Podcast 137 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 137: It Descended Into Butts (2018-02-06).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Jessamyn 0:24 So hey, podcast Hey podcast.

Cortex 0:26 Hey, welcome to episode 137 of Best of the web, the Metafilter monthly podcast. I am Josh Mullard, aka cortex.

Jessamyn 0:34 I am Jessamyn.

Cortex 0:36 It is Tuesday, the 1006 you when you look at your clock, and it doesn't have the data doesn't work that way, Tuesday, February 6 2006. At 1006 Pacific Time, server time. And here we are, we're podcasting. It's time for a podcast.

Jessamyn 0:54 Yeah, I 137 is something that physicists really care about?

Cortex 1:01 Is it an atomic weights too high to be like an element number? Or is it like the number they have a chase down yet?

Jessamyn 1:09 I'm like reading Wikipedia backwards, which is not recommended. But basically what physicist Leon Linderman numbered his home near Fermi lab. 137. Oh, let's see, based on the significance of the number to those in his profession.

Cortex 1:26 I mean, it's the sequence of power

Jessamyn 1:30 all over the place.

Cortex 1:31 shows up naked all over the place. It's a pure number. Was Was that mean? Was that

Jessamyn 1:40 somebody? Maybe a listener could explain this to me because I got as far as like, Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics died in a hospital room number 137. A coincidence that disturbed him?

Cortex 1:52 What? Come on physicists tell us what it means.

Jessamyn 1:55 Come on. Wiki pedia. I've spent so much time this last month doing wiki pedia. It's

Cortex 2:01 not the next element. We found up to 118 I guess or have speculated 118? I don't know. 137? Man. Okay,

Jessamyn 2:12 well, it's a it's a prime. And it's a twin prime with 139. Coming up.

Cortex 2:16 Nice. It is 139 Doesn't sound like it should be a prime. It's no primes.

Jessamyn 2:21 Let's go look at three and a nine. And then those are both, you know? Yeah. Divisible things.

Cortex 2:27 Yeah. 39 is dealt with on prime. Oh,

Jessamyn 2:32 what is the significance of the number 137 in physics? Oh, Thank gosh, it's related to the so called fine structure constant of quantum electrodynamics. This derived quantity is given by combining several fundamental constants of nature. And then there's like some car accident of numbers on my screen. And then it explains it to me. And then I still don't understand it. Yeah. Okay. Well, I will, I'll link this to

Cortex 2:56 you. Yeah, look at that. And we can call that a rainy day reading. I've been too much doing too much. Like, I never managed to read books anyway. And I've been reading books about art again, which is me ever reading books. So that's kind of nice. But it's like all of my, all of my because I can go to the library and find books on topics and I enjoy that everyone's Well, I don't know.

Jessamyn 3:20 I mean, I'm I really fan of books, but many other people, especially people who have to spend a lot of time on the internet often aren't so.

Cortex 3:27 But I have to spend a lot of time on the internet. And so like, getting a book from a library is kind of fun. When I think to do that. It's we I have a I have a complicated relationship with books where I just I don't do that much reading anymore. And I was definitely one of those kids who was reading all the time. You know, and I read a lot in high school. And then like, around college, I think, honestly, I think video games got more advanced. And I started having an independent budget. So I could just decide to play video games that had an effect on things to some extent, in terms of how I use my leisure time. Like as a kid, I played video games as much as I could. But to some extent, you know, you're a kid, your parents would say, hey, stop playing Nintendo. And so I would go to my room and read or something, you know, I think that influenced it significantly at the time, but I don't know. Yeah, so I don't do a ton of reading and it's complicated because like, I like reading and books are good and stories are good fiction is good nonfiction is pretty good. You know, and I get books as gifts. And then like, a lot of time I just don't get around to reading them and I feel

Jessamyn 4:33 electronic. Just literally not anything in the book form.

Cortex 4:38 Not like you know, I don't do I don't do like Kindle or anything like that. When I do read a book, it's basically always actually a physical book. I just do a lot of reading online and I do a lot of other stuff. And it's, it's weird because it feels like something at odds with what remains part of my sense of my identity as someone who of course, it's kind of like Yeah, of course, I'm a reader. Of course. Yeah, I love books. I'm, I'm a, I'm a book person who just doesn't

Jessamyn 5:06 ever read anymore. So yeah. Well, so what are you reading right now?

Cortex 5:10 I am, I am reading a book called beyond geometry, which is sort of a survey of geometric and post geometric art in the United States, and notably the rest of the world in like the 40s 50s 60s and 70s. Kind of taking as its thesis, hey, you know what, Frank Stella and all those minimalist guys in the US were a great novel, but they didn't actually fucking invent it. So let's talk about everybody else, too. That's great. And I've been reading a book called conceptual art, a critical anthology, which is really fucking dry a lot of the time. But it's a bunch of essays from the 60s and 70s, about conceptual art and the art world and art criticism. And yeah, it's really interesting stuff in a sort of also sometimes really boring and dry. And I'll skip to the next essay sort of way.

Jessamyn 6:02 You know, I mean, I think with all art writing, that's definitely true. You have to kind of click with the person in order to be able to get through it because some of just aren't talking. If you're not necessarily within that world is really difficult.

Cortex 6:16 Yeah. And I'm sort of crashing in is part of the weird thing like, like, this is probably this critical anthology is probably a really interesting specimen as a collection of what was being written and by whom, and in what way over that, like, decade or so. But like, that's, that's kind of a 201301 take on the whole thing. And where you're at, kind of like this art is like, kind of like that. Hey, look, I made something with lines. So yeah, it's a weird stew of stuff. But, but but all in all, I'm, I'm enjoying it. I don't remember how we got on this. We should probably talk.

Jessamyn 6:50 Sure. So I'm, I'm reading something called the road taken, which is all about traffic infrastructure. Ooh,

Cortex 6:58 I like that. Yeah, you

Jessamyn 7:00 would love this. I mean, it's written by this engineering guy who's also actually very good at. Oh, interesting. It's also the name of a documentary film about the experience of black Canadian Sleeping Car Porters. But that's not what I'm thinking of. Yeah, he's an engineer, dude, who also is really good at writing about engineering. And in the morning, I can read stuff that's a little more kind of dry and Tinky. At night, I just have to read kind of like, weird Holocaust thrillers that keep me up all night. For some reason, I can't figure out. But for me, it's like books are like medicine. So if I'm not reading a book, there's something really wrong with me.

Cortex 7:39 Yeah. Well, so hey, hey, good book.

Jessamyn 7:47 It was it.

Cortex 7:50 It was okay. A lot of book talk. I definitely talked a lot. So that's good. We got that marked off anyway. Let's talk about jobs. There were some jobs. There's a there's a job in Australia and the taxation bureaucracy. So like, if you're in Australia, or want to move to Australia to do taxes, that's the category is linked accidentally. And so the post that's no good, that's gonna crash my post partially later. So you know, that Australia?

Jessamyn 8:19 Well, there's not a lot of information. Yeah, you've got to be oriented to Australian circumstances. It's in Tasmania, of all places. It's part time. But

Cortex 8:30 heck, you know, if there's, there's like one person who's like, well, actually, you know, that's, and it's

Jessamyn 8:35 the users only comments on the site or post on the site. Yep. But what I'm really looking forward to learning about is I need at John Claude von Johnson onesie for a six foot three

Cortex 8:49 adult. This is definitely the job of the month.

Jessamyn 8:53 Yeah, no really mods. I am 100% legit. This is not a stunt post. This is Nanak the dog. I can totally see why this is important. Yeah, so yeah, man, this guy is married because he would be friends with my sister.

Cortex 9:08 I couldn't like I can understand the motivation to clarify that somebody but there's not a moment in my, like, not a moment of doubt. I was like, Yes, this is I believe, I believe this is

Jessamyn 9:18 weird, honestly.

Cortex 9:21 I mean, I try to source something specific. You know, that's, that's a job.

Jessamyn 9:25 And specific that doesn't fall along the normal bell curve of Yeah, I don't know. What's John Claude Van Johnson.

Cortex 9:35 It's a new already canceled show starring John Claude Van Damme as a guy who is like, sort of a Hannah Montana thing except for being John Claude Van Damme is the basic idea but

Jessamyn 9:47 doesn't help me in the least Hannah Montana.

Cortex 9:50 Oh, come on. Hannah Montana was a show starring Miley Cyrus where she when she was a child actor, and she played a lot

Jessamyn 10:01 I mean, I know what she looks like music superstar

Cortex 10:03 who also had a secret identity in the daytime. So she was like Hannah Montana stage musician, and also just like regular ol kid in the meantime, and secret identities and all that sort of gym ish, except for did gem ever really?

Jessamyn 10:18 reach farther back, okay.

Cortex 10:22 I don't know if I know anything older, like it's like, it's like I saw that. It's like The Incredible Hulk, except instead of doing science and freaking out, Miley Cyrus was doing being a normal kid and also doing music. And also she can control when she changed. Yeah, I think it was more scheduled. And so it's not very much it's not very much like the incredible. It's kind of like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde except it's not Victorian, and there's no murders, and there's no potion. Yeah. So anyway, I guess that's what John Claude Van Johnson is. Although maybe there's the Thor movie. They're not. All right.

Jessamyn 10:57 I have questions.

Cortex 10:58 I'm not? Well, we could ask them. And I could just make up answers just occurred

Jessamyn 11:03 to me, because I'm talking to you that like, oh, right fanfare is where I should take all of my media questions that would do. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Thanks, Josh.

Cortex 11:11 Yeah, no, I'm a helper. Yeah, that's a couple of things on jobs. Two jobs, jobs. Hey,

Jessamyn 11:19 hey.

I think I probably, like thumbed up a bunch of projects this time around because I tried to, but maybe there was only one. Yeah. Jim coin. Yes. Our friend, Bond cliff to you and all the metal filter people just started goofing on Twitter one day, about how he's making his own blockchain. And you guys may know him as the guy who occasionally builds guitars, or kind of slightly cool. Holiday secret quants are projects. And so he decided to do this ridiculous thing where he would make a quote unquote, Blockchain, which is literally blocks linked with chains, and like sell them or let people have them or whatever. And it became kind of funny enough and got linked enough places that he actually put the whole goofy thing up on projects, which then got promoted to metta filter, because it's just something you can enjoy, right that like, at first, all the blocks were free, but then he started selling them a little bit to fundraise for Planned Parenthood. And then he sold off a heart shaped block, which was blocked number 69, which just said nice on it, but then it turned into kind of a weird thing, because the person who want it was from Reddit, but they wanted to put someone else's name on it. Like maybe that was kind of fucked up. But et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just a joyous internet. Fun thing. Yeah, it was in that alley. And I wonder with blocks right next to each other. I don't even know how

Cortex 13:32 just the right timing. Yeah. Hitting that thing.

Jessamyn 13:37 Hitting that thing? Yeah, yes, that thing

Cortex 13:40 is, oh, there's a bunch of cool stuff on there's a couple Metafilter things on projects, this last month, one far lucar farla car, put together an Open Street Map thing. Basically, some people who use script blocker stuff, to not let Google affect their browsing behavior so much, may not also be able to, like, you know, use the Google Map stuff that we use for some stuff on medical care. And so you can use this to use OpenStreetMap instead, as a workaround. So I'm not

Jessamyn 14:17 100% sure I understand that. I mean, it just means that links it previously went to Google Maps will get like rewritten to go to the OpenStreetMap version of that.

Cortex 14:27 So yeah, if you're like, you know, fuck Google, I don't want to do things like, yeah, I understand completely. So. So like, you know, we have some map links that appear on on the site, you know, profile page stuff, and IRL. And I think the idea is, if you're basically cutting out that Google functionality from your browsing experience as a sort of firewalling thing, then those links won't work because you're making them not working on purpose. So this would then let you use the OpenStreetMap API instead to get at those geographic links. So sort of like, oh, like impairing a hole that you have created yourself by blocking this Google stuff? Sure. So yeah, so it's like a very specific neutral thing. But, but it's also that's, that's a good thing to make explicit. Lee. Yeah, it's a little things.

Jessamyn 15:15 Well, and I always appreciate like little hackery things to help people who want to be hackery continue to be hackery and get access to the things that they want slash love. Yeah. And OpenStreetMap is amazing. So yeah. Another, I learned to use GIS this month. Yeah. This has nothing to do with math. No, no, that's cool. That's exciting. I'm always helping like a neighborhood mapping program, like get lists of community spaces. And so as a result, I had to use GIS for a thing. And so I got like a GIS program, and I got like the parcel, whatever the hell it is for my town. And now I have like a clickable map of every parcel in my town. And I can tell where all the little boxes are. And it wasn't as hard as I thought that you know, a nice internet person who I know that does GIS, kind of talk me through. All right, I have this software loaded. It's got 1000 buttons, which three do I press?

Cortex 16:05 Yep. What do you

Jessamyn 16:08 drop in time, who is also really into GIS and showed me the 911 GIS maps that are online. And so you can also look at those and get a different view because they use different layers and whatever. Yeah, of the same stuff. It was very exciting. So now I'm even more excited about maps than I normally might be,

Cortex 16:24 ya know, GIS really starts to pop off once you start, like using multiple sources to like synthesize new views and stuff.

Jessamyn 16:31 Yeah. And, uh, you know, so much of the data is free, which is Yeah, ton

Cortex 16:35 of this is just like, you know, provided like that and basically government data sources that there is out there, ya know, you should you should, you should ping Secretary sometime to she does GIS stuff as well.

Jessamyn 16:45 Oh, God, I keep forgetting. Right. And she's my new buddy and learned League. So, yeah. Not to forfeit and not to cheat.

Cortex 16:53 No, she's, she's on board. I figured we already had one discussion about like, Oh, what if I have to go to the geology fieldwork? And like, it lands right on like, I don't remember exactly what time it works. But what it like lands, right? I'm supposed to doing something and I have to do an eight hour drive and

Jessamyn 17:09 get your questions in advance. There's a whole system built in. Okay, not to worry. All right. We want her to succeed. Yes. Yeah. And it's a nice group of metal filter, people on learned leak. So that's cool. Excellent. Another project that I really liked, right at the end of the last podcast, but you know, we just barely podcasted last month, because it was mostly Colin, which I enjoyed. But it means that there's probably some stuff from December, we didn't even talk about, oh, this is by TMC w. And it's box, breathing box. And essentially, like, if you're somebody who does kind of meditation, or controlled breathing, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, it's literally a box with a light. And it shows you like inhale for four seconds, hold it for four seconds, exhale, for four seconds, do it again. And for whatever reason, it's just beautiful. Like, it's a beautiful little thing. It can help you do a thing you might want to Fez, Jones posted it to metal filter. And I don't know, I just again, it's just one of those like, little like ticket thing that normally you would just be counting and have a little thing with a switch. Yeah, that you can do it. Yeah. And Nelson links to a web page that actually kinda does the same thing if you need help doing it. And if you just want to stare at an internet screen, there's actually a website that lets you do

Cortex 18:38 such a nice little construction. I just liked this minimalist nature, like the just the, like a switch box size, and oh, man. That's that's really nice. That's great. I guess I had seen that before.

Jessamyn 18:53 Yeah, well, because it showed up right at the cusp of like, when we were recording.

Cortex 18:58 Yeah, well, it's funny because like, in principle, I've seen everything that gets posted projects. So I think I managed to review that in like in one of those like goldfish, like I will give this exactly enough attention. Like because usually, so what happens is when somebody for projects post, you know, comes in as they write up the text, and they link to it, and maybe they add some extra links in the write up. And then they just toss it in the queue. And then we review it, which we use usually at this point. But everyone's Well, another model other people could out on vacation, otherwise, like, Yeah, I'll get to it like, anywhere between, like, within two minutes, if I happen to be at my email to maybe the next day, if I'm not working that day. So I look at it. And if I have the time to sort of sit and luxury say, Oh, what's this neat new thing someone's put in here, then I'll sit down and look through it. And I might be like, Oh, this is great. And I'll leave a comment. And on the other hand, I might be kind of in a hurry, and then I might be like, Okay, does the link work? It does okay. You know, is there anything really worrying in the write up text? Nope. All right, put it through. And you know, if it turns out that or something suddenly worrying someone can write us a contact form, and I say, oops, yeah, don't do that.

Jessamyn 20:07 Worrying my dude.

Cortex 20:08 Yeah. So I think I think I did the I will give this a five seconds it takes to verify that it works. And move on in the middle of whoever, you know, who knows what was going on on January 24. But something but yeah, that's really neat. That's really neat.

Jessamyn 20:24 Yeah, and one other one that I really liked only because it's kind of a stunt slash project is, Jason digitised how I became a 44 year old rapper, because his friends were making fun of his wife and her friends. Were making fun of him because of performing the Running Man and the Roger Rabbit. And so he basically made a little movie. Basically, he asked and asked, Metafilter question, like, everything here is kind of redundant, right? But like he asked, it asked me to filter question, which I saw at the same time, like how to be a 44 year old white rapper, and I was like, Oh, God, but it turns out, it was actually kind of a, you know, helpful thread and some useful stuff. And then he made you know, a little video about it and actually made $10 from strangers. I legit have not seen the video yet. I've been saving it. But I just I kind of love the whole idea. Especially because, you know, that's kind of my age and demographic. So I like seeing people kind of messing around and trying to try to still still do things.

Cortex 21:33 Yeah, that's great. Another metal filter thing, brand new user. I don't know if it's a new account or it actually just longtime Lurker, but Thomas Bielski is probably made a product Tomas. Anyway, they made MEPhI post recommendation engine basically did use a bunch of neural Yes, bla bla, bla, bla bla, I'm talking good. Did a bunch of analysis based on user history. It's supposed to comments and then like, you know, posts that exist in the database and just tries to guess well, hey, maybe you will like these, you know, so it's just kind of like some language processing experimentation and search stuff. And it's a little bit hacky just turns up a nice plain page with

Jessamyn 22:26 just didn't work for you since your mod.

Cortex 22:29 Like it functions for me. Like I put in my username

Jessamyn 22:33 works, but I mean, like, did you get stuff that was interesting. I haven't spent enough time

Cortex 22:37 to like, decide if I think it's good recommendations. One of the things interesting is apparently everybody likes the post sky cat.

Jessamyn 22:42 Sky cats top for me, too. Yeah. So there may

Cortex 22:46 be something in its, it may be overgeneralizing in some way.

Jessamyn 22:51 Well, and that's weird, too, because sky cat only, like I figured it was one of those things where somebody put 7000 flat tags on Sky cat, but they didn't need an even spell helicopter. Right?

Cortex 23:02 I don't Yeah. So yeah. I'm really curious how that ended up being this like, dominant thing, but But ya know, I'd be curious to know more about the details. It feels like, I think part of it is like, I look at this, and I see if everybody's getting the same post. My first instinct is well, that's, that's a problem. Like, that's obviously a problem. Because if everybody likes the same thing, then it's not like, you know, it's nothing to do with Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's, that's not really fair. Because that's, it's possible that there's something that just kind of everybody's pretty likely to like, and what I realized what I'm doing in my mental model is saying, Well, I want the posts that I proportionally like the most I want to post that I like, more than the outlier. What Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Cuz like, you know, everybody likes chocolate ice cream, you know, more or less. And obviously, there's lots of exceptions to that. But the ideas are like, you know, chocolate ice cream is a thing that lots and lots of people like. And so on the one hand, I could say, well, no chocolate ice cream does define me as a person. But on the other hand, if you're saying, You're a person, you probably like chocolate ice cream, you're kinda on the money. So like, they're two different ideas. And well, it's

Jessamyn 24:05 like those interesting kind of maps, those clickbait maps where they were like, What term is Googled in your town or your state more than all the other states? So it's not just like, what do people Google the most, which is like porn butts. Yeah. What is this rash? Every

Cortex 24:19 every word cloud would be dominated by the word. If you didn't accept that there is you know,

Jessamyn 24:26 when the search engines drop out, well, yeah, you get

Cortex 24:31 even though I mean, I see word clouds that do it right and word clouds that don't do it wrong. I see a lot of word clouds that actually like they eliminate the stop words, but nothing else common and so it's like, okay, well, the 51st most common word in the alphabet is the most common word in your word cloud. That's not You're not telling me anything, buddy. But yeah, anyway, I have opinions about all sorts of things. Apparently.

Jessamyn 24:52 That's why we're here talking today. If you didn't have any opinions, this would be a lame podcast, or rather, it would just be Jessamyn two opinions which would Believe it per se, in fact, I might like it, but but people are looking for,

Cortex 25:07 there's a nice project that is also just kind of nice thought from ethnic Nocta. We've mentioned many, many Twitter bots on the podcast before. Because he makes lots of great little Twitter bots. And so he did a project where I sat down and said, Well, what if I archive all of the output of my Twitter box to not Twitter, in case Twitter becomes not really a place I want to have stuff be you know. So he built a static site up there, too. Update periodically sites dedicated to or, you know, pages dedicated to various spots is built as a real simple thing is nothing really sexy about it. But it's a kind of a good thing to think about it, it's a good way to think about how to decentralize yourself from these super centralized corporate, you know, social media hubs.

Jessamyn 25:57 Again, like a good way to, you know, hack around and make it the web you want not the web, you're delivered. Yeah. I think that's cool.

Cortex 26:08 too, to that one specific, I mean, there's a bunch of stuff like a, like you said, like, we kind of missed, January, or December. So so yeah. Anyway, lots of good stuff on progress. Go look at it. I feel like it was a little bit of a burst of creativity right around the start a year, which was pretty great. And yeah, people make things I like it. So they're.

Jessamyn 26:56 You know, one of the things we never really talked about here is fanfare. And I wanted to specifically mention fanfare exists. It's a great place to get your questions about the Hulk answered, or whatever the heck else somebody had mentioned in AskMe, Metafilter. They asked whether they should see get out. Because they were concerned, it might be too creepy. Like it is kind of a horror movie. But they talked about like, I don't like this special or that special or whatever. And somebody did mention like, oh, well, hey, come to fanfare and talk about it. And one of the things about that is I happen to know there is still a slightly active, get out thread there. So don't just assume that because the movie came out two months ago, you can still chime in and say something thanks for recent activity. But the reason I mentioned fanfare specifically is there was a nice fun small Eagles vs. Patriots. Super Bowl thread that I enjoyed. While I did not enjoy. I mean, I went to my sister's and we had food for Superbowl but I had a terrible cold. And so I kind of hack through it. And so it was actually fun to go back and read through the Super Bowl thing where my people talk about it as opposed to everyone else.

Cortex 28:08 Yep. No, it was. It was nice to get that up. I was not keeping real close track of it. When it was actually happening. I was helping a friend Lou mefites. Churchill was moving out of his crappy apartment from did he get a house, he got a house, he got a home owner.

Jessamyn 28:28 I should really be checking in on his life more specifically for how much I care about it. But hey,

Cortex 28:33 ya know, it's, uh, we got to move, or at least mostly moved that we got all the big stuff moved. He had some stuff to go back for Sunday evening, and I think today, but your good friends supporting guns. So

Jessamyn 28:44 congratulations for him. I will bug you about his address, so I can send them a bar chocolate. Absolutely.

Cortex 28:52 And there's other stuff. I'm not a fan or fanfares. Good. We're still working on trying to figure out good rework for the front page on that and stuff. We've talked about that before. It's still

Jessamyn 29:00 one of those things you want to do what you've done with some of the other things is get the fanfare, people specifically talking in a meta talk thread about like what's absent that really should be there and see

Cortex 29:12 which we've done close to so we've got we've got good well, but then it doesn't go from folks. Yeah, it's there's a bunch of it's, it's, it turns out to be harder to like, implement a whole new way of dealing with the front page than it is to clone a front page versus what we did in the first place.

Jessamyn 29:29 Well, and with every other sub site, honestly. fanfares actually different Yeah, yeah, there's a fanfare talk.

Cortex 29:40 Discussing clubs is that

Jessamyn 29:43 I only mostly use it to talk about Saturday Night Live and like two or three yeah,

Cortex 29:46 there's book clubs. There's there's more stuff in there is easy. navigability that stuff is the big talk different from the water cooler. Oh, the water water coolers just to clean you. The water cooler. Which is probably good. Part of where the front page will go when we rework it to get more of a like, Hey, here's what's going on rather than here's

Jessamyn 30:05 here's what people are talking about what people have posted. And can I just say thank you internet people for telling me and really pushing that I should watch the good place? Oh, yeah. Because I've been completely like, no, no, no, like, what's your name's irritating? Ted Danson looks like he's super irritating. This looks irritating because like I grew up in a in a decade of like, lots of weird kind of God and Heaven shows and movies that were all shitty.

Cortex 30:33 Yeah, I thought it was gonna be like cloying and earnest. And instead it's like, fantastic. And a different kind of earnest.

Jessamyn 30:40 Yeah, well, it's not all about the two of them. There's a huge group of characters, all of whom are real characters. I mean, somebody was like, it's like community only it takes place in this weird place. And so somebody pushed me to see it. And now I'm excited to go talk to people on the Metafilter about it.

Cortex 30:57 Yep. Yeah, no, it's, it's good. Thank you. I will say, I guess in the spirit of like, talking about and leaves upon fanfare, I've been very much enjoying the fanfare discussion of Star Trek Discovery two, which has turned out to be a show that I really am

Jessamyn 31:13 diggin, is that sorry, is that like a new Star Trek? Yeah, that's

Cortex 31:17 the new one that's currently airing on or quote unquote, airing because it's being shown on like streaming or some bullshit NBC streaming service, because they want to somehow kill their good Star Trek show by.

Jessamyn 31:30 So it's literally not on TV. It's on like NBC internet.

Cortex 31:34 Right? Right. I have no idea how many people watching fanfare are actually watching it the way it is supposed to be watched versus just acquiring it by other means. Because who is going to order NBC dumb thing, but, but it's good. It's really good. I'm enjoying it and the thread discussions, but good. And I sort of came to the thread discussions around episode 10 or so. After just having been watching it as it came along, you know, me and secretary are watching it. And like the first thread I read through there, like seven or eight things that people had, like decided were definitely true, that I had not even picked up on at all so far. And like in retrospect, Oh, yeah. Okay, I guess. Yeah. Okay. That's a good point. Oh, shit. You know, it's like if someone if someone gave you a fever dream description of an episode of a show that never existed, and you're just like, what, what, except for they were actually watching the show and paying more attention than me. And it was what was really going on. So it's it's been good discussion. I've been enjoying that. Yeah. Would you like to discuss Metafilter? The blue, the front page?

Jessamyn 32:38 Yeah. Here's, here's what I liked about the blue. This time around. You and me both made really good posts. We're great. We're super. So go you and go me and let's get that out of the way. All right. Yours was about the guy who carves skulls out of old software manuals.

Cortex 32:58 With an assist for me. That was like, you remember why that post ended up happening? I think, Oh, should I think I think because I

Jessamyn 33:07 found them on the internet. Yeah, Caitlin Doughty, who is a really terrific writer, who I had. Oh, that's right. So she wrote a book. Caitlin Doughty, did, about I forgot what her book is. It's a book about from here to eternity. It's all about death culture. And it's, like, get a good way. She has a sense of humor. She's kind of like Mary Roach for the slightly younger set. And I had tweeted something at her about, you know, my own sort of thing last year. And then I noticed she tweets about a whole bunch of funny stuff, including this picture of this book, which I then posted to my old shop, which you then saw and made a post about a Metafilter which was awesome.

Cortex 33:57 Yep. Go to good.

Jessamyn 33:58 Yeah. And then I posted a thing about five large Canadian men and the little dogs they loved, which was much more popular than I was expecting. It's basically like tall dudes with little dogs, but they do this sort of cutie poo video about it on what is it Canadian BuzzFeed. Know it's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Just did a little documentary about you know, kind of rescue dogs, but it gets. It's just a happy story. Right? So metal filter, people can just kind of enjoy it. The end. And so they did and I got to see lots of pictures, tall metal filter people, and they're tiny. Which was super fun. And then because I live on Hoth, I enjoyed this post that I made about snowplow drivers on Colorado's infamous highway 550

Cortex 34:58 O T's ever which was popular in So

Jessamyn 35:00 weird way because

Cortex 35:03 stress from this it's my my basic pick,

Jessamyn 35:07 right? Yes. sketchy. So my favorite my favorite is things were those things what were some of your favorites? I will find my other favorite things.

Cortex 35:18 I liked several things I think thing was there were things that were good. There was a post fizz made a post about video games which is kind of a water is wet thing but in a good way like water is good. I like water and water being wet is very useful. So keep it up fizz. I mean, you can also post about it as well. So I want to like you know, typecast you and want you to trap you in a box here but but also you know, don't stop there's a post about trap adventure to nominally and also about some other stuff. But particularly about trap adventure two because it's a game like a deliberately cruel like 2d pixel platformer.

Jessamyn 36:02 What the wait what is deliberately cruel meaning that

Cortex 36:05 you have to watch it to see it. It's in characters mean mean to the player? It does? It defies Yeah, no, you don't want to play this. So you do want to go watch like a video of of the gameplay in the post because

Jessamyn 36:19 former actually like a genre or is platformer to the genre?

Cortex 36:24 I platformers the genre, there's arguably, I cruel platformer probably is sort of a niche sub genre because it's not by far the first time this has been done. There's a famous game called, I want to be the guy that was the same sort of thing. And there's a bunch of others basically have that title. Yeah. Which it's classic in every sense. Like, there have been a lot of things that take the basic idea of a platformer, which is the broad genre, you know, the Super Mario Brothers Metroid jumping on platforms, platforms, right? But, but the cruel brand of platformer takes that and instead of saying, Okay, we're going to reward you for developing a sense of the flow and the mechanics of the game. So like, you play Super Mario Brothers a bunch, you get better at running and jumping and hitting blocks and using special blocks. And,

Jessamyn 37:15 like, there's some kind of like, SimCity Godzilla that just comes in and kills you.

Cortex 37:19 Right? Yeah, no, yeah, the better you get at it. 300 minutes. Yeah, the more you play it, the more you're gonna feel rewarded by just sort of the flow of gameplay, it's really satisfying to get good at it and feel like, it feels natural. And you know, like, after, you know, many hours of play, you're like, oh, man, I'm really doing stuff that I thought was impossible.

Jessamyn 37:36 Because I'm improving at the game and not being randomly punished for no reason. Yeah,

Cortex 37:41 exactly. You're developing skill, you're developing familiarity and a built up a sense of accomplishment. And, you know, there's pleasure in that. So things like trap adventure to what they do and say, Okay, we're going to teach you a thing, or we're going to work from the knowledge you've already gained from playing platformers to kill you unexpectedly, again and again and again, and again, by defying every bit of common understanding you have about how these games should work. So jump on this platform. Oh, it went away and you're dead. Oh, so you learned Oh, well, I need to jump and then jump away. Okay, when you jump away, a fireball hits you and you're dead. Oh, okay. So I have to jump jump away, jump back forward. That's great falls

Jessamyn 38:19 on you. And you're dead. Yeah, watching this video

Cortex 38:24 is hilarious to watch. And it's like not the first in this genre at all. But it was a lot of fun. And he sort of fizz used that as a like starting point to post about some other platformers and Metroidvania stuffs. And, and yeah, mentioned game are really dead cells isn't there. We kibitz about that a little bit. But also, there was a late appearance from someone who trying to find it here. I think someone who worked on one of the Mario Kaiser or one of the other old things showed up, I swear in this thread. I'm just completely failing to find it. But anyway, if you read that thread, there might be a common from someone saying, Oh, hey, I made some of that. And I'll just stop trying to describe it. While not remember the details. But it was fun. Yeah, and that video is hilarious. The trap adventure stuff. So

Jessamyn 39:20 this is not a thread that I liked. But it is a thread that is worth mentioning. And it's also sad that Dean Allen, who was the guy who made sexism, and textile and textpattern, and a whole bunch of other things, died last month. And the thing I liked about this thread was there's a whole bunch of old school where people who miss him and it was nice to be around the old school when people who missed him, which is hard to find a place to do that. You know, be with your old school web people to do

Cortex 39:50 Yeah, yeah, it's it's funny that the longer meta filter continues to be around the more dissociated I think for the average user it is from those who fear Early days when Metafilter was one of those weird little hubs of the old school web people, you know, so like, there's a good chance that basically none of them are participating on the site anymore. But a whole lot of people who have been influential and continue to do, like web stuff, blog stuff, have some four digit user account that they haven't logged in into in 10 years. But then something interesting or something sad happens and a few of them just sort of pop back in. So

Jessamyn 40:26 yeah, so I I like seeing, you know, ashtray. And I like seeing Holgate talking about things. I just, yeah, just in general. Enjoyed it,

Cortex 40:37 there was a very goofy fun thread. Eyebrows, monkey went ahead and posted a thing that had been sort of making around on the internet. And then it was, you know, 100, and something comments on metal filter, just as goofy dumb, like, here's a picture of nine different animals, you know, you know, there's 50 Eagles, there's 10 crocodiles, or three bears, etc, etc. I didn't see this at all. And the thing is, you have to pick two and they're going to defend, does the other seven are going to try and kill you? And so you have to choose correctly and then justify your explanation of why tax should

Jessamyn 41:08 I try choosing and then does it run the scenario for you? This is entirely

Cortex 41:12 just, this is just just arguing at the bar, like yeah,

Jessamyn 41:17 oh, God. Oh, well, who's gonna build it? I mean, this is February 1, by now I'm sure someone's built the simulator.

Cortex 41:23 I mentioned I mentioned that I wish I had the spare time to like make a dumb little piko eight version of it because it feels like it'd be doable, but

Jessamyn 41:30 I mean, isn't the answer obviously, rats and bears?

Cortex 41:33 I see. I said, rats and hunters, or rats and Hunter and the hunter is the weird one because it's the human and that's my argument is you have to take the hunter, not only because

Jessamyn 41:44 I had your kid to share with 10,000 Rats.

Cortex 41:46 Yeah, but a hunter. But a hunter can kill you out of spite. That's my take like they're human beings. These rats, fuck off, dude. Yeah, like, I don't I don't think you'd get out of this in any second. Like, I don't think there's any pic that actually works, but, but on the freak chance that like the six other kinds of animals coming for you failed. That son of a bitch with a gun is still gonna like just ruin your day just because you can

Jessamyn 42:12 could 50 Eagles fly you away. They could

Cortex 42:15 kind of like that. That's actually a good point. You should get in and put in a late argument for doing an eagle escape route. Because like nothing else is flying today. Well, I mean, you know when you have a chance. I don't know what's really good, though. That's really good. Like nothing else can fly. The Eagles. Oh, man. Oh, man.

Jessamyn 42:35 Are you away? And then 10,000 Rats swarm everything else on the ground? Yeah. I mean, the hunter is the only thing

Cortex 42:42 that or you could pick the Eagles and whichever thing you think is the worst. And like the Eagles fly you to safety and the thing that you don't like is completely murdered.

Jessamyn 42:52 I mean, there are a lot of early Eagles people in this thread. Ah, maybe though some of that had to just do with the Super Bowl. Can I just say Tom Brady needs to hang it up. And I heard the current kowski is retiring. So this is all very exciting for me. So sick of the Patriots.

Cortex 43:12 Bats. I don't really I don't really follow it all but but I know I'm not the New England so fuck the Pats.

Jessamyn 43:19 Right? That's your job yeah.

Cortex 43:52 I like this post that cash for lead made that he made before I could make it because I was lazy about sauna fIying space filling curves. So the idea of taking a space filling curve is a two dimensional line that curves back on itself and essentially fills up a 2d plane given enough time. It's a way of sort of filling a 2d space with a one dimensional line. It's a fractal thing. Oftentimes, they're very cool. I like them, but I won't get into it beyond that. But you can then say okay, but what if we take the x axis and the Y axis and associate those with tones. And then we play the sound of this thing. And the thing about space filling curves is they often are, you know, self similar fractals. So they they sort of change the rhythm. Yeah, they have a sort of rhythm to the way they change their point in space over time. And that like amplifies as you go farther and farther with it. And so you can use that as the basis for kind of weird little Baroque fugue type setups where you play a curve against itself over time and there's actually some really nice sounding stuff like it's it's still very much abstract. music but it's, it's more musical than I was expecting. And I thought was really cool to listen to so. So go check that out for some nice, nice, properly Merde nerdy music stuff. Because it's a good time,

Jessamyn 45:13 I totally will. And the other thing I'm going to be doing with my day, besides all the other stuff I'm supposed to be doing like going to work includes looking at the Library of Congress digitized, popular graphic arts collection. Thank you, Horace Rumpole, and this post that I should have seen and didn't. They basically have high resolution public domain scans, and you can browse them by thumbnails. And so you know, John pulled out a couple of cool ones, like this picture of the United States and the shape of a pig. And poultry of the world. I mean, there's nothing better, right? But you can just look at thumbnails yourself. And, you know, just look at a little tiny thing that looks like it might be appealing. And you can click through 147 pages of tiny thumbnails, because I don't know what the hell is up with the Library of Congress. But let's just jump ahead to page 147. Shall we

Cortex 46:15 do it?

Jessamyn 46:18 What is that?

Cortex 46:21 This is good radio.

Jessamyn 46:24 It's in Spanish. See, now I want to know what order everything's in. Because I'm convinced that the last five pages are all in other languages, not English. I think I saw a little Day of the Dead picture. I think my internet has given up on me because it's pretty much Oh, there's a picture of Andrew Jackson, that monster. At any rate, it's cool. And the most important thing, it's public domain. Hey, look, here's a chronological chart of American history in the shape of a tree. I don't even understand what's going on.

Cortex 46:55 Yeah, why not? I don't know. Sure.

Jessamyn 46:59 But you can search the collection. I mean, you should be able to, but you can. And there's cool blog posts that explains kind of how, how it all happened. And I wish I'd known about this week or two ago, because we were doing one live one ref for Wikipedia. And this is a really great place to find public domain images of various people that you can then put on their Wikipedia pages. So thanks, Horace Rumpole. That's amazing. Yeah,

Cortex 47:26 nice. I have a few more things. But I think I'll just, I thought this was interesting. I was talking about earlier, and this was a post about an art thing. And this is a beautiful cemetery made a post about a work of art by Sonia Boyce, involving the removing of the water house painting highlands in the nymphs from the Manchester Art Gallery, and being replaced by a notice explaining the idea that removing it is, you know, an attempt to prompt conversation about how and why it works displayed and invite public comment, you know, people were leaving, you know, post it notes that were provided to comment on the thing. And I think I think the actual artwork is interesting, like, you know, it's essentially a conceptual or performance, you know, artwork were like, this written notice isn't the art, like the idea of doing this? And the impact it has on the gallery goer, you know, is the is the piece of work?

Jessamyn 48:30 i Wow.

Cortex 48:32 I thought I thought the idea was really interesting. I thought that thread, a lot of the discussion was interesting, slightly annoying at times, but shots, you know, we're arguing about

Jessamyn 48:42 the cultural context for something like this, like, I could see this being the kind of thing that like, I would have had to have written an essay about in college, you know, but the cultural context exactly right now, you know, with like, time's up, and me too. And this terrible president and all the other stuff, places it in a completely different spot. Which, you know, is cool, but is makes it sort of interesting and weird at the same time. Yeah, that's cool, though.

Cortex 49:08 Yeah. So I thought I thought that was cool and interesting read, and it seems like instead of going for several months, it went for a few days, and then they put the painting back, which is if that's work, that's really fucking lame. But hey, that's part of seeing how stuff works and closer to

Jessamyn 49:24 like, of course, that's how it works, right? I mean, ultimately, yep.

Cortex 49:30 Anything else from Metafilter? Or do you want to move on to a

Jessamyn 49:33 very popular thread, which I didn't read and you didn't read? Probably because we are so lazy. Polly. On the cut, basically, answers question from a reader who's like, why am I lazy? Why am I put every putting everything off? Why can't I flip a switch and just be an adult, which of course connects in a lot of ways to, I think the way lots of Metafilter people feel about adulting in various ways and it had a huge discussion that was actually pretty interesting. Because it's, you know, the people whose opinion you care about talking about a thing you've probably thought about, but maybe not talked about, because it's less of a thing you talk to with your IRL people. Maybe. So I liked it. A fabulous, thank you for posting it, Kevin. And, yeah, just wanted to mention it.

Cortex 50:24 Alright, sorry, I'm

Jessamyn 50:25 gonna keep looking at public domain images. Because I just can't we'll

Cortex 50:29 just quietly do that for the next half hour, then finish out the show. Tell me about last minute filter adjustment asked

Jessamyn 50:37 by the filter. As always, I'm just always sort of Oh, great. Sorry. I was. Well, I couldn't parse this title. And I was like, did I like this metaphor? The classic style really,

Cortex 50:57 we're just going to put that on. Like a testimonial. Jasmine was asked meta filter as always, pause await

Jessamyn 51:06 rate. So basically, this was px E. 2000, who asked a question about other than these three examples are their other single artists tributes to a single album, so where a person does an album tribute, and just does the whole album. And in fact, there's some of them and it's just kind of neat, because some of them are cool, right? So like Camper Van Beethoven completely covered Tusk play feet would back, you know, The Flaming Lips covered? Well, I guess that's one song Smithereens covered, meet the Beatles. And they covered Tommy train covered Led Zeppelin, too. So there's a whole bunch of neat examples, Flaming Lips covered Dark Side of the Moon, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So if you're a person that likes kind of weird slash inspired slash, kind of arty cover ideas, the thread is a great list of generated stuff. Plus, I have a question, because I was sure when I was in Seattle, mud honey covered, I thought it was Tom T Hall and put out like an EP of Tom T Hall covers that I thought was from a single album. And I googled and googled and googled and like, nothing like this exists, or not in any obvious way. And so now I'm trying to figure out like, was it not mud money? Was it not Tom T Hall? Like, how did I screw this up? So if anybody listening happens to know what the hell I'm thinking about, that would be useful, but I liked the thread is kind of a music list generating thread that came up with some neat stuff to listen to.

Cortex 52:46 Nice. Yeah. There was a, a question from Autocar just last few days about finding music basically, you know, which Oh, I saw this not the first time we've talked about music discovery on ask, but it's interesting, because this time, it's not like, recommend some stuff here. It's like, How the fuck do you find stuff?

Jessamyn 53:08 I don't know how to find music at all anymore. Well, I remember Matt, how he bitching about this, you know, five years ago or something? Because I think he's an early adopter of some of this stuff. And so he's like, or I've been streaming, and now I don't hear new music anymore. What do I do to get out of this?

Cortex 53:24 Yeah, yeah.

Jessamyn 53:27 And there were some good examples. I think a lot of times, I still find this stuff because like, people tell me about it. You know, like, I mean, Jim is kind of like a music generating machine, because he's just really into tons of music. And so if I'm like, Oh, I'm interested in that. Suddenly, some of it appears in our FTP server. And I'm like, Oh, thank you. And then I can figure out figure out if I want it. But yeah, yeah, K exp was the thing. I always listened to their podcasts. Pitchfork always does good stuff. Sometimes there's people with blogs. Still. The talk about music? Yeah, it was a deep thread.

Cortex 54:04 Yeah, a lot, a lot of different directions, you can go so

Jessamyn 54:06 music, one that's going to appeal to the twitchy nerds out there is good. Sometimes it's really satisfying when you clean out your ears with a Q tip or you scrub out the kitchen sink until it's spotless, or you get big chunks of snow off your car tires. What else feels good like that? And of course, I'm surprised that the first like five entries aren't all like, you know, pulling out ingrown hairs and picking zits off your neck or something. But there's all sorts of like good examples of little satisfying stuff that you can do that, you know, give you that little like, whoo, like it's like mini Chivos sort of, you know, because it's a very small, a very small little thing that feels accomplished. But there's just this great list of stuff which Pretty much indicates that like, yep, that is a thing other people feel about. Also, small things

Cortex 55:11 you can tell is 2018 Because like nowhere in this list appears, cleaning your mouse ball like 20 years ago would have been like, you know, in there four or five times, I'll just get that.

Jessamyn 55:26 hairs out of your mouth spal and using the little Q tips to get the weird finger gunk out of it. Although to be fair, I have one of those like magic mice now. And it still gets like weird links just stuck to its little feet on the bottom. Oh, sure. Oh,

Cortex 55:41 that's just not the song. No.

Jessamyn 55:43 No, I don't know. It's weird.

Cortex 55:47 Stuff is adhesive. Yeah, I thought this one was kind of interesting. Just like as a thing, because it's like so foreign to me. But orange lower asked, you know, I need podcasts to fall asleep to

Jessamyn 56:00 that is a thing that I don't

Cortex 56:03 apparently a lot of people do that. I I can't imagine wanting. I can't

Jessamyn 56:06 imagine being having a voice and being able to sleep.

Cortex 56:12 I think it would probably work for me, but I don't have trouble getting to sleep in general. You know,

Jessamyn 56:18 I hate you.

Cortex 56:20 It's I mean, I like not literally never, but generally speaking like I usually I go to bed. And I'm tired and I fall asleep.

Jessamyn 56:27 I don't even I don't even know what that must be like. Yeah, no, we

Cortex 56:31 we've always definitely had very different sleeping habits as far as I've been able to tell.

Jessamyn 56:38 Right, and you're up early in the morning. Yeah. I mean, once I get to sleep, things are usually fine. But it's always like a fight.

Cortex 56:46 I think that was really tired those years ago back when the Metafilter schedule was basically you and me and Matt. And we were just sort of like, operating around the clock. I remember thinking like, if you were on the West Coast, and I was on the East Coast, we basically wouldn't need a person in the overnight zone. Right? Because like you just you'd be up till like, you know, two 3am Yeah, and if that was yeah, like if I had to we could have push that. But yeah, so I don't know like, like this is this has got to be a hugely useful question for a whole bunch of people who aren't for

Jessamyn 57:24 somebody else. And for me, if somebody's talking like I can remember being a kid, and I used to fall asleep watching golf. They don't because golf is always like, like it's it's kind of a slightly quiet. Oh, sure. Talking and for something for some reason, that was always calming, but now like if I hear voices I'm awake, like the end. Doesn't matter.

Cortex 57:47 I feel like bowling would kind of work like golf that way if it weren't for the part where something exploded at the end of every like, thing if it weren't for all those like pins that the ball like like like bowling bowling have like it's got to have the like the same televised bowling. Have you ever watched bowling on TV?

Jessamyn 58:02 Yeah, I mean, a candle pin. Right? Like Shut up. That's real. That's all we had.

Cortex 58:11 I haven't I don't actually have any hostility toward that. It's just like, like, I've never seen it on TV. That's

Jessamyn 58:17 the only bowling I've seen on TV. Oh, I just found the accident subject heading go on.

Cortex 58:22 But yeah, it's it's like it's got sort of a golf tone. Right? It's like it's a real laid back thing where everybody's sitting around and quietly commentating on a guy who's stopping and thinking about what they're about to do and they do it and then commentary like, they did that thing and well it went reasonably well or did or didn't, it could have gotten better or Well, he's you know, what he's really got to be thinking about next time is except for there's all this always this thing, you know, like a bowling ball collides at high speed with a bunch of things bounce off each other. So other than that, it seems like it would be good to fall asleep to that was my whole thing. I'm not sure it was really worth me taking out the time to elaborate on that but there we go. It's always

Jessamyn 59:02 good to know how your brain works I think.

Well, one by Lynn never where I learned that thing, which was basically like, Hey, I've got friends but they don't all they're not all in person. And we'd like things that we can kind of hang out and do via the internet. And so there's some obvious stuff right? Like, oh, you know, play A games or slack chat or whatever, but she's like I want to, I want more or different. And so people talk about like, well, you know, you can kind of cook together if you keep your video chat or on or you do video meetings. I'm like, internet scrabble person, as I'm sure everybody knows. Which reminds me I have a funny scrabble picture to show you. But at any rate, you know, what are what are other ways to do it. And one of the things that I learned, thank you, Eris Lord freedom is that there's a whole bunch of like chrome plugins so that you and your remote pals can watch like Netflix or YouTube videos together, meaning it'll like start the thing at the same time. So you're not just like three to one go, which is kind of how Jim and I do things if we want to watch TV together or not together, and which is a pain. And so there's this great link that goes to lots of little apps and funky things where just if you and your buddy want to watch a Netflix movie together, you totally can.

Cortex 1:01:03 That's nice. That's good setup. And I had not

Jessamyn 1:01:05 known that stuff existed, which surprised me a little bit and I was happy. I was happy that it was there. Yeah, here's my here's my scrambled tweet that I thought would make you laugh.

Cortex 1:01:19 It for the for the listener, but has been managed to play be played parallel to horndog.

Jessamyn 1:01:28 With horndog a seven letter word which scored 82 points, and then Jim wrote, but against it, and the letters that are left in my rack are HAVPE. Like, you know, it's 100 Monkeys 100 typewriters, right. It was just a fortuitous day on Scrabble. I happened to screenshot it, and it made me laugh. That was beautiful. I mean, how does it feel Josh to, like, whenever anybody sees the word, but to think that they're probably thinking of you, it's, you

Cortex 1:01:57 know, it's, I'll take it, I'll take it. I feel like I've I've landed some pretty good, like, you know, thinking of me, like, I've got, you know, but especially if there's any suggestion of LOLing you know, I've got, you know, a strong one. That's true. I guess. Menger sponge doesn't come up a whole lot, but like, just visually anything, but if at all, like, oh, yeah, right. If something happens on the internet involving a mega sponge, I definitely hear about it like from like seven different people. It's wonderful. So, yeah, yeah. Nice.

Jessamyn 1:02:35 Evers, 1820 to 1830. All right. So I like that thread. I like this thread only because I was really hoping that there was an answer. But there's super was not an answer, which was like, I want somebody that a, like, customer service through some bullshit that I don't want to deal with. And, you know, they're kinda isn't, like TaskRabbit kind of will do that. But

Cortex 1:03:08 wasn't there like a projects post in the last couple months from someone who was basically just doing that? Maybe it's one lens I mentioned. Maybe it's just not quite what they're looking for.

Jessamyn 1:03:20 I don't, I don't wreck I'm not sure. Well, and part of the issue is, this is somebody who needs something done that is not just irritating, send me a mailing label that might also include like your names, your passwords, maybe your banking stuff, or whatever, health care. And it's a pain, right? Because part of the issue is you need to be validated as the person which means, you know, it'll take you as much time to tell the person who's doing the thing for you, your personal information. You know what I mean? Like, the only thing that could really solve is you literally not having to speak to a person, but you'd still have to be like, in a chat window with the person making the phone call. Yeah. Because like, I did do a bunch of this shit, like for my mom's estate after she passed last year, and like, it was just easier to be like, Hi, I don't want to be on your mailing list anymore than it was to be like, my mom is dead. So can you take her off the mailing list? You know, and it was bizarre, but like, just how the shit works. And so I was really hoping maybe there was a service here. And it's funny because I can do this stuff for other people really easily, like wrestle with people. But for my own purposes, I have a hard time not kind of just getting really irritated. Yeah. Whereas if it's somebody else, even though the process is the same, for some reason, I'm not kind of invested in it. Yeah.

Cortex 1:04:55 I'm real light on Ask.

Jessamyn 1:04:57 All right, well, Jim asked about, he got his genome sequence and is trying to figure out where he can throw it at the Internet and find things.

Cortex 1:05:08 All right, right. I saw this go by.

Jessamyn 1:05:11 And of course, you know, what winds up happening is everyone's like, take it with a grain of salt. And he's like, I know that like, but where can I go to learn the things that I'm supposed to take with a grain of salt? And so, you know, that was interesting. I feel like he asked a question about something else, but I don't remember. I may not remember what that actually was.

Yes, yes. Good radio.

Cortex 1:05:43 I feel like I feel if you look at like the, the curve of of our pattern, like I feel like it pulled the Dow Industrial Index

Jessamyn 1:05:57 I lost $30. I mean, it's no 3 billion, but it feels Yeah,

Cortex 1:06:03 I'm not gonna think about my 401k I'll just let things recover.

Jessamyn 1:06:07 You know, that's actually super intelligent. Yeah, here's another thread that I liked, which was from a long time ago. But I liked it because it reminded me of some stuff and reminded me of some stuff kind of along the lines of Lynn Nevers. Thread, which was mhh five, like, alright, we're in a car ride. We're playing word games with kids. We know I spy. How about some other ones? Yeah. And it was just people talking about fun car ride games to play. Yeah. And your car.

Cortex 1:06:36 I definitely had some of those car ride experiences as a kid. So I felt

Jessamyn 1:06:41 like I spent I mean, I probably didn't write. But I really feel like I spent like a shit ton of time in the car just looking out the window.

Cortex 1:06:52 I would play little video games on the window. This Saturday, like I would I would literally I would turn the view out the the window into like a auto scrolling platformer game and like, my fingers would be like a little guy and he'd like jump over stuff. It was it was not a very good game. It was very unsatisfying. There was no feedback when he messed up, you know, but like, at the same time, eventually you run out of batteries for your Gameboy or you get carsick and you just gotta you know, you gotta make do and that was kind of where I was a kid.

Jessamyn 1:07:27 And it's adorable.

Cortex 1:07:30 Do what you have to do to pass the time.

Jessamyn 1:07:33 Yeah, we played like auto bingo. And we had, you know, boxes of books. I don't know what kind of parents you had that didn't give you.

Cortex 1:07:40 Oh, I mean, there were there were books that I would read a lot in the car, actually. But everyone's will I would get carsick or like, Okay, I gotta guess we would do you do like the license plate game.

Jessamyn 1:07:49 License plate games are awesome.

Cortex 1:07:51 You know? Sometimes we'd incorporate billboards depending on where we were driving. Yeah, we did some mad libs in the car, too. That was a thing. I love those were delightful. It's a killer. I eventually sort of realized that like no one was like, it's Mad Libs may have paved the way for my fondness for Markov chain generators actually come to think of it. Like just like semi structured nonsense language generation.

Jessamyn 1:08:16 See, I feel like after a while, everyone just answers every question with butts. But

Cortex 1:08:21 like, yeah, it as a format, it decays over time, you know, I thought they were the most amazing thing in the world for a while as a kid and then eventually the shine came off and you had sort of descended into butts. To title my memoirs, it just descended into buds.

Jessamyn 1:08:39 I mean, that could be the title of this podcast descent into buds. Now, now,

Cortex 1:08:45 I'll talk I'll pass on the note to consider it descended into buds. Question mark?

Jessamyn 1:08:57 Yeah, I think it descended into Butch. Yeah. All right. Yeah.

Cortex 1:09:02 Well, there was, there was music, I could do a quick medical music minute here. That'd be awesome. There are people posting stuff. There's actually a lot of good stuff. I just wanted to some instrumental stuff sort of jumped out at me when I was going over stuff. Again, yesterday and this morning. There's a nice thing from Grubbs dean called C rack which is this really sort of ambience, slow build thing, just like it's, it's, you know, it's more organized than noise but, but, but by degrees, and I was digging listening to it. There is just sort of instrumental demo from Annika excuse me, Anika cicada parentless motion which is just some crunchy guitars and I dug that she may not actually do anything with it. But you know, she did that and that's nice. There is another big pile of guitars and this one's long and pretty fucking rad from Alex 51 Alex with two x's 51 Just like It's like eight nine minutes and it's it's just good if you want some some heavy guitar stuff building up it's it's really nice there is from I guess Oculus I guess polis it's the annual soundcard close enough that is a sort of loop based build up just some some samples and nice electronic essentially instrumentals Well, the the theme here is no vocals, I guess no vocals this month. And finishing it off. This is actually dipping into December because I think it's dope Music Minute back in the last podcast either Oumou posted a thing called Keeping up with my friends five year old on drums, which is just exactly that's like a weird, free jazz freak out with a five year old drumming and it's, it's delightful. But there's a bunch of other good stuff too. So go listen to stuff, girl is knowledge other things? And and yeah, but that's been your meta filter Music Minute.

Jessamyn 1:11:21 Well, fantastic. I think that's the podcast.

Cortex 1:11:23 I think it is. I'll mention a couple minutes of things real quick that I thought were fun. But that's just a couple of things. There was a thread from earlier this week last week. I don't know what weeks are about. Ian banks culture novel references and usernames,

Jessamyn 1:11:41 I found this entire thing inscrutable. And I don't understand what it is still,

Cortex 1:11:45 I found it highly instructive, because like it explained some of these weird usernames. So well, there's a guy named Iain M. Banks, and he wrote a bunch of books. Have those

Jessamyn 1:11:54 books? Yeah. So they have not started reading any of them.

Cortex 1:11:58 Secretaries read one or two, I would like to at some point, but we were talking about books right at the top. And we'll see when that happens. Anyway, there's there's culture ships and culture minds in the book series that because I haven't read any I can't really tell you much more about other than this is some sort of like late stage futuristic utopia stuff. And all of these, like ships, and these minds have names that are variously cultural references of some sort. And it turns out a whole bunch of medical usernames that seem just like odd strings of words are actually odd strings of words taken from Ian banks as culture books. So, you know, that's it, I found that highly instructive in that sense. Oh,

Jessamyn 1:12:40 more clear. Then the post was,

Cortex 1:12:43 I think the post is sort of going in assuming you knew what you were talking about. Whereas like, I was already sure that I was like, kind of standing outside looking in. So

Jessamyn 1:12:51 I mean, I saw the word banks and the tags. But other than that,

Cortex 1:12:56 yeah. Like, if you don't know, that's what they mean by culture, then it's like, doesn't make any sense. How would you? Yeah, no, but I mean, it was sort of asking people who did it works out. Okay. All right. There was also a fun thread in the middle of January about someone trying to find that you do what previous discussion? led to that. And then yeah,

Jessamyn 1:13:21 I believe I set that page up. Originally did I believe you did what thread? It makes me happy. Yeah, but I had just thought of something that I wanted to ask Metafilter about. Oh, I remember what it was. Whether you have like, songs you sing. When like you run water or flush the toilet, like does water make a singsong noise that you sing along with? And you have a song that you sing along with? Because I do yeah, it's

Cortex 1:13:47 gonna say the sounds like the answer is yes. For you. Because it occurred

Jessamyn 1:13:49 to me, maybe other people do. Like sometimes like, you'll be somewhere and you'll be like, Oh, this totally reminds me of looking in the window of that store when I was a kid. Like, it's just a weird thing where there seems to be like a wormhole between memories. Yeah, you know, and I just have certain songs that are always like, the song I play when I'm running the water to brush my teeth. But it's music. It's not like, Oh, that makes me remember a thing. It's always music. Yeah, so yeah.

Cortex 1:14:16 Interesting. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:14:18 Like, you know, you're always afraid you're gonna like ask that question. And everybody's gonna be like, nope, get your head examined. So

Cortex 1:14:24 be be like, be like, be do what the t shirt from the 90s youth group kids say. And no, no, that's, I think I screwed that up. Anyway, no fear. That was more of a skater thing or something. Right? There was like, a Christian accurate variation. That was like no fear, except was k n o w fear. Because like you're supposed to, like, you know, be God fearing or something. I don't know.

Jessamyn 1:14:47 Oh, we didn't have youth group T shirts, and I get you.

Cortex 1:14:50 Anyway, you should ask that question. You should ask that question. And I'll ask I'll ask my question. That is, it feels sort of too small and a morphus ly dumb. Like maybe I could research first but it might be interesting. Just ask. And so maybe I'll do it. But I'll just say it here on the podcast who in case I forget, which is like, can you adopt someone who's young or older than you? Which Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:15:09 Which way it's the way gay people you should get around the fact that they couldn't get married?

Cortex 1:15:13 Well, yeah, it feels like there's probably like the answers to this feel like they are probably very complicated and contextualized. But the question itself came up like a barbette sort of question. And it might be interesting to just sort of like canvass that territory. Yeah. Because my feeling was my feeling was like, Absolutely, you must be able to just because we've been observed to construct the law in such a way that because it's because it's a law. Right. Yeah. But then the counter argument is, it would be absurd to be able to do that. So clearly, the law

Jessamyn 1:15:37 wouldn't allow it. So yeah, right. To have a child that was twice your age. Yeah,

Cortex 1:15:41 exactly. You know, it's like it just gets into paradox territory. So we also mentioned learned legal bidding, and this might be right down to the wire, but learned league is starting up. And maybe can people still do sign up stuffing?

Jessamyn 1:15:53 So let me take I can check real quick.

Cortex 1:15:55 Okay. Oh, it says, you know, referrals are open through February 6. So that's today. So if I posted this in two hours for probably listen to it, then yeah, maybe anyway, we can just say, yeah, you learn leagues happening,

Jessamyn 1:16:08 believe it. People want to get in for next time. I'm sure people can.

Cortex 1:16:11 Yeah, sort of start seeing that. Well, that's some stuff. Hey, hey, we talked about some things and stuff.

Jessamyn 1:16:19 Yeah. It's always good to talk to you. Hey, the New Year and yeah, yeah, that's my question. You ask your question.

Cortex 1:16:26 It's a deal. Okay. All right. I'll talk to you later.

Jessamyn 1:16:29 I'll talk to you later. Bye, forever recording. Awesome