Best Of MetaFilter

The Voice by Andy Morffew (cc by)

Hello yes this is a bird ... or is it??? How people tweeted in the '70s, from Going To Maine

Storm Cloud by rkramer62 (cc by)

Heroic YouTuber clears blocked storm drains and posts unexpectedly satisfying videos of doing so.

Salliou on YouTube

spamandkimchi draws our grateful attention to Senegalese musician Salliou playing the cas cas (also known as the aslatua, aslato, kashaka, cascas, televi, kasso-kassoni...)

Hello World! Or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise by Christopher Baker by tracilawson (cc by)

dragonfruit is looking for for recommendations for underrated YouTubers producing regular high quality content; Ask Mefi comes through.

Still from Sesame Street animated short 'Cracks'

Check out the mystery of Sesame Street's creepy lost short, and read along as Mefites tell tales of other kids' programming that scared the stuffing out of us.

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."