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The Holiday Doors from The Nightmare Before Christmas

The gates of Hell in Dante's Inferno

The featureless black door that appears in the living room wall that leads to the labyrinth in House of Leaves

The tunnel entrance to Toon Town in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 3:22 PM on May 16, 2024

Another possibility from MobyGames:

Boxes (1996) - "The story behind the game is that the player has been left alone on a space station and has been left alone to stack the colour coded boxes. All the boxes come in pairs are the same shape and size. The playing screen starts with some fixed boxes scattered around and it is the player’s job to stack four blocks of the same colour together at which point they are removed from the screen, the level ends when all the… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 11:01 PM on May 10, 2024

Another important piece of context to remember that really underscores her appeal is her struggle with Scooter Braun over music rights. Braun was an industry bro who bought out her back catalogue against her wishes and tried exercising control over what and how she could perform her own songs; Swift ended up taking the ambitious step of re-recording the albums in order to re-establish ownership and successfully persuaded her fanbase to abandon the original masters in favor of "Taylor's… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 1:10 PM on April 26, 2024

Update: got a call back from the Kia dealership that for this model they are now offering a free hardware "anti-theft deterrent" solution, basically a metal housing around the ignition to prevent thieves from breaking into it to do the USB hotwire thing. So it's not a total bust on security, if that makes any difference.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 1:33 PM on April 11, 2024

Insurance update: spent an unexpectedly long time on the phone with my insurer after getting an online quote for the Kia that was significantly less, despite the newer model, lower mileage, and increased theft risk. Turns out it's roughly the same price as renewing the current 4Runner policy (which is a whole 'nother question), but at least in terms of insurance coverage, both options will be about the same.

PS: The customer service rep I talked to… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 4:33 PM on April 11, 2024

I picked up a pair of these ~$20 PetFusion grooming gloves last year and they work fantastically on my fully-clawed hellion. They're impervious to bites, slashes, and even those disemboweling back leg attacks (all playful, ofc). Plus the palms have a subtle texture on them that enhances the petting experience.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 1:28 PM on April 3, 2024

mekily: "“For the best” is debatable, but from a certain perspective this is the plot of the Dune series."

Specifically Leto II's "Golden Path" plan in the later novels -- see The Scattering.

It also made me think of the motivations of the League of Shadows in the Nolan Batman trilogy (they failed obvs but claimed to have been successful in the past -- the fall of Rome, the Bubonic Plague, Great Fire of… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 7:10 PM on March 22, 2024

40 Performing Bananas

Peanut Butter Jelly Time could be a good dance number (assuming you can find a big video player)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:43 PM on March 19, 2024

For a long time at my local store, the most common issues were scale-related (having to wait for the machine to register the weight of every. single. item in the bagging area) and payment-related (the UI required you to press a button on-screen after swiping a card to process it). Thankfully they finally disabled the weight requirement and updated the software so that it automatically processes a card once swiped. At this point the biggest hold-ups I see are:

- needing… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 6:56 PM on March 15, 2024

redlines: "Something like a map, where you can go arbitrarily deep and never really run out of things to learn -- but not a map."

I adore my large-format print of James Turner's Map of Humanity (background). It looks like a traditional map but the hundreds of physical features and places are named after various philosophers, leaders, and legendary locales from history and fiction, all grouped into logically coherent regions. You can buy a copy here.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:52 PM on March 15, 2024

This is absolutely something you can do with Stable Diffusion, but it takes no small amount of effort to get set up.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:41 PM on March 15, 2024

Lil Nas X - MONTERO (2021) is the first thing that leapt to mind

IGORRR - VERY NOISE (2020) for surreal CGI maximalist insanity

Aldous Harding - The Barrel (2019) is delightfully twee and eccentric and a touch creepy

Blake Mills - Money Is The One True God (2021) uses a hypnotic collage of paper money from around the world

Bo Burnham's INSIDE (2021) had a number of visually striking performances:… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:36 PM on March 15, 2024 marked best answer

Do you spend a lot of time in any locations with poor cell service but decent WiFi? My work has terrible reception, and after a few months I realized that my SE3's constant attempts to maintain a tenuous signal was really draining the battery life, even when not being actively used. If you have any places like this, do what I do and turn Airplane Mode on while connecting to the local WiFi network.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:18 PM on March 15, 2024

I like Gillware because they'll send you a digital directory of files they were able to recover for free, and you only pay if you decide you want access to them. So if there's total damage (or enough to corrupt just the particular files you want), you're not on the hook for anything.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:08 PM on March 15, 2024

Alan Lightman: "A Brief Version of Time"

Suppose that people live forever.

Strangely, the population of each city splits in two: the Laters and the Nows.

The Laters reason that there is no hurry to begin their classes at the university, to learn a second language, to read Voltaire or Newton, to seek promotion in their jobs, to fall in love, to raise a family. In endless time, all things can be accomplished. Thus… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 4:08 PM on March 15, 2024

Twisted Metal 2 had an Antarctica level ("The Drop Zone"), including calving glaciers disrupting the action. The Independence Day game also had a brief foray into Antarctica as a bonus level.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 3:44 PM on March 15, 2024

Bit off topic, but in addition to podcasts I just want to suggest ChatGPT as another avenue for practice (hear me out!).

Their mobile app (iOS - Android) now has a voice-enabled conversation mode (including for the free tier). Their built-in voice recognition service, Whisper, is excellent at picking up poorly pronounced or enunciated terms in a variety of languages, and ChatGPT is smart enough to understand what you're trying to say even if you make grammatical mistakes.… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 2:06 AM on March 15, 2024

Whatever books you can't sell, consider donating them to the Internet Archive for scanning and uploading to their free digital library. They have an app that makes scanning bar codes to see if they need a given title super easy.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 1:25 AM on March 15, 2024

Ursula K. LeGuin's short story "The Building" (borrowable on Archive.org), a strangely beautiful anthropological tale about two related species on a post-collapse world, one of which instinctively works to construct an endless expansive palace.

I've also always loved Douglas Adams's incredible description of the interior of a factory for building planets:

The wall defied the imagination --- seduced it and defeated it. The wall was so… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 1:15 AM on March 15, 2024

TwoWordReview: "I don't know what this is called but it sounds like you'd love GeoGuessr which is a fun game of identifying where in the world the google street view is showing."

You might also enjoy TimeGuessr, which gives you five photos and asks both where in the world it was taken and in what year.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 11:51 PM on March 14, 2024

- "like" videos (or reject them with an optional reason why) to improve your recommendations
- synchronize your watch history and recommendations across devices instead of having to start from scratch each time
- save videos to various public or private playlists for sharing or to watch later

Unless your browser is tricked out with a bunch of privacy extensions, Google is tracking your data whether you have an account or not, so might as well make it work for you.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 11:06 AM on December 25, 2023

hippybear: "Liking improves recommendations: are there actual studies that provide proof that this is true, about the generic Youtube recommendation page? I'd like to read those."

Not sure about studies, but anecdotally as a heavy YouTube user I see virtually none of the noxious right-wing/MRA funnels others complain about, which I attribute to hammering the "not interested" button with extreme prejudice the rare times I come across… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 5:18 PM on December 27, 2023

What does the Chromecast setup screen say? It should have a process for selecting your network and putting in the wifi password so it can be detected by the app. Also, not sure what model Chromecast you have, but it should come with a remote for typing stuff in using an on-screen keyboard.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:59 AM on December 25, 2023

You might enjoy this: The Moments Between the Montage
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 1:59 PM on December 19, 2023

churl: "Our favorites so far have been romantic and historical, and short enough to read in a single sitting, like Nathaniel Hawthorne stories. Longer-form stuff can work too, especially if it’s beautifully written and has a philosophical dimension, like Camus."

Calvino's Invisible Cities is perfect for this. It's a plotless series of dialogues between the explorer Marco Polo and the emperor Kublai Khan, in which Polo… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 12:34 PM on October 29, 2023

Vienna Teng's "Hymn of Acxiom", sung from the perspective of a big data broker system, is beautiful and haunting.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 12:25 PM on October 29, 2023

Reader Rabbit's Interactive Math Journey! ("how sweet it is", "fried ice cream")

You can watch a let's play or download the whole thing (might not work on a modern system, though).

I never played it myself, but I found it using this YouTube caption search, super useful for stuff like this.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:18 PM on September 27, 2023 marked best answer

Thanks, all -- I went with a (non-voltage!) power adapter for now (practical, can be exchanged if they've got one already) and will save one of the guidebook/novel recommendations for the holidays.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:44 PM on September 23, 2023

This definitely seems like more of a reality-show thing. Off the top of my head, Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs always started with a preview of the coming attractions.

The original Mission: Impossible show from the 60s did this, and the modern film series continues the tradition.

Going back to TV, I always liked how the 90s animated variety show KaBlam! started off with the cartoon hosts doing a little dance on top of a comic… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:16 PM on September 19, 2023

For a project like this, you may want to go with OpenAI's Playground API instead of vanilla ChatGPT. The latter is engineered to be a helpful chat-based assistant and it can sometimes be hard to completely avoid its default tone, whereas the Playground lets you interact with the underlying model more directly. With GPT-4, you can also have access to a larger context window of up to 32,000 tokens, as well as avoid ChatGPT's usual length limits to replies (though this can get relatively expensive… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 11:02 PM on September 11, 2023

I adore Vienna Teng's "Hymn of Acxiom", a creepy yet beautiful choral song from the perspective of a voracious datamining company.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:49 PM on September 11, 2023

Truth Emerging From Her Well to Shame Mankind (1896)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 11:45 AM on September 8, 2023

There's a hacky workaround for Reels that involves adding the link to your Instagram bio; TikTok severely limits the kinds of clickable links you can add (just movies/TV/books), but there may be a way to finagle it with a business account and treating it as a product link.

Simplest answer is probably using a MeFi shortlink and pasting it as text over the video. You can get these from the Twitter share function (ew), but the basic format is:

mefi.… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 9:00 AM on September 6, 2023 marked best answer

DON'T FORGET:
YOU'RE HERE FOREVER

Strategically covering with images of loved ones optional but highly encouraged
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 9:52 PM on September 5, 2023

There's a whole class of mathematical puzzles called packing problems concerning the maximum number of shape X that can fit within shape Y. Solutions range from obvious symmetries like "four quarter squares inside a larger square" to subtly chaotic arrangements, and many variants remain unsolved.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:08 AM on August 18, 2023

I find it really useful for cleaning up text; for example:

- pasting poorly-OCR'd text from a PDF and asking it to fix stray line breaks, page numbers, and mistranscriptions
- pasting in Wikipedia text and asking it to remove those numbered citation footnotes
- pasting in subtitles and asking it to adjust the timestamps
- basically any sort of complex find-and-replace operation that would normally require spending 20 minutes… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 12:49 PM on August 9, 2023

Another impressive use case: a few years ago, I used a guide I found online to create a custom RSS feed proxy using Amazon AWS and its API Gateway feature, in order to bypass some annoying rate-limiting that was being done to the feed. I barely understood what I was doing at the time, and when the feed started erroring out recently enough time had passed that I was completely stumped by the byzantine API Gateway interface (and of course could no longer track down the guide I'd used). So I went… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:15 PM on August 11, 2023

I definitely recommend the CoinStar e-gift card route. I just redeemed over $100 in change from a jar with a built-in electronic counter; the kiosk was completely accurate (good reputation there) and the voucher redeemed with no problems. Just make sure to check their site beforehand to see which vendors your local kiosks support -- it varies from unit to unit.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 4:50 PM on August 10, 2023

Willing to trade one (1) Tildes invite for 1 (one) Bluesky invite; MeMail me if you're interested!

(Will copy-paste the above to my profile page and remove if/when the deal is sealed)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:30 PM on August 9, 2023

cocoagirl: "The visual for this is pretty strong for me (less so the voice, but..). Anyway, I seem to remember the commercial showing that you lay cling film/plastic wrap over the ice cube tray, then stick the sticks through that so the plastic wrap holds them upright in place while freezing. This would have been the late 70s, early 80s, in line with your time frame."

Dexter's Lab had an interstitial bit where Dee-Dee showed kids how to do… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 9:16 AM on July 29, 2023

Surprisingly tough to find!

Wikipedia has a list for games where the qualifier is number of appearances on other best-of lists:

List of video games considered the best

They list the games chronologically, but you can gauge the relative popularity of each title by checking the Notes section and comparing the number of footnotes (each footnote = one best-of list appearance).

For music, there is also… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:14 PM on July 22, 2023 marked best answer

One more, for books: FiveBooks.com's Most-Recommended Books list

Over the past decade, we’ve asked hundreds of experts to pick the five best books in their field—and to explain in detail why those particular books are so important. The results of this 10+ year project are listed below. These are books that have been recommended over and over again, suggesting they are some of the most important books ever written. The experts who picked them for us range from… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:19 PM on July 22, 2023

Diskeater: "You can try inputting the link over at the Wayback Machine to see if it's saved over there."

Specifically, if you search the Wayback site for the home URL followed by a slash and an asterisk, it will show all archived pages under that domain:

myblog.com = myblog.com/*
blogname.blogspot.com = blogname.blogspot.com/*
etc.

Also, if you happen to subscribe to… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 9:40 PM on July 22, 2023 marked best answer

Antgame.io - procedurally-generated ant simulation where you have to strategically place nests in order to forage the most food before the timer runs out. Nice mix of skill-based and luck. Has daily leaderboards and the small player population is genuinely tough to compete with.

Chronophoto - Every day you get five random photos from throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries and have to guess the year they're from. Surprisingly tricky, and the photos are always interesting.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 11:20 AM on July 20, 2023

Gotta go FAST. All kinds of free streaming platforms out there now that are surprisingly not-shit, and the model of "hundreds of channels of kinda-sorta watchable TV reruns and nostalgic movies playing in real time for you to dip in and out of whenever" is weirdly nostalgic in this brave new world of on-demand streaming everything. I like Pluto TV myself, but there are many others to sample. Just need a smart TV or smart plug-in like Chromecast, Amazon Firestick, Roku, etc.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 6:59 PM on July 12, 2023

Also, assuming they're not already a fan, I'd let them watch Geography Now on YouTube (Wiki page).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 4:42 PM on July 12, 2023

Of the nearly 300 moons in the Solar System, only our own Moon is exactly the right size and distance to fit perfectly over the Sun during a total eclipse. The view at totality, with the ring of fire and beautiful solar corona around a black disc, is something that can only be seen on Earth, and only in the current (~100 million year long) stretch of time.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 11:18 PM on June 28, 2023

Maybe a wide shot of the two chairs set-up interspersed with some occasional Ken Burns-style relevant imagery to break up the monotony? Just make sure the images are properly licensed or from a royalty-free DB.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 6:30 PM on June 3, 2023

Looks like it's Givalt Levin
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 1:41 PM on June 3, 2023 marked best answer

Perhaps inspired by the fact that swallowing goldfish was a weirdly popular college fad in the 1930s.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 1:05 PM on June 3, 2023