Podcast 127 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 127: I Have No Tabs And I Must Stream (2017-04-03).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Jessamyn 0:00 Other than that, I'm pretty unprepared because I've been busy.

Cortex 0:03 I think we're both like, we're gonna get, we're gonna cover two months, and we'll just not have any kind of preparedness to stand up to that task. I think it'll go very well.

Jessamyn 0:14 I didn't click I haven't I don't even have tabs open

Cortex 0:25 Josh bar just man where God was a muddy mess where the best of the web? You know, what I did was I actually preemptively looked at the last episode number so I can say with confidence. Welcome to Episode 127. of Best of the web, the medical. Oh, that's

Jessamyn 0:48 funny. See, I did that while you were talking. So yeah,

Cortex 0:50 that's that's what I usually do and try and play it off. But, but I don't often actually get there. I don't think

Jessamyn 0:57 well, cuz you don't have to, because I've usually done it. So we're gonna see what happens when both of us are.

Cortex 1:03 Yep, this should be this should be an interesting one. I'm, I'm Josh Malartic a cortex. And I'm Jessamyn. And we are doing a podcast covering while our last podcast was the Colin show, which was delightful and so much fun. Super fun. But it also meant we like did none of our normal podcast stuff. So anything that someone did in February that they were hoping we would notice. Well, I mean, we may have noticed it, but we didn't say shit about it. So we have February and March to basically cover this is covering everything from like February 8, I think up through today is the third.

Jessamyn 1:38 Yeah. And you know, I have a confession to make the last podcast was actually the first of all the podcasts that I didn't listen to all the way through. Oh, yeah.

Cortex 1:46 Yeah, I don't know why. Just Just different fields.

Jessamyn 1:49 Just busy. And I listened to all the people with their stuff. And so it's funny, like, when I talk, I have no memory. Basically, what I say at all gets a little bit of a problem. You know, like, I'll give talks at conferences, and I'll be like, blah, blah, blah. And people be like, That's great. And then later, someone will come up to me and be like, Hey, your talk was really good. I'm like, great, because I don't remember a damn thing. Like, I have a sense like it went well, or it didn't really go well, but can't remember anything. But like when other people called and we listened to their calls before we slotted them in. I remember them. You know, it's other people. I remember what you say. So I when I was listening to it, I got more of a sense of like, oh, yeah, I've heard this before. Whereas when I listen to myself, it's like It's all new. Yeah. Yeah. No diagnoseable issue there that Well, I mean,

Cortex 2:39 I, I think I end up feeling pretty much the same way. Like, I mean, when I listened back to a podcast episode, which I as we've established, I very rarely do but but when I do, it's not like I'm, I'm very rarely like, wait, I said what, you know, it's like, it tends to feel familiar when I listen to it, but at the same time, especially if there's been like more than, you know, a couple months or something. It's sort of like, Oh, right. That's how I went, Oh, okay. You know, so it's like, yeah, yeah, remember it is I hear it, but I wouldn't have been able to tell you what the hell I said on any given podcast. People every once awhile will mention, like some snippet of a podcast, like meetup or something. And I will have no idea what they're talking about. Just because I'm like, not jumping to the right context. And like I, you, right, there'll

Jessamyn 3:23 be like you said, you're like, well, and the problem is I cast the problem

Cortex 3:27 is not so much when they said, you said the thing, because then I can like sort of work it through. But if they'll just say it, like as a reference, like, yeah, and I'll be like, I won't even understand that. I'm supposed to understand that this is a thing I said previously. So I'm not trying to put in that context. I'm not trying to think through my previous utterances. It's uh, yeah, so basically, I think I'm pretty much right there with you.

Jessamyn 3:49 Well, and here's also what's changed. I've actually started listening to more than only one podcast. Ah, like, I mean, I've always listened to the Metafilter podcast just because but, you know, I used to listen to WTF with Marc Maron, and now I hate him. But now I've been listening to Qi podcast, and I've been listening to like more podcasts that have been recommended by Metafilter people because I'm spending more time in a car not listening to the radio, which is my thing. So like race invaders, Aaron's podcast Yeah, love it. So good. Just completely great. And like I started listening to one on etiquette that's done by these Vermonters but like she's got a really irritating voice, so I don't, but I've been like trying more out because I feel like it might help me be better at podcasting. Manners. People can let me know what is it manners now they know it's done by the Emily Post society or something. And the two people who do it are named post, but maybe see I already unsubscribed so it's dead to me but the Emily Post institutes in Vermont and it's a great podcast. But for somebody who's done the minutia of reading AskMe Metafilter for etiquette tips. This is like rookie League, you know what I mean? Like, it's it's I like etiquette for nerds. This is just dedikate for everybody. Yeah. So it's great, but not for me, but great. But she has an annoying voice but great, but not helpful.

Cortex 5:13 Yeah. Well, I hope you got a full refund

Jessamyn 5:23 you don't want to be listening to a podcast anymore. And like, what do you do? That's dangerous?

Cortex 5:28 Well, you know, I mean, are you dropping the street? Like, are you on a straight shot?

Jessamyn 5:32 Sometimes?

Cortex 5:33 I think I think the trick is to be familiar enough with your podcast app that you can basically run it without having a

Jessamyn 5:38 podcast app. Sorry, sagen. I need a new podcast app. Ah, my,

Cortex 5:44 I just use whatever Apple's shitty one is. And I don't, I don't listen to that many podcasts. So it doesn't end up making much of that I

Jessamyn 5:50 used to shoot one and starting to bother me. Alright, we should stop talking about this. Nobody cares. But I listen to podcasts. And I think I'm worse at podcasting.

Cortex 6:00 This is episode 127. And unexciting think about the number of 127 is it's mostly exciting things I would say about it have to do with actually the number 128 Because it's just closely related. Because 128 is two to the seventh. Citing,

Jessamyn 6:17 but like but 127 is negative one plus two to the seventh. So it turns out to be a Freedman number, which is actually kind of nice. It's the first nice Friedman number that's in base 10.

Cortex 6:27 Nice. I know. We talking about the numbers when we did episode 69 Did we declare it to be a nice number? Like 69 We're like nice because you know the tape seconds. Why? Because Because like like, I'm gonna say it out loud. Because there's, there's a sexual practice involving the six and the nine represent the

Jessamyn 6:52 guy thing,

Cortex 6:54 though, dude. I mean, you must know you must like like, I understand. It's funny to me. Like I was about to be fascinated, but it's impossible you hang out on on milkshake. We'll talk about that too. But

Jessamyn 7:07 But I do think go and be like, hey, like thumbs up kind of Fonzie style. When anybody mentions that number may be like a thing for the fellas.

Cortex 7:16 I think I think so. It's tricky because I think yes, I think genuinely Yes, I think almost everybody seems to be doing it ironically at this point. But what have we learned about

Jessamyn 7:28 doing it? No.

Cortex 7:29 I've been I've been enjoying the sort of more far flung takes on it like people finding it in. There's a there's a nice bot. That might be the name of it. Maybe this is something Darius Kazemi built, because what does he do? He builds bots, but somebody anyway built a bot that just scans like publicly available government documents for the numbers 69 and 420. And then just like auto tweets about documents is pretty nice. Because ridiculously

Jessamyn 7:59 stupid.

Cortex 8:00 Yeah, that's that's like the I feel like that's the right level to engage with it on. But anyway,

Jessamyn 8:07 but 69 is a technically a nice number. It's just a nice number. Yeah,

Cortex 8:11 nice. Nice with like four eyes.

Jessamyn 8:13 Okay, but you understand that nice with one I legitimately described mathematical property? Yes. Yeah. Also, it's 111111112 in base two, which is kind of neat.

Cortex 8:24 Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. So the interesting thing about 127 is, yeah, it's the largest number you can represent as a signed integer, signed, one byte integer. So you've got eight bits, and it ranges from zero up to 127 are the positive numbers, and then you got into negatives, you got negative one through negative 128. So So 127 is is a very meaningful, sort of, like, weird little number in a lot of computer science, or, like Applied Computer science, computer programming, just because it's, it represents like, that's the edge of the world in some very specific contexts. Probably tons of very bad things that have happened with the computer software insecurity can be tracked down to someone not thinking about the fact that 127 was the edge of the world and they tried to do something with 128 There was a memory overflow or a buffer problem, and all of a sudden, you know, down or someone's hacking your account. So yeah, it's a neat number. And then 120 Oh, come on. It's like oh, yeah, it's 127. Except for without the Yeah,

Jessamyn 9:34 with the extra one. Yep. rounder.

Cortex 9:37 Yep. Cool. Um, but yeah, I don't know. How are you? I guess, I guess we talked about podcasts, your podcasting.

Jessamyn 9:46 Yeah. I've been doing a lot of podcasts and stuff. I just got back from Virginia and DC. i Yes. Well, this is a shout out to exogenous Thank you very much for putting me up and when I was briefly in DC they live really close to all the stuff that's happening around DC and his wife lent me a raincoat so that I could walk to the Library of Congress and the US Postal Museum in the rain. It was a terrific mitzvah, I had a lovely time eating food hanging out. They have three lovely cats. And it was just a high point of my trip that was otherwise mostly in gross, Virginia, you know, suburban, suburban Virginia at a library conference conference was fun. Virginia's Sragow?

Cortex 10:27 Nice. Yeah. Guys, I feel like there were some island oh, let's let's. Yeah, it's been it's been a busy. It's been a busy couple of months.

Jessamyn 10:41 Josh, you know, your life is busy now. It just is busy. Now.

Cortex 10:45 I know. It's weird. It is. So

Jessamyn 10:47 it's not busy. It's normal. Now. I feel like

Cortex 10:51 and maybe maybe this is a questionable question with sustainable strategy. But if I just tell myself, it's busy right now, every time I that might actually be less stressful for me than just deciding you know, what? Life is a constantly been busy thing. Like, you know, maybe maybe I just pretend that it's like, oh, it's just been about 36 months of busy.

Jessamyn 11:11 Crisis and like this. Yeah, exactly. aberrant. It's normal. Yeah.

Cortex 11:17 But it was just April Fool's. We had a lovely time without on the site.

Jessamyn 11:22 Oh, my God. So I got Josh on Slack and was like, hey, it's noon on April Fool's. And I guess I missed the joke, please. Because Josh explains jokes to me. People they know who know our friendship. And you were like, oh, no, we haven't launched yet. Now. It's like, man, either this is gonna be really good or something is weird and fucked and broke. And I have to say, I'm really happy that what it turned out was it was really, really good. So talk about what you guys did on the back end. I'm dying to know how that all happened. Because yeah, lately new to me, which was such a treat.

Cortex 11:56 Yeah, so. So we did the faves and flags role playing fantasy, Cisco, it's

Jessamyn 12:03 even better when you say it out loud.

Cortex 12:06 Lots of dragons. Yeah, this, this came out of a germ of an idea. Because like, you know, every, every year, we get tables, and we do something. And it's, we're usually happy with it. And we may or may not have gotten all of what we wanted to get done, done. But hey, something came along. And we're always exhausted at the end, because like, oh, man, we really had to rush to get that put together. But we get it put together. And then the last several years, at least, we've tried to make a point of saying, Okay, we had a bunch of other ideas that we had after the fact or instead of the one we did, let's actually write them down. And keep them in the document. And we'll come back to him like, you know, next February. And so we've gotten okay at doing that. And we've managed, I think, for the last couple of years to start out in February and say, Oh, wait, so what we're suddenly gonna do, and

Jessamyn 12:58 instead of just like, yeah, the ideas.

Cortex 13:02 Yep. And then and then I think that has not yet successfully led to us actually being, like, good at planning. But you know, at least we'll have that early conversation. And then like, March rolls around, like, oh, we should come back to that. And we get some more ideas going and, and then, like, you know, the last week of March concerns like, Oh, hey, we should implement this. Well, because April sneaks

Jessamyn 13:21 up on you. It says, April Fool's is like, you have to plan for a month that you're not in because I you know, even fucking iCal on my phone is Trixie about what's coming up next month. I mean, obviously, with alerts and alarms and all the other shit. But there really is a sense in which you have to turn a page to get to April 1. Yeah. On my older computers, even that's how iCal works. You know, you can't just scroll by weeks. So yeah, I don't feel like it sneaks up.

Cortex 13:52 Yeah, it does. And you know, anything else happening at the same time, all of a sudden, is a wrench in the gears when you're trying to sort of cram like that. So the power of deadlines is fantastic and has worked out well enough, once again, but one of these all these years, we're gonna learn a little bit. But I think we were having a conversation in early March, about various ideas, and we were throwing things around. And, you know, one of the things we talked about last year was like, we had a couple ideas that were sort of like political jokes that we then decided maybe not run with because like, what if they would have what if something weird and implausible, terrible happened politically? That was,

Jessamyn 14:26 we talked about about April Fool's, like eight years ago, was, what if what if we make AskMe Metafilter look like the apocalypse? And then, you know, AskMe Metafilter doesn't look entirely like but you know what I mean, like people are really concerned about some real world stuff.

Cortex 14:46 existential angst out there, then then, there might have been

Jessamyn 14:49 used to be existential, I think now, it's not existential, you know, like,

Cortex 14:54 well, it's more of an existential threat sense, I guess now.

Jessamyn 14:57 Yeah. I mean, I think some people are seeing rents that they are perceiving is a lot more at their doorstep than I think they did five years ago.

Cortex 15:04 Yeah. So we stayed the hell away from any of that this year, of course. I mean, we're not not just not wanting to bug people, but we're just all tired of it too. So. So I think we were joking around in in Slack, just talking about stuff and eyebrows. McGee brought up some sort of role playing joke, just some reference. And I think my my ears probably visibly perked up. And we were sort of off to the races

Jessamyn 15:33 playing my song.

Cortex 15:35 And we spent a couple hours sort of brainstorming about stuff. And we're all coming from very different directions to like, like, I'm probably me and maybe RECIST Nomad, I guess I was, or the only like, probably like, role playing game people really. And everybody else has more pop culture understanding or other kinds of RPG ish video game stuff, but like not really Dungeons and Dragons, nerds. So it became this big amalgam of various ideas. And we were talking about a character sheet generator, and we're talking about doing like live role playing in the thread. And we're talking about the idea of maybe trying to work in like role playing game roles for the various staffers and a bunch of other ideas. And a lot of them we sort of looked at and had crazy brainstorms, and then you're like, yeah, that's not

Jessamyn 16:16 gonna, that's not gonna be like to enjoy this, too.

Cortex 16:19 Yeah. So we ended up refining it down to let's get that character sheet generator working. So we could like let everybody just roll their own RPG character with these fake stats and fake abilities

Jessamyn 16:31 to try treasure is it just worked, you know, you launched it, and it just worked. Everything worked. Like how often does that happen? That never happens. I mean, not not in the metal filter universe, just in the universe of like, let's gin something up real quick so that people can play with it.

Cortex 16:48 Yep. And that all that all completely comes down to Trimble who did a fantastic job. Shop Trimble, despite having a pretty busy like week going on that, like you

Jessamyn 16:58 said Trimble was doing a whole bunch of stuff on their own time, too.

Cortex 17:01 Yeah, yeah. And on the day of they were officiating a derby match of some sort. If it's Austria, I'm not entirely I didn't even follow up to find out exactly what's going on. It was I think it was their first time officiating this sort of match. And it all went well. And that was great. But that was, you know, that was in the Austrian. afternoon and evening, which is the US, you know, morning, which so So, we, one thing we did not do is like to know that we've everything, like turnkey to run for sure. So we didn't want to just turn it on overnight, and hope it didn't fall over. So that's why we waited till

Jessamyn 17:47 some of the fun part was that you guys, a lot of you, not just you were kind of around. Yeah. And you and eyebrows seem to be there. And you know, I saw other people popping in and out.

Cortex 17:58 Yeah. But yeah, so the character generator, it's just a big pile of, we basically made a big pile of lists of different kinds of words and phrases. That was a whole big team effort, we filled out, fumble counted, the words we generated with something like 7500 words of content. Now, all these word lists, you know, so you could create a piece of armor by, you know, having something like you know, helmet, or glave, or bracer, but then pick a prefix like scintillating, and a suffix, like, of smacking, and all of a sudden, you've got so you randomize all these things. So we just needed to generate a bunch of content and then symbol set it up in the database to pull from those tables according to a bunch of different little queries that can set up a different kind of item, and the spells and the skills and and yeah, so just been brainstorming bunch of typing and then for bold, did the work of actually pulling it in and bleeding that stuff out to the character sheet. I looked up a couple of RPG looking fonts on Google fonts that we could use I made up a character sheet in Inkscape. And, and yeah, Bob's your uncle later there it is. And yeah, it was it was

Jessamyn 19:11 stuck around so that people could fuck around in the meta stock thread with their new hand. However, that worked.

Cortex 19:18 Yeah, we just set it up. So the database queries you know, the user account and sees if they have saved a sheet and if so, it shows their epithet so like cortex the uncouth or whatever? What I'm the lack land Cortex A lack land I think that means I don't have land. Eyebrows, oh, a bunch of epithets on Wikipedia from you know, historical actual epithets.

Jessamyn 19:43 I am Jessamyn the exile and you were found, like every fucking comment in this person.

Cortex 19:53 I actually gave them a five minute time

Jessamyn 19:55 so that was true. I thought that was like a joke, you

Cortex 19:59 know? Oh, wait, it was, it was actually happening. I was like, after a couple minutes, like, just I, I'm trying to moderate your actual job. Yep. So give them a timeout and send them a nice note saying, Hey, you're not actually in trouble, but you are banned for the next five minutes, because I need you to stop doing that I

Jessamyn 20:14 need you to wake up and

Cortex 20:16 well, and I've never actually gotten an email response from them in previous communications, which is the case for almost everybody on the site. You know, there's a handful of people relatively speaking, that we've actually gone back and forth on over like email. You know, I mean, the handful is probably 1000 people, but you know, out of 100,000 so it's not weird that I didn't have an email from them, but it means I don't know for sure that the email that they have on their account is when the paycheck so they they probably got the picture and hopefully we're not panicked by it, but we'll see. But there's your lesson. Don't flag 200 Fucking things in a thread, no matter how funny the concept is. You will annoy whoever's on duty. And

Jessamyn 20:58 people just assume you guys have more stuff handled by robots than you do.

Cortex 21:03 Yeah, yeah. It's the sort of thing that we could like set up robots for if we needed to

Jessamyn 21:12 be seen that happen a couple times.

Cortex 21:14 Exactly. I would say like literally once every couple years there's some sort of actually problematic plagues situation so yeah. But yeah, so yeah, the character generator all brainstorm together and simple. got that set up. And then the the actual d&d manual thing that recovered faves and flags manual was, that was very much me just going down the rabbit hole because I was excited about the idea of like a knockoff d&d manual that was lost a time except for a few charred fragments. So

Jessamyn 21:42 it was super funny. I laughed, and it had Matt how his face on the front. Yeah, everybody would get that. But yeah, I got that. And I laughed.

Cortex 21:51 That was definitely a deep cut for for anybody who I should. I should track down the links. But there's the old Flickr group of Matt Howey with his recumbent bicycle and his helmet. In fact, those search terms probably work I'll I'll try that out. I think I just searched on that how we were coming to find it. Originally.

Jessamyn 22:10 Now he's recumbent bike pool. Yep.

Cortex 22:14 Bike. Oh, here we go. Oh, there was a thread. But yeah, anyway, so Matt took a selfie years years ago, like must been 1213 years something like that. Up just himself on his bike, and it's kind of a just a Doofy casual selfie. And he's got a bike helmet on and whatever. It's just a It's just

Jessamyn 22:38 his bike. Yeah, that takes a lot of pictures of bike rides.

Cortex 22:41 Yeah. But but it's something about this photo just sort of got going. And people started photoshopping it and doing a whole bunch of goofy reinterpretations of, of the

Jessamyn 22:53 photo. But again, Easy Rider putting it in the Bjork album cover. Making a mat how he's big adventure peewee cover. Yeah, it's great.

Cortex 23:02 Yep. So turning that into some sort of floating headed demigod who is attacking adventures in a role playing party seems like the way to go. And I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. Yeah. But yeah, so that was the thing. And we'll Yeah, we'll we'll keep the stuff loose in the database now. So they'll stick around forever. We may stick a little optional thing on your profile page, if you want to, like link to your

Jessamyn 23:23 I think a lot of people would like that. I saw eyebrows explaining like, this is the URL structure. But I think nicer if there was just a button because why not?

Cortex 23:31 Yeah, something that's not so fiddly. So we'll add that at some point. You know, we'll take down the actual like, banner to the joke today or tomorrow or whatever, but I hit

Jessamyn 23:39 it already. Yeah. Yeah. But people can still roll them up, right? Yep. And they'll be able to thank you should probably leave it up until people I mean, I don't know what the Venn diagram is if people listen to the podcast, but who wouldn't have known about this? Maybe it's zero. But yeah, I feel like

Cortex 23:55 I feel like letting the big banner at the top of the site run for like a workday is probably the key thing. Yeah. We sidebars and everything. But that's the

Jessamyn 24:01 nicest big banner. I mean, it's on mobile, too, right? Yeah. I never looked at the site on mobile because I just can't get it back to mobile view. And it's impossible. And I don't need tech support. This is the thing Jim does to me all the time where I'm like, Stop doing that. We will have some conversation. He'll be like, Oh, I never do that. Because every time I click my thing, something horrible happens. And I'm like, Well, do you need help? Oh, it's okay. I'll just sit around and have it be lousy. And I'm like, dude.

Cortex 24:28 It's improve your life.

Jessamyn 24:30 Right? to be that way. So I guess we could talk about jobs. Yeah, we can do that. I mean, there's not a ton of jobs but there's some really cool jobs.

Cortex 24:39 There's a there's a decent little chunk. There's a couple of WordPress things. So if you're, if you're a WordPress person, someone needs help cleaning up a hacked WordPress someone else needs that help in Indianapolis. I'm not sure you need to be in Indianapolis. I haven't read it that carefully. But but the WordPress is out there.

Jessamyn 24:59 Oh, source that.

Cortex 25:02 Yeah. There's a survey a market research survey if you have 10 minutes and want to take it

Jessamyn 25:11 in my favorite job was another panacea has this interesting job called re entry coordinator. Oh, yeah. Which is basically this is a second chance program at Jessup, current Correctional Institution, outside of Baltimore City, and students will be working on their bachelor's. And so this is helping a reentry program for students from this program. Project and it pays decently well.

Cortex 25:39 Yeah. Seems like a good deal all around so and several other things go go look at jobs. It's that's what it's there for. It's for you to go look at it. Yeah. Oh, man, we didn't take decades down from jobs. We took them out from everywhere else.

Jessamyn 25:55 Wow. Want to explain decades? Yeah, I guess this was the thing I didn't like about the podcast, besides the person's annoying voice is they would start talking about podcast stories. And like, you know how, like, when you read a series of books, it's always a little irritating, because when you're in book number three, they'll have to be like he got that broke that arm problem because somebody shot him. And book number one, you know, and they have to kind of retell some stuff. Yeah, okay. Well, this podcast would be like, as you know, there's been some drama, and then they would just start going on about stuff. And I was like, What drama? I'm a new listener and podcasts. 104. Just like any words at all, you know, but they just talked about it and didn't talk about it. And I was like, oh, hostile. You use your podcast? Terrible.

Cortex 26:42 Yep. That's not great. Rude. Rude. Yeah, the decades I should talk about that i I'll find the metal talk post. But or maybe you can find them. I'll talk to post. And I'll talk

Jessamyn 26:56 fond farewell to add from the deck. Yeah. And you act like that's even a skill is supposed to just reading a page and copying a thing. Do you know just so I'll do your work for you.

Cortex 27:05 I was doing that because I knew that I would not be able to do both at the same time. And we just lift me up, blood have to go to meta talk and have to scroll find the right thread. trust me this is this is more work to do while managing to continue to form sentences, then maybe it sounds like you're doing great, which may just be amazing. But yes, so So the deck the deck, we have been running ads from the deck for, oh, I looked it up for that post something like 10 years, like a long time. And it's been great. It's a company that was run by Jim coudl, who's a longtime mefite And a good guy. And he does a bunch of other stuff too. Including field brand. Field note brand notes, which a lot of people are awfully fond of. And there's nice little notebooks and they make a variety products and whatnot. But anyway, they started Dec back in Alex 2006 2007, something like that, I want to say and it's been this really good ad network for a long time. And they basically refused to do most of the things that other ad networks do. And they have

Jessamyn 28:15 their links. I bought some things after clicking on no links. I can almost never say that about advertising on the web.

Cortex 28:21 Yeah, and you hear a lot of people say that it's one of those weird things where people like hey, no, actually I this is I didn't resent this. I whitelisted this I like this. They've made their ads. Well, they had good taste. They weren't exploitative. Like one time I think they took a ad run from American Apparel and people were like, and I think we may feel more

Jessamyn 28:39 like Nope. Yeah, but it was like, Oh, my T shirt is Nope.

Cortex 28:43 Yeah. And now that that was stark you know that that was a weird sort of like decision making stumble from them probably also good money too.

Jessamyn 28:57 Oh, right. I mean, I feel like American Apparel are a bunch of terrible assholes. But that may also be my sort of internet person. Like, I don't know if that's a widely held belief or just narrowly held belief. I mean, I'm comfortable with it, but it may not be Yeah, leak out to every

Cortex 29:13 corner. Well, and for whatever sort of weird reputation and sort of edgy ad approach they have. They're still like, I mean, that's a mainstream, you know, clothing brand and even

Jessamyn 29:25 suicide girls. Yeah, yes.

Cortex 29:29 Oh, the thing years ago, years ago, here's your story for people have no idea what we're talking about. Many years ago, Matt was running ads in a more ad hoc way on the site. And one of the ad campaigns he ran briefly.

Jessamyn 29:43 text, a text ad campaign. Let's be let's be clear. Here's the link

Cortex 29:49 was for suicide girls, which for anybody I don't know. Is suicide girls still current? They're still around.

Jessamyn 29:55 They're still thing.

Cortex 29:57 Yeah. Basically Sexy cam girls sort of thing, but with a sort of punky gothy, etc.

Jessamyn 30:08 Piercings and yeah.

Cortex 30:12 So anyway, they offered Matt some money for an ad campaign. And this was at a time when Medicare wasn't actually generating much money. And Matt said yes and ran some ads and people like knew and Matt said, okay, no and kill the ads. And it became clear only later after Matt sort of expressed frustration about this years later that like, the little bit of money he lost out on that was not like a few $100, as I think was popularly conveyed, but actually several $1,000 At a time when it would have actually been useful. But that was the thing that was like, you know, that was the user base was not comfortable with it. And he said,

Jessamyn 30:46 to where he was a little bit like, not quite enough information about something. What do you guys think? Like? I mean, I was in favor of the ads, but I understood that people weren't. But it also wasn't clear because Matt would never talk about money what people were actually,

Cortex 31:03 sure, yeah. But yeah, there's a whole thing. Anyway, with a deck, we didn't really have that problem, which was nice. Yeah. And we ran them on the blue. And on the front page of various other sub sites, for a bunch of years, and for the last like three years, we've been running nothing but that on the blue, like, no AdSense in threads, we just ran the Dec. Ad in there as well. Right. And it's the only ad we had like showing to logged in members, everything else is just for folks who are coming to the site logged out. So that was kind of unique, and it was nice, and they were good partners to be working with. They were, you know, great company, no bullshit. But then it just sort of the business model didn't keep working.

Jessamyn 31:47 And so they're closed down, right. It's not like metal filters. Made it like it's just the end of the deck. It's not the end of met filters relationship with them for some other reason.

Cortex 31:56 Yeah, no, totally. We had a good relationship. The end, Jim was very communicative about the the difficulties of the last year on there. And you know, they needed to reduce rates somewhat to try and see if they could get things back in gear. And given the relationship we've had for all these years, I was like, Yeah, let's do that and just sort of stuck with them until they just had to call it you know, throw in the towel and call it quits. So now they're they those ads are off the site now. And we've got some ad sets up for non logged in views of the blue and we'll see how that does financially. But we may do some other ad stuff too. But for now, it's like it's just kind of it's kind of a bummer to see ago because they were a company doing like the good thing they were actually trying to be what an advertising company should aspire to be on the net and it's really frustrating to see that be the thing that goes by the wayside when there's lots of much worse, you know, companies out there that are apparently you know, doing perfectly well on the strength of being worse. So what do you do but it's kind of an end of an era thing. It's It's It's sad to see him go so but yeah,

Jessamyn 33:09 so you feel it or the deck?

Cortex 33:11 Yep. Deck good. You're good Decker's? Should we talk about projects? This is a very we're really like weaving in the sub sites and the the random happenings.

Jessamyn 33:23 Yes, I have a local mention which made me very happy turtle girl who as you know is a neighbor and friend has left her librarian job a little while ago and opened up a natural tannery in town. So you have a sheepskin and she can preserve it for you and make it look all cool. And I'll flip that. And she has this thing called the Vermont fiber tour. That's part of Vermont craft tour thing, which may just be the fiber tour. But basically she does a whole bunch of dyeing and weaving and wool spinning and whatever and it's a participant thing where you can schlep around the Green Mountains and learn about stuff and it's just really cool. And I found out about it because I was staying with exogenous and his wife who is a knitter and they were like oh are you anywhere near to fall fiber toward like in fact I completely am so they were interested in it was cool to kind of look at it and and enjoy it I thought it was the coolest nice yeah anybody who's you know fiber inclined and wants to see Vermont at its finest and learn some stuff I bet it's really cool.

Cortex 34:39 Yeah. I like oh, there was veggie boy has a new book. I'm pacing listen.

Jessamyn 34:50 Oh, veggie boys a waffle guy, right? Yes. Well, it waffle guy.

Cortex 34:54 Yes. So now will it skill it which in reference, you know, in retrospect, like clearly has worked We've been going all along because like, what a great bit of Posey

Jessamyn 35:05 Oh, this will overlap very nicely with my Dutch baby thing, which is the thing you make in a skillet and is amazing. And you know, now that I mentioned it, that is what I should have for dinner.

Cortex 35:18 There you go, solving problems. That's what we'll do on this podcast and solve the inner problems. But anyway, we'll waffle was nice, we'll scale it. Hey, I liked the suggestions in the thread there for future titles as well. So hopefully, we'll get increasingly convoluted

Jessamyn 35:37 pestle. Will it fill it? Yeah, no, that's awesome. And I'm excited about that, because it combines a lot of nerdy mefite. Things like mudpuppy is the master of us cast iron pan refinishing? We have a ton of people who have good recipe things, these books turn out wonderful. You know, how do I make something in one pan, I only have one pan kinds of things. You can make it when you camp, we have a whole bunch of people who go camping. So hey, that's awesome. excited about it? Yep. I don't really know what to do with. But I do kind of appreciate the every name and list of every name from and never Well, I don't understand it. I don't really know what's happening. I looked for my own name and couldn't find it. But it's also kind of a joke. And of course bond Cliff posted it. I don't know why, of course. But Bond Cliff posted it to metal filter where, you know, people found some weird fun names in there. And the thread is kind of small and amusing. Yep. No, may not.

Cortex 36:49 I would say it's very safe to say like, it's it's a joke. Like, like, like it's generating real names. It's absolutely not actually supposed to be every name or even particularly real names. But it's funny stuff coming out of basically named generation stuff that I guess never well wrote up.

Jessamyn 37:11 Stupid thing and enjoyed the stupid thread.

Cortex 37:14 I really liked the fact that people weren't looking for their names in a, I don't want to say,

Jessamyn 37:19 well, you know me, I don't understand jokes. So I was like, oh, and I knew there's a little

Cortex 37:23 pig. So maybe maybe it's not obvious that, you know, I don't think there's anything about the name of it that suggests that it's

Jessamyn 37:30 a humor tag and just walked right by it.

Cortex 37:34 But I like the idea of looking for names that you will never find because your name is not going to be auto Quackenbush or balls, wind Osterley.

Jessamyn 37:42 But Josh, so like when you were a kid, and you were like at a truckstop, or a place where they sold schwag that came with all the names on it. Like, you know, like a little state license plate with your name or like a T shirt with your name or a shirt with your name. Like your name was one of the names right? Yeah,

Cortex 37:59 totally.

Jessamyn 38:00 My name was never Yeah, you. Yeah, you see, yes. You probably got it in the past gentleman. I'm aware of that.

Cortex 38:07 I mean, I feel Yeah, it's like well, and the tricky thing is like you know, sometimes it'd be Josh and something times there'd be Joshua and you know, depending on what I was like inclined, Were you ever a Joshua? Not really.

Jessamyn 38:20 Because you Joshua, but nobody else does. Are you really weren't Joshua.

Cortex 38:24 I just like it like I'm legally Joshua. And like, occasionally you would come up and I think I may have like, flirted with Joshua at some point. Early Childhood, Edward.

Jessamyn 38:34 Jim. Yeah, I application jam would have been cooler. Yeah. Well,

Cortex 38:40 what do you do? Sometimes life is truly outrageous.

Jessamyn 38:45 So never the Joshua never did. Josh will always Josh

Cortex 38:48 pretty much. Yeah. All right. Except for an occasional bits of documentation. That's people seem to do okay. Understanding that Josh and Joshua are variations on the same name. So news doesn't cause problems. I'm immune

Jessamyn 39:03 about the other time that I almost didn't get on an airplane because my driver's license didn't have my middle name on it, but my ticket or vice versa. Some bullshit.

Cortex 39:14 It's like, Come on, guys. That's a That's totally a throwaway field.

Jessamyn 39:17 Right? It's, that's I mean, I had a passport for a long time that had my middle name as God what was it

Jessamyn 39:31 Oh, all right. Middle Ages the weirdest trash. It's the weirdest. No, I think I should have it here somewhere. No, it's not that one. spares. Now, you know, more of a more of a slur and less have kind of a funny little bit of joking you might problematize

Cortex 39:52 in these these late days. But that

Jessamyn 39:55 is what my passport said.

Cortex 39:56 Yeah. Well, what do you do? don't have trouble getting on airplanes, I guess.

Jessamyn 40:02 Yeah, my friend got a passport where his middle name was doofus. That was maybe a little bit better.

Cortex 40:12 I liked also, this LinkedIn thought leadership generator for Miss Jenny, which just generates, you know, things you can do for the sake of thought leadership like you can learning to stay relevant without a playbook or

Jessamyn 40:28 15 Surprising strategies to retain talent without sacrificing creativity. Wait, isn't that real?

Cortex 40:34 Kind of it's it's it's it's funny because it's it's sort of like it's taking a dig at sort of buzzword Enos but at the same time, you know, to exist in the context. So you could, I mean, that's, that's kind of it. The hard to paradise nature of some of this stuff is like

Jessamyn 40:50 15 Surprising strategies to engage mom bosses in half the time,

Cortex 40:55 like, every single one of us sit down and try to actually write something out of it, though, like, you know, even if it sounds like obviously a joke, there's like, oh, well, it could be like the title of this slightly. You know, lilting you know, a nonetheless, this is the blog entry I'm writing this afternoon because this is what I do for a job. So it occupies a nice, weird sort of liminal space, I think.

Jessamyn 41:17 10 methods to leverage VR at CES. Yeah, see? Take a digital detox to retain talent without selling your soul. This is great. Miss Jenny's genius. I love it. So the thing I was expecting you any minute to mention, and you didn't mention is Moon milks. Terrific. Yeah, years of one instrument a day, where every February he tries to make a new instrument every day of the month. And they're almost all documented. And he just finished his 10th year of instrument a day. Yes. And you can see the flicker collection, which is how I of course, immediately went in to look at all of these instruments. And like, you know, some of them are kind of instruments, instruments, and some of them are, you know, a thing that makes a noise but it's made out of a walnut or something. A potato, an egg, a coke bottle, a piece of tubing. Something else more walnuts.

Cortex 42:21 What's interesting is there's a parallel blog using the exact same materials called bang a day.

Jessamyn 42:28 You know, I I can see it. I can see it. Hey, there's Oh. Oh, at the very end it's it's Samson. His his late dog. Ah, I believe Samsung is the late dog. I think Samsung is late dog and I met Samsung and Samsung has special. So hey, Samsung. Nice to see you. Yeah, super, super cool. Now that it's now that it's 10 years old, I just,

Cortex 43:01 it was an awesome project. And very, very impressive. Yep. I liked this photo blog, but from message. It's a double exposure. twitter bot just takes a couple of photos selected random, you know, stuffy posts on Instagram and Twitter and such and sticks them together and you can do your own. You can take the source code and make your own but it's

Jessamyn 43:28 good. It's like it's just that random. Someone who would love this.

Cortex 43:31 And it's nice because you know, you can get the occasional like bonus Geraldo pic in there sometimes.

Jessamyn 43:39 I thought that too. That was Yep. Aren't they married already?

Cortex 43:44 Yeah, no, they got married. Awesome. They're all married and shit. I think are engaged sorry guys. If I'm fucking it up. I don't remember one of those wedding stuff I can't keep track of people anymore.

Jessamyn 43:58 I never could

Cortex 44:02 let's see. Oh, man. I mean it's too much there's it's too there's way too much project stuff to cover.

Jessamyn 44:08 Well we can why don't we just cut bait and then you know we love you all in different ways is kind

Cortex 44:14 of is cutting bait like cutting your losses? Is it like you get like, like it's fish or cut bait? Right? It's like kind of a shooter get off the pot thing but I think I think

Jessamyn 44:25 cut bait is when you're like alright, fish, you can have the fucking worms. I'm going home. Okay, see, I don't know that much about Fisher's metaphor. It's just like I'm not great with humor irony or all those other things. So it's entirely possible I've been interpreting it in my own

Cortex 44:37 weird way forever. If someone listening can explain to us so you tell me you tell me I interpreted as sort of like a get out of the way and do something more useful if you're not doing if you're not usually occupying sort of like the core action space so like maybe if you

Jessamyn 44:54 Oh, like if you're not gonna fish get out? Yeah, like

Cortex 44:57 let someone else get up there and fish and you sit down and cut some bait, you know, which is

Jessamyn 45:01 funny, like fishing isn't really like a limited resource kind of thing, right? Yeah, I

Cortex 45:04 don't know, maybe a very small boat. I don't know.

Jessamyn 45:08 Maybe you're sitting around talking too much and people are like, get out.

Cortex 45:11 Yeah, maybe it's a small pond.

Jessamyn 45:14 Yeah, you're the big fisherman.

Cortex 45:17 Anyway, there's other stuff on on, we can totally cut some bait. And let's, let's cut this bait loose. And

Jessamyn 45:26 we never talk about fanfare on this podcast. And I don't think we should start this month because I had not prepared to do it. But we should think about it, we should try to more and I participate in it a little bit. Not a lot. But I like it. I want to

Cortex 45:39 participate more. It's so easy for it to fall by the wayside. For me, I'm glad that other people are having a good time with it. But like I if I'm short on time, I just, I end up not having to go dig in over there. My disappointment cuz I'm so happy that we have it. So I should try to do that too. I should resolve to like go in like book club. So to speak. fanfare alone, I can just make sure I check it on a couple threads every month.

Jessamyn 46:03 Yeah, so we didn't do it this time. But we will make a plan to do more of it next time.

Cortex 46:07 Yeah, yeah.

Jessamyn 46:08 Let's go and look at us trying.

Cortex 46:11 Yeah. Or at least claiming that we will try, which is the first step to try.

Jessamyn 46:16 Trying is the first step to try and shut up. That's that's

Cortex 46:19 the title of my new self help book. Please attend my TED Talk. Shall we talk about Metafilter? We'll blue

Jessamyn 46:31 law. Oh, god, did you see there was actually someone in like a fairly recent thread and many talk? Who was like, why are you? Why did people call it the blue? What are people talking about? Like who legit didn't know? Like they're gonna have to metal filter and they legit didn't know that. It all used to be that horrible color.

Cortex 46:50 Wonderful color.

Jessamyn 46:53 Plastic for life, man classic for life. Classically, yeah, they literally didn't know that was a thing. And so they saw people talking about the blue and we're like, what is happening?

Cortex 47:03 I stop and recruit myself now. And then if I'm trying to explain something, if I'm trying to think Oh, but we also have newer users to that like, oh, maybe I shouldn't just casually call it the blue with no explanation.

Jessamyn 47:14 You probably shouldn't because you're a boss guy, but like other people that

Cortex 47:17 Oh, no, yeah, I think it's fine for people to do it. I very much like the tradition of those nicknames. But yeah, it's a legitimate thing like the default view of the front pages white. Curse you and Neil. But yeah, I've stopped giving them actual shit about that. But he just had something on the blue. recently. I was something something he's he's

Jessamyn 47:42 glitch glitch was glitch. Yeah. Which is cool. Because he was tweeting about it. Yeah.

Cortex 47:47 So he popped into the thread to say hi and answer a couple questions and whatnot. But he also cackled with the fact that he had, you know, made the default page white. And so, you know, I've done my best to like, stop encouraging people to make that joke, but if he's gonna bring it back, you know, we might have to just like, the old days,

Jessamyn 48:08 then it is on.

Cortex 48:10 But yes, metal filter, there's, there's that lots of other stuff on metal filter. And, and so, let us discuss some of it with our deep preparation that we've both

Jessamyn 48:19 done. I mean, I did favorite things, which is how I know kind of what I want to talk about. And one of the things I really enjoyed was been Cliff's post about Emma grandma Gatewood, who basically had this shitty home life with this gross abusive husband, and like, put on her sneakers and walked out the door and like through hiked the Appalachian Trail in 1955, and became the first person to thru hike it twice the first person of any gender, and then became the first person to hike it three times. So there's a link to a story about her Wikipedia, and a link to an article about her in the Washington Post. And the thread was, it was one of these weird like, 26 favorites. Seven comments. Yeah. Um, and, you know, I think it got a little weird because it kind of opened up with somebody basically saying, like, well, thank God, people don't get the shit beat out of him anymore. Then the cops arrest them. And then, I mean, what do you do with that? In bread? Like it? What do we call it the dead goat? Thank ya. And it's hard because that is kind of the story that the Washington Post thing was saying.

Cortex 49:36 Yeah, and that's the thing like yeah, this is an example where it's not really someone coming against Oh, yeah. Well, did you know about Dummett good, you know, it's it's someone commenting on the content of the story. So it's

Jessamyn 49:46 a continuum, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Cortex 49:48 So this is a guide i But, but it does it even then, like you know, you know, it can sort of like set the tone but I mean, the the post has a trigger warning about domestic abuse. So that so it's not exactly a severe, you know, a swerve as the word I wanted. I'm also a severe, which is not that right. But

Jessamyn 50:08 the first the first comment does kind of hone in on the injustice of her getting arrested when her husband beat her, which then did really set a tone for the thread instead of Oh, yeah, Legion trail.

Cortex 50:21 In a sense that it's nice that it's a thread about hiking that has very few comments, because it was also the recent thread about the couple taking their, like young baby hiking, and

Jessamyn 50:32 that was I didn't even read it didn't even read it.

Cortex 50:35 It was it was contentious. Can you imagine that something involving parenting turned out to be a contentious discussion. It's I don't know how that happened.

Jessamyn 50:43 Well, I'm speaking of other contentious threads, just while we're on the topic, one, probably my favorite thread of the last couple months, and I've been like dipping in and out, you know, I've been, it's been a busy set of months for me, and I'm another one of those people who's like, oh, it's been busy. It's like no, Jasmine, that's her life. This the man of twists and turns made a post about these slightly odd maybe mentally ill twins who are also women of color, and also maybe criminals and one of them died. And the other one kind of then became someone with a slightly more normal life after that. But she like self published a book that became the sort of they're like this weird underground cult phenomenon, even though it's probably just two women who were identical twins with maybe some mental illness thrown in there. And we're not maybe awesome for each other. But they achieved this sort of cult status, because, you know, they went to jail, they burned down a house, I don't even exactly remember. But when you go looking at it on the internet, it's one of those interesting internet stories that you see a lot of people who have kind of weird stories about weird people talk about and I, you know, went to see if I could track down the book that one of them wrote, and it's actually really difficult, like I legit could not find a stolen version of it online. And very few versions of it, even in libraries are given to the given twins. But it was one of those like perfect posts because it had just a couple of links. You could read all the links and feel like you knew something about it. Or you could just go into the internet and be like, What else about this story? Can I track down? Fascinating? Yeah, meat. Yeah, I liked it. There was you like did you read a single post Josh?

Cortex 52:40 I did actually you know, I've got so I've got a couple of classic metal filter things by classic

Jessamyn 52:45 do you mean not in the last two months? Yes. Yeah,

Cortex 52:49 well, it's just the as I'm sifting through my favorite stuff, I've commented and these happen to be you know, the top so I'm just gonna throw them out there. There is a weird one that is still basically on my to read list but someone pointed to me this I don't remember why is the post from 2004 teen to ask us for the rdrd sound about a weird YouTube channel that just has 10s of 1000s of clips that are like you know, a few seconds to a couple minutes long of random blue and red rectangles and weird tones. And no one knows what's going on with it and there was some theorizing and you know some jokes and thread about number of stations and you know, ski but uh but yeah, I don't think there was really any rip resolution in the thread and I don't know if in the long term anyone followed up on it, but someone threw this my way and then I was like, Yes, this is the thing so if you want just something weird that your anyone who lives with you will probably ask you to turn off after a couple

Jessamyn 53:57 suckers. Well, and here's the weird thing, right? I'm looking at one of these 11 second videos and the up next. sidebar is basically 15 of these videos. And then one violent femmes album, one Steeleye span song in one song by Fairport Convention Yeah. Does that make any sense? Not really. I guess those things are recommended and then

Cortex 54:23 I think YouTube just has a real mixed strategy on that stuff. Yeah Hmm. Like they managed to suggest to me a collection of 4chan jokes with posted by a user with Nazi in their name so that this is not this is not really solid semantic targeting here guys. You have not really got me pegged so far apparently.

Jessamyn 54:41 I'm amazed you can even still do that. Yeah, like I'm amazed you can still have Nazi in your in your in your name.

Cortex 54:49 It's weird. It's a weird internet. We're all living in. Yes,

Jessamyn 54:54 should be against the rules. So I also enjoyed this more recent posts. actually just from a couple days ago about the the skinny house, which is one of Boston's spied houses. So spied houses are one of those, like the little houses where they're not going to move and then they just big build big build big houses around them. You know, like, Hey, I'm in a house. We want to build something on that land. No. We're gonna just leave the house there to spite you. And then they're called spied houses. And one of them which is in Boston, which has always been called the skinny house is for sale. It's 11 feet wide. It's completely tiny. It's in a completely desirable area of Boston, north, the Boston's North End. It's completely strange. You can only get into it from the alley, but a lot of people in Boston are familiar with this house. And so it got all the locals in the thread talking about how weird Boston is plus a custom million dollars, which is hilarious. Yeah,

Cortex 56:10 female skinny houses are totally a thing. We've got a lot of new skinny house development in Portland at this point, because you can stick you know two or three of them on a lot. If you get rid of the old not skinny house, and then their new construction and they're nice enough and you can sell them for whatever, four or $500,000

Jessamyn 56:30 God I'm just looking at the inside of this million dollar house. What million dollar house has a bunk bed?

Cortex 56:37 The best kind? I mean,

Jessamyn 56:39 built in bunk beds, like not even I mean, you know what I mean? The whole thing is crazy. Yeah. Wow. Wow. A million. Well, all right. Yeah. I just gotta stop. I really Yeah, I mean, in Portland, I can see that. That's a thing around here. Like the idea of a skinny house makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah. I was. When I was flying to Virginia, you know, I had like a one hour flight. And the flight on the way in was from Florida. And so there was a real estate magazine, like tucked in the seat pocket in front of me with Florida real estate, which I started reading Just For Laughs. And there was literally like an ad for a house. It was like, nice house, but it was like, enjoy privacy on your half acre lot. Which like in Florida is probably a big lot. But around here is not a big until the whole idea of enjoying privacy on a lot. That was basically the size of my driveway. Yeah, I mean, I don't own this place. But whatever. Like privacy privacy is like 10 acres and you can't see your neighbors this was just like privacy is here. Your neighbors flush the toilet and in Florida. So yeah, I left Oh, despite over educated alligator who I actually know in real life also.

Cortex 57:55 I really enjoyed this post. Que O'Meara made that is it's hard to explain it. It's it's a guy

Jessamyn 58:02 can What the hell was going on here? So kale Mara, yeah, you just don't say Kamara.

Cortex 58:10 I say, hey, Omar to remind myself that, Kevin, yeah. And for a lot of years, it was like, it was just like this Komara thing in my mind that didn't parse at all. And so what I find they actually associate the human being, yeah. Oh, I would like to meet him. But he is super nice. I had, I've met him maybe twice in personnel, but at least one of them was drinks in a bar in New Orleans somewhere with cold Schiff. Way to meet anyone, so

Jessamyn 58:41 at least I don't think I've met him. I mean, now that I think about it, I don't think he was like, around by the time we, when I was down there for me if I 10, which was probably the last time if he now I'm trying to watch this in the house going so what

Cortex 58:56 this is, it's a clip from the show. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And I think it's a fairly famous clip from a fairly famous episode, but I'd never seen it before because I don't keep up with the show at all. But one of the characters is like developing this conspiracy theory about someone named Pepe Silvia. And apparently this is the touchstone for a lot of people. But for a lot of people like me, it's like, oh, okay, I guess that's something from It's Always Sunny. But then there's a guy just drumming along to it, and it's surprisingly fantastic. The guy is just like, like, literally just like playing drums. Sort of, along with the dialogue, you know, timing, like, you know, hits to words and syllables and sounds and like, there's nothing else to it. Like, I can't explain it more than it's not very long, so you can just watch it and see what you think of it. But it's great. I really liked it.

Jessamyn 59:43 I am glad you liked it. Yeah, it's

Cortex 59:46 probably gonna be a very sort of like, it's for you or it's not that but apparently there's entire, like, YouTube channels and like subreddits dedicated to this, this sort of thing. Which I haven't I haven't felt don't appreciate the hell out of that. Yeah, it's like a very specific thing was pretty, it's kind of RAD. So I was digging that

Jessamyn 1:00:10 I have to point to the posts that I made, because it's really good. Sometimes I don't think my posts are really good, but I'm pretty sure this one is. I was working at a public library a couple of weeks ago, for 20 hours because they hadn't hired a new librarian yet. And the old librarian moved to a new job. And there was this little picture, there was this little sconce this little crystal thing hanging on the wall, and a handwritten note next to it. That said, from the Mercy train gift to Chelsea, which was the town from the Mercy train mercy spelled like the French way, I mean, rfci. And I was like, What the hell is that? And it turns out, it was something interesting. So I made a little post about it, and you can read it if you like, that kind of thing. The thing that was cool about it, is that there used to be a mercy train boxcar in every state in the US, except Alaska. So it hit a lot of those little points. Like, you know, if you live in the US state, you could probably find something personally interesting about this. And if you lived in France, you might also etc. So that's cool. It was fun to make the post I made a

Cortex 1:01:18 great deal less effort making a post that I want to, because I really liked the thing that I posted about it's short animation by filmmaker named Kristen Laporte. And it's called High Street. That creepy thing with the but yes, and the thing is, saw

Jessamyn 1:01:32 this yesterday on Facebook, and was like, What the shit now here? You are talking to me about it?

Cortex 1:01:37 Yeah, it's been going around. I feel like I got on it early. Just by seeing I, I follow someone on Twitter who follows her work, and they posted it. And I was like, This is great and immediately posted it. And it's just yeah, it's it's wonderful. And it's totally it. Everybody should watch it. It'll take like, it's like two or three minutes long. And it's, it's so

Jessamyn 1:01:56 interesting, you heads up that there's a but in case you're in a place with a claymation, but would be a problem.

Cortex 1:02:02 Yeah, it's like it's a, it's a cartoon, but it's really not a worry, but just you know, just just in case, but I'm saying but a lot and I'm not doing it as a joke. It's just happening. But it's great. It's, it's, it's, it's very nice. It's really interesting to see people's reactions to it is part of what I like about it. And I think part of what I was feeling even before I got a chance to see those reactions, because it's really a genuinely kind of affectionate and kind. Like, little video, it's like this, it's just somebody saying nice things to you. But it has this odd animation style and there's a but and I think people are immediately sort of on edge for to go somewhere super weird. And then it just doesn't it just it's just actually this little, you know, animated person saying a bunch of nice things about you because they like you and they they've been thinking about you a lot lately. And you know, they're proud of the stuff you're doing and it's nice to just sort of hanging out with you. And it's it's I feel like the difference between expectations and what it does. It looks like it's gonna be so creepy. Yeah, and then it's just not and it's it's so it's, it feels like almost kind of a perfect Internet thing right now. And I'm not surprised it's it's been going around because that like it's it's it's really good. But it's also got something going on there in sort of its expectation setting so I think Kirsten knocked that the hell out of the park.

Jessamyn 1:03:29 Nice. Well and I now have to point out that it's a little surprising that we only have 39 posts that have the butt tag well, and given that and given that somehow in August of 2015 We did not manage to mention Joshua 70 ones but lips Vine Compilation for words that work together. I'm not sure either tag which only has one I don't think I've never seen this before I

Cortex 1:04:01 have seen this I think I may have debated mentioning it on the podcast and then either got distracted or decided not to or something I don't remember. It's it's it's great. People should watch it. I feel like I remember there being some sort of weirdness or problematic aspect of it. But oh,

Jessamyn 1:04:15 God is I don't know shit. I'm sorry if it's problematic,

Cortex 1:04:19 I think I think it may just get a little bit weirder and bloodier. Like it might just, it might go into like a poop joke direction at some point. I don't know. Like, I don't remember like an awful thing about it. But I think I remember not quite so basically,

Jessamyn 1:04:32 it's like people wearing spandex pants. And then they put like googly eyes on one of their butt cheeks, and then they kind of flex their butt cheeks back and forth. So it's like their butt is talking. Yeah. Or eating cake, or who? breakfast cereal. But it's all people doing it on Vine. Like back end vine and

Cortex 1:04:55 might be like one person even like if I'm remembering right? It might be like this is this thing this person did, and they did it a lot. But that might, I might be thinking of a different vibe.

Jessamyn 1:05:06 They all look kind of similar. All right, well, if it's problematic, it's problematic at some point after the first minute, because that's all I've been able to sit through while talking to you. But lips.

Cortex 1:05:19 Yep. You know, this is sort of halfway to talk about fanfare, because there will no doubt be a fanfare discussion about it. But there was a post about the new it trailer, which I'm not generally super interested in posts about. Yeah, like Stephen King's It, the book and the old miniseries, and there's, they're making a new movie out of it. You

Jessamyn 1:05:37 know, I used to read Stephen King a lot, but I don't think I ever read it.

Cortex 1:05:42 It's one of the biggies.

Jessamyn 1:05:43 Is it one of the goodies, though? I think so. I mean, it's interesting. So like, the stand, like, I'm a stand and like Cujo person,

Cortex 1:05:52 it's, I would say, is, has a lot in common with the stand not just length, but also some of the sort of storytelling sensibility and sort of sprawling out a big story. A lot of people like it, but you know, it's interesting. So this is why we've mentioned the thread is aside from, hey, they're gonna make a new movie, you know, whatever, it'll come out, and we'll talk about it. But there's a discussion series,

Jessamyn 1:06:10 but this is like a movie, and it'll be the first movie or there was a movie. And this is the new movie,

Cortex 1:06:15 this is the first movie, they might be doing this as a two movie thing, because it's kind of a big novel. So it looks like the novel basically takes place both back in the childhood past have a bunch of characters, and then they come back to the town like 27 years later, because there's like a supernatural cycle involved. So the book sort of tells both of those stories somewhat in parallel, as I remember. And I think this movie is telling sort of like the childhood part of it, it looks like and maybe they're making a second movie as well, that comes back. I'm not entirely sure I'm not super read up on the movie. But I thought that thread was interesting because there was a bunch of discussion of the miniseries and the novel and what people are making of the new movie based on the trailer compared to their understanding of the novel and a bunch of people reflecting on sort of the miniseries as a cultural landmark.

Jessamyn 1:07:01 Fan, the clown is Stellan Skarsgard. Son. Oh, interesting.

Cortex 1:07:06 I haven't got that bit. And I

Jessamyn 1:07:07 do like him. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the kid. But I like him. So the kids probably awesome.

Cortex 1:07:12 Yeah. Let's assume so anyway, so if you're interested in some what's going on with it, but also what's going on with a bunch of mefites thoughts about it and Stephen King and whatnot. It's kind of a it's a turned into pretty good read in terms of people talking about Stephen King stuff in general. So

Jessamyn 1:07:28 what can Stephen King's had a whole arc? Right? I mean, he's been famous, basically our whole lives. Yeah. But like, in and out for kind of different things, right. Like, or, or whatever his kind of lead thing is, at any given point in time is a little bit different. You know, he's definitely not writing the same book over and over again, at least I don't feel like he is.

Cortex 1:07:47 Yeah. He's He's returned some ground sometimes. But he tends to at least try and chase down a new idea. Pretty much every time it feels like so. It's mixed results, but I like him. But I

Jessamyn 1:08:01 mean, I kind of appreciate that. You know, that. Not every not everything. Kinda knocks it out of the park. Yeah. All right, from the pandering to Jessamyn threads. Oops, sorry. That's bill, Scar skirts name.

Cortex 1:08:20 If you need to pander to, like post bill, scars, guards name.

Jessamyn 1:08:23 And New York Public Library, kind of everything they do is adorable. But they basically have this digital collection, which is a series of little how to do it, cards that you could get out of cigarettes. Hmm. And if you don't know what cigarette cards are, there's also a link by to Treece O'Neill to an article in the week talking about what those things are, it was just basically like a little kind of a coupon or something you could get in your cigarettes, and it was adorable. So the post is by standard asparagus. And, you know, it's just a cool search of something that you could find cool images of in New York Public Library. So how cool is that? Yep. It's very cool as the answer. Public Library, nine posts tagged with that, because I'm not even doing a good enough job adding that post adding that tag to posts.

Cortex 1:09:24 There was a post this was by evil spork about a video in which a guy who does a video series about trying to get games to run on very low spec computers. Talks about doing that with our cheese just misplace my tab HalfLife two which is a fairly old game at this point, but was you know famously pretty good looking when it came out. And he basically says can I get HalfLife to to run Okay, on this computer on a USB stick essentially,

Jessamyn 1:09:58 I love these parts. So it's it's really nerdy tries to wedge something like Yeah, something like that.

Cortex 1:10:05 So it's like just it's just a few minutes long but it's like he sort of breaks down the half life to engine as much as possible to get to run at reasonable framerate. And it's it's nice and goofy, just a weird little thing. You don't need to really know anything about computer games or our computer stuff to, to follow it. So like, I like that. That was fun.

Jessamyn 1:10:25 Speaking of and only sort of related. So you saw the Netflix April Fool's

Cortex 1:10:30 thing I did not what was it? Oh, you didn't know.

Jessamyn 1:10:34 Well see, I just went to meta filter to see if it was like its own thread. No matches for the tag April's fools. Alright, hold on. Is there like an April Fool's, like, here's where all the jokes are.

Cortex 1:10:54 There was a thread it mentioned slashed up in Hacker News.

Jessamyn 1:10:58 Okay, well, Netflix did. Somebody had mentioned it to me. And like, you know, there was that, like, open up Google Maps on your phone. You can play Pac Man on your streets. Yeah. Super not interesting. In rural Vermont. Let me just tell you that right now. Super, super doll. So I was mostly spending the day with Jim and like, I did the meta filter thing. But the Netflix one was basically Netflix making a joke that they had canceled their Netflix live show, because people hated it. And so they basically had 40 minutes of this supposes show where you watch people sharpen pencils, you watch grass grow, you watch the refrigerator, open and close at the workplace. And then there's what's his but who played job on Arrested Development?

Cortex 1:11:46 Yeah, we learn that. Yes.

Jessamyn 1:11:48 Will Arnett being the live commentator watching people sharpen pencils. And, and, and it was, oh my god, I'm dying, right? Because one of them was like watching somebody tried to parallel park who's very bad at parallel parking. While Will Arnett does live commentary on it as if it were a canceled television show. So it's got canceled across like the middle of the thing the whole time. But the reason I bring it up at this moment, is that there was one part of it, which was watching somebody like using their computer in their office. And the interface the computer interface is clearly not any operating system. You know, like, yeah, it's not windows, it's not matte. And at first I'm looking at it fascinated, like, holy shit, is that Netflix user using be operating like using BPOS on their computer? Like that's so cool. And then I was like, oh, it's not cool at all because it's just them making up a fake operating system because they're afraid they're gonna get sued. And it's Netflix afraid you know?

Cortex 1:12:57 I don't know if it's even afraid they might just be like if they're trying to do anything with it's it's hard to communicate interface on on TV no matter what. So why not just joke something up that reads more visually. But I didn't see it so I'm just guessing. I don't know. Yeah, no, no.

Jessamyn 1:13:17 So this isn't a roundup post. It's a whole bunch of people fighting with each other. Or is that the roundup post?

Cortex 1:13:24 Oh, the the glitch

Jessamyn 1:13:26 Post No, the Google Mic drop. Oh,

Cortex 1:13:28 okay. Yeah, no, I just yeah, I didn't I didn't Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:13:33 Oh wait, that's from last year. What's the fucking roundup this year

Cortex 1:13:43 I will I will find it wasn't like

Jessamyn 1:13:46 doesn't have an April

Cortex 1:13:49 I feel like here we go. Here is the April Fool's thread from this wasn't huge. I think people were just kind of April Fool's on a fucking Saturday like, like I don't even mean to sound like I'm complaining about this. I'm just observing a thing. April Fool's on a Saturday really kind of fucking defends April Fool's because everybody's like going to have a such an easier time just not giving a shit. Like, you know, if you if you want to get away from the internet, because it's dumb fake news day. You're all set because you

Jessamyn 1:14:23 wanted to go back and see the roundup thread later when I had time for messing around. Oh, I even include the April Fool's tag. Definitely land

Cortex 1:14:33 fix that. I am now curious. Actually, I wonder if anyone has tried to do any study of the impact of a Saturday or Sunday April Fool's landing on April Fool's sort of activity and perceptions and receptions. And I realized we haven't had the internet long enough to really get a ton of data there. There's just not that many years.

Jessamyn 1:14:54 The Internet the entire lives of

Cortex 1:14:57 the contemporary internet that have has things like branded April Fool's jokes happening like we've had? Like maybe 15 years of that really happening at all?

Jessamyn 1:15:07 I want a thread of classic April Fool's jokes that people put in their gopher servers. Be them right?

Cortex 1:15:15 Yeah. Oh, man.

Jessamyn 1:15:17 That's what I want. But yeah, no, I know. I know what you mean. But this year, it felt like more than any other years people feel like their whole life since January has been like a huge April Fool's joke. And so, you don't want to like, Haha, it's Pac Man kind of thing. Yeah, man. I was really hoping there was a thread I hadn't seen on metal filter that I could then go and talk about, because the Will Arnett thing. The thing that's funny about it besides he's funny is it's 40 minutes long. And it just keeps switching to like, let's go back to watching the grass grow. Let's watch the pencils sharpened and let's watch Baba blah, blah, blah, let's like, and he's clearly kind of losing it. Like, I mean, jokey losing it, but losing it. And you can literally watch it for 40 minutes. And it's like a comedy special. Yeah, so it really was delightful. I don't even know if you can still find it. But I was hoping I could go somewhere and you know, talk about it with me fights because I just made me laugh. Well, maybe there's a very specific thing. Like you can't even explain it to non Internet people.

Cortex 1:16:23 Ya know, I'd like to watch that now. Actually. Yeah, he

Jessamyn 1:16:25 would appreciate it very much.

Cortex 1:16:27 I was too busy kind of working on meta filter deployment to like, really go

Jessamyn 1:16:34 ahead to go get you a sandwich because you were just too busy. DMing which also made me laugh.

Cortex 1:16:40 There was a lot of fun, but also amazingly exhausting. That was like four hours of like, oh, god, my brain is so on. And I have to type in sort of trying to accommodate questions and comments as they show up in the thread. I

Jessamyn 1:16:51 kind of dipped in and out so I didn't like was there like a continuity of what was going on there. It was it most people

Cortex 1:16:57 I've been sort of, we were I would say we had a main thread of continuity and also random jokes in there, which is pretty much perfect.

Jessamyn 1:17:04 Okay, because I missed the continuity. And today for the jokes. There are good jokes.

Cortex 1:17:08 Now the the continuity boils down to they started in the requested pony tavern, and then went down in the basement because the bartender said he had a rat problem. And there they found the band rat who were practicing there because I was secretary it's idea. Well done, honey. After which we both had the Wikipedia page for rat open because neither of us know anything about the band.

Jessamyn 1:17:33 Even Piercey headed up rat, rat, I

Cortex 1:17:35 think I feel like I met him. You should go into that thread after the fact. Tell me yo

Jessamyn 1:17:42 and Juliet. Yeah, totally.

Cortex 1:17:46 So rad sent them on a quest to find a dragon who had kicked them out of the rehearsal space. They were leasing because they couldn't meet the higher rent he was charging. And the Greg and it turns out, it was charging higher rent because he was insolvent because a bunch of government had tunneled into

Jessamyn 1:18:02 thing, but I still like they came from somewhere. Yeah,

Cortex 1:18:06 well, it came from deep beneath the earth where they are running a disruptive currency startup that involves mining, bit by bit to create a kind of non Fiat coin. And that's about where we were when I needed it off. Yep. Yes. Anyway. That's been my brain for about a week now. So I'm having to not like fall back into thinking about oh, but what if we done this with it with all that April Fool's stuff. I want to shout out another quick point we should probably want to ask Metafilter because we're already going way long, but a nice little thing. This is from T Kim girl. Say that word out loud. T cam girl. All the con Riffian really con Brechtian? I don't know. I'm really guessing.

Jessamyn 1:19:02 You sound authoritative when you say it. Thanks. That's, is this gonna ruin my computer? Oh,

Cortex 1:19:08 no, no, no, it's so this is my life. Yeah, it's an awesome sort of sea life, like sharks and rays and such. Tree of Life with expanding neat stuff. And it's just like a cool interface and a bunch of awesome pictures of things like manta rays and such. It's just nice. It's just a nice little thing. But it's a it's a it's a great metaphor for folks. It's like, hey, here is literally a cool thing on the web, and a bunch of people favorited and a few people said, Hey, this is cool and talked about marine life and boom, there you go. So good post.

Jessamyn 1:19:43 Yeah, this is the best I'll tell him about it. He does, you know bioscience stuff and is always looking for nice things to put on the computer in the lobby.

Cortex 1:19:53 Alright, shall we shall we move on to ASP Metafilter you know, I think you know the answer that I think we should move on as Metafilter

Jessamyn 1:19:58 I think I'm right there with Yeah. All right, good. Let me pick up all the favorites that I thought maybe I was going to talk about last month and then didn't

Cortex 1:20:09 I had something Oh, you know what I had a, I might have written to you about this. And I don't remember we talked about this on the podcast, but I came across this as Metafilter question. Recently, that's from the middle of last year asking about, you know, where is this GIF of this man skipping along in the water from? And it turns out, it's from

Jessamyn 1:20:29 Can we talk about this every month

Cortex 1:20:31 maybe? Like, I don't know if we talked about that. Anyway, it's, it's, it's, it's something from a weird, old video. And it's like a Soviet comedy team. And, like, we talked about this, but it was a mystery on milkshake too. And I think independent of us discussing on milkshake. This also ended up being asked by someone else who came across it and got answered there. And it's just, anyway, it's a funny little clip from a weird thing. So there you go.

Jessamyn 1:21:00 Hurray, that skipping person. Okay, ah, I always have a couple different categories for AskMe and a filter. So one that I enjoy is the which person in my family is wrong? Question. This one is case a dear addition. So it's dinnertime. There's four case studies for the grown ups, two for each spouse, one spouse eats to one spouse eats one. The one who eats one says the one belongs to them, and belongs to them all of the next day. The other person who ate to say that by the time it's the next day, it's the next day, and then you share whatever is in the fridge the next day. Ah, yeah, who is wrong?

Cortex 1:21:51 That's, you know, I think, like, I'm excited about the idea of this question, I want to go read the answers, because my feeling is like, I've got a very equivocal. Well, it really depends on the, you know, agreement and arrangements of the people involved, you know, sure. I don't think there is a clear right answer. The way like, obviously, if we, if we reframe this to like, you are dating someone and you go out for a meal, and one of you has leftovers, that they take home in a box, that's probably pretty much there's, but like that, but what if your dinner? Well, that's a whole Yeah. But like, can you imagine being like, hey, so we've been we've been dating for a couple weeks now. It's going well, also, technically, those are my leftovers, please give them to me. Like, that's, I can't see that. No, no, that doesn't work. That's That's nuts. So like, you know,

Jessamyn 1:22:49 but with the case of the a thing, it's kind of, you know, like, Who cooked them is what I want to know, you know, and there's children involved in the whole thing. And like, you know, if a kid doesn't need a case of the, like, those Kcd is belonged to the parents, I believe that like, maybe the kid doesn't feel that way. At any rate, it was interesting, because there was not an obvious answer. Although I felt like there was so it was interesting listening to people talk about it.

Cortex 1:23:11 Yeah. Well, like, is there a scarcity thing there, too, is part of what I think of, I guess, like, you know, is it are these cases the is special? Or is it just like, hey, yeah, melted some cheese threw in some chicken? Like, you know, because like, if it's a special case of do that, at that point, you know, maybe I would like know, that one is also mine, I still get like, I get, I want my second special.

Jessamyn 1:23:32 That's the thing I can sometimes be I mean, here's my problem with eating right, like when I'm eating like something that's delicious, but like, you know, how some things have certain extra delicious parts of it? Like, you know, maybe you're eating macaroni and cheese, and there's this little like, crusty part on the top that you know, is going to be amazing. Yeah. You say that, like you don't know,

Cortex 1:23:52 I was I was getting I was getting caught up into macaroni and cheese. Sorry.

Jessamyn 1:23:55 Okay. But so like, there's like, sometimes you eat a thing where there's like one extra good bite, and like, I save that extra good bite for later, or not later, but like later in the meal, whereas Jim eats that extra good bite soon. And then sometimes, you know, we'll pick off each other's plates occasionally, because like we get along, and that's not a problem. But occasionally he'll like go after my extra good bite. And I'm like, I'm saving that I stab you with the fork kind of thing. And to him. It's like, what all bites are the good bites, but I think he subliminally eats the good bites first. So if I let him do his thing, he would have his good bite in mind.

Cortex 1:24:31 Yeah, so that's a problem. Because I

Jessamyn 1:24:34 like to you know, I you know, I like the last bite to be good if the last bite of your food you know, is has some weird problem with it just colors the whole meal. Yeah. I feel like

Cortex 1:24:47 there was a there was an AskMe a thread that I tripped across after it was resolved. And I was so relieved.

Jessamyn 1:24:53 Oh, and that was by rush it. I don't know if I mentioned it, but I'm sorry. Go on.

Cortex 1:24:57 This is from Mike L. Or maybe mica or I don't know,

Jessamyn 1:25:01 Mike. Oh, for God's sakes, did they figure this one

Cortex 1:25:03 out? I did. And I was so glad I found this on being mentioned on Twitter, and it was very much. Oh, man, this is maddening sort of content.

Jessamyn 1:25:11 So I'm sorry, back up and explain it. I didn't mean to jump ahead. This question helped

Cortex 1:25:15 me identify an actor. They were they right. I'm thinking of a comedic actor who may still be active, but came up in his 20s in the 80s, or maybe 90s. And who primarily acted in screwball comedies, but I can't think of the name. Here's some identifying characteristics and lays out a few specific aesthetic things. Usually, these

Jessamyn 1:25:33 things basically get answered in like, anywhere between one to nine minutes.

Cortex 1:25:38 Yeah, like, some will be like, oh, yeah, no, here, you take it off. And what happens is a couple people make suggestions, and they fall to say, oh, no, not not them, although it kind of get what you're going for, and a few other people like, oh, well, but this and this, and this, and this is, yeah, those close but no, that's not it notes several more. No, that's not an either, but several more, oh, well, no, none of those guys, and it just keeps going for lessons of common,

Jessamyn 1:26:01 clearly misremembering something important. Like maybe it's a woman or maybe like they had blonde hair, not black.

Cortex 1:26:08 Yeah. And so it goes on and on and on. And people make dozens of suggestions. And then finally, imaginary Mary pops and says, Oh, Matt McCoy. And immediately the asker is like, Yes, that's him. Oh, god, it's Matt McCoy. You know, and

Jessamyn 1:26:23 I'm looking at his end, he was really active in the late 80s and early 90s. So it's been a steady actor since then. And I'm looking at this picture of him and I, he doesn't look familiar to me at all.

Cortex 1:26:33 He looks, he looks vaguely familiar to me. So like, if someone said, Oh, this is an actor named Matt McCoy. Isaac isn't now okay. Well, I guess I've seen him in something. But, but yeah, I'd never would have liked. I didn't know the name. I wouldn't have guessed in a million years. And apparently, neither would like several dozen people. So. But yes, it's a great thrill ride of a thread, it's almost spoilery to say that it's solved. But it's also seems like a kindness to make that clear going in. Because it's much easier to enjoy.

Jessamyn 1:26:59 And I only feel like this is spoilery if like it was everybody's thing, it's just one person who was like, I'm wondering and it's okay to be like they figured it out as being do other things that have to do with kind of OLED television or whatever. There's a stereotypical French expression, which seems universal in the USA, like when you're talking about France in your life. And, you know, is this a real thing? Do French people say it and where the hell did it come from? And so people who know more about this, we're like, oh, it's more a shovel. Yay, here's some, here's some links. It's a short like this, but then other people do that. And bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla. And so it just turns out to be kind of a thread where people kind of know where it comes from. But they're not like, there's not like a real recording of the guy saying it. But that's, you know, it's his, it's his French laugh, and then people kind of rift on it. So it's not technically totally answered, but mostly answered. And yeah, the whole thing was pretty good by healthy, puffy.

Cortex 1:28:11 Nice. Yeah, that's interesting. It's one of the things where, like, it does feel like there's like, well, everybody knows that. Yeah, that's just like, it sounds like one year impersonating a French person laughing. But why? Yeah, that's nice.

Jessamyn 1:28:27 Now, here's the one that's been driving me crazy. Like, you know how sometimes somebody comes out with a question. And they're having this nagging problem, and everybody gives them a bunch of advice, and they come in, they're like, thank you so much. I'll let you know kind of what happens. And then you never heard from them again. And you're like, Oh, God, I hope whatever the thing was, didn't kill them. So this is mystical listicle, who has a thread titled helped my house and everything and it smells like a dirty hippie commune. And like, we've all been there, but like, you can tell when you walk into somebody else's house that it smells that way. But you kind of sometimes just figure like, oh, they must, like smoke a bunch of weed or somebody in the room doesn't house doesn't bathe, or like they've got teenagers or like, whatever the thing is, but like Miska listicles. Like, no, like, this isn't like, like, we're not any of these smells. We can't figure out why. Help, help, help. And so lots of good advice. I gave some advice, but like lots of other people gave good advice, but now they haven't updated since the 26th of February and I'm dying to know if they missed it. Are you okay?

Cortex 1:29:37 Well, I hope we eventually find out about the miasma. Oh, this, this, okay. Yes, this is a good thread. How many chickens were employed at minimum to provide a steady supply of eggs for guest ons, breakfasts? He's repeating the beast. No one No one needs to A guest on Nolan

Jessamyn 1:30:02 bliss eats a lot.

Cortex 1:30:05 He's the antagonist Archie. How do you not know buting the beast come on

Jessamyn 1:30:09 how the fuck would I terrible sexist garbage?

Cortex 1:30:13 Yeah, but I watched a lot of Disney kid movies as a kid, young adult because of babysitting. So

Jessamyn 1:30:19 because you were a babysat, or you were a babysitter babysitter,

Cortex 1:30:23 mostly because of

Jessamyn 1:30:25 babysitting is a little vague.

Cortex 1:30:26 Yes. Sorry. No, I'm too old to have been watching it because I was being babysat. But I see

Jessamyn 1:30:33 there's a note here by eyebrows Mickey guys don't miss this question.

Cortex 1:30:38 Stan is the chauvinistic.

Jessamyn 1:30:43 See, you ask why I don't watch it. The first word out of your mouth. He's

Cortex 1:30:47 the guy. He's the bad guy.

Jessamyn 1:30:49 Who cares? There's enough chauvinism in my real life. Well,

Cortex 1:30:52 in this film, he's the bad guy, and he's a chauvinistic, big, strapping handsome, not very bright, but thinks he is dude from town and wait, wait, you said he's handsome. Yes. He's got a big old chin and everything you know.

Jessamyn 1:31:08 And so he eats a lot.

Cortex 1:31:10 He is very boastful about all sorts of things. And he sings a famous song. No, like people 12 People Sing it and he sings along and they're basically everybody in town. All the dudes are like, Oh, guest on there's no one like if done. No one eats like guest on no one subs, like guest on no one bothered about it at like a Stan. There's been netfilter posts about this song. Okay. But one of the things he does is eat a lot of eggs. You know, when he was a lad, he ate four dozen eggs every morning. Now he eats five dozen for breakfast. And so how many chickens? This is a lot of setup for this question. If you don't get it, but yeah, so the question is, to me,

Jessamyn 1:31:47 what's the

Cortex 1:31:48 supply chain for these eggs that he's eating? How many chickens would you need? What's going on? And people? You know, it's not a ton of answers. But like every, there's a bunch of like good contributions from different angles on this question. You know, people tackle things like, you know, average yield or chicken lifespan

Jessamyn 1:32:06 where the chickens are younger chickens. Yeah.

Cortex 1:32:08 Are we talking about a contemporary guest on or are we talking guest on in the era in which buting the beast seems roughly set because of breeding for chicken output in the ensuing you know, 150 years or whatever. So yeah, it's just, it's delightful. It's fun to read, even if you don't know buting the beast, I guess, but definitely, this premised on having a sense of guests held

Jessamyn 1:32:34 guests on? Yes, yeah. Yeah, I just assumed he was like from some game I just I literally didn't know and you know, didn't care that much, but was like I'm missing something that makes this interesting.

Cortex 1:32:47 Nope, he's just, he's just a big blowhard.

Jessamyn 1:32:50 All right. thread that I enjoyed about broken technology from Catan Su, basically more detailed stories about how Tech's Tech was designed. Especially stories of a million things going wrong. So nice links to things to read about stuff going wrong in tech. Nice. One of the early links is firsthand, no damned computer is going to tell me what to do the story of the naval tactical data system. But seriously, it's a great long read about Navy nerd stuff. And if you look at the pictures, it's just like old tech porn. It's just so good. So good. Yeah. Highly recommend it. Yeah,

Cortex 1:33:40 that's it. That is a that is a pile of goodness in that thread.

Jessamyn 1:33:48 Are the things you loved? I didn't I had kind of a shortlist of AskMe edify this time around because I've been gone.

Cortex 1:33:53 Yeah, no, I think I've spent my this may have been this may be a historically brief asked Metafilter segment for the podcast but that's okay. Because we're like an hour and a half at this point. So

Jessamyn 1:34:02 it's just always fun. It's always fun talking to you. It is it is like what about what about March by women? How did March by women go I noticed that nobody did kind of a wrap up post. Yeah.

Cortex 1:34:13 I'm assuming someone will this week.

Jessamyn 1:34:15 I didn't use the tag when I posted and maybe I should go back and add that

Cortex 1:34:18 yeah, I feel like like this is such a refrain and it's it's something that we continue to seriously sort of try and figure out how to go with it but like it's hard to feel like marched by women this time around wasn't somewhat affected by just fucking everything. Just like everything else. And so I feel like it didn't we tried to plug it a bit like sidebar and mentions on

Jessamyn 1:34:42 metadata. They use March by women as a tag or Women's March. I think we did March by women again. Okay, so you see it in the sidebar. I'll go look. But

Cortex 1:34:51 yeah, so it looks like there might have been another it maybe it was Women's March. I might be flipping around in my head. I think I think Women's March. And some people ask us march by women. So if you look on the like, it went pretty well there's there's a big pile of posts, if you're if you search the tag, you know, we get down to the bottom of the first list of tag search results. And it's still the middle of March only so. So I think it went, I think it went pretty well. It just hasn't, it hasn't had quite the same sort of energy around it, because there's been all this other distracting stuff going on. So hopefully we'll get a nice round.

Jessamyn 1:35:28 Somebody kind of flogging it and meta talk once it started. People were just like, yeah, all right. Yeah.

Cortex 1:35:32 Yeah, you know, psychiatrics has been a really good, like driver for this. And even she noted, I remember at one point, like midway through the months that like, you know, she's kind of pooped right now. So she hasn't been like, you know, pushing it as hard as you want to, but, but it looks like it. It feels like it still sort of went which is good. So yeah, we'll get around up. And we've been talking about the idea of doing other like themed months to try and give folks other excuses to get out there make a post when otherwise, they might just sort of sit,

Jessamyn 1:36:03 Gene Munster just fun. And there's no downside. You know, as long as the theme isn't like Dixon politics or something like that, which is, you know, the default theme nowadays, it seems like but you know, it's always given people good. You know, you can have game gave months and months and whatever month Yep. Music Month. You know, take all the big the big tags. Yeah, exactly.

Cortex 1:36:26 Computer month. We could like weeks two, we talked about that, like the idea of like, you know, if it's maybe too much to try and do an entire month on a theme, we could do like a theme for a week. So it's a smaller target. And people can sort of jump in and out quickly. Yeah, so yeah, stuff like that. We had a big, we've had a couple big discussion I did the state of the site post.

Jessamyn 1:36:47 Oh, yeah, read that long. Things are mostly good. Yeah.

Cortex 1:36:51 You know, it's steady. The Internet is a weird place still, but people are helping support and finances have been okay. And you know, where we go next after the tech stuff is the main big question at the moment. But it was nice to sort of round it all up and let people know where we are. And folks have talked repeatedly about the idea of doing periodic fundraiser posts, too. And I want to get back to that. So I think I'll do something like that in

Jessamyn 1:37:13 the future. I think it's a great idea, man. I think people freaked out a little bit about your state of the site, because it was right after that interview I did with Patrick. And you were like, Oh, hey, by the way, people were like, oh, it's like, click the link. You guys come on.

Cortex 1:37:29 Yeah. Something in my phrasing it several people were like, Oh, man. Yeah, I was waiting for the part where this involved. And so with sadness, I step away or something. I was like, no, no, not at all. Not a choice. So yeah, clearly, I didn't quite get my phrasing, right. But I think that's a candidate. That's fucking everybody's in that headspace of waiting for the shoe to drop. So it was nice. It was nice to people actually just put it out as No, actually things are going okay.

Jessamyn 1:37:56 Right. You're very, you're bright delete that things are fine. Yeah.

Cortex 1:38:00 I tried to put the lead writer friends and by the way, but I think I didn't get there as hard as I should have.

Jessamyn 1:38:05 Well, and I think for people, it's been around for a while, stated the site. Since you've been doing it has been, things are good. And when Matt was doing it, it was really like one just punch in the gut after another because he only would talk about the site when there was something incontrovertible that he had to give everyone the bad news about and that's not what you guys do, which I think is worked well.

Cortex 1:38:31 Yeah. And it's almost like, you know, I, it would have been good for me to do another one between the last one and this one. Just to continue with the well, no news is good news front, because that's the thing, like if it doesn't feel like there's a ton to say there's like, Okay, well, I've got stuff I need to worry about that I actually have to put concentration on so and that's it just defers itself. And that's how it ended up pushing for months. Because there's always something else that was like, oh, no, just gonna, just gonna get this done. Gonna get the band aid ripped off and sit down and write it. Yeah, good for you. So yeah. But yeah, that's led to a bunch of discussion in that, that in another thread, talking about sort of changes over time and decline, the overall activity on the site and the web. Interesting to see a bunch of discussion,

Jessamyn 1:39:16 looking at membership, plateauing, or dipping a little bit or engagement or whatever

Cortex 1:39:21 it would be, it would be nice to be able to have a discussion about that. That wasn't as charged with people's feelings about the politics threads as it is, but I mean, I understand partly because it's a big, it's got a big footprint on the site at this point.

Jessamyn 1:39:33 I think for some people, their feelings about politics there, it's really become their feeling about metal filter. And for some people, they really don't. Yeah, I mean, for me, like I said, the mega threads are awesome, because everybody goes there, you know what I mean? And I don't have to Yeah, whereas I think for other people the fact that they're they're creeps out into other parts of the site. I mean, I kind of feel that way but not strongly, and just kind of poisons everything slowly.

Cortex 1:39:58 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so there's been a bunch a bunch of discussion lately. And that's that's been a good thing because I think we've got a lot of stuff to continue talking about as a as a community and I'm looking forward to trying to get some more work done on some development stuff Trimble's, gonna have more time as as we move on into the year here to work on development stuff, it's been very part time so far. So this is a nice opportunity to sort of dig in on some of the stuff that's been deferred for really the last year I mean, as much as PB does a great job of being helpful in transitioning out and getting simple setup. And as much as that was basically as smooth as it could have gone and I've been really relieved by that. It's still been kind of a pause on a lot of stuff just because we had to get transitioned stuff set up and sort of get everything figured out on fumbles and and then just have fun believe and find the time to be able to do more than sort of small tweaks and fixes and keep itself alive. Yeah, exactly. You know, there's there's, there's a certain amount of has to happen stuff and if we have extra hours after that great but sometimes we don't so so I'm looking forward to be able to do more of the extra hours there. But yeah, I don't know. It's it's an adventure out

Jessamyn 1:41:21 there. I want to wrap it up with one more post that I found while I was looking at women's march by room 641 dash a called Mr. Toads wild hat with pictures of animals with tiny hats. Ah, thank you and good night.