Podcast 168 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 168: Marquee Biz (2020-12-02).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 And cortex

Unknown Speaker 0:06 Jessamyn Welcome to the metal filter podcast.

Jessamyn 0:12 I got some incense going pissing down rain outside it's about 40 degrees really good day for podcasting Don't you think I was it over there?

Cortex 0:19 It's it's it's it's sunny and rainy which is a very sort of Portland

Jessamyn 0:24 oh you know what that means? Probably rainbows are rainbow weather God's God's agreement with the Jews.

Cortex 0:34 We've been we've been having some rainbows lately so rainbows and circumcision that's what you get. It's a it's a weird combo. It's like the Pizza Hut and Taco Bell of the Old Testament.

Jessamyn 0:43 Don't even talk to me about Taco Bell. There is nothing I want right now more than like one of those disgusting Fredo burritos because I'm on like this low fat garbage, you know? Yeah, crackers and yogurt, low fat yogurt. My life was cheese. Josh. It's,

Cortex 1:04 I feel Yeah, it's a difficult issue. We'll talk about that in a second. First, I should say hello, and welcome to Metafilter monthly Podcast, episode 168. I am Josh cortex Mullard.

Jessamyn 1:14 And I'm Jessamyn. And here we are talking

Cortex 1:17 about the foods that Jasmine would like to eat that she shouldn't eat because of things.

Jessamyn 1:21 Yeah, because I've got some like gallbladder problem that I just I mean, I knew I had a little gallstone, and usually people who have them, nothing ever happens, and that's fine. But my mind took a turn the day after Thanksgiving, probably because I ate a bunch of food I don't normally eat. And I spent some time recovering from that. And now I have to figure out what the plan is. And until I figure out what the plan is, the plan is very low fat diet, which, you know, I've got body by peanut butter, and I don't like don't like it.

Cortex 1:56 It's a tricky thing. It's a it's a tricky adjustment to have to suddenly make.

Jessamyn 2:00 Yeah, and like I'm good at it. Like, you know, it's one of those things that they say do this and I'm like, okay, like I'm afraid of, you know, bad consequences for not following orders. But I've got to find some fun low fat food that I enjoy. Tiny rabbit graham crackers is mostly what I've been up to right lately.

Cortex 2:20 How are you on jello? Do you like jello?

Jessamyn 2:23 Well, here's the problem is um, I'm not big on like the sugars. Just because like, I don't know, like, you know, I don't I'm not diabetic or anything, but like, anything that's too sweet. If I just have a bunch of sweet stuff and not a bunch of protein. I just kind of get the shakes and I don't feel good. Sure. So like jello to me is like a sugar thing. Although, you know, free jello. I do have some in the cabinet. Hmm,

Cortex 2:51 I mean, sugar, sugar free jello is basically like it. It basically doesn't exist. You're eating a ghost as far as I can tell.

Jessamyn 3:00 I like that idea.

Cortex 3:01 I think that I've known a couple people who were like, Yeah, you know, I used to like jello, but then I had this you know, major extended illness situation. Jello was the thing that was easily eaten so I'm never eating jello get in my life. And that's like to get to that but

Jessamyn 3:15 ya know, I don't have any negative associations with it. Particularly I just never really make it or think about it. But I do have some because I got some for some reason. Like, I think I had Cool Whip and I was gonna make some kind of jello Cool Whip thing and then didn't and then Gosh, I don't even remember. I mean, right now it's been a lot of like, yeah, you know, fat free yogurt. I'm gonna make a big pot of pasta, some beans and rice. But you know, when I think about like the things in my refrigerator that I would like to eat right now. It's like the frozen burrito is calling my name. I'm gonna cook up some chicken. Like there's a whole bunch of completely excellent food options that I'm super happy about. But yeah. Yep. Here's my here's my 168 Fact. All right. On a double six set of dominoes, there are 168 pips.

Cortex 4:10 All right. Yeah,

Jessamyn 4:12 I mean, not like it like a huge like, oh my gosh, but like, it's kind of an interesting thing. There's all bunch of other you know, garbage facts about it. But yeah, that's an interesting fact. But yeah, that's,

Cortex 4:23 that's, that's gonna be some sort of common and metric results. And it's like, right, choose, you know, whatever, like nine choose to or something like that. Choose, choose, like, just literally the word choose. So there's the Fibonacci numbers and the binomial coefficient are two different ways. I think of sort of talking about the same thing, which is, you know, Pascal's triangle. Yeah. Maybe it's Pascal's numbers anyway. If you if you take Pascal's triangle and you go down to a given row and go a given number of like steps in along it. If that's like row six, and the fourth thing in, you could call that in mathematical terms, six choose four, where you're saying, oh, six objects, and we're going to choose four of them. And that number in the triangle is how many distinct ways you could manage to choose those four out of those six. So I think with double PIP dominoes, since there's like, the two numbers out of whatever nine is on double Pip, is that right?

Jessamyn 5:34 Right. 6600. Okay, I sent you a picture and it's called domino matrix, which is really hard not to read as something

Cortex 5:48 I guess. So like, that would probably be something like, you know, six choose two or maybe seven choose two, since there's the blank ones, too. But um, but like the just looking at the way the numbers are laid out here, you can see they're sort of like it's a triangular. Yeah. array, which is a good sign that there's some sort of connection there. Yeah. So yeah, that's cool.

Jessamyn 6:07 We've all learned a thing. Oh, we should probably mentioned we skipped November because reasons

Cortex 6:11 cheese. It was fucking Yeah. I don't know if anybody else was in the headspace to do the well, we don't know what's gonna happen a few days. But let's have a normal conversation. I was like, No, I'm not. That's not No,

Jessamyn 6:21 no, I wasn't either. I. Yeah, gosh, that was not a great week. I mean, I worked the polls, which was fun. You know, then spent a lot of time indoors counting with people, which was fun, but nerve wracking? Because like, indoors with people weird. Yeah. And I was in the process of needing a root canal and not getting it yet. And that is not a great

Cortex 6:43 process to set up. Yeah, no, that's not a good vibe to be. Yeah. So

Jessamyn 6:47 the good news is, I got it and everything was fine. But like, I have a lot of anxiety built up around the dentist, which, you know, who knows why, right? Like, just lots of Dentistry has little kid and parents who didn't model good behavior. And so for whatever reason, it sends me into a swivel in a way that other stuff doesn't. So I was just like, and I just Yeah, couldn't find the space to chit chat about the internet. As much as the internet brought me a lot of joy or joy may be the wrong word, but like, you know, kind of comfort and whatever. Yeah. When

Cortex 7:19 companionship and sustenance and distraction and collective anxiety in a sort of therapeutic way sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was, it was it was a, it was a weird, it's been a weird month, like, in a good way significantly, because it looks like fucking you know, Trump is out here.

Jessamyn 7:41 But I really appreciated the metal filter people in the political threads who have been like, look, lots of people are freaking out about various things for various good reasons. But let's just explain the combinatorial ways in which Trump isn't going to do a thing, short of, you know, trying to stage some military coup, which itself wouldn't work for these other reasons, but, and you know, who were just like, I know it feels scary. But realistically, this is gonna work out. Yeah. You know, Biden, not the best dude, but like an okay, dude, he'll be fine.

Cortex 8:20 Yeah, no, it was it was really interesting. Working the evening of what was at the third, I don't like, anyway, that Tuesday, Tuesday night, when results started coming in, and it was watching that thread and watching people be sort of like braced in a different way than the situation in 2016, where there was like, a general sense of this whole thing has been fucking ridiculous and weird, but at least it's finally gonna be over and like we can, you know,

Jessamyn 8:46 we're healing as a nation.

Cortex 8:48 Yeah. And instead, like, it took that like, fuck, turn that whole evening and this time around, like, things looked pretty okay. But they weren't a giant, sudden, definitive landslide. And that was enough, which is funny because they both

Jessamyn 9:02 were and weren't. Because of reasons, right. Like, yeah, Biden won by a lot. Except the counting took a long time. And that was exacerbated by Republican fuckery to make sure that the counting took a long time, so fuck them. And, and a lot

Cortex 9:19 of bizarre shameless messaging by Trump at all as well. And yeah,

Jessamyn 9:23 so and his schmoes Yeah, exactly.

Cortex 9:26 So like you know, it was it was a weird night and like you said, it was a weird week and it's kind of been a weird month although like it's you know, it's descended you know, more and more clearly into farce you know, which is this is this is this is honestly one of the weird fucking, like, kind of traumas last four years is like the fact that like it was forest like from election night onward, like in a normal situation in 2016. No one would have been worried about any of the ongoing shenanigans and tantrum stuff from Trump. They because they would have been clear, yeah, it would have been so clearly obviously terrible flopsweat idiocy. And it is this time to but you know Trump won last time. And so everyone's like, Well, fuck, what are we really going to roll out of the Senate possibility here? So I'm really, really sympathetic to and you know, personally a little bit directly empathetic to that like experience of being like, okay, yeah, but you know, and that's where it feels like everybody's been and we're like still all collectively trying to decompress to the extent we can from that sort of extreme, like, pessimistic braced about the whole thing.

Jessamyn 10:35 Well, and there are some people, you know, on metal filter, but just in the very online community who just live in that space for reasons, you know what I mean? And then there's, you know, the people who live in the opposite of that space for their own reasons. And then there's sort of the, you know, pragmatic middle, but oftentimes the people on the, you know, the, the leading and trailing edges are both like, no, no, no, like, I'm the one who's right about this. And here's why. Which, you know, itself was a little challenging, right? Like, I care about Metafilter, and the people on Metafilter, very deeply, but there are a couple people I've kind of learned to ignore slightly more, because I'm like, Oh, they've just got this outlook. Yeah, regardless, not because it was Trump, they're just, yeah,

Cortex 11:22 you're gonna have people who are not really filtering themselves for the people around them. And you kind of have to do that yourself. You know, to some extent, yes, that'd be that's getting along with people, basically, to some extent, yeah. And, you know, you have to make decisions about how much is, you know, in moderation, and also hanging out in the community and in dealing with your friends and family? Like all of this, you know, you have to make decisions about At what point do we go from look, you know, I'm just gonna give you your fucking space to hey, you know, you need to go find a different space. And it's, it's tricky stuff to navigate. And here we are on the far side of Thanksgiving, where that's like it every year. That's a that's a part of where everybody's headspace is, hopefully a lot less this year,

Jessamyn 12:00 right? Well, as somebody who worked on Thanksgiving this year, it was actually, you know, mostly good news, because I felt like people mostly were, you know, chattery in kind of a positive way. You know, I almost missed the, like, freak outs and meltdowns of your only because it just meant there was so much more, so much more going on that like was in and of itself kind of interesting. But yeah, to be honest, don't freak out. Yeah, you

Cortex 12:28 know, if that's a weird thing we've talked about before, but the sort of like the adrenaline that comes with a freak out. Like there's like, that's the same thing that gets people into arguing online and other conflict oriented in the first place. Like yeah, your body definitely feels a little bit awake and alive when shits going down, but you don't really feel good during or after. So like, you know, identifying the difference between Oh, boy, that was a Russian Oh, that was in any way what I wanted to be doing, you know, right. It's a valuable lesson to learn that some people on the internet never learned. And that's goes back to that whole weird thing where, you know, you got to beat the people on the ground where they are. Right. But, but yeah, anyway, that's been the psychology of the internet

Jessamyn 13:08 for these past this past month. But yeah, good to talk to you.

Cortex 13:13 It is likewise, it's nice talk to talk a couple of days. Actually, I did zoom stuff. That was a lot of holiday day, right? It was my dad's birthday. The other day,

Jessamyn 13:25 I saw those pictures. I don't know if I've ever seen your sisters before. So that was pretty interesting.

Cortex 13:29 Yeah. And yeah, it's, you know, it's Thanksgiving. And so there was family stuff and a couple different zooms. And we had a friend's Thanksgiving thing with a few friends where we managed to do like a food swap type. Oh, lovely. And then I did a podcast with Brundlefly last night he's sort of movie credit and review group called Luton bus. And they've got a podcast called Last Chance cube, I think is chance cube or cat chance cube something. Obviously, I've studied a great deal before they do it. Yes, exactly. It's it's a it's a it's a stick where you know, there's six movies and you roll a die in whichever one it comes up on. That's when they talk about that week. So Brundlefly invited me on and I came up with a list of six Christopher Walken films. And we ended up watching 1980 eights put in boots.

Jessamyn 14:27 Wait, you watch it together. And it's like Ms. Three T K.

Cortex 14:32 We do a little intro, roll the die figure out what's going to be and then reconvene in a week for the main podcast discussing after the fact you can see that's a great little idea. And I had a lot of fun doing it. And I had a moderate amount of fun rewatching that bad movie that Christopher Walken was the best part of

Unknown Speaker 14:50 a bad movie. Well,

Cortex 14:52 the 1988 Cannon Films Puss in Boots that was released direct to video and starring Christopher Walken and no one else It was not a good movie, but also no one's ever seen. Like, why would you? Yeah, it's a whole interesting thing. But he's a lot of fun. He basically, I'm sure he got paid not enough to do no more work than he felt like, but it wasn't like a phone in performance was like, Hey, you got me here. I'm gonna be a cat that turned into a man. And he's has he has a great time. Everyone else is just sort of like there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's possible go horse halfway through this, just because we've been talking a lot more than usual. But here we are.

Jessamyn 15:31 Well, I have not been doing much talking at all, actually. So I mean, you know, I do my talking with Jim. And that's mostly it, my mouth is closed most of the rest of the time. Occasionally, people call me on the phone, I've got a meeting later today to talk about Biblio therapy, which is,

Cortex 15:52 is that like therapy for books or therapy with books with books,

Jessamyn 15:55 it's, you know, there's a couple different levels of it. But there's some of the people from Vermont vocational rehab, so like you had a job, but something happened, you can't do that job anymore, you're gonna get kind of retrained and re skilled to do other jobs, which is particularly tricky this time of year, as you can imagine. And there's a lot of people dealing with, you know, trauma or like mental health issues, whether you know, COVID, or whatever related or something different. And so these people got a grant to do a bibliotherapy program, which they're going to do through a couple libraries as a pilot. And I'm the Lotty doc consultant person, trying to sort of, you know, be the be the go between between the libraries they're working with and their program. And so we've been having far too many meetings. Very not productive. But I got to bring in a friend of mine who's actually a bibliotherapy expert. That's been super helpful. I think he appreciates the work. He's very good at what he does, but also not great at meetings. And so these meetings are excruciating, but like, you know, their work. I feel like I'm helpful. But I am always backchannel texting with somebody being like, Oh, my God, you'll you'll never believe what happened. Right? Like, like, Oh, my God. Now they're screen sharing the handout that nobody decided to email before the meeting. The good news is I don't have to talk that much during those because they're inefficient, so they rarely get to me. Oh, there you go. And the project is great. And I believe in it. And the fact that these people don't run amazing meetings is it's a different skill set, you know? Yeah. I think it has the capability to really help some people with some stuff they could really use help with. So

Cortex 17:45 you can try it. You can get some good stuff done despite bad meetings.

Jessamyn 17:49 Yeah. And, you know, I work at MI fi at five so I have what they call a hard stop. Which means if they're inefficient, I'm still done at five regardless. Yep. Which I always think is pretty useful way to schedule your meetings back to fucking back. Although I don't have anything after this podcast, so we can just talk until four if you want. Oh, sure. Yeah, I mean, my four year one,

Cortex 18:13 Paul, I'll read some selections from see if there's an RA Salvatore book sitting on my desk. Angela, Angela recently decided to try reading the the drift books. I don't

Jessamyn 18:27 know them. It's like

Cortex 18:28 this classic d&d fiction series. Driss Durden I want to say it's like first name is Dr. Izz T or something like that. He's a dark elf. He's a Drow. But he's a good Drow. And that's weird because brows are bad. And I think that's the basic premise of like, here's this interesting, compelling, complicated figure living in this shadowy bit of underground d&d lore. Well, the Underdark and I this is now literally everything I know about this other than I was fine. I had friends who were into d&d in like high school in college, and Driss was definitely the cool guy, which makes me wonder how he recal

Jessamyn 19:06 because he was a bad guy, which was cool. And I think

Cortex 19:11 he was a he was the dark guys that they like droughts are bad, but drift was, you know, sort of a hero a complicated like anti anti hero or something. I don't know. A lot of people like drift a lot of people like read the shit out of these books. All this Forgotten Realms stuff. I never read any of it. So I'm just reading a couple of them now. I might try reading as well. It sounds like they're like they're entertaining. Little bit sloppy, but whatever. So schlocky picking up here's Anthony at this point,

Jessamyn 19:41 for God's sakes. Yeah, Piers Anthony dated even when I read him and oh my god nowadays on unreadable

Cortex 19:50 there was oh geez, what? I've got a thing that's like a half a step away from me. It'll it'll come back to me. I think there's a metal filter thread. I'll remember when say looking at But bad fiction, there's definitely some more bad fiction to talk about looking nearby.

Jessamyn 20:03 Well, and I've been reading fiction that isn't even bad. Like I've been alternating back and forth between, like, I read Cory Doctorow attack surface, which should have been a great book. But number one, it was like, it's a lot to do with like, you know, police violence against protesting crowds, you know, the eternal surveillance state kind of thing. So it was just a little heavy because it was a little too real. And the other really weird part was, it was like, I wasn't the target audience. Like it was very didactic. Oh, the police have the protesters in a kettle. What this means is, are my mind my mind? Yeah. And then there's like a page and a half of some character telling another character about PGP cryptography. And I'm just kind of like, this is not a story. This is like, it's like a security briefing, disguised as a story. And all I want is the story. There's not enough story. Yeah. Which is too bad. Because I like Corey, like, I know that a lot of people don't care for him. And that's fine. But like, I like him, I like his books. And this one just missed. And so I had to dive back into my like, you know, Constable in the French countryside, Bruno Chief of Police books,

Cortex 21:25 a little bit like, little bit less essay style exposition, getting in the way of itself.

Jessamyn 21:31 And there was so much of it. And part of the issue was I kind of knew what 75% of that stuff was. Yeah. But that I didn't know the other 25%. So I did learn stuff, despite myself, but I was aggravated the whole time I read it. Plus, like I read at night to kind of go to sleep and like reading about police violence is not the way to do that, as opposed to like Bruneau, Chief of Police, who is also technically a police person, but it's more like the kind of constable doesn't carry a gun really tries to work things out by talking to people like in many ways, kind of a more optimal. If you if you take as a given that we will have some kind of policing, like a better model for policing. And so I enjoy it because it lets me believe another world as possible. And plus, they eat a lot of amazing food. And, you know, thinking about food when I had this kind of wimpy tooth and then thinking about food now when I have this kind of whiskey gallbladder has been enjoyable.

Cortex 22:34 Are you a Great British Bake Off watcher? No.

Jessamyn 22:37 I mean, I've seen it, I enjoy it. But for whatever reason, like those kinds of reality shows don't move with a pace that works for me.

Cortex 22:45 Sure. Well, I have I have nothing to add there that they just finished up the most recent season. But like it would be absolutely bold to have me just talk about it. Because I don't have much to say.

Jessamyn 22:57 I mean, I My sister loves those shows. And so when I watch them with her, it's kind of fun, because she's super smart about cooking. And so hearing her be like, Oh my god, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, this that or the other. But there's a little too much kind of drama in it for me. Like when I'm watching things. It's like I got all the way through season two of what we do in the shadows. So good. Like has a great wrap up. And Jim and I have been watching you know, we're still slowly working our way through Ted lasso, which we have to finish before we're allowed to start the Mandalorian.

Cortex 23:31 We still haven't started that. Ted last I want to watch it at some point. I've heard it's good.

Jessamyn 23:35 And I did see the Bob Weir documentary finally. And it was very interesting because my uncle was in it and I had no idea. So like we have Sunday Movie night or Saturday Movie Night, and we watch something usually documentaries, the one about Elsa Dorfman's photography is amazing. And this one was just about Bob Weir. And I was like yeah, great. Okay. And then I heard like a voice partway through it. I'm like, oh my god, it's my grandmother, which is what my uncle sounds like. And then he showed up on the screen he wasn't in it for long but it was very funny. That is the media corner portion of this podcast. All right. Do you have any other

Cortex 24:16 meaning? I'm watching disco I'm watching Mandalorian you know it's there's TV there's TV the

Jessamyn 24:22 Mandalorian you enjoying the season? I just read a friend of mine does this like a sci fi newsletter and you know had a spoiler full chunk of it so I didn't really read it but you know, his feeling is they're spending a lot of time kind of preparing for like 20,000 others character spin offs, he feels like like he feels like this season is a lot more like let's bring in a bunch of new characters that themselves can like, be on their own slugger to that. But then I stopped reading because I don't want the spoilers although Yeah, whatever. Like. I don't mind being spoiled. But if I can avoid it may as well.

Cortex 24:58 I don't think anybody expected this The Spock show back up. Surprise.

Jessamyn 25:02 I watched the Spock documentary speaking of documentary. Yeah, it's basically it was a Kickstarter funded thing by his son who himself is like a movie guy. And then Leonard Nimoy died, as you know, after they had started making it. So it was going to be just kind of a biopic about Leonard Nimoy. And then it became more of a documentary about kind of the cultural phenomenon that was Spock. And it's actually very good. I think it's called for the love of Spock. And I think it's on Netflix. It's very good. So if you haven't seen it, I think you'd like it.

Cortex 25:41 Yeah. No, I should check that out. Also, you're a biopic person.

Jessamyn 25:45 As opposed to biopic? Yeah. Oh,

Cortex 25:48 it's, it's both are common. It turns out.

Jessamyn 25:52 Really? I never hear the word out loud.

Cortex 25:54 Yeah. Well, I think that's why like, it's like seeing people attested in both directions. And also, I think technically probably wouldn't be a biopic it was a documentary because biopics are usually like, fictional narratives, or or whether or not it's fictional, like I did? Well, this is a question actually, let me rephrase this as instead of an assertion, my strong association with biopic or biopic, is that it is dramatic film, like not necessarily like fictionalizing.

Jessamyn 26:23 Stephen Hawking movie that, yeah, yeah. It's a dramatization of his life.

Cortex 26:28 Exactly. So I associate that specifically with like, like, like drama, rather than documentary stuff, but I don't know for sure that that's the case or if that's just the association I have. So anyway, well, that was a couple of fun little movie, things that people can yell at us about in the comments. Okay. Well, I'm

Jessamyn 26:43 definitely learning you know, like, you know, because we watch a movie every week now. And normally, I would watch a couple of movies a year, I feel like I'm a little bit more with my finger on the pulse of movies than I used to be, you know. So I left links for the three movies that I very much enjoyed. Excellent. Over the last month or so.

Cortex 27:05 I will try to incorporate those in the post it notes do your best. I guess we talked about metal filter. There has been some jobs posted in November and October, both of which we in theory are covering in this podcast because we skipped a month.

Jessamyn 27:19 And apologies for people whose jobs we may have missed. Because yeah, I don't know.

Cortex 27:26 I don't know that the podcast is the major vector for people finding out about jobs versus actually visiting the sub site but you know, still it's you know, it's nice to throw stuff out there. But yeah, there's there's there are several job postings up.

Jessamyn 27:38 I am Kim, I am is looking for practice clients to guess coaching. That sounds fun. I could use transformational coaching. Probably whatever it is, I like I am Kim, I am She's nice. I bet she does a great job at whatever that is.

Cortex 27:56 There is a post from if I only had a penguin asking for 3d printer, laser cutter, etc. person, someone who does maker stuff to help out making some robust classes for a three year old. I'm sorry. For the for a couple of their dolls. They're getting actual classes for the kid. But But yeah, to make some nice, can stand up three year old playing with him. glasses for dolls, so and that's for Christmas. So when there's probably still time to reach out and see.

Jessamyn 28:28 Yeah, and user TM works with a little open source software project. And they want to have a logo and a custom banner. So it doesn't pay a lot. But if you're good at designing, they have some straightforward ideas. And you could maybe help them out with that. Yeah. And reminder if you need gigs, or a little gigs done, especially in the age of COVID. And you know, the gift giving season is coming upon us. You can use jobs for that. It's a great use of jobs.

Cortex 29:00 Yeah. We've seen people do little things like helping out with weird shipping situations to like, yeah, there's all sorts of odd things that maybe you can just get a hand with one other position worth mentioning maybe I mean, they're all worth mentioning. But one more that I'll mention before we stop and say hey, go read there's more. Another panacea is got a listing up for Tech coordinator for a prison education program in DC. Oh, yeah. If that is somewhere in your wheelhouse and area of interest. Check that out. And yeah, and yeah, there's more jobs. Let's go to jobs. Shall we talk about projects?

Jessamyn 29:37 Sure. I feel like I need to mention meta filters own see Stross has a new book out first novel in two years. So if you are a fan of C Stross and the work he does you can now go get it and read it and I will probably do that because I really liked his books.

Cortex 29:59 Heck yeah. Good job, Charlie. Yeah. Yes, I am definitely doing as we've talked about before, sometimes now that other people post projects, I'm like looking at pressures. Oh, hey, what what? What's there been some

Jessamyn 30:15 of your stuff up on project?

Cortex 30:17 I don't I mean, I don't know I don't do a lot of creative related things like to do

Jessamyn 30:23 that maybe soundboard?

Cortex 30:25 No no no no

Jessamyn 30:27 talented guy,

Cortex 30:28 I take it totally different I think what it is is partly I try and keep myself honest about like not overstepping the 30 day deadline, and then I just sort of keep. So I'll do like two things within two weeks of each other. And I'll post about one now then was like, Well, I gotta wait for that. And so then I wait. And then I just like keep waiting. And so I probably posted some Oh, and then you wait, and then forgot. But yeah, no, I've got some stuff I should put up. I should actually do a roundup of the print work I've done this year and make a nice big post about that and make a project's post out of it.

Jessamyn 30:55 Yeah, that'd be cool. I've definitely enjoyed seeing the stuff that you know, comes down the various socials at me. So yeah, yeah. I also wanted to shout out m Park, who made a 3d mechanical figure that does that flossing dance. And there's just an adorable YouTube video of this little flossing. Robot.

Cortex 31:19 Oh, yes. That is delightful. Yes. Just a nice little, you know, bit of just mechanical goodness.

Jessamyn 31:31 Well, I mean, I feel like there are some people who are really using their core in time in various ways to their best ends, right? Like, I mean, I don't particularly feel bad about the fact that I am not one of those people. But it is cool to see people who you know, watching bond Cliff makes things down in his basement, his core, and train and all the stuff. And, you know, various other people who just decided now's the time where they have some free time to sort of get creative. It's cool. And I enjoy things like this where you in some ways, you almost wouldn't be able to do it if you didn't have kind of this weird cultural downtime to work on it.

Cortex 32:10 Yeah, there's something about that. I am digging this super SIM project from Salvador harden. It is a symmetry based drawing tool. And either you immediately like oh, yeah, fucking day or like, What the fuck is that? In which case, go play with it. I mean, guys, go play with it. It's nice. Basically, it's it's way to draw using various kinds of symmetry to create like rotational and scale and translation symmetry to create sort of repeating or scale related patterns.

Jessamyn 32:48 I don't understand. It just made a squiggle.

Cortex 32:50 You may have to futz around with a little bit to figure out how to get you have to create some symmetry stuff. Yeah, well, there's a there's a 29. There's a there's a video included in the post. So check that out if you gotta do something.

Jessamyn 33:12 Yes. Oh my god. That's so fun and weird. Ah, yeah. Who's gonna love this?

Cortex 33:18 Gym? Yeah.

Jessamyn 33:19 Yeah. Not that I don't. But whoa. Fun. So yeah,

Cortex 33:26 that's cool. That's a fun toy.

Jessamyn 33:27 I love it. Ah, I also would like to highlight Eva poet, Dan Q's excellent essay on the blinking Marquis of the early web? Who? Yeah, sold. Yes. So great. And it is at their excellent. URL, https colon slash slash dank.me. Really, really, so good. So good. And I remember Marquis was like the first time you could make anything move on a screen right now we have many options, but at the time we did it was

Cortex 34:11 Yeah. And it it was one of the early I think band tags on meta filter at some point, Matt, how he was like, This is fucking people fucking cut it out. And so now the only people can post marquee tags would be admins who sneak them in after in an edit. But I don't know what the browser support from our key is anymore.

Jessamyn 34:29 That's totally got to be the title of you got to use marquee on the title of whatever this podcast title turns out to

Cortex 34:37 be. Okay. Title. Something about marquee? Yes. All right. Yes. But yeah, there's old posts. I don't know if browsers. So one of the things that has come up many times over the years is people saying, Oh, and you got rid of the blink tag, and we never got Well, we did briefly get rid of the blink tag. Then browsers got rid of the blink tag. Yeah, yeah. I think what happened is Matt This is another like sometime in the mid 2000s, Matt got fed up about something where he got rid of the blink tag. And people like, oh, you can't get rid of the blink tag. And he's like, Yeah, pay me $20 No, bring it back. And I like immediately started stamping to try and get people to do that. And, and then he brought it back, and then the browser's got rid of it. So the blink tag still works. Your browsers just won't let you enjoy the blink tag that Metafilter still generously allows you to use. Whereas the marquee tag, I have no idea if browsers support that either, because we definitely get rid of it. But give me $20. And

Jessamyn 35:33 same as in town. I love it. Yankee fog came out with a book, another book about memory tricks and tips. You know, that is one of the things I have started doing during my Korean time is I've got some apps on my phone. And I'm trying to remember some of the geography that I had, like been training myself on and then forgot, you know, so like relearning where the countries are in Africa relearning the major rivers of the United States relearning European capitals. And that's been, you know, fun is probably the wrong word. But like, I like feeling that maybe I'm getting a little smarter with basically having kind of a long decline into over the last nine months. So because a lot of it like, you know, there is a riding a bike aspect to it, like I didn't know where the countries in Africa were. But then like, it doesn't come up that often, like for countries where I've like, known somebody who's lived there, you know, watched a movie that happened there, like a whole bunch of other stuff, I can put those together better. But there's just a lot of countries where I don't have a way to pin it in my head. And getting better at geography is one of the things that will help you stay in the C League. In trivia, you're not playing this season, right? Not.

Cortex 36:54 I'm feeling I'm feeling kind of like, I think I've crossed that threshold of oh, boy, I've gotta play next season. Like I actively missing it and not feeling like a sense of like, inability to like, do my Yeah, daily trivia. So. So yeah. Next,

Jessamyn 37:10 advanced access stuff. So you know, set set up your tools, so they get like, texted or whatever. And, you know, I think you can do it. Yeah. I've actually stayed in C League, which is very exciting. grow personally. And then today, there's actually a question about something I dreamed about last night. Very weird. So I figure it's just meant to be right. Yeah,

Cortex 37:34 clearly, clearly. I'm excited to see that Chinese fashion has a new podcast called The Reluctant Phoenix. I have not had a chance to check it out yet. But he's interviewing people who've restarted their entire lives, whether they really felt like it, which is a nice premise. So yeah, we've talked about good, good stuff from Chinese fashion before and this looks like another good thing. So hey, check that out.

Jessamyn 38:02 Oh, that is awesome. All you know, they've got a really great website. Just like a cool picture of themselves on Yeah, you know, a little poster that I really like. So that is awesome. Also, I'd like to know why I should be happy. Because

Cortex 38:19 should you be happy? Why should you be happy? Yes. You know, the, you know, the thing. The thing I think I most regret about us not getting to a podcast last month is we didn't really talk about Halloween stuff at all. And I'm saying like Halloween stuff in projects right around the Oh, yeah. But Halloween, hey, that's that's a thing that happens every year. And it was weird this year, because it sort of didn't happen. And if it did happen, people were probably not supposed to be happening. Well, weird. It's a weird,

Jessamyn 38:51 but the weather was shit for it. Like Vermont didn't start having bad COVID stuff again, until actually fairly recently. In fact, Halloween was the beginning of the end for us to be honest, because there were a bunch of big Halloween parties, not here in my town, but just in Vermont in general, that really became like, you know, super spreader, maybe a little too strong, but like spreader events with young people who then brought it back to their homes. And then since then, like we basically went 99 days without anybody dying of COVID which was glorious, but then like 10 people have died in a month and a half and like that's unacceptable. And so you know, we've got a whole bunch of new rules but those rules hadn't taken effect at Halloween yet and so people are taking advantage

Cortex 39:41 you know, I mean, I'm not saying anything and everybody else hasn't been like thinking for like fucking most of the year now but like, it drives me so fucking crazy. That like the most obvious thing in the world is don't to get get together in fucking large groups and drink and have parties and like, you know, talk a bunch. Like that's the one thing like even if you're like Not sure about the efficacy of every other fucking aspect just don't get together and Greg fucking group and breathe and each other a whole bunch and people still doing that as it's not good. It's really fucking stupid. It's like the thing that is making this be a thing. So. Right, great work everybody.

Jessamyn 40:19 Well, and it's so funny, right? Because around here like all of my friends, like my entire peer group is definitely on the same page with that. Yeah, and so it is odd because to me it feels like something that happens other places, you know, but obviously it's not. But it is weird, because so many of the people I interact with here regularly, we all believe the same things. And yeah, even though, you know, election time on my town, 30% for Trump, a fucking Ghen, which is vaguely offensive, like, I worked out in the parking lot, because I didn't want to work inside on election day. And so basically, people could drop off their mail in ballots, because everybody in Vermont was sent a ballot in the mail, because our Secretary of State isn't a total fucking asshole. And so a lot of people brought their ballot to the town hall on election day, because, you know, it's combination of things, they never got around to mailing it, they were worried about the post office, or, you know, a lot of truckers didn't trust that we would count it if they mailed it kind of. And so I wound up working in the parking whenever they got that idea was 29 degrees, I was wearing a snow suit. And then I had to stand about 10 feet away from Charlie Russell, who was one of the guys who was running for State Rep, waving a giant Trump flag around, like, at the at the closest place to the polls that he could legally be. And, you know, it was really weird, because like, four years ago, I was like, Well, you know, there's some casual misogyny maybe they don't understand what a fucking idiot he is blah. And this year, I'm like, they fucking know. And they're still voting for him, which is chilling to me. Yeah. Charlie Russell with the big Trump flag did not get elected. But he was actually got more votes than the independent who was running, we had like five guys running for two spaces. And my guy, the guy who I am the campaign treasurer for and do his website and everything else actually got elected, which was great. Very exciting. But uh, you know, Charlie Russell was kind of right after him. And that's always a little freaky. So at any rate, I say that, like all my friends, blah, blah, blah. But realistically, that's not the same as all my neighbors. Yeah. Four minus confusing.

Cortex 42:50 Talking about I don't know, I think. No, no, it's not your fault.

Jessamyn 42:54 I mean, isn't it though? Well,

Cortex 42:56 okay, sure. It's your fault. Let's talk about metal filter. Okay, the filter property. Let's discuss the blue. Okay. On which there were many posts. Yeah, because

Jessamyn 43:06 I'm just sorting.

Cortex 43:08 There was a lot of there's been a lot of election posts, which makes sense. This is like, the one time I was like, You know what, fuck it, we're gonna have like an uptick here. And we're gonna have some long threads. And around election time, we had like two or three threads sort of like, really back to back to back and we still have like, multiple concurrent ones. I'm definitely looking forward to like, sort of getting through the end of the year, and getting through like the transition nonsense, and Trump finishing his tantrums and which looks

Jessamyn 43:35 likely that it's going to happen every day.

Cortex 43:38 Yeah. Yeah. Like, it seems like even he may be fucking figuring out that he's a jackass. But yeah, it'll be nice. It'd be nice to basically in January, stop and say, Okay, well, let's think about how many threads about what we really need about this and try and push more proactively back

Jessamyn 43:55 to like a normal stage exceptionalism, navel gazing, like, I appreciate that people want to talk about it. I just appreciate slightly less how much kind of air in the room it seems to take up. Yeah. On the other hand, people like to talk about it. That's good. But especially over since the election, and since you know, the election was a little bit more decided. We've been a little bit of a return to the same people having the same arguments. And that's Yeah, and it's like, that's not going to change.

Cortex 44:26 Yeah. My top priority on Metafilter is not providing a place for the same six political junkies to have the same arguments with each other indefinitely. So that may be something to gear back down on as we as we move into this bold new future of not having a fucking President Trump. Right. Well. Let's talk about everything else.

Jessamyn 44:49 I enjoyed this thread by Jeff, which was a bow thing that happened. Not a couple of weeks ago, a month ago, I guess that the RA freaked out and took down or ordered tweed taken down. Everybody's favorite one one of the favorite browser add ons YouTube DL? Oh, yeah. Ah. And it was one of those interesting things where, you know, lots of people use it. The legal details were confusing. They were claiming that it, you know, went around YouTube's piracy prevention measures, which was a pretty hard claim to I think, substantiate and then, you know, at the very end a couple weeks ago, Kat Blaque, posted that it's back up again. They basically reinstated a fork, they changed some things they could prove the project doesn't violate DMCA is anti circumvention, cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's not a violation of the law. So cool. And, but it was it was a nice conversation. This is one of my favorite kind of Metafilter things, which is something that's just techie, tech, people can sort of talk about it. There's not a bunch of arguing stuff happening. Like nobody's being like, Oh, well, actually, the RA has some points, blah, blah, blah. And, yeah, it was a neat thread. Not not super busy, but busy enough, and I enjoyed it.

Cortex 46:18 Nice. Yeah. No, I didn't even see that. I mean, I knew about the the situation but I had not seen the update. So that's exciting. In a a sane normal thing is the status quo. We eventually found our way back to at least for the time being, you know, definition of exciting.

Jessamyn 46:35 But, yeah, so water on the moon,

Cortex 46:39 water the moon.

Jessamyn 46:42 Pretty exciting. That was the thing that like NASA had, like, vague posted on Twitter, like a week before it fucking happened. And so everybody was like, ah, like, like, is this a sign that things are getting worse? Or things that are getting better? I don't know, who does their social media, but man it you know, that was kind of weird. I thought, you know, everybody was like, oh, T mobile's gonna provide 5g on the moon or something. And I was what and so this post by major clanger basically was just talking about how they discovered water on the moon. And then there were people chatting about it. I almost didn't read the threat because I was just like, really, really into the post. Well, you know what I mean? Like, sometimes you just want to like, follow the links, and you don't care to talk about it. You just want to read about it. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So

Cortex 47:32 speaking of speaking of weird discoveries, there is of course, the other day the Utah monolith.

Jessamyn 47:42 Can I just talk about the monolith for one second, I belong to a group of I didn't even belong. I was like a hanger on to a group of kind of weird artists types who were like my burning man crew for like a year or two in Seattle. And one of the art things that they did was made a giant black metal monolith that looked exactly like the monolith from the movie, unlike this one. And basically had it just appear I believe on a beach in Seattle, or like in a park like, and did pretty much a prank exactly like this. And that was so big, no one could move it and blah, blah, blah. And it was super fun. And then basically the New Year's parade, which is just kind of an informal parade of people. The theme was monolith, it was like spacemen versus monkeys. And so you could dress up like a spaceman or a monkey. And then there was like a, you know, cardboard monolith that people walk around. So I have a magnet on my fridge that just says monolith because it's waiting for the state basically. Thank you for listening to my monoliths. Sorry.

Cortex 48:51 No, that's, that's rad. Well, and that's a funny thing. Like, I feel like anybody who's known like, weird art installation, people was like, Oh, it's a weird art installation. Everybody's like, What the fuck? Why did someone put a month in Utah?

Jessamyn 49:06 Well, and from what Jim told me, who kind of followed up on this more than I did, it's not as remote as people make. It seemed like, like, you should get to it with an ATV and stuff like it is in the middle of the desert. But it's also you know, it's not in the middle of the bottom of the ocean, for example. Yeah. Did they? Did they figure it out? I didn't.

Cortex 49:25 I don't know if they've ever figured it out. So far. Who did it? I don't know if anybody's claimed responsibility credibly. I know it's gone again. Someone came in and got it apparently,

Jessamyn 49:35 like someone came and got it.

Cortex 49:38 Like someone came and stole the model if they think oh, so

Jessamyn 49:40 it's been stolen or not. I shouldn't say somebody came they know if the person who got it wasn't the person who put it there.

Cortex 49:47 I don't think anybody knows. No, it just disappeared again a few days after its presence was blowing up on the internet. Okay. And I should follow up on that and see see what happened. This is the thing about is like this It's such an excitingly weird little bit of cultural, whatever going on, but also there's probably like nothing there. Like, someone, someone built this thing and installed it and waited years. There's nothing

Jessamyn 50:12 mysterious about it. Yeah, it's weird radioactivity to it, we think, from time machines.

Cortex 50:19 It made a tremendous amount of like good room for goofing and riffing and whatnot. Oh, apparently there's a miniature pyramid now where it was, but I don't know if there's any of that has anything to do with the previous thing either. If this is I'm really looking forward to 50 years from now when this has all gotten so distorted that this is a Roswell sort of thing to visit. Red Rock, Utah, and then they covered it up once it was discovered

Jessamyn 50:42 distracted by COVID by

Cortex 50:46 I was making jokes about Carl Andre and Donald Judd and saw the weight on Twitter about it. They their 50s 60s, conceptual centric, or at least conceptual adjacent artists who all did stuff with blocky things. So

Jessamyn 51:05 Carl Andre. Oh, that guy.

Cortex 51:07 Yeah. Yeah, Donald Judd, like, turned Marfa, Texas into a big art. Oh,

Jessamyn 51:13 okay. I'm familiar with that, too. This is great. Hey, Carl. Andre. He's from Quincy, Massachusetts.

Cortex 51:18 I'll see if I can find my tweet. Oh, I love Dunkin Donuts.

Jessamyn 51:21 He went to Phillips Academy.

Cortex 51:27 Fascinating, just be quite

Jessamyn 51:29 frank Koosh as an influencer of him, the Romanian sculptor guy.

Cortex 51:36 Here we go. There's my tweet. But yeah, I enjoyed the whole monolith situation. I look forward to maybe some additional

Jessamyn 51:43 follow you on Twitter. And this didn't make any sense to me. This was

Cortex 51:47 definitely a tweet specifically for people into like a 1960s conceptual art. Which, you know, I have hope you'll on Twitter really, you know, appreciate that. And that's important to me. Rather than each tweet, most, most, most of the most of the likes, there won't be many likes, but every single one of them was pressed like with a little bit extra vigor is what I like to think

Jessamyn 52:06 I hear that. I hear that. Speaking of the 60s, yes, if you're ready to move on from the love of my life posted a Merriam Webster time traveler game where you can see that it's like a game where you can figure out which word was added to the lexicon. And then you can figure out which words came out the year you were born. So Coronavirus came out the year I was born. Oh excited and as well as butt naked cryptozoology. homosocial new key word processor, and Yo, this is a thread that was under appreciated, but I enjoyed it. And, you know, I mean, I guess because it can also be like her after if tell me what year you were born, you know, kind of social. What do they call it? When you're trying to like, get information from people by?

Cortex 53:03 Go like social engineering? Yeah.

Jessamyn 53:08 But I don't care. People know, I was born in 1968. Because Wikipedia tells you

Cortex 53:12 Yeah, there's a pretty low bar for some of this stuff.

Jessamyn 53:15 Yeah, but I did enjoy it. It's just a little machine. And it was just a fun little fun little post very short, you can still play along at home. And that was my only my only bummer about this is the time traveler quizzes the same every time. Like it wouldn't have to be they could have just pulled things from Yeah, but more complicated do everything the same way.

Cortex 53:40 The year of my birth is when they first used the term non insulin dependent diabetes mellitus apparently, so not fun. Also lip lock. That's a little more fun lip locks. Good. Also, also Mersa. So that's that's not great, but also key tar. That's pretty good.

Jessamyn 53:57 Oh, can I just tell you? I just wrote a Wikipedia page for a musician who is in the fuck dirt cowboys. For Christ's sake. Sorry, this is one of those stupid stories. He I could tell the story without knowing what his name is. cowpokes what they're like an Alabama band and let they're like the dirt cowboy truckers or something like that, by truckers, drive by truckers. Maybe, fuck. Hold on.

Cortex 54:31 I, the entirety of my knowledge on this subject is that there exists a band called drive by truckers,

Jessamyn 54:39 by truckers. Yes. So he's J Gonzalez. He is a musician. And I just did a little like a stub page on Wikipedia for him because he was the guest on seventh inning stretch, which is often my Monday afternoon thing that I do. And he has a guitar that has a key tar. Like somehow, like built into it. All right. And it's just very cool looking. And that's my that's my Kitara thing. too long for the for the lead up.

Cortex 55:08 No, I'd love to see. Assuming this. I don't think this is what you're saying his guitars but I would love to see someone you know, they'd like twin neck guitars that you see sometimes like, I would love to see a check. Yeah. Yeah. I would love to see like a twin neck like six string guitar and a key tar just like the weirdest worst Frankenstein thing.

Jessamyn 55:31 This isn't not that. No, the key tar is kind of mounted on the body of

Cortex 55:36 the guitar. Okay, I thought you were saying was really integrated to the guitar? No, it is not. Oh, excellent. Well, then that's I want to see exactly that. That works out very well for me then.

Jessamyn 55:46 Yeah, I'll see if I can find a picture while we're, while we're talking about a thing. I enjoyed this done. Well, now that I'm googling, apparently it's a thing other people have. Also. Okay, cool. I'm sorry.

Cortex 55:59 I was just gonna say, I enjoyed this little clicker game that Adrian Han posted the other day. Partly I like it because it's like it's like an hour long. Like if you really sort of take your time with it maybe a couple hours but it's not one of the things we're like and now you play this for the next like you know, six months it's like no, it's just get the end it's dumb. Like it's it's you're trying to get rid of web ads being run by some sort of evil sentient being it almost seems like is the plot such as there is any better? Yeah, I had a good time with it. And it was a nice little distraction. And there we go.

Jessamyn 56:35 Well, and Adrian Hein continues to kill it on metal filter, generally.

Cortex 56:41 Yep. Also you just posted like raw. Yeah, that

Jessamyn 56:44 was sorry. better picture. Well, you know how like, fucking google images really tries hard to keep you from kind of stealing photographs. Yeah, them? Well, that's what this is.

Cortex 56:58 Well, this is I am. I'm not disappointed, but I am mechanically underwhelmed by this. I was Yeah, I was

Jessamyn 57:04 there are other people. My brief Image Search has told me that he actually do the thing that you're describing. Yeah. But it's more let's see who's the guy. The blade is a double neck Gameboy key tar and that's just God.

Cortex 57:27 Yeah, he's got like five strings on a 12 string guitar for the setup to weird little hybrid.

Jessamyn 57:32 Yeah, well, I'm he's interesting. Like, he's just a cool interesting, dude. But I don't think key tar by Jessica Lynn. This one may be the closest man there are a lot of different people who have tried different versions of this thing. Is that last one kind of more what you're thinking of today. Sorry, everybody say this. This

Cortex 57:57 is better. This is better. But somehow see the thing is the neck part of the Kitara is not fucking important. And yet that's the part I want to see.

Jessamyn 58:05 The double high No, I mean, I hear Yeah, like, but now this one wants when it wants.

Cortex 58:11 Yeah, this one actually looks pretty bad. I like this, this workmanship on this. Jessica Glynn guitar. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

Jessamyn 58:25 I was going to Oh, yeah. Adrian Han, by the way, still killing it on Metafilter. Appreciate it. I still have one post I need to write for magic that which is leftover from my sponsor a post thing. And magic has been really tolerant of the whole thing, but I am very late with it. So it's about you know, fandom computer kind of early computer stuff. But man, I don't know why I've just got a block with it. So I'm going to work on it. Um, but another post that I was going to write and then I didn't wind up having to write it because Adam Basco wrote it was Jim Morris, who is a tremendous travel writer and journalist, passed away as a very old woman. Very recently, and Jen Morris was super interesting, because she transitioned very, sort of partway through what was already a pretty established career. And, you know, lived the rest of her life. As the woman she was and talked about it, like in a book that she wrote in 1974, which was, I think, I mean, I know for me, she was the first transgender person I'd ever heard of, and the fact that she was willing to speak about things speak about them. So frankly, the fact that she was a very good writer, and could really kind of explain I think feelings and kind of, you know what her relationship situation was like, you know, she stayed in a partnership with her wife, but they had to get divorced because of the laws of the time, but they stay together for the rest of their lives. And it was as, you know, a lot of complicated things that if you're a child because the book came out when I was very young, you have questions about and you know, especially in the 70s, there may not have been a place you could ask. And you know, it was just kind of amazing to watch how the whole rest of her career went, and it was cool. And sort of listening to stuff. I'm just now reading the deleted comment from thread force.

Cortex 1:00:32 It's like they say on the internet, never read the deleted comments. What a weird little added aspect of like having metal filter mod stuff, like, just just just just the way there's like everybody else gets to read the thread after it's been moderated. We kind of are always stuck with a thread as it existed all the way along, right. It's just Oh, yeah, there's that the fly got taken out of the ointment, but we kept the ointment that the fly was in in this little right

Jessamyn 1:00:59 and here it is here. It still is. Yep. Well, in my favorite, she was just a pip right. great sense of humor. Interesting lady. And there was a New York Times q&a. This is like the second to last comment in the thread. And they're like, Okay, you're hosting a literary dinner party. What three writers would you invite? And her answer was like, nothing on earth would induce me to host a literary dinner. Right,

Cortex 1:01:24 so good answer. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:01:27 Which is how I feel about the whole thing. I think those are my I think those are my

Cortex 1:01:33 I've got one other that I would not have guessed that this was a post that I would have been commenting in, but there was a post after Biden gave his victory speech.

Jessamyn 1:01:52 This drug was fascinating. Sorry, go on.

Cortex 1:01:54 Yeah. So so he's giving his his speech and whatever. American political speeches are always way too cheesy for me.

Jessamyn 1:02:03 Well, and this one ended on a Jesus note, which was a little bit a gasp by right like I cried all the way through Kamala speech. And then Biden's speech was a little bit more perfunctory. And then at the end, he was like, and, you know, God bless everything. And I was like, ah, but like, I'm not everybody in America. So I think,

Cortex 1:02:21 yeah, there's, there's a big play to, you know, General growsafe General Christian sentiment in American politics. Whatever the fuck and Biden's like notoriously Catholic and, okay.

Jessamyn 1:02:33 Catholic president ever actually, there's one of the things on learned Lee, that's been interesting is there's a whole little message board thread on Biden facts, like trivia about Biden, and second Catholic precedent. Like, I never think about Catholicism that way, because to me, they're all like, lumped in with all the other kinds of non Jewish religions. For people for whom that's a very important distinction. That's a really interesting piece.

Cortex 1:02:58 Yeah. Yeah, that whole Catholic Protestant split is like, I've talked about this before, but like, you know, I grew up like, this is sort of like, why this jumped out at me was like, I grew up like, my mom's Catholic, my dad's Jewish, I've flourished into a very atheist Jew. And, but like, Catholicism had this big sort of like, that was the background content of my childhood a lot because my mom was like, regularly doing church ministry stuff at you know, whatever church we were going to she

Jessamyn 1:03:24 would take care in the house or something, or is that what she does? Now?

Cortex 1:03:28 That's what that's what she does now. And that's, that's not now now but yeah, but that's not that's that's not even like a religious thing. That's just like a like, Montessori Preschool or whatever. But like, you know, she was very active with doing like, music ministry mostly, and also some like Sunday school stuff when I was growing up. And so I was exposed to a lot of like, Catholic liturgy and a lot of Catholic hymns and like, you know, as a family, we would do music ministry stuff, Stipe. So So Biden in his speech he

Jessamyn 1:03:54 was like the Partridge Family. Yeah, sort of

Cortex 1:03:57 Yeah, it's it's there's there's a weird sort of like, a very dysfunctional half assed Partridge Family sort of aspect to it. With my Jewish dad playing electric bass in the Catholic Church to the Oregon Catholic press hymnal. So what this all comes down to is Yeah, Biden end up quoting on eagle's wings, which is this hymn that was written in the 70s is what the post ends up being about. I haven't heard thought of this song and probably you know, 2020 plus years probably whenever the last time I helped my mom out like playing guitar with her at a mass or something. But I was like, oh shit, it's fucking eagle wings and the thing is on eagle's wings is kind of such as they are. Eyebrows. McCurry was using the word bang or

Jessamyn 1:04:49 seeing her add you in the thread because the overlap of like eyebrow threads and Josh threads that aren't somebody needs moderating on the internet is very small. Yeah.

Cortex 1:04:57 Well, yeah, and And this is one of those odd things where it's like, you know, she's got like, serious religious studies bonafides and I had to go to church as a kid. And so the intersection of like, you know, Catholic hymnal stuff gets in there. But But yeah, it was it was such a weird bolt out of the blue for me, like, watching that, and being like, oh shit, yeah, this whole fucking like, and it's a weird part of my childhood to sort of think about because this was like, early body of music that I was exposed to as someone who grew up to be very musical that most music I don't really give like the least shit about because whatever, there's a hymns, hymns, hymns, or I would argue hymns are slightly better than Christian rock for not trying to pretend not to be hymns, but like, it's still it's

Jessamyn 1:05:42 meant that they're the only actually American like, or like the only music that are absolutely originated in America, or do I have that wrong?

Cortex 1:05:52 I don't know. I think that's that's an interesting territory.

Jessamyn 1:05:56 Like any church in England?

Cortex 1:05:58 Yeah. I mean, there could be like, relatively contemporary American religious music, you know, might have some hold there, that might be totally a thing. I don't feel qualified.

Jessamyn 1:06:08 I'm shooting my mouth off. So I should probably stop.

Cortex 1:06:11 And also like, Yeah, I mean, it depends on how you define, you know, American in origin, if we want to talk about like the blues and jazz and a whole lot

Jessamyn 1:06:18 of well, that's why I was like, as I was saying, and I was like, that doesn't make any sense. But why do I think this?

Cortex 1:06:24 Okay, this is probably a tremendously lengthy and spirited argument between people who really wanted to like stake out various different goalposts on it, but not me. So yeah. Anyway, as a result, I was like, Oh, ha, that got me thinking about like, old, like, you know, Catholic mass memories. I texted my mom say, Hey, this is weird, but yeah, made me think about, like, you know, back then she's like, oh, yeah, me too. But, so I ended up leaving a comment there. But like, it was really interesting reading through people's various comments, you know, like, most of the comments are along the lines of like, oh, yeah, back when I had this specific association with Catholicism. You know, in my childhood, like, there's a lot of the usual usual Catholic discussion on Metafilter is definitely like the lapsed Catholic or the decidedly former Catholic discussion, but, but still, it's interesting to see that texture coming out from other people for this thing that I didn't really understand was as sort of, kind of narrowly defined as Catholicism versus various other kinds of Christian sectarianism. Yeah, as a kid, I didn't understand that. It was just like, oh, okay, well, this is church. That's how it works. So it's always interesting to come to these threads and see other people talking about their experiences specifically with Catholicism and try and sort of use that to relate to and unpack other little bits of what I vaguely remembered and internalized as a kid. So anyway, that was a whole that was a whole side trip. That was definitely the discussion about the election that I was most like, into actually sort of being there for for my own interest rather than just moderating so. So yeah,

Jessamyn 1:07:56 yeah, it was just an interesting chatty, side aspect to the Biden stuff.

Cortex 1:08:03 Shall we discuss asked Metafilter? Yeah. All right.

Jessamyn 1:08:11 All right. This lady says she's never farted. Let's talk about farting.

Cortex 1:08:22 Really, Sandy, that's okay. So it's specifically Sandi Toksvig. know who that is? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. She's a she's a British comedian and TV person. She was one of the flavor hosts on Great British Bake Off for a couple seasons. Oh, before being replaced with Matt Lucas this season. This last couple seasons? I don't remember for sure. She does. She's been a longtime host on the panel show Qi.

Jessamyn 1:08:51 Well, and I listened to the QI podcast, but like, she's not part of that.

Cortex 1:08:54 Yeah, that's like that's like staff and writers, folks, right? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Anyway, she's, she's she's very funny. And she's the sort of person who I can imagine making that claim, and really not knowing how much she wants me to engage with that. So I'm but yes, so did people figure out whether or not she's farted? Ah,

Jessamyn 1:09:21 I don't think so.

Cortex 1:09:24 It seems like it'd be hard to prove one way or the other. They felt like

Jessamyn 1:09:26 maybe it was a deadpan bit. But no, how can you prove it? I mean, unless somebody's like stood next to me.

Cortex 1:09:34 Let's do it. Let's do it. This time, just go down to the DMV and DQ dq, I don't that might be a state specific things department of emissions quality or something to get your car checked every couple of years to make sure it's passing emissions. Do they do that in Vermont? Maybe this is like I don't think it's an only Oregon thing, but maybe the key was an Oregon The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. Is that the EQ?

Jessamyn 1:10:05 Yeah, I don't know. It's probably a general term special thing here.

Cortex 1:10:09 Every couple of years in Oregon, at least you have to go and like take your car in and make sure it passes. It's DQ. So you can get your stickers updated on your license and not be breaking the law.

Jessamyn 1:10:21 Yeah, we have to we have to do that. Here. It comes along with your inspections. So basically,

Cortex 1:10:25 that's that for Sandy talks, pigs. But here's what I'm proposing chicken just hanging out at the DEQ for, you know, a week.

Jessamyn 1:10:33 I got nowhere to go. It sounds a little like at the DEQ which would be Dairy Queen.

Cortex 1:10:36 Yes. Which would be a good way to end up hurting too. Especially if you're lactose intolerant, like me, AE. But really what else you got?

Jessamyn 1:10:50 Ah, well, I enjoyed Xin Katz, asked me to filter thread about thinking about a project, we're counting things that didn't really work out, like just small scale well, meaning didn't work things, you know, Hands Across America, the Segway quibi And, you know, can you help generate this list for me, and then they, you know, generated a much longer list of stuff and it's interesting, because it's a whole bunch of things that didn't totally work. Yeah. Just in terms of LIS generating, I enjoyed it for you know, a little bit of schadenfreude. schadenfreude readalong. Yeah. And then on the other spectrum, waving just wants funny videos to get me out of a mental funk. And this thread, which is still open I guess AskMe Metafilter is open for six months now.

Cortex 1:11:55 It's a year Oh, great.

Jessamyn 1:11:57 Has one of my favorite done Salah Cappuccini, which is a whole bunch of of witches to cats that play pattycake and make jokes. And many, many, many other very good options.

Cortex 1:12:11 I am liking how many of these links are not marked as visited for me because that means that's a lot of new content. Yes, I'm favoriting this now? Yes. It was an update in an old post. Solo solo posted question about some cookies back in fall of 2018. And they wrote in recently to say that they found the recipe so if you're wondering what that recipe was, it was the petite were cookie that used to be served at Jalan George's and yeah, go recipe.

Jessamyn 1:12:53 It's like how KitKats are made out of crushed KitKats really

Cortex 1:12:57 that how is that like a sourdough starter? How does that how does

Jessamyn 1:13:01 that work? Way down like you know they break when KitKats break in the manufacturing process they grind them all up and the little layer of kind of goo that's between the wafer layers is actually crushed up KitKats

Cortex 1:13:15 but how did they make the first ones that were no crushed up? KitKats yet Oh,

Jessamyn 1:13:18 no. It's It's It's fractal in nature. It's very funny.

Cortex 1:13:23 This feels like a problem.

Jessamyn 1:13:24 I doesn't have to be sorry, I didn't mean to blow

Cortex 1:13:32 your mind. No, no. Briefly distracted there. I've got nothing so i Except I'm trying to find if I have any, any other asked stuff in my favorites from the last little while but I'm not sure if a few

Jessamyn 1:13:46 there was a difficult but I think useful thread about somebody whose brother passed away unexpectedly. But basically they were like he was kind of a squirrely you know, eccentric guy. And you know, he had a very generic will this person was the executor. But the brother was a prepper a hoarder and a gun enthusiast if you were going to have hidden money in a house where would it be? Because you know I don't I mean, this person did not know their brother super well but was like you know, if there were like a weird and not because they're like, I want it but they were just like I would like to, you know, find it, straighten it out, make it work. And it was a just an interesting thread of people talking about and especially people talking about, like various family members who you know, had funny little hoards of money behind the outlets in the wall or in LightSwitch boxes, junk Trim boxes or something else?

Cortex 1:15:03 Yeah. This is how my squirrely dad hid his stuff for Yeah, wow.

Jessamyn 1:15:06 Many people had a squirrely relative who didn't trust the banks and had their money bla bla bla bla bla. And in the life hack department, because there's always one, just this guy, you know, got some silicone spatulas realize they made their life that much better. Let's talk about you know, everyday things you can get that totally change your life for the better one of those long threads, we probably have one every six months. This is this one.

Cortex 1:15:36 It's definitely it's a renewable resource. You know, it's Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:15:39 well, you know, the metal filter, user base changes. And so it is useful and interesting to see. You know, what the different options are basically. Yep. So I like that. And then, of course, this thread, which I meant to comment in, but I've been busy was is work life balance, I think people actually have ah, this is by unicorn chaser. And you know, people have different things they say about it. Because as he geek has a really good thing about like how, you know, self care isn't just the thing you do for yourself, it's a thing you practice, you know, like, sort of meditation or whatever, figure out what's getting in your way, figure out how to address those things. Different people talk about, you know, insecure over achievers, perfectionist, et cetera, et cetera. Not a super long threat, but I think a pretty helpful one.

Cortex 1:16:39 Nice. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:16:41 And then, the last one I saw from AskMe Metafilter that I thought was interesting is listen to this whistle. What is it? And it turns out, the what it is, is a Candyland commercial from roughly the 1978.

Cortex 1:17:00 I'm gonna listen to the whistle real quick to see if check rings any sort of Bell, Pavlovian bell for this? I do not trust this website. I'd land it on. Oh, maybe they took it down already. That could be it. Yeah. Okay. Nevermind.

Jessamyn 1:17:13 Yeah. But well, you can hear it if you play the commercial. Yeah. But then you'll see the commercial and so that

Cortex 1:17:18 it's fun. Yeah, I'll check this out later. I don't know how to do this without flooding this into the mic somehow. So

Jessamyn 1:17:24 does it come in to the mic? When I have my headphones? Yeah.

Cortex 1:17:28 No, it would come out my speakers, and then I would just sort of bleed into the mic. Oh, because he's done it. Because I Yeah. Why do you have its audio signal chain stuff? There's nothing exciting I can say about it. Other than I can't do this without blasting the podcast with it too, right now. Okay. I'm always both disappointed and relieved when I see a question like this and the answers there. Because like, I want to have the chance to be the person who's like, Hey, wait, I know what that is. Oh, I

Jessamyn 1:17:53 can place that I'm the only person.

Cortex 1:17:56 I know. It's not even. Not even that I need to be the only person but that like, I might be the first person to get there like and that's an exciting possibility. But at the same time, I'm almost never going to know like, it probably wouldn't recognize this. Or if I did, I'd be like, What the fuck is that? You know? So the fact that like, it's definitively answered, I can just like, alright, good, good. problem got solved. I don't have to, you know, ride this weird enthusiasm curve of maybe I'm a genius. Oh, no, I don't know anything. Instead, I can say okay, problem solved. Got their question answered. Good job. Cory flood.

Jessamyn 1:18:27 Yeah, very nice. So that's it for AskMe Metafilter. For me, I did have some meta

Cortex 1:18:32 talk. Yeah, call

Jessamyn 1:18:33 out stuff. Good news. Bad news. Bad news. We lost our friend here on Bob. Yeah, in October. And there's a nice long thread of people. You know, talking about him who either knew him did not know him. miss him. appreciated his. appreciated his contributions. He'll be missed. Here on Bob. We miss you.

Cortex 1:18:58 Yeah. Big, big, big, longtime presidents on the side.

Jessamyn 1:19:01 Yeah. And, you know, force for good in so many ways, I think. Yeah. And there's a health care worker check in if you are a health care worker and would like a little support or just to kind of talk about what you've been up to. We know, it's probably been super challenging, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that that is open. And then on a slightly more positive note, there is the Metafilter gift swap, thank you thread, which has been slowly filling up with people who have gotten their metal filter gifts and are having a fun time. chatting about them.

Cortex 1:19:42 Yes, which is always it's always nice having that sort of tail out through the late November into December. And thanks again to the folks making that happen. It's a it's a bunch of work that it's always someone or other this this year and last year are curious knew who was a friend of theirs in town. So I've been able to like talk about like the details a little bit. But they've been a, they've been one of the primary organizers and have been doing a really nice job of it. Also, I want to mention the Mefi Holiday Card Exchange, which is like fully in gear at this point. This Was I too, too late to get in. Because like, we're well underway, I believe. But yeah. But needle girl, likewise, doing a bunch of work to make that happen. And that's been fantastic. And I sent off a bunch of cards and cards are starting to show up on this end. And it's it's nice stuff. I really liked these sort of community interaction things, and I really appreciate the work people do to make them possible to happen.

Jessamyn 1:20:49 Yeah, Agree. Agree. And we should probably also speak of holidays. Plug the new year's gala, which I have changed from metal filter related to metal filter gathering. So the thread that was closed is open again.

Cortex 1:21:03 Ah, yeah, we'll fix that for real at some point.

Jessamyn 1:21:07 Yeah. And if you have proposals, we're going to start putting together kind of a schedule of what we're gonna do we appreciate your photos, your pre recorded stuff. It'll happen on January 2, and we look forward to seeing you Yeah, check

Cortex 1:21:21 out the thread, if you if you have not caught it so far, don't know exactly what it is. The whole idea is just to like, collect together a bunch of metal filter stuff and people for a couple hours, few hours, we'll figure out exactly what the schedule looks like as it firms up but you know, just have some stuff accessible online and some live performances, if we can make it work or pre taped stuff, people sharing their art people, you know, basically saying, Oh, here's a thing I like, or here's the thing I made or here's a here's the thing I want to perform for people so we can kind of collectively separately be together as a community, which is, I'm really excited about it. It's it seems like a really fun thing. It's gonna be very experimental. Since we haven't really done anything quite like this before. You and I are going to try and do some live podcasting for it. I'm looking forward to figuring out how best we can make that work. Maybe get some people to pop on if we can sort that out. And yeah. So yeah, I just I I'm really looking forward to being a weird, pleasant metal filter cable access. Sort of Yes. And if you have any interest in being involved in creating or organizing content for that, please let us know. Like, you know, we really want to sort of let people get as involved as they want to so exactly about.

Jessamyn 1:22:38 I'm looking forward to that.

Cortex 1:22:41 I was looking at a thread and I forgot where it was. Am I on the wrong page? Maybe? I might be well, that's that's not exciting news. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have a whole lot else. I think it's, it's, it's nice to be closing in on the end of 2020. It's nice to be on the right side of an election outcome. It's nice to be talking to you. And that's all kind of good enough. I'm sort of gonna say that's, I can work with that. I think that's where I'm at.

Jessamyn 1:23:14 Yeah, I share those fields.

Cortex 1:23:18 Well, maybe that's a podcast, maybe that's a whole thing.

Jessamyn 1:23:22 I think that can be the whole thing. All right.

Cortex 1:23:24 Thanks for listening everybody. And you know, as usual, come picnic pit next Nick Pitts. Pick nets, pick nets. Come pick nets in the in the thread and then answer questions ask questions, etc. It's nice seeing people pop into comments or even just to wave hi as we broadcast these lengthy discussions out into the the web space so pop on in. Don't forget to like alright, I did it again. I kept going tonight. All right. Good podcast. Yep. Tom Hanks. Yeah, okay. Goodbye, everybody. Goodbye.