pootriarch

represent your favorite 80s moment, band, singer, over on popheads!

https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/68573

how does one map an abomination of bike lanes running down the center of a two-way street?!

valencia st in san francisco is currently mapped as a two-way street with outer bike tracks, which used to be accurate. the city ripped those up and painted lanes in the middle; these barely deserve to be called tracks because cars can trivially cross into the bike lanes - there's just a little rounded hump an inch or two high.

do we split the road into two one-way roads with bike tracks on the left side? besides being dishonest, as it's a contiguous piece of asphalt with no median, i think we'd need a ton of new relationships to describe what turns can and can't be done at every intersection.

or, morbidly, do we wait for enough cyclists to be killed that they put it back?

[vivid hate of Morrissey…] The bangers by The Smiths remain bangers. If only they could be enjoyed live without the taint of Morrissey infecting them.

Enter Rick Astley!

Not content with Rickrolling stadium crowds… the meme king of side quests has made it his mission to make The Smiths songs enjoyable live again, appearing at the UK’s Glastonbury Festival over the weekend to not only perform a set of his own, but to then put on a secret show with English group Blossoms, which consisted entirely of The Smiths covers. This isn’t the first time that Astley and Blossoms have gotten together onstage to perform the material, and judging by the reception it might not be the last. Morrissey is dead, long live New Morrissey.

oh please let me find video of this

Starting in version 1.54, [the browser] Brave will automatically block website port scanning, a practice that a surprisingly large number of sites were found engaging in a few years ago. According to this list compiled in 2021 by a researcher who goes by the handle G666g1e, 744 websites scanned visitors’ ports, most or all without providing notice or seeking permission in advance. eBay, Chick-fil-A, Best Buy, Kroger, and Macy's were among the offending websites.

this raises my antennae way up but i have to admit, although being probed makes my skin crawl, i don't actually understand what bad actors can do. it seems bad but that could be fud.

more distressing is the wall of shame; if even slightly true, this is hideous. typing just obvious things i know from just one screenful of a 700+-line document: state farm, lending tree, citibank, glassdoor, iberia. for some reason financial firms are heavily represented here.

anyone have any knowledge in this domain? and if it's an actual problem, what's the best way to put a ring around it? the actor is inside your browser, so the usual firewall tricks don't apply.

…baby don't herd me

We pop fans are pretty used to shade, but each of us has unpopular opinions that could cause bar fights even among us.

One of mine is, even though Born This Way is a caricature of itself, I reach for it more frequently than any other Gaga album.

I also still like "Never Gonna Give You Up."

shields up, next

For many, it’s impossible to think about Barbie — or the upcoming Barbie movie — without also thinking about the hit song “Barbie Girl.” The single, released by Danish-Norwegian band Aqua in 1997, quickly became a global success — being described as both a masterpiece and the most annoying tune ever made.

What is less well known is that Barbie maker Mattel tried to sue the band over the song.…

After years of legal tennis, the case eventually made it to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, where Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in his legal opinion, “If this were a sci-fi melodrama, it might be called Speech-Zilla meets Trademark Kong.”

On a more serious note, Kozinski ruled in favor of MCA, noting that the song was parody and therefore protected by the First Amendment. But he concluded his opinion with the memorable line, “The parties are advised to chill.”

call me any -ist you like, but i'm not taking any boomer dude's advice on a britney-themed jukebox musical. even if i fully expect it may be actually no good.

at least they found someone on copy desk to write a punny headline for him

[At an Ava Max concert in LA] a man ran on stage and slapped the singer mid-performance. Security dragged him away, as Max continued to finish her song.

enter hellscape, scene 2

… he said to the white rabbit. 'i'm not a proper swiftie or anything, i've no idea how this got there'

— sure, the rabbit replied