Podcast 162 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 162: Grip It And Rip It (2020-04-03).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 A couple of things you

it is, what is it? It's Friday, it's Friday. Time has time has no meaning. But as far as that goes, it is Friday, April 3 2020, allegedly. And this is episode 162 of the Metafilter monthly podcast. I am Josh cortex Mullard. And I'm Jessamyn. And I have a 16 ounce Occidental, my BOC here and I'm just going to grip it and rip it. And we're going to have a nice little podcast here.

Jessamyn 0:54 And I just finished drinking my internet procured coconut flavored decaf coffee, because I go down my list of like, what's going to force me to go to the supermarket? And like not having decaf was one of them. But if you're if you don't really give a shit about your decaf, like, I like having flavored decaf and that's actually not that easy to get in the supermarket if you're buying coffee and not buying pods. But it is actually kind of easy to get like shitty decaf in flavors on the internet. So I just finished my coconut decaf after my long, socially distant walk this afternoon. I feel like almost anything is possible. Excellent. Yeah. And then I got home, and there was 10 turkey vultures. Over my house. And as you know, like my landlady is 96 years old, and I was like, was she walking around? They see her like, but she's fine, right? Like, she's fine. I'm fine. It was just like one of those little confidential things where you're like, Man, the writers, I've seen this sort of formation in some of the threads like the writers, as if like, we're all part of some sitcom and the implausibility of some of the choices the writers are making are really, really a little a little much lately. And yeah, but I got inside no problem. Turkey vultures have fucked off. And yeah, thanks for good.

Cortex 2:26 Excellent. Yeah, the neighborhood around here has been pretty uneventful. I mean, we live in North Portland, near ish to St. John's, which is kind of a small main street of its own up in the north west Peninsula town. So it's not it's not the busiest place to begin with. Like, it's still like, you know, city residential, but it's not super busy. But it's like, it's definitely less busy in terms of ambient traffic at this point, which is heartening. You know, there's less people out and about when we go for walks, which is a good sign a lot of businesses are closing up. And that's a real hole. That's a so far, that is the most direct personal impact this has had on me, and I'm just thankful that that's like the worst case scenario so far for me has been like several businesses I like, you know, may not be businesses in a few months. Because I mean, that's shitty for everybody involved, but like, it's, you know, it's a coffee shop. I like you know, that's, I'll accept that as, you know, the floor. Personally, if I get so lucky, as far as the impact of this whole bucket Coronavirus thing on me, but But it's like, it's weird having that sort of happening, and being really tracking this stuff pretty closely. And then having conversations with the shop owners of like beloved shops, who it feels like they have not come to nearly as dire of a conclusion as I have about what's going to happen in your business. And like there's an

Jessamyn 4:01 awful lot of bailout stuff, but actually happening, you know, people who don't have to pay rent or people who don't have to pay mortgages, it you know, the laws are changing really rapidly, which is one of the things it's been really hard to keep up with, I notarized something over zoom last week. How is that a thing, but it's a thing now, to keep you in your damn house. A lot of our local businesses are shuttered, but doing takeout at least for now.

Cortex 4:31 Yeah, yeah, we've got several places in town actually, the beer I'm drinking we got as just contactless takeout. This this afternoon, went down to a local brewery and they're just like, they've got it all set up with like, you know, stuff on the table, you pack your own box. You don't handle any money. They've got a card reader set up on a tripod, everything's, you know, nice and about as much as you could manage to operate beer sales without having a beer. Sales interactions.

Jessamyn 5:01 Yeah, yeah, our, our coffee shop is still has a like a window. And I feel bad for them because they literally just opened a couple months previous to this. And everybody was like, hurray, finally the coffee shop is back. And then like, oh shit, the coffee shop is forced to close. But they you know, they live in town, it's a basically a two person operation in their relatives. So they can, you know, be in the shop, and they do, like, take out the window, and you can order a whole quiche, and then go walk up and pick it up, or, you know, buy coffee or do whatever, which has been nice. You know, Dunkin Donuts, emails me basically every day because I got the app when the coffee shop was closed. And they're always like, trying to coax you into the Dunkin Donuts. And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm learning to fold my own milk at home. It's been actually, you know, nice to learn something nice. I think of it like, I was trying to think of this word as I fell asleep last night, like you're the elephant in the zoo, and they have to keep you interested. So you get like enrichment activities. You know, like, you get a box with crap in it, and you put the take the crap out of the box, put the crap in the box, like, you know, puzzles for the elephant. So the elephant doesn't get bored and realize the elephant could probably get out of the zoo if the elephant were so inclined. And I see a lot of these things in my own house now is like enrichment activities for Jessamyn to keep me in the house, like, learn to fold milk. Don't don't get takeout at Dunkin Donuts, like learn to do it. Like get good at it. Watch the YouTube videos. That's your job. Now, your job is finding ways to stay inside. So do the thing. I really do want to hear you. I saw this comment that you left earlier this month with your stay the fuck in line song. I really badly want to hear you do a stay the fuck inside song that's, you know, to the tune of stay the fucking line. I can understand reasons why you might not want to. But wow, it would be really fun. And if anybody else who's listening is inclined to take Josh's stay the fuck in line song and turn it to stay the fucking side. I think that would be super, super fun. Yeah.

Cortex 7:19 It's one of the things we're like if the whim hits me, right. I know. I know. But it's hard to like, just make it happen.

Jessamyn 7:26 Yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of time watching myself not do the stuff I'm pretty sure I should be doing not even like should be doing that I don't want to do like should be doing that I want to do and I'm like, but it's so far away. Yeah, I'm trying to be gentle with myself. But yeah, the wind hits you. That'd be super fun.

Cortex 7:44 Yeah, we'll see what happens. You know, it's, it's weird. I feel so torn between like, what if we just have a podcast where we just don't talk about any of that shit. So people can have something nice listening. But also, it's such all consuming shit that like it's, so we'll probably just mix it up.

Jessamyn 8:00 I mean, Michael, and it's probably your goal, as well as for it to not be a heavy podcast, but to acknowledge that there is heaviness in many people's lives and we don't want to just giggle past that. It's kind

Cortex 8:11 of a, it's kind of a funny thing about a lot of the podcasts I'm listening to that are like, you know, whatever, like humor podcasts or whatnot,

Jessamyn 8:17 can't even imagine. I mean, it's,

Cortex 8:21 there is a tendency not to get into it, which I think makes sense. Like, like, people are like, hey, you know, we're gonna completely change the tone of our show, to dwell on this thing. But at the same time, it's funny, I almost kind of want every one of them to actually take like, two minutes to like, actually introduce the context, whereas instead of tends to be more of like, a, well, you know, everything's, you know, with a thing anyway. And it's like, if you're listening to this later, like, it's going to be what are the thing? Like, I think to some extent, like

Jessamyn 8:47 thing? Yeah, it's almost what stage of the thing were you in?

Cortex 8:51 And I don't know if that's me, like, expecting more than really needs to be contextualized for a podcast, or if it's people sort of like, just assuming that context is so present, because it's there when they're recording that they don't need to like, yeah, I guess it's like is, is Podcasting A, you know, like, transient medium? Or is it an archival medium? Like, do people making podcasts think about what it's gonna be like, five years later? Are they like, gotta get this week's show out? Like, you know, I guess it's a little bit of that aspect to it.

Jessamyn 9:20 And also, not knowing how it's gonna hit your audience, right? I mean, I, for one, appreciate some level of context, right, we're in the first week of April, I was playing with a little tool earlier that like, told me, you know, there was a meta filter thread about it like that told me kind of when we were likely to hit whatever the peak of our particular aspect of the pandemic in my state based on different things that had happened. And the good news is ours is coming up, because, you know, schools been closed for a long time and that kind of thing. And, you know, that's just true for me, regardless of everything else in my life, that's going okay, you know, like Jim and I are having our 12th anniversary tomorrow. I don't know what the fuck I'm Gonna see him again. And that's just true. Like, I don't have to belabor it mope about it or whatever. But to pretend it that's not an aspect of what's affecting my life right now. Seems odd. But you know, you and I don't have persona, we're just us. There's not really, I mean, I don't know about you. I'm pretty sure, though, because I have met you IRL. Yep. Just actually you.

Cortex 10:23 Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, that's one of the things you and I were talking about before we like started was just like the reality that we both have kind of very stay at home compatible lives, where we have kind of had like, a steady being on the internet and not being like extreme social butterflies not going somewhere for work, necessarily, this has been logistically for me less of a disruption than for most people, I think, I mean, partly because, like, I have a job, like, you know, my, my job has not been affected. There's no immediate crash to metal filters revenue as a result of all this, you know, no one's had to be laid off, etcetera. So I've got steady work, I work from home, not leaving the house too much is not difficult. I have a pretty walkable neighborhood, if I do need to go somewhere, you know, it's like, it's the the impact is entirely environmental and sort of, like, you know, emotional and external. And it certainly I'm feeling it, but I'm not

Jessamyn 11:19 affecting everybody around you. I mean, yeah, your parents and their daycare had to be

Cortex 11:25 Yeah, the priests, the three schools closed at this point. Who knows what else is gonna happen there? You know, my, my siblings who have kids, you know, are definitely like, we're doing what, for how many months, etc, you know,

Jessamyn 11:40 right, challenging you challenges.

Cortex 11:43 But, but at least, you know, at least I'm being able to, like, come at it from my own from a reasonably stable place, which I'm really thankful for so

Jessamyn 11:53 well, and having, you know, a little bit of like, for me, at least, like free cycles to be able to help other people, right, like, yeah, I got Ronnie, my 96 year old lady who I probably talk about a little bit every month on fucking zoom today. Because her family wants to interact with her, but she's 96. And nobody feels comfortable kind of coming over. But they'd like to kind of see her and have her participate in the family chats they have. But she's just been like, she can't really install software, you know, she doesn't have a great memory, like zooms, got those buttons at the bottom, but they go away, if you move your mouse away, and she doesn't, she doesn't have kind of object permanence in that way. And but you know, we kind of talked on the phone and talk through the thing. And I felt okay, and good that I have a little bit of free time to be able to do that. And not just like, look, you know, my life is too complicated to deal with you and your bullshit right now. Cable TV is out too. And I'm a little less on the stick with that one. Because I'm like, what the guy came in left a box. She's like, Yeah, he didn't come in. And then the cable guy called me, he's like, she won't let us in the house. And I'm like, Oh, that's not what she said. Okay, I'll talk to her. Because, like, realistically, she'd go in another room in the house, he can fuck with her TV and then leave and then if she washes her hands and is careful, it's probably okay. But, you know, it's like playing a game of telephone. And so I care about that a little less. I hooked her up with my Netflix account. And she's like, Oh, great. How do I watch the news on this? And I'm like, yet don't. That's the whole point of Netflix. You watch the show about a guy and his fucking Tiger and you forget about the news. That's how it works. That's its job.

Unknown Speaker 13:46 Well, you can have you can run from great staycation and bad asthma much fun as you'd imagine, would be lucky in your location Hey, everyone, sorry. Some day we'll laugh about these.

Cortex 14:21 I I've had no context for that fucking Tiger King Show. The name of it and several things like riffing off it like I've seen a picture of Calvin and Hobbes next to that guy and his tiger. I saw someone did a like Lisa Frank style illustration of that guy and a tiger.

Jessamyn 14:39 I made a friend explain it to me today because I felt like I was missing out on it. And she explained it and I was like, Oh, sounds terrible. Well,

Cortex 14:48 I had the same experience last night documents and friends

Jessamyn 14:51 I'm still watching little mosque on the prairie and it is the right show for me right

Cortex 14:54 now. Nice. Yes.

Jessamyn 14:58 It's good actually for social distance. Seeing because they mostly don't touch each other.

Cortex 15:02 Did we? Did we talk about devs? The show? We might not have it's, it's, it's a it's a new show. It's pretty good. I'm enjoying it. It's made by Alex Garland, who's the guy who made the film of annihilation? He also made Ex Machina. But you know that by jumping over the southern reach trilogy, which

Jessamyn 15:29 Oh, I read and have watched and really should remember to queue up for myself.

Cortex 15:33 Yeah, I'd say what's the film? I really enjoyed it. It's I liked the books better than the movie as far as like storytelling goes, but it's a really lovely, beautiful looking film and great. sounds important. Yeah. Anyway, he's got the show called devs. That is some sort of mysterious startup that Nick Offerman is the sort of hobo messianic looking.

Jessamyn 15:58 Nick Offerman Oppermann phonebook.

Cortex 16:02 Yeah. And he reads it in this. He reads it well. He doesn't actually read a phone book. I don't know where I'm going with that. But anyway, he's good. Everybody's it's good. I'm enjoying it. But I knew about it ahead of time because people pinged me several months ago when they were doing press in the run up for it, about the fact that you know, it's involved a Menger sponge and then the show came out and people watch the first episode

Jessamyn 16:23 only way I know about it, as I probably tweeting about some of it.

Cortex 16:27 Yeah, I got several several tweets and messages. Once the first episode aired, they were like, Hey, did you see this? Because I'm aware of the

Jessamyn 16:36 does it feel weird being that guy about I really, I'm

Cortex 16:39 totally, it's like, it's a niche enough thing. Like, I feel like I chose very well by picking a very specific fractal as, as apparently my personal brand thing, because like, my family has a history of doing this. And I'm sure this has happened to a ton of people where like, you know, you like that one thing that one time and then someone gives you another one of them as a joke. Yeah, so my mom for a long time was like the pink flamingo lady like she liked pink flamingos. And so she ended up getting a lot of plastic flamingos. My sister. One of my sisters was like, into pigs at one point when she was 12. And so for like the next 20 years, she got like pig related guesses, like, yeah, you know, it's really hard to source a mango sponge. So like, I'm never going to have that problem. Instead of just happy every time. someone's like, Oh, hey, I saw this specific geometric thing and I thought of you like crazy and

Jessamyn 17:29 mosques stuff to be like, nobody's gonna buy me anything or like one time my sister got me like a resin ring on Etsy. That was literally like resin with like bits of moss in it. And I frickin love it. And then like that, was it like, there's not really much you can buy like, it just lives outside people send me pictures, and I love them.

Cortex 17:50 Yeah, just just just go for something nice. And then you're good. Anyway, I've enjoyed the fact that that was a resin thing. And I'm really enjoying the show too. All right. It says probably HBO.

Jessamyn 18:04 Yeah, somebody was like giving me advice for like TV shows to watch. And they, they were like, well, it's on and I'm like, it doesn't matter. Like I can get anything on the internet. Like just we don't have to talk about it. But I don't care where it is. I will find it. And I will have it. Thank you. Yeah, and same thing. I should probably mention this in the podcast. I will not mention it anywhere else. But you know, the National Emergency library that the Internet Archive have, oh, yeah, people need ePubs or PDFs from Internet Archive stuff, I can probably help people out with that. If, if they're having trouble with the encryption or anything else. Check with your local. There's a lot of opinions on the national emergency library. And I have a lot of opinions about it. But if I can help them better filter person with some content, do let me know. Yeah.

Cortex 19:01 Do we want structure just want to talk about some things you like?

Jessamyn 19:04 I mean, I like a little structure. thing I would really like to mention just is that projects has been off

Cortex 19:12 the hook this man has been there's been a bunch of stuff coming through.

Jessamyn 19:16 There's been a bunch of projects, I have enjoyed a lot of them in a lot of like, sort of random, random ways. But like some of them are like you know, once you can like go send your mom to or whatever if your mother is alive. Why? Like Volvo flicks, which is just a Netflix, front end for public domain movies. Like I think for a lot of people finding kind of content to enjoy. Not for like kind of the core metal filter demographic, but maybe the friends and family of the metal filter demographic is hard, right? Like maybe you've got canopy but you can only watch a couple movies. YouTube is a fucking cesspool like where Here's the stuff, but especially for people in that older generation, public, old public domain movies, great if they can find them, you know, in a way that's accessible to them. Great. And so this vole flicks thing made by manette. malevolent, you know, it's more of the vole WTF content just has a nice Netflix the front end to a whole bunch of public domain movies Abbott and Costello you know, Royal Wedding, Harold Lloyd, Three Stooges, Shirley Temple, but you know, if there's a person in your life who likes that kind of stuff, this is a wonderful thing for them. You know, Elmer Fudd, Mickey Mouse, Gulliver's Travels Daffy Duck in the dinosaur like it's it's a really nice treatment of it. And I think they did a good job. And they kind of snuck in some of their own movies in there as well. So if you want to watch some of the stuff that they've done, you can do it there.

Cortex 20:59 I really liked this project from fiasco to Gama. All up in my grill, which is just a blog of, as it says on the blog, grills, vents, ventilators and other architectural detailing and it's just like photos and like notes about that, just like grills and outlets and, and vents and whatnot on buildings.

Jessamyn 21:23 I love it. I mean, we were talking about this when we were watching the Mandalorian. Like there's that whole thing about like the sewer grate, that's like, Man, how the fuck did they built those sewers? Like, you can't get those grates off? And like I would watch an entire show that was nothing but the you know, the infrastructure of the Mandalorian why don't I watch that show about my own my own world? Yeah, my own home world. Ya know, it's a great one. There's a couple COVID ones that I think are nice, kind of I think anxiety tamper downers, Joey H made this thing, which is literally called Koren timer. Like, if you're someone who's like me, and you kind of bring in your mail and you're like, fuck it, I'm not touching that mail for a day, just in case because I'm tired of watching My Damn ends, this will actually give you a little place where you can know when it's safe to touch it. That's it straightforward. Be safe, wash your hands. But it's kind of a nice way to implement it, like, cuz I am always figuring I'm half assing this a little bit. You know, I'm like, well, that box has been in the entryway for like two days. And I think I need to wait another day. But what about that other box is that box plastic, blah, blah, blah. And so I like this, I like the simplicity of it. And I think it's useful. And then in line with that is Christy's just kind of blog post about thinking about staying at home. So like, you know, if you're somebody who's anxious, and reading more about this is going to make you anxious. Don't read it. But it's kind of her talking through her feelings about what choices to make about different scenarios. She's one of those people who finds that sort of channeling her ideas about how to do things the right way is a good way to help think through it and make herself feel better. And I found that this essay is actually good. Like, here's, here's the ways I thought about it, maybe it'll help other people think about it in ways that are helpful and not just kind of spinning your wheels like wow, you just can't sort of know. So I thought it was nice. Yeah.

Cortex 23:36 Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a little scattered here. But like, that's, that's one of the things is, like I would say, projects has been very busy and probably better than half of what's come along is either directly or pretty strongly tangentially, like COVID related, like, you know, there's there's there's stuff that's like, informational, like, like those last couple of projects, they're stuff that's more like thoughts or something Yeah, you know, it's like it's obviously there's to some extent people are like, Oh, this is this is what is on my mind which workflow but there's a bunch of stuff that is also just like projects people were working on and I'm glad that's in the mix too.

Jessamyn 24:19 Like oh, you and I literally posted the same link at the same hour minute second. I'm not

Cortex 24:26 going to remember this when I'm editing the podcast and then someone's have to say after I posted say oh you double this link and this is this is the moment that happened there you go yes. Libyan made a thing called Big Deal or no big deal which

Jessamyn 24:42 I am so looking forward to playing this just

Cortex 24:44 a sort of Wikipedia article take on the whole dealer no deal mystery briefcase thing, which I watched dealer no deal I think exactly once because like OH, THE FUCK IS HOW?

Jessamyn 24:55 I've watched it exactly once too.

Cortex 24:57 But yeah, you open briefcases and depending on What has been eliminated you can either keep trying or take the money. But it's interesting because this seems to actually have a skill element that as far as I know, that fucking show doesn't, like, as far as I can tell on dealer no deal you just like you have no reason to choose any particular suitcase. Except you have to choose suitcases, whereas this you could like actually make an educated guess about like, well, this is probably an article that a lot of people well, you know,

Jessamyn 25:27 I chose the one I thought was going to be popular and not unpopular. You know, that's, I think that's a good read.

Cortex 25:34 Well, when you first get there, it says, which do you think it's the most pageviews? Oh,

Jessamyn 25:39 so I did read it right. And then the words changed. Because then I clicked like snow.

Cortex 25:45 So So I think I think you're doing it right. It's just like it again, because I haven't watched the show enough. And also, you know, but anyway, it's great. It's a fun little, it's a great, let's use Wikipedia. You know, let's use some fucking API stuff to make a game out of a thing. And that's delightful. So

Jessamyn 26:00 and I've been spending so much time, you know, on various Wikipedia nerd habits, like for whatever reason, I do tons of Wikipedia in January and February, and that and then get over it. You know what I mean? Like, at the end of the month, February, I'm like, fuck it, I'm done for another 10 months. And then I just do little, you know, tidying the rest of the time. But I did have to say, had one of the articles that I wrote, featured in the deed, you know, section on the first page of wikipedia.org, my librarian friend Megan Rosenbloom, who can tell you if a book is covered in human skin or not.

Cortex 26:41 That's a That's excellent. Yeah, she's

Jessamyn 26:42 part of a anthropogenic bibliometro or something group. And that's kind of her area. She's kind of a health sciences librarian who has this weird niche interest. And the article has kind of a cool looking picture of her. And it's a huge pain in the ass, it'll come as a surprise to no one to work through the channels at Wikipedia to make that happen. Like you have to suggest it than a bunch of nerds have to look at it. They'll tell you it's shitty because they are nerds. Look, fix it. If they tell you it's shitty. You get on the front page of Wikipedia, some other nerd tries to delete your page. So like it's, it's a headache, right? But like, for whatever reason, I know people hate this about Wikipedia, and I do not blame them. But for me, I'm like that all you got nerds bring it like, I've got my armor on and I'm gonna make this article work. And so you know, I do spend a lot of time there is what this intended to say. And so I'm looking forward to doing this to seeing if I have kind of my finger on the pulse of other Wikipedian stuff. Looking at this, I don't even know what some of these words are, but whatever.

Cortex 28:05 Know. There's a bunch of other stuff on projects, too. Did you want to do the others specifically?

Jessamyn 28:34 Just how many pigeons fit in a child?

Cortex 28:36 That's right, that was just a day.

Jessamyn 28:38 Yeah, from just the sky. You know, basically, who's like, yeah, you know, you can kind of know how many, you know, comparative volume, how many children and pigeons? How many pigeons could fit in the space that a child takes up and it's just it's a funny little data science. Very tiny little thing, but I I enjoyed it. Nice. Yeah. So glad they put that up. Thank you projects.

Cortex 29:07 A lot. That's kind of probably a

Jessamyn 29:11 thing like it had made me get some pajamas. I mean, can I just tell you how much I would like some nicer pajamas than the ones I'm currently living in? Because I really would.

Cortex 29:24 Well, pH, indicating socks wants pajamas. And so if you wanna make someone jealous, there you go.

Jessamyn 29:34 Yeah, they got they got some Spoonflower fabric and they want someone to make some pajamas. And that would be good. Other than that, you could help Adrian Han being a production executive for those fun games that they make. And then I think there's really only one more job right?

Cortex 29:50 Yeah, tell tell him is looking for a data engineer.

Jessamyn 29:54 Enterprise partnerships, enterprise partnerships,

Cortex 29:58 and it is a remote job. So

Jessamyn 29:59 Hey, and the company is called super conductive which is pretty good. It's pretty good name. It's pretty good name and they're Feds Feds or they have money from feds. Good distributed teams smart, interesting people treat each other like human beings. Ask about it. It's a good quality.

Cortex 30:21 Shall we talk about Metafilter?

Jessamyn 30:26 Absolutely. job

Cortex 30:28 posts on Metafilter this month we decided to have a theme posting months where there would be posts

Jessamyn 30:38 hippie bear, heavy bear made this post. Have you ever made a lot of good posts? Like usual but not pounded by anything as I practice responsible social distancing? Chuck tingles latest.

Cortex 30:50 God bless Chuck Bingle right.

Jessamyn 30:53 I mean, the thing about Chuck Tingle is Chuck tingles, got a stick and stuck.

Cortex 30:59 He's sticking to it.

Jessamyn 31:01 Yeah, but like he's got to stick. It's ridiculous. And you know, he's not writing a Tingler about pounding the Coronavirus, but basically has a little post about enjoy these free books and make some donations to some people who are making a difference. And it's just cool because he's funny. He writes these like really ridiculous, kind of super schlocky porn stuff. But like, It's sweet. It's really, really sweet. And I guess what the no, sorry, I'm completely I'm completely confused. It's

Cortex 31:45 an audio medium. It's an audio medium, we gotta

Jessamyn 31:49 go. Yes. At any rate, he wrote kind of three funny little things that are free that you can read and make some donations if you enjoy the work that he does to some good charities. And I just, I just think it's a sweet approach, right? Because I think a lot of people are trying to figure out how they can take whatever their thing is, and use it to help people. And it's good. It's nice when you see somebody doing it. Well.

Cortex 32:16 I really enjoyed this post, from a CB about a week ago about a one bit music album.

Jessamyn 32:26 All right, Josh, we're in Josh's explainer corner. What? Okay, so I don't even understand this title. It's just lines.

So the idea is, with Triscuits be in three of the thing and biscuits being two of the thing.

Cortex 32:42 No, no, I mean, not not directly. City. I didn't read the whole Triscuit thing. So I don't fucking like I know, I know, that was a thing, but I have nothing to say about it. Go on. So So what do you generate music? The way we generate? What, when? When, when a speaker generates music. Okay. Actually, what's a good way to explain this in brief? I mean, does that make sense? Go read the post, but I'm not

Jessamyn 33:07 reading this. I don't even understand it. But think of it output just like on or off.

Cortex 33:13 Yeah. And that's the thing. Boop. Yeah. Now think of like CDs, like traditional traditional CD audio, or digital audio in general, is usually represented by like 16 or 24 bit detail, which says, like, you know, the value representing the noise happening, and every 44,000th of a second can be anything between zero and like two to the 16th. So you've got a whole variety of different numbers you can have, and those being split up in 10 thousandths of a second can represent basically a fairly smooth curve of a graph, if you like, connect the dot every 44,000th of a second, again, going up and down. So you can get a pretty good drawing of a waveform. Like that. And that can produce digital audio that sounds like just good audio to us, it sounds like natural music or speech or whatever. One bit is saying you have just on and off. So at any given second you can have to be up or down. which generates basically a square wave is the traditional one bit sort of audience. It's up, it's down and up and down. And if you listen to that, if you go on for you know, 10 or like like a 1,000th of a second and offer a 1,000th of a second and on and off. You can act basically very fast. You'll get like a you'll get like an E tone like it can be a very flat mechanical

Jessamyn 34:43 Wolfenstein right now it is Yeah, yours hurt. And there's landscaping advertisement oh

Cortex 34:52 no comment. So So one bit one bit audio, what you tend to think of if you had like, up PC in the early mid 80s. And before like Soundblaster was a common thing or the other good sound cards, you a PC speaker tend to just have like very playful people

Jessamyn 35:13 were like that was like eight bit.

Cortex 35:16 Well, the speaker itself is a one bit thing, you could in theory have larger bit counts stuff that has access to it. But the speaker hardware, like in the PC just didn't have a way to process that I get what you're saying. So one bit, involves just like you have that one square wave that you're modifying when it's on and when it's off. And this post is bouch sort of the process of making music with that. And then also there is an album, linked lower down in the in the post, the short album, link that is a really fucking excellent, very clever piece of chiptune music that doesn't sound like it could possibly have been made by one of those shitty one bit PC speaker things but it is it's so it's basically someone said, Okay, how can I do some fucking wizardry with this totally underpowered tool to make something that sounds like straight up good, like video gaming music. And it's really, it's really amazing and well done. And there's couple links to older stuff in the post in the thread. And I just really enjoyed it, I thought a lot of fun to listen to. But it's also fascinating. There was even accomplishable and there's a bunch of good nerdery some of which I can't even keep up with that comes out in the thread. So I thought was very cool. sounded great. And kind of a fascinating, like, how the fuck do you even accomplish this sort of thing? Yeah,

Jessamyn 36:40 in the people probably didn't read the links, but the conversation was really fun category is the P read will become your BFF for you. Which was basically, you know, toilet paper is a little harder to get than it was before and for other people. For some people it has been very hard to get. And so this is kind of a amusing take on that talking about, you know, women who go hiking, who maybe if you're an ultralight hiker, meaning you carry as little as physically possible, you know, maybe you use a bandana, and this is just talking about that. But of course, the conversation is just all over the place. And it is funny.

Cortex 37:28 Yeah, I saw bits of that. I don't think I've fallen it directly. But

Jessamyn 37:31 I think I left like a like a, like a note on it when I was working maybe one of the days and so mods may have popped in. Yeah. Because it seemed maybe at one point like it was gonna go a little off the rails because of course, people are talking about their own butts or other people's butts. And that's never

Cortex 37:51 metaphor, comma. It seemed like at one point he got off rails because other people were talking about their butts. And it's, it's

Jessamyn 37:57 Yes, exactly. But I enjoyed it. And if you missed it, it kind of rewrite failed, and good. And it was it just I enjoyed it. I learned a thing. And you know what, what more can you ask for in these in these difficult times?

Cortex 38:15 I've been taking a lot of solace in very stupid things at times like it really, sometimes just just something that is very dumb does a lot for me. And so I really enjoyed this post. Oh, hey, curious new mate this, this post about Jonathan Frakes at half speed which takes Have you seen the reminder? Played Riker? Oh, yeah,

Jessamyn 38:39 the beard guy.

Cortex 38:40 Yeah. And he was on whatever, I guess probably beyond belief was the name of the show I never saw. Okay, there's like there's, you may have seen these before. Like, they certainly come up on Metafilter before but someone he had this show, right? He had this like show on cable where like, it was like half our show where there'd be like, three short stories that they would sort of tell and recreate, you know, cable, faux documentary creation style. And then some of them are true, and some of them were false. And so it's like, sort of like, can you guess what it is before we're done with this segment? And oh, my

Jessamyn 39:13 God, that sounds aggravating.

Cortex 39:15 Well, I mean, I don't I think I saw an episode I was like, well, and it's like, it's whatever is it kind of cable fodder wasn't a great show, but like, whatever Jonathan Frakes was sort of hosting it and so he would like set everything up in sort of like a twilight zone, you know, sort of Rod Serling is sort of like you would have you ever been to a haunted house? Bla bla, bla, bla and place you know, like, where, but where was the knife kept? You know, I don't know why I'm doing this voice. It's completely not Jonathan Frakes. But anyway, is it very corny sort of setup for a segment or whatnot? People have made several edits of this show to take just all the questions he asks At various points. But what happened to the the third cowboy? What was the Nice doing in the bathroom. How did he get out of that box,

Jessamyn 40:04 you know, super stilted and ridiculous.

Cortex 40:07 When you put it all together, it's very goofy. And people will post it like, you know, my editor after they review my rough draft, you know of the novel, you know, and then this giant string of questions or like, my, my five year old when I'm trying to work from home and then just the string of observed questions. And anyway, so there's been that in a couple of things. It's good fodder for jokes, because I don't know Jonathan Frakes is like a likable goof in his delivery of the stuff. So anyway, this is yet another riff on that where someone figured out Oh, what if I watch him at half speed, and I love that the internet rediscovers his concept like every several years, because I remember this with Jeff Goldblum in like Apple ads was a thing many years ago that we had a metaphor post, I think. But like if you chose slow someone down to like half speed, they just, they just sound super fucking drunk is all it is is like, yeah. What happened to you know, it's like, you can do it to literally anything works. But it works very well on Jonathan Frakes asking a bunch of like, slow, slurred questions that don't make sense. So I enjoyed that people enjoyed that. There's a couple links to other things. Jonathan Frakes apparently enjoyed that. So you know, that's nice.

Jessamyn 41:18 Yes, I saw I saw that at the at the end that he

Cortex 41:21 was. So if you want something very dumb, please go watch John, who strikes at half speed. Monday, you can stay in bed. Tuesday, you can stay in bed. Wednesday, Thursday, stay in bed. Friday, stay in bed.

Jessamyn 41:41 And this was kind of early on the month, a little before. Things went sideways in the US. But this is from monkey toes. And it is a librarians link to NYPL title Quest 2018. So basically, it's about librarians, looking up books. It's not it's kind of a sleeper of a post, like one of those more more faves than comments. But it's a link to New York Public Library talking about doing if I believe it. Like, competitive book looking up? Yeah, based on sort of comments. And

Cortex 42:29 do you have the the movie, you know, it had that guy in it? But for books instead of Blockbuster Video?

Jessamyn 42:36 Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah. And a whole bunch of librarians who find this kind of thing, actually kind of fun. You know, like helping people find like a mystery book, we all kind of tease a little bit like, Oh, ha ha, like it had a blue cover. But like, I don't know about other people. But like, I want to find you that book. You know what I mean? Like, that would make me happy. Like, maybe you're a dip. But like, whatever, you still want to read a book. And if we can help you get it. That's, you know, that's the thing. And it's cool. So, yeah, I enjoyed the post few comments. If you like that kind of thing, you'll like it. Also, I have to give a shout out a librarian shout out. Because NYPL has also made a whole bunch of zoom backgrounds that you can use that are like New York Public Library, zoomed back, like you can have a background that's like a library themed background. You know, it's just like seven nice pictures or six of the inside of New York Public Library looking cool. I actually. Oh, sorry.

Cortex 43:36 I said, that's excellent. Yeah,

Jessamyn 43:38 I took I actually took a picture of a giant pink Daisy, from Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons. And that is my background for almost everything. It's a little showy, but I like it. I've had from staring at my bookshelves.

Cortex 43:53 I've had very limited like, results with the auto background things so far, so.

Jessamyn 43:59 Oh, really? Yeah.

Cortex 44:00 I mean, it works. But it's like, I think to some extent, I may just be too annoyed at the sort of working

Jessamyn 44:08 doesn't work well. And especially like, if you're a person with hair, like, like, if I wear all my hair back, it works a little better finding kind of the outline of my head, but if my hair is down, it kind of can't figure it out.

Cortex 44:23 And I can I can see it working and like see what's going wrong with essentially that like edge detection algorithm. And I think it's I just get very distracted by it. So usually, at some point, if there's like a goofy zoom call with friends, there will be the five minutes where we're all fucking with our background. And then we just all go back to our actual backgrounds is like, Oh, that's really distracting.

Jessamyn 44:42 Because it is distracting with other people, right? Because if they move around a little bit, then it gets all weird. And you're like, Hey, buddy, your whole arm disappeared. And it's Yeah, I feel weird about that. So

Cortex 44:55 yep. I was delighted to see the news. that you're the man now dog.com is back, which KMZ made a post about?

Jessamyn 45:05 That's a great title. You're the man once again, dog. Yeah.

Cortex 45:10 And we probably talked about this like earlier in the year, because I think, early in the year, the site went down. And you know, for people who don't know, this is a site that has been around for a very long time. Like, not as long as metal filter, but like, filter. Yeah, like that. Yeah, like early 2000s. I want to say Yeah. And it's it's a very simple concept. You can put up a looping image to

Jessamyn 45:35 Rome, bro me. Like, made a link? Oh, better filter posts about You're the man now dog in 2002? was the first one. Yeah. So yeah, early on.

Cortex 45:46 But it plays a looping image and it plays some looping audio, and you can put some text over with a dumb depth effect. And that's the whole thing

Jessamyn 45:54 and a permanent link that you can send to your friends. Yeah. So it'd be

Cortex 45:57 like, you know, my favorite dog.ytmnd.com. And then that that's there forever, or until you take it down, I suppose. But like, yeah, you've got the single service, subdomain sites. And it was it was like, it was an early meme factory. And it's really sort of a fascinating piece of internet history because of that. But it also like, had it was it was edgy, ly problematic. And then just like shitty people, were the only ones still hanging out for a while. So stuff you would expect to come from, like 2002 As your basis for humor. And then that sort of feeding on itself in negative ways over time. But it was still kind of like a big thing that somehow it just straight up went down earlier in the year and at the time, and we're in the middle of discussion. There was the idea like, oh, maybe he finally decided to say fuck it and take it down. It turns out it was actually an unexpected, like hardware failure that took it down abruptly. Yeah. And then he was kind of like, well, yeah, but maybe it's time and then people like but it's YTMND and did some fundraising and he put some effort into like getting it back up. With a Patreon supporting it been rewritten in like moderns like it's all html5, so it works no longer requires you to have fucking flash to play the audio. So yeah, it's sort of back in gear I'm, I kind of I really hope what is going to happen is there's going to be some sort of weird rejuvenation of the weird, strange, fun spirit of YTMND. I'm kind of worried that what is actually going to happen is what tends to happen when a beloved old property goes away and comes back, which is everybody's excited for a week. And they're like, Yeah, but I did sort of grieve and get over it. And also, there's other stuff now and so it might just go real quiet again. But I hope that's not the case. I hope it turns into like, for now. Yeah, yeah. And a bunch of those, like those old links generally still work. So there's a bunch of internet history in there if you're willing to wade through a certain amount of weirdness and you know, come at them tour. caveat, Caveat emptor, I don't know fucking Latin.

Jessamyn 47:58 Latin Kevin, I'm sure. Caveat emptor. Buyer beware. That's how I sort of little sing songy stuff. I have to mention the post that captivated me this month, and I never would have thought this would have captivated me. But this post about hockey hair by grey duck. Like, I didn't even understand it. Right. I was like, what hockey hair? What the fuck, I don't like what is happening.

Cortex 48:33 Ray's hockey here not a meaningful term for you. I know what hotkey here

Jessamyn 48:37 is kind of explain. There's some auto play. But basically, it's this guy who makes his own kind of hockey hair team out of like the people who play in the high school tournaments, I guess. And he's just this kind of like, Minnesota guy talking in his Minnesota way about kids with fun hockey haircuts. And I guess he's been doing this for like 10 years. It's like just a YouTube video that everybody enjoys. And I didn't know what the hell it was. And as soon as I started watching it, I was just like, where is this been all my life. I love it. It's so funny into like a very, I mean part of it. Maybe I was primed for it by like Letterkenny and paying attention to hockey in that kind of way. But like apparently it was a thing. And it went away. And then it came back and they raised money for the Hendrickson Foundation, which raises money for disabled athletes. And it's just great. And so I went and watched not only the post here, but then a whole bunch of other posts by the same guy talking about hockey here and I loved it so much and the thread is just full have happy people and it was just great. If not familiarized yourself with this hockey hair post. I think anybody listening might actually enjoy that. Yeah, here we go

Unknown Speaker 50:22 a modern brain

Cortex 50:44 I enjoyed this Animal Crossing discussion.

Jessamyn 50:50 Not on that. Not on the not on the Animal Crossing train yet tell me you don't have to tell me about it. It's back or there's a new verb.

Cortex 50:57 There's a new one. There's a new one. There's Animal Crossing. New Horizons just came out for the Nintendo Switch recently.

Jessamyn 51:04 And as as a point of contrast, like the last one came out like a year ago or like five years ago.

Cortex 51:10 I want to say it was a couple years ago that a mobile game Nintendo who has been flirting with making mobile games sometimes now put out an Animal Crossing. Pocket camp, I want to say it was a title that came up that's not came out a couple of Yeah, well, you know, and it was, it was it was like the other Nintendo mobile stuff. Which is to say it's not as like good or exciting or rich as their actual, like console titles, but it was surprisingly good for a random little mobile app. But it was not like it wasn't the Animal Crossing everybody was waiting for it was just kind of like, oh, well, this will be fun to play with for a little while. Yeah, but it wasn't like this isn't new. Yeah, this is a new proper one, I want to say New Leaf for the Wii U maybe was the last one or Wii U. I don't know. I I'm not a hardcore Animal Crossing person. But I usually end up buying the major ones because like, oh, it's been a few years time for some more Animal Crossing

Jessamyn 52:07 time now seemed to be a time when everybody was like, I could really use a game to like, that's nothing to do with the world.

Cortex 52:14 I tweeted like three weeks ago, something along the lines of You know, Nintendo has a moral obligation to release Animal Crossing early. But they didn't listen to me. They kept to the original release date, somehow, despite my huge influence in the video game industry. But anyway, yes. So fists made a nice post about the question of time travel, which is a thing that has come up with past ones and can happen with this one, too. So the thing about Animal Crossing? Well, the relevant thing about animal crossing here is that it tends to run on a real time. 24 hour clock or like Tamagotchi kind of stuff, right? Yeah. So it's like daytime, the same time every day, you know, in time, like the sun goes down at normal speed. And nighttime is nighttime does it? So to some extent, you might

Jessamyn 52:55 like your daytime or your nighttime or if you're in school, is it possible that like, you only get to play Animal Crossing at night?

Cortex 53:02 I think you can actually, I think it goes off your system clock. You might be able to like set that differently, to get it to like be on a different timeline. If that's inconvenient for you. I mean, there's stuff to do during the day and at night, but I think some of the village people like sleep at night, so maybe that's a pain. But so it's like a real time clock during like the 24 hour cycle. But also like, there is seasonal stuff. Like there's a I haven't checked in on the last few days. But there's apparently a Easter themed thing where there's a bunny guy named zipper who is doing egg related events while being the Easter Bunny, essentially.

Jessamyn 53:38 That's cool, I guess if that's your thing?

Cortex 53:41 Yeah, I mean, they're they they sort of pointedly avoid saying Easter, it's definitely like sort of like, riff on Easter Bunny cultural reference. But you know, there'll be so there'll be all kinds of seasonal stuff. And the thing is, like, if you're interested in all of the stuff that's going to happen in the fall, or you want to collect things that are only growing in the fall, or fish that are only around in the fall, you can wait till September, or you can change the clock on your system.

Jessamyn 54:05 And so people can like hack it to see what some of the other things might be.

Cortex 54:11 And so there is this, this post is sort of wrangling various links about some of the debate on this and like players who are doing it versus players who think that it's anathema to do it, you know, and are you breaking the game by not like experiencing it in real time? Or are you being too restricted by telling people shouldn't like, people shouldn't be able to go find the content they want when they want to see it, you know, and it's generally good fun. And also, people are just sort of chatting about Animal Crossing, but also young people take on the whole like, well, what is the content of the game versus the intent of the game and so on? Yeah, anyway, it's a it's a good time and the new Animal Crossing is nice, so

Jessamyn 54:51 great. I love it. I this post just came in, I believe today, but it's one of those like kind of personality things Why are you laughing already?

Cortex 55:04 Because I fucking took the thing and it said I was Chandler and this thing can fuck it's Oh, that's

Jessamyn 55:08 what that was. I just saw you posting about Chandler and I was like, I have no idea what Josh is smoking right now because

Cortex 55:15 no find my tweet Dude, it

Jessamyn 55:16 told me I was see Threepio that's better than Chandler. I mean, it told me actually I was Sam. Well, what's his name? Turley? Yeah, him.

Cortex 55:25 I would take that.

Jessamyn 55:27 He's, I mean, he's terrible. He's personality.

Cortex 55:31 Yeah, but he's, he's not fucking I don't know. Is this just me,

Jessamyn 55:35 Sam? Well, what's his name that I got Lisa Simpson. Then I got both Leonard and Amy Farrah Fowler from from the Big Bang Theory. And then I got C three POS so I'm sticking with C three po because with favorite one of those five. Still, though.

Cortex 55:54 Yeah. But the thing is, the thing is kind of nice and interesting.

Jessamyn 56:00 You must have gotten a list.

Cortex 56:03 Abed, I think but I never watched community. So that's meaningless. Somebody from Big Bang Theory, which like, just don't fucking associate me with minute fucking show. And then and then I think Sam Well, yeah, it looks like me,

Jessamyn 56:17 are the same person because they got Leonard and see Threepio was their top people. Like, I don't want to be Lisa Simpson, really. It was interesting, because it's not one of those things where it's like, you're one of the everybody's one of the Beatles. Like there's a lot of people you could be. And so it's really interesting, especially for people that I know, to see who who you are. So fun thread. And I think the last one, which is funny, I just noticed that if you only have emoji in your title, you just get kind of like a raw URL.

Cortex 56:56 Yeah, I usually go and change those after the fact to put a stub in but

Jessamyn 56:59 and so this was by fears and it's just an ode to black science fiction and fantasy writers. It's an article from tore is the main one. And then phys pulls out some other things that you might want to read. So if you're looking for more people of color in sci fi and fantasy, this is a terrific post that I am going to link to because I've been trying to read more people of color and it's always really hard when I find one like I don't click with like Octavia Butler is too brutal for me and I can't do it. Right. And Ken loo I just finished hidden girl and like, wonderful book not right for me. Right. It's to harm me in parts of it. And she Qin Liu, I think I think that's how you pronounce that. Again, like, great writer can't do it. And but I'm trying to find like writers that I really click with that are kind of in that. And there's there's a couple already, but I'm actively looking forward to finding more because I love reading science fiction. And I like not reading the usual suspect kind of dude, sci fi way to testify. And so I'm looking forward to this.

Cortex 58:13 I think there's a new NK Jemisin. Yes,

Jessamyn 58:16 I think so, too. There was a kind of a What are you reading thread that was over on learned League? They were all talking about that. I know. What do you

Cortex 58:26 make of league? I just I cratered so hard. I know, I'm not alone. Like I know, I'm not the only person who had trouble. But like, I just mean Angela both sort of realized at some point after about like three forfeits in a row like boy, we're just this is not the moment to be playing learned league either of us, we just need to not have to have that be an additional, like, weird stressor. And, and I've gotten to the site to because like, We've discussed it before, but like you're really not supposed to forfeit on then or later. Definitely not so forfeit a bunch. And I was like, this is like this is a getting kicked out of learned league level of failure to show up and I

Jessamyn 59:03 really can't come back for a thing. We're actually working on the rules for that. And we have like a real difference of opinion about whether you should like get a timeout, or whether you should be in a you know, like a forfeit League. Yeah, yeah, like a forfeit Rundle where you just play with other people that forfeit or you know how to do it. But this time, the commissioner was like, Look, everybody's having a hard time. Don't worry about

Cortex 59:32 Yeah, and that's what I saw. I went to this, I was like, I gotta figure out a way to like, write a note to Thurston or something and say, hey, you know, I'm, I'm super fucked. This isn't happening. I'm not holding up my end of this whole bargain. And there was a post up from him saying, Hey, everybody, there's a weird fucking time and everybody's having a hard time. We're just not gonna worry about that whole usual, like forfeit. Yeah. And I think that was really nice horsemen. So yeah, that was very it was a huge relief. You know, first of all thing but still sick. Yeah. There's like the one thing here and I'm like, No, I can't do that thing though right now Apparently so. So yeah, that was nice. But yeah, anyway, I finished 25th And my rental. Oh,

Jessamyn 1:00:13 wow. What do you do you in? Or were you in? I remember I don't think you were in mind so you may have been an E Yeah. Which just means you'll stay any if you decide to come back sometime.

Cortex 1:00:25 Yep. No I mean I I'm up for the next round I just like it hit me at the exact wrong moment to like follow through on it so right

Unknown Speaker 1:00:42 welcome to the endemic problem design random systemic, between us humans. Nature that is a schism. I do believe we got to get rid of this. We need

Cortex 1:01:05 another post I liked that. We included on the downtime page actually, along with a bunch of other stuff was this log across the stream? It's just a it's a stream and there's a log across it and animals walk across it. And there's a camera on it. And that's that's the whole thing. And it's just watching. Yes. Yep. So yeah. That's, that's it. If you want to see an animal's walking across logs, go do that. That's the thing. There's a huge

Jessamyn 1:01:38 variety of animals. I was actually really impressed and surprised looking at that, you know, watch the whole thing and was like, wow,

Cortex 1:01:46 yeah. Nature, man.

Jessamyn 1:01:50 Yeah. Well, I got about 20 minutes, so we should probably springs to filter.

Cortex 1:01:55 Yeah, you got some asks you want to mention,

Jessamyn 1:01:57 I do. Um, why did I favorite this? Yes. I enjoyed this one only because I enjoy our community and how smart they are. Like, hey, we have a microwave. Somebody ran the microwave with a meter while the other ones running. It seems like that needle is too high. Look at this meter. Is that a problem? And man, people just dove in. And they're like, let me tell you what I know about electromagnetism. And it was just fun to see. Cuz people are smart, and not smart like me smart in totally different directions of me. And it was great to read. That's fantastic. Because you're helping this person explaining what was going on.

Cortex 1:02:43 That's the thing. I definitely know squat about

Jessamyn 1:02:45 nothing. I don't even have a microwave. I've been thinking maybe for the duration. I should look into obtaining a microwave because it would just make dishes easier. Because I heat things up in the toaster oven and shit. But yeah, don't even have one don't even have one.

Cortex 1:02:59 Speaking of heating things up in the microwave. grandis are asked about what pizza roll is most like

Jessamyn 1:03:07 what was that about? I saw that. Did it ever go?

Cortex 1:03:11 Oh, kind of. Yeah. I mean, it's it's a little bit of a goofy question. But it was also like a defensible goofy question like they wanted

Jessamyn 1:03:18 like that. Don't get me wrong, but I understand. They wanted

Cortex 1:03:21 the right materials like so they they're trying to make a joke about like, you know, they they link to something saying hey, are you eating healthy? And someone responds Yes. Today I made aged organic milk tossed over season tomato puree spread on baked whole wheat. And the person says, Wow, let me see. And that's a picture of like microwave pizza. So I think they were looking for like something in that same line, but for Tina's pizza rolls. And, yes, so So the general consensus seems to be like ravioli as a way to describe it. Arguments for dumplings and potstickers and kelsa.

Jessamyn 1:03:58 Well, and while we're on that topic, how about songs for a hot dog, which is the pink superhero putting on her hot dog costume to walk around the neighborhood and cheer people up? What songs should she play?

Cortex 1:04:12 That's excellent. Yes.

Jessamyn 1:04:14 And there are many, many, many. Good advices and of course, Puffin boffin gets the coveted Best answer with I just want to know why you already have a hot dog costume please. So many of us do. I would like to thank everybody who answered my mirroring a WordPress site, which I'm actually pretty much done with Finally, I got some good advice from people and Mike Finn, who's like a longtime mefite Who I kind of also know now on Twitter has helped me through a lot of WordPress things and he I actually got on Zoom and talk through some of the outstanding problems that I was having and he helped me kind of finish it up. So I will I will post a final update that I think ever But he was right. And not me. And it was good. So that was a girl. Yes.

Cortex 1:05:04 Speaking of final updates, hey, our segway game is strong today. In sector Soros wrote in with an update from a question from January of last year saying, Hey, should I bust my

Jessamyn 1:05:16 head? That actually yeah. They both their head. Yeah, the undercard was good. And the hair buzzing is good. Looks good. Not everybody's got a skull for it. And yeah, and I think they do.

Cortex 1:05:30 Yep. So, so funny. Yeah, I've

Jessamyn 1:05:33 been thinking about that for me, too. Like, I like my hair. But like, you have to watch it. Like if you don't watch it enough, and I don't feel like it. And also, I think maybe it's been a while since I've had a buzz cut. So I've been thinking about it.

Cortex 1:05:49 I was thinking about that. And like not a buzz cut for me, but like just thinking about like, boy in the shower, washing my hair thing. And boys, you're taking a lot of effort to watch this. Like, what if it was short? Again? What if I What if I cut most of it off again?

Jessamyn 1:06:01 Yeah, thinking about it. And very much I should mention this DJs on Twitch, I've been spending a lot more time on Twitch lately, just watching watching mice and birds and kittens and turtles. But also, what's his name? Local Stan, I guess for malt shop does a like a Saturday night DJ thing, like from his basement as near as I can tell, but it's like super fun, like watching DJs do good DJing. Like I don't, again, like people who are smart in a completely different way that I can like, appreciate without being like, Oh, I could fucking do that anybody could do that. Like I could do that. I don't know how to do any of that. And it's amazing watching DJs, who are really good at what they do. Do that. And so I put a comment with Brady's link. And then there's a whole bunch of other links to DJs that are playing stuff online. So if you want to go watch a DJ, from the comfort of your own home, this thread by Wow enthusiasts is the one that you would like to go check out.

Cortex 1:07:06 Excellent. Oh, you know, there's just one question from Sarnoff asking about cute and fantastical video games. I should paste that into the actual chat link here not into the URL bar. Yes. So that you can actually see it. But yeah, basically what it says on the tin, you know, you know, she's looking for games that are kind of bright, and

Jessamyn 1:07:32 colorful, and everybody's kind

Cortex 1:07:34 of Yeah, like not super violent, not super gross, and Tropi and whatnot. And yeah, there's a bunch of good recommendations in there. And this is a pretty good time with playing video games. So you know, yeah, that might be useful to you, too.

Jessamyn 1:07:47 I told you. I think maybe I didn't in meta talk. I've been playing this little paper IO kind of game where you like, just draw a little line around and you know, get territory and try and kill other people and get more territory. It's basically snake. Yeah. And my little, my little guy that drove around was called Hello, but I have changed my little guy to wash your hands. So now I feel like it's a public service announcement. Every time I play that game I feel good about it's great. Yes,

Cortex 1:08:15 I've been Oh, sorry. I've been signing a lot of emails with like, wash

Jessamyn 1:08:19 your hands. That's in your sink, right? Or do you actually tape it?

Cortex 1:08:22 I'm just typing in the name. Oh, my God. I just

Jessamyn 1:08:25 assumed you'd put it in your sink. But yeah, that's good. Speaking of accomplishments, earlier in the month, backseat pilot, learned that if he drove across highway 50 In Nevada, get a passport stamped at all the locations you can get a certificate signed by the governor. He wants to learn about more of these publicity, stunt personal challenges. So like, officially sanctioned, easy for the average person to accomplish tangible form of recognition like a certificate. And there's a bunch of just kind of cute and fun things that things that you can do in that post, and it's still open so if you know some stuff, you should I noticed the last person who posted there's a username what is E T short for there's some really creative usernames.

Cortex 1:09:17 I've thought about the idea of actually automating or semi automating the process of taking that be good username comments and turning them into a new like registered sock puppet. That also sounds like a lot of trouble like it would need I would need to ask for a mole to set up something that took all of the pain in the ass out of that for me. So I could just like click a button and like you know, write spawn and put that into stable of officially sanctioned dumb new usernames. Speaking

Jessamyn 1:09:42 of which were over meta filter user 300,000. But 300,000 doesn't exist.

Cortex 1:09:48 That's a good question. It's probably a sign up that was not followed through on. Let's see what I've got in the old database here. Because like In search by user ID so can I

Well, it's got a note on it because I had the stock previously in January and looked it up. And you found this unpaid for account called my safe pills are x scared. Danna email address speak with nancy@gmail.com. Okay, Nancy. You know what, honestly, if you fucking don't manage quite to finish signing up as your fucking spam account on Metafilter I will say your email address on the podcast. Surreal OpSec vector? You didn't account for it? Yeah. All right. Anyway, so that's what's up

Jessamyn 1:10:44 with that. Too bad.

Cortex 1:10:46 Yep. I don't think Jim arrow ever ended up picking a name for the 100k username either. I think it's still temp 100 was settled, like intimidated by like, the, like, the stakes that I think she was like, I know. So maybe

Jessamyn 1:11:02 now that we've all forgotten,

Cortex 1:11:06 baby, yeah. Any other,

Jessamyn 1:11:40 last ask me, which like, sounds like it's a little mopey, but I think it worked out. Okay. It's my sweet potato. And just like, you know, everything has been kind of hard. And this was like, the first week in March. So like, my gosh, but like, you know, what, what am I doing? What am I doing with my life? I'm really trying to think about like, how do I think about what I want to do with my life? I'm just looking for kind of like quotes and things to think about, or maybe how it worked for you. What are you thinking about to do with your one wild and precious life? And it's a nice thread about people talking about how they made those decisions and what things have meaning to them. And it's, it's like advice, see, but in a very helpful, very supportive way that I that I really liked.

Cortex 1:12:29 Thanks. Yeah. Trying to hide most of the way through that beer now and the burps are trying to

Jessamyn 1:12:38 come in. While we're wrapping up pretty soon anyhow, I gotta say, thumbs up to the April fun thing that you guys put together this week. Yeah, I thought that was good. As somebody who kind of watched you talk about it, and then watched you implemented, I think, wow, I saw all the things that could have been and I think what it turned out being was great.

Cortex 1:13:00 Yeah, yeah. No, that's, it's kind of funny. You're like, you're not super active on the slack. But you're there. So you get to see us chatting about stuff, even if you're not like necessarily jumping in

Jessamyn 1:13:11 two days a week and I try to work two days a week.

Cortex 1:13:13 Yeah, it's a good it's a really good policy.

Jessamyn 1:13:16 For me and my work life balance.

Cortex 1:13:17 I should I should try working few days a week sometime again, in the future, eventually, somehow. But yeah, no, it was a lot of fun. I thought it came off really nicely. And it was it was a nice sort of like, we as we usually do, we built it up and up and up in terms of like the scope of what we could possibly do. And then we sort of like machete to down and down and down. I've sort of become the official machete here. I think in that respect, which is nice, because the rest of team can really brainstorm and then I can be like, the grumpy was like, okay, but I don't

Jessamyn 1:13:45 think that's in scope for you by tomorrow.

Cortex 1:13:47 Yeah. So works out pretty well. But ya know, I had a lot of fun with it. And it feels like it's a nice thing that could just sort of keep rolling

Jessamyn 1:13:55 open all month. So for people who may have missed it or stayed off the internet entirely understandable. First, I certainly don't blame you. There's a fun little scavenger hunt where people are sharing pictures of stuff because many of us are kind of trapped indoors and take some pictures.

Cortex 1:14:13 And I'll say Trimble did resurrect an old project that we had played around with of having a inline Image Viewer, not like actually showing images on the page, which, sorry, we're just never gonna go back to that. But being able to have it detect if you've linked to an image and then like,

Jessamyn 1:14:28 you don't have to flick away like the YouTube inline. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Cortex 1:14:31 You know, it's basically it is literally that code repurposed slightly, is my understanding of what Trimble did with it. And honestly, I didn't hate it. I thought it was kind of like, Hey, this is maybe so I don't know. Don't quote me.

Jessamyn 1:14:48 Maybe totally ambivalent about image stuff. But like it didn't work. I did good. Yeah. And I wasn't exposed to But sir, you know, something I didn't want to see.

Cortex 1:14:58 So exactly. So we'll see. that, that gets into the mix more. So other I've got a few quick meta talk things that were nice. No talks been kind of busy, which is not shocking because there's been a lot of sort of energy and people around on the site because of the fucking prevailing circumstances. But so there's, there's been a bunch of like, bunch of chat and like you know there's there's room for more if you want to like, talk about something or propose something or organize something, but coming back to Animal Crossing from earlier there is a Animal Crossing thread on meta talk where you can share your Friend Codes and whatnot if you want to visit other people's islands or be visited. So check that out if that makes any sense to you. In terms of the prevailing pneus of the prevailing circumstances, there was a discussion a few weeks ago about being able to filter COVID stuff off of asked me

Jessamyn 1:15:54 Yeah, you guys did a good job with getting that up pretty quickly. Yeah, so we've got we've

Cortex 1:15:59 we had sort of exclusion tags on my mi fi that way you can filter the medical different page. But we hadn't done that specific feature for asked me for so from Oh, God, that worked out to work on AskMe as well. So now you can like exclude a series of tags if you really want to, like, not be swimming through that all the time, because there's been a lot of COVID related stuff on ask me for understandable reasons. So yeah, we there's a little bit of advice in there on things you can do. But also, we got that feature added so that you can filter those tags out automatically. I followed through on Oh, yeah, do that. Well, I

Jessamyn 1:16:37 was just gonna say that sharp pointy objects is offering Minecraft slots. I don't know if they're full up. I don't think so. If you're somebody who wants to play on kind of a safe secure Minecraft server with somebody that you've heard about sharp, pointy objects has a Minecraft server that's available.

Cortex 1:16:58 Yeah, unless it's unless it's doing something that I'm not familiar with. I think it's just however many before on at any given time. Oh, okay.

Jessamyn 1:17:04 So it's not 50 people, it's 50 people at a time.

Cortex 1:17:07 Yeah, something like that. Great. Probably, I mean, I should read that read the post, because it knows better than I do. But that's probably

Jessamyn 1:17:14 well, and also, you know, me Fight Club is the thing that is around. And so you should also just know that that is the thing. If you're a gamer who wants to interact with other mefite gamer, you pop

Cortex 1:17:23 on over there. And it's it's a nice place. Yeah. I made a post saying, hey, let's make some daymark, which I had sort of talked about previously in a different thread, just conversationally, and people have been doing exactly what I was hoping for, but just sharing a bunch of stuff that they've been making or talking about stuff they've been making or talking about stuff they want to get to. And I'm really delighted by it. And I really appreciate everybody who contributed to that thread, because it's been exactly what I'm hoping for. It's it's really nice. And maybe we'll figure out a way to make that an ongoing thing as well. Yeah, I

Jessamyn 1:17:52 thought that was cool.

Cortex 1:17:54 And we had some successful scheduled downtime. I mentioned that in passing earlier, we put some nice chill out links up on the status.metafilter.com page that we serve when Metafilter itself is down. And we had we just had to shut down for a couple hours to do some database disk management stuff because we were running out of disk space. So fumble got that taken care of it went off pretty much without a hitch. We were down for a couple hours, we announced it ahead of time. And in the meantime, you can look at things like the animals crossing the log on the river or a bunch of other stuff. So there's a nice comment from Trimble in that thread. Wrapping up the stuff that we have linked in case the downtime was catching me off guard and they needed something we keep them selves, you know, distracted, right. And we may do that again soon. Actually, we may have another little downtime for some Amazon stuff we're doing. So let's see what happens here. We're just moving between AWS. Oh, I see. I see. Yeah, good. Wrapping up yet another trailing end on the whole change of

Jessamyn 1:18:57 illusion. How's that Pay Pal? Going?

Cortex 1:19:00 Let's go. Okay. That one that one we haven't been able to change. But we're gonna get this Amazon thing taken care of. And that'll be nice. So and yeah, a bunch of other stuff. And hey, you know, everybody, it's a super weird time. And I hope the podcast is a helpful thing in among that talk and Jessamyn it's always a helpful thing for me so appreciate like talking to you Josh. And and yeah, let's let's hang in there and you know, hit up the contact form if you have like a question or concern or something like you normally would, but maybe like you'd normally wouldn't be it's still okay to do it. Yep, do it the first time if you want and if you have something you want to talk about or propose at a community level, go to metta talk go ahead and like you know, post a thing and you know, we'll help if there's anything we need to talk about we'll we'll work it out with you, etc. But yeah, this is I'm really glad that it filters here and I'm really glad I'm able to help it be here and yeah, I don't know. It's it's kind of hard to it's hard to express really like the strange comfort and odd circumstances have led to this being a reliable part of my life in so many other people's lives at a time like this so you know you're you're great I'm glad we're here

Jessamyn 1:20:15 excellent good

Cortex 1:20:19 right well I think I think that's it I think we did it I think the pod has been cast her body is where her mother's cry cry cry every moment Steger