As the Internet's reviews site of record, Yelp has amassed mountains of data on which restaurants have terrible parking and which users had terrible dates. Today, the company released a new map visualization tool that lets us see exactly which neighborhoods Yelpers find "sketchy," "frat" or "hipster." And the results may not surprise you.

First up, Yelp's "sketchy" map, which glows red for hotspots where reviews frequently mention the word "sketchy." A big fat blotch in the Tenderloin, with a few other shady stains near the 16th Street BART station, Broadway and Columbus, and a few pinkish spots around 24th Street BART and Fillmore south of Geary Boulevard.

Should you wish to avoid those sketchy spots for something a little more hip, Yelp has a visualization for "hipster" as well. We're not really sure if "hipster" is meant in the derogatory sense here, but you can apparently find those types roaming (where else?) the streets of the Mission, pretty much everywhere from Dolores to South Van Ness and from Market Street to 25th Street.

If the Mission's hipster density becomes too much for you to handle, you can find smaller pockets along Divisadero or Polk Street, in the Haights and Hayes Valley, or in one lone outpost of hipness in the Outer Sunset where you'll find Outerlands, Trouble Coffee and also drugs.

Interestingly, the "hipster" map doesn't necessarily correlate to the availability of PBR.

Luckily for everyone who was happy to move on from college when they arrived in San Francisco, the "frat" scene is fairly limited: Union Street in the Marina, along Columbus in North Beach and a couple of hotspots on Polk Street where Marina graduates go to drink away the remainder of their twenties.

[Yelp]

In light of last week's Four Barrel notice to customers banning hipster narrative, such as those regarding sexual intercourse, they've since updated their original screed to include a popular photo service. Snapped by Instagram user kevinmonty (of Uptown Almanac), the new policy requests that one not mention said update via...Instagram.

And now you know.

[via kevinmonty]

We were happy to find a photo of ourselves -- or is it "ourself"? -- on Flickr the day after we went down to Ritual Roasters to type a letter registering our disapproval of chain stores on Valencia Street.

The photographer, Timoni Grone, duly noted the irony: a man in the picture is wearing American Apparel, but the people are typing letters against American Apparel! In fact, we ourself was wearing an item from American Apparel (and we are wearing the same item as we type this entry on a blog supported by American Apparel advertising). And yet we would rather not have their store on Valencia.

Wait, how can we stand the cognitive dissonance?

Here's how:

As we pecked away on a rickety typewriter, swathed in the stylish comfort of our expensively casual American Apparel hoodie, we felt that the focus on this particular brand has been somewhat misleading. The real issue, it seems to us, is the question of chain stores on the Valencia corridor. Perhaps this confusion is due in part to the many posters visible in shop windows up and down Valencia, the message of which is essentially "No American Apparel in the Mission."

(By the way, our American Apparel hoodie is NOT the new bat wing hoodie, the very existence of which makes our skin crawl, in spite of our fond, nostalgia-tinged memories of the slightly bat-winged mock turtlenecks that were everywhere in about 1987.)

There are plenty of good arguments for and against American Apparel as a company and as a sartorial choice. Nato Green and Daniel Alarcon offered a few of these arguments at Amnesia on Monday night.

But the hearing at City Hall tomorrow afternoon is more fundamentally about this:

Should chain stores be absolutely everywhere in the universe, or could we just have a couple of places in the world where there aren't any?

Because that's where we'd rather live.

Photo by Timoni. Some Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

See an aerial photo and recite the Parker's Pledge, after the jump.

We were in Seattle this weekend, and came across this Volvo in Wallingford. While we may not be hip enough to know what the kids at the Rickshaw Stop are going to be wearing this weekend, we do know that none of them have a car that embodies this amount of anti-hipster hipster cool. Wow.

Warning: when visiting the ice rink at the Embarcadero, please be careful. You could fall face-first on the ice, cut open your knee, swallow a couple of itchy Vicodins to abate building pain, and then send out several emails that you won't remember writing the following morning. Or so we hear.

-- The Last Detail (1973): Jack Nicholson takes Randy Quaid out for a last bit of debauchery before young Quaid is sent of to Navy prison. Ahoy! Screens at 9:25 p.m. at the Castro Theatre; $6-9.

-- Chemlab, U.S.S.A., Skeleton Key: It's nice to see taht bands have temporarily stopped sticking "the" in front of their names. Skeleton Key is described as the "ultimate purveyor of what-the-Christ-was-that instrumentation"and U.S.S.A. features members of Ministry and the Jesus Lizard. Sure, it's no night of martinis and Andrea Marcovicci at the Empire Plush Room, but what is? The indie rock and/or "cyberpunk" sounds start at 9 p.m. at Bottom of the Hill; $14.

-- 1964: It always a drunk fun time over at Edinburgh Castle. The bar/venue accomplishes the almost impossible feat of being hipster-, nerd-, and age-friendly while remaining sexual orientation-neutral. And teir dance party, simply titled 1964, just makes the Scottish venue that more stellar. The '60s sound start tonight at 9 p.m. at Edinburgh Castle

Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a weekly series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist each Wednesday, around the lunching hour.

View the map of all published Blocker episodes.

Blocker, No. 22: La Playa St. in the Outer Sunset

Among San Francisco’s myriad neighborhoods, few are as widely misunderstood as the Outer Sunset. Location certainly plays a role. To your average Upper Haight resident – to say nothing of your average South of Market or North Beach resident – this beach-adjacent community may seem as distant as Honolulu, with an N-Judah trip that may rival a flight to Oahu in terms of travel time. But it’s sometimes easy to forget that San Francisco is a mere seven miles wide, and that the folks out west do have phone numbers that begin with 415, rather than 808.

La Playa St., which borders the Sunset on its seaward side, takes a cue from Arguello Blvd. and Funston Ave. in the way it stunt-doubles for a numerically named street. In La Playa’s curious case, it stands in for 49th Avenue, a street name you’d think would warrant some serious respect in San Francisco. But this block of pavement between Irving and Judah at the edge of the North American continent could be called “Canadian Midwest Boulevard of Dreams,” and it would still convey the Outer Sunset’s singular blend of surfer, urban, Asian-American family, and hipster cultures.

Now you're up to speed. Try it yourself, if you want.