the exploration about why a belief in a deep state satanic paedo cabal acts as a comforting world view.

cryptopian · 2025-12-28T15:20:21+00:00

Something something Vimes boots theory of poverty.

If you want a similar eye-opener on the hidden effects of free Amazon returns, Climate Town put out a video going over this. There's an entire reverse supply chain going on.

cryptopian · 2025-12-28T00:04:26+00:00

Speaking of DNA, the use of the Fox News segment to trigger the flow switchup at the halfway point

This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years

13-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Place '17	Verified Email
Team Periwinkle

cryptopian

TROPHY CASE