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Ooh, this might be just the thing I was looking for, I've been planning to reread the first book again. I recently listened to the first three parts of Alzabo Soup, which is a similar close-reading-via-podcast of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.

I'm I the only one that liked David Lynch's Dune?

No. There are so many of you. (Not David Lynch, though.) Personally there are things I liked a lot in his film,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:56 AM on June 21, 2020

I'm not sure I'd hold up Anne McCaffrey as the poster child for science fiction without problematic elements. But I think it's also possible to enjoy work that has problematic aspects without endorsing those aspects.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:59 PM on June 22, 2020

David Lynch in a Q&A three days ago: "Well, I'm sorta proud of everything, except Dune."
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 1:54 PM on June 23, 2020

It'll be interesting to see if the new Macs support Thunderbird, which Apple's been hyping for like a decade now, considering it's an Intel technology and the dev kits reportedly lack it currently.

This is an interesting question. With USB4 consisting of USB3 plus the now royalty-free Thunderbolt 3 it would seem likely to me, but on the other hand if Apple can make a $70 markup on a cable for "AppleMagicConnect Thunderbird" you know there… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:50 PM on June 22, 2020

Can someone speculate what might happen to Java based apps such as ImageJ under the new regime?

It's speculation as you say, but the JVM has been working on ARM chips for a long time (eg: Android phones, in their earliest incarnations), so I'd be shocked if there wasn't a way to run them in Apple / Arm machines. (The Java ecosystem itself has recently been moving towards more emphasis on natively-compiled binaries via the GraalVM project, too, which… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:56 PM on June 22, 2020

(Er, that's Thunderbolt, not Thunderbird.)
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:00 PM on June 22, 2020

Microsoft actually is making Windows 10 better, but mostly better for developers, not end-users. I'm a developer who likes to play PC games, so I doubt I'll be making the switch to arm chips and will probably go back into the Win10/WSL2 universe when I need my next hardware upgrade, much as Windows's UI is painful to me (and to all right-thinking people).
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:46 AM on June 23, 2020

I don't know if they'll go after Biden. If the GOP doesn't have a post-Trump reckoning they might never want to see them back in office, instead preferring to tolerate central-right liberalism.

This seems pretty naive to me. Romney has obviously been setting himself up for a 2024 run as the kinder, gentler GOP candidate who has learned from the mistakes of the past, and if it's not the Lincoln Project per se that's running this same flavor of attack… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:19 AM on June 23, 2020

Sony Clarifies That ‘Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ Is a Separate, But Equal Game
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 4:29 PM on June 13, 2020

I'm all for strong unions, but I wonder if there's a way to separate out the collective bargaining power of the police unions to negotiate for health care, raises, and so forth from their seeming ability to prevent any meaningful reforms to their member's operations as police. As civil servants, I want the police to be able to earn a decent living, but as agents of the state there obviously needs to be a lot more accountability and a lot less room for judgement calls on the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:06 AM on June 8, 2020

If anyone can think of a way of using them - hit me up

Ooh, I have an idea! Let's set up sites on the dark web that allow members to access sophisticated malware to siphon funds from corporations, financial institutions, and nonprofits that support “the establishment.” Then we'll convert the gains to Bitcoin and distribute it to “worthy recipients.”
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 5:30 PM on June 5, 2020

This was a fantastic essay, thanks for posting it.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:17 PM on June 4, 2020

I was reminded when visiting Hawaii that the floral-print shirts are properly called "aloha shirts." A Hawaiian shirt is a shirt made in Hawaii.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:53 AM on June 4, 2020

Or is this about how the answer is "actually, we don't know because the people who were saying it was bad were super-sketch"?

This seems to be the case. That last Guardian link has a lot of detail on the sketchy nature of Surgisphere and reasons why they don't seem like a trustworthy actor.

I'm not really sure if I understand Surgisphere's motivation for poisoning the well in this way, though. To me, a lay person,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 1:08 PM on June 3, 2020

so has anyone here seen The Wretched? how is it?

It's... fine, I guess? It's a very commercially-viable combination of a teen summer movie and a haunted-house / monster-movie creeper. I enjoyed it but it's nothing at all new and I went in with very low expectations.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:07 AM on June 2, 2020

Here is the view of the world from 9th Avenue, though I prefer Saul Steinberg's version.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:53 AM on May 28, 2020

This was a good video essay, thanks. I tried a few other video essays from the author's channel and liked them. He even has kind of an apologia for The Wandering Earth which made me appreciate some of its Chinese cultural themes a little bit more (but still didn't manage to convince me that it's not a terrible movie).
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:41 PM on May 18, 2020

Yeah, I did catch that, though Yang Zhang still professes his love for the movie and I can't agree there (maybe if I liked Independence Day I'd be more inclined to enjoy this kind of movie, but that's not me). Also, you'd have to be pretty unobservant not to catch the constant themes of "heroes act for the good of the collective, not themselves" which the movie never gets tired of pounding you over the head with. But I did appreciate Zhang's take on the implicit… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:25 PM on May 19, 2020

I'm not loving this stillsuit design - it doesn't even cover the mouth! But I guess I can make allowances for actors wanting to act.

I'm sooooooooo tired of texts with one woman to every five men. Dune was written in the dark ages, but there's no excuse not to recast now, it's fucking ridiculous.

I agree. For what it's worth, Villeneuve has recast at least one character as a woman (albeit a pretty minor character, Liet Kines).
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:36 AM on April 14, 2020

This was quite a journey. The cute house owner has classic "online comedy short" hair.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:06 AM on April 7, 2020

The sonnets, which boil down each sonnet into a couplet or so, remind me of Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks, previously on Metafilter.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:01 AM on March 17, 2020

I liked Exapunks but programming in assembly language felt like swimming in molasses for me (I write Lisp code for a living). Like, I could often see the solution, but the mechanics of actually getting there seemed more like busywork than fun. I contemplated writing a compiler for the platform, and then I realized that doing that might be more fun than playing the game, and then I kind of petered out on playing the game. I love the aesthetics of it though.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:49 PM on November 7, 2019

There's also scansion, which from my amateur investigations, seems like a difficult problem (there's a data problem, that it's difficult to find open source data with reliable information on stresses, and a poetry problem, which is that human beings often don't agree on scansion either). I guess GPT-2 works around all of that stuff by finding subtle statistical concordances in the training text and reproducing them, while not really "understanding" the prosody at all.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:58 AM on November 7, 2019

I recently read this exellent article on TS Eliot's criticism and the birth of the "biographical fallacy," and it struck me as containing a lot of food for thought in respect to poems generated by computer algorithms.

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."

[...] "The progress of an artist is a continual… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:57 AM on November 7, 2019

What is the deal with those exit signs, anyways?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:43 PM on October 9, 2019

.

God damn it. American Water has always been a kind of lodestone to me, and random little snippets from it constantly bubble up from my unconscious. Windex tears roll down the robot's face / he never felt a mother's embrace. Berman was one of the few musicians who I thought was actually a good poet, too, in addition to his mastery of the clever couplet. The new album is really good, but I remember feeling very worried for him… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:47 PM on August 7, 2019

I'm fairly sure this has reprogrammed me, The Parallax View style.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:49 PM on June 11, 2019

I'm 100% in favor of improving cycling infrastructure, but surely there's a way to do this that doesn't result in a bunch of broken plastic cups winding up in the gutters?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 4:10 PM on April 26, 2019

I've always wanted to learn APL, but I never managed to get my head around it because I couldn't find a good tutorial and a good open-source environment to use it in. I did try my hand at J, which looked like line noise. I imagine APL must be a little easier these days with the widespread adoption of UTF-8 - anyone have recommendations for how to go about learning it?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 5:30 AM on April 12, 2019

On a trip down to Big Sur from San Francisco one year I stopped at the Tor House, Jeffers's longtime home in Carmel-by-the-Sea. It is a pretty interesting place and I highly recommend a visit to anyone in the area who is interested in Jeffers. They give little tours of the house, which he had an interesting relationship with. He built the thing by rolling boulders up out of the surf, and was prone to taking rocks and architectural features from various places he traveled to and incorporating… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:37 PM on April 4, 2019

The Current Affairs podcast did a big two-parter rounding up all of the Democratic 2020 candidates, and you can listen to the Buttigieg section here from 1:14:30 to 1:28:00 or so. They mention another few things in there, such as his position on Chelsea Manning and the hospital story linked upthread, but the overall consensus of the panel is that he is "tolerable" and several panelists speak admiringly of him in various ways. Nathan Robinson, having not read Buttigieg's autobiography… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:57 AM on April 4, 2019

I can't find much information on the English web about Absher. The previous article by the same author on Insider largely recapitulates the same information, but without the clickbaity app-store spin, and then there are a ton of other sites restating the stuff from the first two articles. The Android and Apple apps are visible and beginning to show signs of the larger internet taking notice, in the forms of a series of reviews mentioning misogyny on the Android store and what is surely a troll… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:39 PM on February 11, 2019

Amityville Horror, for example, is a franchise that has never, ever produced a good movie, and I say that having seen nearly all of them and having a lingering fondness for them.

I have to agree that they've never produced a good movie per se, and have produced rather a lot of bad ones - is it the fourth entry where the source of all the evil turns out to be an old lamp in the attic which tries to strangle someone with a power… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:22 PM on October 1, 2018

As far as feather-ruffling sermons based on Amos go, the line about justice flowing down like water is memorably quoted in MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:14 PM on September 25, 2018

Tilda Swinton got a lot of practice doing the whole make-up thing in 'Manifesto' too.

Wait, are you saying she was in disguise as Cate Blanchett in disguise?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:15 AM on August 24, 2018

This is an amazing treasure trove, thanks!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:24 AM on June 18, 2018

When I was a young lad in the boy scouts, a fun activity to engage in on camping trips when adults were not around was known as "wall hits." You'd put your back against a tree and then grab your knees and hyperventilate as hard as you could for a minute or so, then lean against the tree with your arms up over your head and hold your breath while an accomplice pushed his hands against your chest. Done properly, this would evoke unconsciousness and vivid dreams / hallucinations. I've… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:05 PM on May 29, 2018

The NY Times profile was facile, sloppy, and vaguely insulting to me as a reader.

I agree, it has a very glib tone that I associate more with the NYT Style section, with a lot of winking implications. I personally don't find it necessary to snark at him in this way to point out that his ideas are bad, and the writer could have done a great service to her readers by posing a simple "enforced by whom?" type follow-up to Peterson's ghastly… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:31 PM on May 21, 2018

the problem with ferries is that you can only board a ferry on the shore

That's true, but you can ride a bike to the ferry and then use it for the last stretch in Manhattan as well (where the majority of offices are not close to a ferry terminal either). If you live fairly close to Manhattan you'd probably just bike in, but people living farther afield (eg, near the Rockaways) could definitely use this as a way to go.

I agree… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:25 AM on May 21, 2018

I think one of the things that bothers me most about bicycle evangelism is the assumption that everybody can ride a bike. No. This is not true, and it’s not helpful to pretend as though it is.

That's fair, and I should have qualified that adding a bike segment to the ferry opens up transit for some users, not implied that it's useful for everyone. But the people who can't or don't want to ride a bike aren't in a worse situation… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 1:29 PM on May 21, 2018

what is possibly the easiest city in the world to get around

I don't entirely disagree, but I think there is a distinction between the ways that you use the system to get around when you're visiting here, or when you're going around the city to do stuff after work (which by and large works very well), and the ways that you need to use the system if you are commuting to work on a daily basis; most of the grumbling you see online is from (and about) the latter group of people.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 1:39 PM on May 21, 2018

I recently started listening to Switchblade Sisters, which is also a podcast a show about horror and genre movies from female perspectives, though from the few episodes I've heard so far it doesn't seem to take a super analytical / critical approach. This one looks right up my alley, thanks!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:27 AM on March 26, 2018

I'm really enjoying this; I especially like how one of the two hosts is constantly swearing. I thought they had a really interesting take on Calvaire, although they failed to convince me in the same episode that Martyrs is a good movie (yes, I know everyone else on the internet thinks so too, I just don't buy it). One of the hosts wrote a book on the New French Extremity, and they have both obviously thought about the subject a lot. Their segment on the first two Alien movies was good too.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:17 AM on March 27, 2018

Here's 567 more covers, courtesy of the Internet Archive and the sadly defunct philipkdick.com
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:10 PM on March 2, 2018

Previous experiments by the Annals of Improbable Research people.

The USPS appears to have some collective sense of humor, and might in fact here be displaying the rudiments of organic bureaucratic intelligence.

posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:10 AM on February 24, 2018

My small company was ensconced in a WeWork for several months in between office moves and I spent a moderate amount of time scoping out the beer supplies, not so much because I am a tech bro as because I like drinking beer and hey, free beer. They once had a keg of Corona Light in the middle of February, and more often than not there were three kegs of sickly-sweet cider on the five floors available. As for the rest of their shtick about "being around other people who you can network with… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:52 PM on February 19, 2018

I agree with loquacious that this isn't necessarily just a pre-programmed puppet show. The hard part of getting these robots to work is the pure robotics of it. Once your robot can move around reliably and know where it is, actually programming it to do stuff is comparatively easy to build on top of those building blocks. Here's a talk from 2013 that sets up a drone with a set of beliefs and high-level goals written in Clojure, for example - it's not trivial, but it's a well-researched area in… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:43 PM on February 13, 2018

I was glad to see the horror list, because it seems really hard to find horror fiction that isn't badly written and awful. I just read Ill Will and liked it a good deal. (I also read Universal Harvester earlier this year, but wouldn't exactly put it in that genre, though I guess it's somewhat genre-adjacent.)
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:24 PM on February 6, 2018

I like how in the interview he says, "it's not just going to show my twitter mentions,right? Cause that would be really annoying," and then the Intel guy says, "no, no, no. Instead, it will show you Yelp reviews whenever you're near a restaurant."
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:26 PM on February 5, 2018

I remember Pictures for Sad Children! This one always always got me.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:25 PM on February 1, 2018