Paddy's "Things that cheer you up"

[BOF]

3 minutes ago, villarule123 said:

I don't think anything in the world other than video games would make @StefanAVFC lose his shit more

[villarule123]

1 minute ago, BOF said:

I haven't been in the NFL section, is he bad in there too?!

He talks about it over the headset but it puts me to sleep 

[Xela]

Never been into gaming but can see why it would be fun - i'm probably best avoiding it as I would be even less productive than I am now!

 

[Xela]

First week in my new office and it is fantastic. Its modern, sleek with plenty of 'break out' areas. The tech works flawlessly and and each floor has quality coffee machines as well as a kitchen area plus cafes and diners on various floors. Not quite in the Google league of working but not far off. 

[AVFC_Hitz]

2 minutes ago, Xela said:

First week in my new office and it is fantastic. Its modern, sleek with plenty of 'break out' areas. The tech works flawlessly and and each floor has quality coffee machines as well as a kitchen area plus cafes and diners on various floors. Not quite in the Google league of working but not far off. 

Have you hand shandied behind the pot plants in the lobby yet? 

You have to properly christen the place.

[bickster]

2 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

I think @NurembergVillandid a few of those (not the Villa one)

[NurembergVillan]

29 minutes ago, bickster said:

I think @NurembergVillandid a few of those (not the Villa one)

I did a couple.  This was my favourite -

[Seat68]

10 hours ago, Xela said:

First week in my new office and it is fantastic. Its modern, sleek with plenty of 'break out' areas. The tech works flawlessly and and each floor has quality coffee machines as well as a kitchen area plus cafes and diners on various floors. Not quite in the Google league of working but not far off. 

I did a stint at Legal and General in the City Centre earlier in the year and loved working there as the environment was excellent. As a consultant I was moved on, a little gutted when I was. 

[chrisp65]

hmmm, I'm hoping I have a similar experience. We're moving office in a couple of months. Moving to bespoke office space on a 'business park' with good broadband, open plan, straight walls, standard suspended ceiling grids, raised access flooring, good lifts and allocated parking. Everything the modern office can offer.

We're leaving a ramshackle old building in a mixed use street on the side of a park by a river near a city centre. Which I really like.

I have a strong feeling the new building will have every modern convenience, except interaction with community and green space. 

[mottaloo]

16 hours ago, Xela said:

First week in my new office and it is fantastic. Its modern, sleek with plenty of 'break out' areas. The tech works flawlessly and and each floor has quality coffee machines as well as a kitchen area plus cafes and diners on various floors. Not quite in the Google league of working but not far off. 

....and the quality of the local totty...? 

(Yes, I did just use the word "totty" !)

[Mark Albrighton]

While I generally dislike Friday night football, I will admit that it is nice having gained a win and then you can just get on with the weekend, not having your thoughts elsewhere, letting all the other teams duke it out in whatever fashion they like.

It kinda feels similar to getting all your homework out of the way immediately so you can relax.

[Davkaus]

My gf has been away with friends for a couple of weeks. She seemed a bit put out when I joked she should stay out there for another week.

Consequently, in time for her being home, there are about 100 balloons spread throughout the house, every flat surface is covered in tacky colourful bunting, and there's an assortment of about a dozen random items we have that are animal shaped arranged as a welcoming committee by the front door wearing party hats. It looks like we're about to host a 6 year old's birthday party. My only concern is she won't realise I'm taking the piss, it's pretty subtle.

Edited November 3, 2018 by Davkaus

[bickster]

Just got back from the latest attempt by a bunch of Fascist Twunts to march in Liverpool

Yet again they didn't get out of the station

[TheAuthority]

3 hours ago, Shropshire Lad said:

It kinda feels similar to getting all your homework out of the way immediately so you can relax.

Nope. 

[Xela]

11 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

hmmm, I'm hoping I have a similar experience. We're moving office in a couple of months. Moving to bespoke office space on a 'business park' with good broadband, open plan, straight walls, standard suspended ceiling grids, raised access flooring, good lifts and allocated parking. Everything the modern office can offer.

We're leaving a ramshackle old building in a mixed use street on the side of a park by a river near a city centre. Which I really like.

I have a strong feeling the new building will have every modern convenience, except interaction with community and green space. 

Ours is the best of both... its all new and modern but bang in the centre of the city as well. It hasn't got parking though... well, it has about 30 spaces for 2500 staff! Its not an issue when you are in the centre though and in a year or so the office will have a tram stop right out the front of it. 

[Dr_Pangloss]

This is just brilliant

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2018/10/dog-rape-and-mein-kampf-feminist-text-why-we-hoaxed-journals-terrible

 

Dog rape and Mein Kampf as a feminist text: why we hoaxed journals with terrible papers

 

We just spent a year writing and publishing calculatedly terrible papers in academic journals that look at aspects of identity – gender studies, fat studies, feminist geography, masculinity studies, sex and sexuality studies, feminist philosophy, feminist epistemology. This is not some obscure academic squabble. This is about something that affects us all. This is about culture.

Nearly all of us see symptoms of the problem. We see an increasing disregard for evidence and objectivity in favour of emotionally resonant narratives. We are becoming accustomed to the idea that people with different identities (eg female, homosexual, black) have different knowledges and experiences that only they can speak to authoritatively. We see an authoritarian focus on language as being dangerous and in need of careful regulation as something that inflicts harm and violence. We see the proliferation of terms like “toxic masculinity”, “white fragility”, and “microaggressions”, and we know we must avoid being tarred with those brushes. 

Few people know the genesis of these ideas. They came from academic papers. They came from articles very much like ours.

Of 20 papers we submitted, seven were accepted, six we deemed unworkable and a further seven were in various stages of the submission process when the project was discovered.

Our papers claim that dog parks are rape-condoning spaces and that by observing the reactions of dog-owners to “unwanted humping” among dogs, we can determine that a human rape culture is deeply ingrained in men who could benefit from being trained like dogs. They investigate why heterosexual men enjoy the company of attractive and scantily-clad female servers in a restaurant and conclude it’s so they can live out fantasies of patriarchal domination. They ponder why heterosexual men rarely self-penetrate their anuses with sex-toys and advocate doing so in order to become less transphobic and more feminist.

 

Do you see a pattern? Although the papers we wrote scanned many subdisciplines of identity-based studies, by far the greatest uptake was of the ones which argued (on purely theoretical, subjective, and unfalsifiable grounds) that heterosexual masculinity is toxic, abusive, and thoroughly problematic. This perfectly comports with the rhetoric coming from feminist journals as aptly demonstrated by Suzanna Danuta Walters, editor-in-chief of the storied feminist journal Signs, when she asked the world in the Washington Post, why can’t we hate men?

In addition to the problematic nature of men’s attraction to women, we also published a rambling poetic exploration of feminist spirituality generated largely from a teenage angst generator which we hypothesised would be acceptable as an alternative, female “way of knowing”. That paper was purely silliness, and the journal a minor one. We took our experimentation with the idea that we could make anything at all fit some kind of popular “theory” to the limits when we successfully published a section of Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism. We denied objective knowledge about morbid obesity too: we argued this serious health problem represents a body just as legitimately built as a finely honed muscular one. We see the impact of this dangerous narrative in activism to prevent the provision of health advice around body-weight.

This is not scholarship. In simplest terms, this is the explicit replacement of rigorous evidence-based research and reasoned argument with appeals to lived experience and a neurotic focus on the power of language to create social reality. This originated with post-modernists like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida, and was made explicitly political by a new generation of scholars who applied it in the fields we’ve called “grievance studies”. In our flagship paper (rather cheekily named “When The Joke Is On You”), we took this attitude as far as it would go and (ironically) applied it to ourselves and our own project. Our argument: all satire of “Social Justice” scholarship is illegitimate and merely an attempt to selfishly preserve privilege. The reviewers of Hypatia informed us that this constituted “an excellent addition to feminist philosophy”. 

While this is deeply troubling, the problem is not confined to the academy. These ideas are produced and legitimised in academia and given the status of knowledge via publication in peer-reviewed journals. This affords them power to influence education, activism, media, culture, and policy. One could think of this as a kind of “idea laundering’” through the university, in which opinions and prejudices can be validated by scholarly journals and come out looking like legitimate knowledge. The trouble is if this scholarship cannot be trusted, the consequences affect all of us – particularly those groups it purports to help.

We did this project because we think it matters. It matters that we study issues of identity, and it matters how we study them. It matters that scholarship is rigorous and non-ideological. Social justice cannot be advanced by shoddy, unsubstantiated truth claims and ideologically-biased agendas. It therefore matters that we put finding truths, whatever they are, ahead of ideology, however well-intended. We need solutions that work, and this is more likely if they are firmly tethered to reality.

These disciplines and the institutions that support them need to be reformed. However, more importantly, we, the people outside the academy and yet affected by its knowledge production, have to be aware of the problems with the scholarship, educational methods, and activism that depend upon these fields. What needs to change is the presumption that this work speaks for the people it claims to, including liberals, women, and racial and sexual minorities. It does not, and risking being called bigoted for pointing this out is worth it.

[Xela]

3 days at work next week then two and a half weeks off. This time next week i'll be in Thailand 

[HanoiVillan]

7 minutes ago, Xela said:

3 days at work next week then two and a half weeks off. This time next week i'll be in Thailand 

Nice! Where are you going?

[Xela]

2 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Nice! Where are you going?

Only in Bangkok for a coupe of nights (its where we are all meeting) before the main break which is Saigon and Hong Kong / Macau. Looking forward to it!

[HanoiVillan]

33 minutes ago, Xela said:

Only in Bangkok for a coupe of nights (its where we are all meeting) before the main break which is Saigon and Hong Kong / Macau. Looking forward to it!

Some of my favourite places in Asia. Good choices!