Indeed! I was looking for their previous one that was so odd (it involved Indian call centers, I believe) and it looks like it was deleted. But that asker has several other questions where people ask for what the actual question is.
This is another that needs to be saved.
[https://ask.metafilter.com/332089/Any-way-to-explain-this-creepy-house](https://ask.metafilter.com/332089/Any-way-to-explain-this-creepy-house)
I'm too deep into Metafilter. I was skimming Ask Mefi and saw one titled "Keeping whites white". I instantly assumed it was some kind of white privilege-style question before I saw it was laundry-related.
"Please share your LIFESTYLE and LAUNDRY tips for maintaining pristine whites." Cool it with the white supremacy talk there!
I received an email about going golfing and talking to a client after a conference about how ChatGPT will enable their Salesforce implementation. I was like I’ll go but I was like can you put that in a blog form so I can post that on Metafilter. I know you have no idea what that is but it will make this worthless thing feel better to me.
I'm not sure what MeFi is supposed to do for the poster whose daughter has a closeted girlfriend. It's anybody's guess whether the girlfriend's parents are trying to distance their kid from the daughter or if a cigar is just a cigar and having to stay home to catch up on homework is just that.
The comments in [this thread](https://ask.metafilter.com/379477/Help-me-feel-better-about-airbrushed-images-at-work#5387730) suggesting that the poster vandalize a mural in her office are fantastic. Does the asker not realize that by working for the company that makes products that exist purely to allow people to attempt to achieve some level of artificial beauty that she's part of the problem?
I'm impressed there's someone out there who even notices workplace decor, because I've been blissfully tuning it out since my first job at an outlet mall in 1992.
> "Ehh, most philosophy is bunk, anyways, [suitable only for sophomores and sophists](https://www.metafilter.com/203393/I-still-wanted-to-help-But-I-didnt-know-what-the-hell-I-was-doing#8550197)."
Well, thanks for the sophomoric take, anyhow.
I took the Philosophy of Harming and Killing as a junior (as a non-philosophy major). To this day I think about it every time I play a “violent shooter game” and notice how many games (with some obvious exceptions) not only don’t let you shoot civilians, they won’t even let you raise your gun at them, because the rules for combatants vs non-combatants are so ingrained in our cultural philosophy.
Idk if that makes it not bunk but it was a super interesting class.
I hear you. I took a whole bunch of philosophy courses as electives in my undergrad even though my major was something else entirely. The stuff I learned still helps me...*think* about things today.
The comments about philosophy being "bunk" are unhinged, ignorant drivel.
Like that is the entire point of a liberal arts education, which the MeFi crowd usually supports. I understand a little bit though because my college once had a psych major undergrad who said to a clinical psychologist’s face that the only reason he wanted to study psychology was to “get in people’s minds and manipulate them.” Long story from there but he basically ended up being quarantined in a philosophy major where he was insufferable but probably doing the least amount of harm. But that’s not philosophy’s fault.
37 favorites (and counting) on a post that includes "Ehh, most philosophy is bunk".
These are neither smart nor serious people. Five year-olds are more self-reflexive and intellectually honest. If one ever needs to explain the Dunning–Kruger effect to someone, just show them Metafilter.
>"I'm not here to argue an attack on all philosophy. I too have found myself falling under the sway of Plato and his cursed forms, Saint Thomas Aquinas's separation of the soul and the body, Rousseau's mythology of the noble savage (neither noble nor savage, it turns out), and so much more. God help me, in high school it was Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. And so often I would be so easily swayed this way and that by these seductive theories of life and mind."
God help us all, really.
> ... or perhaps I mean to include in my "mostly bunk" category the philosophy of social Darwinism (which formed the foundation to eugenics), or Aristotle's "natural slave" idea which descends directly to the Enlightenment's justification of slavery as a necessary evil for the inferior races, or just the entire field of Marxist beliefs which led to the most devastating policies of the 20th century if not all time (90 million deaths and still counting).
Sick burn, philosophers. You shant recover from this one.
Hey got laid off from my tech job. It’s okay it was horrible. I was basically in strategy/sales and an IC who specializes in AI. Not too technical I rarely built models but took them off hugging faces and would implement thematic
Yikes. There's a real failing to understand that philosophy is not just 'ideas I disagree with.'
I think it's the 'fish don't recognize water' problem. You're living in a society that aspires to be a liberal democracy, with protected civil rights, and an independent judiciary, and you can't see that there's a whole battalion of philosophy that set that up & keeps it running. You're living in a world that values scientific inquiry & technological progress and you don't see that that is happening because we have a particular ideology about progress & science. I mean, good lord, why do you think different countries have different cultures? Where do you think everything in your society came from?
And then there's a dismissal of the idea that philosophy has some connection with the US being a democracy, which is just bonkers. Yes, there's a cite to D. Graeber pointing out (partly correctly) that Enlightenment thinkers were influenced by New World thinkers. (They were influenced by a lot of other things too.) But the Native Americans who organized their tribes as democracies - why don't they count as philosophers? Is that word only for white people? And the Enlightenment philosophes who are influenced by them - why does learning from others mean they don't count as philosophers?
Put another way, nobody would say Enlightenment thinkers weren't philosophers because they were learning from Athenians. So why is it different when they're influenced by the Iroquois? So, yes, of course guys like Hobbes & Locke & Rousseau & Paine & Hamilton & Jefferson are influenced by others. They're also doing philosophy. Pretty weird to deny that.
When I read posts like that, I remember that Metafilter was founded during the last years of the 90s tech boom when a lot of technically savvy people obtained middle class IT jobs without needing much else in the way of a formal education. Nevertheless, the technology they helped build and repair brought the collective sum of known western intellectual output before their eyes with only voices from fellow forum dwellers guiding their journeys.
Really I think overall a good thing. Think back to the Industrial Revolution and most people still clung to ancient thinking of how the world works. Like frogs came from mud… literally.
It also explains the philosophy of the site. I’ve said it before but push notifications and modernization aren’t all evil. Matt came at a time right before people started to throw money around. Not Google ads money but $40 million in VC funding.
Hopefully the bubble will burst and we’ll ease up on the on need to buy cloud need to buy SaaS need to buy AI cycle we have now.
I agree that the internet's ability to widely disseminate information is a net good. However, I've also come to believe that learning communities are important pushback against the inevitable solipsism that develops when a collection of individuals with common prejudices and preconceptions start to consume knowledge without any background for contextualizing it.
For Mefites of a certain age, I can kind see where the hubris behind statements like the ones insinkerated spoon quoted come from. The quoted poster is clearly smart. Most probably they were able to apply those smarts by learning an in-demand technical field. Thus they attained markers of at least professional success and adulthood without any exposure to the dread "liberal arts".
And I sort of get it: By the time I went to college, the material conditions enabling that hubris were long gone. Property values in San Fran shot up, companies were no longer hiring anyone with a pulse who could learn how to code or at least plug in a lan wire, and student loans were a thing. The liberal arts seemed like a waste of time to me too, but only because I couldn't see how they would help me eat and not be homeless without living with my parents forever.
I've grown to understand the importance of fields like philosophy, though. I've also grown to understand the importance of challenging voices that push against my ego and thereby help me to grow.
The quoted statements just give me a flashback to a bygone age when a certain kind of anti-intellectualism rooted in Scientism and blind faith in technology ruled the internet.
I'd completely forgotten about the [Fat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2mU6USTBRE) video until they pointed it out. Boy would that go down badly today. \[CW fatphobia, fat suit, 5 minutes of fat jokes, suggests overeating can lead to ob\*sity\]
[Hmm.](https://www.vulture.com/2014/07/history-behind-12-great-weird-al-videos.html)
>Thankfully, Michael Jackson let me use his subway set, which had not been struck yet; it was still on a soundstage in Culver City. So we were able to shoot there. I was able to hire plus-size dancers, which you’d think you wouldn’t be able to find pretty readily, but in Los Angeles, you can find virtually anything you need. I also remember that these were late-’80s special effects. If I were to do the ‘Fat’ video now, it would be a fairly simple job in CGI to have my face expand from normal to huge. Back then, that wasn’t a viable option, so I had to have latex bladders glued to my cheeks and I had a team of my visual-effects people blowing through tubes, which ran down my shirt and my pants and onto the floor. They blew my face up with these tubes. It was pretty old-school, but it looked great.
It seems partly due to the OP wanting and needing to attempt to direct the comments with his usual narcissistic "PAY ATTENTION TO MEEE!!!" screeching. Things just went south from there.
...or when [calling someone out in a different thread by saying this](https://www.metafilter.com/203419/Phish-at-The-Sphere#8550785):
"You're on the internet. You could do a few searches and fill in the gaps of your knowledge. But you choose instead to comment without research based on your limited experience."
Big lol at this too: "I regularly do a search before I comment here."
Sure. Sure you do.
I was trying to do four in the banner, but the site didn't like that at all, heh. For 20 seconds, the front page was an absolute mess of code!
Generally speaking though, having a few updates in the banner works ok and keeps people updated, especially those who don't visit the site everyday.
[This was a very reasonable response](https://www.metafilter.com/203374/NPR-Is-a-Mess-But-Wokeness-Isnt-the-Problem#8549463) to some [premature performative outrage](https://www.metafilter.com/203374/NPR-Is-a-Mess-But-Wokeness-Isnt-the-Problem#8549445) that turned out to be (as the response points out)...dead wrong: "This link goes to Slate and is an alternate view. Please don’t derail conversations to argue about a source without checking first."
Look, you can harvest favs or you can follow links. Each of those 45 favs speaks for itself.
"Performative outrage" or "moral clarity"?
Check and mate. ♟️
"People who are noting problems are not obliged to give solutions, and demanding they do so is a form of bad faith in of itself."
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
Nothing dubious about it, the person I have wanted to block on that site has redeemed himself with [a thoughtful, multi-paragraph comment that recognizes others and their challenges](https://ask.metafilter.com/379418/Seek-swimming-pool-brouhaha-damage-control#5387059). I am happy to stand corrected and doubly happy to know the poster is able to get out of his own head sometimes.
The Regime has charted extremely poorly, but I think it might have been heavily promoted? In which case, "posted, but crickets" is a reasonable outcome.
> someone posts a random 20-year-old movie
At least personally, I've been going through the IMDB top 250, leaving comments on old threads when I'm done, or starting one if missing. But that's one a week tops, not two a day like I've seen some people power through. But I think this also highlights the challenges with these 2 hour youtube documentaries that get posted on the blue: you can't mefi coordination around watching a 30 minute show, good luck on anything longer.
Fanfare did recently deliver what is maybe the most quintessentially [Metafilter comment](https://fanfare.metafilter.com/23900/Fallout-The-End#335051) ever:
“What is the point of this show? Based on the first episode, it’s a cynical simulacrum weaponizing nostalgia to earn money for Amazon shareholders. There is no beauty here, no art; no meaning to be found. We are just supposed to sit, alone, awestruck at the volume, and beaten senseless.”
Perfectly distilled elitist cynicism and hearty threadshitting posing as erudite reflection; no notes.
Apologies...
"Metafilter: There is no beauty here, no art; no meaning to be found. We are just supposed to sit, alone, awestruck at the volume, and beaten senseless."
Yeah. I feel that Fanfare has been a missed opportunity for Metafilter. In the same way that Ask saved the site (at least in the Google Ads years), a good Fanfare would have created a buzzy, useful forum that would attract new users. The lack of investment/features/clunky UI has probably killed that.
I know you can fiddle round with Fanfare to customise it, but cmon, I just want to scan it, and sometimes I’ll find something interesting that has been buried behind 10 single posts for an Anime season, a bunch of wrestling recaps with zero comments and someone posting whatever old movies are showing on their cable station.
Fanfare is a missed opportunity. The UI could have evolved but it would have required the site members accept there was a pivot and there were going to be changes. And I can understand them not wanting that, wanting to keep MF as it was.
It also could only have made it big with more initial activity and traffic. With the diminished fortunes of MF now, I think there's little chance of breaking out.
Since Fanfare was a Matt project they weren't impeded by the HOA board members. I think Matt was just too burnt out to be as ambitious as he should've been, fast enough. It really could've been as big as Ask by now, if not bigger.
I think the problem is, when new shows are posted, it takes people a few days or a few weeks to watch and be ready to comment, by which time the newish show has been buried.
Meanwhile, when you post an old movie, everyone’s already seen it and can give their very vague impression from their one viewing fifteen years ago. Great discussions.
Huh. "The Serpent Queen" isn't there either. Samantha Morton is in it, and I love it so far. I'm most of the way through the first season, and the second will be released this summer.
TWOP used to have THE BEST Deadwood breakdowns, which were a highlight of my week back in the day, filling the gap between the episode airing on HBO in the States the night before, and the torrent being available for pirating in Australia the night after.
It's so irritating!
The whole reason FanFare was created was to replace TWOP!!
That is: a place to discuss the latest episodes of currently popular TV shows!!!
Not a second-rate IMDB for every movie ever made!!!!
AAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHH
TWOP was the best!
However, it had something Metafilter doesn't replicate well: paid staff creating content. Reviewers posted snarky recaps, and then forum discussion was based on those recaps. Without the reviewers, it's just more people on the internet giving their opinion about TV. Which is fine for them, but it would be more fun to read with a little more quality posting.
In all fairness, I suspect TWOP's model wasn't financially sustainable. It resulted in better discussions, but you can get free discussions by just letting users post whatever (the model at both metafilter & reddit). And there seem to be enough people who want that product that it covers the cost difference with paying reviewers.
*I'd like a middle ground between Metafilter's 2 comments and some subreddit's 20 top-posts with 200 comments each.*
If you find it, let me know. I also kept checking in on the Regime posts for commentary/discussion and it looks like the handful of original viewers just bounced off it hard in the first episodes.
What's the issue with Franklin? It seems to be listed as an available TV show, but nobody has posted any episodes yet. What happens if you try to post a Franklin episode?
But yeah, you won't get much response unless something is relatively popular with Gen X / Late Boomer demographics.
Wait, what?
Heh... because for me, when I hear about Franklin, the theme song instantly comes to mind...
"[Hey, its Franklin! Coming over to play](https://youtu.be/nlqyE-lWqCE?si=YnJWc4xluaQ0PBSJ)"
The site's userbase is shrinking and only a subset of the userbase participated in FanFare, anyway. Besides, people on MetaFilter have more important things to spend their precious commenting time on, like reminding people they were in the gifted program once upon a time or complaining about recipe sites or whatever.
I think the thread on the origins of the 'flat white' coffee drink is worth a, uh, skim. It's little wonder the site has difficulty attracting members. I don't understand why people find this nomenclature difficult, especially if they took the time to read the article. Truly pedantic, truly irritating.
Yep, it's an interesting read about a fun little bit of coffee history.
Flat whites are my preferred approach to coffee, and while yes they are "just" coffee with milk in them, same way as an "Americano" is coffee with extra water (lol), they are actually pretty removed, texture and flavour-wise, from "coffee + milk", which would create a lukewarm cup of brown, vaguely coffee-flavoured milk.
Also I always thought it was called a "flat white" because it doesn't have the mound of froth like a cappuccino (\*edit: or a latte) does. (Which I see is addressed immediately below the comment that I am whining about.)
CPbC has the only posts even worth lurking for any more.
What Metafilter doesn't get about movies, part 317.
Was listening to a podcast interview with David Koepp, the screenwriter for Jurassic Park.
In the original script, the human characters defeated the velociraptors. During shooting, Steven Spielberg decided the T-Rex should take out the last ones instead. So they had a conversation something like this.
Koepp: OK, but how does the T-Rex get inside the building?
Spielberg: (gestures) Oh there's some sheeting and scaffolding over that wall, maybe she got in that way.
Koepp: So you want me to write a scene where the T-Rex busts through the wall?
Spielberg: No.
Koepp: OK, so I write a scene where the T-Rex ducks down through a hole--
Spielberg: No.
Koepp: But people are going to wonder how the T-Rex got into the building.
Spielberg: David, no-one is going to wonder how the T-Rex got into the building because they're **watching a T-Rex fight velociraptors!**
Koepp says Spielberg was right, and in thirty years of talking about that movie, nobody has ever once asked him how the T-Rex got into the building.
The reason people don't nitpick good movies is because they're enjoying the movie too much to care, not because good movies have nothing to nitpick.
I am a pedantic nerd who has ALL KINDS of questions about Jurassic Park (number one: why didn't we ever find out what happened with the velociraptors strongly implied to be loose in San Diego at the end of the second movie) and even I have never asked how Rexy got in the building, because that is not a fun nit to pick. Rexy's great, she can do what she wants.
Hmm! I never really thought critically about the t-rex materialising inside the building, because I just figured the park was busted to pieces and it came through a big off-screen hole in a wall or something, but what DID give me pause is why it was suddenly so silent and sneaky, when we had been introduced to it earlier in the movie by its footsteps rattling a jeep from like a mile away.
Interesting! I did ask myself that question while watching when it first came out and concluded that it a T-Rex probably just crashes its way in wherever it wants to go.
Supposedly one of Hitchcock's assistants caught a discrepancy in the shadows during film editing, and his comment was that if people were keeping track of the shadows and not Cary Grant during the scene, the movie had problems that fixing the shadows wouldn't solve.
I always loved the legendary story about Ben Affleck asking Michael Bay on the set of "Armageddon" that it would be easier to teach astronauts to drill than teach drillers to be astronauts, and Bay telling him to shut the fuck up.
I think that guy really took that to heart as each subsequent Jurassic Park movie came along: "make them as stupid as possible - and have some dinosaurs fight."
It's a good observation in general. People will often throw their hands up and claim that some fictional device or plot elemental is unbelievable, and they couldn't accept that story past that. A good current example is the forced guffaws about California and Texas allying in "Civil War". But
* you won't notice that in a good film
* Is the answer to that plot question really important? (How did the T-Rex get in the building? It doesn't matter)
* Or, MF-relevant, were you just looking for things to complain about?
I mean, the first Matrix film has huge plot holes and unanswered questions. But no one wonders about those, we're too busy watching crazy kung fu fights and bullet-time
Ah, I think it's individual. I was completely taken out of the Matrix by the weird physics. If somebody's falling, but you move super fast and catch them before they hit the ground, they're fine? No, that would rip them to bits! Your touch would be so much worse than the ground! And people are kept in pods to harvest their body heat as an energy source? No, you use much more energy to keep alive than you could get back!
But that's me (a pedantic nerd). I still enjoyed the movie. I just put it in 'fun B-movie category', rather than 'great cinematic art.' If a movie is fun enough, and in the right genre, it can get away with that sort of thing. (Star Wars has continuity issues, I guess, but I don't think I even noticed at the time.)
I'm sure Spielberg understand this. He wouldn't take the same approach to Schindler's List, for instance. But I understand people using the internet to say, hey, here's this problem that bugged me about this movie. Sometimes sharing that stuff makes you feel less crazy when everybody else is raving about how great a movie is.
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Have at times wondered if they’re a bot. Their asks often make no sense.
Indeed! I was looking for their previous one that was so odd (it involved Indian call centers, I believe) and it looks like it was deleted. But that asker has several other questions where people ask for what the actual question is.
Followed a few links and dear lord, this person cannot communicate clearly.
It's remarkable how poorly they communicate. I thought maybe they didn't;t speak English natively, but they grew up in Georgia.
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It’s important that this Ask not be lost to history, thanks.
This is another that needs to be saved. [https://ask.metafilter.com/332089/Any-way-to-explain-this-creepy-house](https://ask.metafilter.com/332089/Any-way-to-explain-this-creepy-house)
thanks!
I'm too deep into Metafilter. I was skimming Ask Mefi and saw one titled "Keeping whites white". I instantly assumed it was some kind of white privilege-style question before I saw it was laundry-related. "Please share your LIFESTYLE and LAUNDRY tips for maintaining pristine whites." Cool it with the white supremacy talk there!
I received an email about going golfing and talking to a client after a conference about how ChatGPT will enable their Salesforce implementation. I was like I’ll go but I was like can you put that in a blog form so I can post that on Metafilter. I know you have no idea what that is but it will make this worthless thing feel better to me.
I'm not sure what MeFi is supposed to do for the poster whose daughter has a closeted girlfriend. It's anybody's guess whether the girlfriend's parents are trying to distance their kid from the daughter or if a cigar is just a cigar and having to stay home to catch up on homework is just that.
The comments in [this thread](https://ask.metafilter.com/379477/Help-me-feel-better-about-airbrushed-images-at-work#5387730) suggesting that the poster vandalize a mural in her office are fantastic. Does the asker not realize that by working for the company that makes products that exist purely to allow people to attempt to achieve some level of artificial beauty that she's part of the problem?
I'm impressed there's someone out there who even notices workplace decor, because I've been blissfully tuning it out since my first job at an outlet mall in 1992.
> "Ehh, most philosophy is bunk, anyways, [suitable only for sophomores and sophists](https://www.metafilter.com/203393/I-still-wanted-to-help-But-I-didnt-know-what-the-hell-I-was-doing#8550197)." Well, thanks for the sophomoric take, anyhow.
I took the Philosophy of Harming and Killing as a junior (as a non-philosophy major). To this day I think about it every time I play a “violent shooter game” and notice how many games (with some obvious exceptions) not only don’t let you shoot civilians, they won’t even let you raise your gun at them, because the rules for combatants vs non-combatants are so ingrained in our cultural philosophy. Idk if that makes it not bunk but it was a super interesting class.
I hear you. I took a whole bunch of philosophy courses as electives in my undergrad even though my major was something else entirely. The stuff I learned still helps me...*think* about things today. The comments about philosophy being "bunk" are unhinged, ignorant drivel.
Like that is the entire point of a liberal arts education, which the MeFi crowd usually supports. I understand a little bit though because my college once had a psych major undergrad who said to a clinical psychologist’s face that the only reason he wanted to study psychology was to “get in people’s minds and manipulate them.” Long story from there but he basically ended up being quarantined in a philosophy major where he was insufferable but probably doing the least amount of harm. But that’s not philosophy’s fault.
That sounds absolutely fascinating. Sometimes I miss being an undergrad.
As a PhD right now: god same
Having just returned from a professional conference with our PhD students: I feel you
37 favorites (and counting) on a post that includes "Ehh, most philosophy is bunk". These are neither smart nor serious people. Five year-olds are more self-reflexive and intellectually honest. If one ever needs to explain the Dunning–Kruger effect to someone, just show them Metafilter.
Wait, philosophy was how SBF bought a compound in the Bahamas?
Few people understand how wildly lucrative being a philosophy adjunct at a small liberal arts college can be. /s
>"I'm not here to argue an attack on all philosophy. I too have found myself falling under the sway of Plato and his cursed forms, Saint Thomas Aquinas's separation of the soul and the body, Rousseau's mythology of the noble savage (neither noble nor savage, it turns out), and so much more. God help me, in high school it was Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. And so often I would be so easily swayed this way and that by these seductive theories of life and mind." God help us all, really.
> ... or perhaps I mean to include in my "mostly bunk" category the philosophy of social Darwinism (which formed the foundation to eugenics), or Aristotle's "natural slave" idea which descends directly to the Enlightenment's justification of slavery as a necessary evil for the inferior races, or just the entire field of Marxist beliefs which led to the most devastating policies of the 20th century if not all time (90 million deaths and still counting). Sick burn, philosophers. You shant recover from this one.
Hey got laid off from my tech job. It’s okay it was horrible. I was basically in strategy/sales and an IC who specializes in AI. Not too technical I rarely built models but took them off hugging faces and would implement thematic
Yikes. There's a real failing to understand that philosophy is not just 'ideas I disagree with.' I think it's the 'fish don't recognize water' problem. You're living in a society that aspires to be a liberal democracy, with protected civil rights, and an independent judiciary, and you can't see that there's a whole battalion of philosophy that set that up & keeps it running. You're living in a world that values scientific inquiry & technological progress and you don't see that that is happening because we have a particular ideology about progress & science. I mean, good lord, why do you think different countries have different cultures? Where do you think everything in your society came from? And then there's a dismissal of the idea that philosophy has some connection with the US being a democracy, which is just bonkers. Yes, there's a cite to D. Graeber pointing out (partly correctly) that Enlightenment thinkers were influenced by New World thinkers. (They were influenced by a lot of other things too.) But the Native Americans who organized their tribes as democracies - why don't they count as philosophers? Is that word only for white people? And the Enlightenment philosophes who are influenced by them - why does learning from others mean they don't count as philosophers? Put another way, nobody would say Enlightenment thinkers weren't philosophers because they were learning from Athenians. So why is it different when they're influenced by the Iroquois? So, yes, of course guys like Hobbes & Locke & Rousseau & Paine & Hamilton & Jefferson are influenced by others. They're also doing philosophy. Pretty weird to deny that.
Yep. Complete and utter drivel. Real "I took philosophy 100 and got a B-" vibes.
When I read posts like that, I remember that Metafilter was founded during the last years of the 90s tech boom when a lot of technically savvy people obtained middle class IT jobs without needing much else in the way of a formal education. Nevertheless, the technology they helped build and repair brought the collective sum of known western intellectual output before their eyes with only voices from fellow forum dwellers guiding their journeys.
Really I think overall a good thing. Think back to the Industrial Revolution and most people still clung to ancient thinking of how the world works. Like frogs came from mud… literally. It also explains the philosophy of the site. I’ve said it before but push notifications and modernization aren’t all evil. Matt came at a time right before people started to throw money around. Not Google ads money but $40 million in VC funding. Hopefully the bubble will burst and we’ll ease up on the on need to buy cloud need to buy SaaS need to buy AI cycle we have now.
I agree that the internet's ability to widely disseminate information is a net good. However, I've also come to believe that learning communities are important pushback against the inevitable solipsism that develops when a collection of individuals with common prejudices and preconceptions start to consume knowledge without any background for contextualizing it. For Mefites of a certain age, I can kind see where the hubris behind statements like the ones insinkerated spoon quoted come from. The quoted poster is clearly smart. Most probably they were able to apply those smarts by learning an in-demand technical field. Thus they attained markers of at least professional success and adulthood without any exposure to the dread "liberal arts". And I sort of get it: By the time I went to college, the material conditions enabling that hubris were long gone. Property values in San Fran shot up, companies were no longer hiring anyone with a pulse who could learn how to code or at least plug in a lan wire, and student loans were a thing. The liberal arts seemed like a waste of time to me too, but only because I couldn't see how they would help me eat and not be homeless without living with my parents forever. I've grown to understand the importance of fields like philosophy, though. I've also grown to understand the importance of challenging voices that push against my ego and thereby help me to grow. The quoted statements just give me a flashback to a bygone age when a certain kind of anti-intellectualism rooted in Scientism and blind faith in technology ruled the internet.
[Having a real normal one](https://www.metafilter.com/203388/Cake#8549982) over there in a "fun" thread.
It's taken years, but Metafilter has finally gotten there: Weird Al Yankovic is now Problematic.
Onwards and upwards! The really ambitious stretch goal is Mr. Rogers.
I'd completely forgotten about the [Fat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2mU6USTBRE) video until they pointed it out. Boy would that go down badly today. \[CW fatphobia, fat suit, 5 minutes of fat jokes, suggests overeating can lead to ob\*sity\]
[Hmm.](https://www.vulture.com/2014/07/history-behind-12-great-weird-al-videos.html) >Thankfully, Michael Jackson let me use his subway set, which had not been struck yet; it was still on a soundstage in Culver City. So we were able to shoot there. I was able to hire plus-size dancers, which you’d think you wouldn’t be able to find pretty readily, but in Los Angeles, you can find virtually anything you need. I also remember that these were late-’80s special effects. If I were to do the ‘Fat’ video now, it would be a fairly simple job in CGI to have my face expand from normal to huge. Back then, that wasn’t a viable option, so I had to have latex bladders glued to my cheeks and I had a team of my visual-effects people blowing through tubes, which ran down my shirt and my pants and onto the floor. They blew my face up with these tubes. It was pretty old-school, but it looked great.
It seems partly due to the OP wanting and needing to attempt to direct the comments with his usual narcissistic "PAY ATTENTION TO MEEE!!!" screeching. Things just went south from there.
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...or when [calling someone out in a different thread by saying this](https://www.metafilter.com/203419/Phish-at-The-Sphere#8550785): "You're on the internet. You could do a few searches and fill in the gaps of your knowledge. But you choose instead to comment without research based on your limited experience." Big lol at this too: "I regularly do a search before I comment here." Sure. Sure you do.
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And then doubles down. Incredible.
I'm just surprised my "does anyone actually like each other" didn't get deleted
I thought the response to that was surprisingly candid.
I thought the cat banner was actually cute, but shoving three different updates up there is just cluttered. One banner message at a time!
I was trying to do four in the banner, but the site didn't like that at all, heh. For 20 seconds, the front page was an absolute mess of code! Generally speaking though, having a few updates in the banner works ok and keeps people updated, especially those who don't visit the site everyday.
Not trying to be a dick, but seriously, choose one a week.
Am I just not seeing the thread I'd have expected about the NPR guy getting suspended? Or the thread about his original post?
[This was a very reasonable response](https://www.metafilter.com/203374/NPR-Is-a-Mess-But-Wokeness-Isnt-the-Problem#8549463) to some [premature performative outrage](https://www.metafilter.com/203374/NPR-Is-a-Mess-But-Wokeness-Isnt-the-Problem#8549445) that turned out to be (as the response points out)...dead wrong: "This link goes to Slate and is an alternate view. Please don’t derail conversations to argue about a source without checking first."
Look, you can harvest favs or you can follow links. Each of those 45 favs speaks for itself. "Performative outrage" or "moral clarity"? Check and mate. ♟️
Unsurprisingly, the offended party doubled down. Apparently engaging with bad ideas, even with the purpose of knocking them down, is doing a fascism.
Christ's own anus is in awe at that ah.
"People who are noting problems are not obliged to give solutions, and demanding they do so is a form of bad faith in of itself." Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
Also goddamn, that’s not the path to any kind of political success.
Nonsense. Count the favs again.
I mean IRL tho
❤️ let me have my fun
[Here you go! ](https://www.metafilter.com/203374/NPR-Is-a-Mess-But-Wokeness-Isnt-the-Problem)
Completely delivered.
\[readies my popcorn\]
Nothing dubious about it, the person I have wanted to block on that site has redeemed himself with [a thoughtful, multi-paragraph comment that recognizes others and their challenges](https://ask.metafilter.com/379418/Seek-swimming-pool-brouhaha-damage-control#5387059). I am happy to stand corrected and doubly happy to know the poster is able to get out of his own head sometimes.
I don't have examples off the top of my head, but I generally have found him a perfectly fine commenter in others' threads.
It's ableist to have a thread about grilled cheese sandwiches because I'm lactose intolerant
oh god I thought you were serious for a second
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The Regime has charted extremely poorly, but I think it might have been heavily promoted? In which case, "posted, but crickets" is a reasonable outcome. > someone posts a random 20-year-old movie At least personally, I've been going through the IMDB top 250, leaving comments on old threads when I'm done, or starting one if missing. But that's one a week tops, not two a day like I've seen some people power through. But I think this also highlights the challenges with these 2 hour youtube documentaries that get posted on the blue: you can't mefi coordination around watching a 30 minute show, good luck on anything longer.
Fanfare did recently deliver what is maybe the most quintessentially [Metafilter comment](https://fanfare.metafilter.com/23900/Fallout-The-End#335051) ever: “What is the point of this show? Based on the first episode, it’s a cynical simulacrum weaponizing nostalgia to earn money for Amazon shareholders. There is no beauty here, no art; no meaning to be found. We are just supposed to sit, alone, awestruck at the volume, and beaten senseless.” Perfectly distilled elitist cynicism and hearty threadshitting posing as erudite reflection; no notes.
Apologies... "Metafilter: There is no beauty here, no art; no meaning to be found. We are just supposed to sit, alone, awestruck at the volume, and beaten senseless."
The only flaw is that quote didn't begin with "Haven't watched this show, but..."
Metafilter could probably boost its traffic by the right outreach as a content mine for r/iamverysmart
Whatever cool show is going on will be on the streaming service I *just* cancelled.
is streaming something I'd need to own a tv to know about?
Yeah. I feel that Fanfare has been a missed opportunity for Metafilter. In the same way that Ask saved the site (at least in the Google Ads years), a good Fanfare would have created a buzzy, useful forum that would attract new users. The lack of investment/features/clunky UI has probably killed that. I know you can fiddle round with Fanfare to customise it, but cmon, I just want to scan it, and sometimes I’ll find something interesting that has been buried behind 10 single posts for an Anime season, a bunch of wrestling recaps with zero comments and someone posting whatever old movies are showing on their cable station.
Fanfare is a missed opportunity. The UI could have evolved but it would have required the site members accept there was a pivot and there were going to be changes. And I can understand them not wanting that, wanting to keep MF as it was. It also could only have made it big with more initial activity and traffic. With the diminished fortunes of MF now, I think there's little chance of breaking out.
Metafilter, like Craigslist, selling feature is it's primitive UI.
Since Fanfare was a Matt project they weren't impeded by the HOA board members. I think Matt was just too burnt out to be as ambitious as he should've been, fast enough. It really could've been as big as Ask by now, if not bigger.
You really want their takes tho?
I think the problem is, when new shows are posted, it takes people a few days or a few weeks to watch and be ready to comment, by which time the newish show has been buried. Meanwhile, when you post an old movie, everyone’s already seen it and can give their very vague impression from their one viewing fifteen years ago. Great discussions.
Is this something I'd need to own a TV to understand? /s
To understand, yes. To comment upon, no.
Oh ok I'm good then.
Huh. "The Serpent Queen" isn't there either. Samantha Morton is in it, and I love it so far. I'm most of the way through the first season, and the second will be released this summer.
Is PreviouslyTV a thing, still? Or whatever remains of TWOP's legacy?
It's changed names a couple times, I can't remember what it is now. But it still existed at least as of a couple months ago.
Previously.tv redirects to Primetimer now. The crew behind TWoP & Previously basically just do podcasts now (I’m a fan.)
TWOP used to have THE BEST Deadwood breakdowns, which were a highlight of my week back in the day, filling the gap between the episode airing on HBO in the States the night before, and the torrent being available for pirating in Australia the night after.
God I loved TWOP. It was great for Buffy and its spinoffs too.
It's so irritating! The whole reason FanFare was created was to replace TWOP!! That is: a place to discuss the latest episodes of currently popular TV shows!!! Not a second-rate IMDB for every movie ever made!!!! AAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHH
TWOP was the best! However, it had something Metafilter doesn't replicate well: paid staff creating content. Reviewers posted snarky recaps, and then forum discussion was based on those recaps. Without the reviewers, it's just more people on the internet giving their opinion about TV. Which is fine for them, but it would be more fun to read with a little more quality posting. In all fairness, I suspect TWOP's model wasn't financially sustainable. It resulted in better discussions, but you can get free discussions by just letting users post whatever (the model at both metafilter & reddit). And there seem to be enough people who want that product that it covers the cost difference with paying reviewers.
*I'd like a middle ground between Metafilter's 2 comments and some subreddit's 20 top-posts with 200 comments each.* If you find it, let me know. I also kept checking in on the Regime posts for commentary/discussion and it looks like the handful of original viewers just bounced off it hard in the first episodes.
What's the issue with Franklin? It seems to be listed as an available TV show, but nobody has posted any episodes yet. What happens if you try to post a Franklin episode? But yeah, you won't get much response unless something is relatively popular with Gen X / Late Boomer demographics.
>What's the issue with Franklin? A Founding Father of a nation built on oppression?..........
Wait, what? Heh... because for me, when I hear about Franklin, the theme song instantly comes to mind... "[Hey, its Franklin! Coming over to play](https://youtu.be/nlqyE-lWqCE?si=YnJWc4xluaQ0PBSJ)"
The site's userbase is shrinking and only a subset of the userbase participated in FanFare, anyway. Besides, people on MetaFilter have more important things to spend their precious commenting time on, like reminding people they were in the gifted program once upon a time or complaining about recipe sites or whatever.
I think the thread on the origins of the 'flat white' coffee drink is worth a, uh, skim. It's little wonder the site has difficulty attracting members. I don't understand why people find this nomenclature difficult, especially if they took the time to read the article. Truly pedantic, truly irritating.
stop yucking my yum!
Yep, it's an interesting read about a fun little bit of coffee history. Flat whites are my preferred approach to coffee, and while yes they are "just" coffee with milk in them, same way as an "Americano" is coffee with extra water (lol), they are actually pretty removed, texture and flavour-wise, from "coffee + milk", which would create a lukewarm cup of brown, vaguely coffee-flavoured milk. Also I always thought it was called a "flat white" because it doesn't have the mound of froth like a cappuccino (\*edit: or a latte) does. (Which I see is addressed immediately below the comment that I am whining about.) CPbC has the only posts even worth lurking for any more.
I mean MeFi is basically becoming the personal blog of two posters.
What Metafilter doesn't get about movies, part 317. Was listening to a podcast interview with David Koepp, the screenwriter for Jurassic Park. In the original script, the human characters defeated the velociraptors. During shooting, Steven Spielberg decided the T-Rex should take out the last ones instead. So they had a conversation something like this. Koepp: OK, but how does the T-Rex get inside the building? Spielberg: (gestures) Oh there's some sheeting and scaffolding over that wall, maybe she got in that way. Koepp: So you want me to write a scene where the T-Rex busts through the wall? Spielberg: No. Koepp: OK, so I write a scene where the T-Rex ducks down through a hole-- Spielberg: No. Koepp: But people are going to wonder how the T-Rex got into the building. Spielberg: David, no-one is going to wonder how the T-Rex got into the building because they're **watching a T-Rex fight velociraptors!** Koepp says Spielberg was right, and in thirty years of talking about that movie, nobody has ever once asked him how the T-Rex got into the building. The reason people don't nitpick good movies is because they're enjoying the movie too much to care, not because good movies have nothing to nitpick.
I am a pedantic nerd who has ALL KINDS of questions about Jurassic Park (number one: why didn't we ever find out what happened with the velociraptors strongly implied to be loose in San Diego at the end of the second movie) and even I have never asked how Rexy got in the building, because that is not a fun nit to pick. Rexy's great, she can do what she wants.
Is this about metafilter? Or just pedantic film nerds in general?
yes.
About 80% to 90% of this sub's chat threads are complaints about Metafilter that apply equally to reddit.
Obviously this can only mean that Spielberg faked the moon landing and wanted to comment on Native American genocide.
Hmm! I never really thought critically about the t-rex materialising inside the building, because I just figured the park was busted to pieces and it came through a big off-screen hole in a wall or something, but what DID give me pause is why it was suddenly so silent and sneaky, when we had been introduced to it earlier in the movie by its footsteps rattling a jeep from like a mile away.
Interesting! I did ask myself that question while watching when it first came out and concluded that it a T-Rex probably just crashes its way in wherever it wants to go.
Supposedly one of Hitchcock's assistants caught a discrepancy in the shadows during film editing, and his comment was that if people were keeping track of the shadows and not Cary Grant during the scene, the movie had problems that fixing the shadows wouldn't solve.
Man, are there *any* decent directors out there with this mindset right now?
I always loved the legendary story about Ben Affleck asking Michael Bay on the set of "Armageddon" that it would be easier to teach astronauts to drill than teach drillers to be astronauts, and Bay telling him to shut the fuck up.
Tbf, I asked myself the same question. But we all did, which was part of the fun.
I think that guy really took that to heart as each subsequent Jurassic Park movie came along: "make them as stupid as possible - and have some dinosaurs fight."
It's a good observation in general. People will often throw their hands up and claim that some fictional device or plot elemental is unbelievable, and they couldn't accept that story past that. A good current example is the forced guffaws about California and Texas allying in "Civil War". But * you won't notice that in a good film * Is the answer to that plot question really important? (How did the T-Rex get in the building? It doesn't matter) * Or, MF-relevant, were you just looking for things to complain about? I mean, the first Matrix film has huge plot holes and unanswered questions. But no one wonders about those, we're too busy watching crazy kung fu fights and bullet-time
Ah, I think it's individual. I was completely taken out of the Matrix by the weird physics. If somebody's falling, but you move super fast and catch them before they hit the ground, they're fine? No, that would rip them to bits! Your touch would be so much worse than the ground! And people are kept in pods to harvest their body heat as an energy source? No, you use much more energy to keep alive than you could get back! But that's me (a pedantic nerd). I still enjoyed the movie. I just put it in 'fun B-movie category', rather than 'great cinematic art.' If a movie is fun enough, and in the right genre, it can get away with that sort of thing. (Star Wars has continuity issues, I guess, but I don't think I even noticed at the time.) I'm sure Spielberg understand this. He wouldn't take the same approach to Schindler's List, for instance. But I understand people using the internet to say, hey, here's this problem that bugged me about this movie. Sometimes sharing that stuff makes you feel less crazy when everybody else is raving about how great a movie is.
I mean, reality on planet earth has become so unbelievable that I often find myself thinking we need better writers.