Podcast 144 Transcript, Otter

A transcript for Episode 144: Give Myself A Cold Goose (2018-09-04.)

Pronoiac passed the podcast to Otter for an automated transcription.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 A couple of things you

Well, hey, welcome to episode 144 of the metal filter monthly podcast. I am Josh cortex Mullard.

Jessamyn 0:35 And I'm Jessamyn AKA a

Cortex 0:37 guest go. Working out they're still working out this podcast interface thing we're using. trike tricast. Yeah.

Jessamyn 0:46 For people who are curious.

Cortex 0:48 Or try cat.if, you want to get explicit about the clever domains? No. Yeah. So how are you doing?

Jessamyn 0:56 I'm doing pretty good. You know, summers wrapping up. I'm about to, you know, shift over from being seven times seven to being, you know, five times what? Four times two? I. My birthday is next week and so Right, right, right. And that's actually been going pretty well, I just finished a little project of my own because otherwise you sit around and you're like, Oh, God, what am I gonna do? Am I going to do something? What's happening? What have I done with my life, and I'm pretty good at not doing that. But I figured I'd do something to keep myself busy. And so I did like a 50 by 50 project, where I sent out 50 letters and postcards, by my 50th birthday. So that's what I've been doing this month I've been making. I don't know if I was doing this last month when we talked that I've been making like little envelopes out of an atlas. Does that ring a bell?

Cortex 1:53 I remember, I remember you had been doing that. Previously, at some point. I don't know if we talked about it more recently.

Jessamyn 2:00 Yeah, I figured we might have just talked about it on Twitter or something like that. Yeah. But yeah, at any rate, so I just, you know, made a bunch of notecards with, you know, bubble stuff and sugar and a straw and made envelopes out of an old Atlas and, you know, sent people kind of content free. Hey, here's, here's the thing. And, and that was nice, but it you know, it kept me busy in between helping out at Metafilter while you were on vacation, and, you know, dealing with this unbearable weather. So how was your vacation?

Cortex 2:31 It was good. And thank you for the card. I agree. I got one of those cards from you. And you and Angela. Yeah. And Angela noted that we could date roughly the age of the wrapping of us could you use like a page of some like large and all, you know, Atlas that had like a list of various, you know, notable volcanoes around the world. Yes. And she She noted that like Well, this must have been before 1980 Because you look at it in the Pacific Northwest. It's got Lassen Peak. Which you know if I guess you pay attention, volcanoes, oh, yeah, Lassen Peak, but what it doesn't have is Mount St. Helens. And if you're making a map after 1980 of notable volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest, you're gonna go with Lassen Peak. You know, that's yeah.

Jessamyn 3:17 I said it because we had to you guys, I tried to pick for most people like, you know, Atlas pages. That would be interesting. And we just had a trivia question about Krakatoa.

Cortex 3:27 Oh, that's right. Yeah. Which I did not get. Well, that's fine.

Jessamyn 3:32 You know, I mean, trivia is a struggle, right? Like, I love it, but it makes me feel just a little Butch. A little stupid every day. Yeah. Yep.

Cortex 3:43 It's a weird sort of

Jessamyn 3:47 house. House Angela doing for some reason. What's she in?

Cortex 3:51 She is in somewhere else. I don't ever I don't remember the name of her run up, I think I think she's doing slightly better than I am. But we both had sort of like low performing starts. Oh, so she's

Jessamyn 4:07 in she's an E. So she's in a lower Rundle, but she's doing better. Yeah. And you are in a higher rental and doing worse? Yes.

Cortex 4:16 I'm pleased today to not any longer be literally the last in the Rundle which have been sitting there for.

Jessamyn 4:22 Well, if you have a last name that starts with w you start at the bottom of the Rundle every single time Oh, nice. Yeah, it is. I didn't write enough trivia talk. Yeah, I

Cortex 4:31 was great.

Jessamyn 4:33 So what did you guys do? You flew to the east coast and we

Cortex 4:37 flew out to other Portland and we got a rented VW camper van a 1986 Westfalia Vanagon.

Jessamyn 4:48 I saw the pictures. It looked pretty fun.

Cortex 4:49 It was pretty fun. It was a nice little thing. And we drove around coastal Maine for a few days. We went to a couple of campsites lobsterman was actually a I'm in Maine at the same time. Oh, and so we managed to drop by and hang out with her a little bit. Yeah, that was that was very nice. It's nice for is nice for me to see her again. It's nice for Angela people to meet her and they hadn't met. Oh, that's Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've we've been like internet friends for a decade now.

Jessamyn 5:17 But you live on opposite coasts. Exactly. So Well, that was lobsterman once. So yeah.

Cortex 5:22 So that was great. And did some nice camping saw some cool stuff in May we went to West Quoddy head the easternmost point in the United States.

Jessamyn 5:30 It will not surprise you to know I have been there. Yeah.

Cortex 5:33 Well, I posted a flippy there for a cold chef. And then bonk lift is like Oh, I did the same thing. Two years ago, I posted a picture of himself sending a flippy to culture so

Jessamyn 5:40 you know, there may be one or two we actually stayed in that lighthouse station up there. Not the lighthouse station but the little place that's up there. Yeah, we went on a vacation with my mom and wanted like a place that was like big yet cheap. And yeah, easternmost point us super fun. Nice. And so you this was with your family brother, who was who had the sweet camper or the trailer?

Cortex 6:05 The so the camper van we actually rented from a guy who just rents camper vans, you took

Jessamyn 6:11 a picture of somebody who had a trailer. Oh,

Cortex 6:15 let's see. There was my friends. Roger and Emily had a rented like you know, pull it on a truck trailer that they just rented that just got delivered to the campsite which is amazing. So instead of like renting an RV and driving it in they got a trailer for much cheaper that they just showed up and the guy showed up the cruiser here's your trailer for a week.

Jessamyn 6:40 And you just get to stay in it. Yeah, sure is amazing.

Cortex 6:44 My friend Sean carry on a little tab. That was the thing that's yeah, that's a cute one.

Jessamyn 6:48 That looks amazing.

Cortex 6:49 Yeah, it's adorable. And probably about as much space as the VW campervan while also being more modern having a functioning little toilet and being able to, you know, be towed behind something that has an actual motor. The campervan was was really fun. It was really neat. And I've like never spent any time when like the the only time I've ever spent with one of those was briefly when PB came to a camping trip years ago and he had just gotten himself a Vanagon

Jessamyn 7:19 well, he motors in that thing, right? Yeah, I mean, he's he's a serious camper.

Cortex 7:23 Yeah, so like I think of him as like the the campervan guy that I know. But But yeah, it's it's a neat little it's a neat little ride. It's it worked surprisingly well really well as a place to live for, you know, a couple weeks essentially. It was nice not to have to futz with tents. It was nice at what it was like, wet out, you just could go inside instead of having to worry about tarping and like everything getting wet. Right? And it was fun to drive. It was it was kind of a so this was my first time really driving stick.

Jessamyn 7:56 Oh, God really quick shift.

Cortex 7:58 Yeah, they made some automatic transition into guns, I guess. But the vast majority are manual.

Jessamyn 8:06 Somehow I did not know that. Fascinating. Okay, yeah. And

Cortex 8:10 so it wasn't it wasn't literally my first time driving stick because before we went over there we on a couple different days, rented someone's car from them for like an hour on some Airbnb, but for cars kind of service in town. And people had stick shifts and so we went and got someone's car and drove around and she was like, okay, so this is this the order operations with the the stick and the clutch and the brakes and the rationale and

Jessamyn 8:35 oh my god, I can't do it. I was 16 I could not I don't think I could learn as I grown up. It wasn't

Cortex 8:41 too bad. You know, it was it was kind of like I was keenly aware that I was not good at this and that I was suddenly had gotten very bad at what had previously been a totally solid life skill I had, you know,

Jessamyn 8:52 well, and you learn to drive what like sometime in the last decade, right? Yeah, like

Cortex 8:56 we bought a we bought a hatchback like in 2011 2012. And like, that was when essentially my driving experience started like I had a permit and driven a little bit, but I hadn't like been a driver before that. Shusha and now I'm superduper comfortable with it. But I'm also like, after the last couple of weeks, much more keenly aware of how nice of a vehicle or Mazda three is like just modern manual trans or automatic transmission car with like a peppy engine and like everything's responsive. These

Jessamyn 9:26 were always underpowered. Like that was just their thing. Sure, you know. I mean, fortunately, Maine doesn't have any real hills to speak

Cortex 9:34 of. Yeah, like Yeah, there was nothing there's nothing real worrying like the hardest thing for me was like, just the cold starts on a hill like every once in awhile like the hardest thing at first was just like starting like managing to like make that clutch in first gear, give it the gas, love to keep the car running. So I stalled the thing a few times a day or two but by the end of the trip, I was like, oh, you know, I kind of like it's not net Really yet, but like it's not, I'm not constantly thinking through every step like I'm actually sort of driving along and got used to like, you know, Okay, I'm coming to a hill. I'm just gonna give it the goose right now because I need that to get up and over and you know, getting a sense of when to change gears and managing to get comfortable enough with it that I was the guy on the highway puttering along behind somebody like come on, dude, hurry the fuck up. You're a good guy. Yeah. So that was that was kind of nice. So yeah, that was a lot of fun. And then the camping was just Yeah, I was like, We tooled around for a few days on our own, and we met up with friends at Sebago Lake, and yeah, my brother and a bunch of college friends, cuz he moved out to the East Coast after I went to school on the East Coast. He moved out there later. And so you know, he hangs out with stole all the jerk. It works out, it works out very well. And yeah, so we get to see them, basically, you know, if nothing else, we see him once a year doing that, and that's really nice. Good. And then I got like, a cold on the way home. And so I've just been like a

Jessamyn 10:59 garbage bag stuck in an airport ready? Did you wind up getting home that night?

Cortex 11:05 We gotta Yeah, like, I think it was about the last time I complained online on Slack or whatever, about 15 minutes later, we actually got underway, so it wasn't too bad. But it was like, it was still we're sitting on the tarmac in a hot plane. for like an hour and a half in 95 degree

Jessamyn 11:21 locking, you're coming down with something. Yeah. And like, you know, I

Cortex 11:24 sort of put it together after the Oh, I was even more uncomfortable than I was. Because yeah, okay. So. So I'm still kind of in the throes of that. But I'm going to try and sort of, like cheerfully just be here, instead of, you're saying,

Jessamyn 11:38 Yeah, Jim has been like working through some crud. And, you know, he was like, there was like a lady from work who like, came into work, like, I'm okay, you know, and Jim's like to fucking stay home. Like, that's the worst. And she's like, I've got too much work to do. And so, you know, he comes down with stuff. And, like, part of what I sort of coached him through was like, how do you go back to your office and tell the lady who comes to work sick, you were sick for a week, because she had quote, too much work to do, unquote, because he's like, worried she's gonna be mad at him and turn it into a thing. And I'm like, You should turn it into a thing. Like, I'd be fucking busy. And so he was sick for a week, they had a talk, it went, Well, of course. But then he rallied for like, three days, and now he's like, got a cold again. And I feel bad for the guy because like, we have plans, you know, like, we're gonna go see the Pawsox we're gonna like, go eat Brazilian food. We're gonna, I'm going bowling for my birthday, when I get back to Vermont, like, we have an itinerary. And he's just man, he's not feeling it right now. So we're trying to, you know, don't be like, it's gonna be fine. Like, let's just not think about it right now. I guess I can always just hang out with my sister. Not that I don't love her too. But like, she's part of it, you know? Not all of it.

Cortex 13:03 Did you decide to purchase some fancy hotdogs in the end?

Jessamyn 13:06 You know, in the end, we decided not to do anything I decided to do the kind of postcard project that I'm doing that Jim has been kind of pinging people about, like, hey, send Jessamyn a postcard for her birthday. So it's gonna be a very kind of passive birthday experience. And then Jim and my sister and I are gonna, like, see a baseball game with some friends who have, you know, a meal and cake with some friends and then just do like a little thing every day for a week basically, with like, different sets of people from around here, not from around here. Like they just I just decided I didn't want to do a big thing like and became okay with it. And then was like, Alright, then, if I don't want to do a big thing, I am going to do the thing I want to do so we'll probably have hot dogs here. Because I did have a conversation with my sister like when you said no hot dogs, hot dogs became the only thing I wanted for my birthday. She laughed because of course, right? Like she's on my side. But it was kind of funny because that is kind of part of it. Right? That she's got very strong opinions about how you do things. And I mostly don't I just want to hang out with people I like and have a good time we may put on our animal heads and go to the beach. And like hand out ice cream sandwiches to children.

Cortex 14:20 i This would be the best story of how you got arrested on your birthday. 100% behind this I have

Jessamyn 14:26 never been arrested. Like my whole I've been with other people who have gotten arrested. I've been taken in because I didn't have a ride home when the people I was with got arrested. But I've never actually gotten arrested which is interesting. So maybe it's time maybe, maybe.

Cortex 14:42 Well, good. You want to tell me about the number 144 That's how gross it is. Sorry, I've been waiting 144 episodes. God I'm

Jessamyn 14:52 sorry I didn't get that at first

but Just like you straight person forever, like The what now?

Cortex 15:07 It's even better when I've got a cold because I'm like so delighted I pulled up anything here as

Jessamyn 15:11 well, nice work. You know 144 is kind of your standard 12 times 12. It also is the number of tiles and a module on game, which I found kind of interesting. And it's got tons of math stuff, of course, you know, it's the 12 Fibonacci number. It's the largest Fibonacci number that's a square. You know, some tuition nonsense, but in general, it's alright.

Cortex 15:37 Yeah. 144.

Jessamyn 15:39 And then the article in Wikipedia says it may contain indiscriminate, excessive or irrelevant examples. All right, that was worth showing up for.

Cortex 15:50 All right. Let's discuss for a moment if you will, the subject of jobs.

Jessamyn 15:57 There's a couple jobs. One of them I particularly like is Miko doing activism side project wants someone to do a little graphic for some buttons or stickers, she'll pay 50 bucks shouldn't take too long. If she still wants it, you should get in touch with her because it's probably something cool. In addition to probably a job someone who's good with graphics could do. Yeah.

Cortex 16:22 There's also yes, the typing one, there's a typing one. If you can type. Boy, we got a job for you.

Jessamyn 16:33 Or crooked neighbor has a job for you. Because crooked neighbor is a writer crooked neighbor needs to not be as much of a typer if you have Microsoft Word and can type you should talk to cricket neighbor.

Cortex 16:45 There's also a model my hypothetical kitchen from Oh, no. I have somebody

Jessamyn 16:51 that does that. Like I just remember once on AskMe Metafilter. Or maybe it was even meta chat. I was asking some questions about my idiot kitchen. And somebody contacted me on the on the back and was like, Hey, I do professional kitchen design for a job. Like if you want me to just give you some ideas? Oh, nice. I would do that. Now. I have to figure out who that is, though. Or if you're listening to this podcast. Yeah. You know, this person will flip you 100 bucks if you can give them some ideas. In fact, why don't I search my email for kitchen? That should work just fine.

Cortex 17:26 There's also a senior mobile developer listing from Adrian Han. Which is like a they make good stuff. Probably a good project. Yeah. So you should definitely get on that if that's your deal. Because the be read to do some stuff

Jessamyn 17:40 later. And I use the word kitchen all the time is what I've just discovered about myself

Cortex 17:44 just like is that your like nickname for all kinds of things?

Jessamyn 17:47 I don't know. But I didn't I didn't get off a 2018 and my first 50 emails that use the word kitchen. Oh, and here's the email from you with a link to this discussion.

Cortex 17:58 Kitchen, how often do I say kitchen? Well, let's see. And this is tricky, because I gotta make sure it's not just listing like meta filter posts mentioned

Jessamyn 18:04 kitchen, I know your kitchen, you got to know your kitchen. I don't

Cortex 18:09 I don't say kitchen nearly as often as you even if I pretend that like all this stuff that spam in here is really email. So

Jessamyn 18:14 you have no time in my kitchen. I also write a lot of email.

Cortex 18:18 Yeah, that could be part of it. I don't I don't, I don't do a whole lot of like, random non business email these days. Like, let's do like, I mean, I still email with friends now. And then but like, a lot of it is via other channels or whatnot. Like most of my friends who I keep up with, I keep up with via, like Slack or talk on like, you know, like, like, maybe DMS or just text with

Jessamyn 18:41 the majority of my kind of friendly conversations still happen in email. That's interesting, a lot, a lot of like minor bullshit and Twitter and Facebook.

Cortex 18:50 Sure. But I didn't realize that. Also, maybe we just never talked about kitchens. We'll talk about projects, I do a project as a kind of kitchen as a kind of, let's get started. Let me let me come in again, gonna talk about projects, Sherif

Jessamyn 19:09 did this really cool, graphic novel, that is called Destination Mars. And it's 177 pages. And it's all up on medium. A free thing, a free thing on medium. So if you're one of those people who uses up all your medium articles like the very first day and I'm kind of captivated by if you're looking at this Hold on, I'll put the link in. Like the pictures. He does a thing that makes like that makes it look like it's 3d. Like there's they're just smears. Right? If you look at like the third picture, it's got a bunch of little stars in it, but he smears them in a way that they look like little shadows and it gives this thing which is otherwise pretty, you know, XKCD style drawing, like this weird depth that I just for whatever reason fell in love

Cortex 20:08 with. Yeah, it's nice. There's also a floating graveyard of cubes. So you know, hey, hey, ya know, it's nice.

Jessamyn 20:16 Yeah, I just like it and I think medium is actually kind of a neat thing for that. But if you want it on an ebook, you can get it on iTunes or Amazon David's also on Patreon. So that was that was the first thing that jumped out to me from projects.

Cortex 20:31 There was a nice here's the actual project link animation thing from get the wrong link to hay from Dame is involved in a live coding collective. And this is a thing she did some animation for.

Jessamyn 20:48 Starts out soothing

Cortex 20:52 and ends in Lisa Frank madness. Which seems like a fairly reasonable. It's least Frank like the sticker lady. Yeah, like the unicorns and rainbows and shit. Whoa. Oh, yeah, that's cool. But, yeah,

Jessamyn 21:09 not a lot of projects. I mean,

Cortex 21:11 you know, I feel like basically everybody took August off is kind of how it feels, which works out well, since I did to essentially so you know, it's

Jessamyn 21:19 I was around here being like, Hey, where's everybody?

Cortex 21:23 Yeah, we covered during the period of the summer, we're probably just gonna head You're not fine, we'll be fine for eight hours at a time was

Jessamyn 21:32 pretty interesting. One of the things I was at on, I don't know if I was gonna mention this or not. But one of the things that was interesting about filling in some shifts is that Metafilter seems busier, in like a good way than it did the last time I filled in, like at length, which I think was either this time last year or maybe holiday time. Like there just seems like there's a little bit more going on. There's a little bit more email and people being interactive. The Mega threads aren't just like this, like black hole that kind of sucks in all the other side activity, which I know was like a goal you guys had last year. But it really seems like as someone who only checks in, I mean, I use the site, obviously. But as someone who only checks in sometimes, I feel like it's going really well. So

Cortex 22:17 you know, like I joke about August off, but it's more like it feels like people are like not trying to like get things done. Because it's like people are on vacation. Kids are getting ready to go back to school, stuff like that. But ya know, it's felt it felt nice. It felt like stuff's going on. And that's good.

Jessamyn 22:32 Yeah, yeah. And just Yeah, and in a in a good healthy way, people seem to be dealing with the slightly more active pruning of the mega threads in a good way. There's other political posts that are going on, right. Everybody's not yelling about everything all the time. It feels like it's just good.

Cortex 22:51 Another project I am delighted to see come up. Oh, yeah. satrix put together the poster about singing mice. Because I did come up when we did. I made that post saying, hey, projects is good. And everybody should do it more. And here's let's clarify the rules to make clear, you can put all kinds of stuff up there and satrix had been like, well, like scientific posters like so singing mice.

Jessamyn 23:16 Oh, my God, this is great. You know, I should put up my 50 by 50 project. You totally should. Yeah. And it's at tweeting mouse on Twitter. Man, I'm just reading that from the poster. Yeah. But it looks cool. It's got like a crazy picture. And you can learn some stuff about singing nice. I love it. Yeah. I enjoyed in terms of Jessamyn bait this post by can't pronounce this name. This. He he's from Goldberg, who did tweet bot called Commons time. And all it does is post freely licensed photographs of clocks. The ends, nice, you can follow at common time. And you can look at pictures of clocks and good. And I like looking at pictures of clocks.

Cortex 24:10 Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I've come across several projects recently. They're sort of like, like, this isn't necessarily as thoroughly in that vein, but basically cataloging like specimens of every bit of like time in some context, like film clocks or literature, clocks or video game clocks. It's a video game.

Jessamyn 24:31 They teach you to do in like computer school, you know, like, I remember the one that was like the human clock, which was all people holding their arms up, I think to be different. But you can basically go so now I've got to figure it out. Yeah, you go to human clock.com and you that's not a clock. That's just Oh, I see and it's just photographs that have the number that is A time

Cortex 25:00 Yeah, exactly this sort of thing. And it's interesting because it becomes this project of crowdsourcing, the identification of specimens, like, you know, like any given photo, a photo on this page is not necessarily going to be all that interesting. Like, I'm looking at a picture of a guy holding up a handwritten sign that says, 1034 in front of like a prospective painting a mural on a wall, it's like, it's fine. Like, it's kind of neat, who's this random guy. And that's a nice painting back there. But it's also just some image, like, there's nothing super meaningful about this. But the fact that you need to find, you know, what is it 60 times 24 or 60, by 12, at least different specimens just to have a fully stocked clock. And then you end up with, you know, people come up with like, a dozen for any given number. And it's, it's just a neat exercise in collecting material for what is otherwise very straightforward. I'd be like, Okay, well, we've

Jessamyn 25:49 got right, because it's what like 1400 things, right? Something like that. How many minutes?

Cortex 25:54 I think it might be 14 140.

Jessamyn 25:57 I think it is, hey, I love this. Yeah, it is. Yeah,

Cortex 26:03 but if they don't distinguish AMPM it's only 720. So now we're making skateboarding jokes. I really,

Jessamyn 26:11 I know making a skateboarding joke. 20 is what

Cortex 26:14 it will. It's like, two full revolutions. There's also a skateboarding video game called 720. I'm laughing because I'm remembering a thing that you weren't there for. So like, that's kind of possible podcasting. But when we were actually good, when we're when we're camping at the lake, we're hanging out the beach. And one day, some kids were like spinning around the water. And one of the parents said, Okay, do a 720 is. And kid didn't get the reference and didn't understand what it was. But he understood that there's like a number and spinning. And so for the next 15 minutes, like these four or five random kids, I don't know, are just like shrieking about okay, now I'm gonna do 270 Okay, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do a 730 I'm gonna do I'm gonna do a 286 no scope, and like, this is some sort of strange, these kids are just completely free forming. Oh, so you shout numbers and you spin around? Okay, let's throw in some fortnight lingo. And we're all set. So, yes, anyway, that was a clocks, in other words, is in summary,

Jessamyn 27:13 yeah. And if anybody listening to this can remember what the clock is that maybe are human beings actually holding their arms in the way it's a very difficult thing to Google in whatever the time is. You go to a website, you see a person who's holding their arms in a way I think that's a thing

Cortex 27:29 with humans semaphore clock, because that's not really quite right. But it's like, Oh, two, I'm not getting anywhere and just getting pictures of actual semaphore, which is fair. All right. Anyway,

Jessamyn 27:46 at any rate, I know, I know. It's a thing. And I like clocks. The end?

Cortex 27:51 Yes. Also, airships is out. As our Conan has been working on a game called airships conquer the skies for quite a while now. And it's, it's out, it's actually out for reals Nick bieten, steam and everything. That's super cool. So congratulations, circling

Jessamyn 28:11 body has done a Firefox extension that blocks social media sites for people who need a thing like that. It's also a GPL license. So you can, you know, use it block certain things, not block other things. You can turn the blocking off, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I found I have a little app that just tells me when 45 minutes has gone by, and I find it's really helpful for getting me to be like, stop what you're doing. Get off the computer. Go do the thing you were meaning to do. Don't wait till you have to go to the bathroom. Do it now. Anna. Yeah, so this looks like it would serve kind of the same. Kind of the same purpose.

Cortex 28:53 Nice. There's more stuff too, but I'm catching up in real time. So should we move on to metal filter? Yeah, sure.

Jessamyn 29:02 I made a post yesterday. Just so you know, get that get that out of the way. But I am a huge fan, have been of the work of Stan Brock, who was a guy who if you are an old like myself, was on mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom as like the Barefoot assistant, like you would always like ride a horse barefoot, and you were always like, what is that guy's deal? And he's from New Zealand, I believe. And then he made a couple movies and then he dropped out of Hollywood and founded this program called Remote Area Medical that basically goes to places where people don't have access to health care, dental care, vision care, and they set up these huge kind of mobile triage clinics for like three days using tons and tons of volunteers like on air strips and shit. And last year, they offered free care to 40,000 people and he just died yesterday. And so I just did a little obit post so that people could know who he was.

Cortex 30:04 I did not know about that at

Jessamyn 30:05 all. Yeah, no fascinating. I found out about it, I think because I was like doing some stuff on Wikipedia and I found his page. And I had been like, hey, somebody should put a picture on this page. And then when it got changed, to say that he died, you get a little notification. And so I was like, oh, oh, well, but people should know about Remote Area Medical, because it's fascinating what they do. I mean, it's kind of like, what is it? mountains, mountains, behind mountains, mountains over mountains? What's the Doctors Without Borders?

Cortex 30:36 Mountains over mountain?

Jessamyn 30:38 Well, no. Tracy Kidder wrote a book and it had a name, like that.

Cortex 30:46 Out of context, that was,

Jessamyn 30:48 you know, mountains

Cortex 30:54 over the mountains, beyond mountains,

Jessamyn 30:55 for Christ's sake. And but it's like that only it's done with volunteers in the United States. And one of the interesting things about it is there's only 12 states in the country where you can actually have volunteer medical people performing volunteer medicine. Like it's actually against the law, like in a lot of states to have somebody come into your state as a volunteer to be like, I'm a doctor, let me you know, perform medicine, because practicing medicine without a license is, yeah, do you know that's a thing? Well, and so one of the things that Remote Area Medical did was work to change the laws, so that they could have volunteer, people come in, and, you know, go do go do their volunteer medicine or make, you know, they have machines that make eyeglasses for people, that kind of thing. So it was interesting, I learned a little bit about sort of the political environment in which he worked in addition to everything else, and he was just some dude who, like, slept on a mat in the corner of the office and walked around eating oatmeal and bananas, still barefoot into his 80s. Interesting, dude.

Cortex 32:00 Yeah. Well, the post I made this month I didn't actually make because when I went to make it, someone else had already made it while I was on vacation, never go on vacation. Everybody steals a good post is what I learned from going on vacation. Oh,

Jessamyn 32:13 you know, that happened to bond cliff to I don't know if you saw him on Twitter today complaining that somebody had taken his parachute he beaver talk of talk about your own place?

Cortex 32:23 Yes, this is just, there's a guy who does circuit bending stuff, which is a kind of musical hardware discipline where you take things that have, you know, integrated circuits and circuit boards and whatnot, and that creates sound and then you do weird things to them to come in and make sounds differently. Like the most straightforward conceptual version of circuit bending is to literally take like a, a circuit board and bend it. And as a result, you know, slightly break connections and slightly, fuck up the chips. And then they just behave a little weird and get strange sounds out of things.

Jessamyn 32:59 So that's a dead mouse guy.

Cortex 33:01 Well, this is not that that mouth guy. This is a guy who's like in the electronic music scene is dead mouse and a friend of dead mouse. Yeah. And he's explained that to me in the video, basically, you know, somebody, maybe dead mouse tweeted, you know, something and said, Hey, I found this Electronic Bible, someone should circumvent this and maybe dead mouse was like, oh, yeah, this, Sam should do it. And then he's like, Oh, well, fine. And then he did. And it's so it's just, it's like an Electronic Bible. It like, like, an audio book or

Jessamyn 33:29 something different. Confused about the Bible part.

Cortex 33:34 It's like an audio book Bible on microchip, essentially, it's a digital, you know, it's a, you know, audible economics. It's a it's a person reading the Bible stored on, you know,

Jessamyn 33:48 like electronic devices in a chip, not like just a file.

Cortex 33:52 So I think your ideas you could like, pull up the verse and chapter you want to listen to and then it would play back that but like, it's a whole bunch of audio from the Bible. And this guy, just use that, like it was, you know, the source of random audio noise and added a bunch of cool stuff to make it make weird crazy noises. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I watched the video when you get a chance, because it's,

Jessamyn 34:14 I watched some of it and I'm completely confused. It looks like a man's hand making terrible noise. Yes.

Cortex 34:20 By by flip by, by, by by flipping switches, whatnot on something that in its basis is just sort of regurgitating some recorded reading of the Bible. I get

Jessamyn 34:29 this is the kind of thing you like, and it's the kind of thing where I'm just sort of like kids today. I'm happy. The world has lots of different kinds of people. So that I don't have to appreciate this, but you totally can. So wait, what happened? You went to make this post? David already done it? Yeah, I

Cortex 34:46 got home from the woods and I saw it on Twitter. I was like, Oh, this is fucking great. I went to post it up. Nope. Someone got there. Oh,

Jessamyn 34:52 that's the problem with getting your ideas from Twitter. Well, we're already on the internet, by ideas from books.

Cortex 35:00 See? That's so effortful, though.

Jessamyn 35:03 Super effortful,

Cortex 35:05 like like setting aside the question of Twitter itself, because honestly, this is usually Mastodon or malt shop is my actual source

Jessamyn 35:11 to hear about blah, blah, mastodon.

Cortex 35:14 My point is my point is I like getting stuff from like, sort of like social media, because as much as it has done a terrible amount of damage to the failing, yeah, there's still there's still, that's also kind of as a result, where a lot of the people just saying, Oh, hey, I found this weird thing are like, and so I try and follow people who find weird things on Twitter. Yeah, Mastodon, and so on. And that way, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's like, oh, you know, this would be perfect for me to filter and it just hasn't hit that because it didn't happen on someone else's feed. So fuck it, I'm gonna post it. And I was like, Yeah, with this one. But there's like, Nope, this one got out there. Someone else found it too. So

Jessamyn 35:49 someone else is already also on the thing? Yep. Oh, speaking of. I don't know what I was speaking.

Cortex 35:59 Speak on it. Well, my chat

Jessamyn 36:01 actually

Cortex 36:03 figured out whether whether or not I partially unexist I think I don't. But I should probably know, at some point, Jesus, I

Jessamyn 36:10 don't I have no idea. I guess we should figure that out at some point. But can you remind me when the weather gets a little worse that we can figure out what the ownership structure is? Because part of the problem is we don't have stock, you know, and so there's a whole bunch of people who theoretically own it, but they don't have any stock in it. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, we'll figure out what that actually means in terms of ownership, but we probably should. And I have my lawyer, Danny gumballs, has, like explained this to me, and it just doesn't stick. So but he lives in my town in Vermont. So when I'm spending more time with him, I'll take him out for dinner and be like, Look, I need to actually know what this means. Yeah, and you've got to do you know, all of your sort of financial planning. And what happens is better filter by a bus.

Cortex 36:59 That'll Remind me next time, I need to talk to the accountant that like, oh, yeah, that's another thing that I should.

Jessamyn 37:03 Great. Oh, so back to back to my old shop, I had a malt shop meet up with Bob, who is also a longtime metal filter person. But basically, it's probably the first time somebody I really only knew I didn't really know him, I met a filter. And I knew him through malt shop. And he was saying, Oh, hey, I'm going to be coming through Massachusetts. I was like, Oh, you need a place to stay like, he's like, actually, that would be totally awesome. And it turns out, his sister lives really close to where my mom's empty houses. And so he stayed there. They went to Vermont. They stayed my apartment there. They came to visit down in, down in Westport. And yeah, I got to meet him. It was super fun. And his son and Jim was there and there's an adorable picture. And it just to me, like a social network is only real when like you go meet people from it in real life. I know other people have different definitions, you know, like, that's the feeling Yeah. I you know that you actually because to me, like social networking is all about, like, you know, work stuff, but also like, making friends and like people you can meet in real life and hang out with and so this was just fun to know that somebody I know from the online community was cool and fun to hang out with in real life. Him and his him and his kid brought smores fixins. And so I had my first more of the season, and then they left a huge box of blueberry Eggo waffles in the freezer, which are ruining my life, because if you have them with melted marshmallows, they're basically the best food. But I'm like a grown ass not very active lady who needs to Eggos the marshmallow because, you know, I thought that guy and

Cortex 38:48 I spent all that time camping and I didn't have once more mores were had, I've just I've never quite in the mood. I was drinking like, you know, it's specifically with drinking a lot of beer. He was like, calories from this grain. Exactly. So it's like, I don't really need extra cards right now. I already have like, adult candy at the moment. So yeah, I'm fine.

Jessamyn 39:09 Well, and that's one of the things my sister and I were talking about. It's like, we just mostly don't eat s'mores anymore. Just because it's a lot of like empty calories we don't necessarily need and if we're gonna do that we'll like go have like some kind of crazy dessert at the Portuguese restaurant nowadays. Like we haven't been out like chopping firewood all day or whatever the things are back when we used to camp. Like I don't camp that much anymore. Like I used to and now I mostly don't but you know, good to other people who do it but as a result, I haven't been hiking all day. And so I'm not like yes, I want to stuff my face marshmallows all afternoon. I mean, I want to, but I don't Yeah. So let me sort out my things. Let's see. Okay, okay, here's here's the thing that I learned on Twitter. that I came to post a Metafilter and found that it was already there. The WHAT THE FUCK Alberta? What happened to your rats? This is by Etrigan. And have you seen this? This is so crazy. It was basically somebody was on Twitter looking at and Twinbrook ate makes this comment as the second comment looking at this picture, the link that I'm sending you, which is basically where the common rat is in the world. And the rat is

Cortex 40:29 saw this picture, three winners except Alberta,

Jessamyn 40:32 except for Alberta. And of course everybody in this thread which just you know, rip this guy's mentions are basically like what the fuck Alberta? And so it turns out, there's this long article in the National Post, which explains how, what happened. There's like a rat patrol in Alberta that keeps the rats out, basically, and the article super interesting pictures of the rat patrol with a rat. You know, these guys with guns who actually don't look menacing because they're like Canadian prairie farmers. But yeah, it was it was a really interesting thread. It's people from Canada and other places talking about how you deal with rat stuff other people just telling their rat stories and it's you know, metal filter at its best basically.

Cortex 41:25 That is That is amazing. No, I saw that picture go by. And I had assumed that like, Oh, this is this is somebody joking about some bad data is because of like, you know, inconsistently and data presentation, rather than literally the entire province. Fucked up rats. That's amazing.

Jessamyn 41:39 Yeah, well, and I think I've told you this before, right? When like my sister and I spend time in London, or actually just around Great Britain in general. We were kind of freaked out when we see foxes walking around during the day. Because around here if you see a fox walking around during the day, it has rabies and run. But Great Britain has no rabies because they're an island and they can just get rid of it. And so the animals there don't have rabies. And I guess foxes have a different schedule in a world without rabies. I don't know that

Cortex 42:14 I just wait to be like hunted by very posh people. There's no hunts today, I'm just gonna go down the bar. Have a smore there's a she's,

Jessamyn 42:27 well, last year bitten put a note in this thread so that you would see it for the podcast and I figured it was probably my job to bring it to your attention because I know you've been busy.

Cortex 42:38 Oh, man. Yeah, no, it's there's no chance I was gonna do admin note last week.

Jessamyn 42:44 So essentially, it's an article on the cut. And I'll just read the title. Do men enter bathtubs on hands and knees so their balls hit the water last? What? Up? Apparently, this was something that started on some mommy blog that like maybe like children did it through or something? I mean, I think the answer and ultimately, no,

Cortex 43:13 no, I don't even know how to parse the question. Like, like, like, like, I can read this question in a couple of ways, which is like, question does

Jessamyn 43:26 is, right. Does that work from a physical perspective? Well, I

Cortex 43:30 mean, like, I want to back up and say Do men enter bathtubs on hands and knees? Because I don't think I've never why would why would you just, nah, you'd like you sort of like go but down. yourself in Yeah. Yeah. Like, I'm probably going to step into the tub and sort of like, grab the sides with my hands and sort of like, lower myself ask first into the water like a human being prey to?

Jessamyn 43:57 I don't know, I'm just saying there was this thread. And lobstermen thought you should see it. And then everybody, you know, somebody says, buts, lol, that's Melis. Mata, hey, oh, I'm lucky. Puts his balls in first, apparently. I mean, exactly. It's a great grandmaster. And essentially,

Cortex 44:21 I'll mark this one to come back to you. Because, gosh, you know what I often do, like, I still kind of don't like to use favorites for reference too much. Because like, that's not how it used them. So I don't want to like just like, oh, I should go look at this at some point, but don't have a specific reason. I'll favorite it. And now use my favorites to like bring stuff up for podcasts when I do use them for posts and whatnot. So I just add stuff to activity now. And like, I'll probably forget about this. And then like two days from now someone wants weekly to say, you know, balls and stuff and like, oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I should go read that thread. Right. Okay. On a similar front This was before I actually went on vacation. But I think I was already distracted at this point there was a post about using can opener is the right or wrong way. GRIFFIS made a post. Have we been opening cans around where whole lives? I guess you can use the can. I mean, I think the answer for me is yes. According to this, I'm doing it wrong. But you know, it's the way that works. I saw this and I tried opening it the right way with my manual caliper, and I couldn't get fucking work. So like, no, it's

Jessamyn 45:29 a video or can I actually, this is like a Twitter.

Cortex 45:33 There's like a, you know, short Twitter video. Hashtag I don't like 30 seconds or something. All right. I'm gonna watch it while you talk. Yeah. Well, and the whole thing is like, you know, there's there's a couple ways you could orient a can opener on a can when opening it and one of them

Jessamyn 45:47 there's literally only two.

Cortex 45:49 Well, yeah, that's what a couple is. And so the video shows a guy like laying it down sideways and doing it and it just works. And yeah, I've seen this happen. And for that matter, I've seen electronic can openers work. And I think that's pretty much the orientation they use, but put, I don't give a fuck, like I don't I don't need to do that. It works fine. The way I do it. I'm not like, you know, giving away gifts in the USD CAD. So I don't care if there's like, a rim in the wrong. I don't know. I just don't know. So I'm kind of pleased that there's this boggling point of contention.

Jessamyn 46:24 Please, that knowing this, yeah. Weird.

Cortex 46:27 I don't feel like I need to change anything in my life as a result, but it's nice to be reminded that they're always fun watching the internet be like you're you're doing it wrong, or Yes. Sometimes it depends on which internet and what they're saying and

Jessamyn 46:41 about I don't work there. So it's always fun for me.

Cortex 46:46 It's usually fun on metal filter. Yeah,

Jessamyn 46:48 yeah. Speaking of, you know, shit, that's always been wrong. Women's pockets.

Cortex 46:54 Oh, yeah, I saw that post goodbye. Yeah,

Jessamyn 46:56 I mean, it was a mostly good post. There were definitely a couple kind of hardcore nerds there who were like, well, there's a reason for that. And I'm like, I don't give a shit with reason is like, the point is, it's bullshit. And, or, like, why don't you just get all your clothes tailored? But it was, you know, I always enjoy these kinds of solidarity threads about like, how bullshit you know, the pocket situation is I guess you had to tell people to calm down. So maybe that wasn't a favor. I

Cortex 47:28 think that's why well, I don't know that I spent much time on it. But I think there was just like, some things came to a head or something. I don't know. I forgotten already. So

Jessamyn 47:37 yeah, see, well, that's, you know, what makes you good at what makes you good at metta filter,

Cortex 47:43 or just so tired.

Jessamyn 47:46 Or whatever, but like Jen fullmoon like put together some some articles about like women's clothing and pockets and you know, I mostly wear like men's clothing or like kind of ambi sexual like, you know, preppy clothes are a little bit more sure they fit you know, everybody and I don't know if they're men's or women's clothes or not, so most of my shit has pockets. As a result I'm always horrified when something doesn't because it's so clearly crazy. But at any rate Fonterra Metafilter it's still open if you want to go talk about buckets

Cortex 48:21 get into it. This just missed the mark for like last podcast I think this must have been like the same day but the post Joe Zydeco made a post about the dogs or the dogs. The dogs from we we rent goats.com

Jessamyn 48:40 What happened I just knew the loose go part of the story.

Cortex 48:45 Well, that's some goats got out like that's all you need to know if that doesn't excite you just get the goats got the fuck out. And it was a fun thread. So yes, go read about those goats. Oh, no, it

Jessamyn 48:57 did make that social media reactions.

Cortex 49:00 I did make a post earlier this month of something that someone had not double posted on. And then lobstermen deleted it because it wasn't just didn't search well enough. So that was that was a good time. But here's the actual post which got made by Molek it's about a skater named Matt Thomas ello doing some

Jessamyn 49:25 skateboards that are cut in half. Yeah. When you put it up, I think

Cortex 49:29 yeah, I think and I think I thought I'm all chopped. So but yeah, it's just weird goofy skateboard bullshit. And I really enjoyed it. And again, there's not much else to say go watch some goofy, you know, skateboard bullshit. A lot of moderates. I this was my favorite mod known I think I left this month was there was a post about the Church of Satan getting into some more religious liberty trolling. All right. Turns out it's not the church of Satan. It's the Satanic Temple. So I believe

Jessamyn 50:05 somebody emailed us about that. So this is Dr. Nemo who made this post who I happen to know because he's kind of a extended neighbor in Vermont. And then somebody emailed us and I was like, oh, gosh, you have to Oh, wait a companion cube and I was like, you have to email the OPI or whatever. And then I think that came back on your on your shift. Yeah.

Cortex 50:31 A couple other things here. And then I guess we can move on to the old greener pastures. No, good. Because they asked me to filter. It's the green.

Jessamyn 50:40 I use classic same, everything's white clean.

Cortex 50:44 Is it because of the snowy north of Vermont. cased under ice at all times? Just like little hints of color peeking out through the the frozen landscape. Yes. Okay. That's good.

Jessamyn 50:57 So I also like this thread, because this is a website that's been up and down over the last like, I don't know, 15 years, but it's basically a website pretty straightforward. It's called does the dog die. And what it used to do is tell you if a pet gets abused or killed as part of a movie, so that people who have problems with that kind of thing, do not have to watch it. But it has evolved to basically covering all sorts of stuff that you might not want to see. Like hey, does someone get misgendered? Does someone get burned alive? Does someone die by suicide? Does a kid die? Does a parent die? Are there spiders? Is there any tooth damage? Yeah,

Cortex 51:41 I have a friend who would absolutely appreciate that is there i mutilation aspect. I want to I want to call someone out you're looking at this list of things so like, oh, there's a lot of does this specific thing happened as this specific thing happened? And then there's does someone fart or spit? And now look, I can, I can understand someone might be disinclined to see either farting or spitting. But I don't know that you can just lump them together like that. Like spitting and farting seem like two very different things. They'd be treated differently in the language of cinema. Like you can't just like show someone farting, the way you show someone spitting unless you're being very, you know, flamboyantly, like, you know, slapstick about it. And I don't know, right? I don't know. No, I'm

Jessamyn 52:18 there with you. I'm there with you. Different things. Everything

Cortex 52:21 else is like, does this one thing happen? And it's like farting and spinning. I'm just gonna attempt I don't know, I don't know,

Jessamyn 52:27 is Santa's spoiled?

Cortex 52:30 Well, I mean, he's living pretty high on the hog.

Jessamyn 52:34 But, and of course, somebody pops into the thread, you know, talking about like,

Cortex 52:42 we could just like, clip that out and append that to any discussion with Reddit. We want

Jessamyn 52:47 your your sheltered life kind of thing. And then other people were like, ah, that's okay. Actually, I'm totally okay with my non rapey movie choices. But thanks.

Cortex 53:01 Yep, man. So I was reading Titan, book, watch, do book watch. What's Titan Titan by John Varley was the first in a series of books that started with Titan and there was wizard, no information

Jessamyn 53:15 literally no.

Cortex 53:17 Other people, other people. It's, it's about a ring world type thing that SPOILER ALERT turns out to be kind of like a large, like self contained organism. Like it's not just like,

Jessamyn 53:27 is it good? Would you recommend it? It was good. Yes, well,

Cortex 53:33 here's the thing. I was having a real hard time getting through it. And well, that's obviously I was having a hard time feeling super enthusiastic about it. But it was like the book that I took camping. I know how that is it like characters and it kept mentioning science fiction properties, which was like, You better have a payoff for that. Because like, otherwise, you're just like, and it was really obsessed with like, who wanted to fuck who, in a way that felt like, you know, never really gotten like a

Jessamyn 54:00 male writer. Maybe? I mean, like a George RR Martin,

Cortex 54:04 sort of Martin actually blurbs on the back of the old copy we have, of course. But it's, it's interesting. And it's sort of like, you know, if you've read the Ringworld books, you know, it's, it's another Ringworld. Like, it's its own thing. But like, you know, you have that sense of like you're exploring the large world of foreign alien architecture in space, and people having adventures there, but like it, the character over the motivations felt kind of weird, and he did seem a little too interested in people's sex lives. And also, there's strange alien centers that have both human genitalia and also a great big horse dicks, but they're actually great big human dicks. Yeah. And so the whole thing I'm reading through is like, well, I don't get and at the end, there's sort of a big reveal that ties some of that stuff together like the science fiction stuff turns out to be because the entity He that is and creates and runs the space station is like 3 million years old and it has for last few 1000 years been monitoring human culture in the last 100 or so like watching TV and so like it's getting all these ideas from human TV so it made the sent ours but it was real proud of itself or coming up with a whole giant horse stick thing. And that was kind of that was that was almost maybe the best explanation is like, Oh, the reason this is sort of like weird and inappropriate is it's some strange 3 million year old alien beings like Yeah, well look, what I came up with was like, Okay, well, maybe, but it's it's the whole thing. It was kind of strange, but it wasn't bad in the end, but I don't know. I have weird feels.

Jessamyn 55:39 So why did you start talking about this?

Cortex 55:41 I don't remember. I have no idea. This cold is really up for on me. Oh, great. That's why that's a bummer to realize. That's what it was. There's like, there there's just like a narrative Lee you know, linchpin rape, like the book is like, you know, you did not have to fucking have like, well, this is what the story needs now is violent rapes like, No, you could you could have found a way to do it. Like, like it could have, if nothing else been downgraded to a frightening you know, threat of sexual violence or something, if you really wanted to make that key to what was going on with our character. rapey Yeah. Instead, it was like, you know, like, stoic tactical toleration of a thing, and then some almost murder later. You know, I've been putting, I put, I put my shoulder down and kept on going, and then you're like, Hey, good job. Here's the boss.

Jessamyn 56:38 I recommend as an antidote to that, Josh, that you read this Long Way to a Small Angry Planet trilogy by Becky Chambers, which is a very affirming feminist. Without being just kind of a like, just a women tail. You know, I mean, there's some things that are feminist because they're essentially all only about women. This is just a feminist philosophy with a wide range of, you know, male, female and sort of a gendered characters. That is a really great kind of space romp. And I just finished the reason I mentioned is because I just finished the last book in a trilogy this morning and was like, Oh, it was really good. I felt good about that. Like, it's really bad things don't happen. But there's just no gratuitous bullshit that you have to like, question the motives of the author like, like the person reading this book, just a weird creep. You know what I mean? There's just not

Cortex 57:37 these specific things that are happening in his narrative.

Jessamyn 57:40 Yeah, so if you're interested, Becky Chambers, Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. The Wayfarer series. I really enjoyed it. Nice.

Cortex 57:51 I will mention one more that I just enjoyed a nice little thing. It's a music video that was linked by nerd fish. It's a song about being a cow and fucky llama cow. And it's it's, that's that's again, you know, it's good. Go watch it is the whole thing. And holdings got a super low five video aesthetic, and I appreciate it.

Jessamyn 58:14 And nice. Oh, you know what I was reading last night about that. That that the angry goose?

Cortex 58:22 Untitled goose game,

Jessamyn 58:23 Untitled goose game. It's like the first like, is there a metaphysical post about it?

Cortex 58:29 I have no idea. It's like

Jessamyn 58:30 the first kind of like, dumb game thing where I was like, hmm, I'd like to find a way that I can actually maybe play that. But I also wanted to mention last Metafilter posts that I had was this post by Gudrun Gudrun. How do you tell a thirsty elephant not to take a drink, which is about the elephants that are in the DC Zoo. And the water supply might be contaminated. And they needed to figure out how to get the elephant's the water they needed, but not the bad water that they didn't need. And it's just kind of a long post explaining how it worked and what the zookeepers did, and on a torch, which is a Smithsonian publication, one of the things I really actually like about sort of increased pan Opticon social media stuff is that I can learn a lot more about how good zoos operate. Like there's like zoo TV shows, which should come as a surprise to nobody but it was a surprise to me because I don't watch a lot of TV but my friends who have the TV watch Animal Planet stuff. And there's a whole bunch of like let's learn about the zoos. I mean, I think last month we looked at like tiny goat gets introduced to Yeah, porcupine or whatever. But like all those little things like zoos doing social media to talk about how the zoo works like, you know, I can just only imagine how much 10 year old me would have lost her mind. Getting to have all this good information about zoos. That was just kind of unavailable to us as kids. You know, when I was a kid, you'd have to read a book about a zoo.

Cortex 1:00:07 Yeah. It's an embarrassment of mine upon on the way to the end of that riches. I'm not gonna say riches, I'm gonna finish the idiom.

Jessamyn 1:00:19 Yes, I enjoyed asked Metafilter very much this month, as I do every month, I may have actually been slightly more active in it this month than usual. But there was a music video post about like iconic music videos like what are what are definitive music videos of the last decade, which I enjoyed. Because I got to look at some videos I haven't seen and see some old videos that I hadn't seen in a while. And then so that was by cult URL bias, whose user I don't remember having really seen a lot from before. And then storyboard, I had posted a couple like funny videos that I like, storyboard was like, Oh, my God, I love those, I want to go see more of those. And I was like, you should post an ASP Metafilter thread. And so they did. And there's a great comedy music video thread, which has just wonderful things in it. So if you like iconic music videos of the last 10 years, or if you like comedy, music videos, that kind of thing is good. And this didn't happen in this thread. But I've noticed in some other, like helped me find music, videos, threads, there's a user. And now I'm trying to figure out what the users name is, see if I see them. And there's a user who's like been going around being like, hey, put these all in a playlist enjoy. Like, just, you know, just for fun, like just to be helpful. And so it's cool. If you look at some of the AskMe edit filter threads that put together a whole bunch of music videos. That's theoretically a way to do that.

Cortex 1:02:03 That was clever. And it's cut from for it.

Jessamyn 1:02:05 Yeah, me too.

Cortex 1:02:08 I enjoyed this thing I came across yesterday, just on sort of principle. And also it got me playing this stupid clicker game. So I deeply resent it,

Jessamyn 1:02:16 but not the clicker game.

Cortex 1:02:20 If I only had a penguin asked, Hey, you know, I played yesterday. Yeah, just like last night, said, Hey, I play the shark game. It's this clicker game. And after you get a whole lot of things, it stops giving you actual numbers and just says you have lots of it. So you know, I have lots of everything. And I also am gaining lots of things per second. But

Jessamyn 1:02:43 it won't give you a number. Yeah. So I want to

Cortex 1:02:45 know what the numbers are. How do I get these which is essentially comes down to like, how do I poke around in the JavaScript console for this game, and they got some good leads, axiom and Demiurge popped in to say, Oh, hey, here's a couple places you can look. And this is anything actually, this is true about like, every like, you know, goofy JavaScript game running in a browser. And things that aren't games for that matter. But games are an obvious places like you can just pop up in the developer console in your browser, and start poking around to try and figure out what's going on in various, you know, variables in the program. So if you want to find out an answer to something like this, you can go look. So there's no actual resolution yet in the thread that basically axemen Demiurge gave him enough to work with start poking around and probably produce an actual answer. And so I'm excited to see if, if I only had a penguin ends up getting like a hard okay, here's I found these variables. And it turns out, it's this many Brazilians is how many I have. Right? Like the general thing is nice. And also it's it's a slightly amusing little chart game, so

Jessamyn 1:03:50 I don't think I'm gonna get that you can click it around a little bit

Cortex 1:03:53 last night. Just do it an offhand while actually playing another game last night as I pop over, buy some more shark stuff by crabs go to another ocean universe. So okay, I'm on the board. So that was nice.

Jessamyn 1:04:04 I enjoyed this scrabble question, which was by rebend, which was kind of a combination of like, we played scrabble using this one dictionary, but we're only allowed to use those words. But then there's some words that aren't in there. How could we use a more official dictionary? Also, by the way, tell me about some house rules you have for what isn't it and isn't allowed in your scrabble game, which is still open, so people should go and talk about it? Because there's like, very, not that many 14 comments, I guess it's like, it's not 14 comments, 14 favorites. And so people point out like, this is this is the dictionary, but then people talk about some of their specific rules, like, you know, if you get if you can play JOZXYQ K, that's legal and you get like 100 points or you win the game or whatever. Yeah. Or like, you know, are you allowed to play dirty words or not? What if your dictionary has them or doesn't have them? You know, there's a whole bunch of drama within the Scrabble community about, you know, slurs, you know, some dictionaries have them and some don't. So at any rate, it was fun to hang out with my scrabble nerds and just talk about scrabble a little bit.

Cortex 1:05:16 Yeah, I have on occasion tried to play for like, you know, explain yourself Scrabble, where like, you can play anything as long as you can make a compelling argument that, right, right. But like, that tends to break down pretty quickly. It feels like,

Jessamyn 1:05:30 I mean, Jim and I have been playing so long with the same dictionary. And it's very interesting that, like, our techniques are kind of different. And he will just literally like, he runs at a time because he's trying, like every combination of letters to see if it's a word, like because we allow, we allow that in our house rules, you know, we don't play with challenges. Whereas I have a lot more time, but I mostly go with words that I know. So you know, if he plays a word, and I'm like, What the fuck? That is not why. He asked it, like, tell me what it means. And theoretically, we're learning something. I don't know if we're learning something. But theoretically, we are learning something. I had a couple. What's it called? Like? big, bigger, biggest? Like, when you when you have something that's the most of something? Oh,

Cortex 1:06:25 quantifiers quantifiers.

Jessamyn 1:06:30 Magnify something. All right, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. There are two that I thought were interesting. How do you convey the largest possible number with conventional symbols by the phlegmatic King, which isn't really good user? But basically, I like it, because the below the fold thing is starts out this is dumb and weird, but and they basically were like, using regular numbers and regular symbols, what is the biggest number you can make? And it was interesting. I learned some things, you know, we do in logs and a whole bunch of other stuff. I didn't totally understand it. And now best, worst, most unusual shit. Okay. And then this other one by grouse just the other day, what is the oldest entity still referred primarily to as the new something? Select? There's a new forest or the new forest or the New Forest? Yeah, you know, a long time ago, and new college are their older ones.

Cortex 1:07:32 comparatives, by the way. I comparatives is for

Jessamyn 1:07:35 God, thank you. So you know, people are talking about the New Testament, Naples technically means new, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just a fun smart thread. And I enjoyed it. And you know, it was fun, of course. So those two kind of went together as a as a pair for me.

Cortex 1:07:53 Yeah. I see lobsterman mentioning, in the biggest number stuff using up arrows and I feel like I know about up arrow notation. But I also kind of say, yeah, that's not common, like, like, I guess common versus conventional. Like like

Jessamyn 1:08:09 two up three, you mean, like would be two times two times two, but that's not normal?

Cortex 1:08:14 Well, not Not, not, not that not not carrot. Like I would say, I would say carrot like, like, like to carrot to would be to to the to

Jessamyn 1:08:23 power, right. So I'm not sure what you're talking.

Cortex 1:08:26 There's all linked to the individual comment, there's a common thread. Well look at the comment from Creole food. I'll just I'll just link to the new thing that they're linking to. Just for reference, up arrow, so it's its own thing. It's Oh, it's not just a power thing. Yeah, that's not that's not I don't think it's conventional that like among mathematicians, certainly, like known but so yeah, I think I think powers of powers is probably the way to go. But

Jessamyn 1:08:57 But it's interesting. It's a great nerdy question, right? I think it's a great nerdy tech question. Primitive recursion. See also busy beaver I think I will. Uh, designing a halting binary alphabet Turing Machine, which writes the most ones on the tape be ultra toxic. How did I start? And let's see couple other fun like, nerd question. That thing where there's not enough daggers for all the lines at the checkout, but like, your cashier is ringing up your groceries? Are you supposed to buy groceries? Good question by bleep. variety of answers. interesting conversation. A lot of people kind of default to like, Hey, is it okay? If I bag my own groceries, which is kind of funny that you'd have to ask for a thing that appears to be baked into how the supermarket works, but apparently is baked into how the supermarket works. But I appreciated it because I never know the answer to that question. So I'm always wondering. Yeah. And then technical one Learn from dances with light, which is like those fucking pop ups about the newsletter. How do I make them go? Way? Oh, yeah, answer you can't. But you can a little bit WD Mike came up with a Firefox plugin that gives you a keyboard shortcut to making them go away. Oh, nice.

Cortex 1:10:21 I enjoyed this very, very late follow up. Cashman in 2009. Posted das Metafilter saying, Hey, what's this music? There's this thing I saw played on, like Raiders vs. Redskins game. Can't find the song. What is it? And someone said, Oh, man, oh, here's a guest, but I don't have much. And then they said, Wow, this one's been sitting around a long time, like two weeks after it had been posted. And then like nine years later, I see an ashcan posting on my old shop saying, Oh, hey, found the answer this old question. I was like, You're not gonna post that and ask me for a video? Oh, yeah, it'd be great. So I did. So nine years later, there's an answer. And it came from the person who asked the question in the first place.

Jessamyn 1:11:08 We were just talking about Cashman the other day because Jim didn't know that mash cattle malt shop was cash man on MediCal.

Cortex 1:11:14 Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:11:17 Which I guess I can understand.

Cortex 1:11:19 I mean, they are different names. So you know that they

Jessamyn 1:11:22 have different user icons, I guess. There's so clearly the same person debate, but like, Jim doesn't, he doesn't have that kind of continuity of people because he's not, you know, he's plugged into the mefites. He knows but he really isn't plugged in the ones he doesn't know. Sure. Yeah. So it was this big revelation for him. What? Yes. ashmit same dude. I also truly loved this mask. Masks poor for misc. Oh, mas que so what the Shit I Never Knew. I thought this was like masks poor for like, give me a mask, please. Yeah, but it's no it's more cheese, please. Yes. Mosquito mosquito. At any rate. I enjoyed the question. I need to know everything about state county regional fairs, anecdote, data history, all of it, I need it. And so it's just people talking about state fairs. And they're like, What kind of stuff do you want really? And the OP follows up all of it, please. And so you know, different people talk about what their fares are like people give them movies to watch people talk about stories about going to their own monkey toes is in there talking about stuff. Nosy Mrs. Rat, Bella Donna got a whole bunch of like rural me got a whole bunch of like rural mefites talking about the joy that is, you know, state county and local fairs.

Cortex 1:13:00 Nice. Yeah. It's just a very

Jessamyn 1:13:01 life affirming. It's got one tag fair. Add another tag. fers? Is your county fair? State Fair. Anything else from you?

Cortex 1:13:17 Know, I think that is it. I did not study it for music. So I don't have anything to toss out there at the moment. But hey, go listen to music. It's good.

Jessamyn 1:13:26 I've been in fanfare I've watched a couple. I don't know if I had done this by last podcast. I don't think so. Like, I've watched a couple like late blockbuster movies, like I watched the Avengers movie. And I saw Deadpool two. And it just finished watching. I don't know something just like at home. And so it's been really fun to like, go into like 405 100 Comment fanfare threads, just to kind of see what other people have, like thought about the thing that I you know, just watched and actually maybe don't entirely know what to think about it, you know. So I very much enjoyed that. And hopefully I can do the same with blackkklansman. Mostly, I'm just reading along with elementary at the at the moment.

Cortex 1:14:11 I should go look up books. I just I just read the first book of The Expanse series, which I've been watching the TV show and enjoying it.

Jessamyn 1:14:23 Thanks. I remember you told me about The Expanse series. The books good.

Cortex 1:14:26 I really enjoyed the first one. So I assume the rest will also be good. Not only read them, but it's interesting because like you can really, really see how, how the book got to the TV show. And either they definitely did a pretty good job of like keeping the plot more or less there, which is not surprising. Is your computer currently rocking?

Jessamyn 1:14:50 That was my phone telling me I had a phone call from Palo Alto, which is impossible. So I'm telling it not to.

Cortex 1:14:56 It's a good policy. Yeah, well, I

Jessamyn 1:14:58 mean, I'm one of those people who who answers my phone for the most part, but, you know, it just rings in, I got the same robot trying to talk to me all the time,

Cortex 1:15:07 I've been getting a lot of dumb bullshit calls and I get very few actual calls. It's a little bit tricky, but most of the people I get actual calls for are in my phone has contacts. It's not a it's not a problem. If it's just like, I'm literally not gonna answer it, buddy. Sorry. Unless it's something like when you when you said, hey, you know, I put it down as a reference, like, you know, for a couple weeks as I go pick up random numbers. Sure. But otherwise, I have to have a reason otherwise fucking what happened? Did

Jessamyn 1:15:29 you give me a bad reference to GitHub?

Cortex 1:15:31 No, I never heard from him. I was disappointed. Like I when when PB went to work for Oregon State A while back, you know, he was like, Hey, I put down his references. Okay, cool. And so and that was exactly one of those. I don't know this number, but PB mentioned things while into my phone. And it turned out the guy at OSU

Jessamyn 1:15:49 leave messages anyhow. Yeah, it

Cortex 1:15:53 probably would have been fine. But you know, it was it was fun to take that call. Because basically, I gotta say, like, oh, yeah, no, he's, he's really fantastic. And you would be an absolute fool not to hire him.

Jessamyn 1:16:06 Right? Don't be a dummy. Yeah. The

Cortex 1:16:09 guy's asking like, reasonable sort of like, well, okay, now, why did he leave the company? Well, he worked here for 10 years. And like, he did a lot of work, and he was ready for a change. So, you know, it's like, well, would you hire him back? I was like, Well, yeah. But like, you know, you know,

Jessamyn 1:16:22 he's, he wants a different job.

Cortex 1:16:26 It was just, it was, it was interesting to be in a position to be able to, like, be genuinely and straightforwardly super enthusiastic. And like, like, seriously, listen to me, I am the person who called doing the right thing by hiring this person, you know, so I was hoping to be able to, like, you know, lay that on someone else for you as well. But, oh, dice.

Jessamyn 1:16:44 I've been doing a little consulting for glitch, they're gonna hire a community health engineer. And I've been helping them sort of craft that job thing. And I may be helping them with some other stuff, too, was interesting, because I think I told you I pinged in El Rey, when I found out I got fired a glitch was like, I get help and was like, I don't know what happened here. Do you know this guy? Maybe you can give me some advice. He's like, Nah, I don't I'll ask around. Do you need some work? Because I could really use some help with. Oh, great. Well, that was easy. And it took a while to sort of get it together. But like, yeah, it's been it's been fun. They're, they're a fun place to interact with. Everybody is really happy to work there.

Cortex 1:17:21 Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. Spend some time with glitch sometime, I just never

Jessamyn 1:17:28 know, I don't have a project for it. And so it's been a little challenging for me. And I think it's just kind of like, one level too hard for me, which is probably a level I can surmount, I just need to really be, you know, too sweaty, and a whole bunch of other things. Because I am really interested in the project. And as a company, they're really trying to do some pretty interesting things. They want to be a cool platform that kids can use. They want to really keep the Nazis and like, you know, just general shitheads out from the get go on, like a policy level and it's interesting watching them, you know, figure out and try to do that. So it's it was really fun talking to them about that kind of stuff.

Cortex 1:18:08 Yeah. Nice. Yeah, I think I think I've, I've I've emptied the tank. I think you're gonna podcast let's

Jessamyn 1:18:19 do you wanna do on a whole little space for Music Minute? posthoc or not even fuck music? See,

Cortex 1:18:26 you know, if not, and I'll just come up with energy next month. That sounds good. fully functioning brain and

Jessamyn 1:18:33 good. Rest. Yeah. Nice. Yeah,

Cortex 1:18:36 maybe we'll try and like take a nap. Maybe I'll nap. That's what it sounds like.

Jessamyn 1:18:39 That's what Jim is doing right now. I just got a whole mess. A little texts. Like I'm going to sleep

Cortex 1:18:44 head start on me. Dammit.

Jessamyn 1:18:46 Well, I mean, it is east coast. So true.

Cortex 1:18:49 It's late. Yeah, I guess I'm still jet lagged, too. That's probably not helping anything. Oh, of course you are. Anyway, yes. Let's let's. Let's say it's a podcast. We podcast it.

Jessamyn 1:19:00 I think it's fun cast, as it always is, and I look forward to seeing this. Okie dokie. Listen to it in my automobile and maybe being able to hear both of our voices. Yeah,

Cortex 1:19:11 I'll give myself a little goose. I'll give myself an extra little. Oh, I've got a cold goose. I've got a cold goose. I'd say Goodbye, everybody.