Favorites from We had a deal, Kyle
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They’re like an explosion in a lab
The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements
A lovely multimedia essay from the Australian National University’s College of Science.
Movie: The Princess and the Frog
A waitress, desperate to fulfill her dreams as a restaurant owner, is set on a journey to turn a frog prince back into a human being, but she has to face the same problem after she kisses him.
The greatest clock (and map) ever made(?)
A twenty minute youtube video with a bit of history and a breakdown and restoration of a Geochron Global Time Indicator, possibly the most comprehensive and over-engineered electromechanical clock and map assembly in history!
Together!
In 1994 the Pet Shop Boys were invited to perform 'Go West' at the Brit Awards. They agreed and brought with them 3 separate choirs of miners. Some of those miners had marched with the gay and lesbian members of LGSM in the 1980s. It is one of the great, near-lost music moments [Vimeo, via John Bull, via MetaFilter's own JScalzi]
I’ve met a lot of bears, but not nearly as many bears as men
This leads us straight back to the original conversation about “Man or Bear,” which has nothing to do with bears. (Sorry, bears!) “Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?” is just another way of asking, “Are you afraid of men?” It’s the same question I’ve been fielding for the entirety of my life as a solo female traveler. It’s the same question that hovers over women all the time as we move through the world. And it’s a question that’s always been difficult for me to answer. from A Woman Who Left Society to Live With Bears Weighs in on “Man or Bear” by Laura Killingbeck [Bikepacking]
Fallout: The Radio
Every generation has their own dumbass ideas.
Stand In Pride
"A while ago my wife introduced me to Stand In Pride, where queer people can find stand-in family members for support and indeed often for big life events — when their biological families don’t show up. And so it came to pass that a couple of weeks ago I had the singular honour of walking Taylor down the aisle to marry Ruth. Family is what you make it. Love endures." (via @chrisphin on Mastodon, with their permission and featuring lovely pictures of the wedding.)
Live those dreams, Scheme those schemes
Todd In the Shadows undertakes an epic troll of Brits with ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Proof that the Hugo Awards were censored
The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion
by Jason Sanford and Chris M. Barkley. The latter received from Diane Lacey copies of e-mails that were exchanged between her and Kat Jones and Dave McCarty, fellow volunteer administrators of the 2023 Hugo Awards at the Chengdu Worldcon, showing that the three of them made dossiers of Hugo Award nominees deemed to be potentially troubling to local business interests and authorities. Jones, the 2024 Hugo Administrator, has resigned from her position, after releasing a statement. Diane Lacey has apologized for her part. There have been many responses to these revelations, including by Cora Buhlert, Camestros Felapton and MeFi's Own John Scalzi.
Welcome Kirkaracha: Our New Web Development Team Member
Hello MetaFilter!
We are thrilled to announce the latest addition to our team, a hire that has been highly anticipated - Kirkaracha!
We are thrilled to announce the latest addition to our team, a hire that has been highly anticipated - Kirkaracha!
Eldercare, Family Caretaking, and End-of-life Logistics: Stuff I Learned
My mother died this year, after a long decline in her health, and I was one of the main people who helped take care of her. While caring for her, preparing for her death, and handling logistics afterwards, I learned a lot from online resources (including MetaFilter), various professionals, and friends. So I'm trying to pass on some things I learned -- about paperwork, patient advocacy, body donation, delegating to friends, coping with Mom's delirium and incontinence, and more -- by sharing them in a blog post I have been working on for months. It was pretty hard to write in places, and I hope it saves people a few unpleasant surprises.
"I remember so many little feelings."
"It’s true. I’ve been working on this blog post for ten years.
You see, I’ve been slowly buying up nearly seventy super rare issues of a 80s/90s gadget catalog that meant the world to me growing up. And in the process, I’ve uncovered the secret history of this lost copywriting art.
PLUS, as a bonus, I’ve scanned every single issue — so you can read them all." Cabel Sasser has written a blog post that showcases many many fine nerdy gadgets, the things that dreams were made of for people of a certain age: The DAK Catalog.
You see, I’ve been slowly buying up nearly seventy super rare issues of a 80s/90s gadget catalog that meant the world to me growing up. And in the process, I’ve uncovered the secret history of this lost copywriting art.
PLUS, as a bonus, I’ve scanned every single issue — so you can read them all." Cabel Sasser has written a blog post that showcases many many fine nerdy gadgets, the things that dreams were made of for people of a certain age: The DAK Catalog.
The little guys show up in medieval marginalia hunting mice & being cute
First of all, I would like to ask which “religious leaders” this cat account thinks condemned cats in the fourteenth century.
You would see some kind of documentation, because a mass cull of cats would represent a huge 180 from standard medieval practice surrounding the animals, because medieval people fucking loved cats.
The Transgender Family Handbook
There is plenty of rhetoric out there that might encourage a parent to question their child in this moment that’s designed to scare them into inaction or, worse, outright rejection. There is less guidance for those who choose to believe their children. This is a handbook for the trans-affirming family; it presumes you love your child and want what’s best for them. And while it’s their journey alone, you have the opportunity, and obligation, to help them to become who they are.
WTF did I just see?!
kanuck posted some straight-up blackpill content on the front page. It's still up. I've flagged the post with a note for the mods, but how can we as a community respond more assertively to blatant misogyny that's "well packaged"?
MetaFilter: Nazi bar problem.
I want to discuss how the MetaFilter community addresses comments and users who support or defend Nazi/fascist ideology. A user over in this thread, which discusses Canada's House speaker praising a Nazi veteran, had their comment removed and was given a moderator's note regarding this decision. But I don't find this acceptable. Why would we allow additional comments from this user to be made in that thread? An instant ban would be appropriate for anyone who wants to defend Nazis in this community, otherwise MetaFilter is just setting ourselves up for a Nazi bar problem. I'd like both the moderator team and the community to weigh in on this.
It Freakin' Works!!!
Repairing an Apple II Clone (1/3)
"In the early 80s, the Apple II had was selling well but it was expensive. This is where foreign companies stepped in and started making clones. These machines were much cheaper but also illegal due to them using copied ROMs."
The Woman on the Line
Every day, the calls come. She can tell quickly who might die. CW: descriptions of drug use and overdoses
Kansas man upset he can’t buy mini Toyotas ‘like the Taliban and ISIS.’
The Taliban has fresher trucks than us. The Honda Fit is dead. U can’t find a sauced-out 2-door to save your life. How did we get here??
Scout finds a forever home
"He’d had enough of being at the animal shelter, so Scout the dog climbed over one tall fence and then another, crossed a busy highway in the darkness, entered the automatic doors of a nursing home down the road, walked unnoticed into the lobby, hopped onto a couch, curled into a ball and quietly went to sleep for the night."
CW - sympathetic mention of animal abuse at the start (non-graphic).
CW - sympathetic mention of animal abuse at the start (non-graphic).
Book: The Soul of a New Machine
The experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure.
Movie: Linoleum
When the host of a failing children's science show tries to fulfill his childhood dream of becoming an astronaut by building a rocket ship in his garage, a series of bizarre events occur that cause him to question his own reality.
I missed Claudia Janke's String Phone Sculpture project ...
... when it was live back in 2020, but I've just found these photographs online. "What started as only one phone reaching across the square, ended in an invitation to all neighbours to connect via a string phone. We installed 16 phones criss crossing the square spanning up to 60 meters. We played string phone whispers, watched artist Rubie Green perform a sound piece through one of the phones and cut the strings a the end at the count of three."
How to Be Blind
Andrew Leland is a writer, audio producer, editor, and teacher who explores his transition from sightedness to blindness. He has a book coming out this month and recently published an article drawn from it, How to Be Blind. He has also written about reading technologies for the blind.
Can we please stop using the term "wheelchair bound" on MetaFilter?
Recently I have noticed several different commenters on MetaFilter using the phrase "wheelchair bound." This is a phrase that a lot of wheelchair users (including myself) find deeply objectionable, as wheelchairs actually give us freedom of movement compared to not having a wheelchair. (Also, a lot of wheelchair users are ambulatory wheelchair users, e.g. they can sometimes walk a very short distance.) The preferred term is "wheelchair user". If using it as an adjective, you can say "wheelchair using", e.g. "My wheelchair-using girlfriend."
A badminton rally
Malaysia's Thinaah Muralitharan and Pearly Tan played Rena Miyaura and Ayako Sakuramoto from Japan at the Malaysia Masters badminton tournament earlier this week. One particular rally resulted in much applause from the spectators.
50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time
Another list to argue about! What does Esquire Magazine know about sci-fi? I don't know either, but have at it!
Hell Never Ends on x86
From CathodeRayDude, two deep-dives into old netbooks doing things they *really* shouldn't.
Pt. 1, Phoenix Hyperspace: Anyone who Computers Pretty Good can tell you that there is no holy way to do this. No priest would bless whatever is going on here. This is bad and wrong, and someone should have stilled the sinful hands of Phoenix's devs. So I knew, at this point, that Phoenix had invented multiple novel technologies in pursuit of an incredibly stupid product that nobody wanted, but I was not yet quite aware of how bad it was going to get.
Pt. 1, Phoenix Hyperspace: Anyone who Computers Pretty Good can tell you that there is no holy way to do this. No priest would bless whatever is going on here. This is bad and wrong, and someone should have stilled the sinful hands of Phoenix's devs. So I knew, at this point, that Phoenix had invented multiple novel technologies in pursuit of an incredibly stupid product that nobody wanted, but I was not yet quite aware of how bad it was going to get.
Movie only tag
Since apparently writing about what happened in the source material for a film can be removed as a spoiler, movie posts need to have a "movie only" and "books included" tag.
The Case For Shunning
"I don't know about you, but I get shamed for the things I say all the time, from supremacists and bigots, from people whose criticism I desire and from whose company I hope to be shunned. I would be ashamed to hold beliefs they would approve of. They may mischaracterize me, but they understand me very well. And I crave their understanding. I want them to know exactly what I think of them. That’s what the shunning is for." A.R. Moxon writes a fiery response to Scott Adams' racism (previously) and the New York Times' hypocrisy over J.K. Rowling and trans rights.
“...mourning the loss of yet more games that will soon be lost to time,”
The Live-Service Game Bubble Looks Ready To Burst [Gamespot]
“Fortnite is several weeks into the first season of its fourth chapter. In real time, it's been going strong since the summer of 2017, and though Epic doesn't share player counts, by any available metric it seems to still be doing incredibly well. But in the live-service world, Fortnite's success feels increasingly rare. While there do exist other major successes in the pocket of the games industry where studios operate one game for years on end, many others are closing their proverbial doors for good, which is extremely scary both for players worried about gaming history and future developers concerned with the trends they may be tasked with chasing. Can live-service games survive modest successes, or must they all be as massive as Fortnite to make it?”Amid a host of live-service games announcing their shutdowns, it's starting to feel like there's no safe middle ground between Fortnite and foreclosed.
A Sangfroid Easily Set Ablaze
Such moments also cut to the core of Carmela’s contradictory identity and fundamental dilemma as a frustrated homemaker with repressed desires, a loyal wife who has suffered endless slights from an adulterous husband she cannot bring herself to leave, a devout and conscience-stricken Catholic who owes the spoils of her upwardly mobile lifestyle to blood money and an endless cycle of immorality, and a smart, self-assured woman who has sacrificed all of her potential for a humdrum home life spent in the service of unappreciative spouse and spoiled kids. from How Edie Falco Made Carmela Soprano Matter [Hazlitt]
Off-grid living in NYC
What started as an experiment has turned into a habit I hope will inspire others. I disconnected from the electric grid for 8 months—in Manhattan.
Who asked for a new Twitter disaster list thread? Here it is.
Twitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the social media site against impulsive billionaires who wanted to use the reach of its platform for their own ends....
This article rehashes the last three months of Twitter flushing down the toilet.
Fake Basquiat Paintings at the Orlando Museum of Art
In February 2022, 25 newly-discovered Basquiat paintings went on exhibit at the Orlando Museum of Art NYT Link | archive.org link. The authenticity of the paintings was almost immediately called into question, due to their irregular provenance, discrepancies in style, and anachronisms in materials.
Southwest Fails To Crew Schedule
The holiday travel season saw a polar vortex that caused American carriers to struggle, but for Southwest Airlines, the initial issues of the season quickly compounded into a cascade failure that has left many travelers stranded across the US even as the weather has improved over much of the country.
Life under fascism... in space
Andor: Star Wars for Grownups
"But Andor is something new and astonishing: a Star Wars series written and filmed entirely for discerning grown-ups. It’s accurate but faint praise to call this the smartest Star Wars ever made; it’s one of the smartest shows anyone has made in recent years, and can reasonably be mentioned in the same breath as, say, The Wire. It’s better than this bloated and wildly uneven franchise deserves; that it was greenlit at all suggests, against all odds, that even endlessly recycled blockbuster intellectual properties have some room for artistry." (n.b. spoilers)
Your budget, one envelope at a time
Need some new budgeting ideas? Enjoy something tactile? Try cash stuffing!
Andor: Nobody's Listening!
Under intense scrutiny in prison, Cassian makes his allies to plan an impossible escape.
if Tetris were Thanksgiving dinner with your shittiest uncle
Want to hate Tetris, or for Tetris to hate you? The answer may be Hatetris (which you can play here), an adversarial Tetris game (by MeFi's Own qntm) that tries to serve you the worst possible pieces you could ever not hope for. Here's a detailed writeup of understanding and breaking the high score record by David & Filipe, who just shattered their previous record with 148 whole points.
artist, blogger, grandson
"I spent the last couple weeks finally tackling a project I've put off for years: finishing a stained glass menorah project my grandfather started decades ago and left incomplete when he died." -- by Metafilter's own Josh Millard. (Related Twitter thread)
[via mefi projects]