MetaFilter

I routinely get this song stuck in my head and frankly those are my favorite days.

It's weird how a song with virtually no rhythm, literally no rhymes, and something that only vaguely approximates a melody manages to be so catchy, because I am absolutely in the same boat as you.
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 2:32 PM on February 20, 2022

"More and more I believe that Tufte is correct in his suggestion" is often right thinking, I find. Even (or especially) when Tufte is a cranky dick.
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 11:25 AM on February 19, 2022

While I enjoy all the snark and the pushback and the anti-hipsterism and the anti-monoculturism, I want to engage with the thesis of this article seriously. And if you're not up-to-speed with the kinds of trends the article is talking about, you probably won't find this response interesting—but if you're at least halfway up-to-speed on your 20s culture and subculture, hopefully my opinion here is at least worth some food for thought.

One thing that I find really curious… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 8:25 AM on February 17, 2022

Sorry, something I did must have broken the link—it’s meant to go here
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 8:59 AM on February 17, 2022

Is witch house really back if you can Google the song names?
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 12:56 PM on February 17, 2022

I think that when people call him “funny,” they mean more than anything that he could articulate, sharply and clearly and pointedly, both what he believed and why he believed it. His worldview was cynical and, I would argue, fatalist to the point of nihilism—which is true of conservative ideology as a whole, I think. And while the worldview he articulated was putrid, and while he chose as targets a number of subjects too savaged for me to be comfortable with him savaging them again, he was lucid… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 5:04 AM on February 16, 2022

I Love You Sweatheart

A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway. And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work...?
His words are not (meant to be) so unique.
Does she recognize his handwriting?
Did he hint to her at her doorstep the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 9:10 AM on February 14, 2022

If you love gorgeous apps that do really neat things with programming, Mela is not only the prettiest cooking app I've ever used, it'll let you subscribe to cooking blogs and automatically extract recipes from them. It'll also let you browse the web and strip out recipes from web pages as you go.

It's also just really fantastic for ingredient shopping and cooking directions and note-taking and all of it. I cannot recommend it strongly enough. If it's… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 2:27 PM on February 11, 2022

And corb, I just flagged your comment as "speaks directly to my fucking soul."
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 2:28 PM on February 11, 2022

As a former art student, a lot of the complaints about people complaining about recipe blogs feel similar, to me, to the way my classmates complained about folks not appreciating their plays/student films/bands/webcomics.

And as someone who had a fairly popular tech blog while I was in art school—and while "the long tail" was still the popular mentality re: web content (gosh, what a simpler time)—my mentality now is the same as my mentality… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 3:03 AM on February 14, 2022

Oh, and the flip side to this is that there is absolutely a way to build a recipe blog that incorporates storytelling into its design—but that requires people to actually design the web site they write for, instead of squeezing their content into it like they're grinding out sausages.

It also requires that writing to be genuinely compelling.

Pardon my cynicism, but it's wild to me that on MetaFilter, the site full of people… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 3:05 AM on February 14, 2022

I've been thinking a weird lot recently about how much I miss Craig Ferguson as a public figure. Maybe the pinnacle of talk show hosts with substance, for me.

Ask yourself the three things you must always ask yourself before you say anything:

1) Does this need to be said
2) Does this need to be said by me?
3) Does this need to be said by me now?

His… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 11:54 AM on February 11, 2022

Do these people think women are honestly going to be comfortable with some big burly man coming into the changing room because they were assigned female at birth and didn't get the right documentation?

From the TERFs I know, the sense I get is that they consider the entire concept of "trans people" deeply inconvenient, not worth thinking about, and disturbing. So the idea of burly AFAB trans men making women's bathrooms uncomfortable for… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 11:04 AM on February 11, 2022

Can someone please explain to this humble olde (who utterly abhors both this song and band) why is Africa such a thing? Is it just a dive into the deep end of the irony pool? I really don’t get it.

1. The lyrics are both memorable and excessively generic, to the point where it's a little hard to make out what it's about beyond "is love song"

2. It's got a lot of interesting textures and tones to it—leaving aside… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 4:08 PM on February 10, 2022

Don't overthink it.

denied
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 4:08 PM on February 10, 2022

This conversation was a little frustrating to read. It felt like a lot of people were responding to a different article than the one that I read. But I think that that's because there is a contingent of people who just flat-out reject any use of words like "gaslit" or "triggered", in the same way that some people refuse to understand a legitimate context for "privilege". And I think that this is a different conversation to have within… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 3:22 AM on February 10, 2022

My first-and-only vehicle was a Ford Escape. Deeply non-memorable vehicle. I nearly totaled it driving to school one day, and once I went off to college, my sister drove it to school and totaled it for me.

My on-my-mind-this-week thing, not car-related, is: I finally bit the bullet and signed up to learn Transcendental Meditation after about a decade of curiosity (and trying every other non-pricey meditative practice on the planet). I did that with a lot of trepidation,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 7:46 AM on February 8, 2022

Also, it makes me cringe a little just to write out the name with capital letters like that, so I've mostly been referring to it as TM™ to all my friends.
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 7:47 AM on February 8, 2022

The article goes into wellness as it's rooted in cultural appropriation/rich white women/etcetcetc, but honestly, I think it's simpler than that.

Wellness prioritizes the individual. It suggests that what's wrong with the world is the sum of what's wrong with you. And if you, personally, both feel okay and look okay—because ultimately other people only matter inasmuch as they approve of you, which saves you from asking difficult… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 11:07 AM on February 7, 2022

Two quick thoughts on places this conversation has gone:



Being comfortable with white supremacists as your bedfellows, and being prepared to overlook it for your own convenience because it doesn't affect you to begin with, is itself a form of white supremacy. And that's not considering the highly effective convert-apathetic-people-to-right-wing-extremism pipeline.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 1:45 AM on February 8, 2022

This is an excellent post.
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 1:01 PM on February 7, 2022

The top comment, though:

Imagine Lynch watching this whole thing all the way through and just saying “no” lol

One of the interesting things about Twin Peaks coming back in 2017, with two companion books written by Mark Frost, is that it revealed just how much the "weird conspiracy shit" that people kinda assumed Lynch was responsible for were in fact Frost's obsessions. And I'll forever be curious about their… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 2:35 AM on February 2, 2022

There goes my plan to make a post about Psycholonials! I'm still tempted to make a Fanfare discussion for it.

Seconding the podcast Homestuck Made This World—I find it ever-so-slightly frustrating, but the discussion is meaty.

The Epilogues are extremely flawed but absolutely fascinating pieces of writing. Not Homestuck at its peak, and something I really don't consider part of the "canon story" (not even in the sense of its being a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 2:25 AM on February 2, 2022

(Also, just as a note, there is currently some debate/contention as to what pronouns author Andrew Hussie uses these days; Wikipedia uses "he/him", What Pumpkin uses "they/them", and the text of Psycholonials suggests any/all are appropriate, though the idea of "attachment to gender" is itself a big part of early Psycholonials plot.)
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 2:27 AM on February 2, 2022

I don't know why you're talking so much about Number Six in this thread.

Not when Number Five is still alive.
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 2:03 PM on February 1, 2022

As someone who not only attended the Rally to Restore Sanity but wrote a long comment on MetaFilter about how much hope it gave me for the future, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize, and publicly state that every single whiff of optimism I had back then was wholeheartedly misguided.

I think the issue with Jon Stewart isn't that he's "a comedian," it's that his critique of the media and political partisanship studiously avoided talking about the,… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 3:39 AM on February 1, 2022

I think that, more than anything, Stewart taught a generation some basic ideas about media literacy, which we are collectively astoundingly bad at. Like, to the extent that most millennials alive today with any sense of media literacy probably got some of it from watching The Daily Show or something directly inspired by it.

What he didn't teach is political literacy, which imo is still extremely difficult to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 4:34 AM on February 1, 2022

And what a coincidence that people should try to take down a liberal hero at the same time we have white supremacists marching and a general shift toward acceptance of far-right ideology in the media.

Is it unfair to critique literally anyone who's not a Nazi? What do you call that, Godwin's Anti-Law?
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 5:59 AM on February 1, 2022

Just not surprising to read an article that is so sure in its blaming of Stewart and calling his liberal POV and everything it supposedly wrought a failure during this time of increased right-wing propaganda.

Less snarkily, I think the two most dominant attitudes in liberal/leftist (American) thinking are

Centrist inertia/refusal to engage with broader political projects is a huge part of our present predicamentNah, that's… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 6:29 AM on February 1, 2022

Reading through this thread—which imo has a lot of good comments opining across all sides of this, which is lovely and a little rare—something that occurs to me is that, oftentimes, when we critique a famous icon like this, we're using them as a sort of metonymy* for either their philosophy or their audience.

Critiques of Stewart, in other words, either become critiques of his ideas—his approach to making media or the worldview he articulates within… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 1:50 PM on February 1, 2022

Previously.
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 10:55 AM on February 1, 2022

Also, it's worth noting that his 2019 album Ghosteen—not "about" the death of his teenage son so much as an exploration of grief, loss, love, faith, and transcendence—is available in full on YouTube, and is an astonishing, beautiful, meditative hourlong experience. I hadn't heard any Nick Cave music for a long time, still thought of him as somewhere in the realm of punk-rock-goth, and was utterly stupefied at what a profound piece of music it is. Nothing has stuck… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 11:03 AM on February 1, 2022

I'm simultaneously happy that this guy is making a lot of money for a real good idea he had, and pissed about the ongoing narrative that "someone has an idea that sparks innocent joy without even a seeming asterisk" always ends in "and gets rewarded for it by our Very Good Society that makes sure everyone gets their just desserts, followed by at least 10 books about what this moment of joy teaches you if you want to Live The Hustle Lifestyle."

Not to… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 2:33 PM on January 31, 2022

Also I was just looking for glove recommendations on The Wirecutter and reflecting on how much shittier it's gotten since its NYT acquisition, so.
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 2:34 PM on January 31, 2022

I'm surprised at how upset I am that people are *at all* negative about this or framing it as any even slight form of moral failing on the part of the maker.

If it helps, I'm weirdly distressed in turn at how many comments here seem to cross past "I, personally, think this is great!" to "It is morally odious to have anything slightly more complex than a positive feeling about this." By which I mean: I don't think a single comment… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 3:18 AM on February 1, 2022

Or, on posting, everything that wesleyac just said. Whoops. 😛

(It shouldn't be news to me that MetaFilter does not, in fact, do "discussion" well and does immediately pivot towards @-style bickering about binary notion of who's "right", but somehow, 13 years on, it still feels weird that every comment thread on MeFi immediately turns into this.)
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 3:21 AM on February 1, 2022

AlSweigart, that podcast theme reminds me of nasreddin's best-of-MetaFilter definition of hipsters as "the point where rebels stop selling out and start buying in."

It also reminds me of a political science essay I read—but I can't remember who by—about how political victory consists, not of your side winning over your adversary's, but of your controlling the narrative so thoroughly that your adversary can only think of their argument using your terms. The way… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 4:56 AM on February 1, 2022

I know there's no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism, and that there's no good way to support a big tech company without supporting some kind of bad behavior, but at the same time political stands like this do matter inasmuch as people jumping into them can jolt companies into thinking that maybe, just maybe, their actions have consequence.

Apple and Google are shitty companies, but responding to a big snafu that Spotify invited on… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 11:45 AM on January 29, 2022

it's vanishingly unlikely that in today's music ecology, these artists hold any real control over their catalogs.

Hasn't Taylor Swift spent the last few years publicly and famously taking control over her catalogues, in an explicit "fuck you" to her old record label?
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 11:47 AM on January 29, 2022

D:\My MP3 Files\

Has tons of great music

*eyes personal collection of Aqua b-sides*

speak for yourself, buddy
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 3:52 PM on January 29, 2022

My recommendation for music-streaming service, which I'll admit is (1) probably a little problematic and (2) Apple-device-centric but really nice in a lot of ways if you can get around that:

Apple offers a little-known service called iTunes Match. It costs $25/year, I think, and the way it works is: it scans your music collection, sees whether it has it in its music store, and, if so, it essentially gives you a store copy of whatever songs and albums… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 6:21 AM on January 30, 2022

Hosting Joe Rogan isn't a bizarre business decision, but spending $100M for exclusive rights to him is, because somewhere they had a plan to make money off that. Was Spotify's plan to replicate what YouTube, Facebook, et al, did to make money off Rogan? Or did it have a radically different plan that involved a different audience? A new audience? Changing the tastes of his current audience?

PR kerfuffles resulting from hosting Rogan were totally foreseeable, and surely… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 8:57 AM on January 31, 2022

Also, I see it hasn't been quoted here yet, but it all really does boil down to what acclaimed sexual harasser Isaac Asimov once said about America:

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

Greenwald's screed about liberal screeds above, and all the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 9:08 AM on January 31, 2022

The electoral college works precisely as it was intended

Yes, it does!

it helps moderate the ability of dense urban center votes to completely overwhelm rural votes at the federal level

Hm, not quite it, but keep guessing!
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 6:25 AM on January 31, 2022

The fact that the US has lasted this long has been a minor miracle.

In my more cheerful, hopeful moods—"hope amidst perdition" rather than blithe optimism—I remember that our country started, not as the egalitarian utopia our high school history books pretend it was, but as something a couple of degrees less horseshit than the thing that, in retrospect, was so horseshit that we can't believe people ever lived like that before.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 8:31 AM on January 31, 2022

This might just be a crazy idea, but is anyone else wary of articles written about how "the coming devolution of all things might not be so bad" when written or published by people whose wealth, viewpoint, and privilege keep them from being able to even acknowledge, let alone admit the strife those changes will have on anyone misfortunate enough to not have that same level of insulation?

Fun fact: you can comment this on any article from The Atlantic and it still largely holds true!
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 6:56 AM on January 30, 2022

Sizzle the Meat, it muſt sizzle.
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 6:54 AM on January 30, 2022

I remember the anti-war protest I went to in DC in... 2008, I believe. Maybe 2009. We shipped ourselves over from a tiny college in New Jersey. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up. I forget exactly how many, but it was a relative horde.

As far as I can tell, it was never covered on any news channel, or by any major outlet. Why would it? The war wasn't about to end, Obama was president, and hippie protesters gonna hippie protest. Something like that. The people were… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 4:42 AM on January 29, 2022

She’s also a great writer: How I Got Smart
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 11:59 AM on January 28, 2022

Yeah, that's extremely reasonable! The article makes it clear that the overlap between the January 6th protestors and believers in the Great Replacement is pretty non-trivial. And this in particular makes it clear that that's the most unifying factor by far, specifically mentioning fear of job loss as secondary to race-driven anxiety:

When you ask questions about their belief in “the great replacement,” you see that that is head and shoulders the No. 1 belief that’s… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by rorgy at 1:36 PM on January 27, 2022