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a nice, inexpensive local beer with an attachment to its city and a very nice logo and a history

kensington314, exactly. This is what we've lost (not losing, that ship has sailed), the idea that not everything has to be everywhere. Growth at all costs doesn't allow for "locally beloved," it must be shipped out everywhere. There was something lovely about visiting a new place and seeing things that you couldn't see anywhere else, that maybe,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 11:31 PM on July 12, 2023

I'm grateful that I came of age before the internet, before Peterson, before YouTube, because goddamn, I would have been sucked right into some of this shit. I look back and see in teenage me the same frustrations voiced by people choosing to call themselves incels. It was dumb, but I couldn't see that, and I'm lucky as hell that I managed to outgrow much of it, and I have a lot of people to thank for doing work I had no right to ask for in pulling me out of that place.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:38 PM on July 10, 2023

At a meetup a while back, Dave gave us all bookmarks with the Ukyio-e Heroes, and it's something I treasure, lil chibi Ryu throwing a fireball at chibi Chun-li, who is yawning while holding out a marshmallow on a stick. It's adorable.

I know corona hit Mokuhankan pretty hard, I'm glad to see things are going well. Damn, I need to stop by some time.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:57 PM on July 10, 2023

I loved the AAA little map booklet. Also, Euchre. That's what we did. A lot of Euchre.

I've probably mentioned this here before, but I absolutely loved taking the train from Kalamazoo to Chicago to visit family, or to Ann Arbor to visit friends. I'd get dropped off at the station, and, probably as early as thirteen until about seventeen, I'd ride the train alone. Well, without parents with me. You were never really alone on Amtrak in the early 90s.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 8:13 PM on July 9, 2023

Staff member Lin Codega posted a comment from the staff of io9. (Still Twitter, sorry)
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 9:37 PM on July 5, 2023

> I'd be interested in what people think of the quality of this response.

If nothing else, the bullet points and summary show a serious lack of ability to give more than the utmost surface response and analysis. We, all of us, are making word choices that further our goals. When we use a loaded word, its because we have decided there is value in that choice, and are accepting, or even wanting to exploit the baggage that comes with it. Looking at… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:42 PM on July 6, 2023

Is it OK to use ChatGPT to generate drafts of documents like these, which don’t make a claim to creative “genius”?

The head of my department is currently, gleefully talking about his use of ChatGPT to do things like this for him, and I’d personally be ecstatic if the school caught wind of it and let him know that they expect him to fulfill the role he’s paid for. At a certain point, let’s call it “accepting a role that involves taking on… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:55 PM on July 8, 2023

Adding automated spinning blades to a workplace staffed by people making minimum wage? Sure, why not? I wonder about the level of automation, and when these machines inevitably break down in the middle of a lunch rush, will the company have trained technicians on standby who can fix the problem and get the meat flowing again? At the end of service, when the machines need to be cleaned and sanitized, will there be trained staff to do that work?

Of course not. Whoever is… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:08 PM on July 5, 2023

I was more thinking of cross-contamination of pork products, but would be curious to hear from folks who do observe more strictly.

On the kosher thing (can't speak to halal, I don't know enough about it), at least for some values of Conservative Judaism*, if you're keeping kosher, that means you don't eat meat unless it's been certified kosher. In practice, that means, when you eat out, you're essentially pescatarian. In my experience, if you're… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:52 PM on July 5, 2023

I was at the doctor's office a lot as a kid, and I saw a lot of Highlights. Reading this article, I started to realize how much, how very much I wanted to be Gallant, not that I really ever made it. And yeah, I beat myself up about it every time I realized I wasn't. Worse than that, though is how it gave me a very focused way of looking at the world that I'm still trying to recover from.

Even now, I look at someone doing… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:05 PM on July 3, 2023

Heading to work this morning, I saw a couple Muslim families at the train station, dressed in what I can only call finery, with one couple's little son doing that "look how dressed up I am and how grown up that makes me" strut that only kids under five can manage when wearing their holiday clothes.

It's a nice little moment, right at the beginning of dreary commute, knowing that for some, today is a day of celebration.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:00 PM on June 28, 2023

Mmm, chikinugs™!

Dr. Twist, this is the future, but it is, without a doubt, the dumb future.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 9:02 PM on June 21, 2023

What? Sharing the sacred knowledge? With those who have never had to decide which five cds to bring with you? With those who could pick and choose and preview albums before buying (without having to put on the in store headphones covered in the ghost sweat of who knows how many customers before), who’ve never loved a song so much they spent $18.99 on an album that was utterly and completely different than the single?

No! They must… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 3:37 PM on June 20, 2023

Early 2000s death knell of CDs Japan was an interesting place. Most CDs cost, in stores, $30 or more, and more than a couple companies put really, really restrictive DRM on their albums. I remember falling in love a bit with a pop-punk band here (B-Dash, they were great, I think, but...), buying their album, and putting it in my computer just to play it. The disc spun up and launched a browser window taking me directly to a site letting me know that playing the disc in a computer was not allowed,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:49 PM on June 20, 2023

― Frederic Brown

Ignorantsavage, I'd always heard that Asimov wrote that, in a back and forth contest with Clarke to see who could write the shortest SF story. Nuts. Nice to know the actual origin, though.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:24 PM on June 19, 2023

It’ll be fourteen years since my dad passed away this July. I went from planning to be home for a fun visit for a couple weeks to suddenly needing to be the person who asked the doctor to stop care, or however it’s supposed to be phrased. I changed my plane ticket, and worked with my sister to arrange a memorial, and then I got to work, spending the month of august, 2009, going through the house he had largely stopped living in, having moved in with his girlfriend. There were so many things, so… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:02 PM on June 17, 2023

You start going through things from your past and you pick up objects and get lost in nostalgia and memory. And it's taking you ages to evaluate every object because of the baggage attached to it.

If I were left all on my own, it would be a nightmare of "but this reminds me of" or "this is sentimental because of" or whatever.

None of those things matter to anyone who comes after you. These are your values you place… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:09 PM on June 17, 2023

Well, at least we've finally found something John Brunner wasn't eerily accurate about. See, at the end of The Sheep Look Up (which appears to be the Brunner novel we're living in this week, whereas most other weeks in the US, it seems to be Jagged Orbit), there's smoke spreading into Canada because the US is burning.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 8:47 PM on June 7, 2023

Huh. I’d always remembered it as smoke in Canada, and the farmer wondering if it came from the farm next door, but yeah, Iceland wouldn’t be surprising.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:02 AM on June 8, 2023

Rowdy Roddy Piper, Macho Man, Andre the Giant, Dusty Rhodes, Big John Stud, Junkyard Dog, Scott Hall, Brodie Lee/Luke Harper, and now the Iron Sheik (as well as anyone I've left off the list, forgive me, it is so long).

But Hogan is still alive. Just another brick in the wall of support for "worst possible timeline/we live in the stupidest future" theory.

I'm not an afterlife guy, but it would be nice to imagine Sheik screaming… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:18 PM on June 7, 2023

However, it's incorrect to say the industry requires steroids now.

There definitely was a steroid era, where they were widely used, but even WWE tests wrestlers* now, and has for years. You could actually see the effect of the ban on the physiques of the wrestlers when it went into effect. Very young Randy Orton, for example, was a musclebound, no-necked goon in the mold of all McMahon's favorites, and then a year later, he was, essentially, what he… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:41 PM on June 7, 2023

It works. It normalises these places as places you might go, moves them out of the mental category with Iran and North Korea.

See also WWE's deal with Saudi Arabia, which, if you look at it, even at $50 million a year, WWE got bought cheap. Two shows a year, constantly hyped, complete with full on propaganda/tourism promos, that's an incredible publicity deal. Fans don't even bat an eyelash at the company's female wrestlers suddenly wearing full-body… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 11:36 PM on June 6, 2023

It shows what happens not when AI is out of control, but when we give money and authority to people who don't know how AI should be built or used.

See, I kind of disagree with the sentiment that it’s not an AI problem. The fact that we can’t really figure out how to use it well makes it a problem. A chimpanzee with a chainsaw is a problem. It doesn’t really matter if the chimpanzee or the chainsaw is the main issue, it’s that together, they’re a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 3:26 PM on June 1, 2023

I'd assumed that Lindelof (Insert Name Here) was better than this, and now see that the trust I had was greatly misplaced.

That’s the thing, how many times do we have to have this same thought about yet another person? How many times do we have to find out that a person we admire is actually a shit human being until we switch our default mode of believing that people, in general, aren’t all that bad, to thinking that everyone we meet, everyone we… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 1:54 PM on May 30, 2023

The Japanese government/banking/business establishment is all in on cashless payments. Lots of new places popping up, restaurant wise, as “food halls” (glorified food courts) with large real estate firms owning the buildings and renting out spaces, where none of the spaces accept cash. The push during early covid was non-stop, with commercials for companies putting out their own cashless systems (seriously, the list of accepted cashless payments at many establishments looks… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 8:12 PM on May 27, 2023

One of the downsides of paying in cash is that you have to check if the cashier has given you the right change (mentally taxing, especially if you're tired or have a headache) while the cashier and the people behind you get grumpy that you're taking a few moments to count your change.


One of the downsides of people being pushed towards apps for cashless payments is when you’re in line behind someone who waited until their whole purchase… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 3:06 PM on May 28, 2023

how to continue functioning in an economy when the cashless electronic system goes down one way or another

One of my fond memories of the early push in Japan (fall 2020) for cashless payments was during an evening news broadcast. Break for commercial, two or three ads featuring cashless, back from the break, the weather forecaster talks about how the incoming typhoon has the potential to cause massive power outages, and to make sure to stock up on… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 12:46 AM on May 29, 2023

Distinct lack of airborne cattle.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 8:50 AM on May 27, 2023

but the "mutant metaphor" does at least operate as a power fantasy

This goes back to at least Superman being essentially a retelling of the Golem story, a supernatural being of unimaginable power that protects the oppressed from the oppressor, as written by two Jews, Siegel and Shuster.

Also, as far as the PS4 Spider-man game, yes, the whole aspect of Spider-man as a super cop was deeply unsettling. It's not that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:34 PM on May 24, 2023

star gentle uterus, the only disconnect with Moses is that Superman isn’t a prophet, and never purports to bring a message from on high, he is, until later interpretations, a doer, one who protects, saves, rights wrongs. He’s the one who acts, whose power is his own, whereas Moses was punished for laying claim to the powers he wielded on behalf of god.

For me, the best explanation of the golem view of Superman came in The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:23 AM on May 25, 2023

I’ll agree with you on All-Star Superman being an absolutely fantastic Superman story that captures the best of the character. Morrison’s run on JLA (complete with dumb blue laser Superman!) is similarly fantastic.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:06 PM on May 25, 2023

I started to read this, then realized just how few of the shows on the list I've managed to see. I did a lot of quick scrolling, but read enough to register at least one hill to die on: the original, sudden ending of Deadwood, being forced to wrap up mid-story line, with Swearengen on his knees scrubbing the bloodstain, and while I can't find the exact monologue, the last line: "wants me to tell him something pretty" works on nearly every possible level. In character, it's Al's… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:19 PM on May 24, 2023

The ending of the Shield is perfect, and the linked article in the list is pretty spot on. It’s kind of in opposition to the ending of Deadwood, in a way. In the end, all the terrible people in the Shield get, essentially, what’s coming to them, if not in a legal sense of justice, they are each left in their own hell, which is, to the viewer, something of a traditionally “good” ending: the bad guys don’t win, where in Deadwood, life continues until the beatings stop, as the other, perfect… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:58 PM on May 24, 2023

At first glance, I was puzzled by the opening of the post. Orcs have attacked and sunk... wait, Iberia? Europe?! Orcs?!

Oh. Ohh.

Ooooooh!
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:57 PM on May 19, 2023

The threeness of its structure—three outs, three bases, 32 innings and the same number of players on the field—as well as the way baseball dramatizes and celebrates the human impulse to depart from home and to return or at least to help others to do so, all of this speaks to something deep within the us.

After work, I'll be jumping on the train to meet Mrs. Ghidorah, to watch our beloved Chiba Lotte Marines. She's off today, and will be going early… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 9:08 PM on May 17, 2023

In the article kliuless posted, the writer makes some solid points, but really buries the lede: his kid managed to snag a ball at a game on a school night. That’s the kind of thing that can, potentially, spark a lifelong interest in the game. That’s something that doesn’t happen if the kid doesn’t go to the game because it’ll last for three and a half hours.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 12:42 AM on May 18, 2023

I’ll have you all know that the beloved and brave Chiba Lotte Marines beat the Orix Buffaloes (which are the rare non-Marines team I feel indifference towards) 5-1. Beers were had, and I may have decided what character various players would be in an office related drama based entirely on their pictures on the Jumbotron during their at bats.

“Ooh, he’d be the strict boss wanting to know why you’re taking a paid day next Friday, didn’t you remember there’s the big client… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:42 AM on May 18, 2023

In the barn, after a shared moment of thankful bliss, the two quietly busy themselves rearranging their clothes, wiping bits of straw off of each other. Running her hands through his hair, she breaks the silence and whispers, “whatever shall we call you now, Mr. Kent?”
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 1:38 PM on May 17, 2023

There's a better, pithier tweet that I've seen a couple times in the last several months that sums it up much better, but goddamn, those dystopian science fiction novels these techbros are harvesting their ideas from were supposed to be read as a warning, not as a list of fun ideas to bring to market.

I firmly want to believe in another world, where tech advances have been used to create a genuinely better life for people, and that people there are living happy, peaceful… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:00 PM on May 15, 2023

Yes, Carillon. The Torment Nexus, best purchase ever forced onto me in the Terms of Service I skipped over, and am now damned to suffer from for all eternity.

Void offer in Utah? No, Void OFFERING in Utah. Damn fine print.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 11:01 PM on May 15, 2023

I wonder how much of an impact this will actually have? I'm going to go on the old bias that older people are slower to adopt new technology (I still listen to music I own, rather than stream, for example), but that all the various satellite radio that have become the norm have been the norm for so long that, well, most older people still driving probably have come to terms with it, and have since moved on.

What a world this could have been, though, if AM had been done… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 8:08 PM on May 14, 2023

I had kind of always prided myself on my memory, and my ability to remember things. I could recount things that had happened decades ago in vivid detail. Dates, events, I thought they were all right there, including things that thivaia would’ve had on their list. It honestly wasn’t great, because I could remember all of the shitty things I’ve said and done in a lifetime of them. Those weren’t the things I rattled off whenever needed, those were evidence of the terrible person I am and have been,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:14 PM on May 14, 2023

I heard about this article, and even the discussion of it got to me on a deep, fundamental level. It's such a perfect example of how important representation is, and the effect it can have on the world. As amazing as Connie Chung is and was, it's hard to ignore that the reason for the Connie Boom is that she was, essentially, the only visible Asian woman visible on the national stage at such a high level. The closest I can ever come to understanding that is my excitement at having a Jewish… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:39 PM on May 12, 2023

About Defector, I signed up day one ( I missed deadspin dearly) and I haven’t regretted it for a second. I signed up for the lowest tier because I do my commenting here, and while I do follow sports, it’s not my main or only reason for reading them, and they owe pretty much their whole current (better) existence to a moment where the new owners of the old site told them “stick to sports” and they told the bosses to get fucked. Yes, they report on sports, but in a way that almost gets me to have… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:07 PM on May 4, 2023

I want to love this as deeply as I wanted to love the first film, but the trailer seems to say “tone down that omnipresent, dialogue drowning out, wannabe Passion soundtrack to Last Temptation, but, you know, with guitars, and bad soundtrack? Nah, full on bro!”

I wonder how much of the dialogue I’ll have to try to follow through the Japanese subtitles in this one? Still looking forward to it, but dreading the soundtrack already isn’t the best way to psych oneself up for… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 1:43 PM on May 3, 2023

I saw this thread in the morning, but life kept me busy til just now, on a crowded train home in Japan. Growing up in Michigan, born in the 70s, Gordon Lightfoot was more often than not the soundtrack to the few good times I can vaguely recall of life when my parents were still together, and after that, one of the rare constants between time spent on visitation weekends, or with my mom, a single mother, an artist, trying to keep a roof over our heads in the very early 80s, and something about… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 3:52 AM on May 3, 2023

It says a lot about the pinkertons that most people don’t seem to know they’re real, or still around. There were a few comments here, but elsewhere, half the comments seem to be people shocked they still exist, or shocked they weren’t just fictional bad guys in Red Dead Redemption (or, much rarer, “wait, weren’t they from Deadwood?”). One of their most recent lurches into the light was to try to sue Rockstar over their portrayal in RDR2, if I recall. They’ve done such an excellent job of memory… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 2:33 PM on April 26, 2023

Others have beaten me to posting the the Earth Song from the Muppet Show (and good on them), but damn, there's something about it, that song might well be one of my earliest, most persistent memories. For years after all childhood memories of seeing it had faded away, the melody would just randomly pass through the back of my mind. At times, in my head, the mantra of "We come from the fire, go back to the fire, turn the world around" would pop up in my head, put its feet up, and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:24 AM on April 26, 2023

It’s something I might use with some of my younger students as were moving into using current events and the students needing to find information and news online.

And I liked it, it was simplistic in parts, but did a good job of pointing out that retractions and later fact checking don’t carry as well as initial outragefilter does. The only thing I didn’t like was the closing “forget it, it’s just the internet” Chinatown reference. It kind of undermines the idea of the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:02 AM on April 24, 2023

My initial response to swimming tasks in Forbidden West was, huh, this is different. Then, ooh, pretty. Then, about five minutes in, annoyance at the controls, limitations, and the inability to even have the spear as possible defense. I pretty much gave all swimming stuff a wide berth until getting the super snorkel, which, while a huge relief at not having to manage the breath meter (tension inducing, and annoying), felt like kind of made the swimming more onerous? If you… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:34 PM on April 22, 2023