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RENT RENT RENT RE-ENT RENT
WE'RE NOT GONNA PAY RENT
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:31 PM on November 13, 2012

Not sure how relevant this is but I recently found out that Nickleback's first album was released on September 11, 2001. Maybe Jerry Falwell was right, 9/11 was a punishment from god, just not for the reasons Jerry mentioned.
posted by MattMangels

But so was Mink Car by They Might Be Giants - shouldn't that cancel it out?

It's so weird, when you're watching Gigantic: A Tale of Two… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:36 PM on November 13, 2012

I know I'm late to this thread, but that's because I was under the bridge downtown. (In my own defense, I could not get enough.) This occurred due to my desire to have some fun before I die. Until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard.

Re: "Wild Wild West": much better Songsmithed into bluegrass.

For those of you who remember No Doubt: I ran across an headline on the cover of "India Currents" in the 90s about one of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:44 PM on November 13, 2012

Subtitled version of the video (I made the transcription; I tried to leave in stutters that seemed significant and give a good sense of how Obama speaks).
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 8:33 AM on November 9, 2012

(Oscar Brand's campaign songs CD is THE GREATEST and I will sing songs from it basically forever.

"Wait for the wagon / The Millard Fillmore wagon! / Wait for the wagon / and we'll all take a ride!"

"Hatin's comin' / Satan's comin' / if John Quincy not be comin'!"

"Rockabye baby / Daddy's a Whig / When he comes home / hard cider he'll swig / and when he has swug / he'll fall in a slew… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:28 PM on November 1, 2012

"TAKE THE 'R' TRAIN" left me gapemouthed. I usually like trains and this video misused my disproportionate affection for trains to make an ill-considered political smear that did not rhyme well. Betrayal.

Fun campaign song videos from 4 years ago.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:19 PM on November 2, 2012

At the Open Computing Facility at UCB in the mid-90’s, they used disasters like tornado, planecrash, tsunami, etc.
Still do. SSH takes you to tsunami as of last week. (By the way, OCF accounts never actually die, as far as I can tell.)

Another OCF user here, reminding you further that the four login servers used to be "conquest", "war", "famine", and "death", the four… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:49 AM on October 30, 2012

I'm glad people wrote and translated this article, so now I'll have a single place I can point people to instead of orally explaining that Debian begat Maemo, which with Moblin begat MeeGo, which begat Tizen ....
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:06 PM on October 11, 2012

The music in the German adaptation is so great. It blisses me out.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 10:18 PM on October 9, 2012

"The West Wing is Star Trek in the White House.... These shows are stories about the ambitions of the professional-managerial class."
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 10:11 PM on September 26, 2012

wierdo, I actually kind of worked on Maemo. There is a special strange camaraderie among people who worked on Maemo and MeeGo, a camaraderie that's only possible among people who were on the losing but righteous side of a fight. The conversation goes something like:

[person gets out an N900]
[other person mentions that they worked at Nokia or Collabora or whatever on Maemo]
"Maemo. God, what a missed opportunity that was.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:41 PM on September 26, 2012

I watched Chess at some college production in Stockton, California in the nineties, and was too young to be critical of it. It was neat! Some bits I probably didn't get! But ooh shiny and neat songs!

Of course the song "One Night in Bangkok" stuck in my head. Years later, some guy whose blog I read, and whom I'd met once, put up a silly poll on his site, asking whether one night, ten nights, a hundred nights, or a thousand nights in… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:36 AM on September 21, 2012

If you'd like to introduce female friends of yours to the friendly side of English Wikipedia so they can feel more comfortable editing, show them the Teahouse, which is peer support for new editors. "We are here to help new editors become accustomed to community culture, ask questions, and develop community relationships – supporting you on your journey to become experienced Wikipedians."
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:26 PM on September 18, 2012

(Disclosure - I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, but not on the Teahouse.)
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:26 PM on September 18, 2012

The salesman looks like a cross between Neil Patrick Harris and my brother-in-law-in-law.

My BILIL is a native Utahn, and the landscape looks hella Utah. I was pleased/vindicated to do a whois boredshorts.tv and confirm: Orem, UT.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:24 AM on August 26, 2012

Thank you for the post, divabat.

I read the Updike review of Fernanda Eberstad's Little Money Street: In Search of Gypsies and Their Music in the South of France that LittleFuzzyBastard linked to. Something nagged at me until I remembered: "nothing about us without us". Eberstad is gaje, like me. So is Fonseca (Bury Me Standing). So I started looking for work about Romani culture, traditions, and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 6:25 AM on August 21, 2012

Oh, and of course I should have checked related MeFi posts.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 6:27 AM on August 21, 2012

One of the things I miss about the Rotten Tomatoes show on Current is the 5 Favorite Films segment. I remember being happy for John Woo that he put one of his own movies, Face/Off, into his list -- he'd gotten to do exactly what he wanted with no studio interference! And I remember thinking, huh, Ed Norton is pretty interesting -- he thinks like me! He sees an offhand reference to an old movie within another movie… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:25 AM on July 14, 2012

I'd seen Envelope and The Ventriloquist just yesterday but thanks for the pointer to Spirit of a Denture whose well-made fluff I loved most.

Per the credits: No pirates or ventriloquist dummies were harmed in the making of these films!

I learned a few years ago that translating a written story into a feature-length film goes better for a short story than for a novel. I'm imagining… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 6:24 AM on June 9, 2012

Basically confidence is the unspoken assumption that other people's opinions have only as much value as you're willing to give them...

I'm guessing you would lump values and feelings in with "opinions," in which case it's actually sociopathy.

ignore the annoying social maneuvera and protocols that I have to respect in real life

This is real life. Another facet, another… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:42 AM on May 4, 2012

On BCDIC & EBCDIC.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 2:09 AM on April 14, 2012

I read "A Woman's Story" and burst into tears at the end. The followup gets at why:

Overcoming odds, not settling for society’s expectations, and most especially the fact that while most things are imperfect, programming can be less imperfect than other things because the computer itself is blind to who you are.

But for me it was the flip side of that -- we've created these machines that are more objective than we… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:45 AM on March 30, 2012

Previously.

Just watched a Commander Keen 1 speedrun with my spouse, who'd also played Commander Keen as a kid. Huh, CK1 means something different now. Anyway, I don't know how my family acquired at least games 1-4 -- I remember most of the Commander Keen 1 levels, and I remember "Sand Yego" from the fourth game. We weren't in the habit of buying games, so maybe one of the guys at my school bus stop gave me some floppies?… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 12:18 PM on December 4, 2011

"Handball party" in case you were quietly wondering, as I was.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 1:18 PM on November 25, 2011

Another explanation of the feature.

Rationale: By surfacing new editors' problems and frustrations ("I don't know how to make a new page"), it becomes possible to see emerging themes (the most common problems) and focus on them, and it opens a new venue for directly seeking out promising new editors who experience difficulties with their first edits.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 4:06 PM on November 1, 2011

gracedissolved & Windigo: a bit of sampling error? I put myself forward as an example: a childless US woman who is not on Facebook.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:45 PM on October 27, 2011

Zed, re The Big U:
For anyone who's tempted, realize that there was a very good reason Stephenson refused for years for it to be reprinted. (I assume the pile of money he was being offered for reprint rights eventually got too big to ignore.)

My understanding is that he saw that people were selling old copies on eBay for upwards of a hundred dollars each and could not stand the thought of anyone paying that much to read it, so gave in and… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:44 AM on September 22, 2011

Technothrillers like REAMDE are competence porn. And I am not averse to competence porn (great swaths of Leverage, lots of Stephenson, some Alan Furst scenes, etc.). But if that's all you get, and the worldbuilding/character/prose/plot aspects of the story are only minimally novel, beautiful, or interesting, then it gets all Mary Sue. REAMDE doesn't cross that line but I can see where it gets all liminal.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 7:53 AM on September 22, 2011

Currently loving a few ten-dollar reds: Our Daily Red blend (wordplay!) and the Cycle Buff Malbec/Shiraz blend (serious poster imagery). Yay learning to love wine, and thank God for screwcaps.

fyrebelley -- did you listen to the "Three" episode of "You Look Nice Today", proposing the theme bar "Mommy Needs a Minute"? Also, commenter basspocket on the original article proposes: A suggestion for another category of labels would be… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 6:32 AM on June 11, 2011

cashman's post got me thinking:

Ah. There you go. Network. To me, that was always code. A big system of handoffs, all of which are navigable by the right sort of candidate. "Networking" always seemed like a clever way to keep resources (jobs, board positions, resources) "in the family" so to speak.

I am a manager and I work in technology, and sometimes I make decisions about passing along various… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 2:47 PM on April 22, 2011

I quoted Astro Zombie & anthill in my article about the copyright issue and IMSLP; thanks!
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 12:37 PM on February 26, 2011

My partner and I heard about this yesterday and spent minutes saying OMFG YES YES YES. And UC Berkeley represent!

If you like Twain's nonfiction (including his Ben Franklin and Cooper critiques) and you like travel, Innocents Abroad is great. Every time any body of water comes up, he finds an excuse to talk about how awesome Lake Tahoe is for a paragraph or two.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 3:10 AM on May 24, 2010