MetaFilter

NYT blurb on the response. More importantly: Bloomberg Businessweek gets Pikettymania!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 5:42 PM on May 29, 2014

Grief farm
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:33 PM on May 28, 2014

For completeness' sake, here's the final set by Katie McVay.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 6:41 PM on May 20, 2014

I thought the last Swans comeback album was decent, but this one is really outstanding. They still put on a great live set too.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:56 PM on May 13, 2014

I don't think the field of literature has been especially well-served by having a canon and innumerable arguments about which works belong in it and which do not, so I'm dubious of the value of creating one for software.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 1:29 PM on May 1, 2014

Am I missing something, or did this go behind a paywall? "You have reached your limit of 5 free articles this month. Subscribe today for unlimited access."
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:03 PM on April 21, 2014

He does have a really good Rust Cohle voice, and overall it's a dead-on impression. Just once, though, I'd like to see a True Detective thing that doesn't use the "time is a flat circle" line.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 1:50 PM on April 11, 2014

I really love his albums, but the only time I've seen him live his set sort of devolved into noodly jamming at the end, which was a bit disappointing. Looks like he's about to go on tour again, though.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:23 PM on April 4, 2014

It's worth noting that Google has sidestepped this issue in Android by using its (frankly obnoxious) little Android figures for the emoji, as seen in mr_roboto's first link. It is really duplicitous of Apple to blame this on Unicode, it would be quite easy for them to make the selection of ethnicities that display more diverse.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:10 PM on April 3, 2014

This is too bad, although once they got bought by CBS it was pretty much written in the stars. For what it's worth, if all you used last.fm for was scrobbling, there is a free alternative, libre.fm. Not sure how much client support it has, though I've seen at least a few mp3 player software packages that hook into it.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:21 PM on March 27, 2014

I think something's wrong with the stream, even when I turn my audio all the way up I can't hear The Star-Spangled Banner.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:22 AM on March 26, 2014

Wasn't this guy on metafilter a while back doing this same routine at airports? I really don't like his shtick.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:26 AM on March 26, 2014

Wow, this is really cool.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:30 AM on March 26, 2014

This is a pity. He was one of the first authors I got into once I was starting to crave more well-written science fiction as a youngish reader (Life During Wartime and Green Eyes were two of my favorite books at that time, though I've never gone back to reread them). He was always a name I looked out for in the bookstore.

.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 4:52 PM on March 20, 2014

I've found that the thing that keeps earbuds getting tangled in your pocket is that there are three different lines to get tangled (the left and right earbuds plus the bit with the plug on it). If you turn that into just two lines by using a little piece of a twistie-tie to keep the two earbuds together, the phones almost never get tangled (and if they do, you can usually untangle them just by grabbing them at one end and shaking).
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:45 AM on March 20, 2014

I didn't get even the slightest hint hint from this that the blogger was trying to frame this as "hey, imagine what would happen if I - a woman! - tried to listen to serious records!" She pretty much lays out her musical background in the "about me" post, and it's pretty clear that a deep interest in the nuances of popular music isn't really part of it. That's the whole point of her blog. She never claims to be representing women in general.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:08 PM on March 16, 2014

Personally, I thought this was a perfect summary of AC/DC: "Back in Black" has a very spooky start and made me think I was listening to Black Sabbath for about 30 seconds, until the lead singer’s cheesy ass voice came in and ruined everything. [...] Listening to this album has made me realize that those weird scary kids who I secretly thought might be cool, the ones who wore AC/DC t-shirts in middle school, were not listening to scary music at all or cool music. They were… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:19 PM on March 16, 2014

The naive style is chosen; it's not the sum total of every thought the writer has about music.

Absolutely, I agree, but I guess I just don't see the same latent hostility towards music in taking this stance that you do. There's also the fact that, taking her at her word, the blogger literally does not have any background knowledge about most of the stuff she's listening to, so an authoritative / expert voice is right out.

I… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 7:49 PM on March 16, 2014

I thought this bit from her update sums up my feelings on the matter pretty pithily: It's not my responsibility to compromise who I am in the name of subverting gender stereotypes. [...] I wanted to write in a style I enjoyed, I wanted to learn something new, and I wanted to do something creative with the guy that I love.

I do know that record nerd circles can be something of a boyzone (although personally most of the nerdiest music nerds I know are… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:49 AM on March 19, 2014

I don't mind that stuff so much, I mean the basic gameplay is just "mine gas giants for fuel, mine rocky planets for iron," but I feel like there's enough other stuff in there to spice it up, between technology and interacting with aliens and finding ships, not to mention all the random events.

One thing I've found useful is that if you have no cargo space left to build a technology, you can drill something and then temporarily swap out… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:31 AM on March 7, 2014

This interview with Nic Pizzolatto seems to make the possibility of either Rust or Marty as the killer fairly unlikely.

For what it's worth, I just finished Pizzolatto's novel Galveston and he does eschew those kinds of "pull out the rug" devices in that book too. He's got his various plot twists and turns in there, but it doesn't wind up in some kind of Shyamalan-esque mind-blower. (That interview is well worth reading, too, thanks.)
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 4:48 PM on March 3, 2014

Here's a pretty interesting post about the American VFX industry and its relationship to the big media conglomerates. They kind of bury the lede, but among the interesting points is that the VFX industry is using some of the MPAA's own arguments about intellectual property to push for trade tariffs on offshored VFX work. Also, apparently there are plans for a protest at the Oscars.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:24 PM on February 26, 2014

I agree - for one thing, the whole "house points" thing is hilariously arbitrary and capricious. But I also like about the books that as Harry grows older, the books start to ignore things like the points and the Quidditch matches and whatnot, much as children's tastes evolve as they approach adulthood.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:18 AM on February 24, 2014

Yeah, I knew before Watchmen was awful, but that weird little remake really tips it over into "truly loathsome" territory. What the hell were they thinking?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:32 PM on February 11, 2014

By the way, thanks for the links, looks like a lot of good reading in there, though I'm unfamiliar with a fair few of the works being discussed in the articles. Anyone know whether Sarah Horrocks is any relation to the kiwi cartoonist and comics critic Dylan Horrocks?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:41 PM on February 11, 2014

I am sympathetic to anything that involves giving money to poets (though that sample poem is, uh, not my favorite), but it occurs to me that actually doing this job would rate pretty high on the soul-crushing scale.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:01 PM on February 6, 2014

That Vice article almost made me want to walk the one block from my office to this godforsaken little piece of Las Vegas that apparently detached from the mothership and metastasized, just to take in the grotesque waste of money. Almost.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:39 PM on January 31, 2014

I've decided to adopt srboisvert's definition of a hipster from this moment forward: anybody younger than me who isn't wearing a suit.

Its been a few years now since I lived in San Francisco, but surely someone is trolling Gawker when they put forth Hunter's Point as SF's version of Bushwick? Right?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:47 AM on January 31, 2014

This comment on the story by another guy who had to deal with similar things is worth a read, partly because it argues against using a big-name email provider such as gmail as your identity:

"If someone can fake being 'you' over the phone, they’re even more likely to succeed with these large providers."
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:33 PM on January 30, 2014

I never expected to love Rap News but it's been pretty consistently awesome over the years (and they get an unusually high number of Noam Chomsky cameos). They do a little better when they focus on a specific topic though, as opposed to this wide-ranging stuff.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:27 AM on January 30, 2014

A friend on fb linked to an article (and now I can't find the link because fb) that pointed out that the Art Institute - which has many facilities in the city and runs private buses between them - is charged $35 per stop and is limited to stopping at certain stops (and possibly also certain times of day). They must be pissed. And ready to renegotiate their deal.

That is an interesting case (though I'm pretty sure you mean the Academy of Art, not the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:21 PM on January 26, 2014

Why are we assuming the lesser rings grant invisibility? Why do we assume the Nazgul are invisible, for that matter? I don't think strict invisibility is in the text, only the heavy robes and possibly hints of some spectral/faded form.

The witch-king, at least, is described as invisible when he fights Eowyn during the siege of Gondor. "The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:21 AM on January 17, 2014

I've never understood pkill, what if you mess up the search string and kill the wrong process? pgrep makes sense but by the time it was common in linux distributions I already had ps aux|grep xyz wired into my finger memory pretty deeply. (And yeah, eat it SysV ps options, SunOS 4 lyfe)
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:59 PM on January 6, 2014

What if the NSA, instead of illegally spying on everyone yadda yadda yadda, actually had a division that was tasked with handling these kinds of online harassment? [...] Maybe we don't have to tear it all down and can put it to some good use?

Er, no. The harrassers are despicable and this is a very serious problem, but surely eradicating the privacy of every citizen is not an acceptable solution. Also keep in mind that the vast database of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 3:37 PM on January 6, 2014

Is there a good reason not to dox an online harasser?

Well, I'll make the argument against, though I do find harrassers to be miserable specimens of humanity whom I have no sympathy for. I'm not terribly comfortable with the notion of just doxxing people. Even if they might deserve it in some instances, it's not really the way I'd like to see justice meted out in my society (to wit, by private citizens violating the privacy of other private citizens… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 4:04 PM on January 6, 2014

Having thought about the doxxing issue a little more, I find there's some nuance in my position. I don't support what I think of as doxxing in the sense of breaking passwords and then publishing harrassers' private information (street address, social security number, etc) - this constitutes private individuals breaking the law for a punitive purpose, and doesn't seem right.

However, I do think there's a distinction to be made between this and the other sort of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:08 PM on January 6, 2014

Here's the podcast RSS feed, which is maddeningly hard to find on their site, if anyone wants it. This looks right up my alley, thanks!
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 1:28 PM on January 6, 2014

Can't watch this as I'm at work, but I wanted to drop in book five of The Watchmen as an interesting palindromic work of art.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:40 AM on January 6, 2014

I'm of two minds on this one. I think the thing I like most about the LOTR books is that, having reread them every few years basically from the moment I could read a longer book, I find that the meaning that the books have for me change as I change. When I was a kid I focused a lot on the action and battles, the flight from the Nazgul, Gandalf fighting the Balrog, etc. Peter Jackson's trilogy was definitely the kind of film version I would have wanted at that age - lots of action.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:41 PM on December 26, 2013

To be clear, there's no suggestion in the article that the Air Force was intentionally dumping fuel in order to maintain spending levels or something. There is a leaky fuel pipeline, which the Air Force has repeatedly refused to acknowledge or fix, which is leaking huge amounts of jet fuel and associated deadly carcinogens into the aquifer since possibly as far back as the 1950s (the fuel additive EDB has been found in the aquifer and the Air Force stopped using it in 1975 because it is… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 12:31 PM on December 20, 2013

It's probably just because I'm hung over but the fact that the one script is called "Bury the Lead" rather than "Bury the Lede" enrages me.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:22 AM on December 17, 2013

Can somebody explain what specifically changed in Google's algorithm between penguin 2.0 and 2.1 that provoked this SEO change of heart? The article does a really poor job of explaining it.

Also, given how much Google seems to love Metafilter (which, who doesn't, am I right?), why would spammy SEO types email mathowie asking to have the links removed? Wouldn't that decrease their pagerank?
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 1:23 PM on December 16, 2013

In "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Jane Jacobs wrote, "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." We’re losing that here. The further the tech sector gets from the reality of the problems it’s engaging with, the smaller piece of the problem they’ll end up actually fixing.

From "What Tech Hasn’t Learned From Urban Planning," an NYT Op-Ed from an editor at SPUR.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:38 AM on December 15, 2013

I worked at Williams-Sonoma's corporate offices for several years, and I think my proudest accomplishment was surreptitiously hanging this picture of Jean Baudrillard on the wall of the studio where they shoot a lot of the crazy spreads that you see in their catalogs (along with those of Pottery Barn and West Elm, which they also own).
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:01 PM on December 12, 2013

I loved this bit from the article: Eventually, I scribbled in my notebook: “Holy [expletive] I can’t concentrate on what anyone’s saying. Ants all over me. Phantom itches. Scratching hands, ankles, now my left eye.” Then I got in my car and left.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 11:52 AM on December 11, 2013

I think Fun Home is an absolute masterpiece, but at no time when I was reading it did I think to myself "you know what this needs? More singing and dancing!" But I think I'm just immune the the allure musicals as a genre.

Corduroy, Are You My Mother? is worth reading but I didn't think it was as good as the first memoir. It focusses way more on Bechdel's therapy, and her relationship with her mother just isn't as interesting to me as the stuff she talked about in the first book.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:36 AM on November 27, 2013

Here's an interesting article from SPUR pointing out some of the more subtle deleterious effects of curb cuts on San Francisco's sidewalk space (as contrasted with rowhouse development without garages or curb cuts).
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:09 PM on November 3, 2013

Awesome quote from the KATU reporter in the first link: I told the news director at the time, 'I'm one the of the star reporters around here. I'm not going to go cover a dead whale.' He said, 'They're using dynamite.' And I said, 'OK, I'm going.'
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 9:03 AM on November 1, 2013

I personally think that the discussion about the morality of a prison game simulator is a lot more interesting than a hypothetical discussion about Thriller showing up as an Easter egg in it, especially since the game has not been mentioned on the front page before, as far as I can tell.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 2:46 PM on October 31, 2013

Weirdly, when I saw them play Daydream Nation a few years back for that nostalgia tour they did, they played in the theater of my alma mater, Berkeley High, which I was attending at roughly the time that the album was released.
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 8:37 PM on October 24, 2013