Podcast 171 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 171: Was I Weird (2021-04-05).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Jessamyn 0:01 Here's a question for you as another as another half Jew Schpeel have an ancient it or not.

Cortex 0:08 I consider it to not the way I spell it, but I also don't consider that to be like, nickel I guess. Like there's this sort of liminal H in s words in in Yiddish that I haven't really ever made the effort to pin down like schmuck definitely has an S. H. But feel

Jessamyn 0:32 right, because smock is a different word.

Cortex 0:34 Yeah. But like like schmear is also like, like I this schmear feels sh ish. But if someone like had, like, smear on a menu, I probably wouldn't blink. Yeah, like, you know, it's so I don't know, I kind of wonder if there is something there in terms of how that's, like rendered? And what what the sort of like, because yudishe is a you know, it's a it's a Germanic language. It's in that family and I don't know. I don't know the deal there with German either. But Germans got some weirdness about SS like, that's why you have to like the long

Jessamyn 1:13 the funny. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The

Cortex 1:14 funny is not funny. Yeah, the weirdly rendered s that's the double lesson chairman. And and yeah, anyway, I don't know. This is a long way of saying I really don't know. But

Jessamyn 1:27 that's fine. I feel better that you don't know. Because I was writing it in a sentence. And I had one of those, like, I suddenly forgot this word. And I had to like, go look it up. And like both are right, like the one with the eight shows up in Urban Dictionary before it shows up in the regular dictionary. The one without the H is in the regular dictionary. The spell checker told me with the H. It's wrong. And I just wanted to another data point.

Cortex 1:51 Yeah, I think I would spell it without an H. But I would say it with an H, which is weird. Like it's not a spiel to spiel. So Right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Maybe we can get Gretchen McCulloch on it.

Unknown Speaker 2:09 Casper is just talking people posting questions. These are our favorites. As cortex, Jason, how the talking people posting projects and asking questions. These are our favorites. Yes. Well.

Cortex 2:26 Let me get another good run. Welcome. Welcome to Now that's what I call Metafilter podcast. This is episode 171. I am Josh cortex Mullard. And I'm Jessamyn. And I guess I guess this is happening now. So here we go. Hi. Hey, how are you? I will ask is if we have not been talking five minutes before we start the actual podcast.

Jessamyn 2:55 Oh, you know, pretty good. snowed yesterday, which is, you know, nature's little joke on all of us. But Vermont, what do you want? Yeah, didn't really Gouda rhymes. Kinda. I love what Vermont and was there the scene? Because it really does. Yeah. Yeah. And so it was an interesting day yesterday. It's been an interesting day today. And I'm feeling in a relatively upbeat mood, like, March is like, the month that I sleep the best of all the months. And I don't I don't know why it's weird. It doesn't seem like it would be but I think the lengthening days kind of I get more energy during the day and I get more tired out. So yeah, generally chipper you

Cortex 3:39 I think actually tend to sleep poorly, like March and April. I think I think this is through I think the time change is the primary thing. But also there's just like, you know, the weird cycle of various kinds of, of stressors throughout the year. There's like, you know, tax stuff comes around in the spring and the disruptive nature of daylight savings is a big part of it like that. Seriously. Fuck that.

Jessamyn 4:03 No, It's bonkers. Like I just I don't know when to eat anymore, which is one of the reasons the podcast started late because I was like, oh, I should probably eat before I tucked into headphones for 90 minutes. And at night, like normally my trigger is like it's been dark for two hours, go make dinner. And now if I wait for it to be dark for two hours, it's time to go to bed. Yeah. Not the worst. My taxes are all done though. Very

Unknown Speaker 4:27 excited. Excellent.

Cortex 4:33 My texts are mostly done. They're sort of in waiting. But the dominoes are all lined up. They just need to be knocked down. Apparently the there's been a lot of high jinks in it with the IRS this year as they figure stuff out. So

Jessamyn 4:48 yes, I am working through some high jinks with them from several years ago and like it's fine. It's just one of those like, we think you owe us an extra 200 bucks or something and I was like okay, and I send them a check and And then I got like a grumpy letter like three months later. Where's our $200? And I'm like you cashed my check three months ago. And you know, you try to call them and that's not great this time of year. And so I just like wrote them a letter and was like, please see my enclosed photocopy of the check you cashed.

Cortex 5:20 See, I had kind of the opposite experience of I got a letter the other day that I was worried because I didn't remember what the hell it was about. It was like, as requested. Here's the thing. I was like, What the fuck is this thing? Why they're sending me letters. It's the letter they sort of took me as requesting on the phone when I have sorted out two months ago that there wasn't a problem. Just like a dumb like mistake in like ships crossing and the

Jessamyn 5:43 scary looking letter to assure you there's nothing wrong. Exactly. That's well,

Cortex 5:47 okay. You know, if I remembered that I had asked for that, then I would be delighted. instead. I'm like, what, but But everything's good. So that's nice. Point, let's stop talking about taxes. What are we doing?

Jessamyn 5:59 I don't know. You started it? Did I start? I

Cortex 6:01 know, I probably started talking. Yeah. And then I taught started talking about like tax stress. So it's all entirely on me. It's taxing issue.

Jessamyn 6:13 Nope. Oh.

Cortex 6:19 It's a real dog getting into the carpet sound of that? No, that was a very, very strong, you know, great. Yes, let's talk about metal filter. Let's talk about metal filter.com. And its various sub sites, we often start by talking about jobs. And there were several jobs posted in March.

Jessamyn 6:41 Post neuro imaging

Cortex 6:42 research assistant. So if you are in the vicinity of St. Louis, Missouri, you might do that.

Jessamyn 6:53 Yeah, there is a real interesting combination of jobs. Like, you know, you could be the executive director of the farmer, National Farmers Union and Ontario, which I bet would be kinda cool. And it's a real like, you know, job job. On the other hand, there's a musical entrepreneur job. Because Mr. Visible makes these weird, cool instruments, which I believe we've talked about before, that are easy to play. And I think a whole bunch of people were like, Oh, my God, make it into a business. And he's like, and so he's looking for some people who will help with that. And then there's some USGS water data science machine learning cluster ire.

Cortex 7:39 It's a mouthful, but hey, interesting USGS science stuff.

Jessamyn 7:43 Yeah, by rockin data. And then L G is looking for pros and cons of using a static Jekyll site, which I only vaguely have opinions on. Because I have been fixing one of my old sites that I had a nice man try to convince me I wanted to turn into a static Jekyll site, running it through GitHub, abita habita. And, wow, I sure did not. And so he helped me part way, do it. And then I had to do some part of it on my end. But it was complicated. I didn't understand it. I was too embarrassed to ask the guy about it again. And then I just looked at the site for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and it's badly broken. And I'm not sure why. And maybe it's been badly broken since I stopped talking to that guy years ago. And, and I never spoke to the guy again, even though nominally, we share a bunch of other interests. And so now I'm just sheepishly fixing all the HTML. And that's what I have to say about Jekyll.

Cortex 8:42 Yeah, I like the idea of static site generators. And I've never gotten past like the first hour of considering it. Yeah, in practice, I like at this point, I really, I occasionally decide to make an actual hand written html page for a dedicated like, write up to something and Sure. And you services otherwise in some either No, I would like I would like at some point to feel like there is kind of like, a stable, simple thing that I will do for web stuff for the rest of my life. And I have zero faith of that ever, like developing and I think the closest thing to an answer is literally just write up HTML pages by hand, keep it very simple. And then like the amount of work it'll take to transfer that to something else, at some point is less than some of the

Jessamyn 9:31 other useful stuff that is living in other places. I mean, I use WordPress for a lot of my stuff, and I've been pretty happy with it. But the number of people nowadays who think I'm some kind of idiot because I'm using WordPress, even though I think they're some kind of idiots for implying I'm some kind of idiot, but but like, you know, saying like, Oh, I've got five sites running on WordPress is from a certain era, you know, and I'm fine with it. I mean, when I finish fix Seeing this broken site which is so broken I can't look at it right now and I have to jam it into WordPress probably at some level like I'm not really looking for other What even is Jekyll a framework? I'm not looking for other frameworks. I just want a website and I don't want to learn a programming language maybe at some point in the future I will want to learn a programming language but so far not really.

Cortex 10:23 Yeah man I've been I've been I've been casting around actually trying to decide whether or not to learn this or that new programming language. This is something I'm sure I will talk about a lot more like next month because I will actually have it but I, I ordered a plotter a pen plotter. Oh, the Axi draw three, V three, a three in fact, which is a nice pen plotter. I've seen a lot of people. Terrible name. Yeah. Well, what do you do?

Jessamyn 10:54 Everybody bought the Cricut? Because it had a cute name.

Cortex 10:58 I mean, the XE draws a perfectly nice name. I feel like that's got an x in it. That's pretty cool. I don't know.

Jessamyn 11:05 I guess it's cooler than wersi. Like

Cortex 11:07 people know. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, I'm excited about it. But I don't have it yet. It'll be probably a couple like a week or two. Still before I get it. But I need to figure out how to up my Well, I want to figure out how to up my game in terms of generating like SVG vector graphics for it. Because right now I tend to do that by hand. I just draw stuff in Inkscape when I need it, but I'd like to do more generative stuff more procedurally generated, sort of clusters have

Jessamyn 11:36 set it and forget it stuff that is gonna give you repetitive stress. And

Cortex 11:40 yeah, like, yeah, yeah, generate something programmatically, even if it's not a like, variation thing would be nice, too. And I've done a little bit of that, but I don't really have a good tool set for it yet. So I'm going to try and figure that out. And I think I'm probably going to learn Python, but oh my god, I used to be like, just fucking stoked to learn programming stuff. And then 20 Years went by and now like, every once awhile, I find a situation that I like, like piko eight or, or really Lua as the underlying language for that are both nights and, you know, have fun with it. But most programming environments, I just find sort of stressful and overwhelming. And so

Jessamyn 12:13 they also come with a bunch of programmers and that is I find the hardest thing for me

Cortex 12:19 as someone who like went to school for CSM a little bit more in nerd at that, I guess, because like I was, that was like, you're also a dude, I'm also I'm also a dude. So yes, I'm a little bit more nerd, like the dude, Ash it that aspect of it. For sure,

Jessamyn 12:36 which was how I wound up in this Jekyll business to begin with, but but I think I have that, that that problem where I have like projects, I kind of think about maybe I could fix in a way that a programming language might help me Yeah. But then, you know, it doesn't overlap with like, the sweet spot for when I have time to learn that language. Like, you know, I took this library carpentry class that I talked about learning how to work with data sets using some kind of tool I've already forgotten the name of and I was like, this will be great for the next time I need to do blah, but the next time I needed to do blah was like a year later. And I no longer remembered enough about how to do the thing, you know? Yeah, like, it's like regular expressions, like learning them is not super fun. But it's you know, a thing. But then using them is amazingly helpful. Assuming you still remember the thing you learned, which you never do, and then you need to relearn them and I would just like to know them, like at some future time, where you can put like, a little SIM card into your brain with like the knowledge. Yep, one of the earliest ones besides other languages would be read regular expressions.

Cortex 13:54 Yes, no, the regex is like I feel like a really good dense example of that where like it's a valuable useful, flexible skill. And it takes maintenance because it's so fucking archaic on the face or not archaic but like it's it's substrate. inscrutable oblique. eldritch let's go with Eldridge. It's so elder to on the face of it that like there's nothing about it that is memorable when you step away from it so like it's it's it's the opposite of riding a bike like if you go away from regex you know, and there's probably people who've internalized it well enough or internalized this stuff well enough they're like oh, no, actually, you know, I came back to it for like five years and I was epic bread backup fine, but like for me, like I used to program in Perl all the time. I don't know if I would know how to write Perl right now unless I went over some code. Yeah, tail you know, I do C and C++ constantly in school. And I could not probably write a Hello World script that would run right now or or

Jessamyn 14:54 but like I remember most HTML like falling off a bike either. I know it and CSS Either I know it, or the googling brings it back really fast, or there's examples that I can crib from. And I think I just don't know or quite understand where all the examples are with some of the languages or the regex stuff. There's, there's, there's always like some like, Okay, you do this, and I'm like, I got that, okay. And then you do this, and it's like, oh, god, okay, I got that. And then a miracle happens, like, you know, and then you connect to the server. And I'm like, but how does that part happen?

Cortex 15:31 Yeah. Yeah, no, I, it's. And it's interesting, because like, this is, this is a thing for me with a lot of art stuff to actually like it. It really seems to depend on the specific process and the medium and whatnot, like you have been doing. You know, I've been painting for a few years, I've been staying last for a few years now. I haven't been doing as much of either of those recently, because I've been doing more linoleum stuff. And I've not, I have not forgotten how to paint since I, you know, since I haven't been on it for a little bit. But I know there's little things about things I hadn't quite sorted out things I hadn't quite internalized about maybe like, mediums to alter the paint with that I have to sort of suck up a little bit to remember. And it's like, oh, right, right that or was stained glass. I'm like, Oh, where did I keep that little bit for this one finishing step. You know, and there's I've talked before probably about how I feel that way about music production, where I used to, like, record music a lot. And now I do every once in a while. And part of the reason I do it every once in a while is my recording setup. I've sort of forgotten how I set up the fancier versions of it, you know, and so like recording on my phone really easy recording on one mic at my desktop, really easy recording with a mix of four different drum mics in my basement and doing more of like elaborate mixing whatnot, she's have to remember how even fucking set all that stuff up in the first place. And it's this whole big thing that like, Oh, that is all that has all ossified. I need to like I'm gonna have to like re limber everything there in order to do that. And there's so much overhead because of that. Yeah, I don't know,

Jessamyn 17:08 there's, there's gotta be a name for that, like the stuff that you have to use irregularly enough that you always forget the stuff and whether it's fun or not. Right. Yeah, because there's some stuff that I totally forget. And relearning. It's a joy every time. And in fact, sometimes I just forget that I learned it before until I find some little note for myself when I'm googling it on my own blog, like, oh, I guess I learned this before. Well, to hell with it. It's fun to learn anyhow. So whenever

Cortex 17:37 I have that relationship with some video games, like there's definitely video games that like I played a bunch, and then I stopped because I was done. You know, maybe I beat the game, maybe I just sort of like played it too much and was worn out. Maybe I just lost interest. And you know, some games I'll come back to and like, oh, wait, I don't really remember how to do this. And it's frustrating. Like, maybe it was frustrating the first time and like, it has become frustrating since then, like because I forgot what I did to stop being frustrated. And then there's some games that I really can come back to after a while and I'm rusty, but it's just immediately fun. It's immediately sort of like joyful as like, Oh, right. This is this is a good experience that like you know, Rocket League is like this. It's you know, you're playing soccer with cars I think I've talked about before. It's a ridiculous premise. It's a multiplayer online game, and you're just playing soccer like two on two or three on three, a giant soccer ball. And you're hitting it with cars that have jet engines that can fly. It's it's just a goofy, fake sport. But it's really fun. Like the actual play is fun. And it's fun when I'm rusty as hell. And it's fun. When I sort of limber up, I'm like, Oh, yeah. All right. I remember this goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's definitely something to that, like in all sorts of things in in Yeah, in programming in games in artmaking. In any kind of probably skill or craft, there's probably to

Jessamyn 18:55 other people, I had to talk to other people in person for a whole day, because I went and visited my sister. And it actually did take a little while to like, remember to have a conversation with more than one other person in the same space. Even my sister who's like my favorite person. It was surprising how quickly we kind of got back into it. But it was also surprising how weird and rusty you can get, you know,

Cortex 19:24 just that yeah, that's one of the dynamics I've always appreciated about like metaphor meetups really is like you have this, you know, to various extents, strangers or very mild acquaintances getting together and there's like the social complexity of like doing that and getting into a groove there. But also the shared interest and sort of a shared understanding that we're all a bunch of awkward nerds such that it'll take the meetup a little bit to sort of get moving but nobody's upset about

Jessamyn 19:51 one person wants to sit in the corner and be quiet or just take pictures or it's okay if that person's on their phone or it's okay if because of the specific nature of the group. Yeah,

Cortex 20:00 yeah. So that's, that's, uh, I appreciate the way that that mediates some of the the social pressure and social awkwardness of, you know, relating to other human beings so

Jessamyn 20:13 well because like Jim was there and he sat on the other end of the porch because neither him nor I are vaccinated, and it's very hard. But, you know, we were talking on Zoom later the next day, and he was like, Yeah, I just got back into the car and was like, was weird. Jim, he's always a little weird, anyway. Yeah, let's

Cortex 20:33 get some error bars on that. But it was

Jessamyn 20:35 funny to me that like, he was concerned, he might have been too weird. Especially because he wasn't weird at all. From my vantage point, you know what I mean? But I think all of us were probably are and we'll probably be over the next year or so as things slowly open up. Like was a weird, it's not how that works. Is that how you get money from a countertop? When you pay for things? Burton? It forget?

Cortex 21:01 Yeah. Yep, I'm ready for this pandemic. It'd be over, in my opinion. It's a bad thing and has gone on too long. I'm, I'm a bit of an iconoclast, but I just counterpoint.

Jessamyn 21:14 It's a terrible thing, and never should have gone on this long.

Cortex 21:20 Well, if you want to actually take a critical lens into the whole thing, it's been a humongous loss of life and, like human health disaster and revealed any number of rotting systems in both governance and the social contract. And yes,

Jessamyn 21:38 yeah, pretty mad about the social contract. I was surprised the social contract was that wrinkled.

Cortex 21:46 I mean, I guess I wasn't. But I feel like I shed that cynical fan

Jessamyn 21:51 in this in this way. Like, I knew a certain amount of my neighbors voted for Trump. And I assumed a whole bunch of shitty stuff went along with that. But I didn't know specifically. And in fact, in places where I would have expected to have seen problems, I did not until you could see who's wearing a mask and who's not at the supermarket. And you're like, Oh, right.

Cortex 22:17 Yeah. And I mean, I think I think that aspect of shit, the weird anti mask, anti medicine, anti science, anti vaccine, etc. stuff could have played out differently. On a couple different vectors. If things had been different. I think the biggest thing is if, honestly, if the pandemic had, in fact, not been as protracted of a thing, we wouldn't have seen as much of that just because people wouldn't have gotten bored and restless enough to be as broadly shitty about it as they have. But also, I think, you know, it might have been different with better governance, like having a fucking like, like, the people who are going to roll coal exist, and they will always exist.

Jessamyn 23:02 Is that a metaphor? Yes, and

Cortex 23:05 no, I mean, rolling coal, right. The it's so it's people who drive around with intentionally dirty vehicles that belch out smoke.

Jessamyn 23:17 Actually, Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. Yeah, rolling coal. I guess people do it here. Yeah, there are there are

Cortex 23:25 people who are going to do that, because that's just the life choice they've made. And then there's people who are gonna be like, sort of having a reaction to that based on context. And that reaction might be well, you know, whatever, Bob's a funny guy, or, Hey, that's super fucked, or hey, you know what, he's got a point and it's gonna depend a lot on the surrounding atmosphere, and fucking Trump and all shit related to it. Like in the middle of this is like, definitely had to have significantly worsened how, right? Yeah, it's so fucking frustrating. You know what, I want to tack back to the programming discussion, because all of that sounds like fun.

Jessamyn 24:05 But there was, there was a tweet expressions instead,

Cortex 24:09 there was a tweet yesterday from Lee evelopment, who is mefite I don't know the status of their username. So I won't mistakenly make a connection there. But But anyway, they they were posting about free software being free as an a piano. And I think what we're talking about in terms of the learning curve to some extent, I mean, I think in this sense, it's more like, hey, this project exists, you can use it, it's right there rather than like, this programming language, it's well supported is something you could make yourself learn, but either way, it's like, all you have to do is like spend the time and figure out how to use it and use the tool and like, yeah, all you have to do is like go into my grandma's basement and get this piano and move it up the stairs and put it on a truck and it's like, right, yeah, there's

Jessamyn 24:58 pay someone to tune in doing a bunch of Yeah, exactly. It's patches.

Cortex 25:04 Yeah. And I thought I thought that was a really a really nice tight way of pointing. And I've seen a couple other people repeating it the last day because like, I think it's a good metaphor. So anyway, appreciate it that that sort of puts a button on my thoughts about that. Today, hey, let's talk about projects. Okay, let's talk about metadata projects.

Jessamyn 25:24 Okay. I would like to highlight that rock and data, who is the person who is looking for the job also is a functional equivalent of blogger, Project poster person over at USGS. And so they've got a sort of, you know, rebuilt website working with the smart people at 18. F, to put up a bunch of data visualizations and a bunch of awesome stuff. And it looks pretty interesting as a job. And some of those jobs are remote. And some of them are in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And it's just it's a neat looking thing. If you sort of click over to it, if you're someone who is interested in water, and you want to work for this government, not the previous government. There's some pretty interesting jobs going on, although it looks like they wrapped up. But who knows, you never know. So you may as well try it. There's some cool data visualizations. And yeah, it's just very neat.

Cortex 26:29 Yeah, there's some great stuff on this. This is neat.

Jessamyn 26:34 I also enjoyed bonobo the great who has spent some time indoors, doing a linen press, a pine linen press, which is a gorgeous piece of machinery. They use hand tools. And also, you know, are basically talking about how they tried to be not a jerk about, you know, doing a lot of noisy work at their house while other people have to work at home. And so they talked about the thing, which they made in their apartment. And then there are some beautiful pictures of it. And it's really just like it is the attention to detail on it because it's pretty easy to just nail together some I don't know, like plywood and call it a day. But this is just a it is so beautiful. And and it just started out as a bunch of pine boards. There's all this dovetailing and they talked about how they did it. And just it was the it's a very, very makery

Cortex 27:36 ya know, I love those. The shelf notches for for, for putting in the various shelf supports. That's super great. Nice joinery down in the legs.

Jessamyn 27:50 Yeah, so gorgeous. I just thought the whole thing was cool. And yes,

Cortex 27:57 that is great. Here's a project that I didn't even realize was if I project was founded out in the wild somewhere malevolent

Jessamyn 28:04 kind of love it when that happens. Yeah, right. Yes, this was also on my list.

Cortex 28:09 So malevolent, made a kilobytes gambits, one kilobyte chess game. Sounds like basically, they took an existing already very small chess engine, got rid of some of the stuff that they didn't need to get it down to a single kilobyte, just 1024 bytes of, of chess logic and then used some pixelart that Aselsan somewhere of the Queen's gambit of Anna Taylor joy, you know, looking over steepled hands at the camera, essentially. And it's great, like, I really appreciate this. And also, I'm bad enough at chess that I just got destroyed by this thing. I have I have I have friends who play enough chess that they were like, oh, you know, actually, I played a sloppy game and I lost and then I sort of tried to mix it up a little bit. And then I was able to get no wins like Well, good for you. I don't know what books to wander away from to get away from what you can get into it a 1k Chess engine. But yeah, I love I love that prospect of trying to build that much fundamentals into a very small, like logic engine like

Jessamyn 29:20 oh, like remember the old like 5k projects, right? Like, yeah, how cool. Can you build a website that is less than 5k? All told? Yeah.

Cortex 29:29 There's people who are on Metafilter. Specifically, because they got in via sign up. You got for signing up for the 5k project back in whatever 2002 2003 Right. It was something like that. And like signups were closed on meta filter. But Matt maybe helped co host the 5k thing or something? I don't think so. Somehow. Yeah, you could end up with a medical term account by registering for the 5k thing or some shit like that. Yeah, anyway, This is delightful. I think that's great. I really, I really love the idea of doing those super economical sort of game logic. And I and I excited to find out that it was malevolent.

Jessamyn 30:10 Yeah. So cool. I wanted to call out babelfish, who has a book coming out just in time for whenever Mother's Day is? Yeah, I don't know when that is, but it's an essay collection about feminism and mythological monsters. And, you know, looking at myths about monstrous women and how we still have them in our sort of collective psyche and nah, sort of what to do and think about them and looks at analysis of sort of marked female monsters. So Medusa, harpies, furies, the Sphinx, et cetera. And it just looks like it might be really cool. And yeah, she does a lot of interesting stuff here and there and babelfish and it was cool to see that

Cortex 31:01 she is a good writer. Yes, she writes good. But somebody else in here I was looking for

you do something else I'm I lost.

Jessamyn 31:19 I didn't really understand this. But I liked it to look at it, which was Jerry Ray gone. Dre guns, make believe band. So basically sending a fake band around the world on a fake tour with fake songs. Each performance gets a score. And they're looking for people who love Taylor Swift, the Grateful Dead or king gizzard and the lizard wizard, is that really a band? I guess it's really a band. So they can map fake songs to the real ones. So it's a combination of I made a thing. But also you could help me with a thing. And I got to be honest, I don't entirely understand the thing. Enthusiastic panther is the name of the of the game and doesn't really look like they spend a lot of time in Vermont. But you can, you can sort of click on the there's like, there's like posters, they play in real venues. There's a little bit of, you know, there's ratings and set lists and stuff for the shows. It's a real, it's a real cool kind of big project. And they would like a little bit of help. Keeping it going, basically.

Cortex 32:36 I like this, and I want to better understand what's going on with it. That's a

Jessamyn 32:40 click through on like any of the single Yeah, no, I'm

Cortex 32:43 clicking. I'm seeing sort of like the accumulation of concert ratings and setlist and that is all read I'm I'm curious. I should I should read a little bit more when I'm not on a podcast to see what's going on.

Jessamyn 32:55 I mean, that is really the hard thing about the podcast is if you do get pointed to a thing you cannot have not seen Yeah, you're like, Alright, shut up for a second. I want to learn more about the thing.

Cortex 33:13 Oh, this one is? I think adorable. Thomas Park made needle drop, which is just a sort of vinyl emulator for listening to YouTube. You just

Jessamyn 33:28 saw does it make like clicks and pops

Cortex 33:31 up? I don't remember I don't think so. might also be forgetting. I posted it like you know, it was a month ago. But just the general like the core. Oh my god visual vibe of like the turntable turning and the needle is adorable.

Jessamyn 33:57 Wow. It's both what I was expecting and not what I was expecting. That's neat.

Cortex 34:05 What a score.

Jessamyn 34:06 Right? Wow, that's very cool.

I like it. I think that was it for me for projects.

Cortex 34:20 I think me too. There's other stuff I want to look at. But I probably shouldn't keep mentioning stuff I haven't spent time with so but projects, stuff post projects. If you want to see what people are making go look at projects,

Jessamyn 34:34 right made a website made a cabinet wrote a book, what's your what's your thing, put it on project?

Cortex 34:39 low effort,

Jessamyn 34:41 this broken project that I am working on? I'm gonna post it to projects. Hell yeah. Because I thought I already had and apparently I had not so very excited.

Cortex 34:51 Well, that's some content on the way

Jessamyn 34:55 foreshadow

Cortex 34:57 yes So if it was a foreshadowing is it foretelling? Like foreshadowing would be like, you know, like, well, I don't know what I'm going to do once I get that blog fixed as the camera settles on projects or the gun on your mantle, I guess that too. I don't, I didn't intended as a counterfactual so much was like, yeah, just anyway. Do you have a gun on your mantle? Do you have a mantle?

Jessamyn 35:24 I don't have a mantle. Okay. I mean, so no, I don't really have a mantle as in the kind of one of those things that you slide down around the flame on your lantern. But I don't have what I think you're referring to which is the thing about my fireplace because I have no place.

Cortex 35:40 Yeah. It's called a mantel on a lantern.

Jessamyn 35:42 I believe so. Did I just say, I mean, I understand you're not calling me out. But now I have to Google it.

Cortex 35:49 I had not heard that. I

Jessamyn 35:52 think it is. I buy it mantel. See now I'm looking it up and it says a loose sleeveless cloak or shawl worn especially by women now I've completely confused I mean, I'm Oh, God, this is good podcasting. Dictionary.

Cortex 36:15 I'm seeing things that look like mantle's on lanterns. When I Googled mantel lantern, although I'm gonna gas mantle's, or like the light up thingies, but I'm also seeing like glass cages. So yeah, I don't know. The gaslighter thing is definitely distracting from what I'm imagining. I'm looking for super confused.

Jessamyn 36:36 Okay, fuck it. Somebody will? Well, in the comments, tell me what word I was actually thinking of.

Cortex 36:46 I have I've seen them called chimneys. And I'm seeing that when I google lamp chimney.

Jessamyn 36:51 Gas man topics. It's a real thing. Yeah. But I guess they're called gas mantle's or a Wellsburg. Bentyl.

Cortex 36:59 Ah, see now Now we're getting somewhere.

Jessamyn 37:02 Now we're cooking with gas, Josh. Yes, that was very nice. Thank you.

Cortex 37:09 Yes, okay. Shall we? Shall we talk about metal filter proper?

Jessamyn 37:17 Sure. Let me I have less. Let me see. I was gonna say I have less to talk about in metal filter. But I do have my own post, which actually I posted because it's a topic I love and because everybody who's interested in bird where the birds live habitat, bird house, bird habitat preservation, would be very interested in what's going on with a Blake Huston's fish owl, which has been described as Oscar the Grouch if Oscar the Grouch were an owl, but still lived in a can. And it's basically lives in kind of super eastern Russia. And basically, there's a guy who was a wildlife conservationist went out to try and sort of figure out what was up with the owl and wrote a very entertaining book about being out in the wilderness trying to find this owl capture this owl figure out how to interact with the people who are there who often depend on like the woods for their livelihood, and don't want to be told to stay out of it, because there's a special owl in there. And yeah, and it's just it's an interesting story. It's a great book. And I like to think my posts are somewhat entertaining on that topic.

Cortex 38:41 Excellent. I just enjoyed the other day, the posts by Adrian Hahn maligned directive. It's a post about guy who posts stuff on YouTube under the Ryan edits, channel, a couple of posts on there where to Starfleet get all of those ancient artifacts and a critical analysis of fashion and Star Trek to be a critical analysis of socks in Star Trek, which I feel like buried the lead there. Because I've all the more interested when I realized it was like super narrow focused on socks, but but they're both they're both fun. They're both fun short, like six minute analyses of an aspect of Star Trek by someone who is a pretty good Star Trek, dork. Ryan's edits, also posts, Star Trek intakes, which we may have talked about before, I'm sure got posted on Metafilter before, but basically taking Star Trek bloopers and editing them back into the scenes in which they were cut as bloopers. Which, it's it's weird and absurdist and wonderful because like, on the one hand, it's funny because it's like weird in violation of what we expect of like editing. And it's also and I think this point was maybe made by the guy who made him like it has this weird way of humanizing And the crew in a way we don't get to see, like, whenever we see something funny happen, it's always very scripted, but we don't see like weird awkward foibles from the crew. And so someone doing something slightly off or cracking a joke, and then everybody sort of moves on. That's a very normal thing to happen in, say, every five minutes of this podcast, but like in life in general, and seeing it happen is kind of great. So anyway, same, same, same person, I believe. And these essays are both, you know, short little video essays. They're both very entertaining. I enjoyed them thanks, Adriana Han for posting that. I do not know that I would have seen them otherwise. So that was nice.

Jessamyn 40:36 Meat. That is cool. I, this one just came up. And like, I often like see meta filter posts, because I get them all emailed to me. And so I'll see the titles. And so I just saw the title of this post from just a couple days ago, you know, which was like, and his bio sounds like the worst dog in the world. And I'm like, Well, that could be any number of things, some of which are concerning. I should check it out. And it's basically just it. I don't even think the link, I think the link died in like two days. No, no, but, but basically, it died. Because the dog was adopted. And essentially, it's one of those like, pet adoption, kind of biographies. But it was all about how this is a very particular kind of dog. The person who was fostering this dog obviously loves this dog, but really wants to make sure you know what you're getting into with this dog. So he's got these huge floppy jowls. And they're like, this dog's got jowls for days, and they're coming in on like, you know why? They're gonna get slobber and slime all over those pants. Why did you wear your nice pants always wear dirty pads, it's worth it for this dog kind of thing. Coming in hot was definitely from the original post. But it was just kind of a neat kind of one off. cute dog. Many people on Metafilter can, I think, empathize or sympathize with having irregular pets, for lack of a better word. And so it was just kind of a cute, a cute thread about it. And then the link went away. Oh, basically, they had so many applications, they had to pull the biography. So I guess a lot of people want to get slobbered on. And it was funny because of course whatever happens to me, it's like whenever you click on a thing that lands you like on a real estate website. Whenever I click on a thing that lands me on a pet adoption website, like I do not have a pet and I am the wrong pet. I don't have a profile of a pet owner. But I always kind of just like to look like what's around for pets just in case. And in my local pet adoption circle. There was actually a rabbit named chowder. And so now I kind of wonder if like chowder is just like one of a name like 500 rotating names for you know, adoptable pets or if it was just a weird, weird Kismet because chowder from the post was from nowhere near here. But chowder, the bunny is right up the road. I

Cortex 43:19 mean, that's so there's, in my mind, I want to imagine that there's some elaborate process of naming that goes on at like, you know, shelters and adoption places. And in practice, what I've seen from my limited behind the curtain view is like, someone just like comes up with something and they try not to name anything offensive. And yeah, there's a bunch of really common ones like, there's gonna be a lot of white cats named snowflake.

Jessamyn 43:43 There's a lot of mittens. Gonna be a lot of cat named mittens.

Cortex 43:47 Yeah, you know, and then there's gonna be like, you know, everything else that someone thinks of that isn't a problem. You know, try not to name the cat like Mussolini Jesus Christ, you know, but yeah, I don't know. Uh, so I don't know. I wonder. I wonder if it is a thing where like, chowder is on a list of safe animal names, or I have a hard time imagining shelters, being organized enough in that respect to go to like a software as service provider who lays out safe names versus just two different people thought of chatter. I can buy it, right.

Jessamyn 44:22 It just seems like an odd specific one. But but who knows? Maybe it makes sense for a rabbit in a way that I don't see immediately, but it would be immediately obvious to others.

Cortex 44:34 Yeah, I don't know. I mean, animals like to eat they like to chow. So chowder might maybe there's something there. I don't know.

Jessamyn 44:40 No, no. Right there. We're just looking at the bag of pet food.

Cortex 44:44 Well, here's here's here's a post. Looking around the room, right?

Jessamyn 44:52 Your name is table. A table the cat you're out here on the table. Here name is table

Cortex 45:03 Here is a post from Vasco de Gama. Of a project that I find absolutely delightful. It is a book, a stitched book of color swatches, essentially of CMYK style, color gradients and mixtures and whatnot. Instead of being like offset, printed, which is where you would normally think of like halftone color, with the dots inside, magenta and yellow and black. It's all hand stitched. Oh my gosh, and it's absolutely fucking tremendous. It's like, it's really, really, really good. Oh, my gosh, had to have an enormous amount of work. And yeah, this is, let's see, where is her name Evelyn Cass akov is the artist.

Jessamyn 45:51 There's a great floor if you just like so there's the book artists page. And then there's a Tumblr, which is just lots and lots and lots and lots of pull out images. Wow, I did not see this. It's great to be relevant to my interests.

Cortex 46:07 It's very process oriented, which I superduper. Appreciate, right. And I love like, the ending of this was a very thick bound book of all these pages. And that's also bound with the same colored thread in a gradient. And it's just gorgeous. It's really fantastic. Make my day really, really liked that. Nice. Let's see, I enjoy

Jessamyn 46:35 the conversation that happened in the book horses post Daniel Tiger, welcome to new artistic character to the neighborhood. I think we've seen television shows, but children's television shows in particular trying to, you know, incorporate more kinds of diversity than just sort of color diversity to their, to the people who are actually on the show, not just talking about, you know, the different kinds of people that people might encounter. And so, teacher, Harriet has an autistic nephew, and Max is actually voiced by an autistic boy, which is sort of Nothing about us, without us, like a very important, I think, aspect to this whole thing. And, you know, there's a kind of a gushy article in People Magazine. And there was just a bunch of people in the thread who were like, you know, it's really great for like, really young kids to see a diverse cast of different ways to be when they're little, because it especially helps give them language to understand, you know, either themselves or other types of people or people can work on, you know, empathy and understanding through seeing these characters in the places that they're already familiar with. And it's super, so it was just neat. Yeah, that's great. And I know, I believe, let me just scroll and make sure I'm remembering this per Lee. Yeah, eyebrows was in there talking about how, you know, having more artistic characters in high quality children's media is a great way to help siblings, cousins and classmates understand the ways kids may interact and understand things differently in a way that's like, just super friendly and open and kind of kind of safe, because it's a little mono directional at first, and, and it's and it's cool.

Cortex 48:35 Yeah, normalizing and demystifying and yeah. In goofy internet slash chess draw, I guess, coming back around to chess, there was this played out over the last couple of weeks. Where guy who goes by Gotham chess, he's like a good chess player. I don't follow chess enough to know this about those

Jessamyn 48:59 two guys that both open with that stupid move and then fell a murder laughing? No, this is an anecdote that I know of from this month. That is a very good one. I am sorry, go on.

Cortex 49:10 This is different thing. But you should, you should, you should cover that too. This was a guy who plays online a lot as a well known very good chess player was playing some random unknown on like chess.com, who was playing extremely well, despite having zero record, basically. And he was like, This guy's cheating. And then reported him and moved on with his day. And then the guy got banned for cheating. And then

Jessamyn 49:43 I was gonna say that's not a very interesting story at all.

Cortex 49:47 And then a giant sort of social media Harassment campaign targeting the guy who called them a cheater in the first place commenced, and it's a weird combination of weird chess fandom stuff and may Be like Indonesian culture stuff in terms of like online social media culture and sort of a reflection of sort of anti colonialism at for that matter with like Indonesian folks being frustrated by sort of like the dominance of like American culture in international media, etc. There's read the thread, like people talk about a bunch of aspects of it. And it's, it's interesting, but what it comes down to is, there was this big social media harassment thing towards the guy, Gotham chess about this, and maybe spurned on by the son of the guy he accused of being a cheater, who got banned. And then this sort of like, got enough attention because of this giant Harassment campaign that like, people were like, wait, what's going on here? And what is the deal? was the guy cheating? And the guy's like, no, no, no, no, he's definitely I'm not a cheater. I'm a chess player. And the reason I don't have a record is because reasons X, Y, and Z and whatnot. So it came down to Okay, well, this guy is going to play another very good chess player. I think one of the top players in Indonesia, if I remember, right, and they did like first, like some podcasts, I think arranged this. And they played like three games and all three games, the well established very good chess player, handily beat the guy who in theory wasn't cheating, and who played very much worse when he was sitting in front of the chessboard than, you know, playing online where no one could see him. So it's a big sort of, like, thud of, oh, it turns out, the guy who was accused of cheating was really, really definitely cheating. But in the meantime, there was all this fucking nuts stuff happening, and all this extra stuff, stuff coming in sideways about like, you know, how cheating and adjudication and bannings work on chess.com. And how online chess affects seeing and how people disguise cheating how you know, they do or do not get away with it well, and

Jessamyn 52:00 one of my favorite podcasts, or rather, the only other podcasts I listened to, besides this one, I was talking about this recently, and I'm sure it must have been the same story about how you know, 30% of the accounts on chess.com, they figure are fake, because they're just like, you make like a bunch of fake accounts that are like low ranked, or, and you or you get them up to a certain ranking, but then you beat them, and it increases your ranking, but you're really just playing against yourself, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It sounds like it's over peace with this, this whole situation. And I included a link to the bomb cloud attack. Yes. Which is the story about the two opener guys. And then they just dissolve in laughter and that is the sum total of what I know about the situation.

Cortex 52:51 The bond cloud attack is very stupid,

Jessamyn 52:56 like a guy opened with a stupid move. And then the other guy opened with the same stupid move, because they couldn't believe the other person did the stupid move. And then they just started laughing.

Cortex 53:06 Yes, like it was it was it was great, because it was like, there was no stakes, like neither of them needed to win or lose that game to change anything. Right? And yeah, so the one guy did this joke and reciprocated. And yeah, it was beautiful. So goofy time. It reminds me there was a post a couple of years ago. That EP Jr made about playing chess to the death. Not not in the sense that like someone dies if you lose the game, but the idea that if you are a chess piece, which chess piece Do you want to be to be least likely to die? Oh, course of a game, which is great. And it was a very fun write up and in that someone value of information posted?

Jessamyn 53:47 I mean, is it the king because you got a 5050 shot? Or I

Cortex 53:51 don't remember, I don't remember I haven't looked. But there's a there's a link to a PDF and a comment in there about deploying the bond cloud that leads to if I remember, like a 44 page thing, actually, I think the Link is Dead unfortunately. But if you search on deploy the blog and cloud or search for the PDF, Bond cloud PDF, you can find it I found it somewhere recently. But it's like an entire treaties on this extremely stupid opening and how you can go from there. So dumb chest dump chest is good.

Jessamyn 54:25 Moving on from that, I love this, even though I know it had some problems. Get Dora's post and no one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful. And this is basically about how movies back in the day. Used to be kind of both, you know, Messier just because you know we can do more with movies now. And maybe people feel like we're refining That's sort of what we do. But also sexier in a weird way, like, like that, like, you felt more like there was real desire. And people were actually you, you could see that characters were into one another. It wasn't just this weird like pepper pots and Iron Man thing where like, you kind of know they're dating and yet, like, they just have this very austere relationship that is confusing, and a lot of the superhero movies especially, are like that. And so you know, it's an essay. And then of course, there's a lot of conversation about that, because it's not problematic. assertion, but you know, talking about like, you know, Heath Ledger's Joker, Christian Bale's Batman, like, which of those guys has more like sexual energy? And does it? And does it matter? You know, and what is that? What is that telling people about the world? How is it reflecting the world, etc, etc. There's a lot of really interesting conversation that goes on in that thread talking about the notion of hardiness in, you know, American Hollywood movies that that I thought was, you know, pretty, pretty, pretty interesting. And talking about how to make like the superheroes sort of aesthetically hunky like Hugh Jackman talking about his extreme dieting for Wolverine as an example. Like it's supposed to be desirable. But then in the end, the characters don't. I don't know they don't seem to run the same emotional roller coaster as is kind of a normative what you would think human emotional roller coaster about stuff like that. So what you see on the screen is oddly chased in a way

Cortex 56:52 it's kind of a weird irony of that being a thing with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which I and I think that feels like I hadn't thought about in those terms, but like, that feels very true. is like one of the big things with Marvel comics when it sort of busted onto the scene with like, X Men and, and similar stuff and sort of differentiate itself from what BC was doing, you know, 50 whatever years ago is like they were very much the stories that were more set in a kind of human feel like it was less the cosmic grandiosity of some of Jack Kirby stuff is more like, hey, Spider Man is a kid who has problems. Right. Right. Right, right. And it would seem like that would lend itself to some of that more human messiness. But I think, like, it's the MCU is such a huge project and such a huge investment for Marvel. And now Disney that like, it kind of makes sense that there is that sort of lack of rawness and that sort of weird chasteness. And everything is a little bit of like a mannered play because like, Well, you got to you got to make the whole franchise work, we can't go having a film where someone has a really interesting, hard time in a way that makes them more than a cog in the grand structure we're building, you know, which is kind of shitty. Like why division was interesting that way, because I think it got to be a little bit more intense about sort of the psychology of Wanda's character because of what they were doing with the show. But even then, I found myself sort of disappointed with how it played out the end, because it got kind of superhero. Yeah, at the end. Like it started out as like something different. And then while we're definitely going to have some big, you know, magical power, fist fights, and so on, is it good? Okay, well, this is the same thing again, right? There, there are no stakes involved in people throwing psychic fireballs at each other, because, you know, they're just going to do that until whatever actually happens, happens. Yeah,

Jessamyn 58:47 yeah. So you know, a lot of mefites brought up, you know, various problematic and less problematic aspects of the whole thing. So I don't claim this is just a thesis I 100% agree with, but it was just really interesting. I'm thinking about it. Also, back before we even had PG 13. Right. And your options were like PG or are the end? And yeah, so interesting, interesting. And, you know, obviously, the AIDS crisis and a whole bunch of other social stuff that was going on at the time, but an interesting read and kind of a long meaty thread about about a topic I wouldn't have thought would have gotten that kind of interaction.

Cortex 59:26 Yeah, that's interesting. One other goofy slash stupid drama internet thing. The shrimp thing, the shrimp assuming crossed trust thing,

Jessamyn 59:38 man, I had this explained to me by a not very online friend, and I was so confused.

Cortex 59:45 Oh, man. You're that explanation?

Jessamyn 59:48 It was pretty good because she doesn't know him. She didn't know his wife. She didn't know the TV show. She didn't know exactly what he said. She doesn't really use Twitter and me And it was very it was night and day talking to her about it, but she was interested in it. You know, she wasn't like, oh, this whole thing is stupid. She was like, Yeah, this was kinda, I don't really, I don't quite and then, and then reading this thread, which was just like the opposite, like total firehose, let's get all the facts. Very, very interesting.

Cortex 1:00:20 For anybody who somehow missed it, there was a tweet about finding some shrimp tails. Somebody found some shrimp tails in their box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And they tweeted about it and Cinnamon Toast Crunch wrote back on Twitter, you know, to say, hey, you know, we've taken a look and this is clearly just extruded bits of dried sugar. And in the picture,

Jessamyn 1:00:40 well, there was a lot of back and forth actually. Yeah,

Cortex 1:00:43 this is this is this is what happened that led to it blowing up rice. Guy tweets. Hey, boy, I just found some shrimp tails in my Cinnamon Toast Crunch. What's okay?

Jessamyn 1:00:56 Comedian for a job?

Cortex 1:00:58 Yeah, and a marketing dude and kind of maybe it's shitty guy. It turns out but anyway, he does that.

Jessamyn 1:01:08 No need to be 100% Shitty guys.

Cortex 1:01:14 Yes. In the process of this someone at Cinnamon Toast Crunch social media tweets back is sort of absurd. Like, Oh, well. That's clearly just sugar when it's very clearly shrimp tails. How the shrimp tails got in there whether they were whether this is all a hoax by the dude, whether there's something weird that happened in the middle, who fucking knows so far, we'll probably never find out. Because why would General Mills talk about this more? Right? And the guy Jensen carp is probably not going to talk about it more either. He's been silent for like a week on Twitter now because he's essentially stood up with this. He's a total milkshake duck. It turns out a whole bunch of people like Oh, Jensen carp. Oh, yeah, that horrible. You know, shithead, who lied to me? Or was a terrible fucking partner who was

Jessamyn 1:01:59 an abusive boyfriend level? shithead not just on the internet. shithead

Cortex 1:02:03 Yeah, I didn't. I didn't follow exactly how deep it went. But there was a lot of there were several women basically saying, Oh, boy. Yeah, this guy's super fucking awful. And

Jessamyn 1:02:14 well, and you kind of got a sense after a while when he was really kind of just not like, I've interacted with support people on Twitter who didn't want to help me before. And like, you don't have to go from zero to Shady with them. You can just decide, Oh, this isn't going to be a venue where I get what I want out of it. And I'm gonna walk away and try something else. But he kind of doubled down and was kind of a weird aggressive jerk to them. And like, again, it's like you look at how people treat their their service staff. If they go to a restaurant, you look at how people treat like people who are not as popular and just doing their job on Twitter and you can learn a lot.

Cortex 1:02:55 Yep. Anyway, that's a whole thing. If you missed it, you can go check out that thread. It felt kind of inescapable last week. But But yeah,

Jessamyn 1:03:06 yeah, and to be honest, like I you know, it's entirely possible he got gross food and his gross food still, you know, like fucking nose? Is that a reason you get to be a jerk to a stranger on the internet who yes just parroting company lines. And that becomes its own awkward thing because how do you get to be like this horrified my family or because you know it's a little concern truly to be like what if I had a shellfish allergy but what if he did you know?

Cortex 1:03:36 Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:03:39 I can see it many directions. I thought when you were talking about Internet gouffre you were going to talk about the ship stuck in the Suez Canal

Cortex 1:03:47 we've got to talk about the ever given that

Jessamyn 1:03:49 kept on giving forever for the last week I guess which is now okay. It was stuck for like what five days? Five or six days Yeah, and you know my my favorite my favorite part of it maybe was the memes that came around from the little the little one what is it even called the bulldozer with the little hook on the end that digs up dirt fuck and under eight the little machine that was at the edge trying to dig the thing out with its one little bucket loader think it's a bucket loader and and how people would just make up memes about that like you know this giant immovable object me down here trying trying

Cortex 1:04:39 the the crushing disruption of a year long pandemic self quarantine as the boat and then like remembering to drink water is the the

Jessamyn 1:04:48 right right and then I think me and Adrian Hunter brother Dan went back and forth with a couple of those like, you know, it's like crippling depression and have you tried going outside like It's not helping. But yes, I mean, that's one of those fun things where I literally I will go to metal filter to be like, hey, what's, what's the grab ass about this? And come on Josh, are you literally posting in that thread while I'm talking to you on the podcast?

Cortex 1:05:23 I realized I realized as we're talking about it that I hadn't found it in my tabs. I never actually commented in that thread. I read a fair amount of it. And I think I got the rest of my interactions elsewhere. But I hadn't commented. So now I have commented to say, I miss big boats duck.

Jessamyn 1:05:38 All right. Well, now I have commented to say, please come back to the podcast.

Cortex 1:05:45 All right. I mentioned one more in passing that we move

Jessamyn 1:05:48 on. And that's that's my last one.

Cortex 1:05:50 I enjoyed this post from brain Wayne, about a couple of sort of inquiries into research in history. And so Brett Devereaux writing about the nature of our evidence for the ancient world and its limitations. And then the essay that ended up catching my eye specifically, why do our viewers still like to ask, what are they still ask linked list? Questions, which is kind of an inside baseball thing. For programmers? I don't I don't know what that is. A linked list is just a way of organizing data such that it's sort of a chain of individual little data structures, and each one points to the one after it and the one before it. And it's a way of managing information. It's useful. For some things, it's less useful for other things. But it's just it's a programming data structure. There's this sort of trope of asking people to sort of sit down at a whiteboard and implement a linked list as sort of a proof of competency during programming job interview. And the question is, why is that happened when this is a data structure that exists as a well implemented library for every language that uses them? And some languages don't even need to use them? Because they don't allow you to, like access that level of like, low level stuff? So it's like, it's a very specific question. And, and the question is, like, why do people do that? And so the person who wrote this Hillel waim, looked at it as a sort of historical historical project of like, how do we try and answer this question? And they came up with, I thought, a pretty good compelling answer that like, in the early 80s, it made sense to ask about, because you were hiring C programmers to do Unix. And they needed to know C, and if you know how to do that stuff, and C, you know how to do a linked list. And if you don't, you're not going to be a very good C programmer. So like, you know, Washington people out easily. But yeah, not every programming job in 2021 is a low level C programmer for UNIX. So it's not the useful Civ, it would have been at the time, but has, but people still do that. Because people write books about interviews, and write blogs about interviews, and people read those. And oh, that's how I'm gonna interview is basically the theory. You know, the guy's point is partly like, hey, who knows? You know, this is this is, this is what I've come up with. And you know, it seems plausible, but also, you know, what do I know? And, yeah, anyway, I enjoyed that. And it's a fun thread, because there's like, there's a whole, like, ancient history, biography stuff, and then the programmer link lists stuff. And there's this very strong parallel here, which I think is why bring them up together of like, the sort of figuring out the historical situation as best you can from limited resources. But it's to like completely separate conversations happening in the same thread. And it's, it's nice, it's a fun, sort of, like, parallel thing. So I like that. I will, I think I'll call it that for my Metafilter stuff. What's going on and ask Metafilter Jessamyn?

Jessamyn 1:08:46 Wow, all sorts of stuff. It's been really gratifying to see questions. More questions about vaccinations and fewer questions about COVID related stuff, even though obviously, vaccine questions are COVID related stuff, but I've enjoyed getting to, you know, help people work on the good aspects of this. This was one such question from Kuta. Well, mushy, could swell, mushy. Basically, a family member eligible for the vaccine, hesitant, worried about some stuff, not an anti Vaxxer, but hates the doctor, you know? Are there some good explainers? Or have you successfully convinced a family member with similar concerns to get the vaccines besides just the obvious, Hey, you don't want to die, do you? Which obviously, you know, doesn't totally help and there are people especially Lacus, who got one of the best answers in this thread. Who does this professionally and has you know some ways basically claim like, let's, you know, let's let's talk through this, let's let's, let's help you with it without, you know, sort of pushing or kicking, you know, people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And just, you know, there's a lot of good resources for people from different cultural backgrounds, because people can not want to get vaccinated for a number of reasons. Also, in fact, I was just reading a Twitter thread from a bipoc librarian who I follow in other spaces just in the librarian space on Twitter, talking about how she was getting a vaccination much later than she was eligible, because she was just reluctant for a really long time, you know, for various reasons that were, you know, important to her. But you know, wanted to feel like it was important to actually talk about these things, because there are a lot of reluctant people and they're not all just like, you know, Trumper AntiVaxxer type of people, there are people with, you know, very real mistrust of the medical establishment or who have concerns or questions about the vaccine that they feel like is getting brushed away and learning what people's real concerns are, can help you help them make, you know, the right choice for them. And so I enjoyed listening to people talk about how to do that kind of thing. Cool. I have some more questions.

Cortex 1:11:27 Yeah. Yeah, go for it. Go for it.

Jessamyn 1:11:29 Wow. Ah, crossover ties, which was a thing. I didn't really know what they were when I read the question, but then I read the question, and I immediately got it. Part of the school uniform when false Dimitri went to Catholic elementary school was a crossover tie. Do people still wear them? And what are they? And why are they part of, you know, women's uniform? And and what is the thing and so just, you know, brief conversation, but, you know, like a lot of things that are like in a uniform, they sort of come from other places. You know, they they are in women's uniforms in the US military. You see them in choirs. They have different names, et cetera, et cetera. There were similar ties with part of Girl Guides and Brownie guides. And, you know, one of those things I didn't really know, I didn't know about it, and it was interesting to learn about it.

Cortex 1:12:24 Yeah, I don't think I've ever really visually registered those before. I've probably seen them as parts of ensembles in uniforms, but never never picked it out as a detail. That's interesting. Yeah. I have a five years later, a final update on an ass metal filter.

Jessamyn 1:12:41 I love these.

Cortex 1:12:44 They're usually very, you know, sort of I want to say banal, but not in an insulting way. But like, you know, they did this. Here's the thing about prosaic is good, dirty, dirty old town asked five years ago about streaming Romanian or Hungarian TV in the USA. And it turns out, you just need a VPN. So you gotta VPN?

Jessamyn 1:13:05 Oh, I saw this update, just because I don't know why I saw this update. But I didn't know Oh, because it came over email. But I didn't know what it was an update to. And that clarifies things for me. That's good to know. I, you know, just the terms of metal filter as crowdsourcing, I enjoyed magnetospheres question about, like, I saw this freeze frame television show at a meeting in somebody's background. And now we all want to figure out what the show is. The person was watching. And oh, my gosh, if this question was not answered in essentially half an hour. That it's a it's a freeze frame from this is us. But basically, they had a meeting, somebody had a TV that was paused in the background. And they were like, we just need something to bug us about. And yeah, was just kind of fun. Like, it's basically like, two answers or three answers. And then a whole bunch of people like

Cortex 1:14:16 that's fantastic.

Jessamyn 1:14:17 Yeah, it's always fun. And my personal favorite, maybe in that I gave an answer that I was happy with is NSA IDs. I made a bet with my wife that I could grow a 100 pound pumpkin. Now I have to grow a 100 pound pumpkin have helped me do this. And maybe I didn't comment in this thread. I meant to because I had read. Oh sure. I did. Because I have like watched a video of how people grow these enormous pumpkins and I felt like I had a little bit to share. You know, because it is a thing that you can Do if you're in the right growing area? And yeah, you got to get big moon, pumpkins, and some other things to do. And it's cold outside there. So the NSA IDs, got some pumpkin sprouts inside. And that's the status. But I'm hoping this is a thread that we get an update to, that tells us tells us what happened. What happened with the giant pumpkin?

Cortex 1:15:32 Yeah, I want to I want to see the evidence. I want to see the the offspring. Yes.

Jessamyn 1:15:37 And there were Zeus. Yes. The produce produced. There were not a lot of library themed stuff. There was a really good wiki data, thread on meta filter that I liked, but was short and small. But this was one of those like kitten caboodle needed to try and track down this short story. And they kind of know the name of it, but they read it. Like, you know, I know, this is a long shot, but and I helped some other people helped. And part of the problem is short story collections. The titles of the short stories themselves are sometimes but not always in the metadata for the thing. So you can't necessarily regularly short search for a short story title in a library catalog or in Amazon, and have it pull that up. And this is especially true if you're not 100% Sure, what the short story title was. And so yeah, there was a bunch of people dicking around with it. And it turned out that, well, they didn't read it. I mean, they may have read it in the 90s. But the book is from 1980. But they had the title, right. And it turns out, it wasn't like Best American Short Stories, which was what they thought it was, it was in the Pushcart Prize. And yeah, it was, it was a nice little sort of Metafilter sleuths working together combination success that I was pleased with.

Cortex 1:17:09 That's excellent. It's, it's always interesting with this kind of question, because like, you really don't know whether it's going to be solvable or not like that's, that's one of the weird sort of cloudy probability things about it like, because when you're pretty sure you remember, and you're pretty sure with this, pretty sure was something like something like you may or may not have at all actionable information. And you never know until someone does find it out. This has made me remember, a very, I don't remember why it was asking the question, but 11 years ago, I posted it and asked Metafilter asking who that band was with the white pants and or white belts. Which as, as people basically said a couple times, like, take your fucking pick. And I have no idea what I was remembering 11 years ago, that made me ask, it's just some, it's I can't even call it the visual I had in mind. But it was one of those like, and this was a loser because like, yeah, this was like, it turns out

Jessamyn 1:18:05 the New Age era that could have been or the New Wave, or that could have been anybody ever. He was with the white belts back then. Right? I

Cortex 1:18:12 would not have been paying any attention for most of the 80s to popular music at all. Like I just did not get a you know, early jump on any of that. So, yeah, anyway,

Jessamyn 1:18:23 I mean, link to that, if you asked it, link to it, and maybe link to it. Oh, I see. I see.

Cortex 1:18:29 Like, people came up with 20 different answers. And like, I don't know how I would verify or otherwise, you know,

Jessamyn 1:18:36 recognize if it was

Cortex 1:18:40 seven years ago, I might have

Jessamyn 1:18:42 oh, gosh, so you don't even know what then Josh was?

Cortex 1:18:45 We're so far away from ever being able to resolve that question. Yeah, God, who knows? I have one other ask. I can mention this. It's actually,

Jessamyn 1:18:57 I had a similar one to? Well, it was just it was looking for book titles. I have a friend who's trying to find a book that they read as a kid, and it doesn't have anything marked as best answer. So it is entirely possible that there is no best answer as of yet. So this was just the user whose name is a cat face. You know, like equals up.up equals, I don't know how to pronounce it doesn't say, Ah, but it's a it's a book about kids who go on an adventure in Egypt, blah, blah, blah. And there's a couple of suggestions. But it's just from yesterday, so or this morning, early, early in the morning. So if you like to answer those questions, look at that one. So what did you get

Cortex 1:19:43 in there? I have a question. This ties back to the Jekyll and static site and so on stuff we were talking about earlier, possibly before that episode started. So so this is a failed callback, but question from Mark 7570, who's actually mark Hearst I'm asking about how to set up RSS oughta, you know, handmade blog, basically, which is a weird little thing. And the answer was basically Oh, yeah, I saw that. Just make it. Yeah, this is my radar because he originally linked to his blog, because he barely ever posts on Metafilter did know that was like, Yeah, not so much like it would have been okay. But also this is very

Jessamyn 1:20:19 well, and he understands of FTP. Like, why why that would be? Yeah.

Cortex 1:20:25 Yep. But yeah, it's a weird thing. And I've thought about that myself when thinking about like, do I want to and my solution has been to just not even bother with RSS. Because how often do I even add something to my website at the moment? But yeah, it's a tricky little thing. Like that's one of the things it just naturally comes with a CMS, but then you have a CMS, and now you have two problems. So yeah, anyway, what else you got? Anything else you want to hit? Ah,

Jessamyn 1:20:50 no, I think that was it. I had one thing to talk about, I think one thing in meta talk. And I think that was it, which was just that greenish has been like, hey, meta filter music, still a thing? You should come check it out. There's still stuff that's going on there. There's some talk threads. And hey, keep it keep it up everybody.

Cortex 1:21:16 Yeah, greenish. For anyone who does not remember had for a while been doing a sort of volunteer metal filter music podcast. She was wrangling up good stuff and putting out a little show. And it was very delightful. And then life happened, I think, marriage and baby and Pandemic happened. So understandably got disrupted. But it was a nice thing. And greenish has been a great booster for music. And I'm excited to see her back talking about music and excited to try and wrangle up some enthusiasm for some more activity over there. And yeah, there's a music challenge. So I'm talking about possibilities and whatnot in a little bit more detail. And if you're, if you make music, if you want to collaborate on making music, etc, pop in and say hello, and maybe post something on music, because it's a chill friendly place to do that.

Jessamyn 1:22:10 Yeah, I think I think that's a good idea.

Cortex 1:22:14 There was, Well, yesterday was April Fool's Day, often the worst day on the internet, et cetera, et cetera. And we tried to keep with a plan of doing something not terrible. And so we did a couple of goofy things, one of which was an exquisite corpse thread that I guess, I guess we need to figure out what to do about revealing the content now that it's like 170 comments long. But the whole idea was you can only see the previous comment when you post and so everybody's sort of adding to a developing collection of text that they mostly have no context for. So we'll see what happens there. I'm looking forward to seeing how much of a mess it's like. It's basically a human Markov chain situation, which I appreciate. But it seems like people had fun throwing stuff in there. And then we also made uncle Mefi, his big book of beans, which is a 12 page activity book that a whole bunch of the mod staff helped add puzzles and coloring pages and, and stuff to

Jessamyn 1:23:09 write just to kind of print in work on your own. We were thinking of you, but we didn't want to do anything. Elbow, Ewe, jokey, jokey kind of stuff. Yeah.

Cortex 1:23:21 So yeah, and those were both fun. It was fun to put those together. It was nice to throw a little bit of positive creative energy into it as a little side thing last few days. And now we're safely past April Fool's. And people stop posting terrible fake news about stuff.

Jessamyn 1:23:37 I'm trying to think I feel like I saw like, one library that said you could check out cats now from the library, which bummed me out, because it turned out it wasn't true. And then the thing I posted in that thread about the W three, see bring you back the blink tag, which I'll just laugh at that every year somebody brings it up.

Cortex 1:23:54 Yep. And yeah, so there were those. There was an Asian American mefite Check in thread someone posted. It was a ledson posted a couple weeks ago, basically response to the higher visibility recently of the shitty uptake in violence towards Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. So yeah, just kind of a place to check in. So if you're looking for somewhere on Metafilter, to specifically, sort of get a little bit of a check in or support or there. Hey, that sir, go check it out. Yeah. And

Jessamyn 1:24:35 there have been also an uptick in questions on Ask Metafilter about, you know, how to grapple with same either somebody as somebody who is Asian American Pacific Islander, or somebody who is not but wants to be supportive and helpful, without trying to, you know, make it about you. There are definitely some good conversations happening over there.

Cortex 1:24:56 There was also a nice little thing right at the start of the month, from fk WT saying hey, thanks to my for my career change advice. That was so nice. Just started, like, you know, they asked the asked on ask for advice on stuff and sort of got some suggestions and ran with it. And now they've got a new job. And so yeah,

Jessamyn 1:25:17 and it seems to suit them. And it seemed to be a pivot that totally worked and they seem pleased about it. And it was nice.

Cortex 1:25:25 Yeah. A little bit of good news from something. And yeah, I don't know. I think that's that's kind of, that's the stuff that's that's the news. That's the site. That's the that's the things that my brain can produce over the last 80 minutes or so.

Jessamyn 1:25:42 That sounds good. I you know, it's it's it's weird having it be daytime. And you know, like, that's the thing about daylight savings is it just, it's always weird that it's daytime no matter what time it is. It's just like, alright, daytime, surprising in it. And even though it's really it's 320 in the afternoon here, but in the deepest, darkest winter, it actually would have been deep and dark by now. So, yeah, I'm gonna go out for a walk. Get a little exercise. Shake off. This day, I had a great time talking to you, as per usual, and I'm glad we got to wedge a podcast in because I know, putting together the April Fool's stuff is work. And I appreciate and this is even as much as I like Yeah. So thanks.

Cortex 1:26:31 Like, no, no, totally.

Jessamyn 1:26:33 But this is also a job.

Cortex 1:26:35 There's a certain amount of effort involved. There's a certain amount of like, we were talking at the beginning about, like, you know, social energy and the social energy required to sort of like interact and like the podcast is always a pleasant experience for me because I'm hanging out and talking to you. But if there's also a sense of like, oh, but we're also putting on a show humble though it is.

Jessamyn 1:26:54 And then I walk away from it and then you've got more shit to do, which was it? Was it last month that everything got like deeply

Cortex 1:27:01 weird Okay, there was a problem last month with like downloading from the place we record this on ours getting like, you know, 4k per second, and then the download would die after an hour. And I think it was just they had some sort of service provider fuckup upstream,

Jessamyn 1:27:15 but anyway, you don't know them or you until you figure it out. Yeah,

Cortex 1:27:19 exactly. But I did eventually managed to get it downloaded. So I think it was their fault and they fixed it. Anyway, hopefully that won't happen at all this month. It'll be competitive briefs.

Jessamyn 1:27:27 I see no reason why it would happen this month. Everything's just going great.

Cortex 1:27:32 Let's go forward with a spirit of optimism and belief that things that don't need to fuck up won't fuck up.

Jessamyn 1:27:36 Fantastic with you in optimism, at least for now.

Cortex 1:27:41 All right, talk to everybody else talk talk to you all next month. That was a sentence.

Jessamyn 1:27:46 Oh my god, Josh.

Cortex 1:27:48 Let's do it. Let's Let's hang up.