MetaFilter

I thought that I as a queer person was welcome here, that my experiences as a queer person would be listened to here.

Huh. I as a queer person feel entirely welcome here and that my experience as a queer person is listened to. I guess your experience is different. I as a queer person have a particularly detailed understanding of how dangerous and foolish blanket bans on talking about particular topics, organizations, or types of people are.
posted to MetaTalk by Nelson at 7:23 AM on March 12, 2015

fffm, my gripe with your participation here - of which this MeTa is a larger trend of - is that you seem to take a sharp moralistic stance on everything. This attitude is unfortunately not uncommon within queer communities, but it is a not a very helpful one at all. You're ignoring all of the complexities and competing/overlapping interests that naturally work as part and parcel of being in diverse communities - and therefore, intersectionality. How many times have you come into a FPP where... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Conspire at 7:22 AM on March 12, 2015

If I'd known this was going to happen I'd never have signed up.
posted to MetaTalk by MiguelCardoso at 9:37 AM on March 5, 2015

Thanks, Matt, for your wisdom and commitment -- MetaFilter's successes would not have been possible without the qualities that you brought to it. There are few people whose intuitions about this sort of stuff I value and trust more highly. MetaFilter wouldn't work at all without this alchemical combination of being a large, general-interest site and a vibrant community -- and much of this is the result of numerous decisions you've made along the way.

To everyone else,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:31 PM on March 4, 2015

I guess this is the right time and place to tell this story...

Sometime when MetaFilter was much younger, before it was even Matt's full-time gig, maybe a dozen years ago, Matt crashed on my couch for one of his first visits to NYC. We stayed out a bit late, having fun meeting MeFites, and then both went to bed.

I got up a bit early, and was puttering around my apartment and I saw Matt sitting stock upright, fully awake, without having moved... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anildash at 1:47 PM on March 4, 2015

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

Wordshore: Other regular dude posters - consider doing the same i.e. have a month off from submitting FPPs? Save any post ideas or drafts for, well, any other month of the year.

I really don't like this. I come here for a diverse selection of noise topics that I'm interested in. 100 extra posts by women is great, but those of the other gender shouldn't be asked to post less. You're requesting that males consider not posting for two months out of the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by gman at 4:40 AM on February 27, 2015

This is sad.
... I called up Dr. Jay Neitz, PhD, a color vision researcher at the University of Washington. I sent Dr. Neitz the link to the Tumblr post and asked him to tell me what color he saw. "White and gold," he told me flatly. "What is it you're asking?"

After I explained that I saw the dress as blue and black, he said he wanted to ask one of the students working in his vision lab for a second opinion. "Blue and black,"... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by maudlin at 7:47 PM on February 26, 2015

Yes, it seems to me you may be overthinking. *said without any snark, and with a smile*
This is not about posting 'for our own representation'. This is about posting in a certain time period, and/or with a certain tag, 'for our own representation'.
The posting itself should be, and as far as I'm concerned: will be, happening for all the usual reasons.
posted to MetaTalk by Too-Ticky at 3:56 PM on February 25, 2015

never apologize about talking about Elite, let's talk about it until we die
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 5:45 PM on February 12, 2015

These days, my thoughts about the emulation projects are enunciated in fully at my ASCII weblog.
posted to MetaFilter by jscott at 7:18 AM on January 28, 2015

also gamefilter is a thing! even though it seems like the me and stav (mostly stav) show at the moment.
posted to MetaTalk by juv3nal at 9:28 PM on January 15, 2015

"This latest drive brings us up to a total of $23,691.66 donated to charity over the past five years..."

Wow that is *really* impressive. Good work!

(I never heard of charity:water - here is their blog and mission statement. Nor had I heard of Child's Play, which brought to mind a movie. About page / FAQ.) Once again - well done.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:28 PM on January 15, 2015

I find Star Trek to be the most insipid and uninteresting show ever...

Well, I have to say, thank god for Star Trek. Those scratchy reruns of TOS were the ONLY thing I could latch onto as a kid growing up in the 70s in the Ozarks. Star Trek was my sine qua non and allowed me to survive knowing there were greater possibilities out there for philosophy, creativity, and so on than what I was seeing in the world around me. It gave me hope for the future... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jabah at 6:53 AM on January 7, 2015

it's easier to dismiss me as an unreasonable crank than it is to seriously examine and discuss moderation policies
That serious examination and discussion has happened so many times already in the context of your 'censorship' claim (as you are well aware) that to continue to beat the dead horse of censorship the way you do makes you sound exactly like an unreasonable crank. Which is odd, because you don't in any way sound like that on any other topic.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by dg at 3:50 PM on December 30, 2014

it's a one-note, all-gripe-and-no-substance approach that is self-defeating and gives us nothing to work with

I'm not sure that this has been discussed already, but what is often referred to as "the moderation" in MetaFilter has made it an increasingly distinct entity among its competitors, especially as of late. Perhaps I've missed it, but I often feel that this has not been articulated enough or expounded upon. Perhaps the moderators... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by phaedon at 1:51 PM on December 30, 2014

happyroach: "Really, this is opening a whole can of worms as far as the rights of nonhuman sentients go. Could they have the right to vote? To own property?"

No, just like children don't have those rights, but are still people.

Generally, animals rights philosophers who are hugely in favor of animal rights suggest that animals should have rights specific to that animal's needs -- so cows, for example, should have a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Eyebrows McGee at 8:06 PM on December 21, 2014

I'm going to leave this here. It's a YT playlist of AC/DC playing live at the Atlantis Record Bar Convention in August of '78, in Nashville -- just music, no actual video of the performance. Their set was broadcast on a local (?) FM station, and the quality of the recording is great once the music begins.

The band was playing in a hotel ballroom to a bunch of music retail industry suits that had the power to choose whose music their stores promoted. Not an AC/DC crowd --... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mosk at 4:35 PM on December 12, 2014

I'm unfamiliar with Armstrong's work but I can say a little about the mythos/logos distinction. By the time of Plato and Aristotle mythoi had definitely come to mean stories told by poets which did not have the same standards of truth as logoi (see, for example, Plato's Timaeus 22c-d and throughout the Platonic corpus). Aristotle repeats this distinction himself, regarding mythoi as... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by dis_integration at 11:24 AM on November 26, 2014

I don't have a copy of The Case for God with me, so I can't review her footnotes, but I'll try to make a short response. In regards to your first question, the primeval story in the Hebrew Bible fits more closely into an ancient Near Eastern myths of creation genre than it does into an ANE historical genre. You then move to the Gospels: what genre the four canonical Gospels fall into is a matter of debate. Probably the most widely-held opinion is that they resemble Greco-Roman biography; such... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by apartment dweller at 11:17 AM on November 26, 2014

A) From discussions on similar topics with my hermeneutics roommate on Paul Tillich's similar arguments around ontologic and technical reasoning, my understanding is that until around the Renaissance, the idea of historicity was not understood the same way we do now, with the thought of an ever-progressing timeline, but rather that humanity was always roughly the same (generally after some fall, e.g. Homeric descriptions of a previous golden age of heroes). Because of that, the distinctions that... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by klangklangston at 10:43 AM on November 26, 2014

As a low-level commentator here and a mere user, as opposed to the power users I brush up against sometimes round these parts, on the internet as a whole I'll drop my two cents into the bucket 'o' opinions:

1) The bundle presentation seems like a bad fit for Metafilter. It seems to be an experiment of sorts so, after learning as much, I'm more willing to let my initial squick reaction melt away like so much lake-effect snow. I would probably feel better if the partner... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by RolandOfEld at 11:54 PM on November 23, 2014

"You probably mistyped, but just for the record, IS and Wahabis are Sunni, not Shia, and Iran and Hezbollah are Shia and not Sunni."

Sorry, yeah. Too many open tabs.

"Sorry, what. I'm against our involvement anywhere in the middle east, and if you don't think the US and our allies (Saudi Arabia and Turkey) weren't all over the uprising in Syria, you're being naive. ISIS and the Free Syrian army, etc,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by klangklangston at 2:09 PM on November 24, 2014

From there, with a ton of foreign support by blocs that don't like the Alawites (many Shia consider them apostates, including IS and some of the Wahabi Saudi blocs) and a variety of other outside actors, a weak coalition of local folks got turned into the Free Syria Army. Because Syria is one of the few majority Sunni areas, the Alawites are working with Sunni factions like Iran and Hezbollah.

You probably mistyped, but just for the record, IS and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by VikingSword at 1:23 PM on November 24, 2014

"The mess in Syria is all Obama's."

LOL wut

No, and that kind of thinking is part of why we keep stepping in Middle East shit.

So, Syria had been wracked with a series of military coups and instability until about 1970, which the previous (Hafez) Assad took power out of the wreckage of Baathist infighting. Similar to Saddam (though Syria assisted in the '90 Gulf War), Assad ran a military... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by klangklangston at 1:14 PM on November 24, 2014

> Um you used the wrong article there, which just wrecked any credibility your comment may have had, boo_radley.

punk rock will never die
posted to MetaFilter by boo_radley at 2:06 PM on November 24, 2014

mattress, mattress pad- fitted sheet- flat sheet, duvet.

I go: Floor, skin, organs, core of solid explosive cordite, tiny homunculus who carries my humors, sleeping bag.
posted to MetaFilter by Potomac Avenue at 2:00 PM on November 24, 2014

> Nobody has to answer for their views here, long as they aren't violating conduct guidelines.

No, that's true, I expressed myself poorly. I should have said "people have as much right to oppose your views as you do to state them."

I would also like to say that I truly have nothing against Misha as a person; I've often gotten the feeling we'd get on well if we met, as long as the topic of feminism didn't arise.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by languagehat at 2:39 PM on November 24, 2014

I'm glad folks seem okay with the changes. I appreciate the folks who had constructive feedback, even when pointed. I hope everyone finds the newly-updated site not just acceptable, but worth promoting to friends or more casual users of MeFi! Remember, only a tiny % of MeFi users have ever even been to MetaTalk, and there are _millions_ of people who might find MeFi valuable enough to support it.

[Sidebar: I understand that I represent some sort of bad thing to a few... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anildash at 2:54 PM on November 21, 2014

You're doing that being-weird-and-rude thing again, sgt.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 3:06 PM on November 20, 2014

What Matt said. For what it's worth, I love MeFi and I love Matt and no there isn't some secret Old Web People cabal trying to ruin what makes this site great. I do agree some of the language is far from how folks here see MeFi, and so we'll correct that. But there's a large audience that lurks and might want a chance to support the site, part of the vast majority who have mostly never even been to MetaTalk. (I'm among that group; as pointed out, it's tough for me to participate here without... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anildash at 2:16 PM on November 19, 2014

I feel like the backlash, both for this and for features going as far back as titles (to my relatively-recent memory as a user, at least), has to do with the way in which a lot of the changes made to MetaFilter feel as if they're being applied to the site, rather than built from within.

I see that, and of course, I've always said it is hard to tell where the exact line of ownership lies between a white board with two round circles drawn onto them,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 1:59 PM on November 19, 2014

I agree that the bundle is confusing, and I don't have much to add to what's mentioned above (e.g. I thought MLKSHK was already dead, I think ThinkUp - which I pay for - has not at all proven its value yet, and I totally don't understand what I get by supporting The Toast). I would much rather see some kind of "Cool Web Patron" thing, which had nothing to do with membership and didn't include ThinkUp or MLKSHK.

HOWEVER. While I don't agree with everything... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by adrianhon at 11:54 AM on November 19, 2014

mathowie: I want to mention that I don't want to minimize how difficult this last year, or the time before that when you noticed Google revenue dropping before you announced it to the community, has been. MetaFilter is an extraordinary community, and right now it's going through somewhat of a crisis. I also don't think that you have anything other than MetaFilter's best interests at heart.

That said — and I know I'm not the only one who shares this opinion — you have a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by rorgy at 12:17 PM on November 19, 2014

Because his apolitical stance to blue collar work serves to hide the real structural problems of the lower classes, and instead presents a valorized version of "hard work" without actually advocating for the improving the conditions of those who do that hard work.

I think there is actually a benefit to separating the two now and then. Extolling the virtues of taking on hard and demanding work and seeing it through is a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by chambers at 8:37 PM on November 18, 2014

Comets are cosmic spermatozoa. Everyone knows this.

Ontogeny recapitulates cosmology.
posted to MetaFilter by stargell at 5:34 PM on November 18, 2014

Needs more Doc Savage.
posted to MetaFilter by clavdivs at 10:39 PM on November 14, 2014

While I suppose this video is heartwarming (or about as heartwarming as a prank can be), I also think it points out a certain smugness Canadians possess, as well as a stereotype created by Americans and the American media following 9/11 and the War on Terror, that somehow Canada is this nice, sane rational place north of the border.

Because while it may not be politically correct to hurl invective at a Muslim at a bus stop, I can tell you from experience that it's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Nevin at 8:27 AM on November 1, 2014

I left MeFightClub a while back mainly because of the backlash 256 and I experienced over interrogating our community relationship to violent and misogynistic tropes in gaming. I felt harrased and persecuted by a particular and prominent member and told you and Kimberley and queried a number of other members and essentially got the answer "he's been with us for a long time and that's just his way" and "are you sure you're a good fit here?" So for me the horse was... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by 256 at 5:36 PM on October 29, 2014

Oh god. Well, ok. A ketogenic diet can be helpful for *some people* under very particular circumstances, while being monitored by a professional. For most, it's just another crash diet that leads to muscle loss that ratchets down your body's ability to maintain weight loss in the future, because when you gain back after these diets you gain back fat without regaining the lean body mass. And it's no big secret, it's been around for decades. For those susceptible to eating disorders, it's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by antinomia at 8:01 PM on October 18, 2014

Yep, and those two things -- the threadedness and the fact that reddit only has a decent s/n if you dig around to select specific subreddits -- mean that a good reddit experience is almost certainly a very narrow/specialized one. The fact that I don't need to limit my view of MetaFilter means that I end up seeing & learning things here that I would never in a million years see if I narrowed myself down to the subreddits that I thought I would like. When I look at the things I've favorited... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Westringia F. at 8:24 PM on October 11, 2014

To be clear, this was a pure lark that started when I made nerdy jokes with mathowie over Twitter about tildes after having a few drinks. Another result of that same conversation is that ~[username] on MetaFilter now redirects to your profile. When I woke up with a mild hangover I had 100 people asking to join tilde.club. The "network" is one micro Linux server on Amazon's cloud.

People got a kick out of logging into a Unix server and wanted their friends to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ftrain at 6:13 AM on October 4, 2014

Holy shit. *sunglasses emoji*
posted to MetaTalk by ArmyOfKittens at 3:28 AM on September 25, 2014

Can we please please NOT derail this thread with yet another divagation about the minutiae of grammar and sentence composition (even if I love arguing about them as much as the next guy).

There's no need to — I already said all that needs to be said.
posted to MetaTalk by John Cohen at 11:06 PM on September 24, 2014

editor hat on/

The thing about never ending a sentence with a preposition is archaic and was always stupid, and has been abandoned by most usage manuals. It's fine to do so unless your style manual explicitly forbids it. No one will call the grammar police, who would just roll their eyes anyway.

/editor hat off
posted to MetaTalk by rtha at 10:27 PM on September 24, 2014

Kudos to the entire team on a huge project that seems to have yielded amazing results. I may not have articulated it very well, but all I was ever trying to advocate for was a look that was approachable and familiar to people who had never been to the site before, but would surely have been delighted to discover what a special place this is, despite its intimidating first impression. (And some members' penchants for really never letting a tired old joke go.)

I hope all... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anildash at 2:40 PM on September 24, 2014

Stavros, I believe this.
posted to MetaTalk by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 8:11 PM on September 18, 2014

"And I would like to see the mods to recognize how the hostile tone in some comments, regardless of whether the person's position is one you agree with or not, contributes to this problem."

I've mostly stayed out of this thread and even removed it from my recent activity because it was upsetting me so much.

The dilemma I have is that I think that many people very often have strong justification for being pretty... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:25 AM on September 4, 2014

I am extremely heartened by this discussion. As an older woman, a grannie, I could never have imagined this type of debate happening with men and women together, and on such a grand scale! And with men sticking up for women.

Now we have women openly speaking out against things, Title IX stories all over the place, and the universities are being forced to sit up and take notice. People are questioning why it's okay to show nude pictures of female celebrities.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Marie Mon Dieu at 6:50 PM on September 3, 2014

I agree that this particular case is problematic for the purposes of the larger issue described in the post (polarization and increasingly acrimonious discussion). So, placing the specifics of this particular interaction aside, one thing I think that we each individually ought to keep in mind is that very, very often discretion is the better part of valor.

Even when it's not a hot-button issue like sexism, there's usually someone around who will see... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Ivan Fyodorovich at 10:48 AM on September 2, 2014