MetaFilter

just dropped by for a quick nelson laugh, eat shit you horrible old fucker
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 2:08 PM on May 30, 2024

Take even a single shrimp, give the tail a half twist, and tape it to the head, and in closing this strange loop we've created a topologically non-orientable entrée we can refer to as a "möbius shrimp". This satisifies in at least one sense the stipulated endlessness, but as a hedge against losses we can also provide an upcharge for refills on Klein bottles of cocktail sauce.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 1:36 PM on May 3, 2024

It's refreshing to see purpose-built audiospatial safety solutions display a comparable level of thoughtfulness and craft as what we've come to associate with the industrial and food-grade glycine production of Donghua Jinlong.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 2:26 PM on May 2, 2024

started the game, was like "why does it say 'oh no' tho", put together a nice clean clear, immediately said "oh no" to myself

A+++ would be plunged immediately into despair again
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 9:04 AM on April 19, 2024

I picked the wrong week to stop responding to masto threads about dystopian tech scams

Petit theft

le petit mart
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 6:29 PM on April 18, 2024

A shot that never leaves the player’s hands is called an “orb”, and the rulebook declares this a kind of technical foul called a “pondering”. It can lead to a suspension from both the game and consensus reality, depending on the player’s saving throw.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 4:48 PM on April 18, 2024

Every time I see someone play the hurdy gurdy I think to myself "I should get a hurdy gurdy" and then I manage to distract myself long enough to not actually do that, but I worry one of these days I will stare too long into that particular abyss and then I'll have to figure out how to actually tune and maintain one.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 8:43 AM on April 15, 2024

babe would you still love me if i was a marine worm with extraordinary vision
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 9:48 AM on April 12, 2024

yesssss
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 12:34 PM on March 24, 2024

A Kibo

oh, we got one of those too
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 4:13 PM on March 20, 2024

Why is the TMZ video so blurry? Every picture of Middleton has been in 4k, then TMZ gives us early 2000’s era video? Make it make sense.

This by itself is one of the least weird things to me: covert photography/videography is done at range so you don't get caught doing it. And if you're shooting at range and aren't using huge telephoto lenses to compensate (because, e.g., the people who are going to rumble you for taking photos/video will notice a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 8:27 AM on March 20, 2024

Which just comes back to "why not have a staffer do a brief photo/video session that isn't a fucking paparazzi mess" which brings us right back to conspiracy theories vs. incompetence/stubbornness.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 8:28 AM on March 20, 2024

I wrote a tiny Othello clone on my Palm IIIc back in the bad old days of my call center temp job out of college, and I was working with such an artificially limited source code footprint that I had to jimmy in as concise a player 2 AI as I could. Between that constraint and me not being a particularly good Othello player to begin with, my computer player heuristic came down to:

1. If there's a corner move, make it.
2. Otherwise if there's an edge move, make… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 2:52 PM on March 15, 2024

> also you have the Bene Gesserit who can literally remember their ancestor's memories and so would retain knowledge of the spoken language as well, and who culturally have their claws into everything in the universe

I was wondering about that, too. In the memories of my ancestors from a mere two thousand years ago, I wouldn't be able to understand a damn thing anyone is saying. I am actually among the small percentage of people which has some reading… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 4:31 PM on March 1, 2024

The thing about scams and cons (and any other form of motivated deception, really) is that the attack surface is "literally anything you might extend trust about".

Every point on the spectrum of reaction to a scam story—from the empathetic "everyone might fall for one" to the disbelieving "how could someone fall for THAT, though"—is a reflection of the idea that there's an appropriate amount of trust to extend to any given… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 9:58 AM on February 16, 2024

I'm a nut for hex grids. I think my first exposure was the sea maps in the Avalon Hill game Jutland when I was, honestly, too young for my dad to reasonably expect for me to make a solid attempt at caring about playing the AH game Jutland. But I've had a soft spot for them ever since, and struggled through developing one or two little hobby hex coordinate systems for a game or art experiment over the years. Such a satisfying complement to a square grid.

Navelgazer,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 9:07 AM on February 12, 2024

I've been documenting screenshots here and there of those Hero Wars ads in a shared chat because they are so consistently someone getting paid to do Giant Woman fetish on main to a degree that strikes me as kinda fascinating. Partly because it's a chicken and egg question: was some editorial director with a personal fixation like "and uh, let's put in a, uh, a big woman, like real big, no reason, just [sweating overtly] just for fun, no reason...", or did someone just barf out… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 1:01 PM on February 6, 2024

This is delightful.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 10:32 AM on January 31, 2024

This is delightful; I'd heard the mashup before independently and think it's quite fun, but this hyper montage treatment feels like it fits that weird synthesis of self-serious anthemic rap with the inherent silliness of the ELO song and the take-a-step-back goofy over the top nature of the whole rap battle concept. Converting the whole thing into an incoherent dance party punctuated by cartoon violence feels pretty on the money. Slick as hell editing in any case.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 10:00 AM on January 29, 2024

Is he blaming God?

No, he's celebrating both God's mysteriousness and his own faith, however humble and imperfect, in the unknowable loving majesty of the Lord.

Like Noah, he heeds the call of God to create those things which God demands be created; INDXcoin, like the Ark, is a vehicle meant to carry His faithful though they can not make sense of it themselves and though its meaning and purpose may be unclear. Like Noah's… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 10:35 AM on January 24, 2024

Move fast and break things is a perfectly good philosophy for personal creative experimentation; at the VC scale it's eliding something important that doesn't apply here, and should be understood as "move fast and break other people's things". The less said about it the better I feel like.

Like, if your songwriting or painting or woodworking or crochet or whatever isn't burning your neighbor's house down? Be as messy and as foolhardy with… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 5:13 PM on January 18, 2024

I remember the launch and Andy talking about it at the time; I had signed up as well and used it for a little bit but never really built up a network beyond goofing with the initial rush of other MeFites who also joined up, so it was easy for it to fall by the wayside pretty quickly. For the best, the way things played out, and I'm pretty starkly in "accept VC money at your inescapable peril" territory in general so it's not surprising to me that it *did* play out this way and mostly… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 3:36 PM on January 18, 2024

Cosmopolitan: Is Reverse Cowgirl Really the World’s Most Dangerous Sex Position?

rarely is Betteridge's law illustrated with so overt a failure of imagination
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 8:21 AM on December 20, 2023

Also, I distinctly remember from the sex education film we were shown in fifth grade that the lightly dorky but also apparently very sex-fact knowledgeable protagonist of the film archly corrected his braggy jock himbo friend when said friend claimed they had a cousin who had sex so hard he "broke his penis", claiming that is not in fact a thing at all.

Justice for braggy jock himbo friend, and condolences to his broke-dick cousin.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 8:24 AM on December 20, 2023

I'm reading "Exadelic" on a recommendation from I don't remember who, and I'm vexed by it because I just don't like the writing very much at all, which is not a great feature for a novel! but am still curious where the story is going and giving it some extra slack because it was a recommendation. It reminds me in its clumsy characterization and narrative voice of Andy Weir—The Martian is a good yarn, Artemis was at times a good yarn, but woof the ham-handed style of it all just… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 5:44 PM on December 11, 2023

Hello again, old friend. I did the first thing that occurred to me, which is queue up some 100 gecs and turn up a bunch of dials, because it's a song I could listen to forever anyway and nothing fits messy grungy hyperpop punk better than getting fucky and Burroughsian with it, and I'm not regretting my decision.

and cortex' genius Endless Jingling is offline

It shouldn't be! What we you running into?
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 3:34 PM on December 8, 2023

Now if you're really in for the long haul and for thematically-appropriate compositions, why not listen to a mutating version of track 1 of Eno's 'Music for Airports' literally forever.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 3:39 PM on December 8, 2023

Literally the only saving grace is that he can't run for president.

Knock wood and all that but I don't think he'd make it past the first press conference even if he could run.

Trump was a shock to the system in the degree to which he disproved the idea that it took a degree of composure and competence to compete on the national political stage, but he got past that by being a mix of shameless and weirdly, horribly… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 10:43 PM on November 29, 2023

What's the point of 'intentionally blank pages' anyway?

Sometimes an editor just needs some space.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 10:32 AM on November 27, 2023

"This page intentionally left bereft of content other than this metatextual disclaimer."
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 10:59 AM on November 27, 2023

This somehow being a musical is by far the most interesting thing about it to me; I don't really expect it to be a very *good* musical because it's way too easy for people to make something a musical as a bit than to write great music, but, hey, it's better than it just being literally a needless sequel/remake.

(On Wonkaing, here, is, regrettably, a twitter link that may be the source. This is also how *I* found out it's a musical, I guess.)… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 5:12 PM on November 9, 2023

One thing that really landed for me in Davis' follow-up piece was this point:

In fact, the only way I can understand Rodriguez’s incredibly thin-skinned reaction to my article is that he has managed to rise to this status of apex visibility without any kind of critical writing about him at all. It’s all just been feel-good profiles, so that the first critical word feels like a huge crisis.

Because that does really feel like it has to be part of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 7:18 AM on November 1, 2023

Good piece, resonates like hell. My own trip through the heart of all this has been so central to my life that even a year and a half after stepping away from direct responsibility for it I'm still often pretty overwhelmed by feelings when I get this close to the subject for more than a passing moment. The value this place has had to me, the presence it has had in my life, as my daily thing, and the sense of reevaluating over time what my needs from and expectations for it are over time has… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 9:04 AM on October 22, 2023

If it's any comfort, I didn't get *really* active until like 2005 when I got laid off from a shitty temp job and had a couple months to do nothing but dork around on the internet in my bathrobe.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 10:42 PM on October 22, 2023

Any chance that's true for either of you? I haven't thought about his website in years.

I didn't even know what Brill's Content was until I saw people riffing on Matt's cover photo at some point. I got here via a friend who was a fellow memepool reader and was like "check this out, it's like memepool but blue and there's comments".
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 10:16 AM on October 23, 2023

do they...take after their mother?
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 8:11 AM on October 26, 2023

I feel like the bire-gur-pybgurf fgebxvat, as long as it wasn't n ivtbebhf onpx naq sbegu

enjoying the notion that this zombie of a derail may finally die its final unnatural death with the orthographic vibe that Boebert did the vape-and-grope routine with, specifically, Cthulhu

We are going to make a moderator have to post a really embarrassing message here, you all know that, right?

hey man i don't even work here
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 3:37 PM on October 24, 2023

Been trying to keep myself solidly arm's-length from real-time gawking on politics stuff but by god I'm following along on this one.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 10:31 AM on October 20, 2023

Note that those of keen memory might remember seeing The Oughtred Society on the blue before: there were a couple posts to, inter alia, the main society page back in 2003 and 2006 respectively. But the actual Archive linked here, despite having solid 1995 academic web design vibes, only began to come into existence in 2015.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 9:00 AM on October 15, 2023

I was listening to some alt-rock station on FM in the car the other day and the DJ rattled off a faux-naturalistic ramble about how, sorry fans, The Killers wouldn't be putting out a new album as soon as expected because they'd decided mid-production to change direction, but they DO have a new single out in the mean time, so now here's Mr. Brightside instead. Just an amazing sort of "what was this music gossip segment for?" vibe and reiteration of how inescapable… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 11:23 AM on October 2, 2023

I was gonna try and make a stretch of a joke about Veronica Cartwright also having an Alien 3 / Cujo connection because in both she was menaced by a quite sick dog, but it turns out that was Dee Wallace in Cujo. Cartwright would have been great too tho.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 9:19 PM on September 25, 2023

Here’s the one that makes me laugh hysterically every time (SFW): Labyrinth.

I have gone back to the well on this one so many times. The last panel is perfect shitpost material in the right context.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 7:21 AM on September 19, 2023

Good to see that camcorder animorph nightmare fuel again.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 2:25 PM on September 13, 2023

Starfield is not going to be anywhere near free but I am so excited to spend a bunch of time in the janky confines of Space Skyrim once it's live on Steam.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 10:15 PM on September 4, 2023

There may be 8' 11" between the road and the bridge, but your truck is not a point. If the road dips to go under the bridge, the effective clearance will be lower in a way that depends on the wheelbase of the specific truck.

The ol’ Reverse Edmund Fitzgerald
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 12:09 PM on September 3, 2023

Judith Sketching Holofernes
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 9:26 AM on August 23, 2023

Saturn Devouring His Crayons
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 12:24 PM on August 23, 2023

Thither we go!
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 11:31 AM on August 21, 2023

There are also some greys! Actually the games do a pretty good job (especially Mankind Divided as I recall) of mixing up the palette of the environments significantly throughout to create a good sense of mood and separation of space. But it definitely bends a lot of the time toward muted tones of a gritted-up, worn-in landscape in the more urban/residential/underground areas. Prague in Mankind Divided makes very good use overall of playing the feel of a ground-down, old-but-modern city… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 3:19 PM on August 16, 2023

This is the soundtrack for a tragic Final Fantasy boss fight.

I can see it, though my most immediate thought was this is the soundtrack to at least two scenes in every episode of Tales From the Loop.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 3:15 PM on August 16, 2023