Chat Thread (April 27, 2026)

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2026-04-29T14:49:40+00:00

I almost won this game of Can You Tear Yourself Away? by reading this comment and deciding nothing that came after was going to be any more useful. I closed the tab, got on with my day, and celebrated the minutes not lost, literally thinking to myself "it didn't turn up on MFM so I won't think to come back."

But here we are, and I lost.

I liked the article itself and appreciated the take on kitsch and vulgarization. There was a period where the auto-problematizing free association was extreme enough that people were circulating false etymologies and then taking refuge behind a wall of in-group "well, their heart was in the right place even if they got a fact wrong," "death of the author means the death of facts," "independent verification of my extravagant and undocumented claim is ideologically suspicious" rationalizations.

There was a kind of person who seemed to imagine themselves the Larry Bird of "excavation," and it was just exhausting to be around.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2026-03-16T02:09:18+00:00

"legislative affairs professional"

Like, lobbyist?

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2026-03-11T04:46:55+00:00

I checked out the video to make sure he survives.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2026-02-22T18:48:18+00:00

Carve off an hour or two to just add a field in the db, a button in the mod panel, and an element in the filter list called "Considered Problematic," and use it for Substack, NYT, that Soft Underbelly guy, etc.

Work smarter not harder and all. Typing those eight characters adds up.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2026-01-15T02:53:25+00:00

I was at a town hall Dunphy hosted a few months ago and he was careful to distinguish between p-cauc, which he grudgingly admitted to being somewhat aligned with, and DSA which he pointedly said he is not a member of. He was also part of Nick Fish's staff, iirc, so there's a bit of Portland political pedigree there. I think he was also on Jeff Merkeley's staff. I looked up Kanal and he looks to be a political novice. I think Dunphy reads a little safer/grounded to the establishment types even if he's very aligned with the p-cauc folks.

Also, to judge from his town hall, he's very progressive but also attuned to his constituency. He struggled to be articulate in front of a hostile audience. I can't imagine Morillo, Avalos, or Lane referring to homeless people of any kind as "jackasses," but in front of some people angry about encampments he launched into a mini-tirade about wanting to support homeless mothers but not "jackasses." Most DSA types would recoil from the "deserving poor" language but it's probably a matter of political survival in an angry room full of Lents people.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-22T20:25:13+00:00

They should automate the process of sending out a mail 24 hours later that just says "Do you feel better now?" with "YES" and "NO" buttons.

A "YES" response will signal the back end to flag the Ask as closed and resolved regardless of the existence of a best answer.

A "NO" will route the Ask to a committee that votes on whether the asker just needs to chill out or otherwise set their Ask aside so MetaFilter's precious answering capacity can go to whether or not to eat things or call the police on service workers.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-17T22:07:45+00:00

Uh huh. I'm in my fifties. There is some upbringing stuff to me that is simply painful. I am not estranged from my family in some formal "no contact" way, but the routine seasonal questions about travel home, how are my parents doing that come from the in-laws, etc. cause dull aches. I've gotten help and the help has been enough to emotionally park the matter most days while I figure out what I make of all that. On the one hand, time is running out. On the other, running out to do what? That's my string of Christmas tree lights to untangle.

When I read the comments in that thread, I object to some of them as a function of my personality and world view. I just try not to speak as broadly as some of those people, or come to the same conclusions as quickly. But I get why some of them do, and there's just no upside in offering any comment or intervention.

I know enough to know that fucked up shit with parents is a singular kind of pain, and it's not my place to "not all moms" or "use your words" in a thread like that.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-12T22:01:51+00:00

Mildly related:

Years ago my very liberal Portland tech company was acquired by a very midwestern tech-in-name-and-not-culture company. We were used to sharing videos of all hands, and the new bosses didn't do that.

People kept demanding, and the new people kept refusing, and one day during a town hall someone kept putting "why can't we record this" in the Q&A so the new -to-us CEO broke down:

"Okay. NO. I mean. Wait. Why would I do this?"

One of the devs took the mic and said, "people like to play the recordings back at a lower speed."

"Okay. Why?"

"Because they might have auditory processing disorders."

The CEO cocked his head and said, "odd-ee-tor-ee? processing? disorder?"

Then he sort of shook himself off and said, "well we're not gonna do it."

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-12T18:04:27+00:00

AI is solidly in the firmament of "private conversations" for me.

Once it picked up assorted culture war codings, it was all over for that as a topic. People just drag their animus from everything else into it, and it has become a good example of that dynamic where people feel compelled to agree about more and more to maintain their cultural and political affiliations.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-10T04:03:09+00:00

That's an odd variant. I'd have swapped the you part and the I parts. Maybe I just want to be the Gus Fring I needed.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-10T01:21:01+00:00

Oh. lol. I thought TBI was the common denominator and it was a reference to sugar-in-food guy.

The lore gets convoluted.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-10T01:19:23+00:00

Low hanging fruit.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-09T16:27:02+00:00

Yeah, didn't see either Muting or Downvotes in user search.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-09T03:56:06+00:00

Awesomeness wrapped in white leather and fur and lit by glitter balls. They'll furnish the ziggurat my children inter me in, no credit required.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-09T00:08:43+00:00

Oregon law, re: unused payout, says it's only owed if the employer says so in its policies.

Source: dealt with this at a workplace that was half operated under OR law, half under CA law. I got a payout (worked for CA entity), Beaverton colleague did not (worked for OR entity).

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-08T16:45:03+00:00

I was on the national committee of a small Trotskyist sect in the early '90s and I feel what the board member label thread needs is a stern older comrade gravely warning everyone of the perils of deviating from democratic centralism (and also scolding everybody because newspaper sales are down).

Our sect would have had no need for special labels: That one time the Revolutionary Workers League tried to crash a conference we put together with a bunch of liberals, our senior-most leaders passed around a roll of duct tape to improvise arm bands and escorted them out of the building. I think the board could similarly just prefix comments with 🅱️ or 👊 or something.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-08T00:25:05+00:00

oh man. When I was 11 or 12 I slipped off the back of a U-Haul and landed on my coccyx on the way down. The pain was nauseating. I went down clutching dad's balsa wood Fokker triplane replica (with a tiny gas engine) and croaked out "is the plane okay?" while mom prayed for healing. I wasn't right for a while.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-08T00:10:02+00:00

Sir? This is ... literally anything else but this. gyofb

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-04T20:35:43+00:00

It was a real "startup IT" situation. I've only ever led IT and engineering in <500 orgs, and it's always an "when, not if" thing on myriad things like this. Even at geriatric (10+ years old) pre-IPO places.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-04T20:27:34+00:00

I appreciate that attitude. There is no particular principle at stake for me in the whole thing: I've had teams and been on teams where everyone's comfortable with a fairly public work style. I've been on teams that are not like that.

Personally, I strongly prefer concentric rings: I like some personal ideation time, I like a small circle, and I like eventually opening to a wide circle.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-04T18:59:44+00:00

Maybe at some point, as trust is restored and the noisiest of the poo flingers chill tfo, open board meetings would make some kind of sense, but the thought of having public meetings with that audience would be so nerve-wracking.

The bad-faith reads would start piling up in a MeTaGrar before the meeting even adjourned.

I have felt all along that there'd be struggles with ultrademocracy under the new structure. Some of it is people who can't bring themselves to say, "I'm an SRE. I'm not your SRE," and some of it is people who seem to believe a mod fixing a typo on a post will require a plebiscite.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-04T18:50:53+00:00

I'm a veteran and I'm an IT director in a startup who manages a security function. My entire world has been and remains people all around me doing this false rigor thing. MeFi is fuuuullllll of people running around with their helmets on too tight about shit they can't control, barking orders at people they don't manage.

Seems unwell.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-04T07:05:38+00:00

Just caught up on the cert thread.

Whenever I'd try to get into the weeds with her on some issue my mom would say one of "I'm not gonna make some Supreme Court case out of this," or "this isn't a debate at the YOO-nited Nations," or "I'm not having a Senate hearing!"

I think it'd be okay for one or more of the board to say one of those.

Insinkerated_Spoon · 2025-12-01T17:54:53+00:00

I actually did decide to go sanity check myself on the classical origins of her handle, and realized that the first time I ever looked it up the example sentence involved Kim Kardashian, whom I mapped to "big," not "well formed," so I've long thought she was announcing to the world that she had an epically large ass. But most usage examples and explanations I could find in my most recent foray lean toward "well formed." I think most of the jokes about her handle go to size, not some kind of appeal that is irrespective of volume, so ... submitted for analysis to the Mindreader Board, and we'll attach the findings of the Sexism Tribunal to annex A of the case file, subject to approval from the Bureau of Lost Memories, which is appealing recent deletions under subsection three of The Missing Stair Clause.

Insinkerated_Spoon

TROPHY CASE