Podcast 164 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 164: It's Been A Rough Week (2020-06-02).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 A couple of things you

Jessamyn 0:26 I finished my coffee already.

Cortex 0:28 Oh, have you? I'm on like my second cup of tea

Jessamyn 0:33 and loud slipper?

Cortex 0:34 Yeah, well, that's, it's I like people to I like people to get the fully. You know, I really like them to fully experience the podcast. Hey, it's Episode 164, the medical podcast. I am Josh cortex Mullard. And I'm Jessamyn. And here we are at the beginning of June. And I wanted to say we're halfway through this year, but it's actually that'll be the beginning of July. There's more only five months in. So it's but you know, we're getting there. And, boy, it has been, it has been it has been a year so far. And it has been a week. And I am like brimming with both good news and concern over the state of the world and how our folks are doing and it's very complicated. But yeah, I do want to say how absolutely thrilled I am, we got to announce yesterday that we brought on a couple new moderators, like that is the best news I have had on here. So excited. Yeah, we have two new mods who are currently doing training and orientation stuff shadowing our mod shifts right now. And we're sort of talking through everything we do on the company slack and looking at email together and so on. And, yeah, it's traveling time and loop. And they are both freaking fantastic. There's a meta talk welcome thread that everybody's been being very, you know, kind and welcoming and thoughtful and cheerful in. And they both introduce themselves in there. But But yeah, this, this was the tail end of the job search. We started in January.

Jessamyn 2:14 I mean,

Cortex 2:17 a lot of stuff has happened since January. So I didn't expect it to take this long. And, and part of it is it has been

Jessamyn 2:27 such a give her notice. And like 2019 Yeah,

Cortex 2:31 we had time to work up to it. And I'm really glad we were able to take the time to look at a lot of applications and talk to a number of people. And really, you know, one of the good news things about this is, you know, the problem I had was a lot of good candidates, we had a bunch of people from the Metafilter. Community apply, we had a bunch of people from outside the Metafilter. Community apply. Thank you again to anybody who helped sort of signal boost and spread around the the job listing beyond where I was able to do it myself, because I feel like I don't know exactly what chain of event either of the folks we ended up hiring are both not Metafilter people originally, how they ended up getting the application. But I they both mentioned, having heard about it from friends, or former co workers or community members in places that were specifically focused on hiring opportunities for marginalized folks. So like the word got out there. And that really increased the visibility of the job. And let us really have a lot of focus on the big goal with this, which was not only to find a new mod, because we need to replace Rosa SNOMED left earlier in the year after giving us a generous amount of warning and working for a few more months, right. We didn't just need to fill a seat. But we really want to make this a part of the process of Metafilter has been focusing on of better diversifying the representation on the staff and moving forward in terms of how well the site does in terms of making moderation and community expectations. support a broader set of voices, support marginalized voices get away from some of the way too easy default of kind of American centric, white tech stuff that was the founding sort of community of the site 20 years ago and has carried on to some extent, just through sheer demographic momentum. Right? Well,

Jessamyn 4:23 and a whole bunch of like, some of those people are still around and they have expectations. But you know, it's not that the world has changed. But I think people's awareness of what the world is is changed and

Cortex 4:33 what the internet is doing has changed and what the internet is understood to be capable of doing has changed, you know, like, to some extent, you know, there's people on the site now who are not necessarily they haven't necessarily changed a lot in 15 years, and they didn't go from being like a good person to a person who doesn't care about stuff, but they're catching up with the fact that oh, the internet does not need to sort of default to this sense of like, well if you're comfortable Great and free speech is great. And if that's a problem, well, you know, instead of could be like, hey, look, what if we just think deliberately about figuring out the voices that are not heard as much that

Jessamyn 5:11 some of that is wrapped up in tech really, right? Because it's like, oh, well, I expect you to kind of do the work. If you're going to rah, rah, rah, rah, you know, here's a command line answer to your, what app? Do I need question. And it's alienating and aggravating and reinforces the existing status quo. And if what you're saying is, that's not what we want, a lot of times you have to be deliberate about doing something different.

Cortex 5:37 Yeah. So we've been we've been, we've been trying a lot more to be like, not just passively, but actively trying to make the site a better place in these these ways. And there's been a ton of good community, this discussion, sometimes intense, sometimes pretty difficult. But that's part of the process. You know, people I think people say a lot when they're talking about folks trying to deal with being uncomfortable with change is you need to sit with your discomfort, you know, you need to not say I'm uncomfortable with this. And so the situation attorney

Jessamyn 6:12 saying that doesn't make me Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 6:14 Yeah. Or, or even just let's focus on my discomfort, and let's make me feel better. You know, sometimes the answer is you take your discomfort, and you sit with it, and you let things that need to happen happen, and you figure your own stuff out on your own time. And don't let that be a roadblock to making stuff happen. So I think that's all

Jessamyn 6:32 and it's tricky for metal filter, right? And an all texts say, part of sitting with your discomfort sometimes is shutting up. Yeah. And it's I think that's hard for nerds. Not that. That doesn't mean they have to lump it. But it does mean that like, sometimes it means letting other voices be heard and not like, Yeah, but what about my feelings? And

Cortex 6:55 then also, I mean, there's the aspect that one of the things I think that is very common in folks on on metal filter as, as a general thing in the user base is we tend to be people who think out loud, who sort of like, think on paper, we tend to want to process stuff by saying how we're feeling saying what we're thinking. And that's, that's not something that is without its place. And that's not something that people need to be expected to avoid entirely. But I think learning to say, is, is how I'm feeling and what my thoughts are what I'm trying to process right now, what's necessary to make this a better conversation? Or is it just what's necessary for me to process my discomfort and finding the space between those is tricky. But, you know, I people are trying, the mod staff is trying, and I'm really fucking looking forward to being able to work with a couple of new sets of eyes on this stuff. And, you know, one of the things we've been talking about, like I've been, I've been really energized by this whole process. You know, I've been talking to people about why they want to work for Metafilter has, after what has been, you know, a difficult several years, and, you know, a pretty intense last year. It's been really useful in a way just to remind me that, hey, yeah, this is something that can, you can feel excited about, like, there are days when I'm like, I'm not so much because excited is hoping I can sort of deal with the things I need to deal with for work that day shot, you know, I've talked about like having kind of a hard time with anxiety stuff in the last year in particular, as well. And that's contributed to and that's, that's just kind of me and my experience thing, but I can sort of forget that that experience of anxiety and worry. And responsibility is not like the job. It's just an aspect of how I'm experiencing the job. And other people coming in saying, This is why I'm excited about the possibility of doing this job is like, Oh, right. I'm excited about that stuff, too. Shit. Yeah, that's right. I like this.

Jessamyn 8:54 I have been well, and what what becomes outsized in your mind?

Cortex 8:58 Yeah, yeah. So that's been really great. And I had a bunch of good conversations with folks, both inside and outside the medical community in the process of going through interviews and sort of working out a shortlist. And that was all really useful to like, you know, it was it was useful, and it was engaging to have a conversation like that, you know, one of the things is having a conversation like that with longtime metal filter members, you know, we had some folks who applied who had been very active in discussions on the site about this stuff. And it was really nice to be able to have that conversation in a context that wasn't in text in public in a meta talk thread, because both of those are useful, but they're, they're very different sort of feelings. And so being able to be able to sit down and say, Hey, let's just like yeah, let's talk about this stuff for half an hour or an hour without it

Jessamyn 9:48 being sort of a thing that scrutinized by 100 eyeballs just so that you can have a private personal conversation and it's challenging, right because we get used to not having private conversations when you're on the site and Working on the site, sometimes that's a helpful way. And it's tricky too, because sometimes the private conversation path can be exactly the thing that reinforces those hierarchies. Like, you know, Lord love, Matt, but he always had. But now, but now I'm going to briefly drag him because he had kind of a back room set of, let's be honest, mostly dudes, who would kind of advise him about stuff that wasn't, and they weren't active on the site. They weren't people who interacted with the site, they were friends of Matt, and it's good to have friends who can give you support. But I do feel like having kind of a back room set of friends, who were the the old model can lead you to make decisions that aren't appropriate for your current site. And I feel like that happened for a long time. Well, yeah.

Cortex 10:57 And that was like, that was hard to untangle. Right? Like, yeah, parsing, parsing out that as this sort of exclusive channel, rather than just an additional venue for talking about stuff with folks who are also having public discussion, like, which, which feels like a much more useful thing. And something that like, you know, I want to try and think about how that can continue be part of things too, you know, having, having detailed conversations with folks who want to, like dig into it, like, get on a phone call, or whatever. Because I mean, I don't like phone calls, but I like talking with people, you know, obviously we're doing this right now.

Jessamyn 11:30 I like talking to you, Josh, this isn't feel like a phone call. Yeah. Well,

Cortex 11:33 it's it's interesting how, how different it feels like none of those things, like a couple of them were literal phone calls, but they weren't like, Oh, now you need to do a call with someone's like, no, now I have a conversation with someone about about metal filter and how they see it and what they're looking for it. Yeah, so yeah, I don't know if

Jessamyn 11:48 you've got a better group of sort of backchannel people, just in a general sense, anyhow. And I think that helps. And I also think you're a different kind of thoughtful, which I think also helps,

Cortex 11:58 I think it's a part of it is that the team has been so much more openly conversational about, like all of these challenges in the last few years, as we've really like, moved from that sort of matte model of he's gonna make decisions, and he doesn't want to burden with people with them. And so we don't really get access to his thinking.

Jessamyn 12:15 You think that's what Matt was doing?

Cortex 12:17 I think there was an aspect of it. I think, ultimately, you are so charitable towards me. Well, I mean, I think that's the charitable side. I think I think we have whatever like, like, it's complicated, but I think like that. I know, I know from conversation with him. That's an aspect of it. I don't think it was a good decision on his part, a lot of time to keep that stuff to himself. But I know that was an aspect of him sort of convincing himself that it would be inappropriate. And my take is like, no, it's super fucking appropriate. Let's talk to each other. To

Jessamyn 12:41 me, it was more like conflict avoidant, right. I think, like judgments gonna yell at me. And no, no, you're partly a problem with me. Like it me not being able to just sort of roll with a thing and being like, what are you doing? Why? You know, like, there are better ways to work through conflict. You know, I'm good at this in my relationship. I'm not as good at it in at work.

Cortex 13:06 Yeah. But it was worth doing you. Like, I think you were right to push on that stuff. And like, I know, I've made this comparison before, but like, I definitely have, when I look back in retrospect, a sense that, like I was dealing with moderator, like, inter moderator dynamic stuff there and the team stuff there as kind of the pacifying kid, while mom and dad were like, you know, at odds with each other poor man. Yeah. Which, like, you know, I look back at that. It's like, you know, there's stuff that like, I was kinda like, Well, okay, but let's try and figure this out, where probably, I could have just said, you know, just as fucking right? And, like, doubled down and pushed on some stuff sooner. But you know, yeah, took took time and growth and getting older and tired or to appreciate that as much as I do now, I think. Sure. But yeah,

Jessamyn 13:51 well, you wind up wanting slightly different things. Yeah. Right. And you want metal filter to be a slightly different place. And I think part of those choices involved saying no to some of kind of Matt Star Chamber, people who were like, but you gotta, you know, or you can't piss off this, you know, what did they call Silverback? Like the old gorillas? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. You know, you can't piss off those people. And it's like, well, what if what they want is is the wrong thing for the site now in 20? Exactly. 2019 2020. And I think you guys have been willing to make some of those bad, bad decisions and some of those hard decisions. Yeah. I think in a way that didn't happen. But

Cortex 14:31 we've been willing to say both Yes. And no more in ways that I think, had been more of a well, I'm not sure thing for a long time. And I think that's that's helped make some changes, more possible and get some stuff in gear. And I'm glad that things have grown that way. I'm glad that my own thinking has changed over time in that way. Yeah. And yeah, and here we are today, and we've got some new fresh eyes on the site. So traveling time and Luke are both new To the medical community, although Lupe has worked in internet stuff in his has been aware of medicals for a long time just hadn't signed up. And they're both like, I mean, they're fantastic. I feel Canada's elite just like repeating myself. But it's so exciting to have some new people involved. It's so exciting to have some new perspectives involved to actually make these changes to the representation of the mod team and really make good on that need in the community to see more than just a small team of people who happen to be white. But you know, people happen to all be white on a team, because of the whole systemic process that leads to network effects and not prioritizing diversity in hiring. And, you know, so this is pushing on that actively. This is not just saying, Oh, well, that's the way it is. It's saying, well, that's the way it isn't anymore, let's change this, let's, let's make that a priority. And I'm really glad to have been able to do that. I'm really glad I said this in the meta talk announcements about it, but glad that we're hiring two people, because we really did not expect to be I went into this process, looking to hire one person that the budget that we have for it. It would just cost, you know, a few $1,000 extra a month to hire another person. And where is that going to come from? And it turns out where that came from, is a community member who wanted to make it happen and had the resources to do so great, though we didn't know that like a week ago that that was necessarily going to happen, like it was in the realm of possibility. But we had to figure out the details and actually nail it down. And it did. And that's just, I don't know, it's amazing. So thank you, again, preferring to be anonymous. And that's, that's absolutely reasonable. But thanks again, for making this possible. Because it's it's such a huge extra step to be able to take right now. And well,

Jessamyn 16:58 I think studies have really shown when you're looking at this kind of hiring for small groups, especially, like, you know, like a board or whatever, that bringing people on in a cohort is a better success indicator, because not only they have each other but having more people. You know, it's not just sort of one person and being like, Well, what do you think about this diversity thing we're talking about? And trouble feeling exactly, no one wants to be that person. And so just having a pair, even, especially for an incredibly small team. I mean, I think this means most of the mod team isn't in the United States now. Right? Um, if you don't count me.

Cortex 17:39 Yeah, so So me and lobstermen and eyebrows are in the US.

Jessamyn 17:45 Taz GNF nifty loop and traveling time are outside the US. Yeah. Who am I forgetting?

Cortex 17:53 Well, for Milton Austria. For most not a mod technically but yeah, like we are now a majority non US based staff. A, a majority non sis male staff. Yep. And that's pretty great.

Jessamyn 18:11 Yeah. All right. We should move on from this because so yeah, I'm excited for you. I know you have a lot to say, Well, yeah,

Cortex 18:18 I couldn't bottle six months of hiring process and that's probably not totally necessary.

Jessamyn 18:21 Well 10 years of wishing for a different metal filter. So come on, like happy for you happy for the new mods.

But yeah, let's, let's bullshit about to say yeah,

Cortex 18:55 let's talk. Let's talk about Metafilter and other other respects.

Jessamyn 18:58 This is podcast number 164.

Cortex 19:02 I think I did very briefly earlier, but this is still 164 Despite it all,

Jessamyn 19:07 nothing cool about 164

Cortex 19:10 Well, it's the sum of two squares. That's not really that cool, but it's a sum of two really obvious squares so we can talk about learned League and square numbers.

Jessamyn 19:18 Don't get me wrong. I have a post about learning about later so we can talk about trivia when it's appropriate

Cortex 19:24 we'll get there. In the meantime, I guess we often will discuss jobs I have marked the part time moderator job as filled I remember to do that

Jessamyn 19:35 very satisfying.

Cortex 19:37 It was it was extremely satisfying although I still need to fix some formatting on on dark mode for for that prompt. So I clicked where I knew that was

Jessamyn 19:45 explained in the mods that there are four different ways to view the site and that different mods view that site all differently was a very funny conversation to be present for.

Cortex 19:56 Yeah, yeah. Like this. This, this will probably just keep popping up. As we discuss stuff, but like what's going on right now, with the new moderators? Traveling time and Luke are both hanging out in the meta filter team slack that we use for moderation discussion and

Jessamyn 20:13 like kind of minute to minute updates. Yeah. And

Cortex 20:15 we've got like, we've got a and so we've got a training channel he set up for both of them to hang out in, and they are just shadowing whoever's on duty. So like, this morning, they're shadowing lobstermen is working, and she's just talking through what she's doing. And

Jessamyn 20:28 I got shadowed yesterday. labor intensive. Yeah, no, I gotta do I have so many stories? I'm like, Oh, well, this three iterations ago, they did this thing 11 years ago.

Cortex 20:41 That's the context for why we're looking at this flag with a more skeptical eye and trying to analyze the Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. It's really fucking interesting, honestly, to have to stop and explain all this. Instead of working with sort of a shared oral history behind it and say, This is what I'm thinking, this is why I'm taking this and really EPS explicating every bit of it. And also tying that into moving through the physical toolset of the Admin Tools.

Jessamyn 21:09 Any dimension, there's a Rose Breasted Grosbeak on the feeder outside my window right now is beautiful. That's excellent. Yeah, they, the bird has just started showing up. I can say it's, it's a male bird, I can tell because it's coloring, and he's just started showing up in the last week. So very excited for me, I'm sorry, go on.

Cortex 21:26 No, no, if you can get a photo with your phone or something and posted on Twitter, we can like throw it into their podcast.

Jessamyn 21:31 Just gonna look at how disgustingly dirty my window

Cortex 21:34 is. Because everyone's just imagine a pretty bird.

Jessamyn 21:37 It's on the window that I don't haven't washed yet. Yeah, sorry, go on.

Cortex 21:43 I don't know what the hell was that you

Jessamyn 21:45 were telling them shadowing and us talking about the long history of every individual on the site. It's,

Cortex 21:51 it's I'd forgotten how interesting and how kind of exciting it is to have a new person joining the team and talk about this stuff. And insofar as we've been really, the last year in particular, focusing on reassessing our moderation practice, and how we document and how we communicate about stuff, it's been really useful to talk through this and say, Oh, this is, this is what I'm doing. This is what I've usually done. This is what I've been doing differently in the last year. This is something that I haven't made up my mind about, and also be able to say, what do you guys think about this? What is your take on it as someone who is looking at this particular kind of scenario for the first time on Metafilter, instead of me looking at it for the 100th time and bringing all that baggage to it and being

Jessamyn 22:35 here, knowing what the histories of the users are sometimes is actually really helpful? Yeah, the number of times where I was like, This person is lovely in person, and I don't know why they're doing this on the site was more than zero, you know, which is what I would expect it to be where I'm like, well, they're a really nice person, but for some reason on the site, they act in this different way, which would make that not as obvious Yeah, and

Cortex 23:00 I think there's some value in being able to look at just what's on the page. Without that they'll bring into looking at a lot of this stuff that we've developed kind of app acclamation to, which, you know, has its ups and downs, I think, as they get more context for the user base, and the more frequent posters that'll help them in assessing situations, but I also like them being able to look at it and say, Oh, what's the deal with this though? That's right. You know, that's like, Oh, you're right, it is right. You know, so and it's all complicated and fantastic. And I'm, I'm really I'm really enjoying the process and really looking forward to them getting up to speed enough to start to sort of dipping their toes in independently in the in the next few weeks.

Jessamyn 23:43 A tough week for them to start.

Cortex 23:44 Voice will we'll get about that too. I'll mention the one we said jobs so here's a here's a job post for May

Jessamyn 23:52 I read this job that the work needed to be done within the week.

Cortex 23:56 Okay, there was a job posting a couple weeks ago anyway hope that worked out sorry.

Jessamyn 24:04 Mention that like jobs is here for your sort of gig worker needs maybe not so much as a worker because there's not that much going on but if you've got stuff at home you're having trouble with and there's it's a tech thing someone could help you with, by all means think about using jobs. It doesn't have to be like you know a full time part time forever thing it can just be like I need help with whatever moving my WordPress blog was this one but you know, WordPress he stuff website stuff online store stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, et cetera.

Cortex 24:38 Yeah, put it out there if you need help with it and keep an eye out there if you you know, a lot of people are looking for gig work more than they have been. So both.

Jessamyn 24:47 We talked about this, I think in the slack and maybe not in person, but bringing the metal filter mall around to be a full time. Now that you're not exhausted all day. I would just like to float that trial balloon and maybe we can talk about it more at some future meta talk or something. I would love to revisit that. But with you know, Instagram is just always pushing me all this shit I should buy. But it turns out there's a lot of that stuff you can buy from me fights who are doing various things, you know, sewing masks or making little food or, you know, you've got a little store like we have those

Cortex 25:25 things. Yeah, yeah, no, I would very much like to get back to that, because it's a really nice feature. And there's no reason we can't just make it a year round thing. We just need to do the work to gussy it up for that. And staff

Jessamyn 25:35 maybe has a little bit of breathing room so that they could pay attention to an extra thing. Whereas I maybe wouldn't have asked that.

Cortex 25:43 Yeah, no, that's, that's like, my primary motivation for hiring is not, you know, to free up my time. But I will say, frankly, speaking, I have been working a lot more than I would if we had a couple people on staff. So that's going to be a really nice shift for me to be able to cover fewer shifts and put more attention into stuff that is sort of non shift work and have that headspace to not like be trying to cram that in along with keeping track of everything in a moderator capacity. So I'm looking forward to that. And I looking forward to being able to get more stuff done on the site that I would like to make progress on.

Jessamyn 26:18 So it just becomes a nice high profile way to build community. Right. And, you know, we have a community, it does one kind of thing, but it can do a lot more things. And if you've got the time and effort to be able to do that. Hey, cool.

Cortex 26:31 Yep. Let's talk about projects.

Jessamyn 26:35 Hey,

Cortex 26:38 which I'll be frank, I approved all of these and I don't remember what all if anything, I actually got a chance to look at besides clicking on stuff. I know, I know, I do this, like every other fucking podcast. And like, Man, I haven't really been keeping up with this site. And that's true again this month, but mostly for like, this very positive reason that I keep coming back to is like, I've been really busy with this whole hiring and training thing. And it's fantastic. But as results, hey, what's on projects this month? I'm not even sure let's go take a look together.

Jessamyn 27:07 I mean, I haven't been sort of looking at projects closely. But it's, you know, Jason digitised who is, you know, one of our kind of fairly long time Metafilter people He lives down in Austin, Texas, and you know, kind of builds things. I'm very surprised I haven't met him, I just made this little chrome extension for managing your tabs. And if I know anything about me fights, when I listen to them talk about their tabs, it's that their tabs are out of fucking control, always. And so basically, this is like a little thing. That is a product that can open save share tabs in Chrome, I use a thing that I think called like foxy tab or something, I use some combination of things to do this in Firefox. And I don't use Chrome that often. But this thing is a little cute little thing. And it's a thing that Jason digitise, built. And I think it's cool. And I mean, if you look at the website, for the thing, it is a very slick and nice website, always kind of appreciate like, like, whatever, you don't have to have a website for your chrome extension. But like, if you have one that looks nice, and makes it look like a thing itself that is designed. To me, that's always a good sign that like, you have a design sensibility, you know what I mean? Like, there's a whole bunch of like, weird half ass stuff that I use to kind of work on, you know, to work online, basically. But a lot of it like has these ganky websites, and you're just kind of like, ah, like, why, why isn't this more beautiful, which is always my question about most of the internet. And so I appreciate especially that aspect of this thing that Jason digitise built.

Cortex 29:02 Can I can I say this a little detail, I have not noticed, but in some of the key features animations, one of them, there's a meta Filter tab is one of the things is showing up. And I appreciate that. I mean, Hacker News is there too. And I don't know about that. But anyway,

Jessamyn 29:15 well, and can I just say also, this is a total side note, but like, I don't remember if I talked about this in the last podcast, or if you and I just talked about it, but I had to wipe and reinstall my operating system for you know, various terrible reasons and

Cortex 29:30 happened since the last podcast. Yeah, and I

Jessamyn 29:33 you know, I'm not it's not a secret but I asked an anonymous asked Metafilter question about it because I was very concerned about like finding a keylogger on my computer. And if somebody wants to, you know, kind of holler at me about that I should be more could serve and I'm here to listen to you. But basically, you know, I kind of asked a question, and like three people asked, very answered very quickly. Oh, yeah, you've got a wipe and reinstall it. Our operating system. And normally I think of that as kind of that just like Grumpy dude thing, like we're wiping reinstalled, the only way to be sure. And I'm always like, God shut up. I'm so tired a few people, but like it was the right answer. And so that's what I did. And one of the things that happened was I had to reset a bunch of settings. And what happened as a result of that was kind of two things, one of which actually is relevant to what we're talking about. But like, one thing was I can do this podcast on my desktop computer, which I was never able to do, because Chrome for whatever dipshit reason, could not manage to make sounds work. And the other thing was, Firefox has like this weird, funny little tab animation. That is literally like one second where if you're loading a tab in the background, there's a blue flash that zips across it. And because I am an internet person, this was completely unbearable. Like, I couldn't deal with it. I don't know what the problem is, like, I don't know why I didn't do it before. I don't know why it started doing it. Now. I don't know if I had fixed it in the past. Like, I just I do knows what has been going on lately. Right. And so, you know, as I asked in the forums, it was a little thing that could get fixed in about config. And, you know, it was it was delightful that it was that fixable. Yeah, and I'll start I'll put a link in case anybody else has that same problem, but kind of reminding me that one of the things I love about the internet, generally speaking, is how much you can massage and fix the things if you have strong opinions that they should be in a different way. I think sometimes it gives us a false sense that we can bring that into the larger world. I mean, we're definitely seeing Twitter trying to juggle all sorts of dipshit ways of dealing with what's ultimately kind of a social problem, you know, with technology, but, you know,

Cortex 32:03 to call Trump that yet.

Jessamyn 32:07 No, I think my like little local Vermonter friends were just like, you know, what if? What if the President were a literal piece of shit, like, you know, like thought exercise kind of thing. And I was like, Yeah, buddy, I'm kind of right there with you here. But just being able to actually identify when there is a problem, and when you can fix it. I'll just post my anonymous question, because it doesn't, because I was a little bit afraid when it first happened that maybe it was somebody kind of involved with my internet life. Yeah. But I would be ill there. Yeah, but I'm more sure it was, you know, just some kind of nefarious malware. Although if you're the fucko that put a keylogger on my computer enjoy my boring life. Like, oh, it turns out gentleman's life isn't very interesting, right? Like I've been saying, like just logs into, like, you know, Twitter and email and her bank and, you know, orders apricots off the internet

Cortex 33:39 got an email address to the editorial office of metal filter, by the way. So that's a nice little filter. I don't know, I think someone signed up with that username at some point. But But beyond that, I don't know.

Jessamyn 33:53 Now, you know, metal filter and metal filter in Google is just how to buy metal.

Cortex 34:01 I remember I remember the old days, the internet thing, but I remember it used to be if I thought of a funny riff on a like domain name, or a joke or something. And I wondered, does that exist? What I would do is I would go and just type in whatever.com. And you know, most of the time there'd be nothing and everyone's whether it be something sort of weird or interesting or bland, but sort of hey, it's there. And now like I'm not going to fucking blind type a domain name, I don't know into it into the browser. I'm going to maybe I'll Google it. But But yeah, well that's yeah, that's the other thing is like usually if there's anything there it's nothing and you can buy it

Jessamyn 34:36 well, and I think that I you know, it's a bit conspiracy theory ish, right. But I think that like, there are people who track when people are searching for things and then go buy those. Oh, yeah,

Cortex 34:47 no, that's not even conspiracy like that. That definitely like people WILL FUCKING monitor who is traffic and shit like that.

Jessamyn 34:53 But like, what's the mechanism? How do you remember I

Cortex 34:56 looked into it? At one point, I was like, Oh, that's a fuckery thing. You could do that. Um, but yeah, I don't remember. Someone could probably answer this in great detail come to the podcast read and do so.

Jessamyn 35:07 call in show again, we should I keep

Cortex 35:09 thinking about trying to do like a zoom or something. And I haven't figured out a method I'm happy with, but maybe the method is just put the link up and then kick out anybody's a fucker. I don't know. We'll see. Yeah,

Jessamyn 35:18 that's the thing. Moderators can?

Cortex 35:21 Yeah, yeah, well, Zoom bombing is such an like, shitty random thing that like, oh, still, it still exists, it definitely still exists. I just had a friend telling me about like that being done to there, like, some open like class discussion thing that got posted, and someone came up and started like being shitheads. in it. I don't know how pervasive it is still, but like, it's still just as doable. If you post a public zoom link, someone can find it. So

Jessamyn 35:47 yeah, I guess I had just kind of felt like, zoom 5.0 made the tool to do that to stop.

Cortex 35:55 Yeah, the defaults got better. As they updated things, the fundamental problem of providing a link to a meeting as a URL that includes the password to that meeting is very useful for passing the link around in small quarters. But it means if you put that out there publicly, people will be able to publicly join. So I guess complicated, but I think we could probably manage it. And I'm probably as usual worrying too much about likely downside outcomes anyway. So maybe, maybe that'll happen. Maybe we'll just fucking do that. That'd be cool. Other projects? That's right. We're talking about projects. I have not listened to this yet. But I'm looking forward to giving it a shot at some point. But Jima posted a Oh, podcast, they're doing called in sickness.

Jessamyn 36:38 We're not gonna listen to that.

Cortex 36:41 I don't know. I might, I mean, I would obviously need to be like, I'm ready for something heavy sort of moving

Jessamyn 36:46 is a great idea. I am happy that they did this. And I personally just would not be able to listen to this right now. Just because Yeah,

Cortex 36:55 probably. It's hard. Yeah. Probably not adding it to my week currently. But like, that's the thing like at some point, it'd be nice to go and give it a listen. Like I even even a podcast like this where I think it might be a little emotionally heavy for me. And at the moment, outside of what I'm, you know, having personally to deal with. It may not be a regular Listen, but I like listening to an episode or two or something like that and getting even just some additional context because like, I can imagine the things I feel like I understand about this situation. But I also know that just

Jessamyn 37:25 being a caregiver for I'm not sure if we specifically talked about it. Oh, yeah. Millennial caregivers with chronically ill spouses.

Cortex 37:32 Yeah, so to people watching that, yeah, like like, like helping be caregivers for their their ill spouses, which is not a situation I'm in and it could someday be a situation I am in or that I am the ill spouse, you know, it's not so much that I want to listen to this, because then I'll be you know, prepared, because I'm sure it's going to be a ton of work to figure that out if such a situation comes along. But like having a little bit more sense of the kind of immediacy of the immediacy of hearing people sort of talk in a sort of planned vulnerable way about complicated or difficult experiences like this, I find I get a lot out of even, I just get a bit of that, because it's like, oh, this gets away from my casing. The idea out my mind, this gets away from me sort of trying to create an outline based on what I've read. And instead, I can sort of hear people talking kind of comfortably and frankly, about things that are hard in a way that like, grounded for me in a very, very useful way.

Jessamyn 38:32 Well, and especially someone you kind of know, right, like, but Jim has been on the website a long time. It's these kinds of unknown, unknown person, and I think that

Cortex 38:42 helps. Yeah. But yeah, there's several other things too. I really like I I saw the Stufflebean has impulse late made a post about Coronavirus, street art. It's interesting. It's really interesting how much like the shift in feeling of placing the wrong link here. How much how much of a shift there has been in the sense of what is the overwhelmingly current locus of discussion after the last week with George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis and all the protests and visibility of police violence that has come out of that, like this has been, it's been a hugely intense week, focused around that in a way that feels novel, after a couple of months of just kind of unrelenting focus on Coronavirus, which, you know, is still a fucking thing and hasn't gone away and isn't going away just because something else has happened. But it's it's weird seeing such a media shift and such a conversational shift to be looking at something else with the degree of intensity that's been this sort of unusual degree of intensity for or Coronavirus last couple months. So I'm looking at like, on the one hand, I glanced through Paul's photos. And I'm glad he made this. And it's, you know, great to see documentation of stuff in the moment. And it also feels like suddenly, that's less in the moment than it was a week ago when it got, you know, posted because

Jessamyn 40:20 well, and part of that just has to do with, you know, the media being equally culpable and creating these narratives, and especially if these narratives are terribly negative, right, yeah, that the media chooses to focus on certain things that aren't necessarily the things that help us build community and help us get through this. However, we need to get through this. And yeah, I mean, I would love to see a to the moment version of this that's like London street protests, street art, additionally, right. And

Cortex 40:54 there's just, there's straight at the turnaround time, like, you know, yeah, you're getting stuff collected and curated, it's gonna take a little while, you know, even when you're doing the collecting in the moment,

Jessamyn 41:05 but no, this is great. And just he's always got really interesting things to toss up on projects. If I was gonna follow five people on projects, you would be one of the people. Yeah.

Cortex 41:16 One other that I definitely want to mention, because I really enjoyed it. It's it's kind of weird little extra Susana weirdness at the moment, cuz it's like police related in the sense, but yes, setting aside that in traveling back to a weird 1980s MacOS place, Odin stream, did some work to make an old piece of Macintosh abandonware available on the web. And it's a sort of character creator police sketch application where you can select a bunch of different hairstyles and noses and whatnot.

Jessamyn 41:50 Right? It's it's a face builder, but we're most familiar with that face builder in the sort of COP sketch.

Cortex 41:58 Yeah. So it's, it's a slow pokey program that is surprisingly durable in some ways. But also, you know, it's old, not very good software from like, the early or mid 80s or something probably.

Jessamyn 42:11 Well, and it loads, like a whole Mac emulator thing, which is adorable. Yeah, right. Yes, I forgot what Mac OS six looked like to boot up. But like, I was using it back in the hippy days. So interesting.

Cortex 42:24 Yeah. And some of us have that metal filter. And I got some good discussion. One of the things I liked about the discussion was like, the people were coming in and saying, hey, you know, there's not a there's not a male or female selection. It's like, yeah, there's not, you know, people look like what people look like, and they look like all sorts of stuff. And like, this is something that I said something. And that's right at the time that like, you know, it's really, it's sort of fascinating to look at this and compare it to character creators and video games, which sort of functionally is

Jessamyn 42:53 like, do you want to have giant boobs? Yes, yeah, yeah.

Cortex 42:57 Yeah. Boobs. Yes. No male or female? Which of the two kinds of people are you? And like, that's something that's been becoming less of a thing over time? Not broadly, I would say, but like, more significantly, at least a lot of it in sort of Indian art games. But even in mainstream games, you're starting to see character creators that say, what's your character look like? What's their name? And like, that's the character creation process, rather than like step one. gender binary. So it's kind of it's kind of a cool, weird accident.

Jessamyn 43:27 Or like, you're this dude, unless you get a lot of points, and then maybe you can level up to a lady.

Cortex 43:35 Now that's like, even that is not generally a thing that would come into, like, more likely, it's like, oh, we don't have the development resources to give you the option of playing as a lady. Horrible. Yeah. Video games. Anyway.

Jessamyn 43:50 Speaking of that, leads into two other things, which is this project by Tabitha Sunday, which is a book, The tale of Jordan Parker, a trans girl gets superpowers and the body she's always wanted, which is cool. And basically, it was part of sort of Tabitha Sunday's exploration of realizing that they were trans. And if you are somebody for whom those kinds of stories are great, so far, you know, Peter Alafia, was, you know, found it super readable, interesting into it, and a way to go Tabitha, for writing a book that seems to be engaging and for kind of your own process, like it's just, it's always a happy thing when people get to sort of figure out what their path is. And that opened some doors for them. Yeah. And the other thing I wanted to mention, was apropos of this bond, Cliff posted a meta talk people may not have seen it basically yesterday. Just talking about, like bond cliffs own path on metaphor. He's been on metal filter forever, you know, way, way back in the hippie days, but talking about how, you know, posting posting a question about sending His Son to preschool and now his daughter is graduating from high school, same person, those pronouns are are okay for that discussion. And how Metafilter helped him bond Cliff managed this, you know, change in his life a generally great change for his kid that, that he talks about a little bit and it started a fun little thread also in meta talk about what that you know, what, what has changed in your life? How did meta filter help with a change in your life? Or what's different now and for those of us who have been on the site for, you know, a super long time, it is sort of interesting to think about who we were when we started interacting on Metafilter. And maybe who we are now and what changes are actually a result of actual interactions that we've had on Metafilter?

Cortex 46:03 Yeah, yeah, I kept my comment short, because I realized if I started like, getting long, it was getting long, because like, Well, fuck, my life metaphor has been in my life, like my entire adult life. It's been, you know, the central thing and like, I can just chronolock everything that happened in the last 20 years. But that would be that'd be maybe excessive. I just remembered to speaking of, of bond cliff, then. And Nora and Colin shows earlier there. I think we had an episode where a Colin show were a few years younger Nora did calling to say edgy teenager saying words. remember fondly?

Jessamyn 46:46 Yes, I do. I do remember that Nora is not involved with Metafilter at all. I don't think and in fact, she's fairly active on Twitter. And it's funny because like, I follow her on Twitter, my sister follows her on Twitter. Like we've met Nora, we interact with Nora and but like, Bond cliff is always in various stages of blocking or unfollowing her because they're related. And you know, when your 18 year old kid is kind of, you know, feeling themselves, you know, discovering

Cortex 47:19 other stuff. Like, like, if I'm remembering, right, it's like it was an organized like detent where like they both block each other. So just sort of be on Twitter without getting each other's hair.

Jessamyn 47:30 Yes, yes, exactly.

Cortex 47:34 All right. We're 45 minutes in and we've gotten through projects. So maybe I'll keep my Metafilter Pixa to a shorter list this this month.

Jessamyn 47:47 But yeah, there was like a 15 minute kind of big changes on the site. I think. I think that's all right. I mean, I got Do you have someplace to be?

Cortex 47:54 No, I just I just don't want to stick people like a two and a half hour podcast or something. Yeah. Also, I do. I need to not overdo it on my voice, because I've done a lot of like, orientation zooms and stuff last week. And it turns out that I can make myself hoarse if I'm not careful.

Jessamyn 48:12 I have an in person meeting today. And I'm a little freaked out about it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, our conservation commission. We did a great little talk on Zoom last, I think last week, but like, there's eight of us. And in Vermont, especially in Orange County. It's okay to have socially distant meetings of 10 people or less, and the weather's okay. And we're like, let's just sit out in somebody's driveway with our masks on and see other people. And, you know, there's there's zero COVID cases in my entire county right now. And there's nobody in the hospital in the whole state. And summer tourism hasn't started yet, which I think is when everything's gonna go back to hell where it was. And we're like, let's all look at other people. It's gonna be weird. But I think we can do it. Like, I'm a little afraid that like, kind of the older because like, mass compliance in my town is for shit, right? I mean, partly because people perceive the risk is very low, which may not be wrong, but baby isn't. I mean, you know what I mean? Like, we all know how COVID works. Mask compliance in my town is the worst. But like, we all agreed, like we're all wearing masks at this meeting. And I'm a little concerned we're going to have kind of one older white dude in my group, being like, why just stopped out were pushed down over my nose because right, you know, like, like, even at the post office, like the guy at the post office who works there was wearing a mask, but it was like, pushed down under his nose. And I'm like, you know, that doesn't work. Right? Like, why bother? You're not wearing a mask, essentially. You know, and because you're wearing it to keep me safe. Go fuck yourself. Like and I Love the post office. So this was a very difficult, you know, conversation to have to have. But I'm just kind of like that's not. That doesn't do it. You know what I mean? So at any rate, we're going to have an in person meeting. I'm nervous about it, but I think it's probably the right step. Right. So but that's not till 530. So I don't have any place to be. So we can still talk for two and a half more hours. All right. Cool. All right.

Cortex 50:23 Fuck it. Let's

Jessamyn 50:27 do that. I heard you the first time.

Unknown Speaker 50:29 Really, we have some fun spoonable zone with this bill. And stuff is spoiling by the bucket load. Everything is warning on it. Now. Look, how many marks there are on the underside of this thing. Other spider jockey, there's just one on there. What are the chances that reminds me I was meant to be lighting it up as I went along. I'm gonna sleep because this place is gonna get super deadly as none of us live up to. Yeah, I should probably also light this place up.

Cortex 50:56 Pretty neat. I don't know. It's it's really, it's it's a weird thing. Like as as a brief aside, like, I recognize that the podcast these days is so much longer than it was back when it started. And I know that 90 minutes is a long podcast and kind of our average time. and I both want to sort of respect that and even think about ways we could make it more consistently short. And also, like I always, it's always fucking nice to just talk about stuff. So I don't know if there's, I don't know if there's a potential different thing we should do. Or if I should pick up the fucking phone with you and chat more often. But uh, but yeah, there is definitely I am torn between wanting to not assume people want two plus hours of podcast, and being totally capable of yammering with you for two hours.

Jessamyn 51:37 And sometimes you and I do a whole bunch of pre roll and then the podcast is a little tighter because we sort of caught up but we didn't have as much catching up to do this time because I've been around. And and there was a lot to talk about about the mod stuff. And I think I you know, I don't know. But I think to users who give enough of a shit about the site in order to listen to the podcast, maybe knowing how some of that work is interesting. Yeah,

Cortex 52:01 yeah, absolutely. I hope. Yeah.

Jessamyn 52:05 Sorry about that. Sorry, everybody.

Cortex 52:08 Let's talk about here. We still are.

Jessamyn 52:10 Let's talk about the blue. Okay, so I'm ready for this.

Cortex 52:13 All right. Hit me. What do you got?

Jessamyn 52:15 Here's our first few rounds of trivia. But it's okay. Because crisis Tom Cruise. So Tom

Cortex 52:24 Cruise. Awesome. You. We had this hole

Jessamyn 52:26 every time?

Cortex 52:29 i Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't remember where we came to it. I'm gonna go with Chris saw Chris. Chris Austin, Chris. Okay.

Jessamyn 52:37 I like crisis, Tom. But that's okay. We can contain multitudes. But essentially, the online trivia league that many of us belong to and by many are you participating this season? did take a season off?

Cortex 52:49 No, I took the last half of last season off. But no, I'm back in it. I'm feeling good. Doing

Jessamyn 52:57 essentially, there was a piece in the ringer, about the learned League, which just became a great excuse to have a thread where people could talk about learned League and Etrigan actually has a during the season podcast called learned lag, which is adorable. And there's a list of me fights who are in learned league. And if you're listening to this, and you're in learned League, and you're not on the wiki page and would like to be I can either put you there or you can put yourself there or whatever. But it was it was fun because it basically was posted right around when the new season started. And so people could kind of talk about it. I think I may have mentioned I got promoted above my paygrade like I'm a solid like you're THERE'S A through E Groups A are the best at trivia II are the worst at trivia. Well, I usually live in D where I'm happy. But I and I made it to the top of D but not so high, I would have gotten promoted. But then something happened probably that other people got kicked out for cheating, which happens all the time. And so I wound up in sea where I am just like, what are the kids say sucking wind every day? Like it's it's the worst? Like, I get killed every day.

Cortex 54:23 The kids say that. I really don't know.

Jessamyn 54:24 What do they say?

Cortex 54:25 I don't know. Yeah, sucking wind sounds like something that like I don't know.

Jessamyn 54:29 Well, I feel like that's the thing when like you lose it a running race.

Cortex 54:34 I already know I believe you like that guy. I really don't know I also

Jessamyn 54:37 hear what you're saying. So and there were like two math questions. And one of them was like really hard and one of them was less hard. At any rate. It's always fun to have a place on metal filter to talk about other places that may be used spend time and so this thread about learned League was a fun place to talk to the learned leakers because learned leak has its own forum but it's kind of burried. And it's a UBP format, which kind of sucks. And I get the feeling that the guy who runs learned league doesn't really love the forums because there are occasional cranky people crank it at him. And I think in his mind, he's like, look, the Forum is a totally optional thing. Why are you in here? giving me a hard time. And so he's kind of buried it more and more over time. But it's like, it's my second place on the internet after metal filter. So I like it when kind of, you know, worlds collide like that. Yeah.

Cortex 55:32 I have a to my shame, done one forfeit this season. And it was like the second day, literally last days in what has been good ever since then I set up I set up a timer. And I'm just doing it in the morning now to just like, I'm going to do it. So I can't forget it. But it was against another mefite. Oh, my God.

Jessamyn 55:58 I didn't mean to put you on the spot. Yeah, no, no, I

Cortex 55:59 remember who it is. And I'm trying to remember what I know about how open their name is. So I'm just gonna not say because I I'm pretty sure that they I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be an issue. But

Jessamyn 56:08 I feel like it may not have explicitly linked those. Yeah, I don't remember

Cortex 56:11 offhand. For sure. So just another FYI, a friendly person for medical care who I think I forfeited against in a previous season once and they also forfeited against me that same day. And so they sent me letters. I'm so sorry. And they sent me a second you forfeited to it. Yeah. So

Jessamyn 56:30 anyway, forfeited a 978 matches Josh. Yeah, I

Cortex 56:35 know. You're amazing. And I'm very proud of you. I am not that person. I believe in solid B plus. Anything else is extra. So yeah, yes, I'm enjoying enjoying it and getting back to it. And I enjoyed that thread. And I enjoyed the discussion of the numeric sequence on on learned league that whatever that day for something. Wow, watching people

Jessamyn 57:02 get off to the races, right. It was kind of one of those like, Hey, here's six numbers. We've removed the fifth one in a number sequence. What is it? Yeah. And so for people who are interested in math, that's an interesting question. For people who are not interested in math. It's sort of like, being like, Who's number 32? In the St. Louis Cardinals from 1984? You know, people are like, fuck you. That's a bad question. Yeah.

Cortex 57:25 Which is how I feel about like, you know, there's a reason that I'm in the EA, you know, I feel about most of the trivia. I'm like, I don't fucking know. How would I know that? That's bullshit. Who cares about sports? Who cares about geography? Who cares about language? I actually do, okay, and language.

Jessamyn 57:40 I'm trying to get better at geography because some of my geography misses are embarrassing. Yeah,

Cortex 57:43 that like, like geography, and some of the history stuff really makes me think Ah, man, I should just go okay, this is homework. I'm gonna sit down and fucking Wikipedia article questions

Jessamyn 57:53 wrong, which is even worse. And I get critical mass wrong yesterday, which is extra worse. Because like I have written in the critical mass bike parade and still did not get the nuclear physics question aspect of it, right.

Cortex 58:10 I appreciated both the physics orientation with it and the fact that it was like answerable outside of that because like, Kaldi moment. No one ever says critical. Oh, no, it's critical. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, learned League, it's fun. I have

Jessamyn 58:25 a segue from that actually, another meta filter post, which is talking about other places, you go on the internet. And I made a post in the middle of May, talking about Red Sox, Fenway Park organist, Josh Cantor, who basically because baseball season has canceled and he is out of that job, although he still has his librarian job at Harvard, is basically doing a kind of I play your requests from his living room, every single day. And it's on Facebook Live if you use Facebook, and there's a whole group of people who have kind of coalesced around this event called the stretchers, which is just so funny. And like, you know, once a day, I think, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, like at the top of my lungs, in my own house alone, with a little chat group and listening to Josh play his Oregon. And it is lovely, and it is one of my favorite sort of quarantine time. community building things. And every now and again, they do it later on Sunday, because his wife is a reverend, and she has Reverend thing to do. And it's one of those things kind of like a lot of kids TV shows where there's just enough repetition, that you kind of feel comfortable, you know, what's going to happen sort of, but not entirely, that there's a lot of kind of beats that they do every time. And yeah, it's just it's been a really nice part of the last month or so. So So I discovered it even though there's other people from that filter who were there fairly regularly. And yeah, if you if you need a little pick me up and you'd like baseball or Oregon music, and you have Facebook 3pm Eastern daily Time, Eastern Daylight Time, Eastern Daylight Time. There's a thing that'll lift your spirits.

Cortex 1:00:23 So the daily time it's a time that happens every day. I got a little bit of a boost out of this is a repetitive thing, although that there's probably a bunch of other stuff on the same channel. But Bhuvan Bo U VI. N made a post Labor Day about just a stop motion filming of the teardown and rebuild of truck engine. Oh,

Jessamyn 1:00:48 I bet that is fun. It's great. Like it's remember that time we watched those guys take apart the jeep. Jeep take apart. We mentioned on a podcast, you know, 17 years ago, something like that.

Cortex 1:00:59 Yeah, that sounds familiar. Sounds like a thing we would have watched and talked about. Well, this is this is kind of like that to this one. This one is actually surprisingly artful like it. It's not just like, hey, we used like stop motion to document the process. But they did a really nice job, including some crazy like motion control camera stuff and a bunch of careful synchronization of little details. So it was really nice to watch. So if you Oh, wow, go check that out.

Jessamyn 1:01:24 I was just watching it. Yeah, that's good. Like, gosh,

Cortex 1:01:27 yeah, it's really lovely.

Jessamyn 1:01:29 It's not just some dude being like, and now we're gonna take the wrench continue with the faster anything? Well,

Cortex 1:01:42 I think I think a lot of the things you see that are less elaborately done are like just like time lapse videos aren't like they aren't stop motion in the sense that this is actually this is a work of animation, essentially, as they do this. Whereas you see a lot of time lapse, where it's like, Hey, I'm going to set up a camera I'm going to work for four hours or eight hours. And then I'll play it back in one frame every 30 seconds. So you can see it flooding by but it's not like, composes just like this is a compressed real time document. This was much more of a thing. This is like a short film gotten

Jessamyn 1:02:10 musics to be beautiful and building. Well, and it's one of those kinds of neat things right? That's like happening in another country by people probably not speaking English. And it doesn't matter because we can all share looking at the thing together. Great.

Cortex 1:02:25 I thought this was really interesting. There was a post a post with a twist, Rami made a post about some weird shit going on on Reddit, which

Jessamyn 1:02:37 I got as far as Reddit and then I know popped out of it. So

Cortex 1:02:41 it turns out it's interesting and Rami, you know, longtime active Metafilter user also longtime active redditor and tries to be generally a force for good over there, which I appreciate. There was apparently a sort of conspiracy of control over some politics, adjacent Reddits and some other sort of more meanie seeming Red Hats. But basically, what it comes down to is like a small handful of people, maybe basically two or three people even ultimately, we're being a whole lot of people, quote unquote, participating on and up voting and driving the discussion at a bunch of these subreddits to the point where when they banned a whole bunch of those people, they were completely

Jessamyn 1:03:27 different posts gravitating to the top. Yeah. Reading along with it. It

Cortex 1:03:31 turned out it was like a handful of people really doing this massive control over a bunch of Reddits by basically just being absolutely shitting and unethical and tricky about it then one

Jessamyn 1:03:41 having moderator privileges and using them not yet.

Cortex 1:03:45 Yeah, exactly. So it's an interesting read. It's an interesting sort of bit of thing happening over there. But the big twist to beyond that is that as a result of the big busted kicking people out they that the administrators at Reddit made a call for new mods, and Rami put himself in and now he's kind of in charge of this stuff now. Which is like holy cow. That's that's better, right? Yeah. And there's a there's an update for him right at the end, getting into a bunch of detail of what they found in the process of doing this, which included a shitload of shadow banning of people who didn't know they'd been shadow banned because it was a shadow banning and they just didn't know that all of their stuff was invisible to keep it from, you know, tilting the discussion back towards the actual representative content of the participants rather than this

Jessamyn 1:04:32 right? They're just like, why am I not getting any traction on this? Yeah,

Cortex 1:04:35 so that whole thing is sort of fascinating and weird. Go right.

Jessamyn 1:04:39 This is great. I love this kind of stuff like just peeling back the curtain and like what the hell is going on in these places? Yeah. Absolutely not on topic but absolutely on brand for me is gym, my gym, not other gym whose bond cliff but my gym who's not under Play just posted kind of a short, unfortunately linked to Facebook. Richard scary what do people do all day further revised to reflect our current societal roles. And you know, the joke being basically, that our current societal roles are you know, limiting. very limiting.

Cortex 1:05:24 I'd seen this before this is cute.

Jessamyn 1:05:26 Oh my god, it's it's just small, right? It's like every now and again, Jim will kind of text me and be like, I made a post a metal filter and like 75% of the time, it's some noise music or nonsense. Like it's just something weird that he loves, but it's not a thing that we share loving, you know what I mean? But but this thing, which is just, you know, looking, looking at the different Richard scary pictures and putting down you know, the, we're attempting home cooking, and there's the little Rabbit who's burning a steak. We're growing out our haircuts and there's the little buffalo were snooping on our neighbors. We're watching Netflix, we're becoming obsessed with plants. Like I think a lot of people can really kind of sort of get what the thing is. And then of course, a whole bunch of people in the thread are like, our like, why no lowly worm because he's, he's the Richard scary favorite. And I think that well, the worm got added later in the process. Jim, Jim says, Hi, by the way, every time I tell him I'm gonna say hi to Josh and I'm like, Oh my God, you men who do not communicate with one another ever? So I'll tell him you said hi. Can you God Almighty,

Cortex 1:06:39 anytime. I said hi back. Want to text each other?

Jessamyn 1:06:43 Or anything like that? Well, because often it's not just say hi, which is kind of normal. But it's like, tell Josh I really liked that post on tell Josh. He should listen to this music. And I'm like, Do you not know that man has an email address? And like Jim and I don't even live together like it's not like he's yelling at the back of my head while I'm typing. Like, oh, if you're typing to Josh tell them

Cortex 1:07:08 you can email me anytime Jim.

Jessamyn 1:07:11 You can listen to the podcast

Cortex 1:07:14 Well, that's the problem right there. That I said hi back and so close the loop. Yeah, that's clearly that the soul and core issue

I got a couple of posts about weird humanoid animal dicks. More than one. I know. What was splendor.

Jessamyn 1:07:58 My current animal, like animal decks or like, like like,

Cortex 1:08:03 like humanoid animals, with my god, typically, there's this one post. From from Phys. From early in May, about how big are the dicks in Skyrim. And it's an analysis that someone did trying to take from the game. Skyrim is sorry. Skyrim was a video game. It is a it is video game. It's Elder Scrolls five Skyrim. Tech. Oh, thank you. It's a big, big open world fantasy RPG where you wander around fighting steam, or Yeah, like steam or on a console. Big multi platform series.

Jessamyn 1:08:37 Can you win it? Or is it one of those kind of just wander around?

Cortex 1:08:41 It's a single player thing. So you wander around and you save the world eventually, and you know, fight big things

Jessamyn 1:08:46 or not? isn't one of those ones. You can die or Oh, you

Cortex 1:08:49 can die. But you come back. Yeah, that's normal.

Jessamyn 1:08:53 And modern games. Really, I guess

Cortex 1:08:54 this this one's all about sort of a mix of saving the world by following the plot. So you can probably play through it in I don't know, 2030 hours by just focusing on the main question

Jessamyn 1:09:04 by you. You mean not me? Yeah. Well, the player and

Cortex 1:09:07 everybody's they know, actually, people are generally not naked, but you could take your clothes off or stripped down to your undies. And so the question here is of all the various factors one

Jessamyn 1:09:17 of those games where you have to be a boy character or girl character.

Cortex 1:09:21 I think it probably has a binary like that. I don't know how much Skyrim politically cares about it, but I think it probably I don't remember, notably having a non binary you play

Jessamyn 1:09:31 with other people or you just play with your sleeve or yourself, play by yourself by yourself.

Cortex 1:09:36 Yeah, it's just a single player, epic RPG where you become incredibly strong and save the world. But you can do that as any of like a dozen or so I don't know, like 10 looks like at a client's different base races as well. So there's a variety

Jessamyn 1:09:51 of 20 jash.

Cortex 1:09:53 Well know that it's the same thing but in metric and in English measurements. I'm what?

Jessamyn 1:10:03 Breton Nord Red Guard Altmer Dunmer Bosmer or Cali Argonian metric

Cortex 1:10:11 giving you inches and centimeters in case you are more comfortable measuring Dixon one or the

Jessamyn 1:10:15 other. I am comfortable with any of them. Yeah, so anyway, they basically

Cortex 1:10:19 did they tried to map out based on some assumptions the the average dick size of the different kinds of people you can be in it's including a bunch of human variations and a couple of humanoid variations like orcs and cojita are cat people are gonna Ian's or lizard people. Anyway, it's canonical that the Kashi cat people have spiky barbs on their penises. That's what brought me to the penis theme. And it's it's a fun read and just dumb good times.

Jessamyn 1:10:48 You know, I got to appreciate 2020 Metafilter where this can be done good times, and not just a terrible threat of toxic masculinity. Yeah.

Cortex 1:10:57 Sometimes Sometimes we're just gonna talk about penises, and it's okay. And also we're not going to randomly post about someone because they have nice boobs. We're doing reparative things of sky. God, so there's also this other because I have nothing else to say about the

Jessamyn 1:11:17 pain plus, ah,

Cortex 1:11:20 did you go and look at Dixon and get surprised that you saw Dick's?

Jessamyn 1:11:24 No. No, I'm literally reading a page about a mod called the slums of Skyrim. But I had to click an 18 Plus thing and then I didn't really see any dicks, although those ads are pretty crazy. But alright, let's move

Cortex 1:11:41 on. Anyway, the other the other humanoid post I had was post from a week or so ago from between the bars about an article in The New York Times about wolf person erotica.

Jessamyn 1:11:56 I remember seeing this go by on Twitter, I didn't understand anything as per usual,

Cortex 1:12:01 it's a fanfic thing. There's a whole, like, just read the thread. I don't follow it enough to like do more than make a cute joke at the start of the thread. But but it's you know, it's about a complicated thing involving a whole strain of fanfic and slash Vic involving werewolves and they're, you know, alpha and beta and omega relationships with each other and the wolfy side of that, and, and how the idea of copyright when you're dealing with collective writing of fanfic really works. Exactly. And this is what this also is pretty interesting. And it's interesting that New York Times wrote about it, you know, it's sort of like, oh, okay, stuff you paper, bla bla, bla, bla, bla, we'll fix. But yes, we'll fix. So that's an interesting read, too. And I don't have more, a lot more to say about it. But people talked about some interesting stuff in the thread. But that's my animal, humanoid, double header. And, yes, so

Jessamyn 1:12:54 fascinating. There's no way I'm gonna segue that Oh, sure. I am. This was just literally, this is a post by Dr. Nemo. And it is just a sort of a single link essay in the Paris Review called fuck the bread, the bread is over, which is just this kind of, I don't know, if you read it, I read it. It was a beautiful essay, which is basically talking about essentially being a woman on the academic job market, which is its own shitty, ridiculous thing. Being a mother during the COVID 19 pandemic, which is very difficult. And then the kind of fairy tales we tell ourselves about kind of the way the world works. And it's, it's, it's poignant in a way that I felt wasn't I don't even know what to say like hard for me. Like I thought it was going to be kind of a really raw you know, just things are really hard essay, which I was a little bit like, worried about. It's super short. It talks about being a mom, it talks about looking for work, it talks about kind of the mythologies, we tell ourselves about some of those things it talks about, if I remember correctly, like her talking to her mother, who is not herself particularly helpful. And it's, it's a it's a poignant essay, and it's just it turned into kind of an interesting, an interesting thread with people talking about some of that stuff and and I enjoyed it. You know, to be perfectly honest, because it's a it's a kind of a more I don't know, female side of looking at things that I found very relatable. And I know Dr. Nieman was an academic. He's a friend of mine, who used to live in Vermont and could never get good internet moved to DC. Hope everything there is okay with him. And yeah, I just I just thought it was a really good essay, and I was really happy to be able to talk Talk to people on Metafilter about it. And I have a segue to my next metaphysic thing, which is my last Metafilter thing. Okay, are you done with your Metafilter thing?

Cortex 1:15:12 I've got one more, but you go for it. All right.

Jessamyn 1:15:15 Other things I like to talk to people on meta filter about include ancient Saturday Night Live episodes. And this is a post by Etrigan, who I often see in the SNL threads on fanfare where I've spent a lot of time because SNL did, I think three episodes of SNL live at home, which was fascinating because they did sketches and skits, kinda, you know, on and via zoom, you know, with producers kind of kind of kind of pumping things up a little bit, but it was really interesting. And so basically a 19 98 million years ago, Lucy Lawless, who I think many of us know is like Xena Warrior Princess, did this kind of one off throw away thread impersonating Stevie Dix, as the owner of a bad Mexican restaurant, Stevie Nicks fajita round up, and she does some songs. And it was kind of funny. But then for whatever weird reason, and this is another link to the ringer, which honestly, is not really a website I knew that much about. But, you know, it's been two of my meta filter posts that I've talked about this week. And they get lawless kind of talking about it in modern times. Like, how do you feel that the sketch you did in 1998 now has a weird cult following of people who think it's really funny and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's a neat look at Lucy Lawless. It's a neat look at some of the SNL things. It's a neat look at, you know, the cult of Stevie Nicks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I just it was a great essay. And it was fun to talk about it with people on Metafilter. Nice. Yeah.

Cortex 1:16:52 Yeah, I don't think I don't think I've ever seen the sketch. And I missed it.

Jessamyn 1:16:56 I don't remember seeing it. I mean, now I watch SNL regularly, but at the time I was watching it probably a regularly like I was living in Seattle some of the year and I was living in Vermont some of the year like my life was complicated, and didn't involve as much kind of media consumption as it currently does. So yeah, I may have entirely missed it. Oh, I've got a hairy woodpecker on on my suit.

Cortex 1:17:22 Sorry, I'm trying to bring it back to animal dicks or something. I mean, you'd have to admit, hairy woodpecker is like, you know, that's making it way too easy for me.

Jessamyn 1:17:32 I can't help that. That's his name.

Cortex 1:17:34 I know, I'm not judging him. I'm not judging you just celebrating dick jokes. I guess. Apparently, this is that episode. All right. The one other thing I wanted to mention, we like talked about it earlier in the thing, the podcast that we're recording, that's what the thing is, is there has obviously been a huge amount of discussion on the sites around the events in Minneapolis and George Floyd's murder, bastards, Josh, a cow, baby. So it's been it's been a really intense time on the week, the main thread is a bit over 1000 comments on the blue at this point, and still going, and we'll see what goes with maybe a follow up there, if that just gets too big. But it's been a it's been a, it's been a difficult and challenging also really useful Metafilter thread to have around as people have aggregated stuff. So I think probably if someone wanted to find that they found it by now. But just in case you weren't sure where the discussion was. That's there. There's also been a bunch of meta talk stuff about check ins and making sure people are okay. And we've had

Jessamyn 1:18:38 Minneapolis checking specifically, but also curfew check ins if you're in a city that's dealing with that situation.

Cortex 1:18:45 Yeah. So there's, there's a lot and people are feeling an awful lot. And I may see if there's something additional we can do on on metal talk as far as putting out another sort of like if you need a space or need to be pointed to resources for a space to talk about stuff. So we'll see about that. But anyway, it's been a it's been a really intense week in that respect. And I just kind of want to, like, acknowledge that and putting out that thread and say if there's other stuff we could do on the site to sort of help people during this, you know, let them know, like, let us know. And and we'll see what we can do.

Jessamyn 1:19:22 Yeah, I mean, it's been interesting locally, I'm working with the Vermont Library Association to come out with, you know, some statements of support for librarians of color in the state, which is a small group of people. We're directly talking to our local police force, like we don't have police in the town, we have a county police force, and talking to them about being more accountable for the you know why like Vermont is one of the whitest states right up there next to Wyoming and yet, if you look at traffic stop numbers or who's incarcerated numbers it's a higher percentage of people of color or then is at all conscionable or appropriate? Yeah. And there have been movements to work on that. But they have not had kind of the force of No, seriously stop it behind it. And I think more people are getting to the no, seriously stop it. Point like we've got a local Black Lives Matter group that is that is mostly people who are white. But we got a Black Lives Matter flag flying over the high school and has been for the year, which has been good. And it's it's hard and conservative communities especially. And I'm sure it's challenging for people in their own communities for various reasons. And kind of, we're here to listen if that's helpful or tell you where to donate money if that's not helpful, or Yeah, working, working on moderating challenges, too, has been a little tricky. I know that when I was sort of dipping in and out of stuff, when I was working there yesterday, you know, there was that kind of sense that it was the same five white guys yelling at each other and trying to figure out if that's inhibiting other community conversations that could or should be happening is probably worth a check in about I think.

Cortex 1:21:12 So we'll see what we can do there. And yeah, we'll keep working through this. Would you like to talk about AskMe Metafilter? Always. All right, please do it.

Jessamyn 1:21:24 First of all, I would like to put eyebrows Biggie briefly on the spot and ask her what she wound up serving at mini McGee's escape room birthday party, and she has gotten to that point. Because basically, the setup is, you know, having a birthday during COVID times sucks. And they're trying to do like escape room in a box at the family at home of mystery about an astronomer in 1869. And so she's thinking of things she can make for dinner and snacks. Astronomer related but not like, astronaut food. Yeah, so what's the trick and also can't be fish also can't be mashed potatoes. And she can go get ingredients, but maybe some limits. And so people gave a lot of good suggestions. And I am hoping for a follow up. So I press McGee, we'd love a follow up about what you wound up choosing and how everything went. And happy birthday, Minnie Mickey. Nice. Yeah.

Cortex 1:22:30 I actually had a question I thought was interesting. I learned some things about what I didn't didn't know about even what was in

Jessamyn 1:22:36 the question. And I think that's so interesting in such a weird way, is

Cortex 1:22:40 a question from antagonists. fantasticness about basically, hey, you know, I'm trying to keep my banana fresh by putting in a vacuum seal container and put it in the fridge, but it's still turning brown.

Jessamyn 1:22:52 What's wrong, are interesting, right? Because the reason they turn brown is a combination, like enzymatic Browning is caused by oxygen touching them. But also, they can get brown in the freezer for different reasons.

Cortex 1:23:07 Yeah. So it turned into a nice, yeah, turn into a nice little started well, actually, here's what's going on with bananas. Here's what's going on with like, you know, consumer level vacuum sealing. And, you know, it's like, there's these various different factors here. And now I kinda wanna learn more about all of that, but

Jessamyn 1:23:21 right, and also your brown banana is not only safe to eat, but potentially delicious and banana bread.

Cortex 1:23:27 Yes. You've seen the there's a comic about like turning bananas into banana bread, and how it's never actually going to happen. I'll see if I can find it. Now, you tell me about something. I'll just track it down.

Jessamyn 1:23:39 All right. Well, I will mention my like, every now and again, I find an Ask Metafilter question. That is like a good librarian question. And it always makes me happy. If it hits me at a time when I can go just put my head down for 10 or 15 minutes and do some research and come up with the perfect answer. It doesn't happen a lot. But when it does, it is so happy making and satisfying for me. And so this was a question by long haul trucker, basically looking for what the phone exchange name was for this town in Utah in the 50s and 60s. So So basically, that would be like, you know, like my phone number here is like seven to eight blah, blah, blah, blah. And so that seven two would turn into letters, but those two letters would then be a word people would say right, so no fucking nine. I don't know what seven two are? Phone keyboard. Ah. So seven, two would be like p p a, right. So it could be panda two panda eight, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And those names were sometimes local and made up and sometimes made from a list of canonical names. And so basically, it looked like the name for that part of you Utah in the 50s and 60s, was like Amherst six, blah, blah, blah, blah. But finding it involves kind of looking on old newspapers, which is something I can do because I work at Wikipedia, and long haul trucker actually asked, which many people don't. And I was like, Well, let me let me actually explain how I got there, which is like, you know, oh, thank you for asking about my process, like, Oh my god. So it was just, you know, it was just like a fun, satisfying, you know, way to spend 15 minutes in a deeply unsatisfying set of months, that I was kinda

Cortex 1:26:01 the banana bread cartoon, I was looking, thinking of his apparently from inky rickshaw, and I have linked it, and it's just, it's cute.

Jessamyn 1:26:11 Yes, I've seen that. Although I am one of those people who actually does take us out of the freezer and make but we do too,

Cortex 1:26:19 sometimes, like, it definitely happens. But I think a lot of people that the fact that like, you know, you can, in theory means you end up with a bunch of frozen bananas, or fucking do anything with,

Jessamyn 1:26:27 which many other people can also relate to. That is very funny.

Cortex 1:26:31 What else you got on on ask me, that may be my entire catalog this month. Okay, I have

Jessamyn 1:26:35 a couple more not a ton. But Metafilter user WCM f is going is a realtor, and is revamping her site? And she wants to know, like, Okay, let's get real. what's good and bad about real estate websites. And of course, there are many Metafilter people who have either bought or sold houses, who are like, well, let's, let's talk about what I hate for my real estate, realtors website, or let's talk about what's really useful, or let's talk about, et cetera. And, you know, I'm one of those people who occasionally will just like, you know, if I'm having kind of a loaf day with my sister back in the before times, like, we would just literally sit around and load Zillow on the Apple TV. And like, look at pictures of houses, because it's interesting to write like, not because we want to buy like Jim always found it super confusing. I think I've talked about this on the podcast before. He's like, you're not buying or selling a house? Why are you doing this? And we were like, I don't know, we like to go inside houses and look at how houses are like, it gives you ideas for stuff. I don't know, shut up. You don't have to watch it. Like, but it is the thing that we both share my sister and I and so it was interesting to get to see what other people care about, you know, because this realtor was like, whoa, what about like, a walkthrough video? And like, some people are like, Oh, pretty interesting. Other people are like, no, never like, not know. And so it was just I like to know what other people think about those kinds of things. And so that was interesting. This is funny, just because it's like, kind of one of those, we have a section on the wiki which is like questions that are often asked on metal of metal filter, you know, that are like what are questions that come up regularly on AskMe Metafilter. And in fact, one of the things I would be sort of excited with kind of new mod blood coming in would be to get some of these pages a little updated right like me and read me and a bunch of pages that like haven't gotten updated. I think there is help page has stayed pretty updated, which has been nice. But like questions frequently asked of meta filter, I don't think has been but like

Cortex 1:28:55 the wiki that feels like Yes. Boy, we were editing the wiki in 2008.

Jessamyn 1:29:00 Right, which is fine, you know, totally fine. But you know, this question printer basically gets answers, brother, like every single person is like Brother, brother, brother, brother, brother, brother, brother. Like there I think there's one answer that was like, Oh, you could do this Unix thing. Now, Brother, brother, brother, brother, so it's nice it just in that elder brother printer people get to be like yay, still happy with my printer? Which is I don't know. That is a nice thing to be to be able to see and I don't know why I selected that one. Let's move on. And then this one was fun. This is an Celli. Michelly I don't know if we talked about this last month. No, we couldn't have used that podcast was May 1. What was the movie you saw when you were a kid? That was the funniest Just when you were a kid, so like, let's say you were like seven to 12 You saw a movie that just you thought was hilarious.

Cortex 1:30:08 What was a good fucking question actually?

Jessamyn 1:30:11 Well, and it's fun because you know, people say different stuff, right? There's a lot of answers or Spaceballs. There's a lot of airplane, you know, nine to five. And it all depends on what age people are, right? Because stuff hits you at a certain at a certain age, right, private eyes with Don Knotts and Tim Conway Spies Like Us up in smoke, you know, UHF, and it's just a thread where people are throwing out really good movies. And to be perfectly honest, when I'm just sitting around at home, like maybe watching a movie from, you know, Kid funny times might be just the thing. And this thread would be just the thing.

Cortex 1:30:51 Yeah. That's great.

Jessamyn 1:30:55 And I have two more kind of one more, and then kind of a late update one. But basically, somebody is like, hey, I can do certain things. I like watching credits in shows I watch. Who does those jobs. All right, how would I get that job? So this is Walker Westridge asked this question. And there's a couple people, you know, including Clawson, who works at a studio and asked the editor who does the thing. And they sort of talked about who the people are, I guess there is a blog called Art of the title, which talks about some of these things, including title design finalist awards, South by Southwest and stuff. And yeah, it's just cool to kind of look into it, because it's, it's a completely different thing in many ways than the making of the rest of the thing. Yeah. And so talking about kind of how that works and how people do it was super interesting. Yeah, let's read. And then my late update, which was basically this post from 2017. The original posts are sent in a link wall I happen to be working. And it's a it's a it's a it's a nice update, but basically it is King buzzy, who had a job. Their employer was a jerk, HR got brought in, it sucked. Basically, they were officially laid off, but it was just a super shitty situation all around. What do I do, because I'm obviously not going to get a good recommendation from this person. And so this was a question late 2017 kind of long conversation, let's explain what the situation is like there's a post a follow up post partway through from King buzzy about what the situation is just an academic situation that's fucking sucked. People sort of gave them information including Jacoby and who's a hiring manager. But basically, they just got an update a couple of like a week ago, I got an AV media position, local community college hired after the pandemic hit super unusual, feel a little guilty about it, but happy to have a job kind of thanks. And so it was just it, you know, it's not good to not have a job for that amount of time. I don't know what they were doing in the meantime. But the fact that they got a job in a place that they're happy with was like a nice little update that anybody who wasn't one of the small group of people who posted in that thread might have missed and another just another kind of push for people if you've got a late update to an AskMe edit filter, thread that closed. Obviously you probably get the follow up email or me mail from Josh. But feel free to to update us it's always nice to hear kind of what happened and eyebrows Biggie especially about that birthday, what you ate at that party. But that that's that's it for me for AskMe.

Cortex 1:33:59 Meta talk, there's been stuff on meta talk, the the hiring announcements post is obviously there from yesterday. go say hello, if you haven't learned a little bit more about our new mods. There's been the check in threads we mentioned there's been some general chatty threads.

Jessamyn 1:34:16 There's some mumbling about a music swap me. Yeah, I'm not sure not sure how that's gonna go. And there's been some Do you play games? Let's, you know, swap contact information for games so that we can, you know, maybe, maybe play games together? Yeah, if that's what's happening. There's an accessibility post about not using too much Unicode. And then there's a good conversation too. Yeah, if

Cortex 1:34:44 you don't. If you don't know much about like the accessibility implications of using different kinds of character sets and fancy characters and whatnot. If

Jessamyn 1:34:54 you use Unicode just because you liked the way it looks. You may not realize that when it's read by screen reader, it doesn't read just as the letter, it'll read by whatever it so you use the M, that's the mathematical symbol just because you think it's a cool looking M. But it gets read really weird and screen readers and it makes posts really hard to deal with. And so there's a nice little thread about some other accessibility things that people could pay attention to. And it's helpful.

Cortex 1:35:18 Yeah. And, yeah, and other just meta taki stuff. It's been a it's been a time with COVID. And then a time more recently, in the last week or so, with the protests and the curfews and so on.

Jessamyn 1:35:33 Yeah, and I'm sorry, there wasn't a meta talk tales this weekend. But totally understand. Yeah, we can bring that back.

Cortex 1:35:39 I sort of realized on Sunday, it's like, you know, this weekend, we can we've we've got a big announcement tomorrow, we've got a lot of going on, we'll just we'll take the week off and come back to it next week.

Jessamyn 1:35:49 Well, and I also did want to mention that obviously, most people in most parts of the world aren't meeting in real life right now. But there have been a lot of kind of impromptu meetups, I definitely went to one where I got to sort of check in and say hi to some of the mefites from Toronto, which I enjoyed very much. But IRL has an online function. So if you want to now, so if you wanted to propose an online meetup for the people who are in your geographic area, but like meeting on Zoom or something like that, that is now a thing you could actually be doing, if you wanted to. So FYI. Yeah, you want to be like, hey, Boston, hey, Chicago, hey, whatever. Let's meet up on the internet IRL can accommodate that now. And it'll show up on the sidebar and people get notifications, etc. So you might want to think about it.

Cortex 1:36:38 Yeah. And yeah, I don't know. I think I think that, oh, you know, I'm gonna do my one weird thing about myself. Because it is such a weird thing to have happened as I was tweeting the other day and then got a tattoo. No, I think they should do that at some point. But But I made a tweet. And then William Gibson retweeted it. And yeah, so that happened. And I was like, Okay, this is somehow being retweeted by William Gibson is the most thing from a William Gibson novel that has happened to me. It's very circular in that sense, but

Jessamyn 1:37:12 as a result, Wow, can you explain this to me?

Cortex 1:37:15 I tweeted something. And William Gibson, I'm reading your

Jessamyn 1:37:18 tweet right now. I don't understand it or anything.

Cortex 1:37:23 This is just angry commentary on me on the shitty bullshitty nature of authoritarian police violence.

Jessamyn 1:37:30 Plug into a video No, no, no, the thing that I don't know, it's

Cortex 1:37:32 not an actual game. It's just me. I was feeling angry and frustrated the other night and sort of put it out in a structural way in a tweet.

Jessamyn 1:37:42 Yeah, good tweet, retweeted by William Gibson. So that's

Cortex 1:37:45 good. That goes in the in the scrapbook for sure. So

Jessamyn 1:37:49 I basically got completely fed up, just while we're on the subject of our own topics, got completely fed up with the American Library Association, who doesn't really appear to be able to make a statement about anything on the weekend, or something. And I'm going to actually be the incoming Vermont representative to the American Library Association Council. For you know, reasons, it's a little complicated, right, because I don't love some of the work they do. But this is kind of a low stakes way that I could be a little bit more involved. And, you know, so I came out with my own statement, because why not, but also, I've got a nice collection of readings about sort of institutional racism in libraries, and the problem of whiteness and libraries. And you know why some of these problems are kind of endemic in libraries, where we had a segregated and racist library system in the southern United States, you know, in many cases up until the mid 60s, and how do you think that affects sort of cultural attachment to public libraries as an institution? Yeah, so I put that on Twitter. And if other people are interested in reading some of the stuff I just actually heard from 40 Watt, who's mefite, who I also know in person who's a librarian in Michigan, but any other mefites interested in sort of a set of readings about this? Because, yeah, I'm a librarian. And that's what they do. Yeah, yeah. That was that was my approach to it. So

Cortex 1:39:13 good for you. Yeah. Good for you. Good for us. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I was more venting spleen than like, being productive. But if it helps people be like, Oh, shit, this is a fucked up situation, then I'll think,

Jessamyn 1:39:25 for me, I had mostly collected this stuff so that I could write Wikipedia articles on the racist history of librarianship. Mostly because I was filling in all these blanks with like state library associations. In fact, I should put this up on projects because I'm proud of the work that I did. And, you know, one of the things that I kind of had known about but I didn't know about in detail, was that under segregation, Live Library Associations in the southern states were only for white people. And so usually there were other library associations for black people in life. Bernie and ship but they they had different status and it was all very racist and not cool. And when those associations integrated some of them by choice in kind of proactive slightly ways, and some of them really got dragged kicking and screaming into it and shame on them. Many of them when you look at their websites now don't really talk about it, some of them, some of them do. And and I respect that they acknowledge the sort of complicated history, but many of them didn't. And I figure that's kind of a racist choice you can make, but your Wikipedia article isn't going to ignore the fact that you basically voted against having black librarians in your organization. And ah, it's a very small thing in the scope of things. But you know, I'm happy to sort of call out Georgia Library Association, Alabama Library Association, Mississippi Library Association, and Louisa Anna Library Association as not doing the right thing they could have, as opposed to Virginia Library Association, who was dealing with the same set of laws, and just decided to integrate their association and not meet anywhere that they weren't allowed to meet, like restaurants and conference centers. And instead, they would hold their meetings in churches and high schools where everybody was allowed to meet legally. Yeah, so there's different ways you can do things. And it's important. I think that we understand that historically, so that we can understand it in the present. There's different ways to do things than the way we've always been doing things.

Cortex 1:41:29 Amen. Yeah. All right. Well, I think I think for once, I'll just avoid going into some weird, get at the end, and we'll say hey, good podcast. Once again, welcome aboard new mods traveling time and loop.

Jessamyn 1:41:42 And loop. I'm so looking forward to getting to interact with you on the site. Yeah. You know, work with you for the next couple of weeks to get going.

Cortex 1:41:49 And thanks, everybody who's been both supportive and sort of constructively pressuring in helping things work better on the site over time and continuing as we go on, and, hey, it's a rough fucking week in a rough several 100 years here, everybody, you know, take care of yourselves and we'll see you on the site. Yep. Take

Jessamyn 1:42:09 care of yourself. Wash your hands. Wear your mask when you go outside. Alright, Bye