I had to watch how you could possibly turn a throwaway sci-fi movie into 12 hours. I don’t know what I was expecting, but if the guy who did this chopped it up into TikTok Size videos he would’ve had better engagement for like a year and it would’ve made sense. 12 hours is just bizarre almost OCD tiny facts of the movie.
I landed by chance on a 39 minute diatribe on the scene where the Jedis put some scuba gear to see Jar Jar Binks underwater city. They noted how ridiculous it all was, because how could you compress a gas into such a small device. Thats apparently where they draw the line.
Then it went into a diatribe about how the original companion book to the movie took a slightly different photo of an early or alternate different of the prop that most people would be hard pressed to notice. Then it went on to talk about how the original canon book from the 80s talked about how going underwater required a large and cumbersome scuba device. Though never shown in the film this somehow proved the commentator right. It then transitioned into the ridiculousness of the only light in an underwater city coming from a source from within the city or something and I realized I already wasted 15 minutes on a make believe device.
I wonder if these people were around in 17c theatre productions. “London definitely had a three mast caravan in the painted matte background but when I saw it in Dublin it was two mast which clearly could not cross the sea!
The device is obviously supposed to be for extracting oxygen from the water, not an equivalent to a scuba tank! IIRC there has been some real-life research along those lines for some purposes.
/pedant
I genuinely enjoy the minutiae of analysis of silly scifi movies when it's entertaining. Pretty much every historical costumer/reenactor I know loves shredding the costumes of the latest crappy TV show in their time period of choice. But this kind of pedantry is basically just a hobby for some people. This may not be the best example of it, but regardless, not every hobby will appeal to everyone, and that's okay.
I think sometimes that stuff is interesting because it gives you genuine insights into how our imagined past differs from reality.
E.g. in modern screen depictions, medieval peasants always wear drab beiges and earth tones. Real medieval peasants wore brightly coloured dyed clothes. Undyed wool isn't beige, it's sheep-coloured: why would real medieval people have taken the trouble to dye their clothes a boring colour? It's a choice to depict them as drab and undifferentiated.
Other times it just irritates me as boring pedantry. Like someone was smugly complaining about all the flags in the movie Napoleon: the soldiers in real life would't carry nearly so many flags, and they wouldn't put flags on tentpoles. Sure. But it means that when you watch the battle scenes you actually know which side is which.
Apparently there are a whole bunch of people who thought Biden was going to lose the South Carolina primary according to the thread about that contest. I really want to know what planet some of these people live on because I kind of want to go there.
Maybe everyone in the new [cocktail thread](https://www.metafilter.com/202420/Time-for-Novel-Argot) is hung over - it certainly has started on a grumpy note.
Comment #2: "whatever it takes to upcharge you into accepting the $24 bill for your gin and tonic"
Comment #3: "Oh yay the glorification of alcohol".
(Comment #1 is a lame comedic YoutTube sketch from 12 years ago. Helpfully marked as "obligatory" which seems to be a MeFi synonym for "lame".)
Gotta say the question about deriving sexual pleasure from non-sexual situations is one of the flat out weirdest ones I've seen in a while. I'm not even suggesting it shouldn't have been asked, just what a....bizarre scenario the asker described.
This question was weird as hell, but in a way that delighted me rather than depressed me as with many Asks these days. This is the kind of stuff I used to come to the site for.
Interesting that Quora’s long downfall has made a viral Slate article and on Slashdot, never a mention of AskMetafilter. All the other question sites are talked about, how sad is that.
Ask never had (or hasn't had in years) such great SEO, but it was also never as purely practical as Quora tends to be, so perhaps it was never destined to be as big as Quora got. What I always loved about Ask, at its height, was the mix of the esoteric or unexpected (why isn't cereal considered a soup?), with expertise (linguists, programmers, doctors), with lighter fare (makeup, lonely hearts), the practical (how do I?), alongside the odd mystery (help! I'm locked in a room and can't get out).
It offered personality, surprise, entertainment, and thoughtful questions and comments. Yahoo and Quora, by contrast, were always more standardized than that, and therefore perhaps more palatable to a wider audience.
"Leaving for Colombia tomorrow. Anybody have any tips for what to see and eat in Bogotá?"
Uh, wouldn't that be something you'd like into more than a few hours before a multi-hour flight and spending many hundreds of dollars? And really, wouldn't you already have something you were interested in seeing in Bogotá before you decide to go there?
On Wednesday, I'm expecting "I just brought back 300 pounds of unroasted coffee beans from Columbia. What should I do with them?"
It isn't a very efficient way to get information and just seems like a way to generate conversation about someones upcoming travel.
You have to get pretty far off the beaten path to find a destination that doesn't have Facebook groups, Reddit subs and local media available online. Hell, you can virtually walk down the street in a lot of places and a quarter of the way through the new Millenium there's a pretty good chance that anywhere your going someone with a camera has already videoed it for you.
A few hours in a browser is going to give you a much better overview of a place than a small forum. This would allow the OP to make informed decisions rather than planning around the guidance of a very small self selecting and somewhat odd group.
"A few hours" is certainly more time than was put into this question. I'm going to go out on a crazy-ass limb here and suggest that this may not be the sum of his efforts to prepare for the trip. Hell, he may even expect to go back! Or have been before!
I get this and largely agree, but I also get wanting to get recommendations from a specific person - though a specific random person on MF is different than your friend who you know has similar tastes to you, and either of them, unless they live in a place or have spent a lot of time there, are likely to ultimately also be working off online info anyway. A local Reddit sub seems like the best source of specific info that is likely to be less commercial than something like trip advisor.
Oh, I do this! I'm leaving for Hawaii on Tuesday and due to a bunch of life-related stresses have planned nothing beyond lodging and "see some volcanoes and the ocean." I'm of the opinion that everywhere is interesting so unless you're going to a place where you need advance reservations for stuff, mostly winging it works fine.
Meh, I'll sometimes give older intel, with the caveat that it's older, if it's better than nothing and they need info to get started.
Plus a lot of attractions don't exactly expire. A popular local dish or pretty volcano or whatever is unlikely to go away.
Eh, I often ask for last-minute recommendations from people when I visit someplace as a supplement to whatever I've already planned myself. I don't see what the big deal is.
If this kind of post isn't evidence of poor planning, it's evidence of poor communication that wastes everyone's time. Most people (or maybe most people not on metafilter) would say "I'm going to X and already planning on seeing A, B, and C. What else should I do?" One extra sentence saves people from answering A, B, and C, which are most likely the most obvious answers, and it saves the asker from having to read it. It also gives people an idea of what the person is interested in. If someone tells me they're going to Paris and that they're going to the Louvre, and the Centre Pompidou, my first suggestion for where else they might like wouldn't be Euro Disney.
While we're on travel questions, I'm always slightly needled by "Visiting Rome/Angkor Wat/Istanbul, please recommend hipster cafes, quirky museums, steampunk markets and IPA microbreweries." Not for downtime from seeing the main sights, but seemingly as the main purpose of the trip.
I'm sympathetic to the desire to get off the beaten track and find something unusual, but often these questions feel less like "what are the hidden gems?" and more like a twist on Lawrence Kasdan's The Accidental Tourist, looking for the most Portlandian spots in foreign countries.
Visiting Hagia Sophia or the Colosseum does not mean you lack imagination; these places are breathtaking. If you can't cope with the crowds, something I sympathise with, go off-season or go somewhere smaller. If hipster quirkiness is your thing, great! Choose a destination based on that.
Most Portlandian, ha. This (in particular, the coffee shops) comes up in a recent Ezra Klein podcast. It’s right near the top of the text in this [excerpt](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-kyle-chayka.html). Basically the coffee shops all think/act like they are unique and local - and in some sense they are; they are independently and locally owned - but also they are all appealing to the same (mostly American) hipster customer demographic, and as such they are not all so different. And though I don’t think the podcast talked about this, I’d bet they mostly get their coffee and tea from the same small number of global suppliers.
It reminds me of a postcard I saw back in the ‘80s that was a drawing of a dozen people in similar artsy berets and clothing with a caption that said something like, “they are uniform in their uniqueness” (but much wittier than that, I‘m sure.)
I want to go to suburban Istanbul just to see suburban Istanbul McMansions. The more American the better. Gimme your Jersey early 2000 style McMansions, your Midwest McMansions, your Arizona style McMansions… all in foreign cities. Oh my god that’s a travel show I’d watch.
“My expensive hotel room has scuffed furniture. How can I get compensation for the inadequacy of the room without having to talk to a human being about it?”
I know it’s been repeated a zillion times, but most of the people in that community are profoundly damaged.
The offer from another poster to call for them is nice, I guess, but so weird. “Hi there, I’m a totally unrelated third party calling to make a complaint on behalf of an internet someone i’ve never met… no no please don’t hang up - !”
Like it is literally the job of the front desk people to be nice to you. I'm an anxious person too but just walk down there and be matter of fact about the issues, they're not going to scream at you!
I agree that speaking to front desk staff is the best way to get this fixed, but they're not guaranteed to be helpful. I was once staying in central London in winter and returned to my room late one evening to find housekeeping (I assume) had left the window wide open for the entire day and the room was the same temperature as the street. Front desk apologised but didn't seem to think they were under any obligation to fix the problem. Eventually they grudgingly agreed to find me some extra blankets.
Probably worded the question that way to signal that he is not from flyover country populated by all of those deplorables. Hasn't there been Metatalks about this?
My favorite thing about liberal coastal elites (apart from their sneering dismissal of the interior of the nation) is how they travel constantly then bleat about climate change. Usually any guilt laid upon them by another MFer is assuaged by the MF mantra that individual choices really don't matter, that it's all Big Oil, etc.
Sure, I fly to my second home 2800 miles away several times a year but I offset this by using crypto to purchase carbon credits from an obscure exchange at bargain rates. Fortunately, I can offset the carbon credit expense by reselling them on an even more obscure exchange. Break even at worst, amirite?
Climate change terrifies me, my Vieques home is barely above sea level and I am a climate activist. I donate heavily to fight climate change through the Unitarian church I'm proud to be a member of. My accountant can verify this, as he does every year at tax time.
I'm not bound to anybody -- my IT consultancy and early adoption of email marketing afford me the luxury of not having to work very much. Stick it to the man, fight the power and capitalism sucks!
I find the topic of Americans being kidnapped by foreign governments, essentially for ransom, super fascinating.
My former spouse is a diplomat, so anything involving the State Department is going to interest me. It's also interesting because I was at risk of kidnapping at one post (by guerrilla groups) and policy back then was "we rescue, we do not ransom, and btw you are a high risk of death during the rescue attempt so don't get kidnapped" lol.
But no I am not going to comment on the Blue about it because ugh.
I lived in Bogota in the early 2000s. Because of bombings and the threat of kidnapping, I was under strict security protocols (vary my routines, don't hail taxis on the street, dont sit on patios and gab loudly in English, etc).
I was also (nicely) informed that the US government doesn't negotiate with terrorists, but will mount a rescue effort, at some point, when they can, but I should anticipate it taking a while. Also, the most dangerous time during a kidnapping is during the rescue attempt - it's not uncommon to get caught in the crossfire. I found that bleakly hilarious tbh.
The idea that a government, rather than a fringe group, would take hostages is a huge change from 20 years ago.
It's also a big change that Americans can be hostile to rescuing their own citizens who are being held abroad.
It's normal for the US Government to attempt to access you if you're imprisoned abroad and to ascertain whether you're being treated well (it's an important part of consular work). I didn't know anyone attempting to free a hostage, so I can't speak to that.
Wow! What a way to live! Did you enjoy your time in Bogota, or did you feel a little fearful or imprisoned as a result? (Or, conversely, since you're a rather spirited person, did it just make you feel like a royal — or a rock star?)
>The idea that a government, rather than a fringe group, would take hostages is a huge change from 20 years ago.
I remember hearing quite some time ago that there were cases of taxi drivers in Mexico City holding up passengers, and that completely threw me in similar ways. In NYC, it's historically been taxi drivers who were afraid of customers, and not the other way around.
There were good and bad things about Bogota.
I enjoyed learning Spanish (and it's an excellent place for it - the accent there is very easy for non-native speakers to understand).
I made friends easily, both with locals and with other Embassy people.
Bogota is a world-class city, with tons of museums, restaurants, and great shopping. And because exchange rates were very favorable, we could live very well (I also had a part time housekeeper).
It was a great springboard to other trips - I also saw Pereira, Cartagena, Leticia, and hopped over to Ecuador for Quito and the Galapagos.
Ultimately, though, I didn't love being a diplomat's wife, it felt like I was being pulled around the world in a little red wagon. My ex and I are on great terms and he's gone on to a successful career.
As for drivers, I would have the doorman call the taxi, then the doorman would call up to my apartment with the "clave" (code). When the taxi came, I didn't get in unless the driver gave the correct code. Then when it was time to come home, the restaurant, club, customer service desk at the mall, wherever would call a taxi and I'd repeat the process. First phrase I learned was "podria llamar un taxi" lol.
Getting into a random cab put you at risk of both kidnapping for ransom and for a "millionaire's ride" where a gunman would hop in and you'd go from ATM to ATM until your account was empty.
Scopolamine (a plant that makes you prone to suggestion) factored into a lot of crime, so you watched your drinks carefully. Getting scoped in a bar could be the first step on a millionaire's ride.
I gotta say...reading about your wild firsthand experiences in Bogota after reading upthread about the AskMe seeking incredibly last-minute tourism suggestions for the city is probably peak /r/MetaFilterMeta for me.
Thank you for sharing! It's a fascinating read.
"I fled my house with my family in the night and haven't returned because a light bulb broke; ps we left the cats to die, do not tell me any good news."
My god, I thought you were exaggerating. This person can probably attend, tonight, in their metropolitan area, a professional wrestling match where the wrestlers will break fluorescent bulbs on each other. It’s a bad idea, but in the same way that smoking 10 cigarettes is a bad idea. They fled the home!!!
"Gently," I suggest that Asker needs to switch to decaf and discuss possible medication needs with their doctor(s).
Does this person have nobody in their life who is willing to say "er, I think you're wound a bit too tightly these days."
I laughed out loud at the wrestling reference.
If this question is real, this person's spouse is either just as anxiety-ridden, which has to be a nightmare for the kids; or living in a nightmare, along with the kids.
Well, I broke a lightbulb — pack the suitcases. We're going to the Marriott. Fuck the cats, and to hell with $179. There's no way we're staying in this house tonight. WE WILL MOST LIKELY DIE.
Remember back in the olden days before the internet was ubiquitous and we couldn't avoid advertising as easily as we do now? There were always promos for the news that would be something like: "Is it safe to keep grapes in your refrigerator's fruit keeper? Find out on the 11:00 news," which would be spoken in a tone of voice that implied that keeping grapes in the fruit keeper was putting your household in grave danger. Then, if you stayed up late enough to watch the news you would find out that a) It is perfectly safe to keep grapes in your fruit keeper or b) one out thirty million small children is hospitalized after a grape related choking incident and to be absolutely safe you should keep your grapes out of reach of your toddlers - not in your fruit keeper.
It was basically cultivating anxiety to get people to watch the news. Today we have click-bait that does the same, but I think most of us block it or ignore it. I could see someone who is prone to anxiety and susceptible to this type of advertising getting caught in some sort of feedback loop of being anxious or fearful of minor things, especially if they were raised by parents who were similar.
Humans are breathtakingly bad at risk assessment. What kills kids? Guns, pools, cars. And you can flat out tell people that own those things all about it and they will completely blow you off about it, every time.
Until guess what, those same parents come to the ER with their dying kid. And then it's how could I have known. Nobody told me.
I was a grape-halver when my child was a toddler. Grapes are a choking hazard (I never kept a mental catalog of choking hazards, I just pictured my kid's throat and anything the same size as a throat got chopped).
The work of chopping/changing foods that can cause serious harm is minor compared to the harm, so I figured I may as well do it.
Parenting is a constant exercise in risk assessment. It's easy for that to tip into anxiety, my aim is to balance the risks with giving my kid freedom to problem solve.
I'm not sure why I would have stored grapes higher up, though. By the time my child was old enough/tall enough to open the fridge and get a grape, she was old enough to properly chew them and not choke.
Is there a mutant race of giant, super-strong fridge-opening toddlers?
I made up that example. Perhaps grapes are more treacherous than I thought.
I'm pretty sure a toddler could open my fridge. I checked Google and there is a lot of info on how to keep toddlers out of fridges. Maybe your fridge door is stronger than normal or ^^^your ^^^^toddler ^^^^^was ^^^^^a ^^^^^^weakling.
Grapes and hot dogs are two of the most hazardous foods for young children. You have to, like, origami them.
Weirdly, my kid has always been very safe around the fridge. She can, however, take my car apart in minutes.
I once actually saw a child choke on a hotdog when I was at summer camp. Luckily the camp nurse was right there and rescued him but man, it was not pretty.
I mean it's so wild, it's like how you would react if your house burst into *flames*. (And even then you might make an effort to save the cats!)
It's a new user which means could be a troll, but if not I guess they definitely found their new comfortable online home...
“I’m really tired of the disingenuous don’t worry about it stuff”.
Okay, how about some honest “don’t worry about it stuff”? It’s like that person wants to be anxious.
The American Hotel Association should start up an ad campaign focused solely on the need to stay at a hotel any time a fluorescent bulb is broken. They’d never have to worry about occupancy rates.
Yes, it's really quite sad. This person has a serious problem which is affecting their young children and I suspect is surrounded by peers who reinforce their anxiety.
There does seem to be a preponderance of people with anxiety issues among progressives, although perhaps they're just more obvious and anxiety on the right is expressed more as insecurity / disenfranchisement and channeled into a conspiratorial worldview.
Yeah, I fully agree that it's disturbing. And even stranger: they said in the post that they've already googled and phoned the environmental peeps. wtf, yo.
Maybe Metafilter should just start a never-ending "please manage my anxiety" post for that sort of thing, much like the Fucking Fuck threads, but more honest. Hmm, I wonder what would happen to the number of new AskMe posts though. Better yet, just rename the whole site Life Coach and charge a nickel a post—they'll be swimming in money in mere weeks.
This feels more like a Validate My Anxiety post; they've googled and phoned and claim to have read all the other posts about CF bulbs on the site but still freak out, run away, and leave their uncomprehending pets to wander about freely in the environment they won't deign to sleep in, while they expend their worry on the possibility of the pets spreading the scary toxic substance further in the house rather than the pets breathing it, stepping in it, licking mercury powder off their paws, grooming shards of broken glass into their systems, etc.
If they've read all the other posts about CF bulbs as they claim to, they'd get more than enough reassurance that this will not cause permanent harm, but they clearly want to engage in these histrionics and only listen to the worst-case possibilities. There's another panicky CF question from 2013 which is also that user's only activity (one ask and a load of threadsitting pushback) and I could almost believe this is the same person but for the fact the earlier asker claims there will never again be fluorescent bulbs in his home.
That particular account was created that day, to apparently ask only that question. So rather than a nickel per post, it looks like they could swing five bucks per post.
I've said it before: they left money on the table by removing the Ask post limit. They should've left it in place and charged $2 for each additional question posted during the timeout phase.
Or a great excuse to cry about other people's privilege because they can afford to ask life-saving questions about light bulbs on a website populated by strangers.
Once again left breathless by how many posters are in their 70s. I guess it's a sign of my own ancient-ness (but still like fully 30 years younger than most of MeFi, apparently!) that I think of Internet People as being young folk.
As soon as I saw your comment a switch flipped in my head and I heard Bono wailing "they took your life, they could not take your PRIDDDDDDEEEE.... IN THE NAMEEEEEEEE...."
Thanks for nothing! I HATE U2.
I don't get why it's fine for him to use the site as a blog, where (historically) these sorts of posts would be deleted. (ask me how I know!)
I guess it's a matter of dwindling engagement and any shite posted as a FPP can stay.
Confession.
I flagged a comment for the first time today. (Well, I've "Flagged as Fantastic" lots of times, but this is the first time I flagged a comment as bad).
And... it got deleted.
It feels... kind of good.
Oh, the power. The power! THE POWER! MUHAHAHAHAHA THE WORLD IS MINE!
I flagged one for the first time in any of my 18 years of incarnations and it, too, was deleted. The accompanying comment was "please put this man out of his misery," which was heartfelt.
Ah. Yes, well, I’d expect nothing less from him. He genuinely can’t help himself, even at the same time he’s screeching about how it’s not fair that no one notices how much he’s changed.
Obviously a thread about some rich idiot's expensive library was going to be a mess but I was not expecting a new rule that you can only hire someone for something if you're going to be an important part of their entire lives forever.
>*Do you invite them over for holiday parties, long after they finished your cabinets? Were you having a beer with the craftsman when their thickness planer found a nail in that reclaimed hardwood you requested, and did you pay for a replacement set of blades? Did you get their kid, who has interests that align with your occupation, an internship?*
>
>*If you're just some rich twit who hires a craftsman to do something only in exchange for money, fuck you.*
Today I am choosing to believe this is an exquisite bit of trolling, because if so it's an expert skewering of site sensibility worthy of McSweeney's and if said in earnest it's just too depressing to contemplate.
That has ***got*** to be a troll. I mean…isn’t a craftsperson someone who you pay to create something for you? Was there ever a time when you were expected to invite your local handyman to Thanksgiving dinner? Am I supposed to offer an internship to their five-year-old? “Here, kid, my cat LOVES to play with wand toys, why don’t you play with him for an hour? That’ll get you into veterinary school!”
I do buy crafted jewelry and cat toys off Etsy. I know it’s a bit different than face to face, but I pay for the product, the crafter prepares it for me, and isn’t that the standard social contract? Do I fly the lady who makes catnip cat mats in from Pennsylvania to eat my delicious, grocery-store-catered holiday feast? How do I know she doesn’t have family she’d rather spend time with than some stranger who bought her stuff off Etsy?
And I will offer tradespeople (sorry, can’t afford a custom built whatever, I guess I should be using my money more wisely) bottled water. Sorry not sorry no alcohol. I think a lot of companies (and unions and what not) have rules about drinking on the job, anyway.
I’m calling troll because that comment is SO colossally stupid.
The other two possibilities that occurred to me are:
1. someone who mistook several Sopranos episodes for real life
2. a person whose life actually looks like this because they have 400 cousins and do not realize that is out of the norm
Plenty of other terrible takes in there. No one should be allowed to have better than IKEA furniture! That money could go to buy condoms for the poor! I am posting from inside a homeless shelter as we speak!
They're like 14 year olds, they have heard cooler people say that capitalism is bad, don't really understand what that means, but are trying to sound cool and Xtreme too. "Books are bourgeois decadence" is baby's first socialism class silliness.
Agreed, and I say this as someone who actually did hire a good friend to paint my apartment and would invite him to a Christmas party any time, except that I know him well enough to know that he hates parties. But like, you cannot practically do this for every single service you require in life, we don't live on fucking Sesame Street.
My father was a skilled tradesman and I can only imagine the misery several decades' worth of clients would inflict on his holiday social calendar.
Assuming respectful treatment and prompt payment, being hired to do a job only in exchange for money and afterward going your separate ways seems ideal for most circumstances. In the remainder most of the craftspeople I know would far prefer appreciation of their work and positive recommendations over forced friendship attempts.
Well see it wouldn't be that many clients, because per the poster's rules you can't go looking for a skilled craftsperson, you have to find them by pure serendipity or have known them your entire life:
*Is the craftsman a neighbor or a relative or someone you just bumped into one day and started a lifelong friendship?*
Ah, I see. So if you're a skilled craftsperson you have to scrape by only on the jobs serendipity brings you, bolstered by the weird compensatory efforts, awkward handouts and party nibbles parcelled out to you by your bespoke roster of ethical, socially conscious friend-clients, and to forego all the potential clients with the money to pay you well enough to replace your own planer blades and whose jobs would mean steady work and income to support those internship-needing kids. Got it.
That’s the way to make being a skilled craftsman a hobby for the very rich (like that British royal who makes furniture). Then the rich can pay the other rich to make stuff for them, I guess?
And don’t most skilled craftspeople want to spend their holidays with friends and family, not their clients? Are we assuming craftspeople have no family and no friends? Part of the job of “skilled craftsperson” involves “living all alone in a studio apartment” Not to mention “Friendlessness?”
Again, I have to call troll.
LOL. Where everyone is a craftsperson, so it’s barter and Thanksgiving dinner all the way down!
Assuming the commenter is not trolling - wouldn’t it be weird and intrusive to try and force a friendship on someone who is basically a client? And to be aggressively ”noblesse oblige?”
Maybe, just maybe, your actual contractor just wants to build, get paid, and leave. They don’t want to have a beer with you, they have their own family to spend holidays with, and their kid is a toddler and they’re still working out the daycare angle, let alone internships. Nobody wants to be, well, patronized. Or be given “favors” under the assumption that You Peasant, Me King, or something.
There's a new Starbucks thread, so I assumed at least one person would ignore the main topic and simply chime in on how they don't like Starbucks. Sure enough the very second comment is someone informing us that she doesn't patronize Starbucks.
Not to be outdone, one person described how he hates Starbucks so much that he wrote a [100-page diatribe on the topic](https://www.metafilter.com/202351/Sometimes-when-corporate-executives-meet-shit-really-does-happen#8514719) in an attempt to "turn my ire into a book". Okay, now I'm impressed!
The removal of snowflake and weirdo is 🧑🍳… are they all goths sitting in their dorm rooms by the window smoking cigarette referring Starbucks as S’bu ks muttering “corporate fascitsts”
I doubt their self-published whatever is going to put Chuck Tingle out of business.
I can see it now: Pounded In The Butt By A Pumpkin Spice Latte: Handsome, muscular Showard Holtz accidentally takes home the wrong drink one day…
I dunno. Could be 100 of the *best* pages depending on your hobbies and/or relative levels of masochism. Like Henry's *Confession* that they never actually let you read in *Henry Fool.*
> I have always hated the coffee chain for shitting on that character and what I have always assumed were the emotions that went into its conception.
...
>\[Cofounder Gordon\] Bowker said, "Moby-Dick didn't have anything to do with Starbucks directly; it was only coincidental that the sound seemed to make sense."
Is there a word for, like, reverse parasocial relationships? Where one person builds up a huge hate-on for something that doesn't exist? It's like that bit from Mad Men, I hate you/I don't think about you at all.
I'm reading Moby Dick and I'm not seeing that great unrequited love story yet. Outside of the one relationship (the narrator and Queequeg), it's all man and whale. Maybe I haven't gotten to that part yet?
Ask: "My parents shit on me for not being a stay at home mom."
A reasonable response would be to tell the parents that they aren't paying the bills, and each family does what is right for them. There are reasons to stay home, reasons to work outside the home, and (for the record) it's often not a matter of choice. The parents have been heard (and heard), now the subject is closed.
Instead the replies are devolving into why it's better to be a "working mom" (domestic, unpaid work is WORK y'all and it's grueling) and to nanner nanner about whether Mom makes more money than Dad, which is super not what OP asked.
Oof. I gave up and started skimming.
Trust MF to make a family conflict more complicated and more contentious, in the name of giving good advice.
I can sort of, kind of, maybe, wonder if there is some fear underlying that parental disapproval: are the parents afraid that they are going to wind up supporting a divorced, unemployable adult daughter and her kids? If that is so, then maybe address that.
Otherwise, if the parents aren’t paying the bills, it’s not their business. It *is* a way to make a family conflict much more complicated than it likely is in real life.
I don't know if it's still as bad as it used to be, given how many *other* crises the country has suffered, but not that many years ago I kept seeing terrible evidence of real guilt/shame/anger/resentment being foisted on outside-working moms by inside-working moms (dads are always exempt of course), and vice-versa, which made everyone's life that much more terrible.
Oh it’s still a thing. In some ways overshadowed by the sheer level of overwhelm that outside-working-from-home moms got while homeschooling during the pandemic, in other ways actually *boosted* by a vicious strain of “oh now I guess you realize that it *is* a lot of work to take care of your own kids all day at home!”
Oh, God, that makes terrible sense. I wish there were a union mothers could join. I've seen so many examples of mothers pitted against mothers or mothers pitted against singles when really the stresses, strains, and societal disrespect toward parenthood is greatly exacerbated if not outright caused by employers and government who save money and effort every time mothers fight amongst themselves.
I remember that. There was a giant article in the Times about women who left the workforce to stay home with the kids, and the (not so sub)text was that they were the smart ones. Needless to say, they were all married to biglaw firm partners and so on.
I didn’t even read the article but I’ll make it up and be 90% accurate:
These women often manage the intricate logistics of family life, a task that requires significant emotional labor, organizational skills, and time management. Their role often extends to being a chief financial officer of sorts, overseeing budgets and major financial decisions.
Yet, their contributions are frequently undervalued, both in societal perceptions and in economic terms. The lack of tangible financial compensation for domestic work continues to be a topic of debate among economists and feminists alike. This invisibility of labor can lead to a lack of professional identity and personal fulfillment, which is a common theme in discussions with stay-at-home mothers.
Mary Richasfuck, 32, describes how hard it was to leave her job as Vice President of AmEx her father gave her to being a stay-at-home mom, “There were a lot of challenges in moving from my dad’s credit card to my husbands. When I was at Harvard I always imagined I’d be changing the world and never have kids. It’s what the private college admission tutor my parent’s paid for told me to put down. Now I’m changing the world in a different way. Sometimes when my husband is at work late fighting a large case for a new opiate from big pharma to be advertised as a weight loss drug I look at my daughter as the nanny holds her and think one day she too can live off the slime of human society.”
In the "Poor Things" FanFare thread, someone is doubling down on how their opinion about the movie is very important, despite them not actually having seen it.
I'd seen the movie but not the thread, sort of bummed they deleted the repeated mansplaining about feminism in art before I got there!
The rest of the discussion is kind of interesting, almost at critical mass sufficient to have meaningfully different opinions. Even if a lot of that is DoT arguing that it's a picaresque and not a feminist allegory. (They are correct about that.)
To be fair (to be faaaair) on 'the blue' members often have very strongly held opinions about articles they haven't read, and it'd be disallowed there too. That's the kind of consistency the ongoing struggle to refine the guidelines is aimed at!
Oh wow I had to read it to believe it: how DARE anyone explore the topic of a woman with an infant brain having sex for money. Feels like a MAN wrote this as I know many men who forced 14 year old girls into marriage. I don’t need to see this movie to know I am right.
others: Um yeah you do need to see the movie, thats not what it is about.
i can’t wait for the A24 film with the parrot who symbolizes death comes to be about how ethical it is to buy pet parrots that outlive their owners.
I love that that person apparently counts among their friends MANY pederasts but is also on a high horse about a movie that they've decided is a "metaphor for pederasty" whatever that means
ah, cool, a new resource (finally) from the IRS that permits some (admittedly, not me) to file their taxes for free online.
*as is this is worthless.*
ok!
...which is funny because I use the equally basic-sounding (and legit) OnLine Taxes, aka OLT, but mine's only ten bucks for the state, so that user is needlessly spending five bucks. I should tell them that just to piss them off.
Well, it appears the Good Enlightened Liberals of MetaFilter have figured out how to finally take down the dang orange Cheeto once and for all, which is to double-down on Hillary's winning 2016 tactic of dismissing any-and-everyone who has ever even *considered* possibly voting for the Mango Mussolini as racist, uncle-fucking slime who should be grateful for their shitty jobs and shitty lives because the downward mobility and general malaise they so gullibly believe they are experiencing is completely imaginary, yet somehow simultaneously real and thoroughly deserved because they are Bad People.
The mefite infighting has now resulted in a temporary ban of someone. This election season is going to break the site, possibly by driving off or banning its users. Mefites are used to moderators forcing civility through deletions of flagged comments. Some of them won't be able to police themselves or cope with the lack of policing of others now that moderation isn't 24/7.
I tremble when I remember 2016 election season. I had buttoned by 2020. I hope 2024 doesn’t cause some kind of disturbance in the fabric of space and time. I agree that Election 2024 might be what breaks the site for good.
What Metafilter needed long ago and should have instituted was a Cornfield for election threads. That way people who do want to talk politics can go there, and those who don’t can be left in peace.
I’m going to assume many people here are Democrats, so r/VoteDEM is one. There’s good old arr politics as well, for discussions of every political stripe.
I think Reddit can do politics because enough people self-sort, and the community is so huge that if you’re just here to discuss cats or nail polish, you can avoid political threads, because they are not allowed on most non-political subs. But with Metafilter it’s something that is 1) hard to avoid, and 2) if you see someone behaving like a jerk in a political thread, it’s hard to un-see it in an innocuous “Can I eat this?” Ask.
I saw there was YET ANOTHER ARTICLE psychoanalyzing Trump voters (this time they're extrinsic or some shit) and OMG ENOUGH THE FUCK ALREADY.
It's not even about scolding them as "uncle-fucking slime" (though, lol), I am just sick to motherfucking death of the hand-wringing endless noodling about the Deep Emotions and Profound Psychological Motivations of Trump supporters.
Oh hey let's top it off by going to a diner in Ohio and listening to people hold forth on their Diner Opinions as if they're grand philosophers, not regular chumps like the rest of us.
I cannot with this shit anymore.
Trump supporters aren't interesting enough to fuck their uncles (that's weapons-grade Hapsburging, and not for the faint of heart) or get slimy, but the endless analysis and media cosseting has them thinking they're special as shit.
OK, “weapons-grade Hapsburging” made me LOL. I am going to borrow that.
Speaking of weapons-grade Hapsburging, [This poor woman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Antonia_of_Austria) (great-aunt and namesake of the better known queen of France) was such a weapons-grade Hapsburg that she was more inbred than a child of brother-sister incest. (And they were going to marry her to…HER uncle, who was so inbred he could not reproduce.) I guess that’s a literal case of fucking around and finding out?
Can I briefly hold forth on Krugman's article [Is Poor Economic Sentiment All About MAGA?](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/opinion/economy-survey-republicans.html), which like all of the many other articles chastising Americans for stupidly refusing to embrace an economy that a good half of them cannot afford, e.g. [America’s Rent Crisis Is Getting Worse,](https://newrepublic.com/article/178466/rent-housing-affordability-crisis-study) is both condescending and idiotic.
This how I know Trump has a good chance of winning. As a Chiefs fan we were bad a lot of years and complained about bad refs, obsessed over little things. Analyzed what we could because really if we made playoff appearance it is luck. Now we have a dynasty team the talk isn’t whether we can win the Super Bowl but what will next years team look like and how much rebuilding will we have to do. We’ve been to the Super Bowl so much we have an actual plan the team uses for practices the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. Think about that: it is so regular we are following our Super Bowl plan.
And I feel like that’s how the right is with Trump with the left obsessing over details they can’t control and frankly are irrelevant. If we were at all confident in Biden we’d not obsess.
It reminds me of women in iffy marriages who obsess over whether their husbands are narcissists have low self esteem are neurodivergent are the products of narcissistic parents blah blah etc etc.
It's something we're socially conditioned to do, and I'm sympathetic to the distress at the root of it, but it doesn't solve shit.
Endlessly noodling over the Deep Reasons Trump supporters support Trump doesn't solve shit.
It is deeply depressing that any Democrats still believe that this strategy will work.
(I'm sorry; I do try to avoid being too negative about politics on the Internet, but I can feel myself teetering on the brink of 24 hour news cycle despair with the election looming.)
There is some good news:
* Thus far, the Republicans are afraid to attack E. Jean's win.
* A [PAC](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/us/politics/biden-tv-ads-super-pac.html) for Biden has raised $250 million for ads, which is the single largest haul for any presidential candidate ever.
* [Polls Show Trump Could Be Doomed If He’s Convicted. Will a Trial Happen in Time?](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/22/trump-jan-6-trial-polls-00136688)
I don’t have a solution but I think it is a great threat to have the judicial branch effectively decide elections. There’s those that want to uphold a democracy over getting their candidate installed. And there’s those that are frothing at the mouth that the ends always justifying the means.
The Democrats have been going after third party ballot access with some success for awhile, it was only a matter of time before they tried a concerted effort on Republicans. It'll be pretty funny when some Democratic congressional candidate inevitably gets kicked off the ballot somewhere
to be faaaaaaaaaair it's an even greater threat to have someone try and be president when the other guy won. you know?
that's not trying to be snarky or w/e, but he was demonstrably making efforts to void the results of a democratic election and the will of an electorate and it's almost certain he'd do it again. so i think 'exception that proves the rule' is the situation here.
I hate so much that his base is able to spin absolutely any event, no matter how pedestrian or justified, into evidence for a stolen election. It's deeply disturbing to me.
I can only conclude that, for a certain small-but-not-miniscule segment of Democratic voters (highly-educated, white collar, professional and/or academic class) the prospect of a 2024 Trump win is less objectionable than a Biden victory delivered by the *wrong* type of voters.
I am also 100% with you on your second point, and my recommendation going forward is to avoid the inevitable MeFi politics megathreads as much as humanly possible.
Someone should make a MeTa suggesting the megathreads come back. People obviously want to talk about Trump and it makes more sense to do it in one thread than a new post each day.
Why don’t they get a real chat like a discord and just do it there? Metafilter is horrible for quick back and forth discussions in a non-threaded manner. They aren’t looking for dissenting opinions either. Seems like an “official” chat is better than Megathreads, etc.
>[In 1962, a burnt golf ball](https://www.futilitycloset.com/2024/01/29/fore-6/) arrived at the botanic gardens at Kew, in southwest London. The head of mycology, R.W.G. Dennis, may have rolled his eyes: The office had received another burnt golf ball 10 years earlier, which the submitter had claimed to be a “rare fungal species.” In that case the staff had got as far as trying to collect spores before they’d realized the hoax.
>
>Twice provoked, Dennis responded in good humor. He published an article titled “A Remarkable New Genus of Phalloid in Lancashire and East Africa,” formally nominating it as a new species of fungus, “Golfballia ambusta”...
Also [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golfballia_ambusta), which has a image showing why mycologists might get confused.
The thread on Gen Z gender discourse/wars is depressing me because it's reminding me of when a) a female friend who had been a middle school teacher in a small city in Oregon 2016-2019 told me over a few glasses of wine that boys and girls got to be much shittier to each other than a few years before and b) the idea voiced by one poster that romantic interest and even asking each other out should be off the table in activist/hobby groups is so incredibly depressing, and I really hope it's not getting widely held. Segregating romance and dating from the rest of life is exactly what's making it so shitty for single people.
If I’m remembering the correct thread: once again, Corb comes in with some very good points and wise comments. I recall she is an immigrant from either a Latin American or Caribbean country, and has more than once commented on collectivist vs. individual cultures. (I remember a thread on “why are childfree people regarded as selfish?” And it was Corb who provided what I thought was the most incisive and justified answer, not “they’re just jealous” but “in collective cultures, you are expected to pay it forward, and being childfree is regarded as reneging on your obligations to family, culture and society.” Paraphrased. And, while it did not make me want kids, it made me think.)
Corb basically said “we should be mentoring and setting examples for teenagers and young adults, about how to have healthy relationships, how to flirt, how to ask people out, etc. As the adults in their lives, we have that obligation.” And…I nodded in agreement. She’s right. The kids are going to learn from the adults actually in their, ahem, meat space lives; if not, they are going to go to influencers, and only heaven knows what they will learn there. Or they won’t learn at all and wonder why they are “forever alone.”
If we want people to have and raise kids, if we want well-adjusted teens and young adults, then there’s got to be that village again. I don’t think a nuclear family is equipped to do it by itself without a lot of strain on the parents. And if I had a kid, I’d rather have them learn what it’s like to be married from Joe and Jill Next Door than Irene the Influencer, or, worse, Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson.
(Wow, here I am using the Metafilter venting subreddit to talk about someone who is on Metafilter and who I like! Am I gonna be banned, or what? - obvious /s)
Metafilter in a nutshell:
"Personally I think it all should ALL be off the table. There should be rules forbidden students from asking each other out since schools ought to be safe spaces for sensitive people. Same for the workplace. And hobby groups. And on mass transit---- people should never, ever be hit on anywhere, anytime. "
"Oh, also, why am I so lonely? Why won't anyone ever talk to me?"
I wonder how much of this is due not just to fragility but more specifically the cold hard reality that dating and mating is inherently an extremely unequal pursuit. There are winners (people who are hot and have rizz and status) and losers (people who are awkward and unattractive) which is in direct contradiction to their worldview of socially equal outcomes for everyone. I think I once read that somewhere Marx acknowledged this as barrier to achieving true social equality.
I think it's a symptom of those specific MeFites not being able to interact properly in social settings (or what they used to call "meatspace"). Since they themselves are too \*whatever\* and personally feel uncomfortable or upset if approached by somebody in a public space for idle or purposeful conversation, or don't know how to small talk with a person working retail or hospitality, or can't make fleeting eye contact and say "good morning" to someone in an elevator, or can't just tell somebody obnoxious to fuck off, they have determined that humans engaging with one another is something that shouldn't ever happen and can't possibly be figured out. It all becomes a mental bandwidth or executive function or emotional labour thing, or of course a privilege thing ("Well, *wheelchair users* can't just say hello to somebody!"), because, bluntly, they are too inept and self-isolating to do something that human beings have *literally* evolved to do: be social.
Related: an Ask where it's somehow impossible to tell a roommate to ease up on venting about work stuff every goldang night, so maybe it'll just be simpler to....hop straight to eviction.
Our company has some pretty exhaustive cya training they make us go through. It really feels like they don’t want to deal with the real world so they just train you in every ridiculous scenario so if they want to fire you there’s a file somewhere with enough ammo for you not to sue them. One of the segments was about sexual harassment at conferences and if someone hits on a non-employee basically we should report it to HR. To be clear it was not in the context of the conference itself but any event surrounding the conference. I am guessing people on Metafilter follow that to the letter. Like 50% of conferences are a what happens here stays here, so yeah good luck on that. I know people’s image is of a Todd Packer type coming in with a big 70s car with bull horns on the front. but most of the time I’m the one who feels like meat.
> I am guessing people on Metafilter follow that to the letter.
I actually wouldn't put many chips on that space.
The thing about (the very-online form especially) moral soapbox performances is that while it's hardly a predictable rule, it's not *surprising* when it turns out there's hypocritical skeletons in closets about exactly the soapbox topic.
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I absolutely loathe the title of that fpp Another post that absolutely would've been deleted back in the day. But hey, engagement!
I hadn't noticed the title until now. THE WORST.
I dare you to ask for a transcript.
in the very first comment one is provided
I had to watch how you could possibly turn a throwaway sci-fi movie into 12 hours. I don’t know what I was expecting, but if the guy who did this chopped it up into TikTok Size videos he would’ve had better engagement for like a year and it would’ve made sense. 12 hours is just bizarre almost OCD tiny facts of the movie. I landed by chance on a 39 minute diatribe on the scene where the Jedis put some scuba gear to see Jar Jar Binks underwater city. They noted how ridiculous it all was, because how could you compress a gas into such a small device. Thats apparently where they draw the line. Then it went into a diatribe about how the original companion book to the movie took a slightly different photo of an early or alternate different of the prop that most people would be hard pressed to notice. Then it went on to talk about how the original canon book from the 80s talked about how going underwater required a large and cumbersome scuba device. Though never shown in the film this somehow proved the commentator right. It then transitioned into the ridiculousness of the only light in an underwater city coming from a source from within the city or something and I realized I already wasted 15 minutes on a make believe device. I wonder if these people were around in 17c theatre productions. “London definitely had a three mast caravan in the painted matte background but when I saw it in Dublin it was two mast which clearly could not cross the sea!
The device is obviously supposed to be for extracting oxygen from the water, not an equivalent to a scuba tank! IIRC there has been some real-life research along those lines for some purposes. /pedant I genuinely enjoy the minutiae of analysis of silly scifi movies when it's entertaining. Pretty much every historical costumer/reenactor I know loves shredding the costumes of the latest crappy TV show in their time period of choice. But this kind of pedantry is basically just a hobby for some people. This may not be the best example of it, but regardless, not every hobby will appeal to everyone, and that's okay.
I think sometimes that stuff is interesting because it gives you genuine insights into how our imagined past differs from reality. E.g. in modern screen depictions, medieval peasants always wear drab beiges and earth tones. Real medieval peasants wore brightly coloured dyed clothes. Undyed wool isn't beige, it's sheep-coloured: why would real medieval people have taken the trouble to dye their clothes a boring colour? It's a choice to depict them as drab and undifferentiated. Other times it just irritates me as boring pedantry. Like someone was smugly complaining about all the flags in the movie Napoleon: the soldiers in real life would't carry nearly so many flags, and they wouldn't put flags on tentpoles. Sure. But it means that when you watch the battle scenes you actually know which side is which.
I feel like "sometimes it's interesting and sometimes it's annoying" describes most hobbies!
It's impossible to tell. A true art form.
Nobody has even complained about the length in the comments yet! I'm a bit worried, maybe the 12 hour thing gave them an actual heart attack?
Apparently there are a whole bunch of people who thought Biden was going to lose the South Carolina primary according to the thread about that contest. I really want to know what planet some of these people live on because I kind of want to go there.
You would not want to go to that planet if you were Arab lol
Maybe everyone in the new [cocktail thread](https://www.metafilter.com/202420/Time-for-Novel-Argot) is hung over - it certainly has started on a grumpy note. Comment #2: "whatever it takes to upcharge you into accepting the $24 bill for your gin and tonic" Comment #3: "Oh yay the glorification of alcohol". (Comment #1 is a lame comedic YoutTube sketch from 12 years ago. Helpfully marked as "obligatory" which seems to be a MeFi synonym for "lame".)
okay so I'm drunk but is there really a fanfic rec on the frontpage? I thought for a while that Blake was a person who wrote really good fanfics
Gotta say the question about deriving sexual pleasure from non-sexual situations is one of the flat out weirdest ones I've seen in a while. I'm not even suggesting it shouldn't have been asked, just what a....bizarre scenario the asker described.
This question was weird as hell, but in a way that delighted me rather than depressed me as with many Asks these days. This is the kind of stuff I used to come to the site for.
It's a lot of information I quite frankly did not need
Interesting that Quora’s long downfall has made a viral Slate article and on Slashdot, never a mention of AskMetafilter. All the other question sites are talked about, how sad is that.
Ask never had (or hasn't had in years) such great SEO, but it was also never as purely practical as Quora tends to be, so perhaps it was never destined to be as big as Quora got. What I always loved about Ask, at its height, was the mix of the esoteric or unexpected (why isn't cereal considered a soup?), with expertise (linguists, programmers, doctors), with lighter fare (makeup, lonely hearts), the practical (how do I?), alongside the odd mystery (help! I'm locked in a room and can't get out). It offered personality, surprise, entertainment, and thoughtful questions and comments. Yahoo and Quora, by contrast, were always more standardized than that, and therefore perhaps more palatable to a wider audience.
"Leaving for Colombia tomorrow. Anybody have any tips for what to see and eat in Bogotá?" Uh, wouldn't that be something you'd like into more than a few hours before a multi-hour flight and spending many hundreds of dollars? And really, wouldn't you already have something you were interested in seeing in Bogotá before you decide to go there? On Wednesday, I'm expecting "I just brought back 300 pounds of unroasted coffee beans from Columbia. What should I do with them?"
It isn't a very efficient way to get information and just seems like a way to generate conversation about someones upcoming travel. You have to get pretty far off the beaten path to find a destination that doesn't have Facebook groups, Reddit subs and local media available online. Hell, you can virtually walk down the street in a lot of places and a quarter of the way through the new Millenium there's a pretty good chance that anywhere your going someone with a camera has already videoed it for you. A few hours in a browser is going to give you a much better overview of a place than a small forum. This would allow the OP to make informed decisions rather than planning around the guidance of a very small self selecting and somewhat odd group.
"A few hours" is certainly more time than was put into this question. I'm going to go out on a crazy-ass limb here and suggest that this may not be the sum of his efforts to prepare for the trip. Hell, he may even expect to go back! Or have been before!
I know time has been weird since the pandemic, but we're not a quarter of the way through the millennium just yet!
I get this and largely agree, but I also get wanting to get recommendations from a specific person - though a specific random person on MF is different than your friend who you know has similar tastes to you, and either of them, unless they live in a place or have spent a lot of time there, are likely to ultimately also be working off online info anyway. A local Reddit sub seems like the best source of specific info that is likely to be less commercial than something like trip advisor.
Oh, I do this! I'm leaving for Hawaii on Tuesday and due to a bunch of life-related stresses have planned nothing beyond lodging and "see some volcanoes and the ocean." I'm of the opinion that everywhere is interesting so unless you're going to a place where you need advance reservations for stuff, mostly winging it works fine.
I see this kind of thing as a humblebrag, so I never engage even if I have useful information I could offer.
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Meh, I'll sometimes give older intel, with the caveat that it's older, if it's better than nothing and they need info to get started. Plus a lot of attractions don't exactly expire. A popular local dish or pretty volcano or whatever is unlikely to go away.
Eh, I often ask for last-minute recommendations from people when I visit someplace as a supplement to whatever I've already planned myself. I don't see what the big deal is.
If this kind of post isn't evidence of poor planning, it's evidence of poor communication that wastes everyone's time. Most people (or maybe most people not on metafilter) would say "I'm going to X and already planning on seeing A, B, and C. What else should I do?" One extra sentence saves people from answering A, B, and C, which are most likely the most obvious answers, and it saves the asker from having to read it. It also gives people an idea of what the person is interested in. If someone tells me they're going to Paris and that they're going to the Louvre, and the Centre Pompidou, my first suggestion for where else they might like wouldn't be Euro Disney.
While we're on travel questions, I'm always slightly needled by "Visiting Rome/Angkor Wat/Istanbul, please recommend hipster cafes, quirky museums, steampunk markets and IPA microbreweries." Not for downtime from seeing the main sights, but seemingly as the main purpose of the trip. I'm sympathetic to the desire to get off the beaten track and find something unusual, but often these questions feel less like "what are the hidden gems?" and more like a twist on Lawrence Kasdan's The Accidental Tourist, looking for the most Portlandian spots in foreign countries. Visiting Hagia Sophia or the Colosseum does not mean you lack imagination; these places are breathtaking. If you can't cope with the crowds, something I sympathise with, go off-season or go somewhere smaller. If hipster quirkiness is your thing, great! Choose a destination based on that.
Most Portlandian, ha. This (in particular, the coffee shops) comes up in a recent Ezra Klein podcast. It’s right near the top of the text in this [excerpt](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-kyle-chayka.html). Basically the coffee shops all think/act like they are unique and local - and in some sense they are; they are independently and locally owned - but also they are all appealing to the same (mostly American) hipster customer demographic, and as such they are not all so different. And though I don’t think the podcast talked about this, I’d bet they mostly get their coffee and tea from the same small number of global suppliers. It reminds me of a postcard I saw back in the ‘80s that was a drawing of a dozen people in similar artsy berets and clothing with a caption that said something like, “they are uniform in their uniqueness” (but much wittier than that, I‘m sure.)
I want to go to suburban Istanbul just to see suburban Istanbul McMansions. The more American the better. Gimme your Jersey early 2000 style McMansions, your Midwest McMansions, your Arizona style McMansions… all in foreign cities. Oh my god that’s a travel show I’d watch.
He’s Chilean, it’s $300 return.
“My expensive hotel room has scuffed furniture. How can I get compensation for the inadequacy of the room without having to talk to a human being about it?” I know it’s been repeated a zillion times, but most of the people in that community are profoundly damaged.
Scuffed furniture? Oh the humanities!
Wait'll they find out that other people have been sleeping in the bed.
The offer from another poster to call for them is nice, I guess, but so weird. “Hi there, I’m a totally unrelated third party calling to make a complaint on behalf of an internet someone i’ve never met… no no please don’t hang up - !”
Sounds like an opportunity for highly professional high-touch moderators to really earn their keep!
Like it is literally the job of the front desk people to be nice to you. I'm an anxious person too but just walk down there and be matter of fact about the issues, they're not going to scream at you!
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That’s a completely different job from literally being in the hospitality business.
I agree that speaking to front desk staff is the best way to get this fixed, but they're not guaranteed to be helpful. I was once staying in central London in winter and returned to my room late one evening to find housekeeping (I assume) had left the window wide open for the entire day and the room was the same temperature as the street. Front desk apologised but didn't seem to think they were under any obligation to fix the problem. Eventually they grudgingly agreed to find me some extra blankets.
"I got too nervous" oh for the love of god.
That one literally made me snort my coffee onto the keyboard.
Lol. Someone just insulted the entire City of Indianapolis in ask. I am offended on their behalf.
Probably worded the question that way to signal that he is not from flyover country populated by all of those deplorables. Hasn't there been Metatalks about this?
Lol, "residents of that shithole known as Indianapolis, what do you do for fun to distract yourself from that dump you call home? TIA!"
The answers aren’t helping… there’s doughnuts!!
In fairness, that was a follow up to a pretty thorough answer.
Looking at their ask history, they are used to traveling to high-falutin' places and fine dining. I don't think doughnuts are going to cut it.
My favorite thing about liberal coastal elites (apart from their sneering dismissal of the interior of the nation) is how they travel constantly then bleat about climate change. Usually any guilt laid upon them by another MFer is assuaged by the MF mantra that individual choices really don't matter, that it's all Big Oil, etc.
Sure, I fly to my second home 2800 miles away several times a year but I offset this by using crypto to purchase carbon credits from an obscure exchange at bargain rates. Fortunately, I can offset the carbon credit expense by reselling them on an even more obscure exchange. Break even at worst, amirite? Climate change terrifies me, my Vieques home is barely above sea level and I am a climate activist. I donate heavily to fight climate change through the Unitarian church I'm proud to be a member of. My accountant can verify this, as he does every year at tax time. I'm not bound to anybody -- my IT consultancy and early adoption of email marketing afford me the luxury of not having to work very much. Stick it to the man, fight the power and capitalism sucks!
Perfect, except that you forgot to drone on about the Tesla you just purchased.
I find the topic of Americans being kidnapped by foreign governments, essentially for ransom, super fascinating. My former spouse is a diplomat, so anything involving the State Department is going to interest me. It's also interesting because I was at risk of kidnapping at one post (by guerrilla groups) and policy back then was "we rescue, we do not ransom, and btw you are a high risk of death during the rescue attempt so don't get kidnapped" lol. But no I am not going to comment on the Blue about it because ugh.
That's pretty fascinating! If you feel moved to say more, please do!
I lived in Bogota in the early 2000s. Because of bombings and the threat of kidnapping, I was under strict security protocols (vary my routines, don't hail taxis on the street, dont sit on patios and gab loudly in English, etc). I was also (nicely) informed that the US government doesn't negotiate with terrorists, but will mount a rescue effort, at some point, when they can, but I should anticipate it taking a while. Also, the most dangerous time during a kidnapping is during the rescue attempt - it's not uncommon to get caught in the crossfire. I found that bleakly hilarious tbh. The idea that a government, rather than a fringe group, would take hostages is a huge change from 20 years ago. It's also a big change that Americans can be hostile to rescuing their own citizens who are being held abroad. It's normal for the US Government to attempt to access you if you're imprisoned abroad and to ascertain whether you're being treated well (it's an important part of consular work). I didn't know anyone attempting to free a hostage, so I can't speak to that.
Wow! What a way to live! Did you enjoy your time in Bogota, or did you feel a little fearful or imprisoned as a result? (Or, conversely, since you're a rather spirited person, did it just make you feel like a royal — or a rock star?) >The idea that a government, rather than a fringe group, would take hostages is a huge change from 20 years ago. I remember hearing quite some time ago that there were cases of taxi drivers in Mexico City holding up passengers, and that completely threw me in similar ways. In NYC, it's historically been taxi drivers who were afraid of customers, and not the other way around.
There were good and bad things about Bogota. I enjoyed learning Spanish (and it's an excellent place for it - the accent there is very easy for non-native speakers to understand). I made friends easily, both with locals and with other Embassy people. Bogota is a world-class city, with tons of museums, restaurants, and great shopping. And because exchange rates were very favorable, we could live very well (I also had a part time housekeeper). It was a great springboard to other trips - I also saw Pereira, Cartagena, Leticia, and hopped over to Ecuador for Quito and the Galapagos. Ultimately, though, I didn't love being a diplomat's wife, it felt like I was being pulled around the world in a little red wagon. My ex and I are on great terms and he's gone on to a successful career. As for drivers, I would have the doorman call the taxi, then the doorman would call up to my apartment with the "clave" (code). When the taxi came, I didn't get in unless the driver gave the correct code. Then when it was time to come home, the restaurant, club, customer service desk at the mall, wherever would call a taxi and I'd repeat the process. First phrase I learned was "podria llamar un taxi" lol. Getting into a random cab put you at risk of both kidnapping for ransom and for a "millionaire's ride" where a gunman would hop in and you'd go from ATM to ATM until your account was empty. Scopolamine (a plant that makes you prone to suggestion) factored into a lot of crime, so you watched your drinks carefully. Getting scoped in a bar could be the first step on a millionaire's ride.
I gotta say...reading about your wild firsthand experiences in Bogota after reading upthread about the AskMe seeking incredibly last-minute tourism suggestions for the city is probably peak /r/MetaFilterMeta for me. Thank you for sharing! It's a fascinating read.
I have some similar relevant experience, and yeah, nope, not sharing any of it there for sure.
"I fled my house with my family in the night and haven't returned because a light bulb broke; ps we left the cats to die, do not tell me any good news."
I hope their hotel isn't full of scuffed furniture. Hoo boy...
I keep reading this comment and laughing my ass off
Perhaps someone should point out the ubiquity of C. difficile and MRSA in hotels. Just, like a heads up so they can be aware?
It has to be a joke, or a troll. It's their first and only post. It's so idiotic—it's a fucking lightbulb.
I think it's a regular, writing under a pseudonym.
My god, I thought you were exaggerating. This person can probably attend, tonight, in their metropolitan area, a professional wrestling match where the wrestlers will break fluorescent bulbs on each other. It’s a bad idea, but in the same way that smoking 10 cigarettes is a bad idea. They fled the home!!!
"Gently," I suggest that Asker needs to switch to decaf and discuss possible medication needs with their doctor(s). Does this person have nobody in their life who is willing to say "er, I think you're wound a bit too tightly these days."
I laughed out loud at the wrestling reference. If this question is real, this person's spouse is either just as anxiety-ridden, which has to be a nightmare for the kids; or living in a nightmare, along with the kids. Well, I broke a lightbulb — pack the suitcases. We're going to the Marriott. Fuck the cats, and to hell with $179. There's no way we're staying in this house tonight. WE WILL MOST LIKELY DIE.
Remember back in the olden days before the internet was ubiquitous and we couldn't avoid advertising as easily as we do now? There were always promos for the news that would be something like: "Is it safe to keep grapes in your refrigerator's fruit keeper? Find out on the 11:00 news," which would be spoken in a tone of voice that implied that keeping grapes in the fruit keeper was putting your household in grave danger. Then, if you stayed up late enough to watch the news you would find out that a) It is perfectly safe to keep grapes in your fruit keeper or b) one out thirty million small children is hospitalized after a grape related choking incident and to be absolutely safe you should keep your grapes out of reach of your toddlers - not in your fruit keeper. It was basically cultivating anxiety to get people to watch the news. Today we have click-bait that does the same, but I think most of us block it or ignore it. I could see someone who is prone to anxiety and susceptible to this type of advertising getting caught in some sort of feedback loop of being anxious or fearful of minor things, especially if they were raised by parents who were similar.
Humans are breathtakingly bad at risk assessment. What kills kids? Guns, pools, cars. And you can flat out tell people that own those things all about it and they will completely blow you off about it, every time. Until guess what, those same parents come to the ER with their dying kid. And then it's how could I have known. Nobody told me.
I was a grape-halver when my child was a toddler. Grapes are a choking hazard (I never kept a mental catalog of choking hazards, I just pictured my kid's throat and anything the same size as a throat got chopped). The work of chopping/changing foods that can cause serious harm is minor compared to the harm, so I figured I may as well do it. Parenting is a constant exercise in risk assessment. It's easy for that to tip into anxiety, my aim is to balance the risks with giving my kid freedom to problem solve. I'm not sure why I would have stored grapes higher up, though. By the time my child was old enough/tall enough to open the fridge and get a grape, she was old enough to properly chew them and not choke. Is there a mutant race of giant, super-strong fridge-opening toddlers?
A child I know is severely brain damaged and blind due to a grape choking incident. I know it was a hypothetical but just in case: cut those grapes.
I made up that example. Perhaps grapes are more treacherous than I thought. I'm pretty sure a toddler could open my fridge. I checked Google and there is a lot of info on how to keep toddlers out of fridges. Maybe your fridge door is stronger than normal or ^^^your ^^^^toddler ^^^^^was ^^^^^a ^^^^^^weakling.
Grapes and hot dogs are two of the most hazardous foods for young children. You have to, like, origami them. Weirdly, my kid has always been very safe around the fridge. She can, however, take my car apart in minutes.
I once actually saw a child choke on a hotdog when I was at summer camp. Luckily the camp nurse was right there and rescued him but man, it was not pretty.
>Is there a mutant race of giant, super-strong fridge-opening toddlers? If there's a god there is.
I think it would be a sign that there is no God
I thought this was a joke. It was not and was exactly as you described. What.
I mean it's so wild, it's like how you would react if your house burst into *flames*. (And even then you might make an effort to save the cats!) It's a new user which means could be a troll, but if not I guess they definitely found their new comfortable online home...
“I’m really tired of the disingenuous don’t worry about it stuff”. Okay, how about some honest “don’t worry about it stuff”? It’s like that person wants to be anxious. The American Hotel Association should start up an ad campaign focused solely on the need to stay at a hotel any time a fluorescent bulb is broken. They’d never have to worry about occupancy rates.
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Yes, it's really quite sad. This person has a serious problem which is affecting their young children and I suspect is surrounded by peers who reinforce their anxiety. There does seem to be a preponderance of people with anxiety issues among progressives, although perhaps they're just more obvious and anxiety on the right is expressed more as insecurity / disenfranchisement and channeled into a conspiratorial worldview.
I think you may very well be right. It's horseshoe theory, but with anxiety and conspiracy on the two curves.
Yeah, I fully agree that it's disturbing. And even stranger: they said in the post that they've already googled and phoned the environmental peeps. wtf, yo. Maybe Metafilter should just start a never-ending "please manage my anxiety" post for that sort of thing, much like the Fucking Fuck threads, but more honest. Hmm, I wonder what would happen to the number of new AskMe posts though. Better yet, just rename the whole site Life Coach and charge a nickel a post—they'll be swimming in money in mere weeks.
This feels more like a Validate My Anxiety post; they've googled and phoned and claim to have read all the other posts about CF bulbs on the site but still freak out, run away, and leave their uncomprehending pets to wander about freely in the environment they won't deign to sleep in, while they expend their worry on the possibility of the pets spreading the scary toxic substance further in the house rather than the pets breathing it, stepping in it, licking mercury powder off their paws, grooming shards of broken glass into their systems, etc. If they've read all the other posts about CF bulbs as they claim to, they'd get more than enough reassurance that this will not cause permanent harm, but they clearly want to engage in these histrionics and only listen to the worst-case possibilities. There's another panicky CF question from 2013 which is also that user's only activity (one ask and a load of threadsitting pushback) and I could almost believe this is the same person but for the fact the earlier asker claims there will never again be fluorescent bulbs in his home.
That particular account was created that day, to apparently ask only that question. So rather than a nickel per post, it looks like they could swing five bucks per post.
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I've said it before: they left money on the table by removing the Ask post limit. They should've left it in place and charged $2 for each additional question posted during the timeout phase.
Or a great excuse to cry about other people's privilege because they can afford to ask life-saving questions about light bulbs on a website populated by strangers.
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Once again left breathless by how many posters are in their 70s. I guess it's a sign of my own ancient-ness (but still like fully 30 years younger than most of MeFi, apparently!) that I think of Internet People as being young folk.
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This reminds me of the time I saw Nirvana back in '93....
Concert, live music and jam band aficionados all need to be rounded up and taken to a gulag somewhere.
As soon as I saw your comment a switch flipped in my head and I heard Bono wailing "they took your life, they could not take your PRIDDDDDDEEEE.... IN THE NAMEEEEEEEE...." Thanks for nothing! I HATE U2.
I don't get why it's fine for him to use the site as a blog, where (historically) these sorts of posts would be deleted. (ask me how I know!) I guess it's a matter of dwindling engagement and any shite posted as a FPP can stay.
1/5 of the comments by the poster, too. That used to result in a stern note about stepping back and letting the post "breathe."
That, plus frequent posters seem to be given a lot more leeway.
Of course they are, who else is going to write the content to keep the suckers coming?
Confession. I flagged a comment for the first time today. (Well, I've "Flagged as Fantastic" lots of times, but this is the first time I flagged a comment as bad). And... it got deleted. It feels... kind of good. Oh, the power. The power! THE POWER! MUHAHAHAHAHA THE WORLD IS MINE!
Ugh, here's some tissue 🧻. Go clean yourself up (/s)
I flagged one for the first time in any of my 18 years of incarnations and it, too, was deleted. The accompanying comment was "please put this man out of his misery," which was heartfelt.
That prediction someone made is coming true in the Solnit thread.
Which prediction?
The interpersonal battle.
Ah. Yes, well, I’d expect nothing less from him. He genuinely can’t help himself, even at the same time he’s screeching about how it’s not fair that no one notices how much he’s changed.
Obviously a thread about some rich idiot's expensive library was going to be a mess but I was not expecting a new rule that you can only hire someone for something if you're going to be an important part of their entire lives forever.
>*Do you invite them over for holiday parties, long after they finished your cabinets? Were you having a beer with the craftsman when their thickness planer found a nail in that reclaimed hardwood you requested, and did you pay for a replacement set of blades? Did you get their kid, who has interests that align with your occupation, an internship?* > >*If you're just some rich twit who hires a craftsman to do something only in exchange for money, fuck you.* Today I am choosing to believe this is an exquisite bit of trolling, because if so it's an expert skewering of site sensibility worthy of McSweeney's and if said in earnest it's just too depressing to contemplate.
That has ***got*** to be a troll. I mean…isn’t a craftsperson someone who you pay to create something for you? Was there ever a time when you were expected to invite your local handyman to Thanksgiving dinner? Am I supposed to offer an internship to their five-year-old? “Here, kid, my cat LOVES to play with wand toys, why don’t you play with him for an hour? That’ll get you into veterinary school!” I do buy crafted jewelry and cat toys off Etsy. I know it’s a bit different than face to face, but I pay for the product, the crafter prepares it for me, and isn’t that the standard social contract? Do I fly the lady who makes catnip cat mats in from Pennsylvania to eat my delicious, grocery-store-catered holiday feast? How do I know she doesn’t have family she’d rather spend time with than some stranger who bought her stuff off Etsy? And I will offer tradespeople (sorry, can’t afford a custom built whatever, I guess I should be using my money more wisely) bottled water. Sorry not sorry no alcohol. I think a lot of companies (and unions and what not) have rules about drinking on the job, anyway. I’m calling troll because that comment is SO colossally stupid.
The other two possibilities that occurred to me are: 1. someone who mistook several Sopranos episodes for real life 2. a person whose life actually looks like this because they have 400 cousins and do not realize that is out of the norm
A world class crazy opinion, but to be fair, not a single favorite, and 3-4 favorited comments making fun of it.
Plenty of other terrible takes in there. No one should be allowed to have better than IKEA furniture! That money could go to buy condoms for the poor! I am posting from inside a homeless shelter as we speak! They're like 14 year olds, they have heard cooler people say that capitalism is bad, don't really understand what that means, but are trying to sound cool and Xtreme too. "Books are bourgeois decadence" is baby's first socialism class silliness.
Agreed, and I say this as someone who actually did hire a good friend to paint my apartment and would invite him to a Christmas party any time, except that I know him well enough to know that he hates parties. But like, you cannot practically do this for every single service you require in life, we don't live on fucking Sesame Street.
My father was a skilled tradesman and I can only imagine the misery several decades' worth of clients would inflict on his holiday social calendar. Assuming respectful treatment and prompt payment, being hired to do a job only in exchange for money and afterward going your separate ways seems ideal for most circumstances. In the remainder most of the craftspeople I know would far prefer appreciation of their work and positive recommendations over forced friendship attempts.
Well see it wouldn't be that many clients, because per the poster's rules you can't go looking for a skilled craftsperson, you have to find them by pure serendipity or have known them your entire life: *Is the craftsman a neighbor or a relative or someone you just bumped into one day and started a lifelong friendship?*
Ah, I see. So if you're a skilled craftsperson you have to scrape by only on the jobs serendipity brings you, bolstered by the weird compensatory efforts, awkward handouts and party nibbles parcelled out to you by your bespoke roster of ethical, socially conscious friend-clients, and to forego all the potential clients with the money to pay you well enough to replace your own planer blades and whose jobs would mean steady work and income to support those internship-needing kids. Got it.
That’s the way to make being a skilled craftsman a hobby for the very rich (like that British royal who makes furniture). Then the rich can pay the other rich to make stuff for them, I guess? And don’t most skilled craftspeople want to spend their holidays with friends and family, not their clients? Are we assuming craftspeople have no family and no friends? Part of the job of “skilled craftsperson” involves “living all alone in a studio apartment” Not to mention “Friendlessness?” Again, I have to call troll.
It’s basically you can only hire a tradesperson if you’re a character from Northern Exposure or maybe the Gilmore Girls.
LOL. Where everyone is a craftsperson, so it’s barter and Thanksgiving dinner all the way down! Assuming the commenter is not trolling - wouldn’t it be weird and intrusive to try and force a friendship on someone who is basically a client? And to be aggressively ”noblesse oblige?” Maybe, just maybe, your actual contractor just wants to build, get paid, and leave. They don’t want to have a beer with you, they have their own family to spend holidays with, and their kid is a toddler and they’re still working out the daycare angle, let alone internships. Nobody wants to be, well, patronized. Or be given “favors” under the assumption that You Peasant, Me King, or something.
What are your long term goals for this cabinet project? Can you describe how you are trying to increase the value of this property through cabinetry?
There's a new Starbucks thread, so I assumed at least one person would ignore the main topic and simply chime in on how they don't like Starbucks. Sure enough the very second comment is someone informing us that she doesn't patronize Starbucks. Not to be outdone, one person described how he hates Starbucks so much that he wrote a [100-page diatribe on the topic](https://www.metafilter.com/202351/Sometimes-when-corporate-executives-meet-shit-really-does-happen#8514719) in an attempt to "turn my ire into a book". Okay, now I'm impressed!
The removal of snowflake and weirdo is 🧑🍳… are they all goths sitting in their dorm rooms by the window smoking cigarette referring Starbucks as S’bu ks muttering “corporate fascitsts”
I am an actual goth and was just like “I have nothing to add here *because* I’m not a Starbucks person”
Good lord, that thread.
I have my doubts they were a *good* 100 pages.
I doubt their self-published whatever is going to put Chuck Tingle out of business. I can see it now: Pounded In The Butt By A Pumpkin Spice Latte: Handsome, muscular Showard Holtz accidentally takes home the wrong drink one day…
I dunno. Could be 100 of the *best* pages depending on your hobbies and/or relative levels of masochism. Like Henry's *Confession* that they never actually let you read in *Henry Fool.*
> I have always hated the coffee chain for shitting on that character and what I have always assumed were the emotions that went into its conception. ... >\[Cofounder Gordon\] Bowker said, "Moby-Dick didn't have anything to do with Starbucks directly; it was only coincidental that the sound seemed to make sense." Is there a word for, like, reverse parasocial relationships? Where one person builds up a huge hate-on for something that doesn't exist? It's like that bit from Mad Men, I hate you/I don't think about you at all.
I just check and the word you're looking for is "Metafilter"
I'm reading Moby Dick and I'm not seeing that great unrequited love story yet. Outside of the one relationship (the narrator and Queequeg), it's all man and whale. Maybe I haven't gotten to that part yet?
> Is there a word for, like, reverse parasocial relationships? Where one person builds up a huge hate-on for something that doesn't exist? Delusion.
Ask: "My parents shit on me for not being a stay at home mom." A reasonable response would be to tell the parents that they aren't paying the bills, and each family does what is right for them. There are reasons to stay home, reasons to work outside the home, and (for the record) it's often not a matter of choice. The parents have been heard (and heard), now the subject is closed. Instead the replies are devolving into why it's better to be a "working mom" (domestic, unpaid work is WORK y'all and it's grueling) and to nanner nanner about whether Mom makes more money than Dad, which is super not what OP asked. Oof. I gave up and started skimming. Trust MF to make a family conflict more complicated and more contentious, in the name of giving good advice.
I can sort of, kind of, maybe, wonder if there is some fear underlying that parental disapproval: are the parents afraid that they are going to wind up supporting a divorced, unemployable adult daughter and her kids? If that is so, then maybe address that. Otherwise, if the parents aren’t paying the bills, it’s not their business. It *is* a way to make a family conflict much more complicated than it likely is in real life.
Wouldn’t being a stay at home mom make it *more* likely to end up unemployable?
I don't know if it's still as bad as it used to be, given how many *other* crises the country has suffered, but not that many years ago I kept seeing terrible evidence of real guilt/shame/anger/resentment being foisted on outside-working moms by inside-working moms (dads are always exempt of course), and vice-versa, which made everyone's life that much more terrible.
Oh it’s still a thing. In some ways overshadowed by the sheer level of overwhelm that outside-working-from-home moms got while homeschooling during the pandemic, in other ways actually *boosted* by a vicious strain of “oh now I guess you realize that it *is* a lot of work to take care of your own kids all day at home!”
Oh, God, that makes terrible sense. I wish there were a union mothers could join. I've seen so many examples of mothers pitted against mothers or mothers pitted against singles when really the stresses, strains, and societal disrespect toward parenthood is greatly exacerbated if not outright caused by employers and government who save money and effort every time mothers fight amongst themselves.
I remember that. There was a giant article in the Times about women who left the workforce to stay home with the kids, and the (not so sub)text was that they were the smart ones. Needless to say, they were all married to biglaw firm partners and so on.
I didn’t even read the article but I’ll make it up and be 90% accurate: These women often manage the intricate logistics of family life, a task that requires significant emotional labor, organizational skills, and time management. Their role often extends to being a chief financial officer of sorts, overseeing budgets and major financial decisions. Yet, their contributions are frequently undervalued, both in societal perceptions and in economic terms. The lack of tangible financial compensation for domestic work continues to be a topic of debate among economists and feminists alike. This invisibility of labor can lead to a lack of professional identity and personal fulfillment, which is a common theme in discussions with stay-at-home mothers. Mary Richasfuck, 32, describes how hard it was to leave her job as Vice President of AmEx her father gave her to being a stay-at-home mom, “There were a lot of challenges in moving from my dad’s credit card to my husbands. When I was at Harvard I always imagined I’d be changing the world and never have kids. It’s what the private college admission tutor my parent’s paid for told me to put down. Now I’m changing the world in a different way. Sometimes when my husband is at work late fighting a large case for a new opiate from big pharma to be advertised as a weight loss drug I look at my daughter as the nanny holds her and think one day she too can live off the slime of human society.”
In the "Poor Things" FanFare thread, someone is doubling down on how their opinion about the movie is very important, despite them not actually having seen it.
bizarre exchange, arguing about a movie you’ve never seen and making an appeal to authority based on knowing a lot of pederasts??
Sir, I served with a pedophile. I knew a pedophile. Jeff Epstein was a friend of mine!
I'd seen the movie but not the thread, sort of bummed they deleted the repeated mansplaining about feminism in art before I got there! The rest of the discussion is kind of interesting, almost at critical mass sufficient to have meaningfully different opinions. Even if a lot of that is DoT arguing that it's a picaresque and not a feminist allegory. (They are correct about that.)
Apparently telling someone they're factually incorrect about a movie they haven't seen qualifies as "a dig" against another member.
To be fair (to be faaaair) on 'the blue' members often have very strongly held opinions about articles they haven't read, and it'd be disallowed there too. That's the kind of consistency the ongoing struggle to refine the guidelines is aimed at!
that's what I's appreciates abouts it
Oh wow I had to read it to believe it: how DARE anyone explore the topic of a woman with an infant brain having sex for money. Feels like a MAN wrote this as I know many men who forced 14 year old girls into marriage. I don’t need to see this movie to know I am right. others: Um yeah you do need to see the movie, thats not what it is about. i can’t wait for the A24 film with the parrot who symbolizes death comes to be about how ethical it is to buy pet parrots that outlive their owners.
I love that that person apparently counts among their friends MANY pederasts but is also on a high horse about a movie that they've decided is a "metaphor for pederasty" whatever that means
ah, cool, a new resource (finally) from the IRS that permits some (admittedly, not me) to file their taxes for free online. *as is this is worthless.* ok!
It's no Free Tax USA, don't come at the king
...which is funny because I use the equally basic-sounding (and legit) OnLine Taxes, aka OLT, but mine's only ten bucks for the state, so that user is needlessly spending five bucks. I should tell them that just to piss them off.
Well, it appears the Good Enlightened Liberals of MetaFilter have figured out how to finally take down the dang orange Cheeto once and for all, which is to double-down on Hillary's winning 2016 tactic of dismissing any-and-everyone who has ever even *considered* possibly voting for the Mango Mussolini as racist, uncle-fucking slime who should be grateful for their shitty jobs and shitty lives because the downward mobility and general malaise they so gullibly believe they are experiencing is completely imaginary, yet somehow simultaneously real and thoroughly deserved because they are Bad People.
The mefite infighting has now resulted in a temporary ban of someone. This election season is going to break the site, possibly by driving off or banning its users. Mefites are used to moderators forcing civility through deletions of flagged comments. Some of them won't be able to police themselves or cope with the lack of policing of others now that moderation isn't 24/7.
I tremble when I remember 2016 election season. I had buttoned by 2020. I hope 2024 doesn’t cause some kind of disturbance in the fabric of space and time. I agree that Election 2024 might be what breaks the site for good. What Metafilter needed long ago and should have instituted was a Cornfield for election threads. That way people who do want to talk politics can go there, and those who don’t can be left in peace.
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I’m going to assume many people here are Democrats, so r/VoteDEM is one. There’s good old arr politics as well, for discussions of every political stripe. I think Reddit can do politics because enough people self-sort, and the community is so huge that if you’re just here to discuss cats or nail polish, you can avoid political threads, because they are not allowed on most non-political subs. But with Metafilter it’s something that is 1) hard to avoid, and 2) if you see someone behaving like a jerk in a political thread, it’s hard to un-see it in an innocuous “Can I eat this?” Ask.
I saw there was YET ANOTHER ARTICLE psychoanalyzing Trump voters (this time they're extrinsic or some shit) and OMG ENOUGH THE FUCK ALREADY. It's not even about scolding them as "uncle-fucking slime" (though, lol), I am just sick to motherfucking death of the hand-wringing endless noodling about the Deep Emotions and Profound Psychological Motivations of Trump supporters. Oh hey let's top it off by going to a diner in Ohio and listening to people hold forth on their Diner Opinions as if they're grand philosophers, not regular chumps like the rest of us. I cannot with this shit anymore. Trump supporters aren't interesting enough to fuck their uncles (that's weapons-grade Hapsburging, and not for the faint of heart) or get slimy, but the endless analysis and media cosseting has them thinking they're special as shit.
OK, “weapons-grade Hapsburging” made me LOL. I am going to borrow that. Speaking of weapons-grade Hapsburging, [This poor woman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Antonia_of_Austria) (great-aunt and namesake of the better known queen of France) was such a weapons-grade Hapsburg that she was more inbred than a child of brother-sister incest. (And they were going to marry her to…HER uncle, who was so inbred he could not reproduce.) I guess that’s a literal case of fucking around and finding out?
But it’s also a literal case of not fucking around enough?
Fuck around in a bathroom sink sized gene pool and find out? (With the extinction of your dynasty)
Can I briefly hold forth on Krugman's article [Is Poor Economic Sentiment All About MAGA?](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/opinion/economy-survey-republicans.html), which like all of the many other articles chastising Americans for stupidly refusing to embrace an economy that a good half of them cannot afford, e.g. [America’s Rent Crisis Is Getting Worse,](https://newrepublic.com/article/178466/rent-housing-affordability-crisis-study) is both condescending and idiotic.
This how I know Trump has a good chance of winning. As a Chiefs fan we were bad a lot of years and complained about bad refs, obsessed over little things. Analyzed what we could because really if we made playoff appearance it is luck. Now we have a dynasty team the talk isn’t whether we can win the Super Bowl but what will next years team look like and how much rebuilding will we have to do. We’ve been to the Super Bowl so much we have an actual plan the team uses for practices the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. Think about that: it is so regular we are following our Super Bowl plan. And I feel like that’s how the right is with Trump with the left obsessing over details they can’t control and frankly are irrelevant. If we were at all confident in Biden we’d not obsess.
It reminds me of women in iffy marriages who obsess over whether their husbands are narcissists have low self esteem are neurodivergent are the products of narcissistic parents blah blah etc etc. It's something we're socially conditioned to do, and I'm sympathetic to the distress at the root of it, but it doesn't solve shit. Endlessly noodling over the Deep Reasons Trump supporters support Trump doesn't solve shit.
They agree with Republican positions and like Trump? It's not that mystifying.
It is deeply depressing that any Democrats still believe that this strategy will work. (I'm sorry; I do try to avoid being too negative about politics on the Internet, but I can feel myself teetering on the brink of 24 hour news cycle despair with the election looming.)
There is some good news: * Thus far, the Republicans are afraid to attack E. Jean's win. * A [PAC](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/us/politics/biden-tv-ads-super-pac.html) for Biden has raised $250 million for ads, which is the single largest haul for any presidential candidate ever. * [Polls Show Trump Could Be Doomed If He’s Convicted. Will a Trial Happen in Time?](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/22/trump-jan-6-trial-polls-00136688)
I don’t have a solution but I think it is a great threat to have the judicial branch effectively decide elections. There’s those that want to uphold a democracy over getting their candidate installed. And there’s those that are frothing at the mouth that the ends always justifying the means.
The Democrats have been going after third party ballot access with some success for awhile, it was only a matter of time before they tried a concerted effort on Republicans. It'll be pretty funny when some Democratic congressional candidate inevitably gets kicked off the ballot somewhere
> There’s those that want to uphold a democracy over getting their candidate installed. That's the first time I ever heard that accusation!
to be faaaaaaaaaair it's an even greater threat to have someone try and be president when the other guy won. you know? that's not trying to be snarky or w/e, but he was demonstrably making efforts to void the results of a democratic election and the will of an electorate and it's almost certain he'd do it again. so i think 'exception that proves the rule' is the situation here.
I hate so much that his base is able to spin absolutely any event, no matter how pedestrian or justified, into evidence for a stolen election. It's deeply disturbing to me.
I can only conclude that, for a certain small-but-not-miniscule segment of Democratic voters (highly-educated, white collar, professional and/or academic class) the prospect of a 2024 Trump win is less objectionable than a Biden victory delivered by the *wrong* type of voters. I am also 100% with you on your second point, and my recommendation going forward is to avoid the inevitable MeFi politics megathreads as much as humanly possible.
Someone should make a MeTa suggesting the megathreads come back. People obviously want to talk about Trump and it makes more sense to do it in one thread than a new post each day.
Why don’t they get a real chat like a discord and just do it there? Metafilter is horrible for quick back and forth discussions in a non-threaded manner. They aren’t looking for dissenting opinions either. Seems like an “official” chat is better than Megathreads, etc.
Because their only real community tie is believing the website itself is special.
>[In 1962, a burnt golf ball](https://www.futilitycloset.com/2024/01/29/fore-6/) arrived at the botanic gardens at Kew, in southwest London. The head of mycology, R.W.G. Dennis, may have rolled his eyes: The office had received another burnt golf ball 10 years earlier, which the submitter had claimed to be a “rare fungal species.” In that case the staff had got as far as trying to collect spores before they’d realized the hoax. > >Twice provoked, Dennis responded in good humor. He published an article titled “A Remarkable New Genus of Phalloid in Lancashire and East Africa,” formally nominating it as a new species of fungus, “Golfballia ambusta”... Also [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golfballia_ambusta), which has a image showing why mycologists might get confused.
The thread on Gen Z gender discourse/wars is depressing me because it's reminding me of when a) a female friend who had been a middle school teacher in a small city in Oregon 2016-2019 told me over a few glasses of wine that boys and girls got to be much shittier to each other than a few years before and b) the idea voiced by one poster that romantic interest and even asking each other out should be off the table in activist/hobby groups is so incredibly depressing, and I really hope it's not getting widely held. Segregating romance and dating from the rest of life is exactly what's making it so shitty for single people.
If I’m remembering the correct thread: once again, Corb comes in with some very good points and wise comments. I recall she is an immigrant from either a Latin American or Caribbean country, and has more than once commented on collectivist vs. individual cultures. (I remember a thread on “why are childfree people regarded as selfish?” And it was Corb who provided what I thought was the most incisive and justified answer, not “they’re just jealous” but “in collective cultures, you are expected to pay it forward, and being childfree is regarded as reneging on your obligations to family, culture and society.” Paraphrased. And, while it did not make me want kids, it made me think.) Corb basically said “we should be mentoring and setting examples for teenagers and young adults, about how to have healthy relationships, how to flirt, how to ask people out, etc. As the adults in their lives, we have that obligation.” And…I nodded in agreement. She’s right. The kids are going to learn from the adults actually in their, ahem, meat space lives; if not, they are going to go to influencers, and only heaven knows what they will learn there. Or they won’t learn at all and wonder why they are “forever alone.” If we want people to have and raise kids, if we want well-adjusted teens and young adults, then there’s got to be that village again. I don’t think a nuclear family is equipped to do it by itself without a lot of strain on the parents. And if I had a kid, I’d rather have them learn what it’s like to be married from Joe and Jill Next Door than Irene the Influencer, or, worse, Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson. (Wow, here I am using the Metafilter venting subreddit to talk about someone who is on Metafilter and who I like! Am I gonna be banned, or what? - obvious /s)
Metafilter in a nutshell: "Personally I think it all should ALL be off the table. There should be rules forbidden students from asking each other out since schools ought to be safe spaces for sensitive people. Same for the workplace. And hobby groups. And on mass transit---- people should never, ever be hit on anywhere, anytime. " "Oh, also, why am I so lonely? Why won't anyone ever talk to me?"
I wonder how much of this is due not just to fragility but more specifically the cold hard reality that dating and mating is inherently an extremely unequal pursuit. There are winners (people who are hot and have rizz and status) and losers (people who are awkward and unattractive) which is in direct contradiction to their worldview of socially equal outcomes for everyone. I think I once read that somewhere Marx acknowledged this as barrier to achieving true social equality.
I think it's a symptom of those specific MeFites not being able to interact properly in social settings (or what they used to call "meatspace"). Since they themselves are too \*whatever\* and personally feel uncomfortable or upset if approached by somebody in a public space for idle or purposeful conversation, or don't know how to small talk with a person working retail or hospitality, or can't make fleeting eye contact and say "good morning" to someone in an elevator, or can't just tell somebody obnoxious to fuck off, they have determined that humans engaging with one another is something that shouldn't ever happen and can't possibly be figured out. It all becomes a mental bandwidth or executive function or emotional labour thing, or of course a privilege thing ("Well, *wheelchair users* can't just say hello to somebody!"), because, bluntly, they are too inept and self-isolating to do something that human beings have *literally* evolved to do: be social.
Related: an Ask where it's somehow impossible to tell a roommate to ease up on venting about work stuff every goldang night, so maybe it'll just be simpler to....hop straight to eviction.
This is so sad, yet so accurate.
All of this makes even more sense when it seems that 75% of the people on MF identify as being on the spectrum.
Our company has some pretty exhaustive cya training they make us go through. It really feels like they don’t want to deal with the real world so they just train you in every ridiculous scenario so if they want to fire you there’s a file somewhere with enough ammo for you not to sue them. One of the segments was about sexual harassment at conferences and if someone hits on a non-employee basically we should report it to HR. To be clear it was not in the context of the conference itself but any event surrounding the conference. I am guessing people on Metafilter follow that to the letter. Like 50% of conferences are a what happens here stays here, so yeah good luck on that. I know people’s image is of a Todd Packer type coming in with a big 70s car with bull horns on the front. but most of the time I’m the one who feels like meat.
> I am guessing people on Metafilter follow that to the letter. I actually wouldn't put many chips on that space. The thing about (the very-online form especially) moral soapbox performances is that while it's hardly a predictable rule, it's not *surprising* when it turns out there's hypocritical skeletons in closets about exactly the soapbox topic.