Podcast 39 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 39: Tenth Anniversary Plans (2009-03-28).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary keywords

people, meetup, nice, weddings, post, thread, portland, site, talk, 10th anniversary, person, week, metal, favorites, filter, game, fun, idea, frog, comments

Transcript

mathowie 0:15 Episode 39 For most of March stuff,

Jessamyn 0:19 march 2 was the last podcast,

mathowie 0:20 we should probably talk right off the bat for the people who don't feel like scanning through an mp3 file for annual 10th anniversary talk. I was just overlooking my email where I was talking about like a month ago, we were coming up with the ideas. So the TTS seventh 14th. Right.

Jessamyn 0:41 14th is the actual day, but we pick a weekend and I think the 18th is gonna be better than the 11th and 12. Because people are doing

mathowie 0:50 Fourth of July is the week before. Right? Yeah,

Cortex 0:53 give them give them recovery time, a couple of weeks between parties is probably a good idea.

mathowie 0:57 I was I was thinking so. So the 10th anniversary is coming up, we should do something big is what everyone's been telling us for two years. People wanted to start planning it over two years ago. And the original thought was, hey, why don't we throw something huge in America somewhere, you know, put all our eggs in one basket and have a ginormous party that people have to fly to. And there'll be like, a really cool thing.

Jessamyn 1:22 Can't go suckers. Yeah.

mathowie 1:23 If you can't make it, and yeah, you point that out early, like, probably be better. But we did some sort of like around the world coordinated thing.

Jessamyn 1:33 You guys all live near each other. And I'm out here in the outpost?

mathowie 1:36 Well, we're gonna pick somewhere in the middle of the country. But that obviously ignores all of Europe and everywhere else in the world, which is, you know, like, 25% of the population of metal filter rights, if not really true. Is that really true? 25? Like on just sort of traffic alone to the server? Probably like, mostly, well, that doesn't seem high enough. I mean, I wish it was more international.

Jessamyn 1:59 It's pretty good. Yeah, we're,

mathowie 2:01 I mean, we're kind of a mirror American centric. So I mean, it was a good idea to instead, I think it's way more democratic way more in line at the site to have a, you know, some sort of coordinate around the world thing that's supported with the same you know, kind of money I would be putting into, like, you know, renting some place and paying for beer. So the thought was, like, how can we do this, I was thinking July, anywhere from July 10, to the 18th is like, you know, the week surrounding the anniversary, whatever works the weekend, before the weekend, after whatever works for you in your section. We should, I think, in May, I'd like to launch a site that says basically, like permanent meetup threads for each city. And I was just thinking, since we were probably gonna be leaving comments and stuff, we should just put it at the metal filter.com domain. So it'd be something like, you know, Portland dot 10th anniversary dot metal filter.com, or something in Copenhagen?

Jessamyn 3:01 Ugly URL, but I feel you I feel you otherwise.

mathowie 3:05 Yeah, having meta filter.com means you don't have to log in again. And you know, we don't really want a subdomain of like each city.

Jessamyn 3:12 I think I think it's a good idea. We just need to Yeah, makes up the

mathowie 3:16 normal, maybe the subdomains, we shouldn't have to subdomains it could just be like Portland, 10th, Copenhagen,

Jessamyn 3:22 or just Portland and then figure, you know, you can have a tag for tests. Really.

mathowie 3:27 I was just trying to think of like, I want to total self evident URL if you saw it in print, like, what's this about? Like, oh, that's about Portland. 10th anniversary.

Jessamyn 3:38 Make sure it says Portland, Oregon, then. Now there's only one

Unknown Speaker 3:44 could Sukkot we could we could say like PDX.

Jessamyn 3:48 Yeah. Port codes. Actually, if you want my honest codes. Shut up. embargoes are great.

Cortex 3:57 They're awesome. They're like, you know,

mathowie 4:00 to ask people look up. airport codes are like three.

Unknown Speaker 4:04 You could? No, no, no, I insist.

Jessamyn 4:08 Oh, no, you okay?

Cortex 4:10 I just, I just think they're kind of like, you can sort of pretend you know about something sort of like ham radio or something. Except, it's like, it's like radio call stations except for you know, less so because there aren't sitcoms about it.

Jessamyn 4:22 And they tell you even less about which side of the Mississippi are on? Yes.

Cortex 4:25 Although, are there any sitcoms that are named after a airport code?

mathowie 4:30 I don't think so. Because I was proposing codes that there can exist in meetup that does not have a nearby airport, but maybe I'm wrong. Hey, I

Jessamyn 4:39 know more about that than you. Yeah, I think you're right. What? Yeah, so details.

mathowie 4:48 So we have some placed as someone's gonna, so every city that's gonna throw a party is going to have a URL of some sort, where people can plan stuff, you know, using the metadata booktype thread, we want to get their own

Jessamyn 5:03 URLs that are going to be crazy. mars.metafilter.com That's

mathowie 5:07 true, we would have some sort of control about each place, like you'd have to like nominate. So we're gonna have to, like come up with like a plan, like as party planning committee, but like somebody started has to be the leader for that city. Like, if you're proposing it, you're gonna elect to, like take charge on it. So I think at that point, you're gonna say, you know, I'm Jessamyn and I'm going to do a Vermont meet up in this town. So you know, whatever Vermont tents.meditel.com is me. And the cool part guys, and I'm thinking like, the heaviest weekends in the summer, for meetups typically have, like, heaviest I've ever seen is like eight meetups on the same day, kind of. And I think we could probably Garner 20 to 30, you think maybe more, maybe up to 50. At the top end. I was trying to think of a way to try and

Jessamyn 5:57 schedule like a weekend, like pick a weekend, though, so that it's not like eight days that it's more coalesced around one long weekend, and then people could go to like one or two. That's true. You know what I mean? And there's

Cortex 6:07 nothing wrong with people who decide they just can't make it work that weekend doing it another weekend. On the 12th. Grandfather them as as honorary meetup birthday weekend. Participants yes, they're at a time.

mathowie 6:20 The whole point of having like a leader is because we're trying to figure out a way to basically help with the bar tab in every city leader ideas perfect. Yeah. So like with the if the elected leader, you tell us your pay pal addresses the easiest, and I'm trying to think if we can get, we can keep it under 50 parties, you know, it's like we can give out 100 bucks to every single one of them. You know, I was thinking like 100 bucks or 200 bucks seems to be like 10 people drinking and having snacks all night at the bars about I think, you know, last Portland meetup, I covered the tab and I think it was 250 or something with tip and everything. So I'm trying to think we'll have to think of I'm gonna steal details a workout, but we'd like to be able to like just like send you 100 bucks to cover you know, some part of a bar tab or

Jessamyn 7:07 the first round of drinks or whatever it is like, and it means that all the little teeny meetups that are usually kind of overlooked and ignored. And the redheaded stepchildren will actually like get more cash per capita. If they want it I you know, I think that

mathowie 7:24 mom will purposely have a really obscure tiny town with one person.

Cortex 7:29 I'm seeing Splinter meetup there's like, you know, seven people who want to meet up in Cleveland and three, one and four go to the other just to and then they're just drinking my most expensive top shelf stuff. They can walk

mathowie 7:41 down well drinks, please. So yeah, we're trying to make

Jessamyn 7:48 ends meet up Manhattan meetup Williamsburg meetup.

Cortex 7:50 Yeah, we had talked, I remember we were brainstorming a while ago about like getting people to, like, get the receipt, like, oh, yeah, scan or take a picture of the receipt for the meetup. And then we could just do a big, like Flickr pool of all of the receipts from all of the birthday meetups as well, obviously slightly amended, if necessary to obscure any like, you know, card details or anything like that. But yeah, I think that'd be really awesome as just sort of an artifact of collective boozing,

mathowie 8:19 I would think it'd be cool to stay. I mean, cuz it's a slightly amount of I mean, some programming we need to do to make this slightly custom. Sounds too good to be kind of cool to pull more of like the meetup photos onto the page itself. So you know, you're like, we can use the current mechanism for these are my

Jessamyn 8:36 nails pull right in like I was gonna do?

mathowie 8:38 Yeah, we could do that with the Flickr API and stuff. I think that's a great idea. Just, I mean, also, it's kind of an open book, anything we can think of Elsa, we'd want on, you know, your custom, local meetup page, you know, here's the leader, here's the time and date and where we're gonna meet. Here's the Yelp review for where we're going. Right, like sort of, like a nice highlighted bar at the top with all the details of it. Here's discussion threads about setting it up and what we're going to do that night and here's photos from the event afterwards, or here's a shot of the receipt. That would be cool. And anything else we can think of. I'm not real super hip on stupid live streaming of via Ustream, even though it's a possibility. It's so awkward. Your idea originally Oh, it was like I think Paul was pushing it the whole time. It's really thrown, thrown him under the bus.

Jessamyn 9:31 I think live streaming, I think TV the mod that nobody knows what he looks like.

mathowie 9:35 He mentioned it in the emails and we're going back and forth on ideas, but it's so awkward to have like an open laughs

Jessamyn 9:42 no downside to streaming except to have an

mathowie 9:45 open laptop, but he's drinking beers with people in front of you. Don't know, it's just seems strange to

Jessamyn 9:50 me. Well, you don't have to do it.

mathowie 9:51 Okay, well, I don't know what else there is to cover. I mean, trying to think of a way where I mean It's there can still be this like big New Orleans meetup you know, I'm not gonna personally fly to it, but other people can, there could be some big Vegas meetups there have been in the past. If you want to do that, that's cool. That's I mean, it's fun. And you know, you get like eight to 10 people or, you know, have a good time for an entire weekend. But we're just trying to think of a way to spread this around the globe and be able to support them and then make up some site to connect everyone so and, you know, let you know, that's local. And we have like, you know, the very top line, you know, call outs we sometimes do, like during the server outage stuff we could for basically the month before it say, you know, Hey, meet up. Yeah, yeah, worldwide celebration of the 10th anniversary of medical care coming up, check and see if your town is listed here. And yeah, we could have some main city sites in I mean, like, you know, we need sort of a

Jessamyn 10:51 one those dorky maps with that. Exactly. Yeah, it looks just like

mathowie 10:55 the front page of jobs. If you look at the front page of jobs, it shows the last 50 jobs placed on a Google map. So that was the 10th anniversary is going to look like the front page of jobs. And you can see,

Jessamyn 11:08 we have to have like a minimum requirement. Like you have to have at least what three people two people.

Cortex 11:16 No drinking alone and taking a sad self portrait in the bathroom

Jessamyn 11:20 was five people and under will chip in 50 bucks. And with 10 over will chip in 100 or something just so you don't get like two people, you know, with 100 bucks going and I don't know what they would do with

mathowie 11:31 debauchery as long as the photos.

Cortex 11:35 Maybe that should be the rule you have to document every dollar you spend.

mathowie 11:40 Worldwide Quicken. Super fun,

Jessamyn 11:45 right, get that we saw a guy into totally your banker.

mathowie 11:51 Yeah. So that's sort of our running ideas. I think maybe, you know, I would like to launch something in May or so. So we just have a couple of months to still plan. Local stuff.

Cortex 12:01 Yeah, but we should try and we should try and at least pin down like the weekend if we're going to pick one fairly earlier. So anybody wants to organize something big, like if people want to do a big satellite meetup in New Orleans or anything like that, that will require travel they can they can get a chance to, you know, buy tickets or whatever. For time.

Jessamyn 12:18 Calendar. First day teams 19

mathowie 12:23 actual days, the 14th. That's closer to the 11th 12th weekend, which is a full week. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 12:28 I'm with Jessamyn on this.

Jessamyn 12:30 He's going away for the forest. Yeah,

Cortex 12:32 good. Get back to you know, not not everybody recovers quickly, Mister I just because you're an Iron Man. Just because travel doesn't slow you down.

mathowie 12:42 I think there's a big bike thing. 18th and 19th for me, but at night. I'm free. So

Jessamyn 12:49 yay. Well carbo. Load you.

mathowie 12:53 That's right. So yeah, and well, me and Josh will probably have to plan the Portland one and I'll Yes, I'll cover the entire tab for PA.

Jessamyn 13:03 But I'm coming to that one too. I think you said

mathowie 13:08 if you want to come out, but you said also Hey, I could do a Vermont one.

Unknown Speaker 13:14 terrapins do the Vermont one. All right. Yeah.

Jessamyn 13:16 Right. We could just do a New England massive New England one in Portland or something in Portland.

mathowie 13:24 Bad Portland. Yeah, no,

Jessamyn 13:27 not on display. Now we're thinking about a trip to Portland. So that would be fun.

mathowie 13:30 Yeah, we could do that. And we'll have our superduper too many people too many mods and one too many cooks in the kitchen meet up. Right? And then we can be killed in one place conveniently and the site could be taken over. It'd be awesome.

Jessamyn 13:46 What about schwag? Are we going to make stickers, T shirts?

mathowie 13:50 Yeah, two stickers and T shirts would be cool. We'll probably hang

Jessamyn 13:53 out with devils rancher while I was in Texas, and he's like worked for a screen printing company for 20 years. Might be a good person to talk to about sourcing better colored T shirts. And he's really nice. Incidentally. He hit me to the best barbecue in all of Austin, Texas, but also said he'd be happy to do a little legwork trying to find the right colored t shirt.

mathowie 14:13 Yeah, I actually spent like an extraordinary amount of effort and just found something slightly better than what the free loom offered from this tiny like Brooklyn t shirt maker. It was more blueish and it was like American Apparel ish, like thinner and thinner fabric soft, but you know, yeah, there's nothing quite I mean, I talked to a friend's dad, his own to screen printing company for like years and years. He was like, I mean, he helped his dad. You know, when he was a teen all the time every summer and he was like that color. You're gonna have to custom die and you're talking lots. He's like lots of 1000 costs roughly. You know, undyed is like two bucks a shirt or buck a shirt. But then the dyeing process brings the price up and stuff

Jessamyn 15:00 as well or we could go with white t shirts and then we could do you know, screen images that were in the various different colors, you know, just saying

Cortex 15:09 yeah, or not even white people seem people seem a little bit shy about white t shirts sometimes but we could pick black or just a nice dark color without worrying about site specific color. It could just be

mathowie 15:24 a middle aged man knows a black T shirt hides man boobs, shadows that's essentially why Simon Cowell lots of middle aged men are wearing black tight T shirts all the time. Jobs Yeah, yeah. Steve Jobs everybody.

Cortex 15:42 You know I don't want to be paid listless but as far as black beings living that isn't necessarily working out well. Because yeah, we should just yeah, that was that was because he's getting skinny because he's probably horribly ill is funny Steve Jobs, or is he bounced? Last I heard he was like getting Nazi and he's so you were funny. Yeah, that was like that was like a Stephen King novel like, turned into a bad joke about back in time and

Jessamyn 16:10 I've got girl boobs I want a better t shirt. Just go

Unknown Speaker 16:15 for like a Yeah, like we

Jessamyn 16:18 girls,

mathowie 16:20 I guess. Oh yeah, half the population the universe.

Cortex 16:25 We should get girl shape shirts and black or or something. Something even just like you know, in the middle sort of Tony can be a great t shirt or something but a lot of pain and effort. If we just settle on not trying to get

mathowie 16:40 the consensus level 6699

Jessamyn 16:42 Mettaton Cray would be kind of cool.

mathowie 16:44 Like poor Brown. There's a lot of people call it brown. Some people always think of metadata as being brownish. It comes up a lot

Unknown Speaker 16:56 depending on how you monitor

Jessamyn 17:01 clean and white to me.

mathowie 17:03 The consensus last time was that American Apparel makes some pretty good girl shirts, shapes. So I kinda liked their men's T shirts as well but they run on the tight side.

Jessamyn 17:14 Don't people hate American Apparel? For some reason?

mathowie 17:16 Oh womanizer yeah

Jessamyn 17:22 sleaze sleeve about it. I personally don't get on

mathowie 17:26 the other hand all the shirts are produced in LA with like American labor that's paid well and has healthcare and it's not like Chinese sweatshop labor. And they're super soluble. So I mean, I think everything's everything's great about him except the stupid owner of the company. Except for the dogs weird. What do we usually talk about first metal filter? Oh, projects, jobs, music, anything in the Music Minute.

Jessamyn 17:52 Pick those music songs like I did. I

mathowie 17:55 did Music Minute.

Cortex 17:58 I'm all Yeah, dude. There was a bunch of good music again. It seems like people keep posting good music to metal filter. Thanks, Josh from the music copter. And now whether there's a I sent Jessamyn one earlier this I loved it thing by Oh, are they? It's just a banjo guitar thing but it's just fantastic. And I guess I haven't been keeping up with exactly what he's up to. But people in the thread we're talking about? Yeah, how's the holy shit album because like that's something that I will be acquiring.

mathowie 19:01 Many times we've used a lot. It's great.

Cortex 19:07 I try and I try and pick out people whose usernames I don't necessarily recognize over at music but trying to pick out awesome stuff and or they keeps making awesome stuff so

Jessamyn 19:17 well. And sometimes I just listen to music and I'm like this this is perfect. And then it turns out to be choco cat or or are they and what do you do you know? Natori to not to not say it's great just because it's somebody who's already been great

Cortex 19:31 iron Rand was really good. We can't We can't coddle the media.

mathowie 19:37 God You're weird. Sorry. This is another song. Really uplifting song. Yeah, you are not alone anyone is out there. Shelter to secure a

nice word this sample stuff. Oh, I see together. Yeah,

Cortex 20:22 the main talk is from I am Legion, I guess which I still haven't seen. But, uh, yeah, they sample that. And there's some other samples in there that I don't recognize, but, but I don't know any samples. So, but it's great. It's just a nice little track. And he's right. It's like, let's take this gloomy movie, and let's make a happy little sort of sampling electronic out of it.

mathowie 20:42 Oh, that'd be a cool meme. You know, like the turn of the movie trailer into something happy. Like it's shining. Just do it with songs instead. Yeah. Yeah. Deliberately misrepresent our source material yet? Yes. That would be a cool, like, remix a song or a sample into something. That's the opposite of what the source material was for.

Cortex 21:04 Yeah, no, we could try and run that for the challenges next month, opposite Day Challenge. There's nothing really talking about the challenges this month so much, because the challenge is do one of the other challenges that you didn't do before? So we'll sort of see how it goes. Yeah, that challenge response really goes up and down.

mathowie 21:19 That challenge ideas like the drunken teacher coming to school and turning on a movie. Before kids

Jessamyn 21:29 scription what? Catch up on your homework Oh, I just read this book that I've kind of like this like thriller book on an airplane where it was like, taking place in like cops go to a mental institution. And it's all like what's going on? I really don't understand it. Like this is all very complicated. And then it really gets wrapped up in the Oh, actually, you're an inmate and you're the crazy person like is the Pat ending. And so like as an intelligent person, you spent a lot of time trying to figure out the plot and then at the end it's all like Oh, it was all made up. So that's my 32nd derail analogy. It made me annoyed this week.

mathowie 22:06 He's gone wild.

Jessamyn 22:07 It's spring time.

mathowie 22:10 Sada talking about auto tune No

Cortex 22:13 Yes. So So yeah, there's this there's a song featuring Auto Tune intentionally

Jessamyn 22:27 how to show care for you. Everyone knows the store except for you

Cortex 22:38 give at the beginning of this podcast, which we already heard because it's a podcast and not a couple days beforehand where we're recording it features Matt with some hot hot Auto Tune action. This song also features auto tune

mathowie 23:00 I listened I listened to my own auto tune recording a day later and it was not as good of an idea as I once thought it was the worst ideas I've ever

Unknown Speaker 23:14 Baladi and run with it

mathowie 23:16 new frenetic tune

Cortex 23:18 yeah new new new tune from phonetic aka Brad Sachs. I demand you to be my woman, which is this wonderful sort of metal thing he ran with

Unknown Speaker 23:33 it is nice to have you to find my confidence and I now know exactly why

Cortex 24:01 it's very I want to say Ozzy, but I may not know my metal well enough to name a better analog for the vocals.

mathowie 24:08 These are all hits.

Cortex 24:11 And there's also this is just cute. This is groobie with his 13 year old son Mikey singing son of a gun always starts and Mikey's doing the verses and then they both do a course together. And it's it's it's just god damn adorable.

Jessamyn 24:56 This in my headset you guys don't hear it.

Unknown Speaker 24:58 Listen to it right go crazy.

Jessamyn 25:00 Sweet. Oh, this is a great,

Cortex 25:03 I think we should we should do that more. I think that could be another challenge too although it's kind of tricky. I want to say like, you know, have kids participate on a recording but that's for people who have kids for people that don't have kids go find a small child. here but

mathowie 25:19 choco cat someone used to record on their porch with neighbor kids like

Jessamyn 25:24 oh no, no that was um

Unknown Speaker 25:26 I know s&s ranch recorded with ranch

Unknown Speaker 25:29 yeah as

Jessamyn 25:29 he works with like community neighbor kids struggle cat actually has a bunch of kids. I'm sure,

mathowie 25:35 go to a meet up there. You rent out a kid it'd be totally good.

Cortex 25:44 So the the one other one I had? Is this a sort of moment of Zen thing? There's a readings from the Tao teaching or I don't even know how to pronounce it. Yeah, yeah. So this is this is the second of two so far that man versus son has posted.

mathowie 26:24 So we're done with music. Certainly projects worth mentioned.

Jessamyn 26:28 Yes. I only want to mention this one, because I think it needs as much exposure as possible. Oh, we need three way chat. Are we on three way chat now?

Unknown Speaker 26:37 We're still we're still there. Can

Jessamyn 26:38 you get that?

Unknown Speaker 26:40 That's not a project. That's

Jessamyn 26:41 a Josh Goleman. My favorite Law Professor mefite has a redesign a community site by yesterday. Request and he doesn't mention what the site is. But I've seen what the site is. And it's actually pretty neat and interesting. So maybe on a future podcast, he'll post it to projects when we can say what it is. But for right now, he needs help quickly. Just somebody to mess around with some WordPress plugins and do some

mathowie 27:07 slightly custom. Like if you wanted to do comments on any paragraph and a giant document I think would be the way we could describe it. So imagine a 80 page document. And every single paragraph is

Jessamyn 27:19 commentable. And there are a whole bunch of plugins that work together, but it just doesn't look nice yet.

mathowie 27:24 Yeah. And so they've gotten most of the tech. I think this job listing makes it sound like there's still more tech to do, but it looked like they mostly had the tech done.

Jessamyn 27:32 And they want someone to design it and kind of pull it all together.

mathowie 27:35 Yeah, it just needs a Polish. Yep. That's that's the job. I would have mentioned. Amazing. Right? Amazing, amazing projects recently. I'm trying to think of nice. I can't think of one

Cortex 27:50 there were there were nice projects. But I didn't have anything that like, jumped out of me in the last couple of weeks. The problem might just be me.

mathowie 28:01 Oh, there was the life altering experiences, chat filter question turned into a book at Lulu. And he asked every single person he asked like 80 people if they were cool with it. I said yes. So no, that's okay.

Jessamyn 28:15 It actually he was at the Austin meetup. And I and he told me about I mean, we hung out at the Austin meetup southwest southwest meetup. And he did and he had an idea for a new project. And he said over 50% of the people said yes, yeah. To using their using their stories.

mathowie 28:31 Like, did you have a copy of it with them or anything? No. Bummer. I know. I was all about like, oh, shit, I want to see that. But I want to see it right now. Oh, he does have a free book version.

Jessamyn 28:43 Yeah, there is a free version of it. I will check and

mathowie 28:47 see what it looked like. It was like, oh, take two weeks to print and you're like, ah, two weeks? You know, I'm just lazy like that. Right. PDF. I can't put that on a Kindle. Oh, my. Oh my My first world problems are so severe. You have a Kindle. Yeah. This thing in the world. I can't think of a way to I mean, I guess it renders HTML so it counts. It renders HTML is I guess it's technically like a way to view meta filter. I guess this is probably my favorite project the status bear of all kids book.

Cortex 29:26 I wasn't sure if that was up. Last time we recorded

mathowie 29:30 or no I wasn't came up afterwards. It's just super cool.

Cortex 29:33 And nice little children's book on when

mathowie 29:37 you have when you have kids and you read children's books. Like the first thing comes to my mind is someone who I don't know. It's like the first time I looked at the web, I was like, this isn't very hard I can do. Better things why are we still reading fucking 200 year old Grimms fairy tales, you know, read

Jessamyn 29:54 frog and toad is lasting and eternal.

Cortex 29:58 God I hate frost German In their reality they know how to write a book.

Jessamyn 30:02 I bet you identify with the toad and you think frog is intrusive and rude. frog, the frog and you think Toad is a lazy do nothing.

mathowie 30:13 No, I can't remember. It's just like, sometimes. Types.

Unknown Speaker 30:16 I'm hearing an otter.

mathowie 30:20 These things have often come my friend hates literature classic should I dump him or not?

Jessamyn 30:27 There's like a frog or toad.

mathowie 30:30 This is there's always these offhand comments and the stories that put me off you know, or it's like something the author thought was normal and it's like horrible. There's something there's something progresses to the set me off one day and was like,

Jessamyn 30:45 the worst thing versus told their friends.

mathowie 30:49 I said frog ento didn't know. Frog versus toad. SmackDown

Jessamyn 30:56 like to see some derivative frog and toad works actually speaking of

mathowie 31:00 yeah, that's pretty old, right? Might be out of copyright. Maybe

Jessamyn 31:04 it's not that old. Oh, and speaking of, you know, little creepy things. I also liked the vermin ology project, just because it's some neat, just just neat monster illustrators. I like that a lot. Yeah,

mathowie 31:17 I can't believe these are done on a freakin iPhone. I was gonna. Yeah, I mean, I approve this and went Holy mother of God. How do you get that much detail at an iPhone? And maybe he just starts the sketching on an iPhone then finishes in Photoshop, but I was like, oh, man, I'm gonna post this immediately. But then I was like, Wait, but cool. He totally missed this. This is Sweetie totally. There's the response from about how the brushes work and iPhone and stuff. So that's handy.

Jessamyn 31:48 Yeah, that's yeah, the project posts was kind of interesting because people talked about it and whatever. I don't know why frog and toad is in the fictional dogs category on Wikipedia. There's no dogs and frog and toad

mathowie 32:01 won a medal of some sort on the front, called the cot. What

Jessamyn 32:05 do you mean? Some sort?

mathowie 32:07 I always forget all the metal. Newbery called the cut. Because I just heard, what's his name Neil Gaiman talking about he finally won a medal that all the medals are only for Americans. But he finally won the one international medal. I can't remember which metal is actually okay for Europeans to have.

Cortex 32:30 Speaking of drawing stuff, and

Jessamyn 32:33 very metal in 2009 Is your internet broken? Newbury? Got it? Now, you know, speaking of what,

Cortex 32:41 speaking of drying stuff, and it being hard to do on small services. I wanted to talk about this too. Yeah. Broken picture telephone, which someone posted the blue. I don't know, like a week ago or something like that. Prasad on the blue. Yeah, nobody really didn't manufacture it. But I'd seen it on the blue. And I sort of glanced at it and said, Oh, it's like eat poop your cat. And then I went on with my day and didn't really think about it at the time,

Jessamyn 33:04 especially because there's a lot of poop in it.

mathowie 33:07 Oh, the irony. So walk me through how this works.

Cortex 33:10 The way it works is, it's an exquisite corpse type game where you start with a written description, just a short piece.

Jessamyn 33:20 And you get like 10 words.

Cortex 33:22 And then the next person scription. They see that description and they have to draw on like a small like 200 by 200 pixel note, they have to draw a picture of the district

Jessamyn 33:31 colors.

mathowie 33:32 Yeah, and someone and then the next person's what? Yeah, exactly.

Cortex 33:36 And stuff like that. For however many turns that particular game goes. This is brilliant. Yeah, there's there's a bunch of good stuff. And the site's been hammered, because every it went up, and I guess it had been around before and then he redid it and sort of relaunched it and it took off and is it a dude or lady? It's a dude. It's a dude who struggles with having a name that people think is a lady's name. Was like Alicia, and yeah, sort of sounds like a girl so sorry, Alicia.

Jessamyn 34:08 This one is a good example of sort of the the ups and downs of broken picture telephone. Anytime anybody uses the brown color, somebody thinks it's poop.

Cortex 34:20 There's sort of conventions like that going on. He's sort of

Jessamyn 34:29 been a lot of times. Yeah. And so the meta talk thread turned into you know, 800 comment or something. 370 were because you can have a private game so you can play with your friends. You know, also. So meta filter people can play with other meta filter people.

mathowie 34:51 Oh, the previous one. This one has 180 comments, the new one,

Jessamyn 34:55 the meta talk thread about the thread, the one that the one that Josh also linked to

Cortex 34:59 you Yeah, yeah, they really took off that became sort of a staging ground. And so yeah, there's a bunch of people playing and the site's been struggling a lot with the stability but when it's up, it's fun. And we've we've got

Jessamyn 35:10 everybody should give them money. Yeah, they could use some donations to

mathowie 35:14 the jerk, causing the giant sideways scrollbar on the red.

Jessamyn 35:19 Oh, idiots. Who did I say?

Cortex 35:23 We're trying to we're sort of trying to manage a a running list of who was on the invite list and,

Jessamyn 35:30 and some people are bad at spaces. Yeah. And so

Cortex 35:33 they had an uninterrupted string of names and commas.

mathowie 35:39 There it is. I guess when you start editing these includes stupid ass ruining my sideways scrolling experience spirits Yes, definitely.

Cortex 35:51 It's good stuff and people should check it out. Because it's it's cracking it will destroy your mind.

Jessamyn 35:56 It's really fun. I got my sister into it. And she wound up being in a game with not on display like totally accident. Wow, it's hilarious.

mathowie 36:05 Did either draw you like as something funny?

Jessamyn 36:10 You have to stay pretty limited. And so there are certain people who try to make the game better. So anytime they have to drop poop, they turn it into a potato. And then some people will turn every potato into a poop. It's funny watching people try to kind of engineer certain things to their own. What they would prefer to drop pictures

Cortex 36:29 of Yeah. I often track it down. But I had one game where I got what was clearly a dick spurting on a doughnut and trying to find a way to turn that into something other than a dick spritz on a doughnut was fun, but

Jessamyn 36:44 drinks from hole in wall or

Cortex 36:47 I think I ended up saying like Alien ice stock tracks. The movement of young Billy Creek young Billy Keane across the giant donut or something like that, because it looked it was Datsun so it can be like from Family Circus when the kids are around. I felt I was I felt I was doing good.

mathowie 37:03 I think this thread is old enough. It's pretty old. But I think it is after we recorded. I just love the tips we talked about last time they want to know, we didn't I thought we did. But that's like the coolest. That's like one of my favorite

Jessamyn 37:19 shows. We did I didn't look at it. And you must have just talked about it. And I said Uh huh.

mathowie 37:24 I remember talking about it either recorded on the 25th. And this is from the 27th. So yeah, this is great. Like someone who's like whatever 14 Today, there's no such thing really as an arcade. You know, they don't know what like 1982 was like, you know, that was just way too long ago just to totally dead honest. What are what were arcades like you have actually paid money and waited in line to play a game.

Jessamyn 37:46 Like a dumb game with eight colors.

mathowie 37:49 I know that was over and it costs money. And then you had Oh, cheese

Jessamyn 37:53 nearby that made tons of noise right next to it. You had to talk to people and you put a quarter on the machine to save it for next time.

Cortex 38:01 Yeah, that's, you know, that's one of those things it kind of when I saw that thread, it got me thinking, you know, you look at you look at movies from the 80s. And if they've got kids and um, there's a good chance there's gonna be an arcade and I think even even like 510 years later looking at it, you know, watching it, I would think hey, you know, that's, that's something that's dated, okay, you know, the games that are in there, the fact that you've got like the 80s like pseudo punk rock arcade culture with kids trying to look it up with their spiked hairs and the rat tails or whatever, but, but that's, that's not just going to look dated, that's going to be like culturally incomprehensible to people. You know, kids watching these movies. You know, 1020 years from now they're gonna be like, What the fuck is that?

Jessamyn 38:40 What are you doing? 25 years of free first person shooters for everyone.

mathowie 38:48 Nice segue,

Jessamyn 38:49 which is from today and has 89 favorites already.

Cortex 38:53 Yeah, well, this is this is one of those reference posts. You know, you're it's a rainy day. You've got time to kill. It's got 92 Now, did it get three favorites since when you loaded the page? Yes,

Jessamyn 39:03 it was about 20 minutes ago. Oh my god. Ah, and I don't even care about first person shooters, but clearly they're very popular.

Unknown Speaker 39:12 They're good. They're good stuff.

mathowie 39:13 Just to sort of argue your point. Josh. 25 years ago like Tron came out everyone's seen and still watch his Star Wars. But Tron is kind of ridiculous. Since it's so you know, predicated on that old

Jessamyn 39:26 culture on man. Yeah,

Cortex 39:28 I gotta say the the. The old arcade games from Star Wars were better than the old Tron arcade game though. The old Tron arcade game is it's a classic, but you'd have to admit the vector graphics high fighter stuff, versus I'm going to invade the core now by shooting up

mathowie 39:45 a snake. I was thinking this is John. A lot better but still, I would take the Star Wars game any day.

Cortex 39:57 Store or game was That was awesome. I insisted that my parents take me to phos pizza. Like, you know, for the next three years after one time, we went to a pH rose. And there was that machine. It was the first time I'd ever seen it. I played a quarter on it, and I had a great time. And I just I longed for it for years afterwards, we passed a Patriots pizza and start thinking about that fucking Star

mathowie 40:18 Wars game. I can't think about

Jessamyn 40:21 without thinking of the Addams Family because they had a pinball that pinball game, which wasn't even an arcade game, but you could play it for like the equivalent of like four cents at the place that I was staying up all night playing Addams Family, because it only costs four cents, so you could play it forever and ever and ever. But then we got up the next morning and my mom was like, someone was up making pinball noises all night long last night, and I didn't get any sleep and we paid for it so

mathowie 40:48 well, I click on Tetris. I click on the Tetris link now and I get a swift download like a flash download weird weird. I think their site is fuck surd because I had successfully used it. Like last week. Oh, man, that's no good. Yeah, she's just oops, let me see. Wait, where's the other URL? This is that link just like my browser launches the download?

Jessamyn 41:15 Yeah, I get a start. Oh, your shoot is broken. your browser's fucked buddy. What the hell right that you're fucked.

mathowie 41:21 There's something about the whatever host headers firewall using.

Jessamyn 41:25 I'm using Firefox to you're using 3.0 Beta RU.

mathowie 41:29 Three point something something beta. Are you using beta? Oh 3.07 Your Firefox two? How do you live? What's it like in 1989 1989?

Jessamyn 41:41 I'm popular.

Cortex 41:43 This Tetris like doesn't work in in a inlinks. By the way, just

Jessamyn 41:47 actually I'm using 3.01. But yeah, no, I want links Tetris. Can you get right on that?

Cortex 41:54 Tetris for links? Don't they have already for like Emacs? If you really? Emacs? No, I'm just saying it's probably there. I'm not going to reinvent that wheel.

Jessamyn 42:04 Unless they have it for VI

Cortex 42:06 I don't think they put touches and fly but who knows. They've done weirder stuff.

mathowie 42:12 To move right.

Cortex 42:13 But I like I like this the whole Tetris HD thing. It's, it's cute. It's a nice sort of entry in the taking something fun and managing to intentionally destroy the fun thing, all the fun from it. Someone in the thread mentioned they spent like 20 minutes completing their first line. And then they realized that spent 20 minutes completing a line in Tetris. So I thought that was great. People started Yeah, playing with it and someone posted something via waxy of someone who could just let it run. And there were a bunch of just a bunch of things that fell until it filled up and actually looked like something out of a cellular automata it looked like automata I apparently always say that wrong. But anyway, looked at like something out of Conway's Life or really 2d or 1d Auto moto automata I'm just I'm gonna stop saying the word. I'm just gonna stop ever trying. Yes, yes, the laundry mats. But ya know, it's got a really interesting sort of thing going on there that that looks like something out of Wolfram book. And then me and a few other people in there started geeking out over like the slope of Tetris to at the bottom thread, which I thought was really fun. Because it's fun to take games and turn them into math. For for kicks,

Jessamyn 43:34 keep talking.

Unknown Speaker 43:36 Doesn't everybody love that?

Jessamyn 43:40 Library?

mathowie 43:42 Oh, call it my surprised face.

Jessamyn 43:49 The thing that was the coolest about it is not that there are libraries with interesting collections, which we all No, but that the thread turned into a bunch of library dorks as we know, there are lots of on meta filter, talking about what their favorite online library collections were. So it was a nice little thread that you can go to if you want to look at pretty stuff on the internet. That's it.

mathowie 44:08 Holy crap. It was awesome.

Cortex 44:10 It was didn't didn't. Was this the one where somebody showed up? Or was that a different Smithsonian related post? It was a post for somebody.

Jessamyn 44:19 I think that was the one about museum guy versus web geek.

Unknown Speaker 44:23 Okay.

mathowie 44:25 I think this should be like, every podcast should have a secret word Pee Wee's Playhouse moment where we go. We all have to do we all have to review the people who showed up to comment on their own posts, kind of what famous people signed up to? Or

Jessamyn 44:44 the guy who was one of the people at whatever the

mathowie 44:49 juggler, Douglas Rushkoff?

Jessamyn 44:51 Yeah I know. I didn't know someone

mathowie 44:54 from Wells Fargo showed up Yeah, to a Wells Fargo.

Jessamyn 44:59 Yeah. Yeah,

Cortex 45:01 filter somebody, somebody signed, actually, it was like signed up by somebody actually like their social marketing division or something like that paid for an accountant, someone from customer service used it to say, hey person who had a bad experience, get a hold of me, we'll see if we can fix it, which is

Jessamyn 45:18 kind of cool. That's how you hope that stuff will work.

Cortex 45:21 It's a little bit terrifying in a metaphor context, just because I worry about that good intention leading to sort of weird Ritz invasion stuff happening, but so far, the Wells Fargo account just did that thing. And it was fun. It's

mathowie 45:33 ripe for a misstep. But they've been awesome. So far. That was a pretty cool event.

Cortex 45:38 And I've seen that same sort of thing happening on like, Twitter. Somebody from meta filter,

Jessamyn 45:44 I think. Thank you lazy people.

Cortex 45:47 Oh, right. Yeah. So someone was complaining about Comcast and how their connections sucked. This was a few weeks ago, someone from IRC. And so they they just randomly bitch about it on Twitter, because, hey, Twitter's good for that. And then they get replied to by like Comcast, Betty or something like that is like, Oh, really? What can I do to help? I'm getting this error. And she's like, Oh, that's weird. Let me check with the tech guys. And this is like, Here, try this is it better is like, yeah, it's fixed. So it's point A is fucking Comcast. And point B is, hey, thanks for helping me troubleshoot my problem, Comcast, it was just kind of neat to watch.

Jessamyn 46:30 Well, and that kind of thing makes me so crazy. Because it's like, Oh, my God, this is a five minute solution. And because I don't want to wait on hold for 45 minutes. I've spent six days sorting it out, when one dedicated person with access to Intel can fix my problem in five minutes. Yep. Figured that every problem can be solved in five minutes. And then yeah,

mathowie 46:50 General, knowledgeable geek frustration with all customer service, which is yes, I turned it on and off knowing not a normal idiot. Yes.

Jessamyn 47:00 Router and look at the logs and tell me what's going on with the fucking lights.

mathowie 47:05 What we really want is like, take me I just called I'm not waiting more than 30 seconds, take me to level three of yours.

Cortex 47:12 Let's just Let's skip the farmer, you decide to just escalate. But the problem is, you know, from their side, I mean, from the from the customer service side knows how to say escalate. Well, yeah. And and you've, you've heard, for every smart person who actually can say, no, look, I handled all that. Let's move to the next step. You've got a dozen people like, Man, I know what I'm doing. And they don't know what the fuck they're doing. And it turns out that they didn't turn on their monitors. And so it's like, it's a, you're fucked either way, if you're working, sort of tech support like that, because you can't trust people to be competent in sort of judging their own competence on the subject. You can't trust people to

Jessamyn 47:48 actually swallow their pride say, Do you want to be in the long line? Or the short line? Yeah, yeah, like shortline, please. Yeah. And then, and then they yell at somebody.

mathowie 47:57 That reminds me of my local doctor, they changed their giant waiting rooms, which had two wings to a six side and a well side. And they said, nobody sat on the sixth side ever. I would totally sit there. Even though even the people coughing and hacking would go to the well sides. Like I don't want to be by other sick people, even though they were the infections.

Unknown Speaker 48:19 That's pretty sweet.

Jessamyn 48:19 It's going on here, Josh with your sample links.

Cortex 48:22 I figured as long as we were talking about game stuff, this was just a nice post that I liked talking about some changes made to like the term and scrabble dictionary. I think the post actually may have been sort of out of date. Like maybe this happened like a year ago. But it turned into people

Jessamyn 48:36 think a really long time ago. Zod has been a word forever. Yeah, I

Cortex 48:39 don't know. But the post was recent. And it was fun, because it was people talking about Scrabble, and that always entertains me. And it had a link back to this AskMe Metafilter post that we probably talked about at the time. Yeah, we talked about scrubbing, scrubbing

mathowie 48:55 at someone and losing on Scrabble. And I feel inadequate about that.

Jessamyn 49:01 I was just reading National Geographic there China article and they actually use the word saw and I swear to God, I was like, the Scrabble people must have paid them to use that in a sentence. That seems more like a real word. Because I was like everybody else. That's a fake word. But you know, I read it in a sentence.

mathowie 49:19 We should that's a good segue and asked Metafilter

Jessamyn 49:22 No, we forgot the kuti man post, which was the most popular post Metafilter

Cortex 49:28 Oh, shit. Yeah, that was going around the internet a lot. I mean, it's not shocking. It did so well here.

Jessamyn 49:34 51 users? Yeah, as a favorite, and

Unknown Speaker 49:37 it's great. It's,

mathowie 49:38 I think I sort of like saw it on 25 blogs, and then loaded up going, Oh, this is gonna be great. And I was like, Oh, it's just a remix of a bunch of it's really cool. It's really awesome. But I thought it would just be more earth shattering Well,

Cortex 49:51 yeah, I think he got overtaken somewhat by its its own hype. Like it just everybody was saying this is the best thing in the history of the world. But it's um, it's really good. He did really solid work and it's a really nice the YouTube angle on it just kind of more so you know as sort of like a gimmicky way to do your sourcing in the first place. And the the presentation with the sort of faux YouTube setup for the actual page was very nice, too. It's a

mathowie 50:14 logical progression of like Girl Talk, grabbing the entirety of popular music and making something cool. And this guy is just grabbing the entirety of YouTube and making something cool.

Unknown Speaker 50:25 Yeah. So that was totally sweet.

Jessamyn 50:29 Yeah, yeah. That's one of those things where if I read other blogs, I would maybe have thought it was so great. But I don't have a lot to hide the fact that it made its way to Metafilter. Exactly. But it filter who hates weddings? Everybody? Weddings? Weddings, right? Bring a gift or not? And is it tacky to ask for money, which I swear to God comes up more often than you would think. It's one of those things that like, I never think about, you know, I go to maybe a couple weddings a year. And I don't think about these things. But people have really strong opinions on both sides of this topic. And they fight about it all the time, including recently.

Cortex 51:16 I have very strong opinions along the lines of not wanting to go to weddings. Yes, I think I think this may not be totally unrelated to what you just said. But yeah, it's it's what a what a weird thing. I should not go on at length but I I find I find weddings in general. They are unlike how I want to live my life is weddings. But you're married right? Yeah, we we stopped at the courthouse on the way to work one workday?

Jessamyn 51:45 Yeah.

mathowie 51:47 I have very much of the mindset, you should throw a party for your friends. And if you're, if a few relatives want to show up fine, but it's not for them. It's so hard to drill that into especially bright eyed 22

Unknown Speaker 52:00 year olds, you know, everybody grows up with

Jessamyn 52:02 different registry. Does that mean no registry? God? Yeah. Yeah. I think part of this is how much your parents run your life, you know, whether they're gonna totally give you a hard time or whether they've given you a hard time during your whole growing up about the proper etiquette. You know, like, I'm one of those like, hey, travel more than 500 miles. I'm not bringing a gift. I'm sorry. And I am the gift. Yeah, I'm the gift. But people in those threads, man, subhuman, subhuman. They think I am

Cortex 52:30 different. It's weird how different expectations are and you know, it can't just be how you were raised per se. Because I mean, I don't think I don't think my parents raised us to expect one thing or the other as far as weddings when we went to weddings as a family were once awhile and that was about that. But you know, I'm totally like weddings are silly bullshit. Don't bother go to the courthouse, just, you know, have a good time and be glad you're married to someone you like. My sister is total total wedding person, you know, she she she intends to wet the heck out of herself when when it happens. So you know, it's obviously there's just something very personal that happens. Simply lady,

Jessamyn 53:11 I guess you know that you're married to a female?

Cortex 53:15 I am. But but but the female I'm married didn't want a big wedding either. So we know,

mathowie 53:19 I know. I think Jessamyn you're on to something. There's a total like linear you could graph it of like people how close they are to their parents and how traditional their wedding is. It's probably a one to one relationship as well. A

Jessamyn 53:30 research drive up window in Las Vegas. What does that mean about me and my folks? Enjoy this a lot.

mathowie 53:41 I actually enjoy going to weddings have friends in their 30s who hate their parents, because then it's a great party where the family feels unwell. And it's awesome.

Jessamyn 53:51 But you can still meet people's grandparents and stuff, which is actually kind of fun. Because a lot of you know people that you're friends with once you're in your 30s you might not know like, their whole families the way you would if they were friends from just out of college. Yeah, true. And I can always hang out and chat up grandpa. Like.

mathowie 54:08 Here's another one I loved, which is what are the offices like at Charlie Rose? What are the hallways like? Because someone worked as an intern, a temporary search on Charlie Rose and talked about the office spaces and studio spaces and how they're separated. I thought that was the awesomest background knowledge ever.

Jessamyn 54:27 That's great. There was a library post I really liked.

mathowie 54:31 Oh, also last detail on that post. Comment is the best Charlie Rose has a pair of sneakers and blazoned with the logo for Snoop Dogg's movie The wash on his desk. It makes no sense whatsoever. Library filter,

Jessamyn 54:51 I was just people like what are the questions people asked at the library and it was somebody thinking about going into a library job, and I think they were hoping it would be like how do I spell You know, new monocular microscopic Silikal vulcano, Croesus or something. But really it's usually about where's the bathroom?

mathowie 55:06 Yeah. And can you make that homeless man go away or something? Right right else is popular. I

Jessamyn 55:12 can't my my papers jammed in my printer, etc. But I liked it because it was real true. And all of our library people came in and we're like,

mathowie 55:19 how many times the word bathroom show up in that page bathroom? Gosh, Wow, can you that's a pretty important thing. Oh, shit. Wow. Well, column. Other. Every other comment is

Jessamyn 55:35 bathroom even though I called him out.

Unknown Speaker 55:37 Yeah, no. It's cute.

mathowie 55:42 I'm taking the high road.

Cortex 55:47 I have no AskMe. I've come to the conclusion. I don't think I actually read AskMe Metafilter. I don't think I go there. I'm having

mathowie 55:54 no human curiosity whatsoever.

Cortex 55:56 I dropped by I just I don't know. I think I think I have enough random things entertain me on the internet that I don't. I used to hit it up more, but I just don't read as much.

mathowie 56:07 Because I don't. Yeah, I

Cortex 56:09 don't know. Maybe I'm no longer curious about anything.

Jessamyn 56:13 Wrapped up at some point. Yeah, I enjoyed the random acts of kindness even though it was kind of chatty. But it was one of those like, you know, I'm trying to like do nice things. I need some suggestions for nice things. Which was not entirely different from the one that I saw recently, which I'm not totally sure where it is, which is like, I'm trying to do stuff with my friends who never have good ideas about what to do. So how can we what's a good list of like fun stuff to do when there's nothing to do for adult? Ladies? I'll see if I can find the link to that because it was in the last like day or two. But this one was just like, you know, ways to be nice and some of the dislike paying for the Starbucks, you know of the person behind you. But tell him it's like putting away shopping carts and other kinds of, you know, helping the old people that live next door kind of thing, which I actually think is nice.

mathowie 57:08 Putting randomly putting money in parking meters. Being nice when you're driving comes up a lot. It looks like that helps. I mean, it was like the nice place. Yeah. Kiva sweet. Do you think about it? Or do you have any other favorites?

Unknown Speaker 57:28 There's meta stock stuff that

mathowie 57:29 happened? Oh, what happened? And

Jessamyn 57:31 what happened?

Cortex 57:33 There was there? Well, there was like, 700 favorites related threads. Which was just sort of notable, it was like a storm of let's talk about what should happen with favorites and what favorites are for and what's wrong with?

Jessamyn 57:46 Here's the thing from before. Yes. And they got really

Cortex 57:51 long. Yeah, there was this was a bunch of it. I mean, there's nothing really fascinating about it, unless you're like me, and you just find those discussions fascinating inherently. But uh, but there was a bunch of it. I thought that was kind of interesting. But there was also a Halcyon, I think asked what the dot means. And that was kind of awesome, because I don't remember last time that happened. And it used to happen all the time. And I had this theory that it did happen all the time. Works. Yes, FAQ, actually is doing what is supposed to do most of the time. And hey, we can accept an occasional failure like that. But I went searching after that could not fac I say FAQ a lot. Just just for clarity sake. It depends. You know, if we know we're talking about FAQs, I might say fact. But it's less ambiguous out of context, I think. But But yeah, so I went hunting for threads about the dock, because I knew there were a ton of them. I remember reading them all the time, you know, four or five, six years ago. And there there were like barely any tag that way. And it's hard to search for it. Because how do you search for a.or? Even worse, what's with the dot. But I tried a couple different things then of tracking down I think, like a dozen meta talk threads, probably more than that. So I take them all with like the.or just dot I think now. So if you really want to go see all the threads, or at least many of the threads about what's up with the dot and obituary threads, you can do that now. Just by checking the dot tag. There's 23 posts, I ended up with that were tagged. I think most of that stuff I did that afternoon,

mathowie 59:21 whereas the dot,

Jessamyn 59:23 dot sort of meta conversation, we should probably mention that Josh has been hard at work, not at work, or about worth doing a whole bunch of that nerdy statistics stuff that he really likes. He helped me out and gave me a bunch of numbers for my moderation panel that I was at at South by Southwest which went great. Thanks for asking. Yeah, well,

mathowie 59:45 yeah. Let's talk about it. How did it go? To ask you about?

Jessamyn 59:51 Yeah, it went great. It was me and Heather from Flickr and this guy from YouTube and a guy from Current TV and a guy from Etsy, but it was like one those things it was in the big room. So it was like 800 people or something. And so it was just huge. And so we only answered like a couple questions because of course when you've got five people Yeah, nobody gets to talk very long. I think really what happened is everybody wanted here had their talk about Flickr, and to a lesser extent, wanted to hear that YouTube guy talk about YouTube mica Mica. But really, you know, they had to listen to the rest of us dorks, too. And, you know, if you follow sort of the Twitter that was going on around that time, Heather was sort of talking about, you know, trying to encourage women to get online and, and made a grand gesture to the audience talked about looking out on the vast sea of penis. And that was pretty much the repeatable moment from from the entire event, but I think it went really well. Clay Shirky came up and told Heather, he really wanted to work with her on something or other and

mathowie 1:00:54 cool, but yeah, did you get the hammer the YouTube person? Did you hammer the YouTube person over there the crap I was saying

Jessamyn 1:00:59 he was hammering himself honestly, like, basically, he was like, well, everybody knows the internet's just for sex. Right? And so really what we have to do, and I was like, What are you 14? Like, it was clear that his opinion about the world I believe, was reflected in YouTube's moderation style. But like I said, Before, he spends a lot of time just doing like, law stuff, you know, like keeping kids from being abused on YouTube. And like, he has to do a lot higher level stuff. But honestly, he's also just less, you know, more hands off about the whole thing. I think everybody was amused that YouTube actually had moderators. And somebody from the audience did ask at one point, whether we removed comments, like just a flat question. And you know, how there was like, Yeah, but usually not until after blah, blah, blah. And I was like, Yeah, but usually only and asked Metafilter and not so much the other parts of the site, blah, and he just like, wouldn't answer the question. Like, it was an easy question to have a straight answer. And he just didn't have one, I guess, or didn't want to answer it or whatever. He he came across as squirrely to my opinion. I mean, he was really nice guy. I enjoyed talking to enjoyed hanging out with him. But I was like, God, like, really, that's it. That's it. That's all you to moderation is about. But Josh ran some numbers for me. Cortex ran some numbers for me that led to just this really great posts on his website that talked a little bit about the mathematics of what people do on the site that I don't think made its way into a regular metal talk post. No,

Unknown Speaker 1:02:34 I don't think it did.

Jessamyn 1:02:36 Yeah, so I thought it'd be worth pointing out here because people should people should know about it. Oh, it's really interesting.

mathowie 1:02:46 On the on the metal filter stats, stuff, I totally pulled 10,000 people out of my out of the air out of thin air, I can't believe it's like, oh, well, 9800 people actually was like, what I was just saying, I knew there was maybe 40,000 I'm like, maybe 10,000 or even active, maybe only like 500 even leave comments. I mean, these are total guesses, but they're probably pretty true.

Cortex 1:03:13 Well, it's more than that on comments. It's in the 1000s on comments on a monthly basis. But yeah, it is, I think it was like 3000 or so um, on unique people commenting and like 12,000. measurably visiting, although the methodology was a little bit flawed there. So it's, there's some definite give or take to it. But yeah, about that. So it was about that spot on. But we'd seen that, that those numbers that PB had put together on the labs page before, so that might have been sort of Q and u subconsciously, even if you were just sort of thrown out a number.

Jessamyn 1:03:45 And as it was, I mostly just showed those numbers around. It didn't talk about them too much. Because it was literally like each of us got to talk for like, six or seven minutes after sort of introductions and stuff. So there wasn't a lot of time. Like I was ready to go with the stats, but I got the feeling that really nobody else was like either they didn't have them or they're kind of proprietary or whatever. So it was useful for me and I was happy to talk to people about it. But yeah, other people not so interested.

mathowie 1:04:12 Alright, I think that's about enough for this week. Month. Terrific. All right.