What are your MetaFilter Greatest posts/threads?

August 6, 2022 7:30 AM

I was reconnecting an old HD and while checking the contents found a link to https://www.girlwalkallday.com/ which I think I found through this post. That got me wondering what other great stuff I'd found here, so I dug and here's a small sample of the mostly music threads I loved.

2004 : THAT comment from scarabic in the post "If you killed somebody, how would you dispose of the body without getting caught?"

2010 : Pretend it's 2030 and you're making a Best Of The 00s music mix. What do you include?

2010 : Name a genre. Name its quintessential album. That's it.

2010 : I really, really love "Hayling" by FC Kahuna. Please suggest some other specific songs I might also like.

2011 : Recommend me some music near the intersection of "dance" and "punk."

What would be yours?

posted by I shot a fox in Skyrim and it made me sad to MetaFilter-Related at 7:30 AM (12 comments total)

Back when MetaFilter used to have a big tarball of all the music files that you could download at once, I'd fetch them all and listen to them over time and star the ones I really like don iTunes and then put them into a playlist with other songs I really liked. They'd come up every so often when I was playing my BEST playlist on random and I'd usually try to leave a comment in the original Music thread (since comments stay open forever) and you can see in some cases I leave a comment every ten years or so. Here's the song I'm listening to now. Thanks Doleful Creature.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:12 AM on August 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

One of my favorite posts, an orbital mechanics doodad, sadly was wrecked by the death of Flash.

I’m planning on doing a custom operating system install on an old computer so I can run Flash on it specifically to make the thing go again.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 8:19 PM on August 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was reminded the other day about this post featuring a YouTube video of Super 8 home movie clips set to the Zombies song “This Will Be Our Year.” I watch it every once in a while because I find it moving and uplifting.

I didn’t discover it until 10 years after it was posted. I’m kind of surprised to see it’s now 15 years old!
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 2:51 PM on August 7, 2022

A shameless self-plug, but I loved reading responses to this old thread of mine: “Songs For A Friend”
posted by Going To Maine at 10:22 PM on August 7, 2022

sadly was wrecked by the death of Flash

Mister Moofoo there are ways of converting Flash files if you have a copy of the .swf. There are instructions somewhere on MeFi but my brain has heatstroke and can't search good.
posted by bendy at 6:49 PM on August 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

> Back when MetaFilter used to have a big tarball of all the music files that you could download at once ...

Ah! I think you're thinking of the torrents I used to do. Geez, it's been about a decade since I did that. My torrent-friendly hosting was acquired, and I remember noticing a few songs were being deleted once I started gathering them. These aren't the worst hurdles to try to clear, if there's interest.


About Flash: check out Ruffle. It's like Flash as Javascript.
posted by Pronoiac at 12:45 AM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

"What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople?" was an EXCELLENT source of book recommendations -- thanks to that thread I read and learned from:

Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightingale.
Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom.
A Sense of Direction by William Ball.
In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch.
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch.
posted by brainwane at 7:59 AM on August 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

→ About Flash: check out Ruffle. It's like Flash as Javascript

Except that it doesn't support ActionScript 3 yet (/ever?), and that's what the celestial mechanics site was written with
posted by scruss at 11:48 AM on August 9, 2022

I was reminded the other day about this post featuring a YouTube video of Super 8 home movie clips set to the Zombies song “This Will Be Our Year.” I watch it every once in a while because I find it moving and uplifting.


Indeed. I barely knew the song before that and when I got married to a sporadic mefite, that song was our processional.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:21 PM on August 9, 2022

Ruffle's ActionScript 3 support is actively under development, it looks like, though they haven't gotten very far yet.
posted by Aleyn at 11:07 PM on August 10, 2022

There is so much great stuff in Music, but I still sing Women Drinking Whiskey to myself sometimes, so I have to give it a special shout out.
posted by EvaDestruction at 11:13 AM on August 11, 2022

In August of 2019, I posted an Ask soliciting recommendations for escapist literature to read during hard times. It, uh, came in handy over the next months.

(I promise I didn't know!)
posted by easy, lucky, free at 5:02 PM on August 20, 2022