MetaTalk

Hey. It's cortex. We don't usually do this sort of thing, but: this US election is a couple weeks away and is really important for the future of the US and for the world. We're four years into creeping authoritarianism and outright regressive bigotry from the President and the GOP. If you're in the US, it's really important that you vote Biden/Harris and get Trump the hell out of office. Vote early if you can. There's state-by-state voting information available from vote411 and Ballotpedia.
posted by cortex at 2:23 PM Oct 20 2020 - 186 comments [70 favorites]

Damn, I have been here a long time. I am not a terribly prolific poster or one of those people you see holding court in every single post, but I like to think of myself as one of those "Oh yeah, THAT guy" MeFites who shows up every day. It's been a shit year in a lot of ways, but I still look forward to seeing what's going on here, learn about something, have my perspective on an issue enlightened, and maybe have a laugh, just like I have done for the last two decades. Thanks to you all for being a big part of my life.
posted by briank at 3:31 PM Oct 20 2020 - 18 comments [22 favorites]

In the spirit of the Bad at Life thread, how about a "tiny fixes" thread? Things that are too embarrassing or not worth burning an Ask question on.
posted by notsnot at 5:40 AM Oct 19 2020 - 103 comments [21 favorites]

Happy weekend, MetaFilter! This week, as per jessamyn's request, the topic is, "Honestly, Eyebrows, you sit in the house all day and you've been tripping over five baskets of clean laundry waiting to be sorted for the last three weeks: What is your deal?"
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:22 PM Oct 16 2020 - 180 comments [20 favorites]

A while back I jokingly said something about how we should have a Metafilter Zoom knitting group, and a couple of people MeMailed me to express interest in actually doing it. Should we? It doesn't have to be limited to knitting: it could be a general hang-out-on-Zoom (or some other platform) while-doing-your-small-craft-project group.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:45 PM Oct 14 2020 - 73 comments [12 favorites (8 in the last 7 days)]

Anyone interested in a virtual meetup to sing sea chanteys and traditional folk music?
posted by Sheydem-tants at 8:06 AM Oct 17 2020 - 16 comments [7 favorites]

Signups for the 2020 MetaFilter Gift Swap are now open! The Metafilter Gift Swap takes place annually from roughly November - January. It used to have another name, but times change and so have we! Each participant sends a gift to an awesome Mefite; each participant receives a gift from an awesome Mefite. Awesomeness and gifts abound. The dates this year are: Signups Oct 13 - Oct 28; Assignments Nov 1; Send-by Dec 1.
posted by curious nu at 2:02 PM Oct 13 2020 - 52 comments [12 favorites (4 in the last 7 days)]

I have no fucking mouth but I must scream. FUUUUUCK
posted by rue72 at 7:24 AM Oct 22 2020 - 6 comments [2 favorites]

I think the community would benefit from talking about how the recent thread about "tramp stamps" went. A number of Mefites have expressed that they felt that this thread felt like a big step backwards, like they were somehow visiting Metafilter in 2005 and not 2015. What can we do as a community to maintain whatever advances we've made in pushing back on the boyzone mentality here?
posted by dialetheia at 10:09 AM May 14 2015 - 1802 comments [38 favorites (1 in the last 7 days)]

There is currently a practice across Metafilter, especially within Metafilter proper (the Blue) and Metatalk (the Grey) of making personal attacks against other users that I feel undermines the community aspect of the site. The attacks I am concerned with most often take the form of ugly insinuations that the user is deliberately derailing, trolling or using common tactics which are allegedly known to be popular with (in alphabetical order, thee could be more, these are all I could think of when I set about making this thread):

• Anti-Semites
• Bigots
• Conservatives
• Misogynists
• MRAs
• PUAs
• Racists
• Redditors (specifically, usually The Red Pill subreddit)
• TERFs
• Transmisogonists

posted by misha at 4:29 PM Sep 8 2014 - 1266 comments [21 favorites (1 in the last 7 days)]

I have learned a ton from the community here -- from pure knowledge stuff like how airplanes or viruses or financial systems work, to lived experience stuff like what some aspects of life are like for disabled folks, how to better spot my biases, how to be a better ally. These are just a very small sampling of the immense quantity of stuff I have learned from you all.

The thing is, a lot of that learning has been diffused over 18 years of being here. And a lot of the knowledge transfer has been implicit, from just participating and being exposed to social norms of which I was previously ignorant. This makes the huge gains I have enjoyed less accessible to a new user. I think it would be neat to be able to watch / listen to a talk from a MetaFilter member who is a subject matter expert on topic [X]. A Metafilter Member Seminar Series, of sorts.
posted by lazaruslong at 12:49 PM Oct 9 2020 - 17 comments [15 favorites (1 in the last 7 days)]

Yes, I know -- it's not even spooky season yet! But we're in some difficult times, and I'd like to get a head start on figuring out if we need to do anything different this year.
posted by curious nu at 5:39 PM Aug 13 2020 - 68 comments [11 favorites (1 in the last 7 days)]

Happy weekend, MetaFilter! This week, I'm curious to know what Covid/quarantine hobbies you've stuck with! Are there things you're really enjoying? Are they things you've always done? New hobbies? Things you've always wanted to try or never expected to try? Most importantly, how can we all try them?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:48 PM Oct 10 2020 - 115 comments [6 favorites (1 in the last 7 days)]