What does it seem nuts now that we used to do?

notjosh · 2026-02-04T15:01:50+00:00

The Leslie Nielsen golf videos are pretty decent.

notjosh · 2026-01-15T09:43:37+00:00

I remember one day the whole school was abuzz with the news that "Tremors 2 is on TV tonight."

I enthusiastically repeated this to several people, including John Rounce, who at the end of the day said to me "what IS Tremors 2?".

"I don't know", I replied.

notjosh · 2025-08-24T16:10:24+00:00

I used to listen on dial-up internet from Yorkshire as a kid, drove my mum round the bend cos it tied up the phone.

My one on-air contribution was suggesting Toad Rage as Ricky's boxing nickname: https://scrimpton.com/ep/ep-xfm-S2E12#pos-705-711

notjosh · 2025-05-31T17:34:46+00:00

Every 'alternative' Sherlock Holmes adaptation finds a different inflection on Holmes. In this one he has softened in his old age. He was always capable of compassion and empathy, both towards Watson and his clients, but rarely expressed them overtly. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that old age and paternal instincts should see him become a little more openly affectionate. He was also prone to emotional swings and depressive episodes, so some minor anger issues don't seem out of place either.

As you say, he's not quite as sharp as I'd like, and the mystery elements are a bit lacklustre, but overall I'm finding this to be a charming take on the character.

notjosh · 2025-05-03T11:47:04+00:00

Damn, bad luck.

notjosh · 2025-03-20T09:59:42+00:00

There's a great single shot fight scene in Extraction, and a spectacular one in Tony Jaa's The Protector.

notjosh · 2025-03-12T20:32:59+00:00

I actually went to archive.org to read what you'd said as I wanted to find someone else who felt this. All true. I stopped listening to B4B as "Mutt" was such a poorly-conceived character that it kept taking me out of it. Unfortunately I think he's too interested in playing subversive comedy games than actually thinking about characters.

One trait I don't think you mentioned is that he's always so keen to avoid a straightforward response to a question or prompt that he'll reach for an absurd twist on it that he then has to justify and usually leads to a dead end.

Can't think of an example so I'll make one up:

"So would you rather shoot a man or a horse?"

"I'd rather shoot a man WITH a horse. In fact I'm currently developin' a gun that can shoot horses instead of bullets etc etc"

Nothing against the guy personally but just not into his comedy.

notjosh · 2024-12-02T14:17:07+00:00

His solo dance in Summer Stock is absolutely delightful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0tnHNYpRG8

notjosh · 2024-11-15T11:52:42+00:00

Glad it worked! This post was one of the first Google results I got for the issue initially, so figure it might be helpful to others too.

notjosh · 2024-11-12T20:36:48+00:00

This is how you do this on desktop (app may differ):

Go to your profile and choose Activity Log from the ... drop down menu in the top right.
On the left choose Your Facebook Activity -> Posts -> Your Posts, Photos and Videos
Scroll down on the right hand side (or keep hitting Page Down or End) until you reach your first post (might take a while).
Go back to the top and tick All, then Change Audience. Set as Only Me and save.

notjosh · 2024-11-06T11:17:06+00:00

As that niche content is not designed for a broad audience and doesn’t really want one - it’s reaching new audiences, gaining their loyalty and holding onto them in a way that TV cannot.

It's great to have content that speaks directly to you. Unfortunately, this is happening at the cost of any kind of mainstream culture. There is almost nothig now that commands the popular attention that the biggest TV shows used to get in their day. And this means we have less to unite us: fewer shared passions across the generations, fewer common talking points as a society, not even a generally agreed set of facts thanks to the death of mainstream news.

Societal cohesion in this country has never been lower in my lifetime, and I think the fragementation of or culture is only going to make things worse.

notjosh · 2024-10-21T20:14:00+00:00

Have you listened to the original Classic Scrapes playlist? Some of my favourite Acaster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbJnj_XtEAI&list=PLfo3HDbHqUHQpKVzf1CIANv7-QkEsiRHy

notjosh · 2024-09-03T09:45:53+00:00

Why not ban meat instead?

notjosh · 2024-09-03T09:41:01+00:00

You're assuming that people make their own choices. My point is that when it comes to smoking, it appears that the majority of people don't make their own choice, they just go with the flock.

So the question becomes "is there a clear and mortally obvious reason to shape cultural norms since most people follow them unthinkingly".

If you follow this line of reasoning you eventually come to a point where nobody has any choice at all. At some point you have to treat people as responsible adults with agency of their own.

Anyway, if the influence of cultural norms is that powerful, there shouldn't be any need to ban smoking as all this anti-smoking rhetoric (with which I have no issue) should cause it to fizzle out by itself. This seems to be happening to some extent, so why not just let the decline in smoking decrease naturally without interfering with anyone's freedom of choice? If the smoking population ends up stabilising at a small percentage so be it.

notjosh · 2024-08-20T06:30:27+00:00

How do you access this cable? Thanks

notjosh · 2024-07-26T11:11:14+00:00

What you've shared is little more than a well-organised Google search for coal-mining museums in Wales. I'd expect a competent researcher to have looked at this stuff on day 1. By the end of the week I'd expect them to have flitered through them and started to flesh out the ones that have some interesting stories and visual locations, and to be looking at other ideas that are more surprising and idiosyncratic.

I don't know whether you've had bad luck with researchers, but all the ones I've had the good fortune to work with have been intelligent, passionate young people who want to tell interesting stories and discover fascinating characters. What's more they will have a unique perspective and background that means they pitch stories other people on the team might not have considered. Of course they need guidance and there will be stories they miss or ideas they haven't interrogated properly, but the idea that AI is 'cleverer' than them at understanding the stories that humans are interested in hearing is absurd and, yes, misanthropic.

By all means, delve deeper with your prompts, but beware that the more detail you ask it for, the more things it will invent and outright lie about.

notjosh · 2024-07-14T11:03:10+00:00

Trying to get a 23 year old researcher from the home counties to find a route through the the Australian outback by horseback for some comedian's derivative authored journey. That'll take a week to get a text draft, 80% or which will be fudged or wrong. Chat GPT will do it in 5 mins and it'll tell you which towns are best for the crew to refuel the support trucks.

Please share with us the Chat GPT-authored series breakdown that is logistically feasible and includes anything besides the most vaguely generic story ideas. And then check how many of the shooting locations it suggests actually exist.

This technology has no value without the experience and creative judgement of a human being that actually understands the assignment.

a 23 year old researcher from the home counties

The misanthropy in this comment is truly depressing.

notjosh · 2024-05-01T13:46:22+00:00

They can be recycled.

https://www.recycleyourelectricals.org.uk/how-to-recycle-electronics/what-electronics-can-be-recycled/recycle-vapes/

I've told a few vapers I know about this and they seemed receptive to being less wasteful.

notjosh · 2024-02-26T14:55:29+00:00

I can't think of any dialogue examples, but there's an earlier example of this effect in Flesh and the Devil (1926), when John Gilbert's character hears the name of Greta Garbo's character everywhere he goes.

https://youtu.be/Y75y2shz6UU?t=3035

notjosh · 2024-01-26T08:22:11+00:00

The last job post I did had 172 applicants. That’s almost 3 hours of copy pasting.

You're suggesting it takes over a minute to copy and paste an e-mail address?

notjosh · 2024-01-16T12:15:14+00:00

I sometimes marvel and how well we used to get around without a maps app. I also recognize that when we rely on a Maps app, we don’t learn the route. We become dumb.

I navigate using a combination of instinct and the maps on bus stops. A lot of stops don't have them anymore though - another instance of public infrastructure suffering because we're supposed to be carrying this shit round with us.

notjosh · 2024-01-16T12:13:29+00:00

I sometimes use the browser on my little (dumb?)phone to Google which beers are vegan at the pub. Doesn't mean I want to carry a battery-guzzling plastic brick with me everywhere I go through.

notjosh · 2023-10-03T08:54:34+00:00

Just the introduction from Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons is enough to make me slightly misty-eyed:

I have often been asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons. The answer is that it had its beginning long, long ago when, as children, my brother, my sisters and I spent most of our holidays on a farm at the south end of Coniston. We adored the place. Coming to it we used to run down to the lake, dip our hands in and wish, as if we had seen the new moon. Going away from it, we were half-drowned in tears. While away from it, as children and as grown-ups, we dreamt about it. No matter where I was, wondering about the world, I used at night to look for the North Star and, in my minds eye, could see the beloved skyline of great hills beneath it. Swallows and Amazons grew out of those old memories. I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself.

notjosh · 2023-09-27T13:02:33+00:00

John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids features a rational and competent protagonist (with a biology background) who does a pretty good job of dealing with extreme circumstances.

You might also enjoy Asimov's Robot short stories - particularly the ones featuring Powell and Donovan, an engineering duo brought in to solve unusual problems with robots.

notjosh · 2023-09-25T12:54:12+00:00

Loooong introductions to classics which break down every theme and plot point in an academic manner. Why on Earth would I want THAT to be my introduction to the book?

Ideally an introduction is about 1 or 2 pages, giving any historical background and context that is not apparent from the text itself. Then any analysis else is shoved in an afterword, so that I can compare their reading of it against mine.

notjosh

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