Favorites from sillygwailo
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Adult Wednesday Addams
How Wednesday Addams Would React To Catcalling went viral a few weeks ago with its darkly-humorous, sweet-revenge take on the issue. But it's only one episode of Melissa Hunter's "Adult Wednesday Addams" webseries - and season 2 concludes today.
Hey Dad, I can't see real good- is that Bill Shakespeare over there?
This is where Norris has chosen to live while he tries to win a job in the Blue Jays' rotation: a broken down van parked under the blue fluorescent lights of a Wal-Mart in the Florida suburbs.
Sixteen Years
After 16 years of doing a bit of everything under the sun here, I’m stepping away from the day to day of running MetaFilter and moving into the background. Never fear, I’m leaving it in the best of hands and things are looking good for the future.
Random Game Map Maker
Dave's Mapper
automatically generates tiled RPG/adventure game maps by recombining tiles submitted by artists, with a pile of customization map generation options. Have fun and be inspired, or submit your own tiles.
Music Workshop - FEZ
Are you interested in making ambient, drifting, densely-layered electronic music? But don't know where to even start? This is the most thoughtful and gentle introduction I'm aware of, from a fine musician. It's a 45-minute video workshop from Rich Vreeland aka Disasterpeace, composer of the gorgeous, acclaimed Fez soundtrack. Rich composes a Fez-like track on the fly, explaining what he's doing in the process. While he uses Logic and the softsynth Massive in this workshop, his general approach and attention to sound design and synthesis will be applicable to whatever software or hardware you choose to use. (Hat tip to sparkletone for the link. Fez previously on Metafilter.)
To be honest, he was going to be hanging out that summer anyway.
If you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t believe it all happened in the space of about five weeks in the summer of 1978. But it did happen. In those five weeks, Bill Murray played professional baseball and established himself as a bona fide movie star and the Grays Harbor Loggers – representing the twin cities of Aberdeen and Hoquiam, Washington – posted the best winning percentage in America and won the Harbor’s only professional sports championship in living memory.
Lilyhammer : The Olympics caught my attention
Just checking for interest. The 3rd season of this Netflix original drops on the 21st.
"Little things are big." ~ Yogi Berra
Jackie Robinson West Stripped of Its National Little League Title [New York Times]
An investigation revealed that the Chicago team, which captured the attention of the country last summer, had falsified boundaries to field ineligible players.
In praise of the edit window
I just used the edit window to close a parenthetical statement I'd left open by accident, and I was just thinking about how much I have appreciated it since its introduction. Hooray for the edit window! Saving mefites everywhere from the shame of inadvertent typos! Thanks, mods, for having implemented this incredibly useful feature.
elevator.on("idle", function() { elevator.goToFloor(0); });
Elevator Saga is a game in which you write Javascript to control a bank of elevators.
101: More Elegant Website for a Civilized Web
Podcast 101 clocks in around 90min and covers all our favorite bits from January, and was recorded yesterday, Feb 2.
New Feature: Add to Activity
Today we're rolling out a new feature that allows you to add a thread to Recent Activity even if you haven't commented in it.
10 Seconds of Static
Lot's of interesting things you can do with static. For the January Challenge.
What's the caffeine content of coffee made in an Aeropress?
What's the caffeine content of coffee made in an Aeropress?
You're Not Just Imagining Things
Pitchfork interviews Björk about the inspiration for and methods behind her newest album. Awesomeness ensues.
Facts about life in a small town?
[For a fiction project] Tell me about signifiers of present-day life in a very small U.S. town.
Guys In Pajamas Looking at Viewscreens and Sitting In Chairs
I get it. The show is impenetrable, watching the whole thing takes 178 hours. It’s also extremely silly — nearly every episode has a moment when grown men in pajamas throw themselves around in their chairsBut I want to make the case Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) is important and worth your time in 2015, and I want to suggest about 40 hours of Star Trek viewing that will cover all of the great episodes.
Writing "Good Omens"
Neil Gaiman talks about writing "Good Omens"
- "Terry Pratchett and I met in February 1985, in a Chinese restaurant. I was a young journalist. He was a former journalist and Electricity Board PR, and a writer who had just published his second Discworld novel. I was the first journalist who had ever interviewed him."
Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck
Seattle's unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck — "In short: There is no plan to resolve the dispute over cost overruns, which are ubiquitous on projects like this; at $4.2 billion, it's the most expensive transportation project in state history. The tunnel will have no exits - no ingress or egress - throughout the entire downtown core (which makes the support of downtown businesses all the more mystifying). It won't allow transit, only cars. It will be tolled, highly enough, by the state's own estimates, to drive nearly half its traffic onto the aforementioned side streets. It will be a precarious engineering feat, the widest deep-bore tunnel in history, digging right between a) Puget Sound and b) the oldest part of Seattle, with vulnerable buildings and God-knows-what buried infrastructure. Also: Pollution. Climate change. It's the 21st f'ing century. On and on. People said all this and more, in real time, to no avail."
Bring to Our Attention 2014's Best Underloved Comments
Most-favorited comments get highlighted throughout the year. Now it's time for their wonderful but overlooked cousins to shine. Which terrific comments made by fellow MeFites in 2014 deserve a little more attention? This is the place to share your own Best Of.
Sample new shows on the FanFare Podcast Feed
After recently adding podcasts to FanFare, we decided to add a meta-feed of all currently discussed podcast episodes into one unified feed.
That evergreen feminist cautionary fable: The Handmaid's Tale
Does The Handmaid's Tale hold up? , Adi Robertson for The Verge:
"A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a friend that I was in the middle of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. 'It’s like 1984 for feminists, right?' he asked. Sort of, I said. But it's a lot scarier. It's about how you'll lose every right you have, and none of the men you know will care. Then I said he would probably betray me if they froze all women's bank accounts. That was the peak of my paranoia, but it held on for several more days, as I read on the subway while half-consciously figuring out how I might theoretically escape to Canada. 1984 was for lightweights."
"Walking around a city will never be the same"
We want our tools to sing of not just productivity but of our love of curiosity, the joy of wonderment, and the freshness of the unknown. —Eric Paulos, “Manifesto of Open Disruption and Participation”In his essay “Walking in the City,” the French scholar Michel de Certeau talks about the “invisible identities of the visible.” He is talking specifically about the memories and personal narratives associated with a location. Until recently, this information was only accessible one-to-one—that is, by talking to people who had knowledge of a place. But what if that data became one-to-many, or even many-to-many, and easily accessible via some sort of street-level interface that could be accessed manually, or wirelessly using a smartphone?
Twitter Bots for My Real Friends, Real Bots for My Twitter Friends
Darius Kazemi, aka @tinysubversions, is a bot-maker extrordinaire. Known for his inspiring talk on creativity and the lottery at XOXO last year, Kazemi has founded NaNoGenMo and the Bot Summit, created such wonderful Twitter Bots as Olivia Taters, (actually by @robdubbin) For My Real Friends, Miraculous Pictures and Two Headlines. Today he posted about his process in creating Content Forever, a writeup which covers many angles in creating readable bot writing, including escaping phenomena as the Wikipedia philosophy phenomenon.
Out at Home
"I am extremely grateful that Major League Baseball has always judged me on my work and nothing else"In a "very quiet and understated way", 29-year veteran MLB umpire Dale Scott has become the first active official in any of the major US sports to come out as gay.
I Know It's You (Jeff, It's Roger)
I turned four years worth of voicemails from my brother into this song, and I gave it to him for his 39th birthday.
99: HOW DID IT BE THE 2ND?!
The 99th(!!!) podcast was recorded earlier today and runs about 1h45m as we cover November on MeFi, Thanksgiving fun, and other upcoming events.
Buying duplicates/multiples - when is it a good idea and when isn't it?
I often obsess in my head about how many of X item I should buy at a time. What is your process for deciding this with maximum end satisfaction for any given category?
Panik to Crawford to Belt
MLB.com's StatCast dissects the World Series Game Seven double play seen as key to the San Francisco Giants win over the Kansas City Royals.
Brains vs. Brawn in Baseball
The Economist examines the cult of the genius GM.
In sports, just like the rest of life, the rich keep getting richer. Anyone who saw or read Moneyball knows that the deck is stacked against small-market Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. Their only hope of competing, Michael Lewis’s story goes, is to acquire brilliant, innovative general managers (GMs) like his protagonist Billy Beane, who have mastered the “art of winning an unfair game” by outmaneuvering wealthier clubs. The problem with this narrative is that there is nothing to stop the sport’s plutocrats from hiring the finest minds money can buy, just as they sign the best athletes.The deep-pocketed Dodgers have lured away small market Tampa Bay's heralded GM Andrew Friedman to find out what happens when a man who consistently builds winners with one of the smallest revenue streams in the game can do with a payroll in excess of $200 million.
How to Win the Lottery
Darius Kazemi: Every Talk Ever Given by a Successful Creative Person (SLYT)
Note: It's worth watching to the end.
Tired of arbitrary favorites. A call for orthodoxy.
Favorites! Where do I start? Some people don't get enough. Some people get too many. The system we have now is broken. We need a more orthodox approach to give out faves. They have to MEAN SOMETHING, people!
Dinner tonight: four containers of gravy and a Diet Sprite
Imagine you're hungry for dinner, stuck at home and don't really want to cook. But you're also deeply ambivalent about what to order--Chinese? Pizza? Sushi? Well, Mike Lacher has you covered. Give his new web app Seamless Roulette your Seamless.com account details and a maximum cost, and it places an order for you at a random nearby restaurant, for something it randomly selects from the menu. If you like surprises and giving up the power to choose your own meal, this might just be for you.
Please help me be ok with the prospect of being a life-long renter.
Through a series of unfortunate events and choices, I've reached middle age without being able to purchase a house (I'm single, if it matters). It looks like my financial situation won't change in the forseeable future and I'm carrying a significant load of personal debt.
A new theme for MeFi: Modern
Today we're unveiling a new theme option for MetaFilter. Yes, it's a new design option for MetaFilter for the first time in over a decade, which we are dubbing the "Modern" theme. The new theme is strictly opt-in; no one is being forced to use it and the Classic and Plain-text themes remain as options, so your view of the site won't change unless you want it to. To try out the new theme, select it in your preferences. There is much to explain and show off in this new design and I'll do my best to describe all the thinking that went into the process below.
350-mile bike tour of the Oregon Coast - by Matt Haughey
Matt Haughey describes his bike ride along the Oregon Coast on Tumblr. Spectacular photos included.
Open and Operating
Al-Qaeda deliberately targeted the 9/11 attacks at the backbone of the world's financial system in lower Manhattan, to cripple US and world banking. That totally didn't happen and, national emergency aside, the US's (and world's) financial systems kept operating as normal, with no runs on banks and the NYSE trading at normal volumes just a week later. With the destruction of the physical infrastructure of banking and telecommunications in lower Manhattan, Alan Greenspan stranded in Zurich, and no one having any idea what was going on, how did that happen? Within 41 minutes, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson issued a short statement on Fedwire that the Fed fund transfer system was fully operational and the Fed would remain open until "an orderly closing could be achieved." Within 3 hours, the Fed issued a short statement that "The Federal Reserve System is open and operating. The discount window is available to meet liquidity needs." The financial system, the Fed declared, would not fail.
808 State, interpreted through steel drums, and a brass band
Last year, English conceptual artist Jeremy Deller went to Trinidad to have "Pacific State", the English dance anthem by 808 State, reworked on steel drums. He gave the project to Michelle Huggins-Watts and the Valley Harps steel pan drum group to see where they'd take it. Here is the result. Before that, he also brought a similar idea to the Williams Fairey Brass Band, and they re-arranged 808 State's "Pacific 202" (original version, for comparison).
Doctor Who: Robot of Sherwood
In a sun-dappled Sherwood Forest, the Doctor discovers an evil plan from beyond the stars and strikes up an unlikely alliance with Robin Hood. With all of Nottingham at stake, the Doctor must decide who is real and who is fake.
Doctor Who: Into The Dalek
In the midst of a warzone, the soldiers occupying Aristotle, a secret human outpost, have captured a lone Dalek. This Dalek is so damaged that it has come to view its own kind as evil, and claims it wants to help the humans exterminate the Dalek legions. When the Doctor and Clara arrive on Aristotle, they are miniaturised and sent into the body of the Dalek itself, in the hope of understanding what has happened to it. As the Doctor confronts the question of whether there can ever be such a thing as a good Dalek, he must also confront the hatred in his own heart.
50 Female-Directed Movies You Should Watch
"DISCLAIMER TIME! 50 is a very small number. I make no claims to any of these lists being either comprehensive or some sort of objective analysis of the 'best' films directed by women. I make selections based on on what I've seen, what I like, and the position of the stars. One film per director. Ready? Let's go."
Where are you on Tumblr?
With cortex's permission, I am opening a MetaTalk thread to find fellow MeFites on Tumblr.
I'm a boring person and I want boring music to go with my life.
I want boring music to listen to. Not even elevator music: hallway music. Dull, faceless corridor music. Cheesy, soothing, soft. Commercial music, the kind of music that men in the 1970s thought would induce people to feel groovy and buy stuff. The music that plays in Animal Crossing while you get your haircut. Ceefax music. Music you'd hear in an old Mad Men episode. Music that just sits there and doopey-doops while I concentrate and get important stuff done.
Doctor Who: Deep Breath
In Victorian London, the Paternoster Gang, comprising of Silurian Madame Vastra, her human maid and wife Jenny, and Sontaran butler Strax, are summoned by the police force when a dinosaur suddenly materialises outside the Houses of Parliament. Vastra observes that the dinosaur has something stuck in its throat, and moments later it spits out the TARDIS onto the banks of the Thames.
relative Pitch
Pitchfork recently released a list of what they consider the 200 best tracks of the decade so far (2010-14).
Good non-addictive arty videogame recommendations?
What are some good videogames for the PC that have the fewest grindy, behavioral "Skinner Box"-y qualities?
What are your most memorable or favorite train rides?
Which train ride(s) have you particularly enjoyed? Of any distance and length, anywhere in the world.