Podcast 158 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 158: Keep Them Scrollwheels Scrollin', Though The Browser's Slowin' (2019-12-03).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Jessamyn 0:01 But you'd be like I take you in there but you can't take pictures or put it on social media yeah

all right that's fair. Willing willing trade off. Sorry we're recording Yeah well

Cortex 0:15 that's what that's what the the one edit I will make on every episode is where

Jessamyn 0:21 all right we're recording wait now

Cortex 0:24 we're wanting all kinds of things well, this, this this post payroll payroll has gotten away from us now. Let's do an actual podcast. This episode. Yes. Let's just say all the words in the intro at in random order at the same time I named welcome 150 cortex 188. Yes, damn it. I screwed up the bit by saying the wrong number. Welcome to Episode 158 of the Medicare monthly podcast. I am Josh cortex Mullard. And I'm Jessamyn and here we are. Here we are on December the second Sunday afternoon. What? That's Sunday in Portland.

Jessamyn 1:26 I haven't seen the sun in days.

Cortex 1:28 Yeah, well, it's kind of in the same here. It actually snowed a little bit this this morning. About our

Jessamyn 1:33 snow. No, my sister got 10 inches of snow between last night and this morning. That's a lot

Cortex 1:37 more than we got. Yeah. And there was a slushie on top of the car

Jessamyn 1:42 that Jim and Jim were driving down in New York. So oh my god, not great. Yeah. But we got like five inches here. It's always funny when Massachusetts gets more snow than we do. But I haven't seen the sun in days. But I have a box that mimics the sun in my house now. Haha. And it is surprisingly great so far. I

Cortex 2:04 don't have like a big, big, big day light lamp.

Jessamyn 2:08 Yeah, I mean, basically, I was kind of looking at like, you know, seasonal affective disorder lamps online, just to see, you know, maybe that would help. Kind of we're really far north up here. And you know, it's hard to tell with anything, right? Like, is this a scam? Is this a real thing? You know, you can buy like a cheap shitty one for like $11. But then like the big ones, which don't look that much better than the cheap, shitty ones cost $500. And I don't know if anything will do anything. And so my sister was like, Oh, I got one in the basement. And then she gave me the one she has. And it's like a big cabinet. Like it's a, I feel like it's big. It's maybe 18 inches by like a foot or something. And you turn it on and it glows like the sun. And it's stuff pretty great so far. So you know, we'll see if I wind up feeling less, sort of, wrung out by February than I usually do. But it's fun. I just get to turn it on when I'm using my computer. And it's like it's not perpetual nighttime here. Because this I think I mentioned every month my place is kind of snuggled into a hill. Yeah, the sunsets here about 230 and 1030. Yeah, not really enough daylight.

Cortex 3:20 Well, and like you say you're pretty far north. But Portland actually a little bit farther north than Randolph if I remember. Right.

Jessamyn 3:25 Josh, now's no time for competitive stuff. Well, no, no, no, I

Cortex 3:28 just, I mean, in terms of like, the sense of what it occurred to me because I went up to you know, we went up to Canada for a, the the wedding the wedding happened with Gerald and, and Steve's their wedding. And that was like earlier in the year and just have that. It's stayed light later than I expected. And it's oh, wait, it's during the summertime when you you're up in like farther north and latitudes. It's longer days. Not sure. I just like part of my brain that is like, Oh, if we go north, and like, of course it would like you know, the sun. Yeah. Which like, no, that doesn't work that way. But yeah, I don't know. I guess I've just been thinking about like latitudes and being north of the equator, lately. Or south, or south. But I haven't been spending any time south of the equator. So there's a trivia question about the equator.

Jessamyn 4:23 Yeah. Did you get it? It was basically like, you know, Ecuador is on the equator. And then there's also two other countries in South America.

Cortex 4:31 Yeah. And what was it Brazil and Colombia was?

Jessamyn 4:34 Well, I was gonna pose it as a question to our listeners. But yes, that is correct. Well,

Cortex 4:39 the chance Belka you didn't have to say that I was correct because I might not have been maybe yeah, it the equator is farther down into South America than my brain wants to put my brain wants to run the equator through the fucking Panama Canal. No, that's not true. Like instead I nudged it down to like the very top of like, mainland South

Jessamyn 4:58 geography and show it Yeah, lots of points for that. So I was very happy. Otherwise, not doing so great.

Cortex 5:05 I got a math question wrong and got zero points and knew I was getting it wrong. So I'm just going to get what you meant suspect I could have guessed that, but I really don't like I don't spend enough time think about trapezoid is to think of an isosceles triangle.

Jessamyn 5:19 And you always it's kind of great to get math questions wrong because that way you get your zero on that. And then you get points for something else.

Cortex 5:25 Maybe you got right. Yeah, except for I did I've been having not a very good season.

Jessamyn 5:29 Now. I am not also, like I said, Jim kind of went up on level and it's been lonely without him. And I'm not doing very good. In my own level. I have I have some, some learned league dish for people with just a little bit, just a tiny amount. It's nothing super fun other than I think Mick Mulvaney is still in the fucking. But the other thing is that, so right now there's like, I don't know, 7577 different, you know, leagues like we're in Aurora. And there's also other Centennial Memorial, blah, blah, blah. Well, Centennial was actually the thing. They're gonna basically cap it at 100. So in the next year or two, when we hit 100 different individual groups. For stun, the guy who's in charge is actually going to stop letting people refer people and just let it kind of achieve a kind of stasis. So it's like basically like, you know, when Metafilter, close signups for a while. Yeah. And they're going to have it capped at 100 groups. Hopefully, the last group will be called centennial. That was going to be the, the hope of the learned league naming Committee, which I am on. And yeah, so it's not that dishy, but like, I thought that was pretty interesting. So get your friends in there now because at some point, you won't be able to.

Cortex 6:55 This is your last chance to screw up the mix.

Jessamyn 6:58 Yeah. Yeah. And then after that, I don't know how they're going to be getting other people in. Have we talked about Metafilter yet?

Cortex 7:04 Not really, let's do that. Let's talk about metal filter, sorry, you know, five minutes. There's a certain amount of metal filter enthusiasm for learned leagan such stuff. So you know, and then hey, maybe you get people excited about like doing there. You know,

Jessamyn 7:18 definitely a lot of overlap. And if you've been thinking about joining joining learning Lake now would be a good time.

Cortex 7:24 Yes. So let's talk about jobs. Let me first talk about let me first talk about the

Jessamyn 7:30 job we talked about last time. Yeah. Which now I'm trying to find, of course, because that's good radio.

Cortex 7:40 Probably we closed it. Right. And probably they filled it. Yeah. So.

Jessamyn 7:44 So basically, in the the notes, I think for the last podcast or two podcasts ago, there was a kind of a late comment of somebody, I'll find it while I'm talking. Basically, I'll find it I can find Okay, basically saying, Hey, I had that little job for somebody who could get me a ticket to see this show in I believe it was Japan. And hey, thanks to you mentioning my job on the podcast. I got hooked up with other person and they got me tickets. Oh, BT freak. BT freak said, Hey, as a direct result of my job being on the podcast, I got to meet Dr. Fedora, hung out and went to the show. Here's a picture of me grinning like a loon. And so that wasn't even the last podcast it was two podcasts ago. Yeah. So happy to you know, continue to mention it if you need a little bit more oomph in your job. You know, Josh and I can be negotiated with two

Cortex 8:46 screens. We can

Jessamyn 8:49 but I'm just so I'm just so happy that worked out because you know, that's fun when it works out.

Cortex 8:54 Yeah, that's that's that's that's just the thing of which method that is looking for some help with eBay involving an Italian seller. So basically, if you're in Italy and want to take delivery of an eBay purchase and put it in in the mail to the US matter that would very much like to have you help with that. So yeah, that's one that's

Jessamyn 9:27 yes. Anybody in Italy or if you happen to be in Austin, Texas, Dallas, Texas. The partner of microwave is looking for somebody to fill a sales associate job at a museum. Part time he says regular full time.

Cortex 9:54 Folks, excellent radio.

Jessamyn 9:56 I just read it backwards. Sometimes I have to read into Talk Have you ever have those things happening? So at any rate, it doesn't require a lot of experience a little bit of sales experience, but it's a really nice kind of high end Museum and they're having a hard time finding someone to fill it. So if you are in the Dallas area, that would be a really good place to go looking. The job has been open since September, so they're motivated.

Cortex 10:21 Excellent. Tatiana wishbone is looking for help putting together an ad style double exposure for a family holiday card. So if you're a photo editing, or photo composing, I suppose type of brain and, you know, help me out with that. That's probably somewhat of the essence now that we're hitting December.

Jessamyn 10:46 Yeah, I thought that would probably be fun and aren't okay is looking for a little bit of social media help. They basically want somebody to help them get an Instagram and maybe some LinkedIn and some other stuff for the artists who show work at their Airbnb guest house. So it looked like kind of an interesting job. Pretty straightforward, doesn't pay a lot but pocket money. And you could do some social media stuff and also get some exposure, but also money and exposure.

Cortex 11:18 Also, they would like someone to pick up a small heavy table on Long Island.

Jessamyn 11:21 That one, maybe we record the last one.

Cortex 11:25 I don't think we'd hit it. But maybe we had an armor. We're not repeating that. But boy, gosh, if someone can pick up that small, heavy table, get on it.

Jessamyn 11:32 Unless you're planning a road trip to the West Coast.

Cortex 11:36 If you want to drive drive a table cross country because like why wouldn't you given the opportunity? I feel there

Jessamyn 11:41 are so many questions about like, the mail and shipping like you could probably do part of a job just driving around moving metal filter people stuff in or automobiles around. Yeah. I hear you scrolling.

Cortex 12:03 Yeah, sometimes I'm queuing up the next thing I'll be reading your mouse has a sound. Yeah, no, it's it's you know, I've had it for a while if you like the mouse would maybe got a little bit louder over time. A little bit of that, you know, thing to it.

Jessamyn 12:16 I cleaned out my tech cabinet. I don't know if you saw my pictures that I put up yesterday. That's fine. But oh my god, I have this like rolling tool chest. And it's just full of all my extra sloppy technology. So that stuff doesn't take up like space in the rest of my house. But like, I don't clean it out that often. Because it's in the back. Why would you but I've gotten to the point where it's just the basket of like to be filed cables was overflowing, and it was just a disaster. And I couldn't deal with it. So I cleaned it out, put a couple pictures up on social media. But one of the things I found was not only did I have like, you know, mice, like some mice, which you would expect, right? Like some mice. I also had an incredible number of like wireless routers, like, like seven, eight. Why I've lived in like one place, I think I had like a router that broke. I think I've had loaner routers that I gave to other people. And then I guess I've just been like sticking them in drawers maybe people gave them to me, I'd literally have no idea. But that was like the biggest kind of thing I got rid of. And then like, you know, my weird hobo friends get on social media. And they're like, hey, I need one of those cables.

Cortex 13:33 You still got still got some of those you still got those things have been sitting in drawer unused for years.

Jessamyn 13:37 Right? And you know, more power to it. But I'm like, Well, what do you need? Well, here's kind of a crappy picture of kind of my laptop. And I'm like, Oh, just come over. So we'll see. But I am getting rid of a whole bunch of like, cables and maybe broken but probably not broken wireless router. So I'm very excited about that. And a mouse with a scroll wheel, I got rid of all my little like white button. Apple mice, the old ones because they were never very good. And the scroll balls always kind of slightly disappoint you. Like they sort of work. And like I'm one of those behaviors people wear something sort of works. I'm just going to keep fighting with it forever. Whereas if it's broken, I'll actually get rid of it. But it kind of works like oh my god my humidifier. So I just needed to get rid of them and not continue to struggle with them.

Cortex 14:25 Which also you know, life in general like

Jessamyn 14:31 Bay fate. Yes. Yeah.

Cortex 14:32 Yeah, I was I had a thought that I lost. Oh, the mouse wheel thing. Yeah, I'm scrolling because I I'm sort of like pipelining the next thing in for podcast discussion, which is something that like, in my ideal like world, like that's not a thing I would I would not spend any time during the podcast putting attention to queuing up. The next thing I'm going to talk about on the podcast.

Jessamyn 14:59 You and I are different Aren't people Josh? I have all my tabs open before I get on the line with you

Cortex 15:05 well, and that's the thing like I could do that right and I think

Jessamyn 15:08 it's just the way of telling me you've started taking Strattera Strattera. It's like add medicine. Ah,

Cortex 15:15 no, I have not. You know, check in with me. We'll see I've been I've been thinking about like, third possibility. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I've never I've never done any medication for any kind of brain stuff. And I'm like, starting like, well, maybe maybe, like, seeing if that would help with things that I find challenging.

Jessamyn 15:37 Pills, so we can talk about it sometime.

Cortex 15:39 So we'll see. But not nothing at the moment. Nothing to report there at the moment. Sorry. I

Jessamyn 15:43 didn't mean to buttonhole you on that topic.

Cortex 15:45 She's got my back. No, I mean, I did like I went to therapy this morning. And then podcast ever noon. So it's a very, like, you know, talk therapy sort of thing. Tomorrow, okay, good. work through issues from the podcast. My co host, I

Jessamyn 16:03 swear to God, it's just a time in my life that is just joyous. And I have no complaints about actually can I just tell

Cortex 16:09 you, that's that's a good place to be? Yeah. That's a nice. That's a nice.

Jessamyn 16:13 I mean, we get along. I like talking to you. We've been doing this a million times. It's great. That's the end, you know, yep. The plow is here. So hopefully, it's not making. It's not making too much noise. I can only tell because there's basically this strobe light blinking off the snow in the backyard. And I was like, it's the end times I was like, oh, no, it's the plow guy.

Cortex 16:35 I was getting on a call with someone like, last week at some point and like five minutes before we dialed like, my neighbor apparently has rented a chainsaw for us.

Jessamyn 16:45 This has happened to us before.

Cortex 16:47 It's a different neighbor every time like, just different people decide to take down a tree. Well, yeah, but I mean, at the same time, yeah, I live in the city residential area. Like,

Jessamyn 16:56 I understand that you have a neighbor to your left neighbor to your right. That's it for neighbors, but their blocks,

Cortex 17:00 you know, there's 1010

Jessamyn 17:03 I get where you are.

Cortex 17:04 I mean, the noise, the noise from a chainsaw is gonna carry more than just from next door is the thing like anybody within a two block radius who runs a chainsaw for an hour.

Jessamyn 17:12 In Vermont. You don't hear chainsaws anymore. But I take your

Cortex 17:16 point. Anyway. What the fuck?

Jessamyn 17:20 Tell me how that yard cat is doing? Oh, it's doing good, good.

Cortex 17:24 Good mom. Cats do nice. She hasn't let me like pet her. She's still a little bit fearful for that. But like she'll tolerate me being a half a foot away while she eats so

Jessamyn 17:35 but you were gonna talk about something else

Cortex 17:37 I was gonna get I was talking about pipelining. Like the whole idea of like, Oh, I didn't load things up. Because I've been reading like I've been reading through a book on old x86 architecture, like the, you know, 3d, 646, Pentium, etc. all the way back to the old 88 and whatnot, which I don't really know a ton about, like, you know, I didn't I studied computer science in college, but I didn't really study hardware at all.

Jessamyn 18:00 One. Why would you like, especially nowadays, you can have a very fulfilling life in computers. And sure, yeah,

Cortex 18:07 like, there's no reason. It's it's kind of interesting stuff. But also not interesting enough that I've spent a whole lot of recreational time on it. So I'm just reading this book right now. And one of the things that talks about, what's it called? I don't even know, it's by a guy named I think, Michael abrash. And it was written in early 90s, maybe mid 90s. I got to it via some link in a thread in a Metafilter discussion about something programming or graphics related, it might have been actually a comment in a post I made this last month that just sort of went off in a different direction about something then of assembly language. That sounds right. Or that or another similar book by the same guy. Yeah. But yeah, so it's just it gets really deep, like deeper than I'm actually personally interested in, in some of the details of x86 assembly language, but he writes about it in an interesting way that I can get something from in terms of him talking about how the pieces work together, and how making code actually,

Jessamyn 19:08 optimization. Probably, that might be it. Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 19:12 And one of the things that he talks about is the way Intel put out these, these processors, and they put out documentation for them. But the documentation sort of said what it should require to accomplish something. So like a, you know, computer processor, it's got a bunch of low level instructions for doing things like adding numbers, copying memory around multiplying things, doing logical operators, like AND, OR and NOT. And each of these things has an associated cycle costs were like, literally, you know, 4.7 megahertz processor can do 4.7 million operations per second. So the cycle cost is like, you know, one of those 4 million cycles is like, okay, it's gonna take one thing

Jessamyn 19:56 does 100 things it's less costly than I think that does 10,000 things, right? So optimization you both of them in no time in human time, the processor,

Cortex 20:08 yeah, so depending what you're doing, it may or may not matter whether you optimize that. But if you do really need to optimize it, like if you really need to get as much done as possible, you want to think about those little details. And so Intel's documentation might say, okay, it takes two seconds to do this, or two cycles, rather, to do this operation that moves this memory from the spot to that spot. And that was what it said in the manual. And so you could read the manual and say, Okay, well, I write this assembly language program using these commands, these instructions in this order that it's going to take not to put it into the 10 cycles to do this. So I know I can do this 400,000 times a second successfully and my coder run fast enough, because I need to do it that many times, and then everything will work great. And in practice, that doesn't really work necessarily, because there's moving parts. And one of the moving parts involved in that is the instruction fetching process, where every time the CPU wants to execute another instruction, it actually has to find out what that is by reading it from the program memory essentially. And like, put that into the the CPU and then execute it. And the amount of stuff that can live in that that pipeline of instructions coming in at the CPU, that pipeline only moves so fast, and you can only fill it up so much very, very little on the oldest processors you could like, like grab eight instructions ahead of time to have queued up to pull up quickly. So like the buffer, yeah, it's basically a small buffer to keep things moving on quickly. And so as much as anything, a lot of that optimization at that level would be managing the balance of executing stuff, and also fetching stuff into that buffer to keep it in the stocked up. And so keeping that pipeline going so that there's never a break. Yeah, so like, it's not just saying, Oh, I know what I need to do, I need to add these two numbers and then divide this one and then copy it to that spot, it's knowing how to do that in a way that will let the buffer work in the same time and keep that pipeline flowing. And anyway, it's been really interesting to read if also kind of dry at times, but like, I've also been thinking about pipelining a little bit more just like in random contexts, like when I find myself like scrolling through projects while we're talking about jobs, trying to like keep everything and as a result of how mass flow they've done this there hasn't been a 10 minute break between first started scrolling and when we got around to talking about projects because that's that's how efficiently I pipelined that whole situation

so yeah, you're talking about projects.

Jessamyn 22:57 I saw some projects that I liked I and again, we encourage people if you did a thing please put it on project because it's always fun to see people's things. So I liked story tam they wrote an article for Otto straddle, basically about the drag kings of Taipei and then their own sort of feeling as a diaspora kid of sort of interacting with that it is a very cool it's very cool sort of from the inside look at you know, I know a little bit about Dragon culture but not that much and this was just super interesting. And it has one of my favorite things in like articles that I read about click cultures that I don't really know about, like look if you're interested in this here are some drag kings you can follow here's where you can go see them here is more stuff you can read about them because that's what I always want right like when I like listen to a podcast that I love I then want to go and learn everything about that topic for like a couple hours you know and yeah if there's something I can go and learn more about it terrific if not add the mood might pass or whatever or maybe I'm not going to go on my own or maybe I want somebody's curated like this fucking light box right like I don't know that much about light boxes everything online seems like a scam trying to sell you something I really just wanted to like get somebody else's curated information about those things.

Cortex 24:31 Satellite bucks that may or may not have made it into the podcast in the pre

Jessamyn 24:35 I got a new lightbox lightbox that we were talking about earlier,

Cortex 24:40 but you know I totally feel you they're like I like it like it's it's always nice when there is sort of like an immediate like, Oh, check this out. Oh, check that out. Tied into something it's just there's that much more to the experience at that point. Like it really feels like not just own interesting thing but sort of like the start of like a Good, good old fashioned rabbit hole, which is always nice when what you want is a rabbit hole.

Jessamyn 25:05 Yeah, and I don't stay in rabbit holes for too long. And like, I don't know if we were talking about this on the last podcast, but like, I just suddenly hit an age where like, I feel like what I want to do is go deeper into the things I already know and care about not learn a little bit about a whole bunch more stuff within reason, right? Like I like learning stuff, in a general sense. And trivia is kind of one of my categories. But as well, I'm not looking for like a whole new hobby. But they do like to learn about things other people are into. And it's hard sometimes to kind of draw that line, you know, somebody's like giving you a book or something. And you're like, that's a little more than I'm looking for. But I would like to read a couple more long form articles. But then I'm actually done. Like, I'm not

Cortex 25:50 good. Sometimes it's enough to just kind of find out about something like, Oh, this is new to me. Now, I know that this exists. I know a little bit about this that I didn't before. And also, this doesn't have to be what I'm doing this month.

Jessamyn 26:00 And like my local drag king friends might be really interested if they hadn't read it already about the drag kings of Taipei. But for me, hey, I could maybe follow one or two drag kings on Instagram now that I know a couple that are good that have been pre curated. Great. That's awesome.

Cortex 26:18 There was a couple things I've really dug this month. Oh, you, not you but user, you use her y O W.

Jessamyn 26:27 Love that username.

Cortex 26:30 It's pretty good. They made an AI dictionary twitter bot, which does more. It does. I don't know enough about like, I know all the open AI stuff. But basically, it it attempts to create, provide definitions of words based on existing knowledge base stuff, and I'm guessing some sort of neural network, but it looks

Jessamyn 26:55 like it has a wrong setting and a normal setting. Am I reading that properly?

Cortex 27:00 Yeah. And so like, I think if you use the normal setting, it would like given a prompt to try and provide you with like useful definitional information about that thing. But it can also not try and get it very right. And I don't know exactly how that works. But what it comes down to is they have a twitter bot, that provides a bunch of just keeps posting new definitions of words. And the definitions are varying from a little bit off to just absolute fucking nonsense. Just like free association on the

Jessamyn 27:29 metal filter thread, ran metal filter through it a number of times, and got different answers. And that made them happy.

Cortex 27:37 Yeah, I really like I like the concept. I think it's a great use. I love this sort of like use of a simple tool and a simple idea to like, create a thing that feels very concrete. And this is like a great example of doing that I really liked their Twitter feed too, because they are using images of entries. I don't even know if they printed some out and took photos, I'm assuming what they're actually doing is just generating the look of printed page, just as a wholly digital image based on the output, but like, it looks like a dictionary entry. And look, it sounds like that. It sounds like someone being excited the first time they see like, you know, a photograph or something. But like there is a lot of fucking visceral charm in like making output that also looks like an artifact. And so that I think it's that much more effective looking at the Twitter feed that it's not just these weird definitions, but these weird definitions with this however simple, like feel of you know, a real book, it's, it's just a nice little detail. But yeah, I like that kind of hyperlinks.

Jessamyn 28:40 Glorious. I love it. Simon W made a niche Museum website, which I love for a number of reasons. One, there's a ton of museums. And he posts a museum every now and again, and puts them up on its sort of niche museum site. So that's one thing. But then as well, the source code is all on GitHub. So that's kind of great. And the other thing is you can use your location and find tiny museums near you. If you does it work? Of course it doesn't work. Is it? Of course,

Cortex 29:25 as long as it's not a Dunkin Donuts,

Jessamyn 29:27 yes, but at any rate, finding tiny museums near you so that you can not only kind of play along, like on the first page of this is great, like columbarium like, you know, place for ashes in the Neptune society in like right in the middle of San Francisco, who knew I had no idea. It's amazing. I'm completely into it. And you know, once I can turn off all of my privacy settings and make this thing work, then I can go find little tiny, cute museums near me, I hope and they're all All over the place like, you know, the front page has like Gloucestershire and France and Oakland, California and the United Kingdom and some weird lamp and Santa Monica. And Deutschland Cleveland, Ohio, Argentina. So you know, Arizona cactus garden. dollhouse Museum. This is just so great. Yeah, that's awesome. A sound art event presented weekly since 1967. In San Francisco. Just great. Great. Great. Great. So very good. Thank you, Simon. W why I like to do metal filter. Ah, that's what I'll do this afternoon.

Cortex 30:36 Haha. Man. I had something I was thinking about posting yesterday. Was it too weird for? And I told Angela about it. And she was like, no post that. Obviously, it's too weird posted. Like that's perfect.

Jessamyn 30:47 For websites complicated. There's also a Twitter.

Cortex 30:51 Next, yes. I like this slightly off brand, use of projects to float an idea for New York Review of Books discussion group. The TED is just trying to sort of see if people are interested in trying to do something that has a different sort of organizational thing than hey, let's just post up on fanfare I think we're looking more for trying to put together a, like self contained book, discussion group. Oh, great. Yeah. I'm curious to see how that goes. I don't know. I don't know how well projects is going to work for a staging ground for that. But I say fuck it, give it a try. So that's why I put it through it said fuck it. Let's go to drink. Yeah,

Jessamyn 31:30 I think that's a good idea.

Cortex 31:31 If you're into that, go take a look at that. And

Jessamyn 31:34 our friend, Max Sperber, aka old timey Astro zombie has a little newsletter if you're somebody who enjoys little newsletters, and or max barber and just want to get more from him, because man, he is great on Twitter. This is probably something you would like. I haven't subscribed yet. I will subscribe right now. Ooh, several times per week, maybe I won't. Maybe I will. Alright, I feel like all of a sudden, a whole bunch of my, like people in my kind of general area slash atmosphere have newsletters, whereas I was not as aware that everybody

Cortex 32:16 had a newsletter before. It's kind of it's kind of hitting right now. It's definitely

Jessamyn 32:19 substack I think is really getting their stuff out. MailChimp has made it a lot easier to do sign ups and that kind of stuff. I have a newsletter, by the way. Yeah, it's

Cortex 32:30 just about to do that. Yeah, you

Jessamyn 32:31 probably did. It's just about library.

Cortex 32:33 I think I knew you had it. Yeah.

Jessamyn 32:35 But I use tiny letter, tiny letters. Great. But just you know, I subscribe to a lot of them. Because I find that I really do. I mean, I know not everybody is like this, but I really still live out of my inbox. And I'm okay with that. But what it means is stuff that goes into my inbox is a really high likelihood that I will actually see it. Yeah, you know, which is, which is awesome, basically. So I enjoy seeing other people's. Yeah, where's I don't know where my little signup pages. At any rate, I have one too. You should probably have one, Josh.

Cortex 33:11 Yeah, maybe I'd have to figure out what I was gonna write about when I was gonna write about it.

Jessamyn 33:14 I think when is the real trick, right? Yeah, that Yeah.

Cortex 33:19 Oh, yeah, that's the thing I need to use to fill my empty days where?

Jessamyn 33:24 Well, I've really started because, of course, as we talk and talk, the days are short and shorter, and I've been, you know, trying to rein in all of the too much stuff that I do. I've gotten back to spending, you know, my little half hour fucking around on Wikipedia. And I actually enjoy that time. So maybe I don't need to do another thing that takes away from Hobby I'm already enjoying hard to say. The news. The newsletters easier to keep up with when I'm not like, busy.

Cortex 33:51 Yeah. Shall we proceed to Metafilter

Jessamyn 33:55 I would like to proceed to metal filter

Cortex 34:00 could work on projects as much more projects as always, yeah.

Jessamyn 34:02 And, you know, use projects for the stuff that you're doing. If there's something you worked on, if there's something you care about, if there's something you did, and you want to share it with Metafilter people, projects does your thing.

Cortex 34:12 Get it out there? Yes. Metafilter I didn't pipeline this. Yes, I mentioned that I didn't

Jessamyn 34:20 we call it like stacking nesting queueing. Like, I introduced Jim to the idea where you can like be doing a thing while you're doing the other thing. Like I get up. I put the water on for coffee. I go to the bathroom. I come back. Coffee Waterston. I have now peed, everything is good. Otherwise, you have to line everything up. And if you only do one thing at a time, you're just sitting around like a goof while the water is boiling, and then at any rate, I'm a big fan of efficiency where it's, you know, useful. But to Jim like he often just kind of does everything at once and then has vast swaths of nothing time and so being able to like it Oh, I'm doing a thing that takes five minutes. I can do a three minute thing in between there if the thing that takes five minutes isn't done yet. Nesting, nesting? Well, I actually have some stuff for meta filter. Also. This one, I'm pretty sure was after the last podcast. I think the last podcast it just took a while to get it out there. Oh, no, you posted it on the first maybe we recorded it early. We could maybe

Cortex 35:26 yeah, it may have just been like prompt for once. I have a hard time believe we should probably spend less time on the podcast talking about the pacing of the last podcast like I'm not I'm not complaining about you. I'm thinking a general thing. I know I just want to back that up. Just as a as a as a radio thing in general. Other people

Jessamyn 35:45 there are a lot more aware of when the podcast comes out. And I think with you and I were like, monthly ish, but I can never remember what's kind of before and after. But at any rate, what I wanted to talk about was the post, which I loved, I don't again, mandolin conspiracy has his finger on the pulse of what I like to read. And this was basically about the guys from spinal tap. So Harry shear Chris gas to Mike McKean, Rob Reiner, they had a copyright and royalties dispute with Universal Music Group over the soundtrack to the movie. And then they settled, which was good, but I didn't even know this was like a crazy story. And it is a crazy story. And this is just a good post, in general, because Spinal Tap was, you know, formative and important to me. And who would have known that, like UMG is making a ton of money and they're just not giving any to the guys in the band. Yeah. And a lot of dumb jokes in this thread.

Cortex 36:47 Ya know, the second comment from exogenous saying I'm glad that could leave this behind. Just maybe that's a perfect dumb like, callback. Yes. Well done. Exogenous. Yeah, that's weird. Like, I I should I should read that because like, I love Spinal Tap, but like, I've never, like really engaged with like, what the whole, like business of that as a movie and musical thing was like, I've been aware, like, yeah, the music's out there. But yeah, it's like,

Jessamyn 37:18 well, and these are all guys that are all doing fine. Right? Like, yeah, like, they're all, I think, happy and successful in their career. So it's not like there's somebody who's just like, you know, I need the money. So I'm just gonna find ways to get it. This was really like, we were super fucked over. And we're gonna, we're gonna do it precisely because we're comfortable and can do it. You know, like, how bald chop is gonna go after the guy who continues to send us takedown notices, harassing us. And we should do it because other smaller websites can't. You know? Yeah, I tried to pay the lawyer myself. And while Trump wouldn't let me know, all right, well, we're gonna sue them for declarative judgment and California. So let's see how that goes. And what often happens when you do that is then the person who is represented by these copyright troll lawyers. The copyright told lawyers will often issue you a retroactive license if you're actually gonna take them to court. No, seriously? No, I

Cortex 38:22 don't believe it. It's

Jessamyn 38:24 shitty, but like, maybe they'll sue you. But probably they'll just give you a license instead of the $15,000. They were asking for a picture that was put up on malt shop that was seen by you know, 900 people. Yeah. So ridiculous. cheeses. Yeah. So that continues to go on. And so I always appreciate a good lawsuit story. Because like, our lawyer is like, He's awesome, right? Like, he just loves going after these guys. So that also helps, right? I would not be awesome at it. I'd be like, oh, you know, he's just like, nope. How dare you, sir. So that's kind of what this story reminded me of. Yeah.

Cortex 39:06 I enjoy. I found this very interesting. African made a post about

Jessamyn 39:12 enjoy is the wrong word. But yeah, kind of

Cortex 39:15 like, like, the thread is interesting in sort of a grumpy way. But the the post itself is just a neat thing in a realm of technology that's like, the everybody is feeling troubled by which is, someone made a deep fake video of Richard Nixon giving a speech, basically, you know, some subgroup at MIT did this. And it's a fairly good looking, convincing one, especially when you then sort of downgrade the image to look like, you know, 60s era film or television technology. You know, Nixon looks like Nixon, and he's giving a speech that Nixon never gave. which by itself is like okay, so it's a deep fake, but it's the specific subject matter they used was, in turn, a bit of speech that William sapphire wrote for Nixon to give in case Something went bad, which it didn't. Yeah. So this is a speech Nixon never gave about how, but it's gonna die on

Jessamyn 40:07 the moon because it's all about. Right, right. Well, I remember, you know, hearing about that, because they didn't know what the hell was going on. Right. Like, yeah, you know, space travel was so much more of like this bizarre black box of nonsense.

Cortex 40:22 Yeah. And it's not like stuff hadn't gone wrong already in like NASA missions, like lots of stuff had gone wrong. They just hadn't had a go wrong after guys otherwise got their feet down on the moon

Jessamyn 40:33 well, and they hadn't had a go wrong in that specific we can't get them off the moon why?

Cortex 40:38 Yeah, exactly. So that's like a brand new sort of, and I feel like this. I feel like the Sapphire speech was going around at some points earlier this year. And whether that has anything to do with MIT folks using the speech or just like a little bit of Zeitgeist, I don't know. But I feel like I'd seen chatter. someone's like, oh, man, I was reading this fucking sapphire speech that he wrote for Nixon to give in case these various bad things happened. And then there's this post. So I thought it was really interesting as it's a surprising ly kind of literary take on a deep fake. In that sense. It was just to see it like not just like, like, it's one thing if you'd like, made Richard Nixon say, I hereby announce that I am a crook or steward there. But you know, like for you, I have two butts, you know, like, that's the better you're making someone say something that they didn't say, but making someone say something that they could in fact, have said, because that was something they were prepared

Jessamyn 41:32 to say, super crazy, right? Because you think about like five years in the future, you know, kids who didn't know who the hell Nixon was? You know, it's plausible. It's a plausible alternative history. And it would be like, how are you going to prove somebody wrong? If that like gets out and spreads around in that kind of weird way?

Cortex 41:52 You will? Yeah, it's the sort of thing where if you if you if you got curious about Google that you would find evidence of that speech having been written and so they go out, but yeah, like, people trying to put two and two together, it's, it's weird stuff. It's weird, wild stuff. But I thought that was a really interesting specimen. In a lot of ways. What else do I have here?

Jessamyn 42:15 Well, I did, um, I think I made two posts this month. So I'm going to tell you about both of them because I liked them. One of them is about the name of the vertical ellipsis. Or as my intern calls it, the ellipse isn't. I know, right? I mean, people call it like a kebab menu. Now, because it's, it's a, it's a thing that really wasn't used a lot until it was suddenly everywhere in mobile. Right. And so it's basically like a single link post, talking about, you know, why, where we got this from? Did it used to be on typewriters? What's the truth of, you know, the alternative history for it. And, you know, that it was, it was an interesting little article, and I was happy about it. And then the other thing that I was really happy about, was this really interesting project about Native Americans who were recorded by linguists in order to kind of help save their language, but then they were recorded onto like, you know, Edison cylinders and other shit that was just really not like, it got recorded. And then people were like, now we can even record off the Edison cylinder, because as soon as we start playing it, everything's gonna fall apart. And so there's this really interesting project that will scan these Edison cylinders using this kind of 3d scanning technology, and then turn it back into digitized files that are then going to be accessible to the native communities and researchers, but not just like, on the internet, and everyone can have them, which was kind of an interesting point of the whole thing. So I read about it in the humanities magazine, which was what I get now for being on the board of the Humanities Council. And then I went to go reading about it, and it was really interesting. So it's kind of like a tech thing, but also like a culture thing. And there's also interesting sort of cross cultural considerations. And, and I enjoyed it.

Cortex 44:27 Yeah, no, that's really neat. Yeah.

Jessamyn 44:30 Seven comments.

Cortex 44:34 Yeah. Not a big sexy pitch there. But But no, that's really cool. Yeah, like that. Hold that, that. That's an interesting sort of intersection of like sort of archive and anthropology and also the inevitable march of technology is if you're capturing stuff like small languages, and you aren't doing like breakneck work on that it would be so easy for just like a generation of tech to leave that in serious danger. Yeah. Which is dumb when the whole point is like, there's already some, like, you know, sort of geopolitical danger that it's in. That is why you're trying to archive it in the first place. So yeah, yeah.

Jessamyn 45:20 Well, and it's, it's tricky, right? Because a lot of this, the people who are doing it are like, you know, not exclusively, but many of them kind of white academics. And so trying to do it right. Within that context is also just, you know, a tricky thing to think about. And it's sort of worth really thinking about it basically.

Cortex 46:04 I really liked this post going domain made, which I can't pay successfully, there we go. It's just the length of time.gov. Well, it's not just but it's, you know, the website he's linking to is

Jessamyn 46:18 time not understand this. Post

Cortex 46:22 time.gov is a website run by the US government. I mean, that. That's, that's okay. So I have a theory that this may have been prompted by recent meta talk discussions of the double post rule someone, we looked up a double post, and I saw that, and so I'm guessing this might have been prompted by that is why it's like, Oh, hey, well, this was posted 16 years ago.

Jessamyn 46:47 Was it in 2003? At which point metal filter was already four years old? I cannot I know what, 20 years. But still.

Cortex 46:59 It's weird. Yeah, so anyway, I I enjoyed seeing that come back around. And I enjoyed the fact that it was like such a, like, simple post structurally that like, you've got a nice mix of discussion. And goofing. I was definitely on the goofing side,

Jessamyn 47:12 angry mode. First, first comment, this post is garbage. And you know, it. Is that?

Cortex 47:21 I don't know. I honestly thought

Jessamyn 47:23 was right, when that was daylight savings time, right? Yeah. Or it wasn't actually it was daylight savings time.

Cortex 47:30 I think it's entirely possible that Milton was just actually expressing genuine dissatisfaction, if they posted only had one Lincoln was a link to time.gov. How could you do

Jessamyn 47:39 that? Sorry, I'm looking at the post from 2003. Yeah, yeah,

Cortex 47:43 yeah, no, that's Yeah, honestly, I think if someone had come into the current one with that, without an explanation, we probably would have just deleted that say, Hey, try her.

Jessamyn 47:53 Say this post is garbage, and you know it, but I'd be afraid I'd be misunderstood.

Cortex 47:59 It'd be a bit of a reach. It's tricky.

Jessamyn 48:03 But I do feel like I should go into this thread, and talk about how my father used to travel around the world with His courts time clock to help set time at satellite stations before there was global time. I've told you this before.

Cortex 48:19 Maybe, really, I've literally made one of my father's

Jessamyn 48:24 first jobs out of I will, I will send you a link so you can see the picture. One of my father's first jobs was to work for the Smithsonian as a young young man, early 20s. I guess. He travelled around the world with this super precise clock that looked like a fucking bomb. And would go literally use it to set time at satellite tracking stations during the brief period of time when we had satellite tracking stations. But before we had time servers. So before we had network time, it was actually set by a dude carrying a clock around the world. And that dude was my father. Well, it's other dudes, maybe, but he's the only one I know.

Cortex 49:10 Yes, he was. So he had

Jessamyn 49:12 to get special letters to go places. Um, because people thought he was carrying a bomb. Like he had this letter from the Smithsonian being like, he's supposed to carry this. He had to go to Spain. He had to get a letter. You know, he got he went to jail because somebody didn't know what the hell that thing was. And I don't he didn't speak the language. I don't know. At any rate, that's my relationship to time. The end. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. This is now Jim and I end all of our little rants about whatever. Thank you for coming to my TED complaint talk. I enjoyed this post by web goddess. about people's scouring homesteads for long Last Apple varietals because that is one of my favorite stories and I'll read it every year during Apple season. So basically it's about the people who founded the nonprofit last apple projects. And they just go digging around looking for old orchards trying to find varieties of apples that aren't ones we kind of we, you know, the supermarket Apple eating people kind of know about. So it's a really cool, it's a really cool concept. And of course, you have a whole bunch of people in the, in the thread talking about their favorite, weird varietals. And Jim is always kind of afraid of varietals, because there's one that's like, just disgusting called like, sheep's nose or something. And like,

Cortex 50:43 because we would always look at that and it'd be delicious. I know. Right? So

Jessamyn 50:46 we would always pick up these apples at the farm stands because there's a lot of weird apples around here that aren't kind of your normal apples and I'll try any apple but man the sheep's nose was not good. It you know maybe because like apples nominally are for many different things right? They're not just for sticking them in your mouth and eating them some are better and pie some are better and sauces. Some are some keep longer,

Cortex 51:14 all the stuff, but it was a good. This one's a throwing apple.

Jessamyn 51:17 I don't know what it was for, but not anything I could think of. So yeah, in conclusion, apples are land of contrasts.

Cortex 51:26 Yes. I really enjoyed this post. That which follows made linking to a snake game like you know, the go around eating dogs I can't deal

Jessamyn 51:36 with. I already can't deal.

Cortex 51:38 It's snake and Tetris. Simultaneously controlled at the same time. You're playing Tetris and you're playing Snake and you know, people. It's hard.

Jessamyn 51:48 I will not comment. I will just read a comment aloud Jacqueline's. This is the worst and I hate you for ruining my life in this manner.

Cortex 51:58 I want to highlight in a different way light s said I enjoy the Thank you. I'm today's high score of Tetris one, Snake three. Which that tells you like, you know, someone got three and three in there. And honestly, I played with this thing for 10 minutes. I am fucking impressed that someone got three points in snake and three lines and Tetris before just melting down. So that was a fantastic fantastic find. Good job that which was

Jessamyn 52:22 the trick is I'm now trying it. I think the trick is,

Cortex 52:27 this is why we need some video content on the podcast we

Jessamyn 52:30 need I mean, the trick

you know, Snake falling

Cortex 52:48 it's, it's so it's so fantastic. Like they're they're, there's such different control schemes and pacings. And like, sort of sets of moves that you do that like finding the common denominator between the two like seems like a really interesting problem that I do not want to have to let my brain solve. It's just to, basically, but it's fantastic that it is.

Jessamyn 53:10 Oh my god. Like 00 And wow, okay, yeah,

Cortex 53:18 if you really focus you can get like one on one of them. Like I think it's probably easier to try and get a couple snake pips before. Tetris game just fails

Jessamyn 53:25 on you're supposed to eat those things. Yeah. I was avoiding them a power pill. It looks like

Cortex 53:41 that's fair. That's fair, but also hilarious. Man, I've implemented a couple of snake games over the years. Like it's so baked into my brain, like, how can there be any? Oh, because like, if you haven't, like, immersed yourself in,

Jessamyn 53:56 think if there was ever a time where I'd like really had snake like steak was the thing I remember playing on, like, x86 is when I was babysitting. You know what I mean? Like, I don't remember playing it. Like I mostly if I think about snake in my mind. I remember playing it on someone else's computer. A long time ago. I think. I'm trying to think of where I don't know. Like, I don't think I had it for the Atari. I don't. I don't know. Yeah. Well,

Cortex 54:31 I made a I gotta figure out where the fuck it is. I made a snake game for the FICO 808 FICO eight. It's the the fake well, not fake, but fictional video game console development environment that I was playing with a bunch a few years ago. I remember

Jessamyn 54:52 you were talking about it. And I didn't understand that either. It's a

Cortex 54:57 way to make video games. It's like a sprite. It's it's it's it's for a fictional console that never existed that like could have existed sometime in the early mid 80s. Sort of like a mash up of like Nintendo and Commodore 64. But just like made up the guy just made this for the fun of it and it's a fully functioning development environments fantastic. And I made a snake game called shine salute. Themed on Dune you know, the sandworms

Jessamyn 55:33 I don't know dune.

Cortex 55:36 Buggy you know about you.

Jessamyn 55:41 There's the sandworms that have butts for mouths and sting wears a bikini

Cortex 55:46 feed. That's all you need to know. plenty good. Yeah.

Jessamyn 55:48 But I didn't know they were called whatever it is. Shyla boo for whatever they are.

Cortex 55:54 Shank elude is the Fremen one of the friend names for for the sandworm. Anyway, that's that's the whole thing. You know, another thing I liked I met a month was this post lizard made about a dog in Florida that accidentally set a car into reverse gear and then just wait around in circles for now. Everybody's

Jessamyn 56:15 I didn't know that made a metal filter post. I saw that on the larger internet and Oh, my God. Hacking fun is a pretty good. Pretty good tag.

Cortex 56:25 Yep. So that was pretty good. And that's literally all there is to say about it. Go Go watch if you want. It's a very brief, funny thread about Oh,

Jessamyn 56:32 speaking of tags, can we use, like, accented characters and tags it?

Cortex 56:40 I don't know if that change has been made. Trimble was doing some work on it. But there were some decisions to work out there. So it's mostly it's mostly a matter of figuring out how to make it except a much broader variety of URLs. character sets that we don't have to worry about URLs, fortunately. But like character sets, without adding in weird non displaying control characters that could like fuck up the page or whatnot. Because if someone takes something as reverse the flow of text, all of a sudden, like, oh, fuck what's going on here? So you have to like, add some blocks in but but you're working on it? Yeah. And it's possible for Bill actually got it in place. I'm just not sure. I haven't tried to tag anything with an exit character lately. So Well, let's try it. Yeah. That's probably enough of metal filter. You want to do ask Metafilter?

Jessamyn 57:30 Hold on. I'm trying to take Oh, okay.

Cortex 57:33 We'll just do this live? Not yet. Not yet. Okay.

Jessamyn 57:37 But I'm glad you're working on it. Because really, if you want to work on your sort of inclusion portfolio, that's kind of the bare bones. Yeah,

Cortex 57:44 yeah. The situation with it has definitely improved since last time, it came up like back in the PV era, back in

Jessamyn 57:51 the PV says no era. Well, it was like, during then

Cortex 57:55 fribble was looking at like, I mean, honestly, you it's possible, it could have been a thing that Matt would have been good on it and just like kiboshed it but like, if it was just doable, and there wasn't any problem with it. Like there's a good chance PB would have just like, Oh, yeah. Yeah. So at the time, like fribble went and sort of dug up some of the past discussions and some of the documentation that had existed at the time. And it basically it's like, oh, yeah, this was apparently asked at the time, and maybe less, is it's probably less opinions now. So like, at least something can we can probably make some progress there. Compared to the state of things last time, like several years ago, when it would have been looked at so I'm excited about,

Jessamyn 58:33 you know, I'm Brad, who is the malt shop Dev, who's basically the PBR malt shop. He does that too. Like, he'll have some weekend alone. And then all of a sudden, we have a search feature. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, cuz I know, engineers, I grew up with engineers, it's still weird to me that, like, they have these odd things in common that you don't necessarily think are like, a personality based on an avocation kind of, but maybe so.

Cortex 59:04 Yeah. Let's talk about last medical,

Jessamyn 59:08 I have so much stuff on AskMe Metafilter, bring it, bring it all the heavy lift Riley ready. 3000 wants to fuck around with the library. And they want to do it basically leaving writing themselves a letter, and then leaving it in the library book for 20 years. And then coming back. It could be anywhere in the world. I love this as a puzzle game. I don't mean to cast aspersions. Like this is a great idea. And it's super cool that it doesn't seem like they're gonna fuck around, really. But like, Okay, if you were gonna do that, how do you do it? Right. And so there's a bunch of librarians being like, you know, maybe, like, because it's hard, right? Because what what would be true in my library say, would be super different than what would be true in like an academic library. And like, you know, your average academic library would be really different. Unlike your kind of fusty Ivy's kind of, you know, Harvard who doesn't ever have to make space for anything and has more money than crusius. And so maybe them. But so trying to figure this out as a puzzle is really cool. I had some, you know, ideas, but other people had some completely different ideas, and it was basically a fun thread. There's nothing wrong with this thread, and Holyrood, who is a librarian, you probably know her as the bride of Clank Clank stun had got the best answer. Because she had a good idea but also she lives kind of geographically close to where Riley Ray is. And so they were basically going to Baby Baby make something work. So I was happy about that. I mean, you know, people had the average like, please don't do this and, you know, rare book where you'd actually be screwing it up. And you know, that didn't see what they wanted. It was not mischief. It was just kind of an idea.

I also enjoyed because it is Movember. Or was Movember. December now, and I yeah, I always wind up confused briefly because obviously December is supposed to be the 10th month and so I just can't deal with anything.

Cortex 1:01:23 Yeah, no, that's that's a real the some of those dead old Romans have a lot to answer for.

Jessamyn 1:01:29 But so Movember, it was last month, and now is the time when the men shave, or some of them and so this is next day only. Now Phil, Napoli Nath fell Lee. I don't understand how to pronounce Napoli's name. But at any rate, there's going to be a mustache Pratchett. They are the designated emcee, looking for some one liners, introducing the dudes has to be saved for work and funny, and I don't want to be mean. And so people get their best mustache jokes. And it's hilarious. It's kind of a brief thing, but I would I would love to hear some, you know, feedback on how it went. And you know, there's some people blow Joe Blow do has some really good ones. Roger accurate has some good ones. Nick, golly. You know, mermaid Cafe is like, hey, stiff upper lip jokes. But it was nice. You know, you get to you get to feel like you get to kind of help people help people do their thing. And it was a fun small thread.

Cortex 1:02:35 Yeah. riffing with purpose. That's good. Yes. Good setup. Yes. I thought this question from cat cafe was interesting. It's, it falls into his genre of like, what is going on with this art critic?

Jessamyn 1:02:52 This to him was very curious.

Cortex 1:02:55 It's a question about there was a New York Times article talking about, like, I think Valence is have meaning in different, like, expressions in texting. And they were comparing k k versus okay. And they described it, k k as an ice cold glass of blood, mostly neutral, slightly basic. And the question is, like, what the fuck is this, you know, and then people sort of like, tried to talk through it, and I think hit on some possible intentions of meaning. And in an, an unusual amount of closure. Explanation just was like the author, like, tweeted in response to someone asking about it,

Jessamyn 1:03:37 which indicates it was confusing. Yeah. It's probably

Cortex 1:03:41 not a great sign of people tweeting saying, Hey, what's up with that? But I guess if someone's asking Metafilter same thing. But yeah, so just like, idiosyncratic bit of writing. And it turns out, the answer is, oh, yeah, that was an idiosyncratic bit of writing. Which is a little bit unsatisfying. If you're looking for some grand reveal. Like, Oh, yes. Now I see. It's more like, okay, I guess I guess that's what they're going for. But, but I really liked it as a like, cuz you run into ship

Jessamyn 1:04:05 ice cold glass of blood on and off since then. Yeah. Like it's,

Cortex 1:04:09 it's, it's tricky, because it's such it's kind of an arresting image, and I think maybe more arresting that it was intended to be in terms of its function in that bit of writing. Like, it seems like it was meant to be like an idiosyncratic clever little turn of phrase, but instead it's like, super distracting. It's like what the fuck is this just like vampires in the Arctic? What's going on here? You know,

Jessamyn 1:04:30 vampires think I would read that.

Cortex 1:04:33 Yeah. There'd be big stretches of the year where they wouldn't have to worry about the sunlight so you know, hey, then stretches where they couldn't leave the house for months. But yeah, anyway, I'm glad I found this way to ask Metafilter because that's the sort of like weird shift that just sort of pops up like low key weird shit not like it this doesn't matter. Yeah. But also, it kind of makes my brain go.

Jessamyn 1:04:58 What so help me

Cortex 1:04:59 Yeah, Yeah, exactly so.

Jessamyn 1:05:19 So this was another thread that I liked from Krawcheck credit check. My roommate has an irrational hatred of the oboe. So naturally I am compiling and gifting him a mix CD called Now that's what I call oboe. What are your favorite oboe tracks? I don't think much about the oboe. And I wasn't in fact entirely sure I knew what an oboe was. I mean, like, what I thought it was, but then I went on YouTube, and I think I was thinking of a bassoon. Ah, maybe? Well, I

Cortex 1:05:52 mean, they're both double reads.

Jessamyn 1:05:54 Are they shaped the same?

Cortex 1:05:56 I think of as soon as long and sort of a little saxophone. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:05:59 It could be really bends. But does an oboe. Yeah. Or is it like a cleric?

Cortex 1:06:03 an oboe looks more like a clarinet. So then I don't know the difference. If I remember right, I think that's sort of. So the big difference is it's a double read like an elbow is a double Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:06:14 blah, blah, Ginger. I don't even I mean, I know what it is. But what it should be a double read that there's, there's one on top of the other one.

Cortex 1:06:21 Yeah, so So like with a saxophone or clarinet, you've got a single read and it's up against a wooden or potentially plastic if you're me, and growing up with a cheap clarinet mouthpiece. And so the Read is this flat thing that thins down to a very thin taper. And it's sitting there like, you know, a minute or so away from

Jessamyn 1:06:41 so I'm familiar with that, because we had to go buy a new one.

Cortex 1:06:45 So with a double read, you have two reads, and they're they're thinner, and they are just very closely parallel to each other with little specks in

Jessamyn 1:06:54 between on top of each other. Right, like a sandwich.

Cortex 1:06:57 Yeah. No, no, yeah. On top of each other, like there's a thin space and you, you, you press the two reads towards each other with your, with your mouth.

Jessamyn 1:07:12 So you can kind of make more kinds of noises by the amount of pressure that you're putting on the reader.

Cortex 1:07:16 I guess like I've never played a double read. So I don't know. But But Angela played the oboe. So like, I know. This thread. I don't know that she was. I think she made I think she saw it, but I don't know if she had any recommendation. Hey,

Jessamyn 1:07:34 here's what I just learned the word wise. Cracks has the first four letters of Angela's username. In the middle of it, that's no. Yeah, so tell Angela, she should check that out.

Cortex 1:07:49 I will do so she actually just came in because he overheard this conversation and drew me pictures of an oboe and bassoon. So a bassoon I think is also a stringed instrument, but it has a curved mouthpiece coming off it is that thing. So it's the one where it's like, it's like a long tube. But then there's a mouthpiece partway down that's bent that then curves off. Well, yeah, it's bent. But I was imagining like a bend like in the body of the instrument like a saxophone. So I was I was misrepresented.

Jessamyn 1:08:13 There's not like, is there like a giant bassoon that does bend at the end? Like it

Cortex 1:08:18 might be? There might honestly, people make weird variations? But I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Anybody dying in the other room listening to this conversation, I'm sure anybody else about double reads is like also just like she's like,

Jessamyn 1:08:35 Oh, God, Josh, you're poor dumb friend.

Cortex 1:08:37 The thing that the thing about double reads is they're like, they're they are definitely the hardcore variety of woodwinds, like, like saxophone and clarinet. There's lots of things to master over years of work there. But it's definitely like as far as making a noise with a reed. Sax and clarinet are, relatively speaking, easy mode. And like oboe, and bassoon players, and web players are just like, they're doing it on like hardcore. So I respect the hell of it and will probably never learn to

Jessamyn 1:09:06 trust.

Cortex 1:09:09 Yeah, I agree. I don't know what you're looking at. But I

Jessamyn 1:09:11 thought it was gonna help me by being like, yeah, what is that thing? And then I get stuck in Pinterest, and I still don't know what it is. All right, well, this is good. I can go learn about it. And now I've talked to you about it, which means I don't have to talk to Jim about it, which is good. Because he's maybe not the person I want to have explained instruments to me. That's the thing. I want to know what the fuck is that thing? It's like Ukrainian traditional Slavic instrument to say what it is. Oh, God. Maybe it's a Bandura. Alright, so clearly, I'm confused with some other thing and I'll figure it out. But that was a great thread. And I hope I hope we all get to listen to terrible oboe music or good Oakland. Music really?

Cortex 1:10:00 I think that's one of the things that yeah, that's one of the things like there's there's, there's people who just like are just down on the oboe on principle at that point like any oboe music is bad oboe music,

Jessamyn 1:10:09 right? Like people used to be about like the banjo or the ukulele. Yeah, just arbitrary. Garbage. Yeah, yeah. All right. So speaking of satisfying conclusions, I enjoyed this thread from rooftop or rooftop, basically got some stainless steel appliances. There's scratches on it. And I'm a little bit like, is this normal? And people get out or both simultaneously? Like, no, it's not normal. Number two, is there a plastic film by any chance on the front of your appliance that you can pull off that the scratches are in? Oh, and it turns out? Yes.

Cortex 1:10:49 I mean, oh, yes. That's great. That's a fantastic outcome. But oh, my gosh,

Jessamyn 1:10:53 well, how was your and and it was just it was a very short thread. I mean, I think that the time between the Ask the time between them when they found it out was like an hour. But they were like, hey, it's a plastic film. You know, I don't even know what those emojis are. They're so tiny. But it's like all the celebration emojis. And so that's good. And they peeled back at the film. And it turns out the scratches were in the film. So All right,

Cortex 1:11:18 fantastic. Excellent. I have a couple of like late update, final update

Jessamyn 1:11:23 things. Those are fun. Sometimes. They're both kind of

Cortex 1:11:27 anodyne, but but JB was clearly going through their their stuff. And so it turns out that Old Navy worked out really well when they were looking for affordable quality clothes in Toronto. That's happy news.

Jessamyn 1:11:40 What did you need?

Cortex 1:11:43 Oh, like kind of affordable quality clothes in Toronto? A little bit.

Jessamyn 1:11:46 Wow. But I mean, yeah. Okay, good.

Cortex 1:11:52 They also ended up buying a Kobo mini when they were trying to replace an e reader. Oh,

Jessamyn 1:11:58 I was actually really curious. What did what had happened with that? That was a 2014. Question.

Cortex 1:12:05 Yeah, but they still use it. And then something that worked. It's discontinued. So they're, they're gonna have to start all over if it goes, I guess, but. But it sounds like it's been working like a champ. So. So yes.

Jessamyn 1:12:16 Hey, that's great. I always love it when people sort of follow up really late, which is another, you know, reminder. Hey, folks, if you have old asked me questions, and you haven't, and you found a solution after the thing closed, you can send a final update through the mods, and they will update the thread and then everybody who has a thread in their recent activity. Right, will see it, I think, yes.

Cortex 1:12:41 Yes, you do. Great. Yes. There was a this is that there's two different things about this, that I like, one of them is the question. This is a question from plant or animal. basically asking how many books are printed in an edition? And I think if this became a question that needed to like, comment, application, yeah. Because like, there's a question here. And I only the question came across totally clearly in the in the question, because the very tersely worded question, but they're trying to it seems like they're finding their way around to trying to figure out whether or not they have accurate information about a book that presumably they had some sort of connection or involvement in,

Jessamyn 1:13:26 right, that they were like, can I figure out how many books were actually printed? When my friend's book was printed? Yeah. Because yeah, that's dispute.

Cortex 1:13:35 Yeah, it's possible. This is like, you know, the prelude question to how do I sue? Right. But I don't know, I guess it's not totally clear in that, but like, you know, so that was interesting. It's an interesting question that like, it turns out, the answer is basically, you just kind of can't unless you do go hardcore into pressing the issue legally, because you just kind of have to trust them to give you reasonable No,

Jessamyn 1:13:55 because it's trade secrets at some level. Like, they don't want to tell you that like, Hey, we're hyping this book like crazy, but we only printed 500 of them. Or we printed 5 million of them and nobody's buying them. It's the way publishers are just squirrely like that.

Cortex 1:14:10 Right? So it's like a black box thing and yeah, maybe you've just can't really get that answer unless things go south so far that it's not something you just want to be curious about. But the other thing I liked about this is it did get flagged by someone who was worried that it was in the wrong category because they had put this question about book printing in the plant or animal category. Users just like the byline it says posted by blah to blah

Jessamyn 1:14:38 And my comment I did not understand it and now

Cortex 1:14:42 I did not understand it at first either it's like I don't want Oh, so yes. Turns out plant or animal sounds enough like a category I

Jessamyn 1:14:51 wish we had that category. Yeah.

Cortex 1:14:54 I like I like this plant or animal to like, doesn't matter. Just one or the other.

Jessamyn 1:14:59 I enjoyed speaking of kind of slightly misleading. So I had, you know, I go through and I favorite things that I want to like I favorite like normal, but I also favorite things I want to mention on the podcast. And so I favorited this thread, but then I went back to the thread. And when I read the title, which is how to clean ears before ear mold, I completely forgot what it was about. And thought it was a different kind of asked Metafilter question, which was like this disgusting thing. But instead, it's actually somebody Madonna of the unloved who is getting ear molds made for custom earplugs. So it's not how do I clean my ears before fuzz grows in them. It's Hey, I made this appointment. And the receptionist said I should make sure my ears were clean. And I'm not totally sure what that means or how much I need to clean it or whatever. And one of the other things I really liked about this is Lutoslawski, who we have followed since the beginning of getting his sort of audiologist degree because I remember when he was starting down this path basically comes in with the kind of like, Hey, I'm an audiologist. Let's, let's talk about you know, Q tips and everything else and it's just a really good really good question. Really good answer. And I hope there's a follow up that says, Hey, I got my awesome your molds and we're all cool. That's excellent. scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Keep that mouse wheel scrolling. That should probably be the title

Cortex 1:16:33 browsers slowing Yes. I had a couple more make a note. I'm clean on Ask

Jessamyn 1:16:42 Glion ask. Melis mana, has a thing about the potato. And but this is an asked Metro altar. Basically, it's a question about Akkadian recipes, which are, you know, sort of Keva qua French Canadian recipes. So she's talking about poutine. And talking about a thing she read a National Geographic about Cajuns that talks about how poutine is a dough ball containing salt pork, and she's like, what I thought poutine was French fries, cheese curds and gravy. And, and I thought this was what. And so then there's a whole bunch of people wrapping up completely with ashwagandha, who is a French Canadian, of Acadian descent, and basically spells everything out. So in fact, there's Akkadian, poutine, and you know, Canadian poutine. And they are different. And so it's all spelled out along with some good recipes for delicious stuff to eat. And it just turned out to be a very useful thread, I think, like only five answers. But somehow, yeah, her question got completely definitively authoritatively answered.

Cortex 1:18:03 That's fantastic. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:18:06 I had two more. One kind of is sort of more like personal and one is just a good one. I think other people should read. This one I enjoyed, which was basically sweaty, or sweetie, writing in their novel about calling the telephone of somebody whose house is just burned down. But it's a 1991. So what would happen, right? Because now you call me and my house burns down. I'm not in my house. I'm standing in the driveway with my phone alo house burning down. Who's this? You know what I mean? But back when you had a landline that went into your house, if somebody called the house but the house had burned down? What would happen? What would you hear? What would be on the other side? Would it just ring and ring? Would there be a message, et cetera, et cetera? And so then there's a whole bunch of people talking about, you know, did people have answering machines? Did people have voicemail? Did people have, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And like a lot of these client clients and shows up at the end of it with a text file from a message board called telecom digest in 1991, talking about reaching people after the Oakland fire, which I think was what sweetie was maybe talking about? So super interesting, you know, US centric, obviously, but I'm just really interesting trying to figure out how that would work. So it was a fun thread. And then my last thread just because it's a it's a good kinda, I don't know, people had lots of I enjoyed reading everybody's answers. I enjoyed giving an answer. Basically, filter is looking at like, you know, okay, you're, you're, you're getting a chill vibe in your head. Like, is there a place you kind of go in your head that makes you kind of your happy place? Like, like, what kind of things do you like, enter that are really kind of If you're chill thing, and then they're like, you know, I'll go first this would have been maybe check filter under old metaphor, but they're working on a project. And so like if you could make basically what they say a soul terrarium, s o u l terrarium for yourself, what would it be like? And it's so interesting to me, because they're very different. You know, like, being on a beach, being indoors, being outdoors, being like in a building, you know, being asleep, being awake, being with friends, being alone being, et cetera, et cetera. People just have tons of different different stuff. But you can kind of, I don't know, I can kind of get inside the head of like, different ways you would want to do this. And it's kind of fun to read. Everybody stuff. I liked

Cortex 1:20:48 it. Yeah. Yeah, that's very cool.

Jessamyn 1:20:53 Yeah, I, you know, for me, it's all about like taking a nap. You know? Because it's all about like, stuff that can exist, right. So like, for me, my happy place is being tired and being able to go to sleep. Awesome. Right. That's all I want. So yeah, it was a nice question. And it's still open for a little bit longer if people want to if people want to chime in.

Cortex 1:21:16 Well, should we mention I guess the music is the thing that I will do. Like got my tabs confused there for a second. Quick medical music. Some nice stuff from this last month us Sonian posted skeleton dance. Nice. It's nice to fingerstyle banjo bit. Early 20th century composition looks like it's, it's good. Some good bands are playing. Appleseed posted a instrumental piece called magic show that I enjoyed have a nice sort of mix of like acoustics and some hacking some cynthy stuff in there, too. This is one that's going to make an odd music break in the show because there's kind of no traditional musical content. But this is you are not there. Or you're not here. A record recording a field recording performance of a conceptual music piece called stones. Water time breath.

Jessamyn 1:22:14 I like that name that. Yeah.

Cortex 1:22:17 Based off post Miko made about that piece of work. sometime in October looks like. And one other what else do we have? Oh, yeah, that was rancher posted. Fire over the deep. Titled, old band recordings. So this was like an unfinished record. From Bo.

Jessamyn 1:22:41 Yes. Yeah, I love this older stuff. Just post his old stuff occasionally. And it's always really fun to like, hear what people did a while ago.

Cortex 1:22:49 Yeah, yeah. And it's nice. It's nice seeing like, what's changed, and also what the through line is on that stuff. So those were some nice things. I liked those things. Well,

Jessamyn 1:22:59 I have a few Meditec things to mention. There's a secret quants are kind of open rolling. Thank you thread, which is good, positive stuff to check out. Like who's Mayland who's receiving who's blob, the blob or the blah? Old Metafilter favorite guests? My word is back. Yeah. I mean, it's so funny, right? Guess my word. It's a completely one note. Type in words, it'll tell you if the word it's thinking of as before, after there's a hard version and an easy version and a leaderboard. And I guess the person who did it originally stopped doing it. And I guess somebody else got the code and is doing it themselves. There's one word a day and everybody gets the same word. And I don't know, it kind of took Metafilter by storm when it was, you know, a big deal before and now it's back and people are really happy about it. And I play it every morning. And it's I feel like it kind of sets the tone for my day. I think today I gave up on both words. Oh, wow. I don't know what the hell was wrong with me. I feel pretty good. But like, ball was a word.

Cortex 1:24:10 It's funny. Like, I feel like it's a really interesting game for the way that it like forces you to like, really actively use a limited amount of like working memory that anybody has and like when you start loading in like suffixes and variations and inflections of the words you're guessing it crowds out like it's such a not being able to see the forest for the trees thing. Where where because you're like mission was one of the words like a week ago or something that it took me way too long to get like mission is not a hard word. It's a word. I was like, cleanly I

Jessamyn 1:24:44 don't think I got mission. Actually.

Cortex 1:24:45 I had I had gotten to missing on one side and something else on the other side and was like looking at these two words and thinking. There's literally there's no words in between these two like these are the only two words that exist. And then at some point like Oh, But what if it wasn't? What if it wasn't missed? In or Missed? Missed or something? What if it was something in between that was just a totally unrelated word? Oh, right mission. That's a word that I've said like, probably 1000 times in my life. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a good game I like I like it for the simplicity. But like it for the subtle, absolute brand fuckery of like, both of those features really happy.

Jessamyn 1:25:23 It's only one word a day, because otherwise, I would play it until my fingers were nubs. Because it's just, it's super fun. It tickles that part of my brain in a good way. But then sometimes when I don't do well, I'm like, Ah, but ya know, I'm happy about it. And thank you. Oh, thank you, BQ for posting that again. And then the other thing I just wanted to mention was the NI fi law is up again, this thread kind of didn't really turn into anything, because there were a lot of weird questions about it. And I guess it should be in the FAQ, if it isn't, but it's open. And if you want to buy holiday time stuff for your people from Metafilter people, there's a lot of good stuff there. And if you want to put up a shop, I believe it's not too late. In fact, we should really get around. Let's be honest,

Cortex 1:26:15 that's that's I mean, that's the long term plan. It's

Jessamyn 1:26:17 just a long term

Cortex 1:26:20 very long, long enough term that it being a long term plans now a long term plan. But yes, no, you know, it's you can totally still add if you if you sell something, anything, then you can link people to it on the internet somehow. It can go into my mall, so yeah, yeah, I

Jessamyn 1:26:36 have to say I learned about John good chocolates. And now I'm just losing my damn mind. Have you seen these things? You can get like a job with starfighter? You can get a chocolate Millennium Falcon for 20 bucks. Yeah, like, there's a whole bunch of wonderful things. But I always just click around there sometimes when I have to kill time doing a thing. And this was the thing that caught my eye this particular time. Yeah. And it's John evil is his username. And his chocolate place is called John. Good. So that's, that's a good joke. And, yeah, there's a whole bunch of other really good and fun stuff in there. Little books from veggie boy. I know the gauge whole farms. People have a whole bunch of crafty stuff. Robocop is bleeding, quarry, press all sorts of stuff. Handmade this, that and the other knitting kits, hand cut ornaments, swirly hand, marble paper, all the stuff. It's great. So go look, if you're a person who shops for the holidays. There's some pretty neat stuff out there.

Cortex 1:27:37 Yeah. Oh, yeah, I was gonna mention some fanfare stuff. I have not been able to keep up with fanfare but I've been watching some stuff that I will get back to. And other people have been discussing stuff. So that new watchman show pretty good. Fairly people are liking I haven't been following enough to find out whether or not I'm cancelled for liking it, but it seems like it seems like maybe it's better than people expected to do because Zack Snyder made that movie. And after that, no one expected anything else to be good? Yeah, but it sounds like the show is pretty interesting. I've been avoiding spoilers because I've seen enough enthusiasm for the catalog and like not find out why people like it. But yeah, it sounds like it's pretty good. People been talking about it. There's the Mandalorian which turns out to be good.

Jessamyn 1:28:23 Talk about the Mandalorian last week?

Cortex 1:28:24 I don't think so. I don't think so.

Jessamyn 1:28:26 I know what the Mandalorian baby Yoda. That's

Cortex 1:28:29 it. That's all you need to know. It's a it's a it's a new Star Wars series, like a television series.

Jessamyn 1:28:36 Series

Cortex 1:28:37 is it can Yeah. Yeah, this is what I mean. I don't fucking know. It's been put out by Disney. Who owns the Canon so like, presumably so. But it's nice because it's kind of off to the side. It's set like sometime after the movies. Baby. It's not Yoda it's it's a baby of the Yoda species as far as.

Jessamyn 1:28:59 Okay, that's why I'm so confused. Because it looks like Boba Fett I.

Cortex 1:29:04 Yeah, so Boba Fett was a Mandalorian. And oh,

Jessamyn 1:29:07 So Amanda, is a show.

Cortex 1:29:10 It's It's like It's like a It's a society. It's a culture. Warriors. And there's all these there's a I mean, I don't even know that much about them. I just know that that's the case. And so there's sort of a question of like, I don't even know if there is canonically, a Mandalorian species or something part of the thing is they never take off the suit. So you never see him. But the character in it you find out like, immediately in the first episode, basically, was an orphan who was taken in by the Mandalorians that he knows. And he wears Mandalorian armor and he does Mandalorian things. And it's basically a space Western like he's going around, being sort of like a Clint Eastwood who never takes his hat off. sort of thing. So it's all it's very western vibes. It's fun that way. And yeah, it's been good. I've been enjoying a lot. Hopefully, hopefully everything everybody's saying in fanfare doesn't wildly contradict that. But they're saying stuff. Also the Good Place is wrapping up. It's,

Jessamyn 1:30:07 yeah, this year watching that and not really following along and fanfare because I can never remember what episode I'm on. Yeah. But yeah, no good, excited, kind

Cortex 1:30:16 of I kind of want to not follow along on fanfare until after I've caught up because there's been a couple like twisty reveals this season like there have been previously. And I know smart people are paying attention and making good guesses. And honestly, every time I find out about a twist, I'm like, Oh, I'm delighted to be completely surprised by that thing that in retrospect, I could have seen coming, but it's funnier this way. So yeah. So I'll catch up on that app that I've been like actively avoiding that because like, I know that the collective Metafilter like fanfare commentariat is smarter than I am about picking out those details. Yeah. And I did mention, till death do us part, I think during the actual recording earlier, but it's the yearly watching Paul Blart Mall Cop to thing to the macro boys. And the worst idea of all time guys do where they watch Paul Blart to and then discuss it every year. And they did that again this year. And as usual, I enjoyed it. And there you go. And I think I think that's it. I think that's everything. I think we did such gusto literally every post on Metafilter this last month. Good. So go us. Yeah, well, we're tremendous.

Jessamyn 1:31:20 You know, we didn't even talk about your Thanksgiving was your Thanksgiving. Good. Yeah. All right. All right.

Cortex 1:31:28 Well, we did that. Good episode. Good. Good. EPEN we, yeah. Yeah, my browser is like totally freezing up now. So this is obviously a good time to stop.

Jessamyn 1:31:41 And everybody hang in there.

Unknown Speaker 1:31:44 Yep.