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It's got to be hard to feel like you're the king of comedy and then one day and wake up and realize that you're not as funny as dril.
posted to MetaFilter by phooky at 9:08 AM on April 30, 2024

hi everyone, i'm bombastic lowercase pronouncements and this is my woo.

so let's talk about the concept of boltzmann brains and the related concept of boltzmann universes. a note before we start properly: boltzmann brains are not my woo, and i'm kind of uninterested in arguing about the mathematical plausibility or whatever behind the boltzmann brain thought experiment — which is as i see it functionally equivalent to arguing about the plausibility of the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:26 AM on May 3, 2024

Like what does "Never again" mean?

To me, that was the most interesting and central point of the article. As someone raised Jewish, what I’d thoughtwas being instilled in me was Never Again (for anyone, ever), but the last several years have had me questioning if I just missed the point, and ascribed an utterly undeserved altruism to the faith I was raised in. It’s been hard for me to properly articulate it, this... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 3:51 PM on April 25, 2024

Let’s say you were a normal unarmed human civilian person. How would you stop one of these?

Throw rope or fabric at them. I have yet to see a robot that can handle the chaos of flexible rope or fabric without getting tangled up.

You do know where your towel is, don't you?
posted to MetaFilter by loquacious at 7:19 AM on May 2, 2024

I kind of liked the ideas in this article, but I thought it didn't go far enough to articulate the nuances and differences between a great show and a "mid" show. I would like to build on it and try to articulate what I wish it had.

I think the difference between mid TV and really good TV is vision, or ethos, or whatever the word is for "something unique that the show is trying to do/say/showcase, underneath its... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by MiraK at 6:59 AM on April 27, 2024

man, yeah, as much as I enjoyed the leaping-through-time parts, at times it did feel like a parody of clip shows or maybe even that one episode of Lower Decks where they just kind of leap around from one improbably extreme scenario to another without context

this show sure has had a lot of entire-universe-threatening dangers, huh
posted to FanFare by DoctorFedora at 6:48 PM on April 22, 2024

Reno's "Are you stuck in a time loop, Stamets?" was such a perfect and perfectly delivered line I wish they'd run with it instead of backing off and making like it was a joke.
posted to FanFare by Pryde at 9:37 PM on April 19, 2024

Last dialogue whinge, I promise, and then it'll be out of my system. I thought that this episode was a perfect example of how the writers snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and how the bad dialogue makes perfectly fine dialogue worse.

In one of the first two episodes of this season (can't remember which), Culber name-drops his abuela completely randomly in the middle of a throwaway remark about how he doesn't know anything about some people (Moll and L'ak).... [more]
posted to FanFare by confluency at 2:58 AM on April 15, 2024

and also WHY IS THERE NOT MORE GOTH FOR AND BY OLD PEOPLE. WHY DO ONLY YOUNG PEOPLE MOAN ABOUT DEATH. GOTH SHOULD BECOME MORE INTENSE AS YOU APPROACH THE GRAVE, NOT LESS. WHAT THE FUCK
posted to MetaFilter by phooky at 5:31 AM on April 26, 2024

Good thing we spent all that money upgrading our ventilation systems in response to COVID, right? /padme
posted to MetaFilter by Horace Rumpole at 2:22 PM on April 22, 2024

I remember the first time I got some kind of temporary weird condition in my early 30s that took a while to fix - some stomach ache issue or whatever. Took a few months to resolve with beta blockers. And I was all surprise pikachu face to be restricted in what I could eat and having to take certain pills and complaining why was it taaaaking so looooong to go away at the doctors office one day and my GP looked me dead in the eye and was like “those of you who have grown up in good health take it... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by St. Peepsburg at 12:05 PM on April 24, 2024

Here are pictures of our last 5k costumes, and our 5k in Juneau.
posted to MetaFilter by gmatom at 8:20 AM on April 24, 2024

gmatom, what a beautiful elegy for your wife. Count me as another internet stranger who is sorry for your loss.
posted to MetaFilter by turbowombat at 7:39 AM on April 24, 2024

Yes, favoriting seems an inadequate response for that comment.
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 7:32 AM on April 24, 2024

gmatom - I just want to thank you for sharing that with us. With me. I don't have the presence of mind to unspool all the ways in which it's connecting to me but please just know that it's beautiful and this internet stranger is sitting in a coffee shop feeling very emotionally full. Thank you so much for this gift.
posted to MetaFilter by Tomorrowful at 6:51 AM on April 24, 2024

(Apologies, this got long)
Oh this hits so close to home. Not for me, but for my wife. We both came to running later in life (I was 35, she was ten years older than me and started a few years later when she was almost 50). When we were first married, running meant running to the store to buy a pack of cinnamon rolls to split.

But after we started running, we both fell in love with being active, for different reasons. For me, it was the first time... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gmatom at 6:22 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

Watching Dan Stevens and Aubrey Plaza bounce off each other in season one of Legion was a real pleasure. It had a lot of other things going for it, but the interactions of those two actors was absolutely what pushed it over the top, in every sense.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:02 AM on April 24, 2024

Jebus effing fuck that’s beautiful

I’ll never get tired of looking at pictures taken of space or from space
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 1:38 PM on April 24, 2024

tl;dr

"Any Salad Can Be A Caesar Salad (if you stab it enough)"
posted to MetaFilter by lalochezia at 8:26 AM on April 23, 2024

I'm on team if you're going to put an classic item on a restaurant menu without further description, it better be what a person would expect.

There's no problem with changing recipes / techniques just be upfront about it and nobody will be upset.

From the article....

Last week, I called up Stewart Gary, the culinary director of Nitehawk Cinema, the Brooklyn dine-in movie theater where I ordered that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by WaterAndPixels at 7:21 AM on April 23, 2024

Periodic, though off-topic, reminder that The Atlantic is edited by David Frum, who is implicated in war crimes committed by the regime of George W Bush.
posted to MetaFilter by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:16 AM on April 23, 2024

in many cases it's far too late for most of us to avoid being "known" & "perceived" in this way

I will never cease to be grateful for being alive in the paranoid 1990s, and being assiduous about scrubbing information accordingly. Instead, I get advertising targeted for what it thinks based on my generic age and gender. Which is fucking horrifying.

I also want to write a paper... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by corb at 5:27 AM on April 23, 2024

If this is a difference of cultural expectations and customs around new-baby visits, can you just explicitly frame it that way for your mom? It's weird to treat it as though your wife's preferences were the natural or default kind while your mom's model is culture-bound. Could you say to your mom some subset of the following:

--I know you're eager to help, but in the white culture my wife is from, breastfeeding is very high-status and they're afraid that if anybody... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Bardolph at 12:19 PM on April 22, 2024 marked best answer

- My wife asked me to remind my mom this and she was visibly shaking/angry from the first experience (my mom would ask for baby, thinking that holding baby and feeding him-- her thought). She somewhat blames my parents coming for her shortened breast feeding experience (they came to help after about a month of bodhi)

This is an incredibly high cost to pay for a few days of childcare and help around the house. I would first talk to your wife about... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by bluedaisy at 12:05 PM on April 22, 2024

I used to go to my local Dunkin Donuts often enough that eventually the nice lady working there told me what I wanted as soon as she saw me, before I even had a chance to place my order, and I was embarrassed because I lived in a big city and this was a busy DD and I never would’ve thought anyone working there would recognize me from day to day and know what I was going to order. So when she did that, I actually started going there less because I suddenly felt very self-conscious… which is weird,... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by wondermouse at 7:05 PM on April 28, 2022 marked best answer

If it's just remembering people's names you're struggling with, i'd just pretend you're simply required to ask their names every single time, full stop. "I'm sorry sir, but it's policy to ask everyone their name every single time in order to ensure we don't make any mistakes." No one has to know it's *your* policy. People can really suck. Kill 'em with politeness, and feel free to blame some undefined policy-making entity as needed. It often helps if there's a common enemy people can... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by cgg at 3:20 PM on April 28, 2022 marked best answer

weight is the outcome of lifestyle choices

I am so, so sick of this thought-terminating cliche.

It's horseshit. People who don't run to fat have bodies with appetite regulation subsystems that work properly. People who do run to fat don't. There's no "choice" involved in the operation of those systems, just biology.

Yes, it's possible to stack on weight by choosing to,... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by flabdablet at 6:42 AM on April 22, 2024

Fuckin' SCIENCE, yo. Amazing!

The science is pretty amazing, but this story has not been primarily about the science but about the engineering.

Voyager's compute machinery looks comically primitive compared to anything in commercial use today, but the flip side of that is that unlike any modern system, Voyager's computers are simple enough for a single human mind to comprehend in their entirety. Packing... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by flabdablet at 6:36 PM on April 22, 2024

Or "just this once, everybody lives!"
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 4:19 PM on April 22, 2024

Developers sometimes talk or brag or pride themselves about working "close to the metal" but there is no software engineering team in the world who are simultaneously as close to and as far away from the metal as the people keeping Voyager operational.

Hotpatching code in specific regions of a near-50-year old memory core to work around a failure in a device 25 billion kilometers away? Incomprehensible.
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 2:20 PM on April 22, 2024

This is as badass as computer engineering gets. Programming a nearly 50 year old 64k computer that's outside the solar system with a lag time of almost a day. Simply amazing.
posted to MetaFilter by indexy at 1:40 PM on April 22, 2024

This makes me happier than is probably normal.
posted to MetaFilter by marxchivist at 1:02 PM on April 22, 2024

Yes!

And I want to celebrate the sheer glory of these lines:
"Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune."
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:37 PM on April 22, 2024

For anyone confused by the post title and description: Twitter's new "grok" feature published the above accusation after a copy-paste joke started going around about how Thompson, who went 0-10 in the game last night, was "throwing bricks" through the windows of Sacramento homes. "Throwing bricks" is a term for shots that don't even reach the rim.
posted to MetaFilter by grumpybear69 at 1:22 PM on April 17, 2024

You wanna pay for it?

DEAR GOD YES, I WANT MY TAXES TO GO TO PUBLIC GOODS THAT WORK
posted to MetaFilter by Horace Rumpole at 10:00 AM on April 17, 2024

none of the articles mention the solution of installing blue lighting to discourage needle use....I've seen it mostly in Europe; the Star market near Boston's north station has it too.

This worked as intended for like a week, and then addicts figured out they could just draw their own veins onto their arms with a blacklight pen. Making this an arms race is more pointless cruelty, we also need safe injection sites.
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 4:34 PM on April 15, 2024

Part of the US's lack of public toilets is connected to a hostility about public space in general, especially in dense areas. We lack a shared idea of a commons, of public space, of a place where you can be and do without paying for the pleasure, in part because so much of our commons has been sold off to people who will charge us for access to it. And so we lack the idea that there should be free, comfortable public places, and we lack the idea that the government (us!) might need to pay to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by entropone at 11:35 AM on April 15, 2024

In my home town the youth have a long tradition of vandalizing any public bathrooms to the point of being unusable. The city (of only 13,000 people) spends up to $25,000 a year just to repair the bathrooms.

I think there's a lot of things that go into Why Americans Can't Have Anything Nice, but fundamentally someone has to make the first move. I think that if you have to pay to keep up the public toilets because they get vandalized, that's the right... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Frowner at 10:07 AM on April 15, 2024

On the list of things a functioning society should have, convenient easy access for all to clean, comfortable places to expel waste is both #1 and #2.
posted to MetaFilter by Saxon Kane at 9:47 AM on April 15, 2024

I mean, this isn't exactly a new phenomenon; the wealthy stayed pale when the working class was out in the fields getting sunburnt and started tanning on the beach when workers moved indoors. Wealthy homes were stuffed with decorative tchotchkes and fine china when such goods were expensive; now that everything's cheap, giant empty minimalist homes are a status symbol. The only constant seems to be the gendered way in which people following these trends are described: when men change their... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by nanny's striped stocking at 2:11 AM on April 17, 2024

You want to ban an elderly woman for complaining because she wanted someone to switch lanes so she wouldn't get splashed while she was exercising?
You could rightfully try to ban her if she grabbed the kid's foot and tried to force him into another lane, or screamed hate speech and obscenities.
She might have been unpleasant, but there is no reason a 17 year old can't know that they are not living life totally "in their own lane" and that even innocent actions... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by rainy day girl at 9:07 AM on April 15, 2024

So, I have lived this problem from the perspective of both the lap swimmer and the water walker. There is a person who uses my building's pool who highly, highly objects to the degree to which I cause waves when I swim laps. They have complained to my building management about it as well as whining about it a tenants association meeting. And I have some sympathy for the woman, because I also do water walking and if you're doing water walking and regularly getting smucked in the face with waves... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jacquilynne at 8:33 AM on April 15, 2024

Or simply change the law so it's illegal to sell guns in the US!

I mean, if I had my fantasy wish list of changes the US would make, "not selling guns" would be right up there with "universal health insurance" and "forgive student debt/free higher education" and "legal abortions that are easily accessible to everyone in the country".

But not selling guns is probably the least likely... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by litera scripta manet at 12:34 PM on April 9, 2024

said it before and will say it again: mr. musk is a waste of perfectly good ketamine
posted to MetaFilter by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:49 PM on April 9, 2024

He said yes but later admitted he didn't try very hard because he really doesn't want to change jobs.

This statement, while it's honest, kind of seems like the crux of it to me. You asked your partner to have your back, and they said they did - but later said they didn't really. I think this is very recoverable, but it's a big realization that when you did ask, they didn't step up right away.

I think it... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by warriorqueen at 6:21 AM on April 10, 2024

It sounds like you need to stop splitting household chores evenly. I’m completely serious.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 5:10 AM on April 10, 2024

Since the conservative view is that parents should have complete dominion over their children I think it's only fitting that they should have complete responsibility for their children's actions as well.
posted to MetaFilter by RonButNotStupid at 11:33 AM on April 9, 2024

I'm bad at navigation. I also tend to easily get confused when given choreography-type directions (raise your left foot, wave your right hand...) and I have pretty strong visual aphantasia, and wonder if those things are related. Also, ADHD-ish symptoms where even if I know where I'm going, if I'm having a conversation or thinking about something, I will miss turns or just drive somewhere else on autopilot.

I've been driving since 1989 and playing video/computer games... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Foosnark at 1:57 PM on April 14, 2024

I have absolutely no sense of direction.
I am 52 years old and have spent my life walking, cycling and driving in all kinds of urban and rural environments. I've only recently started using GPS devices and they are a blessing to me.

I pay very careful attention to where I am, and yet I still get turned around, and only one mistake will throw me completely off my map of where I'm supposed to be.

Here's the thing.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Zumbador at 11:57 AM on April 14, 2024