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Just chiming in to say I’m so happy to see the Joanna Russ love in this thread. We Who Are About To… is one of my absolute favorite books despite the fact that I’ve barely ever recommended it to anyone (“It’s kinda like an angry lesbian postmodern sci-fi The Stranger” is a pitch that doesn’t draw in many people but the people it does draw in are my very favorite type of people)
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 9:16 AM on April 13, 2023

Honestly, I feel like any list of SF novels is gonna reflect the evolution of the genre way less than a list of short stories. I think that’s somewhat particular to SF.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:52 PM on April 14, 2023

If I remember correctly, when Buffy and Roswell moved to UPN it was basically unprecedented for a currently airing show to switch networks. Now of course it’s totally commonplace, but those two shows are kinda what made it a viable option initially.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 5:41 PM on March 15, 2023

This is sort of orthogonal to the topic but this thread isn’t totally on the rails as it is, and it’s been driving me nuts recently:

Every time Roald Dahl is described as “a children’s author,” or one of his books for children is described as “his most twisted work” or something, I have a moment of cognitive dissonance, as if I’m reading something written in a parallel universe. Sure, he wrote children’s books. He also wrote dozens of the darkest, most fucked up short… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 8:41 AM on March 12, 2023

I’ve never made anything close to $75K/yr in my entire life and every time that study gets trotted out it seems to be to be saying “$75K a year, which of course is a normal amount of money for regular people to have” and it makes me want to fucking scream
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 11:17 AM on March 11, 2023

I truly cannot believe that anyone in this thread is more angry about a guy filming in public than about a cop saying he wishes he could kill him for doing it and would have done so 20 years ago.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 4:38 AM on February 17, 2023

Gudrun I know that was just a flip remark but: no, I really truly do not think “guy filming in public” and “cop openly fantasizing about murdering a guy filming in public” are in the same universe of bad.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 5:08 AM on February 17, 2023

You guys… people who think we should have fewer cars are proposing making cars unnecessary via safe and convenient alternatives, not seizing your car and spitting in your face and telling you to go fuck yourself. But the fact that more than half of people on this ostensibly lefty website immediately go there sure is disheartening. Guess we’ll just continue having it be totally normal for “bones smashed and organs pulverized by massive machine” to be a leading cause of death in America, because… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:02 PM on January 17, 2023

Can you link to any research refuting the concept of induced demand?
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:34 PM on January 17, 2023

Do you think that if there were more and better buses and trains, people might choose to use them more? I’m not sure why your calculus here is cars vs. nothing.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 7:58 AM on January 18, 2023

I really feel like I don’t understand what distinguishes autism and ADHD, since as others have stated, so many of these descriptions of autism sound like things I’ve been told or read about ADHD. It makes me wonder any of the terms for various kinds of neurodivergence, and the definitions of what they encompass, are even vaguely close to accurately describing the way brains actually work.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 7:38 PM on January 13, 2023

I will probably see this but mostly because I’m Mad About Mads
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 4:03 PM on December 3, 2022

This is one of the frustrations that I had with Tumblr, and maybe one of the reasons why I just stopped following it. I would end up scrolling and scrolling and scrolling past reblogs of stuff that I'd already seen, and that was after I'd weeded out some people.

There is a plugin for tumblr called Xkit that corrects a lot of the frustrating issues with the site, and one of the things it can do is block all instances of a specific post from appearing… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 9:22 AM on November 26, 2022

Yes - I have a friend who works with medical students and has said that that’s the reason so many of them are children of doctors themselves. It’s not so much that the parents took any specific action on their behalf; it’s just that the idea of becoming a doctor is perfectly pedestrian to them, whereas for most people it’s this lofty nigh-unimaginable thing.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:35 AM on November 25, 2022

I certainly believe nepotism is real; I just think it’s one of many, many factors that work against our culture being a meritocracy, and not the most important one. Privilege is not a synonym for nepotism. Access to opportunities denied to other people happens in far more ways than just “hey I’m famous, hire my kid.”

For example: I went to college because everyone in my family went to college and it was expected that I would go. But I went to a state school that no one… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 8:16 AM on November 26, 2022

We always made the Libby’s pie and then covered each slice in homemade whipped cream - and I mean COVERED, like, no orange is visible whatsoever, an inch thick on top, sides covered too. I need to do that for myself this weekend, the family’s far away and most people apparently think this is insane behavior.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 7:07 AM on November 24, 2022

Starting to think the only responsible move is to chop down every almond tree in California
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 9:07 AM on November 19, 2022

Back in 2017 I had a coworker who was into bitcoin. I asked him what it was all about one time and once he had explained, I was like “so it’s kind of like Beanie Babies?” He was not amused by this.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 9:50 PM on November 14, 2022

In the comments the poster says the prof liked it so much that he shows it to subsequent classes every year.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 5:54 AM on November 14, 2022

The boob lights in my rental killed half a dozen supposedly quasi-immortal LED bulbs until I googled it and discovered you need special boob bulbs for those, because regular ones overheat. My landlord didn’t know this either.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:28 PM on October 31, 2022

My dad loved Warren Zevon and was very moved by this interview. At dad’s memorial service, I made sure to include “enjoy every sandwich” in my eulogy.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 12:22 PM on October 30, 2022

But anyways RIP Warren Zevon, I was probably your only teen girl fan in my high school in 2006
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 12:24 PM on October 30, 2022

I’ve been reading up a bit on lichens, which as it turns out are actually algae and fungi in a symbiotic relationship that doesn’t resemble either the original algae or the original fungi… wonder if this could have any relation to that extremely trippy process.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 7:25 AM on October 3, 2022

I am a huge fan of vampire shit and I loathed the book so much that I left it on a train after finishing it because I didn’t want it in my house. I’m not sure I even remember why anymore, but I am definitely provisionally interested in the show…
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 5:23 AM on September 9, 2022

I live in this city, I have met many people who have lost children or been permanently injured when drivers blithely ran them over and faced zero consequences. Over a hundred traffic deaths in the city this year alone. Not to mention the devastating impact of emissions on the poor communities they paved through with highways.

I support this action, because it’s the next best thing to setting them all on fucking fire.

Yes, including yours, with… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:35 AM on September 8, 2022

in Russia one of the most popular books of the summer is a (very tame, non-explicit) book about the ambiguously romance-tinged friendship between a teenage Young Pioneer and his troop leader.

Woah what’s this called, I have a friend who this was basically written for
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:56 PM on August 26, 2022

Gideon the Ninth is excellent. Harrow the Ninth… hmmm, ‘needed a better editor’, is perhaps the polite way of saying it.

Well I thought Gideon the Ninth was great fun and Harrow the Ninth was a work of avant-garde genius so there! The reader not knowing precisely what is going at at all times on the first read does not equal “bad book.”
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 5:07 PM on August 24, 2022

They are very DIFFERENT books, more different than two books in a series almost ever are, but that was one of the things I loved most about them. There are lots of straightforward SFF trilogies where I love the first one and then the next two feel like more of the same (or less of the same). I was THRILLED to open up Harrow and find a completely different book playing by completely different rules. Obviously everyone looks for something different out of the books they read and I’m not mad if… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 6:06 PM on August 24, 2022

Uh ha yeah ok so I thought us lazy slacker Gen Xers were the ones with Boomer parents?

Millennial with boomer parents here, sorry my parents were old I guess? What are you even saying here?
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:49 AM on August 9, 2022

As I first heard it posited, his theory was that the planet we called Earth was in fact a sentient being, conscious and beyond complex; certainly beyond our puny human capabilities of comprehension. As a young man who was doing lots of psychedelics at the time, spending lots of time exploring wilderness (rain forests, beaches, mountains) -- I had no problem accepting it as at least plausible.

Still do.

I think about this a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 9:37 AM on July 27, 2022

If you read the full article - yes, I would say that their level of neglect and negligence in ignoring many very clear warning signs that multiple other people tried to get them to address at least merits being argued in court.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 11:18 AM on July 23, 2022

It was around then, a little before his 15th birthday, that Ethan started to send his mother a series of texts that will be produced as evidence at trial. In the texts, Ethan said he was hearing things. Imaginary presences felt real to him. He sounded lonely and afraid. “Can you get home now?” he wrote on March 9. “There is someone in the house I think. Someone walked into the bathroom and flushed the toilet and left the light on. And I thought it was you but when I came out no one was… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 11:28 AM on July 23, 2022

I'm bisexual but I sometimes bristle at the idea that a man-woman relationship where one person is bi is automatically a queer relationship. Sure it can be, but that depends on how the people in the relationship relate to each other and to the world.

Yeah I’m not really understanding a framework that says a heterosexual cisgender person is suddenly queer because they’re dating a queer person. Sometimes it feels like certain… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 12:28 PM on June 4, 2022

I have to say… if any of the straight cis men I dated when I was dating men had claimed that the two of us were in a queer relationship because I was queer, I would have been terrifically offended. Those who had their own independent queer identities - I wouldn’t have been offended by that, but I personally considered us to be two queer people in a relationship, but not “a queer couple” per se.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:14 AM on June 8, 2022

North Carolina has a law saying they can’t be resold at all unless they’re attached to a car. Seems pretty sensible to me.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 9:51 PM on June 2, 2022

I do know that. But people who steal them are generally not cracking them open themselves, are they? They’re selling them whole. Requiring the car makes it more of a pain in the ass to do that and disincentivizes stealing them, at least to some degree.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:16 PM on June 2, 2022

I only learned in the past few days that there was no such thing as a non-spicy pepper until maybe 100 years ago. There are a handful of people still alive who are older than the existence of bell peppers.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 7:35 PM on May 22, 2022

I just said "OH!!" out loud as soon as this image loaded. I live in Bed-Stuy and my local grocery store has a ton of those brown cardboard barrels, lined up on top of one isle of shelves. I guess I always assumed they were storage for the grocery store. I had no idea.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 6:41 PM on May 12, 2022

Oh my god, I noticed this post but was like “eh I already read it, seems cool though” and then yesterday, out of nowhere, my entire tumblr dashboard was full of people talking about getting emails from their very good friend Jonathon Harker and his weird business trip, and I wound up scrolling through the tag for over an hour just watching all these new Dracula readers discovering how WEIRD this book is, along with people who’ve already read it being SO EXCITED that everyone else is going to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:38 AM on May 7, 2022

Anyways, if you like most people are mystified by tumblr, here’s a link to the Dracula Daily tag, I highly recommend a scroll
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:42 AM on May 7, 2022

Oops and now I see that someone else already linked it, but seriously, so fun!

It really is remarkable how much shit from the book doesn’t show up in basically any adaptation and has made no cultural impact on our ideas of what vampires are like. As a person who loved vampire shit before I ever read it, that was maybe my favorite aspect of it - discovering all these bizarre canonical vampire traits that nobody ever uses.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:52 AM on May 7, 2022

I think Clinton did the absolute best outreach to rural America we've seen in a long time from Democrats, and you see how successful it was.

Doesn't the above article literally say "the Clinton campaign had only a single staff person doing rural outreach from its headquarters, in Brooklyn; the staffer had been assigned to the role just weeks before the election"? If that's the best outreach to rural America we can muster, that's pretty pathetic.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 9:39 PM on May 4, 2022

It really is unbelievable to me how many woman give a fuck about men’s height and vice versa. My dad was 5’8” and my mom’s 5’11” and both of them got so much weirdness about their height over the course of their lives and it’s just SO STUPID. Who cares!! It’s completely fucking ludicrous to put any kind of judgey meaning on this whatsoever!!
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 11:34 PM on April 30, 2022

Uhh… I don’t recall having my flesh rent and my bones cracked the last time I went to Lenscrafters…
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 12:03 AM on May 1, 2022

This is like the opposite of a big Easter egg hunt I attended as a kid. It took place in a big field which has been intended to be full of tall grass… except someone hadn’t gotten the memo and had mowed it the day before. It was more of a five-minute-long Easter-egg-grabbing bloodbath.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 8:35 AM on April 16, 2022

In Civilization, there is never a reason not to build another mine or not to take another shot with an archer.

This is technically untrue re workers in Civ 6, now that they have limited build actions - which is a change I really appreciated! Very interested in this game.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 2:49 PM on April 8, 2022

I truly cannot believe how many people apparently want to waste their precious limited winter daylight to illuminate the vile and hideous morning commute rather than saving it so that it isn’t pitch black at 4:30pm and you can actually do a thing after work before your circadian rhythm tells you to fall the fuck asleep. You people may as well be aliens as far as I’m concerned.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:42 PM on March 21, 2022

Ah, see, my rhythm is shifted SO late that it doesn’t matter whether it’s light in the morning or not - you could shine a flashlight in my face and it wouldn’t move the needle a bit.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 4:12 PM on March 21, 2022

I got today’s in 25, but that required some leaps - and then when I looked at the “closest words” list it became clear that whatever data set this is pulling from, it associates the very common and not at all specifically sports-related target word with a particular sport. I don’t think that’s a spoiler because I would never in a million years have made that association.

Basically: this is not looking for neutrally DEFINITION-based similarities, rather it seems to be… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 5:41 AM on March 15, 2022

So, I finally started typing in random words that were largely unrelated to 997 and finally hit on the correct word which is essentially antithetical to 997.

Well… sort of? Based on the connected word list, 997 isn’t a synonym but it’s also the same TYPE of word, if you see what I mean. To use an unrelated example, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ are opposites but they’re a lot more closely related than, say, ‘tiger’ or ‘effervescent.’
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 8:13 AM on March 15, 2022