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"I am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me" is all-time classic.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:13 AM on June 10, 2024

I can't decide if this is the Epic of Gilgamesh as written by a Markov-Chain or Anne Carson, but it's kind of terrible and kind of wonderful.

I've been trying to think of what to say about this without sounding unduly negative. The intention is beneficient, even pure! The means adopted will some day be good enough and are not absurd to try now! But I worry about the effect of these kinds of gibberish-y translations being put out into the world,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:12 PM on June 9, 2024

not all Boomers - just the yups

Did you vote against Reagan, or didn't you: in the end that's what it boils down to.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 9:03 AM on June 9, 2024

I mean, she's still out there getting arrested in her 80s!
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 3:36 PM on June 9, 2024

Look at the stats. A smaller percentage of 30-44s voted for Carter in 1980 than of 60 and ups! (If you go below the age 30 breakpoint, which slices through the Boomer cohort, it does get a bit less depressing, but you can't blame Reagan on the GGs. At the very least, the yuppies played right along with it.)
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 3:52 PM on June 9, 2024

I'm not a big tabletop gamer, but Mansions of Madness has both an app that handles some more complicated randomness (the board itself is partially randomly generated) and actual physical dice. I think it would verge on unplayable if you had to do it all through physical dice, but, yes, for aging nerds physical dice are indispensable for atmosphere.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 9:02 AM on June 9, 2024

For those of you (like me!) who didn't know:

The Irukandji jellyfish (/ɪrəˈkændʒi/ irr-ə-KAN-jee) are any of several similar, extremely venomous species of rare jellyfish. With a very small adult size of about a cubic centimetre (1 cm3 or 0.061 in3), they are both the smallest and one of the most venomous jellyfish in the world. They inhabit the northern marine waters of Australia, and cost the Australian government $AUD 3 billion annually through medical costs… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 9:18 AM on June 8, 2024

LinkMe: For This Indigenous Beadworker, Every Stitch ‘Is an Act of Resistance’ Sometimes when I am trying to make a Metafilter post on an artist or artform underappreciated by the mainstream that happened to get good coverage somewhere, I think how much better it would be if someone with more expertise and/or from the community in question could make the post, instead of my fumbling attempts to draw together context: this is such a topic!
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:59 AM on June 8, 2024

People who don't understand why I was so harsh on the people arguing on this site a couple years ago that access to crypto was important for poor people are cordially invited to read all of this.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:54 AM on June 8, 2024

Someone from India is going to say it was always good without the cultural context of American religious nuts who thought that strong flavors or even satiation were a failure to control your base instincts and would lead to other moral hazards like teenagers wanting to have sex.

I call this the "lentils are God's protein!" approach and, I'll be honest, my attitude towards legumes as formed in a childhood home dominated by this approach has never been healthy.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 11:35 AM on June 7, 2024

It's much easier to push dark patterns and other abusive processes on the consumer on a smaller screen. End of story.

Occasionally I just try to read something on the web on my phone and I'm appalled by how intrusive and actively user-hostile the design is.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 5:31 PM on June 5, 2024

real Gen Xers* didn't think to whip out their phone and purchase a new plane ticket. They already made me use the app to check in, so I defeated a line of people at a counter to snag the last two tickets to an alternate airport during a weather delay

The way the airline apps are set up this is a pretty simple process--much simpler than researching a trip in the first place. Says this Gen Xer (real, I think?). Honestly don't even think of this use… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 9:46 PM on June 5, 2024

The online services that price scam you for using a mobile device will equally scam you when you use a desktop, windows or Mac or the time of day you try to book.

My ad-blocking-equipped laptop browser never puts a big pop-up in the way of my browsing, or repeatedly in the middle of something I'm reading, that is almost impossible to dismiss and ends up diverting me into scammerville. I can barely escape that experience at all when using the web on my phone.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 5:10 PM on June 6, 2024

Cue massive university protests and building occupations.

If this is supposed to be some kind of zinger, you can stuff it. Really?
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 5:34 PM on June 5, 2024

I am the horrible goose who lives in the prison
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 5:29 PM on June 5, 2024

How much tourism actually does anything to help people understand and grow in reality?

I feel this is the kind of question you can only ask if you've never lived personally in a community where few people have ever traveled far or lived elsewhere (or given serious attention to another time or place where this was the case). The blind provincialism and herd instinct of humankind is hard enough to overcome with the ability to get… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 7:39 AM on June 5, 2024

Our downtown is adorable but it is absolutely useless for anything practical for us downtown residents. Nowhere to get a house key cut, but hey, would you like to visit yet another expensive boutique??

Great news--you can get that situation without tourism, too. Hooray for late capitalism!

(Also European cultural hegemony which means traveling to the beautiful/historic European and sometimes American places is so… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 7:43 AM on June 5, 2024

Not sure why you thought that was helpful, but okay.

Because if the issue is whether travel causes the (real!) problem you've identified, pointing out that this is a common scenario even in places without travel (but with wealth) is highly relevant. If your town had no tourists, only wealthy seasonal residents of summer/winter (depending on location) homes, you'd have much the same problem. Under our current system as it has developed in… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:18 AM on June 5, 2024

This is the stereotypical Rude Tourist who is trying to monetize their rude travel habits

This is a category I am happy to cast shade at, as their monetary incentives to behave selfishly (at best) to get the "best" or "famous" image have had the effect you might think they would...but I'm not sure it is, in the end, a huge group, or that even if we somehow could ban them, it would help much. I took my mom to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:28 AM on June 5, 2024

Reaping the whirlwind of, uhh centuries of violence and exploitation?

Are you expecting me to disagree with this?
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:29 AM on June 5, 2024

Most people I know are on some combination of social security, disability, or welfare, and terrible jobs. I don't notice them being particularly more provincial or bigoted than the world travelers I have had cause to interact with.

I notice that you don't mention cultural or ethnic (i.e., that most commonly implicated by travel) diversity here. Or how your poor/disabled/anarchist friends get treated by the local power structures, by which I mean not… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:43 AM on June 5, 2024

I suspect you'd see a much bigger shift in urbanites, who actually have to live with people of different origins and backgrounds, rather than just spending a few days or weeks some place "exotic".

This is a fair point, but I do think even a little can benefit those who are open to it (as opposed to checking off an item or conspicuously consuming or whatever).

I'm not trying to suggest that your… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 9:29 AM on June 5, 2024

When we decide it’s time to part with them, we want to know they are going to a nice home where they can continue to enrich and improve other people’s lives.

"It has no feelings!"
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 9:26 AM on June 4, 2024

For some reason I find I retain information better with an actual book, often being able to remember where on the page a particular passage was.

I do, too, and strongly prefer to read serious fiction with pencil in hand to mark things, but oddly this has not led me to greater attachment to the physical medium in itself. I would regret losing my elaborately annotated copy of The Golden Bowl with all the tracing of the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 12:40 PM on June 4, 2024

Correct? Or what am I missing?

The (largely misguided, though charmingly optimistic) view that without the books you could live in a smaller and cheaper place, rather than just filling up the space you'd free up with other stuff.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 7:50 AM on June 5, 2024

The seeds, at least, look to be huge--bigger than chestnuts.

I do hope that if Brown and others succeed in increasing interest in indigenous foods, Indigenous peoples are the ones who profit from the use of their traditional knowledge.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 9:29 AM on June 4, 2024

Don’t you have like six months after finishing a degree before you have to start paying loans?

Not (for federal loans) if you're in full-time student status.

I find this guy's dilettantism (coupled with credentialism) lightly offputting. Learning is valuable for its own sake, yes, but at some point you should start actually contributing to the creation of knowledge instead of remaining in permanent arrested development… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 5:02 PM on June 3, 2024

I think the real story here is how this demonstrates the reality that many terminal master's programs, even at the very top universities, are basically profit centers for the school and not especially difficult to get into, or graduate from, if you're willing to pay their enormous sticker price in full.

Depends on the field, of course, but Oxbridge are notorious for this.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 5:28 PM on June 3, 2024

I'm left wondering why there's no meme about how much we all hate Fleetwood Mac.

Timing, to some degree? If you were mid-to-younger Gen X, you definitely had a sense of them as one of those Tedious Self-Involved 70s Bands That Belonged on Oldies Stations Only (*). There were a lot of these types hanging around cluttering up young people radio in the early to mid 80s before finally going off into that great cocaine sunset. If we'd had memes in the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 7:45 AM on June 3, 2024

But in the back of my head I heard distant feet
Che Guevara and De'bussy to a disco beat.

Being honest, some of their lyrics (*mumbles* like these, sorry) are, well, cringe, and yet Please clicked with me; is there anything like the click of new music in a young teenager's head as they lie on their bed listening to late-night radio? Why this click in the mind of a nerdy, disaffected, straight girl from a laboriously… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 5:54 PM on June 2, 2024

"A trap and a bait, made of peanut butter, sardines and rolled oats"

Well, I mean, who among us could resist
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 10:09 AM on June 1, 2024

so they had to switch to a less-tasty bait made with oats.

*chef's kiss*
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 1:33 PM on June 1, 2024

I wonder if there was no cluster that might be fairly characterized as "horny" or if she excluded it for privacy's sake (which would be fine, it's her project). I mean, they were 17...but they were 17.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 3:06 PM on May 29, 2024

the out-of-date idea that reusing any text at all from one's previous publications constitutes self-plagiarism

Currently being used as a stick to beat women and people of color in leadership positions in academia by bad-faith actors in absurd ways.

If someone doesn't title their study of this "Counterfeit Consciousness" I will be very disappointed in humankind.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:34 AM on May 29, 2024

Maybe some of the links are messed up? I'm not sure there is a Paul Kocher, professional historian, though there was a literary scholar by that name (wrote a bio of Tolkien many of you may have read), and I don't see links to his work?

If anyone is interested in the Paracelsian controversy, there's a whole chapter on how it played out in London's medical and "paramedical" communities in Deborah Harkness's The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:33 AM on May 29, 2024

Landlord dude is at the center of a Venn diagram of contempt, but as a parent I think the most offensive part to me is the parents who don’t want to spend time with their kids to the point of bringing a nanny on vacation.

I don't think anyone who's ever travelled with kids would dispute that an extra pair of adult hands/eyes can be incredibly helpful.

To me, though, it's just like, "so...you're saying you're too poor to fly everyone in first. Weird flex, bro."
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 2:08 PM on May 26, 2024

I dislike the death of amateurism, but it is frankly obscene for the universities to be profiting to such an extraordinary degree off the labor of players who mostly aren't even getting proper educations. In an ideal world these "minor league" units would all be spun off and no longer connected to the universities, but that's never going to happen.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:55 AM on May 24, 2024

Since it's a holiday weekend here in the U.S., I'm going to assume that all of you who responded to my initial lament about amateurism with critical remarks that recapitulate just what I went on to say from there simply had to run to catch a train and didn't have time to finish my sentence, rather than that the follow-up statement "it is frankly obscene for the universities to be profiting to such an extraordinary degree off the labor of players" was too recondite to follow.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 4:55 PM on May 24, 2024

.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 7:29 AM on May 24, 2024

I have a lot of thoughts about this, but to jump on one that hasn't been brought up here yet...honestly. If you teach Ovid's elegant poems of rape and other forms of sexual coercion in a classroom as if there was nothing objectionable about the content at all, nothing worthy of note, nothing to see here, just a bunch of rapes and trees and brooks, you are doing a pedagogical harm that goes beyond provoking an immediate trauma response. I'm not talking about somehow promoting or excusing rape,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 8:50 AM on May 23, 2024

I've yet to really understand why giant companies and banking instituitions like this, are allowed to make billions of profits year on year, then publicly complain about their 'unforeseen losses' when their profits drop because of all numbers of reasons, and expect (and receive) government bailouts and similar to pick up the pieces, all whilst still excessively rewarding their directors 'for a job well done despite the challenges'.

I hate to be… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 2:20 PM on May 22, 2024

This is a nifty find! But the assertion that wives would largely remain at home and have little chance to learn the language is...strange, or at least badly phrased. A lot of Huguenot refugees were small craftsmen working from or near their homes or a combined home/shop and their wives would've been intimately involved in running their businesses. Much household management would also have required interaction with the surrounding community. Huguenots were Protestants and they did have a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 11:58 AM on May 18, 2024

Dabney Coleman walked so Stephen Root could run. RIP!
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 11:15 AM on May 18, 2024

...as it is too early in the day to drink, it is too early in the day for this nonsense.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 7:41 AM on May 15, 2024

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...the Wonder Wheel.

Inexpensive chipwiches are overpoweringly sweet for me, but lately I've been suffering from a severe vulnerability to the Oreo cookie version.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 7:39 AM on May 15, 2024

"Sugar, water, and...of course...purple."
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 11:55 AM on May 13, 2024

Most of these are in the realm of "okay, you love your little buddy, do as you will," but the Odalisque one is a little terrifying.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 1:59 PM on May 11, 2024

It is interesting that animal painting seems to have become "odd," given the success of painters like Edwin Landseer in the nineteenth century.

Just BSing, but I suspect that the increased sentimentalization of nature generally led to an increased sentimentalization of art about animals which did not correspond well to the values of twentieth-century art. It's actually rather difficult to find stand-alone portraits of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 5:39 PM on May 11, 2024

"I feel bad for some prosecutors in these situations." I wonder why I phrased it like that, as opposed to "I feel bad for this prosecutor in this case." A mystery for the ages, I guess.

If you've never had to rely at work on colleagues who are not reliable but whom you can't avoid having to use, you've led a blessed existence. That's all I'll say.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 2:28 PM on May 11, 2024

People are rightfully worried about using these tools to spread fake slander, but it's equally possible to use it to claim real footage is fake, or to accuse someone of faking who's actually telling the truth.

Yes, ultimately the point is to destabilize the truth altogether.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 3:36 PM on May 11, 2024