MetaFilter

Assistive tech for a lot of people often is smartphones, and while yeah, it's not an awesome feeling for your show to get recorded, or just for someone to be using a phone during a performance, maybe it'd be a better idea for people working in theater to resist the urge for righteous indignation in the middle of a performance. Theater people of anyone ought to know that everyone has their own story.

Follow up quietly if you must, but please, people... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Aleyn at 11:41 AM on October 17, 2022

I find this all too apt and I would like to be his apprentice.
posted to MetaFilter by Peach at 2:53 PM on January 26, 2022

There's a bakery by my apartment that makes fresh croissants every morning. You have to be there at the right time, they open at 6:30am. The croissants are still inflated by steam pressure, and when you pull them apart, a puff of buttery steam comes out. 6:45 is way too late, 7am they are sold out. I buy two, one to munch right away, one to enjoy with coffee at home.

I'm not alone in this, I keep seeing the same faces. We're friendly, holding the door open, saying good... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by adept256 at 3:08 AM on October 17, 2022

As a Chinese netizen, I can confirm that people do write this way, and not just about politically sensitive matters. Celebrities' names are often not written in full - we use nicknames, quite inventive in some cases. For example, each active kpop group is denoted by one Chinese character, which may have no surface-level connection to the group's actual name. It's impossible to know which groups people are talking about if you're not familiar with Chinese kpop fandoms.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by fatehunter at 2:15 PM on October 16, 2022

Chinese tones give so more much space for punning than in English ..... Chinese dads must be insufferable
posted to MetaFilter by mbo at 12:47 PM on October 16, 2022

We're headed for +3.2°C by which point tipping points push us beyond +4°C.   We're fairly sure +4°C leaves the tropics uninhabitable by humans, and reduces the earth's maximum carrying capacity below one billion humans.

Anderson showed climate change creates a wet stratosphere that'll destroys our ozone layer, which makes climate change worse than nuclear war in every way.   Also, island nations tend towards cannibalism when real famines... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jeffburdges at 5:09 PM on October 15, 2022

Content warning: sad

.
.

Maybe I shouldn't comment this near the top of the thread. I'd feel bad if I derailed the tone, ruined someone's fun. It does, however, align a little with this week's theme so I'm going to bull ahead anyway:

Today is a hard day. In a couple of hours I'm leaving to attend a memorial service for someone I've known for nearly three decades. This person has figured large in my life... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by majick at 7:11 AM on October 8, 2022

All the Hong Kong Cavaliers and Blue Blaze Regulars in "Buckaroo Banzai".

Yes! I'd be the sidekick with specialist knowledge who can't be arsed to take the lead on anything because I'm lazy.
posted to MetaTalk by mollweide at 6:42 PM on October 12, 2022

I was the youngest in my cohort of siblings and cousins, so I always had to be the minor characters whenever we played. When my sister and cousin were the Bionic Woman and the Six Million Dollar Man, I was always Oscar Goldman. You would think that would be me giving orders and sending them on missions, but they weren’t having any of that. So I spent most of my time at my desk, taking phone calls from Congressmen and applying for grants for my cool projects.
posted to MetaTalk by The Underpants Monster at 7:12 PM on October 8, 2022

Hey, why not just ask them to immolate themselves on the White House lawn? That's what a real environmentalist would do.

Wynn Alan Bruce self-immolated on the steps of the Supreme Court six months ago as a climate change protest and it was barely in the news. Certainly raised fewer hackles and caused much less discussion than this whole Sunflowers situation.
posted to MetaFilter by twelve cent archie at 4:56 PM on October 15, 2022

Nowhere is reporting that the painting was covered by glass...

Of course it isn’t. There’s a lot of capital in letting general public believe a beloved masterpiece was trashed by some of those filthy eco-terrists.
posted to MetaFilter by Thorzdad at 1:28 PM on October 15, 2022

The movie Wild, Wild West was an exception to the Kevin Kline rule (he was clean-shaven), except it wasn't because the movie wasn't funny.
posted to FanFare by It's Never Lurgi at 6:01 PM on October 14, 2022

I'd assume that the similarity between "Xon" and "Sonak" was intentional; I remember reading about Xon in a story about the planned revival of the franchise a few years before the movie came out, and Sonak always seemed to me to be Roddenberry or whoever's nod toward their original plans to replace Spock before they got Nimoy to change his mind. (Just as David Gautreaux, who was originally cast as Xon, was recast as one of the people on the station that V'Ger annihilated,... [more]
posted to FanFare by Halloween Jack at 5:42 PM on October 1, 2020

I really, really enjoyed this series, and loved the ending. I can't think of many people who could have pulled it off the way Maslany did. She's an incredible talent.
posted to FanFare by synecdoche at 7:01 AM on October 14, 2022

Oh, to have someone talk about me the way Jen talked about Matt.
posted to FanFare by Quonab at 5:02 PM on October 13, 2022

I went to local courthouse today to submit paperwork for a name and gender change. Walk up to a self-serve kiosk, wander through the menus on two different computers trying to figure out how to find the option that this falls under, eventually find my way into a "no, this isn't it.. no, this isn't it.." situation and get a default category. Walk up to window, hand over forms, pay ~$125. Now I wait 4-6 weeks, after which I can do the SSN changes (which take about 2 weeks), and then I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by curious nu at 6:10 PM on October 11, 2022

The whole main bit here is an homage to John Byrne's run on She-Hulk (which establishes a lot of the tone of this show). There's an issue where Jen says "okay, this villain is stupid," and literally tears through the pages of her own comic to skip to the end.

I was hoping for exactly this sort of homage. I really was. I did not expect them to directly address and even concede major criticisms of the MCU, in the text of an MCU production.... [more]
posted to FanFare by scaryblackdeath at 10:09 AM on October 13, 2022

The subtitles changed from Kevin to K.E.V.I.N. when the receptionist mentioned him, which did kinda spoil the reveal.

It showed up as K.E.V.I.N. for me from the first time it was mentioned, in the writer's room.
posted to FanFare by EndsOfInvention at 7:11 AM on October 13, 2022

We've been living in the metaverse for 15 years. We live in a technology-mediated reality. There are no facts. Narrative is the only thing that matters. Everything is propaganda. That's the world we're living in, and we're not going back.

Christ, what an asshole.
posted to MetaFilter by RonButNotStupid at 6:26 AM on October 13, 2022

I gotta say, as someone who does remember the Cold War, "Don't worry, Putin's nukes are probably defective, they probably won't even go off!" is not the comfort people think it is.
posted to MetaFilter by fortitude25 at 2:58 AM on October 13, 2022

This reminds me of a chess variant my kids came up with - Narrative Chess. Any move is possible, however each individual move must be supported by clear narrative motivations based upon relationships with the board and other pieces. Characters (eg pieces) start with traditional rules and develop new motivations and abilities over time.
posted to MetaFilter by q*ben at 11:32 AM on October 12, 2022

praemunire: I took some classes that really made me think about the ancient conception of time, and what mattered or did not matter, what people knew and did not know, in ways that we have taken for granted. I always think of a bit of dialogue in a novel (probably but not necessarily by Pratchett) that really got at that kind of reckoning:

"I were born the year the old thane died."
"What thane?"
"How should I know? I ain't... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Countess Elena at 10:03 AM on October 12, 2022

(Also, as ever I want to call attention to the most metal of all possible titles for a work of classical scholarship, Time and its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire.

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, his successors, the Seleucid kings, ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia and Anatolia to the Persian Gulf. In 305 BCE, in a radical move to impose unity and regulate behavior, Seleucis I introduced a linear conception... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by praemunire at 9:35 AM on October 12, 2022

The connection here is that it is possible to build complicated systems without making the schedule the top priority. But you have to build slack into the system to begin with,

the word that comes to mine is contingency. Way back when in film school, I was taught that when budgeting a production, I should always include a 10-percent contingency. That is, given the amount of "moving parts" in a production, it was best to just... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by philip-random at 8:59 AM on October 12, 2022

"Tragedy of the Commons" was written by a literal fascist whose white supremacist ideology led him to completely misrepresent the practices around actual commons as they exist in real life.
posted to MetaFilter by derrinyet at 3:41 PM on October 10, 2022

[A few deleted. Take it to metatalk if you don't like the title, or other people's commentary about the title.]
posted to MetaFilter by Eyebrows McGee at 8:25 PM on October 9, 2022

To truly appreciate what Daniel Gill has done in his 53 years of teaching

Wow! This is where I get a hitch in my step right off the hop. I'm a 57 year old white male teacher and I've just retired (this year in June, in Canada) after a 32 year career in the high school classroom, and I just can't imagine doing another 21 in any reasonably effective way. Competent? Sure. Effective? I dunno.

This is not to say that I quit... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by kneecapped at 8:06 PM on October 9, 2022

My problem with the demise of physical media is that I can not depend on any streaming service to have anything that I want to listen to or watch. Or to have it anytime in the future. I’ve built a library of media - CDs, DVDs, cassettes, books, some vinyl - of the things I like. I can just grab it and away I go. I live not far from Amoeba in San Francisco and I used to go there at least once a week and just browse and I would find stuff all the time. Over the past couple years, their stock has... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by njohnson23 at 4:41 PM on October 2, 2022

Not to mention that Canada did actually have slavery and we weren't taught that either.
posted to MetaFilter by mandolin conspiracy at 5:01 PM on October 23, 2018

I guess I don't have that much of an issue with the DD tonal change. We see it all the time in the comics after all! Different writers, different takes, different levels of comedy and grim to serve the story at hand.

I've always taken this sort of thing as a tacit exploration of how one's self-perception is different from how others perceive them. Like, Matt Murdock probably feels overwhelmed and hopeless a lot of the time, taking on pro bono cases... [more]
posted to FanFare by gauche at 1:43 PM on October 7, 2022

I am sad next week is the finale.

This felt like simultaneously the most joyous and also saddest episode MCU TV to date.
posted to FanFare by Faintdreams at 5:29 AM on October 7, 2022

a respondent's lawyer can't just fling questions at a plaintiff from the bar. The judge would have censured him for that. The plaintiff would need to be sworn in.

There are a lot of issues with the courtroom scene in terms of procedure. They were there to argue a motion about the production of evidence, and the judge ends up dismissing the case sua sponte and IIRC without a motion. In real life, if the plaintiff made such an... [more]
posted to FanFare by gauche at 5:34 AM on October 7, 2022

I'm here for thicc Leguizamo on the naughty list

I can't see him in anything without stopping to remember the Leguizamo is French for "the guizamo."
posted to MetaFilter by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:10 AM on October 7, 2022

Somehow this show can manage to shoot twilight scenes but still have the actors' faces lit well enough that you can see them.
posted to FanFare by octothorpe at 4:04 AM on October 6, 2022

The days of the week are associated with the seven 'luminaries' (the wandering "planets" of ancient Hellenic/Babylonian astrology, which include the sun and the moon). This association comes from the underlying concept of planetary hours: each 'hour'* is associated with one of the luminaries, proceeding in the 'Chaldean order' from slowest-moving along the zodiac (Saturn) to the fastest (Moon).

The name of the day is (in modern times) determined by the first... [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by heatherlogan at 4:00 PM on September 20, 2022 marked best answer

Oh shit I forgot student debt relief.

* Student Debt Relief!
posted to MetaFilter by gwint at 12:50 PM on October 6, 2022

All Hail Dank Brandon

For those not keeping track, in less than two years, the Biden administration and a Dem congress *without* a supermajority has:

* Passed the Inflation Reduction Act (biggest climate bill ever)
* Passed the Infrastructure bill
* Passed the Chips and Science Act
* Passed the bill that helps veterans exposed to burn pits (thank you also Jon Stewart)
* Passed... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by gwint at 12:44 PM on October 6, 2022

This is amazing. The dumbest comments I'm seeing are along the lines of "He's only doing this because there's an election!" Like, yes? Elected officials do things they think will get them elected. Why is this presented like some grand revelation?
posted to MetaFilter by star gentle uterus at 12:25 PM on October 6, 2022

She Hulk/Daredevil is the ‘ship I did not know I wanted, but it is So. Perfect.
posted to FanFare by damsel with a dulcimer at 2:59 PM on October 6, 2022

“Previously on my show…”

Perfect, just perfect.
posted to FanFare by Brandon Blatcher at 7:07 AM on October 6, 2022

"We also didn’t consider adult, betting, illegal streaming/downloading services, and malicious websites"

Well, that explains why this isn't just Pornhub covering the land masses.
posted to MetaFilter by Halloween Jack at 6:54 AM on October 6, 2022

there's perhaps nothing more telling about *anything* than how the most popular site for much of the world is Wikipedia, but for the United States, it's Amazon.
posted to MetaFilter by martin q blank at 6:26 AM on October 6, 2022

Daredevil has the power to warp space so that long hallways tend to form around him.
posted to FanFare by 1970s Antihero at 6:30 AM on October 6, 2022

Anne Hathaway's Catwoman feels like a hostage taken from a better, more enjoyable movie.
posted to FanFare by DirtyOldTown at 6:47 PM on October 4, 2022

A good friend of mine pointed out how weird it is that of all the voices Tom Hardy could have chosen for Bane he decided to go with Cartoon Walrus.
posted to FanFare by Parasite Unseen at 2:40 PM on October 4, 2022

Bane voice: GOR VUH MUHPON ECKRAHDA. FURMIN GOOM LA CAMBA.
posted to FanFare by DirtyOldTown at 7:47 AM on October 4, 2022

Compare the different experiences of people playing poker for money on the internet, of people who go to Vegas and play cards, and of a group of friends gathered around someone's living room table playing cards and bantering.

Exactly the same game, same deck of cards, same rules. But they're completely different human activities.
posted to MetaFilter by Fiasco da Gama at 8:11 PM on October 5, 2022

You cracked the biggest mystery of all; Oneself.
It's hard out here for those whose gender is "Haunted Amusement Park".
posted to MetaFilter by bartleby at 11:39 AM on October 5, 2022

Lesbian here. Born in 1974, knew I was gay when I was 5- how did I know? I just did, take my word on that, and it didn't have to do with any sexual awakening which came much later. Zero representation at that time, I was left in my own world to sort out how I knew I felt versus what possibilities there seemed to be in the world for me. I have a strong memory of a Love Boat episode where Doc had an old college friend on board who he used to hound dog around with only now the friend admitted... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rene_billingsworth at 9:27 AM on October 5, 2022

Sorry, on further reading the thread, I thought this is 100% truth:

There is implicit heterosexuality in almost all the media kids consume (as pointed out above in many places). You have to make the queerness explicit now so that someday you don't have to.
posted to MetaFilter by From Bklyn at 8:23 AM on October 5, 2022