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It seems impossible to me to be talking about Clickhole for this long with no one bringing up Which One Of My Garbage Sons Are You?
posted to MetaFilter by mhum at 10:59 AM on April 26, 2024

Wait wait wait. Let’s not lose track of what’s really important here: ClickHole has somehow been around for ten Earth years?! But I still think of it as that kinda new thing??

Disgusting conspiracy to make me personally feel old.
posted to MetaFilter by Suedeltica at 10:34 AM on April 26, 2024

Coming up on the 25th anniversary of this gem. I say "big ol' bus" to myself a lot.
posted to MetaFilter by neuron at 9:11 AM on April 26, 2024

Yes ... ha ha ha ... yes!
posted to MetaFilter by RobotHero at 8:59 AM on April 26, 2024

For reasons related to current politics, this well-meaning opening cracked me the fuck up:
You’ve spoken in the past about being a little disconnected from your heritage, but you’re one of only two^ actors with Arab heritage in big Star Trek Roles [the other being Oded Fehr,] and I was wondering if the disconnect casts that in a different light.

^ (I’d overlooked the presence of the fantastic Shohreh Aghdashloo in Star Trek: Beyond).... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by cendawanita at 8:22 PM on April 25, 2024

A couple months back, Robinson was a guest at my home convention. I volunteer on the transportation team, so I had the chance to tell him how much I admire his performance of Garak.

He was profuse in his praise of the writers and his costars, and specifically said that he had a lot of fun flirting with Siddig on camera, and was always astonished at how much ended up in the final cut.

Really nice guy.
posted to MetaFilter by Vigilant at 8:18 PM on April 25, 2024

Garak memes are popular in the corner of the Mastodon world I live in, and they are usually quite queer coded.

"I believe that's where I come in" is a classic.
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 5:23 PM on April 25, 2024

As a Canadian Muslim kid I was so excited to see that DS9 had a Dr. Bashir played by someone named Siddig El-Fadil. It was nice to know that people like me existed in that future.
posted to MetaFilter by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:13 PM on April 25, 2024

Likewise a little surprised that Clickhole still exists. It was a perfect sendup of Upworthy, et al, when those were the dominant force in social media, but when those dropped away, I thought Clickhole ended. Seeing something like the Boo Berry piece linked above, it feels like ClickHole is doing great shifting their satire toward something like hot Substack takes, though they're still continuing with parodies of BuzzFeed quizzes and other lost internet forms.

Very... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by msbrauer at 8:16 AM on April 26, 2024

Some years ago, I used this similar photo to calculate how far away the picture was taken from.

A back of the envelope calculation from the picture: around 942,000 miles.

Earth in this photo measures 2128 pixels from top to bottom. Meanwhile, the moon measures 778 pixels. According to Wikipedia, the moon's radius is .2727 that of Earth's. So if the Moon and the Earth were at the same distance, then the moon should either measure 580 pixels... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fings at 8:10 AM on April 26, 2024

I knew nothing about her personal life until I saw the obituaries.

Graduated summa cum laude... in chemistry.
Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship... to study mathematics. But she changed her mind on the way to Belgium and switched to literature when she got there.
Took English courses at Boston University to qualify for the doctoral program at Harvard, where she received a warm welcome the chairman of the English department wrote “You know we don’t... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by pracowity at 6:06 AM on April 26, 2024

I appreciate Clickhole's commitment to taking complete brainfarts and just running with them, which is probably why one of the stories on the front page right now is "Finally: The Eiffel Tower Is Getting Skin".
posted to MetaFilter by phooky at 6:19 AM on April 26, 2024

I haven't paid much attention to Clickhole over the last several years, but in the mid 2010's, their quizzes were incredible and live rent free in my brain. My wife still sometimes refers to me as "a little jazz boy" because of those quizzes.
posted to MetaFilter by TheKaijuCommuter at 6:00 AM on April 26, 2024

She was a fantastic professor and really helped me understand and enjoy poetry.
posted to MetaFilter by snofoam at 1:58 AM on April 26, 2024

"The original intent of Backrub was to profit off of the work of Internet curators without paying them for their time creating high-quality sites."

That's really interesting. My browsing habits are definitely "lower depth" than they were 25 years ago. Then I'd be more likely to read a page, follow a link from it, follow a link from that, etc. But now I search for something, I click on it, I read it... depth = 1, and often that's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by clawsoon at 4:20 PM on April 25, 2024

> The original intent of the Backrub algorithm (later renamed PageRank for obvious reasons) was to use a few high-quality sites to bootstrap the rest of the index, because "good" sites wouldn't link to garbage.

My phrasing of this point differs, but not in disagreement or criticism, just as another way to view it through the lens of wnissen's really excellent phrasing above:

"The original intent of Backrub... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Callisto Prime at 2:23 PM on April 25, 2024

I'll stand up for ClickHole, not to say they land every joke or that I always think what they're going for is particularly funny, but I've admired their willingness to stick by their brand of vaguely anti-comedy weirdness even after being consumed by a soulless capitalistic money-printing machine. I think they excel at creating weird little surrealist scenarios like this one. Maybe they'll be able to afford bylines now.

I'm excited about the AV Club under its new... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by whir at 10:20 PM on April 25, 2024

oh separately congrats on an extremely good post title
posted to MetaFilter by DoctorFedora at 10:15 PM on April 25, 2024

I just kinda miss the pseudo-Olden Times when you got The Onion out of a vandalized newsbox next to the bus stop…

(which sometimes had a baggie of crack but god only knows if you can steal it, probably better just ignore it, wait maybe I could take it? no better not just let it be it’s not my thing anyway)

…and read it on the way to work because wtf was that guy doing with his scarf is nobody else seeing this???

…haha, Jim Anchower!
posted to MetaFilter by aramaic at 9:14 PM on April 25, 2024

You can't fool me. I know that T. Herman Zweibel is behind all of this.
posted to MetaFilter by mr_roboto at 9:01 PM on April 25, 2024

oh okay I recently was reminded of the existence of Clickhole, by a particularly sweaty joke attempt that had so little faith in itself that it went on to explain its punchline twice, so it makes sense that they are now owned by Cards Against Humanity now that they have gone from sharp parody of Content Slop to just actual Content Slop

the "donate a dollar to The Onion" thing feels perfectly in-character in the way it's handled, and also... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by DoctorFedora at 8:37 PM on April 25, 2024

The most surprising thing about seeing the solar eclipse in totality a few weeks ago was the presence of the moon, which is basically invisible all the way up until it completely covers the sun. Then you take off the glasses and suddenly the moon is right there! It's not a black void like in most pictures, it's actually a flat dull gray, much like it appears in these photos. I couldn't see any of the surface detail, it wasn't bright enough for that. But the effect is to make the moon a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by grog at 7:15 AM on April 25, 2024

Some mutants could be dangerous, obviously, when their powers first emerge. That's a reason for caution, not fear, IMO. It's a reason to reach out and prepare for what could happen when their power emerges.

There's a pretty famous Xmen short where they show one young mutant awakening to his power - to cause anyone near him to disintegrate. By the time he realizes his power is the cause, he's killed his entire family and a good portion of his... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by NoxAeternum at 7:20 PM on April 24, 2024

Well, yeah, but… your kid who runs out to be gay, trans, or straight has 0% chance of, say, giving you multiple cancers when their radiation powers emerge unexpectedly. That’s a world away from wanting to be respected for who they are. I mean, I get why the X-Men resonate, but it’s honestly a terrible metaphor. Besides, I prefer the Doom Patrol, where your powers make you a complete freak and an asocial mess, but you still get to be fantastic, at least sometimes. Maybe that’s because the 90s... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 7:04 PM on April 24, 2024

Sure, but the mutant metaphor reifies that idea.

Now, I actually love Magneto, because he’s the reverse side of Xavier, who says “we can live together.” Magneto says “but, if we can’t live together, we will wreck you, win or lose.” And I kind of hate it when Magneto is just a killer or a “human-hater,” when he’s the guy who says “I’m going to burn down the world if you won’t let me live in it.” He also tend to have a lot more freaks and losers on his team than the X-Men.
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 6:55 PM on April 24, 2024

But your mutant neighbor could annihilate you with an energy blast or eat your memories or whatever. The fear of gays and Jews is Rightist paranoia

okay but have you considered that no less an authority than pope francis, first of his name, successor of the prince of apostles, supreme pontiff of the universal church, and patriarch of the west, has decreed that trans people are as destructive and inimical to life as atomic weaponry and seek to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by i used to be someone else at 6:37 PM on April 24, 2024

But Magneto likes jazz.
posted to MetaFilter by star gentle uterus at 6:36 PM on April 24, 2024

But what if you're inside the metaphor?

You can take it as you want, it's still flawed. It's simply not just bigotry in that world to fear mutants. That doesn't mean Sentinels and death camps, but it's perfectly reasonably, even necessary, for the public to be concerned about them and governments to take action to deal with them so that it's not just "they hate us because we're different".
posted to MetaFilter by star gentle uterus at 6:28 PM on April 24, 2024

Also, Cassandra Nova, who commits genocide on 16 million mutants isn’t human but instead something beyond mutants, trying to make room for her own existence in the worst possible way. What the hell do you do with that?
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 6:10 PM on April 24, 2024

My point is that it’s a bad metaphor. It’s stupid and paranoid to be worried about gay people, for example, but mutants can avtualky kill you without even trying. Phoenix eats worlds, which is something g to be concerned about, and something a gay person won’t do. The superpowers wreck the metaphor.
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 6:08 PM on April 24, 2024

Part of the problem for using Marvel mutants an as stand in for oppressed people is that mutants are authentically dangerous. The fact that your neighbors are Jewish, or gay, or gay and Jewish should mean nothing to you: it’s not like they will inflict gayness or Jewishness on you, despite the Right’s fantasies. But your mutant neighbor could annihilate you with an energy blast or eat your memories or whatever. The fear of gays and Jews is Rightist paranoia; the fear of mutants is at least... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 5:46 PM on April 24, 2024

Search is important, and I was just kidding about webrings, but I think that there is an obvious parallel between page rank revolutionizing search in a keyword spamming universe and some hypothetical authority-based search that could revolutionize things in an AI spam universe. I am not the one to create it, but it definitely feels like we are back to where we were when Google first cleaned shit up. Maybe someone can do the same now?
posted to MetaFilter by snofoam at 5:40 PM on April 24, 2024

Most searches don't need Google scale. Many searches are cache hits. Your browser can (and most do) maintain a history, which is the beginning of a search index that will satisfy 80% of your searches, unless you are someone who always remembers where everything is.
Searches for novel information can largely be satisfied through one's social graph. If your browser history is available to you, then you can make an expurgated / annotated version of it available to your people... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by sardonyx at 5:33 PM on April 24, 2024

With that prominent dark impact crater, it seems like the Moon would look like a big eyeball overlooking the earth if only the verso side were rotated toward us, which would be kinda cool. I can't help wondering what sort of creation stories would result.

Even at night, it's really Sol that provides our little nightlight. I often look up at the blue sky during the day and think about the fact that the stars are still out there, shining against the blackness of space, but... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by effluvia at 5:56 PM on April 24, 2024

Does anyone know why there is a blue (left) and yellow (right) halo to the moon? Beautiful photos! Thank you for posting.

I strongly suspect that each of these images is a composite of several individual frames taken through different single-channel filters (e.g. red, green, and blue filters, though they could be different in this case). There is a delay in between frames while a filter wheel rotates to put a different filter in front of the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Songdog at 5:28 PM on April 24, 2024

“Oh, Moon, lovely Moon, with thy beautiful face
Careering throughout the boundaries of space
Whenever I see thee, I think in my mind
Shall I ever, oh ever, behold thy behind.”

Supposedly written by a Victorian housemaid and quoted by Patrick Moore. Suddenly remembered by me,
posted to MetaFilter by Fuchsoid at 5:27 PM on April 24, 2024

But where's the alien base?

All your base are belong to us.
posted to MetaFilter by thecincinnatikid at 4:32 PM on April 24, 2024

I've had the conversation more than once about how everyone thought Dan Stevens was making a huge mistake for leaving Downton Abbey and then, wow, his career has basically been the most interesting of all the "unknowns" from the show.

I like that he just picks chaos. It's a thoughtful chaos but I love how much he's just willing to go big or weird or big weird.

I agree on his performance in I'm Your... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by edencosmic at 6:10 PM on April 24, 2024

I recently learned that the famous quote "There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark." from the end of Dark Side of the Moon which sounds nonsensical, is incomplete.

The full quote, made by the doorman from Abbey Road Studios, was "There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun."
posted to MetaFilter by justkevin at 2:30 PM on April 24, 2024

Surprisingly, there ARE places on the moon where the sun don't shine.
posted to MetaFilter by AzraelBrown at 2:23 PM on April 24, 2024

From the Earth we only get to see the full frontal view.
posted to MetaFilter by Tell Me No Lies at 1:55 PM on April 24, 2024

We’ve been mooned!

Backside, indeed.
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 1:49 PM on April 24, 2024

90% of my searches are just "fudgesicle recipe" and I still feel like google is broken.

The internet is broken by this shit now I guess, I can't even tell you how often I'm reading a recipe now and I realize no one has ever cooked this, this is probably just generated, ugh.

I miss the young internet. I wish we hadn't let corporations take it from us.

But we did. Lets all meet up at the library.
posted to MetaFilter by euphoria066 at 1:48 PM on April 24, 2024

Thorzdad: The internet’s post-mortem will note cause-of-death as SEO.

bombastic lowercase pronouncements: yes but the search engine concept is itself Internet-killingly bad even without the optimization part

I get that it's a bombastic lowercase pronouncement, but can you include more detail, especially about centralisation of the index used to search vs distributed networks with varied interests,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by k3ninho at 12:40 PM on April 24, 2024

I certainly remember the point in late 2020 when I realized it was no longer possible to simply search for reviews. You could get review-shaped pages but none performed the crucial task of describing the options in a way that would allow me to choose the ones I preferred. Y'know, reviewing.

Before that I remember hearing various rumors and then confirmed stories that Google was paying billions of dollars per year for default search engine deals, which honestly puzzled... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by wnissen at 10:32 AM on April 24, 2024

Wow, I watched all of Legion so it's weird that I never notice the actor in other projects.

Actually it's not weird, Aubrey Plaza sucked up all the air on that show. And then Jemaine Clement. And then Jean Smart. And then Jeremie Harris. And then Amber Midthunder -- you know, Legion was kind of a mess, but I'm suddenly realizing why I stuck with it.
posted to MetaFilter by grandiloquiet at 8:16 AM on April 24, 2024

Legion is still some of the best work he's ever done. In that show, Noah Hawley (the mind behind the TV version of Fargo) took an incidental Marvel character and made a truly bonkers, borderline psychedelic show about him.
posted to MetaFilter by DirtyOldTown at 8:13 AM on April 24, 2024

A bit late to the party but for anyone still reading and interested, there IS a working modern web directory service: Risen from the ashes of DMOZ, Curlie.org! I mentioned it in this Ask thread (which btw took me several G searches to find despite knowing several strings on the page and the domain).

Curlie is fun and interesting. I've found a bunch of cool stuff through them, almost like the early days of the web. It's better at finding good sites than a specific snippet... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by SaltySalticid at 6:26 AM on April 24, 2024

Back in the late 90s I had an idea for a fiction story about software engineers looking for The Next Big Thing in tech: a search engine that instead of giving you the results for the thing you wanted, gave you the results for the thing you didn't even know you wanted yet.

In a way, all this messing around with tracking personal data and AI is trying to do that, but only in the service of showing you ads you might possibly click on.
posted to MetaFilter by rikschell at 5:33 AM on April 24, 2024

My experiment with using Wikipedia as my search engine default is continuing. Its a little frustrating when I don't need something from Wikipedia and I need to remember to throw the request at a 'real' search engine, but it also throws up content & articles which are often tangentially relevant to my query so its still a net positive.
posted to MetaFilter by phigmov at 12:26 AM on April 24, 2024