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Well, one thing you could do would be to recruit some of your friends to help, and do a real-life quest.

Make several yellow ! and ? marks out of foam and wire, and attach them to hats. Have your first friend stand somewhere where your proposee will be, wearing a ! hat. When the proposee approaches, have your friend hand him a scroll done in the same yellow color and weird font that Blizzard uses, instructing him to seek out the next friend.... and then take off his... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Malor at 4:52 PM on October 21, 2006

There are a lot of more conceptual terms that have changed a lot in meaning that we don't often think about; in fact, you'll see period films that are supposed to be set in earlier times in the past century that use these words because they're so much a part of how we see the world that we don't even notice that they shape our view of it.

A lot of them are part of the cluster of psychological terms that really only gained their current meaning through popularization of a... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by koeselitz at 6:18 PM on September 8, 2010 marked best answer

In Wyoming they skip the middleman and just warm it directly in the sheep.
posted to MetaFilter by mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey at 5:59 PM on September 3, 2010

Landowning gentry received money primarily from tenant farmers:

"...by 1873 local government boards had examined and cross-checked over five million valuation-list and poor-rate assessments from the 15,000 parishes of Great Britain and Ireland outside of metropolitan London. Two years later alphabetical lists of landowners, their addresses, their acreages, and the rental values of their real estate (excluding mineral and forest rights) appeared for each county in... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Paragon at 4:32 PM on September 1, 2010

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Manifesto Batshit Index = ----------------------

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posted to MetaFilter by Blazecock Pileon at 12:21 PM on September 1, 2010

Some reference points:

Columbia/Barnard rendition

The UC Berkeley rendition

Ben Folds "original" cover from 2005

Dr. Dre's 1992 original from "The Chronic"

I get that the "original" Ben Folds cover is supposed to be ironic, and it certainly isn't the first time a soft-spoken white singer ironically covered gansta rap. But that mode--the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Pastabagel at 7:22 AM on August 31, 2010

I'm deeply "meh" on college a cappella -- it's this weird tradition I never connected with in college and find even odder now. But I'm all for people reclaiming noxious words and phrases, whether they do it seriously or with a wink and a nod. (At the risk of dating myself, I can vividly remember the arguments about the word "queer" in the name Queer Nation, for example.) So I think cute college girls in tiny skirts singing a song with sexist lyrics is great, even if the joke... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Forktine at 5:58 AM on August 31, 2010

Print out their facebook page and make it into an origami pterodactyl. Toss it out the window as you drive to your therapist's office.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Askr at 2:47 PM on June 11, 2010

If I recall correctly, in the olden days of the numbers rackets, some people used the last n digits (n being something like 3 or 4) of the closing price of the Dow Jones on a given day to select winners. It had the benefit of being a widely-available, transparent number that was pretty much immune to manipulation.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by mhum at 12:46 PM on April 14, 2010

Now wait a minute, Mr. Cocks Doc!

When a doctor makes us boggle as he panders to a rabble
who would whinge about Obama as a sound goes up their dongle,
THIS is what we call...

...a teabag fleabag drivel whinger dongle boggled
muddled duddled fuddled wuddled doc of cocks, sir!

Doc of cocks, our game is done, sir.
Thank you for a lot of fun, sir.
posted to MetaFilter by flabdablet at 5:02 AM on April 3, 2010

Confirmation bias.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by fixedgear at 10:02 PM on January 23, 2010

I was what they called "HAPPy Kids" (High Aptitude something something) my entire frigging life. This was Catholic school, late seventies through the eighties. There was definitely an emphasis on "you can be anything in the entire world that you want to be, because you are exceptionally bright and lalalalalala". Speaking for myself, I was somewhat disappointed that when I graduated with my Masters in Sociology with an emphasis on trans-national social work (a program I pretty... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by msali at 3:28 PM on February 18, 2009

Whenever I learn a new programming language, I always code the following two things as a way to learn them:

Conway's game of life, and a Mandelbrot set viewer. They're both relatively simple tasks conceptually, but together they cover a pretty comprehensive range of programming features. If you figure out those two things, you can consider yourself basically fluent. Also, they're both awesome - I can mess around with the game of life forever, and the Mandelbrot is... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Salvor Hardin at 7:33 PM on December 10, 2009

4NIK8 2NITE?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by b33j at 8:24 PM on December 9, 2009

As I see it, this has nothing to do with your boyfriend, but everything to do with you and what's going on between your ears. Take a look at this list of thinking fallacies (cognitive distortions) and see which one(s) might apply to you:

15 Styles of Distorted Thinking

Perhaps seeing the type of thinking you're engaging in written down and defined might help you be a bit more Spock about the whole thing and a lot less Kirk :)... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by willmize at 10:42 AM on December 4, 2009