MetaFilter

My mom got a call once from 'Stephanie' at her bank branch claiming that there was an issue with her account's contact info. She didn't feel comfortable with the call, so she told Stephanie that she'd call her back at the bank's main number. She did, and the bank didn't know who Stephanie was, so OK scam defeated.

Then a week later Stephanie calls again. Mom says "I checked with the bank and no one knows you" (it's a local bank). Stephanie says "oh, I'm... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by RonButNotStupid at 1:47 PM on February 15, 2024

Remember "replacement toner" scams back in the '90s an early 2000s?

At the insurance company I worked at, I was the designated "toner ordering guy" both because I knew what they were trying to do, and if I was bored I'd keep these guys on the phone by sounding helpful but acting incompetent -- "I'm here at the copier, where's the model number? Do I have to open it up?" -- until they got bored trying to get me to say the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by AzraelBrown at 1:09 PM on February 15, 2024

It’s fascinating to see the shift of the telephone from being how you talk to whoever is in a room to being a personal data device you never answer.

Has any other technology inverted, on so many fronts, so completely?
posted to MetaFilter by davemee at 12:28 PM on February 15, 2024

My son asked what if nobody's won this super bowl by the time the next super bowl happens because the overtime lasts for a full year and I told him then four teams will all be on the field in next year's super bowl and any one of them could win but the Chiefs and 49ers will likely be pretty tired by then. So that's how the conversation is going chez potrzebie
posted to FanFare by potrzebie at 7:33 PM on February 11, 2024

So if I'm hearing you right, then the 1979 sitcom "Hello, Larry" would not be allowed into the park, being a vehicle for McLean Stevenson after his ill-fated decision to leave M*A*S*H?
posted to MetaFilter by credulous at 7:37 PM on February 14, 2024

can I keep my dog in my handbag while I walk around the supermarket?

Which spawned the delightful NYC system where you can bring your dog on the subway as long as it fits in your bag.
posted to MetaFilter by Mitheral at 3:13 PM on February 12, 2024

this would be a lot more fun if the rule were "no sandwiches in the park"
posted to MetaFilter by glonous keming at 10:47 AM on February 12, 2024

* The author should have had a question involving a helicopter flying above the park and then asked what the lowest altitude is that qualifies as "in the park". I think that's a lot closer to the grey areas of content moderation than the airplane and space station scenarios.

Yeah, this would be easy to set up. Is a traffic helicopter that passes over the park a vehicle in the park? If the helicopter lands in the park is it a vehicle in the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jacquilynne at 9:54 AM on February 12, 2024

Lupercalia is a challenging safe word.
posted to MetaFilter by MonsieurPEB at 8:48 AM on February 14, 2024

Apropos of nothing, part of me wants to see an all gay football team called Da Bears.
posted to MetaFilter by BrotherCaine at 2:55 PM on February 13, 2024

Yeah, get f*cked. I worked very, very hard and I’m proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish.

Gee, it must be rough, people not respecting your artistic efforts.

If you make ‘art’ using other people’s money, other people’s ideas, other people’s intellectual property etc

Ah yes, respecting corporate Ip, the most punk rock position of all.
posted to MetaFilter by The Manwich Horror at 10:17 AM on February 12, 2024

The actual material effects on labour that folks have identified are pretty small-scale -- basically the same as working on a flop or on unaired episodes of a cancelled TV show.

Scenario A: Hi! I'm Michelle Smith. I spent the last two years doing digital VFX for a movie. It turned out to be a huge flop and you probably didn't see it, but I'm proud of my work. Let me show you a clip of a scene that illustrates the kind of work I did on the film, as... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by DirtyOldTown at 1:33 PM on February 12, 2024

Be super mad about it, if you think that will help.

I’m not mad, just really disappointed at how selfish your perspective is. I’m glad your mode of making art yourself, at home, has been sustainably successful for you—truly, that’s awesome!—but some artists are actually collaborative, and some artistic media (like movies) are intrinsically collaborative, so if you want to make the art at all you must collaborate with others.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by LooseFilter at 9:40 AM on February 12, 2024

Wait till you find out what happens to unsold books!

What a terribly disingenuous comment to start the thread! Obviously, unsold books are: a) published in the first place, thus available to the public for at least some time, and b) the books are not erased from existence when extra copies re destroyed. This case is about annihilating an entire completed, large-scale creative work from existence without ever allowing it an audience at all.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by LooseFilter at 9:18 AM on February 12, 2024

On the other hand, maybe I can just put this film on my resume and no one can prove I wasn't in it.
posted to MetaFilter by dances_with_sneetches at 9:04 AM on February 12, 2024

If a studio turns a film into a tax write-off, the film should immediately become public domain.

Agreed -- in effect, if by not releasing the film they write it off as a loss for tax benefit, the US Government has paid for the movie, and therefore the public should thenceforth own it entirely.
posted to MetaFilter by tclark at 8:56 AM on February 12, 2024

If a studio turns a film into a tax write-off, the film should immediately become public domain.
posted to MetaFilter by gwint at 8:45 AM on February 12, 2024

Damn, youthenrage. God damn.

Not enough people have really internalized the fact that allowing prisoners to be used as slave labor means that you, citizen of the outside, are now competing with them for work. And there's just no way to be more cost competitive than an enslaved labor force that has no minimum wage and no rights. None. Letting that happen at all fucks over free people, it fucks over everyone. It fucks you, yes you, over. Pure and simple.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mhoye at 1:31 PM on February 10, 2024

I spent 15ish months of the 5 years I was down working at a farm exactly like the ones described in much of the article. Former slave plantation, in the south, worked by hand, vast majority black prison population, COs on horseback (no shotguns though). If you eat asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, watermelon, kale, collard greens, cantaloupe, and strawberries to name a few it may have come from prison labor. They worked the shit out of us for like $.20 an hour, a portion of which the state kept... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by youthenrage at 1:19 PM on February 10, 2024

Wait. You are telling me that in a country that has massive excesses by nearly every societal measure, wild injustices between economic classes, and a long love of cheap mass produced foodstuffs, we have a slavery problem to boot?

/s

Contextually, the war on drugs takes on a whole new light.
posted to MetaFilter by discardme at 9:08 AM on February 10, 2024

Another great example of a double-take from a summary that uses "Victorian" not to mean "lived during the reign of Queen Victoria" but rather "lives in the Australian state named after Queen Victoria".
posted to MetaFilter by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:58 AM on February 11, 2024

If you want thought-provoking then "Hell is the Absence of God", a novella by Ted Chiang, is for you. The hell he describes is mundane; what happens in the story qbout how you get there is most definitely not.

The higher plane of existence ("ascension") in Stargate: SG-1 is very interesting, especially as it's clearly shown as the start of a journey, not the end.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman has a lot... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by underclocked at 8:05 AM on February 8, 2024

As somebody at Slate pointed out, these justices are originalists when it comes to letting innocent poor people die, but they're consequentialists when it comes to this particular rich person.
posted to MetaFilter by clawsoon at 2:03 PM on February 8, 2024

sensory hallucination, and simply getting sensory data 'wrong', is not uncommon

Another possibility is that the person seeing whatever it is simply has neither the knowledge nor the education to connect that visual information in any meaningful way with anything they already understand.

Everybody has gaps in their understanding because we are small and parochial and the world is huge and wild. There's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by flabdablet at 10:15 AM on February 7, 2024

Any other Gen Xers here who remember competing with friends in high school to see who could get the lowest time on the stopwatch on their digital watches? Pressing that side button as fast as you can, dit-dit, di-dit, d-dit. Who needs a PS5.
posted to MetaFilter by rory at 7:53 AM on January 13, 2024

I'm on a local Facebook group for my suburb (NOT Next Door), called "PLACENAME community notices and chat group" and it's a useful resource and 98% free of racism and fear mongering (it helps that it has volunteer moderators and a code of conduct).

Regular posts include:

"I found a lost dog/cat/duck/chicken, is it yours?"

"I found a lost bicycle/pendant/prescription glasses, is it yours?... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:03 PM on February 5, 2024

A couple years back I saw nextdoor post written by a guy complaining that he had been shorted two dollars at the local Food Lion. He was enraged that the employee hadn’t been fired on the spot.

This is my Food Lion too, my favorite place to shop and most of the employees are African-American so I made a little joke about hey man I’m glad you survived your awful trauma. I know how important two dollars can be…etc

He absolutely lost his shit. So I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by chronkite at 5:49 PM on February 5, 2024

I’m still optimistic for a Biden landslide.

Unless women are over having a fundamental right most of them have had their entire lives taken away, I am too.
posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 4:39 PM on February 4, 2024

About four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times’

40% of Americans Believe in [Young Earth] Creationism
posted to MetaFilter by torokunai at 2:10 PM on February 4, 2024

"Literally tried to overthrow the US government to form a dictatorship, and is actively planning on doing it again, but incompetent at it" vs "insufficiently effective and active persuing policies I consider important" seems like such a toss up.

I can't decide who I would prefer to win. They are both so wrong.
posted to MetaFilter by NotAYakk at 11:47 AM on February 4, 2024

Be polite, and it might work.

For context: May I recommend Reddit's sub Tales From the Front Desk? Everyone is always trying to get a credit from the front desk person for their complaints. The front desk person can help but if you don't make them want to, you are just one in a long line of people who are angling for a credit for various reasons.

I hate hotels in general but this sub is hilarious.... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Peach at 6:15 AM on February 3, 2024

I like the esteemed Mrs. Betty Bowers' take: "To save time, I call Nationalist Christians 'Nat C's'."
posted to MetaFilter by xedrik at 8:34 AM on February 3, 2024

I remain disappointed that our federal and provincial leaders weren't involved from the start, speaking directly to the protesters to both acknowledge them

This is a thing is is almost never, ever done as a point of policy, at least for protests on the Canadian federal parliament. It's fine for individual MPs, sometimes even the PM to come out and meet protesters and do photoops. However, the government (and it hasn't until now mattered who is in... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by bonehead at 8:50 AM on February 3, 2024

Can we please stop misspelling MeFites? It's MeFites. MeFites.

Or on crankier days, MeFights.
posted to MetaFilter by Dip Flash at 8:31 AM on February 3, 2024

do Mefites happen to know that this convoy thing is/was inspired by a far more successful and disruptive "trucker convoy" protest petulant stunt in Canada?

...oh yeah. (Canadian). And like the DC one, its original raisons d'etre (COVID cross-border restrictions) were also pretty much on their way out by the time the truckers got into it. But its timing was such that it caught and grew on pent-up COVID-mitigation fatigue and vaccination... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Artful Codger at 7:49 PM on February 2, 2024

I saw U2 when I was in college; I’m 70 now. Seems unreal.
posted to MetaFilter by coldhotel at 7:40 PM on February 1, 2024

U2 still features in one of my favorite random memories where the wife and I were sitting in our backyard on a late Spring evening with a cocktail. (This would have been either May 20 or May 21, 2017) and suddenly off the mountains around us comes echoing a distant filtered sound of those opening riffs of "Where the Streets Have No Name". We realized it was U2 playing at the Rose Bowl a few miles and a flat plain away from us with the San Gabriels wrapping the stadium like a reflector... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by drewbage1847 at 7:01 PM on February 1, 2024

Not positive how long the link will work, but this video of a disappointed true believer is quite the thing.
posted to MetaFilter by Devils Rancher at 2:07 PM on February 2, 2024

Not to be a buzzkill, but the 'aren't these people hilariously stupid' tone of the article would go down better if we weren't within a hair's breadth of losing the entire country to them. If they're a bumbling, pants-shitting embarrassment, and we can't get ahead of them in the polls by substantially more than a statistical margin of error... I don't know, it seems unlike something to crow about.
posted to MetaFilter by Sing Or Swim at 1:33 PM on February 2, 2024

Hey donuy, part of your responsibility as a person who is concerned but who doesn't know anything and is outside of the group at risk is to go look things up on your own without asking for energy and effort to be expended by the group

On the one hand, I understand this. On the other hand, the amount of bullshit that's thrown up by Google for any topic that reactionaries have decided to make controversial makes me want to ask questions on a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by clawsoon at 10:15 AM on February 1, 2024

It’s a very powerful film, especially in the way it sneaks up on you. Like an MR James story, it deals more in dread and unsettled uncertainty than outright scares, and the addition of grief as the central theme holds the whole thing together. If you haven’t seen it, and you are open to slow burn “gentle horror,” make it a priority.
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 4:02 AM on January 31, 2024

recency bias
fine, fine:
38. Galba adopts Lucius, offending Marcus Salvius Otho
20. Isis marries Osiris, despite being siblings
7. Cronus eats a big rock, thinking it's a baby
posted to MetaFilter by phooky at 6:06 PM on January 30, 2024

And yet there are still people who, every June, will whine: "but why do we even need Pride parades? Don't we already have gay marriage?"

This. Shit like this is why. Because people like this will always hate us.
posted to MetaFilter by fight or flight at 9:56 AM on January 30, 2024

Last week, I got a question at work from a Japanese colleague that I’ve been sort of dreading, the “(Ghidorah), why is Trump back? Why is he so popular?” The explanation I gave is pretty much what I’m writing here:

There are people, a lot of people, a lot more than we're comfortable admitting are out there that are just inwardly seething that they have been told they have to be nice, that they can’t tell blatantly racist/bigoted jokes without getting in trouble. There’s... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Ghidorah at 2:07 PM on January 29, 2024

Say what you want about DeSantis, but he's not stupid.

Trump is successful because he draws in two huge constituencies: assholes, and stupid people. I've never met a Trump voter who wasn't at least one of these, and most of them are both. Trump appeals to assholes for reasons that have all been exhaustively discussed, but he appeals to stupid people because here's a big, powerful person who is just as fucking stupid as they are. The absolute word... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by outgrown_hobnail at 1:06 PM on January 29, 2024

Seth Meyer looked at the choice between Clinton and Trump in 2016:They just don’t love the two choices. Do you pick someone who’s under federal investigation for using a private email server?

Or do you pick someone who called Mexicans rapists, claimed the president was born in Kenya, proposed banning an entire religion from entering the US, mocked a disabled reporter, said John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured, attacked the parents of a fallen soldier,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 12:48 PM on January 29, 2024

I got my job back.

I left in early October as a direct protest against the new "leadership" at the college where I work. I filed for unemployment based on a hostile work environment and got it, to give you an idea of how much fun it had been around here. As of three weeks ago (in a Board meeting that should have been televised; OMG the drama) that leadership was gone. A week later, the new new leadership called to see if I would please consider returning as an... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by mygothlaundry at 12:47 PM on January 29, 2024

I just got a text message from a friend, and their autocorrect turned "surreptitious" in "syrup petitions". So that's going to be my new username.
posted to MetaFilter by Greg_Ace at 11:05 AM on January 29, 2024

ricochet biscuit! I did very similar things when I traveled Canada by train. I found the train schedules would not stay in my brain even though I'm normally pretty good at schedules and remembering times.
posted to MetaFilter by joannemerriam at 9:34 AM on January 29, 2024

what are all those weird D&D sets I'm seeing in stores? Are those my previously presumed BD&D sets?
It gets complicated, since there are lots of products and sets around.

At its heart, modern D&D is akin to improvisational theater. One person (the 'Dungeon Master' or DM) creates a scenario; and several other people (Players) go through that scenario, as characters.
But there are technical rules, beyond just... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by bartleby at 3:58 AM on December 10, 2022