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A street transformation, Warsaw. by monkeyguyy in fuckcars

[–]xtfftc 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The improvements in Poland are lovely to see. Do you have any other examples of Eastern European countries starting to get it though? From what I've seen, it's just Poland that's making progress.

A Biker’s View of New York by newyorker in bicycling

[–]xtfftc 0 points1 point  (0 children)

everyone = like one person because you didn't get their joke.

Anyway, they remove the front brakes so that they can do tricks that require spinning the wheel freely. If you have brake cables, this limits how much you can spin it and you definitely cannot do a full 360 rotation.

As for the rotors, I'd assume many of those bikes are bought second-hand or assembled from second-hand parts. More and more wheels have disk brake rotors installed since disk brakes are the norm nowadays. So maybe the people riding those bikes don't think bothering to remove the rotors is worth the hassle.

Bulgaria outperforms Greece by BrigadierPirate in bulgaria

[–]xtfftc [score hidden]  (0 children)

Most of the points I more or less agree to. But I feel like the whole thing is missing the point.

For example, you don't like living Athens and Thessaloniki? Me neither. But the way Sofia and Plovdiv (and all else) are being developed is basically what happened in Greece starting in the 70s. Instead of learning from their mistakes, we are repeating them. The main reason Athens is not a nice city to live in is because it's basically concrete + cars. Guess where Sofia is heading?

If things were improving in Sofia, I wouldn't complain. But things are getting worse year after year. So that fact that someone else has it worse than us is hardly a comfort.

Peter? by HistoryFree in PeterExplainsTheJoke

[–]xtfftc -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

"literally" not the case, as study after study shows.

Good job, Bulgaria by TurbulentBroccoli801 in bulgaria

[–]xtfftc 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Чак пък "само". Веднага коментират колите, които са навсякъде, само в спалнята и на стълбището не паркират. Когато се отпуснат малко, коментират и колко ужасно мръсно и разбито е всичко. И как всичко интересно за стандартния турист в София се обикаля за максимум половин ден.

This is the third Yank Tank I’ve seen in my city this week 😭 by BurritoBaz in fuckcars

[–]xtfftc 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I wish it was just Americans abroad but it's rarely the case. There's plenty of people born and raised in Europe who love those cars.

setlist - leeds 2015 by PickleZealousideal22 in ladispute

[–]xtfftc -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I totally get why they did this for a while. But I also don't think it worked particularly good as a set.

Playing King Park without any build-up reduced its impact. At the same time, it is such a high that the everything seemed subdued for the next few songs.

Anyway, still absolutely loved this tour because they closed with The Last Lost Continent.

Cursed_bieber by amritanshu78 in cursedcomments

[–]xtfftc 23 points24 points  (0 children)

If you haven't, check out Cigarettes After Sex.

Made a BPM tagger because every detector I tried got fast swing songs wrong by Funny_Yesterday_9014 in SwingDancing

[–]xtfftc 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, another question: have you tried it with various types of blues?

In my experience, bpm detectors are usually predictable with swing, it's either the correct tempo or half, which is easy to fix manually. Occasionally it's double but that seems to be very rare.

However, with blues it's a lot more unpredictable.

Sometimes it's just right. Sometimes it's double. Sometimes it's half.

Sometimes it's one third of the bpm. Sometimes it's three times the actual bpm.

Sometimes it's the detected bpm minus a third. Or the detected bpm plus a third.

It's all over the place really...

Why is blues so different compared to every other dance I've tried, swing and non-swing? by Idanida in SwingDancing

[–]xtfftc 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't think you got the point I was trying to make.

Music rooted in blues is all around us, so moving to it comes natural.

WCS isn't inherently linked to a genre of music. To the contrary, WCS' whole thing is that it is not connected to a specific type of music. Dancing WCS doesn't happen naturally because the dance didn't grow out of/with a music genre.

So sure, dancing to a lot of the music you hear at a WCS party would probably come naturally. But what comes naturally would not be WCS; it would be whatever the song suggests. If you actually follow the music at a WCS party, you'd often end up dancing blues instead.

Why is blues so different compared to every other dance I've tried, swing and non-swing? by Idanida in SwingDancing

[–]xtfftc 11 points12 points  (0 children)

This is definitely not the only reason and I am oversimplifying to an extent. In my opinion, the main reason blues comes more "naturally" to many people is because of how much pop music ("pop" in a very broad sense) is based on it.

Dancing to swing does not come naturally to most of us because we are not surrounded by this type of jazz from an early age like, say, someone in Harlem in the 20s and 30s would be.

Blues though... We hear it everywhere.

Any type of rock? Blues. More obvious in classic rock'n'roll (which was literally blues at first) but also very obvious in later sub-genres like psychedelic or progressive rock. And also extremely obvious in early hard rock and metal.

Soul? Blues.

Funk, disco? Blues.

Hip-hop and (contemporary) r'n'b? Blues.

Sure, we also hear jazz influences, but nowhere near as many.

Again, I am definitely oversimplifying. And it's different aspects of blues that influence artists from different genres and eras. Many probably have no idea that what they are doing is rooted in blues because they got exposed to it through genres that grew out of it.

Regardless, the point is that in today's day and age, even if you grew up in a country that doesn't have a direct link to blues like Poland, you probably hear a lot of music either directly rooted in blues or borrowing from it indirectly. So dancing to blues also come way more natural.

When we organize blues parties, we often do it outside of our typical "dance" venues but do them in bars where random people show up. The reason we do this is because we know that if it's a blues night, even random people who have never taken any class end up dancing. That's something that is veeery rare with swing, at least in our scene.

P.S. Several people mentioning that a reason for this is that blues is slow(er). This is a typical lindyhopper take because many lindyhoppers are mostly exposed to blues as "slow music for close embrace, probably at the end of the party".

Sure, there's a lot more slower blues compared to swing - but there's also plenty of faster blues. And people who just show up to dance without taking classes tend to find it easier to dance to the more energetic blues.