MetaFilter

I guess I have no choice but to love this song forever

Solved the problem of falling out of the musical mainstream by never having been in the musical mainstream.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:31 AM on April 26, 2024

I have mixed feelings about streaming music services, but they have absolutely facilitated me finding a ton of new music, usually by deciding something is interesting and doing a deep dive on it. Thats not particularly tied to any era though, frequently landing me in the 60s and 70s as well as recent stuff.

(To me “recent” is now “in the last 20 years”, so that’s a little time stuck too.)
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 9:38 AM on April 26, 2024

Looks like our most played albums of the moment are the new Beyonce (2024), the new Idles (2024), and the Andre 3000 flute toot album (2023), so that’s not doing too bad for old fucks.

Probably makes us less cool that New Blue Sun has become our “we’re going to sleep, throw something on” album, replacing Music for Airports.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 10:19 AM on April 26, 2024

Protesting for Gaza on US universities

Keeping the press out very much seems like a move in solidarity with Israel, yes.

The establishment very much wants these kids Kent Stated and to be able to feel good about it.

Referring to anything as “the establishment” feels shockingly antiquated, like some 60s protest thing, but boy do politicians, media university legacy billionaires et al all feel unified on fucking hating these kids to a deranged degree.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 10:14 PM on April 23, 2024

There’s the violent threat to Jewish (and all other) students everyone was talking about.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 1:59 PM on April 25, 2024

Police snipers on the roof at Ohio State watching the encampment
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 4:25 PM on April 25, 2024

Police Arrest Rabbis Near Gaza-Israel Border at a Rally to Highlight Starvation
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 9:29 AM on April 26, 2024

Compare and contrast that description of events on campus with the first few paragraphs of the Shai Davidai profile.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 9:55 AM on April 26, 2024

Examining What "Never Again" Means Through the Lens of Magneto

Dropped off of x-men a bit during end stage Krakoa because it seemed to be doing one of its periodic status quo resets in a way that wasn’t super interesting to me, but from what I hear I really have to pick up Ressurection of Magneto. Al Ewing gets a lot of mentions in the article alongside big names like Claremont and Morrison, and honestly it’s justified, he really is that good.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:55 AM on April 25, 2024

Krakoa being an exclusionary ethnostate is certainly something I kept expecting the other shoe to drop on, because Hickman had to have something in mind when he came up with it… but for whatever reason (COVID, scheduling, wanting to let other creators have a shot at the setting) he never really closed the circle on that. A couple of the other x-writers took a shot at addressing that, I think Gillen came closest, but when it was time Krakoa to be wrapped up it wasn’t so through any internal flaw… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 9:21 AM on April 25, 2024

How do we deal with Magneto's age at this point? He wasn't frozen in a block of ice. At this point, a child today finding out that Magneto survived the Holocaust would be like me as a child finding out that Cyclops fought in the Franco-Prussian war.

Marvel invented a sliding time analogue for the Vietnam conflict - it wasn’t a very popular move. I imagine trying to do the same with WWII would be vastly less well received.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 12:28 PM on April 25, 2024

The core query softness continues without mitigation

The vacuum it leaves is going to be hard to fill.
There’s Bing, but it’s a) Bing and b) likely to disappear into AI and other bullshit while chasing money even worse than Google will.

There’s duckDuckGo, but that’s just dressed up Bing.

So the golden period of the entirety of the web being easily searchable is just going to disappear and who knows what comes after.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 12:04 PM on April 23, 2024

Everyone having an index of the entire web sounds a bit impractical, TBH.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 1:22 PM on April 23, 2024

This was the funniest part of the story for me, as I appreciate irony

Not really, merely the kind of thing that’s going to get less and less possible then go away.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:30 PM on April 23, 2024

The Life and Death of Hollywood

David Zaslav, who’s every decision is bad and destructive and who has sent the value of Warner Brothers rumbling, just got a massive raise.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:25 AM on April 19, 2024

Opening HBO Max (or “MAX”) these days is wild because though the old, good, pre-“MAX” stuff is still there and there’s still new HBO material being made it is buried under tidal wave of total unwatchable shit, and it’s easy to see that as the beginning of change in ratio of shit/worthwhile that ends in all shit all the time.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 10:53 AM on April 20, 2024

Basically at this point everybody with any large amount of money turns out to be brain breakingly, jaw droppingly stupid with such regularity that there has to be some kind of positive relationship between the two.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:30 AM on April 21, 2024

Creative people will always have a tough time breaking into the business and contrary to the article, it's been increasingly good for them.

This is not what I have heard about the past few years from literally any person in a creative industry that is trying to make a living at it.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 4:42 PM on April 22, 2024

There was a whole strike about this!
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 5:13 PM on April 22, 2024

Vicky Osterweil on the muddled anti-politics of contemporary movies

I suspect it has little bearing on the actual movie but Garland has done an amazing job making Civil War sound unappealing and himself a naive simpleton in ever single interview or media appearance he’s done for it.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 9:51 PM on April 21, 2024

she has said, in essence, "trans women are women and trans men are men, but let's be cautious about bad actors taking advantage of access to women's refuges", which, sure, is an argument that one can take issue with, but it isn't evidence of being fascist

Honestly that sounds like exactly the kind of “just asking questions” nonsense that makes TERFs a useful leading wedge for fascism and why all of them just coincidentally seem to find… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 4:41 AM on April 22, 2024

Right has currently removed the right to control my own body and much more on the horizon, so forgive me for believing this thought process is fucking BONKERS, and the province of a rich and out of touch jerk. Yikes

I have personal reasons for not wanting Garland to drift off into being a “neither right nor left” style right wing weirdo, but he’s absolutely sending off all the signals.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 6:05 AM on April 22, 2024

Sure. But Helen Lewis isn't fascist, if that word is to mean anything at all, which Osterweil seems to hope it does.

Noting here that she’s a regular source of “anti-woke” “cancel culture has gone too far” columns in The Atlantic and the like.

She absolutely part of the fash ecosystem, like all TERFs become.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 6:17 AM on April 22, 2024

I hear plenty of people on the left in everyday life making jokes about wokeness. The word now fills the same role in popular rhetoric as "PC" did 30+ years ago

Er, yeah. It’s cover for doing bigotry same as that shit was.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:17 AM on April 22, 2024

Again, haven’t seen it, but having an actual imminent threat of nation destabilizing violence sure does complicate “Don't do this” as a message… what if it’s getting done anyway? Do you just give up?
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 11:31 AM on April 22, 2024

i think the movie was saying don't let it get to that point.

So… preemptively give up? Nothing is worth fighting for? Certainly more appealing when the stakes are abstract, but it’s a not great vibe right now when they are very much not so.

Honestly I’d probably watch it and enjoy it if Garland hadn’t said anything about it, because I can totally see it working on a visceral level if you go in assuming it uses the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 12:37 PM on April 22, 2024

*shrug*

Possibly not living on Arrakis I have more latitude to appreciate how Paul can both be bad and bad-ass, and be less bothered about how Villaineue might potentially be having his cake and eating it.

“Division is bad” lectures about looks-like-America present more of a challenge.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 1:06 PM on April 22, 2024

I thought this was going to change the world. In a way, it did

More recently: Orbital -Smiley
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:03 PM on April 20, 2024

David Cameron being a Clash fan is the example that springs to mind here.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 10:39 AM on April 21, 2024

Folks from round ere ain’t from round ere

Borat and the Folk Horror of Post-9/11 America
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 2:18 PM on April 20, 2024

"so many tech demos end up hiding an ugly truth deep down"

fully automated communism

As far as I can tell AI bros lean way more fash-adjacent libertarian.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 2:25 PM on April 17, 2024

. (I do not consider this evidence that Amazon was being smart, just lucky.)

A bit mixed, as the end result is they created the world’s greatest talking clock.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 6:32 AM on April 18, 2024

Line go up!
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 8:10 AM on April 18, 2024

IIRC McDonald’s actually did do a fake AI McDonald’s where it was all hidden workers.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 11:48 AM on April 18, 2024

Cannot be overstated how much the current shoplifting scare, to the degree that it isn’t just manipulated figures and media exaggeration, is just the result of understaffing stores and relying on self checkout.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:41 AM on April 19, 2024

I thought that whole thing was based on gangs of thieves robbing the same stores multiple times per day and making off with thousands of dollars of merchandise each time, not somebody failing to pay for a couple pears at self-checkout.

Makes for good footage but the numbers don’t bear it out.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 10:56 AM on April 20, 2024

Twitter AI says

This is more of a colossal fuck-up that could only really happen on Twitter.

Pretty sure it could happen anywhere people are using “AI” as a source of truth.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 1:31 PM on April 17, 2024

Netflix Doc ‘What Jennifer Did’ Uses AI Images to Create False Historical Record
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 9:37 AM on April 18, 2024

The Backdoor To The Entire Internet That Didn't Happen

It is basically this xkcd cartoon bit with an unknown state actor trying to whack out that tiny block at the bottom.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 12:27 PM on April 15, 2024

Well, if you want something like that…

The tendency of popular AI-based tools to recommend nonexistent code libraries offers a bigger opportunity than thought to distribute malicious packages.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 8:00 PM on April 15, 2024

It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people

Facebook and Google giving and taking away with advertising also pays a part. Special mention going to Facebook for the whole “pivot to video” debacle.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 2:08 PM on April 15, 2024

The thing that doesn’t work about paywalls is they’re basically a choice between committing to a subscription and not seeing the article, which is pretty easy to make unless you really want a subscription. Finding some kind of model that’s a smaller unite would be an easier sell, but nobody has really made that work.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 6:05 PM on April 15, 2024

Hey voter voter voter voter... SWING!

Interesting article hanging off the main article about the whole “young people are leaning Trump” thing. It’s based on polling, which I don’t trust etc., but pretty interesting and suggests a lot of the panic was bunk.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 3:03 PM on April 12, 2024

I cannot see any use whatsoever for a straight percentage of voters poll in an American electoral system.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 8:09 AM on April 13, 2024

which to be blunt, is unlikely to be repeated

Why’s that?
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:54 AM on April 14, 2024

I’m pretty aware of the structural reasons why younger people are less able to vote.

But… they made the effort to overcome that one election, to Democratic advantage, but that’s not expected to happen again.

What has changed?
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 8:27 AM on April 14, 2024

But this was different in 2020?
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 8:57 AM on April 14, 2024

Linked questions, probably, neither answered.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 10:47 AM on April 14, 2024

Per recent polls, as much as you trust them, the real big problem is Gen X.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:55 AM on April 15, 2024

From December: Fewer young Americans plan to vote in 2024, Harvard youth poll finds

Which was, I think, when people started panicking about this.

Though…

Overall, the number of Americans between 18 and 29 years old who “definitely” plan to vote for president decreased from 57 percent to 49 percent in a poll at a similar point in the 2020 election cycle.

Among Democrats in that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 2:27 PM on April 15, 2024