MetaFilter

It doesn't look like anything to me.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:33 PM on September 19, 2022

Yeah, this seems like a really bad idea to me, one that will definitely not serve to change anyone's minds, and the emissions from the inevitable tow truck that will show up and idle in the street while they reinflate the tires will more than offset any time the SUV is unable to drive.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:03 AM on September 8, 2022

I had a good experience with buying a car online from Carvana. It did involve doing a ton of research first to figure out exactly what make and model we wanted, then figure out the manufacturing years we were looking for and what the trim options were, but then it was mostly just watching the site to see if a car that fit came up. Once it did we reserved it and then scrambled a bit to finalize the insurance and financing with our credit union. They drove the car up from Florida to our apartment… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:31 AM on September 1, 2022

(I'll add that this was in the before times, right at the beginning of the pandemic, and spitbull's comment makes sense of me in terms of the relative value of buying a new car at the moment. We got a two year old model of a relatively expensive car and saved roughly 12K over what it would cost new, but I'm not sure that we could find that kind of deal today.)
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:40 AM on September 1, 2022

I think the bigger accomplishment here is that the the AI was able to generate a whole "Jason Allen" persona and fool a bunch of meatbags, including a Vice reporter, into thinking that a human being was behind the submission.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:57 PM on August 31, 2022

I've torn through a bunch of others -- Monster Train is a hoot but I got bored after a few cycles; the difficulty curve of Against the Moon made it a bit un-fun after a while, I got decent mileage out of Nowhere Prophet and might pick it up again, and Roguebook is a good time (but I got it really early, and I think it might be priced too high for its value now). Deep Sky Derelicts took a chunk of time but I kind of just lost interest after a while. I think I'm too stupid for Cultist… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:16 AM on June 8, 2022

If you are developing for iOS, get used to it.

This is how I feel too. One the one hand, it totally sucks for iOS developers, but on the other hand, it's not like Apple has been in any way secretive about their ruthless control of the App Store and generally not giving a shit about developers in the first place. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:55 AM on May 10, 2022

This is fun! I got to the second boss in the new game+ mode and couldn't get farther (the amounts of hit points the monsters get in the second go-round was eventually overwhelming). I had good success with the key sword + cleavers and with the pick-axe. I have not been able to make a build with archery or magic work out yet. I'm looking forward to a full release of this.

People who vibe with this might also like Loop Hero, which has similar aesthetics and is similarly… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:29 PM on April 29, 2022

Gonna have to go be a farmer, learn a trade., something physical I can do with my hands.

Definitely. First you'll need to start a subscription plan with John Deere for the software for your farm equipment, then it's time to look into licensing some seeds from Monsanto.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:46 PM on April 15, 2022

her original stretchy powers are in some sense thematically appropriate

I do think they're thematically appropriate, personally. They are the very embodiment of being a gangly teenager who doesn't feel completely in control of their own body, and as drewbage1847 noted, a person who is not totally sure where she fits in to society (American or super-hero). Plus they are kind of goofy and fun in a way that perfectly suits Khan's character.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:20 PM on March 15, 2022

Ha, I love these. I still think "Man in Wheelchair Killed by Train, doo-dah, doo-dah" every time I hear Camptown Races.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:16 PM on February 28, 2022

Long live the new flesh! Death to videodrome!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:52 PM on December 23, 2021

No, Frank. Not now.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:51 PM on November 14, 2021

I believe at one point the vision was a browser plugin, too, back when those operated under considerably freer browser security restrictions than they do today. Personally, I always felt that that vision came with the caveat that "this will work great until Google decides to crush us like a bug via Chrome updates, or acquire us into their surveillance infrastructure" but I guess they were never able to get any user traction for it anyways.

The pity is that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 1:58 PM on September 30, 2021

But that isn't the same thing at all as talking about why this work continues to fascinate while that one doesn't

*waves hands* Neuroscience!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 1:31 PM on September 30, 2021

This is not really my jam, but if it's the kind of thing you like I recommend the itch game Hidden Folks, which was part of that mega itch bundle last summer. It's got a very similar art style but with a lot more interactivity and you're searching for a lot of different kind of things.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:33 PM on September 8, 2021

Is there an archive somewhere of all the awful reviews which Pitchfork later determined were too embarrassing to leave up and scrubbed from their site?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:44 PM on July 31, 2021

Whether they’re good-naturedly harassing an owl caught out in daylight, or carrying bits of sticks and used gauze bandage in their beaks to make their colorful, free-form nests, or simply landing on the sidewalk in front of you with their characteristic double hop, the crows have become a part of the fabric of our days. When you had your first kiss, the crows were there, flying around nearby. They were cawing overhead at your college graduation, and worrying a hamburger wrapper through the wire… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:44 AM on May 25, 2021

I haven't seen a comb now for days / It's indie on the radio waves - American Analog Set, Weather Report
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:08 AM on May 25, 2021

Wow, today I learned that Factsheet Five-era enfant terrible Jim Goad managed to un-fade from obscurity somehow during the Trump years. It's not so much a surprise to see him on this list as to see him on any list at all.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:25 PM on April 6, 2021

anybody familiar enough with Ta-Nehisi Coates' run on Captain America able to tell me if it's worth picking up as a good read and self-contained story? I've been out of comics for nearly a decade now.

I've read the first three trade paperbacks, so roughly half the 30-issue run. It's... ok? It does some kind of interesting stuff like team Cap up with a team that is all women, and it's got some fairly pointed commentary in there, although to be honest… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:39 PM on April 9, 2021

I have to imagine that Dobbs was fired so that he'd need to pay for his own (very expensive) legal defense, as he is directly named as a defendant in the suit.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:40 AM on February 6, 2021

Does the paid membership remove ads on the (android) app, or just the website?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:57 PM on January 22, 2021

Er... where's the essay?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:29 PM on January 14, 2021

I'm not generally into the style of music the KLF played, but I can give a hearty endorsement to this book about the band by John Higgs, which situates them in a 90's cultural milieu which includes the likes of Alan Moore , Dr. Who, and Robert Anton Wilson, and is engagingly breezily written. The author also discusses the book in some detail in this podcast interview with Ezra Klein.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:47 AM on January 3, 2021

This whole story is astonishing, but getting Navalny himself to get the admissions out of his antagonists is the cherry on top.

I don't feel a lot of sympathy towards them, but it will not surprise me if all of these operatives are dead within a week.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:07 PM on December 21, 2020

Russian police detained Lyubov Sobol amid a crackdown on activists seeking to draw attention to the nerve-agent poisoning of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:14 AM on December 26, 2020

You are 0% basic. Have you considered there's a reason nobody listens to Half Film?
Yeah, cause they all have bad taste
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:33 AM on December 23, 2020

"Did we just run out of money to finish this?"
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:54 PM on December 21, 2020

I can't get over Dress: The Vampire's Wife
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:18 PM on December 20, 2020

I always appreciated that "No Scrubs" defines its terms very early on. What is a scrub? The singers will explain!

Yeah, but their explanation is a tautology! "No, I don't want no scrubs / A scrub is a guy that can't get no love from me (eg, a guy I don't want)." It's begging the question. This has always deeply bothered me about the song.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:28 PM on December 15, 2020

I have to admit that I like their website with its Comic Sans and <blink> tags.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:17 AM on December 14, 2020

This will be handy for exterminating the last remnants of humanity when we've gone into hiding after the coming robot wars.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:32 AM on December 4, 2020

The 1950 Arthur Philips essay that coined the phrase "Cultural Cringe", linked at the bottom of the original post, is an interesting read. Philips makes some of the same points, more eloquently, but the context is English-language literature and the stultifying culture is England, not America (although with a shout-out to Moby Dick).

It does strike me that this is a situation that many cultural art movements have faced as they grapple with… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:19 AM on November 24, 2020

lay a useful event sourcing resource on me.

I found this talk by Bobby Calderwood about event-sourcing inspiring enough that we implemented a similar system at my then-place of work. He is using Clojure and Datomic but I think he describes the general architecture and rationale quite clearly apart from the language / technology specifics.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 1:41 PM on November 3, 2020

Also, to counterbalance the largely sanguine view on event-sourcing in the above talk, this blog post points out some of its downsides and seems realistic to me as someone who has traveled down that path.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:47 PM on November 3, 2020

I second The Haunting (1963).

This movie really stands up and manages to be genuinely scary mostly through excellent editing and sound design (I say this as a devoted horror fan who is not normally scared by most movies).

One of my favorite cinematic memories was seeing a double-bill of The Haunting and Jacques Tourneur's masterful 1957 film Night of the Demon at San Francisco's iconic Castro Theater on… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:42 PM on October 26, 2020

This is possibly the only good news in 2020.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:44 AM on October 9, 2020

(This may also be because I am living in NYS where, prior to the last year or two, I have sometimes felt like I am living in a bizarro blue state with red state-style voter restrictions, but that's another story.)

I also moved from California to New York, and really felt like I had returned to the dark ages when I cast my first ballot here. Where was the voter guide? Where could I learn about the pros and cons of the (infrequent) ballot measures?… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:55 AM on September 28, 2020

Yeah can someone explain that?

It works by adding an event listener to 'fetch' events which constructs synthetic http responses out of data that it's parsed from the PNG, rather than going out to the internet as the browser usually would. None of this works without javascript, natch.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:03 AM on September 28, 2020

Google is in the midst of weaponizing breaking the URL with intent to break adblockers like Pi-Hole by doing something very similar to this: bundling all information about a website in a closed box, a blob URL

I mean, I don't disagree with the general sentiment that Google is trying to capture various web standards through things like AMP, but in terms of URLs, the great majority of modern web sites these days use client-side routing for most of the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:17 AM on September 28, 2020

Totally on board for more plot-light, mythology-light space adventures.

Surely I'm not the only person who keeps waiting for the "...step inside" every time somebody on the show says "this is the way?"
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:48 AM on September 20, 2020

The writing on this show was great, but it went for so long between seasons that I often found I'd forgotten about the intricate world-building and would miss a bunch of jokes and references. Still, it had a lot of great stuff - Everybody Comes to Hank's was totally delightful, for one.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:20 AM on September 8, 2020

Feeling existentially helpless about the future is the standard operating mode for a lot of people under 40

Er... I've got some bad news for you about life after 40
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:41 PM on September 2, 2020

Previously, some of gwern's explorations with the earlier version, GPT-2.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:22 PM on July 15, 2020

Some reporting from Politico on Courier, the most widespread of the liberal organizations mentioned.
Courier’s operations differ from the NRCC in that it is a for-profit newsroom, and election law doesn’t regulate the press due to its First Amendment protections. As a result, Courier raises new digital-age questions about what is and is not a news organization — questions that political ad regulators are unlikely to answer, according to election experts, leaving this murky space open… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:10 AM on July 14, 2020

Our cyberpunk dystopia didn’t come in the form of Hong Kong cityscapes, it came in the form of rabid authoritarian proto-fascism

I don't mean to be flippant about it, but check back on Hong Kong in a few years.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 5:40 PM on July 7, 2020

Showgirls is a hilarious and amazing film, though I've always wondered how much it was planned as satire versus how much Verhoeven cannily backed into the satire angle once it was in the can. One the one hand, Starship Troopers (obviously satire). On the other, Basic Instinct (pure trash, as far as I can tell, though maybe someone can convince me otherwise).

That's also why I wouldn't want to let Verhoeven anywhere near… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 5:48 PM on July 7, 2020

I'd just like to say, as someone who has never been to Seattle but is interested in what's happening there, that I appreciate this kind of longer-form piece from a person who is obviously closely following the situation and has background knowledge of what the political situation is, and I also appreciate Seattle Mefites chiming in to point out biases in the original piece and give their own takes. It's been a little frustrating to try to find good sources of information as an outsider;… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:08 AM on June 24, 2020

Of course, it gets immediately racist as fuck when you name the card giving a bonus to White: "Crusade".

The fact that the knights on that card are rocking the Flag of England doesn't exactly help either.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:43 PM on June 23, 2020