Regular and semi-regular MeFi clubs?

March 20, 2025 9:19 AM

Hey, with the recent MeTa about the Card Club, I was reminded that there are a number of member run activities and events, but there is no list of them. So I'm going to put together a FAQ entry about the member related MeFi clubs and activities with the following information for each club: Name of club/activity Contact Person Premise of club/activity How often/when the club/activity occurs For those who do run these activities, thank you! Please chime in if you have any special instructions or corrections and I'll include them in the FAQ entry/listing. For anyone who wants to help with compiling this information, let me know, we can do it in Google docs.

Optimistically, these dates and times would be put into a calendar which members can then subscribe to and get reminders about. A Google calendar should be fine for that, yeah?

Otherwise, here's the clubs/activity that I can remember at the moment:

MeFi Card Club
Contact: Sparky Buttons
Premise: Request cards from other MeFites for a special occasion or some time basis that you decide.
Dates: user decided


Valentine Card Exchange
Contact: Sunpower
Premise: trade cards for Valentine's
Dates: Signups begin in January of the year

The Metafilter Gift Swap aka Secret Beans
Contact: RhysPenbras and okayokayigive
Premise: swap gifts for the holidays
Dates: November-December of the year, sign ups begin in October

MeFi Holiday Card Exchange
Contact: needlegirl
Premise: exchange holiday cards
Dates: November-December of the year

Annual Mystery Science Club Xmas Marathon
Contact: JHarris
Premise: Group watch of MST's marathon
Dates: December 23-25 each year

What other events and activities do MeFites for the site?

posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) to MetaFilter-Related at 9:19 AM (10 comments total)

After we launch the new site we can add a page for clubs. The admin panel can be set up to allow different groups access to different features, so each club could manage their own events.

I added a club page to the feature request form. (list of requests)
posted by kirkaracha (staff) at 11:06 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

It's a cool idea to highlight the things that the community does here that make it a neat place to be a part of, but I would prefer if staff focused their energy on aiding the nonprofit transition from interim to permanent board rather than yet more FAQ rewriting. It doesn't feel like the best time to squeeze yet more energy and goodwill out of the individuals doing this work (for free).

If you really need to write things for the site or update pages, perhaps go to the prior thread and address the open questions to catch folks up on the BIPOC board since it's made up of [undetermined percentage but well agreed to be too high] staff. Please. Thank you.
posted by phunniemee at 11:22 AM on March 20 [9 favorites]

To confirm: what we do for Christmas at MST Club is a variety of things. The highlights each year, I think, are the riffed items, which I try to make sure all the MST3K Christmas episodes get in there, but also Rifftrax and other things, and we also put in Christmas specials and (late) weird movies and videos, although each year varies. Lately I've been worried that we replay things too much, but there's only so many suitable Christmas items? The Christmas Marathon typically goes through all of December 23-25.

We also tend to do other things around that time. In particular, every Thanksgiving the official MST3K people do "Turkey Day," and it's usually a low-effort thing for us to park their stream in our video sharing room to enjoy without having to swim through the overflowing official chat stream. And we're known to do something New Year's Eve night too.

All of this is in addition to our usual Thursday shows, where we usually watch one riff item at 9 PM in the evening US Eastern Time; and other miscellaneous things Sunday and Tuesday nights. And between shows we have a playlist of other things, which lately has been one of the official everyday riffing streams that Shout Factory puts out.
posted by JHarris at 7:06 PM on March 23

In addition to the gift swap, there is also a holidays card swap that runs at the same kind of time- that's run by needlegrrl (link to the first metatalk about it that was what google turned up: https://metatalk.metafilter.com/24593/Holiday-card-exchange
posted by freethefeet at 8:09 PM on March 23

Hey JHarris, thanks for the updates, sounds like y'all have several things going on? Does the info below better capture what y'all do?

Annual Mystery Science Club Xmas Marathon
Contact: JHarris (metafilter_mst3kclub)
Premise: Group watch of MST's marathon
Dates: December 23-25
Link: ????

Turkey Day
Contact: JHarris (metafilter_mst3kclub)
Premise: Puts the official MST3k stream in a video sharing room for ease of viewing
Dates: December 23-25

Thursday Night Riffing
Contact: JHarris (metafilter_mst3kclub)
Premise: Group watch of MST's marathon
Dates: Every Thursday at 9pm ET.
Link: ???
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:27 AM on March 25

In addition to the gift swap, there is also a holidays card swap that runs at the same kind of time

Thanks freethefeet, have added that information to this post, will eventually put all this in FAQ entry!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:35 AM on March 25

Re: Gift Swap AKA Secret Beans - there are two organizers, myself and RhysPenbras; while the gift swap itself does generally run November-December, the signup post goes up in October. (I would hate for someone to miss out because they weren't watching for it yet.)
posted by okayokayigive at 10:22 AM on March 25

Thanks okayokayigive, your name and other info has been added (see the more inside portion of this post).
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 10:35 AM on March 25

We have had a regular monthly Getting Stuff (interpreted widely) Done on IRL for the last three months, posted by me but inspired by earlier posts by others, including mochapickle, toastyk and happyfrog. All welcome. Here is March's.
posted by paduasoy at 12:30 PM on March 25 [3 favorites]

Does Zelda Day count? Our yearly celebration of that time on December 26th, 2009, when a few people coincidentally posted legend of Zelda related things within a small period of time.
posted by kaibutsu at 11:06 PM on March 25