Podcast 100 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 100: The Big 100 (2015-01-07).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Unknown Speaker 0:00 And welcome to the metal filter,

mathowie 0:10 podcast. Hello, and welcome to episode 100 of the metal filter podcast. I know. Wow, yeah. So Hi, Matt, how are we?

Jessamyn 0:23 I'm Jessamyn. West.

Cortex 0:24 And I'm Josh Mullard, aka cortex.

mathowie 0:27 Wow. And how's everyone doing with this? 100th? Episode

Jessamyn 0:31 100 is numerically amazing. Did you know that it's the sum of the first nine prime numbers? Really? Wow,

Cortex 0:38 how did I not know that? That's pretty fucking dope. Yeah. Why does 100 even need I mean, it's 100. It's already got a lot going on. I'm a little angry that now for hogging that, because it's like, you know, you don't need it. Everybody already knows about you. You're the hundo.

mathowie 0:56 That's like saying, I don't know Christmas is the sum of every holiday or something

Jessamyn 1:00 saying Christmas is also on the Fourth of July.

mathowie 1:05 It's already good enough as it is. What's the highest prime number like in the 70s?

Cortex 1:13 Highest prime number under 100? Yeah, like, probably 9797. Sounds pretty

Jessamyn 1:19 well, because it's not 98 or 99. Good. Wait,

mathowie 1:22 if you total them, you get way more than 100.

Cortex 1:25 For first nine is prime number 2357.

Jessamyn 1:31 Just moving my lips here and everybody's what they said

Cortex 1:35 it's because we don't have a video podcast. So we can't see your lips moving. So we don't know that you're actually talking. There's no way for us to like that time that Matt was on the podcast, but he wasn't there.

Jessamyn 1:45 That was pretty good. We should do that again. Sometimes. That's a call back

Cortex 1:48 to before we just hit record. hope everybody enjoyed that little inside the studio joke there.

mathowie 1:55 We our first one was like February 2018.

Jessamyn 1:59 I have one more thing about 100. Did you know that there's 100 prime numbers whose digits go in order. Like like, you know, like a number 1234. The digits are actually also in their own numerical order. There's only 100 Prime's, whose digits go strictly ascending. Cool, interesting. Cool. How do you even know those things? You can't know those things? I

Cortex 2:18 feel like that's the sort of thing you know, because we got computers, like there's a bunch of neat facts about numbers that we've still would have no idea if they were true. If we couldn't just tell a computer to go to check it for us. Yeah, go look at these numbers and tell me some things about it.

mathowie 2:34 Can we ask what? Jordan? You know, is s. She? Yeah, like do they run computers all night on on ridiculously obscure math problems? That's a good

Cortex 2:46 question. I mean, to some extent, the answer must be yes. I mean, I know there's a ton of computing power that's been thrown at just sort of trying to brute force questions about large sets of numbers. But yeah, I'd be curious how much how much it's

Jessamyn 3:01 just grind. It's like Bitcoin mining, just grind grind grind. I've been interested in Bitcoin again, because at the Internet Archive, we all got Bitcoins for Christmas holiday time.

mathowie 3:14 That's like giving away pottery.

Jessamyn 3:18 Or getting a scratch card. I mean, you can buy stuff on overstock.com and Tiger Direct. I gave mine away

mathowie 3:27 every day. You don't spend that you lose money. Well,

Jessamyn 3:31 that's what's been happening lately is the Bitcoins been plummeting? And so it's like, whoa, thanks for this fun gift. I'm just watching myself. Broker I mean, you know, not very broke, but still, but so I'm interested in

Cortex 3:44 it's like getting someone a pet as a gift. You know, everyday it should get them closer to dead. So

Jessamyn 3:51 I did not go there with a new kitten.

Cortex 3:54 years left.

mathowie 3:57 We had a kitten last year. Yeah, there are diseases, man.

Cortex 4:04 That new kitten is a is cute, though.

Jessamyn 4:06 I cute. I've been enjoying pictures of the new kitten. Yeah. What's it saying?

mathowie 4:12 To him? You? Gene Fitzherbert? It's the character from Tangled. Yeah, it's the guy entangled with the iron pan or whatever that guy

Jessamyn 4:24 fits her for. I'm just going to look up a picture because I have no idea what you're talking about. The handsome guy. Yeah, I saw the movie. I just never remember what anybody's name is. He's got one of those like hipster chin beards,

Cortex 4:36 right? I'm gonna pretend you just said Frank Herbert. That's so cool.

Jessamyn 4:42 He's better known as Flynn Rider.

mathowie 4:44 Yeah, the shelter we got him from names all their pets after obscure Disney characters or something like that. Not an obscure Disney character. Well, that's not as human as real character name. It's like his real name. But yeah, I didn't know,

Jessamyn 5:00 you know, cats actually don't know their names all the time. So you could just give it his own name.

mathowie 5:07 To anyway, yeah.

Jessamyn 5:09 Herbert.

mathowie 5:11 So 100 Man, we started in February of 2007 or eight.

Jessamyn 5:18 I cannot believe this. It was

Cortex 5:22 before, it would have to be 2007. Because the first podcast episode that I was on, I was on as a guest, and was not yet. It's a link on a website.

Jessamyn 5:33 Look it up.

mathowie 5:34 I'm on page 810. Yeah, I think it's 2007 which is pretty cool. Eight years. That's not to definitely 2007. Wow. Yeah. All right.

Cortex 5:46 I can start doing math like that. Now, if I want math like what now? Now? 2007 can be eight years ago instead of seven years ago. That's

Jessamyn 5:53 except it's only like five days late. Yeah, yeah. Wait, there's a couple random ones in here that don't have transcripts? Oh, the metal filter music holiday podcasts back when that was a thing. And nothing before Episode 42 Oh, we can go to some back podcasts things. transcriptions that would be nice.

Cortex 6:14 We should we should take a note from one of my favorite podcasts. You talking you to to me? What I can't even parse. It's a podcast by Scott Ackerman of common. Adam Scott from Parks and Rec and it's on. They're both YouTube fans. And they ended up doing a podcast about YouTube called you talking YouTube to me. And it's fantastic. And

Jessamyn 6:39 I still recommend it and listen to it. Well, it's

Cortex 6:41 if you would be disinterested because you don't want to hear people talking endlessly about minutiae of you too. Don't let that stop you. Because they do both actually like you too. And they both are like yours long fans, but they managed to do very little talking about you too, and mostly just the two of them bullshitting. Like you'd expect them to when left alone together. So it's really great, but they did a they did a commentary episode about their first episode, where they played their first episode and then talk to each other about their first episode over and then you know, maybe we should maybe we should want that for him. It was pretty it was pretty fucking distracting to listen to so

mathowie 7:19 video you bring down that's

Cortex 7:22 with audio. They just turned down the audio some and yeah, it's it was the dumbest thing and it was fantastic.

Jessamyn 7:27 So it's like Mystery Science Theater. 3000 Except they're listening to themselves.

Cortex 7:31 Yeah, it's like if they MST three Cade an episode of MST, 3k which, if they haven't done that, I'm surprised because I was

mathowie 7:37 gonna ask you Josh about Comedy Bang Bang, because like, it got out into the podcast fee. No, listen to one that was like three hours really. And then, over the course like three or four days I listened to an entire episode. And, man, it's just like two and a half hours of straight up improv. Like, it's crazy, basically. I

Cortex 7:54 mean, that sounds like a long one, too. It's like a holiday special. Like an hour, an hour and a half. But, but ya know, it's just a big pile of the sort of freeform. bullshitting, and it's like

mathowie 8:07 when you see the Godfather when you're 30 like I did for the first time and Simpsons suddenly made every joke for The Simpsons ever. Oh, I get it.

Jessamyn 8:16 You know, that Fat Tony. Oh, gosh.

mathowie 8:19 Why me mean I could do with some of the references, you know, the direct ones, but um, I went and saw Andy Daly, who's like a frequent guest on it do stand up and it's like, I've heard him do stand up 1000 times on his albums, seeing him on TV shows. He shows up and he just starts talking like an old west guy and everyone personal applause and I was like one

Jessamyn 8:40 that's always hard to live to because you can't like get on your phone and be like, what is happening?

mathowie 8:44 And he did four or five characters that had to be Comedy Bang Bang characters. Everyone was nuts over the moon for all his characters. I was like, what show did I sign up for? And then I realized I should listen to Comedy Bang Bang more often. Because it seems like like people like Paul F. Tompkins. They do the same character. I'm looking for different podcasts. You know, they're

Jessamyn 9:05 right. Paul has like a couple major characters, I think and then like some minor ish ones.

mathowie 9:11 He did some ridiculous was in no not Ian Fleming. He did some really ridiculous Jewish film executive from the 40s or something on this one episode I heard and it's like he never broke his accent in like, two hours. It was kind of incredible.

Cortex 9:27 This one although he he regularly laughs out loud when he's on stuff that's like like he'll stay in character but but he will just like, you know, Barker's when someone else does something that he finds funny. I like talking a lot. He's a super funny guy.

mathowie 9:42 Pft Alright, metal filter. Podcast, right? Hi,

Jessamyn 9:49 guys, well, we were gonna meet last week and then I had to get my windshield replaced and they found a giant

Cortex 9:55 slave Yes, nightmare. So adjustments like oh, we gotta we gotta push it back a couple hours. So on Friday because

Jessamyn 10:03 I was driving home from holiday time and my windshield had a crack in it. And I was like, Oh yeah, it had been in my dad's for a month that I've been driving my dad's car. And then I was like, alright, so I made an appointment on the internet with windshield world, and was super stoked, right. I've got an appointment at one podcast at three, no problem. And I'm sitting in the waiting room drinking my free eggnog coffee. And this dude comes in, like, I gotta show you something. And I'm like, is it something cool? And he's like, kinda, and basically, long story short, it turns out, there's this giant mouse nest, that's in my, in my air vents, like, they have to take off your windshield. And then they take off that thing kind of under your windshield, where the air intake goes into your goes into your whatever. And it just turns out that there was mice living and they weren't there anymore. They were absent mice. I was an absentee mouse landlord.

mathowie 11:05 Every mouse nest I've ever seen in a car pulled from a barn from 50 years ago.

Jessamyn 11:11 Really big, right? Like, like, it was the size of like my head and then some like I spread it apart a little for photographic. So you could really see what

mathowie 11:19 happened in six weeks is amazing. Six weeks, two

Jessamyn 11:22 months, not very long. And my car didn't like smell the best, but it's always kind of smelled not awesome. Just because it smells like feel like it's an old car. It's a 99 but it smelled kind of bad. And the dudes like I mean, and they were so nice about it like that's like their nightmare as like a lady taken a car to a mechanic is like they're gonna find something that proves you don't know how to own an automobile and then tease you about it mercilessly because you still owe the money. But these guys were like incredibly nice, friendly. They thought it was weird too, but they weren't dicks about it. Fixed it, cleaned it out, rinsed it all out, put it all back together. And now I have no mouse test and a much cleaner car bias I missed the podcast

mathowie 12:06 is that in the like plastic vent.

Jessamyn 12:10 Like underneath the bottom of the windshield, there's little vents and that's where the air intake is for like you know your engine and also the fans and stuff. It's kind of like where the motor is for the windshield wipers but there's a whole kind of tube under there that's open to the outside so that air can come in and circulate through your the cabin of your car. So mice can't get all the way into your car but they can get as close as possible. And then they just hold up there for wintertime

mathowie 12:40 to windshield question for you why? I had like a small you know rocket my windshield made a small crack or something like it's it was there for two years. And then one day while it was snowing, I think I went snowboarding or something. You know, I got into sub freezing temperatures and crank the heater. Everything stretches all the way across a in a matter of an hour. That's what they say. Yeah, so I was like, okay, physics probably right. And then the second thing was on my Honda truck when I had the windshield replaced, the car was never the same ever again. Like I remember contacting the dealer going, Hey, man, I need a new windshield. This car is only a couple years old. You know, what do you guys do? And they were like, hands up. They're like, I don't know go the Yellow Pages. We can't help you. Like there's they did not want any part of it. And so I went with some national, you know, windshield replacement guy. Sure. It's like the car squeaked in Crete ever since it never leaves.

Cortex 13:42 But never leaked.

mathowie 13:43 I think that was their motto on the side of the van.

Cortex 13:45 But after that it was never the same. So so it peaked and squeaking leak, but never.

mathowie 13:50 It's like the window was 99% fitting or something. I had a car after that for like the next two years I owned it. I was just like, oh, every time you like, go down the driveway, you can just hear the car like squeak. And like

Jessamyn 14:05 what do you do, right? Because it works, right? Just

mathowie 14:08 like, Oh, this is what the dealer didn't want to touch it because it's like you think it's a car part? Right? It's a windshield. That's what the factory makes give me a new factory windshield and they're like, Oh, we don't do it. We don't do it. Because they probably don't want to ruin cars. I don't know. I

Jessamyn 14:22 don't think it ruins it but it does probably destabilize it. I mean, I don't know neither of those were questions but

mathowie 14:31 first one was does that is that how it happened to you? And the second one, like Does your car seem the same? Does it seem as good?

Jessamyn 14:37 Yeah, my car seems the same but my car is kind of I mean, it's it's 16 years old, so it already kind of sucks. I mean, it's a forester all it has to do is get up and down hills in the snow and it does that. But yeah, I mean mine seems the same and there was like rust underneath the windshield. So the guy like sanded it all down. He was awesome. I left him a review on Yelp. Nobody had left them review on Yelp before Oh, That's what I love about Vermont.

mathowie 15:02 Also your Subaru in Vermont is like a reference device to car people. Like they get to work on, you know, 50 a week. Exactly.

Jessamyn 15:10 And probably why it's a thing. I'm sure we'll get lots of podcast listeners talking about the various windshield stuff. I mean, the big deal was I brought it into the place and they were like, I don't even see the crack and I had to, I was like, I you have to fix this crack because I can't get the car inspected. And they were like, we don't even see it. And I had to point it out to them. I probably could have gotten the car inspected. Anyhow, you have inspections. I live now they took off my windshield with my inspection sticker. So now like the clock is ticking, I'm driving illegally, right and dirty. It's weird

mathowie 15:41 Oregon. Like if you had to do air quality checks just in Portland immediate area, nothing else you can run a 1965 tractor if you want if it has turned signals, you know, like they don't care. So weird.

Jessamyn 15:53 I love the Pacific Northwest for that. I mean, moving from California, of course, because they're crazy about like admissions there. Yeah, around here. They just want to get the hobos off the road, because, you know, everybody knows that. They pretty much let you drive drunk all the time because they can't not and so yeah, crazy. Okay, because what do you do you live in the hills and you have a job? And you know, you get Dewey's? And then they're like, but I have to get to work well, nerves are.

mathowie 16:22 Okay, metal filter.

Jessamyn 16:24 Filter was great this month. Yes.

mathowie 16:27 And there's a cool job. There's two cool jobs, fake jobs. One the fix the XML, my blog post is the one you picked. Well, it's seriously like an hour of work for anyone. I kind of like hope it's already been fixed. But it's someone who has an export of their blog or blog and they just don't know how to do regex it sounds like to you know, import it into another system. It's

Jessamyn 16:54 done that how can you have experience with Unix, Linux, das Java, Python and basic and not know how to do this?

Cortex 17:00 Well, okay, if you've never done like web stuff, specifically, or metadata management than meta data

Jessamyn 17:05 management

mathowie 17:06 Yeah, this is a nightmare ginormous pit. I

Jessamyn 17:09 just see loss of control F's using Microsoft Word and it's all fine. Yeah, that's true. And somebody helps cardinality with this.

mathowie 17:17 Yes. And then Oden's dream is looking for someone to test drive a Tesla across the country, which is actually a difficult job because how many Tesla's have most people ever been in what would you compare it to?

Jessamyn 17:29 That's near me. No, the cars in San Jose and he's near me.

mathowie 17:34 Yeah, so like, you should

Cortex 17:36 fly to San Jose and drive the car back.

mathowie 17:38 I've written in one Tesla it was kind of like an amazing golf cart. So I don't know what to compare and

Jessamyn 17:44 I'm gonna totally drop them a note and offer to drive it back cross country for

mathowie 17:48 that might take forever, but

Jessamyn 17:50 it gives a shit. I mean, nothing but time,

mathowie 17:53 dude, it would be the ultimate research trip because you there is a charger every you know, whatever. 200 miles but it like careful planning. Right? Did they did it last winter, right? Yeah, they wrote they drove two of them across country and like they went through like what? North Dakota in the middle of snow blizzards. It was pretty impressive.

Jessamyn 18:12 Well, those cars aren't very heavy. I wonder about that? Because they're heavy. They're batteries, but they're not heavy. Like they have a whole engine and um,

mathowie 18:20 well, no, they're like 5000 pounds. They're there. They're like SUV heavy. Really? Yeah. Fascinating. All right, like remember the two seater? Like racy Tesla, like that thing is 2000 pounds lighter than the sedan. I keep

Jessamyn 18:35 forgetting you're a gearhead and I should ask you my car questions. Model S the Model X. Oh, this is I was thinking about the other one. Yeah, the X doesn't exist yet.

Cortex 18:48 I kind of want to post a listing to ask them to drive like a 1987 Honda Civic five miles for me just to let me know what it's like.

mathowie 18:56 Give you a full report. Please, please

Cortex 18:59 drive across Portland, Maine.

mathowie 19:03 And send me a postcard and

Jessamyn 19:06 fuel costs $650 For what for electric for one of the Tesla's I guess

mathowie 19:12 yeah, they say it cost about a Model S they say like a buck or two a night. That sounds about right, like two bucks a night if you just plug it in when you go home. That's cheap ish. Yeah, it's cheap. Like I said, cheaper than gas. Two bucks a night of course it's cheaper than gas. Yes. insanely cheap.

Cortex 19:31 Depends on how much you drive though. Like we don't drive a whole lot. So you know, it sucks that it costs you know, 45 bucks to fill the tank but we also don't fill

Jessamyn 19:39 it with 4600 counts really timed it. times what?

Cortex 19:43 How often we fill up the gas

mathowie 19:45 if you use futilely until we

Cortex 19:48 do you own that again? I can't remember if I should

mathowie 19:54 still use it. So any jobs do you like? Jessamyn John? Yes.

Jessamyn 19:59 I like house and cat sitter. We live by the water in Door County, Wisconsin, the Midwest premiere vacation destination. Oh, they already left. Forget it. They left three days ago. But they needed somebody for like two months to go hang out, you know keep house from burning down. I can totally do that stack the mail. Yes. Get in touch with the repair people. Yes, internet cable. Rupert is talkative. That was car mica car Mica. And I was sorry, I could not do that. Because

mathowie 20:33 I'm a frozen lake probably. Ah, it says it was on the lake on the water in the water.

Jessamyn 20:39 I don't think the Great Lakes freeze under normal circumstances. Although you'll remember I was up there last year at this time, or slightly later in the year and they were frozen.

mathowie 20:52 Oh, it's the Great Lakes. I thought you a lake. No. Minnesota lake where there's just a billion lakes, you know, but like Green Bay? Yeah. Lake Michigan. Wow.

Cortex 21:03 Yeah. Which means before the Packers

Jessamyn 21:07 I'm not even listening

mathowie 21:08 with their heating bills me crazy. Keep a house sitter around. I guess your house freezes up. And that's even worse.

Jessamyn 21:14 You got to keep your house. I mean, unless you want to drain all the water out. You got to keep it at 50 Anyhow, so that being 50 and 65.

mathowie 21:23 Yeah. And the cats happy.

Jessamyn 21:27 Well, and the cats happy and you know boarding a cat's expensive and you'd feel like a dick keeping your cat at 50 degrees.

mathowie 21:33 Yeah, well that covered in fur, but I mean, they're okay,

Jessamyn 21:37 but you feel like an asshole. You're gonna be fine. Your cat doesn't care. Your cat doesn't know you or its own name.

mathowie 21:46 But accounts are assholes. So it's a wash in the end of a dog? No, well, no, not really. Like, oh, come

Jessamyn 21:55 on. What does that really mean?

mathowie 21:57 My parents are the worst pet owners in the world. So there's probably a time when I was like six years old. We had a dog for like a month or two. I don't know.

Cortex 22:06 possibility that dog ownership was a thing that occurred it wasn't I never done portions of your Yeah.

Jessamyn 22:13 Okay, maybe that's what this is

mathowie 22:15 all about. I just know cats are assholes. And I tolerate them.

Jessamyn 22:20 But like a dog can be your buddy. Yeah.

mathowie 22:23 Does seem messy. This PB have pets? Yes. Two dogs say like cat used to have a cat.

Jessamyn 22:30 Josh, you're just cat guy, right? Yep. Couple cats. I gotta plant to be plants are good. They stay alive.

mathowie 22:38 Do you wanna do projects?

Jessamyn 22:40 Sure. Let's talk about Josh and how annoying he is. With his endless jingling Oh, my God. And I am just kidding. Because this is the best thing ever. I was pretty happy with how it came out. as well. As annoying as well as the best. Please tell us about this.

mathowie 23:01 You explained it to me over lunch like two days before went up? And it went? Like okay, go ahead and do it.

Jessamyn 23:08 But it's like a roguelike with so much quicker aspect to it. And then it also does one of those fan squares are what is this thing?

Cortex 23:23 Carpet, carpet maker sponge? And how to incorporate any of those. I really should I could have upped my game on this. No,

mathowie 23:32 this is had the most votes for the month of any project. Yeah, it was very

Cortex 23:36 well it went over well, I feel like that it played out nicely. You know, it was it was sort of an idea to have like an inkling of for a few years of doing something like this. But I figured like okay, just take a bunch of Christmas carols, record them all in the same key and then all at the same tempo. And then you can jump between arbitrary like, measures and half measures of it. And you'll just get a bunch of relatively seamless Christmas carol ish. Yeah. And

mathowie 24:02 you make a JavaScript array of each sentence in the audio file, what I

Cortex 24:07 what I ended up doing actually, I just had like the 36 songs, each one was an mp3. And then each one started right on the beats at the first zero point in the in the recording. And so then I would for each time I want to jump around, I'd pick a song at random of the ones loaded up and then pick a position at random at a one second mark and that would jump somewhere at the beginning or halfway through a measure.

mathowie 24:34 Oh, so if you pick like eight seconds, it's always the second

Cortex 24:37 eight seconds is four measures into any given song. And then I had to type in a bunch of metadata for the lyrics just to say okay, each measure has these words. So Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way you know would be four elements in the array associated with Jingle Bells.

mathowie 24:53 And you have to do silent nine Silent Night.

Cortex 24:57 It turns out when you jam everything into the same meter and and key and tempo some songs really sound ridiculous. And yeah, I opted on the side of going fast rather than slow. So nothing would get super dirge like, so yeah, you've got Silent night, holy night. But it kind of worked okay with the idea of this goofy little elf playing his guitar, you know, and yeah, pitch shift everything up, like a step and a half to compensate for the fact that a lot of these were way too low for me. And also to just make it sound a little bit more healthy.

Jessamyn 25:25 Crazy. Yeah, crazy. I just thought it was gonna be like one of those 10 hour YouTube videos of jingling. And I was a little disappointed until I realized how awesome this was. But I would like someone to make that for me. Because that I looked for it, and I couldn't find it. Well, that

Cortex 25:45 should be doable. Someone should make that happen. I don't have a good sample of Jingle Bells, otherwise lazy Web. Yeah, I remember

mathowie 25:51 loading it and being like, that was just odd and random. And reading the comments on the meta filter thread. And people are stoked, like, they were quoting Joe, they were quoting, ridiculously amazing lyrics. And

Jessamyn 26:04 it was 184 Comments 144 favorite, at first for the first greatest monster.

mathowie 26:12 It totally randomized. Refresh three times. And then I got magic. I

Cortex 26:17 wasn't sure how best to sell that. And maybe, you know, maybe I'll revisit the next year, a couple people actually from Fit Club, we're helping working on trying to clean up the code a little bit. So maybe there'll be a group sourced improved version next year, because also I could have stuck controls on it if I'd wanted to keep working on it. So you could actually pick which songs maybe or control a little bit how random it was,

mathowie 26:38 you know, I learned you can you can do hosting of projects at GitHub for free, even like, blah blah.com. You know, you can actually associate domains with a GitHub project, as opposed to GitHub, GitHub, like, oh, open source there, we can see the code plus he just wants to get the GitHub free hosting. It's

Jessamyn 27:01 basically just don't have to push anything. And so it just is your website.

Cortex 27:07 Yeah, they, I think the main thing they charge for GitHub is like private repos. So yeah, if you're wanting to sort of do stuff in public, that's just basically free. And I think as much as anything, it's good advertising for GitHub, so hey, why not?

mathowie 27:19 But you can, like, your final site doesn't even mention GitHub or anywhere. It's crazy. Like you can put up something.com Yeah, and nobody would actually know it was on GitHub, unless you told them it's, I was kind of blown away. Like if you ever worried about hosting costs for a popular project.

Cortex 27:36 I've just got, I've got I've just got my dream host. I was originally gonna put endless jingling on on tilde club, actually, but then I was like, what if it does get some attention? And then instead of me like, collecting on the amount of money I've poured into DreamHost, over the years and their notionally free stuff, I'd be actually someone would have to pay

Jessamyn 27:54 for money

Cortex 27:57 to pay an extra 20 bucks. Oh, people like so. So yeah, hold off on that. But enough about me. There were other nice projects too.

Jessamyn 28:07 Sure. For example,

Cortex 28:10 oh, sorry. No, there's a there's a nice new blog. I actually can't swear if it's new. It's new to me.

Unknown Speaker 28:19 From Roddy Roddy twos is our favorite.

Cortex 28:21 Yes, right. Who always does amazing stuff. And they've got a blog called esoteric codes. That's about esoteric dude. He Okay, esoteric programming languages. Can you explain esoteric programming languages are programming languages that are esoteric. Which is to say they they tend to be intentionally weird. No, no, no, Haskell Haskell is merely just weird. In a unintentional it's an interesting, unusual language. Certainly, esoteric languages tend to be things like mailable or be funge. These are languages that are intentionally super weird, like a language that only has six characters in it, like you know. And so writing anything is super weird. There's there's a neat graphical one he mentioned somewhere in one of the recent entries. But basically these are all languages that are designed to be really unusual be fun, just a good example if you Google it or he's got a little bit of on it fairly far up the bog at this point, it's it's made entirely out of directional symbols and a few other character codes and the code actually executes in the direction that a symbol points or maybe it's brain fog anyway, that basically if someone said, hey, what if we did this really fucking weird thing is language and then made it happen? Boom, esoteric languages. So they tend to be as much about how strange they are as anything. They all in principle are completely you know, they're Turing complete languages. You can do anything you want. But you would never use them to get anything done, except to prove that you were able to basically so Oh yeah.

Jessamyn 30:01 The hipsters of code. Kinda

mathowie 30:03 kinda. I interpreted it as like board CS kids, like making up tricky methods like this. There's an interview with Ben Olmstead. That's amazing that he made this bizarre, super awesome tear IQ like it's in ternary not binary because it's more confusing, and then somehow ended up as a clue when a crime show

Jessamyn 30:28 on elementary that's like the Sherlock of New York

mathowie 30:32 and then you look back, that's actual code. That's a nightmare. It's just it's just,

Jessamyn 30:37 I just saw that show. I thought they made malburg up you guys.

Cortex 30:43 For once the weird bullshit that doesn't make any sense is because it was real.

mathowie 30:47 How did a writer on the show? Yeah, like, how did a writer on the show even understand? That's really weird. So some writer from the show knew about it from Twitter. It's weird. Crazy.

Cortex 31:01 It's awesome. Anyway, I that's that that seems like a good seems like good reason. And he specifically notes that it's intended for less technical readers. So it's not like oh, but I don't know. I mean, you know, why don't we try to make them more? Why am I trying to make the less technical reader sound like a bad impression of a nerd? I don't. I don't know what I was going for there. But anyway,

Jessamyn 31:21 yes. punching down Josh.

Cortex 31:23 Hey, it's my tribe man. Cross, just turned your left in

Jessamyn 31:31 the mirror.

mathowie 31:33 I like the shape, shape, shape, shape for shapes. These really cool porcelain cotton robe wearable. Like

Jessamyn 31:42 it's really cool. Rainy, sure range. Cerini

mathowie 31:45 in St. Parker is a ceramics person. So they like made these stoneware porcelain shapes and then they put a rope through them. There's really cool organic shapes. They're kind of big, but they're cool. I really liked the colors and it seems like it almost 3d print I guess the ceramic parts. Those are beautiful glazes and stuff to it's really interesting shapes. Interesting. glazes interesting. Like, rope, I guess based. Nickel free shipping. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like it. I thought it was really creative.

Jessamyn 32:24 I, of course, like the pandering to Jessamyn project, which is came in right after our podcast last time, which was click clish Scott made an e book library you could touch so basically, the whole thing is like you have your books on your Kindle and you read them but they're like on your Kindle. And sometimes the way you kind of spark your memory by Oh yeah, I read that book is by like looking at your bookshelves. Like I look at my bookshelves and I look at the spines of my books and I think things about them. And that kind of instigation is missing with digital books among many other shitty problems they have. And so this guy has kind of an art project wrote an article on Medium about basically having a physical thing that could represent your ebook and it's just cool it's cool in an interesting way because it makes you think to me about books and reading and you know what what we don't have with ebooks and what we do have with eBooks, so at any rate it was cool project I really liked it. I don't know why more people didn't freak out about it

mathowie 33:33 was that the one side of it is the title page is what he's printing with old like lead pre Yeah, so what are side or like highlights from your book?

Jessamyn 33:42 The first sentence I don't even remember exactly what what was on the other side? Well, yeah,

mathowie 33:47 yeah, it wasn't getting i mean i Yeah, and then you mount them on a wall instead of like the the or you put them shell finds. I guess there's no real spines but they are thick cardboard. That seems a really clever cool. I just have it you can have an import your favorite highlights and I just started using Goodreads cheese yesterday.

Jessamyn 34:10 Really? Why? Why did everyone suddenly get on the good read bandwagon?

mathowie 34:13 I don't know. I just I was like, you know, I

Jessamyn 34:16 mean, good. Meat is awesome. Yeah,

mathowie 34:17 I was just like, I'm gonna read more books this year, not as like a New Year's thing. Just like a like last week actually, before New Year's, I just started reading some books. And I was bored and stopped playing games. And I was like, Hey, that was pretty fulfilling. It's good for your brain, man. And then you know, everyone does recaps of their year in books because they have all the data and then I did mine so I just so they just released like the Kindle iOS app books up to good reads, but I'm surprised it doesn't do more like pull all your highlighted passages.

Jessamyn 34:45 Because Amazon's a piece of shit. You know why that is? Yeah, they're terrible. man Yeah, I did my end of the year. I vowed to read more books and actually read more books. Yeah, he's very happy about it.

mathowie 34:58 Like a dozen friends were able to say I I read exactly 42 books in there. And I was like, wow, how do you and then I guess that's good reads output is that good?

Jessamyn 35:07 I made an open source thing that was on projects a million years ago didn't close, but it's a pain in the ass Good Reads actually is easy.

mathowie 35:14 Yeah, it's impressive.

Jessamyn 35:17 So good for you get acquainted with your library. They have lots of awesome books also.

mathowie 35:21 Yeah, I have to find my library card number and I can use some weird Tindall lender.

Jessamyn 35:27 Calm on the phone, man. They have your number.

mathowie 35:30 Yeah. Was it called over something? Overdrive? Yeah, the OverDrive

Jessamyn 35:33 Media Console. You can check out books you can check out books from Open Library to if you like, weird old esoteric bullshit, typos, sweet typos because we don't fix them at odd source that don't even care. Nobody cares.

mathowie 35:51 Justin, do you have any favorite other projects?

Cortex 35:53 Like there's a my other thing that I my other favorite thing that I made last month? Now. There's a nice interview with the welke. And Josh flinger, aka comics curmudgeon who had been a big fan of for a long time. And it's the two of them discussing Brenda Starr the Brenda star movie, which apparently is

Jessamyn 36:16 like the worst thing in the comics page when I was a child. Yeah, and apparently

Cortex 36:20 in 1986 they made a movie of it starring Brooke Shields and then it sat for like three years before being quietly released. This thing existed but it's obviously super duper up comics curmudgeons alley, because Because through the years spent the last many years writing about you know, comics and giving some attention to soap strips that have otherwise been pretty much completely forgotten by everybody who wasn't alive during World War Two. So it's kind of a perfect and yeah, this is like my I'm gonna watch this fucking thing now and not probably not going to enjoy it, but but I'll enjoy

mathowie 36:57 the worst movie. Of course, that's where I went.

Cortex 37:00 Was there a movie? I know they mentioned

Jessamyn 37:03 name, isn't it? No,

mathowie 37:04 that's the YouTube says Yeah.

Cortex 37:06 Which is great. They they're just like this super awkward recitations, word strips created it shot by No, I remember when for linker mentioned that a few years ago, and it was like, This is amazing. This is the weirdest fucking thing and I'm so glad someone's doing it. But

Jessamyn 37:20 look, and this is what's his name? What is that guy's name? From Arrested Development and trans whatever it is.

mathowie 37:27 Decent Pete? I can't tell who new Skype. Is it? Jeffrey Tambor? Yeah. Yeah, so I remember, in the late 80s being addicted to you know, the comics pages, the first thing I would do on Sunday, like in the era of farside, and Calvin and Doonesbury, all being new every day. And like Mary Werth was just this time capsule from my grandparents is generation like read this or use makes no sense you can't even jump in anywhere. It's just Oh man. That's great people about

Jessamyn 38:10 Well, I think when I read it I hadn't been aware that the movie was a long time ago like I had thought oh there's some new movie I don't get it so

Cortex 38:19 yeah, I don't think Brenda Starr could be made to i i hold out the tiniest possibility that someone could similar ironically decided to make a Mary worth movie today still I feel like Mary worse got some there's some juice in there. There's some Mary worth is crazy. I probably talked about this before, but like there's some weird fucking plots in there. There was one time where a guy was stalking Mary Werth and not not like in a murder stalker way but like a guy with poor boundaries sort of way. His name was Aldo kill Rast. Kel RAS is an anagram of stalker, and he's got this terrible bowl haircut and he's probably like 1015 years younger than Mary. And he just takes a shine during prints and flowers and keeps asking her out and eventually, her friends stage confrontation back at the gated community where they all live. Where they basically tell him to leave her the fuck alone and he drives away brokenhearted drinking straight from a bottle

Jessamyn 39:12 and kills DICE DICE thrives off

Cortex 39:15 a cliff and dies and that just that and then everybody's like, Oh, well that's sad. And then they moved on because like yeah, it's way Mary worth works. It's like two strips later up. Well, time to spend eight months talking about that one ladies failure to land the man.

Jessamyn 39:30 He looks like Captain Kangaroo.

Cortex 39:32 Yeah. God I love Although the original

Jessamyn 39:35 desperate housewife. I feel

Cortex 39:37 like the Coen brothers could end up like deciding to tackle the elder kill rasp plot of Mary worth and turning it into a film and it could work but I'm not really hold my breath. I don't really

mathowie 39:47 fascinate. Before we close out projects I wanted to mention one that came in like an hour ago to play dungeon. Dragons over Twitter.

Jessamyn 39:56 It was a joke.

Cortex 39:58 I have since replied on Twitter.

mathowie 40:00 I think it's gonna be a real thing. And I usually do not approve projects that are like super. That's such an early stage.

Jessamyn 40:07 breaking all the rules this week, Matt?

mathowie 40:09 No, I mean that done. I mean, I don't know d&d over Twitter sounds like it seems like it

Cortex 40:14 could be amazing or terrible, but I'm interested. I'm actively interested.

mathowie 40:18 Actually. Can you describe me to move in 140 Carry? I'm gonna take

Cortex 40:22 my break. Yes, couple tweets you can you can be pretty concise at times.

Jessamyn 40:26 Well, a lot of the moves are just go here. Look at this. I mean, it's all got like a real structured language. It's the Dungeon Master part. That's tricky, right? They're the one that tells the story. Yeah,

Cortex 40:35 unless you're a big monologue or so. Then. You know, in my experience, not a whole lot. I'm actually I played a d&d game, we played through the fifth edition starter kit. I think I talked about this previously, me and a few other mefites actually. And by the end, I was sort of having a manic sort of talking to a dragon and trying to convince him to be the mayor of one of the locations in the game. And so I sort of like went on a little bit of a sales pitch, but other than that, it was more perfunctory. Oh, hey, let's ask him about this. Oh, hey, let's talk to that person.

Jessamyn 41:08 We're gonna get you to say the word dragon on the show dragon dragon.

Cortex 41:15 Regan bout my dragon pronunciate.

mathowie 41:20 Was probably go to MIT to filter.

Jessamyn 41:25 If you gentlemen haven't done any work whatsoever, I think I would like to say that internet fraud detection squad station number nine. There was just a nice, funny Hanukkah era thread, which was some Jewish acapella songs about Hanukkah, because we don't really have that much in terms of music, and definitely not that much in terms of like, sing along stuff. Everybody knows the idiot dreidel song and like, that's it. They don't. And they think that has something to do with Hanukkah. And so basically, this was a Hanukkah video to the tune of shake it off, which I thought was pretty good. I mean, there's basically like two acapella, you know, there's the Maccabees and there's six, whatever 613. And they do, they do these things every year and so they're adorable. And I don't know, I just really liked it because they make me laugh.

Cortex 42:23 I really enjoy just from all about

Jessamyn 42:26 that NACE.

Unknown Speaker 42:29 It come on.

Cortex 42:32 I like to just just from the other day, it's just a little bit of weird nostalgia, but Nintendo character guides, sort of an internal Nintendo of America Bible on some of the characters who were, you know, contemporary to 1993. And it's just weird because it's it's a bunch of details and sort of style guide stuff. That you know, like looking back now, it's actually really clear that they must have been developing this sort of thing all along over the years as they went. But I think if I had seen this as a kid, like it would have blown my mind that there was such a thing as like, this definitive style guide and

Jessamyn 43:10 thing behind the thing. Yeah.

Cortex 43:12 It's like, no, it's just they exist, right? They just show up.

mathowie 43:15 Was it an internal document? Nintendo are a fan made thing?

Cortex 43:20 This is like Nintendo company materials.

mathowie 43:22 And this never seen the light of day. Yeah, I

Cortex 43:24 don't think so. Yeah, just like recently started. Someone got it out there a little bit.

mathowie 43:29 I saw everyone going apeshit on Twitter and meta filter over it. And I was like, I don't what is this new or is this found or is this made up? Like I couldn't tell.

Cortex 43:39 Also, jumping back to jobs briefly, we just got a MEPhI Contact Form email titled, under the table. It says I'm looking for the under the table jobs in Calgary, call me and a phone number. So if anybody's in Calgary and has been under the table jobs, will will pass on that phone.

mathowie 43:55 I was gonna mention the cool job came in five minutes ago, which was I'm collecting those pressed pennies you always get at museums,

Jessamyn 44:04 a collection of those pressed pennies, and they said specifically, we forgot

mathowie 44:07 to get one while we were in Museum of Science in Boston. Can you go there and make it like mail it to me for five bucks. And I'm like, that's pretty cool.

Jessamyn 44:15 Dude, everyone would do that. There's like 20 people I can think of right now who would do that?

mathowie 44:20 Yeah, no, it's on jobs. Now. I don't have to approve them. So yeah, that's pretty cool.

Jessamyn 44:26 Press Penny. That's it from Iowa fiesta. All these jobs are awesome.

mathowie 44:32 Fun jobs. A lot of fun. I love this post by Infini about the mother of the sea, which is about the sort of invention of Nori, which in sushi and everything, like I just assumed, like knowing zero history about it that it's just you know, Norian sushi must be hundreds of years old.

Jessamyn 44:52 I don't know what nori is. used for. That you wrap stuff in? Yeah, okay.

mathowie 44:59 I assume centuries old, right? But I guess fishermen and people on coastal villages ate seaweed, like sporadically but it was like a harvest that only came at certain times a year and sometimes there'd be no harvest and people would be hungry and it was like a British researcher, like marine biologist discovered there was sort of like this weird like pupa stage of seaweed development and she wrote some paper and I guess it got in nature or what's the other big one science or something like that and some Japanese some Japanese researcher like whose coastal town just lost their a year's annual seaweed crop because of somewhere weird weather pattern, read this and went holy shit. We can like seed these things. We can grow these things ourselves. We can farm like basically she invented seaweed, seaweed farming in like 1950.

Jessamyn 45:52 So and change the face of everything. In like

mathowie 45:55 two years, all of Japan was farming seaweed, and it became a bigger industry than fish and like

Jessamyn 46:00 completely changed stainable and all the other good stuff. Yeah.

mathowie 46:03 And she never visited Japan. She died a few years later. They've made all these amazing trines to her. And she she basically saved Japan's nutrition and then spark their whole sushi industry. And never knew it. And like it's fascinating. I had no idea this stuff was like 1954 or something was their second paper on it. That sparked it all. Like I had no idea it was so recent.

Jessamyn 46:27 That's cool. What a great post.

mathowie 46:29 We have nori chips that are healthy we get from a Japanese store. It's awesome. Like you can eat nori kind of like, you know like, what do you do like bake kale? You know, you like kale chips?

Jessamyn 46:39 I have done that. It is not any good. But TV tastes terrible. So it's better than that.

mathowie 46:44 Yeah, well, with enough like salt and flavoring. It's pretty good.

Jessamyn 46:49 Garlic, lots of garlic.

mathowie 46:51 So yeah, it was cool. I had no idea.

Jessamyn 46:53 That's a great post. Speaking of with our ladies, the ladies theme, I enjoyed a beacuse post, which was basically linking to the blog s who wrote an open letter to the Girl Scouts basically talking about the problem with their pensions. And some of the changes Girl Scout cookies have gone through and whatever. Like, you know, the blog posts zipped around the internet and everyone was like we're but one of the things I like meta filter about the most is the thread was interesting. Like there's a lot of Girl Scouts or former Girl Scouts or people who didn't understand what Girl Scouts were about. And were curious about it, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was a really interesting thread. And she the blog s updated her posts, sort of a million times because she got feedback from the Girl Scouts. And so you wound up sort of learning more about the whole situation. And I liked it. I liked the original post, which BQ put a lot of effort into like what's going on with the Girl Scouts and I liked the thread, which was people talking about it

mathowie 47:54 a Girl Scout Cookies really on sale already. I thought that was like a February March. I'm

Jessamyn 47:59 the wrong person to ask at all. I ignore the Girl Scouts.

mathowie 48:04 I buy him if I see him in a supermarket, but I haven't seen him.

Jessamyn 48:09 Interesting. Well, they sell them online now. So you don't even have to talk to a single girl scout if you don't want, which I think is sort of part of a part of the concern. I mean, as a fundraising thing. It's not the best fundraising thing was part of the point. Yeah, at any rate, it will turn out to be a really good post. I liked it.

Cortex 48:27 Neat. Yeah, no, I was never really exposed to any sort of Scout culture. I mean, I was thought of, to the extent that I was tangentially aware that I wasn't exposed to it, I was mostly aware of like Boy Scout culture. Because I think my dad was like in Boy Scouts when he was young, but never went very far with it. And I had a couple friends who were more involved in the whole thing. And it's always been, it's been a weird thing to me to have like these organizations, boys, both the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts stuff that are out there and really meaningful to a lot of people that just sort of like a formative part of their childhood or of their parenting. I feel about church. Yeah, yeah, it's some of the similar things. They're like there are organizational, organizational and social aspects, this independent of the details of the organization, ethos, or whatever, that are really meaningful to a lot of people. And it's one of the things I really don't know much about, and I've learned a little bit about it just from mostly from having friends who are parents who have, you know, had kids involved in that, but yeah, so that's neat. Yeah.

mathowie 49:26 I didn't mind getting mired down in another pensions talk I found my friends. Like, you know, you can be at a party with eight liberal friends, and you can have the biggest fight in the world over retirement pensions. You'll, you'll find like the lefty of liberals, they'll be like, Fuck the old people cut them off like, and then you're like, Well, I mean, they weren't there for 60 years or so.

Jessamyn 49:48 I was one of the interesting things in the thread is that there was a real difference of opinion. I mean, you know, like all threads about women. It turns into two men wrestling with each other, but in this case, it was about pensions and about how predictable pension fund management is, and whether the Girl Scouts manager kind of fucked something up or was doing what anybody would do. And it's just word of the market man. And I don't understand that stuff well enough to have a strong opinion. But it was definitely interesting seeing two people who are intelligent, come down on completely opposite ends. I mean, I kind of feel like you make promises to people, and you kind of should keep those promises. But someone I'm sure would want to fight with me about insurance then.

mathowie 50:29 Right? Well, yeah, I mean, those promises are made under different circumstances, you know, people used to live like 20 years less and stuff. So it's those very old,

Jessamyn 50:38 that's one of the things that this guy talks about in the thread is that that's actually not true that like, what's happening is child mortality is going way down. But like, at the time, at the point at which you've lived at 30, your life expectancy is the same as it was 40 or 50 years ago, people believe those kinds of things, because why wouldn't you? It makes sense. Right? And so people may

Cortex 51:00 think that yeah, you know, clearly I

mathowie 51:02 saw, I saw my grandfather. He was a truck driver for I think Coors, I think it was one of the big breweries. And he like, he worked for 20 years, I guess, or maybe 25 years and retired at like, 50. And like, he lived to 96. And he was, he was making like, 2000 a month. He was golfing. I mean,

Jessamyn 51:27 a month is $24,000 a year if he's golfing, he's living somewhere in a box. No,

mathowie 51:32 I'm trying. I mean, I'm still I mean, he's making social security, something like 80% of his salary, whatever the 1960s salary was, or 70. Salary. But like, it was, it was impressive. It was basically retired for more years than he ever worked. I was amazed.

Jessamyn 51:50 A lot of cops to and some military people. Yeah, military,

mathowie 51:53 definitely. They kind of like butyou after 20 years, and then the I know, some board and you know, 45 year old military people that are like, retired, retired, well, you get kind of

Jessamyn 52:03 second careers or an education or you raise a family or whatever. But yeah, I mean, I don't think any of this was unexpected is sort of the interesting argument about it. I mean, i Far be it for me to like, go fight with anybody. But like, that's why my sister's staying working in state government, you know, like, the pension is part of the deal you get for having kind of a crappy job for some people. And then it becomes this thing like, Haha, we made you keep the crappy job. And also don't pension be sorry.

mathowie 52:33 This was where's the, there were a couple of like Mega posts that were kind of amazing.

Jessamyn 52:38 Because you guys had the best post stuff, right? I paid less attention in December than usual. Because, you know, people were just agitating to make their mefite Choice stuff that came out really well. I thought did you guys think so? Yeah,

Cortex 52:53 no, there was a bunch of great stuff. And yeah, I guess that's the easy that's the easy bumper for this podcast is also go check out all for those threads for a bunch of awesome further prize winning stuff.

mathowie 53:05 Yeah, there were a couple of ginormous there's a ginormous post about

Cortex 53:09 the trunk line. There

Jessamyn 53:10 trucking one truck. It was truly amazing. Just because the Colbert story had a nice arc to it that I think people liked.

mathowie 53:17 Yeah, yeah. RAM is called bear one and see Wes did the trucking one. Yeah. Cool. Bear one. Yeah. It's weird. COVID is really good. And he's not coming back till August or September, I guess the new TV season this fall. It's kind of

Jessamyn 53:33 right when he starts with the I saw a nice picture of him with David Letterman. But he just killed it in the whole last like several weeks before he left like every show was amazing.

mathowie 53:43 Yeah. Yeah. And it didn't dawn on me till like all the Comedy Central shows are back now except, but it's gone. It's gone. Gone.

Jessamyn 53:50 Well, and I was watching a DVR. So I still haven't seen the whole rest of it. But yeah, I have to point out from the mefite choice things that I was really happy with shcool 510s. So you want to play ukulele? Shout out to my friend Terrapin who got a ukulele and he's going to come to my ukulele club. Yes, but this was a really that was really nice post about ukulele.

mathowie 54:15 So need to come back to this. I got a ukulele through mefi.com What does that even mean? Me H is like the new woot.com Are they just for non assholes? It's the guys who used to own woot. They hated Amazon so much because Amazon tanked it so they just quit and started a new woot. So it's called me eight.com. And every day is a you know, ridiculous deal. You know, like, they're always freaking Bluetooth speakers for 20 bucks or something.

Jessamyn 54:44 Oh man, Jim is always looking for the perfect Bluetooth speaker.

mathowie 54:47 He said sign up for

Jessamyn 54:49 what he does. He hoards old iPad, iPods, not because he wants like a thing that syncs with his giant iTunes that has buttons, not a touchscreen Nice yeah so anybody has all the iPods that you would like to trade to Jim for something

mathowie 55:05 iPod classics that are like 120 gigs or going for like 500 bucks on ebay now you can

Jessamyn 55:11 get them on Craigslist for 20 bucks if you know a guy Yeah, that's exactly what's going on.

mathowie 55:16 I guess you don't have to repair but anyways, so like three weeks ago randomly and it was just like a learn ukulele kit for like 30 bucks it was like a decent ukulele made out of like Colwood and came with like a for dummies book and stuff.

Jessamyn 55:29 I got a ukulele strap and a tuner for holiday time. So yeah, way to go Matt. Yeah, they're fun. Dwarf that ukulele is Jessamyn sighs it is not Matt size

mathowie 55:43 kills my fingers hurt so bad.

Cortex 55:48 I think of the ukulele is the thing that I play because I don't want to have my fingers hurt because I'm playing enough like this compared to the guitar. Yeah, steel strings, steel strings, right? Because then nylon strings are like just heaven.

mathowie 56:01 There's a there's a YouTube video I had to find. I don't think it was on this one where a guy teaches you three chords, and then you can play 200 songs. Yeah. It's so great.

Jessamyn 56:10 Yeah, well, and it is fun because you can really like after practicing for a couple days really play some stuff. As opposed to just having to like gear up forever. So yeah, I hope you enjoy it and get a tuner because they're cheap. And you should have

mathowie 56:24 one. Oh, my phone tunes. I already had tunes. I could

Jessamyn 56:28 not make my phone tuning work for me. This is like a little thing that clips. I don't because I could never figure out if I had to go higher or lower. And I don't know what am I probably

mathowie 56:37 there's like a nice wheel with guitar tuners I use so you can like turn it and you can see the band F's and stuff and you can get it right in there.

Cortex 56:47 If you want to buy a cheap, nice tuner, there's a term called the snark. That is, it's great. It's just a little lightweight clip on tuner and it's it's super good. It's like probably 15 bucks.

Jessamyn 57:06 Like one of these one of these clip on ones. The calla tuners

mathowie 57:11 my favorite thing ever was going to see Steve Martin in concert with the steep canyon Rangers isn't like bluegrass band and he probably played six different banjos and like on the neck or whatever you call the top part with all the string do dad things stock right up there he had an iPod touch on everything so you can just look and tune in a second life boy tells a joke you know didn't didn't didn't enter a tells a joke the stereo they all had their own iPod for each

Cortex 57:47 have dedicated iPods

mathowie 57:49 I was amazed. evangelists and he make basically I'm old joke you know about the young people and their crazy jargon and the Twitter's and all these iPods. It was awesome.

Jessamyn 58:03 But yeah, that's cool, man. Ukulele I'm excited you should put up on music because it's fun to do that.

mathowie 58:07 Oh my god. Yeah, fingers are I'd still have to I need to learn strumming you've already

Cortex 58:12 got like, Oh my God, my fingers hurt.

Jessamyn 58:15 I need let me tell you, I still don't know how to strum up. Don't let that stop you. Right, fingers

mathowie 58:21 stuck. You watch these videos and you could tell they're strumming for different ways instantly in microseconds. It's kind of like it looks a class

Cortex 58:31 we could we could sit down and workshop a little bit you know, within driving distance. I have a small amount of experience with stringed instruments. So a

Jessamyn 58:39 small amount of

Cortex 58:43 strumming deceptively difficult skill to pick up actually.

Jessamyn 58:46 Strum up next time you are in my timezone. Josh, I will take help from you. Yeah, absolutely.

Cortex 58:51 Fly to San Jose, you drive the Tesla up through Portland. And then

Jessamyn 58:59 with a Tesla in Portland. What kind of an asshole Am

Cortex 59:02 I charging stations? I don't know.

Jessamyn 59:06 It's an extension cord. Right? I don't understand what a charging station is.

mathowie 59:09 A lot of you don't see a lot of Tesla's in Portland.

Jessamyn 59:14 I've never seen one in Vermont.

mathowie 59:16 This. Did you see this internet pinball machine that was pretty cool. So when revamped a pinball machine with like every internet meme there was I did see this I love this. The only thing that hurts me is like I don't get to play it. Like I would love to see this. Why can't you play it? Where is it? Is it but it's like it's not a thing that's actually in a public place. You know, but it's like they set up a Raspberry Pi you like trick a rip? You trip off a Rick Roll at some point. It's just

Jessamyn 59:44 awesome. Got the dog much flipping. So Grumpy Cat on the top.

mathowie 59:52 I went to a New Year's Eve party at a friend's house who is a saw your outfit. Top 10 pinball player America WHAT THE FUCK IS WHAT THEY ARE THERE ARE pinball competitions. As an adult you can join us and King of Kong we I know about them. So like his basement, it's 16 working machines because get this they don't. There's no such thing as like a reference competition machine. And every time you go to a pinball competition, you have no idea what you're going to be expected to do.

Cortex 1:00:24 Life is like a competition, a pinball machine.

Jessamyn 1:00:27 No one ever said that.

mathowie 1:00:28 So he has 16 Different pinball machines all do something wildly different. Some have ramps, some do multi ball, some have multiple flippers, like because he has to like prepare all the things right. And they're all up on two by fours and the ball goes faster. And they're all like kind of extra hard. But like they're all about that.

Cortex 1:00:46 Just yeah, just tilt the damn thing. And boom, he said,

mathowie 1:00:49 they'll turn the tilt the tilt sensors up and they'll take out pegs so you lose the ball more often. But like he's like competitions, the guys catch him a lot and then hold it way they try to memorize angles and so Right, right. So it's like, I was like, there's more to this than I thought. And it was a lot of fun. I mean, I've never been

Jessamyn 1:01:09 okay, I get it. Yeah, I know. I've always been super into pinball. And it's weird, right? Because you can have like one cabinet that will play like 1000 video games, but you know, I told you guys I've got that like video pinball thing for the PS two. It's not the same. It's not the same at all.

mathowie 1:01:27 I used to play the windows 98 Pinball.

Cortex 1:01:29 Yeah, there's there's ongoing like there's there's games. There's there's a couple of pinball engines that release tables, like the contemporary stuff. It's like under active development there's a few people on that Fight Club are actually sort of super into pinball and, and they buy up the digital pinball packages when they go on sale.

mathowie 1:01:45 To play them on a desktop.

Cortex 1:01:47 I think somebody may have built like a sort of physical one. But But yeah, you play it just on the computer, you know, so you don't have an actual pinball table of course and that, but yeah,

Jessamyn 1:01:58 so it's a lot more like figuring out the flippers and stuff like that because there's no tactile interaction. Yeah,

Cortex 1:02:03 yeah. So you can be like digital, you know, tilted a little bit but but yeah, you're it's a little bit more of a puzzle game I think at that point, because you take away the physicality but yeah, it's a big thing. It's like that's an ongoing

mathowie 1:02:17 it's not easy to make portable.

Jessamyn 1:02:20 Right which is why it's so cool when you get to see something like this which is somebody actually making it real Yeah. Which is

mathowie 1:02:29 my last favorite thing on metal filter was this cop was was the song I only heard it Oh, common people. The common people song I never heard the mid 90s original British. I only heard jokey, William Shatner one which is you know, like, all ironic and funny and stuff. And like, there is a basically like an hour and a half BBC documentary on the creation of the song they try to they go through every female art student at St. Martin's college to try and figure out who took sculpture. And they tried to find the woman from the song and they sorted do but it's unclear. And the lead singer is like, and made some stuff up, you know. It's just really it's really good and just sort of captures like, this band was like the most 1990s thing ever in the UK and like this song was a humongous hit and, and they talk about how they, you know, built the song up and tore it down and like the lead singer learned how to play like some casiotone Tiny ska at the simplest. They talked to like a Concert Orchestra pianist or something. It's just like, oh, that sounds so brilliant because they just play the simple like doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. That's all you can do. Like the background of it's so simple. It just gets in your head. It was just really fun. Like I had no idea what the history of it because I was a dork who only heard it for the first time in 2005 or whatever.

Jessamyn 1:03:53 And of course the thread turns into a whole bunch of guys wrestling about each other with each other about whether William Shatner was rich or not.

mathowie 1:04:01 Right? Yeah. Because it's

Cortex 1:04:04 like the Shatner version. It's it's actually it's a really great

Jessamyn 1:04:08 he's funny. It's good.

Cortex 1:04:11 Anyway, albums actually really good. Ben Folds did a great job with that album and did a great job with that album working with William Shatner because William Shatner and since put out at least one other album that just wasn't I thought this was one of the best post winners from Eva destruction put together this big post about Soviet mostly Soviet and there's also as she notes there's like Hungarian and so on but but in particular Soviet bootleg records made on X ray prints because vinyl wasn't available. And they're just the coolest fucking looking things in the world. But yeah, just there's this pile and pile of like, you know, music history from you know, the last 50 years. tied up with this weird looking set of artifacts and it's just neat stuff. And yeah, I mean, it's a big dense pole full of neat stuff. So it's yeah, it's

mathowie 1:05:13 like it's like the nori post is quintessential metal filter like this weird thing from history. I had no idea existed that's super fascinating, like these actual records with giant bone X rays on them. It's so amazing. And it totally makes sense that, you know, you know, with all the sanctions and stuff, they would have no vinyl production. So what are you gonna do? Like, that's amazing.

Cortex 1:05:39 Also, garlic made a post about some guys blog post about podcasting. Mathowie I don't know. Like, that

Jessamyn 1:05:48 was great. That thing that you wrote, man?

mathowie 1:05:51 Yeah, I mean, then I guess I heard and I wrote a follow up because I got so much feedback on it. And I guess the guessing game let guys the do startup and what's the new TLDR called? Reply All they talked about? They were thinking of trying to make the Instagram of podcasting. I guess that's in the StartUp podcast. They spent an episode or two on that.

Jessamyn 1:06:12 They're making it completely easier to Yeah, they're

mathowie 1:06:15 just going like this is like nerd paradise. Podcasting, right, like, what a regular book can we point to? We're starting a podcast company. You know, we're trying to make millions of dollars or something?

Jessamyn 1:06:24 Well, because remember, like audio was briefly gonna do that.

mathowie 1:06:28 Yeah. And it was. It's funny. I wrote it on medium, right? Like, because people said, Oh, f should bring audio back and make like a people's podcast system. That's easier than what we got. But yeah, I just tried to write down every idea. I could think of that. Like, you know,

Jessamyn 1:06:43 what, what people have said, like, what's missing? What needs to happen?

mathowie 1:06:47 Yeah, and I'm like walking through my wife through pod. She's like, you know, working out more, I need some audio set me up. And I'm like, Okay, first sit down.

Jessamyn 1:06:58 To do this, and then make sure you click this button. That the other click that but not that she falls asleep. This is why I watch videos on my iPad. I just can't deal with it.

mathowie 1:07:08 But it's like it's a painful, like first hour and like that can be smoothed over so easily. So yeah, I wish

Jessamyn 1:07:14 it was easy. It's just files you fucking subscribe to like, there's nothing hard about it. But it's got something to do with like, why RSS didn't take off either. Right? Like it tries to be everything for everyone. And it winds up being no good for anyone.

mathowie 1:07:28 But like, Why is every podcast client when you break it down? It's just a stupid File Manager. That's all it is. It's like an ugly File Manager. You know, like, iTunes looks like frickin excel at this point.

Jessamyn 1:07:38 Doesn't iTunes work better than it does for this? I have never understood it looks so

mathowie 1:07:43 bad. It's weird, right? doesn't care at all. I mean, they hate iTunes. Yeah, yeah. There's no one

Jessamyn 1:07:51 was reading I was reading your whole thing nodding like yep. Yep. I mean, I wanted to write a response that was like, Yeah, let's talk about the user side of it. Because you know, we want to do it, embed a whole bunch of like links and stuff in the meta filter podcast, and it was so hard. And like all the fan scribing stuff our dudes do, which they made easy, but it's hard. Like all the stuff doesn't have to be that way.

mathowie 1:08:17 Right? Yeah. Like I can't believe we have no way today. We have no way of sharing the podcasts anyone listens to you know, like, there's no there's nothing. It's so ridiculous that I can't just say these are the 18 I listen to you know, whatever, click on him press subscribe, like, like nothing exists on the web that like there's no social network that tracks that and baffling because it's just a simple things that we could code in a day.

Jessamyn 1:08:41 But oh, well. It is a little weird.

mathowie 1:08:45 Yeah, podcasting couldn't be better. Could be more like blogging and look where that got the end. Yes. AskMe edit filter.

Cortex 1:08:55 One more. I'll just mention real quick because I thought was delightful. RGD made a post on a whim of Werner Herzog's inspirational posters. Been working on these. Yes. And then it's funny. I was like,

Jessamyn 1:09:09 he made the thing. Yeah.

Cortex 1:09:11 Yeah. posted about RGS thing without I think even knowing that was RGS because I remember I was a few days later, I was like, Hey, should stick that our project. It's like why there's already opposed. Oh, yeah, it was really going around that I was seeing that in a bunch of places from people who as far as I knew, knew nothing about like, meta filter didn't know are just like, you know, nope.

mathowie 1:09:34 Read about it. The night before it was on metal filter. I was just like, because it was only like four posts. Sounds like it's not quite, you know, enough. And then I think it had another post the next day and someone posted now there's a bazillion posts. It's great. You should describe it, Josh.

Cortex 1:09:49 Yes, well, it's inspirational posters. Featuring existentially despairing quotes by Werner Herzog. You know, if that doesn't mean Listening to you, it probably won't mean anything to you. If it does mean something to you. You've already stopped listening to the podcast and you're going to look at the post because Oh man, it's great. It's great. Because Vernors got like this whole Yeah, he's he has this tendency to have these dark, despairing. Monologues he is so pleased the bleakest I love my favorite part of his Antarctica documentary was where he talks about the penguin going insane and marching.

Jessamyn 1:10:25 Everyone loves the insane penguin. Yes, it's

Cortex 1:10:27 a great little moment. And you can sort of tell that he's just fucking going for it because you'd like he asks one of the scientists about penguins losing their minds, and the guy's like, oh, well, I guess sort of a thing that happens. And then we get this, these shots of this penguin, and him just

Jessamyn 1:10:42 chattering off and

Cortex 1:10:45 it's a perfect fucking moment. So these these phases is basically a series of that as inspirational posters.

mathowie 1:10:52 Yes, the awesome juxtaposition of cat poster with like, bleak ass text on top of it. Something uplifting that's download and you know, tears you down in the text. It's great.

Jessamyn 1:11:05 It's great to point out this one right now, because it's supposed to be negative fucking fifth fucking teen tomorrow. And this was from Diablo Barrett, who lost a bit of weight. And now she's fucking freezing all the time. And what the fuck do you do about that? And I like it because the tags are cold, Burr and help. And because there's lots of useful information about what you actually do when you're freezing all the time. Like, it doesn't necessarily have to be like, Oh, I lost weight. But like, I remember that. Like, I remember like, you know, I lost 20 pounds one year, and then that next winter was the worst. Like, I was like, what happened to me? I'm sick. I'm dying. What is going on? And it's like, no, you just lost your extra layer of fat and now you're freezing. So lots of good information in this thread about how to deal with that.

mathowie 1:11:59 Also haircuts I always forget when you feel miserable for three weeks because the neck is so cold that time

Cortex 1:12:05 I shaved my head, like three years ago now. Like just

Jessamyn 1:12:11 the current hairstyle.

Cortex 1:12:12 I'm not super happy with it, but Okay.

Jessamyn 1:12:15 Fine. I just want to know what you look like right now. I know what he looks like the same. I'll

Cortex 1:12:21 snap a pic. I'll tell you what. I'll do it right now while we're doing this, I'm gonna take off my headphones talking about yourselves because I don't want to

mathowie 1:12:27 you know, while I was getting long, Josh.

Jessamyn 1:12:28 Oh, it looks great. Now you should make it shorter in the back and it'll look awesome.

Cortex 1:12:33 Yeah, and I kind of want to go in the other direction there. I feel like I accidentally sort of went for this like Edward Furlong in Terminator to sort of balance

Jessamyn 1:12:42 out a bad luck though. It's a terrible stand. It's not an intentional look,

Cortex 1:12:45 if I had it longer all around, it would be a better sort of shaky match. But don't. And I've been going more for yet. It's just it's not what I expected to get when I went in for it. And

Jessamyn 1:12:57 that's always a problem. Let's talk about haircuts for like, a couple of minutes.

Cortex 1:13:03 I still you know, I there's a place, uh, and I just go to bishops in town, which is this sort of hipster chain? Well, they're fine. I asked for a haircut. They're supportive. And they give me a haircut. That was really important to me, when I started doing my haircut again, because I've spent like 15 years not getting haircuts. Even when it was long, you know, just every, every year or two, I would pull it back in a ponytail and cut off a foot. And that was that was haircuts. And when I was a kid, I got haircuts, and they were always terrible. And they were always done by this fucking like retired Marine who knew two kinds of haircuts the crew,

Jessamyn 1:13:37 you're saving money on haircuts is that stealing a friend who was like

Cortex 1:13:40 the family barber like he's one of my Marine grandpa went to get his hair cut. And so that was just like the the barber that we knew, and it was, you know, inexpensive marine

Jessamyn 1:13:47 grandpa, at least you couldn't get USAA for your bank.

Cortex 1:13:51 I didn't know I tried digging into that for a long time. And you know, I'm sure. Anyway, yes. Haircuts were always terrible. And I didn't know what I wanted. I didn't know how to ask for what I wanted. I wouldn't have gotten it if I had asked for it. And I always just felt sort of crappy about my dumb short, crappy haircuts. And that's probably why I end up growing my hair out and I was like, fuck it. I'm gonna do not that and then. Now I've had to learn how to get haircuts. And it's a it's an ongoing process of figuring out what I like and I still haven't quite found what I'm looking for. You're listening to you talking YouTube.

Jessamyn 1:14:29 I haven't gotten a haircut in like 678 months, but I do have one ponytail holder and a hat. I recommend it.

Cortex 1:14:35 There you go. There you go.

mathowie 1:14:38 Let me see. A filter. There's a great your favorite dad joke. Give it to me. Yeah, read a minefield half of them are amazing and clever. And half of them are groan worthy. And I think I think a dad joke needs to be about 60% Groan worthy. Like it's pretty good. That's a good thread.

Cortex 1:15:00 adages should require you to acknowledge grudgingly the quality of the internal wordplay even while you were checked out really the idea that you should have had to been exposed to that. And I say that as someone who's only regret about not having children is not being able to technically make literal dad jokes.

Jessamyn 1:15:20 You have cats.

Cortex 1:15:21 Yeah, but they don't listen. They don't they don't understand my jokes. You know, the cat doesn't look any unhappier once I'm done talking. He's already just like, What the fuck are you wasting my time with? So

mathowie 1:15:34 some of these are kind of mean, but they're pretty funny. Some of them are good. They're mostly good. They're mostly grown.

Jessamyn 1:15:40 I should not have this kind of dad. So I look at this thread and I just sort of transpose these are like Jim jokes in my head because those kinds of jokes, or his dad does, so my dad did not but his dad would do this. So yeah, but it was a fun thread. And if they get cheered up, see Jorgensen.

mathowie 1:16:00 You tan from the sun? Yes. Glad to meet you, um, dad from the earth. Like, yeah, these are awesome truth bombs. I'm gonna drop on Kiona throughout her Right, right. It's pretty good.

Jessamyn 1:16:15 I did enjoy getting to talk about living in a small town. It's one of those like, I'm writing a book. Tell me about a thing in the book. And usually I don't have anything to say, because people are asking about things I don't know anything about. But this is all about life in a small town. So on so yeah, it was just me and a bunch of other people talking about our door yards.

Cortex 1:16:35 Yeah, it's kind of this got a bunch of a bunch of answers a bunch of favorites. This was like, there was a big thread.

Jessamyn 1:16:41 It was fun to read.

mathowie 1:16:42 Did you write about small town Vermont?

Jessamyn 1:16:45 I did. Did you control F for Jessamyn?

mathowie 1:16:49 I'm scrolling and looking at the lazy way. Sometimes it's nice to just scroll and scroll.

Jessamyn 1:16:55 you lecture me about scrolling?

Cortex 1:16:57 Oh no lecture

Jessamyn 1:17:03 Yes, civic groups. The side yard is called the dooryard. Where who you borrow the chairs from who gets in the newspaper and why?

mathowie 1:17:12 Why is the side yard called the door yard because that's where the door

Jessamyn 1:17:15 is that you go into your house Liberty goes in the front door. You always go in the side door in the door. Yeah. That's awesome. It's in New England anything like it's not I mean, some of these like, small town New England is different from small town like Midwest. So it was really interesting for me listen to people who grew up in like these micro towns in the Midwest where you're really like, much more sort of like buttfucking. aegypti than you are up here. Because like around here, everybody's in a small town and you're all far from everyone. So in the Midwest, like there's some big central city and then everybody is isolated more isolated in the small towns. That's how it seems to me.

mathowie 1:17:51 I also learn pecan pecan. Pecan pecan is a New England thing I learned this last week or

Jessamyn 1:17:59 two. I mean, they call it pecan instead of pecan. Yeah, that

mathowie 1:18:03 is everywhere. But North. Korea isn't doing everything except New England's pecan, or I guess they say it really weird.

Jessamyn 1:18:12 Pecan pie and then people tell me the nuts. You're supposed to say pecans.

mathowie 1:18:17 Yeah. Oh, no, that's a way to do it.

Jessamyn 1:18:20 I don't know. Yeah, there

mathowie 1:18:21 was also a hotspot in North Carolina, which I suspect was wintering New Englanders. Maybe that brought that word down. I don't know. It was funny.

Cortex 1:18:30 Most of the time when I'm talking about the cons, it's because we've actually made something that's pecans. So like, if it's a pecan pie, it's because we made it in which case I'm gonna pronounce it how I want it because I made pecan pie, man.

Jessamyn 1:18:41 Oh, exactly.

mathowie 1:18:44 And pecan is what they call it like New Orleans. Nobody says that. Oh, like like crazy. Super Cajun, like, again.

Cortex 1:18:53 Colin segment only for culture, culture. Podcast.

Jessamyn 1:19:00 Speaking of which, we should really do some more Colin stuff on the podcast. Talk and yeah, I mean, I like you very much. But it would be fun to have some other guests. Yeah, it's

mathowie 1:19:10 hard. It's hard to record well, but then it's hard to schedule and then schedule this to and then splice it all. But yeah,

Cortex 1:19:19 to just make the effort.

Jessamyn 1:19:21 You just told me why this is a bad idea.

mathowie 1:19:23 No, no, no, I'm just saying why we don't do it. If I don't

Jessamyn 1:19:26 understand what you're doing. I think we should try it.

Cortex 1:19:31 Well, we'll try and make it happen.

mathowie 1:19:33 I should probably look up that sweet, sweet, cold Jeff story of the very in the woman from the Beverly Hillbillies. Did you say that?

Jessamyn 1:19:40 Did he say anything about our meta filter I saw on Twitter?

mathowie 1:19:43 Yeah, he totally wrote it up on meta filter and he pointed to it on Twitter to say okay, you can go the forum. I will go dig it up.

Jessamyn 1:19:51 I'll talk about some other stuff that was amazing.

mathowie 1:19:54 My favorite AskMe edit filter the month was there a cool tracking websites you You know the do like the wind map and FlightAware shows you the plane travel. Like give me a bunch of weird more obscure. Track real time trackers of things. Susan Audrey. Yeah. And there is like whales in their trains you can like you load up a Hawaiian island thing and watch whales swim. Like their little dots and they're moving around a map. That's pretty sweet. And there's like, there's lots of Underground trains and like, it's really cool. I had no idea buses and trains.

Jessamyn 1:20:31 Watching whales

mathowie 1:20:34 is cool. I had no idea. I guess they're tagged on their tails with to trackers. That's really impressive.

Cortex 1:20:43 So there's a neat one. My my my wife pointed out, Secretariat, she pointed out this asked me about sleeping in a log zero random Rando wants. He wants information on how to plan to sleep in a log like he was a, I guess a fallen log as a bed and sleeping it. So asking for, you know, logistics their advice on I somehow

Jessamyn 1:21:13 missed that thread, which is surprising because Aranda was a neighbor. close neighbor. But like he neglected to mention it's I mean until later it's for my in the middle of winter.

Cortex 1:21:27 Yeah, and there's a couple of please don't die. I gotta get scrubbed

Jessamyn 1:21:31 in there because Scrump is the winter camping guy. Oh, yeah,

Cortex 1:21:37 I did not know he was into that. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:21:39 I did because you know he doesn't seem like a super outdoorsy dude. And he was telling me about like winter camping with his wife and kids and I was I should

mathowie 1:21:49 the tree seems to make sense like you know when you step on like a rotting hollowed out tree like it's really spongy. So like air could you know it'd be like almost like a down jacket.

Jessamyn 1:22:00 You're gonna wake up with a bug in your ear and then that's gonna be your next Ask political question. Oh my god. Slept analog and now I've got a bug in my air. First don't sleep in lux.

mathowie 1:22:12 Lee Anchorage, the director of Toy Story three tweeted that he got bit in the ear by a centipede how painful it was. And then he revealed it came out of his pillow at his house and oh god, he had a picture of it. It was so gross. I do have a long much concerns.

Jessamyn 1:22:28 I mean, I'm not even bug phobic. I'm just sort of surrounded but I'm you saw my mouse thing right? Like if mice are gonna get that close to me that fast in my automobile what are they gonna do if I sleep in their house? They like poop in my ear despite me

Cortex 1:22:44 having take their log in the mechanic say yeah, no, I think there's something wrong with the leaves. What do you mean there's a human in there?

Jessamyn 1:22:50 There's a lady she peed all over everything. I

Cortex 1:22:53 don't know Lady What are you talking about?

Unknown Speaker 1:22:58 Sleeping Bag seven berries. Oh, good gracious.

Jessamyn 1:23:07 In the turning over a new leaf. thing I really enjoyed my girlfriend's quitting smoking. My girlfriend's giving up smoking. It's been 12 hours. She's a monster. Help me help her and RJ Reynolds who is also quitting had some nice punchy help like doll thread is really useful. But RJ Reynolds comment notably, was super useful and firm. This was so Gabriel Ricci's thread, helping the partner help the person quit the smoking.

mathowie 1:23:39 Oh score. Cory was really quitting. He was making jokes on Twitter, but he hadn't smoked and 20 Or he smoked every day for 20 plus years. And I didn't think he was actually trying to quit super quitting.

Jessamyn 1:23:51 So send him a big thumbs up and some candy.

mathowie 1:23:55 Yeah, me. I see Cory Chica when we were in New York City. And I always sad because he always wants to have a smoke and walk and talk. People I Love You know, I don't want him to smoke. Like, Oh, that's great. I'll send them some encouragement.

Jessamyn 1:24:10 You should you totally should.

mathowie 1:24:13 There are a couple of great like books ones, which was and there's you know, evergreen content. People always want to know about books, but uh, it's like one of the best books of 2014 and one I really loved, which was what non what's a bunch of nonfiction books I can tackle in a single city and so you know, something that's, you know, a couple hours long or short story ish or just a day or less, you know, 300 pages. I don't know why it started at BuzzFeed. But all the

Jessamyn 1:24:40 you know why? Because it's product placement. I don't know who Junebug 79 is

mathowie 1:24:46 born 79 That makes her a millennial. Yes, is great, great books, especially if you just joined Goodreads.

Jessamyn 1:24:55 And I do want to point out just because we're talking about books and meta filter there is also Read me on the meta filter wiki that are curated lists, stuff to read, that are crazy. Like there's so much useful information about from AskMe edit filter threads, and it hasn't really been updated much since 2013. So if people are looking for little credit Susi projects, you could get on that.

mathowie 1:25:21 Pretty amazing. Every aspect you can imagine a math, like there's a list

Jessamyn 1:25:28 that I found this one thread about, like, I want to find books more like this, and this and both of those books were books I liked. So I just read every single book that was recommended in the thread, but now I'm done. And I need more books exactly like those books. So I will be asking my own question as soon as I'm done with what's on my nightstand.

Cortex 1:25:47 I've been rereading the dune encyclopedia for about eight months now. So I really got to have I've actually got a bunch of physical books, I just I have such a hard time sitting down and reading and

Jessamyn 1:25:59 you mean the set of books or there's an encyclopedia.

Cortex 1:26:02 There's a there's an in universe encyclopedia that was published in like, the early mid 80s by a friend of Frank Herbert's. That's just a, it pretends to be selections from an encyclopedia written in the

Jessamyn 1:26:19 checkers Guide to the Galaxy or whatever, sorta?

Cortex 1:26:21 Yeah. And it's great, then yak of Griffis got me a copy. Read it on this body scan of a PDF from years ago, when there's medical reports about it. But yeah, they sent me an actual physical copy and, and, ah, and, and so yeah, I've been, it's my bedtime reading. You know, it's like I hop into bed I read for a few minutes, let my brain go to sleep. And so you know, I can get through a pager so that

mathowie 1:26:48 I have read two books in like the last two weeks because I'm just not playing threes for like, 30 minutes before bed. Like turns

Jessamyn 1:26:56 better for your brain for sleeping. Reading before bed helps, helps helps

mathowie 1:27:01 to turns out, like it's kind of hard if it's really meaty content, but it turns out like, yeah, you can just like a half hour each night to an hour like you can plow through, you know, several books,

Jessamyn 1:27:12 that was my resolution last year, 30 minutes reading every day, whether I want to or not. And, you know, most days I do a little bit more. Some days I do a little bit less. But you know, you get through a ton of books if you read it all fast and you know, pick up some good graphic novels too, because they are awesome.

mathowie 1:27:30 Man, I wish there was a like a man who went into a comic book store in Milwaukee I think it was or sell wood or something the other day. And it's just impenetrable, right? Like there's the graphic novel area then there's all the superhero comics,

Jessamyn 1:27:46 graphic novel section of Pauwels you know, comic art.

mathowie 1:27:51 I wish there was like a battle no popularity index. I mean, I can't judge a book by its cover literally. He can't he can ever tell like a congressman. Good artwork or good writing. Rarely both solved problem. How do you find the best graphic novels like that that

Jessamyn 1:28:10 are picked out at the library? Actually, you know what you do you go and look at the yalsa picks. If you read like why stuff but basically I look at librarian lists to tell you the truth.

mathowie 1:28:22 I just wish there was like a non super comics nerd. I don't know review site or so there is which is called

Jessamyn 1:28:32 wow, I don't know it might be no tights, no stockings, but I don't I don't know if that's for kids or not.

mathowie 1:28:39 Because it's kind of like it's kind of like to me wandering in the graphic novels area of pals is like walking wandering into the Zeno flying no tights. Oh, cool. It's like wandering in the zines area of pals are just like, oh, wow, these are all cool looking. I don't know what's going to be good. These are good.

Jessamyn 1:28:56 So this is all good reviews. You can split up by kids, teens, adults, their staff pics and then a whole bunch of resources or their stuff adult

mathowie 1:29:04 through the year.

Jessamyn 1:29:05 It's a really good website.

mathowie 1:29:07 Sweet. Yeah, I mean, they're just five choices. I just don't know what's going to be good

Jessamyn 1:29:13 about graphic novels as you can at least just pick them up and flip through them and see if they're terrible. Whereas, you know, a lot of times with books, you're invested by the time you're like, Oh, this is awful. Yeah, like I just read Rachel Dratch. His biography. She's like, the lady that was on SNL. Yeah. And like, just, she's interesting, but the book just didn't. Her life is weird. And it didn't really go anywhere. And I was like, Ah, I could have been reading something else.

mathowie 1:29:40 I saw she I think Jesse Thorn interviewed her first show. And yeah, she talks about the weird like, she didn't get work when she had a child. And yeah, and it's like Tina Fey,

Jessamyn 1:29:49 like accidentally pregnant and then like, didn't have a lot of work and her boyfriend lived in California and like the whole story is kind of you could play that story a lot of different ways and The way she chose to play it was just odd.

mathowie 1:30:02 And it's like her contemporaries like Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler. His books are like the most amazing things in the world. Like they're so funny and interesting. That yeah, I guess they'd set a high bar. Wow. There was a thread that totally strikes to the bone to me. Oops, that wasn't it. The same one, because the wrong pasting it was. How do you teach kids the value of growing up poor?

Jessamyn 1:30:29 I love this thread.

mathowie 1:30:30 Yeah, because like, when I was a kid, I

Jessamyn 1:30:32 didn't look too

mathowie 1:30:35 much like gifts. Thank you remember how to spell

Cortex 1:30:42 a lyric in a song?

Jessamyn 1:30:45 American what song?

Cortex 1:30:47 Right. Cheese now I'm trying to place it. It's it's got a fucking unless I'm like a Bavarian drinking song. Okay. I'm close. If I'm close if dadgum oohed Lee height, time, close it. Time rolls it dagger Moodley.

mathowie 1:31:07 Kate. Wow, have you heard that?

Cortex 1:31:10 I've sung. I've sung that standing on one of 1000 picnic tables in a giant tent in Munich with 5000 other drunk people. It's which I highly recommend.

mathowie 1:31:24 I was I was wondering, did you go to college? After college to do crazy summer?

Cortex 1:31:29 No, I didn't do a summer but we went to we went to Germany for like a week, while Germany and Austria, me and a bunch of college friends a few years after we graduate. Okay. And it was, it was great. It was a really good time. And Germany's

mathowie 1:31:41 always Oktoberfest so. So this thread by that name. It's interesting, because I was just thinking when I was a kid, once a week are special go out was like McDonald's. And my parents made like, probably the equivalent to $20,000 a year or something, you know, wasn't great. I had to borrow lots of money my whole life until you know, it's like my daughter, we can go out to, you know, a nice restaurant any night of the week. And I always wonder how that's warping her. She's got fancy clothes. Yeah. And I'm like reading this thread is great. Well, like how do you remind your children if they're growing up better than you did that like, it can get worse and you should be nice to people and poor people mattered and stuff

Jessamyn 1:32:24 like that. Just understanding what the value system is, that allows you to get what you have also often keeps other people from not getting what you have, and how do you work within that right? A lot of really thoughtful answers. Well, and I just saw what Kevin Hart on, you know, Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. And like Kevin Hart grew up in this completely. I mean, Chris Rock talks about the same thing, like grew up completely, like super working class poor. And they have children now who just are, you know, their fathers are rich, and but they live, you know, they're still like little black kids. And so how do they sort of balance and figure it out? And how do you impress that upon your kids without just seeming like some creepy, moralistic rah rah kids today, et cetera?

mathowie 1:33:11 So it was an amazing blackish comedy show, which is great because it reminds me of he takes his kids to his favorite restaurant he had growing up is basically Sizzler. His kids are just like, oh, this is like this is overcooked, like, you expect me to eat this, like garbage. And he's like, my favorite thing. And I'm just thinking, I would love to go to a sizzler from 1983 In my mind, but it's probably like,

Jessamyn 1:33:36 go to McDonald's all the time when I was a kid to not I mean, we were doing okay. But my parents always treated us like we were broke. And so, you know, I do have these, like, Kid associations of that, like the fancy meal we would have would be like Chinese food. Yeah. And I still have that in my head. Even though you know, now I'm like, Let's go the Chinese restaurant my friends, neighbors are like, I'm like, No, it's like, it's weird. Trying to figure out like, you know, I have this nostalgia for a thing that only sort of makes sense nowadays.

mathowie 1:34:10 Yeah, like, it's a $6 meal. Now, it's no big deal to get fried rice or something. Like it's not special at all to people.

Jessamyn 1:34:17 Right? Right. Right, that it's not fancy well, and also being in the country where a lot of people just don't eat out at all. So if you're gonna make the effort to go out, you'd go someplace nice. Maybe, I don't know, it's it's a whole bunch of different things. I have more of that sort of urban. Yeah, let's eat out a couple times a week. And people are like, what? I'm like, I'm a, you know, middle aged lady with no kids. We spend all my money on me.

Cortex 1:34:42 I'm trying to think about like magical childhood restaurants. I feel like I may have like, you know, in my 20s, embracing, you know, adulthood and independent and whatnot. I may have sort of like, you know, wrung out a lot of those childhood memories by just being able to go wherever because yeah, I mean, like going out to even get like fast Food was sort of a unusual thing for my home that we tended to cook in or you know, stuff from the freezer maybe. And so yeah, like going to McDonald's was kind of a treat, going to talk about high school actually probably started me down the path of getting over it, because there was a Taco Bell and a KFC and Burger King within walking distance to school. And

Jessamyn 1:35:20 because when we go there, even imagine such luxury. Yeah, well, and

Cortex 1:35:23 yeah, and yeah, we'd go there for lunch. And, you know, you know, on the one hand is not great food. On the other hand, it's cheap, and it's there, and it's salty. And it's hot. It's like, yeah.

Jessamyn 1:35:33 And it's not in the school cafeteria. So yeah.

Cortex 1:35:36 Because my stay in the cafeteria. I just get like a thing of Joe Joe's and the, like, hostess pie. Probably. I had gotten in at one point in high school, I'd gotten in the habit of buying a hostess pie and something else for lunch. And then it occurred to me the economical part of my brain was like, You know what, I'm paying way too much for these hostess pies. I should really try and find a way to you know, get these in bulk. And that part of my brain was like, Yeah, well, yeah, I should. I should tell my parents we should buy, you know, like a case of hostess pies. And then the smart part of my brain was like, if you told your parents you're eating a fucking pie every day at lunch, they would not be happy. You can't tell them and so I really never had any more money for lunch. Exactly. So I had to continue overpaying for my hostess pies. If I wanted to

Jessamyn 1:36:18 maintain the fiction, yes. What a sad story.

Cortex 1:36:24 Yeah, it wasn't too sad. It just just feel sad. A little bit. Sad, right? was really interested in high school. I have no idea.

Jessamyn 1:36:34 I wonder about that sometimes to wonder about what, like what my parents thought I was doing all the times in high school when I was doing all sorts of things that weren't any good. God, I'm

mathowie 1:36:45 such a nerd. I would like I was playing arcade games, you know, a long lunch. That was one of the worst things I got into.

Cortex 1:36:52 We couldn't even leave our campus. See, that's so weird to me.

mathowie 1:36:56 Yeah, I mean, you sort of couldn't in that think until your junior high school and then it was free rein. And I was a teacher aide, which basically means you can blow off a whole hour of school. If you've done your work, you know, there's nothing to do. So like, I would have like two hour lunches. It was not, that's probably not smart to give to a 17 year old. And with that, dessert AskMe

Jessamyn 1:37:24 eating, Mr. Moon Pie had this kind of weird, funny thread about like, help me order stuff at Subway, which I thought was kind of, I don't know, I mean, this is kind of a nerd thing. Like, I hate subway, because there's like a bunch of questions. And somebody's talking to me. And there's someone behind me and it makes me tense and irritable and whatever. And apparently that's true for Mr. Moon Pie, too. And so this was back in June. And people were giving a whole bunch of like, try this, do the thing, blah, blah, blah. And then it turns out, you can order stuff online. And so it totally solved the problem, because now we can just show up at Subway and someone can hand him his little bag of food, and then he's done. All right.

mathowie 1:38:01 I tried that at a local subway when like the line was like 20 minutes long, and it turned out the subway did not support the cars are all independently owned franchises. We are getting

Jessamyn 1:38:12 a subway in my town, my town, which only has a McDonald's and many local restaurants is getting a subway that's gonna go in with the gas station that's getting rehabbed. And we're all like, Ooh, did you hear subway?

mathowie 1:38:26 Making it great.

Cortex 1:38:27 We've got we've got a sandwich shop. We've got a subway near the house here. But then sandwich shop opened up a little farther down the road that makes actually like good. Sandwiches, basically. So I feel good about myself that that has seized my subway consumption because like Subway is closer, and it would be a little bit faster. But I just haven't really gotten back and

Jessamyn 1:38:51 you can't live in sub in Portland and eat at a subway. Yeah, you can maybe live in Randolph and get away with it. But Portland

Cortex 1:38:58 subways in town actually do some decent business. It's weird, because it's like, there's so much good food in this town. But then sometimes you're hungry and oh, there's a subway. And that's just you know, it just happens. That's usually a

Jessamyn 1:39:12 subway in the last, you know, month or so I we had to eat something before we went to my friend's party because we didn't know if there was going to be food there or starving. So we stopped in a mall to get something at the food court and everything was ridiculous. And subway was the least ridiculous and we sat under the Boston Garden. Former Boston Garden score board

Cortex 1:39:34 had our little sandwich no Panda Express.

Jessamyn 1:39:37 You know, all the Penn Express stuff is like seven eight bucks for like a huge plate of stuff which like, you know, from a value perspective, I appreciate but like

Cortex 1:39:45 if you weren't wanting them to bite, ya know, that makes sense.

Jessamyn 1:39:48 And it turned out there was food at the thing anyhow, so we didn't have to. I don't know. Never again, should we do this before dinner?

Cortex 1:40:00 For getting hungry and hungry as we talk,

Jessamyn 1:40:03 there's the scoreboard. The only other thing I wanted to mention, I don't know if you guys had any any special last things, but it was the end of the year and I always enjoy the meta talk holiday thread. And the what was your favorite under appreciated quote of last have, you know, your favorite underappreciated comment of last year?

Cortex 1:40:28 Yeah, I still gotta go through in your name. What? No, no, I already did that. But

Jessamyn 1:40:36 that's what I do. Now go

Cortex 1:40:37 back to my favorites and put together a little list to

Jessamyn 1:40:41 Yeah, I figured it's a great way to pass like little Wafi around saying, and I thought it was cool.

Cortex 1:40:46 You know, it's an excuse to remember some of the neat stuff too. So it's for you and for the other people.

Jessamyn 1:40:51 It is for the other people and especially with you guys, being mods with great power comes great responsibility.

Cortex 1:40:56 My favorite so little, I have to go back sort of manually to find stuff. It's very hard to basically what I'm saying it's very difficult.

Jessamyn 1:41:03 I have noticed that from the outside,

mathowie 1:41:05 every podcast, I try to bring up a couple of great comments and then we never get around to it because you know, we're mostly focusing higher up on post I can about lunch, and I should be writing this down.

Cortex 1:41:16 You should prepare at all I have a I could do a quick music corner here. There's a bunch of good music. Let's see there's this nice song by sports writers. Called shame the devil turn it up. It's nice sort of poppy dark toned rocker that sounds pretty great. There's this bid from Eric grande called it won't be the same this is really really really nice sort of stripped down but then it builds up a little bit mid tempo acoustic driven thing. Really nice vocals nice guitar work. The chorus is just fantastic. On a completely different note, there's a I guess pull this pull of a track called I also do weddings, which is some sort of deep electronic dance hell weirdness that I really really liked. I think it might be difficult to dance to what was the tempo changes and stuff but it's it's it's pretty fantastic. People are still doing They Might Be Giants. We're still coming up to the deadline for the big flood 25th anniversary celebratory cover album thing we're all working on. So there's a nice cover of we want to rock by walrus, which is sort of tmbg via harpsichord yeah, that's

Jessamyn 1:42:35 all wrapping up right?

Cortex 1:42:36 Yeah, we've got another like week or so really get things in. And then choco cat did a fantastic cover of dead which is also one of my favorite songs for the album. So those are great.

Jessamyn 1:42:48 How does the dead song go?

Cortex 1:42:49 Return the bag of groceries accident Oh yeah. Okay, so he does a really nice job of it. And then one of the thing getting off the D MBG. Like there's a really fantastic like break net how to ship bluegrass version of swing low Sweet Chariot by overlapping Elvis bands new their debut album this is a track off it and it's really fucking great. So ah, so yeah, that but and a bunch more stuff but there's there's plenty for the fighter for here.

mathowie 1:43:19 Who sounds like a beaut chased. Fast banjo. What is a mellow Tron?

Cortex 1:43:27 Mellotron it's it's a it's a really neat instrument. It's an early sort of mechanical synthesizer, but what it used rather than like, you know, digital synthesis of noise or analog synthesis of noise, it actually used loops of tape.

Jessamyn 1:43:48 Chuck uses them a lot. Yeah,

Cortex 1:43:49 each key has a loop of tape attached to it, and it sort of plays with it. So instead of like synthesizing a square wave to create a cynthy sound, you would actually have a loop recording of some sound

Jessamyn 1:44:00 and then present it with a key. Yeah, so

Cortex 1:44:03 it's like a crazy sort of like we use sampler meets pad synthesizer.

mathowie 1:44:08 Do you rerecord each of the things at

Cortex 1:44:12 each keyboard? Yeah, each key on the keyboard triggers a different tape and it's it's insanely finicky thing. It's the sort of thing you would only have invented at the time in history was invented.

mathowie 1:44:22 It should only exist between 1963 and 70. That makes perfect sense basically figured things out after that.

Cortex 1:44:28 Wow. But ya know, it's a neat instrument. It's

mathowie 1:44:30 well, I still own them. And they work Yeah, well,

Cortex 1:44:33 that they they do their best to keep working. I mean, I'm sure it's a total pain to maintain. But it's one of the things Yeah, it's one of those things where part of me is like Oh, I'd love to own a Mellotron and part of me is like no I fucking wouldn't like Why on earth would I want to saddle myself with that much potential heartbreak and maintenance

mathowie 1:44:50 of the borrow one.

Cortex 1:44:52 Well, and the thing is, at this point, you could do a pretty good synthesizer you know, you can do a pretty good you could do it with a computer. That

Jessamyn 1:44:59 sounds good. Yeah, that's

Cortex 1:45:00 a really good job of emulating all the specific mechanical quirks that make the Mellotron so interesting to hear. So like at this point is like good do you really want to own the physical thing but yeah, it's a really neat instrument really weird oddity of of that period of 20th century music that's really cool. And that's battlefield Music Corner.

Jessamyn 1:45:20 Josh that was awesome.

Cortex 1:45:25 I should go back and figure out what all my theme songs were. I wonder if I do the exact same? Do I improvise the same thing every time and not realize that I've actually got a memorized theme song that I don't know I have.

mathowie 1:45:38 I guess that's about it. Anything else?

Jessamyn 1:45:41 I copy pasted my links over to you guys because I posted them to the Internet Archive chat instead. They thought it was funny. I don't know how anybody puts up with me on

mathowie 1:45:52 Slack. Slack is fine. Oh,

Jessamyn 1:45:55 yeah, I heard you guys move to slack.

mathowie 1:45:57 Well yeah, we just sort of do develop in Slack but everyone's on Slack. Like I'm getting invited to like Slack instead of Twitter basically like five or six friends you know, email us

Jessamyn 1:46:10 we use it on medium and we use it for Tildy club well we use use it until the club but now nobody's there anymore. So I feel like they went somewhere and didn't tell me terrible feeling.

mathowie 1:46:23 I feel bad. Whenever I post on the utility club I'll go the recent update in the last 24 hours is like to update

Cortex 1:46:29 it's it's gotten real quiet people are still working on stuff in the back into some

Jessamyn 1:46:33 serious Cliff I think part of that has to do with you know, there isn't the sort of hype anymore and part of it is Unix is hard and people actually don't like it. I mean, I made my store I was very excited about it. But I you know, I don't want to be on a command line and learn things every minute.

mathowie 1:46:50 Yeah, I'm a poser. I'm totally using an outside app.

Jessamyn 1:46:54 You figured out how to do it go you like it's basically an

mathowie 1:46:57 app running on my Mac it makes it go but yeah,

Jessamyn 1:47:01 do you use like the slack app it's amazing. Oh yeah, you don't even have to use a browser it's so cool.

mathowie 1:47:08 Yeah, yeah it's cool that's the show then

Jessamyn 1:47:13 All right great talking to you guys under two hours we did

Cortex 1:47:17 amazing a pleasure bye

Unknown Speaker 1:47:31 whenever as much love and affection on your elegance Where's his pain oh six. Saying nothing and you're telling me you did one day said I'm your next time and time and time again. I'm trying to Forget The sweetness of your skin is just voice. shamed me for putting your time