Posts by Tom Beard
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Coincidence? Or tattoo idea?
Has anyone yet printed underwear with "NSFW" on the front?
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In my mind NSFW stood for "not suitable for work" i.e. if the boss wanders past and you are looking at this you are going to be hard pressed to say if it is for any work related purpose ..
That was one of the advantages of working as a web designer. If the boss wanders past, just hit "View Source" and say, "My, they do make interesting use of CSS on Fleshbot". Um, whatever that is.
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beer drinkers will leave the Backbencher much poorer but not much drunker as they serve the most expensive beer around. Try the Occidental on Lambton Quay instead.
Really? Try Leuven or the Malthouse for some properly expensive beer. I'm not sure that the Poxy Oxy has much worth drinking: mostly mediocre Monteiths stuff. As someone once said about wine: "Good beer is never too expensive. Bad beer always is".
Yeah, um, this isn't really dispelling the whole snobbery thing, is it?
No. No it isn't. Where on earth did you get the impression that I intended to dispel any impression of snobbery?
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And then you end up with those detailed warnings like the ones in front of The Sopranos and Outrageous Fortune, that act like promos. We try to predict the plot on the basis of whether we've been warned about sexual content, or violence, or both.
But do they warn you about the truly dangerous stuff? Such as "Supernatural themes"?
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The Backbencher's a five minute walk I'd say -- don't know how you're getting Customhouse Quay as the closest leisure facility. Certainly the Fever never had any problem getting from a pub to the stadium on foot.
The Molesworth area (Backbencher, Thistle and ... that's about it) doesn't really add up to a "Leezure area". Kumutoto/Queens Wharf (off Customhouse Quay) is one of the nearest bar/restaurant areas with any critical mass, though there is a smattering of bars along Featherston St. But if you're on your way from the Stadium to Courtenay Place (which is where most of the munters ... oops, I mean "dedicated sports fans") will be headed, then Kumutoto would be the first cluster of bars you hit. Not exactly adjacent, especially when you count the long trudge along the concourse, but better than Auckland's situation.
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Offices, gyms and even cafes are not public space. (Any more than the Canary Wharf tower in London is a public space just because it includes a train station and shopping mall).
Train stations and the like are an interesting case: I tend to think of the Wellington Railway Station concourse & booking hall as interior public spaces, and the great stations around the world are spaces of great civic significance. In the strict sense of "a space that belongs to a public authority rather than a private entity, and to which public access is guaranteed almost all the time", then of course malls are not public spaces. But Benjamin wrote a lot about arcades, which were a precursor to malls in a sense, in a way that treated them very much as part of the public realm.
In reality, there is a spectrum of land uses that ranges from the truly public to the purely private. Cafes and bars form a vitally important part of the "third space", and as the phrase "public house" indicates, in many cultures they are considered to be as important a public facility as a park or square. In fact, the ground floor of a building that houses a popular and accessible cafe can be much more relevant and useful as a sociable public space than a poorly designed and sited park.
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Often the truly "NSFW" sites are those that attract attention to the fact that you're looking at something not work-related. For instance, the Snorg T-shirt ads on Bloglines don't show a lot of flesh, but they are, ahem, eye-catching. The fact that I use Bloglines to keep track of work-related feeds (Treehugger, BLDGBLG, Eye of the Fish, and never anything frivolous like Public Address, no never) wouldn't be apparent to anyone who glanced over and saw models in tight T-shirts and teeny pants.
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You're thinking about stadia only as they look towards the playing field in the middle.
And sometimes even that is public: the Basin Reserve is a pedestrian and bike shortcut when a game's not on, and the grass berms are used for eating lunch or lounging in the sun.
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Without wanting to rehash an argument that I've been involved in for nearly a decade, I'll just give a hearty "hear hear!" to Tim's comment:
Not wanting to talk too much about Wellington, but thank god there are an awful lot of new buildings there. It means it gets used, even today. Shouldn't be one or the other, but both.
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/cry
not of ... have
That's kind of the point.