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[Yoink]

What does it mean when someone includes a 'gender symbol' (I'm sure there's a more correct term that I am unaware of) after a social media post?
Is it a pre-emptive strike on people potentially assuming their gender, a declaration of their feminist tendencies, or what?
Been seeing it more and more lately, feels like I missed something.

This is really bugging me, guys. Surely someone has to know??

[Sheb]

Apparently it's a iOS thing. iOS got gendered emojis, but on other platform it shows as emoji+symbol.

[Yoink]

Apparently it's a iOS thing. iOS got gendered emojis, but on other platform it shows as emoji+symbol.

Aha, thank you! That is probably it. Although I don't remember seeing a preceding emoticon beforehand in most cases... perhaps my device is especially non-compatible.    

[Trekkin]

I guess it's the time one, then. Thanks, everyone.

Edit: I had another one. Is there a word to describe an architectural style similar to Brutalism but without all the frivolity? One with less of an emphasis fancy curves and angles and complicated involutions and windows, and more on appropriately-sized rectangular concrete buildings with as little fuss as possible?

[EnigmaticHat]

Modernist architecture.  The emphasis is on removing adornment and on form over function.  Modernist buildings were often but not always box-like, some were weird domes or senselessly curved structures.  From what I understand the purpose of the curves wasn't lowered price so much as increased function; the shape of the building was supposed to interact with sun and wind to effect the heating, lighting, and sound experienced by the people inside.  Some modernist architects even experimented with spaces open to weather, in extreme cases having rooms with the floor open to bodies of water, or building the structure around flowing water that would flow through some of its rooms.  More practical applications of that concept would be skylights, porches, balconies and decks, which allow the benefits of outdoor spaces while still having a clear delineation between indoor and outdoor.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Even that isn't as bad as brutalism. If I could tear down every brutalist building in the world, I would. It's criminally ugly.

[EnigmaticHat]

Boston's city hall is Brutalist and I'll never get over that.  It runs completely counter to Boston's... spirit, I guess.  And it physically looks way out of place.

Edit: Which BTW, if you have an interest in architecture you might what to think up an excuse to visit the city.  Maybe see a few of the tourist attractions, ride the duck boats.  The city is a blend of many different architectural styles and there's a lot of interesting history for why that is.  Its also very archetypically New England and a little lost in the past; you can walk around some parts of Boston at night and feel the same inspiration that Poe and Lovecraft must have felt.  Its sort of... spooky and bleak but at the same time cozy.

[Reelya]

The funny thing was that some people were calling Brutalism "communist" architecture at one point on the forum. It turns out that only makes sense when you consider Western cliches about the Soviets: e.g. they all want to live grey lives in grey boxes.

"Revolution is success! Now you live better life in featureless concrete box!" <= this just wouldn't work as internal propaganda. This is the actual thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture

In fact. nope. Classic Soviet architecture is overly ornate because they wanted to express the cultural achievements of the revolution. Similar to the USA building all that Greco-Roman style stuff. Brutalism was thoroughly a Western development, which then influenced the East.

[Avis-Mergulus]

Am I the only person who kinda likes Brutalism? It does have this sort of raw badassery to it, and also sometimes looks like something you would see in R'lyeh with all the intersecting weathered concrete planes and stuff.

The funny thing was that some people were calling Brutalism "communist" architecture at one point on the forum. It turns out that only makes sense when you consider Western cliches about the Soviets: e.g. they all want to live grey lives in grey boxes.

"Revolution is success! Now you live better life in featureless concrete box!" <= this just wouldn't work as internal propaganda. This is the actual thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinist_architecture

In fact. nope. Classic Soviet architecture is overly ornate because they wanted to express the cultural achievements of the revolution. Similar to the USA building all that Greco-Roman style stuff. Brutalism was thoroughly a Western development, which then influenced the East.

That's a little inaccurate, isn't it? I mean, Stalinist architecture is "classic Soviet architecture" in a way, but the way you're phrasing it makes it seem like "classic Soviet architecture" is limited to Stalinist architecture, when in actuality it came after Soviet constructivism (which is really cool and also not something you'd describe as "featureless grey boxes") and ended really abruptly with Stalin's death, condemned as "architectural excess".

I would say that constructivism has much more to do with "expressing the cultural achievements of the revolution" than Stalinist architecture. The constructivist idea is something like "a new life, a new order, a new architecture", and they built a lot of weird and novel stuff that was very influential later on. While the Stalinist idea was more like "let's make everything very palace-like and basically something like a communism-flavored Empire style". Which isn't fundamentally a bad idea, but not really new. The constructivists took discarding the old world and shaking its dust off their feet very seriously, while Stalinist architecture represents a return to the old-world values and ideas, which makes it a bad candidate for expressing the cultural achievements of the Revolution. Its material achievements, maybe.

Basically, constructivism is high-concept, Stalinism is high-bling.

[Yoink]

*googles*

...Man, y'all are complaining about Boston city hall?
It's certainly weird but it is nowhere near as bad as most modern architecture over here. At least that is more-or-less building shaped and looks quite impressive with its dramatic windows.
Here in Australia our architects and developers are locked in a ceaseless battle to one-up the creations of their peers in terms of sheer ugliness, happily tearing down structures from better times to make way for fresh abominations. I hate this country.

[Trekkin]

Am I the only person who kinda likes Brutalism? It does have this sort of raw badassery to it, and also sometimes looks like something you would see in R'lyeh with all the intersecting weathered concrete planes and stuff.

Oh, I love Brutalism when it's sensible. The problem I have with it is, like I said above, people get way too artsy with it. We cannot have sensible concrete boxes, oh no; we must be artistic and make everything triangular and convoluted and inefficiently complicated.

Modernism is closer to what I had in mind, but still loves to put windows and curves everywhere. I was just hoping there was an actual word to describe the style of something like the AT&T Long Lines Building that didn't also cover ornate, overly complicated things like the Kyoto International Conference center -- or the Boston City Hall, come to think of it.

[Sheb]

Boringism?

[redwallzyl]

Who the hell through eternally accumulating interest was a good idea? aside from the people who profit from it of course. any sensible society should cap it at like 3x original at most. debt slavery is stupid.

[Frumple]

Eh, bankruptcy, debt annulment and selling. The whole collecting thing. It's not eternal, usually, and there's a bucketload of disincentives for it to go the debt slavery route these days. More or less indefinite being there's mostly for bonds and long term investments and whatnot, iirc. Practically, there probably is a sort of societal/economic soft cap. Hell, want to say tracking that sort of thing is important for economic prediction making, canary in coal mine style.

You could cap it at something but I think folks decided it'd be less effort letting that bit be and sticking exceptions for cases of import. Also screw a bunch of people (mostly the person after the loan, rather than the one giving it) over to have that sort of hard debt cap, since the possibility of it extending that far is one of the ways lenders mitigate risk... weren't there, and you'd probably be seeing much smaller loan caps and more stringent barriers to access, if I'm recalling the interaction correctly. Some of that is good, but too much strangles a lot of potential inroads for starting business and crap.

Bad juju on the economic front, basically.

[redwallzyl]

Eh, bankruptcy, debt annulment and selling. The whole collecting thing. It's not eternal, usually, and there's a bucketload of disincentives for it to go the debt slavery route these days. More or less indefinite being there's mostly for bonds and long term investments and whatnot, iirc. Practically, there probably is a sort of societal/economic soft cap. Hell, want to say tracking that sort of thing is important for economic prediction making, canary in coal mine style.

You could cap it at something but I think folks decided it'd be less effort letting that bit be and sticking exceptions for cases of import. Also screw a bunch of people (mostly the person after the loan, rather than the one giving it) over to have that sort of hard debt cap, since the possibility of it extending that far is one of the ways lenders mitigate risk... weren't there, and you'd probably be seeing much smaller loan caps and more stringent barriers to access, if I'm recalling the interaction correctly. Some of that is good, but too much strangles a lot of potential inroads for starting business and crap.

Bad juju on the economic front, basically.

Less risky loans sounds like the opposite of a bad thing seeing as what keeps happening. Also it could prevent people who don't make a enough to catch up to eventually pay it off without ruining their credit eventually instead of bankruptcy possibly givings lenders more reliable borrowers and preventing abuse. also it would stop the excesses of payday loans and such fairly well.

this assumes of course that banks are not scum that gamble with peoples money and don't care if they get replayed becasue they sold the debt to someone else but that standard neoliberal fuckery.