What is Reddit's opinion of
MetaFilter?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
100 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I thought this comment from a discussion on this topic on another forum was insightful:
>If you are interested in undermining these communities that are repressive to women, one of the most important and effective ways to do that is to provide women-only gathering spaces outside the control of the men of the community where women can network and be amongst each other without men policing their thoughts and speech. And even better is women-only spaces that belong to the general community where women in oppressive communities will have the opportunity to interact with women in the general community, and to build the sorts of connections that allow them to safely escape repressive communities.
>Women-only gyms, pools, hairdresser hours, nail salons, etc., are where an awful lot of women who end up fleeing closed religious communities (or domestic violence situations) meet the women and get access to the social services that help them escape. There's a reason DV and cult-escape groups do a lot of outreach through commercial and community locations with women-only hours.
http://www.metafilter.com/160128/Everybody-Into-the-Pool#6552288
In Super Mario Brothers, if you lose your last life and then hold A when pressing start, you'll restart on the the world you died on in the previous game. Source.
That girl is actually pretty awesome and used her temporary 'net notability to raise money for charity.
Someone ~~answered~~ asked, "Why are you so awkward?" And she responded, "Because I'm 13."
Stolen from here
"Amok is a Malay word for the homicidal sprees occasionally undertaken by lonely, Indochinese men who have suffered a loss of love, a loss of money, or a loss of face. The syndrome has been described in a culture even more remote from the West: the stone-age foragers of Papua New Guinea.
The amok man is patently out of his mind, an automaton oblivious to his surroundings and unreachable by appeals or threats. But his rampage is preceded by lengthy brooding over failure, and is carefully planned as a means of deliverance from an unbearable situation. The amok state is chillingly cognitive. It is triggered not by a stimulus, not by a tumor, not by a random spurt of brain chemicals, but by an idea. The idea is so standard that the following summary of the amok mind-set, composed in 1968 by a psychiatrist who had interviewed seven hospitalized amoks in Papua New Guinea, is an apt description of the the thoughts of mass murderers continents and decades away: >"I am not an important man... I possess only my personal sense of dignity. My life has been reduced to nothing by an intolerable insult. Therefore, I have nothing to lose except my life, which is nothing, so I trade my life for yours, as your life is favoured. The exchange is in my favour, so I shall not only kill you, but I shall kill many of you, and at the same time rehabilitate myself in the eyes of the group of which I am a member, even though I might be killed in the process."
The amok syndrome is an extreme instance of the puzzle of human emotions. Exotic at first glance, upon scrutiny they turn out to be universal; quintessentially irrational, they are tightly interwoven with abstract thought and have a cold logic of their own.
From How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker"
>Here is a fun game to play: If you spot a black bird, mimic their noises while staring at them head tilted. For whatever reason, staring directly will only scare them. Now as you repeat their calls, they will vary the sequence seeming to try to throw you off. Keep repeating the sequence back to the bird. Repeat the squawk as many times as they do. Keep this up for a few more minutes. The bird will continue to vary the sequence. This is to identify whether or not they are hallucinating or if, you, the human down below, really is being this strange. Stick with it. Eventually the black bird will make some weird noise it had picked up. A poorly emulated car engine start, or some stray human syllable. If you can make a decent impression of it then the bird will try another noise, or less creatively, make the same engine noise in a vague rhythm. Once you fail, however, it is extremely likely the bird will take flight and circle the neighborhood making this unemulatable noise. Now if any other black birds come by this game is usually dropped and you cannot get to the very end, but keep trying.
> This game works better for crows and ravens than other crovid, but try it out!
> It is like an easter egg for REALITY.
Not if you can't handle the emotional burdens.
A comment made by Metafilter user Doroteo Arango II
> What is the name of that feeling were you feel awed and happy and infinitely sad at the same time?
> Octopuses give me that.
> They are so smart and beautiful. When kept in aquariums they can learn to recognize their owners, and they can be trained to do all kinds of tricks. They can even answer to their name, if the name is a shape painted on a card or some other visual symbol. They have their own individual personalities, and they come up with tricks of their own.
> And once they know you and trust you, they will let you touch them, and will come to you and give you hundreds of loving kisses with their little suckers. And they look into your eyes and you look into theirs and you feel that a fragile golden thread of communication is connecting two of the most advanced and alien intelligences on earth, and that gives you hope for every little living thing.
> And then a year has gone by and they die in front of your eyes and you have to learn to say good-bye and there is nothing you can do about it.
> Keeping octopuses is like Fry's dog in Futurama ever year for ever and ever.
> I am happy there are braver or more masochistic scientists and enthusiasts advancing the state of the art in octopus breeding every year. Dolphins and apes are intelligent, but too much like us. Even parrots and corvids, the tiny dinosaurs that made it, are just a few branches apart in the tree of life, like half brothers, all tetrapods. Octopuses, who are not even vertebrates, are as close to an alien intelligence as we will probably get before we are all dead.
I'm gonna quote a super-smart dude from MetaFilter on Black Widow:
>You are missing the point of Black Widow. She can kick ass and shoot stuff and all, but her REAL value is she's AN INTELLIGENCE AGENT. She's already read the dossier on the massive eldritch robotic space horror. She's got the blueprints. She's paid off the massive eldritch robotic space horror's college roommate and she's been rifling through his sock drawer. She's got a guy who knows a guy who happens to have the only anti-massive eldritch robotic space horror gun in the galaxy, and she's bribed the Kree ambassador to smuggle it to Earth.
>And all this was like three years ago. THAT'S Black Widow. Her super-power is being PREPARED.
Legally it's not, but a Black woman who swam there said she was treated rudely and kicked by multiple Hasidic women.
De facto it looks like it's a Hasidim-only time.
> In the pool — basically all the worst kind of passive aggressive lap swimming stuff: pushing off in front of you, jumping in front of you, not moving from the wall when you need to turn, etc., plus being kicked underwater, multiple times by multiple different people. In the locker room — cutting for the shower as though I wasn't waiting and staring, mostly. I've swam at other times, so I know it isn't just that the pool has a culture of chaos. And you know, it's possible other people found it calming and wonderful (and I am not sure how much being black would have to do with it either), but it was super uncomfortable so I stopped swimming them after a few tries, because who has time for that kind of shit?
My favorite comment on this so far is from this metafilter thread.
>"There's something bizarre about reading dispassionate, factual accounts of the Republican attack on NPR on NPR's own website. It's almost like a Monty Pythonesque scene with a journalist narrating their own disemboweling by a large grizzly bear.
>I think that's part of why I like them so much."
This reminds me of the amazing metafilter thread on emotional labor and particularly a comment explaining why sometimes women are too tired for sex with husbands who don't pull their weight at home. Operative quote:
> I pointed out that women are biologically disinclined to have sex with their caretake-ees
It reminds me of "Beyond," a short from The Animatrix where some kids find a "haunted house" that is actually full of glitches and lag in the fabric of reality.
EDIT: If you want to see this and other Animatrix videos, check out this post I put together for MetaFilter about the series with links to all the videos from it that are online.
I dislike Congress as much as anyone (probably more than most), but this isn't really true. See the discussion here.
Metafilter fills the bill for me. Its like Reddit for the cultural elite, and therein lies both its strength and weakness. Its hard to find more interesting material and more insightful and challenging commentary anywhere but, at the same time, some members there tend to go on annoying elitist ego binges.
Wow, I just checked and I’ve been there for 7 years. I’ve been on Reddit for just over 4 years. During that time I have, sadly, watched Reddit go downhill as its membership swelled. Meanwhile, Metafilter has kept its high standards... partly through pro-active moderation, and partly through a $5 membership fee - you can still view threads for free, you just can’t post stuff.
For what its worth, I used to be pretty active on Metafilter, but I spend a lot more time on good ‘ol effin Reddit now.
Don't I wish! No, I'm not very knowledgeable on the subject. Porn is more my area of faps-pertise, and specifically fetish porn. Even more specifically, fetish porn produced by Kink.com. Those guys and gals make some quality fetish porn, and the legal footwork they did that in effect allowed more weird and wild porn to be produced in the US is a service to pervs everywhere. I think without Kink.com, things like FetLife and reddit's own BDSMCommunity wouldn't be nearly as popular - they've done a lot to regularize fetishism for mainstream porn consumers and non-consumers alike, and the 2257-required pre- and post-interviews (which were supposed to let performers complain about acts they didn't consent to and thus were not legally obligated to perform, as happened when an Insex.com performer, tied up and gagged, was subject to an anal assault she had neither asked for nor consented to, and which she essentially couldn't stop (i.e., she was raped*)) have turned into a forum for all these hot freaky girls to let their freak flags fly, both in anticipation of some weird, wild, often public sex, and then in the afterglow of said events.
* I know, it's very hypocritical of me to lionize a company that allowed an adult performer to be raped on-camera. I have absolutely no good reason. It seems like a likely eventual scenario in that kind of situation, which is why I'm glad the 2257 rules are in place now, but it was fucked up, and Insex covered it up/wouldn't talk about it for a long time. I'm not sure what their official position is on it now, but there's a documentary on the company amd the incident I've never been able to make myself watch, if anyone's interested.
One of my favorite comments about Anonymous, from MetaFilter:
> Anonymous is like the T-rex at the end of Jurassic Park: it's not heroic, and I wouldn't want it to ever notice me, but I cheered when it took down those fucking velociraptors.
Okay, snail story time! (/u/Communist_Seagull and /u/yokayla, this is for you, too. And everybody else.)
So in 1846 this little snail, Helix desertorum, was collected from the Egyptian desert, put in a box, and brought all the way over to England to be a specimen in a museum. The curators reasonably thought that it was just an empty shell at that point, so they stuck it onto cardboard, put it in a glass case, and displayed it for all to see. For four years it stayed there just like everybody expected, glued in place and doing an excellent impression of an empty shell.
Then in 1850, it just...fucking woke up. Decided it had enough of sleep (four freakin' years) and wanted to see England. Only it was stuck, oops. So it ended up just sliming around the cardboard around where it was glued, until somebody noticed, and (I assume, after much freaking out) took it down, put it in some water to rehydrate, and gave it a cabbage leaf for its first holy-shit-you're-actually-alive meal. It lived for two more years, with as much cabbage and fame as it wanted, and it even sat for a portrait, until it died in 1852. And here are its pictures. (sauce)
"One day in 1984 character actor Stephen Tobolowsky (Groundhog Day, the original, unaired pilot of Buffy The Vampire Slayer) was walking down the street when Jonathan Demme pulled up and asked if he wanted to see a movie he was finishing. Tobolowsky accepted: taking his girlfriend Beth Henley, they went to the Academy Linwood Dunn Theatre to watch the rough cut of the movie, Stop Making Sense. The audience in the otherwise empty theatre consisted of Tobolowsky, Henley, and Demme, along with members of Talking Heads, including David Byrne and Tina Weymouth. Later, Byrne passed Tobolowsky on his bike and asked if he wanted to work on a new movie. Interest sparked again, and during the ensuing collaboration Tobolowsky shared his past experience of psychic phenomena. Inspired, Byrne went on to write Radio Head. The song was heard by Thom Yorke and became the name of his band."
From Metafilter
I started looking through my saved posts for stuff to post in this thread and damn, I can complain about reddit going to the dogs, but there's a lot of good stuff on here in comments and in posts. Just going through I was reminded of all the stuff I've saved that I've never gotten to revisit because there's just too much of it.
The Internet is pretty cool.
A sampling:
Here's the tl;dr for the Fistula Foundation and dude, there are few causes more noble. It's a seriously fucked-up thing. More, from an old Mefi post from long ago.
The What A Cartoons were fantastic. The whole project was the brainchild of Fred Seibert, the same guy who helped create MTV's astronaut logo, develop the orange splat and doo-wop brand identity for Nickelodeon, and now produces Adventure Time for Cartoon Network. Dude's a genius.
If you want to watch more of the What a Cartoon shorts (plus a lot more stuff, like CN's Groovies), check out this old post I wrote about it for Metafilter. It's a couple years old and YouTube-heavy, so there are some broken links, but the content is solid, especially if you were a kid in the 90s.
He was using the plannedchaos account to pose as a third party, to argue with people about e.g. what Scott Adams thinks, how smart Scott Adams is, etc. His first comment in the thread was here:
http://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Education-by-Scott-Adams#3637648
Which wouldn't have been a problem formally speaking if it was Scott signing up to say "hi, I'm Scott Adams and I'm gonna tell you what I think and how smart I am". It's the deliberate misrepresentation makes it a problem on mefi.
Metafilter was responsible for my first peak trans, but I think I've peaked again with this one. A user -- who I suspect has no experience with trans people whatsoever, given his demographic, but who clearly would like to be seen as a virtuous ally -- linked to a cringeworthy poem about a child who was abused for liking the wrong toys and who subsequently discovers his true identity as a girl. (What a happy story! Isn't it great that the family came to understand that the boy that they scolded for skipping around the house is really a girl? If only they had known, they probably would have let him color with pink crayons from the get-go!) Antics follow in the comments, including a comment that "TERFs" are "co-opting nonbinary." Yes, friends, if you believe that genitals are irrelevant to personalities and preferences you are a TERF and you are co-opting nonbinary identities. Isn't it great, being a progressive?
It is now time to talk about The Wheel.
Note: This may be the most incredible and bizarre story of parenting gone wrong I have ever read on the internet. Whether it's true or not, it's a great read.
> Right now, the story seems to be "Women can do science!.... as long as they dress and act enough like men."
There was a metafilter post a while back about teen vogue that turned into women discussing their experience (not) performing femininity in the comments. A few women there talked about men being nicer when they were being more feminine versus men respecting them more (professionally) when they performed more masculine so this does seem to be a common experience.
If you want to understand what this deal really means, here's what I wrote on Metafilter.
Hint: John is not a millionaire. Rather, John is now in the position of a professor who just got tenure.
First sentence in that article:
>Christopher Lee was Ian Fleming’s cousin. Both were distantly related to Charlemagne...
Aaaaiii! Pretty much everyone of European ancestry is distantly related to Charlemange!!
Sorry, had to get that off my chest.
>good reddit alternatives
There's always Metafilter. It's much smaller than Reddit, but very active, well-moderated, people there generally write in complete sentences, and no one ever whines about feminism. Plus, there's a $5 dollar entry fee which keeps out all but the most dedicated trolls, so most discussions are in good faith.
One of my all-time favorite Internet comments. Long but worth the read.
>They mentioned and showed several other ships, we just don't know what happened to them.
I was reading another discussion about this movie recently which suggested that the Axiom sustained itself for so long by cannibalizing the supplies of the other ships -- leaving their inhabitants to die.
EDIT: I was thinking of this Metafilter comment by user Eddie Mars; there's more discussion of the idea at the link, but note that MeFi doesn't have threaded comments, so you have to read through everything to find responses.
(Also, holy shit highest rated comment. Thanks, Eddie.)
MetaFilter.com - a community blog with excellent links, excellent discussion, excellent moderation, and a Q&A section that makes Yahoo! Answers look like chickenscratch (which is admittedly not hard to do).
Another stupid generalization I've read several times over the years in defiance of processed foods is "Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food."
There sure are a lot of "foreign" (eg. asian) healthy foods I would have no doubt she would not recognize... so I guess instead its going to be a bowl of sugar for lunch.
I suspect Adams' motivation is to prove that he is a master manipulator. By successfully defending someone as indefensible as Trump, he proves he's some kind of genius. He cherishes narcissism and self-promotion like it's his religion. You have to know a bit about Adams to know that this is entirely fitting with his character.
In 2011, he created a sock puppet account (plannedchaos) on metafilter to defend one of his articles, and he wrote about himself:
"Everyone on this page is talking about him, researching him, and obsessing about him. His job is to be interesting, not loved. As someone mentioned, he has a certified genius I.Q., and that's hard to hide."
"Is it Adams' enormous success at self-promotion that makes you jealous and angry?"
In defending his pitiful attempt at deceiving people, he wrote:
- "As a general rule, you can’t trust anyone who has a conflict of interest. Conflict of interest is like a prison that locks in both the truth and the lies. One workaround for that problem is to change the messenger. That’s where an alias comes in handy. When you remove the appearance of conflict of interest, it allows others to listen to the evidence without judging."
In other words, he was actually helping people get past their biases. Hilarious.
This image from the metafilter admins sending Adams an email summarizes the event. Note Adams' childish response. Would someone with a certified genius IQ get caught like this? Or behave like this in any way?
This is why Scott Adams thinks Trump is great. He sees a fellow narcissistic traveler. They live the same bullshit life of endless self-promotion with no substance.
I read this yesterday. It's so incredibly sad, and also weird that just a few days ago I read his final Metafilter post about character actors. I didn't know him or anything, but it was a bit odd to think that we sort of "crossed paths" in that Internet sense just days before he died. RIP, Bill.
Edit: I just did a quick browse through his Twitter feed and the guy was genuinely funny.
Edit 2: One of my favorites, he tweeted on April 19th - "is considering adding "Sent from my iPhone" to all his outgoing email, allowing him to type with reckless abandon and brevity."
Yes, every single throwaway gag in every single animated sitcom is a very serious attempt to establish canon forever and ever. That's what media subreddits have taught me, anyhow.
EDIT: No offense to OP intended! I realized I was being a little grumpy about this. I'm just getting tired in general of fans hatching theories about shows based on random pattern-matching. Yeah, we've gotten some amazing and indisputably real easter eggs, but I really think 90% of what happens in a show like Archer is more about trying to make the audience laugh than filling in every tiny shred of backstory. We really gotta look at this stuff with a healthy sense of irony.
The Igor theory isn't by far the worst I've heard... :) But it still feels a little far-fetched to me, since "Igor" already makes perfect sense as a snarky throwaway line... and what the hell would a Veddy English fellow like Woodhouse be doing with a name like "Igor" anyhow?! If it was that important to Adam, wouldn't he have thrown something Eastern European into Woodhouse's background too?
I dunno. Maybe it's just me. I've been a little traumatized ever since the goddamn Viking thread.
He's been a caricature for a long time. Years ago on Metafilter, someone linked to an article by Adams and the comments were very critical of him. He shows up with a sockpuppet to defend himself. He's unmasked fairly quickly and flees back to his safe space while claiming victory. He did the same on Reddit.
I don't have any of the old posts saved or anything, but with some quick googling I found a message board where a (supposedly) actual former prisoner from Michigan (where this guy claims to have been locked up) talking about all the things that were completely wrong about the story.
The last post questions its authenticity, then the debunking happens on the next page
[](/party) And then I said "Oatmeal? Are you crazy?"
[](/sp)[](/lyra) In unrelated news, I saw that the Horse Wife tumblr has been posted on metafilter:
http://www.metafilter.com/151396/excited-horse-noises
Hi Dr. Watts -- big fan! I was the one who put together this in-depth guide to your work the other day for anybody unfamiliar -- thanks for dropping by in the comments!
I was curious about the names you chose in Blindsight -- they seem split between the fairly ordinary (Susan James, Amanda Bates, Jim Moore) and the unconventional (Siri Keeton, Isaac Szpindel, Jukka Sarasti). What made you decide on these names? Do they have any deeper meaning?
edit: Heh -- for anybody wondering, the "MeFi" in Dr. Watts' OP is referring to MetaFilter, the community blog I posted that guide to and invited him to visit yesterday. This is Reddit, man -- don't cross the streams!
Did you see this Buzzfeed piece the other day? I found it linked on MeFi, where there was a spirited conversation about it. It''s a lot like what you're talking about, I think.
Also, there's a pretty funny Metafilter thread about this article full of people who just completely shocked by the fact that the youngest generation in America is more conservative and more sexist than the generation that came before, because wasn't history supposed to be progress and all that?
Theory: precincts still outstanding = taking longer to count = larger turnout = Sanders advantage
It was pretty much this: (Only, you know, individual reddit posts in scattered sequence.)
http://www.dorkly.com/post/77685/april-fools-webcomics
http://www.neatorama.com/2016/04/01/Maybe-I-Am-the-Fool/
http://www.metafilter.com/158312/Maybe-I-am-the-fool
It's an odd name for the phenomenon, because most of them aren't really denying AIDS exists, but denying that HIV causes AIDS. Towards the beginning of the outbreak there were some scientists who reacted with skepticism to the idea that HIV causes AIDS and published some alternate theories. Usually AIDS denialists cling on to those papers.
There are also current scientists who have more nuanced takes than the HIV=AIDS that is the modern understanding and sometimes their work gets misconstrued by AIDS denialists. Here is a direct response from a professor who has been accused of AIDS denialism but actually has a much more subtle take on it.
Ahhhhhhh, Metafilter. You old rascal, you old so-and-so.
Metafilter used to be a great resource for keeping up with the many ways Dick Cheney was lying to us, from around 2003 onward. You could go to Metafilter and now you'd know what the Daily Show would be covering about a week into the future.
But no one ever cracked the windows and let the echoes drain out of their chamber, even after the dawning of the Age Of Obama. It's been a constant feedback loop in there for over 10 years now, and the vibrations have caused every subatomic particle to spin as far to the left as it's possible to spin.
For that reason, it's actually a nice resource as a case study in how SJWs think. And it can be extremely entertaining when they run into, basically, victim contests where no one knows who the bad guy is and everyone has to go through an infinite loop of saying hateful things, then apologizing profusely using all the correct SJW keywords, again and again.
Some of my favorite threads:
The original 'Dickwolves' thread, where you can literally watch the last of the reasonable people leave the room forever ("Rape culture?"):
http://www.metafilter.com/100148/Phalluses-Wolves-and-the-Wheaton
A thread about a woman crying harassment because Trader Joe's was playing canned music from the 60s she found 'rapey.' A few people felt like this was taking the whole thing too far. They were summarily excommunicated.
http://www.metafilter.com/139806/Take-it-easy-babe
The Duke Nukem Forever thread ("we need to find a way to stop this game from ever being released"):
What would it be called then? I thought that emotional labor had a broad enough definition to include things like having to reject a man gently so as to spare his feelings (but with no expectation of the reverse), remembering the birthdays of family members on both sides and sending cards (once again with no expectation that your partner will do it), noticing the chores that need to be done and either telling your partner to do them or just doing them yourself since it won't get done otherwise and you've already asked them to do it so many times that it's more exhausting to ask than to just do it yourself.
I was mostly basing my definition off that Metafilter thread discussing the "Where's my cut?"article. http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor
>Lots of haters here. I hate Adams for his success too. But some factual clarifications are in order
I was on the fence, but this is incredibly dickish.
The funding does not matter, it's who carried out the poll that matters. It's Public Policy Polling (which does have a slightly blue bias, apparently).
Also, I'm inclined to trust Kos's polls. Remember that little scandal back in 2k10? Kos handled itself ok there, in my opinion.
Oh, wow, I just read about how that company is a creepy cult. And recently an employee murdered another employee in a store, while members of the neighboring cult did nothing.
It's not that managing your husband's social calendar is weird. It's the idea that women have roles that they taken on that aren't even viewed as roles. It's like they're running the administration for their husbands social lives even though they have their own lives to run. It's why isolation in elderly men is a huge thing that happens when their wives die because their wives have been the ones to manage their social lives for their whole lives up until they died. (Note this is not to say that elderly women don't end up socially isolated when their husbands die, it's just that it's a trend I've noticed more with elderly men than women). It's a metafilter thread that features stories from women that explains it better.
Oh, when I was first told it was Dave, he tells playboy otherwise:
http://www.ericspitznagel.com/playboy/bob-saget-20ish-questions/
http://www.metafilter.com/41802/Who-is-the-real-Bob-Saget
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1rdnvt/til_that_the_first_joke_bob_saget_ever_told/
>PLAYBOY: Legend has it that after the birth of your daughter, you told a comedian friend that he could “finger her for a dollar.” That’s just a very sick joke, right? You didn’t really say that, did you?
>BOB SAGET: I can’t lie and say it didn’t happen. I guess I could lie, but it’s too late for that now. The thing is, it was a very traumatic birth, and we almost lost my ex-wife. She was in intensive care the entire time. Paul Provenza, who directed The Aristocrats, came to visit me in the hospital. I was holding my baby, and I hadn’t slept and I’d been crying for four days. So obviously I was out of it and I wasn’t thinking clearly and… well… (Sighs deeply.) I don’t know what to say about this. I’m in huge amounts of pain. I know that my daughter and her friends are going to read this, and I don’t want to say anything that might hurt her. But it’s not one of those things I can just ignore and make disappear. I’ve said things I wish I could do over, and this would be at the top of the list. I guess the only thing I can really say in my defense is, I should’ve asked for more than a dollar. It should’ve been at least five bucks. This is my daughter, for god’s sake.
On a different discussion forum, Metafilter, there's the concept of "threadshitting" - the idea that posting dismissive, not-terribly-thoughtful comments early in a thread (especially comments that don't really respond to the article, such as if the person is responding to the general topic and hasn't fully read the specific article) can be really distracting and unhelpful, encouraging the rest of the thread to be similarly unconstructive.
We can do better than this - we can have a substantial and interesting discussion with thoughtful comments responding to the article. We do it on lots of other threads; we can do it here too. If you have a bone to pick with a specific part of the article, or if you want to support a specific part of the article, pull out a quote and write a thoughtful response with reasons - that will be much more interesting.
They used the obscenity laws to pursue him.
http://www.metafilter.com/84865/Graphic-Sexual-Horror-a-documentary
https://randazza.wordpress.com/2007/06/15/first-amendment-no-thanks-this-is-utah/
https://avn.com/business/articles/legal/max-hardcore-sentencing-postponed-54555.html
The great news with repealing net neutrality is you won’t have a choice whether that particular role-play is your style or not - even amongst consenting adults.
Comcast has decided for you - this pornographers isn’t for you.
I was pretty surprised to see them mention the emotional labor Metafilter post I read that post over the course of several days and it seems like that should ah-ha moment for them, like, "Women don't actually enjoy emotional labor, or feeling pressured to do certain things that fit into their role as females and therefore servants". But I suppose that would have been too self aware.
You are absolutely right. Muslims used to predominantly vote for the republican party, 70% voted for Bush in 2000 (http://www.metafilter.com/121606/70-of-Muslims-in-America-voted-for-Bush-in-2000). I doubt the Republicans will ever get those voters back.
NO. Public libraries are the main access point to online forms, tax information, genealogy, computer literacy study, and email for millions of working-class Americans. People wait in line for hours to use their facilities, and if we cared about the intellectual, IT and economic health of our nation, we would have three times as many.
Read this. Your encounter with homeless people at the library means we need better services for the homeless, not that libraries aren't deeply necessary.
"This coming from a writer whose books are so replete with adolescent homoeroticism I almost came in my dry goods reading Ender's Game in ninth grade." - Someone on Metafilter
Emotional labor. Society expects women to do most of the maintenance for social relationships: remembering birthdays, buying gifts, arranging outings, being an unending fountain of empathy, etc.
If you haven't taken a look at it, I suggested reading this MetaFilter thread (nicely organized into a 70-page PDF file here). Even as a woman, I found it eye-opening.
Like tests for jews in russian university examinations.
>From the document: The Mathematics Department of Moscow State University, the most prestigious mathematics school in Russia, was at that time actively trying to keep Jewish students (and other "undesirables") from enrolling in the department. One of the methods they used for doing this was to give the unwanted students a different set of problems on their oral exam. I was told that these problems were carefully designed to have elementary solutions (so that the Department could avoid scandals) that were nearly impossible to fi nd. Any student who failed to answer could easily be rejected, so this system was an effective method of controlling admissions. These kinds of math problems were informally referred to as "Jewish" problems or "coffins". "Coffins" is the literal translation from Russian; they have also been called "killer" problems in English.
http://www.metafilter.com/108272/Jewish-Problems
Modern US academia relies on essays and extracurriculars.
I think this comment from Metafilter is very relevant:
"...It is well-documented that most people, when confronted with horrors, completely panic and blank out. I believe there was an article on Metafilter earlier discussing a plane crash where most crash survivors were so traumatized they remained on the plane and burned to death rather than escaping. On 9/11 there are numerous accounts of office workers not attempting to escape, instead remaining at their desks while the buildings fell. It is not uncommon in serious war zones to witness even soldiers acting completely irrationally in the face of death and destruction, trying to rescue a comerade even though they're completely blown in half.
If you read the grand jury report, you would know another eyewitness is a janitor who was a Korean war vet. He saw Sandusky performing oral sex on a boy in 2000. He didn't help either--he panicked, ran, and when he recounted the incident to coworkers and higher ups he was so traumatized they all thought he was having a heart attack. He directly stated that he had seen many awful things in the war, but nothing as terrible as that.
SO. We would all like to imagine that we would enact our terrible revenge fantasies on Sandusky if put in that position. But none of us have ever been in that position. McQueary was nearly 30 and he ran to his father. Is that evidence of his cowardice, or evidence that what he saw was so deeply traumatizing that in that moment a grown man turned back into a child?..."
EDIT: More about panic inaction.
Yep. The most thorough analysis I've seen is from Jonathan Rhys Kesselman. He goes through three different options, and concludes that none of them is workable.
Simple and appealing ideas don't necessarily work in practice.
I think anti-poverty spending needs to be targeted, supporting the elderly, disabled, and working poor as well as the unemployed.
Policy should be aimed at maintaining full employment. It's much easier to supplement someone's earnings to bring them above the poverty line than to try to provide their entire income, and there's also negative social effects from concentrated unemployment (for example, see William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears).
- Monetary policy - when core inflation drops below 2%, the Bank of Canada lowers interest rates, boosting demand.
- Counter-cyclical fiscal policy - loosening fiscal policy during a severe recession (as Harper did in 2008), tightening it during a boom.
- Labour policy - I think we should be tightening restrictions on the Temporary Foreign Worker program.
- Tax policy - reducing marginal tax rates on the poor. The Canada Child Benefit reform helped here.
- Subsidizing low-wage earners (through the WITB).
- As a last resort, direct employment by the government.
This should be the top comment. Have an upvote. Regrettably, Mary Ellen Mark died a few days ago. Here's a MetaFilter post about her, and about the great documentary you posted a link to: http://www.metafilter.com/149949/Mary-Ellen-Mark-March-20-1940-May-25-2015
MetaFilter and reddit* are two very different cultures, both of which I really appreciate having available to me.
The MetaFilter signup page is more of a manifesto of what's expected of you if you want to have an account. It very clearly says that you'll get booted if you break the guidelines. The guidelines clearly state "Self-promotion isn't what this site is about." and anyone who has spent any amount of time reading the site is aware that gratuitous self-promotion is the easiest way to get banned.
Note that those are guidelines, not rules, and real human beings like joshmillard choose exactly when and how to enforce them. You can get banned for things that aren't explicitly listed there and you can break the guidelines but still remain on the site. The moderators do a good enough job of deciding how to maintain the community culture that people keep using the site.
[ * Edit: I accidentally a reddit ]
my name is Cow
and wen its nite,
or wen the moon
is shiyning brite,
and all the men
haf gon to bed -
i stay up late.
i lik the bred.
That probably has a lot to do with the workers being Chinese. I doubt you'd get those improvements in Germany for example.
Source: I work for a Danish engineering firm in China where, despite our best efforts, we see shoddy work and laziness from the operators all the way up to the Chinese draftsmen, production managers, and quality control department. This is so far after a year of working balls out to improve all of our processes, upgrade equipment, positive KPI incentives, etc.
We see the same shit with out sub suppliers, our customers, and other companies that are in the same industrial park. There's absolutely no pride in workmanship or desire to be efficient. When I first started, some of the guys in the plant would screw up on purpose because they would get overtime pay for staying late and redoing their work. It's insane.
Obviously there is neither a single explanation nor solution to this, but it's endemic and literally every single expat I've ever met working in manufacturing over here has a similar story. They even have a special word for it that basically sums up China in a nutshell "差不多", "chabuduo" which means "close enough".
Some links for further reading: Metafilter article
There's no need for anyone to even go to Jezebel. The entirety of Scott Adams conversation is in this Metafilter thread, just Ctrl+F search for PlannedChaos:
http://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Education-by-Scott-Adams
or look for the individual comments here:
http://www.metafilter.com/activity/128528/comments/mefi/
Either way this is pretty old news.
I've been catching up on Hugo and Nebula winners / nominees. I've been out of touch, and Reddit often gets a little ... circlerepetitive with suggestions.
You can read a lot of shorter Nebula nominees online for freeeee.
I'm reading The Goblin King by Katherine Addison. It's a pretty fun and fast read for a fantasy court intrigue type book.
Metafilter. It's got mods who truly care about cultivating quality posts and discussions and won't hesitate to step in to warn users to back off when things get heated or delete posts that cross the line. The community is pretty great and I find that even the posters I disagree with ideologically can be pretty great people who make some damn fine points. It's not perfect but it's the best I've found.
YSK that ads on the web are the main reason internet has been turned into a surveillance tool tracking your every click and profiling you.
See also: If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer,you are the product being sold
Read this: http://www.metafilter.com/151267/Wheres-My-Cut-On-Unpaid-Emotional-Labor
You are doing real work, but it's not considered work. It's twofold - managing his emotions and issues with your "No", because god forbid dudes have to actually take responsibility for their feelings, and the other part is actual, real, hands on work that is to your detriment, is tedious and time consuming. He should pay you.
This was posted over on Metafilter, and there are some solid comments.
>Humans are crazy, but Vulcans don't hang out with humans because they're crazy and provide research fodder. Vulcans are analytical and recognize that hanging out with humans is inherently dangerous, and research can be gotten much more safely and securely.
>No, the reason Vulcans hang out with humans is simple: because wherever the Vulcans go in the universe, every other race treated them as, at best, a potential co-operative ally. More often they were regarded as a potential resource to be exploited or, in worst cases, an enemy to be annihilated.
>But when the Vulcans made first contact with Earth - "what the hell is that insane thing these aliens here have built, let's go look at it" - humans didn't look at them as an enemy or a resource or even an asset. No, the very first time humans met Vulcans, they tried to do the Vulcan hand thingy and they couldn't do it so they just offered a handshake, and then said "let's get drunk and party." THIS IS ACTUAL LITERAL CANON, REMEMBER.
And then, in response to "This all seems to imply that the Federation is made up entirely of boys/men. Or more specifically, bros."
>To be fair, B'ellana “It’s some sort of chromo-dynamic module powered by a tripolymer plasma” Torres once built a highly experimental spaceship with controls that her boyfriend scribbled ona napkin out of his favourite videogame, and then made it go so fast it deevolved the captain and her boyfriend into lizards who had space lizard babies and one of the lizards looked at her.
>And she's half klingon.
>Just imagine what a fully human female chief engineer might build?
If anyone's looking for a rational place to discuss whatever happens tonight, try Metafilter. Their previous Ferguson threads were great and very informative with reporters and people on the ground checking in. I think most Ghazians would feel at home there, especially since Metafilter was extremely hostile towards GG.
And I'll be sticking around here. I know GG is far, far down the list of important things. It's nothing compared to what's happening in Ferguson. But it's therapeutic to see the bad guys floundering and losing for once. They seem to be winning a lot lately.
EDIT: If anyone was wondering how Metafilter treats GG, a post about Randi Harper's blocklist appeared tonight. A gator was brave enough to come into the thread and tried sealioning everyone. It did not go well for him.
The police is obligated to investigate any allegation of rape. Whether or not they actually believe it to be true.
Despite what you see on Law & Order: SVU, police officers are much more likely to be sceptic of any claim of sexual assault and/or rape than to adopt a position of blind, unwavering, belief in the veracity of said claim. http://www.metafilter.com/143893/So-no-I-dont-always-believe-them-and-yeah-I-let-them-know-that
Rare means just that: Rare. Unlikely. Not impossible.
Currently the top topic at /r/cheese.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Cheese/comments/27oriw/fda_to_prohibit_maturation_of_cheese_on_wooden/
Linking to metafilter discussion:
http://www.metafilter.com/139797/First-they-came-for-your-raw-milk-then-your-Parmigiano-Reggiano
>Moments after spawning, before I’ve even collected a single item, I encounter three heavily armed players on a beach. They tell me to put my hands up, then to kneel and not to move. They handcuff me and collect blood from me. Then one shoots me in the back of the head.
>This image is the moment of my death: you can see the shell casing from the rifle shot as I’m executed.
This is one of the most truly horrific things I've ever seen in a game. I guess shit like this really would go down if the world became completely lawless overnight, but that doesn't make it any less upsetting.
As much as I enjoy survival horror as a genre, I don't think I have the stomach for DayZ. The idea of actual people, not AI, behind acts like this is just too sickening.
edit: I found this tumblr on metafilter, and one of the comments there is just amazing: "It's the perfect Libertarian Utopia simulator."
exactly
10 to 1, dollars to donuts, this game becomes a reddit classic overnight.
Sure. I wish I could say that I parachuted into Pyongyang as part of a ninja black ops mission and escaped with my posters by swimming across the Tumen River under fire. Actually, though, it was persistent web research and developing personal contacts.
Years ago, I saw a post on metafilter (I think) about N. Korean propaganda posters. I started calling poster dealers and curators, and as the degree of difficulty in obtaining them became more apparent, so did my desire to get some. I have a friend in Shanghai who owns an art gallery and he made a few inquiries over time and pointed me to another gallery in Beijing. They said that occasionally, a buyer of theirs could get out of N. Korea without having the posters confiscated. Sometimes, they'd let one of the industrial/agricultural posters get through, but rarely one of the more militant ones. I waited for a long time, and once in a while, I'd get an email with a couple of posters they'd acquired. I wanted one of the militant posters, so it took some patience.
There was a firefly con that went to shit as well. I think it was called Flanvention?
Edit: my memory for once serves me fairly well. It was Flanvetion II. The fans got together and organised a backup bash and some of the stars who were due to attend came anyway unpaid.
Intellectual Property is the final frontier of Real Estate. Compare it to land and resource ownership. If someone buys up the entire desert between two cities and those cities want to connect a water pipeline through it, guess who gets money just for signing their name? The exact same thing is happening in IP today.
There's an entire economy of people supported by nothing, nothing at all except for negotiating terms for use of patents, fictional characters and music. Perhaps you've read that they want to control flavors, scents and colors too? These lazy cretins don't even blink at sending teenagers to jail for downloading movies because they have to justify their conflated budgets. The more havoc they cause, the more lawyers and thieves get paid. And remember: they produce nothing.
If something ever enters the public domain here in the states, then all derivative work is immune to litigation and-- GASP! --people would be able to publish this heritage work without paying licensing to any pointless agencies, establishing a new publishing economy which isn't entirely dependent on their imprimatur. Yes, it's literally about locking out any competition.
I'm not exaggerating when I say there are people who want to own all creativity outright and police which artists and engineers are allowed to work. If that sounds bananas, try to remember the last time someone wanted to ban a book or establish yet another approval agency and remember it happens every damn day.
There are cheaper beers, there are better beers, but there is no cheaper, better beer.
edit: source -
> I pretty much "grew up" drinking Yuengling - the friends who taught me to drink in college were beer snobs, just undergrad beer snobs without much spare cash. Where so many of our peers chugged vast quantities of Milwaukee's Best ("The Beast") or Keystone Light, we drank a lot of Yuengling lager alongside Iron City's offerings. When out of towners express curiosity about it, I reflexively recite the cliche:
>"There are cheaper beers than Yuengling. There are better beers. But there is no cheaper, better beer."
Craig Ferguson is probably my favorite late-night host. Here's a round-up I did awhile back of some of his best bits for anybody who's not familiar with him.
A comment from Metafilter, around the time of the writers' strike:
> >Really, how hard could this be? > > > >CHASE: House, we need to cure this patient. He is very sick. > >HOUSE: Did you try the medicine drug? > >CHASE: I did try the medicine drug. > >HOUSE: Only stupid people try the medicine drug. You are stupid. > >PATIENT: I would rather not be sick. > >HOUSE: You are stupid too. Did you take stupid drug? > >FOREMAN: I gave patient stupid drug. > >HOUSE: You are a black man. > >FOREMAN: This vexes me. > >PATIENT: I have blood from my nose that is dripping. > >CAMERON: That's bad! > >PATIENT: Also I was bitten by mice due to my poor hygiene. > >CUTTY: You need hygiene drug. Also, I have not spoken in awhile. > >HOUSE: No! Hygiene drug will kill Patient! He needs mouse bites to live! > >CHASE: [Shocked] > >CAMERON: [Shocked] > >FOREMAN: [Vexed] > >HOUSE: More mouse bites! > >CUTTY: I forbid this. > >HOUSE: Don't care. > >CHASE: [Gets mice] > >HOUSE: [Makes mouse bite serum] > >PATIENT: I feel better. No more nose blood! Thank you doctor! > >HOUSE: I am very smart. > >WILSON: I, too, am in this episode. > >FOREMAN: This vexes me. > > > >~FIN~ > > > >Seriously, Hollywood? My phone number's in the book. Give me a call.
> It's free because the Chicago market is very competitive which is good for you...
> It's our job to bring them qualified tenants who will be a good match and for this service, they pay our brokerage 1 month's rent...
> If you were my client, my fiduciary duty is to find you the best deal for your needs and wants...
Somebody once said, "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
It's a noble idea, but perhaps a bit misguided?
http://www.metafilter.com/113608/we-dont-want-your-shoes http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/10/11/haiti_doesnt_need_your_old_tshirt http://www.talesfromethehood.com/2010/04/20/swedow/
This is a cool documentary .. edit : As dacaeq points out, turn on subtitles, unless you are Dutch and can speak all the languages of the world.
And this is a great mefi thread on Demoscene with lots of examples
Isn't there an app for android that can stream video to a secure server in case police take possession of the phone? That way if they delete the video, it's still saved on a remote server. This kind of app is becoming necessary now that the police routinely destroy evidence and fabricate stories to assert their authority.
GAH thank you for understanding! It's been hard to find the specific overlap of RF and MeFi but seriously MeFi has been a very important community to me for SO LONG (well only since 2011 so not as long as you!) and I am absolutely shocked at their stance on gender/sex.
My most recent angering thread is here: [http://www.metafilter.com/169830/an-informal-inquiry#7189738!]
[](/rabmeh) I'm kind of abhorrant about the general treatment of humanity on reddit, sometimes.
I've said this before in this "should we be in /r/all?" post, but reddit has a reputation in other Internet places as a hive of pseudonymous jerks. There's a lot of great subreddits here (not just MLP), I am occasionally reminded there's also a huge teeming mass of jerks just over the fence.
From 2003:
http://www.metafilter.com/23230/Portland-Thai-Restaurants-discovers-Indentured-Servitude
"Here's the gist: Typhoon, a Portland chain of Thai restaurants, sponsored two cooks to come over from Thailand. Once here, the restaurants said they would help them get their green cards but the cooks would have to sign a contract which bound them to the restaurant for five years, prevented them from working at any other Thai restaurant in the vicinity of Portland for three years and required them to repay expenses three times over if they left the restaurant.
When the couple backed out of the agreement, the restaurant set the INS on them who ended up arresting them and held them for four days."
From September:
"workers who were recruited to come over from Thailand were:
• Not paid proper wages
• Not allowed raises
• Required to work longer hours than U.S. employees
• Not given the same vacation time as U.S. employees
Even worse, apparently when Thai workers complained, they were threatened with job termination, deportation back to Thailand, and even legal action against them."
> I no longer feel like MetaFilter is a place that cares about what I care about, and in fact it often began to seem outright hostile.
You aren't imagining that, either. That's why a lot of us are here, because we see that hostility being accepted as long as it is directed towards the 'wrong' kinds of people. For example, this new post has the WORST framing (deliberately demeaning, provocative title), and has clearly just been put up as an excuse to point and laugh. But not only did it not get deleted, it was posted by a moderator.
> And to be anti-feminist is to be anti-woman.
Holy shit, I say that as a joke, winky ridicule that likens them to stormfronters. A Mefite said that without irony.
Based on stories I have heard I don't judge people who use handicapped spaces. A lot of times the disability isn't visible — for example, a young person with rheumatoid arthritis will look entirely healthy, and can walk around, but does so in significant pain. They will have the same issue on buses — they really need to use the "for disabled person" seats at the front of the bus but no one will yield them a seat because they appear young and healthy. So many of them will get off the bus and wait for one where a seat is free rather than having to explain that standing would be agony.
This case seems a bit fishy but like I said I don't judge. Here's a great thread about it: http://www.metafilter.com/80454/Halls-of-Shame
That reminds me of another crazy lady who got conned into buying land for a libertarian utopia.
http://www.metafilter.com/142267/Shrug >I claimed it because I fell head over heels for the most beautiful tree I've ever seen. I felt an instant connection as though the two of us were old souls who had found each other. I could believe it, I could see it... waking up each morning and having coffee under that tree, telling it about my plans for the day.
http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/35591/Wendy-McElroy-The-Fate-of-Galts-Gulch-Chile/
There was a long ass Metafilter post that touched on this and on the tidal wave of misogyny that Anita Sarkeesian just recently faced.
On the double standard at play here on user noted that of all the games they could think of that involved male protagonists in prison settings (where the statistics for rape are reversed), not one seemed to feel the need to make that a plot point.
Thanks for sharing this.
From that same page, the submitter clarifies that the story was exaggerated:
> "Thanks to all for the feedback. The story is mostly false - my sister's name is not Shelly, she is not in an institution, nor did she get accepted to Princeton. The Wheel, however, did exist briefly for a summer, created by my physicist father and later removed by my non-dead mother. My sister, the real one, did have horrible luck and I really was a lucky sumbitch, which is what led to The Wheel's removal. There was no option D that turned victory to sorrow and neferious deeds to filthy lucre.
>I have in recent months attempted to resuscitate The Wheel as a tool for training the pet rabbits. This has met with mixed results as rabbits, as a species, are not bright enough to associate punishment or reward with their behavior. Beef Wellington, the youngest, does enjoy going for a spin though. My wife has already vetoed any application for The Wheel on our own future children. Given the steely look in her eye whenever I mention it, I'm pretty sure the idea will always be a non-starter."
And here's some software to set up your own Wheel! Complete with 90s gradients.
My guess is the Jesse Jackson AMA. It was as if all of Stormfront came out to lynch Jesse Jackson in that thread. Fucking disaster. Embarrassing for Reddit. Fucking shit-show.
For those of you questioning this... I refer you to this post about how Stormfront has been actively targeting Reddit for a while now, and also this article about the "Chimpire" (and yes, just because the original source is Gawker does not mean that the article isn't to be trusted. Read it yourself, look up what it says, and decide for yourself.)
Depends on what you want to do; one of the undisputed greatest bassists of all time only played with his right index: http://www.metafilter.com/75769/James-Jamerson-Motowns-Secret-Weapon
I picked up the bass after being inspired by Steve Harris, to that effect I worked on three finger gallops, then found out he only uses two.
Are you planning on being a pro? Then learn like a pro, which means all of the right hand methods including a pick.
But hell, when you're in the moment, forget that you have hands and let them make the decision.
The guy sounds like a dickbag. He claims he couldn't stop, or even come to a slower and safer speed. Why do I think he was riding a brakeless fixie?
Edit: Rumors are yes, he probably had a fixed gear with no brakes.
Metafilter had a very interesting thread about Anderson a few days back:
http://www.metafilter.com/111182/
tldr:
Anderson was wearing six-inch platform shoes while filming the duel in Empire Strikes Back.
The reason the Princess Bride swordfight is so awesome is that it was a compilation of sorts of the best of what Anderson had done while choreographing Errol Flynn.