Tag: culture

Restaurants hate 1st dates

Your awkward first date can amuse restaurant staff. But other patrons may not be that delighted. And because every seat is a piece of money-making real estate, the 10s of dates you’ve gone on this year may also be affecting many businesses’ bottom line. Particularly when daters stare into their phones for 30 minutes without ordering, waiting for their match to turn up. And when they spend another 2 hours talking about their childhood and lactose intolerance while nursing a single, happy-hour-priced beer.

“Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley

Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open. It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”

Scarfolk

the Most Spectacular Dystopia of the 1970s

The term most often applied to Scarfolk is hauntology. Hauntology recycles aesthetic forms and reflects the clash between the dreams we had of the future in the 1960s through the 1980s versus where we actually are now. But it also looks back, as did 1970s culture, to earlier periods, like pre-Christian paganism and Victoriana, for example.

Powerlifting World Record

On July 2, 2015, a video was uploaded to YouTube that began with a teenage girl in a gym wrapping a weightlifting belt around her waist. Her hair was nested atop her head in a messy bun, and headphones covered her ears. A straight bar with 6 plates on each side, totalling 190 kg, rested on the ground next to her. She huffed and puffed, paced from one end of the gym to the other, and clapped her hands. Small clouds of chalk wafted from her palms. Then she walked up to the bar, howled, bent down, and lifted the weight to her mid-thigh, in what is called a deadlift. She exhaled, arched her back, and dropped the bar and the plates to the floor. “Yes!” she screamed. “Fucking shit! I did it!”

The Cause of RBF

The cues are understated, yet the machine detects and interprets them the same way our human brains do. “Something in the neutral expression of the face is relaying contempt, both to the software and to us.”

i’ve been diagnosed with RBF, and the root cause is contempt. sounds about right.