nephihaha

Sometimes. I think this is partly because search engines are so poor nowadays. I have asked AI for certain websites that I know exist but it can't find them.

This is a very good point. If it should be used as anything, it is as a pointer to other things.

There are a lot of corporate piss-poor local stations. Apart from the Heart and Crapital stuff, the Forth and Clyde stations are awful. Even their continuity has one of those awful Estuary accents.

Most of them are indistinguishable, don't carry local news (apart from boasting about charity fundraising they do), or local bands. Pure pap

There is a very different feeling streaming radio online as compared to getting it off a traditional radio. For me anyway. It's hard to explain. At night, you could pick up many weird stations from around the world here including Iceland and the Eastern Bloc, the Voice of America, sometimes if the conditions were right North American stations. I used to try and guess some of the languages. That was a challenge in itself sometimes.

Thanks to censorship and government interference, you can't listen to certain stations now, e.g. Turkey won't allow you to listen online outside Turkey, Russian stations are blocked thanks to the Ukrainian situation, and even some American stations are blocked. Search engines are near useless for most things nowadays.

"I grew up in the UK in the 80's, and that entire generation received our music taste from BBC Radio 1."

I didn't. Apart from John Peel, many of the DJs were naff and the station was behind the curve (as the BBC nearly always is). The BBC was faintly ridiculous and banned groups like Runrig (informally because they considered them too Scottish) and songs like Split Enz's "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" (formally, because of the Falklands War). Both of which were inoffensive...

But apart from Peel, the BBC was way behind when it came to metal (except pop/hair metal), hip hop, indy/alternative/shoegaze, rave/trance/techno etc. I think they picked up on the Pixies and grunge but not much else.

I did enjoy that article, especially the main point, but I would take issue with the notion of diversity in the Roman Empire. I have seen this label before, but it is misleading and anachronistic, since the various other groups the Romans conquered were gradually romanised. We might as well say the British or Spanish Empires were diverse... On one level they did have many cultures, but there was also a concerted effort to assimilate those cultures and languages.

"Outcounterexampled": there's a neologism worthy of German.

At the same time as a lot of other countries.

Ascension Island and the Falkland Islands seem to have reasonable broadcasting because they have major military bases on them. Diego Garcia would be the same. The Falklands have a substantial civilian population, but Ascension has almost no one who can be classed as a kind of native. (Tristan Da Cunha and Saint Helena both do.)

Somewhere like Bermuda or certain smaller Caribbean Islands will have had decent service due to being tax havens (Cayman Islands, Virgin Islands) or major tourist destinations (St. Barts, Bahamas, Barbados). (Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad & Tobago, and Hispaniola all have large populations.)

I was in Nepal in the early 1990s and there was a surprisingly limited service within Kathmandu (mostly satellite), and none up in the hills. I imagine that has changed a lot since then. I am friendly with a Nepali family here and they watch a lot of Hindi soaps and Bollywood, because they can understand the language. I'm sure Nepal is swamped with "global" content now and is no better for it.

Diagnosis for a start. I was having this debate with someone about it. While I do know someone who was diagnosed in the 1970s, it was never "a thing" while I was at school and no one was looking for it seriously until the late 1990s. Even then the screening was mostly for children not adults.

Many older people have slipped through the net and never even considered it. I definitely did encounter a number of people who had it when I was growing up. Some were misdiagnosed with catastrophic consequences.

A lot of these places have gradual introduction as well. There were parts of the UK without a proper TV signal well into the 1980s.

Mid 1990s is earlier than I thought. Places like Tristan da Cunha and Pitcairn Island may be even later.

Spielberg has dealt with a few American tropes: UFO encounters, WW2 service men, slavery, monster sharks, road chases, cowboy archaeologists, tricksters, Abraham Lincoln, and hauntings.

Longfellow springs to mind. Not my personal favourite, but wrote epics in meter.

Some other suggestions are in the wrong genre.

Likely there are some native American bards who were nearer to Homer in spirit.

DVLA customer service is appalling. Always has been. They are just a means of extorting money from drivers with little in return.

YouTube algorithms have a tendency to try and lead you down rabbit holes and watch AI generated content. I notice YouTube constantly trying to bias me in one direction or another. A lot of the political content on there is nowhere near as intelligent as it pretends to be.

If it notices you are interested in something, it will show you a glut of content on that particularly subject. Some of the videos are just churning out similar content. If you click on a Monty Python video, Python takes over your suggestions. Nothing against Python, I just want to watch a variety of things.

The island of Saint Helena only started getting TV relatively recently, so some studies have been done on children there to compare effects.

I don't think these are a good comparison. The nature documentaries are primarily visual (and since it's Attenborough involve a lot of Foley work). His docs are extremely well made, but you could still use them as wallpaper as I have seen some do.

Maybe the same could be said about the Marvel films. You don't have to concentrate much, but you are guessing some of what is going on.

Some programmes do require some more imagination or interaction. A murder mystery, if it's any good will get you wondering whodunnit. If you are watching a better quality gameshow, you may be at least attempting to answer the questions. Or both may be wall paper.

A fair point. I would argue that middle brow content is more dangerous. A lot of documentaries, news and political content will promote ideas which sound sophisticated or reasonable, but are no such thing.

I could have told you that years ago. LOL. The problem is that as a medium it is so passive. Radio forces you to visualise to some extent or maybe do other things. Computer games and some of the internet (even social media!) require some interaction.

Reading and stage plays require heavier use of the brain too. In the case of reading, you both interpret the words and in many cases visualise things based on them.

There was the cassette thing a few years ago. Cassettes were good in that you could drop them on the ground and they would be okay. Not so gold when they got tangled.

I don't think vinyl ever fully went out of fashion.

Fandom was good a few years ago, but it is obvious that some of their Wikis are better run than others. The James Bond wiki has major issues for example.

Fandom has also adopted the UN SDGs without user consent and is beginning to impose them and use them to censor content.

It may be because in those days that daughters were seen as a means of forming ties with various mens' families through children.

Either way, there is a strange ending to this story which is that Lot's daughters got him drunk and seduced him.

The best thing about vinyl is the covers. The artwork and sleeve notes look great due to the size. Cassettes and CDs don't work as well that way.

MiniDisc never took off in some parts of the world, so little real nostalgia in those places.

I knew plenty of smaller and tenant farmers who benefitted from the EU. There weren't industrial farms around there.

Well, there was the line about Pushinka being checked for an implanted listening device, so I suppose that counts as hacking news. :)

Meh, sounds AI generated and generic. The song doesn't sound remotely Scandinavian or "folk" other in the general way that so called Celtic music can.

In those days, people did not have many qualms about such things. The Romans destroyed Carthage long after this was written, and expressed little regret over having done so.

https://archive.is/20260716124040/https://www.economist.com/...

Paywall free link.

That's my interpretation. He's trying to get back to Penelope, and has bizarre adventures on the way.