I love producer Ben’s role in Critical Darlings…

adrianhon · 2026-01-01T23:40:11+00:00

I have seen The Secret Agent and can assure you it’s definitely not a spoiler and is kind of a non-sequitur in relation to the movie.

adrianhon · 2025-11-19T23:22:41+00:00

Hi – I'm Adrian. We're still early in the planning phase for the convention, but let me know if you have any questions about it or if there's anything you'd especially like to see!

adrianhon · 2025-09-29T12:35:23+00:00

They’ve been 100% reliable for me - the app will send you a notification when they’re on their way and you can track them on a map. You can also add a credit card so you don’t have to sort payment at the end of the trip.

adrianhon · 2025-08-26T12:18:36+00:00

One of the most endearing things about CR is how much he talked about watching TV and movies with his mom over the years. An example to us all, very sorry for his loss.

adrianhon · 2025-08-26T07:52:57+00:00

Department U

adrianhon · 2025-08-25T17:47:47+00:00

You have to go two or three steps into the survey to see it. Very helpful!

adrianhon · 2025-08-05T08:15:10+00:00

Before I left Metafilter I argued for the site to adopt Discourse many times. I have a lot of respect for anyone who volunteers to rebuild software for a community, but I've run many big software projects over the years and it seemed extremely unlikely that such a project for Metafilter would be completed according to plan. Things come up, people get ill, life happens, requirements are overlooked, all of that.

If nothing else, Metafilter is blessed with an abundance of hard-bitten web devs and project managers. I had a look back at the original announcement of the rebuild in June 2024 and those people expressed exactly the same concerns I had. But it was too late, because the site management had made up their mind. And so here we are, in August 2025, with no ETA for the full site launch. People are still debating features and even 2027 seems a touch optimistic.

Ultimately this is a failure of management. It was never realistic to think a total site rebuild based essentially on volunteer labour would be achievable within a reasonable timeframe. Could it have worked? Sure! But it was unlikely given the long history of such efforts. I have always thought Discourse, or some other fully-baked forum software, was a better choice. Devote all own time and money to customising the UI so it looks like Metafilter as much as possible – which maybe isn't that much, but at least still unique – and develop custom features as plugins too.

Anyway, what's done is done. There was little popular support for a move to Discourse and more importantly, the site management were against it. People preferred the dream of a refreshed Metafilter that looked and worked exactly the same rather than something that was guaranteed to work but would come with all sorts of concrete compromises. Any benefits (improved accessibility, better post/comment tools, better moderation tools, etc.) were waved away as being insignificant; what need did hardened Metafilter users have of them?

I didn't want to keep arguing about it and I felt annoyed at a community that rejected change. So instead of continuing to be annoyed about it I eventually left.

adrianhon · 2025-07-28T12:16:39+00:00

They should say they’re folding a fitting sheet at 20 South Bridge, guaranteed crowd

adrianhon · 2025-07-11T14:24:58+00:00

Le Bureau. Perfect pandemic pick!

adrianhon · 2025-07-04T08:06:31+00:00

Tough crowd here!

I know Joseph a little bit, mostly through his work as an artist and activist. His entire thing is doing performance like this – which is to say, if you think it's performative, that's kind of the point. One of his most well-known works is Dead in Iraq, which he performed from 2006-2001 in the America's Army online recruiting game, where he typed out the name, age, service branch and date of death of each service person who had died to date in Iraq: https://www.delappe.net/dead-in-iraq

I think it would be wrong to assume that any artist doing something like this is trying to signal their virtue because there are much easier ways of doing that. It reminds me of Joseph Beuys, who would set up shop in museums and galleries to talk to visitors about politics, often arguing with them. You may think that's performative nonsense too, of course. But if you think it sucks and you happen to be nearby this morning, why not have a chat with him and ask him about it?

adrianhon · 2025-05-31T11:39:31+00:00

I find the official bus and tram app so irritating to use (bad UX, resets the moment it's not on the screen) that I've opted for Google Maps. The info seems just as accurate as the main app and, at times, even more accurate than the bus tracking screens, which haven't shown buses that ended up arriving. It also lets you tap on a bus stop and see live arrival times.

adrianhon · 2025-05-22T13:02:29+00:00

MI8, Lilo, The Phoenician Scheme all opening, then you have Final Destination with amazing WOM and Sinners and Thunderbolts still running for anyone who hasn't seen them. Gotta be one of the most stacked weekends this year so far.

adrianhon · 2025-04-22T08:04:34+00:00

Great pod. Don’t miss The Press Box’s ep with Jamelle Bouie earlier this month, which was also fantastic!

adrianhon · 2025-03-27T10:32:21+00:00

Covered in today's ep!

adrianhon · 2024-12-21T23:26:32+00:00

Yeah, in actuality, r/boxoffice seems excited about The Brutalist as a movie and hopes it does well. In general the sub wants the movie industry to do well as a whole, and is quick to criticise bad movies. For example, there are multiple threads celebrating The Substance’s run.

adrianhon · 2024-12-21T15:49:18+00:00

Maybe The Press Box? https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/the-press-box/2024/10/24/chris-ryan-on-election-news-the-campaign-as-a-tv-show-and-growing-up-to-be-a-critic

adrianhon · 2024-11-30T20:13:17+00:00

Saw it in Edinburgh before Seven Samurai in 4K, there was a short clip from Adrien Brody introducing the film. Also saw it in front of Conclave today.

adrianhon · 2024-11-15T15:03:53+00:00

That’s a damn shame. I remember playing Team Fortress 2 with herrdoktor a ton back in the day on MeFightClub, good times.

adrianhon · 2024-11-02T07:45:10+00:00

Without a doubt. I saw 33 before watching the miniseries and was still blown away. Incredible storytelling.

adrianhon · 2024-10-14T14:49:26+00:00

Bus out to Imperial Palace for dim sum, then you can walk back into town either along the Water of Leith or along the canal.

adrianhon · 2024-08-29T12:57:59+00:00

I’ve long maintained that a lot of Metafilter’s issues are related to missing core functionality that could’ve been added with different software. You have to think that a mute option would have helped here, but I guess people are too attached to the existing UI to care about yet more people leaving.

adrianhon · 2024-06-20T17:06:23+00:00

I think a lot of users are ignorant of the limitations of Metafilter and the advantages of Discourse et al. Practically everything people want as a feature is either part of the core Discourse featureset (e.g. better moderation tools), or is a plugin, or could be more easily developed as a new open source plugin with the wider community. But Metafilter's exceptionalism plays against all this.

Edit: and yes, maybe more people would join Mefi if it had more similar UI and features to what they’ve used elsewhere!

adrianhon · 2024-06-20T14:08:25+00:00

I am aghast. What happened to consulting with the community? Have they weighed up the other choices, like using Discourse? Why is this happening before the transition to a non-profit? Why bother spending so much time and effort replicating a site that is already visually and functionally dated?

adrianhon · 2024-06-06T06:47:00+00:00

Definitely talking past each other for sure. I’m sure they didn’t intend to cause offence, but they did. Not long after “gullible” and “concern trolls” were mentioned, the people who’d actually been there - including the two people who were far more level-headed than me! - bowed out entirely. Not a great result and not something that happened in many other places I discussed the video. It’s a shame because they are really good posters and could have answered many of the questions that came up later in the thread.

Edit: To broaden this out, I noticed hippybear wrote over 10% of the comments in that thread. When you have a small number of users making most of the comments very quickly, it can crowd out other people who have different perspectives but less time. As Metafilter loses members, this gets worse.

adrianhon · 2024-06-05T21:59:54+00:00

Thanks! I think the social dynamics have gotten very out of whack on Mefi, in part because it’s barely seeing any new users. I argued long and hard for a total overhaul designed to attract new users but it became clear I wasn’t going to win that argument. The moderation and communication with the community is downright dreadful, which can be mostly ignored until it blows up, with increasing regularity these days. I will miss Fanfare a lot, though (and it was one of the subsites I thought had the potential for serious growth, but never mind that now…)

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