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Japan's Dododo Land, the most irritating place on Earth
One we discussed yesterday with a colleague (we're C++ devs): seeing anyone - especially a fellow dev - browsing the web WITHOUT ANY ADBLOCKER.
Reminds me a bit of the Park of Aging in Miraikan The National Museum of Emerging Science.

I remember when staff casually handed me a paper brochure near the area dedicated to aging that when opened was blurry and difficult to read. I was confused. When it finally dawned on me this was one of their simulations of old age I never laughed (at myself) harder. Such a fun and educational experience highly recommend for all ages.

Additional: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/11/22/japan/science-h...

  • gwern
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  • 7 hours ago
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A Dododo Land on that premise would be more interesting than what is described, which is weak tea social commentary. A Dododo Land where the doors are confusing and you have to pull rather than push - where there's typos everywhere and the kerning is always inconsistent or sometimes the font randomly changes and everything is hung 1 degree off level - where you pay for a ticket but then it errors out at the entrance and the clerk tells you that your payment must not have gone through - where a few lights just flicker once in a while and there's an odd high-pitched sound that half your group can't hear but sounds like tinnitus - where the employees are reading manga and you have to get their attention by coughing loudly - ...
Yes exactly.

Where the map does not represent the actual venue. Where every route leads to the gift shop. Where some displays are only in English. Where the flow between the rooms is non-intuitive. Where the audio guide is too loud/quiet and you cannot adjust the volume, or pause it during an item. Where there are mind-your-head bars in the way for no reason.

You call the lift (elevator) and it starts descending toward you, before stopping on the floor above (for far too long) then turning around.
That sounds like Shenzhen!
That sounds amazing, agreed!
Don't forget automatic doors on a timer: you walk into them and they stay shut, but then just as you walk away in disgust, they open.

Or a heater/airconditioning blasting unpleasantly cold or hot air in your face as you go through the doors.

I like your typographical examples, but I'm afraid they'd be lost on most people.

Miraikan is one of our favorites, been there like 3-4 times with my son. The current exhibit that turns quantum logic gates into a DJ game is really innovative but they only give you like 5 mins which is barely enough time to figure out WTF is even going on
My guilty pleasure at these tourist trap places is significantly overpaying for their staged portraits. They (often) ask you if you’d like a free portrait, and then will print you up a postage stamp sized picture with a big watermark on it, with the option to pay ¥2000 or (or thereabouts) for a larger print. Or other times they’ll even print up the big print in advance and just throw it away if you don’t buy it, which I think preys on peoples’ guilt for waste. I don’t know if dododo land does this, but seems like the kind of place that would.

I’ve got one with my family from Pineapple Park in Okinawa that makes me laugh every time I see it. Smartphones make it easy to take a million photos with incredibly good quality, but there’s something about that crappy print with its ridiculous cardboard frame that hits different.

Soranews24 is one of the best websites on the internet! So weird and looks like spam but it's not. This Dododo Land is so weird. Seems like Meow Wolf or Museum of Ice Cream but featuring little things that bother people instead of creative fiction or photo ops.

fta: "'dododo' is the kanji character for 'anger' (怒) written three times in a row".

Do other countries have websites like this covering them?

I don't think SoraNews24/RocketNews24 isn't that interesting in itself, but I'd be interested to know how these are popular as a phenomenon - there have been tons of these small shop couchsurfing news blogs on Japanese WWW since mid-2000s. It was obviously trivial to find a few college kids that could Google random stuffs and write up blogs that collect enough AdSense revenues, in Japan and in online ja-JP sphere.

Is it another one of those 7-11 sandwiches, or do there exist like, the webring and jump cushions and individual blogs and hosting colocations and all that infrastructure for each of all major languages? I suspect Chinese WWW might have some, but what about e.g. Indonesia, major Western European languages, LATAM as a region, or, most importantly, en-US?

Is this another one of those weird bot posts I've been hearing about? 3 paragraphs, low-content but apparently interesting, ~50 points new account?

@dang what's HN's position here, I feel like my paranoia is going to ruin the shreds of authenticity that underpinned real engagement on this site. It's a giga-eternal September, and idk how one can moderate this in a way that earns trust and buyin from the humans among us (I swear I'm a human, look no third paragraph).

Definitely not a bot or ai touched at all or ESL. And reading the comment as I wrote it, it definitely read oddly to me too! Maybe I’ve accidentally created a mini dododo land here with the comment..

I take a little offense to the low content. Maybe low effort, but I feel like the references were worthwhile and for a reply-less post (at the time) I thought soranews24 deserved more attention. It is a very weird and good site to me. And I guess I wanted to address the content of the article at least a little with my comment. I read dododo as the bird.

I appreciate the comment saying Meow Wolf is a cash grab. I kinda agree but I’m glad it exists. And the cracked citation, I agree it’s a kindred spirit. (What’s the deal with 3rd paragraphs?)

I don't know what you saw but the post you're replying to seems pretty human to me.

But then i see a comment below saying that the post was edited multiple times, so I'm late to the party.

I didn’t think it was a bot, but I think a good rule is when in doubt, just move along. There are times when it’s necessary to verify the authenticity of the things you read, but this is not one of them. Certainly nothing worth getting paranoid about.
> I feel like my paranoia is going to ruin the shreds of authenticity that underpinned real engagement on this site.

That’s a you problem.

You can either tell or you can’t. I don’t know what to say other than some people have this way of thinking intrinsic and some do not. I’m not sure it can be trained. The moderators of HN do appear to have it, Dan certainly does: I’ve had a few direct interactions with him. Tom I don’t know, never interacted with them.

Insightful comment!

But -- It's not a me problem, it's an us problem.

Let's be honest here, the erosion of trust spans across this and other sides. And your strong beliefs that you have 100% predicitve precision and recall smacks of self serving reasoning. Inspect your own priors and move forward, fellow human.

errr, is dang's name Dan? That makes... so much sense.
Of course anything is possible, but I don't think bots typically edit their comments multiple times.
I hear about meow wolf all the time and I seem to be the only person in the world who thought it was an underwhelming cash grab that is beaten by a half dozen events a year in nearly every major city in the US. Am I just missing some huge piece of it?
Which one did you go to?
Not a perfect match but I instantly thought of ianVisits for London stuff. It's a similar vibe to this but is mostly transport-related: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/
We have legorafi.fr in France which is a reference. To the point that some foreign papers quoted it :)

Some articles:

- resolve your attention problems in 328 steps

- according to studies, humans use only 10% of their smartphone

There are others that are very good but to close to France to be understandable abroad

My other hangout is cracked.com. Another corner with really niche and weird content.
Imagine if your job was to sit at a fake desk all day and pretend to be annoyed by someone walking into your room.

Probably highly relatable to office work tbh.

I already do this for free.
"Imagine if your job was to sit at a fake desk all day and pretend to be annoyed by someone walking into your room."

Reminds me of some of the old tourist information places in Scotland before the internet was widely available. I was in Huntly, a small town and I was the only person in the office. I remember asking for information/a leaflet about George MacDonald's birthplace in Huntly, and when it was open etc, and getting told something like, "I wouldn't know about that, that's for people who are interested in that kind of thing."

I just replied by saying, "You might not be interested in it, but I am, that's why I'm asking."

She eventually dug out a badly made leaflet with a phone number from just under the desk, as if it was some great chore.

Her heart wasn't in that job. There wasn't much else to see in that town, other than a castle (which is pretty impressive TBF) and some whisky distilleries.