MetaFilter

Pitch: a trip for young people to Morocco to get to know one another and create lasting friendships. One of your friends will be framed for the theft of a diamond, and you will take the blame and flee your country. On joining the tour you will be shouted at by a sadistic sergeant and made to march. A fort will be attacked. Can you do the right thing?
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:38 PM on March 21, 2023

This man isn’t being charged with a military crime though, it’s the civil crime of murder and he’ll be tried in an ordinary criminal proceedings.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:50 PM on March 20, 2023

To add to the negatives: rental churn has a shocking effect on voluntarism. My volunteer organisation simply can't keep young people, they all move away.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:15 PM on March 19, 2023

xdvesper, the context is that NZ is experiencing an extreme housing shortage. It's an extraordinary owner's market.

(Also, w/r/t rent raises, known rents for specific dwellings have an effect on yield, which lenders take into account for investment property loans, so landlords who may be considering selling or refinancing have a great incentive to raise—or advertise, anyway—the dwelling as high as they can).
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:40 PM on March 19, 2023

Night patrol on the puffling patrol / kids that want to make sure the puffins get home
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:31 PM on March 18, 2023

AC/DC must have a taken a hostage leprechaun not to have made it onto this list. By rights they’ve earned recognition for four decades of wringing the last drops out of a single 4/4 idea. It’s well known they aren’t good people. How have they not managed to put out a completely dogshit album?
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:59 PM on March 17, 2023

🎶 hunting giant rodents in Cuba, whoooa / take me where the April sun gonna treat me so right 🎶
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:19 AM on March 16, 2023

I've got a Brother laser printer, a HL-2270DW, nearly 12 years old now I think. The thing is far sturdier than any car I've ever owned or driven. I'm pretty confident I could use it as a blunt tool to drive nails if I wanted to.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:29 PM on March 15, 2023

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:06 PM on March 9, 2023

FWIW company towns have an honourable (if forgotten) role in the history of socialist and town planning experiments. But Musk is no Robert Owen, nor even a Billy Lane.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:03 PM on March 14, 2023

ASK ME ABOUT ‘LOOM’
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:58 PM on March 14, 2023

It’s the economics of it that’s key, yeah. Pirating games might be about high principle for some but mostly it’s a demand/price curve

But more importantly, w/r/t economic factors, it amazes me that this person obviously has extraordinary talents and self-discipline, and a deep industry knowledge, and uses them *for this*. It’s a squandering of human potential so mind boggling it’s very nearly admirable. Nearly.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:20 PM on March 14, 2023

If big butts should cause you to lie, pluck out your eye now, for it would be better to like big butts and not lie, than be forever stung!
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:20 PM on March 13, 2023

Uncle—I think that’s partly it; heterosexual men in patriarchy are far likelier to understand what may make them attractive to gay men than they are to understand what may make them attractive to heterosexual women. The first is male desire, which is well known, if the subject of fear and prejudice, the second is female desire which men are not encultured to know about at all. No wonder middle aged men miss flirting, no wonder men fail to understand how they present, no wonder flirting is so… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 1:08 PM on March 12, 2023

These extraordinary people who resist interpretation of their lives through narrative don’t realise they seem to be trapped in a cursed David Lodge novel
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:04 PM on March 11, 2023

just so you know, ‘franger’ is Australian/NZ slang for a condom
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:18 PM on March 11, 2023

The author is bang on about the legal age. When I taught at universities I was always struck by the fundamental cultural difference between the American exchange students and the domestic Australian students; the former were both more and less worldly, in that they hadn't had the same opportunity as the Australians (drinking age 18) to be part of a culture of open alcohol consumption. Not to say they hadn't been exposed to alcohol, far from it, they just had a very different set of assumptions… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:19 PM on March 6, 2023

Alcohol at lunch also seems to presuppose a culture of work lunches that are taken away from your desk or break room and that last more than 30 minutes

THIS IS WHAT THEY HAVE TAKEN FROM US
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:39 PM on March 6, 2023

I was thinking of this reading the other post about terrible 1970s cartoons. Apart from the songwriting for the themes (for which the 1970s were still pretty good), an AI could probably do comparably shitty writing and produce endless Scooby Doo Clone Shows. That's a rough thought.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:45 PM on March 5, 2023

As Bismarck said about LLMs, it’s best not to know how the sausage is made
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 1:38 PM on March 2, 2023

With respect to the Turing test, I've always thought any cursory glimpse at history would show you that humans are, as a rule, really really bad at evaluating the humanity of other humans—and that goes for elaborate 19thC intellectual arguments about slavery, to the reflexive language used today about the desire to 'speak to a real person' rather than a call centre worker with a script, a worker whose job is counterfeit themselves.

'Help, how do I… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:53 PM on March 2, 2023

One part-time and now defrocked Blobby, who was trained by Killerby to play Blobby

What on earth do you have to do to be defrocked from Blobby Orders?
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:03 PM on March 2, 2023

Stand by, I’m monitoring the radio, over
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:07 AM on March 2, 2023

This is superb and thank you for posting it.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:02 PM on March 1, 2023

The political reason was that soldiers in divided Berlin came under the command of the Allied Control Council, which were until reunification the sovereign authority for the post-1945 city (counterintuitively, the Western military powers administered the city, through all its crises, together with the Soviet Army, until the fall of the Wall). The DDR authorities were not to be acknowledged by the Western military since that would have implied East German sovereignty in Berlin.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:04 AM on March 1, 2023

Is there something wrong with amateurism-hobbyism in the humanities, I wonder? Go through the canon and in almost every culture it’s amateurs, the privately rich, or the precarious jobbers, who’ve produced the enduring texts and works of art.

I wonder why the fall of the Soviet Union isn’t identified as an inflection point here. The Cold War forced Western governments to support humanities as professional bodies of knowledge as a non-materialist,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 1:53 PM on February 28, 2023

Screens should be based on the form of a sheet of paper (read in portrait). Prove the statement wrong.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:34 PM on February 27, 2023

How about some rule changes to create a much more engaging game;

* reduce the number of innings to two, twenty overs of six balls in an innings
* overarm bowling
* two batters at either ends of a crease with wickets
* it's T20 cricket
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 4:43 PM on February 26, 2023

1993: Rick Rubin conducts a funeral for the word ‘Def’. RIP.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:13 PM on February 22, 2023

I've always liked the idea of a miniature Civ spinoff where you get to play as the Barbarians, generating at random in some out of the way spot on a map, and then either having to negotiate the hostile attention of one or more empires by existing in a hill-people liminal space beyond State control (James C. Scott style), or deciding to make a glorious piratical dash for glory, destroying stuff and plundering (Blackbeard the pirate style). Raise the black flag.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:46 PM on February 21, 2023

Hypocrites that you are, you trust in artistic realism to establish the real! Everything that was directly lived has already moved away into a representation. Will you fight? Or will you perish like a dog?
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:04 PM on February 20, 2023

In the inner west of Sydney where I live, small-backyard cricket games have the same arcane and specific requirements. I remember walking home and hearing a child’s voice screaming the rule IF YOU HIT THE STATUE OF THE BUDDHA THAT’S SIX AND OUT
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:52 PM on February 17, 2023

Every time I clip my beard I start underneath my chin and for thirty seconds I have Lemmy from Motörhead’s beard. I salute myself in the mirror with the index-and-pinkie horns. One of these days I’ll stop there. One of these days.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:27 PM on February 16, 2023

‘Use two fingers to navigate’ FNAR FNARR
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:03 PM on February 16, 2023

people know its secret internal alias, Sydney

[Sydney resident] Vastly overpriced, viciously parochial, heir to hundreds of years of colonialism, corrupt, hypocritical, self-serving and cruel, segregated along many levels, but still undeniably attractive. Yep
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 6:00 PM on February 14, 2023

Maybe pure villains are emotionally shallow and unentertaining, without the kind of dramatic depth that goes along with ambiguity in character, but you’d be hard pressed to tell Lee Van Cleef that who made a very good career out of playing them
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 12:05 PM on February 13, 2023

FWIW as a character who is mostly notable for their attractive good looks, whose bad judgement drives plot points, has to be constantly rescued by an aristocrat, and has a wacky animal sidekick, Han Solo is clearly not an antihero: he’s a Disney Princess
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:32 AM on February 14, 2023

On ask metafilter there’s a well trod piece of wisdom about distinguishing between intentions and effects of behaviour, that just intending well isn’t enough; I think that applies here too.

Bad intentions, bad effects: stage villain (Gargamel, Hedley Lamarr)
Good intentions, good effects: hero (Lone Ranger, Bruce Willis in Die Hard, 1960s Batman)
Bad intentions, good effects: antihero (Omar Little, 2000s Batman)
Good intentions, bad effects: tragic hero (Hamlet, Michael Corleone)
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:05 PM on February 14, 2023

I love this because it’s the kind of weird definition of ‘productivity’ that would absolutely throw Frederick Taylor and make the apostles of time-and-motion efficiency throw a rage shitting fit.

Hey you, do you want to be a high-priced man? Stand behind that dumb Dutchman, do nothing for not much money, and watch him lift pig iron for twice what I pay you.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 5:20 PM on February 4, 2023

Actually on second thought I love this even more. What this man has invented is the self-surveillance effect of a shoulder-hovering manager, without the manager’s actual power; he has enough money that he can hire the kind of micro-manager he can tell to fuck off. (As for the temporary ‘manager’; look, I’ve done weirder jobs, honestly). And in the end. Who is the manager in this scenario? Who is the surveilled? Qui custodiet ipsos taskmasteres?
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 12:09 AM on February 5, 2023

My mate in high school had a camcorder and an interest in making movies. What he didn't have, and what nobody we knew had access to, was editing equipment, so what he did was borrow two video players from friends (since he didn't have a player) and some cables, hooked one to the other and to the TV, and stop-play-record using two machines. It was janky but it worked enough. The problem was when he got back in his car to deliver the VCR players back to the parents of his friends he borrowed them… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:45 PM on February 1, 2023

There is no doubt in my mind that if someone made this for Neighbours or Home And Away it would become hugely and unironically popular in the UK.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:04 PM on January 31, 2023

1. Spartans are mammals.
2. The purpose of a Spartan is to flip out and kill people
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:26 PM on January 29, 2023

I have had whoper
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 10:18 PM on January 29, 2023

WALTER SOBCHAK: You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 11:41 PM on January 28, 2023

Apart from anything else, in what possible way could driving this be anything like flying a fighter jet?
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:52 PM on January 27, 2023

This seems to me genuinely a shift in meaning for 'nepotism', where it used to refer only to a corrupt or dishonest preference for family members in e.g. specific public offices. But isn't this just British class operating in the same way it has done for hundreds of years; just the older-definition of Privilege through old boy or public school networks?
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 3:36 PM on January 26, 2023

W/r/t dynastism in sport, it’s long been common for the sons and daughters of athletes also to be athletes, and for good reason, the physical characteristics (height, strength, vision, stamina) that make good athletes are directly genetically inheritable. The early coordination and awareness that come with sporting parents (throwing a ball, kicking a football around in the park, knowing the rules and customs of a game) gives a huge advantage too.

That’s not what’s going on here though.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 2:06 PM on January 27, 2023

VFS: We're so good you only need two weeks

…IN A ROW?
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 9:15 PM on January 26, 2023

[finance bro] hmmm what if there were such a thing as lunar time based arbitrage
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 7:29 PM on January 26, 2023