MetaTalk posts by languagehat

Yesterday when I visited MeFi for the first time, ...

languagehat — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 07:13:51 -0800

Yesterday when I visited MeFi for the first time, I got "no links and no comments posted since your last visit." I figured it was some momentary glitch. But the same thing happened today, so I'm wondering if anybody else has this problem. When I go to MetaTalk and AskMe, it has the correct number of new posts/comments. (Firefox 2.0.0.11 on Windows XP.)

Matt, you might want to rethink this deletion. Yo...

languagehat — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 09:57:58 -0800

Matt, you might want to rethink this deletion. You seem to have taken it as simply random gibberish ("doesn't really make any sense at all"), when it's actually a link to an online code/puzzle; you've allowed those many times before, and people seem to enjoy them. Alongside the jokey comments (like mine), people were working to figure out the code. Maybe reconsider?

What ever happened to majcher's Genefilter? It wa...

languagehat — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 17:36:04 -0800

What ever happened to majcher's Genefilter? It was the best thing to hit MeFi in 2003, and it was still being updated last November. I miss it terribly. If majcher can't or won't bring it back, can someone reproduce it?

Attention first-time posters: hpsell recently made...

languagehat — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 10:51:26 -0800

Attention first-time posters: hpsell recently made a hideous front-page post that violated just about every possible rule. Inevitably, he was greeted with a barrage of negative responses: [bad bad bad], "I'm not going to make fun of you because I strongly suspect that you're retarded," and the like. Did he whine, counterattack, or curl up into a ball and hide? No, he said "i didnt mean to ruffle any feathers... ill try to do better with the grammar." [more inside]

Is it possible to have a conversation around here?

languagehat — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 10:22:00 -0800

Is it possible to have a conversation around here?

In a recent MeFi thread, caution live frogs asks:w...

languagehat — Wed, 12 May 2004 13:52:51 -0800

In a recent MeFi thread, caution live frogs asks:

what's up with the ``fake quotation marks" style of quoting something in online papers? why fake it when there are perfectly legitimate ?curly quotes? available?

I have often wondered why those awful open quotes are so ubiquitous (and why only the open quotes?); anyone know?

Why are some spam messages predated, often by days...

languagehat — Sun, 25 Apr 2004 09:35:21 -0800

Why are some spam messages predated, often by days and occasionally by years (I just deleted two that were supposedly from the year 2000)? I'm sure there's some technical means to send them that way, but what do they get out of it? How likely am I to see a penis enlargement offer that's hidden on page 66 of my inbox?

Why do reporters ask "How do you feel"? ...

languagehat — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 12:56:58 -0800

Why do reporters ask "How do you feel"? I've wondered about this for years (sometimes yelling at the TV); I'm inspired to ask the question by a sentence in this NY Times story about the families of the contractors killed in Iraq Wednesday: "He would not discuss the details of his brother's death or how the attack — in which at least two of the four bodies were dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge in the city of Falluja, west of Baghdad — made him feel." Well, how do you think it made him feel? I understand why reporters have to ask probing questions of grieving families, but this particular one seems so pointless and so ubiquitous I wonder if any reporters in the group could explain it to me.

Having bought a house, I'm now faced with paying a...

languagehat — Fri, 02 Jan 2004 08:51:24 -0800

Having bought a house, I'm now faced with paying a mortgage. You save a few bucks (and the effort of remembering to mail a check each month) if you have the payments deducted automatically from your bank account; is there any reason I shouldn't do this (assuming I keep enough of a balance to cover it)?

Self-link. As far as I'm aware, this is still a n...

languagehat — Tue, 22 Jul 2003 07:44:58 -0800

Self-link. As far as I'm aware, this is still a no-no.

Have we found God yet? Not picking on this post p...

languagehat — Sun, 03 Nov 2002 12:03:46 -0800

Have we found God yet? Not picking on this post per se, but last week we had this (142 comments, so you'd think the issue had been pretty thoroughly hashed out), and before that a bunch more that I listed here, and I'm starting to wonder what the point is. NewsFilter posts get annoying, but at least the news changes; God's either there or He/She/It ain't, and I don't think we're going to find out by arguing about it on MeFi. If everybody else enjoys the never-ending discussion, fine, I'll just skip the threads, but I thought I'd ask.