>>31078

I own two lampposts, they light up my driveway.

Went full bachalor-mode and stirred my coffee with a pen, but that pen had a tiny hole in it so now it's full of coffee.

I thought the whole gender thing was overblown but holy shit do you notice it when you're shopping for young children. Teens are easier because you can just buy them computer games of the type they enjoy but with young children you have a colour scheme and then it's working out if its not tat or riddled with broken English.

Any ideas on what to get a 1 and 5 year old?

>>31081

These and some starter picks to go with them.

>>31082
These are great for something to fiddle with on a zoom call when I have to pay enough attention to make doing actual work impossible. Probably a bit of a stretch for a 1yo, although they're as good to chew on as anything, I guess.
Can you ask the owner of the kids for an explicit suggestion, 'to avoid buying something shit that clutter the place up, kill them or go against your (probably batshit) child rearing ethics'? At worst, it's a minefield (hmm, probably not a good suggestion), at best, it's a waste.
Anyway, I think I've ruled out explicit publications, land mines and bat shit. That's helpful, yeah?
Get the 5yo riding lessons if you want to torture the parents for fun.

How do they teach kids not to get run over these days? I can't imagine that the tufty club gets a lot of traction, was shit even in the 70s.

>>29083

Not a problem now - they're not allowed out on their own. It's all lessons on how not to get carpet-baggerd online these days.

>>29083

When I were a lad it were them hedgehogs what sang King of the Road.

>>29085
I distinctly remember them having a mostly white background.

>>91800

The depressing part part is how oblivious your average American people are to all this.

I watched The Boys a bit ago and it struck me how directly on the nose of a caricature the Homelander character is- An almost omnipotent unstoppable force everyone fears, yet who's childish and naive and doesn't know how to handle that power, whose powers are a result of Nazi science from Operation Paperclip and falls in love with an actual Nazi. He's not just a Captain America/Superman stand in, he is America.

It's really very blunt, but most Yank viewers interpret it as a topical jab at Trump supporters.

>>91814
In fairness, their lack of understanding often undermines their imperial ambitions.
Think of the way they basically fired everyone who knew anything about Southeast Asia during the McCarthy era because they were too sympathetic to commies, with the result that America spent an unreasonable amount of time being afraid of China and utterly ludicrous amounts of blood and treasure fighting in Vietnam to contain an entirely imagined communist monolith. The first thing China did after America left Vietnam was invade Vietnam themselves, in a twist that shocked everyone since China and Vietnam have traditionally been the best of friends, having only been fighting one another since... before the birth of Christ.

>>91816
The domino effect is real and should be feared though, that's why everywhere in the Old World from Kamchatka to Cape Town fell to the Reds after Vietnam was done and dusted and why Russia and China are still very purely communistic to this day.

It's easy for me to joke about but the stain of McCarthyism is still very much part of contemporary political discourse and the illusion of the dichotomy of choice the American two-party system promotes works wonders in propping that up.

>>91817

>The domino effect is real and should be feared though

нет

>>91815

If you like a glaringly obvious, but on the other hand ingeniously implicit caricature of America's view of sand people, you should rewatch the original Stargate film from the mid-90s.

Roland Emmerich is an unsung hero of taking the mickey out of the Americans completely unbeknownst to them. Not only did the satirical message of the original Independence Day completely elude them, but he really nailed it with Stargate where the people who pass through the Stargate, all of whom U.S. military and scientists, come to the rescue of an unwashed desert tribe against their alien oppressor. It brilliantly sums up America's perceived sense of superiority by juxtaposing its high-tech military prowess against tent-dwelling, bearded, foreign-talking tribespeople on another planet who are only a few steps removed from the Stone Age.

Put in the context of the 1990 Kuwait invasion and the Allied response, it doesn't take much to realise what Emmerich was really taking a dig at in his film three years later.

>>13976
I suppose to answer the question in the /£$€¥/ thread, I've found myself living close to, and able to semi-regularly buy things from an M&S food hall recently. Their beef and onion with peppercorn mayo sandwich is very nice.

>>13976
Best prepackaged sandwich I've ever had was a carrot chutney one from M&S in London about 7 years ago. I've never seen it again since.

>>13982

I've had some excellent packaged sandwiches, but the best I've ever had was a ham and cheese croissant sandwich from WHSmith's. It wasn't fancy, it wasn't even hot, but for some reason it always hit a spot other meal deal sandwiches and wraps simply couldn't.

I only ever saw them in the airport stores, and the pandemic has caused them to stop stocking them.

>>13987

The Smiffs in Lime Street station stocked these for about a fortnight, then presumably had to stop selling them because they were actually edible.

This spice mix has made me overdose on chicken thighs for the past few days. Delicious stuff.

>>13655

I saved up £10k living in China for 2 years, then when I had to get back to the west for health reasons I spent pretty much all of it being unemployed for the best part of a year.

Ngl it was pretty brutal.

>>13654
>>13655
In addition, there's another important reason to go on Jobseeker's or Universal Bullshit as soon as you're out of work - National Insurance contributions.

Unless you have no interest in a state pension, and I don't see why OP wouldn't be thinking about support in his retirement if he wants support while of working age.

>>13656
Would bitcoin count as an 'asset'?

>>13660

It might if they had any way of linking it to you.

>>13658
Where'd you work in China? Enjoy it? Would you go back?

>>29076
As a member of the downwardly mobile middle class with a passing interest in economic history, that all sounds like another day at the office.

>>29076

My business has taken a huge blow and I'm very angry with the government, but that has little to do with believing the virus doesn't exist or that 5G causes it.

>>29076
I don't think I've ever been so angry that I disbelieved basic science.

>>29080

It's worth remembering, though, that science changes as our understanding changes.

You can easily be embarrassed if you trust the science too vociferously and then new findings prove otherwise. I'm not standing up for the 5G conspiracies or anything here, but I'm saying covid is one of those things our understanding will probably still go on developing a long way after all of this is history, and a lot of what we currently believe and hold up as the truth could turn out to have been bollocks. I mean we still don't know how long antibodies last or if reinfection is possible.

For context, I'm the covid testing lab lad, and I made a right tit of myself back in January/February going around telling people "don't worry, covid will be fine, even if it does make it over here it'll be easy to handle, and even if it isn't the death rate will be tiny, nothing to worry about" because that's what the science bods much more highly qualified than me were saying. Arguably some of that is still true, even, but you'd laugh in my face if I was to stand by it today and say we weren't wrong.

>>29079
It's quite possible to oppose lockdown and not believe in lizard men and the like.

Today I've tried using red wine vinegar in my pasta sauce. I think it might be a bit of a game changer.

>>13055
As I said in >>12823 you need a bit of vinegar to make the tomatoes taste nicer. It's definitely a game changer.

I think I've perfected tomato sauce:-

3 tins of chopped tomatoes
6/7 cloves of garlic
Glug of oil
A few herbs
A squeeze of tomato puree

Perfecto.

>>13056
I always add white wine vinegar to pasta. And a small mountain of salt. The pasta should taste delicious on its own.

>>13274
It ain't perfecto if it's tinned tomatoes now is it, mate.

Never heard of them before, but my local Asda has tins of Di Leo chopped tomatoes for 28p so I've stocked up. They must have tried to import shitloads from Italy when everything hit the fan earlier in the year because they also had loads of bronze cut spaghetti and 00 flour for 20p.

>>4867
>with upper-end prices on amazon marketplace, there would be two or more vendors somehow increasing their prices on a daily basis to dizzying heights

That's a slightly different thing I think - most tech savvy sellers on Marketplace revise their prices multiple times per day, to snipe at their competitors and drive prices down, ie to be the cheapest by a couple of pennies - when you see prices rising to stupid heights, it's nearly always an algorithm going wrong in some way. As an example, I once knew of/detected a competing seller scraping the prices of the company I worked for, so I made the system detect and show them slightly higher prices to break their algorithm - that kind of thing goes on a lot.

>>4868
Bot interactions are fun.
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

>>4864
It's a torrent site just for books

>>4870

Got it with "bibliotik". Looks promising, thanks.

>>4871

Looks like it's invite only. Can you help anotherlad out?

LinkedIn makes me sick to the core. It's like entering an ultracorporate hellworld with no connection to reality. Full of #ThoughtLeaders and #ChangeManagementCoaches, all presenting this ultra-sanitised 'aspirational' image of a world where the only joy in life comes from work, and everything is squeaky clean.

>>13663

I agree, but I view it from a ruthlessly pragmatic perspective. Job alerts, making the occasional cold contact with people who have similar research interests, etc.. I've actually made some decent use out of it in the few years I've had one.

In theory, there's nothing that you can do with LinkedIn that you can't do with e-mail and mailing lists, yet for whatever reason some people are more open to being contacted on there. Maybe there's an informality to it, the ability to see a human face, it doesn't get buried in work e-mails, or any/none of the above.

Just don't scroll through the newsfeeds, unless you've meticulously curated it or enjoy reading mindless corporate propaganda.

It's an absolute shithole full of shitlords. It can help for getting random recruiters to contact you, but not much else - the endorsements aren't worth anything.

If you keep them in the fridge, then your boil timing goes all to fuck.

I left an egg on a radiator for a month to give to someone as a prank, expecting it to smell when cracked, but he cooked and ate it without noticing and before I could stop him. It didn't make him ill and he said it tasted completely normal.

I think you can tell when eggs are off, the yolk seems to stick to the inside of the shell more than usual. I've had a few recently where it was slightly stuck and they didn't taste off.

>For proper eggs you don't put them in as moisture builds up on the inside of the shell.

I've never heard this before. As >>13981 says aren't eggs already full of moisture on the inside of the shell?

At the back of my cupboard is a box of 7 year old eggs. They look fine, but feel a little fluffy and roll like mexican jumping beans.

>>13983

A little bit of experimentation is required, but I find 4:30 to 4:45 is ideal for soft boiled eggs, if you're taking them from the fridge and putting them straight into a rolling boil.

>>67545
Homosexuality is condemned in Leviticus and the story of Sodom in Judaism, Christianity and Shamanism, it's qwhite odd why you would single out Shamanism for religious nuttery.

>>67553
It's odd for the same reason the BBC singling them out and putting them on the front page of my news feed today is odd.

>>67554
Oh it's odd is it. You'll find these really odd too then?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-46445459

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35978328

>>67555
Yes.

This thread is pretty gay.

>>91793
>Grow up.
He's not wrong though.

>>91805
>real issues around a lack of trade union culture

Like Amazon hiring Intelligence to surveil their staff and ensure the workplace is not conducive to Union formation?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements

Or Amazon using Lib Woke talking points as a weapon to ensure the workforce doesn't Unionize?
https://observer.com/2020/04/amazon-whole-foods-anti-union-technology-heat-map/

No you're right. These CEOs are saints, they are not to be expected to adhere to any kind of Social Contract, nor should they be yoked with any additional responsibilities for their staff with all the power and privilege they wield.

>>91799
>The situation might be worse in the US
In the US they're subject to mandatory 100% exit searches, and aren't paid for the time this takes, which can be upwards of an hour on a heavy shift.

>>91799

I don't know how hard you'd work for under a tenner an hour, but my old boss had a phrase I've always rather liked.

"If you're paying peanuts, you'll only get monkeys."

>>91812

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/29/a-year-after-wuhan-alarm-china-seeks-to-change-covid-origin-story

>Nearly a year after doctors identified the first cases of a worrying new disease in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the country appears to be stepping up a campaign to question the origins of the global Covid-19 pandemic.

>State media has been reporting intensively on coronavirus discovered on packaging of frozen food imports, not considered a significant vector of infection elsewhere, and research into possible cases of the disease found outside China’s borders before December 2019.

>The official People’s Daily newspaper claimed in a Facebook post last week that “all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in central China’s Wuhan”.

>>28362
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16614209

>A majority of people believe Black Lives Matter, the anti-racism movement that spread across the UK this summer, has increased racial tension, according to a poll.

>Just over half (55%) of UK adults believe the BLM protests that took place in big cities but also in the Shetland Islands and the Isle of Wight, increased racial tensions, according to a survey of more than 2,000 people by pollsters Opinium. Only 17% of the people polled in October disagreed. The polling also showed 44% of ethnic minorities felt BLM increased racial tensions.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/27/black-lives-matter-has-increased-racial-tension-55-say-in-uk-poll

>>29064
But that doesn't really tell us what people think about BLM itself, just what they think the outcomes of BLM's protests have been.

>>29065
The general consensus seems to be that people agree with the notion that black lives matter but have a much less favourable view on the clusterfuck that is BLM UK as an organisation.

>>29065

Given that the same research shows that Asian people have had a similar rise in racist experiences to black people, they may have a point about the rise not being entirely due to BLM's actions.
Black and Asian Lives Matter would be so much easier to pronounce though, just BALM. Then you'd get some interesting confused mythology referencing Poe; "There is no BALM in Gilead" as in, there should be no minorities in the promised land, only that gets tied up with how Atwood used Gilead in her books.

>>440320

Looks like things haven't been easy for her since then.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/emily-atack-admits-needed-strong-20664306

>>440322
That's a lot of forehead. A lot.

It's very disturbing and concerning to me just how aggressive the counter-propaganda around The Crown has been.

>>440341
I, for one, find this hilarious.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/royal/1365949/the-crown-news-royal-family-Netflix-prince-Charles-princess-diana-culture-secretary-ont

So the government are all just "beta cucktards" who need trigger warnings now, I see?

>>440342
Even with the biggest quotation marks you can find, don't ever speak to me like that again in your life.

>>22950
I tried watching this last night and realised half way through I'd seen it before but forgotten because of how boring it was. May as well just read the plot summary.

Lads, I'm trying to track down a film I saw one night on Channel 4 years ago.

The gist of it is a guy pretending to be a photographer scams his way across Italy. Is joined by a woman running away from a convent. Then after conning a mafia funeral he ends up jailed.

I know it wasn't a fever dream.

I always want something I've never gotten elsewhere when I watch a film, and Colassal certainly delivers. 100% recommended watch on my part.

>>22995
try tipofmytounge on reddit

I watched this last night before bed and it was so good I decided to bump this old thread because it's basically the perfect definition of a hidden gem.

If you've ever stayed up watching some rubbish TV documentary about the Rendlesham Forest incident then this might be your new favourite film. Otherwise I'd recommend it because of how well shot, written and edited it all is. It's not Signs or anything though, just to make that clear. Now one fights a monster with a stick. Most of the people who worked on it or starred in it don't even have Wikipedia pages, so again, the definition of a hidden gem.

>>27618

An ACTUAL PROFESSOR has done studies on the caloric expenditure of popular VR games.

https://vrhealth.institute/vr-ratings/

>>27619
About 1 hour on drums and 30 mins of Beat Saber.

>>27621
Well, I'm glad it was more fun than an hour of walking.

GTA V VR mod works surprisingly well. It's very fun to explore the world map in full VRw.

However, the mod renders the left and right eye alternately, so each eye is always one frame offset from the other, though this can be disabled at the cost of losing stereoscopic effects (which doesn't affect the game all that much, imo). What it does mean though is that now I've come out of about an hour of playing it, the real world feels very strange indeed.

The game is fully playable though, although the Menyoo's laser sights option is a good one to turn on.

2ish month update:

I'm still using it every day, even if just to crack one out, and the novelty hasn't worn off. Been playing Fallout 4 VR for the past couple of weeks, and despite its many, many problems it's far more engaging in VR than it ever was in 2D. Weirdly it almost feels like the Nuka-World DLC was made for VR but it has never officially been released.

At this point I'd say I've got my money's worth out of it, and think that whilst VR still has a way to go, especially with the Quest 2 launching at £299, it's something that I think is worth looking into for more people.

If you've been furloughed but don't own property you are middle class.

The median income for taxpayers is £22,400 and the median household income is £29,600. If you earn more than that, you're doing better than most people. What kind of lifestyle that affords you depends very much on where you live and whether you have kids.

With that said, I think that beyond the level of near-poverty, "doing alright" is much more about managing your expectations, living within your means and building yourself a secure financial foundation. A lot of people who earn well above the average still feel poor, because they compare themselves to an unrealistic standard. A lot of people who could live comfortably are beset by constant money worries because they're living beyond their means.

Having a nice car or a big house doesn't actually make much difference to your day-to-day life, but being financially secure is life-changing. Pay off your debts, build a rainy day fund, take night classes to add another string to your bow and you'll play the rest of your life on easy mode.

>>8028
Median earnings for full-time employees are just over £30,000. I'd have posted an image but this board is still fucked.

>>8029

That's setting the goalposts rather arbitrarily, not everyone is a full time employee but the concept of class and relative prosperity applies to us all.

http://home.bt.com/lifestyle/which-class-are-you-test-which-of-britains-7-new-classes-you-belong-to-11364027532575

7 years ago there was talk of 7 new classes and there was an online quiz to tell you what you were but it is now unfortunately defunct.

>>29052

>>67510
The blur makes her worryingly look like my mum.

>>67511

Is your mum single?

>>67512
No, but my dad is definitely punching with her.

>>67509
She's dead

Carol Vorderman with my future wife.