MetaFilter's site and server can always use upgrades of hardware, software, and bandwidth, as well as more stable funding for continued support of its small but high-skilled moderation and backend team! If you'd like to chip in, you can donate to Metafilter.

Podcast 166 Transcript

From Mefi Wiki
Jump to navigationJump to search

A transcript for Episode 166: The Metafilter Monthly-ish Podcast (2020-09-11).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.


Transcript

Cortex 0:00 A couple of things

well, welcome to let's wait, that didn't feel like a good hey, hey, there you. Oh, I didn't see you there. I was just talking with my. No, I don't like that either. Welcome to welcome to episode 166 of the Metafilter monthly ish podcast. I am Josh cortex Mullard. And I'm Jessamyn and we are back after an extended break. We didn't have a podcast last month for a good month of leisure Fuck it. August doesn't exist.

Jessamyn 1:01 We took a public holiday like they do in Canada. Yeah.

Cortex 1:06 So it Yes, but now here we are, again once more talking into our microphones and creating this a podcast. And it's so yeah, it's, we were talking before we started recording. I'm sitting here in Portland, Oregon, and the sky is full of smoke from many fires and is kind of the color of a jaundiced. sclera it's it's really a weird fucking vibe.

Unknown Speaker 1:36 Not like an eyeball. Yeah, the

Cortex 1:38 white sorry, the white of the eye. Okay, that's clear is on the mind. Like they I don't know why. I was been listening to a lot of sclera McLachlin. Okay.

Jessamyn 1:50 Have you seen the picture of that? Like the bald cat with no eyeball? So? Yes,

Cortex 1:55 yes. I saw that on malt shop. Speaking of. Yeah. Which I mean, I both get the odd reaction people have because it looks like some weird sort of like, zombie fucking cat with no eyes on the other hand, hey, it's just a hairless cat that also lost its eyes. And it's just a cat. Just somebody that

Unknown Speaker 2:13 loves it. Yep. So her you know, Jazzy purse.

Cortex 2:19 So yeah, you know we today we are all hairless cat with no eyeballs. Yeah, no, it's it's it's it's very It's very weird. It's not like the deep red Doom pictures that have shown up other places. A lot of California. I said doom.

Jessamyn 2:36 Okay, I'll say dune. Because that was.

Cortex 2:39 We talked about that too. But

Jessamyn 2:41 you're just gonna have to monologue on that one, man. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you will.

Cortex 2:46 I'll do my best. Okay, probably good. 3040 minutes out of it. Yeah, so that's that's the thing. It's, this may be a stuff here and sneeze your podcast and he was all because the air quality index is well over that point where they start saying hazardous. So I'm gonna be staying inside. But yeah, other than that, and I hear it's beautiful in Vermont.

Jessamyn 3:12 Yeah, it is nice in Vermont. And my big news is I have a new me fight next door neighbor. Yes. I won't kind of go into detail in case she doesn't want everybody to know where she lives because people know where I live. But mefite bought the house next door and moved in and moved up here from somewhere else, and it's super cool. Haven't met them yet. They are quarantining at home with their two cats, cats. And it's just nice. I'm happy about

Cortex 3:40 what a happy happenstance. Yeah.

Jessamyn 3:45 And we have other mefites who are moving into the next town from again, somewhere south of here. They bought a house with a zipline. Zipline came with

Cortex 3:57 and or the setup for the sad story? Well, I

Jessamyn 4:01 think this is what I learned. I'm actually too old for zip lines. You know, like, you don't really think about it until you're there. And you're like, Wait a second.

Cortex 4:10 I mean, honestly, you know, joking about horrible injuries, that side is applied. It's nice and straightforward. You just like, get on it and jump and gravity and then you're done. You know, so that's, that's right.

Jessamyn 4:20 But you might be like, six or eight feet above the ground? And what if you can't actually hold on?

Cortex 4:27 Oh, well, I mean, zipline of any height should probably really have a harness involved. I think part of the idea. I guess there's two levels of zipline, there's the I'm going to just grab this thing and hold on to all I swing down and then there's the I'm going to not fall in horribly injure myself. And that's what this carabiner is for.

Jessamyn 4:44 Oh, I see what you're saying. There's definitely a way to do it safely. Yeah, yes.

Cortex 4:49 So you know, because, yeah, boy, that'd be a really dumb way to shatter your legs.

Jessamyn 4:55 Well, it's a dumb way to wind up in the hospital and 2020 You know, I mean, And not that there's any great way but like that it's an entirely prevent real

Cortex 5:04 own goal right there. It's a real Johnny Knoxville way to end up in the hospital. Yes.

Jessamyn 5:10 Actually, I have a Johnny Knoxville Metafilter story that is one sentence. Tell me when I went to the meta filter 10th anniversary in New Orleans that was held at a place in the Garden District. I was staying there and one day I walked into the place, and Johnny Knoxville was sitting out front having a drink. All right. Yeah, good story. I didn't say it was exciting. I just No,

Cortex 5:40 no, no, you just spin and that was that was accurately described. Yeah. That was a story about Johnny Knoxville. And medical care.

Unknown Speaker 5:51 Was good party. Yeah.

Cortex 5:57 You mentioned you had a little bit of 166 trivia. Yeah, I

Jessamyn 6:01 just, you know, I always look up 166. And, you know, most of the time, there's really,

Cortex 6:06 you always look up 166. Sorry, I

Jessamyn 6:08 always look up the numbers for the podcast. As you know, and most of the time with these higher numbers, there's really sort of not much going on, you know, it's like the random name for a road or it's got some math thing associated with it. But one of the things I kind of liked about 166 is it's the atomic number have one of those weird elements in the expanded periodic table. And it's the it's called Unhak axiom. And it's a for short, like you ha, which I enjoy. I don't know, you know, I'm very bad at science. For whatever reason, like I like science, it just, it doesn't like me back. And this is a problem with trivia. And every time I learn a little bite size fact that I think I will remember, I get very excited, and I might remember this one, 166. That's it.

Cortex 7:13 That's excellent. That's that's a pretty good fact. Yeah, that's that's I also like, Unum but is way better

Jessamyn 7:20 under new new. Yeah. Those are fun.

Cortex 7:25 Yeah, I don't think anything off the top of my head about 166 that I can come up with, like, I think last time at 165. We talked about that feeling like a big number. And 166 Feels like a big number the same way. It's like the rounded version of like one and two thirds instead of the rounded down version.

Jessamyn 7:42 If it were 1.66. Yeah.

Cortex 7:45 Well, yeah. I mean, we if we have to start off with a podcast and do them all in hundreds, I don't know what I'm going to do. Let's not do it be very short, though. That have that going for them? Yeah. Metafilter. Yeah. Should we talking about medical stuff? Sure. So

Jessamyn 8:04 and there's been a lot of stuff going on. There's been a lot of stuff going on. One of the things that has not really been going on that much is job stuff. There are some jobs. Not so many since the last time we were here. Yeah,

Cortex 8:16 a few jobs in September and something still starting from August. brainwave is looking for some blog migration. Hey, so if you have that sort of skill set, help brainwave out. My camera type There we go.

Jessamyn 8:31 Real real pay to like it's a real job job.

Cortex 8:35 Yeah. Dr. Fedora is looking to hire a game UI programmer and character modeler and VFX. Artist.

Jessamyn 8:46 Interesting. I am reading a sci fi book right now that the one of the central conceits in it is a very high concept. immersive gaming system. Anybody who's into this conceptually, topic wise, might like the planet falls series.

Cortex 9:03 Oh, I don't plan fall.

Unknown Speaker 9:05 Oh, are you serious? So good. I don't know I've ever tried to there's two

Jessamyn 9:11 planet falls, just FYI. Okay, this is the Emma Newman one. And it's like a series of kind of four books. Each one follows a different person in this overarching arc of, you know, stuff that happens. But the last one is a female gamer, who I don't know, because I just, I'm just kind of starting it. But it's really interesting. And it sort of pushes the envelope of kind of what you can expect from games in a kind of a future when you can do this immersive, wholly immersive. Thing.

Unknown Speaker 9:47 Books Yeah. Good books.

Cortex 9:50 Oh, and this, doctor Fedora the job that Dr. furless did is for Serling games. Interesting. I know I know Surlyn as a sort of guy Game Designer. The fantasy striker game is a game that comes out of a bunch of game design concepts stuff. He's done over the years about fighting games in particular. And like the whole sort of like structure and balancing of fighting games, which it's a huge, gigantic topic, but not when I can actually speak in great detail on because I'm terrible at fighting games and don't really want to get better at them.

Jessamyn 10:21 Are you saying fighting games or finding games?

Cortex 10:23 Fighting games? Like like Mortal Kombat Street Fighter, you know, two people fighting each other? Fighting game?

Jessamyn 10:29 This is very exciting for me anymore. Well, no, I named it Street Fighter. You also know I thought, I thought

Cortex 10:35 this was a story about how you've met Johnny Knoxville one time while you were giving someone a name that they should Oh, that would have been like, what should I call it? Like you should call it libraries rules. Like you're right. Everybody can rip each other's spines out in right libraries rule to

Jessamyn 10:49 that though. I'm just happy if I can name like one thing from any category. Because again, it's another topic that kind of hamstrings me in trivia is not knowing a lot about the world of gaming post 1995.

Cortex 11:02 I appreciate when that manages to pay off for me. Yeah, Mom and Dad. It mattered. After all, I won a free pint glass.

Jessamyn 11:09 I got a point.

Cortex 11:16 Oh, would you like to take this one?

Jessamyn 11:19 Sure. John, Goran is looking. Yeah. But I'm intrigued because he says there is an they have a nature app that has some OAuth two issues, wants somebody to look at the code, give them some help. Bla bla bla bla bla bla, not a ton of work. But I'm I'm intrigued by this nature app. And now I want to poke around in his project posts. I don't know it's not on projects. All right. I want to hear more about it. But maybe you can help make it better.

Cortex 11:53 Good out there. Yeah. Also, Cindy goes looking for help with Wix. If you know, Wix helps him to go out. And yeah, I think that's I think that's the September and August.

Jessamyn 12:04 Yeah, that's the entire wrap up. Reminder, jobs is for jobs. gigs. can even be volunteer stuff. Please feel free to post stuff there. If you need help with stuff.

Cortex 12:20 Projects, should we talking about projects? I sure we should talk about projects.

Jessamyn 12:26 Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why you phrased it as a question.

Cortex 12:28 All right. It's, it's, it's it's just like a conversational flow thing. And it offers a you know, like, Colin response thing, you know, it's like, it's, you know,

Jessamyn 12:36 well, you know, how I am, like, talk about this. Was there a choice? I?

Cortex 12:45 Sure. So I'm, it's, it has similarly been a month of leisure for projects hasn't been as busy as it is sometimes, although I'm not not nothing. But I'm also less caught up than I would normally be because we've sort of re shuffled some of the expectations about how the project's cute works to where other people on the team are also putting them through so sometimes I just

Unknown Speaker 13:10 feel for you, that's

Cortex 13:11 fine. At the moment, it feels terrifying. Like, oh, no, I don't know what to do. I'm just gonna take us take a scroll through project

Jessamyn 13:23 I'll talk about one or two that I have paid attention to. One of them I want to mention specifically is disaster 70, sevens, random, random. random, random animal Karasik Island dream codes, so you can get a dream address. And this is a tool that will put those together so that you could visit a random Dream Island which I actually think is kind of nifty and the tie in is that you've probably seen traveling time is doing a theme week that they're calling dream week. And this came in this project came in before this was announced so I thought it was really a nice kind of Kismet so you can use the tag hashtag dream week and anything you post that ties in with that will tie in with that and I just I just love this tiny thing that disaster 77 built because you can just go look at stuff in Animal Crossing a world I have only basically heard about on the internet. Yeah. You have an Animal Crossing.

Cortex 14:37 I do have Animal Crossing. I have not played much of it actually. Secretary was playing a lot more of it.

Jessamyn 14:43 Well and is it a thing where like you and Secretary like It's like each individual person or can you guys have like an animal crossing household the way you have a real life household?

Cortex 14:53 It's it's a complicated thing. What it is is on switch there's like one island that you share. And you can have multiple different like players with their own accounts on the switches, which is usually in most games would be just like a completely different safe game so you don't mess with each other safe games at all. In animals crossings case, Nintendo set it up so that the island is common to everybody on the switch who is playing on that island. So if one person is playing a lot more than the other, that person is going to see most of the changes and do most of the development on the island, which is what happened with us is Angela was playing a lot. And so she sort of saw a lot of the progression of unlocking things and upgrading stores and building things out. And I would pop in now and then there'd be like, Oh, look, this is new, cool bowling alley. What

Unknown Speaker 15:37 the fuck? Yeah.

Cortex 15:39 Which for me was fine, because I wasn't super invested in the oh, I need to unlock that. It's more like go drop it when I dropped by. Right? That's but I think for a lot of people who really want like multiple people in the household all want to be will have the full like, I'm gonna play Animal Crossing experience. It's been a big point of frustration actually. That like there wasn't a way to just really have your own independent islands that you could,

Jessamyn 16:01 because like you and your partner can't have a just use space. Is that am I understanding it correctly?

Cortex 16:08 It's like It's like say I wanted to build an island that I Terra formed to be in the shape of a giant sur Pinsky carpet, hypothetically, actually, hypothetically, because I haven't done this bus. Can I say? Angela wanted to have a, an island that wasn't that we'd be really sort of stuck. Like, either we would have that. Or we would know it

Jessamyn 16:33 if you share. You want to be on the same island.

Cortex 16:37 Right? Exactly. You're, it's like the switch has one tiny island inside of it that everybody has to visit, which is both good and bad. It's bad if everybody wants to really do their own thing. It's good. A few like just popping around the same spot. But I think Nintendo ended up selling probably some extra switches as a result of that, which is maybe the fiendish intention in the first place. I don't know.

Jessamyn 17:01 So that like you could theoretically have two switches and belong to two separate islands, one of which was

Cortex 17:06 laid having your own island and you could visit the other island, but yours would be yours and and you could visit each other vice versa. So that's the thing you can't Yeah, like you if you live on an island. That's the island. But you can visit other people's islands.

Jessamyn 17:21 Interesting. Well, thank you for this episode of Josh explains video games to me. I have no I mean, how else would I learn? Oh, no,

Cortex 17:29 no, you're genuinely welcome.

Jessamyn 17:31 I have to pick this stuff up from Twitter otherwise, and man, I was trying to explain trying to explain baseball the gym. I don't even I don't even know if that's how you say it. But like, I was like, Well, Josh likes this thing. And he's like, it's a totally made up thing, right? I'm like, Well, yes and no. Like, there's a real thing that is happening. But then there's a sort of a fan culture built up around it that is different from that. And I think it's I don't know. Yeah,

Cortex 18:03 I mean, you thought I was going to talk about doing this episode, but no, it's gonna be baseball. I feel like we should finish projects before I go. No, I mean, just just to not be mean to anyone else's like oh, I want to talk about my thing. Cuz MAN Yeah. So Paul Slade has been posting photos and whatnot and that's the wrong field there we go. posted some Black Lives Matter street art from Hackney and Islington which I'm really enjoying seeing stuff like this rounded up around it's been a it feels like especially visible time for documentation of and making of sort of street art and protest art. Like it's certainly not unique to this moment, but it has felt for some reason like it's been more than ever to some extent. So I really like I like seeing this like like there's even around town here. I'm not I'm not running around Portland a whole lot, you know, most days right now because there's a pandemic. But even just in my neighborhood, there's been like, you know, a lot of art and turnover of art and vandalism of art and so on. On like, like bridge crossings there's a railroad crossing that you know, we walk across a lot of we're going to go for a walk to one of the cafes that does take out food and yeah, it's just like you know, it's that's been a hotspot of just sort of art making and posting and also constant vandalism that which is really fucking angering rate.

Jessamyn 19:53 Well, and it's so interesting like around here, people mostly are doing that with like, you know, various lawn signs, but kind of depending on who your neighbors are, because there are conservative people in my community, we have some areas and I may have talked about this before that are like dueling lawn signs, where like two people across the street from each other are trying to kind of outdo themselves in No, really Trump's the guy. No, really, you're a terrible person. Like all, you know, Black Lives Matter and all the other things that you know, your guy is against. And we don't have as much in terms of sort of street art just because like, what are you going to do like go paint on a tree. But you know, there has been some interesting extinction rebellion stuff, which I enjoy. And my neighbor on the other side of my new me fight neighbor, just for some reason put up a giant Trump flag. Like, I didn't know anything about them or what they believed in. They've always been nice to me when I walked by and say hi, but now there's a giant Trump flag. And when I stopped to look at the giant Trump flag, I noticed it's in front of two giant, gigantic pot plants that are like in a cage, right in the front yard. I mean, which is legal, but like, I don't know, all I can say is like weird flex, but okay, like, I have no idea what is going on with these people?

Cortex 21:21 Yeah. Well, now you know, one thing that's going on with them,

Jessamyn 21:24 right? And then I told my, you know, new me fight neighbor. I was like, they just did that. So don't worry too much about it. And by and large, this is not a Trumpy neighborhood. But there are like a couple outliers, and it's just worth knowing that they're there.

Cortex 21:43 Yeah. Other projects branwen made a blog post about sort of parallels between y2k and climate change in terms of institutions taking big upcoming threats seriously, based, I think, off comment from a threat on medical term got her thinking about it, so. Oh, nice. Cool.

Jessamyn 22:06 Well, I mean, that is kind of a question, right? Like, what gets people to the tipping point of, oh, it's not a big deal. I mean, you know, y2k at least had this deadline. But like, you know, with climate change, a lot of the stuff we're looking at on the West Coast, like that's what happens. But you know, what, what can be done to mitigate it and take it seriously and throw a lot of money and resources at it? Because that's what needs to happen. Many people have understood this. And then some how many people have that it was really interesting, actually, in Massachusetts, which is near where I am, that like Joe Kennedy, the third, who was like a young Kennedy asked Kennedy, Kennedy challenged the Senator Ed Markey, who's an older man has, you know, kind of a Biden vibe about him not in like a handsy gross way, but just an AI has been around for a while. And he's one of the green new deal, guys. And but, you know, Joe Kennedy, the third is the son of Joe Kennedy, who's doing a whole bunch of you know, help people weatherize their house, you know, cheaper oil, Joe for oil is kind of his thing. And a lot of people looked at that as sort of a referendum of like, how people feel about climate change, because Mark D is like, green, New Deal, unwavering. I mean, you know, back in the day, he was not as much of a hard ass about it. And like, you know, marquee ate that kid's lunch, and it was kind of good to see. Because I think a lot of people are like, yeah, you just vote in all these young people, blah, blah, blah, but what are they really doing? Which I don't agree with, but like, that's kind of the narrative, like, you know, Ed Markey, not a young person, but I think get out the young people and everybody else realize that he's serious about a thing that they're serious about. Yeah. I also liked Don Pardo is fixing up a 1974. Toyota Land Cruiser. Yes, this is great. And there's basically a sort of a thread on the I hate mud.com forum, and about rebuilding that thing as what we call a daily driver. And there's just some pictures of it and some pictures of a very nice looking garage. And yeah, it's just cool. If you're kind of a gearhead person who's really into cars stuff. You should check out this forum, because it's really interesting.

Cortex 24:39 Yeah. And this came out of a question he posted last August saying on AskMe he's anxious to accept a free 1974 Toyota Landcruiser. And everybody was like, Yeah,

Jessamyn 24:53 hell yeah. Everybody was enthusiastically Yes, yes, yes. And the last comment in the thread from LA Last November was it arrived this weekend, I am doomed. Thanks to all for advice. That's

Cortex 25:07 another one, I'm actually I was, I don't know, I'm trying to narrate the flow of projects through the queue. David H, posted a project, a game he made called mix a Lumia. And it's a block clearing puzzle game, you know, sort of like, you know, in the vicinity of Tetris, and Bejeweled and other falling stuff like that. That's just like, a new take on it.

Jessamyn 25:33 First self published commercial release, cool. I

Cortex 25:37 spent the last 18 months working on it, which is rad. And it's, it's, it's pleasant. I like it. But I specifically like there's a Twitter thread mentioned in the post. That is just like a thread of the entire development of the game over oh my gosh, 18 months, which is fantastic. Like, literally, the first tweet is like a GIF of some falling blocks. And Dave saying, I don't know what this is yet, but I had an idea. And then 18 months later, like, this is this complete document of the development of a game, which is really, really fantastic.

Jessamyn 26:13 Oh, man, this is super fun. I'm just kind of looking at it as you're talking over it. Yeah, I can't. So here's a 3am quality of life update, a preview of where your block will land blah, blah, blah. It's really cool, nice work.

And you should probably mention, but you probably won't. So maybe I will. You have a line cut printer now. And you have a Patreon and you were showing off some of your new work. And you know, I follow you on the relevant social, so I kind of knew about this. Yeah, but talk to me a little bit about your lineup printer.

Cortex 27:11 So I have been doing lineup cuts since basically the start of the year, I started like late January on a whim and turned into more than a whim, it turns out, it turns out I really like making linoleum cuts. And so I ended up buying an etching press about a month ago and an etching press is just a couple of big metal wheels. And you know, you feed you know, a plate and some some art and some ink and some paper and whatever through it or, or any number of other sorts of ink and pressure based things but

Jessamyn 27:44 called an etching press or not called the printing press,

Cortex 27:47 because it's one of the many things it's used for as etching. And it's one of the etch etching is a specific style of printing that kind of needs a press is part of it. Like line. Okay, but I was doing Lancope for months, I was making prints for months by hand and

Jessamyn 28:03 well, that's what I had thought and you're still doing the cuts by hand, right? Yeah, printer.

Cortex 28:07 Yeah, so the press is just the thing I used to create the actual print. So I take out some knives and I sliced into some linoleum to create gaps. And linoleum is a relief printing style, which means you carve away the bits that aren't supposed to print, roll ink across the top of it, put paper on that and then apply pressure. And then everything that you didn't carve away, ends up being, you know, ink on the paper. But you can do that by hand like you really can like there's whole, like the Japanese traditional printing is basically all hand printed. But there's, it's somewhat effortful to do it that way and I have a shitty rotator cuff and so avoiding a bunch of extra labor with my bad shoulder, just to create something, it's a good idea when I can mention that. So printing press it is so I got an etching press. And it's it's really it is a couple of big steel rolling pins that you roll, you put ink on your linoleum plate or whatever, put a piece of paper on top of that, put a couple of blankets in it to sort of distribute the weight and then run it through the wringer. And then boom, and you know, some machine that's doing all that pressing. So I don't end up like, you know, worrying about injuring myself. Right? Which is very exciting. It's I've really enjoyed having the press and I've been doing work with it. And it's really nice. I was worried about it, because it's, there's no such thing as like a cheap etching press. Like, you know, I bought a pretty, relatively small and simple model and the whole thing start to finish it's about $1,200. Right. So it's like, I don't have to really decide. Yeah, you have to decide

Jessamyn 29:42 less than that Range Rover or more than that Range Rover.

Unknown Speaker 29:45 Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 29:48 But, you know, it's, it's going to be a really long term useful tool for me so

Jessamyn 29:53 well, and it means the things that come out you've got I assume, like a little bit more consistency. And so if you were person that was gonna like do art kind of for a job. And I'm aware that Patriot is kinda like that, but also kind of not like that. You could you could run off 100 of them much more easily than you could run off 100 of something. Yeah, exactly. Like leaning into it.

Cortex 30:14 I've made, I've made like 1218 prints out of go with the etching press, and been okay afterwards. Whereas like, usually, if I was doing this short run of something, if I did like that many prints by hand, I'd be like, What the fuck did I just do and sort

Jessamyn 30:28 of not your arm exercises? Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 30:32 So it's, it's a huge, it definitely means I can work at a more reasonable pace when I'm trying to actually produce a run of prints or addition, something. So that's very exciting. And so I had been working on this print before even got the the etching press, but while thinking about maybe I would get one, this larger print, most of the stuff I do has been like six inches by six inches, because that's a it's an easy size to design for and easy to hand print. Yeah. But this I made this line of cut print, calling a powerful culture as a small phrase from within the text on it, which is the Sandia Labs report on messaging for long term nuclear storage at facilities like the waste Isolation Pilot Plant in eastern New Mexico. Right. Which is a fascinating topic. And it's, you know, the core question there is like, how do you communicate to future societies when there's no expectation of a common language, even 10,000 years from now,

Jessamyn 31:32 when Oh, my God, I read such a good short story about that by Ken Liu. But yeah, go on, like about people who encounter this thing and can't make sense of the text? And you know, yeah, the bad news that happens kind of,

Cortex 31:49 yeah, well, there's a report is kind of saying, Okay, how do we manage this messaging? And how do we do it through other symbols and architecture and like the feel of the place and whatnot. But it includes some texts that, you know, people who spend time goofing around on Twitter and such might have seen going around at various times, because it's been sort of menial times, which is this long string of words, including phrases like, you know, this is not a place of honor. No esteemed deed is, you know, forgetting the details, now,

Jessamyn 32:21 remember this, you know, how to place this is not a place, there's nothing of value here.

Cortex 32:25 Nothing valued is here, you know, this is a place of danger, the dangers to the body, if, you know, they they were trying to sum up, what are the things we want to communicate, even if we're trying to communicate them non verbally? Like, what is the vibe check, we're trying to do future civilizations. So they say, You know what, let's not dig a big fucking hole in the ground here. And so that, that has been rattling around my brain a lot this year, because it like same thing that like that brain weighing blog post, we just mentioned, you know, taking things seriously in the long term, looking at long term dangers and taking them seriously. And thinking about that as the sort of nuclear project but also think about that as like, fucking everything has had me in a big mood for a while. And so the line of code itself ended up being this layout of an American flag, but replacing the starfield with the International radiation symbol. And then imposing the text of that draft message in the Sandia Labs report that this is this place is a message and part of his system messages in like carrying that into the stripes of the flag. So that like from a distance, it sort of blurs down to looking like just that American flag but up close it has this you know, big symbolic shift in the in the content of it.

Jessamyn 33:44 Great. Yeah, no, I liked it. I thought it came out really good. And I have been enjoying watching you sort of narrated on your various places.

Cortex 33:53 Yeah. Yeah. I'm really enjoying the lineup. It's it's a good time. So yeah.

Jessamyn 34:01 All right, anything.

Cortex 34:06 No, thank you for asking. Suit anvil. posted the thing about updating Lauren, protocol to relearn oh my god, Lauren is a hack. Clone. So net hack and, and Rogue and those classic roguelikes

Jessamyn 34:30 and ends when they say fork, and I'm sorry to ask this. But like, does that really mean like they took the actual code and are editing that actual code? Or is it kind of a reverse engineered, similar version of

Cortex 34:45 the former if they're saying forks, like a fork is

Jessamyn 34:49 mean, I know what a fork is, but I didn't know if they were using that like metaphorically if that's a thing you can do. Or if I'm a real if the code is open for the roguelikes

Cortex 34:58 it would be it'd be weird to me first. I'm going to use fork, metaphorically, because like, people write their own versions of things all the time, they just call Oh, there's my remake or whatever. So yes, I'm sure I'm sure that this is a, a fork. They're longer title of it, is relearn as refactor, you learn. And refactoring is a process of basically restructuring a programming project, you take a software engineering project, and you sort of rework the infrastructure in less or more significant ways. So you're not like rewriting it from scratch. But you're also not just like twiddling bits, you're saying, Okay, there's ways that this work that needs to be changed for this to work better if you're going to change something to work on multiple operating systems, if you're going to change things to work on new kinds of operating systems or new environments, you might need to refactor it to get it to play nicely with a whole bunch of systems that weren't anticipated when it was originally written. Got it? So yeah, refactoring is something that some programmers fucking love. And it's something that causes me profound existential distress, which is why so many nice smart programming projects, stop. As soon as it becomes clear, I need

Jessamyn 36:11 to refactor because you're like, No, don't want.

Cortex 36:15 I've painted myself into a deep, deep corner, and and then I get the fear. And then we're like, let me add it. This is a big old fucking Dagwood sandwich of joy. Now, I can really get out there, like steam shovels and clean it out the basement. Yeah, like, you know, and so like, yeah, I just I, I want to, I want to keep doing the fun part. I want to keep making a new thing happen. And I don't want to stop and like do all the work to undo and pay back my technical debt chatter. So yeah.

Jessamyn 36:50 Well, neat. So yeah, that is a neat project.

Cortex 36:56 And yeah, I don't know. There's other stuff, go look at projects, go post up on projects? Yeah. Should

Jessamyn 37:02 you have done something that has something on the web, or you are planning to put it on the web? Tell us about it, because it's fun to see what other people are doing? Yeah. I've been, I mean, it's funny because I, you know, interact with a lot of mefites on social media, and I can see them making things. And so I am always a little bit curious. Like, I'll put it on project so other people, other people can see it. Oh, and I think I also want to quick toss in a mention for I don't think we had this no last one. The book of bees. Oh, yeah, I d and g 62. strange beasts. And I mentioned it because the second one is a violet penguin. Yep. Girls bird was not miss named

Cortex 37:54 Violet penguin is a recurring character and showed up in a pretty previous drawing project that

Jessamyn 38:00 the that is what I thought Thank you. Because this is kind of, you know, tickling some ringing a

Unknown Speaker 38:06 bell. Yeah. And also,

Jessamyn 38:07 there's a strange moth in there. And I feel like that was really what last month was about for me. Like it was hot. I had a fan going in the bathroom all the time, because of my weird bathroom, I had to have the light on in the bathroom at all times to have the fan on. And that meant that it became a gathering place for moths because it was really the only bright light in the woods where I am. And so I go in to turn the light off at night, like, you know, and go to bed. And like, it was just like, ah, all these moths and a lot of them were like hanging on to the screen right in the line of the out blowing or the wind blowing fan. And like, that just seems counterintuitive to me. Like, why do you enjoy that weird little moth but again, they're strange, strange moths

Cortex 38:52 who could understand them off? Now? I just fixed a link on the front page

Unknown Speaker 39:04 of Bennett filter. Are you working right now?

Cortex 39:06 No, but I know but it's super. It's a super easy fix. And it's an obit about Diana Rigg who just died and I can fix a link that's that's what I could do. In Memoriam I'll fix that broken link for her OB post.

Jessamyn 39:25 I did post a comment on one of my own threads while you were talking actually to

Cortex 39:28 see okay, so like yeah,

Jessamyn 39:31 fix something. Die in your nobody died by thread is still dead? Yes.

Cortex 39:39 Yes. I still Yeah. Let's. Let's talk about Metafilter because Diana Rick died. This is now the Diana Rigg Memorial Medical podcast episode.

Jessamyn 39:51 Great. She was great. I mostly know her from that spy show.

Cortex 39:57 The Avengers? Yes, yes. Hey Jonathan Avenger Sorry, I'm just a little punchy. Yes, no, no, the Avengers was a great classic goofy spy show and she was fantastic. And and so was I'm blanking on his name who was in it and I'm the guy. Yes,

Jessamyn 40:21 that's okay. This is how whenever we go happens all the time. You know, it's Bill and Ted and their wives, the princesses, just these random women. They're played by different actresses and all three movies. Who cares?

Cortex 40:36 Yep. But also she was she was Lady Tyrell from Game of Thrones,

Unknown Speaker 40:42 where I forgot. Yeah, well, I

Cortex 40:46 think a lot of people who were like big lady Tyrell stands also, I had no idea who Diana Rigg

Unknown Speaker 40:49 was prior to that, but they just knew she was

Cortex 40:53 a young people like this old lady rocks. And then they had to hear uncomfortable conversations from their like, you know, middle aged dads about Oh, yeah. Well, let me tell you back in the day, so Dad, I don't need to know that. Right. But yes, yeah, she was great. She was in a ton of stuff. She was in the Great Muppet. caper, really is another thing. People may Yeah, she was the Rich Lady. It's a great scene where she doesn't want to exposition, and then Miss Piggy is like, why are you telling me she's like, well, it's exposition. It's, it was a very Muppet scene. What else on Metafilter? What what doesn't involve me suddenly finding out that someone I like died, though?

Jessamyn 41:33 Well, I just have to say as part of Metafilter fundraising month, I've been doing a post a day. And I won't mention any of them specifically. Except to say that if you would like to support Metafilter, in a way where you feel like you're getting the thing, like the metal filter tote bag is essentially getting Jessamyn to make a post for you. And I have made some and thank you to as she put it on the best of blog. And it's been fun, because I really like kind of flexing my brain to learn enough about a thing to be able to make a post about that thing, you know, in like, half an hour or something like that. Yeah. And it's tricky in some cases, and fun in other cases. And just in a general sense, it's been a good time, I was inspired by Adrian Hahn, who decided at some point recently to just get reinvested in metal filter. And, you know, because he'd always kind of read it and kind of clicked along but hadn't contributed as much. And so now, he's been making an effort to make a ton of posts. And his he's number 482. Like, he's right there in my cohort, basically. And so I was like, you know, yeah, I've spent a whole bunch of time on Metafilter I could make some more posts. Why don't I wrap it up with fundraising month? So

Unknown Speaker 42:49 that's my plug for that. Yeah.

Cortex 42:51 It's great. It's It's such a fun project and it's so playing to your strengths. Is there any particular post that's been especially like challenging to find a good angle on or find good lead score one last night?

Jessamyn 43:05 August West, I think I think it was August West. You know, asked like, hey, why don't you do something on it with throat singing and I was like, Okay, that's interesting, because you know, in our throat singing is different from August West may have been the night before I went right into it. throat singing is different from the throat singing that I think a lot of people are familiar with, which is, you know, kind of Tuvan Mongolian throat singing, you know, a Feynman. Richard Feynman kind of made it popular in oats guy, zero, sorry, I guess was was the day before. And also, it involves talking about a culture that is very much not my own. And so the tricky part is learning enough so that you can speak not like an idiot about it, you know, like not not being Tropi about it. But also, you know, trying to hit on what makes it special and important within the culture, as well as being able to talk about it. And being clear, like, this is not my culture, but it's a thing I learned something about, you might like to learn about it. Here's some ways to learn more about it, instead of just like, Who are these quirky people that sing in these weird ways, because there's definitely enough, you know, you Google it and you find sort of a combination of like, YouTube videos, which are helpful. And then like newsy stories, some of which are sort of what I would consider culturally appropriate and some of which I would consider to be kind of other Re and weird. And the trick for me is to kind of skip all the other and weird stuff. Try not to be other in weird myself. And also share something with people that I think might be interested because it's okay to like things. But you don't want to like stomp all over. You don't want to be kind of like white splaining something. Yeah, in a way that's not Not okay. And so, you know, last night, you know, this is really cool kids show up in sort of, I believe Nunavut where this woman who's very popular in that area, does a sort of dual language show in both the indigenous language and in English. And she, one of the things that happens is her friend visits and a lot of times they sing together in this inner with throat singing style. And it's or she sings with a puppet, which is kind of interesting. And, and so that in and of itself was a good kind of doorway for me. Because that's something that's accessible. It's for children, it involves some of the popular people in the culture. But it's not the CPC having some kind of white person being like, we had no idea what to expect. And because one of these women who's one of the singers and like, into it throat singing is often women. You know, 60 minutes came up and hung out with her and they ate fish together and whatever. And so that was both useful and a kind of a touchstone that American audiences would kind of get into. But also you don't want that to be your only entree because they sort of white gaze Enos to it or whatever American case Enos to it. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think the favorite one is the one I did the most recently because honestly, it's the one I remember. And, you know, the heady green one, which was the day before, she was this woman who made a ton of money on Wall Street, but was kind of a weird eccentric in some ways. And she didn't leave a lot of money to what we call reputation, protection, right. So she was just a strange woman who was odd in several ways, left her money to her children, one of whom kind of blew it all and the other of whom hung on to it. But then when that child died with no heirs, the money just kind of went away. And so nobody named a building after her. She didn't fund a ton of hospitals. She didn't, you know, do the kind of Carnegie esque stuff that made people ignore the fact that he was a terrible robber baron of a business person. Yeah. And so as a result, when you google her, a lot of the stuff you find is what a nut she was. But realistically, she was an amazing financier, but because she was so out of step with the time, the people who write the narratives about her are the, you know, the kind of traditional narratives and in their eyes, she was a weirdo. And it's a little hard to find stuff about her that isn't she was a weirdo. And in fact, somebody in the thread, found a better article even than the ones I had, which I thought were fairly even handed which talked about, you know, why she was viewed the way she was, and how we can re review her through a modern lens in a way that's a little bit more interesting. And at the same time, like she wasn't a feminist. And so she's you know, she's got a complicated legacy. It's it was an interesting thing to put together.

And she lived in Vermont of all the weird things, right? All right. She lived in Hoboken and Vermont, and she was born in New Bedford, which is right down where I would spend summers in normal times.

Cortex 48:16 See sunrise don't go out to watch. Sorry, I'm staring at the wrong thing. Because my eyeballs betray my attempt to the moment. I know, right? What's with that?

Jessamyn 48:55 Oh, actually, I should include a link to that post that I was talking about. Also, I'm going to be like chewing on this ginger.

Cortex 49:03 Let me tell you about the post. I like that.

Jessamyn 49:07 It makes too much noise.

Cortex 49:09 Well, I just I, there was this fascinating thing that sort of broke a couple weeks ago about oh my god, god. I wish I I'm sure this is something that you have been exposed to. But the basic version is you know, there's different language variations of Wikipedia that you know, English Wikipedia is the one that people in the English speaking world tend to, you know, end up at, but you know, there's Russian and German and Italian and French and also Scots, Scots and Scots,

Jessamyn 49:46 to have tiny niche language, Wikipedia is to the extent that they can as part of their kind of, you know, equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives. And they always have, which is one of the things I kind of like about Wikipedia. Yeah. and go on.

Cortex 50:01 So the thing about the Scots Wikipedia is a huge amount of it a huge, huge amount of it. Like there's 60,000 or so articles on Scots Wikipedia, which is way way less than like English Wikipedia where there's more than that many articles about any given fucking anime probably, you know. But of those articles, it looks like a huge plurality, if not majority of them were all written and edited by basically the same person.

Jessamyn 50:33 Person 18,000 articles, something like that it was very disliked,

Cortex 50:37 depends on how you add up the edits, basically a huge amount of the excellent work there's by this one person and this one person is an American who doesn't speak Scots, it's this person who started as like just a teenager doing this, like, like 14 or 15, something like I want to say. And they, they just had sort of an interest in Scots and in in Wikipedia, but that was like literally it and they just started doing it. And they just kept doing it. And it's a very weird story, because there's this tendency to want to frame it as this is someone like, intentionally vandalizing or doing some weird, obsessive troll. And in practice, it really sounds like this is someone who started doing some of them that when they were too young to understand how bad of a job the thing they were doing, because they were a fucking kid. Like, you know, they had this idea. Oh, well, I'm going to be a encyclopedia editor. And I'll start right now.

Jessamyn 51:30 And I can learn about Scott's by using this translator. And sure, yeah,

Cortex 51:36 and because they were doing this, you know, essentially as a kid with their own little habits slash obsession, and without any real structural support for it.

Jessamyn 51:47 I'm at some point in a Reddit thread that like they've got diagnosed OCD, and this may have fed into this

Cortex 51:52 Yeah, like, you know, this is this all comes out to basically continuing to do this thing not Well, for a very long time, because there's really no nothing to stop it other than someone noticing. And it turns out someone recently

Jessamyn 52:04 small, the Scots language Wikipedia editing community itself is small.

Cortex 52:10 Yeah. And you know, Scots, as a language, using group is relatively small. And that's, that's part of the value of having the thing but also part of why this is so notable is like, this isn't the first time someone noticed that there was something sort of dodgy about this Wikipedia editing. But this is like when it caught the public imagination when someone on Reddit posted about it, and it blew up on Twitter and sort of everybody noticed, because people who were doing natural language modeling, one of the big concerns here is you have a lot of machine based natural language work done by by, by linguistics, by by linguists that involve taking in big corpora of text and using those to do things like set up machine translation, or you know, setting up parallel text models

Jessamyn 52:58 for wiki pedia because Wikipedia is

Cortex 53:01 free. Yeah, it's free. And it's big. And they use it because everybody uses it. And also, this is like the big pile of Scots on the internet. The problem is it wasn't actually Scots and so everybody who was trying to model Scots was modeling essentially gibberish. Like, I have to be clear, I believe this person was not attempting to do harm. They were also doing an extremely bad job. Like this wasn't just like, a poor translation. It wasn't a translation. They were not. It was just read the post for the details. It's a fucking mess. It's amazingly, it's amazingly bad. The result of this whole weird 10 years of

Jessamyn 53:38 this because if you just eyeball it, like if you're me, who doesn't speak Scots and you eyeball it, you're like, Ah, maybe like because I don't know what Scots is right. But it's a very like, if everything you've learned about Scots was like from watching, like Willie, the groundskeeper on The Simpsons. Yeah,

Cortex 53:54 I watched the Simpsons and Trainspotting once, 10 years ago. I know, I know what the Scottish language is. Like that's, and that's kind of like, yeah, so anyway, it's fascinating. And the good news is, it seems like what has come out of this is a awareness of the situation and folks with actual knowledge of Scott's and a willingness to try and do some work, starting to organize a hey, let's unfuck this let's try and well

Jessamyn 54:19 and because that's what the totally scary part of the whole thing was right? Like this. Maybe well, meaning volunteer kid spent 10 years wrecking it. How are you going to find Well, meaning volunteers to fix it because Wikipedias whole plan to fix stuff that goes wrong, is finding volunteers to deal with it. And everybody was like, well, you that's just not going to happen, like, you know, start from scratch, burn it to the ground, whatever. And they actually wound up finding like, you know, Scott's language community who was willing to do that work, which is borderline amazing, as far as I'm concerned, like I was heavily involved in that thread. it um, you know, I can be a little bit of a Wikipedia apologist. I'm just one of those people who's like on balance, it's better than it is bad though it is very bad. And so at and it's interesting watching people's reaction to it, right? It's like a thread about Cory Doctorow, right? Like, people come out of the woodwork to be like, fuck that guy. And you're, like, whacked, like, but people have deeply entrenched feelings about Wikipedia because it's been around as long as meta filter you know what I mean? And watching people manage their already existing feelings against kind of a weird scandal slash fiasco. Fascinating. Yeah.

Cortex 55:42 Another post I enjoyed, and this was much more just like a goofy thing. Was guy zero posted about a sign generator that will generate ad CZ 535 compliant safety signs, which I know nothing about the NCSY 535 safety sign standards, but I know what a sign looks like. And this makes those signs and

Jessamyn 56:06 this has to do with mats weird Google Reader killed blogging sign now this is something totally different, isn't it?

Cortex 56:13 I don't know what you're talking about. You don't

Jessamyn 56:15 all right. Keep talking and I will track

Cortex 56:18 I it might be like if he made a sign. He may have made it using this. Oh, this was like, a bunch of stupid

Jessamyn 56:25 signs and put in his house.

Unknown Speaker 56:29 Oh, wow. Okay. Well, you

Cortex 56:32 Oh, sure. Yeah, no, I just yeah, I've missed this thing. Up. No.

Jessamyn 56:36 Sorry. Just just keep talking about your thing. Well, I

Cortex 56:39 mean, I pretty much explained the whole thing. It's the it's just a sign generator, you can make just dumb signs we made

Unknown Speaker 56:45 a gift, right? Or like, a packer. Yeah, it

Cortex 56:48 generates a nice, or at least a nice image with, you can put in arbitrary text, and then one or two standardized symbols. And we all just tried to come up with real dumb things to do with it. And I would say by and large, we succeeded.

Jessamyn 57:06 Fun, those charts are fun, because then everybody has their own funny little ideas. I sent you a link to Matt how he's tweet, he literally got like a street sign printed in his house that said, shuttering Google Reader killed blogging. Number one funny, but then in the thread, you also find out that making a really big street sign is actually significantly cheaper than you might think.

Cortex 57:29 How cheap is it?

Jessamyn 57:31 I don't I mean, I think you can get like a big one, like the one he has, like, it only costs like, I don't know, 2530 bucks to make the sign and then almost that much to ship it just because it's expensive. Mullings that's a big, indestructible sign. It says whatever the hell you want it to say. Like I priced out like a big black lives matter sign that I could just bolt to the tree in my front yard and people can try shooting it as much as they want, but of shit, you know. So I toyed with the idea of, you know, what would my sign say if I had a sign, blah. And then I decided I don't need more things. But it was an interesting idea.

Cortex 58:14 Yeah, boy that blew up in it.

Unknown Speaker 58:16 I mean, yeah, I see. It's not the internet.

Cortex 58:20 Yeah. Yeah, but he doesn't do 10k numbers on every tweet. That's a 10k tweet. I didn't. Yeah, no. Yeah, steamrolled.

Jessamyn 58:33 Article blogger people in the Panduranga. Jessamine category, we have the never anger librarian. This was kind of a Dippy one off. You know, Boris Johnson talked to the school library, and people noticed that there were books behind him that were kind of shitty books, but it actually turned out it wasn't a prank on Boris Johnson. It was like something put by the librarian who had gotten laid off and was steamed about it. But it just happened that Boris Johnson was standing in front of it was a great juxtaposition was super funny.

Cortex 59:12 Nice. Context.

Jessamyn 59:15 Can I just say I got my room rated on room rater, Skype Room rater, and I got eight out of 10, which I feel okay about.

Cortex 59:21 Nice. Yeah, I have I've not tried that. I

Jessamyn 59:26 don't know how it happened. Like, I was talking to somebody, I had a picture of something. And then somebody was like, Whoa, room Raiders should rate you and then room Raider was like, Hey, I was surprised and it was funny.

Cortex 59:39 All right. That is like is it because you posted an image from I must have on Twitter because like otherwise, that's got some implications. I've heard of him Raider, but like I haven't five and follow the whole and then somebody

Jessamyn 59:51 just recently got 10 out of 10 because they live in this like futuristic space household situation. And everybody was like, Whoo cuz it's not like we rate dogs where every dog gets 13 out of 10. Like they can actually be pretty hard on people. So I was pleased

Cortex 1:00:12 let's see, I have Okay, here's the thing.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:17 Tell me Josh. I want to

Cortex 1:00:19 not talk about place vol for like an entire half hour because that would be too much. Okay. You want me to like, you

Jessamyn 1:00:24 know, give you kind of the wrap it up or you want to set a little timer? No, we make this place. Really interesting.

Cortex 1:00:34 Yeah, I'll just I'll just try and keep it in check. I'll just not talk about any other posts on metal filter, and then we'll move on.

Jessamyn 1:00:41 Pretty, pretty small. I have a pretty small set of metal filter posts. Anyhow, I think I have like one or two more so

Cortex 1:00:50 cool. Well, baseball is a thing that is my entire life. It turns out I've been a lifelong flap fan since late July. And it is it's a thing on the internet. It's very much

Jessamyn 1:01:02 a thing that a joke like lifelong fans since late July, like how long has baseball been a thing?

Cortex 1:01:06 I mean, it is a joke insofar as my life has been a lot longer since then since late July. But it has been an intense part of my life in that time. Baseball at its basic baseball is a simple baseball simulator that just feeds out, like boxscore level information. It's just text on a screen. This person is up to bat they hit a double this person edits made up right? Well, hundreds are made up it's fictional teams in fictional leagues with fictional players playing fictional games. There's 20 teams in the in the whole baseball league, they're split up into couple leagues, and those are split up into divisions. So five teams per division, and they have players with randomly generated names and statistics. And they play baseball. A game every hour all day, every day, Monday through Friday, till the season is over. It's a 99 season, the 99 game season, and I assume

Jessamyn 1:02:05 this is like aI bought generated to a certain extent.

Cortex 1:02:10 It's like well, I mean, it's it's all it's all just straight up yet. It's just all like dice roll kind of thing. Yeah. Like, like, no one's playing a thing. No one's rigging the games. As far as we know. It's just generating random games based on you know, this person. Is this good at batting. This person's disguised as pitching. Here's a pitch. What's the outcome?

Jessamyn 1:02:27 Okay, so it's like Dungeons and Dragons for baseball.

Cortex 1:02:31 I mean, it's like, that's almost adding too much. That what? It's, it's like a computer RPG version of Dungeons and Dragons that no one is playing. Like, it's it's demo mode for computer. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:02:45 that's kind of what I meant.

Cortex 1:02:47 So that's the whole thing. Like that's,

Jessamyn 1:02:50 that's you go to the main page, like

Cortex 1:02:54 all.com. Okay, you do have to sign up to look at it. I think I'm trying to keep the load from being totally overwhelming. It's a free sign up, it takes like 10 fucking seconds. I'm not, but they're a small team. It's a little side project thing. So they like they need to have the server load not be like literally the entire internet, just the portion of the, you know, people you've heard of, I had not heard of them before. They're just a small development company called the game band. And this was a goofy little side project that they were throwing together in July, that has now turned into like, their full time thing. Funny. Yeah, it really it has blown up. And the thing about it is like what I described just sounds like whatever. It's a fake baseball league, but it's also a little bit weird. And it's gotten a little bit weird every time. The end of the first season when like, nobody was paying attention to this thing. You can vote at the end of every week with coins you earn through betting on the game, if you want to bother to do that. All all fake money, you can't buy the fake currency. It's just in game fake money. You can vote for things to happen. And one of the things you could vote for the first season was to open the forbidden book, which you shouldn't do because it's forbidden. But you know, people voted to because why would you not vote for that? And that caused an entire year of solar eclipses and Rogue Empire started incinerating players at random during they would just cease to exist and a new player would join the team instead. And this This is bad. This is a bad thing. This is not how baseball works. But this is baseball baby. And since then, there's been

Jessamyn 1:04:27 something between you and the other people yammering about it. And I've had no idea what the hell is going on.

Cortex 1:04:34 Yeah, yeah, no, it's like a normal baseball game except for everyone's while someone just gets incinerated by the clothing. I umpire because it was a solar eclipse. Like Jalen hot dog fingers. Yes, Jalen hot dog fingers was the first player ever to be incinerated Jalen hot dog fingers. Pictures now

Jessamyn 1:04:53 live team but he I assume that person was on a team?

Cortex 1:04:57 Yes, they were on the Seattle garages. If I remember Right, and they were incinerated, and that's how we found out about incineration. Now there's all kinds of other weird weather stuff going on too. You can get feedback to switch a couple of teams, you can get reverb, which shakes up a team's roster in various ways. There's blood draining now. So someone can actually suck some baseball skills from another player. It's all it's all very, very weird and strange. And the thing is, all of this stuff still is built into place by like, this is stuff that if you just sat and watched this text go by and didn't talk to anybody else about it, you would know these players existed, these events happen sometimes. But it's still just that and the other part of baseball is there's this gigantic burgeoning fan community generating basically all of the actual storytelling going on around all of

Jessamyn 1:05:47 this right? All the fan art and all of the Yeah,

Cortex 1:05:51 yeah, people are drawing tons and tons of pictures of baseball players and the baseball players can be real weird. You know, some of them are just basically humans, but some of them are you know, demons and some of them are dogs and my favorite player, the former

Jessamyn 1:06:05 from the moist mind. I've signed up as you were taught

Cortex 1:06:10 Excellent, excellent. Yeah, fish summer used to play for the Hades Tigers but got swapped with Richmond Harrison, who's the biggest wettest boy in the entire league? Just a big round ball of Axolotl. I think maybe he's an axolotl. And now he plays for the team in Haiti. So that's weird. There's a lot of good stuff. My favorite player, my favorite player in the entire game, which I've made pretty final from my Twitter, and also also definitely my idol. Thieves. Yes, the shoe thieves is my team. And Gunther O'Brien is my boy, Gunther O'Brien is a penguin who showed up after previous pitcher we had was incinerated. And Gunther is a very bad pitcher or was and, and so he's just a penguin who doesn't know anything about baseball or sports. He just was there. And so he does his best and he has fun and he has so much fun. And that's basically the whole deal of Guthrie made a video game about this called Gunther O'Brien pitching simulator, where if you do sort of a DVR thing, you can pitch a a ball, sort of, and then it tells going through that it's okay. And that's the whole thing. Gunther is an amazing, amazing person. And I love him. And he's a penguin and doesn't understand what's going on.

Jessamyn 1:07:26 Right. This very penguin penguin podcast today.

Cortex 1:07:30 I guess it is. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:07:31 I mean, two fingers for August.

Cortex 1:07:34 That's all just a bunch of headcanon nonsense that we came together. Sure.

Jessamyn 1:07:38 But I mean, that's good. Because that actually gives me a sense of like, what is going on? Thank you for encouraging me to sign up so I can at least kind of see the stuff. And yeah, now I'm back into Canada moist talkers.

Cortex 1:07:51 Excellent. And I made I made an old school baseball fan page the other day, because I've been making like music and art and stuff. Yeah, anyway, plays ball. It's fantastic. It's wonderful. It's it's such a weird, emergent phenomena is the thing that's so exciting about it really, the degree to which this was not planned and to the degree to which this is working, because it creates a space for this collaborative storytelling and this sort of a cacophony of generally joyful fandom and riffing. And it's so fast paced. This is okay. This is the other thing about and I was writing about this on Twitter the other day a little bit. But one of the things about baseball is it really, really happens fast like a normal sports season is, you know, over the course of several weeks, I've

Jessamyn 1:08:35 been sitting through this abbreviated baseball season via seventh inning stretch and like it's, yeah.

Cortex 1:08:45 Well, I mean, so yeah, like you compare that to baseball, where there are 10 games every hour, 24 days of game play every day, you know, a season starts on Monday ends on Friday, the postseason happens. On Saturday, Sunday, there's world changing voting that happens. Everything gets shaken up variously and then it all starts over on Monday again, and in among here, you know, it's not just that, like games are happening, and it's hard to keep up with the scores, whatever. But there's all those elements of things like players getting incinerated or swapped between planes, there's a random element. Yeah, like things world shaking things can happen to your team several times a week, every week. And this is it. This can be hard to keep up with, like, you could go away for a couple weeks and come up with like, Who Who are all these people on our team, but like everyone else died, because there is this ability to sort of develop this fan lore on these characters. So they aren't just literally funny, random names on a screen. You start like, like I really I genuinely care about Gunther O'Brien, he's my little penguin boy and he's fantastic. And I know I understand that baseball is unpredictable and he could end up getting traded to another team or incinerated or god knows what like Something could happen to Gunther, he can no longer be a pitcher on my beloved shoe thieves. And I know this and I'll be prepared for it. But I'll be sad like I'll be. This is a character in fiction, who I care about your soap opera. Yeah. And there is something valuable I think about baseball that it presents this fast paced opportunity to kind of experience and model and practice some of this grief and disruption and sense of disappointment and loss on something that doesn't really matter. Like, you know, right. I'll be heartbroken if Gunther gets incinerated. And also, he's a fake penguin in a fake sports game. I'm gonna be okay. Like, my life is not going to get fucked up if going through,

Jessamyn 1:10:42 right, real life stuff is also happening that can be harder to process. Yeah. And

Cortex 1:10:47 there's, it's hard. There's a lot of shit going on in the world, as we've discussed many times. And and so having something where I can like sort of speed run dabbed a little bit is actually it's nice, it's nice to be able to say, look, I'm going to be devastated about this thing that doesn't matter for a little bit so that I can sort of like work through that cycle. Right now, instead of like having to process the fact that my entire state is on fire or whatever, right. I think there's something really valuable about that. And something that like was probably not at all intended, when this was first spun up. And something's gonna be really difficult for fandom to deal with because it's, you've got a ton of people coming to this in waves of new excitement, enthusiasm, enjoying the goof getting invested,

Jessamyn 1:11:35 right? Somebody does a spin off that adds a thing in a different way. Well, I

Cortex 1:11:40 mean, not even spin off stuff, just like waves of new fans coming in every week. New people like oh, this baseball thing. Oh, this is so funny. Oh my gosh, there's, there's crazy weather. And would they swap teams? And like, you know? Oh, yeah,

Jessamyn 1:11:55 it can be like, Oh, add another thing.

Cortex 1:11:57 Yeah. And another thing, but then like, you know, weekend, a weekend someone's gone from saying, oh, yeah, sure. I picked this team like, Oh, I love him. He's the best. This is my favorite player. She's wonderful. Oh, this is my, this is my, you know, this is my nan Berry, binary idol. And then they get incinerated. It's like, oh, what's you know, it's like, shit got real. And I think probably a lot of people argument, go through that curve of like, oh, this is such a weird, funny goof. Oh, I really care about this. Oh, I've been devastated by this thing. And from there decide, is this a cycle that I want to keep going through? Or is this not actually what I want? Is this a little too intense? And I think people sort of sorting out their fandom is going to be a whole challenge. From a community moderation perspective, I've had conversations with people about like, how to manage sort of like a flat unmoderated community space when things like disappointment and sadness and grief are a part of that. Right. So yeah, I don't know. It's it's a it's a big pile of fascinating stuff. And it's it's weird to me that this like literally did not exist last time were recorded. Like this was weeks away from being a thing that ran on

Jessamyn 1:13:06 the internet. And now it's this all encompassing, kind of big deal.

Cortex 1:13:09 Yeah, it's very appropriate to a year and a series of years where time has lost all meaning that like, this is, this is a this is a part of my life isn't like a genuine, important part of my life at this point, this fake sports game that I have strong feelings about on the internet. There we go. That was about 20 minutes. That was that was that was a good compromise.

Jessamyn 1:13:31 And there is a little Wikipedia page if people you know are comfortable and happy learning in that way. But yeah, great. Thank you, Josh. I feel like I know some things

Cortex 1:13:43 all right. You better watch your step. Better watch where your feet are going. You better lace up take up insights without even knowing where can

Unknown Speaker 1:13:59 you You better watch your step

Cortex 1:14:04 around the Charleston shoot.

Jessamyn 1:14:08 I have two posts just literally mentioned and move on. One is Philip Brandon's how to cook steak by about Letterkenny which is of course, the you know, the TV show in Canada that most people seem to like. And there's a thread talking about the things that are I mean, it's basically like, it just links to like a video from one of the shows where the men talk about sorry, Jim's decided to text me four times book, just making sure his house isn't on fire. It isn't. But they you know, there's a little there's a little spot in one of the shows where you know, they talk about how to cook steak. And so it's that video but really it's just a thread for talking about Letterkenny but it's it's fun to watch that I'm sorry, five times.

Okay, and the next one I mentioned Adrienne Hahn and the posts that he's been making, but I just wanted to mention one, specifically talking about fact checking non fiction books. And you might like to know, how it works and how it operates. I thought this was interesting. There's a couple authors in the thread talking about that. And there's some people talking about books they've read with bad fact checking. blabbity blah, one of the many good threads Adrian Hahn has made over the past couple months.

Cortex 1:15:39 Thanks. Yes. Keep up the good work, Adrian. Yes. You know, Adrian, is part of zombies run, which sponsored the last season of bliss ball.

Jessamyn 1:15:50 Is that true? I mean, I knew he was the zombies run person. I didn't know we sponsored a season. So it is sponsoring a season like sponsoring like 11 minutes. How long was the season again? A week a week? Like, okay, and so what does it mean to sponsor the season? Like, do you get like a thing?

Cortex 1:16:06 I mean, you pay him a bunch of money. And the shout you out on the site and on Twitter over the course of that week?

Unknown Speaker 1:16:14 Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Cool.

Jessamyn 1:16:17 All right. Way to go bliss ballers.

Unknown Speaker 1:16:19 Yeah. All right.

Jessamyn 1:16:21 I am done with my metal filter.

Cortex 1:16:24 Let's talk about filter. Okay, I definitely I definitely use my time. So

Jessamyn 1:16:29 okay, let's talk about it filter. My favorite. I've spent lots of time here, as I always do. I enjoyed this question by Fick bought, Hey, I've seen ghost towns for sale. What does it mean, to buy a ghost town? And, you know, talking about like people in their weird pandemic pods, or maybe they want to go to a place. So you know, let's say money was no object. What if me and 10 friends bought an island? What do we need to think about? How does that kind of work? And it's interesting, right? Because it varies a lot, depending on what country you're in. And, you know, people have done it. And the this kind of ties in a little bit to hold on one second, I have to look up the thing while I'm talking to you.

Cortex 1:17:24 A little Is it a periscope? What? You need to look up a thing? Or is the thing? Or do you need to look up a periscope do you need to, but I'm deliberately misunderstanding you for humorous intents. See, a periscope is a thing that like if you needed to see something higher than where you are, you might use

Jessamyn 1:17:42 playing on the two different meanings of

Cortex 1:17:45 the word. Yes, yes. Yes.

Jessamyn 1:17:49 Because I have written a couple

Cortex 1:17:55 of podcasts. I missed

Jessamyn 1:17:56 you, Josh. I've been I've written a couple Wikipedia pages on teeny tiny pay teeny tiny towns in Kansas, who are kind of like who, which that are kind of ghost towns now, like they used to, there used to be there, they're usually because the train went through there. And then after something happened, usually the train stopped going through there, the school moved or something, the town kind of very slowly went away. And it's interesting, because, you know, in America, like the land belongs to some government, right. So like, you can't really buy a town per se, but you could like build a structure in a space that belong to a town area, and suddenly be the one person that lived in the town, like Vermont has like five towns that have such low population, they're essentially run by a state agency, they don't have any local government. And like living there is weird, you know, and it's kind of an interesting thing to think about. You know, what, what, what the world of ghost towns would be? And of course, that varies in other countries where maybe that's not the same thing. So I enjoyed this ride, because there are a couple, you know, here's Monterey, Nebraska, incorporated city that has one resident, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, kind of fascinating. Kind of interesting. I like my non ghost town. But you might be interested in that. Yeah. Speaking of if you bought a ghost town, you might be interested in building a cheap off grid cabin, which history is a weapon was asking about, like, hey, I want to build a super small cheap, off grid cabin. How do I do this fast and quickly? It's just me. And the it's just me is a really important part. Because it's a very different thing to do it if you're one person than if you are even two people, even if we dip you know, like,

Cortex 1:19:57 like, like to be clear. It's just me building if not It just it just needs to contain me when it's done.

Jessamyn 1:20:02 I think it's well, I don't know. I mean, based on what I know about history is a weapon. I'm not sure. But it's kind of like a 12 by 12. Tiny House? Well, I'm

Cortex 1:20:11 not saying that no one else would be inside. I'm just saying the it's just me part is, yeah, about the construction process.

Jessamyn 1:20:18 Yeah, I'm the only person who would be building it. And that's a really different thing than even if you have a second person to just hold up a wall while you put in a nail. So it's history as a weapon does update later in the thread that was like I can, I can find a second person to do extra stuff. But it is interesting people talk about kind of how, how you would do that, you know, maybe you could build a straw bale house, maybe you'd have a tiny house, maybe you'd get a shed and you turn it into a house, maybe you get a container. And you turn that into a thing you can live in a lot of it depends on what your environment is, obviously. You know, there's earthbag building, which is like building your whole house out of like, you know, bags of dirt. Like it's, it's fascinating. I used to love thinking about that when I was a kid because, you know, I grew up in kind of rambley old farmhouse, but my father was always like fixing and it was a pain. And all I wanted was to live in a very small place that like never, like that was just always the same. You know, somebody wasn't tearing down a wall or building a thing or putting in a new window or whatever. And so I you know, and people in the 70s did that a lot. So you could always like read about people doing it

Cortex 1:21:33 next reminds me of the Grand Designs if they weren't all insane and doomed they have you seen that? We talked about grand design before?

Jessamyn 1:21:46 No To me that's like just an adjective and a noun. Whoa, it's just

Cortex 1:21:49 it's a it's a long running at this point, British sort of reality documentary show about people building

Jessamyn 1:21:56 houses, just told me to go like that was just pushed towards me by the socials. Very recently. Actually, that is strange. Bit like somebody who was like, You should go see this. Maybe it's like newly on Netflix or something?

Cortex 1:22:12 I don't know. Yeah, no, I haven't thought about it forever. I just thought about it because of like, house building.

Unknown Speaker 1:22:16 Yeah. And so there's, like, it's

Cortex 1:22:19 worth watching. It also gets kind of samey. And the presenter is kind of like, smoke Brit. So like, it also wears out after a certain amount of binging. But you want to

Jessamyn 1:22:31 punch that guy in the nose, and enter the homes interesting. Are they all kind of

Cortex 1:22:36 they are generally they're generally interesting. Sometimes they're interesting, architecturally, because it's like an actual really cool architectural idea. Sometimes they're interesting, because it's like a reclamation of an old space. Sometimes they're interesting, because it's a weird construction style. And sometimes it's really only interesting because it's people with too much money and yet not enough money to accomplish what they intend to have fucking everything go wrong. So it's it's a real mix like that. Upload. Yeah, it's it's a whole various things. It definitely has that feeling a lot of times of like, people talking about their budget, and then it turns out the budget is twice that and somehow they make that work in a way that most people would be like, Oh, were ruined, instead of like, oh, well, I guess you know, we'll do a little bit of that. And maybe there was a little bit more money floating around in the, the narrative wanted to suggest just to up the drama, but whatever. It's TV. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:23:34 I have two PSAs ah, as if Metafilter threads, okay. One of which is probably the only mention I'm really making of COVID today is s Nourison. Is like look, I see men wearing those like Gator things or bandana things a lot more than masks. Why? Like I live in Ohio. I don't understand it. What's going on? And you know, they throw out some like weird ideas. And then people also are like, well, you read what they said about gators. It's actually worse than wearing no masks. And so my PSA is that that's not true. That somebody actually mentions fancy pants. Mountains. Yeah,

Cortex 1:24:13 there's a big site Geist, the clickbait thing with, right.

Jessamyn 1:24:17 Wearing a gator is worse than not wearing a mask, which is

Cortex 1:24:20 the headline to God perpetuated constantly, rather than anybody talking about the contents of this study. Yeah, so

Unknown Speaker 1:24:25 the PSA hellscape. We

Cortex 1:24:26 live in disconfirmation as a systemic method of writing, it's possible to know what the fuck is going on.

Jessamyn 1:24:33 So as your librarian, I felt like I would mention that. And, you know, and people are talking about different reasons they might be doing that or other people, as nursing has kind of feeling like kind of a point they're trying to prove, but hard to see. Hard to say. And it's an interesting thread. And the other PSA, which was the thing I didn't know was as widespread as it appears to be from this thread is Some there's an anonymous question about person who's having a hard time swallowing pills. I'm having a hard time. It's a pain in the neck. I've tried all these things. This sucks. Tell me what else your ideas are. And it's actually a really long helpful thread of people talking about things that help them for pills, which is good, like, just super useful. Like I am a person that takes a certain number of pills every day. And I every day, am thankful that like, it is not a thing I have a problem with. Like when I was a child, I had a problem with it i Who knows why went away. I also don't know why. But you know, if it's something you need for your medicine, that is definitely a

Cortex 1:25:50 yes. helpful thing?

Jessamyn 1:25:52 Yeah, sorry, somebody just texted me that they have tomatoes for me. And I know that

Cortex 1:25:57 you got, you got this whole text thing going on?

Jessamyn 1:26:00 Well, I like I finally got so I got this new computer, right, because my last computer was bought by Matt when I used to work at Mehta filter, and I got a PPP loan. And I used it to get myself in new to me, Mac and one of the things I did when I set it up was I set it up a little bit differently. So I use messages on the desktop. But it also it also allows me to get texts from like non iPhone users. And it used to be that I had Do Not Disturb set up. We've talked about this I know, from like 1201 in the morning to 1159 at night, so it never made any noise. And I figured out why that was doing it. And I was missing texts that I thought I should have been getting. But so now it makes a little noise. And now I've all of a sudden gotta re acclimate to learning to turn it off when I am doing something like a podcast. And this was based on somebody saying they have tomatoes and peaches for me and they left them on the porch. Unfortunately, I have no idea who it is,

Cortex 1:27:07 unfortunately. Yeah, I

Unknown Speaker 1:27:18 So at any rate pills, pills, pills, pills.

Cortex 1:27:24 This is a nice title of St. Vincent. Yeah, if you have what? There's a song by St. Vincent. Pills. Pills. Pills. Pills. Pills. Pills. Sorry. Go on.

Jessamyn 1:27:34 This is how Jim and I interact. It's just occurring to me. I never know. Like, I'm also has lots of funny things. He does, and he interjects, literally in the middle of a sentence with a completely lateral pawn. So we have to stop so he can explain it to me. And I don't get to talk about what I'm talking about. And of course, I blame myself that maybe I just monologue too much. But no, no, it's

Cortex 1:28:00 only idiots. The key thing here,

Jessamyn 1:28:04 and it's a little hard on Zoom to because you have that like half second delay. Yeah. And so did you. I don't know. Like, did you just say something? And he's like, oh, yeah, I said this. I was like, I don't understand that. Literally in the middle of my sentence guy. And But St. Vincent has a song named pills that's useful.

Cortex 1:28:38 I have an asked me that I really liked. It's a question from Lulu Naml saying, Hey, I saw this chair. What is this chair? And then it's three people immediately saying, Oh, it's a poem. And I'm saying all right. Just there you go. In and out.

Jessamyn 1:28:58 Oh, I saw that question. Come back, and I saw that it was answered basically immediately. Yep. Now I gotta go look at this chair.

Cortex 1:29:04 I mean, it's definitely appalling. If I if I'd gotten there first open, like, Hey, that's a poem.

Jessamyn 1:29:09 Oh, hey, guess what? I have news for you about this chair. Do you have a Pong? I have two and only one footstool? Oh, because something happened to the other footstool. And it's super weird.

Cortex 1:29:23 When children set up for an extremely chill version of musical chairs.

Jessamyn 1:29:26 Well, I mean, right? So like, maybe we broke it. And I forgot about it and we threw it away. But like, I feel like I would remember that. And so we have two chairs and one footstool. And I didn't know where they came from. And so I didn't know what I could do about them. And now I'm like, Oh, I can just buy another one of those because now I know what they are. Amazing. It's really weird. I feel like I'm gonna open a closet door and the footstool is gonna have been jammed in there by a child.

Cortex 1:29:58 Felt like a face hugger like no legs. First, just been coiled up this whole time waiting in a vacuum of space.

Jessamyn 1:30:04 I would also like to encourage anybody who has had a question especially about like travel they were nervous about or like a thing, you know that they had anticipatory concerns about to do follow ups and let us know if they went, okay. So like, for instance, is it possible to socially distance at the Grand Canyon by Nancy Nickerson? Because Nancy is packing a car to move cross country figuring out how to make their pipe copilots Grand Canyon dreams come true. And obviously, that is not completely risk free thing. But so they're asking, Can I socially distance at the Grand Canyon? Can I see it without having to have other people sneeze on me? But like, what's the situation? Do you have advice. And actually, people have a lot of really good advice. But there are parts that are closed, there are parts that are open, there are parts that you can see, not in a jam, there are less busy places. And I would actually like to do. I would like to know how it went. It turns out, they're gonna go. They made this plan and told us about it on August 5. I don't know if it's happened yet or not. But I would like to hear about it. Because hey, it's Grand Canyon, maybe there's some pictures. Grand Canyon is beautiful. And if it's your dream, it's really worth trying to find a way to make it work.

Unknown Speaker 1:31:29 Yeah.

Cortex 1:31:35 What else we got? Ah, that's great.

Jessamyn 1:31:39 Escape from potato planet. We have like a couple potato users that post a lot now. And it's a little challenging for me sometimes to keep them all straight. I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah. How escape from the potato planet? Oh, wait, was that crunchy potato? Oh, wait, I think that was at any rate, basically was like, okay, look, the language that appears in rulebooks for games is copyrighted. But could you have like a web based version of Scrabble? Let's say, as a game I play, you know, four to six nights weekly. Would that violate copyright? Would people sue you? What's the situation and people kind of talk about, like, what, what the outlines are basically trying to try and to sort of figure figure that out, you know, so, you know, Rick shell mentions like, Hey, this is why there's a whole bunch of Scrabble clones that let you customize things. So they start out, say with a cue that's worth 20 points, but you can tweak it to get it to a Scrabble level of the to being worth 10 points, but you have to do it yourself. You know, it's like a lot of those like DRM cracking things, where like, the thing can take a plugin that you cracked DRM with, but the thing itself isn't a DRM cracker. Interesting.

Cortex 1:32:56 I like this. comment at the end of that thread from a number about a law review article about

Jessamyn 1:33:06 I have totally clicked that to read when I'm done talking to you. Because yeah, I think that I am doing pretty well, this scrabble season, but I can always do better. Jim won last night and he didn't even feel good. He had a headache. He still beat me at Scrabble. And then, in the pandering to Jessamyn category, this thread by beard man, looking for novels that are kind of literary fiction, but are also recognizably sci fi. You know, kind of like, you know, Jeff VanderMeer is annihilation, like the reach trilogy, kind of like casual shoe girls never let me go. I'm looking for adult not really politically like Handmaid's Tale II. What do you got for me? And there are 59 comments with a whole bunch of recommendations for books you might like I put in a couple I have read a lot of these books. And I think next time I'm dipping in for like books I haven't read yet. For books I'd like to read because I read, you know, kind of a combination of like sci fi Industries at night. And there's a whole bunch of really interesting looking books in here that I haven't read yet.

Cortex 1:34:20 That's excellent. Yeah. Wow, the sun has reached a point in the sky where it's managing to shine in my office window. And so the suffuse of yellow glow that has been the main thing is now cut through with also some distinctly red specks and

Jessamyn 1:34:39 remind me it's your bedroom and not your office that has like the orange sunburst in it right.

Cortex 1:34:44 Right. My office

Jessamyn 1:34:46 now with the weird light coming in,

Cortex 1:34:49 I mean, we're so used to light coming through the orange shades that we have. That's, that's actually the least weird thing in lighting. It's like every house in the every room in the house. Is that So now it's

Jessamyn 1:35:01 right. Right? I know what you mean. Well, and with me like, because outside my window is like I'm in a forest. Like, you know, I have lights, but they're kind of not like shining right at me. And so there's the room and all the walls are green too. So I always look just a little sickly. Because I always look just a little green. I don't mind it, per se. But I think if I was really looking for a flattering angle, I would have to actually do something about that. And that's it for me for AskMe Metafilter. Do you want to mention Metafilter fundraising month? Should I

Cortex 1:35:42 go for it? Do it?

Jessamyn 1:35:44 Well, ah, usually there's a fundraising drive in the summer, but not this summer, because July was just messy. And now there you year over year, subscriptions are up, you know, AdSense is dipping off. And that's a problem. And so there's a whole bunch of like, sort of innovative ideas for things you might want to chip in to help the site be the site. And I told you I'm doing the post today for as long as people make donations, and I've been mostly enjoying that. There's some check filter threads. I really enjoyed the filter on the blue. Yeah, try to filter on the blue come talk about cereal or whatever. Are you guys doing it? Like every week? I wasn't 100%? Sure.

Cortex 1:36:28 I think I think the plan is do it every week. Yes.

Jessamyn 1:36:30 Fantastic. And you should talk about your own?

Cortex 1:36:34 Well, I have a lot of hair, I have more hair than any person could reasonably use. And so I'm letting people pay to advocate.

Jessamyn 1:36:47 So what does that mean exactly

Cortex 1:36:50 what that means? Well, if you go to the if you go to the meta talk thread about it, you can see the hair ometer which as default state is just a picture of me with all my hair. And as people add more increasing monthly recurring contributions over the course of the month, I will have less of that hair at the end of the month is the plan. So if we get say a total of $200 worth of new recurring contributions, by the end of September, I will cut four inches off my hair. If we get $500 Worth I will cut my hair till I only have like four inches of it left if we hit 700 I'm just gonna shave the sucker

Jessamyn 1:37:30 fan freakin tastic. Yep, man. So I need to get seen a meta tag. Fred was so many deleted inappropriate comments.

Cortex 1:37:39 There's an interesting thing about this, you know, I don't want to paint the wrong picture here. Because like most of the comments that were deleted aren't like horrible. Like, what?

Jessamyn 1:37:49 Are you thinking? Friendly jokey,

Cortex 1:37:51 they're very goofy Riffey comments, but they're Goofy, Goofy comments that would have like, totally made sense in like 2008 like 2008 cortex is the new mod, the site is still a little bit, bro, you're in its feelings about what's good to throw into a thread. And so like, no one has posted anything. It's like, I can't fucking did that. But like other people were working. And I like that's not really no kick, comma to put in this thread, is it and they deleted it. And that's like, okay, that works. So it's kind of it's a weird little time warp thing in that way where there's there's several sort of dorky jokes from people being like, I know they're joking. I know. They know. I'm know they're joking. But everyone else is like a bunny. Really? So Right? Anyway, I need to update that I need to find our current level and make a new image with some of my hair gone and get that updated. And I'll tweet about it and whatnot.

Jessamyn 1:38:42 Great to great view. I love the I love the shirt you put yourself in. It turns out that text I got with the backyard peaches is actually from my new next door. mefite neighbor. So it's on topic

Cortex 1:38:52 paying dividends. Already. Anything, you Zanna toast like you know, we executed this complicated. Neighbor Gambit.

Jessamyn 1:39:00 Yeah. I don't understand that at all.

Unknown Speaker 1:39:04 Right. I did that.

Cortex 1:39:08 And yes, we're also Yeah, we got we mentioned the dream week. I think traveling time is prompting a theme posting week on the subject of dreams. So you can post on the blue or elsewhere anywhere you want. Yeah. And also you had a birthday happy birthday. Oh, right.

Jessamyn 1:39:23 Yeah, that was nice. I asked people to send me postcards and I got a little stack of postcards, and kind of a big stack of postcards, actually, because I'm also part of the metal filter Card Exchange. So one of the things you get for metal filter Card Exchange is people send you cards in your birthday month if you want or like whenever you ask. And so yeah, I have a bunch of cards for me fights. Thank you very much. mefites I have some cards for my buddies at the seventh inning stretch the sort of Facebook watch the Red Sox organised play from home which is now moved to weekly and regular post random postcards from like Twitter randos because they see You know, what I'd really like is if somebody would go buy a stamp from the post office and send me something in the mail. And it was nice, like, I actually had like a local, small appropriate takeouts from appropriate places with distant friends situation that actually wound up being pretty nice as these things go. Like, I like doing birthday stuff. Like, it's just the thing I enjoy. And I actually managed to do some birthday stuff this year, which I appreciate. Yeah. Yeah. Was was very nice. Cake. My sister sent me a box with a whole bunch of like, weird random stuff in it. But one of the things was one of those new quarters that has the bat on it. And I had literally just tweeted her about the bat quarter being out, like a week earlier. And she had gotten me the bat quarter, like three weeks earlier. And so she just had to shut up and be like,

Cortex 1:40:57 yeah, no, no,

Unknown Speaker 1:41:00 that's, that's nice. So

Jessamyn 1:41:04 yeah, I here's Ed. It's not just a bat, Josh. It's a bat and a baby bat. Hell yeah. Yeah. It's American National Park. And now I have one of those quarters. And all I need to do is not spend it by mistake. So I put it away. But it but it's that kind of stuff, right. It's not like fancy. Like, we don't do big presents, but we do really enjoy tiny presents. So I had a tiny quarter. I love it.

Cortex 1:41:37 Talks about baseball earlier. We're doing weekly baseball season long threads and special events on fanfare. So if you want to stop part of what you talked about, I'm just remembering now. It's like if we're getting around the end of the podcast. Oh, it's fanfares had been some

Jessamyn 1:41:55 ideas for special events that aren't baseball, you should let us know. Because we can set them up if there's a special sports thing or a special thing that doesn't fit into the normal categories. Yeah, it'll be cool. Let us know.

Cortex 1:42:10 So yeah, I think that's about it. For me. I think we've gotten to a pretty solid length here. So

Jessamyn 1:42:17 pretty solid, like just like your hair.

Cortex 1:42:18 Yep.

Jessamyn 1:42:20 For now. And I have peaches to pick up next door apparently.

Cortex 1:42:25 Yeah. Gotta get them peaches. Millions. rageous peaches for the for free? Yeah. Yes. Well, then, I think that's the end of the podcast. I think we have done the podcast and we should stop now.

Unknown Speaker 1:42:40 Okay. All right. All right.

Cortex 1:42:42 Okay, well, it's been good talking to you.

Jessamyn 1:42:44 It's been great talking to you. All right. Let's

Cortex 1:42:46 do this again sometime.

Jessamyn 1:42:47 Maybe next month. Sounds good. Okay.

Retrieved from "http://mefiwiki.com/w/index.php?title=Podcast_166_Transcript&oldid=14755"