Britain

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

roach-works:

lasrina:

luimnigh:

Okay, here’s my idea:

The British should put a time limit on the Monarchy.

Not like declaring a republic tomorrow, but deciding on a date in the future that ends the British Monarchy.

And there’s a perfect date for it coming up!

October 14th, 2066.

A thousand years since the Battle of Hastings. A thousand years of this one specific bloodline ruling England.

Call time on the Monarchy after exactly one thousand years. Nice, and neat.

Even better: Charles isn’t living 44 years. He’ll be gone in about twenty. Now William? He’s what, 40? Yeah, he can live another 44 years. His great grandmother was over a hundred, his granny was 96, William can make it to 84 barring accident or assassination.

So on October 14th 2066, William the Last steps down a thousand years after William the First won the crown.

Nice, neat, and fair. William gets the crown he’s been waiting forty years for already, but ten-year-old George grows up without expectation of it.

Have a nice big abdication ceremony, even.

Plus, what an absolute baller move to announce your regnal name as William the Last.

the Final Bill

Tags:

#Britain #that one post with the thing #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

likeadevils:

so does the uk falling apart meant that johnlock is about to go canon or is that just for american politics

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #politics cw #BBC Sherlock #Britain #home of the brave

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

jadagul:

dagny-hashtaggart:

kata4a:

limeadeislife:

dagny-hashtaggart:

The more Jules Verne I read, the more apparent it becomes that he’s basically whatever you’d call a weeaboo but for the US and UK

The UK version is “teaboo”, idk about the US one yet

freeaboo

This line of conversation is leading my brain into generating puns on “weeaboo” with its spare processor cycles.

So far I think my favorite is “Shiaboo” for a foreigner obsessed with Iran and Persian culture.

I hadn’t realized that Jules Verne wasn’t British. Which I guess is your point.

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #puns #Britain #home of the brave #(I also like the alternative suggestions in the notes‚ ”yankeeaboo” and ”yee-haw-boo”) #also I agree with jadagul #(holy shit he’s French)

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

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a5599d8ef598501b7c197e067aea32a136e1c0d9

earlgraytay:

mapsontheweb:

The Plus Four Wristlet Route Indicator, a British product from the 1920s, is a scroll-map navigator in the shape of a watch. It came with tiny interchangeable instructions that you scrolled manually to see which roads to take when driving.

People have been trying to invent the GPS for as long as people have been driving and I for one think that’s beautiful

Tags:

#history #clothing #driving #Britain

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

quinn-tessent1al:

dappermouth:

anytime someone from the UK orders a print from me I’m delighted because the addresses tend to be charming and sound completely made-up, I just suspend my disbelief and accept that I’m sending a package someplace with a name like Bristleberry House at Ditchmallow in Brambleford-on-Cotton—incredible lmaooo I bet this gets delivered to you by a badger in a little coat

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e12c8bc9ef20bd8afc423e3ccb05dd69cfba6262
3c3ea911f4544abedc0d1b4ce72a225542d3b0f9
fb141f8547a3eb92e72cb8e71a5916e712467e60

The replies to this post are fucking hilarious

Tags:

#Britain #geography #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

spikesjojo:

tumblr_inline_pq2zzel4kb1rmy8g1_500

Tags:

#Star Trek #Brexit #politics cw #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(tiny pedantic part of me: ”but 2387 would be about a decade post-Voyager”) #(”while this picture’s special effects are clearly pre-Voyager”) #(”this seems like more of a 2200’s picture”)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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toocooltobehipster:

map of British accents!!

 

haus-of-ill-repute:

How can a country smaller than montana have so many fucking accents?

 

youblowuponesun:

this is why we say please do not talk about a “british accent” thank

 

doctadonner:

but me and my sister both live in yorkshire (I live in North and she lives in South)  and she has to talk slowly when she comes to the north because no-one can understand a word she says, so there’s deviations of accents within accents.

 

darael:

Oh, and then there’s:

Spread out all over the fucking place but more prevalent in the South: RP (which is what Murricans think of as a “British Accent” even though it’s a minority of the English that have it let alone the British)

 

thedreadvampy:

plus like…there’s a LOT of variation in the Lothian area? Edinburgh’s super posh.

 

dropkicks:

if you think there’s only one accent in london i’ve got news for you son

 

silly-cleo:

I’ve lived in the UK for more than half my life, certainly my entire adult life, and I still can’t successfully ID all the accents there are here. I’m sometimes mortifyingly wrong, but less so now.

 

jescissa:

There’s way more than two Welsh accents. How can you categorize it as ‘Welsh’ or ‘Cardiff’? The accent in Caernarfon is completely different to the accent in Wrexham, so that’s at least four. Then the accent of Ceredigion is different again. Five. The Welsh hill farming accent is different to the Welsh mining accent (North/South divide.) People in Penmaenmawr sound different to people in Llanfairfechan and there’s a 7 minute drive between them.

 

cosmic-llin:

This! Even if you’re grouping similar Welsh accents together, there’s at LEAST one in the North and one in the South. Cool map though!

 

brin-bellway:

Are there actually people who honestly believe there is only one British accent, or is that a myth? Whenever I see people claim Americans think there’s only one, they always use the existence of the phrase “British accent” as their evidence.

Yes, I say “British accent”. Thing is, it’s not that I don’t know there are a zillion different accents in Britain. It’s that I don’t know what they’re called, and so am forced to use “British accent” as an umbrella term because I don’t have the words to describe them more specifically except perhaps by comparison (“it was a Dave-Lister-y sort of voice*”).

*And even having heard that this is a Liverpool accent, I would still describe it by comparison if I could possibly get away with it. I don’t entirely trust my source on where Lister’s accent is from, nor do I trust Liverpool to have only one accent.

 

cosmic-llin:

I think it’s less that people really don’t know that there’s more than one British accent, and more that very often “British Accent” is used to mean Received Pronunciation (in my TV and real-life experience that’s what a majority of people will do when required to fake a British accent), which is kind of a sore point anyway because in some British circles RP is still considered “better” than other accents and people with regional accents already feel marginalised?

And yup, Lister definitely has a Scouse (Liverpool) accent, although you’re right that Liverpool accents can vary a bit!

Tags:

#(February 2014) #conversational aglets #language #accents #Britain #Red Dwarf #long post

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

im-a-tnuc:

I don’t know why, but I think some Americans don’t realise how big the UK is….

 

American Customer: you’re English right? Do you know the bookshop between Wales and Bristol that has lots of books in?

 

Me in my head: yeah mate, I know that one. Classic. Love to pop down there on a cheeky break between work. What a wanker…

 

lizq-vs-the-kitkatuprising:

the continuous 48 states are is almost 39x the size of the isle of great britan

that’s your answer

 

mymindsecho:

For reference:

tumblr_inline_p7vj1zqt2f1r8bo0o_500

That’s JUST Texas.

 

welcometothemusicandthemisery:

Fucking hell

 

ryuraven:

But how many bookstores do you know the location of in your state, just for reference? Because my guess is it’s still too big to know even a quarter of them, which I think op’s post was about.

 

elodieunderglass:

If the conversation happened at all, the poor possibly-fictional American was probably just trying to talk about Hay-on-Wye. Hay-on-Wye is the most famous book town in the world, with a prestigious literary festival and so many “shops with all the books in” that the streets are literally full of open-air bookshelves. It’s like Pinterest and Diagon Alley and Waterstones all created some kind of massive hashtag-book-life village for the sole purpose of trying to attract Americans. It’s on the Wales/England border and a tourist would have approached it from Bristol.

This is hardly an unreasonable conversation starter, not like how British people are always demanding to know where I’m from, and then, when I release the information, say chirpily “I have a brother in San Diego!” as if that isn’t on the other side of a continent. And then! ! the only thing for it! is to say “Oh, I don’t believe in San Diego”! and turn away!

In general, the premise of the OP surprises me a bit, because I bet that I could put a photo of a single tree from somewhere in the UK on my Tumblr with a slightly incorrect caption, and three people would immediately correct me, because they would know that specific tree with an uncomfortable intimacy. I know because you have done this to me. It’s like a national pastime for you all. I’m shaken by OP, I am shaken to my fucking core and I respect them so much for having this terrifyingly novel attitude. I bet they’d look me dead in the eyes and tell me they had never heard of London. This is some kind of Gen Z shit that I’m not prepared for.

Because I know, I KNOW that I could spout a bunch of gibberish CAPTCHA word salads that are much more obscure directions than this, and y’all will IMMEDIATELy know exactly where in the British Isles I was talking about to a fuckin’ five foot radius, like some kind of wild scavenger hunt, you’ll all be like “oh did you enjoy it Elodie? did you go to the tea shop”

I swear to God I’ll do it. how do we place bets. how does that work exactly, does anyone know

Tags:

#UK #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #home of the brave #geography #discourse cw? #embarrassment squick? #(I actually kind of find it weirdly gratifying when people ask me questions about where I’m from with bad geographical assumptions encoded) #(I know that sounds unlike me but) #(I tend to suck at foreign geography and I find it reassuring that foreigners also suck at my geography) #(like it’s fair you know? it’s not just me‚ means I don’t feel as guilty about Shouldn’t I Know This) #((I’ve had multiple people at work express concern about my relatives dealing with hurricanes)) #((and I’ve had to explain that we’re from the *north*east and hurricanes are just big thunderstorms by the time they reach us)) #(((unless they’re named Sandy))) #(((but Sandy was a pain in Ontario too))) #((one time I told a Brit I was travelling to Massachusetts and he wished me luck with the jet lag)) #(((it’s in the same time zone))) #tag rambles

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

justice-turtle:

biscuitsarenice:

Black and British: A Forgotten History 

Francis Barber’s descendant Cedric Barber [x] [x]

#kind of perpetually surprised that this is surprising #generations and genetics happen? #smaller phenotype populations are mixed into the larger ones #this doesn’t mean they magically disappeared #or were never there

I don’t know about the British perspective, but coming to it as a white USian raised in Southern culture, I think at least some of the reason this isn’t obvious to a lot of people is that we do have that history of blood quantum, of tracking whether someone was one-eighth or one-sixteenth black and refusing them civil rights, of basically forcing the black community to intermarry among themselves, so that they *didn’t* mix out and disappear this way. (Of course, there were also a lot more black folks in USia than there ever were in Britain, I’m not saying that’s the only reason. Just, I think that is a part of the perspective I’m personally coming from. *thinking out loud*)

As a white USian raised in *Northern* culture, I’m not surprised by the intermarriage thing, but I *am* surprised by this clip nonetheless. The surprising thing is that they portray *positively* this guy having an Emotional Connection to His Ancestral Culture because of someone from *five generations back*.

Once you get to smaller fractions than one-quarter or so, having Emotional Connections like that stops being Celebrating Your Heritage and starts being Failing to Stay in Your Lane. The “white person who makes a big deal out of being 1/32 Cherokee” is a *negative* archetype.

As it happens, I too have a black former-slave great-great-great-grandfather (and likewise no black ancestry more recent than that). I don’t have an Emotional Connection about this, but…like, you have no reason to believe me when I say that, because I would say it regardless of whether it were true. You bet your ass I wouldn’t dare openly claim a Connection: it would be seen as cheating, as trying to claim the advantages of being black while skipping out on the disadvantages.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #racism cw? #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

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On matched betting

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

jbeshir:

reasonableapproximation:

I decided to do a little bit of matched betting to earn a small amount of money. I used the guide at https://matchedbettingblog.com (and their calculator.

So far:

  • I made about £10 profit from Coral, which is lower than it should have been but partly because I misread their odds for my qualifying bet and lost ~£3 on that instead of ~£0.50. This was a few weeks ago, now I’m doing a second bet.
  • I chose ComeOn for my second because they had a £10 free bet, and small bets require less stake. They aren’t a very good website. I had trouble finding things to bet on and they don’t seem to offer very good odds. I expect to make about £6.50 profit from them. (I’m betting on France v Paraguay which started a few minutes ago.)
  • My betfair liability is ~£40 to make £7 on a £10 bet. To extract closer to £10 (well, £9.50 thanks to commission), liability needs to go up crazy fast. Also, if my free bet was x times larger, liability would also need to go up x times. (“Liability” here is not how much money I risk losing, but how much I need to have in betfair. If I lose that money it just means I gain money somewhere else. But betfair is the convenient place for it to be.)
  • This does not seem a very time-efficient way of earning money, though I do expect to get faster.
  • When I withdrew money from Coral it went into my paypal account. I think I can use that money as partial payment when I make charity donations, maybe? I’m not entirely sure how to use it if not, I can link a bank account to my paypal account but effort.
  • I should probably sign up for Smarkets, but I already had a betfair account so I’ve been using them.
  • It looks like I have a free £5 bet from betfair? I’m not sure where that’s from. Presumably it’s stake not returned, so… I’m not sure how to calculate my optimal strategy using it. I could do the arithmetic, but I might just use it to place a bet, for simplicity.
  • It’s possible to do this as an ongoing thing, but it doesn’t seem very convenient. It looks like you need to do things like “place bet on this game while it’s in play”, which is only like a two hour window (and ideally you place at half time to avoid odds moving, which is even shorter), and you only get a few pounds at a time.
  • I’ve heard that this does bad things to my credit score. I don’t know how much I should care.
  • I have not received noticeable amounts of annoying emails from Coral or Betfair. Or ComeOn, but too soon to tell with them.

I made upwards of a grand from this during the last year and a bit; I did it fairly intensively for a while farming easier/larger signup bonuses, and then just settled into collecting money whenever any of the betting sites I’d signed up for sent me an email offer I could turn into free money readily.

A common thing is that I get an email offering me a free in-play bet of up to £50 if I place a same-size pre-match bet, which means by being around at the time of the match and jumping on it I get a free £30-£35ish. Just today, though, I woke up to an email offer from Betfair for a refund on losses up to £100 on bets settled today or tomorrow, and set myself up with them against Smarkets to get a free guaranteed £75-£80ish out of that. The annoying emails are not really annoying! They are actually quite handy. They think you are a potential gambling addict and will offer you free money, and you can be like “sure thank you I will take your free money”.

Smarkets is better for any markets with enough volume; I would sign up, it’s worth it for the 2% commission vs 5%. You will still need to use Betfair for any markets where volume is low. You also will need Smarkets to match Betfair; if you try to match Betfair with themselves they will get angry and refuse to give you the offer, and maybe bar your account if especially pissy. Betfair never used to send out offers, but this is the second I’ve had from them in the past few months so maybe they’ve shifted strategies.

The biggest individual profits I made were from large signup free credit offers, which were in the region of £200 but had to be turned over lots of times so it only nets to about £120ish. /do/ account for accumulating losses to cycling; things which have to turned over more than ~5 times are liable to either be a lot less profitable than they look or actually a net loss, because each matched pair makes a small guaranteed loss leaking your profit.

Matched betting really does work! The big limiter is that you need to do a lot of research to understand what you’re doing, and you need to stick to common sports or else deal very carefully with differences in adjudication between markets, so we’re talking this being for quite clever people, and you need upwards of a grand in capital for any of the bigger things; to jump on that offer I got today, I had to have £800ish around to tie up for the next week or so (withdrawal is reliable and safe, but takes days, unlike the instant deposit) and I had to have it immediately on hand.

This limits the people who do it enough that we’re an acceptable business expense to hook the potential gambling addicts they’re after. It does emphasise how often they must hook people and how much they must get, though, that they will put so much free money out there as bait. That said, I’m not sure how many of the big signup offers are still around, and I get the impression an increasing number of offers are designed to be hard to match.

…are British gambling companies more trustworthy than American ones?

Word in American supplementary-income circles is, if you think you’ve found a loophole in a set of gambling rules that will allow you to get risk-free money out of it, the loophole will usually turn out not to exist. If necessary, casinos will straight-up lie about what they will and will not do, in order to prevent you from exploiting it. (I’ve heard so many stories of casinos that just *didn’t pay* a promised sign-up bonus, and didn’t respond to messages about it.)

*Sometimes* you get places that actually give you the bonuses they say they will, under the circumstances they say they will. But because a significant portion of them don’t, and you don’t know for sure which category any given instance will be in (and you can’t necessarily trust that it will at least be consistent person-to-person), the money is no longer risk-free: you’re meta-gambling.

Tags:

#(stuff like this is probably part of why I’ve acquired an alief that any company advertising online is untrustworthy) #(I have to actively fight the tendency to reduce my level of goodwill towards a company I already liked if I see online ads for them) #the only way to get guaranteed money out of a gambling place is to help them inflate their search-engine rankings #by pretending to do a legitimate search for gambling-related keywords and then clicking their link in the search results #and sticking around just long enough #to trick the search algorithm into thinking you were interested in the site (and it was therefore a good match) #every so often you find some on Mechanical-Turk-type places paying four cents per click #though I haven’t seen any in a while so it’s possible Google outsmarted them once and for all #reply via reblog #gambling #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism

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