In "Primitive Girl"

All women have something that make them beautiful...does not compute: Beautiful = superior to average. Not everyone can be above average. The math breaks.

In "This article"

Since the author seems focussed on partisan dislike of the administration as a bad thing, does that mean it's OK that I'm vehemently against the administration from a non-partisan standpoint?

In "The Angus Diet."

Our local Black Angus restaurant had the G stolen so often that they gave up replacing it and just painted the G straight onto the wall.

In "Japanese jingle gets chart action. "

Hmm...Living in Japan, I can say I've never heard of this song. It looks like it may have debuted in the Oricon top 100 (think Billboard), but I can pretty much guarantee that by the next week it was long gone. That said, if it was picked up by 2ch.net, it means half the computer literate population of Japan has seen it used in a million flash movies of varying quality.

In "IMDB's 100 lowest rated movies. "

The IMDB's top and bottom ratings have quite gone to hell since the site's popularity has boomed among young'uns, who tend to rate movies they like as "10" and movies they don't as "1". As such, the bad new movie is more likely to rack up "1"s than the "3"s or "4"s it deserves, displacing (through sheer volume of votes) far worse movies. And MST3K has always had pretty strong sway over the bottom ratings, not necessarily because they do the absolute worst movies, but because their use of bad movies increases the popularity of said movies, causing them to eclipse other, worse movies.

In "The end of music. "

Yes - Owner of a Lonely Heart

In "The View Master"

So, uh, can anybody give me a link to whatever it is that's being looked at? Languagehat, Beeswacky, and I seem to be missing the actual contents of the page. All I can see is advertising and a bit of "proof of concept".

In "The austere lifestyle of Kim Jong ll"

ThreeDayMonk: When? I haven't noticed broadcasters saying that...

In "Ishkur's amazing electronic music guide."

IDM is a really aggravating name (as is anything that starts with "Progressive", with the exception of perhaps prog rock), but it is unfortunately a reality. Yep, people really call it that. Some of it is really great stuff, too, which makes it a shame. Ishkur's site is great, though I have a few quibbles with definitions (for example, he doesn't seem to realize the origin of "illbient": ambient which makes you feel uncomfortable (hence ill), and instead goes off on "ill" in the "You be illin'" sense). The only one that kills me, though, is his placing of most epic trance stuff in a category called "Crap". It doesn't kill me because I disagree (I do, but that doesn't bother me), but because it's so useless. That is, the info on the page is so good that a friend who doesn't know electronica might be able to use it to describe something. For example: "Have you seen the new Audi commercial? It uses gabba in the background!", but "Crap"? Me: "How was the club?" Friend: "It sucked. They played crap." Me: "What kind of crap? Minimal? Italo?" Friend: "Uh, no, you know, crap. Like, the genre, crap." Me: "The genre 'crap', huh...Very useful..." Other than that, it introduced me to the Venetian Snares, which I am now gobbling up. Plus, he calls guitar oriented goa "butt-rock goa", and then procedes to praise it. As a fellow fan of guitar based goa who also calls it "butt-rock goa", it's great to know I'm not the only one who uses that term.

In ""

Some of the points are good for making writing "better", but quite a few seem to be aimed at making the writing more to the tastes of the author. For example, though the comma example offered seems awkward, in the context of the story, it probably offers a lot more impact than the "corrected" version would. The rules of grammar can be broken to good effect, as long as they are intentionally broken, and not just through slopiness. The Hamlet example was another stickler for me. Though "be" words should probably be avoided for writing to engage the reader, the whole point of "to be or not to be" is the contrast of choice with something so passive that we don't even think about it. "To live and suffer or to die" would not have the same impact. "Being" is something that just happens; it isn't usually viewed as an intentionally chosen activity. Yet Hamlet's monologue starts out questioning the very value, not of doing, but just plain "being". At best, the page should be approached as a list of things not to do subconsiously, not as a list of things never to do.

In "You can continue reading this page right after these messages"

Well: Turning off javascript will kill it. Uninstalling flash will kill it. And (the least intrusive) downloading the "Flash Click to View" extension in Firebird/Mozilla will kill it. Just tried it out at work on IE and Firebird, and on IE I got a full screen ad, and on Firebird: nothin'.

In "http://www.monkeyfilter.com"

For you Firebird users out there: I cannot recommend the AdBlock extension enough. It allows you to block ads individually, by site, or with wildcards. Very useful for sites where the ads are served from the same server as the regular image (for example, if I block all images from "images.somethingawful.com" using the standard Firebird image block, I lose both ads and normal images. With adblock, I can block all "images.somethingawful.com/ad/*", effectively killing only ads). Everyone at work has just swarmed over it. /derail

In ""... this IS dangerous unless you know what you are doing. You can actually crucify someone if they are not properly supported...""

"I rather prefer posting metafilter style, where the FPPs actually say something instead of presenting some cryptic link"

Thank you! I'd been wondering why I clicked on so many more links in MeFi than I do in MoFi. I didn't realize until you'd mentioned it that there are so many MoFi links that are just short phrases or quizzical expressions followed by [more inside]. My eyes skip over them, probably because I unconsciously consider them to be advertisements, trying to lure me into clicking, as opposed to just plain telling me what they're about and letting my own curiosity decide...Though it has been getting a lot, lot better recently.

In ""

And ditto with Forksclovetofu: no way I'm going to pay $36 to see a single movie split in two parts. I'll wait until the DVD taken from the "New" rack to the "Regular" rack so that I can watch it for the price of a regular movie.

Geeze, what's the deal with the toy sized teaser? Sure, space is a premium here in Japan, but generally people have computer monitors bigger than 2 inches.

In "The decline of fashion photography."

Hmm...I remember stumbling across this site a long time ago, and halfway through realized that I could only tell if the picture was an example of a "good" or "bad" picture by reading the caption. I found about 50% of the pictures the site calls good to be bad, and 50% of the pictures the site calls bad to be good. Perhaps it's less the "decline of fashion photography" and more the "divergence of fashion photography from the site author's tastes".

In "Sabrina Happy; Me Scared "

DNG: Probably the ones that seem interesting now would seem mundane, and you would find that some of the plainest looking ones are some of the best things ever created by man.

In "Mixerman Chronicles"

The posts were in real time in summer of 2002. As for alsihad: ok, going off memory (because I'm not going to read a hundred pages to find the real answers): alsihad was not a new package when the chronicles were written, and from what I gather, it was extremely widespread, so my guess is ProTools. And, yeah, the guy isn't a great writer, nor a good person, but the story itself is damn interesting.

In "Another Masterpiece Of American Marketing..."

Um...what is a "Wet-Nap"?

In "Brits Nix Poo W/A View"

Done.
User name: "filtermonkey" Password: "filtermonkey"
Use it for any MoFi needs.

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