MetaChat - What's your favorite Metafilter memory?

my favorite memory is when everyone had a big argument over something that's totally pointless. otherwise known as: all the time!

posted by puke & cry 02 July | 02:03

You're harshing my buzz, puke & cry.

posted by LeeJay 02 July | 02:04

yeah i know. that's been building up for a while. sorry.

posted by puke & cry 02 July | 02:06

Eh, no problem. I've been a bit frustrated with the tone there myself. That's part of the reason I posted this. To remind myself that Mefites are capable of nice shit from time to time.

posted by LeeJay 02 July | 02:08

Some of the AskMe Qs have been amazing - the one the other day about killing a TRex. The one where someone typed out 'humming' of elevator music and the song was named. Another where someone recalled a small segment of a poem(?) from a pc screen in a magazine and wondered what it was and someone reading worked with the author. I also get amazed at the speed sometimes - someone asked about an Aussie movie the other day -- with a tiny amount of detail -- and holgate named it (with a link) in 4 minutes flat!

Other than that, I generally like the blue threads most where I see the depth of intelligence in the community - molecular biology or language tropes and other esoteric areas. They blow me away actually.

But one line humour in any thread can crack me up. I'm not sure, but I can't get into MeFi at the moment or I'd snare some links. (Is it just me or is the site down at present??)

posted by peacay 02 July | 02:23

Site's up for me, peacay.

I'd add to this discussion, but my favorite metafilter moments are mostly delicious, delicious meltdowns.

posted by interrobang 02 July | 02:32

We have cameras.

posted by tracicle 02 July | 02:34

the Laurie garret(?) episode, or even the invasion of the survivor cam-people farce. Lots more though.

posted by dhruva 02 July | 02:47

interrobang: even though I implied that only happy moments are allowed it's OK to name the meltdowns. I quite enjoy those as well. And I'm willing to cut off my right hand to prove it.

tracicle: Oh yes. Classic moment.

posted by LeeJay 02 July | 02:48

That time it had that j-run error. Oh man that was a laugh! peacay, I can't connect either.

posted by arse_hat 02 July | 03:04

.

posted by thatweirdguy2 02 July | 03:29

right now, it's your last post which i can't stop looking at

ok, i liked bakiwop's "rage against the dying of the light" and stuff like the 9622 thread and redux
or when everyone starts working like some great many headed beast on a single goal
but it general it's just stuff like joelf helping analogue or, even better, when bunch of people whip out their specific links on something, and it's all like a bunch of people discussing something they really know or care about or something equally as ridiculous

that's why i started looking at comments, that's why i still occassionally look through comments, that's why i almost never make comments, even when i'm afraid i might be the only one with the answer

posted by ethylene 02 July | 06:48

When my friend Rick was caught in the bombing in Bali, and when a thread was posted to mourn for him when he died 10 days later, was when I realized that MeFi was a community I could never I leave voluntarily, because the emotional connection that happened there, then, for me at least, was.

Was... big. The internets came alive for me then, for the first time, in my gut and heart. That has actually been a negative thing in my life as much as it has been positive in the last couple of years, I reckon, but it did change my life, and having a permanent textrecord of all that pain and love sustains me sometimes, when I'm feelin needy.

I've had too many drinks to hunt down the threads right now. A search for "Rick Gleason" at the 'filter will find them, if you're interested and weren't around at the time.

posted by stavrosthewonderchicken 02 July | 08:27

I liked the recent thread on Beethoven MP3s at the Beeb. It wasn't spectacular, but it had all of the quiet elements taht make MeFi worth reading. It started as a discussion of bandwidth, and moved on to a discussion of the specific symphonies on offer with special commentary on tempo for Beethoven in general and the problems of playing classical music at a decent pace.

Like I said, it was quiet, but it showed the depth of knowledge and talent on MeFi without drama. Other than that, I like the meltdowns best because they are so funny and painful.

posted by omiewise 02 July | 10:22

i am mathowie's sockpuppet.

posted by quonsar 02 July | 10:55

for me the knowledge and talent is the drama
the rest is tabloid hell/fun

posted by ethylene 02 July | 11:14

The AskMe threads on creative projects--decorating, cooking, etc.--are tremendous. The history and literature discussion on the blue can be great, as are the science threads. A spectacular MeTa flameout can be entertaining, though saying so proves I am a bad, bad person.

posted by LarryC 02 July | 12:00

Some of mine:

News events: September 11, Wellstone's plane crash, and the Space Shuttle Columbia.

On a lighter note, there were one-hit wonders, musical memories, reformatted songs, childhood toys...And of course there is the legend that is Pepsi Blue.

posted by sisterhavana 02 July | 13:23

I really like the support people get when they ask personal questions in the green. It's amazing the amount of compassion the community can muster.

oh I am so cheesy. so very very cheesy

posted by gaspode 02 July | 17:45

See, I like the huge long trainwrecks in the grey. Not the nasty ones, the over-the-top-image-fight funny ones. One had me in tears laughing, it was something about Dairy Queen.

The green helped me give up my constant companion of Pall Mall plains this Feb. How cool is that?

posted by dabitch 02 July | 18:05

Congratulations, dabitch! That is very cool.

posted by LeeJay 02 July | 23:46

So many memories, each so great in their own way, that I can't choose. But here are three.

Reading a thread about the Green River Killer and coming across a comment posted by a man whose sister had been one of the victims.

The Drama Queen thread.

Trying to find a poem for a friend of mine that referenced Auschwitz, and getting help from a librarian from the National Museum of the Holocaust in Washington, D.C.

posted by Orange Swan 03 July | 14:03

The one where someone typed out 'humming' of elevator music and the song was named.

I think I laughed for a good 10 minutes after finding that thread.

The Drama Queen thread was which? I'm thinking of the huge thread that happened when that guy left, which warbaby started another thread about the day later...

posted by invitapriore 03 July | 17:45

"We have cameras" stands for me as the defining thread, because it really sums up the hive mind that is MeFi - that semi-snarky, intelligent, funny, irreverant attitude that is at the heart of the place and what keeps me coming back even though 90% of what goes on there is absolute crap.

This is the thread to which stavrosthewonderchicken refers to, which is a high-low point for me also. For some, the 9/11 thread may have more meaning, but I don't think the same kind of commmunity spirit was being displayed there - it was more of a news-gathering exercise. Perhaps it was just that the Bali attack was more personal for me, as it was somewhere that I had been and was more real because of it.

posted by dg 03 July | 18:52

I think it was the first time I was treated civilly on MeFi. It was scarabic, if I remember correctly.

posted by Doohickie 03 July | 22:25

Well, having been around almost since the beginning (uh, this is dhartung, for those who don't know me by my new blog name), there are too many to count. I still remember the relatively minor earthquake that was live -blued, and I realized it wasn't a cozy little corner of the web anymore (and of course it got much, much bigger beginning later that year). I remember Kaycee Nicole, which ended up crashing the site due to so many people reloading the thread over and over (wow, it's "only" 330K, too). I remember the Bali thread. I remember 9622, managing OK in the initial thread, then as it morphed into a stranger beast, trying to get into the spirit, failing, and even trying to get into the spirit of that other 9622; I wasn't ready then. I remember the thread that upset aaron enough that he left, one of the first major flame-outs. I remember bunnyfire (and yes, I know).

Most of all, I remember the day I took a flamewar so seriously that I angrily mashed my kitchen garbage, and cut one of my typing fingers on a soup can. That day, I realized I needed to change my relationship with the site, turned myself into a mainly-lurker, and have been sooooo much happier ever since.

posted by stilicho 04 July | 00:45

Many of my favorites have already been mentioned, but let's not forget the Get Your War On cliche thread (I'd link but at the moment "Application server is busy"). Also there was a wonderful poetry thread started by y2karl.

posted by languagehat 04 July | 15:55

I've been around Mefi for years and years (Dejah420), but I'm taking a Mefi break, in the hopes that it will mellow out a bit and quit being so horribly mean and cruel, but I love the fact that I've gotten to know some really incredible people through the site. Some of my fave people are Mefites...and ex-mefites.

posted by PsychoKitty 04 July | 18:22

i have tons of great memories of interactions with cool people--poopy, stan chin and i went crazy in a sexy gay robots thread, surprising moments when people who were assholes stopped being assholes, those times when someone else says exactly what you meant but more clearly and better, ericb and i updating gannon/guckert threads... : >

there are really too many trolls who derail everything they don't like now tho, and matt doesn't smack them down at all--it's less fun than it used to be, and i thought i'd never ever say that.

*waves at dejah and sends a sloppy kiss*

posted by amberglow 04 July | 21:42

Well, amberglow, you were one of the ones yelling at mathowie to "let the people in" and now you are reaping what you have sown.

I agree that those who piss all over everything need to be smacked down a bit, but am also glad that it is not me who has to do it. It would not be much fun, I am sure, but would probably only take a short time before the guilty parties got sick of it and left or changed their ways.

The vibe has certainly changed in the last year or so, mainly because of the influx of people - not all for the better and, in my very humble opinion, more for the worse than for the better. I guess it was inevitable that the doors would be opened one day and there were problems with things becoming a little too predictable, but a trickle would have been nicer than the flood that we got.

posted by dg 04 July | 22:22

i still want new people in--i always will, but i don't get why none of them get the treatment even longtime members get (q for one)--there are some people who only troll, and they get away with it no matter how many flags or callouts are done about them.

posted by amberglow 04 July | 22:36

True - it seems that newbies are being cut huge amounts of slack and, I assume, this is to give them a chance to get to know what the boundaries are etc. The problem there is that, unless they are pulled back into line, the boundaries will be permanently stretched.

I agree also that some longer-standing members get rougher treatment and quonsar is a prime example - even though he contributes a fair share of what seems like noise, if you add up his contributions to the Community, he comes out way on the positive side of the scale and I don't think many of the newer members will reach that level.

Or maybe we are just getting old?

posted by dg 04 July | 23:11

I don't know--i just really notice the difference in treatment. I think many threads have been trashed by the trolls recently, and the personal insults are way way up--and people were insulting before, just not exclusively--the way some are now. And if they were, matt smacked them down.

posted by amberglow 04 July | 23:35

Yeah, it seems more personal now. People have always hurled insults at each other, but I always got the impression that they didn't really mean it for some reason (with a few notable exceptions, of course). Maybe I am just ascribing better qualities to people than they really deserve.

posted by dg 04 July | 23:50

02 July 2005