MetaFilter

I loved the open house. It was better than Cats. I'd see it again and again.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:06 PM on August 24, 2016

I don't understand. What are the two extra chords for?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 4:55 PM on July 11, 2016

It's funny how the friendly spook doesn't have any advice about the first scenario they depict, where the guy at customs scans his ID and hits a button called "initiate surveillance." Gosh, it's almost as though citizens have no means to deter state actors that wish to surveil them!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 5:26 PM on June 29, 2016

It's weird that they seem to be celebrating the dankness of their memes, I always thought it was a pejorative term implying that the meme was lazy and poorly thought out.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 4:14 PM on June 17, 2016

Yeah, this is a dumb exercise doomed to failure, but honestly, Magik is greater than Professor X? Shatterstar is greater than Professor X?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:15 PM on May 30, 2016

I have never been to Seattle, but here is Mudhoney playing a set on the roof of the Space Needle, so it can't be that despised by locals, can it?

I was in Portland as a tourist a few times doing touristy things and I rather liked Voodoo Donut. I definitely didn't go there because I'm into gourmet artisanal donuts, I mean, it's a donut, not some obscure regional specialty. But it was fun hanging around in the neighborhood and waiting in the big crazy line with all the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:00 PM on May 30, 2016

Imagine Chuck Klosterman cornering you at a party and pontificating for hours about Dylan vs Elvis vs Chuck Berry vs Jimi vs Beatles vs Rolling Stones, oh god, the nightmares

Ok
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 5:02 AM on May 24, 2016

aherm
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:10 PM on May 4, 2016

All it needs now is an overlay of The Parallax View to churn out an army of brainwashed assassins.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:18 AM on April 21, 2016

Well, for what it's worth Akka's ! operator was taken from Erlang, along with most of the rest of Akka. Scalaz, I assume, takes most of its cues from the ASCII APL variant J, which also resembles line noise. Here's quicksort in J: quicksort=: (($:@(<#[), (=#[), $:@(>#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1<#). But operator overloading isn't exactly new to Scala, as anyone who used C++ in the cout << "Hello, world!\n"; era will likely remember.

It's too bad that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:31 PM on October 15, 2015

Sorry, I'm sure it must be linked somewhere, but is there a list of the nominees this year along with a notation about which ones are from the Puppy slates?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:16 PM on August 21, 2015

Ah, found it by comparing this list of the puppy nominations to this list of the non-puppy ones.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:28 PM on August 21, 2015

It would seem that sad puppy allies made an attempt to prevent consideration of the alternative voting methods this morning, which was rejected. Here is some thrilling video of fandom parliamentary procedure, courtesy of comments at file770.com.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:21 PM on August 22, 2015

I loved this bit from the interview:

Do you have any regulars who stuck around for decades? Yeah.
What are they like? They’re all right—they get older and then they die.
Oh.

I live in the neighborhood, and I confess that while I'm a little sad to see it going away I never did spend a ton of time in there. It reminded me a lot of the now-closed Forever After Books on Haight Street in San Francisco, huge… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:37 AM on August 18, 2015

This sounds great. I don't want to be that one guy, but I always liked her first two EP/CD-R things the best (Walnut Whales and Yarn and Glue), which she then re-recorded most of the songs on for Milk-Eyed Mender. Ys is way too baroque and proggy for me, losing both the spare instrumentation and the simplicity of the song structures in a way that I've always thought is kind of damaging to the lyrics. Anyways, I'd… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 5:52 PM on August 10, 2015

Thanks 23skidoo!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:09 PM on August 6, 2015

Interesting that Graham is evidently trying to rebrand "the 1%" as referring to people who serve in the armed services, rather than rapacious oligarchs in the top income percentile.

Edit: where is the chat room?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:13 PM on August 6, 2015

Cool Papa Bell: You gotta read What's the Matter With Kansas

I was thinking about that book a lot today reading this pretty excellent long-form piece in the NYT magazine about the recent budget struggles in Kansas, where the politics have divided into roughly three camps of conservative Republicans (moderates having been voted out in the 2012 and 2014 elections). I'd be pretty interested in Thomas Frank's take on the current, uh, state of Kansas,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 5:32 PM on August 6, 2015

Sorry for the callback to one of the first comments, and I'm not trying to call out the man of twists and turns with this, but the contents of this link :

Why is Trump surging? Blame the media.

...drive me nuts. I find WP reporter John Sides's theory that increased mentions of Trump in the news were a big factor in his rise to the top of the polls to be completely plausible, and even likely. But then Sides deploys a bunch of graphs with really… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:40 PM on August 4, 2015

For the record, she said "normalizing gender where it could be," not "where it should be."
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:51 PM on July 20, 2015

I don't love Jared Leto, but apart from still shots we've only seen about 7 seconds of actual footage of his Joker so I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Can anyone recommend a good run on Suicide Squad if I haven't read any of the comics but am reasonably familiar with DC continuity? The Ostrander run someone mentioned upthread?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:09 PM on July 13, 2015

I do like Sim's take on the New 52 Harley Quinn costume from the article skycrashesdown linked above:

When Harley reinvents herself for the Joker, she dresses herself in a way that’s explicitly designed to be for him, and that fits with the way he presents himself. That classic Bruce Timm costume is great, and part of that is because those vivid, blocked colors look like they fit next to Timm’s Joker. One clearly follows from the other. If, however, Harley was… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:27 PM on July 13, 2015

Karaage: the "findings" are reported in the article in poetic verse

I don't wish to derail the conversation, but I sort of assumed this was a joke until I looked at the PDF and there it is on the ninth page.

Short responses in poetic form were selected in the reporting of findings, in this way preserving the intensity of that fear as reported by participants while alerting readers as well to the converging discourses… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:46 PM on July 12, 2015

I dunno, not to be a jerk about it but to me this comes off as Friend of a Friend's Shitty Noise Band: the Game: the Movie.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:28 PM on July 1, 2015

I really dislike Carles's schtick, but I do think he's more or less on to something. It doesn't seem like an accident to me that the rise of foodie culture coincided with the decline of indie rock culture in the popular zeitgeist.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:19 AM on April 22, 2015

Yeah, Scott Lang isn't even the least favorite Ant-Man.

Spencer's Superior Foes of Spider-Man was really enjoyable.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:29 AM on April 17, 2015

I'm a Fantastic Four fan, I loved the books when I was a kid because they got into cool sci-fi adventures with outer space and alternate dimensions and whatnot. The semi-recent Ed Brubaker run was pretty good, too, there's a whole plotline where Reed Richards teams up with a bunch of other Reed Richardses from alternate dimensions in order to try to solve all of the problems. So I'm hoping they will actually put out a good movie for once. The Thing is not nearly beetle-browed enough though - I… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:49 PM on April 19, 2015

(Er, oops, I'm thinking of the Johnathan Hickman run, I think.)
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:56 PM on April 19, 2015

I read Ballard's Crash and didn't find it disturbing so much as lyrically hallucinatory.

I feel the same way about Crash, although I did get somewhat disturbed by the clinical, joyless way that the constant sex is described, and by how vividly the characters' alienation is depicted. I remember thinking that it was a masterpiece of that kind of expression of late-capitalist ennui, and also that I could go a very long time without… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:16 AM on April 11, 2015

Follow-up from the NYT this morning. It would seem that Clinton staffers turned over a selected set of her email to the State department late last year, and that State has not been including them in FOIA searches, but now says that it will.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:24 AM on March 4, 2015

Yeah, it's also a little weird in that there are 2-3 Genius people commenting on the annotated version of this page who (I'd venture to guess) don't have MetaFilter accounts, and most MeFites probably aren't able to post comments on the Genius annotated version, so our two parties are sort of talking past one another. I'll admit that I find the whole thing a little intriguing, especially for turning MetaFilter into a sort of threaded-comment site which it explicitly doesn't want to be.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:30 AM on March 3, 2015

Welcome, nightpool. The tech does seem a little more well-suited towards a magazine article or blog post than an ongoing discussion, I agree, partly because for a site like MetaFilter the ongoing conversation is sort of the whole point. (MetaFilter is also heavily and skillfully moderated, which I imagine might make for some interesting culture clashes.)

I'm curious if you have a plan to deal with the potential for this feature to become an unholy mashup of Third Voice and YouTube comments?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:35 PM on March 3, 2015

If the contract specifies that he can change his investments any time before the next results are published, couldn't the insurer just start publishing results on the hour (or in real time) in order to minimize their exposure to this?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:02 AM on February 27, 2015

Metafilter: the most dedicated sysadmins and moderators, sitting crouched over keyboards hitting refresh constantly for 40 hours, peeing in soda bottles lest they miss the slightest wink of activity on their site

I had a friend who got pretty into the Forum, and it did seem to help her get through a pretty rough time in her life. It always struck me as a sort of self-perpetuating money-making endeavor, like a lot of the holdouts from the 70's New Age… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:39 AM on February 17, 2015

As another point in the "hard sell" data set, the owners of the late, lamented (I assume lamented, by somebody somewhere) San Francisco restaurant Cafe Gratitude got into some trouble by forcing their employees to attend Landmark events a few years back.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:59 PM on February 18, 2015

I am sure it is no accident that green, white and purple are the original Suffragette colours

Actually, it does seem to be an accident. The origin of the color scheme, for the curious.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:13 AM on November 25, 2014

Zoe Quinn has just posted a really-quite-good piece on lessons learned about ethics in games journalism from Gamergate on medium.

That is an excellent piece, thanks. I also liked this succinct list she linked to, of actual ethical concerns in games journalism.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:19 PM on December 2, 2014

Someone who understands neither computers nor mental illness is probably the best person to write this story.

I dunno, I thought it was an interesting profile, if a bit on the thin side. I'm not sure getting deep into the internals of TempleOS or MUA typeface selection would have improved it, and it does talk about his mental illness and his own attitude towards it.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:54 AM on November 25, 2014

What they need in this facility are these 3,000 tarantulas somebody seems to be selling on Facebook.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:20 PM on November 7, 2014

I liked the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy a lot because it was very atmospheric and strange, but then in the second one he got a lot more plotty and explainy, which I didn't like as much. I will probably read the third at some point.

(On preview, I agree with murphy slaw that Night Vale seems more like something I should like than something I do like.)
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:38 AM on November 4, 2014

If you didn't pay a guy to wait in line for an hour and a half to buy it for you, it's not a real cronut.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:17 PM on October 29, 2014

I like my share of Sun Kil Moon / RHP records, the guy does have a legitimately great voice, but every time I've seen him he's been just the worst kind of insufferable prick, insulting the audience, insulting the venue, and generally holding everyone around him in great contempt. Last time he was talking about looking for pretty girls in the front row that he was going to talk to after the show, and asking less-attractive people to move farther back in the crowd. He just seems like the worst… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:11 PM on October 29, 2014

I loved part III when I first saw it, but rewatching it a year or two ago I didn't think it held up all that well. It's still pretty interesting as "homemade science fiction in the vein of Phantasm," as the Dissolve article that AlonzoMosleyFBI linked above puts it, but it's more of a curiosity than anything else. In a way it might have been better as an entry in one of the horror/fantasy TV shows that were big at the time than as a feature film.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:13 PM on October 21, 2014

Yeah, actually I just rewatched Halloween 3 and it's not as bad as I remembered. It would seem that my enjoyment of it has been heavily influenced by my expectations about it going in - when I expected it to be good I was disappointed, and when I expected it to be terrible I was pleasantly surprised.

It's not too bad and is a fascinating document of its times, reflecting a lot of fears about industry and media consolidation that were current at the time. (Also, potato… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:09 PM on October 22, 2014

...although it's also evident that John Carpenter wasn't sure which of the British Isles Stonehenge is located in at the time he produced this film (hint: it's not the one with the shamrocks).
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:15 PM on October 22, 2014

Holy cow. All this time I had no idea that was a Captain Kirk mask. That's hilarious.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:25 AM on October 24, 2014

Yeah, for the real cassette experience, this should get stuck in your computer and continuously play every time you start it up, until you are finally able to destroy it with a screwdriver and pliers.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:45 PM on October 9, 2014

Also, nice touch using that Caribou song with the weird tempo distortion as the first song there, naju, that's good for the verisimilitude.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:49 PM on October 9, 2014

no SWANS, list fails

Well, in fairness they do include (World of) Skin, which fits in with their theme of "don't go for the better-known stuff."
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:08 AM on October 4, 2014

I wonder if the lack of women artists on the list might also partly be down to the curators' evident affection for proto-electronica, metal and industrial music. Those aren't genres I know tons about, but most of the artists I do know from that period are pretty heavily male dominated. (I'd be glad to be educated about women working in those genres back then, I just can't think of many.)
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:57 PM on October 4, 2014