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This kind of shit got people killed.

Wow. I thought it was kind of somewhere on a spectrum between "Fairytale of New York" using the bundle-of-sticks-word or up to Eminem using anti-gay slurs on "Rap God," but not that.

This pivots me from "these guys are evolving, great" to "if they aren't unpublishing this stuff, pulling it off Spotify and making real efforts to eradicate it, yeah, you're nowhere close to where you need to be."
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 2:53 AM on May 29, 2023

They never released it. It is not available commercially, or through ICP, nor has it ever been.

Pivoting back to Team Violent J, and it feels good to feel good about people, even briefly.

Thanks for the clarification on that.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 8:47 AM on May 29, 2023

I agree with all of this, but I also have a vague feeling around how making media a lot easier to produce has also thinned the support pools to the point that resource-intensive projects are folding.

Pre-Internet, my support dollars (had I the money back then to patronize anything) would have been reflected in magazine subscriptions, which sometimes didn't pan out (I'm still mad about Might magazine collapsing the very issue after I paid for a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 9:21 AM on May 23, 2023

Five breaches for me, but for all the site trumpets the terrifying possibility that these have created an accurate and penetrating profile of me, they show... none of this? And in aggregate, the breaches have revealed my email address, home address, and social media accounts, which anyone can find on Google if they know my first and last name.

So I guess I'm... reassured? This site certainly hasn't provided anything that raises my eyebrow in terms of information that's… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 1:36 PM on May 19, 2023

It's a minor thing, but I appreciate it when people share authors' names when sharing an article. Thanks for doing it!

I feel like North American comics went through this cycle years ago, post Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, when comics got super grimdark, up to and through the birth of Image and the grimmest of grimdark grimdarks, and that there's been a ~20-year project to kind of find some sort of balance between that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 5:46 AM on May 2, 2023

I have been a DR fan since I lived in Quebec in the 1990s and early 2000s; if you're looking for some OG Robitaille Franco-Ontarian bops, I recommend:

Serpents et échelles (Snakes and Ladders)
Mot de passe (Password -also in the original post, it's really good!)
L'homme qui me ressemble (The Man who Looks Like Me)
S.O.S. (no translation required)
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 11:53 AM on April 5, 2023

Ryan North is relentlessly delightful and if you can make any talk with Ryan I 10000% endorse it. I'm sorry I'm busy that night!
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 10:14 AM on March 28, 2023

Wil Wheaton once very graciously agreed to be a Returner (zombie, but smart) in a comic I wrote back when I thought I could make a go of it writing comics, and would have a lifetime pass just for that, but his mensch spiral seems to continue circling ever upward, which is wonderful.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 1:55 PM on March 27, 2023

I'm just here to point out in that the linked article about No Man's Sky second life after relentless work post-terrible-launch is almost four years old, and Sean Murray has continued to work relentlessly on the game in the intervening four years.

I put about 150 hours into a new save between November 2022 and now, and it is a spectacular (IMO) experience. You can pursue a well-written (if sparse, and existentially disturbing) main plotline, or just explore cool space… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 12:37 PM on March 6, 2023

Thanks for sharing this! I'm new to Lady Wray and the Tiny Desk Concert is blowing my mind. Ridiculous amounts of talent packed into that little room.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 3:56 AM on February 24, 2023

We drink gin and tonic when watching TNG. We call it TNGNT.

I love this, but I'm sober, so if I ever come over maybe you can offer me a Snapple and we can all enjoy an ST:TNGNT/Ice Tea.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 11:06 AM on February 22, 2023

I've tried the Gloomhaven PC implementation solo a few times (I've never played it in person, and am not likely to, given time constraints / friend circles / partner interests) and keep bouncing off it real hard -- it seems to dip just a squidge too far into fiddly, and the interface never quite felt natural to me. I always felt like I didn't fully understand the cards or their implications and was being punished harshly for even minor bad decisions.

By contrast, I've… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 10:47 AM on February 21, 2023

I would love to see more science and data that pushes back against our car-centric culture and makes us re-examine all of that! I would love it!

Like the above posters have noted, looking at the questions presented, this is not that. They're throwing wild strawmen into the argument with some frankly weird context shifts. Particularly galling:

(We originally considered specific v general questions, e.g., "People driving cars in public… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 9:24 AM on January 17, 2023

I loved Max Headroom when I was a kid and one day I was at the Oshawa Centre with my parents, where the Zellers (proto-Wal-Mart, Canadian edition) for whatever reason sold records, and I saw Max Headroom on this single and bought it.

My parents only listened to the CBC (NPR/BBC One, roughly -- all talk, music was only classical or jazz) from dawn til dusk. I'd sometimes catch snatches of music at friends' houses or on the radio at restaurants or in cars. My solo… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 9:26 AM on January 12, 2023

DirtyOldTown has been championing the Chucky series over in FanFare, and I am a strong seconder of that emotion: it's far better than it needs to be, gruesome, funny, suspenseful, wildly 2SLGBTQIA+ positive, and at times bizarrely heartwarming.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 8:51 AM on January 4, 2023

This may be the only time I can make this comment in a remotely relevant context: I'm proud to have known the editor of the Stanstead Journal, a tiny Quebec weekly newspaper (now defunct) when Shania Twain created intense international interest in a locally made product (just across the border in Vermont) created to soothe chafed cow teats, Bag Balm, by saying she used it as a moisturizer.

This created an incredible rush on Bag Balm, with orders… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 10:53 AM on January 3, 2023

I really enjoyed this! Thanks for sharing it.

A lot of people that really reminded me of high school friends that leaned heavily in the hippie direction; even then, it felt like it was an echo of the genuine movement/times, so it's interesting and a bit shocking to realize that I'd be identified as one of the older people in this doc, and that there's a cultural gravity to the tie-die/tinted glasses/dreadlock aesthetic that seems to persist as a perennial thing… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 5:27 AM on December 28, 2022

I feel like there's a great game waiting to be made by somebody that focuses solely on whoever's job it is to light the candles, oil lamps, gaslight posts, etc. in the backgrounds of all these ruined steampunk-Victorian settings while dodging the constantly battling monsters, clockwork heroes, technoflesh battle-tanks, etc.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 8:01 AM on December 27, 2022

This reminds me that I was working on a gift a while back for a friend and got distracted:

Lie Lurk Loathe

posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 3:07 AM on December 17, 2022

Almost 50, 6/6, only marginally confused by "out of pocket." My job involves hiring university students as assistants for various things, so maybe I'm picking up more through osmosis than I thought?

But "slay" for "made me laugh" is goddamned ALF, people (not that the sitcom originated, I'm just dating the term). Are the kids super into Gordon Schumway?
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 5:09 PM on December 14, 2022

Is it just me or is the article itself incredibly ugly? Chunky unbroken slabs of poorly spaced text on planes of battling beige. I tried it in three browsers and various privacy modes to make sure that it wasn't the result of some sort of adblock or script-blocking tool making it hideous. I literally couldn't read it past the first few paragraphs; a daunting, ever-scrolling wall of garbage CSS.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 12:16 PM on December 9, 2022

I can't even hack Stellaris (even after an AskMe about it and some very kind MeFites giving me tutorials/re-introductions) so I don't think this is for me. But I wish it were? I have a deep envy of people who can really get into these kinds of things; I'd love this kind of engaging escape in life, but I just don't seem to be wired to get pulled into the deeper sim elements.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 1:34 PM on December 6, 2022

I've owned my own house since I bought a literal shell of a place to fix up in 1999; when we sold that and moved in 2014 we tried renting, but after six months I couldn't handle it. The thing that a lot of rent/own arguments don't account for is power over your own space -- owning a house I can (with the right permits) cut down a tree that's turned the back yard into a shaded sprawl of moss and mud, renovate my own kitchen any way I like, paint, put in shelves, reconfigure… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 6:28 AM on December 3, 2022

So glad that EmpressCallipygos already big-upped B. Dylan Hollis, who seems to occupy a middle space in which he's making recipes that are objectively terrible, but through a kind of historic-food lens and also with so much joy that it doesn't feel like "ragebait" but just the kind of super positive vibe everyone could stand to have a little more of in their day.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 9:00 AM on November 30, 2022

Puffery! That's where I'm a Viking! See previous comment for much more information, but "the thing in the package is not the thing I expected to find based on that package" cases are a dime a dozen and I will be shatteringly surprised if this doesn't just get tossed out.

First and foremost, without any tangible harm, there isn't much there there to file suit over. "I spent slightly longer doing a thing than I'd like" isn't really… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 1:51 PM on November 28, 2022

I know Conover is differently appreciated in various quarters, but I think this message needs to be said as loudly as possible, as often as possible, by as many people as possible, and I'm grateful for him to use his platform to do this.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 9:08 AM on November 24, 2022

We've used the envelope system successfully in the past, and have only dropped off because my partner and I were both raised with different-but-similar strains of never talk about money as a cultural imperative in our houses and still find dealing with it very uncomfortable.

Our current system is logging everything we spend scrupulously in a spreadsheet across about a dozen categories and (failing to) review those at the end of each month to see how… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 2:39 AM on November 21, 2022

The Sick Systems link is a stone cold classic. Thanks for (re)sharing it.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 9:23 AM on November 3, 2022

I have the vast bulk of the trades and love them. In an odd wild spotting, my wife and I double-featured House and House 2: The Second Story the other night, and there's one scene in House 2 where the goofy frivolous comic relief guy jumps onto a bed and starts reading a comic book, and it's Love and Rockets, which was kind of cool for a Very '80s movie to throw onto the screen.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 2:23 AM on October 19, 2022

I am not good at any of this and generally just rely on uBlock Origin to... block all the things? Do these cookie-blocking extensions do something that the broader ad-blockers do not?
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 2:34 AM on September 30, 2022

I can't quite get it together to put a Fanfare post up, and I think Fanfare posts ideally start kind of value-neutral to give commenters space to discuss without jumping in with a value judgment off the bat, but we watched the 1958 Dracula (Horror of Dracula in the 'States) last night and were amazed at how kind of... bad?... it was. Nothing remotely resembling suspense or horror, characters acting in baffling ways, tremendously leaden acting.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 5:50 AM on September 26, 2022

"We have such synth to show you"
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 12:52 PM on September 23, 2022

I went to the movies with friends outside Montreal once at a Cineplex kind of place, and they all went to see a Nixon comedy, and I was the only person in the theatre playing The Iron Giant and cried so hard the projectionist came down to see if I was okay.

I don't know why people cry at movies but if I even hear somebody saying "Superman" in a creaky voice I have to excuse myself and go look at the sky for a while.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 12:42 PM on September 23, 2022

is that a weaker album? good, average? "Thieves" and "So What" are just so good

My completely subjective and probably empirically wrong Ministry album rankings:
Psalm 69
The Land of Rape and Honey
In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up (live album, largely tracks from...)
The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste
12 Inch Singles (two tracks stand out, including… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 3:44 PM on September 21, 2022

After a slight bit of poking around I may be about to fall down a Norman Pain rabbit hole.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 3:16 AM on September 21, 2022

I think about and discuss the Man-Thing a lot more than is required, and I have a lot of fundamental issues with the entire Man-Thing premise. I mean -- I love the Man-Thing. It's an inversion of the whole idea of a western superhero -- almost wholly responsive, it doesn't seek adventure or injustice, it's just a constant challenge to a writer to come up with compelling stories about a protagonist that things can only happen to.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 5:21 AM on September 19, 2022

Thanks for the tip on grass whips, SaltySalticid! I've always prioritized having homes with yards so small I can use a trimmer to cut them, but the cordless trimmer I bought ~6 years ago is starting to fade in terms of battery life, and a scythe is too big to cut around a lot of the odd things in our yard. A grass whip looks like it might be perfect.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 6:01 AM on September 11, 2022

Having David Boreanaz doing "Angelus" as their voice coach was in retrospect possibly ill-considered.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 11:21 AM on September 9, 2022

It's probably just me going slowly mad but at first glance I always think Older Edward Norton is Young Brent Spiner.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 9:49 AM on September 8, 2022

I can watch horror movies all ding-dong day, but this really got to me for some reason and I had to stop -- oddly enough, the only book that ever actually scared me was House of Leaves, and now I'm wondering if I've got some hang-up about unnavigable and shifting interior spaces that I really need to unpack.

I'm watching in the default YouTube configuration on a laptop screen, and it all looks pretty good to me? I'm sure sharper… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 9:08 AM on September 1, 2022

My dream of a prestige TV series where Bill Nye and Bill Nighy get together and solve mysteries through a combination of science and acting edges ever closer.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 6:34 PM on July 23, 2022

All of the above -- I was vaguely stoked about this, the idea of Rob Zombie smushing some giallo-influenced goofy/extreme horror sensibilities into a hoary old second-tier (the Addams Family ruled, come on) TV property seemed like an idea with legs.

But it feels unfunny in the worst sense of "tries to be funny and falls short," as opposed to aiming in a number of directions that could have worked really well. Maybe there's some sort of genius riff in here on… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 1:46 PM on July 13, 2022

Paul F. Thompkins weighs in on the subject

That whole PFT album is gold, including the ultimate resolution of the perennial cake v. pie debate. The title of the album -- from GAA -- is appropriately Freak Wharf.
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 3:15 PM on July 8, 2022

On the entirely other end of the spectrum, at the Kingston ag fair in 2019, I saw the category for Peanut Butter Cookies, in which there was only one entry and it was awarded second prize. This seems like a contender for the most savage takedown in ag fair history: telling an entrant that literally the concept of nothingness is a better cookie than their cookie.

I think of Yvonne Brownlee and her peanut butter cookie often, usually when I feel like… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 2:59 AM on June 30, 2022

audrey or GTFO
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 2:33 AM on June 30, 2022

25% of the top 12 are Grant Morrison (if you count 52, which I do; they were all over the place with their weirdzo philosophizing, and I even poked gentle fun at one point) which is interesting... move down two slots, and 5/14 are Grant Morrison projects. What's fascinating is how much has been done to undo Morrison in a lot of ways; the most egregious of all of this being on the Marvel side of the fence, where Marvel unwound almost all of the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 10:09 AM on June 28, 2022

Despite being too busy and trying to curb my tendency toward micro-obsession projects, I feel compelled to try to start some sort of visual blog of the bathroom signs in cottages / homes of people with septic tanks. A quick trip out to visit my folks and some distant relatives over the weekend; three cottages, three very different approaches to flushing protocols and waste management, written in a variety of metres and rhyming schemes. No yellow/mellow/brown/down, either!
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 5:35 AM on June 20, 2022

Worth it for the first few minutes alone. He has a light now! More amps! An obtained but (SPOILER) quickly forgotten about external microphone!
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 4:54 PM on June 13, 2022

I love deckbuilding games and spend more time than I should on MTG Arena; in the world of solo deckbuilding games, I had a solid amount of time with Slay the Spire but my go-to for a long time has been Griftlands, which I find much more interesting and rewarding on replay -- after a few plays I do tend to quick-click through all the dialogue, but it's got excellent characters and world-building, the interrelation between the playable characters is really interesting, and I love the "combat… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 11:54 AM on June 7, 2022

Other than John Byrne and possibly Carmine Infantino, it's hard to think of two other artists that defined the post-Golden-Age comics world like Adams and Perez, as Ipsifendus says above. Perez and Byrne (Crisis on Infinite Earths, Alpha Flight) were comics art for me as a kid, and Perez (to my knowledge) managed to maintain a long and successful career with grace and poise without ever turning into a crank.

So many iconic Perez moments, but even… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Shepherd at 12:25 PM on May 7, 2022