Beans, LEDs, Police and Play-Doh

September 22, 2008 10:21 AM

Star Simpson, the MIT student arrested in Boston Logan Airport for wearing a home-made light-up sweatshirt (and the subject of a Mefi post) has her first public interview one year later at BoingBoing. (Link is to transcript - MP4 video also available).
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul to MetaFilter-related at 10:21 AM (81 comments total)

So?
posted by k8t at 10:31 AM on September 22, 2008

So, it's a callback. But what kind of a name is "Star"?

Wait a second. MITERS may be just what I'm looking for. No "membership"! Too bad they are fairly distant from me, but...
posted by DU at 10:38 AM on September 22, 2008

I fully support the "So?" camp and would like to add my vote to the roll call that this thread may become.
posted by 517 at 10:38 AM on September 22, 2008

I applaud Bora long-name for posting this.
posted by Mister_A at 10:40 AM on September 22, 2008

Finally, some closure!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:46 AM on September 22, 2008

Thanks for the follow up.
posted by Artw at 10:47 AM on September 22, 2008

This is related to metafilter how?
posted by puke & cry at 11:05 AM on September 22, 2008

...in that it's a follow up to a 725 comments thread?
posted by Artw at 11:10 AM on September 22, 2008 [1 favorite]

I would've said fuck it and FPPed it myslef, though no doubt the same parade of picky assholes would show up.
posted by Artw at 11:11 AM on September 22, 2008 [2 favorites]

And? Just because something is posted here and has a lot of comments doesn't mean it has anything to do with metafilter.
posted by puke & cry at 11:13 AM on September 22, 2008

Just because something is posted here and has a lot of comments doesn't mean it has anything to do with metafilter.

Doesn't mean it doesn't, either. Nyaaa.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:16 AM on September 22, 2008

Just because something is posted here and has a lot of comments doesn't mean it has anything to do with metafilter.

Aren't follows-up normally posted to MeTa?

Actually, I should make that question itself a MetaTalk post. It's about MetaFilter, so it must be quality, right?

Christ.
posted by DU at 11:17 AM on September 22, 2008 [3 favorites]

As noted above, we post follow ups in meta all the time. No one has killed your dog, please stop jumping up and down.
posted by Artw at 11:18 AM on September 22, 2008 [5 favorites]

Sew?
posted by C17H19NO3 at 11:22 AM on September 22, 2008

Artw: I would've said fuck it and FPPed it myslef, though no doubt the same parade of picky assholes would show up.

Jesus god, can somebody just link to the stupid thread already? That would've saved all this, you know. And it would've kept this post from sounding like 'hey, look, this happened on BoingBoing, so it's Metafilter-related!'
posted by koeselitz at 11:24 AM on September 22, 2008

it's a follow up to a 725 comments thread?

That's 300 more than the original September 11th FPP! And way less than the Violet Blue nonsense!
Where are your priorities, MetaFilter?
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:24 AM on September 22, 2008

Missed that it was there the whole time. Here I've been searching for it for ten minutes. Ack.

I'll be soaking my head if anybody needs me.
posted by koeselitz at 11:25 AM on September 22, 2008

Bug report. I'm the only user that can see this text: (and the subject of a Mefi post)
posted by DU at 11:25 AM on September 22, 2008 [2 favorites]

koeselitz, bora linked to the thread in question.
posted by Mister_A at 11:26 AM on September 22, 2008

I seem to remember being sort of douchey in that thread, so I'm not sure I want to go back and read it again. Or maybe that was "every other thread besides that one" where I was a douche, I forget...
posted by Mister_A at 11:28 AM on September 22, 2008

I seem to remember lots of "OMG why are you talking about this or finding it interesting?" type dickishness at the time as well.
posted by Artw at 11:32 AM on September 22, 2008

It was the second thing.
posted by Mister_A at 11:32 AM on September 22, 2008

the same parade of picky assholes would show up

That about sums up the downside of ANY post.
posted by dirtdirt at 11:33 AM on September 22, 2008

Oh look, theres MetaMan.
posted by Artw at 11:34 AM on September 22, 2008

Oh my god! Somebody killed my dog!
posted by yhbc at 11:34 AM on September 22, 2008

That about sums up the downside of ANY post.

Heh. I do feel a certain nervousness until the first few comments are made on any post of mine, in case one of the threadshitter brigade finds a reason (real or imagined) to dump all over it.
posted by Artw at 11:39 AM on September 22, 2008

Star Simpson

Sarah Palin and OJ had carnal relations?!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:42 AM on September 22, 2008 [2 favorites]

yhbc, your dog was carrying A PIECE oF FRICKIN BONE IN HER MOUTH, in the BUS DEPOT, fer chrissakes, so we figgered she'd kilt someone already and planned on doin' it again. Please remit $4.55 for the cost of ammunition.
posted by Mister_A at 11:43 AM on September 22, 2008

She had to plead down to 50 hours community service, not getting arrested again in the next year, and a public apology to the city of Boston.

Are you freaking kidding me?
posted by allkindsoftime at 11:47 AM on September 22, 2008

"Boston, I'm very, very sorry...THAT YOU'RE SO STUPID! Oh burn."
posted by DU at 11:49 AM on September 22, 2008 [12 favorites]

So now we're giving free publicity to terrorists? They win again. Weeps small, patriotic, red-white-and-blue tear.
posted by Deathalicious at 11:54 AM on September 22, 2008 [1 favorite]

I'm the only user that can see this text: (and the subject of a Mefi post)

And? It's been over a year, if it's worth another FPP, put it on MeFi. I know there's been back and forth on this issue already, but updating on MeTa doesn't make sense to me; the Blue has a daily audience of tens of thousands, while the Gray's regulars number in in the low hundreds. You're not doing your subject matter any favours posting updates to it here where the viewership is a fraction of the original, the expectation of polite conduct is far lower, and the likelihood of derails proportionally higher. If you believe your content to be a valid post, bite the bullet, post to MeFi, and let the chips and chumps fall where they may. If it gets the hook, it gets the hook. If it's worthy, it deserves better than this.

Artw: I like your posts.
Well, except for that Dr. Who stuff.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:57 AM on September 22, 2008

Bostonite.
posted by Artw at 12:04 PM on September 22, 2008

Matt has a hook? I thought this stuff was all, like, digital.
posted by everichon at 12:10 PM on September 22, 2008

On the other hand, this did make me look at Boing Boing, so screw you Bora.
posted by Artw at 12:18 PM on September 22, 2008 [1 favorite]

Oh yeah! I would like to post an update on my personal removal of Boing Boing from my RSS feed, following the Violet Blue nonsense: It's going very well.
posted by everichon at 12:25 PM on September 22, 2008 [1 favorite]

thanks for the update. I had forgotten about this girl.
posted by nitsuj at 12:35 PM on September 22, 2008

She had to plead down to 50 hours community service, not getting arrested again in the next year, and a public apology to the city of Boston.

Well, that's all very fair and just, considering she had committed no crime.

I once played a game of Centipede in a Boston airport. I'm still wanted by the police there.
posted by Astro Zombie at 12:51 PM on September 22, 2008 [2 favorites]

updating on MeTa doesn't make sense to me

And yet it doesn't seem to bother many others, crucially including the mods.
posted by languagehat at 1:18 PM on September 22, 2008

And yet it doesn't seem to bother many others, crucially including the mods.

It bothers me. And it may or may not bother the mods—that's beside the point. Anyway,
mathowie: MetaTalk....it's for site policy discussions, bug reports, and feature requests.

I don't see 'updating closed MetaFilter posts' in there, do you? This topic is a site policy discussion, not something to be left to the mods to decide. In fact, discussing what type of posts MeTa is for and what it is not for is exactly what MeTa is for! So, I say, MetaTalk is not for updating MetaFilter posts.
posted by carsonb at 1:26 PM on September 22, 2008

that's beside the point.

Except for the minor matter that it's the mods who decide what stays and what goes, what fits and what doesn't. Since they leave follow-up posts and don't chastise the people who make them, those who take it upon themselves to act as Junior MeTa Cops and do the chastising for them are simply being dicks.
posted by languagehat at 1:28 PM on September 22, 2008 [1 favorite]

So we're no longer a self-policing community? We don't have a flagging system? We, the users, may not make the final decision but we sure as heck have the opportunity to input our opinions on the matter. Leaving it up to mathowie, jessamyn, cortex, and vacapinta is abandoning this community's great shining quality, the bit that sets it apart from all those other community sites out there: MetaTalk. MetaTalk is where we get to hash out what doesn't belong and of what does belong, where it should go. Don't get me wrong, I'm not slagging on the moderators of this community. They know I love them with a passion reserved for long-distance internet-based one-sided love affairs, but I'm not going to let that blind me to my duty as a Junior Fucking MeTa Cop. I'm proud to be a part of a self-policing community, a participating element in MetaTalk.
posted by carsonb at 1:34 PM on September 22, 2008

Well, that's all very fair and just, considering she had committed no crime.

The people of Boston are a simple and superstitious folk. She's lucky she didn't get burned as a witch.
posted by Artw at 1:34 PM on September 22, 2008 [1 favorite]

Lately, metatalk is becoming a place to reopen discussions that get axed from the blue, or that have since closed.
I don't consider this to be metafilter related, so mostly to prevent it from becoming a defining precedent I'd prefer not to have it here.
On preview...I like to think the mods base their decisions to some extent on opinions expressed in MeTa, so, far from being "Junior MeTa Cops", we're participating in a decision process here.
posted by rocket88 at 1:35 PM on September 22, 2008

I'm proud to be a part of a self-policing community

trans: I like sanctioned trolling!
posted by Artw at 1:35 PM on September 22, 2008

Well now it's getting interesting.
posted by Mister_A at 1:39 PM on September 22, 2008

There are two lessons here:
1. Stay out of Boston airport if you insist on wearing light-up clothing.
2. Stay out of MetaFilter if you are not braced for a pummeling.
posted by Cranberry at 1:46 PM on September 22, 2008

Wow, carsonb went meta on meta. Never go meta on meta.
posted by Artw at 2:13 PM on September 22, 2008 [1 favorite]

She's a pretty cute terrorist. It's too bad she had to drop out of MIT because of a stupid misunderstanding.
posted by Dave Faris at 2:20 PM on September 22, 2008

What a smug, insufferable brat. And Star Simpson is irritating as well.
posted by Pastabagel at 2:24 PM on September 22, 2008

Updates on old major posts are fine in metatalk, carsonb, if they're rare as they are now (we only get them once or twice a month which feels fine to me)
posted by mathowie at 2:30 PM on September 22, 2008

Well alright then.
posted by carsonb at 2:32 PM on September 22, 2008

Just to be clear, if they were super frequent, or on really minor threads, they would get old and maybe we'd say hey, no updates in MetaTalk anymore, but for the most part people have used this space wisely to make very sporadic updates on fairly major threads months later.
posted by mathowie at 2:45 PM on September 22, 2008

OK, cool, I can hang with that. Thank you for taking the time to explain your reasoning. I don't suppose you could put similar sentiments in the closed MeTa thread on this topic?
posted by carsonb at 2:52 PM on September 22, 2008

She better not try to copyright that sweatshirt design, or she'll be disinterviewovelated.<sup>*

*</sup>A dark ritual beginning the careful excision of all vowels from the printed transcript. The remaining consonants are then crammed back into the maw that originally spake them into being. Finally, the transgressor is forced to recite their vowels backwards—sending the poor soul back to the dimension from which they came.
posted by CKmtl at 3:10 PM on September 22, 2008

...and so inconclusion you can identify Bostonites by their queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes, features which are most likely the result of interbreeding with fish people. Never go there.
posted by Artw at 3:12 PM on September 22, 2008

Jesus, Boston is pathetic.
posted by maxwelton at 3:16 PM on September 22, 2008 [1 favorite]

Star has a greenpeace sticker on her computer. It's backwards, because boingboing flipped her feed for some goofy reason.
posted by garlic at 3:21 PM on September 22, 2008

Well, OK then. I guess it must have been too much to hope that the Boinger hipster might ask something like "Granting that you meant no harm, and that you had no inkling that your sartorial effotrts to attract attention to yourself might attract some negative attention at the airport, at some point in the past year have you come to terms with why you were arrested that day?" or "could you wipe that smug superior smile off your face long enough to talk seriously about how you can claim today that you had no idea why you were being grabbed by security after, by your own account, the LED-festooned circuit board on your chest with the red wires coming out had freaked out the poor lady at the information kiosk and you had decided it might be a good idea at that point to catch a cab?"
posted by longsleeves at 3:55 PM on September 22, 2008

Clearly, this is not someone who watches enough TV. Americans have been trained, from many hours spent watching television, to associate any exposed circuitry/wiring and/or blinking lights with homemade bombs or the flayed skull of a Terminator. Throw in a soft, claylike substance (probably stained red with the blood of Christian babies) and it's a match for "bomb" in the eyes of people who probably have not received a great deal of training on what bombs look like. Now, that's hardly a correct association, but it is one commonly made anyway.

I don't suppose TSA ignorance is an excuse, but her ignorance shouldn't be a bulletproof shield, either. She lives in a city where the government had freaked out over some LED throwies, eight months prior. I know MIT tries to cultivate a reputation of being removed from the affairs of mortals, but it isn't as if the event somehow wouldn't have penetrated. The swastika was (and still is, I suppose) a good luck sign in some cultures, but you should probably try to be aware enough not to stagger into a bar mitzvah while wearing one and then wonder what the fuss is about.

I suppose wearing a giant wristwatch (in stopwatch mode) made from a bunch of seven-segment displays with the wiring (red and green) wound round her wrist as a wristband would qualify as marginally having less common sense.
posted by adipocere at 3:56 PM on September 22, 2008 [1 favorite]

It bothers me. And it may or may not bother the mods—that's beside the point....This topic is a site policy discussion, not something to be left to the mods to decide. In fact, discussing what type of posts MeTa is for and what it is not for is exactly what MeTa is for! So, I say, MetaTalk is not for updating MetaFilter posts.

So much of what is and isn't "legal" is based on precedent. The rules of MetaFilter constantly evolve. Personally, I think the practice of putting updates on the grey is fine and would probably also be okay on the blue as well, but at this point there is an established practice of putting updates of note in MeTa. It's happened many many times before, and many of these posts were allowed to stay open and were well received by the MeFi community.

You can't have it both ways. You can't say, "Just because a mod says it's okay doesn't mean it's okay, because this is a self-policing website" and then ignore the fact that this is established behavior by the users of this website.

Whether it is cool with a mod or not may be beside the point, but you can't expect it to be removed just because you decide that your self-policing is better than others.

I would add that the strongest support seems to be for threads that touch us emotionally and updates that answer an unresolved situation or change the status of the individual or topic in question. I think that at least a few of the updates are, "Remember that awesome person who did X, Y, and Z? They died." or "You know how FirstName LastName was trying to achieve impossible goal q? Well, s/he did[n't][!.]" In these cases, this really is a follow up. It is interesting mostly in the context of the earlier thread and does not necessarily stand on its own. On the other hand, this Star thread easily could have stood on its own as "Star Simpson finally talks about her experiences at Logan Airport [previously]". So if we were going to be more restrictive about it, we might ask posters to restrict updates to stories in which the key part of the story is that there is this new change and development [i.e. death or accomplishment] rather than new information [interview, book/software/piece of hardware finally released].
posted by Deathalicious at 4:15 PM on September 22, 2008

pssst, Deathalicious - it's over. carsonb gracefully expressed satisfation couple hours back, it would seem there will be no pistols at dawn.
posted by longsleeves at 4:30 PM on September 22, 2008

Clearly, this is not someone who watches enough TV.

Verily. TV would have helped this situation on so many levels. Really, is there anything TV can't do?
posted by stubby phillips at 5:14 PM on September 22, 2008 [2 favorites]

"could you wipe that smug superior smile off your face long enough to talk seriously about how you can claim today that you had no idea why you were being grabbed by security after, by your own account, the LED-festooned circuit board on your chest with the red wires coming out had freaked out the poor lady at the information kiosk and you had decided it might be a good idea at that point to catch a cab?"
Seriously? I saw Star wearing that sweatshirt on campus earlier that day and at no point did 'bomb' or even 'thing that could vaguely resemble a bomb to the untrained eye' cross my mind. Of course she was surprised to be arrested, the entire situation surrounding her arrest made no fucking sense. The only reason Boston had to continue pressing charges was to save face, which backfired because whenever this comes up in the press again Boston just looks stupid again.
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 6:13 PM on September 22, 2008 [4 favorites]

I haven't read the articles or any of the comments on this thread ....

But let me guess, she's being treated like a fucking hero over at BoingBoing.
posted by jayder at 6:18 PM on September 22, 2008

Well, if the regular police didn't arrest her, then the fashion police would've, so it's all good.
posted by jonmc at 6:37 PM on September 22, 2008

STAR: Things dived further into this spiral of surreality.

She actually said that? out loud?
posted by jonmc at 6:40 PM on September 22, 2008 [2 favorites]

You know, I'm still pissed from that one time the cops tackled me when I went into the courthouse wanting to speak to Judge Stark. They claimed they couldn't tell whether BB-gun I was wielding was a real gun. I mean, come on! It's like they learned what guns look like from TV or something.
posted by FuManchu at 7:01 PM on September 22, 2008

I went back and re-read my posts in that thread. I stand by them. I still think we can talk about your rights and your date with Xeni and Cory after we determine the strange thing with wires and clay strapped to your chest is just a dipshit undergrad art project.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:11 PM on September 22, 2008

I don't suppose TSA ignorance is an excuse, but her ignorance shouldn't be a bulletproof shield, either. She lives in a city where the government had freaked out over some LED throwies, eight months prior.- adipocere

Star only lived in Boston for her school; she was raised in Hawai'i (Maui, even!).

Yeah, cuz, even with the "wonderful" exposure to television, most of our children still remain amazingly unsophisticated and trusting. We all share many poignant family stories about the misadventures of our young when first hitting the mainland jungle.

Even Obama can't explain what it means to grow up in this place. It's an ohana thing; you wouldn't understand.
posted by Surfurrus at 8:52 PM on September 22, 2008

I didn't know they had internet in Hawaii.
posted by puke & cry at 9:03 PM on September 22, 2008

OK! OK! Boston is pathetic! Boston is stupid! The garment made students smile so the needlessly tense people in security at Logan should have said "Oh, that's Star in her witty circuit-jacket! She can wait in the VIP lounge!"

I mean it wasn't ticking, right?

In the future, everybody will wear battery powered clothes. That's how we'll know it's the future!
posted by longsleeves at 9:07 PM on September 22, 2008

But what kind of a name is "Star"?

It's a first name.

And those of you who hate Boston, WE ALREADY HATE YOU WORSE.

Also, MIT is in Cambridge.
posted by Sidhedevil at 9:12 PM on September 22, 2008 [2 favorites]

Also, MIT is in Cambridge.

True, but denial is not a river in Egypt.
posted by Ryvar at 10:35 PM on September 22, 2008

And yet it doesn't seem to bother many others, crucially including the mods... Except for the minor matter that it's the mods who decide what stays and what goes, what fits and what doesn't.

Too bad there isn't a subsite where the mods actively encouraged feedback from the community, to discuss and talk about Meta-related things, the grey issues, if you will.
But what would they call it? And just as crucially, what colour would the background be?

Since they leave follow-up posts and don't chastise the people who make them, those who take it upon themselves to act as Junior MeTa Cops and do the chastising for them are simply being dicks.

Unlike yourself, O Mellow and Never Dickish Languagehat. If you had bothered reading past the point in my comment where you decided I deserved to be put in my place - nice shiny badge you got there, by the way - you'd realize that I'm averse to updates on MeTa because it's a crappy delivery system for the content and information its poster presumably wants to share.

I'm not motivated by the "MetaTalk is for this and this only," ideology as I'm thinking "Hey, the original post got over 700 comments. That's by no means an indicator of quality, but this subsite has a daily dedicated audience of approximately half that, you're probably missing a ginormous chunk of people who'd be interested in hearing about this." The mods are cool with it, fine, I'm not trying to change their minds or the policy. Again, I just think that Updaters are cutting themselves off at the knees and not giving the material its due by posting it here - an update is not a double and MeFi is not MeTa, where derails abound and jerky comments largely go undeleted.

Self-policing has been grossly devalued by people using it as an excuse to be pricks. Sort of like how the tired "Golly, I hope there's a flame out!" meme lost what little charm it had and became more of an obstruction to constructive discourse by encouraging a gleefully nasty pile-on mentality. If I'm acting like a prick, it's because that's how I'm feeling at that given moment. If I think something's subpar or crap, far more often than not I flag it. I didn't flag this.

Now here's the part where someone says "Hey, that whiny Asterix guy's flaming out! Quick, page languagehat!"
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:44 PM on September 22, 2008

Well, after rereading the original thread, I guess I'm going to have to cancel my plans to visit the Boston Airport wearing a trench coat, bowler hat, curly mustache, while carrying around my cannon-ball trailing a lit fuse.

Which is a pity, because that look always gets a lot of laughs.
posted by quin at 8:21 AM on September 23, 2008

I saw Star wearing that sweatshirt on campus earlier that day and at no point did 'bomb' or even 'thing that could vaguely resemble a bomb to the untrained eye' cross my mind.

You can also carry around a little baggie of pot and a bong in your backpack on campus. You cannot at an airport.

Although I never knew it at the time, university students really are self-obsessed, egotistical chuckleheads.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:23 AM on September 23, 2008

She better not try to copyright that sweatshirt design, or she'll be disinterviewovelated.

It's funny that you should mention that. It's so funny I finally threw down my $5 for the chance to share the joke.

The shirt- this shirt- has one of my husband's pictogram drawings behind all wiring and boards. It was a weird shock/thrill to see the drawing all over the news until we discovered that one of the MIT dorms had been using the image as its mascot for a few years. A fine way to discover you've been ripped off by one of the country's most badass colleges (or at least, a dorm at said badass college). When contacted, they were kind enough to mention that would sell us a shirt.

So that's not only the story of how my husband's work was on the national news by proxy but the story of how I discovered MIT is cheap. That Star! She'll keep us in anecdotes for a while yet.
posted by cheap paper at 10:57 AM on September 23, 2008 [3 favorites]

As someone who was lurking and five dollars richer a year ago, I never got a chance to ask a question that plagued me then and still haunts me now: every piece of coverage I saw on this (including the original FPP) seemed to employ some variant of "fake bomb" or "hoax explosives".

If a sweatshirt with a circuit board is a fake bomb, what exactly is not a fake bomb? (Besides a real bomb, that is.) Yesterday I boarded a flight in Vancouver and the security types swabbed down my laptop to verify that it was not full of C4. It having been established that it was not a real bomb, did the laptop then not fall into the set of fake bombs?

And if so, why was I not arrested for attempting to board a plane with a fake bomb (or just hit with tasers... it was Vancouver, after all)?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:04 PM on September 23, 2008

cheap paper, I'm glad you posted that, because I was going to if you hadn't.
Also, hi!
posted by zusty at 6:24 PM on September 23, 2008

I thought the interview was really interesting (she sounds like a sweet kid, actually). Clap clap, good read.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 12:06 AM on September 24, 2008