Podcast 110 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 110: Stealin' Lincoln, with Eyebrows McGee (2015-11-02).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 podcasts for a podcast podcast Josh bar and gentlemen where God was a muddy mess where the best of the web Hello and welcome to episode 110 of Best of the web the medical term monthly podcast. I am cortex aka Josh Mullard I'm Jessamyn and with us today is our special guest Mefi mefite Of The Month eyebrows muggy Morning. Morning. She is also known as Laura sometimes in her human name but you know her on the site is eyebrows McGee. Fun contributor and recent helpful guinea pig in the books stuff we're starting to fiddle with on fanfare which I appreciate you helping out trying to figure out some book club stuff on that.

Jessamyn 1:01 And my Western me fight. So we're coming at you from three time zones. Yes, yeah, you're saying after daylight savings time, we could not be more discombobulated.

Cortex 1:12 So yeah, thanks. Thanks for Thanks for joining us. I'm excited. Are you? Are you a regular podcast listener?

Eyebrows McGee 1:19 I am and then I studied over the weekend.

Jessamyn 1:23 You poor bastard.

Cortex 1:25 done more work on this than we are going to

Jessamyn 1:29 10 minutes getting prepared and that's prepared for me. To have those minutes. We're just emailing Josh being like you better prepare.

Eyebrows McGee 1:38 I gotta get back to the ones with the guests recently. So I would you know, know what I was supposed to sound like

Cortex 1:47 that some solid prep work. Jessamyn Do you have anything to tell us about the number 110?

Jessamyn 1:51 Do you know I am unimpressed by the number 110 I know it's got a whole bunch of things like it's a scenic numbered a pranic number. It's three squares that are all five squared, six squared, seven squared, which is kind of cool, I guess. Self number. It's the atomic number of Darmstadt theum. Which I have no idea what that is. And, you know, i It's the first number that's really kind of left me like, I don't I don't have much to say about it. Except it is also known as a Levante, which book nerds will appreciate is a Tolkien reference. Bilbo Baggins has his 11 D first birthday at the very beginning of the Lord of the Rings. That's right. So that's the only thing but that's not even quite I mean, you know, yeah, that's a different word. But it really is 110 for those pedants out there who care about that kind of thing.

Cortex 2:45 You say pedant I say Pete and of course you do. Well, but it's funny because like, I mean, the more familiar like

Jessamyn 2:52 tiebreaker pattern

Cortex 2:57 I'm coming more to grips over time with just accepting the the idiosyncrasies my pronunciation lucky on it, yeah, making peace with it. Instead of instead of always trying to deny that it exists.

Jessamyn 3:12 Like you say it out loud it sounds

Cortex 3:14 well no, no, no, no no. deny that everybody else is correct is the thing that's what I'm trying to not do quite so much is just insist that everybody except for me has gotten it wrong. So Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's a work in progress, you

Eyebrows McGee 3:25 know, but it's like a sign of being well read that you know, many more words.

Cortex 3:30 Single words. Exactly. Yeah. It's a badge of pride it's it's because my large vocabulary just not field tested. We usually start talking off jobs and projects. There wasn't a whole lot of jobs but couple things in there and there was a VFX thing for a low budget science fiction movie.

Jessamyn 3:53 actually look at jobs. Oh, show Laura where we put the links. Oh, yeah, already do i No,

Cortex 3:58 no, I did not already. I will paste the link this is some serious live podcasting right here. I will paste the link into the chat window if I can find it. This is the part of the show where

Jessamyn 4:08 we traditionally thing in there that should help

Cortex 4:10 Okay, I got it. Yeah. So yeah, any any link you're linking to just talk while we discuss it? It's very

Jessamyn 4:16 excited do is be friendly about mentioning everybody's name because it's like, you know, seeing your name in the paper or something be like Hey,

Cortex 4:24 so yes, Dr. Jimmy 11 has a posting for a freelance VFX artists for a feature film. Sounds like a low budget. You'd be like the person doing it. Nothing crazy spectacular. But if you do VFX

Jessamyn 4:36 it pays in money. Yep. They will

Cortex 4:39 pay you in negotiable dollars. So that's going on. But yeah, kind of quiet jobs is usually pretty quiet. But it's still it's I think particularly quiet.

Jessamyn 4:50 northeasterners can help crooked neighbor

Cortex 4:55 that's already out of date. They moved on the 26th it looks like dang it. So Yeah, I was gonna say yeah, go help people move but you know, what do you do?

Jessamyn 5:04 You know, I have to say I had a whole bunch of mefites and former mefites helped me with I got a new bed. You know how they tell you for sleep hygiene you're really supposed to like only use your bed for like, screwing around and sleeping and not anything else.

Eyebrows McGee 5:17 Right? Yeah.

Jessamyn 5:19 Crickets Come on, you guys.

Cortex 5:21 I was just It sounded like you were like, that was the that was this setup. I was waiting. I have sleep

Jessamyn 5:26 issues. And so I decided the best way to deal with that was to get a second bed and put it in the living room. Ah, see, you pronounce things funny. This is the way I you know, this is my manifestation of what is probably an identical quirk, you've got this big steel bed. But then like I'm one little person and I live up to very steep flights of stairs. So I had to get various people including terrapins, thank you. And the long ago band foe Scott, but still my neighbor to help me bring this thing inside so that I could hook it all up. Excellent. That is my furniture moving story.

Cortex 6:02 Way to move furniture? mefites. Yeah, I guess. Laura, how do you? Do we explicitly say you're also named Laura? Yeah, I think so.

Jessamyn 6:13 Oh, my God. It's earlier it's early. But

Cortex 6:15 it usually is I'm still doing it. My second cup of tea.

Jessamyn 6:17 Even put off taking Sudafed until after this podcast.

Eyebrows McGee 6:21 I took it before the podcast.

Cortex 6:25 But yeah, what's what's your take on pronouncing? Me, FYI? It

Eyebrows McGee 6:30 me phi c be fine. But when my sister first told me about the site, and this was like six years ago,

Jessamyn 6:37 we your sisters on the site? Yes. She's not very active.

Eyebrows McGee 6:41 But if we were all home for Christmas, and I was enormously pregnant, and I could barely get off the couch. And she's like, I'm like, I'm so bored on the internet. And she said, Well, I like to read this site called Mefi. And I was like, What the hell is that? And so she showed it to me. And a couple months later, after my first kid was born, I joined because I was so bored. And you were having such interesting conversations. And, you know, the breastfeeding moms of men of filter who are posting all night because they're up all night. Right? So yeah, that was she calls it Mefi. And I'm like, no, no, it's me fi you're wrong.

Cortex 7:20 It's important to be able to argue about these things. I think it brings something to the site, you know, it's something we can all get together be angry at each other about

Jessamyn 7:27 well, and if you're I am Kim, I am you can write your whole PhD on it. Yes. I mean, that's really what you want, right? It's a thing that will actually generate energy relevant by Internet, people fighting with each other. And

Cortex 7:40 actually, you know, it's like, let's have some actual, like, productive outcome on this stuff. Right? Should we talk about the projects?

Jessamyn 7:46 Oh, we should projects was kind of great. This, this time around, at least I thought, so

Cortex 7:50 it's continued to be really busy. Okay.

Jessamyn 7:53 You know, when you try to close a tab and you or you try to go to a tab and you click Close, tab manager that puts the close buttons on the both corners and you forgot, because you haven't been using your computer for two weeks, because two months because your shoulder hurts. I

Cortex 8:07 totally understand every aspect of that.

Jessamyn 8:09 I know.

Eyebrows McGee 8:11 I actually, I bought this project, the astronaut instruction manual.

Jessamyn 8:18 That was one of the ones I liked. My kids

Eyebrows McGee 8:21 are spaced crazy. And so I ran right out to get that because my four year old is going to die when he gets

Jessamyn 8:29 this was a post by Mike Mongo. And then it got posted to Metafilter. And I just saw it like today and was like, Oh my God, that's crazy. But can you tell us more about it? It's a heavily linked very long post.

Eyebrows McGee 8:40 Yeah, he, when he realized he couldn't be an astronaut, he decided, as many of us went through, right? He decided he would write a book for young people for like Junior High elementary school age students about how to be an astronaut. And it just I went and I looked and I'm like, Oh, my God, my kids want to read this so bad. So I think it's for the nine to 13 year old set, but I think we'll be reading his bedtime reading.

Jessamyn 9:14 When you can when you can basically do something about it. Right is kind of like, okay, you're a kid and you really want to go into space. What can you do right now? Yeah.

Eyebrows McGee 9:25 How can you learn to be an astronaut?

Jessamyn 9:27 How can you learn about science? And then it turned into a thread on Metafilter? Yeah.

Eyebrows McGee 9:34 I don't have the thread linked.

Cortex 9:35 I did. It's linked in the projects post. You can just

Jessamyn 9:39 Well, here's the thing. It's linked above. I see at the bottom. Conrad is fully awesome. And yeah, there was just I mean, it's mostly just a bunch of people being like, woo. And Mike said some more stuff. Yep, looks about it. it. So I'm looking forward to getting the Metafilter shop back up again. So, make this book and we can all sell our things.

Cortex 10:09 Yeah, we gotta get them all running for the Christmas season approaches, holiday season holiday season, the season of giving things to people.

Eyebrows McGee 10:21 So I like I email Brandon blancher with my space questions from my kids. Yeah, he's a big space. And he's very helpful. But I made my my four year old a Mars rover. And I take that to you

Jessamyn 10:38 that the stuffed Mars rover, I thought you turned your four year old into a Mars rover but no,

Eyebrows McGee 10:45 he loves He says it's my favorite thing in the whole solar system. He says to be the first human astronaut on Mars so he can join the robot astronauts. That's awesome. So I showed that to Brandon and he was like

Jessamyn 11:04 my question for Brandon black shirt. Maybe I can look it up now. In five seconds. That the this thing I just saw a run around Twitter again that the the Mars Rover sings happy birthday to itself alone on Mars.

Eyebrows McGee 11:19 We'll send you a wake up sign. Nobody said

Jessamyn 11:23 it a song. Well, they

Eyebrows McGee 11:25 can send it a song. Oh, I see they're vibrating.

Jessamyn 11:30 It vibrates frequencies to move soil samples and it's kinda like Happy Birthday. God. At any rate, I saw that, you know, Internet people trying to figure out that other people are lonelier than them.

Eyebrows McGee 11:45 That's the model for the stuffed Mars rover is curiosity. Nice.

Jessamyn 11:51 I couldn't tell them apart. Are they different?

Eyebrows McGee 11:54 I Oh, yes. We know all the Mars Rovers in this house. They don't kind of all look the same. No. Well, sort of. They're all different sizes and they range from the size of a shoebox to the size of an SUV.

Jessamyn 12:06 That's important Intel for me. I should get a child to explain this to you. Are you someone

Eyebrows McGee 12:12 my child he will tell you at length and about how the earth irritates around the sun and you'll get excellent four year old Intel.

Jessamyn 12:23 Whatever three syllable words. Way to go kid.

Cortex 12:27 Next month's podcast guests sorted out

Jessamyn 12:31 about having a child on the podcast

Eyebrows McGee 12:32 and things Hamilton Oh nice.

Jessamyn 12:36 I've got I gotta know Hamilton zone around me.

Cortex 12:40 As I Hamilton are just not investing and so feeling

Jessamyn 12:44 cold. You have so much in his Twitter thread. It's become so much about that.

Cortex 12:48 It has it has been he's a major outlet of Hamilton tweet and Alia I haven't I haven't listened to it at all yet. I should because I think I would probably enjoy it. I thought it was funny I so it's it's written by a guy named Lin Manuel Miranda,

Jessamyn 13:04 who I discovered on Twitter literally four days before this all blew up because he did a little video as a child about loving my landlady's book, The pushcart war and I had just found it randomly probably because he was getting internet famous.

Cortex 13:18 I discovered him. Like a couple of weeks after the Hamilton stuff started sort of blowing up on kilchis Twitter feed, because I was watching I've been slowly watching through the entire series run of house because it's like the dumb easy TV that we watch when we don't want to think. Yeah. And he was on it. I saw the name of it. I've seen that name a bunch on Twitter who the hell is that? Oh, it's Alvie it's the crazy guy who raps on on house. Okay, and it also seemed

Jessamyn 13:44 like a long term character or like

Cortex 13:48 he was he was in a like one or two part episode at the beginning of season five I think how many season seats I think there's total at some point house has a big breakdown where he realizes that he's hallucinating because of Vika den. And so he goes to a rehab facility and so there's a sort of like, you know, happy shiny, friendly, honestly kind of black episode where he sort of learns to be seen again while interacting with a bunch of people, mental patients, Cuckoo's Nest except for like, you know, way shinier for the most part. So it's kinda it's not a great episode. It's sort feels sort of problematic and a lot of ways but among other things, Lin Manuel Miranda plays a guy named Alvey who's like a sort of wrapping you know, I don't know he's like, super high energy. I don't remember even what the characters deal was. So you see him for a couple episodes of mania Yeah, manic and maybe had a pill issue or something. I don't remember what the situation was. But anyway, he comes back a couple seasons later just out of the blue so

Eyebrows McGee 14:54 also, he was on the new edition of The Electric Company.

Cortex 14:59 Why Hey, yes,

Eyebrows McGee 15:01 rapping about letters.

Cortex 15:02 It's pretty sweet, sweet projects, I guess I guess. We're like doing the opposite of like, making a no Hamilton zone for you. We're just gonna talk about Hamilton for 10 minutes for no reason on that podcast.

Jessamyn 15:17 Object, verb from metta filter, did a great little thing called by it's called What If WordPress was your boyfriend? But realistically, he and some friends redesigned the toast. Yeah, yeah, it toast the website that we all love to love. And they did some blog posts about how they did it. And it was very, it's adorable, like the post about how they made it in the decisions they made is really thoughtful and interesting. At least I liked it. I thought it was extra interesting. Like, how do you take a website that's pretty popular and already pretty good. And make it just a little bit better? And more like itself? Kind of basically.

Cortex 16:03 Yeah, they did a nice job and yeah,

Jessamyn 16:05 so that so the site was already on WordPress, and they just kind of redid it literally inside WordPress. You him and Ethan Marcotte who's I think? Think he's on? I think all these people are somewhere on the internet, but like, it's people you've heard of. And yeah, fascinating, fascinating, fascinating, and a fascinating webpage about sort of how they did it.

Cortex 16:31 It's nice to see a good write up on that sort of thing, rather than just having it happen in the background. It's also nice to have it. Oh, sorry, I was gonna say it's also nice to have it actually come out well, rather than like, hey, we did a redesign, because we decided as a corporate strategy thing we should so it's terrible.

Jessamyn 16:45 Moments. Yeah. Seriously, I, I've never been one of those like, Oh, I like to hate read things. But I like the hate read moments. On Twitter. Really, because it makes me so angry. I swear to God, they took up you know, a feature and they took away like 5% of every button space and gave it to this button I don't want and then I swear to God, they let an intern fill it in, or a robot or an intern guided by a robot or a robot guided by an intern. And it's just so wrong and so bad. But I enjoy my 32nd hate of moments every day when I check it but refuse to click on anything. A little

Cortex 17:23 vitamin gararion important to keep those muscles at least flexed a little bit? Yes. I really enjoyed as no one will be surprised to find this project by womp rat 78 called it's autumn on Arachis which is a Twitter account called Wadi bucks. That does dune quotes except for it puts pumpkin in front of the word spice in in those quotes about spice so you get things like the pumpkin spice must flow. And wherever there's pumping pumpkin spice, there are worms and so on. Because there's you know, doing spice by students so pumpkin spice because Starbucks. I feel like I'm over explaining the joke. But the point is, I'm delighted by this.

Eyebrows McGee 18:12 I thought it was very funny. I'm not into doing but I still thought it was very funny.

Cortex 18:16 Hashtag Chai Hulu's just by itself makes a whole thing for me.

Jessamyn 18:21 I don't even Yeah, I mean, I get it, but I don't get it.

Cortex 18:25 It's I feel like it's exactly like either the greatest thing in the world or it's gonna just depend on where you are i as ridiculous dune fan I I'm definitely

Jessamyn 18:36 not a dune fan. I get why it's funny. It just, you know.

Eyebrows McGee 18:39 Yep. I'm just a pumpkin spice hater. So,

Jessamyn 18:44 spice lover I just have a sincere enjoyment you know on ironic enjoyment of pumpkin flavors and colors just

Eyebrows McGee 18:51 don't want to eat it. I don't want to like go stab anyone for liking it. I just don't want to eat it.

Jessamyn 18:56 If I had to choose like, what one flavor my Soylent would have for the rest of my life and like bacon cheeseburger flavor were taken. Pumpkin Spice would be a close second or third.

Eyebrows McGee 19:09 I don't want your Soylent.

Jessamyn 19:11 I'm just saying, you know, you have to prepare for these future dystopias.

Eyebrows McGee 19:14 Now I'm gonna have to think about that all day.

Jessamyn 19:17 I know it's a good question, right? I mean, cuz you know, you don't want to be at parties being like so what do you do but like if you have to eat one flavor for the entire rest of your life, pick

Cortex 19:28 on a slightly more cerebral front, I guess then just pumpkins Christ puns. I also liked this project by the truth is just Ali just alive for us. Probably the truth is just a lie. Parsing parsing usernames scoring lyrical cliches with engrams. Basically, they're taking the lyrics to songs and throwing them at Engram frequency analysis to figure out how cliched the lyrics are and grand AMS for anybody who's like what is just a generic general way to refer to search for a word on Google and get a chart. Yeah, or a certain number of words. So the N and N gram stands for, like how many words in a row? So if you're searching for a three word phrase, that'd be a three gram. As Yeah, like, like if you're so. So say you want to find out, you know, various different four letter word phrases, those would be four grams, a one gram would be a single word. So n grams just refers to the general idea of sets of consecutive words that you're searching for.

Jessamyn 20:34 Now, let's search for phrases somehow. All right? Yeah, I've learned a thing. Great.

Cortex 20:39 So this is taken out and saying, Okay, let's look at popular music. Let's look at the lyrics of various artists or albums and see how rich and wide the vocabulary is how much things repeat themselves, or use very common phrases and sort of get a picture of the prevalence of lyrical cliche in a given body of work just through that sort of automatic analysis. So it's a neat thing. And it looks like they're playing with a bunch of stuff related to it. They also link in the, in the comment thread on the projects post a side by side playback of country version and r&b versions of the song I swear, which aren't quite tempo match, so they sort of diverged from each other, but almost, I think that makes it better. But yeah, I thought that was really neat. That's kind of up my alley, though.

Jessamyn 21:28 I'm more of a visual thinker. So I think I really enjoy it. Although it's, you know, two days too late now. Thomas parks, carbon costume DIY guides for cosplay and Halloween. Yeah, what you have to wear to be the guy from Devo what you have to wear to be wizard white beard. What are the essential components to be? Winder? Which I guess is the lady Waldo which I'm embarrassed? I didn't know what I forgot. When there was a thing I did actually

Cortex 21:59 now that you bring it up a bit. Yeah. I don't I don't think I've ever had a whole lot of like, interaction culturally with Wendy. But I know of when the I believe that that is ringing a serious Bell. But like

Jessamyn 22:11 what if you want to be Gary from Wet Hot American Summer, which is what I've been watching lately.

Cortex 22:18 If you didn't know, did you watch the original movie of that?

Jessamyn 22:20 Watch the movie, whatever, when it came out, and now I've been going through and watching the TV series.

Cortex 22:25 I watched the movie many years after it came out. But after I had sort of caught up with the people involved, like I had never really watched the state. I'd never watch real 911 I never watch I

Jessamyn 22:35 didn't watch it when it came out. Hold on. When did it come out? I thought it was recent ish.

Cortex 22:40 I don't think it was a super long time ago. But it came out. It was a few years ago.

Jessamyn 22:46 One Oh, no. So long time ago. Yeah. All right. So

Cortex 22:49 you know, they've all aged conspicuously, which I love as a straight face gig that they keep running with where characters just pointedly named check the fact that they're like, you know, Janine Graf. Hello. You know, being a nice teenager teenagers. Yes, exactly. Very nice. Yeah. I really enjoyed that.

Jessamyn 23:06 Have you seen this movie? Or this TV show? Laura?

Eyebrows McGee 23:09 I have not.

Cortex 23:10 Oh, come out to the film called Wet Hot American Summer. And then

Jessamyn 23:14 presuming you're approximately in our age cohort that is somewhere between Josh's age and my age. It

Eyebrows McGee 23:21 sounds like it's right at our because I can't watch anything with language until my kids go to bed at night. And so then it has to be like short.

Jessamyn 23:33 Well, you might like the TV show, because the TV show is short. Yeah. It kind of doesn't. I don't think it matters. Like what order you

Cortex 23:41 I don't think it particularly does, you know, the TV shows definitely sort of a sequel to the movie, but it's also a prequel. And it's also I think they're aware that 14 years Yeah. Yeah, temporarily narratively. It's a prequel to the

Jessamyn 23:58 movie, but everybody's 14 years older, which is hilarious. Yeah.

Cortex 24:02 And it's goofy sketch comedy forced into the shape of a movie and then into a TV show. So it's like, you know, it's, it's, you don't have to worry about it too much. It's not a

Eyebrows McGee 24:11 Oh, it's 97 minutes. I can probably do that. Yeah. I have one of those little e cards somewhere that says, How old am I? I'm it's 830. And you want to start a movie now. That's how old I am

Cortex 24:26 now. There's something psychological about the movie thing even like like, like me and secretary, we don't have to worry about the kid wrangling stuff. So there's less you know,

Jessamyn 24:37 each medicine Well, yeah,

Cortex 24:39 but but that mean, that's not going to make us need to go to bed early so we can get up early for the cat's medicine or anything like that. So, but still something psychologically, we'll watch like two or three episodes of like an hour long TV show, but saying, hey, let's watch a movie. That's just that's too much, man.

Jessamyn 24:52 That's a commitment. Yeah. Can you get some fucking sleep or moving? It's over two hours long. You know, like you sit down and watch Cloud Atlas and all The sudden you're like gray hairs what has happened?

Cortex 25:04 I always know exactly how. Now I just look at the I look at the runtime before we start, you know, in fact at that

Eyebrows McGee 25:11 time for that, it took me like four weeks to find an evening I could watch Lincoln because that one is a long

Jessamyn 25:20 anguish in Lincoln just a lot of super gory, you know, Civil War battlefields.

Eyebrows McGee 25:26 Yeah. And my kids talk, talk talk and

Jessamyn 25:29 children I imagined it was boring for me.

Eyebrows McGee 25:32 I well see my husband works with my husband actually did the contracts for the on location filming? Why Illinois for that play, because he works for the Illinois Historic Preservation agency for that

Jessamyn 25:45 love the story of Lincoln's grave,

Eyebrows McGee 25:48 where which part where they poured concrete on him or

Jessamyn 25:52 steel him and then they poured concrete on him. And then like, you know, the guy who spent his entire life guarding the grave and the weird criminals that tried to steal it fascinating.

Eyebrows McGee 26:03 My husband's like, first day at work, I guess five years ago now, some teenagers stole the sword. The statues on top of Lincoln's grave. And so that was like the first thing he had to deal with. Yeah, so I have watched this movie because he does all this Lincoln's stuff. But it took me like four weeks to find an evening. I knew I could stay up long enough. Right? Without my kids. But yeah, he was really interesting. Lincoln stories like he, for the sesquicentennial. The Smithsonian wanted to borrow Mary Lincoln's bloody gloves. Yeah. And he had to write a contract about this. Ah, lawyer job ever.

Jessamyn 26:48 Yeah, I just read a book over the summer about stealing Lincoln's body. And so I got all hopped up on because I didn't realize most of that took place in Illinois, like you kind of I don't know, you just don't You don't know.

Eyebrows McGee 26:59 Well, if you live in Illinois

Jessamyn 27:04 right, well, like, you know, I think the Lincoln Memorial, you know, because I've been to DC and so there was just a whole bunch of education ahead for me,

Cortex 27:11 they should have just put Lincoln's body inside of that statue of Lincoln, I think that would have kept it very secure.

Eyebrows McGee 27:18 I mean, they literally like a concrete on top of it, because people kept trying to dig them up.

Jessamyn 27:24 For reasons Yep, yeah. So that's it for projects. For me.

Cortex 27:28 I have one more I'm gonna mention real quick, which is every word the book, A Parrish made the Twitter account, every word which has inspired so many riffs and whatnot over the years, but she has put together a book about the account and annotations related to tweets and favorites on it and some introduction and stuff. So if you're a big every word fan, this is literally the one book you need for Christmas probably

Jessamyn 27:57 Wow, this is just going to be the world's best metal filter bookstore over the summer. Seriously terribly. Christmas holiday took

Eyebrows McGee 28:06 over the Australian summer

Jessamyn 28:11 but awesome and people seem to really like it. I'm just looking at the webpage for it which is nice yeah.

Cortex 28:46 Let's move on to Metafilter proper array, which there was a bunch of good stuff. It was a let's just get this out of the way up front. Always confusing anybody who doesn't know what the hell's going on with it. It was capslock day. October 21 is international Clops kept blocks day and you know, crockery bloat and sandwich toast and so on. Is this ever gonna get any less confusing of a thing? Like Like, how, what's

Jessamyn 29:11 confusing about it? Well, it's

Cortex 29:13 imagine that you don't know about catalog day and then you see this post. Like, I am guessing this is one of those things that like, there's no

Jessamyn 29:21 Halloween What do you want to be for Halloween? Why isn't that getting deleted post? Oh, yeah,

Cortex 29:26 I deleted one of those ones several years ago. And then I realized, you know, it's okay for this to be a weird tradition that happens every Halloween. And so I stopped doing that said let's let's roll with it. That's that's okay. And this is yeah, this is that same sort of thing. It's like, this is just, this is a thing that occurs on metal filter. Don't ask for an explanation because there is none. That will actually explain it. It just happens. Either revel in it or just dodge around. Get out of the way. But it happened and everybody typed a bunch of capslock. Occasionally people typed not And capslock as As is the tradition and shocking.

Jessamyn 30:05 Yeah, I missed it. I missed. I don't know why I missed it. I missed that. Something else was going on a minute filter that was getting my attention for some reason.

Cortex 30:13 Probably. It's been a busy month. It's been a, like it's been

Jessamyn 30:17 a busy month. Well, mostly, mostly good. I

Cortex 30:20 mean, it's good, sometimes challenging. But even that is generally a good thing. You know, usually usually challenging leads to decent,

Jessamyn 30:29 better, better outcomes. Yeah. Can I say better?

Cortex 30:32 things even better, I think. Yeah, I think that's fair. All right. Better. Yeah.

Jessamyn 30:37 So the I mean, I think I think there was probably some roguelike thing, so that'll probably get your attention later. So the thing that got my attention. Besides the post that was about me, was the van down by the river all about Brandon, the 23 year old software engineer who lives in a box truck parked at work. Yes. And it's by Matt did that who I guess is back around, I mean, I have a hard time keeping track of some of Matt did that. Older Sockpuppet accounts, but he's kind of like a longtime me fight that I like. And I enjoyed. Just I don't know, this is the kind of lifestyle that I sort of, I feel like is an alternate path that I could still maybe I'm still in the age cohort that I could take, like, at some point, that door will be close to me, but it's not yet. But like

Eyebrows McGee 31:33 to, you know, live the small life in the small portable van not so much to live in the Google parking lot.

Jessamyn 31:42 They have a pretty good cafeteria.

Eyebrows McGee 31:45 And you know, really like corporate sharecropping.

Jessamyn 31:51 The thing that I'm surprised more people didn't point out, is really that's what they'd like Google would prefer you actually live in a box in the parking lot if they got I think,

Cortex 32:02 it seems like it seems like they could just like make a move there and buy a bunch more vans. Because like, you know, buying up a van is gonna be a lot cheaper than like, you know, paying even rent on an apartment for a year.

Jessamyn 32:14 Well, that was the thing that was the sort of one of the main parts of the post, right? He's saving 90% of his income and his incomes, probably not small.

Cortex 32:22 Yeah. I thought I thought that discussion was really interesting for how much it really was these two different, like, there are two really different reactions, people had this, which is like yours, which was like, oh, yeah, you know what, I could fucking pull that off. And then there's access to

Jessamyn 32:37 the building. It's not like he's pooping in the woods. You know what I mean?

Eyebrows McGee 32:41 No, I mean, I think he's very smart. Taking advantage of it. I just, it makes me nervous on a structural level that

Jessamyn 32:49 I agree with that concern. Yeah.

Cortex 32:52 So the conflict between the sort of like the resourceful oddity of it, and then the various weird implications of the whole thing, both in terms of corporate like, life boundaries, and also what this says about the nature of Google's impact on the more traditional real estate. And not not just Google, obviously, you know, the whole tech sector at large. But ya know, it's it was an interesting thing was interesting to see that really popping around. I had not originally even looked at it, but I became aware of it. Just because, yeah, the way people were talking about it. I managed to skip any shifts where real work needed doing in that thread. So I've been able to do your work. I didn't know. There are a few flags. I think Russ is no mad left a note at some point. But But yeah, I didn't

Jessamyn 33:38 know cuz that's the thing, right? You have anybody living an alternative lifestyle, and you'll get somebody from the peanut gallery being like, ah, what about Mercer or something like some, you know, objection that has nothing to do with anything, which is just like, I found a couple of people not idiots like on Twitter, because one of the things that's great about the day after Halloween is street candy, right? There's a kid in the room. That's alarming. And you can just well, many people feel that way. I am not one of them. So you just go walking out in the neighborhood and there's just candy in the road. You can just have it not that there wasn't lots of candy that you could just have on Saturday, but I feel like a hunter gatherer when I eat street candy.

Cortex 34:21 It's it's Yeah, I mean, it's all pre wrapped. So, right.

Jessamyn 34:25 Well, I had some smarties and one of the packet of Smarties clearly it had some sort of breach because they will. And I did throw those away

Cortex 34:33 once you do that with produce too. It's like well, this one looks a little funky. And I'll do the same thing with your street candy.

Jessamyn 34:38 Right and you touch them all the street candies at least in a wrapper? Yeah. But you know, the feedback from people on Twitter was mixed. As it often is, I just thought it was kind of a you know, funny throwaway joke and some people were like me,

Cortex 34:52 I was over at some other mefites House on Halloween night and we weren't doing a Halloween thing. We're just doing a little get together that happened. Be that night.

Jessamyn 35:01 Did you wear an outfit? No,

Cortex 35:02 I did not well I wasn't going to any sort of Halloween thing why? Why would I feel obliged to put a bunch of work into a costume I just didn't feel like doing it but the point is we're there and we were not like the porch light was off there was no hatred computers come up here but everyone's want someone to knock anyway and what I do in this scenario if I'm not panning out kind of trick or treaters is I don't answer the door. But the folks we were hanging out with they're like they would answer the door anyway. Well, partly because we were

Jessamyn 35:32 no candy or like give somebody a carrot. They would answer the

Cortex 35:35 door and he would go and answer doors and she would go get a chocolate bar because I hadn't really prepared to trick or treaters but at the same time, they wanted a chocolate bars. Not very many chocolate bars. So each group got age. She was like, you know, do you guys like each other? Because I've got one I've got one chocolate bar and I just love that.

Jessamyn 35:57 That is the height of nerdy on preparedness social unpreparedness

Eyebrows McGee 36:01 can't believe kids come up to doors without the lights on?

Cortex 36:04 It's weird. I don't know. I don't understand it either.

Eyebrows McGee 36:09 We didn't like we it was raining and we got 150 trick or treaters. But once we turned our lights off, no more came. Yeah.

Jessamyn 36:16 We had some kids that came I always go hand out candy at a friend's house because I live in the woods. But like my friends live on the big street. Yeah. And there's a protocol, like once you turn off the lights, but if some people because they know my friends will actually come around the back door and be like they're still awake. So yeah, I wear a Pekinese dog costume I sent you guys I

Cortex 36:40 continue to love and be sort of terrified by that thing.

Jessamyn 36:44 It's funny, it's really kind of weird, because it's a little creepy in

Cortex 36:47 the picture. So just giant, shiny softball sized eyes, I think, what can

Jessamyn 36:52 you see out of them, like you can see out of the two eyes, the dot between the eyes and the there's a little triangle in the mouth. So once it got dark, all I could see was like light sticks wandering around. And children would be like grabbing me and hugged me and stuff. And I had no idea but like, you know, I told you my sister and I had realized at some point, she and I both independently spent a lot of time on eBay looking at mascot costumes. So this was her birthday present. And this was the first time I actually got to wear it. Now I have to find any other time to work.

Cortex 37:29 It's a hell of a thing as well. local veterinarian

Jessamyn 37:31 asked if maybe I'd be in the Fourth of July parade. And I was like, Oh yeah, that'd be great. And then Jim's like, dude, that costumes motherfreakin Hollywood die. What are you thinking? I'm like I lost my head.

Cortex 37:47 Maybe you could build like an a whole AC unit inside of it somehow. I don't know how that would work. But I'll do

Jessamyn 37:54 it. I dressed up in costume like this as like a temp job at a at a book festival and dressed up as the stinky cheese man. And the stinky cheese man has a giant head and the giant head had a little fan in it kept you cool.

Cortex 38:12 I really enjoyed this post about reverse video of a backwards running competition just it's just a simple little thing. This is what the internet is for. It's it is what it sounds like watch it some time.

Jessamyn 38:28 And as you can actually watch things and they won't we won't hear them. So like I spend a lot of time being like Oh, Josh, tell us about that. And then I'm like watching the video being like

Cortex 38:42 yeah, it's people you know, people running backwards backwards. And it's it's yeah, it's pretty great. It's just a it's just a little thing, but, but I really liked it. I also really enjoyed this post about a guy named Rob Scallon who's a metal guitarist, but he's covering stuff on banjo like metal songs and it's it's pretty great. So it's just something I mean is the joke Enos of doing all the banjo but it just sounds cool that Pope guilty made this hop guilty. Yeah.

Eyebrows McGee 39:15 I've really liked on the already theme dancing posed by Bob Tao about this woman who won the MacArthur Genius Grant for tap dancing, which I knew. Yeah, which I know nothing about and just beautiful videos and really interesting to watch and it was just a great there's not a lot of comments, but it was just a great really interesting post. I didn't know anything about before I

Jessamyn 39:48 kept dancing was kind of a uniquely American art form. Hmm. My uncle used to tap dance and that's about all I know about tap dancing besides, you know Charlottetown bowl and I think that's pretty much it.

Cortex 40:04 Thank you know Gregory Hines

Jessamyn 40:07 him him,

Cortex 40:08 you know, all right we've named all the tap dancers

Jessamyn 40:13 Wikipedia helped me out

Cortex 40:15 not to pick that up. I did not see that at all. I did like this from just the other day there was a post about bot named Botstein that just does to twitter bot that does lyrics for guest on song from beating the beast. You know, no one's dry as guest on a wild try like it's done. No one's got a thick cheese in his tie, like a stop sign. It's yeah, it's it's just the very specific rhyming and meter scheme of that song. But it's just random new lyrics instead of anything sensical. And it's, it's really fantastic. Partly because it's such an easy song to sort of like you know, you know, sort of seeing on your head so singing along the lyrics is really sort of rewarding.

Eyebrows McGee 40:58 Another Twitter bat was Can men have it all which the Nova goofy elk I love is one that just that one cracked me up and I keep going back to it. I don't do Twitter a lot, but I keep going back to it because it makes me feel better. If men accentuate parts of your body you like like your feet to drop attention away from problem areas such as your head.

Jessamyn 41:23 But today's debate, isn't it about time we gave male comedians ago

Eyebrows McGee 41:29 is your wife a big kid at heart to mine is I tidy up after her and organized her life? It feels like I have four kids not three

Cortex 41:40 it's such it's such a simple premise, but it works so and it's it speaks to how fucked up things are that it does work so well. Like this particular just flip around creates what feels like absurd things rather than just like oh, okay, I guess Yeah. It's it's, it's great. I keep I shows up people retweet random things from my Twitter feed. And I every time I'm like, Fuck, yeah. That is that is onpoint What do you guys have any other?

Jessamyn 42:13 Oh my god, sorry. I'm still laughing at this. I enjoyed the Halloween themed just single link post by Odin stream, which was all about Halloween with a toddler fact versus fiction. You should know that if you consume your child's Halloween stash, they have technically worked for you as an independent contractor and therefore need to be given payment W nine or you're committing tax fraud. It's just super short. And like, just kind of amusing. And like if you did I mean, we must have handed out candy to 350 people and there's a lot of like, and I live in the country and there's a lot of like young people with toddlers. You know what I mean? Like, Jim kind of freaked out because most of the people with toddlers who are doing trick or treating things are like his son's age, you know? And so we're sitting around like in our costumes, being like, oh, right, we are grandparents. And so just abusing and it was funny in the thread fun in the dread to kind of read people talking about trick or treating with their children. I always enjoy that kind of like, oh, let me share a story that's not likely to get me into a fight with somebody else.

Eyebrows McGee 43:21 My kids went as Steve from Minecraft, and then a character from the Wild Kratts which is on PBS.

Jessamyn 43:29 I saw a Steve I saw one Minecraft costume and was very like, kid he was like, nobody knows what this is. I'm like, You are the best.

Eyebrows McGee 43:40 My kid was like, Mom, I need an emerald block for my trick or treating been. And I was like, Okay, and so then I got to spend a whole day making an emerald block out of a FedEx box so he could carry his emerald black trick or treating been

Cortex 43:59 nice. No. I'm crap stuff can suck away time. Even people who aren't making money

Jessamyn 44:06 playing Minecraft at that moment.

Eyebrows McGee 44:08 I had to like look up with the stupid Black looks like right? I have such faith that as mom, I could produce this. I felt like I had to try to

Cortex 44:19 better the role

Jessamyn 44:20 with my mom. Like, she helped me with costumes when I was a little kid. And like, you know, as a grown up, I'd spent a lot of time being like, My mother grew into kind of a weird old lady. But like when I was a little kid, she really could just manufacture costumes out of nothing. And it was just magic.

Cortex 44:36 It's a it's a mom ability. I guess.

Eyebrows McGee 44:39 I did by the head. But I made the I made the Emerald block.

Jessamyn 44:45 Very nice.

Cortex 44:46 Should we move on to ask Metafilter here I have one

Jessamyn 44:49 more. Oh, it is one more to go ahead. Okay, mine is just because I think it's metal filters obligation to report to our Four Eyed colleagues. What the work Is with glasses. This is by mccrane Owen. And it's like a single link thing talking about how 80% of major eyewear brands are basically designed in retail by this one company. And talking about you know why glasses cost so much, I mean, because for a lot of people who buy glasses, you probably know, if you're on the internet, you can buy them for super cheap, with some exceptions from like Xeni optical or $29 eyeglasses or whatever. But it is interesting to sort of think about the market because most people don't necessarily know that this is like an example I use in my digital divide classes. You know, glasses cost 20 bucks, if you have access to the internet and know these kinds of things, which if especially if you're buying classes for children, my God, you know, huge savings and whatever. And this talks about kind of the flip side of that, which is why we're in this crazy mess to begin with.

Cortex 46:01 Yeah, I remember this coming up. I think it was come up in the past medical history, too. And it's yeah, it's just it's such a weird thing. The the fact that there's just this huge structural thing that is making classes being super fucking expensive, rather than something essential to the nature of making glasses.

Jessamyn 46:17 Well, and that was one of the original, I think, sort of internet people who really popularized the cheap glasses. Because not only did he write about it, when he was blogging, and lots of people were listening to it, but he also bought like a shitload of different pairs of glasses. And like, you know, you'd see pictures of him selfies in various glasses, you be like, so cool. But like, having five pairs of glasses means if you're a guy, you can have like, a style with them, you know, instead of just like, you have your main x, and that's all you get. Yeah.

Cortex 46:51 What was your last thing?

Eyebrows McGee 46:53 I this, I thought this one was really cute with the little girl who started the business with the passwords that M Shelly posted.

Jessamyn 47:02 Oh, I didn't see this.

Eyebrows McGee 47:04 She handcrafts passwords by rolling dice, and then sends them to you in the mail for $5 which the US government she notes can't open without a warrant.

Jessamyn 47:15 In the mail, the postal mail, ah,

Eyebrows McGee 47:19 and she people were like, you know, it's a lemonade stand for the modern age. And then people kind of started going down into which I always think it's funny talking about their passwords. How they the funny things they do. My Wi Fi is named Abraham Linksys because we're big into Lincoln. And I just I have I have this really nerdy neighbor with a PhD and I am just waiting and waiting and waiting for him to change his Wi Fi to router e li. Bluetooth. And I'm like, I want to tell you, I've thought of funny Wi Fi is for you. But then it wouldn't be funny.

Jessamyn 48:01 Maybe you could just send it to him in the mail. I could the postal mail. You know where that guy lives? I do

Eyebrows McGee 48:08 when people say oh, hey, can I get on your Wi Fi? What's the password? I say oh, the guest password is the date the civil war started.

Jessamyn 48:17 You monsters?

Eyebrows McGee 48:18 And then it's the most

Jessamyn 48:19 out there. Like if I could get on Wikipedia. I would need your password would I

Eyebrows McGee 48:24 actually but there's just this awkward silence because nobody wants to say no, when the civil war started. I

Jessamyn 48:32 have no idea what. Sorry, can you tell me now?

Eyebrows McGee 48:35 Well, then you'd know my password and it would defeat the purpose of

Jessamyn 48:38 hacking into your Illinois. Wi Fi. Yes.

Eyebrows McGee 48:41 It's an APR 1861.

Cortex 48:43 Oh, month and they're like,

Eyebrows McGee 48:46 no, no, you have to know the date. yet. Oh,

Jessamyn 48:50 I can look that part up. Well, and dates are tricky, right? Because you don't know what format Yeah. Right.

Cortex 48:58 So I just I was just getting Wi Fi last night. And their password is like opening phrase from some classic middle literature. But it had spaces in it. I wasn't working because I didn't put spaces in because I assumed Oh, it's a password. People weren't gonna have spaces in it. And it was it was too it was too accessible of a password for me to get it right based on them just telling me what it was.

Jessamyn 49:21 I did you know exactly. 100 years later, the first man went into space.

Cortex 49:26 I really that doesn't seem right. 100 years later

Eyebrows McGee 49:33 1961

Cortex 49:34 Oh, from guys like that was so I was lost there. It's like it was not 100 years ago, I Kennedy. Kennedy wasn't even born then let alone

Jessamyn 49:45 and there was a gravity wave over New England. This is great. Let's start talking about dates instead of numbers podcast.

Cortex 49:53 Just in history for whatever we recording. Yeah,

Jessamyn 49:56 yeah,

Eyebrows McGee 49:57 that would be great. Lincoln his inaugural address his 1861 inaugural, it took seven days by Pony Express to get to California. And that was the fastest information had ever been transmitted to California. And then his 1865 inaugural was transmitted by transcontinental telegraph instantaneously to California.

Jessamyn 50:23 This is great. I'm so glad we had you here today.

Eyebrows McGee 50:26 I think that is a great fact. That is a wonderful fact. And that's like, sorry. So that's why we couldn't defeat you faster. We were busy, like uniting the continent with trains and telegraph

Jessamyn 50:37 technology.

Eyebrows McGee 50:40 But it's kind of amazing. They managed to build out that whole infrastructure while fighting this massive war.

Jessamyn 50:48 Well, sometimes you get infrastructure when you have wars, because all your factories are like, chug, chug, chug in right.

Eyebrows McGee 50:54 Well, true. But you know, the going over the Rocky Mountains part, there wasn't so much, you know, wore out that way. Yeah, California didn't really need to know what was going on.

Jessamyn 51:04 Do you guys do like a Lincoln podcast? Like just a short one? I think that would be cool.

Eyebrows McGee 51:09 I'm sure there is one. We actually we know what?

Jessamyn 51:12 Yours?

Eyebrows McGee 51:15 Well, I don't know. Maybe I'll see. We know a historian who has worked so long on Lincoln that He only speaks in phrases Lincoln used, you are lying. I am not. And his emails are written with like phrases from Lincoln.

Cortex 51:30 Does he ever insert the word pumpkin into key quotes?

Eyebrows McGee 51:33 Just I don't think so. But he's kind of a weird guy. I bet he would be an entertaining podcast interview. Wow, there there are a lot of Lincoln reenactors and a lot of kind of weird people

Jessamyn 51:47 that I know that I know.

Jessamyn 52:25 All right, let's move on. We're doing great for time.

Cortex 52:27 Metafilter. Let's talk about AskMe Metafilter stuff. Well, there

Jessamyn 52:31 was one from today that I enjoyed because I did not know the answer. But in sort of true trivia fashion, I was actually curious. What actually happens to a game if a professional opens from yesterday, if a professional athlete dies on the field and Laura, I mentioned this because you responded to it with some completely disgusting hockey trivia.

Eyebrows McGee 52:51 Katherine's he and I were actually talking about this. I we were chatting because she, I teach her about football. And she's a Seahawks fan. We're talking about the Logcat. The guy who got hit, right? Because we were like chatting during and we're like, oh my god, I think he's done. So then we were talking about what happens when someone dies. And she's like, I'm gonna use my ask. So I was like, well, here are my

Jessamyn 53:18 for the answer. Yes.

Eyebrows McGee 53:21 Because we were trying to we were like Googling, we're trying to think of it and I was like, Well, this guy almost died at a hockey game. Because two of my friends were reporters at the hockey game where the sky almost died. And they stopped the game, but I'm like, I don't know what they do if someone actually dies.

Jessamyn 53:37 Right? And then she links to a disgusting video.

Cortex 53:42 What's it what's in this disgusting video?

Eyebrows McGee 53:44 Oh, shoot disgusting videos.

Jessamyn 53:46 I was thinking about the second one.

Eyebrows McGee 53:49 Oh, Kevin, were who played for Louisville. basketball playing against Duke in the NCAA Tournament. took just a weird fall and his femur popped out of his leg.

Jessamyn 54:01 avulsion Yeah, it was. It was the other one. The game stopped because they couldn't clean the blood off the ice.

Eyebrows McGee 54:10 And they weren't sure if the guy was gonna die. Bad for morale?

Cortex 54:15 Well, that's a weird thing. Because it seems like probably the default thing is unless someone formally ends the game, probably the games just would, by default, in theory continue, which

Jessamyn 54:25 are there's an obscure rule that never gets implemented except in you know, three times in your in your life.

Eyebrows McGee 54:32 Yeah, and people are talking about like all of these different. Like, football players who there's only been one who dropped dead during an NFL game, someone said in the 70s from a heart condition. And then there's all kinds of different people having terrible injuries or just Sudden Cardiac incidents. Right? But mostly they die after they're off the field. Right? And

Jessamyn 54:59 part of that is just because you almost can't be pronounced dead until they've actually done some done some done some check in on you. Which people have

Eyebrows McGee 55:07 like, there were a lot of hockey stories which you'd expect. But there were a lot of soccer stories like I did not know so many people died from soccer.

Cortex 55:18 Like injuries or just like, like general impact of Well, I mean, like, well, as we

Jessamyn 55:23 get hurt or they just keel over because they have some internal malfunction. Yeah.

Eyebrows McGee 55:28 ruptured bowel in a man tetanus from fall on a piece of glass.

Eyebrows McGee 55:35 It didn't that person. Sorry,

Cortex 55:39 this was back when back when I played on glass fields, they stopped doing that after a while because they realized it was just a little bit of a hazard. The more recent ones like

Jessamyn 55:49 jokey, jokey things, because I'm just noticing I haven't been groaning as much as we

Cortex 55:53 were on a time limit. I'm just trying to throw out a little respectful of our constraints. All right,

Jessamyn 56:00 well, we'll we'll see what the feedback is like. And if people are like, please, longer more time for cortexes jokes

Cortex 56:06 weren't nearly enough terrible puns.

Jessamyn 56:08 Sorry. All right now.

Eyebrows McGee 56:12 As I scan the dead soccer players list.

Cortex 56:17 That sort of makes sense. That seems like a referred me extreme physical activity stuff.

Jessamyn 56:23 So wait, are you reading this off a Wikipedia list somewhere?

Eyebrows McGee 56:26 Someone linked to it? The agents of chaos linked to the Wikipedia list? And here's the list of association football players who have died while playing.

Jessamyn 56:37 And by football. You mean soccer? Yes. Not freedom football. Wow. Wow.

Cortex 56:46 So much. A lot of dead footballers.

Jessamyn 56:49 A lot of dead children,

Cortex 56:50 I mean by a projectile while leaving the pitch. So he's walking off field and someone hit him in the head with something.

Eyebrows McGee 56:57 Yesterday, Reggie Bush is like an important football player tripped on the concrete on the side of the field and had such a bad knee injury. He had to be taken out of the game. To that sock, yeah,

Cortex 57:09 that's gonna be frustrating.

Jessamyn 57:13 And so then there's a death related lists category. Oh, god, my day is over. Down the Rabbit Hole list of rampage killers by cotton list of selfie related injuries and deaths. We were

Eyebrows McGee 57:29 talking about that the other day. I don't remember who I was talking to. But more people have now died from selfies this year than shark attacks.

Jessamyn 57:38 Hey, Jim actually asked me the other day. If because we were watching Brooklyn nine, nine and Chelsea Peretti like takes a selfie with one of those idiot sticks. Have you ever seen one of those? I'm like, Yes. Have you never seen one? City and I live in the country but yeah.

Cortex 57:58 Well, you know, it's a lot more crowded.

Jessamyn 58:02 On the death related list.

Cortex 58:05 That's that's that's a stretch.

Jessamyn 58:08 I think so also alright, we should really move on. I could be here all night.

Cortex 58:11 Like a list of corpses somewhere that's like, you know, 7 billion

Eyebrows McGee 58:15 there was one on the the Everest Mount Everest dead body boots on Main metal fell.

Cortex 58:23 That's fair. That's that's pretty specific.

Eyebrows McGee 58:25 That there was a dead body list.

Cortex 58:28 I liked in a I thought this question. This is a question from Michael age. And this I think of this is like a high degree of difficulty question.

Jessamyn 58:39 I go back and forth on this question. Well, that's

Cortex 58:42 the thing. So this is x is x is x is the title which gets the thing it's it basically says, hey, you know, people call Louie CK a comedians, comedian. CP block is a composers composer. But what about like, the Xs xs X thing? Like, let's go through, like, you know, who is

Jessamyn 58:59 a writers, writers writers think is the best? Yeah. And you know,

Cortex 59:03 so it's a very specific question. And there's a couple things that I think are just dead on answers. And someone said, here's a site of someone using that construction. And then there's some good answers that are like, well, this person probably matches that thing. And then there's some answers that are like, well, this person is sort of a major, x is x, but it's not an x is x is x, and even left a note about that. And a couple people were like, Well, I'm not

Jessamyn 59:27 sure if I'm gonna dig in that thread, too. Right, or was that just you?

Cortex 59:30 I think I think there was, I think it was a couple shifts. Yeah. But in any case, it's one of the things was like, it's specific enough that technically, anything that's not an answer that fits that form could probably be pulled, but at the same time, it's also a subjective construction of an idea that it's harder to say, well, that's absolutely out of line rather than Well, that's sort of within the bounds. And so it's, it's hard, it's hard to know exactly where to draw the line and how useful the question can even manage to be but at the same time, it's an interesting question. Didn't you like the idea of whether you can find that sort of triple thing? So,

Jessamyn 1:00:04 and it didn't turn into a lot of people wrestling about it, because really the only people who had answers had kind of special. I mean, I commented in that thread, like who's gonna argue with my assessment of the librarians? librarian? librarian? Nobody, you know, and so people don't fight, you know, because there's no like, footballers. Footballers, footballer, not really. Yeah. So it's interesting. It was interesting without it turning into a no, it's

Cortex 1:00:31 there's no follow up boys the best man, you know. Fall Out Boy,

Jessamyn 1:00:38 I enjoyed from Oh, sorry, Laura, did you have a tank?

Eyebrows McGee 1:00:41 Oh, I was gonna say, this one surprising aspects of everyday life during past times, which akk 2014 asked, and there was a fantastic long, long answer from Jane the brown.

Jessamyn 1:00:55 Right, that got called out in metal talk, I think, right. Yeah, it's,

Eyebrows McGee 1:00:59 it's a fantastic. And I mean, mostly what I'm left with is God, the past was gross. But, you know, and then other people were talking about, like their grandparents being put to bed and goose Greece and what? Find it. My grandma, this is Parmon Parmon Permin. My grandma would be lathered up in goose Greece before putting on her pajamas, because the fire would go out at night, and it would be that cold in Philadelphia, they'd never watch, watch the pajamas to let the fat build up, and tore them up to be the end of winter truth. Okay, that's pretty much ever rat attitude. If that were not true.

Jessamyn 1:01:49 Yeah, yeah, I

Cortex 1:01:54 got a bunch of neat stuff in here. It's,

Jessamyn 1:01:57 ya know, fascinating. And this whole thing about, you know, Puritans versus Victorians and their attitude towards sex and how Puritans are just against wasting resources. So one of the things Jane says is like, the biggest sin was to waste time with socializing a social No, no was hanging around on the doorstep chatting with your neighbor. And like, that's totally a thing around here. Like you're expected to do that in rural New England. Sort of, except some people don't talk at all. And there's like a sort of a French Canadian Puritan kind of ad, and it's difficult to figure out exactly like, are you supposed to just be like, thanks. And fuck off. Are you supposed to like sit on the porch talking for no reason forever? And yes, I enjoyed that. I forgot about that thread entirely. Glad you brought it up. He

Eyebrows McGee 1:02:42 said that Niepce were a ubiquitous food before the potato and that turnip and parsnip and in NEEP, and I was like, Whoa, mind.

Jessamyn 1:02:53 So it was like just that either of those.

Eyebrows McGee 1:02:56 Yeah. Or and also mangled word souls, which I don't know what those are rutabagas and Rapunzel. Puzzles. I don't know what those are either, but my family sounds like something

Cortex 1:03:07 while your town

Jessamyn 1:03:09 is a beat, okay. It's like a cross between a beat. I mean, it's a beat that looks like a potato.

Eyebrows McGee 1:03:16 I was buying a rutabaga because we always have them for holidays. And the cashier at the checkout said, young people just don't buy enough root vegetables these days. And I was like, Okay,

Cortex 1:03:27 it's true. The kids today rutabagas Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:03:32 that reminds me I have a sweet potato in my fridge that I should really actually cook.

Jessamyn 1:03:37 Now I like vegetables very much.

Cortex 1:03:40 I like some I'm down with a carrot.

Eyebrows McGee 1:03:45 That's not like the right kind of fruit veggie. I

Cortex 1:03:47 know. But you know, I'm trying to I'm trying to reach across the aisle. I'm not big on beets. turnips. I'm sort of working on.

Jessamyn 1:03:56 turnips. I don't totally like we had parsnip soup as part of the community lunch that was here on Friday and I didn't really warm up to it.

Cortex 1:04:02 I think I prefer a turnip to a person that but we just don't spend that much time eating them.

Eyebrows McGee 1:04:06 Well get a rutabaga and chop it up like you would a potato and then mash it like potatoes.

Cortex 1:04:13 I have I have surprising difficulty with mashed potato like substances that aren't mashed potatoes, eatin mashed potatoes, I have to be the right mood for but mash up

Eyebrows McGee 1:04:21 with the potatoes you can

Jessamyn 1:04:22 do it in secret rutabagas Alright, moving on team wants to do like what else? I enjoyed this question because I thought it was a very sensitive question, which of course got mostly sensitive but some insensitive answers. Basically, this is alto power, who directs a choir at a white church and want to sing, you know, some African American spirituals or maybe some South African songs and trying to figure out like, look, is this cultural appropriation? Is this appropriate? Is this how music happens? Like I'm trying to be thoughtful about this. I'm happy to not Do it if it's just obnoxious. But if it's not obnoxious, you know, what's a way to maybe do this? Right? We're a liberal church. And I'd like to share more different kinds of music. And so there's a lot of thoughtful, helpful responses from people who have thought about it, including, you know, people who are really into social justice movements, people who are really into doing choruses, people who are really involved with their church music situations. And I just thought it was kind of an area I hadn't thought much about. I mean, I think about cultural appropriation, but not these other parts. And I liked reading the responses people had, and not having one of my own just like, oh, I don't know.

Cortex 1:05:39 Yep. Yeah, and this was this was timing wise, right on the heels of some discussion of cultural appropriation elsewhere on the curvature of perversion. Elsewhere on the site, we had a big thread on the blue and then a thread on the gray sort of about how that thread on the blue went. And so this is sort of, I think, that may have been sort of kicked off. Oh, yeah. This is a thing that's tricky and needs thinking about. So it's been sort of cultural appropriation week or a couple of weeks.

Jessamyn 1:06:11 Halloween month always winds up like that, right? Because there's a culture not a costume stuff going on and

Cortex 1:06:18 people are paying thinking about exactly it's a lot easier to sort of

Jessamyn 1:06:21 being on the horizon. Nightmare. Columbus Day happened. What a disaster sorry, indigenous peoples day.

Eyebrows McGee 1:06:30 I said something the other day about Columbus discovering America and my six year old said, Mom, he didn't discover it. He just found it. There were already people here.

Cortex 1:06:41 Excellent kid.

Jessamyn 1:06:43 That wasn't attached.

Eyebrows McGee 1:06:46 Right. So apparently, that's what they're teaching in public school these days. To six year olds.

Jessamyn 1:06:55 In line with me, I live in a box in the parking lot. I enjoyed, try fillings thread about how to go on the lam. They've been watching hunted on UK channel four. And it's getting their imagination going and trying to figure out like, Okay, if I really wanted to go on the lam, what do I really need to do and what's just kind of, you know, useful and people talk about different people who disappeared and how that works and what you need to do. And different people are more or less accomplished with knowing how to do this or just wild ass guessing it. This was a thread I did comment from in because I have some ideas. But yeah, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed listening to people talk about it.

Cortex 1:07:39 Anybody suggest getting into a van, I'm getting a job with Google. Hide in their parking.

Jessamyn 1:07:46 I think once you have like a job and you're on some of these corporate payroll, unless you're really going to go the whole, like change your identity thing. I mean, that's the thing, right? Because having a job or getting into any of the machines under your real name makes you eminently findable unless you've got a name that you can vaguely obscure or something. Right.

Eyebrows McGee 1:08:08 Well, this one makes me a better camper by telling me your favorite backpacking hacks you could use while you're going on the lam hat.

Cortex 1:08:15 Oh, yeah. I think we talked about this last month, actually. Oh, did you talk about a little bit again? It's fun. Oh, no, I

Eyebrows McGee 1:08:23 only liked because

Cortex 1:08:25 I think I mentioned it in passing. All right.

Jessamyn 1:08:27 I don't remember it. So talk about it now.

Eyebrows McGee 1:08:29 Well, I've never been camping. So for me, I've never been my mother doesn't really go outdoors. All right, she does but not where like for login. Three. outdoorsy, fun stuff. Yeah, not the kind of outdoors where there's bugs and you have to sleep somewhere away from a bathroom. So as

Jessamyn 1:08:50 we always say in my family, camp.

Eyebrows McGee 1:08:53 No, she's Catholic. But she's like, Yeah, we didn't come to this country not to have indoor plumbing. All right. All right.

Cortex 1:09:01 That's, that's a lot. We could do an entire

Jessamyn 1:09:04 parking lot.

Eyebrows McGee 1:09:07 But I just thought it was so interesting, because all these people were like, well, if the if the if the spout on your water bag gets cut off, you need to do this. And I'm like, Dude, if the spat on my water bag got cut off, I just sit down and call 911 and wait for the rescue helicopter.

Cortex 1:09:23 I'm not a big camper. But I am always sort of surprised when I end up in that conversation about what do you mean camp? What do you like why would you ever camp essentially versus like I'm like, I'm not like you know, oh, yeah, camping we're gonna go camping but like it like it's a normal thing. Like I grew

Eyebrows McGee 1:09:39 up. I think it sounds fun, but I think you need someone who knows how to teach you I don't think it's a skill you can like learn on your own without.

Cortex 1:09:48 i It does seem like it'd be weird to jump

Jessamyn 1:09:51 to it. Yeah, I would watch lightweight camping and then you can

Cortex 1:09:59 I would watch a real On a show that was just about taking people who've never been camping, and just give them some money and some vague instructions and document them as they prepare to go camping by themselves for the first time, like start to finish just see them go camping,

Jessamyn 1:10:15 walk in the woods movie. No, one No, not yet. Is that sort of like a big dumb yacht who lives in in Hanover, New Hampshire decides he's going to start walking the Appalachian Trail. And, and it's and it's true, like it's a true story. And so he talks the book is hilarious, because he's so ill prepared. And and it's all like a joke about kind of himself not really being, you know, feeling like how does this work? How do you? But I haven't seen it yet. So I don't know if it's all that or not.

Cortex 1:10:47 Yeah. The companion to wild I guess.

Jessamyn 1:10:52 Well, and I went, you know, Jim, and I kind of like to hike, like, just walk around in the woods, but just for the day, you know, like not even with a backpack unless you just bring like water and a first aid kit. But we went for a walk yesterday and a new part of the woods. We haven't been in a while. And we noticed it's like the town forest. And so there's a whole bunch of rules about what you can and can't do there. But one of the rules is like you can camp there for up to three days. And Jim's like, we should totally go camping here. And I'm like, we're like a half mile from my house. And I was also he was just like, in a good mood, you know, but I'm like, we don't camp when have we ever. We've been together for seven years. We have never gone camping. We're not campers, you're not a camper. Like, I think it's the thing he used to do. And definitely I used to camp a lot more than I do now. Which is almost none. But like he just got enchanted and decided that was what we were going to do like hey, it's a free forest and he looked at it like free stuff. You know? It's free camping.

Cortex 1:11:53 Just because you're on it's you know, it's it's while you do it. I feel like we are sneaking up real close on eyebrow buggies is deadline here so we should probably wrap out books. Yes. Let's talk about books for a minute. So books, finally adding books to fan affair. And we've done this experimental there's a few book clubs I had folks start eyebrow started one and catalyst catalyst. I never know how to pronounce it username.

Jessamyn 1:12:18 But tell us good Tony, you asked me and I couldn't. But I like the idea. And I'm very

Cortex 1:12:23 you were you were busy at the moment. But but the idea is we'll do more. And I want to get some more books, but we haven't made it so people can just randomly post books yet. And we kind of need to transition to that. So we're sort of figuring out the details. But we're also doing a bunch of work on sort of the front page of fanfare and stuff and trying to get some long overdue stuff sort of updated there.

Jessamyn 1:12:40 Because there wasn't really a meta talk thread about Okay, now that we've got all this stuff here, the front page really isn't serving.

Cortex 1:12:48 Yeah, it's kind of a mess. So we're reworking that whole stuff from scratch and light because has a book club just like us. So the three you put stuff together, which was fantastic. And we've got all three of us sort of experimenting with different formats there and I started doing club

Jessamyn 1:13:05 one, two, I'm only see six things,

Cortex 1:13:07 Apocalypse fiction. Now. I think I think he's starting with here's the first book will come along after this amount of time. So there's not a book posted for it yet.

Jessamyn 1:13:19 So how do I even find out about that?

Cortex 1:13:21 Go to his book club. We'll make a one. Yeah, yeah.

Jessamyn 1:13:25 Oh, it's in clubs. Yeah, I clicked on books, and I there it was not

Cortex 1:13:29 only the actual books that are posted so far. So yeah, what did so obviously there's some organizational stuff. We're still working out there. Sure. Sure. Gonna

Eyebrows McGee 1:13:37 do like because now you're doing a crossover in February. We're gonna read the Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, which is historical fiction, and a post apocalyptic novel.

Cortex 1:13:49 So get the synergy going on. Yeah, it's fun. I don't know

Eyebrows McGee 1:13:53 how many people are gonna get through it because it's written in fake old English, but I thought it was one of the best things I read this year. So I quit. Excellent.

Jessamyn 1:14:02 I have to say I check into fanfare see how people felt about the labs this episode of third Saturday live and check right back out again. I love it. It hasn't. It hasn't found the sticky for me yet. But yeah, it's like other filler.

Cortex 1:14:16 You have a lot of simple it turns out which is great. It's actually like looking just to internal traffic on the site. It gets a lot of pageviews a lot of people are looking at stuff on fanfic. All right, yeah. So people are people are getting use of it. There's not a whole lot of external traffic on it. But that's okay. We'll get there. We won't. As long as people are having a good time. That's the that's the whole core idea. The thing so. Oh, sorry.

Eyebrows McGee 1:14:42 I really thought what people have discussed so far in the book euphoria, which is the first historical fiction book club book, it's been really interesting and people brought up a lot of stuff that I didn't think of when I read it. And that didn't come up in my you know, my local book club. Sure, because we have people who are like Anthropos apologists and who know all this stuff about Margaret Mead and who knows. So people have just been saying talking really interesting things about the book that's very helpful for books

Cortex 1:15:11 cuz that's, that's the thing that I'm so excited about a lot like, like books are like the worst of the media for me because I just don't spend much time reading books. I'm taking this as an excuse to just force myself to do a little bit more. But I'm really excited about Yeah, being able to cast that sort of wide net to get takes on stuff seems like a really, really great use of I often

Jessamyn 1:15:30 don't want to take Lord love my neighbors, but like, they don't talk about books the same way I talk about books, which is more the way metal filter, people talk about books, like, Hey, I just burned a swath through Peter watts, latest four novels. And I want to talk about all of them kind of, and well, and

Eyebrows McGee 1:15:49 I've been in my book club for eight or nine years now. And so now we kind of get there. We're like, what was the book this month? Oh, yeah, let's gossip about our children. Because we all have small children. Right, right. Right. Like I think we are the middle aged lady white wine book club, except everybody's pregnant or breastfeeding and can't, you know.

Jessamyn 1:16:14 But one day, I just wanted to say this one note about helping RT choke, who has internalized asked Metafilter enough so that when they were having something really weird happening with their eyeball, they actually went right to the doctor, and now they're gonna get the retinal surgery that they need quickly. And thanks to them going in quickly, they didn't even ask a question. They just asked the question in their mind and knew that the answer was going to be get the hell out of the doctor right now. And they did and hopefully they're doing okay. Post surgery.

Cortex 1:16:47 Yep. Fingers crossed. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:16:49 Well, amazing. Amazing.

Cortex 1:16:53 Good job, everybody. Everybody.

Eyebrows McGee 1:16:58 This is really fun. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Thank

Cortex 1:17:00 you so much for joining us.

Jessamyn 1:17:01 Thanks so much for joining us. I am happy to hear more about books happy to hear about Lincoln and happy to hear about you know, all the all the other things that I have not seen Josh and I know,

Eyebrows McGee 1:17:11 I'm glad I got to do a couple Lincoln facts because if I didn't do like my shout outs for Peoria in the Midwest and Illinois, you know, no one would know it was me.

Cortex 1:17:22 So you gotta you gotta you gotta maintain that personal brand.

Eyebrows McGee 1:17:25 I got a rep for flyover country.

Jessamyn 1:17:28 Fantastic. Don't say that. Everybody gets to use the F word.

Cortex 1:17:32 They're taking it back. They're reclaiming it. No,

Eyebrows McGee 1:17:34 I can say flyover.

Jessamyn 1:17:37 My my my dad grew up in Naperville, so I'm like familiar with the problem and yet I grew up in New England so

Eyebrows McGee 1:17:44 I grew up not far from Naperville. Ah yeah but no everyone I want to be like everyone should move here but then don't because then it would be full of people

Jessamyn 1:17:54 we feel that way in Vermont also. Thanks for listening let us know how you like the shorter abbreviated slightly fewer jokes slightly formats of the podcast. We are standing Operators are standing by yes

Cortex 1:18:09 thank you again eyebrows for for thanks so much. Thank you for having so much fun. What a lovely night for a dangerous word lovely waiting to spend this day with you. Weekly hide away. Promise me another day takes to be