Posts by oga
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to BenWilson,
That's a good tip about the fare review. I use my Uber account to book cars for my partner to go to work and back (in Mexico City), so my account has been used twice a day six days a week. About 30% of the time (usually later in the week), we have to use surge pricing, but that tends to be about 10-15 pesos more than the usual 35 peso fare. I'm not complaining because I earn a first-world income in Yen and AUD and that's still less than NZD $5 per trip. I haven't had any bad experiences with Uber, but I do note that sometimes the surge drivers take the long way around instead of the direct route marked on the app. I suspect that sometimes this is because of local knowledge, e.g., roadworks, but I think that 80% of the time the driver is just taking the piss and adding the pesos to the fare. So I'll tell my partner about the fare review option. Thanks! Do you have the complimentary bottle of water thing in NZ? I'm paranoid about that here in Mexico. It seems that drivers could fuck with the water (lace it with drugs, etc). While we do have the reassurance of knowing everything about drivers, I am still not sure that it's entirely safe to be giving out water nilly willy.
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Hard News: BRB, at UNGASS, in reply to Russell Brown,
Isn't it the usual thing to approve the minutes of the previous meeting before commencing the next? That's what I know from my governance experience.
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Hard News: What you lookin' at?, in reply to Emma Hart,
I likewise have to pirate my TV and get the related subtitles if I want to watch TV at all. I live in Mexico and Netflix here does not carry English subtitles for the same shows that include English subtitles if I use a proxy to fake an US IP address, which is tiresome because then we can only watch through my laptop ported to the TV instead of the smart TV itself, which can only access the Mexican version of Netflix. The Netflix originals do carry all the language and subtitle options, so we have been watching these, such as Narcos, Jessica Jones, Daredevil, and so on, but the catalog for Netflix is such that we've already seen most of the content previously and so we have more or less stopped watching Netflix until they post a new original series.
The Expanse was my most recent favorite series, and I have a soft spot for the Chronicles of Shannara, mostly for the locations around NZ that I recognize. The Walking Dead is really hitting its stride this season with these episodes that follow the comic book. I am excited for the Negan episodes coming up because I loved that part of the comics. OJ Simpson started strong, but we found that the Kardashian children kept taking us out of the story, and 11.22.63 is definitely better than the book. Black Sails is really strong this season and I am really loving the echoes from my childhood every time I watch it.
Telenovela and Jane the Virgin give us our over-the-top comedy fix, along with Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, Younger, The Muppets, and Crashing.
One thing that turned us back to Netflix from watching pirated TV was the arrest of the guy behind Yify in Auckland. Yify was the most reliable distributor of films including proper subtitles. Nobody has really filled that void. I have been looking for further updates about this (given that it's in our country), but there seems to be no more information about this, which seems odd because I would have thought the media would be all over a local piracy story.
Given that we are sick of Netflix, we are considering subscribing to HULU through the US proxy server, but lately we have been trying out Netflix services in other countries, like Japan, but the chances of English subtitles are spotty, depending on the proxy server country.
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Thank you for the nostalgia. I lived on K Road for several years in the late 1990s (the top floor at 155 above Kirsty, Sue, Rob and Fred), painted the red walls at Verona at one point for some pocket money, lived in Calibre most weekend nights (especially the drum & bass Thursdays), ate copiously at Kens, got my coffee fix from Brazil, chai teas from Alleluya... too many things to recall here.
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I recently moved to Mexico City from Playa del Carmen, on the Caribbean coast of Mexico. Playa del Carmen is a resort town one hour south of Cancun, which could fairly be described as spring break central.
I lived in Playa del Carmen for two years, mainly because I work from home and it was easy to meet Mexico’s temporary residency requirements, and I could challenge my aging brain by trying to learn Spanish (even though I am profoundly deaf). My partner and I moved to Mexico City for a variety of reasons, but one of the main reasons was because we were repulsed by the party culture in Playa del Carmen. It really destroyed our love for the Caribbean environment, the white beaches, the warm sea, the humid briny air, and the constant sunlight.
Playa del Carmen is a slightly tamer version of Cancun, and any night of the year, one can go out to a variety of beach clubs or nightclubs, have a drink or two, and dance to some generic EDM. I frequented a bar called Dolores, which usually had more eclectic and interesting techno DJs playing. It’s a nice space upstairs above 12th Avenue, which is lined with superclubs playing inane doof doof EDM. Predictably, they are filled with transient tourists every night of the week. This suited me initially because my days off work usually fall on a Monday or a Tuesday, and it was always great to go out and have a dance in a full nightclub at the beginning of the week. You can’t do that in Auckland!
At the beginning of January is a two-week EDM festival called http://thebpmfestival.com/BPM, during which the town floods with EDM fanatics. For the most part, they are Americans and Europeans, with a large contingent of Mexicans from cities like Juarez or DF. What they all seem to share is that millennial sense of irresponsibility, of sunburnt dudebro tourist gangs roaming the streets high on bad cocaine and ecstasy analogues looking for women to objectify, and groups of women wearing barely anything. It doesn’t help that the climate means that almost all of the male and female tourists are wearing togs day and night, so everyone is showing as much skin as they can. I became so desensitized to the constant leering and harassment from these tourist gangs that I barely even noticed it anymore. I’m a guy, and it still bothers me to see the rapey male gaze.
Eventually (about one year into living in Playa del Carmen), we stopped going out at all, because of this pervasive culture. I started clubbing in the mid 1980s, going to see bands like Head like a Hole in the pub in the Square in Christchurch, eventually graduating to Worcester bar and the rave scene. Sexual harassment or objectification of women seemed a little less obvious than in the general rock/punk scene, but I knew from my female friends that it was still present, and never went away over the years.
As I aged, I noticed the more ignorant youth coming through, who didn’t care about the music and just wanted something to dance to while they were high on party pills. I felt a growing disconnect from these kids, who invariably ruined the vibe whenever they showed up. In the age of the Internet and the lack of proper MDMA drugs, there seemed to be an increasingly aggressive vibe from kids preloading on alcohol and then taking amphetamine analogues. I missed the more mellow vibes of the 1990s. Yes, I’m saying the drug culture changed, and the party culture changed with it.
Coming back to Playa del Carmen, my experiences showed that the culture seemed to be straight out of reality TV shows like Girls Gone Wild, and I greatly suspect that this type of media has had a great influence on the millennials of today, in addition to the example given by our political leadership (Ponytailgate anyone). Whenever National is in power, there always seems to be an emerging culture of entitlement or selfishness that somehow seems more muffled when a more considerate or altruistic political party is in government.
My partner and I went to one day club during BPM this year, mostly to see Timo Maas play. He was epic as always, and a stark contrast to the much younger DJs before and after him. It was clear that he really could bring the vibe, whereas the other DJs played track after track that thudded dully through the sandy dancefloor of the club but was predictable enough not to alienate the young crowd who were mostly shirtless, bikini clad, and imitating countless rap video moves for and with each other. I still don’t understand why these women need to do a grinding dance or to twerk to show that they are having a good time. I blame the music video and reality TV show culture.
I’m not sure what I as a man can do except step in to ask if people are OK if she/they are obviously being harrassed, or find security guards to throw out the miscreants. Sadly, the behavior described in this thread is everywhere during BPM. That’s a big reason why my partner and I left the paradise environment of Playa del Carmen to move to Mexico City.
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How many MPs in the Labour party themselves received an education before user-pays kicked in? I for one would be content to pay higher taxes for a return to free education and health-care like my parents enjoyed before participating in the user-pays experiment.
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Polity: On tour with The Boss, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I'd read Fear and Loathing in Coatesville: The Mega Internet Party. Someone should write it.
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I wouldn't characterize The Sparrow as hard SF. The hardest science it deals with would be linguistics. Now, Ann Leckie...
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How did I forget the Native Tongue trilogy by Suzette Haden Elgin?
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Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, anything by Doris Lessing will slake literary thirsts beyond the more generic SF books mentioned above. Tiptree’s biography is fascinating reading. Also, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, Sarah Lotz, Alice Hoffman, Lauren Beukes, Ann Leckie have all been doing interesting things recently.