MetaFilter

Delete your activity history, folks. And not just in YouTube, google is tracking your searches across all of their products. YouTube also irritatingly tracks thumbnail views so if you even accidentally hovered your mouse over a thumbnail that's now feeding the algo.

If the algo has latched onto something weird/annoying then chances are something is in your history and you need to delete it.

https://myactivity.google.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 11:59 PM on May 12, 2024

They keep relocating Emerson because he clambers out of the beach zone so that he can molt in grassy parks and has also wandered into bike lanes and roadways. They're also pretty worried about an unleashed dog picking a fight or otherwise provoking him. Chek has a better article and plenty of good video for Emerson fans.

Here are some photos of Emerson that I found amusing that have been shared around the Victoria internet places.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 8:10 PM on April 17, 2024

The DTMF theory is highly suspect. Far more likely the resident simply watched and memorized a code, but I would give that equal odds with the the resident coincidentally activating a delayed egress system when trying to exit. These buildings also frequently misuse bypass systems, so if someone told me the access control was disengaged at the time of egress I would believe that without batting an eye.

I can also confirm what neuron said about the codes being pasted right… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 1:55 PM on March 17, 2024

Someone living in California should maybe think twice before posting their gotcha about "affordable" units as defined by the CMHC. That program has been rotten for at least a decade.

Regions like Vancouver, are in a bad place right now due to years of corruption in this industry. BC developers, government, and real estate have been using the system and programs to enrich themselves, launder money, and fuel speculation while draining well-meaning programs… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 10:09 PM on March 13, 2024

The commentary around this stuff is always so focused on fans and access to media. There is little commentary on the why of it. Suits aren't taking things away because they want to deny people and twirl their mustaches. It's because the streaming model doesn't work and has cannibalized the revenue streams and lifecycles of media.

These projects don't bring in anywhere near their production costs in new subscription numbers. They don't make money per stream. They don't… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 3:28 PM on December 4, 2023

For what it is worth, Muzak/Elevator music/Piped Music and Library Music is getting a kind of re-evaluation these days. I think a big part of it is that there is a category of music (and demand for it) that appeared in the streaming age of background music. Chill beats to study to, unobtrusive jazz while you cook, minimalist ambient piano while you drink tea and do the crossword, etc. Another aspect is hip hop and electronic music sampling and the last is record collectors finding value in the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 8:59 PM on December 3, 2023

Another Obsidian user here. I tried dozens of note apps, writing apps, and personal wikis before finally landing on Obsidian. Nothing else comes close to it. Once you have learned to use it and customized it to suit your needs it is like unlocking a new part of your brain.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 9:06 AM on December 2, 2023

I thought The Escapist fell apart ages ago when they lost a lot of their creators over gamergate conflict.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 8:55 AM on November 7, 2023

I think Peanut butter on burgers is rooted in the diner tradition of having celebrity themed sandwiches. In this case, Elvis. I'm inclined to think most people will be disappointed that it isn't more interesting if they try it. It's really not very exciting. Have you had peanut butter toast? Do you think adding some savory meat to that would be bad? It's fine, underwhelming at worst.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 2:36 PM on October 22, 2023

Creature Feature makes nothing but cheesy Halloween music. Sure to appeal to people that enjoy "This is Halloween" and want several albums worth of goth/rock/punk/cabaret-esque music to drunkenly song along to after carving pumpkins.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 5:09 PM on October 5, 2023

I know I am late to this party, but I want folks to know that anyone fascinated by how The X-Files mined conspiracy theories for ideas and in how conspiracy theory "culture" feeds back into other narratives should go read The Department of Truth.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 6:30 PM on September 11, 2023

Starfield is quite similar to Mass Effect Andromeda, which the internet panned at the release. It is definitely more open than Andromeda as far as factions and player choice goes, but it has the same feel right down to the clumsy menu juggling for space travel and scrambling for resources on different planets.

Andromeda had more interesting planets, for the most part. Most weren't explorable unless there was a colony/terraforming to do there. It was clear a person had… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 8:13 AM on September 1, 2023

Enshittification comes for all web services eventually. I hold out hope that the pendulum will eventually swing back towards openness and away from the increasingly balkanized and unsearchable web that we have today. The decline of search isn't just that Google has gotten worse (it has) it's also that so much of the Internet doesn't happen in the open anymore. The digital commons has been devoured.

I wonder what a search engine would look like that only included results… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 11:15 PM on August 28, 2023

JHarris, if I had a dollar for every time someone has showed me their enormous $100 before expansions board game about being a fantasy/scifi/horror character in a scenario and I looked at them with a confused face and suggested an RPG instead... well, I'd probably have enough to buy one of those bloated board games by now.

I find it surprising that it has taken the board game world so dang long to start exploring the medium more, but I guess it wasn't until the Internet… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 7:50 PM on August 15, 2023

I'm no instrument maker, but wouldn't this open design lose a lot of the characteristic warmth and resonance of more classic piano designs? Not that a more unrestrained (to use their term) sound is necessarily undesirable. I'm just curious how a design like this would affect the timbre and other characteristics.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 11:15 PM on August 5, 2023

I saw John K. Samson a few years ago and it was a strange audience. Everyone clearly loved him from their formative years and would emotionally support heckle him when he was being self deprecating. At one point someone in the audience shouted out a marriage proposal and the crowd turned on them and, as a group, informed that person that he was already married to Christine Fellows.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 5:34 PM on August 4, 2023

I feel like reclining is a much more natural human posture than sitting on a chair.

I converted a recliner into a reclining desk in February of this year and it has been life changing. My lower back and neck pain cleared up in a week or two.

I didn't have a bad setup at my office before this, either. My (former) work paid for all the ergo things. I'd always joked that I would prefer a recumbant desk over a sit/stand and when I got a new full… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 6:20 PM on July 26, 2023

Wikipedia article for those that just want a quick overview
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 5:15 PM on June 23, 2023

I want to express my disappointment that this was not a link to a manifesto about replacing all doorknobs with novelty doorknobs.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 11:37 AM on May 11, 2023

The commentary around this game is so weird. I sat down to play with friends thinking it was going to be awful and we'd have fun glitching it out. We were just confused because it's fine.

The negative reviews are waaaaayy overblown and performative. I've played much worse games with far better launch reviews. It is a B- kind of thing. I'm not sure why people are constantly comparing it to the likes of Dishonoured when this is quite clearly attempting to be an arcadey,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 11:25 AM on May 4, 2023

Er, the reason for this isn't subtle or complicated...

Okay, let me rephrase that. It is *disingenuous* and *bad criticism* to compare it to likes of Dishonoured. It has been 50+ years since Roger Ebert changed popular criticism. Why are game reviewers complaining that a multiplayer arcade loot 'em up doesn't meet their narrative and gameplay standards for a single player, story-oriented stealth game?

Should critics have the same expectations and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 11:43 PM on May 5, 2023

My favourite thing about Zellers is that when it was closing it resulted in The Case of the BBQ Bandits.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 10:42 AM on March 23, 2023

Seems like a good time to recommend Garfield Vibing to Blue Monday . This one is an interesting entry into the genre of Garfield meme accounts because it became increasingly topical as it went. It starts with Garfield having a good time and ends with riots and pandemics.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 5:16 PM on March 7, 2023

I have a friend group that group watches Star Trek and we two of our own rituals/games:


When the enterprise goes to warp and it cuts to the ship in space you throw your arms up in the air and say "wooosh" just as the ship warps.
Anytime you hear "captain's log" you have to touch the nearest piece of wood. First person becomes the captain until the next "captain's log".
Saying, "He's fully… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 10:39 PM on February 21, 2023

Tables are one of the best parts of tabletop RPGs. I'm so glad that there is a subset of the hobby that has really embraced them for their power to quickly establish fun situations and settings. So much can be communicated about a setting with just one or two tables. Plenty of boring tables in the early years, but they're very easy to just not use.

One of my favourite set of tables is the one used for Last Gasp's Cörpathium. These are extra fun because these tables are… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 6:45 PM on February 8, 2023

In the grand history of abusive British reality tv competitions, this seems rather tame.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 4:12 PM on February 3, 2023

Spotify and YouTube changed how people listen to music. Post-millenial cohorts are far more into the weeds of microgenres and have more diverse/omnivorous tastes. This is also reflected in new music where you can hear influences colliding in ways that would have been impossible pre-internet because nobody could ever be exposed to hat much music, let alone afford the records.

The flipside of this is that mainstream pop music is even more lowest common denominator. Not to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 1:31 PM on January 13, 2023

I gave up on D&D after they did a cross promotion with Crocs. That was the moment I knew that the Hasbro poisoning of D&D was complete. COVID and youtube/podcaster let's play types created the biggest boom in D&D in decades. It brought in so many new people and helped transition role playing into something a little more mainstream, but at the same time it has become a lifestyle brand and IP farm. There is vertical integration, brand crossovers, and disgusting amounts of merch.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 8:50 PM on January 9, 2023

I could see this working under the right circumstances. Traveling circuses are essentially villages all on their own and circus performers are usually very community oriented. Perhaps a permanent circus village could work out, especially if they opened a circus arts school or something. You never know, this could turn into a circus arts version of the Stratford Festival.

I can also see this turning into a whole libertarians and bears situation. I give the circus… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 3:47 PM on January 5, 2023

Folks interested in this sort of thing should also look into TidalCycles, Overtone, and SuperCollider. I believe both of the former are built on top of SuperCollider.

SuperCollider has been used by a lot of artists working with data sonification, so digging around the forum or keyword searching can lead you to some interesting projects.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 12:31 PM on January 5, 2023

I encountered one in the park region of Banff in June where there was an argument going on via graffiti. It was pro/anti trucker rally stuff. Must have been dozens of people that had come through and each added their own comments to the discourse. Some were treatises while others were punchy gotchas or inane tangents. Others had taken to editing and fact checking the graffiti.

It was like a low tech Facebook argument had taken over a toilet. It was to an extent I've… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 4:52 PM on December 28, 2022

Thanks for sharing, I will definitely dig into these when I have time. I loved House of Leaves, and most any other book that so lovingly plays with form. There is a tactile and participatory pleasure to HoL and books like it, that I appreciate even more now that I primarily read ebooks.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 8:26 PM on December 21, 2022

This is why I now refer to most of the internet as the corporate web. I say we call it what it is.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 5:35 PM on December 21, 2022

The lazy ingenuity of the late night kitchen prowler is something that I feel like he only truly approached with pizza section of this video. Ain't nobody waiting on a rice cooker and veggies 'n' dip is too basic. Peanut butter is quite the omission from this video as well, but perhaps BDG can't eat peanuts and thus does not know the myriad ways it can be used.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 6:15 PM on December 20, 2022

I think XV is the best one. It is such a cohesive vision and the way that it shifts your perspective on the roadtrip as it goes is fantastic. The characters also felt very alive, more so than any other FF. So many unique barks, banter, and personality shines through. The only game I've seen do it better was that Guardians of the Galaxy one. The payoff with the photography stuff was also...wow. I saw it coming and it still made me cry. Those manipulative evil geniuses. That was something that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 11:13 AM on December 18, 2022

Immortality, Pentiment, Norco, and Dorfromantik I enjoyed a lot and are my favourites of the year.

Citizen Sleeper feels like it should have been my right up my alley, but I really hated it. I understand why people liked it and I am happy that they did.

All the big games that I played, and make up swaths of these lists, were fine, but are ultimately just more of the same I've played before. I really don't get much out of them anymore and I don't… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 10:30 AM on December 14, 2022

I'll cross any road or set of roads if it appears safe to do so, but I do often find myself quite annoyed to see someone crossing a busy street a half block from a, theoretically, safer controlled crossing.

That said, the only times I have ever been hit by a car were when crossing at a crosswalk with lights and everything. Bad drivers are going to drive badly no matter what. Maybe there is something to be said for not putting any stock in in lines or lights and instead… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 8:01 PM on December 13, 2022

Supply chain has severely boned the little eurorack businesses. I feel bad for MI clones going out of control, but I think it just isn't viable for most of the little guys to survive right now unless they want to burn the candle at both ends in logistics hell.

Behringer is a symptom, imo. They're scummy, no question, but eurorack is sooo expensive. The community needs more good entry level stuff. Especially cases! Behringer is getting people early before they know better… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 5:15 PM on December 12, 2022

Without question, Èmilie is everything that is good about eurorack encapsulated in a single person. I was very sad to hear that Beads would be the last MI module. There's something about her designs that just "clicks" with the way I think. She was always too good for such a small industry, though. I wish her the best.

I think the community is going through some growing pains right now. Tons of new people coming in, lots of folks closing shops while others start… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 10:15 PM on December 12, 2022

Somebody get Teenage Engineering on the phone. I have a groovebox concept to pitch to them.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 5:18 PM on December 9, 2022

Everybody in here talking about the cookbook when this blog is the home of an entirely fictional supernatural cop drama called Night Beats which these writers have all been slipping into their own fiction as an elaborate practical joke.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 11:15 AM on December 7, 2022

Always happy to see this particular internet subculture appear on the blue. I love that these folks are keeping the dream of the internet alive with their personal sites and linkblogs and casual disregard for the corporate web.

It's a shame Kicks Condor doesn't post regularly anymore since that was a great place to find these kinds of sites and people. indieweb.xyz and href.cool are still plodding along, though.

In my wildest dreams I imagine… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 1:35 PM on November 3, 2022

Bezos buys Facebook. Amazon reviews are now FB comments from Friends, FB recommends friends based on consumer preferences. Goodreads is merged with Facebook. Facebook comments on author and book pages start to appear in Kindle highlights. Metaverse property now purchasable via Amazon. Any physical items purchased from amazon can be upsold to virtual representations in MV. Your can feed prime video and music into the Metaverse. Prime Video begins to offer immersive VR films and television shows… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 10:46 PM on October 31, 2022

That manga reads like a 40 page SMBC comic.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 4:50 PM on October 25, 2022

Shame nobody listened to Thomas Spence 250 years ago. How many times have we looped through this exact problem since 1775? Can we try Spence's plan this time instead of having a massive war? It barely needs updating.
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 11:02 PM on October 17, 2022

I find horror a genuinely interesting film genre because of how much more willing filmmakers are to take risks and try different things. You don't get a lot of that outside of a very narrow set of film festival type movies. Even fewer of those are created with more general audiences in mind, but in horror it isn't unusual to see something quite different. The relatively low budgets and an audience that is more forgiving of faults also makes for a more diverse range of voices than elsewhere,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 12:00 AM on October 6, 2022

Do people still use Gamefaqs? I guess it must still have all of the great guides written in its time, but are people still writing guides there or have they all moved to Community Guides section of Steam?
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 7:28 PM on October 3, 2022

There was some controversy in 2019 involving this video. Microsoft was accused of taking too much inspiration from it for the Xbox Series X reveal trailer, which I won't link because using Alan Watts' The Dream of Life to sell video games fills me with unbearable existential disgust.

Anyways, this is a cool short. It reminds me a lot of those CGI shorts you would see in the '90s and early '00s. Those are all pretty cheesy in 2022, but they were a ton of fun to stumble on… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 9:58 PM on September 30, 2022

Zero surprise here. I have the same opinion wrt Stadia pricing and that the cloud gaming competitors are all better. I did almost buy it at launch just because the preorder chromecast deal was pretty good and I thought a more powerful chromecast would be nice.

I regularly use Microsoft's take on cloud gaming via Game Pass and it works a lot better than I expected it to. I would recommend people interested in the promise of game streaming to give it a try. It does work… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 8:37 PM on September 29, 2022

One could probably take MIDI inputs and convert them into Mouse/Keyboard/Gamepad controls. I didn't search too hard to find this MIDI to Joystick option. The harder part would be getting a trombone to MIDI. You might be able to use Silent Brass to get a line out and then convert that to MIDI. Alternatively, you could make something like the Trom or Digibone

So I think it is possible to play CoD or Elden Ring with a trombone or trombone-like instrument, but you'd have… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by forbiddencabinet at 9:31 AM on September 23, 2022