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I think I was both lucky enough to work for a different chain than Ferreous, and also in a slightly different era than the article focuses on. My last job as a high school student/first job as a university student was at a Coopersmith's, itself an outright oddity. Known nationwide as Brentanno's, due to local trademark issues, the upscale-ish side of Waldenbooks had to go by a different name in the Chicago area. It was, from, say, fall of 1994 to sometime in 1996, the best job I've ever had, and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 9:41 AM on March 30, 2022

I’ve been following Hough since, I think, her essay on working for the cable company. She’s prickly as fuck, and is quick to fight. Is Twitter a great place for that? Most definitely not. She’s still a great follow, though she’s definitely not blameless in most of the fights she finds herself in.

However, I think it’s important to be clear about the goodreads fiasco. She, as far as I remember, jokingly called out people giving her book four stars on Goodreads, and as… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:02 PM on March 22, 2022

Perhaps merely that it's commensurate with your experiences with her, but it seems pretty difficult to credit on its face.

Yes, very much it is only in my experiences with her on Twitter over the last couple of years. She reacts like this a lot. It’s not rare, and it honestly does seem to be indicative of how she approaches things. She’s fiercely protective of friends, and incredibly dismissive of people she doesn’t actually… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:42 PM on March 22, 2022

Highlander II: We Said There Was Only One, And That They Had The Power to Essentially Create World Peace, but Hah, Jokes! There’s Tons of Em!
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:35 PM on March 15, 2022

You know, in all of the last... howeverlongagoitwas... the sea shanty thing was just about the last bit of random web culture I think I really enjoyed. If we're bringing back stuck boats, we could do worse than revisiting shanties on TikTok.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:14 AM on March 15, 2022

So sick of hearing the words "supply chain" and wondering if I have enough of, well, everything...

Don’t worry, soon we’ll all be nostalgic for this time of random temporary shortages. You know, when we’re all wondering if we’ll ever have enough of anything.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 3:08 PM on March 15, 2022

Dammit. I had been following his recovery, and his work with Diamond Dallas Page in terms of getting clean, and then trying to fix the damage wrestling had done to his body. Kevin Nash wrote a pretty heartbreaking note about how he's spent more time with Hall than anyone else in his life, and now needs to figure out how to move forward without him there.

Wrestlers dying has become something that just always keeps happening, but Hall's passing hits hard in a different way.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:17 PM on March 14, 2022

63 is old for a wrestler, but far too young.

It’s also mind boggling how Sting, only one year younger than Hall, is not only clean and sober, but possibly in the best shape of his life, and not only still wrestling, but is jumping off of stadium exits and diving through tables. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, but I guess all we can do is hold them close to our heart as long as we’re lucky enough to have them.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:47 PM on March 14, 2022

They would be trying to screw a poor white community every bit as badly.

Not to pile on, but this is pretty much demonstrably not true. Not Tennessee, but in Michigan, the state enacted a law allowing the state to declare a city or township to be "failing." That would allow the state to appoint a manager to the city, subject to no democratic processes, and with the power to run the city's budget. This process is essentially how the Flint… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:32 PM on March 14, 2022

I found her performance in Station Eleven... weird. Her choices, her mannerisms, her accent, etc., were just too strange for me to make sense of.

I hadn’t seen much of what she’s been in since, well, the nineties, but I’ve been watching Station Eleven (it is fantastic, everyone should watch it, seriously, what are you doing reading this it’s amazing), and when she first showed up on screen, it took me a minute to realize it was her, and it was HER.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 3:47 PM on March 13, 2022

I might have seen movies he’d “starred” in when I was too young to really grasp who he was, but Until the End of the World was probably the first movie I saw where I could recognize him and think, huh, this guy, he’s… different. There’s always in my mind been something very stiff, very mannered, very pained about his presence in films. The description in the main link of his role in Lost in Space, that he seemed miserable the whole time is weirdly apt of a lot of roles I’ve… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 3:25 PM on March 13, 2022

I tell all of my tenth graders, who I’ve been teaching for several years, that on their final lesson of the year, I want them to tell a joke. I want it to be practiced and natural, because I believe everyone should know at least one joke they can tell if someone says, hey, know any good jokes? Like most tenth graders, they kind of forgot about it, so I told them a week before the last class, hey, jokes, right? And honestly, they did all right. And yes, I believe everyone should know at least one… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 1:00 PM on March 10, 2022

One of the perils of being in a two language household is that, well, neither of us is up to reading in the other’s language. Past that, we’ve got some very different ideas of what genres we like.

On the other hand, we’ve both read and loved Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, me in English, Mrs. Ghidorah in Japanese. I texted her as soon as I’d heard the news, and she was as excited as I was.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:40 AM on March 9, 2022

i read the transcript and unless i missed something i didn't see anything about that in the linked content. this appears to be MartinWisse's unsupported assertion.

If you had just approached the concept of anime and translation, having never experienced any other facet of Japanese culture, stereotypes of it, and overseas fandoms and their very, very different reasons for being fans, sure, I could see how you’re confused, and encourage you to run… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:02 PM on March 7, 2022

Hot damn. As someone stuck between English and (conversational) Japanese, teaching junior high students who have lived overseas, but are passable at best in both English and a Japanese, I have a strong desire to show them this story. Thanks for posting it.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 1:22 AM on March 7, 2022

All these sites are part of what I think of as core left-wing media, but they’ve recently been purchased by forces of the right.

It was pretty clear when they shut down Splinter with no explanation shortly after purchasing GMG that this is the new tactic. It's much more subtle than a big showy trial bankrolled by a billionaire. That got too much attention, too many people talking about how it was a bad sign for freedom of the press. Instead, buy out… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:25 PM on March 1, 2022

If nothing else is a clear neon sign for just how much Spanfeller and the rest have completely missed the point for the media group they bought, their kneejerk disabling of comments hammers that home. For a years the commentary on posts was just as good/enjoyable as the articles themselves. A good number of commenters on Deadspin ended up with writing jobs because of the comments section.

Even if the writing and editorial staff that had been built… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:07 PM on March 4, 2022

Holy shit, they won?! Four days of picketing, and it looks like they got basically everything they were striking for. Good fucking job, GMG. It’s nice to see some good news for a change.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 2:48 PM on March 6, 2022

there are plenty of other people to fill public roles who have NOT made problematic choices

This is the thing that I keep coming back to. We’re not talking about a skill so rarified that we need to accept how terrible a person is (and honestly, I’m not really sure there *are* any of those), this is politics, specifically American politics which has turned into an intensely hypocritical contest to see which candidate can smash the clay feet of the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:17 PM on March 3, 2022

It seems pretty clear this is mostly about the tape library, but with AEW having signed so, so many people (and likely to sign more), I wouldn’t mind seeing them bring back RoH as an NXT-like minor league/training program. Get it out there, touring, have some of the names they’ve signed but not found space for, build it into a space for highlighting up and coming wrestlers.

Basically I want NXT back, and that’s never going to happen because it’s been murdered out of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 2:26 PM on March 3, 2022

RoH could never consistently draw more than 1000 people (for non-PPV shows) even at peak.

Damn. Looking at the outsized effect RoH had on wrestling overall, and the careers that came out of it, that’s honestly shocking.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:08 PM on March 3, 2022

I wasn't sure what the post was about, and when I clicked the link, somehow I hadn't realized what I'd be seeing, and goddamn, but stomach just sank. A completely physical reaction, a sort of feeling of absolute dread. Leaden paralysis, just wanting to sink into the floor.

Today is the last day of the school year here. I'm watching over a class of students I've been teaching since 2019, and it'll be my last class with them (I teach 7th-10th grade), and... damn. I'm… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 9:40 PM on March 2, 2022

“There is no definitive Gotham,” says Barbara Ling, the production designer on Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.

Daring choice with that pull quote. Inside me, it inspired a war between running screaming from anything that tried to find a positive in anything to do with those movies, and reading it out of spite. I mean, I get the idea that they were supposed to be fun and camp, but they always struck me as a soulless attempt at printing money… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 9:57 PM on March 1, 2022

If you like a little more hands on-ishness (though I imagine a lot of folks here already know of it), Townscaper is a pretty amazing little town building game. It's on Steam, iOS, and Google Play, and it's a pretty solid experience. Every town I've built ends up being a setting for a long term city-based campaign in my head, with districts run by different guilds, etc.

The only thing I would sort of like is an option for different skins, but it's still a solid base. One… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 3:25 PM on March 1, 2022

I think once you run food through a grinder and pour it into a mold, you've officially left the earthly plan and entered the otherworldly sphere of industrial food design...

I mean, sure, it's easy to off-handedly shit on thousands of years of food preservation techniques, like, say, sausage, potted and preserved meats, terrines, and pates. Then again, I find myself a little suspicious of people who live "deep in the woods" but subsist off… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 3:44 PM on February 25, 2022

??

Sorry, I was just thinking of the "process" of getting them from the field to the bulk container. Pasta, yes, super processed, but I'm not, in any way, against carbs (delicious carbs). I was just put off by a comment that, to my mind, maybe the writer didn't give necessarily a lot of thought into just how much of the baby they were throwing out with the bathwater.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:34 PM on February 25, 2022

Zucchini. The mention made me gag a little.

I deeply despise these terrible things. Spiteful cucumbers. Yet, recently, Mrs. Ghidorah found the kind of gadget that makes, essentially, spaghetti out of things. She cooked the strands like regular vegetables, mixed in some Chinese fermented chili sauce, and they were not only edible, but for the first time in my life, I honestly enjoyed eating zucchini. I guess the trick is to render them utterly… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:53 PM on February 25, 2022

I've pretty much removed the NY Times from my media diet, as they've not only embraced conservative views, they frequently give the NYPD free reign over reporting. I've been following Alec Karakatsanis, who highlights the heavy pro-cop bias in the paper's reporting, focusing on who, exactly, paper uses as sources (nearly all either cops, police union leaders, or other pro-cop sources). Yet the paper is still held up (by conservatives) as some sort of paragon of liberal… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:24 PM on February 23, 2022

I never dug very far into his work, but I truly believe Nearly Lost You was the song that most clearly captures the grunge sound, and the sound of an era, a moment that was a formative thing for me.

Years back, I was playing at trying to learn the bass, and like most things I’ve done, it was sort of half assed, with no where the dedication it needed. I did a lot of “why can’t I do that” until a friend pointed out that the person doing “that” had been working… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 1:49 PM on February 23, 2022

all three have very unequal educational outcomes

I have to ask, honestly, how much those unequal outcomes in France, the UK, and the Netherlands have to do with race and class? Coming from an American background, with property tax funded schools and the massive, untenable disparity that creates (combined with all sorts of traditional feeder ideas like education being a path to success, but ignoring that success in education has a lot to do with how… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:32 AM on February 23, 2022

Reading through Putin’s speech, a lot of it was spent detailing why the Ukraine is not, and has never been a real country, and that everything the modern nation claims to be is only how Russia has allowed it to be. He denies the legitimacy of the government, or even the concept of non-Russian Ukrainians as a people.

And then, at the end, he announces that Russia is recognizing two brand new countries pulled out of chunks of Ukraine that he’s… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:44 PM on February 22, 2022

Style note: please leave out the definite article in front of Ukraine. To include it indicates that it is a colony

I hadn't ever thought of it like that. I'd always kind of liked the old-timey way of referring to things like that, but, on seeing this, and doing some thinking, I can see that quite a lot of the "the" places are called that way out of colonialism. Noted, and thanks for the gentle advice, I will be more careful in the future.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 6:21 PM on February 22, 2022

I remember hearing something about how China was unhappy with the incursion into Ukraine and recognizing breakaways as nations because, well, Taiwan, but I don’t know if that’s a real position or not.

What I am very nervous about is Russia jumping into Ukraine, pulling the US in, and China, with the US distracted, invading Taiwan. There’s been a lot of saber rattling, a lot of shows of force, and, living in the region, I’m terrified of what would follow. Do we end up… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:05 AM on February 23, 2022

I am a two thumb typist on my phone, but I’ve gotten a Bluetooth (seriously, why didn’t they go with BluTuth?) keyboard for my iPad, and, because I made the mistake of getting a Dell laptop, another Bluetooth keyboard (full size, with number pad) for use with the laptop.

Seriously, it’s a 17inch laptop, and I should have just gotten a desktop, but I’m always convinced I’ll be moving, even though we’ve lived in this house for 13 years, but this laptop’s keyboard is… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 1:47 PM on February 21, 2022

As much as I feel a sense of glee at the destruction of such ridiculous symbols of wealth and excess, I'm stuck wondering just how much of whatever toxic shit that boat contains is going to end up in the ocean, which, of course, is just a drop in the giant bucket of shit we've already dumped there.

Also, I am no fun at (salvage) parties.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:37 AM on February 19, 2022

Kayln Kahler at Defector wrote about this as well: Nobody Won Women's Figure Skating. It's worth reading, as Kahler is pointing out what the cameras caught people saying, and how the translations offered weren't even close to what was being said. There was a lot of rage, and you had the gold and silver medalists both basically saying they never want to skate again.

At some point, we need to realize that sports like this (and gymnastics) are not all… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:42 PM on February 18, 2022

I'm incredibly proud of myself for having seen this thread after I had already decided to go to bed, and managing to only play three times before closing the window and actually going to bed.

It's okay though, I've already told coworkers about it, so I am doing my part to spread this infection. And I will be playing when I get home after work.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 3:24 PM on February 18, 2022

Not specifically a World's Fair, but the Great Columbian Exposition in Chicago featured a lot of construction. The book Devil in the White City (half about the Exposition and the birth of capital A architecture in the city, half about a serial killer, all amazing) goes into fantastic detail about all of the buildings and things that were built for it. Nearly all of the buildings are gone, except for one, which is the modern day Science and Industry Museum. Visiting the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 9:50 PM on February 14, 2022

Going way, way back to the idea of pennies being thrown away or melted down at the beginning of the thread, I was honestly a touch unsettled.

Unused/unneeded pennies get thrown in the wishing well. They are wishes. You don't just throw wishes in the garbage or burn them to see if they're copper.

Madness, I say. If you end up having a sock full of pennies (because that's the best storage receptacle), just take them out in the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:55 PM on February 14, 2022

Whoever that is over there isn't me and if I meet them I'm probably going to kick their ass.

Meanwhile, in the thread you can only get to if you’re on the other set of stairs, other-loquacious is thinking about the possibility of the existence of not-other-loquacious, and their activities in this thread, the thread they feel exists, but cannot be certain of, and thinks:

Whoever that is over there isn't me and if I meet them I'm probably going to give them such a hug.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 1:47 PM on February 13, 2022

how this is all going to turn out

I imagine it'll turn out the same way it always turns out when it comes to people trying to rely on Google, or any tech giant, for any sort of income/traffic stream. At some point, Google will alter their algorithm to fine tune it in some arcane way that allows them to generate a fraction of a fraction of a penny more, which, since they're as big as they are, will generate billions of revenue. They won't announce the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 1:25 AM on February 12, 2022

The Old Spice commercial is something like the perfection of the form. It manages to be all funny and weird, but never loses sight of the product it’s selling. It’s fantastically produced, written, and performed, and endlessly rewatchable. It should be studied and revered.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 8:10 PM on February 10, 2022

Also, mentioned in the Forbes article, but I didn't see it in the post, was Chipotle's Back to the Start ad, with Willie Nelson covering Coldplay's The Scientist, where the chain tried to stress it's move towards localized, small farm sourced produce (for whatever it's worth, starts must be had somewhere).

Even as well done as the Nelson backed commercial, The Scarecrow with Fiona Apple covering A World of Pure Imagination is even better, with a breathtaking piece of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 8:35 PM on February 10, 2022

As far as I've been able to tell, a lot of Just In Time practices revolving around stock and supply chain is based to an extent on things like The Toyota Way of outsourcing parts manufacture to small and mid-sized companies, and we're living through a moment in history where someone decided that a situation that appeared in a single location with very specific environmental conditions (post war scarcity, low capital base, lack of suitable parcels of land for large scale manufacturing plants)… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 7:51 PM on February 4, 2022

the Boring Apocalypse.

That’s the thing, and same with Gibson’s idea of the Jackpot, it’s been ongoing, and we’ve become inured to each new collapse and degradation that we can’t even see how far things have declined.

Just as an example, over at Defector, Albert Burneko’s response to the Rudy Giuliani fiasco on the Masked Singer, I Don’t Like This At All just tries to lay out how far back you’d have to go to explain what’s… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 11:38 PM on February 5, 2022

kmt, I'm sorry, I don't really have a link to share, this is just based on decades of various newspaper and magazine articles. It's one of those things that I've sort of noticed and that, whenever it pops up, it sort of pings my internal radar, if that makes any sense.

Part of it has to do with living in Japan and noticing that zoning is quite different here, and that (at least in older neighborhoods) it's not uncommon to have a small factory or lumberyard right in… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 5:42 PM on February 6, 2022

When I hear someone saying “things are too political” it’s nearly always coming from someone for whom the society they live in is set up for their benefit, and for whom things, in general, work.

But past that, it’s nearly always coming from someone with a stunning inability to give a shit about people they don’t resemble, for people the system is not set up to serve. People (charitably) who have limited experience with people of other races, religion, or sexuality, or… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:23 PM on February 3, 2022

The thing about all of the (much) better names people are floating about: in addition to being a moral cesspool of a human being, Dan Snyder is also just bad at business. Rather than anticipating and preparing for a possible name change, Snyder stuck to his guns, refusing to make any moves towards a change. So who does this pustule lose out to? A fucking trademark troll.

McCaulay said he's applied for so many trademarks in six years that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 9:41 PM on February 2, 2022

change the Kansas City Chiefs to the Chefs

For some of us, that’s what we’ve been calling them since the 90s.

Also, I will brook no Gritty blaspheme. I’ve loved him since I first laid eyes on him. He is us, we are him.
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 2:30 AM on February 3, 2022

The Bears just played along with this sham, too. They had Jim Caldwell in for interviews, and it was reported that he’d presented the team with an offensive scheme entirely built around Justin Fields, the Bears presumptive quarterback of the future. Especially after two rounds of playoff games literally decided by who had the ball last, and by the arms of each team’s quarterback, the general shift in the league is that the offense is the foremost concern.

Instead, the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 9:52 PM on February 2, 2022