https://projects.metafilter.com/ The past 20 posts to MeFi Projects Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:51:05 GMT Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:51:05 GMT en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60
i made this because i wanted reading on the web to feel like the web: a book is just a webpage, your progress stays on your device, and you can create+link annotations completely anonymously i feel like the web is very non-fiction focused (reddit, facebook, this site), so i wanted to make a place where fiction felt more at home the audiobook sync turned out to be the hardest part: i ended up using a ctc force-align to the text word by word, which gets you a free version of something you have to pay for on other ecosystems: whispersync for the open web. i'd love to hear any feedback or bug reports!

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6514/talefyi-read-write-or-hear-an-entire-book-from-a-single-link tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6514 Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:51:05 GMT samuelcole https://projects.metafilter.com/6514/talefyi-read-write-or-hear-an-entire-book-from-a-single-link/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6513/Let-Us-Sit-in-Goddamn-Silence-for-One-Hour tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6513 Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:08:18 GMT Shepherd https://projects.metafilter.com/6513/Let-Us-Sit-in-Goddamn-Silence-for-One-Hour/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6512/No-Pizza-On-Luna tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6512 Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:17:46 GMT egypturnash https://projects.metafilter.com/6512/No-Pizza-On-Luna/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6511/Interactive-Mars-Globe tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6511 Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:17:32 GMT AlSweigart https://projects.metafilter.com/6511/Interactive-Mars-Globe/rss
I've recently revamped the website to highlight the scale of touring SEAsia -- especially enabling different payment methods. Hope to expand touring to other cities beyond where I've been! Happy to answer any questions one might have about this experience.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6510/I-tour-Southeast-Asia-with-an-analog-aura-camera tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6510 Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:39:52 GMT drea https://projects.metafilter.com/6510/I-tour-Southeast-Asia-with-an-analog-aura-camera/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6509/I-Found-My-Special-Purpose tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6509 Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:12:23 GMT paladin https://projects.metafilter.com/6509/I-Found-My-Special-Purpose/rss
The work (annotations applied to The Great Gatsby with a preface and appendices) is also available as a paperback or Kindle book through Amazon's self-publishing system, but I thought pop-up footnotes would be a quicker way to access and understand the esoteric content. Author's blurb: F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby, is a manual for spiritual development. It is not a unique text, for many American modernist novels of canonical stature are similarly grounded in the occult. Fitzgerald was a follower of A. R. Orage who not only taught the Gurdjieff Work (the Fourth Way) but organized a vast literary network to further its goals. The chief reason that this occult literary tendency has remained in the shadows is that the arbiter of the movement has been poorly understood and critically neglected. The Great Gatsby belongs to a genre of the novel invented by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten's novel, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923) was the model for The Great Gatsby and for many other modern masterpieces. My annotated presentation of Fitzgerald's novel performs three functions. Since emblematic novels are all written using the same phonetic-syllabic code, the alchemical cabala, I have decoded the novel and presented a running account of the coded subtext in footnotes. The actual texts that have decrypted are presented in italics.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6508/The-Occult-Great-Gatsby tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6508 Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:40:28 GMT ASCII Costanza head https://projects.metafilter.com/6508/The-Occult-Great-Gatsby/rss CineBrats.com is a site for serious film nerds. It's a curated map of the film canon (only the films that matter) for people who want to work through film history systematically. You log the films you've seen, it tells you how much of the canon you've actually covered as a single Cinephilia Score, and it helps you decide what to watch next.

The site sorts film history into Collections — the Movements, Auteurs, and all-time Lists that define the medium (e.g., French New Wave, Mumblecore, the Greatest Films of All Time). Log what you've seen and your coverage resolves into that one score; then you set goals — pick the Collections you want to complete and work through them. The idea's been with me since 2010, after I watched Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. It hit me that there was this whole world of film most people never hear about — and that every time I tried to explore it, I felt like I was stumbling around in the dark. Fifteen years later I finally built the map I wish I'd had. It's free, non-commercial, and a solo passion project — no ads, no upsell, and honestly no idea whether anyone but me will use it. This is the first time I've shared the site publicly, so I'd love feedback. I plan to maintain the site obsessively going forward, so join with confidence that it's a loved-and-cared-for thing.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6507/CineBrats-Measure-your-film-literacy-Chart-a-path-to-go-deeper tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6507 Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:38:35 GMT JPowers https://projects.metafilter.com/6507/CineBrats-Measure-your-film-literacy-Chart-a-path-to-go-deeper/rss Moshpit Memories collects seven years' worth of trivia, anecdotes and gig reviews from my old diaries as a music fan at the height of UK pub rock, punk and ska. I started the diaries in 1975, when I was just 16 and ended them in 1981. Among the gigs I wrote up there you'll find a 1977 Clash show in a sweaty little club (plus the NYC appearance which gave us London Calling's cover two years later), Lynyrd Skynyrd threatening to upstage the Stones at Knebworth, pre-fame encounters with both Ian Dury and Shane MacGowan, the Ruts frantically improvising on the first night Malcolm Owen went AWOL and a couple of wonderfully chaotic label revue tours by Stiff and 2 Tone. Live music in Britain had never been more exciting, and I had an almost indecent amount of fun chasing down the best shows. The book's available in digital and paperback editions here.

After 127 pages of the material I've just described, the book switches to the period 1982-2002, via my diary accounts of US and UK shows by Tom Waits, Nick Cave, the Pogues and Jim Rose's extraordinary Circus Sideshow. Finally, I've included expanded versions of my recent Songlines and fRoots interviews with modern roots musicians like Tom Russell, Charlie Parr and Eric Bibb. All this and a bonus comic strip looking back on punk's aftermath too!

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6506/New-PlanetSlade-paperback-recalls-glory-years-of-UK-punk-pub-rock-ska tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6506 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:54:50 GMT Paul Slade https://projects.metafilter.com/6506/New-PlanetSlade-paperback-recalls-glory-years-of-UK-punk-pub-rock-ska/rss
Note for my fellow spreadsheet nerds: the drag handle on the current cell automatically fills down with relocalized formulas, but you can't drag/drop it, unfortunately. You can also use the ( and ) operators to stash stack values and restore them later (e.g., Grand total: ( A:A + ) . pushes "Grand" and "total:" onto the stack, stashes them for later, adds up all cells in column A, then restores the labels underneath the sum and prints the joined values to the cell).

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6505/Cell-Culture tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6505 Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:03:57 GMT Four String Riot https://projects.metafilter.com/6505/Cell-Culture/rss
Our first idea was to mount a regular exterior screen door inside, but after further thought we realized it would be shredded by the cats. We also have an older house with odd door sizes so I would have had to build filler panels or something to use an off-the-shelf screen door anyway. I decided to build a basic frame out of butt-jointed 2X4s which were screwed and glued together in a rectangular frame. I then cut a sheet of cedar lattice to fit the inside of the frame and added little wooden cleats to secure the lattice to the frame. I'd strongly advise using 2X6es for the uprights rather than 2X4s, the 2X4s were too narrow to allow proper installation of a standard lock set. I made no attempt at fine carpentry here - this will hopefully be just a temporary installation until cat harmony rings throughout the land. Materials cost about $80. Also note- most of the available lattice was pressure treated wood which is toxic to animals. Only use cedar or untreated woods.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6504/Building-a-Cat-Integration-Door tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6504 Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:16:04 GMT Larry David Syndrome https://projects.metafilter.com/6504/Building-a-Cat-Integration-Door/rss page: all it's doing is taking a password and then showing some text and images and some links to PDFs. What if I... took apart the app and made it into a static site generator? What if I used my reverse-engineering skills... to subvert "app culture", one app at a time?

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6503/I-got-so-sick-of-app-culture-that-I-subverted-it tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6503 Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:21:18 GMT avapoet https://projects.metafilter.com/6503/I-got-so-sick-of-app-culture-that-I-subverted-it/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6502/rubber-duck tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6502 Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:47:40 GMT vert canard https://projects.metafilter.com/6502/rubber-duck/rss "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. Like the copy of Martin Luther King Jr's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" at LetterFromJail.com, this website acts a resource for accessing the direct text of a civil rights activist's words.

A lot of web design considerations came up while I was making this. I wanted the text to be complete and accurate, but also have pull quotes to break up the walls of text. I made a few corrections found in the multiple source texts I consulted. I've added several Wikipedia links to figures, events, and Bible passages mentioned in the speech. I wanted it to look good on desktop and mobile, and chose a sans serif font to give Douglass's words a modern look. I added social media share buttons and a link to a PDF version. The printer version of the site removes a lot of the unnecessary website cruft. The entire site fits on a single page, with an intro and FAQ at the top for SEO purposes. Each paragraph has a permalink for direct linking as well as a "Copy to Clipboard" button. The full speech can also be copied to the clipboard with a single click of the "Copy Speech to Clipboard" link. The two portrait images of Douglass are from Wikipedia, one from his younger years and the other from his senior years, and they've been shrunk and converted to webp to trim their file size. Alt tags have been added to the images. The entire site weight is 146kb. I create a sitemap.xml and robots.txt file to direct search engines to index the page, and a GitHub repo allows people to submit changes.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6501/WhatToTheSlaveIsThe4thOfJulycom tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6501 Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:57:56 GMT AlSweigart https://projects.metafilter.com/6501/WhatToTheSlaveIsThe4thOfJulycom/rss A Book Of Small Science Fiction is a little book that contains 181 short (often very short) science fiction stories, one written every day so far this year (up to June 30th). You can read a selection of them here, or download the book (as 50 page, 15000 word pdf) here.

I wrote these rather than keeping a diary this year, so there's no continuity between tales, no structural choices in the placement of the stories. They're all just presented in the order they were written, day after day after day. (Which means there's some slight repetitions here that could probably have been condensed into one, and couple of others that would probably have been better off left on the page of my notebook entirely, but I've included all of them as a commitment to the project). The second part, containing 184 small stories, will be released at the end of the year (if I manage to keep up writing one every day to an acceptable standard (which hopefully i will)).

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6500/A-Book-Of-Small-Science-Fiction tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6500 Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:43:14 GMT dng https://projects.metafilter.com/6500/A-Book-Of-Small-Science-Fiction/rss
The index currently only contains 20 months of data, is not meant to keep up with the chain tip, as the classification algorithms take quit a bit of CPU time to run. I'm currently backfilling the data to The Merge.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6499/Browse-the-Ethereum-Blockchain-by-execution-structure tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6499 Tue, 30 Jun 2026 01:51:25 GMT Stu-Pendous https://projects.metafilter.com/6499/Browse-the-Ethereum-Blockchain-by-execution-structure/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6498/Babel-Nexus-A-public-domain-repository-for-books-with-reading-trails-and-hexagonal-galleries tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6498 Sun, 28 Jun 2026 03:25:01 GMT NishanStepak https://projects.metafilter.com/6498/Babel-Nexus-A-public-domain-repository-for-books-with-reading-trails-and-hexagonal-galleries/rss
By treating a cryptic poem on a 1614 tomb as a potential riddle, I followed a trail of clues that led to a nearby chapel, an obscure Kentish MP named Edward Master, and a web of unexpected literary connections. I've mapped out this archival detective story—including a side-by-side handwriting analysis using modern AI tools—and I'd love to hear what any history buffs, codebreakers, or genealogists think of the path I followed.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6497/I-Know-What-Happened-to-Christopher-Marlowe tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6497 Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:15:27 GMT iotic https://projects.metafilter.com/6497/I-Know-What-Happened-to-Christopher-Marlowe/rss The Museum Of Everyday Items (to be renamed The Museum Of Obsolete Objects in 2066) is a small collection of common yet otherwise unremarkable artefacts from contemporary Britain. All items were collected on June 23rd, 2016, at the moment of their use. A diary of the day kept by the curator of the museum places the items in their appropriate historical context. There are 36 objects in The Museum Of Everyday Items. These items were kept in storage until June 2026, when they were photographed and catalogued for the opening of the museum on June 23rd, 2026. A handful of contemporary notes were added to each item which reflect the curator's current thoughts rather than those of the day in question. Further observations on the items will be recorded on June 23rd, 2036, and at ten year intervals ever after, or at least until the curator forgets and/or dies.

The primary purpose of The Museum of Everyday Items is simply to provide a permanent record of some the artefacts we use and encounter in a relatively normal day, and present them in a way which reflects their prevalence in everyday living. Of course even here, having collected items such as food packaging and receipts which would normally be discarded, there are still many omissions (clothes, crockery, cutlery, are all conspicuous by their absence). But still, I think keeping (and in displaying here, actually looking at) items such as cash machine receipts and carrier bags is interesting, at least on some level. A secondary idea behind this was the thought of telling the story of a day in its entirety. Even now in an environment of near ubiquitous social media coverage of every aspect of our lives, we pick out moments to share, shorn largely of context (or even, perhaps most often, with the context purposely obscured or misrepresented entirely). This museum therefore presents a day as a day, each artefact here presented as evidence of the reality of the attached narrative [#036]. Thirdly, I've always been interested in how, while the objects themselves don't change, our perceptions of them do. This is often clearest in old photos, where what was once the subject of the photo (the people in it, usually) becomes less interesting over time, while the background itself achieves the reverse and becomes endlessly fascinating. Old furniture, wallpaper, the clothes worn, technology, toys, shop signs, adverts. All the things that were transitory, momentary. So here we get a snapshot of 2016 where all the things are items from that periphery. Receipts from shops that no longer exist, items that have either become or are becoming obsolete through changing consumer habits (CDs, newspapers) or legislative changes (carrier bags) or simply the passing of time (actual paper £5 notes). And through it all still the reassuring ever unchanging presence of Tunnocks Tea Cakes.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6496/The-Museum-of-Everyday-Items tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6496 Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:15:12 GMT dng https://projects.metafilter.com/6496/The-Museum-of-Everyday-Items/rss
I made a summary post that links to each of my more in-depth posts. I also provide a one-page summary PDF and an easy-to-share image to help people take the guide to the polls; I distributed a paper version at a weekly in-person outreach table I run. This is the third time I've written up local election recommendations (I did this for the primary and the general elections last year). For this election I expanded to covering some more kinds of races, and one of them -- State Senate District 13 -- is incredibly controversial, and I spent a lot of time trying to cover all the nuances. I don't think there's any other non-paywalled source that collates the New York City Bar Association, LGBT Bar Association of Greater New York, and Queens County Bar Association evaluations of the candidates in the Queens judicial election. I also met some of the candidates for several races and incorporated my impressions of them into my recommendations. In one case I even filed a Freedom of Information request to get more info about a candidate as part of my research. Overall I did significantly more research for this election than for previous ones.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6495/Hyperlocal-primary-election-recommendations-for-part-of-Queens-NYC tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6495 Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:43:22 GMT brainwane https://projects.metafilter.com/6495/Hyperlocal-primary-election-recommendations-for-part-of-Queens-NYC/rss