MetaFilter's site and server can always use upgrades of hardware, software, and bandwidth, as well as more stable funding for continued support of its small but high-skilled moderation and backend team! If you'd like to chip in, you can donate to Metafilter.

Podcast 135 Transcript

From Mefi Wiki
Jump to navigationJump to search

A transcript for Episode 135: It's A Dang Podcast (2017-12-03).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.


Transcript

Cortex 0:08 Testing. I'll tell you what, I'm just gonna I'm gonna straight up I'm gonna pretend we didn't fall. Start there. And I'm just gonna say, hey, hey, welcome. It's your guy is Josh it's GoreTex. It's, it's Jasmine is your girl, Jasmine, and it's up pisode 135 of Best of the web, the Metafilter monthly podcast, and we are podcasting right here at the end of November, November 30. The last day of November, the very last of November. And it's it's the evening and maybe you can feel that I can feel that I can feel this glass of wine in my hand.

Jessamyn 0:43 I am back from the bar already. Nice. Yes.

Cortex 0:46 Yeah. Did you have trivia or

Jessamyn 0:47 Yeah, yeah, we had trivia. And none of the people on my trivia teams are on Metafilter. So I can say we have a sort of fighty trivia team that always wins. And there's nothing like being on a team of people who are really competitive who win all the time anyhow, like, it's terrible, right? We should just not fight or not win so much, either one. And so I guess the some of the people kind of got the thing. And so they just came in, and we're like, we're gonna sit somewhere else today. And I was like, what? Like, are they mad? And so we split into two teams, which was actually probably the right thing, right? It's more competitive, it's less fighty. But my team wound up winning anyhow. Which, I guess was good. Because I mean, the whole point of splitting up is to make it more competitive. But I guess you still like I'm very good at bar trivia. And then I get my ass handed to me on the regular in learned League, internet trivia, but I still would like to lose more. But it's really hard to kind of pair up with people and be like, I think I've got a good chance of losing if you're on my team. So

Cortex 1:53 that's a dicey one to try and sort out. That's, we would have done even better

Jessamyn 1:57 if I could have looked at like one of the one of the rounds was bars. And I happen to recognize a great deal of like, one of them was like, the snake hole from Parks and Rec. Okay, I was literally the only person in the room who recognized it.

Cortex 2:13 Yeah, I like parks and rec a great deal, but I did not remember that at all. Yeah, I

Jessamyn 2:16 mean, but it was like that kind of weird. Random. But we did look at one bar from Futurama and think it was from the Jetsons because we're all old. Anyway, rate, I've been to the bar. You know, who was at the bar? My elected representative was at the bar. J. Hooper. Is my state rep. He was at the bar. No, he's all right.

Cortex 2:37 The nice yeah,

Jessamyn 2:38 he's 24. Oh, god, that's That's right. He is a child. I have two reps that are under 30. And he is one of them. And he shows up in a in a in a suit jacket at the bar to ask people when would be a good time for him to have a call in radio show? That's like what he's there for. He's like, he's pressing the flesh. And I was like, never Jay has never. He's like what I'm like, no one wants to listen to you on the radio for an hour. Even though I liked the guy but it is true. Let's be honest. Everybody's blowing smoke up his ass. But yeah, it was actually Alright, so did I mention I've been to the bar? Yeah, no,

Cortex 3:12 I think so. So we've got your bar we've got my my wine. I'm drinking the velvet devil.

Jessamyn 3:18 Shelter was the answer to one of the trivia questions on internet trivia today that I did not get. See and if I had waited

Cortex 3:28 you just sort of hit the Velvet Underground.

Jessamyn 3:32 That's probably something 30 Right. All right. This

Cortex 3:34 is gonna be a good one. I can feel it like a devil. Is it just kind of some wine and some clever name for a wine you know? Like that's what like like wine comes in like you know, fancy script in like, you know, faux gold on white or it comes with like, clever sassy. And this is the clever sassy side. Right tiny penguin with devil and big stuff in like a pitchfork and Yeah, nothing to drink.

Jessamyn 3:57 But we did get payday candy bars in between each round.

Cortex 4:01 So you're hopped up on sugar.

Jessamyn 4:02 Well have to punch sugar. Ah, and 135 is does have a couple of interesting things about it. Tell me. Did we actually start the show? Yeah, no, no,

Cortex 4:10 no, we're going even all this, okay.

Jessamyn 4:12 It's just got a really cool Roman numeral, let's see XXX V, which I like. I like and it's 888 in the AB herb condotta, the Latin Roman numbering system.

Cortex 4:30 I know that numbering system, that's something I

Jessamyn 4:32 didn't either, but like a post about it. It's like in the calendar. So like there's a whole like 135 in various calendars. And eight eight was the interesting one. It's also 135 and the Julian character calendar because I guess that's ours. Yes, it's a negative number on some calendars. That's weird. That seems it seems like the

Cortex 4:55 numbers on the calendar. That's just

Jessamyn 4:56 I don't know the Burmese calendar has um negatives use continuously sense they use it in Myanmar.

Cortex 5:10 I'm gonna change my my, my comment to this sounds like several medical posts that which they can make starting next month, which is tomorrow because we're doing the best post contracts. Yeah.

Jessamyn 5:23 It's not too late. If you want to sponsor a best post oh yeah contest of your own. So like the mods did one I did one, Adam basketball rangefinder, 1.4 and fizz all did one, meaning that they'll give a little prize to someone who wins in whatever category and you can win these by accident. Oh, yeah. So like Adam basketball is offering an award for art by a deceased artist.

Cortex 5:47 So you could you could make a post about some art you found without even knowing that's going on. And boom, you could win that sub category. If that's the one that had a basketball ex best boom. Or the one that gets the most its way. I haven't even reread the rules I was I go to the best post contest in the spirit of posts more so than of having the contest organized.

Jessamyn 6:09 I am so happy. I don't have to judge the damn thing that I can just enjoy it from afar.

Cortex 6:15 Yeah. And it's it's a nice thing. So I'm excited about that. It should be fun. We were talking about talking about metadata stuff up front. And here we are talking about metal photography up front. And I may or may not have already cut out the previous pre start conversations where we said we were gonna be doing that. Yeah, so we might be repeating ourselves, but we're just going for it. This time. We're gonna we're going to talk about some of the nice, nice fun stuff up front, which for example, Johnny wallflower had grandkid? Well, I mean, I don't know if he had a grandkid, Johnny. He became a grandfather type by one more unit that?

Jessamyn 6:50 Yeah, I don't know what your situation is. Yeah, I know. He's got a lady. And that's all I know.

Cortex 6:55 Johnny wallflower has a descendant who has now had their own descendant is the situation. So Johnny wallflower is the grandfather of this new descendant of a descendant? Boom, there we go. I described that very well. No one could have a problem with Don't even start

Jessamyn 7:15 talking like that. It's not funny like you think it is. It's funny in a bad way. son

Cortex 7:22 thinks a little bit of both.

Jessamyn 7:24 Well, I wanted to mention that two things happened kind of in a row Metafilter is now going to has gone to entirely HTTP. Yes. Yes. When did that totally. When did that start happening?

Cortex 7:38 That happened for realsies. This last Friday, we gave a heads up about a week ahead of time to let people sort of get their ducks in a row if they had anything that was specifically sensitive to that, which should be just about nothing. But there's a few odd edge cases. So we wanted to least warn people first.

Jessamyn 7:54 Yeah. And as a result, a whole bunch of meta filter scripts may or may not have broken. And so there is now a growing Script Repository over at GitHub, set up by John Hadron Collider, a friend of mine, who used to be GHC. And if you are looking for scripts, or you want to contribute a script that you wrote, or you want to clean up a script, so that it works for HTTPS, and then people can use it. I just made a script today. That changes people talking about the Grauniad to changing it to say the Guardian because it's like a joke among people who understand that the Gorani ad is the same paper as the guardian. But it was bothering I think octothorpe or something.

Cortex 8:45 I think that a lot of people not like in the in the UK in particular who like it's it's a it's a decade's long running joke there that has sort of turned into almost a term of affection at this point.

Jessamyn 8:55 And is that because everybody spells it wrong? Or why is that? I think it's

Cortex 8:59 because famously they had typesetting correctness issues like I don't know if anybody ever quantified this but but the basic the folk tale is the guardian did such a bad job of checking their copy for

Jessamyn 9:11 Oh, so it's a meta commentary. It's not just like, I spell it wrong to be all

Cortex 9:16 right. Like the idea is that like, you know, they're so bad at it, they might even misspell style, their own masthead or whatever. Which I don't know that that ever happened. But that's the joke. And so people call it the granny ad or a couple of things with the ground. Yeah, that is common one. And then people in the US who don't like have that history, like what the fuck is that about? And everyone's want someone's like, wait, wait, wait, the granite.

Jessamyn 9:37 It's, oh, my God. I thought it was a blog. I

Cortex 9:40 thought if somebody had a blog called grani. So it's, yeah, it's a it's a decisive thing. But it's a decisive thing. That's also like a Well historically footed term of reference in endearment, or, you know, duration or derisive endearment. So it's not really going away ever and we have a congress Rayfield like once every, like year or two. And then it talks about like, Oh, also we need to stop doing that. And like people like Well, yeah, but no. So it's people are always gonna be at odds with about it. But you made the script to sort of like, slice the Gordian knot.

Jessamyn 10:15 Yeah, so if you just want to read metal filter and never see grani ad, again, you can install this script using tampermonkey, or grease monkey or whatever it is the kids today use. And the script is so easy that anybody who knows how to copy and paste can use the script to replace whatever it is like it used to be when I would make these replacement scripts. I would also include the thing that replaced my name with mom. So that when people would say thanks, Jessamyn, it would say thanks, mom. And that always made me laugh. Yeah, I have stopped doing that. But I did it. I did enjoy it. And it was good. The other thing to mention from meta talk because I wanted to front load it while I was still feeling awake is to me $5 back. Yes. If you sell a thing, or you have a service you offer or you want to be in the Mi fi Mall. Sign up.

Cortex 11:06 Yeah, just check it out. Drop us a line of contact form if you're not sure what the deal is, but it's kind of a self serve thing where you can just set yourself up with a listing for whatever you're selling. And, you know, I mean, link link to something. It's a little bit of a blurb. So wait

Jessamyn 11:19 a second, Josh, theoretically, you have a store, but all it is is a picture ended up.

Cortex 11:26 That's a dumb story. Yes. Yes. Like the day after I put up a link to my article site for my paintings, because I've been doing a lot of painting in the last year. And it was originally,

Jessamyn 11:36 I have an original Josh Maillard. And I do love to you do

Cortex 11:39 I love it. Anyway, set up an art site for a few months ago. And that went well. And then all of my shit just got completely owned by some fucking script, Kitty, and

Jessamyn 11:46 oh, God, really? Yeah, I'm so sorry. I did not realize

Cortex 11:50 Yeah. And so what happened is like, I was like, I could either find somehow right now and I don't have it like the pile of extra energy and time to try and deal with this. Or I could say, You know what, I've been thinking about this for a while, and just pull everything down for now and give myself a break and say, You know what, I can rebuild it in the near future. So kind of doing that. And that included the you had a store? Yeah, I had it was I mean, it wasn't a store so much. It's just a blog that listed prices and said, email me, but you know, it was a store. Yeah,

Jessamyn 12:20 I mean, this is not a start. This is not sure. And I'd like to

Cortex 12:23 get something back up there soon. But I'd like I'd need to set aside the time for it. And I might actually get to that soon, because that's kind of a priority. I would like to have that function again. But that's why it's there. Yeah, it was it was much there was put up the linkers that I should probably just pull that down for now. But yeah, anyway, that's what's going on with my shit there. But your

Jessamyn 12:43 store I have no store this year, I decided every to just dial everything to hell back. So like, I'm not selling any old T shirts that sell in moss gardens. I just figured I would either buy stuff or do nothing. So I've been enjoying looking at the stuff people have. It's always cool to see what people have.

Cortex 13:02 And there's a bunch of cool stuff we've actually, Secretariat and I have bought stuff from two or three people so far this year, we will probably do a little bit more but we picked up some some rad occultist wood engravings from Robocop is bleeding from his quarry press stuff and we picked up some engraved or not engraved but cut out well I shouldn't I'm just gonna stop saying that well right now because it's gonna be a gift for someone who so bought some stuff I bought some stuff and it's great and you should also buy some stuff and or yeah, if you're ready to try and ship stuff in time for Christmas you should listen stuff you everybody out there I'm talking to you the listener not to Jasmine she just said she's not That's okay. I'm not pressuring her. But you let you imagine me pointing through the screen you've got your 3d glasses on not making the small stuff Yeah, not not not not Jasmine. I'm putting I'm putting past gentleman

Jessamyn 13:55 I don't buy it. I don't buy it for the holidays. But what I do need is someone who's good at WordPress who can help me do a redesign but I'll probably just put that on jobs

Cortex 14:02 you should put that on jobs. I thought about putting my thing on jobs but then I realized I wasn't sure what the scope was and I also felt a little bit silly about saying hey, I'm responsible for this website that you are reading this on my shits all fogged help which is its own thing it's it's offensive personal stuff but it's like

Jessamyn 14:17 stuff at home

Cortex 14:18 ya know and I may get there I may I may once I figure out what I want to do I may enlist some help that way but I

Jessamyn 14:23 told you that sure I'll fix my shit right up right yeah,

Cortex 14:27 he's a good guy.

Jessamyn 14:28 I finally literally yesterday with my friend stuck the glass back on the top of the thing and it's now back to being a computer again.

Cortex 14:38 Fucking A and my computer's in the shop. I'm recording this on my laptop which I never do. Which is not any good reason because it's a perfectly nice laptop. But my my main iMac that is my normal workstation. and has been for like six

Jessamyn 14:52 years. Why do you have in the shop? Why didn't you just have Jesse fix

Cortex 14:54 it? Jesse. Funny story, Jesse. Thanks, Mike. I live in Vermont. I took it to basically it's not Jesse's problem to deal with it. Plus it needed parts. So

Jessamyn 15:06 she sent me parts in the mail. It's just not a very good friend of

Cortex 15:10 yours. Yeah, no, I did. Yeah, we were our guards bed so I'm just I got a new hard

Jessamyn 15:18 drive but not from Jesse. Yeah. That's so funny. Was it the iMac? Is it your old metal filter? iMac? Yeah, my metal filter iMac hard drive literally just shit the bed like a month ago.

Cortex 15:30 2011 Yeah. Fucking 20 lemons, man. They're the worst.

Jessamyn 15:34 I think it's 2011 Actually, I should check in like 2012 2011 Because I didn't work at Metafilter no till late. 2012 did I still? Yeah, I guess I just I just barely did. Yeah,

Cortex 15:45 that's right, right around the end. Turns out five years is the moment that I'm finally like, just genuinely comfortable talking about that whole, like, dynamic without like internally cringing. So there we go. We've hit it we hit the five year crunchy dashes

Jessamyn 15:58 for years.

Cortex 15:59 I just I created all that stuff. I can't help it. It's the the the amount of just like not big deal. But just like slowly cooking anxiety I have about like the social implications of navigating, like post dissolution things with any kind of organization I've been involved in is just complicated.

Jessamyn 16:17 Oh, interesting. CMB leaving is like the great part of those things. Like the worst part is like the before the leaving the after the leaving, like leaving is at least a decisive thing. You did. You know what I'm sure everything else is worse.

Cortex 16:31 We'll see. That's the thing is I in this case, I didn't leave so I have weird feelings about all that Fallout, you know?

Jessamyn 16:37 I'm sorry.

Cortex 16:38 No, that's alright. It worked out. Okay. For you to view. Yeah, no, no, I'm fine. I'm fine. You're fine. It's fine. Wine is fine. I want to also mention the Animal Crossing pocket camp code shirt.

Jessamyn 16:54 Yeah, so here's where Josh explains something to me because I don't understand why Animal Crossing is a thing all the sudden.

Cortex 17:01 It's because Nintendo put out a mobile game.

Jessamyn 17:03 Now this mobile game comes with a mobile game player or you play it on an old player or

Cortex 17:09 lose your phone. It's like that's, that's like a it's yeah, it's it's like an iOS and possibly Android too. I don't know. But I played on my iPhone. And it's just kind of weird to

Jessamyn 17:22 feel DS but now they can play the game they love on the thing that they are always staring at

Cortex 17:27 sort of they can play a game in the franchise that they love animals, not the saucing pocket camp is not actually very good as Animal Crossing games go. It's like it really, Nintendo has done a good job of embracing the whole Free to Play mobile game thing. for better and for worse, and for better, because it means they put out a nice little Animal Crossing game on the phone and for worse, because they kind of nailed everything that is kind of crappy about Free to Play mobile apps too. So it's like it doesn't. It's not a oh boy, there's new Animal Crossing game. It's Oh, well, I guess this will do until there's a new real Animal Crossing game, which is gonna be a new Animal Crossing game, or it's not gonna announce as far as I know, like, they should really, really put one out for the switch, which is their new console. But I don't know that they've announced any intentions to yet so. So who knows. But for now, just saying it's kind of a lightweight fun time killer. And

Jessamyn 18:16 you can there's a meta talk where you can find other meat fights to play. Yeah. So

Cortex 18:19 you can be friends with each other. There's not a whole lot of interaction, but like you can at least know who the people you're not having much interaction with. That's nice. That's cool. I enjoyed that. There was also a couple weeks ago, there was a meta happy thread fizz posted just to say, hey, shits been tough. How about about happy stuff. And so it's a couple 100 comments of fun, happy stuff you can catch up on if you're into that.

Jessamyn 18:42 I like those threads. Yeah, I always just enjoy. I mean, I think also in line with the we don't have to talk about it a lot. But probably you guys's attempt to not only corral people in the political mica threads but encouraged them to interact more with the rest of the site. I feel like threads like this have always been I mean, since the election, like my kind of positive interactions with the site like I love the threads that eyebrows Biggie does in meta stock and like I've always been around asked me to filter but there are a lot of mefites who don't really spend a lot of time and asked me to filter but I feel like a lot of them come out for these threats.

Cortex 19:19 Yeah, it's a nice thing. It's accessible in a way that is a good thing. I think I like having them in the mix. And I want to keep encouraging people to do that. You know, it's funny, I was just talking to a friend today about the idea of even sort of like the slightly grapey but not like high stakes. griping meta talks is the thing that we have a little bit less of than I think we used to in the sort of Thunderdome meta talk heyday. Yeah, and I don't miss a lot of Thunderdome stuff. But there is something about someone saying, You know what, I kind of wish there would be less of X and even if

Jessamyn 19:49 like everyone's like, I have an opinion. Yeah. If people are like, Well

Cortex 19:53 I agree and or no X is fine. You know, it's like it's kind of nice having that little bit of like, you know, kibitzing energy a little bit water Jewelry So, right. And that's something we're like, you know, I think that has just sort of fallen out of fashion more than anything because it's not like we get those in and like, you know, quash them. Just get rid of the cue that I haven't heard so much. Yeah. I you know that I still I still there's part of me that wants to get rid of the cue and there's part of me that does not miss like, you know, what wasn't shitty this year, Jasmine. Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving was fine, you know, and

Jessamyn 20:24 my Thanksgiving was really fine, too. But mine's been fine for

Cortex 20:26 about three years. Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah, it's, they've been they haven't had giant, horrible arguments. Generally. Although

Jessamyn 20:34 when you guys were talking about HTTPS? That was like, gonna be my funny joke. Yeah. Oh, HTTPS right. before Thanksgiving. I know how this is gonna go. I know this story.

Cortex 20:44 But actually, it's so anticlimactic. You know, like, this has been a subject for several years, and we put it off and we thought more about and didn't quite do it. Yes, yeah. And you finally ruined Thanksgiving. Yeah, no, no, the HTTPS. And then we made the announcement a week ahead of time to give people time and whatnot. And then we just like flipped the switch. And there were like, two problems that they someone's like, Oh, hey, this, this page that no one ever visits that you forgot existed? It doesn't work. And it was like, oh, okay, well, it works now. And that was pretty much all thing. There was a there's a weird bug with people who had not visited meta filter at all, usually, because they were like an incognito session that just forgot everything from Opera. We're getting a weird redirect loop because opera lies about what it is user agent wise. What mode or something like that. I mean, it's not doing anything wrong. It's just that's what it does. And so yeah, weird little stuff like that. Yeah, it was quite a once in a while. Yeah, no one good.

Jessamyn 21:43 And also, thanks to the give up your food thread. By slap happy I remembered that slap happy is someone who lives right up the road from where I was going to be alone at my dad's house for a chunk of Thanksgiving weekend, because Jim was visiting his parents, and I had to go pick up my snow tires. And so I made a comment and said I'd be in town and he's like, please come over and eat all the food. And that's what I did it all the food all weekend. It was really good time. That is red. Yeah, their whole family just cooks and are all very good cooks. And they like to feed other people and it's just like a house where you just like hang out and the kids play video games and the parents watch TV or you walk around and there's just tons of food and everyone's really nice and slap happy sister works like two buildings away from gyms so they kind of know the same people and yeah, that's awesome. So happy about that.

Cortex 22:35 Oh, in the spirit of the mall here we should just put this in the mall and enter to just as a goof, but I will I will remind folks we got stickers. We still got some shirts leftover. We'll make some more stuff too. But we still got we got these new stickers. We made a pack of stickers and they look great. I've got one of my car and I gave them out at a meet up recently and it's just great fun.

Jessamyn 22:54 I think you sent me one right? Somebody sent me one. Yeah, I

Cortex 22:56 think I sent everybody like a sticker. Well, not everybody like six people but the mod team and a couple of Emiratis emeritus emeritus emeritus usually emeritus sounds right and feels good. It's gonna get mouthfeel like this wine. This podcast brought to you by the velvet devil. Know why. This little, we're monetizing the podcast now with really bad advertisements thrown in like 30 minutes in.

Jessamyn 23:26 I liked a little tobacco thing that's miles. I don't even know what that thing is. But it always just tears me up. The little yellow guy. What is that?

Cortex 23:33 That's to Pato that's tomato potato. He's made a poison. He's he is what it's a real thing. Ya know, so, so to Quantico is run by a guy named Geoffrey Rolland, who is either known as Oh that guy who fucking runs to Patoka which is like the webcomic merch store along with you know, they have a wider business model now than just apple. That's kind of their whole thing. Like, if you are a person seriously doing webcomic there's a good chance that your merch is at the portico. Yeah, the filter is doing there is a weird question. And, you know, it's very good of him to work with us, despite that weirdness. But yeah, but part of it is he had a he's he's done a couple of comics, and he does comics. But he does it a little bit less now that he's been running a busy business for several years. But he called Waygu. About a little kid named Weibo. And his username on netfilter is also Weibo. He's got a low user number. And we whose favorite show was a cartoon starring to Pato potahto. The this adventurer, a superhero who was like a potato made out of poison, and he and Sherif pony would go have adventures and stuff and

Jessamyn 24:44 see I just typed to Pato potato and the duck duck go and I'm looking at his pictures with potatoes.

Cortex 24:53 That's a good question.

Jessamyn 24:54 It's tomato potato spelled like you think it is? I would think so. Oh, Miko will do better to pop open.

Cortex 25:04 Yeah, I'm saving images.

Jessamyn 25:05 Why is terrible? I don't know. Oh, that's really weird. I've never like I use DuckDuckGo because whatever I just don't want to get tracked and I don't care and most of the time, it's the fucking same. But that's crazy to pot a potato a duck taco is literally pictures of potatoes.

Cortex 25:24 That's fantastic. I would I would I would be excited about a browser that like intentionally got everything wrong and I could refuse to understand things like references. Well, that would be Siri

Jessamyn 25:33 on my goddamn phone is what that would be.

Cortex 25:36 It's nothing but pronounced. Potatoes

Jessamyn 25:39 doesn't. I know. It's weird, right? I mean, check, but it's the same word. I literally copied and pasted the words from DuckDuckGo into Google.

Cortex 25:48 It's freaking me out.

Jessamyn 25:49 It's freaking me out. Oh, man. What the fuck? I don't know.

Cortex 25:53 Okay, well, anyway, so go buy some stickers in summer.

Jessamyn 25:58 Well, and I got a new laptop because my laptop broke. And so I need things to put stickers on. Oh, yeah, there you go. So, yeah, everybody gets some stickers. And yeah, nice job getting some stickers out there. Compliment.

Cortex 26:14 Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you. Sorry. I was I was I was suddenly I was gonna say, you know, what, why don't we? Why don't we call this a structureless. One. We've done this before once and just say like, now we'll talk about whatever else we talked about on the site. without going through the sections, we'll just say

Jessamyn 26:30 stuff. Okay, well, because there's no jobs anyhow, there's just one job. That's just probably against the law. Even though I wish Tatiana wishbone the best luck getting morning sickness medicine mailed to her from whatever, Italy, and someone should really handle this. But it is also probably illegal. Yeah. But whatever you should do.

Cortex 26:49 Follow your heart. Yeah. I'm also very unprepared, which I think we talked about very briefly, and

Jessamyn 26:58 I just need to click through to my favorites and remind myself what I liked.

Cortex 27:03 Well, I'll mention a project that I quite like, from Master Boot Record, who? That's not the right link. I just pasted the wrong link. That's no good. Not that.

Jessamyn 27:16 I didn't look at it. Okay, well, good.

Cortex 27:19 Yes, virtual reverse a cyberpunk point and click adventure. Which is exactly

Jessamyn 27:24 what it sounds like. I know what all those words are.

Cortex 27:28 Yeah. So that's what that's what it is. And this was posted to projects by Master Boot Record, who listeners months past will recall as the name of the artist who made an album that I very much liked, and made a post about on the front page, and then Master Boot Record joined up to say, Oh, hey, thanks. And I just lost my mind.

Jessamyn 27:47 Come on. That's great. Yeah. you losing your mind, you need that?

Cortex 27:52 Well, you know, in a good way. Anyway, he makes read stuff. I really liked his chiptune metal, he mixes metal record. But he also does other stuff, too, including this isn't working for a while. So I was excited to see that come by.

Jessamyn 28:05 Cool. That's awesome. I advocate I made two posts this month. And I was gonna start being just I actually made three posts. One about a squirrel that were women's clothing, a male squirrel that war wounds clothing, the less said about the better probably squirrel named Tommy Tucker, where women's clothing sold war bonds. But then I was listening to a podcast that I really like the only other podcast I listened to, besides this one is called Qi no such thing as official distributor. But it's like British people talking about trivia. So it's

Cortex 28:42 like an official Qi product. Yeah, it is. Okay.

Jessamyn 28:46 Yeah, it's the same. It's the people that do the research for the TV show. And then they have their own podcast. And it's like, they each pick one fact. And then they tell you about it, but they everybody always researches everything. And so then they riff on those facts. And so the fact this time was that there used to be that there have been different ways people have thrown the Javelin like, you know, the Javelin like that. You throw the shark and, and there's this way of weapons. Yes. And there's this way of throwing the javelin, which is called the Spanish way where you actually twirl around and throw it, which was like, done once and then made completely illegal, because it's just ridiculous and it was banned immediately. But at any rate, these people are like laughs Annabelle, like Javelin facts, and I'm like, that's super funny. And so I looked some up and I made like a goofy post about javelins. But then while I was looking up the goofy Javelin post, I found out stuff about the Javelin car. And on this really great website called ate up with Moto, like I don't understand why it's called that. ate up with Moto like a tee up with Moto I don't I don't understand it at all, but it's car histories.

Cortex 30:03 And it started with like a mad ape den thing and they just lost the plot really quickly with a name.

Jessamyn 30:10 I have no idea. It is fascinating. Oh, why is it called EYDAP with Moto back in 1977 stockcar driver Darrell Waltrip said that his Chevy Monte Carlo Bertha was quote, all ate up with motor unquote. It's a common southern expression meaning is very, or in this case has a lot of so.

Cortex 30:32 So like a buffet could be ate up with food. Ah

Jessamyn 30:39 sure. Yeah. And at any rate, it's a great website. So then I was in this awkward position of like, having my Javelin post be completely reasonably received, but then wanting to make another Javelin post like the very next day. And then I was like, Okay, I'll do it. And then I was like, I'm gonna make one every day for a month, but then I kind of ran out of javelins. Like there was like a horror movie called javelina. Lena, but there wasn't enough information about it. I tried. Made by one of the guys in Top Gun, actually, one of the guys that was an actor and Top Gun.

Cortex 31:12 Really? Yeah. Tom Tom Cruise, Anthony Edwards.

Jessamyn 31:16 No. Not Val Kilmer either, like the guy you don't know his name. That guy. But yeah, he made a horror movie about crazy pigs. So that's what I've been up to. So for free farming, those are my thing.

Cortex 31:30 Fucking A. I saw a post, I liked this very day. Secretary, shout out this out from the other room. And she's like, Hey, you should check out this biscornu thing? Why the hell is that? Guy? That's exactly yeah, this was it turns out a biscornu is a specific kind of I think the biscornu is specifically the craft project version of what is more generally mathematically according to a carful of lines known as a deform. And a deform is what you get when you take two shapes, and then sort of stitch their edges together. So like a circle, and a circle, would make basically a pizza I guess, but a circle and a square, you get a complicated sort of weird back and forth border, because the square sort of wraps up on the circle a bit. And this is a good post to look at, because I'm not gonna describe it well at all I am. Basically you take the take two things, and you put together and biscornu is a specific, I guess, octagonal shape you get when you take two squares, turn 145 degrees against the other and then just sew up the edges and you get this weird back and forth. sort of wandering edge and this sort of octagonal pin cushion.

Jessamyn 32:41 And it's a French term that means bizarre or crooked.

Cortex 32:45 Yeah, like in that song, how biscornu will have is gonna be like, make Sorry, what was that? I can't even remember who that artist is. I can't even say what that bad 90s throwback was. Anyway, how bizarre how bizarre. It is. With the French wine. Anyway, it's nice. There's like, you know, 1415 comments, but it's just like this thing I didn't know about at all that happened across Metafilter. And then people said several interesting things about it. And it's fantastic. Josh, man,

Jessamyn 33:18 I believe that mega threads have ruined people for Metafilter the way porn has ruined men for sex. Because everybody's looking at their little posts with like, 20 comments and being like, ah, like, how can 20 Post 20 comments is completely good. It's totally fine. It's

Cortex 33:39 totally a thing. And it's, it's yeah, no, it is kind of bullshitty. That, that like, that feels like a problem. And I understand we talked about it a little bit in the metadata, big minutes discussion we've been having, which I'll we'll dig into that a little bit more to say. But yeah, no, it is sort of a thing like it. One of the things I've been saying is like, hey, just go ahead and comment more in other threads, go ahead and post more, make eight new posts, and a couple folks have been like, well, but you know, I go and make a post and then it's like tumbleweeds, like there's like, yeah, there's there's 20 comments. There's 10 comments. There's five comments.

Jessamyn 34:15 We used to be happy with 10 comments. Yeah,

Cortex 34:17 I mean, you look at the first couple years of the site, especially like, Yo, you'd be happy with a comment. And usually if there was a comment on a post, it was mad commenting on his own post.

Jessamyn 34:26 Yeah, it was Yeah.

Cortex 34:27 Yeah. So like, yeah, there's there's this there's this, I think, sense that. Yeah, I mean, whatever analogy you want to use, there's definitely a sense of like, you know,

Jessamyn 34:37 my analogy is perfect. Yeah, it's

Cortex 34:44 trying to have a family podcast.

Jessamyn 34:46 You are not

Cortex 34:48 wine. Yeah, no, it's weird. I would like people to not like worry about that. Because like, you should just make a post and I sort of talked actually about my posting habits lately, which I've posted so much more in the last year than I have in any previous year. I've maybe posted ever. Yeah, no, it's I've really been enjoying it. It's nice. I feel good every time. And a lot of the time I get like five comments, maybe like, you know, sometimes less sometimes a little bit more. And you run the place. Yeah. Like, like I cynically

Jessamyn 35:21 for signups.

Cortex 35:22 I know, right, like, where's that? I feel like that's not paying off enough. I should be I should be totally out of touch with the common man. I'd be like, no, no, it's really easy to get at comments on a dumb post. It doesn't deserve posting. Yeah, I do. But yeah, so like you're posting because there's a thing that you're posting, posting should be about being that little drop in the bucket. Who'd be one more little note in this weird little?

Jessamyn 35:45 Because you want to see something on metal filter more than? Yeah,

Cortex 35:49 that's that's all it needs to matter. Like it doesn't. There should not you should not be thinking about metrics. You should not be thinking about like, is this gonna get enough meal comments or responses? You should be thinking, Oh, this was interesting. Boom, I want my friends to see this thing, because I think

Jessamyn 36:01 it'll make medicine, Twitter. Yeah, I'm gonna interrupt for a PSA. If you're somebody in the United States, who needs to get your shit together and get some health care you got till December 15. And there's a great post by Zach Lipton. That gives you a whole bunch of information. But yeah, tell everybody tell your friends. The government is being fuckity like always. And there's a smaller window and it's more complicated, so encouraged people who could use healthcare to get health care.

Cortex 36:31 Yes, do it. We're having I'm playing a fun game with Boaty McBoatface. One of our who is really enjoying longer around on my desk, because it's getting close to dinnertime. And she likes to just sort of those animals eight o'clock at night.

Jessamyn 36:49 Yep. Is that just so they won't wake you up at four in the

Cortex 36:51 morning? Partly Yeah, it's a it's a reliable schedule that works. We have to feed them at the same time because otherwise one cat will eat the other cats food and like it's so yeah, we just do an eight the morning eight at night works out pretty well. We'll always be up by then we'll never be in bed by then. You know, that sort of thing. Anyway, she's she's kind of restless about dinner coming up.

Jessamyn 37:13 And you were like, this would be a great time to do a podcast. Well, I

Cortex 37:16 mean, she's she's, she's not being noise or anything, but she just likes bumping into stuff, including my microphone, which is at a different position than usual because of my laptop. And so it's like, it's just on the edge of tipping over just by default, and she keeps walking into it. So we're playing a fun game called trying not to drop the microphone on the laptop. It's a it's a good time.

Jessamyn 37:36 You're doing great. Yeah, no, it's

Cortex 37:37 working out. Well. She's keeping me on my toes. I like it. I liked this post that oh, gosh, who made this? This was winter sweet made a post about among other things. mashups of Brooklyn nine nine and deep space 909

Jessamyn 37:54 died Yes.

Cortex 37:58 And Deep Space Nine if you don't know what is a Star Trek franchise from now many years ago it's weird to think about that. That I have a particular affection for because I was doing which commander? That was commander Cisco. The Intel

Jessamyn 38:16 commander Cisco is

Cortex 38:18 Yeah. Benjamin Cisco man. He was he was the fucking he was the bomb.

Jessamyn 38:22 I just I just every picture of a potato

Cortex 38:28 would have everything is

Jessamyn 38:30 seriously though, Commander Cisco. And I see one picture of this dude. And then the whole rest of it is screenshots of Cisco routers. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong

Cortex 38:43 with SK Oh. Oh, is that my problem? Yeah, you probably spell it that one's probably on you. Alright, good, good. Anyway, so Deep Space Nine is a Star Trek series that I quite like. Brooklyn nine nine is a comedy cop show. Which almost feels like you

Jessamyn 39:05 miss Andy Samberg from from SNL or other places. There's a lot of good Andy Samberg. I love the show crumbs are Andy and Andre Brower. Chelsea Peretti. Joe Lutra Julio. Lots and lots of walk ons by like random hilarious people you've heard of.

Cortex 39:27 Jason Lucas shows up a couple times this season, which I love because I love him and everything.

Jessamyn 39:31 Which is he What does he

Cortex 39:32 play? He he's he's he's roses. Boyfriend. Oh, God. Undercover out. Yeah. And he made every like, he has cameos and everything and everything. He plays a cameo as the super intense crazy guy, which sounds like it'd be bad typecasting, but it's actually just JSON data because does that really well and it's wonderful. So yeah. Anyway, so this post is just linked to a bunch of mashups like the so like you've got the Brooklyn nine nines last DS nine stuff but there's also like mashing up Brooklyn nine, nine and Hamilton or putting the wrong quotes on adventures screenshots or Hogwarts nine, nine, or misquoting Buffy and so on. It's a kind of like it's inherently a referential humor. So like it may sort of fall flat if you aren't into at least one of those two things. But if you are it's it's a nice way to waste time and there's a ton of this shit on Tumblr. Like basically every mashup you can think of somebody does a comedy misquote for Miss caption thing, and it says a good time. So I like that. I got some good laughs out of that.

Jessamyn 40:35 Buffy misquotes on Hannibal screenshots.

Cortex 40:40 You know, it's,

Jessamyn 40:42 it's what's his name? Mickelson, Lars

Cortex 40:47 Nicholson from Mark Mads.

Jessamyn 40:49 Maj. I got like three out of four letters.

Cortex 40:52 So you were close. That's pretty solid. I mean, magic. Mars would be a more like, you know, believable name if we pretend that there isn't like, you know, names that aren't American.

Jessamyn 41:02 I know, right? Yes, well, I enjoyed this. We were talking about Thanksgiving. And one of the funner things about Thanksgiving for me was, and I didn't even find this until later, was Martin whiskey. And his show me the weird stuff in your parents house. single link Twitter. And normally, I'd be like single link Twitter Come the fuck on. But it's just basically this woman who you know, is home for the holidays. She's like this gal from Cards Against Humanity. And her Twitter is just good in general. And it's basically like two tweets, please show me pictures of weird stuff in your parents house. Tweet number two, I want to see the seashells in the bathroom people. And then it turns into a thread with 3000 comments on Twitter, which then turns into a thread with what 90 comments on metal filter, which is basically the metal filter version of this thread, like whether you're home or you just did somebody else's house, or you know, you've got something weird in your own bathroom, like whatever it is. And I think it's something that a lot of people can kind of share and like maybe you hate your parents or you're like, Fuck your parents, or maybe you don't, or maybe you love your parents and you're like, oh, this thing, like everybody could contribute in a different way as opposed to like, I hope you all had the typical Thanksgiving dinner, everybody and yeah, metal filters like I'm not like an American. What like, I just enjoyed it because it felt like lots of people could participate. And I enjoyed it just because the thread was great.

Cortex 42:41 Yeah.

Jessamyn 42:43 And I'd seen it on Twitter the night before and I didn't know it was on meta filter until I popped over and then was like, Ah, awesome.

Cortex 42:50 In related things I saw on the internet news this was talking about religion. Yeah, well, I know but like this is another thing that was going around like that. I saw that Thanksgiving weird stuff in here.

Jessamyn 43:02 Okay, I don't know what this is. So I'm looking forward to hearing about it for me this this

Cortex 43:06 is a goofy Japanese you know, Game Show type thing where several people are competing to climb up a set of lubricated stairs and the stairs. Oh God. So it's called slippery stairs and Oh, God. It's it's fantastic. It's as good as it sounds or possibly better. And yeah, you should just go watch it and the thread was enjoyable. Everybody's like, oh my god, you know? What do you say? It's it's a good time. There's a little bit of discussion of sort of like the nature of Japanese game shows versus American game shows and now it's like sort of a different conference.

Jessamyn 43:40 Well this is amazing because if you slip you take someone out with Oh yeah, that just

Cortex 43:45 sort of keeps happening more and more as it goes on to spoiler alert but yeah, I thought that was a lot of fun.

Jessamyn 43:54 Oh my god sorry, I'm just basically watching this now Sorry, go on.

Cortex 44:04 I made a post about a thing that I liked. And I'm just gonna fucking toss it in here. Because it's just a little sort of something somebody but there's no rules do what thou wilt

Jessamyn 44:18 that guy's a fucker though.

Cortex 44:21 That Oh, you mean sorry the quote I was like I don't know he's just some guy who made this thing I liked what do you tell I'm sure

Jessamyn 44:27 it's fine. Every time I hear do it that well that always reminds me of like bad dudes in college OSHA your fault, but

Cortex 44:33 just Oh yeah, well, no, I'm not gonna quote that straight face because I don't think that's actually a super great bit of advice for me but in the spirit of the thing. The the

Jessamyn 44:44 golden lately, like I was over at the post office the other day and they had candy. And you know, I was like, I don't know, I stole a Hershey's Kiss out of a bag and they're like, ooh, steal the good kiss, are we and I'm like, you know, postal guys. We just don't talk that way anymore. They're like what Well, and they were totally they are nice people. They did not mean it in any weird way. And yet I was just like, Nope.

Cortex 45:08 Just gonna say hey, you know, had it. I'm not

Jessamyn 45:10 mad, but no, say something else. They were like, oh, okay, whatever. Yeah, everyone sends a jerk. And I was like, Yes, he is. Let's move on. Cool.

Cortex 45:20 Well, I like this thing. This just somebody who goes by knock key is some some game developer who made a little infinite library for a procedural Game Jam earlier this year

Jessamyn 45:32 at procedural Game Jam. Is that just like a? What is that?

Cortex 45:35 Well, Game Jam is generally like, hey, you've got a week or three days or a day to make a game. And here's the theme, and everybody who feels like participating does that and they stop at the end of that. And that's what they submit. And everybody's goes into pile and hey, this is what came out of this jam. So that's the basic idea of procedural Game Jam happens to specifically be about the idea of generating a lot of content with systems in the game. So instead of saying,

Jessamyn 46:01 I get it, so you make a pattern that builds Yeah, you make

Cortex 46:04 something that makes things like Minecraft famously, is sort of built around the idea of effectively infinite procedurally generated worlds. So instead of, you know, there being some individual set of levels that someone designed by hand, there's just a machine that generates terrain, and then you can walk as far as you can, and indeed, come direction that keeps generating it. So yeah, so procedural Game Jam, just, that's kind of the core idea, you're building a thing that generates a thing. And so he made something that generated an infinite library based on porches porch, or his foreheads.

Jessamyn 46:38 That's cool. Well, and you know, this was a very formative book, like the bar has staff at the infinite library was one of the, you know, if there's, like five books that I can point to, and like, what really made librarianship become like, a thing in my mind, like that bar has started that this game is based on is actually one of them. Nice. Yeah. So this is cool, because I would have missed this otherwise. So I'm glad you're talking to me about this post.

Cortex 47:06 It's a little it's a little thing he developed and he just writes sort of about how we got there and how we execute it. So it's a it's like two parts and one is sort of like, here's the idea I had and then the other part is like and here's how I dealt with these dumb little graphics, things that are you know, how you make this thing actually show up on a computer and so it's a nice combination of the two.

Jessamyn 47:23 Great fiddly bullshit. That's cool. Yeah. I enjoyed movable book lady just seems to like, you know, hey, like you meet a person on metal filter, and they just seem to kind of like a lot of the same weird stuff that you do. Oh, sure. Movable book lady. A lot of the posts she makes are like things I'm really interested in. And of course, some of them are like, you know, bookish, but this one is just like a crazy dollhouse. Like, that just people just did a ton of work on. And like, there's a dollhouse in the dollhouse. And maybe there's a dollhouse inside of that doll. And I just, I liked it. It's one of those great kind of like, it's just one cool thing to go look at. on metal filter. It's a set of Flickr photos. If you're the kind of person who will like that kind of thing. This is an example that you will that's fantastic.

Cortex 48:15 Just really cool the

Jessamyn 48:16 house. Yeah.

Cortex 48:19 Also, there's there's in this Flickr stream, there's Xena Morse eating breakfast couple.

Jessamyn 48:23 Yes. Yeah, there's some Xena Porsche talking around there. Hey, if I asked you if you saw the new aliens.

Cortex 48:30 I think we might have talked about it. I did. I think we I think we did talk about on a previous show because it was in reference to it being on fanfare.

Jessamyn 48:40 Ah,

Cortex 48:41 I watched it I thought it was I thought it was pretty dumb in the same way that Prometheus was also pretty dumb. And I still kind of like him both too. But I also wish they had turned out to be actually good. Better movies. Yeah.

Jessamyn 48:53 See, here's like a funny little bowl of flick of frogs and bones. find little things if you look at it. Yeah, I mean, I saw it was just like, wow, that was a lot more violent than I thought it was gonna be and enjoyed it. But it was like, I wish it had been better. But I couldn't remember if I talked to you if you had seen it.

Cortex 49:11 Yeah. I liked this. Bit of piano playing that this was a post by the theodolite. About pianist, Nari soul, improvising variations on Mary Had a Little Lamb in the style of a bunch of classical romantic and Baroque pianists. And it's, it's great. It's like she's obviously a fantastic pianist and great at style mimicry. But there's also just these running annotations about what she's doing with a sort of like acerbic like, angry voice and not angry, but like, you know, mocking voice in your head sort of. It's hard to explain, but it's fantastic. It gets no

Jessamyn 49:52 I'm looking at it. I see exactly what you mean. Oh, and there's a little puppy underneath underneath the piano.

Cortex 49:58 So I thought that was pretty great. This Little Dog.

Jessamyn 50:02 Just hanging out.

Cortex 50:03 I forgot about the dog. It's asleep.

Jessamyn 50:08 And then it's and then it's gone. Yeah, no, this is cool. Very neat. Let me do a quick run through my comments. But I think that may be most of my stuff for Metafilter. Except, of course, today's amazing post by my boyfriend, please do not let in the cat. Because I sent him a link to this bullshit from yesterday. Like, look at all these crazy librarians and other people on Twitter talking about this cat. It's not allowed in the library. And he's like, Oh, my God, did you put that on? Metafilter? I'm like, No, I'm going to bed. And he had just like, flown back from Arizona on a red eye and hadn't been asleep yet and had been awake for 36 hours, and was like, hey, and so he made this post. It's actually a very good post about the max the cat who is not allowed in the library. You'll just have to click through and see it.

Cortex 51:01 There's a cheese. I feel like this is one of two posts about Well, no, it was probably just this one. Do you know about steamed hams? The classic symptoms bit? Steamed hams? It's

Jessamyn 51:14 no I mean, maybe if you

Cortex 51:17 there was an episode of Simpsons called 22 short films about Springfield, and I'm just linking to this, this post. It's by going to Maine that's about some of this. But anyway, in this it had a bunch of short little things in it, making up the episode and one of them was a fake episode of a sitcom called Skinner in the superintendent, which was about Principal Skinner from the elementary school and then superintendent General Motors who was the superintendent, the school who in the show, you know, have clashes and whatnot, because of plots of sitcoms, etc, whatever. But anyway, this tiny miniature sitcom about the two of them, and Skinner having superintendent over for dinner, and madcap things ensue. But for whatever reason, this particular thing has gotten inside the internet's brains. And people have made a million weird, like Simpsons riffs and memes and shit posts about this episode, modifying it in every way you can imagine the internet doing and once it starts getting bored and doing strange stuff. So this post domain is about someone who took that episode or that like, you know, two and a half minutes of an episode. And they created an arrangement for Guitar Hero, can you? Yeah, there's tools where you can do custom song creation for basically anything at this point. Okay. So somebody made an arrangement of this episode, and there's not much music in this, but there's a couple of musical stings for transitions and whatnot. But most of us are just kind of enjoying the dialogue. Yeah, they're playing the dialogue, you know, and somebody just like gets a perfect score on this guitar, the arrangement of this non song and the YouTube video of it and it's like, what the fuck is even happening out of

Jessamyn 53:03 love, just listening to you try to explain.

Cortex 53:06 And if you go in there, there's a roundup going to man actually does a nice sort of link up of several other things, somehow attached to the steamed hams meme, like nothing to do with Guitar Hero, just every direction you can go. And I had seen a few things going around. And the whole thing is just it's amazing. And I don't know, it's just go watch this and lose your goddamn mind. It doesn't make any sense. And that's the way it should be.

Jessamyn 53:27 It's my place. I love it. Yeah, so that was it for me on Metafilter. I literally did not comment in or favorite. Anything else after I think the pumpkin thread, which I believe was in October. It certainly should have been in October,

Cortex 53:45 let's assume was in October.

Jessamyn 53:47 Maybe it wasn't. I was October 30. Wonder what did we do the last podcast? Pumpkin Bread happened?

Cortex 53:54 I don't know. It would have been close. I think I think we did it on like the first. I think we I think we're excited because we did it on the first. All right, sure. Anyway, no one cares. Let's move on.

Jessamyn 54:05 Pumpkins. Dancing pumpkins. Did you put the dancing Santa's on the AskMe Metafilter post

Cortex 54:11 yet? Not yet. So So here's the thing, you you step out the pumpkins. And I was like, hey, Bramble. Hey,

Jessamyn 54:19 we shouldn't have the pumpkins been up the whole time? Is that where you're going to tell me?

Cortex 54:22 No, no, no, they were not up yet. They went up like a day or two later, because a day or two later is when they're in the system to automatically go up? No, which is the same thing with the Santas stuff, when that comes around will go up automatically. And we looked at it and I think we decided maybe we should bump that up sooner. Maybe we should make it start like a few days or a week sooner than the because it was like a terrible idea. So but yes, the answer is we're on it. Just wait for the machine to do is magical work. Did think Santa

Jessamyn 54:50 did 600 That's awesome. Good. Yes, I'm satisfied with that answer. Good. Alright, so AskMe Metafilter, I spent a ton of time on AskMe Metafilter this month probably unlike yourself.

Cortex 55:06 Yeah, it's like it's like a tomato to put no. Wine. Tell me what you've seen.

Jessamyn 55:16 Well, some stuff like, Hey, I'm a straight white man in my 30s. And I didn't always treat people so well, how am I supposed to deal with the fact that when I was younger, I was a jerk in a way that a lot of the media attention is pointing out? Famous people who were jerks.

Cortex 55:37 Just read, right. I that was an anonymous question. And it's a perfectly good question. And I proved it with such fear in my heart for whether it was going to turn into a giant mess

Jessamyn 55:48 up and I was like, Oh, God, but I really feel like by and large, people gave that guy advice that he thought would be helpful. And sometimes it was coming from, hey, let me tell you what happened when, you know, the guy that harassed me tried to make it up to me 15 years later, and I actually never wanted to hear them again, hear from them again. But it is sort of, you know, it was interesting listening to people talk about what how things felt to them, and what the best ways are to move forward as that guy from the past, and if you're not that person anymore, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's hard, right? Because, you know, you still feel bad about the thing you did, maybe, I mean, just thinking for myself, like, you know, maybe a bad thing that I've done in the past, you know, you feel bad about the thing that you've done, but if it's an offense against another person, and they've moved on, scratching that scab, just to be like, I've got bad feelings. So I need to talk to you about it is maybe not actually the way to, you know, work it out. And so this thread is really interesting for people kind of talking about it. And what I thought were incredibly helpful ways actually, because it would have been pretty easy to be like that garbage person, there's nothing you can do, etc. But there were some pretty interesting, interesting parts of compensation. So I was happy that there was there and it worked out. I felt like,

Cortex 57:15 yeah, no, it went very well. I was pleased and relieved that it just turned into basically a big constructive, sort of best case scenario.

Jessamyn 57:23 Yeah. I thought, Oh, and this one, which I think every metal filter person of a certain age will enjoy. So back in the day, I kind of get that you could get dial zero to get an operator. But what happened? If you were looking for a phone number in a different town? How did that work? Can you remember?

Cortex 57:48 Yeah, that's weird. What's weird about it? No, it's just a totally fair question. But it's also I hadn't thought that that was something that I felt old about, but I suddenly feel very old. And like, What do you mean, you just wait, you literally never do that in new orders? What do you call

Jessamyn 58:03 when you were a kid? How do you work? Yeah. Like, did you ever talk to an operator? Or did you have a 411?

Cortex 58:09 I definitely used 411. A couple times in high school, like I sort of knew that that was a self service thing. But I also definitely talk to an operator at least once or twice.

Jessamyn 58:20 Well, and I remember that the long distance companies had their own, like, if you dialed like, you know, different area code 5551212, you would talk to an operator that worked for like a long distance company, your long distance company. So like sprint, or AT and T or I don't even remember Bell South, like, I don't really know. But if you call for directory assistance in a different state, you would talk to a person who was employed by a different telephone company to do that job. It was weird. And I remembered when they were automating it, but I remember back when Google Voice would like, do that for you for free. Like they would look up numbers and call for you. Yeah. Which was its own, like, very weird, brief period in time. And so whatever. It's just nice to bullshit and talk to people about phones. Yeah. old phones.

Cortex 59:15 Yeah, that's kind of fantastic.

Jessamyn 59:17 Yeah, I put it up on Twitter. I thought I thought people would. I thought people would like it. I believe I asked a question about fixing my computer. And I did tell people, hey, it mostly worked. And I'm just looking through my answers to see what else I found that I that I enjoyed. Oh, can I just tell you today at bar trivia, there was a question about like, a game that has like 16 dice like objects that have letters on it and what is it? And we were all like, Ah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know when I was like, I don't know spill and spell. And like the answers trucking boggle. Like I play it all the time. How did I forget boggle worked I forget

Cortex 1:00:00 it so you have to admit that was that was like his natural setup as could possibly happen for a dumb joke like that's like if boggle was a game made out of doors that opened themselves. That's wine

Jessamyn 1:00:24 Yes, um, well, speaking of idiot wordplay I really enjoyed this thread by masters 2010 Oh, I don't know if I said that last post was by Seder. Masters 2010 talking about like words like nauseous and nauseated, right? You'll say like, I'm nauseous, but like, really what you mean is I'm nauseated, like nauseous technically means you make other people sick. But whatever language changes, right? So it's been it's, the people just say nauseous, and everybody knows what you mean. So what are other words like that, like words, where people started out using them incorrectly or a different form of the word is incorrect. But now it's acceptable. And so like thinking of something like I am something and I think they're trying to conjure a specific freeze, but there was just a whole bunch of really interesting sort of guesses at that, that were fun, because it's fun to listen to people talking about,

Cortex 1:01:29 there's a weird, complicated sort of linguistic tip of the tongue place to be and not even like, I can't remember the word, but I can't remember the, the the case. And it has these properties, I think, you know, so it's not even like, you know, you would use this and it starts with I think, I think it starts with a P instead of like, there is this logical structure involved, find me another logical structure similar to it that I can't tell you what it is because it's escaped me. Right? Right. It's basically the linguistic version of going to the video store and say, Hey, do you have the, it's, it's the one it was, it had the guy, not the guy from you know, it's like, on the one hand, guiding, but on the other hand, this is how our brains work. We're scrapping at these like, little like chance connection with

Jessamyn 1:02:18 kind of the right person who either knows you or knows, like, the world of things, you know, they can actually kind of help parlay you to, to an answer, right?

Cortex 1:02:28 That can totally happen.

Jessamyn 1:02:30 Oh, I also asked a question about hating SlideShare, but wanting something where I can take my slides and put it into something that looks good on a computer. And it looks like there's a cool I don't even know what the hell it is Python script that if I can figure out how to use Python, I will solve my problem. Close. Yeah. But I have to figure out how to use Python. And somebody on Twitter offered to help me. I don't know week or two ago, I guess it was three weeks now. And that was before Max ACAT ruined my Twitter for everything else. So now I don't even know how to find that person. Like how do you search Twitter if you need to search Twitter? Like how do you search your own Twitter? Like that guy offered to help me with Python? search Twitter for the word Python, I could find this.

Cortex 1:03:22 I searched my user name and the keyword. And that usually gets me to whatever I'm looking for, like, through Google or through Twitter, like like through Twitter, or through TweetDeck. I guess, most of the time. I mean, it's I'm not saying it's foolproof.

Jessamyn 1:03:38 Tech. I never use TweetDeck for searching. I use it all the time. But it didn't occur to me you.

Cortex 1:03:44 I don't know that it searches any better than Twitter's native search, but it's just what I can use. But it might and then if someone replied to you, and you know, you were tweeting about Python, and someone replied to that searching for Jessamyn, Python, find your tweet, read the replies, it's hopefully in there and then like, boom, you're there. I mostly use this function to search for old jokes I made two years ago, so I can mention.

Jessamyn 1:04:09 Do you worry sometimes that you're gonna make just the same joke to an old and you can't remember anything you've ever done?

Cortex 1:04:15 I mean, it's not it's not even that it's just like, my general belief in my overall fallibility. You know, like, I know that I've not, I try real hard not to repeat jokes actually. Like, like, I'm making an active effort. Probably more than I need to, but I just like, it's, I want to say joke once and I don't want people to think oh, he's coming back to that old joke again. It's like no, if I'm going to do a variation on that trip, you will know it is a variation on that joke very intentionally. So I will actually go and search my Twitter feed for a joke I just thought of to make sure it's not a joke that I actually just remembered. And usually, it turns out that I didn't and every once awhile I find one, and then I just turned it into a tweet about how I tried to make the same joke twice and that works out okay. Uh

Jessamyn 1:05:02 yeah, because I do worry. I worry sometimes like I worry I'm gonna make exactly the same like, Halloween joke or something like that. But I mean, not enough to fight with Twitter to go searching it.

Cortex 1:05:17 Oh you know I want to paddlers lead half heartedly, I want to harp heartedly I want to hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt hearts the knee and I better not ever actually have a stroke while recording this because you would never be yes I'm gonna haphazardly mentioned posts from the blue about terrible orchestra that Brian Eno was in at one point. Why? Because it's fantastic. It's an orchestra. That was the whole thing is it was an orchestra made of people who were not very good at playing the instruments that they

Jessamyn 1:05:51 played. It sounds terrible. Well,

Cortex 1:05:53 it's bad like the music doesn't look good. I've made I don't want to. There's no clever trick here. It just turns out that they're actually bad at making the music that they're getting together to play, but it's bad in such a fucking charming, wonderful way and I lose my shit. Every time I listen to it. It's just it's really good.

Jessamyn 1:06:12 Brian Eno because I believe he is just sincerely weird.

Cortex 1:06:16 Yeah. No, I think I think I think he's, he's not one of those guys who like figured out how to market weird because it sounded like a good investment. I think he's just an odd guy who ended up being very successful partly because of it. Anyway, yes, this this. This fucking this fucking thing. And this post by Martin Lewis. Another another for the podcast. You did a twofer? It's just it's so good. It's so good. Go listen to it. It's fantastic.

Jessamyn 1:06:49 Nice work, Martin. Which Oh, which reminds me of I'm not 100% sure where this thread is. But Bond Cliff asked a really interesting I thought it was interesting question about, like alternatives to Yankee swap. Like they get together with the same family people every year. And like, you know, there's only so many sweaters you can buy for people like their family members and you love them. But like ad Do we really have to like buy some stuff? Like is there like a Yankee swap ish thing? I'm still like, scrolling around looking for it? Actually, I know how I can find it. You know,

Cortex 1:07:29 it's user history.

Jessamyn 1:07:31 What I can't find how do you find it?

Cortex 1:07:34 Bond users just search type type into the search box. Go to the site type wide search box that you want on the fog in the bucket.

Jessamyn 1:07:47 Josh, classic style, it's in the lower corner.

Cortex 1:07:50 Well then go to the lower corner. I

Jessamyn 1:07:52 mean, I don't even see it. It's gonna be at

Cortex 1:07:54 the top or the bottom right.

Jessamyn 1:07:55 Impossible. I have found it.

Cortex 1:07:58 I mean, it's there. It's gotta be there.

Jessamyn 1:08:00 I found it. All right, it's at the bottom. It's easier it was easier to find it my way. Well, that's

Cortex 1:08:05 fine too. Just I don't understand what the problem was

Jessamyn 1:08:09 I this a tiny box down at the corner and I never use it is the problem. Okay,

Cortex 1:08:14 okay. Anyway, tell me about this gum. What are some

Jessamyn 1:08:19 ways families and groups can exchange gifts or otherwise do a Christmasy thing without everybody getting a gift for everyone? And I just mentioned it here not because the thread was so great, but because maybe people have other ideas and if we mentioned in the podcast maybe people can tell their ideas maybe and because we're getting together next weekend for everybody's birthday and I always enjoy it so I enjoy a chance to talk about that

Cortex 1:08:43 good yeah oh you know nothing I want to harp hardly mentioned it made sure I did that on purpose but not anyway, there's this is a this is a nice thing. Another project. This is by HJ oh three and it is a monthly alternative zine called tumble weird about the Washington State, tri city area and surrounding areas. There's some cities in Washington, Kennewick Richland and Pasco make the tri city area

Jessamyn 1:09:17 known as places. Yeah.

Cortex 1:09:19 Anyway, it's just it's a zine about the area and stuff. And it's, it's pretty great. It's like it's just straight up as Oh, wow,

Jessamyn 1:09:28 that is super nice looking. That's great.

Cortex 1:09:30 And one of the folks who I'm assuming is hu three, but it was like, you know, that name instead of a username and email just wrote to say, Hey, can I mentioned Metafilter? I was like, Fuck, yeah, please. Yeah. So, so Anyway, check out check out a recent issue of tumble weird. And you'll probably see I mentioned of meta filter made by metal filters own ha with 3d. And, yes, I feel like I feel like this is my alternative zine about this specific region. In this specific state is kind of the old school personal blog thing in action, and that stack up thing is something I love and I've been thinking about with, with my whole web ship get, in fact, part of everything. And I was like, Maybe I should rethink about what I actually want a blog for and what I want a web space for. And and yeah, it's, it's it's time to tell the club again until the club was great in 2014.

Jessamyn 1:10:25 Tell the club still exists. Yeah, still there.

Cortex 1:10:26 Yeah, my blog is still sitting there not updated since. But yeah, I really loved sort of the the energy and the aesthetic until the club and I think maybe that's where I'll be heading. When I start creating personal web space content again, I don't know. Anyway, go check out tumble weird.

Jessamyn 1:10:44 That's my blog is still there to actually not my blog. But like, yeah, I love this page. I think it looks nice.

Cortex 1:10:51 I was just looking at the other day because I was about to look Lebanon's like, oh, yeah, I should go look at my sidebar links.

Jessamyn 1:10:59 There was Matt's blog that he was going to keep up there.

Cortex 1:11:02 There's a lot of blogs that people were going to keep up there. I think yeah. 2015 came along. It's like, Oh, right. Everything else in my life.

Jessamyn 1:11:10 Oh, I just saw a little update, which makes me happy. It was kind of a slightly sad, like, post by Tim Ian. Hey, my daughter's fifth birthday this weekend. We're gonna go to a like a party in a rented play space. The parties on Saturday, the space takes 20 Kids, we invited everybody from daycare, five people RSVP need. One of those RSVPs was no. What am I supposed to do at this point. And so it was a nice kind of Chatty thread about Well, here's what you can do. And you know, they put like notes and copies, maybe you can blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so hold on to I don't know, if tambien is the moment of the data didn't read super close to me and the parent. Basically, they like, followed up with the parents and got a whole bunch of RSVPs. And they're gonna have a party and it's gonna be great for a way to be so I'm happy because I know like that kind of nerve wracking, like, Oh, God, nobody's coming like. So that's cool. I'm happy about

Cortex 1:12:20 that. Grab that bull by the horns and ask him.

Jessamyn 1:12:23 Happy Birthday kid. Yeah.

Cortex 1:12:25 Yeah. I gave a talk. And I was sort of talking.

Jessamyn 1:12:30 I was gonna mention that, but maybe you should mention.

Cortex 1:12:32 I'll mention it. Here. All the tuition. Let's, let's do this real organic. We'll pretend like it just came up naturally. You're just bringing it up. So

Jessamyn 1:12:38 Josh, you were doing a talk.

Cortex 1:12:40 I did a talk. I did a talk.

Jessamyn 1:12:42 I still haven't looked at it yet. But I hear it was here. It went really? Well. I know you were concerned about it. And I know it went well.

Cortex 1:12:47 Yeah, there's a local local, sort of creative and tech speaking conference thing in town called donut dot Jas, which is not actually about JavaScript necessarily. What is

Jessamyn 1:12:59 it about donuts?

Cortex 1:13:00 It's always about doughnuts. I

Jessamyn 1:13:01 always have done it sounds pretty much like it's made for you. Yeah, you're saying? Yeah, this

Cortex 1:13:05 was the first one I went went to was the one I spoke at, which is sort of ridiculous. But it's run by cool people and cool people attend and cool people talk. So it's, it's one of those. It's kind of like XOXO insofar as like, I haven't been paying attention to it, even though I totally should have been because it's my jam. Anyway, Matthew McVicker who is a mefite, and actually designed, he did the bulk of the design work on the modern theme that you fill this. Yeah. Super nice guy. And he's an organizer for donut Jas, and he's like, Hey, you want to talk? I was like, Sure. What do you want me to talk about? I don't know JavaScript. Really. He's like, no one ever talked about Metafilter. I was like, okay, but I talked about, everything's terrible. He's like, Yeah, I guess. And that's what I did. And, and they record everything. So I gave it was like a 15 minute talk. And I put together a slideshow and talked about, basically, you know, how it's been fucking hard. And it's hard on a community when things are hard. And, you know, metal filter has been dealing with that. And we've been talking about a ton over the last couple years in meta talk as we've been living through it that like deal. Yeah, this is, this is a weird, hard thing. And we're all sort of struggling. And so my talk was just kind of about, you know, how we can work together to get through that and how, as a moderation team and a development team, you know, me and the rest of the mods and from Vulcan sort of try and help find ways to make metaphor workable for people which, obviously, right, also dealing with a lot more. In the last week, we've been talking about that. But yeah, it was nice. It came together pretty well. I was nervous about it. But actually, I think I did a good job and people seem to like it. And I've been able to point to it several times amount of toxins and and say, Well, yeah, actually to expand on the thought. Go watch his talk that I gave, which feels slightly obnoxious, but also like, totally vindicated because I put a bunch of stuff into that that's sort of on point for stuff we're dealing with. So being able to have that as a reference and say, Hey, okay, here's Do you think my comments are long? Here's here's a long spoken comment on video with captions. Yeah, yeah, it's not it's not crazy. It's not like a fucking hour long thing or whatever. So yeah, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed doing it. Once I stopped worrying about doing it, then yeah.

Jessamyn 1:15:22 Good. Congratulations. Thanks. I think I may have reached the end of my Metafilter stuff. Well, I totally alright.

Cortex 1:15:33 Yeah, no, I think I think we should wrap up pretty quick here. And we did. I am going to be talking about I've been so distracted, go go listen to stuff on music. There is always good stuff there. I can't tell you what, but hey, that one, that one looks good. And also that other one, hey, they're all good. Go listen to him. Go listen to frickin music. I'll do a better job next podcast. Okay. But uh, yeah, I don't know, that's about it. I was gonna, I was gonna dig in a little bit on the whole reworking how politics discussion is going, but honestly, I'm just going to leave it as I made a big post about it a few days ago, and I'll link that in here just for the reference and stuff. But you know, we sidebar to it. So it's not too hard to find either. At basically talking about, hey, as a mod team, we've been looking at how things have gone from last year with how the mega threads go. And it's not sustainable. It's not working like it's it's not valueless, people get stuff out of it. But it's also we're just, we're, we're falling over, like we can't keep up with it the way it is. So we need to change it, we need to throttle it back some and redirect some that energy like we were talking about earlier in the podcast. Right.

Jessamyn 1:16:36 So and it seems like the choices that you have made. I was like, I knew you guys have been planning that for a while. And I was I thought it was a good idea. But I was worried because obviously it's it's not small change. Yeah. And it seems like the way you decided to go with it. And the the things you tried to do were mostly well received. And I felt like that was Tanna, you know, testimony to the fact that you were really thoughtful about it that you talk to people about it, you did a lot of data collection about it, you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think it was pretty excellent. You

Cortex 1:17:12 know, it's been going it's been going really well so far. And yeah, it is nice that like, generally it's been taken well, like there are people who are concerned about it, a couple of people who are just kind of upset about it, but shot you know, I mean, it's a big community, it's impossible not to get some of that. So the fact that it's basically gone

Jessamyn 1:17:27 well, and you shouldn't run the site as if the goal is to not make anybody unhappy. Yeah. Because? Because you can't.

Cortex 1:17:33 Yeah. But yeah, I appreciate how much people have been sort of understanding and game for it. And even the people who are sort of like skeptical or disagree, people who

Jessamyn 1:17:41 are like, this is not what I want, or at least like, but I understand where you're coming from. So let's see.

Cortex 1:17:47 Exactly. And it's, like we've said in that discussion, in some recent previous discussions, like, you know, it's partly, it's beyond a question of whether everybody likes it, because it just has to happen, we got to do something, we got to make this more trouble for the mod team. And it's been, it's been good the first few days here, like, you know, I'll be interested to talk about this again, and talk about this and more like,

Jessamyn 1:18:09 Sure, with a little bit more data into your belt. And with the mods being like, wow, this feels totally different. Well, and what I'm hoping is, we really do get some of the energy back in the other parts of the site where I feel like the constant kind of, you know, squatting in the megathread has, I think, got no I mean, I feel like and it's not worth kind of doing the math, but I feel like, you know, attention and AskMe edit filters down a little bit attention in jobs is down. Yeah, the project seems like it's actually doing pretty good. But like, I'd be interested to see if that some of that attention kind of comes back. Yeah. Because who knows? Right? I mean, that the downside might be like, wow, people fuck off and go, you know, pitch each other about politics somewhere else, which is,

Cortex 1:18:53 which is possible. And you know, I would hate to sort of like, but at the same time, if the only thing we lose if it's not a loss of overall attention, it's just a loss of the stuff that's like, kind of making politics unworkable. I mean, I hate to see less energy, but at the same time, like saying, oh, man, they had to cut a four pound to erode me, I lost weight. I hate it. Well, maybe it's okay. If you just wait slightly less instead of having that inside you. Right. Which is in retrospect, that analogy seems a bit harsh. I'm not gonna put you know, it's it. Yeah. So I'm curious as to how it goes. But honestly, it's been I was just saying in metal talk today that like, it's felt like kind of a relief to honestly just cut some of the stuff out that we've been living with because it's like, it's, well, that's just how those go and we're too tired to try and tackle it. So finally actually saying, Okay, fuck it, let's put a shoulder down and get some steam up in the tackle it for real.

Jessamyn 1:19:51 It's got a little bit of time and space to do it and things are otherwise doing okay. And et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, it's cool.

Cortex 1:19:57 Exactly. Clear. Anyway, that's it. thing. We'll see how it goes, but I'm feeling good about it. And I think it was a podcast. I think we made a podcast.

Jessamyn 1:20:06 I think so too. And I was a little concerned because obviously, you know, I've been up since seven o'clock this morning and it's now 11 o'clock at night. But

Cortex 1:20:15 yeah, it worked. Yeah. Go us.

Jessamyn 1:20:17 We re enjoyed it. It's always good talking to you. Yeah. Likewise, and I will go to bed after I upload this file. All right. He can post it on that their internet you get there?

Cortex 1:20:28 Yes. All right. Talk to you later.

Jessamyn 1:20:31 It was good talking to you. Bye.

Retrieved from "http://mefiwiki.com/w/index.php?title=Podcast_135_Transcript&oldid=14804"