MetaTalk

100K raffle is over! Congrats to jamaro!

cortex — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:21:10 -0800

The 100K raffle is over! In just four days, we raised $12,745 for five good causes thanks to the generosity of several hundred mefites. Video of the drawing here...or if you can't stand the suspense, winners and miscellaneous details are below the fold. Our five runners-up will each get their choice of a Metafilter tshirt from the shop as well as a copy of the Metafilter Compilation Album. They are: - lantius - birdsquared - lalex - bigmusic - ColdChef (who came up twice as a runner up, so we redrew, but he can have an extra shirt and CD too if he wants) And our grand prize winner, who gets custody of usernumber 100000 and paid airfare to and from a meetup of their choice: - jamaro! Congrats, everybody! We shot the video this afternoon; Jessamyn is traveling right now (happy birthday, Jessamyn's dad!) and I wanted to incorporate some ad hoc footage that she gamely cameraphoned in the airport but I didn't manage to pull it off. Hopefully she'll post those outtakes to youtube herself when she has a chance. And as folks who have been following the previous thread or Matt's twitter already know, we're having kind of a nightmare with Paypal right now freezing up Matt's account. Hopefully we can get that figured out in a sane way and finish off the raffle the way we intended, but if Paypal does ultimately just completely shit the bed on this we'd ask folks to go ahead and send the money they'd see refunded off to the intended beneficiaries on their own as a sort of DIY solution to the problem. We'll post more in here as things develop. Thanks again to everybody who participated and to everyone who helped support or brainstorm the idea along the way. This was a lot of fun and an amazing community turn out.

boys are like this and girls are like that

jabberjaw — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:10:52 -0800

Couch in the Ladies' Room. Am I the only one who thinks a chatfilter thread devoted to stereotyping and generalizing men and women is a bad use of AskMe? I'm more troubled that it's such a popular thread. What am I missing?

Israel Meetup

alona — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:43:06 -0800

Israel meetup? This has come up a few times but to the extent of my knowledge never actually happened. All you mefites that are planning to be in Israel in December, this thread is for us. Who's in?

Yay. Another favorites discussion.

yhbc — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:28:41 -0800

Maybe we shouldn't be able to favorite our own comments?

Sorry Dallas, you can always make the drive.

djduckie — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:34:16 -0800

Sorry Dallas, Austin school's out meet-up? Spikeleemajors had mentioned in the last thread about having another meet-up after finals, and i really think that would be a good idea, as I really enjoy the meet-ups After finals puts us at the weekend before christmas, or we could do the 6th or the 13th. The 13th is in the middle of finals though. My suggestion is the Pour House, as previously mentioned, also in the last thread. Or we could do dog and duck again, that place was really cool. Food was amazing, and when i spend that much on a sandwich i am glad when the flavor gives me my money's worth. Tell me what you guys think. By the way, i was coming here to do this before I saw the Dallas post. Really not trying to be a jerk, coincidence i decided to take advantage of.

DFW SUCKS

pineapple — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:37:35 -0800

Dallas sucks! Remember how much fun we had at the anniversary meetup in July, and we were all "We're besties now, let's do this every weekend, forever!!!" and everyone else was all "YEAH!" Then.... nothing. Austin has met-up three or four times since then. Even Houston has planned a couple. Dallas? Verily, we sucketh. Therefore, it is time. So, what say you? Should we look at a date in the next few weeks? Any ideas? Shall we air the Festivus grievance airing? SantaCon? Suggestions on parts of town? Dinner? Just drinks? Thoughts? Who's in?

Five years in the making and finally complete!

jessamyn — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:54:29 -0800

Thank you backtaggers! Thanks to a nudge from mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey and a lot of metadata specialists and friends we finished backtagging all 12,496 MetaTalk posts last night at 12:15 EST (with a few stragglers afterwards). MeFi and AskMe have been done already. This means that every post on MetaFilter that can have tags, has them. Thanks everyone for a job well done. A few more notes about tags, for people who may be curious. - mutual contacts can add tags to each other's posts, feel free to add tags that you think might be useful (but please refrain from editorializing in tags if you can help it) - until we get some sort of a power search going, tags are one of the best ways to pre-search for double posts on the blue - more backtagging MeTa posts/discussion here - If you want to know who our librarians are on MeFi [a group whose membership overlaps but does not ecompass the whole of the backtagging team] you can install this greasemonkey script. If you are a librarian and not marked as my contact, please let me know. It was really gratifying to see this semi-stagnant project get the push that it needed from a dedicated team of volunteers. I really appreciate everyone's willingness to step-up and help out.

MeFi Mall page for this year's holiday shopping?

lalex — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:19:32 -0800

MeFi Mall page for this year's holiday shopping? As far as I can tell (which isn't actually that far), the MeFiMall hasn't been updated since the last holiday season. Is this correct? I'd love to be able to check out MeFite stores, and would be happy to help with any of the work involved with collecting links/descriptions.

URL shorteners?

idiopath — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:01:44 -0800

URL shorteners in FPPs? Are we OK with FPPs via URL shortener? Is there an explicit policy about that? Maybe a static check for the common shorteners and a recommendation to link to the actual page could be added to the post form? Not picking on this post, I just noticed it was a link to bit.ly and figured it would be worth clarifying.

Desuetude Does Dallas... er... Houston

greekphilosophy — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:56:54 -0800

Hey Houston: desuetude is coming to town at the beginning of December. Let's get together so she can teach you how to pronounce her username! She's arriving on the afternoon of the 5th and departing the morning of the 10th. She can correct me, but it looks like Tuesday is the only day that is absolutely out for a meetup that wont keep everyone up past their bedtimes. Suggestions for a cool evening meetup place?

Five years, same as in town

octothorpe — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:29:13 -0800

Five years ago today, Matt posted "New user signups are back on" letting all us rowdy unwashed masses into Metafilter for the mere price of five dollars american. Happy Fifth Anniversary to users 17578 to 18680 from 18117.

MeFiChi Holiday Extravaganza

eriko — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:13:18 -0800

MeFiChi: It's that time yet again, where we bundle up our holiday cheer, throw it into the Chicago river, and head to the darkness of Lower Michigan Avenue.... Usual place/time? Which would be, I do believe, Wednesday, December 3, 6PM, at The Billy Goat on Lower Michigan Avenue. Unless you have a better idea. And, hey, for the holidays, we could go to Daley Plaza and stare at the lights, or even better, take over the beer tent -- but it closes at 8PM.

Two steps forward, 1.999 steps back?

kalessin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:31:12 -0800

WTF, MetaFilter? Especially after two epic threads about rape experience and not knowing whether to trust other people, it seems, I don't know. Unwise? To post about this animation that's rather the antithesis of all that work. I'm really just not getting it. I'm just not feeling the "different strokes for different folks" here, even if it's "art". (closed)

MeFites were right - it was a hoax

Oriole Adams — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:06:20 -0800

Anyone remember this thread about Dan "Blitz" Krieg who suffered a freak accident and then perished from MRSA? At the time several MeFites suspected a Kaycee-type hoax, but doubters were immediately trounced by those who knew and loved Dr. Syn and assured us that the story was true. Once again, though, MeFites were correct in their suspicions, as it seems that Daniel Krieg, ex-Navy man and northern Kentucky resident, is alive and well. Even some of his former supporters are peeved at his deception.

Raffling off the big 100K

cortex — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:32:15 -0800

We're raffling off usernumber 100000! ~~For the next week~~ Through Friday, you can buy $5 raffle tickets (to benefit your choice of five charitable orgs) for a chance to win the big account and airfare to a meetup of your choice. The details: 1. You can buy as many tickets as you like. The purchase page will let you buy multiple tickets in one go. (You can divvy your tickets up among multiple charities if you want to, by going through the purchase process multiple times and choosing a different charity each time.) 2. The face value of tickets will go to the charity; we'll eat the paypal commission fees on the transactions and write five checks at the end, one to each organization, for the full amounts donated. 3. The organizations are: - Doctors Without Borders - Kiva - DonorsChoose.org - Electronic Frontier Foundation - Creative Commons 4. The prizes: The grand prize is ownership of account 100000—you can name it whatever you like and it's yours to keep. (You're also expected not to do anything with it that'd break the guidelines, so don't get any Bond Villain ideas, please.) The grand prize winner will also be given airfare to attend the meetup of their choice, wherever it is and wherever they're coming from. Keep in mind it's just the roundtrip ticket; accommodations and so forth are up to the winner. If the grand prize winner isn't able to travel for whatever reason, they have the option of having a meetup come to them: we'll fly in one of the mefi mods. Instant nerd party! Five runner up prizes will be drawn as well, good for one (1) t-shirt of your choice from the Metafilter Shop and one (1) copy of the Metafilter Compilation Album. 5. The drawing will be done in the style of a normal raffle—buying more tickets gets you a better chance to win, but every ticket has a chance to win. Whether we have a physical raffle or use a random number generator will mostly depend on the volume of tickets, but in either case we'll take some pictures. 6. The raffle will run ~~for one week; next Monday~~ until Friday, at noon Friday we'll close it down and arrange a drawing and announce winners as quick as we can.

Great read!

four panels — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:26:10 -0800

Hi, just wanted to say how great (I think) this story comment is. I don't get to read everything on the site, and maybe someone missed this like I miss other things.

San Fran Post T-Day Meetup

waraw — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:38:54 -0800

I'll be in San Francisco for Turkey Day and the weekend following. Let's meetup! Friday 11/27/09 would be optimal. I leave it to local people to decide the where, though somewhere that serves alcohol would be nice.

No English Help Please

PhoBWanKenobi — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:13:50 -0800

This question seems like homeworkfilter to me. As someone who's taught freshmen comp, this sort of editing was precisely the homework that my students were often given. Though the OP says he cleared it with Jessamyn, and that his questions are specific rather than "help me edit this", the questions are all actually pretty broad, particularly as he appends that he wants "general feedback about grammar etc." I appreciate that kylej is hoping to improve his essay, but I can't help but think that editing high school comp papers isn't a good ask of AskMe, and would hate to open the door to questions here being used as free editing help. I get the feeling that a bunch of the responders so far feel the same way, but kylej says to take it to metafilter, so here we are.

Great ask.me shoe answer -and- Search the sideblog?

theora55 — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:36:50 -0800

I'm looking for a great ask.me answer about buying quality shoes that's probably several years old. There was an answer from a shoe store manager(owner?) that was very good, and I think it was sideblogged. Which brings me to my 2nd question: Is the sideblog searchable?

Does she owe him sex, too?

prefpara — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 20:18:57 -0800

This answer in a recent AskMe made me very uncomfortable. I know about "flag it and move on," but I don't actually think the answer breaks the guidelines. It didn't seem appropriate to turn the thread into an argument about it, so here I am. I think it's outrageous to say that in a relationship, the person whose salary is less "owes" housework to the other person, especially as the asker stated that she and her boyfriend work the same hours. In addition to that, the answer relies on questionable assumptions (e.g. "you chose not to invest as much time/money/effort into developing your human capital"). I think the overall feel of the answer (as well as the other answers by Jacqueline) is sexist. Frankly, this answer, and all of Jacqueline's answers in that question, make my blood boil. It feels to me like an attack on the asker. I disagree completely with all of it. I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing where I should just ignore it and accept that not everyone sees the world the same way that I do. If so, I apologize for making this post. However, I think that the perspective Jacqueline is sharing is actively harmful and just horribly wrong, and needs to be countered.