Podcast 129 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 129: We're Blaming Everything On Pancakes (2017-06-04).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 Podcast stand for a podcast podcast. Josh bar gentlemen where God was

Cortex 0:14 the best of the web Welcome to Episode 129 of Best of the web and that ultra monthly podcast. I am Josh Maillard aka cortex.

Jessamyn 0:32 And I'm Jessamyn

Cortex 0:34 and we are recording this on Saturday June 3, we are trying to get back on a normal schedule after doing a belated dis shortish whatever the hell was going on podcast middle of last month. You know, I had I had this idea that we would do that one and we just mentioned a few things. And then you know, we'd come into this one and we'd like, sort of cover everything we missed. Then I realized it's it's fucking impossible for me to actually remember exactly what I did and did not cover in an already somewhat harried podcast. So I'm just gonna mention the stuff that I mentioned. And some of might be duplication and I just, I just don't care. I don't care. I'm,

Jessamyn 1:09 I'll be happy to keep you honest.

Cortex 1:10 All right, good. Good. That'll work. That'll work.

Jessamyn 1:15 And we don't usually record on Saturdays. So that's the one thing that's unusual.

Cortex 1:19 Yeah. We're gonna see if there maybe there's a weekend feel it's you know, it's, I

Jessamyn 1:23 was I was at the Rhode Island Library Association Conference. Yes, busy. And then yesterday was just kind of, you know, recouping from travel and hanging out with people and eating too much Portuguese food. And I was in traffic like three times in a day. Wow. Like, why that never happens. I'm usually in traffic one time in a week or a month. But I, you know, I went out to dinner with somebody from the conference. And we were recommended this awesome place, but it was on the other side of the city. So we went like through the city. And then I took him the airport back through the city. And it was still trafficking the whole time. And he's like, Oh, God, I'm so sorry about this. I'm like, dude, whatever. This is like, you know, theme park for me. I never seen

Cortex 2:03 your regular Jack Kerouac. Because he was on the road.

Jessamyn 2:11 Give it as much laughs

Cortex 2:14 I'm giving it the rest. Oh, I need this. Well, yes. I don't know. How are you? We talked beforehand. So that's like, that's total artifice. Because you know, we've been

Jessamyn 2:26 right Josh is eating pancakes. I was talking about how eating pancakes for breakfast is like solo pancakes. So just a pancake syrup on it is like a thing I can't do and not even anymore. I don't know if I ever could I just I think I powered through the weird carby sugar caffeine crash. When I was younger. There's definitely Life's too short.

Cortex 2:47 Yeah, like but like the big buildup in the big drop afterward is is is a danger. And I totally get it. In my defense. I was giggling about it when he first said a little bit because you didn't say all that you said?

Jessamyn 2:58 Oh, yeah. Pancakes in my family. You can't have pancakes for breakfast. Yeah.

Cortex 3:02 Which is just like, that's, it's just what that's like, that's like saying, Well, you know, we don't believe in in swimming and water. You know, it's the whole thing. That's, that's all there is to it. It's pancakes. Well, I won't go that far. I mean, our pancake dinner.

Jessamyn 3:18 And here's the thing, right? Like, um, you know, now that malt shop is up and running, we have our Dutch baby thread. And so I've really shifted to being sort of more of a Dutch baby person over pancakes because you can put like meat on them. They've got an egg in them. So there's they're intrinsically more or the egg to everything else ratio is higher. So they've got a little bit more, they're there. Yeah. And I just I haven't had as many pancakes since I've been on the Dutch baby train.

Cortex 3:50 I've been I've been trying to consume fewer carbs in general for a while now. And you know, it admits it's a mixed strategy. It's not a hardcore saying it like the degree of adherence comes and goes, but, but there are some things that are easy to sort of just cross out as a rule and like, a lot of karbi breakfast foods fall in there. So pancakes have gone down, but also Dutch babies, which we've probably talked about this before, but like I grew up with them as German pancakes.

Jessamyn 4:20 Right, right. But, but and I'd really never had them before. So yeah, they're still kind of new and interesting for me.

Cortex 4:27 We learned to make them in home ec class in middle school. I think I learned

Jessamyn 4:31 to make them on the internet.

Cortex 4:33 Yeah, you and everybody else I learned to make what's your posers?

Jessamyn 4:38 I learned to make some kind of weird omelet and home at class. I didn't learn a lot of useful cooking at home at class. I learned a lot of weird esoteric cooking like lollipops, who gives you that right? It's got to be useful. What you should learn is how to cook a steak or whatever alternative protein you prefer, like something that you can put on the table and people can eat and be fed

Cortex 4:59 to be free. Our kids have like no appreciation for good steak and steaks expensive so I can see why. Hey, let's let's let's let you make candy out of it extremely inexpensive ingredients.

Jessamyn 5:09 It's a very good point. I missed that whole. I mean, I learned to sew, which was super helpful. And probably some other stuff that I've forgotten sewing was useful sewing machine stuff was useful.

Cortex 5:19 Yeah, more people should learn to sew, I should I should learn to sew basically, at all I can. I can sew very slightly, I can certainly hand stitch very badly, but I've never like developed any facility and I should, I should do something about that.

Jessamyn 5:34 Yeah, and I can't keep really keep a sewing machine going, you know what I mean? Like, I can have a sewing machine and do some sewing with a sewing machine and be like, Whoa, this is great. And then at some point, I sit down, I do a thing. Everything goes. And then I don't sew again for 20 years, right? Like, I know people who do that with the internet and their computers. And I'm always like, oh, so sad. We should help these people. But that's me with sewing machines. You know, I've probably got a sewing machine in my house. I just put it away when it stopped working and couldn't get it working again.

Cortex 6:05 Yep. Well, there's a lot of stuff in life, you know, it's really easy to just, you know, there's probably other stuff to do if you do just put something down and never go back to it. So

Jessamyn 6:13 absolutely. It always gets filled with another thing. Oh, so 129 Nothing. Yeah, interesting about it, except it's a rep digit and basics. So it's 333. And basics. I was like that nurse. And it's pretty cool in binary. Like it's one and then like six zeros and then one again.

Cortex 6:31 No, it's a palindrome. Yeah, I like that. Oh, I guess that makes it. Yeah. Okay. That would make sense. Because it's, it's 128, which is round number in binary,

Jessamyn 6:40 which does all sorts of cool stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought that it's a happy number to which I don't know what it

Cortex 6:47 just has a it has a positive attitude. Okay. Don't Don't Don't give it like just let it have this. Let it have this.

Jessamyn 6:54 Teach it. I don't understand it. i Yeah, I'll read this later. It's also happy number. But yeah. 129. And it's June, which Haley June?

Cortex 7:05 It is June. You don't

Jessamyn 7:07 you don't have to have the air conditioning on? Well, at least at least where I am.

Cortex 7:12 We just we just sort of move back and forth every couple of days in Portland right now is how it is? Of course, no

Jessamyn 7:18 one there freezing are way too hot.

Cortex 7:20 Yeah. I mean, we had some nice days in in between and some good transitional ones. But there's been a few taught and then you know, go back to being overcast and a little bit chilly, which is what I prefer. So I'm not complaining about that end of it.

Jessamyn 7:33 Yeah, that's what it is here. You just put on a sweater. Yeah,

Cortex 7:35 exactly. You know, weather. Let's talk about jobs real briefly, because I don't think we talked about it all. Like last month, we just said let's not even say what we're talking about. Let's just say you mentioned things and I kind of enjoyed that. But there's also something about

Jessamyn 7:48 work but jobs is has nothing a little bit yeah,

Cortex 7:52 there's there's there's one new thing or is our text window, even paste anything in our Here we go. Boom, there, there is a global health eLearning Specialist position at the University of Washington. So that's

Jessamyn 8:06 really pretty cool.

Cortex 8:07 That's a degree. Yeah, really not. Oh, that's right.

Jessamyn 8:11 You know that? Yeah.

Cortex 8:12 I'm a little as these pancakes I had pancakes for breakfast, and I'm just I'm,

Jessamyn 8:17 it's the morning where you are whereas the afternoon where I am

Cortex 8:20 exactly. So you know. Yeah, check that out. If you're in the Seattle area and are interested in such a thing.

Jessamyn 8:28 I worry a little bit not that this probably isn't a great job. But any place that calls like online learning elearning Well, I mean, it's, you know what I mean? Like, it's 2017 Isn't it? Just on the other hand,

Cortex 8:41 it's like, it's, it's a large institution, which they tend to move slow on stuff. And so like, you know, elearning feels like the sort of thing that was like, establishes the departmental title or something, you know, 1015 years ago? What it was like, you know, ya know, we're elearning that's what we're gonna try and, you know, and then that's stuck there. So, yeah, he could be right. That's my theory. And sticking but

Jessamyn 9:08 University of Washington awesome place to work, I bet or at least I think so. It seemed like a good place. I mean, yeah, there's places that you look in here. Like, that place is fucked and probably a terrible place to work. The University of Washington is never struck me as being one of those kinds of sites.

Cortex 9:22 University of toilet, definitely, definitely. I've always felt that way. I was like, I don't know. Why did you why did you build a college inside of a giant scale model of a toilet?

Jessamyn 9:33 You know, how does your brain go there?

Cortex 9:36 I don't know. Pancakes, everything are lame and everything on pancakes,

Jessamyn 9:39 oatmeal and coffee and just yeah, I've also been awake for a lot longer.

Cortex 9:46 I'm just, I'm just adding that as a potential title now. You're wondering

Jessamyn 9:51 about breakfast, oatmeal projects, oatmeal and coffee.

Cortex 9:56 That sounds so that sounds so like. That's like that's a rock Solid breakfast, right? That's like I'm gonna get up and like, do my day sort of breakfast.

Jessamyn 10:04 So I need my brain kind of early in the whole thing. Oh, well, you know, we probably should mention since we're doing this I don't know if we did mention this and I don't think we did. Veggie boys butter and syrup. Occasional Food News.

Cortex 10:21 Oh yeah.

Jessamyn 10:22 Just I mean since we're scooting over two projects, and since this is kind of apropos Yeah. Boy,

Unknown Speaker 10:30 nice segue has

Jessamyn 10:31 written a nice newsletter called butter and syrup, which is just a little bit of stuff about food. That's cute.

Cortex 10:38 You may remember veggie boy projects will its skeleton like waffle? Yes. So yes. Breakfast bonafides bone a few days, we've talked about this before to what bonafides or verse or bone a few days, bona.

Jessamyn 10:57 fides, television, you know.

Cortex 10:59 So here's the thing, like, I know that like popularly it's bonafides. But it's like, it's like Latin, right? It's like it's

Jessamyn 11:06 Oh, god, you're nerding on it. Well, that's the thing like iterating. On Latin.

Cortex 11:10 It feels like it feels like it's it's one of those things where it's like, it's just

Jessamyn 11:13 like, where you start calling Amarillo, Texas like, I'm better yo, because it's Hispanic.

Cortex 11:17 Do people in Amarillo call it that? Because no, they call it Amarillo. Learning from like, South by Southwest that had meaning to me was how much people don't pronounce anything in Austin, the way you would think they would if they were just pronouncing Spanish words. Yeah, no. Should I assume nothing about anything anywhere in Texas? No, no, I'm not. I'm not trying to be like, but I mean, it's the same argument, right? Sure. Yeah. And that's the thing. I'm not trying to say, like, Well, now let's be correct. I'm trying to like understand, I don't understand if there are actual, practical competing interpretations of how you should say it. Or if literally, everyone's just like, No, it's bonafides. Just shut the fuck up. Because I'm fine with bonafides. But at some point, my brain like, I think someone may be corrected someone and like, I was like, Oh, wait, really, and I've never really been able to let go of it. So it's like, this weird juxtaposition mystery in my head. Not a point about which I've specifically want to be pedantic, I just got like, the pedantic part of my brain is like, gets excited. And I'm like, Oh, Jesus, here we go. Again.

Jessamyn 12:16 I have I have that same problem. I just literally, I'm speaking at a conference in Canada, like later in the year, and I had to register. And he usually drives me crazy, because you have to fill out these forms. They're super irritating. And if it's one, it's no big deal. But if it's like, 15 a year, it's irritating. Yeah. And I filled it out was like, great, everything's good. And then I was like, you know, but I had to tell you, like, what, you use the word, it's here. And it's actually the other it's and I'm sorry. So yeah, the little ticks that you can't, I mean, I was right. But you know, I don't know if they care. Right. Like, they're like, Dude, we've got this whole conference registration thing that almost entirely works. I'm like,

Cortex 13:02 this small detail that is is unambiguously incorrect, despite not impeding communication anyway.

Jessamyn 13:09 Right? Well, it was somebody's title. And I didn't want them to look bad. Like it was the title for their talk. Yeah, and I wanted to forget about it. So I didn't meet them and be like, this is a person who doesn't know how to spell.

Cortex 13:22 Yeah, that's more of a thing. That's all the way. Yeah. I enjoy this project by never calm, one light Portrait Project. Basically just taken pictures of people where they work. Which, if I recall correctly, is the Yeah, The Daily Show. I think.

Jessamyn 13:44 I was gonna say I recognize some of these people from television. Yeah.

Cortex 13:50 Like, who can forget good old horse mask? Yeah, so it's just just a simple setup. One light, one camera taken portraits of folks. And it's nice. I mean, it's, it's interesting because like, there's obviously a degree of sort of goofy familiarity to this.

Jessamyn 14:11 Some people make a face they clearly kind of know what's going on. They're not supposed to be glamour shots.

Cortex 14:15 Yeah, you've got you've got a whole mix of sort of like, mugging and comfortable happy smiles and people pull and stuff and then the occasional, like, you know, attempt to the actual, like, sort of straight faced portrait pose. And it's a really nice mix. And, and I like the simplicity of setup means like, everything that changes from person to person jumps out a lot more compared to if you were looking like

Jessamyn 14:42 what they're wearing. And yeah. And you've seen I mean, do you have a new I mean, never call me uses an actual camera, but like, Have you've seen that the new iPhones have that portrait mode. Do you have that?

Cortex 14:56 I have not. I mean, I I heard something about that. But I haven't looked into it. And I'm

Jessamyn 15:01 like, you know how like you get OS updates and they do certain things. Yeah, if you have older phones, you can't do certain things that the camera does. And I guess the new ones have a portrait mode. I mean, I literally saw a television advertisement about I've seen some like sponsored my phone is not new. But but it does just a little bit of that stuff like slightly better lighting slightly fades the background slightly, like just makes everybody look more like you took an intentional portrait as opposed to you know, snapshot kind of stuff. Interesting, but it's supposed to make things look like this. So yeah, very nice. Yeah. While we're talking about food, maybe I'm a little hungry. I don't know what's going on here. But bow beacon or bow beacon. Oh, let's figure this one out. Who even knows. Bow beacon is trying to eat the entire menu at my local beachfront Chinese restaurant in Massachusetts. They have a chop suey sandwich on the menu. The only one apparently it's in Salem. So there's a whole bunch of Nephi to live around there. And I was reading this being like what I've totally had a chop suey sandwich, but I have not. I have had a chow mein sandwich, which is a delicacy down in Fall River, Massachusetts, which is kind of near where I am. And I had no idea. So at any rate, Barbican is eating through the menu, and they're gonna, you know, put they put one picture up on Instagram, it's another Instagram. It's called eating Salem low. And it just has, you know, all the sodas, pictures of the stuff. Now, I'm super hungry. Now, because I came down here, and I went to Rhode Island for this conference, but I haven't like kind of settled in and gotten to my spots yet. You know, I've just been at home like eating leftovers and whatever. And so Jim and I usually have the spots we go to, but we haven't been to the spots yet, because we're not. We're not up and out yet. But she does get off the phone with you. Can we go to all the spots?

Cortex 17:10 Yes. This is a good plan. You get your day now.

Jessamyn 17:13 Yeah, I got one more food thing. It's really weird. I didn't think about this until I got on the thing. But Max Barber has done a little movie. Yeah, eating Year Old Candy. And of course, it's always great to see Max doing anything just because he's a great sort of actor and interesting person.

Cortex 17:40 I've done some other eating stuff to like they've got to eating Russian food. And

Jessamyn 17:45 yes, and this is eating Year Old Candy.

Cortex 17:49 It is charming. And also Bert the dog makes an appearance. Yeah, no, it's a lot of a lot, a lot of good. A lot of good faces in that video, if you want some some some good face shots. Just lots of twisted metals. And at one point, they're sort of like a I would say like a dead eyed stare for Max around the 11 minute marker. So as I think some of the candy starts to really sit in his stomach. You Yeah, no.

Jessamyn 18:23 I liked I'm done with food.

Cortex 18:26 This project by H li how long? About BRAC backpropagation for literal credit assignment, which basically saying, Hey, there's this

Jessamyn 18:35 I didn't like those words. It's pretty

Cortex 18:39 wonky. I like I only have sort of like a general. So Oh, yeah, I know, I learned about this at one point in college, you know, 18 years ago or something. Backpropagation is a type of basically sort of a neural network kind of operation, you know, you'd have like values for relating to each other via weighted stimuli and stuff. So you can sort of take a bunch of data and then sort of take take sort of a neural network rolling pin to it and get some results out of it. Somehow, I'm bringing the food into I guess. But anyway, the idea is like, you know, they're saying, hey, well, what if we take this idea of sort of backpropagation and we take it and we apply it to the idea of a company and a company is a thing. It's a it's a complicated machine that produces stuff, and someone deserves the credit for the stuff that gets done, but it's hard to figure that out. And like the traditional way of figuring out who gets credit is well, you know, if your boss gives you credit for it, your boss gives you credit for it and you got credit. Yeah, but what if what if you use this to sort of analyze, you know, the outputs and say, okay, but who, who actually did this and you know, use it as a method to sort of like automatically algorri chemically determined, who actually should get some credit for a thing that happened, which is really interesting idea. And this is sort of both a discussion of, you know how you could do that. And also a discussion of why it's unlikely that anybody would actually do this and how there's problems where it'd be extremely capable as soon as something was on the line here, because like, one of the probably one of the main issues with like, giving people credit were due in a large organization is, you know, there's a strong advantage to not doing that correctly. If you want the credit instead, you know,

Jessamyn 20:30 well, and money is attached to it, right? I mean, that's the big thing, right? Like, if you're the sales guy, but you're the programmer lady, and you're the, you know, Office admin person, you know, the credit for the thing may actually translate into cash. Yeah,

Cortex 20:45 exactly. So it's an it's inherently basically a very adversarial, adversarial situation, which makes, you know, a simple solution that does things fairly hard to keep actually working, simply and fairly. But anyway, it's interesting. It looks like confusing hogwash, probably. But if you actually just sort of let yourself glaze over the bits of you glaze over and read through the text bits, it's interesting. So I liked it. Only I liked it so far. It's sort of super niche things. It's just sort of sitting there and projects, but check it out. You have any other projects,

Jessamyn 21:27 just one more. This one is from destination unknown. And a Punnett sterically. This project is called this land this year, traveling to every state in the United States in 2017. And writing about it, which is kind of interesting, because like, it's May and they've been to eight states so far. So I'm a little concerned.

Cortex 21:49 This is a real sushi on Steven situation here.

Jessamyn 21:54 Did you have to?

Cortex 21:55 I did I did. I even made a soup John Stevens joke on the podcast in like two years. I'm sure

Jessamyn 22:01 now it's true. It's true. It's true. But I'm still annoyed, you know?

Cortex 22:06 Those albums so Hey, Soos, John.

Jessamyn 22:09 Hey. But, um, and so I was like, great. I love completionist projects just generally, right? Like, you're gonna go to all the things you're going to do all the x you're going to a all the B's see all the DS. But then, you know, I clicked through to look especially to be like, Well, have you been to Vermont yet? Well, yes, Miss miss them when they came to Vermont. But there's a lovely essay about Vermont that I really found. captivating, just super interesting. And the writing is super strong. So if you're somebody who likes kind of travel these stories and you would like to follow destination unknown around her travels. I recommend this because it's really it's, it's, it's, it's more than just the A every Z, B every be every D thing. So let's check it out. It's nice. I like it.

Cortex 23:08 I have one more I want to mention, which is Interrobang made a little foldable military instruction booklet for a marker crosshatching art

Jessamyn 23:20 thing. That's been his thing for the last several years. Yeah, it's is the color cross hatching as opposed to the more sort of cartoony stuff he was doing kind of when he was first met filter person?

Cortex 23:30 Yeah. Yeah. This is lovely. Yeah. No, it's really cool. So I'm biased because I've got like, several pieces in this dial on my wall at this point. I don't know. I mean, me and John have known each other via the internet, basically via Metafilter slash via the Harvey girls for like, I don't know, a decade now I guess. And we did a little bit art stuff. One point several years ago. Task two if I'm remembering right, and a couple other people doing polyoma stuff if you remember that like the little cards that can sort of be arranged in any order.

Jessamyn 24:08 Oh, yes. I remember that. That was

Cortex 24:10 a while ago. Yeah, it was like years ago.

Jessamyn 24:13 What what's it called? We should find it polio. ramaa which polio Rama Yeah.

Cortex 24:18 Which Polly Oh, Rama

Jessamyn 24:24 is it one word? Or is there

Cortex 24:25 one word least I think it was the way to it. Anyway, there was a lot of fun. I would like to come back to that sometime. But anyway, like I sort of like been in already communication with John at the time back then. And then that sort of like fell way by the wayside. And then just recently, I've been doing painting stuff and John's obviously been doing and doing and doing art. And he ended up doing a couple of crosshatch things in the style of you know, based on Mega sponges, which I thought was fantastic. And I was delighted and whatnot and I ended up doing a painting based on his crosshatch Menger sponge based on. And at this point we've exchanged, you know, across the country

Jessamyn 25:07 and so far down the rabbit hole.

Cortex 25:10 But it's been really it's been really neat. And it's been, it's been a lot of fun getting sort of back in touch with him. And we've talked about a couple art project ideas that have mostly been festering because I've been busy with other stuff but but yeah, you've

Jessamyn 25:24 been busy. Yeah, just generally busy lately, it seems like yep. Not not really in a bad way. But

Cortex 25:32 I really enjoyed like trying to roughly emulate his cross hatching style. And I recommend others. Check this out and play with because it's a really, it's a really neat interesting way to get some very cool color treatments out of even very simple, you know, shape ideas. And it's, you can do it liking your colored markers, you could do it with you know, colored pencils, just whatever just this whole layering thing is very cool and worth playing with. So go go check out John's pamphlet and crosshatch some shit.

Cortex 26:41 Metafilter

Jessamyn 26:42 Sure, let me pull up my nut butter. Yeah, Metafilter was great. I spent a little bit more time interacting with Metafilter than I then I usually do maybe total why? Favorite. And one of these posts that I often look at and I'm like, oh, yeah, I kind of like those kinds of posts. I wish I had any time in my life to deal with those kinds of posts. Fill the light dish did a great mega post on roasts, comedy bros, where he it's sort of nominally about Comedy Central roasts, but it really talks about kind of like where roasts came from. And you know, the Friars Club who did the kind of well known roast and like what's going on with the friars clubs now because they're kind of weird. And people who you know, rated the Comedy Central roasts and whatever. And yeah, it's one of those, you know, 35, favorites, 10 competencies.

Cortex 27:45 There's so much content.

Jessamyn 27:47 People will leave some comments, job guy.

Cortex 27:53 I agree with you that people should but I understand how it ends up like getting this pile of papers because like, oh, it's like, here's hundreds of hours of stuff to watch. So it gets bookmarked gets bookmarked fondly.

Jessamyn 28:06 Yeah. Well, I just I just really enjoyed getting to read a little because, you know, I like look at the roast on Comedy Central. And some of them are good, and some of them are crappy. But like they're clearly kind of taking a tradition and doing something slightly different with it. And I was kind of curious, like, where did it really come from? And what's that about? And of course, the Friars Club is a problematic institution for a number of reasons. And so that was interesting to read about as well, like, the history of, you know, these comedy roasts is really kind of the history of like, raunchy, you know, a raunchy male space, sort of, but like, you know, women exist, and they're funny, too. So, looking at how that changed over time. Interesting. So I liked the post, I engage with the post and I appreciated that he made the post Merce

Cortex 28:51 sorry, yeah, I really dug this posts by Empath about a series of music, video construction things a guy named Jeremy Blake he makes music on an OP one which is a very nice little self contained sort of synthesizer and sequencing machine. And he makes music on it, which is cool, but he also makes videos that are sort of playfully textually narrated recordings of the process of making the song so you might end up with like you know, to song but then you get this like, you know, 10 to 15 minute setup and it's all just like a camera down on like a flat colored surface with the you know, Jeremy's hands and the keyboard and him building things out just step by step and changing things and modifying things and the whole thing has like, nice text. NARRATION like it's not him talking over it. It's just like text labels popping up and they're just there. Beautiful little videos, that's nice music, the whole thing is it simultaneously like really sort of interesting and also sort of super chill to watch. Nice. And yeah, it's like, you do not need to be particularly interested in like, you know, synth based or electronic music to really enjoy these videos I think just because because I'm not Yeah, it's just it's a fun it's a really interesting fun processing so so yes.

Jessamyn 30:30 Along the same lines, Jim, not on display made a little electronic music opet post also this month about Joanna broke, who was a very early kind of electronica, New Age person. And she kind of released his retrospective not as long ago and was gonna, you know, play her first US concert this year and instead died, which was crappy, but it was interesting. You know, it's another one of those threads. 29 favorite six comments? Yeah. And range finders shows up with a little bit more information about Joanna, which was, which was really interesting. It's one of the things I like meta filter for is, you can start a thing like, here's the robot, and here's some things about our album. And then other people are like, Oh, well, let me tell you, let me tell you some more about it. And when it doesn't go down a rabbit hole of terrible nerdery it's awesome, because you can really learn some things and you come away feeling like you understand the topic better. Yeah. Not that there haven't been some terrific hate ons in metaphysica. This month, to of note, include the tiny house of your dreams is actually a nightmare posts not

Cortex 31:47 even opened this thread is like, Oh my God. There are days when I would be all about this. But I

Jessamyn 31:54 well, and it's interesting, right? Because it is one of those threads that maybe had the possibility of going really bad, right? Like, it's an article that's in Thrillist, which takes like, you know, disenchanted hipsters who move to tiny houses, and kind of pokes fun at them more than you need to, right where they're like, Fuck, man, I don't even know how I'm going to do my fucking laundry. And it's like, maybe you should have thought about that before you bought a $50,000 300 square foot house, but whatever, right. And so the thread kind of starts out like that. But then it goes. And it becomes a lot of like me fights talking about their housing situations, you know, and like, whether they make it work in a small space, or why they feel more comfortable with a large space, or maybe they lived in a tiny house and they didn't like it, or what's the tiny house movement about as opposed to like people who live in trailer homes who are often not part of any movement at all, but are making it work in a similar amount of square footage space. So it turned into a fascinating thread. That's actually you know, it started in like the end of May 27. Then it's been getting kind of regular comments up till yesterday. Fascinating, super interesting and didn't turn into just a pile on snark fest. It was actually people being more thoughtful than the original article, which is nice when that actually happened.

Cortex 33:13 Yeah. I liked this thread from just yesterday, the day before. The wrong window. Just the metaphysical Slack channel just like hey, yeah, by the way, you know, here's the thread that you don't have to do anything about. I'm just fed up with a fire alarm just for the fun of it. No, it's at this post Etrigan made a post about

Jessamyn 33:40 this is relevant to my interests.

Cortex 33:43 Pure booton butene I don't know. Button. Pierce button, made a blog post essentially about doing so called brutalist redesigns of mobile UI. And I want to say upfront, like much of the discussion in the thread is about whether or not it makes sense to use the word brutalist in this context and what brutalist means. And

Jessamyn 34:08 I think no brutalist, brutalist, serious, brutalist, people are serious business. Yeah.

Cortex 34:14 It feels like the consensus is basically brutalist is a word you could use as a pop cultural reference to some of the ideas represented by this, but this isn't necessarily a good example of anything that looks like an actual like brutalist treatments. But, you know, I don't know enough about

Jessamyn 34:30 digital, right. I mean, I have not read the thread, but like, and I'm interested in brutalist architecture, I tend to really like it. But it strikes me that part of it is because it's stuff that's architected, like it's a three dimensional thing you're supposed to interact with. It's not a flat 2d graphic. Yeah, thing. Now I have to go read it.

Cortex 34:49 And the idea that like there's base materials as part of like, that's like my very thin glimmer of awareness about brutalist architecture is sort of like the idea of it. Trying to get down to to the metal so to speak, and like making the architecture be about how it's built rather than

Jessamyn 35:06 right, as opposed to just like oh, brutalism. It's make it ugly. Yeah.

Cortex 35:12 But anyway, it's neat, because it's basically a bunch of treatments of contemporary mobile user interfaces, redone in a fairly specific style, it throws out a whole lot of designer II stuff.

Jessamyn 35:29 And it's, which is, which is in and of itself fun and interesting. I mean, I like re skinning of things. Yeah, exactly.

Cortex 35:34 So just just for the spirit of that it's fun to look at, it's fun to think about what's going on.

Jessamyn 35:39 Definitely attracted some hyper commenters. Yeah. And

Cortex 35:42 you know, there's a bunch of different sort of thoughts on what's going on there and people agreeing with and or objecting to the treatment on a bunch of different fronts. So I thought it was a it was a really interesting, fun thread to read, even if like, the post itself is a little bit goofy and the, I mean, the original post Africans post about it's fine. You know, it's a little bit of a stunt. And it's a little bit unfocused, but it it made a fun thread. Plus somebody who's like a hardcore, like, student of brutalist stuff should go in there and you know, drop a page of knowledge, but

Jessamyn 36:14 chop some science. Well, that's the thing I think I've told you before, but like, I have a buddy who's like a guy who went to college with reconnected thanks to Facebook, and he's really interested in brutalist architecture. I just kind of liked it. But he's like into it. And so every now and again, he's like, Oh, we should totally go visit this building, blah, blah, blah. And a lot of times, I'm like, Yeah, great, whatever I like to hang out. But because I'm not sort of a purist about it. I always wind up pissing him off, you know, because I'll make some sort of like joke about like, ooh, brutal. And he'll be like, Oh, that's not the thing. He's not a metal filter. So it's okay for me to discuss it this way. But it is sort of like the difference. I mean, just getting too deep into any architecture stuff. I always feel like here, there'd be Tigers kind of Yeah. Because people who take it super seriously, I can't. I mean, you know, it's like the little free libraries thread from last month that we did talk about, but I was marking to talk about it again, in case we hadn't talked about it. But we had, you know, there are people who are heavy into that culture, and then people who just wander in like we're afraid or if the word library means a lot of different things, and you're like, Ah, so I know what it's like from the other side. Also,

Cortex 37:24 I can do it. I can do a segue off that actually. About like, sort of jargon and being deep in our thing. So there's a post just the other day that is the infinite artwork simulator by I guess it's all cheese digests all made a post about this project, which generates random descriptions of non existent artwork.

Jessamyn 37:46 Like the anti me in metal filter stuff, right? Like you go for the posts that I literally can't understand the sentences and I'm always on the here's the thing. Here's eight things to read about the thing read them all now discuss.

Cortex 38:01 I think there's there's there's there's a lot of appeal to both but I think I get excited about posts.

Jessamyn 38:06 Everything you do is on github.io. Damn thing,

Cortex 38:13 it's, you know, if that's a good sign. I'm like, I want to know more. Because obviously, I don't nothing so far.

Jessamyn 38:21 I need a little bit of pandering using the language that I speak which maybe my own failing

Cortex 38:26 Well, no, I mean, there's, there's there's good. I think this stuff sticks in my mind is the thing like, you know, yeah, I see lots of really well communicated interesting posts, and I appreciate them. And then like, nothing, nothing they're like,

Jessamyn 38:39 but other people appreciate them to eat your love. Yeah. So.

Cortex 38:43 But yeah, this is neat. It generates just a description of a piece of artwork, it's you know, random text generation sort of thing, which is obviously kind of my wheelhouse to begin with. That I'm in sort of an odd place so I'm like thinking a lot about art and art jargon and also about like, the space between taking yourself seriously and trying not to take yourself like up your asshole seriously. And Paul white here. Yeah, exactly. So this is a, this is this is this is sort of like landing right and in a good spot there. But it's, it's fun because like, on the one hand, like if you read the description, it's intended to be kind of tongue in cheek like this is partly playing with the idea of sort of froofy description of art that maybe is to sell stewardess or to buried in jargon, but at the same time, it also works as like, you could take this totally straight faced and try and imagine the piece of art any given random generation here is describing and the plausibility of

Jessamyn 39:40 work deploys architecture as pointing out discomfort about otherness.

Cortex 39:45 And so that's like, that's a completely legit thing that could be going on with something like you know, so the idea is you could stop and say, Okay, well what is this? You know, what is the piece of this is describing, while it is at the same time, maybe, you know, taking The pins a little bit out of like words that show up way too much or get overused or end up doing a lot more work than they're actually doing in someone's kind of bullshitty description of something. You know, the the tension there is really interesting me and and so it's simultaneously fun and interesting and also kind of funny and yeah, so I think it

Jessamyn 40:20 was what was it? What was the discussion like?

Cortex 40:22 Pretty short actually, like me and another commenter salty salticid. Between us, like posted, like, you know, seven or eight paragraphs of text it probably is as much as everybody else in there combined is but it hasn't been a ton of discussion, but Well, it's one of those things like, you know, what do you do with like a random something generator like either people quote and link to output or they say, Oh, hey, this is neat, or Oh, hey, I don't get it. You know, like, there's not a whole lot to do in a with something like this. So, like the two of us have had a short exchange about like, salty salt as it's comparing it to, we're not comparing it precisely. But the Sokol hoax the whole

Jessamyn 41:06 Yeah, well, that's what I thought of, right, because it is kind of insider language. Or it's masquerading as insider link. But it also kind of works. Yeah. Et cetera. Yeah.

Jessamyn 41:20 The last three.

Jessamyn 41:51 I got a great segue.

Cortex 41:52 Alright, say it.

Jessamyn 41:53 I got a great segue.

Cortex 41:55 Look, what be like be like Bob and say, Get Bob Saget. He's the former former host of America's Funniest videos starring Danny Tanner have a full house? And presumably, Fuller House, was he and I still haven't watched that? I probably never will. Because why would I? But yeah, so Bob second, from Street Fighter to Bob. Second. He's, he's one of the big bosses. Please continue.

Jessamyn 42:22 As we talked before about Jolly Roger, the thing that you can send your telemarketing phone calls to. And it's essentially like a robot that kind of gives responses that a person might give, but that aren't an actual living person. And then they record the phone calls like, like, you can, you can forward a call that you know, is going to be a spam marketing call to this number. And it picks up and says like, hello, and then it just does a stream of like, Huh? Oh, yeah, hang on a second. I got to check something. That's beautiful. Oh, hey, I'm back. How's that again? I don't think and, and you and then it records the phone calls as these telemarketers just get more and more irate and crazy. Trying to like nail the deal the deal with these people? Yeah. And it's really funny. So I've been learning from that. But back to my segway.

Cortex 43:21 Segway thing correctly.

Jessamyn 43:24 Shut up, you derailed me. So I'm on one that says the work deploys images of dicks and motorcycle jackets as representative of the politics of sickness and health. Right? Right. So speaking of Dixon motorcycle jackets, myself, about a Guardian article called me and my penis, which is just a photographer who took a lot of pictures of dudes kind of from the chest to the kind of upper legs and interviewed a lot of them about how they feel about their genitalia. Interesting. So

Cortex 43:56 let's go ahead and get back to it. But yeah,

Jessamyn 43:59 lobster bitten market is on the radar.

Cortex 44:03 This is, ya know, this is this is totally if I had been like on I would totally take note on this to the next module is to just to know that hey, just in case, you know, like it was going fine enough that she didn't need to, like elaborate on the just in case because people are dumb about penises and breasts, which Yeah, we'd had it actually I

Jessamyn 44:23 was really happy. It went really well. I saw a link to it. Like somewhere on Facebook. I read the article, and I was like, this is really interesting. I'd be interested to talk to me fights about it, and maybe they're gonna be jerks about it. Probably not. And they mostly weren't. And it was an interesting article, and I got to make the tweet that I just looked at pictures honored penises, and I think you should do Tim Carmody, who's like internet friend of mine was like, Why? Because people I guess like just troll him on Twitter all the time trying to get him to click on terrible things that are gonna make him angry or upset that like, no, it's just a legit article I thought you'd probably like it. What I was like, Yeah, try it. So nice. That's a good article. I was happy about it and the thread was good. That was my post this month.

Cortex 45:09 Excellent. I made a couple posts this month, but I don't think I've got enough other stuff that I don't think I'll even get to him. I made some posts that were nice go look at my post. But I really enjoyed this post. This was from Stark. This is a post about a couple of professional soccer players, I'm sorry, footballers playing against 30 like nine year old kids. And it's just like a seven minute video of you know, somewhat edited probably version of this, this short little soccer game and it's ridiculous. And it's fun. And it's great. And it's you know, it's as goofy as you would think. But it's also like the kids are not slouches. They're, you know, they're little kids. But they're they're playing.

Jessamyn 45:51 They know how to play the game. It sounds like when you're four and you play soccer or football and you're mostly just kind of like running around and like whatever. It's just fun to run around.

Cortex 45:59 Yep. And the kid side has two goalies and the adult side has a kid for a goalie and the kid goalie on their side just does a great job. There's a couple of really fantastic saves. So yeah, it's a lot of fun. Seven minutes, go watch it. You don't have to like soccer. Just just go watch the thing because it will make your smile. Oh, brought up someone. Someone mentioned an old post that ends up coming up in the comments about other goofy soccer things like an unrelated goofy soccer thing. But it's this older post from a few years ago, that we ended up

Jessamyn 46:30 I feel like bringing, you know, bringing back the older posts to talk about him again. It's a great idea. So what is this unusual football?

Cortex 46:38 Yeah, it's a bunch of like stunting matches, playing, playing soccer while wearing like, binoculars. Doing it. Yeah, like just like supersenses don't like these are adults playing against each other. But like the whole thing is it's just a series of really, really goofy soccer matches, and they're pretty fantastic. So yeah.

Jessamyn 47:01 See, now I'm completely wanting to

Cortex 47:05 save it for later. You can't like to during the podcast. You can't have pancakes breakfast. I also like

Jessamyn 47:12 pancakes when I get off the phone now because the phone, it's a phone because it's no longer breakfast, you're

Cortex 47:18 on the phone, and later we'll we're recording a radio show, you know, it's just no media dies, it just changes shape it gets, it gets figurative. Later I'll write about this in the paper. I liked this comment. In this post, though, there was a post, I guess I should just note, there's a post in Dubreuil made a post about an article that ran the New York Times about how the wealthy talk to their children about money sort of talking about the somewhat, you know, complicated, difficult discussions of explaining to your kids, the millions.

Jessamyn 47:53 I'm familiar with that article when it went around. Yeah. Like the article went around. And everyone was like, Whoa, like, things you should know.

Cortex 48:02 Yeah. And it's funny because like, you know, it's one of those things where like, meta filter readers are not the target audience for this. Most people who get the New York Times are not the target audience for it. But definitely, there's a target audience for it among New York Times, as readers, you know, they got wealthier people who are like, lifelong readers, and there's little stuff in the paper that's very much targeted at them. And as people notice a great place to stick your ads for, you know, an expensive watch and etc. You know, so there's a business side of it that people talk about a little bit along with people doing a mixture of eye rolling, and actually some interesting unpacking of the whole. Oh, man, yeah, it must be really hard to have millions of dollars, or to have to tell your kids that they're going to get millions of dollars, you know, that there's some audible eye rolling, which is kind of understandable. So it covers a bunch of stuff in there. But there's a really nice comment from Jay Scalzi in there, where he talks about, like, you know, hey, you know, over the course of my daughter's childhood,

Jessamyn 48:58 we've got and we know him. We know when he sold that thing to TV and gotten a lot of money, like you can kind of track what he's been up to financially, you know, in a loose hand wavy way. Yeah,

Cortex 49:08 he's gone from doing pretty okay, as a science fiction writer to doing pretty good as a science fiction writer. And he basically talks about that, and he talks about how, like, you know, they live in a small town, so like, you know, they're not assholes about like, their money, but like, everybody knows the business because of the small town. And their daughter sort of grew up through the process of this, you know, upward change in their financial situation. And he talks about how trying to keep her grounded and have her have an understanding of like, the value of money and sort of how it works and how different people having to pronounce money is a you know, thing that you actually have to have an understanding of to be a good person about money. So yeah, it's just it's just a nice, nice, nice pilot comment from Scalzi helped, I think, sort of ground the thread a little bit for the discussion that followed after you did. It's one of the things we're like It's nice to have a reminder in a thread where it'd be really easy to be like, oh, yeah, well, you know, fuck the rich, that like there are these intermediate Larry's layers and these more complicated sort of situations where, you know, people who are not Satan who also have ended up doing well, financially.

Jessamyn 50:18 Well, and it's hard to because I think for a lot of us who spend a lot of time on the internet, the people we know who that has happened to, in many cases, I don't know about your life, but like in my life, like, just in my kind of social group, but not my direct friends are often kind of like weird text millionaires. You don't I mean, money kind of happened all of a sudden, and disproportionately to their ability to deal with it. You know, it's not like they had a job. And they worked really hard. And they just earned it for 20 years. And then suddenly, they're like, you know, we're actually doing really well. And we didn't used to be, this is the kind of like, Hey, your stock options vested. And now you have $2 million. Yeah, I used to just have a $90,000 a year job, which is a different thing. Yeah. And, you know, I know fewer people, for whom, I mean, you know, I've talked about myself a little bit, you know, my dad dropped dead. And now I have a big house, you know, in addition to my tiny apartment, and you know, I share it with my sister, and it's not uncomplicated. But it's really hard to talk about with people with different financial, like, I really do appreciate, in some ways, having some friends at least to have similar, like, shit, trying to figure out how to pay the gardener is difficult, like conversations, at least so I can talk about it. Because I mean, you can't even talk to your therapist about it, you know what I mean? Whereas in my universe, most of the really rich people, I don't like the people who live in this town where the houses are difficult to interact with and analyze them. Yeah, you know, so it's hard to be like, Okay, I want to be me. But I also have questions about the situation that kind of fell on me that maybe wasn't, you know, I wasn't ready for Yeah, kind of, and I think for children, that, you know, that's a true thing. Like children aren't. I mean, they're rich, but they're kind of not rich, but they're going to grow into a world that's different. But like, I often think about you listen to Chris Rock, talk about his ark. Oh, sure, you know, because not only is he incredibly wealthy, he lives in a, you know, a nice neighborhood, basically. You know, there's other wealthy black people kind of, but his children are growing up as like rich black children. Whereas he did not grow up that way. And it's hard for him in some ways to have those conversations with them, because that wasn't his arc. You know what I mean? That like he didn't grow up as a wealthy black kid, he grew up as a poor black kid. Yeah. The out now is raising wealthy children. And it's unusual for him and yeah, comes, you know, he makes it part of it stand up. That unusual kind of.

Cortex 52:56 Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's. Yeah, it's complicated stuff, basically.

Jessamyn 53:03 Yeah, but fuck the New York Times. But sometimes it helps you have good conversations, and I appreciate Scalzi stepping up, because, you know, we, we kind of know what his deal is. He doesn't have to jump into that thread and talk about himself. But it was it was interesting.

Cortex 53:22 Yep. Yeah, no, it's it's, yeah, I have a thought and I completely lost it. So I'm just gonna keep saying sorry. Yeah, no, no, no, it's not your fault. It's just my brain.

Jessamyn 53:31 Yeah, why? You know why?

Cortex 53:34 God dammit why I do that. For breakfast.

Jessamyn 53:38 I know Angela shows up with her skill. And she's like, Hey,

Cortex 53:42 is I mean, they were so good. They were really good. These were scribers cornmeal pancakes. Oh, man. They were tasty. They were darn tasty. Thanks, honey.

Cortex 54:13 Think that's Oh, you know, I think we recorded before this happened. We like we've talked about mal chop the last couple. Oh, I guess but like malt shop is like, up. It's out now. I think it wasn't quite yet when we recorded the last one.

Jessamyn 54:29 Yeah, no, it launched on the 16th Yeah, so when Zark made this post you and I were kind of bullshitting about it.

Cortex 54:34 Yeah. So yeah, malt shop. If you've missed the last three episodes, is a new spiritual successor to milkshake which was itself a little long running niche image sort of sharing community that was run by Andre and Amber. And almost went away three years ago and then didn't go away. And then they like more recently, the guys gotta go Oh wait, we got to stop doing this because it wasn't making any money.

Jessamyn 55:03 We got jobs kid and this was like harassed by lawyers and

Cortex 55:09 so milkshake decided that was shutting down and like immediately in the the aftermath of that announcement like people from the milkshake community were like, ah, you know what, what if what if it doesn't? What if we find some way to have like this thing keep happening like milkshake can go away, Andre and African, like be done with it they have every right and deserve so much. But But what if this thing What if this idea sticks around and and everybody started organizing shit and you jumped on that you took some point on that?

Jessamyn 55:38 Well, I talked to Andre, which no one else could do for some reason. Yeah,

Cortex 55:42 there was a lot of, well, what does Andre thing is like, well, have we asked him? Well, maybe we should get him on?

Jessamyn 55:47 Can we have the code? He's like? Yeah, you know, I mean, it was a little bit more complicated than that, but not much. And so we had a fundraiser and raised a couple $1,000 so that we could pay for startup costs and some stuff. And we got some free lawyering done by a local lawyer to me, which was really amazing. And now we've launched as a subscription site, we've got money in the bank. The tech works. We've got a code is on GitHub, people can come work on stuff. I mean, we've got tons of little like, niggling CSS shit to deal with, you know what I mean. And for a lot of people who just really wanted the site to come back, you know, the site's back. And it works. And it's better. I mean, not better. Well, you know what I mean? Like, we changed some things so that some of the problems from before, like bandwidth and spam and whatever are going to be less problems, because everybody has to subscribe, even though it's just a little bit of money and gifts get turned into little movies, and but there's still stuff that needs to happen. And so I'm always trying to kind of in fact, maybe we have a meeting this afternoon, I don't know. So I'm always I'm always trying to, like get people like, Okay, if you want to, like fix some CSS and be part of this little community thing, like please come on by. But yeah, it's been a really nice post about it. Yeah. that I thought was cool. And people could show up in the thread and say things and ask questions. And like, one of the things I wanted to do when the site launched, was have like one big thread on malt shop that was just for collecting feedback, so that we could open tickets and do that kind of stuff. And Brad, the guy who codes it was like, let's, I mean, he's the lead code. guy was like, you know, let's just use GitHub, like normal people. And I was like, but normal people don't use Git at me. You know, that's one of those questions, right? Like in the tech community, GitHub issues are normal. Whereas in the I just want to use an image sharing, say GitHub issues may be a little confusing. We settled on a happy medium, and it was really nice. But yeah, but it meant that it was another focal point where people could come in and ask questions, say how it is. And

Cortex 57:55 yeah, and the milkshake was never huge. So it's kind of useful. Like, it's not like, you know, someone relaunching some major site in spring. Mill Creek was a small committee, but like

Jessamyn 58:05 five or 600 users, five or 600 users who all chipped in a little bit of money. It pays for itself. Yeah.

Cortex 58:10 Which is fantastic. So yeah,

Jessamyn 58:13 yeah. We're a business. We are incorporated in Delaware. I I'm the president because I filled in the paperwork.

Cortex 58:23 Am I Am I technically director on paper? I don't remember.

Jessamyn 58:26 Did you sign something? You know? I did. I did. I guess I am. Okay. Yeah. You're putting steering committee. Yeah. So

Cortex 58:33 we also have a working the pedals committee and we just.

Cortex 59:07 These pancakes are really hit me. Oh, I'm having I'm having that secondary pancake. Hi, it's all Do you want to talk about F Metafilter? Should we do? Is that a thing? I do. Talk to me.

Jessamyn 59:20 The thing I want to talk about last month, but we were doing a sprint so I didn't was this really cool? Question by anticipation of a new lovers of rival comma, the just one of my favorite usernames, but basically like, Hey, I'm reading about John Muir and my first summer and this year, it's a love letter to the landscape. But you know, I live in New Hampshire and I want to read people writing about their a loving relationship to the landscape only in New Hampshire. And Warren Buffett, Warren Buffet, what, what a user whose name I don't see that often. I'm gonna go through delay. Nice.

Cortex 1:00:00 Wha buffet. Yeah, like that. While buffet

Jessamyn 1:00:04 had a really nice kind of early, early posts of stuff from the Internet Archive some good comments, and then it's just a couple more. It's very short, short, but dense, very short, dense post, but I like it and I hope they like the answers and that's a, you know, part of the country that I really love too. So it was nice to see.

Cortex 1:00:26 Yeah, that's cool. I like this just on the basis of hey, I like people working on doing things. I like the idea of me thinking about doing things but there was a post question from Guillo de sang helped me start woodcarving.

Jessamyn 1:00:43 I always love these posts. Yeah.

Cortex 1:00:46 And it's like, you know, hey, I just want to I want to try this out and like get started, you know, what do I need to know to like, do the first bits and you know, short set of helpful answers and links and yeah, good asked me.

Jessamyn 1:00:57 Well, in speaking of, I'm now looking, because there was a similar one on AskMe to filter in the last couple days, which was all about like, helped me find the perfect hammock. But I think that person didn't use the hammock tag. Oh man, so I can't fucking find it. Well, I'm

Cortex 1:01:14 just gonna search on hammock. I need to lay down for a long while in a hammock. Oh, they use the hammocks tag. I'll go ahead, singular

Jessamyn 1:01:24 dude. Does your website really not put hammocks and hammock together?

Cortex 1:01:30 I don't remember where we did and did not go with potential stemming and whatnot all those years ago, something to revisit

Jessamyn 1:01:37 some hated tags. And the tags have always sucked because you can you can you can rebuild.

Cortex 1:01:44 It could happen. We could we could revisit the whole question of tagging at some point. It's not it's not likely to jump out of the high priority. We have no other stuff backed up but but it's true. At some point we could have a take reckoning.

Jessamyn 1:01:56 Yes. Yeah. So this was by a terrible llama. And you know, the people who really care about Amex care a lot about hammocks. And of course, this thread is related my thread because bond cliff of course shows up a lot. Because he's like outdoorsy dude.

Cortex 1:02:11 I'm wondering if corpses in the library popped in here because we were looking for a hammock a couple of years ago. And corpse had found that hammock that she really liked. And we ended up thinking the same time now. Yeah, nope.

Jessamyn 1:02:24 That's a cool, yeah, middle class. They're talking about hammocks. Oh, is that his wife? Oh, the inspiration is from a meta talk. Oh, yeah. Middle class tool in meta talk talking about Trump started talking about?

Cortex 1:02:46 Oh, yeah, there was a whole hammock discussion in the recent sort of like, hey, everything's super weird and fucked right thread that we had.

Jessamyn 1:02:54 Right? Yeah, but he talked about hammocks, and then she opened the thread. And then there was a great thread about hammocks, which I thought was pretty good. So yeah, helped me start hammocking basically, yeah. I'm not speaking of that at all, except the outdoors. This sort of made me laugh a little. And I don't know. I don't know. It's post by soul. And it's that baby bumblebee song that you probably know your childhood. And it's basically all about like, squishing and eating a baby bumblebee. And so I was like, this is super fucking creepy, right? You're right. This is too creepy. Like there's something wrong with my kids. Teacher, or it's there. And so a whole bunch of people on the list are like wow, you never seen nothing because bla bla bla bla bla bla bla other things. But they did bring up great green grabs of DC great green grabs of DC greasy grimy gopher guts, which was like a big one when I was a kid. And so it's a great thread about grows out kids stories. And I feel like we all learned something

Cortex 1:04:05 good to see guess all go eat worms represented here. There was a there's a book I really liked as a kid that we had. That was about the slug and all the things you can do to them and like you do all these terrible things to slugs, but then like halfway or two thirds of the way through the book, it just takes a turn. And the slugs come back at night. And they do those things to you. And the illustrations were like fucking Yeah, it was like disturbing and weird. And I thought it was great human

Jessamyn 1:04:32 faces.

Cortex 1:04:33 Yeah. Like, you know, this is a book that ends with like, I think slugs basically skidding a human child and wearing its flesh as a retribution of costume. But with some you know, nice illustrations. God damn I haven't thought of that in the years but yeah, that Oh, man. Yeah, good thread. Excellent thread.

Jessamyn 1:04:53 Yeah, like

Cortex 1:04:55 there's so much creepy kid shit.

Jessamyn 1:04:58 Exactly right. So much creepy, cute shit. Speaking of creepiness, I guess. I was interested in this thread by parodic dicuss Pato. This is right after Chris Cornell died. I assume there was an open thread a meta filter. Yeah. Yeah, there was. And, you know, people talk about you know, you're not supposed to glorify suicide when you talk about it. But you should also talk about the fact that, yeah, people are very depressed, and it is a problem. And there is help and that kind of stuff we've talked about, and I met a filter before. This, this, this poster was just like, so is that like a thing we talked about? Or is there actual data about that? And so it's a nice thread with people giving some good information about whether talking more about depression and about suicidal thoughts and suicidal feelings are useful, not useful, what the what the data suggests, so I liked it.

Cortex 1:06:03 I liked i Okay, so we've talked before about how sometimes I'm just like, Yeah, fuck it on an ask me questions that arguably should have just been deleted, because hey, this was not

Jessamyn 1:06:15 all the time. You were the total

Cortex 1:06:18 time I am. And I enjoy it. And this was

Jessamyn 1:06:22 I roll my eyes at you.

Cortex 1:06:27 Well, if you end up working a few shifts later this month, then you know, you have a chance to righteously delete things look out

Jessamyn 1:06:33 shatters, because I'm coming back for a couple days, and you're in huge trouble.

Cortex 1:06:42 Anyway, if this was a question, that was it was badly framed, but there was a core question in there. And I got really curious about the implicit question, which is basically about like, what was the fucking deal with? And to what extent was there actually really a deal with people leaving on like, a recording of a dog barking as a home security?

Jessamyn 1:06:59 Right? No, I actually, no, I, this is completely legit question. I thought you were going to talk about one of those other completely. Not let's check. I thought this one was fine.

Cortex 1:07:10 Yeah. And you answered it. So like, and sort of like two or three other people? And, you know, it didn't really you

Jessamyn 1:07:17 should probably describe for because one of the things that was so interesting about this was there was a ton of people who are like, I've literally never heard of that before. What are you talking about? See, should probably describe what the?

Cortex 1:07:27 Yeah, so yeah, this is, uh, this is a thread. That's a question from 30 days to basically saying, hey, when I was a kid in the 80s, you know, my family had a tape recording of a big dog walking around. Did anyone else have this dog tape? You know?

Jessamyn 1:07:41 And the idea is so that somebody's like, trying to break into your house maybe listens for a second. And here's a dog being like, woof, woof, woof. And they're like, Oh, my God, let's skip this the other house go

Cortex 1:07:52 find some lower hanging fruit with this dog situation?

Jessamyn 1:07:57 And was that a thing? Or my parents insane?

Cortex 1:08:00 Yeah. And the question ended up getting very few answers.

Jessamyn 1:08:04 I know, I'm kind of hoping it gets more answers because I really am interested to know,

Cortex 1:08:09 I feel like there is some vein here and it just didn't get anywhere. But I do really like that one of the few answers in the thread is from porn in the woods. And so we're like, we've got a question about Oh, weird. Did that happen in the 80s phenomenology answered? Weird. 80s. Exactly. So that was that was nice, too. I dug that.

Jessamyn 1:08:29 Yeah. Speaking of homes and break ins, and oops, sorry, that's the same link. This was an interesting question that I enjoyed by EGS. It was one of those things, which, you know, might have been better if it had been phrased a little bit with like, I'm writing a book, you know, but like, Okay, you live in a tiny town, and you're like, a sort of an isolated hermit type. And you go away and die. Like go on a trip somewhere else and die. When? What? What happens? Yeah, like, like, how do people figure out that you die? How do people link you with your house? What happens to your house? What you know, like, you live on a kind of a random mountaintop, and you die away from your home? Does that home just become like a weird empty house forever, or whatever? And I like this despite Yeah, I said, EJ, is it because in the United States, at least most of the United States, the guy who we are now starting to call dead Bob, because that's ETS formation, you know, doesn't won't pay his taxes and eventually, something will happen to dead Bob. Right. But it's interesting, because it has a lot to do with sort of civics, you know, not so much like, well, you're nosy neighbors would immediately blah, blah, blah, like every now and again, and the thread ends with this completely weird. Two comments, both of which are linked to articles that are fascinating. About like, Did you know a random guy who died in New York City along New York Times article about what happens to you if you die? And nobody has? You don't have any family

Cortex 1:10:13 was going around. So

Jessamyn 1:10:15 interesting. And then what about this thing, this Michigan woman who died and all our bills are on auto pay? And nobody found out for years, until the all the money in her bank account ran out? Yeah. Fascinating. So interesting. And you know, there but for the grace of God, right, for a lot of us kind of like isolated internet people, always, you know, have someone call your house or whatever. But it was an interesting, really interesting thread. And it led to those two articles that I probably wouldn't have read otherwise, most fascinating.

Cortex 1:10:46 Yeah. Here's that medical post about the death of George Bell, the New York City one from that comment, post a couple years ago.

Jessamyn 1:10:54 Oh, great. Great. Great. Great. I didn't I didn't see this by Maggie Maggie.

Cortex 1:10:58 Yeah. Making connections. Well, I wasn't linked. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:11:01 I mean, as it turned out, he had had some friends. Like it wasn't, it doesn't turn into just this completely grim story. But it talks a little bit about, you know, kind of what the unclaimed property division does and how that works, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and the, you know, the noble people who burry those people and how that works. Just very, because, you know, you see it kind of ginned up for TV a lot of times, but not, you know, almost by definition, people don't know those people. Right. So you don't know what happens. Yeah. And I found it. Super interesting.

Cortex 1:11:34 I liked this. I mean, like this not quite, I found interesting, this question about having an allergic reaction in the anonymous thread. Yeah. And the question is,

Jessamyn 1:11:48 genes nearly killed me. Which got my attention right off the bat. Jeans nearly killed me.

Cortex 1:11:55 That's a pair of jeans, it's a jeans, you

Jessamyn 1:11:58 know, it is not.

Cortex 1:12:01 But yeah, the question is basically saying what what chemical tests can be done to deal with this. And the answers ended up being like, I'm not sure anybody really have like, well, here's the chemical testing rubric you should go through because that may be sort of like a big ask, but several people commented to basically say, Oh, well, okay. This is a thing like toxicology genes and dyes used to manufacture them and the chemicals used to style them. Yeah, people have allergic reactions to some of these. And yeah, it's something you got to sort of be careful about, you may have to, you know, proceed with caution. See an allergist one person was like, Well, if you really want something done this probably you should make noise on Twitter, because Tommy Hilfiger is more likely to respond to a bad Twitter PR situation than a polite or whatever email. Sometimes

Jessamyn 1:12:50 there's just Twitter's customer service people that you can get a hold of who will help you. Yeah, you know, like, you don't even have to bitch as much as just kind of get started like, hey, yeah, so I've got this rash

Cortex 1:13:03 from your jeans. Yeah, I thought it was I thought that was interesting. I've never really thought about that before. But I guess I've been lucky to not have clothing related rashes, but, man, I'd be paying the athlete. Oh, yeah. Jeans. I shouldn't ever wear those again. Okay.

Jessamyn 1:13:17 Right, or just worrying about them, right. Another one that I found interesting, just in the Oh, hey, other people are really different for me. category was this one by Opal shards who dropped a hairbrush in an unflushed toilet, just to pee filled toilet. And of course, the title is a mix made in hell. And you know, it's a slightly dramatic reading of, you know, to my utmost horror, I dropped my toilet bowl, blah, blah, blah, you know, here's what I've done. You know, do I have to throw it away? Am I gonna get a scalp infection? And you know, the answers are kinda split, not like, yes, you're gonna get a soft scalp infection, but like, oh my god, super gross. And, dude, it's just pee seriously. So what's interesting to me, right? The, you know, the tweet I can post in my head and never made was like, when I wonder about American xenophobia, I forget that. So many of them are afraid of their own urine, basically. So no surprise there. They're afraid

Cortex 1:14:25 is gonna sterilize everything. They need those terms.

Jessamyn 1:14:28 I cited some stuff from frontiers in cellular information, infection, microbiology, and I said that Opie was gonna be fine, but it's totally fine. Yeah, I thought so. doing my bit doing my bet.

Cortex 1:14:40 It's the bit to do. That's the correct bit that you should be trying to get done. It's the only one yours do the bit that you wish to see. Yeah, yeah, leave it Okay. Any other ask me?

Jessamyn 1:14:55 Oh, yeah, little one that I really liked. was a question by a Riley raised 3000 looking at, you know, the Black Power salute at the Olympics, and Colin Kaepernick and his kneeling, etc. Other examples other examples of people in sports taking stands for stuff that they believed in politics, racial issues, sexual equality, and it just turned into a very interesting thread of you know, activist athletes and some of the stuff they did. It's good readin

Cortex 1:15:31 true love will find you in you'll find out just who is your friend. Don't be sad. But don't give up until Love finds you in the locker, do a quick medical music minute here. There was good stuff, people do stuff and it's good. I'll be more specific dig duct posted a really cool thing called mouth of the coldest seas, which is sort of like the title, multi multi piece thing combination of some synthesizers and Oregon and weird tonal stuff and sort of like slow building progression over some odd chord patterns and

Jessamyn 1:16:38 and he did it almost entirely on Nano studio on his phone.

Cortex 1:16:42 Yeah, you can even get small tools. And it's kind of great. There's some there's some singing on it, which he put out a call for help with and a friend ended up working on it who he only found out after the fact if I'm remembering correctly here. Found out was a Mefi after that call for help. Oh, really? That's funny. So yeah, I might also be screwing up two different pieces of music this month. But I think that was I think that's right. Anyway, it's pretty cool. It's it's it's on the weird side. But it's a good weird, I liked it. Appleseed did sort of a doodle sort of running with the process theme here. Apple today doodle using Ubuntu studio to test something out and somebody this nice little cynthy thing. Oh, no first guess I should say the titles of things, I guess. Then, may I have had this conversation before. Anyway, I may have mentioned

Jessamyn 1:17:51 neck,

Cortex 1:17:52 the previous version of this. This is a finished version of a song from earlier in the year. That came back to and it's really nice. I like it. And I like I like seeing multiple versions of something too. So like the fact that we have like the earlier version. And then this revisit is really cool to me for this on like math. Nice. And then just the other day Oumou posted this fantastic thing called Evil autoplay, they recorded with his kids and a bunch of musical instruments, and it's fantastic. And

Jessamyn 1:18:23 a clown car of musical instruments.

Cortex 1:18:27 Listen to it, there's a video you can watch. His kid

Jessamyn 1:18:30 is 10 Yeah, I met that kid or I think I met him right before that kid. Wow, that's so awesome.

Cortex 1:18:37 Yeah, so that's super rad. And then there was a recording of Daniel Johnson song that I really like. True love will find you in the end. This is recording by black pebble and it's really nice, simple sort of Spartan arrangement but very nicely done. And I'd recorded a version of this and I just commented This morning when I found it sort of doing a round up that I'd recorded a vision in my head is like oh yeah, I did a version that a few years ago it's like nine fucking years ago.

Jessamyn 1:19:10 Back in 2008 Yeah.

Cortex 1:19:14 So like that. I like seeing the same song coming out of different people to you know, that's another one of those things I dig seeing happen on music show and there was there was other stuff there's always more stuff that I can mention, but we'll use those in the show this time and and yeah, I I dug all that so good job people waiting music keep doing it.

Jessamyn 1:19:36 Nice musicking

Cortex 1:19:39 Yeah, anything else you'd like? I guess I could take a scan through metal talk but metal talks with metal talkie we've keep having

Jessamyn 1:19:47 to talk I enjoy the Saturday things was there one what's today oh there's one today Yeah,

Cortex 1:19:52 it'll be it'll be later today. I don't even know what the topic is gonna be. We've we've had people have been sending them in which is great and eyebrows has been managing the list and We just, you know, pick something every week and run with it. And it's it's a nice system, I'm really diggin that. And there's been a couple other just sort of like for the hell of it sort of threads along those lines that have been joined that to, you know, meditate can be quite some weeks, there's just, you know, the site is more stable than it was years ago, you know, there's less random grouchy chips, because we've sort of slowly gotten people to give up on the idea of solving the problem of being really angry by going about a talk and doing that in public, you know, sure. Let's still happen sometimes. But you know,

Jessamyn 1:20:40 see what happens if you turn the queue off? We haven't even met a talk request. Yeah, actually. But I got you on the phone. So I can talk to you. Yeah, I think you shouldn't approve all the anonymous AskMe and filters all in a row so that there's like four or five of them all in a big block. Yeah, that's my feeling. I come out over time. So that in case there's a whole bunch of really weird dramatic problems, yeah, just get kind of dumped.

Cortex 1:21:04 I think about that sometimes. And I might, I might try and push back in that direction. It's often easy to just make sure it gets done on sort of a shift bases, at which point, you know, the check clump up. But yeah, it is, I can sort of see it going either way. So maybe I'll maybe I'll see about trying to spread out a little bit more. But ya know, duly noted it or support me in emails. It's a it's a reasonable point. And it's something I've sort of thought about, even as we've sort of moved towards,

Jessamyn 1:21:30 but you could say like, I didn't even care enough to email but I was like, Oh, my God.

Cortex 1:21:36 Exactly. There's a couple proposed sort of June things, which I realized we're into the first weekend of June already, but you know, we'll see what we can do. Zark proposed a joy in June sort of theme to posting filthy life feet, put out a somewhat vaguer notion of like, posts about journeys and places and whatnot, since it's summer and sort of travel season in the northern hemisphere. And oh, that's a good idea. First of all things to sort of look at and yeah. And yeah, go look at meta talk. There's stuff. There's things. There was a fun thread about like, what was going on the week that you joined meta filter, which I enjoyed that very much. Yeah, a lot of people were in the same shoes. I was like, I don't really remember, you know, I should say that joined at some point, I'd been reading already. But then a lot of people were like, oh, no, actually, yeah, this was a specific thing that was going on.

Jessamyn 1:22:31 This caused me to sign up

Cortex 1:22:34 when I signed up three years ago, or when I signed up 17 years ago. Wow. Yeah, we're going on at and it's going to be the big AP in this, you know, the site will be allowed to smoke now, but not inside anywhere anymore. So born too late Metafilter

Jessamyn 1:22:53 in the United States, that is Yeah.

Cortex 1:22:57 And I don't know if it's consistent across the US or if it's just become so common in major cities that it kind of feels that way among like folks who are talking about where it's like an issue like if if if you're in a city the fact that you can't smoke outside is going to be more of an issue than it is if you're out in the more rural area where maybe not expect most of the things that happen happen inside of businesses in a downtown area or whatever so right right right right. That's not a that's not a fully developed thought there. Anyway, yes, I don't know I guess okay. That's that's the situation that's the that's the podcast. That's the things that we talked about just now. Yeah. How's that for solid? Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:23:43 back to back to a long blabbity blah podcast. Yep. Maybe we should get a guest on or something

Cortex 1:23:49 we totally should we really, really should. And let's let's let's try to figure it out. And I'll try and I'll try and make some goddamn preemptive effort there. Okay, all right. Good talking.

Jessamyn 1:24:00 All right. Nice talking to you.

Cortex 1:24:37 Find you when

Cortex 1:24:44 you will find out

Cortex 1:24:54 you Don't give up on love