Podcast 103 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 103: Strictly Non-Palindromic (2015-04-10).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:07 Gentlemen, welcome to the metal filter odd. Well hey, welcome to episode 103 of the Metafilter podcast. I am Josh Maillard aka cortex.

Jessamyn 0:21 I'm Jessamyn.

mathowie 0:23 And I'm Matt, aka Matt Holly.

Cortex 0:25 And and this is the this is the first episode where I'm introducing it because Matt doesn't work here anymore. And so now I'm the only employee on the podcast. Since technically, we we recorded last one before we announced anything last month, right? Like,

Jessamyn 0:41 we couldn't let it lead on I we should have users record the introduction.

Cortex 0:47 That'd be great. Just get a little like volunteer snip. Yeah,

Jessamyn 0:51 like eight fucking seconds. Don't fuck around.

Cortex 0:53 Yeah, no, no five minute tone poems.

mathowie 0:56 What's his name? Jesse Thorn does it with I think he hasn't read one sentence. But then you cut it up in the three people saying that one sentence and it sounds like they're all in the same room. It's actually a good trick. That sounds. So it just goes. Hi, I'm Jennifer. And I'm Brandon. And I believe this is the medical term podcast. And it sounds like whoa, there's so many people involved in really, it's just three recordings. Cut up. It's good.

Jessamyn 1:23 It's kind of three recordings cut up. Right?

Cortex 1:25 Yeah. 332 recordings, like what people don't understand about the podcast is that we don't actually call each other. We don't even talk about things at each other. Yeah, we sit in our rooms just sort of talk about some stuff we wrote on the site. We record these on different days. And then we send them all the math and then met half man has to sit down and edit together something resembling a narrative and discursive thread.

Jessamyn 1:44 So now we've got to actually talk to each other in real time because Matt so lazy,

Cortex 1:48 exactly doing his job.

mathowie 1:51 I don't have to write Josh.

Cortex 1:54 Second. We

Jessamyn 2:00 literally have not spoken about this the entire month how this was gonna work. But the advice that was great, man, I'm glad that was helpful to you. Sorry.

Cortex 2:09 No, no, we can make that work. I mean, you know about you know, how my, my my other extracurricular podcasts go? Randomly hit record, talk for a while. And then and then hit stop. And then that's the editing process for it. So

Jessamyn 2:28 Oh, are you kidding? That does noise gates. Yeah, I

Cortex 2:31 know. I have no patients. closer to

Jessamyn 2:33 your mic, man. Oh, sure.

Cortex 2:35 But yes, well, we'll just see how this goes then. Anyway, that the talking part, I know we know how to do so. That's quality control

Jessamyn 2:45 is really going out the window since left?

Cortex 2:47 Yep. downhill. How is how is? You know, legitimate jlb life, Matt? How's it? Yeah,

Jessamyn 2:56 I bet it's hard.

mathowie 2:58 It's good and bad. Yeah, it is hard to like concentrate fully on something for eight or nine hours a day, which sounds really stupid.

Jessamyn 3:06 Oh, I can't imagine doing it ever. You have my complete app. I haven't

mathowie 3:09 had a day job in 10 years. So having to go back to like I'm, I'm exhausted by five o'clock, which is Cardenas, I am totally spent from like concentrating the whole time. The upside is, the hours before that starts in the hours after are completely free, which is like a first and

Jessamyn 3:29 the people you work with are awesome. I suspect. I mean, the people I know are awesome. And I'm sure more awesome people there.

mathowie 3:36 Yeah, everyone's really nice. The company generates almost zero email, like they eat the dog food. And nobody ever emails anybody. So that emails stressful to me and having almost no email anymore. It's like, amazing.

Cortex 3:50 It's just all internal communication in Slack channels.

mathowie 3:53 Yeah, I mean, there's like hundreds of channels. You have to get used to like, it's basically like Twitter. It's just going on all the time. And where I have time to read this that. Yeah. And there's like eight or 10. I don't miss but they let the hundreds just wash over me. It's fine. But yeah, it's great. It's great. It's hard. It is hard. And but it is really nice to have weekends and stuff. So yeah, yeah, I

Cortex 4:19 haven't I haven't worked a nine to five job in, I guess, like seven years now. Which is weird to think. And yeah, I think going back to it would be a really strange thing. I have never had one. Really never, never at all.

Jessamyn 4:31 I did a temp job for like two or three months where I worked nine to five that whole time. And that's it.

mathowie 4:38 Well, I was thinking the other day, like how do you get a haircut on a Tuesday? Like before I would just get a haircut on a Tuesday.

Jessamyn 4:46 That's why barber shops are open on Saturdays.

mathowie 4:49 That's true and the way they're always packed. Yeah, yeah. I have to come up with some convoluted get my haircut at 8am so I can kind of start

Jessamyn 4:57 how you feel about haircuts. I don't believe I've gotten here. I cut in the last like nine months and I've, you know, literally need to check up and do that. And it's it's hard. So you get a haircut does it look good?

mathowie 5:09 No, I haven't gotten. See. I will Friday morning I think before work so

Jessamyn 5:14 that's what I keep telling myself to

Cortex 5:19 do I also haircut? Yes.

mathowie 5:27 Jessamyn Do you know anything cool about the number 103? I bet you do. It's really

Jessamyn 5:32 interesting, right? This is 130/3 podcast. Our last podcast was recorded sometime a month ago. And I 103 has this really short entry on Wikipedia, which makes it just look like so much bullshit. And so I'm reading it like, well, it's prime, the prime before it's 101. They're twin primes, it's a happy number. And then I get to it's a strictly non palindromic number. And I'm like, Okay, it's not a palindrome strictly what the, what does that mean? But that's exactly it. It's the coolest what it means is in no base number lower than base 103. Is it is the number you wind up with a palindrome for 103?

Cortex 6:16 That is super dope. I had no idea what strictly

Jessamyn 6:19 non Palindrome numbers are. All of them are prime because of math reasons. And so I got totally rabbit hold by what I thought was the dullest number, sort of that we've heard before encountered, but in fact, strictly non palindromic numbers are super cool.

Cortex 6:38 Yeah, that's that is, man. I'm sorry. Yeah, I was

Jessamyn 6:43 excited about learning about that already. Yeah, it's a great nappy thing, so 103 won't forget it. 103 or 103 depending some people spell it with the and some people don't that's when I know that 103 and

Cortex 6:57 mostly an Andrew Yeah.

Jessamyn 7:00 100 300 300 And I'm not a 103

Cortex 7:04 That's that's that's ostentatious at that point.

Jessamyn 7:07 Yeah, you all fancy.

Cortex 7:11 But yeah, okay, strictly strictly palindromic. Yeah, strict Palindrome I'm gonna look that shit up. Good.

Jessamyn 7:20 Oh, somebody asked to open the chat window, or do you guys have a chat window open? You're not chatting with me? Oh, it says, argh, I'm trying to get to work from Matt. Oh, and we weren't even looking. I was saying

mathowie 7:33 I was typing on Skype, and I was Yeah. Turns out it was cats all along. Cats

Jessamyn 7:46 all the way down.

mathowie 8:47 There's only been one

Cortex 8:48 job, Jesus. No, no, it's just up in March. So this is this is this is covering all of almost all of March. I think March 4 through today's April.

Jessamyn 8:58 We talked about like March 4, it's a sentence Urd or

Cortex 9:02 Oh, yeah. So yeah, most of March stuffs new since we last recorded too. And

Jessamyn 9:06 last recording. We all just talked about your job and not that much else. So we could even talk about other stuff if there's other stuff. Yep. But ya know, the jobs are really interesting, actually. Were all my tabs. I'm having a tab problem this time around. But one of them looked like it was gonna be really cool. But then it didn't turn out to be quite as cool. Which was the one about living in a national park on an island working in a movie theater and I thought you'd get to like go live in a movie theater or something cool. I don't know like there's a movie dormitory. It's in Maine. So it's Bar Harbor. They have an old timey theater there and illegal acts heliotrope Elio somebody

mathowie 9:49 was wrong with it was the downside. Nothing.

Jessamyn 9:52 It's just a mock but it's a movie theater job. I mean, it's

Cortex 9:55 doesn't pay much. It's a kid job.

Jessamyn 9:57 But you don't. They don't put you up there. err, that's what I thought it was going to be. So you still got to find a way to stay someplace that you have to pay money for and your nine to 10, nine to $12 an hour job.

Cortex 10:07 And they're hopefully suggesting that you find somewhere to camp in the National Park and try not to get caught, you know, real money.

mathowie 10:13 The island with our key the

Jessamyn 10:16 Yeah, yeah. And it's awesome. And I bet this is going to be a super fun job. But I thought, yeah, yeah. For a kid. Or, or, or like a hobo. I mean, maybe Lila wants it because he lives out there. And he's interesting. Wow. So it's like a summer

mathowie 10:36 theatre. 10 bucks an hour,

Jessamyn 10:38 maybe. And this is the inaugural season, which isn't in of itself is kind of cool. So I'd like to hear more about this. But it is a vaguely interesting

Cortex 10:47 job. If you move to Maine, and work in that movie theater, please let us know. And we'll do a podcast about it.

mathowie 10:56 It's only 2700 miles away from me.

Cortex 10:58 Yeah. You can like commute on the weekends, podcasts

mathowie 11:03 galore all the way. Not that bad.

Cortex 11:08 Jobs that jumped out to you guys are

Jessamyn 11:10 well, you can answer answer those questions about electronics over the phone. She'll pay you some money.

Cortex 11:15 I'm certain that I can't. I am certain that I can't

Jessamyn 11:19 as well. But for someone who could. It will be kind of a neat and neat gig. Yeah. So you heard me bitching about how it's fucking snowing, snowing?

mathowie 11:30 How could it be snowing? Should it be done by now?

Cortex 11:34 It's, it's it's you know, global warming, as I understand it, is the editorial cartoon response to that. Question. Projects. Jobs, I think yeah, I think so. Yeah. All right.

mathowie 11:52 There were a billion projects,

Cortex 11:53 or was a shitload of projects. It was exciting. It was exciting, approving projects. So silly little thing. But I used to be those emails went to Matt and yeah.

Jessamyn 12:03 You see them all the sudden, it all new for you. I haven't seen him and wherever, whenever,

mathowie 12:08 for my first month as a reader, I was just checking on the main parts of the sites. But I forgot about projects like until a few days ago. It's like, oh, this ratio of some projects, and I could not believe how many I mean, there's like, one or two every single day. It's not

Cortex 12:22 a ton of great stuff. people or people are up to things.

mathowie 12:25 Yeah, it's amazing. It's a productive time.

Cortex 12:29 There's a there's the I've watched up a portion of one of these and I enjoyed it, but I sort of just forgot to come back to it. But right Knox Yeah, Greg? Yeah. Yeah, no, I tell

Jessamyn 12:44 me about it. Because I'm afraid to start even looking at it. Well, you know, and I

Cortex 12:47 watched, like, I watched half an episode. And I was I was, I was delighted. And then I'm like, Oh, I gotta get back to this. And I've had a bunch of other shit that I've been trying to get through media wise, this this last month to

mathowie 12:57 only two minutes long. So I know, I know, I

Cortex 12:59 just I just sit down and plow through them. It's like, it's, you know, it's comedy with puppets. And it's, it's actually really fucking great. There was a metal filter post about it as well. Oh, cool. And yeah, I just, yes, I recommend you watch more of it than I have.

Jessamyn 13:15 By the well.

Cortex 13:18 Yeah, you know, this is this, this is always intriguing. It's, I try and get my head around, because like, you know, the whole self league friendly thing. Is that's almost kind of like the obvious exception to the friend link thing is, if you're only friends with someone, because you were both already hanging out on metal filter, and you're like, Oh, I like this stuff that person does. You know, it's all of a sudden, it's harder to sort out that thing versus the Oh, hey, I found this amazing thing on YouTube. That who knows where it found it and it's your best bro who's not a metal filter? And it's totally a scam job. Phil. wonder

Jessamyn 13:59 a little bit sometimes I wouldn't post anything by Greg because he is a friend of mine. But then it becomes a problem right then there's the Greg nog penalty because you're friends with everybody and nobody could post your shit.

Cortex 14:09 Exactly, you know. Tar Pits

mathowie 14:14 just to keep this opening for me. Greg, stop calling.

Cortex 14:21 Also check out this thing I wrote on medium. It's

mathowie 14:24 really good. You should we don't know each other at all.

Jessamyn 14:29 Speaking of Matt, that very short thing you wrote on medium but furious seven was hilarious. Oh, good. I thought I loved it. I loved it.

mathowie 14:37 seriously asking me if they should watch one through six. And I'm like, This is not rocket surgery. This is like they're

Jessamyn 14:45 all the same. And if you like that, then by all means watch one through six.

Cortex 14:51 They didn't make the seven film because people didn't like the format so

mathowie 14:55 they're getting better actually. Which is weird, for

Jessamyn 14:59 well, the As the Sci Fi is getting I mean, the Sci Fi the CGI is getting I think better

mathowie 15:04 the sequels yeah it's getting more family frenzy you know is dealing with it matters. It's good, less about car racing and more about, you know, relationships or whatever.

Jessamyn 15:14 Feelings.

mathowie 15:19 Sequels usually get worse and I think they're getting better. It's probably the only sequel series I can say that about a superhero movie.

Jessamyn 15:29 Did you see the rock on SNL where he's talking about how he's franchise Viagra? You just like put the rock in your franchise and suddenly everybody wants to get with it. It was the only musical number in the beginning of SNL I have pretty much ever liked.

mathowie 15:44 Oh, I fast forwarded through it was

Jessamyn 15:46 worth it. It was worth it. I usually would have fast forward to do it myself. But you can check it out.

mathowie 15:53 I liked nor reads insult generator.

Jessamyn 15:57 Oh, yes. minded me of Our Insult jazz from way back in the day, Josh?

mathowie 16:01 Yeah. I clicked on the wrong thing to reload it but you have to click on another to

Jessamyn 16:10 get and not borrow what is borrowed. Link? Oh, it is the one that's the link school bastard. spunk spelunker.

mathowie 16:21 Meme Hopper

Cortex 16:24 Toad fucker.

mathowie 16:26 Trout bollocks.

Jessamyn 16:28 But scrotum. This doesn't even make any sense. It's just list. Bottom come dragon. Fool for skin frog for skin. It's exactly like insult jazz, like

Cortex 16:42 that pattern to it. Nut keeper. I like that. You know, it's not it's not the most obvious of insults like you know, just the fact that you keep nuts. It's like, it's like getting on someone's case for knitting. Oh,

Jessamyn 16:53 you kind of like an insult because it means you're kind of like a squirrel,

Cortex 16:58 I guess. Yeah.

Jessamyn 17:00 And those things suck.

Cortex 17:02 Okay, squirrels, squirrels.

Jessamyn 17:05 Well, I had a one that I liked, because I liked it. And when I liked because it's pandering to me personally. The one I liked because I liked it was Jin cats and cat has is doing like a little set of YouTube videos about how to tie all the neck ties. Just real nice, real straightforward. But like, here's my videos, here's how to tie the knots. It's from a guy you like and trust. And here's how to tie them. They're short. They're easy. They're I don't know, I just really liked them.

mathowie 17:37 How are they? How is there six minutes of content on one tie?

Jessamyn 17:42 Well, Patrick is you know, he knows things. I mean,

mathowie 17:46 there's a standard right?

Jessamyn 17:50 I'm the lady. Yeah.

Cortex 17:52 Josh Shaw. I've heard the word Windsor before

Jessamyn 17:57 and we were born at PTI.

mathowie 17:58 AF is normal. That's how I learned at age 12. And then yeah, I

Cortex 18:02 think I think I know how to tie a half and a full but I'm never sure which I'm trying until I tried a couple times. But I wear a tie like you know once every three years so last time

mathowie 18:11 I was at a wedding everybody had you

Jessamyn 18:13 sound weird? What? You sound weird again.

mathowie 18:17 You sound like a ham radio to me.

Jessamyn 18:20 You sound like a ham radio to me.

Cortex 18:22 Well, you're all recording on on your end. So if it should be intelligible. We can.

Jessamyn 18:27 Yeah, you sound like Thomas Dolby. Why five? to eight, what are you saying about phones and wedding?

mathowie 18:37 Oh, yeah. Last time I was at a wedding. Every dude in the wedding party had YouTube running on a phone for how to tie a bow tie like 10 minutes. There's not a single person ever worn one their lives. That was real. It was good.

Jessamyn 18:53 Patrick's got a video they could watch Patrick talk for six minutes about it. Anyhow, I liked it. But the pandering project Yeah, was of course blaming Gibbons books for DC. So he's he sorry, let me check. Flanner copy it looks like it dude. At any rate, started a books for DC project goal of increasing user engagement with DC Public Library, which is an awesome library with a terrible reputation. And so wrote a web Scraper with the Twitter feed of the new books at DC pls book catalog. And it's just cool. And the books for DC project, generally speaking is just cool. There's a Firefox extension. You can search the catalog via tweet. It's all just you know, sex on wheels as far as I'm concerned because we never get anything any good for any of our technology ever. So it's exciting to see somebody building something that's really Good.

Cortex 20:00 How did the library get such a bad reputation? Um,

Jessamyn 20:03 it was mismanaged for a really long time and underfunded. And it's hard when the Library of Congress is up the street to get people No, seriously, to get people to pay attention. Yeah. And it's hard, right? Because I mean, in DC is like, you know, a teeny tiny bit of Washington politics and a lot, just like really poor, and, you know, has a lot of crime. And a lot of people who don't really are not used to interacting with public libraries, and a lot of just sort of racial issues. And so, you know, the library just kind of magnified that. And they had a triage mentality, I think, for a long time, against their own patrons, which was a big problem. And so they've got new direction, they've got a whole bunch of new stuff going on, they're really trying to make more of an effort to engage much more sort of usability stuff with their web content. I mean, it's far from perfect, but the libraries seem a lot less like bunkers than they used to. And people seem to be happier interacting with them, because it's not, I mean, the funding is not awesome, but it's not like super shitty, but you know, DC is weird, right? Because of the way the money works there. They don't have a State Library System and Library of Congress. You know, as you may or may not have Fred is like having its own weird issues. That fucking director doesn't use email. dildos. I mean, how can any right

Cortex 21:23 lol memos around? What

Jessamyn 21:25 he does, he just sits there and stares out the window and strokes his naked cat or something? I have no idea what he does. He's awful.

mathowie 21:35 I was like looking at this gun. I wonder what the data sources are. So it's been interesting code project. It's like I wrote a web scraper. So that means there's like no data sources like so.

Jessamyn 21:47 The libraries have a tendency libraries are not very good at making public datasets, even though they totally could, because there's so many privacy issues that they don't totally understand. I feel like that they're afraid to let any of their data out and some of the stuff they don't have like a lot of the database stuff. You know, you don't really own the traffic data with that stuff, which is too bad.

mathowie 22:12 Oh, yay, code for DC, which this is affiliated with as part of Code for America, which is in the business of doing these sorts of things.

Jessamyn 22:20 That's Thanks for passing on my name to them. By the way, Matt, if I was for a full time job, I would work for them.

mathowie 22:26 Yeah, they seem like a really cool sense. I am not

Jessamyn 22:29 looking for a full time job though. I had to break down Hans Hart and but I suggested a couple other really good people, and hopefully they'll find some good people to work with.

mathowie 22:38 He didn't even know she was perfect person.

Jessamyn 22:42 I know. I know. But I mean, you know, they could offered me a 25 hour week job too. And, you know, so I understand. It is what it is. Shut up. What does that mean? That's, that's the day that hopefully you say that. It's you

Cortex 23:00 know, well, it is what it is. I like this post by vatic. Vedic

Jessamyn 23:08 check. I saw this one too. Yeah, yeah,

Cortex 23:10 basically just a big collection of awesome gospel tunes. From there, they've got a big collection, I guess of of gospel stuff on, you know, LP and 45 and so on, and they're posting them. And it's great. It's just a bunch of really great. Fucking gospel music.

mathowie 23:31 They're like, ripping to LP.

Unknown Speaker 23:34 I think I think maybe so yeah. Wow.

mathowie 23:37 DT. D is just the record labels spinning? Oh, it's probably a static image. Right? Yeah. The

Cortex 23:45 couple eyelets do I don't remember seeing any actual video content? I think it's just yeah, some image or other. I wonder

mathowie 23:50 if the content ID that YouTube does can even match these really old recordings? Yeah, kind of I would assume not

Jessamyn 23:57 if it if they're still up, because if it could match them, it would match them.

mathowie 24:01 But it usually will yell slapped by links on it and give those people money and train not give you Oh, I

Jessamyn 24:08 see what you mean. Like,

mathowie 24:09 I think that's there's copyright middle ground.

Cortex 24:11 Yeah. I actually I ran into that for the first time with a YouTube video. The weird house edit thing I did a couple Oh, really? Yeah, it managed to detect that. You know, I was using copyrighted content, which makes sense because you know, it's literally just unedited snippets from a television show. But the funny thing is it figured out that something was up about six minutes into this video that consisted of nothing but clips from the same episode of House as it took it like somewhere at the six minute mark it figured out hey, wait a second. I think this is an episode a house and then gave me that hey, you know, your

Jessamyn 24:47 nose even did that with TV? Oh,

Cortex 24:49 yeah, no, apparently, NBC is in their library of automated complainants and so I got a grouchy message about you know, hey, it looks like this is using copyrighted material. And if you'd like to contest this, then press a property button and it's got like, five or six different options, all but one of which are like things they'll say yeah, but no, actually you don't own the copyright. No, actually, you can't just say you can use it. No, you can't just say it's first, you

Jessamyn 25:18 know, property and theft check checkbox. Yeah, it's like a bunch

Cortex 25:21 of things that you might think you could say, are the reasons why it's okay to use someone's copyrighted material because you're, like 14 year old and have a hazy understanding. But then one of the options is like fair use. And so I click that off and wrote up a relatively simple little paragraph about, hey, this is the thing I'm doing for free with no profit. educational purposes,

Jessamyn 25:44 as well. And it is like, I think a supercut totally is that thing. Yeah.

Cortex 25:49 And then it somehow like, you know, 20 minutes later, it was unblocked. And wow. So yeah, it's first time I'd run a nice word. Interesting. Yeah. Thanks, Gary.

mathowie 25:58 When you get the red marks again.

Jessamyn 26:03 warn you right. Like if this happens too often, they'll be consequences.

mathowie 26:08 I put a video I think I took with my phone of like someone accepting an Oscar that wants to work with this is back at Creative Commons. I was showing the other people like oh my god, he won an Oscar he for documentary, check it out that night. And like the next day, it was removed because of the copyright.

Jessamyn 26:26 Or the Oscar people or pit vipers about? Yeah, they're

mathowie 26:29 like the Olympics people. But I think content ID works on any recorded audio or video because you see people saying like, you Shazam, is that the music ID app, use it on anything like play use it during a TV show. And they'll tell you about that TV show. Like it's, it's weird how they can get an audio footprint from anything.

Cortex 26:51 Yeah. And I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's just a straight up footprint of the audio, or if the use of watermarking is just so pervasive at this point, that there's always a watermark or what the deal is,

mathowie 27:01 I don't know how they identified yours. You mean? Yeah, we

Cortex 27:03 just haven't looked into what the current state of the technology is. If they, if they're still using watermarks or stuff or if computing power has just gotten cheap enough that they just brute force that shit at this point.

mathowie 27:14 I was kind of pissed off the other day trying to use Vimeo if you use any song, like any song behind a little goofy video, you know, like, it basically blocks you from posting, or it'll say,

Jessamyn 27:28 the place you could put stuff that had food, they got busted. They got probably, I mean, they didn't have a rap for that.

mathowie 27:35 Yeah, I would go there when I didn't want YouTube to squawk at me. You know, if I just wanted to show friends you know, some cool bike tricks and yeah, whatever print songs in the background, I don't care. Vimeo now, because we just silenced your video. And we and we set it to private you know, you think about what you did. It was like click a button to choose from a Creative Commons song and we'll think about maybe making it pop.

Jessamyn 28:01 Oh god, I remember having to do that on YouTube. That's

mathowie 28:05 the worst. It's the worst. And I'm like, fuck, maybe I used to be so fun and cool. Now you're Captain Bree. What

Cortex 28:11 happened? You man, you still allowed

mathowie 28:13 the opposite of Yeah.

Cortex 28:17 I like to go smoke

mathowie 28:20 vine and do that for six seconds. Obviously everywhere in New York City where movies are filmed by Galka M go I didn't

Jessamyn 28:33 get that because I assumed it was our same old same old seen guy different.

mathowie 28:39 Oh, no, not a scout. Last and yeah, I don't think it's the same person. I just thought the map is beautiful, which is block by block. How many times there's been film shoots. When I'm in New York, I always run into law and order trailers everywhere.

Jessamyn 28:57 The first comment on this thread blows and you should delete it

Cortex 29:06 you know, and people people are very you. I

Jessamyn 29:08 mean, you Josh right now.

Cortex 29:11 I I agree. And I'm removing it as we speak. People never flag stuff in progress, because proportionally, you know,

Jessamyn 29:22 hey, look, Matt voted for it. I flagged it. Josh deleted it. That's great. We're still a team.

mathowie 29:29 Nobody else voted for it's the most beautiful visualization. This isn't just a Google map of dots. Like that's pretty beautiful. Like it's it shows you where like the concentration is I think it's an Upper West Side where or upper east side is where law and order is kind of famous for shooting but also cover some of Brooklyn.

Jessamyn 29:47 This is a glorious actually this is an amazing thing. What's that funny little thing? Up in the sort of Northeast corner those little red lines what TV shows that?

mathowie 29:59 Oh no Is that clickable? Oh whoa. Bourne Legacy Birdman.

Cortex 30:04 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

mathowie 30:06 There's like an upside down middle finger here talking about like North Brooklyn, I guess. Yeah. And

Jessamyn 30:11 I guess it's like those movies that were filmed on those three streets, which is funny because I never would have known that otherwise.

mathowie 30:18 I thought Birdman was like on Time Square because he kind of has a Time Square moment, but

Jessamyn 30:24 Well, they probably make it look like the rest of it's happening in Time Square. And that's where Spider Man was filmed. And Noah, Noah

Cortex 30:34 you know, Russell HBO as

mathowie 30:35 you know, maybe that's a soundstage because why would know a V on the street?

Jessamyn 30:40 I don't understand. i

mathowie 30:44 Ah, man to did a shooting day. We're

Jessamyn 30:49 gonna be some time during this podcast for me to complain about the Boxtrolls

mathowie 30:53 the Oh, the movie? Yes. It was so so I didn't like it.

Jessamyn 30:58 Didn't have any females on it. Oh, girls were dudes

Cortex 31:02 i did i This is passed me by completely what is this is a kid movie.

Jessamyn 31:08 For the Oscar, I think right?

Cortex 31:10 Oh, I wouldn't know.

mathowie 31:12 Yeah, I think it was huge. And

Cortex 31:14 you don't want a movie theater to understand.

Jessamyn 31:16 But you could stay at this one in Bar Harbor by

mathowie 31:21 seeing

Jessamyn 31:24 it was awesome animation. And then the storyline was, you know, just boys and boy trolls. I didn't like actually worth watching it if you don't mind not having any women in your movie. My sister started like checking her phone through the end of it because we were watching it at home. And then I saw something on milkshake about you know that thing where your friend whips out their phone during the best part of the move. Oh, yeah. I was like, that's a thing. People do that. I just thought that was like my one rude family member. Very happy to learn otherwise.

mathowie 31:57 I think I did the same thing once. appropriately. Sure. I think I opened a laptop while the stage was playing, which is my wife's favorite movie on Earth. And I was like, I check email. I totally I don't even have paid attention to the movie for the rest of the movie. It was terrible.

Cortex 32:17 This is at home or in a theater. Okay, laptop your theater. You're like you are the

mathowie 32:23 worst. Oh, but as exactly though like let me like you need to watch like, you know my favorite movie on Earth and then you know me like a dork an hour through.

Cortex 32:35 That is bad manners. I'm used to having my laptop around because like sometimes, you know, if I'm working in the evening, I mean, Angela, you're gonna watch some, some TV or something. You know, I'll have the laptop sit in there and keep an eye on stuff that way, but I find I mean, I don't even like doing that if it's not specifically because I'm on the clock. Like, I've never gonna like watch TV and read something. I'm always like, either I'm committed to whatever I'm watching and it has my full attention. Or I'm just gonna not you know be watching TV or watching a movie whether it's like yeah, I don't really I don't really do the half watching thing. I've never totally understood that.

Jessamyn 33:15 I don't do the half watching TV either. I would just go in another room seems rude.

mathowie 33:18 How did I not mark this as I love it? You must have missed it. I think I was scrolling through milkshake I didn't bother to hit the heart but I saw

Jessamyn 33:28 what happens when you work full time.

mathowie 33:32 Time hearts know love hearts oh wait I think I did the original No you did no no. Actually carry over but i Wow Cal did it Jesus. One of my co workers marked it as a favorite Jesus.

Jessamyn 33:56 You should follow that guy is that CMC Mei Han

mathowie 34:01 No I am cow like on the original Cal Henderson you know from Flickr and

Jessamyn 34:06 stuff I don't know Cal Henderson should i He was a Flickr

mathowie 34:09 co founder guy and

Cortex 34:12 wait CMC may sound would not be like no no no, that's

mathowie 34:15 someone else.

Jessamyn 34:17 That was the joke original. Oh wait, what's Kelsey username?

mathowie 34:25 I am cow I think I know kids. Yeah, but it was on the original poster he fell I'm looking at it I understand

Jessamyn 34:32 how the internet works.

Cortex 34:35 or something I don't know if now we'll go back and like find this this last minute and cut it but this is we're running with it. This is pure pie. Oh,

mathowie 34:45 so you are gonna edit it awesome. If now we heard it we got recorded I

Cortex 34:52 already. Contingency make no further assumptions.

mathowie 34:57 Are there any other projects Okay.

Cortex 35:00 There were a bunch. I've got a couple that I'll mention real quick at least there's there's a couple fun word ones. There's we Libyan I can never remember if we LePen with a peon, I don't know why why are F? Would you rather fight the old? I think rather than particular mean. Would you rather fight you know, 100 duck sized horses or one horse sized duck. And so this just has a great big pile of potential things with their relative sizes, and it will generate fight. Proponents,

mathowie 35:36 these are really crazy. Would you

Cortex 35:39 like to would you rather fight one poltergeists sized boomerang or 125 boomerang size poltergeists,

Jessamyn 35:43 one cello size octopus, or 5.33 Octopus sized cellos

mathowie 35:50 took me a while to get something made sense. But would you rather fight one Sumo, Sumo wrestler sized chicken or 50 Chicken sized sumo wrestlers that is not

Jessamyn 36:02 one rogue nation size poltergeist are 120,000 poltergeist sized rogue nations. Although I would like to complain about this font that zero the zero with it's just an O kind of it makes everything look weird.

Cortex 36:17 It's yeah,

Jessamyn 36:18 it's zero that medium uses I think it's like the new trendy zero and I'm not down with it.

mathowie 36:25 Oh, look terrible on medium. And they care so much about typography. Because

Jessamyn 36:29 about that zero, it's the zero,

mathowie 36:32 don't even if you put like 4pm It just doesn't look right.

Jessamyn 36:36 They have some problems. And they don't care. They don't care at all. They're like, shut up. We're a startup. And we're like your startup run by a bunch of like, 50 year old white dudes Really? Really?

Cortex 36:49 These numerals but they're Yeah, you gotta be real careful about the context you use them in. Like you shouldn't really use them in like, any sort of mathematical or numeric context. It isn't just hey, let's look at some pretty like, like for an address. I think it looks great on like, an address line or something, you know, sure. 130 with a funky descenders on a bunch of

Jessamyn 37:12 for when we talk about AskMe Metafilter. Because I have a thing that you would like, off topic now. All right. But yes, I know what you mean. It makes it hard to look at numbers as numbers. Numbers.

Cortex 37:21 Yeah. Well, another another sort of word play. One is every non word by Ronnie tooth.

Jessamyn 37:29 This guy we should just have him on.

Cortex 37:32 We should? Well, you know, I say I think in the I think it was in the thread for this that you know, at this point, I feel like we should have like meta filter, like Twitter, word but jam at some point and just have everybody try and come up with some sort of weird twitter bot that tweets you know, some kind of language thing.

mathowie 37:48 Oh, we can hackathon.

Jessamyn 37:50 I understand some of his are larger than others, even though they're not favorited or not retweeted? Is that just because more people read them?

Cortex 37:59 I don't know. I think Twitter just kind of fucking wings it if it doesn't have enough data to work with.

mathowie 38:05 They're all the same size for me.

Cortex 38:07 Yeah, get down further than that. And yeah, like

mathowie 38:11 if they have no data must be reads I guess after

Jessamyn 38:15 you because I mean, you have you guys seen like the you know, you can see your stats, I guess. Yeah.

mathowie 38:20 And you click on a timestamp that probably tick some a box somewhere. Yeah, I think it's funny because there's so the joke is there's all these every word Twitter things that going through dictionaries that have been going for years and years. And then there's every user Dick bots there's all these bots that do words like a stamp so someone to make one they're nonsensical non words is really funny. Well, yeah, and

Cortex 38:46 a parish. Did every word.

mathowie 38:50 Oh, right. Right.

Cortex 38:52 And so yeah, so it's like was directly Yeah, ready to sort of running with the idea and I love I love the output like this sort of thing is great. This is something you can also actually kind of do with Markov chains in a more generalized way too. And yeah, just like, jam these things together. Presumably running through thing is actually checking to make sure that you actually do get sick too, but but I just I love the sort of like, word like oddness you get out of this stuff. Also cop car. Apparently, seven hours ago it came up with all this one Rideau

Jessamyn 39:31 cap cop cars. Oh, yeah. Sometimes it's just multiple words jammed together. Yeah. Did you?

mathowie 39:37 Did you post your own project Josh? Did you post the project?

Cortex 39:42 I think I did. I posted the house thing.

mathowie 39:44 No, what was the thing you did? It was something with Oh words. Oh, just the other day. The Markov chain the monkeys? Yes. Yeah,

Cortex 39:51 not Markov. It's

Jessamyn 39:52 Oh, right. I saw Yeah, the comic I didn't. Not on

mathowie 39:55 projects.

Cortex 39:56 Well, I posted something like you know, a week before. Oh,

mathowie 40:00 Good thing was like a month ago? No,

Cortex 40:02 I was like, it was like a week or

Jessamyn 40:03 two, you know, you can post two projects every minute, you're in charge of the website,

Cortex 40:08 that's wrong, you know, it's like I can I can wait a fucking month to make another course I don't need to violate the

mathowie 40:13 didn't get on the front page and meta filter at least. Yeah, it

Cortex 40:17 doesn't do that much. I'm actually working on a thing right now that that will probably be my x next legit projects post and it'll probably be in good shape. By the time I get there, I'm doing this another genetic algorithm because the monkey thing, it's just, it generates virtual monkeys that are genetically inclined to hit a typewriter keys in a certain order. It keeps generating generation after generation through cloning and sexual reproduction to try and generate the monkey that's like the chosen monkey that will actually type whatever input string you gave. And, you know, so if you give it like a three word fate phrase, it'll take 1000 or 1500 generations to come up with this Golden Monkey that can actually type I like butts successfully on the face guy. But that's all it does. Like it doesn't do anything else. And it's not as much fun to watch as it was to sort of think about building. So it just sort of like got it done enough that it was on a web page and put it out there and left it at that.

Jessamyn 41:14 I saw that you were working on some football thing. Yeah, yeah, I'm

Cortex 41:17 working on a let's see where is that? I can pull that up. And you guys can look at the host these URLs. But the football thing is I think there'll be a lot more entertaining in the end because it does a lot more.

Jessamyn 41:29 didn't look like it did very much. Why so

Cortex 41:32 I just I just started working on it yesterday. It's doing more at this point. I got a little bit more work done this afternoon. Wow.

mathowie 41:39 done better than the 80s Mattel three dots.

Jessamyn 41:47 You love that font that's becoming your signature font Josh?

Cortex 41:51 Yeah, yeah, really big feature. It's a nice it's not. It's not the best choice for a lot of stuff. But I don't care because I just liked the way it looks. But yeah, this was all thing. I think it'd be fun.

Jessamyn 42:02 almost scored, but then I didn't. Now these guys are in their own endzone. What the fuck? Yeah, they're crazy.

Cortex 42:08 They're really bad at football. They're just they're really essentially chickens running around with their head cut off and each chicken has a pair of legs that aren't the same length and so they they're all moving to one side of the other

mathowie 42:21 safety score score holy shit yeah, good game going

Jessamyn 42:27 My guys are doing nothing killing the Reds thumbs up their butts.

Cortex 42:32 Yeah, and all you can do right now is reload you'll get a new random pair of teams if one team is destroying the other but eventually they'll they'll sort of play through games and then do the genetic sampling thing for the best quarterback will get to reproduce some clones and the worst ones that get sacked and

Jessamyn 42:49 wait to meet with each other either are there they're totally aren't well, there's their genderless Charles all over their football playing genderless construct Yeah,

Cortex 43:03 that's okay. It's not it's not football dudes. It flips football genderless circles

Jessamyn 43:10 fails the Bechtel test

mathowie 43:15 so Wait, wouldn't an entire game have to take like 30 seconds to get generations to click? Yeah,

Cortex 43:21 yeah, that's probably what I'll do is make it like make a game last.

mathowie 43:25 Even a minute is like one generation a minute is super slow.

Jessamyn 43:29 Barely having to watch this compared

Cortex 43:32 to watching actual

mathowie 43:34 apps. The monkeys do a sentence every two seconds. It's more fun.

Cortex 43:38 Well we'll see. We'll see how it works. Maybe it'll turn out

Jessamyn 43:45 there'll be Josh did you talk about your project? No, maybe I will. Your project is rough. I don't want to die from the Reuse Room at Harvard. Oh, not to text me but he of course texted me to say hi. That he wasn't gonna text me.

Cortex 44:13 That's very thoughtful of him. He's an accommodating guy.

mathowie 44:17 He gets no emoji in response.

Jessamyn 44:20 Exactly. Right and back up in the air about it.

mathowie 44:24 30 other projects or is that all the word do you want?

Cortex 44:27 I think that was most of the already ones this month. But keep making already things people

Jessamyn 44:32 are great. We enjoy them. Also, I enjoyed the frog Passover thing just to mention it because and because I have one more person told me Happy Easter I was killed. kill somebody. So I appreciated the post by what was it Eric? Bob? I get Eric Bob and Mike pop confused. But it was Eric Bob about why the frogs take over Passover and it was in the Atlantic and I was right crowd. It looks awesome. That's it. Let's see it. All right. That's all.

Cortex 45:07 Well, should we move on to Metafilter, then? Sure.

Jessamyn 45:10 Sure. Well, Matt left. And then before he actually left left, but after we announced it, Miguel Cardozo showed up. And it was that crazy thread that was after the last podcast. Yes.

Cortex 45:24 And that was beautiful. And it was like, Yeah, makes makes totally pulled a mix, just out of nowhere.

mathowie 45:30 And I just wanted it to be true and looked up and his IP was from Portugal and everything. So whoever's doing the long con have Miguel Cardoso is

Jessamyn 45:41 I think Ricardo got in touch with him and told him to do it.

Cortex 45:45 Well, was there ever a question that Miguel was actually Miguel, I thought the question was whether his quote unquote friend was actually his friend or just his second account, so that people would know less about his meta talk.

Jessamyn 45:55 Oh, wait, what are you talking about?

Cortex 45:57 There? Was there was a guy there Esteban or something? Yeah, who was Miguel? Sometimes Miguel would help him post. I think this post would read like Miguel wrote a post.

Jessamyn 46:09 Oh, I didn't

mathowie 46:12 meet up. She used to take me aside and go do you think he's real? Do you think this is really the real guy? Because he's supposed to be super famous, like, like, super famous, like Kardashian famous in Portugal. And you're like, why would like Brad Pitt be on a Chinese website? You know, is kind of the flip side of that, you know, like, would he is that really the guy? And I'd be like, I don't know, they come from Portugal. I mean, I did basically have a video Skype with him maybe five years ago, like he was gonna be a guest on the podcast, or remember that. And I did have a video chat, where I saw an old man who looked like, the pictures of the guy look like so I think it's the real guy. But yeah, people have always asked me if it was a long con of some sort. Because it was like, like Ricardo would constantly say, like, like, do you guys have any idea how famous like his daughters are on the front page of the newspaper? If they get a new dress or something like his daughters are famous, like, it's a really weird thing. So yeah,

Jessamyn 47:13 my whole feeling is it doesn't totally matter. Yeah. I'm not calling him to bail me out of jail. He's entertaining me. That's fine. I mean, I wouldn't want everybody to be all kind of lousy grab bass. But once in a while, sure. Yeah. I never much thought.

Cortex 47:29 Carlos Quevedo, by the way, was Miguel's friend. Okay. That was a matter of maybe it was pin name. Kind of meta talk comment from 2002 on the subject. And remember just how long we've been hanging out on this.

mathowie 47:45 Wow. I have co workers that were in college, starting college and that year, it's really weird.

Jessamyn 47:56 Josh used to be my young coworker. Yeah,

Cortex 47:58 I used to be young. I used to have dreams of a future. Now I'm just running some rinky dink websites scrubbing for ad use

Jessamyn 48:12 I don't even know how old my coworkers are at the archive honestly. Like we have some new guys and developers Italian no idea he could be 18 He could be 100 Nate no idea

Cortex 48:24 oh yeah, I suppose I suppose you don't necessarily have a whole lot of face to face time with anyone's another Yeah, internet company basically.

Jessamyn 48:32 Yeah, no idea.

Cortex 48:34 What what is it? What is it? I'll tell you what it is. What is the face thing a boy does when he gets a new toy to democracy but with my invention he doesn't have to do that. The toy is already broken. I made that up in the other

Cortex 48:59 boy, when he gets a toy don't really have to do

mathowie 49:31 so meta Filter

Cortex 49:33 Filter. Yeah,

Jessamyn 49:34 I love meta filter

Cortex 49:36 medical. Matt how has how has How has your reading been?

mathowie 49:41 Not good? Busy. Yeah, yeah, I've been super busy. So it's probably only like two days a week. I like look at the front page. That was pretty interesting stuff. And that's it. You don't

Jessamyn 49:51 have it, like send stuff to your phone or anything?

mathowie 49:54 No, it just like 30 posts a day.

Jessamyn 49:58 Yeah, I should have Wherever how many posts there are a day that I could

mathowie 50:02 pipe. I could pipe the RSS to slack. Actually, I could read it in Slack. And

Jessamyn 50:08 there's some neat little neat little box that can do some pretty neat stuff.

mathowie 50:11 Well, I didn't know there's an RSS reader built into Slack. So subscribe to any RSS feed. So I could do that. But yeah, basically to every two or three days, sort of spend 15 minutes reading the front page.

Jessamyn 50:23 Well, in last month was mostly Women's March, right, which I thought was kind of dynamite. I mean, I didn't notice a ton except the predictable awesomeness that happens every time. Lots of new people post,

mathowie 50:38 how many posts in total for the month?

Cortex 50:40 Oh, it was something on the order of 300. I think last time I looked, it was in the high two hundreds, but the month was

mathowie 50:46 26 ahsay.

Cortex 50:50 Plus, I think a couple of deletions, just like you know, in that volume of posts, there's a couple things are looking good. Maybe not best for post or whatever. So technically, numbers probably like that solid 330

Jessamyn 51:00 Yeah, but I just, you know, it seemed to go really well. I made a couple posts, because I was like, you know, it's been a while since I've done anything. But yeah, I thought, you know, Metafilter was really good. Yeah, the goal was 100 Extra posts, and I feel like they totally killed it. Yeah, killed it.

Cortex 51:19 My my usual method for finding the posts I want to mention during the podcast, is to go through like Recent Activity filtered by sub site, and then sort of look for the stuff that I had commented in particular,

Jessamyn 51:31 you know, favorites. I just favorite stuff. That's my way of trying to

mathowie 51:36 see something Oh, hey, that's awesome. I can't wait to read that later.

Cortex 51:41 I'll maybe add it to my activity, or maybe everyone's favorite, something like that. But usually, I'll be like, Oh, well, I should remember to come back to that. And then I do or I don't. But you know, there's a lot of TV that's really good that I haven't watched it either. And it's not because I don't still think it would be fun to watch. It's because I got so much time in a day. And you know, I would rather I would rather talk on a podcast about the stuff that I actually like, took a good look at and the stuff that I thought, Oh, hey, maybe I'll want to take a look at at some point. And so it just sort of falls together. But anyway,

Jessamyn 52:07 and then I look at popular posts just to see if everybody has their heads up their ass Are they like good stuff?

mathowie 52:14 I just scan the front page and like the subjects jumped out at me. And then I usually Yeah, or if I found myself spending 10 minutes reading something I just go oh, I should go back and favorite that since I put effort.

Cortex 52:25 Yeah, and that's I think my biggest thing I could I could do that a little bit more with favoriting is just remembering to be like, Oh, I did dip my toe into this. I should I should make a mark on it. Even though don't have it. Somebody's gonna say right now, although we've got to add to activity as part of

Jessamyn 52:38 that. And the last All right, everybody else gets to that now too. Yeah,

Cortex 52:41 so that's been helping to I managed to at least throw stuff into recent activity. But I was just I was just gonna say I feel like I've left a few more notes than the average month and like moderation stuff. So like, my recent activity all this stuff at the top of it is like threads that there's no way I want to talk about in a blog as well. Yeah. And this was acrimonious. Now it was a really difficult

Jessamyn 53:00 fucking guy. I occasionally put notes in there too now like, just because I think lobstermen will read them and laugh just ask better filter, you know, same old like, Ah, this still weed.

mathowie 53:17 It's enjoyable. All my favorites are based only on the front page, because I didn't have time to read any of these.

Cortex 53:23 What do you got? What do you got? Man?

mathowie 53:25 Have you ever heard this holacracy stuff? This came up at work.

Jessamyn 53:30 I'm afraid to even ask until you explain it. It's so dumb

Cortex 53:35 for bad like,

mathowie 53:36 well, it's it's attempting to make like or like workplaces super fair. And this is the the guys the

Jessamyn 53:46 incident had a name before but then a man renamed it and wanted to catch on.

mathowie 53:51 Actually, I think it didn't exist. And then a bunch of programs I came

Cortex 53:54 up with a term for that phenomenon.

mathowie 53:58 A bunch of programming dudes, I think in the mid 2000s came up with some ridiculous like they're trying to make the workplace fair. It's so dumb it is so Lord of the Flies, conch shell, there's no managers. It's like trying to have a flat organization, yada yada yada. So famously, is science

Jessamyn 54:14 behind it or is it just this guy from Zappos thinks this is gonna

mathowie 54:18 Zappos guy loves it. And it's so when you so someone worked at medium at Slack, and they mentioned what it was like when you have a meeting, using all these rules, and it's like, it's like, nerds trying to outdo each other with how many rules there are.

Jessamyn 54:33 That's the plan. Yeah,

Cortex 54:34 yeah, they turned management philosophy.

mathowie 54:38 But they like the goal of it was to make like, you know, get rid of upper managers and people playing favorites and make everything more democratic. But in reality, it's just like loud nerd autocracy

Jessamyn 54:52 because it's the people who can follow all the rules and use them to piss on other people that was on top.

mathowie 54:59 Yes. Sadly, there are so many rules that it was really intimidating to you don't know when to say anything because you're gonna break a rule. Anyways, Zappos they famously were like, you know, hey, everyone's just gonna get on board with this or you're fired, which is also hilarious, because they tried to spin it as a good thing. Like, we're gonna give you a great severance package, but it's really fired. There's these long articles, they're just going like, this is mostly bullshit and lame and crazy. And people sit around, even the people are into it to sit around going like, they ask is that or is that not holacracy? Like, any sort of thing? Not a word. Right? It's this dumb. It's so funny. People can't even agree on what the like limits of it are the actual rules out it's really funny.

Cortex 55:45 Like, oh, like crazy. Am I right?

mathowie 55:49 Totally. Oh, cray cray. Yeah, it's,

Jessamyn 55:52 it's ridiculous thing. Now,

mathowie 55:54 if you read either of these articles, one in courts and one in recode. And they're both they're pretty, they're scoffing at the whole thing. It is. Sounds like such bullshit. I wish. I wish we knew someone that's lived through this, because it sounds terrible to me. A lot of people are in the thread are just basically mocking it and going like us is garbage. Like, this seems like bullshit is this bullshit. And people

Jessamyn 56:15 always have interesting ideas about management stuff is a lot of times those people who make those the people who are affected by those decisions wind up being the people who can actually talk about them, because they've got these sort of edge case jobs where they can be like, what was that thing about the lady who got fired? Because she mentioned? Oh, I don't remember, I'll have to go check. But basically, you never hear from the service and support workers because they're always worried about their jobs. So you only hear about like the Zappos people, when they're like, hey, my customer service job isn't actually as bad as most of them, and they get a good reputation. But then you don't actually talk to the people who are the ones who are affected when crazy management decisions make everybody crazy. You know, you can't talk to a Facebook moderator. You know, it's hard to talk to any moderators.

mathowie 57:07 And I guess they they did this in the first place is Zappos because they had such lacks policies that apparently people are getting mad inside. So they had like, no managers, and then everyone could set their own hours. So it turns out, nobody in support wanted to work on Saturday or Sunday. So basically, there was no support on the weekends. And then people were like, Hey, we're supposed to be a great support company. Someone should work the weekends. And everyone be like, Yeah, someone should. I'm not like, you're not my manager, I'm not the manager of you. Like,

Jessamyn 57:37 this was the problem, we used to have a better filter, right? We're all taking turns, because we're grownups.

mathowie 57:43 So like they so I think they went too far the other way, which is like, let's implement this super hardcore new rule set. So there's nothing up in the air. Someone in the eye remember some of the thread, I can't find them now or is like defending this. But I think this is just what Zappos is doing is at one extreme and the opposite extreme of just, you know, come in whenever you feel like it, man, you'll still get paid a lot is the other bad extreme. And they really need to go for a middle ground where humans want to live. But Zappos is cheaper,

Jessamyn 58:14 which is run by humans and not algorithms, right? I mean, that's the whole trick. You need a high touch thing sometimes to make those things fair, because the computer rules can't make it fair.

mathowie 58:25 Yeah. Like I understand what I'm not surprised to hear mediums doing it. I did not know they did that before last week. But

Jessamyn 58:33 I have my doubts about mediums management style, let me tell you,

mathowie 58:37 I was I was trying to, I was trying to I was like reading about this stuff. And like going, I think at the very core like Blogger never had more than like six people and it was kind of great. Like it really was flat, right? Like, whatever Paul Bausch thought, you know, it was held at the same levels, whatever thought at one time, and it was neat, it was really creative, because everyone had ideas. And then medium has probably like 50 people now or something. And that's probably harder to get that kind of feel. So they come up with this ginormous rule set to like, try and make it feel like everyone's equal. I get what they're trying to do is just seems like a horrible implementation.

Jessamyn 59:16 It's pretty fascinating feeling that they I mean, they haven't really figured out what the revenue model is. And so as a result, they're like, jerking things around anticipating different revenue models. But since they don't have one yet, I don't know. I mean, we get a lot of things that change all the time as someone who writes there and nominally works there. It's weird. I mean, I'm not coming for anyone, but it is it I am not surprised that the management thing is Herky jerky.

mathowie 59:42 I mean, I've heard people like it. GitHub is famously like one of the biggest two or 300 people and there's no managers and people are like it's kind of lord of the flies over there. Like the loudest person wins basically because there's no one there's no oversight. Also, God

Cortex 59:57 help you if your work lasses

Jessamyn 1:00:00 Yeah not the Twilight Zone, man.

Cortex 1:00:04 No, no no no the piggy. Piggy yeah the kid with the glasses. kid whose glasses get taken I didn't

Jessamyn 1:00:11 see your read it.

Cortex 1:00:12 Oh it's yeah it's you know it's a total prepubescent sauce sausage fest anyway, there's no good female characters. I like this bizarre character creator called very man dot experts that ghost bikes posted. That is hard to explain. But it makes weird

mathowie 1:00:37 angry kid be stuck on 0% What's happening right now

Cortex 1:00:41 it has to load. I don't know.

Jessamyn 1:00:43 I keep clicking it and nothing's happening.

mathowie 1:00:46 It has this URL. I'm a fan of stupid URLs of neat.

Cortex 1:00:50 Yeah, it's got a great URL.

mathowie 1:00:54 Making dance.

Jessamyn 1:00:55 I got a bunch of stuff in Chinese.

Cortex 1:00:58 Japanese is it? Yes, Japanese? Well, you can tell the second column you can tell the simpler characters are Katakana so you know it's Japanese.

Jessamyn 1:01:10 I got a man who's all covered a dick's Oh yeah.

mathowie 1:01:13 Wow,

Jessamyn 1:01:14 can I play Lady

Cortex 1:01:16 Gaga pink as far as I can tell there's just this one model but I'm hoping

Jessamyn 1:01:22 that you're nice way of saying no Yeah,

mathowie 1:01:26 I guess it kind of gross if it was like wrote an app of a woman I got the same guy when I reload well I hit hit go

Cortex 1:01:34 down to see where it says new friend in the bottom left just click on that and you'll get a fully randomized what

mathowie 1:01:39 was this is this is like a T Rex. It doesn't look like a dude yes well no, I

Jessamyn 1:01:45 got something that looks like it whoa,

mathowie 1:01:51 whoa.

Jessamyn 1:01:53 Are any of these female?

Cortex 1:01:55 No, I think they're all very man. We may have to wait on very woman dot expert.

Jessamyn 1:01:59 That's what they say. Yeah.

mathowie 1:02:02 Dinner be like creepy like it just poop size settings. That would be kind of weird. Well,

Cortex 1:02:07 there's the Adjust dick size setting on this one. Oh, is there general ability does take ability

Jessamyn 1:02:17 unreliability, just adjust the size of your deck that is awesome. But

Cortex 1:02:24 anyway, I It's bizarre I hope to go with with with it in further directions. But the as just a let's totally break the concept of a character creator thing. It's kind of fun. And I liked that they built into GIF functionality. So figure when you're like you can just automatically turn it into a GIF to go on there.

Jessamyn 1:02:40 That's cool. Yeah. That's very cool. Well, speaking of I enjoyed this fart and pooped posed by flex on my mother's birthday. It's all about interviewing college students about their habits and concerns about farting and pooping.

Cortex 1:02:58 How did I miss this?

Jessamyn 1:02:59 I don't know.

Cortex 1:03:00 You know, I probably saw let it go and just frozen post and I was like, ah, yeah, whatever.

Jessamyn 1:03:06 Well, and like everything else. It's funny because the thread is fun. I mean, flex links to a bunch of interesting articles. But also, it's just funny.

Cortex 1:03:18 People talking about farts and poop is definitely gonna be a good time.

Jessamyn 1:03:22 Nothing better.

Cortex 1:03:24 It's what I enjoy from the erudite and mature crowd that makes Metafilter go is their willingness to really dig in on a part and

mathowie 1:03:33 part of terrible, terrible act. Terrible lack of poo of smiling poo emoji.

Jessamyn 1:03:40 You know, it's not a real emoji crowd. I keep trying. We

mathowie 1:03:44 got it in browsers now we can use

Jessamyn 1:03:46 understand that.

mathowie 1:03:49 recently had a breakthrough. This is only a month old. I think our breakthrough. Like it just happened. But we can catch up.

Jessamyn 1:03:57 I know. No, I'm very excited. I am right there with you. People just need to stop right back all the emojis title OG in the mailing list for the local music hall subject line. You should everybody's got to get on board. That's how it's gonna go.

Cortex 1:04:10 You should try and figure out if there's some sort of string of emojis that if put on a postcard with your zip code would get to you.

Jessamyn 1:04:17 Wow. See, I gotta address to the lady in the lake.

mathowie 1:04:23 Oh, that's the Gmail joke. Right?

Jessamyn 1:04:25 That's the Gmail joke. The guys in the post office don't even know that joke.

Cortex 1:04:30 I think they may just know that you're the one person that that zip code who gets weirdly unaddressed postcards? Exactly.

mathowie 1:04:37 Totally. I'm gonna send in zip code. Jessamine zip code. That's all that's required now. Yeah. Yeah. Jasmine, zip five. Your LIKE, SHARE for Randolph Vermont. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:04:50 I mean, you couldn't do it. Jessamyn Vermont, I don't think but you know, somebody really sent Jessamyn my zip code USA and it got here from England. But I mean, it's a zip code is really the main thing. You know, I mean, you could probably just include my zip code. I think Jim has done this and not my name. If you do if you do the zip plus four, which is my post office box, then it's easy, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. But that's fun. You know, that zip code

mathowie 1:05:18 is probably like 8000 people tops.

Jessamyn 1:05:21 Five, five, I think. And one Jessamine, I'm literally the only adjustment is zip code.

mathowie 1:05:26 Yeah. That'd be totally easy. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:05:30 totally cool. But anyway, that is a fun, a fun thread that everyone should look at farts and poops.

Cortex 1:05:37 I really enjoyed this. This post from six years ago. I don't know how I ended up at this thing the other day, but animated Keyboard Cat

Jessamyn 1:05:49 by fiasco de Gama. Wow, that's really nice. Looking for off Keyboard

mathowie 1:05:53 Cat is really funny. Yeah.

Cortex 1:05:56 I liked it. Like the link worked. And the thing is awesome. And I don't even remember how I got there. But

Jessamyn 1:06:01 well, and that site is still current. There's a there's a foldy Doge and some other stuff.

Cortex 1:06:07 Yeah. So so with the discussion about link rot in meta talk, just in the last day or so, you know, it all comes full circle because not all not all links rock happily.

Jessamyn 1:06:19 A lot of them don't. Which means I have to mention the post. I wasn't necessarily going to mention but Jim and I had this thing looking at like If cats were on OKCupid and like you know how everybody's got their kind of funny dumb go to thing on the internet that makes you smile when you're having a really shitty day. Yeah, mine is these damn cats. I'm really good at sneezing on your mouth.

Cortex 1:06:47 If you want to see me lick my butthole

Jessamyn 1:06:50 I'm really good at nibbling

mathowie 1:06:53 photos.

Jessamyn 1:06:54 The first thing people usually notice about me my pepperoni

mathowie 1:06:59 today make this BuzzFeed for color. Funny Tumblr.

Jessamyn 1:07:06 I think it is funny Tumblr and some of these are old. At least I think so.

Cortex 1:07:11 Well, this whole meme has gotten a lot of lecture has gotten a lot of use too. So yeah, I'm sure a bunch of people have done variations on stuff.

mathowie 1:07:21 You should message me if I'm only into Blackcats I don't care if my mom says she doesn't know me. Black so good.

Cortex 1:07:31 I thought this was really interesting. I there's a post about Ronnie O'Sullivan by pale yellow with orange made this post. And Ronnie O'Sullivan is as the Post says a really good snicker player. And snicker is the harder version of pool that British officers invented while you know continually colonialist Indian the 19th century or some, you know, charming shit like that. But anyway, Ronnie O'Sullivan is a really amazing snooker player with the weird sort of bumpy life. And there's a bunch of really interesting videos in here in the thread, and also some people doing a good job of digging in on what the hell's going on. And snicker. What's going on with these weird, exceptional situations?

Jessamyn 1:08:17 And he's actually a young, slightly handsome. I mean, I don't know handsome, but like, he's not like, you're like he's not 82 years old with an extra nose or anything? Yeah,

Cortex 1:08:27 he's Yeah, he's like a 38 or 39 or something at this point. And he's been like this huge presence for like, going on 20 years now.

Jessamyn 1:08:35 Is that true since he was a kid? Yeah, yeah. No,

Cortex 1:08:37 he started playing as a kid. He was a he was a prodigy of a child. I think he won his first actual tournament when he was like, 16. And he'd been cleaning up in bars before them.

mathowie 1:08:48 Sponsors on his best, and that's amazing. Yeah, it looks like NASCAR. But like, so

Jessamyn 1:08:53 he's had like a huge run. Like he's had a run for forever as well.

Cortex 1:08:57 Yeah. When it's been up and down, he had he had a really solid several years. He's had some really off years. He's quit the game a couple times. But every time he's like, oh, yeah, I'm really good at playing snooker. And also, I've been playing snooker my whole life. I guess I should probably keep playing snooker. But yeah, so there's a the main link is

mathowie 1:09:18 video at the New Yorker. Article.

Cortex 1:09:21 There's an article to

mathowie 1:09:22 or video.

Cortex 1:09:25 Link to the article inside. Yeah, like,

Unknown Speaker 1:09:29 younger than me. Yeah, no, it's

Cortex 1:09:31 he's not much older than me.

mathowie 1:09:36 No, The New Yorker even did video. That's yeah,

Cortex 1:09:39 no, it's great. The videos. The video is really nice. It's like it's just a commentary from a guy who's, you know, up to speed on snooker and O'Sullivan talking over a recording of a really great run at the table where O'Sullivan broke. I think a world record for the fastest Maxim on break, it's called when you get as many points as you can get

Jessamyn 1:10:04 at the Wikipedia article has almost 400 footnotes.

Cortex 1:10:07 Jesus, I can

mathowie 1:10:08 barely tell what's going on

Cortex 1:10:10 because well, yeah, no. And that's the thing like, like, watch the video and then read the thread and find some of the comments where people start explaining what's going on. And it because I had no,

Jessamyn 1:10:19 which is why it's so good did have a metal filter.

Cortex 1:10:22 Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's a really neat thread. And it's a bunch of great stuff. People point out some other interesting videos. Yeah, no, it's really cool.

mathowie 1:10:30 Just remember the, I guess, British people trying to describe American baseball like it's cricket? Like, why? What is going on? Um, speaking of sports. The there's only one essay you read about? Pro Wrestling, you should read the one in this thread by Ms. Kaz, which was great. It was amazing. And it's about the importance of representation in modern wrestling. And there's this gem that's quoted there it was, if you don't use positive representation, to speak to new fans who look different, who act different, and who have new ideas, you'll never have any new fans at all, which applies to pretty much every everything and every sort of line of work, like, you know, don't make, you know, just your Arab wrestlers, the crazy iron sheiks that are supposed to be the evil enemy, because, you know, they're never going to be fans of the sport and like, like it's it's really fascinating as about how women are in and out of the WWE. Now they're kind of terrible to them. And I think they've launched their own sort of competing network. I'm not a pro wrestling guy, but it was really,

Jessamyn 1:11:41 there's the Luka underground, which is all sorts of different folks. And people love it, because it's all sorts of different folks. I'm just sort of reading ahead here, it looks really interesting.

mathowie 1:11:53 And there's some yeah, there's some sort of like all the women are fleeing from the WWE to this other thing that they own and run and it's working out for them. And it's just this whole thing about, like, the future of pro wrestling is inclusivity. Even though you gotta have bad guys, you shouldn't make all the bad guys, you know, brown people and stuff like that, because it's terrible. And, like, it's really good. So

Jessamyn 1:12:14 you never should have done that in the first place. And Now's the chance and you could change it. I mean, that's the thing about wrestling, right? It's all made up, sort of, I mean, it's all drama stories. So there's no reason you can't flip the traditional script immediately. You know, you don't have to have some kind of weird racist. Well, that's the way it's always been. And you're like, nope, tomorrow, we're never gonna have you know, we're never gonna have the brown people be the evil people again, forever. Yeah, something you can just decide.

Cortex 1:12:42 Yeah, something it's so built around sort of, like, you know, bite sized narrative spectacle, you know, it's such a good fit for that, because it's not like your two seasons into a long form TV show where you already have a really established cast who, you know, you can't do something weird and son surprising with them. Because that would fuck with. It's like, it's wrestling. It's all about doing weird and surprising things. Any narrative trick turns and so on. Yeah. So there's

mathowie 1:13:06 some weird stories about, like, there's some I think it's in Central America, or somewhere, there's sort of like this gender bending stuff, or like a dude dresses. Like in women's clothes, but it's not a joke. And he's not weak. He actually wins most battles. But he still identifies as a dude dressed in a dress, but he's actually a hero. And they're just going like, that's, that's an interesting,

Jessamyn 1:13:30 that's like, a model. It's surprised. There aren't more people who do that.

mathowie 1:13:35 And it's like all this, you know, machismo around wrestling, but like, everyone loves this guy in a dress, who's not making fun of it at all. It's

Jessamyn 1:13:44 because if you're gonna wear like, a chic costume or something else, like, if you're gonna dress up like a spaceman, or like a guy from the jungle, why not dress like a woman, you know, it gives yourself a lot more options. And you can reclaim that and it's better for everyone, I think. Yeah, no, that was interesting. I read that part of that article as well.

Cortex 1:14:03 Yeah, there's a certain absurdity to the idea of like, you know, wanting to say, what are you doing, man? You can't, you can't wear a dress. That's totally what do you thinking? Now? Go put on your mascara.

Jessamyn 1:14:14 Right? Right. Right. They're all wearing makeup. Well, like people said, that's why the rock was really good at Saturday live because all of what he was doing, you know, Dwayne Johnson. He's good at like short form, Goofy, improv, you know, and reacting to the people around you. And so as a result, he was okay on SNL, whereas other people who are arguably better actors are not as good at the

Cortex 1:14:37 Yeah, they may be more directed in that sort of a process rather than Yeah, exactly. What sort of improv sort of feel.

Jessamyn 1:14:44 Yeah. The only other thing that I saw that I loved was this month, and it was mostly awesome. I mean, one because Horace Rumpole posted it and he's awesome. But it was talking about Sears releasing their first and last LaserDisc based catalog in 1981. That's interesting enough something from Gizmodo, but the best part about it is the second link in that post actually links to a crazy long, interesting comment by pasta bagel in 2007 talking about how Sears was on the cusp of being the mail order company, and then they shuttered their moral mail order business right before Amazon giant.

Cortex 1:15:26 Yeah, remember that common and I had seen that go and run it and realize it was triggered by recent posts. I totally have not seen

Jessamyn 1:15:32 Yeah, so I'm sure a lot more people favorited it and a whole bunch of stuff. So the laser disc thing? Yes. Interesting. Haha, funny in and of itself. But then, you know, getting to read pasta bagels common again was also really great.

mathowie 1:15:44 God Sears could have dominated everything.

Jessamyn 1:15:46 Well, they had CompuServe. I mean, what didn't they have?

mathowie 1:15:50 Companies? They had everything. Sure. They owned everything end to end. It's crazy. Yeah, dude, a laser disconnect at one. Were there even laser discs around? I always think of laser discs as kind of a mid to late 80s.

Cortex 1:16:07 I didn't play around on man.

mathowie 1:16:09 Right. But that was super new. I don't know. I thought it

Jessamyn 1:16:14 wasn't. Yeah, I didn't see him until late 80s. But I mean, we didn't push button telephones until the late 80s. So that's

mathowie 1:16:20 when they hit the sale rack.

Cortex 1:16:21 Maybe in the later Yes. Because I think of them as early 80s As someone who never like had or used one at all, but I for some reason, I associate them with the early 80s. And by the late 80s, they were already failing to achieve what they wanted to.

mathowie 1:16:36 I always think of them as post videotape. Like, like you had the VHS versus Betamax wars. But then the other the super nerds came out with laser discs as like, you know, this is even better. Because I had a neighbor who had Betamax and would just constantly talk to me about Sonic fidelity. You know, yes, I can't tape as long as you but I've so much better sound like I cannot believe people aren't flocking to this. Because really funny. It was just a slow burn to watch. us so good. Did you see Josh this one about why an electric guitar sounds like an electric.

Jessamyn 1:17:16 Josh? Because Josh is because he plays

mathowie 1:17:18 guitar because I play ukulele. That's true. Well, this is this basically like a long form piece on like how electric guitars became things. And then there's a whole bunch of stories of amps being dropped and vacuum tubes getting sort of broken or Yeah. And people like getting weird effects. And then, like in the 60s, there's like no electronics race, I guess in the 50s. They're just they're tweaking like purposely destroying amps trying to get new sounds. But then the 60s or 70s, they're like digitally recreate the sounds because they liked them so much. So sure. Like you had one amp that made a sound and then you know, 1000s of people want it and there's kind of this arms race and Led Zeppelin was part of it, where they're really secretive about what weird mash pedals they're using, and how they'd fuck up their own pedals. And it's, it's really fun. It's It's amazing story of like, basically 40s 50s and 60s of electric guitar and how it became to dominate the industry of music. Yeah, no,

Cortex 1:18:19 I've got that on my list of stuff to read, but I had not, because I looked at it like, oh, this long, I gotta have time. It's funny.

Jessamyn 1:18:25 I'll read it. It sounds really interesting.

mathowie 1:18:28 I saw the title and I just went, Oh, I've got my 10 minutes a goof off time. I'm gonna stop read that filter. I'm just gonna read this one essay in the Atlantic and it's really good. It was really good.

Cortex 1:18:39 And it's funny, because these days, like all of those effects. There's a huge, you know, analog effect stimulation scene where, you know, there's a ton of plugins that people have written and people are making pedals again, Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, sleepy peep. You know, Hiram Renard, doing that now, like, he's making pedals and hey, if you're thinking, hey, I need a new guitar pedal. He's, he's got some, but ya know, it's yeah, it's turned into a whole resurging scene where like both there's all this giant world of digital simulators and emulators in plug in form, and then people are manufacturing actual little metal boxes. Sort of in a resurgence, I think as well. I know, I don't like three different people in town actually. Who just literally that's what they do is make effects pedals, which is kind of Yeah,

mathowie 1:19:33 yeah. kits or something. Now something.

Cortex 1:19:37 I'm sure that I'm sure there are too. Yeah. And it's it's you know, it's something where if you're into music, and you want to learn a little bit about like, just well, like not welding but soldering or in electrical engineering, you could make your own really basic effects pedals. At home. It's like, you know, it's not a bad solder kit sort of thing.

mathowie 1:19:54 So you should read this article though. It's because it's about like how we came up with these accidental sounds and now we

Cortex 1:20:00 And I shouldn't you know, because I know I know little bits of the history of the development of that stuff, but not anything more than just like tiny little glancing notes. So, ya know, I do want to sit down and actually get through that sometime can remind

mathowie 1:20:13 me of early, early web design where there was, I think, two camps, one campus from academia was like, Hey, check this out, look what I can do. I figured out CSS, everyone should know how to do this one crazy trick. And then there's another world, which was like, Hey, we figured something out. I never ever want to tell anyone about it. We're the only people

Jessamyn 1:20:34 to use that hack on all my websites. And it'll be glad. Yeah, I'm glad

mathowie 1:20:39 that like GitHub, World of open source has kind of pushed people to like, share their code more. Yeah. Did I tell you? Go ahead.

Jessamyn 1:20:48 Today, I'm teaching an HTML and CSS class at a college next year. Really? Yeah. That was like, one of my local library and friends had a baby. And so she's not going to teach it anymore. And so she put my name in, and they're like, can you teach HTML and CSS? I'm like, sure. But why are 10 hooked up

mathowie 1:21:06 to the go these days? Do you have to go

Jessamyn 1:21:08 even knows I can decide I think,

mathowie 1:21:12 Yeah, cuz like, we're using

Jessamyn 1:21:13 Notepad. I don't even think the kids have server space. Notepad plus, plus.

mathowie 1:21:19 So you could teach him Get Hub and GitHub Pages for free hosting,

Jessamyn 1:21:23 is I think, what I'm gonna do, I mean, what an opportunity, right? Like, here's your free web page, kids, you can share one.

mathowie 1:21:30 And everyone can look at everyone's code and stuff. But yeah, everything is like toolkits and frameworks, and I hate less than Sass, all these like abstractions to CSS, everything's getting kind of crazy complicated.

Jessamyn 1:21:43 Yeah, and I don't know any of that stuff. I mean, GitHub is about the the range of what I know. So I'm gonna have to, you know, woodshed a little bit over the summer. But

mathowie 1:21:52 yeah, I think it's good to teach people basic HTML basically to because they're just going to use Bootstrap and jQuery and not understand the underlying

Jessamyn 1:22:01 learning how code works generally. And, you know, I think learning how like, you know, a browser interprets HTML really helps you understand code in general. Not that I understand code in general entirely, but I conceptually I do.

Cortex 1:22:16 Yeah, I, I really enjoyed as I always do, whenever there's a post about something made by Neil Sisir raiga. Something made by Niels, it's your ageia

Jessamyn 1:22:28 that fucking guy.

Cortex 1:22:30 I love him. Everything he does is gold. It's just I don't know. I've talked before about mouth sounds and then mouth silence is to sort of Smash Mouth adjacent mashup albums, and he's made a bunch of one off videos and stuff, and he just made Bustan, which is

Jessamyn 1:22:47 we're watching it. What am I looking at?

Cortex 1:22:50 It's an aggressive remix of the Ray Parker, Jr, Ghostbusters song

Jessamyn 1:22:55 where all the words are bustin.

Cortex 1:22:57 Well, not all of them, but it comes up a little more often the he recounts the art of lyrics and it's it's really fantastic. It's just, it's him doing what he does, and I love it. And it's if you can forget that it's ridiculous. It's also just kind of a great weird little remix. I mean, it's, it's funny, like Smash, mouth sounds and mouth sounds are goofy as shit. Like, they're sort of like, take girl talk and then get weird and intentionally, you know, self defeating in a way and like, you know, silly as hell. But it's also they're really listener able to like I I will just put those on and listen to them. And even though yes, he's juxtaposing Atlantis Morissette and the full House theme it still works and so yeah, this this song is like a legitimately solid little single

mathowie 1:23:45 even what's the credit card when he does think oh, yeah,

Cortex 1:23:49 that's that's that's awesome.

mathowie 1:23:51 So it's just a loop of what one phrase from the song and it's so listenable and hilarious that's our stats phenol

Cortex 1:23:59 that's a track off of mouth silence where yeah keeps looping don't need no credit card to ride this train.

mathowie 1:24:03 No credit card don't need no credit card like it just goes for five minutes and it's awesome.

Cortex 1:24:09 Me and PB have been doing a slow back and forth months long on Facebook at this point I think where we check in with each other about whether or not one needs a credit card on this train. Yeah, so bustin lessons amazing. That's

Jessamyn 1:24:27 good. What do people talk about in the thread like that?

Cortex 1:24:31 I think they just talked about things that are funny.

mathowie 1:24:34 Every other awesome video made by that person?

Cortex 1:24:38 Yeah, stuff Neil's done weird stuff about Ray Parker Jr. The original video being creepy, you know? It's a it's a tapestry.

Jessamyn 1:24:45 What's the joke? That's a joke. Ghost sacks filled it with ghosts. Love it. All right. How about AskMe Metafilter you fellows?

Cortex 1:24:57 Oh yeah, I'm gonna miss mentioned in passing just have mentioned that the the thread about the dress because it got 951 comments.

Jessamyn 1:25:05 Wait, there was a thread about Oh, you mean that a talk or I don't know there's a thread

Cortex 1:25:09 on the blue like,

mathowie 1:25:10 toasted that what asshole would have done that?

Cortex 1:25:12 I don't know some dickhole we may have talked last podcast because

Jessamyn 1:25:20 we've had this conversation because I was away. So I missed. I missed it. I missed everybody talking about the dress. I missed. I you know, I I didn't understand the April Fool's joke until somebody explained it to me. Like okay, I'm just your slow friend.

Cortex 1:25:38 I just wanted to it's one of the milestone it so just make sure you know that we got the mile marker there. But yeah, that's right. We did talk about last time. So enough, came up on April 1, it did because we changed had the color scheme. Right? Or they thought it was legit. It was kinda like,

Jessamyn 1:25:55 I like how you set up PB to get all the immediate you know, as what is it call when you send somebody on the front to get shot?

Cortex 1:26:04 Throw it in front of the bus, but ya know, there's there's,

Jessamyn 1:26:08 you know what I mean? There's a special guy like somebody who's on point and then they wind up getting practiced. Yeah,

Cortex 1:26:15 the cannon fodder. Cannon fodder. Maybe that's it? Yeah. No, actually, that was that was PBS Idea. He was like, yeah, no, we'll do it real straight face. And I'll do it as a as a feature announcement. Which was perfect.

Jessamyn 1:26:28 He has sleeper sense of humor. Like he has the best sense of humor, but it's kind of sometimes hard to tell, you know, he's not on the podcast enough, like busting it up like we are. So you're never sure. But he really has a sense of humor. So he's, he's the perfect straight man for this kind of thing.

Cortex 1:26:46 He is he's a very funny guy. There is a moment where we'll get a chance to see that. He's gonna start a long form improv show so people can finally see the real PB.

mathowie 1:26:57 The funny part is that there's a moment where it's like gray on gray on gray and you can't read anything. That's what I saw on Twitter. People thought hurl, it'd be like, here's a click Turn it

Cortex 1:27:07 off. How am I supposed to read it for these two seconds?

Jessamyn 1:27:12 Right. The only thing that is constant is change.

mathowie 1:27:15 Seems like nothing happens. And then everything happens all at once. But yeah, it's good. It's good. Well done.

Jessamyn 1:27:21 Loved it. And it was a surprise. Yes. Was it a surprise to you met him

mathowie 1:27:29 on Slack the night before once every three days? Four or five days I checked slack you know, it's all metadata was unread. And I just went there like showing mockups. I went You spoiled it for me the night before? Oh, well. Wow. Joke.

Jessamyn 1:27:45 It was a surprise to me.

Jessamyn 1:28:27 So as Metafilter was full of awesome stuff, including this recent one, which if you guys missed it, you will love it. And I don't mean to make fun of agent rocket. Except that this is really funny. My kid has a friend named CJ. What is that song where they're singing C J. I presume it's called CJ or

Cortex 1:28:52 Oh sweet. Oh, sweet.

Jessamyn 1:28:59 I knew Josh that it would make you laugh like that.

Cortex 1:29:02 Oh man.

mathowie 1:29:03 answered in 10 minutes. Yeah, no, I

Cortex 1:29:06 love it. The immediate response is damn it. Damn it. Damn. I wonder Yeah, I wonder which version of was like I guess if it's 70s then it probably was the Velvet Underground.

Jessamyn 1:29:22 Yeah, me Cowboy Junkies do a version of it. Yeah,

Cortex 1:29:25 we'll try that there's I know what from them.

Jessamyn 1:29:28 They're mumbler Yeah.

Cortex 1:29:32 What did Massey star also cover to or did I just hear you do sweet Jane and and what was that big? What was Mazzy stars big.

Jessamyn 1:29:44 Oh, God, I know what you Yeah.

Cortex 1:29:47 Anyway, I'd maybe I'm just I think I've always had those two a little bit mixed up because of that. But no, this is fantastic. I feel like I need to impose ask questions I haven't thought through enough because I barely use AskMe Metafilter Because I always do the well what would I ask? If I was going to ask us metal filter? What should I search for? What do I think people would say? Where would they tell me Look, and then I end up just like doing all the groundwork and not actually posting a question, but

Jessamyn 1:30:10 Right, or you find the answer, or hey, somebody asked that four days ago. Great, I guess. But I just thought this was durable. And hopefully, it has, it's fantastic. Yeah, cuz the one of the tags is my kid has a friend named CJ.

Jessamyn 1:30:30 So I think you're just trying to like do is get a solid? And then yeah.

mathowie 1:30:35 does sound like it? Was there every closure to this the loss deposit box one? And Mark doesn't

Jessamyn 1:30:42 mean the guys answered. I mean, yeah, basically, at the if you go to the end of it, they did find the safe deposit box, some of the shit is missing from it. They just put it in the wrong place.

mathowie 1:30:56 That this is nuts. So I marked as a favorite the day it happened to the like, this is intriguing. I've never heard of any. So the story is, someone goes to get a safe deposit box, and it's not fucking there. And then they're like, What do we do? Do we go after the bank? Do we call the police? Like, what happened here? Like there's a locked door? There's only two keys, you know, there's no way anyone you know that, as part of my family opened it. Like,

Jessamyn 1:31:25 what guys? Like, are you sure it's not asset forfeiture by Rob our IRA.

mathowie 1:31:30 So it was in the wrong slider. But then how could there be anything missing? If there's no keys to it? Except for the owner's keys? Well,

Jessamyn 1:31:38 because do you know how a safe deposit box works? I mean, I don't I don't mean to like be, you know,

mathowie 1:31:44 no, no, I don't dowel gal.

Cortex 1:31:45 So let's, let's learn about

Jessamyn 1:31:49 teas Shut up, I put my will in it. And you like, here's the thing, I have a safe deposit box and my sister and I share it. And so we put like our will and like our special passwords in it. So if anything happens to one of us, the other person can access the safe deposit box where you would otherwise never go. But like you unlock a thing, a door. And then there's a drawer that's behind it. The so the door has the double locks, but the drawer doesn't have any locks at all. So theoretically, it's like a post office mailbox situation where the whole front could come off. And the drawers themselves aren't locked at all. So if you had to move the whole thing, for instance, like we're putting

mathowie 1:32:31 in kind of a key and you have a key or a key

Jessamyn 1:32:35 and you have a key, but it's only a front to a drawer that isn't itself locked. It's the illusion of of privacy and security, but it's not really secure,

mathowie 1:32:45 can ever open the door in front of it without too or No,

Jessamyn 1:32:49 I assume they could take the whole thing off. You know what I mean? Like like it like a like a post office box, you know how you have to have the special code to your post office box. But the mailman could just reach in the back.

mathowie 1:33:03 I've only seen him in movies, I've no idea how they work.

Jessamyn 1:33:07 They're not that secure, really. But but the whole deal is they're private, and they encourage you to put shit in it. But apparently, and this was what I found out through the thread. You know, the branch moved shit around. I mean, because banks keep getting bought by other banks and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And

mathowie 1:33:29 if you actually opened it, you can get inside it because there's no lock on the outside of it. The box itself isn't

Jessamyn 1:33:35 locked. It's like a plastic box with a plastic lid that slides into a locked compartment. But I think you could probably have the whole front off and move shit around if you're the bank.

mathowie 1:33:48 I thought since it's been around forever. It's kind of like a movie trope. I just thought the whole like security of it was locked down 100 years ago.

Jessamyn 1:33:57 Used to be and now they're chancing out and they wind up with these plastic things that it's I mean, I'd like to know more. That's just my best guess at how this works. But like, you know, this guy got some jewelry stolen out of his mom's safe deposit box, the bank maybe? I mean, it's just the internet, I'm assuming what's actually happened?

mathowie 1:34:17 Yeah, when I read it and marked as a favorite. It was kind of like, we opened the door and there's nothing there. What and I was like, that's never happens in the movies. That's not great. That's amazing. And it

Jessamyn 1:34:29 is unusual and that they're not deposit boxes aren't expensive. They're just not useful for most people for most reasons. You know, I mean, my post office, safe deposit box cost about the same amount

mathowie 1:34:40 as it just like 10 bucks a month or something like even less

Jessamyn 1:34:43 than that. I think I pay 70 A year or something like that. Maybe 50 Pen my sister and I each have a key so if I dropped dead, she could get my things you know,

mathowie 1:34:53 in the movies, they have this complicated setup with rooms inside of room.

Jessamyn 1:34:57 Well there's a private room. So see theoretically, you could go in there and mess around and you know, get your secret passport and your secret fucking money and the bank doesn't know what's in there. But if you have somebody who's dishonest at the bank, apparently, they can mess around this Donna's

mathowie 1:35:14 bank shouldn't, this shouldn't be possible. But it's fascinating.

Jessamyn 1:35:18 Well, back in the day when like, if you had stocks, that you had pieces of damn paper, you know, and you had to keep those safe, that was your job. And if you lost the stock, you basically didn't have it anymore. Whereas nowadays, that stuff's all electronic. So the role of the safe deposit box and the bank for keeping your stuff safe was different than it is today.

mathowie 1:35:40 A lot of people have home safe. So I wonder Yeah, should home safe or safe deposit box? I'd rather not be in my house which can burn down.

Jessamyn 1:35:49 I mean, the bank had burned down to theoretically, yeah,

mathowie 1:35:52 they seem to do better at not having fires than

Cortex 1:35:55 you have burned down a lot of houses. That's true. I thought this question was interesting, even though there was never any real, like definitive answer, but Jessamyn actually produced some useful stuff. The question about why does a search for empty pair of parentheses return zero results?

Jessamyn 1:36:16 Oh, yeah, that was really interesting by user one in a billion mistake who I was not really aware of before that, yeah.

mathowie 1:36:25 Why shouldn't it be a zillion programming results? Well, because the way you

Jessamyn 1:36:30 made some choices. Basically, most search engines drop all the punctuation out of everything to just solve problems for you. But realistically, then programmers want to search for stuff and so Google adds stuff in later for like operators and then they ignore most punctuation so you have a couple people mentioning stuff, but we don't really know

mathowie 1:36:52 oh my god they were searching for it. Was it Segur Rios the like Icelandic band. That's super weird. That album was called bracket bracket like like parentheses parentheses.

Jessamyn 1:37:04 Well, that used to be the thing you used to not be able to search for the and Google

mathowie 1:37:09 That's awesome. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:37:12 No, I enjoyed that. I there was a couple there was a lot of stuff that I really liked. Um, probably my favorite goofy one was things are melting. This is bad. Funny story. I didn't get a freezer and now I've got a whole lot of frozen mice a couple months worth and no way to keep them frozen. How do I buy a freezer? A night? User because when unfortunately, it wraps up I mean, you know, people gave him some good advice, but it wraps up like oh, it turned out my roommate left some disgusting shit in the freezer and I took them out and put the mice in so we're all good. But like Catherine T was like, hey, the Costco and Woodinville has 17 chest freezers in stock right now. Like people gave them a lot of really good advice, but I just didn't know Christmas dinner format snake story.

mathowie 1:38:09 I liked this one by a DW turns out to be Dylan Willowbank the person I follow on Twitter. You know Dylan, and he just posted on Twitter the other day like, Hey, I'm going to Spain. I asked enhancement filter I asked on I don't know Rick Steves forum. And everyone Rick Steves told me I was a dick and I was an idiot and Italy and all these things I was wrong about he said AskMe edit filters super knowledgeable, helpful people who are like me said some tweets and something like hazmat filters humans in it. Rick Steves even though he's a nice guy, His form is filled with jerks like like trolley.

Jessamyn 1:38:50 It's like the foodie forum, right? It's like, it's like going on chowhound to try and figure out a good place to take your six year old is not always going to be the good way to do it. Instead, he gets back up into who's like, oh, by the way, I'm Portuguese, you know, bam, or lives in Portugal or whatever. Like, here we go, blah. And like that's who you want to answer your question. Perfect.

mathowie 1:39:12 And it was a kind of complicated question where it's like, we're gonna hit these major cities, we can get a car, you know, what's a couple hours drive? It's really worth it. And then, you know, I guess Rick's de swarm was like, here's the thing, 14 hours away,

Jessamyn 1:39:24 and we want to see Peninsular War battle sites. Don't forget that.

mathowie 1:39:28 These are all Yeah. And people come up with this itinerary. That was awesome. And like, these are these things are closer and you think this thing's awesome. You should see this. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:39:36 Like, you know, he's like a user from a million years ago. I mean, that's awesome. That that? Yeah. AskMe Metafilter. Totally.

mathowie 1:39:45 I was surprised Rick Steves would attract an angry lot. He's like the most harmless Average Dude I've ever seen.

Jessamyn 1:39:54 Just that the forum. I mean, you know, people coalesce around different kinds of places in forum I wouldn't be surprised if they'd be like, Oh, well, you have to go to blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, they're people who are opinionated about travel.

mathowie 1:40:07 Yeah. Yeah, that's true. So opinionated, they joined a group to argue about,

Jessamyn 1:40:13 like, I like arguing with Josh about how to say the word GIF. Exactly. Every time

Cortex 1:40:20 I've said it before, I still don't even know what I think is the right way to say it. I don't know.

Jessamyn 1:40:24 Why don't you say the way and stop annoying me?

Cortex 1:40:26 I can't even remember what you're what? I'm so bored. I'm deaf. But the pronunciation of that word is a non orientable surface at this point. It's like it's a klein bottle word I don't even remember which side of it I was on. I

mathowie 1:40:39 said it wrong twice today. Scoring which I just said like the peanut butter which it's not will say

Cortex 1:40:52 completely reasonable pronunciation but sodas gift so yeah,

Jessamyn 1:40:55 this is why can't help DW get to help you get

Cortex 1:41:03 mad keep saying get hub. So I feel I feel like I feel like

mathowie 1:41:10 what am I supposed to say it

Cortex 1:41:11 gets it spelled.

mathowie 1:41:14 You say go? Oh, whatever.

Cortex 1:41:15 Say you get hub every single time like Oh, I better

Jessamyn 1:41:18 get that code and anything that annoys people?

Cortex 1:41:22 No, you're perfect.

mathowie 1:41:24 You say like it's get just half a second shorter.

Cortex 1:41:30 It's not good. It's good. It's like It's like y'all. Now it's you know, it's it's a Cowboys word you could possibly

Jessamyn 1:41:37 like giraffe. Yeah. Josh can't hear it. Either way. It's like ELLs and ours. He can't tell the difference.

Cortex 1:41:47 It's all just one big valley smear to me. I was born without vowel receptors. Any other big asked me it's

Jessamyn 1:41:56 sure what happens if you're arrested and left the oven on?

mathowie 1:42:00 Oh, what?

Jessamyn 1:42:02 So just hypothetically, you're walking down the street buying milk and you get arrested. But you baby you left the oven on what happens? And this like splits asked metal filter like a big meat cleaver down the middle. Half of them is like, well, they'll probably let you go home and deal Oh, kids, whatever. And the other half are like, Are you kidding? You're lucky if bla bla bla bla bla and I think Kessler had actually gotten arrested and talked about that somebody there's we have a guy blue sock, who's actually I believe a cop who occasionally comments and asked me to filter in sort of useful if you want to know what a cops thinks about things ways. And you know, I think it's a dude actually. Maybe

mathowie 1:42:45 Oh, Canadian cop. Super scary cop. But hey, it's gonna apologize a lot and be very

Jessamyn 1:42:57 Yeah, but I mean, it's an interesting thread. Because you know, different people have different experiences. There's not a whole bunch of like, because they're cops fuck them, bla bla bla bla bla. But, you know, talking about like, one of the things that happens when you're on the sort of acid of police enforcement is cops can really decide if they're gonna give you time to get your shit together or not. You know, and this is why sort of casual racism and stuff like that can be such a problem. Because, you know, people the cop maybe doesn't like for whatever random reason may not be able to deal with childcare, whereas people the cops getting along with may be able to, you can't put a finger on it. It's just up to the discretion of the officer. Yeah, so it was kind of interesting thread about getting arrested.

mathowie 1:43:40 There's a thread on like, what are some good these are like these evergreen, awesome topics. What are some good TED Talks? But the funny part is 200 and something people marked as a favorite and only 30 comments, which is there

Jessamyn 1:43:53 aren't any good TED Talks.

mathowie 1:43:56 Oh, these of these 30 Like I've seen a lot of these and I don't watch them a lot. So it's pretty good. Like the paper towel guy in Portland has

Jessamyn 1:44:05 come up the paper towel guy.

mathowie 1:44:08 Use one paper towel, shake your hands a lot and you won't waste paper is basically the shake

Jessamyn 1:44:14 your hands a lot. Oh, shake the water off. You shake

mathowie 1:44:18 your hands. Right when you're washing your hands in a public restroom. Don't grab three towels. Grab one towel, I'll shake your hand 12 times first. Then grab one towel and that's all you'll ever need. Like these people don't own

Cortex 1:44:31 jeans or wash their hands all the time. That's why your thighs are there. You have thighs to keep your jeans in place while you drag your hands out.

mathowie 1:44:41 And they show like old there's old Reggie Watts one that's fun. There's an old saying like hands

Jessamyn 1:44:46 good. Like Temple Grandin. I enjoy Jill Bolte Taylor I'm familiar with all right. All right. All right. That's good ones not as terrible as usual.

mathowie 1:44:55 Anything else are we done to almost

Jessamyn 1:44:58 Alright, hang on. minor quick how do I pull over when there's an ambulance behind me lots of good people, including several ambulance drivers talking about it. And the usual twitchy nerds yelling at other people because like, you know, life and death situations blah. Yeah. And my favorite, and this was the one I wanted to just bring up to you, Josh. How do I, a non scientist recognize quackery in science and technology. So fascinating thread of how you can sort of figure it out. And my favorite thing, let me see if I can, is 10 signs a claimed mathematical breakthrough is wrong. Just which is just a fantastic post, basically talking about stuff like anyone who's not using tech, like anyone who's not using whatever that's called, you know, the thing you do to write your paper, like 60% of wrong mathematical breakthroughs can be captured because people aren't using tech as an editor. And then they list like the three guys that doesn't count for Yeah, unless your love Grover, in which case, blah, but the thread is just really nice. It talks about how you can kind of recognize bad science, Michelle in California got a best answer. And just it's interesting listening to people talk about it, because it's not like rah, rah antivaxxers, making me want to kill people. It's just how do I learn to assess those things? If I don't understand all the science?

Cortex 1:46:22 Yeah, give me some give me some rules of thumb for protein, the whole critical analysis angle when I don't have a lot of background.

Jessamyn 1:46:30 Yeah. And I thought it was great by Beethoven's Fifth which is a really nice username. That's actually, that's actually it, I think, for me, for AskMe Metafilter. Alright, so Josh, we're gonna edit this. Talk about,

Cortex 1:46:50 I'll cut off the first few minutes before we started recording and then I will probably not edit any significant content. Because I don't feel like we always get the whole thing. I might try a little gating. We'll see what happens and see what your audio files sound like. But otherwise, I feel like we had a we didn't stop for any 15 minute rant about users that we need to delete or anything so I didn't

Jessamyn 1:47:13 get a phone because nobody has to. There's your problem. delete them if you want. Yep. I didn't get a phone call. Nobody's at my door. Yeah. I like this evening. Podcasting. I think we'll need to do this more often. Yeah, it

Cortex 1:47:27 feels like it feels in the days a little bit more settled in. It's not like, you know, 10 o'clock in the morning. I'm like, Yeah, I've had some coffee and I need to pee. You don't drink coffee? Do you? Did I drink coffee now and then mostly drink tea in the morning. But sometimes I'll go out and get a cup of coffee or, or go out to breakfast and drink coffee with it. I like coffee. I just need not drink it every day all the time. Otherwise, I'll be bouncing off the wall. So

Cortex 1:47:58 yeah, well, I don't know if there's really any other big meta talk stuff that we didn't already sort of talk about, you know, between the transition stuff and April Fool's.

mathowie 1:48:08 me how many times I read meta talking last.

Cortex 1:48:13 For you, God bless you.

mathowie 1:48:15 Said thanks on the end of the goodbye threads

Jessamyn 1:48:18 posting and I was like, I hope to God, he just hasn't been here that whole time.

mathowie 1:48:22 That was literally the first page I'd looked at. Ah, so nice. I should just host file that thing into

Cortex 1:48:34 don't even let yourself go to the front page. No one needs to link you to a thread. They can do it. But they have to fill out a two page form. Explain why you should be reading metadata.

mathowie 1:48:44 There's a happy birthday cortex thing did that happen? Or that happened?

Cortex 1:48:48 My birthday is later in the month. So okay, if it does happen, it will not have have happened yet.

mathowie 1:48:53 Are you gonna go to that happy early birthday? Oh, yeah.

Cortex 1:48:56 Oh, the meetup. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was just someone who's throwing a meet up anyway, because they were in town. And then I was like, Oh, I think I think maybe Angela pointed out that my birthday was in the facility. I was like, well, then it's there's his birthday too. So now I better go. It'd be kind of awkward if I didn't say

mathowie 1:49:16 happy birthday on title.

Jessamyn 1:49:19 And then you're gonna have to make the meta talk post to Josh. in your lap.

Cortex 1:49:23 It's exciting.

mathowie 1:49:24 While you listen to it play through you make you take this copy and paste this Skype file and you just HTML fie it it's pretty easy to do some keystrokes. Yep.

Cortex 1:49:35 No, I've done it a couple times before, you know when you were traveling or whatever. So So I think I can I think I managed the procedures just gird myself for it. Make it happen. So yeah, so

Jessamyn 1:49:48 nothing's happened.

Cortex 1:49:52 Hopefully by Friday, but, yeah. All right. Pleasure is always talking to you guys. Die

Unknown Speaker 1:50:00 Hello