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Won't you help me solve a thirty-year-old puzzle?

Hello darlings. I'd like your help, specifically in the form of looking at a painting and telling me if you recognize any parts of it from the city you live in, especially if that city is Boston. There's a fair amount of background in terms of what to look for, so please do bear with me. It's all relevant, I promise.
posted to Ask Metafilter by FAMOUS MONSTER at 10:39 AM on May 14, 2013 (177 comments)

What books will be an axe to the frozen sea inside me?

What fiction should I read next? (Enclosed please find a ridiculously, excessively long (and yet incomplete) list of some books I've enjoyed, both to assist and as a thank-you.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by Eshkol at 12:36 PM on January 31, 2011 (39 comments)

Examples of beautiful writing

I aspire to write beautifully -- what is some great writing that uses colorful, creative language and style?
posted to Ask Metafilter by switcheroo at 10:02 PM on April 29, 2013 (52 comments)

“THERE ARE NO WINDOWS. the room has great lighting. it’s beautiful.”

The Worst Room is a Tumblr where people can submit their worst NYC rental pictures, via Craigslist.
posted to MetaFilter by roomthreeseventeen at 7:34 AM on May 8, 2013 (253 comments)

Looking for happy, uplifting book suggestions!

Help me find books that are as happy, joyful and well-written as Silas Marner! Last time I visited my grandmother I gave her my copy of Silas Marner. She loved the book so much she read it three times in a row within two days… She told me it brought her "an unexpected deep and quiet sense of joy"… Because she's pretty sad and depressed right now I'd love to find other books that might lighten her long and lonely days! Can you help me? :)
posted to Ask Metafilter by mugitusqueboom at 1:31 AM on April 22, 2013 (28 comments)

Candy Box

Candy Box is an ASCII-based web RPG. Collect candy, farm lollipops go on epic quests, and win!
posted to MetaFilter by CrunchyFrog at 2:34 PM on May 1, 2013 (362 comments)

Never fear quarrels, but seek adventures. Julie d’Aubigny or d'Artagnan?

Shortly thereafter, one of the nuns died. La Maupin disinterred the body of the deceased nun and, placing it in the bed of her beloved, set the room afire so that the two could flee in the ensuing confusion. Julie d’Aubigny a.k.a. La Maupin or Mademoiselle Maupin was a 17th century fencer and opera singer of the Paris Opera. In detail.
posted to MetaFilter by ersatz at 5:25 AM on April 29, 2013 (7 comments)

You Speak Valyrian?

Last week's Game of Thrones was fantastic and reminded me that one of my favorite kinds of scenes in film and television is a scene I like to call the You Have Chosen the Absolute Wrong Person to Fuck With scene. The basic setup is that a character feels entirely positive they have another character under their thumb only to have a moment of panic and terror as they realize precisely the opposite to be true. Can you name terrific examples of this?
posted to Ask Metafilter by DirtyOldTown at 5:19 PM on April 27, 2013 (60 comments)

Can we be more old fashioned?

We are looking for old-timey things to try that will enhance our lifestyle and save us money.
posted to Ask Metafilter by sadtomato at 3:05 PM on April 27, 2013 (57 comments)

Garanimals for Grownups

The Vivienne Files. "Timeless, Elegant, Classic, Simple, Unique, Beautiful. Working toward carefully curated and deliberately distilled wardrobes that reflect our personal styles and our distinctive contributions to the world."
posted to MetaFilter by drlith at 6:16 AM on April 27, 2013 (21 comments)

Will it go 'round in circles...

It's not so often that a new acoustic musical instrument is invented that really makes you go "wow!", but the Wheelharp might just make you go "double wow!"
posted to MetaFilter by flapjax at midnite at 11:48 PM on April 24, 2013 (29 comments)

Grimes is not your waif

"I don't want to have to compromise my morals in order to make a living" - Claire Boucher, a.k.a. Grimes, has apparently canceled her 2013 tour via Tumblr. (previously)
posted to MetaFilter by mrgrimm at 9:08 AM on April 24, 2013 (222 comments)

email problem or not

I get a TON of bounced email, have I been hacked or is this something else?
posted to Ask Metafilter by raildr at 8:13 AM on April 21, 2013 (6 comments)

NZ becomes first country in Asia-Pacific region to approve gay marriage

New Zealand legalises same-sex marriage , becoming the first country in the Asia-Pacific region and the 13th country to do so. The bill was passed with a wide majority, with 77 votes in favour and 44 against. "In our society, the meaning of marriage is universal - it's a declaration of love and commitment to a special person," said Labour MP Louisa Wall. The declaration of the vote was followed by a waiata.
posted to MetaFilter by arcticseal at 7:47 AM on April 17, 2013 (72 comments)

Please recommend movies!

My boyfriend and I are having a hard time coming up with movies to watch. Brainstorming based off of movies, directors, and genres we tend to like has gotten us nowhere, so I'd like to see what the hivemind can come up with based off a list of our recent favourite tv shows.
posted to Ask Metafilter by to recite so charmingly at 5:45 PM on April 13, 2013 (33 comments)

Sinuous, Grotesque, and Fantastic.

U.K. illustrator Kate Baylay creates gorgeous book illustrations, like these for The Olive Fairy Book.
posted to MetaFilter by benito.strauss at 6:39 PM on April 8, 2013 (29 comments)

In the midst of life I woke to find myself in the East End of London

Spitalfields Life is a blog about an East London neighbourhood. Sometimes it's about the dogs of Spitalfields. Sometimes it's about the wallpapers of Spitalfields. Or the leather shops of Spitalfields. Or people in Spitalfields who collect pictures of dogs.
posted to MetaFilter by Erasmouse at 4:46 PM on April 6, 2013 (11 comments)

The Llama Stares Back

Animal Eyes
posted to MetaFilter by bigbigdog at 9:12 AM on April 4, 2013 (45 comments)

Help me find a clean, bright, sexy smelling perfume

I want to get a new perfume but perfume shopping is an utterly horrible experience for me. I'm looking for a very clean smelling perfume. What can you suggest?
posted to Ask Metafilter by PuppetMcSockerson at 9:35 AM on April 3, 2013 (64 comments)

He is interested in confusion

‘I am a phantasmagoric maximalist. I like things to be overwhelmingly strange and capacitous. I want what I write to live; it isn’t about something, it is something’— Michael Cisco.
posted to MetaFilter by misteraitch at 4:28 AM on April 3, 2013 (4 comments)

There was a dead cockroach in my gin and tonic.

Trip Avisaargh - a tumblr collection of links the best (worst?) and most memorable reviews on the travel site Trip Advisor. Sales Pitches! Statues! Manager responses! (more!) It can't get worse! Mr. Toilet House! Bonny Old London! Palaces!
posted to MetaFilter by The Whelk at 10:56 AM on March 30, 2013 (39 comments)

Her work was complete

In 1933 political activist and champion for sexual freedom Aurora Rodriguez killed her Utopian 'project' and brilliant young daughter Hildegart. The Red Virgin is a short film about Hildegart by Sheila Pye. (all films somewhat NSFW)
posted to MetaFilter by Potomac Avenue at 8:44 AM on March 31, 2013 (4 comments)

What's your "go-to" salad?

Inspired by this post, I'm working on my own "go-to" salad that I'll always be able to make. The criteria are: "fresh ingredients you can get in most stores, which you will never tire of, and can eat twice a week for the rest of your life." Do you have a "go-to" salad or something similar? - I'm looking for inspiration here so the more unusual/personal the better!
posted to Ask Metafilter by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 6:04 AM on March 31, 2013 (71 comments)

The fabled Dr. Hans Sachs Poster Collection

...is universally described as being the most significant collection of its type in existence (scroll down). About 4500 posters from a collection of around 12500 were recovered from Germany recently and auctioned (view here) during three sessions in NYC. Day 2 and Day 3 of the auctions for more Plakatstil.
posted to MetaFilter by indices at 3:25 PM on March 30, 2013 (12 comments)

It was a very exciting time when the Chalk River plant melted down.

They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now. On December 12, 1952 some 200 km upstream from Ottawa, Canada the NRX research reactor at Chalk River Laboratories suffered a partial meltdown. The reactor underwent a violent power excursion that destroyed the core of the reactor, causing some fuel melting. Unaccountably, the shut-off rods failed to fully descend into the core. A series of hydrogen gas explosions (or steam explosions) hurled the four-ton gasholder dome four feet through the air where it jammed in the superstructure. Millions of liters of highly radioactive water flooded the building. A young U.S. Navy lieutenant by the name of James Earle Carter, Jr. was sent to assist in the damage control. As chief engineering office for the nuclear propulsion system being designed for the USS Seawolf (SSN 575) Carter, located in Schenectady, New York was the most qualified and closest member of the U.S. military at the time. "And one of the few people in the world with clearance to go into a nuclear power plant," as he remarked later.
posted to MetaFilter by three blind mice at 5:25 AM on March 29, 2013 (12 comments)

Part time Earthling

According to Lindner, his patient first began experiencing a strange feeling while reading fanciful adventure novels during his youth. "In some weird and inexplicable way I knew that what I was reading was my biography. Nothing in these books was unfamiliar to me: I recognized everything... My everyday life began to recede at this point. In fact, it became fiction—and, as it did, the books became my reality." At the further stage of this "psychosis," the patient "filled in the spaces" between the written stories with "fantasy 'recollections.'" -- So you thought otherkin and people believing they're the reincarnation of a fictional character were a modern thing? Well, it turns out science fiction author Cordwainer Smith might've been otherkin half a century before the term was first coined, if The Atlantic is to be believed.
posted to MetaFilter by MartinWisse at 7:31 AM on March 27, 2013 (45 comments)

Rise of the Earths

How Artists Once Imagined the Earth Would Look from Space
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 7:02 AM on March 27, 2013 (5 comments)

Ellen DeGeneres and the shifting US attitude towards homosexuality

How Ellen DeGeneres Helped Change The Conversation About Gays
"Ellen DeGeneres is ... almost a litmus test of where we have been as a society," [Dietram Scheufele, a communications professor at the University of Wisconsin] says. "When she first came out and really put the issue of same-sex partnerships on people's agendas, and I mean people who really wouldn't have thought about it, I think the country was still in a very different state."
From her first stand-up performance on national TV in the US in 1986, the same year that the Supreme Court ruled that states have right to enforce code of sexual behavior, to 2008, when Ellen married Portia de Rossi, after California's Supreme Court ruled a previous ban on gay marriage to be unconstitutional, Ellen's public life has mirrored the broader shift towards accepting homosexuality.
posted to MetaFilter by filthy light thief at 8:57 PM on March 26, 2013 (109 comments)

Share your favourite documentary films/series here

I watched Nina Conti: A Ventriloquist's Story - Her Master's Voice yesterday and it was so amazing I forgot how long it's been since I saw a really good documentary. I've watched everything Herzog has done in the past 6-7, Being Elmo, Carl Sagan's Cosmos, the 7 Up films and Jarvis Cocker's Outsider Art series. What are your favourite documentary films/series? (except nature docs? I can never get into them). I'm happy to watch films from any english-speaking country - but will also give it a go if they're subtitled.
posted to Ask Metafilter by abbagoochie at 5:36 PM on March 22, 2013 (35 comments)

Today would be an important day.

Harold and the Dark, Dark Forest
posted to MetaFilter by cthuljew at 10:25 PM on March 18, 2013 (22 comments)

All day I hear the noise of waters

Some random, wet images: A seahorse on a diver’s watch.
A diver hitting an Olympic pool
Mass stingray migration off Baja
Two streams of water colliding
A photographer in the rain
Waiting for the bubble to burst
Close up of a wave
Bathtime at a refugee camp Kutupalong, Bangladesh
Water being released from a dam to prevent flooding in Jiyuan, China
Transparent Montana lake, (and more)
posted to MetaFilter by growabrain at 5:49 PM on November 19, 2012 (26 comments)

Inventions of the Monsters

"It was John Polidori's misfortune to be comic without having a sense of humor, to wish to be a great writer but to be a terrible one, to be unusually bright but surrounded for one summer by people who were titanically brighter, and to have just enough of an awareness of all of this to make him perpetually uneasy. Also, he couldn't jump."
posted to MetaFilter by Iridic at 8:20 AM on March 18, 2013 (107 comments)

Decode This German Shorthand Mystery Letter From 1939!

This envelope with a letter inside was found inside a large decaying bound edition of Shakespeare auf Deutsch in a junk shop in Bushwick that was only apparently open for a few months before disappearing. The letter, postmarked 15 March, 1939 - was sent to Paris by a Mr. Henri Wolf. The contents of the letter appear to be German shorthand. Included was small piece of what looks like code, there's nothing else on the back.The letter, envelope, postcard, etc in question are at this imgur album. Hivemind: What the hell is this?
posted to Ask Metafilter by The Whelk at 12:56 PM on March 14, 2013 (28 comments)

I have opinions, where should I put them?

For the last few years, I have reviewed every book I read on Goodreads, just for my own edification. I read a lot. I have written a lot. Is there a better use to put this content to?
posted to Ask Metafilter by restless_nomad at 1:52 PM on March 16, 2013 (25 comments)

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense

The lack of female road narratives and why it matters Whereas a man on the road might be seen as potentially dangerous, potentially adventurous, or potentially hapless, in all cases the discourse is one of potential. When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.
posted to MetaFilter by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:35 PM on March 15, 2013 (74 comments)

Invisible People

He was methodical, he rode the highways, and he preyed on teenage girls. Girls who'd run away. Girls no one would miss. In the summer of 1985, the author was such a girl. One night on I-95, she hitched a ride from a stranger and endured the most terrifying moments of her life. Now, years later, she returns to the scenes of her fugitive youth looking for clues to that terror—and the girls who lost their lives to it - The Truck Stop Killer
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 10:24 AM on October 28, 2012 (23 comments)

New Parasites for 2013/ The Cat That Screamed Like A Man/ Coffin Bro

Liar Town Usa: An alternate USA where our products, signage, headlines, and fads are all slightly more surreal, sinister, and threatening.
posted to MetaFilter by The Whelk at 5:13 PM on March 7, 2013 (93 comments)

Share your org p*rn please?

It's time for Thing Cleaning at our house, which is just like Spring Cleaning, but I have to do it all year round because while I am not greedy, I like a lot of things. Thanks to MetaFilter, I have found, and am always inspired by, UnF*ck Your Habitat and A Slob Comes Clean. What I realized I need more of are blogs with "Before and After" pictures of de-slobifying, preferably as their main focus.
posted to Ask Metafilter by peagood at 11:19 AM on March 9, 2013 (10 comments)

Songs by a world-weary cowboy/girl required...

I have recently discovered that I really love the kind of music that is heartfelt, lyrically strong, with a wistful and melancholic vibe. The type that conjures up images of a world-weary cowgirl/boy (cowperson?) passing on words of wisdom as the sun sets in the distance... and I am looking for more!
posted to Ask Metafilter by 0 answers at 5:47 AM on March 14, 2013 (50 comments)

I need helping identifying the era of this photograph.

I was given some photographs of old relatives that were found in a box in my great-grandfather's house after he passed away. All but one photo is someone I can identify. I have no information on that one photo, which is of an old woman standing on a path in front of a farmhouse. I'd like to at least get an idea of the era so I can begin narrowing down the identify of the woman.
posted to Ask Metafilter by lbo at 11:24 AM on March 13, 2013 (17 comments)

Come! We must find the pin head!

A Mind Reader, A Pin Head, and a Fool; The Story of "Professor" Johnstone's Visit to Wind Cave [previously].
When they [the search party] arrived in that portion of the cave two members of the party were insensible. I was raving and Moore was the only man in his right mind. He had me down on the floor of the cave, my throat clutched with his hand while in the other hand he held a Colt revolver. We had had nothing to eat for five (sic) days and four nights. McDonald dies soon after that, one of the party was adjudged insane and taken to the asylum. I was almost blind and it was necessary to have an operation performed on my eyes.

posted to MetaFilter by unliteral at 5:23 PM on March 10, 2013 (8 comments)

I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies

The Aleph is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which a man is suddenly able to see all things at once. I wanted to present a version of what The Aleph might look like now, designed as an endless stream of descriptive passages pulled from the web. For source texts, I took the complete Project Gutenberg as well as current tweets. I searched for the phrase "I saw."
The Aleph: Infinite Wonder / Infinity Pity by David Hirmes
posted to MetaFilter by Lorin at 8:23 PM on March 9, 2013 (30 comments)

you can stop reading to me now, itunes

I love listening to audiobooks as I fall asleep. I hate skipping around trying to find my place the next day. Is there a way to tell itunes to stop playing after X minutes (probably 20 or 30), so that it doesn't keep on keeping on long after I've conked out? The books are all on my computer in audiobook form (not as music, which I know itunes sometimes does), so I can't separate tracks into sleep-friendly playlists.
posted to Ask Metafilter by tan_coul at 10:47 PM on March 9, 2013 (11 comments)

"When I say this, it should mean laughter, not poison."

"Naming restricts. Once restricted, it’s easy to be judged and punished. Identity is more subtle, more liquid, I hope." An interview with Richard Siken, a poet whose work is easy, entertaining even, yet ferocious as all hell. If you're new to Siken, Scheherazade is a short introduction to the man and his style. You Are Jeff is a prose poem in twenty-six short, brutal chapters. Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out is one of his best: "You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights! / What more do you want? / I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you're / really there." He also paints.
posted to MetaFilter by Rory Marinich at 4:14 AM on March 8, 2013 (21 comments)

Poor Mum

The English songwriter Nick Drake's reputation - and enigma - have grown since his death in 1974, at the age of 26. A new album (recorded at the family piano in the 1950's) collects the songs of his mother Molly, and sheds new light on Nick's beginnings.
posted to MetaFilter by misterbee at 5:00 PM on March 7, 2013 (18 comments)
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