"Bubbler" usage in my experience is much stronger in Rhode Island than Massachusetts. I don't know why it's attributed to MA, at all, actually. I've never heard it outside of RI. When you meet RI-landers elsewhere the words we connect on are "bubbler" and "wicked", both of which tend to get mistakenly attributed to MA and are (in my experience) both more prevalent in RI.

That said, I'm kind of shocked to come out 53% dixie.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 10:52 AM on May 2, 2008

Much as I love this game and topic, I must point out that it's a double.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 1:33 AM on April 12, 2008

Also, when you're forging documents that were supposedly filled in with a typewriter, do try to avoid using a non-monospaced font.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 3:09 PM on March 26, 2008

The thing is, entertainment based virtual worlds (I exclude Second Life here, for the moment) are fundamentally all about stories. The game itself is often stupidly boring. As a raw game mechanic, WoW is pretty terrible. For the vast majority of PvE encounters, you press the same 4 buttons every time for hours, and just hope you don't pull another mob that messes up your pattern. The same goes for raids that you've got on farm status. They're really repetitive. But what makes these worlds so... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:23 PM on January 24, 2008

Well, this looks to me like the end of the 30 second preview. If you really like the song, you'll want to buy it to dodge the onerous play limit restriction, making last.fm not so much a jukebox but a huge preview service. I expect digital vendors will be trying to renegotiate how previews work on their own services immediately.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 9:11 AM on January 23, 2008

Did anyone else think he would look different? After many hours of slogging through djbdns docs and config files, I had kind of built up this image of djb as a much older man who spewed magic out of his fingertips but was really, really crotchety about it. Maybe Gandalf meets Scrooge?
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 1:39 PM on November 30, 2007

I don't get why every post about online gamers has to deride everyone as 14 year old losers who've never left their parent's basement. That stereotype hasn't been true for a long time, and it's just a ridiculous thing to trot out in this context. Yes, there are those kids. I got destroyed last night by some kid who couldn't have been more than 12. But gamers are not all shutins. This is not to say they're not racist, homophobic assholes. But racist homophobic assholes can be... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 11:27 AM on November 27, 2007

The keyboard is a little cramped for grown-up fingers. You can learn to type on it if you spend a long time with it, but as a very-occasional user of XOs that are around the lab, I'm always frustrated by the keyboard. As someone raised on normal keyboards, the lack of a clear tactile response when you press a key takes getting used to, too.

I'm with delmoi re: feeling uncomfortable about the project, but for different reasons. I don't think the UI itself is condescending.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:10 AM on November 12, 2007

Last I checked, banning on SA is an intentionally temporary thing. Forum accounts (like Metafilter) cost money and banned users are usually welcome to just cough up the fee again and they get their account turned back on. I think there's also a mechanism for people to ban each other if enough people pay money for the cause. It's ingenious. I might have the process wrong, though. I've never been a goon, but have friends who are.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 8:28 AM on August 19, 2007

I was going to write a witty response to ZachsMind, but I have Second Life running in the background and it somehow manages to make typing in webforms excruciatingly slow. And, uh, I don't want to quit it because I'm working on something fun. So I guess that makes for a very lukewarm recommendation?

Seriously, though, IBM is playing its cards well here. It's not yet clear to anyone, as far as I can tell, what virtual worlds will be good for, but you only... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 4:48 PM on July 26, 2007

quosar deploys the elusive and devestating DOUBLE SNARK.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 1:01 PM on May 18, 2007

See all this movie of all the advertising/interface bits that were done for Children of Men. They did quite a good job with them.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 3:05 PM on May 2, 2007

Consider me underwhelmed. Agent simulations have been around for a zillion years. Yes, they're cute, yes, you get interesting patterns. But lots of the flashy processing pieces (eg these) are doing some sort of basic "agent" simulation, whether it's particle physics or some other system, and this little flock of birds is less impressive than most. Some of his other stuff is more cute.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 2:58 PM on May 2, 2007

The "I'm in ur base killin your d00dz" is actually pretty well understood. It was original in a review of starcraft, in which the reviewing player spends the whole match building up a bunch of battleships, and goes hunting for the other player. He asks the guy where he is, and the guy says "im in ur base killin your d00dz".

I'm having a hard time finding the original review, though. I've definitely read it, as recently as a few months ago. It's also... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 9:26 PM on April 24, 2007

Where's my best use of unicode ever flag?
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 10:35 AM on March 16, 2007

The linked site does an amazing job of not really telling you what happens during a game. Maybe I missed the magic "What The Game Is Actually Like" page, but it seemed to gloss over critical details like how the ball changes hands, what kind of tactics do the defenders employ, how do these big hugs decide what to do? Can you be sneaky and run in a very round-about path to avoid detection? It's a super interesting post, I just wish the BBC site was better.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:16 AM on February 20, 2007

Heh, just sent this article to my dad this morning. I've been on his case to try delicious for a year and a half, and he still won't do it. I'm hoping this articles helps him see my perspective on the issue.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 1:48 PM on February 17, 2007

I have no idea why I clicked on this, but it is for some reason incredibly soothing. The content is weird and not that interesting, but something about watching skilled people create things with weird new age music was the Right Thing For Me this evening.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:34 PM on January 31, 2007

I completely disagree about B!H. What's great about it is that it's not about levels. There are few things you can buy that really help your game that much. There are a handful of unlockable units, but for the most part they're pretty easy to get at once you're decent. The biggest flaw is that you start out without those unlockable units and have to play against people who have them (and wreck you as a result). I think that turns a lot of people off. This is exacerbated... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 8:30 AM on January 30, 2007

empath hits the nail on the head, I think. It looks like the reason for the latency is that they're doing some sort of pattern matching in software between the motions they make with the remote and preprogrammed motions. Though, the Wii seems to have pretty low latency on motion detection - I'm not sure why theirs is so much slower. They make it look good by having a wider variety of motions than in most Wii games I've tried, but it's still just pattern matching.

I can... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 9:31 AM on January 26, 2007

This is kind of cute, but I liked Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About quite a bit more.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:37 PM on January 20, 2007

As someone running a "Web 2.0" site, StumbleUpon is a really mixed situation for us. It's by far our biggest referrer day to day (and has been for the past two+ months) but because StumbleUpon's users are in this stumble...stumble...stumble... grind, they tend to spend very little time at the site. Our yield of SU users is atrocious compared to users who follow specific links. So in that sense, SU has a big challenge. It drives lots of traffic, but it's not intentional traffic, so it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 9:41 PM on January 17, 2007

Yeah, but the point is there isn't a good API for it at all now. It's not that they dropped a crappy experimental interface, they dropped the only interface.

This is why I use Yahoo's APIs for the app I work on. They're not amazing, but they're generally good. I'm pretty sure you can get JSON back, too, which is Awesome.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 9:29 PM on December 24, 2006

Flight or invisiblity?
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:49 AM on December 21, 2006

Thanks for this post! When that episode ran I turned to my friend and asked "I wonder what pro-Iraq War people would think of this episode?"

Also - what is this "Religion of Peace" the freepers keep talking about? Is this some secret code word no one told me about? I'm probably part of it, huh?
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 5:21 AM on October 16, 2006

Well, it's pretty ridiculous to expect a guy who already has Calc III (or more, god knows) under his belt to go through the intro courses again.

There are other ways to handle AP credit. My school (and others, I think) will let you test out of courses you've already seen the content for, from, eg, AP classes. That doesn't mean you get fewer credits to graduate, just that it opens up higher level courses to you earlier.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 5:50 PM on September 20, 2006

The only snark I can detect is from the link title's allusion to the Civil War "Jon Brown's body lies a molderin' in the grave" song, whose tune was ultimately hijacked to become the Battle Hymn of the Republic as described here.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 4:56 PM on September 20, 2006

They won't do that. I've been following the director's commentary up until the end of the second season and this is for real.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 6:35 AM on September 7, 2006

For completeness, he's also read one more story on This American Life called "Giving Up The Ghosts." It's about his part time job watching over Jewish corpses at the morgue. I like the spelling bee story linked earlier more, but this one is still pretty excellent. And be warned, the first story in that show is heart-breakingly sad.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 8:08 AM on July 25, 2006

I just don't like Hapland that much. It'd be okay if it was clear what all the interaction points are, but most of the time when I got stuck, I was missing something to click on. I found that to be extremely aggravating.

I really liked the Eyemaze games, though. They grow series has some of the same logic elements that Hapland does, but without the figuring out what to click on phase.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:03 AM on July 21, 2006

I tried the Cities and Knights expansion, and it really left a bad taste in my mouth. It gussied up a beautifully simple game with lots of extra cruft that wasn't that much more fun for me.

What I've always loved about Settlers is that it isn't as intense as games like Tigris, San Juan, or El Grande. It's very people oriented, it has a fantastic and clear metaphor, play moves quickly, it's easy to formulate short term and long term goals, skill clearly matters (experts... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 9:48 PM on July 8, 2006

I'm no golf expert (or fan, really) but it seems to me that this looks a lot more incredible than it is because of the nature of TV cameras. The accelerate-at-the-hole bit seems weird because it's hard to appreciate the slope of the green from the iso-ish angle of the camera.

As for the ball basically stopping, that's a little weirder. If it actually stopped I don't think there's any way to start again; static friction in the rough and all that. I suspect it's moving the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 11:31 AM on June 4, 2006

I just want to add my kudos. I expected something dry and absorbed by its meta-ness, but this was truly a treat. Well done. It's particularly amusing for someone like me with a high user number to see what the old days looked like.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 4:45 PM on June 2, 2006

rmm: Well, it's a beautiful visualization of data, and that's always useful in illustrating concepts

Ehh, I think this is okay but not great. The author's discussion of other sites is a real gem, but the visualization itself is poorly designed which makes it hard to do your own interpretation. The real problem here is that it's visualizing something that very few of us ever look at, and so it's critical that the visualization describe it more... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:29 PM on May 26, 2006

Evil-doing in Eve discussed previously on Metafilter. For more background on Eve, an overview of the Eve experience from Jim Rossignol of the Escapist article, previously.

Eve isn't all swindling scumbags and backstabbers, though. Players have also banded together to create, manage, and protect their own assets.

More excellent (though admittedly less epic) Eve stories about various stages of the game and interceptor combat.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 10:38 AM on May 14, 2006

Ryvar: "someone else can post about the aggravation of instabookmarks"

I have to admit, I only played Eve for about 4 weeks before school started up again and I stopped having time for it, but I enjoyed the insta-bookmark thing.

Some quick background: Solar systems in Eve are connected by jumpgates. To get to a jumpgate, you can select it in a list of destinations in the system and say "warp to here." The... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 12:47 PM on May 14, 2006

"Where outside means of communication (e.g. email, IM, VOIP...) used to gain trust of the 'victims'? If so I think the 'victims' have a real complaint, and the people who are in charge should do something about it. If not, they should stop their whining."

I don't know for sure, but I would not be at all surprised if they had talked on AIM or teamspeak or VOIP or something. These games are not separated from "reality" in any sense.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 12:55 PM on May 14, 2006

Assassin Sharon being dead, hence the pallor.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 6:02 PM on May 7, 2006

Is it a bad sign that I read the quote and assumed it was about Pitchfork?

I'm skeptical of their power, too. Saying that they gave Funeral a 9.7 and it instantly became a huge hit is a classic correlation/causality confusion.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 1:50 PM on April 30, 2006

The compass logo is Apple's Safari browser.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:27 PM on April 13, 2006

See also Inkling Markets. It's a very different model, but has a similar goal.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 4:02 PM on April 6, 2006

I feel like the autism angle is getting overlooked. Boredom detection is an easy snark target, but there's a genesis of a great idea in trying to provide social tools for people suffering from autism. I'm skeptical about its efficacy, but it's still an admirable goal.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 12:16 PM on March 30, 2006

Peptide: I'm not sure why you're hating on Rails' docs. I found them to be much more helpful than the docs of other systems I've worked with.

Compare the "horrible frameset" to Python's ridiculous Library Reference or Twisted's insane undocumented warren of an API.

I used to not like Rails' docs either, but they're really not that bad. I guess every API can't be Java's API

Maybe it's just a personal style thing,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 6:44 AM on March 28, 2006

I was convinced I had the "never get searched in airports" superpower, but sadly I broke my four year streak last week. Tear.

See also this wonderful episode of This American Life: Superpowers. It's really fantastic. It's also being rebroadcast this weekend, if you want to listen live.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:04 PM on March 15, 2006

It's definitely not an MMO. The engine harvests content from other players in an asynchronous manner, but the game's AI is always controlling all the behaviors of the beasties in the game.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 6:31 PM on March 7, 2006

Apparently not for sale yet, though it certainly takes a lot of persistence to discover that.

Is the ultra-wide site trying to make a statement, or what? I don't get it. Seems I suspect a lot of maybe not super savvy users will totally miss the action in the right column.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:36 PM on March 1, 2006

I was always vaguelly aware of NHM, but it wasn't until I heard the Dresden Dolls cover of Two Headed Boy that I really got into the album. The link goes to a bootleg of the cover performed live. There aren't any studio versions, yet.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 9:25 AM on February 22, 2006

On retrospect, I'm not sure what MeFi policy is on links to mp3s. As far as I can tell the link is legal and legit, but if it's bad form to post something like that, please nuke my post(s).
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 9:26 AM on February 22, 2006

Not to retread an earlier point too much, but what was that crap about sans-serif being bad for large blocks of text? For printed documents, sure, you're definitely right. It's rare to find a book set in a sans serif.

But on the web it's a different story. Sans-serifs are much cleaner and easier to look at on screen, and from a brief survey of the sites I visit, the NYTimes was the only site I could find that set its body in a serif.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 8:28 PM on February 10, 2006

... can you really complain about quicktime plugins anymore? I think quicktime has entered the exclusive list of Plugins You Need Or Else The Internet Sucks, along with Flash and Windows Media.

Thanks for the link, I enjoyed it, even if the narrative was thin.
posted to MetaFilter by heresiarch at 7:08 AM on February 9, 2006