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josephdunphy

Last seen: 26 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •







    I tried to review one of the posts on this blog, one entitled On Picking Up Checks, but the Stumbleupon system wouldn't let me discover the site. I went there, clicked on the "thumbs down" button, and nothing happened. Then I found that somebody had discovered the blog itself, and decided that posting here would do. While reviewing an entire blog based on a single post might seem a little hasty, the post was so thoroughly obnoxious that I found myself feeling far more comfortable with the idea of doing that, than with that of crawling around in the muck of the author's mental world any more than I already had.

    The author writes:







    "Women, girls, self-described 'feminists' all: listen to the voice of experience. Check-paying has nothing to do with equality between the genders, good sex, or feminism. Check-paying is the simplest, most accurate method of ascertaining whether you are on a date with a man, or with a bizarre specimen of animated pond slime."







    going on to engage in a feeding frenzy like binge of character assassination directed against those men who ask the woman to split the check on a date, listing all of the distasteful things that they will supposedly do, and never mind the fact that plenty of couples can be found who have split the check, in which the men have done none of these things. The strikingly ugly "prettylady" goes on to write








    "A man who does not pick up the check is a man who values his pocketbook more than he values your opinion. ... In short, any man who does not appreciate the privilege of being allowed to take you to dinner for the simple glory of your lustrous presence should be shunned like the mutant he is."








    an arrogant remark that makes her remark about the "man whose ego is so out of control that he believes he is God's gift to promiscuous women" all the more amusingly ironic

    The question that she doesn't seem to grasp is a question is why the man should feel any more or less privileged to be on the date than the woman; is his company worth less than hers? One hears a demand that the man show his appreciation of the woman, but not even the slightest hint of how the woman ought to be reciprocating or even of any tolerance of the notion that she might; note the quoted comment about the man valuing his checkbook more than the woman's opinion. But in context, what is the woman's opinion about? Whether or not he ought to be opening his checkbook for her, in effect paying her for her company, and what was the technical term for that, again?




    [ continued ]