Podcast 157 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 157: That's The Title, Everyone Get Back To Work And Thank You (2019-11-01).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 A couple of things you

Jessamyn 0:24 one of the reasons we're not podcasting earlier in the day was because I had a finance committee for the Vermont Humanities Council. Okay, which is just like sitting around while somebody breathes into a microphone and somebody else explains the spreadsheet over the sound of other people's heavy breathing while you try to tell everybody how a phone conference works, but you know, we, we straighten out the budget, and I feel kind of good about that, because I know how numbers work, but I thought it was going to be more painful than it was. So I'm actually in a pretty good mood. Sometimes things work

Cortex 0:56 out. Yeah. Things like episode 157 of the medical term healthy podcast with me, Josh cortex. Mullard. Me Jessamyn and here we are in the world of natural transition. That was

Jessamyn 1:09 your true talent Josh,

Cortex 1:10 I'm I'm a genius in my own mind.

Jessamyn 1:16 Isn't it legend in your own mind?

Cortex 1:18 I don't know. I'm just saying words. It's

Jessamyn 1:20 like legend in your own time. And then it's a send up on that. Yeah. Jessamyn explains jokes to you. Hey, oh, usually you explain the jokes to me.

Cortex 1:28 I know. It's a real switcheroo.

Jessamyn 1:34 Is that a kangaroo costume from yesterday?

Cortex 1:37 I didn't know. Yeah, no, I did not know about that. Oh, my God.

Jessamyn 1:40 So you know, that like funny meme? Where it's like, you know, it's a costume. You know, you drove show up at the party and you're Baboo costume

Cortex 1:49 wines and more adults being you know, drinking wine and wine. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:53 well, we have a trivia night, as you know. And on the Facebook group for the trivia night, they were like, hey, you know, anyone who comes wearing a costume because, you know, Halloween? Fucking day. You know, I'll go to the I'll go out and buy you the candy bar of your choice, right? And like, I'm a 51 year old woman motivated by candy. And I was like, I also like costumes, right? So I put on my kangaroo outfit. And went to the bar, only to find I was the only person in the entire bar in a costume at all. And I was wearing a full kangaroo costume. Yeah. And, you know, was good candy bar. But, you know, it's a little funny, right? Like, I don't know if that's like a digital divide problem. I don't know if that's a like a timing thing. Like, I just I don't know. Other people don't like costumes. Am I the only person that likes costumes? The rest of my damn team didn't wear them? Yeah, I

Cortex 2:52 don't know. Did you did you did you know? Did you communicate with your team at all about it was it like, was that the sort of thing that can even be coordinated ahead of time or?

Jessamyn 3:02 Team is not really like we coordinate enough to know who's going to be at the bar. But like, we don't really they're not you know, I think this was probably something that was posted to Instagram or to Facebook like a couple hours before. And, you know, as a result, no time there's no time. So I was just very surprised. I'll send you a link because it's sort of funny. Nice, but like if I were younger, I would have been like oh god, I'm the only person with a costume so humiliating and now I'm like fuck y'all I got a candy bar and this costume is comfortable

Cortex 3:36 that's a good kangaroo accustomed to I like that.

Jessamyn 3:38 I think so I you know somebody was selling it for you know not much money on the local buy and sell list and it's good to have a costume that's comfortable.

Cortex 3:45 Yeah, okay.

Jessamyn 3:47 Yeah

Cortex 3:49 yeah, I guess I guess we should say it is it is in fact Halloween right now as we're recording

Jessamyn 3:53 for you do you do Halloween in your neighborhood?

Cortex 3:55 You know what? In in principle Yes. In practice every year it's when we do turn the light on and have trick or treaters we get like five of them. Like we're on a street that's like three blocks long and it's not one of like the streets that gets big Halloween crowds so we get very little we can just get the people who are feeling I guess more adventurous to go down one of the low loot table seats streets.

Jessamyn 4:19 Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 4:22 So yeah, we we do it in principle. It's just not much of a thing. Certainly less than like when my life growing up in my parents neighborhood like you know, there was a big roving crowd that seemed like but it happens it happens in the vicinity so

Jessamyn 4:40 well and we have I live in like on the other side of the road of a heavy Halloween traffic neighborhood. So every year I dress up and go to a friend's house to do the handout, but I don't think we're doing it this year and it's raining. exhausting week so I'm not 100% Sure This may be my first hear of No, you know, no candy Hangout, though, I may just go walking around with my friend and her dog Stein.

Cortex 5:07 I think it's okay that like, you know, I mean, the candy will still get distributed like the you are not liking, you know, supporting load supporting beam in?

Jessamyn 5:18 Absolutely not well give yourself that break used to be at a big house where they'd handed out but then they split up and then he sold the house and she doesn't really do candy at her house. And my other friend really good friend doesn't do candy at her house for various reasons. And so it would just be kind of walking around, which I did last year in the kangaroo outfit, and it was fun, but I don't know different. So we'll see.

Cortex 5:44 Yeah. Well, let's talk about some metal filter stuff. Hey, a couple jobs were posted this month. One of which Catherine M is looking for some retouching on an old photo, an old photo that's framed and needs some color correction and retouching maybe. I mean, they're, they're partly saying, Hey, I'm not even sure how to precisely describe this, because I don't know how to do it. But if that is up your alley, take a look and see if you can help out there. And then on the more large scale job a job front. BBC 34 is posting about Cornell looking for a back end Python developer for the RX i don't i Well, I want to say archive, but it's archive.org. But it's not archive.org it's AR XIV that archive dark art chive. Yeah, it's occurred to me. I've seen this many times before. And I've never once tried to say it out live out loud. But you know, they do. The scientific paper publishing as a, like, lots says open access platform, on the job posts. So yeah, if you are in the Ithaca, New York area and know your Python and want to get into that, check it out. Is the that's the news from jobs.

Jessamyn 7:08 Yeah, jobs hasn't been getting a lot of traffic, I keep suggesting that people go to jobs to, you know, for their little kind of gig economy type things. And, you know, like I always say, Go Go look at jobs.

Cortex 7:21 Yeah, I steer. I steer someone there every once awhile, and it's nice. It's nice when people do have a use for it. So. But what of projects oh my god

Jessamyn 7:33 projects. So this project, which is by kind of fell in like after we recorded but before we distributed last time, and I wanted to make sure it did not get ignored. It is the principle totally real birds of the world 2020 Because there's this thing called Inktober, which I don't know that much about. But I guess it's drawing some stuff. And so basically, you can print out different birds and a different calendar for every month of 2020 including the headless horse Raven, and the southwestern turd burglar. I won't ruin it. You can just look at all the rest of them. But it's cool. I appreciate it. Thank you Cobra. Yay, birds.

Cortex 8:22 Yeah, that's great. Dobbs posted a real does what it says on the tin project, which is a bunch of pictures of Orange Grove tool sheds and utility boxes in Oliva Spain. That is

Jessamyn 8:37 an awful lot of pictures. It is it's

Cortex 8:42 100 or so 108. Of his his favorite from the 1000s He took while he was there. I always liked that sort. I always I was like a good like, you know, okay, here's one thing and here is a collection of that thing. And there's something about like the weird little mundanity of, like utility sheds that really works for me, in this case, there's something about like, you know, like, it's a box, it's a small box with a door and maybe a couple windows. And that's all and like, you know, there's only so

Jessamyn 9:15 whatever purpose you need that for.

Cortex 9:19 Yeah, so like, there's only there's only so many ways that that itself can really go and so like looking at a bunch of pictures of it becomes not so much as like, Oh, I sure wonderful utility shed looks like but sort of taking in, like the contexts and the variation from one to the next as, you know, something that you can see more than if you would like, like more more than if, like the individual architectural entity in the foreground was like really, genuinely, like super interesting in its own right. Like, you know, none of these are architectural marvels their hair, their boxy sheds, you know, and so like,

Jessamyn 9:51 I come in what comes out non US country, which I was intrigued by,

Cortex 9:55 yeah. So yeah, I don't know. I like that. Okay. is the sort of thing where it's like it becomes the repetition of the theme. And the simplicity of thing becomes kind of a, almost of substrate you can sort of like, you know, wade through to get more of a feel for that everything else involved and the little details stand out and that ticket

Jessamyn 10:18 here's a Josh, please explain this to me project. The emoji adventure by n McCoy. So I looked at this, I really liked it. It's got a name that is just the little snake emoji. I clicked around having no idea what I was doing. And I expected the penny to drop at some point. And it didn't. And then I read about it, and I'm still not totally sure I understand it. So over to you, Josh.

Cortex 10:50 You know, for once, I'm just gonna have to punch this, like I did not spend any time with him when it went up. I'm delighted looking at it right now, but I just hadn't spent any time with it. So I'm now clicking around blindly a little bit just to see what happens. I mean, I'm seeing a lot of things that feel like good trappings of the idea of using emoji as both item and descriptor in a adventure game of some sort. Like it like there's fighting or running from like I went into a city and there's some rats I'm gonna attack the rats gonna attack the rats

Jessamyn 11:25 I found a princess I think

Cortex 11:30 through Legolas emoji basically is my my person.

Jessamyn 11:34 Yeah, so you know

Cortex 11:36 yeah, I'm delighted with this but like,

Jessamyn 11:38 Joshua is something wrong

Cortex 11:45 around the sword in the city. No, that's that's Boaty McBoatface who usually is actually pretty well behaved during the podcast but apparently had something to say she's. She was she's been a fucker last night too. This is this are adorable tuxedo cat we have we have a rambunctious adorable tuxedo cat Boaty McBoatface and then a much chiller, older like Shaggy, buffed cat named Freya. And they're both very good cats. And they're both terrible monsters depending on the time of day and what's gotten into their brains. Although at this point, Frey is pretty chill, pretty 24/7 Actually, and Bodie is delightful, but also sometimes just isn't getting sufficient attention from the universe, I guess, is all we can figure about it. So for example, we went to bed last night at midnight or so and I think I fell asleep about 1245 or so because that's when she had finally stopped standing or just fucking me out in the bedroom out in the hall downstairs, back up, quieting up for a couple minutes and then starting up again. What does she want? Who knows us to never sleep is one possible answer. Another possible answer is she just wants to be in the bed with us but is not closing the fucking gap from the floor of the bedroom to the bed which she can jump onto effortlessly. But she's just not making that connection. Because like if she gets up and gets under the covers, she's out and that's fine until morning like this. Nothing is going to be a problem at that point. But getting her there. And if you get out of bed and try and pick her up, she's like, Oh, we're playing Okay, I'll dash off so oh my god. I didn't get as much sleep as I normally do because of that cat. And that's that's that's extremely adorable. And I love her. But yes, that was her making some noise. I think she's still on whatever the hell she was on last night because she's been kind of talkative today.

Jessamyn 13:35 You're starting to break up a little by the way. It's your internet or my internet.

Cortex 13:43 I had a brief little bit of robot from you. But just just the tiniest bit. Am I still sending weird or sound good now? Okay. Might have been just a hiccup I guess. Anyway, enough about my cats. This modular adventure looks fantastic. And McCoy and I will spend some time with it sometime soon, because I want to figure out what's going on there. That's very up my alley. But I failed to explain sorry, I can't help

Jessamyn 14:07 you. That's fine. And in low number users back around doing stuff you remember Rory Rory. Rory is an Australian living in Scotland. He's been traveling around the place. He has put together a bunch of photo galleries on his site. And it looks cool. I'm reminded of PB when PB was you know, making his own Flickr alternative and kind of wishing, wishing I had that now. So that I could get all my stuff. That's what I want for a job. I want someone to be able to get all my stuff off Flickr to put on to some self hosted locations so that I still have my galleries and albums intact,

Cortex 14:53 but you can pay someone

Jessamyn 14:56 well, but I mean, what I want is a tool right? So not just for me But for other, yeah, other Flickr users because, you know, you can export all your photos, but it doesn't keep the album information. And I feel like there's got to be a way. But it, it's outside of not only my capabilities, but my actual ability to want to get that detail with it. You know what I mean? Like, I have other stuff where if I was going to learn to code, I would want to do fix these other things first. Yeah. But I am interested.

Cortex 15:28 I like this eyeball graffiti dude from that one photo set. Yeah, yeah.

Jessamyn 15:38 Lady. Yes.

Cortex 15:40 I grew up. I volunteer to be the humanoid. Yeah. Yes, no, there's a great, yeah, you

Jessamyn 15:47 could just kind of click and click and click. And there's a whole bunch of great stuff, if you like, looking at kind of, I'm looking at a series of trees and vines, and beaches and rocks. And yeah, rich, great photographer. And this is a fun way to experience all bunch of photography.

Cortex 16:04 Yeah. There is. This one, Beijing Brown has another project up, which is sort of cataloging 70 years of Chinese music history. Wow. Okay. Basically saying, Okay, well, you know, there was a really rapid push through sort of catching up on contemporary music history in the last 70 years in China, and it sort of tracks some of the development of China culturally. So here's, you know, sort of a condensation of that into a shortlist. Yeah,

Jessamyn 16:51 that's a great project. I was just reading some whippersnapper on Twitter complaining about how blogging is dead. You killed it, you bastards. You know, because social media has kind of killed blogging, and I'm like, yeah, no, it hasn't. Like, people still write, you know, one of the things that they were complaining about was the absence of these, like single serving sites, where people would go into like, exquisite detail about their nerd topic. And they were like, people don't do this anymore. They just make threads on Twitter. And I'm like, you know, I don't know what internet you're hanging out on. But the internet I hang out on, people are still doing stuff exactly like this. Right? Yeah. Where you can like learn an interesting thing. I mean, you read it on medium? I assume that stuff gets surfaced on Google? I don't know for sure. But I think it does. And this is great. Beijing Brown, you know, keeps it keeps it real.

Cortex 17:45 Yeah. Yeah, no, it's login. There's, you know, there's, there's, there's a whole playlist, there's you can, you know, you can go sample through them, watch the videos and whatnot. Yeah, no, that's, that's a weird thing. You know, it's, it's like, on the one hand, you're both right, basically, like, like, this stuff is out there. And it's, I really, really liked that it's out there. And I really liked that, you know, people do interesting, detailed work, and the visibility is like, so the visibility Ubiquiti have been so damaged, by the way, things change over time that like, yeah, it's there. And also, it doesn't have the same footprint that it used to, and it doesn't have the same cultural expectation that it will be rebroadcast and shared away, shared around the way it used to be. And that does suck like that. I mean, that's that it's a genuine thing, right? The the nature of how we expect to share and the nature of how we expect to even find or discover or look for content has changed so much, too.

Jessamyn 18:46 Well, and what they were talking about was, you know, your ability to build an audience. And I was just kind of like, well, I guess, like, it might be that if you're the nerdy person who's really into this thing, but you're not somehow amplifying that through social media channels, people are never going to know that you're that person. On the other hand, maybe building an audience is overrated. I mean, there was like, a brief period of time where you could make money blogging.

Cortex 19:13 Yeah. And I think that's part of it, too, is like, you know, there is the distinction between like blogging as a, you know, mainstream monetizable silo is dead and blogging as something that you just fucking do anyway, because you want to put that information out there. And they are definitely two different things. Like, I miss. I missed having blogging being more of a part of thing that I do, but like, it was never something that I was doing other than just because I wanted to post stuff that I was thinking about writing in the first place. So whatever. Right, I still do that.

Jessamyn 19:44 I still have a blog. Like, you know, but it was originally so that my mother would know things were okay when she couldn't get me on the phone and we've kind of moved well past that. All right. It's gonna end you know, They'll do it for I don't know why. Who even knows. Muscle memory?

Cortex 20:05 Yeah. I have another that's on my I want to get there and just haven't found the time things which is maic wrote up a thing called What is your deal with Carly Rae Jepsen?

Jessamyn 20:23 It's funny. I just read the introduction. And I. Yeah, you know, I should read this later today because I I'm curious.

Cortex 20:32 Yeah, I mean, Carly Rae Jepsen. Great. So like, I'm on board already.

Jessamyn 20:37 Right. I've already got a good agreement. But tell me what you think. Yeah.

Cortex 20:40 Yeah. Yeah, and there's more stuff. But a, we got sort of a slow start. So I don't want to go through everything, point by point. Go to projects, check out the other stuff. There's more stuff, post ups, you're making stuff, make stuff and put on

Jessamyn 20:55 projects? Josh, why don't you post your unwieldy book?

Cortex 21:00 I will, that's a good idea I needed to get down in there. Somebody's really satisfying

Jessamyn 21:05 about the Super blackness of these pages to like, yeah, I don't see a book where all the pages are all the way black.

Cortex 21:13 Yeah, no, I was really pleased, replaced by that when I saw it.

Jessamyn 21:17 Yeah, I'll have to think I mean, cuz that's really the thing, right? Why don't you think about what you could put on projects? Right? Yeah. I just have been putting up a whole bunch of Washington Senators, Library of Congress, photographs of the old baseball team from the turn of the last century on Library of Congress. I'm not sure how I could put that on projects. But it has been something I'm working on. You know, as the days get shorter, Jessamyn starts turning to Wikipedia. I mean,

Cortex 21:43 you know, you're you're organizing some stuff, you know, what the content is, you're doing some work on it, write something about that and share that because hey, why not? Doing a bunch of math stuff that I could like, turn into a blog post, maybe instead of a bunch of Twitter threads. And like, I should throw that up on projects. And

Jessamyn 21:57 I swear, I follow you on Twitter, but I've been missing most of this.

Cortex 22:01 Oh, did you meet me at some point because of an annoying thing or something?

Jessamyn 22:06 I don't, I don't use mute actually, for the most for the most part. I don't know. I'll have to go back around and figure it out.

Cortex 22:13 That's just me drawn stuff. So whatever.

Jessamyn 22:16 Oh, it's drying? So I didn't know then. Yeah. Like, what do you mean drying? Yeah,

Cortex 22:21 yeah. Like graph paper, and then notes and such? Yeah. Anyway, let's talk about metal filter. The blue. Okay. Mi fi proper?

Jessamyn 22:31 Well, first of all, can I just say that? I believe I made a post

Cortex 22:37 that I did. Did you know? Yeah. And it's

Jessamyn 22:39 funny. Like, I find that one of my recipes for making a post a good poster as far as what I like, like where people are like, Oh, that's interesting. And nobody yells at each other or whatever, is, if I find out about stuff from some way that has almost nothing to do with the Internet. You know what I mean? So like, this was my trivia team, I talk about one of the guys on my trivia team is like a mainframe engineer for the state of Vermont. He is not online, basically, at all. But he reads, you know, some things on the internet. I don't even know what and so occasionally, he'll be like, oh, did you hear about this story? And the answer is usually no. And then the answer is that I'm usually like, my god, that's amazing. And so in this case, it was essentially something that was a post on Polygon, which is not a sort of blog, or whatever the hell it is that I read very often about a Christian rock band from 35 years ago, stay with me, that encoded a Commodore 64 program on the center. Like, you know how there's that little center thing that will just play on repeat on a vinyl album. Yeah, encoded a 64 program. And then just this year, this kind of YouTube, Commodore 64 enthusiast managed to retrieve it and run it. And so Robin Harbor on is the guy who runs this eight bit show, which is a thing on YouTube, which barely has a blog, but also has a Patreon. And he talks about how he does it. And so if you're somebody who's interested in Christian rock, or Commodore 60, fours, or weird transcoding between formats, like this is going to be your jam. And so it was fun. It was like, you know, not a super long thread, but it got all the Commodore 64 people out of the woodwork and and it was a little hard because the polygon thing, of course, doesn't really link to this guy's stuff. It just, you know, is like we discovered a thing and you're just like, like, because that's kind of useful, but what I then want to know about is the thing and there's not a lot of other good information. So I spent some time finding finding the other stuff. And that was fun. So yeah, I I enjoyed making that post on metal filter about that. And then there was like one or two people who were like, Oh, I remember that Christian rock band, which, unexpectedly

Cortex 25:12 there was a fun post and like, it's got an FYI zone aspect to it. So this is a post by a CGC 373. About a write up from em boy, sort of trying to say, Okay, how much of a line can we draw between the sizes of banknote presses in the mid 19th century go? The fact that terminals are 80 by 25 character displays. And it's, you know, I mean, go read thing because it's a fun sort of romp through some stuff tied together. And there's like, there's some there's some spots that are just kind of like, there's a gap here like No, there's nothing saying that this is what happened. But in the absence something else, maybe this is the connection because it's really interesting guests lines up. Well, yeah. And so like, I appreciate I went into the thing, I actually saw it before it ended up on metal filter, I think, just going around somewhere else. And you know, I went into it feeling like is this going to be Hey guys, buckle the fuck up, because I'm gonna blow your mind with a bunch of really tendentious conclusions. Curse, so you don't think about? So sick of those. Yeah. And it said it was much more thoughtfully put out. Like, it's like, Hey, here's what I could find. Here's some things that do line up. Here's some hand wavy answers I got from someone about this. This I don't know. But it's, you know, the possibility, you know, so it has much more of that flavor.

Jessamyn 26:40 Somebody who doesn't know shit about history who's like, Guys, guess what?

Cortex 26:45 It used to be a USSR, you know, right. Oh, God, I was just looking at Wikipedia. You won't believe what I found out. Oh, yeah, there used to be a check. Oh, Slovak. Anyway, so it's nice. But then the thread turns into a bunch of fun, nerdy discussion about punch cards and terminal hardware and software and sort of history tied to that and people talking about their experiences with this or that aspect of it. So there's a bunch of fun, sort of computer history nerdery in there as well. Always

Jessamyn 27:21 enjoy, always enjoy.

Cortex 27:23 So it's a good time.

Jessamyn 27:24 Great. I more often lately, I think we've talked about this, in general, find good metal filter posts or find good, like calm content that winds up has already been on metal filter over in Malta. So in this case, it was cash man, who is match Ken

Cortex 27:45 over on mug shots isn't such a clever. No one will ever be too confusing for you.

Jessamyn 27:51 But essentially, it's a really straightforward article for the players Tribune about like WNBA basketball and like, I'm just not really a basketball person, like, you know, more power to people who love basketball, but it's just I don't know, not my thing. But basically, this was Bradley Beal from the Washington Wizards talking about what Sheryl Swoopes and Lisa Leslie? Ah, I don't remember who exactly. I read it like, you know, weeks ago, basically. But essentially talking about how these women in the WNBA specifically some of them, like it starts off talking about himself and his mother, and et cetera, et cetera. But then talking about these people who are the best players you've ever seen, right? Like how some of these WNBA people are, like, even more than the Michael Jordan of what they're doing, talking about how the WNBA is really kind of different, talking about how women don't get paid. Like everybody knows, like the female players, the players in the WNBA don't make as much money. But one of the things I didn't know that I learned from this, this article was basically they don't even make like the same percentage of player money like like, this was the comment that I made in the beginning, but basically, in the NBA players in the NBA get 50% of the league's total basketball related income. Right? So like you play for a team, the league brings in X amount of dollars, the players get 50% of that in the WNBA it's frickin 25% That's so shitty, right? And so basically, this is a pro NBA player guy, really writing this thing about what makes the WNBA glorious and at the same time being like they're getting this total, like short end of the stick. Yeah, player wise and it was fascinating because I don't normally I don't know that much about it and The woman who is talking about who plays for the mystics, this was before they won the WNBA championship, which then not that many days after this post went up, the mystics went on to win the WNBA championships. So that was just cool. Like a great long form article written by, you know, with a post written by a fan, where you learned a thing that made you appreciate something that maybe was not in your appreciation zone before very cool.

Cortex 30:44 I like this post from AWS 17576. What is about Tarski?

Jessamyn 30:52 username?

Cortex 30:54 AWS 17576? Does

Jessamyn 30:56 that mean something to you?

Cortex 30:58 I think they did an offhand but I think they mentioned it on a user page or in the thread even.

Jessamyn 31:06 Actually page anymore?

Cortex 31:08 Yeah, I'll have to look sometime. But anyway, the point is,

Jessamyn 31:13 do I just do that every time or just

Cortex 31:18 some portion of that. So sorry, it's a post about an interesting math problem and about how finding a solution to that problem involves projecting it into three dimensions. Even though it's nominally just a two dimensional problem that you're trying to solve something on just a flat plane, and then a collection of a few other problems that you can sort of use a third dimension to solve planar geometry problem. So it's just a it's a fun little roundup of some interesting math stuff, with a nice theme. And it's also AWS 17576. Is first post 18 years after they joined the site. Is that? I think it is I think it is, but I'd have to check. But I think it might be. We've had, we've had a few first posts from upwards of tenure users in the last month or two. And I really enjoyed seeing that. But this is definitely like vying hard for the podium, at least if not the gold. So yeah, a very short thread it just like a few of us being you know, happy about math, but but a big achievement and Hey, nice first post newbie, yeah. I'll just see if I can remember why I think I know what their name is about.

Jessamyn 32:40 As far as a semi political posts, not really political, political post, but the welke. I feel kind of like you could just open a thread on basically every Teen Vogue article and have some pretty interesting conversation about it. But I don't know if you remember, last, you know, couple weeks ago when Ellen DeGeneres was like, I hang out with George W. Bush, what's the and it was really interesting, right? Because I think for a lot of people, depending on where you personally stood, you would get a very different message from Ellen DeGeneres saying that, right? Yeah. And so basically, Teen Vogue rights are really good art article about you know, not only like so she said that thing, and then people were making like, kind of jokey videos about it. And then the Ellen DeGeneres machine started trying to take down all those videos, you know, people should be able to say whatever they want, unless they're making fun of me or rich lady, and there was just the wealth made a post with two articles. Really well done. That turned into a pretty decent I think, conversation on metal filter. Yeah, delving into what exactly is sort of going on with with that situation, right, like to me for my particular vantage point, it's like Yeah, well, of course all the fucking mega millionaires are friends with each other. Like that's how capitalism works. That's what's so stupid about America. But like I'm sure everybody sees something different you know, maybe there's like well white people all have to stick together or like famous people all have to stick together or whatever the thing is, and so there's two articles kind of looking into you know, what, what what we can learn what we know about from that, etcetera. Yeah,

Cortex 34:21 yeah. No, that was that was one of the things were like the event itself was enough of the internet sort of media phenomenon. It was like okay, well this is this is gonna get to some discussion on this I probably and so having a actually pretty decent postgame together about it rather than like, you know, jumping to Oh, hey, look at this. Have an opinion immediately. Let's bring up the takes, and having something a little bit you know, couple days later, and a little bit of thoughtful framing, I think did a lot for it being a kind of interesting discussion, which was nice. So good work, everybody. That worked out okay. I liked This post about the Terminator, a theme song to the city make made a post about the the theme to the original Terminator film.

Jessamyn 35:10 How does it go? Sorry?

Cortex 35:12 Didn't didn't didn't? didn't add?

Jessamyn 35:19 Yeah, well, it's

Cortex 35:20 been 13, eights, I think 13 for 13? Is it? Well, okay, so here's the thing, it is 1316, I guess is what I mean time signatures, this is a good thread to read, because it's easy thing to argue about. And because people have weird like, time signatures, or fucking weird rhythm, that's fucking weird. We have a very, very strong basis in American and in general Western pop music towards four, four, or sometimes three, four or, or two in six months. But basically, we know four and we know three and variations on them. And that's kind of what's gonna Yeah, like, like, that's, that's 99% of pop music for the last, you know, 100 years, at least, is that and so parsing out more complicated times, is not, you know, as easy a skill to come by, as you might expect, if you were thinking it was a real fundamental part of like, music. And that is different in other cultures. Like, there's a lot of good discussion in the thread about how folk music and a lot of like, Eastern European countries, for example, or in the Middle East, tend to have more complicated time signature. Oh, yeah. Just as part of the like, it's cuz it's just part of the ongoing folk tradition. Yeah, Romania,

Jessamyn 36:43 Romania, music, all the kind of, you know, good, a little and whatever stuff. Definitely more complicated. Yeah. Yeah.

Cortex 36:51 And part of it is like, you know, 1316 Sounds like a ridiculous thing, right? But really, if you look at the Terminator thing, like, it's three, plus three, plus three, plus two plus two, you know, it's like, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, you can break it down into chunks, and it's much well, you can, you'll get there faster than you get trying to count 13 Anyway, like, you know, you can sort of break it up. Yeah, a little bit of waltz, a little bit of straight mash together, you know, and all of a sudden, you have something that's built up out of smaller, more digestible parts. But at the same time, it is also just kind of a feel thing at the end of the day, and like, you know, you aren't going to be able to, like, count everything out all the time. So you kind of need to feel it. And that's part of like good news, you get used to a weird time signature, and then it becomes normal, like, people got used to listening to take five from the Brubeck quartet. And you don't hear a lot of five in pop music, but you hear more of it than you did before. That record came great, right? Because ultimately, oh, right, you know, and money from Dark Side of the Moon is you know, in seven eight and you know, there's there's examples out there in pop culture of someone to to learn tool does, whatever the fuck they want all the time. Time Signature wise, but yeah, so it was a fun discussion, I enjoyed it. Plus, the team from Terminator is really good. So it's nice to have that be the thing stuck in my head as a result of whatever is going

Jessamyn 38:17 well, and I was doing some traveling this month, I briefly went to and from Florida and I on the plane I watched beware of Mr. Baker, have you seen that about do not know that it's about Ginger Baker. It's a sort of a documentary about Ginger Baker, but it's now available for free on YouTube. And Ginger Baker, you know, the noted drummer for cream and a whole bunch of other bands and just kind of a noted pretty out there dude, in a lot of ways. Part of his whole issue was, you know, he was a guy who played in rock and roll bands, but he was very number one interested in jazz and number two really interested in African music and African drumming, generally speaking, and he actually moved to Africa in his later years. And, you know, he spent a lot of time like in the I don't know what it was 70s 80s Playing with Failla and doing sort of that kind of like Jazzy African drumming, but, you know, listening to him, and he was a noted crank and a lot of ways but listening to him sort of talk about trying to bring more complicated drumming into the world of rock and roll, like, you know, just jazz stuff number one and then number two, sort of more African polyrhythms number number two was was just super interesting and gave me more of an appreciation for why people thought he was such a kind of a singular drummer, which I had never really understood like I thought it was just kind of because he was weird and whatever. And it gives you kind of more of an understanding. I went looking to see a fanfare how to post about it. Because you know, made the rounds a lot more just after he died recently. And no, no posts on fanfare but For people who are interested in odd time signatures, that would be another really good thing. Plus, Josh, I mean, for anybody who's interested in music, fascinating, so fascinating, cool, or any of those sorts of weird rock bands of the 70s 60s and 70s.

Cortex 40:15 Well, and maybe this is going to turn it into something someone posts, but who knows, maybe we're starting something here. Oh, maybe this is like the Velvet Underground of five minute segments of the podcast, it

Jessamyn 40:24 was. It was probably a Ginger Baker. Opet. Actually, speaking of

Cortex 40:29 that seems likely.

Jessamyn 40:31 I'll, I'll noodle around that. Well,

Cortex 40:33 I look at that. I'll talk about a post, you know, why don't you do that? Okay. All right. Another post that I enjoyed, enjoyed is enjoyed. It's a tricky word for this one, because I found it sort of unsettling, it's interesting this, but fizz made a post about as a YouTube video of a robotic hand solving a Rubik's cube. And it's solving it one handed. And it's solving it through a neural network training process. So instead of like, giving this hand a set of very explicit mechanical instructions on how to manipulate a cube, they basically gave it a cube, and told it how to look at the cube using the old computer vision like, you know, analyze images of what's in his hand, and told it what it's trying to get to and said, Okay, go for it, you know, and basically did a bunch of training simulation to get it to figure out what kinds of things it could do to cause the cube to manipulate and eventually get around to solving the cube, which it does inconsistently. But it does it and it has a sort of weird, like, palsy motion to its hand the way it's constantly sort of, in a strange way. And it's uncomfortable. I I've really I had literally a hard time watching it in sort of motion sickness sense. Like it's just there's a constant movement that with my eye tracking it and with a camera being fairly close up. Like it was like, yeah, it was really like it was

Jessamyn 42:05 lights blinking on the ends of its fingers. Yeah. Which also makes it challenging. So yeah,

Cortex 42:12 it's it's genuinely interesting to watch, and it's a neat accomplishment and fizzling. It's more of an explanation about what's going on inside the thread, too. But yeah, I thought it was really neat, and also more unsettling than any other robot stuff I've seen in an odd way. Like it looked more like us sort of parallel organic kind of behavior than, say, a robot dog jumping over an obstacle. As impressive as that is in its own right. You know, that that feels like people doing robots? And this looks like a robot figuring out how to do it. Yeah, yeah. Which I mean, and it's not unsettling in a UI, you know, just like, this is a different looking kind of like, this is what it looks like when instead of trying to make the robot do it, how we want to instruct it to do it, we say figure something out. And it turns out, it can figure out something other than what we would have tended to describe. And that's, it's always, it's always really interesting to see that kind of emergent behavior as part of stuff. You know, this is like a physical mechanical version of weird deep dream, neural network imagery bullshit, where it's like, this is a picture of absolutely nothing, and it's kind of terrifying to look at. While this is, you know, this is a different domain with the same sort of like, okay, well, let's let it figure out how to do it without taking in our aesthetics into account in the process. So I thought that was pretty great.

Jessamyn 43:42 I have found the Ginger Baker obituary, which was hard to find, because basically the only two tags on it were music and cream. Alright, I have added some tags, such as COVID obituary, Ginger Baker and Mr. Baker. But that's the that's the thread if people want to find it and several Steviol Steve, Steve, he'll actually put a link to the YouTube film, right right up near the beginning, which means where I found it and just a lot of people talking about what made

Cortex 44:15 me think evil as it seemed evil. Oh, is it that sounds very badass and also blasphemous so now if it's like no no, it's just evil and also Hey, I'm I'm Catholic be nice. Apologies so

Jessamyn 44:30 Oh, yeah, it's just some letters from his name, huh? Yeah, well, good.

Cortex 44:34 Well, that's my headcanon now anyway, I I enjoyed this post atomized made a post there's a Twitter account called no context JATC which in this case stands for Jack trick checked. Jack.

Jessamyn 44:50 I got your the first Yeah. Anyway, Jack Chick jammed but I don't know why it's GTC.

Cortex 44:57 Yeah, I don't know. Actually. I can't figure it out. Anyway, though the Twitter account just like takes, you know, out of context, right? Like this whole no context thing has been like that feels like the last year or so the last two years that's really blown up as a thing that everybody does now it seems like a startup one off Twitter accounts that do no context something

Jessamyn 45:16 and that's what they're actually called. Like. No, yeah, like,

Cortex 45:18 you'll see like I associated with things like shows like I've seen a lot of like, no context, Brooklyn nine, nine, no context, the good place where it'll be like, one line of dialogue subtitled over a steel frame of, and like out of context, it's a weird funny thing, usually. But this is like the same thing. But for chick tracks. And so the person who runs that Twitter account put up a Tumblr blog just with like, their 50 I don't know necessarily favorite or not, but like 50 notable sudden horrible deaths in chick tracks, which chick tracks and a half. And the interesting thing we like, like chick tracks are weird. And they are a part of a strange combination of religious Kook history and sort of underground comics history, and there's been posts on on chicken chick tracks before. It's interested me to that extent, like, every single time though, like, you know, Jack Chick is dead, these tracks will probably be around for a long time, because they'll keep getting published, but they also they feel like something from a bygone era of pre internet, you know, weirdo evangelism, which they are. Yeah, you know, so the fact that they still get published, that's one thing, but they're also like, their thing that are over and just sort of, so hang on. So more and more, it's going to be the phenomenon that people seeing a bit we'll be seeing it for the first time and there's a couple of people in the thread here like I'd never heard of these before. And it blows my mind because like I learned about these in fucking like high school middle school. Fortunately, not from being seriously evangelized in the process, but you know, it was they were rounds like, oh, yeah, this is, well, this fucking chick tracks. So the idea of someone coming across this brand new is always kind of mind blowing, and sort of like, wow, I mean, you're in for a weird ride because like, fundamentally, at the end of the day, everything else is by about them aside, they're just fucking terrible. Like they're awful, hateful, shitty underground comics evangelism literature, but But what a fucking weird strange vein of that they are so right. Anyway, I thought was interesting sort of revisit that and hear a mix of people talking about being exposed to this shit as kids and also people like not really knowing about this or only coming across it as adults and the weird history of of that whole thing. So yeah, good.

Jessamyn 47:38 I think that may be it for me for Metafilter like I said, I was traveling so was not as interactive as I normally am on that part of the site.

Cortex 47:46 I must mention a couple more in passing because if I'm gonna open the tab I might as well mention it but I won't get into either and they're just both interesting look at one is a post by three John Craig Silverman wrote up thing on how fake ads as such like hidden subscription scams basically work history of like, what why? You see an ad saying you won't believe what happened to random celebrity x and you click on it because like, oh, RAM, select reacts I'm interested in that's a scan this bit of news and it takes you a page that has a like a news article from Fox News or something saying, oh, yeah, random celebrity X was in this situation. Anyway, also, there's this product that they endorse, click through and buy that and it's, it's a fake. It's like literal fake news. It's literally a fake mock up of a boxing page on somebody's website. And it funnels into like, Hey, you can try this exciting product for very cheap or for free or pay for shipping. And you can get this thing for five bucks. And hey, celebrity likes it and you like celebrity, so hey, and then you do that and you get charged or five bucks or whatever. But then like, you know, two weeks later, you get charged $80. And then every month you get charged $80 And you get the stuff in the mail, they're shipping you actual shitty products, but it's very, very hard to cancel. You know, like they that that old scam. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So and so it's just a, it's a big, it's a big write up on some of the history of that, and on a specific company doing it, and sort of how that went up and down. And so that was interesting. It's a it's a good read, but I don't really have much else to say other than Hey, it's a good read. And there is also a kind of fun in a dystopian way thread about random number generators being worthy. How many people are looking at this flight right now type information comes from when you're shopping for a flight. So you gotta look at flight and like, you're like, oh, okay, maybe I'll take this flight to New Jersey. Oh, seven people are looking at this flight right now. Well, I better move on this. So this is almost certainly bullshit. Most of the time you see anything like that, but in one case, it was like very clearly bullshit because security researcher man to figure out that it was bullshit in one specific case. I love it. So yeah, it's an interesting read and fun discussion, too. That was a

Jessamyn 50:11 lot, a lot of math, the math people in there.

Cortex 50:14 That's cool. Yeah, that's metal filter, currently about AskMe Metafilter.

Jessamyn 50:17 Well, we have to start out with this question by gender, which is orca moose predation. How common is this a way for moose to die? Right.

Cortex 50:32 I'm on board. Okay, tell me more

Jessamyn 50:34 well, apparently, together heard or read this somewhere soft factoid? And is like, what? And then people are basically like, No, this is actually not, not only is it not common, it maybe has only happened once or sometime, or like there was an orca that had moose in its stomach once. What have we learned from that? And so it's a pretty short thread, you know, five answers for favorites. But there are people sort of talking about, you know, Anik data versus data, and a couple people cite some actual scientific articles. And it's kind of rare that an asked Metafilter question that asks for numbers, backed up by citations actually receives citations. So yay, team. Also, I enjoyed reading this. It was funny. So thanks.

Cortex 51:37 Yeah. That's a very good premise. You know, sorry, sorry, to the muesli involved, but you know,

Jessamyn 51:43 if maybe hypothetical moves. Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 51:49 I'm not any less sorry. Because it's hypothetical. It's, the moose is really my heart. Now I'm seeing a moose being an Orca. Whether or not it's ever actually happened, you know,

Jessamyn 51:58 right. Now, and I hadn't seen it before this day.

Cortex 52:02 Exactly. Yes.

Jessamyn 52:07 Go on, I can keep on with the Canadian content.

Cortex 52:10 If you keep it up, keep going down. Okay.

Jessamyn 52:11 So there was this question, which is from Sky crashes down, basically, sort of a sad story about trying to get this package and like, there was a Kickstarter, it was laid, and then we moved, you know, blah, blah, blah. We didn't get the email asking, et cetera, et cetera. Long story short, where's our package? How do we figure it out? And you know, a whole bunch of people are, you know, kind of, like, wow. And then basically, a couple hours after posting this, the package turned up in the mailbox. And the sky crashes down comment was I choose to believe me posting this made it happen. You can't convince me otherwise. The end. Yeah. So glad you get your package. Yeah.

Cortex 53:04 I wanted to mention a post from a couple days ago from science geek, saying, hey, I want who gets sort of a spread of music for a winter holiday display. And, you know, try and source that can include, like, you know, Christmas music, but also non Christmas music, you know, this isn't just like a hey, it's Christmas. So we're gonna do this one specific cultural thing. So basically looking for suggestions on a broader variety of holiday music. And potentially, you know, secondary music to bring in to the mix. So it's kind of a good, like, get a wide spread of takes to get a good spread of answers. So let's take the next one.

Jessamyn 54:00 I love lists generating music. Yeah, music theory. It's a fact I may have to add one to my list of things I was gonna mention. I'll have to see if it's already in my list. In the meantime, particularly apropos. Aikman Akemon Akman do not know how Oh Akemon Thank you Aikman for putting that in your profile. It was flatmate and they are having a Halloween party built around the theme or the general mood of Cursed images. I am putting together menu items give me a generally unsettling feel or a certain wrongness but something that will still be tasty for the party. I am hoping that Aikman will follow up at some point with what they wound up doing for their party, but there's lots of links to gross looking food. stuffed mushroom eyeballs, vegan even Oh my God. Oh, those are horrifying. And, you know, the like Kool Aid pickles, deep fried fruit. Trader Joe's creamy pink Primavera pasta sauce, demon pig. It's It's good. It's very good, good thread.

Cortex 55:15 That's nice. Yes. There was, you know this, this is a anonymous post sort of like a difficult discussion. And there's a bunch of good answers in here as a poster basically saying, hey, you know, I found out just now and like, you know, I'm, I'm an adult, I'm, like, 40 or so. And I just found out that when my mom had a liver transplant in high school or junior high, it was not a mysterious illness, it was that she was a serious alcoholic and had gotten cirrhosis for bringing. And this was entirely new to me. And it's changed my whole understanding of a bunch of stuff about my childhood and my relationships.

Jessamyn 56:07 I missed this entirely. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, so interesting.

Cortex 56:11 And so yeah, so it's basically how do I deal with now like, my mom is dead. And I'm just left trying to sort this out after the fact and a bunch of good answers people saying, hey, yeah, like that, or something structurally similar, that, you know, is something I had to deal with too, and sort of talking about what their experiences were and how they process it after the fact. And you know, how they're still processing it potentially. So yeah, it's a really, it was really interesting. Read if, obviously, kind of a heavy one.

Jessamyn 56:43 And it's probably really complicated. I mean, you know, as someone who had a lifelong alcoholic parent who was alive the whole time, like, I would assume the situation Anonymous was in could in some ways be more complicated. Just because there's got to be a bunch of coulda, shoulda, woulda aspects to it. Like, oh, if I had known that, would I have done something different? Would I have processed something differently in my teenage years in my childhood? Would it have caused me to form relationships differently? You know, because for me, it was always like, well, given that, you know, my dad had this drinking problem my entire life. And that affected this, that and the other, I can make my choices with intact information. Right. I knew it. My sister knew what my mother knew. And his wife, you know, knew it, like, you know, wasn't great, don't get me wrong, but like, didn't do it. And it was a fact he knew it. Like it wasn't a secret. And you know, having this be, I wasn't totally sure from this, whether it was a secret, versus just an anon known thing. Because that really is one of the difficulties with, you know, substance abuse problems, or mental illness problems, mental health problems. Because if somebody's got like a physical health problem, in most cases, it's obvious, like you know it, right. But if they've got a mental health problem, you might not know what there's a really interesting asked Metafilter thread about like, hey, you know, I'm someone who suffers from depression, I'm, you know, might have kids someday. Yeah, what should I know about that? And, you know, part of the reason that's such an interesting question is because one of the things you have to decide is whether to tell people or not, right? Or how much to tell them? Or if you haven't told people, is that decision going to change when you have children? And, you know, if you're somebody who is just living, not knowing this about a parent, or somebody who was central to your life, I can imagine that would be really complicated. Like we always thought my mother had like mental health problems that never really got dealt with, or weren't really sure what they were, you know, that makes my relationship with her in some ways, more complicated than my actually more problematic parent, because we just kind of knew what his deal was, you know what I mean? So yeah, yeah, exactly. This is a very, very interesting, I'm very interested. What else you got? I have a couple like, Hey, it's me. Asked me to filter questions. This one in particular, tonight's NCIS, what is going on? Hey, we tuned into NCIS a little bit late and I don't understand a couple things that are happening. And so somebody explained in the first two in the first two comments what was going on? And then the third person who commented with their user, brand new user, this is a one time thing is actually the actress who plays the forensic scientist on NCIS and did not get a best answer for showing up in this thread. To explain that thing, and they're never coming back again. And I really think it's a missed opportunity. But it was very funny.

Cortex 1:00:09 Yeah, no, it's it's beautiful.

Jessamyn 1:00:11 In fact, I hope I mean, I do want to like, sort of put in another plug for people editing the better filter wiki. More. I mean, I know it's kind of a hard like, nobody, I don't know, most people really don't like updating wikis. But, you know, there's this page called, Hey, it's me. Or, hey, that's me. On the on the wiki, which is just, sorry, I'm also looking it up while I'm talking to you. metal filter Wi Fi. Let's try that again. And, and those things are fun, right? Like, they're fun when the person who's the subject of the thing shows up in a meta talk thread, or, you know, the the filter thread or whatever. So that was that was one of them, which I enjoyed, and maybe that person should reconsider handing out their best answers, but maybe not.

Cortex 1:01:04 To be fair. You know, the answer says, hey, those other two answers are right, and those got best answers. So it's kind of an endorsement of that appearance to mark as best the two answers that they said, your reach

Jessamyn 1:01:17 and Josh. Yeah, well. And then this question, which is not necessarily me, per se, but it's user, htm, who has osteoarthritis in their left thumb, and then etc, etc, etc, I've been getting cortisone shots, I can't get cortisone shots anymore. Has anybody had this surgery, and I was like, What the hell, my sister got that surgery and her non dominant thumb this summer. And so she's now you know, three or four months, three months into recovery, and I had lots of information actually, for this person about what their what their, you know, healing. path would be like, so that was, that was good. I mean, basically, you know, htm was a little concerned, like, like, is this gonna cure it? Or is it just a lot of surgery, and then it's just gonna come back, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I was just really happy to be able to help. Because it's great. I think the, you know, I think the prognosis is good. You know, in a general sense. You know, nobody, nobody likes the idea of surgery, especially when me you know, this one, they they relocate the tendons in your arm, like, it's just ridiculous. But then you just never have the problem anymore. You know, they put a little spongy thing in where this bone used to be, and then you're fixed. You know, it's not just like, oh, maybe it's really, it's really kind of good. So I was happy to be able to kind of show up and sort of say that.

Cortex 1:02:51 That's pretty great. I had a couple other that I was gonna mention.

Jessamyn 1:02:57 Hey, that's me. I'm gonna post it into the Ah, yes, that's okay. It's me doesn't get me anything.

Cortex 1:03:07 There's a question from Amphoe. Asking for examples of simple solutions that were wrong.

Jessamyn 1:03:18 Which I love this thread.

Cortex 1:03:21 That's like I again, Lis generating, but instead of songs like concepts and it's, you know, it's one of the things where there's, there's a tendency, like it's inherently somewhat subjective, obviously, like, there's a lot of things that like, simple but wrong solutions, but also probably, in some cases, describing them as wrong. Not complicated, not ugly. But you know, nonetheless, like, you know, there's a lot to lot not to reach there to and say, Okay, well, here's something that yeah, is not the simple truth that it was presented as an act of dawn. And a little bit discussion of a couple of them. And yeah, I thought it was like, it was it was an interesting sort of lateral thinking list generator since like, there's a lot of conceptual territory you can cover. on those grounds. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:04:05 no, I really enjoyed it. It was it was long by the time I even saw it, but it was actually fun to just read through the whole thing and see what the heck was going on. As far as LIS generating, this was the one that I was searching for, and just chuck down. It's by hot chocolate. I really liked fun Poppy feminist songs, share them. My preferences are boring. I like a good beat energy and pop happy to listen to anything. Here's some examples. Couple Lizzo songs and Meghan Trainor songs Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift song, and a whole bunch of people again, they kind of interpret the brief slightly differently. A lot of the songs I didn't know and it was fun to just go through this. Go through this whole thread. A lot of these are amazing videos. I am now completely in love with God, who is it? Some band I'd never heard of before. Sorry. If there's one thing I can't stand, and it's really like one of those, like, you know how some people who just can't listen to people tune with their mouth open or chewing gum, it just makes them irrationally angry. You know, like, it's not just a preference, they just kind of lose their minds. That's the way I am when people ask questions out loud when they're actually asking the questions themselves, but they ask the questions using their mouth. You know, what was I looking at? What was what was because I'm like, I'm right here. Like, I can't check my phone, if you're talking, stop talking. But there's some like pop band from the UK that now I just can't find it all. Maybe I'll think of it and put it in the podcast thread. Where I just never heard of them. All of their songs that I listened to are amazing. They're super poppy and fun. And their videos are great. Like very, like, kind of inclusive. The, you know, all kinds of women are super fun. Women like just I don't know, the whole thread made me happy. And it was it was really great. Now it's gonna drive me crazy little to ban called Little Mix. And they're just to have you heard of them? Nope, they've been around forever. And the fact that I have never heard of them, because they are kind of up my alley.

Cortex 1:06:23 I did see a old voces username answering in there though, which reminded me of another medical post from last month that I thought was cool. Found

Jessamyn 1:06:31 another metal filter posts too. So maybe we can have a little metal filter carve out here. Well, it's

Cortex 1:06:36 they'll they'll never stop us. It was made a post about list from audit, Conan, Conan 20 Black bunkbeds, you should listen to which I have bookmarked as next time I'm doing a dive on music. I don't know. Maybe I just remember that in passing. So that's, that's also great.

Jessamyn 1:06:58 And speaking of the posts that I was actually thinking of is by the blue Ollie, which is oh, well actually, this is asked Metafilter ah, ah, classic theme. Let's bring it back around. classic theme, I can't tell the difference between green and blue anymore. It's grayed out. Essentially, it is the blue oily Ollie oily. Like Ali Ali wants to create an art exhibit of every photograph ever taken of Frederick Douglass with the the link here explains that Frederick Douglass had over 160 portraits of himself taken during his lifetime, because it was a big deal for him. He wanted to acknowledge his humanity. Lots and lots of photographs, you know, and, okay, I want to create an exhibit of every photograph taken. And then radio man he shows up and he's like, Well, how about the book that's linked from the article, Frederick Douglass an illustrated biography of the 19th century's most photographs. Photograph, American and blink Frank blank, Frank blanc blanc frunk. I don't know, basically links to a webpage called Frederick Douglass infoset. IO, which also has I believe, every photograph, or every known photograph of Frederick Douglass. Pretty nice. Pretty cool. Yeah. So yeah, that was asked Metafilter Fuck it. Yeah, and then

Cortex 1:08:26 go I have I have one other asked me to mention I have two more after that. It's literally my own but people made some progress and I'm hoping

Jessamyn 1:08:37 so fun and so maddening. So let's go.

Cortex 1:08:42 The color the actual like regulated like federal regulation, the United States color of don't walk signs, whether it says don't walk or has a hand up. It's varied over time, is specified as Portland orange. And I don't know where the fuck Portland orange comes from. It came up in conversation that someone had found this in a regulations manual. And not explained Of course, like why would say Oh, and that's an interesting aside. No, no, it's it's it's fucking regs. Right? So why is it Portland orange, and I did some searching and was not able to find a good answer that I looked around in like, like Google Books and looking through patents and you can find mentors if ik going back to like the late 50s is I think the earliest I actually really concretely antedated it, but none of what I found explained where it came from, they were just calling it that.

Jessamyn 1:09:34 I spent a lot of time looking at old newspapers. And one of the things I found I don't know if I told you this at the time, was that Portland Grange and Portland orange are essentially the same as far as optical character is concerned.

Unknown Speaker 1:09:47 Yeah, I think Twitter huge.

Jessamyn 1:09:49 Yeah. Yeah. So so much.

Cortex 1:09:52 So that's not so helpful. Yeah, like, OCR is definitely a helper and an enemy in this case, because a lot of stuff that would be searchable only because of widespread OCR projects. Also, they're widespread and they're not going to double check a lot of these things. I'm probably the only person who's looked at in the last couple of years. So but some folks in the thread actually did some good further sleeping people who are better at like digging through archives than I am or getting more out of Google Books. So poche came up with some stuff. interplant Janet found a site for a newspaper article, saying that it didn't come from Portland, Oregon. S Henderson found some more web Mike found some more. And where it is right now is probably the next step. As as Henderson noted in the last comment in that thread currently, is going to a library and looking through some physical copies of things that have been indexed, but not actually like OCR and digitized for reading online

Jessamyn 1:10:56 or at the State Library.

Cortex 1:10:59 Yeah, I could try figuring out if there's like a State Library and I could pick a brain on on it. But yeah, so anyway, that's that's where where it is it definitely I tapped out my basic internet research skills turned as metal filter didn't get like the light shining down from the sky. Perfect answer, but got leads. And hopefully, I or someone else will be able to find some orange

Jessamyn 1:11:27 county library would have.

Cortex 1:11:30 Ah, it's just I should. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:11:33 I librarian should know. And I say that in that kind of won't, but they should. But they might not. Yeah. Oh, well. Try it though.

Cortex 1:11:46 We'll see if that goes further.

Jessamyn 1:11:47 It's free. Yep. All right. I enjoyed ah, fizzes thread about unique road signs from your neck of the woods. Oh, and it's an it's an it's restricted question. Right. It's just about signs, road signs. Not just like I hung up a side on the side of my barn that says bla bla bla bla, bla bla, but like road signs. Yeah. And so it's, you know, because around here, we've got like, Moose crossing and bear crossing. They're not that interesting. But like, you know, you don't see them in a lot of other places. Oh, hey, I got a favorite in this.

Cortex 1:12:23 Oh, man. There's so much in here. I'm excited. This is fantastic.

Jessamyn 1:12:27 Because there, you know, there's all sorts of like, you know, stop for me. It's the claw. That's one of my favorites for Matilda. Ben, I remember that from when I lived in Seattle. And I love that it is still a thing. Like it's just like somebody took a stop for me. It's the law and then put a C on it and then draw drove drove a little drew a little claw on it. In fact, this is a pretty deep cut because Matilda Ben is actually linking to a blog post from 2005. What joy What joy? I totally remember that. And spit. Yeah, it's just a fun, you know, a fun list of a fun list of stuff. Oh, that was it for me, because my last one was amp those post which you already mentioned. Alright. I have a couple others. I have a fanfare thing. Okay, do it. This was the first time so I watched it live for better or worse. And usually, rhizome or someone else makes the Saturday Night Live post. And I like talking about Sarah live because it's a little complicated, right? Like they have some new people Michael Che is often a very sort of contentious sort of joke teller. It's, you know, there's interesting questions about his jokes, he made what appeared to be a fairly transphobic joke or tried to over the weekend, I wanted to talk to metal filter people about it. But nobody had made the post yet. So I actually made one of my first fanfare posts with the Senate live of Chance the Rapper Chance the Rapper, because he was the both host and musical guest. And there's some really interesting discussion actually, in this thread. I thought it was interesting, but you know, other people might have found it aggravating I'm not sure about like, you know, who are some of these jokes for right like there was one sort of People's Court II type type skit called First Impressions court where chance to represent judge and he just kind of people walk in and he decides all his cases in like 18 seconds. Like you're clearly guilty right before anybody opens her mouth. And like for my perspective, it seemed like some of it was kind of this punching down stereotype like he's pointing out kind of the the people of color are the the people that appear to have mental illnesses and be like, you're the one who's wrong, but like from other people's perspective, you know, it was making a slightly more subtle joke about you know, that would be kind of a you know, black comedian makes jokes for sort of people of color, not for me, and there's and some interesting discussion about like, Well, why do you assume all the jokes live are made for you? Why do you think you're the target demo? Is that live, succeeding or failing? If it makes jokes that hit in different ways with different audience members? And it was it was good to read.

Cortex 1:15:14 Yeah. Interesting.

Jessamyn 1:15:16 Yeah. You guys got some updated documentation? Yeah,

Cortex 1:15:23 I

Jessamyn 1:15:24 want to mention that I don't know. Maybe

Cortex 1:15:26 you don't cobbling together my meta talk tabs not. So that was a one nice thing from that's the wrong link. My tabs are all in a confusion.

Jessamyn 1:15:38 I close them. Here we go talk about them. I do

Cortex 1:15:41 too. But I was lining up the meta talk once and then they've got them in the wrong order and copied the wrong URL bar. Anyway, yes, we couple weeks ago, we put up some significantly revised or in one case, brand new bunch of site documentation re reworked the new user page that you hit when you click on sign up, if you're not signed in member of the sites, and reworked the join page that comes after that a little bit to try and make those clear about like, what to actually expect and what sort of like the main roadblocks that we see coming up over and over again, from brand new people on the site, we rewrote the guidelines to actually be coherent sort of site guidelines page, because for a long time, Matt, liked Yeah, what's a good and bad posts, like there were there were sort of nods to behavior stuff a little bit on the old guidelines, but it was like kind of in passing, but also, here's some advice on how to make your post, right, you know, people, people can figure out how to make their post, okay, you know, we should talk about like, behavioral expectations in the internet as it exists right now. And the idea that there are a bunch of things you should be thinking about,

Jessamyn 1:16:49 assumed you're gonna treat one another that may be different from maybe how it is on other sites.

Cortex 1:16:55 Yeah, exactly. So like talking about, like, what the behavioral expectations are, and then figuring, you know, if you haven't trouble, specifically, post formatting, we could work that out later. That's not the most important thing to say about, you know, what the guidelines of the site are. And we wrote up a new page outlining sort of briefly outlining the concept of microaggressions, and talking about some of the common microaggressions folks have identified as sort of recurring issues on the site, and given a sort of brief write up on those to give people an idea that, hey, these are things that actually they happen, they matter, it's a problem that they keep recurring. And, you know, folks need to make themselves aware of them and avoid perpetuating that behavior. And talking more generally, to about just kind of the impact of having, you know, cultural majority or, or culturally dominant groups, taking up outside space in discussions and being aware that if you're a member of one of those dominant groups, so that you can actually do more than just not mean harm, and actually make a little bit of an active effort to create space for other folks, and but less well represented and marginalized voices, you know, have have some space. So sort of talking through that stuff, but it's just stuff we've talked about a bunch in meta talk and, you know, in, you know, contextually and threads on the blue, over the years, but putting it somewhere in an organized referenceable space, feels like a good step forward, as far as making it clear that these things are explicitly part of what it means to participate on medical two, rather than something we just sort of talked about in oral tradition

Jessamyn 1:18:27 with you and mods are gonna start assuming people are gonna stick in line with those expectations a little bit more. Yeah, we're gonna start doing things a little differently. Not a lot differently. But I mean, in some cases, I'm aware this is just getting in line with how you've already been as

Cortex 1:18:46 Yeah, like documenting it clearly. So people know that that's what the expectations are does matter. Like, it's one thing to say, Okay, well, this is stuff we're already trying to focus on. But letting people know, outside of just firsthand experience with an instance of us doing it, you know, makes a difference. So yeah, so it feels like a good start, we've got a bunch more we want to do and we got some good feedback on the details of some of these. They'll let us do some revision passes as we go along. But it's nice, it's nice to have some forward moving on that there's also on a much smaller scale, but kind of a nice thing to be reminded to revisit signal asked about using non ASCII characters in tags for posts, which is a thing that you haven't been able to do and something that like back when it was last looked at years ago PB found the situation was it is going to be very difficult to do it basically. Things have improved in terms of support in various ways that symbol would be will explain much better than me if they were inclined to.

Jessamyn 1:19:49 So it's not just a new attitude situation. It's not just a can do attitude. Oh, no,

Cortex 1:19:55 no, I think I think it was it was it was a can't do situation for reasonably speaking. And it's Sounds like it's doable now. So fumbles working on expanding significantly the character sets of portable, there's no there's, we can't just throw the gate wide open on every UTF eight UTF eight character because there are things that would break.

Jessamyn 1:20:14 Well, I remember fake Matt, how we back in the day, right? Yeah, using UTF eight characters, you could make user names that were functionally the same. And you can still do that in URLs. I've seen people like fake apple.com URLs using allowable URL characters. And it's, it's scary, right? Because it looks like a PP le dot Colm to your eyeballs. But there's actually something slightly different happening with character encoding.

Cortex 1:20:39 Yeah. And that's, that's, that's, that's always the trade off with this sort of thing is like, you have to figure out like, what's the acceptable amount of high jinks allowed? And like in the text of a comment? You know, it's a behavioral question more than a structural question. But in something that gets used as data like tags do, you know, it becomes more of an issue to control that somewhat? Anyway, good news is it sounds like we will be able to significantly open up the character set supported in tags, pretty soon now. Work in progress. So that's nice. A couple things to mention as well. Julian has done organized a secret concert gift swap for years now is looking for folks to help take that over, because they just do not have the bandwidth right now, to do it again this year.

Jessamyn 1:21:25 Thanks, Julian. Thanks for all your hard work. Yeah, it's

Cortex 1:21:27 like it's a really, really a fantastic amount of work just for the sake of making this happen as a totally volunteer thing. So passing it on to someone else is an entirely understandable deserved thing to do. And if you think you might be interested in helping out with that, check out the metadata thread, because I think they've got a pretty good collection of volunteers come together. But you know, it's, it is a bunch of work. It's a bunch of work. And having people able and willing to do that is what makes this crazy thing happen every year. So yeah, check it out. If that sounds like that is up your alley. And it's put your name months, there was poster animal month, last month, month before where people were posting posts the front page about animals that were in their usernames, and so orange dinosaur slide, put a post up early in this month in meta talk saying, hey, let's do it again. But just your name. So all of us without animals in our names can participate more easily. And people have been doing that. And it is once again very enjoyable. Great. I love it.

Jessamyn 1:22:32 And that's about it. I just wanted to note this post from today. Oh, yeah, basically by pro Gasc, according to Popular Mechanics, which is still a website, and all their old magazines are on the internet, which is cool. Men filter is one of the 50 sites that quote made the internet what it is today, unquote, kind of nice, and it's just kind of a chatty blah, blah, blah thread. I mostly mentioned it because oh God, who was it? Ah, oh my god, it's me doing a terrible thing. I am sorry. Oh, the second comment is I feel like metal filter is one of the sites that has done all it can to prevent the internet from becoming what is today, which has two completely orthogonal readings. And I read it at first, like, and fuck you metal filter. And then and then I was like, why is it favorited 50 times this Can't I must be missing something and then read it again with my charitable glasses and figured out like, Oh, right. Most people think the internet of today is garbage. Given that this comment makes total sense. So I appreciated that sorry, skewed and read your thing wrong. Beginning and hey, congratulations. That's kind of cool.

Cortex 1:23:49 Yeah, no, I saw this. I saw this list. I think earlier in the day yesterday, before I met a talk, I'd seen it just somewhere else. And someone had shared it was like, Oh, hey, that's a pretty good list. I was like, Oh, I'll go take a look. I'm curious to see what someone put together there. And like it's not that I was thinking you know, this isn't a good listen, let's Metafilter ends up on it. But like I got down to Okay, now you're doing it. Okay. Good job was like I was gonna read it with interest anyway, but it was very nice to see Metafilter show up on it. Yeah. Yeah, that was fun. Yeah. I'm gonna do a metal filter half minute because I got to close out real quick here but I wanted to mention to be I Do I Do. Congratulations. Yeah, yeah, no, go me right. Three, three songs. I'm going to feature in the facility to get them edited in chords and gourds which is some nice acoustic stuff from carrot adventure. A new flame, which is from Sredny Vystar revisiting an older song from a few years ago, and invocation which is a nice kind of driving piano electronica thing from wolf duck. So you'll hear those in the episode and that's the half minutes

Jessamyn 1:24:59 Josh Go do work. It's been so great talking to you. Likewise. Thank you for this box of stuff. Thank you to everybody. And yeah, Janelle is address. I sent her a thank you card. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, everybody. Go do some work.

Cortex 1:25:18 Yeah, everybody get back to work and thanks. That's, yeah,

Jessamyn 1:25:21 that's the title, everybody.

Cortex 1:25:26 I'll talk to you next month. Okay. All right. Happy Halloween.