MetaFilter

I played it for about 4 1/2 minutes of it and uploaded the video on our Peertube server. Pluses: the opening music is kind of a bop! (but not the gameplay music, you might want to turn that down) Minuses: I got stuck a few screens in and couldn't figure out what the heck I should do next.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 3:14 AM on June 11, 2024

(the video is provided to help people see what it's like, but is technically a self-link, although a relevant one; mods, feel free to delete that comment if that's beyond the pale, I used a Peertube server to try to lessen dependence on Youtube)
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 3:18 AM on June 11, 2024

Also: I like how, when Tarzan runs, it looks like they put a black censor bar over his naughty bits.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 3:26 AM on June 11, 2024

I recently learned that, when The Pat Sajak Show started having guest hosts once a week, one of them was Rush Limbaugh.

While I don't think Sajak ever had serious beefs with Limbaugh's rhetoric, that was from a time early on where Rush Limbaugh became almost mainstream. He was on sports shows as like just another guest. He was friends with Charles Barkley! Snapple advertised on his radio program! He had a short-lived TV show!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:37 PM on June 9, 2024

Do we have to give credit to terrible people for being good at things that are entertaining or pleasing to us?

The question here isn't if you like them, but if you like something they've done, and those are different. The fandom adage is: it's okay to like problematic things. That link offers four tips, I don't think they're all perfect but they make an attempt:

1. Realize that the thing in question is… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 12:19 PM on June 10, 2024

Honestly Saxon Kane that comment started out as being something entirely different, but as in the process of writing it I thought harder about it, and I realized I had to work out somethings maybe for myself. None of the original text I set out to say remains.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:36 PM on June 10, 2024

people trust that company much more than Microsoft to be honest and do it right.

So long as you're not Jon Stewart.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:34 PM on June 10, 2024

"metafilter" as a name generates a gray cat wearing a blue scarf!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 12:11 AM on June 10, 2024

This is wonderful, it reminds me of Memepool of old.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 12:31 AM on June 9, 2024

In 1858 when Charles Dickens was 45 he tried to have his wife institutionalized by falsely claiming she was insane & didn't love the ten children she had borne him, all so he could bang an 18 year old actress in his employ.

"Next time on Behind the Bastards!"
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:05 PM on June 9, 2024

LinkMe: A cat generator, for making social media avatars. [⇔ Linked]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:56 PM on June 9, 2024

LinkMe: The University of Helsinki offers a variety of free computer science courses for anyone. It may even be possible to get credit for some of them, although I'm unsure.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 8:41 PM on June 9, 2024

Part of the confusion over the authorship of XScreensaver has to do with my accidental mixed used of pronouns in the FPP, using "their" and then "he" for what should be the same person. I learned to write pretty young, and so as the rules have changed I get them mixed up at times: should I use a default of them/they? What are jwz's 'nouns? I'm really trying to do it right, but I still mismatch them sometimes.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:28 AM on June 9, 2024

An editor's answer would be to restructure to either make the referent unambiguous or avoid it altogether,

Yeah, I know. If I were editing it I'd be sure to catch it. But a quick FPP is a different kind of thing, I just wanted it up quickly so I could move on to other things, but at the same time a post can't be edited by the post maker once it goes up.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:01 AM on June 9, 2024

It's....

App development is something both huge companies and individuals do? In a sense, every mandatory step to do something will favor corporations that have endless resources to throw at requirements, over individuals. It's like handling DMCA requests. For a Youtube, they can field a whole department to do it. For Kyle Drake, creator of Neocities, as reported in an episode of the podcast Software Sessions, it can be onerous and possibly an existential threat to the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 7:19 AM on June 9, 2024

There's been a push towards readable privacy policies, more nutrition-label style descriptions

It seems to this uninformed commentator like something where 90% of cases could be served by one of a small number of boilerplate solutions, like the Creative Commons licenses. If you don't collect nor care about user data, then go with Default Option A, which says so plainly. Since that Option is always the same for so many projects everyone comes to know… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:08 PM on June 9, 2024

This reminds me of the good old days of Things I Won't Work With. (Previously)
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 12:55 AM on June 9, 2024

Google became popular because it was the first engine that tried to account for SEO games and present stuff that might actually be useful.

When Google was getting started (before they became a company even) I was attending classes at our town's community college. I remember spending a lot of time in their computer room browsing the web. It was an age before internet ubiquity.

There were already several search engines by that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:37 PM on May 31, 2024

DuckDuckGo, as demonstrated when Bing went down recently, depends heavily on it for their results.

Also, at the scale that Google operates at, having a low ranking is practically the same as going missing. If a good page isn't offered or if it's on page 13 of results, either way no one's going to click on it.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:26 AM on June 5, 2024

> I think the internet needs a decentralized protocol for social media.
like usenet?

pyramid termite wins.

There has to be an algorithm which 'suggests' speech you might be interested in and which places unsolicited, paid-for promoted speech in front of people who wouldn't ordinarily be aware of it.

A social media prioritization algorithm is not necessarily a bad thing.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 6:10 AM on June 4, 2024

Most of what I know about cooking eggs comes from Adam Ragusea's Eggs 101 video (14 dense minutes).
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 6:35 PM on June 3, 2024

But why is Nickelback the internet's punching bag of choice, and what seeded this collective animosity?

I don't know. See also: Wil Wheaton and Barney the Dinosaur.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 12:44 AM on June 3, 2024

Another legacy of Shawn Manning, according to Ed Zitron on his podcast Better Offline, is that it's due to his actions that Mark Zuckerberg controls three out of five board seats of Facebook, making him unfireable despite ridiculous decisions like costly bets on a virtual reality metaverse.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:10 AM on June 2, 2024

One of the bits from Brunching Shuttlecocks that has stuck with me through the decades is An Open Letter From Metallica, remarking on the band's lawsuit against Napster for sharing their music:

By now, you've probably heard our position on Napster: rebelling against authority and not letting anyone tell you what to do is all well and good as long as you're shelling out the headbanger dues. Freelance rebels, on the other hand, have no place in uncivilized society.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 11:52 AM on June 2, 2024

Oh you're going to have to explain that one in more detail if you want buy-in.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:23 PM on June 2, 2024

Well Candleman, first off you led with an unnecessarily antagonistic statement. Metafilter is far from a monolith, literally anyone with five bucks can sign up for a membership, and any claims that the site has a unanimously held opinion are simply wrong.

Second, your comment was a non-sequitur. The term enshittification has absolutely nothing to do with whether artists deserve to be paid for their work. And it isn't… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 6:30 PM on June 2, 2024

Geez, you're really trying to make this into an argument. I'm not going to bite on this one, I don't think you can be convinced, and I don't think you're going to convince anyone either going on like that.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:10 PM on June 2, 2024

Just chiming in to add that the classic fantasy manga and anime, Record of Lodoss War, was also adapted from TTRPG play sessions.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:33 PM on June 1, 2024

Campbell's monomyth ideas is really handwavy anyway, and not endorsed by people who actually study myth and folklore.

Oh I'm so glad to hear that. I'm sick of hero's journey narratives.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:37 AM on June 2, 2024

I've nearly watched half of it now, and the best part so far is the discussion of the game-like aspects, which begins at nearly exactly 1 hour 30 minutes and goes through two complete parts.

While Disney hasn't released the details of how the story paths and their game-like elements work, Jenny makes some decent guesses based on what little we do know, which likely includes information piped, through earpieces, to actors playing their roles at their timed appearance… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 3:58 AM on May 29, 2024

Still working through the video, a bit at a time.

Thinking about it more, if they had just dumped all of that linear storytelling, and just made it a Star Wars themed hotel, with an only slightly interactive story that unfolded around the guests, and no app and no restricted access parts, and was much cheaper of course (I cannot be in favor of anything that I'll never be able to afford to go to), it might work really well. the singer, the minigames,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:07 PM on May 29, 2024

I made it to the end! I did it by using NewPipe to download the audio and listening to it in pieces while driving around! It meant I didn't see much of the video of the hotel, but I did hear all the points she made! I really liked them!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:10 PM on May 31, 2024

I should shout out to bradsucks, whose blog is where I learned about this movie!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 6:13 PM on May 30, 2024

I love how it unabashedly cribs so many bits of imagery from Looney Tunes. In recent years the classic Termite Terrace shorts have been in short supply on the air, enough that I began to despair that they would pass out of the cultural mindscape.

But just today I found out that MeTV is starting a cartoon spinoff, and Bugs Bunny and friends are getting two hours, six days a week!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:06 AM on May 31, 2024

There is a little sexual innuendo. The trailer linked in the FPP shows an instance, where a rabbit mimes sexual activity. There's a couple of places where snow forms cartoon genitalia. It might go over the head of kids. There also is the pole dance Pink Fuzzy Bunny mentions. Other than that though, the whole thing is very cartoon like. Minor joke spoiler: The "gore" (usually the furrier disembowling mascot corpses) is plush! The opening (also linked in the FPP) also depicts drinking to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 1:54 PM on May 31, 2024

Been awhile since I mentioned it--

Thursday nights are still MST Club, our weekly showing of riffing and related items, at https://cytu.be/r/metafilter_mst3kclub! Come on our and join us, if you're of a mind!
posted to FanFare by JHarris at 5:51 PM on May 30, 2024

The Rifftrax people have posted a half-hour talk with the makers of The Amazing Bulk to Youtube.
posted to FanFare by JHarris at 9:52 AM on May 30, 2024

Stupid J.J. Abrams.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:19 PM on May 29, 2024

There's a reason why Microsoft is Microsoft and Corel is a memory.

Recently Humble Bundle did a collection of Corel programs, including WordPerfect, and I sprung for it. In exchange, I got a version of their QuattroPro spreadsheet that often pops up three disruptive error boxes when I paste multiple cells, a version of Corel Painter Essentials that immediately shuts down on my machine when I try to start it, and versions of CorelDraw Essentials and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:33 AM on May 28, 2024

I feel that way too, except with Windows 98, which I think was what brought us USB plug-and-play. Maybe call it at Windows XP, where they switched to the NT kernel. Casting back, there are surprisingly few user-facing elements of Windows that have stuck throughout the years. They're constantly making bad decisions that have to be rolled back later. I already listed them in a recent comment elsewhere, but I'll just say one word that will send shivers down the spines of People… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:49 AM on May 28, 2024

Yes on Steam Deck. Or otherwise take a Windows machine, bulldoze the harddrive, put Mint on it, then install Steam from its Software Store.

Once it's installed and you've created/logged into an account, go under the Steam menu item in the very upper-left corner of the window and go to the Compatibility tab. Enable Steam Play with all supported titles to get one level of support, Enable Steam Play for all other titles for more, and under "Run other titles with,"… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:17 PM on May 28, 2024

This is not the first time I've heard LibreOffice Writer's Formatting Marks offered as a replacement for Reveal Codes. I don't know why people do that when it's absolutely nothing at all the same thing. Reveal Codes will reveal everything that's in your document that might potentially affect how it displays or prints, and it'll tell you where each code's markup begins or ends. It's rather like a window into an optional, print-focused HTML version of your document, but one… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:15 PM on May 28, 2024

Artw's right. You can rename a DOCX to ZIP and look around inside. You can also do that with ODF formats and EPUB too.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 8:17 PM on May 28, 2024

LibreOffice, which runs on nearly anything that's a desktop or laptop, can export to RTF, the WordPad file format, as can Word, if that helps you in any way neuron.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 1:21 PM on May 29, 2024

It depends, as with many things, on your distro. Broadcom chips are infuriatingly common, but there are official drivers. And not everything uses Broadcom; my alternate laptop, as it turns out, doesn't, and Linux runs like a breeze on it.

And things are slightly better than they used to be. The thing with networking in particular is the chicken-and-egg problem: you need internet access to get the proprietary drivers that you need for internet access. But at least now you… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:42 AM on May 28, 2024

Yeah, I mean, explain that to someone trying to install Linux on their own. I am one of the few people within five miles of my location that wouldn't be sent into the screaming meemies upon exposure to the phrase "git repo of blobs," and yet it even gives me pause. I recently had cause to install Debian on more than one machines with Broadcom chips, and while I got them working, it is still not turnkey. One of the machines I had to search through old forum threads like in Olden Times.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:26 PM on May 28, 2024

Our JOB is our job, and it takes up all the hours of our fucking life. We do not wish to acquire a second job, of all of the "doing linux" stuff detailed in the comments above, where we do a bunch of computer things for free, in our very small free time, in addition to our regular job where we wouldn't be allowed to use the damn Linux thing anyway.

Understood, and that's fine... except you're going to get that kind of problem no matter what… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 11:32 AM on May 29, 2024

What's the tortured phrase for "publish or perish"?

Release or decease!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:12 AM on May 29, 2024

Cool Retro Term is great! I used it to make the cover of both the EPUB and updated print version of my roguelike book!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:44 PM on May 28, 2024

Oh, and NCommander is great too. I've followed his adventures for a couple of years now.
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:44 PM on May 28, 2024