Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with mischief

Please introduce me to the best books about tricksters, clowns, or mischief makers.

theiconoclast31 — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 22:43:02 -0800

What are some great books about tricksters or clowns? To give this some context, I recently saw Emily Levine's trickster talk on TED (wonderful but occasionally preachy). I've reserved a copy of Trickster Makes This World from the library, and I am fond of Mulla Nasreddin stories. But I don't know where to go from here.

What is the purpose of this livejournal bot?

anonymisc — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:18:18 -0800

What mischief is this LiveJournal bot up to? An unknown livejournal "user", zdvovl, friended me, so I looked at the profile, and it had friended some of my friends too. (It had a friends list of over 200, about 8 of which were friends of mine). In some cases, there was no-one in the world, besides me, who could possibly know both of those users, or social circles, and there were clusters of friendings that aligned with social circles, so zdvovl was clearly using my friendslist (and those of my friends) to find users to friend. (Likewise, zdvovl was happy to friend ancient clearly-abandoned web-detritus accounts that it found in my friendslist, and other stuff that is unusual for genuine users to do).

I did a google search, and found some recent friendings that zdvovl was no-longer friends with. It appeared that zdvovl was trawling the network of friendships - it would friend users, use their friends list to friend their friends, de-friend them, and thus move through the social web of friendships, maintaining it's friendslist total in the 200s, but quickly making (and recording?) a far far greater number of connections over time. Mapping out who knows who? Recording all public lj entries? I don't know.

True to form, a few days later, zdvovl de-friended my account, and it has moved beyond the circles of users that I know.
Quirk: It doesn't appear to de-friend users that have friended it.

Livejournal has procedures for legitimate search-engine bots to follow, so I assume this is something illegitimate. (The name itself sounds generated - are there more of these bot-users?)

Does anyone know anything about this? Anything similar? What is the likely purpose of this bot? I can come up with a lot of speculative ideas, many of which would be an unwelcome use of Livejournal.

What mischief could I get into with someone who has my same name?

jeremias — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:00:18 -0800

If I connected with a complete stranger who has my exact name (first and last), what sort of friendly mischief or hijinks could we get into on a night out?

Are U.S. Government publications in the Public Domain?

jdroth — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:33:05 -0800

Are U.S. Government publications copyrighted or in the Public Domain? More specifically, are Federal Reserve publications copyrighted or in the Public Domain? I'd like to be able to monkey with these comics, but am wary of violating copyright. (I've sent e-mail to the Federal Reserve asking this same question, but am skeptical that I'll receive a timely response.)