The way the moon is perfectly sized to just exactly cover the sun while still showing the corona and stuff like Bailey’s Beads. It’s an extremely rare cosmic coincidence, and a few million years before or after today and total solar eclipses as we know them wouldn’t be possible.

Maybe, but you definitely see more niche flavors like pistachio, coffee, mango, pineapple-coconut, rum raisin, etc. Hard to believe apple would be less popular, unless it’s more expensive to make for some reason.

Southeastern US. This is my first time seeing apple-anything ice cream on the shelves, from major national brands at least.

This particular one is apple pie, but the ice cream itself (minus the pie crust chunks) would be great on its own.

It’s a well-constructed skit – unabashedly silly, with just the right amount of ironic detachment. I love how after Pumpkins shows up, the couple just coolly analyzes the regular monsters that were making them scream moments before. The music is ridiculous, Tom Hanks demeanor is ridiculous, the dancing is ridiculous (with a dash of sexual weirness at the end). And it comes full circle with him genuinely scaring them in the end.

I do think that them doing sequels and trying to spin a mini-franchise out of it was stupid though.

The fact that Silicon Valley interests effortlessly shrugged off the non-profit board’s attempt to hit the kill switch last year, and now are preparing to take the company commercial despite the deliberate design otherwise, becomes much more interesting when you consider the theory that corporations are a form of artificial superintelligence.

If the AI idealists can’t stand up to basic forces of capitalism, how do they expect to control an actually dangerous AGI?

My man, I said nothing about the science or the validity of that comment, just that it’s wrong to call Ask MetaFilter “some Ask Yahoo knockoff”. If you want to get het up about an argument I never made, you do you.

It doesn’t matter if it was created before Ask Yahoo or if it’s older.

It does if you’re calling it a “knockoff” of a lower-quality site that was created years later, which was what I was responding to.

edit: btw, you’ve linked to the profile of the asker of that question, not the answer to it that /u/half_built_pyramids quoted.

some Ask Yahoo knockoff…

AskMeFi predated Yahoo Answers by several years (and is several orders of magnitude better than it ever was).

Tbh, if it were possible to record dreams or reliably trigger vivid lucid dreams, that could be one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of art, recreation, and psychology. The fact that some startup is trying to grift on the idea with IoT/gig economy bullshit doesn’t change that.

ECHO (2017)! It’s an indie game with AAA-feeling production quality from a tiny Danish studio that sadly went bankrupt after the game only sold a few thousand copies. I played it during lockdown on an old recommendation from MetaFilter and it has since become one of my favorite hidden gem titles.

Trailer

You play a bounty hunter named En (voiced by Game of Thrones star Rose Leslie) who wakes from hibernation when her spaceship arrives at a legendary artificial planet said to hold the secret to resurrection and eternal life. When she arrives on the surface, she soon discovers that its interior is a vast, abandoned baroque Palace, straight through to the core. As she wanders the infinite halls guided by her witheringly sarcastic AI London (voiced by Nicholas Boulton), she is surprised to find the Palace generates hostile clones of herself that hunt her down and copy her actions in a unique spin on the stealth genre. Gameplay consists of trying to navigate through various beautiful, byzantine concourses, collecting artifacts and unlocking elevators that lead deeper into the secret at the heart of the planet.

You may or may not enjoy this based on how you feel about stealth games with minimalist combat, but for me the challenging adaptive gameplay combined with the evocative score, compelling voice acting, intriguing story, and gorgeous environmental/sound/UI design made this a really nice surprise. (And while the studio might be dead, I’m really hoping the plans to turn it into a movie eventually rise from development hell.)

Played a few minutes of Altered Beast (1988) on an incredibly shitty Genesis emulator I f̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ rose from its grave in the closet last week.

Tbh I debated posting it because it was late and there were already dozens of comments and I didn’t have it in me to write some big review. But I’m so glad you enjoyed it! Make sure not to miss the soundtrack.

Perfect Days. Got it half-off from Criterion based on the trailer and little else. Absolutely gorgeous cinematography, and a subtle and compelling character study.

“Associate your personal brand with the fringe-right/antivax/Nazi YouTube! What could possibly go wrong?”

they won’t have to self-censor themselves from saying fuck or shit

…or “non-white people are degenerate inferiors”.

Fuck Odysee.

Here Comes the Sun. Simple melody, timeless lyrics, and it’s the most-streamed Beatles song out of an already strong and memorable catalog.

I really wish they’d rerelease this in 4K, the visuals are spectacular.

IMHO 2012 was the one that really broke their brains. The tea party types tried to get various firebrands on the ticket, but end up having to support Romney. Hey, at least he’s a squeaky-clean telegenic millionaire pushing the most severe conservative fiscal policies! Proceeds to get stomped by the Obama campaign so bad that Karl Rove couldn’t believe it as it was happening. THEN the establishment GOP flirts with moving to the center on immigration. The backlash against that on the right, supercharged by the mainstreaming of mobile social media (plus social justice protests and the looming Clinton campaign) was what fueled the rise of Trump.