It's that time of year again... the time I surface and look around with a sigh and a smile having spent 3 weeks immersed in the Best of 2023 lists from Headphone Commute. As resolutely restrained in its format and delivery (12 unranked lists, albums released in 2023 only, shared sporadically from the 1st January onwards) as it is particular in its choice of genre names, if you can get past the whimsical titles you'll find a treasure-trove of new pathways and inroads to stunning ambient / instrumental / experimental / electronic / modern-classical music.
posted to MetaFilter by protorp at 4:23 AM on January 21, 2024 (13 comments)

I enjoy things as much as I have ever done but recently I have lost the motivation to make the effort to plan and carry out things that used to make up a lot of my non-work leisure time.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by scribbler at 12:56 PM on January 14, 2024 (11 comments)

These entrancing maps capture where the world’s rivers go. When Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs looked online for a map of the world’s rivers based on their ocean destination, he found nothing on a global scale with high resolution. “It’s like, how does this thing not exist? So, I just instantly put it on my to-do list."
posted to MetaFilter by rory at 8:03 AM on January 14, 2024 (23 comments)

This is intended as a picnic table at the bottom of the garden where anyone who would like to, can come over and share something about a mefite who has died, either this past year or any other.
posted to MetaTalk by From Bklyn at 4:11 AM on January 17, 2024 (43 comments)

You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient. from Slow Change Can Be Radical Change by Rebecca Solnit
posted to MetaFilter by chavenet at 2:17 AM on January 13, 2024 (13 comments)

Brainy quiz show University Challenge gets pedantic over the difference between drum 'n' bass and jungle, and Nathan Filer calls for remixes of Amol Rajan's insistence that "We need jungle I'm afraid!!" The internet responds. My favourites: One Two Three Four. Amol explains his delight at going viral.
posted to MetaFilter by mokey at 8:25 AM on January 15, 2024 (44 comments)

"Start Often, Finish Rarely": "start as many things as you have the ability, interest, and capacity to, with no regard or goal whatsoever for finishing those projects..... You can be finished with your project whenever you decide to be done with it. And 'done' can mean anything you want it to be. Whose standards of completion or perfection are you holding yourself to anyway? Forget about those! Something is done when you say it is. When it's no longer interesting. When you've gotten a sufficient amount of entertainment and experience from it. When you've learned enough from it. Whatever, whenever. Done is what you say it is." A bit of inspiration, for the subset of us who'll find it helpful. Related: the No Maintenance Intended badge.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 5:28 AM on January 15, 2024 (37 comments)

Baseball And The Algorithm: The MLB YouTube channel has posted 291,289 videos. If you had to guess what happens in the video with the very most views, what would you say?
posted to MetaFilter by imabanana at 7:57 AM on January 14, 2024 (31 comments)

AskAManager: "men are hitting on my scheduling bot because it has a woman’s name"
posted to MetaFilter by ShooBoo at 12:14 AM on January 9, 2024 (61 comments)

Sleep Like the Dead for mattresses. Ken Rockwell's camera and lens reviews for, well, camera and lens reviews. What are the other obsessively-focused review sites dedicated to applying a highly thorough process and methodology to reviewing everything within a particular product category? These websites just really satisfy me to pore over and I want to find more.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by capricorn at 8:58 AM on January 11, 2024 (28 comments)

The MeFi interim board met Jan. 3.
posted to MetaTalk by NotLost at 9:34 AM on January 11, 2024 (14 comments)

I'm hitting that age where my life is stable and I'm grateful. But it's very much same-same, and every week is blending into the next without a lot of NEW experiences. What can I do to shake things up?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by hellochula at 12:03 PM on January 3, 2024 (12 comments)

I wanted to let you all know that we're replacing FeedBurner with RSS feeds hosted on our own domains before next week’s Site Update.
posted to MetaTalk by loup at 11:45 AM on January 10, 2024 (9 comments)

I am single, male, 32, dating women, and I do not want to date people with pets. At this point in my life I am dating monogamously for a long-term relationship, and I do not want to live with a pet. I am allergic to cats and do not enjoy the company of cats or dogs. But now for some reason everyone has a pet! And I don't know how to effectively meet people without pets.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by LSK at 6:40 PM on January 9, 2024 (21 comments)

How Google perfected the web
posted to MetaFilter by TheophileEscargot at 11:50 PM on January 8, 2024 (48 comments)

All the shows I've recently liked are in a similar vein, with supernatural or science-fictiony goings-on, a bit of humor, and as little actual horror as possible. List below the fold.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Sing Or Swim at 9:35 PM on December 31, 2023 (20 comments)

Happiness journalist Gretchen Rubin's 24 for 24 is a fun way to rethink the usual new year resolutions. She's doing a #Write24in24... what's the Metafilter 24 in 24? What's yours?
posted to MetaFilter by dorothyisunderwood at 6:42 AM on December 26, 2023 (10 comments)

I'm looking for recommendations for movies about the impending end of the world. Not action movies about people trying to save the planet or kill each other. In the vein of Last Night or Seeking a Friend for the End of the World or Melancholia. About how people spend their last days and deal with accepting their fate.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by starfishprime at 6:37 AM on December 25, 2023 (35 comments)

I’ve had a recent breakthrough in therapy, when my therapist asked me: “why is it that you always need to do the objectively right thing instead of the right thing for you?” And I didn’t have an answer. I need some help figuring out what “doing the right thing for me” looks like.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by gmb at 2:22 AM on December 16, 2023 (18 comments)

Looking for examples of gentle sci-fi set mainly or exclusively on space stations/spaceships, but where the focus is about human relationships rather than grand sci-fi plots.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by knapah at 2:15 AM on December 16, 2023 (24 comments)

Following on the recent Rolling Stone best albums of 2023 posting and with a few media outlets yet to weigh in, a few more best-of lists from the media jungle, compiled for your reference and enjoyment.
posted to MetaFilter by the sobsister at 10:32 AM on December 6, 2023 (30 comments)

My personal data is a complete mess. It's spread over multiple external hard drives and devices, a Windows PC, iCloud, various other cloud services, many manual backups over decades. There's a lot of confusing duplication and uncertainty about whether some things are backed up at all... The photos are particularly bad. How can I get started organising all this, removing duplicates, checking that cloud services are on my local machine too, and so on? I'm fairly techie (can use Linux tools if needed) but very disorganised.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by d288478 at 5:26 AM on July 1, 2023 (11 comments)

I've always been terrible at maintaining friendships and relationships with extended family. I have no trouble in person, or concrete things like birthday wishes, but I struggle with initiating calls/messages, and sometimes even responding in a timely way. It low-key stresses me out to begin an interpersonal interaction, so I avoid it (even though I like all these people). Looking for hacks to help me get better -- anything from apps to stickies to daily routines.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by redlines at 1:30 PM on November 9, 2023 (8 comments)

Young People Have No Idea What We Used to Do After Work. "The very idea that, once work hours were over, no one could get hold of you—via email, text, Slack, whatever—is completely alien to contemporary young people, who never let their cellphones leave their hands. Yes, it’s because they’re addicted, but it’s also because we’re all expected by bosses, co-workers, and friends to be online and available pretty much every time of day."
posted to MetaFilter by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 10:40 PM on July 13, 2023 (102 comments)

I am someone who is very externally motivated, that is, great at meeting commitments and deadlines imposed by others. For example, I would have to be pretty much dead to cancel an appointment with, say, a personal trainer or a therapist. If a paper or work project is due on x date, it will be delivered on that date. But if it’s just me, alone, doing a thing whether it’s education, work, exercise, cooking for myself, pretty much anything that’s even the most minimal effort, even when I really enjoy it? I find it much much harder to stick with it consistently. Are you someone who does things consistently by yourself? How?!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by t0astie at 2:15 AM on May 23, 2023 (21 comments)

MLB owners approve Athletics' planned move to Las Vegas
posted to MetaFilter by smcdow at 11:20 AM on November 16, 2023 (69 comments)

One thing I've been enjoying about the Thursday Murder Club books is that they make me laugh out loud on a regular basis. I've found the same thing to be true of Alexis Hall's romance novels. What are other books in ANY GENRE that are hilarious? I'd love a wide mixture of genres!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by azalea_chant at 6:18 PM on November 8, 2023 (55 comments)

Chef Jean-Pierre Bréhier shows us how to cut the most common vegetables.
posted to MetaFilter by swift at 5:13 AM on November 9, 2023 (58 comments)

The peninsula of Reykjanes, which is home to the town of Keflavik as well as the famous "Blue Lagoon" geothermal spa, has seen a number of recent earthquakes as well as a measurable movement of ground level centered on the mountain known as Þorbjörn. The lava ledge growing below the peninsula is estimated to be one metre thick and six million cubic metres large. Evacuation plans have already been circulated for the towns nearest Þorbjörn, however experts fear that fast moving magma could isolate the residents of the peninsula without power or clear escape routes.
posted to MetaFilter by The Pluto Gangsta at 8:09 PM on November 6, 2023 (37 comments)

If you write in a journal daily, or regularly, are there any specific questions or prompts you use to stimulate good, short entries? I'd especially like to end up with journal entries that are both somewhat newsy and also somewhat insightful.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by kristi at 10:52 AM on November 3, 2023 (9 comments)

Can you point me to any research (or good opinion pieces) about social apathy during global crises? My partner is doing a lot of political activism around a current big violent conflict, and is struggling to understand why most people are just "carrying on, pretending everything's okay, when children are being killed". Help them understand?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by pablocake at 1:35 AM on November 5, 2023 (42 comments)

Today Icelandic women and non-binary people will strike against gender inequality highlighting the gender pay gap [NYT, archive], gendered violence, and the status of immigrant women. This is the seventh women’s strike in Icelandic history, and the first whole-day action since the first one in 1975 [NYT, archive link]. The Guardian’s Miranda Bryant writes about the history of women’s strikes in Iceland.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:21 AM on October 24, 2023 (10 comments)

How to Fix The Internet "We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change. For the first time in years, it feels as though something truly new and different might be happening with the way we communicate online. The stranglehold that the big social platforms have had on us for the last decade is weakening. The question is: What do we want to come next?"
posted to MetaFilter by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:42 PM on October 18, 2023 (65 comments)

The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic
posted to MetaFilter by folklore724 at 10:24 PM on October 12, 2023 (50 comments)

Sleep With Me has put me to sleep for 10 years and 1200 episodes, entertaining me and helping me feel better about the brain bots that keep my mind busy at night. Northwoods Baseball announces games for a made-up league in northern Michigan. Everything Is Alive is back for another season, this time exclusively interviewing animals. And EIA's sister-show In The Scenes Behind Plain Sight rewatches a fictional show about a nudist colony, as an homage to rewatch podcasts (and it drives my husband up the walls).
posted to MetaFilter by rebent at 2:40 PM on October 4, 2023 (47 comments)

Cory Doctorow writes: "Right now, Google's on trial for its sins against antitrust law. To secure a win, the prosecutors at the DoJ Antitrust Division are going to have to prove what was going on in Google execs' minds when the took the actions that led to the company's dominance. They're going to have to show that the company deliberately undertook to harm its users and customers. Of course, it helps that Google put it all in writing."
posted to MetaFilter by AlSweigart at 9:01 AM on October 3, 2023 (63 comments)

In major news in the fight against malaria, the World Health Organization has approved the R21 vaccine - which can be produced cheaply at scale.
posted to MetaFilter by NoxAeternum at 10:17 AM on October 3, 2023 (17 comments)

Dan Olson's This is Financial Advice, a two and a half hour deep dive into the Gamestop meme stock phenomenon and the resulting cult that sprang up in its wake.

I tell you what, when you try and tell this story you either sum it up in ten minutes with the broadest strokes or you settle in for a rabbit hole made entirely out of onions and ogres. Conspiracy theorists flock together and constantly try and rope each other into the orbit of their personal hobby horse conspiracy, so once you break the surface suddenly you're digging through endless side stories, each with their own cast of characters, trying to figure out if some tertiary claim is true, was maybe true in the past but is no longer true, or was never true, and discover that the only sources on the matter are the same three people quoting each other in an endless circle of false legitimacy.

posted to MetaFilter by Pachylad at 6:59 AM on October 1, 2023 (61 comments)

Hi everyone -- I'm walking more for fitness lately and I'm hoping to find an app with a very specific functionality: I want to be able to request a loop of 1, 3, 5 or more miles from a specific point, and then through some sort of GPS wizardry the app (or website) would automatically generate a map for a route that meets approximately that specific distance. Does this exist?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by mochapickle at 11:42 AM on September 23, 2023 (8 comments)

Apparently back in 1975, Graham Chapman of Monty Python and Douglas Adams not quite yet of Hitchhiker's Guide wrote a television show. It's an incomprehensible mess that's entirely worth watching. Out Of The Trees [32m]
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 11:43 AM on September 26, 2023 (25 comments)

I am looking for songs with land-line telephone sounds - particularly dial tones or busy signals - used as musical elements.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by niicholas at 11:26 AM on September 25, 2023 (53 comments)

A guide to modern phone etiquette. (WaPo gift link.) Evidently Apple is bringing old school answering machine "screening" back, although if you're not supposed to use voice mail I don't get the point. Anyway here's a handy guide to the bewilderment that is modern phone use. For those who have a cell phone, anyway.
posted to MetaFilter by JanetLand at 7:18 AM on September 25, 2023 (153 comments)

Spin-off from today's phone etiquette FPP: Why do you use your cell phone like this? Were you taught that's a good way? Because you see others doing it? To be closer to the microphone? Cancer fear? Please explain.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Rash at 10:22 AM on September 25, 2023 (35 comments)

Yes, it's another listicle. That said, I like it for several reasons: it does not ignore pre-2000 shows; it indicates where the episodes can be streamed; and it does, for those series with which I'm familiar, make solid (though, as always, debatable) choices. (As a bonus, Andre Braugher appears twice!)
posted to MetaFilter by Kat Allison at 10:42 AM on September 19, 2023 (128 comments)

I recently finished Ruthanna Emrys' A Half-Built Garden and looking for near-future sci-fi book recs in a similar vein. Details inside!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by verity kindle at 7:29 PM on August 14, 2023 (16 comments)

I want to be a person who writes things down in their notebook, but I have never developed good habits and practices for being the type of person who writes things down in a notebook. Please share your wisdom with me, dear notebook people! How do you do it? like how and when do you make the time? do you draw little quadrants for every meeting? Start each day with some set of journaling intentions in your mind? Some deeply learned wisdom about how and why writing stuff down helps you? My to do lists overwhelm me to the point even writing them down is hard.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by bingbong at 4:30 PM on September 13, 2023 (22 comments)

How Scientists Working in Antarctica Inadvertently Developed a New Accent. A 2019 study of scientists over-wintering in Antarctica revealed subtle but measurable changes in the participants’ speech.
posted to MetaFilter by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:38 PM on September 15, 2023 (34 comments)

#metafilterfundraiser2023 I finally figured out my chatfilter question!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Jenny'sCricket at 2:45 PM on September 13, 2023 (49 comments)

I’m curious if any other folks who are or have been single or living alone have thoughts or advice on dealing with the loneliness of evenings. I find that the times when I feel the most lonely are after dinner, but before bed - say 7:00 -10:00 pm.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by mulkey at 5:39 PM on August 28, 2023 (32 comments)

I'm looking for your recommendations for board games that are either designed for just one player or have an optional set of solo rules. So what are your favorite solo board games?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by drezdn at 11:24 AM on August 13, 2023 (16 comments)