Best Of MetaFilter

Robots at the Science Museum by p_a_h (cc by)

Robot History; Cannibal Robots; Wakey-wakey, Roverbot; Robot Taxi; Robot Fears; Injury Bot; Roboraptor vs Puppies; shittyrobots tag; Bite my shiny metal asp; Space Robots for everyone; Robot playlist for kiddo.

李子柒 Handmade oven

In case you missed them, see the Mahlongwa River breach as a tiny trickle turns into a raging torrent; watch a short, quiet, idyllic video of Li Zikai building a cat-shaped brick-and-clay oven from scratch; read the secrets of a diary written on castle floorboards; view a compendium of four short films about a Kyoto dye workshop that creates a range of rare and beautiful colors solely with plants and other natural materials.

Countouring_BIALE _ Nanshy_IGP5798 by NanshyOfficial (cc by-sa)

I don't know what I expected, but it was not 'you will have to pause a 5-minute video about makeup fundamentals twice because you will not be able to stop laughing.' – mhoye

(hat tip to shibori for the title)

For the third year in a row, the MST3K Club No-Stress Christmas Video Marathon brought to you by JHarris and co: "On the menu: MST3K Christmas movies, a few other riffing delicacies, a wide assortment of Christmas specials and episodes both good and bad, and some other short oddments thrown in..."

Nam June Paik - Megatron Matrix by Ryan Somma (cc by)

How did that bizarre avant garde show get broadcast, anyway? Mefi's own Dean 358 worked with pioneering video artist Nam June Paik, and explains how Paik's personal charm and enthusiasm got the art made and on the air. "...getting access to video equipment in the 1980s was a really big deal. Video edit suites took up lots of space and cost millions of dollars to build and operate. Getting access to a satellite...well, absolutely unthinkable."

Lofty Pursuits handmade candy video

Between kneaded sugar, hand-cranks, and cracking apart cooled candies... this is satisfying on so many levels. – BungaDunga

Mefites are sweet on carter's Hand cranked candy post, wherein we learn "how to make Victorian Nectar Drop candy and why are Lemon Drops called drops?"

Pont en Royans by FrenchHope (cc by)

Recently on Mefi, people and places around the world, enchanting, mysterious and magnetic:

Good luck finding parking: "The Precarious Architecture of 7 European Cliff Cities"

The REMAINS of Greenland project is attempting to locate and preserve archaeological sites in Greenland before they are lost to the destructive effects of climate change

Italians Compare the Arrival of Starbucks to the Apocalypse: pjsky's roundup of the unthinkable

Grace's Guide to British Industrial History is a project publishing the history of industry in the UK and elsewhere

"Being Iceland, it gets complicated": Saga Thing is a podcast about the Sagas of the Icelanders

Roadtrip like it's 1966: 1966 video photolog trips of selected highways via BC Ministry of Transportation

No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end: A short video from the British Geological Survey about Siccar Point

'They made me wear my bathrobe' [screen capture from video via hlntv.com]

Now is the time when I am typing. I am typing on my computer doing internet things. Isn't this interesting? Cool internet things. I solved a puzzle and now people are taking pictures of me pretending to solve a puzzle. – harperpitt

JannaK reports that the HLN network has produced a short video episode featuring the Ask Metafilter post requesting help with her late grandmother's coded messages, and "the true hero of this story: Metafilter's own harperpitt, her code-breaking skills, and the power of the hive mind in tackling web mysteries."

(Post title text grabbed from littlesq!)

vinyl by suzy_yes (cc by-nc-nd)

Thanks to the work of everyone in this thread, I was able to make a positive identification of the song, order the vinyl, and have it professionally converted to digital.

The OP has updated an old thread about a 30-year-old mystery tune in Ask Me with a YouTube video of the song. Yay, team!

Looking for more musical mysteries to solve?

What's the Baby Elephant song I heard at Burning Man?

I'm trying to identify a sample from the first few minutes of this album

Loving you is . . . easy to forget? What was that song from 2008 - 2009?

Finding a song based on a music video: "a woman riding a horse and she had dramatically long hair that floated through the sky"

3-eyed Bear by Brandon James Scott (cc by-nc-nd)

Please Don't Ursinate in Pool! – Atom Eyes

Shibori's first post about a video of a home pool invasion by bears is a fun thread with some great anecdotes from nevercalm and Nerd of the North.:

a bear that is not much larger than a traditional stuffed teddy bear is quite strong enough to do whatever it wants, fuck you very much

After several months of eating nothing but salmon, you'd be pretty desperate for a Breath Saver, too.

"I don't know," I said. "What do you think it is? I have an idea but it's kind of disgusting."

know when to stop by ** RCB ** (cc by)

Eriko advises on what to do if your vehicle is ever stranded on a train crossing in the recent "It'll buff out" post featuring video of an amazing Train-Limo collision. (no deaths or injury)

Chocolat de Bonnat. Côte d'Ivoire by EverJean (cc by)

I work in southwestern Cote d'Ivoire, just on the border of Cote d'Ivoire and Liberia. The men I employ are largely cocoa farmers, when they're not in the forest taking complex observational data on primate behavior and ecology.

ChuraChura responds to, and takes some issue with, a video of Ivorian cacao farmers tasting chocolate for the first time, plus gives a larger picture of the day-to-day reality of the tough economics of farming in the region.

Dancers on The Judy Garland Show (1964) A few illuminating answers to a question about why some old Twilight Zone episodes can look especially creepy. Meet the term, and the MeFite, orthicon halo.

Tetris by Gryphus R (cc by-nc-nd)

In a thread about competitive Tetris, tournament ref Chris Higgins drops in to answer some questions about the whole experience, in this and later comments:

So, yeah — being a ref in this case did not involve the kind of ref action you'd see in boxing or other physical sports. The players were well-behaved (no cheating that I saw, no pausing, etc.). But it's a real tournament, and the players are serious. They're also using thrift store equipment that could die at any time, so I was keeping track of scores in realtime in case we lost a console, TV, etc. and I had to call whoever was ahead. Keeping track of the two scores is actually pretty hard.

Famous fantasy author Neil Gaiman recently did a great commencement address at the University of the Arts (embedded above) and it is currently making the rounds. MeFi member Rory Marinich was in the audience and recounts the experience:

As great as I'm sure this speech is as standalone inspiration, for our graduating class everything Neil said really struck home. Art school is a weirdly draining and exhausting place, and I think that caught a lot of us off guard – definitely me; I'm just getting over a panic attack that hit in waves over the course of a very rough last week. The weirdness isn't that it's exhausting (I'm sure all colleges are like that), but that it comes from the same thing that also makes art school exhilarating: the freedom you have to pursue your own creative path, to be as strange and as personal as you can bear being.