Personally, I'm just too tight-fisted to buy bottled water, regardless of the environmental cost - my lined aluminium bottle cost the same as five disposable plastic bottles of the same volume, so paid for itself in a week. (Admittedly, the tap water here is absolutely delicious, easily on a par with fancy brands of the bottled stuff, which helps.)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 4:21 AM on July 5, 2008

I read 500-odd comments of vitriolic spouting, only for Messrs. Scalzi and Hat to ruin it all by being thoroughly reasonable chaps? For shame.

As for the scandal - on no evidence whatsoever, I'm thinking it's an elaborate performance of some kind, and that Violet Blue is in on it. A bit like that time all those webloggers did a post about a girl on a bike.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 7:23 AM on July 1, 2008

Kattullus wrote: As long as we're pointing out stupid edits without explanation or notification, Valleywag's renaming of their post from something along the lines of "Boing Boing loses credibility" to Did the Internet's free-speech guardians try to hush up a girl-on-girl love affair is shitty.

It used to be "Blogging For Dollars: How Boing Boing disappeared its blog authenticity". And, yeah, the choice of new headline is shitty;... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:07 PM on July 1, 2008

Ms. Jardin's latest post: Internet catfight. I think the pristine floor is meant to symbolise Boing Boing's reputation, and the vile splurge of cat vom their recent actions.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 1:37 AM on July 2, 2008

jsavimbi writes 'All of her posts, via Google Spreadsheets'

Did you even bother to plug any of those URLs into the Wayback Machine? They are posts about her, or about stuff she's suggested, not by her. There are plenty of reasons to be miffed with Boing Boing over this, no need to invent new ones.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:09 PM on July 2, 2008

Ugh, that latest Valleywag post really does err on the side of too much information, doesn't it?
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:15 PM on July 2, 2008

(Although as someone who's never read Valleywag before, the tone is snarktacular to the extent that I have no idea whether the post is meant to be some sort of joke.)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:20 PM on July 2, 2008

jsavimbi writes 'Of course I didn't. I barely looked over the VA post in its entirety. But that's not going to stop me from adding fuel to the fire.'

Hee - good to see you're getting into the spirit of things!

drezdn writes 'I just want to post that there are those of use who don't love or hate BoingBoing (we're BB agnostics? apathetic?) but are following this issue because we think it's important for blogs to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:50 PM on July 2, 2008

CCBC writes 'I suppose this is a reference to the xenisucks site. Now, at that time it was VB who defended Xeni. Her overzealous behavior got her into trouble. '

Blue's passionate defence of Jardin includes a link to this Boing Boing post, in which Jardin describes xenisucks.com as 'a total hoot', and yet, as others noted a few hundred comments ago, the post in question has subsequently been unpublished. I've lost count of the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:03 PM on July 3, 2008

I am very proud to call Teresa Nielsen Hayden a colleague, she's handled this with dignity and sincerity throughout., says Xeni Jardin.

Has this driven Jardin bonkers? I really can't see how anyone could read that thread and see 'dignity and sincerity' in Neilsen Hayden shrieking like a banshee at the folk she's meant to be moderating.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:54 PM on July 4, 2008

tylermoody wrote: We're gonna blow the house off this sucker

I really hope this is a genius parody.

It's pretty obviously mediocre parody. Almost funny in places.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:58 AM on July 4, 2008

I dunno, for me, he just kept threatening to be funny without quite managing it. (The guitar faces did cause me to smirk slightly, admittedly.)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 10:43 AM on July 4, 2008

hortense wrote: Thumbnail calender

I love that. Equal parts daft and practical.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:12 PM on July 3, 2008

Wow! Wonderful, and mostly wonderfully strange. I like the very dry titles, too.

But there's... All but forgotten today, his work informed Disney's "Dance of the Hours" sequence in Fantasia.

That doesn't seem to make any sense. Flagged as HTML/display error.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:04 PM on July 3, 2008

Eideteker writes 'Is there a different definition of "gearhead" that doesn't involve working on cars/motorcycles?'

I'd never assume that 'gearhead' referred to cars/motorcycles, always gear of the music-making kind. Well, that and drugs.

Whatever, the 'gearhead' link is the best bit of the post, I reckon - anyone who digs Delia Derbyshire and hangs out with Thighpaulsandra is okay by me! Her torch song-ish... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:18 AM on July 3, 2008

As for the 'whooosh' effect, it sounds to me like there's a 'pre-echo' (ie, a bit of echo applied on the original, but coming first because the recording reversed), but otherwise it sounds characteristic of reversed audio to me, no added sounds or other mucking about: the strange harmonics or overtones - probably not the right terms, I'm not a musician - especially are something you often hear on reversed recordings.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:24 AM on July 3, 2008

ChickenringNYC wrote: Big whoop. We've all seen this before.. Anyone with a few hours to kill can record themselves singing something.. listen to it backwards, and painstakingly rehearse singing it backwards. There's a reason we have thousands upon thousands of languages in this world. In fact, some of them SOUND like backwards English when spoken normally.. so to sum, this is cute but big freakin' deal. Anyone could do it. You just posted about her because you think she's cute.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 11:57 AM on July 3, 2008

The UK's Independent is outraged.

That's a slightly misleading way of putting it. More like an author who, famously, hates blogging, user generated content, Wikipedia, online polls, &c. is using the story to bolster his ongoing campaign against anything that smells even faintly of 'Web 2.0'. On a weblog, ironically, not in the newspaper.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 10:40 AM on July 3, 2008

Besides the fascinating content, that's a beautiful artifact. Reminds me of prison camp newspapers - eg. POW-WOW, The Liberation Bulletin, The Tiki Times.

a diary kept by his nephew Robert Dickinson

Uncle, no?
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:34 AM on July 3, 2008

If it's an advertisement for Lotus and there's 19 days until the reveal, they've started a bit early, no? And I'm not entirely sure associating a sports car with terrifying no-face people who can't see very well is terribly clever from a marketing standpoint - vague notions of being creeped out then run over by partially sighted mutants is not something I'd want associated with my new supercar, really.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 11:33 AM on July 2, 2008

How many other animal-assisted hunting/fishing traditions are there?

I'm having trouble thinking of a hunting tradition that isn't animal assisted - can you even go hunting without a retriever, terrier, setter, pointer, flusher or some other specially-bred and trained dog (or a pack of them, if you're after a fox for kicks)?
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 1:25 AM on July 2, 2008

tadellin writes 'Ha, the article says it's stronger than most bicycle chains/locks. I'd just go through the bike chain.'

Yeah, that does seem to be a whopping great flaw in their plan. I mean, who cares how heavy and strong the thing you lock your bike to is when pretty much every commercially available bike lock can be snapped/sawn through/unlocked with a ballpoint pen/&c.?... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 7:30 AM on July 1, 2008

dobbs writes 'I think you folks are being pretty ridiculous. Obviously these things are for people who can't bring their bikes inside so they've got to lock it to something. If the lock is cheap, the thief is gonna go thru it no matter what it's locked to but if it's a quality lock (and that pen lid problem's been solved) then they're going to have to go thru the thing it's locked to.'

Do bike thieves ever do that? I've never... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 11:13 AM on July 1, 2008

He's brilliant live. And until you meet him, you can never truly understand the meaning of the word lascivious - it's like he simultaneously hits on every woman in a five mile radius. Which is just a teensy bit creepy.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 6:04 AM on June 30, 2008

Did he write this during the strike?

There was some shit about singing mushrooms and elderberries in the 'master plan' that sort of suggests he did, but it's not terribly clear.

Whatever, Dr. Scab's Scab-a-long Scab! is a way better title.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:02 PM on June 29, 2008

Just read the weblog, DreamerFi - it's a teensy bit disappointing unless you really like photos of rusty metal, but much easier to read through. (That said, I'm sure I'd be pretty excited if I found a WWII-era tunnel in my garden too.)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 2:22 PM on June 29, 2008

Interesting that the list is stuffed to the gunnels with trip-hop, but there's no hip-hop or electro.

Overall, it's more like the 25 Greatest Electronic Albums Of The 20th Century That Made It Into The Top Twenty While This Thirty-something List Compiler Who Isn't Really That Into Electronic Music Was Still Young And Had Just Got A Coffee Table On Which To Ostentatiously Display His Compact Discs.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 11:22 AM on June 29, 2008

Huh, it seems that at 31 I enjoy relacing my shoes in a (slightly) fancy way as much as I did when I was ten. Why did I ever give up the lace experimentation? Two decades of wasted lacing opportunities!
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:55 AM on June 28, 2008

The other day I was wondering why I hadn't bumped into any of the Tartan gang at the Edinburgh Film Festival (which is unusual because you can normally hear them coming from a mile off). Guess this explains it. Very sad.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:40 AM on June 28, 2008

cilantro writes 'Whatever she has going on now is likely a manifestation of some kind of mental illness'

More like a manifestation of Blake Fielder-Civil.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 3:38 AM on June 23, 2008

did not everyone in grade 5 do this?

The only time I've ever done the Popcorn and parachute thing was while working as a teaching assistant at a special school. Some of the kids who normally did nothing more than sit in their wheelchairs dribbling would absolutely hoot with pleasure while being whizzed under the parachute - it was this that convinced me that Popcorn is more than just an ace song, also having Important Healing Powers.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 4:45 AM on June 22, 2008

bwg wrote: They leave together after the game for dinner, drinks, dancing, and who knows.

I was totally expecting this post to be about some form of bisexual topping from the bottom multi-gender strap-on porn, never having wondered about the possible origins of the slang term 'switch hitter'.

That it's actually about rounders baseball is pretty disappointing, really.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 11:37 AM on June 20, 2008

Totally ace. I have no idea what the original sounds like - is this version relatively faithful to it, given the equipment?
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 11:28 AM on June 6, 2008

TheOnlyCoolTim: "Yes, except for the poor choice of putting a minute of static and a blank screen as some sort of early computing in-joke."

What's the opposite of 'get off my lawn'? ;-)
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 1:09 PM on June 6, 2008

2or3whiskeysodas wrote: That is honestly pretty amazingly cool.

But (unless I'm missing it) I certainly don't see anything on the artist's site indicating that he got this to happen in real-time. I'm thinking that at least some of the sounds were sampled and/or multitracked.

If I am missing something saying that that's not the case, please do point it out so that this guy can be made my god.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:53 AM on June 7, 2008

I just got a press release announcing that Houston won the Newbery Medal and The Bram Stoker Award for his degree show work at Glasgow School of Art. The Newberry Medal is given to the top student in the final year.

Is it too cynical of me to think that this massive viral video hit he made might have something to do with the award?
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 10:07 AM on June 20, 2008

They were embarrassed that I was going out and just painting like an old fogy from the 1800s.

This strikes me as really odd - I deal with totally poncey commercial galleries, and even poncier artist-run spaces on a daily basis, and they mount shows of straight up painting all the time, and have lots of painters on their books. In fact, painting is totally hip at the moment. (Paintings with LEDs stuck on, less so.)

Whatever, as... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 8:41 AM on June 20, 2008

Hee. And I just read a bunch of the other columns - good stuff. I especially like the one-line bio that changes to match each post.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 1:55 PM on June 19, 2008

PeterMcDermott wrote: So is there a way of forcing FF3 to use incompatible extensions that were designed for FF2 (as suggested in the comments at the 'holdoff' link)? Because the last beta I tried wouldn't allow me to use various greasemonkey scripts and extensions that I rely on.

Nightly Tester Tools will let you force compatibility (though it might break a few add-ons in the process - all mine work fine except Google Browser Sync, which is very old... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:05 PM on June 17, 2008

camcgee wrote: Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog has a lot about this phenomenon in the UK.

The Panorama documentary Goldacre discusses in that post is worth watching, if only as an example of spectacularly biased, unscientific science programming. (Which is depressing: Panorama used to be a fine documentary series, but now just punts Daily Mail-level bibble.)

M.C. Lo-Carb! wrote: Sheesh -- don't... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 10:33 AM on June 17, 2008

Would this be funny if I knew who Chuck Todd is? I sort of doubt it.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:07 AM on June 17, 2008

Those are are some ass ugly beasts.

So are half the dogs at Crufts. I think ZaneJ. has it: there are probably arcane and complex critieria for judging, just as at dog or cow shows - there was much tedious discussion of udder symmetry on a recent cow-judging themed episode of The Archers.

Ten points for a totally fucking freaky nose, that kind of thing.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 5:24 AM on June 15, 2008

I sometimes think the best 'phone I've ever had was the first one, a Nokia 5110, or maybe a precursor of that model, as I don't remember being able to replace the fascia on mine - built like a brick shithouse, really simple UI.

I'd still have it, but the poor thing never recovered from being dropped in a toilet mid-flush (don't text drunk, kids!).
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 3:02 AM on June 13, 2008

XQYUZYPHYR steals his jokes from Bernard Righton.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 8:56 AM on June 11, 2008

You know, I've never, ever seen anyone order one of these boxes - they're on the menu at most crappy take-aways, but folk tend to stick to one or another of the Munch Box items on its own, as nature intended. Even at 3am in the East End.

el_lupino wrote: Glasgow remains the only place on Earth I have ever been offered a deep-fried frozen pizza.

Pizza Crunch, it's called. I have one approximately every three years, which is how... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 7:34 AM on June 11, 2008

Described as Britain’s Andy Warhol, undercover graffiti guerrilla Banksy is not only our most important working artist, but one of the world’s most elusive criminals.

That's the stupidest fucking sentence I've read all day, on at least three levels.

The decapitations are good fun, though.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:24 AM on June 5, 2008

Also, Banksy gave an exclusive interview to the Daily Mail? Eugh.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 9:26 AM on June 5, 2008

Huh, I had no idea a friend of mine was currently starring as Walks-home-in-bare-feet-after-a-gig Girl #2 in an Irn Bru ad.

The Snowman one is still my fave by far, though.

Nick Verstayne wrote: I take it the NSFW part was the Celtic girl kissing the Rangers lad.

Must be, but even in Glasgow I doubt viewing inter-Old Firm snogging would get you sacked, and surely there are no workplaces so prudish that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:09 PM on June 4, 2008

Ah, thanks for the explanation fearfulsymmetry - it didn't even occur to me that some old bare bums could be the reason. Thank you, constantly naked hippie parents.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:48 PM on June 4, 2008

pineapple wrote: Dude -- on what planet is a blog that displays photos taken up a vagina right on the front page considered SFW?

The same one on which an advert for Irn Bru is considered NSFW.

pwb503's trolling is a shame, though, as the cervical diary is a fascinating link to post.
posted to MetaFilter by jack_mo at 12:40 PM on June 4, 2008