>>472486
I think some details about clothing have just always been lies. People always talk like "100% cotton" is the best thing a T-shirt can be, and yet if you sweat into a cotton T-shirt, it'll be soaking wet and sodden, while polyester just dries almost instantly. I do sweat a lot, like medically so, it's awful, but cotton is overrated. And "Wow, it's 100% cotton!" is a marketing spin that goes hand-in-hand with, "Wow, it's made by Fruit of the Loom!" Never trust either of them.

It could also be another Blaupunkt situation. Blaupunkt, they of the top-quality stereos and car radios, went out of business years ago and now they just license the name out to any Chinese factory that's willing to pay. So if you have a Blaupunkt toaster, or blender, or kettle, and it cost you £20, it's not the famous Blaupunkt and it probably wasn't a fantastic deal. There's no German engineering involved; they might as well have one of those made-up Chinese names like Bauiiie or Pfnorzeiu or Gbaghnop.

>>472486
There's nothing special about Fruit of the Loom t-shirts. Especially not ones you get for a tenner from Amazon. Without wanting to be a dick, part of the reason they're not very good anymore is because people are increasingly unwilling to spend more than a tenner on a t-shirt.

I do buy clothes online, but rarely t-shirts. This is because I've found the fit of t-shirts to be subject to massive variations. This usually means being very long and ending below my bollocks, which isn't really right.

>>472487
Be careful, brother. Encasing oneself in petroleum by-products is a surefire way to wind up with genitals that look like the inside of a seabird!

>>472488

I bought these off Amazon because my big Tesco here now wants over £12 for a two pack of entirely generic white Ts. Which seemed a bit much.

>>472489
I didn't even clock that you bought five for that much. Sanch already summed up my opinion on the matter.

Uninstalled everything I don't actively use, including Steam, and it only freed up 20GB. I give in, I need a new external. If I transfer all my documents from the system drive then there'll be nearly 40 free on there, and my external HD is overdue a replacement, I'm surprised it hasn't died on me already.

I've told you lads before and I'll tell you again, you can get Hollister t-shirts for about a fiver each when they're on sale and they're (probably) the best ones you'll get for a low price.

Lidl had absolutely cracking sweet chestnuts today for 59p per 100 gr. Quite large and very firm. They're in my oven now.

>>472495
Oh, honey, that's where food goes, not woodland detritus.

>>472496

Fun fact - sweet chestnuts were a staple food of the poor for centuries until about late Victorian to Edwardian times, because the trees were growing in abundance across many cities. And because they were the food of the poor, many members of classes above the poverty line were afraid to be seen picking them up and collecting them. It was only relatively recently that they became seen as a seasonal delicacy for everybody.

I'm stumped by this quarter's National Trust magazine crossword competition.

The clue is "featured on BBC's Antiques Roadshow" and I have the letters D, T, A, E, R, G, R, E, but fucked if I can rearrange that to fit.

>>472505
Is there a Great Red something? It's probably going to be some stately home or something where an episode was filmed.

>>472506
Gartered?

My personal rules, which admittedly I have broken in the past, are to put on a jumper for the first time when I go away for my birthday (I go away on the 11th this year) and put my heating on in November. After the hottest summer on record, I thought it would be easy, but no, I have just donned my jumper a week early. Winter is here. The SAD seasons are upon us. Fun’s over till April. Most interestingly of all, putting a jumper on hasn’t actually warmed me up at all.

>>472505
I’ve got it! TREDEGAR.

If you got this five minutes after you asked and never told us, I will be very upset.

>>472509
You magnificent bastard.

Do people still use Amazon Alexas, or were they a fad that everyone’s now moved on from? I certainly haven’t heard about them for a while. They were basically the same as all these modern AI tools, and whenever people hype up AI, a lot of its planning features and information-fetching powers are all things that Alexa used to do. I never had one because I refuse to talk to things that aren’t a person, but if nobody else has them now either, that doesn’t bode well for AI.

>>472578
I have a few Echo Spots in my house. Mine is essentially a glorified alarm clock and the kids mostly use theirs for playing music or communicating with each other when they're gaming together in different rooms.

I boil eggs often enough but I realised the other day I haven't bothered to poke a hole in them in years. Can't say it made much difference.

>>472578
I don't think they ever caught on in the first place and then LLMs made them irrelevant. Amazon were trying sell them at a considerable discount at Christmas a few years back to try and get mass adoption but I think even normal people would rather talk to their phone if they're into that.

My girlfriend at the time got me one but I'd found out that she was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and I was doing sensitive work. As a result a cat-and-mouse game started where I put it in the fridge and only got it out when she came over. She admitted that she fucked up by ordering me it quite early into us dating without knowing that I'm the sort to rip out my walls looking for government microphones.

>>472578
My mum definitely uses them. Someone I know is called Alexa, and if my mum says her name while we're talking on the phone, I can hear the device loudly announce it's doing a task of some sort.

An OCD PTSD autistic girl I knew used them as she had a phobia of touching switches and buttons, and they integrated with smart lighting. There was a light by her front door that was red, and when I had to leave she'd go upstairs into a safe zone and use Alexa to make the light green. This indicated I could leave, and she was safe from doors being used near her.

So from my sample size of two, I can at least say old people and the mentally ill still use them.

>Ian Watkins has died after being attacked in prison.

https://news.sky.com/story/lostprophets-singer-ian-watkins-dies-after-attack-in-prison-13448665

>>472587
First of all, brilliant reporting from Sky. There's a photo captioned "Watkins performing in 2014", despite the article itself stating he was arrested in 2012 and sentenced in 2013. Too many cooks, and all that. Secondly, I always enjoy the appreciation for the perpetrator of these kinds of killings and attacks, despite the bloke who did it probably being a family anhiliator or a raper of adults, or some such villain.

Anyway, so endeth the music news.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T96qBwZIBvs

>>472589
I was hoping she'd be meaner. Took my trousers off for nowt.

>>472587
There can be only one.

Anyway, onto the longstanding issues that I came here to post about. Ghostbusters: Afterlife is on BBC1 right now, because there's no Match of the Day. It's making me so angry. The characters are mostly normal, but there's a little girl who happens to be a nerd. She knows absolutely everything, of course, looks down her nose at everyone she meets, is unbearably smug, and is sassy and empowered. I decided that my visceral hatred would be unreasonable, unless I would be willing to tolerate her as one part of a group, perhaps with two boy nerds. Because anyone can be a nerd, and poorly-written nerd characters can be male or female. Three nerds, including one nerd girl, would probably be acceptable representation of women in STEM fields. Just as I was thinking this, she did indeed meet a boy nerd. He's Asian, obviously. He couldn't be white and male. This is why people voted for Trump. And I'm going to rage about this nerd girl being an unlikable, unrealistic, and one-dimensional Mary Sue, and the only people who will listen will either be inbred fascists or people who get angry that I'm being problematic because I just can't handle a strong independent #girlboss.

I genuinely really enjoyed the all-female Ghostbusters that came out before this one, but this is awful and I'm so angry that I don't think it can be saved.

>>472591
>I genuinely really enjoyed the all-female Ghostbusters that came out before this one
You contrarian prick. Sorry, but that film is so naff it's maddening so much was written about it at the time. There isn't a damn thing funny about it. It's full of tedious ad libs, one note gags and tired nostalgia. It's probably the worst thing I've seen Melissa McCarthy do, and that's saying something.

Regarding the other Ghostbusters film: obviously, yeah. It was always going to be rubbish, but you're also someone who's blaming imaginary wokeness for Trump winning, so it's fair of me to assume I'm dealing with a rather dim bulb here. "#girlboss", for pity's sake, mate, did you originally try to post this seven years ago but a dodgy WiFi connection held it up until now?

Everyone knows the true successor to the two Ghostbusters films is Evolution.

I was absolutely roasting on my walk today. I regret not taking anything sugary with me because I was craving something like Tangfastics all the way around.

>>472594
The worst thing to eat when hot - all that geletine and sugar seeping out of your pores. Disgustang.

>>472595
Depends on whether you overdo it or not.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0593gy62edo

Fancy chipping in for Michael Caine's house?

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/163069712#/?channel=RES_BUY

>>472597
The decor isn't great, but you can escape via boat onto the Thames. I'll go halves on it ("havles" is my personal slang for £500).

Also, Michael Caine: secret gamer?

>>472599
>The decor isn't great

I like how the living room is a generic old ladies front room without the television and electric fireplace. I bet he reads the paper in there and gets mad that he has no way to watch the horses without having to walk up into the attic movie room and in the winter he has to wake up and chuck some more logs onto the fire.

>>472601
Yeah.

>>472592

>you're also someone who's blaming imaginary wokeness for Trump winning

It's one thing to suggest wokeness had nothing to do with the reactionary swing toward Trump, but quite another to suggest all that wokeness was imaginary to begin with. When you are talking about the catastrophically bad all female Ghostbusters movie, of all things. I don't quite agree with everything otherlad said but come on lad, you are just being contrarian in the opposite direction here.

The way it's going these days for the woke faithful it's like clinging on the deck of the Titanic yelling "THIS SHIP IS UNSINKABLE" while the hull breaks in half. After not one but two Trump victories the 21st century liberal ideology is completely and utterly discredited.

Sage for going pliticul on /b/ at half 1 in the morning.

>>472603
Do you apply this same binary filter to the politics of 1940s Germany too?

>>472603

>The way it's going these days for the woke faithful it's like clinging on the deck of the Titanic yelling "THIS SHIP IS UNSINKABLE" while the hull breaks in half. After not one but two Trump victories the 21st century liberal ideology is completely and utterly discredited.

What eventually kills off ideologies like wokeness is that its followers don't realise the shaky ground they're really on, mainly the firm and almost religious belief in what their ideology holds as its tenets. Before long, those tenets become unquestioned truisms. And therein lies the danger, because not only are they unquestioned, but to question them becomes sacgrilegy. While at the same time, the lack of reason and common sense or groundedness in reality is quite obvious to most outsiders who aren't part of the movement. And who will also growingly reject the idea that that movement's beliefs should be the standard and reference point for the whole of a culture. Which is what the proponents of an ideology usually claim - that what they believe should apply to everyone, regardless of where everyone stands on the issues. And that unshakable belief in that ideology then usually leads to ever bigger extremes, which are ever more rejected by the mainstream.

By and large, the majority of the people within a culture are usually quite middle of the road, and hold no extreme beliefs and views to one side of the political spectrum or the other. Most of them are too busy going about their daily lives. And that's often where those ideologies then fail to gain ground and the backlash inevitably starts. Because not everybody has the luxury of spending their time daydreaming in sociology seminar rooms, removed from everyday reality.

>>472603
>>472608
What even is "wokeness"? What is "woke ideology"? Nobody's ever managed to give me a consistent definition and it varies from person to person, almost like it was intended to be a vague boogeyman used to discredit, attack and divide instead of having productive conversation about policy/beliefs. From my experience with people who use "woke" seriously it seems to be anything to do with trans people, representation, empathy and climate and vaccine science somehow. We can even see this from the ridiculous "anti-woke" laws they've established in the US, and look what they've been used for. And apparently accurate representation of women in video games is "woke" now too?

>>472611

Postmodern liberal gender/race essentialist identity politics, in a nutshell. The type of online faux-left wing cultural critique that would attack anything and everything but the material roots and mechanics of capitalism. It's a very "you know it when you see it" kind of thing.

One of the main reasons it's hard to give a real definition of it is because it constantly shifts and redefines itself. It was never a true, concrete ideology in itself, it was more like a sort of progressive ideological treadmill where any inconsistencies and contradictions were patched up ad hoc. Hence ending up with the mess of "intersectionality" instead of just admitting that maybe the common thread between oppressor and oppressed is wealth and institutional influence it buys.

"Woke" as an actual word was, as I understand, born out of AAVE and the American black community as a sort of catch-all term for understanding things like the police are biased against you and how things like the sale of crack cocaine to fund CIA black ops were actually true and not conspiracy theory nonsense. For a brief period in the early 2010s the kind of white woman who has dreadlocks and doesn't shave her fanny specifically because she thinks it will spite men started to use it. It quickly became a term of mockery though.

The trouble is it's stuck as an effective form of mockery because there's a nugget of truth to the stereotype, for every bad faith use by some terminally online frogposter there was some Twitter humanities graduate who seriously thought the characterisation of Lara Croft was one of the most significant political issues of our time.

>>472611
My father recently defined 'woke' as people who're shy, appologetic and cowardly. We had noticed two tiny English and British flags flying on the duck island of a pond and the conversation instantly regressed to immigration. I did ask why seeing out nations flags inspired such hatered in him rather than pride at our achievements, but we didn't have much to continue with.
I think his habitual reflex to GBN could cause him to spill some of that hate on to me, eventually. He'd deny its posibility but.. well he doesn't practice his intellectual capabilities very much. Not to say that all racists are dumb, but in this particular case he certainly behaves that way. It's as though he sees an attack on GBN as condoning the immigration situation around the UK. There're barely any jolly foreigners around here, anyway.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one who realises the power of propaganda. Oh well, back to QOS and sissy porn. That's surely not alterning my perception is it.

>>472608
This is some of the most pseudo-intellectual wank I've read in a while. Not to mention it's tediously repetitive.

>ideologies like wokeness
An ideology can't be defined solely by it's detractors, which is by whom we primarily see the word invoked.

>religious belief in what their ideology holds as its tenets
There isn't anything superstitious about social liberalism.

>those tenets become unquestioned truisms
You got me. I think foreigners and women are people too. I'll hold my hands up to that one.

>the lack of reason and common sense or groundedness in reality is quite obvious to most outsiders who aren't part of the movement.
There is no "woke movement". Practically every single "woke idea" you could name has a positive polling outcome in almost every European nation west of the Vistula. The exceptions being migration, which people have a wide range of opinions on, but they generally boil down to "legal migration is fine, but illegal migration isn't, and I reckon a lot of these asylum seekers are taking the mick", and trans rights, which have been subject to a wide ranging and well funded propaganda campaign in recent years, that has lead to what I'm quietly confident is a temporary backslide.

>Because not everybody has the luxury of spending their time daydreaming in sociology seminar rooms
Well, clearly someone here does.

>>472613
>spoilered section
Please say sike.

>>472615
>keep the temperature at 20 degrees
Are you a lizard? Just get a heat lamp to sleep under at that point.

Sometimes I think I should be living about a thousand kilometres closer to the Arctic circle than most people in this country could live with.

Can you lads please stop talking about wokeness?

My new hobby theory of politics is that it's all just coolness. Hip and cool young people and their desperately-trying-to-keep-up middle aged allies versus deeply uncool old people and their angry resentful uncool youth allies.
Trump is fun because his followers are deeply uncool, but the man himself is sort of ironically cool. He's so arrogant and speaks so iconically that his mannerisms make it into cool circles. (Plus, his opponents have both been uncool people, so hating him too furiously is a bit uncool, although it's cooler the second time around.)
Cool people say "I'm a very aesthetic person", "I'll keep drinking that garbage", and so on in a winking, knowing sort of way, uncool people say "Make X Great Again" and they mean it.

It's close to the age/education theory of voting behavior, for obvious reasons, but it captures some things that theory misses like why cool, socially liberal young people generally think Clinton's 2016 loss was hilarious rather than being a tragedy, or why socially liberal 'rationalists' are usually more Trump-sympathetic than not (because they're uncool), or why people regret Trump winning 2024 but don't really mourn the Harris campaign, which a lot of people desperately wanted to be cool because Trump 2024 was a freak-show, but Harris went with the Clinton persona rather than the auntie-found-the-wine persona...
It also explains a lot of the odd behaviour of the younger right-wing cohort, or the right-wing turn a lot of washed up old comedians or older women have gone through: they want to use the power of the state to legislate that they are cool and the current crop of cool people aren't cool anymore..

>>472617
>Please say sike.

>>472619
My own grand theory is an experimental avant garde one we can all participate in: Think about all the high-minded political debates and economic ideas in your head. How quickly do you stop thinking about any of that when you when you see a woman with a nice fat arse and a tight dress? I bet you don't even notice it all flicking off like a light-switch.

There are the things you actually care about, sure. But then there's a lot we're all just boorish idiots about but that we're doing as a parlour game. Fukuyama is probably closer to your idea on acceptance and feeling respected whereas I'm more inclined to think that western civilisation lends us to getting stuck on shit we don't even care about.

>>472617
>An ideology can't be defined solely by it's detractors, which is by whom we primarily see the word invoked.

Would you not say the same about "neoliberalism"? I've never encountered a single person who calls themselves neoliberal or says they sympathise with neoliberal ideas, but according to some (often the people who are always accused of being "woke"), "neoliberals" are indisputably running the show.

>>472627
There's a whole subrudgwicksteamshow.co.uk of self-identified neoliberals, plus the Adam Smith institute have identified themselves as such since 2016. It came about as a response to people using it in the negative to describe things these people think are positive, but still.
As a positive and related identification, you can probably track it back to Charles Peters' "A Neoliberal's Manifesto" from 1983 ( https://www.unz.com/print/WashingtonMonthly-1983may-00008 ), which contains a lot of future third-way cliches and which people like Bill Clinton sympathised with. It was coined as a riff on 'neoconservative' and the essay presciently warns in its own introduction that 'neoliberal' is a terrible name for a movement. That, and the residual distaste for identifying too closely with 'liberalism', is probably why its proponents went for 'New Democrats' instead.
Pile in conceptual stretching and neoliberal ideas having dominant status meaning their proponents can take their basic assumptions for granted ("realism", "economic reality", etc) while opponents need a label for them, and you can see how people wind up going from describing Clinton as a neoliberal for keeping Reaganomics to describing Reagan as a neoliberal because he had the same economics as Clinton.

>>472630
Well, you have answered a question I have always pondered, although I'm not sure if the deranged scrivenings of rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk users says much about reality.

But having said that, I have actually known people use the word "woke" unironically when talking about their own views, even if these days it is used mostly as a pejorative strawman. And also I would still say the term neoliberal is used by its detractors more than anyone who actually calls themselves neoliberal. So, I'm not sure if you can use that approach to discredit the idea that there is such a thing as "wokeness", if that is what you were doing.

I reckon the thing about neoliberalism is just that we're all quite neoliberal as the norm and as a result it works as a convenient strawman for whatever we think is wrong about (today's western) society.

Politicians selling off public assets to their mates to make a fortune off? Neoliberalism.
Eurocrats bending our bananas? Neoliberalism.
Perestroika AND Glasnost? Neoliberalism.

Post-facto there's an attempt at reengineering back to liberalism as we're basically fucked if the free world collectively loses that argument but I imagine the alternatives will eventually prove themselves flawed anyway.

And then we have neoconservativism which has itself evolved into a general critique of intervention without realising the false dichotomy that creates.

>>472653
To add to the list, I've heard someone describe a woman who believed that opposition to female genital mutilation was a form of white supremacy as a product of neoliberalism, and my very conservative in-laws claiming that the blue-haired BLM LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ+ crew are neoliberals. It makes me feel bad for the tiny number of self-described neoliberals otherlad has cited, having their identity stolen from them by proxy.