Interesting Links for 10-01-2014

[fearmeforiampink]

• BBC News - The secret history of fashion laws
  'The 1732 Hat Act banned American colonists from wearing US made headgear'
  (tags: Interesting clothes culture history law )
• Men – if you're not a feminist, it's fine, just move on | Comment is free
  On the problems of 'But MEN!' from people who want to be feminist allies
  (tags: feminism discrimination but-MEN comment comment-is-free )

Comments

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

You might enjoy this article on regulating ties by one of my favourite authors, John Kay.

http://www.johnkay.com/1996/01/12/a-question-of-clarity-and-certainty

[fearmeforiampink]

Heh, nice. Added to the linkspam too.

Reminds me of one of the very commonly quoted rules of LARP — Rule 7: Don't take the piss.

Because you can try to nail down every single possible occurrence, no matter how contrived, in the rules, or you can make it clear how things are supposed to work, what the spirit of the rules are, and then go 'No, that's taking the piss' when someone comes up with an edge case that isn't covered by the rules you have.

A lot of it is that if you're searching for those edge cases, you know what the rule is trying to get over to you, you're just looking for a way around it, looking for a way to bend it, looking for a way to take the piss.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Aye – and a general prohibition against taking the piss can only be worked by a combination of cultural norms against taking the piss and people not wanting to do business / play with you in the future.

I once spent some time as a paralegal supporting my boss, the head of legal at an oil services company, on an industry wide let’s-look-at-standardising-contracts exercise. I was comparing contracts for the same goods and services from A Major Oil Company with contracts for the same stuff from A Different Oil Major. One had a 40 page contract, the other was 4 pages. When I asked my dad, (senior manager at Different Oil Major) what he thought lay behind the difference his answer was basically, “We’re Different Oil Major, if you take the piss you’ll never work in the North Sea again.”

[fearmeforiampink]

With LARP, because the people running it can do what they like, so long as people still want to play their games (the place stuff is run from is the Games Operation Desk i.e. GOD, for roughly this reason), so there's rather more ability to go 'Nope, that's taking the piss, bugger off."