Podcast 151 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 151: A Birdwatching Mecha (2019-04-05).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Jessamyn 0:00 You know, whatever, I'm in a good mood and, you know, it's a nice sunny day out and you know what else is there?

Cortex 0:06 Yeah, what else is what? I was gonna try and inflict that in different ways, but I think I hit the inflection. I want it the first time. So what else is there? What's what else? What else? Is there?

Jessamyn 0:18 What else is there?

Cortex 0:21 Elsewhere there is what?

All cup of things like favorites is you're listening to the metaphor, method podcast. This is episode 151. I am Josh cortex Mullard. And I am Jessamyn. And here we are early on in April of the year of our dog 2019. And yeah, we're doing a podcast. Yeah, I have no idea if we're gonna keep that link pre roll or not.

Jessamyn 1:10 I mean, you know, there's enough better filter people. I feel like it learned late but I feel like for people who aren't probably excretes

Cortex 1:16 Yeah, we should just start that we should start like meta filter like learned League side. podcast. Yeah. I mean, anyone other than me so that I don't have to do any work on it.

Jessamyn 1:27 Rotisserie baseball going? There is actually at this is vaguely on topic. There is a podcast about learned league by league people literally, it's very short. And they just talk about the day's questions. Most Yeah, it's actually I listened to it once or twice. Like, I don't really listen to podcasts, as you know. But, you know, it's kind of fun listening to how other people puzzle out the questions. It does help me learn a little bit about how to be not so terrible. Yeah, a little.

Cortex 1:57 Yeah, I've really, I feel like this season in particular, I was really feeling the balance of I want to do well, and I want to be a good trivia citizen, and I want to win everything. And also, I really don't want to put any more work into this. Like, I have no desire at any point to like, drill something. I just like, I remember not to cheat and remember that before fifth, and I'm good. And I got one of those. I got one of those down solidly

Jessamyn 2:22 to forfeits is not amazing. But it's definitely not like flagellation.

Cortex 2:27 They were just both stupid as part of it. Like, it wasn't like, I didn't forfeit because like, yeah, no, it's not. Oh, shit, I forgot I was gonna be on a transatlantic voyage. You know, it's like, Oh, shit. It's both times I forfeit it. Actually, I actually did submit answers, but it was after 10 o'clock, and 10 o'clock cut off. But it was before 11 o'clock, which was the hard cut off. And then yeah, in either case,

Jessamyn 2:49 it was just too late, right where you might have where it might have worked out. But I had a

Cortex 2:53 near forfeit to idle last chance or where I did get in, like 1005. And that got scored. Thanks. And I think that maybe as part of where the forfeits came from is like, that taught me that I could like, maybe be living on the edge. And then I live like, you know, off the edge of the cliff. And that didn't work out. So I don't know, hubris. Let's talk about Metafilter was talking about 151. Let's talk about I mean,

Jessamyn 3:20 I think for people of a certain age, when you hear 151, what you think about is high school drinking. Yeah. For me, I don't know about you, but like Bacardi 151.

Cortex 3:31 I definitely think I definitely think Bacardi I definitely think rum. I didn't have a formative terrible rum experience. So I literally just think of the branding. I don't think like, oh, fuck, why did I do that? No,

Jessamyn 3:43 no, that's Southern Comfort. For me. I actually enjoyed Bacardi 151 in a reasonable teenage drinking way. But I'm reading the Wikipedia page right now. And it says it's discontinued. They don't mean in the United States anymore. Which which may or may not be true, obviously, because you know, Wikipedia, but I still have some in the closet. So that's the good news. For me. I mean, not since high school, but like, you know, it's one of those things, you ask Jim to bring rum to a party and what you're expecting is like a fifth of kind of normal, whatever. And what he brings this gallon of 151 And you're like, super, that's awesome. But I don't know if I told you. I'm pretty sure I did not tell you but a long time ago, I spoke at a library conference in Puerto Rico. It's the only time I've been to Puerto Rico. It was a really good time. And some library conferences trying like if you're the speaker, they give you the hookup and they're like, Oh, well, you can go on this fancy tour of whatever wherever you are. And the fancy tour for this conference at which I was just a regular speaker. So I was surprised I got to go was to the 1/5 but not the 150 went to the Bacardi factory. And like I didn't know anybody. Most of the people that are spoke Spanish. The people who didn't speak Spanish spoke French. I speak a little of both of those, but not many. And everybody was like, ranking because as you may or may not know, librarians, like party like the world is ending, and I have no idea why this is the case, but they just do and as you know, I party did it. Like I have to get up in the morning. So like,

Cortex 5:19 are there like, hey, let's let's let's get let's get Dewey decimated.

Jessamyn 5:23 You're the first person I've ever heard that joke.

Cortex 5:27 I mean, it doesn't really work.

Jessamyn 5:30 But yeah, so I mean, my memories are just, you know, it was kind of a fun factory tour. But that was a lot of like, free alcohol. And so the bus ride home back to the hotel was just like all these like drunk librarians just. And I'm like sitting in the backseat, because I don't know what my problem was. And like, nobody's talking to me. And I was like, oh my god, like, this is some like high school situation. And but I had a really good time otherwise in Puerto Rico. But now whenever I think of rum, I don't even think of high school drinking. I think of being in the backseat of a bus full of drunk and librarians. That's very good. So Happy April. Before we get going, man, that croutons garden pretty great, huh? Yeah,

Cortex 6:16 I'm very happy about it. Yeah. So April Fool's. Every year we try and do something. And every year we basically try and do something that's like fun and not shitty. And I happy with that as a goal. And it feels like it's working pretty well year to year. And this year, we made a croutons petting zoo.

Jessamyn 6:34 And a couple people who don't know what crew Tom petting is maybe you can just start. Yeah,

Cortex 6:39 so that's about Yeah, years ago, someone made a comment about how their wife had a tendency to anthropomorphize you know, inanimate objects. To the point where like, she would just like develop an affection for them. She, you know, she could pet a croutons that sort of turned into croutons petting as a meta filter in reference to that general phenomenon of having or sort of like feeling a sense of compassion or affection or fondness for things.

Jessamyn 7:09 Talk about it, like on AskMe Metafilter. Like I'm totally Yeah, Tom pattern. Getting rid of my sweater. Yeah,

Cortex 7:14 exactly. And so we decided like, well, what if what if we made it so you could actually pet croutons and so we made up some little electronic croutons that live on the site and you can randomly generate

Jessamyn 7:29 they're not electronic digital.

Cortex 7:33 The point is, we're not shipping people bread in the mail. They just exist as drawings on the exam if you were to the problem is if you got actual croutons in the mail you'd like want to eat them I guess I guess you mean maybe like a plush croutons or something. I was thinking of like just sending people bread as well. It'll get stale. Yeah, then you eat it or you don't anyway, I mean, this is all

Jessamyn 7:52 you nobody clicks on it right? Well, yeah, it's not stale.

Cortex 7:55 It's just dry. stale. Has sort of like almost like the crunch is gone when something's stale.

Jessamyn 8:00 I guess I know. Yeah. Yeah.

Cortex 8:03 Like stale crackers that like they just they've been turned into something. That's Bob. Okay. Anyway, I could go either way. I could go either way on that definition to stay alive. But I'm not actually that ideological about it. The point is, we made a croutons generator that creates croutons. I drew up a bunch of like Krypton bodies and krypton faces and fumble. Yeah. And put together some. Yeah. And I still hear

Jessamyn 8:30 you were like dropping out. And I didn't know if your room and the connection had suddenly

Cortex 8:35 just been quietly for five minutes now. Yeah, no, I I drew them up and scanned them and digitized them with Inkscape and sent those off to Trimble who then wrote up a bunch of image processing code to take the various bodies and the Vedic various faces and superimpose them combinatorially with like color textures. We made some bread texture files,

Jessamyn 8:57 wondering if I have all the colors. Like every time I found a funny colored one. I stuck that one in my Zoo.

Cortex 9:04 There's a few special for the colored ones I think three or four total. And then the rest is variations of

Jessamyn 9:09 okay, cuz I've got like a Trans Pride croutons. And I've got like the just Metafilter blue croutons. And then I've got like, I think a rainbow group.

Cortex 9:18 I think that's all the special colors. Yeah, currently we've done we we definitely, you know, the April Fool's always works out like this. We the first step is April 4, we sit down say, Well, that went pretty well. What should we do next year, let's make plantlets plan ahead this time and then like, a bunch of brainstorming, right? And maybe we put in the document, maybe put it in a Slack channel. And then like February rolls around like, Oh, hey, you know April Fool's coming up let's look at that stuff we wrote down and maybe

Jessamyn 9:47 the holidays. Now we can start thinking about April Fool's. Yeah, and

Cortex 9:51 there was like yeah, no, let's let's start thinking about and we'll get going early this time. And then like, march 1 rolls around was like, Okay, well, we're getting close. Now. Let's let's let's let's Get to work on this. Something we need to start. Yeah. And then like March 15 rolls around like, oh shit, okay, we really, you know, this is not this is not universal some years it's

Jessamyn 10:10 like somebody's got a family emergency and like I really wanted to get on this but unfortunately every year I just died.

Cortex 10:16 It's always it's always like sensitive to whatever's going on. And I think I think what we've done over the years has gotten better at scoping that basically we've gotten better at saying, Okay, well, we've got this amount of time, we might get to work on it by now, we might not get to work on it for real for another week. things could go wrong during those following two weeks. Yeah. And so that's that's where we ended up this year, we did a pretty good job of pacing ourselves. Trimble planned for the possibility of just suddenly being very busy for a few days in the last like week or two. Because they've got a foster child who is, you know, a child. And that worked out pretty much exactly right. There were a couple days were extra busy, because like kindergarten management type stuff, and, and there was enough runway and so we got a bunch of stuff together. And then we got it launched. And it was very exciting. And now we've got this overflowing hangover of Oh, but also this and also this. And so fumbles added a few more things are the

Jessamyn 11:14 color so that I can see the names of my Yeah, my classic croutons.

Cortex 11:18 Yeah. So yeah, and they're probably it's probably about as baked haha, as it's gonna get for now, but we are going to keep them around like they aren't going to disappear. We might revisit some of the stuff and build it out a little bit more later, we'll see

Jessamyn 11:32 well, and it was fun for me. I don't know. I mean, this time, I had no idea what was going on, because I have just not been anywhere inside the project this year, which was delightful. The other thing that was really interesting for me, and I'll see if I can track down this link. It's somewhere in the thread, but was looking at the wiki. The meta filter wiki about what you guys did every year because I forgot, you know, for for newer members. Like, you know, he's mad actually in this. Oh, Max in the thread. I didn't even know. Matt showed up. That's so cool. But like the the wiki talks about, you know what we did basically every year, and like, some years, we didn't do anything like I was gonna post something to be like, oh, you know, on Twitter, like, hey, 20 years of Metafilter, whatever. April Fool's when I was like, Oh, God, there was a couple of years. We just didn't do anything.

Cortex 12:28 We had some gaps. There were definitely some gaps in there. Yeah, one year, I think what we did was have a thread where we declared that we weren't doing anything and then spent like, 400 comments debating whether or not there was secretly something coming. And I think that was the entirety of the thing that you're

Jessamyn 12:45 Yeah, well, because, you know, way back in the day when it was mostly just me and Matt, like, either either Matt did something or he didn't do Oh, sure. And I was just kind of like, Ah, okay.

Cortex 12:54 Yeah, like, like the actual, like team planning stuff wouldn't have started until like, 2007 2008. Yeah. Yeah. I know. It was really fun. People seemed delighted by it. I'm very happy with that. It was a nice excuse to try and do a little cartoony drying and

Jessamyn 13:08 gradual learning shift is still my favorite. Yeah, you know,

Cortex 13:10 I, every year like that comes off as like, oh, man, that was so good. And it was so good. It was also like a total dick move. But it was also a memorable one. Yeah. We weren't calling about the fact that it had happened.

Jessamyn 13:23 Yeah, it was a little hard. There was definitely a couple people who didn't take it well, and you feel bad because that's super not the intention, but it doesn't matter. They felt

Cortex 13:31 I think if we were going to do that again, today, we would actually like instead of doing it as like this like subtle gas lighting joke, we would just do it with like an actual like, hey, warp speed control panel clearly visible. Right? Set your settings and hit engage. Lose your mind, like having a digital acid trip on the site today.

Jessamyn 13:52 Right? Instead of being like, fuck, something's wrong with my computer. Oh, it isn't it?

Cortex 13:56 Yep. Party. I don't I don't trust the internet not to be doing something like actively bad in a subtle way these days as much either, which is funny, because like, I feel like there were more in the wild, terrible, like, browser hijack shock sites 10 years ago, but at the same time, like these days, if something's going fucky I'm like, something's really fucky versus like, Oh, someone probably did some weird JavaScript. Ha ha ha. You know, I'd be like that, you know, I'm just gonna go and never come back to your, your site where things like this apparently happened. You know, it's harder to sort of funny or whatever. Yeah, exactly.

Jessamyn 14:35 I didn't really do I mean, I was, oh, so what I did on April Fool's was, you know, got up and trundled off to the bus station. All you can eat Chinese place in White River Junction, where I met Jacqueline and her fiance, Darrell and I performed a basic minimum viable Wedding Ceremony for them. By the way, loose. Yeah, me fight Jacqueline. You know her? Yeah. Congratulations. Yeah, she moved up to New Hampshire recently to be with her man. And so I missed a lot of this. Like I saw the thing in the morning because a lot of times I spend April Fool's just like clicking around the internet seeing if anybody's doing anything fun. And you know, being in the thread of metal filter people playing grab ass about what other people are doing in addition to what metal filter is doing. Yeah, but I don't know if that really doesn't seem to happen as much the way it used to. You know what I mean? Like, where there's like a list of like, here's 30 Amazing April Fool's things like I saw like REI kitten gear, and I don't know if I saw I didn't click on Google's because fuck them. And other than that, like, I don't know. Do you remember other April Fool's stuff you saw on other?

Cortex 15:48 Not really, I kind of don't go looking. I did watch one jokey video about a bunch of stuff being added to like the Nintendo Switch was like, which was the one actual like, this is kind of a dumb way to interact with your content, consumers thing, but it was funny, but it was also kind of like video. So here's the thing every every I feel like video games is like one of the worst territories for like trying to do April Fool's write because while pranks I feel like the general temperature of ill conceived pranks has come down significantly over the years. It's always tricky. If you're going to try and pull a prank which basically comes down to hey, you know that thing? You're excited that you're hoping would happen even though it probably won't? Well, guess what? It's happening. Haha. Just kidding.

Jessamyn 16:31 Just kidding. We're totally not doing that then. Yeah, yeah. And

Cortex 16:34 it's like, it's like, you have to understand you are operating in a sector where your specific thing is letting people know when these things happen. This is in some weird way. I can't believe this uncharacteristic thing at all is happening. This is just like, Oh, I was kind of hoping to do that. But the rights management on that is kind of fucky or there was this assets issue, so they couldn't manage every release. So we'll probably never get a good release of that game. We really like oh, well, that sucks. But I'll deal with it. Oh, what it is happening? Or what? No, no, it's not happening. That was just a thing you said because you knew I'd be like, I did. Like, I watched one thing where I was like, I'm setting myself up to find out in which way this is actually fuckery and it turned out it was just fuckery. You know, it's like it was a funny well produced series of plausible lies about unlikely video game releases. That would be very nice if they happen. Yeah, I was like, Why did I Why did I you know, why did I watch this? But also, why did they do this? Why is this? How on earth is this still how you think this is how we're going to engage with the concept of tomfoolery by basically once again fucking up our own credit. We got this blanket excuse for

Jessamyn 17:41 your parents saying Get in the car. We're all going to Disneyland. Yeah. And then they're like, Haha, we're going to you know, not Disneyland.

Cortex 17:48 But divorce court doctor. So anyway, I don't know.

Jessamyn 17:58 Oh, and next week is library card sign up week I think or

Cortex 18:01 like or something. God damn library,

Jessamyn 18:05 library cards if you don't have them already. Libraries used to do kind of like April Fool's ish, prankish stuff, and I didn't see as many libraries doing it this year. And I feel like Halloween has become like the library holiday because the librarians all dressed up as goofy characters from books and it's funny that yeah, that's,

Cortex 18:23 that makes it kind of sense. Do you think do you think to some extent people are less interested in hilarious April Fool's pranks just because of like, just the abiding shittiness of

Jessamyn 18:33 the world isn't funny right now? Yeah.

Cortex 18:35 Do you like Like, like, at a certain point, like, you know, what would be hilarious would be I don't know. You know, letting waiting and reversing. Yeah, you know?

Jessamyn 18:46 Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm with you there.

Cortex 18:49 So it's really turned into a whole discussion. Let's talk about metal filter, or anything,

Jessamyn 18:53 right, like six jobs.

Cortex 19:00 Let's do it. Yes. Start with oh, I guess jobs. That's the thing we do first, hey, jobs, there are jobs. What have we got on the old job board? Let's open up the old job Bay.

Jessamyn 19:08 Well, there's a nice like, flexible admin. job in New York City. I like that word. Flexible, but it's basically sixth sense, is a medical person who does home visits and needs someone to, quote, take it to the next level. But basically, I think kind of help run an office and blah, blah, blah. I do not know sixth sense. I can't even say it out loud. But they're, you know, person who is on Metafilter. And if you're somebody who's sort of medically obviously inclined, that might be a cool job doesn't pay particularly well for Manhattan. So you know, take that. Take that for what it is.

Cortex 19:48 There's another NYC job is Project Manager for a nonprofit Oh cenc is boasting about so yes, if nonprofit project management

Jessamyn 20:01 Totally not typed that into the into,

Cortex 20:04 either. Yeah. All right. I got you. I got you. Thank you. I got I got your job URL

Jessamyn 20:10 and your man Cheryl is looking for a person

Cortex 20:14 for her. Yeah.

Jessamyn 20:17 Employees first tight knit check. I don't know 100% What he does help desk tech support whatever. They want you to have experience with a whole bunch of things. I swear to God or made up. Bomb gar. That's not okay.

Cortex 20:35 Bomb guard. I didn't even see that. Exactly.

Jessamyn 20:37 But basically, it's a it's a full time salary eligible for benefits job, being excited working with computers, clients, et cetera. And Shirl is top notch and would probably be fun to work with,

Cortex 20:51 I bet. Yeah, no, totally. I endorse him. There are several other jobs. There's too many jobs to mention for once. It's very exciting. I'll mention one more, which is the I think, maybe we've got the list. I don't remember the Ted did we mention the emoji designer? I did. I'm just gonna fucking mention it again. I'm just gonna go I'm gonna double it up because emoji designer needed emoji designer needed. So there you go. Calgary. Canadian emoji on? Yeah. And other stuff. There's several other things. So go look at jobs. Yeah, we just want

Jessamyn 21:24 to sit around and help Katie, crop some photos. They're all on Dropbox that doesn't pay well, but it's just crop crop property crop crop. She could use some help.

Cortex 21:36 And yes, I think Secretary may have picked that one up, actually. I mean, I don't know if she's talking to the whole thing or not. So if you're just do like, drop a line, but projects, let's talk about projects.

Jessamyn 21:49 Well, the made for Jessamyn project, which of course I missed entirely because I don't know what I was doing is the due to random walk through the Library of Congress loc serendipity, which I kind of liked, because it actually simulates the experience of browsing through the library looking for stuff. So medicine day is the person who built it. And I think the problem was I tried this, and I was having a hard time. I was having a hard time. What? Wait, now I'm super confused. Because it said it was posted to Metafilter. But the thing that was posted to Metafilter is something else.

Cortex 22:32 They posted a subsidiary link or something? Yeah, well, no.

Jessamyn 22:39 I mean, tell me what's going on. Am I just missing something? You?

Cortex 22:44 This is good radio.

Jessamyn 22:48 So basically, I don't know, basically what I'm seeing, right? Yeah. Okay. So basically, it's loc serendipity. And I think I looked at it, but it was challenging because of my bandwidth issues. But basically, you can it sort of aggregates open records, you can click it, it gives you a list of, you know, you can look at the book, and the book is at the Internet, you know, the books are at the Internet Archive. So it's books that LLC has the Internet Archive has, and it's just kind of a fun way to like reload. And like, I mean, I do this a lot of times at Open Library where I just kind of, you know, type some random word that I'm interested in, you know, knowing more about and then I wind up, you know, sitting around reading principles of food preparation all afternoon. I'm, I'm still trying to figure out what happened, right? Yeah,

Cortex 23:44 I think it's possible the person who made the metal filter posted is linking to started from that project, hit the post the metal filter, and then ended up like, reworking the post a little bit and like it just so it can it continued to have that connection back. Even if the actual post content changed out underneath. We found a bug last night. Sure. It's even a bug. I think it might just be like a user workflow issue. Like it's, I think the the thing worked the way we're supposed to is this just there's nothing that physically prevents someone from changing their mind about what links they're using out to get

Jessamyn 24:17 you well, at any rate, Mandalay conspiracy also did a good post, which is linked to this post, but isn't actually the same thing about Boston Public Library 78 RPM collection, which is made available, the Internet Archive because Brewster's got up, you know, I don't even know what you would call it. I just Brewster's really into having like all the 70, eights on the internet, and so, and they've got a really good working relationship with Boston Public Library. And so manually conspiracy made this post on metal filter, which I'm realizing I'm going a little lateral here. That is also pretty interesting stuff you can find at the library. So all right, back to projects. Sorry,

Cortex 25:00 I really liked this puzzling arts or puzzling art project from Margalo EPS, which is some jigsaw puzzle based mixed media, sort of collage type constructions.

Jessamyn 25:18 So it's a different jig shot. So Mark Phillips is this is

Cortex 25:21 this is not other jigsaw puzzles. Yeah, no, I think this is unrelated, unrelated.

Jessamyn 25:26 And yet it's similar. Yeah, definitely.

Cortex 25:29 There's a similar aesthetic going on. But yeah, they're cool looking. And it seems to be playing like multiple levels with sort of Jigsaw imagery. So yeah, I'm taking those and I think Martin was trying to get a whole bunch of sort of art up. So we may see future project stuff on other art angles, too. So that's exciting. So yeah, Doug Duck, duck, those.

Jessamyn 25:57 And Miss Jenny made another thing. She makes a lot of these little websites that kind of help teach people about stuff. And so this is basically figuring out how, you know, lenders, lenders make money profiting on your loans, it's kind of a little, a little teaching tool. She's the creative director, she's the one who did one of my favorite projects of all times, which is sort of a donation thing where you could put your name on, you know, the jar of peanut butter, or something that they buy at the shelter or whatever, like this kind of weird, funny branding thing to help raise money for a thing that like people would be more likely to donate money, if, you know, they got their name all over something. Yeah. Which I always liked. And so this is a different thing to teach you about. Money. A lot of the stuff she does is kind of learned how to learn how to destroy

Cortex 26:51 by the predatory practices of late capitalism.

Jessamyn 26:56 Yeah, yeah. But helping Yeah, helping people learn how to navigate that kind of stuff. And I appreciate it. Now. I'm trying to figure out where the thing is. No. Good radio.

Cortex 27:07 Yes, I liked these a case got a blog called terrible things happening in cold places. Which is just periodic write ups of exactly that think polar expeditions, and oh, God,

Jessamyn 27:19 this is relevant to my interest. Yeah. Cuz

Cortex 27:23 you always wanted to die in the cool like stories

Jessamyn 27:26 about space, right? Where like, some terrible thing happens in like, your sci fi novel about space. And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's like in some weird future dystopia, not where I live now in my warm little whatever. And it's like, well, if you go to you know, North America, you know, North Pole, South Pole, blah, blah, blah, weird. fuckity space level tragedy can happen there because the elements are so you know, always with us, basically. Yeah. Yeah, in fact showbiz Liz says it specifically the Arctic Antarctic are the second closest we can get on Earth to totally alien environments, aside from under the sea.

Cortex 28:04 Yep. It's weird places to be.

Jessamyn 28:07 Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to look at looking at that later. That's cool.

Cortex 28:11 I've got one other I'll mention which is brain Wayne. Did 18 short plays about Python and programming, which was

Jessamyn 28:18 nothing personal, but I skipped completely.

Cortex 28:22 It's, you know, it's it's goofy. It's, it's basically a weird tech talk in the form of a series of very short, you know, one or two person plays.

Jessamyn 28:33 Or you play some person.

Cortex 28:34 I know very little bit of Python. I learned about a week worth about one,

Jessamyn 28:37 I was pitching to somebody about having trouble doing some shit with a spreadsheet, you know, just something normal. And he was like, well, Python. How dare you? I thought you were my friend. Oh, no, but I'm always wondering if maybe I'm missing something by

Cortex 28:54 pay. Not really. It's, it's a programming language. It's a programming language that has done well and has a lot of good support tools. So as programming languages go, you could do worse. But it's also it's just a programming language. Like, you know, if the solution to your problem is learn a programming language. Great. Python sounds like as good a choice as any depending on what you're doing. But Sure. Other than that, no, yeah, it's kind of like, it is kind of a get fucked thing. You know, on the level of like, hey, yeah, you know, my, my mom, she's having trouble. She has her Hotmail but there's this issue that's been causing a problem. Oh, well, you know, you should really good are on Ubuntu. Like, no, fuck off. No, there's nothing wrong with Linux. But that is not the solution to my mom's fucking Hotmail problem, right? And a lot of damn work, right. Yeah. Now, if you were if you were habitually going crazy, because you were trying to do an enormous amount of data shuffling in spreadsheets, and it was just driving you crazy. And there had to be better way to do this. 80 hours of work a week. I would say yeah, learn learn how to handle some of that with a programming language but like, you probably would have learned how to do that with a programming language if that was the situation If you're like, Ah, this fucking spreadsheet thing is annoying me. It's proportional response, like, you know, right? Learn a spreadsheet trick at that point is probably the real answer. Anyway, none of that has anything. This series of plays which are just

Jessamyn 30:17 about them, I didn't want to.

Cortex 30:19 I love the concept. And I think it's a funny way to approach a talk and do something unconventional and there's video and transcripts. If you're curious about what the content of 18 short plays about Python programming would be the end. Sorry, you can you can say what you wanted. I didn't mean to cut you off. So no,

Jessamyn 30:37 no, I was done. No, I was 100%. Done.

Cortex 30:40 I just I just didn't want to actually lapse into Hey, I like this project, because you know what, fuck programming. Like we've went on a real emotional arc there.

Jessamyn 30:46 There's a big woodpecker outside my window. Nice. Big Hairy woodpecker. I mean, it isn't hairy. That's its name, like hairy woodpecker is what it's called. But I haven't seen them around. And they're starting to come back. And it's about five feet away from me just looking at me. And I'm looking at it. And my phone is in the other room, so I can't take a picture. I'll just appreciate this little moment. Hey, buddy. Hey.

Cortex 31:10 Alright, so apparel. You want to talk about Metafilter? I do. You know, but I just I just now realized, by the way that your name in our recording software is not Mic check. It's Mike Keck. It's an extra.

Jessamyn 31:28 Josh? No. Josh, you will tell me if you feel like I'm experiencing cognitive decline? And I don't know.

Cortex 31:34 Sure. No, that looks like that looks like a typo to me. I mean, I've stared at it for half an hour. And I thought it's a check. So like, maybe a change underneath us. Maybe this is tricast. April Fool's, what we'll do is we'll wait until it's the third. And then we'll add a letter a half an hour into a session, they'll never see it coming.

Jessamyn 31:51 Oh, my God. Well, the reason this is relevant to my interests is because my sister and I, along with bond cliff, who is on our board, have started a little nonprofit in Massachusetts to do some things. And we finally got all our paperwork completed, we got a bank account, and this is all lovely. And the name of the organization is the Massachusetts Mutual Aid Society. And so I was like, Alright, I'm gonna get like, internet checks, right? It's like getting internet glasses, right? Because we might still need checks.

Cortex 32:19 And I don't want to get some cheap internet checks.

Jessamyn 32:21 I want to make fun internet checks, right? I want to put my own pictures on it. I want them to

Cortex 32:27 know that I write like, five checks a year. Why don't I like order some custom goofy checks,

Jessamyn 32:31 you should custom goofy checks, checks, unlimited is where I get them, you can upload literally your own picture. And so I'm like, Yeah, we're gonna upload the logo. I'm gonna make these checks. It's gonna be awesome. And I sent away the order, it was gonna be like 10 bucks, like not too much money for checks, although more than three checks from the bank. And then they bounced it back to me because they couldn't verify my address because companies in Massachusetts, I'm in Vermont banks in Vermont, blah. But then I looked at the checks again, and I realized I had spelled Massachusetts wrong. I'm like, Massachusetts is a little complicated, but like I had gone through the proofing stage. I've been like, that is totally how to spell Massachusetts with all those S's in it. And then I got it bounced back to me. And I was like, it looked like Massachusetts yesterday. And now it looks like garbage. Thank God, this happened. Otherwise, we were gonna have all these checks with like, the wrong name for our company, and dummies who can't spell Massachusetts. And I was just so now I'm concerned that I have like a brain problem, of course. And this is just part of it.

Cortex 33:43 Yeah, no, I, I was tweeting the other day about trying to type the word. The name Zeno as in like, Zeno's paradox. Yeah. In a Slack discussion with the team about something. I don't know what probably trying to get closer and closer to getting the croutons done. Yeah. And I managed to type XAMPP instead.

Jessamyn 34:02 Oh, you said that XAMPP is actually an old metaphor person.

Cortex 34:06 Oh, really? Yeah, I did not know that at all. Or I forgot. I think it was an F on the end of it. But yeah, okay, well, that's totally different. That's, that's, that's nothing. Anyway, you have to like Miss type in two different directions in the same misspelling, right. Like pull that off. So it was that's all I think our brains are dumb.

Jessamyn 34:27 I'm gonna I'm gonna find some and it's not just one of those like you moved all your fingers like one to the left. It's really like you just you just did something crazy. Yeah, exempt this user 967 Nice. Like oh, gee, me fight. Yeah. And I know him because he's one of the like, the one one for two people I think

Cortex 34:54 which we we must not speak of. I've done all right. I don't remember if that's even Still the if that was them, or 962 was

Jessamyn 35:03 the secret group? Okay. I don't know. I don't know. It's weird. 20 years one

Cortex 35:08 way or the other, or maybe maybe both. Yeah, like last last time I had information about that was a decade ago. Yeah, who knows? Shall we actually talk about Metafilter?

Jessamyn 35:20 This time? Yes. I have a great story about Metafilter, which is this post, basically. So this post on its surface is monkey toes talking about ah, funny librarian, named. I don't even remember his real name. Norman Stevens. I believe he's a librarian who who died recently real real librarian. But essentially, I have a mailing list library and mailing list, right. And I send out a mailing every, you know, every couple of weeks. And one of them was about like this funny. It just there was a link to a story that I had heard about, which was basically preserving library books with jello, right, because I had read a book about jello. I had found in that book that there was this funny article written by a librarian called preserving books with jello because you can actually use gelatin to preserve library books. But this was like a jokey joke article. Sure. And then the jokey joke article was actually written by this guy, in this thing called the Molesworth Institute, which is actually itself a jokey joke, not real institution, made up by this librarian, just in order to sort of publish goofy library humor stuff. And so monkey toes read my newsletter was like, I really want to find out about this found out about this ridiculous institution, and then wrote this lovely post, which is kind of a love letter to this guy and his fake organization, and library humor, and it's very sweet. And just the whole thing just made me happy. And it was, you know, I mean, basically, it's, like 36 favorites. And like, six comments, two of them are from me. Now, one of them is from me, and one of them mentions me, and it's just lovely. So maybe happy mosquitoes Thank you. And she and I kind of, you know, email back and forth like, Oh my God, look, what else I found out. I'm gonna make a post about it. I was like, go do it. So yeah, funny.

Cortex 37:32 Excellent. Yes. Fantastic. I liked a bunch of things. Oh, this is Top Top for just chill. Delightful. Post. Bye, Janelle. Who is a mefite and also a friend and a neighbor. So hey, Tony is a homegrown veg, which is just a YouTube channel of gardener and his Border Collie. Molly, as the Post says, and that's it. He grows vegetables at home. And he makes essentially like unboxing videos and other sorts of like, just chill processed things about Well, I grew some carrots. Let's see how the carrots did last time a gruesome carrots. Crop wasn't so good. But I feel good about this one because you can see how this sort of anyway, let's pull these out. And the whole time Molly, the dog is also there and watching and waiting to be allowed to eat some of say carrots and whatnot. Really cute. Carrots and and a number of Molly definitely likes carrots. Molly's into carrots. Molly gets bath. It's, it's a delightful, delightful channel, Molly's a very good dog. This guy's got this nice, I want to say like North England accent but I don't really know how to place it. But anyway, they're delightful. Nothing happens. This is definitely just like very chill flow TV with no like big dramatic hook. It's just a guy and a dog and some vegetables. And it's fantastic. And I heartily recommend it.

Jessamyn 39:01 Love it. This is probably a terrible segue. But it is a segue. It is a why you shouldn't bury your pet in the backyard, basically by JG D, Roy D ROI, et cetera. But essentially, it's just a little essay about you know, if you have your animal put to sleep at home, they have chemicals in them that aren't actually good for your your backyard. And here's the article about it. But you know, the thread turned into kind of a nice, you know, people talking about pets and pets who die and it was actually kind of a sweet thread talking about sort of that general topic. I talked about this little pet cemetery that I found in the woods. When I was walking around trying to kind of clean clear my head during when my mom was in hospice and it was just kind of, you know, an interesting thread about real stuff that happens. And you know the art Go to alpha is just kind of an article on the internet but I liked what the thread turned into. And even though I'm sorry to segue from living dog to not living dog, it is really good threatened worth looking at.

Cortex 40:10 That's what happens with dogs. And I guess all other living beasts. Yeah. I have a trio of sort of textile art related really okay. The first of which is this post from just a couple days ago. This is BQ poster this it's a anatomically correct replica of the human brain needed by a psychiatrist

Jessamyn 40:36 at the Museum of Science in Boston,

Cortex 40:39 and there's if you go in the links duffles got a link to some some more images as well. And some you have to use flash but it is high res images that you can zoom around it's it's just some some good textile brainy work. So there's that. And then there is this post from yesterday. About tri axial fabric clue made this post.

Jessamyn 41:08 Wait, wait, wait, can you just tell me what tri axial fabric is before I click this?

Cortex 41:12 Sure, it is fabric that has sort of weaves on three different axes since

Jessamyn 41:20 the scarf like that, and it's been driving me crazy, because I didn't know how to Google and figure out what the fuck it was. Got another scarf like that. This is relevant, relevant.

Cortex 41:32 The deal is is usually usually fabric is woven by actually like you've got a warp and a weft you've got like, you know, horizontal and horizontal is the word of the day. Horizontal and Vertical local

Jessamyn 41:49 hexagonal cross stitch.

Cortex 41:51 It is. Well to do cross stitch you cross stitch on fabric that has a grid of holes divined by the the weave like that's what the distinction between cross stitch and more freeform embroidery generally is is freeform embroidery, you're going to be just stitching on fabric that has no sort of built in structure to it, particularly. Cross Stitch you're generally working on a grid defined by the holes between the vertical and horizontal weave. So to actually weave gives you a grid of holes, essentially, with 60 degree angles, and you can get proper triangular layups, that way you can.

Jessamyn 42:34 Alright, this isn't relevant to my interests, because it's not what I thought it was. But it's cool. Like I have a scarf that like if you look down on it, it has three like it doesn't just have a back and a front. It's got like, three fronts and three backs or whatever, like you look down on it's like a circle. You know, like, what the Mercedes logo looks like. Yes. Or the the P sign.

Cortex 42:59 Yeah, I need a picture of this thing down because I don't understand what part of the scarf I'm looking at it like the scarf has like three walls. Yeah, essentially. So it's like it's like an extruded Merc Mercedes logo. Yes. Interest and

Jessamyn 43:11 it's beautiful. And I love it so much. But like, I can't find another one. Because I don't know what it is.

Cortex 43:17 Yeah, no, I want to see a picture that I'm taking picture. Yeah, let's follow up on that. But yeah, this this sounds like dif different different three axis thing. But anyway, it's it's neat. And I enjoyed how much it was like on brand in like three different ways.

Jessamyn 43:34 Because I've been seeing like Angeles cross stitch coming across Instagram every year. Yes. Super fun.

Cortex 43:39 Yeah, well, and that's not cross stitch that's generally embroidery. And some Hungarian Hungarian written embroidery more recently took a local class on that. Which is just another specific type of embroidery. But yeah, yeah, she's been she's been digging on the, the, the embroidery stuff. And the third in my trio is this post by Captain Renaud about transit, transit fabric transit seat covers, hey, which is just great. As someone who lives in a town halfway famous for its near Port carpet, carpet, getting into bus seats is like yes, this is the clear and ethical step. And I don't know if Portland ever really had any good like transit seat fabric. So now I'm kind of like a little bit jealous and excited. But yeah, it's just like it's exactly what sounds like it's, you know, pictures of sea covers and then you know, a thread full of people really, you know, enjoying it and talking about textiles and transit and whatnot.

Jessamyn 44:40 That's awesome. Big fan of Captain you know, he came in stayed at my house when he was traveling through Massachusetts and left us some amazing candy. Because I was like, you know, chocolate kiddie and I always figure like a pound of chocolate in a candy bar, but this was like a box of amazing nonsense, which I believe probably iced they'll have some of when I go down there. One more thing for Metafilter I had was another very metal filter type thing. It's a tumbler about all the kosher Pokemon. 77 out of 802 are kosher.

Cortex 45:27 Yeah, Jesus. Yeah.

Jessamyn 45:28 The internet is amazing. That's fantastic. Which actually, I don't know if you're done with metal filter, but I have a, you know, a kosher segue.

Cortex 45:39 We'll we'll do a bridge segue. I'll do I'll rattle off my last quick set of things. And then

Jessamyn 45:44 I got to double check that I don't have any others. Oh, I do have one more anyhow, so forget it.

Cortex 45:50 It'll be a double bridge segue. segways go on, right. Yeah, that's right. Dean came in. I haven't made that joke in a while. Boy, I gotta fix the stub on this medical post that I just linked. Post by Quint about a wow, Asian ours and ELLs essentially, or, more broadly, the question of perceptions of Asian ours and ELLs and kind of both, it's the video is great. It's like 10 minute or so video. And it talks about the perception of Asian people, which is kind of the heart of the problem here is the fact that Asian people and their arms and ELLs, it's about the depth to which it's even engaged with in Western media, usually Sure. But the perception of of what's going on with ours and ELLs and mixing them up and what's actually going on with the various vowel and liquid sounds involved in human speech in a whole variety of languages. And why we sort of identify some sounds as being wrong when we're hearing them pronounced by people who have a different native language, right? We're adapting to the phonetics of the language we're familiar with. Right? So it's a really good explainer. And it breaks down Japanese and Chinese and Korean and looks at a couple of different dialects of Chinese to dig in on okay, what are the sounds and what it comes down to is like, you know, I mean, like, comes down to his watch the video, but like, very briefly, not every language has the same set of genomes. So when we are on phonemes, lifelong issue, lifelong issues. Yep. No, it's from the discipline of fanatic don't even try don't even try. Anyway, it's a it's a good and fairly gentle explainer, or something that honestly, like you could put it put put together a good explainer, that was basically the issue is boy, white people are fucking racist about Asian accents. The video is much nicer than that, while still sort of saying about some of this stuff, right? There's really interesting linguistic stuff going on. Once you get beyond just the straight up fact that people who are linguistically and curious can also be dumb and fucking racist about how they deal with people's accents or whatnot. And I really, I liked the video was very good. So go watch that.

Jessamyn 48:07 And, yeah, there's a whole bunch of people saying interesting stuff. In the thread, I saw meat bomb show up as somebody who's often trying to teach English to people who have an Asian language as their first language. And he talks a little bit about that. And, you know, it was interesting for me when I was learning Romanian, which is, you know, it's very, sort of you know, it's like French and Spanish and Italian, right. It's, it's one of those languages, it's a Romance language. And, you know, people make fun of like, the Dracula accent, you know, blah, blah, kind of thing. But like a lot of that, and I had a hard time learning how to roll my arse, because when I think of roll bars, I think of Spanish and Spanish as a really ruled are, but Romanian has kind of a restricted ruled are. And I found that it was actually easier to like, just say, all my Romanian RS is what I thought of as DS. You know, because instead of saying, You know what I do with it, like, you just say dad do. And it it winds up sounding to Romanians more correct, than if you do this ridiculous Spanish sounding rolled R, which is what you think an AR should be.

Cortex 49:18 Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, the video gets into how many different kinds of things there are, that are kind of an R or an L or, yeah, there's also there's a, there's a cool comment early on from user tubos. Yeah, saying, Hey, I did this research on like, the, the nature of how we basically structure and perceive our concept of, of robotics of our sounds of various sorts, you know, because there's, there's this, there's the sounds you make, and then there's whatever's going on internally that models, The Linguist

Jessamyn 49:52 that's written down which a lot of people too in a way that isn't useful for them and understand.

Cortex 49:56 Yeah, so that was a really neat sort of random Oh, also, here's some fucking literal science that I just happened to mention in the threads. So yeah, very good, good stuff. Very good stuff.

Jessamyn 50:10 And I just had the little thing, which was just this kind of funny little thing that Jim posted, which was basically, you know, NCAA basketball bracket a nonsense happened, I guess where it's still happening. Basketball. All right, I don't care. So but basically, this is a the the US Census Bureau is trying really hard to remain relevant and to get people to fill out the census and not blow off the census, even as the federal government is trying to take apart the census and make it a mockery of what it was. So Jim and I are both like, subscribe to like census mailing lists for like little cutie poo stuff they send out. And they basically make a bracket, a population bracket, where you can you go down it to try and figure out which is the biggest, I think city, or you can do it just with states. So you get to look at a bracket. And you can be like, you know, which do you think is bigger? Denver or Washington. And you can see if you get it right or wrong. And you know, a perfect score is 63 where you know which city tampered Detroit, Miami or Worcester? I think that's Miami. Yes, it is. And so it gets an at the end of it, you need to figure out kind of what the biggest city is. I just think it was fun and kind of stupid. And I enjoyed it from a purely like word nerd perspective. Also, I feel like it helped me get a little better at trivia, like we were talking in the pre roll, which I don't know if you're going to include or not about trivia, and doing should do is

Cortex 51:49 include more, more running time talking about whether or not we include the prereqs by cutting up and just like really get the worst of both worlds. I'm

Jessamyn 51:58 gonna make it included. But like, I think a little bit about how much I should like practice, like, go learn the rivers or go learn whatever. Like I spent some intensive time learning state capitals way back in the day. And I feel like that was time well spent. You know, like, because knowing the state capitals is helpful for a whole bunch of reasons. And that's not the

Cortex 52:17 worst bit of random knowledge to just carry around. Even if you don't end up getting any questions.

Jessamyn 52:22 Your country is useful. And it helps you talk to other people and etc. So this was kind of interesting to like, what should he really is bigger, like rally or Tucson? I think it's Tucson. Nope, it's fucking rally at any rate.

Cortex 52:33 It's a fun rally. Rally. Rally. Yeah. You know, I just I've just thrown it. Fucking I was trying to trash talk a little bit.

Jessamyn 52:43 I didn't. Alright, so yes, it's a little post that helps you learn a little trivia. The end, I think that

Cortex 52:51 I will mention two quick things. And then we can ask it. I'm sorry. And yes, and

Jessamyn 52:57 no, I'm still looking for the thing and asked me that's gonna make this terrific segue. That's not

Cortex 53:01 well give you a little bit more time. Now. We're gonna really we're gonna land the shit out of segue. Okay. Two things. This is a post that I made. But it's not because I'm so brilliant at posting. It's just I like this game so much. There's a little game called

Jessamyn 53:17 Chicken clickers.

Cortex 53:18 No, no, no, no, this is like this is like, sort of like a tiny combat chess game. It's like a sort of chess roguelike like thing. The play is very fast. It's very simple. You're trying to beat several stages attacking various chess monsters using cards that you draw at random from your hand. And that's all and it's you should go play it because like I'll take me long to explain it and we'll get it figured out but I really enjoyed it that made a posting and other people seem to enjoy it and personally made it's going to turn it into a more fleshed out game and that's all great. And then the other thing is in my official role as steamed ham Ambassador medical Third Doctor said make a made a post about a steamed ham thing that's very good, which is that someone needs steamed hams but it's Basket Case by Green Day Like someone made a autotune edit of the song using the audio of the episode and then someone else turned that into video to go with it and it's I think it's amazing and also if you don't like if you're already on board it will do nothing for you because it's exactly what it sounds like it's steamed hands except for its basket case by Green Day. Your honor the defense rests

Jessamyn 54:32 excellent. I can't find the thing I'm looking for it all in AskMe

Cortex 54:36 it's so epic when you finally find it

Jessamyn 54:41 that interesting but now I'm kind of mad at the person who did it who didn't use any tags talking about the thing Oh, fucking is

Cortex 54:52 fucking Raleigh.

Jessamyn 54:54 So essentially this you know links back to the kosher Pokemon but it is a And of course, it's about kosher food

Cortex 55:02 and decent kosher pecan. Sorry.

Jessamyn 55:06 And then the title is The nuns at Sunday school didn't prepare me for this.

Cortex 55:11 Just add some more tags, I'll let you talk, I'll add to it, I'm

Jessamyn 55:15 adding a tag right now. Basically, somebody who's an office assistant, part of their job is to keep the office stocked with snacks is the Empress cow pitchess. I'm not actually mad. But my boss and his clients are Orthodox Jewish. And they want as much food that's kosher as possible. And I'm a lapsed Catholic, and how do I make sure that I do that? Yeah, and it's kind of a salt problem, really, because if you want kosher snacks, there's places it just snacks. But there are a bunch of people who, you know, kind of talk about, like, what's important and sort of what are guidelines and you know, Empress basically posted in this thread four times the fourth time saying trying not to threads it but on at any rate.

Cortex 56:02 There's exactly two kinds of trying not to threads it but comments, ask me those. There's ones where you definitely are threads sitting. And then there's the ones where you're someone who's absorbed the etiquette enough that you're terrified of threats. First, you add you add one comment that helpfully clarifies something that needed clarification in your thread, it's gonna make it go better. And you like, I'm so sorry, for threads that he's like, No, you're fine, you're fine. Well, and

Jessamyn 56:25 if it gets tricky, because Passover is coming up, right, and so certain things that are kosher, the rest of the time may not be kosher for passover, a lot of it depends on kind of like what, you know, what? Kosher, this they're looking for, like not only how intense, but like which kind of branch of it, yada, yada, yada. So it's actually an interesting tricky, and I like it, because of course, it's a very rule based approach harnesses is super interesting, right? Because it's just a set of rules. But if you want to try and adhere to as many of them as possible, like who, who's your authority and what you do? So that's my segue. That's now we're in AskMe, Metafilter, I guess.

Cortex 57:10 Let's see. Yeah, no. To engage with the Segway, I didn't get prepared in any way. Okay, here's a fun one. Don't do it, do it. Well, I could go for love of God go.

Jessamyn 57:26 So this is mermaid cafe. Basically thinking about if you're commemorating the deceased, this is all like, you know, dead pets, dead family. This is that this podcast. So you know how different cultures that commemorate by using things that are empty or broken or whatever, like the way you leave an empty chair for somebody who's recently deceased, or like during Shiva when this segues perfectly from the one before it, where you put a little rip in your clothing to indicate sort of the loss of the person. And you know, I like different people kind of interpreting that in their different ways. So er, vos Yat FOSS talking about like the the ghost bikes thing, where like, people would like paint these bikes wait and leave them around in a place where a biker cyclist was killed, which is actually kind of an interesting thing that you see in different places, you know, leaving a lighted candle in the window for a loved one at war. Last call for the police officer. It's actually an interesting thread, not super long, about various traditions on how to commemorate you know, people who've moved on passed on aren't with us, etc, etc. Yeah, it's cool. I liked it.

Cortex 58:39 I liked this thread. I'm doing such a good job of doing this smoothly now that I had type of bear. Ever heard my explanation? Remember, that gave you an aha moments? This was a question from placing a unicorn basically saying, Hey, give me give me examples of it's nice. It's it's like, you know, give me not just like, give me an interesting number. But give me an example of a situation where like a number or a statistic or a figure really conveyed sort of like a revelatory, oh, sort of way of conceiving of the idea that it's about. So it's a real grab bag. It's all over the place. You know, people are taking this from a few different directions. But it makes up for interesting threat of like little numeric things, or like, oh, it proportions and crazy little mass dents and whatnot. And yeah,

Jessamyn 59:27 you know, I do that. When I taught community engagement, I would have my students think of a statistic. Like we'd learned about statistics, and then think about a statistic about whatever their population was, they were doing their report on that you could like throw in a conversation that would make people be like, Oh, I never like mine was always that in the United States. There's about as many people without access to the internet at home as there are people who smoke. So when you think about people who smoke and I don't know what Portland's like but around here, you see people smoking all the time. And if you think like that, Many people in America don't have access to the internet. It takes kind of a statistic that's hidden. But yeah, people without access to the internet, like how would you know? And makes it visible like you see smokers all over the place and then you know parallels them and so like, but that's how many there are. It really is a fucking lot. Yeah, makes you think.

Cortex 1:00:22 See there was,

Jessamyn 1:00:24 Oh, I've got a couple. I've got a couple of backseat pilot who congratulations got promoted out of our cu Rundle and trivia, basically is a pilot and flies out of small airports, and wants to do more traveling, but kind of wants to do like a little random walk and like certain things like cool food or restaurants, natural features that are fun little museums and weird local monuments. And so he's like, look, I've got a little plane. I want to go to a little airport. Tell me what's near a little airport that is near you that I could go look at. And so it winds up being like a cute little list of little things near little airports like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which is like the bird watching Mecca where you can go learn about birds and whatever it's two miles from the Ithaca airport like you could literally ride a bicycle from there to there and so the thread is just little towns talking about people from little towns talking about little things that backseat pilot might want to go visit. That's very nice.

Cortex 1:01:29 Yeah. Can I also say that the word Mecca has a weird overload at this point where there's like Mecca as in like the place but also the figurative notion like as you're using it of like you know, a mecca sort of like you know, central Nexus or or Epicenter but there's also a Mecca is in giant robots and so a bird watching Mecca is a really fascinating

Jessamyn 1:01:52 there you're going with that people stopping around and like the language police Mian Josh

Cortex 1:01:57 No No No Yeah, no, no, no this is this is entirely my my brain is going where does that come from? But yeah, I like the idea of someone like tromping around the wilderness and like a 25 foot tall robot amazing with guns and like, oh, look, it's a it's a

Jessamyn 1:02:11 I think that's the name of this podcast is birdwatching. Okay, my channel I'll

Cortex 1:02:16 put that down net Cha. Let's see. Bird watching Mecca.

Jessamyn 1:02:22 Well talk about the weird lie that is people have different types of a million words for snow. Do Are there different words for different kinds of snow drifts? Are there is there typology of snow drifts or whatever and this is from sequined ballet flats. I feel a little bad like I hadn't been mentioning people's names enough. sequined ballet flats, and then salty, salty. salticid. Salt aside, I don't even know was like, Hey, here's an article from 1987 discussing the scientific typology of snowdrifts. Yeah, and

Cortex 1:03:02 set a couple other things. Bar chain, and they're mentioning doing typography, comparison to? Yes,

Jessamyn 1:03:11 because bar chain is I guess a thing you can do with snow.

Cortex 1:03:15 Oh, nice.

Jessamyn 1:03:18 Yeah, here's a old timey internet question, which is Arne see? Who is an old timey metal filter person? Only in the 70 4000s was basically like I lived in Springfield, Illinois. I remember this internet service provider. It was an alternative to AOL. What is it? What, what is what was this internet service provider? And then, you know, there's a whole bunch of people say, Well, maybe it was this or maybe it was that or maybe it was blah, blah, blah. And yeah, he basically found something in an archive of an online newspaper. And, you know, it was one of 16 Internet service providers in the nation. And it was one of the only ones in the Midwest, so it was a cool I don't know it was a cool Yeah, cool. Little help me. Yeah.

Cortex 1:04:11 Yeah. Reminds me of teleport was the ISP in Portland for the 90s I don't know it's what we were on. And at some point, Earthlink bought them out,

Jessamyn 1:04:24 I guess, to one of the ISP that I used early on in Vermont in the late 90s.

Cortex 1:04:29 Yeah, well, for a while teleport was still around as a domain and I think they just sort of like ran it a subsidiary for a while and eventually I think they just got rid of it. Yeah, it's very weird that it had this

Jessamyn 1:04:38 like ISP which was Spry net. So like dealing with my mom's affairs every now and again, she'll have something with an email address it Spry net, which hasn't existed and I don't know how long

Cortex 1:04:48 buddy I don't know what to tell you. But my sister does

Jessamyn 1:04:51 the same thing she has like a she has an ISP that got bought by another ISP and she literally pays like six to 10 bucks a month just to have this antique Email Address, because she just doesn't want to deal with changing shit over. You know? Yeah. So like RCN, which is not a thing anymore. She has a dial up. Some, she pays money, like, it makes me crazy, but like, it's her life, and why do I even care. But like every now and again, she's like, Oh, just give my RCN address. I'm like, we're not fucking using that, like, not for anything in this century. That is your last century email address. Because like, when I was in Seattle, I had, you know, dial up through University of Washington when I was a student, and then switched to eskimo.com of all the, you know, totally culturally inappropriate names, and it's still around, and then decided to leave eskimo.com when the owner went to prison. For some reason, that wasn't a good reason. You don't I mean, like, you could go to prison for reasons I don't care about, but this was some reason I was like, jump ship. And I had to, you know, get rid of my eskimo.com account, which was probably a great idea. And yeah, let's be honest, I probably stuck with it longer than I should have. But yeah, I remember there was like Seattle, Freenet also that you could just dial up to for free and connect to whatever. And again, like, I think I've talked about this, but like, Jim came up through bulletin boards. And so for him, dialing up was like BBs is whereas for me dialing up was always like, TCPIP. And we just have different sort of experiences of that. Yes, thanks.

Cortex 1:06:30 I think I got I think I got like actual like, dial up. IP based internet access first and then got into a couple of local BBs is once I realized that was a thing, this would have been like, mid 90s. Well, and I think I

Jessamyn 1:06:42 dialed up to BBs is a little bit in high school, but like, I didn't really get it. And I was female. So like, you know, you're there with your regular name. And people are like, yeah, and I was like, you know, fuck it. I'm gonna come back when the Internet has grown up. And yeah.

Cortex 1:06:58 Nice. Yep. Anything else from ask just one

Jessamyn 1:07:02 more, which was from agent rocket, which is like, Hey, I just learned last week, Amazon Prime can get a year of the tendo switch online for free. What? I didn't know that. But if I hadn't been paying attention, I might have missed that. What are your favorite like perks that you can get, if you know where to look and not like, sign up for this credit card and get $500 worth of whatever fucking airline miles, but like little benefits that come with a thing that you might not know about, like reciprocal privileges, or whatever. Like, you know, somebody's like, I got an mlb.tv Like, you know, Major League Baseball, just for having a T Mobile cell phone plan. Like that kind of thing. Like, I'm mostly mentioning this on the podcast even because I would like more people to like, I mean, some of them of course, hydro 77 is like, Hey, your local library card gets you a whole bunch of shit, which is also true and that people don't know about. But like, you know, American Express helps you with like rental car stuff, you know, target cards, help you with, you know, give you a discount on Starbucks, et cetera. So it's a cool thread for like learning some stuff. Yeah. And then spit ball goes off on some grumpy rental car grumpy. So we need to wrap this up so that I can get dressed and go to work.

Cortex 1:08:18 Yeah, I have not been keeping up on these. We're gonna have to do a minute right now. So I'll just say hey, go listen to music people. There's good music stuff. The croutons, like music, you should like music, too. There's also been some stuff on metal talk, but I'm not like don't have any notes. So I think let's just call a podcast. Wait, I

Jessamyn 1:08:35 have a couple notes from editing. Just now let's talk about that paint roller thing? By Cashman, because you know, a couple people are like, Oh my God, it's this thing from whatever. And then other people are like, it's not that thing, which is, you know, the person who maybe opens the window, it gets a paint roller in the face, but maybe it's seen from the end of facts of life, or whatever, at any rate, fun thread. And then I really liked like, Oh, I'm a fish got married.

Cortex 1:09:07 Yeah, congrats is

Jessamyn 1:09:09 to Oh, my God, remind me his wife's name. I saw their pictures. Gotta hit them at the top real quick. All right. Well, you can do that while I talk about infine Infini. How do you pronounce her name? Oh, no. Okay. Um, basically, it

Cortex 1:09:24 was I think infine but maybe, I mean, I not I think that it is. In my head. I think the sound Infini Yeah. And

Jessamyn 1:09:32 was her 14th anniversary, and basically was like, Hey, tell me about because the reason I thought of physics because physicists often having these like chatty meta talk threads where people can talk and community build and those are cool. But then then infine has one which is basically like, hey, talk about how being alone in some challengingly new environment and being able to access medical care make a difference for you. So if you don't check out medical talk that often because you don't want to talk politics or you don't want on a blog with the blonde Saturday with the rest of us, you might really like that there just because it's got a couple cool comments and Happy anniversary. And that was neat

Cortex 1:10:10 night recordings, visit night recording. I

Jessamyn 1:10:11 knew Sarah was an and I just didn't want to embarrass myself and be like, Ah, you're married to someone else. But Mazel tov. You too. That was really lovely. Mazel Tov to Jacqueline and Terrell, who I believe does not have a an account. And, yeah, mazel tov to everybody. May you have a good April it's mud season here. I don't know about where you are.

Cortex 1:10:36 It's it's Portland season here. I don't all right.

Jessamyn 1:10:39 I don't even know what that means.

Cortex 1:10:40 I don't either it but it's a podcast. We did it.

Jessamyn 1:10:42 We did it.

Cortex 1:10:44 Were the winners.

Jessamyn 1:10:45 Great talking to you as always, Josh.

Cortex 1:10:47 Yeah, talk to you next month.

Jessamyn 1:10:49 Talk to you next month. Happy croutons.