"I worked in a warehouse. It's where I felt so free. Then HR saw that video and terminated me."

I was good. I was great. I was busy moving freight. But I wanted to be funny, now the trucks will have to wait. I miss that icy freezer. I know that must sound odd, but now the smoke has cleared and my testicles  have thawed. I used to pick up pallets and I used to lift them high. It used to lift my spirits up. I felt like I could fly....

That's Blake Porter, via this Metafilter post by CrunchyFrog.

I enjoyed that. It was sweet and quirky, and I felt for the guy (even though I also think employers do need some rules about making your own videos at work, especially if you're working with heavy equipment like forklifts).

But it also got me wondering about Metafilter. I remember years ago, it had hot debate about political and social issues, but now it seems that everyone has agreed amongst themselves only to talk about sweet little quirky things and to be really nice to each other. It's a gentle pleasant atmosphere, but what the hell happened? What sapped all the vigor out of the place? If you go over there now, you'll see a post about what Isaac Asimov wrote about "1984" in 1980, how Jhumpa Lahiri is finding "quivering energy" in the works of Thomas Hardy, the rescue of a sea turtle, a walk to see (hear?) a sound sculpture, a bird that has relearned an old birdsong, a cat in a library, what rock art might be saying about Tasmanian tigers, etc. etc. 

Attempting to use Grok to explore my wonderment, I encountered the word "cozification." My search based on that word might have led me down various sweet quirky paths, but in the interest of keeping myself sharp and fast-moving, I decided to end this post with this screen shot (from Urban Dictionary) which I deem found art:

"As the categories have gotten, well, weirder, I’ve tried to create balance by not mixing tricky wordplay with hard trivia, so that there’s a path to a solution."

"If there’s a particularly hard-to-spot category, I might try to include a hint on the board. While cards are usually arranged to mislead the solver, sometimes the arrangement can be used to help, too. The category of 'Anagrams of Famous Painters' was tough, for example, so the top row of that board read 'EGADS SCRAMBLE ARTIST NAME' (EGADS is an anagram of 'Degas')...."

From "I Make Connections. Here’s What I’m Actually Thinking. The 1,000th Connections puzzle is out today. Wyna Liu, the writer behind the game, knows you have thoughts" (NYT)(gift link).

"I’ve... learned that some people hate when a word on the board is repeated in a category name. So I was honored when a friend showed me a post in the subreddit r/NYTConnections, with the heading 'In celebration of the single worst purple connections category ever …' A solver shared an image of what appeared to be a tattoo: a clam encircled by the words 'Things That Open Like a Clam.' (COMPACT, LAPTOP, WAFFLE IRON and … CLAM.)"

I think the problem is that a clam isn't like a clam. A clam's a clam. It was a great category, just named inaccurately.

Now, that I've got my "mollusks" tag on this post, I'm motivated to blog this other thing. I didn't even know about nudibranchs — lovely colorful mollusks — but I learned about them today when somebody at Metafilter linked to Wool Creature Lab a place that uses the craft of felting to make (to order) images of quite specific nudibranchs. They're beautiful, too beautiful to believe they are accurate images of real creatures. But the scientific name is listed with the felt item, and you can look it up and see photos of the living nudibranch. It's accurate.

"Will this scatter the Effective Altruism herd? Or will they bleat that he Did It Wrong, and the movement can never fail only be failed by the weak, &c.?"

A good question, asked in the Metafilter discussion, "Jury finds Sam Bankman-Fried guilty."

That made me notice that I hadn't heard much about effective altruism lately (but isn't it always hard to notice what is not being said?).

I went looking for recent SBF stories that talked about effective altruism. Hard to find anything — that is, I found the absence of talk — but I did find this at CoinDesk: "Sam Bankman-Fried Demonstrates Ineffective Altruism at Its Worst/The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

That sounds like it's going to be the he-did-it-wrong "bleat" that the Metafilter commenter was predicting, but it's not:

"I feel like people younger than I am have an idea of what [the] 90s were like that increasingly has little to do with..."

"... my actual lived experience of being a teenager/twenty-some[t]hing in the 90s. This clip in all of its awkward, heartbreaking, briefly, inexplicably lovely 'how did all of these people end up here together?' energy is exactly it for me"/"It’s remarkable how the vibe of everyone on-set changes when Elliott Smith starts playing the song, they all seem like people who’ve all fled their god’s command to seek truth and beauty, and then that song rises from the deep and swallows them all, even the puppet."

2 comments at Metafilter, reacting to this 1995 clip from the FX show "Breakfast Time."

Hosting the show are: 1. Tom Bergeron (later of "America’s Funniest Home Videos" and "Dancing With The Stars"), 2. Laurie Hibberd (AKA Laurie Gelman, who published a 2022 novel titled "Smells Like Tween Spirit"), and 3. Bob (a puppet):

Elliott Smith died, in 2003, of 2 stab wounds to the chest. He left a note: "I'm so sorry—love, Elliott. God forgive me.

We're just not existing at the same speed as the birds.

Let's just slow down that birdsong so we can really hear what's going on:

 

Amazing bird singing
by u/sabbah in nextfuckinglevel

Via Metafilter, where somebody says, "Reddit is a terrible place to learn things, because any comments with real info gets lost in thousands of silly puns and cultural references. But the video comes from this Instagram account with many more videos of the birb."

So Metafilter is the place where they just have to say "birb" for "bird" and they get snooty about Reddit, and,  I guess, Instagram is the best choice for finding the originator of the material.

And TikTok is where you go to find a guy who comically portrays Redditors as the ones who are snooty.

"Wow."

Via Metafilter, where many comment "Wow"... because Owen Wilson says "Wow."

 

"In dreams (Coleridge writes), images take the shape of the effects we believe they cause."

"We are not terrified because some sphinx is threatening us but rather dream of a sphinx in order to explain the terror we are feeling. If this is the case, how can a simple account of such imaginings communicate the dread and the thrills, the adventure, anxieties, and joys conjured by last night's dream? I am going to attempt to do this all the same.... It took place in the Humanities Building, at dusk.... We were electing people to committees... Suddenly we were assaulted by the racket of a street band or a demonstration.... A voice cried: 'Here they come!' then: 'It's the Gods!'..."

Wrote Jorge Luis Borges, in "Ragnarok."

I'm reading that this morning because it's in an Ask Metafilter discussion about something that happened to me last night: dreaming that you are very sleepy, struggling with sleepiness within the story that is the dream.

I'm blogging it because I find it very cool when a subject recurs within a blogging session, and I had already blogged about Coleridge this morning.

"Two days ago, I decided to stop doing the dishes. I make all the dinners and I am tired of having to do all the cleaning too. SINCE THEN..."

"... this pile has appeared and at some point they are going to run out of spoons and cups and plates. Who will blink first? Not me."

Tweeted Miss Potkin, with lots of photos (keep scrolling). 

Via Metafilter, where somebody says "So it’s like Wages for Housework, except you get Twitter faves instead of wages, and instead of a deep feminist critique of capitalism, you get a resentful critique of your shitty family?"

"This is one of the more bizarre articles I've read in a looong time, but not necessarily for the details (which are admittedly bizarre), but more because it's unclear to me why this article exists."

"The article title suggests that it's about how an 'expert' on judgment is still capable of making bad decisions. This led me to believe the rest of the article would expand on this concept, and perhaps offer some insights on the human condition or how all of us are fallible, etc. But it doesn't do that at all, it's more like an extremely detailed laundry list of unpleasant human behavior, but no real attempt at analysis. The punchline is 'Hay remains mystified about what the women really wanted from him.' Um, ok? And you're publicly revealing all this why?"

Writes jeremias at Metafilter, about "The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge/A Harvard Law professor who teaches a class on judgment wouldn’t seem like an obvious mark, would he?," which we've been talking about here and which I can't stop thinking about.

Answering jeremias's question is jam jam:

Since you won't say it jeremias, I will.

We are seeing this right now because so many people are so uncomfortable about the things women are saying about powerful men, and they are DESPERATE for any excuse at all to disbelieve those women.

And this story will give them that at an unconscious level.

Suddenly, "The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge" pairs up with that other article we've been talking about,"The Case of Al Franken/A close look at the accusations against the former senator."

Asking "how."

Google put out a glossy video based on the Google searches beginning with "how" that people did in 2017:



I watched it this morning because there was a Metafilter post about it, here, where people said things like:

When I type "how" into Google, the first auto-complete which comes up that I know isn't mine is, "how to hard boil eggs".

Thanks, Google. I know that some of my other searches may put me into "can't tie his own shoes" categories, but I do know how to hard boil eggs. I'm slightly less useless than that.

But there are fine points to hard-boiling an egg. You might want to check unless you already know whether to put the egg in at the beginning or only after the water boils. Do you really know the exact number of minutes to go after the water boils and is that with the water continuing to boil or with the heat turned off? Now that I think about it, I bet if you Google, you'll find your method of tying your shoes called into question.

Speaking of which... "how to tie a tie" — along with "how to make slime" — is one of the most common search completions on Google. Another Metafilter commenter said:

Top three "how" autocompletes for me are:

"how to tie a tie"
"how to lose weight"
"how to kiss"

I think Google has a misapprehension about me. I bloody hope so.

I blame the fact that I'm on the Internet connection at my parents' new vicarage where they've only just moved in, so maybe this is a picture of the single vicar who was here before?

So I did my own "how to..." search, and Google gave me:

how to tie a tie
how to make slime
how to buy ripple

How to buy Ripple?! You mean how to stumble into a low-rent liquor store?



I prefer this song about Ripple:



And for you "Sanford and Son" fans, here's a full glass.

Ah, but I'm living in the 1970s. Google is right now, kicking 2017 to the curb and moving on to 2018. And Ripple, I learn this morning, is another cryptocurrency, that is, another subject that fails to convince me to ground myself in the present.

"Ripple is huge in Japan and Japanese interest in crypto currencies in general has skyrocketed (based on trading volume) over the past six months... Ripple has been one of the first cryptos to really recover from the Christmas doldrums... Ripple is still a buy-and-hold.... Disclosure: I own some Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ether."

Ether... to get back to the 70s....

This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel ... total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue – severence of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally ... you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can't control it.

"What's the most pointless argument you've been passionately involved in?"

A Reddit discussion. The top-rated answer is:

My junior year of high school I got into a very heated debate with my friend over whether Cheetos were considered chips. After half an hour of yelling about this he finally called frito-lay headquarters to ask their opinion on the matter. I was right, they're not chips :)

Via Metafilter, where somebody says:

I remember an epic argument about whether Minnesota is "almost in Canada."

And:

A famous argument I remember having was whether or not the crust of the bread is indeed considered to be "bread" itself, or if it is in fact another, distinct product known as "crust."

I'm amused by that use of the word "famous."

Here are some things I've found myself arguing about far longer than sanity would advise:

1. Whether butterflies are insects. I found myself resorting to statements like: "If you don't think they're insects, what do you think they are? Birds?!!???"

2. At what age do you become "middle aged"? I was in my 20s and saying "middle age" must start by 40 or 45 because it's considered the longest period of one's life, and I was talking to a woman who was almost 60 and wouldn't even concede that she was middle aged. One of her arguments was that the President of the United States — Gerald Ford, in his early 60s — shouldn't be considered middle aged yet because he played golf.

3. Who was conceived in the "immaculate conception"? I was at a dinner party with Madison academics and their spouses in the 1980s and got hooted down by people who sure the answer was Jesus. I was hampered by: a. No iPhone and no Google to make the correct answer obvious, b. Not seeing any social benefit in arguing about religion at a dinner party with people who were ready to be so ignorant and assholian about religion, c. Thinking about how much money I could make taking bets and distracted by the static of the idea that it would not be religiously correct.

4. Whether it is possible to picture infinite planets. I was willing to concede that there could be an infinite number of planets, but stood firm on my own personal subjective inability to imagine such a thing. How can you argue with that? I was with someone whose point of view was: How can you NOT argue with that? I could not be left alone with my imaginative shortcoming. I said I understood the idea of infinite space and could imagine infinite space, but a whole planet.... I'm picturing each one with a number on it. You never run out of numbers. So how could there be any planet that could not have a number to go with it? I don't need you to agree with me, you can even pity me in my disability, but leave me alone with it. NO!!! It's as though my non-infinite-mindedness was contagious and he had to cure me so he didn't catch it. Or maybe he was so angry because he did catch it and it horrified him.

"How Corporations Became Obsessed with Fitness Tracking."

"Once companies amass troves of data on employees’ health, what will stop them from developing health scores and wielding them to sift through job candidates? Much of the proxy data collected, whether step counts or sleeping patterns, is not protected by law, so it would theoretically be perfectly legal. And it would make sense. As we’ve seen, they routinely reject applicants on the basis of credit scores and personality tests. Health scores represent a natural — and frightening — next step."

Here's the article and here's the Metafilter discussion. Many good comments there. I'll just single out:

The really galling thing is that employers put the burden of these 'wellness' programs entirely on the employee. They want employees to walk 10,000 steps per day, for example, but don't provide breaks for employees to go for a walk during the day. If you're a sedentary office worker, this effectively means making the wellness program an unpaid second shift. It's a hell of a racket.

These 'incentive' programs should be legally required to be completable during normal, paid work hours. If an employer wants its employees to go to the gym, then the employer can damn well pay for their memberships and let them count time spent there as work.

"These are neat? I guess? In that someone made effort and put something that I can kind of identify with on the web."

Says a Metafilter participant, reacting to "Extremely Accurate Charts for Book Nerds." The commenter continues:

[T]he older I get, the less I identify with books being cool for their own sake. This may be a function of hyperabundance, both of texts of any sort (Kindle, magazines, www, &c.) and of actual books--books, which are harder and harder to unload at used bookstores or even Goodwill because of that same hyperabundance. I live in a small place, our home library has something close to a book-in, book-out policy.

I love to read, I can't not read, but I guess I don't care as much about the substrate as I used to.

"Okay, so as a looney leftie who is constantly told by liberals I can't dislike Obama for things like..."

"... ramping up the drone war, finding legal justification to extrajudicially murder American citizens without trial, and so on and so forth, because of his "other accomplishments" that just outweigh that so much. You know, like that hand-out to the insurance industry instead of giving us Single Payer healthcare we all asked for, oh and don't forget, he's cool with gay people! So *waves hands* just forget all this icky shit happening, he loves teh gays! Isn't that just progressive? So, for real, considering this is fucking flat out going down the 1984/Police State hole, can I officially hate Obama for such obviously fascist positions? Can I just say I hate him, just this once, and not be told that I'm not a good liberal because of it? That I need to let it go because he's done some minor stuff for regular people? What the living hell is going on with our government? How can they make these kind of arguments with a straight face, and why am I expected to take them fucking seriously, and treat them with respect when they pull this kind of shit? How am I supposed to take Democrats seriously when this is just as bad, or worse, than anything Bush II ever pulled while in the White House? This was a moment that the shoe incident needed a fucking repeat. Maybe a swift redwing to the noggin might make Obama realize he's being the worst he can fucking be. He may have skipped Nancy Reagan's funeral for this, but god damn did he position himself on the coattails of Reagan with this speech. Seriously, I am so angry right now. I can hardly even contain it over this shit. Honestly, any government official suggesting this kind of thing against their citizens should be fucking impeached."

A comment on a Metafilter post about "Obama, at South by Southwest, Calls for Law Enforcement Access in Encryption Fight."

Sitting in a booth in a diner, Ben Carson explains his campaign's new urban radio ad to Jorge Ramos.

You hear only the beginning of the ad in that video — as Ramos, after asking Carson about the ad, starts playing it on a mobile phone. You can play the whole ad here. And here's the discussion at Metafilter. Excerpt:

I was hoping for more of the "I'm Ben Carson and I'm here to say..." style rap popular among conservatives and corporate team-building consultants everywhere.

"...store your grain the Egyptian way."

"I identify as grey-asexual (can't bring myself to call it greysexual) and for me it's a useful term."

"I experience sexual attraction vanishingly rarely and when I do it's often not strong enough to even act on, more of an intellectual curiosity. Some folks in the asexual community can be absolutists about the identity, so that a person with my history, for instance, wouldn't be considered asexual, even though my lived experience is more in line with asexuality than not. Grey-asexual identifies those who fall between asexual and non-asexual and can help those of us who fall on that part of the spectrum understand ourselves. It's not a term with an exact definition and people who identify with it often have their own interpretations, but it's functioning in an area where the language is evolving rapidly as people work to more accurately express their feelings, hence the host of identities in the article."

From the Metafilter comments on a post about a HuffPo article collecting a bunch of words that purportedly identify various sexual conditions. The HuffPo article is not good. It seems like it could be a joke, but if so it would be: 1. not particularly funny, and 2. disrespectful toward some people you'd expect HuffPo to swath in dignity. The HuffPo article can be experienced as funny, as Metafilter commenters point out, if you concentrate on why the various stock photos were chosen to illustrate the particular sexual conditions. Why is the "graysexual" a man in a hat walking down the middle of a country road?

The serious question — the one that made me choose the quote above — is whether having more specific words for feelings helps people understand who they are and what they are doing with their lives? Off hand, I say it depends on what you do with that word once you learn it.

"Do you need vulva emoji? Or do you want to keep typing ({|})?"

"Feministing has done an article on Flirtmoji's recent release of 15 vulva emoji, realistically asymmetrical and in a variety of pleasant colors. Designer Katy McCarthy did an interview on her work on these sexually explicit emoji and the necessity of inclusivity."

So says Metafilter. The linked Feministing article is "THESE NEW VAGINA EMOJIS ARE THE BEST." So you've got Metafilter subtly prodding the feminist blog to be a tad more accurate with the genitalia terminology.

Here's the interview with McCarthy, going into the depth of why people need sexy emoji:

What’s really beautiful about sex, and emoji, is that sex is really playful and also really difficult. And at the core of good sex is good communication. So to that end, I think that whatever it takes for you to be able to communicate what you want or need, or what you don’t want and don’t need is fine... I think with sex there are things that are really hard to say and hard to ask for, and that’s such a beautiful window to be able to provide someone with language....

This takes me back to something we were talking about yesterday, the "yes means yes" movement and how it privileges those who are language oriented. 

"This sounds like so terrible an idea that it almost has to be a joke — parents seriously proposing to give their daughter a large amount of money because she's a girl..."

"... and thinking that this won't kill the relationship between the siblings plus render junior a lifetime MRA. Plus 'we have to give your sister a lot of money because the world beats up on women'... that seems like the privatization of a structural problem. I mean, you could say 'well, little boys are spoiled by the world, so who cares if he feels like his parents didn't love him as much? and men are largely useless as family members, so who cares if their relationship is ruined?' Or even 'the son has to accept his privilege and if he wants a relationship with his sister, he has to accept that his parents will be giving her investments to generate three million dollars — if he can't accept that, he's an [overprivileged] whiner.' But I just...I don't think that's how feelings work in families...."

Comment on a Metafilter post titled: "Saving for a daughter but not a son: This father is starting a fund to combat the the wage gap." Here's the underlying article at Elle, subtitled: "As Paul Ford's twins grew, he couldn't stand the fact that his daughter would always lag behind his son financially. Then he hatched a brilliant plan...."

Relive the old-time frustration of typing on a real typewriter.

Here. I did:



Click to enlarge.

Via Metafilter, where someone bemoans the lack of simulation of the keys jamming when you hit 2 at the same time.

"Three months ago, I began posting images of myself without makeup on social media."

"The following film contains real comments that were left on images of my face."



Via Metafilter, where somebody says:

I'm really not trying to say that men with acne don't suffer; however, the abuse shown in the video IS heavily gendered. All of that horrible shit about "never trusting a b*tch with makeup" and "have some dignity sl*t" is very specifically a thing that women have to deal with and men do not.

Although of course women are expected to cover it up,

And then be excoriated as liars and deceivers and whores by the same men who demanded they cover it with makeup in the first place.

There is absolutely a strain in U.S. culture, at least, which says that a woman in literally any state of existence is fundamentally horrifying and wrong.

To be fair, there is a huge middle ground between absolutely no makeup and theatrically heavy makeup. Only foundation was needed to even out the skin tone. The penciled eyebrows, false eyelashes, and "contouring" have nothing to do with hiding acne. But I do think the insults mean something. The Metafilter commenter calls them "heavily gendered," but, interestingly, we can't tell if they are coming from men or women. If from men, they ought to examine why they feel attracted to a look they know is a mask. Why get mad at women for walking through a well-known open door? If the insults are from women (heterosexual women), then what's is it — some screwy demand for a level-playing-field competition?

Somebody else at Metafilter links to this Amy Schumer video: