MetaFilter

> with the largest drops in Toronto

I usually go to a couple of Jays games a year, and while I generally enjoy them I wouldn't want to be in charge of trying to entice casual fans to attend games featuring a lousy team in a cavernous, personality-free stadium* where even crappy beer costs over ten bucks and everything else is similarly overpriced.

* which, to be fair, is extremely easy to get to and does have nice views of the CN Tower if the dome is open
posted to MetaFilter by The Card Cheat at 10:45 AM on July 29, 2019

No mention of Tal's Hill, an actual hill in the outfield of the Houston Astro's Minute Maid Park? It made for some great plays and embarrassing bloopers. They flattened out Tal's Hill in 2015 but the memories live on: mostly of annoyed outfielders that not only had to sprint across the outfield to catch a fly ball, but then they had to climb a damned hill.

I'm all for having variety in ballparks - it's one of the things that makes the game fun -... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Gray Duck at 2:00 PM on May 9, 2019

You do not want to see my bookshelves; they need a major reorganization. But the books are my comfort objects and they are the main feature of my apartment. They were moved to Canada slowly, in small boxes in the trunks of cars, because I couldn’t wait for my visa to have them.

I’m waiting for my ... date ... at the bar I’m the restaurant where he works. It’s so ... normal!
posted to MetaTalk by wellred at 5:57 PM on April 27, 2019

I was unhappy in 2015 with the effort to speed up baseball and I remain unhappy with it in 2019.
posted to MetaFilter by chavenet at 1:25 AM on March 30, 2019

Life in a Squalid Dwelling: A Hovel
Umbilicus: A Navel
The Digging Tool: A Shovel
The Judge's Ruling: A Gavel
My Mother's Brother: An Uncle
How I Obsequiously Attempted to Gain Your Favor: A Grovel
Growing Up in the Suburbs: A Split-Level
posted to MetaFilter by Rock Steady at 11:59 AM on February 15, 2019

The reason I find it helpful is because I mostly read nonfiction, and authors keep giving their books clever titles that sound like things I’d want to read. So I’ll see something like Domestic Life in Rural Texas and get all excited, then notice the little “A Novel” on the cover and stomp away. I wanted to read about domestic life in rural Texas!

This has honestly happened to me a bunch of times (although I can’t think of any real world examples... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:42 PM on February 15, 2019

Excluding romance novels and thrillers, none of which said “A Novel” on the cover, the proportion rose to more than 80 percent.That's the meat of it right there, I always figured. "A Novel" says "This book is literature. It's not one of those books for cretins who demand sex and/or violence in their literature." Moore says that when he came across “The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls: A Novel” on Amazon, he interpreted the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Etrigan at 10:02 AM on February 15, 2019

I don't think it's peculiar to AskMe, no. I've heard things thirded, fourthed, and nthed in a lot of different contexts. But I've spent most of my life hanging out with nerds, so, hey, it might be an observation bias.

Interesting to look at the progression of google results:

Seconded - 3,960,000
Thirded - 78,700
Fourthed - 12,900
Fifthed - 4,390
Sixthed - 1,850
Seventhed -... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:31 PM on January 13, 2008

So you have a cellphone which, out of the box, is locked to an awful telecom network, comes crippled to third-party software installations, lacks basic functions like video recording, MMS, filesystem browsing, bluetooth file transfer, SIM-swapping, or plain old cut and paste of text, and needs "jailbreak" hacks to break the firmware into accepting installs of external apps. But hey, look, you can use two fingers to zoom stuff!

Still sticking to my Nokia 6600... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brownpau at 9:53 PM on December 16, 2007

It looks like we lost him twice, if not more times.
posted to MetaFilter by filtergik at 4:22 AM on January 19, 2018

Josh covered much of what I wanted to share, but I wanted to add my angle on the transfer.

I ran MeFi day-to-day for 16 years but by the end, I was pretty well ground down. Over the years, a combo of depression, exhaustion, and anxiety from managing MetaFilter took its toll on me, and one of the major turnarounds for me was to change careers entirely. I took a new job in a field that wasn’t remotely about community management and found it creatively satisfying. It was... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:15 AM on July 31, 2017

The most useful keychain I have is a Gerber Shard -- it's a bottle opener, flat & Phillips screwdriver, wire stripper, and tiny prybar all in one. I've taken it on flights with no trouble.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by vorfeed at 12:04 PM on May 14, 2012

I would like to know the athletic background of The Freeze.

That's the outfield wall.
posted to MetaFilter by Etrigan at 3:24 PM on June 10, 2017

This ground is well covered by Tara Brach's book Radical Acceptance. Consider the audio book, I found it moving to have the words spoken to me.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by crazycanuck at 10:30 AM on July 23, 2016

WHIPPEDY DOO!!!

i'm sorry
posted to MetaFilter by adept256 at 4:11 PM on May 12, 2016

How many major league baseball beat writers -- a lily-white and male profession if there ever was one -- speaks more than a few phrases of broken Spanish?

This is an exceptionally good point. If you make it your life's work to write about baseball, you owe it to yourself to learn Spanish (it's not that hard as a second language, really) and Japanese (of which there are excellent language resources available,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Slap*Happy at 5:17 PM on April 8, 2016

YES. My last experience with that was about an hour ago. I'm serious.

Some time back, someone I was casual friends with confessed to me that she was lonely all the time. I hadn't really reached out to her much because I assumed she was always busy. We went to a birthday party for her once, and her friends filled a whole bar, and she's in big demand for professional and political events, so I'd never thought she'd have time. Apparently not. She said that she can usually... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by ernielundquist at 2:37 PM on January 17, 2016

Humans have been talking for, well, we don't really know, but call it at least 80,000 and maybe as long as two million years.

Not only do we talk, we "learn" to speak despite never receiving sufficient instruction to do so. (This is Chomsky's Poverty of Stimulus argument.) Place an infant with talking humans, and the infant will learn to speak their language -- even if the infant is adopted, and was born to culture speaking a different language. Place an... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by orthogonality at 7:39 AM on January 3, 2009 marked best answer

Jmnugent has the right idea.

Even if you have the plastic ones, take them out when you launder your shirts. It's awful when a plastic collar stay breaks in the collar. (Plus, if you forget that they're there when you iron your shirt, it can be even more trouble.)

Investing in few metal ones is always worth it. Any good mens-wear shop should have them.

Why do some shirt have them? Probably a reflection of how formal... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by generichuman at 3:35 AM on February 1, 2008 marked best answer

My father is a successful writer, and he didn't start writing until he lost his job in his early 50s. It's meant the world to see him do this for himself, and to see how someone can live a life very far outside the prevailing ideas about creativity.

As a young(er) person, you can feel so trapped if you're not "doing it right." If you don't have your shit together by a certain age, you start to feel like you've missed the boat on everything. It's how I've felt... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by teponaztli at 12:13 AM on August 11, 2015

One thing that can be said for George W. Bush: when threw out the first pitch in the 3rd game of the 2001 World Series, he actually threw a no kidding around strike.
posted to MetaFilter by DirtyOldTown at 7:56 PM on April 6, 2015

There's really fine line you need to strike with the Wednesday character. She's not evil, nor cruel, but she is pitiless. She is not camp or ironic, but neither is she completely sincere. Wednesday is a wry eyebrow.

This nails it.
posted to MetaFilter by leotrotsky at 7:51 AM on March 11, 2015

Choosing to live simply is not choosing to be poor. Choosing to not buy $10K worth of impulse items as soon as the first big check clears is not choosing to be irresponsible. It may be weird comparative to the culture that one normally sees, but a love of baseball does not preclude one from getting to be both eccentric, frugal, and stay within their comfort zone. Maybe rather than wonder whether or not he's mentally ill, maybe we should wonder if this is what the game should look like and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nanukthedog at 3:24 PM on March 5, 2015

On the morning in 2011 when his $2 million signing bonus finally cleared, Norris was in Florida with the rest of the Blue Jays' new signees. All of their bonuses had been deposited on the same day, and one of the players suggested they drive to a Tampa mall. They shopped for three hours, and by the time the spree finally ended they could barely fit their haul back into the car. Most players had spent $10,000 or more on laptops, jewelry and headphones. Norris returned with only a henley T-shirt... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by dry white toast at 2:45 PM on March 5, 2015

Incidentally, a nice lookbook of Niigata street fashion.

Dokaben's anime adaptation is old and sub-par, but if you wanna watch a baseball anime worth your time, I'd suggest Mitsuru Adachi's Cross Game.
posted to MetaFilter by procrastinator at 7:50 AM on March 6, 2015

Oh shit, retired tag, y'all
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:26 PM on March 4, 2015

Javascript infuriates me, and I'm dreadful at object oriented and event-based stuff. So I'm planning on hate-programming this all day.
posted to MetaFilter by Jimbob at 11:56 AM on February 6, 2015

I totally cracked out on this game for an entire morning last weekend. Gave up eventually because the UI presents state that isn't really exposed in the UI. Event-driven programming is great for web and async, but real-world elevators use PLC or similar logic controllers. Having to write a state machine to track things like "is the second-floor up button currently depressed" while it's being displayed by the game got pretty annoying.
posted to MetaFilter by 7segment at 11:52 AM on February 6, 2015

Events is missing:

Fire Alarm
Sex in the Elevator
Giving Birth in the Elevator
Tremors
Lights Flicker
Tornado Siren
Tsunami Siren
Angry Stalker
Random Angry Pigeon
Skip every $RandomNum floor request

Elevator Objects are missing:

Panic Button (and associated Events)
Light Flicker... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Buttons Bellbottom at 11:52 AM on February 6, 2015

This isn't exclusive to comedy. In fiction in general the default gender is male in most modes and genres, with a few exceptions. Gender is one of the subjects in the novel I just finished. It had bugged me about my first novel that I didn't give more thought to gender issues. One way to keep that in my mind was that I decided that I would make female the default gender for every character, and wouldn't change it unless I had some reason. It was quite enlightening because it got me thinking... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 6:32 AM on January 8, 2015

I’ve been messing around with Ingress lately, which is a gamified version of “Urban Computing.” Two factions battle over control of “portals,” which when created have to be approved by some official to prevent businesses spamming it with their own locations, or individuals gaining competitive advantage by creating portals in their own bathrooms.

The portals are usually landmarks or public artworks; it encourages wandering around and finding interesting stuff as well as... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by El Mariachi at 1:18 AM on December 17, 2014

Yeah, watching it live, there was this wonderful tension to it where everybody knew it was some sort of joke but he was so thoroughly deadpanning it that no one was really sure what the joke was going to be. Nervous expectation, not something that was there in most of the talks so it was a nice twist.

In totality it's also just a really good, sane-making deconstruction of the huge practical and emotional dangers of the lottery-chasing idea, which for... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 9:21 AM on October 27, 2014

RE: MultiFavorited_MultiWidth

removing the following line made it look a lot nicer:

commentNode.style.marginLeft=''+'-'+((favCount/2)+1))+'px';


On my version, this line was slightly different:
commentNode.style.marginLeft=''+(70-((favCount/2)+1))+'px';

Removing it completely helped, but made the left alignment vary depending on the number of favorites. Instead of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by SpookyFish at 10:29 AM on October 8, 2014

Uber-Roulette: tell it your maximum price and Uber drops you off in a random part of the city.
posted to MetaFilter by 2bucksplus at 11:58 AM on October 7, 2014

My favored script which sort-of-works but has some layout issues is:

Metafilter MultiFavorited Multiwidth
posted to MetaTalk by adrianhon at 1:02 AM on October 1, 2014

While opinions on the general basis of the US economy and central banking system may vary, one hopes we can all agree that having it fall due to an act of terrorism would have been a very Bad Thing. The best way to discourage terrorism is to prove that it does not achieve the intended ends, and insofar as the 9/11 attacks were targeted at the world banking and financial system, those at the Fed who kept the system operating were therefore fighting Al Qaeda on a direct level.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kadin2048 at 3:07 PM on September 14, 2014

plot recycling malaise

Enh, I think it was Terrance Dicks who said there are only two plots in Doctor Who: the aliens are coming and the aliens are already here. My husband and I (both longtime Classic Who fans) came up with a half-dozen episodes/serials of the "the knights/troopers are really robots" and "the castle/fortress/factory is really a spaceship" in various forms of dress in both the classic and new versions of the show,... [more]
posted to FanFare by immlass at 12:12 PM on September 7, 2014

Mefi's Own Adam Savage had his own take on this, which he told as a story for The Moth; he came to a conclusion so amazing I literally stood up and applauded in front of my computer listening to it. Here.
posted to MetaFilter by EmpressCallipygos at 7:21 AM on August 26, 2014

How the original photo looks is really beside the point. I think one point is to get us to think about and perhaps empathize for one freaking moment with the subjective life experience and viewpoint and reactions of a person -- this one in particular, and her individual life story, but also any person, really -- who is made an impersonal object of entertainment, amusement, scorn, or ridicule. It's not harmless fun.

Words cannot... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by FelliniBlank at 11:02 AM on August 23, 2014

OK, I'll bite: here are > 50 significant (critics and/or box office) movies from French or francophone female directors of the younger generation (so no Kaplan, Varda, Companeez, Mieville or Duras here). Occasionally NSFW. Unifrance can send me a check now.
Mona Achache: Le hérisson
Chantal Akerman: Golden eighties, Un divan à New York
Lisa Azuelos: Comme t-y est belle !, LOL
Sólveig Anspach: Hauts les coeurs!
Pascale Bailly: Dieu... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by elgilito at 5:35 AM on August 1, 2014

*Looks in vain for Spotify playlist*

Here ya go.
posted to MetaFilter by escabeche at 7:53 AM on August 21, 2014

Alright, I'm just going to say it, Pitchfork is a goddamned national treasure.

Their taste is truly eclectic and includes mainstream hip-hop (Kanye, Jay-Z, Kendrick) Unerground Hip Hop (Danny Brown, Killer Mike, Chance the Rapper) Major Pop Stars (Beyonce, Rihanna) People making pop music but aren't superstars (Grimes, Robyn, Sophie) Indie Rock (Deerhunter, Vampire Weekend) Heavy Metal (Deafheaven, Pallbearer) Crossover EDM (Disclosure, Daft Punk) Underground EDM (Todd... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by R.F.Simpson at 6:18 AM on August 21, 2014

Because the rest of the series is a bit tricky to find:
In-n-Out and Wendys
Carl's Jr and Tommys
Astro Burger and Fat Burger
Burger King and Five Guys
Five Guys continued and McDonalds

That Fat Burger was grossly disgusting!... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by unliteral at 10:55 PM on June 10, 2014

1Password was definitely worth my money.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by desjardins at 9:42 AM on June 24, 2014

.

posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 11:42 AM on June 21, 2014

Oh cool! These are friends of mine!

Ben Sinclair plays the nameless pot dealer in these. He's a really fantastic guy. He had a Dia de los Muertos themed wedding last year, and it was just about the most fun party I've ever attended. He had a really great couple of lines in this 30 Rock episode, too. Katja Blichfeld is his lovely wife and the award-nominated casting director for 30 Rock. They really are super sweet people. She gave me a t-shirt I have in my closet that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by lazaruslong at 11:05 AM on January 13, 2013

I use 1Password as well. Here's how it works:

You install a program on your computer(s) and your phone. You choose a secure master password to use that will unlock the app and allow you access to all your other passwords.

You set this up to sync, probably via dropbox. That way if you add a new password on your computer, it's available on any other computers, and your phone.

You can also generate a secure file to store on... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by brentajones at 10:48 PM on June 4, 2014 marked best answer

One of the pieces of the puzzle that we might need to work on, with respect to all this, is that we need to stop shaming men who are virgins. No virgin-shaming men (involuntary celibates or otherwise), no slut-shaming women. These are two areas where judgment of others, and patriarchial ideas intertwine in ugly ways. There are no "real men" defined by getting laid, in the same way a woman is not "tainted" by sleeping with men. Cultural ideas of where men or women SHOULD be at... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by naju at 6:46 PM on May 24, 2014

I read earlier this week that Anne Lamott recently had been trolled pretty fiercely. ANNE LAMOTT, she of gentle and funny writings about spirituality and the writer's craft. There's something very wrong out there when that happens. I'm not sure what the solution is, but people who are on a good spiritual path need to keep speaking out and writing, and I see that happening in this thread.

I don't know anything about this specific incident, but I'm... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rtha at 3:03 PM on May 24, 2014

Piggybacking on the NPB and Japanese baseball, and the Yankees discussion, the worst team in all of baseball (from the 'rooting for this team is a sign of a lack of moral fiber/good upbringing' discussion) is the Yomiuri Giants. The Yankees wish they were this evil. The Yankees have a cable channel. Yomiuri has one of the four or five national broadcast networks. Imagine if, say, instead of TBS, the Braves were broadcast on NBC. Every. Single. Game.

Yomiuri... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 4:59 AM on April 25, 2014