Podcast 111 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 111: It's Too Late To Play The Accordion (2015-12-01).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Jessamyn 0:00 I mean, some of these kids are like equine studies majors, they don't actually give a shit about HTML think they in particular be

Cortex 0:06 interested in horse texts markup

Unknown Speaker 0:12 for a pedophile are just man when God was the best of the web

Cortex 0:34 well perhaps we should start this thing. Fantastic. This is episode 111 of the medical robots of the web monthly podcast.

Jessamyn 0:43 I am cortex. I am Jessamyn.

Cortex 0:46 And with us as our special guests, no one we're just going to do with the two of us. And oh my god, we'll see how this goes.

Jessamyn 0:51 Yeah, had enough. You know, deaf, quality time together.

Cortex 0:54 Exactly. You know, I like I like having people on. And honestly, the only reason we don't have someone on this month is because holiday weekend crap. Holy shit. It's December, logistically, I didn't want to try and cram someone in, in short notice. So. But it's also I'm kind of excited about it. Because like, we really like when we have someone on, we're sort of both sort of shepherding them through the podcasting process. And I feel like there's a certain amount of

Jessamyn 1:16 which I've enjoyed. I've also enjoyed it. No,

Cortex 1:19 it's fun. And it's but it's a challenge. Like it's, it's, it makes me very conscious of the podcasting format. Like as we're doing it, you know, I'm constantly thinking, Oh, what do we need to accommodate this person? Should we try and help them get in on this conversation, et cetera, you know, and now I feel like we can just spend like an hour and a half, totally bullshitting here without giving a second thought, which our listeners are very excited about, I'm sure.

Jessamyn 1:40 Very excited, although it can't last forever, because I do have another job to go to at some point, but not for a while. So

Cortex 1:47 we got a little time. Well, I feel like trying to do it short last time. Worked out. Okay. I enjoyed it. Eyebrows brought the the energy and helped make that happen. That was good.

Jessamyn 1:58 Well, she's got that. Let me tell you this crazy story about this crazy thing already built in. So she was perfect.

Cortex 2:04 Yep. So that was that was a lot of fun. But yeah, apparently we can do it in less than two hours if we make an effort. So

Jessamyn 2:10 also, I am following her Instagram, which is all tiny houses of Peoria, and I am. Oh my God, loving it. Like, I don't care about Instagram, whatever Instagram, like I look at pictures on it. Sometimes I put a picture on it pretty much every day. And I'm like, Oh, they're people like my pictures. I like people's picture pictures. But I find that I look forward to the small houses of Peoria because there's so little and weird, and I love every single one of them. You don't like I don't feel that way about other people's cats. I don't feel that way about other people's babies. But the little houses of Peoria? Yes.

Cortex 2:44 It's a thing. It's you know, something if it hits you just right. That's, that's that's what the internet is for? Yeah,

Jessamyn 2:50 I think so. And I can never remember the web address. Like somebody asked me like, what's the web address of? And I don't? I'll have to look it up. But it is great. So yes, that is red. So so let's talk about the number 111. Let's

Cortex 3:06 let's pick you as number right there.

Jessamyn 3:09 I grew up right off of Highway 111. In Boxborough, Massachusetts when I was a kid, so that is my first first experience with it. And so some basic things. Yeah, it's a palindrome. It's not prime, it's actually three times 37. And what that means is that all the triplets 222777999 Are the form three and times 37, which is useful to know. Because then you automatically know all those numbers are divisible by 37. I don't know if other people care. I think it's cool. But the thing that I liked the best about 111 is that it's sometimes called a Nelson this maybe this is not true. Ah,

Cortex 3:55 sorry. That was not a very good Nelson laugh. I mean, it's clearly too hot. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's more of a it's more of a tone poem.

Jessamyn 4:07 I thought maybe you were laughing because you knew where this was going. Admiral Nelson, who theoretically only had an arm, one arm, one eye and one leg at the end of his life, but that was not true. I mean, and I don't even know how you could think that he had a leg like how do you make that mistake? And so people are like, yeah, he's one eye, one arm one ambition or one eye one arm and one asshole. I don't know. So if anybody has heard that, Nelson, I would be interested to know that

Cortex 4:36 sounds like this sounds like gonna ask me that should happen. Yeah. I've gotten you know, we've talked about before people have talked about how they you have sort of an internal AskMe and a filter. There was just a there was a meta talk post about that basically saying I didn't eat it preemptively. Oh, right. Thanksgiving one. Yeah. You know that. But that's something that comes up frequently, where people sort of talk about like, you know, I've been using ASP Metafilter for a long time and sometimes I Question. And sometimes I just asked myself the question in my head, you say, well, it asked me to filter. Yeah. And I go through. And I figure out what my answer is without actually having to ask Metafilter. And that's, that's really my relationship with AskMe as well. Like at this point, I do a lot of sort of, how can I phrase this question in a way that I'm not gonna feel dumb when someone says, Have you looked for x? Have you Googled why?

Jessamyn 5:22 I really do want them to just do my homework for me. Someone else to look up the Nelson because I don't feel like it. I look things up for a job.

Cortex 5:30 Yeah, that's work well, and that's the thing. I feel like, I feel like I should probably try and ask slightly more. I'm lazy, but someone out there knows how to do this questions instead of this.

Jessamyn 5:41 You could just softball it to me. Yeah, I'll just answer your question. Anyhow.

Cortex 5:46 Okay, we'll take turns from now on every every other week, one of us will ask a softball question and just happen to mention to the other person. Oh, by the way, have you seen AskMe Metafilter. And we'll just

Jessamyn 5:56 actually had a question that I thought you would be good at answering in my mind the other day.

Cortex 6:02 Forget it. If it comes to you bring it up. No, no

Jessamyn 6:05 idea. It was something to do with cats or medicine or houses with cats or medicine. I don't remember.

Cortex 6:11 Okay. Yeah, that that might be a thing I would know about. Depending on ethnomedicine in the house, it might want to live in what I love is a palindrome as well. There's like lazy palindromes, like I like it. It's like rhyming with commercial. Yeah, you know, it's like it's like it's this is just an identity function. Like it's like if you said a rock on the ground, is it look that rock, it's a palindrome? It counts. But it's also kind of,

Jessamyn 6:34 you know, that might be sort of interesting thinking of like palindromic emojis where the center emoji is has vertical symmetry. And then you have the same emoji on the other side. Because I've been teaching my students about how you can use emojis in URLs. But on the back end, they just get converted into crappy ASCII. Yeah, but it would be kind of cool to have a palindrome emoji URL, because like, whatever palindromic URLs are a dime a dozen, but palindromic emoji URLs, that would be kind of cool.

Cortex 7:05 Well, what if at some point, they just introduced that as a part of the emoji standard where you can, because now they've started supporting the whole, like varied skin tone stuff on emojis,

Jessamyn 7:14 awkwardly only on iPhones. I was telling my students about that. And they were like, no mind doesn't do it. And I'm like, what your phone is racist. And they were like, so Yeah, apparently, it's only Apple right now. Interesting. Well, I don't know if it's only apple, but it's definitely not my students phones, and it is my phone. I feel

Cortex 7:35 like transformational operations that you can add to emoji in general would will become a thing eventually, like, you'll be able to do things like rotate it, or flip it or scale it or whatnot. And then people will start doing these much more complicated. Like, the emoji thing would be super easy, because then

Jessamyn 7:52 you can do that with Snapchat, Snapchat, lets you take the emojis and rotate and flip and stretch. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you should be on the Snapchat. I should there.

Cortex 7:59 I find the most boring

Jessamyn 8:02 one.

Cortex 8:02 I gotta get up on this stuff. I go dive in.

Jessamyn 8:06 You don't have to. If you wanted to flip an emoji?

Cortex 8:09 Yeah. The opportunity is there. Someone has said that. All right, let's go.

Jessamyn 8:39 Hey, I just noticed a funny little bug. I'm looking at me five jobs. And I'm using my desktop computer, which I rarely use anymore. And it stretches the map. So I see basically two maps. But the jobs are only in one of them.

Cortex 8:55 Yeah, I'm not sure exactly how that zooming is supposed to work is probably good. Because otherwise you just end up with probably way too many things being rendered and bogged down. But, but it is weird. Why is there why are there multiple Earths, ooh, actually, if you want to play a fun trick, zoom way out and then slowly drag the map to the left to the right. And the the jobs will start skipping from one America to another. Oh my god, this is this is the best long at home podcast game we've ever come up with.

Jessamyn 9:24 Oh my god, I can actually get it. So half the United States jobs are in one United States and the other half are in the other United States.

Cortex 9:31 This is some this is about this. I've just started doing recovery. That's pretty cool. I'm very distractible.

Jessamyn 9:41 So speaking of jobs, the jobs are really Oh, so this podcast is basically all of November right? We got it together. It is the first of December go us Yeah,

Cortex 9:51 I know. Right. It's the first of December. The last one was the second of November. Close enough. So yeah, look how high functioning we are. We're amazing people.

Jessamyn 9:58 Nice. Nice. Oh, so I didn't scroll down long enough. There's actually an accordionist job although that's probably too late. Yeah, shit. You know who plays the accordion and Boston?

Cortex 10:09 Gym? Yes, I did not. I don't know if I didn't know if I just forgot that.

Jessamyn 10:16 He should have given him some lunch. He likes to work.

Cortex 10:21 It's a good thing to work for.

Jessamyn 10:23 Hmm, well, I'm sorry. We missed that. I hope px e 2000. Found a good accordionist

Cortex 10:27 that's I always hope that someone finds a good accordionist there's a couple still very much in the running jobs. One that's actually coming up just this Friday. Looking for a steady handed videographer, Pfc. 2000 wants someone to shoot a thing on Friday, presumably Friday?

Jessamyn 10:45 Pst 2000. What? It's the same person?

Cortex 10:50 What Oh, is it? I didn't. Same as what? The coordinates I said

Jessamyn 10:59 it out loud.

Cortex 11:00 I was I was I was caught up in the idea of Jim playing. What I was like, I was like imagining Jim with an accordion and trying to think Yeah, I think I can imagine what what it would look like if he was playing an accordion. Yes. Anyway, so they're just they're hiring like crazy. Apparently, Pixie 2000 is what they're doing. But if you're a steady handed geographer in the, in the vicinity of Tufts University and you want to do something on Friday, boom. And if

Jessamyn 11:24 you've ever wanted to work in Minneapolis advice pig they're hiring someone at the Minneapolis Minnesota population center with actually is probably an awesome job. Yeah. New things in big data. Huge fan of open source. The pay is good. I should move to Minneapolis. I love it. There. It's great. There. There's a ton of interesting mefites everything else I'm trying to think if I met it vice pig. No.

Cortex 11:49 Well, there you go. And it should you should move to Minnesota and mediawise pick and take a job.

Jessamyn 11:54 Yeah, gender has taters.

Cortex 11:58 That narrows it down. Thank you. Oh, I I referred to I guess luck. Because was he rather than she? I saw you do that. And and some that? Yes. Their gender listing in the profile was something. See you I can't remember it now offhand. But, yes, I felt not so bad about it. But still, I feel I always feel silly when I get someone's gender backwards on the on

Jessamyn 12:23 the will because we do try. Yeah, the argument is we could try harder, but we are trying at least a little bit.

Cortex 12:30 But uh, but yeah, so jobs. There's a couple other things in there too. But basically jobs, go get some jobs, people. But let's talk about projects.

Jessamyn 12:37 Yeah, I was trying to see I think I didn't like vote for anything this month. This was kind of a low interactive month for me because shoulders better not sick. And so all I've been doing is catching up on all the stuff I have been doing for the last few months, which has been great. You know, like all those little social media kind of, you know, trap lines that you set and then forgot to go check, like are all filled with like little comments. Like saying Howdy, but I've been doing that and not doing? This is one of the few months I'm like, Yeah, I haven't been as up on Metafilter. I mean, I've been interactive, but I haven't been

Cortex 13:15 you haven't been all up in there so much haven't been voting.

Jessamyn 13:17 And I noticed I haven't used fanfare talk at all. Like, I used to pride myself on having at least one thing and everything with a number.

Cortex 13:24 But you missed the clean sweep this month.

Jessamyn 13:28 Well, no, I mean, I'm not you guys added a new thing. fanfare talk to the profile page and a while ago, but

Cortex 13:35 yeah, the last month or two? I think we got the rose.

Jessamyn 13:40 To say you have to get

Cortex 13:41 on there. You'll have to. Yeah, we'll come up with something. Okay. It will be related to one of the stunt AskMe he's one of us posts about that the other one can answer. It will be about fanfare talking. That'll just tie it all together. bunch of good stuff on projects. I feel like we say that every month but that's one of the things I like about projects is every month

Jessamyn 14:00 that he knows how to make the bots now like I feel like maybe we've hit peak bot.

Cortex 14:06 There's a lot of bot action and I'm I remain totally for it. But I am becoming aware that like every month I'm like, Oh hey, here's a bunch of Twitter bots. I'd like it's like oh, well that hurt. People do other stuff too. I guess you know, we should talk about that stuff as well as you know, bots but ya know, the bot thing it really it is it is nice to see it continuing to be a thing that people are digging in on because I think that's a really fun sort of contemporary internet creative expression mode. But speaking of bots, here's a post it's not about a bot at all. Not about about at all. Not about about at all. Not Yes, what you said chatty with nothing. There we go. Yes, this is a freelance Astro, which is a good username for this user because their whole thing is they're essentially a freelance astrophysicist. Nobody does that. I know. It's like What you do, but he doesn't,

Jessamyn 15:01 I liked it, there's only two comments one is by you. And one is by schmuck who's been a user since 2006. And I just I love that user. It's a

Cortex 15:11 great username. Ya know, it's a, it's a nice little freelance Astro ended up doing a little interview with the BBC about Einstein's general relativity and sort of trying to do a quick explainer of some of what's going on in there, which would be neat just by itself. But but then there's this video that someone the BBC put together a little little animation sort of animating his talking about relatively, it's super charming. It's just it's, I guess, it's a thread, you know, it's it's just, it's, it's a nice sort of riff on it. And the animation is great, and a lot of fun. And I really enjoyed it.

Jessamyn 15:45 So you understand relativity, not really, ever, ever ended better now?

Cortex 15:51 A little bit. I mean, it's, it's one of those things where like, I feel like I get sort of in spitting distance, every time I make I can say

Jessamyn 15:57 the words, I can read the thing. And I understand it conceptually, in that I know other people think these things are true, I just have a hard time feeling it in my bones, not that I don't believe it.

Cortex 16:11 It's like, like, there are things that I've gone from not really understanding how that works to understanding how that works. And relativity, I

Jessamyn 16:16 think I actually understand what it is like, not that I could talk about it, but I could listen to a person talk about it and know what they were talking about relatively tivity mostly, but not, not entirely, so it will be helpful for me to learn a little bit more. And that was part of it is I don't have any hooks to attach it to anything else in my life, even though I should because it attaches to other real world things.

Cortex 16:42 But in a very, it's a very abstract sort of way. I think it's like, you know, that's when I was when I was in high school, I remember I really, really liked geometry because like there was such a strong relationship between the ideas and the actual mechanics and producing boxes, and boxes angles, like like producing an actual geometric proof of something was really satisfying. Like, oh, because I totally see how all these things tie together.

Jessamyn 17:04 With the algebra same thing. Yeah, algebra.

Cortex 17:07 I was I was sort of just for algebra. I was I was just I was busy being you know, middle school. You know, middle schooler, but, but calculus, calculus lost me. Yeah, calculus. And I've since made a little bit of progress, coming back to it. Occasionally, we're like, oh, no, this is a little bit more concrete in it. But it's still very kind of this is pushing symbols.

Jessamyn 17:28 Like read books about calculus to try and understand it, like calculus for people who like math, but don't, you know, and it always comes down to I can never think of an application where I couldn't just do it with a fairly close average. Yeah. And so it's hard for me to be like, Okay, I've got to do all that extra stuff. But I only approximate it a little bit closer. And I'm sure there's somebody listening to this, who will be like, that's wrong, because blah, and I'd be happy to hear about it. But for me, I'm always like, Well, can you just mostly average it? And

Cortex 18:03 yeah, this thing like do you need do you need the more powerful, more abstract discipline to solve a problem in your real life? And if you don't, it's kind of hard to get super worried about it. Yeah, so So relatively was like that, for me, too. It's like, it's, it's in the territory of I understand the pieces going towards it. And I sort of understand it's placed there, and I appreciate it. And I believe that it's a powerful and useful tool, but I never feel like I can sit down and actually explain it. So you know, listening to someone trying to explain it. It's kind of nice. It's like, oh, yeah, that's yeah, for the next five minutes, I'll feel like yeah, I'm right there. But also just just a really nice animation.

Jessamyn 18:45 So the two things and projects that I like, kind of go together a little bit, just because they deal with trans issues a little bit. One of them was not that girl reviewed sex education book by a Quaker teacher, and found that their sort of sort of progressive approach didn't really kind of solve a problem or really represent her family. And so she wrote a thing about it that was, you know, good in that kind of sort of plain talky way. It's one of the things I really like about you know, Quakerism in general is that is that speaking, in an in a caring, useful, albeit critical way is actually useful in what you're supposed to be doing. And so she could do this and write the thing and it was good and sort of a part of what you're supposed to be doing, doing, doing your job of being a person of faith in that community. And then the other thing I really liked was by elephants Spanish, which basically was an article called my path to trans motherhood, talking about how to adopt become a mom. there, it was picked up on Buzzfeed. It's the second piece that she's written. And, you know, talk to her last one talked a little bit about a little bit about, you know, dealing with Metafilter. But this one's just kind of interesting thinking about, you know, what, what it looks like, I haven't read the entire essay. I just really liked it. And I saw those two is sort of part of a part of a kind. Yeah. And I just like to people are thinking creatively in writing about their creative thinking about things.

Cortex 20:32 Yeah. I thought with Not, not that girls. One. I mean, this is this is not the point of it. But at the same time, it's sort of it's nice that at least it was a response to Hey, this is someone trying failing, but least trying to be sort of aggressive about this, rather than like, I feel like if this were a discussion of something, well, you will, you know, it'd be so easy to be like, Hey, here's my response to this incredibly, horribly regressive book about sexuality from a religious perspective. So it's like, the world in general nudging in the right direction, I guess. And yeah,

Jessamyn 21:03 thanks for trying. But here's where you could do better. Yeah, let's let's, that's sometimes a really hard thing to say. Especially if you're feeling that it denies the, you know, existence or humanity of your family or your you know, your makeup or whatever. And I think she does a really good job with it. And that's one of the things I really liked about it. Yeah.

Cortex 21:25 I enjoyed this. Just from today, making an under the wire projects submission from this morning from gaming thing. You don't have to watch it. I've not seen it click it. This is by user Azerbaijani. It's called Final consternation for and it is as it describes itself, and 11 minutes supercut of Scream. So if you ever wanted to see a whole bunch of screaming footage from basically horror movies, cut together, boom, there you go. And that sort of thing amuses me like if you if you need something to put on in the background, while your band is playing a show. This this goes on your reel of great, weird, random bands, in theory, sort of. I've always liked the I just kind of like the trappings of performing as a band. More than I like the practice of performing.

Jessamyn 22:12 Jim's exactly the opposite. In fact, sometime he would like to be on the podcast only because I talked about we should totally have him on. Yeah, I didn't even think about it. Um, but yeah, he likes to practice but they don't really play out so much. We'll see. And

Cortex 22:27 it's interesting. I don't mean I don't mean I don't like practicing as a band. Like I like playing music now. I mean, the practical aspects of gigging we should probably ranted about previously but like it's there's a lot of bullshit that goes on the front and the back end of just going and playing a gig that I turned out, I'm someone who finds that pretty tiring. But, but what do you do? Anyway, that's my feeling.

Jessamyn 22:52 We should mention that. You know, Jeff Tech has added a few more people to his her suit history t shirt shop. You guys have to store

Cortex 23:00 up yet? We do we do. And I think we're gonna have I think we had a meta talk post sort of about getting that rolling last month, but we're going to do another one in the next day or so to really say, hey,

Jessamyn 23:09 go buy more stuff.

Cortex 23:12 But yeah, just tech of of the excellent T shirts.

Jessamyn 23:16 The excellent all the excellent all the all the things. Yep. But yeah, there's more new stuff there. And so that's awesome. If you

Cortex 23:25 need your Bernie Sanders t shirt. I do. If you need your Donald Trump

Jessamyn 23:32 There's so much I just went into the so you know, I teach part time and I went in, we have like what you would perceive? It's like, it's like the Platonic teacher's lounge of like, 1984. You know, I've got a like a cubby. And there's always a little bit of burnt coffee in the coffeemaker and like, you know, a bulletin board and it's a plant at dusty plant. But somebody I don't know, has a button maker. And so there's Bernie Sanders, like feel the burn buttons that are clearly just randomly made from like, some sort of clipart or whatever. They don't even have pictures of Bernie Sanders. It's like font and background color. Nice, but I have to say, they're pretty awesome.

Cortex 24:22 I have I've thought just on the button maker thing. I've thought like a couple different times this year, and I should have a button maker and just make buttons. I thought about making buttons for XOXO actually. And so definitely next year, assuming it happens again next year, and assuming I get a lottery but Well, is there alright. No, I expected will they? Andy and Andy, Andy Bejo. And Melanie and Andy I know but we have listeners. We have listeners who don't necessarily Andy Bell and the other guy and the other guy had a Macmillan very nice Irish filler. They they have said every year you know during the XOXO Oh, they're putting on that, like, you know, we really this isn't an annual festival, we really don't know if we're going to do this again. And this year is like the fourth time they're saying that and you can even hear them sort of rolling their eyes at themselves like, now, we don't know if we're gonna do this again next year, but also come check out our permanent warehouse space we're opening later this year. So I think I think at this point, people are just sort of expecting it to keep happening, but, but it's still gonna be limited tenants. And you know, it's a lottery. So you know, I've gotten lucky a couple of years in a row, but I might not get my name pulled out of the hat next year. But if I do, I'll make some buttons. I'll make some buttons. And I think that there's just something about a button is kind of you

Jessamyn 25:36 have a lot of buttons, and they were very few buttons, but I do wear like a button like my button says read. And I think I got it from the California Library Association Conference, or I maybe got it from some other conference. Neela but I like having a little button that says a little thing. So yeah, Buttons.

Cortex 25:54 Alright. Buttons, I think, you know, part of the I like the end of giving buttons away. Even if I only made like two of those buttons, like just give away and those buttons are out there. Because then someone else will be like, Hey, where'd you get the buttons go some guy.

Jessamyn 26:07 Stick and they're easier almost to make them stickers. Like it's easy to make crappy stickers, but it's harder to make better good stickers, but you can make a button that's as good as any button out there.

Cortex 26:16 Yeah, exactly. So yeah. Anyway, buttons are great. Speaking of occlusion buttons, I'm gonna give in and talk about the bots after all, because there's a button spots I don't know

Jessamyn 26:31 what's done. You're not done.

Cortex 26:32 I just a couple quick ones to mention there's a official roguelikes you know, there's been a real there's been a real lack of rope like on the podcast in general lately.

Jessamyn 26:43 Well, that's because there's been a lack of it on the site. Yeah, it's not like you're holding your tongue. Well, it's a

Cortex 26:47 little bit of both. There's been a couple things I haven't mentioned him but I have been playing a lot of roguelikes as part of the thing. But anyway, it's not a roguelike but it is a bot from ethnic knocked and Metroid baby and and of adventure and so this is like this is like the the creme the toto of meta filter bot projects post Oh, real super group situation.

Jessamyn 27:08 I do like this. It's fantastic. This

Cortex 27:11 is if you are reading this, which is a twitter bot that sends out alerts about fictional emergency scenarios.

Jessamyn 27:18 Warning a chromatic blob has disappeared. Mecha Godzilla will now finish the job Do not attempt to ignore us.

Cortex 27:25 If you're reading this, the missile launch has disappeared obey inside a bridge. This is not a test.

Jessamyn 27:31 It appears that the self destruct sequence has disappeared deactivate like a real Bostonian. We're sorry. Well, and I have to admit for bots, the Twitter format is actually kind of excellent. Where it makes like if you're literally reading it on twitter.com because it will make the things that other people have already favorited bigger. Yeah, so you can read ones that you know your internet people may also

Cortex 28:00 you got some filtering going on for you which is nice. You can pick out the really great ones another bot that I like is the magical realism but and this one has gotten I think a lot of love. There was a the post about it on the blue. But this is from don't jump Larry. And it writes tiny, magical realist stories.

Jessamyn 28:22 Thanks to me, like Oh, right.

Cortex 28:23 You're not just magically reading my mind. I thought I thought we've got me telepathic I am

Jessamyn 28:27 magically reading your mind. And it's like, oh, God, no.

Cortex 28:30 But this is this is this is great, too. This is like it's a similar sort of thing but you know, a different format. But basically just he don't capillary put together a bunch of sort of sentence templates using syntax form of that. And then it fills in with, you know, vocabulary random to fill that out and creates these weird little magical stories. And the really interesting thing to me is like, I don't think there's anything in the bot that is specifically trying to create weird juxtapositions. It's just the power of knowing that if you throw in random language, you're going to get juxtapositions. You know, it's very unlikely that you're gonna get a genuinely unremarkable little narrative.

Jessamyn 29:15 There's a ton This is a very popular bot.

Cortex 29:19 Yeah, no, this it's really it's, it's gotten

Jessamyn 29:21 like 5000 followers, I was looking at a thing that I liked. 100 year old Alchemist writes a love poem that is made out of the future and went to like, go favorite. It's got 97 favorites already.

Cortex 29:34 Yeah, like Yeah, I'm looking at ones that are like, poorly received, and they've got like, you know, 10 retweets and and 20 favorites or whatever. In Athens is an ocean where every drop of water is a volcano, you know, it's like it's great. It's it's, it's it's just the right placement of all this, I think as part of it. And this is really going back to what you said about Twitter being like the good format for I think it's also a good length for these sorts of experiments. Because Because the thing is,

Jessamyn 30:05 I love it's a constraint. Yeah. It's an it's

Cortex 30:09 a natural constraint is the thing, like, you know, no one says, Yeah, but your tweet was pretty short, bro. You know, it's like, it's supposed to be short, you know. So you compare that to generative stuff that produces paragraphs or pages. And, you know, that's, that's cool, too. And that's interesting. And sometimes there's stuff that really plays with it long form, but mostly, you kind of get these things working out approximately So the sentence sentence level, so when you throw together a whole page of them, you just have a bunch of unrelated bits of weirdness so why not just take it a sentence at a time and so yeah, these these things. This bought the random fictional alert powers talking about they're both were like just a perfect fit. Right for the medium is kind of how I feel about it.

Jessamyn 30:50 If you are reading this someone has disappointed the president pray as fast as you can, it will cause a mild skull rash for a few days.

Jessamyn 31:35 Other projects to remove metal filter proper I never know where we go next.

Cortex 31:39 We got a metal filter. Okay. Like like all the cool kids. I'm sorry, the uncool kids come in medical there too.

Jessamyn 31:48 We're all every time you say the cool kids think God kills a kid.

Cortex 31:52 Do I say the cool kids English? It felt weird coming out of my mouth.

Jessamyn 31:55 I don't need you. You I mean, oh, the general

Cortex 31:57 Yes.

Jessamyn 31:58 This is not a problem you have I am by him. You know what your problems?

Cortex 32:02 Yes, I their sundry is what they are. Well, I if we're going to talk about metal filter, I don't know how we can not talk about like the hugest post of of the month. So huge. It actually happened back in October. This is Joshua 70. Ones.

Jessamyn 32:22 Epic. This was yes. Right,

Cortex 32:25 is a post about association football in the Philippines. widely, widely widely lauded and received by the poster with his one comment on the post saying this one's not. Which oh my gosh, I think Greg pointed that out to us. And oh, I feel Yeah, that is that is that is an amazing non reception, Josh is everyone. And I didn't feel we could not mention it. Because that's such a perfect setup for mentioning it. But but you know, this shit happens every once in a while, you know, you make a post about something you're like, hey, this is interesting. And I don't know how many people are gonna be interested. And sometimes like, just nobody out is the the way it plays out. And

Jessamyn 33:08 here's what I really don't understand about this post. It links to the as calls. Blog. But if you look at the as calls blogs, the top two posts on it or spammy shoebox.

Cortex 33:21 It's interesting, and I don't think they were originally and and this is my theory, my theory is back in October, this blog was set up by maybe to someone being trying to be sort of opportunist because they were sort of interested, or maybe they had been genuinely interested in but didn't blog much. So they set up this site for the team posted out a few times, then around when Josh was 71, who's going to make this post there was probably that little bit of a well, this, this could be a thing they could be other so so that as of that date, October 6, you know, there were a few posts about the team. And then you see one more post about the team and then more recently, up at the top are backdated posts that are weird advertised. So I feel like it may have been sort of like if that team had done well. This would have been a blog about that team. I'm taking from the fact that the top two posts are a couple of advertisements now, which they probably weren't when he made the post originally, that maybe that team didn't turn out to bust into you know, World Cup fame or whatever. Or not World Cup but whatever.

Jessamyn 34:28 World Cup, was it? I mean, even even getting close to being able to qualify for the World. Yes, I understand. So yeah,

Cortex 34:34 I feel like that. Joshua 71 May, in retrospect be the victim of someone sort of saying, fuck it. Maybe I can monetize some of the you know,

Jessamyn 34:42 right. I saw some incoming traffic for once. Yeah, rather than

Cortex 34:47 rather than that that actually been what it looked like when he made the post because it's like, Oh, that's weird. Right. And

Jessamyn 34:52 he said right on dude. Yep. So yeah, sympathies

Cortex 34:55 for the epic failure of a post to take off. It had to think it's what we all see they awake at night thinking about until we make a bunch of posts and stop thinking about that sort of. But a BS, hats off to you for for being the guy who got stuck with that and for calling it out yourself in your own thread because I thought that was kind of beautiful.

Jessamyn 35:18 But we've denied you not making the podcast now. Sorry.

Cortex 35:20 So we've we've we've ruined what vestige you had of prediction about your post, I guess.

Jessamyn 35:27 So I would like to call out my favorite thing that happened in Metafilter this month, which partly it was because we did Thanksgiving a little bit different this year, like my sister often has to work on Friday. And so even though we'd like to go down to my dad's place, which has huge kitchen, and whatever, she doesn't like to do all that driving, so we go to her place. And this year, everybody was just kinda like, it's been a hectic couple months for everybody. So we did some really low key, we didn't have turkey. And I was just like, you know, one of the things we never do, as a family, I mean, me, Kate and Jim, but we probably should do is just like, turn the TV on and just sit, you know, because we talk all the time, and talk and eat and drink coffee. And that's awesome. But when we're feeling kind of just rundown are low key or whatever. We don't have kind of that constant TV option, because we're just, I mean, she watches TV on our own. And I do sometimes. But I was like, you know, there's a parade, like, let's turn on the TV and just watch the parade because football is against the rules. Kate says no football, but like the parade. So I watched the parade for the first time. And I can't remember that used to be a thing I used to do with my grandparents.

Cortex 36:33 I don't think I've ever watched it actually. It's kind of fun.

Jessamyn 36:36 And then I went to metta filter, and there's a thread about the parade, which includes the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I know it's a grudge of certain people, if you call it the Macy's Day Parade.

Cortex 36:52 I was not aware that that was the thing, they will get upset.

Jessamyn 36:56 So I was moving my desk because I redid my living room and my computer pitched over forward and created a huge divot in the desk, which was ugly, but whatever the computer still works, but I just noticed it bent my aluminum keyboard, not that it matters because it's just around the F 18 and F 19 keys and nobody uses those. I just sort of noticed. So at any rate, it's the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, not the Macy's Day Parade. It's not Macy's Day. But there's this epic comment by all kinds of time who used to work for the federated merchandising group who was the parent company, and he got to be a balloon pilot, and tells these great stories about what's actually going on. For the people that are piling the balloons completely amazing. That is the life of a balloon jockey. We ruled the skies.

Cortex 37:54 Because yeah, I mean, that's it seems like such an obvious thing to say. But this is one of the things that I sort of enjoy about constantly realizing in life is that every goddamn thing that happens that's somebody's job somebody's in charge of doing that. And they have this whole inside view of a process that I know nothing about and probably in a lot of cases have given no thought so like

Jessamyn 38:16 of course there's aren't the sort of blogosphere people who are just going to be like mad at blah blah blah on the internet, so you should

Cortex 38:24 know about it. Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. It's, that's yes. I loved it. I'm contemplating the blue balloon chalkiness there was I was just I was just looking at this the other day, a post I like in a Hegel play a video game sort of way. There's a game called No

Jessamyn 38:47 Hey, go play I thought you said Hegel play a video game. And I was like, it's

Cortex 38:52 it's a philosophical text adventure called that handle play video game. Someone should make this now actually, I'm kind of excited. But no, a video game that hey, you could go play called Sky that I had been playing few weeks ago. So I was excited to see a post about it. Because yeah, video games. But it's interesting, not just because it's a video game that people play which you can, hey, because it's free, it's open source, it's cross platforms, you can just download it and and it's a it's a flying around space, trying to make money by either like being a pirate or shooting down pirates, or ignoring all of that and just sticking to commerce and buying low and selling high in different galactic systems, that sort of thing. But it's, it's it's very much built as the successor to a classic series of games called Escape Velocity, that anybody who was playing video games on like the Mac in the mid late 90s has a chance of having strong memories of because it was like a huge Mac on the game at the time.

Jessamyn 39:55 I did not play any of these big games. So I'm not like, oh, no, you didn't I just I ha, neat.

Cortex 40:04 Well, sure. And I don't I don't know how broadly they were known. But like, I think the thing is, I've known a couple of people who had max at the time and relax, and well, yeah, they didn't have PCs, and they didn't have, you know, necessarily video game consoles. So like, what existed for games on the Mac was what it consisted. And that is a much smaller zone of gaming experiences at the time, so tends to have a lot more, you

Jessamyn 40:26 know, a lot of people who play games on the Mac played the same 10 games. Yeah,

Cortex 40:29 exactly. Because he knows it's just hard out there for a Mac owner. So the games you'd like you really liked. So anyway, this is it's nice. If you have memories of this older series of games. This is just this random open source projects. And people have been doing that you can go play for free, that like really does a good job of getting the feel of that. And it's, it's neat. It's it's a nice being able to sort of dip back, you know, 1520 years. And just like pure gaming and nostalgia, just because people decided to make it happen. Not because it's a big commercial rerelease. You can still buy the original game. It's kind of weird. I talked about a little bit in the thread, like they updated. So it works on modern systems, but they didn't really update it. So it still feels like it was designed for, you know, but it

Jessamyn 41:12 plays with like a race speed and stuff like that. Right?

Cortex 41:14 Yeah, that stuff is more or less correct. It's just you kind of have to put on your, your reading glasses to make out the pixel art and read the wait, wait,

Jessamyn 41:22 wait, did you read my tweet about?

Cortex 41:24 Did I just set that up? Or what?

Jessamyn 41:26 I don't know. Did you? Yes, I

Cortex 41:28 did. I mean,

Jessamyn 41:29 you have glasses, right?

Cortex 41:31 I do have glasses. They're not reading glasses. They're they're really dry? Because if you had them since you were a kid, no, no, it's actually the the last the last several years. I started wearing them when I was walking around downtown with Secretary at one day. And I was like, hey, you know, those, those towers in the distance are a little bit blurry. And I think she was like, and because she's she has significant vision correction. She wears contacts and when she goes to work classes are pretty thick. So I was like, you know that something in the distance is slightly blurry. She was like, really?

Jessamyn 42:06 It's like with me and Jim where I keep being like, he's had glasses since he was a kid always. And now he's like a grandpa with like, three different pairs that he juggles, you know, for like the screen and reading and driving and sunglasses. And that's for I don't even know how he does it. And so I'm always like, when do I get my glasses? When do I get shut up? But, you know, I kind of I wake up in the morning and one of the things I do in the morning is I read usually like book Kindle something. And like, everything's always blurry, a little bit, but I just figure my brain hasn't kicked into word parts yet. But apparently, no, I'm just my vision is getting slowly. And it clears up over time, I think because my brain started streaming and fixing everything, or I stopped caring. But I got some reading glasses that I want it trivia. And I was like, oh, wait a second. Like I just didn't? I don't know. I didn't think about it. So now I'm very excited to get my glasses.

Cortex 43:06 Yeah, no, that's that. It's nice to be able to embrace it. I was actually kind of happy when I first got my glasses when I decided that I should go to the optometrist and get a vision check. Because it's like, oh, no, I actually, things are a little blurry. I could

Jessamyn 43:19 Oh, when you started that. I mean, your classes are good looking glasses, I think. Yeah.

Cortex 43:23 Well, you know, it's a real month prescription so I can sort of do whatever I want in terms of right frames and style them. Which is funny because like, I'm I'm not a person who is usually super hands on involved in your style choices. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, a little bit wasted on me, but at the same time, it's nice. No, I can just really Oh, yeah. Those big frames.

Jessamyn 43:41 Yeah. No, I mean, you know, in my profession in the library world, like this is the rite of passage, you know, right. I get to get a chain, hanging them bounce them off my chest as I walk around with my cardigans.

Cortex 43:54 This is like a massive accessory in context for you. Above and beyond. I

Jessamyn 43:58 haven't been able, I mean, I've had prop glasses, but I felt very, she

Cortex 44:03 was yes. Yeah, so now you've got you're totally justified. This is rad. You have you have reached like this is your third Pokemon librarian. I don't understand the reference at all poker minds have multiple forms that chain. Oh, Charlie's hard. Yeah. So like, you know, char is art or whatever is art. Yeah.

Jessamyn 44:23 Somebody asked me on Reddit what my favorite Pokemon is. I saw that Jim what my favorite Pokemon was

Cortex 44:27 we should we should we should talk a little bit about like you so you later we'll talk. We'll get back to that. So other other Metafilter stuff.

Jessamyn 44:35 Other medical stuff. Let me see. Oh, I liked the box thing. Let's see who was it that posted a pale yellow with orange. Basically, you've got a funny gift, which I always have. And then you can measure it up. And you can do a template and you can print it and you can make a box like any kind of box all the boxes.

Cortex 45:00 Open stuff.

Jessamyn 45:00 I mean, seriously, there's nothing better this is Oh my god. Like, you can make one of those little pillow packs like you got like a hot apple pie in from McDonald's when you were like four years old. You can make them all.

Cortex 45:15 When you were four.

Jessamyn 45:17 Yeah, so I just oops, sorry. That's the actual. Yeah, no,

Cortex 45:22 I saw this.

Jessamyn 45:23 And those things like 15 comments. 115 favorites.

Cortex 45:27 This is this is one of a couple of different posts that I was totally gonna mention. Basically, just as a, this is a thing. Other people are so excited about that. Like, I appreciate the utility of this, but I was like, oh, okay, well, it'd be handy. But yeah, a ton of people. I saw people tweeting about LEGO boxes, and I'm like, really? Wow. But people are really excited about it. And I can get it it just, it doesn't jump to jump out to me. So it was interesting to see so much enthusiasm about this box thing. I had a weird moment when I first saw the post because this could also so easily have been a post by a spammer. And it's a weird sort of like you know, you could imagine someone's like hey you want gray box? I found this fun site boxes are for you dot Are you right

Jessamyn 46:09 have a box boxes can be boxed in the box box. Hey, I got your box. Do you like boxing? Because box?

Cortex 46:17 Yeah, exactly. But at the same time, it's totally obviously not here. And it's interesting. It was interesting, and also slightly weird to me to sort of look at it and try and sift through my process for analyzing a post and realize, yeah, there's these weird sort of adjacencies between really great post and post it would get someone banned. I feel bad even talking out loud about the zones because they don't want to get pale with yellow orange. They're on pale yellow with orange the wrong idea because this is a great post. There's nothing wrong with this post. It's just it's interesting. My brain processes at this point. Yeah, no, I think that comes

Jessamyn 46:49 across the post is perfect. Like it's a great post. The boxes are awesome. Well, because do you remember I think we mentioned this on a podcast years ago, the YouTube video of the guy, you gave them a thing. And he just went like on a piece of cardboard with a razor box cutter. I guess that's why they call them box cutters. No, it's not okay. But he would make a box of any size because he just could do it in his brain. And the video was just him putting a thing down and going. And then folding the thing and you've got your perfect box. And everybody loved it. And that struck me as a similar, similar thing, only free into the people, which is another awesome part of it.

Cortex 47:31 Yeah. I really dug this A, I just did this concept really. But this post by Etrigan. About It. Isochronic maps, he made a post about it. The Isochronic maps in economics their way to a

Jessamyn 47:52 milkshake, I think, saw some fallout from it. Yes.

Cortex 47:57 Yeah, I think I saw a couple of milkshake.

Jessamyn 47:59 And I just thought Isochronic map. I didn't know what Isochronic was. And I was like, I don't know what's going on there. But now I do.

Cortex 48:06 Yeah, it's neat. It's just yeah, it's just a map that says okay, about how long would it take to travel from a given point to everywhere else in a region or in the world?

Jessamyn 48:16 As you know what I want? I want to Isochronic map for Vermont, because like we're really close to, like, you can be equally close to two towns and one of them takes three times as long to get to because mountains. Yeah, and it would be cool to like, yeah, figure without that. I

Cortex 48:35 mean, it's probably the sort of thing, if you're gonna do like just basic road based travel, you could probably generate that pretty easily with, like freely available tools at this point from freely available data, which is a neat thing about the world we live in.

Jessamyn 48:47 Great. I'm just gonna put a wish out there. Yeah, just do that. Do that. Well, you should pause and ask

Cortex 48:51 Metafilter question saying, Hey, how can I easily generate a nice product map of Vermont? And boom. But yeah, just need to look at like, it's it's a useful idea. It's a different way of thinking about mapping.

Jessamyn 49:03 And it's a cool post. And it's from 1914, which means public domain. Yeah. And people

Cortex 49:07 added some links to other stuff in there too, which is, yeah, so it's red. It's it's some rad stuff is what it is. It's great. It's on the roadside.

Jessamyn 49:14 Speaking of stuff you can make with your box cutter, sort of. Jamie is a friend so we're allowed to link Oh, sure. Oh, sure. But basically, he did a post called cut microbe. It's a sculpture made out of paper and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw those. Wow, paper craft. I know. Holy look at it. It's 44 inches long. And it's just a bacteria. But if you look and you keep looking and you keep looking and you keep looking. There's just all these all these little pieces, all of this stuff. It's amazing looking. That is so neat. That is really rad. And it's just you know, it's essentially kind of like a single link. microbe art thing I mean, papercraft is a general sort of internet keyhole kind of thing. But this specifically was a great example of it. And it took the person for months. And it's another I think all of these have been like more favorites and comments. Yeah. The ones we pick out,

Cortex 50:20 there's, there's, there's only so much you can say about an elaborate hand cut microbe, you know, it's like, holy shit, that's great looking. But you know, you can't really well, you know, in my opinion, paper cutting a microbe is problematic, because, you know, if you look at the, you know, there's there's not a whole lot to there's not a whole lot to like, necessarily argue about their, I guess, I guess, microbial.

Jessamyn 50:38 Oh, God even I'm sure people. That's not a challenge.

Cortex 50:43 i You're right, I'm gonna knock on wood right now. Here's, here's a thread that I have not read through. But it was like a huge thing back at the beginning of the month. And I haven't read through it partly because of what it's about, which is making it sound like a terrible thing. But what it is, is a collection of people's most awkward. I was

Jessamyn 51:03 gonna link to this also or whatever. Yes. So explain the context of this. So Five, Four Eyed girl,

Cortex 51:10 yeah, for a girl made this post. And it's a post about the blogosphere sharing an embarrassing moment on Twitter. You know, she's, she's a funny blogger, she writes funny stuff. But so the post is sort of about that. And then people starting to tweet their own awkward stuff in response to that, and this big pile of, you know, little awkward stories people told on Twitter. And then of course, this gets posted to Metafilter forum posts about this. And then Metafilter does the exact same thing. And it's this gigantic collection of just awkward stories, you know, people's personal stories, stories, I've heard from other people.

Jessamyn 51:49 Like their kind of tweet length, you know, it's like, when you like, you know, something, you drop somebody off, you're giving somebody a ride home and they, you know, leave and you're like, Bye, love you. You're like, yep. Because all you can do is just be like, That was ridiculous. You don't want to like make it more of the thing that it already is.

Cortex 52:08 So you just sort of it's better to let it dry. And it's like that it remains that chrysalis. The coda

Jessamyn 52:13 to all of them is of course the you know, the the unrelenting nerd shame, you know, so what was the one that I was looking at? Did this while renting a car clerk Thank you have a safe trip me you to never going to Texas again. Like like that's the funny joke, right? Is that you're just like, burned it was fire. Like, I've just forget it.

Cortex 52:36 Forget to me now. So yeah, that's okay. I've dipped into it a couple times. But I haven't been in like there's a mood I could be in where I would just like eat the entire thing hole and be really injured. But instead of like, oh, but awkwardness I'm awkward a lot. I don't want to be there again.

Jessamyn 52:55 I guess horrible moment yesterday, involve me attempting to explain that my problems with Spanish are not because I can't speak or understand it. But because I'm a little deaf. In actual fact, I became claimed myself to be a small female big. O poppin. Buff, and I am so sorry.

Cortex 53:14 There was a post about I don't know, I don't know if I talked about suck a little bit in the podcast after XOXO. But that was a fun thing at XOXO. This year was Andy Bayeux waxy had gotten the folks from suck.com back together to do a couple of patient things, which is which is really neat. And it's great to see them and and also kind of weird, because it's like it really was like, you know, like 1520 years ago that that whole run and so a lot of people like what the fuck is suck now. And like even just the idea that it existed as it did was sort of like it's a weird thing to look at from the current web economy almost. Even though some of the ideas there the idea of like a site that does you know, daily funny writing, in exchange for getting to exist is like

Jessamyn 54:01 starting to do what everybody does. Now. It's the internet is now.

Cortex 54:05 Yeah, so it's sort of a weird coming full circle sort of thing, in a way. But anyway, someone's actually been posting and not the water, made a post about this a minute filter about suck again, which is a newsletter that's actually just republishing suck via email a year later day by day, which is really kind of interesting. And it's

Jessamyn 54:27 a way it's new soccer. It's old results. It's

Cortex 54:29 just they're they're they're they're reiterating the, you know, archives of the site like suck.com itself, that isn't even there anymore. It's a it's a crappy placeholder. But yeah, they're basically taking the Internet Archive essentially of it and sending that out on a daily basis. 20 years later, as sort of, hey, we're just republishing suck. So and I don't know, like I have to look at this from the perspective of having sort of been reading it at the time. Right, but, but I wonder how much differently Due to someone who's just like coming at it, like totally blind, and seeing it just with zero context,

Jessamyn 55:05 you know, my HTML class, I was explaining to people why blogging started. And just watching a bunch of little eyes looking at me and talking about like the WTO protests in Seattle, and you didn't used to be able to look at these things on your phone. And now if a cop shoots someone, there's a good chance there's video, but back in the day, you know, cops could do all sorts of things. This was of course, the class where the dean is sitting in and I didn't mean it to be that way. But talking about blogging, and how you could have a personal site for talking about your stuff, and how that was important and why it was important and how it changed the conversation, for lack of a better word. And they just kind of stared at me with their Little Orphan Annie eyes. Like they've just never not had it. Like I had to tell them they were the millennial generation. They just have no, they don't know that about themselves. Yeah, they just live. It was fascinating, fascinating and stock.com. And trying to explain like, why something like that was important. Or like how you met people because you read their website, like what was fascinating.

Cortex 56:16 Yep. There was a there was a post about engrams. Specifically in the context of Reddit engrams.

Jessamyn 56:24 I now know what N stands for in and

Cortex 56:26 gram. Yes, it stands for n. It's various different numbers. It stands for algebra. Yes, yes, algebra. grams is the proper pronunciation. Blah, blah, blah, made a post about engrams. Because Google's had their Engram search for a long time, which is a way to let you look for like short phrases in a large corpus of text. So someone has done 530 games, specifically, he has done a Reddit and gram search. So you can

Jessamyn 56:53 find 38 Now, Nate, or is it a site or he doesn't work for the times anymore? Right?

Cortex 56:58 I don't remember exactly what the state of things are. Because originally it was his own blog. And then it got sort of acquired by the times. But then, you know, he was still the blogger. And I think it also picked up a couple of people. And I don't know, has it changed the point where it's no longer New York Times anymore? Did they let go? Or is it I thought,

Jessamyn 57:15 well, I don't know. I can actually answer this question while you're

Cortex 57:20 sure. So 538, the site that became famous in 20? Was it 2008 or 2012? It must have been 2008 2008. For basically doing accurate metadata assessment and sort of overall filtering of

Jessamyn 57:34 yeah, they haven't been with the time since 2013. Sorry.

Cortex 57:37 Okay. So yeah, they decided sort of, it got big for being a political sort of forecasting. And for being right, yeah, and specifically for being right in 2008, like, really, really accurate predictions about the polls, but also the guy who does it, Nate Silver, it's also like, it's the big sports guy, like, that's sort of how he got to it was like, Oh, I'm gonna take this stuff that I use for looking, you know, in super nerdy mathy way at sports. And we can look at politics too. So he's sort of into general, nerdy numbers stuff, which is good, because it turns out the presidential elections only happen every four years. So if you're just famous for tracking polls, during an election, you kind of fucked the other several years of the site. So anyway, basically, that's all to say that like, looking at a giant corpus of Reddit text and and doing Engram, manipulation and charting things over time. Sort of makes sense. It's sort of in their wheelhouse. So this is a post about that, blah, blah, blah, made and people were sort of looking through some of the there's not a ton of conversation in the thread, but you know, it's something and it's just looking at Reddit. Yeah, it's looking specifically at Reddit and sort of looking at trends on Reddit over time, and what's what's risen and what's fallen in terms of frequency. But it's a nice it's a neat subject, it's it's neat to be able to look at a giant pile of text in any sort of, especially in any sort of specialized region so like being a look at Reddit as a whole is kind of cool there.

Jessamyn 59:06 Any of those sort of Corpus things right? Like

Cortex 59:11 yeah, like Reddit does not would not be the top of my list of somewhere to look, but at the same time as a big you know, internet place, it's, it's an interesting, it's an interesting place to have a specific lens into so

Jessamyn 59:22 looks like assholes declining, but butthole is not really gaining a lot. I just try to think of like, DME synonyms. Yeah.

Cortex 59:34 Yeah, that's as much as I'm like, Oh, yes, this is a fascinating area. And there's all these linguistic opportunities, but then I like the first thing I searched for as always, but so I don't know what that says about me other than I'm huge.

Jessamyn 59:47 Like, you can actually type in some very bad words. And then look at sort of moderation practices.

Cortex 59:54 Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting way to be able to sort of say, Okay, where is ship probably linked with Stickley hitting the fan.

Jessamyn 1:00:00 When did they stop saying whatever, although I'm not seeing that? Yeah, well, like I'm typing in a bunch of slurs that I'm not even gonna say out loud. And they're just all. Oh, you do see the gradual decline of the use of the word bitch after a peak in the end of 2011. Interesting. It is interesting.

Cortex 1:00:25 Anyway, if you're interested in these ideas in general do read it or not. It's a neat thing to check out. And there's some talk about tools in there and

Jessamyn 1:00:31 20 Comments 19 favorites. Bam. Yeah, parody.

Cortex 1:00:34 That's interesting. parody. Like, Pa Oh, no,

Jessamyn 1:00:39 I just I never noticed those two words sound kind of the same. Yeah. Purity, purity, purity,

Cortex 1:00:47 purity, purity. Again, and again, that's also a parody. It's like, it's like a parent. Like a parent. Like a parent. That we're at, we're at like, the hour and five minute mark and I now feel moved for the first time to actually apologize for my podcasting. That's that's not bad. That's, that's,

Jessamyn 1:01:14 that's fine. It's fine. You know, you're fine. I'm also I have to mention, I made a post because I liked it. Yeah. Yeah. Because I did a talk in California this month about how much of the technological innovation on the internet is driven by porn? I think I mentioned it. Yes. And then I found these little poll things, but I don't think I made a post about these yet. I think I was just talking to you about it. Yeah. And so basically, they're these tiny things you'd carry around like a little stick pin, and it would have like a little lens you could peek through. And there'd be a tiny naked picture of cookie dough, a little butt or something, you know, or people doing it, but it was like so tie with whatever. But there was a really interesting article about this. And Dan, Stanhope, which has to be a guy right presumably but you would have them in a bunch of different in a bunch of different stuff. And you know, somebody's somebody had those

Cortex 1:02:16 Yeah, like this was this was an actual Oh,

Jessamyn 1:02:19 Morpheus I have one of these that shows me sitting next to a nun not naked eating my chicken and hush puppies.

Cortex 1:02:28 Maybe and maybe this will become a thing maybe like the

Jessamyn 1:02:33 picture picture of himself. It's actually the the sweetest photo look. Oh, yeah. It is so sweet.

Cortex 1:02:45 Oh, that's great. It's like a kaleidoscope.

Jessamyn 1:02:48 Yeah, but also just like the grin on that face. You know, I just liked the picture. That is read by user Lego Morpheus. Yeah, that was cool. But I enjoyed the post anyhow, but yeah, all right.

Cortex 1:03:00 Good job. Well, I'll mention one other I mentioned earlier the box holding thing as a other people are really into this chat and an even more towering sort of make a post example this is a post Steve about made last last week about planners, and it's it's a great big every goddamn like, like let's like personal planners, let like be honest, like a thing you carry. Yes. And so it's a big post about planners. And there are people who this should not really be a shock but at the same time, there is a shocking amount of planner culture on the internet and this post is a giant roundup of the whole thing. And it's crazy people are just super duper fucking into to planners and decorating planners and customizing planners and it's so if you have that part of you inside of you that's like oh man, a fucking day planner. Yeah, this is a post to go look at because it's it will either be like your new home or make you question whether you need to get some distance from the planner. Life.

Jessamyn 1:04:04 Fascinating. Yeah, planner decoration fandom on Instagram.

Cortex 1:04:11 I know, right? That's like, what, the same time? Why not?

Jessamyn 1:04:15 All this tape. Wow,

Cortex 1:04:19 a ton of stuff. They're crazy.

Jessamyn 1:04:21 I mean, do you ever have that thing where like, all the sudden you realize people are paying attention to a thing that like you didn't even know was a thing you could really even do anything with? It's like It's like waking up one morning and being like, Wait a second. You couldn't get your hair cut in this special shapes. You know? But I feel like it's the same thing like looking at all these and they're beautiful. But it like it never occurred to me this was would be a thing you could do use tape on your planner to do it. Wow. Fascinating. Great. I'm super glad. And you know, I love checklists. I love Awesome, Jim and I finally went in together on like, a checklist app. We share after he showed up at my house one too many times without like one of the four things he's supposed to bring. And I'm like, you know, technology has solved this. I don't need you to remember. And yeah, I just, you know, but we really do need to solve the problem, because it's ridiculous. Yeah. And so we have an app, and I can put things on a list for him. He can put things on a list for me. You list things. My dad just used to keep an index card in his pocket, you know. And then he had a stack of index cards, and then each index card had a name, and then Amen. So yeah, wow, that's a great post fantastic post.

Cortex 1:06:12 Let's proceed a pace to AskMe in a filter.

Jessamyn 1:06:15 Great. A couple of things I liked in some of the traditional ways. I like very repetitive music. Energy, not too fast, repetitive, no vocals unless they're repetitive. I don't mean theme songs. I mean, the same note over and over again, this is by Stern Meyer. And I love that same music. And so I love this post. Yeah, I think I've told you like I listened to sort of this ambient. It's called party vibe, radio of all ridiculous things. It's electronic. But it's not party music. It's like, it's like heroin, chic music. You just lay there and it kind of washes over you. It's kind of like listening to music in an airport,

Cortex 1:07:03 you sort of get into a status quo with it. Yeah, but every now

Jessamyn 1:07:07 and again, they do some bullshit where somebody talks over the top of it. You know, like the guy from Earth Liberation Front or some sniper from the army, and you're just like, ah, and then I just I need something to fill in quick, quick, because it just blows everything. So I was very happy to see that thread.

Cortex 1:07:25 Yeah, no, I I definitely. And I'm pleased to see Kraftwerk getting called out early and often in it because yeah, that's, they, they they do pretty well there. I mean, there are vocals but it's, you're never like, you're never caught up by the emotive vocal thread through a craftwork song and never like, oh, yeah, that reminds me of that time. That happened to me. When I saw a model and she was

Jessamyn 1:07:49 like, vocals. Yeah, and they sing. Well, that's what

Cortex 1:07:53 I'm saying. It's like they sing. There's there's definitely lyrics on some of the songs. But you know, it's not. It's not like, you're not like listening to an Adele song. Like, you're not like, oh, yeah, no, I really, I've been there. I really, yeah, no, I can feel the emotion in your voice.

Jessamyn 1:08:06 One breakup, and she's just written like three albums about it.

Cortex 1:08:10 Well, to be fair, so has every fucking other musician ever. I mean, we have current

Jessamyn 1:08:15 relationships that they talk about. Well, that too. Sometimes. They're very good at driving their automobile.

Cortex 1:08:21 Yeah, well, I was gonna say cake has had both a series of failed relationships, and a lot of automobiles. So Adele just maybe doesn't dry like

Jessamyn 1:08:30 Adele. Don't get me wrong, but I'm like, Is this about that same person?

Cortex 1:08:35 Yeah, I kind of well, and you know, you'd like Taylor Swift's. I guess probably all of her albums.

Jessamyn 1:08:42 Dating and sometimes she's breaking up.

Cortex 1:08:45 She has broken up and some time she's predicting a break. Oh, about

Jessamyn 1:08:48 different dudes. With family. So

Cortex 1:08:51 presumably, so? I don't know. I mean, maybe maybe Adele just believes in musical narrative monogamy.

Jessamyn 1:08:58 I got one less problem without you. One less problem without you.

Cortex 1:09:06 Yeah, that song, just this. This is songs that I grown at the podcast will be groaning songs that I grew

Jessamyn 1:09:15 up. I had to tell somebody that Macklemore wrote thrift shop the other day. Really? Yeah. Because he's in like an ad. We were watching football. And he's in an ad with the quarterback from the Seattle Seahawks. And they're like, oh, that's Macklemore. And I'm like, yeah, and they're like, I couldn't name a single song Macklemore does. I'm like, sure, you know, thrift shop and they're like, what? And I'm like, Well, the good news is, you're gonna love this. Because whatever. It's kind of a fun song that everybody likes, right? I mean, you may or may not like Macklemore but like that song. It's fun.

Cortex 1:09:46 Yeah, it's a pretty solid accessible song. It's goofy. Boop, boop, boop boop boop. If I get thinking too much about the state of popular music and my relation to it, In other people's it could it could get into a very long derail. So Oh, see,

Jessamyn 1:10:03 I just listen to pop radio on the radio and I just, you know, let it wash over me and the only way I know anything about modern day America, that's mostly

Cortex 1:10:10 what I do too. But then I end up developing strong, complicated opinions.

Jessamyn 1:10:14 Because you're a musician. Jim's the same way. Yeah, it's

Cortex 1:10:16 not a musician totally compartmentalized. I'm

Jessamyn 1:10:18 like, What is this? Oh, or something? Jesus, really? It's piano. Oh, whatever.

Cortex 1:10:27 I liked this question about board games for boring old people is how exactly yes. Because this is a thing. I really like board games. And I like weird complicated board games. And I'm totally down. spend four hours on this. But that's not

Jessamyn 1:10:41 a neighbor as a haunted castle games as Yeah.

Cortex 1:10:47 But but make sure there's some Lovecraft involved explicitly, too, you know, so I

Jessamyn 1:10:52 labor in a haunted castle. But someone should

Cortex 1:10:55 actually make a game called that. Nope. But anyway, yeah, there's there's lots of games that are like that. And I like them. And if the circumstances are right to get into that, that's great for Scrabble.

Jessamyn 1:11:03 Well, and it's nice to boggle.

Cortex 1:11:07 I feel like there's, I feel like there's some space in between, you know, and I think that's kind of what this question is about is like, you know, no one needs to be said, No one needs to be told, Hey, there's this game called Scrabble. We'd like, you know, scrabble exists. And it's serving.

Jessamyn 1:11:19 There was a question about Scrabble, actually, was it was it? Well, it was it was it was, you know, I'm trying to find a very specific offline scrabble thing that will run on Windows 10. Oh, it was nitpicky by source quench. But they, I think they found it. Nice. Yeah, but I'm sorry, go back.

Cortex 1:11:41 Anyway, it's just it's if you're interested in board games, but kind of don't know what's out there and do have Castle neighbor fucking, this is a good place to go. Because there's a bunch of good. There's several in here that I played and enjoyed, and several that I haven't, but I've heard good things about. So it's so yeah, it's, it's nice to have that sort of Roundup at the, let's keep this accessible, and come up with things that aren't going to immediately turn half the people off in terms of their complexity or the setup or whatever.

Jessamyn 1:12:12 You know, I of course, was mildly chagrined that chocolate pickle was the guy who came up with my favorite of all the, of all the board games, which is Qwirkle, which is like you can kind of play it with anybody

Cortex 1:12:25 just saw a picture you posted a picture of you playing with Jim and Jim like, fussing about not winning or whatever. It's

Jessamyn 1:12:31 like a joke with us now because you know, if I get like a good move and Scrabble or something, he is pretend angry. Because real life we just don't you know, you're in a relationship with someone for a really long time. And you're just like, sometimes he wins. Sometimes I win, you know, otherwise, but the game one of us always wins. We don't play it at the bar most of the time.

Cortex 1:12:48 Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:12:50 But Coracles like, it's fun, because it's not super challenging. But you, you can play with children, and they can do well. And, you know, it's shapes and colors.

Cortex 1:13:01 I would probably enjoy that. I should check it out.

Jessamyn 1:13:04 Yeah, it comes in a big box. So it feels like a real game. You know, like, the tiles are nice. Although I talked to somebody and they're like, well, those tiles look huge. And I'm like, and he's like, Oh, well, I just have a travel version. It's like, what? You have a travel version of this game. How was that possible? But then I was like, oh, it's actually yeah.

Cortex 1:13:23 Travel travel versions of games. Were always I had a couple of Miss kitten. They were always sort of like, you know, pretty big. But also because they weren't games that were designed for that there were games that were adapted to it. Like like travel Scrabble.

Jessamyn 1:13:34 I had I had a travel Scrabble. Did you have the one that was like the colorforms? One? I don't think so. Was it like plastic stickies, or how did it work?

Cortex 1:13:43 It was it was I think it was magnetic. And it was, it didn't it was it was a shitty travel scribble? This is possible that I just had one shitty travel scrabble thing and have extend from there that all travel games are bad, but But yeah, I don't I can't remember having a travel.

Jessamyn 1:13:58 But a lot of them are like crappy little magnets. And yeah.

Cortex 1:14:02 Poor manufacturing. Yeah, they're selling it because they know people buy it not because they're like, we've made a really great product here. We gotta get sell. Right,

Jessamyn 1:14:08 right, right. I also liked this very short thread, which was good memoirs by comedians, best memoirs by male comedians. And there was a question four years ago, so you can look at that. There weren't a ton of entries, which is too bad because I love these kinds of things. I mean, now that I have Netflix, like the only thing I do pretty much is like, watch stand up on it. Yeah. But it's Oh, it's great. Because a lot of the standup is like autobiographical, whatever. So you learn like weird funny things about mostly male, unfortunately, comedians. And I like reading those books, too. So I'm looking forward to reading a couple of the things that showed up in this thread.

Cortex 1:14:45 Excellent. Yeah. I would. I shouldn't talk at length about not reading books, because that's that's just boring, but I read a lot of Josh Yeah, I know exactly. You know, it's dumb book. I hate poor I'd like to poke as a jerk. I think what I mean to say is I would read those if I was reading a lot more things because

Jessamyn 1:15:08 well, here's the question. Are there like gamers and book readers?

Cortex 1:15:11 I don't think it's I mean, for me, it's it's internet reading versus book reading is the problem like I definitely play.

Jessamyn 1:15:18 You read up to read on the internet a lot. Yeah, like, yeah, you got a device,

Cortex 1:15:22 mostly mostly on or just literally on a computer on the computer, just like I spend all day reading like, it's what I do professionally, essentially. So it's harder to be like, oh, you know, what I need to do sit down and read. And I try sometimes I've been working on the dune books, again, because of trying to sort of, we're still in the process of figuring out how to roll out books stuff on fanfare and Right, right, right. So as a result of that, I'm reading the dune books again, which is great. But I'm having to force myself to sit down and read and it's weird. Right? Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:15:49 See, I just have a time slot. Like in the morning. I don't get to get on the computer for 40 minutes. Yeah. So I wind up having to read because there's nothing else to do. And at night, I read before I go to bed, because I have to kind of get my eyes off the screen.

Cortex 1:16:04 Yeah. And that's what I should do. And I'd be Oh, no, I

Jessamyn 1:16:06 need glasses.

Cortex 1:16:10 I've been doing the reading in bed thing. But the thing is, I like I lay down and I'm asleep very soon. So I don't do a whole lot of reading now. That way

Jessamyn 1:16:15 I can't even imagine. Like I read for 40 minutes, and then I lay down and then 40 minutes later, maybe I'm asleep.

Cortex 1:16:21 Yeah. Oh, yeah. I should just return some time. But I like it's that time of year basically. There's a question. Oh, I

Jessamyn 1:16:29 saw that the answer is up on the posting page. By the way. Yes. I Santas on that page. If I send you some more dancing chances would you put Absolutely. Yes. You promise,

Cortex 1:16:39 I promise, we will make it happen. I was I was thinking about how we should like gussy up our dancing bar. Yeah. And I think it was like we always sort of did it from scratch every year. And then eventually, we made it so it automatically shows up. And then it's it's whatever was on the table at the time for those so we could revisit it make it a little bit more a little more jazzy. Go make it a destination, people will be bummed that they've made a post too recently because I can't go hang out with a generated sentence or something. Right? I'm maybe going too far with this. Maybe that's not the best way to go. But anyway, it is that time of year it is the holidays are SAS Cat said, hey, hey, man, what's your favorite holiday record? So if you're looking for holiday music, and you're not just gonna listen to endless jingling all month, this year, like you did last year, because why would new

Jessamyn 1:17:29 enlisting like I forgot all about?

Cortex 1:17:32 I need to mention it at some point soon, because it's definitely time again for it. But yeah, anyway, bunch of Christmas albums. Well, holiday albums, holiday ish albums. If you're looking for that, boom, here you go. Here's your round up.

Jessamyn 1:17:48 Sorry, I was listening to endless strings. But oh, this is good. It's still open because I Horton. The Reverend Horton heat does a Christmas album. That's actually really good. And I don't see that anybody mentioned it.

Cortex 1:18:00 Go recommend that, sir. Yeah, this just came up like yesterday or the day before?

Jessamyn 1:18:03 Well, and I skip everything that says Christmas. I have like a Greasemonkey script in my head that enables me to just basically not see it. Like, we're one of those towns that has like a town green and the town green has like a Christmas tree on it. And the Christmas tree is all decorated. And, you know, whatever. But like, you know, it used to be nice look in and now they're decorating some other tree in the same town green and it looks crappy. Like it just looks like crappy LED lights. And somebody's just kind of hooked up there. Yeah, so it's not only like not my holiday, but now it's like kind of a crappy version of not my holiday.

Cortex 1:18:38 Like, you want to get involved with the thing that you don't want to get involved in. I want to build like an eight

Jessamyn 1:18:43 foot menorah out of out of railroad ties, because I've just had it I want to show people how to do it right. You know, yeah, like, I'll show you the holiday spirit.

Cortex 1:18:54 I don't give a shit but I'm not gonna sit correctly.

Jessamyn 1:18:57 Well, I've got other holidays. Solstice is coming up. I like Solstice I celebrated by nothing down Friday and didn't buy a damn thing. Good job. Yeah, went to the beach. Fuck it. Nice. Yeah, it was. It was nice. But yeah, that's a thread. My favorite thread just in terms of the I feel you I've been there is the thread by Ziggy 500 Who is basically somebody who, you know, like many of us, like has a look and keeps that look. But every now and again, she'll like change a thing. And like, the people around her are like, Oh my god, are you wearing lipstick? Like they freak out? And it's awkward, right? So they're kind of complements, but they're also just kind of super weird. And she's like, how do I deal with this? Like, I don't want to be wimpy and just kind of like, you know, Wilt but I need a way to sort of respond and I think people are being weird. Like, why is this happening? And there was just a lot I mean, number one, this is me. You know if I wear a skirt like it's a thing, even though whatever I like skirts, I just mostly don't wear them. Because mostly were the same six things. And even

Cortex 1:20:02 if people aren't trying to be like, Oh, wow, you're wearing a skirt, they're not necessarily trying to be like, How dare you change a thing, but at the same team time, they're just experienced with, I'm observing something and you're like, Wait, so I can't just do this and not have to

Jessamyn 1:20:16 be under scrutiny. You know, it's that it's that it's that male gaze female thing. Well, and and sometimes somebody put this in the thread. Like, you hear people saying different things, partly because of your conditioning. So like, oh, look, she thinks she's people. That's how it sounds, no matter how people meant it. And so there's a good combination of feedback. I gave some feedback, because I have the same problem. Yeah. You know, I think one of the reasons I like having a uniform is because people just shut the fuck up. And don't talk about how I look. You know what I mean? I'm talking about how to deal with people and how, you know, some people have good snarky responses. Some people are just, you know, how to work on sort of self esteem. But I just I liked that thread. It was a bunch of nice, supportive people helping Sookie 500 Figure out how to how to deal.

Cortex 1:21:05 Yeah, it's nice. It was nice. There was a speaking of me wishing I would read things others unasked me from just today, saying, hey, I really liked later. You know, future future Noir. Fiction, Gregory D. Yeah. So you know what else is out there? And already, there's a bunch of responses. And I'm sort of like having a you know, like, Oh, God, there's so much out there that if

Jessamyn 1:21:35 you read Gibson,

Cortex 1:21:36 I've read the one or two William Gibson books, Bruce Sterling. I don't remember if I've written the Sterling or not, Dick. I've read. I'm a huge fan of the dick. Okay, I never I never don't want to stop this. No, I really liked Philip K. Dick. I read a bunch of his short stories.

Jessamyn 1:22:02 And somebody mentioned screen within you mentioned at the very end of this thread, the city and the city by China VFL. Ba. And that's the last book. Basically, there was an asked metal filter thread from I think last year Hold on, I've got to actually find it. Typing. There was basically like, yeah, in March of last year, Matilda Ben who I went to library school with asked this question about more smart thrillers like blah. And it was a really short thread, it got like 45 favorites, but only 10 comments, but the comments are all good. And I have literally spent the last year among other things, reading every single book in this thread, every single one and the China Mayville one is the last one and I'm reading it now. So as soon as I'm done, I'm probably gonna go to this inspired by Blade Runner thread and find more things to read because I was literally gonna post my own asked Metafilter thread about like, where do I get more books like this? Because I'm done. I read them all me, Phil.

Cortex 1:23:09 Neville, me, but I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's one of those saying things out loud. Speaking of saying things out loud. You just can't know some things Josh? Yeah, well, maybe you can meet me maybe I just don't know some things. I'm trying to you know. Speaking of pronouncing things and not knowing how things are supposed to be pronounced. You

Jessamyn 1:23:26 don't have to segue you know, or you just felt like it well,

Cortex 1:23:28 it's not it's this isn't even a segue. This is actually an aside, but

Jessamyn 1:23:32 I do like hearing you say segue

Cortex 1:23:37 to make a quick jump on the pronunciation of segway. I segway I had a I had a great big argument about how shitty contemporary so called Hoverboards are. With Churchill, on the crapshoot. Like the last episode, we recorded

Jessamyn 1:23:54 him on the crib sheet again, are you guys again on the craps?

Cortex 1:23:56 Ya know, we'd love to have a great time. Maybe Maybe we'll have him on as a meta filter.

Jessamyn 1:24:01 You know, that's a great idea.

Cortex 1:24:03 Actually. We'll have to do that. Like he has a normal like day job. So we'll have to figure out the timing. I pray at night. Yeah, well, we'll maybe we'll do that. Maybe I'll do that. Maybe that'll be next month. We'll just see. Or GM or something else. Anyway. I was arguing. Both of them. Yeah. Oh, gosh, that could be complicated. Yeah. It'd be like, okay, that could be simple. That could be uncomplicated. It was like going with this.

Jessamyn 1:24:27 So there's, there's just speaking of me was what you said

Cortex 1:24:31 hoverboards came up. Oh. Okay, so here's the thing. Here's the thing I want to explain. I went off at length about how Hoverboards are like to the extent that they exist are shitty and they're still not really hoverboards like this was contemporary to the anniversary Back to the Future two

Jessamyn 1:24:47 wheels. Okay, so

Cortex 1:24:49 that's the thing I was talking about the thing Lexus Lexus was the most recent, actual straight up hoverboard. Oh my god. Hoverboards a real thing. And I think they've got an actual working shit. domain specific if it's over the right surface, we built a special tiny little skate park thing with a board hovering in the air of, you know, presumably electromagnetically and completely ignoring the

Jessamyn 1:25:09 fact that they're electromagnetic. Is

Cortex 1:25:11 that how they work? Oh, no, no, this is the thing. I'm not talking about the thing you're talking about. Because I didn't know that's what the fuck those things were called. So I went on in like 20 minutes of length about hoverboard doesn't literally floating in the air not touching the ground back to the future to style hoverboards. And I think Jessie was probably partly talking about those actual things with the wheels that look like tiny segways was no virtual things that's been driving around, robotic, sideways skateboard things. I know, those were called hoverboards. So they shouldn't

Jessamyn 1:25:40 ever boards is why you didn't think that exactly.

Cortex 1:25:42 I mean, it's a terrible fucking name. Because why? You can't just take a hoverboard like that. But I feel like I'm gonna go back and listen to that rant for me in that, because I want to figure out exactly how confused he was at my, in retrospect, probably completely incomprehensible complaints about those things that I didn't know. He would have thought I was complaining about. But yes, there's a brand of those called swegways. Is the button on the story? Yep. swegways. Which swegways? Yeah. Oh, because it's fucking swag, right? I'm sorry. Swag ways. Is that how people say it's swag.

Jessamyn 1:26:20 That's how normal people I don't know. I don't know why you should meet up with friends. I don't know.

Cortex 1:26:25 Anyway, that's. I have so

Jessamyn 1:26:31 why did my battery decide to stop working in my mouse right now?

Cortex 1:26:34 Your battery is a jerk. Piece of shit. It's definitely it's definitely not swag. That's for sure.

Jessamyn 1:26:43 Oh, yeah. So those things. And so Wait, do they snap in the middle? Oh, I get it that your feet can rotate independently? Yeah, it's like a pivot around the axis. So we have a skate kid at my at the school that I teach at right, which is a technical college. So he's he's the one riding his skateboard around. And we're all like, what are you doing here? Like, you're obviously too hip for Central Vermont. But he you know, skates around and is cool. I just saw him yesterday, he had these little things that were basically two wheels on each foot. And before you say, but Jessamyn that's a roller skate. I'm gonna tell you, they went the other way. You know what I would like? So it's as if you had one swag way under each foot. Okay, but so basically, it's like a little, it's like trucks, like you take the trucks from the bottom of your thing. And you put them on a little platform and you put one on each foot. And then you kind of skate around sort of weird. I couldn't I didn't know if it was a thing or just this kid's thing. And of course he's you know, he's a cipher. You can't talk to him. So I I don't know. I figured I would ask but I just saw it yesterday. It was interesting.

Cortex 1:27:53 Huh? That is yeah, that's that is a thing. There's this this is this is like I've so clearly lost touch with youth culture. I'm I'm I'm an old man now.

Jessamyn 1:28:03 Well, I can't even make kids today jokes because the students are just like we don't even understand those.

Cortex 1:28:09 Yeah, like that's that's

Jessamyn 1:28:12 emoji and they're like why are we learning this? The only way to teach Unicode you Fox

Unknown Speaker 1:28:19 little bit hard to be proud man. We're just one way nobody wants to hear my hard way to make a mistake

Cortex 1:28:58 I'll do a quick medical to Music Minute here there is as usual people posting nice stuff. But there was kind of a there's a the first three things that occurred to me to include were all instrumental things so I guess this is sort of a similar music corner there's a nice piece of instrumental acoustic guitar music from TellTale Heart called llg sort of a nice chill pretty thing there's similarly on the sort of Chilean pretty side a song by wolfdog called Thanksgiving snow also very pretty and then on the far more energetic but still instrumental side there is BlackBerry blossom. Done by overlapping Elvis band and yeah, this is this is BlackBerry blossom is funny because it's it's sort of like

Jessamyn 1:29:46 it's if there is a sign that the shell shock covers right.

Cortex 1:29:50 Maybe I wouldn't be surprised. It's kind of a lot of it was like the Stairway to Heaven. Oh, yeah, bluegrass, like everybody knows the song everybody who's learning to play bluegrass tries to learn to play the song you know, it's that sort of pervasiveness but compared to stairway it's, you know, fast paced and, and has a short sort of cycle to it rather than being upon a seven minute long sort of wing fest is always a great song but it's also it's a great big pile of song but BlackBerry blossom is one of the things where like you know it's such it's got such a simple structure in such a straightforward solid sort of sense of movement to it that listening to people play it well I just always love I will never get sick. This is a great this is a great rendition there's a bunch of really great playing on it. I was I was like the stuff overlapping Elvis posts with the bluegrass and stuff here because it's it's always great. So those your trio of instrumentals, but I do want to mention a couple other things as well that made me smile. One of which is that the amazing choc crema land jingle by Grumpy Bear 69 which is a made up jingle for chocolate milk. And it's just fantastic. It's a minute and a half long. It's like a long form jingle and it's

Jessamyn 1:31:03 it's just sometimes you just want to make a fake jingle.

Cortex 1:31:06 Say hello to health. Say hello to milk. Chocolate. Hello, milk. Yep. So is that that's great. I love that. That was fantastic. And sort of a nice meta thing is a cover of a brad suck song. One of the first times ever was a cold. Yeah, well, that sucks bread.

Jessamyn 1:31:27 All I wanted to say yeah.

Cortex 1:31:29 Yeah, yes. But one of the very first songs posted to music, I think, was dirt bag. And then this is a cover of it by come along pole. And so it's, it's nice to see it sort of come back around full circle like that. Anyway, those are the things I like there's other stuff as well. But those were some good ones. But I also want to say greenish. Where's the Lincoln? I misplaced it here. greenish has done an episode of a new meta filter music podcast, which is so exciting.

Jessamyn 1:32:01 That's so great. She's terrific.

Cortex 1:32:03 She is she's fantastic. And her episode came out great. And I look forward more. Right now is basically just posted on SoundCloud.

Jessamyn 1:32:13 That was gonna be my question. Are you gonna work it into the podcast?

Cortex 1:32:17 Yeah, if you decide she wants to keep running with it, we'll absolutely just sort of work it into the podcast Plex on the site and get the whole thing set up properly there.

Jessamyn 1:32:24 She's the best but yeah, she

Cortex 1:32:26 she's she's the best. It's awesome given listen. People with long memories will remember that I did a few music podcast episodes like, five, six years ago. But it's been five or six years.

Jessamyn 1:32:38 Memories and graduates. Yes, yes.

Cortex 1:32:43 But yeah, that's super exciting. And that's probably for music stuff. There's there's been some other nice little stuff in meta talk too. But I don't know if you had anything else specifically you wanted to, to mention.

Jessamyn 1:32:53 Well, just in circling back around to what we were talking about, about, like, if you had a little post that you felt like was cruelly overlooked, or whatever, there's one of those fun threads by Billy be in meta talk, where you can sort of be like, Hey, here's a post that I liked and nobody else.

Cortex 1:33:14 Yeah, it was, it was a fun, it was a fun roundup of stuff. Not the funniest offense because I mean, to some extent, there's like, there's an actual actual, you know, really bugged me that this didn't get better. Which is understandable. Like it's

Jessamyn 1:33:29 about those threads as you can actually talk to people about it, that you're not launching this axe grindy like mods or mods or Nazis, blah, you know, you're like, hey, this poster, we should have gotten more love. And sometimes people can be like, hey, you know, this might have helped or that might have helped or whatever.

Cortex 1:33:47 Yeah. When? Yeah, and that's, that's, that's really good. I like it when that is going on in metadata, because that feels like that feels like what meta talk like is about is like, hey, let's actually have a relatively low stakes discussion about the way the site is how we experience it, etc, rather than it having to be precipitated, like you say, by you know, some some biggest really, yeah, cuz I mean, that's, that's legitimate and understandable, but it's not necessarily the best seed for a nuanced discussion right out of the gate. So yeah, it's interesting to see in the mix, I also liked in sort of a similar vein, more on the strictly goofy side, there was this meta talk post about collections. I'm nomnom. Oh,

Jessamyn 1:34:30 this was so fun.

Cortex 1:34:31 Basically, what do you collect? What do you have collections of more of the point?

Jessamyn 1:34:35 I bet you collect? What is it? Come on? What is it?

Cortex 1:34:39 There's a bunch of great stuff from from mefites about? Oh, well, I have a bunch of these or I have too many of those

Jessamyn 1:34:45 honey bears, art supplies Snoopy items, magic cards. scarfs. Yeah, glass paperweights. Love ya. barware Yeah, soldering iron. That's

Cortex 1:35:01 interesting variety like, like stuff that you wouldn't necessarily think about. And then you're like, oh, wait, yeah, that is a thing. There was a fun thread that happily did not turn into too much of an angry thread about Myers Briggs, because that was my one worry with

Jessamyn 1:35:15 it, but I feel gonna get angry about that

Cortex 1:35:18 I have some people feel really strongly negatively about it, I feel very, like mildly negative about it. So like, I'm, I like, I'm not sure how much I buy it. I'm more on the this is a specific sort of cold reading, you know, palm reading situation, in a sense, in terms of its overall utility, I feel like it's something that people really enjoy talking about. And I think that's great. And to an extent, it's a thing people enjoy having a way to frame their understanding of other people,

Jessamyn 1:35:44 where I find it useful. It's like tarot cards, you know, like, there may or may not be anything there at all. But a lot of it is just a frame through which you can think about things. And I think for some people who haven't gotten this, who haven't gotten his into it, the idea that there's kind of like introverted and extroverted ways of responding to things, and you might think you're one way, but you're actually another way, and that might help you understand your world exactly helpful. You know, the fact that I'm a INTJ. And Jim is something completely other else, you know, and you look at the chart, and they're like, You guys hate each other.

Cortex 1:36:19 Like, no. Yeah. And I think that's where it is. I think there's, there's sort of an allergy of the pseudoscience aspect of it that that I can definitely think of a couple discussions of Myers Briggs that have gotten very grumpy but there's no reason that these metal filter proper were you know, yeah, well, that's that's part of the thing. So definitely, they

Jessamyn 1:36:37 actually take going to go into may actually take the thing and put it on a chart.

Cortex 1:36:43 Yeah, there's a Yeah, so yeah, there's graphs of like, collective like, basically. Oh,

Jessamyn 1:36:49 everybody's like me. There's a lot of like it. There's so much more No wonder I built it that way.

Cortex 1:36:56 Haha. The truth revealed.

Jessamyn 1:36:59 Oh, this is fascinating.

Cortex 1:37:01 That's cool. Yeah, there's neat.

Jessamyn 1:37:04 All right, so I've got to get to my other job. Let's wrap up and mentioned that my office is now an AMA thread in Reddit. You can come there and ask me anything you want to until it closes sometime next year?

Cortex 1:37:18 I think of it as AMA. AMA. Yeah. Wait. Yeah, this was this was really interesting to read. So yeah, you you did a

Jessamyn 1:37:27 Brian friends had been like, oh, you should totally do an AMA. And I was like, all right. And then, you know, he was like, I'll totally help. And I was like, great. And then we did it on Tuesday before Thanksgiving. And I was like, Alright, I'm ready to go, but I don't know what to do. And he's like, oh, man, I'm totally on the bus. So I decided to do it instead of in one of the Reddit sub threads and just do an AMA themed thread in like the libraries group. I was like, No, fuck it. I'm gonna go full AMA, and did it and publicize it. And it was very popular, and people liked it with you know, 20 Dudes being like fear so famous, how come I haven't or

Cortex 1:38:03 I haven't gone back and counted, but I have hard time believing it's only 20. Like, that was a long tail of it to like, after everyone else who had showed up to pay attention. Dudes, were still wondering, oh, yeah, but you know, if you have to, if I have to find out why you're famous. Are you really famous?

Jessamyn 1:38:19 If you say you're famous? You're not? Yeah. And I'm like, no, no, I am google it. Famous librarian. There's a picture of me, I don't know how to make it any clearer to you. But I decided, unlike, you know, a lot of these things. I you know, I did it for a couple hours. And then I did less of it. But like, it was on the front page of the AMA thing for days. It was on the front page of reddit for a day, which was actually very exciting. Yeah, that's crazy. And I just decided I'm gonna hang out there. So like, I answer questions that show up there every couple days. You could just keep hanging out there. It's just nobody ever does. Yep. So

Cortex 1:38:54 it's interesting, how weirded out and surprised people are that you are being responsive at length. Yeah, you know, and it's surprising and not surprising, as I understand. It's just like, yeah, they tend to be sort of over and done with things. But it's what I'm

Jessamyn 1:39:08 a librarian. So that's kind of what we do. But it's not what like famous people do. Yeah, there's a lot of people there who aren't necessarily famous. And also, I don't understand Reddit culture. So it's, it's pretty. It's like just the done thing that you're there for a couple hours, but there's no you don't close the thread. So to me, because I'm from medical culture, if the thread is open game odd. So I get confused, but it's also fun. You show up and people ask questions about librarianship. There's a couple kinds of people who are slightly crabby like she thinks she's so cool. I'm like, whatever. Yeah,

Cortex 1:39:41 there's a handful

Jessamyn 1:39:42 of I'm used to

Cortex 1:39:44 I stayed out of it because like me showing up to be grumpy at people for being dickheads in New York, right seems like

Jessamyn 1:39:50 this is I mean, thank you.

Cortex 1:39:53 Exactly. This is like I don't need that to make this about me being grumpy at other people for being dinguses play Yeah, yeah, it was it was really interesting to read. And I really enjoyed reading your discussion of the actual sort of like library stuff and stuff that was relevant rather than the people being dragged by doing his stuff. Because as much as

Jessamyn 1:40:11 this stuff is such a small part of it, you know, you can get so wrapped around the axle about that, that you don't sort of enjoy. I mean, it was a rush having so many people asking questions and being interactive. Like, one of the things about threaded discussions, it's not right for metal filter, but it does allow for this kind of like, Pew Pew, pew pew, kind of thing, if you've got

Cortex 1:40:31 the bandwidth to respond like that. I think that's why it makes a lot of sense or like an AMA, yeah, lecture, like that's why it's been successful. I have structural issues with some of it. Like I still check that's a whole that's really getting in the weeds of you know, various presentational questions of

Jessamyn 1:40:47 confusion for doing that, am is specifically figuring out where the unanswered questions are like there should just be a button and there's not a button

Cortex 1:40:58 Yeah, and that's that's tricky but but anyway, it was really neat. And I was glad to see you do that that was that was fun to read through and I had fun. I had fun and and Yeah, well I think we should probably we should probably call it then we can get you

Jessamyn 1:41:11 I gotta go teach email the old people to tweet excellent

Cortex 1:41:16 Well, we will talk round the end or beginning of the year I guess as well. I don't know I don't know if it'll be late December early January but yeah,

Jessamyn 1:41:24 I'm you know I'm done in Massachusetts and then I'm back up here so either either either I mean basically I'm done with my big traveling and so I'm just you know by then all my students will have passed or failed or whatever they didn't fucking do. I'll be a lot more relaxed that I have been all this semester.

Cortex 1:41:40 Excellent. Well, I'm sure I'll talk to you on the internet but you know, happy holidays in the meantime, and yeah, talk to you soon.

Jessamyn 1:41:48 You do this was fun. Yeah. Bye bye.

Unknown Speaker 1:42:10 To help you. Box juicing for you. Gosh, my mom just doesn't get it. What's the new lunch box Sally John? Sharp crema Land Of course.