MetaFilter

Please assume I already have experienced the horror, dread, numbness, and despair. I am wondering: should I consider using this?

I can't give you a full answer, but I can say that other people definitely will be using it. Also, if you see it as just another tool, like outlining, or word processing software, maybe that will help you find an answer. This particular genie isn't going back in the bottle, in any case.

I've been... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by surlyben at 4:37 PM on July 22, 2022

I love books. In history trouble is always created because of books.

Meanwhile the fact that Bezos started with books makes this seem more ominous.
posted to MetaFilter by NoThisIsPatrick at 4:13 PM on July 22, 2022

I think part of what bothers me is that selling out is rewarding, and words are as close to sacred as anything that exists, in my psyche. It's like watching someone take a shit on your mother's face.
posted to MetaFilter by liminal_shadows at 4:07 PM on July 22, 2022

I've seen a ton in the last decade about how the decline of permanent organized structures has really disadvantaged the left (broadly defined as basically anyone non-corporate.) Labor unions are the big ones, but also mainstream protestant churches and even fraternal orders. If you're not actively religious, there's a good chance that the only organization you interact with is a professional group. I certainly read this piece with that in mind.

This series is... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mark k at 1:14 AM on July 22, 2022

So, I've had a half-baked theory about this rattling around for a while and I figure I might as well dump it out here.

In the US (and I think Canada as well), there's a general consensus that the "right" kind of protests were the ones that MLK Jr. did. I'll note that this consensus is relatively recent considering, for example, how John McCain voted against establishing the MLK Jr. day holiday in 1983 and how Arizona didn't recognize it until 1992. In any case,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mhum at 6:17 PM on July 21, 2022

A good discussion of how protests do or do not work should touch on the work of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. Basically, they argue, masses of (generally poor) people can influence political decision-making to the extent that they can disrupt business as usual and convince elites that they better offer concessions or else the disruption will get worse. This makes it easy to see why protests in the 60s (accompanied as they were by riots and other forms of even more radical disruption)... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by derrinyet at 2:44 PM on July 21, 2022

"“Take her to the Moon for me, okay?” -- Bing Bong, Inside Out"

I think I may have told this story here before, but I'll never forget seeing Inside Out in a crowded theater on opening weekend. It was a multigenerational audience, and we were all having a great time. When The Thing Happened, the entire auditorium went completely quiet. Then, a tiny litttle voice piped up somewhere behind me, just loud enough for everyone... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by The Underpants Monster at 12:55 PM on July 21, 2022

Lara Flynn Boyle’s character on Las Vegas.

Oh wait, are we being serious? Maddy Ferguson’s murder on Twin Peaks. Laura arrived safely dead and tidily wrapped in plastic; Maddy was not the first on-screen murder on the show, but it was the first to acknowledge the brutality, the resilience, the terror, the despair, the compulsion, and the innate wrongness of one human wasting the life of another.

It was also... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by infinitewindow at 12:26 PM on July 21, 2022

T-Rex toilet lawyer.
posted to MetaFilter by AlSweigart at 12:05 PM on July 21, 2022

I can't read about half of these without an upwelling of grief. Estraven? No. Not while I'm at work, dammit.

A few I'd add:
+ Lucy Knight on ER
+ The characters in the tiny game Passage
+ Leslie in Bridge to Terabithia
+ Vivian in Wit. God, the scene where her professor reads her The Runaway Bunny?
posted to MetaFilter by Caxton1476 at 11:17 AM on July 21, 2022

Snowden's secret in Catch-22 has to rate.
posted to MetaFilter by philip-random at 10:57 AM on July 21, 2022

Spock. So what if he got better?
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 10:35 AM on July 21, 2022

What we are witnessing right now is the start of a text book modern US style military operation. Phase 1 dig in and gear up; conduct fighting retreats to learn your enemy. Phase 2 identify enemy command and control centers, logistics hubs and where they rest their soldiers when they rotate them off the line. Phase 3 (where we are now): Use precision guided weapons to demolish those key areas. Phase 4: Having destroyed your enemy's ability to command, supply and recover after attacks you... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by interogative mood at 12:48 PM on July 21, 2022

This Is Just To Say

I have cancelled
Allan Dershowitz
who was on
the Vineyard

and who
you were probably
dying
to hear speak

Forgive me
he's a liar
an asshole
and so choad
posted to MetaFilter by chavenet at 1:28 AM on July 20, 2022

I'd rather get involved in a land war in Asia than sit down for an interview with Isaac Chotiner.
posted to MetaFilter by RakDaddy at 5:02 PM on July 19, 2022

Reminds me of the scene from American beauty: "You're boring, and you're totally ordinary, and you know it."

You haven't been cancelled, no one cares about you anymore. That's probably for the best.
posted to MetaFilter by Toddles at 5:23 PM on July 19, 2022

Brian Eno's Windows 95 startup chime yt is my all time favorite

B:/ Startup (Blank Banshee)

yes, it should be a backslash, but it isn't
posted to MetaFilter by snuffleupagus at 9:12 AM on July 13, 2022

"...maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life."

"But what about us?"

"We'll always have Sex. And the City, Too."
posted to MetaFilter by AlSweigart at 6:12 AM on July 10, 2022

Chuck Prophet - Summertime Thing
Francis Dunnery - American Life in the Summertime
Doves - Catch the Sun
posted to MetaFilter by borborygmi at 8:07 PM on July 1, 2022

Bananarama’s ”Venus” or ”Cruel Summer”
posted to MetaFilter by computech_apolloniajames at 3:45 PM on July 1, 2022

I've laughed with Stewart and Colbert and Oliver and all the rest, but now I'm angry I did and angry that they made careers of making entertainment out of the long slide towards fascism the United States has been on.

Yeah, it's worth looking at the difference in how Stewart and the rest tend to work for liberals and Tucker Carlson and his ilk work for the right. The Stewart brand of political comedy can make one feel better for seeming to unveil the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gusottertrout at 10:04 PM on June 24, 2022

WE FUCKING VOTE, Joe. It's not because people don't vote, it's because Republicans are fascists who've gerrymandered the shit out of Congressional districts, and it's because our antiquated system designed to hand power to slavers means 18% of the population control a majority in the Senate. This is how a president who lost the popular vote nominated three supreme court justices who were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population. What we have now is a full-blown legitimacy... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 9:56 AM on June 24, 2022

We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse (Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker [Unpaywalled])
posted to MetaFilter by chavenet at 8:12 AM on June 24, 2022

In a way, it doesn't matter what we argue about voting, direct action, how much action and how direct, etc. Events are overtaking us. What's happening now is that options are being foreclosed.

What's going to happen in the next few years is that fewer and fewer ways of politics are going to be safe and legal, and the effectiveness is going to drain out of the legal ones - picture some sad little legal protest cage protest... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner at 7:49 AM on June 24, 2022

I'm sure my mom is happy today. She's catholic, and has leaned more and more right over the past decade, just like the American Catholic church. She would never allow herself to see the flaws in the Church, how it basically exploits whole peoples, how it propagates racism, how it preaches poverty while amassing wealth. And let's not even start on how it built a child-raping network.

All she ever talked about was abortion. It was her number one issue. It was her only... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by nushustu at 7:43 AM on June 24, 2022

A few thoughts:

1) Billy Bragg once said that no protest song could change the world, but that what it could do is remind like-minded listeners that they were not alone and encourage them towards collective action. I think The Daily Show did something similar, and that's valuable in itself. I loved Stewart's ability to "be silly while giving a damn" (as Colbert put it) and that's still a rare quality today.

2) That said, the Daily Show... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Paul Slade at 1:50 AM on June 25, 2022

if you set aside the arcane russian mythology and the bs russian propaganda about fearing invasions from nato and all the armchair psychology about putin, what remains sort of makes sense in a sick cold way: putin thought ukraine was weak after the 2014 invasion yet highly strategically important due to its gas pipelines, and he knew it was highly unlikely that nato would get directly involved, and he saw how western military assistance (as in afghanistan and iraq) doesn't do much if the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by wibari at 10:25 PM on June 20, 2022

Opinion:

I grew up on the Suwałki Gap with family split up amongst all four bordering countries due to previous war(s). That is, of course, not unique in Europe. Still, the thought of it happening again or worse is ... not good. It seemed far-fetched not long ago, but no longer.

While far from perfect, it's a relief NATO countries have been expressing support for Ukraine in words and weapons. Despite that, in the context of the last few years... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by UN at 12:00 PM on June 20, 2022

Desperation? It reeks of emboldened strength.

So realistically, it's a little of both.

The hard fact in Texas is that demographic shifts are coming, and they're coming pretty hard: Texas is a fast-growing state with a ton of migration into it from other US areas, and the biggest of these is the flow into Texas from California. Most of that increase in population is happening specifically in the cities, not in the rural... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by sciatrix at 8:54 AM on June 20, 2022

It sure seems likely that an evolutionary feedback loop rewarding novel experiences and the unexpected would offer an advantage. Laughter seems to fit squarely in this category - a theory of mind advanced enough to imagine someone doing something unexpected (rather than "surprising" exactly) in the sense that it violates default predictions (instincts) in a way that isn't exactly plausible but also isn't exactly impossible could help create counterfactuals that underlie human abilities... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by abulafa at 7:18 AM on June 19, 2022

I will never cease to be confused by the fact that a Johnny Cash cover has erased the public’s memory of a Nine Inch Nails original and not the other way around.
posted to MetaFilter by sinfony at 5:27 AM on June 19, 2022

The "opening" is an obvious masterpiece (so much so that most seen to forget that the actual opening is the whole sequence with Kid Carl meeting Kid Ellie), but for my money it's surpassed in emotional heft by the scene near the end where Carl discovers the "Stuff I'm Going to Do" section of the photo album. Giacchino's score does a lot of heavy lifting, but it really does a fantastic job of summing up the core message of the film: that the times in life... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 11:44 AM on June 17, 2022

I acknowledge I must be one of about seven people total. It feels to me not so much a piece of emotional film with a relatable story as the product of a team of cynical psychologists and marketers who were tasked with ripping tears from the most people as fast as possible, bc that's what corporate decided would sell.

There is a line where cynicism becomes foolishness.

Corporate didn't have a say on whether the animated... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Merus at 11:03 AM on June 17, 2022

The secession thing is a non-starter. It's just a rotten-ass way to look at things, frankly, both morally and practically. "Good luck, Black folks in Mississippi! Bon voyage, queers in Birmingham!"

It's easy to hand wave and say that maybe this would be something that could be worked out with a period of rapid migration between regions. But maybe just give a quick Google of "partition of India" and see how that goes.

The US... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by DirtyOldTown at 9:15 AM on June 6, 2022

Between Paul McCartney showing support for Johnny Depp during this trial and Ringo pimping NFT scams I'm starting to understand why the younger generations don't have a lot of time for The Beatles.

As Mark Steel said, "They're dying in the wrong order."

(not to say that John and George were massive prizes in their personal lives, especially in a thread about abuse)
posted to MetaFilter by Lentrohamsanin at 9:25 AM on June 3, 2022

I found it disturbing, when it began to look as if Jussie Smollett might have fabricated the attack on himself, how a large contingent of people absolutely howled for his blood. I thought, why this man? Why now? Who do other crimes not warrant this sort of public outrage? And then the same thing happens to Amber Heard. Even if they're not the same people, not the same situations, not the same victims or perpetrators, the rhetoric and behaviour are the same. The ecstasy at the outcome is the same.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by klanawa at 8:46 AM on June 3, 2022

One more argument for the space elevator then.
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl at 11:38 AM on May 31, 2022

"Don't fear the Reaper" is a sincerely moving song about mortality and fear of death.

It may have not been the first time I heard it, but I most associate it with the opening credits of the original "The Stand" miniseries back in 1994. You just hear the music as the camera pans over dead bodies on the base where the virus got out. Really effective.
posted to MetaFilter by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 10:33 AM on May 30, 2022

People here on MeFi know me to be a jaded snarkbucket.

But.

Could SNL have picked any. other. fucking. song. to reduce to a punchline?

"Don't fear the Reaper" is a sincerely moving song about mortality and fear of death. It was written when Donald Roeser had his first brush with mortality as a young man.

This fear - the fear of death - is responsible for SO MUCH WOE THROUGH HISTORY.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by lalochezia at 9:52 AM on May 30, 2022

Work around the second amendment

A reminder: For about two hundred years, the meaning of the Second Amendment was clear and mostly undisputed, despite the gnarled syntax of the text itself. Generations of Supreme Court and academic opinion held that the amendment referred only to the privileges belonging to state militias. The late Chief Justice Warren E. Burger said, in 1991, that the idea that the Second Amendment conferred a right for individuals... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:12 PM on May 24, 2022

Let's not pretend that this is anything but a grim roulette where you just hope that there are enough school districts in the nation for your own school to not make the next headline. You put your children in school and you assume a risk.

It comes to me that for a significant number of Republicans, this is a feature rather than a bug, because destroying public education is also one of their main goals. The more of a nightmare it becomes to send your kids off to school... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peakes at 9:02 PM on May 24, 2022

This is a moment where @POTUS could post, "and so tomorrow morning I will introduce a bill to repeal the 2nd amendment" (or whatever the hell you do to get that train moving), or he could not. One day the democratic leadership in this country will finally realize that a winning strategy is one that actually stands for something. Make it a fight, don't step aside while our kids our killed. It's called leadership. Post pictures of those dead kids with bullet holes in their little... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by lab.beetle at 8:13 PM on May 24, 2022

You know, the purpose of the US constitution is to enable people to live fulfilling lives of their choice, not to live in constant terror of their fellow citizens.

And yet, here we are.
posted to MetaFilter by Big Al 8000 at 4:24 PM on May 24, 2022

I fully expect to outlive this country at this point. Whether it will mutate into some unrecognizable fascist state or simply balkanize into a group of other countries, I do not know. But I do not expect the United States of America to be an ongoing concern in another 40-50 years.

The mass shooting issue is the clearest possible example of how legislation and the public agenda are in no way affected by desperate needs for public good.
posted to MetaFilter by DirtyOldTown at 2:55 PM on May 24, 2022

I found this passage about the value of fandom quite moving.

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Horace Rumpole at 5:57 PM on May 20, 2022

I'm not sure why anyone should be "worried" about conservative comedy... isn't this really just another example of how hateful people are now completely comfortable about being openly hateful?
posted to MetaFilter by Saxon Kane at 3:02 PM on May 16, 2022

I took a graduate level class in color capture and reproduction; the whole process of taking a photograph and then displaying it with correct colors. It's wacky how complex this is, every part of the path the color data takes is subject to distortion and errors. And then there's how your brain actually perceives things with a whole gamut of fun optical illusions.

My favorite color illusion is chimerical colors: you overload your retina with one color and then expose it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nelson at 9:29 AM on May 17, 2022

As with most things Wittgenstein, it's not so much philosophy as semiotics. Objectively, the differences we see are differences in wavelength, but then we give each point on the spectrum that we care to distinguish a name, like dusky rose, or cerulean, and we try to reach a consensus on that name and its wavelength so we can communicate meaningfully about it. It gets hazy when each of us has an aesthetic preference that lies between familiar conventional names. Try to send someone to the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by OHenryPacey at 9:18 AM on May 17, 2022

Coming from the animation side, we pretty much always have two people doing the job they describe. There's a director, and there's a producer. The director makes artistic decisions, the producer makes sure everybody does their job and gets the show done on time and under budget.

FWIW, 90% of the directors are men, and 90% of the producers are women.
posted to MetaFilter by clawsoon at 8:44 AM on May 16, 2022

Article:

We are the unlucky ones who are going to bear witness to the single most transformative episode in all of human history — the one that will never be forgotten. We are the witnesses to the death of a planet

Matthew 24:34-35, NRSV:

Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

posted to MetaFilter by howfar at 5:41 AM on May 15, 2022