171: Was I Weird

April 5, 2021 2:29 PM

We've made it through the dark tunnel that is April 1 online and jessamyn and I are here with that good good MetaFilter chatter and a little bit of linguistics speculation. Runs about 85 minutes.

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- Leah Velleman notes that a lot of free software is free as in piano
- I can't believe we had a whole conversation about doubting ourselves about what a gas mantle is supposed to be called and didn't once riff on gaslighting
- chess masters make history with double bongcloud opening

Jobs
- Research assistant - neuroimaging by ghostbikes
- Executive Director by mcbaya
- Musical Entrepreneur by MrVisible
- USGS Water Data Science, Machine Learning, and Product Management Cluster Hire by rockindata
- help me brainstorm pros and cons of using static jekyll site by elgee

Projects
- Recent work at USGS Water by rockindata
- Painted pine linen press by bonobothegreat
- The Kilobyte’s Gambit 1k chess game by malevolent (MeFi Post)
- Women and Other Monsters book by babelfish
- A make-believe band by jragon
- Needledrop by thomaspark

MetaFilter
- The quest to save "the floppy goblin," the Blakiston’s fish owl by jessamyn
- Malign Directive by adrianhon
- And his bio sounds like the worst dog in the world! by jacquilynne
- Swatchbook by Fiasco da Gama
- Daniel Tiger welcomes new autistic character to the Neighborhood by brook horse
- GothamChess vs Dewa Kipas by interogative mood
- a comment by value of information
- No one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful. by Ghidorah
- Shrimp Heaven Now by punchtothehead
- It's stuck by automatronic
- Ways to research the modern and ancient worlds by brainwane

Ask MetaFilter
- Have you convinced a reluctant family member to get the vaccine? by Kutsuwamushi
- Catholic School Crossover Ties by falsedmitri
- Streaming Romanian/Hungarian TV in USA by DirtyOldTown
- NAME! THAT! SHOW! From a single still image. by magnetsphere
- I need to grow a 100 pound pumpkin. by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug
- a comment by jessamyn
- Who was the 80s? band with white pants and/or white belts? by cortex
- looking for book titles! by =^.^=
- Can I set up RSS on my made-by-hand blog? by mark7570

MetaFilter Music
- MUSIC CHALLENGE - ideas and votes! by greenish
- MeFiMusic - O Come All Ye Faithfull! by greenish

MetaTalk
- Right day, wrong century by cortex
- Uncle Mefi's Big Book of Beans by cortex
- Asian American MeFite Checkin by Alensin
- Thank you MeFi for career change advice, & coding bootcamp success story by skwt

posted by cortex (staff) to MeFi Podcast at 2:29 PM (12 comments total)

Question about "Right Day, Wrong Century" - will we see the thread in toto on some future date?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:10 PM on April 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

will we see the thread in toto on some future date?

If you click the comment "preview" button at the bottom of the page you can see the whole story so far.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 3:53 PM on April 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

The 80s Ask question made me think of Platinum Blonde.
posted by dobbs at 4:21 PM on April 5, 2021

As a meta follow-up to "It's Stuck", there was a comment that one of the Mefi usernames in that thread was the same as the largest cement carrier on the great lakes. It turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg.

I can now reveal that, based on an extensive analysis of all 74513 usernames in the Metafilter Infodump, along with comparison to the VesselFinder site, at least 6.05% of all Metafilter users are actually sea-going vessels. That's right - at least 4514 of us are actually boats.

Many Bothan spies zoom calls died were placed on mute to bring you that information.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 4:40 PM on April 5, 2021 [14 favorites]

"If you click the comment "preview""

hey, oi!, ah, oh, eh, er, k.
posted by clavdivs at 5:06 PM on April 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

yiddish smear with or without an h? Well, that depends on if you're using the c or not, right?
posted by pwnguin at 8:00 PM on April 5, 2021

Oh, dang, that's a good point pwnguin; didn't even occur to me while we were going off the dome during that conversation that I'd e.g. find both schmear and shmear less blinkworthy than smear. I do tend to think and write spiel instead of schpiel, but I think schpiel would make me blink less than shpiel when you get down to it.

Spiel also feels in my gut a little more fully incorporated in American English usage than a lot of Yiddish loan words, and maybe that's part of it; a relative loss of markedness would translate pretty well to a regularization of the spelling (and for that matter the fact that I've heard folks using "spiel" without an sh sound at all).
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:52 PM on April 5, 2021

IMO, schmear, but spiel. It's a spiel if it's short, a schpiel if it's long, but both spelled spiel. But it's always a schmear and my local kosher deli agrees.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 10:05 PM on April 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

I can now reveal that, based on an extensive analysis of all 74513 usernames in the Metafilter Infodump, along with comparison to the VesselFinder site, at least 6.05% of all Metafilter users are actually sea-going vessels. That's right - at least 4514 of us are actually boats.

You're not going to believe how many of us are Ships.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 1:59 AM on April 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

If you're using German orthography, then

s: before and between vowels: [z] or [z̥]; before consonants or when final: [s]; before p or t at the beginning of a word or syllable: [ʃ]

Whether to use German orthography for Yiddish is a separate question. Anecdotally, a lot of English speakers represent the "sh" sound in Yiddish using the English convention and not the German convention.
posted by trig at 2:23 AM on April 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

On the topic of shelter pet names: the place I adopted one of my cats from gives all of their animals rock'n'roll names, which is why I now proudly share a house with a (currently sleeping in her cat tree) Alice in Chains. I assume she is only one of many, since there's only so many band names out there, and I think to think of all the other Alices out there.

(I had thought of renaming her, but she is extremely an Alice. Also I have just remembered that my other cat, adopted from a totally different place, had the shelter name Phife as in the rapper Phife Dawg, so it's just music references wall to wall here!)
posted by kalimac at 7:30 AM on April 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'm very grateful for the responses to my story question--I hadn't realized, first, that I couldn't see some of the stories in the (wrong) books because I'd been long since logged out of the IA in the first place, and then that, as you mentioned, I didn't have the right freakin' anthology in mind. I love it when Internet detective work works out!
posted by kitten kaboodle at 3:27 PM on April 8, 2021 [1 favorite]