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Podcast 102 Transcript

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A transcript for Episode 102: Retired (2015-03-05).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.


Transcript

mathowie 0:00 So how are we gonna play this?

Jessamyn 0:03 Well I so it was me you guys come out

mathowie 0:09 right there'll be strange like asked Yeah,

Cortex 0:12 I think we can just talk about like people who know that the news will have come out by the time we make the

Jessamyn 0:19 trial balloon this is the thing that is happening no matter what

mathowie 0:23 I just met Do you want to talk right off the bat or probably but or talking about site and then talk about it I

Cortex 0:31 think probably upfront would be good

Cortex 0:39 Jessamyn Welcome to the metal filter podcast.

mathowie 0:45 Welcome to Episode 102 of the metal filter Podcast. I'm Mathowie

Jessamyn 0:49 I'm Jessamyn West.

Cortex 0:51 And I'm Josh Maillard aka cortex. Boom. landed it.

Jessamyn 0:58 Nailed it. So gentlemen, 102. Nothing interesting about it.

Cortex 1:03 Nothing at all. Nothing whatsoever.

Jessamyn 1:04 It's the emergency telephone number for police and Bell roofs.

Cortex 1:07 See, that's interesting. What if I'm in Belarus, and I'll be good for you to know an emergency. I need to know what's interesting about your phone number that's like, well, it gets to us. It's like, bam.

Jessamyn 1:16 You'd have to get a special SIM card for it. That was enjoyable about my trip to Europe. Hey, SIM card. Hey, does it work? Hey, I have to cut it down with scissors. Hey, maybe it'll fit. Hey.

mathowie 1:28 Oh, they didn't have a SIM cutter. Oh, yeah, there's three somebody

Jessamyn 1:30 sent me one and they sent me the wrong size. And I was really happy they sent it but it was the wrong size. And so I cut it and was like if it doesn't work, I'm not out anything but it did work. But then my sister bought a card but it was the wrong size and just throw everybody's go into London and the next like five days and wants a SIM card that still has some money, data money on it and it's a nano sim. Get in touch.

mathowie 1:55 Alright, micro nano and regular. Yeah. You were there for seven days?

Jessamyn 2:01 Yeah, yeah. Like Saturday, Saturday, basically. What was a vacation? I don't know when the last time was I took just a vacation. I literally cannot remember that was more than a weekend. Sweet. Yeah. It was nice saw people walked around the weather. There was like 45 and kind of rainy, which is perfect. And Kate and I just like ate food and looked at museums and things in jars and whatever. I put up a big set of pictures on Flickr. So if anybody is still uses Flickr, my stuff is there.

mathowie 2:35 What did you fly with? British for sure. With Sony.

Jessamyn 2:40 Nobody cares about this.

mathowie 2:45 I'm just like, Why do you have cooler playing video?

Cortex 2:50 We're just in our natural battery habitat here. It's

Jessamyn 2:54 very much more interesting to talk about than not

Cortex 2:58 true. Experience

mathowie 3:00 techniques. I don't know how it wouldn't choke. Whatever,

Cortex 3:07 like just never gets to your throat. There's no choke. You just have to Yeah, you've been talking about neti pot some time, you can come over the house with a water thrown nostril. I totally

Jessamyn 3:16 get it that you wouldn't want to do it. But like after you've done it and like you've actually rinsed out your disgusting nose after a while. It's really, I don't do it a lot. But when I do it, I'm always like, I feel much better.

Cortex 3:31 Think of it as something I want to do recreationally but I've definitely felt a lot worse with sinus stuff that I have felt bad while using a neti pot. Like you know, it's it. Yeah, I've structured that correctly. But there's worse things sticking in

mathowie 3:46 here clog up like a month or two ago for the first time. My life.

Jessamyn 3:50 Probably related to the shit you're dealing with now, right? Well, no, it's all the same. Eustachian tube. Yeah, and then I went to you and I have the same illness. This is terrible.

mathowie 4:01 I went to the parallel evolution. I went to urgent care and they flush out my ear. It is basically the first time I live I've had zero earwax. And I've had doctors tell me I created the earwax like enough for 10 Min. Like I have to share it them. So I just remember I heard for the first time like that's what I'm imagining post neti pot will feel Yeah, exactly.

Jessamyn 4:25 It's exactly like that. Like when you like land in a plane. And then you like do the vest, self maneuver and pop out your eardrums. And suddenly you're like, oh, there's actually real sounds that I couldn't hear

mathowie 4:36 that though, like like I couldn't be a scuba diver because I was so bad at like being able to depressurize my head like I just had sinus headaches trying to scuba dive.

Cortex 4:45 The important thing is that we've managed to get back to the neti positive side of stuff here. So that's not lost to our pre roll.

Jessamyn 4:50 I was a little worried we'd spend too much time talking about my vacation. I would instead like to talk about all of our sinus passages.

mathowie 5:02 So yeah, we have not said, Well, let me see how are we even gonna approach this? I guess we posted

Cortex 5:10 a couple of weeks behind the scenes, hasn't it? Here's the whole thing.

Jessamyn 5:15 Josh emailed me and said, Hey, I kind of need to talk to you about something. It's not bad, but weird.

Cortex 5:21 Weird, but not that weird, but not

Jessamyn 5:23 bad. And I spent a lot of time worrying that some user that I didn't really like maybe had died. But it turned out instead that Matt and Josh had some news.

mathowie 5:34 See?

Jessamyn 5:37 Spanish?

mathowie 5:38 Let me see.

Cortex 5:40 Gentlemen. Well, you know, I said, it was good. I was trying to be supportive,

mathowie 5:47 good setup. Well, read the text,

Cortex 5:51 like, like a band aid mat. Just

Jessamyn 5:53 not got another job. Yeah, that's going to work a job. And so Josh got another job. A cool job. I could not get another job. And that's awesome. Also, all three of us are stoked. The gentlemen are having a very difficult time talking about it for we typically do not understand the job.

mathowie 6:13 I've been secretive for months, you know, it's really, that's

Jessamyn 6:18 that's you though. Yeah. Like, that's not new. That's how you are. Yeah. So I'm happy that you can have it all out in the open and you know, it's like the neti pot, man.

Cortex 6:29 Once it finally once it's flowing. It's not out of there. No, it's funny, because it's really been Yeah, sort of, like I haven't had as long to dwell on it because Matt sort of wait until the process actually looks like it was going somewhere before we had a serious conversation

Jessamyn 6:42 about it for four days.

Cortex 6:45 But, but ya know, it's, it's, it's kind of crazy and exciting, am I obviously a bunch to sort of take on more responsibility here, but it's also just exciting. To see Matt getting a chance to do something new. Something something it's gonna be 16 years of accumulated stress, which is just so fucking awesome for you, honestly.

Jessamyn 7:09 I've had some back channel discussion about just how great this is gonna be for him.

Cortex 7:16 To you, Josh. No, no, no.

mathowie 7:19 Yesterday, I had to get my iPhone repaired, I had no phone for like three hours. And that was a trip because I had to figure out how to move around Portland without a map like,

Jessamyn 7:28 fire you at your new job for that, Matt. They can fire you at your new job. No phone, your

mathowie 7:35 new phone. And so I get my phone back over to three hours. And there's 30 emails, and 29 of them are about like an mra. That won't be a problem.

Jessamyn 7:48 I haven't even looked at the MRA thread. That's how great it is.

Cortex 7:52 I actually yeah, I have a thread right before the podcast brand new guy who like had not taken like any time to get to know the site stuff. So it kind of sucks host

Jessamyn 8:01 or did he just didn't show up.

Cortex 8:05 He just showed up in the middle of the conversation and was like, Hey, let's start from scratch and all the things that I am, I think are wrong with feminism. And the thing is, like, it wasn't even like total ragers like angry anti feminist nut job thing so much as he was just like, he was kind of beefing in a general way without having any the backstory of like years of conversation about this stuff on the site. And he was doing it in a way like his opening line was I'm first of all, I'm not an M or a guy. And fuck you

Jessamyn 8:33 if you think you have some good points. It was weird. Fuck you. And you didn't just ban him immediately.

Cortex 8:40 We were nice about it. It was it was an odd situation. I might abandon leave I'd been on the clock but the generous side of me sees the reasoning to and we basically tried to give him a chance to cool off and like actually join the community. But that wasn't happening.

mathowie 8:59 So subscribe to his newsletter. It sounds like correct but so is

Jessamyn 9:02 he banned already? Yeah, yeah. Ah, I like this new ban happy cortex.

mathowie 9:07 Someone signed up three accounts right before we started recording what is up with that

Cortex 9:12 was the weirdest thing. And usually nothing happens with it too. Like I always like I peg those immediately make something is up here. And most of the time, I mean, most accounts nothing really happens with you know, the ones we don't look at weird are mostly people who are just sort of lurking but now they can use favorites as well. But But yeah, those ones are always like, what is your angle? Are you going to have a conversation with yourself about this exciting new products? Oh, this person

mathowie 9:35 accounts that's weird.

Jessamyn 9:39 Send me a link.

mathowie 9:40 They're making a joke and meta talk about cortex. It's three different spellings of Dragon

Jessamyn 9:49 just use the word peg which he says funny also. Yep.

mathowie 9:53 Where did they meet a human that said dragon.

Cortex 9:55 I told you that? Yeah, like like a dentist or something I don't remember. Or waitress. Oh, I don't know what the hell it was. Yeah. You mentioned

mathowie 10:03 there was some sort of, she was from somewhere else Canadian. She just kept saying dragon we have some dragon bourbon in stock and I went

Cortex 10:12 oh, yeah, maybe like yeah, beer, or something.

mathowie 10:15 Yeah, it was called Dragon to her drinking cider.

Cortex 10:21 It still doesn't sound weird to me. But of course, it doesn't sound weird to me because it's how I say

mathowie 10:25 it. So yeah, I am. I was I was noticing I was getting completely burned out in the last few months, and

Jessamyn 10:32 you've been burned out for the last couple of years. Be honest, be honest.

mathowie 10:35 The last five years, even the up times are super stressful. The downtimes are super stressful health scares. My mom died, like all sorts of shit has been logged at me. So yeah, it's been. But like, really? I mean, since you left Jessamyn it's like I took on, you know, an extra mod job plus all the other old Stan, you

Cortex 10:53 were like, You really haven't been doing that regular moderation for a few years before they just

mathowie 10:57 spend like a day a week and now suddenly was six days or five days a week, three

Jessamyn 11:00 hours a week? Yeah. The only reason I'm here is just so I can be the color commentary on your explanation.

mathowie 11:11 So like, it felt like 70 or 80 hours of work, you know,

Jessamyn 11:15 it's really hard. It's hard work.

mathowie 11:17 Yeah, it's it's rough. And I'm the I'm the worst mod because I'm just like, trying to get through it. And yeah, so lobstermen will be a way better mod.

Jessamyn 11:25 Oh, wait, that's the part we actually didn't mention. So Josh is like moving up the food chain a little bit. Matt's going to be a little bit more emeritus. I'm still going to be the person at the other end of the podcast phone and lobsterman is coming back with a vengeance. And that's awesome news.

Cortex 11:40 Back Back button, the seat full time, which I'm really excited about. She seems to be excited about.

Jessamyn 11:43 I love you, Josh. But she is the best of all of us.

mathowie 11:48 She's like, we were all in the first two years of it. I think just like oh, did you see this other thing? These eight other things that happened in the last six minutes? Like Wow,

Jessamyn 11:57 incredible communicator? Yeah,

Cortex 11:59 yeah, she has a she has an excellent, excellent way of structuring communication. She's got a really strong super diplomatic sense about things like I feel like I can be pretty diplomatic. But I think I'm a little more likely to be are you fucking kidding me? You have a long day, right? Yeah. Whereas locksmith manages to be a lot more consistently like, the FAQ,

Jessamyn 12:18 and she's got her finger on the pulse of a whole bunch of other stuff at the same time that she's moderating, which I just think is gonna be delightful.

Cortex 12:24 Yeah, she's super great, Tom. I'm so happy about that. Yeah.

Jessamyn 12:27 Plus, it means more ladies, fewer dudes. No, no, no. offense intended, Matt. I think that that will only help.

mathowie 12:36 Yeah, totally. There'll be more female moderators than male moderators. So tell

Jessamyn 12:41 us a little bit about your job, Matt. I don't know anything about it. Except the place you're working starts with us.

mathowie 12:46 Yeah. Slack and doing content stuff.

Jessamyn 12:49 Doesn't mean anything. Empty, meaningless.

mathowie 12:53 Empty, meaningless job title like senior. Good for you good for Senior Content Director or

Jessamyn 13:01 no know. Content Director, I am so happy about

mathowie 13:04 this content to always

Jessamyn 13:08 be the annoying guy. It's somebody else's

Cortex 13:13 crazy socks. Yeah, I need any like really primo bad puns, by the way you can just

mathowie 13:22 so in the last few months, I've been approached by a couple different companies. And there was this one opportunity where these people were like, run a huge community on the internet. And they were like, you're the one person on the planet and understand everything we have to do. And I'm like, and then we went kind of far down that path. And I realized, like, I'm kind of burned out on my own. Why would I sign on to one I didn't create and I would be doing the same job. Yeah, and so those are fun. And then you know, Slack is something I've always loved and there's like maybe five products on earth I really love and I've you know would love to work on and I've actually interviewed at Apple and Twitter and stuff for various things and nothing ever panned out over the last few years is sort of a maybe do think about it, but um, Slack. Yeah, like it's like how big is Slack? Slack is now 100 People around the world I think seven year in San Francisco and like 20 or 30 are in Vancouver, Canada and then remote get to be remote go into San Francisco once a month. Like half the half of Flickr I think is ended up back at Slack and everyone I know there's like nobody I intensely talk to you know the dozen or two dozen people I know there and nobody had a bad like I couldn't there's no bad stories there's no bad I mean no one had anything. No drawbacks like it

Jessamyn 14:41 was that mean you can read the stuff I say about you in other slacks now?

mathowie 14:46 I hope not. Like I mean they have serious security situation right. So the company the product looks like a toy and it looks like fun chat, but it contains all knowledge management for an entire Our corporation. Right, right, right entire industries. They are super dead serious. I mean, it looks like a toy, right? It's past who haven't

Jessamyn 15:07 used it? What's your like? 22nd? What is slack? Like when people say what is slack? What do you tell

mathowie 15:13 them? Yeah, I guess it depends on Nerdy they are because it's just basically IRC for business, you know, but

Jessamyn 15:18 looking skinned IRC Yeah,

Cortex 15:21 it's a nice interface with a bunch of features under it.

mathowie 15:25 It's mostly great search. So there's some permanence to what is typically not permanent. But yeah, I guess it's just for work. It's workplace chat. And it's really good than done well and easy to use. And the search is really great. Yeah, like I was thinking about it. Like, when I think about, oh, I have an idea for a metal filter, there's probably like 14 things I can do. I can like, send an email, place a call to go on Skype, like, you know, there's just a stack of ways I could share that with someone else that works there. And slack is just good at like, all the middle things.

Jessamyn 15:58 Right? It keeps stuff in in one area, it allows notifications of people. So if people need to get a hold of you, they can ping you on whatever your method is. I was trying to explain it because we use it at the message. And yeah, it's I'm amazed. I'm amazed at like how we sort of clown shoes hit around meta filter before we had better tools.

mathowie 16:20 Yeah, we're going all in on it on meta filter, too. And it's working pretty good, although we still do tons of email stuff.

Cortex 16:28 Because that's how the users just sort of yeah, we've just started really playing with it. Over the last week and a half, maybe? Yeah. Yeah. It's got a lot of promise. But yeah, we sort of have to figure out how to

mathowie 16:41 do on two paragraphs, which is too big for slack. And you kind of want to not do it. It's weird in emails. Yeah. They're still trying to figure out where, like, Me and Paul have been using it for since last fall. Works pretty good for dev stuff. And we have all these Dev, like anytime Paul checks in code goes no code channel. So as a mod you can go, someone says their fonts changing. Just go through the code channel go. I don't say anything about fonts, like this person has a grease monkey problem or something? Yeah. There's Twitter stuff. You can yeah, there's integration.

Jessamyn 17:13 Communications means what? Like, is this gonna be a public facing job? Are we gonna see you talking about shit and the press and stuff or I have to write more of a back office.

mathowie 17:23 I've been like interviewing people that use Slack and how they use Slack and businesses. And those will be like case studies somehow ended up I guess it'd be like blog posts,

Jessamyn 17:32 or like, white paper kind of thing. Yeah, white paper, but

mathowie 17:34 like, I was supposed to help out with the blog a lot. But not just be a blogger. But yeah, I just have to write stuff about Slack and help sell it to people or explain it to people. So yeah, I've been doing that stuff. And yeah, just being able to sleep in, there's no server downtime emails in the morning. Like, it'll be good.

Jessamyn 17:55 Are you serious you haven't been sleeping in because you get server downtime emails,

mathowie 17:58 like I just, I mean, there's anxiety from like, I don't know, I know, I'm gonna wake up at 20 to 30 emails,

Jessamyn 18:05 bad news for you about the anxiety. It may not go away.

mathowie 18:11 You produce other things to worry about. I've got some years of practice. But yeah, not having 30 emails every morning, I sort of dread Gmail in the mornings.

Jessamyn 18:22 See, I love Gmail now, because it's like three or four messages. So my boyfriend, my neighbor, someone who wants to hang out with me, like, you know, it's nothing about work for the most part.

Cortex 18:34 And I'm always a little bit worried if I get up in the morning. And there's like, not at least we're in the right sort of like complimentary dispositional places on this

Jessamyn 18:43 break for this job, Josh, because you have a relaxed attitude towards your workflow that neither Matt nor I have ever.

mathowie 18:52 And I bottle stuff up, because that's what I do. And yeah, yeah. Yeah. The ticking time bombs gone long enough. So done. And yeah, I'll check in with stuff. But you know, I guess I'll do the retired tag, and we'll figure out,

Jessamyn 19:09 how are you excited to share that retired tag with you?

mathowie 19:13 Oh, man, yeah, I might never have to like, look at metadata you don't. That's the nice thing.

Cortex 19:19 You don't you don't even have to

Jessamyn 19:22 use the six part, you still will.

mathowie 19:24 I'll just wait for the happy metal talks. I'll read those fun.

Jessamyn 19:28 They are awesome. We can

Cortex 19:30 set up a little filtering on the mod side row can assign either a happy face, or sad face as like hidden metadata that you can see.

mathowie 19:36 There's an API for emotionality. Like there actually is a public API for the stuff that you're talking about,

Cortex 19:43 based on like, just parsing of the content of

Jessamyn 19:45 nerds. You

mathowie 19:47 can put in your Tweet, tweet stream, and it'll rate like every tweet if it's happy or not. It's always there's some sort of

Jessamyn 19:53 like, oh, and then bar the dove so people will tell me like cheer up little buck. I actually got an email from them like probably just a mass spammy email asking if I wanted to be like, kind of a brand ambassador kind of person who would. It was like, Hi, I'm so and so like, no, no, some like, we represent have and x and whoever else we're really looking for whatever, whatever. I don't even know what it was. But it was like from some young kid. Like, you know, how are we could talk to you about lucrative blah blah blah. I was like, nope, not even going there not I'm not super thrilled. I don't want to be anywhere near dove and their internet explosion. Thank you. No, no, nope.

mathowie 20:36 Yeah, they're like BuzzFeed of brands. You know, they're like, trying all sorts of weird stuff. Yeah. No, no, yeah. Yep. It's going out. And a bit will will have gone

Cortex 20:49 out by the time we get this. Yeah,

Jessamyn 20:51 you better put it out. While I'm on this podcast. Let me tell you one thing right now. No,

Cortex 20:57 just scared to start leaking tweets

Jessamyn 20:58 against the rules.

Cortex 21:01 Well, that was that was my biggest Josh

Jessamyn 21:03 Almeida told no one. And I told no one except my sister and Jim.

Cortex 21:08 Yeah, that's about the operation.

mathowie 21:10 Did they say was their first response? Oh, that's weird. Or that sounds completely human, like what a normal person would do after 16 years.

Jessamyn 21:17 Now. They're like, are you mad? And I'm like, What? No. And then they were like, oh, that sounds great. Cool. Because everybody was afraid that I was gonna have some, you know, reaction, even though it wouldn't seem like I would, but maybe I would say, more like, how do you feel about that? I was like, I'm stoked for everybody. Yeah.

mathowie 21:39 Yeah. We're worried about that a little. But I was like, when Jessamyn left, she did not want to take on 240 hour jobs. Like it was insane.

Jessamyn 21:49 Doesn't either actually, yeah. Better at delegating?

Cortex 21:52 Yeah, I think part of the secret here is I'm going to try and make sure it's not 40 hours of extra work. Because we do have a whole team and as much as I appreciate your inclination to try and not burden people with stuff. I think that that kind of goes with your bottling up thing to probably part of why stuff ends up being so burnout at work, I'm okay saying, hey, let's figure this out and seeing how that works. So but ya know, it's uh, it's, it's, it's crazy, exciting stuff. And I'm presuming the meta talk thread that has already been going on by the time anybody hears this will have been going very positively. But but maybe it won't, it will be hilarious.

mathowie 22:29 Literally knew at the time.

Jessamyn 22:31 Right? Everybody's just having their, you know, naively wondering about they're not not even knowing not even knowing.

Cortex 22:40 Yes. All right. Jesus, I know, it's, it's big news, because it's big news. Because I mean, hey,

mathowie 22:50 better, like, it's yeah, it's positive in three ways, you know, telling yourself that a better mod, you know, I'm out of the burnout mode, like, Josh is great and thoughtful about this stuff. And everyone's putting in, you know, their input on things. And like,

Jessamyn 23:06 I don't think there's any argument, I think you're worried that people aren't gonna miss, you

mathowie 23:10 know, man, I would totally be fine with that. You know, I'm worried about like people saying, like, oh, you know, there's a sinking ship, and he's jumping off. And

Jessamyn 23:21 it's like, that's a message that can be controlled. If anybody says that it's so clear, it's not the case. You just have people like Josh and me and lobstermen, and everyone else being like, no,

mathowie 23:32 moving. Humanity, and empathy would be like, I get tired of it, too. I mean, people email us all the time and say, like, I don't know how you guys do it. And it's like, well, yeah, I found my limit. So like,

Jessamyn 23:43 Yeah, I think you just need to be like, I was following Jasmine on Twitter, and she seems really happy. vacay it took a vacation. It was crazy. To be fair, I read metal filter on vacation a little bit. I hung out with metal filter people. It's true. Well, it was all like voluntary so perfect.

mathowie 24:03 Yeah, yeah. No, I would love if metal filter changed in was ran away from me. That's fine. Totally. I'm totally over it. Like I don't have any ego wrapped up in this at all. No, I'm worried about people thinking it's on shaky futures. I'm freaking out. But

Jessamyn 24:19 I think that's an easy message to manage. Yeah, we can reassure people

Cortex 24:23 pretty easily and things are things are have been really reasonably solid the last few months. I mean, that's one of the nice things about it. Honestly, if we'd been in a nosedive enough to say, Hey, Josh has taken over.

Jessamyn 24:34 You'd be like, No, I will not take that thing for me.

Cortex 24:38 Much more complicated conversation to have.

mathowie 24:42 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can't I mean, we're gonna have a few people

Cortex 24:47 always do it. But like, I don't 10,000 people, a few of them are gonna be buttheads in one direction or another. And that's yeah, that's just part of the whole deal. Yeah. But no, I think I think we're gonna be I think the thread that exists already by the time this is airing is probably just mostly Hold on people saying, hey, that is awesome for you, Matt. Thank you. All right.

Jessamyn 25:04 We're so happy for you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And then you just have to play that Taylor Swift song in the background. He's gonna hitting hay and dance around your living room. Shake it off. Shake it off.

mathowie 25:23 Yeah, I guess my last day is Friday, so then I don't have to read meta talk impulsively every day forever.

Cortex 25:31 So that'd be good. Just clock right out.

mathowie 25:34 Looking forward to Friday night taking.

Jessamyn 25:37 Make little gestures at the screen being like, Better you than me cortex.

Cortex 25:43 You can just start flagging things. Have you ever flagged anything? Like in 16 years maybe? Well, yeah, just

Jessamyn 25:54 medium about

mathowie 25:55 I did once like a month ago, to let restless Nomad know that something was kind of hinky. I wasn't sure, but I didn't feel like sending emails. I was like, oh, flag it. Like at least you'll see it. And then she did. I think she deleted it. But yeah. Yeah, flags stuff that is like it's fun. Jasmine, I caught us somewhere saying what was it when some huge things happen on Twitter? I mean, Metafilter. He said, was it not my monkeys, not my

Jessamyn 26:23 circus, not my monkeys. That's all my life. On Facebook, there's a whole bunch of like back channel stuff on Facebook, where people talk about stuff. And sometimes I dive in if I think I can be helpful explaining why a thing is going a certain way. But at the end of the day, I'm like, Well, you guys are just that's kind of how Oh, well.

Cortex 26:43 Yeah, I've got a few of those that I've basically just stayed out of them. Because like, on the one hand, like I could get in on this, but on the other hand, why not just let people have their channel and I'm just not going to make it weird by making them self conscious about the fact that they're, you know, talking about stuff in basically public. But that's okay. You know, it's like people can have boundaries. And that's, that's all right. Yeah, I've

mathowie 27:02 seen longtime members. Like saying, I didn't like how this went. And I'm like, I could explain it but in a weird amount by barging in, like a sea lion or something. And

Cortex 27:10 sometimes people just want to be able to say I didn't like this. And that's all right. They're allowed to talk about metaphor. Sure.

Jessamyn 27:18 Where are we just talking about Metafilter Oh, no, we were talking about Matt and now those are two different things. You're gonna love it so much. Let's see

mathowie 27:27 what you did there. Yeah. So if we went to jobs As is the tradition there's only like, there's two cool jobs of weird stuff. Like mail me the thing go buy me something in a weird place. That's pretty much there isn't really a lot of real jobs. Yeah,

Jessamyn 27:43 there was to buy me something weird place right prints obtained from Berlin Museum and I need a souvenir from Lima Peru. Certain stuffed guinea pig.

mathowie 27:53 Oh, from an actual gift shop in a section for us. So is this when you get home and you go, I wish I bought that thing. I don't understand how these things happen.

Jessamyn 28:03 It may be that you took a picture of a thing and someone was like oh my god, that would be the perfect thing and then you're like yeah, but I didn't get it and then there's a problem.

mathowie 28:14 Wow, I wish we can geotag like the Berlin one find Berlin users are something

Jessamyn 28:21 don't we have that ability? You need to walk away walk away?

mathowie 28:26 Not my circus.

Jessamyn 28:30 But no, it's not good for feature requests. But it's great when people are you know, flipping you ship for no reason. It's specifically a shit flipping response. Yeah.

mathowie 28:40 Yeah, not a lot of jobs aside from that.

Cortex 28:44 So I guess projects, but yes, if you happen to be in Lima. Yeah. Buy

mathowie 28:49 some stuff for some people. Yeah. I

Jessamyn 28:50 don't think we have a lot of users in Peru. But yeah, projects was great. I enjoyed projects.

Cortex 28:55 A lot. bunch of good stuff. That's my opinion. I've

mathowie 28:57 got a bunch. Go first.

Jessamyn 29:00 I really liked glowy clock, which made they used to have an LCD clock and it glowed in rainbow colors. But he didn't like it. It was a waste of space. And so he made one you can add it to your homescreen and then have no chrome which I guess means what? No window around it. I don't know exactly what that think you can run

mathowie 29:19 this on an iPad and landscape while it's charging next to your bed. It'll look just like a 70s 80s clock.

Jessamyn 29:26 Yeah, it's lovely. Days

mathowie 29:28 rainbow out. Wow. I thought let's just read.

Jessamyn 29:32 Isn't it just read?

mathowie 29:35 Shit. You could probably turn it off. It's just all in like JavaScript so you can

Jessamyn 29:42 tweak it. This is yeah, this is like that April Fool's joke. Exactly

mathowie 29:45 right. goes too fast though.

Jessamyn 29:49 Wow, it's cool. Except I don't want anything glowing in my room when I sleep but I can understand the appeal.

Cortex 29:54 Yeah, if you're a clock person

mathowie 29:55 isn't a blue light bad for your sleep. So it shouldn't go blue. But it's cool. It looks neat. I wish the flippy kind seven nice clock 60s.

Jessamyn 30:04 They make noise though.

mathowie 30:06 I get used to it.

Jessamyn 30:08 You get used to it.

mathowie 30:10 Did you see that really sweet one they saved a loved one's voicemail greeting. Did you get that? Like what was going on there? What? So get this one Z rail made a thing to say like a stepdads voice. So you, you place a number into this website, and it calls it and then it goes to voicemail and it records it as an mp3 and emailed to you. And he built this for his mom because his stepdad died a couple of years ago, but his voicemail still exists.

Jessamyn 30:42 So it's like a funny Twilio hack.

mathowie 30:45 I think so yeah. It's a sweet Twilio hack. It's No, it's cool. Yeah, so you have a long lost loved ones. I mean, the window for that. Why would this voicemail still be operable to yours? Well, I

Jessamyn 30:56 think they left a message. I mean, Jim does this like on his cell phone? He like keeps all his old.

mathowie 31:03 Oh, no, no way to get that off.

Jessamyn 31:05 It's good. Oh, it's an outgoing. You

Cortex 31:09 pecans to Bob, I

mathowie 31:12 think that for years. I don't understand how voicemails still exist two years. Like you cancel that after a few months. Right. But that's what happened.

Cortex 31:21 However. Yeah, it's

mathowie 31:22 pretty cool.

Jessamyn 31:23 Don't nerd it. Don't nerd it.

Cortex 31:26 Yeah, no, that's that's a sweet little. That's kind of a nice sort of bookend to that song from a couple episodes ago.

Jessamyn 31:33 Hey, Doug. It's it's Charles your whatever that was. Yeah, I know

Cortex 31:37 what you the song with all that voicemail?

Jessamyn 31:40 I have listened to that song. Since that is a great song. It's so great.

Cortex 31:43 It's really wonderful. I it it still puts a big smile on my face. Hey, Bob.

Jessamyn 31:47 It's Charles, who was what was the guy's name? I don't remember. I'd have to. Roger. Hey, Bob. It's Roger. Hey, Doug. It's Roger.

mathowie 32:01 Any favorites? Josh?

Cortex 32:02 I like to well, this is the first project post that I've proved myself after being the person getting the project's email. So it's, it's very special. I guess. Now that I get those instead of you, but

mathowie 32:17 I'd never heard of, yeah, I know how

Cortex 32:19 now you can enjoy the serendipity. You're like, oh, my gosh, what's that? Logic has been working on this thing called life simulator engine that he has been working on to sort of run simulation scenarios based on simple code based rule sets. And it looks neat. I haven't dug into it yet other than sort of reading through his talking about in the thread, and poking briefly at the GitHub repo. But it looks like a really fun thing. And at some point, it'd be nice to sit down and actually see what I can do with it. Because I like that idea of taking well, but what if we set up this simple sort of rule set for a world and saw what would happen you know, I've always liked things like Conway's Life. That are exactly it's a very simple rule set. And then you just sort of see what happens when you give it some input and let it run. So this seems like it could be a really neat way to play with things like that. So I look forward to see where it goes with it

mathowie 33:08 graphene or to text inventor. It's life used,

Cortex 33:13 I think, I think your output is probably likely to be we have explained it better. And there I don't have a super solid handle on how it was worked. But yeah, the idea is you can use sort of scripting, and maybe some graphing to set up kind of a world state that then just gets computed. And so you get things happen, because you've set up the rules for how the universe works. And then it sort of iterates through

mathowie 33:38 so like any kind of output you can imagine. Just this is the rule set,

Cortex 33:42 I suppose. So yeah, you tie this in and then you could do whatever with the output. This reminds

mathowie 33:47 me of, there's this new app for iOS called lark, la RK

Jessamyn 33:52 that that was the kind of cigarettes my dad used to smoke.

mathowie 33:56 It makes a fake it's a fake messaging application with an AI robot that's basically like this just rulesets based on your like, your activity chip in like iPhones, like that stuff gets stored, like how much the phone has moved at, you know, two miles an hour today. That would be walking, you know, yeah, so you get this like, Curie robot who's sending you fake text that just goes Oh, I see you doing 12 minute walk Good job, Matt.

Jessamyn 34:26 Real texts they're just not from a real person.

mathowie 34:29 And then you like fake texts back it they're like canned responses and you just tap them to say thanks for Tell me more. And it goes Do you want to see a graph? And you go Yes. And you have this fake conversation with a set of scripts that are talking to your you know, your

Jessamyn 34:45 don't pay money to do this. Do

mathowie 34:47 I know it's pretty funny. It's funny in how Yeah, how jovial this AI is, and how convincingly good it is kind of but it reminds me of this where you know if person runs five miles give them a kudos.

Jessamyn 35:03 Can I use this with my Pebble?

mathowie 35:06 I don't think so. Someone might have made an app for it to send the fake messages to your Pebble

Jessamyn 35:13 to my to my fake watch.

mathowie 35:16 I couldn't get the pebble to work on my iPhone. I hate pedals.

Jessamyn 35:19 I got it to work. It just doesn't turns out doesn't solve a problem for me. I traded some fishing rods for it. So like some, like my dad has like 15 fishing rods that he's never going to use. So I was like, Who wants fishing rods? Oh, my friend, the fisherman. Hey, let's trade something. What do you got? He's like, I've got these pebbles. And I was like, alright, I'll try it. You know, I wasn't using the fishing rods. But yeah, it's not fun.

mathowie 35:41 Apparently worked better with it. Android phones. I can never get the Bluetooth LTE connection to work. But it only work like exercising. It was great. Like, I'll actually use the apple sport watch for sports. Like yeah, I

Jessamyn 35:54 made sure to get one of those because yeah, I it was too big to like, I got a little wrist and that thing just made me look ridiculous. So

mathowie 36:01 steel one the big? No.

Jessamyn 36:03 So one of the Exactly. It does

mathowie 36:07 have hardware buttons, which is nice. Like you can learn gloves and operate it which I don't know is gonna work with the apple one.

Jessamyn 36:13 Wow, you need special gloves right?

mathowie 36:17 Provided by Apple. It's a special gloves.

Jessamyn 36:24 So to Jack's

mathowie 36:26 any other brands,

Jessamyn 36:27 yes, this one that mentions me that nobody commented on but many people liked. This is basically bidder girl.com Whose otherwise known as Shannon, sir, who, what? What's your fault? Yes, my client. But basically, you know, ebook licensing and marketing and everything is insane. And for smaller publishers, it's really hard to, you know, if you sign on with a big service, you've got to give away a huge chunk of your money in these places are operating at little teeny margins anyhow. And so Shannon and some friends, I think friends want to put together kind of a storefront for indie booksellers so that they can sell to libraries.

mathowie 37:10 Neat. So would they provide like Kindle of five versions of your book for a load.

Jessamyn 37:18 More and more libraries are going to like having a three M server or something where they run the server that does the DRM and they can put their own content in it. And so this would just literally be the thing that you get the content from and then you can load it into your own content server.

mathowie 37:35 What's the what's the one something that the libraries are using for Kindles?

Jessamyn 37:40 Overdrive?

mathowie 37:41 Overdrive, that's it yeah.

Jessamyn 37:42 Oh, we're having Kindle are different. But yeah,

mathowie 37:45 overdrive is the end and Kindle lending sort of works with it, but

Jessamyn 37:50 doesn't really work because Kindle lending requires you to have an Amazon account. So it's basically just the library is facilitating you getting a free book at your own account, kind of, you know, it's, it's bad. Overdrive actually works pretty well, but the DRM is kind of shitty.

mathowie 38:06 Yeah, I'm only allowed to have a book for three weeks at the most and you can set that library set default to two weeks to three weeks and

Jessamyn 38:15 your thing is if you use the app on your computer as opposed to your device, you could just get the book out of there anyhow, you know, like the DRM is actually not very hardened, I guess.

mathowie 38:27 to like put artificial scarcity on it where like someone's you read my

Jessamyn 38:31 article about you know, when you book lending is stupid waitlists for ebooks is stupid, but it's the you know, stupid environment we're in right now. And so given that we're in this stupid environment having better tools Is

mathowie 38:44 it Yes, we all have to admit like large print edition for everyone is awesome. Like that kind of makes all the Kindle nonsense worth it to me that you can resize reflow

Jessamyn 38:56 for everybody, right? You can make it bigger you can make it brighter darker for

mathowie 39:00 visually impaired audio by default. They all wish that wasn't weirded out, but you know, some books get audio versions,

Jessamyn 39:08 they're gonna lose some lawsuits, and that's gonna happen, right? Yes, the American with Disabilities Act should double blind or just suing people and good for them. I mean, it's really funny, but like, one of the things national level advocacy groups for print disabled people do is sue people who fuck around with that kind of stuff. Because copyright law and shrines print disabled people's right to access audio versions of or print disabled versions of books, but publishers are kind of drag asking about it. And so yeah, it's gonna it's gonna go their way.

mathowie 39:42 Yeah, so yeah, I think yeah, the increase of accessibility is kind of makes this whole Kindle nonsense worth it, but Amazon are still dicks.

Jessamyn 39:51 Amazon are still dicks Exactly. But when they have more competition, I think things will get on a more level playing field and that would be nice for everybody.

mathowie 39:58 So this is like an open licensing for or indie books,

Jessamyn 40:01 like you're a publisher, and you've got 50 books, you know, a lot of places aren't going to really talk to you until you've got like multiple zillion 1000s of titles because it's not worth it for them to set shit up for you. But if you're a retailer, which has a bunch of titles, you can do business with libraries as kind of one entity and give people access to all these books. And

mathowie 40:23 so this is duplicating like with CD Baby, any CD Baby person, any user of T baby, they create CDs for bands, but then they made one iTunes licensing deal. So anyone who gets into CD Baby shows up on iTunes. Exactly. It's exactly like that, because they don't want to talk to you.

Jessamyn 40:42 I mean, they're still waiting for some licensing shit to work out with their state, which I think is the state of Ohio. But that's, you know, small potatoes. I think it should be cool. Assuming it works like it's supposed to. Cool. Yeah, I'm stupid excited about it, actually.

Cortex 40:55 Yeah, it's really neat. Yeah. I have a couple projects that this is more an endorsement than a specific review of the content of because I'm happy about both these ideas. But one of them I'm just, I'm just saying like, I can't promise saying no, I'm just saying I haven't had the time to

Jessamyn 41:16 read Taylor either. So

Cortex 41:18 once again, I'm talking myself into trouble by trying to over explain instead of just saying I like a thing, but hey, one of the things I like there's this new podcast, or new ish, called console obscura from dancing with talk talking about classic video games, basically, which Hey, obviously, kind of up my alley.

Jessamyn 41:36 He's got a he's got a picture in his profile. Finally, that's cool.

Cortex 41:39 Yeah. And there's, they're like six episodes, they've done punch out, they've done. No one was forever, which was one of my favorite first person shooters ever. Partly because it's not a like focus on the person shooting aspect of things. I mean, it still is you wander through sort of a 60s spy adventure as an awesome spy heroine named Kate Archer, sort of navigating both like the sort of Austin Powers this 60s throwback comedy stick. And also, you know, the biting background radiation sexism of the era too. So, you know, she's sort of like, this is the this is the superhero, you didn't get so much at the time. And then there. Anyway, they made a couple great games, and I hope someday the license for that is gonna get sorted out and someone can make another one because I feel like someone could make a really, really fantastic, like, follow up to that series at this point. But uh, but yeah, so exciting things I'm, I'm, I'm hoping to track down sometimes. So I can actually sit down and listen to it. But I like that they're doing it

mathowie 42:42 in office an hour away.

Cortex 42:46 I don't have to drive anywhere. So many good podcasts. I

mathowie 42:49 wish I commuted more.

Cortex 42:51 But similarly, although I can more thoroughly endorse this one. On principle, Jay Harris is bringing back his at play column has no cool old column about roguelikes. Yeah, it's been on a break. But he's back. He's got a new column up and more stuff coming. So. So it's exciting. Because yeah. There's a double whammy of gaming. So

Jessamyn 43:13 he's made a list of all 79 of his columns, but they're not linked.

Cortex 43:17 I think he may be sort of in the process of some of the rebooting, but I'm not sure exactly what the plan is. He's mentioned, you know, being concerned about sort of Google's stewardship of blogspot, too. So, so we'll see what happens

Jessamyn 43:29 there. But because crazy about adult content recently,

Cortex 43:33 that whole thing I haven't caught up on the whole deal. But yeah, basically, they're just being weird about anything porn. Porn, I guess. Because you're not the internet. You know, people don't go there, looking for that kind of thing. So let's keep it friendly.

mathowie 43:47 They can apply advertising to anything that isn't quote, unquote, family friendly. So I bet you they're by combatted, drops a bomb. It's like, ads on everything. And when they say, oh, we can't put on this cool sex work. That's that words. I mean, there are a lot of like, I mean, I don't think Tumblr is like the sex

Jessamyn 44:10 Blog World, right? Yes. Tumblr is the sex

mathowie 44:13 part. I do see, you know, whenever there's like positive sex, sex positive, like sex worker stories, they're almost always like a blog spot where someone's like, here's Tales from the street or whatever. And

Jessamyn 44:24 because they're older, I mean, the blogs are older. And so people been writing for them for a while. And that used to be where you did long form writing stuff.

mathowie 44:31 It's true. Yeah. So I bet it's like Google ads. Dick's Dick's always money

Jessamyn 44:42 for you, Josh,

Cortex 44:44 I got one other that I liked. Gotta get the weird programming driven twitter bot of the podcast. Anyway, so this time, it's by user 23 twitter bot called dubbed up draw, or maybe doop doop I like saying dubbed up which basically accepts tiny little programs and then renders some fairly abstract computer rights. Based on that I don't

mathowie 45:09 curl it twit, Twitter streams, beautiful.

Cortex 45:13 Think of it like a super, super, super minimal logo, maybe, you know, in terms of like telling a turtle what to do. So you're describing the color of the pixels in each of the pixels of like a 512 by 512 image based on some sort of little bit of code that moderate you know,

mathowie 45:30 these are like process value recipes or something. Yeah, that sort

Cortex 45:33 of thing. So it's like tiny little programs that just create different patterns and colors and stuff. Seems really neat. I played

mathowie 45:42 it a few months ago where I took a photo I think and then apply to what a weird stuff to it. It took a lot of tweaking to get really weird, cool photos. I think there's a there's a diagonal stripe ones are cool.

Jessamyn 45:55 Weird. And hey,

mathowie 45:57 then you can just copy someone else's tweet and tweak and see what you get

Cortex 46:08 I think I think I had even more but the we're going long already. So yes, those are some of my favorites for the month. Sweet.

Jessamyn 46:16 Great. Hurry for projects.

mathowie 46:19 Regular Metafilter.

Jessamyn 46:21 I actually went on a like I tried to favorite stuff as I saw it this month. Crazy. So right after our last podcast, there was this awesome post by scruff, I went to the foreshore when the tide was out, looked around the riverbed and found three pieces within 20 minutes. The doves type, basically, this typeface that the guy wanted to get rid of forever because of reasons and threw it all in the water. And then somebody found a whole bunch of it. And when I was at the London meetup, one of the gals there who's an American gal, talked about where you can go to like mess around on the Thames and find stuff when the tide is low, which is not really related to this, except it wasn't really a thing I knew you could just kind of do. So it's just basically a single link. Wow, fascinating, really interesting story.

mathowie 47:21 Then this would be like me leaving metaphors here. But that'd be servers in the Willamette River.

Jessamyn 47:27 Yes, exactly. Like at all. Screw you.

mathowie 47:30 That's amazing that they're not more rusty. That's awesome.

Jessamyn 47:36 Yeah, they've just been in the water they threw them away and now they can actually like

mathowie 47:40 scrape it with like a sieve it looks like and there was some mud and is that a bullet casing or looks like a bullet in the last photo on the on the blog post?

Jessamyn 47:53 Let me say

mathowie 47:55 I guess I could Oh, yeah. Might be World War two bullet deke. I can't believe they're not completely rusted out.

Jessamyn 48:05 So the end result is a full type spec available that you can actually see of this typeface.

mathowie 48:14 Can you download is open type.

Jessamyn 48:16 I don't know. Probably.

mathowie 48:19 Copyright as we click

Jessamyn 48:21 in the same length that you're clicking, I have no idea.

Cortex 48:24 But I just I'm sure it will be eventually.

mathowie 48:28 Can I kind of plug Josh's amazing posts because not because Josh but because the post?

Jessamyn 48:33 Sure or because Josh actually posts

mathowie 48:37 people paper demit the photographer who takes these things that look like illustrations, but they're actually real photographs and they look like the looks like that. Honestly, they're amazing. They're like these weird flatly lit things that you see like in Sunday.

Jessamyn 48:52 You posted on this? I'm not check or somebody did.

Cortex 48:54 Yeah, that's where I found it, too. I saw a couple of milkshake. Yeah, so I'm going to post a couple he's on milkshake with like out any specific detail, but I think they may have had a link to something, I think was a link to somebody else's blog post collecting a few of the guys stuff together. This is awesome. And I tracked it down and yeah, the

mathowie 49:11 fun part is there's so much work to make this real stuff look fake, that you can just open up Illustrator and make these things would probably be easier. And you'd get you know, almost the same output but it's just as a as someone who's done illustration and photography, like these things blow my mind. Right, right, right. The one with all the stuff on the squares and he does weird lighting. It's just shocking. Like it's it breaks your brain to think that these are real photographs. And this is real stuff.

Cortex 49:46 Yeah, it was just really the fact like I see I love a post like that. Like I don't make enough of those. I usually have ended up posting about something that I specifically like or something which there's nothing wrong with but it means I sort of have to like try and navigate that. Okay, I like this thing but it's a really good post here. So there's this sort of thing where like, it's just literally that old school serendipity like, Oh, I saw this thing somewhere, I'm gonna post about a metal filter. You know, I don't end up doing that a whole lot, because usually other people have done it before I got there. And I was sure I was gonna find this. posted somewhere, too, but but no.

Jessamyn 50:17 illustrations for that New York Times Twitter shaming article, which is Metroid baby's first comment. So I didn't know those were photographs. I assumed they were just really catchy illustrations.

Cortex 50:26 Yeah. And it seems like yeah, he was getting a few pieces of like, mainstream work like that, like last fall, it looks like started to really sort of pick up for him. So

mathowie 50:35 he uses weird salt printing methods to get flat colors. And so weird.

Cortex 50:42 I was hoping someone I tracked down and he wrote detailed process. Yeah, no, that's, that's a classic, like a few people saying, Hey, this is neat. And then a bunch of three favorite Yeah. Yeah, no, I never found a good article on the details of his current working process, I was hoping someone else in the thread might turn it up.

mathowie 51:01 That's a metric we should you should watch and pull up in the next five minutes. It's a number of favorites per over comments. Exceeding 1.0. This

Cortex 51:13 is like six months, we've talked about that. Some everyone's gonna feel like that. Especially in it usually comes up, especially with AskMe edit filter, the question is like, how is it that you know, this question has, like, 17 answers and 500 favorites, you know, it's like, and it's like, well, sometimes, you know, people are interested in the thing, or it points to something good, or they want to see what happens more than they're actually able to necessarily say anything particularly about it. And yeah, it's really neat when that

mathowie 51:41 happens, and this is probably a really strong signal of a cool post. Like, yeah, obscure, yeah. Yeah. Or, or a very pleasing question that everybody has that may not have answers.

Cortex 51:55 Yeah. Or just a lack of naked provocation. Like there's nothing to be upset about,

Jessamyn 52:02 right sometimes to talk about

mathowie 52:05 those posts where people are just stunned into silence. And there's a billion favorites,

Jessamyn 52:09 right, the old slow clap posts.

Cortex 52:14 I liked because I always like it when this happens. There was a there was a post Brundlefly made a post about an article talking about that thing that happened two years ago with this. Yeah. Marilyn, Voice of

Jessamyn 52:31 the world's smartest woman. Yeah.

Cortex 52:34 Rights has written for years and years and continues to, I believe, right, basically a column about math and stuff. For Parade Magazine. And there was a time that she tackled the Monty Hall problem.

Jessamyn 52:47 I remember that when it happened. Yeah, no,

Cortex 52:49 I did to us like, Oh, shit. Yeah. And it was a huge fucking deal. And partly just because like, Oh, hey, World's Smartest woman can't get this probability problem. Right?

Jessamyn 52:59 Right. She did the Monty Hall problem. And then lots and lots of people were like, boop, boop. You don't understand basic numbers, lady.

Cortex 53:07 Yeah. And article collect some like some shitty just super snide? Well, maybe if you can go back to the basics, bla, bla, bla, bla, signs, your real name, Professor, PhD, blah, blah.

mathowie 53:18 Women look at math problems differently than men. That's a real thing.

Cortex 53:24 So the article that Brundlefly posted is really sort of about that phenomenon, the stuff that got written in and sort of the weirdness and and to some extent, saying, hey, there's something kind of weird about the way people reacted to this. But inevitably, the thread became 276, and counting comments about the Monty Hall problem, and people trying to explain to me all power to each other. And everyone's while someone saying, no, no, I'm afraid you've all made a mistake. Let me tell you what the actual answer, you know, it's like it's inevitable. All Viking

mathowie 53:58 internet interactions in 1998, were arguing about the Monty Hall problem. And it took me about six months to come around to just like the plane takes off on the treadmill. I was adamantly like, No, I'm not gonna follow math proofs. took me six, when someone explained it with 10,000 doors. Like you can have one door or you can have 9009 or 99 doors. Which one do you think will have better? You know, and I was like, right, yeah. And it's

Cortex 54:29 a thread full of people trying those various ways to convey things to people and the article does a good job with a couple of them too, but I just I love it. I fucking love it. It's it's simultaneously wonderful and so so predictably fucking stupid. Like, like we are incapable of helping ourselves. Yeah, it's a total honeypot. Just everybody's just like cuz I tell you half the people in that prob that thread probably looked at it rolled their eyes, cheese, the fucking money haul property and I'm not even going there. And then five minutes later, they're typing a fucking comment, because someone said something incorrect as it no but Then yeah, I just love those big dumb nerd parties,

mathowie 55:03 the other math nerd rule that everyone knows, but you can snare people as the like two people at a party with the same birthday day. Oh, yeah, it's only like, the math works out to one and 23 or one and 24 the chances. Great, yeah, it's not 365 And people know it is and you're just like, wow, there's a lot of explanation, but it's really not the case.

Jessamyn 55:26 Right? I don't want to fight with you about this. I mean, plus, there's the whole sort of feminism article so I can bring up Lewis's law, which is my favorite thing, which comments on any article about feminism basically justified feminism? Yeah. Which everyone should know about just in case. Yeah. People don't know about it.

mathowie 55:46 Here's another one. This is a this one pushing three favorites. Over comments. Someone just made a Flickr gal gallery of paper, craft arcade cabinets from the 80s I don't know why. They like fit on a piece eight and a half by 11. You cut it out and you tape it up and you have a full color sign. Yeah, full color. 80s arcade cabinet stand up. I don't know why you want this but I just thought it was awesome. In Frogger. Super good. dollhouse? No, you put a frog or cabinet or on your iPhone, you play Crossy Road.

Cortex 56:30 That would actually be super dope actually. Like, well, I imagine you know if one of the things is like, you know, six feet tall and you sort of just create an extra slot to slide your iPhone in. So the screen is where the screen of the arcade cabinet would

Jessamyn 56:43 be seen those little arcade cabinets you can slide an iPad into right I have one. I have one. Well, you've got to buy special games for it because it's got a Bluetooth with your iPad. And it's one of those things where like the cabinet's really cheap, but a lot of the games cost a little money, but you can play like certain games like I don't know, what's that one where you're running through the jungle, you're the guy. Now, it's it's newer, like you're running, and you can like slide under things or jump over things. Doesn't matter. At any rate, it plays some free games, but it's cool because it does have those little buttons and the joystick from the old like arcade cabinets, and you can like play stuff on your iPad.

mathowie 57:26 It's the proper speed.

Jessamyn 57:29 Yeah. Wow. That's a cool, that's a cool one off.

mathowie 57:33 Yeah. So we went to all this trouble, but it's awesome. And things are cool.

Cortex 57:36 There's there's a huge amount of energy in sort of like the repurposing the old retro arcade stuff. Like I was talking to Jay Scott, actually last year at some point on, like tilde clubs, IRC, just about rkV stuff, because I was filling fiddling around with like a really silly, minimal arcade based thing. And he was like, Oh, well, let me tell you about these couple of huge ambitious projects. And then yeah, there's a couple of like virtual arcades that different people are working on that. Basically take this idea and say okay, but let's turn that into like an actual 3d modeled arcade instead of like, you know, paper craft to stick on your desk,

Jessamyn 58:15 right? In his basement and it is amazing. Yeah, it's all I think about

Cortex 58:23 that someday at some point, I may put some sort of actual arcade cabinet in my basement

Jessamyn 58:28 place every

mathowie 58:29 month Yeah, my name is like what? Let's go the opposite way on the same idea and make the most I've been dreaming for 10 years after I built my own main cabinet. It's like it weighs 200 pounds of MDF you know and I got rid of it when I moved out of California Yeah, so much work for just a case for your PC basically, that one do a minimal arcade cabinet which is like floating LCD panel you know floating joystick coming out of the wall Raspberry Pi like duct taped to the back of the monitor like no presents to it except buttons and joysticks and like you can make it so minimal and like it wouldn't you know be like your gaming chair when you know people can

Jessamyn 59:14 see the appeal and yet

mathowie 59:17 you can display whether in lovely photographs you know and you're not gaming like it could be a thing in your house. That's not

Jessamyn 59:25 a nice looking right it's the appliance we were always promised to never received.

mathowie 59:29 Yeah, I would love to have just a wall monitor pan. I guess I can use my TV somehow like a Bluetooth choice. Like somebody in the back pay pop produce that and I would pay money for Super minimalist. Like you could fit a Raspberry Pi inside the game stick like bass and stuff. Check. Yeah, there's gotta be a way to do this.

Jessamyn 59:51 Here's a picture of what the little iPad arcade thing is, by the way. It's very cute. It has

mathowie 59:59 a way Tell me how to calibrate. Oh, knee buttons,

Jessamyn 1:00:04 click the link proper bumper. So another post that I really liked only because the discussion was sort of funny, although it kind of went in a lot of weird ways was what I imagined my boyfriend's ex girlfriends are doing right now. It was like a jokey New Yorker article about what if you showed up at a convention of your boyfriend's ex girlfriends and like, you know, it's Mallory Ortberg sort of tamale are

mathowie 1:00:32 told, you know, when I saw this post, go out and got some flags, which was weird was supposed to be taking pre light light, but the New Yorker and I thought I can I can imagine the meeting where someone came in with Who the hell's eaten or lunch this month on traffic? Oh, there's these two women that do this funny stuff called the toast like, Oh, get on that. This is totally

Jessamyn 1:00:53 fair. The article was, I thought really funny. But of course, there were. I mean, it turned into a funny thread about people talking about their exes. Although there were, you know, some discussions about the performance of femininity and a whole bunch of other loftier topics, but I just I enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed getting pointed towards the article, which I wouldn't have read anyhow. And it's just if you like, that kind of humor. It's a very good version of it. If you don't like that kind of humor, you would hate it because it's very good.

mathowie 1:01:22 I don't think I've ever seen the New Yorker try that kind of humor. It was weird.

Jessamyn 1:01:25 Cuz not they're saying, right? Yeah.

mathowie 1:01:28 It'd be like we opened the New York times.com. And it suddenly had like, smiley faces BuzzFeed style and all the comments and you'd be like, what happened? Like they're just

Jessamyn 1:01:36 trying Did I wake up? Am I in a dream? Yeah, trying

mathowie 1:01:39 to copy the other thing that has a different culture. It's weird to see. I mean, you're a New Yorker does

Jessamyn 1:01:46 humor. They do humor pieces, but normally not like this. Here's their human

mathowie 1:01:49 piece. Let's drill like, oh, you get out of

Jessamyn 1:01:55 cycling or you're like, I guess it's about New York and I don't understand this.

mathowie 1:02:00 Oh, another Manhattan tunnel. Brooklyn joke. Great.

Jessamyn 1:02:04 Speaking of regional humor, because I do have one more posted than you know, happy birthday Maple Leaf feckless vehicle fear monger exe 50th birthday of the Canadian flag post sweet philology It is awesome.

Cortex 1:02:25 I will I did not see that

Jessamyn 1:02:28 50 years like that's not very long exactly. For Montes had its flag you know how many more times than that

mathowie 1:02:36 what it was counted as flag before that.

Jessamyn 1:02:39 They kind of had like a British he themed flag because they've you know, they weren't super sovereign. And so they had to go get it and so the articles are also about like, candidate did kind of a shitty job with the museum piece on Oh, our flag and everyone was like, oh, so lame. And then they have like, here's some other designs that people made. You know, one of them had like, what 11 Tiny beavers on it or something like just ridiculous.

mathowie 1:03:07 Like, three leaves because it's more maple Leafy. But

Jessamyn 1:03:11 yeah, more maplelea There's a design with a beaver wearing a Mountie hat was great. It was just it was a fun thread. And it was fun to talk to people but that was it for me and metta filter.

Cortex 1:03:25 i A funny but not funny or not funny but funny thread. Basically a funny person died. A guy named Harris whittles Oh, yeah, died this last month. And he is he is like 30 years old. And I presume just based on context that probably it was like a drug overdose, which is somehow both better and worse than if it was like him taking his own life because it's like, at least it's not another funny person who couldn't be you know, deal with, you know, crippling, you know, depression or suicidal ideation or whatever, but it's also just That's so fucking dumb. Harris Come on. But ya know, it's super funny guy. He was a writer for Parks and Rec and occasional

Jessamyn 1:04:11 was like, Stoner guys on Parks and Rec. Yeah. Remember, he's one of the service people that show up every few episodes. And he was magic. Every time he was on the screen. He was just mad, just fantastic.

Cortex 1:04:20 He was he was a regular guest on Comedy Bang Bang, which is where I came across him. He had a recurring feature called Harris's phone corner, which was originally called Harris's phone corner, I think, but then they people couldn't decide if he was saying the word phone or the word phone like, you know, a piece of foam. And so here's his phone corner, he would just like read like half baked tweets that he had left notes for himself on his phone and it was all super deadpan and super funny guy incredibly sad that he's dead, but the thread is chock full of like so much fucking funny stuff if you were not aware of him that it's a whole lot of entertainment right there looking back at the stuff I He has done in his life so so yeah that

mathowie 1:05:05 background everything great and

Cortex 1:05:07 yeah, he's he was all he was. I think he was basically just constantly working and doing good funny shit. Yeah his own and with other people

mathowie 1:05:15 I saw a slurry of tweets that night of people just saying like, like, oh I talked to him two months ago and he had kicked her when or whatever it was like, oh my god like there. Yeah, bomber. Yep, I was only 30

Jessamyn 1:05:32 which is like young yeah now.

Cortex 1:05:35 Now I'm 35 So I'm like, oh that kid you know it's like fucking weird.

mathowie 1:05:41 But he's been writing comedy on big shows since he was like 23 years or something? Yes, very high performer? Yeah.

Cortex 1:05:52 On a lighter note, generally speaking, there's a post all about Satan.

Jessamyn 1:05:59 Demise

Cortex 1:06:00 atomise made a post about sort of talking about where the pop culture perception of the devil as you know the goateed red skinned pitchfork guy that we know, which is

Jessamyn 1:06:13 funny because it's kind of a mirror image of that stupid post about the global Jew, you know, except just not quite

Cortex 1:06:24 cool. It's interesting, because instead of being like, you know, more or less a product of marketing firm, this is much, you know, this tied into real old stuff. Which I guess you could make the same argument for Santa. So there's some sort of parallel there. But But anyway, this idea that like there's these really pervasive images, but then how does that tie into the actual history of Christianity and the, you know, Satan related context?

Jessamyn 1:06:51 was an angel, right? Who felt? Well, yeah, there's, there's,

Cortex 1:06:55 I think Lucifer as a fallen angel is part of it. Yeah. Well, then, and then and then there's sort of like Satan as the adversary versus Jesus, as you know, the advocate, I guess, in treating the Bible as sort of like a story of judging the morality of its own sort of narrative, or I am not a scholar. But there are a bunch of really smart people and some really interesting comments and people digging into all the sort of like, some of the history of the stuff both like lay Christianity and scholarly Christianity about the history of the conception of Satan, the devil, Lucifer, etc. And it's a really neat read. And yeah, I just really enjoyed that thread a lot. Wish we had come to mind, because it actually I've been really enjoying that thread. And then a couple days later, in some argument, a minute talk, you know, there was some sort of like an end, you know, people are crucified if they, you know, talk about Christianity on the site, and I'm like, Dude, come on. Really? Yeah, me and like three other people. But anyway, yeah, that's a lot of fun. I enjoyed it.

mathowie 1:08:05 I love this post about this GitHub thing of where some code to like when you're committing code to a repository, it turns on your webcam takes a photo. Like animation, so it takes video. But if you look at a gallery of people committing code, they're printing.

Jessamyn 1:08:27 Oh my god, it's all like sort of LoL cat style pictures.

mathowie 1:08:32 Oh, yeah, it automatically imports what your commit message was, why you're doing this and then overlays it with your username and stuff? Or yeah, some hex code of the fingerprint of

Jessamyn 1:08:43 it. So many broken images. So

mathowie 1:08:45 this is this is brilliant. Yeah, it's funny. I think I recognize one person. Wow, face painter. That's interesting.

Jessamyn 1:08:57 Are these all

mathowie 1:08:58 dudes? Mostly dudes?

Jessamyn 1:09:01 No, but seriously, are they all dudes?

mathowie 1:09:03 See a woman in purple hair?

Jessamyn 1:09:06 Yeah, I see her

mathowie 1:09:08 to to fix the ratio people. But it's hilarious hair. That's using a scary webcam thing for good. Fun.

Jessamyn 1:09:20 That's like what was that? The commits from last night or something? The Tumblr blog. What is that called? You know what I'm talking about? But I don't remember what it's called. Or I wasn't

Cortex 1:09:36 because it's riffing on the whatever tweets from last night or texts from last night. Like or meme.

Jessamyn 1:09:44 I will I will find it well, you are commit logs from last night and it's just commit logs from last night.com and that's all it hasn't it hasn't updated since December. So Oh,

mathowie 1:10:00 But he's public and they're just looking for funny words.

Jessamyn 1:10:03 I assume it looks like you know, they're looking for shit fuck stupid fuck this thing

Cortex 1:10:09 and fuck it again normalize the shit out of Hello Kitty

Jessamyn 1:10:16 yeah science bitch and JavaScript all the things being discussed

mathowie 1:10:20 the best contact email ever it just says can you call me internet please?

Jessamyn 1:10:28 i MAN i get those contact emails open library all the time. I have like a specific it looks like reply which is like I'm not sure I understand you. Can you send me some more information?

mathowie 1:10:42 Rural internet or something?

Cortex 1:10:45 rural Jamaica is the preferred for it. So can be a call internet. Click I went earlier, please from someone who wanted information about a sperm bank. So

mathowie 1:10:56 yep, that was good. And then it was a reference to like an ass medical threat on like actual fertility stuff. And this was like a dude going home to pay for my sperm, which is so weird.

Cortex 1:11:07 You'll have to call them for right sir. I have a couple of weird posts about minimal audio that I really enjoyed. One is this one is the sound of one hand smashing a post by strange interlude. That is this will take a little bit of setup. It's it's a video in a game called Super Smash Brothers and Super Smash Brothers is Nintendo's sort of flagship fighting game where a bunch of Nintendo characters and characters from other video games you can play as them and just like getting a big brawl with each other. But at the end, somebody wins any given round and they say who it is. And then that person sort of stands there triumphantly. Why? And while everybody else who was in the fight, just sort of claps for them. Right now. Yeah. So there's no audio in the game for the clap and you just see an animation clapping and different characters have different clapping animations. So someone went through and fully read all of the hand clap for every character. And it's the dumbest weirdest thing. Like I don't know. It's one of the things where I don't know why it works, but it just fucking

Jessamyn 1:12:12 kills them enjoying it. That little penguin thing or turtle thing?

Cortex 1:12:20 Oh, yeah. Yeah.

mathowie 1:12:22 It's funny. Yeah. Anyway,

Cortex 1:12:23 it's, it's, I imagine half the people who watch that video are like, What the fuck am I watching? And the other half are just like me and laughing like a fucking idiot. And like, you have to, like it's one of the things were like about four minutes. And you really have that crossover point to I think where either you're like, Why do I not have this four minutes back? Or you're just sort of like, Yes,

Jessamyn 1:12:45 this is the thing that was a

Cortex 1:12:46 total good use of my time. Exactly. Similarly posed by Phys. Oh, my God. segment and edit segment of Dr. Phil without dialogue. So someone says do not click

Jessamyn 1:12:57 this. Oh,

Cortex 1:12:59 really? should watch it. Sometimes. I

Jessamyn 1:13:00 get it right now because you guys are here with me? Yes. No. Yeah, there's

mathowie 1:13:04 Dr. Phil. I mean, there's a lot of

Cortex 1:13:07 there's like 20 seconds of pre roll setting up whatever the premise of the episode was. And then there's a bunch of just staring at each other and not saying things and like just reaction. Shot camera stuff. Oh,

mathowie 1:13:17 someone did all the courtroom scenes of what was the you can handle the truth movie with Tom Cruise? Oh, yeah. A Few Good Men, a few good men's entire courthouse. Quiet. It is insane. It's like two minutes long, just people looking at each other.

Cortex 1:13:33 So effective. It's like it's just I think just the fact that it's so intentionally unsettling. And it's sort of editing of our expectations.

Jessamyn 1:13:41 It's super weird and sounds like a weird look. And did he is like

Cortex 1:13:45 this. Like, I'm sure he's just as Dr. Phil as he ever was. But I don't watch the show or anything. So I just, I'll see an occasional still in some media context. But yeah, he's just really pop eyed mugging a bit in there. And it's

mathowie 1:14:00 it's so awkward. super weird. You can assume the body language if people don't like it, right.

Cortex 1:14:10 And there's this community theater aspect to it to because you know, they're all on TV. They're not professional actors, presumably. But they're all sort of like they know they're acting a little bit. For the camera. And yeah, just the I don't know, it's kind of great. I'd love to

mathowie 1:14:27 tell you what to do. AskMe Metafilter. Last 20? Yes.

Jessamyn 1:14:29 All right. I can't chainsaw the snowbanks or can I? So you would think this would be Admiral haddock with yet another question about his house, but instead, it's dy wYP. I do we basically I live in Boston, the snowbanks are too high. I'm thinking I should get a chainsaw, blah, blah, blah. And the reason I love it is not because it's a ridiculous idea, but because cuz bond Cliff showed up to be like, Hey, man, sorry to ruin your fun. This is a terrible, terrible idea

Cortex 1:15:10 that I mean, that's probably for the best but like

mathowie 1:15:15 chainsaws are serious business. They're not a toy.

Jessamyn 1:15:21 Then of course, there's the follow up on ship February 26. Are you still alive?

Cortex 1:15:27 That's always always a scary but you say as you say de YW ypi is as a note on their profile page, actually an acronym from net hack. It stands for do you want your possessions identified? Which is one of the questions again asked you.

Jessamyn 1:15:43 is awesome. Thank you for that extra information.

mathowie 1:15:46 It's an ASL joke from games. Games

Cortex 1:15:51 like I bet we have. I bet someone on the site has the username. Why ASD two although I can't remember offhand

mathowie 1:15:58 if there's a wi SD. What's that

Jessamyn 1:16:01 mean? Yeah, what is that another

Cortex 1:16:02 stupid death?

mathowie 1:16:04 That's yeah, we have I think so we for the first a year probably would not be surprised. I loved loved loved my favorite metal posts are like history I didn't pay attention to in history class. And here's some old history that you didn't know about math. It's really cool. did how did how did you book a rail ticket in the early 20th century and someone were talking about finding tickets with like physical descriptions. And so apparently you couldn't see the ticket. If it was like, short woman brown hair. You know, you couldn't just give it to your cousin. But like, why couldn't you because it's just a paper ticket. But this is what they did. And like, yeah, and there's all this people to diving into?

Cortex 1:16:48 Yeah, this this was great. Angela just showed me this. This morning. She was like, Oh, hey, this wasn't the one this month. And I had not seen it all. And it's so great. It's like I think I had no idea about and it's just like, it's, you know, it's it's Women's March we're doing this month. And yeah, if anybody's looking for post material, this could totally awesome fucking metal filter post. Because yeah, this is just this whole thing. Like I had no idea. And it's such a neat sort of outcome to an interesting question.

mathowie 1:17:19 And you have to fit Yeah, it felt passenger information. So I guess you couldn't resell it. Is, comes down

Jessamyn 1:17:26 to the people I met at the Medfield meetup in London. We're both one of them has a history blog. And one of them used to work for the London rail and has all sorts of bizarre esoteric knowledge about old train cars. Both of them I'll try and find the one guy's website, Matt, because if you like this kind of stuff, you'll love this dude.

mathowie 1:17:48 I thought someone mentioned racism, right? Like he couldn't like because there was black only colored only, you know, train cars, and maybe they're doing this to

Cortex 1:17:58 I'm sure they could manage the outright racism a lot more easily.

mathowie 1:18:02 Nope. If you if you walked up, buy a ticket. They said, Nope, we're sold out. And then your white friend walks up buys a ticket for you. Maybe I don't know. Yeah, there's

Jessamyn 1:18:11 a website you would like London reconnections. It's just sort of talking about London Transport and some weird history stuff.

mathowie 1:18:19 I like I love the you know, aspects of the question were a couple years ago, like how did you sign a legal document and prove you were who you were in? 1800s? Like those are

Jessamyn 1:18:28 right, because you didn't have a photo ID so what you

mathowie 1:18:31 paid a barrister to hang out with you a counselor to claim that he was your friend or something? Yes. Awesome.

Jessamyn 1:18:39 Well, that was a great question. I mean, I think we I think we brought that up on the

mathowie 1:18:43 Yeah. This totally remind me of it. Sorry. any favors.

Jessamyn 1:18:51 I enjoyed this one, even though it kind of went in a funny direction. But basically like, look, I'm one of those people who busses tables, and I try to like consolidate cutlery. I'm a little helpful. What are some other little helpful things I can do that just make the world a little bit easier for everyone around me? And it's got like 80 Answers 100 favorites. And one of the funny things about this thread is in addition to lots of useful information, there's this total subtext of Well don't be like this fucker and be super irritating.

Cortex 1:19:26 It's kind of that's, that's this is like one of the best like, you know, help me with my novel questions under under the hood there because like if you're ever writing and you just need to come up with something for one character to be irritated. Another character has a low simmering long running annoyance. Just find one of the things that isn't being done here and have one character really care about that thing. And the other character just never does it. Boom. It's like, it's like a petty grievance generator thread.

mathowie 1:19:53 Anything except like tip will live a life with like, over tipping. Like you will not fix anything not doing that.

Jessamyn 1:20:00 Well some people get uptight about tipping if you're in like a place in another country where you get people used to white people over tipping, but ya know,

mathowie 1:20:10 we pay the people $0 per hour. Oh, man, that's great. There's a great ratio on this post a billion favorites.

Cortex 1:20:21 This is your this is your first like, no longer have to do anything metal filter assignment is just do a roundup of ratios of posts. Just as just like a hobbyist project. Oh, man.

mathowie 1:20:31 Yeah. Well, I mean, Paul could do this in two seconds with

Cortex 1:20:35 fun. Let's count yourself out. Man. You got

mathowie 1:20:38 almost 10 favorites per comment. What's his any optical other things? You know, oh, that

Jessamyn 1:20:45 was a great thread, right? Like,

mathowie 1:20:47 I woke up today. And I realized I don't want to pay $400 for a pair of glasses, I can pay $8 Are there other things in the world like this, and there's a whole bunch of other things, a lot of razors. And then people figure out where Dollar Shave Club gets their razors from, they're just really selling cheaper, even cheaper razors. It's fascinating. And there's like restaurant supply stores, I used to be my favorite place to shop. Or there's one in LA that had food for restaurants like, like basics of food. So you can get like blocks of chocolate for baking that were like a 10th of the price at a store. And you can buy you know, all the cookware you needed.

Cortex 1:21:26 Did you go to a Cisco, like a Cisco factory?

mathowie 1:21:30 I can't remember what was it called the tubs of lard. It was called surface and it was in West LA. And it was amazing. And they would have steaks cheaper and they'd have a fresh pasta that was cold. You know, that was cheap, like freshly made that day. Like it was great. Nice. And it was walking distance from my house. So it was awesome. Oh, yeah. Oh, cat litter. So there's this new cat litter. Like every five years, there's a new cat litter technology. That's a very pricey thing. So we've moved on from what like that we are desiccant pellets. And now it's pine needle pellets everywhere you go. And someone said, Oh, if you just go to seed and feed, and you get animal bedding, it is the pine pellets at 1/10 of the price, like 100 pounds for 30 bucks, or you can pay 50 bucks for five pounds of the same stuff. Yep. Like this. Yeah, I love this thread. Life axe.

Cortex 1:22:27 I thought this was a good question. Because sometimes, you know, this sort of thing happens. User point. Wanted to help finding music for a Viking thing party. Yeah, they wanted like not just a whole bunch of metal basically. So you know what other Viking stuff is out there and people had a bunch of suggestions. So yeah, if you if you need to, if you need to dig real deep into an argument over which color addresses. Here's your literal and figurative Viking music that you can draw into that whole situation.

mathowie 1:23:00 Wow, Finn troll. That sounds like the Viking version of the Dropkick Murphys push play sounds like like, Wow, that's awesome. Awesome, awesome.

Jessamyn 1:23:14 So asked me to filter. One of the things I really liked. This question was about restoring cast iron pans. I was looking at Craigslist, here's a deal. I'm wondering, is this a deal? Blah. And so people are like, Yeah, but yeah, blah, blah, blah. And then mudpuppy shows up, and it's like, bam, you do this for a job. Let me explain to you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I rehab and sell collectible cast iron on eBay, bam. And she just drops the science on it. And it was just super helpful. And it was great. And pointed her to cast iron collector, which is a good website on information about this and blah, blah, blah. And it was just great. Like interesting question. And then there's the answer

Cortex 1:24:00 dropping some fucking science.

mathowie 1:24:02 Yep, I put on the site blog is so good. Yeah, I think I've heard some like Alton Brown tips on how to find old cast iron. But that comment is so much better. So I felt like what metal marks to look for what condition to look for what you can repair and what you can't because good. Super good. I marked What's the matter with kids today is a favorite, but I didn't see a ton of awesome responses. Like let's find old history mentions. Oh, I guess.

Jessamyn 1:24:32 Oh, like the frustration from a long time ago.

mathowie 1:24:36 Well, yeah, that's what I want to see. But I think they're just talking about like in the last 50 years, and you'll find some 1960s sources saying kids today. But yeah, they do go back a bit farther. But yeah, there's a 19 Oh, 919 to seven. I've seen I've seen what was it? Someone was passing around in New York Times clipping from like 1920 and it was saying like Kids are obsessed with. I think it was not Morse code but Telegraph's or something like that was gonna ruin like the world because we'd be moving information too fast. And that people couldn't handle it. It was really good. And it's that's like the you've seen the photograph of the, like New York that are Manhattan bound, like Connecticut train. And every single person on the train has their head buried in a newspaper. It's like, technology in my right.

Jessamyn 1:25:32 Exactly. Perfect. I really liked this post that taught us all how toilet cruising worked. So back back in the old days, when men needed to meet sort of surreptitiously, maybe in public toilets, maybe in other places. Like how did that work? Exactly. This is by user VAT tech fintech. And you know people talk about it and there's some explainers and talking about why that's really changed and you know how the the world now being a lot more welcoming for gay people is really bait sort of toilet cruising sort of a thing of the past almost,

Cortex 1:26:14 I'm actually really relieved to find out that it was like literally cruising in, in toilets, because I was immediately trying to imagine some sort of maneuver involving like, using a toilet while I don't know getting momentum. Yeah, it's Yes. Anyway, that's much more interesting. Much less gross.

mathowie 1:26:34 way into it. When the weird Minnesota Senator, what was that? Oh,

Cortex 1:26:39 wide stance, fella?

Jessamyn 1:26:41 Yeah, people brought him up in

mathowie 1:26:44 like, how does that work? And then the tea rooms is what it's really called. Yeah, yeah, I remember. Yeah. Trying to discern foot taps of some sort. And they're all

Jessamyn 1:26:54 secret. Well, as you know, then, of course, you get the crazy moral bathroom panic if you've been like one of them just sitting there tapping my foot. Well, there's a whole system to weed out people like us, so nobody sucks your dick by mistake.

mathowie 1:27:11 That's a problem.

Jessamyn 1:27:13 accorded the wide stance guy. Yeah.

mathowie 1:27:15 Oh, I'm bummed. Does Colin Firth own a yacht or not? Couldn't get a definite answer. Pretty much hopelessness. clonfert on a yacht. I thought I heard him say something about a yacht. He seems like a yacht guy, right.

Cortex 1:27:32 That's the kind of question you can ask. But yeah, I'm not sure if you're, you're likely to get an answer. Well, I mean, I guess maybe someone would have like a definitive interview with him talking about the yacht that he bought.

mathowie 1:27:42 Yeah. Or like, maybe there's some British public records of yacht ownership. I don't know. He hosted a party on a yacht, but he probably rented it. Someone found photos of him on a yacht. I just love that yacht or not. But this

Cortex 1:28:00 time, why should we wrap on? Yes,

mathowie 1:28:03 we are running. Wait.

Jessamyn 1:28:04 I just have to mention the word short story. Is this post? Oh, God.

Cortex 1:28:09 Yes. Yes, I

Jessamyn 1:28:10 did. Several children who lived in a world that was almost perpetually dark.

Cortex 1:28:17 I really, we need to track down every question that's ever been asked about this and just do some sort of like, you know, textual analysis of all these different variations and figure out what the word cloud for asking this question about the story you don't know.

mathowie 1:28:30 This is a honeypot for people who remember things. It's not

Cortex 1:28:35 even so much. A whole bunch of people need to answer the question because it's a real simple, it's like a one answer and you're done. But people cannot resist commenting on the fact that it has come up again. And I always worry a little bit so whoever asked that I think every case is gonna be sort of sad, like feel like ganged up on or something that people are like, Well, yeah. But that's actually the

mathowie 1:28:55 secret code to get into meetup sin locked behind locked doors, it's

Cortex 1:29:00 like three times to say all summers in a day, or what was

mathowie 1:29:03 that story? And then they have to answer back the call back. So we also Yeah,

Cortex 1:29:09 yes, no, so great. I was so it just makes me smile every fucking time that happens. Asked me version of the Monty Hall problem. Yes,

mathowie 1:29:16 yes. Yeah. So we have to go but Women's March just started. gonna be awesome. And

Cortex 1:29:23 yeah, we'll talk about that more next time. And it'll be at the tail end of it. So we can talk about all the great posts of the good but there's already been a bunch there's people have been posting a bunch of really good stuff. It's been a fun few days for posts already this March. And we

Jessamyn 1:29:35 had the fourth and 4 million dancer to ask Metafilter guest posts are now open forever.

Cortex 1:29:41 You can go back to here five year old podcast episode and be like, Oh, hey, by the way, I really want to. So

Jessamyn 1:29:48 we've commented in almost all of them. It's like secret notes to the mind. And

Cortex 1:29:57 it's gonna be a weird few days. Are to it. Yeah, it's gonna be fun. All right. Let's go travel back in time and make a metal talk post that blows a bunch of people's minds.

Jessamyn 1:30:06 Yeah, you guys are both awesome. It's always great to talk to you.

Cortex 1:30:09 Always fantastic talk to you. Alright, good bye Bye

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