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I was reading about the von Trapp family yesterday, and saw that descendants of the family were still in the singing business until recently, as the Von Trapps. They made an album of songs with Pink Martini, including a cover of Kuroneko no tango (e. Black Cat Tango). Before that they joined Pink Martini and Rufus Wainwright on a cover of Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s Kitty Come Home.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 4:06 AM on April 30, 2024

Thank you all! I'm really happy to see the process moving forward.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 6:14 AM on February 20, 2024

Is this how we'll find out P. J. Harvey's a MeFite?
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 6:18 AM on February 17, 2024

Yay! Welcome!

Also, "Kirkaracha" is just one of those usernames that's fun to say in different ways. KIRK-a-RACH-ah! kir-KAH-rach-a! kir-kah-rah-CHA!
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 5:01 AM on February 10, 2024

That’s a really interesting story! Somehow the Linda Bruner post passed me by at the time, though it’s very much my sort of thing. Thanks chococat! And Going To Maine, for the original post!
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 11:50 PM on January 25, 2024

There are several voices here that have fallen silent in recent years, and I wonder whether have passed away or not. Just yesterday JHarris mentioned oneswellfoop, but there are many others I could name.

The strange thing about a community that is entirely text based, existing only as a web forum, is that it is impossible to know whether someone has stepped away from participating, or whether they've passed away, unless someone confirms it.

Most… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 6:12 AM on January 17, 2024

Yay! Supercongrats!
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 12:08 AM on January 17, 2024

I think I might try that from time to time, if it was an option. And I could do with a bit fewer silos in general, most obviously IRL should be reintegrated into MetaTalk.

There was a proposed Reykjavík meetup I couldn’t’ve attended, and since I don’t live there most of the year, didn’t get an alert, but I could’ve alerted some Icelandic MeFites who’d’ve loved to hear about it, but it was over a month after it was proposed that I saw it.

And I… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 4:40 PM on December 29, 2023

Hurray!

I wish every post in MeTa was positive wombat news.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 3:15 PM on December 28, 2023

*pops head back on*

YES WE ARE ALL HUMANS HERE 

*looks down, pops head off, turns it around, pops head back the right way round*

ABSOLUTELY COMPLETELY HUMAN 

*whistles in infrasound*
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 9:50 AM on October 27, 2023

jessamyn: My lawyers indicated that while it's probably important for the majority of board members to be from the US, that doesn't preclude non-US folks from being on the board or serving in other capacities.

For a MeFite who isn’t an American, I don’t quite know how to feel about this. On the one hand, it’s nice we won’t be excluded, on the other, it’s a bit worrisome to hear that a majority will always be American.

Now, I… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 1:21 PM on October 3, 2023

warriorqueen: As an additional note: I would very much caution about the perfect being the enemy of the good. As an example, I think the board should be based in the US. The site just plain is American-dominated, which comes across at every turn. While I agree a more international format would be best (perfect), trying to sort that out on top of everything else when the reality is that visitors to the site will encounter an American dominated discussion in almost every thread, it may… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 11:09 AM on October 5, 2023

No one is asking to find a jurisdiction which treats everyone in the world equally, but that we keep in mind that a large proportion of the userbase doesn’t live in the United States, and think of ways to account for that, because in every discussion we’ve ever had on the concerns of non-US MeFites, someone treats us a joke.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 6:19 AM on October 6, 2023

Miko: especially if an ED is the only paid staff

I apologize if this is a dumb question, but does this mean that MetaFilter mods would be volunteers and not staff once it became a non-profit? Or does this mean that the executive director would be the only paid staff member of the non-profit before it assumes ownership of MetaFilter?
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 12:30 PM on October 13, 2023

dusty potato: I feel like this development has been brewing for as long as the site decided that the rolling Fanfare-style Ukraine War threads on the Blue are essential and constructive content

As someone who lives in a country bordering Russia, who is far from fluent in any of the native languages, the Ukraine threads are the best regular source I’ve found for aggregating good English-language information on the conflict and the wider implications… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 2:15 PM on September 28, 2023

.

Looking at his activity page, I see that the two front page posts he made were about the death of Elliott Smith and the Great White nightclub fire. The former had an impact on me, not only because I was a fan of Smith’s, but also because the previous winter I had been an exchange student at Hampshire College, and a lot of my friends there took his death, he was an alum, personally. As for the latter, a couple of years later I moved to Rhode Island, and got to know many… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 12:01 AM on September 26, 2023

Neat sheet! I dropped two invites in there. I’m also Kattullus over on Bluesky.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 6:16 AM on September 19, 2023

On Icelandic Bluesky there’s a divide between people who call a skeet “skeyti” (pronounced SKAY-tih), which means “message”, and those who call a skeet “skítur” (pronounced SKEE-turr), which means “shit”. Those are the two genders of a Bluesky post.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 8:57 AM on September 19, 2023

That was meant to say “two genres of a Bluesky post” but autocorrect is the shitposter in this relationship.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 8:58 AM on September 19, 2023

.

I was wondering what had happened to him just recently, and I was sad to hear had passed. What a fine MeFite.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 11:52 AM on September 4, 2023

Oh geez, this is all so wholesome, how lovely!
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 11:31 AM on August 12, 2023

.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 2:34 PM on July 31, 2023

There’s a bunch of us here who’ve lived a peripatetic life, for one reason or another, moving around the world, having to rebuild a social life in new places, with new people.

I think I can speak for all of us in that particular subgroup of MeFites that having an online community that’s stuck around and remained recognizably itself for nearly a quarter-century has been incredibly valuable.

It’s a third space I carry with me wherever I am in the… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 4:04 PM on July 14, 2023

Hey, for next year, can MetaFilter do another raffle for user number hundred thousand (if whoever won the last raffle accepts) and maybe two hundred thousand too?

As the self-proclaimed spokesbody for the triple-zero community, I’d really like to see some quintuple-zeros around.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 2:14 PM on July 19, 2023

Don’t blame him, we voted #1 quidnunc kid.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 5:31 PM on July 24, 2023

What I’m hoping for is the calling card of a dashing thief, and a bottle of her signature perfume.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 2:34 AM on July 9, 2023

This is an excellent suggestion. I’ve camelcased names for a long time, but I will do the same for other tags from here onward.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 3:43 PM on June 30, 2023

I will say that as someone who’s in the process of learning a grammatically robust language, Finnish, I’m exceedingly thankful for how patient my various interlocutors are with my wild guess about which grammatical case I should be using in a sentence. But I do find it annoying how my mouth can blurt out a Finnish sentence only for my mind to immediately correct myself. Mind you, the correction isn’t always right either, which is another peeve.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 3:03 AM on April 22, 2023

mochapickle: A dear friend who writes for a living has started using the "and I's" construction

Weirdly, I just noticed this today on a podcast I listen to, and said by someone who writes for a living. I entirely blame this on prescriptivists making people doubt their own sense of grammar, so that they stopped using the entirely correct “and me” construction. Ah well, it’ll be normal usage soon enough.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 7:10 AM on April 22, 2023

fantabulous timewaster: I think the ad absurdum here might be High German, which I understand is a formal dialect that no one actually speaks at home.

High German is a collection of dialects spoken in the mountainous southern parts of the German-speaking world, such as Bavarian, Swabian, Austrian, Swiss and many other types of German. The "high" isn't a social marker, but a geographical one, like in "highland".
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 11:31 AM on April 22, 2023

I think most languages with a long history of writing have varieties that are considered standard and are primarily written. German has several, so does English. In Finnish, there's puhekieli, spoken Finnish, and kirjakieli, standard Finnish, and certain word forms are different in the two varieties (for instance the standard first person singular is "minä", but there are lots of varieties of what people actually say). There are people who speak in standard Finnish, like there are… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 3:14 PM on April 22, 2023

Oh goodness, that's horrifying, mark k.

I'm fine with incorrectness, I'm fine with pedantry, but incorrect pedantry is deeply annoying.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 1:48 AM on May 9, 2023

I wish I could say that I took my subconscious’s hint when I started dreaming about reading MetaTalk, but that was fifteen years ago and here I still am.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 2:27 PM on April 28, 2023

Having young children on April 1st can be a trip. I was woken up this morning by my wife informing me that my three year old, who had crawled into bed with us during the the night, had peed on my side of the bed, where I was still quite peacefully asleep. After briefly being hopeful that this was an April Fools by my wife, a quick inventory of my physical sensations confirmed that I was, indeed, wet on one side of my body. After groggily taking the bed linens off the bed and to the laundry… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 10:01 AM on April 1, 2023

Oh, and while on the subject of April Fools, I found this effort from Iceland, about a grocery chain announcing a line of Easter eggs filled with vegetables, to be pretty charming. The Google Translate version is pretty good.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 10:04 AM on April 1, 2023

daisystomper: 4. I announced on Facebook that I was pregnant. I was, in fact, actually pregnant, but my friends (knowing me) were deeply unconvinced and so there was a lively debate.

That reminds me that way back when it was considered fun to tell outrageous whoppers on blogs. The idea was that the post would be so over the top that almost no one would believe it. To my consternation, I found that I wasn’t good at thinking up truly unbelievable… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 3:06 AM on April 5, 2023

To be perfectly honest, I don’t really have a strong opinion on this posting style. I tend not to comment or favorite until I’ve looked at most of the links, and so a megapost feels uninviting to me, but they work for others, so I’m glad they exist.

My one reservation is that it’s happened a few times for me over the years that I’ve wanted to post a link and it’s been embedded within a megapost. Most of the times I’ve just worked around it, but a couple of times that… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 11:56 PM on March 21, 2023

Personally, I’d like to reinforce the “parish notices” aspect of MetaTalk, with meetup announcements, births, cool news and just kinda random community events and happenings. And alphabet threads.

A lot of that got shunted away for serious community business, which seemed necessary at the time, but it made this subsite very serious, and it could do with a bit of levity.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 1:55 AM on March 26, 2023

NotLost: Schmod, do you have any specific, concrete suggestions?

I am not Schmod, but one very specific suggestion comes to mind.

For background, I’ve done a lot of volunteer work through the years, sometimes in ad hoc groups, and sometimes in committees in larger organizations.

One thing that’s struck me in discussions by and about the Steering Committee is that it sounds a lot more like an ad hoc… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 11:33 PM on March 22, 2023

I think electing an entirely new group of people seems like starting again from scratch. The staggered term election system is good for keeping continuity and fostering institutional memory, and going back to the drawing board seems unnecessary.

The basic system seems sound, and the people who were elected to the Steering Committee have experience that no one else has, and so it seems best to me that they work out the structure of the Steering Committee going forward.… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 10:22 AM on March 23, 2023

Yay! This is frabjous news!
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 5:37 AM on February 16, 2023

.

What an awful loss, for his family and friends, colleagues and neighbors, but also for us MeFites. He was always someone who I was happy to see posts and comments from.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 11:59 PM on January 26, 2023

Right this minute I’m listening to Brazil by Cornelius, my wife put on a mixcd I made her for our 3rd wedding anniversary, and it’s on there. Earlier today I stumbled onto a recommendation for the album On tullu mietittyä kuolemaa ja semmosta by Ite Eerola, which is lovely Finnish indiepop that kept me company while I was cleaning the apartment this morning. Oh, and in the time it took to write this comment the mixcd moved onto To the East by Electrelane.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 8:29 AM on January 13, 2023

My adult life has been spent in a number of different places, so not many Christmas traditions have had an opportunity to get established, but one thing I hold onto since childhood is to try to stay up as long as possible reading a book I got as a gift. For the first time in gadzoinks I managed to finish a whole book on the night before Christmas (in Iceland and Finland Christmas Eve is the traditional gift giving day). It was a short book, more novella than novel, by a former professor of mine… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 12:49 PM on December 25, 2022

My native, and home language, is Icelandic. My wife is Finnish, and I’ve gained a basic, very basic, proficiency, in the language. I can converse in it, but how long that conversation will be depends entirely on the patience of the Finn I’m speaking to, though thankfully Finns are generally a patient bunch. Also, I’m spurred on in learning the language by the fact that my wife learned Icelandic in just a couple of years.

My second language, in chronological terms, is… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 12:47 AM on October 27, 2022

I was most active in MeFightClub about ten years ago, when I moved back across the Atlantic after spending most of a decade in the US. It was a weird time for me, and one way I kept my mind on the level was to play Minecraft on the Aporkalypse. Some friends and I built a "notional park" inside it, which essentially meant staking off an enormous amount of extremely weird early-days Minecraft landscape and making it look like a national park. It was probably the most fulfilling thing… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 2:19 PM on October 13, 2022

Yay! That looks like a really good committee.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 9:35 AM on August 29, 2022

.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 11:03 PM on August 15, 2022

Usually, all I share imagewise with people is pictures of my kids, but randomly enough the last image I sent to someone is a part of a rather odd project.

A friend of mine is a poet who’s trilingual, Icelandic, Galician and Spanish. He asked me earlier this summer if I could send him some lines of poetry from my notebook, that I had never worked up into full poems. He would then translate/rewrite them into Spanish (I don’t credit him because he hasn’t decide how he wants… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 5:05 AM on July 9, 2022

Thank you, Rhaomi! I’m a tiny bit disappointed that Dall-E 2 has better parameters to parse “thingamajig”, but I suppose that’s the price of progress.
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 1:35 AM on July 6, 2022