MetaFilter

Thank you for bringing these to our attention and making my spouse laugh really hard several times this morning.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:28 AM on May 14, 2024

Wow, cool! Thanks for sharing this!

More behind-the-scenes info in this interview with the author.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 12:00 PM on May 9, 2024

Wow! That's neat!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 2:58 AM on May 6, 2024

I appreciate this post and explanation as context for jests I was noticing on social media - thanks!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:10 AM on May 5, 2024

Some MeFites may not know that we have a kind of similar thing: the MeFi Mall where (for free) MetaFilter members can link to things we make and sell online. Just text and links (no graphics). We have often promoted it toward the end of the calendar year, when many users are shopping for gifts, but it's available year-round. More in MetaTalk.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 6:35 AM on May 3, 2024

By the way, logged-in Cohost users can also read ads within Artist Alley that are marked for people 18 years old or older (such as things involving nudity), and can filter whether we want to read them or not. (Cohost community guidelines, ad guidelines.) I think non-registered users can't access those ads.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 6:34 AM on May 4, 2024

Shout out to the Otherwise (formerly Tiptree) Award, mentioned in a few of those lists. Disclaimer: I'm on the board. Our mission: to celebrate science fiction, fantasy, and other forms of speculative narrative that expand and explore our understanding of gender. Our current pause and interim plans.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 1:34 PM on April 30, 2024

This was fun! Thanks for posting it.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:42 AM on April 28, 2024

Yay!

Also, I should have mentioned: audio version available.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 10:14 AM on April 26, 2024

jamjam: Clarkesworld is named after editor Neil Clarke, not Arthur C. Clarke.

If you can find Fiona Jones to ask her more about her inspirations for the story, I do hope you will do so and report back here! I have been having trouble finding contact information for her (especially as there is at least one other writer with that name) and hope she sets up a website soon. Maybe I'll ping the Clarion Foundation workshop folks, if only to get word to her that people here are enjoying the story.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 10:35 AM on April 26, 2024

genpfault, thanks, I'll ask the mods to fix those!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:00 AM on April 25, 2024

I am regretting, right now, having used a "why don't they just" joke in any way, shape, or form in the beginning of this post. I hereby request that people consider reading and commenting on any of the links that I posted -- or lambasting me in the form of a checklist.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:03 AM on April 25, 2024

amtho, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Gold star.

I find the rhetorical form of this checklist template intriguing.

The format itself conveys: Your idea is not only bad, it is bad in a way that is a cliché. You are likely unaware of important considerations, and it behooves you to develop some humility and some appreciation of past efforts if you want to succeed in this field.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:19 AM on April 25, 2024

Oh and the "approach to fighting spam" template I link to was written by MeFite lapsed.catholic in 2003 in a Slashdot comment thread. In that Ask thread, lapsed.catholic notes that one source of inspiration was a form letter disproving various proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:32 AM on April 25, 2024

Some favorite glimpses from the checklists I linked to (and I would love links to others):

Here is why it won't work:
( ) It assumes that using the government to force abrogation of private contracts that were freely entered into by the participants won't have any negative side effects
( ) Many network users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Lots of things are polymers, but not everything is a polymer.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 10:09 AM on April 25, 2024

My friend Zack wrote one a few years back:

Your post advocates a

□ software □ hardware □ cognitive □ two-factor □ other ___________

universal replacement for passwords.....

posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:31 PM on April 25, 2024

Seeing the calendar reform one reminds me that there is a sort of transformation one can apply to turn a "falsehoods [kinds of people] believe about [topic]" list into a rejection checklist, and vice versa.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:34 PM on April 25, 2024

grouse, thank you for that! The specific wording, for those seeking it in that boilerplate Publisher Agreement:

the Archived Content is determined in good faith by the Board to be unavailable from any publisher for at least six consecutive months

Alicia Wise, Executive Director of the CLOCKSS Archive, told Chemistry World that:

the Japan Institute of Heterocyclic Chemistry is weighing up future… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 2:21 PM on April 16, 2024

Fediverse conversation includes:

"This 2019 document claimed that all triggered content thus far has been through publisher request. Which would explain why so many other cases were faster. http://documents.clockss.org/index.php/CLOCKSS:_Extracting_Triggered_Content" - Michael Hoffman

"It would be a lot of fun to create a chart demonstrating out of the 17,000+ vanished articles at Heterocycles, which ones were funded by e.g. NSF,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:11 AM on April 17, 2024

I am an Indian-American woman and this article MADE ABSOLUTE COMPLETE SENSE TO ME and I empathized extremely thoroughly with it. As a person in my twenties I did know how to turn on a stove, boil water, make a few basic stovetop and oven and rice-cooker dishes, etc. But I one thousand percent empathize with how the author finds freedom, autonomy, in convenience food such as the device-boiled egg.

Right now I'm not going to get into the particulars of how my childhood… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 6:30 PM on April 15, 2024

Previously on the blue (March 30th). Quite a lot of discussion and useful links in that thread.

they did it by messing with autoconf and... nobody understands autoconf.

My friend Zack Weinberg and I did some work on autoconf a few years ago, leading to him writing up this analysis in January 2021 concerning (among other things) concerns that the GNU autotools probably needed to address. Zack recently wrote a Fediverse thread… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 1:18 PM on April 15, 2024

A lot of conversation about this in the Fediverse.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:02 AM on April 1, 2024

Luis Villa and I are friends so it's not surprising that I pretty much agree with what he wrote about the xz incident in his capacity as co-founder of Tidelift. (Disclaimer: I sometimes do a little consulting for Tidelift.)
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:46 AM on April 3, 2024

New thread on this topic.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 1:11 PM on April 15, 2024

[Please note that neither of these people is giving readers advice of the form "you should do this" -- they are each saying what they do.

Azz notes in their profile page: "You are the expert of your own situation. Advice given by others may be actively counterproductive, because they don't know your situation the way that you do. When you give advice, it's almost always appropriate to add qualifiers that make it… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:57 AM on April 11, 2024

Azz wrote a comment responding to many bits of the discussion here. Includes sleep maintenance tactics.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:52 AM on April 12, 2024

There is a subreddit for Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder and they have a Discord as well, by the way.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:50 AM on April 12, 2024

I appreciated the link to the February 2023 thread by Mekka Okereke. Through it I found a link to "excerpts from the tapes and transcripts delivered to the Court by Laura Hart McKinny" with quotes by Fuhrman spanning 1985-1994 which I had not previously read. (Okereke says, "Please don't try to talk to any Black people, (especially me!), about the OJ trial, if you have not read this transcript in its entirety.") Repulsive stuff. Content note for lots of uses of the n-word;… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:38 AM on April 11, 2024

You both might be interested in this recent post about quizzes to help check wilderness medicine knowledge and keep fresh!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:25 PM on March 28, 2024

Friedman is a NOLS Wilderness First Aid instructor and frequently refers to the NOLS wilderness medicine textbooks (and to Medicine for Mountaineering) in his videos.

Here's Friedman's video on the difference between NOLS's Wilderness First Aid and Wilderness First Responder courses -- WFA is 2 days, WFR is 10 days, and then there's Wilderness EMT which is a month-long course (more details). NOLS-affiliated instructors teach frequently in lots of US… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:18 AM on March 29, 2024

And, an octopus IRL, your reasoning is also a reason I recently got more into this topic. (Well, that and my increased outdoor activity, and my mother's decline and death and probably some kind of sublimated wish to help others where I could not, in the end, help her.)

I want to be able to provide first aid in a few different settings: the wilderness, my own home (or a friend's home or an office or a party), and the street/subway here in New York City. Some of the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:31 AM on March 29, 2024

Rewatched the Bois video, thanks.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:40 PM on March 27, 2024

flabdablet and Dysk, you have given me an experience I hadn't realized I was missing: the experience of being a bystander during the thread in question.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:23 AM on March 28, 2024

AP News also has a livefeed.

Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefeld said all vessel traffic into and out of the port would be suspended until further notice, though the facility was still open to trucks.

I found this image, purporting to be from FEMA's National Watch Center, saying that long-term operations interruptions for Baltimore Harbor are expected.

Can't find it now, but a previous AP News article said… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:18 AM on March 26, 2024

Found a PDF source that is likely that FEMA briefing (evidently it's just nearly impossible to find the daily ops briefing on FEMA's site so this independent aggregator finds, reposts, and archives them):


Impacts: (USCG, R3 SPOTREP as of 6:45 a.m. ET, Mar 26)
All lanes of I-695 in the vicinity closed until further notice
Alternate harbor crossings: Fort McHenry (I-95) and Baltimore Harbor (I-895) tunnels
Vehicles… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:32 AM on March 26, 2024

Christopher Mims, author of Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy, posted in the Fediverse:

As a person who has actually ridden with harbor pilots before and wrote a whole book about shipping goods across oceans here’s a tiny bit of possibly clarifying detail about this horrible bridge tragedy:

If as reported there was a power failure on this container ship that… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:41 AM on March 26, 2024

(Oh, whoops, the oranges and lemons piece on MetaFilter previously.)

mhoye, believe you me, that One-Minute MBA piece is in the draft of one of these Daviesbrations:

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.....
Fibbers' forecasts are worthless.....
The Vital Importance of Audit....

and I'm reading that Brompton book too!… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 1:43 PM on March 12, 2024

This bit of conversation is taking me back about 20 years!

"Sadly, No" and its Shorter category

Davies, 2003, possibly starting/naming the "shorter" style of criticism (satirical summaries):

...people don't necessarily want a Smarter Stephen den Beste. Part of the joy is watching a man who knows nothing about anything except the innards of mobile phones trying to understand a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:18 PM on March 12, 2024

I've now made 2 more posts in this series, using the tag "DanielDavies".
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:18 AM on March 25, 2024

[Within the last year, we had a 600+ comment MetaTalk thread about how we talk about billionaires on the site, especially when they are the victims of tragedy. I hope we do not recapitulate it here; I do recommend it to your attention if you are in conflict with other MeFites on the topic of pressure to perform sympathy or to express/not express anger at the royal family in this particular thread.]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:38 PM on March 22, 2024

Glad people are liking this series!

chavenet -- indeed, btw, in another post Davies does call Pound a fascist.

AsYouKnow Bob: yeah, he came to my attention about 20 years ago, too! In the last 10 years I think he's been concentrating more on his book projects, and I've read some of those books and they are worth reading. He has a new book coming out next month on the industrialization of decision-making.

Just in case this… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:54 PM on March 13, 2024

AsYouKnow Bob: Glad to help, and I totally understand why you might have mixed them up!

Somewhat connected to Davies's "Verjus Manifesto", from 2006, on post titles that attract or repel readers, and how off-putting titles can be a virtue:

what would be the most off-putting title in the world? So far, my suggestions are “Insurance Accounting in the Communist Countries”, “Comitology in the EU” and “The Role of Telecommunications… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:49 AM on March 14, 2024

Rhaomi, you have done a superlative act of service in putting together and publishing this post. Big thanks.

People who love feed-reading and are seeking good feeds to add to their feedreaders might enjoy this list of fiction magazines' feeds I put together, and this directory of personal blogs.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:37 AM on March 10, 2024

And: McIntosh is MeFi's Own.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:59 AM on February 29, 2024

[Side note.

Usually, when I post to the front page, my posts get significantly more favorites than they do comments. In the past ~14 months, my posts that have gotten more comments than faves have been about:

* bacon
* changing a flat tire
* biking and stop signs
* web browser market share over time
* endless dishonest "please rate us" customer surveys
* a word puzzle… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 12:51 PM on February 29, 2024

apartment dweller wrote:

I recommend the SuTab pill prep, if your doctor approves. My prescription plan D (Medicare) doesn't cover it, but you can go to the manufacturer's web page and get a coupon that brings the cost down to $50 (you have to affirm that this is being obtained outside your plan D).

I believe this is https://www.sutab.com/Savings.

If you don't have Medicare Part D, the form asks for… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:15 AM on March 2, 2024

mittens please go ahead and post it!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:01 AM on March 2, 2024

The instructor responded “no, they’re out of the way when on their back like this” and demonstrated as best they could

Excellent!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:43 AM on March 1, 2024

Very cool!

On Instagram, his mission statement - I am on mobile right now but perhaps someone here could transcribe it from the image.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:02 AM on March 1, 2024

I've been listening to Keep It Together and Look Alive and Easy Wonderful and Lost And Gone Forever quite a bit recently so this is such welcome news! Thanks for the links!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:54 AM on February 29, 2024