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Recipes with high return on investment

I'm looking for dishes where the taste, appearance or "wow factor" is much more than the effort, time or money put into the dish. For the purposes of this question, there are no other restrictions.
posted by NotLost to Ask MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 4:18 PM
86 users marked this as a favorite

The core query softness continues without mitigation

Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.

Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019
posted by zenon to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 11:40 AM
74 users marked this as a favorite

By Amun, it's full of stars

Enclosed within its rugged mud brick walls the temple precincts at Dendera seem to be an island left untouched by time. Particularly in the early hours of the morning, when foxes roam around the ruins of the birth house or venture down the steep stairs leading to the Sacred Lake. Stepping into the actual temple is like entering an ancient time machine, especially if you look up to the recently cleaned astronomical ceiling. This is a vast cosmos filled with stars, hour-goddesses and zodiac signs, many of which are personified by weird creatures like snakes walking on long legs and birds with human arms and jackal heads. On the columns just below the ceiling you encounter the mysterious gaze of the patron deity of the temple: Hathor.
It might not have the iconic status of Giza or the Valley of the Kings, but the Dendera temple complex north of Luxor boasts some of the most superbly-preserved ancient Egyptian art known, ranging from early Roman times back to the Middle Kingdom period over 4,000 years ago. Most breathtaking is the ceiling of the temple's grand pronaos, which is richly decorated with intricate astrological iconography. But you don't have to travel to Egypt to see it -- thanks to photographer and programmer José María Barrera [site], you can now peruse an ultra-HD scan of the fully-restored masterpiece in a slick zoomable scroller. Overwhelmed? See the captions in this gallery for a deep-dive into the symbolism, or click inside for even more.
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Apr 21 at 9:52 AM
60 users marked this as a favorite

“members of the Voyager flight team celebrate”


"Not-pleasant! I am causing you not-pleasant!"

The short science fiction story "Hello! Hello! Hello!" by Fiona Jones (published March 2024 in Clarkesworld) begins:
I express greetings and most joyful salutations!
I do not mean to interrupt you if you wish to be without company. It is only that I noticed you have been drifting alone for six flares of star-home-past-great-star-birthplace, and that is many flares! Your movement has been aimless, and I express concern!

posted by brainwane to MetaFilter on Apr 26 at 9:21 AM
48 users marked this as a favorite

EPIC indeed


Passersby were amazed at the unusually large amounts of synergy

G/O Media, the much-reviled owner of such internet landmarks as Kotaku, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, and The Root, has been selling off their assets recently, including ClickHole (sold to Cards Against Humanity), Lifehacker (Ziff Davis), Deadspin (gutted), Jezebel and the AV Club (Paste). Latest on the auction block is The Onion... who ended up with a surprising buyer: Global Tetrahedron, a name that might ring a few bells for longtime readers. But what does the advent of this ominous conglomerate mean for America's Finest News Source?™
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Apr 25 at 6:59 PM
41 users marked this as a favorite

Revolution in Tennessee


Ukraine war heading into third summer

As Congress has finally passed the Ukraine aid bill, hope is returning to the frontline, where Ukrainian troops are increasingly struggling to hold out against a numerically superior Russian force that also has a lot more ammunition to spend. This post has some status updates and commentary on the war at present.
posted by Harald74 to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 6:32 AM
37 users marked this as a favorite

That mysterious font is Festive, not Stymie


Realistic is not necessarily the most convincing

Emil Dziewanowski is a technical artist in the gaming industry who excels at using inventive techniques to create compelling visual effects. His latest blog post, Flowfields, walks you through the process of animating the complex whorls and vortices of Jupiter without using traditional fluid dynamics, using lessons learned from such prior art as Contra's color-cycling, frame-by-frame animation, and the trippy lava effect in Quake, ultimately using a combination of clever tricks to design a "universal" flow simulator that can render appealing fluid effects in just half a millisecond.
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 12:04 PM
33 users marked this as a favorite

Examining What "Never Again" Means Through the Lens of Magneto

Writing for Defector, Asher Elbein talks about the evolution of the character of Magneto, who is (yet again) back from the dead and the shift of meaning in "Never Again," from inclusive aspiration to its violent modern application.
posted by Ghidorah to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 4:13 PM
32 users marked this as a favorite

"One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea"

When you often notice people "why-don't-they-just"-ing their way into a proposed solution to a gnarly problem, you might turn your criticisms into a checklist. "Your post advocates a [( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante] approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work." These templates often offer a summary of the problem space and a glimpse of experts' frustrations. Solution rejection checklists exist for fixing the housing crisis, beating the CAP Theorem, protecting against DDOS attacks, improving pharmaceutical drug discovery success rates, creating new programming languages and distributed social networks, and (MeFi comment!) saving journalism.
posted by brainwane to MetaFilter on Apr 25 at 7:30 AM
31 users marked this as a favorite

Our Man Bashir

“ So my editor, and I, would like me to bring Garak into this.” - “ That’s interesting. There is an interesting angle for that.” - Star Trek’s Alexander Siddig interviewed for Arab-American Heritage Month
posted by Artw to MetaFilter on Apr 25 at 1:34 PM
31 users marked this as a favorite

If only your economy room included an escape pod

Little Workshop is an award-winning French studio specializing in high-quality immersive 3D experiences for the web. Their portfolio contains many charming and fun projects you can try out yourself, including endless city generator Infinitown, cute procedural dungeon crawler Keep Out!, pulsing geometric music visualizer TRACK, and Arde Madrid, a multi-scene recreation of Ava Gardner's home in Francoist Spain. Their latest and most ambitious project: EQUINOX, a slick, stylized adventure game set in a failing starship in deep space, complete with a full soundtrack and voice acting in a mobile-friendly interface. Read the case study on their website, or check out their other projects (including the dearly-departed Mozilla MMORPG BrowserQuest).
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 9:57 AM
29 users marked this as a favorite

Life After Running

Life After Running Athletes are often defined by their physical strength. Who are they when they lose it?
It is not a replacement for running, but to live with a chronic condition is to become an expert at negotiating between one’s wants and one’s capacities. It means constantly hacking away at the richness of one’s life—there is nothing casual about it.

posted by hydropsyche to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 3:57 AM
29 users marked this as a favorite

I guess I have no choice but to love this song forever

Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences. The pervasive nature of music paralysis across generations suggests that the phenomenon's roots go beyond technology, likely stemming from developmental factors. So what changes as we age, and when does open-eardness decline? from When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter on Apr 26 at 2:05 AM
28 users marked this as a favorite

Vicky Osterweil on the muddled anti-politics of contemporary movies

Image without metaphor in Dune 2: Because in 2024, I don't find it hard to believe that people are incredibly excited by the vision of an anti-colonial guerilla movement driven by Islamic faith defeating a massive and technologically dominant empire... I do find it hard to believe that more people in 2024 aren't outraged that Dune Part Two literally features a talking embryo.

Civil War, a piece of radical-centrist, middle brow bothsideism is not only sure to be the most successful film he has made, it is also by some margin the worst. But to my pleasant surprise, it's not a completely terrible and evil film. It is just a deeply mediocre one.
posted by spamandkimchi to MetaFilter on Apr 21 at 12:53 PM
26 users marked this as a favorite

No One Buys Books

Elle Griffin's report on the testimony from the Justice Department's 2021 antitrust lawsuit to block the merger of Penguin Random House with Simon and Schuster reveals a disheartening truth: practically nobody buys books.
posted by dis_integration to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 8:10 PM
26 users marked this as a favorite

Social media is neither inherently beneficial or harmful to young people

The Coddling of the American Parent by Mike Masnick (TechDirt) debunks Jonathan Haidt's panicky new book on teens & the internet. Developmental psychologist & scholar Candice Odgers' article for Nature: The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.
posted by spamandkimchi to MetaFilter on Apr 25 at 12:58 PM
26 users marked this as a favorite

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Popular Comments

(Apologies, this got long) Oh this hits so close to home. Not for me, but for my wife. We both came to running later in life (I was 35, she was ten years older than me and started a few years later when she was almost 50). When we were first married, running meant running to the store to buy a pack of cinnamon rolls to split. But after we... [more]
posted by gmatom to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 6:22 AM
299 users marked this as a favorite

Here are pictures of our last 5k costumes, and our 5k in Juneau. [view]
posted by gmatom to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 8:20 AM
91 users marked this as a favorite

As all the search engines fail into enshitification and needless AI wackiness, Yahoo! sees their opportunity and blows the dust off their old web directory that's been sitting in a closet forgotten. [view]
posted by Clever User Name to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:09 PM
66 users marked this as a favorite

The only thing that's costing lives is the war continuing. Russia's shown it's happy to grind up whoever Ukraine sends to the front for however long it takes for Ukraine to sue for peace. Cool, so let's give up and let Ukraine get steamrolled. At least more people won't die, right? Because, you know, people in Russian-occupied Ukraine... [more]
posted by Method Man to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 12:27 PM
56 users marked this as a favorite

Pay the extra $10 and consider this a learning experience about clear communication when interacting with service providers. It sounds like the cost would have been $38 for cuffed hems anyway ("cuffed hem is different and costs more"); the tailor is doing you a big favour by accommodating your wishes without charging you for the... [more]
posted by heatherlogan to Ask MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 8:21 AM
54 users marked this as a favorite

MetaFilter: the room full of old nerds [view]
posted by hippybear to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 1:49 PM
52 users marked this as a favorite

It was always conventional wisdom that Google could fuck up as many products and launches as they wanted and they'd still always be fine as long as they didn't fuck up search. It's been fascinating to watch them fuck up search. Both the speed and breadth of the fuckup is astounding. Search went from "eh, this seems less good than it once... [more]
posted by phooky to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 11:58 AM
51 users marked this as a favorite

<Moe Szyslak voice> You know what I blame this on the shutdown of? Reader. </Moe Szyslak voice> [view]
posted by Kattullus to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:27 PM
50 users marked this as a favorite

Yesterday I might have read that Civil War thinkpiece, but having seen it last night, today I won't. I'm Team DirtyOldTown from our FanFare thread on this. I came out of it wondering what on earth people are thinking when they say that it lacks context or is centrist or "bothsideism". The context for the movie is the entire last... [more]
posted by rory to MetaFilter on Apr 21 at 2:28 PM
49 users marked this as a favorite

$38 is a reasonable price to pay for what you got. The work of the tailor is the same whether your pants cost $80 or $280. I think people don’t go to tailors as often these days because we are used to clothes being really cheap. The tailor was rude and I wouldn’t go back there but this is a lot of fuss over $10. [view]
posted by sibylvane to Ask MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 8:33 AM
49 users marked this as a favorite

gmatom - I just want to thank you for sharing that with us. With me. I don't have the presence of mind to unspool all the ways in which it's connecting to me but please just know that it's beautiful and this internet stranger is sitting in a coffee shop feeling very emotionally full. Thank you so much for this gift. [view]
posted by Tomorrowful to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 6:51 AM
49 users marked this as a favorite

This is as badass as computer engineering gets. Programming a nearly 50 year old 64k computer that's outside the solar system with a lag time of almost a day. Simply amazing. [view]
posted by indexy to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 1:40 PM
48 users marked this as a favorite

tl;dr "Any Salad Can Be A Caesar Salad (if you stab it enough)" [view]
posted by lalochezia to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 8:26 AM
47 users marked this as a favorite

This is interesting but I have a problem with the framing of heroic software engineers against evil management/consultants. Not that management isn't evil but there's nothing inherently ethically or morally pure about software development. It's some old school Silicon valley/Microserfs philosophy. [view]
posted by muddgirl to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:36 PM
45 users marked this as a favorite

and also WHY IS THERE NOT MORE GOTH FOR AND BY OLD PEOPLE. WHY DO ONLY YOUNG PEOPLE MOAN ABOUT DEATH. GOTH SHOULD BECOME MORE INTENSE AS YOU APPROACH THE GRAVE, NOT LESS. WHAT THE FUCK [view]
posted by phooky to MetaFilter on Apr 26 at 5:31 AM
43 users marked this as a favorite

{looks around the room at literally thousands of books} Shit. [view]
posted by metametamind to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 8:18 PM
42 users marked this as a favorite

How do I evaluate the risk? In 2023 there wasn't a single fatal accident, anywhere in the world, involving any make or model of jet aircraft. A rational process of risk management should focus on (a) the car ride to and from the airport, and (b) any roads you have to cross on foot. [view]
posted by Klipspringer to Ask MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 11:49 AM
42 users marked this as a favorite

Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want? Just like you get all the movies you want from Netflix? Or all the music you want from Spotify? I'm sitting here trying to figure out what that $9.99 a month would get me that my library card doesn't. (Faster access to new titles, I suppose. Is that a... [more]
posted by aws17576 to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 10:31 PM
39 users marked this as a favorite

Clearly, the wombat heard about sea level rise and is working on evolving to the aquatic life. It could be the first mersupial! [view]
posted by GenjiandProust to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 9:00 AM
38 users marked this as a favorite

I heard a long interview with Haidt and got pretty suspicious, sure enough he thinks transgender kids are infected by social media/peers and is supportive of his colleagues who refuse to use a student's correct pronouns, under the guise that "truth" is more important than "social justice." [view]
posted by muddgirl to MetaFilter on Apr 25 at 1:17 PM
38 users marked this as a favorite