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I can't remember if I ever actually had lutefisk, because my memory of a sort of fish jelly does not at all jibe with Shirky's experience. I do remember that there's a long shaggy-dog Minnesotan-Norwegian story about how lutefisk was actually invented by the Irish as a plot to kill off the Norwegians that backfired. Now, lefse, I do remember, and I could eat that all day.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 11:34 AM on March 1, 2024

YMMV WRT auto tire flats. I have a Honda Fit, which has relatively thin tires, and the biggest cause of flats for me are pinch flats from hitting potholes, which in my midwestern Rust Belt city are quite common. I get puncture resistant bicycle tires, and generally do well with those, although they're not foolproof--I hit a nail once, and must have hit it at just the right angle, because it went clear through the tire head-first. The thing that I'm really looking out for,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 9:56 AM on March 1, 2024

The original Crow hit that sweet spot for me as someone who had moved beyond superhero comics somewhat, but still got the essential appeal of the superhero, and really just wanted them to do something really different with the genre. Like, what if Batman or the Punisher had an expiration date? They got their much lusted-after vengeance and then they just... stopped? For that reason, I wasn't that much interested in any of the sequels; there's an interesting concept in other people being sort of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 1:09 PM on February 29, 2024

Iris Gambol's timeline is useful; I'd append to the front end of it this Rolling Stone profile that probably did as much damage to Depp's public image as anything. (Discussion of that article previously on the blue; see also this and this about the trial.)
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 7:17 AM on February 28, 2024

a lackluster candy station that dispersed one jelly bean per child

Here's hoping that he gets sued by the Onion.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 3:17 PM on February 27, 2024

Holy shit, that ambulance at the top of the article is the coolest looking thing.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 7:27 AM on February 27, 2024

“You’re such a naughty sick mom, you’re just as sick as us pedophiles,” read another. “I will make your life hell for you and your daughter.”

The literal worst of the internet, right there.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 5:40 AM on February 23, 2024

O good people of this thread, what is the name of that Culture ship?

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot

Oops Upside Your Head

Beachcomber

It's Got A Beat And You Can Dance To It

Mummy, I Can See His Thing

Plz Send Noods
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 12:08 PM on February 22, 2024

Another one for the time machine list: Michael Shannon doing Bowie's Scary Monsters.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 5:35 AM on February 22, 2024

“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you. (...) I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.”

I can only hear this in the voice of Napoleon Dynamite.

Rex Kwon Do.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 8:21 AM on February 21, 2024

I think it's worth remembering that the biggest model for highly successful office comedy at the time was Dilbert (which was not at that time widely recognized as vile but in retrospect always contained problematic elements and attitudes that time only magnified.)

Dilbert is in hell, because nothing ever changes. Or maybe it has, because Scott "plannedchaos" Adams has moved it behind a paywall, and who'd want to pay to take a look at what… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 6:23 PM on February 19, 2024

This article equates Depp/Heard with Khashoggi's murder?

Well, the thing about corruption is that it has no bottom.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 5:48 AM on February 19, 2024

Amazing--after all these decades, a version of Tom Bombadil that I actually might like.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 6:07 PM on February 18, 2024

WRT the Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic... I'll believe it when I see it. I mean, I understand why Alan Moore has been slow in completing it; he started it with his longtime friend, Steve "No Relation" Moore, who he credits for getting him involved both with comics and with magic. I would have been disappointed but not terribly surprised if A. Moore had simply decided to drop it. Still, though, we'll see.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 9:12 AM on February 18, 2024

Cf.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 2:02 PM on February 16, 2024

I have dozens of cousins; big Irish Catholic families on both sides. My relationships with them are pretty lopsided, though, because of family history. When my parents died (I was seven, and have three brothers and three sisters), my dad's side of the family (or at least the uncles) got together, decided which kids would go with which families, got the custody transfers from the local judge, and then told my mom's side of the family what they'd done, which is how my sibs and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 8:24 AM on February 15, 2024

Codpiece, the supervillain
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 8:06 AM on February 14, 2024

As much as I hate overpowered colored car headlights, I've been a fan of colored gadget lights ever since watching Star Trek in the late sixties; the need for them to perform any actual useful function is purely secondary.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 10:25 AM on February 13, 2024

I've never been into wrestling, except briefly for GLOW (both the actual wrestling show and the fictionalized series about it), but I did enjoy Grantland back in the day, and this part caught my eye:

Bill Simmons—whose longtime collaborator Connor Schell resigned from the WWE board around the same time the Journal broke the hush-money scandal, something curiously unmentioned on his Wikipedia page—is currently involved with a Netflix documentary about McMahon which, from… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 7:22 AM on February 13, 2024

.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 8:30 AM on February 12, 2024

Late-stage capitalism: maybe we were too hasty in dismissing graverobbing as a revenue generator
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 6:51 AM on February 12, 2024

I like the picture of an antechinus attempting to eat an entire researcher; very inspirational!

Dream big, little guy.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 1:57 PM on February 10, 2024

Doubtless his parents thought that being sent to a school like that would help him in his adult life, but he probably didn't pick up much more than the ineluctable advantages of nepotism: "peers" really being other kids who were to the manner born and would never have to work that hard to wield outsized influence on the world.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 1:36 PM on February 8, 2024

Finished the piece, and wanted to pull out this great bit: "To launder cash—or a reputation—is to mingle the dirty with the clean, and one consequence of London’s new identity as a twenty-four-hour laundromat is that the city is full of crooks with pretensions to legitimacy and businessmen who seem a little crooked." It is absolutely no surprise that Shamji moved on first to crypto, then to something allegedly and vaguely to do with AI.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 5:11 PM on February 8, 2024

You know, I'm not 100% sure that I've ever heard Freddie Mercury speak until now. And being part of the "We Are the Champions" video shoot is going on the time machine list.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 6:59 AM on February 8, 2024

Honestly, my eyes glazed over reading this review less than halfway through. Some of the info on Isaacson is interesting, especially his actions during the early stage of the GWOT, but then Kriss goes on at some length about how it wasn't the biography of Lone Skum that he would have written, heedless of how he'd already established that Isaacson really isn't the kind of guy who would have written it. (And I'm really not interested in hearing more about Skum's dad, Skum's… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 7:19 AM on February 7, 2024

I'd always thought that that Hero Wars ad was less about vore and more about just trying to make eyeballs stickier, but, you know, ¿por qué no los dos?
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 5:22 PM on February 6, 2024

I'd rather someone break into my car (which is left unlocked, because windows are expensive to replace)

Data point: I left my car unlocked (in my mid-sized Midwestern city) last year, and during the night someone took advantage of that fact and did $2200 worth of damage (not counting the cost of towing) to the steering column of my car, apparently thinking that they could hotwire it. Unless you have an antique and/or unusual make/model of car, the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 9:14 AM on February 6, 2024

There are two notable events in the continuity of the Star Trek universe that were supposed to take place in 2024 (at the time of their respective appearances in the episodes, still decades away): the reunification of Ireland and the Bell Riots, sparked by the herding of unhoused people in San Francisco into the cruelly-euphemistic "Sanctuary" areas. No points for guessing which one is considered vastly more likely to actually happen.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 2:27 PM on February 6, 2024

The longest writing that I've probably ever done was a background for a character in the City of Heroes MMORPG. I've never been really tempted to do NaNoWriMo, but I do like coming up with character backgrounds for RPGs. That kind of leads into talking about my having participated in a relatively small gaming con this past weekend, which was mostly fun, except for the one game (and it seems like there's always at least one in every con that I've been to) in which another player contrives to suck… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 6:59 AM on February 5, 2024

Absolutely gorgeous.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 9:20 AM on February 1, 2024

"I meant that satirically. If you were anywhere near my level, you'd know that." [paraphrase]

--recently posted on another social medium by someone notorious for online vendettas.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 5:49 PM on January 31, 2024

Making a "real" satirical travel site might take some hard work and risk, maybe chancing that the actual AO might do its own version and call it something like The Bureau of Unverified Reports. (Possibly based on actual unverified reports, of which they must surely have a plethora.)
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 7:18 AM on January 31, 2024

Cost of Xerox Alto, 1979: $32,000
Cost of Apple Lisa, 1983: $10,000
Cost of Apple Mac, 1984: $2,500

That's not even adjusting for inflation. The cost of the original Macintosh in 2024 (well, December 2023) dollars? $7,488.92. You could buy a really nicely kitted out car for the cost of that Lisa. As has been noted recently, the Macintosh has just celebrated its 40th anniversary. What's that in human years?… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 6:55 PM on January 30, 2024

Two bees are hanging out in a honeycomb, their stripes white-and-black instead of yellow-and-black.

"...so, that's my story. How did you end up in a cell?"
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 8:29 PM on January 28, 2024

Your periodic reminder that many of the unhoused have jobs; they simply can't afford housing, which would be especially true in the current economic/social climate. They clean up at Planet Fitness (still $10/month, I think) and lay their head just about anywhere they can. Travelers might have a bit of a problem with references and whatnot but I still see a fair number of Help Wanted signs, so the job market may still be to their advantage. Maybe there are a few middle-class kids working out… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 8:00 PM on January 27, 2024

Does the Sooner State capital really have a market for thousands of urban high-rise apartments?

I certainly didn't get that impression when I lived in OK in the mid-nineties.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 2:16 PM on January 27, 2024

You know what else is warm and wet?

soup, you pervs
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 11:55 AM on January 27, 2024

Baby steps, people.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 7:27 AM on January 25, 2024

Your periodic reminder that this is an industry award, no more geared toward or relevant to the customers of said industry than any other industry award, the inexplicable popularity of the award ceremony notwithstanding.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 10:04 AM on January 23, 2024

I started playing RPGs seriously in the late aughts, at the age of 43, which is relatively late for someone to get into it, but for some reason I never fell in with a group of people in college that were both RPG players and tolerant of newbies. I dabbled a little bit in the eighties--one session of a superhero RPG and also DC's Watchmen game at a local comics shop--but the superhero RPG wasn't much fun because the person who brought me into the game did not, and I will never really understand… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 7:16 AM on January 22, 2024

The Blazing World is also part of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 12:35 PM on January 21, 2024

It's almost as if the trains are trying to protect us....

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the Trolley Problem is not really a problem for the trolley.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 6:39 PM on January 19, 2024

🎵
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 8:39 PM on January 17, 2024

bettongs, chuditch, quendas and antechinus

"What's on the secret menu at a Klingon deli?"
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 11:53 AM on January 17, 2024

So many good suggestions here. thecjm, I really appreciated the recco for Forged, which I somehow missed; the description of the book includes "an over-the-top pulp adventure of sex, violence, and sci-fi inspired by Conan, Heavy Metal, and other comics you tried to hide from your parents."
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 6:53 PM on January 16, 2024

If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.

This is literally the difference between whether I'd buy music legally (mostly iTunes, some Amazon Music) or go to the torrents.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 5:39 AM on January 15, 2024

To me, it's not just that this took over his life, or that he neglected his family along the way. It's that he expected labor from his kids, and any friends of theirs that might be unlucky enough to be around, but when his son wanted what amounted to a relative pittance in return for what sounds like a substantial chunk of his childhood, the guy thinks that the son is somehow "entitled." No pity from me for this guy because the focus of his obsession is getting broken up.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 6:25 PM on January 13, 2024

Predator: supposedly the result of the Thomas Brothers taking seriously the suggestion that, after Rocky IV and the final fight against the nigh-superhuman Dolph Lundgren, the only place for the Rocky franchise to go (not counting where it actually went) was for Rocky to fight an alien. Basically a reskinning of Alien (instead of a mostly-empty starship where a stealthy alien eliminated the humans one by one, it was a mostly-empty jungle), but still… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 7:09 PM on January 11, 2024

I have mixed feelings about the anniversary, because if I had started playing then, or close to then, who knows what my life would have been like. Maybe not better, but probably not worse. I first dabbled in RPGs in the mid-eighties, and didn't play D&D itself until 3.5, and most of the people that I played with soon switched over to Pathfinder as simply better. I've got a couple of games going on next week and will make some note of the anniversary then. Maybe even… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 6:20 PM on January 11, 2024