Was Metafilter on the latest episode of "Six Feet Under"?

July 25, 2005 5:38 PM

Was Metafilter on the latest episode of "Six Feet Under"?

via Kottke.
posted by Freen to MetaFilter-Related at 5:38 PM (87 comments total)

Looks like it to me.
posted by Quartermass at 5:44 PM on July 25, 2005

I think I see hints of yellow highlighting in the text in mathowie's blown-up screen cap. I say it's MeFi.
posted by yhbc at 5:57 PM on July 25, 2005

I'm also more puzzled by the meaning of the "Keep your Disside" sticker.
posted by vacapinta at 5:57 PM on July 25, 2005

I've got a torrent of it. I don't thinks it's Mefi because I can't see any colors other than white and blue and Mefi's dates are offset, the small segments of text before each paragraph on the screen aren't.

I could be wrong.
posted by 517 at 6:02 PM on July 25, 2005

Metafilter is not the only blue computer-type thingy in the world. /skepticfilter
posted by Rothko at 6:02 PM on July 25, 2005

The intervening lines are too short and the spacing too much and damn I have been going to this site entirely too long.
posted by furiousthought at 6:06 PM on July 25, 2005

Didn't the left-wing cabal here learn anything from the Swift Boats ordeal? It's all in the kerning.
posted by Rothko at 6:08 PM on July 25, 2005

I posted it because I sort of recognized it as something that could be either MeFi or a Word in blue mode, and when a few friends IMed me this morning, I took a screenshot to post.

I still say it's a very outside chance, but the way the text flows, it almost looks like halfway down a long comment thread.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:15 PM on July 25, 2005

I'm still flipping out over that Dell ad where the guy asks the tech support guy "Do you like pancakes?"
posted by jonmc at 6:16 PM on July 25, 2005

I vote no
posted by matteo at 6:16 PM on July 25, 2005

yeah, the Dell ad was creepier, giovanni
posted by matteo at 6:16 PM on July 25, 2005

looks like here to me. is the character sitting there a good guy? (i've only seen it once--no HBO)
posted by amberglow at 6:16 PM on July 25, 2005

Naw, he's the office geek, a very minor character that's supposed to have tourette's or something.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 6:23 PM on July 25, 2005

...is the character sitting there a good guy...

Office drone, sorry. In that scene he is being very picky about his soy latte.
posted by 517 at 6:23 PM on July 25, 2005

He's a minor new character - kind of a creepy office drone with an annoying catchphrase. (Claire is forced to temp at The Office From Hell.)
posted by CunningLinguist at 6:23 PM on July 25, 2005

But I could picture the actor surfing before the cameras start to roll....
posted by CunningLinguist at 6:25 PM on July 25, 2005

Again:


posted by yhbc at 6:33 PM on July 25, 2005

yup--it's here.

thanks folks...we have a lot of annoying members so it fits. : >
posted by amberglow at 6:46 PM on July 25, 2005

yeah, the Dell ad was creepier, giovanni

did anyone ever figure out who the source of that was?
posted by jonmc at 6:46 PM on July 25, 2005

jonmc, isn't it possible that it was random? or does every referent to pancakes in the world of computers have to be somehow metafilter related?
posted by Hat Maui at 7:06 PM on July 25, 2005

ok, i just saw it
i don't think it's mefi
posted by philida at 7:13 PM on July 25, 2005

It does look like it's in a browser, Netscape 4 maybe?
posted by euphorb at 8:07 PM on July 25, 2005

is Kottke still being supported by visitors to his site?
posted by amberglow at 8:20 PM on July 25, 2005

Yeah it does look like an old browser. With a location bar and icon buttons below it. But as Matt pointed out there are no ads so it can't be Metafilter; if it was they'd owe him royalties , right?

Is this TV show put out by AOL-Netscape-Time-Warner ?
posted by davy at 8:22 PM on July 25, 2005

Was Metafilter on the latest episode of "Six Feet Under"?

Doesn't look like it.
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 8:23 PM on July 25, 2005

if it was metafilter i'm sure whoever was surfin on the show will come here and post sooner or later. that is, if they read the grey.
posted by jabberwock at 8:27 PM on July 25, 2005

pssst - for "Again" in my comment above, please read "Cropped and resized:" There were a couple of false starts edited out.
posted by yhbc at 8:33 PM on July 25, 2005

.Someone on the page Mathowie linked to suggested the character was logged in. Now that would be amazing, because the guy would actually have to have an account, and we could find out what it is. But, sadly, it just doesn't look like MeFi to me. I don't see any yellow and the format just doesn't look right.
posted by orange swan at 8:35 PM on July 25, 2005

I see a little yellow if I squint.

Regardless, this isn't enough. I say we chip in for a prize for the first TV show to write MetaFilter into the main plotline.
posted by soyjoy at 8:39 PM on July 25, 2005

The blue is too dark; there is no yellow. Wishful thinking, at best.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 8:45 PM on July 25, 2005

After reviewing mathowie's blown-up screen cap I conclude that (1) that redhead is cute, and (2) it's not MetaFilter.
posted by kirkaracha at 8:46 PM on July 25, 2005

What 517 said. And at home I use Word in blue-and-white in order to differentiate recreational writing from work (otherwise it just bugs the shit out of me).
posted by dreamsign at 8:55 PM on July 25, 2005

"...via Kottke"

Via whom? Who the hell is this guy?
posted by mr_crash_davis at 9:13 PM on July 25, 2005

Via whom? Who the hell is this guy?

He's a hustler, baby
posted by vacapinta at 10:33 PM on July 25, 2005

mr_crash_davis: it's a link. It links you. Use it. Love it. It's what this whole interweb is all about.
posted by Freen at 11:08 PM on July 25, 2005

No, Freen - we always ask who Kottke is.

In fact, technically, you've transgressed MetTalk guidelines by not framing your question as:

Was Metafilter on the latest episode of "Six Feet Under"?

via some guy named Kottke, whoever he is.

Please don't let it happen again.
posted by taz at 11:20 PM on July 25, 2005

Where's that kottkefied metatalk thread again? It was purty!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:27 PM on July 25, 2005

Hustler? Kottke is a ganster!

And I just lost The Game. :(
posted by grouse at 12:51 AM on July 26, 2005

Yeah, thats MeFi, but that guy has an ad blocker installed and a custom style sheet to remove all the yellow text and throw the spacing off. Also, I think I see some wires coming out of his shirt...
posted by rajbot at 1:01 AM on July 26, 2005

But as Matt pointed out there are no ads so it can't be Metafilter

There are ads on Metafilter?
posted by salmacis at 1:15 AM on July 26, 2005

The gray bar on the left looks like the Windows start menu bar dragged and snapped to the left hand side.

But I'm also not convinced that it's a view of MeFi. I don't see any yellow.

Why does he have some kind of shrunken pig's head on his desk?
posted by loquacious at 3:32 AM on July 26, 2005

If it is MetaFilter we need to find out which page, and whose posts are on the screen. If there is no way to find this out, then surely they owe us like a squabillion dollars each.
posted by nthdegx at 4:30 AM on July 26, 2005

We should probably start a thread to discuss how we are each going to spend our squabillion dollars. I think I'll spend mine on a HDTV and spend my time website-spotting. I could make squatrillions. Hey, I could get a quote on bash.org, and then the bartender in Deadwood could be laughing at it at the beginning of a pivotal scene. Man I'm gonna do that today.
posted by nthdegx at 4:34 AM on July 26, 2005

posted by moonbird at 4:55 AM on July 26, 2005

Perhaps they made the swcreen blue so that a blaring white screen wouldn't throw off the shot's focus of attention.
posted by Space Coyote at 5:41 AM on July 26, 2005

But MeFi is always my focus of attention.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 6:43 AM on July 26, 2005

Maybe he's got his browser set to display links as white instead of yellow. Just, uh, because he doesn't like yellow.
posted by agropyron at 8:26 AM on July 26, 2005

This is ultimate nerdcore.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 8:47 AM on July 26, 2005

Where's that kottkefied metatalk thread again? It was purty!

Are you sure you don't mean the kottkefied MeFi thread?
posted by languagehat at 9:02 AM on July 26, 2005

If Six Feet Under is filmed on a set, would the art department go to the trouble of running an ethernet cable to the computer?
posted by FreezBoy at 10:17 AM on July 26, 2005

/kermits

thanks for the mem'ries, languagehat
posted by gleuschk at 10:25 AM on July 26, 2005

...leftarmnumbleftarmnumb...
posted by robocop is bleeding at 11:06 AM on July 26, 2005

i miss rodii!
posted by zpousman at 11:10 AM on July 26, 2005

Robocop is bleeding, I believe the exact quote was "narmnarmnarm......"
posted by jrossi4r at 11:12 AM on July 26, 2005

That rodii character still lurks these halls, zpousman. As does holgate, and I'd imagine that the rest of the old schoolers just created more anonymous nicks.

This place truly is more addictive than crack, and I've yet to figure out why.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 11:17 AM on July 26, 2005

Where's the HD capture of this already? I think it is a blue'd out word processor.
posted by geoff. at 1:45 PM on July 26, 2005

Hell if I know if this is a valid or useful analysis, but here I've made a screen cap of my view of mefi in a thread with no ads and a big comment, then ntsc safed it, then added the histogram alongside. Same with the cap of SFU. My thinking was that we'd be able to tell something by the histogram, although of course the center and relative sizes of the curves would differ:




posted by Ethereal Bligh at 3:31 PM on July 26, 2005

CSI: total nerds.
posted by Mid at 3:42 PM on July 26, 2005

I love this place. I've never been surrounded by such hardcore nerditude in my life. You slay me.
posted by tristeza at 4:18 PM on July 26, 2005

there could be a message here
posted by clavdivs at 5:42 PM on July 26, 2005

You want hard core nerditude? It seems Kottke is trying to relive the late 90's.
posted by Freen at 7:04 PM on July 26, 2005

Are you sure you don't mean the kottkefied MeFi thread?

Nuh-uh. It was Metatalk, and it was ORANGE, as I recall.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:14 PM on July 26, 2005

Also : clav!

Also also: unless someone tells me holgate and rodii's new usernames, privately if necessary, I'm gonna throw a tantrum.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:15 PM on July 26, 2005

Well, holgate's username is easy: it's holgate. Here's a posting from just a few days ago.
posted by vacapinta at 8:25 PM on July 26, 2005

Wait then, who's that new guy posting under the "vacapinta" handle? I really used to like him, but the new one I'm not too sure about.
posted by yhbc at 8:48 PM on July 26, 2005

Well, if we're giving away people's "new" nicks, I'd like to know who iceberg273 is now. And semmi. And sennoma.

My theory is that owillis is AlexReynolds.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 9:08 PM on July 26, 2005

I kid. I kid. But just thinking of those two standing next to each other gave me a giggle.
posted by SeizeTheDay at 9:13 PM on July 26, 2005

And I just lost The Game. :(

fuckfuckfuckfuckFUCKFUCK!
posted by obiwanwasabi at 12:00 AM on July 27, 2005

stavros, this is what you were thinking of (kottke's site no longer has the images though.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:05 AM on July 27, 2005

I agree with stav that the whole "rodii [or x] is here but you just don't know it" thing is getting really old.

It would seem to me that if enough people know of the new secret identity, then the original purpose of the identity change is dead and the only remaining function of the "secret" is to permit name-dropping ("I know who he is but you don't"), which is pretty un-cool, I think.
posted by Mid at 6:01 AM on July 27, 2005

That's it, Matt! I laughed like a silly person when I first saw it....
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:09 AM on July 27, 2005

Hi. I'm still here, kinda, I just don't post anymore (and read fairly sporadically). This is my only account, I promise. This "I miss rodii" stuff perplexes me, by the way... it's nice to be remembered, but, geez, how long has it been since I've contributed anything? There are so many people that don't post anymore that probably deserve to be missed more than me.
posted by rodii at 6:34 AM on July 27, 2005

*smooch* [/frykitty]

Well, hell, that may be so, but I miss you, anyway. I'm glad to hear that you're still around, reading sometimes, and unreasonably glad to know that you haven't been posting under a new monicker.

'I miss rodii' has become one of those Metafilter passphrases of the sort that groups use to self-identify as part of the tribe in the last couple of years (?), old friend. If I'm anything like right, you probably find that somewhere between gratifying and mortifying, and the needle wobbles more to the right than the left, but there it is. 'I miss X' might be more accurate, maybe, but X is bounded, quite strictly, in practice.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:47 AM on July 27, 2005

My theory is that owillis is AlexReynolds.

My theory is that Necker is a sock puppet for either Witty or Dios.

Not kidding, not kidding.
posted by Rothko at 6:56 AM on July 27, 2005

Shibboleth.
posted by gleuschk at 7:36 AM on July 27, 2005

Exactly: shibboleth.

And rodii confirms that he is way cool by deflating all the "I know who he is" shibbolething.
posted by Mid at 7:50 AM on July 27, 2005

'Shibboleth' lends Metafilter more gravitas than it deserves, maybe. But yeah.

Golem, rise!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:31 AM on July 27, 2005

If Six Feet Under is filmed on a set, would the art department go to the trouble of running an ethernet cable to the computer?

Could have been dialup, but the point is, I think we have our winner. What set techie is going to run a live internet connection complete with service provider to a fake computer that is going to be partially visible in the scene? Is this even a real computer? How come the monitor doesn't appear to flash?
posted by Pollomacho at 10:54 AM on July 27, 2005

Is this even a real computer? How come the monitor doesn't appear to flash?

Well, they sync it to the film framerate usually (i.e. some multiple of 24fps, like 48fps or 72fps).
posted by kindall at 11:00 AM on July 27, 2005

Only tangentially related (but isn't everything on Mefi?), but didn't some Mefi'r once say they were friends with a hollywood star who wanted an account?
posted by drezdn at 11:15 AM on July 27, 2005

would the art department go to the trouble of running an ethernet cable to the computer?

They wouldn't need to.
For a brief time last year when I had no net access at home, I would skim the front page for interesting looking posts before leaving the office, save the comments pages to disc, and read them later at home. The pages weren't live but they looked just like the real thing.

Now, exactly how embarrassed should I be for confessing to this kind of addictive behaviour?
posted by Zetetics at 12:27 PM on July 27, 2005

would the art department go to the trouble of running an ethernet cable to the computer?

I don't believe computer screens film well, so there wouldn't be anything there during the shoot. The screen--whatever it is--would be added post-production.
posted by frykitty at 12:40 PM on July 27, 2005

i thought if they film digitally or use video the screen problems aren't there anymore?
posted by amberglow at 4:35 PM on July 27, 2005

They'll always have to sync rates unless they're using something a lot faster.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:45 PM on July 27, 2005

not metafilter.
posted by angry modem at 7:13 PM on July 27, 2005

If someone were a real ubergeek, they would get every frame in which the screen appears, cut out the screen, correct for aspect and orientation, and use fancy resolution enhancement algorithms to correct for the reduced res. I bet that you'd end up with enough statistically significant letterforms to then be able to map, with a good degree of certainty, into likely wordforms. From there, it's a simple matter of corpus analysis that I would explain, but unfortunately these margins are too small.
posted by felix at 11:17 AM on July 28, 2005

"correct for aspect and orientation, and use fancy resolution enhancement algorithms to correct for the reduced res. I bet that you'd end up with enough statistically significant letterforms to then be able to map, with a good degree of certainty, into likely wordforms."

I've been thinking about that technique of res enhancement for a long time. The magical res enhancement in TV/movies we see all the time really annoys me: you can do it a little bit by some smart inference, but nothing at all like what we commonly see. But often they're looking at a short piece of video. In the time direction they've got a lot more information about what's being imaged. The problem, however, is that this becomes a variety of the computer vision problem because to solve it requires at least a rudimentary model of the real world insofar as the context of the image is concerned.

With text, I think it'd be very doable, however.

One problem with your idea, though, is that in this sort of case, with a static image on the screen and little perspective change, there's relatively not that much new information along the time axis.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 3:48 PM on July 28, 2005