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The cartoon Steven Universe has some aspects of this. (some spoilers here:)

Long ago, Pink Diamond, one of the rulers of the Diamond Authority, wanted to preserve human life, and tried to beg the other rulers to not create a space colony out of Earth (which would have destroyed its environment). The others failed to see that she wanted to call off the colony, and instead abducted some humans to live on a small space station with an environment that they considered suited… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:18 PM on March 13, 2024

Ah I came to this late, but I can't recommend Adam Koford's Haircut Practice enough. (He's the guy who created The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, if you remember them.) It's a deep homage to early Peanuts strips that also has a modern sensibility!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:45 AM on February 27, 2023

I have a friend with an iPad in a similar situation to flabdablet, I might consult with her about whether we can do this.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:10 PM on August 20, 2022

Also suggesting Steven Universe.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:44 PM on April 28, 2022

MST Club perspective--

Just about any movie with a MST episode qualifies, of which there are over 220 now, and with 13 more coming up soon. We also watch other weird movies at our shows, so a few more--

"The Car" is about an evil motor vehicle that menaces people. It also has some really ridiculous characters. One of them abuses his wife and is pretty horrifying though.

"Tammy and the T-Rex" has a very… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 1:23 PM on January 29, 2022

A few more from MST Club's lists:

Head is the Monkees movie, directed, unexpectedly, amazingly, by a young Jack Nicholson.

Circle of Iron is a schlocky martial arts picture, and ostentatiously dedicated to Bruce Lee, but it's goofy fun.

Someone else already mentioned it but definitely The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, written by Dr. Seuss. Stars Hans Conreid, which is a sure way to get on MST Club's good side.… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 3:09 AM on January 30, 2022

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Band. Bee Gees and Peter Frampton tackles the Beatles. The viewer loses.

Aaah we've seen that.

There's also Fantastic Planet, which is not for kids (despite being animated), and isn't bad so much as extremely weird, possibly the weirdest movie we've seen at MST Club, which I do not say lightly.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:16 PM on February 1, 2022

BABA IS YOU
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 6:33 PM on June 29, 2021

Also--

Miitopia will keep you going for a while, and is a nice game to play a bit of at a time, it almost encourages you to put it down after every few expeditions and come back later, but you don't ever have to. It is not very challenging, but all the characters in it are ones you make in the Mii Creator, which can be tremendously fun, especially if you have a good collection of celebrity look-alikes (and you can use any amiibo to copy them from your Wii U, although one… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 6:48 PM on June 29, 2021

Score is and remains very important to pinball, because it's universal across plays on a single machine, and across machines of the same type. (Although there's important differences between, say, individual Twilight Zone tables, depending on machine maintenance, physical adjustments and operator settings, score still means roughly the same thing between them.) How do you compare "four multiballs and a wizard mode" to "two multiballs and two wizard modes?" Both, however,… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:47 AM on February 22, 2017

"You know what's funny?"
"What?"
"A joke."

It's worth noting that the well-known "Why did the chicken cross the road?" joke is of this variety.

I once obtained an inexplicable can of Sterno that rode around in the back of my car for a while while I tried to figure out what I should do with it. I tried giving it to a friend, but he had no more use for Sterno than I. However it… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 3:29 AM on January 16, 2017

Good lord, don't name your kid Kermit. Even as a middle name, there are plenty of chances for it to be discovered and then used for teasing and bullying.

I've seen this opinion a lot. But it seems to me that they are arguing, instead, for you to name your kid something highly ordinary and non-distinctive, like John Smith. Do you really want to avoid naming your kid something because of what idiots will think?

Really, names… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:38 AM on October 22, 2016

(And some of them might actually like the Frog connotation. There are worse things to think of when meeting a new, kind person.)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:43 AM on October 22, 2016

It's always been "here or to go" here in Brunswick, Georgia that I know, as well.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:20 PM on August 10, 2016

That's because the overwhelming national attribute of the United States, above wealth, above freedom, above democracy, is insecurity.

Here in rural Georgia, people talk about highway numbers, and once in a while names, as if everyone absolutely knows what they are. 341! 95! 82! 17! The spur! I never got used to that and I still forget what they are all the time.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:04 AM on August 30, 2016 marked best answer

If you have stuff you want to offload I could take off your hands, but have no money to spare for such things and am hobbying on the cheap, so seriously, I should be your last resort.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 8:30 PM on July 29, 2016

We often use bad movies as mid-week material on MST Club.

How about Eldorado, which has some unexpected star power (Daryl Hannah, David Carradine, and a seriously slumming Peter O'Toole narrating), but is a bit irredeemable, and really quite atrocious. Don't watch if you can't handle random bad lip sync musical numbers, lame attempts at comedy, bad 3D CG, rape jokes, and ultimately (quite some ways in, in fact) gross out horror. After recent review, it is not what I… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:37 PM on June 18, 2016

jon1270, it's a Dell Inspirion N4110. I could probably replace it myself if I could get over the sizable reluctance to take it apart. I always worry about not being able to get it back together right, or breaking something. Fixing it would be ideal though, it is true.

Could compressed air work for this? Can air even get underneath the rubber button-nub? Aren't those all molded into one continuous sheet, could air even get in there?

Am trying… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 11:46 AM on December 8, 2015

Hey wow, that does look very similar to my system! Huh, I may try that when I can get the part. Thanks very much lmfsilva and Sunburnt!

Actually, thanks everyone, this has all helped me out a lot. I can use Autohotkey in the meantime, and probably replace the keyboard without much issue when I have the spare funds. Attapersons all around.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 12:05 PM on December 8, 2015

That's very kind of you to find for me! Thank so much.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 1:20 PM on December 8, 2015

Some followup....

I found the freeware (and apparently open source) program SharpKeys, which can effectively swap the identities of two programs at the Registry level, which is helpful for some programs that are not fooled by AutoHotkey.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:02 PM on March 9, 2016

I finally got the keyboard replaced. Thanks everyone for their advice!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:15 PM on April 27, 2016

When I upgraded to Windows 10 on my old laptop, Bluetooth suddenly stopped working. It turned out the proprietary Intel Windows 8 Bluetooth app held over was conflicting with Windows Bluetooth support. It refused to work until the drivers and app were uninstalled, at which point Windows' built-in support worked fine.

I mention this to lend support to mosschief's suggestion, of removing proprietary drivers and letting Windows 10's innate support take charge, or at least… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 12:23 AM on April 8, 2016

Firefox opening up sites in new tabs is probably something unconnected with Windows 10. Try restarting your machine and see if the ability returns? Or alternatively, make sure you're actually running Firefox and now that Edge thing Microsoft is trying to push?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 11:42 AM on April 8, 2016

Install the version of Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection for your device (PC, Mac, Linux or mobile), pick a puzzle type that looks interesting, and figure out for yourself how to solve them.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:23 AM on March 4, 2016

This is going to seem strange at first maybe, but....

One that will get you eventually is the popular indie/Steam game Undertale. It pulls off a neat trick regarding what it's all about, because it's often crazy funny and heartwarming (depending on how you play), but you'll encounter some quite disturbing things before the end, especially if you manage to play the game in one of two certain (opposite) ways.

It really shouldn't… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:05 AM on February 28, 2016

Along the lines of Lyn Never's suggestion, I add poonikins the magic warrior princess and poonikins the magic warrior driver, which have very misleading titles, considering that they are Grand Theft Auto IV hack videos involving a horse. They are, however, great.

Here's one and then another GTA IV mod, this time one that changed the air friction constant to a negative number. It is as hilariously an apocalyptic vision as possible.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:36 PM on December 5, 2015

Once malware is on your system it can be frustratingly random if scanners will actually remove it when they say. Some malware is quite talented at resisting efforts to extract it from your machine.

What I suggest is using a different machine to burn an offline scan CD, and boot from that. Windows Defender Offline works well for me. The reasoning is, if the machine is booting off of alternate media, the malware is just dead data that cannot do anything to protect itself.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 6:08 PM on December 4, 2015

Update-related command prompts are not unknown, but aren't really common either. You were right to be wary, especially while browsing Encyclopedia Dramatica.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:51 PM on December 4, 2015

Ah okay. Good luck!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:07 AM on December 5, 2015

You should boot off of a Linux live CD and see if your monitor works. If it doesn't, that's pretty solid proof that Windows is not your problem.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 6:18 PM on December 4, 2015

Did you tell them that the monitor worked when you tried a live Linux CD? I want to give people benefit of the doubt, but to jump straight to replacing the motherboard like that, wow.

Do you have restore CDs? Also, often these days computers have a magic keypress that, if you hold it down while powering up, will boot to a recovery partition. But installing Windows 10 may well have wrecked that mechanism, I should warn you.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:37 PM on December 4, 2015

A friend suggests: Sir Francis Tinglebottom the 9th.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:33 PM on November 2, 2015

Check out Open Game Art.

Also you shouldn't overlook the Creative Commons search, but with the understanding that anything you find you're going to have to investigate to make sure that it's licensed Creative Commons. But that's usually not difficult, if it shows up in the CC search then the people who originally posted it won't be shy about how they're licensing their work, if it's not obviously old enough to be public domain.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:43 PM on October 30, 2015 marked best answer

Seconding Bittorrent Sync. Pretty awesome, although the fact that it's closed source is a problem.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:28 AM on March 11, 2015

Gosh, I don't know why I didn't try this first, sorry--

I used System Restore to go back a week (to the 5th) and the problem went away.

That doesn't mean whatever caused the problem won't happen again (it might have been a system update), and it provides no insight into its cause. It seems to me that I remember issues like this happening, spontaneously, before.

For the future, it seems unlikely to have been a hard drive… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:50 PM on February 13, 2015

When things like this have happened before, Task Manager has never been of any use in tracking it down. The fact that a rollback stopped the issue implies the problem was in software, and that it happens even right after a reboot that it wasn't a resource or RAM problem.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:42 PM on February 13, 2015

The others reporting in this thread are correct. Google Play remembers what you've purchased in the past, and allows you to redownload anything you've previously purchased before for free. Your purchases are tired to your Google account. Some makers of tablets and phones supply alternate app stores, maybe with different account systems, but they pretty much all follow the principle that, once you've got it, you can always get it again.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:48 AM on February 12, 2015

Update --

I've bee avoiding Firefox lately because of this problem, so I think I misremembered what was happening. I was just watching a Flash video in Firefox, the problem recurred, and it did, indeed, freeze the video when it happened. I seem to remember there were a couple of other weird interactions, but I can't say for sure that's always one of them.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:23 AM on December 27, 2014

It's only Firefox. My system has been running slow lately, but I'm pretty sure that's because I'm running Firefox and Chrome at the same time. When did web browsers get to be so damn memory hungry, I used to have 40 tabs open at once without much issue, now....

I guess disabling hardware acceleration is the next step, but I've been reluctant to do it, because of the slowdowns. Will try.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 10:17 AM on December 27, 2014

I had been avoiding the reset option specifically because I didn't want to lose history passwords etc, it's nice to know those won't be affected. But on the other hand, I've already tried disabling all extensions. Isn't that effectively the same thing? What other kind of state does Firefox preserve that could mess things up to this extent?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 6:12 PM on December 27, 2014

I've never reset my profile before, but I have cleared my downloads a few times. In fact, I did that a week or two ago just to eliminate it.

I'm currently running with hardware acceleration turned off, and the problem hasn't recurred yet. I think I might also be getting better performance, oddly, although I turned off smooth scrolling at the same time. I will try resetting my profile, I've never done that so I expect there might be some of the things dhartung alludes… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:53 AM on December 28, 2014

Okay, I did eventually end up resolving this, but only by turning off hardware graphics acceleration.

With it off, Firefox doesn't freeze up anymore. It does, however, sometimes, when I switch to a new tab, not refresh the screen. There is little or no visual indication this has happened. Internally, Firefox thinks it's displaying the new screen; externally, it's still displaying the old. Sometimes one element from the new tab will be displayed, overlaid, on the old.… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 1:32 PM on January 26, 2015

While IANAL, I believe I can answer these pretty conclusively.

If you make the program for the use of only you and friends, if it's not publicly available, then there is no issue. Go to town.

If it is to be made publicly available then, if it doesn't use the original's art or text, you're in the clear. CrystalDave is right, in the US game rules are not copyrightable. This is why Words With Friends can persist despite its similarities to… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:27 AM on December 31, 2014

flabdablet is right. Sexual attraction is strange and confounding, and often doesn't map to our understanding of it, especially when that understanding comes from friends and the media.

And this is something a lot of people won't tell you: sex isn't everything.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:04 AM on December 30, 2014 marked best answer

From a friend with a PS4:
- Says the camera isn't worth it yet, it's only really good for some dancing game or other. He adds, after a moment, that the camera is also a microphone, so that might be useful in other games.
- Shooter games are the thing he's played the most of lately, isn't quite sure what to suggest other than those.

I just noticed that Fez is downloadable on PS4 according to this list. It's an excellent… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:03 PM on December 27, 2014 marked best answer

More suggestions from my friend:
Terraria is out for PS4, which is like a 2D Minecraft. And hey, there's also Minecraft.
There's a number of Lego games. Lego Marvel Heroes has an explorable Lego Manhattan to poke around.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:08 PM on December 27, 2014

If we're talking quasi-roguelikes, my friend informed me that Spelunky is out on PS4, and that's a wonderful game. It's quite difficult though, but it's still fun just to play around in any slowly make progress. If you don't stress out over winning, Spelunky can be tons of fun.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:21 PM on December 27, 2014 marked best answer

Spelunky is a much better game than Rogue Legacy. Rogue Legacy subscribes to the kinds of grind cycles that have driven me away from most other games. In short: play Spelunky.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 5:37 PM on December 27, 2014

That's my (also not-a-lawyer) understanding. You can always re-license something you've published. Others who have already used the work are still protected for their use, and their continued use. That's the point of the license, to tell other people you're okay with it if they utilize your work in a number of ways, provided they do a number of specific things depending on the version.

One thing I heard a ways back that might be… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by JHarris at 9:21 PM on December 2, 2014