Magic 8 Ball Santa Witness the jiggling fat man! This couldn't wait for a Friday humor post. I've asked questions like: Will that cute brunette ever return my call? Will the Cincinnati Bengals go undefeated next year? Oh those lonely times at work...Huzzah!
posted by lheiskell on Dec 5, 2002 - 18 comments

Remember Hanging Out And The World Out There? This invigorating article by Jay Walljasper in the current Utne Reader, lists 60 favourite gathering places in the U.S. I half-expected MetaFilter to figure prominently. But then, all of a sudden, it hit me. And I felt guilty about forgetting the real outdoor, face-to-face meaning of the lost art of hanging out . Well, I plan to make amends this weekend. I'll be hanging out at my favourite café in Lisbon - the beautiful eighteenth-century Nicola - where table-to-table political discussions, flirting, studying, hot buttered toast and almost illegally caffeinated espressos are de rigueur. So what's your favourite hang-out? If and when you can tear yourself away from your computer, that is...
posted by MiguelCardoso on Mar 5, 2002 - 62 comments

"I don't think it's a big problem," Willy told her. "It's a lot of little problems, and I think that's good, because little problems have little solutions." Leave it to a 6-year-old to describe my life far more eloquently than I ever could. I have an autistic son, and deal with the little things on a daily basis. I don't think I am all that unusual; what kind of little things are a part of your life that other people might consider a big problem?
posted by Lokheed on Feb 24, 2002 - 4 comments

What if London got hit, not us? Just wondering what would be different if London was the primary target.
posted by sadie01221975 on Dec 16, 2001 - 19 comments

Just some light reading... Buck Wolf is a producer at ABCNEWS.com who writes a twice-weekly column on items currently in the news. Nice, light reading, a few laughs, and some stuff you didn't know before (probably). Do any of you have favourite sites with interesting stuff for reading on slow news days?
posted by BGM on Jun 17, 2001 - 11 comments

What hasn't been noted much on the DEN and boo.com closings is the high-bandwidth aspirations both sites trumpeted. No doubt this is why much of Metafilter's readership is privately reveling in these failures. They subtly reinforce the Web's "minimum" ideals -- keeping multimedia to a minimum, minimizing file sizes and download times, letting the minimalist purity of HTML reign supreme. Should this really make us happy, though? I'm a big supporter of fast browsing and markup-language standards, but aren't we missing the point when we secretly root for the bleeding edge to fail?
posted by werty on May 19, 2000 - 16 comments

This is one for discussion. Last week, I read an article debating whether or not photography was a true art form like painting or drawing, or if instead it was merely a reflection of reality and not artistic. With that in mind, when we see photos like this one, this one, and this one, why do we assume that any part of what was captured was the truth? Is the camera an impartial observer, or is the photographer staging these images as a painter would? Do you think a photograph has enough reality to be considered the truth, or is a photograph a miniaturized view of reality, depending on what you point a camera at? I'm curious to hear people's thoughts, as I see groups on every side of the issue spinning these photos to support their cause.
posted by mathowie on Apr 22, 2000 - 26 comments