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That's no moon
Yes, it is! No, it isn't!
Until scientists get more data from James Webb, or future missions such as ESA’s PLATO launch, it’s all down to what they can do with the existing numbers.
MeFi Nonprofit Update 1/30/2024
The board forming the nonprofit for Metafilter met Jan. 18.
Fisk: Fisk
Decider - ‘Fisk’ On Netflix, A Comedy About A Woman Taking An Estate Law Job After Some Life Setbacks: Helen Tudor-Fisk (Kitty Flanagan) used to practice contract law at a high-end Sydney law firm, but after her husband ran off with an older woman, she’s decided to move back to her hometown of Melbourne. Her life is certainly unsettled — she’s living in an Airbnb rental — and she’ll take anything, especially if it involves little interaction with clients. Oh, and she won’t give any references from her old firm.
Preview. Kitty Flanagan and the Fisk cast discuss wills and their new Australian legal comedy
i've heard of chiptunes but
Warning: sharp, startling static sounds
Turns out if you crash a GBA game and wait a couple hours, it will start singing the entire content of its memory to you: Dumping the ROM of a GBA game by crashing it
Turns out if you crash a GBA game and wait a couple hours, it will start singing the entire content of its memory to you: Dumping the ROM of a GBA game by crashing it
Do Like This
Favorite Dance Moves.
Ed People gets people to show their favorite dance moves from all around the world.
Slowness is hard for most of us
You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient. from Slow Change Can Be Radical Change by Rebecca Solnit
Operation: I Do
Sometimes, when a rambunctious baked good and a kryptonian/atlantean doofus love each other very much...
Help finding a lightweight video editor
I'm looking for a lightweight video editor with a few specific features that might be able to run without lag on my somewhat-old computer.
Movie: Bottoms
Unpopular best friends PJ and Josie start a high school fight club to meet girls and lose their virginity. They soon find themselves in over their heads when the most popular students start beating each other up in the name of self-defense.
Like a high-seas version of the Fyre Festival
Sell your belongings for cash, sail the world for three years on a ship that hasn't been purchased yet. What could go wrong? [NYT Gift Link]
McSweeney's on the tradition of developers as Hallmark-movie villains
The villain who plans to demolish the toy shop in a Hallmark Christmas movie sets the record straight.
By Joanna Castle Miller, December 2021.
[MeFi Site Update] December 20th
Hi there, MetaFilter!
Welcome to your monthly Site Update! You can find the last Site Update here.
Reminder: I will be the only mod actively monitoring this thread so please be patient. I’ll reply to your feedback and questions at least twice a week. I’m looking forward to your feedback and questions!
Welcome to your monthly Site Update! You can find the last Site Update here.
Reminder: I will be the only mod actively monitoring this thread so please be patient. I’ll reply to your feedback and questions at least twice a week. I’m looking forward to your feedback and questions!
You don't have that kind of time.
An essay about aging by Anne Lamott.
(WaPo gift link).
This is a funny story. This is a sad story.
This is both of those things.
Gavin Crawford tells a story about his mother, Alzheimer's, and Christmas trees.
Introducing Rob, who was sleeping 10 seconds ago but can still hit D#
Can Pat Finnerty, pride of West Philly, execute step 13 of his simple plan and acquire a hot tub that fits in his rental? He answers that and more in What Makes This Song Stink Ep. 8: Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town."
Anyone here know the Time? No.
In Search of Lost Time.
"If I’d gone to Boulder [NIST] expecting to find some unassailable master clock, surrounded by druidic time lords reverently conveying its results—the sacred source that had so captured my childhood imagination—what I found instead was rather disconcerting: Time, it would seem, is quite often out of joint."
A lovely essay on the delicate measurement of time and other things.
The Kids are Alright
Stairway to Heaven.
(YouTube via Invidious so you aren't tracked.) At the annual prize-giving ceremony at St Andrews College in Ōtautahi (Christchurch) in Aotearoa, the music department covers Led Zepplin's 'Stairway to Heaven' and absolutely nails it. It's going viral here but deserves a wider audience.
Plagiarism and You(Tube)
HBomberguy's latest video is about plagiarism.
It's almost 4 hours long but really worth a watch.
What was it like to build the Millennium Falcon?
"Voice of a Star Wars Fan"
is a fan video perhaps like no other. Better to know as little about it as possible before watching, but if you love old school model making, ILM, and the original Star Wars films, this SLYT video will surely be worthy of your time.
Finance is messy because the world is messy
But crypto kept growing until the control systems could not ignore them any longer. And the control systems cannot continue to avoid knowledge of the crimes. So, so many crimes. Many of them are what crypto advocates consider as utterly inconsequential, like serially lying on paperwork. And also Binance gleefully and knowingly banked terrorists and child pornographers. That’s not an allegation; that has been confessed to. There is no line a Bond villain will not cross. They will cross them performatively. from The Bond villain compliance strategy
In the beginning the character’s name was Poochie
The Oral History of Magnitude
His name isn't Pop-Pop, that's just the gorgeous catchphrase for Magnitude, the annoying, no make that compelling minor character on Community.
Cats wedged into YouTube, I don't know how or why
The YouTube channel catw is full of videos under 10 minutes in length that are compilations of cell phone videos of cats being cats. Cats did what they shouldn't do [8m25s], I wish cats were real [10m], and Why you should have a cat [7m30s] were all posted in the past month, but there are only 21 total so far.
mefi nonprofit - project update for November 19
The group planning the transition to make MetaFilter a nonprofit held its first meeting Nov. 15. This is a brief update to keep you all up to date with the progress made.
Connections
I just yesterday discovered that all three seasons of James Burke's history series Connections [Wikipedia] are available on the Internet Archive. That's 40 episodes for streaming or download. This comes along with news [ArsTechnica] that Curiosity Stream has a new short series Connections With James Burke [Trailer] now on their platform. Previously, from 2010.
Movie: The Marvels
Carol Danvers gets her powers entangled with those of Kamala Khan and Monica Rambeau, forcing them to work together to save the universe.
Isn't It Nice To Make A Thing?
Over the summer, comedian, musician, and voice actor Kate Micucci of Garfunkel & Oates (NSFW... also an ancient previously), Steven Universe, and one of my personal PBS Kids favs, Nature Cat, committed some light vandalism on what she thought was a temporary fence around a construction site. As it turns out, she had marked up the walls of what was to become a restaurant. She chronicled her attempt to square her trespass with the establishment on her TikTok, and as with most things she does, it is extremely adorable.
We're all tryin' to tell you something about our lives
Indigo Girls' recording of Closer To Fine is not on Barbie: The Album. Given its prominence in the plot of the film, this is odd. Included as a bonus track on a special version of Barbie is Closer To Fine by Brandi & Catherine Carlile. And I will say, I was not expecting to be moved to tears by a song I've known for nearly 40 years. But here we are.
"Why isn't everyone else as angry about this issue as me?"
Can you point me to any research (or good opinion pieces) about social apathy during global crises? My partner is doing a lot of political activism around a current big violent conflict, and is struggling to understand why most people are just "carrying on, pretending everything's okay, when children are being killed". Help them understand?
Maybe I was incapable of helping anyone anyhow
Everything was going as it had to and therefore as it should. What could I do about it? I got into bed and watched the sleet strike my window, grateful to be inside for a while longer. Then I thought some more about Jesse’s blanket. That way I could add another paragraph to this essay, and maybe earn an extra fifty cents. from Four Men by William T Vollman, about homelessness, alcoholism and the death of his daughter. [Harper’s; ungated]
The world taught me to muzzle myself
The home movies served as a stern reminder to conceal the parts of myself that seemed to bother people. I lived under the assumption that I’d make Dad and others explode in anger if I wasn’t careful. So I tiptoed through life, aware that my obsessive enthusiasm could set people off like a bomb. from Off Camera
A challenge to the idea of writing such stories at all
Modern forms of true crime aren’t just cynical entertainments: they also suffer from a form of epistemological hubris, reassuring us that though the crimes they document are unspeakable, they are, in the final accounting, explicable. And if they are explicable, it follows that they are avoidable. from Accessory After the Fact, a review of Mark O'Connell's A Thread of Violence [The Baffler; ungated]
I could show you incredible things
This reading list collects pieces from the last decade that use Taylor Swift as a muse, a conduit, a springboard, or a punching bag in service of the authors’ own journeys. They demonstrate how, as Taylor’s Swiftdom grows, so too do the opportunities to use her as a lens through which we can project any number of issues—gender, race, identity, authenticity—and witness the prismatic results, a “kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats under coats,” an easter egg waiting to be unwrapped. She’s a mirrorball, after all, reflecting every version of ourselves. from Imperial Eras: A Taylor Swift Studies Reading List
MeFi Business/Legal Update Follow-Up
Hi folks -- here's a thread to talk about constructive next steps after this thread from two weeks ago.
A purpose and a finish date
We believe the time has come for scholars across fields to reorient their work around the question of ‘ends’. This need not mean acquiescence to the logics of either economic utilitarianism or partisan fealty that have already proved so damaging to 21st-century institutions. But avoiding the question will not solve the problem. If we want the university to remain a viable space for knowledge production, then scholars across disciplines must be able to identify the goal of their work – in part to advance the Enlightenment project of ‘useful knowledge’ and in part to defend themselves from public and political mischaracterisation. from The ends of knowledge
🔔MetaFilter Transitional Board Volunteers Wanted!🔔
📣📣🫱🏿👋🏽🖐🏼✋Hi everyone,✋🖐🏼👋🏽🫱🏿📣📣
MetaFilter is beginning the transition to becoming a non-profit (seee this thread ) and to begin that process, a temporary transitional board is needed. This board of volunteers would establish a basic framework for the future site, along with defining what to look for in an Executive Director
We have several volunteers already, but most are based in the United States and have similar backgrounds, so we’re casting our net wider to encourage a more globally diverse board.
Interested? Let us know in the October 18, 2023 MetaTalk thread about changing the site to nonprofit.
MetaFilter is beginning the transition to becoming a non-profit (seee this thread ) and to begin that process, a temporary transitional board is needed. This board of volunteers would establish a basic framework for the future site, along with defining what to look for in an Executive Director
We have several volunteers already, but most are based in the United States and have similar backgrounds, so we’re casting our net wider to encourage a more globally diverse board.
Interested? Let us know in the October 18, 2023 MetaTalk thread about changing the site to nonprofit.
You Think You Know a Site
I’ve known since I was 11 who these people, this Eyebrows McGee and this languagehat, are.
After graduating from college, I still thought of Metafilter as a rarified club of experts that I’d somehow snuck into. I also thought of Metafilter as a perfect window onto the world. I was sure I could better understand different life experiences because I read strangers’ thoughts, freed by anonymity to be honest. I knew I lived in a tiny bubble, and Metafilter seemed my best defense against that insularity.
How can I avoid flogging myself for missing the life I could have had?
A recent diagnosis of ADHD, at a late age, has made me realize my life could have been very different had I been diagnosed sooner. By most measures for someone living in North America, I've had a good and fortunate life. But I know myself enough to know that, sooner or later, a spiral of thinking "I could have been better, done so much more" will start, and this cannot end well. Have others among you found ways to prevent this line of thinking?
[MeFi Site Update] October 18th
Hi there, MetaFilter!
Welcome to your monthly Site Update! You can find the last Site Update here.
Reminder: I will be the only mod actively monitoring this thread so please be patient. I’ll reply to your feedback and questions at least twice a week. I’m looking forward to your feedback and questions!
Welcome to your monthly Site Update! You can find the last Site Update here.
Reminder: I will be the only mod actively monitoring this thread so please be patient. I’ll reply to your feedback and questions at least twice a week. I’m looking forward to your feedback and questions!
Cognitive Bias, Situations Matter, Pick a Noun, and other dead ends
Gino's work has been cited over 33,000 times, and Ariely's work has been cited over 66,000 times. They both got tenured professorships at elite universities. They wrote books, some of which became bestsellers. They gave big TED talks and lots of people watched them. By every conventional metric of success, these folks were killing it. Now let's imagine every allegation of fraud is true, and everything Ariely and Gino ever did gets removed from the scientific record, It's a Wonderful Life-style. What would change? Not much.I’m So Sorry for Psychology’s Loss, Whatever It Is: an essay by psychologist Adam Mastroianni on academic fraud, the replication crisis, and the questionable paradigms underlying a still-adolescent field
“You have to trust someone, right?”
The couple thought they’d executed the perfect crime: victimless and profitable. But, as hard as Konashewych had worked to keep his girlfriends apart, his two worlds were about to collide. from The Inside Job
Surely a shoe-in for an Ig Nobel
48 people flipped 46 different kinds of coins a total of 350,757 times [PDF] to demonstrate that a flipped coin has a 50.8% chance of landing on the same side it started. This confirms a theoretical result from 2007 [PDF] which took into account precession, which is the fact that "the direction of the axis of rotation changes as the coin goes through its trajectory".
I'm gonna trick ya!
Once again (previously, previouslier) the Spanish band Broken Peach has released a Halloween Video in their classic style.