What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.
(The photo is by
drumcorpse, taken at the April 2008 Northampton meetup.)
I like
languages, and I wear
hats.
Some good resources:
free online scholarly books!
Country Studies
the entire Gutenberg Bible
The Making of America (19th-century documents, scanned and searchable):
Cornell collection,
U. Mich. collection
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle: 1841-1902
The Encyclopedia of Chicago
The Ancient World Web
Oddens' Maps
historical maps
city maps
A Visit to Old Los Angeles
medieval names (scroll down past heraldry)
Encyclopedia of the Orient
Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization
histories of Things That Never Were
1911 Britannica (best encyclopedia ever)
Great Books (fully searchable concordances)
complete Talmud online
Tree of Life
Listening to Nature
sf and fantasy online
HTML character chart
Verge (for your avant-garde music needs -- prices in Can$)
Riffola's MeFi stuff
Mike's Little Greene Schoolhouse (the accumulating rants of a friend of mine who used to play piano for Sonny Boy Williamson's band)
Some favorite threads:
y2karl's Blind Willie Johnson post
OmieWise's great translated-literature post
Rembetika
Old-time music online
Norwegian cities
Calendars
Early Cities of the Americas
Yazidis
Greek temple architecture and religion
Jazz ain't dead yet!
Art & Life in Africa
RobbieFal's
political threads
The Russian Avant-Garde Book
the Nobel for literature
Civil War reenactment (and Dirty Billy's hats)
the infamous MeFi cliches thread
Flann O'Brien
Kiarostami/Iranian film
Heinlein/Panshin
classical tune search
the Amazon camera thread
the Kottke thread
jonson's classic performance-art MeTa thread (shortest comment: "poop"; longest goes on for pages)
Poetry
What is poetry?
Poets reading
Bunting
Heaney
Poetry International
y2karl's magnificent Yeats thread
Language
Hittite and Indo-European
GeoNative
Heavens to Murgatroyd
the "He said nu-kyu-lar!!" pronunciation thread
crazed sentence-rewrite thread
quotation sites
mathowie on internet anonymity
A quote I can never find when I want it, so I'm putting it here so I'll know where it is:
"My friends in 1830 would have done almost anything to get me out of a serious danger, but if I had gone out in a new set of clothes, they would have given twenty francs for someone to throw a glass of dirty water over me. Apart from Barral and Bigillion, I've only ever had, throughout my life, that sort of friend."
–Stendhal
"The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind"
—Wallace Stevens, "Connoisseur of Chaos"
I've gotten tired of "The Metafilter Zoo" (which represented my take of it over two years ago anyway); my current take on the place is better represented in
this comment. Actually, I've gotten a bit fed up both with the increased asshattery and the concurrent overreaction to said asshattery, but that's not why I'm going to be around here less for a while; as of today (1/10/05) I'm moving, and once we get to the new house I'm going to have to start buckling down and trying to earn a living without the comfort of a paycheck (and the pleasure of surfing on the boss's nickel). Time spent on MeFi will be time not spent paying the mortgage. So I'll be scarce, but (like rodii) I'll be dropping by from time to time.
2/27/05: OK, this time I'm serious. I've been hanging out here and avoiding the whole work-from-home thing, and it's
got to stop. So I'll drop by once in a while to see if the place is on fire, but I'm going to spend most of my time online more productively. Y'all behave, now.
10/28/05: OK, I got sucked back in again. And a good thing too, because now I've won the hard-earned title of
cranky old jackass. Thanks, klangklangston!
You like me, you really like me!
Seriously, that was a real pick-me-up; many thanks to y2karl and everyone who said nice things. I'll try to justify them.
