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Podcast 108 Transcript

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A transcript for Episode 108: That's A Solid Three-er, with ignignokt (2015-09-09).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.


Transcript

Cortex 0:00 The cortex. Welcome, gentlemen. Welcome to the metal filter odd. Hello. Welcome to Episode 108 of Best of the web, the meta filter monthly podcast. This is covering August 3 through today is September the eighth slightly later than usual podcast because I was traveling and that messed everything up. It's all about you. It totally is

Jessamyn 0:32 about me today and I didn't want to do the podcast. Oh, that's

Cortex 0:35 right. We believe it because it was just his birthday. I am I am Josh Malartic a Cortex.

Jessamyn 0:41 I'm Jessamyn.

ignignokt 0:43 And I'm Jim Kang. I'm indeed knocked on Metafilter show guest

Cortex 0:49 Yes. Joining us for some some some guest hosting. Yes. How the heck are ya?

ignignokt 0:56 I'm alright. I was like, you know, we were talking a little earlier about how we're all kind of sick. I was like, sneezing constantly from like 8am till like 2pm I was like, oh, please stop.

Jessamyn 1:10 That's an awful lot of sneezing. It

ignignokt 1:12 is. And I'm like a, like a violent sneezer. So it was like you know like, my chest was

Jessamyn 1:20 scared the cats terrified the baby everything else? Well,

ignignokt 1:24 this isn't work so I just didn't know in my office mate. It probably probably felt like a bed I felt like a bed person like you know what I see people doing that and like why did you come in just go

Cortex 1:36 home just go home. I

ignignokt 1:38 thought it would be over like

Jessamyn 1:40 after the first couple hours he really believed it was gonna wrap up

ignignokt 1:43 well, every hour I thought this will end in the next kept going for a while. Yeah, I'm sorry.

Jessamyn 1:52 I think it's something to do with like me because you're in the Northeast where I am and like there's something to do with just this shitty abysmal, globally warmed.

ignignokt 2:02 Yeah, just like dropping yeah limber

Jessamyn 2:05 because the kids in my class today were like sneezing and hacking and after a while I was like, why are you guys all here and all sick like did you all go to some party together and drink out of the same bottle? Like they were all just like

ignignokt 2:22 yeah, maybe it's the weather like the severe like shifts or something like that. Like you know turning things all the way down? Well, I mean, not that far, but things are like down to like 6070 last week and then like 90 Yeah, yeah, I was actually talking to about that this morning with a cat who is also admitted filter. Metro baby. Ah, and it was dark when we got well first I guess we get up really early because we have a baby but it was dark when we got up and left the house. That's depressing. But it was also super hot. Is this this is like not really like a fall it's like hot hot winter or something. Like the seasons are now like summer hot winter and winter.

Jessamyn 3:11 I'm not so thrilled with hot winter myself. Oh, it's dystopian

Cortex 3:17 Do you like I came back from Huntsville a few days ago and got home to like the perfect sort of Portland early autumn weather I've been missing. And it was like you know, it was it was partly overcast. And there was some bits of rains and bits of not and a nice cool breeze. He went oh, this is perfect. But now it's sort of cranking back up into the weirdly warm thing. It was while I was in Huntsville anyway, so Oh, there's no AC here. I need to put the AC unit in my my window if I expect to not cook I guess for the next few weeks.

Jessamyn 3:51 I mean, I assume in Alabama, you just have to have a Portland is kind of optional.

Cortex 3:57 Yeah, Portland, basically nobody does. Vermont, Vermont say yeah, so we just sort of have to sweat through it in the summer, which is fine, because it's usually not much of it. But I guess this summer has been real bad even though I was lucky enough to miss it.

ignignokt 4:10 Do you guys what do you guys have like real old houses in Portland?

Cortex 4:16 Yeah, like

Jessamyn 4:19 how old do you mean well,

Cortex 4:21 you know for for the West Coast like 1910 That's my house. Oh,

ignignokt 4:25 so pretty old. That's still old enough to have weird weird windows.

Cortex 4:29 Yeah, I mean, versus there's there's much newer houses in town that are like, you know, built by modern people in modern times were really sort of framed up back when insulation was not a thing that existed and

Jessamyn 4:40 corncob insulation. Yep.

ignignokt 4:43 Yeah, I'm afraid every time basically every time I put in like the air conditioners, I have to use a ton of duct tape. And I'm always afraid they're gonna fall out and like kill somebody.

Jessamyn 4:54 Had a friend conditioner fell out. Oh, geez. I mean, it didn't kill anybody but That's because no one was beneath it. But like he was trying to do something with it and like, man, it cut like deep into one of his fingers. He had to go to the hospital, the cord pulled out so it broke into so the air conditioner was toast. I'm a little bit afraid of those like, the window.

Cortex 5:16 They're tricky. Yeah, I really reinforced mine on I put it in and even though I never totally trust it, but they got all those like that a million knife blades on the back

Jessamyn 5:27 out. Right for special flaying like you think you could put like a potato on the ground, and it would just be the most perfect French fries, if you know, but if it was your head, it would also be the most perfect French fries.

ignignokt 5:38 Had fries?

Cortex 5:40 Well, hey, Jessamyn, do you want to tell us what's special about number one away?

Jessamyn 5:43 Sure one away, it's kind of a cool number for a number of cool reasons. It's a hyper factorial of three meaning that you can you can write it all out like one to the one to to the to one of the one times two to the two times three to the three. Oh, which is pretty nifty, I think. So hyper factorial. I did not know that word before. And then it's a whole bunch of other math stuff, but blah, blah, math. What's cool is that an official Major League Baseball has 108 stitches. And 108 degrees Fahrenheit relative to our interests is the internal temperature at which the human body's vital organs begin to fail from. So you know, if you can just keep on taking that temperature and apparently in a lot of the Indian subcontinent, 108 is a secret number. Um, this is, you know, pulling from Wikipedia, not from personal experience, which it's also the toll free emergency telephone number of India 1801 works out well. Yeah, I thought so. So it's an interesting number. And those are some things I liked.

Cortex 6:55 See, the internal Oregon thing I wonder is like, is that the temperature at which at least one starts to go? Is there an external systemic thing or one always, like bad for everything? I'm like, oh, everything is freaking out right now. Can your pancreas do like 112? If you've been watching a lot of

Jessamyn 7:11 fish, right? It's optional.

Cortex 7:14 Right, right.

ignignokt 7:15 Yeah, maybe, maybe like, all your there's like lower thresholds and like, other things have shut down by the time you got to 108. Like your brain goes at 107 and staging? Yeah, I think I think, like, a reasonable or not reasonable, but like, I think that actually happens to real people who live is like fevers of 105. Yeah. Wow, that's

Cortex 7:44 sort of puts it into context, right? It's like, Oh, shit. Yeah, I think I had 105 fever at one time as a kid, like briefly, you know, brought it down. Yeah. I lived. I'm not a ghost. This is where it ghost calls people.

ignignokt 7:57 That sounds pretty good.

Cortex 7:58 It does sound pretty good.

Jessamyn 7:58 Yeah. Otherwise, you wouldn't really brought that up. And we talked to called chef. Yep. Oh, and by the way, I'm undead.

Cortex 8:05 Yeah. Little details. So Jim, yeah. Since I, I'm assuming, I feel like you're really casual about being Jim. Yeah, some people call it Nick nacht. But But yes. So you've done a project stuff. And I figured we could we usually start talking about projects. But I, like so many of your projects that I figured we could just sort of pick your brain about

Jessamyn 8:34 this, like your favorite project is, and did you make a project this month, which is what I'm looking right now?

ignignokt 8:39 I don't think I did. I like we had to have you

Jessamyn 8:43 on the podcast? Because a project? Yeah.

Cortex 8:46 Every month, if you don't make a project, you will be required to talk to us. There were some

ignignokt 8:51 that were close. Yeah, you know, I used to be. So I had a period of like, two to three months of unemployment. And I was like, super onpoint. During that time. Obviously, I would like set reminders about posting the project at like the time the the queue limit. And then like, Yeah, I've been like, just like, I think last week, I was like, Oh, I could post a project. It's like, oh, nothing's ready. But yeah, the projects I liked. Well, there's quite a few of them is there we could find all the ones they voted for.

Jessamyn 9:28 You can look on your own profile page. Oh,

ignignokt 9:31 nice. Projects. 249 votes. Well, I liked a lot of projects. You

Cortex 9:43 aren't in franchised individual

Jessamyn 9:45 thing that was my big sort of eye opener this year like Anil Dash favorites, everything on Twitter. And at first I was like, he's so free with the favorites and so it diminishes and then I was like, You know what the fuck? It's not like you go back and look at It's a way to be like, Hey, I have data that a boy and a girl, or whoever, and sort of changed my thinking. And now I do much more favoriting everywhere, Facebook and Twitter and meta filter and everything

Cortex 10:12 I've been trying to get to, I'm still pretty shy about another filter, just because I have a very utility driven use of them.

Jessamyn 10:17 Yeah, me too. Actually, a lot of my favorites are just gonna talk about you on the podcast.

Cortex 10:22 Yeah. But on Twitter, I've been trying to do a better job of just like saying, Oh, hey, that's nice. I'll favorite that and not like, Why am I being stingy with these? I don't care about

Jessamyn 10:31 you. So I said Happy Birthday to Anil on Twitter. But then he didn't say Happy Birthday back. Is that shade? Or is that just a thing normal people do?

Cortex 10:38 I assume it's not shade. Barring other circumstances, like,

Jessamyn 10:44 like that I got laid off from the message. And he didn't.

Cortex 10:46 Oh, man.

Jessamyn 10:49 To be fair, they laid off like six of us or seven of us. And they didn't lay them off because I think he's an advisor. But I don't know. I don't think he's mad. We talked about it. Everything seemed good.

Cortex 11:00 Unless you know, something's going on. I would say, you know, he probably just got a lot of Twitter.

ignignokt 11:04 Trolls. Yeah, maybe he's fighting some guys. Sometimes he has to do that. I've noticed.

Jessamyn 11:10 actually keep that in my little Hopper of responses. Yeah. Fighting some guys.

ignignokt 11:19 Yeah, I that's a that's a really good point. Like somebody like him, you know, quasi famous guy, right? It's very easy to favorite something. And it really means a lot to other people. So yeah, yeah, that's very nice of him to do that. Until I

Jessamyn 11:32 feel like you know, librarians who have small Twitter followers, as opposed to me and my weird amount of Twitter followers. I'm like, it's all people from meta filter. And then I say, the meta filter people, it's all librarians

ignignokt 11:46 are the all the librarians on meta filter.

Jessamyn 11:49 It's probably also all the librarians on Metafilter.

ignignokt 11:53 Yeah, yeah.

Jessamyn 11:57 I don't know. You're gonna tell us about your projects.

ignignokt 11:59 Oh, yeah. So the projects that I liked the so this is a twitter bot. And there's been a lot of Twitter bots lately. But you guys. Yeah, you know, Twitter bots are just so you know, you could make them with just plain text. And the they just keep on going by themselves. It's, it's very rewarding in terms of like effort to reward ratio,

Cortex 12:31 you're building a machine and such as building a specific, a website or

ignignokt 12:35 something. Yeah, if you build build an app, right, which, you know, I've done. You might, you might feel good once you've done it, but then you don't ever go back to it sometimes.

Jessamyn 12:46 And that can be bad for the app, because people maybe want you to,

ignignokt 12:50 yeah, they may want to. But you know, the other thing that happens is nobody likes your app, or oh, he's interested. So everybody forgets about it, including yourself. But Twitter bots,

Jessamyn 13:04 I have some websites like that. Yeah, I don't know anything about that.

ignignokt 13:09 Yeah, like the Yeah, I wish there was like a way for like, websites to just kind of remind you that they exist that that you made them

Jessamyn 13:21 tell you that they're expiring. That's what happens to me. You got more dollars for the thing you never did anything with since the last time you paid $17

ignignokt 13:30 Oh, yeah, it sucks. It cost $17 or more, depending now that they have like the crazy pricing, demand and capitalism pricing or whatever for domains. Like if you happen to be early and you find something that's something something that's something that's a bad example, but something that's something abc dot space or something like that, that will cost like I remember seeing something like that. It was like, like $5,000 for a year. What? Yeah, the the apparently they don't price things anymore as like, this is just our price,

Jessamyn 14:07 right? The top level domains were but all the other ones. It's just like, land grab.

ignignokt 14:13 Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 14:14 The rent is too damn high. The rent

ignignokt 14:16 is too damn high. That's exactly that's why that's why I stopped. Although somebody taught actually for a project I did once somebody in the comments talked me into buying a domain for it.

Jessamyn 14:28 Which one which was

ignignokt 14:28 it was gluey clock. It was just like a clock, a website.

Jessamyn 14:33 We were huge fans of glowy clock. Oh, awesome. Yeah, but he mentioned on the podcast, I can still remember it, Josh.

Cortex 14:39 Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's big red LED man. Yeah.

ignignokt 14:43 But I bought a domain for it. And now I realized, like that guy talked me into I think we'll see Jordan soon or something. Eventually. He talked me into paying for this every year.

Cortex 14:58 I've been I've been sort of sorting out my field. Things about domain stuff. And I've actually been making the decision to let domains lapse if I'm not like, there's a couple that I had held on to for a while, like, I haven't updated this project in years anymore. We're going to update it again. Oh, gosh, well, I let it lapse. You know, I let Lloyd tube lapse, I had built a silly project a few years ago that showed a very slightly animated GIF of John Cusack holding a boombox over his head. to YouTube,

Jessamyn 15:29 I taught all my students how to make the GIF sound. website project, it's called GIF, not GIF, or GIF. GIF. People can vote.

Cortex 15:40 It should be Yeah, yeah. Well, anyway, I made that. And then at some point, the YouTube API changed and it stopped working. I was like, I could go back and fix it. But I don't know if you'd like doing it right now. And then like, two or three years went by, like, I redo this domain at least once for this project that I'm never going to fix that was not that notable in the first place. I'm just gonna stop paying $12 every year for the rest of my life, to keep that URL and I can stick you know, I can I can rehome it like Josh mueller.com/lloyd tube or something.

Jessamyn 16:06 To keep the content up and people find it, you put a 301 redirect, and everything's good, right?

Cortex 16:11 Yeah, but I don't need to I don't need to, you know, actually pay to sit on that indefinitely. I don't owe my past self, you know, rent at $12 per bad idea. My life so yeah. Which is it kind of sucks. Because like, I do feel like Yeah, but I kind of hate web rot. I hate the

ignignokt 16:29 way the web but but you don't want to be a hate Web. Right.

Cortex 16:34 A fair amount. It's good. I feel like I've I feel like I've I've mellowed a little bit out over the years, just out of like practicality. You know, it's gone from being something I used to be really, really big on principle about to more something that I think is worth making an effort on when it's reasonable to do so. But to some extent, I've like, I guess I've given over to the reality that search engines generally work. So if you want something to be available, just make sure it's searchable. And if someone wants to find it, if they know enough to look for it, they'll probably be able to find it by searching for even if it moved.

Jessamyn 17:07 So many people don't know what a domain is anymore, anyhow.

Cortex 17:10 Yeah. Which is terrifying in its own right, but terrifying. So there's

ignignokt 17:15 actually isn't that that? That one movement? vaporwave? Isn't that all about? Like things are never permanent? What? Yeah, I don't know this. I think

Jessamyn 17:27 today, how old are you, Jim?

ignignokt 17:29 Well, I'm 38 I'm pretty old. Sorry, what?

Jessamyn 17:36 I'm just I don't remember how old Josh's. Oh, I'm

Cortex 17:38 36. I think I'm 36.

ignignokt 17:44 Okay, problem at this point? To hold your Yeah. Yeah, but actually, not you. And I think what is this username Kendal mint cake. Okay, while back they had a project where they're, I don't know, if they've kept it up, where they're said they're gonna have a music label. But the music they post will only be available for a number of people. And once those people download that music, they will take it, they take it down from the website forever.

Jessamyn 18:16 Vapor wave Wikipedia page, but I can't tell if what I'm looking at is the same as what you're describing.

ignignokt 18:23 Oh, maybe maybe I'm getting it wrong, because I don't know what the kids are really doing.

Jessamyn 18:28 Wow. I certainly don't either.

ignignokt 18:31 Let's see. Let's see. If I look up. I look up to be user name. Now as you look at this guy's project, so he's 33 years old. I don't know if that should be

Cortex 18:47 today's today

Jessamyn 18:50 bringing stuff over from people's profile page. I guess we'll have to bend you sorry.

Cortex 18:54 It was a nice last interaction

ignignokt 19:00 it's a good way to go. about space, the audio flameouts. Oh no heat. So I've confused this phenomenon has called the new digital ephemera. And his label him and mint cake. His label their label is called vapor cake.

Jessamyn 19:20 Vapor cake. I can see how you were confused. Although now I'm really into vapor wave and I you know,

ignignokt 19:27 vapor wave like where they like just capitalist music.

Jessamyn 19:31 Oh, it is okay. Apparently, whatever. That's

ignignokt 19:34 also there's also a vaporwave bot. And I think it just posts like it has like sprites from like old Sega video games and then just smashes them together at random. Like Ecco the Dolphin and let me find it.

Jessamyn 19:50 Oh god and now I've just googled vapor cake and I'm looking at e liquid for your vape pipe that tastes like cake better and I just did Chicken and Waffles e liquid Josh.

Cortex 20:04 Wait token and waffles to vape parently. I don't know. I don't know. I think that's that we might be into crime against nature territory at this point.

ignignokt 20:13 So here's the vaporwave images. You can tell me what this means.

Cortex 20:19 Oh, wow. This is this is some serious Oh, that kind of stuff like Hotline Miami.

Jessamyn 20:27 I can just hear

ignignokt 20:33 oh, wait, my air conditioner turned on. Are you hearing that?

Jessamyn 20:37 I hear like they're walking through the snow.

ignignokt 20:41 Oh, just shut that off real quick. One second.

Jessamyn 20:44 But I think it's just him touching his microphone. Oh, wow.

ignignokt 20:53 Okay, I'm back. Hello. Okay, great.

Jessamyn 21:00 To be sitting there miserable.

ignignokt 21:02 I won't be miserable until 30 minutes later.

Jessamyn 21:07 We should wrap it up before then. Right?

ignignokt 21:12 Well, that is really the vaporwave image that just been posted is really cool.

Jessamyn 21:18 It's beautiful, isn't it? Yeah.

ignignokt 21:21 It's just like, film negatives in color sort of offset? Yeah, offset channels, I guess. Yeah. That's pretty sweet.

Jessamyn 21:29 It's like it might be cool outside, which is

Cortex 21:34 that blue channel really feels like good weather.

Jessamyn 22:05 So we started talking about this. Okay, so projects that you like, yes. Yes.

ignignokt 22:09 So the project I was going to talk about was space stories. And it's just, basically, there's a tool called cheap bots done quick.

Cortex 22:22 Yes, yes, Jen. It's pretty

ignignokt 22:23 sweet. And the way it works is you define a set of grammars, by which I mean like, rules like, replace, like, if you say a replace that with either combats space, dogs or something like that. Or, and like those rules can have other rules within them. So either space combat, or D, and then D could be something else. And you just kind of compose them. I don't know, this may be a terrible explanation. And

Cortex 23:00 a really a really a really, really simple version of what it'd be like. You could have a template that just literally says like, noun, a verb, and then noun and verb would both be categories that it would take that as a rule, and it would take noun or replace with with something from a list of nouns. Yeah. And oh, so it's just like

Jessamyn 23:20 all those other crazy things you do? It's like an off chain thing. Yeah.

ignignokt 23:24 Yeah. It's like, it's basically Yeah, it's like that. It's a you don't have to write that much code to do it. Because it's so simple grammar. Yeah, yeah. So people have been writing like lots of bots with it. And some of them are pretty good writers like so this is by I think, ends of invention. Yeah, I think he's not invented here on Twitter. And yeah, it just like comes up with little space stories like that you might read in like some pulp sci fi thing like you come to in a combat vehicle. You're accompanied by a pill fish, but it's clad in power armor. Or

Jessamyn 24:00 you're all tied up at a space wedding. You open fire on the wounded cosmonaut, a tiny bubble expands to fill the room. They're almost haiku. Yeah.

ignignokt 24:12 Yeah, and they just nice little

Jessamyn 24:14 analysis

ignignokt 24:19 there's just these nice little evocative things and yeah, I thought that was really neat. And then there's like a more a little bit more ambitious. Not saying ambitious is necessarily better anything but the Villanelle bot form Yeah. And and actually use you know, content from Twitter. Like actually say it said like, Well, okay, I need something that's this many syllables. Let me fish through Twitter to get it. So it's like real things that people have written, all compose together. into these really nice poems. I don't actually know much about poems, but these These all sound great to me.

Cortex 25:09 They certainly seem political. Yeah. I know, I have never. I've always been more of a you know, songwriter than a poet. So, you know, it's kind of like being a shitty poet, I think. So I've never, I've never like had a strong sense of judgment about the subject, but, but, ya know, I've really enjoyed that one. I thought that Villanelle but I think my, I think I jumped in with an annoying first comment saying, Okay, now but do sistine is, hey, but a behead. I really really enjoyed it. Yeah, I'm I, I'm hoping people will keep sort of exploring the territory with the camera rather than the, you know, the pop done quick. The Bots done. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, seems like such a great sort of like, the same way I really liked twine for being really accessible. So that the barrier for someone who wants to write a little interactive text adventure type story, or a to your adventurous types where you can do it so easily with twine compared to some of the previous interactive fiction just

Jessamyn 26:09 required more understanding of coding and syntax to be able to make them work?

Cortex 26:13 Yeah. Yeah, it's a neat thing.

ignignokt 26:17 Yeah. And that's, that's why I was actually. But so you know, let me know if this is like some kind of.

ignignokt 26:27 So the metal filter projects ethics thing, sometimes they get confused about. So this guy I should disclose is like, not a friend like that. I've met a person

Jessamyn 26:36 but he's a guy doesn't matter. Oh, yeah. Okay, your wife we don't use

Cortex 26:41 this is a lawless land of any guideline,

Jessamyn 26:43 all her own stuff, all its history, okay. Well,

ignignokt 26:46 he's he's a guy I know, on Twitter. And he was he was, like, I said, you should post your thing to projects. And he was like, I don't know, everybody's posting Twitter bots. It's like it's popular, but you know, it's still good. It's, you know, it might not be like, amazing to people anymore. But I still think yeah, things that generate, generate stuff like that, over time, are, are, are pretty interesting. You know, and each one is kind of different. So I think they're still worth posting.

Cortex 27:26 Yeah, it's a really cool format. I think people should definitely if you make something, stick it up on projects, because yeah,

ignignokt 27:31 I mean, no one is like, Oh, you posted like a story you wrote, that's bullshit. People have already written stories.

Jessamyn 27:38 Jim, Wasn't there an update to the your friend story that you that you wrote in that? Event? I had done it. But oh, I went in to see how it worked. But I wound up kind of in the middle of it. And so I couldn't figure out what the what the coder added.

ignignokt 27:56 Okay. So there's there should be I don't know, if it really worked. There shouldn't be a link in there. That you probably saw it if you clicked on that link. That that's just skips to the end. The last stretch. Yeah, it didn't work. So, you know, the interesting, this ties into the whole domain thing. I updated it just because I that domain expired is like Oh, man. So then I had to I dug it out and was like, okay, I can wrap this up. But yeah, so if you click on that link, it does not take you all the way down to the one that starts with I was asked to write a letter testing.

Jessamyn 28:36 And I couldn't figure out I had forgotten how it works and figure out how to get to the next thing. Basically,

ignignokt 28:43 you could either hit down the down arrow key, or

Jessamyn 28:49 it took me somewhere crazy. It took the ICAC

ignignokt 28:53 texts from an unknown number, hopefully, or somewhere else. Because you can also click on the little circles, so like the circle below it, you click on that and it expands that

Jessamyn 29:04 and I got lost and I couldn't find it again. I mean, you don't have to sort of tech support me through this but

ignignokt 29:09 oh, is this Firefox? Yes. Yeah, I'm not great at Oh, great. I shouldn't be I shouldn't be. I just want your tomorrow and I'll try to try to fix it for you.

Jessamyn 29:24 Because I was like, Am I really stupid? Like I want to know what happened but I can't make this work.

ignignokt 29:29 No, no, I was I was so tired that I was just like, Firefox mobile Safari ship it. really should. I mean, sorry, Chrome and mobile Safari was where it worked to let it go. But

Cortex 29:43 I got past some serious under undertrained anxiety about web development stuff, because like when I first started making little things on the web, I was like, Oh, but I don't know if this works everywhere and bla bla bla at some point, I just, you know, it works in my browser because you

Jessamyn 29:59 work and people are like it doesn't work and dolphin on my Android, whatever BlackBerry

Cortex 30:07 like it's nothing nothing nothing that I'm building is so important that I need to hurt myself trying to make sure it works in browsers that are not like the main browser people's use. And if someone else really wants to make the effort to make something work, that's that's great,

Jessamyn 30:21 but it's worth what you paid for it. I,

ignignokt 30:24 I guess. I mean, I think that like for like, things that you're selling and stuff like that, it's very important. But for for projects, it's like, I remember. Somebody said, you know, Darius Kazemi? Yes. He has a lot of the Twitter bots stuff and interesting stuff. He he wants made a really neat HTML five thing that took that game Spelunky Yeah. And it would it would like it would like, like, show you interactively, I think, how I actually forgot exactly what it did. But

Cortex 31:00 that's how the level generator works. Yeah, he basically broke down all the details about how it graded random, but always navigable and levels of the game.

ignignokt 31:08 And so of course, that got picked up by Rock Paper Shotgun, and said in the comments, some guy was like, Oh, thanks for not supporting Firefox, or whatever it was, you know, thanks for supporting the open web. And then, he was like, he's like, okay, you know, what I this is free time. But you know, just just, just, I'm just going to go and I'm going to spend two hours to Saturday trying to make this work. If it doesn't work, I'm not gonna, it's not gonna work. And it was really nice. And like somebody else on Twitter was like, okay, guy who did, too, did nothing complains about a guy who did something. It's kind of what happened.

Jessamyn 31:53 You know, the work I do for Open Library, like answering email and stuff, they're the people who are like, Yeah, you don't have an ebook reader for Linux. And the crazy thing is, we actually do have an ebook reader for Linux, or rather, ebook readers that will deal with DRM do exist for Linux, but people just presume that because there's DRM involved, nothing Linux could possibly and so you know, they get presumptively outraged, and then email us about how shitty we are. And I'm like, Oh, actually, you can just use this. And they're like, Wow. And I'm like, Come on, buddy. We lend ebooks worldwide for free. Really? Really? Really? So? Yeah. Familiar with the problem.

ignignokt 32:35 So So do you do? Do you like the DRM stuff? Is that like, something that what why you it's like the only the DRM stuff on your open library stuff? Is that like a thing where you found like something and you want to share it, but it has DRM or is there like?

Jessamyn 32:57 Yeah, I was wondering, like, a project of the Internet Archive.

ignignokt 33:01 Okay. Okay. So you guys, they lend

Jessamyn 33:04 sort of in copyright books, but they have DRM on it. So they're only lending one digital copy at a time. And they're kind of waiting to see if anybody has a problem with that.

ignignokt 33:16 Okay, and that's how you, you get not sued by the copyright people. So far.

Jessamyn 33:22 It is. Yeah, but it's got like real DRM. So it's like Adobe's DRM and we pay for the licenses. But it does mean that people who just want to read a book like they're used to on Gutenberg can't. On the other hand, we've got books that are a little bit more current than what's on Gutenberg. But I mean, it's dicey, right? But the thing that's always really interesting is, you know, the open source people being like, Fuck you, Internet Archive, and I'm like, Oh, my God, really? Real CEOs

ignignokt 33:49 are always so ready to save

Jessamyn 33:52 money. But look where the Internet Archive like we're, we mostly agree with you most, like almost all the way agree. So come on, come on. Yep. Speaking of librarians, actually. The librarians and enthusiastic eaters I just wanted to you know, get us a little bit back on Metafilter unless anybody would mind

Cortex 34:16 Oh, yeah. Let's do it.

Jessamyn 34:19 Did the how many eggs project were they like eggs, and they have a website and it's called 36 eggs. And they always wondered what the pound cake in and of windy poplars, the 36 egg recipe and they made a little, a little website about different things with lots of eggs in them and how many eggs they have, and the adorable blog. It's just super cute, super small and I love it.

ignignokt 34:54 It's crazy actually. Like make these recipes or or is a JSON.

Jessamyn 35:00 I think I'm just I'm looking through it right now.

ignignokt 35:04 Wait, let me get that link.

Jessamyn 35:07 But basically it's like food from books. And they make the stuff eat the stuff and talk about the difficulty and deliciousness ratings of the stuff. That looks like an awful lot of Harry Potter stuff is near. It's like, oh,

ignignokt 35:24 windy poplars. I didn't know there were that many ads that I thought

Jessamyn 35:30 around a lot at Green Gables was the only one.

ignignokt 35:34 Well, that and Evan Leigh right. That's the one where she comes into power. And it's like, the final book or bricks and

Jessamyn 35:48 but how could you not love this image with 36 Egg pancake? Oh my Wow, that is Oh, and also the only thing we do try to do is include people's usernames. So that was except insects.

Cortex 36:02 That was several pounds cake. That's what that is. That is something that you doing with that Jasmine?

Jessamyn 36:10 You said my name with a Z sound that I thought we were friends?

Cortex 36:14 Did I say I'm gonna blame a cold because everything kind of has as the sound coming out of me.

Jessamyn 36:20 I wish I had a Z sound coming out of me because it would mean I was asleep.

Cortex 36:25 I took a nap earlier. That helped a little bit. But it

Jessamyn 36:27 is a 630 this morning. I pretty good job. Now.

Cortex 36:31 You're going to bed after this? I think it's probably Yeah, let yourself like if it

Jessamyn 36:38 started talking that way since you got back from Alabama? No,

Cortex 36:42 I don't know. I like saying if and I also I'm perfectly happy to say fuck it. But f f just has a nice like f it. It's It's It's oddly effortless to say f it. You know it's a real low friction. We mentioned one algorithmic poker thing. There's a couple other projects that also along those lines be Boston made a website that generates poetry in the style of a given poet so you can configure

Jessamyn 37:17 Who is this user? Oh, yeah. Is he in Boston? This is a brand new user.

Cortex 37:22 Yes, this is made one comment. So you know,

Jessamyn 37:26 it's a link to your website. Do you know this person? Josh? What? There's a link to my website. It's a link to some Calvin and Hobbes something.

Cortex 37:35 Things? Oh, oh, that's interesting.

Jessamyn 37:38 That's the person's only comment on the whole website.

Cortex 37:41 That's awesome. Yeah, I don't think I know them. But maybe they're incognito, or I'm super forgetful. But yeah, things sort of went around. So very cool. I enjoy it. It's nice.

Jessamyn 37:54 I have to give a shout out to Beagle who there's a whole bunch of stupid bullshit in Vermont, as you know, but one of the stupider bull shittiest parts is the open meetings law, which is not stupid, but basically says, Look, you gotta post the minutes of your board meetings in your committee meetings on to the town website within five days of the meeting. And you're looking at me like five days, how about five minutes? It's just ft fucking pee, right? But some towns lost their minds. And just were like, you know, we're not doing it because I don't know. And so some of the towns, very few towns, most of them handled it, but a couple towns were like, we're just taking the website down. We can't deal with this. We can't. Sorry, die. And so Beagle who is Vermonter Martin Lang built lives in Brattleboro southern part of the state. Made a little website on WordPress with a little template called town press, which is for making little town pages and made one for the town of Vernon, Vermont, which I just thought was really cool. He sent it to me on

ignignokt 39:04 responsive Oh, look at this, I shrunk it all the way down to iPhone size. And

Jessamyn 39:09 I mean, not bad, right. Better than my town website.

ignignokt 39:13 That is way better than like Somerville.

Jessamyn 39:17 Somerville has a terrible website. I know that first. So Vermont Yankee Vernon is known for having Vermont Yankee up until December 29 of last year. And you know, it's got 2000 people in it like it's a teeny town. And so it's nice now they've got a nice little little Lipsyte.

ignignokt 39:37 So I don't know what is Vermont Yankee.

Jessamyn 39:40 Oh, sorry, nuclear plant. Oh, okay. So it was remodeled the nuclear plant and there was a huge fight about getting rid of it. I mean, obviously, it creates a lot of power but it was you know, in these heavily populated areas and it was owned by people from out of state and then you were supposed to take it apart but then they didn't want to and there was no The lawsuits forever. And they finally turned it off at the end of last year and they're busy decommissioning it over the next I think 20 or 30 years. It's such a ridiculous mess. But you know, you could probably read about it on the new website for

ignignokt 40:18 oh, they have a Vermont senior earning seniors section. Regular businesses, potluck supper meetings are held on the second Monday of each month, birthday celebration and program on the month, fourth Monday.

Jessamyn 40:31 See how well and I was gonna write him and be like, hey, you know, the picture you have in the upper left is kind of big, and you could shrink it down. And then I was like, Dude, shut up. That website looks lovely. Don't give the guy like the one piece of feedback for the website that is otherwise terrific, just be fine. And so I've just

ignignokt 40:51 really good advice. Like, I want to interact with somebody that did something good. The only thing I could think of is like, Well, that was really great. But

Jessamyn 41:03 the well actually are the

Cortex 41:05 sort of sort of timing and scoping your feedback. Yeah, creative stuff. Yeah. I want to just formally name check a couple of the things we were talking for before we started formally going through projects. So we mentioned the Villanelle bot. That was by evasion. And we also mentioned the Jimmy mentioned this space stories when by end of invention.

Jessamyn 41:29 I voice Oh, I always thought that was Apple vision. Simpson No, you're right. You're right. I just I was wrong.

Cortex 41:38 I never know what I'm right. So I at this point, just assume that something may or may not be correct. I wanted to mention one others too, because this is such a thing. But a Parrish put up a twitter bot called the FM meridian. Oh, I'm lousy at by. She

ignignokt 41:57 is a real art person. Yeah, this is serious stuff. Yes, space. Yeah,

Cortex 42:04 space imagery paired up with computer generated poems. So it's the month of computer generated poems, I think but what is it

Jessamyn 42:10 about August?

Cortex 42:12 I think it's all the heat

ignignokt 42:15 see yearn for space and yeah, the

Jessamyn 42:18 absolute zero

Cortex 42:21 Well, it's more like like four or five Kelvin I think is like the champion, isn't it? There's all that background radiation.

ignignokt 42:29 Things move right. So yeah, yeah.

Cortex 42:34 It was actually absolute zero with things like fly through space and just explode because they will probably won't explode. They probably just freeze. Yeah, that wasn't that wasn't a strong start.

ignignokt 42:46 Have you guys seen the that Wikipedia page the timeline of the far future? No, what is that? It is a meat. Wait, let me send it to you. It has things like it tells you like when protons will decay when all things will start moving.

Jessamyn 43:03 Are you I found it

Cortex 43:05 sounds like this sort of thing that like Neil deGrasse Tyson would pop out at a party if he's like in a shitty mood and trying to bring people down. Oh, well. The Universe mother burger.

Jessamyn 43:16 Yeah. This has this been a metal filter post? Why not?

ignignokt 43:20 I think it has been. I think a long well, not longer maybe a couple

Jessamyn 43:24 of years ago relatively speaking. Yeah.

ignignokt 43:27 i It is amazing. I basically whenever I think I am feeling kind of down. I like look at this. And I'm like, yeah, it doesn't matter.

Jessamyn 43:38 cheered me and my weird sore shoulder muscle up for sure.

ignignokt 43:43 Your your shoulder will be better before estimated time until the central black hole of s five or 14 plus 81. The most massive tone black hole with 40 billion solar masses dissipates by the emission of Hawking radiation. Wow, that's a long sentence.

Cortex 44:04 Well, we got time, you know, so that's why I'm gonna follow up on I got to save this for later. There's the link to a Boltzmann brain as a reference in the second paragraph. Oh page. Yeah, I've never heard of Boltzmann. But that's looks interesting. But it also reminds me of one of the characters from sort of the dune mythography guy named Holt's college and Yeah, well, there's, there's, there's a yeah, there's a elaborate while doing takes place in like 20,000 years in the future, right. So everything that happens between now and then, is the mythology of that universe. It's there was there was a guy named Holtzman who had a psychotic break and launched himself into space wired into a computer. So basically, he became an artificial intelligence. He transferred his brain to a computer and then spent the next several 1000 years flying in a very, very elliptical orbit back through the habitat. IT systems and every time he came back over a couple 1000 years, he turned his brain back on and tried to send out new scientific theories. And so he revolutionized science over the period of 8000 years in like millennial fits and starts before eventually he was blown up by a bunch of anti robot activists. And his name was Holtzman. So I'm wondering if maybe Holtzman was chosen partly as a nod to Boltzmann if the Boltzmann brain is a thing.

ignignokt 45:25 So the Boltzmann brain is sort of like that. Except like, Yeah, apparently Holtzman was once like a person, sort of like Ray Kurzweil plans to eventually be like a robot man or something that lives on forever. Whereas a Boltzmann brain?

Jessamyn 45:41 humanist kind of, yeah,

ignignokt 45:44 we're Boltzmann brain is a brand that just springs up from pure coincidence, like, hey, all these molecules just like atoms happen to be in this spot. System version. Thanks. Yeah. And and it's estimated that will happen in 10 to the 10 to 50 years. That's how unlikely and when it's there, there's only three more astronomical events listed on the page. So it's kind of late to the party.

Cortex 46:19 It's gonna be lonely. It's going to be feeling some serious FOMO at that.

Jessamyn 46:26 Point 2 million years Mount Rushmore erodes into unrecognized ability.

Jessamyn 47:03 But gentleman, let's talk about metal filter.

Cortex 47:06 Let Oh, yeah, let's discuss the blue the big blue page.

Jessamyn 47:10 That's regular ol Metafilter. Yes, they're all white to me.

Cortex 47:15 www dot Metafilter. You? Yes. stuff from the last month or so. I've been, uh, I've been I've been sort of weighed down a little bit between travel and political season getting up going, I'm having to, like swim back to Oh, yeah, there were things that I just liked, because I liked them. Not because I had to be, you know, babies have a conversation about,

Jessamyn 47:41 like, for instance, this post about how to get more Chipotle burrito for free.

ignignokt 47:47 I did that. Yes. It was great. I

Jessamyn 47:49 remember I seem to recall. Didn't you comment in this thread?

ignignokt 47:53 I did. I did. Yeah. I thought about it. Like there's some discussion about whether or not you are just being a jerk by doing this. But I concluded that it was probably the thing I asked for, like, I didn't do all like six hacks or whatever. Didn't seem that much harder. And the guy seemed to be cool with it. So. So I did it.

Jessamyn 48:15 Yeah, I seem to recall I specifically read your thing. Like, oh, yeah, I totally did this. And it didn't seem like it was a Yeah, how to spell your username. So I can't even

ignignokt 48:29 if you for IGN IGN. Ctrl F you'll find that

Jessamyn 48:33 significantly more ice cream. Comment? Oh, yeah, try to have them bowl with our tea on the side half of two kinds of meats. Yeah, I read that.

ignignokt 48:45 Yes, it was basically it's

Jessamyn 48:46 like ways you can order stuff at Chipotle. So you know, the thing that's rigorously measured out, you wind up with slightly more if that's your thing, by Renam 100 Comments 20 users marked it as a favorite.

Cortex 49:01 There was a, there was a post about a guy who build stuff using primitive technology. I think the title of it was primitive technology. It's a nice 15 minute video of this guy just sort of steadily building a little hut with clay, tile roof and mud walls. And it's just, it's really weirdly serene, to just sort of sit and watch the roaring beast. Yes. And there's a there's a previous link in the first comment, but it's actually just a previous thing by this guy, not the same video. So he's done videos are like building various tools. And so this is just like one of the bigger project things start to finish using some of the stuff you've done previously. And it's just it's a neat watch. You know, it's one of the things where people are sort of geeking out a little bit in the comments at times saying okay, but why do it that way instead of this way, which, you know, internet but at the same time, you know, it's it is interesting to think about what the processes are and where They're sort of different props and

Jessamyn 50:02 it took him 102 days according to the pike war, it

Cortex 50:07 might have been I think the guy said in his write up, it might have been more like 66 If rain had not been a problem, but there was a bunch of interruptions. So because like, you know, he's drying mud. So if it's if it's rainy, it gets that much trickier.

Jessamyn 50:19 But now I'm watching him. Is he wearing? Oh, he is wearing clothes.

Cortex 50:24 Yeah, he's wearing like shorts or loincloth or something like that. People noticed that you spend 106 or 102 days building something shirtless in Australia and don't get a tan. Yeah, no, it's just really neat to watch.

ignignokt 50:40 That human planet show the you know, the BBC, they, you know, yeah. Have you heard of the planet Earth series? Where the Yeah, it's like that, except they show things that people do. And yeah, there's some there's some really cool it's really peaceful watching like, like, people put things together or go find wells in the desert. And yeah, without using like, you know, high tech stuff. Of course, there's always like a section where Oh, now that we built this we could kill a giant whale or something like,

Jessamyn 51:14 oh, by the way, we're total you know, libertarian preppers FYI page you look

ignignokt 51:22 yeah. Out here the people talk but that isn't

Jessamyn 51:29 Oh, I should mention the egg people also their stuff got cross posted to medic filter. I didn't even see the post there. But I noticed I favorited it and I was wondering why it seemed familiar to me in the projects. That's why

Cortex 51:41 there was a nice article by a non Prasad. Bout taking better selfies.

Jessamyn 51:50 Like, is this the guy selfies? Yeah.

Cortex 51:52 Or it turned into a pretty fun, interesting discussion. A lot of people's selfies for men. Yeah, sort of like, you know,

Jessamyn 52:00 can you maybe explain to me why selfies for men is the thing that needs to happen. Oh, good, Lord. It's on media.

Cortex 52:09 Are you in a weird place with with medium at the moment because of working there and then not working there?

Jessamyn 52:14 No, the weird part about them not working working there and not working there. Besides the fact that they laid off six or seven of us and then did a kind of a jokey, jokey. Get ready for season two? thing?

Cortex 52:26 Also, do I need to be like editing?

Jessamyn 52:29 No, no, no, no, no. Okay. But you know, the weird part of it is, then they were afraid that somebody from BuzzFeed had all of the information that was on our Slack. So the same slack that we used to talk to each other for seven or eight months, and the same slack where they said, We're not going to be renewing your contract. Then they deleted entirely like three days later. All the conversations, including the you know, who are we going to hire? What are we going to do workshopping all the talks? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I even contacted Matt, and was like, Hey, you work at Slack is this stuff really gone? And he said it it like, the person who owns the slack could get it back within a week and then after that, it's actually gone gone? Which I have a hard time believing but apparently it's true. So that was interesting. No, this is an interesting post. Sorry, I didn't mean

ignignokt 53:28 equivalent of like, yeah, you find out you've been laid off and then like, you can't like get to the bathroom or whatever with your key card. Or trade sounds like yeah, it's very corporate.

Jessamyn 53:39 I mean, I tried to sort of get a jump on the whole thing you know, I was like, Okay, fuck it. I'm not doing any more tweeting anymore face back booking I'm sending my invoice today. And I don't think the thing about BuzzFeed was true but I don't know what I'm curious

Cortex 53:53 what you'll have what happens next will I screwed that up? Landed Yeah, what happened next you think I need to start a Twitter feed that does nothing but poorly formed clickbait phrases. The hell just made a noise here. Oh, sorry.

ignignokt 54:12 I flipped to a tab with annual

Cortex 54:18 I don't think I have it open. Oh, so this article this take better selfies article. It's yeah, it's a it's a bunch of good basic sort of examples with visuals of selfies sort of in progress. You know, talking about composition and angle and color and lighting and you know, stuff that people may not actually have ever like if you've taken a photography course okay, you know, some of these things. But even then, you know, a lot of people haven't done necessarily portrait photography and self portrait photography is kind of its own little thing there. And so it's a bunch of basic advice. Please

Jessamyn 54:51 don't do that as often I think women do well, and that's

Cortex 54:55 that's what he'd like at the very end that was he sort of talks about is like, why do this though, you know, I post all these pictures, and his argument is basically, you know, there is value in sort of self acceptance and displaying both vulnerability and sort of, you know, love for yourself and love for others. And you know, there's something very sort of, like associated, it feels like sort of a gendered thing the way like selfies. Everybody thinks of women taking pictures of themselves, and not so much

Jessamyn 55:26 guys like girls.

Cortex 55:29 Yeah, or duck facing it up, or whatever it is, like, it's something that like, I think, at least generally, we strongly associate with girls instead of boys with women instead of men. And partly, Aaron was like, Well, you know, that is partly a reflection of some of the weird shit that we have in how expression and self, you know, self care and vulnerability are, you know, gendered and express so like, this is a thing that you can do just like sort of say, Fuck the patriarchy and, you know, be okay saying, Hey, I took a picture of myself, because I feel good about me. And I think I look good today.

Jessamyn 56:05 You know, I had a couple of friends who were on Twitter, taking a couple selfies, and I was like, hey, it's nice to see you guys. Like it. Just it was nice.

ignignokt 56:14 You know, it's like, I think there was something like this while a couple years back where I don't know if it was like, the same motivation. But it was like, it's okay to dress nicely. I never participated. But I thought that was cool. You know, where I think like, people would like post pictures of themselves wearing like, dudes like that were older. You know, nice wearing like nice clothes instead of like, t shirt jeans or whatever. I think that's even though I like T shirt and jeans personally. The Yeah, I think I think that should be an option. You know, you shouldn't feel bad about doing it. Yeah, that's a pretty cool thing. I saw I didn't see the actual article. I did see the outcome of that, which is Yeah, Twitter. With tons of dude. selfies,

Jessamyn 57:11 right? Yes, the Twitter full of dude, selfies was definitely a thing

Cortex 57:20 what else you guys got? I've got I have so much stuff. I can't mention everything this

Jessamyn 57:25 much for medical care. I have a bunch from AskMe Metafilter so I'm happy to save them.

ignignokt 57:30 I will. Oh, perfect. Oh, yeah. Oh, sorry. I was just gonna say there's a really good comic is called Let me post this is called new panel is the post by Greg Knight actually even though this is not like a haha kind of comic, but it's uh, like, you know, kind of anthropomorphize animals, but they're, they're basically like, kind of another kind of gutter punks. You know, they're they seem to be in their 20s and 30s. And they like live in crappy apartments. They get high and yeah, and stuff like that. It's just really well done.

Jessamyn 58:17 Here is definitely sweet shit. You can vape today, right?

ignignokt 58:23 Vaping I don't know anyone personally, who vapes but uh, oh, you know what, I think bitter old punk vapes. And not that I know him like

Jessamyn 58:33 vaping let me I hate to sound like some grandma but like vaping is just a cigarette thing with flavored stuff right? Yeah, slang. Yeah, smoking dope, right? Yeah, you can't as well smoke weed through a vaporizer. But that's not usually what people mean when they say vaping or

ignignokt 58:51 Yeah, I think they mean e cigs.

Cortex 58:54 It it's sort of ambiguous. So like, hey, who knows? Because, you know, someone could be a lighting that you know, through the convenience of vocabulary too. But yeah, I think generally speaking, like, the useful newness of vaping at this point is referring a lot of the times that E cigarettes I mean, I know people who use vaporizers for weed and sure that's but that feels like that's like that's now the old fashioned use of those

Jessamyn 59:19 taping chicken and waffles. They're exactly

Cortex 59:23 right. Okay, despite the fact that they might very well use their vaporizer to smoke something with the name chicken and waffles. But then we've got two different universes colliding, delivered by some hobo with a backpack. Seriously. Modern Life is complicated. And that's why we all need to watch the vine of the ducks. Oh, duck army vine. Did you see this gentleman?

Jessamyn 59:43 Of course that oh, God, you

Cortex 59:45 gotta watch it. We're This is fine. Six seconds. Right, exactly. So just just go ahead. We're just going to enjoy. You watch again.

ignignokt 59:58 I could hear it over like screen

Jessamyn 1:00:03 that's pretty good. All right.

Cortex 1:00:05 It's so good. Just like who knew you could get so much out of just pressing on a bin full of quacking duck toys. But

Jessamyn 1:00:13 no, I knew I should have uploaded the video of me dancing in the Pekinese costume. Oh god I projects.

Cortex 1:00:20 I swear to God I saw I saw some pictures of that on I don't know milkshake or Facebook.

Jessamyn 1:00:25 Well milkshake or Twitter? Yes. And I saw

Cortex 1:00:29 them. I was like, What the fuck is going on here? And

ignignokt 1:00:33 I did not. And then I see

Cortex 1:00:35 I've forgotten. Like, somehow this is somehow this is just it was it was a great twist. Because I worked through.

ignignokt 1:00:45 They make these costumes.

Jessamyn 1:00:46 My sisters and I at some point realized that we had both been surreptitiously checking eBay for used mascot costumes for a long time and hadn't talked to the other one about it. And my birthday came up first. She got me a US Pekinese mascot costume. That's my sister sitting next to me. And that's me in the Pekinese dog hat. Is that really heavy? It looks Wow. Yes. But there's a video of be dancing, which I think maybe I will have to get on Vine in order to actually be able to. I think that's important. But sorry, it has nothing to do with the restaurant.

Cortex 1:01:29 It's great. giant fucking eyes on. It's, it's it's terrifying and wonderful. But that Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:01:37 reactions have been split. Like, I think people who understand me and my sister are like, best fucking thing ever. And other people are like, you want that. Not only do I want it, my sister never has to get me another present as long as I live because of this. Like she made me close my eyes and then went outside with Jim. And then she dressed up in it. And Jim walked her in while my eyes were closed. And then I opened my eyes and she was just standing there in it. Or had no idea.

ignignokt 1:02:14 It's just amazing craftsmanship. And I've never thought about that about like mascot costumes you have to make. Yeah, if he's really gigantic,

Jessamyn 1:02:23 and heavy and expensive. And one of the things you can't tell is there's padding on the inside. So that whether you're a man or a woman inside the costume, you can't basically tell Oh, like there's chest padding inside padding to make it kind of hang in a special way. So what's up with this duck? Duck?

Cortex 1:02:42 It's just it's exactly what it is. It's you know, it's six seconds of brilliance in it and I don't know it's it's to me Oh, consistently worked on people to go from Okay, well, it's oh my god, just that that chorus that human crowd screaming feeling of all these watching

Jessamyn 1:02:59 it in reverse? Oh, it's

Cortex 1:03:01 great. And reverse.

ignignokt 1:03:03 Yeah, it took me like at least five loops to understand that. Like, that wasn't a noise that was superimposed on top of that, like, some great singer can crowd sound that's actually what that many ducks sounds like.

Cortex 1:03:15 Yeah, cuz they've all got slightly different tones. And so it adds up to this really complicated. Yeah, it's flew me I was like, I think I think I left a comment about this, because they they got posted when I was on the road somewhere in the south. And so I had to fix the link on my phone. And so I wasn't going to bother loading the vine because like I was on really shitty connection right at that moment. And finally I came back to it later, like, oh my god, this is amazing. You know, sort of tied in with the theme of the take better selfies on a somewhat more downer note, but really interesting thread that came out of it if occasionally bumpy was this post, be Swinburne posted this talking about social perfectionism and why suicide unfairly impacts men. And it turned into a big conversation of people sort of, like differing experiences with some of that same stuff, but on the negative side, and a bunch of, you know, discussion of, you know, stuff people have dealt with and guy sort of talking about some of their experiences and dealing with sort of having to deal with the conflict between their idea of how they should be and how they, how life really is. And so a bunch of a bunch of really interesting a bunch of, you know, sometimes dark sometimes kind of gutting anecdotes about stuff but but a really good interesting collection of stuff as a result because of that,

Jessamyn 1:04:43 like a mod nightmare.

Cortex 1:04:45 It was it was it there was some there was occasional heavy lifting in there it was it took a lot of attention. But you know, sometimes that happens and that's okay. And sometimes it's worth it. And that's, that's that's the situation that's the job. But the discussion that came out of it was really good.

Jessamyn 1:05:02 It looks like it, I skipped it entirely like I do any posts on suicide. But yeah, there's a lot of good conversations. And it is tricky when you try to talk about a thing where it's like, here's a gender difference. It's one where men are impacted more negatively than women. And even starting from that. People have a debate about whether that's even true, et cetera, et cetera. And but it seems like people are mostly once it got sort of sorted, having a reasonable conversation about a lot.

Cortex 1:05:32 And that seems like that's how it usually works. If we can get it that far with a thread when something's bumping like that. It's like it will sort of settle down, right,

Jessamyn 1:05:38 if you can jump in early enough. And

ignignokt 1:05:41 so I did read that was was it? Was it the idea that are people? Like men are expected to be like high achieving captains of industry? That kind of thing? Or was it more like, certain, like everyday social pressures or something like

Cortex 1:06:01 that? More on the everyday social pressure stuff? But I mean, it's also something where the actual thread was posted. Oh, I don't

Jessamyn 1:06:09 know. Emotionally dealing with it. Right. And I'm familiar with the problem.

Cortex 1:06:13 Yeah, yeah. And the way the way that stuff, yeah, we the way we sort of socially mediate that stuff, or don't and how that plays into it, but I ended up being it's one of the things where, like, I've, I'm more familiar with the thread itself than with the, with the Article, Article A month later. It's like, I know, I read at least some of it, but I remember is the you know, 200 comments or something.

Jessamyn 1:06:34 It was awhile ago. And after that you drove from Alabama?

Cortex 1:06:38 Seriously, it turns out to be really disruptive to drive cross country and back. And

Jessamyn 1:06:42 dude, I drove from like Massachusetts to Vermont, and it's disruptive I feel you. Yeah.

Cortex 1:06:47 But on a lighter note, one other posts I liked on the blue this month was this post, Jay Harris made a list. Not doing your Mario levels, because there's this thing coming up for the week. It's out now for the Wii U Super Mario Maker where you can actually build your own Super Mario Brothers levels using your blocks and enemies.

Jessamyn 1:07:07 So this is how not to build it or this is how not to

ignignokt 1:07:10 how to how to not do something that they feel is like, unfair, like not Nintendo quality. But I have served with the country and opinion where I think it's great. Things like that to people. Well, I think it's great to do things like that to people who are familiar with Mario, I don't think it's great to do that to people who have never played and

Jessamyn 1:07:33 are just trying to play a game and make it all fuckity Yeah, well, yeah.

ignignokt 1:07:37 People sort of don't expect it. Yeah,

Cortex 1:07:39 audiences are Yeah, you've got the if you're trying to just make sort of like a Nintendo good level, like you want to make a level that flows well, and people can sort of tell what they're supposed to do and the tricky parts, they can sort of recognize what's tricky and be led to sort of figure it out in a satisfying way then that's actually That's tricky. That's there's a lot of subtlety that goes into designing a level that feels like it's just sort of effortlessly there and flows. You know, so it's talking about what your things like don't do this. Don't do that. Don't do these fuckery things. But yeah, like what Jim said came up in the thread a few times. Like as you said,

Jessamyn 1:08:13 like Jim said,

Cortex 1:08:16 there is this whole other realm of like, you know, okay, we all know how Mario Maker works. Let's talk about or let's we will know how Super Mario Brothers worked his world let's talk about how we can fuck it up how we can play with goofing on people's expectations, which is also its own fun thing, but I think there's a reality that if you make a really pain in the ass goofing on people's expectations to fuck with him level a lot of people who are just playing random levels on Mario Maker gonna be like, Oh, this is a piece of shit. No and yeah, you really have to know your audience, I guess.

ignignokt 1:08:45 Yeah, you have to read you're gonna have my guess. And like I think I say like the first thing I don't know how seriously well Mario Maker is for fun right? So you should do anything you want really? But yeah, I guess if you want to like really learn the craft of making a Mario level Yeah, I think those are some good guidelines and you should try to make like levels that would actually fit into like Super Mario Brothers three or something like that but to me Yeah, I would have a good time with with those levels I think that because do you remember cat Mario? I think that was posted to meta filter. Let's see cat Mario it didn't look at all like what it's called not the Mario here's what Mario said power no, man I'll just find a way

Cortex 1:09:45 it'd be difficult to find something with as rare of terms on the internet as kept

ignignokt 1:09:49 barrio. Let's see cat Marie was a cool free online name. No, that's not it. All right. Oh, yeah. All contract is super cool though.

Jessamyn 1:10:05 Did you say cruel or cool?

ignignokt 1:10:07 cruel, cruel? Like there are some hilarious playthroughs of that game. It's made to look like the first level in the first Super Mario Brothers game. But it just like knows what you expect. And then intentionally do those things like moves blocks away as you jump towards

Jessamyn 1:10:25 them, because it thinks you're going to be playing it in sort of the standard way. Yes, yes. Yeah, exceptionally cruel.

ignignokt 1:10:33 Oh, I favorite some things that I didn't actually read. And it's too lazy.

Cortex 1:10:39 I'll do that for like, Oh, I hope to get the Diablo to post just a day or two ago. I'm totally gonna check that out. It's like oral history of sort of the development of Diablo two I think.

ignignokt 1:10:49 Yeah. And I there's one fact that is amazing. They said that So originally, famously, Diablo was a turn based game. So turn based is like you Yeah, you you decide I'm gonna make this move and I'm gonna make this guy do this move and then the enemies also do that and then the computer executes them. Whereas real time is like I click this button and then the sword does this thing. Apparently, they decided that was going to be real time and then some guy did it in one day. That That sounds like I mean they must have like they must have had such robust software

Cortex 1:11:36 yeah

ignignokt 1:11:38 that's that's all I remember from the first page of that but I read but yeah,

Cortex 1:11:41 yeah, no, I gotta check that out. There was a I guess a quick obit post mentioned and not mentioned that. Gilliam died which he did not today that variety is actually tweeted about. But in actual dead person news of filmmakers I like Wes Craven died recently, and I mentioned me and Griffis I'll end up talking about that on the next we have such films. Oh, boy. Yeah. The man was a giant man was a huge horror influence in so farewell West.

ignignokt 1:12:15 Yeah, it was I saw like, probably not. I think in third grade, I saw Nightmare on Elm Street. And that was freaky as hell. That was and then and then he let's see. Did he go on? He didn't scream later on. Right? Yeah.

Cortex 1:12:32 Scream was him. Okay. Bunch of things. You know, he'd done the Hills Have Eyes. Before Nightmare on Elm Street. And there's a great four. There's a four hour documentary on the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in particular. Which is only partly Wes Craven because like many of the films he didn't really have much involvement with. But but But it's like, it's literally four hours of going through the entire franchise. And it's really fascinating and funny at times. It's like it's a relatively inexpensive documentary, but it's like clearly made by people who really cared about the subject matter. So if you ever have four hours to kill one of the history that I read on Street series, definitely check that out, I think is called never sleep again.

Jessamyn 1:13:12 No. I'm living the dream already. So no sleeping. Should we move on? We should also mention the thing that maybe evening that would not mention, but this was actually a favorite post of mine. And it happens to be Yeah, Metroid. cohabitant and CO parent with eggnog about a new type of

ignignokt 1:13:37 Pentagon

Jessamyn 1:13:40 type of Pentagon known that can do the tiling and the first one discovered in 30 years. What the hell,

Cortex 1:13:47 so it is super rad. And

Jessamyn 1:13:50 posters, the post is a cool post on it. The whole thing is just great. Yep.

ignignokt 1:13:54 The square one video is pretty sweet. Cool Kids dancing on a beach.

Cortex 1:14:04 Yep. Man Square One was huge for me when I was a kid.

Jessamyn 1:14:09 I think I was too old for this. It was these people.

Cortex 1:14:13 Square One is like Sesame Street if it was only about math, and they basically got rid of the Muppets in favor of like C list.

Jessamyn 1:14:22 Character comedy actors, anyone I have heard of who's in it.

Cortex 1:14:26 You know, actually, there's a bunch of people who are in it who have gone on to be sort of that guy actors in a lot of stuff and some a little bit more success in that.

Jessamyn 1:14:38 Tessellation but they're not wearing anything. tessellated How hard is that?

Cortex 1:14:42 Well, yeah. It was

ignignokt 1:14:46 maybe the pre record the cool guys dancing section. And then they like, you know, later cut that with the actual math part.

Cortex 1:14:55 Yeah, maybe some of the roles.

Jessamyn 1:14:57 This was an 87 So I was out of high school but By the time the show was on TV, which kind of explains maybe why I missed it entirely? Hmm.

Cortex 1:15:06 Yeah, that's probably like a perfect definition of our culture gap despite having a real amount of cultural overlap as well. Because like I was in late in grade school, I think

Jessamyn 1:15:19 so Norman Wilson in the wire was in it. Oh, that's pretty good. The guy who played Freddy on House of Cards was in it. Yeah. That guy spent his childhood in West Germany. Fascinating.

Cortex 1:15:36 Square One, man. Maybe Maybe. I think someone did a post about square one like in detail a while back? Probably. Maybe Jay and

Jessamyn 1:15:42 Joe Howard from math net. Yeah, math net. So

Cortex 1:15:45 math. That was great math. That was the segment like was like a five to 10 minute segment at the end of each episode. That was like a dragnet parody, except it was you know, math. So

Jessamyn 1:15:56 I've seen that. I think Jim is like, pointed that out to me other Tim, there's like three Cambridge's metal filter

Cortex 1:16:04 that's how you get your name it's like social security numbers are different. The prefix by status you know firsthand my

Jessamyn 1:16:09 area and you Jim can your birthday isn't the sixth of December is it is that

ignignokt 1:16:13 but oddly enough, there's another big fight. Mary are whose name is those two guys? Those two gyms

Jessamyn 1:16:21 as gym and other gym?

ignignokt 1:16:23 Yes. The other gym is barn. Mother gym.

Cortex 1:16:31 I just call him reformed standard.

Jessamyn 1:16:39 Thank you, Jim. It's so nice to have somebody else being like,

Cortex 1:16:43 should we should we talk about AskMe Metafilter

Jessamyn 1:16:45 will pretty much have to otherwise we'll have to talk about your sense of humor. Yeah, that's

Cortex 1:16:49 not gonna get us anywhere.

ignignokt 1:16:54 Yeah, so I saw. I saw. Let's see, let me post this link. How do I maximize the potential of a Saturday job?

Jessamyn 1:17:04 Oh, I just don't see that somehow. Yeah, this this guy? Because it was my birthday on a Saturday.

ignignokt 1:17:11 Yeah, yeah. So you choose. Yeah, that's when you really don't want to look at netfilter I guess. You don't have any responsibility.

Jessamyn 1:17:19 So what is the actual question?

ignignokt 1:17:22 He, he this person used to work in an office and you know, had a regular salary, white collar type job, but he's fallen into hard times. So he basically has to take a part time job at a grocery store. And he associates that with like, you know, being a teenager or something like that. So he asked for advice about how to make the most of it. How to turn this into something you put on his resume and you know how to get out of it. So yeah, like I think I think I only saw three comments. Oh, no, there's there's a lot more comments now. But yeah, that's an interesting thing to think about a like Reddit restless Nomad said that. Apparently, she was working at a type of job like that right before she started working at Metafilter.

Jessamyn 1:18:18 Well, then she worked at the census briefly.

ignignokt 1:18:21 Yeah, yeah. I think that's what she was talking about. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:18:25 Yeah. He's got a cool census map on the wall of her at least her old place. I don't know. But her new place?

ignignokt 1:18:31 Yeah. And she said that like, yeah, basically. She, she made it look good on her resume, and she got through it. And, you know, it's like, it's like, there's not really I don't think there's a like a really good answer to this. But it's nice to hear about people who have gone through that. And then like, Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:18:51 Well, and who's like, you're 30. Like, you've got you've got some time. Let's sort of figure it out. Right. I mean, the funny joke is, I don't think we ever looked at Jeremy's resume before hiring.

Cortex 1:19:02 We're not really looking at the resume, sort of,

ignignokt 1:19:07 like background check and references.

Cortex 1:19:10 Like if we've got a unique sort of set of criteria that mostly involves like being around and not freaking out. Beyond that, like, I don't care. Like I'm not going to do a credit check on someone. I'm not going to call their prior employers like, Hey, do you know? Can you tell me about how your previous employees spent time on my website while at work?

Jessamyn 1:19:33 Raise we called your previous employer.

Cortex 1:19:36 You're like, wait what.com

Jessamyn 1:19:39 website from the

Cortex 1:19:42 logs? Yeah, I was moonlighting for like a year and a half there before I came here so and no one noticed.

ignignokt 1:19:52 So what do you do? Are you able to do like metal filter work at work? Oh, yeah, I

Cortex 1:19:55 was. I occasionally I'd have to send an email that Matt and Jess and say hey, I should not check out this link because people are saying it's not safe for work. I don't want to go out on the corporate filter so I have no idea what's going on here. Someone else take a look and make a call on it. It was it was it was a mess, but it was better than not doing that. So

ignignokt 1:20:14 yeah, yeah. And then staring at the wall or I assume you didn't like the job. So yeah,

Cortex 1:20:22 it was it was fine. It was it was it was whatever was a corporate day job. I was scanning stuff in the basement of an insurance company so certainly not chasing the dream wasn't despicable. Yeah, it was better than my previous shittier job or your

Unknown Speaker 1:20:33 kid or your dad or all the all the heat that oh hate that. Oh, b2b.

Cortex 1:21:10 Speaking of vines, very very, very well. Not that we're speaking of them.

Jessamyn 1:21:14 Oh, I love this. I

Cortex 1:21:15 love this thread. Single single single purpose. Quick answer asked Metafilter. Title is zero results for guy screaming on toilet Taco Bell. I get that one. It's just it's just like a it's a little vine that Jason's pilot was trying to find again, because it couldn't find it at some guy freaking out because he went to the bathroom without his iPhone. But you know, he's like, Hey, I can't find this vine. And I was like, here it is. Okay, done. That's Metafilter is done if duty asked and answered. I said duty Shut up. That was very

Jessamyn 1:21:56 I wanted I want another role.

Cortex 1:21:58 Well, you just gotta you got to be jumping in grab it. Just start making terrible jokes. Just just one up me. Mario

Cortex 1:22:14 What do you got? What do you got from ask?

Jessamyn 1:22:16 Well, I like this because it went with the one from last month about the Digital Equipment Corporation computers special colors. Right? Right. This is I want to paint an early Stratocaster the original color, but how it cetera? Oh, wow. Which is that age old question. Right. And clearly this user James Paik. You know, this is, this is an issue, this is a thing. It didn't I don't think it even wrapped up by by this point. It's pretty much a month old. It's closing up real soon now. But it's, you know, how do you match a color from an older thing? And how do you and how do you figure it out? Same similar kind of question as the one about the computer. And it's interesting to me watching people kind of talk it over. It's really I

Cortex 1:23:07 mean, we talked about this some already, I think, but you know, it is interesting as a sort of analog. Well, it's an analog analog to sort of like the whole digital archaeology thing. Like here, we see computing platforms that just sort of go away. And then what do you do about that, and you try and do the best you can with archiving and emulation but still like, but but things like this, that like, aren't as clearly a platform, but just the idea of how we make and source and, and provide colors, range and weird thing to think about, oh, that can just we can lose that, you know, especially on such a short scale, like we're talking about guitar,

Jessamyn 1:23:42 I think about it with like, you know, old, old timey pronunciation, right, we only sort of know how people said old words, even if, you know, we've seen them written down a million times because we don't necessarily have them transcribed in you know, in a way that we all agreed on what the what the letters were, etcetera.

ignignokt 1:24:06 Yeah, it reminds me of Yeah, like, like, like a lot of the things the Internet Archive, like, has to do, right. Like, you're just saving like the text and the HTML. Like, all that, all that matters. But yeah, it's not really quite the same as fumigated. Like, Netscape Navigator 2.0 or something like that. I think I think they do work or somebody works on that. Oh, yes. Okay. So they like keep around old versions of browsers and machines to run them on and all that.

Jessamyn 1:24:47 Why don't they keep machines but they have emulators that do a fairly passable Good job. There's other people that do that kind of stuff as well. But yeah,

ignignokt 1:24:55 yeah, cuz I remember, a friend of mine was telling me so There's like, you know, people play like old video games on emulators all the time. But it's actually Apparently, people notice the difference between playing like, a Super Nintendo Super NES emulator on a fast computer versus playing an actual Super Nintendo hook up to it hooked up to a CRT.

Jessamyn 1:25:24 Yeah, you have to actually physically slow it down so that it doesn't the processor doesn't just bump it along.

ignignokt 1:25:31 Yeah, so yeah, there's like those two issues like when you have processors are faster also, like emulators try to like limit, you know, clock speed. But the other thing is, responses are we like the response from you hitting the button on a physical like Super NES controller. And something changing on a CRT monitor is just way way faster. Well, I don't know a way but perceptibly apparently. like hitting a button on your ps3 controller hooked up through USB to your iMac or going through a

Jessamyn 1:26:09 whatever the emulator is with emulator

Cortex 1:26:11 and if you're doing like if you're if you're doing like serious, hardcore gaming to if you're trying to do like frame perfect moves. Yeah, good speed running, then, if suddenly there's a 30 millisecond difference in response time, that's gonna matter. It's gonna matter.

ignignokt 1:26:24 Right, right. Right. And in terms of enjoyment, or I mean, I guess experience which I guess is related to enjoy minute, apparently. So there's there's a scene because there's a scene for everything of like people apparently playing. Yeah, playing that way. On actual hardware. Stuff like that. Sorry to slant everything towards video games all the time.

Cortex 1:26:49 It is no problem. Let me

Jessamyn 1:26:53 because I mean, I don't think Matt was even that much of a gamer. Right. So I think this happens when we get other gamer guests which I you know, fine with me.

Cortex 1:27:03 I should I should conspire to make this happen more often.

Jessamyn 1:27:05 No, I think this is the last time never again. Ever again. No, I mean, I enjoy it because I don't have much of a gaming background. So to me, it's like an opportunity to actually learn something I don't know anything about. Instead of people telling me things. I do know stuff about being like, you know, Jessamyn like this, and I'm like, I know that. No.

ignignokt 1:27:30 Yeah, like Yeah, like I've learned things today. See? Ya, like, Open Library, like, DRM stuff in order to get you stuff. That's

Jessamyn 1:27:40 the land.

ignignokt 1:27:44 Yeah, that's pretty cool. There being a single power plant in Vermont.

Jessamyn 1:27:49 Nuclear Power Plant, but not anymore. A couple power plants.

Cortex 1:27:56 doesn't need any power. It's peat fires, right?

Jessamyn 1:28:01 For the most part, that's why we had the thriving bog mummy community. Is that how they do it?

Cortex 1:28:08 Yes. Well done. You nailed it.

ignignokt 1:28:10 It's a bog mummy a real thing. It is. Well, it does sound real. It sounds like some dragons die.

Jessamyn 1:28:19 Yeah, well, they're called bog bodies. And it's like when people wind up buried in peat bogs. Their bodies get preserved. So they're like mummies. I mean, looking Tollund Man, you can look at his face. And he looks like he, you know, he's just sleeping. But he's been dead since the fourth century BCE.

ignignokt 1:28:38 Oh, that's pretty neat. Oh, actually

Jessamyn 1:28:41 very, very cool.

ignignokt 1:28:43 I just image search. It's pretty cool.

Jessamyn 1:28:46 Oh, God, that sounds like

ignignokt 1:28:50 it this looks like several Iron Maiden album covers. Well.

Jessamyn 1:28:55 I'm not done. Bob butter list. Oh, wait.

Cortex 1:28:59 One thing to be careful when you're searching is to make sure you're looking for peat bogs and outweighed bugs and feel cooked on the way out

Jessamyn 1:29:11 because the words themselves I could see were funny, but there was something wrong with the way you

Cortex 1:29:15 just need. Yeah, just again the cold.

ignignokt 1:29:18 It's funny that you would refer to wade bards?

Cortex 1:29:21 Yeah, I know. It's like topical reference the kids love Wade Boggs.

Jessamyn 1:29:25 This Josh you probably don't but like babies when your baby in a diaper is like pooping. You can kind of tell by looking at them from across the room.

Cortex 1:29:34 I'm really I'm really appreciating this analogy. I've done well, I liked this. This aspect of filters purple blobby things

Jessamyn 1:29:47 to the to the chase. So it's Lolly macat burglar, which is a terrific users and

Cortex 1:29:53 passengers. Is there an answer? No, no, this is this is just an argument that will never be satisfied. Well what it is Like, hey, you know, I found these. Oh, I saw this. Magnets, assorted magnets of animals. And if you look at them, they're assorted, not just like 500 animals from a set, but clearly this is a grab bag. Like these are five different animals from five different, like whole artistic.

Jessamyn 1:30:15 See the other ones are there more after the blobby thing.

Cortex 1:30:18 Yeah, it's there's a, there's a link somewhere.

Jessamyn 1:30:22 Sorry, I'm assuming Oh, here we go. I'm assuming lalime cat burglar is yeah. So

Cortex 1:30:26 yeah. So follow up. And it's got the whole set. And so yeah, it's like it's the total grab bag. So you cannot look at this and say, Oh, of these five. Obviously, this one. They're all farm animals. Yeah, it's all over the map. And so it's like, it's impossible to know. And

Jessamyn 1:30:41 it's like a blimp with a note the horse like of manatee baby manatee.

ignignokt 1:30:47 Yeah. tiger stripe though. So that's, that's what throws you off. I prefer to

Cortex 1:30:53 think it's a Pokemon, but Oh, yeah. But yeah, Taz ended up sidebar in this because it's like, Hey, this is a good one to just get some eyeballs on maybe someone come up something someone track down like, you know, a larger set of just that specific blobby thing to argue I think maybe that the purple misses. I don't know what it is. No. I mean, we still don't know. Yeah. So yeah, that's that's a big, it's a mystery. If you can figure it out. Yeah. Anyway, I enjoy it. I like that sort of thing. And hey, shout out to Taz, who's been doing super great job. Sidebar, invest of stuff. We've, you know, we've talked about trying to do that more, but then we sort of like collectively didn't necessarily gel there. And so we sorted. And then Taz just got on it. We've been sort of collecting links and trying to keep an eye out for stuff. But she's been I think taking advantage of those, those quiet evening shifts. Because it's usually it's usually relatively quiet overnight. So I think that may add up to Yeah, yeah, it was it was real nice. It was real nice and quiet yesterday on the site. Until I said that, like five times, and then I'm at a picnic for Labor Day. And all of a sudden, I have a laptop a couple times. Like oh, shit. But yeah.

Jessamyn 1:32:13 Yeah, like one of these sort of perennial favorites. Oh, my gosh, cat, Mr. Cat, and I lost it. What do I do?

ignignokt 1:32:25 Yeah, have cats

Jessamyn 1:32:26 like you have I don't even know how many cats you have. Jim. I just know one of the SU CONUS. Cats.

ignignokt 1:32:31 Yes, we have gorgeous CAD, we have Dr. Wily and yeah, yeah, the Yeah, the the, the key to this one seem to have been like, it moved. So it had one really good hiding spot. And then, you know, this person looked there or looked somewhere else, and then looked later at that hiding spot. And yeah, it's just like, just like, if a cat like was able to just fine. I think there's been previous ones where? I don't know. It seemed like maybe the cat was just one box. Right? Yeah, like underneath like a recliner. So good. Like this kid moved. That is very clever.

Jessamyn 1:33:14 Right? The cat was under the bathtub. But they checked under the bathtub once until the cat had a second hiding place that this person that G Steph still doesn't even know about. But it was nice because everybody piled on and was like you didn't lose the cat. The cats just hiding? Yeah, not worry. You are fine.

Cortex 1:33:31 To bring this back to video games. Like everything else on the podcast. We just started playing Metal Gear Solid five and you definitely have to hide in multiple places. And one of the early things to not get murdered by mysterious military men. So it's very Yeah, I feel like Yeah.

ignignokt 1:33:50 That guy is getting crazier and crazier. Right? Yeah. Hideo

Cortex 1:33:53 Kojima is Yeah,

ignignokt 1:33:56 I heard like so. I haven't played any of them except for the first one and like I this is this someone that there's like I don't even want to mention it. Or something like some crazy scenario in I think Metal Gear Solid four with like, there's a grenade in somebody's vagina

Cortex 1:34:21 or something. didn't play for so I don't know. Okay. That sounds terrible. Could you make up metal Metal Gear Solid five. You can sneak up on and like weather balloon airlifted goat out of a situation apparently, is the thing that I'm looking forward to being able to do just like send some hapless go up to a spy plane. So it can be I don't know, interrogated. I have no idea what's going on or yet. I just know you can. You can send a goat into the air to be collected by professionals. Which sounds pretty great. Anyway, I just wanted to say I just wanted to make the sneaking joke, I guess. But also speaking of speaking of TAs and speaking of AskMe Metafilter, she asked, What do you do with your sweet red peppers? So if you've got or one

Jessamyn 1:35:12 thread, give it food thread this month.

Cortex 1:35:17 There's a bunch of good looking stuff in there. If you

Jessamyn 1:35:19 like red peppers, oh my god, you can do all sorts of great stuff with them. People had a whole bunch of great recipes. It's a nice simple

ignignokt 1:35:29 you know, are there are there sweet red peppers and non sweet red peppers? Well, there's hot red

Jessamyn 1:35:33 peppers. Like they're not the same thing. But red bell peppers, and then there's like spicy hot peppers.

ignignokt 1:35:39 Okay, so all red bell peppers are sweet red peppers.

Jessamyn 1:35:42 Yeah, yeah. Okay, no, I think

Cortex 1:35:47 I think I think all bell peppers are sweet, but not all sweet peppers are Bell. Oh, yeah. That a syllogism? Is that what have you? Yeah, but I don't feel like making the effort.

Jessamyn 1:36:04 I also, oh, goodness drawn. Well, I just enjoyed this thread by a little bit a bit a bit about Dorothy is Underwood, basically talking about, you know, male socialization, which I think was the one about suicide. And Dorothy Underwood was basically asking, like, how can I help my sons to grow up to be happier in healthy fat, healthier feminist men? Given the toxic patriarchy, you know what's useful? Yeah. And so, you know, a lot of good feedback on how to raise feminist men usefully from you know, younger, you know, how do you start with with kids to raise kids who don't become part of the toxic patriarchy to the extent that you are able to do that? A lot of good, a lot of good, a lot of good feedbacks.

ignignokt 1:36:52 Laying a good groundwork, gender swapping, characters in books. That's a pretty good idea. Okay, I'm scrolling real fast.

Cortex 1:37:05 Through all this Facebook faster, there was a there was a Facebook related question. Basically,

Jessamyn 1:37:13 I saw this, I was wondering if it worked out.

Cortex 1:37:16 Yeah. And I didn't think to look to see if there was an update.

Jessamyn 1:37:20 I didn't want us set it up.

Cortex 1:37:21 I think it's still in progress, basically, trying to deal with Facebook's shitty dumb name policies. And, and it's just because it's like, you know, Facebook is like sort of arbitrarily attentive about this stuff. But at some point, they may just say, Oh, no, we need documentation proving this thing, that there may not actually be helpful documentation for even though it is totally legitimately your name.

Jessamyn 1:37:46 Let's say you're a person who has been going by the same name for the last 15 years, but it's not the one on your driver's license, Facebook may decide to be dicks about it. Yeah. You're like, No, you need to use the name or your driver's license, regardless of

Cortex 1:37:59 Yeah. And in this specific case, basically, I think what happened is Facebook just changed their listed name to include their full last name and not what login

Jessamyn 1:38:08 and sometimes when you can't log into Facebook, you have to confirm by like giving them some piece of information or whatever. And so in this case, the user sent in their picture of their driver's license, which is one of the things Facebook asks for, but then Facebook was like, Oh, your name is different and then just changed it.

Cortex 1:38:26 Yeah. And that's like now my name that I was pointedly not putting there is something Facebook's insisting is on the internet now which is

Jessamyn 1:38:33 so lame. Yeah, yeah, I was really I was really wondering about this

Cortex 1:38:38 Juliette bananas, comment early on God heavily favorited as sort of the you know, if only there was a widely available piece of software that would allow you to manipulate and edit photos and other images like you're sending them a digital file of ID and it's not for you know, government security clearance. Just photoshopped the name you want on your ID on to the scan of your ID

Jessamyn 1:39:01 their job someone can do

Cortex 1:39:05 so yeah, it's just interesting stuff. It's sort of related there's also the getting Social Security to change my middle name to my maiden name one. Oh, right. I remember that one too. This from a couple days ago. Basically fucking fucking you know, documentation man.

Jessamyn 1:39:25 Did that one. This was what the turtles teeth another great username. Did this one. Have a good wrap up?

Cortex 1:39:31 I think I think it's still waiting. I mean, this really was just just a couple days ago. So

Jessamyn 1:39:35 Right. Well, this person basically wanted Yeah, to do that change. maiden name becomes a middle name, drop the middle name. And the person at the Social Security office was like, nope. Oh, you have to put a hyphen between them and, and they asked Metafilter like, really? That's and everyone's like, No, I don't even know that person is but yeah, I

Cortex 1:39:55 get the feeling. You get very varied experiences depending on who you haven't run to when it changed my social security card to use the name I've been using forever. But another name, my gift. Not given. My original my birth. Last name is datas actually, is Wyatt Davis. Davis like like

ignignokt 1:40:17 Joe Davis. I thought you said datas. Josh Davis?

Cortex 1:40:19 Yeah. Well, my,

Jessamyn 1:40:22 like, that's the normal thing in the world that I moved to me. I grew up. Me

Cortex 1:40:27 Well, you know, my mom and my mom and my bio dad got divorced when I was like, you know, an infant. And, you know, mom got remarried a couple years later, and I grew up with my dad being you know, my dad. And so yeah,

Jessamyn 1:40:41 I grew up in is Mr. malarkey. Yeah. Yeah. And

Cortex 1:40:44 so I just like I grew up with a

Jessamyn 1:40:47 guy on the birth certificate. Yeah.

Cortex 1:40:50 And so eventually, I was like, This is dumb. Yeah, no, I know. He's a good guy. He's, he's one who bought me a banjo he got

ignignokt 1:40:58 is that the first instrument? You played?

Cortex 1:41:00 No, no. But I learned to play. I learned to play guitar. On his guitar, actually, his old guitar because I went up and visited. He lives in Montana, we'd go up and visit sometimes. And I got a splinter in my heel like the first day of a week at cabin on a lake. And so like waterskiing was suddenly sort of not so doable. And so I stayed at the side and played, I taught myself play guitar, and he said, Okay, well, just here, take the guitar with you, because you're playing it more than I am. So. But anyway, Oh, yeah. At some point, like in high school.

Jessamyn 1:41:33 Shadows real name is Josh Davis.

Cortex 1:41:36 Crazy. Maybe it's me. That's what the shadow stands for. Yeah, I basically wandered in the Social Security Administration. And you were how old is at some point when I was like, I don't know. I would say like, 17 1819. Somewhere in there. I was like, I should really get this change. I didn't really get the name I used on my social security card. And I think I went and said, Hey, I want to do this is like, well, you're supposed to have this as like, well, I don't have that. And they're like, Well, okay. And then just

Jessamyn 1:42:05 going by Josh Millard the whole time, it just wasn't on the cart.

Cortex 1:42:08 Yeah, exactly. I mean, it was it was totally defensible. If I was going to do it more formally, it would have been like, no problem. But I think I may have gotten away with a couple of skip steps just because someone's like, Oh, whatever. Sure.

ignignokt 1:42:18 Somebody who Yeah, when they got married, they changed their first and last name, just all in one go. And

Jessamyn 1:42:25 when you get married, you get one free name change, change all the names.

ignignokt 1:42:31 Oh, so I don't know this. This is kind of stupid. But this was an interesting question, just because I never realized this even though the question wasn't answered. So his question is Has rose ever commented on the fact that his stage name is an anagram for oral sex?

Jessamyn 1:42:50 MC Mike.

ignignokt 1:42:53 Yeah. Mara, post is like that. That's a very good question. Like, it does seem like he would intentionally pick that right? He would know. Okay, he would like pick first like oral sex. And then you'd be like, what name can I form from that? But it's pretty nearly seems like it's just like a huge, huge coincidence.

Jessamyn 1:43:12 Well, people said like, his real last name was rose because that was his biological dad. So I mean, you know, similar. Similar seeming. That is funny. I remember. I remember reading that when it came up. Yeah. It's not stupid. It's interesting.

Cortex 1:43:27 It is interesting. I can't stand Axl Rose. Yeah, but that doesn't really play into it one way or the other. It doesn't matter what you feel. I know. Same. Feelings aren't aren't at issue here. They're tangential to the subject.

Jessamyn 1:43:44 I had one more just I thought this one was kind of weird and interesting. Like I really like Fiji bottled water, but I don't like buying bottled water. Can I make water like Fiji water from tap water? I used to like magic by one. One go see. Does anybody know how to go see David by David?

ignignokt 1:44:09 Circus Yeah, so Fiji water. Apparently. I have heard that they see let me look at the Wikipedia article. Does they have like a really oppressive totalitarian governments in Fiji

Cortex 1:44:27 it may be sort of a problematic situation I don't remember exactly what the details were.

ignignokt 1:44:33 Politics 2006 military takeover forces. Okay, I'm not gonna make a judgment about Fiji there's there's some 2006 military takeover action in there which pedia article but yeah, it's weird that it does taste better like I played poker for a while. And like if the casinos they would give you this Fiji water. I'd be like whatever poker

Jessamyn 1:44:55 in casinos

ignignokt 1:44:57 Yeah, yeah, there's like a period where

Jessamyn 1:44:59 guys I'm learning all sorts of Josh's name isn't Josh's name. You were like, Vegas poker player.

ignignokt 1:45:05 I played in Indiana. I drove to from Chicago, and I would play

Cortex 1:45:12 piano is the Vegas of the new Midwest.

ignignokt 1:45:15 It's a very it is it's like, it's like, Well, Gary and East Chicago, they, they have, they don't have much to look forward to. And they don't have great government. So, you know, I'm not saying that having a casino is necessarily a sign that, you know, you're screwed or something like that. But you're saying, so that's where you go to play poker in Chicago? Sorry, what?

Jessamyn 1:45:45 For money, like you made money on it?

ignignokt 1:45:48 I did, I made like, I think overall, like I was very scared of like, somehow getting sucked in and losing a ton of money. But overall, I made enough money to like say, buy a computer, not enough to like buy a car or something like that. But it was it was on TV for a while, right. And like people were all over it. So it was it was pretty soft for a while. And then people like online poker became huge. And then then it became even more popular that way. So it was like this exciting tension between you know, you wanted to play good players to like, prove that you're good and like, you know, have exciting plays, but you also wanted to play bad players to win money to make you feel like you're a good guy one. But at the casinos, you you play mostly bad players. And you know, unless you got into some ego problems, which you could, you could stay away from bed, good players. And that's that's how I made money for a while that money isn't making money for a living, but just like, you know, making a few $100 a visit.

Jessamyn 1:46:57 I mean, it was money. That seems all right.

ignignokt 1:47:00 Right, right. And then it got really hard after they passed this law called Weijia. Or UI g, where they made it impossible to transfer money from US banks into things that poker surfaces could get. Yeah, and then like everyone stopped playing, and then like the only people who like are really tough. And then I think I started dating. So it's just like, forget

Jessamyn 1:47:32 too hard. Like the stereotype. I got a girlfriend no more poker. Yeah.

Cortex 1:47:38 It's an okay trade off, you know?

ignignokt 1:47:40 Yeah, yeah. Well, but yeah, there's it was like, I'm not particularly great or anything. It was just like, kind of a easy time for people who were like, you know, we're willing to like read some books and things like that.

Jessamyn 1:47:54 Interesting. See, I don't I don't know any poker players. So that's a interesting look into something I didn't know anything about.

ignignokt 1:48:01 Yeah. I did in the

Jessamyn 1:48:06 back in the arts, to be honest, I

ignignokt 1:48:08 guess that's what we call that right now. That's what I call I don't know.

Cortex 1:48:15 I feel like we had to get through it to figure out what to call it. And at this point, we realize now that we're through while we were in it, well, yeah, well, that's what I'm saying is like, you know, so people have had time to sort of settle on something personally. But it turns out once we're out of it, we just don't have to talk about it so much. So maybe we'll just never get a consensus there. And everybody just be like saying whatever they say when they do but mostly just avoiding talking about it.

ignignokt 1:48:37 Yeah, you could just say now and stuff like that back.

Cortex 1:48:39 Back when I was president. Any other medical stuff?

Jessamyn 1:48:48 That was my complete list?

Cortex 1:48:49 I can I can.

ignignokt 1:48:51 I think that's all I have. There are many things I favorited and meant to read but didn't so I can't really say much. Well, so there's two that are like one is be fights with young children. What do you love hate about your house? And this is a question like asking like, what should I look for in a house? That is very important. Is it bye bye. Catseye. Let me post the link Sorry, I'm on point here.

Cortex 1:49:24 It's like you haven't done this. 100 times before. Right. amateurism

ignignokt 1:49:30 Yeah, you're getting some folk podcasts in here

Cortex 1:49:34 like it it's nice to mix up the energy like this we get a slightly different playthrough each time.

ignignokt 1:49:41 So ya know, it's like, you know, people can get numb to your sleep professionalism.

Cortex 1:49:47 Yes. That's telling me the podcast is so credibly well produced. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:49:53 Slick.

ignignokt 1:49:56 Oh, and there's another one. I was reading that I It participated. But I don't know if that's a good thread because it doesn't have great answers. But it's like Where can I think it was? Where can I live? I should be married. Oh, where should we live in the Boston area? Scott S Oh 17 has like a 20 month old daughter and he lives in Cambridge. And he now wants some other kid friendly type stuff. But some are more affordable than Cambridge, which is now many people's reach. Yeah.

ignignokt 1:50:35 So they're like a couple of people talked about, like Melrose and Salem. And I think it's, I think it's interesting to hear about these things. Because, you know, I, I moved here six or seven years ago, and I rarely go outside of Boston, for Cambridge. So, you know, knowing about these other towns is probably important now that things are crazy expensive here.

Jessamyn 1:51:01 Great. Well, and that's where you guys live, right? Yeah, we live in Somerville. Okay, so over the border

Cortex 1:51:08 where it's always summer

Jessamyn 1:51:12 or high real like it's always summer everywhere in the world right now.

Cortex 1:51:16 Yeah, that's our future always summer all the time. Yeah, I could toss out a quick music minute here. Great. I because I had a cold I was just like, I'm just gonna pick some things I like and not try as hard as I normally would to look for new names and whatnot. So there's a really nice thing from choco cat. Which is like that guy in the music he made. He makes great stuff and so this is a song called be what you want that he did for for Song mefite That I guess he's still doing on and off. Oh, yeah, it's still going launched the career of one. Jesus Christ.

ignignokt 1:51:51 This is grand stats are like Jonathan Coulton or

Cortex 1:51:55 NC front a lot is what I was going for. Oh, yeah, he got going there. So that's really nice. There's this fantastic piece of work by by Jake. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because like, I think I think of him as one of the guys does really great chip tune stuff. And the thing is, this is also really great. Sort of chip tuning electronic stuff, but it's so sort of off the hyperactive bleep bloop feel. It's much more of a sort of jazzy

ignignokt 1:52:23 feel. Yeah, I just listened to as you read his comment about his setup. He has an entirely different PC. That just does just runs his VSTS for his sentence for months. Right. Right. And then his, his MacBook Pro is like the master thing that runs Cubase and controls that. Yeah. That's kind of amazing. Maybe it's that amazing. Probably people have this all the time. But it occurred to me.

Cortex 1:52:51 Yeah, you could sort of like slight those two things out. But yeah, it's really nice. And it's, I think, for people who think of like, oh, like Nintendo era video game music with not expect what that sounds like. So it's a really great place to work and he does excellent stuff.

ignignokt 1:53:07 And a guy he's, he's a professional music composer. So, you know, I guess you should expect that.

Cortex 1:53:13 He's got the chops. Yeah. And then there's last Cuevas haason Echo and Sacromonte I don't know I may have gotten that this I don't even post this nice central nice Spanish language track and it's great it's nice it's something I want to drink like a gin and tonic on a porch too. And there's been other stuff too but again, it's the last the last trip cross country haze plus cold here I'm just not going to pretend to be able to do a better job but nice more

ignignokt 1:53:52 admirable Yeah, I can't really tell you have a cold mostly verbal mentioning or any

Jessamyn 1:54:01 constant whining.

Cortex 1:54:03 Well, that's that's the that's what holds my world together as you know, complaints unending

Jessamyn 1:54:07 Well, I'm that's funny. You're like, Actually now that I say that I realized exactly how not true that is. Like you

Cortex 1:54:14 never whine about anything. I tried to keep my wines mostly good spirited.

Jessamyn 1:54:18 But I mean like you'll occasionally like bitch about a thing but you don't have that like whiny like. Like other people I've known in the podcast.

Cortex 1:54:27 Oh shade. You heard me. couple a couple of nice quick things on metal talk to one of which we sort of mentioned briefly at the beginning but hey, you know who's Jasmine's birthday so Happy Birthday just

Jessamyn 1:54:44 very nice. And there is a picture down there of the I think I fucked up the picture and PB had to fix it for me. All I see is he edited I don't know what he did to it. Yeah, there may have been maybe I can't add pictures anymore since I'm only used

Cortex 1:54:57 to the Admin Tools thing. I think he added Oh, started from resizing too large on phones. That's just with stuff I've run into as well. I think people who are looking on phone sometimes there's like, it's wider.

ignignokt 1:55:11 You ruined my life. Oh, I saw this in recent activity. I just saw your comments. Sorry for party linking. And there's no,

Jessamyn 1:55:17 like, there's no party linking. Yes. Go to the thread. Cuz there's a very funny picture. And we don't have, but thank you for that. I always appreciate birthday threads. Yeah,

Cortex 1:55:29 it was PBS birthday. Just recently do so.

Jessamyn 1:55:32 He's also a Virgo. Yes.

Cortex 1:55:35 It's a very big ocean scene

Jessamyn 1:55:37 out here. I sent him some pictures, links to pictures on Facebook. And he sent me some links to pictures in this thread. It was really nice. Excellent. PD. Scott. Like the awesomest. Instagram. He is such a talented photographer. Everyone should follow him on Instagram.

Cortex 1:55:49 Yep. The man knows how to take photographs. Yeah. Also, this month we're doing the posting to the front page. You can do it too thing basically. Hey, if you don't post

Jessamyn 1:56:01 Julian is so good at community spirit stuff.

Cortex 1:56:03 Yeah. And she she's done a great job of she did sort of a previous post to sort of like get ideas rolling for this and then did this on the first. And yeah, it's going pretty well, I want to get a banner up actually, that's another thing that I got to stop complaining about the drive but it's just weird losing a week like that I gotta play. But we'll we'll get a banner up on the like off the top of the screen to at some point to say, Oh, hey, you can come do this. Because yeah, if you if you if you have been afraid to post to the front page of meta filter or just haven't gotten around to it or haven't done a long time, we're just sort of encouraging people to go and just post for the heck of posting you know, get in on that enjoy posting, try it out, see if you like it, you know, because more people posting is always you know, good for sort of diversity and interesting new details and

Jessamyn 1:56:50 different perspectives. And there's a bunch of people in that thread who will be happy to look over a post if you're concerned. I will be happy to look over a post if you're concerned so many other people.

Cortex 1:56:59 Yeah, if you're like, I have an idea, but I'm not sure then yeah, just check with someone who said hey, let me know. And they'll be happy to you know, work through it with you figure out what will work best it etc. So some

ignignokt 1:57:09 people from they came out of the in July by women from like last year. Yeah, I think they are still posting to the front page. Yeah, no, we could do it. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. So

Cortex 1:57:21 it's neat. And I'm happy it's going along people are getting their post on and Yeah. And I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff but we've we've we've run up to about two hours here so we should probably just

Jessamyn 1:57:35 Yeah, what a very Karen Yeah. Cameron with us for this whole time.

ignignokt 1:57:40 It was fun. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I glad that I meant to like really prepared for this, but then I did. I'm glad it worked out. Yeah, thanks for having me on. This has been fun to see the side of this. This is like pretty much a podcast I subscribed to and like listened to. Usually within a week of it going up.

Jessamyn 1:58:09 how little we edit it.

ignignokt 1:58:12 It's, it's I think it's like a it's one of those things I feel is a good podcast, even if you don't read metal filter, just to hear about what's going on on the internet. We kind of like I also listed like some other podcasts where it has like this vibe that is, you know, well maybe that's a personality thing. Like maybe you don't like maybe maybe you you could listen to it and that like the vibe but I also like that if I don't don't care about it, there's like some other podcasts I listen to like, like, I listen to this video game podcast that is like all about video games, but I really don't play any video games anymore. I just don't have any time but yeah, it's like it's it's you know, I'm glad you guys do it. And it's like a great thing to great to hear familiar sort of being a voices

Jessamyn 1:59:06 plenty to me to think that I'm that person like oh yeah, Voice of whatever

ignignokt 1:59:11 internet like Marc Maron things of less good or bad.

Cortex 1:59:20 He's really got the wind down, though. You know, he's leveraged president.

Jessamyn 1:59:25 I did listen to that entire episode. In fact, I was just listening to Marin yesterday with his Jason Segel interview I listen to him all the time, but I sometimes fast forward through the his personal life part of the whole thing.

ignignokt 1:59:37 Yeah, I I think I listened to every 10th One or something like that. Because yeah, there's just too many of them. i Oh, not too many of them for his fans. Obviously. He's big, big fans. Yeah.

Cortex 1:59:49 Well, right. Let's call a good thank you so much again for for joining us and thanks, everybody, for listening and we'll be back probably closer to the actual first of next month. Just A couple three weeks. Yeah, three, solid three or as they say, they, they they they totally say a solid three or I know it's been said at least twice. You just said it was exactly so we're solid. All right. Thanks everybody for listening

ignignokt 2:00:20 okay

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