Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with tortoise

Great movie, awesome sunglasses

Groovytimes — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:18:01 -0800

Where can I find Ryan Gosling's sunglasses in Half Nelson? I just love the glasses that Ryan wears in this movie. I've searched high and low and can't seem to find a pair like it.

Here here here and here are some shots of them.

This is the closest pair I've found. I ordered them and they're coming in about a week, so I'll tell you guys if they're pretty close or not.

Berkel Aviator

Thanks!

What's wrong with my Russian tortoise?

semp — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:27:50 -0800

What's wrong with my Russian tortoise? I picked up Bowser, my new Russian tortoise, this weekend. He was the most active of the lot, and his caretaker said he had quite the appetite as well. Since he got home he's been rather inactive, except when taken outside, and hasn't eaten or drank at all. I've noticed that this is semi-normal while they're still stressed out, but I'm wondering if this might not be more.

I also noticed skin peeling not just around the neck/legs near the shell, but on the face as well. In fact, it looks as if a whole scale (between the eye and the nose) on his face is about to peel off. I know that a tortoise is money and time, much like every other animal, and I already have a vet appointment scheduled for him upon our return home (keeping him in his cage at a friends this weekend, as the closest dealer is several hours away). I also know that I very much want this turtle to survive, and if he's going to require extensive care I would like to return him to his caretaker and point out the problem, as I am sure she would be more than happy (and have better resources) to get any problems he has taken care of.

Any tortoise owners have similar experiences?

What is your favorite instrumental music?

bigtex — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 03:01:28 -0800

Can you name some modern instrumental bands/albums that are interesting, lively, and unpretentious with a bit of a dark edge? I'm looking for some music that like Tortoise, but darker and maybe less... perfect.
Or like Godspeed You! Black Emperor but less dramatic and epic.
Or like Dirty Three but without quite so much scratchy violin and a little more variety in song structure.

Yeah, I know. Picky, picky.

Green Tortoise-like but on the East Coast?

lorimer — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 05:17:12 -0800

Is there anything like Green Tortoise that has East Coast and/or Eastern Canada trips? By "like" GT, I mean you sleep in beds on the bus as it drives overnight, then you wake up at your next destination in the morning and can explore all day. I've found many bus-trip companies that are not like that (you sleep in motels) -- and I know I could assemble a quasi-GT trip (more expensively!) with individual overnight Greyhound legs. I just wanted to make sure I'm not missing any real GT-equivalents.

(GT has only one east coast route, three trips a year from NYC to New Orleans, and even that isn't a sure thing... I booked one of those last year, then it got cancelled because not enough people were booked! They were fast & nice with the refund, though, and I probably will try booking it again this year.)

I know GT does 14-day trips from one coast to the other, but I couldn't be away from regular work for that long -- and those trips also would cost more since I'd have to fly either to or from the west coast.

Jazzy electronic music recommendations?

electric_counterpoint — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:48:24 -0800

Jazzy electronic music recommendations? I'm thinking of Squarepusher, some Tortoise, etc. I realize asking for "jazzy" music can mean a lot of things, many of them not at all what I'm looking for. So what I'm after is good quality music with small, jazz-style acoustic drums (or at least small, jazz-style acoustic drum loops ;) ) and an overall electronic feel. An electric bass and/or keys (e.g. organ, Rhodes) is a plus.

I was listening to Squarepusher's latest this weekend, and found myself really digging some of the stuff he's done in this vein. I don't have the album in front of me now, so I hope it's clear which tracks I'm talking about. Tortoise also approaches this sound occasionally from the other direction, when they've added a lot of swashes and what have you.

Anyway, obviously these are two examples of very good artists, but I wonder if there's anything else out there with a similar feel. I'm trying to avoid simple, reductive downtempo/lounge stuff, because I'm looking for music with more of a concise song structure that would fit on an LP rather than in a SomaFM mix (simply because I can usually fill my appetite for that sort of stuff with SomaFM...).

Help me understand SVN

AmbroseChapel — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:47:01 -0800

Help me understand SVN I'm working for the first time in a job where we have source control.

In the old days I would just upload and hope for the best, or maybe if I was feeling especially careful, take a backup of the file then upload and hope for the best.

Now I follow what is to me an obscure and tedious process using Tortoise.

I "switch to Trunk view" on the PC *
I "Commit" the folder I'm working in *
I "switch to Production view" *
I "Merge" from Production to Trunk (HEAD) *
I "Commit" again *

I have marked with an asterisk the bits of that process I don't understand. Various dialogs come up, I click on OK, but I'm just a trained monkey at this point.

I think I understand the big picture, that is, the SVN system will keep, and allow us to roll back to, earlier versions, that kind of thing. But what actually is happening?

And it appears I followed my set of trained-monkey steps on a folder and accidentally reverted someone else's code to a previous version. How did I do that? And more to the point, isn't the whole point of these things that I should have got an error message saying "hey, that file's newer on the server than on your PC"?

Before I actually had to use one, I imagined SVN and CVS systems as being some kind of magical smart FTP -- I would upload a file and it would just "know" that it should back up the old one, warn if it had been updated since I last downloaded it, or even merge their changes and mine. Apparently it's not that simple!

Anyone who can give me a mental picture of what I'm actually doing when I follow these steps, TIA.

Is there a way to separate music from sound effects and dialogue in a film, starting with a DVD?

scarabic — Sat, 17 Jul 2004 20:58:48 -0800

I watched Donnie Darko again recently and I thought it was a damn shame that Tortoise didn't do the soundtrack. I became ever-so-briefly obsessed with the idea of replacing some of the musical sequences with Tortoise music, but I wouldn't know how to do this without completely removing any sound effects and dialogue from those scenes. Is there a way for a non-audio-geek to separate these audio elements? Assume I'm starting with a DVD.