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Mother of the Sea

Every year in Uto, a remote town at the Southern tip of Japan, a festival is held to celebrate a woman known locally as the Mother of the Sea. Dr Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker died without knowing her research would save the Japanese seaweed industry and lead to a world multi-billion dollar obsession with sushi. The story of nori in Japan.
posted to MetaFilter by infini at 5:16 AM on December 12, 2014 (20 comments)

It's A Licensed Character Christmas

For use spreading misery and pain during this holiday season, have a heaping shovelful of bad bad 80s Chrismas cartoon specials. Hail Grinch!
He-Man & She-Ra's Christmas Special (YouTube 44m)
Christmas Comes To Pac-Land (Dailymotion 23m)
The Wacky 12 Days of Christmas (YouTube 24m) (with Phil Hartman)
And the one that inspired this post, the amazing Deck the Halls with Wacky Walls (YouTube 23m) That is to say, the Wacky Wallwalker Christmas Special. Written by Mark Evanier!
After the break... TWENTY-ONE MORE OF THESE THINGS. You're welcome!
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 4:39 AM on December 13, 2014 (60 comments)

Endless Jingling

Endless Jingling: an elf singing randomly generated holiday music, forever and ever. Reload for a new combination of carols. Spiff up and/or ruin holiday parties as needed.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by cortex at 7:20 AM on December 15, 2014 (6 comments)

Radio Raheem Is a Broken Record

Do the Right Thing wasn’t ahead of its time. It was behind its time, and it’s ahead of ours. It came out in the summer of 1989, six months before Driving Miss Daisy, but if you can imagine it without hip-hop, it could have come out in 1939 alongside Gone with the Wind; without color, in 1929 with The Jazz Singer; without sound, 1915 and The Birth of a Nation. If you updated the soundtrack and the fashion a bit and released it next week, critics would praise its timeliness and how its depiction of police brutality and racial tension captures the angry zeitgeist surrounding the recent killings of unarmed black civilians by police officers. Some might even predict that it would ultimately end up feeling dated, as some did 25 years ago. If only. - Lessons from Do the Right Thing on Its 25th Anniversary
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 2:53 PM on December 13, 2014 (33 comments)

"I made it so she wanted to sleep with me, which was totally a lie..."

She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge
She studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College, that's where I caught her eye.
She told me that her Dad was loaded
I said in that case I'll have a rum and coke-cola.
She said fine, and in thirty seconds time she said,
I want to live like common people I want to do whatever common people do,
I want to sleep with common people I want to sleep with common people like you.
Well what else could I do – I said I'll see what I can do.
posted to MetaFilter by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:50 AM on December 13, 2014 (52 comments)

"East bound and down, loaded up and truckin'..."

Have you ever wanted to quit your job and head out on the open road? Perhaps long distance trucking might suit you? Yes? No? No worries. We can go on a trip right here and see what the life of a long distance trucker is really like. Being an over-the-road driver has the reputation of being tough and hazardous. Why do they do it? Schneider National 11 Western Regional. Cincinnati, OH to Toledo, OH. Jeffersonville, IN to East Chicago, IN. What truck driving is all about. A Truckers View. An Office With a View. The long haul - OTR truck driving. This trip will be North American-centric, because it's what I'm familiar with. So with that proviso in mind, let's ride. We've got a long way to go and a short time to get there.
posted to MetaFilter by cwest at 5:00 AM on December 13, 2014 (43 comments)

Bitcoin Bowl Brings Virtual Currency to St. Pete

The first Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl will be played on December 26 at Tropicana Field between N.C. State and UCF. The bitcoin processor BitPay bought the naming rights, paying for the deal in the virtual currency, and the event has grown beyond the game. A nearby town in a "Bitcoin Beach" initiative convinced 65 percent of its businesses to accept the currency, touting no transacation fees or chargebacks as incentive. Five bitcoin ATMs will be installed at the game and concessions will take it as payment. A sign that this isn't all bitvana, from the Tampa Tribune: "A downside to the coin is that its value fluctuates. But BitPay has offered area merchants the opportunity to accept it from customers and then receive the exact dollar amount of the transaction back into their bank accounts."
posted to MetaFilter by rcade at 6:57 AM on December 12, 2014 (60 comments)

ADVENTURE: I absolutely loathe adventurers

Werner Herzog Inspirational Posters [SLTumblr] (brief but perfect)
posted to MetaFilter by Going To Maine at 9:45 AM on December 11, 2014 (27 comments)

"A sort of fleshly pogo stick..." Lowly was Scarry's favorite creation

Fans of the late Richard Scarry may be happy to know that a new book featuring Scarry's favorite character Lowly Worm is due on the shelves this autumn. From the Guardian article: "The book will feature one of Scarry's best-loved and most ubiquitous [and mysterious] characters, the alpine-hatted, singly-shod Lowly Worm, who drives an applecar and was probably the first worm in space."
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 10:14 AM on September 14, 2013 (45 comments)

Shape Shape Shape Shape—porcelain and cotton rope wearables

My partner and I have recently launched a project of porcelain and hand-dyed rope necklaces that we are calling Shape Shape Shape Shape.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by Sreiny at 2:39 PM on December 9, 2014 (1 comment)

scribble scribble *CLICK* scribble scribble *CLICK* scribble *CLICK*

Do you need to get the lead out? Are you having trouble getting to the point? Maybe this post all about the joys of mechanical pencils will help!
  • Dave's Mechanical Pencils is probably the gold lead standard, with reviews and links about everything related to mechanical pencils, leads, erasers, and pencil-related ephemera.
  • Vittorio Villani's Drafting and Mechanical Pencils takes more of an individual collector's approach, with many beauty shots along with the reviews.
  • All jammed up: The Old Geezer offers advice on how to clear a lead jam.
  • Leadhead's Pencil Blog focusses on antique and vintage mechanical pencils. They are works of art themselves, and blogger Jon Veley has even set up an online museum.
  • Leadholder Drafting Pencil Museum hasn't been updated in a while but is an exhaustive collection of lead-related material, including a section on the mechanics of different types of mechanical pencils.
  • If you've only seen one mechanical pencil, it was probably a Scripto.
  • The Pencil Pages is a treasure trove of pencil information and links.
  • Finally, Pencil Revolution (previously) does not limit itself to mechanical pencils but the entire pencil lifestyle. After all, a great pencil needs great paper. (Warning: the links will take you down a time-sucking, pencil, paper, and office-supply rabbit hole.)

posted to MetaFilter by Room 641-A at 4:50 PM on December 1, 2014 (37 comments)

The true history of the Paisley design

How Ambi became Paisley: "It began as a teardrop in Babylon. Where the sunlight came from Astarte, shameless goddess of the fecund feminine. The boteh. Stylized rendition of the date palm shoot, tree of life, fertility symbol. It danced through Celtic art, until the heavy feet of Roman legionaries tramped over the Alps. Then it fled the wrath of Mars and Jupiter, dove underground as Empire rose ." From Shailja Patel's Migritude. Here's a short film about the Migritude project (book on Amazon).
posted to MetaFilter by dhruva at 1:02 PM on December 6, 2014 (6 comments)

How to automate infinite scrolling? While I work in other tabs?

I frequently find myself needing information that is somewhere down a long infinite-scroll page. Like searching for old tweets on Twitter, or old posts on Facebook. For the sake of this question, assume that I cannot just search for the content I want. I have to discover it by scrolling until I expose a certain date range. Is there a browser plugin or some other method that will let me set a given number of page-downs or seconds of scrolling and then get back to work elsewhere on my computer? Can I say "keep scrolling down in this window for 3 minutes" or "execute Page Down in this window 100 times" all while I'm working in another tab, or in Mail, or getting coffee?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by reeddavid at 9:58 PM on April 11, 2013 (10 comments)

Flagged as Fantastic, a MetaFilter-related Twitter account pointing out excellence

An independently-run MetaFilter-related project that tweets to all followers anything I've flagged as "fantastic".
posted to MetaFilter Projects by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:00 AM on November 28, 2014 (1 comment)

Movie: Joe Versus the Volcano

When a hypochondriac learns that he is dying, he accepts an offer to throw himself in a volcano at a tropical island, and along the way there, learns to truly live.
posted to FanFare by troika at 4:10 PM on November 27, 2014 (24 comments)

Looking for resources on teaching consent

I'm looking for resources, not just articles, about teaching "consent" and body awareness and boundaries for kids at all ages and stages.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by amanda at 9:16 AM on November 26, 2014 (7 comments)

Original in the streets/in the sheets shirt?

So there are a bajillion shirts with variations of "X in the streets/Y in the sheets" where X and Y might rhyme and are related and it's funny. What was the original one? Where did this start?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by GuyZero at 2:24 PM on November 25, 2014 (9 comments)

NES My Life

My latest t-shirt project: mundane everyday challenges (such as finding a job, dealing with ultra conservative relatives, or deleting unwanted dick pics on a dating site) envisioned as classic black box retro 8bit Nintendo games. Hope they give you a chuckle!
posted to MetaFilter Projects by Jezztek at 10:28 PM on November 22, 2014 (7 comments)

Otto Jukebox - A multi-user streaming anti-cloud music player

Otto is an open source music jukebox app that disguises itself as an iTunes replacement without all the extra baggage, but is actually a web-first, fully streaming, anti-cloud, social music server that allows multiple people to listen to the same stream of music at the same time and DJ for each other. Kinda like a private turntable.fm. For Mac OSX and Linux. A limited demo loaded with some CC licensed music can be found here.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by irontech at 12:00 PM on November 21, 2014 (1 comment)

Biographies of interesting lives

I'm looking to read about the interesting, fascinating, and crazy lives people have lived. Any recommendations for biographies of people that have led fascinating lives?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by markbao at 11:56 AM on November 20, 2014 (34 comments)

The Phone Number 321-Liftoff Is Not For Sale

​​How I Got My Own Area Code: It took the combination of phone phreak and "space cadet" to find a relationship between the number 321 and the countdowns of Cape Canaveral.
posted to MetaFilter by danabanana at 8:34 AM on November 19, 2014 (18 comments)

If You're Tired of Breakfast Tacos, You're Tired of Life.

I love breakfast tacos! I eat them a lot. If I eat the exact same combination of ingredients every time it gets boring; thankfully there are endless combinations. Help me think of every ingredient that would be tasty in a breakfast taco.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Juliet Banana at 1:17 PM on November 14, 2014 (34 comments)

The People Podcast

Short interviews (6-9 minutes) with interesting people you probably don't know about.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by dziga at 11:15 AM on November 14, 2014 (1 comment)

not to be too Lindsay Lohan

In London in 2012, aspiring French fashion designer Anais Bordier was shown a YouTube video starring Samantha Futerman, an American actress who looked spookily like her. Some investigation revealed that the two were both Korean adoptees born in the same port town on the same day. Anais reached out to Samantha on Facebook - and everything changed.
posted to MetaFilter by divabat at 5:53 PM on November 13, 2014 (45 comments)

MetaFilter tools: new and updated

Seven current Greasemonkey scripts and Chrome extensions written by me, six(ish) following the request of MetaFilter users. These scripts and extensions have been successfully tested with MetaFilter after its recent redesign, including support for both the modern and classic themes.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by mdevore at 9:43 PM on November 4, 2014 (11 comments)

The Living New Deal

In less than a decade, The New Deal changed the face of America and laid the foundation for success in World War II and the prosperity of the postwar era – the greatest and fairest epoch in American history. The Living New Deal project inventories, maps and publicizes the achievements of the New Deal and its public works in all 50 states and outlying territories.
posted to MetaFilter by latkes at 1:09 PM on November 11, 2014 (24 comments)

Keeping love alive and well

What are some of the things you do, and your partner does for you, on a daily basis and perhaps as an occasional surprise that makes you feel loved and helps keep the romantic love in your relationship alive? Anything worthwhile takes some serious effort to maintain and nourish in the long term. I am very much interested in learning about the efforts healthy adults in healthy relationships have made that took their relationship to a higher level of love, maturity and intimacy.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by xm at 4:24 PM on November 8, 2014 (35 comments)

Are there separate fart and poop muscles?

I have an important human Kinesiology question: are there different muscles for farting and pooping? Specifically, when one has a fart feeling that might be a poop, it feels as though one has the control to selectively let out the potential fart but not the potential poop. Is this a dangerous delusion? Is it really just a "let it all out" switch?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by 256 at 9:24 PM on November 6, 2014 (18 comments)

20 years later

The poster of the 42nd Angoulême International Comics Festival has been unveiled and it's a brand new comic strip by Bill Watterson. Watterson won't be coming to France for the festival, but he did a very short interview for 20 Minutes (in French). Previouslies: STRIPPED (February 2014) and Pearls Before Swine (June 2014). According to this pattern, the next confirmed sighting of Bill Watterson('s art) should occur in February or March 2015.
posted to MetaFilter by elgilito at 6:44 AM on November 5, 2014 (16 comments)

Mom-Friendly Podcasts

I've gotten my 64 year old mother hooked on Serial, and now she's requesting more podcasts. The ones I listen to are silly comedy things that I don't think are quite her cup of tea.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by something something at 1:25 PM on October 30, 2014 (24 comments)

Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me candy to trade for cash

Halloween is not good for the teeth of trick-or-treaters. There's a plethora of candy, and kids will eat candy they wouldn't normally eat, because hey, it's there. What's a parent to do? Offer cash for candy, with the help of a local dentist. Halloween Candy Buyback, complete with zip-code dentist search, the website for the movement that has expanded from it's quiet start in 2005 with a single dentist in Wisconsin. Now, thousands of dentists across the U.S. buy back tons of candy at a dollar a pound, then send the candy with toothbrushes and toothpaste to Operation Gratitude to be added into care packages for active U.S. Military. If you're having trouble getting a younger child to part with their candy, there's the Switch Witch, who will take a pile of candy and switch it for a special switch gift. And if you want to start at the source, you can always make your own candy with one of the various sugar substitutes, or go with a teal pumpkin and avoid the candy all-together.
posted to MetaFilter by filthy light thief at 1:05 PM on October 31, 2014 (144 comments)

If? When? Why? What? How much have you got?

For their annual contribution to the AV Undercover series, GWAR has their way with Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls". New singers Blothar and Vulvatron (the ass-kicking, blood-spewing-from-her-bosom new female face of GWAR!) then transition the song into a weirdly moving, personalized take on Jim Carroll's "People Who Died" in tribute to fallen comrade, Oderus Ungerus, aka founding member Dave Brockie.
posted to MetaFilter by DirtyOldTown at 10:25 AM on October 28, 2014 (34 comments)

Surprisingly, Atillas are fairly liberal; Adolfs less so

How Liberal or Conservative is your name? A rare "what x are you?" online tool which is apparently based on real data. There is no need to search for the most liberal of all (past and present) MeFi moderator names, I've already done that for you.
posted to MetaFilter by Curious Artificer at 9:38 AM on October 17, 2014 (79 comments)

Stopping in a manual transmission

6-speed manual transmission, standard clutch--not "paddle" or "semi-automatic" or "clutchless." Two ways to stop:
posted to Ask MetaFilter by BadgerDoctor at 4:52 PM on October 23, 2014 (76 comments)

What to read when pressed for time.

17 Brilliant Short Novels You Can Read in a Sitting by Lincoln Michel at Electric Literature:
This week author Ian McEwan expressed his love of short novels, saying “very few [long] novels earn their length.” Certainly it seems like a novel has to be a minimum of 500 pages to win a major literary award these days, and many genre novels have ballooned to absurd sizes.

I love a good tome, but like McEwan many of my favorite novels are sharpened little gems. It’s immensely satisfying to finish a book in a single day, so in the spirit of celebrating quick reads here are some of my favorite short novels. I’ve tried to avoid the most obvious titles that are regularly assigned in school (The Stranger, Heart of Darkness, Mrs Dalloway, Of Mice and Men, Frankenstein, The Crying of Lot 49, etc.). Hopefully you’ll find some titles here you haven’t read before.

posted to MetaFilter by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:39 PM on October 23, 2014 (50 comments)

Make my mornings less painful.

I'm not a morning person at all, I never have been, and I doubt I ever will be. Unfortunately, society refuses to acknowledge this, and even forces me to do things before midday. Because of this, I'd love to hear what you do that makes getting up into a somewhat pleasurable experience, rather than keep experiencing the Promethean torture I go through every morning.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Ned G at 7:22 AM on October 23, 2014 (60 comments)

When Baby gets that first haircut, Mother saves the hair.

"Hair work mourning jewelry served as a sentimental and tangible memorial to the deceased. In the late 1700s, hair work started to become professionalized, but tradesmen were soon deemed untrustworthy. Customers would send the hair of a loved one by mail, expecting it to be returned worked into a piece of jewelry. Instead, some tradesmen returned pre-made pieces containing anonymous hair... Some makers even replaced human hair with sturdier horsehair—leaving the jewelry with none of the sentimental attachment Victorian women coveted."
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 5:01 PM on October 22, 2014 (18 comments)

Cocktail arcade-type games for iOS designed for 2 player tabletop?

I am looking for games for iOS that are played 2-player at the same time, with the phone flat on a table, one person on each side playing against each other. I don't know what to call this so it's hard to search for more (I think of them like 80's arcade cocktail machines). So far the only ones I've found are OLO (a hybrid of shuffleboard and air hockey), TEN (same company, it's like mega tic-tac-toe) and some checkers/chess games. Are there others? What is this style of game design called?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by mathowie at 9:30 AM on October 15, 2014 (16 comments)

Grandpa's Old Spice and grandson's Ax Body Spray

I distinctly remember Drakkar Noir as being the cologne of choice in my high school years, and suspected that it was a kind of rite of passage to manhood. I don't think that many of my male classmates actually had to shave often enough to justify the purchase of other fragranced items, but they definitely sprayed Cool Water and Drakkar Noir when going to dances or on dates. Is this something that young guys still do and why did everyone in my age group (mid-30s) stop wearing cologne? Is there a U curve to men's fragrance usage over time? Are guys in their late teens and retirees over 70 years of age the most likely fragrance wearers or is that just a sampling error in my universe? What are the social norms for using cologne? How have those norms changed over the last 50 years?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by spamandkimchi at 8:48 PM on October 21, 2014 (31 comments)

Don't Let's Stop

Why is the world in love again?
Why are we marching hand in hand?
Why are the ocean levels rising up?
It's a brand new record
for nineteen-ninety,
They Might Be Giants' brand new album:
FLOOD (43m)
Or, if you'd rather meet James Ensor, there's John Henry (57m)! For something Fingertippy, there's Apollo 18 (43m)! More recent: Nanobots (45m) - Join Us (47m) - The Else (38m) (Official links from the band's YouTube channel! Oh, and they also have a podcast.)
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 2:33 PM on October 20, 2014 (48 comments)

JUST HOOK IT TO MY VEINS

Following a record-breaking $750 million syndication deal with parent company Fox, the FXX network most recently made headlines back in August with its twelve-day marathon of Every. Simpsons. Ever. But that was just the prelude to the real deal launching today: Simpsons World, a staggeringly comprehensive multiplatform video database including clips, news, featurettes, curated playlists, a heartbeat tracker of each season's popularity, and (for the intrigued who'd like to subscribe to their newsletter network) on-demand streaming of all 552 episodes and counting. Coming early next year is an even greater expansion of features, bringing full-series dialogue search, real-time script tracking, and "geolocation" of all scenes throughout Springfield -- something very close to Myles McNutt's vision for a shareable Simpsons clip database (previously). I, for one, welcome our new Simpsons-quoting overlords.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 2:29 PM on October 21, 2014 (78 comments)

Let Me Tell You About Homestuck

5 years.
7,000 pages.
13,000 panels.
700,000 words. [Approximately the length of the Bible.]
Over 3 hours of animation.
Over 23 hours of soundtrack.
15 separate games, in 3 unique styles.

PBS once called Homestuck the "Ulysses of the Internet". Its author, Andrew Hussie — who resembles Joyce in his impishness, stylistic maximalism, and fondness for disturbing smut — calls it "a story I've tried to make as much a pure expression of its medium as possible". It has become a cultural phenomenon, inspiring proms and dominating Amazon makeup reviews. But most importantly, it's a rollicking good read, equal parts slapstick and epic, bildungsroman and cultural commentary.

What on earth about it makes its fans so overly zealous? And how the hell does one start the daunting process of reading Homestuck? If you're even the remotest bit curious about this Internet phenomenon, the following is a teensy-weensy introduction to just what makes Homestuck so terrific.
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 1:14 AM on October 16, 2014 (227 comments)

First Drafts of History

This Tumblr consists of the earliest extant versions of various Wikipedia articles. It's easy to overlook what an ambitious project Wikipedia is in its design, and the way in which its articles have been built bit by bit into extraordinarily useful resources from often very modest and unpromising beginnings. It's interesting as well to see how the editorial voice and organizational structure common on current articles have evolved over time. If you have suggestions for interesting articles to examine, let me know.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by Horace Rumpole at 8:30 PM on October 16, 2014 (2 comments)

Istanbul not Constantinople

An extremely hasty rough draft of a They Might Be Giants cover.
posted to MeFi Music by cortex at 5:51 PM on October 15, 2014 (11 comments)

Gender transition and grad school applications

I'm a transgender woman in my last year of an undergraduate degree. I'm currently using male pronouns and my given name in most situations, but I'm planning to come out over Christmas break and use female pronouns and a new name in the spring semester, which will be my last before graduation. If I apply to computer science grad schools after I graduate, is my transition likely to cause complications which could hurt my application?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by unknot at 9:25 PM on October 10, 2014 (9 comments)

GIFYouTube, for those times when you want a YT GIF right now

If you don't want to bother with a program like GIFGrabber or GIFBrewery to make a YouTube video clip into a looping GIF animation, simply add "GIF" to a YouTube URL you get a tool to make a quick looping GIF! Or you can go to GIFYouTube.com to enter a YouTube URL, and view creations from other folks.
posted to MetaFilter by filthy light thief at 8:27 AM on October 8, 2014 (14 comments)
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