Podcast 105 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 105: Have Fun At Space Camp (2015-06-03).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:02 bluntly cortex docking projects all our favorites these articles are fake. Justin how we talking people posting? Asking questions. These are our favorites. Hi, welcome to episode 105 of the metal filter podcast. I am cortex aka Josh Mullard.

mathowie 1:12 I'm Jessamyn and I'm Mathowie

Cortex 1:15 and we're talking about everything from Oh, I think it was May 6 through today is June the second We almost made the first it's it's so close to June 1 That it's we can hardly complain.

Jessamyn 1:28 My boss at the other job was like, Hey, I'm not getting my contract renewed for stupid harassment reasons. Can we have lunch? And that was like, Oh, God. I mean, I shouldn't laugh because it probably means the end of my teaching at that school too. But I can move my little kid somewhere else.

Cortex 1:47 Yeah, that's a reasonable reason to push a podcast. Yes. compensated for for a day, I think.

Jessamyn 1:52 Yes. Thank you, gentlemen, for your for your patience and understanding.

Cortex 1:57 Well, it's been a month of Metafilter. And as usual, it's been a pile of good stuff how you guys been?

Jessamyn 2:03 I've been really good actually. Um, you know whether it's been pouring nonstop for two days. I can't remember a time before it started raining. I have that like internet attention span.

Cortex 2:15 We were talking about that before we hit record but the thing is mad is super bummed because it's been it was super super warm here for like a good solid week at least, like you know, 80s and shit and sunshiny and now just as of yesterday, this morning, it's been cold and wet and shitty, and I'm so happy and mad and sad. And like all that and Oregon, like June you were January. Hey,

mathowie 2:42 January, January, it's 50 and raining as it should be in June. They also

Cortex 2:46 use that to refer to very specific complicated kinds of relationships. Yeah, no, no, it's I'm really really happy about what I had to pull a blanket back out of the closet yesterday and put on the bed before going to bed. And that's that's the happiest thing in the world for me. So

Jessamyn 3:01 yeah, good. Sleeping weather is what we all call it. So weather has been great. Everything else has been pretty much the same. Not bad. You sigh did the Greg Naga? Yes. The wetter the NOC, which was delightful. You know, it was perfect, actually, like, there's usually always like a thing or a wrinkle or, you know, some aspect that's like, hey, you know, it went well. But there was a problem. This just, you know, the whole thing just went dynamite. Like they both have really nice families. It was a really nice event. I was happy with my part of it, which was a little jokey, jokey, but that was kind of appropriate to their thing. It was 40 minutes from here an hour from here. So it wasn't that far. It was in the afternoon. So it wasn't that early. We left not super late. So that was good. I met Optimus Prime, which was super weird, because I've never met him before. And he's normal in person.

Cortex 4:03 Yeah, I met him. I met him really briefly in like 2008 or so whenever did that Jet Blue thing I think I'm gonna meet up but it's a super crowded meetup. So we got as far as we're like, shaking hands with sort of like, sometimes this site is a weird place for us to interact. And

Jessamyn 4:19 we had a table like it was me and Jim and Griffiths and blister lips, or Nikki and Nikki and Yakov. And then we were supposed to be with Shakespearian and his family, but there had been a sickness. Somebody was sick, so they couldn't come. So we wound up being in this big table in the corner with only the four of us. So all four of us got to kind of sit with our backs against the wall and kind of shoegaze and mumble to each other and play with our phones, which made it perfect. And then those guys later the rest of them's kind of came down and we hung out. We met a bunch of other people who I cannot give shoutouts to because they all had obscure usernames, but they didn't know

mathowie 4:58 Do you publish the About Oh, you do I just send you a link to them? No, no, I meant like, do you do it for everybody? Or just internet weirdo weddings?

Jessamyn 5:06 No, no for everybody.

mathowie 5:08 Thursday. Oh my god for not

Jessamyn 5:10 internet weirdo people. I sometimes take the names out, just so that people don't google themselves and find some random wedding ceremony that their grandma was mentioned in, you know? Yeah, but yeah, no, I wrote the whole bagpipes there were bagpipes that not only were there bagpipes, Greg nog who is half Scottish and half Greek was full was in full on Scottish it. You know, like he had not only the kilt but like the socks and the shirt and the jacket and the thing and the whatever

mathowie 5:41 thing on the front called The thing was a little boring. The round like a sporran sport, okay.

Jessamyn 5:51 I'm pretty sure.

mathowie 5:52 I think it was the rare

Jessamyn 5:53 spar and SPO r r a n.

mathowie 5:58 I promised myself I'd never read meta topic me because I don't have to. And then I think I did on one day, and it was his post and it was like, Oh, my God, there's it's real. And it's like, often as China's mentioned, I went, Wait, what happened? What's going on? Because there's always controversies. I have no idea they're happening.

Cortex 6:19 I I'm glad for you that that is the one meta talk that you've read. Yeah.

mathowie 6:23 And like four paragraphs into it. It started dawning on me like, Oh, I see what you did there. But man, I was terrified for like 30

Jessamyn 6:31 had done it in the wedding because him and Jakob were looking at their phones making like jokes about it. And Yaakov didn't have like an internet signal. So I got to share my Metafilter phone signal so that he could up load a video of Greg dancing at the wedding. I don't know, at any rate that happened. And it was really nice. And Heather was likewise delightful and has delightful family and it was fun to meet all of their friends. All their non non internet friends

mathowie 7:01 was in Vermont.

Jessamyn 7:04 Yeah, yeah, I can only marry people in Vermont. So Greg's family has

mathowie 7:11 a you can like marry people in looser states to

Jessamyn 7:15 need a different qualification.

mathowie 7:18 Like, you know, my brother in law printed a thing off the internet and married.

Jessamyn 7:22 Yeah, Jim has that Universal Life Church? I think Josh, don't you? Yeah, that's what I have to.

mathowie 7:27 Oh, you have to do one this summer. Right, Josh? Do I? Are you gonna marry people soon? I thought that was this year. I thought you were gonna do it.

Cortex 7:40 No, I'm going I'm going to Huntsville for this summer. But I'm not married. When is that happening? Huntsville? You're going to space camp? No, but Angela.

mathowie 7:49 Oh, that's right. Or NASA. Yeah, she thought she was just gonna go away and you're gonna sit with the cats. Now.

Cortex 7:55 We'd both go crazy if we did it that way. And it turns out that I have a job that's really mobile. So we're going to like middle of this month we'll take off. We'll hop in the car and haul ass for four days and get over to Huntsville and set up there until basically the end of August and then you know, wind our way back a little bit slower. So

mathowie 8:16 are you gonna like deadline? Airbnb or house or something?

Cortex 8:20 We got to like a rented furnished apartments. We're just leasing it. No,

mathowie 8:23 I'm at your house.

Cortex 8:24 Oh, no, I don't think so. It just we don't have anybody specifically that we know who specifically would need it and want it right now. And so

Jessamyn 8:33 it's just empty. So if I wanted to go to Portland for a week, I could just break in and hang out in that awesome bedroom. Right right. In the catch there alone.

Cortex 8:43 Another thing with Angela's mom. Yeah, I've got a safe house now. Yes, right. Exactly. If I'm getting tailed if you need to call me ahead of time.

mathowie 8:55 I need door safe houses and 12 routes to get to it for door code.

Cortex 8:59 Yeah, you know, like the pin. Like digital pin things. We got one of those so no digital pin thing to the door. You can buy them at Home Depot. Yeah, they're not. They're not.

mathowie 9:11 Don't buy a Wi Fi one because they'll probably break but the simple pins Yeah, just

Cortex 9:16 real basic one. They're they're pretty tried and true. At this point. It turns out we were asking friends about it. And they're like several they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, this

Jessamyn 9:22 send me a link. I need that for reasons. Sure. Okay.

mathowie 9:25 Airbnb. The people use those now a lot. Yeah, I think the only like 3040 bucks because

Jessamyn 9:30 then you can change them. Yeah,

mathowie 9:33 sporadically.

Cortex 9:34 Yeah. In any case, that is to say, No, I'm not marrying anyone. I don't think but maybe. Maybe I'll marry someone in

Jessamyn 9:41 Bama. That's gonna be so great. It's gonna

Cortex 9:44 be but my main concern is is gonna be as hot. Yeah, it's like I get annoyed at Portland in the summer because it's too nice outside. I'm going to the salad. But everybody has AC so

mathowie 9:55 do you have a porch in a rocking chair and mint juleps? I don't know. Is that a thing? I think

Jessamyn 10:00 I think there is a similar coastally. But yeah, that's yeah,

Cortex 10:03 there will certainly be brown liquor available. So yeah, and there's a pool at the place where we're getting the apartment. So it posts

mathowie 10:10 photos, I gotta see, I will do so. Also, base camp as an adult, I never got to stop it means keep calling it's Basecamp Basecamp is that I found out cold Jeff got to go to space camp that was like my dream as a fifth grader was to go to space camp and my parents had no money and didn't

Jessamyn 10:29 and you were super far away to he was nearby. It's the

mathowie 10:32 other side of the world to California. So

Cortex 10:35 cold culture should be a reasonable day's drive.

mathowie 10:38 Yeah,

Cortex 10:39 Angela has to you know, show up to work every day, Monday, Friday. But I've got you know, days off throughout the week, you know, scheduled so I might sneak down, you know, sneak around, set up some meetups,

mathowie 10:50 how does geology work with NASA,

Cortex 10:53 NASA has a lot of satellite imagery of this crazy marble we call Earth. And so doing analysis of basically landslide data and prediction in Uganda and Rwanda is what the the project she's working on is, which is super relevant, because there was just a bunch of like Quake and landslide stuff, or flooding and landslide stuff in that vicinity in the last few months, and so the team that she's gonna be working with was using some of what they're gonna be using to try and literally identify potential spots where there could be landslides in areas where people are populated that. Yeah, so

mathowie 11:39 like you could do predictive modeling on like with the Mathematica and just looking at angles, like the cleavage angles of those parent materials, totally.

Cortex 11:49 soil scientists getting

Jessamyn 11:51 soil science background,

mathowie 11:52 be all this is a first Google Maps scrolling every day going no,

Cortex 11:59 no send music to them using data to make Yeah, somewhat more intelligent, I think predictions fascinating. So yeah, it sounds like it's super spacey though. It's not NASA

Jessamyn 12:11 is from space NASA.

Cortex 12:12 NASA is involved. That does not mean

Jessamyn 12:15 it's also an aeronautics you know, the A and NASA space it

mathowie 12:19 USGS also are just,

Cortex 12:21 they may be involved as well. i It's not my internship. I don't really know. I don't really know.

mathowie 12:28 Yeah, get her on the podcast.

Cortex 12:31 whatsoever. Once we get there, and she actually has a chance to do it. Yeah, we could get her hop on. Anyway. Should we talk about? You've got your you've got your 100 bucks. Yes. I think we established that that was a quintuple, Dexter number.

Jessamyn 12:45 You made up some bullshit, but I have in the intervening time while you guys are like blah, blah, Space Camp actually look some stuff up,

Cortex 12:52 tells me 105

Jessamyn 12:53 Here's the interesting thing about 105 105 and its neighbor 104 are a Ruth Aaron pair. I don't know why I didn't mention this last month. Maybe it did. I've got a you know 10 news to me lately. But the prime factors of 105 and the prime factors of 104 are the same. They both add up to that at the same but they both add up to 15 which means there are Ruth Erin payer. So it's it's only meaningful in its relationship to its neighbor, though it is also the atomic number of dominium to WM, which is just sort of a weird interesting element that I didn't know any

Cortex 13:35 feeling with it. I used to make more on

Jessamyn 13:39 the hypnotoad element

Cortex 13:44 is Ruth Erin after some baseball records of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, or

Jessamyn 13:48 the buzzing sound coming back, what was that?

Cortex 13:52 Babe Ruth, I really have no idea I haven't looked at I don't know if it's gonna cute baseball name from a mathematician who's a baseball fan or if it just happens to be related to I think it's two people, two people named Ruth and Aaron who have nothing. This is seriously

Jessamyn 14:06 you're asking me to click a thing so you don't like it? Thank

Cortex 14:11 you. Yes. Well, you didn't post the thing that I would name

Jessamyn 14:15 was given by Karl Pomerance for Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron.

Cortex 14:20 Okay. I'm thrilled.

Jessamyn 14:27 Sports roots home run total was 714. And then Aaron eclipsed it when he got his 715 homerun and the prime factors sums are the same for those numbers. No, no, ma'am.

Cortex 14:40 There we go. I speculated successfully. I I'm happy to have been involved in this analysis with

Jessamyn 14:46 you. Your wild ass guess happened to be correct.

Cortex 14:50 Decent guests. Jason numbers.

Jessamyn 14:54 Some roots Aaron scientists mathematician. No.

Cortex 14:58 Nope. Baseball Owens apparently

Cortex 15:14 Well, jobs there were a few jobs last month.

mathowie 15:17 That's not fair like none.

Cortex 15:20 Like you're probably just looking at June again. Oh, there's a whole page full of May.

mathowie 15:27 Well, there's not I think last time I looked there too, because there's a big gap of like 11 days. Yeah. Anywho Yeah, there is some stuff.

Cortex 15:35 Well, this is an extremely last minute thing, but it should come up before. Before the wedding happens. We should get this podcast published. So you could photograph natural logs wedding in New York City on June 5. So if you're not doing anything on Friday, and you're a photographer who won't screw up someone's wedding. Give him a call.

mathowie 15:56 Whoa. Yeah, that's some tight.

Jessamyn 16:00 And also Wilders looking for some people to do a home and garden work in exchange for getting to hang out in sort of a neat part of a world. If you can do replace some decking, lace and paving setup a wire trainer three days a week for a while. DIY. They speak Spanish in German and English would be kinda cool. free room and board

Cortex 16:26 and hasty.

mathowie 16:28 Looks like Jesse Thorn is looking for some sort of intern. No.

Jessamyn 16:35 You sent the link to Greg Knox wedding again.

mathowie 16:38 I did. Yes. You did.

Cortex 16:40 It totally. Maximum funds looking for

Jessamyn 16:46 return off these previews and Skyping

mathowie 16:47 out they're trying to be they're trying to be slack.

Jessamyn 16:51 They are trying to be slack and slack. Turn that shit off. Yeah, what did you just do?

mathowie 16:57 I removed and edited. You can edit and they're totally trying to be Slack. So they can cut all this. Jesse Thorn.

Jessamyn 17:09 I don't care. I'm interested in that. Jesse

mathowie 17:11 Thorn is looking for someone transitioning to a career in audio production and giving them some sort of this is above internship, but seems meaning it's paid. Yeah, it's pretty low pay scale, but that is NPR world. Normal I think. A year. Yeah, that's fine. That's pretty low. But how much a year? 21 grand a year? Because

Jessamyn 17:36 that's more than I make at the arcade? What? But I'm only I'm wicked part time there.

mathowie 17:42 Oh, yeah.

Cortex 17:44 We could part time.

Jessamyn 17:46 Yeah. Meaning quarter time.

Cortex 17:48 Yes. Pro do your part time squared projects?

Jessamyn 17:54 Means? No, I guess it kind of is.

Cortex 17:58 It's like it's like, you know, it's intensifier, right. So if you're intensifying a fraction, you could do it by squaring the new smaller fraction, like, time and then we could have time, which

Jessamyn 18:09 kind of freaked me out. But yeah, you're right. Projects. I loved this. So everybody followed all the Twitter isn't doing shit about harassment stuff back when it was happening. And then women action and the media became the sort of intermediary before Twitter said they were gonna beef up their nonsense, and became the intermediary between people like people could report harassment to them. And then they would escalate stuff to Twitter. And so theoretically, even though there was critiques of that method, what it meant was that Twitter was only getting sort of claims of harassment that had been vetted by a third party so that they could spend their time just dealing with and fighting with harassment. And they finally did this is honest knave, and they finally did a big report on sort of what they found out, which was, you know, kind of depressingly sort of what you would think and a lot of ways, like, even for claims when WAM was like, oh, yeah, this was totally, this person was totally being harassed. Only sometimes did Twitter actually do stuff about it. blahdy blahdy, blah. I mean, Twitter clearly still has a problem, but the report is awesome. You've learned a lot of stuff about the project. And they have an infographic with summary and recommendations that I thought was really worthwhile. So awesome project and was happy to read about it.

Cortex 19:48 But yeah, that was nice. And yeah, that was the metadata post about it.

mathowie 19:53 I wonder if they gave Twitter a heads up because Twitter seemed to make announcements right before this came out like the They say, Hey, this is coming out in a couple of weeks, and they move to action on it.

Cortex 20:06 You should do a guest mefite podcast interview segment with honestly about it. Just do a little Tennessee meme. We'll paste that in the next podcast,

mathowie 20:16 because this is pretty, it's a pretty damning report, but then Twitter just suddenly turned over, you know, a month ago going like, we're gonna try and do stuff. Yeah,

Jessamyn 20:23 I think this happened in between the time when WAM started collecting data. And like, I think Twitter did that secondary to WAM stepping up and saying they were going to do this in the first place. That was my that was my read on the timeline, although I could be wrong about it. I mean, here's the thing, it's only a damning report of Twitter gives a shit and it's unclear still whether other than like, whoa, made mistakes, PR moves, whether they actually do.

mathowie 20:50 Yes, Costello did set public a few months ago.

Jessamyn 20:55 And then what happened? Well, yeah, it's really easy to be a dude and go on social media and be like, we're wicked, sorry, and get retweeted a million times. It's harder to actually do something about the problem. And I'm not saying they're not.

mathowie 21:10 I said something on the record to a reporter at a conference or something about it. I think he said in the speech, but yeah, yeah, they didn't say they're gonna do anything

Jessamyn 21:19 they said was, you know, abuse reports are up, like, whatever percent, and then they're like, so we're beefing up our abuse staff by whatever percent, and those percents were just weren't the same. You know, like, like, abuses up, you know, 100 times. And so we're doubling our staff or whatever. And you're kind of like, Dude, I can't do fucking math everyday. The internet can do math. Yeah, unless

Cortex 21:42 you have a really amazing force multiplier plan that you can explain clearly.

Jessamyn 21:46 Well, and one of the things that was really interesting about the report, which I read was how much kind of jokey fake abuse, signal noise stuff goes on. Like how many people just report abuse on people that don't like opinions they don't like or just to be dicks, basically. So dealing with both the problem of assholes on the internet, but then assholes on the internet, using the tools to keep the assholes away, creates a real difficult situation because of your abuse team gets to has to deal with 1/3 false positives constantly by trolls, it makes it really difficult to get serious about your abuse team. So anyhow, we can move on. But like I just a lot of the things I learned from that were interesting to me and kind of eye opening. Because we always had it kind of easy. I met a filter because like it was pretty easy just to ban people forever, both from a technological perspective, but also like you could tell if somebody's really abusing the goodwill of the community. And I think in Twitter, it's a lot less clear and Twitter was a lot less likely or willing to take those steps for whatever reason.

mathowie 22:53 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I know we always mentioned igneous Knox like he's a talent project and design stuff. But this one is amazing. The snake people bought so there's this millennials, the snake people or anytime the word millennial shows up in his article, Chrome extension changes the words to snake people, which that's great, hilarious headlines, it's become like a huge thing like, like the cloud too. But extension that people did they turn all your files in the cloud, you know, and you replace it with but it's hilarious. It's sort of Yeah, sort of getting like mainstream popular. And then this is there a snake people bought that grabs news headlines and replaces different ones with Yeah.

Jessamyn 23:44 That's pretty good.

mathowie 23:45 It is. Snake people.

Jessamyn 23:48 It's enjoyable. So if we're going to talk about the usual suspects, I would like to say how much I enjoyed Horus Ron Paul's article on Shakespeare syndrome, which was basically a response to internet freakout, oh my god, we might have found a picture of Shakespeare. And he's like, really?

Cortex 24:06 It's an old mustache? Clearly.

Jessamyn 24:08 I'm a librarian. And as I know, it's more it looks like a picture of you, Josh. Thank you. Nothing wrong with that. But like it could be used. Like, he looks more like you than like he seriously. And so he's like,

mathowie 24:21 old research librarian, right? Or whatever. No,

Cortex 24:24 no, he was a playwright age.

Jessamyn 24:25 But he

mathowie 24:27 works in a weird old collections.

Jessamyn 24:30 Yeah, he works at Houghton, which is, you know, special collections, neat old books from Harvard. And he's very talented. And he's been doing it for a very long time. So he's like, let's actually talk about what's actually going on when you do real research, not just that guy looks like that guy. And it's and it's just a fascinating short article. I mean, you know, I should probably mention, he writes for my group, so you know,

mathowie 24:54 he's, oh, yeah. To see Is he a message writer for real now?

Jessamyn 24:58 No, but we just we just brought that We've been sort of like looking and getting messages and stuff. Yeah, so he was a designated hitter and it's just a great short article that talks about like what real librarians do and what real research is like sorry Internet people. And it was very good. He did a great job I was really pleased with it.

Cortex 25:17 Sweet. Speaking of word bots, there's a couple others this month as well along with the snake people but Moonmilk made

Jessamyn 25:26 really also mentioned a lot

Cortex 25:29 well, I should say though, the word of mouth thing is especially on my mind, too, because we had a discussion in meta talk recently about the idea of doing some sort of word but jam I think maybe we talked about it since the last podcast because I sort of

Jessamyn 25:43 saw that I must have missed it, it we haven't organized

Cortex 25:45 anything concrete yet, it's more of people just talking about the idea in fits and starts but we might try and do something more formal later in the year the idea is maybe we can get some resources together. So we can point people who are brand new to it to some tools that they don't have to like learn to program from scratch or anything and that's sort of coming along or your program from scratch nothing but if someone who doesn't know anything about programming can spend a little time and make a simple word bot in you know, an hour versus be given a manual for Python said hey, learn to program you know, it's more more people who know they can get there. It's gonna ask

mathowie 26:19 Is it like a Node js word? thing that's like a status point a corpus and I still have I still haven't even used no JS yet.

Cortex 26:28 So I don't know I don't know

mathowie 26:31 about forgetting angry just thinking about dri Yes, or loco.

Cortex 26:36 So Moonmilk built this thing that looks for well in mood milks words how it works, and watch the Twitter stream for tweets like I'm lounging on the couch with my dog and rewrites them as Uber but for lounging on the couch with your dog, so it does some pronoun replacement and whatnot. And the best thing about this is then, Nora Reid had also done one called like Uber, but so now we have two different meta filter generated Uber but for joke, Twitter bots out there, so I'm really enjoying that but also, this fantastic idea from frenetic. AKA Brad sucks. He made a bot called odd vice that matches up to Vice headlines into something nice

Jessamyn 27:19 and immediately hilarious, immediately hilarious.

mathowie 27:23 What's his name? Darius does this he has Yeah, headliners because, yeah, this is this is gold. Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 27:31 It turns out the vices the perfect, perfect corpus for this sort of

Jessamyn 27:36 formula.

Cortex 27:38 The vice guide to right now redheaded terrorists allegedly wanted to spit on my vagina. So I told his employer that

Jessamyn 27:44 I learned as a children's birthday party at a Toronto upscale bath house, watched orgies and felt nothing

Cortex 27:51 was one of the strangest weeks ever.

mathowie 27:54 I don't follow these jokey things, but this is amazing.

Cortex 27:57 Ya know, it's super great. So yeah, he's really

Jessamyn 28:02 or lose your job the life of a Brazilian teenage hot air balloon guy. Those are two articles like, in there somehow, right? Yep.

Cortex 28:12 Oh, God. Oh, but but but okay. My favorite project of weight. Same as my favorite project? I don't know. I don't know. I bet it's not but that I think is yours. You go first. I just talked about me.

Jessamyn 28:24 No, you go first.

Cortex 28:25 Okay, well, my favorite project was not the birdhouse you're gonna mention with this awesome. I'm

Jessamyn 28:29 not gonna mention a fucking birdhouse. There's a birdhouse.

Cortex 28:32 Nevermind that birdhouse. Now I feel like I have too much. So my favorite project was super micro paint. Oh,

Jessamyn 28:40 I didn't even look at this. Because oh, gosh, I was gonna talk about it.

mathowie 28:43 This is my other favorite. Yeah, we should let Matt talk about talk. Sure. It's like this 90s era Well, 80s almost like simple paint program that does four simple frames and you like draw with your mouse and that animates them immediately. And you see a little preview. Like you can make a cheesy animation in about two seconds.

Jessamyn 29:08 Because you've been posting a milkshake over and over and over right, Josh?

Cortex 29:11 Yes. Okay. I actually set up a shake for it because I realized at some point, you know, the thread is going to close and

mathowie 29:18 so I just did one does that work? I just drew this while I was talking to stay bubble going down to nothing. Like you can just do that. It does four frames. Yes. So good.

Cortex 29:29 Yes, super minimalist. It's just monochrome. So you just got black and white or you can change the colors it actually uses.

Jessamyn 29:36 I'm sorry, is it just you draw four pictures and then it makes a gift out of them?

Cortex 29:40 Yep. Yep. And you control the size and all these

Jessamyn 29:46 labels are like a Lego

mathowie 29:49 Gameboy aesthetic, kinda, you know. So you

Jessamyn 29:52 know I missed Gameboy. Like, I missed that. Yeah,

mathowie 29:55 right. I was a little too old for it. Well, the

Cortex 29:57 interesting thing is if you look at what I'm rain You know, writes about it, it's really a Tamagotchi aesthetic. I mean, this is super low res, or to a Gameboy Gameboy, a much bigger screen and you know for different shades of gray. And this is this is so much more restrictive too. And anyway, I fallen in love with it. I think it's super neat. I love I love playing with this sort of thing. I love seeing other people playing with it. I love seeing what people figure out they can do in that tiny, tiny constraint.

mathowie 30:24 So what did an elephant shitty? Matt It's metal filter, right? Right. quants are called back. That's amazing. Anyway, I

Cortex 30:33 saw so yeah, I super loved super micro paint. I'm so happy that I'm Ray made the thing that Metafilter thread about it was very fun people posting stuff. And yeah, so that was awesome. So what was your What was your favorite thing of the thing that I feel?

Jessamyn 30:47 Now I'm worried about this birdhouse that I'm not appreciating. But I enjoyed the I made a LED array wall 3200 pixels led thing and I'm gonna bring it to Burning Man, but this is just what it is. In my house. Yes. This is super, like super techy like very project the project. Like this isn't a twitter bot. This is like a big thing. That's made of stuff. Yeah. And this is by Baba Baba, baba Tao. Long. I mean, I feel it's funny. Like, I'm looking at his user numbers. I'm like, Oh, he's kind of a new user. But he's got 100,000 user number. And he's been on Metafilter for quite some time participates a little bit. But yeah, made this really cool thing, which is a prototype for an amazing cool thing. He's gonna bring to Burning Man LED wall and he talks about how he built it so

mathowie 31:46 expensive. LEDs are cheap. Well, yeah, I

Cortex 31:49 mean, it's probably scales up but

mathowie 31:52 wow, look at all those wires. That's scary.

Jessamyn 31:55 Yeah, but look at how it looks when he's like taking a picture and then showing it on the on the thing and can you imagine what its gonna look like? You know, doesn't

mathowie 32:06 look super portable. Like I kind of like it's wallmounted and stuff. Like, wow, that's

Cortex 32:11 terrible. You just slap it on the back of a bicycle. And it's like a carpet

mathowie 32:16 and one of the photos are like you can roll it up.

Jessamyn 32:20 Yeah, that's you can see you can see what it looks like when he's been he's building it.

mathowie 32:25 Is it probably all Raspberry Pi ease or something? Well, he

Jessamyn 32:28 talks about it in.

mathowie 32:31 Oh, right. I'm looking in the wrong place. Okay, cool. Five controllers. Jesus Christ.

Jessamyn 32:36 Yeah, so so he had to, like mess around with it to get it going. But now he can push stuff out over Ethernet and blah, blah, blah, but he's gonna He's gonna make it even bigger and even possible. Right? Yes. Can you tell me what the birdhouse was the

Cortex 32:52 birdhouse? So there's a birdhouse called juncos pub. This was built by mefite named stonecast. It's a tiny Newfoundland pub.

Cortex 33:07 And I keep forgetting to check in regularly. So I still haven't been able to see an actual live bird in there. But there's a bunch of captures on the webpage.

mathowie 33:19 This is like the hamsters eating burritos that was everywhere a few months ago. Like oh, as this is as good. It's so great. It's I have stupid Oregon. gIucose like crazy in my backyard.

Jessamyn 33:32 juncos just tell you.

mathowie 33:35 Ours are greater. So if there's no live cat, where's the live camera?

Cortex 33:39 It's up in the top left. There's just often not burden, though. So you know, it's not a whole lot to look at. It's just an empty pub when you got so small when there's no customers. Yeah, it's adorable. There's a medical post about it. It's just like, you know, I don't I don't even care if there had never actually been a bird in there. Just doing it is

Jessamyn 33:59 great. And the point was really interesting is that for a lot of people having a little window onto something, especially if you're working in some godforsaken cube is is the best like Jim there's a hallway monitor where Jim works and he's always putting like live penguin cam or OWL cam or whatever. Because you're buried in a building and they're the Bio Labs and so it's interesting to you know, have a thing to look at that's natural. And this is exactly the same thing. Look at those juncos They're beautiful.

mathowie 34:30 You any reaction gifts they make to

Cortex 34:35 Yeah, I like the collection of stuff on there.

Jessamyn 34:39 Well and so good. And I had I had recently seen somewhat relatedly this this Twitter library for birds, which is the same thing. It's a library for I mean, you can see it, but it's basically the same thing. It's like a bird feeder, but they made it look like a library, but they put pictures up on their Twitter feed of who's visiting and make library jokes. And every librarian in the world thinks they are. Oh.

mathowie 35:10 This is a very messy library.

Jessamyn 35:13 It's well, secretly they all are. Let me tell you,

mathowie 35:17 I had, I had a working bird cam in the backyard that I could barely reach Wi Fi and upload to Flickr, I have all the parts necessary to do this. I just need to work on my diorama production, I guess.

Jessamyn 35:28 Seriously, it had Fiona, you know, figure out what would be hilarious for her bird roller coaster? Who knows?

mathowie 35:38 Green screen, so you just put them in the middle of

Jessamyn 35:42 don't get tricky. Aim for success, man. Think about something you would actually do?

Cortex 35:48 Well, you know, actually, if you could find a way to like, pair up like the chroma with, like random YouTube videos that look exactly.

mathowie 36:00 Like movie trailers. There's

Jessamyn 36:02 this pop does have a little TV in it.

mathowie 36:05 Yeah, I love the little coke machine. That's insane.

Jessamyn 36:09 The whole thing is, it's

Cortex 36:10 a lot of great detail.

Jessamyn 36:10 Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I am sorry, I missed it the first time. I'm excited. You missed it. You can actually show me. Hey, you

Cortex 36:19 haven't seen this thing. So that's still cached.

Jessamyn 36:21 Nice work. That was wonderful.

mathowie 36:26 Other projects? Wow.

Cortex 36:31 I don't know if this is what the username is a reference to but it might be a playful misspelling of the idea of stochastic which I assume that's yeah. What you're after my own heart Markov chains and all that. One of the quick projects. This is just neat to play with. Ludwig band built a synthesizer in a JavaScript web page. Yeah.

mathowie 36:53 Oh, repo. What do I do? There's so many dials.

Cortex 36:59 To play with the synthesizer. It'd be more meaningful for people who are a little bit Oh, yeah. Old school since then people who are like I don't know what to do with a synth. But anybody can play with it. And it's kind of neat. And it supports MIDI right off the get out of the gate if you have a MIDI controller, and that's pretty cool.

mathowie 37:14 Is there any way to share something you make? Oh, yeah, there's a Share button. Does that save all the settings like the share, Link? I mean, does it save like every setting,

Cortex 37:24 saving? So you can share patches with other people?

mathowie 37:28 Matches? Yeah, I just love jargon. Wow, that's I saw a patch and it's completely different sounding than what I get.

Cortex 37:40 That's cool. synthesizers are neat. I've been playing a bunch with reason, which is a very robust piece of ad's synthesizer emulation sort of

mathowie 37:50 software every 15 year old in the 90s would make music with reason right?

Cortex 37:55 No no reasons reasons a little bit newer than that. Or I don't know exactly when recent started but people in the 90s it was people playing with like mod trackers seems like was the big thing. If recent was out it was very new would have had to visit

mathowie 38:09 and cracks everywhere. I'd go reason this reason that I

Cortex 38:13 didn't 1.0 is that it's it's a sort of synthesizer sort of piece of software that I recently got reacquainted with, which is where the theme that we use this month for the podcast. It was

Cortex 38:30 we will have had gone with the Daft Punk thing.

Jessamyn 38:33 Can you calm everybody down and tell him that's not the new podcast? It's not it's not, not the new podcasting.

Cortex 38:39 I had some anxiety about this. so long since I've been meaning to do a new podcast theme that I finally got around to doing something that was new podcasting related, but it feels much more like

Jessamyn 38:51 a new podcast theme.

Cortex 38:52 It's surprisingly difficult to properly commit. I'll keep working on it. I got another month now. Right? So it's man Exactly. I'll record something in Huntsville.

Jessamyn 39:02 Oh, that would be great. You gotta do but woodshed down there

Cortex 39:07 I'm sorry. I was reading I was reading some words and so I'm not processing sound so I got woodshed

Jessamyn 39:14 you got nothing to do but woodshed down there. Yes, yes.

Cortex 39:16 Yes, Highland and easy apartment and record music. Yes. It's awesome

Cortex 39:46 All right, well, let's let's talk about metal filter. Great.

Jessamyn 39:49 Metafilter asked me to filter metal filter. Just close the tab. I didn't mean to damn dang

Cortex 39:57 thing at all. All right.

mathowie 40:00 Post today what? I had made a post right before the podcast started, because I want to kick it off cortex style. Every worst nightmare we have as running a community right? What was what was our worst nightmare when someone's just insufferable for like three years you go getting murdered by this person again paid? Oh, it's

Cortex 40:26 just a Russian troll thing.

mathowie 40:27 Yes, the Russian troll factory. It's a real thing about it was in the so I was surprised this wasn't on metadata already because Oh, New York Times Magazine usually publishes things like five days before Sunday, you know, like they'll publish on Thursday with a date of the next Sunday. So I assume this was an old article, but I guess it just came out this morning. And it's about this. Adrian Chen, you know, for formerly of Gizmodo, and lots of famous publications, he wrote, yeah, he spent like six months, he went to St. Petersburg and everything to like, research this. There's basically this fucking disinformation campaign that's like bankrolled by Putin like cronies to try and make Russia seem better by just being horrible people on the internet on forums and Twitter and Facebook with these giant networks of fake accounts. And they like make up stories that are just insane. They just talk about like a chemical plant exploded in Louisiana is how it starts. And then like, it didn't happen. And there's like, hundreds of accounts, and they're trending hashtags, and they're freaking students out at a university nearby and nothing happened. Really. It was just them. It's insane. It's so fun. It's like, it's all my worst fears come to life, which is like, when people are just like insufferable to us and horrible for years,

Jessamyn 41:51 you at least know they're real people are you hope you know that?

mathowie 41:55 I always thought in the back of my mind, like, is this person paid to do this? Why would they keep doing this month after month?

Jessamyn 42:01 Nobody doubles down on this type of bullshit, except somebody who's doing it for a job.

mathowie 42:06 Yeah, and these are like, the weird part is when you read it in the get an Adrian gets in the details. It's pretty clunky, right? Like, their English is bad, the grammar is not great. And you can kind of make the connections and figure out who the fake accounts are like, which, like you look at all their Twitter followers, and all those Twitter followers are exactly the same. The same kind of, and you're like, Okay, this isn't super sophisticated, but it's sophisticated enough to trick a lot 1000s of people and they wreak havoc and stuff. And you're like the next version of this when they're just like a little bit better English speakers and a better researchers will be terrifying. Well,

Jessamyn 42:41 that's kind of the thing about all sorts of like, wide ranging scam behaviors, right? Like, they don't need to get everybody to believe them. They don't need to get you to believe them. They need to get sort of the slightly credible internet hot potato machine because as soon as you get some kind of slightly Dippy, occasional Facebook user to start amplifying your signal, then it just goes viral that way, and you don't even have to push it anymore. I mean, I think about this a lot when I when you see things like, suddenly blow up on Twitter at like, I feel like a bad person that I'm like, I wonder if that's really happening. Yeah, because I'm at home. I don't know what's really going on in the places. And so you try and corroborate, knowing the ways that you know, to corroborate, it's super. It's complex, right? And this is how conspiracy theories start, right, that there's not quite enough information to prove or disprove them maybe. And of course, with fucking Twitter, like circling back, not really handling it when people abuse the platform to do stuff like this. What do you This is great, though, this is a great article.

mathowie 43:59 Yeah, you think about like the using the tactics, that Kony stuff that comes in 2012 Right. Where like, it seemed like a good thing. And it turns out it was this weird shadow right wing bullshit propaganda thing in like, Man, this is scary, scary stuff. This is like gnarly.

Jessamyn 44:19 Well, and Adrian Chen did a great job talking about it, it seems. Yeah. I'll go read this whole thing once I'm done talking to you.

mathowie 44:27 Yeah, it was just like, Oh, God is what we always like, people paid to be shitty on forums. And they're basically trying to discredit online discourse, like in the process, just tear it all down. So nobody believes anything, or at least they think, you know, Putin is a great guy and Russia is doing a great it's so weird. It's so fucked up.

Jessamyn 44:46 Well, and it's funny. That's one of the things that I've been like watching third season of House of Cards now. And like that's one of the notable absent things from House of Cards, is, you know, you've got the weird creepy dude who try subtract people using sort of NSA spy material. But you definitely don't get the sort of misinformation in the comments, aspect to public opinion stuff, you know, it's just like, go talk to the union people and tell them this and then they'll vote for you. And not like, how do you deal with the anti Vax lunatics who are in some, like they just don't even talk about sort of online discourse as being relevant. And maybe it's true. It's completely irrelevant. But I feel like in the political world nowadays, it's more of a thing.

mathowie 45:31 Also, I think that Frank Lutz world of junk like that kind of like, I'm not sure why Frank Lutz is the guy who invents all the terrible right wing language that everyone parrots Oh, like Frank Lutz is the guy who comes up with the word death tax. And then he tells, you know, Rogers, he

Jessamyn 45:48 worked for the Koch brothers or who is he?

mathowie 45:51 He's some sort of K Street guy who works for the GOP and like, that's how they all get on message. You know, like, one day everyone on Fox News says the word death tax is because of him. And like,

Jessamyn 46:02 Jean Lutz? Yeah,

mathowie 46:05 horrible. Yeah, he is like the worst. And he's the he's who's the Berkeley guy or something. The elephant in the room guy. He wrote a book about Frank Lutz and saying that liberals need to get better at manipulating language, but it's like a terrible like, you don't want to play their game. When you come up with terrible throwaway phrases and you like any, any, it's just like emotional manipulation, I thought House of Cards, they don't really talk about how they're going to, you know, all collaborate to you know, slam some law through with like, terrible language, you know. Awful phrase ever,

Jessamyn 46:44 and his parents invented the first forensic dentistry book.

mathowie 46:47 Hmm. So he's got a weird sense of humor about himself, which is also weird. Like, he knows what he's doing this kind of evil. And I think he's probably on the way down. But yeah, that stuff is lacking from House of Cards. But Swords is not a documentary.

Cortex 47:04 House of Cards is so much more about like, you know, the specific egos of the few people involved that sort of pervasive machine stuff gets more of a glancing.

Jessamyn 47:13 That's right. I saw him on on Colbert. That's where I saw him. The the lens guy,

mathowie 47:20 yeah. Anywho.

Cortex 47:24 Well, on a completely different subject, because I can't think of a segue. One post I liked was this neat little thing called type drummer that,

Jessamyn 47:34 oh, oh, everybody loved this, I didn't quite understand what was happening.

Cortex 47:38 It's just it's a weird little drumming arrangement toy where you can type in random letters if you feel like it. And each letter of the alphabet is assigned a different drum sound. So you can put together like coherent and beats by putting in specific structured selections of of letters and spaces. Or you can just type like a cat and see what it sounds like.

mathowie 48:00 Only words, it doesn't work with numbers,

Cortex 48:03 or Yeah, I think anything that's not a letter, I think it just treats as a rest. So So numbers, punctuation spaces, will all end up just sounding like no note for that moment. And you can do triplets by throwing them in parentheses, but that was a little bit wonky. Anyway,

mathowie 48:21 so that's what I was. Yeah,

Cortex 48:22 it's a it's a super fun little thing. And people had metal filter made stuff. There's a big thread on Reddit of people throwing in beats they came up with as well. And it's just like, it's so light. It's so lightweight that you can fiddle with it really quickly, which is the fun thing. You know, it doesn't take a bunch of work to get into it.

mathowie 48:41 Oh my god, I got to know your review of Kung Fury. So I have not had time to sit down for the half hour of Kung Fury fury. This is like a hilarious the most 80s thing ever kind of trailer came out like a year or two ago. And they did a Kickstarter and then they're gonna make this half hour movie and they finally did it. And it's it's out there. I haven't watched it yet. Have you seen it? Josh? My

Cortex 49:05 review is that I have not seen it yet either. Oh, come on. No, it exists. But I haven't gotten around to it. Jessamyn Have you

mathowie 49:11 watched the trailer at least? It's a

Jessamyn 49:13 no I'm just watching part of this now. For the 80s is what I'm was that is what I'm saying.

mathowie 49:20 It's just like lasers and hilarious everything

Jessamyn 49:23 it looks like around glasses bandanas? It's so funny. No, I did not see that. That is terrific.

mathowie 49:30 It's been on netfilter a couple of times in the past with each like new development with it

Cortex 49:36 yeah see I mentioned around alien to some never really quite got totally on my radar so I'm like oh yeah, that thing that was gonna happen happened is about as far as with it so far.

mathowie 49:47 Okay, I have got to sit down and watch it.

Cortex 49:50 Yes. While you're watching all watchable discussing it. I liked this post. This was I believe, first post I think is why Hit by abysmal about bones just colored bones. It's a collection of loss. Not it's not a first post, I just caught my eye. I guess. They recently started posting in the last in the last month or so they're a new user. But yeah, it's just like a collection of sort of medical articles about various strange bone coloration situations come up. So it's just yeah.

Jessamyn 50:26 Where they actually go and curate some stuff and link them all together, whereas you wouldn't have. I mean, you know, you wouldn't

Cortex 50:32 have come across these things together. This is just someone's like, collarbones Yeah, I'm making

mathowie 50:36 a really random Instagram photo. Dry PDF from a couple drive PDFs from journals like this. Amazing.

Cortex 50:46 It's it's a taster menu, man. It's a it's a bunch of stuff put together. This

Jessamyn 50:51 is a picture of a squirrel. Oh, wow. And there's little pink skeletons under the blacklight fascinating.

mathowie 51:01 Yep. I want to know how that happens. Your new lab and then you like turn on your black light. Oh man. Check it out.

Jessamyn 51:11 There's one thing you learn it's never turn on your blacklight

Cortex 51:16 oh my god protein stains everywhere. Oh, yeah, another another sort of fun little thing I liked post about shower hair masterpieces. Artists named Lucy Gafford

Jessamyn 51:32 Do you remember that shower hair animated GIFs thing that we? I think at one point in time, I don't. Oh god it was it must have been. Maybe it was milkshake but somebody who did like a huge animated GIF of like a shower hair thing. I mean, these are cool. Don't get me wrong. But

Cortex 51:55 these are like real minimalist sketches I Countess

Jessamyn 51:57 by Countess Elisa. Let me see if I can find it. So this is one of those things. It's really difficult to Google I think. Shower here

Cortex 52:13 Well, she's looking on so you got man.

mathowie 52:15 Oh, man. That is cool. It's revolting at the same time. I hate hair in the shower.

Jessamyn 52:22 Well that you got a short haircut right? Problem solved. Now you just need your own bathroom. I swear that tells you no fancy rich people do it. They just go get their own. They get their own bathroom and then whatever their annoying. spouse does they don't have to worry about it do keyless I'm never gonna find this.

mathowie 52:49 Well, it's God. What is wrong with my copy and paste today? Jesus. See if that works. Okay, that did work.

Cortex 52:57 When you when you try and copy and paste new fail, there should be like a voice that comes in everything goes gray and hey,

Jessamyn 53:04 last time was that? Hey, dummy, that's the same link as last time. That's what the voice should say. I'm just Oh, yeah. I can't find this shower here. Thanks. So I'll just rejoin the conversation. Okay.

mathowie 53:20 There's a really cool comic about the whole McDonald's lawsuit. You know? We already know right that the lawsuit that people use as a frivolous lawsuit shortcut is lazy and stupid. But this is a really good. It talks about the actual case like McDonald's was so horrible that like the jury was like, we have to give this woman more money because like the lawyers are set. So despicable. I mean, like, oh my god, I had no idea. Like the actual text of what the lawyers said in the courtroom was so awful. It was based like she's an elderly woman. And she basically she doesn't have that long to live. So her private parts, which he's not going to use, because she's like, 80 I mean, who's gonna have sex with her? Like he says things like this. And like the jury turned on him. It's really amazing. So first, yeah, I'd say it's good on the first level of like, Oh, hey, there's more to that story than you thought. And then there's the second level of like, it's so much worse than you thought.

Jessamyn 54:17 And then there's the third level which is this is done by Shannon Wheeler. Who does the too much coffee man. Comic like I followed Shane Wheeler as the too much coffee man cartoonist and so getting to see Shannon and doing this is extra double plus awesome.

mathowie 54:34 It's a pretty awesome style almost looks like our crumb like it's really cool.

Jessamyn 54:39 Well, and the too much coffee band stuff is hilarious. He he I think she wanted to dude shoot need to figure this out. Shannon Shannon Shannon Shannon's a guy but too much coffee man. Yeah, it's just very funny and kind of Indian and they're on the he's published on The nib on medium also, so I've like kind of reacquainted with him as I've been spending more time there. And yeah, too much coffee man is sort of this weird, reluctant anxious superhero. So I liked it on that level also, because I've always loved that comic.

Cortex 55:18 Yeah, too many cargo vans basically the official superhero of alternative weekly news magazines.

Jessamyn 55:25 Yeah, where's the where's ours, it has a little coffee cup for a hat. Like just very ridiculous all the way, all the way. So I like to think it was earlier in the month and kinda liked it kind of didn't like it. It was room 641 A's post on the Beth project, which was basically a series of photographs of a woman who lost a bunch of weight. It's a nice, easy to use website. But you know, through the miracles of modern photography, it's pictures of the woman before she lost weight right next to pictures of the woman after she lost weight. But like, and dressed up kind of simple, like so like one is like Laurel and Hardy. And half of it is the picture of her being heavy dressed up like Hardy and half of her is the picture for later dressed up like Laurel. And they're together. You know what I mean?

Cortex 56:17 Yeah. Or a nun and Maria von Trapp, both holding their arms up on the Swiss hillside or

Jessamyn 56:28 Yeah, or Frida Kahlo and Diego, what's his but Frida and Diego. And so they're just they're just super interested in the pictures. But then of course, the the, the thread because of issues people have concerning weight gain, weight loss, blah, blah, blah. It became like a Rorschach for how people sort of decided what was going on there. Like some people really liked it and thought it was really cool. A lot of people read a lot into stuff that maybe wasn't there maybe was there whether gastric bypass surgery is appropriate or ridiculous, et cetera, et cetera. So

Cortex 57:11 it's just one of those topics that people have a lot of varied feelings based on personal life experiences. Yeah. And

Jessamyn 57:17 so the thread itself, from my perspective was interesting to read. Because the the post itself was interesting. The pictures were lovely. It was a neat idea. And then people kind of rift on it. And it didn't turn into I mean, it didn't go on very long actually, but it didn't turn into kind of a wow all against all situation. But it was kind of a very Metafilter interesting thread to me.

mathowie 57:40 Isn't it amazing photographs. I'm like this is a talented photographer Jesus Christ. How do you composite yourself in front of yourself? I guess Photoshop

Cortex 57:52 Yeah, Photoshop is yeah, you do you do some good cropping and feathering at

mathowie 57:58 the at the edges? Yeah,

Cortex 58:00 I guess I see some elbow as speaking as someone who has a lot of experience doing a pretty shitty job of that I I really get it bad Photoshop. Yeah. Yeah, we should we should we should have a bad Photoshop collaboration sometime.

mathowie 58:13 Bad Photoshop jam.

Cortex 58:15 Well, tennis, but it'd be like Photoshop shitty broken Pong machine.

Jessamyn 58:20 That's exactly what we should call it. Since my computer's upgraded D 70. You know, I was using Photoshop four or something like that. And you somebody's like, you don't get that anymore. Like, I'm gonna save you from yourself. And so now I've been using GIMP, which is okay. But I mean, like all open source projects, it's like, just learn the way to do the thing. It doesn't have to be easy or Wow, why it's all very complicated. So now I've learned these bizarre workarounds for things that were very easy in old photo. No,

mathowie 58:49 yeah, on modern Macs. I think it's Pixelmator is like the $30. Like 90% of Photoshop is that is good intel, like, pixelmate are not bad. I thought there might be a better one, because

Cortex 59:06 I uses Photoshop Elements, which is not amazing. But it's also relatively cheap, you know, and it's, it gets the job done for me. Because, again, like, you know, it's just, I have a dumb hobbyist idea. And I wait, make it happen.

Jessamyn 59:19 Didn't Adobe go full cloud now. So you do their stock

Cortex 59:23 thing? So yeah, and I mean, if you if you own an older version, you still own it. So like, I'll be using this version of elements until you know the x86 architecture goes,

mathowie 59:33 I think Photoshop six.

Jessamyn 59:36 Somebody I thought you somebody was the x86 architecture going away?

Cortex 59:40 That might be Well, I have not been keeping a careful enough track of x86 to to know if that's actually still around. So buying cheap. Rent it because yeah,

mathowie 59:54 yeah. 10 bucks a month like the minimum cheapness? Yeah,

Cortex 59:59 and I don't have I don't have that level of need. I paid like 90 bucks for elements five years ago and I'm just gonna stick with that as long as I can

mathowie 1:00:08 just pick somebody there's 29 bucks on the App Store. That's not bad. It's pretty good. It's got layers and everything, you know, things. It's got text. It's got brushes.

Cortex 1:00:20 Oh, I remember the actual first post first post I was thinking of this is actually from last month but I don't think I mentioned it. There's just a nice post about some dance work by dancer named Maya plus that Skia by user random inconsistencies who ever wanted to make a first post and ran it by the contact form and worked with them a little bit to get it put together and they did it and it was a dancer I was totally unfamiliar with so it was it was neat to see a post put together and to see someone make a first post so I was just kind of a nice thing

Jessamyn 1:00:54 Wait a second. This is from April I missed the beginning.

Cortex 1:00:57 Yeah, this is from April I just I don't I think I had meant to mention it last podcast but forgot.

Jessamyn 1:01:03 So do you like Ravel's Bolero?

mathowie 1:01:05 The woman dancing is 5050

Cortex 1:01:10 That's cool dancer keep in shape man. Dancers.

mathowie 1:01:13 Wow, she can still do ballet on point. Good God, that looks painful.

Cortex 1:01:18 Oh, and speaking theater. Here's a thing that came up the other day. So there's this viral is funny this this is a post about a viral video that shows up every June 1. And the thread is almost entirely discussion of people's varying experiences of ever having even heard of this. So it's like viral, if it's viral, and if it's not viral, and you've never heard of it. And Leslie Uggams is a you know, musical theater person and if you know her, you know her because she's a big musical theater person. But if you don't you're like who?

Jessamyn 1:01:48 I was trying to figure out if I knew her, like the name was super familiar.

mathowie 1:01:52 80s television,

Jessamyn 1:01:53 right? Yeah.

mathowie 1:01:57 She was always on the battle of network stars or something. I just always heard that name and starring Leslie Uggams. I've never seen this video. She

Jessamyn 1:02:05 was on the Leslie Uggams show, Hollywood Squares, Muppet Show, Magna pie, all my children.

Cortex 1:02:13 I've never seen this video. If you watch and you haven't seen it, it's a totally unremarkable thing because it's just someone walking along at some sort of outdoor live musical events, you know, doing some staged singing and getting up on stage and then clearly went somewhere from there. But then it plays it back, and then it plays it back and it shows the subtitles and it becomes clear if and this will probably be clear if you really really knew the song she was singing. But you know, becomes clear that she is not singing words to any human song for much of the song. And the post is about the video but also the main link is an interview with her where she explains what the hell happened in this video where she just started seeing total fucking nonsense in a super, you know, brash sticking with it, the show must go on to

Jessamyn 1:03:00 spoil it for me and explain what the hell happened.

Cortex 1:03:03 No, no. And so so they were doing this and the short version is they're doing this outdoor musical performance event thing. And it had rained like crazy the night before and it rained like crazy that morning. cleared up for the actual presentation. But the cue card guy was you know, showing her cute cards and backing away off camera because this was not a song that was like in her repertoire. So she just needed the prompts for the words and he just fucking bails like he just eats shit on the grass and does not stop and it's a live event and it's moving forward so she's got a track with a camera so she just starts like Savannah Saba Richards and you know if you listen to just the sound of her voice and the presentation she is 100

Jessamyn 1:03:44 She's singing a song yeah until closely pay attention to exactly

Cortex 1:03:48 and then it's just complete random scabby do not it's not it's not quite scab to do so it doesn't jump out as like oh and now she's doing this gap it it's just like you know she she watermelon bubble gums it

Jessamyn 1:04:00 and comes up sound bubbles gumming it

Cortex 1:04:04 that's like what you do if you're if you're an extra water, watermelon water yeah, you're like you're just you're you're stage murmuring but you don't want to lose a blah blah blah blah blah so you say something with some nice mix. Syllables watermelon.

mathowie 1:04:19 Great school if you figure out the lyrics to any song in the back row of course everyone just sings watermelon watermelon watermelon cool. It looks like you're singing with everybody.

Jessamyn 1:04:27 No idea. Life hack. Next time I'm in chorus, I'll remember that.

Cortex 1:04:36 Anyway, though, the whole thread is pretty fun because it's a weird mix of people are like, Oh, that fucking video and people are like, What the hell is this and then talking about like, you know, sticking it out when you have no idea what's going on lyrically and so on. So it was it was a fun thing.

mathowie 1:04:50 I gotta watch it.

Jessamyn 1:04:52 All right. I don't think I had other better filtery stuff, but I have a lot of AskMe to filtery stuff.

mathowie 1:04:56 I think I had one last metal filter thing from the small already in that hit hit the popular list is amazing, like an amazing mega post on income equality. And she's, I just I've spent like a half hour reading it this morning when I woke up at like six and I was like, This is really good. It's just like, it links to more things and more things and how Iceland is doing the right thing. And it's amazing.

Cortex 1:05:24 That is that is that is a lot of post is what that yeah,

mathowie 1:05:27 it's kinda like a lot of research on income equality thrown together. But yeah, the first three articles I read are pretty good. And I was gonna dive into the rest, but it's got a almost 100 favorites and a few hours.

Jessamyn 1:05:43 Who cares? It's long. And that's easy. Yeah. I don't mean to be rude, but like I yeah,

Cortex 1:05:51 I gotta run the stats on that again sometime. Because I think we did establish last time we looked at it years ago that there was a correlation between the sheer length and favorite count on stuff that yeah, there's, there's definitely an effect there.

mathowie 1:06:01 Yeah, I think it gets to the point where like, I read the first three or four articles. And I'm like, there's like eight more hours of work here. I'm gonna mark it come back to later. Probably what those favorites mean

Cortex 1:06:11 reference ability? Well, I'll mention a couple of quick things. And then we'll move on to ask. This is just weird. And had a little bit of metaphors or angles. It turned out a Pakistani company that does basically a fake diploma mill scam thing. Which, you know, you can sort of imagine various aspects of what's going on there. But then the funny thing is, then Matt, got a letter from them saying, hey, you need to blah, blah, blah, cease and desist because there's

mathowie 1:06:42 libel and slander. You met. actionable? Yeah. Like, oh, my

Cortex 1:06:47 god, man tweeted at night tosses in the thread. And, and also like someone has since been arrested from there, I think, yeah. To take into custody after a raid on their Karachi offices. So apparently, they didn't see in D, the correct people, I guess. But yeah, the whole thing is just weird. And I thought it was funny that Matt got a letter about that. I'll

Jessamyn 1:07:09 link to it. Oh, my God. What's the last? D

mathowie 1:07:13 order? I know it's crazy from some barristers. But the best part is like, here's our response. And it's their internal intranet, like address. You can't read it in the public Internet.

Jessamyn 1:07:28 Domestic

mathowie 1:07:29 X web server devenue. 705. Like that's their internal exam. I know. Well, they make millions of dollars on diploma mill stuff. So they can pay lawyers.

Jessamyn 1:07:43 Because they just need because their diploma mill. So if you don't mind just getting a mill factory diploma. I guess it works for you.

mathowie 1:07:51 I mean, they could have paid a lawyer 1000 bucks to make one letter that they just dropped in every URL they could find, like, write a little Perl script. And

Cortex 1:08:00 yeah, it'd be easy to do a mail merge. Another quick mention, this is just neat. If you're into this sort of thing, as opposed from a few weeks ago about a game to learn named it Karen, talking comprehensively about using camera movement in 2d video games, like the way you move the view screen versus where the player is at any given time. And if you're not particularly into that, sort of like very video game stuff, it's probably like, this is just a bunch of math and jargon. But if you are interested in that at all, it's super great. It's really he does a great job of looking at basically every single trick people have come up with over the last 30 years to figure out how to move the camera to keep stuff visible on the screen for the player. And how much it depends on what you're trying to do with a game how?

Jessamyn 1:08:52 By folk cipher analysis, which is funny. Yes,

Cortex 1:08:56 very appropriate.

mathowie 1:08:58 Wow, this is amazing. It's like

Cortex 1:09:02 yeah, so it's it's got animated GIFs with showing boundaries imposed on it to clarify how the camera is working. What triggers if you look at the stuff like several examples from Super Mario World that show just how thoughtful and

mathowie 1:09:17 super meatboy

Jessamyn 1:09:18 because it is super tricky, right? Because obviously if you have a thing that just appears from one side, and it's like physically impossible for you to get to it that diminishes the fun in the game immediately. So you have to I mean, I assume that's what he's talking about without having read this

Cortex 1:09:33 Yeah, the camera plays a big part in not making situations feel like total bullshit. Like you're right as a player to feel like you have a sense of what's going on

Jessamyn 1:09:40 or that if you looked in the right place, you could get it. Yeah, yeah, that it's possible.

mathowie 1:09:46 So many of my favorite games in this in this in the post explaining it. Yeah, like holy cow. Like I played Moon Patrol like crazy. I played excite like like crazy. Oh my god, and then like rods and Go into your eyeballs work like this. And this is why it works like

Jessamyn 1:10:03 any of these games.

mathowie 1:10:06 Oh my god, this is odd. And this is what VR people need to figure out. Right? Like,

mathowie 1:10:12 VR has got its own set of weird camera challenges, partly because it's tethered to someone's head and all of a sudden assumptions. Everyone I know who works in VR talks about the, we really need to solve the motion sickness problem.

mathowie 1:10:28 Like half the people use this want to throw up after 10 minutes. And my wife is like a visual, you know, field researcher, and she's like, well, they're doing this, this and this, and they shouldn't be doing that. And you should never show forward movement in this way. And like, it's pretty good.

Cortex 1:10:43 Yeah, no, it's a whole thing. And I hope they figure it out better because I've, I've enjoyed playing with like an Oculus Rift a little bit. But I've also been surprisingly, put off by motion sickness with it, compared to like, I played tons of 3d video games on, you know, normal monitors and never have a problem. But yeah, so because I'm really excited about the whole VR thing. But that's a big problem. If you'd like half your user base is like, oh, yeah, this is really broad, then well, I

mathowie 1:11:09 found was cool. I mean, I guess if you're doing forward motion video games, that's crazy. But the simple demos I've done that are really amazing are just, I guess, 360 degree camera YouTube's like, like old IMAX video cameras, and you film some scene, they do a heads up display. And so let's last weekend I was playing with someone came back from a friend came back from Google IO with the Google Cardboard is literally an amazing, it's just a piece of cardboard that holds the phone over plastic lenses. It cost 20 bucks. Yeah, and you stick your phone in there and you run an app that does build right left. So there's these videos of like, people on a hot air balloon and you can look all the way down to the ground and then they jump off and parachute off of it. And then with the like, you look up and you see the fire like and then you look down and the guy jumps and you're like holy cow.

Jessamyn 1:12:04 It's like whatever your Starlink story about this. Oh, maybe you can like other people record life things and then the rest of us just sit at home on our couch and watch them through our

mathowie 1:12:17 crash.

Cortex 1:12:18 No, no, that's strange days. Strange Days. No,

mathowie 1:12:24 I never saw that. Oh, Snow Crash the guys that walk around filming everything all but no, no.

Cortex 1:12:29 Well, I mean, there may have been a gargoyle in Snow Crash, but Snow Crash was all about the VR. Maybe

Jessamyn 1:12:35 a PK dig story actually come to think about all right. All right. I'm sorry.

mathowie 1:12:39 SpaceX lead. Always is. Yeah, VR is fun. Okay,

Cortex 1:12:47 one other quick thing, and then we'll move on

Jessamyn 1:12:49 to one other quick thing.

Cortex 1:12:52 I just the Berenstein Bears, you know, the Berenstein Bears Berenstain. Yeah, I know. And I was I'm one of the Berenstein obviously, it's Berenstein people and it just blew my mind. And so it's a nice post. If you're where do you fall on that? Light always was staying. It's always been staying. It never was theme. I had the post carefully to make sure that that was the actual claim. And then do my own little bit of research to make sure that was actually true. Anyway,

Jessamyn 1:13:21 can you help me with this so that I don't have to read anything? It is stain. It is stain? It's dinerstein? Yeah, a

Cortex 1:13:28 lot. A lot of people remember it as having been Steiner steam, you know, but it's always been staying.

Jessamyn 1:13:34 Okay. So I was right, because I work in a library. You weren't because you didn't.

Cortex 1:13:39 Yeah, exactly. I

Jessamyn 1:13:41 links to Schweden page.

Cortex 1:13:47 I don't remember what all the links

Jessamyn 1:13:49 again by for Cypher analysis.

mathowie 1:13:51 I said Berenstain. But I guess I always thought it was spelled with an E. Fi and I just

Jessamyn 1:13:58 E in earlier.

Cortex 1:14:00 Yes, true. That's it's the infectious e that's probably a linguistic phenomenon. That's it's like a Dexter number. Anyway,

mathowie 1:14:09 false memories. Yeah. Things about how you just think

Cortex 1:14:13 Nelson Mandela died in jail years and years ago.

mathowie 1:14:18 Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 1:14:20 And the actual post is in part, kind of about the idea that this is because of, you know, possibly because there are alternative dimensions where these things did happen and we have but that's a whole thread. Thread. Let's not get into it here. But that's you know, it's another wrinkle there. Anyway.

Cortex 1:14:57 How about we talked about asthma filter, just one minute A filter.

Jessamyn 1:15:01 Well, this was where my bird link came from. Because you know one of those kind of evergreen questions that shows up every now and again, birds, why do some birds hop and some birds walk? I'm pretty sure we've actually talked about this on the podcast before and walk but this is by username clacks on UGA, which is a favorite username of mine. And you know, people sort of talk about it wow, there's lots of different kinds of animals. Yeah, birds are just not Yeah, there's not a very easy answer except that wow, just calling the thing a bird and thinking it has good to common with another bird is

Cortex 1:15:44 as long as he's got a beak and a cloaca I'm happy.

mathowie 1:15:49 Speaking of birds that was an amazing post about leave me alone crows by Knox per pet. Yes. Yeah. been attacked by there's no resolution to it, sadly, of like, why they are constantly getting chased by crows, not the same crow. Just crows in general. And what can they do and why? And there's all this. Basically, the thread is filled with scary intelligence of crows talk. Just like the more you talk to me about Crow's the creepier, they are just that they are way sharper than we give them credit for. I think of them as the stupid background birds, you know, like, oh, they

Jessamyn 1:16:24 stay away from me, I stay away from them. But I mean, in the walking hopping thing, it's really weird to see them like eaten some dead thing in the middle of the road. And then you like drive up to them. And then they just walk away just far enough so that you don't run over them with your car, but like they stay in the middle of the road. They don't care. They don't give a shit. They just, you know, they don't want you to get any of their tasty squirrel and so they just glare right.

mathowie 1:16:50 John Roderick told this amazing story once in Alaska about and he's terrified of grackles and crows and ravens in general, that a friend was paid by like the anchorage sanitation department to get all the crows away from the dump. Like they just had a dump at the edge of town where people just dump trash and then there are all these crows get rid of him. So he had like a BB gun. So he drives his white van out there, shoots them with a BB gun. So they go away. And then every every few days, he'd go back and make sure they weren't there. And it turned out over the course of a few weeks basically anywhere he drove and his white van like crows would scatter and it's just frightening it like crazy all talk to each other. Crows all over Anchorage Alaska are terrified of this guy's van. And like they do creepy because you're like they're just dumb crows. And like You're like there's a crow network, the social network of crows. Like what how did they has this happen?

Cortex 1:17:48 It's called Facebook.

mathowie 1:17:50 I think after you kill it with Twitter, but not even he said like after two or three weeks he couldn't find a CRO anywhere he drove

Jessamyn 1:18:04 he I thought the answer was going to be different that they would secretly crap all over his white van and it becomes so covered in bird shit that he wound up getting like toxoplasmosis. Whatever you get from pigeon shit.

Cortex 1:18:17 Oh, awesome. He's crap chat. Stop.

mathowie 1:18:25 Stop it actually sounds like real startups, too. That's the other part.

Jessamyn 1:18:32 Where is that synthesizer thing I can just play the noise button until you guys stop.

Cortex 1:18:37 You know what? You know what ferns like to use?

Jessamyn 1:18:40 The setup makes me know.

Cortex 1:18:43 From you never.

Jessamyn 1:18:47 Friendster joke, you weren't even born when Friendster came?

Cortex 1:18:50 I was two. I was three.

Cortex 1:19:01 I liked this. This post from Greg nog from earlier last month. He's asking about how Ben Wyatt in parks and rec talks about the cones have done Shire? Oh. Selling multiplayer figuring based strategy fantasy sequel game in history.

Jessamyn 1:19:19 I was like who's having pre wedding jitters but this guy, this guy.

Cortex 1:19:24 He's got some energy to burn but it's okay. What else qualifies for that hyper specific thing and people made their best effort.

Jessamyn 1:19:32 Best answer. Yep.

Cortex 1:19:35 Yeah, no one no one nailed it down I guess lobster mitten answered and then deleted her own comment for for missing a thing. So transparency and moderation that's doing

Jessamyn 1:19:46 that occasionally. It's pretty funny.

Cortex 1:19:48 Yeah, she's she's, she's she's conscientious, you know? But yeah, I thought that was kind of great. The whole thing was just, that was a good thing to try and nail down.

mathowie 1:19:58 There was a post last month right after we published the podcast like hours afterwards,

Jessamyn 1:20:04 Oh, I love this post escape planet.

mathowie 1:20:07 A great, great post about like, I'm a web developer almost 40,

Jessamyn 1:20:11 almost 40

mathowie 1:20:12 I know, whoa, spring chicken really? Gonna be interesting? How am I gonna be competitive in my 50s 60s? I don't want to be a manager. I don't want to be a manager. I want to write code, but it's a young man's game. Right? So how do I, and it goes into, and there's a lot of answers from people like in their 50s. And they're like, using Node js and stuff. And they're like, it's not hard. And some people say, like, move, you know, transition into a legacy system you learn now, yeah, right. Like, I know someone in the 60s who does basically software the banks used that was written in this in the 1960s. Like, it is like assembler code, that you could find these, this sort of speaker saying, it's not that hard to keep to freshen up your job skills. And it's fun to learn new languages. There's other people that said, like, you can kind of settle in and, you know, it's good to have old coders around. And you know, you can't have a bunch of like 22 year olds, using every wacky new thing. Like it helps to have someone with experience, you know, you don't have to manage and stuff. So it's pretty good. Lots of good advice,

Cortex 1:21:19 I want to just make a brief sideways reference to a game that just got released called CIS 100, which is, in fact, an assembly language debugging puzzle game by a guy, excellent game called Space cam that was secretly sort of a programming game, the pretended to be chemistry game several years ago. Anyway, it's fantastic. I love it, the manual, you can just look at it in a PDF. It's playing with the stick of the ideas like you'd be prompted to. Anyway, it's great. That's all I wanted to say.

mathowie 1:21:49 Whatever game A is debugging code that actually builds game B that comes out.

Cortex 1:21:54 The running joke is eventually it's gonna put out a game where like, what you do is you program his previous games

mathowie 1:21:59 the other game know your next upcoming game. Yeah, there's always another game.

Jessamyn 1:22:04 Well, along the lines of that I enjoyed the helped me age gracefully post from Mulcahy from the middle of May, but basically like I'm 48, you know, since my last birthday, I noticed I'm actually getting older needed glasses, back pain, blah, blah, blah. So what else should I do to kind of make sure I'm in decent shape? And like, you know, some of the answers, right, like, if you don't smoke, don't start Bar Bar Bar. But you know, stuff like doing yoga stuff, like working on your bones, stuff like sunscreen, stuff like flossing. It was just a nice thread for old timers to all talk about, you know, things, things you could do, or especially things that they did like I'm in my late 60s, and here are the things that I decided to do in my 40s That really helped block. So it was a nice and helpful thread about getting older. Gentle gentleman.

Cortex 1:23:02 Nice. I'm not I'm not older yet. So I'll remind myself to read that thread from the perspective of a 48 year old when I turned 40. So

Jessamyn 1:23:12 you are getting older. You are aging?

Cortex 1:23:14 No, I'm a perfect flawless ageless crystal entity.

Jessamyn 1:23:19 Do you wear glasses?

Cortex 1:23:22 Yeah, but only for distances. Computer fine. Only for all this. I got this new iPhone six. So now I can read my phone. Just

Jessamyn 1:23:31 put a piece of cardboard VR stream your life in the appropriate sizes for you. Exactly. Exactly. Jim just switched over to being one of those guys that has three pairs of glasses, like reading glasses, distance glasses, prescription sunglasses, and like at some point in the last like three or four months. Suddenly he's become my dad in a way like he was never my dad before a great theory. He never had anything in common with the man except you know, some general things that like human beings have contact with you, then, but now he's got glasses cases and a front pocket that's always being held down with multiple glasses cases. And he winds up in the movie theater with his sunglasses because he forgot the other. Just like how did this like you don't set out to date your parents. And if you're lucky, you don't wind up dating your parents in any way. But what happens if your partner becomes your parent over time? And you had no idea?

Cortex 1:24:27 That's that's some stealthy should right there.

Jessamyn 1:24:29 That's right. He doesn't look like him. They don't they share very few characteristics. And all of a sudden with the glasses, the last glasses shift.

Cortex 1:24:39 It's like a double reverse Benjamin Button

Jessamyn 1:24:41 now and I feel like a ridiculous person being like, you can't carry three pairs of glasses. And he's like, I need them and I'm like, I don't care. You don't need to see you just can't look like my dad. You know, and

Cortex 1:24:52 here's what you do. Instead of 20 pairs of glasses. You take you make one pair of glasses with three sets of lenses stacked vertically on top of each other and

Jessamyn 1:25:03 up and down with like a ratchet you get well yeah I

Cortex 1:25:05 was thinking like that too I was gonna say just like stack them sort of in a plane so like you know one set on top of another article another and then have the nose bridge thing in between be replaced by something that can move up or down along the line

Jessamyn 1:25:18 that's it idea that you just wear a piece of cardboard over your face and put your phone in it that video the world around you adjust it to your prescription

Cortex 1:25:29 right well yeah as you can see right if you can see near then yeah, you can just Yeah, I think you're on this if you can see me Oh,

Jessamyn 1:25:35 that's a good point.

Cortex 1:25:36 Well yeah, cuz I mean I've heard people's

Jessamyn 1:25:40 vision not understand these like

Cortex 1:25:41 they can put a phone you know three inches from their face and see so they can't find their glasses but they can find their phone. They can use their phone to find their classes by holding the camera right up to their eye and looking around

Jessamyn 1:25:52 fascinating

Cortex 1:25:54 which is not I think a perfectly fun solution but hey, it works you

mathowie 1:25:58 know many opportunities here. Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 1:26:02 You can also do the pinhole thing if there's enough light you know? Well, you know the pinhole thing like like if you look through a hole then things won't be blurry because

Jessamyn 1:26:12 nothing flurry in my life I have perfect vision.

Cortex 1:26:16 This is not this is not

Jessamyn 1:26:19 I don't understand it. Because I don't I, you know, I guess maybe I could read about people with glasses like you might read on the prairie. You could borrow

Cortex 1:26:26 someone's glasses to make yourself not be able to see because of their prescription and then experiment with trying to

Jessamyn 1:26:32 put on Jim's glasses every now and again. It just fall immediately over on those facing coats. Like how do you live?

mathowie 1:26:42 Oh, man, there's an amazing post on AskMe air filter, which is like

Jessamyn 1:26:47 amazing that I'm here to tell you. It's

mathowie 1:26:51 fantastic. Delicious. Every few months, there's lots of where should I go in the world post this one has its tweak its difficulty level is I want to be the only person around in somewhere peaceful by myself. And so there are tons of great weird add away places and people telling stories of where they went somewhere. And they were the only person for miles and chocolate. And it was really, really good. I guess it's very bucket listy but tons of ideas for places to go.

Jessamyn 1:27:28 Well, if that's you know, if that's the thing you want, it's hard to also find them using conventional methods of crowdsourcing because by definition, the crowd means it fails.

mathowie 1:27:39 Right? Well, and a lot of this is this is a previously thought of as popular place go during this season. And I'm thinking this is like introvert catnip, which is like if you go to this one national park, but it's in October before the snows come. There's nobody there, which is great. You know, that

Jessamyn 1:27:59 was like my sister and I go into London in February. It's not a touristy time to go to London. I mean, there's obviously tourists just like any place and it's a big city. But it's like the reverse commute. You know, anyone who's going there on vacation will not choose the shittiest month and we didn't care because we just wanted to like be indoors most of the time.

mathowie 1:28:18 Someone mentioned someone Mitzi Yosemite in winter, I went missing the weekend, the few days before Martin Luther King day in January, it was dead. Like Bridal Veil Falls at 8am. It was the only person in the lay at the base of a giant waterfall, you know, covered in ice, like, Ah, it's cold, but it's beautiful. And then like I remember, we left on the week, the start of the weekend. And suddenly there were like 10s of 1000s of people showing up. It was it was the most magical week ever, you know, like everywhere. You're so alone in one of the most popular national parks in America. It was so great. That's super. Yeah, it's like an extra level of enjoyment when you can have it all to yourself. Speaking sofas, but whatever

Jessamyn 1:29:09 of travel ones that are related, I didn't have anything to say about this specific but it was the similar thing want to visit a dark sky park. Oh, and by the way, my wife and I are multiracial. So just to make sure it's not going to be a problem with that. Also, dark sky parks are cool. And it was again, a couple neat little stories about going to dark sky parks.

mathowie 1:29:30 There's a list of them. I've never heard that phrase cool.

Jessamyn 1:29:33 Yeah. Because for people who are stargazers like that's what you need, right. And if you're going on a vacation,

mathowie 1:29:40 the darkest sky the contiguous 48 states is far eastern Oregon, I think in the John de wilderness somewhere and like people said go there in August for the meteor shower. It's amazing compared to everywhere else you've ever seen it But I remember looking it up and there's like no hotels. Of course, yeah. Well, there's not even I mean, it's just really like you'd have to get lots of supplies you drive basically a couple hours into the middle of nowhere where there's nothing there's no towns there's no because there's no lights. Yeah, nothing.

Cortex 1:30:17 And you pack a really warm sleeping bag because it gets cold as fuck out. jhandi

mathowie 1:30:22 even in like August. Yeah,

Cortex 1:30:24 I think even in the summer, it's probably a lot better than like March which is and Angela's been out there a couple times actually. For for geology stuff. And yeah, like in, in even the spring it's cold as fuck. It's like bringing a sub zero sleeping bag so that you are miserable. And or,

Jessamyn 1:30:43 yeah, you can make ice on the ground in the desert.

mathowie 1:30:46 Oh, that's right. Like, Fiona went on a field trip out to Eastern Oregon, like, end of April. Right? And it was like in the 70s here, but it was cold at night. Like in the 40s there was 28 degrees when she woke up which is nuts.

Cortex 1:31:05 See, there's a post on ask about volunteer work for loners basically saying, hey, I want to do some volunteer work, you know, do five hours a week or something. But I want to do it without having to be social.

Jessamyn 1:31:19 Right? Because for some people volunteer work is all about meeting people and making friends. And that's definitely what we tell people. Like, Oh, you want to meet people volunteer work?

Cortex 1:31:29 Yeah, yeah. But some people like Hey, I just kind of want to help out with something. But I don't want to have to not be introverted while I do it. So yeah, a bunch a bunch of suggestions from folks about

mathowie 1:31:40 is it like data entry? Or what do you do? I haven't read it. Well,

Jessamyn 1:31:45 data entry, one says a volunteer, it was perfect. Like, I was like, I know how to use a computer. I'm new to town, I'd like to thing to keep me occupied and get me out of the house. But I don't really want to, you know, hold signs, go to meetings. And I just got to just got to put things into there. You know, I mean, this was back in the 90s got to put things into their database so that they would have a database. Just perfect.

Cortex 1:32:11 Yeah. And then a lot of crowdsourcing suggestions come up, along with some like feel like there's the suggestion yield some of this Habitat for Humanity stuff is relatively social, but some of it's pretty darn just, you know, one person or two person job stuff. But yeah, crowdsourcing in particular like stuff you can do from your computer.

mathowie 1:32:31 Yeah. Humanity do gardening work like on the side or do trail work like that is work that everyone ignores? Because you while you do it, too? Yep. Cool. Yeah. No shelving books to the library. Come on. Really?

Jessamyn 1:32:53 Yeah, that's, I would not recommend that actually. I mean, often they pay people number one and number two, you got to do a lot of interaction with librarians and stuff like that, depending, I mean, in big academic libraries, it can be like that. Not always. I enjoyed this P journ. Thread. He's building some tank cars for a friend's railroad mini railroad. And he wanted to make inside jokes on the side of the brain. And so people made you know, just various jokes about why

mathowie 1:33:34 the cortex alarm good sounded. Yeah, I'd like to come in from retirement for this. clear my schedule, I'm making puns. God damn it.

Jessamyn 1:33:47 Yeah. But, you know, just people people enjoyed riffing off of because they, you know, they're usually like four letters, the end in x, and then you want and you'll have to read it to sort of understand it, but four or five digits end in x, and then it would be a you know, a Tokido kind of title. So I enjoyed the thread. It had some funny answers, and Peter is going to post can't wait pictures after he gets the custom decal, HLA

mathowie 1:34:14 X Banzai kitten farms. That is it's brilliant. Brilliant. hoax and internet hoax. Joke writes itself. So smart. These are great. Yep. They are great. My favorite. That is excellent.

Jessamyn 1:34:34 Yes, I'm going to Australia. I'm interested in looking at animals. I'm kind of curious how people in Australia think about the animal populations by Badger doctor. But basically wondering like if you actually live in Australia, have you come across these deadly animals that are supposed to kill you? What is it? You know, can I talk about the protected status of Koalas and Kangaroos do Do people like the animals not like the animals with these be asshole questions to ask. And so it's basically someone planning a trip to Australia. And of course, we have a lot of Australian members or people who have visited Australia, who, you know, it's a great thread to read about animals in Australia. Fascinating. Super

mathowie 1:35:18 great.

Jessamyn 1:35:18 Yeah. Josh, you should go. Yeah,

Cortex 1:35:22 I should go.

mathowie 1:35:24 Everything's deadly is deadly. Like everything I read was how deadly everything is. Well,

Jessamyn 1:35:29 that was the Bill Bryson thing right. Like you know that that everything in Australia is gonna kill you it it wiped the Prime Minister out to sea and the you know, what do you think it's going to do to you

mathowie 1:35:39 blow? I distinctly remember watching like some PBS program. I'm like, 14, I'm just sort of like half paying attention on the couch. And suddenly, they showed saltwater snakes in Australia, and I went, wow. I am never going to the beach in Austria, like weaponized snakes in the ocean that are poisonous, like tear. Have you ever seen like sea snake? They're terrifying how they move through the water. It's like, Oh, my God.

Cortex 1:36:07 It's like a snake like fashion. It's creepy

mathowie 1:36:11 how they float through the water. And you're like, nothing could bite me at any time. And the oceans scary because it can't see but yeah,

Cortex 1:36:19 this is. To be fair, that's basically the same thing applies to a four year old in a swimming pool.

mathowie 1:36:26 Pretty much. Yeah. They're not very fast. True. True. And they

Jessamyn 1:36:31 can't stay underwater for

Jessamyn 1:36:32 very long so it's good to see like, a poke in your argument.

Cortex 1:36:36 Dammit. I didn't think that through.

mathowie 1:36:39 I live in Australia swell off the coast. You know, my whole life. 40 years. I've never seen a box jellyfish or I've never seen this like this good is good.

Jessamyn 1:36:47 And of course, the the old drop bear mythos. The bears hanging out in trees. And they they dropped down. And I mean, that's kind of that's kind of the joke. Yeah. But the funny thing about drop bears is oh, God, where is it? Sorry, I was just reading it. Now. I forgot that there's an actual dropbear page on the Australian Museum site, which makes it extra funny, because they don't actually exist. So yeah. A big koala type thing.

mathowie 1:37:27 Where they call it in Virginia. Squonk.

Jessamyn 1:37:31 Who even knows what you're talking about?

mathowie 1:37:35 Everyone has like, everyone has stories of the kid hearing about fictitious animals and every region has their own so that's funny. Drop. There's

Cortex 1:37:44 slots

Jessamyn 1:37:49 they grow monster. They don't move fast enough not to

Cortex 1:37:55 lazy bastards.

mathowie 1:38:00 Can I just rant for a second for no reason? Am I gonna edit it from the Oh, proceed? This is good. For some reason. Somebody in the music PR industry thinks metal filter music is a hot place that all the kids are going to. I am getting like 100 emails a day.

Jessamyn 1:38:20 Those emails?

mathowie 1:38:21 I don't know. I guess my name still listed them

Cortex 1:38:23 still. You still got names on a couple places? If they hit that who is then yeah, they're gonna hit you. Yeah, it's

mathowie 1:38:28 like Matt, how each email somebody adds me to every music marketing list on Earth. And I have so many demo tapes. And it should listen to all of them and start a podcast about it. So no way they could tell their junk like people who made one CD like or mixtape.

Cortex 1:38:45 I didn't mean it was gonna be a nice podcast, just.

mathowie 1:38:49 It's so it just ramped up. But like last three weeks, like from zero to a billion weird nuts.

Jessamyn 1:38:55 Were 100 billion.

Cortex 1:38:58 If there's more than one, zero, any number that has more than one zero is substitutable. That's why it works. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:39:05 I'm helping our library with a grant. And I was like, Oh, we're probably gonna have to get a hard drive. So blah, blah, blah. 500 terabytes should be about it. And she's like, okay, and then she looked it up and she got back to me. She's like, those are $10,000 Real Estate. I'm like, Oh, I meant gigabyte. It's thing you know, they add up to a terabyte so and you know how like people who think you're the computer genius, you say one dumb thing. And all the sudden they're like, remember that? She lied about every other thing and she doesn't know fucking anything. So I know I have to rebuild that trust because I got terabytes gigabytes confused.

Cortex 1:39:41 That is rough. That was rough, very difficult to

Jessamyn 1:39:43 beat me. I think that was it. Hey, did did? Did you by queers actually happen.

Cortex 1:39:51 It has not come together in any sort of organized sense. I'm not sure if anybody has specifically decided to just use the tag yet or not. It actually occurred to me I should look and see if they Get the last couple days. Yeah. But yeah, it didn't end up cohering into an organized things. So that may be something that just comes back around in the future when folks find a way that they're collected with or comfortable with.

Jessamyn 1:40:11 Great. I think that's a possible thing that could possibly happen in the future. And I hope it does.

Cortex 1:40:16 Yep. And there was, you know, all else aside, there's a lot of good, interesting, complicated discussion in the meta talk along with it being sort of a difficult discussion. So I think that was good. And I'll give people hopefully somewhere to start from in a future attempt at something along these lines.

Jessamyn 1:40:44 Do you want to tell the podcast listening audience about whatever this club thing is that I don't know anything about? Oh, the fans game stuff. Yeah. Seems like a thing. That was cool.

Cortex 1:40:53 I talked about a little bit last time as something coming up. Oh, that was maybe coming up. Yeah. But we got to put together in the meantime. So yeah, there's there's there's clubs on fanfare now. So people have been doing things like movie clubs, like the Robin Williams Movie Club, where they just organized on the wiki. And on fanfare talk, they'd figure out okay, let's watch this movie next week. And then this one the week after that, and they just been sort of like doing this manually. And it seems like a good way to sort of organize the idea of watching a bunch of stuff, especially if it's something a little bit less obvious than this popular show is literally airing every week right now. Right? Right. So we we built something where you can actually create a club dedicated to a specific sort of kind of content, you know, a movie club about a given actor or movie series, or potentially, you know, it could be a mix of TV and movies, and you know, books and podcasts and video games, you know, once we have more stuff in there. But basically, you you set up the club, say, Hey, this is a club about everything about werewolves. And then you can make club talk posts to organize stuff instead of doing it all in the big general fanfare talk thing. So you could, everybody doesn't have to watch everybody's discussion about every thing they're organizing. And you can post a if you want to post a thread in your werewolf club about, hey, let's talk about great werewolf transformation scenes.

Jessamyn 1:42:14 You know, that's kind of a talk thread to Yeah,

Cortex 1:42:16 he doesn't have to be tied to a specific episode or movie, you can just say, hey, let's talk werewolf transformation scenes, and boom, you got a thread. And then anybody wants to join can join. Anybody who's joined can tag a thread as belonging to that club, it'll show up on its page. So you know, werewolf club, and I can't think of a name of the actor, but London club, maybe there's a club all about stuff that happens in London, in TV movies, they could both tag American world has London, in London, and that would show up in both of their club pages. So yeah, it's it's neat. It's I mean, it's brand new, we're still working out the basic kinks, we got a real basic version of it rolled out and we want to add more stuff, too, but it seems to be working so far. So yeah. So that's a neat thing.

Jessamyn 1:43:01 Yes, it just occurred to me, I should put the passport project that we're doing in Vermont on the project's page, because it's a project you should I got that launched yesterday, and we're doing this thing. So you know, like Jessamyn is dumb, I'm gonna visit every library thing that I talk about occasionally, in the state, and the 251 Club, the people who visit every town in Vermont, well, I got together with some people on the Vermont Library Association, and we made passports, little like, you know, Vermonter passports, let me find your picture. So I can. And basically, it's a program summer program, not a summer reading program. But just a program where you can go to a participating library, which is half the libraries in the state, you can pick up a little passport, you can see a picture of them, they look really nice. And you can go get them stamped at other libraries as you visit them as you travel over the summer, or do whatever it is that you're going to do. And so you there'll be prizes, like libraries will give a local prize, like who saw the most libraries of all our patrons. And then we've got a statewide sort of Ambassador to libraries prize that we give to like the adult, the young adult and the kid who visited the most libraries. Over the summer between June 1 And September 1 Most and there's a map you can see like, you know, digital digital map, there's, you know, maps you can see that have all the participating libraries on it. You can see maps that have all the libraries on it, but we made 1000 of these passports like real real stuff.

Cortex 1:44:33 Yeah, and less less talked with you about this year. We're trying to figure out how to get that printed. So

Jessamyn 1:44:38 yeah, we I basically yeah, I asked a question on us metal filter, actually about how the fuck to do it. And it turned out the easiest way to do it was Do It Yourself, basically. So I borrowed the copy machine at school who let me use the copy machine. I bought the paper which was like 40 or 50 bucks. We printed it off. We went to the library when the library was closed and assembled 1000 of them. We handed out half of them at the library conference, which was two weeks ago, where I got to see Scott Bonner talk about being the librarian in Ferguson, Missouri, which was amazing. And then we borrowed a corner cutter, which was the most complicated part of the whole thing so that they look nice. I designed them. And yeah, we've can we've got 1000 of them that are out in libraries all over the state. I should put it on projects. I didn't even think about it. Yeah, totally. No, that's awesome. Yeah. And AskMe Metafilter helped me with the initial parts of it also, because, you know, I was like, there's gotta be a template. I'm just not finding the template, right? Nope. No templates don't know why, but no templates.

mathowie 1:45:43 Can you open source all that stuff? So every state Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:45:47 yeah, all the pictures are open. I'm gonna rip down the templates that I use so that people can put their own state in them. And, yeah, I did it in pages two, which I'd never really used before for desktop publishing, and it came up pretty well.

mathowie 1:46:02 Yeah. Wow. This is really cool. Yeah, I

Jessamyn 1:46:05 was really happy with it. So sorry. Yeah, that's what I've been up to. Awesome. papercraft So Matt, we're gonna get you out of here in time for your job. Yes,

Cortex 1:46:14 yeah. How about real quick music corner here. I'll mention your songs and then we'll record okay. And I'll just I'll go rapid fire so I don't drag it out at all. Just one more thing. One more shot one more quick thing. I just need 20 minutes. There's a really nice Dire Straits cover song called Why worry by song. Well, you will love this product because it's a really really nice stripped down. resonator take on it that I really enjoyed listening to

Jessamyn 1:46:46 that album is amazing. Oh, wonderful. I'm so glad you brought pulled this out.

Cortex 1:46:51 I've never really listened to Dire Straits in any kind of detail. I keep every time I hear a nice, straight song. I'm like, oh shit, I need to listen to some dire straits. Hey, guys. You tricked me to do it.

Jessamyn 1:47:01 They're their first album was the first thing I'd ever heard on a CD player. Father, my father brought it home brought a CD player and CD home from Japan. Before you could buy CD players in America. Yeah. And we listened to it at very loud volume.

Cortex 1:47:17 There's a there's a Grumpy Bear 69 posted something called I am on your side which is this nice electronic and vocoder things so very much after my heart there as it's super nice and na vocoder. There's a fiddle tunes for a Friday by mandolin conspiracy.

Jessamyn 1:47:39 Which I love how this is a whole new set of users to

Cortex 1:47:43 Yeah, yeah. And there's been a bunch of stuff that's been posted and some of it's from people I know and some from not so much. I'm trying to make sure I get some of the not so much out there too. Because yeah, mandolin conspiracy. This is the second thing they posted and they post you know, mandolin tunes Go figure. But they're super nice. Just really nicely played medley of a few traditional tunes. There is going by, I guess, opolis who at this point, I've decided I feel confident it's pronounced I guess opolis. So if it's not really settled on the wrong thing, but both it's just as nice sort of driving, it feels like road music to me. It's got a real sort of sense of movement to it. There's a similar nice night. Similarly, nice sort of chill driving thing by Caqueta verse called def dev puts at development end celebrating the end of their online web dev course. And then Mike SkyPark I think,

Jessamyn 1:48:52 Mark I do not know how yeah, I've always called him miski Park, but I think you're probably right.

Cortex 1:48:59 However he says it's soon really

Jessamyn 1:49:01 not miski Park as I'm reading it all right, Mike.

mathowie 1:49:04 Yeah, Mike side Park.

Jessamyn 1:49:06 Yeah, he does. He does great. Great music terminally

Cortex 1:49:09 Yeah, this is this is a demo that sounds great. You know he's talking about how it's you know, demo for future studio recording but you know, this sounds good. So anyway, those are just some some nice things for last month people have been doing the town there hasn't been a ton posted to the town specific challenge but

Jessamyn 1:49:26 it's gonna try and think of a good town song and just, it just turned into like, endless bullshitting session and we never we never picked a thing to actually go with.

Cortex 1:49:35 Yeah, it's tricky. I'm going to try and write something about Huntsville in Huntsville, I think. Or possibly something about Portland in Huntsville. If I get down

Jessamyn 1:49:42 to it. Oh, you miss about Portland is what I would love to read. Yeah, yeah, I might do that. And what you don't miss?

Cortex 1:49:49 Yeah. music music.

mathowie 1:49:52 It's funny how the 60s Singers, Sinatra and them and Tony Bennett and so many city songs like for tours, like Chicago and New York and like San Francisco left my heart like all this the crowd man it just seemed like it's like a holiday album right you make it thing everyone will love it everyone love you and you play it funny. Yep. Yes.

Cortex 1:50:15 Well that's that let's let Matt get to his meeting.

Jessamyn 1:50:18 Get to your meeting.

Cortex 1:50:19 Alright yeah it has always been a pleasure talking to you guys.

Jessamyn 1:50:22 It's great talking to you guys Josh we're not going to talk to you next time we talk to you up in Alabama right

Cortex 1:50:26 now how weird is that?

mathowie 1:50:27 What fun edgy Yeah. sere sucker.

Cortex 1:50:32 Yep I was I was thinking the

Jessamyn 1:50:35 sound of Josh not taking your advice.

Cortex 1:50:38 Shorts and shorts and socks and sandals you know that's I think that big fashion move

mathowie 1:50:44 up like an hour away from Colchester like that,

Cortex 1:50:46 more than that? No, I'll be like, I'll be like a drive away from culture. If I could get there probably six, seven hours I think so it's not casually Yeah, Huntsville is right up that north tip Alabama so

mathowie 1:50:59 I always forget which ones Mississippi was. Alabama.

Cortex 1:51:06 Mississippi is the one with all the essence in the piece and the eyes on it.

mathowie 1:51:09 No, no, they they're mirror shapes. You know, like Vermont, New Hampshire mixed up. But now I know. Now I know in my head. I know you're closer to Florida. Got it? Right,

Cortex 1:51:20 right. Anyway, have fun.

mathowie 1:51:22 It's Basecamp thanks

mathowie 1:51:24 so much. mathletics Basecamp that's the title of podcast squirrel can do the things they say. Oh, my voice is away those restless.