Metatalktail Hour: I'm the Last One to Know!

October 28, 2021 7:51 PM

Happy weekend, MetaFilter! (FaceFilter????) This week, I'm wondering what is something AMAZING that you are the last person on the planet to discover? This question brought to you courtesy of having JUST DISCOVERED STARDEW VALLEY THIS WEEK, and I clearly should have gotten into this years ago.

Also I just accidentally bought 435 beet seeds so I guess now I'm Dwight Schrute.

As always, talk about anything that's up with you! And hit us up with ideas for future editions. :)

posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) to MetaFilter-Related at 7:51 PM (23 comments total)

For some unknown reason, I eschewed salt for most of my 58 years. I only recently discovered that it actually does often help foods taste better. I still haven't learned to salt "to taste" and am a little afraid of salt.
posted by NotLost at 8:03 PM on October 28, 2021 [9 favorites]

I think I was just too busy having a baby to pay attention to music when he first came out, but my Sirius indie station has been playing Sufjan Stevens a lot, and I started thinking "wow this guy seems pretty good!" I'm only a decade or so behind on that but oh well. I wander around the house singing "I made a lot of mistakes..." to myself now.
posted by emjaybee at 8:38 PM on October 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

Have fun with Stardew Valley! If you want some play advice just ask, I'm almost done with my third Community Center completion.
posted by JHarris at 8:42 PM on October 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

I finally connected the (yarn) skein winding and measuring equipment known as a clock reel or yarn weasel to ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’.

(I also might be the last person to ever figure out that if one locks oneself out, after dark, without one’s phone, that the spare key in a realtor lock is NOT THAT HELPFUL when you can’t make out the digits on the combination dial. Serves me right taking out the bins! )
posted by janell at 10:37 PM on October 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

In my area 'Boss' is the new 'Dude'. I was shocked when my black neighbor called me Boss like WTF did I deserve to be called that? Then like a day later I'm at the Korean market across the street that I've been to for the past twenty years or so.... good friends and such, watched the kids grow up. So junior calls some other customer Boss and I'm like WTF... youngster explains that Boss is just the new slang for my Dude. Did not know that thing that everybody else did.

+++

Re: locking oneself out... tonight marks my third time breaking into some neighbor's apartment because they locked themselves out. Muahahaha.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:02 AM on October 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

xkcd has useful way of looking at this kind of thing!
posted by Harald74 at 4:36 AM on October 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

I just picked up and started playing Final Fantasy Tactics (there’s an iPad version now), a couple weeks ago. That’s me, cutting edge gamer, playing a game from 1997(ok, the War of the Lions update happened in 2007, but still).
posted by notoriety public at 5:14 AM on October 29, 2021

Up until like a week ago, I thought the word "cordial" meant stuffy and formal. I don't know why, but I had learned it from reading books and I guess that's just the definition I came up with. Anyway my wife corrected me the other day and now I have to re-read every book ever to properly figure out people's relationships in them.
posted by Literaryhero at 11:16 AM on October 29, 2021 [5 favorites]

notoriety public, you're going to LOVE FFT, although it has a lot of steep learning curves. If you can save in different places, please do so at least every three major fights. That game does not let you coast through it at all.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 11:52 AM on October 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Only in the last year have I started listening to Taylor Swift. Turns out she's pretty good!
posted by suelac at 1:28 PM on October 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

I have lived in Vermont since 1997 and I just now realized that those rubber boot trays are an incredible invention! Especially for a shoes-off house.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:22 PM on October 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Update: I am down to about 250 beet seeds.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 8:07 PM on October 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

We didn't even know you were on a diet. What is that in metric?

[rim-shot.gif]
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:17 PM on October 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

So, I probably heard Belle and Sebastian back in the late 1990s when I was a grad student at UMN listening to Radio K online in the lab I was working in at the time. Yet I really didn't get into them until 2015 or so. I really don't no what took me so long, as they are completely up my alley.
posted by mollweide at 6:28 PM on October 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

Just this year I discovered I really like Radiohead. I’m heavily into Belle and Sebastian, too.
posted by waving at 6:37 PM on October 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

Waving, Radiohead is on my list of bands I should listen to. I really don't know what is wrong with me.
posted by mollweide at 6:45 PM on October 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

So a thing I'm currently excited about is this acrylic riser thingie that I bought to put over my keyboard to keep Twinkle the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Cat from tromping all over it. It works very well for the purpose, and it's even tall enough that I can stick my hands under it and type. Which lead to the amazing discovery that I can also use it to set a plate on while eating at the computer, so I'm not trying to type with one hand while balancing a full plate of food on my boobs with the other.

And, and, and... I can also use it for writing or drawing or laying out tarot cards. Which is super handy, considering the tiny little bit of desk space I have to use for work, art and basically every other thing I do in life. Having accidentally solved all these problems at once is very exciting as a person who continually struggles with my living space.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 8:45 PM on October 30, 2021 [9 favorites]

Just this weekend, I learned that any Reddit subreddit can be converted to an RSS feed by simply appending .rss to the URL.
posted by COD at 1:40 PM on October 31, 2021 [4 favorites]

Thanks to Metafilter, today I learned that such a thing as an altarista exists.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:10 PM on November 1, 2021

Drink has been had, and I've just applied to two remote developer jobs...either of which will pay twice my current salary at a minimum.

GAAAHHH WHAT HAVE I DONE?
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:40 PM on November 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

I... discovered that I care about HMS Pinafore.

This is news to me. I thought I was done caring about anything G&S wrote after I finished my undergrad. I had sung a lot of their stuff as a student, and on leaving university I swore to myself I would never again sing Gilbert and Sullivan unless it were well paid, or for charity, or to help out a friend. And so far I have held to that, even as there's been a post-millennium revival of G&S at the professional level.

Case in point: English National Opera are doing their first ever production of HMS Pinafore, and a friend got me in to see the dress rehearsal last week. It being ENO, the orchestra and voices are beautiful, the conducting is great and the design is lovely: a beautifully built wooden ship on a revolve; ladies in perfect 1860s dresses. But the direction SUCKS BALLS, and it was while I was thinking about *why* it sucked balls that I realised I cared about this ridiculous opera.

In Gilbert's work, you (of course) get a lot of tension between the rigid boundaries of Victorian society and the tendency of human nature to strain against those boundaries. In Pinafore, the hierarchies are twofold: the strict discipline of the Royal Navy, and the social strata of aristocracy versus commoners. A director has to build a world on those boundaries, and then create the equal-and-opposite force of human love that longs to break them.

Love: not only the younger couple of captain's daughter Josephine and Ralph the foremast jack, but also Captain Corcoran and Buttercup, who are equally off-limits to each other. That Act II duet should be the first time they touch, and should be a tango of sexual tension.

Corcoran himself is at the point where the hierarchies intersect-- the highest on his ship, but treated as a commoner by Sir Joseph, all the while trying to keep his daughter away from her low-born true love. Properly played, he should be breaking under the strain. Properly staged, the finale of Act I is a revolution.

All of which is to say: if I ever get the chance to direct Pinafore, it's going to be queer as hell. It's going to take the "love that breaks boundaries" theme and run with it. (I mean, the ship is named after a frilly apron for god's sake.) Might get an AMAB artist to sing Buttercup, the Bosun and Carpenter will be an established couple, and if I can get my trans tenor friend to play Ralph, that would be great. And those love stories will be treated as seriously as the canonical ones. That is, it's G&S so there will be jokes aplenty; much of the humour is character-based; but characters' sexuality and gender identity will not be played for laughs.

(Will I ever actually get my arse in gear to make this happen? Who knows?? It will probably end up consigned to the Valhalla of directing ideas I will never be organised enough to begin. If someone else does the same or a similar thing, I'd watch and cheer.)

Anyway. Maybe I care about Gilbert and Sullivan again?? How embarrassing. MeFi, let's keep this our secret.
posted by Pallas Athena at 5:41 PM on November 1, 2021 [12 favorites]

I knew that wild turkeys eat our acorns and hazel nuts but it never occurred to me to wonder HOW they eat them. Until last month, watching a flock mosey along across my yard, pecking here and there at the ground, moving steadily on. I realized they never stopped to peck repeatedly at any one spot the way the small birds at the feeder do with sunflower seeds in the shells. So what are they doing?

Turns out turkeys SWALLOW THOSE BIG OLD NUTS WHOLE and crush them in their gizzards in a matter of hours. Huh.
posted by evilmomlady at 4:11 PM on November 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

i've forever pronounced the brand kweez-in-art never looking closely enough to see the portmanteau until someone -- probably in the last year -- pronounced it like both words, cuisine art, whereupon a bolt of shameful eureka for me!
posted by 20 year lurk at 6:26 PM on November 8, 2021