Best Of MetaFilter

TV series "Breaking Bad" filming locations in Albuquerque New Mexico by Boortz47 (cc by-nc-sa)

Vince Gilligan didn't originally envision the locale as any specific place, certainly not ABQ. He saw this as a story taking place in vanilla suburban USA. So while the show has very much developed a strong sense of place, it's a carefully limited one — emphasizing the quotidian suburban life and bleakly semi-urban neglect and in contrast to the austere desert surrounding it. Missing is the mountain and national forest to the east, the more picturesque and lovely examples of Albuquerque life and architecture. BB's Albuquerque is a city of uninteresting middle-class, suburban homes. The despair of ubiquitous and shabby strip-malls is accurate, though.

Back when I read about where each of the depicted homes really were, I was pleased to find that I'd correctly identified all the neighborhoods by sight.

Ivan Fyodorovich talks about Breaking Bad's sense of place.

Silly putty is a copying tool. by PugnoM (cc by)

Somebody at Xerox had PDF as a checkbox and put it into the scanner, and since Xerox is part of the JBIG committee, you can bet that they have free access to that and embedded that too....

Smaller files that are delivered in standard formats is a marketing/sales point. It's in a blurb from Xerox right here. The problem is that in implementing this feature, they don't have a particularly good way to turn it off. Maybe there is - I read through the user manual and system admin manual and I don't see anything that would appear to do that, although while it seems like there is templating system under the hood that could be manipulated into changing those settings, they didn't really go out of their way to document it.

It comes down to complicated choices that were informed by a marketing decision and hidden behind friendly menus that hide the complication.

plinth breaks down what you need to know about PDF compression, and what probably went wrong at Xerox.

MeFi member blahblahblah is an academic researcher that has studied Kickstarter and shares a bunch of really interesting tidbits and statistics about successful campaigns.

Your chances go down 13% if you make a spelling error. [...] 21% of successful projects have female cofounders. Being a woman has no statistical bearing on outcomes...

(you can download the paper this data was based on as well)

Fair Food by MEFI's OWN Waldo Jaquith (cc by-sa)

The machine also had a lot of blinking lights and complex looking buttons, which I thought were important features I didn't know how to operate for the first few days, and then learned they were just for appearance and to make the machine look more futuristic or such. I poked fun at their brochure and logo at the time, laid out entirely in comic-sans, a sin for a wanna-be graphic designer like myself. I still remember one of the guys impassioned response, borne of having to defend it multiple times. "Why do people hate comic-sans? It's happy, it's FUN."

Pandalicious's first comment is a memory of working at the Tulsa State Fair back when Nitro Ice Cream was getting started.

Funnel Web with venom by dnatheist (cc by)

It turns out that there IS actually enough vascular tissue in your eye to carry funnel web venom to your heart. Not enough to need anti-venom, but enough to make your heart do very strange things and enough to make you go a very strange colour. A trip to the emergency room ensued.

The next day a trip to the opthomologist revealed that the venom had acted like a strong acid/ alkaline and burned a hole in the iris, just missing the pupil (no glass cuts thankfully!). Long-term, the sight in my left eye is a bit worse than it should be. I also get "spider eye": if I'm tired or stressed or jetlagged, my spider eye goes incredibly red, hot and bloodshot for about 24 hours. It's not the most spectacular spidey-super-power of them all, but I'm happy enough to have it :)

Alice Russel-Wallace discusses why Shaun of the Dead is THE definitive opthamological treatment for spider envenomation incidents.

Peaches by La Grande Farmers' Market (cc by)

Former fruit agency and Whole Foods employee jocelmeow offers amazing detailed advice on how to find and treat yourself to the best peaches possible.

Ethylene (the fruit's natural ripening gas) output rises for a while but then levels off. The level of sugar the fruit contains and its red color stay exactly the same. The effect of all these changes is that the fruit goes from hard and sour to soft and sweet.

Cat scan by zircon3035 (cc by)

MetaFilter is 14 years old today, and tradition dictates a reposting of the first thing ever posted to the site.

Hazards of Riding Bears by CarbonNYC (cc by)

As these things do, this scene began a bit underground and then started to gain momentum and then really EXPLODED. Suddenly the bears weren't a movement, they were a marketing niche. And the energy of the scene began to change. Big meetups became more, for lack of a better term, corporate. Suddenly you could buy "bear" merchandise easily rather than having to seek it out. Bear clubs were springing up all over the country, and then breaking up into smaller groups as the fights between the "we want to fuck" and the "we want to socialize" groups surfaced.

hippybear talks about the changes that have happened in a different sort of bear movement.

Bear cub by travelinknu (cc by-sa)

Me in my head: Okay Momma I'm just going to go sideways and climb up as high as I can get on this big pile of logs. I'm sending you vibes that I mean no harm. I climb. Mamma rejoins her cubs. None of them even act like I'm there. I then spend the next two hours sitting on that pile of logs as Momma and cubs wander around foraging. I swear they were laughing at me.

MeFite Jalliah discusses some of their bear encounters.

Ceiling Cat Debit Card by Tony Webster (cc by)

Now looking back, some of this was my fault. I was stupid. One of my co-workers hammered in to me that I needed to get direct deposit ASAP, and yet between the stress of work and school I kept forgetting about it. I had no experience at the time setting up a bank account, or setting up direct deposit, and so these things that in retrospect weren't a big deal felt like insurmountable obstacles. And all the stress I was surrounded--a new job, working nights, a new school, a new apartment, new bills to pay, new classes, being broke, etc.-- made it that much easier to keep putting it off. Had I been more established, and less overworked, none of this would have been an issue. But because I was weak, precisely because I was weak and stupid and stressed, they preyed on me.

Self Portrait Reflected by rocket9.net

Due to the nature of pinball, the ball ends up in places where it's not supposed to be. What's awesome though is that there are machines that recognize when this has happened, and reward you for it.

JHarris explains a few nifty pinball hacks.

Sea of Cotton by subarcticmike (cc by)

My big thrill, enacted every time I brought my sack to the trailer, was to climb the ladder and dump my cotton, just like the grownups did. The field boss always seemed to take me seriously, and logged my meager tonnage in his book as if I were an adult. But he looked the other way when I climbed the ladder; sometimes I would "accidentally" fall off the plank onto the soft cotton.

Emergency Room / Health Care by Rosser321 (cc by)

When a paramedic gives tips on what to do when something is embedded in your body, you should file this away for later, just in case.

A Road Less Traveled by ~Pixelsmithy, used with permission

Tim Samaras is in the same class a volcanologists who race to a volcano when eruption is eminent, the same class as the astronauts who lost their life in the Space Shuttle, or in the Apollo III fire. You try to make things as safe as possible, but you still go to work knowing that there is a risk of something going wrong. On this day, it did.

This fragile card is the way refugees access non food items and multiple distributions of food.

Most of these people have been uprooted from years if not decades of living in Sudan. Their patience and grace in a very hot, dusty and challenging environment is impressive.

MeFite tarvuz talks a little about his blog featuring photos from South Sudan.