RULES
No slurs, offensive memes, or any of that white supremacy shit. In chat or video. No Pepe the Frog. We have all had way too much of that elsewhere. We don't claim to be perfect, but we do try. We are LGBTQIA-supportive, and some of our regulars identify with letters in that sequence.
For random items during shows we try to follow the rule of anyone vetoes. It is known, however, that this poses challenges against bad faith actors ("I personally find Mr. Rogers offensive"), and doesn't scale well to large numbers of viewers, so mods reserve the right to exercise our own judgement. And some things we cannot casually skip, even if they are a bit problematic, because they are the subject of our shows, such as particular Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes and episodes of serialized programming.
Between shows, use voteskip! The voteskip button (right-most button under the video) is usually enabled and set to 51%, meaning, to skip, half the people in chat plus one must agree to move on. This works even if no mods are around. If there are mods available, please go through them.
During shows, chat members can suggest videos to play by pasting their URLs into chat or a direct message to a mod. It is up to the mod whether they add the link or not. Mods can add videos for any reason. If you offer something, keep in mind it could be promoted to permanent rotation.
INFO
MST Club is short for Mystery Science Theater Club, an unofficial watching group for the TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000, although we put in many other things. Some of these things come from DANGER RADIOACTIVE, a curated list of weird YouTube videos. Commonly seen are MST3K shorts, Rifftrax (all paid for), Homestar Runner, Barats & Bereta, Waverly Films, Neil Cicierega and other bits of internet randomness.
Shows are Thursday beginning at 7 PM Eastern time (that's 4 PM Pacific, about 11 PM UK), with the MST episode beginning two hours in. For the moment we're also watching shorter shows, "MST Club Lite," 7 PM Eastern on Sundays, with the episode heading up the program. We also watch movies and episodes of TV shows. These will never be announced or advertised, and are absolutely not guaranteed.
We are currently on our second run through the entire series. When it is done, we don't know what we'll do. MST Club has been running for six years now, which is a long time for anything.
The biggest event in the MST Club year is the great Christmas Marathon, usually 72 straight hours of generally holiday-themed stuff every yuletide December 23-25. We sometimes do other events throughout the year: we usually have watch parties for the annual official Turkey Day stream over US Thanksgiving, and put together shows for New Year's Eve and US Election Day.
MST Club got its start on Metafilter's Fanfare subsite, but Metafilter membership is not required to participate. Please note it has no connection with "Club MST."
A NOTE ON OUR RIFFS
Mystery Science Theater 3000 began in 1989, and hit the height of its popularity during the 1990s, a time when stand-up comedy was experiencing a boom. 90s comedy tended towards being "edgy," pushing people's buttons and bordering on offensive. Sometimes, by current standards, actually offensive. MST3K is pretty tame (they didn't make many racist riffs), but there are some subjects that they returned to repeatedly. Gender-based jokes, for instance, are common in a few episodes. If a writer thought that a woman looks like a man, they weren't shy about mentioning it. One of the most classic MST3K shorts, Mr. B Natural, trades a lot in that type of humor.
And Rifftrax got its start in 2006, the age of Something Awful, and for a few years they would also make jokes that would be considered overly mean-spirited today.
We don't condone this aspect of either show. We'd like to remind viewers that it was a different time. Both MST3K and Rifftrax outgrew these kinds of jokes. We do show episodes from those eras, because it was their heyday and far from the only kind of joke they made, but we do ask that you understand how the shows, and popular comedy itself, has changed over time. When you hear an insensitive joke, feel free to bring it up and say "that's not cool." Or just ignore it.