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It's Monday and my day off and I've done like six hours of work anyway, which means now I absolutely get to put my feet up and crack open a nice cold can of Free Thread with the boys. (The boys are my cats. They're both girls, come to think of it. Anyway.) Come on in and talk about whatever the hell one talks about when one talks about things, I (increasingly literally) don't make the rules.
posted on Apr-18-22 at 3:33 PM

Waxy.org, the slightly younger blog compatriat of actual elder websites like MetaFilter, turned 20 years old yesterday. Run by MetaFilter's own waxpancake aka Andy (absolutely no relation) Baio, Waxy has been a font of interesting links for longer than most of the people on TikTok have been alive, and remains a valuable and likable roundup of web and internet weirdness to this very day. (Hi, Andy.)
posted on Apr-15-22 at 5:46 PM

Tiny Elden Ring: Elden Ring, but zoomed out and tilt-shifted and everything moving in a low-framerate Harryhausen stutter.
posted on Apr-12-22 at 4:04 PM

It's snowing in Portland, OR in the middle of April, which according to the prophecy means it's time for a Free Thread and also for me to not leave the house today. Come on in, chat about whatever, and put on a sweater, I'm cold.
posted on Apr-11-22 at 9:43 AM

David Friedman at Ironic Sans rounds up the digital game show set recreations of Steven Rosenow, with mockups of Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Price is Right, and so on. More images and other photography on Rosenow's flickr account.
posted on Mar-31-22 at 9:00 PM

100 Boots is a narrative work of photographic art by Eleanor Antin, made of 51 postcards over the course of 1971-1973, telling a visual story of a collection of rubber boots making a pilgrimage from San Diego to New York. Additional bits at MoMa; kadist.org; getty.edu.
posted on Mar-30-22 at 3:01 PM

Nine Inch Nails via Eight Bit Architecture: Pretty Eight Machine, by prolific chiptune musician Inverse Phase, is a reinterpretation of the classic NIN album on a variety of different 8-bit hardware configurations, ranging from the C64 and Atari 800 to special onboard sound chips from the Famicom Castlevania 3 cartridge.
posted on Mar-28-22 at 8:06 AM

Vol Libre, by Loren Carpenter: "I made this film in 1979-80 to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper on how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. It is the world's first fractal movie. It utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan. These frames were computed on a VAX-11/780 at about 20-40 minutes each."
posted on Mar-26-22 at 3:16 PM

I was going to quit playing Scrabble competitively. Then something utterly nuts happened. [It was bushveld. Bushveld happened. -ed]
posted on Mar-23-22 at 6:22 PM

It's Monday, the site is not currently experiencing unexpected downtime, and we're just narrowly on the far side of the the equinox: what else is there for it but another Free Thread? Come on in and discuss your favorite solar calendrical phenomena or, like, probably mostly other things, whatever is fine.
posted on Mar-21-22 at 9:26 AM

Free Thread? More like free games. As in I am currently playing at least three different free idle games between my PC and my phone. None of them are great! But they're free, and they each have small charms, and it's a pleasant distraction from everything. Which, hey, free thread! Come on in and chatter about whatever and make the comment number go up.
posted on Mar-14-22 at 7:37 AM

Free Thread? More like Three Head, amirte? Janus was an amateur, triple-faced hellhounds are where it's at. Is that a hot take? They said you should do hot takes to get engagement. I guess hell is hot, so that part works. He's a hot dog! Hot dogs. They're a hot dogs. Okay, this isn't going well, just come on in and chat about whatever already.
posted on Mar-8-22 at 10:28 AM

No, you got distracted by the everythingness of everything from keeping to the nascent Monday-ish pattern for new Free Thread posts. I told you not to play so much Elden Ring. You really look like a silly goose now. Anyway, here's a place to talk about anything but the stuff we've been unable to escape the last several days, come on in and chatter.
posted on Mar-3-22 at 8:48 AM

Who has two thumbs and is not sure without looking which one he uses to hit the spacebar while he's typing up a new Free Thread post? This guy! [Imagine me pointing at myself with both the spacebar and non-spacebar thumbs]. It turns out it's the right thumb, btw. Anyway, come on in and chatter about whatever!
posted on Feb-21-22 at 9:35 AM

Roses are red
MeFi is blue
Here's a Free Thread
Full of poems for u
posted on Feb-14-22 at 8:34 AM

Africa, by Toto, played entirely on in-game instruments in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.
posted on Feb-10-22 at 9:29 AM

What's the most important factor in a guitar's tone? Well, apparently it's not like 99% of the guitar, including the part that looks like a guitar or that a normal human being would refer to as "a guitar".
posted on Feb-8-22 at 8:19 AM

*slaps roof of website* this baby can fit so many Free Threads in it

Come on in and chat about whatever. Did your family have a minivan? My family had a minivan. You don't have to talk about minivans, I just sort of got thinking about that. Hi!
posted on Feb-7-22 at 9:24 AM

It's a thread, it's free: it must be a Free Thread. We're up to five now! That's probably some sort of anniversary, we should exchange gifts but not like gifts gifts, nothing elaborate, let's not make it weird. Anyway, come on in and chat about the whoozit and whatsit.
posted on Feb-1-22 at 12:53 PM

It's been nearly a decade since we last saw it, so why not take another starlit stroll through the Planetarium and Projector Science Museum.
posted on Jan-25-22 at 2:09 PM

It's a fourth Free Thread and this is the one that has Alicia Silverstone in it I guess? I really hadn't planned this whole thing around the Warner Brothers run of Batman movies but it just sort of happened. Anyway, no link, no topic, just come on in and chatter about stuff. Oh, and if you're newish or lurkerish on MetaFilter or just feeling friendly, you should also stop by the Introduce Yourself thread over on MetaTalk and give a wave.
posted on Jan-24-22 at 10:50 AM

Long-time very-online creative inter alia video type person Hank Green discusses how fucked TikTok's revenue-sharing is and why that's fine for TikTok-the-cash-cow but a bad long-term investment in TikTok-the-creative-hub.
posted on Jan-20-22 at 12:00 PM

It's another Monday, by which I mean it's a Tuesday, and so it's time for another Free Thread! Come on in and talk about whatever, tell folks about an interesting animal and/or mineral you know something about, discuss your progress along the Kübler-Ross "five stages of social media Wordle score posting discourse" journey, etc.
posted on Jan-18-22 at 9:07 AM

Physics simulations of bounching balls, simulated forward and backward from a perfect moment in time. More where that came from. [via Kottke]
posted on Jan-12-22 at 11:38 AM

We had a free thread last week, and it was nice, and so by gum we're doing it again. Come on in and chat about whatever, share wee links, tell everybody something weird or interesting you just learned or that you've studied professionally for 20 years, whatever you feel like.
posted on Jan-10-22 at 11:03 AM

literal best person on TikTok Petey's new cover of Crash Into Me is good, actually.
posted on Jan-5-22 at 9:06 AM

Free thread! No link, no topic. This is an experiment for the new year, a place on the front page to chatter about the stuff that there's no post for or that doesn't really feel like it needs a dedicated post. Come on in and say howdy to other MetaFilter members, share a link, talk about web stuff, etc.
posted on Jan-3-22 at 9:19 AM

Fabien Sanglard looks into when Capcom stopped laying out CPS-1 arcade sprite sheets by hand with scissors.
posted on Dec-23-21 at 11:45 AM

Hey, why not read up on brass history with Greg, on Greg's Brass History Page.
posted on Nov-24-21 at 10:09 AM

I hope you like Frasier looking at video games, because all you'll find at this link is Frasier looking at video games.
posted on Sep-8-21 at 11:59 AM

Do you like fake movies and shows that only exist within the fiction of real movies and shows? Then you will enjoy Nestflix, a catalogue of metafictional entertainment from Lynn Fisher.
posted on Aug-11-21 at 9:06 AM

Hey, here's seven silent minutes of brief, clever stop-motion vignettes using wooden matches.
posted on Aug-10-21 at 8:45 AM

Oh, you're a big fan of semantic dissociation, huh? Then name ten unrelated nouns.
posted on Aug-6-21 at 4:11 PM

Can I interest you in a wordless 14-minute timelapse video of making a fancy surfboard?
posted on Jul-26-21 at 10:41 AM

Paul F. Tompkins says: This is the place to let me know if any other food-shaped vehicles that you know of
posted on Jul-11-21 at 1:55 PM

Everybody knows that improving the 2016 Super Mario Bros. non-tool-assisted speedrun record was physically impossible. What this documentary breakdown of SMB speedrun progress since then presupposes is: maybe it wasn't?
posted on Jul-10-21 at 11:27 AM

Musical force of nature Tom Cardy has a helpful suggestion for finding that thing you can't find. [Note: a bit sweary.]
posted on Jul-4-21 at 11:13 AM

Here's a thing that exists: geared unicycles.
posted on Jun-4-21 at 10:20 AM

RugsInGames is a twitter account that documents the appearance of at least one rug in a given video game.
posted on May-28-21 at 8:47 AM

A shape's Heesch number is, roughly, the number of times it can be surrounded by copies of itself. 0 is boring: it just can't. Infinity is boring: it tiles the plane. Positive but finite? Now that's the good stuff. Craig S. Kaplan has been looking for specimens and has turned up a bunch of new examples recently.
posted on May-26-21 at 7:55 AM

A single-mission twitter account about video game design and representation, Can You Have Black Hair documents the answer to that question for a wide variety of games, plus related game asset and digital art tidbits.
posted on May-10-21 at 7:45 AM

I don't know if there's really any rules and I'm pretty sure there's not really a point, but apparently every year at Rockford Speedway they have a figure 8 trailer race. That was 2018; here's 2019, and (complete with shouted COVID seating instructions) 2020. Heck, I'll even throw in 2017. Not into trailers? You drive a hard bargain. Here's some schoolbuses.
posted on May-8-21 at 9:28 PM

From Bartosz Ciechanowski, an extremely readable illustrated tutorial of the basics of an internal combustion engine, with interactive 3D illustrations of various parts and principles.
posted on May-1-21 at 12:46 PM

Low Poly Videogame Foods is a twitter account that aggregates images of low polygon-count food objects in videogames.
posted on Apr-13-21 at 2:38 PM

How to beat The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, a game in which you walk all over a sprawling world and through the dungeons and houses therein, but without ever actually walking anywhere. A whirlwind (see what I did there) 50 minute annotated tour through alternate forms of locomotion in the classic RPG adventure.
posted on Mar-22-21 at 2:33 PM

Here's a five minute German-language video about making, inter alia, little wooden horses with a lathe.
posted on Feb-26-21 at 3:04 PM

Mike Stinnett carves a walking stick with a lizard and rattlesnake elements. Including some absolutely St. Francis-ass shit with a western fence lizard at one point.
posted on Jan-29-21 at 9:56 AM

Nicolas Bras builds a sympathetic nail violin.
posted on Jan-27-21 at 8:07 AM

BobbyDuke makes a very small sword out of an old rusty nail.
posted on Jan-14-21 at 1:59 PM

1. Bad robotics maven Simone Giertz makes Teeth Wall, a midi-powered 12-note xylophone of chattering teeth.
2. Swedish artist Love Hultén runs with the concept with a 25-note sampler synthesizer also made of chattering teeth: the VOC-25.
posted on Jan-12-21 at 9:19 AM