MetaFilter

It would be nice not to have users’ comments explaining why they are leaving the site deleted.

This is at least the second time a user has left after their response to this certain someone’s shittiness was deleted, and their follow up explaining that they were leaving was also deleted. Absolutely ridiculous.

MetaTalk has become far too much of a memory hole.
posted to MetaTalk by hototogisu at 5:19 PM on June 4, 2024

I disagree kbanas, the mods told us "If folks want to start another MeTa, that's fine and a option". And then when someone followed those instructions and did just that, they said "no, we don't like to post two MetaTalk threads per day". Maybe that should have been mentioned before. It seems like we're trying to follow the rules here, but it's hard to do when they're shifting and opaque. If the mods are enforcing a breather, they should just come out and say it instead... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Sparky Buttons at 5:04 PM on June 4, 2024

I mean, we aren't children. Just tell us that MeTa queue is clearly being used as an editorial filter so that y'all can choose what goes up, because its clearly what is happening.
posted to MetaTalk by Jarcat at 2:43 PM on June 4, 2024

As the newest mod, I'm not sure of that particular situation, so I've posted on the Mod's internal Slack asking for history and clarification. So it'll be a little while before there's any sort of response

It is truly incredible that the answer to this isn't a flat out and immediate "of course not."

I've stayed out of all of the years of angst about moderation here because I generally think it's fine and I also... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by phunniemee at 7:35 AM on June 4, 2024

Enjoyed this! It’s easy to opine and grumble to myself about social systems I see in books, and so much appreciated when scholars dig in with both the history and the textual references to give me more concrete tools to think with.
posted to MetaFilter by rrrrrrrrrt at 12:18 PM on June 2, 2024

I was getting into Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn until the midpoint when I realized the characters were all deadly dull and I bailed. (Come to think of it, that's always my reaction with BS's works). I thought Mistborn read like a RPG, and I don't know if that was its origin, but it certainly evolved to that.

The Books of the Malazan are so very clearly from an RPG--the DNA of it at least. I read the first... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by zardoz at 6:51 PM on June 1, 2024

I'd love to be a fly on the Thomas and Alito corpses.
posted to MetaFilter by DirtyOldTown at 3:43 PM on May 30, 2024

"average U.S. President has 0.74 felony convictions" factoid actualy just statistical error. average U.S. President has 0 felony convictions. Felonies Georg, who lives in Mar-a-Lago & commits felonies constantly, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
posted to MetaFilter by Jacqueline at 2:44 PM on May 30, 2024

Maybe in the bio you can de-emphasize the themes you used to focus on for the stuff before the pivot, and make it a bit more like a list of accomplishments?

E.g. a structure like "creatrixtiara's latest project A explores the themes B and C. Previously, they were best known for their publication in X and Y, and their collaboration with Z."
posted to Ask MetaFilter by internet of pillows at 12:24 AM on May 30, 2024

Sneakers
posted to Ask MetaFilter by qxntpqbbbqxl at 1:25 PM on May 24, 2024

Isn't the end of Her that she fucks off into another dimension with her other, cooler AI 'friends'? I have to confess I fell asleep at some point and don't remember how it all shook out.

Her is an interesting movie in that it dances around a bunch of possible themes and interpretations without squarely landing on any one of them. Like, you can look at virtually any aspect of the film and either read it as a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:56 AM on May 22, 2024

I don't know if you want anything this extensive, but in about 5th or 6th grade our teacher had about an hour every Friday where we would have a "market". He gave everyone X money every week and we brought various things from home to sell to try to get rich. This went on for several weeks near the end of the school year - maybe 4, 6, or 8 weeks, approximately.

The inflation over time became blazingly obvious to everyone as each week there was more money in... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by flug at 1:11 AM on May 18, 2024

In the 89 years since its discovery, Pluto has not yet traveled even half of its orbital period (240 Earth years)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Thorzdad at 1:52 PM on March 13, 2019

Surely there's someone available to do this paid mod work who likes metafilter more.
posted to MetaTalk by phunniemee at 11:14 AM on May 16, 2024

Unless they followed “In conclusion” with “Metafilter is a land of contrasts.” Then it would be undetectable.
posted to MetaFilter by nickmark at 7:07 PM on May 12, 2024

The role of planned obsolescence, of capture, is part a big of the anger here.

The lords of tech keep insisting that it is both out-of-touch/ fuddy-duddy and snobby to prefer any means of production other than theirs, since their tools democratize and decentralize and scale and you can learn how to use them on YouTube instead of investing 10,000 hours and all that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ducky l'orange at 12:42 PM on May 9, 2024

I am not a preservationist. I'm happy to watch upright pianos lit on fire and shoved down a flight of stairs. Melt down your trumpets and saxophones and make them into plumbing. Slice up your old paintings and stitch them into tablecloths. You can get a sharper, faster, better picture from a five-year-old cell phone than you can from high quality 20th-century film cameras. The destruction of the old-- that's not what's stirring the negative reaction.

What's stirring the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by phooky at 12:31 PM on May 9, 2024

Just to follow up my own comment (sorry), from the Verge, not exactly luddites, and generally very Apple positive:

The message many of us received was this: Apple, a trillion-dollar behemoth, will crush everything beautiful and human, everything that’s a pleasure to look at and touch, and all that will be left is a skinny glass and metal slab.

Astoundingly, this is meant to sell a product. “Buy the thing that’s destroying everything you love,”... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by The Bellman at 12:07 PM on May 9, 2024

The solution is making friends, discussing things you care about with them, and building coalitions, taking action together to change things. But that's a lot harder than judging people.

Yes indeed, but if only this weren't more difficult than you (may or may not) realize. Because the sad reality (as I experience it at least) is that the mere mention of climate change can drive a wedge between people because frankly not many want to hear it, and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by clandestiny's child at 5:33 PM on May 8, 2024

The world is not going to end, but there will be much avoidable suffering.

I admire Hannah Ritchie for wanting to respond to the state of things with hope and optimism, it is important to try to respond in any way other than hopelessness. But I do worry that she's overlooked some of the more worrisome aspects of what we're facing, such as ocean acidification and also the threats of feedback loops that are already set in motion from methane emissions,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by clandestiny's child at 11:06 AM on May 8, 2024

If you are on the side of cracking down on large-scale student protests, you are on the wrong side of history.
posted to MetaFilter by SoberHighland at 4:51 PM on May 6, 2024

Anywho, I know a few mefites who are not being included on this year's 'Magneto Was Right' t-shirt-for-xmas-present list.
posted to MetaFilter by signal at 5:17 PM on April 25, 2024

the Eagles did not refuse to fly to Mordor because of money; it was because it wasn't their job, and also, do you want a power-mad Eagle Ringlord? I did not think so

Plus how would a football team even get over the Mountains of Shadow?
posted to MetaFilter by star gentle uterus at 9:03 AM on April 25, 2024

Trans people and other marginalised people absolutely *are* dangerous.

We're dangerous to people who desperately need a world where the power of the patriarchy is seen as wholesome, natural, common sense.

Anyone who starts deciding who they are for themselves, instead of accepting the identity society has granted them, is an existential threat to the patriarchy.

The challenge is not to convince everyone that we're... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Zumbador at 2:58 AM on April 25, 2024

This is just reminding me, once again, oh lord, the promo cycle for Captain America 4 is going to be awkward af.

Pleased to see Yeshayahu Leibowitz namechecked in this piece too.
posted to MetaFilter by cendawanita at 7:09 PM on April 24, 2024

It is not gross prejudice to worry that your child can blow up a city block with her mind.

Of course it is, because not every mutant has the same type of power. Leech, Caliban, Cypher, etc etc have very non violent powers. Hell, the Morlocks had a friggin' healer, that would be hella useful!

Plus, assuming that your mutant kid will kill you is pretty gross. It's putting what they are before the person you raised, known, and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brandon Blatcher at 6:57 PM on April 24, 2024

But your mutant neighbor could annihilate you with an energy blast or eat your memories or whatever. The fear of gays and Jews is Rightist paranoia

okay but have you considered that no less an authority than pope francis, first of his name, successor of the prince of apostles, supreme pontiff of the universal church, and patriarch of the west, has decreed that trans people are as destructive and inimical to life as atomic weaponry and seek to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by i used to be someone else at 6:37 PM on April 24, 2024

“I went to the ocean because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
-Henry David Wombat
posted to MetaFilter by indexy at 9:32 AM on April 24, 2024

Ctrl-F "Magnetanyahu"
No results
Disappointing

I joke, this is really good.
posted to MetaFilter by Joakim Ziegler at 4:32 PM on April 24, 2024

tl;dr

"Any Salad Can Be A Caesar Salad (if you stab it enough)"
posted to MetaFilter by lalochezia at 8:26 AM on April 23, 2024

Just to avoid the slide into “everybody else of doing it right”, I will drop in the anecdata that one of the worst public toilets I’ve used in a long time was in the Tokyo subway.
posted to MetaFilter by Going To Maine at 10:07 AM on April 15, 2024

I feel like this piece is several years too late. At least here in the Midwest, every brewery makes multiple simple and decidedly drinkable beers. In particular, Mexican lagers are de rigueur. At the brewery I work at, our taproom offers five beers at 5% or lower. We have a golden ale, Modelo-esque lager, a helles adjacent lager, a cold IPA, and a very mildly fruity passion fruit pale ale. My sensibility is that the industry has very much course corrected from the excesses... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by barrett caulk at 5:07 PM on April 12, 2024

I feel like the overwhelming theme of life now is pollution. Commerce is polluted. Brands are polluted. Information is polluted. Culture is polluted. Politics is polluted. The environment is polluted. Air and Water are polluted. Food is polluted. We are polluted. Goddamn lunchables are polluted. Shein is just more of this.
posted to MetaFilter by srboisvert at 5:50 AM on April 11, 2024

I’ve never seen any of John Ford’s movies, in fact.
Right, ok. Listen, quick suggestion: go watch them.

I fucking love John Ford's movies. They aren't as powerful as they were, sure, context has changed, but when I saw The Searchers a couple years ago it was still a bracingly frank portrayal of an old, racist shit-head. Not soft-pedaled at all. Guy is a fucking ex-Confederate soldier piece-of-shit that everyone... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by From Bklyn at 5:30 AM on April 9, 2024

I have lived in Japan coming on 20 years and I have spent a total of about 30 seconds in a pachinko parlor. Upon entering you are assailed by a cacophony of sound: pachinko machines clicking and clacking and ringing, and deafening loud music on the speakers. Cigarette smoke as thick as you've ever inhaled. It was disgusting, and at the time I was a smoker!

Seriously, it was one of the least comfortable places I've ever been to. Makes a Vegas casino seem like a Zen... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by zardoz at 6:02 AM on April 6, 2024

I'm kind of surprised that there haven't been more comments about how sad this story is. A guy tried for decades to make America a better place, I mean he really put in the time and effort, and ultimately found that he'd rather live somewhere else.
posted to MetaFilter by ZaphodB at 10:10 PM on April 3, 2024

As someone who grew up in the States and moved away as an adult and has lived in two other countries, I really identify with the relief and joy he expressed. To experience so many basics of society - like healthcare - just working so much better and so much more equitably is actually wonderful.

Where I am now, like everywhere, has a lot of its own problems, but it’s astonishing how horrible the US is in comparison to a lot of other places on many, many dimensions. I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by congen at 5:47 PM on April 3, 2024

It is obscene that this entire article manages to completely ignore the fact that going forward, piracy is the only way to guarantee access to the media you have enjoyed.

After these companies started to expect me to buy the same movies two, sometimes three times I hoisted the black flag and never looked back.
posted to MetaFilter by hobo gitano de queretaro at 6:06 PM on March 30, 2024

So in the end, it all goes to cannibalism.

I walk just a stupid amount and when people ask me why I like to say it is because people are persistence hunters so I need to keep my cardio up if I'm going to be a persistence hunter hunter when everything falls apart.

Pretty much anyone who can't casually walk a marathon should probably shoot me if they see me coming, because I am a very hungry boy.
posted to MetaFilter by Parasite Unseen at 3:46 PM on March 27, 2024

If you're on the fence about buying a new or used car, you should sign the papers in the next 12-24 hours if possible.

Baltimore is the east coast hub for all incoming shipments of automobiles, so this will first drive up the price of new, then used cars, for a while.
posted to MetaFilter by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:11 AM on March 26, 2024

But the epidemic of loneliness and depression that has swept society reveals that many of us are now walled off from one another in vats of our own making.

Balderdash.

The loneliness epidemic isn't going anywhere until we stop a) blaming lonely people for being lonely and b) thinking that insisting that lonely people stop being lonely is a solution.

The loneliness epidemic is caused by the fact that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by MrVisible at 7:09 PM on March 24, 2024

I'm 99% sure that the overworked, extremely underpaid, tired designers of Aldi's inhouse brands will be reading this article and weeping

On a sidenote - it's not as if Aldi isn't engaging in bullshit marketing tactics which this article seems to imply. Their whole 'non-GMO, natural food dyes' only type schtick is very much leaning hard into that 'health' conscious foodie space. There's a reason why the Aldi I knew growing up that my mom shopped at existed as a space for... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by paimapi at 12:17 PM on March 24, 2024

Scott Pilgrim gaining self-respect and growing the hell up and growing out of the video game metaphors he's been seeing the world through is literally how the comic ends. He never needed to defeat seven evil exes- he needed to grow up and relate to Ramona as a person. Wright skipped all of that.
posted to MetaFilter by Pope Guilty at 12:14 PM on March 21, 2024

Probably the greatest pleasure of threads like this for me is impassioned — and in this case pretty convincing! — defenses of books I actively dislike, such as Ghidorah's apologia for On the Road. I’m going to have to take another look at that one as well as Kerouac in general.
posted to MetaFilter by jamjam at 10:39 AM on March 17, 2024

"I would consider paying something like $10 a month for SEO- and sponsor-free search, and for well-managed and curated newsfeeds."

Ah, but would you pay $20? How about $25? How about $15 for the Silver package, where we add just a little SEO in there, from our trusted sponsors, of course. Sorry, now that level costs $25, as well. It's only $30 for the Gold package though, although some say that our curated newsfeeds have gone downhill since we fired the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rudy_Wiser at 3:49 PM on March 11, 2024

If we are going this route please have remote kill switches for police to use on all cars.

I'm sick and horrified of highways and byways becoming pit maneuver central for police. If driving is a luxury expecting to be able to live while driving should be a baseline.
posted to MetaFilter by MonsieurPEB at 9:42 AM on March 12, 2024

Eight people is tiny, yes, but/and SARS-CoV-2 contributing to cardiovascular disease isn’t new information. This feels more like a “how” study than a “what” study and while we should be mindful of the N in assessing whether the details of the specific mechanism are right, we don’t need to be skeptical of the study’s whole premise, I don’t think. I think it’s safe to say that first sentences in this kind of brief are ~always things that ~everyone in the field can agree on, and this one begins... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by eirias at 9:27 AM on March 12, 2024

Every time I see this phrasing pop up, it's just a reminder to move whatever "respectable" names from their current place in my head, and put them in the "batshit insane conspiracy theorists poisoning society" box where they belong.

“batshit insane conspiracy theorists poisoning society who write/wrote for the New York Times/WaPo/Atlantic”, generally.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 5:08 AM on March 4, 2024

Notice how there was not even a cursory nod to the idea that Irulan could just inherit the mantle of empire herself.

Of course, because the empire is a representation of the patriarchy. Irulan is the only woman who submits to it, and that diminishes her.

However, women do inherit the empire. When Leto and Ghanima take control, Ghanima becomes Empress to the emasculated Leto and takes Farad'n as a concubine. Ghanima doesn't... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by betaray at 10:45 PM on March 1, 2024

This all being announced on the same weekend as Sting retiring from professional wrestling, hits me hard.
posted to MetaFilter by The Pluto Gangsta at 12:37 PM on February 29, 2024