Podcast 119 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 119: We're Very Helpful You're Here (2016-08-04).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Jessamyn 0:00 Yeah, they're their needs. We need to like just take a minute and be like, relax your mind.

Cortex 0:06 Pom Pom just just man where God was the

Cortex 0:24 best of the web Well, hey, welcome to another episode of Best of the web, the meta filter monthly podcast. This is episode 119. We're recording this on August 4 and covering everything up after July 1. I am Josh Maillard, aka cortex.

Jessamyn 0:46 And I'm Jessamyn aka Jessamyn.

Cortex 0:50 And yeah, we're just we're talking about stuff, things and stuff. Stuff stuff that

Jessamyn 0:55 happened last month. Yes.

Cortex 0:57 That's that's the premise. That is our premise.

Jessamyn 1:01 Early in the day instead of late at night,

Cortex 1:04 we just had 10 minutes of completely natural like, you know, warm up chatter and hey, how you doing? And now I'm like it now talking. I figured how are you good

Jessamyn 1:13 with words? Well, and it's funny, right? Because the last time I spoke with you, we weren't doing meta filter stuff at all. We were doing the crapshoot podcast, right. Sure. All right. Which did you listen to it? I don't,

Cortex 1:27 I have not listened to it. I need to go back and listen. And for once, as much as I like, I never listened to the podcasts I record. I want to listen to this one because I listened to it. Jesse, Jesse spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do with it. And sounds like it was a big editing job. And so I'm kind of really curious how it all came together. But I just haven't set aside the time to go through it again.

Jessamyn 1:48 Well, I listen to it entirely. And the only thing I will tell you as far as spoilers go is that entire trivia that we did at the end is gone.

Cortex 1:56 Yeah, yeah. It was a nice idea. But maybe he's

Jessamyn 1:59 gonna save it for something else. Because, you know, Jesse made a whole bunch of trivia questions. I don't even remember what the conceit was. He had done it for a friend's something, breather. And so Josh and I did like some head to head trivia stuff, which was super fun and challenging. And you know, he's really good at it. And I'm okay at it.

Cortex 2:17 I think you are way overselling me and underselling you.

Jessamyn 2:21 Everybody says that, but I'm fairly certain I experienced the same thing.

Cortex 2:25 I think I think we were heading head for like the first pilot questions, and then you definitely started to break away after that was

Jessamyn 2:31 mine. I remember it the exact opposite

Cortex 2:34 case. It was a lot of fun. But it turns out, it doesn't make great radio to have people answering trivia head to head over the phone, essentially. So

Jessamyn 2:41 well, and you guys were drinking and I was not drinking. Yeah, it's really late at night. Yeah. So it's nice to talk to you when you're awake. And I'm more awake. Exactly. And neither of us are drinking, I think

Cortex 2:51 no, no, I mean, I'm drinking water. I'm drinking tea. I had coffee. I'm drinking in the the love and humanity of the world that has been brought to the forefront by the US election season.

Jessamyn 3:06 And Josh just did a whole bunch of nice things for people like helped his mother in law with the floor and helped him friends move. Good guy. And I had a whole bunch of people come to visit and it all went well. Instead of me having my internet person reaction. Oh, my friends. I love them so much. When will they go home? I just had a great time having people come visit.

Cortex 3:23 Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. Well, so what's episode one on team? Is there anything when they say Hey, girl, 119

Jessamyn 3:32 is five consecutive prime numbers added up together the primes 117 through 31. Inclusive? Nice. Yes. It has some other dumb things to it that nobody cares about. And but it's also the default port for unencrypted NNTP, which is my favorite.

Cortex 3:55 Did people do encrypted NNTP words? I want to read them. I mean, I shouldn't. People should encrypt anything they want. I don't mean actually given like crap out there. But at the same time, it's like I have a hard time imagining like

Jessamyn 4:10 you're an NTP. Yeah, it's like, you've already

Cortex 4:13 made the questionable decision to spend time on Usenet. Oh, no, I know it is. I've spent a lot of time there. Castle. Yeah, no, it's just like, you know, just like, I don't know, I've got nowhere to go with this. But that is interesting. Apparently, I've never I've never paid attention to Usenet ports because that didn't ring a bell. And

Jessamyn 4:35 I to be honest, I don't pay that much attention to it either. I'm just kind of paying attention to Wikipedia. The other thing of Wikipedia that I thought was interesting about 119 is like Project 119 is this government project from the People's Republic of China, trying to raise the amount of medals that Chinese athletes won during the 2008 Olympics so that they targeted boards that Chinese athletes have historically not done as well at. And oh, this,

Cortex 5:05 okay,

Jessamyn 5:05 this was kind of worked on this. This was a project

Cortex 5:07 at the time or leaving it as interpreting is like trying to raise, in retrospect the number and it's like, wow, that is that is strange rules lawyering shit right there?

Jessamyn 5:17 Well, and I'm not sure I can't really tell because of course, I'm just skimming. If it's a thing that they still do, ah legacy. Yeah, I guess it's sort of an ongoing thing that they're doing. And they won the second largest amount of gold medals in London. 2012. And the Olympics start tomorrow?

Cortex 5:36 Oh, yes, they do. Yes, they

Jessamyn 5:37 do. Maybe they do.

Cortex 5:39 I haven't been following too close. I've been vaguely aware of some of the clusterfuck II aspects. And you know, one of these one of these years, there's just going to be like the most dole completely unacceptable Olympics. And people just won't know what to do.

Jessamyn 5:53 Well, I mean, the London Olympics were normal. Yeah, yeah, I

Cortex 5:56 guess I guess I don't remember anything super crazy there. No, I mean,

Jessamyn 5:59 they were just kind of perfect. Like, the opening ceremony was amazing. And everybody felt moderately good about the whole thing. And I mean, maybe I'm maybe I'm repressing something truly terrible that happened.

Cortex 6:10 Maybe that's maybe that's exactly the thing. I'm thinking. I was like, you know, what if there was a normal of his Oh, it turns out if there is I just forget.

Jessamyn 6:18 Right. And so she was ridiculous. And this is ridiculous. And, you know, but I like kind of following along with the Olympics at home sometimes. Yeah. You know, you can get Canadian TV here. And so you can watch not just Americans being American. Yeah. which I enjoy. Well, we've

Cortex 6:33 sort of chatted about what to do about the Olympics on the site, and whether maybe we'll do like an open, you know, thread on fanfare sort of thing. So I think we'll be picking that up. watching the Olympics. Yeah, well, it's real tricky. Because, you know, there's, there's so much there's such a spoilery aspect to it, like, you know, it's, it's like, if you have literally no idea when people are gonna see this notionally live event, and people care about finding out and it's time shifted by hours, or

Jessamyn 6:58 really kind of matters, who wins, but by the same token, like who wins is going to determine who's even playing in the next thing. So by the time the next thing happens, even saying so and so's competing is implying that they want. And the last thing

Cortex 7:11 Yeah, so it's tricky. I think, I think there's sort of like a inclination to live blog because it's sort of a live TV event, but then it's not exactly live, because people are seeing in different times he has like, yeah, so we'll, I imagined there will be a fair amount of discussion about that in the next 24 to 48 hours as we sort of hash out what to do, but

Jessamyn 7:29 very exciting. Well, I'm glad you spent some time talking to me, instead of mucking around with, you know, two hours basically off of US politics.

Cortex 7:35 Oh, Jesus Christ. I'm sure we'll talk more about that. But

Jessamyn 7:40 hey, let's do this. Nothing to say.

Cortex 7:42 I think I probably have many things to say about it mostly probably in the form of size. Let's let's let's talk briefly of jobs. There were several jobs posted last month. I am particularly fond of this one from Ursus, Kommentar, competent Oh, of course, writer, commenter, art commission for fiasco RPG place and I'm, I'm excited about this both for the premise of it and because I think fiasco is neat. I think I've rambled about it on a previous podcast, but the short version is pF fiasco is kind of a storytelling collaborative role playing game in the sort of heist film or Coen Brothers film genre so you're sort of collectively taking turns telling a story about like a heist gone wrong or some similar sort of like you know, gritty oh man, everything's just

Jessamyn 8:34 oh god I'm so to dip. I know Fred and I completely keep forgetting. He's also a committer. who I have met. Now I have to add him as a contact because I met him last summer sorry,

Cortex 8:44 here we go. Anyway, she asked it was traditional cover art has been sort of a Saul Bass sort of thing with that, you know, Angular font and the sort of striking flat illustrations and so vs comedor is looking for someone to do that up for the place that that they've put together

Jessamyn 9:04 and he's great so I can thumbs up working with him is probably delightful. Meeting him last summer if you're

Cortex 9:11 already and do it up a small basket thing sounds like up your alley. Boom. There you go. Good. All right.

Jessamyn 9:17 Great. And for those of you who also like just general web stuff, legally bread is looking for someone to help them just manage to maintain a website who can do Squarespace on a contact track level in Ontario. Easy peasy

Cortex 9:31 and this is a this is you or it's not you but if it is you Hey, help them out. There mix the remix the remix Oh, parsing usernames

Jessamyn 9:43 I always thought it was three Meg's decided to read all the letters Yeah, I

Cortex 9:47 was gonna say three MCS and I was like, oh, no, it should the closer I wonder if there's also a three mix. What if this is one of those subtle username things? Anyway, the remix needs help figuring out a bass tap. So

Jessamyn 9:58 Jim could probably I mean doesn't need work but there are probably other people who need work who could do that. Yeah. Nice.

Cortex 10:05 And then there's there's a bunch of other little contracting things to basically go go look at jobs because jobs jobs are there. Yeah.

Jessamyn 10:11 There are some jobs.

Cortex 10:14 This has been jobs another another five years of this, it'll feel natural 119

Jessamyn 10:21 pods. And you showed up when with the pods.

Cortex 10:27 Oh, I'd like to 2008 2009 I had been working here for a little bit before I got on. Because my first

Jessamyn 10:34 my supplanted Matt Howie with your slow motion quest for podcasts nomination. Here's my scheme. It will take eight years, but eventually,

Cortex 10:45 eventually, it'll all be up and running. I'll be thoroughly half assing it

Jessamyn 10:49 it'll all be mine.

Cortex 10:51 Let's talk about projects. Yeah, there's been a bunch of good projects, which is Oh my god. I liked a lot of stuff I liked let me just come out of the gate with something something simple that I was very fond of. Louis the dog horror movie posters are here that right did I Louis the dog horror movie posters. Okay, Josh,

Jessamyn 11:12 the word H O R R O R. Horror. Because I heard dog whore.

Cortex 11:18 Louis the dog horse. It's a it's a real it's a real horse. Yo.

Jessamyn 11:25 Ha show.

Cortex 11:28 There's there's what horror have we talked about? Have you done the horror horror thing before? We probably have I say horror. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, Louis the dog horror movie posters. Crap. This is the best. This is from Uncle Glendening. And it's just a it's a few little like dog horror movie picture posters about like, what would be

Jessamyn 11:47 dogs don't like for instance, the bat, the vacuum. Thunder.

Cortex 11:53 Super cute. It's fantastic.

Jessamyn 11:57 And it's you so much for linking me this.

Cortex 12:00 Yes. And that hack that thunder of doom one is almost like that's halfway to sort of assault bassy. aesthetic. tying everything together. But yeah, I thought those cute. Good rock. Good work ankle blending Glip Glendening enunciation.

Jessamyn 12:20 So because we haven't mentioned ethnic knock somehow this month yet.

Cortex 12:26 been like, it's been like seven minutes.

Jessamyn 12:28 I know. I will also have to highlight the bots that he did. Which are pokimane in space and pokimane in the NYPL. So I do have to take a little side conversation, Josh? Yes. You've been doing the Pokeyman stuff. Okay, I haven't been I'm also doing the Pokeyman things.

Cortex 12:47 How's it going for you on the poker mining stuff?

Jessamyn 12:50 Well, rural Pokemon is really just sadness, but I lit some incense and lay in bed and waited for them to come to me last night and that worked out okay.

Cortex 12:58 Yeah, I haven't tried that yet. I should try that at some point. It feels like cheating.

Jessamyn 13:01 I mean, I feel you add to the game for little children who can't otherwise do the game. Well, you know what I mean?

Cortex 13:08 If it makes you feel any better, there's also a horrible dark side to it, which is you know, incentives you can find at random occasionally but in general you just need to spend actual human dollars in order to acquire more if you want them so it's it's also hugely exploitative so that you can feel good about it. Well, I find the

Jessamyn 13:23 whole thing exploitative, right, you find these little creatures in the wild and trap them and make them fight. Oh, that's barbaric. Yeah, no, it's like, if it's a card game, it's one thing but if it's a little thing that cries real tears, like that's hard. Yeah.

Cortex 13:34 Like, are you? Oh, my God. Are you playing dog fighting to? Yeah, no, I love it. It's, I've been having so much fun dog fight.

Jessamyn 13:43 Starving my dog. So my dog is really hungry. I find it helps if you you know, I can't even talk about dog abuse. But for some reason I can like with my worms into a frenzy so that they can. I mean, I don't know. I've gotten as far as learning what a pokey stop is. We don't have pokey gyms or other people who play Yes.

Cortex 14:04 There's a real weird hit

Jessamyn 14:05 while I was on my road trip. Oh, so we were like at the shot tower in Dubuque Iowa being like, oh, and then suddenly there's a bunch of like kids with their phones. And I'm like, there's no way they're here for the shot. But what what is happening and then we figured out the thing but only kind of what you could read in the news on your phone while you're driving six hours a day. Anyhow, it's

Cortex 14:28 that shot tower thing I said as much on like your picture on milkshake, but I totally missed that. What back when you made a post about it. Right? And those, those are great,

Jessamyn 14:38 are great and there's not that many, and there's only one on that side of the Mississippi and we saw it quite by accident because we were just killing time and frickin Dubuque on our way to Swingle Yeah, today's the day I'm gonna write up the second half of my trip and I'll probably put that somewhere on Metafilter just because I think people might enjoy it.

Cortex 14:59 Excellent. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna throw in the link to your old post here because it was it was such a neat thing to discover shot.

Jessamyn 15:05 My other picture that turned out to be the thing that you had a post about but we can talk about that reassured me back

Cortex 15:44 to back to Pokemon Go.

Jessamyn 15:48 But you know how like you can look for anybody maybe a metal filter who doesn't know this like, it's kind of a augmented reality thinks you can like look at a picture of your pajamas and there's a Pokemon on your knee kind of thing. And so you can use this to like, take funny pictures of Pokemon in the real world and exotic knock, basically made a bot that just takes pokemons and puts them over pictures of things at the New York Public Library. And then there's one in space. And that's really all there is to it. But it's cute. And I like it.

Cortex 16:23 It's uh, yeah, it's nice. It's nice work. Yeah, I'm really kind of curious to see what happens with Pokemon Go not so much as a game because the game is whatever it is, like, you know, it's if you're aware of Ingress, then it's, it's a reskin of that, essentially, just,

Jessamyn 16:36 I was massively an interesting for me to learn about that. Because I'm always like, how does this work? Like, why is there a thing here or not here or whatever?

Cortex 16:44 Yeah, and at the moment, Ingress is definitely a better like game as a featured video game that works well and has stuff to do. But Pokemon has Pokemon, so boom. But yeah, I've been really enjoying the sort of pop cultural riffing of the Pokemon Go explosion. So I've kind of curious to see where that ends up a couple months, a couple more months. kind of

Jessamyn 17:04 missed the first time like Jim had a kid who has a kid but who's not a kid anymore who was into Pokemons. And so Jim's kind of can, like lives in the pokemons slipstream sort of understands what the things are, and at least some of the references whereas I'm just like, Oh, it's a thing you can do with your phone. Yeah, ah, interesting. I suspect I won't go very far with it. But it's fun to talk to other people. My age won't be like, Oh, you're doing the pokemons and seeing what they say.

Cortex 17:34 Yeah, and you can learn the basics of it. You know, through pretty minimal casual play. I mean, I haven't not been playing it seriously. I've been sort of pulling it out. Yeah. When I pull it out, but it's it's one of the things it's like hey, you know, it's a great excuse to go for a walk. And me and Angela tend to you know, like go for walks it's just good easy like Gemini

Jessamyn 17:51 is Gemini do the same things. So that makes you stop at all the churches because those are the only pokey stops around here. We're pretty much in rural no play yeah,

Cortex 17:59 we'd like don't even bother walking specifically to pokey stops because like there's there's it we're in like a residence here in a city. I mean, we're in a residential neighborhood of a city and so it's like it's not super thick with a pokey stops, but they're around and so if you just sort of walk your usual route, you'll go past a few if you walk, you know, a mile or so. So, like I and I'm not playing super seriously. So it's not like I'm getting rid of all the items you find it pokey stops very quickly so so I just we just sort of wander around but you stopped to get like Pokemon themselves, like you know, for Pokemon shows up. Okay, well, I gotta try and catch this guy. And so it's like, it's a great excuse to go for a walk. But it also sort of fucks up the walk a little because like, Okay, now just hold on. I got it. Now this fucking zoo Batman.

Jessamyn 18:37 I have to keep Jim out of people's yards. Oh, see? I guess he's just kind of wandering around. And the line between the front yard and like the road is?

Cortex 18:47 Well, yeah, and that may be a little bit less thoroughly structured.

Jessamyn 18:51 And Westport, Massachusetts where I am for the summer has the highest gun ownership per capita in the state. And Jim has really long hair and a man bud now which means like there's a whole new class of people who might dislike him. Because maybe they think he's a hipster. Like who even knows? So yeah, one of us has to at least keep half an eye out for that kind of thing.

Cortex 19:13 Yeah, it's a weird thing but it's it's amazing thing but another route that's the wrong link. Another project I liked is I split on your grave by Sue at anvil which I think I finally posted correctly going in the first time

Jessamyn 19:31 an anvil also a person I have met excellent very exciting all around.

Cortex 19:36 This is the people in going for like that. These are the people in your neighborhood but then I want to go like these are the days I know I know.

Jessamyn 19:44 And then we have to talk about the fact that they fired Gordon and Bob Oh Jesus. Oh man. Oh man still mad.

Cortex 19:52 Yeah, frickin HBO.

Jessamyn 19:56 How can they not ruin? Yeah. So Tell me what this.

Cortex 20:00 Okay, so I split on your grave is just a series of code examples by suit anvil that from the comments in the project post they did for exactly the right reason, which is that the name made them giggle when they thought of it. There's a you know, the movie I Spit on Your Grave? Yeah. Okay, so so that obviously it's a play on that. So I split on your your grave with quotes around your grave. The the premise here is you had to do like regex stuff, sort of like a small subset like there's a the concept of splitting a string on a specific, this is where it should split. delimiter is a real common thing in a lot of programming contexts. And it's something that like, if you had, say, a comma separated list of terms, and you wanted to turn that into like, one term is an item each in something instead of a big long sentence, you would split on the comma, right? So you have your program, go through and find the commas and the sentence, an easy thing for you to do. So you say, Okay, so the comma is the splitting delimiter. There, that's the thing that it's going to find and Chuck away and then split things, the listed two at that point. But the thing is, you can use anything for a delimiter. And sometimes you want to use other stuff, maybe you have a tab separated list, maybe you are trying to break up a list by appearances of someone's name, and you know, turn a big long paragraph into a bunch of lines of dialogue, you know, any number of arbitrary things. So you can use whatever you want as a delimiter, including the phrase your grave. So if you decide to do some code examples, about splitting on the phrase, your grave, you can call it a split on your grave, and then cortex giggles. Perfect. That's pretty much the whole thing. So it says on the tin, it's there you go. So yeah, I liked that. I was amused,

Jessamyn 21:45 great. I enjoyed Jetta cusses project about the Supreme Court database, CC licensed database of the Supreme Court decisions, and it's searchable by a whole bunch of things. It goes from 1791 to 2015. And it's got an online analysis tool. So if you're like, oh, great, a data dump, how lovely. They actually have basically, what's a faceted search, which is kind of badass in this like, okay, so I kind of got in a fight with my boss, not a fight. But like one of those things where like, we were talking about how open library is or is not like a library in the 21st century. Besides that, it uses the L word, right. Yeah. And so we talked about what does the library do? What does open library do? What does open library not do? So it's great for lending books, it's great for looking stuff up. We don't do for instance, any reference work. So you can't ask us a question about the world. You know, you can ask us a question about our collection, sort of, but we don't answer like, reference questions. And I was like, well, we don't do that. And my boss, who is tech and not library was like, Yeah, but you're talking about like the implementation of, you know, something, something? What about the goals? And I'm like, I think the goal is you have a human being who does reference and in his world, the goal is you have search that works so well, that no one has to ask a reference question. You witch in kind of an idealized, wouldn't it be great if there were no poor people anymore, thing I can get behind. And otherwise, I wanted to kill him. Like I literally spent like a day and a half being like, Oh, my God, I'm wasting my life trying to talk to this guy who otherwise is wonderful. Like, he's a really good guy, very optimistic, very positive. But his view is really that you get to a point where you don't need humans for it anymore. Yeah. And my point is you build a beautiful search, that you minimize human interaction, but you still may be needed. And so one of the things I kind of love about this project, is that the search II thing has, I mean, it's kind of ugly, because it's a really long setting the parameters thing, but instead of making you learn some kind of fucking query language, they just have checkboxes and things that normal people under Yeah, exactly. Like the query that this thing builds has got to be the ugliest fucking thing ever. But you can really figure out if the vote went conservative or liberal if the Justice wrote an opinion or not, if it was a state, Apple at court case or appellate case, scores, if bla bla bla bla bla, like, the things it lets you do, somebody clearly went through some time and care to make this readable by humans and usable by humans, even though it's not a sexy looking search page. And as well, I'm sure the query is awful, but they want it to give people the highest utility. Yeah,

Cortex 24:45 well, it's okay. If it's a query it's awful because it's just some computers computer

Jessamyn 24:49 doesn't care Exactly. You're not gonna hurt its feelings

Cortex 24:52 when it's Yeah, and I like I like that, that it is like yeah, this is this is a large interface, but it's not necessarily that Clea complex one. So you can learn how to use the answers you want to use pretty easily.

Jessamyn 25:04 And they've tried to break it into sets so that you can eyeball it and figure out what's going on like the archive, the way you actually on the back end, as a staff person access content is through this awful, ugly, you know, check boxes thing where you literally do have to send the query string, which is in the URL, if you want to explain to somebody something about a set of items. Yeah. And so our Slack is just littered with these 20 line, query string dumps that are so bad. Yeah, yeah. No, because engineers are like, I don't know, there's. So this project made me happy. Yeah,

Cortex 25:46 no, it's really nice. Ya know, the interface side of it reminds me of sort of like the interface, or the relationship between the info dump files that we generate the raw files, and then the interface on the front of the info dumpster, which is the unofficial interface into the info dump that combustible Edison Lighthouse maintains. Oh, right, right. And it's, you know, it's the same sort of thing is like, you can get more, if you want to get really wonky about it, like writing your own custom scripts, or queries, or importing the database yourself and query that way, you can get more out of the incident than you can get from the info dumpster with the available fields. But at the same time, most people are just want to poke around, are going to find so much more use from the info dumpster, because I can just go and yeah, do a simple search, look at some of these various options that are available there. You know, throw a couple, that'll be fine for them. Exactly. So it's like, serving both of those needs is really good way to go. So So yeah, no, that is rad. That is that is a it's a cool project. I had not actually looked at that interface. So that's, that's neat.

Jessamyn 26:49 Yeah, well, I always like head straight for the surgeon to be like, you know, I

Cortex 26:53 started looking at the data instead, because I got interested, like, Well, I wonder, can I do something funky, but it's really metadata about the cases rather than Garfield. Exactly. And, you know, it's like, it doesn't have quite the right information yet. So, so I need to look elsewhere. But I think that that other data may be out there too. But anyway, very cool. I really liked this project by duffel. It's all grist to me, which is just a wonderful, simple premise. So taking it so so people like to spell stuff with like Russian characters to be to make it look sort of Russian ish, but they're still spelling it in English with lookalike characters. So like, you know, backwards, our, you know, a backwards and various other Cyrillic characters that look sort of like English characters. And so you use that instead of the English character to say, Oh, by the way, this is sort of, you know, Russian evocative. Yeah. And also, I think, maybe there's a Greek in here, too. But basically, so what double is done is taken these and then translate the weird mishmash into the actual English transliteration. And of course, every time it's complete nonsense, because like a backwards are isn't an R a backwards N isn't an N. A Greek. You know?

Jessamyn 28:20 This is so clever.

Cortex 28:21 I love it. So it's, it's, I was pretty pleased with it.

Jessamyn 28:26 Eat me. This is great. I've seen duffel all over the place, like a metal filter in the last like, maybe two or three months? Like duffles not a new user, is he?

Cortex 28:39 I don't think so.

Jessamyn 28:42 Since 2006, I don't know why suddenly, I see him everywhere. Maybe maybe in a good way, like, you know, being helpful on you know, meta talk and doing a bunch of stuff.

Cortex 28:52 Yeah. I don't know if it's because he's been more active lately. Or if it's just one of those, like, you know, the intersection of your shared attentions to the site, just line up at the right time. Yes, yeah.

Jessamyn 29:02 Yellow, Pink 17 kind of thing. Or you just see it as soon as you start thinking about Yeah,

Cortex 29:07 exactly. Yeah. Speaking of users and longtime users, whatnot, we had I think the new record for signing up after starting and stopping in the middle the process the other day. Oh, someone finished signing up after 11 years. Yeah, they were having trouble. Like, oh, yeah, no, I think I see why. Maybe there's a problem. Like, I think it was enough of a gap that somehow that screwed up that PayPal workflow for them. Yeah, so

Jessamyn 29:35 let me like, this is a fraud alert.

Cortex 29:38 Yeah, that's the thing. I think I think they actually they successfully paid for it. And then somehow it just didn't sync up correctly, possibly, because the account structure had changed in the ensuing you know, upwards of a decade. So. But I'm always pleased when that happens.

Jessamyn 29:52 That's great. Do you know who the user is? Or is it a secret or can we say like,

Cortex 29:55 I don't remember offhand, like it was. Okay. I don't know if they've even become active since I helped them get the account working. You know, it's one of the things where I always worry a little bit of someone's coming back to account way later because oh man, I was gonna go spam. But I don't think that's happened either. So I'm gonna finally get around to signing up.

Jessamyn 30:14 Nice. I loved I saw this on milkshake and then I just noticed that it's a project but Kamara does this really cool? Kind of, you know, he makes skulls out of paper mache and then wears them on like a skeleton costume for Mardi Gras. Yeah, and I had seen in the past the he did this kind of like pumpkin head picture, like pumpkin head head. But then he like wore it with a suit like in front of a graveyard. And it was just it's a very, he's like not only that very talented dude who does the stuff. But he's actually also very good photographer like, so his Flickr stream in general is really good. Yeah, the picture of him in the suit, but the hat is good. But then he took this composite picture, which is Him with all wearing all the pictures, composited in one room. So it's basically six hems with six outfits. It's sort of a single picture. Yeah. I don't even know if he's in a museum or this is his house. Who knows. But I've, you know, been following along with him and his outfits for years. And so it's been cool to see. Yeah, all of these together. And the composite photo itself was actually quite good and interesting. Yeah.

Cortex 31:28 Yeah, the photos great. The gallery stuff was great. I was so happy because he actually wrote because he had posted it on milkshake. Right, you know, and yeah, that's right there. And then he wrote to me, he's like, Hey, has this probably isn't really like a project, right? That's like, do you know,

Jessamyn 31:44 it's a composite photo? It's actually a sort of a complex photo. Yeah.

Cortex 31:48 Oh, that was like, Yeah, I mean, you've got you've got processed stuff, put it together. And yeah, posted because it's, it's awesome. So. So yes, I'm glad you did that. And hey, I've met him. So there we go. I've met people too, you know, of course.

Jessamyn 32:01 Oh, maybe this is a good time to say specific. Thank you shout out for Metafilter user Amen daily. You've been in Chicago. Yeah. Like not only were there two meetups for us coming to Chicago, me and my sister and Jim. But they turned into like, we had like wine by the Chicago River. And then a rewatch people dance in the park. Then we add wine by the river. Then we went to like this 96th floor bar where you can view like with huge windows that you can view all of Chicago and like even slip the waiter like a look at 20 or something so that we could get a great seat by the window. And then he helped me drive back to his house where everybody came back for a nightcap and then we hung out. And then he put me and my sister up in guestrooms and we had breakfast with him the next day before we headed off on a road trip. Like he is as wonderful as he seems on the internet. And we spent like almost an entire day with him. He's great. His wife is great. All the Chicago mefites who came out thank you so much. It was great to see you and it was super fun. So like thumbs up thumbs up thumbs up all the way around

Cortex 33:13 Chicago. Definitely. Definitely a top tier meetup town. I had a fantastic time when I went through there years ago and yeah,

Jessamyn 33:21 I saw all sorts of little things in Chicago like we took a walk from like one meet up to the next meet up and they made sure I saw like the fun fountain and like some of the other stuff and I just I just felt really well taken care of my sister was like, oh my god, everybody's awesome. It was great.

Cortex 33:35 Did you end up with the billy goat at all?

Jessamyn 33:37 We didn't go to the Pentagon and I'm not sure why. Like we were near the billy goat but I think it was just it was a lovely day out and so we just wound up at this kind of fancy ish kind of wine place by the

Cortex 33:51 same token okay call me the billy goats really kind of a dungeon like a sub terrain? Yeah, like like I really liked it. That's where we did that photo. The old. Yes, I

Jessamyn 33:59 actually was looking that up. Yeah, that last supper photo. Yeah. And the only downside was, as you probably read Peter got in his accident with the guy on the wrong side of the road. Way to the meetup. Not only did I not get to meet him and indigo rain super shout out for Indigo rain for handling that situation. very unhappy. But it just wound up being you know, a really difficult thing for you know, Peter and delay get home and everything else. Yeah, sorry. I missed meeting him.

Cortex 34:30 Yeah. Yeah. Well, as long as we brought it around to a downer note,

Jessamyn 34:35 that's Wow, I did my best.

Cortex 34:39 Anything else you want to mention specifically?

Jessamyn 34:42 That was sort of the bulk of the bulk of everything. I'm sure I'll you know, remember exactly the thing I wanted to mention. As you know, everything is always awesome. And project so it's always hard to pick. Yeah. But you know, Creative Commons licenses does sort of send up the Jessamyn a

Cortex 34:55 lot. That is in your wheelhouse. I think there was I think there was at least one real life project I forgot Oh, wait

Jessamyn 35:01 a second. No, there is one more sorry. I didn't notice that Jin cat had put up his mens long hair. Oh yeah, thing and I've been following along with his, you know, he's got a ton of videos, long hair for men. super interesting. They're really good. And yeah, they're just all the way around like I follow him on Instagram. So I sometimes watch the videos I sometimes don't I send Jim to them occasionally to talk but it's like if you've got long hair and you're a dude and you would like somebody to give you good advice about this, that and the other. So good.

Cortex 35:35 10 years ago, me would have been all

Jessamyn 35:37 over that. Yes, you're still sticking with the short hair. Yeah,

Cortex 35:40 I'm running with it. I really enjoyed it. It's nice. Right now right now it looks kind of like a shake any late 70s, early 80s thing that really I just need a haircut. But

Jessamyn 35:52 Shaggy. I mean, maybe you just need like a brief undercut over your years.

Cortex 35:56 Well, yeah, that's the thing I could pinpoint. I could probably like get a just a cleanup of what it is right now and keep it more or less at this length and kind of like it but

Jessamyn 36:05 I mean, the great thing about having long hair is you just never have to get anybody to cut it. I had somebody like, like color my under hair. So I've got like, sort of pink hair like all the middle aged ladies do nowadays. And I found that that was pretty much all I needed to do. And I haven't seen the inside of a barber and yeah, I don't know when

Cortex 36:22 there's a What the hell was gonna say I lost it. I lost a thing. There was a thing and I lost it. Something about your year. We Okay, so this is this is sort of a weird tangent, but we we just watched Stranger Things on Netflix. It's this new Netflix original series. It's sort of

Jessamyn 36:43 I think Matt was just telling me about that kind of like pseudo horror. It's like

Cortex 36:47 it's like, files meets at BT stand by me sort of weird.

Jessamyn 36:53 Having dinner with slap happy and his wife and they were this they just started this also.

Cortex 36:57 Yeah, it's what's your take? But it was really good. I enjoyed it a lot does it have to do with your hair? It's my hair feels like it's a period piece. Like it's like my hair is like, like a dumb joke. Like a guy from that. I feel like my hair is right there right now if I wanted to try and make a related early 80s joke, basically.

Jessamyn 37:19 Yeah, they basically told us it was kind of horror movie and I was like, they were like, well, maybe more thriller eight. And I was like thriller you can get behind horror II completely not.

Cortex 37:29 That's not pure horror. It's like it's got some supernatural. There's some monster stuff. But it's not. It's not. It's not like it's not slasher Philly. Yeah, it's not like, it's not like killing new bile teenagers as a fame or anything.

Jessamyn 37:42 Or just splatter stuff, which I can't. Anything that is now telling me to stay out of the woods I've had it with. Although, you know, another thing that has nothing to do with metal filter, but like Jim got Lyme disease. I saw reference to that, like, Yeah, speaking of the woods, he basically got it two days before our trip. And so I mean, he's fine now, which is the only way I can joke about it. But yeah, so he like didn't get the normal. Bullseye was just kind of feeling like shit. He's got really good doctors, his tests were negative. And then like six or seven days into this, like tiredness and fever, they won't go away. He broke out into disgusting rash. And the doctor was like, oh, and then got on medicine and was on the way to feeling better. But, you know, I've always been trying to not be one of those stay out of the woods, people. And now I've become completely timid again, about going into the woods

Cortex 38:33 around here. Let's treat Lyme disease. Yeah, it's such a fuckery thing. I've known a couple of people who had the experience of figuring out only belatedly that that's what's going on. And it's like, it's a shitty, it's well,

Jessamyn 38:46 especially because there is that kind of, like concern that, like, if you have it for a long time, you can have long term effects. Jim basically just kind of felt shitty for a week or two, which is not awesome. But, you know, then he just kept doxycycline and had to stay out of the sun for two weeks. And he's fine. Yep. But yeah, it was just he was just a wimp brag and probably was getting it on the trip you know? Yeah. Like you're on the trip and so it's like I wrote food we're sleeping funny like who knows run with it. Right? Well, what are you gonna do like he wasn't like Dr. Level sick, but then he got home and slept for two days and was like oh

Cortex 39:50 let's move on to medical.

Jessamyn 39:52 Let's move on to metal filter. So I had that thing happen on metal filter that sometimes happens to me where I see the best thing on the internet. And I come to metta filter to compose it only to find that Zark has already made the best post about it and seriously like Zark I was coming to just kind of one one and done link it like look at this. It's funny and Zark put together this really great post. So the thing in question is called the weed route, not what you think. It's essentially, there was a railroad that went between Montana and Cedar Falls Washington by the Chicago Milwaukee railroad, for whatever reason, and Sark explains this in the post, they were going to decommission that railroad. And so these two guys in 1980 got a speeder, like a little railroad car that you zip down railroad tracks just to like go fix it and stuff like not even like a car like an automobile card, not a car like a railroad car, and went down from the the almost 2000 miles of track to document it. And so this is all and then just made a website recently. And so this is all photographs from 1980 of these guys in this railway maintenance car, taking photos. And so it's all like slice of life slice of America very 80s beautiful photographs, flicker set so you can look at them. And so I got there to metal filter and was like ah, but I wanted to post this. And so I wound up making a comment looking up some of the locations that were in those photos like this old diner, that old hotel blah, blah blah and figuring out what it actually happened to those things.

Cortex 41:41 That's that's some solid value add you really synergize

Jessamyn 41:45 tried. So figuring out what happened to this hotel Hey, figuring out and of course, there was a train snowplow picture, which harkens back to my train snowplow picture post of 2010

Cortex 41:58 What was the train snowplow post?

Jessamyn 42:00 I made a post about trains every

Cortex 42:05 I don't really? I don't really like you love me. Oh, I do remember this? No, actually. Oh, yeah.

Jessamyn 42:11 It was a good post. Yeah.

Cortex 42:14 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've decided like, definitely six years ago is probably what I no longer remember things that I have definitely seen. So yeah, that thing plowing right through that. It's like it's plowing through the snow. That's amazing.

Jessamyn 42:29 But like, I just made me happy because Metafilter consistently still, when there's a neat thing on the internet. Somebody does it justice by making a post and sharing it with people. So even with all the fuckery of, you know, bad politics and bad shootings and everything else, which I also think deserves attention. There is this kind of fun stuff as well. Yeah,

Cortex 42:53 yeah. No, I'm looking through my, my, my sort of favorites and recent activity. Like picking out the stuff that isn't just like politics or terrible stuff. has been it's been a busy. It's been a busy month. For politics. Obviously, we did the whole the convention season is upon us or has come and gone to tap in this month. Yeah, like, Oh, back to back one week. And then the next which is, I mean, it's probably a good thing to get that done. And I think that's not a typical as far as the scheduling. But it's also this this, this whole election season has been like, really, and we've talked about this, I think probably every podcast briefly.

Jessamyn 43:35 All year, they didn't some of the metadata, it's about a to just get out to see what people are. Yeah.

Cortex 43:40 But it's been it's been it's been it's been definitely a whole lot crazier, like 2012 was, was almost a vacation of an election cycle. 2008 as as, as I remember, it was like, pretty crazy. And then 2012 We were sort of bracing for and it was still I was paying the askers as election season. But, but it was like, I was really, really braced for it in 2012. And then I was like, oh, you know, actually, I guess maybe, maybe maybe it was just new the job and then this year has been like No, no, it was just because this is this is super crazy again. And yeah, so the the RNC and the DNC, we ended up doing a thread a day for each of the four days of both of those. And I think that worked out well. I

Jessamyn 44:24 saw that go together. And it seemed like it actually went together.

Cortex 44:28 Yeah, no, it Yeah, because we ended up with like a two 3000 comments thread for every single day of each of the conventions. And if we tried to sort of stretch that out across, you know, one thread, I think it would have been, we would have hit like apocalyptic levels of dissatisfaction with the fact that you can't even load the thread. I mean, I remember I remember slogging through that epic Palin thread. There was a certain sort of perverse, you know, stupid pride and, you know, grittiness to managing to continue to operate the thread once it hit 4000 5000 comments but it's not a great user experience, obviously. Right? So yeah, we ended up just doing that one thread a day for each of those. And that worked out, okay, you know, because it was also very life blogging, and so the threads grew pretty quickly. And now we're sort of coming out the other side of that and trying to adjust back to No, you know, we'll get a new thread. Yeah, in a few days in a week, you don't just don't just get a new thread every day. It's it's

Jessamyn 45:24 people can talk about sort of the meta issues like I saw, there's a meta talk thread where people are like, Ah, this joker is really difficult to parse for people who aren't great at parsing Joker. Yeah, as someone who actually asks you Josh to explain many jokes to me, like I super sympathize, because not everybody can just get you on chat and be like, Josh, I don't understand the Internet.

Cortex 45:45 Yeah, you know, it's definitely a thing. It's, I haven't even read that meta talk yet that like came in last night. So I'll catch up on that at some point.

Jessamyn 45:55 There's some legit concerns. But of course, there's the medical concerns where you know, people want to kind of go lateral and people who just really are having a hard time anyhow, following things and so lateral makes everything that much

Cortex 46:07 yeah, yeah, it's difficult to find something that works for everybody, unfortunately. So it's I think it's gonna continue to be something we have to sort of chat about and try and figure out compromises on but yeah, yep. Anyway, I trust you'll do it. Well, it's been a it's been a whole lot of that and happy shout out stuff that eyebrows McGee had. Oh, I saw she had baby baby, bro. Yes, yes, Andalucia. And Alicia. I don't remember which pronunciation it is. This is what happens when you communicate with your team members, like strictly by text. Sounds. Oh, that's my new headcanon it's definitely a slide pixies reference. Yes. Yes. So she she she had her baby and Reza SNOMED got married. So Happy, happy, joyous occasions all around. But those happened to

Jessamyn 47:06 lovely. That's so great. What did you know what a great, congratulations, wrestles nobody congratulations, eyebrows, Mickey.

Cortex 47:14 I think I think there's a rad wedding video, but it was still in the process of being edited. Last time I heard. So we'll get a post up I think at some point about

Jessamyn 47:21 wrestling. Was it like a big wedding? Did everybody go?

Cortex 47:23 I think it was a relatively small wedding. But it did take place during critical moments, at least on horses. So no, no, I'm serious. This is like what they get whenever it is ready to go. I definitely if no one else gets around to it. I will make metal tacos myself just to get that out there because it's amazing. There's great photos of them both sitting on horses and then the officiant also sitting on a horse or wearing like a viking hat. And yes, they did it upright, they know how to rise. But the thing is, both of these things happened like right in the middle of July. Baby McGee was supposed to come along Via C section on like, I think the 21st and it's more like the 11th because like oh god like oh, hey, you know what, you're ready to go. And so we had to do some schedule rearranging on pretty short photos. So I it was simultaneously like managing daily life blogs of the RNC. Which were very busy. And, and also, I think I worked something stupid, like 60 hours that week, just because like it was it was a short term thing. I was like, You know what, I'm up for it. I'm just gonna take it real easy, and I'm just gonna

Jessamyn 48:30 handle it. You were like, I know, this is like has a finite end to it.

Cortex 48:33 Exactly. You know, I was pretty crispy by like, Saturday, but I was like, Nope, I managed it. And now we're back to schedule as normalized we just had to like deal with a sudden collapse of scheduling stuff. So yeah, it was a very it was a particularly intense experience for me sort of like, this is the most RNC RNC I have ever had will ever experience thanks to this strange Columbia, agglomeration of conglomeration of circumstances. Nation agglutination Confluence is good juxtaposition Nexus. This is the this is the vocabulary for the transcribers.

Jessamyn 49:15 Yeah, what's the thing where all the railroads come together at the place junction

Cortex 49:18 junction? Yeah, juncture, juncture, I think juncture is like, maybe more of like a figurative place. Like at this juncture at this moment that this gesture junction, yes, let's conjunction, let's conjecture about a juncture.

Jessamyn 49:39 For Latin, that's good.

Cortex 49:40 Oh, I enjoy we should Latin shout

Jessamyn 49:42 out to the transcriptionist. Yes. Because they really went from kind of was kind of a thing that was sort of happening a little bit, whatever. And then there was a big post meta talk to be like, Hey, why don't we get on this? And now they're on it and it's wonderful for people who would prefer to read then listen, and a bunch of other kinds of people. So thank you everybody. Yeah, because it's just so nice that people have been getting together to do that. Yep. No, it's usually good for morale.

Cortex 50:11 It's a great thing. And it's that, hey, it's fun to do. It's easy to do get in on it.

Jessamyn 50:16 Yeah, you can just do a little bit. And Josh and I are, you know, funny and do things like La la la, la, la, la, you know,

Cortex 50:24 we're hilarious. Metafilter posts, right, I should mention some of those.

Jessamyn 50:33 We'd met a filter this month.

Cortex 50:34 I did you know, and I mean, I was gone for two weeks. So I mean, I certainly read the shit out of metal. But apparently I read stuff that even wasn't you know about the election or police. There's a Pokemon Go thread. We were talking about that.

Jessamyn 50:50 I had to go here in order to figure out what the hell was going on when I just saw people waving their phones. And I was on a road trip and could not stop and figure it out. By prizepool Octorok.

Cortex 51:04 And, and yes, so if you if you need some edit, submit a talk. You go wow, that'd be a horror show. Found a flaky on? Yes, go check that out.

Jessamyn 51:18 But it's still on. It's still open for a couple more days, right? Yeah.

Cortex 51:22 Yeah. You can squeak in there. So go if you will poke him on go check it out. Yeah, Jerry Doyle died. I shouldn't sound cheerful about that. I'm not actually cheerful. It's sad

Jessamyn 51:34 for the misfits. No, I

Cortex 51:37 don't think so. That'd be amazing if that was a crossover, but no, he's an actor. I

Jessamyn 51:40 didn't know what I didn't know what Doyle's first name was. No, he was I don't actually know who this guy is at all.

Cortex 51:47 He's an actor. He was a he played Mr. Garibaldi on the Seminole didn't have the budget at wanted Sci Fi series Babylon five.

Jessamyn 51:56 Never seen it. It's one of those TV shows I'm saving for my old age.

Cortex 52:00 It's it's worth, it's worth checking out sometime. It's one of the things where it was a it was a show that I really like but it was definitely sort of it had a budget and the budget was not what I wanted to be. And it so it's rough around the edges. You know, the effects are kind of cheap. A lot of the time. The writing is a little mixed. Some episodes are not very good. But it's still it's really interesting in ambition and sort of like, doing some of the stuff that Battlestar Galactica was interesting in his writing for before Battlestar Galactica, there's a legendary story about Babylon five being something that J mop coaster sinski pitched to whoever Paramount or NBC or whoever the appropriate folks were, and said, Hey, I've got this idea about this, this show. And it's, it's set on a space station. So it's like a science fiction space show, but it's on a space station. And it's all about like, diplomacy and being sort of like a diplomatic place in space and stuff comes out of that. And you know, and they're like, Yeah, we're gonna give it a pass. And then, like a year later, you know, they said Star Trek Deep Space Nine. It's about a space station. You know, the thing is, like,

Jessamyn 53:15 this post was by Dr. Nemo, he's my neighbor in Vermont, Brian.

Cortex 53:18 Okay, nice. Yeah. But yeah, anyway, so it's kind of like no one will probably ever know for sure. And I think mostly Strzelecki, maybe writing that theory a little too hard, but in any case, interesting show and Jerry Jerry Durrell played Michael Garibaldi who was he was the security chief on the station this guy's got sort of a like Bruce Willis ish. Yeah, learn about him Ananda. Yeah. So it's sad that he died but but it made people talk about Babylon five. And so yes, that was the thing that happened. That's That's my happy stuff that I'm reading about what I'm not being bogged down by license. Oh, yeah. People dying. Yeah, no, it's it's it's much more. It's been a weird month. It's been a weird month. Hey, you know, making another tiny Nintendo. I don't even know what that means. Joshua. They're they're making a little cute. Nintendo Entertainment System like yeah, the the original Nintendo, the original NES. They're making a little, you know, that was like 26 games and an Atari controller, plug it into your HDMI port things. Yeah, it's that sort of thing, except for it's shaped like an NES and you can plug controllers into USB ports on the front, it's got like 30 games on it. Anyway, it's weird because they get

Jessamyn 54:30 a button to see a picture.

Cortex 54:36 It's just cute. And it's also like paying $60 To have a chunk of plastic when you could just play the stuff for free on an emulator. So the thread is a weird combination of people being excited about it. being excited that certain titles are built in being critical that certain titles aren't saying it's a bad ripoff deal because hey, you could just emulate this free saying oh, it's an amazing deal because it's a cute thing. And loads of good things, good games on it. And so the whole the whole mass of humanity is they're having complicated feelings about the whole thing.

Jessamyn 55:07 Speaking of complicated feelings, one of the posts that I really liked, which was kind of an interesting random post was by mandolin conspiracy about Diane Arbus, who was a photographer who was kind of a big deal photographer, but then committed suicide when she was 48. And there's a New York New York Magazine article about her weird life. And it did bring up a lot of I mean, it's there's not a lot of conversations in the thread. It's one of those like, 18 favorite 16 comments. Yeah. But, you know, it was people kind of talking about, like, things that were weird about her things that were interesting about her, bla bla bla, bla, bla bla, because she was kind of complicated. You know, she was a woman doing really interesting art, but also had kind of a fucked up family life. And two mental health problems, and, but her work was amazing, and etc, etc. So, the article itself, I mean, I kind of this, I flagged this, to pay attention to because the article itself is super, super good. And I would never have seen it if there wasn't a post meta filter. And there's some interesting, brief conversation.

Cortex 56:21 Yeah, yeah, I should go back and read through that too, because I know like, basically nothing about arbites Other than that she existed and some of her iconic photos

Jessamyn 56:30 well, and I was into her because, you know, if you're kind of a young person who's into sort of odd, weird, radical stuff, she was mainstream enough that you could get photos, books of her photos in the library, and yet weird enough that you could look at, you know, photos of like, circus people or people with mental health problems or mental health institutions kind of thing. And she also briefly taught at Hampshire, like for like a summer program or a winter program, like was briefly there. And so she's kind of part of the Hampshire mythos. And but I didn't know that much about her at the time, I was just a young person being like, Oh, finally, someone who's not just taking like, you know, Ansel Adams style photography. And then you get older and you learn about Joel Peter Viken, and a whole bunch of other even more esoteric stuff, but that's the kind of thing you can't get access to necessarily in the public library. Yeah. Well, I like to speak this is new this.

Cortex 57:27 Speaking of arts. My segway sounds good. Casey green posted a follow up to this is fine. Oh, I

Jessamyn 57:36 noticed that. I did not see it on metal filter. I just saw it, you know, through my streams yesterday.

Cortex 57:42 Yeah, no. Yeah. So so the dog sitting calmly in the room cartoon. This is interesting, because like, on the one hand, it needs no introduction. On the other hand, part of the whole thing with the history of this is it desperately needs introduction, because it's like one of the most thoroughly non attributed non credited bits of meme in the world. It feels like at this point, it's a dog sitting in a room. And the room is on fire. And it's like, you know, cartoon like, like cartoon laundering. So it's a cartoon dog sitting there in a chair with his hat on. And he's just smiling, and there's flames all around. And the iconic panel is him saying

Jessamyn 58:18 larger comment. Yeah, like, yeah, the one panel is what became Yeah,

Cortex 58:22 the last panel that like flies around is just like the dog sitting there smiling and saying, This is fine, as there's flames licking up around him. And it's, yeah, it's part of a larger thing where he's like, this is fine. I'm fine with the events that are currently transpiring, etc. And the whole later though, maybe you shouldn't be Yeah, the whole joke such as it is, is like the juxtaposition of this, like, inappropriate level of not being concerned about obviously, concerning situation.

Jessamyn 58:45 And then that's also the Deke Bug Guy. FYI. Yes. Yes,

Cortex 58:48 this is casey green. Oh, geez. What's the name of the comic? It's killing me. I know this. It's not shovelware but it's something anyway, Casey green talented comic drawer person made that and then after however long that's been going around, finally just put out this is not fine, which is a follow up with the same dog. Starting to repeat the idea that this is fine and then freaking the hell out and even making a Harambee reference. And like, what is the Harambee reference? Oh, the gorilla, the gorilla. They shot a gorilla for God's sake.

Jessamyn 59:28 I didn't understand that. Ash.

Cortex 59:30 horombo. Like the whole thing. I don't. Okay, so her um, was a gorilla.

Jessamyn 59:36 I mean, I'll probably remember it and I don't just have the words in my rolodex that was the gorilla that got shot because the lady letter baby, something

Cortex 59:43 something like that. Yeah, that yeah, the kid got in the kid got in a closure closure. And then they ended up shooting the gorilla was the decision to the zookeeper folks ended up making to resolve the situation and the

Jessamyn 59:58 gorilla was called horombo. Yeah, good. Okay, thank you.

Cortex 1:00:01 There you go. I did not follow it closely. So it's possible even in that terse description I fuck something up but anyway, that's, that's at least what you meant. Exactly. So So yeah, there you go anyway new comic it's, it's, it's weird it's like it's it totally deserved a post and yada it's a nice little comic but it's it's so much it's more like it's the shoe dropping, it's the punch line to, you know, a shaggy dog joke. It's the it's the closure on a long thing like the comic itself, there's nothing wrong, it's a perfectly nice follow up from Katie Greene is interesting how it's like, simultaneously like a comic and also like, not funny. But it's sort of funny as a thing that exists

Jessamyn 1:00:40 as me because you see yourself in it, or you see other people and it's funny because it's a reflection of society now because it's like walls walls, yes.

Cortex 1:00:48 But it's also something that absolutely deserves a post just because of the interviewing, like mimetic nature and and everything that came in between it because otherwise, like, if if someone had posted the this is fine comic to the front page, the original one, which may have happened, I don't remember but like if they had it would be like, well, this kind of thing for post. And if someone had done like a week later posted the week later follow up. This is not fine. It was like, no, just go, you know, it would have been like like nothing nothing wrong with Casey greens work. But that just wouldn't have made sense. Like as a pair of,

Jessamyn 1:01:21 I guess there's a Kickstarter to

Cortex 1:01:23 yeah, there's a Kickstarter because of the Kickstarter. I think that Kickstarter, just sort of having a Kickstarter is

Jessamyn 1:01:29 totally overfunded at this point. Yeah. So it's not

Cortex 1:01:33 the post wasn't about the Kickstarter, which is good, because otherwise, we've been like, oh, you can't really do that. But I think that Kickstarter must have been something that Casey Green was specifically thinking. So wait,

Jessamyn 1:01:40 this is somebody who's in East Hampton, which is also where is Casey green on? Metafilter? I don't know, if that's also where diesel sweeties is from? Thy friends,

Cortex 1:01:51 I would not be surprised. I think that whole to podoco crew is fairly fairly tight.

Jessamyn 1:01:59 Okay. Well, I've never sure if that to political people are like, just the business or people who because like, their shirts were on topotecan. Yeah,

Cortex 1:02:06 it's a weird mix. I mean, I think I think there's like a tight crew of some of the like core old school and next generation of webcomic. errs. And then there's a somewhat wider range of people who were also sort of in that general sphere, but might not be quite so much in there. But I don't know, I don't know the details. But I wouldn't be surprised if our students in case of cream. We're on. Pretty good, friendly terms. Yep, sort of ran that one right into a ditch.

Jessamyn 1:02:37 Myself, it occurred to me I turned my phone off. And so I wanted to look and just make sure there wasn't a thing I missed that my sister had gotten a new haircut. And so I was looking at a picture of it, and it's my bad.

Cortex 1:02:47 Art W made a post about music video for a song I liked by a band I really like. And I thought the music video was kind of okay, and the thread wasn't huge, but I really liked the band. So fuck it, I'm gonna just say hey, yeah, so churches or churches is a true way to go

Jessamyn 1:03:02 art our web like you

Cortex 1:03:05 need video just felt like sort of like a proof of concept to me, rather than like a coherent narrative.

Jessamyn 1:03:10 I like how I can actually press play on this video and listen to you talking over the video. Which I am now watching.

Cortex 1:03:18 Yeah, it's nice. It's a nice animation style. I was like good. It's a nice video, but I really liked it. I like the song I like the the different mix here with Hayley Williams is interesting to hear because I've listened to the original album track a ton. But it also turned into a discussion in part in the thread about how you pronounce the name of the band, which is sort of a reliable discussion, whatever, this band comes up and people link to some other some other good stuff in the thread. And yeah, just a happy happy music time. Happy music time. I like music. It's fun.

Jessamyn 1:03:51 Nice. Sorry. There's a video that I was just watching again, and I'm trying to remember if there was, I believe there had to be a metal filter post about this when it came up. But because I was enjoying I don't see it. Alright, I'll deal with it later.

Cortex 1:04:09 Okay. What else did you look at a filter?

Jessamyn 1:04:13 Well, I made a post that I actually enjoyed very much. Tell us tell us about it. Cuz as you know, I went on this road trip. Yes. Actually, had I made this five? Podcast?

Cortex 1:04:24 No, no, we hit it like, right on the on the first I think the podcast last time. So this would have been a couple of

Jessamyn 1:04:30 clever are we? So um, so I went on this road trip and the road trip was with my sister and Jim. And we started in Massachusetts, and we got as far as Field of Dreams in Iowa. And one of the things I was trying to figure out is, you know, where does route 20 Start? Exactly, because I knew it was in Boston, but I didn't know where. And so I wondered finding this website called U S ns, like us, e n d s.com, which is all about photos and trivia about highway endpoints. Oh, this is great. So Geeky, super fun. And it's the kind of metal filter thing I like, like, here's something weird you've never heard of. And it's this old website. And so then it's just, you know, there's a bunch of highway nerds on metal filter. So we got to talk in and one of the comments was from Adam G, who runs this website, universal hub, and basically talked about how somebody filed a complaint that the end marker of us 20 is missing, and ask that it be replaced. So you can go to 311 dot boston.gov, and actually see the report that the sign is missing. And it's also not fixed. So we decided thank you to this thread to not actually start in the middle of Boston on the fifth of July after there's a half a million new people in Boston for the Fourth of July, and instead was started in Jim's house, which was slightly outside of Boston, which was probably better. And then the thing that happened, which was so interesting, was that this thread, which was something that I posted to meta filter, then got posted to a road nerd forum. Oh, hey, Jessamyn posted Greg's thread. And people are like, who's Jessamyn? What's better filter, what is going on? It's a post called a rhodes.com. And so I joined a rhodes.com like the way we used to back in the day to be like, Hi, I'm Medfield Don from meta filter and just left a comment. You know, it was one of those things where like, there's a thread and the last person who commented in the thread was on the 10th of July and then I show up two weeks later

Cortex 1:06:30 Hey, that's awesome. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:06:33 but you know, for someone who's super into like highway nerdery the A roads forum is amazing. Like it's a BBS you BB kind of set up. But like you can find like trivia for highway in your state, your region, your town, you can talk to people who you know, are know the things about the things. I found the piece of trivia that actually the shortest highway in Vermont is 69 feet long. Yes, fascinating. Because basically, it's a highway that's mostly in New Hampshire, but it terminates in Vermont, but it's like, oh, man, and so the the highway technically in Vermont starts from the middle of the bridge to the end of the bridge, which is 69 feet long. Here's another funny thing. The next longest highway in Vermont is 420 feet long. That's also ever alone. But like 69 feet, okay, yeah, maybe but like 69 and 420 being the two numbers for 20

Cortex 1:07:36 Ah I think I got distracted thinking oh, I need to make a joke about nice. And then fortunately Yeah, man that is yes. That just said like for 24 or something I was I was failing to pick it up. That's fine. It happened that's amazing.

Jessamyn 1:07:55 That's so yeah, I just thought that was funny and so that was just you know, the roundabout how me researching my road trip turned into a fun metal filter post and as well Yeah, that's awesome. interesting trivia belt for a month yet.

Cortex 1:08:07 I want to mention one other Metafilter post which is this is just from like last night, or yesterday at some point. A comedian Billy domino has written a spot on spec script that takes place three years after the show went off the air. It's titled Seinfeld the Twin Towers and it's the whole it's like it's Oh, suspects like it's a fake Seinfeld script that takes place you know, presumably like the September 12, September 13 Like deal just after the attack on the World Trade Center. Ran it's it is it's it is it is super spot on it's it's a weird, strange dark read because it's like just doing their best to put together an actual like straight up Seinfeld episode. Not even not like a special episode. Just like Seinfeld, if the thing Seinfeld was doing an episode around just happened to be that. So Jerry's got like an aversion to dust. And George ends up pretending to be a guy who saved a bunch of people from one of the towers. And Elaine is dating a guy who she was getting ready to break up with but then he died in the towers. But it turns out he lived and so she's stuck and he ends up like I shouldn't go into I don't want to spoil the fake episode but it's it's a really strongly written like Seinfeld script that just also has this incredibly sort of dark premise. And it's if you if you don't like Seinfeld, you probably won't like it. If you do like Seinfeld. You'll probably like it if you like Seinfeld, but also have strong, complicated personal feelings about the events of September 11 I have no idea how you're gonna feel about it. I I read it last night right on my laptop and it's like it's pretty weird. It's really good. It's really weird. And oh, and Jesus Christ. Yes. Yeah, it's I want to I want to strongly recommended and As a piece of like, cultural, something, even if you don't like Seinfeld like it, I think it helps to have seen enough Seinfeld that you sort of remember the voices of the characters and the beats of the show because the script really, really gets him. But you don't necessarily have to enjoyed it to sort of like,

Jessamyn 1:10:17 write. I might still like this just because it's a good example of what that is. Yeah, it's such

Cortex 1:10:23 a weird, like, yeah, revisiting some cultural landscape and a super interesting way. Yeah, anyway, I want to throw that out there because I read it last night, and I didn't totally know what to think of it. And I didn't even say anything. That's right at the time. It just stuck a favor on its own. Remember this morning and yep, there it is. i You

Jessamyn 1:10:42 should see the other guy. I don't know if we mentioned Oh, yes. Did we? I don't know. We did. Oh, and this is the the throwback metal filter post because this was the video I was watching this morning, which is basically last year, I guess. Oh, no, it was in June. Did I mention this in June? I don't remember. I don't remember. I hate it listening to other people ask.

Cortex 1:11:01 I definitely said something to someone about something about this. But I don't know if I was on the package or not. Yes. This is one of

Jessamyn 1:11:07 those things that I watched the video every now and again, just because it tears me up and I like it. And then I went to Metafilter. And of course people are complaining about everything. So yeah,

Cortex 1:11:15 well, we do. But yeah, cool. Cool. Motion Capture meets CGI, dancing, dancing.

Jessamyn 1:11:21 I like it cuz it's got a little like, dunk. Dunk. Dunk. Dunk. Yep. It's good. It's pretty good. That's it for my metal filter. Did you have other better filters?

Cortex 1:11:30 i Okay, I have to mention one. Of course. I almost forgot this. But it's kind of a quiet year for it. We just had a nice little traditional yearly thread, but it was metal filters birthday on the 14th. So we posted the cast. My

Jessamyn 1:11:42 God I totally forgotten didn't get you anything.

Cortex 1:11:44 That's okay. It's okay. Just just being here is gift enough. Yeah, happy birthday. Metafilter. Happy 17. Maybe we'll do something a little bit more up in the big next year. And I won't be a presidential election season. We won't all be insane.

Jessamyn 1:12:01 And it's like, you know what, like three squared times whatever.

Cortex 1:12:05 Two? Yeah. It's also the site will be able to smoke. They won't be able to smoke anywhere, everywhere.

Jessamyn 1:12:12 Here's what I learned. Massachusetts actually does smoking on a town by town basis. Oh, interesting. Yeah, cuz Jim's son just turned 21 Happy birthday, Milo, and now can smoke everywhere in the state whereas he couldn't formally smoke in His own town or buy cigarettes in his own town or the towns around him.

Cortex 1:12:32 Yeah, interesting. Yeah. Well, in a lot of places anyway.

Jessamyn 1:12:36 Yeah. Oh, this is so great. Oh, and should we do a little cut for like, this is when we're going to insert the calming music. You just want me to

Cortex 1:12:45 let's let's just you ready to go on that right now? Because we're going to do right now. And then I'll just like slap it back earlier in congruently. into the middle of the podcast.

Jessamyn 1:12:52 Yeah. All right. Yeah, I totally could. And then you can kind of get your musical acts together. I'll just talk for like a minute. Yeah,

Cortex 1:12:58 I'll just I'll just shut up right here. Go for it.

Jessamyn 1:13:00 Hold on. Let me let me get the timer. One minute on Google. Okay, you're ready.

Cortex 1:13:06 Do it. Okay. So,

Jessamyn 1:13:09 thank you for transcribing this podcast. It's really nice of you to do this work. We're gonna take a little time. Get a little space for herself. Maybe do a little body scan. Make sure your fingers, your wrists, your elbows, your upper arms, and your shoulders are all relaxed. Take a couple deep breaths in through your nose, down through your lungs, into your belly. Just take a deep breath in one. Deep breath out to. We'll do that a couple times. While we step back from the keyboard. Maybe focus our eyes, the medium length, stare at something that's not our screen. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Set our intention for the rest of this podcast. And we'll go about our day. Thank you for helping us transcribe this podcast. Were very helpful. You're here. Helpful, thankful.

Cortex 1:14:17 95% 95% back to the monkey

Cortex 1:14:26 Yeah, and I'll toss him next into piano under that or something?

Jessamyn 1:14:29 Yeah, whatever you want. Speaking because it's calming. And not that weirdly whoo jazz.

Cortex 1:14:34 Yes. Oh yeah, no, I've got a couple of great electric pans that sound like they came from somewhere in the 80s. So that'll work. Like your haircut. Yeah.

Cortex 1:15:17 Let's talk about tell me about last minute filter?

Jessamyn 1:15:22 Well, there were a ton of like I thought really interesting asked Metafilter. And I'm like, so I was away for a couple weeks. And then I came back. And I just like, one of the things that I don't do anymore when I'm on vacation is like, kind of read metta filter, you know what I mean? Like, at all, like I checked in on Twitter, a little checked in on Facebook a little, but it kind of I missed two weeks of AskMe edit filter. But then when I got back, I was like, yes, answer all the questions, read all the questions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, favorite all the questions. And so there was a whole bunch of them that I liked, including and once it had, like, good questions and good answers, doleful creature, asked, like, look, I do software support small team, but I don't need to know kind of like how to, you know, install Flash. I just want to know how to kind of troubleshoot in general. Like I'm trying to help people learn to troubleshoot. Yeah, tech and it stuff. And so there's a lot of there's a lot of different people, you know, giving good feedback, a lot of good questions. But my favorite thing is the answer by halting problem solved, whose username I already like, who has a whole bunch of like, detailed information from like I Tripoli, about, here's a six step troubleshooting process from the Navy, and you look through it, and you're like, if this doesn't do it, nothing can do it. Because troubleshooting is kind of what I try to teach people how to learn. So they can fix their own computer problems. Some of them, you know, yeah, like, it's almost the opposite of well, I guess it's an analog of like, everybody will learn to do their own searching. So there's no need for reference, but like a lot of the IT shit we do isn't shit that IT people need to do it stuff that people need to learn how to do at least low level troubleshooting. And like this thread, because it kind of stepped through that.

Cortex 1:17:16 Yeah, it's definitely it's a whole. That's a whole skill set. That's not obvious. It's like one of those things where learning how to figure out how to do something is the right, right, right, exactly. And if you haven't been exposed to that, then it's like, I don't know how exactly you would bootstrap that. I mean, if you're someone who just like, enjoys fiddling constantly with stuff until you sort of figure out, it may not be an issue, you kind of know this already, right? But then you end up being the person who people ask for help with stuff as a result, because you turned into that person who does that.

Jessamyn 1:17:48 But there's a lot of aspects to it, I learned some things because I always want to kind of make my troubleshooting or teaching people how to troubleshoot better. It's one of those things like I'm kind of good at it myself, but I'm not sure how I would teach other people to get good at it. And this gave me some pointers, and I enjoyed it.

Cortex 1:18:04 Yeah. Well, good. I, I want to throw sort of like a signal boost out to this one, because I'm curious to see if someone comes up with something before. This was a question from seeking direction. That's appropriate bass Metafilter. username. Asking about specific minor chord progression, like the one.

Jessamyn 1:18:27 Yeah, I read this, and I wasn't totally sure it was going on. But I love all those songs. So yeah, I'm also curious.

Cortex 1:18:33 Yeah. As basically just like, is there a name for this specific chord progression? Because there are certain chord progressions or cadences that have the sort of working names, and maybe this one has to maybe it doesn't.

Jessamyn 1:18:54 And yeah, it is from like a couple of weeks ago. So it'd be nice for people kind of step up and exactly

Cortex 1:18:59 so if you know your if you know your, your chops on this front, go check out this question and throw them some guidance, it may turn out to be one of the things was like, well, there's just really not a name for it. You know, I mean, there's lots of, there's lots of sparse namespaces like that, where you know, you don't necessarily come up with a name for every single thing. Versus poker hands where it turns out they came up with as we talked about, I think at some point because of a post like there's two or three names at least one of them races for every pair of cards. So yeah, but this might not be like that. So but but but but yeah,

Jessamyn 1:19:36 I had never heard of the sensitive female chord progression before.

Cortex 1:19:39 I haven't heard of it by that name either. But I think I recommend talking about Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:19:46 Well, I also enjoyed the fairly straightforward Okay, I like black and white cookies. Okay, how does the ice and get on them? And BBQ and the answer I very quickly in 12 minutes was here's a video showing the making it. But I had kind of wondered. And then what you find later in the thread is that different people have different ideas of what a black and white cookie is. Meaning some people are correct and others are wrong. But like

Cortex 1:20:20 I mean, I will tell you, I don't immediately have a sense of what kind of cookie we're talking about. So Well, that's because

Jessamyn 1:20:25 you're from the West Coast, like it's basically kind of like a Jewish bakery thing from new, like from New York. And then everything else, like there are cookies that have black and white in them. But it's sort of on almost a cake, like cookie like a flat cake. And then it's got like a stripe of chocolate on one half and a stripe of white kind of vanilla on the other half. So it's like big, probably like six inches around. So it's just it really pushes the limits of what you might call a cookie. But it's not anything else.

Cortex 1:20:56 So it looks like a big cookie. Yeah, I'm looking

Jessamyn 1:20:59 delicious. And if you're like a kid who grew up with like any kind of, I mean, especially Jewish, but probably not just Jewish family members in New York, like this was just part of your life and you love these things. Yeah, you've never got them enough if you, for instance, lived in New England. And so I have always loved them. But like for some people, it's like a cookie that has frosting all the way around it, for instance. And so yes, it was an interesting, interesting little thread. And I learned to think

Cortex 1:21:24 like a pre entropic yin yang sticker with that, let me just run running with it.

Jessamyn 1:21:33 Lacks, or it's like an Oreo only completely not an Oreo,

Cortex 1:21:37 right? Yeah. It's like It's like a It's a Oreo has been in a terrible accident. It went through a portal to another dimension.

Jessamyn 1:21:46 What else? I'm trying to figure out why I favorited the thread about colonoscopy prep,

Cortex 1:21:54 who wouldn't? Were you just thinking, you know, at some point, I might need a colonoscopy. I

Jessamyn 1:21:58 should know there's no, no, but there was like, a thread and it was somebody who's like I'm having a colonoscopy, the preparation instructions, say blah, except that I don't want to do that. I mean, maybe this is just why favorited it because it was basically like my doctor says do this, but I don't want to do this. How else could I do this? Yeah. And the person got a lot of really good advice. I don't know why I favorited. It's not really the kind of thing I would normally

Cortex 1:22:25 I could I could see him in that moment was like, Oh, that's interesting, dynamic. Like that sort of like it's the want to go swimming. You know, complication? I can't get wet. Sort of. Like there's that aspect.

Jessamyn 1:22:38 Oh, that reminds me. Did anybody admit it filter? Talk about the new Intel on flossing.

Cortex 1:22:43 You know, I've seen like seven fucking flossing references and have no idea what's going on. So probably someone did somewhere. But I don't know. I don't know, I

Jessamyn 1:22:52 actually made somebody explain this to me, because I had one of my friends who was visiting was one of those friends who kind of sits around with their phone. And every now and again, they read you like, half a headline from something. Yeah, you know, you're like everything you always thought is wrong. And I'm like, What? What? So I made her kind of explain it. And actually, there was a post on meta filters. So, you know, I think it was because it was trending on Facebook. Who knows. But essentially, the Department of Human Health and Human Services didn't have evidence that flossing helps you prevent gum disease or cavities. Now, you can nitpick the hell out of that, because maybe it does prevent tooth loss and gingivitis and a whole bunch of other stuff. Yeah, basically, somebody asked them like, you know, facts, please, about that. You know, what's, what's your basis? And apparently there hasn't been a lot of research done about floss versus not not floss? Well, the data for floss actually helping on its own. I mean, I know every dentist I've taught, like floss totally helps you and if you're going to either broad brush or floss, floss because it's more important. But yeah, so but then there's a whole thread of metal filter people talking about it. So the only reason that was relevant was I bet metal filter talked about it, I should have gone to metal filter, and I didn't. And I don't want to do it. My doctor says what's my alternative? Blah. So So whole thread about flossing, I am going to go check it out. Because as you know, probably, I floss now and I didn't used to and I floss everyday this year, which is completely crazy. Because I use an app that makes me do and, and I'm very interested in this kind of thing.

Cortex 1:24:37 Yeah, my subjective experience is that flossing is probably a good idea. But my practical experience is that I am doing it is well I mean, someone notes like early on in the thread, like, you know, you can sort of look at this in more than one way because you know, the question of like, you know, like flossing deftly helps my breath like if you're gonna get meat stuck between your teeth and then it just stay Is there? Yeah, you're gonna have some gross ass, you know, digesting meat breath. Flossing is definitely like,

Jessamyn 1:25:07 really tight teeth and some people don't. Yeah. Um, yeah, I don't know. But I'm interested in that. And I don't I don't want me to be on those people who's like, now I do yoga and I need to tell everybody that yoga, blah, blah, blah. But I am curious about people's habits without getting too into people's business.

Cortex 1:25:23 Yeah, I'm enjoying skimming through the comments on this already. There's a dialogue from asperity sort of talking about talking to their dentist, and it's So how often do you floss? Every night? Even if I'm drunk? I mean, not that that's that often or now? Just, you know, every night. I mean, floss every night. Well.

Jessamyn 1:25:46 Good. I am looking forward to this.

Cortex 1:25:48 Yes. It seems like a good read. Yeah. Okay. I'm glad to know what's up now. Because the flossing joke.

Jessamyn 1:25:56 Right? Because, you know, news headlines on the internet don't mean shit anymore. But if I really can stop flossing, I would love to. So, you know, tell me what's up. The flossing I have found Josh, is you just have to buy like 20 containers of floss and leave them everywhere. And just do it when you see it. And

Cortex 1:26:13 I will say I was doing better flossing when I had a thing of floss on my desk all the time to you know, sort of look at as like, Oh, yeah. Well, okay. Yeah, let's do it.

Jessamyn 1:26:22 Two minutes. I don't I learned to do it fast. I

Cortex 1:26:26 don't like the run up. Process of flossing is the main thing for me. That's the thing. There's no run up. What No, no, no, no, like, if you get out of floss or on your fingers. No, no, I mean, a larger scale like, like, like, like the first few days. Like if I sort of, like the first time I floss my, my gums were like, motherfucker, or we think and I was like, Oh, well, I should definitely do this again, while you're angry at me like that. Second.

Jessamyn 1:26:50 The days two through five are basically the worst. But then I was surprised how quickly that went away. Like I thought I am sounding like that person. I am so sorry.

Cortex 1:27:01 Still. No, no evangelists plots, like do it. But I had thought

Jessamyn 1:27:05 like it was going to be that wait for a month, but really kind of angry gums was three days. You know, like it was so not that much time that it turned out. I got it. But I just never made it to four days before. Yeah, you know, middle age is Pokeyman. And flossing

Cortex 1:27:22 life is a journey. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:27:25 So another thing I liked, which was kind of interesting and random, was this question by Nice. Who's like I read this mystery novel. But I'm actually not totally sure what happened. So could you actually tell me not only kind of what exactly there's kind of a vague ending. And some of it really relies on your reading of kind of a couple sentences, even though the book is really long. And so she was like, you know, I'm not totally sure what happened, number one. And number two, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to think happened. Like, it's possible that what happened was different than what would what implied happened. But I don't know either one. Could somebody just frickin help me? And so if there was, and I had had the same feeling about the book, so it was good to read this thread and have other people talk about? Yeah. What they thought actually happened based on clues that they found, and I liked that.

Cortex 1:28:24 Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. 10

Jessamyn 1:28:25 a French is a great writer. But sometimes, you know, yeah, like literally the difference. If you read the one sentence and remembered it, you would know what happened. Whereas if you didn't read that sentence, you were like, I'm perpetually confused.

Cortex 1:28:39 Yeah. Oh, hey, I asked a question. That's right. I also asked a question putting the time ago, well, let me throw mine out there. It's, I need to follow up on this because there was, there's some good answers. And as well, as questions, were by trying to carefully ask a question based on my knowledge and assumptions, I basically found out how much my knowledge and assumptions were like, you know, off the mark, which is really useful. Right, but yes, this was, this was based on analysis. This was a sign that you posted on your road trip, right? Yeah. Okay. So you were on your road trip doing route 20. You posted this, this picture of the Z H con fair Memorial Highway? Well, I

Jessamyn 1:29:17 was on my way home at this point. Yes. Not on Route.

Cortex 1:29:19 20. Oh, yeah. As I learned later, this is like a little bit of route 80 or something. Yeah, I think. But anyway, yeah. So you, you posted a picture of the sign on milkshake. And I was delighted by this terrible signage because they managed to swap capital and lowercase o and and likewise on a on a sign and I'm just

Jessamyn 1:29:40 looking at a highway sign being like, there's no way that lowercase word has an uppercase A in it, and yet,

Cortex 1:29:46 yeah, and yet it did some they managed to fuck it up. And my question was basically, what's the actual process by which this gets fucked up? Because like, you know, I think of like, I think of like printing a sign is like, Okay, well lay it out in you know, Photoshop or InDesign. Right, or whatever the fuck people using and then, you know, but yeah, highway signs are sort of a weird thing. It's uh, they're, they're bigger. And they are made out of weird materials. And so it's like, how does this happen? Exactly? Where did this go wrong? How did it go wrong? And how did it not get fixed? And people came up with a bunch of good thoughts on it. There's a great comment by I'm just gonna best answer this right now, just to make sure I don't forget, by Tc K m a tick, but yeah, we've dropped some good knowledge on sort of sign standards and how stuff gets put together and also linked to a bunch of sites. Together the same, the very same site.

Jessamyn 1:30:46 That's how I found the metal filter thread that mentioned me on a roadside calm, there we go.

Cortex 1:30:51 But yes, links to various threads about erroneous road signs and designers. And a bunch of other people had stuff in there and someone made a very reasonable point that like the the actual answer to how could this possibly happen, that this sign ended up looking like this? And then no one's you know, caught it is that well, it's expensive to make a road sign just because of the materials and the process involved. And so maybe someone did catch it fairly early in the process, but after the letters had been attached, and at that point is like, you know, what? We don't have $1,200 in the budget to fix this, and you can read it. So that's this. I

Jessamyn 1:31:29 don't care if people think we're a bunch of goons, exactly. It handled Pennsylvania for God's sakes.

Cortex 1:31:33 I was really overthinking it enough that I went looking to try and figure out if maybe z H con fair was some kind of like surrealist. And so it's actually like, a literal specified thing, like done on purpose to audit, but it doesn't seem like that. It seems like it's just a fuckup. But yeah, I thought that was

Jessamyn 1:31:49 the end of this right. You found it the tail loci used to work for the

Cortex 1:31:53 Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:31:56 Which is like used to work with the Ontario sign company making road signs. What Yeah, like, yeah, yep.

Cortex 1:32:05 A treasure. I love AskMe edit filter, as and meta filter and stuff is great. This is a good site. I like this site,

Jessamyn 1:32:14 and Xender contraire seems to have been a right on dude. Yeah. Pennsylvania, Senator. Yeah, well, I also asked a question, because, you know, we traveled on Airbnb, and me, my sister, and Jim all have different kinds of sleep failure modes, you know, like, my sister needs to kind of wind down for a slightly abnormal amount of time. And I sometimes like wake up in the middle of night and have a hard time getting to sleep, Jim would probably sleep for 15 hours if you let him and that's before the line. And so there's always kind of a thing where we both all kind of wake up from our respective waking ups. And, you know, people ask, like, how do you sleep? How did you sleep? Or I'll stay at somebody's house, and there'll be like, How did you sleep? Or I'll ask somebody what I don't do so much anymore. How did you sleep? And it occurred to me that I'm never quite sure what that question is asking. And I feel weird is a sometimes sleep problem people to answer truthfully, which is like, kind of like shit if the answer. If I feel like I'm also answering your guestroom sucks. Yeah, what I mean?

Cortex 1:33:20 Yeah, it's like, how do you how do you parse what context they're asking that question from? Because I mean, it seems like you can probably safely assume except for in really bad situations that like, part of what they're asking is oh, hey, are you doing well? Was that comfortable? Did you okay,

Jessamyn 1:33:37 but like, yeah, I feel like if I answer, I mean, it's just a classic overthinking. Right. So my question was just like, are you asking, how are you doing today? Are you asking how was the bedroom? Are you just making conversation because there's nothing else going on? And what's up, or like, literally, like, I want to know about the quality of your sleep. I mean, because me and my sister are actually interested in the quality of each other's sleep, you know, but for me, partly, like, if she hasn't gotten a lot of sleep, she's going to be a monster. And it's important to know that without, you know, asking, like, are you going to be a pain all day? And so but it was fascinating getting feedback from a variety of metal filter people about what actually they're asking, when they ask that question, or how they answer if like me, they're kind of a difficult sleeper, but maybe they enjoyed the room. Because like, sometimes you sleep in a room and the room is terrible, and you want to kind of politely be like, you know, like when I stayed in the treehouse in New Hampshire, and you want to be like, you know, the way that kind of Gangplank attached to the thing there was kind of this terrible noise all night long and it was a little lazy, kind of, like you want to let people know there's a thing you could do that would really help. But also be like, thank you so much for putting me up here. I appreciate it. It you know exactly. Yeah, it's like I knew I was a bad sleeper when I walked into that so it's not really fair. To set people up being like, How'd you sleep? Not perfectly, but like, sometimes to hear, but I rarely do so. Yeah. So I learned a lot from the thread and from people's answers to the thread. I'm not going to mark best answers now because I'm not totally sure what they are. Yeah.

Cortex 1:35:17 I should read through that. That sounds like a nice pile of human experience. I wanna mention this one. I haven't. This is a this is basically sight unseen. I saw this when it went the other day, and it sounded interesting. And I want to go back to it. It looks like there's been a bunch of stuff. But there's a question from Hank Scorpio at three. Asking for examples of regional common knowledge. Oh, yeah.

Jessamyn 1:35:41 How did I miss this thread? Nice.

Cortex 1:35:43 So yeah, that's probably Kyle's thread.

Jessamyn 1:35:45 Hold on to.

Cortex 1:35:47 Let's see, did you? Nope, you're in the cow. You're saying thank

Jessamyn 1:35:50 God? Because I saw that pint of Picasso talks about like changing carrying change for driving? Yeah, you know, you don't do that in Vermont. We don't have toll roads.

Cortex 1:36:03 Yeah. Yeah, I bet there's a bunch of driving related stuff in here. That's something that's always struck me like, whenever I drive into different towns, I'm like, wow, people drive wrong. But then whenever people are like, in Portland, they're like, wow, people drive wrong. And like, there's a it'd be really interesting to map out like the details of all the small variations in driving culture and expectations, like like in Portland, people will blow through a yellow and even a red sometimes if they're an asshole. But people also are sort of slow off the line on a green and I think those two have a strong relationship. And there's other cities I've been in where people like, know, if it's going to turn yellow, you're going to stop because people are going to peel the fuck out on a green. And you're gonna cause an accident if you don't like, you know, sure the fuck up.

Jessamyn 1:36:51 So since everybody kind of knows the way everybody kind of Yeah,

Cortex 1:36:56 yeah. So I'd be curious, like, like, even just that little detail, I'd be curious to see how that plays out from from city to city. And whether I wonder, like, is there a regional gradation there that like make sure that like, if that sort of, like spectrum that shifts one way or the other, it only does so slowly region to region? Because like, if you had two cities that were like adjacent and had like, starkly different driving culture there, you'd probably have a ton accidents. Right.

Jessamyn 1:37:21 Right. Well, and I there was some office read. I was reading about driving, which of course people love to argue about. And it was like somebody who was like, oh, yeah, in Los Angeles, the left hand lane is not the passing lane. Like you can pass in any lane. It's whereas, you know, from being in New England, I literally thought it was illegal to pass on the right, because it is around here. Yeah. But apparently that's a state thing, not just a how to drive thing. Fast. Yeah,

Cortex 1:37:49 I know. I feel like the Washington State might actually even specify in their road code that you have to stay in the right lane. Unless you're passing.

Jessamyn 1:37:59 Yeah, no, some of them do. Yeah. Whereas in Massachusetts, during like rush hour, you can drive in the fucking breakdown lane. Like that's okay. It's just okay to drive in the breakdown lane sometimes of the day. But talk about a thing that is crazy, right? Because if you're not from Massachusetts, you're trying to take an exit, and there's a lunatic in the breakdown. And you're like, that person clearly is suffering from a mental illness and driving a car. Oh, that's just normal. Where's my sister would stop it like every red light and be like, Can I turn right on red? And I'm like, Yes, you can turn right on red everywhere on the planet, unless there's a sign that says no, well, here's it actually, I don't know if that's true or not.

Cortex 1:38:39 I have a question there too. Because this is something I feel like I need to look up in like Portland sign well, and like my sister, you're late driver. Yeah. Which it's a real mixed bag there. Because on the one hand, like I don't have any of the lore, but on the other hand, I do. Maybe ask questions about situations that people don't always ask questions about because like, sure, whatever they figured out when they were 16. So it's yeah, it's weird.

Jessamyn 1:39:00 Well, and I think it's better to ask the question, yeah, to just like, bomb through it and be like, of course, you can right turn on red everywhere in the world. Well, I don't know. I've only lived in two places. Yeah,

Cortex 1:39:08 exactly. So it's like that's the way we do it. So clearly. That's correct. So here's my very specific right turn on red question. There's a couple of intersections in town that I hit every once in a while.

Jessamyn 1:39:18 Where there is can you right turn on left? No, no, no, no, no, no,

Cortex 1:39:21 this is a right red arrow. Like it's got a right turn. And it's got, you know, a dedicated signal for it, including like, Green Arrow, yellow arrow, red arrow. Yeah. Now I read that it's like Don't fucking turn on read. Like, if it's gotta write means that Yeah, but at the same time, motherfuckers will turn through it and they'll like, I'm

Jessamyn 1:39:38 not sure it might mean you can right turn on red after a full stop though. I would assume it doesn't.

Cortex 1:39:43 Yeah, yeah. That's why I feel like I need to look it up because it's possible that the answer is no, just don't fucking turn on a red arrow. But everybody who takes us intersection knows when there's lows and they're like, fucking America can sit here for another 45 seconds. While no cars are coming. I'm just gonna take a

Jessamyn 1:39:58 right red arrow means that you Let's come to a complete stop before moving into the crosswalk or intersection. After stopping you may turn right on a red arrow at most intersections, at least for the state of Florida.

Cortex 1:40:10 See that's that's good to know slash useless because the

Jessamyn 1:40:14 server says a right turn on a red arrow is not allowed unless there's a sign saying it's

Cortex 1:40:20 like turtle out on yeah, see this I gotta look this up. I gotta find out.

Jessamyn 1:40:27 vehicle operators facing a steady red arrow indicator may not enter. Oh, of course. Why don't I just link you to the Wikipedia turn on read article?

Cortex 1:40:37 Oh beauty? Yes.

Jessamyn 1:40:40 Because it appears that the answer is it depends.

Cortex 1:40:43 Excellent. Well that's a that's an AskMe edit filter question I can no longer in good faith posts that Wikipedia is God wow this is great. This is a mess. Oh, that's fantastic.

Jessamyn 1:40:54 Left turn on red for US states it's a map this is glorious aside from the gas pack lot of these officers

Cortex 1:41:19 aren't allowed to grant a screencap game Speaking of music Metafilter Music Minute here mentioned a few things that I liked there's a bunch of good stuff there's a bunch of good stuff by people who I mentioned a lot and so I'm just gonna skip that say hey go listen to music first some of that other stuff by people

Jessamyn 1:41:54 that's good. Yep. So

Cortex 1:41:57 but there's a first post a first music post by Lucas Gonzi Gonzi probably screw it up. But it's improvisation on bluegrass standard Angelina Baker. And it's just some some nice plan and some folk singing and I like it. So good job Lucas. Do some more of that. Nice. I like this one by I guess polish. Still Still ages polish. We really please, please just just spell it up an athlete in the meta talk thread about this. It feels so bad. But it's a great little sort of techno edit of a clip from a John crew song I guess I don't know John Cruz, but I Googled briefly. And it's great. I really like it. It's it's a nice little piece of music in a sort of similar experimental vein but more so there is list four of the Harvard sentences specifically by stress the Harvard sentences is a follow the link in the post it's a list of basically test sentences for dealing with speech quality measurement. So things like the source of the huge river is the clear spring smoky fires lack flame and heat. We talked of the slideshow in the circus. So the soul of these various lists, this is list number four done with speech synthesis if I'm not screwing up my memory of this stuff I was listening to this morning speech synthesis and some ambient music and it's nice I enjoy it.

Jessamyn 1:43:44 One comment from Jim I will play this slightly more than sparingly 22 In the morning thank you scrub

Cortex 1:43:53 there's something by signal which is I am really going with the sort of slightly weird ambient thing here but it's that tar and super slow down sample of nitrous nail song and I like it

Jessamyn 1:44:10 it's a really positive comment from black pebble that is cool also.

Cortex 1:44:15 I need to get in and do a little bit more commenting on music. I've been feeling bad about being distracted but I've also been distracted

Jessamyn 1:44:23 feeling distracted and been distracted

Cortex 1:44:26 but yeah, feeling distracted is justified by the fact that I have Yeah, and he actually had shit to do but I like the music people you're nice you do good stuff. One more on that front sort of sort of instrumental rockin sort of thing from Annika cicada called instance go with it. Or I'm sorry, I think it's called go with it off of instance. Yes, I'm parsing titles badly. Anyway, I like that as well. I like them all and I like to end their stuff by Carrier adventure and Docker cat and, and others up there as to that I'm not even linking to but that's good too. So just go listen to music. Listen to this listen other stuff. Boom. That's your minute.

Jessamyn 1:45:09 Fantastic. Did you set the timer? Because

Cortex 1:45:11 Oh no, it's never it's,

Jessamyn 1:45:13 it's actually a minute.

Cortex 1:45:14 Yeah, no, it's always way more than a minute. That's your I would just be I would just be angrily shouting titles through five songs in a minute that wouldn't be, it'd be an injustice to everybody involved. You suddenly toss me a note in our chat here saying, Hey, can you hyperlink those links? But I don't remember what that was about anymore. So I'm just going to ask you right now.

Jessamyn 1:45:35 Oh, it's in the post right before it Lucas's post has links in it? But they're not like clicky they're not Oh, you could just take him out. I mean, I could do but my job

Cortex 1:45:47 your job? Fuck that. Yes, I will fix those links. Somehow. Like I stared, right. Those bear URLs and didn't touch anything. And I don't know what that's all right.

Jessamyn 1:45:54 Yes, no harm no foul.

Cortex 1:45:57 Anyway, that was that was that was that was music. Meta talk? I Geez. My brain is so fried. At this point. There was stuff in meta talk to go read meta talk. Talk about fanfare Oh, books that that.

Jessamyn 1:46:10 Books is the big thing from yesterday, which I was gonna talk about. But why don't you talk about? Yeah,

Cortex 1:46:14 like talking about it, and you can talk about it. Basically, the thing is, we started experimentally rolling out books, as something you could post on fanfare, last fall, early winter, somewhere in there.

Jessamyn 1:46:26 But it became a thing. We're only sort of certain people or the people I don't even remember the

Cortex 1:46:31 plan was to give a few people posting stuff. So we could experiment with it and sort of roll that out over a couple months and get stuff fixed up and then sort of go from there. But then ended up being pretty busy several months in a row. And then took his leave. And fumbles getting up to speed on stuff. And so it's just been

Jessamyn 1:46:51 awesome. By the way, we're both doing great. It's been great seeing fumble kind of in meta talk being helpful and whatever. So I'm super stoked for you. And for them. Yeah, no,

Cortex 1:46:59 no, they've been fantastic. I'm very happy with the whole situation. It's working out great.

Jessamyn 1:47:04 I miss PB like crazy, but his photo stream appears to indicate he's out having a good time

Cortex 1:47:08 and making excellent Euro puns on Twitter. So. But anyways, as a result, we haven't been able to do the kind of work on tweaking the front page and some of the organizational stuff of fanfare that I otherwise thought we might have been doing by this time this year. And so keeping books constrained to just that smallest people. It's been sort of like, we're doing it for a reason that keeps not panning out. So Greg nog poked us about a meta talk yesterday, nice, friendly way, ya know, it's something he's been excited about. He's brought it up a couple times, and so have several other people. And it was like, you know, it's fucking time. Let's do it. Yes. So everybody can post books on fanfare. Now, if you want to post about a book, it's in the new post genre options. And we'll make a little bit more noise about it today or tomorrow. We rolled it out yesterday. And we didn't think anything should be Herky with it. But because symbols on Austria time, I didn't want to like roll it out and declare the entire world hago crazy. And then have them be asleep when some bug turned up, after all. So it's sort of

Jessamyn 1:48:15 it's kind of the way to do it. Right? Because it's really unlikely to just go terribly. So you know,

Cortex 1:48:20 yeah. Yeah. So So let's, let's, let's go with it and see what happens. And if we learn that there's things we should tweak. They're great. That's, that's part of the process. So yeah, books, yay. For books also. Okay. For science, too. This was just yesterday as well. User, or any reg? O helped me out with this. Anyway, or

Jessamyn 1:48:44 rewrite? Or or any

Cortex 1:48:47 reg? Yes. Anyway, a user already Reg, posted about the abstract to an article they're working on, that they're going to present at a conference. And it's a article about the use of legal theory in Word. Oh, there we go. It's a it's a, it's an article about use of acronyms in a legal context on AskMe Metafilter. So like, I am not a lawyer, you are not my lawyer, those

Jessamyn 1:49:16 I am a lawyer, but not your your lawyers. Exactly. This is not legal advice.

Cortex 1:49:20 Yeah. So they're looking at the use and the change in use of those things over the time on ask me out of a corpus of I think they said in the abstract, like 7300 questions that,

Jessamyn 1:49:33 like approved or selected for the conference, but they haven't actually written that thing. I didn't do that. Oh, yeah. And there are a law librarian, which is also exciting. Yeah.

Cortex 1:49:43 So that's, that's very cool. I'm always excited about metadata related. academia and so on. So So that's, that's, that's cool. I'm excited to see what happens there. The conference, if you want to have a meet up, they said they're up or when it's in Cyprus, so If you're in Cyprus, when that's happening, you know, definitely get something you You clearly don't mean me. Yeah, not me either. I don't think it'd be a little make it up to Cyprus, unfortunately. But But yeah, I don't know. There's, I'm sure there was other stuff in meta talk too. But we've gone long here and my voice is sort of failing me. So,

Jessamyn 1:50:18 no, I hear you and you want to start your day and I want to have some lunch. And but this was great. I'm really glad we worked it out. Because we had rescheduled this podcast many, many times. It's been turned out there wasn't even lobster thing yesterday. We just had steaks. So I had a great time. But you know, yeah, we scheduled we rescheduled. We did the other scheduling. So yeah, I'm happy but

Cortex 1:50:38 we pulled it together by God for both of us very well. We've cast this pod. Alright. Do you want to make some final weird noises for the transcribers to try and

Jessamyn 1:50:55 manipulate the video?

Cortex 1:51:00 Yeah, okay. Good. All right.

Jessamyn 1:51:06 Perfect.

Cortex 1:51:07 Thank you. And I'm sorry, everyone.

Jessamyn 1:51:09 Thank you, and I'm sorry. Talk to you. A second you bye bye.