Podcast 159 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 159: Enter The Talkredoers (2020-01-10).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 A couple of things you

all right, let's do this thing. Let's do I have this idea. So the way this works is we get two or more people and they sit in front of microphones and they talk to each other about things. But you also make a digital copy of the output of the microphones so that you can play it back to other people afterwards. And I'm calling it talk redoing and my name is Elon Musk and I would like a trillion dollars.

Jessamyn 0:53 My name is Grimes and I am pregnant. And here's a photograph of me on Instagram and welcome to our talk they doing Yes,

Cortex 1:02 this is the episode 159 of the Metafilter monthly talk are we doing? I'm I'm Josh cortex Mullard and I'm Jessamyn and we're both slightly under the weather I think so we're just gonna see what happens here. It's a It's the new year it's 2020 Here we fucking are. We made it and we made it good solid we can change into the month before we even got around to recording the podcast because it's been that kind of year already.

Jessamyn 1:30 Yeah, and we were talking about maybe having a Colin show. I know you sometimes do it for the new year so maybe a little

Cortex 1:36 bit later. Yeah, maybe maybe maybe this next month I'll put out a call for calls and we can do a whole talk redoing Colin show. Talk we're doing is not going to I'm already forgetting it like a minute into investing. The jet was like the top of your deck. Yeah, well, yeah. Like I was saying I haven't like I haven't been talking out loud much last couple days because of sore throat you know, rescheduled the podcast and everything. So I've just like I've got a lot of words inside me that apparently are just gonna come out in whatever order they feel like I don't

Jessamyn 2:05 have a microphone in front of me. I have one that like attached to the headset that I swear to god is the same one that bought me however long ago. That is the only one I still continue to use.

Cortex 2:15 And I would rather have a microphone in front of me than a frontal Mycroft three.

Jessamyn 2:23 Take that. We work that.

Cortex 2:25 Okay. Did you do you recognize like the dumb old joke that that is? Okay, good. That's all that's

Jessamyn 2:34 easing the pain? Yep. documento was really my home for so long.

Cortex 2:42 Since we've we've probably talked about that like a dozen times before it began, I grew up listening to like, my sister's friend would tape dr. D shows off the radio. We'd have like, we had like these three or four cassette tapes of dr. D shows. And these were fucking revelatory to me as a kid. I was also listening to a lot of like, Weird Al. But like, I also had this impression that the Dr. Demento tapes were like, you know, these rare artifacts were like they're like, it was so hard. There's like Is this the one that has boot to the head is the one Is this the one that has the you know, extended remix of the Star Trek and song. And like so there were three or four of the tapes. And I spent my whole childhood think of like these three or four tapes as these weird holy relics, basically. And, like, having no understanding that if I just like, you know, organized myself a little bit or asked my parents nicely to help me do the work. I could listen to Dr. Demento. Like, every every fucking week. Yeah, like, I'm glad it

Jessamyn 3:36 was like he's still doing his stuff. I have to say, a great amount of that stuff does not hold up really well. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Let's make it a little windy for me because I feel like I grew up with Dr. Demento. Kinda didn't like, I mean, you listen to his stuff nowadays. And you know, it's a little bit more listenable than listening to old stuff. Nowadays. Yeah. But yeah, man, some of these songs I know, every single word to and I opened my mouth and I'm like, oh,

Cortex 4:08 I should I should close my mouth. Like, yeah, like that out loud. The things that were like, you know, this is a novelty song in 1980. And it's got 1980 sense of like, what's just totally fine to make an extended joke about it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, anyway, metal filter is a thing that we are both casual fans have. Really, I don't have a whole lot of a brain is basically where we're at today. That's fine. But yeah. So So,

Jessamyn 4:44 so 159 Yes. One thing about it. Tell me about the number one 159 enrollment, like spells of Roman enrollment. I take back what I just said about my own capabilities. This is gonna make my jokes that much funnier though. 159 in Roman numerals actually spells a word clicks, clicks, feel X clicks, which is not really a word so much is like a proper noun, but that it means a lot of things. And I just learned today that clicks is a kind of Unix. It's a type of X. Bobby, nonsense, miniature games produced by Whiz Kids a kind of malt liquor. Very exciting all of it. So that's, that's my 159 report.

Cortex 5:30 There was a video game called CLACS. Those K L a x, which that doesn't work at all for this but but similar sounding word, and it was a video game. That's the that was the story.

Jessamyn 5:39 I wanted. Our trivia moment. Are you doing any of the mini leagues? I'm

Cortex 5:43 not been I have not been. I guess we didn't do a wrap up on trivia last last month either.

Jessamyn 5:49 Yeah, I wound up staying in the same place. Jim got demoted. So he's going to be in my league. I'm in the same league with her. I'm not sure who else from Metafilter. Because I haven't looked. But I went like 11 for 12. On my first one, like the first time I ever got 11 out of 12 on a one day special. Then I money the wrong answer. I need the one I got. So instead of getting literally 99th percentile, if I had moneyed correctly. I was in like 73rd percentile, not even a collect, not even a contender on just images smells. So it's literally pictures about smells. That's pretty good. It was really good, actually. But I just had to brag because I feel very good about it. Except it's one of those like, I would have felt really, really good about it. But yeah, and we have a code of conduct at learned leak now. And I was part of making that happen. Nice. Yeah. I mean, it's mostly just don't harass people on message boards. And then of course, like their one lawyer guy is like, but what I mean, what exactly can you spell out specifically? And a whole bunch of people were like, dude, if you're asking, like, how much you're allowed to harass people before you get kicked off the message board? How about just don't harass people?

Cortex 7:13 How about err on the side of caution about Yeah, about like, don't like say, oh, there's an envelope. Okay, how hard can I push on it?

Jessamyn 7:21 Exactly. But that was kind of exciting. So I was happy about that was

Cortex 7:25 great. Congrats. That's fantastic. I was just thinking about now she's thinking about some code of conduct drama, actually, somewhere. So nevermind, that's not interesting.

Jessamyn 7:36 Wait, a second code of conduct drama is always interesting. Well,

Cortex 7:40 it's, it's a long I might even talked about it in passing a few months ago. And it's been a like a long running sort of thing. So Stack Exchange, the Stack Overflow turned into a broader set of sites over the years Stack Exchange is sort of like the container site of all those sites. And they cover a whole bunch of topics. And they had a thing with a volunteer moderator who they took away their moderation role and a disagreement about basically, extended discussions of the new code of conduct stuff they were rolling out, involving, in particular use of gender neutral pronouns. And it sounds like it was sort of a weird sort of someone is roubles lawyering a lot more than they should, in the face of this sort of thing. And beyond that I am. So their whole fucking structure is Byzantine. So they've got a big life. They've got I think, paid community managers who sort of manage a very large volunteer moderation staff and the volunteer moderators are elected. And so the process of like, firing someone from a moderation Job is saying, Don't do this specific set of superuser tasks anymore, and don't say you're free work for free anymore. Yeah, exactly. And so it's like, on the one hand, I totally appreciate how much if you're doing volunteer moderation, like being allowed to do it is kind of your compensation in a way. So having that taken away as a traumatic thing. And on the other hand, it's also this is a weird situation, like keto, that's, that's a strange thing to become a doer dicer thing. And the whole thing is very complicated. And I kind of don't want to get into detail because it's like a weird snarl of things. But it kind of came down to a situation where they were trying to improve the code of conduct and more explicitly, sort of, say, hey, you know, don't be shitty about pronouns, be respectful of people's gender identity shine away, that turned into simultaneously a huge amount of drama over of mod getting fired. And also people sort of arguing about the validity of that policy, and the two got mixed up in a real weird, shitty way. And in the end, there was a lot more noise about like, reinstate this moderator than there was about oh, hey, yeah, don't be fucking transphobic and that left me pretty uncomfortable with the overall community dynamics with the whole thing and were

Jessamyn 9:58 you involved in that? sort of meta commentary,

Cortex 10:02 I just sort of saw this going, yeah, no, I saw this going down. And I honestly I kind of started reading up on it because like stackexchange is kind of a big site. This is kind of a big kerfluffle for them, at least

Jessamyn 10:14 from within the community at Wood, who is not known for being particular.

Cortex 10:18 And it's also not at would like Jeff just been basically gone for a while, like he stepped away from it. And I

Jessamyn 10:25 don't know, and I feel like

Cortex 10:27 we I mean, there may be aspects of that, but but in any case, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a whole, it's a whole complement. It's, it's extremely not my circus, not my monkeys. But I was like, If this turns into a thing that actually spills out beyond the bounds of Stack Exchange, this is totally going to be a metaphor for discussion about this. So maybe I'll get caught up and then I just fuck it. And I got, like, I got in on the deep end of just like, sort of trying to parse and follow extended discussions across multiple different channels of like, posting on Stack Exchange, as this sort of developed over the course of a couple months. And honestly, I mostly want my time back. But it was, it was interesting and complicated, and a fucking mess and in any, in many ways made me feel better about some things that sometimes I worry about her feel frustrated about on Metafilter because like, you know, this web way worse, in way different ways than things tend to on Metafilter. And that's like a kind of comfort.

Jessamyn 11:23 Right? Well, I mean, as we were talking about before we started recording, like I have this, you know, awkward, Lumpy 30 plus 1000 member Facebook group that I have admin rights on. Right, right. And like for people, and one of the things that's really interesting to me about off meta filter, group dynamics and discussions, is there really is a kind of, I mean, even though on meta filter, I feel like we do kind of go over though, like, you know, blah, 101, please, please familiarize yourself with block 101 before commenting in this slightly complicated thread about something that's somewhat difficult. Like, man, there's other groups where people don't even agree that block 101 is the thing we need to be talking about. And you know, you get all of this like stuff that we know shorthand for, right? Like Sorry, I just got a weird robot buzz back.

Welcome to segment four of Episode 150, the meta filter podcast. I am Josh, and this is my robot associate Jessamyn. Yes.

Cortex 12:45 Nailed it. Fucking, do you want to try and finish the story? Or is it is it like, what's dooming us? Like? I guess we sort of I think we got through your and then I was going off on another tangent. Basically, you know what? Community Management, it's a whole thing is complicated. And yeah, some

Jessamyn 13:05 places do it better than others. And I don't mean to be like, Oh, Metta filter, we've solved all those problems. But I feel like in the grand scheme of who's doing better and who's doing worse, every time I see a major place, do worse. I'm always like, hurray, it's good

Cortex 13:20 to feel like we're getting something done. Basically, it's good to feel like you know, at least among like places that someone just can randomly roll up on we're making a fucking effort and that's reassuring to see even even by negative examples some time elsewhere. As much as it'd be nice if there just weren't negative examples because everybody was getting their shit sorted out. Via and so, so yes, in theory, this was gonna be a real short one, to save my voice and now we've gotten fairly far into chattering and trying to get the podcasts working not to crash. We're an hour into this process with a lot of our podcast audio so let's let's just talk about a few things. One of them is hey man filters hiring. We for the first time in like, four years basically, we are hiring a part time MODERATOR We're gonna bring someone new on to join the existing team, which at the moment is

Jessamyn 14:22 Mesas. Nomad, moving on? Yeah,

Cortex 14:24 versus Nomad who has worked here for just about nine years now. I started back when you worked here,

Jessamyn 14:30 nine years is the killer. Well, I mean, here's the story. I don't know if everybody knows the story of how restless Nomad came to work for metal filter. But basically I met her at South by Southwest I believe the year we were all staying together in the firehouse. Yeah. And we had gotten together to sort of hang out and she had been working doing community management for I think, a gaming company. I don't know if I have all the details of this.

Cortex 14:57 So yeah, I mean, she definitely had been doing like, you know, gaming company.

Jessamyn 15:01 Yeah. And I was like, Oh, I work all the time at Metafilter. And we don't have a schedule, and everything's kind of crazy. And that was, I think, the same year that Matt gave his South by Southwest presentation about how he took weekends off. And just, you remember?

Cortex 15:20 Do you?

Jessamyn 15:22 And I was like, Oh, he's not working seven days a week, like I am. And Jeremy was like, hey, you know, I am available for work, possibly, and had some good ideas. And basically, that started the whole ball rolling where I was like, I want a schedule. Josh kind of wants a schedule, not as much, you came around to schedules a little bit late. Yeah. And basically, when restless nomads started, she was like, first thing I need is a schedule. And I was like, you go. And that's how she started. And basically, I believe early on, and I mentioned this in the thread, like, took us to a level of professionalism, we would not have probably otherwise gotten to four years if ever, and I always, besides the fact that she's fun to hang out with and I enjoy her company and like her in general. Like that alone was like, Oh, my God changed my life. So great. So yeah, you know, wishing, wishing her the best and all the future endeavors. But I'm happy we got her as long as we did really? Yeah, no,

Cortex 16:26 absolutely. It's been Yeah, she's been a tremendous member of the team. So it's gonna be you know, I mean, I said, as much as the thread. But like, it's, it's great that we're able to hire, and it's great that she's able to move on to something else. But it's also sucks that I'm working with Tim anymore.

Jessamyn 16:40 I know. So that also, she'll probably do what everybody does, right? Which is kind of like, just fucks off for a couple months and isn't around and then hopefully, we'll come back around and

Cortex 16:50 come back with fresh eyes. Oh, hey, I can just hang out here. That's nice. Everyone's gonna be like, Hey, can you fill in for it? But I don't know if she's gonna want to do that. But she's, she's made the offer, which

Jessamyn 17:02 I've gotta say, I super enjoy the times when I come back for, you know, a weekend or something. And I'm like, Hey, everybody, and then leave it behind again. Like, it's a different, it's a different ask being like, hey, person who doesn't actually work here. How do you mind work in here for a day or two?

Cortex 17:21 I imagined that would in fact, feel very

dry. But yeah, so as a result, we are radical. If I could figure out the square the circle of both like needing a vacation and having a shitload to do like, anyway, yes, that what it comes down to is, as a result, we are hiring. And so we've kicked off the hiring process earlier this week. And we're going to be looking through at least mid February, we want to give it plenty of time, as much as we would like to find somebody get him going as soon as possible. We'd also like to take the time to actually talk to as many people as we can, and give folks an opportunity to apply. So we'll be doing that for the next month and change at least, and go from there and probably have like news in like, end of February, March is what I'm guessing. About, we'll see how things go. I'm very excited about that. So and excited excited about, about the possibility to give someone else a chance to work here excited about the possibility of working with someone who is seeing it from the inside with new eyes, you know, there's a lot of a lot of like, good upsides to being able to bring someone on that I'm, like, now actually

Jessamyn 18:38 be like, I don't want to be all the leaves so we can bring somebody on. But yeah, this is real and happening how to

Cortex 18:47 filter is such a small complicated, like slow moving machine that like you know, it doesn't have the same sort of like hiring turnover that you would expect from like a larger company, or somewhere with much more sort of transactional roles. So yeah, it's been a while since we were like, really think about it in this way at all actively, which is, it's nice to be there. So. So that's the news. And hey, you know, if you give the give the job listing to read and if you're interested, go ahead and tossing a application and brainwave actually had a really great suggestion to be more explicit in the job listing about the idea of being available for like, sort of a short informational discussion about the

Jessamyn 19:27 great idea. Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 19:30 I really appreciated that suggestion. And I wouldn't added that into the job listing because I think that's the thing like that's, that's kind of the nature of the interview process at Metafilter. Anyway, you know, it's like, mostly, a lot of this is really about trying to make sure someone understands what the position is, and we understand what they understand about like, what's important. So like, that's kind of a necessary part of like, the later part of the process anyway, so someone wants to do that early to make sure they understand what they would potentially be applying for. Hey, that makes sense. You know, I'm happy to do that. So, yeah, and

Jessamyn 19:59 if anybody wants To chat, I mean, I'm also happy to talk to somebody who's been there from before. And who just wants to talk to somebody maybe who's not on current staff about things. I am always available for chit chatting about any of it. So

Cortex 20:12 yeah, yeah. Needless to say, you have very strong and very grounded sense of like how things have and do work. So, you know, that's

Jessamyn 20:21 reasonably be expected from the position and

Cortex 20:24 yeah. So we're doing that. And that's, that's, that's a big exciting thing. And that's, that's, that's, that's my jobs update. Yeah. What other like, that's, I mean, that's kind of been the big news. On my, my mind, obviously, it's a big process to go through. We actually, you know, we're having a hiring process these days, which is another distinction from the like, when RECIST Nomad came on when it was literally, hey, we're at South by Southwest, we really need some help. Okay, you're, you're using like a good egg. Okay, you're you're a

Jessamyn 21:00 person on the website who could work which I think

Cortex 21:02 for where we were with medicals with time was the only way it was going to happen. So it's very good

Jessamyn 21:06 for me to I was like, Oh, my God, having another woman working there would be amazing. And Matt was just like,

Cortex 21:15 No, no, no, we can still.

There have been several

Jessamyn 21:25 precious few jobs. Since then, I mean, that one of the reasons you listed your job is because there's almost no jobs.

Cortex 21:34 Yeah, no, it's been a year is a funny time to you know, I have a feeling January may like pick up over the course of the month.

Jessamyn 21:43 I mean, it would almost have to be in three jobs since November that remain open. Yeah.

Cortex 21:49 Yeah. That are still up. Yeah. I think we might have had some stuff in December, but then it got filled, but I'm not sure. So yeah, but yeah, there's a couple of jobs.

Jessamyn 21:58 Raccoon 409. Looking for Girl Scout Cookies W city Mike looking for some of the to help him make a VBA outlook mount macro.

Cortex 22:06 So out of those are, you know, you get on it,

Jessamyn 22:10 man. These days, I'm gonna post my job for somebody to help my antique book list software do nothing. I mean, it's so stupid. Because basically the end of the year, I go through, you know, everything I read for the last year and, you know, make little calculations. How many people of color was I reading? How many women how many men? How many blah, blah, blah. And my software could be doing it if only I set it up that way to begin with, but it's creaky. And yeah, I don't I don't think I have the chops for it. Yeah, I should do it. You're right. Do it. You're right. You should

Cortex 22:45 do it. That's that's, that's the ever abiding aspiration of I think this podcast in general is just do the thing. Just just frickin do it. You know, what I'm gonna do is, say we talked about projects. Great. Let's just do that. I have. Oh, no, no, go. You. Me.

Jessamyn 23:06 Chitra did the eight primates of Hanukkah, because a lot of the holiday countdowns on science Twitter are Christmas themed, which fine, right? That's just how the world works. She wanted to do something. What?

Cortex 23:22 Yep. I'm just interrupting, please, please, please continue.

Jessamyn 23:27 That is fine. So she celebrates the eight primates of Hanukkah, where she basically talks about both Chronica and a primate in a tweet. And here's an interesting thing. mandolin conspiracy said he posted it to better filter. But it's not in the user interface here posted about a filter

Cortex 23:53 or who might have done it, because I'm pretty sure it did get there.

Jessamyn 23:56 This happened with him all the time.

Cortex 23:59 I don't know. I don't know if it's particularly a mandolin conspiracy thing. Or maybe there

Jessamyn 24:03 was a project by mandolin conspiracy that this

Cortex 24:06 was something I hate that there was something tied to that. Yes, you are. Right. There was also another meddling conspiracy involved. Projects lack of connection that I will maybe not this. Yeah, it wasn't this one. And I don't know. Anyway,

Jessamyn 24:20 let's stop talking about him. Let's talk about Churcher he did this great Twitter thing. Oh, fence battle and conspiracy. Yeah, we posted a new primate and some information about Monica. And I just have to brag briefly also sorry, I know we were just going to talk about Chara Chara, but I actually managed to go through and light the candles every night of Hanukkah this year, which may have been the first time I've ever done that. I'm usually like moving between like my house and like wintertime hanging out with family. There's usually like a fence going on. We base it some night and it's one in the morning and we're like, Fuck it, we'll do it tomorrow. But this night, we this year we just got it all going and I felt really good about Got it. Excellent.

Cortex 25:01 That's nice. I did an extremely bad job this year, I lit the candles on two nights, one of them the wrong number of candles.

Jessamyn 25:10 I mean, for anybody who didn't really grow up, grow up doing it, I find that that's almost a normal thing that happens. Because we did that one night too. And usually I only find out because I post a picture to Instagram and somebody's like, hey, and I'm like, oh, it's the Instagram algorithm. They're like, No, it isn't. You just don't know how many candles?

Cortex 25:31 I actually thought about like, do I try? And do I post this after all and try and retcon I was like, man, just fucking, I fucked up. I posted on Twitter. But I did make a menorah out of stained glass. And I'm very proud of how well

Jessamyn 25:42 I saw that. That was beautiful. And there's a story behind that. Right?

Cortex 25:45 Yeah, which I probably talked about this earlier

Jessamyn 25:49 last year. I'm just kind of setting you up for it.

Cortex 25:52 Yeah, I don't remember how much I talked about on the podcast. But if I did, it would have been back around like probably April last year, I started doing stained glass at the start of last year, I just like took a class on a whim from a neighbor who has a studio. And it turns out, I really liked making stained glass stuff. And so I become friends with her. And I took another open study class. And then I've just been like going at it in my basement. Instead, I got set up. And when I was sort of coming off that class and starting to set up, like start to think about setting up a little kit in my basement, you know, there's a few $100 worth of stuff you need to buy if you really want to get to work on stained glass, which is not terrible. But it's also it's a few 100 bucks to lay out all the ones for tools and stuff. And my parents, like reached out and said, Oh, hey, do you want your grandfather's stained glass stuff? And I was like, my grandfather's what, what? And it turns out my my dad's dad who had passed away, like 20, something years ago, later on his life had been doing stained glass and that stuff ended up sitting in his garage after he passed away. And then my grandma passed away many years later. And my parents helped packed up the estate. And I think the stained glass stuff was maybe just going to be one of the like, well, we don't know what to do with this. So maybe this just goes and they're like, hey, no, let's like pack this up. And so that stuff ended up in my parents basement for many years. All this I didn't know about because why would I have known about it, but my little brother when he found about this is like, you know, I was doing stained glass in college. And they never told me about this. I'm not sure how the timing worked out there. But anyway, so I came in to my grandpa's leftover stained glass kit, which was some glass and some very bad led that I will never use. Not because lettuce bad but because it's in bad shape. It's just like it was it was probably great led 20 years ago before it got bent over a bunch of times and corroded. But some glass and some tools and like most of it including a grinder, which is like the machine, you know, the inches down. And that's like 150 bucks new for this. And this old 1970s grinder still works fine. So. So it was great. I basically ended up mostly set up, I went out and spent like maybe 100 bucks on odds and ends to finish out the kid after that. But the other thing that came with it was grandpa had some small stained glass pieces that were like little small finish things. And then he had a fairly large menorah project that was like half done. And he was doing a lead channel style. And I do copper foil style. And that's a whole discussion, but basically the two different approaches. And it had some broken pieces. And it was kind of in a shambles. And it was based off a design that he had deviated from. So basically, I know better now than I did at the time. But even at the time, I was like I don't really know, I kind of like to finish this thing. But also I don't know enough to know how to figure out how to do that. And I thought, well, maybe later in the year, maybe by the time you know, Hanukkah is coming around this year, maybe I'll be ready to go for it. And I established like in October or November like I know enough now to know how much of a job this is going to be. And it's not happening this year. Because I think it'd be nice to get it done and like get that to my dad. And that didn't happen. But I got to thinking about it around the start of Hanukkah this year. And I said well what if I just did my own little thing that I worked up a design then I got real busy. And so last night of Hanukkah or Lord the day of the last night of Polycom

Jessamyn 29:18 couch, you know, I

Cortex 29:20 got started, I got started and I think that count, I got the cut the class cut and ground and then I still had another like 10 hours to go. So I was like, Well, I'm not gonna stay up all night and destroy this thing in the process of losing my mind. So I got I got it to him a few days later. But But yeah, it was sort of like a kind of a placeholder, I think because I still want to finish that project and I still have to figure out how to do it. But in the meantime, it was nice to sit down and say okay, well I'm just gonna execute my own thing. I'm gonna make my own sort of contribution to this chain of creation first and then I can come back to my grandfather's menorah. With a little bit more time a little bit more runway to work with. So maybe Yeah, maybe maybe this winter, Will, we'll be able to see my my grandfather's mirror finished up.

Jessamyn 30:06 Oh, well, just how much you done already. And you know, it looks great. Like it's just a cool project,

Cortex 30:15 I'm really happy with it, it came out nicely. It's weird, you have to make a lot of decisions with stained glass, the kind of design I'm doing involves like, it's a weird, it's a weird thing, because you have to put a lot of lines into a design that wouldn't be there. If you were just trying to do a nice clean line drawing or something like you just have to accommodate the reality of glass is something that you can only get away with so many sharp corners and so many thin pieces. So you need to break stuff up and figuring out how to break that up in a way that contributes to the strength of the image instead of just sort of distracting from it is, is definitely part of the art that I'm still very much trying to find my way towards. And I feel like I got there. It feels like I did a reasonably good job with this one. And so I'm really happy about that. So anyway, that was that was my project that I didn't post apparently, I should maybe make a project post. But a project post that I did like is smash has a blog called Tinseltown tasty times, where as he says he reviewed every place to get lunch at an odd mall called tinsel town in Vancouver, Canada. I love him. It's exactly what sounds like and it's fantastic. And also I said his username right, I think because I went to his wedding and heard his family saying his last name. So it's magic. There you go. Boom. You can't hide it from me anymore, buddy.

Jessamyn 31:34 That's awesome. Yep. I like the idea of a mall called Tinseltown. Yeah. I very much enjoyed this sort of comprehensive and other one of those sort of completion II things by D and G, called this film as 100 years old, watching and reviewing films that are 100 years old, or more than 100 years old. So looking at Felix, the cat's first appearance, printing press in motion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just the a lot of them are on archive.org. And so you can, you know, you can go see them. I mean, it's a little weird, because you can't look at some of the videos that he's been viewing outside of the UK. The good news is something like tunnelbear could probably help you out with that. And I don't know, I just like it. I love it when people do kind of completionist you know, check all the, you know, X all the y's stuff. And there's some really cool screenshots on the website. That just make it look especially interesting. And I love the one that's on the top right now because it's about a weird, blimp.

Cortex 32:45 Nice. Yeah. Speaking of aircraft, that's that'll work. I also like this project by JT Wiseman, Advisory Circular LA, which is a twitter bot that tweets when it detects aircraft flying in circles over LA, you know, just tells you, it shows you a map of recent flight movement by that aircraft and describes the aircraft and whatnot, you know, this is presumably just coming right off some, you know, API on, like, you know, public facing air traffic control stuff or whatever. You know, like, but

Jessamyn 33:20 still, if they're flying in circles over something, the presumption is that there's something interesting going on,

Cortex 33:26 maybe, like, yeah,

Jessamyn 33:27 maybe you might want to know about it.

Cortex 33:30 Yeah. Or, or, or you just want to, like know what planes are doing. But yeah. Well plant aircraft, I should say, you know, because there's things like helicopters do and topics. Yeah. I played a video game where there's a helicopter and you know, playing it with my, my, my brother and a couple friends and chatting about stuff and like, we own things like, you know, here comes the helicopter or let's get to the helicopter. And aside from the obvious Get to the chopper joke that like we made probably 1000 times because of that line from Predator. We also like, say short versions of words and you know, so instead of saying helicopter, you might say chopper or, or copter, or you might say chapter a million fucking times as yours apparently when I tended to kick when I would just say Chuck let the something something the chapter and then I would be like, What the fuck is wrong with my brain? That is my story about helicopters.

Jessamyn 34:28 Chapters. I love it. Yeah,

Cortex 34:31 shall we in the spirit of the keeping short that in theory is trying to do Should we move on to Metafilter Now there's other good stuff on projects, go look at all the good stuff and projects.

Jessamyn 34:38 And if you're wondering if you should post your thing to projects you absolutely should.

Cortex 34:43 Yeah. Don't be like be in Jasmine posted jobs posted projects do the thing. You posted to jobs? Yeah, true. I did. Hell yeah.

Jessamyn 34:53 All right. You're doing great. Yeah, I'm

Cortex 34:54 doing I'm doing fantastic. I'm excellent. Man, I felt termina filter is a thing where people post things. And I like that.

Jessamyn 35:02 All right, I have two things that don't go together. But they're my two main metal filter things, one of which was, I tremendously enjoyed your post about embroidery renderings of aerial views and Lanzo. Ship,

Cortex 35:15 right. Isn't that stuff? Dope?

Jessamyn 35:17 Yes, it was December 17. So I mean, basically, we didn't really talk about December. Let's put a bookmark in this to remember to talk about the best post contest for this month too, because I'll forget probably otherwise.

Cortex 35:32 Like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna type the words but then I'll just have to try and remember that because it's

Jessamyn 35:37 been a year rate. These are incredibly cool pictures, I guess from the mat and from create magazine of an artist who does you know, kind of use from above of stuff with embroidery. And you know, I feel like everybody kind of started picking up embroidery over the last like, five or 10 years. Like it's a thing now like you might meet a person who has done needlepoint or embroidered or something. And as somebody who is become kind of a pain about becoming a visible mending person, I don't know if we talked about this at all. But like, I have a whole bunch of sweaters that are my favorite. And I don't want other sweaters. I want those sweaters. Yeah, except the problem is those sweaters have been absolutely savaged by moths. And like, what do you do? It's a, it's a problem, right? And so, you know, over time, I've been like, oh, you know, I, I do know how to sew, like, I should be able to solve this problem. And then I'm like, Well, I don't have any thread. Like I could watch myself not dealing with it, right. But I found some embroidery thread at the local thrift store for 50 cents, which is about how much I want to do with invest in thinking about this. And then it turned out I had a needle that I could use at home. And so now I've been like fixing holes in my sweaters in what I consider to be somewhat amusing ways. You'll notice this one has a googly eye on it, because I have too many googly eyes now. And I was a little bit like Justin,

Cortex 37:07 I saw this I saw the same it's goodbye on multifocal at the time, and it just wasn't even parsing or like I don't even I'll just like I check the site sometimes just isn't very reflexive, sort of, I'm just gonna put things in for my eyeballs way and I definitely saw this googly eye and I definitely was like, Okay, I thing just happened. I'm so glad that that's what it is. That's that's much better.

Jessamyn 37:27 Yes. And I was a little bit worried that like, you know, that's just too weird. I just blah. But then I wore it to the library the other day. And people were like, Hey, cool sweater. And I was surprised because I think it looks kind of weird, but I also enjoy it. So at any rate, seeing other people who have done stuff with sewing or embroidery, especially who are super talented. You know, I see Angeles stuff go by on Instagram and a couple other people's and it's just, it's neat. Also, there's this Shel Silverstein eyeball in the gumball machine. poem that has always been a favorite of mine. That I will include just, you know, eyeballing the gumball machine right there between the red and green looking at me as if to say, you don't need any more gum today.

Cortex 38:14 Because that throwback.

Jessamyn 38:17 Yeah, it's great poem. So I wanted to point out your post, which I thought was good. But also, you know, back to another thing about me, I guess, that I wanted to mention was Art Garfunkel has kept track of his reading since 1968. And in the early web, that used to be kind of a thing like, you know, one of those like sites where everyone was like, well, here's this weird site where Art Garfunkel tracks all of his reading, and you know, I track all my reading and I started doing it partly because I saw Art Garfunkel doing this, and I started doing it in the late 90s, which is now a really long time ago. And I'm becoming that person and I was pretty sure we talked about on metal filter. And sure enough, we did 12 years ago, Jasper friendly bear. Basically linked to Art Garfunkel is reading lists, which were actually on metal filter in 2007, also, and posted by partial law. And so it was just kind of a fun every now and again, I find like an old metal filter posts that I just enjoy reading through again, both to see who's still around but also who's not around and also how conversations went better or worse or differently. And so this was a neat little encapsulation of that and link to our carbuncles reading habits which I appreciate it

Cortex 39:38 you know, you should make a project post about last year's reading list now that last year is over and you

Jessamyn 39:44 I mean, am I gonna just gonna do that every year? Yeah, fuck why not? All right. I mean, last year was like a

Cortex 39:49 banner year once a year is pretty poof, slow down there. Just because you read 200 Plus books you can make up post.

Jessamyn 39:59 I didn't read too. 200 Plus bucks. Are you kidding? Did you owe like 128?

Cortex 40:04 Maybe? Not. I mean, it's a lot. There's a lot more than I read. I just

Jessamyn 40:11 been reading like, it's my job because I spend a lot of time like trying to go to sleep and reading is part of. But yes, so yeah, I think most of my other stuff is asked me to filter. So filter and I'll see what else I commented. If there's something else on my list,

Cortex 40:29 there was speaking of drama and other organizations as we were earlier.

Jessamyn 40:35 We love to is this going to be about the Romance Writers? Look, oh my god, it got better today.

Cortex 40:41 Yeah, no, yeah. No, I've been I've been following it. Like, Jay, as someone who has like, like, I don't, I don't get a lot of book reading done. None of its romance. But like the organizational and fandom stuff, intersecting in the RW a stuff has been fucking amazing. Like, you know, it's like, it's amazing in a shot. And for anyway, it's amazing insofar as the fallout that is happening because of a bunch of fucking racism. So it's not like really, really,

Jessamyn 41:06 really backwards assholes. I mean, every time I tried to be like, no, no, no, you know, there's totally, you know, librarianship is kind of white, but like, we do pretty good. And then you look at photos like this, and you're like, I can't shove out shit, like, because it doesn't affect me. And so I don't see it. And this was just oh my god, Romance Writers of America. Oh, my God.

Cortex 41:27 Like, it's essentially it's good that some of the shit is crumbling. so badly under some visibility is basically the overall story like that's

Jessamyn 41:35 crumbling? Well, because it's not just that there was like one romance writer who did some embarrassing shit, and somebody called her out on it. And people didn't pick the right side, it was that the organization doubled down repeatedly, in supporting the wrong side of what was a completely righteous and reasonable allegation. And the whole and the book that was this was all about is not even a current book. It was from a long time ago. And so you could have just been like, yeah, I fucked up and I do better now. Instead, like, you know, there was a whole bunch of like, white lady says, She's the victim, horribleness, where you're just embarrassed for people that they feel like, that's an appropriate thing to say, well, the whole weird,

Cortex 42:23 like, Shadow Cabinet, Lego. Yeah, it was, it was it was an impressively complicated way to do the wrong thing very loudly and expect it to work. And now it's all sort of falling over sideways.

Jessamyn 42:38 Because people transparently pick it apart now. Right? So this woman said she lost a three book contract. Only she didn't lose a three book contract, you know. And so she her original assertions about how horrible this has been for her weren't even accurate. I mean, whatever she feels what she feels. But there's a big difference between Hey, feelings are valid. And hey, you made some assertions about facts that were super not correct, because we can jack like, and then tell other people that you're ridiculous. So

Cortex 43:11 I didn't turn his turn into sort of like, it's yeah, it's a fucking it's, you can read

Jessamyn 43:16 about it on meta filter, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Jacqueline, which we should mention, and is not even that long. But there's been a lot of people, you know, talking about it and digging. Yeah.

Cortex 43:28 Well, yeah, no, that mean, the post went up once it was starting to turn into more of a thing. Like it had been sort of like a thing on Twitter for a while. And then Jacqueline put together sort of a roundup of where things were. And then it's been the threads been kind of tracking that, like, you know, it's been conversation and also sort of people saying, Oh, and here's another thing that happens, so it's actually, it's not a bad way to get caught up along with the occasional jokes about, you know, heaving booms in the commentary about what's happening.

Jessamyn 43:58 Yeah, as of this morning, when the, you know, the head of our wa resigned, like, you know, fascinating, fascinating like, you know, the president of our who maybe didn't even meet the basic requirements to be president, like, it's one of my favorite metal filters is tracking a thing that is interesting and newsworthy, but not maybe our lives are on the line level of of tragic, so that you can just get a lot of good information read along with people who know more about it than you and maybe learn something so that you can be conversant in it more than just having listened to like one NPR story on the whole thing if there even was an NPR story on the whole thing.

Cortex 44:41 Yeah. So

Jessamyn 44:44 I did, I did find one other Metafilter post. Yeah, well, just that Carol Spinney, the guy who played Big Bird past, the very, I think right after our last podcast, and I grew up with his niece in Massachusetts. And so he is one of the other notable people that went to my high school along with me and the kid from Dropbox. And, you know, I just I liked this thread, I liked seeing people posting interesting things about Big Bird and how it Big Bird affected people growing up and things that they had known about it and thinking about Sesame Street and what Sesame Street means to people in 2020. As opposed to what it meant to people in 1975 Just a really interesting set of remembrances. You know, people talking about stuff.

Cortex 45:39 I thought the announcement by Gary Larson that the power side has a website was interesting. And there was an interesting discussion thread about it, catalyst made a post. And it's kind of weird, like, I don't want to just like repeat my comments from the thread. But it's interesting to think about, like farside as something that has kind of been gone for a while as a going concern. Obviously, it's still around, but like, culturally, it's not as around as it used to be either. And the ways in which like the timing of the internet and the farside, shutting down and Larson sort of pointedly not making a web space for it, and all that stuff interacts in interesting ways to create the situation where like, I don't exactly know what to think of it finally getting a Website Other than being kind of glad that it does. Like I'm glad he got around to feeling like okay about the idea of it being online, because that was part of the thing is like, he didn't want it to be an internet thing. And he kind of just was doing this tilting at windmills and trying to get people to not paste it everywhere.

Jessamyn 46:37 Hard, right? Yeah. It's great for pasting.

Cortex 46:41 Yeah, and the thing is, like I can I can sort of see how in 1995, you know, that made more sense, maybe even as a practical thing. Like, I think you'd be tried to, like, convey this to a young person today, essentially, they'd be like, Are you fucking kidding? Like, how would that even work? Like the concept that like, no, just these images don't exist online? Just don't don't ever as but how and and at the same time, it was such a ubiquitous, like, physical cubicle. Paste up that, right? Yeah. So anyway, I thought that was coming.

Jessamyn 47:16 Calendar. And you know, I don't think a month goes by that I'm not googling that, like dog trying to get the cat to go in the washing machine. Every time with cat solid Cat food, cat food, and the dogs like, Oh, please. Oh, please. Like, to me, that is the quintessential, I am wishing for a thing that is also bad, like reaction that I want to have on Twitter probably once a month. And I'm always trying to find that comic. And it did occur to me after a while. Like, is this even relevant to somebody who's like 20 years younger than me? Yeah, like I did. Yeah, still a good comic that was

Cortex 47:53 discussion went to is like the idea that like, you know, farside was like one of the very, very few weird comics when farside was like, in its prime and

Jessamyn 48:01 right timespace caveman job. Yeah,

Cortex 48:05 these days, like a weird comic is like, that's a lot of comics. We have web comics. Now we have a lot of people finding ways to do all sorts of flavors of weird comic that just wasn't like, possible in mainstream culture or connected culture anyway,

Jessamyn 48:21 like, how a lot of us got comics? Yeah, like, I

Cortex 48:23 don't know, the Perry Bible. Fellowship is in any sense, mainstream culture at this point, but a ton of people know about Perry Bible Fellowship. And if that had been a comic, you know, 30 years ago, the people in the town where it was in the town paper would know about it, like, you know, like, chances are, you're able to get a bunch of people reading your weird comic, because most people just didn't have a platform of any sort. So speaking of

Jessamyn 48:45 weird comics, I have a segue to a post from last month. Dan Wilson, another person who has died, who was possibly one of the earliest weird comics that I ever knew anything about. He was he was the one who was like, man, we finally found out what was clogging your chimney. And then there's like a disgusting Santa skeleton in there. Do you know cam Wilson at

Cortex 49:11 all? Just a little bit. Like I recognize his stuff. Like I didn't know him by name, but I recognize this stuff. When I started.

Jessamyn 49:15 He was formative for me because I grew up reading, you know, old New Yorker magazines, but also like New Yorker compilations of cartoons. And so a lot of them were kind of stupid, and I didn't get them and they were New Yorky jokes, but like George Price, and Gan Wilson, were both just strange and approachable. And kind of I mean, George Price was interesting, because a lot of his people were rural. And so they seemed like people I knew growing up rurally and Ken Wilson just because it was creepy and strange. And he had a book called nuts, which came out I don't even know when it came out. But it was all like basically kind of the it was all about this character, the key it, right. And it ran a National Lampoon from 1972 to 1986. And so I saw it there. And it was all about a kid experiencing the adult world, kind of before we had like Calvin and Hobbes, or other things that were very sort of kid mentality. And the kid was always dealing with, like, fucked up parents doing aggravating things, either in school, kind of like peanuts, or like, at home, or like, and it was all like, you know, remember the first time somebody in your family actually, you know, got really sick. Or remember, like those weird back alley games used to play or remember the guy that ran the comic bookstore, and you would think that guy would enjoy his life more because he was surrounded by comics. And he got reissued fairly recently. And it kind of just brought, I felt like Dan Wilson and his weird comics, to a new generation of readers. And I just found that the, the nuts comic book, which I have a version of, and I was always taking pictures with my phone to put reaction gifs again, or reaction JPEGs on Twitter, is now available at the Internet Archive. So I can take screenshots of like all of my, all of my favorite comics and send them to people, and they can now sort of enjoy Ken Wilson again. Yeah, yeah. And so at any rate, the post is just a rip thread for him. But just people talking about sort of first and early exposure to his his weird comics. Yeah. Let me see. I think I have one. I'll just, I'll just include as a link in here.

Cortex 51:46 But we really got a rhythm today, we're really clicking. Yes, yes, I will include that in the in the thing. Yeah, the one thing I wanted, like, I don't have any other specific posts. Again, I'm gonna aim for brevity, brevity. But

Jessamyn 52:08 brevity, look at you that just like gets on to other birds.

Cortex 52:12 It's just it's going for it. But there's been a bunch of really good posts from folks under the I think unofficial, like organized off site, POC takeover tag, where there's been 50 Plus posts at this point a bunch of people posting stuff just kind of focusing on POC experiences and outside the sort of like white demographic assumptions that that stuff we've been talking about a bunch in the last six months. So I think people just said, Hey, let's let's do a thing. And they've been doing it. And it's been pretty rad bunch of bunch of people posting in particular seen a bunch from Primal Lux. And JJ is mama and conspire. Stoke stone, we've seen some great one. Yeah, there's basically a bunch of people like, you know, some people have made several, some people just made one or two. And it's been it's been really nice. Actually, I super appreciate the both the spirit in the content of it. So yeah, that was kind of cool to see just sort of show up and happen.

Jessamyn 53:15 Yeah. And for people who want to sort of follow along, there are, there are some new hashtags that you can that you can use.

Cortex 53:24 We don't call them hashtags on Metafilter. Are we going to have to start calling them hashtags at some point? That we don't have to do anything we don't want to. We're not the boss of us. I've lost. I've lost. Okay. Let's talk about filters. How about how about

Jessamyn 53:43 a filter full of really interesting things. So let me segue from what we were just talking about, and

Cortex 53:51 oh my god, so balancing standing wheelchair device,

Jessamyn 53:54 no shoes, the tart has a patch of land that they inherited, where their grandmother's house was in East Texas, they've been played property taxes for 20 years. Ah, like, what should we do with this? We don't live they're what we do. And one of the things that they kind of, you know, they kind of matter to them is I mean, let me find their words. So I'm not using none at all. Sorry, this is terrible.

Cortex 54:34 This is the quality audio, we professional podcasts.

Jessamyn 54:38 Now I'm trying to find these specific words where it was just, you know, it's color owned land in Texas, and that's important to them and has value and so they're trying to figure out how that intersects with the land that they have. And one of the things that's really interesting from my perspective, is Not just kind of grappling on, you know, I don't have a ton of money, but I have this land and I have some attachments. But different people talking about how we don't want to sell some of the last land owned by African Americans is how they put it. A lot of people have some really interesting feedback and including money memoir, who has a very interesting kind of similar, but different situation, talking about that. And you know, looking at the Texas Land Conservancy, other people talking about different ways they do that kind of stuff. And I often like it, because I think it's easy to really think, you know, most mefites live in, you know, Brooklyn, the Bay Area, cities, Portland, etc. And it's great to hear from kind of rural mefites, or people talking about rural issues, kind of grappling with how it's different. And what you might want to do. I mean, basically, they've owned this land, paid the property taxes, and nobody's there. Like, you can't really do that with a house in Seattle, but you could easily do it with land in East Texas. And so it's an interesting thing watching people grapple with, yeah. I feel like I should mention, during this downtime, that my contribution to the best post contest in January, because box the librarian in Arkansas has already picked libraries will be for people who post about rural something. On the front page, I will give a word, use the tag rural, keyword rural, and post a thing. I'll pick one, or find one that has been the most favorited and send somebody something yet to be determined TBD.

Cortex 56:48 I had, well, you know, I so rarely get around to actually answering ask medical questions. And there was a question from anonymous about what to do about their teenage son, not cleaning up his oh my god, this was great. I've got I've got a teenage son, and he's jerking off. And he's not putting the tissues in the trash. How do

Jessamyn 57:07 I solve this? Runny nose? You don't or you can't do some things? Sure.

Cortex 57:12 Anyway, how do I get this tissue to get in this trash? This is how do I broach this? And, you know, people have different thoughts on it. And the parent

Jessamyn 57:20 is really trying to be cool, right? Like, I'm sex positive. I don't care if the kid jerks off. But I don't want to be picking up all of his Kleenex. Exactly the same token I did feel like, a lot of people were like, Well, why do you then? Like, you know, just let him you know, pile up under his bed until I don't know what happens. Like, it mostly seems to do with like other people. Like he knew that a guest would be staying in his room. And then there's Kleenex everywhere. And you're like, Well,

Cortex 57:49 yeah, there's an intersection there of like, okay, but what Where is, you know, what's your standard on mess or whatnot, but I think that feels to me, like, a reasonable like, yeah, just fucking put stuff in the trash. Like, that's, that's a solvable problem. But anyway, I basically just said, Hey, you know, I was a dumb teenager boy, and wasn't good at cleaning up. Just Sure, just say it. But like, you know, there's a bunch of stuff coming out there. So it was interesting for me to read other people's perspectives, too, because I understand that my perspective is not universal, either. Like, that's who I was, as a kid, I can recognize my own flavor of dumb fuckery. But that might not be, you know,

Jessamyn 58:30 because I had one of the most disgustingly messy rooms as a kid. Like, I don't know why, like, just was bright. Like, I had one window. It was dark all the time. My family situation wasn't great. And my room was disgusting. Like, just filled with too much crap. But it was my only it was the only space that was mine in the house. And then like, when I grew up, like something happened in college, and now I'm like a tidy person. And it's weird, because I don't know what happened. I just remember being a kid. And my room was so messy. It was just like, knee deep and crap at all times. And I'd clean it like once every six months. And now like, I'm a grown up, and my place is clean. And it's it's weird, because I don't know what, you know, maybe it had something to do with my parents. I moved in with a different parent. They were cleaner. Maybe that was it. Maybe something changed in my mind. But I think for a lot of people, that's like the big question in their life, if they want to achieve a change. It's like, well, other people who have achieved this change, I would have they do it. And it's weird for me looking back and I'm like, I have no idea. Like, it used to be incredibly messy. And now, not messy. W city might ask a question in s Metafilter that I have had in the past. Like I see this fun ad for this game that's supposed to be fun, and has mechanics in a very specific way and I would like to play that game. But then I get the game and the game is nothing like the mechanics In the ad that I'm seeing, and it turns out that this is actually a thing. And he winds up being reply to by MC Mike. Mike the Mara MC McNamara, who's also I believe a neighbor. I think they both live in Chicago. It was like, actually, this is a thing, like these fake game ads make a lot of money. And here's why. And yeah, like, don't be surprised, like, because there's a lot of I mean, I remember that when I had like, some game I used to like to play on my phone, and I would see these ads for this other game that looked like it was doing certain things. But then when you look at that ad, it's just or you read the reviews for that ad. It's a completely different game. Like it's not it's not the same at all. And it turns out, that's the thing. And MC. Mara has some links to why

Cortex 1:00:50 that's fascinating. Because yeah, there's a bunch of there's, like I say, obviously, but like, experientially, there's a ton of horseshit in like mobile ad gaming, and it's such a weird little oroboros of a market. Like if you play any of broad swath of mobile games, they basically finance themselves on running ads for other mobile games. And it's just like a weird network of like, straightforward, or bullshitty advertising and both are leading to underwhelming gaming experiences. But like the fact that someone is just like, we're just going to literally make some shit up. We're just going to say fuck it is like, that's a, it feels like a weird twist. Because like, people are doing a pretty good job of producing not very interesting actual existence games, too. So like, why not make that game? And yeah, I

Jessamyn 1:01:41 play that game. Why isn't that game available to be played? Yeah. Some AI game, and I can only mention this because he doesn't really listen to the podcast. Listening to somebody recount their text based adventure AI game,

Cortex 1:02:00 the GPT to AI dungeon. I think so. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:02:04 Um, no, maybe I don't even I don't even know. Because every time I talk to him, he's like, Oh, this really interesting thing happened in my game, I opened a closet door and inside the closet, were a bunch of jars. And then I said open jar. And I'm just like, Oh, my God. Sweetheart, I love you so much. Please stop telling me these stories. They're not interesting to me. Like, I'm so psyched. He's into the game. But listening to him talk about like a weird AI game. Because it's weird. And that's what's fun about it for him is you never know what's gonna happen up late playing it. But I'm just like, you know, weirdness other people's weirdness was like

Cortex 1:02:43 describing your dreams, you know, it's like, it's not going to translate very well.

Jessamyn 1:02:47 I listened to his dreams with rapt attention. And I liked them. You know what I mean? But like a game, which is kind of like somebody else's dream, you don't know. You know, you're like, cut ahead to the point where I figure out if I'm in it or not. But like, he loves it. I'm excited that he loves it. It's fun to have a game you love. And yet, it is definitely a thing we don't share. Yeah.

Cortex 1:03:13 I liked this question from EJ s. Trying to talk about specific, more recent feeling idiosyncratic feeling use at all is a modifier. That, yeah, basically, that's it like, it's it's an interesting sort of linguistics usage question. And I enjoyed the discussion. It sort of came up, I left a comment early on, and then EGS clarified that, like, they were in fact looking for the more specifically like recent version, rather than just general use of of it all, which is not like the heart of it all. Um, but yeah, like making that distinction also requires sort of like identifying what is different about this newer feeling usage. And, and, yeah, there's an argument that like, a lot of this is coming down to maybe drag race specifically as having popularized that specific thing, but I think it was that but anyway, I thought that was interesting.

Jessamyn 1:04:11 Oh, well, speaking of linguistic quirkiness, I like this one from very recently, which is about repeated words names and phrases. So agent rocket is a trivia Quizmaster and there's a category with repeated words phrases or names like you know a rose is a rose is a rose are Phillip Phillips, can you think of good examples? And of course, it's a great question because lots of people can think of good examples from whatever their own part of the world is. And so you know, we kick off with buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo. But, you know, it just you go to, you know, through Duran Duran Boaty McBoatface, which if I believe that's the name of your cat, right? I mean, I know where it comes from, but like you have a cat Who graces the front of my refrigerator? sitting on my lap right now? Oh, booty, tomato, tomato, etcetera, etcetera. It's just kind of a fun thread to read where?

Cortex 1:05:12 Tomato, tomato. You say tomato, tomato, I say tomato, tomato. Let's call the whole app off.

Jessamyn 1:05:20 Exactly. Serhan Serhan D Day.

Cortex 1:05:24 developers, developers, developers, developers, developers,

Jessamyn 1:05:27 like, all of those. I like that. You know, the Devo song. Yay. Yeah. Yeah. Like, and then there's the band da Yes, etcetera. And anyway, fun, linguistic list generation. Definitely good. Also, I loved densa man, Ipanema sterically, has a daughter who wants to become a Rockette. I know dancer, man. Just his name is Dan and he's not a dancer man, set in kind of a Massachusetts accent. But I like to thank dance. A man has a dancer a daughter, who wants to become a radio city, Rockette. So how would you actually go about doing that? And again, outside of my universe know nothing about it. Got some good advice from I love bananas and Pascal Pinocchio's and Dorinda and it was the video the day in the life of rocket who's been doing it for eight years? Fascinating. Interesting.

Cortex 1:06:27 Yeah. Like, it's one of those things like, and this is, this is one of the things like I remember having this sort of realization, as I sort of moved into adulthood that like, you know, there were entire worlds of things that I just never thought about as being more than just something that had like, crossed my vision in passing, but like, there's so much stuff in the world that like, you know, is abstract until you actually think about it. And like, I understand that a very straightforward way that like, rockets are dancers working in a specific job in a specific profession, but I've never really thought about the rockets as something other than a cultural phenomena, like, too hard before, right this moment. And so it's like, oh, wait, yeah, that would be a job. There would be a whole process of getting that job training for that job qualifications for that job. That's the whole thing. There's, there's, there's an entire fucking world of like, what that would involve that, like, just never, never really thought about it. So like, Yeah, well, and

Jessamyn 1:07:17 the fact that like, most of the people who are involved in things in the world around you, even entertaining people, or whatever, people are people doing a job. Yeah. That has its own. I'm sure. Like, you know, paperwork, the paperwork to become a rocket. Interesting, right? Yeah. Curious, or whatever. Yeah, I like that. And for people who are interested in the world of showmanship, may I recommend Elizabeth Gilbert city of girls, as a fun book that I read last year. That was about kind of the world of theater and showmanship in New York.

Cortex 1:07:53 Next, Hey, how are we on time? Did you have a thing and like,

Jessamyn 1:07:59 No, I secretly texted my friend and said, How about 330? So we're, we're good. But thank you for paying

Cortex 1:08:07 timezones. Yes, yeah. No,

Jessamyn 1:08:10 I was, I'm just having coffee with a friend. But like, you know, it was going to be at two and then I was like, oh, podcast later. How about three? Great. Oh, wait. I'm still in my pajamas in bed. So about 330. So I'll have to hustle out of here in about 20 minutes or

Cortex 1:08:24 so. Yeah. All right. Cool. I will mention one more ask. Just because I enjoyed this involving a co worker. A couple? Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:08:37 Oh, yeah. This question keeps going

Cortex 1:08:39 sublimity had a question about the die cut patterns used for making jigsaw puzzles because they were really frustrated with a specific puzzle he did recently that was like, because of the because of the lack of clear variation in the curves of some of the pieces. It was very hard to work through a section of the puzzle where there was nothing to rely on except for like puzzle shapes. And then the puzzle shapes the piece shapes were not distinct enough to be sure you weren't actually

Jessamyn 1:09:10 miss fitting something into the wrong place. Yeah.

Cortex 1:09:13 Which is like a nightmare scenario because like, nothing makes sense. Nothing works. Okay. Well, it's probably one of these pieces is wrong as well. Fuck. Anyway, this question got exactly one answer, but it was a detailed, useful onpoint answer. Yeah, who, who enjoys the puzzle? And which

Jessamyn 1:09:29 I didn't know about her. I love that. I love learning that about her.

Cortex 1:09:34 So yeah, I just thought that was that was nice. Oh, hey, look at this really good answer. Oh, hey, this is this is a nice Mefi. So

Jessamyn 1:09:41 that's all I saw this AskMe Metafilter thread title. And then I was like, oh, gosh, but then I read it. And I was like, Oh, neat. So basically, titled, How do I make someone's first time be as enjoyable as possible? And I was like, Oh, God. Not that that wouldn't be maybe the question but it was phrasing oddly and I was concerned. But then it turns out it's pastor of Muppets who is going to run his first. Sorry, gender check. Don't know. First. Yeah. Pastor Muppets who's going to run their first d&d game. And I've played before, but it's been a while and I want other people to have a really good time. What what's good to know? And oh my gosh, so much good feedback about, hey, when I've been, you know, a DM, here's what I've done, that really helps. Here's some stumbling blocks that people wind up having, like rolling for characters takes forever. Maybe you can have some pre made characters that you give people don't let people play evil characters right off the bat, give people you know, do you want the red shirt or the blue shirt kind of thing? And it was good. I didn't really know a lot of these things. I played d&d briefly as a kid. It was fun. I know people play a lot nowadays. And but I never really thought about what went into it. And I thought this whole thread both pastor puppets Good on you for trying to give people a good experience. And also other people who've been there before who could share their experience. It was nice,

Cortex 1:11:10 ya know, that's, that's really nice. I'd be curious to go back and read through that. Because like, yeah, there's a there's a lot there. I've been just recently playing a little bit again, for the first time in a while, I'll let some other Mefi friends in town. And we're doing something simpler than d&d and trying to sort of figure out how to, like, you know, do more of the storytelling and less of the die rolling. And it's been, it's been a good time. And the challenges are there. It's like, it's, it's a complicated thing to figure out what works well for everybody. So

Jessamyn 1:11:37 I gave Jim and other Jim copies of the mefite dice that You sent Me, I have my copy. But now they each have their copy, too. Because you gave me like four party bags that had like Metafilter dice in them. And I don't need four sets of dice. But I would like to keep one so I kept one. But I gave him another gem. They're copies for their birthday and they liked them. Alright, I got a quick three, three AskMe ease I liked. Three mix. The remix, is in a band. And there's a part where you're supposed to play an anvil. On Maxwell's silver hammer. We don't have an anvil. What do I do? And different people chimed in for what you could play that would sound like an anvil, including, of course, a recent discussion on music Stack Exchange about how to get the best anvil sound, of course, nerds. So that was a fun thread.

Cortex 1:12:35 Ah,

Jessamyn 1:12:37 sodium lights the horizon had a question about whether there's any voice control agents that you can get that won't also spy on you. Which was I thought a useful question like with everybody like, ooh, Alexa, this theory that bla bla bla a Google, like, can you do one of those that aren't sending stuff to the mothership? And the answer is kinda, not totally, but it was an interesting question. And then my favorite weird question was which pair of animals which can interbreed tastes the most different? Right. I appreciate you chuckling because that was because that was my feeling.

Cortex 1:13:23 Oh, geez, what an angle?

Jessamyn 1:13:24 Like, not a lot of answers. But the threat is tricky, right? Because, you know, there's a lot of animals that can maybe interbreed, but maybe haven't. I mean, the different birds probably taste different. But who knows? I'm not sure there was an, you know, an actual answer to this, but I appreciated the hell out of the question, which I think was like, you know, I mean, it got flagged a couple times, but I think it was a good faith, if joke question. But you know, kind of makes you think, yeah,

Cortex 1:14:01 that's pretty great.

Jessamyn 1:14:02 Um, were you gonna dive into meta talk, because I wanted to only mention two things and fanfare also.

Cortex 1:14:09 Good. Mention them? Yeah, I was just gonna mention a couple minute talk things and wrap it up, but

Jessamyn 1:14:13 maybe three things in fanfare ah, ah, there's a lot of people continuing to talk about the new Star Wars movie, I've got to go. I won't say anything about it. But you know, as you know, it was contentious for a number of reasons. Many people felt like you know, too much fan service going the wrong direction. Not enough rows, all kinds of problems, but there's a very lively conversation. Still going about the movie if you wanted to talk about it with your favorite nerds. Mandalorian was a big thing that I think a lot of people watched over holiday time or and, number one, I loved it ever since Firefly I've been wanting more space westerns and This is a really good one. And so there are still people who are talking about it you know, the chapter eight thread I think has some of the, the the wrap up the things and then I gotta find, but basically season I think seven Hold on I know I know, but I know what I'm looking for. So I'm just gonna put some words here while I try and track it down season eight season eight full season of Letterkenny dropped basically right after Christmas. And there's an open thread for the entire season if you want to come chat about Lennar Kenny, Letterkenny, you know, for those of you who maybe don't know is kind of like a rural sitcom, it takes place in Sudbury, Ontario, it's Canadian. And there's like kick skids Christians and hockey players, and they all kind of get along. And it originally was just a kind of a, it was straight to crave, which is a Canadian, kind of Netflix alternative. But it's been it's been a little bit more I think mainstream released maybe I don't know, but we watched season eight over the holidays. And I felt like season seven was a little bit of a letdown season eight back on their game. totally enjoyed it.

Cortex 1:16:19 Excellent. Yeah. Yeah, let me mention a few little meta talk things. And you mentioned the best post contest already. And that's continuing to go on. That's a

Jessamyn 1:16:34 Yeah, vote for your posts. And, you know, comment in your posts, etc.

Cortex 1:16:40 Yeah. So that that is a thing. There is a post that went up this one up after our last podcast, I think, but a December open thread about disability, neurodiversity and deafness. That psychiatrics put

Jessamyn 1:17:00 together. Yeah. Really? Well, the last time I checked it on it, yeah, you know, this

Cortex 1:17:05 is this is of a piece with previous ones talking in this territory, which inspired in turn by some of the sort of open thread, POC specific discussions from last year, and basically just a place to talk about some of the stuff that sometimes feels like it's hard to, or can at least feel like, it's hard to talk about, in the more open reaches of the site in general, you know, yeah, this is more of a space where like, the expectation is like, you can talk about your feelings and your experiences with this stuff, rather than like trying to put it into a conversation where you don't know for sure whether people gonna be like, Okay, well, but you know, you know, this is a place where you can just, it's fine. You know, wherever you're at, you can come sort of talk about your experiences and your feelings. And it's, you know,

Jessamyn 1:17:52 along those lines, I thought, the more recent post by quacks like a duck, which was the gentle reminder about the intersection of class and culture was really good has been so far really good conversation about different people talking about their feelings, talking about class issues, money issues, how that intersects with culture issues. And if you talk about something, you think you're just putting down someone for say, bad taste, maybe what you're doing is painting with a broad swath about people who didn't have a lot of money, right? The taste is one thing, but you know, class is another thing and kind of watching how you talk about things that can be class markers, or if you baby didn't know, they were class markers. Well, now you do. And so there's a lot of people just talking about that kind of stuff. And I thought it was a really I was reading along and I felt like it was a really, so far at least, like good, good conversation.

Cortex 1:18:55 Yeah, no, I agree. I thought it's been. It's been really, really good overall so far. And one of the thread that was kind of nice roundup thing in the year, Johnny wallflower made a sort of discussion post is based off a tweet, basically saying, hey, oh, yeah. Yeah, so like, you know, just people sort of talking about, like, stuff that happened in the last 10 years. And, you know, it's a lot of like, a lot of like, well, hey, I'm proud. I did this, you know, the certain amount of like, well, hey, I'm, I'm proud to have managed this situation. You know, it's a mixed bag, because like people in all kinds of decades, but all in all, it's just nice to see a bunch of thoughts for a bunch of mefites sort of talking about what they've been doing over time like decades. While

Jessamyn 1:19:42 Wow. That whole time yeah.

Cortex 1:19:48 So yeah, I enjoyed that. I thought that was a nice place. Nice place to be. And yeah, I think I think that's it for me, we've we've probably hit something like an hour and a half on this short version. Didn't the book. Conclude the pieces back together? We'll get it one of these days. Hey, my voice held up so so

Jessamyn 1:20:07 yeah, I'm still I'm still feeling all right. I'm gonna wander off into town. Basically, I'm watching the sunset over the hill that my house is nestled into. And so if I get outside while the sun's still shining, I'll consider that a win.

Cortex 1:20:20 Yeah. All right. That sounds like a plan. Well, hey, good podcasting. And yeah, we'll do another one of them. Sounds great. Another good talk. Talk redoing? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Good talk. We're doing Yes.