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I will be there this year, so I'm in for sure, though I agree that pre-existing plans tend to become increasingly tentative at the event itself.

*hides secret shame from loqacious*
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 10:54 AM on May 9, 2008

Hurf durf meme repeater
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 2:02 PM on April 21, 2008

To continue that derail a little bit, I've often wondered whether 4chan gets credit for originating so many memes simply because nobody can stand to actually read it and verify whether their claims are true or not.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 9:09 PM on April 24, 2008

I'm in! Sad to see y'all heading south.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 11:28 AM on April 10, 2008

My ears are burning! I sometimes think I should have chosen a username that doesn't take like two sentences to describe in person, but who expects to actually meet people from a web site? Plus if I changed my handle I couldn't lord over everybody else as a 14ker any more. Anyways, I always enjoy these but I had a fantastic time this time. Big up to loquacious for the afterparty which was excellent per usual. And I'll miss you little scamps, AV and contraption. Don't let them grind you down… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 12:36 PM on April 21, 2008

For the Loma Prieta I was in a video game arcade in Berkeley and probably a good 1/2 of the patrons just kept playing their games, blase as could be. I thought it was fun, personally, though that's undoubtedly because nobody I knew personally was hurt in the quake. I am resisting the urge to pat your little Midwest 5.4 earthquake on the head - how cute! The things that stop me are (1) that would be incredibly annoying, and (2) I'm sure it would provoke a rash of tornadoes and hurricanes out… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 12:07 PM on April 18, 2008

Here is mine.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 1:24 PM on April 17, 2008

I've been getting this for a while as well in XP / FF2 / Adblock Plus / Flash 9, intermittently. For what it's worth, I haven't seen it occur in Firefox 3b5 yet, though I've only been using that for a week or so.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 11:18 AM on April 17, 2008

I actually got mine just after Christmas. The hardware rules, but the Sugar UI has gradually come to foment a low level of mild hatred in me (in fairness, it's intended for kids rather than the likes of me anyways). It seems ridiculously hard to customize things, like I'd be far better off running an emulated XO if I want to develop for it. I'm OK with doing that but it seems contrary to the "let's get everyone to learn how to program" vision of the thing. Installing Opera made it… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 1:57 PM on March 26, 2008

duggaloes? teenage macwhores? eh?
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 5:59 PM on March 26, 2008

Sounds like fun! I can bring my dog, although being 1/2 black lab and 1/2 devil, she has a tendency to try to eat small (like pug / chihuahua sized) dogs, or at least kind of beat them up. (She'll be OK if I'm around though.)

I found an abstract here about MBFE. AV, I suggest keeping enough peroxynitrite around to keep the catalytic rate constant up around 3 × 10^-3.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 4:47 PM on February 28, 2008

Sorry I missed it - I had some trouble procuring my dog.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 3:53 PM on March 24, 2008

We should get involved in two protracted wars simultaneously while drastically cutting taxes.
Text is not likely to be stupid.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 3:52 PM on March 24, 2008

There's nothing ironic about Hitler

*cough*
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 9:07 PM on March 22, 2008

They serve garlic ice-cream at the Stinking Rose, and it's rather good. It's kind of a chalky vanilla with no particular garnish.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 2:06 PM on March 18, 2008

Would it be possible for 24 hours to elapse before we started to declare the (ok, admittedly rather good) speech "historic"? And less snarkily, the old guideline that MeFi is about the links seems like a good one to apply here. FPP linking the video transcript from MSNBC? Not so good. FPP with a lot of background detail on (let's say) Obama's take on race relations, or great political speeches, or excellent and unusual analysis by a noted public figure? Better.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 1:18 PM on March 18, 2008

marble: So with jonmc gone who's going to be the person who takes over as the one who enters into threads about a type of music and posts a comment basically saying "your music sucks"?

Uh... Everybody else on the site?
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 11:54 AM on February 29, 2008

Next time just flag it as single and move on.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 4:57 PM on February 26, 2008

I'll try to be there but I probably won't arrive until 8:00 or later, possibly with my dog.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 4:12 PM on February 21, 2008

quoted for truth!
quoted for truth!

Nice to see you all. I am just now beginning to get the liquorice taste out of my mouth.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 1:22 PM on February 22, 2008

I just wanted to chime in in support of hermitosis's comment waaay upthread. I'm an atheist myself, but I'm deeply interested in religion, and the constant axe-grindery and invisible sky superhero malarkey that seems to pop up in every thread that is even slightly religious is really, really tiring. I think MetaFilter is surely capable of good discussions about religion, and I even think there's been some here and there around the site, even in this thread, but it really seems like a terrible… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 3:26 AM on February 18, 2008

Actually a problem is that there are many authorities saying our followers are christians but those guys over there aren't and vice versa

But is that really a problem? I mean, the problem is that there isn't a single authority, right? But even among atheists, who are not so well organized, there are still some differences in matters of faith. For example, let's say that I'm willing to positively assert that there is no God; this evidence I take… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 6:16 AM on February 18, 2008

(I should also say that I don't want to pretend that the kind of bigoted Christian doctrine that taz and many others have called out does not exist; it's pretty clear that, especially in the US political spectrum, MLK is not the only relevant figure in Christian politics. I'm just frustrated by the grouping of everyone who shares one aspect of a complex belief system into a single bucket.)

also, liberation theology. /mefichan
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 6:54 AM on February 18, 2008

I was rather pleased with myself for my recent rendition of Across the Universe.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 1:42 PM on February 11, 2008

If the tags were put into the title="" attribute of the "XX comments" links from the front page to the FPPs themselves, they would be visible on mouse-over for most browsers (suck it, Opera), would not clutter up the front page, and would add some semantic information for Google and the like to pick up on.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 12:46 PM on February 4, 2008

I'm totally OK with features that aren't universally loved or wanted being provided by greasemonkey scripts, but I don't think that that's practical for this particular pony request. The tags themselves aren't visible anywhere on the front page, so in order to make them available to display there, such a script would need to fetch every linked page from the front page, parse them for tags, and then add the tag text to the front page HTML. That's super-inefficient, and likely too slow to be… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 7:02 PM on February 4, 2008

Also, bonus points to Pinback.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 7:10 PM on February 4, 2008

Seeing results sorted by mefi / askme / meta might be nice, maybe somehow color-coded with the respective site background or something?

Interestingly, it seems to be indexing HTML in comments, at least their URLs. Eg, searching for "ceiling cat" pulls up this post, which has the world "ceiling" in its text, but "cat" only appears as part of a linked URL. (This is actually kind of cool, though it's not how I'd expect it to work.) In a… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 12:51 PM on February 1, 2008

Er, I mean this post (from this search).
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 12:55 PM on February 1, 2008

That deletion discussed here.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 12:59 PM on January 31, 2008

Why didn't I see it before? In retrospect it's obvious that on a conveyor belt, the plane
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 11:20 PM on January 30, 2008

I'm not saying that sexism isn't a problem, or that it shouldn't be discussed. I just don't think that MeTa is the place to do it.

But do you have an alternative in mind? I agree that the issues need to get discussed, but there's not really any other place to do so, inasmuch as overarchingpolicydiscussions.metafilter.com does not exist.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 11:42 AM on January 28, 2008

sometimes it may be good to avoid certain kinds of discussions for the good of the community

Well, I think the problem with that is that for the people who do see boyzone tendencies in metafilter, the perceived problems are there regardless of whether any discussions about them exist. A whole bunch of users delurked in the original sexism threads to make it known that they did feel this way, and most of the time they didn't say… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 1:22 PM on January 28, 2008

You're about to be sorry you asked.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 1:05 PM on January 28, 2008

Can we stop with the pile-on now? The fellow is a new member and has apologized for his past transgressions and gone to great lengths to explain himself; let's please judge him from here on out on the basis of his conduct here.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 2:44 PM on January 7, 2008

some way that at least a few of us can make some sense of what just happened here without lining up in opposition to or support of?

If that's your goal, I'd suggest that you find particularly relevant and/or opinion-changing comments in the relevant threads and link to them from somewhere on the wiki with an eye towards Wikipedia-style encyclopedic summarizing. By doing so you'll make any insight that you gained out of the conversation that much… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 12:20 AM on January 25, 2008

What do the bike stickers actually say? They're illegible on the cafepress page.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 4:34 PM on January 21, 2008

I'm in. Already saw the revamped Blade Runner, but the Film Noir Fest is always a blast. (Although it was kind of cooler when it was out in the outer Richmond, because you'd walk outside afterwards and everything would be all foggy and full of shadowy figures - the Castro's a great theater but Castro and Market just isn't as gritty.) We could go for drinks afterwards to accommodate latecomers and facilitate conversation.

Or, I am a big fan of loquacious's batcave,… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 11:23 AM on January 8, 2008

Tickets for the rifftrax thing are available online at $30 each (including TicketMaster usury). That might be a little rich for my blood, personally. I can't do Saturday the 12th myself but most other days will work for me.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 4:12 PM on January 8, 2008

I have a prior commitment on Thursday (to see a documentary about voting machines, evidently in an attempt to out-nerd even the rifftrax crowd). I think we still need to decide on a movie for the Noir Fest, too.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 9:39 PM on January 16, 2008

Well, to be fair you'd need to wait until the year 3821 for Scientology to produce its own version of Tolstoy, for whatever that's worth.

Personally I think both of the posts in question should have been deleted under thundering twin avalanches of meh. I mean, one link to a YouTube video in which a celebrity known to act crazy is acting crazy? But the Cruise post didn't bug me enough to flag it, and I recognize that I'm a little more celebrephobic than average.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 6:59 PM on January 15, 2008

I think we could maybe generalize this out to MeFi events or a MeFi calendar? I'd certainly like to be notified of gigs / art openings / etc from other MeFites that happen to be happening in my town, and a calendar structure would also allow for stuff like occasional, irregular movie nights that wouldn't necessarily warrant a MeTa post of their own every time.

In the interim I'm in favor of just having a single official, blessed offsite source for calendar info (maybe… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 3:48 AM on January 15, 2008

I miss the old GiveWell thread.

(Seriously, though, am I really the only MeFite who doesn't have a hair up my ass about Phil and GiftHub? Calling the dude out for stuff he does off on his own site seems unseemly to me, like randomly criticizing a MeFite for writing Harry Potter slash or something. But I concur that the best thing to do at this point is just to walk away.)
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 12:34 PM on January 14, 2008

RIP Aural Times. It was truly my favoritest website EVAR.

Seriously. I still hum a few bars of German Cat Had Deadly Strain of Bird Flu from time to time. "If you see a feline... / Better make a bee line..."
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 5:22 PM on January 9, 2008

I've found that using Opera makes reading the thread a little more bearable (in that it's somewhat faster than firefox). As far as Google reader goes, I haven't tried it but I do see all the latest comments in the RSS itself.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 1:17 PM on January 6, 2008

I want to chime in on the GiftHub thing before the topic is completely cold. I myself find the whole masks and personae thing a little offputting and more than a little precious, but frankly it's their site and they can set up their community culture however they want, just as we can on ours. As visitors to their community it's our responsibility to figure out what their norms are and play within them if we really do value web community as much as we say we do.

And… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 3:40 PM on January 5, 2008

(I should also say that in general I think we MeFites have been doing a good job of being civil and well-spoken on the various blogs and such that have been covering this, especially cortex and jessamyn as our official ambassadors and Miko who has been consistently well-informed, thoughtful, articulate and forceful, and way more patient than I would probably be in her place in the face of stuff like the Moral Tutor's last screed.)
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 4:15 PM on January 5, 2008

Mine just arrived, I'm charging up it battery now. If anyone has questions, send me mail, or if somebody else opens a thread I'll participate.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 1:14 PM on December 20, 2007

D'oh! I'm so sorry Miss L! I will buy you beers at the next meetup in recompense.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 10:13 PM on December 17, 2007

Ok, now you owe me a beer.
posted to MetaTalk by whir at 2:39 PM on December 18, 2007