Podcast 169 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 169: Soon May The Podcast Come (2021-02-01).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:02 once was a site that we hung out on and the name of it was metafilter.com. We post any comments on that post, we post the links and

Jessamyn 0:18 just will

Cortex 0:28 Alright, I'm gonna close my other windows so I don't look at stuff.

Jessamyn 0:31 I closed my windows on the big computer and I now have the little computer in front of the big computer. And I hope Facebook is okay after my bizarre, bizarre gaffe. But

Cortex 0:43 I think you should tell that story on Mike here if you're if you're okay, yeah,

Jessamyn 0:47 well, I moderate this 45,000 library and Facebook group, which is most of the time, okay, but there are a couple like white male edge lords in their occasionally posturing. And complaining about presidents is war criminals. Oh, by the way,

Cortex 1:00 I'm sorry. No, no, that's sorry. Just let me say real quick that this is episode 169 at the Metafilter monthly podcast, I am Josh cortex Mullard. And I'm Jessamyn. And now please continue with your story.

Jessamyn 1:13 And, and so there was something about the Trump library, which of course, is something librarians and mefites like to talk about. And there was some guy whose profile said he was from Canada being like, why are you guys so obsessed with him? And then people were just responding like they do. And he just kind of kept responding in a way that like normal people having a normal conversation would not, and he seemed like a new person who I didn't know. And so, you know, I went to moderate his comment, and I deleted it, and then wrote in the box that you can send a message to the other admins, you know, another, another aggro white guy or something, another white guy acting up, I think, is what I said. But then, I guess with the Facebook moderating, thing, if you don't want your note, to go to the moderated person, you have to hit a slider. And I didn't hit that slider, because I didn't really know about that slider, because I just it all the stuff changes all the time. So I sent the note to the guy, and then realized my mistake, and then put his comment back. And then I sent him an email of apology. And I was like, sorry, we've just got a bunch of guys who are doing this a lot. We need to kind of keep track of them. I'm really sorry. I hope this is okay. And he wrote back No, not okay. And then he took a screenshot of my comment to him and posted it in 20 threads all in a row. Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out where in the new Facebook interface, the band user thing is, and everybody's reporting everything. And it was just a little hectic. And this was all happening roughly two minutes before to five to 10 minutes after Josh and I were supposed to meet and have our leisurely conversation about our much better behaved community here on meta filter.

Cortex 3:06 Yes, I appreciate Metafilter members general capacity to not flip out even when they're annoyed or upset about something,

Jessamyn 3:14 I kind of appreciate the fact that the interface never changes to be perfectly honest.

Cortex 3:17 The fact that the admin tools are still comprehensible. 10 years, you know, after they were, you know, last touched or something that was very good. The admin tools have stayed very steady over the years. There we go. That's a sentence that actually says what I mean. Yeah, and

Jessamyn 3:34 if they've changed, it's only been to sort of helped the mods do their job better. So you don't, yeah, yeah. You don't you don't have a whole bunch of like, I no longer know how to do the thing I used to know how to do in short,

Cortex 3:49 we don't have anyone imposing a top down Well, here's the new UI we're gonna use this instead. Right?

Jessamyn 3:53 Like it or lump it. Oh, wait, you can undo it for a day and then you have to do that every day for a month and then you can't anymore and you know, I know I should maybe give up Facebook but there's stuff there I need and want so tough I don't

Cortex 4:08 I'm gonna try and find my tweet about this. But speaking at admin interfaces, the parlor stuff

Yes, I'll paste this will link this in the in the thread but basically, one of the many incredibly fucking many things that have happened in the last month which it's it's kind of tricky. We didn't do a podcast for the end of the year because we did the Gullah and that was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it a great deal. But it also means we've got kind of like a two month backlog on potential podcast

Jessamyn 4:48 discovered a lot of time in America.

Cortex 4:52 Yeah, we pretty much tried not to I think talk about the election and whatnot, and so on during the golly either which I don't want to get into tons hear either because I'm tired of it but you know there are a lot has happened since the podcast we recorded in the first of December I suppose. One of those many things that happened was there was that whole fucking storming of the US Capitol shit on the sixth and one of the results

Jessamyn 5:20 didn't want to talk about it. Why about it?

Cortex 5:23 I'm bringing I'm I'm contextualizing the

Jessamyn 5:26 know that you can just see waves hands, that's okay

Cortex 5:29 now anyway waves hands, blah, blah blah. And as a result parlour ended up sort of imploding. Or in relation to that parlor and up. Like this thing I'm doing in retrospect, I'm looking at the date and realize it was actually from before that when this was first posted, it was a picture of the parlor content moderation UI.

Jessamyn 5:52 Oh, I never saw that. Oh, while

Cortex 5:56 it's on the one hand, it's like whatever it's, it's something that you would use someone reports a comment or something, you'd go to this interface and you press an appropriate button. And, you know, that's what every comment moderation interface is gonna look like to some extent, but this one has a bunch of different things on it. And they're color coded to some extent to imply importance or severity. So there's like, not

Jessamyn 6:17 as bad the word is bad or cred.

Cortex 6:20 Nudity is orange threat is yellow, and everything else not violation is green, and everything else is the default color including terrorism. Child Exploitation, gore and blood. So these are normal things, nudity and pornography. Hey, buddy. It's it's the whole the whole fucking parlor is a clown show. And I don't know if it's really going to survive this weird journey. It's on now of trying to be re hosted in Russia and whatever the fuck. It definitely felt like it. It landed on the wrong side of a lot of people's attention with the whole fucking Trumpist insurrection, shit. And good fuck them. But I'm curious, in an abstract way, how that finds out. I'm also excited to just never find out because it never becomes worthy of mention again. But yeah, that whole that was a whole that was a whole thing a lot happened. And hey, now we've got a different president who's not a giant fascist should bake like the last one. And that's,

Jessamyn 7:22 I mean, if I were being an edge Lord and my Facebook Live, do you see like, Yeah, certainly.

Cortex 7:30 Yeah, no, it's

Jessamyn 7:31 an old white man, though.

Cortex 7:33 He's an old white man. And the US is not suddenly free from all the systemic problems that has and systems of oppression baked into its government and business stances. So plenty of stuff is still really fucked. But one thing is less fucked. And also, that thing isn't on Twitter anymore. And it's amazing how nice that is. It's it's a different flavor to not have other I didn't follow the fucker but like people would retweet it. And this whatever the fuck he was on about was the story. And that having been absence,

Jessamyn 8:07 I can hear a bunch of dishes in the background with you, by the way.

Cortex 8:11 I don't have any dishes in the background. No. Ghost dishes. It might be my chair adjusting? I don't know.

Jessamyn 8:19 I don't know. It sounds like somebody's in the kitchen stacking dishes. Nope.

Cortex 8:26 Anyway, that's, I will I will cut myself short on all that. But anyway, it's been it's been a weird month. And here we are. And I'm okay being here.

Jessamyn 8:39 Yeah, and earlier today, I was in another meeting with the American Library Association Code of Conduct Committee. And that's going to be really interesting. I am helping this gigantic organization of librarians create a code of conduct and it is going to be nuts. But the meeting went really well. So I feel optimistic, maybe too strong, but you know, good about, like everybody else's like I don't know much about codes of conduct but I have a lot of experience working in groups and blah. And I'm like, I'm not very good at working in groups, but I know codes of conduct like the back of my hand. So maybe we can all make it work together. Or maybe

Cortex 9:20 there's I mean, there's a lot of good source material out there at this point. So

Jessamyn 9:24 yeah, and we're working with some of it we're mostly working with the ALA groups versions of it and I'm looking at like, while many filters Community Guidelines, which are pretty good and like terms of I still hear that noise.

Cortex 9:38 I just adjusted my drapes, like blinds Okay. Try sitting extremely still and see what happens.

Jessamyn 9:47 I mean, we have this problem with Jim to like the microphone makes any noise in the room that it thinks might be somebody trying to talk amplified and everything else is quiet. Yeah. And and I'm just It's hard for me to hear for whatever reason. Um, yeah, but I'm like, let's look at GitHub. Let's look at, like, let's look at giant tech communities. Because like, these are people who don't know, a lot of the sort of internet terms for, you know, frequent and almost boring because it's so familiar harassment. And it's worth being like, well, if you didn't know, now, you know, like, we got to talk about see lightning today, and it was adorkable.

Cortex 10:30 Oh, nice. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna filter.

Jessamyn 10:37 Yeah, I think so. Thank you, I think goes out to fumble for removing the broken Map API for now, of jobs and IRL, so that whatever Google's free thing was, was no longer free. And then it was lingering for a while because we have a slightly choppy means of allocating our scarce tech resources. And now,

Cortex 11:05 we continue to be in a pandemic, basically, is the thing, which was, does not itself affect the durability of any given technical task, necessarily. But it does affect the ability of someone who is solo parenting a special needs child, much of the time to have time to sit down and interrupt a computer. So verbals doing what they can. And it's deeply appreciated. And it's, it's just slower going than it would be if there weren't a fox and a hen and chicken feed and a boat and a river, etc.

Jessamyn 11:43 Yeah, well, and it's sort of hard to determine, like when they have time to do things, like what exactly is gonna reach the top of that list? And it may not be the thing that I don't know, users members are more concerned about, and it's a lot of times the back end stuff that helps the site. run more smoothly.

Cortex 12:07 Well, yes, yes. So so on job, there is no map. I kind of don't miss it. Honestly.

Jessamyn 12:12 Maybe we'll just I never liked it, honestly.

Cortex 12:15 Yeah. So we'll see. It would certainly be an easy way to resolve the problem is to say the problem is resolved. Because it's right. Well, we'll Yeah. Anyway, there were jobs. There were jobs in January, there were jobs in December, there were several jobs

Jessamyn 12:32 that were Mary Kay had this really interesting customer journey specialist job that I thought was actually pretty interesting. And I'm like, I could be a customer journey person. And then this list of stuff to do is kind of long, so it's probably not for me. But if you're someone who's good at opening closing tickets, and you're a good communicator, and and some other things I'm not totally sure I understand. This is actually a pretty interesting, fairly decent job that comes with benefits and a whole bunch of other stuff. And they talk about, they use Slack and a bunch of other tools you're probably familiar with.

Cortex 13:08 Yeah. And let's see, goat dog has a Pay Pal checkout web tweaking thing. They just need a little bit help with their website. Oh, yeah,

Jessamyn 13:19 that's nice. I mean, likewise, red, Nikki was looking for somebody to do just a quick helped me with a Shopify thing. I don't know if that happened. Hope it happened. And then there's a couple posts from December that I don't think we talked about, Adrian Han was looking for a fact checker, most ACIS most Moses, how do you pronounce that username? Moses, maybe Moses, Moses needs somebody to send some DVDs, et cetera, et cetera. There's, there's a couple jobs and again, you know, if you need somebody for a thing, whether it's a gig or an actual sort of, you know, thing that pays money, Metafilter jobs, help. It was really helpful. I also, we don't always talk about this, but I wanted to mention that there's two ongoing IRL things stanczyk And, etc. People have a Saturday morning online Baking Club, where they just kind of like, Oh, that's right, chat together and bake together. Catherine, um, I think, and it's just kind of a neat, a neat, a neat thing. They just cook and chat on Saturday mornings. Eastern Standard Time. And it's a it's a nice thing. And then Eniola and friends are still doing their peripatetic persistent pirate puffins, Pacific peregrination kind of, you know, walk, walk together. So check that out. If you're looking for some little community things, and maybe getting some exercise. Jim and I were both talking about how it is so cold. It may be too cold for exercise today. Yeah, and it's like six, it's like six degrees out and the sun's up now. And it won't be up probably when by the time we're done talking, so that'll maybe six degrees. You heard me.

Cortex 15:06 Okay. I was like 60s warm. What are you talking? Oh,

Jessamyn 15:10 six Fahrenheit

Cortex 15:15 boom. I am editing a little back anything on a project post right now. Oh, great to make the MEPhI post id thing

Jessamyn 15:23 work. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't post these all in the place where I should have been answered. I did it. I was just like reading from the website. You know where this is.

Cortex 15:31 I was just I was making it happen subtly on the hood and then you tattled on yourself

Jessamyn 15:36 revealed. revealed

Cortex 15:38 secrets revealed, oh, let's talk about projects. Let's, let's let's Let's experience some projection.

Jessamyn 15:46 Yeah, let me see. Baba, baba, baba, baba, there was one. Oh, yeah, I think one of my favorite ones was. And you know, there have been many. Well, too well, a couple. At any rate, the one I was going to talk about first was malevolence, happy birthday to you. The song is out of copyright, public domain day gave us the Great Gatsby and some other stuff this year. But this song has been out of copyright for a couple years. And they made a couple different versions. And you can download high quality web vs under a CCO public domain license. So it was very, very cool. And it also became posted to metal filter with a very short one comment as as short as it gets really without being comment LIS posed by Eniola. So I liked it. In fact, that reminds me, I have made three new versions of my End Meeting for all video. Yeah, and I don't think I put that on projects originally because it was in music. But maybe my videos should be in projects.

Cortex 17:02 That could work. Yeah, they are. They are great.

Jessamyn 17:04 No. hyrax is just a lot of public domain. Video content from the prevalent or library.

Cortex 17:10 Foods just posted? project called finger farm. Which is well, I mean, okay, so finger.

Jessamyn 17:22 So finger, you're like UNIX finger. Right?

Cortex 17:25 Right? Yeah, finger utility. People could people on a UNIX system could put special files in their home directories. And then you could finger a user on a server, and it would basically give you the content of those,

Jessamyn 17:37 oh, wait, I don't know, well, I think maybe I'm not sure if you're describing something different, or if I didn't understand. But essentially, it's just a text file. It's not like an FTP where you can go get a file,

Cortex 17:50 right? It's just, it's like a dot plan file in your directory would just be like, you know, some text that you wrote, and a few word a finger cortex at meta filter, if we had a finger server set up with that domain, then it would grab my plan file,

Jessamyn 18:03 and it just, it just spits it out onto the screen. And you can

Cortex 18:08 just put a note on your personal, you know, cubicle that someone could drop by him read without having to actually go there,

Jessamyn 18:15 I really did have people who I had sort of, you know, flirty relationships with where we would, you know, put like special notes in the finger files. And it's hard because the word is again, not extractable from it's also kind of sexy meaning, which makes it all super complicated. Yeah. But tell me more about this project. Well, this

Cortex 18:40 project, I think what foods did was basically write up a finger server so that if you get an account on an instance of this server, then you can have you know, your dot plan, file, your dot project file, and people could finger you at finger dot farm, which is just the functionality, but like, its its little own standalone, kind of social network thing. And also the codes available for distribution on GitHub. So you could start up your own finger server. And yeah, that's the whole thing. It's just like, he's like, you're not let's let's let's make finger a thing again.

Jessamyn 19:17 Yeah, you know, I have a couple like Shell accounts left in the world. And I should probably put something in my diet plan, because that would be fun. Right? Yeah. Finger farm. I love it. It's adorkable. None of that. The other thing I wanted to mention which has specific funny, sort of adorable library utility is waning Gibbons, little browser extension. So if you use canopy, which is like a movie watching thing, sometimes libraries are signed up for it and you have a watch list that's just long and you just sit there go On, I don't know what to watch, you can use this browser extension that's available for Firefox or Chrome that will just choose a random movie and play it for you. It won't click Play. So

Cortex 20:17 well, what's the point.

Jessamyn 20:20 But it but it will show you kind of a random thing. And I just I just love these little like, you know, trying to try to try to make it easier for you.

Cortex 20:33 I am enthusiastic about this project from overlapping illness called blob opera MIDI, which, as he as he describes, there was a thing called blob opera that Google may or something that Google made, I should say, that came out. Since our last actual podcast, this would have been mid December, yeah. And blah, blah, blah, is great, you just sort of go and play with it. And you can make these little guys sing by picking one of them and raising, you basically pick the note that one of four little blobs of singing, and the other three will harmonize along with it in a nice way based on a bunch of arrows

Jessamyn 21:12 webpage, or is it just code. I'm looking at it on GitHub, and I want to see blobs.

Cortex 21:21 So you should go to the Google blob opera link in the

Jessamyn 21:26 post, I'm clearly in the wrong place,

Cortex 21:28 then click on the launch experiment. And then that do that and I'll let you play with that and giggle. But the the whole idea of the actual Google blob thing was like, it takes your input of a single note. And then it creates music, sort of algorithmically based on some rules about harmony derived from a bunch of existing basically

Jessamyn 21:52 can't show this to Jim. Oh, my God. All right. Exit experiment. Yes.

Cortex 22:00 So that's the thing. And if you haven't played with blob operation, because it's a fun thing to play around with, but but overlapping pelvis when this was posted on the blue, felt the same way I did that it would be nice to be able to actually control things a lot more precisely, but he actually did something about it. And so he figured out a way to actually sort of hijack the notes that the excuse me, the notes that were being generated for harmony when you move one of the blobs around, and they said, Well, what if I just tell it, all of the notes that shouldn't be singing, and hijack all the clever stuff that's behind the harmonization work that someone did for this experiment. And they said, say, let's just feed it some fucking MIDI files. And he worked it out so that you could take an arbitrary MIDI file and feed it to the blob wrapper, and these blobs will sing that thing you gave it. And he's got some examples that he generated. And he was posted on Twitter as he went. And so he put that all together into some code. And that's what blob opera MIDI is, that's a project is code with which you too can force the blobs to sing random MIDI files of your choosing, which is excellent way to wait to fucking get the job done. Because there was no chance that I was going to, like, make that kind of effort.

Jessamyn 23:11 Right. Very cool. Yeah. I would like to highlight another movie watching tool, this one by Miss Jenny, which is called net flex. And this is probably what I need to do today, because it's six degrees outside. How do you so you can watch Netflix. And if you watch it with this little Chrome extension called net flex, it'll give you a guided bodyweight workout in the lower corner of your program. So you can see a little person I assume, doing little stretches and stuff while you're watching your. whatever your thing is. Yeah, that's excellent. I like it. I don't know a lot of people voted for it. But nobody commented. So maybe they haven't. I don't know what it's called Netflix and sweat. So, so cute. Yeah, it's really inspired. Miss Jenny is the lead on a lot of fun, interesting projects.

Cortex 24:13 Yeah, we've we've ended up talking about a few years over the years. Yeah. important news that came out just a couple days after our last podcast and in early December as psychiatrics Yes, information about singing mice.

Jessamyn 24:29 So good. And congratulations. sidetracks that's really cool. And a very hard thing to do during this very hard year.

Cortex 24:36 Yes, this Yeah, this was a thesis, a PhD thesis events that happened over zoom because of the pandemic. And yeah, this kind of medical proposed to and yeah, it's it's, it's rad. Congratulations. Just good stuff all around.

Jessamyn 24:52 And I'm not really sure why you haven't mentioned this, Josh. But Mr. Visible created the new kind of musical instrument that's ridiculously, maybe ridiculously easy was like, oh, where's the challenge someone

Cortex 25:09 else, it now that we've distributed projects posting to happen more across the team, I just literally don't know about some projects until we get to this part of the month where we do a podcast. And I like alright. So no, I haven't seen this at all.

Jessamyn 25:24 And it's basically sort of a concept and then they have some very long follow ups, being like, Oh, hey, you know, I'd really like to make this into a thing, but that's not my thing. So if somebody can sort of help with this aspect of it something something there's a lot of chat going on on Reddit, in addition to in this thread, if you're someone who has a talent for you know, bringing things to actual market, but you want a good idea. Mr. Visible has done a great deal of that work. It just it just looks super, super cool.

Cortex 25:59 Oh, nice. So it's a little sort of diatonic courting.

Jessamyn 26:04 Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's like a little cording thing. But it's, you know, it's got the letters on it. You don't have to have a lot of like flexibility or ability to do lots of things with your hands in order to make it work. It's, yeah, it's really just great.

Cortex 26:20 What is pretty rad, I will have to look more at that later.

Jessamyn 26:22 I think I think it's, I think it's solidly, solidly in your wheelhouse.

Cortex 26:27 Yeah, I heartily endorse inventing musical instruments. And you know what, there's a bunch of other stuff on projects, too. But we've got two months worth, and we're not going to go through it all. So hey, go check out projects. And if you're making something go posted on projects, projects,

Jessamyn 26:43 projects,

Cortex 26:45 it's kind of hard to convey a nod on just audio, like, there's definitely a firm nod when I said projects again, and I feel like maybe that sort of comes from the cadence, but I

Jessamyn 26:55 gotta say one of my favorite things about the Gala was it's really fun to like, get that kind of not just audio feedback, like, you know, just moving around, or hey, what are you wearing? Or, you know, seeing the other people it was great to see time and eyebrows and Jeremy and you know, other people who popped in bond cliff and his and his, his live? He's got he's got a quarantine tank now. And fish. Yes. I mean, he is that guy where like you like go to bed at the end of the day and look in the mirror and you're like, What the fuck did I do today? Bond Cliff got a whole tank of fish. He made a bowl. He has a job. Yep. I wound up brushing my teeth and put on socks.

Cortex 27:47 Nice. Yeah, it's better than not putting on socks and not brushing your teeth.

Jessamyn 27:52 Well, and the only reason I wear socks is because otherwise I fuss with my toes and pick all my toenails off. So it's not really it's more like medicine that it's like, you know, an accomplishment. But I'll take it. I think

Cortex 28:06 there's been a thing. This reminds me. I guess this was like late last year, but I just saw it for the first time today was like this thing. The short phrase for which is run the dishwasher twice, which is basically we just

Jessamyn 28:19 saw this too. I guess we both probably saw it on Wall Trump, right? Yeah, probably.

Cortex 28:23 It looks like there was a mid November. I'm not sure what I don't really want to do.

Jessamyn 28:29 Get back into the Twitter world. Yeah. Talk about the thing.

Cortex 28:35 Yeah, we'll talk about the thing. And maybe we can find a good non clickbait

Jessamyn 28:39 mug trap is a non clickbait link for Well,

Cortex 28:41 if you can find that I don't remember where the image was. But anyway, the whole concept is this is

Jessamyn 28:46 on it. So I'll be able to find it because I use the conversations feature on this website that we made. That is so nice.

Cortex 28:53 Excellent. Run the dishwasher twice is the sort of button on a story about a woman who was talking to her therapist and basically was in a like a real sort of shitty depressed,

Jessamyn 29:08 do anything. My fucking dishes are just killing me. I don't want to scrub them. And so I don't do anything with them. And then they just pile up and I am sad.

Cortex 29:16 Yeah. And so she she gets on like telehealth with her therapist, and he's like, Well, what do you wanna talk about? And he's like, Well, I don't know nothing. And he's like, Well, what are you feeling? I'm it's this stuff's crappy, like, ya know, what's

Jessamyn 29:28 getting in your way?

Cortex 29:29 What specifically is bugging you right now as well. I haven't done the dishes. And the thing is I my dishwashers shitty so I need to scrub the dishes before I put it in the dishwasher. Otherwise, they won't come out clean. And I don't want to scrub the dishes because that's, you know, fucking too much and, and so I'm not doing them and I feel really shitty about all of that. And therapist was like, Well, what if you just run the dishwasher twice? What if you just run your shitty dishwasher more than once to get things clean? And I like but I can't it's like, well, why can't you there's no fucking rule that you can't just fucking run the dishwasher twice, you know,

Jessamyn 30:09 constraints for this. You made up this rule and you can break this or ignore this rule. Yeah.

Cortex 30:15 Which I I deeply identify with, it turns out, yes. And yeah,

Jessamyn 30:22 well, I don't know about you, but like this applies to my life directly, right that like, I make up a bunch of arbitrary rules. And some of them to be fair, I really grew up with like, kind of etiquette slash manners, like, well, I can't do that, because it's rude. And you're like, you're talking about dealing with a person who's being deeply rude to you, but you don't want to be rude back to them. Maybe you need to rethink your own constraints that you put in place, so that you're not spending the rest of the day being like, Fuck, what I should have said was, you know, like, my landlady. She's lovely. I help her with technology. But in these pandemic, winter times, technology is like everything now, right? It's like getting signed up for the vaccine. It's ordering stuff through the mail. It's keeping up with her family. And it's expanded. And if I wait for her to be like, Oh, if you've got a minute, as opposed to me just coming down and being like, Hey, how's it going? And her being like, I have 17 things I need you to do kind of. And I'm not great at being like, yeah, okay, but we need to schedule a time not have you just kind of ambush me. And that's what I should say. But instead, what I do is help her with the 17 things and then come home and don't eat enough dinner or whatever my problem is, because I think I'm being nice, but what I'm just doing is eroding my own ability to deal with everything else in the world. So this is how it applies to me personally, because like, you don't want to be mean to it. 97 year old lady. On the other hand, it's still okay to have boundaries with other living human beings, because you're all alive. So also, she's gonna get vaccinated in like, a week and a half, and I'm gonna get vaccinated in June. So I'm gonna tell her to enjoy the supermarket for me. And yes,

Cortex 32:08 I feel like yeah, there's, there's something to the idea that like, one way of slicing the Gordian knot is to look at it and say, I don't I don't have to fucking deal with this not this not is not actually important. What if I just walk around the knot? And

Jessamyn 32:22 well, like, I'm with other shit. That is one of the things that I always think typifies what I consider to be kind of the average slightly maladapted internet person, right? And I'm not saying I'm in that group. I'm not saying I'm not in that group. But somebody who's like, Well, imagine if you couldn't, blah, then how would you do blah? Like, what if you found out that eating macrobiotic would, would, would cure or inhibit this health problem you're having? Then? Would you do it? And it's kind of a leading question, because they're trying to get you to be like, Well, sure, but otherwise, I wouldn't have them be like, ah, but instead you can be like, Yeah, but we don't know that because the world is complicated. And they're like, but what if and you're like, No, we don't know that. And you know, the complicated is in the uncomplicated years. Strike me to be part of that and human relations is that huge gap of what if you know, it's the trolley problem? What if fuck the trolley? What if I walk to work?

Cortex 33:24 Yeah. What if I don't just borrow trouble? recreationally

Jessamyn 33:29 but you know what rush says if you choose not to decide Josh

Cortex 33:35 are we talking about the band? You still

Jessamyn 33:37 have made a choice? Well, I mean sure. Of course you're talking about the band

Cortex 33:43 as bracing for the possibility that against all odds all this time he will Yeah, but he makes some good points all else

Jessamyn 33:53 wait, you make good points. Well, you know rush Geoffrey Rush. What are you talking about? Oh, oh my god.

Cortex 34:00 I've done surely you were gonna turn out to be a crypto did oh head like they have done

Jessamyn 34:03 something to my brain where I've literally forgotten those people exist. And so you know where I have to like, go Google Alex Jones again, because I forgot who he was. And like, that's kind of cool. And I also worry sometimes that maybe there's actually something wrong with my brain. You know what I mean?

Cortex 34:22 Yeah, I would never have pulled Geoffrey Rush out of Rush either. That's great. Now I'm thinking about like him acting and stuff. That's way better than Limbaugh. Alright, so

Jessamyn 34:32 I never think about that guy. Just I the only time I think about him was like Medal of Freedom when they were looking at giving it to Bill Belichick and Bill Belichick turned it down. And Jim wanted to talk about Rush Limbaugh and I made him stop. Yes. Yeah.

Cortex 34:48 All right. Let's talk about metal filter. Let's talk about Metafilter proper. Let's talk about the blue. Okay. To find the blue.

Jessamyn 34:54 I have a couple sets of things basically I'm This one is maybe my favorite. Because it's like a classic. It's by Nicholas with two eyes. And it's sort of a classic, like slightly grouchy blog post about a thing that then people can, you know, talk about the larger issue. So it's basically someone who is an archivist, talking about how people just use the word archive to apply to a million different things. And please stop and it's just a blog post. So it's not like the Society for American Archivists being like, we insist that you stop. But so it became kind of a fun but short thread talking about you know, the Internet Archive, I think I was the one that was talking about them, and other people talking about, you know, different stuff that they use for their own jobs that they want people to stop talking about. Bla bla, bla, bla bla is an interesting thread and I liked it.

Cortex 35:56 Nice. Yeah. I really enjoyed seeing this. Scrubs made a post about the bronchial graph. Ah, yes, a very small, not very accurate pen plotter that can be built out of like platinum, I think it's something like 50 bucks worth of stuff. I mean, if you know how to do this, if you know how to do it, like it's it's definitely a little bit of a DIY project. It's not a crazy one. But you know, there's things like Yes, you, you might do a little bit of soldering. Right, right, right. And you need you need a you need a small computer you need like a Raspberry Pi, which is very small and

Jessamyn 36:34 smallest. Am I right? Well, I

Cortex 36:37 mean, there's probably smaller but like, I think Arduinos tell I pronounce it Arduino.

Jessamyn 36:47 I don't know I say Arduino as if it were like DWI. No, kind of like you. You have an extra syllable in there. I'm only pointing it out because I'm curious that because I'm Yeah, I have

Cortex 36:56 no idea. Yeah, don't quote me. Okay. Don't call me or do endlessly in future podcasts. That's also fun when that happens

when when someone keeps calling me out on a idiosyncratic bit of pronunciation, that's called Dragon me. Anyway, the brocco graph is great. It's a goofy little thing. It's not a high precision plotter. It's just a little thing that looks like you're making a little robot arm that draws pictures, and I fucking love that.

Jessamyn 37:31 Wiggly pictures. Yeah,

Cortex 37:33 wiggly little pictures. And there's some kind of annoying stuff in the thread of people yell, blah, blah, blah. But is it good,

Jessamyn 37:41 but I did leave kind of a long note. Because as people were discussing how early snarking is not conducive to sort of community cohesion.

Cortex 37:51 Let's enjoy the fun thing. Let's talk about the interesting things well, or like if you

Jessamyn 37:55 don't get it be like, Hey, this looks cool. But I'm not sure if I know how to do a thing. I think too many people don't use that softening language. Yeah, like, I like this. Don't get me wrong. But I did have a question about blah. Instead of just like, tell me how to do this or whatever. And you're like,

Cortex 38:12 Yeah, you get a lot of mileage out of contextualizing critical thought by acknowledging that as a critical thought and reaction to a thing that otherwise seems interesting. And like if your actual feeling is everything about this is fucking terrible. I can't believe you posted this. Wow. Maybe Yeah. That's that's probably a pretty overt reaction.

Jessamyn 38:30 Go trade some more Gamestop stock.

Cortex 38:32 Yeah. We'll get there,

Jessamyn 38:36 I suppose. I didn't even notice if there was a post on it. It's just been delighting over the last couple months. But if it did, it didn't go to sideways because it can show up in the mod stuff. Well, I'm gonna have a pair of posts because every time I tell Jim, I'm coming to the podcast, he's like talking about my thing. And to be honest, I like his posts. But I'm gonna actually talk briefly about other gym, which is bond cliff, who posted just a nice kind of obit thread for a British mountaineer, who was a big deal. The first climb Everest via the Southwest face bivouacking at 28,000 feet, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it was just a very sweet obit post, which I liked. And then Jim, my Jim made this post about a month and maybe a half later about the Sherpas and apologies it's actually almost all Sherpas, one Nepali became the first team to summit que tu during the winter, and they were two separate teams. They got together. They sang the net Nepali national anthem, did the summit, and it's just kind of a nice, like, you know, it's it's super cold. I believe they didn't have oxygen. I'm not 100% sure on that part, but it's just it's just the people talked about Cal Have been for a while because oh my god. And there's just really cool pictures and and there's a nice link to Nepali national anthem, which I appreciate it. So it's a nice, it's a nice little, a nice little combination. And it always makes me laugh when I see schmuck commenting because schmuck goes username is very dear to my heart.

Cortex 40:23 It's a very good username. Yes. I also enjoyed this thread from just a couple of days ago, that hippy bear posted about Twitter user who goes by at BS auto posting about the process of retrieving data from a five and a quarter inch floppy disk. Early 80s that had a game that they wrote.

Jessamyn 40:47 Oh, I remember this. I remember this story. Yeah, I think I saw it on Twitter. And I didn't know it was over I met a filter, I should spend some more time like, looking for cross posts, because I prefer talking to the metal filter people.

Cortex 41:01 Yeah. Yeah, same, I try and remind myself, remind myself to come over here and look. Excuse me. Anyway, this this, this thread, it's a long thread going through the steps they took to try and figure out how to retrieve the data from this disk that had been corrupted. And when a disk is corrupted, the short version is that doesn't necessarily mean that the the disk has been literally, like damaged stroy Yeah, it means that there has been some amount of damage at some level to the data. You know, it's a magnetic disk, and it's some little bit of a got D magnetized, if that's a bit that tells you where some other stuff is, you know, no longer know how to find that stuff, it's a bit that tells the discount to boot the computer up, it won't boot up correctly, you know, you can do a small amount of damage to make parts of a computer system not behave correctly. And that was going on here. Basically, there was like, I know this disk is corrupted, I can't make a clean copy of it, it won't function the way disk should if you just put it in. But maybe I can get most of the data back. And it turns out that they were able to do that. They managed to see their terrible old game. There was a dog racing game, and they drew pictures of each of the different dogs and what a dog's name is 20 bucks. I was so happy about

Jessamyn 42:24 that. Josh, that's such an Easter egg for you.

Cortex 42:27 Yep. Anyway, it's, it's, it's a fun read, I could not follow most of what they were doing in the thread, but they're writing in a conversational way with pictures and sort of making their way down. And it's, it's totally fun. And you get to see pictures of computer dogs. So I thought that was a lot of fun.

Jessamyn 42:42 That's pretty great. Pretty great. Oh, I forgot the other pandering to Jessamyn. Post, which was about the library for the most recently departed president. Because it's a really interesting thing that the concept of Presidential Libraries has undergone a lot of shifts in America, since you know, the beginning of time. And, you know, there was a lot of kerfuffle, when the Obama Presidential Library was not going to be called the library it was going to be called I don't even remember Cultural Center, which actually makes sense to what it is. But presidential libraries used to be kind of literally libraries, but then they would also have like museums, but it was where the President's documents were stored. And nowadays, you have to kind of and and often, but not always, the presidents were buried there. So it's like a huge mausoleum. At the same time, Clinton is going to be buried at Clinton's library. Although Carter's going to be buried at his home, in Plains, Georgia, which of course makes sense. Um, so at any rate, there's a thrown a thread about, you know, the Trump presidential library, and what that means, and of course, people make a lot of kind of hurt turf. He's an idiot comments, which there's

Cortex 44:00 a lot of really low hanging very ripe for delicious fruit there,

Jessamyn 44:03 which are completely reasonable. And in fact, the guy that I had to banned from this Facebook group was, in fact talking about the Trump presidential library now that I think about it. Oh, pick that scab. Jessamyn. All right. Um, but you know, I think the concept of presidential libraries in America is its own kind of interesting thing. And so I enjoyed this thread for the conversation of the people who kind of had stuff to say actually about, you know, reading the articles and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. was interesting. If you're interested in that topic of presidential libraries. There's some information in there.

Cortex 44:40 Nice. Let's see there is a post that I went to make the other day and someone else had already made it several days earlier. Little thing Yes. It's like, you know, it's disappointing and also vindicated. Oh, the thing I wanted to have happen happened,

Jessamyn 44:56 and I didn't have to do any work. But yeah, I don't understand this post at I've read I've read every word in it I have no idea what's going on

Cortex 45:03 so this post it's it's a random text generator.

Jessamyn 45:07 Former Vermonter now lives in DC. Yes.

Cortex 45:10 Make the post all around

Jessamyn 45:11 good guy.

Cortex 45:12 There is apparently a podcast called The Lorman I don't know it, but I gather it's sort of like 16 17/17 century ish feeling old stories.

Jessamyn 45:25 Like legs like true stories.

Cortex 45:27 Like Like, I don't I don't know. I don't think about it looks like

Jessamyn 45:31 it is. Yeah, it's a podcast about like local legends. Interesting. Okay,

Cortex 45:36 so this this is a text generator, which is the Patrick Josh part. And it just generates couple sentences of like there's a story that comes from a which is you know, journal or here's something passed down by the people of the town of floor but for you know who this past Sunday three text on blah, blah, blah, you know, and it just tells it like, it's a very short synopsis of a story. Someone might then tell

Jessamyn 46:03 Oh, my God, the comment by AFI I think I found the porn. There is a legend which is spoken of in Cumbria and 1477 and necromancer died of drops, he can track from a skeleton.

Cortex 46:20 Anyway, it's delightful. It's just a fun thing to play with.

Jessamyn 46:22 And you left a comment in that third self amusing joke. Yes,

Cortex 46:26 it was yes, we just know uptaken. I mean, we just okay, because it doesn't matter.

Jessamyn 46:32 I talk about on mailing lists where like, you know, you're the thread killer, like you show up and you're like, Yeah, that was all great until it turned out, you know, this bad thing. And then everyone's like, nobody

Cortex 46:44 really, it's just that I showed up several days late already. So it's like, all the

Jessamyn 46:48 time, I'm gonna filter now I actually kind of enjoy that method of interacting, like, Oh, hey, this party is already over, but and a couple posts from last month. The Lonely legacy of Spam is a post by dirty old town, talking about you know, how spam has a different meaning feeling vibe to people, from other countries, Asian Americans specifically than it might if you're grew up in America, your whole life, and you just knew it as like the weird processed food that was on the supermarket shelves, kind of so to like Filipino Americans, different kinds of Asian Americans, people who grew up in Hawaii, et cetera. So this is an article by Eric Kim, posed by dirty old town thread was, you know, just like had a little flag on it. Like, let's make sure this goes okay. And it actually turns into a really great I thought, sort of conversation about different people's local foodstuffs, for the most excellent for the most part, and as a person who actually kind of like spam. Like, not like I have it in my cabinet, but like, if I see it on the menu at a restaurant, and we do have one restaurant here that occasionally has like spam week. I'm like, Yes, Sign me up. Like it's salty. It's, it's kind of fake btw, it's like the hot dog and Ellen, look there. There. I am showing up late with my comment.

Cortex 48:19 Yeah, no, it's spam is great. It's great in like a hash. Spam. musubi is one of my favorite things in the world once I found out existed, which is it's it's Japanese style, some spam and a rice ball wrapped in seaweed with a little bit of sweet sauce. What I tend to think of as eel sauce. And it's very good, and it's very good. And it's it's it's a staple in Hawaii. I gather. I think I ended up like eating mseb Probably every morning. The one time I was in Hawaii. Wait, why

Jessamyn 48:55 did you go to Hawaii?

Cortex 48:58 Angela had a geology conference. So wait a second. I must have known you then. Yeah, no, this was this was in the last few years.

Jessamyn 49:09 Hawaii in the last few years?

Cortex 49:10 Well, yeah. Probably not at the same time.

Jessamyn 49:12 I hope not.

Cortex 49:15 No, we were just there for a few days. And she had a conference and I sort of tromped around and we saw some geological stuff. And yeah, it was nice to be Yeah, it was it was very pleasant. I guess. I don't understand why people like going to Hawaii. It's a nice place. Big Island. And I sort of I wasn't as happy when I was like on the hotel grounds because like it's a resort hotel or sort of thing that we ended up being booked at. And it's like a ship that's got even more square footage, but

Jessamyn 49:42 I stayed in a dorm. And it didn't have any air conditioning. And there was a power failure, because there was like a hurricane warning. And so the ceiling fan didn't work and so it was very hot. And I had terrible allergies the entire time I was there, which was really too bad because I like otherwise, like, you know, the culture of Hawaii obviously is sort of laid back and I am not. So it's very interesting to be somewhere where you fit in so badly for me. You know, the food was amazing. My colleagues at the University of Hawaii because I went there to like teach a class and give a talk and whatever were just lovely. But it was a very weird because I went in, I guess it was April. So it was like before plants were out here. But plants were out there. And so my whole like, system was just like, No, and I had like a 10 hour direct flight from New York, which was wild. Just in terms of travel. But yeah, I understand why people like to go to Hawaii. I would probably be okay. Never going again only because it's not entirely for me. Oh, and I got a sunburn.

Cortex 50:50 Someone's I was a problem.

Jessamyn 50:52 Well in sunburn is just my thing. Like, I am transparent in the skin and I burn but yeah, yeah. So another

Cortex 51:01 Oh, do you have him anyway? Yes, I have. Yeah, I've got a couple more quick ones. And then

Jessamyn 51:06 I have one more quick one from from last last month, but go on.

Cortex 51:11 Alright, there is a poster on Jay Harris to a YouTube series called soft lock picking which it's hard to explain in detail other than to say it is possible to in some video games make poor choices such that you have seemingly no way to actually continue the game, which some of the old Pokemon games in particular had situations like this

Jessamyn 51:34 is that like, meaning that you just get stuck in kind of an eddy where you can't play your way out of it. Or

Cortex 51:40 let's say like, for example, so you're playing a Pokemon game. And for anyone who hasn't played Pokemon game, you collect monsters, and then you fight them against other little pocket monsters and whatnot, and is a bunch of that and bunch of deals wandering to other towns and whatnot. But one of the things you could do is like, maybe you need to ride a Pokemon who has the ability to swim across water to get from town A

Jessamyn 52:02 to town, but then they're like, all dead or something, or well, and then

Cortex 52:05 and then you just decide to let all of your Pokemon Go. And then you don't have a Pokemon who can swim and there's no Pokemon on the at the town you swam to that have the ability to swim. And then while you're fucked, you're never gonna leave again. That would be that would be a soft luck. Like the game didn't crash. The game doesn't know it's broken, but you're just you're boned?

Jessamyn 52:25 Well, and theoretically, you could just walk in circles for the rest of time, right? Like, because the game doesn't time out.

Cortex 52:31 You can keep playing, you'll just never make any more progress do anything. So that's, that's the whole idea of soft locking. And this, this post is two. It's about a couple videos and an article about the soft locking stuff. And it's amusing if that sort of thing sounds amusing to you. You might enjoy this. If you're like, What the fuck, then you might not enjoy this. But I liked it a lot.

Jessamyn 52:53 Yeah, no, I liked the idea. And I'm kind of jazzed about it. Now that you've explained it. To me. This is a thread that had sort of one vibe when it was posted and a different vibe now. But it's basically Larry King interviewing Danny pootie. About, you know, a luxury item you couldn't live without and Danny Pudi has, you know, who seemed confused by Larry King in general? Right was like, I don't know socks. Really good coffee. And like king keeps kind of pushing him like Nah, no, no, not like,

Cortex 53:25 private. A private jet, you know, right. Something.

Jessamyn 53:29 Yeah, right. And Danny put, he's just like, what, what? And you know, Larry King's just like, yeah, private jet or something and dandy. Pretty slick. I bought duck tails. Like, like, I don't have private jet money. And so it turns into kind of an interesting conversation. And then, you know, Larry King died at the very end of it. So it turned into a very different, I mean, not conversation

Cortex 53:53 with the thread, not the conversation. Yeah. Yeah. So then pretty says I'm on on DuckTales. Larry, and then Larry King done.

Jessamyn 54:04 Well, and there was a Larry King obit post, which I didn't really look at, because I didn't have anything decent to say about Larry King, particularly. And I'm sure other people did. Maybe arch de posted that. I have been a couple like, I guess

Cortex 54:18 nearly immune to Larry King. Like I know Larry King exists because like, he's been a huge media figure. But also I have never watched Larry King. I never had feelings about Larry King. So it's been like, Yeah, okay.

Jessamyn 54:30 I mean, I mostly knew, like I get really I don't even know what the word is kind of like monomaniacal about like judging, like historical or like celebrity figures. I'm like, Are they a good parent? Are they a good partner? Are they a good? Like, do they have integrity? Like where they had good, you know, and many people who have done many wonderful things in the world were nonetheless terrible spouses and parents and I tried to manage that but later King was one of those terrible spouses. I don't know about parents. So I was just like, you know, let other people who have stuff to say about Larry King talk about him. I don't need to show up with like, that fucking guy. Nobody needs it. So yeah, you

Cortex 55:15 also have no obligation to put in apply to parents because it's the fucking internet and not a funeral for your grandma. So,

Jessamyn 55:20 yes. So you know, I regret putting in a polite appearance at my grandma's funeral. Because it was in a church and it was very churchy. And then I posted on my blog, and this must have been like, 1520 years ago, that it felt really churchy, and I didn't I mean, maybe my grandma was religious, but I didn't know it. And this is like, you know, kind of Piske paleo and Christian religion and, and then my aunt who was bumped of course, because her mother had died, just like lit into me and like was very like crabby and yelled at me about it. And so I've just kind of like maybe I will put in a polite appearance at the next churchy funeral. Yep. Yeah. That was it for me for how to filter.

Cortex 56:10 The two more things I mentioned. One is this post by meta Baroque. About bread falling over and a cucumber falling over and a hot dog falling over and a carrot falling over. They're extremely short videos of exactly what I said. It's like a five second video of a piece of bread falling over this video. And that's that's the whole thing. And I'm fucking delighted and there's waffle falling

Jessamyn 56:30 over.

Cortex 56:32 Yes. There's there's so much of it. And it's just like, it's one of those like, how and why? Who cares? It's the internet. This is content piece of

Jessamyn 56:42 piece of bread. Let's go. Well, just they make little funny noises. What else was I doing? Oh, burnt waffle falling over. See? Yeah. It took a while to fall over lemon muffin tower. Didn't know that was a thing. Okay. Moving on. That's great. That's good.

Cortex 57:03 I will mention this because we mentioned it earlier, there was in fact a post on the 11th about the whole parlor situation.

Jessamyn 57:10 I feel like I must have commented in this. You might uh, yeah, that's me. Yeah. You're in there. Just talking about the serverless architecture and why it bit him in the ass so badly. Yeah. So that was pretty good. Yeah.

Cortex 57:23 Anyway, that's that's worth a shot. And Friday read and picking through of what did and did not happen and whatnot, if you're into that sort of thing. It was a big threat. And that's it. That's me for the blue. Me for the blue. Shall we discuss AskMe? Metafilter? Yeah,

Jessamyn 57:38 let's, um, there's a couple sort of related things. We haven't talked about meta talk, really. But signal definitely has a recent post in there talking about like, hey, how do I get my good vibe back? And every day, a new day, posted a thing and asked me to filter being like, all right, it's been a while. Is there anything that you've done during the pandemic that have really upgraded your life in a way that I might want to know about? Because, you know, we've we all like different things, what have you done that you've enjoyed? That is giving you an upgrade? And so it's just people talking about things that kind of worked out for them, which in a general sense, I always enjoy reading about because there's so much that doesn't work out. It's nice to sometimes read when stuff does.

Cortex 58:29 Yeah. Nice. No, this is cool. Yeah.

Jessamyn 58:35 Both that LM adatok thread from signal.

Cortex 58:37 Yeah. Which we'll do a little bit of talk around up to Yeah. Let's see, what do I have? Do I have anything from asked me? I do actually have one? This is a question from G nos. Greg, nos.

Jessamyn 58:52 Whoa, really? Greg? Greg? Yeah, yeah, I got a Chris.

Cortex 58:59 I had an old cold email conversation on the side with him about this, because he was trying to figure out was it and so he had his question is, hey, I've got this. I've got this image that he links into post that's a specific image of Don Quixote in Santa Ponsa. That one Yeah, it's not it's not the Picasso Don Quixote picture. It's, it's nothing like it really, you know, other than being like black and white, it's totally different style. And he's just wanted to try and find it, so he could get a prints and get a better, you know, version of it. And all he had was this pretty shitty image with a watermark that isn't even legible. And someone found it and I this I love this question, partly because like I was talking with Greg about this, like on email, sort of in parallel with it, and had gotten close to the name, which it's, it turns out it's like My name William Ehlers Oh e ll ers. And I've made a couple of assumptions trying to decipher the watermark that turned out to be wrong. So I thought his name was going to be William O E L L. And that didn't turn up anything because that's the wrong fucking name.

Jessamyn 1:00:13 Right. But I mean, it's a lead. Yeah, it's

Cortex 1:00:16 a lead but but what is E T short for independently got there and found the original image by hopping around the right spot and found his website. And it turns out it's a paper cutting specifically my guess was it was some kind of like relief thing. Right? Just because the sharp lines but paper cutting totally makes sense. Right. And William Ehlers passed away back in 2014. And it sounds like he wasn't doing a lot of like, specifically commercial art production of his stuff. So probably Greg is out of luck is is the answer, but at least he knows specifically how he's out of luck. Because what is the t shirt for? And did you a couple other people?

Jessamyn 1:00:56 Did you go to what is at short force? Profile page?

Cortex 1:01:02 Because he's got little legs. Oh, that's so fucking good. That is so great. I love this.

Jessamyn 1:01:10 Sorry. It's just it's just a funny profile joke. But yeah, that was thanks for bringing it to my attention because I did not. I did not see that. And I was happy that I did. This is one of these chatty questions that I actually kinda like that we're having more of them around. This was ubiquity. asking, Hey, did you romantically sign your initials and a loved ones initials in a public place? What happened? You know, just saying a thing. But one of the things that's kind of nice is at least some of the metal filter people basically, you know, wrote their initials in some place, it's still there. They've been together. 25 years.

Cortex 1:01:55 Nice, adorable. I don't think I ever put initials into a tree in that sense. But I and I, I cringe even saying this. But at some point in my late teens, this was maybe maybe high school maybe summer after my freshman year of college because I had been broken up with by my my girlfriend. I am certain that I carved at least some probably all of the phrase life is pain into victory at the park outside of my high school, near where I grew up. And I've never gone back to try and find it and see if it's still there. And I'm like, Oh my God, but at the same time, I kind of want to because like, Wouldn't that be amazing? If I have like this evidence of this incredible like teenage emo expression? Right? Carbon in living wood? You know? Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:02:53 Wow. Heavy. Yeah, I think all I ever did was like, you know, initials in a heart on a bathroom wall kind of thing. Nothing. Nothing big, nothing lasting. Nothing carved into a thing. But maybe I should.

Cortex 1:03:07 Maybe, yeah. I say carve something real weird, too. Because like you want you want someone to find it be like What the fuck is going on?

Jessamyn 1:03:14 Right? Got like, life is paying everybody can relate to that. Yeah,

Cortex 1:03:17 that's that's that's fucking I've, I have a copy of the crow in, you know, graphic novel. Right? Right. Right, right. It's like whatever. Do some real weird stuff. What else you got?

Jessamyn 1:03:30 I got a couple that are right up my alley. One about really beautiful bird feeders. But not super expensive. But unusual. And or really neat would be cool. Not a lot of stuff going on in there. But I did definitely see some bird feeders I haven't seen before, which I appreciate it. I'm having some sort of bird problem here. Where like, birds still exist. I'm sure of it. But they're not at my house. And I don't know why. Like, I have feed out it is relatively fresh. I don't believe there's any predator birds out but my birds have just stopped visiting. And I don't know what the problem is. And I know they're nearby. So it might be that just neighbors have better feeders. Or it could be there's something specifically I'm doing wrong here. But I'm this I'm this close to Googling, like, Where the fuck did my birds go?

Cortex 1:04:23 What have I been canceled by birds? Right.

Jessamyn 1:04:26 Right. You know, because like the last time I remember this happening, there was a Merlin like a bird that like was around and probably picking off little birds. And so I didn't at all blame them. But this time, I don't think that's what's going on. And it's still just vaguely mysterious. I don't know.

Cortex 1:04:44 That's very strange. I have a bird who keeps trying to I don't know. I don't know if he's trying to get into my office. But he certainly would if there wasn't a window there.

Jessamyn 1:04:53 No, he's fighting with himself.

Cortex 1:04:56 Maybe Maybe, I don't know he's been doing it a lot. You He's definitely fighting

Jessamyn 1:05:01 with himself. Well, he's

Cortex 1:05:02 a dumb fucking bird.

Jessamyn 1:05:03 Have you tried like soaking up the window in that little area? I

Cortex 1:05:06 don't care. It's fine. Okay.

Jessamyn 1:05:09 Well, clearly you and the bird have a relationship, then

Cortex 1:05:11 my cats do dumb shit inside the house all the time. And I'm fine with that too.

Jessamyn 1:05:16 I saw you struggling with your cat on Instagram.

Cortex 1:05:20 I carry it's very come and go and you'd like to come up and hang out on the way you actually asleep. I was actually asleep. I can't imagine

Jessamyn 1:05:26 being so like asleep so that somebody could come in and take a picture of me.

Cortex 1:05:32 I can't get out. I kind of got pretty good, amazing,

Jessamyn 1:05:35 jealous, very jealous. Another one up my alley was this question by Christy. Basically, they use their she uses their library data about that data, bass data, bass, they use the library databases all the time. And just wanted to know, like how the libraries get charged for them to make sure that they're using them in ways to you know, save money for the library, which is very sweet. And ultimately the answer is, please keep using the library in a general sense, because there's not like, in most cases, those things get paid for it some higher level and there aren't usually sort of granular changes but it's basically kind of a library and catnip thread where a bunch of people who work in libraries talk about what things cost and how they're charged for them and please Christy use the library the way you want to the end

Cortex 1:06:39 I like the I like a weird question. I like a question that is just sort of like a weird what is the deal with this and goodbye waffles both were the weirdest nonstop flights.

Jessamyn 1:06:50 Well, my 10 hour flight from New York to you know, Honolulu I felt was fairly weird, but not compared to some of these ones.

Cortex 1:06:57 Yeah. It's a nice it's there's just like, I love aviation trivia. I don't care about aviation. I don't care about trivia. But like telling me weird things about aviation. I'm using Oh, really? Okay. Oh, hahahahaha.

Jessamyn 1:07:09 Oh. Yeah. And like these little mountain hoppers, American Airlines having this tiny flight between Vail and Aspen. Yeah. Yeah. And just the people who are nerdy about these things. Wow, that thread really filled in since the last time I looked at it. Oh, that's cool.

Cortex 1:07:31 That's an action. Action. I thought it was nice.

Jessamyn 1:07:36 Cool. Yes, I liked a net it. This was another kind of weird just wondering, what, what did I do open another tab instead of posting in the box? Basically, this is by trick. Like, okay, you live in a country where the dates are not written like December 11 2020. You live in a country where the dates are written like 11 December 2020. But when you say it out loud, how do you say it? You know, if it's an English obviously, if it's not an English, that's a completely different question. So like, you know, Dorothy, is Underwood is like, I'd say it is 11th December or December 11. But in their head that read it as 11 December. And so it depends where like people are, you know, are brought up where they learn to speak English bubble, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And yeah, it's just kind of a interesting, interesting English but not American English thread. Yeah. And there's a lot of a lot of a lot of different stuff going on there.

Cortex 1:08:48 Yeah, there's a whole yeah, I've got a big tangent that isn't actually even that tangential so dates are weird. Dates are complicated assumptions about dates being done just the way that you used to them being done caused a lot of problems in programming.

Jessamyn 1:09:02 Oh my gosh, story. As you probably know, I use military time on my computer just so I can tell if I'm waking up in the dark if it's six in the morning or six at night, and I was early to a meeting by two hours earlier this week because I just glanced at the 13 o'clock or I just glanced at the three o'clock in the email and I assumed it was 13 o'clock and so I showed up at one and was like Where is everybody? And it turns out it wasn't until 3pm I think it's fine You got any more asks? Just a couple Miko Scott a really good one about like luck. I'm not the world's most organized person trying to figure out holiday stuff while Christmas specifically in this case. I don't want to start too early but then I do everything at the last minute. Is there like Got a timeline to when you do some of this stuff? How do you do it? How do you know when it's too early or too late to do bla bla bla bla, and like, and Pascal Pinocchio's has a really good kind of blocky list. Couple other couple other people, you know, talk about like, Look, you got to send your cards early, but your presence blah, blah, blah. It's just I like it, because I like sort of scheduling and ordering. And it's a great thread where people talk about how they schedule and how they order. Yeah. And speaking of when you were talking about not being interested in airplanes or trivia, here's an entire thread by cozy be about the boring is topics, like, hey, what about container shipping? Well, actually, there's some interesting stuff about container shipping, if you get really deep into it. And people talk about like ATM fees, property loss stuff, you know, remedial COBOL how paint is drying. There's the boring Conference, which talks about some of these things insurance, and it's just interesting looking at, you know, different people talking about their different stuff.

Cortex 1:11:20 Yeah, it's, it's tricky, because like, on one hand, I want to, like take that stance of like, you know, ya know, if you talk about something in an interesting way, you know, it, it can be interesting. If you take an interest in a thing, it can be interesting, but like, the question acknowledges that it's not like, you know, okay, what would be hard, though, and it's interesting to see like insurance and financial stuff come up a lot, because I think that's, that feels true to me. Like, I worked at an insurance company. I didn't really work in insurance. But I for a couple I remember. Yeah. Back when I was moonlighting as a hotshot young, part time moderator.

Jessamyn 1:12:01 You were doing both that wasn't Moonlighting. You were doing both jobs simultaneously. I think it was double dipping.

Cortex 1:12:08 I would call it efficient. Okay. I would call it

Jessamyn 1:12:13 time anybody had called you that? I love you so much. Efficiency is really not like one of the top 10,000 adjectives I would use to describe you.

Cortex 1:12:25 I can be efficient, like for short spurts, I can be achieved of efficiency. If I'm really focused on something. It's just really to put myself in that state.

Jessamyn 1:12:35 I could see it. I mean, I have seen it. I've seen those specific in Worms you draw? What five?

Cortex 1:12:42 I don't know how many followers I've lost on Twitter, because I won't shut up about the worms. So um,

Jessamyn 1:12:46 can I just say, Do you want to talk about the worms for like 20 seconds because I think they're so cool.

Cortex 1:12:51 Oh, cheese. Can I do it in 20 seconds, though, um, a lot of work with some mathematical figures that I'm calling Fogle worms, but which would better be described as a self avoiding paths in in technical terms, I call them focal worms, because they were suggested by a guy named Michael Fogelman, who is a mathematician and engineer, I follow on Twitter and post about cool stuff definitely has an intersection with like math, art stuff that I'm into football worms are just a little worm, a little path that every step it moves forward, it moves either forward or takes a left turn or takes a right

Jessamyn 1:13:27 turn like a four by four grid, right? Are they not all in four by four grid? Well,

Cortex 1:13:30 they don't have to be in a grid. But like that was the problem was like, if you have four, four segment long worms and a four by four grid, how many different ways can you configure worms in various bending shapes? Yeah, to fill up that grid, which is an interesting problem to ask, and not an easy one to answer necessarily in any sort of efficient way, it turns out. So I've been playing with that. And I've been posting a lot of pictures and thoughts about these worms and the math behind them and things really,

Jessamyn 1:13:56 have you gotten focused attention? That was my question.

Cortex 1:13:59 Oh, yeah. No, he started the fucking Oh, okay.

Jessamyn 1:14:01 Okay. I don't mostly follow it on Twitter, I mostly see the kind of meta posts that wind up on all chop. So I haven't been, you know, doing a close read of your activity here. I just know that it's been your activity.

Cortex 1:14:12 It's a very much, you know, it's social media. He's just some guy. You know, he's like, he's a guy who's on Twitter. I think he he knows more math than I do. And he's got more followers than I do. But he's like, just hanging out talking about math. That's cool. Yeah, it's been very fun. How did we get on this? I was trying not,

Jessamyn 1:14:27 because you were claiming to be efficient in some ways. We were.

Cortex 1:14:33 Really I've been very efficient about diving in on phobal Worms recently. And yes,

Jessamyn 1:14:39 I apologize for that opportunistic dunk. I should. I should have more manners than that. But really, it was what I was thinking. So I don't know. I don't know.

Cortex 1:14:49 Anyway. Yes, insurance is in fact boring. I think I think if you are interested in insurance insurance could be interesting. I think it would be actually very difficult beyond explaining the whole The concept of someone of insurance and blowing their mind if they've never culturally encountered it before. Yeah, the details of insurance are really fucking boring. It's just like, it's really it's, it's well, cuz it's

Jessamyn 1:15:10 all. It's all like tables of likelihoods, right? Yeah. And then a whole bunch of functionaries, and then like salesmen, who are salespeople who get paid in also weird ways, so the whole thing is weird. Yeah,

Cortex 1:15:25 yeah. Insurance is fucking weird. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:15:28 My last ask Metafilter thing is this one buy through your 35 Hey, mains got this island trail. Kentucky's got a Bourbon Trail. There's trails everywhere, you know, like kind of a packaging marketing idea. Where you know, you get a little passport or you go on, you know, the Bend Oregon bend ale trail or the Cooperstown New York beverage trail or the donut trail in Ohio. Or But Larry,

Cortex 1:15:55 I'm on duck trails. That that was called back, Larry. Larry, I'm on duck tails. I said trail instead. Because Larry King, because Larry, Larry

Jessamyn 1:16:10 see to me, Larry and trail don't ride.

Cortex 1:16:12 What? No, no tail. duck duck tail.

Jessamyn 1:16:15 Oh, duck trails. Oh,

Cortex 1:16:17 sorry. cheeses. I feel like this one's on you. For one. I feel like I landed that just fine. Sorry.

Jessamyn 1:16:26 I mean, I am a little slow these days. And I'm not on my regular computer. And Jim keeps texting me and now he's like, I'm gonna take a nap at 430. I'm like, buddy, I told you. I was taking the podcast. You've texted me like five times. And because I assume if he's texting me during a time I've told them not to text me. There must be a reason. But he's just being friendly. So yeah, it's discombobulating.

Cortex 1:16:50 He likes you.

Jessamyn 1:16:54 Oh, my God, he'll probably get vaccinated before me. Which means maybe he can come up and visit which will be really nice. Yeah. Yeah. My sister is gonna get her second vaccination shot because you know, the police.

Cortex 1:17:10 Well, that's the sound of Yes,

Jessamyn 1:17:12 exactly. So I

Cortex 1:17:13 think I'm sorry, would you like to finish talking about trail?

Jessamyn 1:17:16 No, no, it's just a nice thread of people talking about other kind of of those kinds of trails. So they're not like hiking trails, but they're like, you know, collect all the x's or do all the y's and, and it's nifty. Excellent. Anything else from you?

Cortex 1:17:37 Not not for ask. We commissioned a few minutes, I suppose I was just suddenly distracted. And this is great. Audio Williams stuff. I'm looking at a pencil that has some like, hold. It's a pencil that has like grippy dots on it. Just it's a triangular pencil. It's got like a double row of little like rubber grippy dots towards the front of the pencil for Oh, I love that grip, I guess. Yeah. But something has happened to these grippy dots and weirdly melted and they're not sticky, but at some point they've been like heated badly and run and it's like a Cronin bergerie and row of fucking dots on this pencil and I think I just had to throw it away because I don't like it. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Fuck you. Fabric Castel. Meta talk? Yes. There's been it's been a couple of months a meta talk. There's some there's plenty of fun fret threads, and blah, blah, blah. There's plenty of fun threads and nice chatty threads and, and venting faculty, fuck threads and people looking for things they thought they saw and, you know, go read metadata. That's where that stuff is. I will mention a few things. One of which is that early December, just after our last podcast, we found out that longtime FYI, Ray baby had passed away. Yeah, so there's an obit for there. So again, a poor one out. There was in a less somber tone, a metal talk thread, sort of marking the end of the Trump administration, with the inauguration and whatnot. So if you want to see a bunch of people say, you know, yay, happy fuck that guy. That's your spot. Yeah. There was a nice thoughtful thread from Adrian Han. Talking about the value of sort of supporting a positive culture of posting on Metafilter

Jessamyn 1:19:24 was talking about closer to the beginning. Yeah,

Cortex 1:19:27 yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's it's a it's a good post that he wrote up, and I basically agree with him on every front.

Jessamyn 1:19:35 Well, especially with like, early snarking, early snarking, where you're just like, wow, and you don't think about like, well, somebody made an offer, like a post is a gift. Really? Yeah. So you know, you don't you don't maybe it's not your thing. That's totally fine, but you don't have to. Yeah,

Cortex 1:19:51 yeah. And that's one of those. It's one of the things it's like it's a habit thing to like, you know, the problem is not that people are fundamentally jerks. The problem is that it's It's very easy to sort of fall out of the habit of thinking about supporting the posting culture you want to say on the site. So I thought it was I thought was a nice thing to put up. And good discussion in there.

Jessamyn 1:20:10 Well, and my feeling is it's not that people are jerks, but it's that everybody is just rubbed raw by the combination of events over the last 12 months. Yeah. And so stirs are feeling that more acutely. And commenters are feeling that more acutely. And posters are feeling that about commenters and commenters are feeling that about posters and everybody's feeling that way about the internet. And it can be hard to keep that in mind when you're experiencing whatever your own feelings are about a situation. And so that's a helpful thing to also be thinking about.

Cortex 1:20:43 Yeah. There is conversation from earlier this month, suggesting that we avoid so much tiny text on the site. Can

Jessamyn 1:20:55 I just say that is one that is firmly in my glasses wearing wheelhouse right now?

Cortex 1:20:59 Yeah. Basically, you know, as text gets smaller, it gets harder to read. And as people have more visual acuity problems, it starts getting hard to read sooner. And and this is just your font on meta filter. But you can't do anything about someone who wrap something up in a bunch of small tags.

Jessamyn 1:21:17 I think what Franco had said was didn't they notice that like the setting for small on small tags, if you hadn't set the baseline smallness, smallest font wasn't something that would like that you could make. Maybe I'm getting this wrong. But I felt like like the usual thing we do to make text bigger, you know, Command or Control plus, plus, plus minus minus minus on a browser, that the small tags if you hadn't had a minimum size set could be super small. Yeah, and not adjustable the same way everything else could be sort of excessively adjustable. Yeah.

Cortex 1:21:57 So basically, what it comes down to is, we can try and change the CSS, the site to sort of clamp down to create a minimum font size isn't so small, so so you can nest as many small small

Jessamyn 1:22:10 tags as you want. But your font is only gonna get so small. And please, exactly please don't make tiny asides that people can't read, because it just means that people have to work harder to read them. And then if it's just some dumb joke, they're that much more aggravated.

Cortex 1:22:24 So yeah, that's that's, that's on getting that CSS change made is on the to do list. There's some more more ideas in there that we're going to try and like look at too, we've talked before about changing the formatting of mod comments so that instead of using small text, they just use some other sort of formatting. And that'd be a nice change too. But that's more involved than just

Jessamyn 1:22:44 maybe further down the road. But it seems like in the in the short term, this is a thing that we can actually do. Yeah. Which would be nice.

Cortex 1:22:52 No, microscopic tech seems like a real good thing to try and

Jessamyn 1:22:56 get accomplished. Yeah. And not, not a giant ask.

Cortex 1:22:59 And also, we have merch we made some new merch around the start of the year. Oh, hey, did you send

Jessamyn 1:23:04 out the gala stuff to the gala people?

Cortex 1:23:06 I did send out the gala stuff. It went out later than I expected. But it's out there. I sent out some prints to him.

Jessamyn 1:23:15 Thank you for playing our gala trivia. Yeah,

Cortex 1:23:17 it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. And thank you for organizing that. Jesse. Thank you for doing the work on that. Sure. But yeah, so there's there's some new T shirts and some stickers, and some magnets if you want to, along with the other merch we already have. And yeah. And I think that's it. I think that's everything I wanted to hit.

Jessamyn 1:23:36 So yeah, yeah, I'm trying to think if there was anything else I wanted to hit. It was great to see people in the gala. Maybe we'll do another visual podcast sometime in the future, because that was fun. And it was a different kind of interactive experience. But

Cortex 1:23:50 yeah, yeah. It was fun. It was nice to mix it up. So I agree. I could definitely see doing that.

Jessamyn 1:23:56 And thanks to everybody who participated attended or followed up or just kinda, yeah, raised raise the level of cheers so that the year could start on a good note.

Cortex 1:24:05 Yeah, exactly. It was nice. It's nice being together like that. Agreed. It was nice being together like this here at the end of this podcast episode that we are going to finish without me getting caught up on some strange tangent.

Jessamyn 1:24:18 Good. All right, all right. Okay, now you know you