Mefites' Choice 2014 winners, Week Four January 1, 2015 9:19 AM   Subscribe

It's the final week of the December Best Post contest, and the winner is EvaDestruction's incredibly interesting post about underground Soviet records made from old x-ray films. For the win, capricorn will send some delicious coffee, tea, or hot cocca to keep them warm.

Second place goes to AlonzoMosleyFBI for highlighting an amazing MST3K riff on pastries.

Third place is a three! way! tie! and coincidentally, all about nostalgia-related subjects. joseph conrad is fully awesome shared a big post about 1950s/60s era British school satchels, escape from the potato planet reminded us that Salvador Dali did several holiday greetings cards for Hallmark in the 1960s, and litlnemo did a great post on those kiddie coin-op rides you used to find outside of big stores.

There are also loads of month-long prizes to be given out on the Wiki, and this is a reminder if you posted on the wiki, send a MeFi Mail to the winners to arrange your prize delivery. Also for this final week 4, rangefinder 1.4 will send a portable mini-tripod to the author of the best photography-related post this week.

Thanks everyone for making this such a great month filled with amazing, interesting, and fascinating posts on subjects all over the map.
posted by mathowie (staff) to MetaFilter-Related at 9:19 AM (47 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite

Paging cwest! Your post, The Enduring Art of the Lowcountry Basket, was a winner with me. Not only was this a terrific post about American folkways in and of itself, but it was also a wonderful addition to the site. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to discover here at MetaFilter. Thank you! Please get in touch by MeFi mail and send me your postal contact info.
posted by MonkeyToes at 9:30 AM on January 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


Brundlefly and Dhruva! Your posts on bird evolution and baby birds who look like horrible terrible caterpillars were my favorite wildlife posts of the month! Memail me your addresses and I'll send you one of these mangabey pictures!
posted by ChuraChura at 9:56 AM on January 1, 2015 [3 favorites]


Oh wow EvaDestruction and capricorn are both great! We should have a meetup to celebrate and hand over the prize! DC MeFites FTW!

We should not have this meetup today as I am in no mood to talk to anyone who isn't French Onion Dip.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 10:25 AM on January 1, 2015 [3 favorites]


Filthy Light Thief, oh humble organizer, wins for best science post (as determined by favorites in the science tag as of this morning) with his well crafted post on How Big is Space? and thus will get his pick of a fossil, fossil shaped cookies, and a guided-by-me fossil hunting expedition if he'd like. (FLT, have you ever been in the Raton Pass area? Lovely ammonites and the K/P boundary! Pssst also it's quite possible I have a "secret" special spot around there. . .) FLT, look for a Memail from me this weekend with a link to some photos for your fossil choice and other info.

However, due to personal bias on my part, I'm awarding a runner's up prize to Brundlefly for the bird evolution post and infini for the post on story of nori in Japan, Mother of the Sea. I have to figure out what that prize will be, but it'll probably be a fossil too. I'll MeMail you both this weekend as well unless you want to get in touch with me first with your postal info.

Science is awesome.
posted by barchan at 10:30 AM on January 1, 2015 [4 favorites]


No, no scratch that - science and Mefites are awesome.
posted by barchan at 10:37 AM on January 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


Great job, everyone!
posted by FAMOUS MONSTER at 1:46 PM on January 1, 2015


Thank you, MonkeyToes. Congratulations to all the winners.
posted by cwest at 2:04 PM on January 1, 2015


Here are the winners for the two category prizes I offered. I am also offering to send out a picture postcard to the authors of the runners-up, if you would like to receive one. (I'll send memail messages to everyone within the next couple of days.)

My favorite photography-related post for Week 4: Etrigan's post featuring photos of "Interesting Reference Questions" from the 1940s to 1983, from the New York Public Library. It was fascinating to see the different ways the questions were written down, and a lot of them made me laugh (which was very welcome last month). Etrigan wins a mini tripod.

Runner-up / honorable mention to fearfulsymmetry who had a nice round-up of photos looking back on 2014 for Week 4.

For my favorite post in December about a woman or women doing awesome things -- so many to choose from! The winner is the man of twist and turns' post, A Sword Among Lions, about the amazing work and legacy of Ida B. Wells (I have to admit, I also really liked that the actual post quoted Kate Beaton). The man of twist and turns wins a paperback copy of Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney.

Runners-up / honorable mentions -- all posts that introduced me to interesting women I didn't know about:
- Like barchan, I also really liked infini's post, Mother of the Sea, about how Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker's research on seaweed ended up saving the nori industry.
- adamvasco's post about photojournalist Jane Bown.
- dhruva's post about Marie Tharp's map and how it shook the foundations of geology.

I really enjoyed going through all the posts in December -- thanks to everyone who contributed!
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 2:35 PM on January 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm going with It's a White Industry for the film category win because the article was great and the conversation was excellent too. $20.00 at amazon or the movie theater of your choice, aydee jones! I'll memail you directly.
posted by Pardon Our Dust at 4:04 PM on January 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


Congratulations everyone! I think it's important to note that, even if you didn't win anything, everyone's contributions combined are what make this site as great as it is. Many of my favorite posts are those that would never win, or maybe even get that many favorites, but still helped me to discover interesting things. My own favorite would be the one on the 50 games Kenta Cho made in 2014, which I liked so much that I wrote up detailed play descriptions for 30 of them in comments.
posted by JHarris at 4:16 PM on January 1, 2015 [4 favorites]


Yay, congrats everyone and especially my neighbor EvaDestruction who gets my prize!
posted by capricorn at 5:24 PM on January 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


What a lovely surprise to start the new year. Thanks to capricorn, everyone who enjoyed my post, and especially to the commenters who added more material (particularly languagehat and flapjax at midnight, who found previouslies I'd missed - 2015 resolution: stronger search skills) and made it even better! Off now to check out the posts I missed.
posted by EvaDestruction at 7:38 PM on January 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


YAYAYAYAYAYA!!
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:06 PM on January 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


W00t! I tied with joseph conrad is fully awesome and escape from the potato planet, both of whom make me feel that my username is too short! Good work, everyone! Thanks!
posted by litlnemo at 8:16 PM on January 1, 2015 [3 favorites]


Congratulations everyone, you're all winners!

rollick - if you're reading this thread, please choose one DVD: (1) Adventure Thru Inner Space: The Special Edition; (2) Skyway Story with Bob Gurr; (3) Pirates of the Caribbean Story. (I'm sending you a second memail - I know holiday time is really busy!)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:21 PM on January 1, 2015


joseph conrad is fully awesome, I want all three of those DVDs, where can I order them?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:34 PM on January 1, 2015


You're all beautiful winners!
posted by The Whelk at 9:42 PM on January 1, 2015


I do not have the DVDs to hand, and at my current hotel, have a frustratingly slow wifi connection right now. However, here is what I believe to be the Youtube link for the Haunted Mansion one; the rest might be on Youtube as well. Also, the website to check out is Extinct Attractions Club (you can see the DVD cover artwork in the upper right-hand section of the page) (Note: I cannot, at my current location, ascertain if this is a legit website or someone scrapped the legit website onto a url w/"club" appended to it.)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:25 PM on January 1, 2015


oh wow, talk about being out of it ... took Rangefinder's memail for me to discover I'd actually won something again.

oh wow, twice in one month.

a month in which my account was disabled for half the time.

that's gotta be a record right?

oh wow

*flips through dictionary for synonyms for oh wow*
posted by infini at 6:05 AM on January 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


Wait, what? I get a fossil too????

OMG

A fossil for a ...cough... heh... fossil...

*swoons*
posted by infini at 6:07 AM on January 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


who's been bribing people on my behalf? 'fess up
posted by infini at 6:08 AM on January 2, 2015


*and* cookies?

*brain asplodes*

/feels like Rhaomi ;p
posted by infini at 6:15 AM on January 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


I sent you my address joseph conrad - thanks again for your patience!
posted by rollick at 8:32 AM on January 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Great! No problem, thank you - sent you options (two left at this point in the game). Look forward to hearing from you.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 10:29 AM on January 2, 2015


joseph conrad is fully awesome, your post on The Handmaid's Tale was, well, awesome! As the author of December's most favorited FPP on books, you can choose one of a selection of signed books. I'll send a list to choose from as soon as I get into the office on Monday.
posted by lyssabee at 11:38 AM on January 2, 2015


The best post about libraries: 'Is this the place where I ask questions I can't get answers to?,' about a box of 'Interesting Reference Questions' found at the NYPL.

The best post about hip-hop: 'I need to know my place,' about Macklemore, Iggy Azalea and white appropriation. (Honorable Mention: raihan_'s 'Abandon. Cultural immunity. I Had a self.')

Congratulations, Etrigan and DirtyOldTown! I'll MeMail you both about prizes soon.
posted by box at 2:35 PM on January 2, 2015


Thanks to everyone who posted, commented, offered and won prizes! The wiki is current to this point, with links back to the winning MeFites and their posts in the fourth week and month-long topical areas.
posted by filthy light thief at 3:16 PM on January 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


Can a mod tell me which of these posts got the most fantastic flags in December? That's the metric we're using, right?
posted by Juliet Banana at 9:29 AM on January 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I also need mod help on what post had the most fantastic flags! My category was a cute animal slyt.
posted by phunniemee at 8:57 AM on January 4, 2015


I still have a prize to allocate for best post about fandoms or special/fringe interest groups - I'll get to it tonight, I swear!
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 2:49 PM on January 4, 2015


There were two great posts turning me on to cool 21st-century science fiction last month - MartinWisse's post about the new Nigerian speculative fiction site Omenana and The Whelk's post about Uncanny Magazine - so I'm going to split my prize of 2 signed paperbacks between them. MartinWisse gets the signed Octavia Butler and The Whelk gets the signed Orson Scott Card. MartinWisse, just MeMail me your address and I'll send it along!
posted by mediareport at 11:01 AM on January 5, 2015


That's the metric we're using, right?

JulietBanana, for prizes donated by users, the metric is whatever that user wants it to be. Since you offered a prize for "the best post on a transgender person or topic," you get to decide what "best" means in this case.

Of course, if you think number of favorites is the preferred way to decide "best," that's up to you. But you don't have to use any criterion but your own, is how I understand the process.
posted by mediareport at 4:11 PM on January 5, 2015


The criteria used last year (and I would guess previous years) is most fantastic flags (boilerplate people use favorites in different ways). Community chosen, please!

I don't want to choose myself. The stakes on cute animal videos are way too high. I can't take that kind of pressure.
posted by phunniemee at 4:17 PM on January 5, 2015


Yeah, I never liked that "vote with the fantastic flag" thing. Most folks never use it, and the folks offering the prizes seem to me the best judges of who should get the prize. If most of them use the fantastic flag, fine, great, but it shouldn't be mandatory for user-supplied prizes.

Just me, though.
posted by mediareport at 4:35 PM on January 5, 2015


FWIW or FYI or something, I did not use the fantastic-flag metric--instead, I just picked the ones I thought were best.
posted by box at 5:37 PM on January 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


I still have a prize to allocate for best post about fandoms or special/fringe interest groups - I'll get to it tonight, I swear!

OK, so after perusing my extensive favourites list, I have decided on filthy light thief's History of Chairs post , which in my view constitutes a chair fandom post and definitely falls within the special interest category.

Special mention to FLT's impressive Young Frankenstein post (but that one already won a Week 3 prize), and cwest's Logan's Run post.

Congrats, FLT. I will memail you to ask you for your address, and your useless but pretty Swedish yo yo will be on its way ASAP.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 7:27 PM on January 5, 2015


Mathowie in the original planning thread for the December Best Post Contest:

You know what? We're getting much better data going off the fantastic flag vs. favorites. It didn't really tease out until after the first week, but the top three are fairly different when you go with favorites vs. fantastic flags.

Given favorites can be used as bookmarks, I tend to think the fantastic flag should be adopted from here on out. Sorry to change gears mid-campaign but strictly favorites is highlighting all the outrageous huge news stories, fantastic flags are uncovering the well-crafted, amazing posts that people think of as MetaFilter's best and are long remembered as ones they love.


I'm gonna ping a mod to take a look at this thread. Does anyone besides me and phunniemee need help with fantastic calculations?
posted by Juliet Banana at 8:50 AM on January 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


I don't want to choose myself. The stakes on cute animal videos are way too high. I can't take that kind of pressure.

Well, it's tricky because part of the reason we moved to fantastic flags for the big weekly winners and encouraged "your award, your choice" type stuff with the more specific user-provided awards is that it takes a lot of workload off the mods to be arbiters of the whole process. I totally get not wanting to, like, inject personal bias into the adjudication process, but the difference between you picking and us picking/calculating is that you as the person specifically wanting to reward that kind of post are removed from the process, and we as people who didn't choose that subject/reward thing are left having to determine what, out of an entire month of posts, does and doesn't qualify and then crunch the numbers on it.

I'm really personally in favor of the idea of just having folks say "hey, I think this was my favorite post for the category I said, so, bam, winner!" and everybody being fine with that. I think it's in the spirit of the thing, works well, is more hands-on in a good way, and distributes the labor on this thing in a good way to keep it from being a big pile of extra side-work for the us. So if you can get down with making a pick independently, I'm thumbs way up on that front.

Also, fantastic counts are pretty useful for picking out the most-flagged stuff for a given time-period but they fall off pretty quickly from there; saying that post A got 2 fantastic flags and post B got 1 and therefore A is unquestionably the best is getting into pretty noisy territory, in terms of useful data, and may really be less useful than the qualitative judgement side of the equation.

All that rambling philosophy-of-the-thing stuff aside, though, if you want to go with the strict count thing and you've got a shortlist of specific finalist links or suchlike that you want a fantastic flag count on, I will totally look them up for you.

Can a mod tell me which of these posts got the most fantastic flags in December?

See rambling above for why I don't think this needs to be a binding metric or anything, but of those five posts tagged with transgender in December, these two were tied for first.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:33 AM on January 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Thanks Cortex!

roomthreeseventeen does not have Mefi Mail enabled, or an email in their profile, so just based on the fact I have a way to contact her I'm going to go with and they trembled before her fury. Memail has been sent.
posted by Juliet Banana at 10:45 AM on January 6, 2015


wait, what, i'm confused.
posted by and they trembled before her fury at 11:56 AM on January 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


and they trembled, your post won the December best post contest for posts on a transgender topic or person. Technically tied, but the tie-breaker was "who was memail," so you won. HOORAY [PARTY HORN EMOJI]
posted by Juliet Banana at 12:25 PM on January 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Sorry I'm getting to this rather late …

Congratulations to Rhaomi for his "encyclopedic" and "epic" post about Stephen Colbert! It was apparently the most-fantasticked (and it seems most-favorited) post of the month, in addition to already having been MeFite Choice Winner of Week 1. Laurels upon laurels!

Your prize: A custom designed Poster glorifying said post.

Memail me and I can send you a nice printout.
posted by Kabanos at 9:26 AM on January 9, 2015 [6 favorites]


I already got back to you via MeMail earlier, Kabanos, but I just wanted to state for the public record that that is SO F*CKING COOL. Thanks again.
posted by Rhaomi at 8:08 PM on January 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


That is nice, Kabanos!
posted by JHarris at 10:00 PM on January 13, 2015


Colbert is such a faker, said the monsignor of comedy.
posted by infini at 10:13 PM on January 13, 2015


As Rhaomi pointed out via memail, I'm suffering from some minor New Year's Dyscalculia, so all those "2015" dates on the poster should actually be 2014, so that's been fixed (although if I had to bet on next year's winner I think my odds would be good).

For the record, my initial intention was to do a spoof on Madonna's old movie and do a "COLBERT: Truthiness or Dare" poster, with Stephen lying in bed with a sexy US flag dress. But I couldn't find a large enough version of the original poster to photoshop. Also laziness.
posted by Kabanos at 7:39 AM on January 14, 2015


Kabanos: "For the record, my initial intention was to do a spoof on Madonna's old movie and do a "COLBERT: Truthiness or Dare" poster, with Stephen lying in bed with a sexy US flag dress."

He actually already did you one better...
posted by Rhaomi at 11:50 AM on January 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


« Older Happy New Year!   |   MeFi Labs updates for 2014 Newer »

You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments