Podcast 149 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 149: IROC-Z FOMO (2019-02-06).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Jessamyn 0:00 Jaime phi this is Alibaba happy 2019 I hope you'll have a good year. Thank you all for being my favorite place on the internet favorite

Cortex 0:34 Well hey, welcome to another episode of The Metafilter monthly podcast. This is episode 149 We're recording it on the morning of Tuesday February 5, keeping myself honest by baking the delay and I'm actually getting this up into the intro. I am Josh Maillard aka cortex.

Jessamyn 0:56 And I'm Jessamyn

Cortex 0:57 and and here we are we were Yeah, we're off to a brilliant start. But yeah, we were just saying well, so yeah, not not featured on Mike almost like by definition was like 15 minutes I've just been having to wrestle with her computer stuff to get audio to come out. So we're kind of coming out of like, the come down from like, finally triumphing over that bullshit.

Jessamyn 1:22 I don't know which audio webinar bullshit software is Hijacking My nonsense, but yeah, it was a pain in the ass. So coming to you live from the laptop

Cortex 1:31 webinars never did anything for the world.

Jessamyn 1:34 Sometimes they keep me paid. I appreciate though. Okay, yeah, they keep me at home. And so I don't have to get on and telling people I care about my carbon footprint. But really, I'm just tired of traveling, honestly. So in

Cortex 1:45 summary, webinars have changed the world for the better.

Jessamyn 1:50 Webinars are a land of contrasts.

Cortex 1:52 Yes. But yes, you're well, I'm well, we were discussing that there is snow in our respective regions of the United side

Jessamyn 2:00 of snow here, less snow here, every now and again, the entire house, your shakes, because some huge glacier of snow and ice falls off my roof. And it's very exciting, because, you know, I've lived here 10, almost 11 years, and I just freak out each time.

Unknown Speaker 2:17 Like, What the shit Oh, yeah, yeah.

Jessamyn 2:21 And then I went down to Massachusetts to, you know, the big game. And, and, and there was no snow on the ground, and it was unnerving. But it was windy and fucking cold.

Cortex 2:34 So that's good. Good enough, as long as winter is like showing its face.

Jessamyn 2:38 And our dumb Patriots won, and it was really fun to go read the fanfare thread after the fact. Yeah, Tom Brady needs to hang it up. That is my thesis.

Cortex 2:48 I was I was pleased by how little it impacted me as someone who wasn't I wasn't doing any Super Bowl stuff. I wasn't doing any not doing Super Bowl. Stuff satisfying that just sort of yeah, just sort of went by which was nice. Eyebrows watched the game and reported that it was very boring.

Jessamyn 3:07 It was super exceptionally boring. Like the Patriots are kind of good for lively football a lot of times, but it was boring. The ads were kind of boring. The food was great. Like the reason we went down to Massachusetts is my sister really likes an occasion to just friggin trash her kitchen and make a ton of food. And so us coming down to like nominally watch TV is as good an excuse as any. So I got to go and see my cat nieces and nephews basically, and just eat a lot of food and hang out Jim and I went for a completely freezing walk. Beach adjacent because there's theoretically snowy owls down on the south coast of mass. But we didn't see any because we had to keep our eyes closed. Because the thinking of flying through the air. I was literally at one point just because Jim wears glasses like holding on to his arm, and just letting him lead, hopefully towards the car and just being like, oh, man, what have I gotten myself into? We didn't see any hours either.

Cortex 4:08 Oh, well, but you gotta you gotta walk it, you know, anything. You know, we tend to like frame stuff in terms of like, Yeah, but you know, we got to walk in, you know, try to try and get out there and move the legs every day.

Jessamyn 4:19 Exactly. So let me talk about the number 149, which I think is hilarious. Because on Wikipedia, there's a little there's a little one of those alerts that says this article may contain indiscriminate, excessive or irrelevant examples. Like they're all examples, like what is it a relevant example when you're talking about what a number is, you know, it's prime and a number of different Dumb Ways. What you wouldn't necessarily think is an infinite nine. There's some rep units shit that I don't understand. It's a non palindromic number, you might appreciate this, meaning that it's not a palindrome in any base. Notice from binary up to base 147, which is fairly cool. And then there's some other bullshit. And, you know, maybe these are irrelevant examples, but they seem fine. It's just, you know, yeah. There's a 149 Medusa element temporarily called unquote demonium.

Cortex 5:22 Yeah, it's the digits RS ascending series of squares, like one and four and nine.

Jessamyn 5:29 See? That's cool, right? And that's not even in here as an irrelevant example.

Cortex 5:36 Yeah, like, we should make it like just really long form.

Jessamyn 5:40 Yeah, well, I've been, you know, Wikipedia nut this month, because it's the one lib one ref. Like, what if everybody added one citation to Wikipedia, we wouldn't need any citations anymore. Last year, they paid me to kind of stand for it. And this year, they are not paying. Because they are not a good place to work as much as I enjoyed actually noodling around Wikipedia. So this year, I am not getting paid to do the same thing I was doing last year. And it's been fun adding more, you know, articles about African American women and yeah, it's good time.

Cortex 6:21 I just had an audiobook. So that was just an awkward

Jessamyn 6:28 I talked to Jim about this sometimes, right? Like, sometimes we'll just be having a conversation. And I'll say something, and then he just kind of won't respond. And like, you know, he's just thinking or it made him think of something, but he just doesn't say anything. And I'm like, I really feel like your mic has dropped out. Like what? You're supposed to say something like even if it's just

Cortex 6:49 yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's I

Jessamyn 6:53 am actually listening, not just like watching the birds. I do remember that we're in here together having a conversation.

Cortex 6:58 Yeah. And it's that subtle cadence thing, like, you know, an extra like 500 milliseconds makes a difference in how it feels like pause or just extended pause, but I'm having that maybe, you know, the thing I've talked about previously, where every once awhile while we're using this software, you'll get a little bit slow and robotic. And then like rubberband back to full speed.

Jessamyn 7:17 A little bit slow and robotic. Yeah.

Cortex 7:20 You know, but for technology reasons, not not, not personal reasons. I mean, both it was doing that right when you were putting a button on that sentence, I think and so like waiting for it to catch up. I was like, waiting for it to catch up. And then when it caught up, caught up on silence and yeah, so it kind of fun silence. Technology, man. I like I like the software reasonably well.

Jessamyn 7:42 Where you can try it just by the way, if anybody put that

Cortex 7:45 one little thing, and it'd be thing and it might just be my shitty internet connection, which should not be shitty, but I feel like it's

Jessamyn 7:51 the internet connection. I do. You don't well, well,

Cortex 7:54 but it's I think it's when I'm uploading my segments like it doesn't like piecewise every 30 seconds said it. Segment. Yes. We gotta we gotta get I am Kim. I am back on the podcast on time for five minutes to like lay out specifically this like, like phonetic nature of that particular bit.

Jessamyn 8:13 Where that comes from? Because, you know, that's an ad elect. Pretty much like, I feel like that's you and like people from northern Minnesota.

Cortex 8:23 Yeah, there's, there's like, there's definitely some regional stuff to it. That doesn't make any specific sense, as far as I know, to my in yours context. So yeah, I don't know if it makes sense for someone in my family. I don't think my mom or my dad or AIG people. But I don't know, I look. Anyway. Let's talk about jobs. There's there's a very specific, exciting job thing in particular, that you see show up because I was like, I should poke the Andes until one of the posts and then one of them just did already.

Jessamyn 8:59 I mean, not actually. But

Cortex 9:04 all the jobs actually, that they

Jessamyn 9:06 look good. Yeah. There's four jobs. They all look cool. Yeah.

Cortex 9:09 So the one I want to mention specifically is it's actually a couple of jobs. Posted by Eddie McMillan, who's one of the two Auntie's who runs Echo Echo, which I've talked about before, and the other one is our own waxy wax pancake, Andy bale. They have started working on a like rework of product called drip, which Kickstarter started a while back to sort of work in the same space as what Patreon does with sort of recurring micro payments support for artists. So Drake,

Jessamyn 9:44 except without Patreon being dicks Yeah, well,

Cortex 9:47 yeah. Anyway, so drip was kind of the same sort of thing. And then Kickstarter decided that like, you know, they weren't, I think they just didn't really know specifically how they wanted to carry that forward and they have good relationships with Andy and Andy.

Jessamyn 10:00 because that was gonna be my question, because I know Andy used to be the Kickstarter guy, but I wasn't sure what is how he was with them.

Cortex 10:07 Now, yeah, yeah, I've actually had like real direct involvement a while back. And he's still on good terms with them. He just like, stopped working there and was working on stuff like so. So I think that is part of why they were like, Okay, let's figure this out, let's, let's find a good home for this. And let's let this have its own go at being what it's going to be. And so they're still working on developing that into what they want it to be. And as part of that, they're hiring a couple people. So if you

Jessamyn 10:32 are, or can maybe work from anywhere.

Cortex 10:36 They are okay with remote as well, like they're in Portland. But they mentioned that remote hires in the US are also totally doable. So if you're anywhere in the US, and you are potentially a senior web application developer or a project manager, and you find any of the rambling I've done about XOXO, over the years, intriguing, you should definitely check this out.

Jessamyn 11:00 I like it. I like this little job that came from an asked me question. Basically, it's a lover Whose phone is ringing, and I'm ignoring it. What what the noise? Basically, the friends got a Blogger blog, Google doesn't index it quite right. I'm trying to figure out the Google Search Console can't what's going on help? Maybe you could help. So if you're someone who thinks you could log into a Google search console and help someone with the thing, try to help them with the thing.

Cortex 11:37 And crush has a job listing asking for some help drafting up a pattern for a woman's garment based on photographs of that. If that is in your skill set, jump on that.

Jessamyn 11:51 And then our last job actually is ln, ln Eileen Island. I don't know, Claire is looking just for somebody to eyeball a CV and give them some feedback on it. And you know, this reminds me I really have to put up my job. Which is another like kind of it's like a quiz plover level job where it's like, I just have some thing. Like I've got this book list, right? Where I keep track of all the books I read. And at the end of the year, I do a little summary. Like I read this, many have this kind of book, and I read this many female authors and this many male authors. And it's it's fine, right? Like I enjoy it. But the book list thing, which was of course, like written by like a, you know, random boyfriend 15 years ago, doesn't really lend itself to my Booklist report, if that makes sense. Yeah. So like, what I want to know is how many books I didn't finish last year, and I have an unfinished category. But then it just gives me a list of every book I've ever not finished. Not which books I didn't finish last year. Yeah. So there's no it's all php. And I think it's pretty easy. But every here's the problem, right? I get caught in this cycle where I'm like, It's Php, right? I can figure it out. I should break it and learn it anyhow. Third, and then I dive into the code. And then I'm like, Oh, I have to learn about this thing. And then all right, trying to arrive have to go to work. And then, but I feel like I should be able to do it. But I'm watching myself not do it. Yeah. And after a point, I really need to just do it, and get someone else to do it. And they could probably do it in an hour. But I also don't want like somebody to like PHP shame me. You know, like, no idea what he was doing. It's like, yes, that's why we split up 15 years ago, please. So maybe I'll put that in my head. Yeah. But I really should take care of it. I think about it. I think about it when I fall asleep. Oh, I should really? And then. Yeah, although I have been putting my reading list up on Twitter. You haven't seen that? Yeah, it's been fun. It actually, here's what happens, right? Like I read widely. I like science fiction. I read a lot of other stuff. I usually read nonfiction in the morning fiction at night, but I need some kind of story at night so I can fall asleep. So, you know, certain, like difficult books need not apply. And I don't like complicated, difficult books. And sometimes I finish a book and I'm not sure what the next book is. And I have like Dan Brown's latest book on my Kindle. But because I'm tweeting out my book list, I'm actually not sure I want to let my Twitter followers know that I am a Dan Brown reader. It's very embarrassing, right? Because I'm like, the world's most supportive librarian, like read whatever you want. Doesn't matter. Right? And yet, and yet, so the good news is having this Dan Brown book on my Kindle means that I'll try and read almost anything else to avoid reading the Dan Brown book. So the other like fiction books that maybe I wasn't going to dive into, I've been diving into. It's remarkable. I never would have occurred to me this would be the pattern. But yeah,

Cortex 15:15 that's kind of fantastic. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, it's okay to shed brown. It's like Dan Brown's kind of like the guy theory of speculative fiction, you know, it's like, yes, okay. There's legitimate, profound criticisms, in the context of your work. On the other hand, whatever. It's, it's schlocky fiction. And if you like it, you like it. That's fine.

Jessamyn 15:34 I mean, that's exactly it, right? I mean, it's like reading romance novels. Like I have tons of friends who read romance novels. And I'm not even like, I'm just like, great. You found your thing. Yeah. The end. Like, I don't think any more about it. And yet, for me, I'm like, oh, it's like, I know, he's a bad writer. But like, everything I read is really good writing.

Cortex 15:54 Let me have this beat reading. Yeah, but

Jessamyn 15:57 I read too many like sentient plant, sci fi books, and I just need to read something where all the characters are human. And there's just one goddamn storyline, you know, not like and now here's a chapter about the sentient bamboos like God dammit. I don't care about the sentient bamboos perspective.

Cortex 16:14 Enough with this flora.

Jessamyn 16:17 So, I want to talk about projects because I'm very excited about projects.

Cortex 16:20 Do it. Tell me about the exciting projects?

Jessamyn 16:23 Well, my favorite exciting project was mill man's laser cut peacock dalla, which we only found out about because there was a meta talk thread about like, what have you been up to? Right? Like, you know, what have you been doing? What's what's I think it was, what's something you're happy about or something you're proud of? I don't even remember, it was a nice thread of like, Yeah, whatever. And mill man, like, I made this thing. And then you look at it. This amazing stacked cut paper, glued, like laser cut paper. And everybody was just like, whoa, and I was like, and I'm sure other people were like putting out projects, dude. And so we put it on projects. And then it got posted to metal filter. And it was just the whole thing just made me really by Laylax. And the whole thing just made me really happy. I just I liked I liked the original thing. I liked the post, he talks to people about how to do it if people are sort of interested in it. And he's totally likes self effacing. Like, well, you know, I just thought I would. And then you look at this thing, and it's incredible. And it's just all the extra pictures were really fun. Whole thing made me happy. It's on projects, it's cool. Go check it out,

Cortex 17:41 ya know, it's really fantastic. i i that sort of work with laser stuff seems like really like a really good use of the tool and the sort of like a medium to work. And I follow a couple people on Instagram who do like similar kinds of stuff. And it's always just like, oh, yeah, there's this like, it would be a pain in the asked to do this by hand, like people have certainly done similar things by hand, you know, for as long as people didn't have lasers. But the I feel like the greater accessibility to doing the work with lasers is a really nice development, like the fact that people can more practically accomplish this because there's still a tremendous amount of design work and a bunch of conceptual work. But there's no reason that like you holding an exacto knife in your hand needs to be a key part of producing those objects. So like,

Jessamyn 18:31 you would watch the exacto knife people do their stuff, and you'd be like, Whoa. Yeah. And now, people are doing it using different tools.

Cortex 18:43 Yeah. It's nice when the tools can sort of follow along with existing art concepts and improve the process for creating them. I really liked in similarly bold, wide scoped creation of original work I like pronephric made a little font out of the afterlife Wingdings on the good place.

Jessamyn 19:07 I just see a row of boxes.

Cortex 19:09 It's so we've talked about the good place TV show. I like it.

Jessamyn 19:13 I like it. It took me a long time to come around to it. Like I don't know what my deal is about getting the television late. But yes, agreed.

Cortex 19:21 You know we can deliver up to speed now but but you're watching Mr. Robot now

Jessamyn 19:25 and reading fanfare threads from like, 2015 2016 to figure out what the hell's going on.

Cortex 19:31 I need to get back to that we basically watched the first season and then

Jessamyn 19:34 that's where I am right now. Crack. Wow. And the first season like ends right at the year like Who is it behind the door? And then I went to check the Metafilter thread and they're like, oh my god, that four seconds whatever, or four minute what's called Stinger, like when there's a little bit after the credits. Oh, so in the very end of the last episode of the first season, there's a four minute

Cortex 19:58 bit I did not

Jessamyn 20:00 Sure. I wouldn't have known maybe you didn't know. Yeah, no, I did not. Whoa. Well, you have to go back and watch it now. Because it's actually a pretty important scene with the whole What the hell's going on? So yeah, at any rate, I'm sorry, go on about the good life.

Cortex 20:18 Just did. They've got you know, there's some plain sight. Yeah. The Good Wife with what's her face? Margolis. Yeah, no, it's just like, they've got some like sci fi fonts in sort of alchemical angelic scripts littered around in the set dressing sometimes, and people got together and figured out what the script was, like, you know, capital and lowercase, you know, A through Z replacement cipher. And then yeah, Pronoiac said, Okay, well, I'm gonna make a font out of it. So now there's a font that you can use to type in afterlife Wingdings as that that's funny.

Jessamyn 20:53 I can see it in Firefox, and I can't see it in Chrome. I am forced to use Chrome for the podcast recording tool that we use. Yeah. It is shitty.

Cortex 21:03 Yeah. I feel like we're in like a new weird muddled shitty dark ages on like, font support, it feels like for extended font support and

Jessamyn 21:12 the Unicode I mean, are the emojis don't come quick enough. Yeah. But yeah, that's an awesome project. Let's see, the other one that I really liked was another one that got bumped up to Metafilter by Laylax. The project itself is by D and GE, and it's just talking about, like sexist disparities in the numbers of winners and various awards. So I saw some of this bouncing around on Twitter before I saw it here. But like, for instance, the earliest it can be when as many women as men have won Best Director at the Oscars, because of the disparity currently, and how many men have one versus how many women is 2111, or the year 2111. Which, you know, not in our lifetime? Dramatically.

Cortex 22:03 It's a great index, you know, it makes a point, you know, very, very efficiently with these numbers. And it's also one of the things where even then it's kind of like, it reminds me of like the Bechtel test in that, like, you know, this is this is proposing such a specific, you know, the Bechtel test is interesting for what a low bar is proposing, you know, how many movies failed to pass

Jessamyn 22:29 something that isn't a man for longer than a minute or whatever? Yeah,

Cortex 22:32 like, that's such a low bar, and yet so much stuff doesn't cover it. Whereas this is saying, Okay, let's imagine for a moment that literally every Oscar winner for the next 50 years is a woman, even though along 50 years, would we be caught up and that's like, even if things balance out now, that's, that's obviously not going to happen. So like, it's that that sort of like extremity that even at that, like the earliest possible in this impossible scenario, you know, would be decades or more. So yeah, no, I thought that was really cool. Yes, I really dig this EP, from bluebird wine who have mentioned on a couple of previous podcasts in the medical or Music Minute, who's been posting good stuff, and she got an EP recorded and released. And it's, I think, five songs, maybe six songs of just nice, well recorded, well written folk stuff. So yeah, definitely go check it out. Because it's nice. Good job.

Jessamyn 23:37 I'll also like this bug report zine by split pea soup, which is basically, you know, a free up on archive.org zine about frustrations and growing disillusionment of working in technology. And it's online. And if you want to go submit stuff for the second one, it's got some like, Bezos must die bingo, man. I saw fucking Bezos, his dumb bald head wandering around somebody's box during the Superbowl. And I was like, I thought we were having a nice time that fucking guy. No, I mean, it helps you remember everybody's a zillionaire. And

Cortex 24:24 that's great. I did not get a chance to look at that before. So

Jessamyn 24:28 yeah, it looks cool. It's very it's very, it's wordy. It's illustrated. It looks cool. It's free. They have an Instagram. Yeah, you should. You should check it out. It's

Cortex 24:39 cool. Yeah. And there's a bunch of other great stuff on projects too. So just go look at projects and if you're making stuff or doing stuff, go make a projects post. Like yeah,

Jessamyn 24:47 please don't be shy. You know, you got you got something you're working on and it's more or less done. Put it on projects, share it with everybody. There's been get a lot of good feedback from people who are nice

Cortex 25:26 Just clicking over to Metafilter hey, let's talk about Metafilter. Just clicking over the front page to dig through some of my stuff. And there's a brand new post about the debacle about slacks new logo in the title is a swastika made of dicks. It's kind of over and

Jessamyn 25:43 wait, wait where I did the front page of Metafilter? Like,

Cortex 25:47 oh, right, I suppose. I suppose we could I suppose that's the thing I could do. I could send you the benefit really good. Anyway, I had seen that. That that phrase before in when like, because this this was like, what, a couple weeks ago when slack?

Jessamyn 26:04 And I mean, whatever, right? There's two ways to do logos, right? Like, okay, everybody give us feedback on what we're thinking about. Or, here it is. You didn't even know we were thinking about it. There was nothing wrong with the old one go. And this was more of the second one.

Cortex 26:22 Yep. Anyway, I don't really want to get into it that people

Jessamyn 26:26 I want to get into it. There's a swastika in the middle of it. Like, Blake, it's the rule. It's the rule. If there's if you show the logo to anybody, and they say, well, there's kind of a swastika in the middle of it. You do something? Fucking Like, seriously, I cannot get over the there's a swastika in the middle of it. You know what I mean? I just everything else, whatever. Slack doesn't work for me. You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't matter if I like it or not. But really, yeah, there's a swastika in the middle of it. And that's a problem. And somebody should have caught it. But nobody did. Because there aren't enough Jews in everywhere. You know what I mean? Like, it's a weird thing that highlights and and with me, the whole issue is like, you know, anti semitism is on the rise, you know, in the world and on the internet. And I told you like I work with Gianni wallflower. I've kind of gotten off it in the last like week or so because it's really the, you know, been poking me in my fields too much. But like, you know, I used to spend like 10 or 15 minutes reporting horrible anti Semites on Twitter every morning and watching them get banned, which is gratifying. And yet the fact that there was always new fuck the Jews, anti Semites on Twitter every morning, despite the fact that the other ones had gotten banned, is you know, super shitty. And so given that, maybe not having a swastika in the middle of your logo would be a way to, you know, be

Cortex 28:07 you know what I mean? Like a good idea to avoid that,

Jessamyn 28:11 because I think slack really tries to do the right thing. You know what I mean? They're not like, we don't give a shit, they do give a shit. Or at least that's their kind of corporate posture. The people I know at SLAC seem to give a shit. So I was very surprised. So I'm gonna dive into that thread with gusto.

Cortex 28:28 It should be, they should have a good common count. By the time we're done with the podcast. Like,

Jessamyn 28:31 I'm a little surprised it took that long. And I don't know if you get this joke. This was the picture I was looking for.

Cortex 28:40 To do? Yes, yes.

Jessamyn 28:43 So you get that immediately when you look at it, or you know that I do I

Cortex 28:47 get it immediately, because I've been exposed enough to the last meme that like now I know whenever I see a slightly inscrutable thing. In a like two by two matrix layout. It's probably a lost joke. And then I'd look at it closer. And like if that's what it is, it's the last joke. We talked about.

Jessamyn 29:03 We have not because if we had, I would have gotten this joke joke, you know, joke earlier. Do you want to talk about for 10 seconds,

Cortex 29:13 I'll do the short version. There's a webcomic called Ctrl Alt Delete. It was one of a whole bevy of web comics in the form of a couple of guys sit around talking about video games and having like a hydrangea whatever. It was basically constantly kind of sarcastic and caustic and tone and then the guy did a comment about the story of one of the characters. Losing her pregnancy having a miscarriage and the other character you know, they're so who's the main character showing up the hospital of being sort of devastated and on the one hand, it's trying to do a little bit storytelling about some earnest dramatic thing and like you know, you shouldn't make fun of someone for doing essentially a diary comic ish thing about, you know, having a miscarriage. On the other hand, when the person's whole shtick is basically sarcastic asshole hurry, and then they suddenly do bout face and drop in contextless this

Jessamyn 30:03 thing that happened in somebody's real life or was intentionally decided to have a very special episode, I'm

Cortex 30:09 not I'm not clear on that either. So I'm not going to like speculate way I don't remember, I may have just been sort of very special episode. But either way it it was so out of character that people kind of didn't take it seriously. And it ended up being widely, widely mocking someone's, you know, earnest strip about, you know, losing a baby, that's shitty. On the other hand, it's so hard to extend the benefit of the doubt, like when you have the context for that, that this wasn't just like a bizarre misstep, or attempting to use unearned earnestness. So like, it's a weird clusterfuck, where like, nobody really looks good if you dig in on the last name, because it's basically a whole bunch of people making fun of this thing. And this became like the most high profile thing associated with this guy's webcomic work. But on the other hand, maybe his webcomic work was kind of assholey to begin with. So like, and this is all like mid 2000s, I want to say, maybe late 2000s,

Jessamyn 31:06 like the dick internet person who winds up having a change of heart after it turns out, somebody close to them is affected by the thing. Yeah, they used to make fun of whatever and whatever, whatever that thing is.

Cortex 31:24 Yeah, people, people are complicated. And you know, you don't just fit water on it. Anyway, what happened is people started making jokes on literally the format of the comic, like there's a character standing by himself in the first frame. And then the second frame, he's talking to someone at a slight perspective. So there's two fingers standing and the third frame, he's talking to someone else in a different slightly offset vertical perspective. And then the third and the final frame, he's standing over the bed where his partner is laying down. And so you have this like, one vertical line, two vertical lines, two vertical lines, one vertical and one horizontal line that is like the visual structure of the layout. And so everything that like, all the last jokes are using those templates, without any other semantic relationships whatsoever, the comic strip as a reference to it, and then like people posting it and then making jokes about well, I'm at a loss or really losing something or whatnot, to riff on the name loss, and is this loss. And that's the whole thing. It's so it's very, like, the thing I will say like the the most constructive positive thing I can say about it is that it is an extremely internet specific level of self referential, ongoing, referential humor. You can make up your mind about like, the humor content and all of the backstory and whatnot. But like, it is a very, very pure case of like, an idea that exists only because of the internet, on the internet perpetuated in a very internet way. So I find it interesting that way. And like the part of me that can laugh at people being sort of audacious ly dickish with visual references. I can laugh at that stuff, too. But it's complicated. It's it. It's hard to feel not like kind of shitty in the process of being like, Oh, hey, we're doing that thing again, where everything about this is kind of fucked up.

Jessamyn 33:08 Right where nothing is real and nobody cares. Yeah,

Cortex 33:11 yeah. You know, it's like, it's hard to divorce it from that, you know, it's one of the things like it's, it's yeah, the joke that you realize that you don't know how to get your way out of explaining without kind of sound lick and asshole for enjoying it, that sort of thing.

Jessamyn 33:25 Right? You probably shouldn't have been making it but whatever. Yeah, like someone who comes cold was like,

Cortex 33:28 Wait, so this is, this is funny. Why is like, well, you have to understand the web comics, even in the mid 2000s. Yeah, right. But anyway, that's what that is. So that was the version that took us like, I talked for

Jessamyn 33:41 fun. And so somebody readjusted the slack, new dumb logo, to at least that have a swastika in it. But then it looks like the in this is this last meme. You know, so yeah, I'm mad about the swastika. But again, it's just like welcoming the internet. Right? I mad about the swastika. They're not going to change it. Moving on, you know, I, but you know, I have all my icons on my sidebar arranged by color. And now I'm mad because it's in the wrong place.

Cortex 34:16 You know, I haven't I haven't updated slack yet. I don't think because I still have the mobile

Jessamyn 34:20 app on my computer. And it turns out, I haven't updated on my laptop. So I'm still looking at the friendly old logo. And realistically, you could hack it in five seconds to have the icon basically be Yeah, it looks like it's like, like, peeing all over everything. When it spins. It's terrible. Just terrible. Okay,

Cortex 34:39 well, okay, anyway. Now that we've talked for 10 fucking minutes about we Oh, okay. Well, you're an enabler. I really liked this post on metal filter about bassoon tracker, which is an open source JavaScript music tracker on

Jessamyn 34:58 the web link link. semi link, link. Oh,

Cortex 35:01 damn it, I made that a show note instead of a message. Show note, I can say I can make a secret show notes if I need them. And I don't ever do it, like doesn't have any use for it. But there are two fields right next to each other.

Jessamyn 35:13 This is why the title of the last episode wasn't it's about friendship. Was that. Was that two months?

Cortex 35:20 I don't remember exactly. Anyway, but soon tracker is a piece of tracker software. And tracker software has a very specific kind of music production software that had its heyday in the 80s and early 90s. What is it? It came out of, I think basically the Amiga demo scene back and like, you know,

Jessamyn 35:40 I'm sorry, I asked her and I well, basically it's a it's a kind of tune in it.

Cortex 35:45 It's a piano roll style music maker sort of related to how MIDI works, but it was designed to specifically use samples and audio processing, whereas MIDI just uses like, just gets whatever MIDI hardware you have to play it. So MIDI sounds would often be like very like, you know, dorky, bad, fake little trumpet sound bad fake. Familiar with MIDI sounds. You're familiar with the phenomena of MIDI trackers were sort of an end run around how bad the audio quality of MIDI libraries were. So instead, you could use actual sampled audio and it would use those samples and trigger them to at different frequencies and pitches and rates and whatnot to create music.

Jessamyn 36:30 So a bassoon tracker uses bassoon samples to be

Cortex 36:35 turns out, I think it's called the Sweetwater because trackers tend to have goofy names and this one is goofy.

Jessamyn 36:41 Ready to talk about my neighbor who plays the oboe. Yeah, sorry.

Cortex 36:45 I mean, you could use a bassoon sample but there's no

Jessamyn 36:48 pocket looks like old. What was the that weird old music player we all used to use.

Cortex 36:55 When amp? Yes. Yeah. Which was an mp3 player that was styled like fast. Like like tracker style. I feel like the wind amp styling definitely hearken to the era of trackers. Is that true than for mp3 as well, like

Jessamyn 37:07 aesthetically? I would say so like, but like trackers came first is what you're telling. Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 37:11 I mean, Tracker started in the 80s. You know, there was people talk about it a little bit in the thread, actually. But the Amiga had hardware that supported audio stuff that was way ahead of like general PC stuff back in the 80s. Like the Amiga was a really cool machine. And it had this good audio process suffer. So the tracker software for the Amiga use all four of like the hardware audio channels that could do much better playback than your shitty PC speaker could

Jessamyn 37:40 and easily be has mentioned in the thread that it's named after the effects that the music has on the time perception part of the brain, which is known as Shatner's best soon. Aha, there we go. Come on, Josh. It's just reading. Yeah.

Cortex 37:56 I was being distracted.

Jessamyn 38:00 Totally in the shadows that soon now.

Cortex 38:02 It's really cool. And if you don't anything about trackers, it's a good jumping off point to learn about the history of this strange kind of music production stuff.

Jessamyn 38:10 I don't understand why Shatner's Facetune redirects to a brass. I am so confused.

Cortex 38:18 I don't know either.

Jessamyn 38:20 Which PD is so weird sometimes? Yep. All right. Sorry.

Cortex 38:24 Anyway, it's neat. It's neat. It's a weird anachronism to kind of make that at this point. Because the the whole impetus for trackers to exist, went by the wayside, you know, 20 years ago, but it's still, you know, I mean, violins are old to fucker, we still play music on them. So, so a bassoon tracker? Oh,

Jessamyn 38:41 I see. It's like a made up thing from a TV thing. It's not a real thing. Ah, thank God. All right. So we're gonna talk probably about the best post contest a little bit later. But there was a best post contest which did for me what basically, I think it was supposed to do. I mean, I'm as engaged with the site as I'm going to be. So it didn't like hop up my engagement. But it did help me find some posts that I would not have otherwise seen. And specifically different meta filter users could all give awards for different topical stuff, which is probably my favorite thing about it. And if I had been a little bit more higher functioning this month, I would have done my own award. Oh, rip movable book lady, by the way, who actually was one of my book award spin back in the day of best post contest, but embers cow videos, had one about buds. And it led me to this delightful post about hockey buds, which I guess are like a thing, right? Like if you're a hockey player, you have incredibly overdeveloped like glutes and quads, right, like your legs and your ass. It also means though, if you're a hockey player, it's very hard to find pants that fit because you have glutes and quads that are gigantic and you've got kind of probably a normal size waist right? And so women everywhere know this as a problem because women have more different shapes that are not accommodated by jeans is my take. And so basically a fiendish thing he made this terrific post about hockey dudes who can't find pants that fit, as well as having these bizarrely, overdeveloped butts. And then why they don't like just go to Taylor's because the kind of everyman aesthetic is really important in hockey, and you have to kind of fit in in the locker room. And so talking about that, and it just became a really interesting thread. And there's some cool photos of hockey butts. Nice. Yeah, so thank you upper scalp videos for having that. Instead, incentive thing thank you a fiendish thingy. And thank you for all the people who gave our hockey information. It was a really interesting thread to read. I liked it.

Cortex 41:03 I am delighted just now saying I was glancing through the best posts, one of the best posts, posts. And this post from Nika spark about a Camaro IRock Z fan page.

Jessamyn 41:16 Oh my god,

Cortex 41:17 exactly what it sounds like. Amazing.

Jessamyn 41:21 I wanted one of those cars, more than anything, like were you of the age where this was a car you wanted? Or it

Cortex 41:29 was. It was a little young for that like to be something that I was into. But also I was never like a car person as a kid anyway, like, I there were a couple of cars I liked as a kid, but I never really like paid attention. So I was aware of like, the Iraq z because it had such a weird name, like what the fuck is in Iraq? See, what does that mean? As far as well don't know. But like, I've also I've always been culturally aware of them as like, this is a very specific car that exists out there. People have these, whatever these fucking trans AM's are, or whatnot, right? Probably like committing a venial sin by calling

Jessamyn 42:01 they find they were like, you know, it's Coke, Pepsi.

Cortex 42:05 But yeah, so and this page, this this, this post is beautiful, because it's just like it is what you would expect if 20 years ago, someone said, oh, yeah, I've got an Iraq see fan page on the internet. Like, it's like old school. Like, I liked these cars. And here's some stats about them. It's fantastic. So yes,

Jessamyn 42:22 well, and I didn't realize, you know, they didn't make that many of them relative to, you know, other cars. Well, and here's my thing, right? So I loved these cars. And I wanted a car like this some kind of Camaro or some crazy shit. And my father was just like, no. Not what, like he was gonna buy me a car, but I wasn't even allowed to think about having one. You know what I mean? It was just how I grew up. And he was like, no, no, no, it's a phase, you'll grow out of it. I was like, never, I'm gonna have this feathered hair forever. And I am going to drive this car. And you know, didn't. But for my last year of high school, I actually worked for an auto auction. Where the whole job was you showed up crack of dawn on Saturday. And what you did was you got into these cars, and you drove them through. I've probably mentioned this before, but you drove them through the garage and all of these auto dealers would bid on them. And they'd crawl all over the car and ask you if the air conditioning work. And I was 17. Right. So I had driven two cars in my life, basically. And then in the auto auction for this One Crazy Summer. I got to drive every car including the I Roxy's and the Camaro Porsches and the Firebirds and one of the things that I found out was that I'm short. And I can't drive a car where you sit on the ground because I can't see out of it. Yeah, like I can drive it kind of lying down is if I were manipulating something in a hospital bed, but I basically can't drive one of those cars and see Yeah, so my love affair with them ended I wound up driving like a Opel Manta, which was actually a pretty cool sporty car as my first car because somebody was selling it up the road. But I sort of got over it. And then when I met Jim, you know, 10 or 11 years ago, he had Camaro briefly when he was a kid. Because he wanted one and his parents were less shitty. I was like, Ah, it's just one of those dipshit things we share from our you know, Agent Jason childhoods Oh, it's fantastic.

Cortex 44:59 I also Though like this post about recursive gouffre, the draft effect post that I don't

Jessamyn 45:06 even know what it says, but it just sounds like it's totally up your alley. Well, the

Cortex 45:10 text of it, like I read it, or posted a picture of their mother holding a painting someone else, picture of themselves holding a painting of the first picture, and so on, and so on and so on. It's fantastic. It's just like,

Jessamyn 45:22 only it goes all the way down.

Cortex 45:24 I've never seen the family like

Jessamyn 45:27 whatever, like there's a little intro where something happens. And then they capture that scene. And that scene becomes part of the painting. Oh, that the people are holding. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, pretty much not very complicated. Oh, that's so cute.

Cortex 45:42 It's delightful. I there's just people being goofy, fun, creative people on the

Jessamyn 45:46 show. And it's like, what Reddit is good. You know, like, like, where everybody's kind of on Team nerd doing something where everybody can just be supportive, and no one is a dick. Yeah. You know, I just I love that kind of thing. I should point out my post because I liked it. My sister basically sent me a thing on Twitter, which had to do with no, I sent her a thing because I subscribed to some like CDC newsletter or something. And it talked about the dangers of hedgehog snuggling. And like, clearly, that headline is intended to get traction, right? It's not you wouldn't call it snuggling a hedgehog, probably if you were just but whatever. Don't get into your headshot, they got disease, right? Don't put it in your mouth or whatever. And so I sent that to my sister, and then she wrote me back and she was like, Oh, I thought you were going to talk about that. I shouldn't be snuggling. My wombat and she sent me a link to like another animal thing you can't snuggle because I think wombats are just foul tempered and have claws. But then I just started googling. And there's a whole bunch of stuff. You can't snuggle backyard chickens, your cat with a rash, naked blind baby squirrels, etc. So I just made it goofy. But it turned into like, again, like another one of those kinds of fun threads where everybody's just playing granddad's. Yeah, that's funny.

Cortex 47:08 That's fantastic. Yeah. I liked this post from duffel. If I can pay successfully, because I just had this one of like, Ah, those fucking things. I think it was more or less what my comment was in the thread to weebles, tiny little pom pom things with like feet and faces. And they were used as like, basically the bait for doing magazine sales and other fundraisers shit, and

Jessamyn 47:35 like they had stickers like you could they their feet were stickers. Yeah. And you could stick them on a thing, although I never knew what they were called. Yeah, well,

Cortex 47:43 apparently, they were called a couple different things. People mentioned some other names in the threads. But God damn, I'd like it was like a shot out of the blue. Like, oh, I remember this whole very stupid thing I got caught up in because I was a dumb kid. And it's easy to incentivize kids with sort of dark marketing patterns. And

Jessamyn 48:00 you know, I actually had to look someone in the face when she said her daughter was selling girl scout cookies. And if I wanted any, and I just did that thing where you just hold the conversation and you don't say anything for just long enough. So that you don't have to say no, but the answer is clearly no. Jim actually got worked by a Girl Scout who came to his door and he can't say no, and now he has cookies, which I guess doesn't sound like it's the moral it should be. But the whole thing irritates me right? There too. I love the Girl Scouts. The cookies are too expensive. I don't feel like it sends a good message. I'm aware this is mostly only me. But I do think I'm right.

Cortex 48:42 It would be it would be great for there to be a alternate thing that didn't feel like it was halfway to being an MLM using child labor.

Jessamyn 48:50 The only reason it makes money is because the kids work for fucking free. Yep.

Cortex 48:54 And the cookies are fine. But they're also like, you know, they could be cheaper if the goal was just to make cookies as inexpensively as you could. But it's fun to add. Yeah, I have a couple friends who are like Girl Scout people. So like, that cleanly takes me out of like, the concern of making the call in the moment that like, you know, roadside stuff, I can just be like, Nope, I already gave it the office.

Jessamyn 49:16 Wait, so you're saying you bought cookies from them? Well, yeah, but

Cortex 49:20 it's a very direct it's a very direct support thing. Like, you know, it's a good friend who like is actively involved in like troop management. And yeah, you know, so like, we're like, yeah, every year that comes around, yeah, we get a couple of boxes. Just like be like,

Jessamyn 49:36 don't make me do cookie thing.

Cortex 49:43 Gosh, what else is there?

Jessamyn 49:44 I very much enjoyed only because, you know, Superbowl weekend, right? And, like, I'm from Massachusetts. So you know, I have feelings about it. But I also have, I don't know if you saw but Horace Rumpole aka John Overholt was just on Twitter all day during the Superbowl talking about traumatic brain injury, which I thought was a bold move, and I respected very much. You know, because he's got like, a lot of people pay attention to him, you know, and he's just like, not watching it totally concerned. Here's a bunch of things you need to know about head injuries. And I was like, good on you. So this was a post from before Super Bowl, basically, like Yahoo Sports did a thing about this kid who did a science fair project, about proving that Tom Brady is a cheater, which, of course is a theme that goes through football, right, like patriots, you think they're so good, but that's just because Tom Brady cheats. Wow. But everybody cheats. Well, but do they and not everyone a little brother but, and of course, like this kid's just got this huge shit eating grin on his face. And then you know, a whole bunch of people show up in the thread to be like, well, actually, that's actually not what that science project proves. And then other people are like, patriots. At any rate, I just enjoy those because I just don't care. Like, whatever if you ask me I have an opinion. But I don't have an opinion enough to argue with anybody who has a contrary opinion. It's just like, you know, what's your favorite color? Orange? I like green great. You know, the end right? So it was it's but it's fun to watch people who have different levels of opinions on the opinion meter, grapple with that and so this thread had a little bit of that. Tom Brady needs to hang it up. That's my only opinion. I will argue about

Cortex 51:27 that fact about. I liked the joy Michaels made a post about this Tumblr meme that grew into an actual sound recording, which is Jolene the basically, yeah. Someone named Ellie jelly ended up recording what had started as just sort of like goofing lyrics on Tumblr, and it's fantastic. It's like a Lovecraftian Horror. Take on Jolene,

Jessamyn 51:54 and the name and vain your voices off like summer rain. She tied you to her kitchen chair with flaming locks of auburn hair. Oh my god, it's good. And then there's people ripping in the Yeah. Oh, that's nice.

Cortex 52:09 Good little bit Internet, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Jessamyn 52:13 Speaking of Vermont was on the internet briefly, which does sometimes happen. And LuBu Jackson did a post about front porch Forum, which reminds me answered the next door. Well, it is like it's just it's a complete, it's a different thing. Right? Like it's a moderated email list. I mean, Andrew Libtech, who I vaguely know Who? Who? Sorry, who wrote an article about it. I feel like there's an art. It's not. Oh, that's weird. Oh, yeah, yeah, who wrote the article about it for the Verge is actually kind of a neighbor. Like, he lives a couple towns over. And I know him because he's also into like sci fi books. And he kind of writes about, you know, the title is how a Vermont social network became a model for online communities, which you would think would be something you know, metal filter people would care about. But it is a little weird. Because, like, it's not a social network. It's a fucking email list. And it's not even an email list. It's an email list that you can only get in digest form. You know what I mean? So like you email to the central location, and then once a day, maybe more the email out a list of the emails, all in one format. So the good news is for people for whom interacting online is actually pretty complicated. You can just totally do it with front porch forum, and they moderate the crap out of everything. Wow. I mean, this is the argument thread, right? Do they moderate a lot? Or do they moderate a little I haven't noticed ours being moderated at all, but we don't really talk about shit. You know what I mean? It's mostly like, I've got Christmas trees. I've got goats. My goats eat Christmas trees. Hurray. Like it's just very, you know, small townie kind of thing. But so it was just interesting because it kind of got the Vermonters out in the thread. And you know, I knew most of them but I didn't know all of them. And so it was just neat to see everybody. Also, I applied for a job there and I didn't get them. So fuck those guys. That's the spirit. I was like, nobody knows more about moderating online communities than me in the state period. But I think maybe I was overqualified.

Cortex 54:28 Yeah, that could be an issue. bad attitude. Yeah. It could be something where

Jessamyn 54:35 I mean that wasn't my whole cover letter but

Cortex 54:40 might be more than they were looking for. I I'll go first I like this post that many people who listen to it will not like particularly but that's the way experimental music goes to post by mandolin conspiracy about a bunch of compositions by a guy I named Neil's line loca guard, Danish, I don't know if I've got the pronunciation, right anyway, it's unusual stuff looks like sort of like non traditional experimental music using a whole bunch of given instrument to sort of explore the not even clicking product capacity of that instrument. Music for eight recorders is probably the best way for anyone who's not going to be into this to immediately decide they're not into this, because you take the joy of experimental music and combine it with the Joy of listening to people play the recorder. But actually, I really liked it. I thought it was really interesting. And it's worth giving a listen to if you don't mind some weird experimental music. I do. And

Jessamyn 55:40 I like meddling conspiracy. And I trust him. So maybe, yeah. I got one more. Yeah, one more, do it. Um, basically, this was posted before the last podcast, but I didn't see it because I didn't see it. So essentially, Blair Braverman has just a great Twitter, where she talks about dog sled racing. She is a dog sled racer, she's on the I did ride, she got a great Twitter. She's a nice lady. Everything's cool. And she has a Twitter thread, which is the topic of Katie's post, which is just introducing you to her dogs in that kind of, we rate dogs sort of way. Right? Like, here's all the dogs. Here's a funny story about each dog. And it's really if you like dogs at all, it's cute. But I know Braverman because Braverman is Twitter and the end of last year, she basically takes a bunch of mail or will take a bunch of mail on a dog sled from wherever she is to Anchorage. And she'll put like little stamps on it. And then you have dog sled mail. I think you and I talked about this, but I don't think we talked about on the podcast. I don't think we did. But I got. So basically you have to send your shit to her before like the first week of December. And then she'll drive it down to Anchorage and put it in the mail. And so then it'll get to your people by Christmas. And so I sent out four letters, one to you one of my sister. I forget the other one to Jim. And I think one of my cousins. I don't even remember. But yeah, you got one. And so I was really cool. happy about that. And then I got one from a different needle girl. And it was just such a treat, because I was like, oh shit, like I'm running out the door. But I really want to do this. And so it was like it was just basically a postcard. Right. But it was just, it was just a really cool thing. And so you can talk about the you know, it was just what a cool envelope, right?

Cortex 57:48 Yeah. No, that's, that's fantastic. I have Okay, I have a random medical story actually. Great. That I'm delighted by. So I've been taking stained glass class last few weeks,

Jessamyn 58:00 I have been enjoying the pictures of that. That looks like it's really been kind of fun and challenging. Yeah,

Cortex 58:05 no, yeah, it's been a I've been enjoying it more than I necessarily expect. I would like I thought it would be interesting, but like, I'm really digging it. So it might be something I try and keep doing beyond just the class. But it's like a local Glass Studios, a woman who rents it who just teaches out of there sort of converted, shed out back of their house that turned into a studio space, her and her husband. He does primary ceramics, she does stained glass. And like, week five, like, you know, this weekend, we're getting around to the tail end of the class and work finally sort of came up in some capacity. I think a scheduled thing I mentioned that I needed to work and and it's like, oh yeah, why do you gotta do this work? I run the site called metaphysics, which is like, oh, yeah, I know, metaphor. I was like, oh, yeah, it was a bit. Yeah. It's just like, Wait, so you weren't there? It's like, yeah, as I am. Well, I mean, I run the place. I actually own it, these Metafilter and cortex never came up. Exactly. But like, why wouldn't have both? Yeah, she and her husband have both been like members for a very long time. It sounds like like, probably early 2000s. I don't know their usernames at this point. Like, like, I It's the sort of thing that could go searching for a kind of like, even if like I establish a medical connection with someone, I'd rather than say, Oh, by the way, this is me rather than me like, Oh, I could use the admin interface. But yeah, we're not talking about medical. They're a bunch and like, it was just like this super weird, small world thing. For me, and yeah, so this little surprise

Jessamyn 59:31 if they knew metal filter at all, they wouldn't have looked at that shape and been like, Oh, hi, cortex. Well,

Cortex 59:37 I mean, I don't know that they're super involved. I don't know that. They're like following like me doing stuff on mod level. Yeah, they have a longtime association with the site. So I was telling her Okay, well, there's this thing on the site and talking about the Kate Bush challenge, which I'll get back to and when we go from medical to music mood. Yeah, it was just it was just kind of nice. More like, Oh, hey, there's this this is a total meta filters. All rolled moment like that only came to bear like right at the tail end of this class of this like intensive creative thing. So soza is a nicer like random bolt out of the blue. I like it I'm Shane two

Jessamyn 1:00:44 that may be it for me

Cortex 1:00:45 I'm, let's talk about ask metal filter,

Jessamyn 1:00:49 I spend a lot of time on AskMe and a filter.

Cortex 1:00:53 I hear that. Well, it's been going around the rumor mill is Jasmine lady likes, like CS Metafilter. Alright, so North going with this,

Jessamyn 1:01:03 they have all lumped into different kinds of categories, right? Here's two that I call like helped me science. So one of them is about beer, right? They totally like, you know, cross the highway and are complicated. And so this is pigtail orchestra, trying to figure out what configuration of like your speed. And like multiple cars driving down the road would keep you from hitting a deer and you know, the it's kind of mathy. But you can't really figure it out. But it's always interesting. I mean, it's one of those like kind of Microsoft job hiring questions from the 90s. Right? Where you really just want to know how someone would go about dealing with that question. There's not like really an answer. And I lump it along with this question from the truth is just a lie. About do rockets have the most fire? Which is essentially a question from their three year old. That's a very good three year old sort of question. Yeah, and trying to figure out if there are things that have the most fire, like fire storms, or a ship explosion, or like a volcano, and like devil's advocate went at it with some pretty serious math as did a couple other people. wobb wobb buffet. I don't know what that is. And a couple others. And I just enjoyed it. Because, you know, I like watching people be mathy about things that are not particularly

Cortex 1:02:43 great. Yeah, no, I didn't see that. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I like the question mentioned, not wanting to introduce like the concept of like nuclear warfare yet. Which I fear I figure if you are ruling out the sun as not being fired, then you can safely sidestep nuclear bombs to since the sun is basically a gigantic nuclear explosion. So So yes, you're you've got an immediate out there. Wow. No, that's great. Those are both great. I am I'm delighted by both of those.

Jessamyn 1:03:14 Yeah. Another one I enjoyed a couple about people's looks. So one of them is this considerate, dude, aka benevolent actor, being like, look, I have one of those slightly Fashi haircuts. Or, sorry, I am bald. I have this beard. I don't want to look like a Nazi. What do I do so that when I'm walking around people don't think I'm just kind of like a generic racist. And unfortunately the pictures aren't up anymore but like he's you know, kind of normal looking dude but has one of those beards that if he were wearing kind of the Nazi outfit would you know potentially look not Jewish? And so people the threats really interesting because it's a lot of people giving him like advice like, hey, wear a rainbow bracelet or, you know, you know, some of it's just dude walking around at night advice. But some of it is also just like, here's some other here's some other things you could do

Cortex 1:04:14 do some fashion counter programming to be more explicitly not the thing then the thing you're worried people will like vaguely think maybe you are being

Jessamyn 1:04:23 Yeah, you know, and other people are like you're overthinking this and other people are like, you can't really overthink this enough. You know, that was actually one of the confusing things about the Super Bowl is you know, the Jets have this kind of like blue and yellow color scheme. And so their entire sideline is all guys and like chinos and these blue shirts and it just looked like opening day at fucking BestBuy which was take I didn't see anybody else making on the internet but I stayed off Twitter for the game because I just my sister like, is kind of like on her phone and watching TV at the same time and like I don't mind Did if she's given us little like, here's the hot jokes from Twitter, but I do kind of mind it when I feel like she's just checked out. And she's like on her internet and not really hanging out with us. Yeah, I mean, especially because Jim, a lot of times, it's kind of like a non stop chatterbox. And I'm like, Dude, I'm trying to hear what it was dog. But yeah, he's fucking best Bye, guys. But at any rate, so that was question number one, how do I not look like a Nazi? And then another question, interestingly about appearance is, it's an interesting by calcitonin calcitonin port for user name, I don't really know. But basically, I applied to an internship and didn't get it. And when they told me why I didn't get it, they said, The position was being offered to a person of color. Actually, I am Hispanic, but also white, which, you know, as people who understand categorizing is like, that's the thing you can be. And I don't know if I should, this is the user. Again, I don't know if I should say anything to the hiring people, or if I should deal with this differently in the future, and they're exceptionally like, Look, I'm not mad, that's totally cool that they want to do what they want to do. But I am wondering if I'm sort of not playing this, right. And it's a really interesting thread, not a lot of comments. But like, you know, a couple people who were like, that HR person should never have said that to you. Like, that's totally against the rules, but other people talking about how to kind of walk that line between being sort of marked as Caucasian, but also being part of, you know, diversity category, for lack of a better word, but you know, it's like, it's like a lot of like invisible disability type stuff. Like, how much should you mention it? If it might help you in a situation, but how much is mentioning it? Not your job at any rate? Yeah, interesting thread. I liked reading it. And I was happy they asked it and also I felt like they asked it in a really sort of empathetic and considerate, like, Rod and get this job and fuck it, you know, like, just very like, look, I totally get why they do what they did. But I'm wondering if I should do something different. So it's a it's a thread that very easily could have been a very different thread with, you know, different and or worse wording from the person asking the question, so I was also happy about that.

Cortex 1:07:18 Castle team turns out to be Spanish for sock. solid solid, you

Jessamyn 1:07:26 should have figured that out. Right?

Cortex 1:07:29 I wouldn't have known offhand. So thank you. This came up in meta talk. And so I'll just mentioned it here too. But this asked Metafilter question was so

Jessamyn 1:07:37 confused by this question. Please go on.

Cortex 1:07:41 Laloo No, no. La luna Mel la luna mill. That shirt? Yes. The Moto Spanish for sock.

Jessamyn 1:07:48 Which Hispanic for the moon called bow?

Cortex 1:07:51 Yes. But let's just say Hey, I like I like eggs and toast for breakfast. I want to mix it up. Give me some more ways to sort of do this. I'm not just always making the same eggs and toast. Well, and I couldn't figure out

Jessamyn 1:08:05 if this was looking for like different. For whatever reason, I looked at this thread. I got confused by it. You know what I mean? Like, I was like, Are they just asking for breakfast food? Because kanji has no eggs. So what? Ah, at any rate, go on?

Cortex 1:08:22 Yes, I will. And that was that was my take on it is like yeah, like, give me some other breakfast ideas. I like this. But just making this again is not great. Give me some other breakfast options as well. You know, not so much with a meat eater to make sure whether it's eggs or not. It's just like, it's I always I always like, like, sort of recipe brainstorming threads when I see them. Because like, oh, yeah, well, there's a bunch of food that I don't think about, like I don't know about or,

Jessamyn 1:08:48 you know, especially people who come from other food traditions. I mean, it is one of the things people say about sort of American food traditions is not only do we eat too much, but we don't eat very inventively, and a lot of the stuff we eat is very kind of, you know, meat and dairy heavy, which, you know, it's fine, if that's what you'd like. But there's a lot of other options, but we just don't think about it, because it's not our food tradition.

Cortex 1:09:11 In a related question, there's also a question from mica Ventus. Saying, What would happen if you ate a handful of jumping beans? Which probably I guess you just shouldn't

Jessamyn 1:09:23 figure anything out?

Cortex 1:09:25 I'm not sure. Really, I think I think the answer is you would probably feel gross if you think about it, and that's about it. Like I'm not sure there was anything else with

Jessamyn 1:09:33 Venus. There's just a little bug in it.

Cortex 1:09:34 Yeah, basically what I learned from this read without the information about gross that's all but it was interesting, interesting thread, even though it didn't really produce much of any exciting answer. I think the answer was No, probably not. But stuff. Also, because I always enjoy when this happens, there is a belated follow up from an asker

Jessamyn 1:10:01 Cat is it about the cat?

Cortex 1:10:03 No, this

Jessamyn 1:10:04 is about the cat the cat sound.

Cortex 1:10:07 No but you can. This is much less. You've completely made this like this was this is a reached in the beginning to be worth mentioning but someone wanted to put you Ubuntu on on their crappy laptop and they eventually succeeded in getting something good. I

Jessamyn 1:10:23 think it's harder to put a bun to on your crappy laptop than it is to find your missing cat.

Cortex 1:10:27 Maybe Yeah, anyway, they pull it off. So good job. I'm guessing blank. Frank. But it's Blanc, Frank.

Jessamyn 1:10:34 Oh, with the ice with it? Well, no, it's

Cortex 1:10:37 just like no vowels could be blink Frank. Could be blanc frunk. Could be Blunck Franc,

Jessamyn 1:10:43 which is Spanish for sock sock. Yes,

Cortex 1:10:46 yes. What else you got on as?

Jessamyn 1:10:51 Well, I like this thread. I thought I faked it because there was a comment I was looking at. But scanning it again, I can't find it. Basically, hey, I live in an apartment complex. And they're installing keyless entry for each unit, which basically means there's a centralized computer, which is going to let me sort of in and out, there's going to be a phone app that you can use for unlocking the door. I don't really this is Rhiannon stone. I don't really feel good about this. But I'm I'm wondering, is it me? Like, you know, I don't feel good about this. I would like some anecdote, or real information to convince me either it's not a problem. Or it really is a problem. And I'm not really looking for this is just the way life is now. Blah. Yeah. So I felt like there were a couple people in the thread who actually understood blocks. Like there was a really well you know what I mean? Like, there, there is stuff to understand about locks and like Eris Lord is freedom had a good like list of like things you need to think about little gone actually had some citations to other stuff you need to deal with, like, there's domestic violence, if you live with a partner, who then has access to how to get into your house. And then you can't lock them out again, like that's a huge problem. At any rate, it was just interesting, because I don't, you know, I live in a part of the country where we don't lock the door, like, you know, it's not a thing I need to deal with. And I grew up in a part of the country where we didn't lock the door. And so I only really locked the door for about 10 years of my life when I live in Seattle. And so locks are a little confusing to me. Like, just in a general sense. I locked myself out of my house a lot of the time, like I locked the door at night when I go to bed. But when I'm out and about I don't. And so I'm always interested in people's lock culture, for lack of a better word, like do you lock your car? Do you lock your house? Do you lock your garage and your car and your house? Do you lock your car if it's in your locked garage? Like, it's just interesting to me, because it's different. I locked my car when I go to the city like I'm not an idiot. But like, I clearly think you'd be an idiot to keep your car unlocked in the city. But I don't block anything here and other people think that's idiotic. So it's always good to read to read about other people's cultures that I don't really understand. Speaking of technology questions, which I think that one kind of was this a question? Really? No. I didn't really know. I had a question about until I read it. And I was like, Yeah, so basically, it's MCC x x. I don't know my glasses. I, I

Cortex 1:13:35 see 1223 1223. Maybe. Let's say that.

Jessamyn 1:13:43 Great. So essentially, Look, I get TV from the cable company, I get internet from the cable company. I can watch as much TV as I can watch. But there's a cap on my internet usage. Why? And, you know, is it like a fakie made up thing? Is there actually some reason those two streams of content are different, you know, sort of explained to me what the differences and again, there's people in the thread talking about it's a very short thread, actually. But there's people in the thread talking about what's actually happening when you're watching Netflix through your cable connection, or when you're watching movies through your cable TV connection. And I enjoyed it, and kind of made sense. I mean, I have really bad internet, but I don't have any data caps because basically, it's so bad. I couldn't use enough data. Yeah, so I liked reading, you know, Internet people geek out about that.

Cortex 1:14:42 Yeah, that's nice. I've always sort of vaguely wondered about that. Never looked into it. Um, The Circus

Jessamyn 1:15:05 walking did you have anything else to ask me? I

Cortex 1:15:20 only had a couple. But that's it for me. Okay. Oh, I

Jessamyn 1:15:24 only had one more. And then one Metafilter poster I forgot to mention because all the tabs are the same color. This was just a really interesting post from bleep. It's actually another one of those pronunciation posts. Basically, I know someone whose first name is Tara, and who habitually pronounced it with a short a like tap or taxi. So Tara, almost everyone she meets politely asks if it's Tara, or Tara. And so she when she tries to explain it's Tara like taxi. They 100% of the time get a baffled look on their face. And now I don't know what's going on. Is this a difficult vowel sound? Or what was

Cortex 1:16:01 so like, like, it's Tara?

Jessamyn 1:16:02 Well see, that's the question. Right? So the thread turns into a long like, like, Wait a second. Do you mean Tara like tax like that? Doesn't that Tara like Tara? Like, like try? Like, like, and so a lot of people are just trying to figure out because it may be the bleep who asked the question themselves has some kind of an accent which means when they mentioned I mean, just any we've all got accents, right but has some kind of an accent that those words sounds specific to them where they didn't to a lot of other metal filter users. And so the thread like aspersion comments 11 times like just excuse me like you know it's a lot you know, it's a lot of people just trying to work their way week gets a little exasperated

Cortex 1:16:57 my immediate assumption of what they're trying to convey like is making every single one of these like like flagged applet says you know, Tara like Tehran, and I say Terragen Terragen so that's no use at all. But I suppose a paragon differently in a way that would make man phonetics are fucked.

Jessamyn 1:17:14 Right, right. And so it's super, you know, people are like, Wait, ruff doesn't rhyme with hoof. What is happening? Until there's a whole bunch of people

Cortex 1:17:22 there are 100 Plus favorites on an answer that I'm certain is wrong based on my reading. Yeah. Oh, this is wrong, because oh, this is fucking

Jessamyn 1:17:32 great. And bleak gets a little exasperated, which I think is a completely fair thing to happen. But the thread is really interesting for people. I mean, you know, you and I talked about pronunciation fairly regularly. And it's always interesting, right? Because there's a lot of ways to say things.

Cortex 1:17:50 Man, man, and this is I want to come back. Because it's so difficult like, that's the thing like the IPA the International Phonetic Alphabet exists for like some very specific reasons, not least because it's fucking hard to actually capture the the like the distinctions between different subtle vowel shapes. When you have to reduce it to comparisons to just actual like written words, like the IPA, you can say no, there's a very specific phonetic aspect to this vowel sound. If your mouth is in a specific position, it's open. So far, your tongues is a certain place, there's exactly one sound that this is. And different people may pronounce a word using different sounds. But like, if we're talking about a specific sound here is the character used by everyone in the world to denote, like, every linguist in the world, to denote that specific physical phenomenon that we're discussing, of making that noise. And it's so hard to do that in plain language, like all these analogies,

Jessamyn 1:18:47 anybody who doesn't agree with the Yeah, yeah. And actually, now I'm trying to find it. Ah, there was an AskMe Metafilter thread and I may need to, like poke around on it while you're doing your Music Minute, which is essentially I'm trying to remember what it is. That has to do with pronouncing a C all I remember, and maybe we mentioned it last month. But it has to do with like pronouncing words in other languages. And I just remember mentioning in Romanian, that there's a word that has a vowel sound that is only different in Romanian. So the two words sound the same to you know, in American English, but in Romanian, one of the words means blow job and the other word means lemon.

Cortex 1:19:37 This rings a bell, but I have no idea what the context is. But I feel like I have heard this from you in some. It was probably like a malt shop thread somewhere. No,

Jessamyn 1:19:48 I mean, I talked about it on AskMe Metafilter. Oh, what are some sounds? Okay, found it How nice. So maybe I mentioned it before, in which case I'm sorry. I'm on medicine that makes it hard to remember that thanks. But like, what are some sounds that English speakers have difficulty perceiving by mystical listicle. And it is a great thread where people talk about that nice, you know, people talk about, like tonal stuff. And so yeah, the difference between like, give a lemon and give a blow job is a non difference to English speakers. And so, you know, we would go to the market and try to buy lemons, and you just grab lemons and handed to the guy and he'd make you say the word because it always made them laugh, because you were saying blow job. And I was always furious because I'm always curious. And just but yeah, similar,

Cortex 1:20:36 similar, terrible, but yes,

Jessamyn 1:20:37 I know, I know it's in the past.

Cortex 1:20:41 That's excellent. No, that's a good crop. That's a good crop of questions there. This podcast surfaces, good quality content.

Jessamyn 1:20:47 And I had one thing to circle back to just very, very quick. But it was a meta filter post by filthy light thief, which was all about quiz shows, and the big fat quiz of the year. And quiz shows are just one of those things we just kind of don't have in the United States in the same way in the UK. And this is if you're someone who likes quiz shows, this is a great wrap up about quiz shows. Thank you filthy late, deep, it's yet another thread where I showed up, you know, days after the last person commented to be like, I like this.

Cortex 1:21:21 This is it. This is a good shape for like a big roundup post to like, I mean, I appreciate weird big poets of all shapes and sizes. I think variety is the spice of life. But if I was gonna, like, suggest a way to go with like a really functionally useful sort of like, here's a big pile of content. I like this because it's like, Hey, here's several shows and brief information about them rather than like, here's 500 episodes of a show, say Well, I'm not going to really use a list of 500 But tell me about the show and I can go dig around right

Jessamyn 1:21:48 well and I've been watching the big fat stuff, you know, it's like sometimes you just want to like eat an English muffin and watch them for you know 10 minutes before you get on with your day. Yeah, and you know quiz show content is perfect for that. Yeah, you know, Mr. Robot is fucking not

Cortex 1:22:05 Yeah, it's we've been we've been doing that with a terrace house and enjoying it that the last what is that? Another two. So Japanese taxi terrace house. No, seriously, I'm not sure what that was like a terrace like an architectural terrace house. terrace house.

Jessamyn 1:22:22 I'm not making fun I just

Cortex 1:22:26 it's a it's a Japanese reality show. That's like it's kind of like the real world except for a lot more chill. And it's like, you know, 20 something like 620 Something Japanese people living in a house together and just sort of did getting to know each other and CO living and a little bit of dating and a little bit of drama depending on what's going on. But not like reality TV drama, drama, generally speaking.

Jessamyn 1:22:50 Everybody's cool our time.

Cortex 1:22:52 Yeah, it's like people cry occasionally. And you know, maybe there's the occasional heartbreak and the occasional like House meeting to discuss something but but yeah, it's it's the same thing. Like you know, it's we're totally kind of hooked on it. Like we're 36 episodes into the season. But it's also like each episode like a half an hour long and like nothing. There's no big dramatic arc or anything, so you can watch 1015 minutes of it without thinking too hard about it. Like the only thing is it's Japanese, so you have to be paying enough attention to read subtitles. So

Jessamyn 1:23:22 yeah, that's what I sometimes have trouble with. If I like eating. Yeah, like eating TV depending what I'm eating sometimes you have to look at your food.

Cortex 1:23:30 Yeah, but but all in all, it's I've really enjoyed it's a nice chill show. And I believe it's been discussed in an ongoing fashion on fanfare too, but we're way behind so we haven't been keeping up with the current stuff. Would you like a metaphor Music Minute?

Jessamyn 1:23:44 Yeah, although now I can just pay attention because I was going to use that time to look up that poster kid, remember? Yeah,

Cortex 1:23:51 I never find these enough for you to listen to ahead of time. So we never discussed them. But there are some nice songs that I liked and also some other ones that I'm not gonna mention cuz there's too many but music is good. One of the things I'm gonna mention is a little thing called If You Want Me by carried adventure, which I was on board for immediately, because the entire description of a folder is VO code and I love the vocoder vote vocoding editor likes like nice chill sort of thing. There is a slightly less chill piece of work by existential dread called taps, which is like a noise rock interpretation of the song taps for sort of compilation collaboration thing he was given an EN so it's, it's some aggressive music. There is a nice working project progress from Nika spark called well I guess I'm not sure if it's called begin to your project stem. I haven't been keeping track enough of like the band versus whatever. Anyway, I think yeah. Anyway, it's it's nice. She posted previous thing A while back, that was Starlix rough bit of this and then the is more getting to develop piece and netiquette. It's got nicer a motoring groove to it. And there's a very nice little song by corduroy called Sebastia. I always like the sound of his stuff. He does such a nice, always layered folky thing.

Jessamyn 1:25:16 And I feel like he started metal filter, like as a kid practically. Yeah. Now he's like a grown up person. I feel like you and I are like, more or less the same age. But for people who started out very obviously, as younger people and now seeing them as you know, yeah. Adult people is is cool.

Cortex 1:25:36 Yeah, that was really interesting. And then one more Cuban has a song called damping with a nice sort of damping. Damping. Oh, nice. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that nice little electronic thing that sort of grows and builds up a bit over time. And I liked them all. They were all good. Music is good. I dig music. And that's Metafilter music minutes. And I can try and transition smoothly into metal talk with challenge stuff that got mentioned on no talk and

Jessamyn 1:26:08 greenish talked about that they got the baby, and now they're back on the back of the plan.

Cortex 1:26:12 Yeah, I guess I can post the actual challenge students to there's a couple of music challenges, there's that that greenish has kicked off, one that's going to go for a couple months, and one that's going to go for several. And the the shorter term one is a change would do good, which is to basically take a song that had some sort of issues, and then do a version that gets rid of those issues, like whether it's problematic lyrics or something wrong with the way it's constructed, or whatever you think. Take a song and change it. And then the bigger scale one is, let's all cover a whole bunch of Kate Bush songs, which I've gotten excited about partly because like, I just have not listened to Kate Bush. That road running up that hill. I think I might do that one because I'm digging that song I really listened to hey,

Jessamyn 1:27:01 I love Kate Bush. And I was I mean I still love and appreciate her but like at the time just in high school it was like nobody has like this kind of

Cortex 1:27:10 we'll see and I think I got the Tory mo side of the equation. And so I was I was a hardcore tardiness fan. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:27:20 my thing I don't know, I put Tory Emerson like Natalie, merchant in that category, wherever, wherever recently, just give me the data. And I don't know why like they're both great musicians. Who knows what I mean?

Cortex 1:27:31 It's just what lands for you. Like you know, setting aside problems with Morrissey politically. Angelo is really big into the Smiths, I think in high school, and I just they bounce right off me and I've come back around and be like, Oh, I kind of get this now. You know, like there was they made me made good enough music but I just really didn't like the Smiths like the

Jessamyn 1:27:48 read the metal filter thread that was all about like, your new title of your song is

Cortex 1:27:55 most recent miles miles come up at a restaurant? Yeah, yes. No, I enjoyed that a great deal. I think I might have mentioned that last podcast but maybe it had just started

Jessamyn 1:28:04 like by the last podcast was you know, we did kind of a sprint and then it was mostly Colin.

Cortex 1:28:09 Yeah. But anyway, yes. So there's there's metal talk post as well as some music, talk posts about music challenges, and we'll try and poke on those regularly to get folks involved because I was like it when like we get some some new faces or some old faces coming back into music stuff, ya know? And yeah, we had all the best post stuff. The best post contest, as we sort of mentioned earlier was a lot of fun. People made a bunch of stuff we got first time posters, we got topic specific posts. There's a whole string of meta tacos I'll I'll link the most the final post since it links back to all the previous ones as well. But if you're looking for some extra stuff that we didn't mention, in the podcast, you just want to see some cool posts go hit that because it's a bunch of good stuff and everybody did a great job. Yeah, congratulations

Jessamyn 1:28:54 bond cliff, but I really feel like I was happy thank you mods for doing the work. I remember that that was a pain back when I did it. Thank you people for making really good posts. Thank you other people who sponsored you know, your own kinds of challenges. I feel that's kind of really how you make Metafilter the Metafilter you want to be seeing in the world so

Cortex 1:29:14 yeah, yeah, it's nice. It's It's It's nice that it's got this collaborative feeling to it. I really appreciate that. And we did mention in passing but I'll mention again, movable book lady passed away right around the beginning of the year, I

Jessamyn 1:29:27 guess. Yeah. rangefinder 1.4 wrote a very beautiful post just for her and about her

Cortex 1:29:32 Yeah. And yeah, it sucks that we've lost her but she was a really great poacher and just sort of like a you know went from being a Johnny come lately to being a like, really felt like a permanent fixture on the site and

Jessamyn 1:29:47 kind of the new crowd which is what kind of excites me is you know, that you can still have like someone who comes to metal filter after you know, metal filters already been around for 15 years and find a way to find a place They're and add, add to it and become kind of one of the gang like, I feel like there are a lot of people who make critiques that whatever medical just kind of insular or whatever the thing is, and you know, watching people like her find, find their place really just makes me very happy. Yeah.

Cortex 1:30:19 And from Final fanfare, we had the Super Bowl thread and stuff. People are talking about stuff Star Trek discoveries back. What is what does that mean? Star Trek Discovery?

Jessamyn 1:30:32 Is that like a TV show or a movie? It's a team shot. So it's the new the new reboots kind of Rick. Yeah.

Cortex 1:30:39 Well, it's not a reboot. It's just like a new series that's set approximately Original Series time or a bit earlier. And yeah, it's good. I'm enjoying it. People are enjoying it. So yeah. And other stuff. There's other stuff on fanfare too, but but I think I'm a lot of talk. You got anything else?

Jessamyn 1:31:00 No, no, I you know, it's just been a good month on Metafilter I feel like by and large, and you know, the the end happy taxes everyone.

Cortex 1:31:13 All right, well, that's that's an episode then good luck to you.

Jessamyn 1:31:15 Good talking to you too, as always, talk to you next month. Bye. Bye.