MetaFilter

At least from personal experience, meetups functioned well, and became friendships that involving texting to see if people are free for dinner or drinks. They've become a little more organic that way, and easier to wrangle. The downside is that, yeah, we don't often post on IRL anymore.

Obviously that's not the case for everyone, and I would definitely encourage (especially) newer members to attend a meetup if they are able.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 10:52 PM on February 25, 2024

Careful, I think I saw it post a question about how to get a fake ID. Not yet, young website (unless you live outside the US, then have at it)!
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:19 AM on December 10, 2023

I can't begin to figure out how many times the local FOX affiliate used to show Buckaroo Banzai when I was a kid growing up in southwest Michigan (Channel 17!), but it was a lot. I watched it every time it was on, and I was way, way too young to understand that the whole thing was a pastiche based on old serials, like Indiana Jones had been for old adventure serials, but for science fiction. I took the whole insane thing, including the fans with their decoder rings, at face… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 8:09 AM on August 13, 2023

My first real "I'm an adult, and this pet is my responsibility" pet was named by my partner at the time. My second, though, currently imitating a loaf of bread covered in black fur in the middle of the floor behind me? I named her Gazpacho.

Any future cat will be named Vichyssoise, unless somehow we end up with a Russian Blue, in which case they will be named Borscht.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:36 PM on August 13, 2023

and we lost Gotanda

God damn it. I’m not a mod. I don’t claim to know the shit you all have to deal with, but part of the whole thing has got to be impartiality, and we’ve seen over the last couple of years more than a few times where mods have let things get personal. I know it’s hard to deal with people who are yelling at you, and it can be easy to want respond in kind, but goddamn, the last couple years seemed to be this… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 6:12 AM on August 3, 2023

Damn. I just checked, and I missed the start of my fifteenth year here by a day. Glad to have this place around. It’s done me a world of good. To more and better for all.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:00 AM on July 16, 2023

/through bulging cheeks smeared with blue and yellow frosting:

Cake? What cake? It was gone when I got here!
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:54 AM on July 16, 2023

I know exactly what's inside: it's exactly whatever it is that your heart most desires, and once you get it from the safe, it will be everything you've ever wanted for about five minutes. You'll put it somewhere, and almost immediately forget you ever wanted it.

Best to keep it locked up.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 8:26 PM on July 9, 2023

My heart desires BLOOD

That seems totally norm...(hand to earpiece)

Oh... *other people's blood." Uh...
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 11:32 PM on July 9, 2023

Musical theater in general, with very, very few exceptions.I just don’t like the concept of it. I like, as best as possible, realist theater, where people don’t break into song to highlight plot points. The utter lack of narrative subtlety (ooh, a musical cue, something important must be about to happen!), and in a lot of plays, characters aren’t singing about themselves and their inner thoughts, they’re just telling the audience what the writer thinks about the scene, the character, and the… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:40 PM on June 10, 2023

THINGS I DO NOT UNDERSTAND:

Wait, wait, isn’t this where the wise sage figure makes this a lesson, and tells us the only reason we hate something is that we fail to understand it?

But also: USA! USA! chants. I hated them as a kid when otherwise lovable violent slob Hacksaw Jim Duggan suddenly took over as the super patriotic mid-card guy who spent all his time fighting incredibly racist caricatures of othered wrestlers.… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:40 AM on June 12, 2023

Big “if I could transfer to high school two towns over nobody would know me and I could be really cool” feels.

Not so much hate, but deep cringing revulsion for a relative of this: heroes that are so clearly idealized versions of the author, and villains that are obviously stand-ins for the kids that tormented them when they were younger?

I just showed (on a rainy day right before a typhoon) perennial AskMe favorite All… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:18 PM on June 12, 2023

This is my first Mother’s Day without mine, and I’m struggling with the prompt. I can’t remember a thing she said as I spent most of the last thirty years either doing my best to avoid talking to her, or gritting my teeth and asking my sister to pass her the phone when I called, because I knew it was the right thing to do. The last ten years or so, when she chose to totally isolate herself in my sister’s tiny condo (ruining the last 17 years of my sister’s life is on the list of things I’ll… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:28 PM on May 13, 2023

Nightswimming, by REM, has an almost anchoring pull back to an exact moment for me, something I thought would end up having more meaning than it did, and in the end, meant nothing, but I hold that moment of possibility inside, and the who the what, the when, those are things I keep for myself.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 9:13 AM on May 6, 2023

I’ve never slept better than in a bed on a train. When I lived in China, I took every chance I could to travel by sleeper car, and it was heaven. Just the gentle rocking back and forth of the train car passing over the tracks, being able to actually lay flat, it was heaven.

All other forms of transportation just leave me drained. Even if I somehow fall asleep on a plane, I just wake up feeling worse than when I finally fell asleep, exhausted, sweaty, and miserable. The… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 3:27 AM on March 20, 2023

I was a voracious reader and then I just sort of stopped. The internet, smart phones, Twitter, it just took the place of books. A couple members here got me back into reading a bit in or around 2020 (who even knows anymore). In the last couple of years, I read the Fifth Season (great), Station Eleven (fantastic), Consider Phlebas and Player of Games (interesting) before bouncing off of Look to Windward and not picking it up again. I read the first book of the Expanse series, and it’s been the… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:11 AM on March 12, 2023

supermedusa, I hadn’t heard that, thanks for the heads up. All I’d heard about it was people saying they liked it even more than Station Eleven, so I thought I should check it out. Thanks!
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:06 PM on March 12, 2023

I'd gladly see the site do away with chat generated comments altogether. I know that there are a good number of members who enjoy playing around with it to see what it can do, but for me, at least, the novelty has very much worn off. As mentioned above, there is the very samey-sounding chatbot house style, and most examples of user posted chatbot comments are very similar to what's here in this thread, which is to say pretty banal at best, an annoying waste of time at worst.… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 3:19 AM on March 3, 2023

The bestest, most tried and true thing I've found is that, when using any sort of disposable razor (the dumb kind with five to seven blades in the head that you swap out when they get dull), you can get months out of each one simply by sharpening it on your arm. Run it along the inside of your forearm the opposite direction you normally use it to shave. It's the same basic idea as sharpening a straight razor on leather. Just wet your arm (works great if you shave in the… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 8:31 PM on February 4, 2023

The “King” is implied. We just thought pointing it out would be passé. We will forgive the oversight, just this once.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 6:13 PM on January 2, 2023

I like to think that this was the year I poked and was poked to kind of emerge from a fog, and re-engage with things around me, though I am still fuzzy on details like "time" and "this year being separate from, say, September 21", but I managed to start reading again, start gaming a bit more, and make more of an effort with TV and movies.

I haven't been reading. I used to, as a kid, devour books. I think I went the last five years without really… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:39 PM on December 9, 2022

Shit. Forgot games. I fell in love with Hades for the first several months of the year. Got stuck in Horizon Forbidden West, avoiding main quests in favor of keeping things going, if being able to inhabit the world just a bit longer, then found myself jumping into the Plus second go round. Finding out the DLC is only coming out on PS5 sucked quite a bit, and I’m waiting to hear if Hades 2 is going to be on PS4 or not.

This week, faced with immense amounts of work I need… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 2:17 AM on December 10, 2022

I am utterly overwhelmed, and unsure how much longer I can really hold things together. The only thing I have going for me is that the school term finishes on the 13th, but before that’s done, I need to pull myself together and finish all of the marking that I’ve largely failed to do this term, and I need to do it all in the next five days.

Once that’s done, I need to focus on my side gig of making meat for people, which is, after a good five year run, seemingly dying… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 1:04 PM on December 7, 2022

Yesss, this thread is what I come for, so deliciously meta, but no click here to donate buttons every other comment!

OOOH! If we want to get really aggressive, have a pop up every time a user favorites something:

"Hi there! We love that you like this comment. Aren't you glad that we all have this place to gather together? Isn't pretty keen? Wanna donate a dollar to help keep the lights on? (STRIPE BUTTON HERE)… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:49 PM on November 23, 2022

I too might silently break.

/break dancing continues after the boombox has died
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:38 PM on November 21, 2022

I talked with jessamyn about applying my donation to cover aniola's post, and I'm excited to see what comes of it. It sounds like a pretty great post, and something I don't really know enough about. Let the language post celebrations commence.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:43 PM on October 29, 2022

I'm really enjoying these, but yeah, I think a visible tag would help not only explain the idea, but also get more people into these. As seen in the fundraising post, some folks chimed in about not having seen it until the banner went up across the site, as not everyone stops in to MeTa.

Would it be possible to have a similar tag to the STAFF tag in the title that says "SPONSORED BY DONATION" where the tag is a link to this thread? It's a bit clunky, but I… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:49 PM on October 29, 2022

I had another idea for trying to boost the visibility of these, and I wanted to check, is posting ideas here helpful? Should I be posting them in the overall fundraising thread? Memailing/emailing? What would be most helpful?

What I was thinking was putting sponsored posts in at the top of the sidebar. "(poster name) wrote a post on (topic) sponsored by (username)" Honestly, I don't know if making a change like that involves scheduling Frimble-time or not, but… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 6:15 PM on October 30, 2022

I'd like to second adamvasco's idea about a MetaVersary memail. I know there are some people out there who dislike notifications and mails and such, but this place is a bit different to me, and I'd be happy to receive a note on my join date. Maybe something along the lines of usage stats, and a link to a five dollar one time contribution button?

"Hey there (USERNAME), it's your MetaVersary! You joined up on this date in (YEAR), and your first engagement on the site… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 9:27 PM on October 25, 2022

tavegyl, thank you for that. I’m planning to make a donation, but the yen is collecting historical lows against the dollar like something that might someday have value (unlike the yen…) so I hesitate to set up a recurring payment in dollars that might end up costing me a lot more than I thought a month or two from now.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 12:24 AM on October 26, 2022

Secondary merch request: ringer t-shirts (with the neck band and ends of the sleeves a different color: MeFi blue collar and sleeve ends, white t shirt, metafilter logo, with a very small “professional background, classic” underneath the logo, for the two or three of us still using it.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:56 PM on October 6, 2022

The decablog

Or, you could Jeopardy the whole thing, and give contestants "Metafilter: snarky comment repurposed as site mission statement" comments from random threads. Then, they have to compete to be the first person to figure out the actual topic of the post the comment was made in.

Brutally difficult, but then, this is the 'Lympics we're talking about.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:42 AM on September 11, 2022

The speed/reflex test, where contestants must exercise total restrain while letting the judge finish the following question before buzzing in to be first:

There’s this story that I read, or maybe it was a movie that our teacher showed us in elementary school on one of those old film projectors, you know the ones that actually had reels of film, and sometimes the sound was like when Robin Williams did that thing in Good Morning Vietnam where he tapped on his… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 3:36 PM on September 11, 2022

I am not really in favor of any artificial or imposed limits on Metatalk threads. In the past, mods have closed them when they have devolved, and I think they have a good handle on that, and when it’s time to close the (for the most part). An artificial limit means comments left unanswered, or viewpoints left out of the record, such as it is. The point of meta, to me, is that voices get heard, that people are allowed to say their piece, and that it is a valuable tool to discuss the site, and… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 1:39 PM on August 20, 2022

Book - Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, maybe? That, or Schismatrix Plus

Book Series - Dune? At least the first four books. I have read the last two, and, well, I'm good.

TV series - Simpsons. I haven't really seen new episodes in the last ten to fifteen years, so I'd have some catching up to do.

Album - Tallahassee by Mountain Goats. In case the Simpsons makes me too cheerful

Game… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:43 AM on August 13, 2022

theatro, awesome, Horizon Zero Dawn was one of the games that made me happy I was playing games again. I think I was talking about this in the last thread, but I'm *still* playing Forbidden West. I've been dragging it out, like I've done with a bunch of games/TV shows/books recently where there seems to be something in me that doesn't want them to end, so I just don't finish them. Forbidden West makes you relearn some things, and they took away/nerfed/made harder some of the ways I loved to play… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 8:49 AM on August 10, 2022

In college, due to the excitement of a herniated disc and the way I hobbled around, my best friend took to calling me Torgo.

In Japan, silly love nicknames aren’t really a big thing, but I’ve got a long list of names I call Mrs. Ghidorah, and they change from time to time. Obviously honey bear is a standard, but why not bunny hair? Trying to explain “my little pumpkin” involved direct translation (Boku no chisai kabocha) which is long and silly, so it’s been shortened… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 6:31 PM on July 31, 2022

This has been a really odd weekend in ways I'm still trying to process. Obviously, in Japan, there was Friday, and the Abe murder, so that's been weirdly surreal and we're all just waiting for the consequences to find their way to us all.

This weekend, though, was the return of the Narita Gion festival after a two year corona induced hiatus. It's a touchstone for me because 22 years ago, I was down the road in the guest house of the language school I was going to start… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:12 PM on July 10, 2022

1. Yes, I have no problems with getting more help. We want less burnout, not more.

2. Good lord, I wish I could, but I shouldn't even be looking at the site right now. Too much to do, all at once. Best of luck, and thanks for the work you're doing.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:46 AM on June 28, 2022

I'm not sure if this fits, but the night before last (a Sunday night) I slept terribly. I woke up repeatedly. I have distinct memories of doing this. I also have distinct, vivid memories of getting up and going downstairs because I couldn't sleep, and lying down on the sofa and watching crap movies on cable until it was time to get up and go to work.

I only realized, in the shower, that many, if not most of those things that I distinctly remember were things I had… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 11:49 PM on June 13, 2022

I'll add you later (I'm Ghidorah5000), but Go Fest finished up yesterday for us. I hope they managed to fix the "mon appears on screen, you go to tap it, it disappears" bug. Half of the Axew that popped up this weekend for me did that.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 8:45 PM on June 5, 2022

I played a bit of the free version of Vampire Survivors, and I loved it up until I'd built up the character enough that I couldn't really die unless my attention lapsed, and, well, it did. It sounds like I should try the paid version, though.

I took a long time off of games, going from not having enough time while trying to get a business going, to trying to remember what a day off meant after that ended. One day, sometime in 2016, I fired up my PS3 and went back to… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 8:09 PM on June 1, 2022

Echoing lazaruslong, with the weight of how rapidly how many things have gone to shit in the last week or weeks, I haven’t had much of the energy I’ve increasingly needed to engage here, and randomly seeing a hint of this on Twitter (and yes, spending time there is part of what’s weighing me down so badly), I came in to check.

Seeing this news has lifted off of me a weight I didn’t know I was carrying. I know that cortex took over because he loved this place and… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 8:23 AM on May 26, 2022

[2] Surely forthcoming (he's 99 in two weeks time): the most negative obituary thread in the history of MetaFilter obituary threads.

Not to contribute too much to this derail, but I can’t stress how mistaken this assumption is. It will almost certainly be one the most positive obit threads this site has ever seen. I can’t think of a figure whose death would silence the hall monitor impulse to type out and post inane pleas for… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:54 PM on May 14, 2022

but stop trying to make it sound you haven’t spent the last three decades hosting fancy champagne jacuzzi parties for pets.

If that’s what he’ll do for pets, imagine what he does for tummy rubs or head scritches!

Oh, wait.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 7:40 PM on May 14, 2022

I'm aiming for a good mix of trustworthy and immediately available folks

(Jokingly) So… you’re saying there is a cabal?

Less jokingly, I guess I’m glad that it’s up and running. Showing a sense of urgency is good. I can’t help but feel, though, that the lack of transparency on who, how, and why of selection and role is… less good, and kind of a part of the ongoing back and forth between mods/owner and… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 3:53 PM on April 14, 2022

The Metafilter Committee Advisory Board (that meets at) At Lunchtime.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:43 PM on April 14, 2022

try GURPS

Steve Jackson’s Steering Committee Conflicts was a wildly unsuccessful follow up to Car Wars.
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 1:59 PM on April 15, 2022

loup: Reminder: I will be the only mod actively monitoring this thread so please be patient as I reply to your feedback and questions.

cortex: I want to make a note here that loup works M-F and so likely won't be back in here for a couple days more yet

The last thread, after it went mute for a week, needed a similar note, and I asked then, and am asking now, that in the regular updates about transparency and clarity, that… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 4:49 PM on March 19, 2022

loup, thank you for your comment, and frankly, for the speed of your response to being asked about the timeline. I hope you can understand, at this point, that “Trust me, we're working to make things happen as promptly as we can.” is a pretty hard ask at the moment. This thread is very specifically talking about how the ability of a large number of users to trust the moderation of the site has deeply eroded.

If nothing else, given the amount of time… [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ghidorah at 5:09 PM on March 23, 2022