philmophlegm | Entries tagged with social media

A useful summary of how many types of people disapprove of Pokemon Go. (Christians, muslims, moral guardians, leftards, gaming purists, conspiracy theorists, nanny-statists, more leftards, SJWs, puritans…)

Remember when the Democratic National Convention used a photo of Russian warships by mistake? No? That's because it got very little coverage over here.

I love these Game of Thrones posters that HBO did. One per episode (almost)!

The plot of all three major Tolkien works in a single haiku.

Pretty much how I feel about both babies and cats.

The IMF was wrong and I was right. (I feel smug.)

Some clever statistical analysis of the EU referendum.

"How did the language of politics get so toxic?"

Considering the impact of cheaper Sterling.

Clare Short is responsible for a lot of the bad things that have happened in Zimbabwe.

The Class of '92's Lost Genius

"Actually it was *Advanced* Dungeons and Dragons that I played”, clarifies Gove.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of Uganda.

14 tips for aspiring humanities academics.

To a leftard, "all lives matter" is racist.

Some idiot left the floodlights on all night before the Euro2016 final. Moth-based hilarity ensued. (By half-time, the moth that landed on Cristiana Ronaldo’s face had fifty different accounts on Twitter.)

Former Swansea and Liverpool manager Brendan Rogers is the new manager of Celtic. His first match in charge was arguably their worst ever result since they were founded in 1887. Well done Brendan.

What did Neanderthals sound like?

Of all the people leaving British public life in the last few weeks, will any be missed quite as much as Barry Scott?

Now why might the son of a famous fascist, himself famous for NAZI-themed orgies, want to ~~bribe~~ [make a generous campaign donation to] a politician who campaigns against freedom of the press...?

Big Chinese statue.

Is it just me, or is the new Cabinet very...blonde?

Every review of the new(ish) Ghostbusters film you will read this week.

CoiffeurGate

Philip May might be no SamCam, but he's more stylish than Dennis. (Except for those turn-ups.)

Why bad ideas refuse to die.

Whatever happened to William 'The Refrigerator' Perry?

No, the British did not "frantically" google what the E.U. is hours after voting to leave it.

New Robin of Sherwood audio drama with original cast. (We’re working our way through the boxed set in preparation!)

Gordon Murray has died. No, not the bloke who designed the car in the userpic, the guy who did Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley.

How the **** did a television journalist as bad at her job as this one get a flipping CBE? This is a total car crash and she comes across as (at best) incompetent and at worst borderline deranged.

Mapping the growth of cities over the last 6,000 years.

An interview with Matthew 'Pandemic' Leacock.

Five steps universities could take to revive free speech on campus.

NASA's mission in the 1960s: Get America to the Moon. NASA's mission in the 2010s: Reach out to the muslim world. (Wait, what?)

One of my occasional hobbies is social media (usually Facebook) hoax-slaying. I think I'm pretty good at spotting hoaxes. You can usually recognise something in the wording that doesn't seem quite right. Maybe it's my auditing experience - professional scepticism and all that.

Usually these hoaxes are crime scare stories - marks on the pavement are signs left by dognappers, look out for axe-wielding maniacs who get into your car at petrol stations - or chain letters purporting to be from Microsoft or Apple. Today though, we've had a political one. It's this:

"The most perfect thing I have ever seen just happened on the replacement train bus service between Newport and Cwmbran:

White man sat in front of a mother and her son. Mother was wearing a niqab. After about 5 minutes of the mother talking to her son in another language the man, for whatever reason, feels the need to tell the woman "When you're in the UK you should really be speaking English."

At which point, an old woman in front of him turns around and says, "She's in Wales. And she's speaking Welsh."

Perfect."

( Read more... )

Sorry – bit overdue…

Not an item we have in stock at The Shop on the Borderlands. Shame really.

If Facebook was designed by its users

It's an odd legal system where a muslim judge gets to decide which parts of the Bible should be illegal. And this didn't happen in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. It happened in Somerset.

How to talk about Star Wars with your ignorant, Rebellion-backing uncle.

The Appendix N Blog. (Appendix N of the AD&D 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide was where Gary Gygax listed all of the literature that influenced him.)

The secret network exposing fake military veterans.

One third of people living in London were born in other countries.

Who the f**k is my D&D character?

FA Cup tie held up after cat wanders onto pitch.

My grandparents used to live in Bridgnorth. Their house wasn't like this.

Accenture to scrap the annual performance review. I worked for a similar big professional services firm for 15 years. I’ve been an appraiser and obviously an appraisee. Nothing was more harmful to performance, morale and bottom line profitability than the annual performance review system.

When Jeremy Paxman repeatedly asks an evasive politician the same question, he's a "tough interviewer". When Kay Burley does the same, she's "confused" or "loopy" or a "bossy bitch".

This is how I imagine all comic and SF conventions.

Doubly eclipsing quintuple low-mass star system

Pakistani immigrants are 13 times more likely to have disabled children because of intermarriage.

21 people who 100% did not meet a celebrity. (But how cool is it that the real Maisie Williams took the time to point out to number 2 that he hadn’t actually met her?)

Of course the budget was regressive.

The Ku Klux Klan is on the rise.

In mid-2014, Greece was the fastest growing economy in the Eurozone and even had a budget surplus if you ignored debt servicing. Then they elected Syriza.

This Warhammer player is quite upset about the rules changes in the new Age of Sigmar edition.

Making air travel even less pleasant.

"Panini launches 2015 FIFA Corruption Scandal sticker album."

Raped in a playground at 11, abused by seven men a night aged 12, her sister was murdered - one of the 1,400 victims of the Rotherham muslim paedophile ring.

Never swallow a porcupine whole.

And the lesson to be learned here is this: make a self-deprecating joke to a conference that could be misinterpreted as politically incorrect if removed from the context in which it was made, then it _will_ be removed from its context, selectively quoted and used by a social media mob to hound you out of your job, no matter how great your previous accomplishments. Richard Dawkins is angry about this, and really so should we all be. This is typical of the condemnatory articles that didn't think to check facts.

Doctor Who Online does look to be defrauding advertisers. They’ve tried this with The Shop on the Borderlands (we sell Doctor Who RPGs), but I was too sceptical. Combine a proprietary analytics system that massively overstates traffic with quite persistent selling, and yes, I think Mr Sandifer is on to something.

Half of households receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. (And that’s before you include the cost of state education, state healthcare, public sector salaries etc…)

Free market lessons from Scandinavia.

The man who invented trainspotting (sort of) has died.

Well Google, this is awkward...

Sir Nicholas Winton, the "British Schindler", has died aged 106.

Did Joss Whedon base Firefly on Traveller? This is a good examination of the evidence.

Holograms that you can touch (sort of). Next step, Holodecks!

This year's ENnie Awards (the RPG and miniatures industry awards) nominees

So let me get this straight - Scottish votes for Scottish laws is right and proper; Welsh votes for Welsh laws is right and proper; Northern Irish votes for Northern Irish laws is right and proper but English votes for English laws is "racist".

Nice collection of photos of the British Grand Prix over the years.

I'm amazed that the Forth Bridge isn't already a World Heritage Site.

This is who we got to present the winner's trophy at this year's You're Hired! final. Seems a good chap.

This time it really is the end of the line for the Avro Vulcan.

Even if the minimum wage doesn't hit jobs, it hurts the poor.

Why Netanyahu won.

How to roleplay during RPG combat.

How diverse are the English?

More on that British DNA study.

Historiography in RPGs.

Of the Rings of Powerpoint and the Third Age

Christianity didn't nick Easter off the pagans.

Fluid dynamics is weird.

One of my ambitions in life is to come up with a hoax this good.

A pretty decent short history of the British videogame industry.

Every argument about 'Buffy' on the internet from 1998 until now.

Brazil have reacted to their World Cup humiliation by retreating into the past.

'Virtual nose' may reduce simulator sickness in video games.

Generally I like LiveJournal and wish it was more popular. But there are one or two things that I don't like. One of those seems to be by far the most popular community on LJ - '

ohnotheydidnt .

I don't know if this works for all possible configurations of friends feeds, but on mine, there is a section on the right hand side of the page called LiveJournal Today which shows the most popular posts. Most of them (if not all) on most days will be posts in this community. Have you ever clicked on it?

If you're ever trying to convince a friend to give LJ a go, don't go near this community. It's like the worst kind of sub-tabloid celebrity gossip mixed with twitter/tumblr style extreme SJW political correctness. You rarely see a comment of more than a sentence in length. Most of the commenters seem to be illiterate. And just to top it all off, most of the userpics you'll see are animated gifs with a duration of no more than a second featuring some film star blinking or just moving slightly. No more than a second might be the attention span.

Urrgh.

Worried that you might avoid tax? This helpful guide shows you how to avoid avoiding tax.

Does going to court to change your dead millionaire father's will so you pay less inheritance tax count as "avoiding tax"?

Interesting reviews of all the Gollancz SF Masterworks so far.

5 Misconceptions About #GamerGate and the Truth Behind the Myths

Five Actors Who Almost Played Aragorn (Russell Crowe?)

Whatever happened to Football Manager legend Freddy Adu?

No, unemployment is not the "underlying cause" of ISIS.

"Why are people in Scotland saying I murdered someone called Lucy?"

UKIP Cornwall's website gives Cornish web designers a bad name.

The latest SJW idiocy in SF / Fantasy literature.

I miss 'The Thick of It'. Luckily Green Party leader Natalie Bennett can easily fill the 'incompetent politician gives car crash interview' hole...

The appalling compensation for those people imprisoned through a miscarriage of justice.

It's really cold in New York at the moment.

Evidence used by Henry VIII to support the break with Rome turns up in a library not far from us.

Why we shouldn't clamp down on zero-hour contracts.

A rousing defence of private property from an unusual source.

Why are NHS Accident & Emergency units suddenly too busy to cope?

Very serious corruption in the NHS watchdog. Seriously, people should go to prison for this.

Which society connects Oswald Mosley, the founders of the London School of Economics, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw...and advocated eugenic sterilisation?

I'm not a fan of James Blunt's music, but his Twitter putdowns are great, he prevented World War 3* and you have to appreciate letters to leftards that begin "Dear Chris Bryant MP, You classist gimp..."

"Tax Systems: The good, the bad and the completely toot toot ding-dong loopy"

2014 was the warmest year in moden record.

...although actually it's within the margin of error and tied with 2005 and 2010.

Dodgy anti-trade measures from "so called chocolate maker Hershey's". (I remember a colleague who had been on holiday to the US bringing some Hershey’s ‘chocolate’ into the office for everyone to taste. It tastes of vomit. I’m not saying this in a way that means “it doesn’t taste very nice”, I mean literally that you can taste vomit and you can taste Hershey’s and they taste very, very similar. And everyone in the office who had some agreed with this assessment. If you run a Google search for “Hersheys tastes”, see what the auto-complete suggestions are. How is this stuff so popular?)

How to appreciate American cuisine.

Baseball's toxic tradition - chewing tobacco.

Benedict Cumberbuzzle falls victim to SJW idiocy. (The leading black/colored/coloured/African-American civil rights pressure group in the US is the “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People” so how can the word “colored” be “outdated” or “offensive”? But presumably your typical hashtag social justice warrior is too stupid to realise this.) See Rules 21, 22 and 23.

Lars Andersen explodes Hollywood's archery myths.

Geekdad explodes Lars Andersen's archery myths.

Practical jokes through facebook advertising.

124 year old business destroyed by single-letter Companies House typo.

The French government has just spent £40million on this "How to spot a Musilim Terrorist" wallchart.

* True story.