Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with yourself

What song should I learn on the guitar first?

handee — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 06:54:10 -0800

I've just bought my first guitar & amp. I want to teach myself. What songs are easy for a complete newcomer to pick up? Right now I know one chord (D) and I am not very good at that but boy am I looking forward to learning chord no. 2. I have a teach yourself guitar book which I will work through, but I want to get onto proper songs as soon as possible.

Bonus points for things I like (Talking Heads, 90s Indie, New Wave, Springsteen...)

I need to learn everything about storage sheds and barns

adriana — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:36:19 -0800

I am writing an ebook about storage sheds and barns, and would love to learn a few things. What do you use your storage shed for? I know most people use it to store their lawn mower and gardening supplies, but others are using sheds/barns creatively, and I'd love to hear those creative uses of sheds and barns.

Also if you have a shed or barn story you'd like to share, I'd love to hear some of those as well (if you include your story, please let me know if you'll allow me to use it in my eboook).

Did you build your own shed? If so, what are some of the things you learned? What would you do differently?

If you purchased your shed, what was your experience? Are you happy with your purchase? What would make your online shopping experience for a shed a more pleasurable experience?

Of course, if you can think of anythign else that has to do wiht sheds, I'd love to hear it: everything is valuable for my research.

Thank you for your help.

Wall Graphics

Sreiny — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 20:33:25 -0800

Converting an image to a simple dot-matrix pattern? A section of my wall is concrete and so I can't hang anything on it. I am planning on buying a few thousand color labels and creating an image in a dot-matrix style. This is a bad example
but kind of along the lines of what I'm thinking of doing, except with an image. Is there a program or application that I can download to convert an image to a dot matrix grid. Basically what I'll do is set up a grid in Illustrator to plan it out, and either there'll be a sticker there, or there won't.

To focus the answers a bit, this isn't a job for Rasterbator or photoshop halftone filter, it needs to be gridded with an "either there's a dot there or there isn't process." Thanks.

Piano Drill Books

Ogre Lawless — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 23:21:51 -0800

Piano Drill Books. Not very sexy, though always a highly practical tool for learning an instrument. This time its piano -- what do you have laying around? (similar: here, here, here) Previous queries along this vein were related but generally of "I wish to pretend I can play a major instrument quickly". Well into faking it now, I want to get some plain old drill books to bulk out what my hands actually know.

In summation of the other threads, the books pointed to there were: Mark Levine's Jazz Piano Book, Fake Books (but who needs that when you can read tab-format which is f-r-e-e on the Internet these days?) , and Play Piano In A Flash.

Thanks for your help. Gramma's piano thanks you also.

Interior monologue, externalized.

grumblebee — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 07:04:53 -0800

How many of you frequently talk to yourself? Why do you do it? Do you do it more when you're completely alone or do you do it when people are around? Are you halfway talking to yourself and halfway talking to the other people? [more inside.] Okay, after offending people with my classist comment about spitting, I'm going to jump headfirst into the fire and offend even more people with
(what some may perceive as) a racist comment: where I live (NYC), it's almost exclusively African Americans who consistently talk to themselves in public (I'm excluding crazy people from this discussion). This must be a normal part of black culture (at least in this part of the country). I don't understand it.

I have a couple of questions about it:
(1) Do you think this is natural human behavior? Have I just been trained out of it by my upbringing? (I know, it's the same question I asked about spitting...) The few times I have talked to myself in public (usually at times of high emotion), I'm gotten embarrassed and glanced around to see if anyone heard.

(2) Is talking to yourself 100% talking to YOURSELF? Sometimes I'm in an elevator with a self-talker, and I hear him say something like, "Man! What a DAY!" or "Damn this elevator is SLOW!" Although the talker is not looking at me, I always get the feeling that the talk is partly for my benefit. And I wonder a couple of things: (a) am I being rude by not responding (I never do). Should I "talk to myself" too ("yeah, this IS a slow elevator!?!") Should I talk directly to the self-talker? Should I ignore it? If two of these self-talkers are in the elevator together, what do they do? (b) do self-talkers engage in self-talk when they are completely alone? I guess this is the heart of the question. I'm wondering whether it's really just for them, or if it's a social thing masquerading as a personal thing.

Again, I hope I don't offend anyone. I think a great thing about forums like this is that we can ask these questions. I could never go up to someone on the street and say, "excuse me, but why do you talk to yourself?"