Podcast 122 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 122: Your Dumb Early Feet (2016-11-01).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Unknown Speaker 0:00 How can I stand for a podcast? Podcast? Josh bar joke man when God was embody the best of the best of the web be

Jessamyn 0:23 I help somebody get an attachment out of her AOL mail.

Cortex 0:27 Nice. Was it that was a photo or it was

Jessamyn 0:31 a PDF, but she'd renamed it as a document. And so it came up gibberish and I fixed it and

Cortex 0:36 hero. Yay, cool. You know, it

Jessamyn 0:38 was nice. But it was like seven people with complicated computer problems. So I came home and had a slice of pizza. And now I'm like, I want to talk to somebody who knows how to use computer. Josh.

Cortex 0:50 Well, you're listening to Metafilter pod something. Oh, Jesus Christ. I was gonna I was just gonna, like, take us right in there. I guess that's the one. That's what you're listening to the best of the web. Metafilter monthly podcast. With I, your host, Josh Malartic a cortex and also

Jessamyn 1:07 your other hosts. Jessamyn

Cortex 1:09 Yes. And here we are at episode 122. Gonna be excited about 123. But 122 She's kind of like, near a good number. 123 That's just like 123 It's like a It's a good sequence. Oh, it's

Jessamyn 1:22 like my mailbox. 345 Yeah, there you go. And then my zip code.

Cortex 1:26 Oh, so it's like, you got some good numbers, another dress that's that's

Jessamyn 1:30 I made them like, shuffled through a whole stack of empty post office boxes.

Cortex 1:34 Oh, nice. I didn't even well. And then I got

Jessamyn 1:36 this other phone number. I finally got a Google voice phone number so that I had a local Vermont number because that actually matters to people here. So my Google Voice number is like 802, which is Vermont, but then it's 23489 10.

Cortex 1:48 Nice, pretty good, right?

Jessamyn 1:52 Good luck calling and it goes straight to voicemail everybody, but you could leave me a message.

Cortex 1:57 Speaking of which, we still gotta figure out a Colin Shaw thing too.

Jessamyn 2:00 Yeah. Well, I mean, if people have ideas for that, leave them in the comments in the thread because we'd like to do some kind of Colin thing. I do like the idea of having people like, read their favorite short comment, you know, something like that.

Cortex 2:13 Yeah, that could be a nice way to go sort of like a like we have meta talk threads like that everyone's while but why not do it? You know, out loud. Right? That'd be cool. Yeah, we should I was just saying before we we got going here. How much the the election remains such like a weird looming shadow on getting other shit done and wanting to like, you know, try and dig in on various things. So I'm really feeling enthusiastic for like the middle of November and being out the far side of that epical day next,

Jessamyn 2:45 I do have one recommendation to I don't know if this will help or not, but this helped me.

Cortex 2:50 early vote. Oh, well, it's I'm an Oregon so I have totally Oh, perfect. Yeah, I've

Jessamyn 2:56 done voting. Yeah, the voting

Cortex 2:57 part is not a problem. The the just the worrying why other people worrying Yeah. Life in the life in the mixture, your life on metal filter. Sure. It'll be it'll be a nice change.

Jessamyn 3:08 But from a personal perspective, it's been really nice for people to be like, wherever this thing and I'm like, I don't care already voted. And they're like, but I'm like, already voted. already voted. But who did it already voted?

Cortex 3:20 It's possible. I haven't gotten a lot of election stuff in the mail. And I mean, there's another week to go. So maybe he's about to blow up. But one of the notes people have made about like the benefits of early voting includes from it, you can look at it. Basically, you can get yourself by getting your vote in ill potentially get off people's lists to take election related actions for which from a from a selfish perspective is great if that means you just don't get a bunch of mail and you don't get a bunch of phone calls. Because you they're like, Oh, well, shit. Okay, well, that's, that's Oh.

Jessamyn 3:53 So I saw Eartha and ginger beer while I was in California and got to snuggle with your vet and Roswell, which was so fun. But they were, you know, looking at their voting stuff. And there's this thing called the pissed off citizens. Which I thought was like, jokey joke joke. I thought it was like one of those satire things, you know? No, there's like an actual sort of group of lefties in San Francisco that puts out this I think it's San Francisco, maybe California they can correct me but puts out a thing that tells you like, Hey, I'm a concerned lefty, how do I vote? And it's, it kind of gives you advice. And it's amazing. There's like some there's like, I don't know 50 different things to vote for, besides just people to vote for because they got all these crazy initiatives. And there's a lot of like pro and con. A lot of the stuff Yeah, you know, like there's a pro weed bill and an anti weed Gil and there's a pro I don't know thing and an anti I don't know thing pro soda, anti soda pro smoking, anti smoking. It's crazy. But you know, they're super pretty politically involved. So we actually had a great time. Like I was exhausted. I'd been at the archive all day just talking. Oh, Uh, and I just got to like, go there, we ate tacos. And I asked them about politics, which I sincerely was interested in local politics. And they just kind of told me all about it. And it was great. Yeah. Pissed off Citizens Guide.

Cortex 5:12 Yeah, we've got a couple news weeklies here that do, you know, varying levels of sort of earnest and whatnot voting analysis, aside from the voter guide stuff in Oregon, but

Jessamyn 5:23 San Francisco League of pissed off voters? Yeah, I'll drop Yeah, I'll drop you the thing. And they, you know, they have a little voter guide. And it's amazing, but it's, you know, there's What 20 Something. Propositions just in California proposition A through X. Oh, my God.

Cortex 5:40 There's not that much in Oregon this time. But we always have a few two. We don't have any of those weird, contradictory. Yeah, it could go either way. Once this time.

Jessamyn 5:48 We have nothing.

Cortex 5:51 Which President state for so long, just like you got it all figured out.

Jessamyn 5:57 But like Massachusetts has weed on the on the ballot? So does mean, we don't somehow I don't know. It's weird.

Cortex 6:05 Is it possible that the relative low population and relative morality of Vermont, means that people just don't deal as much with some of the headaches of acquiring weed in a casual way? And so there's no one cares.

Jessamyn 6:24 I think it's that no one cares. Yeah. Yeah.

Cortex 6:27 Interesting. Anyway, anyway, the election that's

Jessamyn 6:31 still illegal in New Hampshire, so I can't drive you know, with it in my car anyhow, but whatever. I don't even care. Yep. All right. Yes. So 122 122 Tell me about it. Nothing, nothing. No, it's, it's natural, which is, you know, numbers. It's a non portioned. And it's a non cold torsion, neither of which I understand in math. It's the atomic number of some chemical nobody's heard about. And it's the name of the United Nations Security Council resolution that has to do with jamu in Kashmir. And the only thing I know about Kashmir, is that Led Zeppelin song. Yes. This is just as bad as it gets.

Cortex 7:15 Yeah, that's this is let's let's sorry, 122. You're a stinker. We're moving on. That's all you get.

Jessamyn 7:20 Yeah. I had hoped for more. Yeah,

Cortex 7:23 there. There are some interesting jobs up I always talk about like I slag on having to report on jobs. But there's a few that

Jessamyn 7:30 are kind of interesting. I looked at jobs to actually,

Cortex 7:33 I liked this one from apathy girl, of course, someone to buy a copy of circus flokati the Japanese version of it and send it to them in the US. So that's

Jessamyn 7:44 what it's called. Apparently, okatie is cutting a deal with that rug that I have. I

Cortex 7:49 don't know the word.

Jessamyn 7:50 I'm gonna click in this link. Alright,

Cortex 7:52 do it. So yes, if you're I can't

Jessamyn 7:54 figure anything out. What is this? It's like a card game. I assumed it was a video game. Oh, that's

Cortex 7:59 quite a two. Okay, nice. Well, anyway, if you're an independent want to send a game to ask the girl in the US. There you go. The location on this is listed as 13,564 miles away from me. So that's about as

Jessamyn 8:15 far as it gets. Well, I enjoyed Chris Glover's job. He just needs someone who speaks Bengali. You are a native speaker who can articulate Bengali and record yourself. I need you to record 25 words and read through a little article on the culture to identify errors, please. 50 bucks. Oh, nice, little simple job.

Cortex 8:44 And dirt, dirt need someone to edit music video. So

Jessamyn 8:47 dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt has a Milo he's one of the Milo havers.

Cortex 8:52 This is this is definitely also a not big paying gig. He's pretty clear about it being like, hey, we need someone to help with this. And it'd be great if you can,

Jessamyn 9:01 but there are he's

Cortex 9:02 in a band. Yeah, yeah, it's I mean,

Jessamyn 9:04 certainly machine chokes on it. Yeah, that's pretty much he had more money. He'd buy a computer.

Cortex 9:09 Yep. Being in a band. I mean, I mean, he's probably not just in a band, but job too bad. Exactly. But

Jessamyn 9:19 he's married. Yeah, yeah. He lives in Texas.

Cortex 9:24 Yeah, and there's a few other things in there too. So go check out jobs, jobs or things that exist. Yeah, we did it. Let's talk about projects.

Jessamyn 9:31 Okay, well, in the pandering category, metal quarry who is also known as Galen who I actually know in real life. Did this little talk about a cat and a librarian. The librarian is him writing about wasps and such so it's just like a set of notes to the cat and you know, it's no like Rick, Rick, Rick kind of thing but I enjoyed it because I know Galen, I'm not sure if you didn't know Galen, if you would enjoy it so much, but I enjoyed it. It's just a little Storify story about Galen and gallons cat.

Cortex 10:08 Yeah, it's nice. Let me Yes. Yeah. I cosign that I also dug there's a for Moonmilk it's a I'm trying to think of the thing I'm comparing to but a trumpet practice Elegy for Vine is is what he called it. And it's basically live mixing of vine loops together to make sort of arty music. Which kudamon That's, that's what I'm thinking of. The guy did the YouTube mashup stuff, it reminds me that, you know, somewhat different flavor and sort of live mixing stuff, but that's cool. It's anything.

Jessamyn 10:47 Oh, this is Ron G. I confuse Moon milk with the other Moon guy from North Carolina.

Cortex 10:54 Yeah, there's, there's several Moon folk on the site. It's true. also

Jessamyn 10:57 does a lot of interesting stuff on projects. Oh, this is great. Yeah. Real Time remix found video footage. That's really cool.

Cortex 11:07 Here's the sort of thing that I like watching someone else do, because I don't think I would have like, specifically the attention span or the patience for it at all. It's like, it's definitely feels like a specific kind of skill set. So

Jessamyn 11:16 why is fine going away?

Cortex 11:19 because Twitter is terrible, I think, is the basic thing. Like, like, like, they bought vine. And then now they're shutting down vine,

Jessamyn 11:27 in order to do Periscope or something else? Or I think maybe the

Cortex 11:31 maybe they're just trying to cannibalize all of the vine stuff into Hey, you know, we support short, you know, we support GIFs and videos now. So just use Twitter for those things. And let's, I don't know, the comment I saw from someone that that sort of rang true for me was that, you know, this reminds them of Google read a lot in the sense that it looks like a company killing something that people enjoy using in hopes that that will force them to use something that they don't like, like maybe by shutting vine down, Twitter will get people who do vine stuff to just do that stuff on Twitter instead. But like, there's the whole sense of, you know, sort of space and community and affection and like the kind of stuff you find on fine. And then the specific constraints are sort of a valuable part of it for a lot of people. Right, but it doesn't translate for so

Jessamyn 12:19 it's a different thing. And you want to do it, I'm buying not a frickin Twitter. Yeah.

Cortex 12:23 When we get to a metal filter, we'll we'll we'll definitely link that thread of people collecting Vinyl, because that's been kind of an amazing pile of proof that this is a stupid idea on Twitter, it's part of it. But I also enjoyed the same thing you just said, LinkedIn there, the fake App Review detector by hodgepodge

Jessamyn 12:44 hodgepodge, which is something that they've done before. And then they've added a bunch of new features. So you can talk about what it is.

Cortex 12:53 Yeah, it's it's, there's a lot of review fraud in the mobile, and sort of App Store environments. Fraud

Jessamyn 12:59 is like an app that isn't what it says it is, or it's an app that pretends it's something else, it's just

Cortex 13:04 in this case, it's it's an app that pretends to be better than it is through fake reviews, basically, you know, I mean, a lot of there's so much like, like any sort of App Store sort of context, there's a big problem with viability and recommendation and whatnot, that comes out of the fact that there's so much stuff and people churn out a lot of crap. And one way that you can sort of like, find something that's not crap is at least you know, check, well doesn't have a lot of reviews as it were reviewed. Sure. Which means, of course, that there's a lot of fuckers out there who are trying to monetize the process of ruining that metric. And so you get well, as

Jessamyn 13:37 you know, the reviews are kind of a shallow metric, because you can't be like reviews from my friends reviews from like, there's Yeah,

Cortex 13:44 it's such, it's such a broad, you know, sort of space, and it's so under featured as something that we like, really have that kind of people, you know, nobody wants, like, nobody gets excited about Yelp, you know, no one no one no one's like, you know, there's not a, there's not 100,000 people or 10 million people, like you know what I love hanging out on Yelp and review and stuff like that. No, the only people who get excited about Yelp are the people who are angry when they're excited about giving a bad review. You know, it's like, so it's never going to be it's never going to be a big social, natural, fun thing that people just do and make good content for, at the scale that you would need to for, you know, this sort of review spaces to really work super well, organically. You know, there's just not

Jessamyn 14:23 enough capital. Like you look at your friends reviews and stuff. Oh, sure.

Cortex 14:26 Sure. But like, tell me, what are your favorite 10 Yelp friends that you have? You know, I mean, my friend

Jessamyn 14:34 Don and my friend, I mean, I you maybe use Yelp more than you do? Yeah,

Cortex 14:39 maybe. And I could be I could be being more of a dick about it than I need to be. But basically, my feeling is there's not

Jessamyn 14:45 being a dick. That's not

Cortex 14:48 I hate putting fuck, you know, I've got nothing against Yelp specifically. But like the, I mean, the My point is basically, you're not gonna like you can think of those people that you We love following on Twitter because of what they do, you probably the average person doesn't have anything like that degree of a sense of like space like Yelp. Same thing with like, you know, app reviews, you know, so you aren't gonna have this really robust natural system for generating good reviews and whatnot, you're just gonna have, you know, people review when they do and one of the things that that means is there's kind of a vacuum that's really easy to get in some sort of compromising bullshit to overwhelm. And so things like, coercing a review out of people in order to unlock stuff in an app or, or etc. Well,

Jessamyn 15:30 that's the thing that's crazy about this, like, I clicked around and actually looked at app wrecks, which is the thing hodgepodge built and like, oh my god, like the things that looks for, like the worst offenders. If you look at this page, it's just basically apps where the people who review the app specifically say in the five star review, I needed to rate this in order to keep using the app or get coins within the app or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you just read like, review after review I just did this for tokens free VIP with Review, I'm doing this for 100 coins lol I'm only reading this for the coins. Yikes. I doing this for the free stuff only doing this for the free updates. And it just goes on and on. And it's all like shit, like, get friends on Instagram, get more comments on Instagram, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Some of these are apps, I've actually used like Calculator Plus that hides, you know, your porn, I guess or whatever. I've tried those out because I read about them on the internet. But it's really a service to collate this stuff somewhere other than the App Store, which really tries to drive you through in a very specific path. Yeah. I think it's awesome.

Cortex 16:38 So it's smart stuff. smart, smart.

Jessamyn 16:40 And hodgepodge is looking for Hyderabad is looking for feedback. So if you're interested in stuff like that, please head over to the project post and give them some feedback.

Cortex 16:50 Yes. I also enjoyed this fractal art that Jim Bob's been making. Named for

Jessamyn 16:57 rack, I looked at the title and I couldn't figure out what the hell it was. And I just kept it. Whoo,

Cortex 17:03 just click on through, it's just pretty. Doing pretty computer generated art stuff. talks a little bit you know,

Jessamyn 17:12 oh, and it's all like, it's all hashtags so I can look for stuff that's tagged orange. Oh, can I tell you Josh? I tried really hard to go find like, some sheets for my bed that have like some kind of orangey splashy, sunburst look that like your room does the room that you made that crazy color? No, no, impossible. Yeah, that's, that's what I want. Now more than anything, and it's impossible, at least not on Amazon. Now I've got to expand past Amazon. But much to my chagrin,

Cortex 17:42 it seems like it could be like a home tie dyeing project, if you're willing to put in.

Jessamyn 17:47 I liked I liked the kind of hard lines to write the tie dye thing is a little to 24 years old for me,

Cortex 17:54 you might be able to like do a like a hard dye, sort of like a hard line dye somehow. I don't know. Sounds like work. Yeah, it does. It sounds like a lot of effort. Like this is probably something that someone's like, oh, yeah, actually, no, if you wanted to do it, you know, they could tell us but yeah.

Jessamyn 18:09 Well, it may just be that I have to because here's what happened, right? Twitter sent me a link that was like, tell us how you use Twitter for business. And we'll get you a gift card. And I was like, All right. So you know, I did 20 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, where the surveys, I use Twitter for my business like this, blah, blah, blah. And then I finished it. And they're like, $25 gift card. I'm like, this is the bomb. And then I got another email from them. Tell us how you use Twitter for your business. And I was like, what? Okay. And I tried to fill it out the same way again, figuring I get to the end of it. And they'd be like, Hey, you fucker, you already filled this out. But they've got their heads completely up their asses. And I got another $25 gift card. So I was like, all by sheets.

Cortex 18:51 Well, you know, this is this is just paying dividends on the money. They're saving for not running the vine servers again, in the future at some point. So you know, that's

Jessamyn 18:59 a good, that's a good point. I just, you know, I mean, that's the thing that's so weird about you know, internet stuff, generally, right? Is that, like, you know, it's just free money to them where it's like, 50 bucks. I mean, 50 bucks isn't gonna make or break my life, but it's a real amount of money. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's weird. It's weird. Maybe feel weird. Not so weird. But, yeah, I need sheets. That's what I'm saying.

Cortex 19:26 I believe you get some sheets. I'm visualizing you getting some sheets.

Jessamyn 19:29 Well, and then Jim, bless his heart like is like how about these? I'm like those who aren't even made of cotton. Like 1500 thread count is not a real thing. Right? Like to me,

Cortex 19:40 that seems Yeah, that's like, that's like made of soda bottles. That's not cotton. That's just corrugated plastic. One other one I want to mention I like lawrencium posted last in Shinjuku, a series of multiple exposures.

Jessamyn 19:55 This was so much cooler than it had any right to be. Yeah, they're really cool to know why I loved This,

Cortex 20:00 I mean, I kind of like a double exposure in general, but these are like good.

Jessamyn 20:04 So these are like double, triple exposures, quadruple exposures in Japan, black and white, and just really dense and full of interesting things. And he's got he she, they have a real eye for it. And I just thought it was the best

Unknown Speaker 20:26 Oh, my darling. You know that I love you very, very much. And it just tears me up inside to say this, but lately, it seems that nothing I do is right. Then you can't seem to pull yourself together. I'm not sure if you're just having a bad year financially. Maybe it's some kind of nutrition related thing? I don't know. But it seems like I'm always walking on eggshells around.

Cortex 21:06 But yes, yes, let us let us talk about metal filter. Now I've just misplaced the tab where I had my shit organize. So I've saved nicely into me delaying What do you talk about give cities because

Jessamyn 21:19 I was just at the Internet Archive for their 20th anniversary party, which was about as much of a circle jerk as you would think it was gonna be. But fun. And they basically unveiled gift cities GIF cities that everybody says Jeff apparently the geo cities animated GIF search engine. So it's got 4 million animated GIFs and you can search it and it's cool. And they launched it. And at the at the Archives thing which of course is in an old Christian Science church. DJ Spooky was there with like some art that he specifically made from this archive and uh, they handed out fleet free Flexi discs and whatever. And so Ozark made this post, which actually was one of those kind of like, you know, 20 comments. 34 favorites. I don't know why everybody wasn't in there. Like, why? Why? Why? Because, like, it's so fun and ridiculous. But um, yeah, who knows? I loved it.

Cortex 22:22 Yeah, it's, it's, it's good. I think it's just

Jessamyn 22:29 a huge nightmare page of animated GIFs. Some of which are like banners like old style banners. You know, Blinky this, that of the other a lot of like, kind of eight bit. Little, what's his, there's a banana that's waving at me. But you know, it's just one of those fun things, you type a word and you see what you get?

Cortex 22:48 Yeah. Well, it's one of those things too, like, I don't know, it's like, I have a real sort of strong, you know, attachment to sort of, like historical GIF stuff on the internet because, like, you know, that's, I was, you know, growing up on the internet when the web was finding its dumb early feet, you know, and so like, that's, that's often aired, and it's one of the things where I do kind of wonder, like,

Jessamyn 23:12 dumb early feet.

Cortex 23:15 That's, that's episode idle there. You're dumb. I'm just gonna type it in right now.

Cortex 23:26 There we go. Quality radio. Yeah, no, I don't know. I mean, I wonder like, Are the kids today gonna care about the GIFs? You know, I mean, like, GIFs are obviously a huge medium again, in a completely different context. At this point. Like, we were just talking about Vine and the like, the Tizen, the same sort of, like, large, large file GIFs, essentially, you know, like, these days, people post up on milkshake, and there's ongoing arguments between the people who think you should or should not post 100 megabyte animated GIF. Speaking

Jessamyn 24:01 of which, this is just fucked up my whole browser shift. Alright.

Cortex 24:09 But yeah, so like, but like the old, old shitty pixel RT gifs like the old school gifs it feels like it feels very dated in a way that like, you know, I have affection for, but I also wonder if it's going to come across as Oh, yeah, it's one of those old gifs or just like, What the fuck is that sort of thing to, you know, younger people on the internet? Like, what's their relationship with gonna be? Is it gonna be primarily baffled or ironic or embracing?

Jessamyn 24:35 Well, because I don't have any concept of what the internet pre me was like, I've been around since there was the internet. Yeah. So I can't imagine like, oh, that's old. You know, like, it's like how I would think of like, the telegraph or something. Yeah. You know, not even record player. I had a record player. Like, what's the old tech where I'm like, I can't get my head around it. I don't know.

Cortex 24:59 Yeah, it's a weird thing. I said I would mention the actual vine threads. So here's the main thread. I think we started on best off as well. But basically, someone made a post rebill made a post about Twitter, discontinuing vine and linked to a few of their personal favorites. Which technically speaking is a little bit of a all go first thing but it's not as Metafilter and hey, they're shutting fucking vine down. So oppose a oh, here's some vines I like by the way, while everything burns to the ground seems like an okay way to go. And people just ran with it in the best possible way. So if you

Jessamyn 25:32 do this is awesome. Yeah. Me to kill

Cortex 25:35 a lot of time and like hurt. I've never spent

Jessamyn 25:38 any time on Vine. You know. So to me, having somebody select 50 vines for me to look at like I occasionally see them in random places. Mostly like weird dog and cat vines. So having somebody else be like, hey.

Cortex 25:54 enjoyable. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I basically the same. Like I catch it secondhand for the most part.

Jessamyn 26:01 Often boffin got got in there with a lot of good

Cortex 26:06 shoes on it. Yeah. See, she's in the right curatorial position, I would say, Oh, hey, did you hear that Jack Chick died? Did I hear that? Did you hear that Jack Chick died?

Jessamyn 26:17 Of course I did. Is this a setup for

Cortex 26:19 like? No, not really. There was just a thread about it. Which did

Jessamyn 26:23 add obit or obituary to this? I swear to god, you guys. Wow.

Cortex 26:28 I didn't even look at that. I mean, at the time,

Jessamyn 26:30 we've been sort of too busy. Oh, added either the meta talk of deaths, which is also kind of it's been a tough month.

Cortex 26:37 Yeah. It's it's been a whole thing. So I think we talked about a little bit last time and it is not it's more stuff. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's been a it's been a weird couple months on that front. I mean, you know, it's because people die. It happens. But but it's still there's been a cluster, it seems like it's been a cluster. It's just enough to like, sort of put it on the radar as Oh, that's a thing rather than just like, oh, that that person died.

Jessamyn 27:07 All right. Well, you know, in the case of meta talk, I mean, it's been three longtime users that you probably recognize if you've been around for a while. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe more if you count everybody sock puppets. I said it. You heard?

Cortex 27:21 Yeah.

Jessamyn 27:22 So back, back in the in the lighter in the lighter things. This is a great post by matrix clown, which is basically just a single link. As you may know, a couple weeks ago and identified woodland creature ate our internet. And this is just like a wildlife preserve. And this goofy guy basically makes use of the collection of animal skulls they have and talks about whether or not they could be the things that ate the internet. So like suspect Pleistocene horse, last seen on the North American continent 2 million years ago, now extinct ancestors of modern horses would not have been alive at the time of wire chewing, and it just goes on like that. And it's hilarious box turtle. And there's all these pictures of these skulls next to this wire that got chewed up. European Hornet. No, I do not want to live in a world where Hornets can disable our communications that will white tailed deer. Don't be ridiculous. Black Snake. In science, sometimes you've got to attack a question from an unusual angle. At any rate, it's just delightful. It's clearly kind of a funny little PR blog post thing. But it's It's cute. It's funny. You learned some things. 24 Comments 21 favorites. And it's adorable.

Cortex 28:39 It's cute. I have not seen that. That's kind of great.

Jessamyn 28:43 Oh, and apparently slippy Tov says oh, sorry, they linked to something else. About About bunnies and a link to a page that was up in 2003. But not the main one. It was something else. But super fun. I loved it.

Cortex 29:02 I really enjoyed it and then managed to forget about because it was all of like a week and a half ago while I was gonna go make I found something on the internet and I was gonna make a post about it. And then someone else had made a post earlier that day. I was like, Oh, damn it, I think I said as much thread. But this is a post petrogenesis made a post about some work someone did.

Jessamyn 29:22 Or their pictures is this link itself? NSFW.

Cortex 29:25 It's Yes. Abstract it's so it's using what am I even Oh, this is sort of the same territory

Jessamyn 29:35 of Butthole Surfers album cover.

Cortex 29:40 It's using so Yahoo developed not safe for work, you know, neural network filter essentially, to I think helped them you know, try and predict whether or not they needed to write. And so it studies a bunch of you know, it's it's fed a bunch of, you know, positive input like, this is not safe for work. So basically a bunch of porns naked people, bunch of porns. You know, they found some of the porns. And then like the definitely not the definitely paperwork stuff is things like you know, beaches and landscapes and whatnot stuff that's totally safe for work. And the thing is, you can take this and sort of run the brain backwards and generate imagery by altering it to create imagery that has not safe work properties. Yeah, and so you end up with these wonderfully weird, horrible abstract landscapes that feel variants or like, you know, some sort of weird Geiger or Gieger sort of situation or whatnot. And it's

Jessamyn 30:44 totally what it looks like. Yeah.

Cortex 30:46 So it's like, it's just really fascinating. It's great output. It's a super neat project. I was super excited about it. And so it was biogenesis. And so we got to be CO CO ko enthusiast. about it being on Metafilter

Jessamyn 30:59 show I had penis Guitar Hero genitals of the universe. Yes. beekley Ban has a genitals of the universe cartoon from a million years ago. And samples to the very end of this thread is like Does anybody remember that? Because this looks like that. And they are not wrong.

Cortex 31:17 Oh, nice. Yeah.

Jessamyn 31:22 I because it is now cold here. And it snowed a week before Halloween. It is now wintertime. And so Diablo vert actually made this post right after the podcast last week, or last month. That was basically at three of the funniest books ever, according to some of the funniest authors. Like remember that thing from AskMe edit filter where it was like, what if you ask a specialist in the field, what their specialist books are, you know, like the meta specialists? Well, this is like funny books, according to funny people. 83 of them. Nice. And then of course, the first comment is like this user interface sucks. Second comment sort of annoyed that they just duplicated the books that got recommended multiple times. I mean, you know, yeah, it's hilarious. The thread itself is hilarious. But I'm always looking for a good funny book to read. And I appreciate this. And thank you, Diablo, ver,

Cortex 32:23 boom. I'm gonna mention my own post.

Jessamyn 32:27 Because I make a post this month. Okay.

Cortex 32:31 It's just stuff I really, really like I came across I don't know via Twitter or something. Someone tweeted some of this and it's music from the video game Metroid, which was a huge formative. Metric babies username comes from, presumably, yes. Not sure where the baby comes in. But that's probably what the Metroid is. And yeah, so this this person named luminist is just remaking like a week at a time they're doing another bit of music from the original Metroid using an ms 20. Since that, I don't know my sense worth shit. But some people have threaded like, actually, it's better to go and why it's cool that they're doing it that way, which was nice to get some detail on. But she's really great music. I love music from this video game. And I really, really, really love these treatments. Like they're just so nice. Like the title theme is one of my favorite bits of video game music ever. And ah Brinstar is pretty great. Craig's like, it's all good. It's all good. It's really good. So go listen to it. That's that's all I

Jessamyn 33:28 have antique video games. How about my post on Meridian 59, one of the longest running online player games launched in 1996. And then there's like 100 people who still hang out there. They open source the game in 2012. But it still runs on the servers. I'm basically reading this book called Death by video game, which is a guy who writes articles about video games. And then clearly someone was like, You should write a book. And so the book is basically a lot of disparate essays. Yeah. But the one chapter, I was like, Oh, this is great. I love this metaphor would love it. Well, it turns out it's a New Yorker article basically exactly the same. And so I made a post about it a little a little post about Meridian 5915 favorites, nine comments.

Cortex 34:18 I loved it. Yeah, I saw that that fell on my I should get back to this list because like I love the idea. I just that sort of continuity is fantastic. People sticking around until the rafters clearly been sort of decided

Jessamyn 34:30 about Metafilter sometimes.

Cortex 34:33 It's not the 100 people kicking around. Now, we're doing better. But yeah, but still, yeah, no, but that

Jessamyn 34:40 whole idea about I mean, I liked the title thing, which was basically fighting with the same 200 people. We've known all our lives that totally pushed a Metafilter button for me, like oh, this asshole and it's like you've grown up together. Like, you know, it's their family, you know, and And even if even if you fight with them they're you know they're the people you've always known so I enjoyed that part of it I

Cortex 35:08 had a completely random aside I helped a friend move and I discovered probably I discovered this every like year or so when I see it somewhere but there's a branded like children's car seats called even flow and every time I see it I spent the next two fucking hours doing stuff in second party

Cortex 35:28 but like the thing about Pearl Jam song is like I don't know what any of them are about I mean, I've I've discovered this

Jessamyn 35:34 saying except Jeremy's fallen

Cortex 35:38 Jeremy spoken class today

Jessamyn 35:40 and the one about your adapt your adopted and the one where the girl's father interferes with her. Yeah, those are the ones I know. Yeah,

Cortex 35:51 like that. It's been getting protein has been getting a lot of play on like one of the stations in town that I listened to on the car radio and so I've been slowly picking out some of the new songs some of the lyrics finally and yeah, anyway, even flow, that's all I'll start as needed it's a tricky thing. It's hard to it's hard to come up with good parody lyrics for a song if you don't know the original lyrics, you just sort of have to, you know, I'm going to do a, a double segue trio of posts here real quick. Because I liked all three of these and I don't really need to talk too much about any of them. But that now we'll see it we'll see how it goes. But number one foci for analysis posted a roundup of flute and kazoo covers from I want to say the shitty flute is the name of the YouTube account at somebody who does. Recorder and Kazoo and maybe melodica covers of various songs where they replace the like main melody stuff with them playing the song very badly on recorder and Kazoo and stuff. And it's it's a hard pitch to get any more detail than because that's all there is to it. But it's fucking hilarious. And if nothing else, go listen to the Jurassic Park one that is linked in there somewhere.

Jessamyn 37:03 I got two seconds in and I'm done. Yeah, no. It's like it's it's

Cortex 37:07 actually terrible. Not like not like, well, interesting outside or it's just it's intentionally very, but

Jessamyn 37:12 the pictures are really funny because it's all the pictures of all the people with like, forgetting recorders in their mouths and for whatever reason that is hilarious.

Cortex 37:21 Yeah. But speaking of weird music, I also liked this post by But tomorrow is another day about bicycle horn music. Which it is using samples of various bicycle horns to play various songs and that's exactly what it sounds like. It's it's like, you know, cat singing except for its bicycle horns instead. And I feel really bad because I got in like with a first comment joke on this because I misread the post at the time as being about both bicycle and car horns and so that I took I'm never going to honk again and followed up with guilty Fiats got no rhythm because we were doing a Careless Whisper thing. But it's not about cars and Fiat doesn't make bikes. So fuck that they do. Maybe they do. Maybe that's what the five favorites are all from people who are like deep fans. Totally makes bicycles. There we go.

Jessamyn 38:11 What's wrong with you? Like, is your Google broken?

Cortex 38:13 I didn't even look. I made an assumption make one and I realized it was wrong later. So I've just

Jessamyn 38:20 there's a bicycle. It's 420 pounds.

Cortex 38:22 I'm gonna call that the wow. I know what Oh, British pounds. Okay. It's like that's a heavy fucking bike.

Jessamyn 38:30 It folds up. It's still an expensive fucking bike, honestly.

Cortex 38:34 Well, yeah. But yeah. Anyway, speaking of bicycles, though, let me I ruined most of it. So anyway, speaking of bicycles, there was a post by Dr. Fedora of the video of designing and creating and testing the unit Baikal and this is a YouTube video, it's about 1314 minutes. By fellow who does this, I think he does a whole series of these. I think I've seen another one at some point. But anyway, it's it's all about what if you made a bike that had less bike to it, because you just use the way you can sort of jump on the pedal a little bit while doing a one leg dismount to keep a bike going forward. So let's, and he, it's just you just have to watch it because like, there's no way to summon up in a way that it will do it justice. It's just a super nicely made dry communicatie about designing a bike. It's humor. It's humor in sort of like a little bit of wacky engineering, but it's definitely like a whole thing is definitely basically a joke. I think it's like a straight face joke in the sense that like, he's actually saying, Well, I've got a dumb idea. Let me see if I can execute it. And he tries and spoiler alert, it turns out the dumb idea doesn't work very well. It's both humor and also like him sort of like being thoughtful about the dumb thing he's doing. And it's interesting. You can sort of see in the comments a couple people sort of get slightly different takes on that word. I feel like a couple people actually sort of reacted to it like, Wow, no, that was a terrible engineering idea. It's like, well, that's kind of that's kind of the idea. But uh, but you know, do superstrate pays homage to you know, what are you gonna? Yeah, Josh. Yeah,

Jessamyn 40:15 this guy's also other videos include port man tout a portmanteau of every English word.

Cortex 40:23 Ah,

Unknown Speaker 40:25 oh, oh,

Jessamyn 40:28 I don't even I can't even but like, Yeah, but I like this guy, because he's in it. So maybe if that hasn't shown up, we will try that for later. Because I appreciate the hell out of that.

Cortex 40:39 Yeah, that's, that's a good plan. Anyway, there's my super clearly presented

Jessamyn 40:47 more that I appreciated, including this sort of goofy one. It's that goofy, this serious one from Jack Ma, it's not serious either. I don't know. It's a website about the British Rail, corporate identity, like lots and lots and lots of digitized British Rail design material. But it's neat. I mean, it's an old school kind of HTML II website with lots and lots of scanned information, but they've got kind of a nice serious business graphic identity. I mean, you know, mine to GAAP and all that stuff. And this has like their corporate identity manual and a whole bunch of other stuff. And it's all in Helvetica, I don't even know. It looks like it's all in Helvetica. And, you know, it's got a big document with all the stuff and if you're really into graphic identity, graphic design, it's fascinating. I totally click through it to see you know, how they, how they do all this stuff.

Cortex 41:42 There's a there's a page specifically about the rail alphabet, where they designed a typeface in 1964. And that looks pretty it looks pretty Helvetica Yeah. At a Glance actually. See, it's interesting pictures are different here. I haven't read through the

Jessamyn 41:57 pictures of everybody's trains. A whole pictogram set, obsolete pictograms, including one for like the telephone. What are some other obsolete pictograms? Luggage lockers, hair dresser, this is great. But ya know, it's just, it's fun and interesting. Silly. Buffet. Ladies, gentleman, they must have changed that. So yeah. And you know, the thread was a little 16 comments. 24 favorites.

Cortex 42:31 That's not good web. Some good solid web there. Yeah. And

Jessamyn 42:35 there's actually a page about the person who designed the British Rail thing that's in comment that that how the runs scored. made. And so basically, it talks a little bit more about that alphabet.

Cortex 42:56 Meat. It is neat. I love to read that. Well, I think that's all of my Metafilter stuff.

Jessamyn 43:04 What am I spiders, Johnny wallflowers post about spiders. jumping spiders don't have ears, but they can still hear you coming, however, or believers can control the tension of their web to help identify potential partners as well as prey. It's just a video about spiders. And it has a jiff about how to deal with a spider infestation, which always makes me laugh. It's basically like you try to like hit a spider with your broom. But then it turns out it's 100 baby spiders. And then it turns out that this guy goes to the space center with all of his luggage and shoots himself into space and then destroys the planet. Because this because there's 100 baby spiders, and it's funny. So I don't know. I enjoyed it. And Dhruva is in there because he's a spider researcher.

Cortex 43:49 Nice. Eric erect monologist.

Jessamyn 43:53 Maybe.

Cortex 43:56 Yeah, something like that.

Jessamyn 43:59 And it's got a couple of funny tags. And I don't know the whole thing just made me smile. Spiders.

Cortex 44:03 Speaking of spiders, I saw a tweet yesterday by a guy named Tom asshole who asked all Yeah, anyway, he develops a he's. And I think I made a post about it a couple months ago when I first came across it but it's got generative little dogs. And so he made some spider. Some Halloween versions of the dogs, including a little spider dog with a whole bunch of legs that he tweeted out yesterday.

Jessamyn 44:31 Did you go to your video game conference thing? Oh, yeah, I did. Hell that thing was fun.

Cortex 44:36 I did. It was fun. Yeah, no, I did a little thing in Portland. Retro Gaming Expo. Me and some other folks from the Portland independent games squad. The pig squad went and showed off.

Jessamyn 44:48 Wait, wait, wait, did you say pig squad or pig squad?

Cortex 44:51 Pig squad.

Jessamyn 44:52 All right. All right. Nice.

Cortex 44:54 Yeah, it was fun. It's good time is weird. You know expos are strange. I don't really go to them. So Being there on the other side of the table was like double weird, but a bunch of friendly people around. So hey, cool.

Jessamyn 45:05 Yeah, I was doing a whole bunch of demos of Open Library at the Internet Archive thing. So yeah, I totally know what you mean. Lots and lots of talk, talk, talk talking. And then Brewster shows up, and he's like, this thing still broken. And I'm like, shut up, do this demo. So it's your company pay more money for people to do things here.

Unknown Speaker 45:24 I got my feet stuck on the ground and fall down. And you fall back on the throttle. And I say stop, bring in Midtown. And I can sweep down.

Jessamyn 45:50 But that's it for me for Metafilter.

Cortex 45:52 Alright, let's move on to the old AskMe Metafilter.

Jessamyn 45:56 AskMe. Metafilter. Always, always great.

Cortex 46:00 What were you excited about this month? You said? Yeah.

Jessamyn 46:03 Yeah, well, one that I really liked. We mentioned, Robocop is bleeding and his new store last month, and this month, he's basically like, hey, women have Metafilter. When you purchase a t shirt, how Cognizant Are you of how the design might interact with your chest, basically, he wants to print t shirts, but he's got a wife. And the wife is like, Ah, you gotta be careful for you know, reasons. And he's like, I'm just looking for feedback, because I want to do the right thing. And boy, does he get feedback. Because, right, like women are shaped differently. Often, though, not always, unisex T shirts are often men's T shirts that they've tried to convince women to wear, they're not really kind of agender T shirts, which would be terrific if it were true, but it is not. And you know, figuring out things like hey, if you have kind of like a triangle, or a square or something with straight lines, but then you put it on the, like a on a woman who's got like breasts, like the straight lines kind of stretch out. And that doesn't look very good at all. So like things to think about. You don't want to you know, like the Hooters T shirts out with like a big eyes, and each one is over like one breast and you're like hubba hubba? Well, that's kind of okay, if that's what your intention is. But you do that by accident to somebody, and that person is never buying a t shirt from you again. Yeah. And so it's a great thread of mostly helpful, occasionally snarky feedback of what women would like in T shirts, and they don't always agree, but like, they have a lot of opinions. And it's helpful. Yeah, and

Cortex 47:35 I've got that one. favorited because I kind of want to dig through it. And like, sort of take that in, because somebody will pull it up some more medical teachers, and I want to talk about, you know, design stuff.

Jessamyn 47:45 And originally, when I had a medic filter t shirt, it was like, kind of a women's medium, which is a little snuggie on me, but like there's nothing wrong with a Snuggie t shirt. But like, you know, I'm a middle aged lady. And the the text was like, right on top of my like, above kind of my chest. And it made it look even weirder. Like it made it look like I was wearing a little kid t shirt. You know, only I was a grown up lady. And like, that's not a good look for most people, like some people can make it work. And I specifically asked Devil's rancher who was went, who worked at the company, and like, they had kind of tried to do that on purpose, because they didn't want to put it like right across your chest, you know, but I don't know if that was right, either. And or, I mean, it's hard. I don't think there's any right answer, except maybe don't have words going right across the middle of the front of it. But yeah, it was interesting reading what other people had to say about it, because I know my opinions on it, but not necessarily what other people have to say. Yep.

Cortex 48:39 Yeah. And I think especially if you're like, if you're a dude designing T shirts, you probably haven't thought about that as much if it's so like, yeah,

Jessamyn 48:47 right. Read up, or you know, like the women that you know, but maybe not all the women. Yeah. So it's a good thread for anybody considering T shirts. Yep. Like what what kinds of things women like in their T shirts?

Cortex 48:59 Exactly. I dug

Jessamyn 49:03 read AskMe Metafilter this month? Yes.

Cortex 49:06 Yeah, yes, I had. I had a moderate some stuff. But there were some things that actually I thought were interesting too.

Jessamyn 49:13 Well, okay, so there's this I could just go on and on and on. I'll

Cortex 49:16 throw out a couple a couple here. This one is this is like totally the borderline ish. I was being generous and not sort of saying you know, you're framing your sucks, because it's kind of curious to see where it went. Yeah, this is the this is a post from just the other day yesterday, the day before? Yeah. Yesterday about what's the deal with people basically leaving bagged up dog poop in the park in the woods. You know, because like, it's, it's, it's one of the things where like, it seems like on the one hand, they stopped to actually put poop in a bag. But on the other hand, then after sitting there, what's the fucking deal? It's essentially

Jessamyn 49:52 actually worse, right? Because like poop left on its own. That's not awesome, but at least it'll biodegrade but poop in a bag just turns into like If I did,

Cortex 50:02 yeah, it's just gonna stay there. But anyway, you know, so it is a phenomenon and that the question framing was, you know, a little bit hand wavy, it felt a little bit like, well, I'm bummed about this, but there was a question. There's like, okay, you know, I'm gonna let this go. And we'll just sort of watch it and clean up some of the comments if we need to, and, and yeah, a bunch of people had, you know, sort of thoughts on it, you know, that weren't just like, Oh, I hate that, you know, it's like, oh, well, you know, here's like, a context where I could have ended up being the person who did that. Or maybe that's actually you're catching it at a moment when it's been deposited. And someone hasn't come back for it yet. But they're actually honoring the part or something. So you know, so there was some actual thoughts on it, other than just hey, well, people are terrible. Although there's also an aspect of well, you know, maybe some people are kind of lazy, non committal about cleaning up after themselves. And so, so I thought that was kind of interesting.

Jessamyn 50:48 Yeah, a lot of those kinds of survey questions, as usual. Here was here was another one that I did like, when you're not in the bathroom, so like you're in your house, you have a bathroom? Randomly is the door of the bathroom open or closed? Why? And so basically, this a person who has a housemate who always closes the bathroom door, and that person grew up in a house where you only close the bathroom door if you're in the bathroom. And so they walked by and see the bathroom door closed and assume somebody's in it, because that's just their assumption. And they were like, well, maybe that's not right. And I don't know what the default is, or even if there is one, and you know, it tends to break down around whether you have cats or dogs, you know, like a dog that will Yeah, to drink out of the toilet or like a cat that has a litter box in the bathroom or something. Whether or not your bathroom door locks. I was very surprised that people in the UK, at least in this thread, seem to think that like having a bathroom door that didn't lock was weird. Whereas like every bathroom, I mean, most bathrooms I'm in don't lock, you know, they close, but they don't get other old doors that have like keyhole locks, and that nobody put a hook an eye or something else on them. I'm just used to it.

Cortex 52:04 Yes. I'd say it's kind of a 5050 thing from ASEAN both like I don't I never use like, I think I can actually remember right now if our bathroom door has a lock. We certainly never use it. If it does, but my childhood home did.

Jessamyn 52:19 Yeah, my childhood home, we all shared one bathroom, and it didn't lock. And there was one downstairs. And so people knocked and whatever, but you kind of just left the door open and cats and dogs and they didn't have litter boxes, because it was the country but like, yeah, I just added you know, I never thought about it that much. door's always open in my house. But I live alone. So easy, right? Yeah.

Cortex 52:40 This is? It's an interesting sort of question. And I think part of the reason questions like this can be so fun, when they're put together well enough to survive, basically, is that it's something that people, sort of everybody has some experiential, like, contribution to make on it. It's not up with the bathroom. But it's not something you probably spent a lot of time thinking about having an opinion on until the moment comes up. Well, I don't know. I mean, maybe maybe I'm wrong there. And most people think a lot about bathroom doors when they're not interacting with them. But But I think if if the average person if you ask them about this, they would develop like a statement of opinion fairly quickly. But if you ask them one last time, I thought about it like, well, I don't know, I guess, you know,

Jessamyn 53:29 I think it's one of those things to where like, if you've lived alone, or you lived in a family, and then at some point, you maybe live with roommates, and then at some point you live with a partner. Like I think if you live with roommates, you kind of work it out with your roommate, but like with partners, like the whole idea of like, do you leave the bathroom door open even when you're in there? It's like a thing people feel strongly about or at least people I've been with certainly do you know, that. Like I like shower with the door closed if somebody else is in the house, but if no one's in the house, I leave the door open. Because I were to be out if somebody walks in the bathroom when I'm in the shower, because I for no reason. Like it's so stupid, but it just, it's weird. But if I'm not home, I just leave the door open because then the steam gets out and everything else. Oh, I don't know, again. And you know, I've like dated guys who are like, you know, if they went in the bathroom to take a piss they would leave the door open. If they went in the bathroom to take it out. They would shut the door. And that was the thing and you were supposed to know not to knock. I don't know people. Yeah.

Cortex 54:23 One. Yeah. It's like, like, if you get a agreed upon rubric for any of these things, they sort of fade in the background, because we're a bit of just sort of it's on the same page. And it's only there. Isn't that agreed upon that it comes up, which is sort of how that question came up was like, oh, yeah, well, anyway, yeah. No, I thought that was I thought that was a really interesting read. What else you got?

Jessamyn 54:43 Well, similarly, garbage disposal. So this was a user space male who has I'll just put it in their words. I've left two garbage disposal equipped departments behind me now, with mysterious intractably slow draining sinks. Whatever I did to them, it was beyond the powers of maintenance to reverse. How do I deal with the garbage disposal? And again, this is like one of those like us and everyone else kinds of things where like people in the US in a lot of places, use garbage disposals and like people everywhere else, kind of mostly don't or think they're weird or think you're not supposed to, or they fill up your septic with crap or whatever, that it's just not a thing. Yeah. And so it's people talking about like how to, hey, I got a best answer in this thread. You know, it's people talking about how to take care of your garbage disposal number one, but also like maybe you just don't use it at all kind of because like rental units have crappier garbage disposals than like, maybe the kind you'd put in your house? Me Sure. Yeah. Like it like I have one of my dad's house, I don't have one here. And I had one when I was a kid, and I was afraid of it. So I never really used it. Because you know, you get like one spoon in there like your finger and like, oh, it's all over. But I enjoyed kind of, again, reading people being like, this is what you need to do and other people being like, don't use it or other people being like, just pour a lot of hot water down it and everything's fine.

Cortex 56:09 There's a scene in Stephen King's novel Firestarter were someone who's had their head messed with by a sort of mind altering person in the story sort of goes crazy and ends up sticking their hand down a garbage disposal.

Jessamyn 56:26 Stephen King, yeah, he would just do that with me. Yep.

Cortex 56:32 Anyway, that's the thing. Just want to throw that in there.

Jessamyn 56:35 Well, thank you

Cortex 56:40 oh, you know, I mentioned one other one that I had, actually this month that I've gotten genuinely utility out of this is Oh, keen to Picasso painter Picasso posted this about a week ago saying one of the most scary movies available first screaming like, you know, what, can I just go stream right now on Netflix or, or so on? And yeah, there's a bunch of good normals out there. And we ended up watching both. Let us pray, which got mentioned dirty old town mentioned that and this got sir Davos from Game of Thrones as basically a mystery like that national fellow. Yeah, he's a, it's a small cast. It's sort of a crazy little movie, but, but I enjoyed it a lot. The cast was all good and so strongly recommended, let us pray. But we also finally got around to watching the babba Duke, which I have here to

Jessamyn 57:29 for all I know about the babba Duke is what I heard on Twitter.

Cortex 57:33 I've seen that you know, when you go to the Halloween party as babba Duke, but then it turns out, it's more of a drinking wine vibe. Photo that went around a ton on Twitter. Did you see that one? It's like, yeah, and then someone recently like the other day managed to post like an inversion of like, when you go to wine and chill vibe. You know, what went into a Halloween party, but turns out is more of a bad dude vibe. And there's some more than just sitting there surrounded by like, three people in babba do makeup. Right, right, right. Anyway, that's the entirety of my understanding of the Babadook until I watched the movie, and the movie was actually quite good. There was less babba Duke in it than I expected based on the memes, but but, ya know, it's a good, good, good watch. Australia.

Jessamyn 58:18 I don't watch scary movies. Just ever at all. No, like, you know, the inside of my head is scary. Like I'm a jumpy anxious person. Like anything that kind of turns that up. Really doesn't solve a problem for me. Yeah. That's cool. Well, this. The world is scary. Yeah,

Cortex 58:34 no, it's a specific.

Jessamyn 58:36 I mean, I get to people are into it. I just ah, it's hard, I guess to have a movie. For me. That is scary. But that doesn't push any of my like, I can't actually deal with that buttons. Like, you know, pet torture. Lady lady torture, like, you know, a bunch of dumb kids in though in the woods running around scared, like, that's one thing, but as soon as you like, take the woman out and like extra terrorizer then I'm like, No, fuck this. As opposed to like, if all the kids were just terrorized. Equally, I guess it would be okay. I don't know. I don't know.

Cortex 59:06 Did you ever watch. It follows we may have talked about that previously. It's it's, it's interesting. It's the premises. There's a monster that you know, always chases whoever the person is who has after but who chases it's the possession sort of situation is sexually transmitted, which sounds like the setup for a bad

Jessamyn 59:25 movie. That sounds like sky or whatever.

Cortex 59:29 But it turns out it's actually a really good movie and not like remotely exploitative despite the fact that the premises Oh, what if like, teens passed around a sexual? Yeah, and I it's, I would say maybe give it a shot sometime if you like it. It's also got a super great soundtrack by a guy named disasterpiece. So selling it, Josh so yeah, I don't know. It's a good movie. It's it's it's I think it's a better movie than it ever sounds like when someone's trying to pitch it. All right. Yes, what else you got asked Metafilter

Jessamyn 59:58 Ah, well, I enjoy write the problem solving in Castle Bravo's thread where basically this person had to go on a work retreat that her manager had arranged for days, three nights with her. And the two colleagues who make up the team in a rental house with every minute planned out. And this person who is more of an introvert, and has a young kid and husband is like, how do I deal with this? Like, I need to meet time? How do I ah, and you know, the manager is really high strung. And she's like, I need my alone time. This is ridiculous. I you know, everything's scheduled from like, the minute you wake up until the minute you go to bed. How do I carve out time for myself? Yeah, so I like this because I offered some, you know, helpful feedback, but it was also like good, reading other people's feedback, like for introverts who have to really fight to get time for themselves when other people are like, now we have a meeting. Now we have another meeting. Hey, look at other meeting isn't this the funnest time just us girls hanging around? And a bunch of people giving them good advice on sort of how to deal with it. And it sounded like it was going okay, like, like she updated. saying, like, here's some things that I did, but I haven't heard after the fact. Maybe she has been killed by her high strung boy, yeah.

Cortex 1:01:17 Oh, no, it turns out it was a horror movie setup.

Jessamyn 1:01:22 I mean, it does seem that way right now that we've been talking about horror movies, like, like, oh, just us girls at the cabin alone in the woods doing work for a long weekend where Nobody's expecting us all until Monday. Yeah. But I enjoyed that. And to segue into holiday time, a little bit. Did you guys do anything? Halloween?

Cortex 1:01:44 We just had we hung around a party. Yeah. We had like, probably five knocks on the door, which is, I think up from last year, it's there's there must be somewhere in the neighborhood. That's more of a trigger treating, like zone, but our street is just not it. And to top it off, we have a weird doorway that faces sideways instead of just kind of the driveway, right? Yeah. So people have to sort of like believe that, you know, so. We got to future computers. But we still got a bowl full of candy.

Jessamyn 1:02:15 We gave out 400 pieces of candy. Dang. Yeah. different worlds crazy man how

Cortex 1:02:19 he was posting pictures of his, like 100 and something full size candy bars. Who's ready to get out? I

Jessamyn 1:02:24 told you I had dinner with him, didn't I? Or no.

Cortex 1:02:27 I think I may have seen a picture. I don't remember. Probably.

Jessamyn 1:02:31 Francisco. The Internet Archive on Foursquare. Yeah. I noticed Matt was in San Francisco for slack. I was like, Hey, buddy, we're having a party. Now. You should come. He came by, you know, like, stop by the booth said hi. It was awesome to see him. And then like, went to the event. And afterwards. We're like sitting on the sidewalk. He's like, you want to get dinner? And I'm like, Yes, I do. keep me away from this place. And we went to dinner at like, 930 at night in San Francisco was so fun. Yeah, I mean, he's still good. It was good to see him. But yeah, him and his candy bars. I know. I know how he is every year every year. But what the reason I asked was, she's bookish, grew up in Ohio, moved to California, and is used to being somewhere where trick or treating is scheduled. Like it's on a certain day at a certain time. And that's published in the paper. And that's when it happens. And she's like, I can't find any information about this. And I brought it up and a friend laughed at me. What is going on? Is it scheduled where you live and apparently Super Regional? And this whole thread is about people talking about whether it's scheduled or not. Halloween is scheduled?

Cortex 1:03:40 Yes or no? Yeah, interesting. We have a there was some sort of next door organization is a little bit of next door uptake in our neighborhood. And so there was an organization there about like identifying yourself as a trick or treating house so people would know to go there. I have noticed that did anything but But it's interesting because yeah, like,

Jessamyn 1:03:59 there was a thing about how to identify yourself as a trick or treating calcium. You just didn't do it.

Cortex 1:04:02 No, we did it. We put ourselves like oh, yeah, no, we'll be there. And then we ended up with you know, like, six door knocks. So

Jessamyn 1:04:09 who knows? Oh, now it's six. Yeah,

Cortex 1:04:11 was it what? Five or six but I'm gonna revise my official answer is it was five or six

Jessamyn 1:04:18 fair? Yeah, no,

Cortex 1:04:19 it's interesting to see that happening because like that was the only organization we were aware of, because I don't know I don't think of as a non parent I don't really think about trigger treating organization until it gets to like, right around Halloween and then I was thinking we definitely thought like you know, over the weekend What if What if people

Jessamyn 1:04:36 trick treat what if trick or treating is on Sunday? Right? What if

Cortex 1:04:39 they just do that like and we're like well fuck, then they won't get any candy because the doors gonna be closed. Right? So yeah, it turns out that didn't seem to happen so that's fine. But yeah, it is kind of a weird thing. It's a well and

Jessamyn 1:04:50 we've got a little like, like you take your little tiny children and there's like a safe and seen Halloween where like they can trick or treat in our to block down town during daylight, you know ya got a super little kid or like whatever a kid that you don't want going out at night. There is like a little business trick or treating like before kind of official trick or treating so it's not scheduled Exactly. But like everybody kind of knows when business trick or treating is so if you want to like get a little piece of candy from the bank and a little piece of candy from the drugstore get a piece of candy from the gas station like that's happening. But then regular trick or treating just happens sometimes afterwards. Usually it's about 435 till like seven 730 Something like that. Yeah, but there's a little kid parade it's very cute. My Did you see my picture? Do you see my

Cortex 1:05:38 Yeah, yes. No, that looks great.

Jessamyn 1:05:41 My My Ghost of Christmas emoji or whatever the hell it was. Thank you Twitter and people from Metafilter for helping me put this together but I just basically painted a scowl on my face with my outfit

Cortex 1:05:52 worked out great. It looks awesome. Goes to

Jessamyn 1:05:55 Christmas pizza Josh though you get some kinda.

Cortex 1:05:58 I was I did not expect you to go with it. I was just free associate I wouldn't

Jessamyn 1:06:02 have gone with it except it like I had one of those like crappy paint things that you get from like the dollar store. Yeah, and it has like what they call cream paint and what they call grease paint and grease paint as near as I can tell, it's just butter with color in it. And I couldn't make it like you know what I mean? Like it wouldn't stick to anything would just stick to my finger. So I just went with the other paint and I gotta figure out how to use grease paint before the next time I do any of this. Yeah, but I was I was I was all for it. Christmas pizza.

Cortex 1:06:30 One of our neighbors Secretary grant Victor walking by when she was going down the street at the store. I wonder if neighbors dead at their front door is a Stranger Things cosplay and I

Jessamyn 1:06:40 see you linked to this but I don't understand I don't

Cortex 1:06:43 there's a thing with some Christmas lights and letters written on the wall in Stranger Things and this is like a super shitty cosplay of that and it's adorable because of

Jessamyn 1:06:52 that. That's because specifically it is like super shitty like that.

Cortex 1:06:55 Yes, people who will get it we'll get to everybody else. But that's alright.

Jessamyn 1:07:00 Yeah, I didn't get it but I saw it. I mean, you know I basically understand memes because of what you tell me and milkshake and about three other things. Yep. Wow. The mayor of Burlington Vermont isn't verified on Twitter

Cortex 1:07:13 he's he's he's OG he's just like snap messing around. Or she they

Jessamyn 1:07:18 Hey, Miro Miro Weinberger it's a great name right

Cortex 1:07:21 it is solid

Jessamyn 1:07:44 wow and then in line with that I don't know if you're done with us benefits or not but the annual yes fi show us your Halloween costumes which I love because Metafilter people are so creative and interesting.

Cortex 1:07:55 There's a ton of great stuff in here. I was I was really enjoying

Jessamyn 1:07:59 I love Angeline her I mean I don't even know what half of these things are West Covina Rebecca bunch no idea but I love this picture of her in her sparkly shoes and her giant pretzel Dapper Day Honey Lemon. Nope no idea what that is. I don't have any idea but I love that picture. grayscale movie stars Oh grayscale movie stars is always a really good

Cortex 1:08:23 101 was from Big Hero something.

Jessamyn 1:08:30 That's right, I did see that. Max barber went looking like a Jewish lumberjack because he wasn't actually jumped up and that's just what he looks like. Funny me dressed up as her co worker but her co worker didn't know she was gonna dress up like her co worker. So there's a picture of the two of them there. Rocksteady was building a steampunk Ghostbusters costume, which Oh my god. So it's just you know, watching those like creative watching creative and interesting people doing creative and interesting stuff always just makes me really happy in combination with getting on Facebook and seeing all the librarians who dress up to go to work. Because like librarians always like dress up for Halloween at the library. You know, it's just so fun. So fun. It's just it makes me so happy.

Cortex 1:09:21 It's a good day, the Halloween.

Jessamyn 1:09:23 I think so. cat tail from plants vs zombies. I was just a link to cat tail not a picture of the costume. And who is it Darold daughter crystalline, I think had a great picture. No Forget it. Oh, well you know I start this and then I don't remember where the thing is. Oh yeah, no crystalline, did some ah. She did her husband's ventriloquist dummy makeup and he doesn't like having pictures of him posted on social media, but like the picture is really good. She did a great job. She does great. She does Rate, great makeup and so just seeing everybody in sort of what they what they did vegan what vegan terpil

Cortex 1:10:10 Veg art Anaplan it's it's a collection of Yes.

Jessamyn 1:10:15 Did this low like what if you're What if your face was a low resolution? Picture? Yeah, so it's a really pixelated face paint. Yeah. So you know I just Peggy Carter don't know who that is. Don't don't know who anybody is loved the pictures. Loved it. Super

Cortex 1:10:34 Rad stuff, folks. There was also Oh cheese. Where did that just put it? Secret quants are is is

Jessamyn 1:10:44 just kicked off. I don't think I'm gonna do it this year because I'm gonna probably be out of town. But I've always enjoyed it when I've done in the past. People are nice to me, you get fun stuff. Don't worry about it, send whatever, you don't have to be the amazing, most amazing person just do kind of whatever. It's super fun. Exactly. And it looked also like everybody in this thread was like, reasonable. Like, like, there weren't people who were like, wow, I've been mad at you. Your clients are since last year. So that's good.

Cortex 1:11:10 Yeah. And for anybody who doesn't know so your concert is an annual Secret Santa type gift exchange thing that it gets organized metal talk and Senator open for another week? I think so. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:11:23 Hop in. Like, you know, you spend between 10 and 20 bucks you swap with a person and yeah, it's cool.

Cortex 1:11:30 There's also wrestling something pleasant out of the election season. There's the Get your voting stories thread that a keeper posted a week or two ago for just like since there's early voting starting and everybody's been sort of so mired in this in the US at least specifically if you want to go read people's stories about voting or post your own that's place to do it it's kind of a nice largely Grier free you know, little slice of the Hey voting as part of you know what you do participating as a citizen blah blah blah blah blah stuff the nice stuff without you know any of the election stuff. So yeah

Jessamyn 1:12:15 I liked it I was surprised how many people did phone banking I mean surprised and pleased right like it's a great way to contribute it works for people who don't want to like go door to door getting people's houses you can totally be helpful and people were really supportive and nice to everyone else which was also really cool

Cortex 1:12:31 yeah yeah and then I'm not in the mood around a bunch of death related posts there were also some death related posts like to go look for them

Jessamyn 1:12:45 what what

Cortex 1:12:48 yeah, what what

Jessamyn 1:12:51 do you mean like the people who died who we miss

Cortex 1:12:54 Yeah, there were there were there a couple there were a couple of obits and then there was a sort of meta meta post about you know having friends online and

Jessamyn 1:13:02 yeah, I mean you know we miss Stevens invest we missed J pickers we miss government drone all those are people I have sort of interact interacted with personally and then Johnny wallflower who we also mentioned on that filter did a post about mourning your online friends that for people who are having a hard time sort of dealing with this or coming to grips to it it's an interesting thing to read in a nice post that people can read that people can talk in

Cortex 1:13:27 exactly. You want to metaphor Music Minute Go ahead. All right. But to do there are some songs I like there is a song by choco cat that I like which I could just cut paste

Jessamyn 1:13:40 was in Boston and Jim got to meet.

Cortex 1:13:43 Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, gotta meet Yeah, well, this song is called Walking on Eggshells, and it's a nice little throwback vibe song by choco cat featuring his son doing a spoken word bridge interjection which, as chakra cat notes, we need more of those these days. So that's cool, but it's dropping cat and son. So I like that. There is a nice song. First post, maybe I think by Jeff XL.

Jessamyn 1:14:12 My cat, you just click the guy's name.

Cortex 1:14:15 I'm working on it. I'm working on it. Oh, no, not remotely close. I think most of the time. I look at these things. And then two hours later, we record a podcast and

Jessamyn 1:14:26 say you love this guy. Look at this guy's website.

Cortex 1:14:30 Looking at this website. Love that's pretty good. Okay, I do like that. But I also like a song, another bottle, which is sort of about being a drunk and it's about Don Draper from Mad Men. And I liked it. And then there is embark by Kabuto, who makes lots of good stuff. And this is him messing around with an arpeggio on a Opie one synth. Seder. And it's pretty great. And also my heart as your home by soccer shot first. And this is

Jessamyn 1:15:10 my first consistently Yeah, yes.

Cortex 1:15:13 And this is this is the cover of their friends song. And it's soccer and also brother of soccer. Working together and putting holding together. It's really nice. And yeah. So yeah, that's what I have to say. That's some good music. And there's some more good music too, but I can't mention at all. So there you go. Music is good.

Jessamyn 1:15:40 Not in more than a minute. Yep. Yeah,

Cortex 1:15:42 that was that was clearly was what 43 seconds maybe?

Jessamyn 1:15:47 I don't even know.

Cortex 1:15:48 It was Yeah, I know. I would have to really right. Yeah, no, no, I care but I care in a very abstract sort of way. Also, fanfare people I guess are watching Westworld if we didn't float avoiding spoilers because it sounds like it's pretty good. And I haven't started yet. Great British Bake Off just finished off. And someone was the best Baker also the walking goes back on and people were talking about that. I haven't really looked at the thread there because I'm really kind of burnt on the show. But what people are talking about stuff bakeoff no Walking Dead big

Jessamyn 1:16:23 off was Oh, I heard they like killed everybody. They there was a huge bloodbath.

Cortex 1:16:28 There were there was there was there was lots of scenes of people being harmed. And if you're really into that, just go watch The Walking Dead.

Jessamyn 1:16:37 But I am so not into it.

Cortex 1:16:39 Yeah, I was pretty. Yeah, I should not spend the tail on the podcast, beefing about a show I don't like. So the other thing that I mentioned from fanfare is we have thrown up threads for the baseball

Jessamyn 1:16:53 World Series by

Cortex 1:16:54 though I don't know exactly the Cubs have not lost it yet. I know that because it would be impossible to avoid that wait

Jessamyn 1:17:00 cubs also games on right now? Is

Cortex 1:17:02 it like the game? I don't know. Well, there is three Oh cubs, right at this moment in whichever game this is. Anyway, I'm sure. I guess if the game is on, then clearly it's not over yet. But in any case, I have not heard gnashing and wailing about the Cubs losing or the Cubs winning. So clearly, it's still going. So if you want to follow along and get in on sort of goofy live blogging of the road series, that's the place to be.

Jessamyn 1:17:28 How do you feel about doing that? I think that seemed like a really good idea.

Cortex 1:17:31 I'm liking it. Ya know, I've been I've been trying to be supportive of like sports stuff this year. And I feel like it's a good thing. We're still sort of figuring out details but saying yeah, here's the thread Olympic

Jessamyn 1:17:39 stuff went really well. It seems like this has gone pretty well. Yeah, it just it by and large. It's yeah, thing you could add that people mostly like that hasn't required a bunch

Cortex 1:17:48 of fuckery. To deal. Yeah, it hasn't involved someone having to like sort of oh, well, you know, here's an interesting essay I have found about baseball games on on the front page. It's literally totally okay. We're gonna say yeah, no, this is fine. This is the place to do it. So it's gonna seem to be working out. So I'm looking forward to be able to get back to building out some of the fancier stuff in the future. But once again, the election we're just we're gonna muddle. Yeah, I'm, like, can we do to help?

Jessamyn 1:18:16 Let's just be working on not being a fucker, which I think is helped. That's the

Cortex 1:18:21 main thing. That's the main thing, you know that. And, you know, I already took a couple vacations this year, you know, so I probably shouldn't just take the week off and be mean to the rest of the staff.

Jessamyn 1:18:31 This is what being a boss

Cortex 1:18:34 but but but if I could somehow just sort of like blackout for the next week, that would be good. Just like just be spending a

Jessamyn 1:18:39 year dead for tax reasons. Yeah.

Cortex 1:18:40 Like I'm willing to be around like, next Tuesday for the actual day and like just be in the fucking shit there. But you know, the week between now and then probably nothing I'm going to experience election related is going to like do me any good. So I just need to like zone out. I need to play a whole lot of civilization six, maybe.

Jessamyn 1:19:00 I recommend meditating to

Cortex 1:19:01 record work that could work. Well, anyway,

Jessamyn 1:19:05 get a little bit of distance from your feelings.

Cortex 1:19:07 Yep. I think I think that's about it that I have for the site. Anything else you want to throw in the last minute here?

Jessamyn 1:19:15 Thanks. It's been good. I just mostly want to talk about the people I missed and talk about that I saw are the ginger beer and talk about how I saw Matt and that I hope everything is good for you and the rest of the mods and I think that's it. Hang in there.

Cortex 1:19:26 All right. We will. I'm confident about Mexico.

Jessamyn 1:19:29 I mean, what's the alternative? Got that? Well, yeah,

Cortex 1:19:32 I've got that light at the end of the tunnel thing at this point that I can see it a week a week is that's that's barely 168 hours, man.

Jessamyn 1:19:38 Awesome. Well, got it. You got this.

Cortex 1:19:41 All right. Well, pleasure as always talking to you. And I look forward to talking to you again in a month in a complete,

Jessamyn 1:19:47 mix it up and do something. Yes. We'll figure something out. I've advice what to do put it in the comments. Yep.

Cortex 1:19:52 Yep. All right. Well, until then.

Jessamyn 1:19:55 Okay. Good night. The sun goes down he'll be drunk and be down