Podcast 172 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 172: I'll Get There At Some Point (2021-04-29).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 Oh, I am nope, that's that's not the right word for that. Hey, this is a podcast about metal filter that happens monthly. There's 172 episodes including this one and I am cortex aka Josh Maillard.

Jessamyn 0:18 You said that backwards to screw me up?

Cortex 0:20 Yeah, I was I'm absolutely fucking with you.

Jessamyn 0:23 And I am Jasmine known as Jessamyn

Cortex 0:27 Nice. All right, here we go we nailed it. Two tries

Jessamyn 0:34 this one's better though.

Cortex 0:35 Yeah, no, I like this better. How are you? Jessamyn? I asked in an artificial way because we've been talking already. Ah,

Jessamyn 0:42 pretty good actually all things considering I got very good news about my gallbladder. I have found interesting hidden pictures of librarians on the interwebs and mostly nothing hurts and

Cortex 0:55 I'll take it. That's a good situation to be in.

Jessamyn 0:59 Oh and half vaccinated which I think you are too.

Cortex 1:01 Yes. I will be fully vaccinated on Monday. In fact, I will drive up to St. Helens, Oregon, which is named after mountain in Washington. And you have pretty good view of St. Helens though from there.

Jessamyn 1:16 Are you serious? It's just a place in Oregon that's named for having a view of Washington.

Cortex 1:20 Yeah, well, for a really cool mountain Washington is probably among the closest places Josh, you're in the West. Well, sure. But you know, that's the one you can see. You can see it really well. It's it's close enough that like even with the tarp missing from Mount St. Helens, it's still a pretty good view and probably see the hell out of it back when it's still had it's so Wait, you're

Jessamyn 1:41 getting your shot then or that's when you've completed the 10 days after your shot or

Cortex 1:45 how well that's where I will go to a Walgreens in St. Helens, Oregon. Half an hour up a state road. It is a little bit of a schlep but you know my other likely options it was seeming like we're in Salem, which is like an hour south so and it's a nice chill drive up to St. Helens because like, so

Jessamyn 2:03 you're not vaccinated until you waited the amount of time for your antibodies to build up.

Cortex 2:09 Right. So I'll go up Monday and get my second shot. And then I can start, you know, counting down a couple weeks or so.

Jessamyn 2:15 That's great. I'm excited for you. Yeah, my second shot is a week from yesterday. And Jim's is a week from yesterday, no week from today, because he got Pfizer and I got Maderna so we got we started the different times and we'll end it pretty much the same time. And and then we wait 10 days, and then we're gonna hang out I think nice. Yeah, that is so excellent. And I just walk across the street to get my shot, which is nice.

Cortex 2:40 That's a good setup.

Jessamyn 2:41 It is really nice. And Jim went to like this giant Convention Center in Boston, which just you know, because Massachusetts has some of these mass vaccination sites. And it was like giant Convention Center you know, they're also doing them at like Fenway Park, which I really would have thought would have been cool. And then like Gillette Stadium, which is stupid and in the wrong direction, but still like you know, they're doing some like drive thru ones in the rural areas up here. Next show up and your car roll up your sleeve pull over there and park for 15 minutes. Get the fuck out of here.

Cortex 3:14 Yeah, we're doing a there's there's the Oregon Convention Center in Portland is doing large vac stuff. That's where Angela was doing some volunteer shifts.

Jessamyn 3:22 I saw the pictures. Alright. Yeah, sure. I think we talked about that. Maybe But yeah, it's very cool. Yeah, I

Cortex 3:27 think she was maybe just gearing up for that last time we recorded but ya know, she's I think she's done with the shifts original scheduled there. But she may do some more. But she's also got her second best shot yesterday. So cool. And so far, so good. Just sort of chillin out and doesn't seem perfectly bowled over by it. So great. Yeah, vaccinations.

Jessamyn 3:50 I do have one thing to say about the number 172. At the point, we are ready to I think we're

Cortex 3:55 ready. I think I think Bring it on.

Jessamyn 3:58 Hold on. That I say ready. Why click the link, I'm using a different browser. But 172 is a member of this sequence, which I find kind of interesting, which is, you know, you can tell me if you have heard of it as in this term or not, but the lazy caterers sequence

Cortex 4:20 I have not heard the phrase but I see the image and I'm immediately like, oh, okay, yes, it's

Jessamyn 4:25 one of those you can cut straight lines across a circle and get that many bits from it. Yeah. And lazy cater are basically means like, you cut across a thing like a cake or whatever. And you just get what you get, instead of having all the lines crossed in the middle. So you'd get a certain obvious number each time. You cut it in seemingly random ways. So that like with five cuts, you get 16 pieces, but they're not all the same size,

Cortex 4:53 but it's actually a very, very constrained way. And that's why you're a laser caterer because you want to make as few That's as possible. Right?

Jessamyn 5:02 Many pieces as possible. Who cares if some of the pieces are shitty? Not you.

Cortex 5:07 Not me. Definitely not me. No, this is this is this is right up my alley. Well, I may have to futz around with it. Hey, hey, 172. Good job. That's a good. That's a good thing for a number. I like it. Yeah.

Jessamyn 5:23 I didn't even read the rest of it. Because I stopped when I got to Lacey cater sequence. And I was like, Tell me more. Tell me more.

Cortex 5:32 Nope, I am into it. Excellent. All right. That over in my tabs to hold on.

Jessamyn 5:37 Hey, I just went to jobs. And I noticed there's a map that seems to work. There's

Cortex 5:41 is it fully working for you? I've got a white box on my screen.

Jessamyn 5:45 For me, you may have an ad blocker or some other third party blocker that's doing that.

Cortex 5:50 Yeah, I'm not sure what it is. Yeah, no.

Jessamyn 5:53 Job. You're me. Excellent. It's actually fairly near me. Not a job that I want. But hey, there's jobs. And for both fix the map?

Cortex 6:05 Yay. Yeah, I've been trying to, there was a whole thing with, as I understand. This is thankfully something that's been entirely a horrible thing. And not something I've had to futz with. Because it's weird web API shit. But I guess Google used to have basically a free tier for their, one of their map API's. And a bunch of people were using it because it was free. And then Google said, Maybe you should pay for that. And a bunch of people had broken maps at that point. So yeah, we're moving over to several

Jessamyn 6:35 have broke. Oh, you mean a bunch of people like a bunch of different websites? Like every single metal filter person did?

Cortex 6:40 Yeah. Yeah. Like, well, and Well, anybody using the free version, like people who were paying for that IP, I think, continue to get that API to work, because they were already serious, something like that.

Jessamyn 6:51 I want I was paying for the API, I would still see the map on No, no,

Cortex 6:54 no, if metal filter was paying for the metal filter would still like yeah, it's people who were using it as a free product. And then he was like, well, free. Well, I don't know if we should do that. No more free. Yeah. Something like that. I have it with you. Yeah, no, how

Jessamyn 7:08 about you pay for this?

Cortex 7:09 Yeah. But yes, so we're getting those maps stuff backed up in shape. And yeah, which also matters for like, what really matters is the geolocation stuff powering it like because we do stuff, like, you know, users can put in their like location, and we use it for like IRL stuff. So independent of actually showing a map, it's important to have the ability to deal with coordinates. So that's, that's back in pretty good shape. I think at this point. I will notice,

Jessamyn 7:37 wow, this The interesting thing about this map is it does show the name of the countries, we're in that country's way of needing it. Right. So it's fine. Yeah, instead of Spain. Although France just says France, France. Is France called France and France.

Cortex 7:54 I don't know. No.

Jessamyn 7:56 Deutschland, Italia, turkey, turkey. United States.

Cortex 8:04 France is spelled France In France, but it's pronounced France. France. Francais?

Jessamyn 8:12 Yeah. I don't know the answer to this, but I'm curious about it. Now. At any rate, thanks for amble for the map. Yep. At any rate jobs.

Cortex 8:20 I don't think there's any new jobs for April. Or I

Jessamyn 8:23 guess that I kind of forgot, of course, what month it is. Yep.

Cortex 8:28 So I don't think we have new or there's no, not subsequently close. What's at least you know, who knows? throating Jers filled job. But

Jessamyn 8:37 yes, we can't see the filth jobs. We the mods when we're looking at this website, we've we've never

Cortex 8:41 we've never set up to do that we should get around to it's just like one of those like, super low priority things that it really only comes up when we talk about jobs on the podcast. So we'll get there at some point. Let's talk about projects. Let's pop over

Jessamyn 8:54 to projects where there have been things we'll get there at some point.

Cortex 8:57 I mean, you know, I think anybody who knows about software knows that any sort of like,

Jessamyn 9:01 Did you write it down? Or is it just I'm gonna keep bringing it up until someday when fumbles visiting you and you can tell them yourself.

Cortex 9:10 I think I mentioned in the to do channel is 10 point I would not be surprised if it is in fact on Trimble's extended list of potential projects, that's

Jessamyn 9:17 putting something in the to do channel the way to get it taken care of or the way to put it on the list.

Cortex 9:22 It's a good it's a way to sort of get it on the list. Which then if it is a quick easy thing to take care of it may just get taken care of. But then we started talking about the tech to sort of we're talking at this point now about the breakdown of internal channels on the company slack I realized this is well you know it is important I don't I don't know if it's very good podcast material and just wanted

Jessamyn 9:43 to know how those sausages are made.

Cortex 9:46 I mean, I don't have a problem with it. I just say I don't want to be boring or than usual. Anyway, yes. I would not say I guess my my view from my limited exposure to software development patterns is that any any statement that involves at some point or soon, that doesn't have an actual firm date on it is not actually an optimistic statement. It's it's a vaguely aspirational one, right.

Jessamyn 10:18 I think you and I can both agree on that. So, projects, I have mostly teed up stuff that I thought I might want to pay more attention to. So same place Chinese fashion, which is longtime, longtime mefite wrote a story about doing stand up comedy right before COVID. And I'm trying to do for unwrapped bar show stand up what Anthony Bourdain did for line cooks, while chronicling the last days of a fertile scene that may never return. So basically, doing a whole bunch of stand up, right on the eve of when stand up stopped. And then you've got a bunch of questions about whether it's coming back at all, or how or whatever. So seemed like a interesting thing. long essay on medium by writer Chinese fashion. I'm loading it into a tab right now.

Cortex 11:22 Yeah, I'm glancing through projects and seeing like, things like Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Jessamyn 11:28 Like we've linked to some of Jeff's stuff before.

Cortex 11:32 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Chinese faction has posted a bunch of good stuff on projects in the past. So it tends to, it tends to come up. There's in assembler at some point, I will get there. Thing Beijing Brown has started a newsletter, about online culture in China called Chaoyang trap, like, oh, no, no idea how I'm doing phonetically. But yeah.

Jessamyn 12:04 And we've made up for it right now,

Cortex 12:06 we've mentioned Beijing browns, stuff several times before too, because they post good, they create good stuff, and they put it on projects. And that's how it supposed to work. And I appreciate that. So yeah, the whole newsletter game in general, I appreciate him doing it, I

Jessamyn 12:22 kind of, oh, God,

Cortex 12:25 I just, I kind of wish, I kind of wish what we could be doing is like saying, oh, blogging is okay again. And if that has to take the form of I've started a newsletter, I will accept that, like, you know, like, it's people are blogging, and it's just called something else

Jessamyn 12:39 very weird for me to have both a blog and a newsletter, and trying to figure out what goes on what, but really, it's all the same stuff, you know, I wind up like, my newsletter winds up having a lot more random links. And then my blog is for like, longer form, let me tell you about my day and or work like stuff. And then I link to it in my newsletter that, you know, is a little bit more graphically interesting and a little less reading, but I have to say, as someone who there was a interesting asked Metafilter thread I will talk about when we hit the AskMe Metafilter thread, but I've been thinking more about how I've been thinking lately, and and, you know, I'm a really like writing and reading person. And you know, the podcasts revolution pass me by because I just don't, that's not how I take in information that I intend to hang on to. And so getting to have an inbox that is full of newsletters has actually been a delight for me. And, you know, I curate them to make sure I don't have ones that I'm not reading and then I'm just deleting or whatever. But I'm getting to read a whole bunch of like different people's talking about different stuff in a way that like RSS feeds of blogs weren't working for me, even though if a newsletter was just like, you know, 20 words, read about the rest of my blog, I probably would go do that because my inbox is like my primary organizational tool. You know what I mean?

Cortex 14:05 Yeah, yeah, no, that's I've been, I've been I've been sort of stubbornly reading newsletters catch as catch can instead of subscribing them which seems very weird when that's a good mechanism for it. But I'm also like, sort of figuring out what I'm doing with my email and I've been like, I've been continually trying to shift I used to have basically my inbox was how I handled all my personal email and also meta filter related email and

Jessamyn 14:33 my life, although I filter all of it into a whole bunch of different sub folders and deal with it that way.

Cortex 14:38 Yeah, well, at this point like that we've got the app Metafilter G Suite domain stuff working we've had that going for a while and so I've been moving as much metal filter stuff over to you know, the cortex Metafilter address instead of my personal and that's really good thing, but it means my personal inbox is quieter now but not sorted out enough to be quiet but also like some of the stuff that I would be looking for is not there because tilbyr in my work email and

Jessamyn 15:03 multiple inboxes in one, one login,

Cortex 15:06 I find I find it more useful to like keep them separate just because I have, I have a bunch of meta filter things that like, in some cases are meta filter related account for service, I also have just a personal account for so at this point, I just Oh, it's so much easier to have like Safari is my work browser. And Chrome is my personal browser sort of thing. And I realize I could do that with sessions. I'll get there at some point. But anyway, like, I should get more

Jessamyn 15:32 officially like, I'll get there.

Cortex 15:39 To put a button on that I should subscribe to newsletter. So I have more things that I am looking forward to see in my personal inbox instead of just continuing to read out the spam and sort out the long tail of benefits or stuff is what I like. Because they'd be like, Oh, hey, here's the thing I like. So yeah, that's all

Jessamyn 15:54 I'm probably this close to having all my newsletters go in their own newsletter folder, just because my inbox I log in, and I'm like, you have 30 messages since you went to bed last night. And I'm like, fuck, and then I look at them. And I'm like, Oh, this stuff is mostly Nice.

Cortex 16:07 Yeah. Yeah, that's not a bad idea.

Jessamyn 16:11 Well, and it's other people gravitate away from email, you know, the utility of email diminishes, like in the same way like I think for a lot of people postal mail just got ridiculous. And or phone calls got ridiculous.

Cortex 16:23 Yeah, yeah, my phone is useless for phone calls if you're not in my contact list. And like 90% of the phone calls I get are random spam. So I just kind of don't answer my phone anymore. Unless I'm expecting to write every now and again fucking purpose. You know,

Jessamyn 16:39 it's never somebody I want to talk to. And sometimes it's somebody I very much do not want to talk to you. Hi, Jessamyn I looked up your phone number and I've got this aggravating tech support problem and I ignored all the ways you want to be contacted and decided to contact you how I want to contact you. It's really all like Gilbert Godfried level kind of yelling in my ear type stuff.

Cortex 17:03 Yeah, basically, communication was mistaken. We should go back to being isolated beings stranded forever in the darkness alone.

Jessamyn 17:10 Speak for yourself. I'm already an isolated being. turn the computer off, turn the phone off. You got to come here and knock on the damn door.

Cortex 17:20 That's pretty good. It is particularly to me. It is another little project I liked is from Mack rail.

Jessamyn 17:28 That was just gonna link to that. Yes. Yeah, they they

Cortex 17:31 made some grocery bags for the bike. Bags. That's that's the whole thing. bags, bags. Bags that they can drag around their rigs and their eggs. Yeah, it's cool ride their bike with their legs.

Jessamyn 17:46 But it was like a very satisfying like little project. I wanted to figure out how to do this. I did it.

Cortex 17:51 Yeah, that's that's that's the way to be.

Jessamyn 17:55 And I think we would be remiss if we did not talk specifically about a quarter I his first music video and vinyl release, which made its way to I believe, fanfare talk and metal filter proper, because I was telling Jim about it. Like, you know, corduroy, we love his music, blah, blah, blah. And Jim's like, yes. And I was like, Well, you know, new album. And he's like, Yes, I know. Because I read about it. He said fanfare talk. And now I'm looking forward and it is not on fanfare talk. That man

Cortex 18:33 music talk maybe

Jessamyn 18:37 new music talk would make a lot more sense fan for talk was confusing. Now. I've got to find it. Yeah, music talk, Jim.

Cortex 18:46 Yes, yes, Carter Carter. I makes fantastic music and has been making fantastic music for a very long time was I don't remember if he was actually in the Harvey girls at one point years and years ago or just did some stuff and he was in Portland. I think he's in I want to say maybe Seattle now. But he's moved around. But anyway, he joined the site as a child learned child, teenager, a teenager making excellent music and has continued to do so for like 14 years now.

Jessamyn 19:21 And this video, which is you know, it's not only like a vinyl pressing of a record, but apparently it's a puppet video that is itself really cool.

Cortex 19:33 Yeah. Basically, check out all of Cordray stuff. If this is new to you go through the music catalogs because boy quarter is great. Yes, that's very exciting.

Jessamyn 19:45 Yeah. When When? When and thank you Anbu for posting it to metal filter. And thank you for Jim for reading music talk.

Cortex 19:53 Yeah. And there's some more projects. As always, if you're making a project I

Jessamyn 20:00 Last month, Josh, I said I was gonna finish my little thing and posted two projects. And you know what?

Cortex 20:06 You didn't, I didn't finish it. That's okay. You can do it this month. You can do it this month. You know, the best time to post that project is last month, the second next point, Josh, this month, I'm not shaming you. I'm trying to be some No, I told me to.

Jessamyn 20:22 That's the title of the podcast. Okay, I'll get there at some point, all engine that could. It's just some HTML tedium. And I found other tedium that I prefer. I figured out how to use an advanced query tool on Wikipedia. So seriously, I knew you would appreciate this. So basically, I can make a list of all the people who are American librarians who are dead. I'll explain why in a moment. And

Cortex 20:50 who, just so you can take good,

Jessamyn 20:54 don't have a photograph on their pages. Because there's this loophole on Wikipedia. It's not really a loophole. But like, you can't take a copyrighted photo and put it on Wikipedia, you just can't. But you can take a small low resolution image from a copyrighted source and make a fair use justification for it if the person is deceased. And if the picture is only used to illustrate their Wikipedia page that otherwise has no pictures. So you can like go around and find a picture I was working on like Librarians of color. And you can find a picture from an old like ebony or jet magazine and take it even though it's copyrighted, as long as you have a fair use justification. And the picture is low resolution, and small like in pixels. And so doing the squarey allowed me to find only dead librarians with no pictures. And now it's like a little work list that I can just go find pictures for them. And as I told you, in one of our aborted run ups to this podcast, you know, I found this picture of a librarian who wrote a Newbery Award winning book. There's no pictures of her on the broader internet, but because she worked at Stanford, and like many Ivy League colleges that are kind of up themselves, and they record everything they ever do. I found a picture of her as a young librarian from 1913. And I was super happy about it. That is fantastic. Yeah. So. So that's my TDM. That has replaced the other two.

Cortex 22:19 Yeah, no, I think that that makes me think between some, some overlap of that sort of query process. And we were talking about 172, being a lazy caterers number. Yeah, which that Wikipedia or that Wikipedia page, links to the online encyclopedia of integer sequences, which Oh, four because I very much. Those those sequences all tend to list some number of terms in a series to illustrate like yellows show the first 40 terms in any given energy sequence. I could search through that somehow to find underrepresented numbers in like, the low like, like in the three digits and try and find the distribution of like, you know, numbers less than 1000 in the encyclopedia and find out which ones are least represented and see if I can find a series that contain those that could I have no idea where we'd go.

Jessamyn 23:23 Like the idea of energy on this, though. Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 23:26 Could be, you know, someone's got to stand up for 913. Right? Because eventually, we'll get there on episodes. 2040s We'll get there at some point. Yes. All right. I'm there with you. I've got the vibe. Good. Should we talk about Metafilter?

Jessamyn 23:43 Yeah, I think we probably should. I don't know if you know, the listeners at home know this, but like, the podcast isn't gonna be rambley. And forever long, because I gotta pick up a meal at 230 at the tech center. And so we do have a hard stop, but it's not for a while.

Cortex 24:01 The hard stop would let us go for like, I think like two hours.

Jessamyn 24:06 Two big promises to 17 minutes of a board of B roll. So yes, True. True. Yes. Oh, my God metal filter was really fun. This month, I spent I had a little bit more kind of free time and energy this month, like just fewer dentist appointments and like less meetings. And so I got to spend more time on metal filter, which I really enjoyed. Excellent. Yeah. So other than mefites on quarter, I made a record, which I think was kind of the segue on to Metafilter. I enjoyed this post from just a little bit ago because it was one of these like lists generating posts, which I like, which was essentially a post from going demand about a Roz chast who was writing in The New Yorker about like, Hey, do you have that word for like when like nobody's really making dinner but you're just kind of shuffling around the kitchen just putting stuff on plates to eat sort of like what do you call that? And so in her household they call it fending like you know fending for yourself. But then she asked on her Instagram account about what other people call it and there's a long list and then it just turned into a really long metal filter thread about what metal filter people call it. You know, fridge lotto get your Roni grazing freezer surprise. Moomin memoir has the Danish word for it, which is turned over fridge. It was just it was just a fun, like, you know, and it talks about, like, you know, people's dinner traditions and, and what that's like, and somebody mentioned, like, since they have children now, they eat like three regular meals a day, which means like, they very rarely get to do this thing anymore. Which I sort of hadn't really thought about. Although I have thought about like when I used to have like dinner with other people having dinner with people with kids was always a little weird because there was always like a serious routine around it. Instead of just like, yeah, we're just gonna talk and drink and bullshit and then eventually dinner will show up kind of clean the refrigerator night. Ploughman's Lunch.

Cortex 26:22 I've heard that sandwich together. I think I've heard that on big

Jessamyn 26:27 lunches, kind of a specific thing in the UK. It's like bread, cheese, meat. But like something you can like put in a bag, you know, salami or whatever, and just leave all day kind of animals in the jungle. You catch it, you kill it, you eat it. Funny. So yeah, good throw, good thread.

Cortex 26:45 I'm trying to figure out when I favorited a thing. And if we mentioned it in the previous podcast, and I can figure this out. Out Loud. Yeah. Yeah, I kind of got lost there in the in the search.

Jessamyn 27:01 I'm trying to figure out why I favorited a thing. I'm looking at it. And I'm like, this is boring.

Cortex 27:07 Well, I guess we can mention

Jessamyn 27:11 superiore Oh, I think I favorited because I wanted to talk to Trimble about it. Because it's one of those things. I'm in the classic plane theme. And if you look within Google V Oracle thread, which has a lot of tags. I don't know what it looks like to you. But to me, there's like this huge chunky whitespace because the tag box goes all the way down before the comments start.

Cortex 27:36 Oh, yeah, it doesn't do that in modern but I think I think I know what you're talking about.

Jessamyn 27:41 Yeah, it's just a dip thing. So I think that's why I favorited it Google V. Oracle. Not my favorite. Yeah. All right. Move on. What were you saying?

Cortex 27:48 Yahoo Answers rip is what I was because there's kind of a short thread about it. That's funny. I kind of almost expected there to be more but Well, yeah, basically,

Jessamyn 28:02 people yahoo answers just wasn't part of their life, you know, but like true answers. Correct me if I'm wrong. It showed up before AskMe Metafilter. Right.

Cortex 28:12 I think the other way around, I think I think we watched it born. We watched it be born. I watched it. Yeah, we watched it born. We watched it. Jason Bourne. I could be wrong. I don't know. I should look it up. I'll do that. But basically, the Verizon bought Yahoo. Some time back. Maybe bought them from someone else who bought them? And I don't remember exactly. Yahoo Answers continued to operate until abruptly was announced like a month ago that it's going to stop operating. And somebody

Jessamyn 28:48 I saw mentioning this on the larger web, probably Twitter was like Yahoo is killed better, more valuable web content than most websites ever have.

Cortex 28:59 It is. It is a thing. It's a very weird thing. Where they just they're a terrible sort of corporate thing that like, you know, bye bye stuff and shuts it down. And then like Verizon buys them and shuts stuff down. And it's just yeah, and it's I think it's easy to point at Yahoo because what else are they even been accomplishing? Exactly in the meantime, but you know, Google does the same fucking shit like people are still mortally wounded over Google shutting down reader

Jessamyn 29:32 never used and I feel like I dodged a bullet of angst. They're

Cortex 29:36 similar. Like I like I was talking about how I tend to read newsletters by going physically to the URL of a given newsletter and checking in instead of signing up for email, so I wasn't any better with all right. Yeah,

Jessamyn 29:51 I know it's important to people. Matt got that ridiculous sign printed. Yep, yep.

Cortex 29:58 Matt was definitely in there. or Yahoo Answers was finally made available for general availability on May 15 2006, after being beta 2000. After asked me yes,

Jessamyn 30:11 yeah AskMe and now it's still around. You kind of missed it real, you know, branding bragging. But I think we need something. Yes. Same time metal filter social media.

Cortex 30:24 You're gonna hire a douchebag you're doing

Jessamyn 30:27 Josh's social media. Well, it's a no shade, but maybe somebody else should be doing the Twitter.

Cortex 30:34 What have you I've been somebody at all weekend probably. My I have I have issues with horrible douchey brands, social media, I guess it's part of the problem. Like on the one hand, I say hahaha, fuck you yahoo answers. We were here before we're gone in, you're gone now. And we're still here. And also, we didn't have a bunch of shitty right wing content on us in the meantime. But at the same time, like I don't really want to be that guy who's fucking beefing on social media or swinging my dick around about brand stuff. Like that also sucks. That's a bad thing on the internet and on social media. And there's a space in between there, I think. Yeah.

Jessamyn 31:13 I like steak them is the librarians brand of pre processed meat. I appreciate that. We made that connection. Yeah, like I also stay calm stem grab s stuff.

Cortex 31:27 Yeah. I don't know. Like it's

Jessamyn 31:32 complicated feelings about you're not the more sincere of the two of us not that neither of us are insincere. But you know not to take that like. Like, I'm like the no irony. I don't understand. I don't get it person. And you're the like, no, it's actually kind of a funny joke. If you think about it in this lateral way.

Cortex 31:49 Sure. No, I mean, like, like the steak and stuff. It's funny. It's entertaining, and sort of refreshing in a narrow way that like, the fucking brand Twitter for whatever the fuck steak comes is it's like, some sort of die cut. I've never

Jessamyn 32:04 heard about being America's thirst trap one more time. It's barely off my soda.

Cortex 32:11 Like, I don't want to

Jessamyn 32:14 know that. I hear what you're saying. I just feel it's a way to do it. Sincerely. FYI, so there's no dick swinging. It's just yeah, you use a lot of like Dick and nuts. metaphors have you lately,

Cortex 32:27 I ever once wanted to become like more aware of it. Like I had a very Beavis and Butthead like high school. Like me, me and my like, best friend growing up, literally watched a lot of Beavis and Butthead. And I think we have a lot of that like baked in, like adolescent male American idiomatic stuff. It's like, burrowed deep into my fucking brain.

Jessamyn 32:49 Sure. I mean, don't get me wrong. Complaining per se,

Cortex 32:53 no, no, no.

Jessamyn 32:54 I've noticed it in 24 hours.

Cortex 32:56 Yeah, like yesterday, I was saying something about like, you know, get off my nuts. Right? No, get

Jessamyn 32:59 off hard nuts. Collective nuts.

Cortex 33:03 Yeah, the idiom of getting off one's nuts. Which, yeah, obviously also has that, like, Oh, my God, don't make a joke gendered thing. But

Jessamyn 33:13 yes. You know, I haven't clicked any of the Ed Balls links. I was thinking maybe you could explain to me what that is.

Cortex 33:19 Oh, you don't know about that ball?

Jessamyn 33:21 If I don't know about it, because I get

Cortex 33:23 there's like nothing to know. So if you don't know about it, you don't know about it. Because there's almost nothing to it. Ed Balls is a politician, maybe an MP, maybe just a guy. A real person in the UK, who 10 years ago. This is why it's been going around. It's a 10th anniversary of the time that Ed Balls, went on to Twitter, tried to search for himself, and accidentally posted a tweet instead. So there's a tweet that balls at Ed Balls saying Ed Balls and and that's the joke, everybody. That's the entire fucking thing. Ed Balls hyped his own name into Twitter as a tweet. At balls, Ed Balls. The whole fucking thing.

Jessamyn 34:00 Okay, so there was a metal filter post about it, which doesn't have an awful lot of content, but still

Cortex 34:05 fun. Yeah, yeah. Ed Balls. But yeah, it's not like a joke about balls. It's just his name is Ed Balls.

Jessamyn 34:11 I mean, it is kind of a joke about Well,

Cortex 34:13 I mean, it was wild. Is that funny? To some extent, but yeah, well, I mean, it's funny because it's like this. Because it's someone who doesn't know how to use Twitter. Who is very much in the public eye, I

Jessamyn 34:22 guess. Speaking of names,

Cortex 34:26 speaking of names are we going to talk about okay, that's a much better one to talk about. I thought we were gonna talk about the band camp thing or not band camp cheese, hopefully the band camp, the base camp thing? Oh,

Jessamyn 34:36 I'm not gonna talk about it.

Cortex 34:38 I'm not gonna talk about either I'll tell you what I'll because we've mentioned it, I'll find the post and link it and talk about it. But then we can just not talk about it. Yeah, don't be stupid shitty tech guys is I think the whole the whole story.

Jessamyn 34:53 My favorite thing about that whole thing was like watching people in their takes about it on Twitter and seeing a whole bunch of white Midwest. Jason's all been I'm a white Midwestern Jason and technology. And I'm just here to say that I think it's great to talk about politics at work, or whatever the thing was. Yeah,

Cortex 35:10 yeah, that's that's the elevator pitch is Basecamp, a company that makes software and has been very loudly iconic clastic about everything or corporate politics has declared that people cannot talk about politics anymore.

Jessamyn 35:23 They declared it kind of on the tail of the fact that some people were doing some racist shit at work. Yeah, vaguely racist. And also

Cortex 35:30 announcing no more committees comfortable. Yeah, announcing, you know, no more committees after a third of the work place joined a diversity, equity and inclusion committee. So yeah, anyway, fuck them. And moving on, let's talk about your thing. Because it's way more fun.

Jessamyn 35:46 I wish this were my thing. But basically, it was just something that you are bringing up Tom saying about a guy named Josh Josh Swain, who made a Facebook message group of all the other Josh swings he could find and made like kind of a fake, hey, we're gonna have a, we're gonna have a fight and determine who gets to keep this name. But then there weren't enough Josh swains, I think to have a big fight. So he just opened it up to any Josh, who wanted to meet at this place in the kind of, you know, crop fire that only could happen on Reddit and other sort of social media places. And it turned into the Josh fight. And it happened on April 24. And the winner was a young black child named Little Josh, and they crowned him the king. And they raised a whole bunch of money for I believe the local food bank, I can't remember exactly what they raised money for. They raised a lot of money for his hospital and medical center. And it was just a very funny fun, I think pretty entirely wholesome has not been milkshake duck to the best of my knowledge. And it's just adorable. Yeah, horrible. Oh, yeah. Children's Hospital. I don't know how I missed that. And it was just kind of a COVID era boredom thing?

Cortex 37:02 Yeah. Well, that's great. Because it had been like, it was like, it was the wholesome side of that anybody wants to ask if you can meet me in the parking lot outside Denny's on Thursday at 345. thing, but also forecasts so far into the future that like, when it came, I was like, Oh, I guess this is happening. Okay.

Jessamyn 37:20 I guess we're all going to Nebraska. Yep. And then there's a whole bunch,

Cortex 37:25 I think was exactly to Josh swains, who actually showed up, I think was the count of Josh Wayne's genuine Josh swains.

Jessamyn 37:32 And then there's all bunch of people talking in the thread about what it was like to have a name that everybody else had, like, did you grow up with a lot of Josh's I feel like we've talked about this before, there was

Cortex 37:41 usually a couple Josh's in in my classes growing up, I was on the tail end of sort of a Josh peak that happened in the 70s. So like 79, there would still Josh's on the ground, but they're they're not as common, proportionally, in younger generations. Still not rare by any chance, but Right. By any chance, by any measure.

Jessamyn 38:05 Any chance?

Cortex 38:06 Yeah, it's still rare by any chance.

Jessamyn 38:09 Yeah, and you know, I have not met a lot of gentleman's but I will note that two of the more popular Jasmine's Now, I mentioned this in the thread, but like, one of them as a yoga enthusiast who could, I'm sure kick my ass, and one of them who was a mixed martial artist who could definitely kick my ass. So I'm not gonna go fight Jasmine, anytime soon. And the yoga enthusiast who was very popular on the internet, her email address is contact jessamyn@gmail.com. And then there's another Jessamyn, who's a therapist in the Pacific Northwest, and her email is email jessamyn@gmail.com. I regularly get email for both of those. Because it's email dot Jessamine and contact dot justment. And as we get the dots drop out,

Cortex 38:59 well, you should register you know, email Jasmine, that's the actual email address@gmail.com. And that'll Yeah, just have people write to that.

Jessamyn 39:07 Yeah. I mean, it doesn't really bother me. But I probably once a week, send a very nice message to somebody who thinks they're emailing their therapist, and in fact, are emailing me. I was like, I'm gonna delete this. But just so you know.

Cortex 39:24 See, I just get the occasional like, Happy Birthday note from someone's aunt and then a lot of receipts for people who bought something at CVS or

Jessamyn 39:31 Oh, man, there is also that Jessamyn in fucking Louisiana who buys stuff at Home Depot, like every week, so much shopping at Home Depot and with home people, there's no way to fix it. You know? Yeah. You just because she knows it's not her email address. Yeah,

Cortex 39:48 she just put it in some. Yeah, that's the one I get. I don't even use this email for anything anymore. But it's like Josh, Josh at Gmail. And yeah, how many Josh's like, what's my email address? Well,

Jessamyn 39:57 it's Joe's Joe's. Josh or maybe there's to Josh, isn't there? I can't remember who Josh isn't there. You should be Josh and Josh, Josh.

Cortex 40:06 I don't I don't want them. I don't want them. I don't I used to be sad that I didn't get josh@gmail.com. And I kind of I don't how much you're terrible.

Jessamyn 40:17 I thought you would have been I thought like six letters was the smallest you could get. I don't know. Maybe I think it is. I think they're all internal. Under six letters, but I am maybe I'm wrong about that. Somebody who listens to this podcast,

Cortex 40:29 way back in the day, maybe like whether or not they had but yeah, I wonder. I wonder.

Jessamyn 40:33 I don't know. We'll get there eventually.

Cortex 40:35 Yes, I enjoyed this thread. About Park. Josh. We are on a fucking wavelength. I

Jessamyn 40:44 just found this on Twitter and was going to talk about it except that I was like, Yeah, but there's really no metal filter angle to that. So I don't and then I found this. Please explain.

Cortex 40:55 So there's a there's man named Gareth Wilde, who lives in Bromley, England. And six years ago, he decided to try parking in every single available space at his local supermarket might be a Sainsbury's and so then he started doing that. And you know, he goes to the grocery store about once a week and then the occasional impulse thing. So he was figuring Okay, 60 trips a year, I can do this in about four years, because there's about, you know, 220 230 available spaces. And but then the pandemic happened in it. So it's taken longer, they finally finished and he's finally parked in every available usable space in the Sainsbury parking lot in Bromley.

Jessamyn 41:38 And the Twitter thread is a thing of beauty because both fully knows how nerdy and ridiculous this is, and also completely applies himself to the task.

Cortex 41:49 Yes, he does a wonderful job, he created a nice drafting, rendering of the parking lot based on an aerial view of it marked out of the unavailable spaces, there's, you know, trolley cart returns, that you can't park your car. And obviously, there's a couple odd non spaces that seemed like they could have been spaces, but they aren't because there's something in the way. And then he parked in the rest work through it, you know, aiming for the ones he hadn't been to he marked out, he did an illustration of the quality of spaces based on some of the exigencies of the parking lot.

Jessamyn 42:28 Right ones that are hard to get into or get out of or that aren't near the exits or entrances or that somebody's likely to get in your way or whatever. And I guess he got interviewed by the Guardian as of today. Oh, nice. Leb la mentions. Excellent. Yes, that's

Cortex 42:43 fantastic. Yeah, that was delightful.

Jessamyn 42:45 I was in his mentions, because I was like, hey, as the board member for the Vermont 251 club, you know, the club devoted to going to all of Vermont's 251 towns, I salute you. And then on another slack, I mean, we talked a little bit about like, you know, people who try and go to all, you know, the United States is 4000 counties. You know, rip Lilo, who was actually a county, a county bagger, and just all of those, like, nutty, completionist projects. They're fun. Yeah. Yeah. And funner. Now, I bet because you can crow about your victory on Twitter, whereas in the past, you just have to be like, Well,

Cortex 43:23 yeah, it's kind of Yeah. Like, it would have been like a, you know, four column inch news of the weird thing inside the, you know, Arts and Culture section of a newspaper, the local newspaper, yeah, yeah, that someone had spent 20 years doing nothing. And now you can just like you can do it on Twitter and like, develop a following for your strange hobby you've decided to jump into. And I appreciate that. Yeah, that seems like a net improvement in the world. Yeah.

Jessamyn 43:50 I feel like a lot of our posts this month are like net improvements into the world. The other one that I liked was kind of a classic but a, or did I a classic, but a good one, which is the internet cable. I mean, you know, Jim, always when I say I'm gonna do the podcast tomorrow, so don't text me. And he's like, mentioned my thing. And this time, he didn't, I just really enjoyed this thread, which is, you know, internet keyhole, which is basically a bunch of like, found photos and kind of selectively given photos in a giant, weird Tumblr blog format of context free pictures. And, you know, there are some concerns that people bring up in the thread, like, hey, that's somebody's asked on the internet. How do you think they would feel about that? Blah, blah, blah, lots of feathered hair, which I appreciate. There appears to be a picture of a young Lemmy up top of it. Now that I'm linking to it this time, but for those of us of a certain age, it's Like there's a bunch of pictures of our childhood that we can now look at.

Cortex 45:05 It really has a this is a slide show of being in a van in the late 70s, early 80s. Like, like, texture to it.

Jessamyn 45:18 Yeah, it's very specifically curated to look like a specific kind of thing, even though it didn't all take place at you know, during those times, like some of these pictures are 90s pictures, some of these pictures are probably 60s pictures, you know, somebody's getting mooned somebody, you know, with rat boots at the Grand Canyon, somebody blah, blah, blah. But there's just there's a lot of pictures. It's fun to look at. It's interesting to talk about, there are certainly privacy concerns. But yeah, and it was gone for a while. And

Cortex 45:53 yeah, like this was this was a blog from like 1012 years ago, I want to say is when it was like the thing originally. So it's like it's interesting to see it having sort of like been this thing for a couple years and then sort of falling off the radar and then yeah,

Jessamyn 46:11 not to be confused with acid sweat lodge, which I think is a slightly earlier slightly more like biker aesthetic, although there's definitely a lot of overlap. And acid sweat lodge, I believe still exists. Like has has stayed existing this whole time.

Cortex 46:32 It seems to be there. Yeah.

Jessamyn 46:35 And you know, hairbands kid birthday parties, Gough's weirdos. Yeah, people goofing around, etc. poster.

Cortex 46:45 Someone on MailChimp has been posting the not my family. Oh, flooring,

Jessamyn 46:48 postcards, I believe. On metal filter. Yes, yeah. Got a huge stack of pictures from somewhere and has been posting them to mulch up but not my family. But it's basically this except for like a family in the 50s. Yeah, you know, they go on vacation. They do this. They do that they do these other things.

Cortex 47:10 Yeah, sort of like 50s 60s nuclear family slideshow, vibe instead of weed in a van.

Jessamyn 47:17 Yeah. Yeah. But also fun and interesting. If you like that kind of thing. And if you don't like that kind of thing, you're welcome to not look at that kind of thing.

Cortex 47:27 Yes, I enjoyed. This is an opportunity to do think do two things. One is to say this post by Ahmad Connie have a roundup of you think I have irate IKEA tiktoks? From cat. His name is not in the post. So I'm not I'll go find it. But from a guy named Scott Sykes. The mustache? Yeah, he's a he's a comedian. He is among other things on TikTok

Jessamyn 47:53 Oh, he's an actual comedian. I just thought he got lucky with this thing.

Cortex 47:57 Well, I mean, like, it's, you know, it's one of the things like I don't know anything about his comedy career, but I understand he does comedy. And also, he's on TikTok doing comedy. And he says comedian in his Twitter bio. So he's a comedian. Anyway, he just has a recurring bit he's been doing on TikTok of being an irate you know, IKEA employee talking back to a customer saying something

Jessamyn 48:19 using this like menacing music like pretending to be the customer. And then this like dumped on music comes in. And then he has the, you know, scathing retorts, basic well,

Cortex 48:29 and this is this is a whole, this is a whole TikTok format, too. And this is one of the things that I thought was interesting sort of reading through this thread is sort of realizing that I am, at this point, very familiar with this TikTok format. And for a lot of people, this is just a thing that's on YouTube, or on Twitter, I guess, is where the compilation is posted without any of that TikTok context. So this is like, it's very good on its own, but it's also like exemplary of this whole format of using that specific music to do that format of, you know, seemingly straightforward, straight face statements with a turn with dramatic music into challenging that statement. Right. So, you know, he's like, you know, I'm never going to shop here again. Well, then don't don't I don't, I don't enjoy.

Jessamyn 49:14 Happy for you to never come back in again. Because frankly, yeah, no, I saw it. I think randomly somebody posted it to Twitter. And then I did not actually see this thread which appears to have turned into a derail about the use of the term Karen.

Cortex 49:31 There may have been some of their I don't know there

Jessamyn 49:33 was a lot in there

Cortex 49:37 oh, you know, there was there was Yeah, right. Because the stranger customers Yeah, a gender

Jessamyn 49:42 Agnes thing but also Yeah, a call.

Cortex 49:45 I was thinking I was thinking caring aspect to it. Anyway, I enjoyed his a great deal. And also you, you said something somewhere, I guess, on Twitter, maybe about trying to.

Jessamyn 50:01 I wrote an

Unknown Speaker 50:02 article with TikTok

Jessamyn 50:04 for Computers in Libraries magazine, a print magazine about Computers in Libraries, but it does pay off my rent and I enjoy writing it. And this month I tackled TikTok which is actually a format I am only a passive appreciator of and not even on the app because the app is too noisy for me. So I figured out how to make a video and made one video for TikTok. So now I have a TikTok. Although I you know, probably it's really not my thing, because you can't turn off the sound. You know what I mean? Like, like, once you started playing one video, when you scroll through them, they all autoplay, and some of them are very loud, and it just doesn't work for I don't have like misophonia. But like, it's, it's a lot for me. It's one

Cortex 50:51 of the weird things about TikTok. And it's like it's a natural thing. You have a bunch of different people creating audio and a bunch of for context, but like there, it would be possible for them to implement some like noise. And I

Jessamyn 51:04 think that's a little bit to be honest. What aggravates me is that I know, it's a very easy thing to not have do it. And so it's a conscious choice for them to not have turned it off. Yeah, yeah, let me see. I think I am edgy, hammock queen? Well, because every single one of my you know, preferred, every single one of my preferred handles was taken. Okay, there you are. Yeah. And so I basically made one video, which is me, like, holding up some library catalog cards, but I had to figure out how to do a whole bunch of stuff. And it was fun trying it and you actually use TikTok, at least a little bit more than

Cortex 51:49 I do. I haven't been doing it as much. Recently, I definitely had a whole unbundling of like, oh boy, I'm going to figure out because I've been like watching TikTok and whatnot for a week or so like, Okay, I started that, that Dun dun dun dun music we were talking about in the IKEA thing, I think I'm actually going to do one about not simply walking into Mordor about that this morning. So we'll see if that shows up by the time this podcast up.

Jessamyn 52:16 And it definitely is like there are some like whatever jokes or interesting things to talk about an interesting thing that really might fit on TikTok better than they fit on any of the other platforms I currently use. And it's good to have it available. And I was really happy with how my article came out. But yeah, it was really interesting to be kind of like, I don't really use this platform. I don't really live on this platform. Like the last time I remember doing this was like Snapchat, you know, years and years and years ago. Yeah. So it was fun to just get to kind of flex that muscle, when a new thing, obviously, there's tons of brilliant creators doing fascinating stuff. And the scale of it similar to like, with kind of YouTube stars is just difficult to imagine in somebody who lives a very small scale life in a lot of ways. Like, you know, like on Twitter. The scale is like, you know, the very famous system people have, you know, a couple million followers, I think, I mean, except for like, you know, President of the United States level famous, you know, couple million, and then the lowest popular people are like, you know, dozens of 1000s. But like, you know, with TikTok, it's like you can like you can have a viral video and all of a sudden, you've got like 20,000 followers, like overnight. And it is really interesting to think about that level of scale and that level of voice and like what that does for you, and you know, and the shift it represents and kind of how people are talking to who they're talking to and how that conversation happens, which I thought was really interesting. So was fun to learn. Yeah, and I really enjoyed back to the topic of the thread. I watched that video multiple times, and it made me laugh every time. It's very good. Speaking of good stick, internet meme stuff you may have I believe we talked about last month, chowder, the unadoptable Pitfall, but then there was also Prancer the little chihuahua who hates everyone who I believe like kind of came up in the thread basically print chowder got adopted and Prancer also got adopted by a nice lady who you know doesn't live with any men which is good because prints or hates men doesn't live with any children which is good because parents are aids children and you know a whole bunch of these kinds of things and there's a whole bunch of pictures and I don't know I just like these these goofy these goofy little little things that only only briefly turned into Internet person. Just just a little bit just briefly,

Cortex 54:56 internet person have little fight as a treat. Am I really enjoyed smod posted endless acid banger, which is a website that will generate an endless and surprisingly danceable, 1990s PC game soundtrack did not see this at all. It's great, you just visit the link and then fucking kabalarian You're there. It's, it's great. It's like it's just auto running a, you know, synth tracker with lots of modulation and filter stuff. And I love it. It's great.

Jessamyn 55:30 I love it. Also, because it plays on a really short loop. And every now and again, that's the kind of music I need to get my work done.

Cortex 55:37 Yeah. It's endless acid beggar's to relax and study to nice, basically, I really like it. And you can go in and fiddle with stuff manually, too. But you can also just like, let it do its thing. And I think that's fantastic.

Jessamyn 55:51 Two posts, I did not like per se. But we're, I think, really good, interesting posts to read. monkey toes made this post about, I called off my wedding, the internet will never let me the internet will never forget, which is basically those the social media trend to be like, Hey, here's some memory about blah, which can often be like, you know, maybe you had a child who got born and then you know, like something terrible happened to that child, or maybe you were gonna get married. And so you had a bunch of like high engagement social media posts, which the algorithm will then find and show to you over and over and over again. And it's very hard to turn off. And a lot of people find it very distressing. And in the course of reading about this, you know, I learned here or somewhere else that they call this the quote, miscarriage problem, unquote, which even the fact that that's what they call it sort of shows, that's part of what the problem is, like, can you imagine being a female engineer being with a whole bunch of male engineers, I mean, not that obviously, miscarriages only happen to women. But like, that whole idea of like having to deal with a problem that's named after sort of a pregnancy related, very distressing thing that could happen, just sort of talks about everything wrong with technology. But the thread itself is an interesting conversation among sort of nerdy people who think about things, which I did appreciate, I thought the thread was really interesting. Even if, you know, the topic itself is like, kind of a bummer. Yeah. And relatedly on kind of a bummer. I enjoyed the extra stuff, I learned about a historical thing that I didn't know as much about, which was about the girl in the Kent State photo, which was posted by Tony CPSU. The Kent State thing was a protest where the National Guard actually opened fire on the students who were protesting. And it's contextualized in a number of different ways. But there was an iconic photograph of a young woman who was 14, I guess, I did not know who was standing over the sort of prone body of someone who has been shot and killed by their own national guard. Look, you know, and there's this look of anguish on her face. And then this is a kind of a after the fact. sort of talk to her and then what several people talk about in the thread, which I had also really not known and should have, was it 10 days later, a very similar thing happened at Jackson State, which is a historically black college university in Mississippi that got a lot less attention. And, you know, that sort of was because of political climate at the time, some of that political climate still exists to this day. And I guess derf defector who's a graphic novelist, whose work I really like is wrote a graphic novel about Kent State that includes some of the information about like the National Guard's people, I believe they were national guardsmen at the time, and sort of what they were thinking and from some of the archived audio recordings with them. So was really was really kind of interesting all around. Yeah. We should probably move on so I don't just sit here with the

Cortex 59:30 I also liked this thing that I don't think I thought to mention last month about Sudoku. This is a post from last year, like May of last year, there was a magic Sudoku was like a Sudoku puzzles. I only had like two numbers filled in but had a couple extra like constraint rules and it's just a joy to watch but it's why handle because it's fun to solve puzzles basically. I mean, like that's watch other people solve puzzles. I found it fun, but I've done a little bit of Sudoku. So like, I could sort of follow up

Jessamyn 1:00:09 on it, I just I, I've never gotten into the world of Sudoku and I would find like watching someone do it would break my head.

Cortex 1:00:15 I think if you went and watch this video without ever having done any Sudoku would just be like boggling. Yeah. But it's this channel called crap cracking the cryptic that does, you know, puzzles Sudoku and other puzzles. Like, I don't think like a daily basis really is just like a regular feature they do. And they work through varying ly difficult puzzles, and sort of talk through it. And if you are into those puzzles, it's extremely charming presentation, like the guy in this video is the basically starts with his like, Okay, well, this is obviously not going to go anywhere. So I'll work on it for a couple minutes. And then we'll do a different puzzle. And then he's like, Oh, wait, but I mean, this, it can't be obeyed. It could be done if. And you see him like, do what seems like this. And yeah, and the pennies keep dropping. It's wonderful watch, because like he's excited about it. He's like, quizzical he's taken aback. And he's so in love with the design of the puzzle he's solving. And it was just a lot of fun to watch. And when this came around last year, I didn't watch it because like, that sounds impossible. But also I don't really know much about Sudoku, I'm gonna learn about Sudoku and right. I did learn about some Sudoku. And then recently, I remember that I was like, I'm gonna try it again. And I, I read the challenge more carefully. Oh, oh, and I managed to get like a reasonable way. And I got like, 14 minutes into the video in terms of my own progress before I hit a roadblock of like, you know, like, God, no, 25 minute video. Yeah. And so I felt actually really good about that. And then when I saw him make the leap that I was missing, I was like, oh, and I think I got the impression that it a little bit of chatter about this, that people like, watch this. And they'll do exactly that. For any given puzzle, like, guy, I'll set up the puzzle. And then I'll like pause and say, Okay, let me see what I can do here. And then like, go along until they get stuck, and then watch the video until it catches up with that, and like, see that next Penny dropping like, oh, and then pause and then work on us more, which seems like a very satisfying,

Jessamyn 1:02:11 being like, give me the cheat code, or like, what's the trick? Yeah, cuz

Cortex 1:02:15 I mean, there's nothing else to the Sudoku other than like doing it. Like, you know, solving a sudoku without actually figuring it out. It's not like, you don't get a prize, you know, it's like, it's like, filling in a crossword without bothering to check if the answers are right. Because like, yes, you filled in that piece of paper, but that's not really the point. The point is, like, the joy of the, you know, sort of problem solving, right? So anyway, it so yes, it's it's it's a little bit niche, but I found it very enjoyable to watch and very charming and fun to engage with. So that's me for Metafilter you want to do some AskMe Metafilter.

Jessamyn 1:02:46 I just wanted to mention two other things bouncing off of your Sudoku thing, which is that there is a meta Filter group at Board Game Arena. If you are a person who likes playing games with other Metafilter people, I feel like there was a meta talk thread about it and I cannot find it. But I have enjoyed meeting some mefites who I didn't know super well and playing board games with them, and I'm not really going to get into it. But Sudoku reminded me of watching Nish Kumar's solve Sudoku on taskmaster, which is been one of my Quarren time, television watching things. And there are many fanfare threads about watching taskmaster together, which is just kind of a funny UK panel show that has a bunch of sort of random tasks done by Alex Horne, which is very funny. And I just wanted to oops, sorry, was clicking on the link got the wrong link. And we'd just like to encourage anybody else who maybe has been watching taskmaster, or who was interested in it to join us over and fanfare because it's fun to talk about it.

Cortex 1:04:04 Angela, I've started watching that since you kind of sold me on it podcast or two back and we're enjoying a great deal. Yes, it's it's a lot of fun. And I had the realization the other night, the taskmaster is basically a soft film where people don't die, which is also kind of a fun way to sort of engage with it.

Jessamyn 1:04:22 How soft works I mean, imagine read the boxes for saw because so not my thing. So I don't I don't I literally don't know,

Cortex 1:04:32 the general stick of saw is that the the bad guy behind it all the mastermind instead of being Greg Davies pretending to be grim is a actually grim serial killer named Jigsaw who would want to know if you'd like to play a game. And then instead of having to like you know, get the most flower onto a target 20 feet away, using the tools in front of you, you know, it's like, okay, crawl through this pit of Glass to retrieve this tree, this key from inside this boiling water, then you get well, no, no, that's if you do it, then you don't get killed. Like if you can do this terrible grotesque thing, then you can survive and like his whole thing is like, I don't know, testing people blah, blah blah. Anyway, it's kind of this kind of same vibe, but without being, you know, horror porn.

Jessamyn 1:05:18 Right and it's

Cortex 1:05:21 decidedly playing off that a little bit. If you think about some of the like, weird spooky comedy transition stuff they do. Like they're playing with that kind of horror porn, edgy aesthetic in a very, like, light, glancing way, with all those weird shots of Greg Davies is every person in an old 19th century Dick era type and,

Jessamyn 1:05:40 and it's every like, you know, UK panelist you've enjoyed on any of the other shows. And it's driving Jim crazy, because he is ahead of me. And so he really wants to talk about his shows that he's watching, but I haven't caught up. But I can talk about the shows that I'm watching, which feels terribly unfair to him. Because he's ahead of me. So like, what do you do, right? But yes, enjoyed it. And please join us and fanfare.

Cortex 1:06:10 Also, the meta talk post about Board Game Arena is titled bread clave jalapeno, and it was by going to Maine, and it was in March, and it mentioned community on VGA. So I think that was the thing you were talking

Jessamyn 1:06:21 about. Yeah, I, you and I just both posted that. And if you look, I posted it a minute and a half before you not see.

Cortex 1:06:29 Well. You said I found the link. And then you posted the fanfare thing is like, oh, okay, and then I didn't look back after I had pasted before I hit Enter. So yes, that's my bad. That's fine. Oh, well, I'm the one who will accidentally forget to edit it out and have Lincoln twice in the metadata post until someone mentions it. So it's really just me setting myself up.

Jessamyn 1:06:45 Fantastic. Yes, AskMe, Metafilter, AskMe Metafilter? Well, maybe my favorite thread only because it's just a really interesting conversation about how people live and what people want was Claire bears. The question is, Is it strange if most of the windows and a house don't open, but the real thing is, Claire bear is redoing their house, and really wants to make most of the windows not open. And every single person in this 72 person meta talk thread tells them it is a terrible idea. For reasons, various reasons. And they're probably going to do it anyhow. Because it may be well, because it may be that what they want, is specific to them, you know, but one of the questions they do ask is whether that would be weird for you if you were going to buy the house. And I think pretty much everybody is like, yep, too weird. But you know, and it does sort of make this really interesting question, right? Like, if it's just the house that you're gonna live in for the rest of your life, who cares? You know, make it exactly the way you want it. But if it's a house that you're really literally thinking about selling you may need to think about saleability, that said nowadays in the US, maybe you don't, because just houses are selling like hotcakes, at least in a lot of places. So blah, blah, blah. But it was a really interesting thread about people talking about how they feel about houses, for reasons, and I enjoyed it.

Cortex 1:08:18 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I have like, I mean, I have, I have huge instinctive fire code reactions to the premise. But at the same time, I realized, like there are

Jessamyn 1:08:32 I mean, I think the presumption was assume fire code is met. So you have the minimum viable windows that open. Can we get away with not opening any of the rest of them? Yeah, because it's cheaper to build. And they like the aesthetic look better?

Cortex 1:08:47 Yeah. It's easier to steal major

Jessamyn 1:08:49 ways. Yeah.

Cortex 1:08:51 I mean, I guess that comes with it. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. How's this man?

Jessamyn 1:08:57 Yeah. And so speaking of random tasks, I really hope Riley Ray 3000 comes back to us with what they did about trying to get soft serve from LA or from San Francisco to LA by car without ruining it. Because the answer is basically you can't

Cortex 1:09:18 Yeah, yeah.

Jessamyn 1:09:22 But it is unclear if they tried or not. And it has, you know, people talk about working with dry ice and you know, the ideal temperature for soft serve, which is actually not that cold. Like if it's ice cream. It's easy, right? You just hyper freeze it so that it is the coldest, and then you know, it can melt a little bit. But soft serve is really different. Baba blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it turns out the franchise they want to get it from does also exist in LA. So maybe that problem got solved in other ways, but I just found it to be kind of an interesting, an interesting challenge.

Cortex 1:10:00 No, that's fantastic.

Jessamyn 1:10:03 Right. Right.

Cortex 1:10:05 Like that feels very taskmaster right there. I answered a question, which is, you know, exciting for me.

Jessamyn 1:10:18 Oh, I was wondering about the answer to this question. That's better. Dr. Badger, Dr.

Cortex 1:10:23 Badger doctors learning to play guitar. And they restreamed restring restrung scrum Sure. They're restring? No, no, it was restring their guitar for the first time and got the strings in the wrong order, which is totally doable, especially since like guitar strings are. Yeah, they're skinny. And also, they're wound in two different ways. Usually, for acoustic guitars, in particular, you'll get like, thin strings that aren't wound with another wire, and then ones that are wound as you get into the thicker ones. Anyway, it's like, yeah, it's you put them in the wrong hole. And then oops, so the question was, like, can I reuse these? And what if I just leave them like this and tune them differently? And the answers cover a lot of the same ground for people went into more detail. But basically, you can't really tune the string that was meant for a different note to the note, you accidentally strung it on without it being like super loose, which is just going to be a pain in the ass. But they're just, they're not fancy. They're just metal, you can restring it, it'll be fine,

Jessamyn 1:11:33 right? You're not? I mean, nylon strings, maybe that's different, right? Because don't they stretch out?

Cortex 1:11:39 Well, I mean, all guitar strings do, I would say nylon strings is probably gonna actually behave a little bit better with a restringing.

Jessamyn 1:11:46 Multi metal kind of, yeah,

Cortex 1:11:49 like steel, steel strings can get crimped, you know, in the process of screwing up the guitar. So that might be a weak spot, it might break sooner, like guitar strings are gonna break eventually, you know, and they just break when at some point, some weak point gets fatigued. So you're creating a weak point when you string it in a couple spots, because that's just like it's stretched over the nut at the top of the fretboard. That's going to be an inflection point. But yeah, anyway, just it's like a weird practical thing that like, it's one of the things that like, I've been playing guitar for 25 plus years, like it's so boring and normal. Another thing to think about, but also it's like, it's a thing you have to think about, it's a thing you're gonna have to do for the first time, you're gonna be in that situation for the first time. So it's kind of nice to see that nice build up and say, Hey, good news, bad news.

Jessamyn 1:12:39 Here's some trivia that I learned. Yeah, about stringing guitars. Jim's newly found while teeth been a year now, but his newly found biological father who I have talked about before, Klaus fluoride Dead Kennedys. We all thought he was right handed because he plays right handed bass. But it turns out he is left handed and he just plays his bass in a right handed fashion. Cuz, quote, unquote, it was just easier that way.

Cortex 1:13:11 I think there's probably a lot of lefties who play right handed guitar because it's just more of a pain in the ass to play guitar left handed because you have to find a reverse model. You have to string things right away around. You can't borrow someone else's guitar, mid,

Jessamyn 1:13:24 I guess guitars are more bi directional. And sometimes bases are only one way is that an accurate statement?

Cortex 1:13:31 I could see that I I've never very seriously played electric bass. So I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised if the wider heavier strings on a bass mean, it's harder to switch it around.

Jessamyn 1:13:42 And we've seen a lot of like random decay videos since this all happened. But there was this new kind of COVID COVID era you know, some guy who's like a ukulele player on YouTube, like gets together a whole bunch of like new and older famous people on stuff and then they make mash up video so they did this mashup video with Josie cotton about Joan jets, bad reputation and Klauss they're playing bass. And Jim was like, oh, cool, blah blah, blah. And then close but then he saw Klaus doing something else and he was like, Wait a second. You're lefty like I didn't pay attention to any of it but Jim like you know, saw it like very strongly and I was like, Oh, interesting. Yeah, new thing I learned

Cortex 1:14:31 you know, I should say actually, there's there's an issue with reversing the strings on both guitar and bass that would probably be even worse on bass but probably is an issue on both. We're in theory, you could take a right handed guitar string and upside down so the strings go the other way and you know, play left handed, but the the nut at the top of the fretboard is where the strings rests as they come off the fretboard and go up to the tuners on the headstock. Yeah, that's sort of the inflection point that they rest in. That is you know, the different channels that string sit in are generally different. Why? I guess two sizes of strings. So you might have something. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like probably the thing to do would be to replace that nut with. Yeah, one that was carved in the other direction. You could also carve out all the holes to be wider, but that would be, that'd be shitty, I think. Anyway, sorry, I'm just rambling. speculatively. But yes,

Jessamyn 1:15:19 I started to derail. Here's another music based AskMe Metafilter post that I thought was really good. Wait, did I just post what I think I posted? Yes. But LS K, looking for songs that are about a song that has the same name as the song you are listening to. So like Monster Mash is about a band playing the song, Monster Mash. But that isn't necessarily from context, the same song you were actually listening to help me think of more of these. And so Zamboni links to their TV Tropes version, and, you know, Alice's Restaurant and some other ones and people have some discussions about it. And it's fascinating.

Cortex 1:16:05 Yeah. So yeah, someone mentioned tribute by Tenacious D. And I'm trying to think through whether I think tribute, because I guess tribute is a song about itself in that sense. Like, it's not the greatest song of all time. It's a tribute song about that song. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:16:23 No, this is Dallas, Achy Breaky song. Hey, won't you play another somebody's done somebody wrong song. And then you know, people the wienerschnitzel waltz. These are very funny. So it's a long list generating thread, which is kind of delightful.

Cortex 1:16:43 Yeah, no, I should. Ballroom Blitz. That's nice. Ah,

Jessamyn 1:16:47 the man in the back said everyone attack. I love that song.

Cortex 1:16:51 I was introduced to that song as with many other songs. When I saw Wayne's World for the first time as a kid. I was kind of the impression that like Bohemian Rhapsody was some song that was contemporary to that movie. I, you know, because because I was a kid and I just assumed things about anything, you know, is that child general childhood recency bias? If I've encountered this, you know, it must be the same time as me. And yeah, well, there's another shorter list generating song but Boudin a bucket posted asking about comeback song saying, Hey, I'm looking for songs to listen to you when you're down, but not out, you know, lay him on needs. So a good pilot stuff there, which, hey, this feels like a period of time where that might be useful thing to have, you know, on a playlist. So,

Jessamyn 1:17:39 yes. There's a lot of those. I don't have links handy, but I remember like, you know, hey, I want one that says like, things have been hard, but you're gonna get through this or, you know, just songs on a theme that you can, yeah. A couple other list generators that I specifically liked. Well, actually, maybe just one list generator and then a couple other questions. What strange things has your dog eaten? So warrior queen is getting a foster dog? Who is a goofball? But maybe isn't super well trained. And so maybe you could talk about some weird things your dog ate, and oh my god, do dogs eat some stuff. I was gonna say you know, dogs eat some shit. But we know that

Cortex 1:18:27 that's hardly noticeable. A whole

Jessamyn 1:18:29 like, we'll have three they eat flies, they eat you know, they can if they get into like chocolate or grapes or stuff like that. It can be bad. Eight, a tube of food coloring, whole sticks of butter. decorations on the Christmas tree foam earplugs, menstrual products, especially if you've put them in the trash, which is just a nightmare. I glasses, they eat their own dog gates. You know, the remote controls. Like it's just I mean, everybody has mostly good humor in this thread. But it is clear that like, you know, they have dogs who they love. And yet these dogs get into the grossest shit and MIT sometimes it's one of these threads where like, everything is a favorite. And yeah, and and it's very funny and they laugh. So it's a fun funny thread. Excellent. Couple other like helped me help me answer this question. Ah, dip flash, just trying to like get a little bit like how do people think about this, about whether you delete the contacts in your phone or on your computer for people who have died? Like, you know, many of us have lost people, especially this year. And the question He comes like, do you keep them? Do you not keep them? Do you? Like, what do you do and you know, people have a lot of different different ways they deal with them, like, you know, delete them immediately keep them around forever. Some people put them in phone purgatory, which I think was what tip flash like the most, you put a z at the beginning of their name, and then they're all grouped together at the bottom, you know, like seeing them or you want to remember their number. I think a lot of us have, you know, experienced this at some level or in some way. And so it's just interesting. It's interesting seeing this. Yeah. I mean, as I think I've told you, I keep the email addresses for both my mother and my father and use them for stuff I don't want to use on my own email address. So they had a very strange, I believe, you know, advertiser profiles, but who cares, they're dead.

Cortex 1:20:59 If there's ever some, like post singularity, returning to digital life of engrams of those presumed dead forever, and they get back to their inboxes for this sort of thing, right? It's gonna be a whole awkward conversation in the scarcity transcend my

Jessamyn 1:21:15 father's another one, those people who had a slightly boring name, I mean, my mother too, but for whatever reason, she doesn't get as much in this. There are many different Tom West's who get their email winds up in my father's inbox and like, emailing them and being like, he's been dead for 10 years, you have reached the wrong person. I'm sorry. Goodbye. Is Yeah, just one of those things. And another thing will and as fit. He tells me, I don't remember. Him and his wife are celebrating their 25th anniversary. They were thinking about going to Canada, they were asking about the border. A whole bunch of people told them in June, a whole bunch of people told them at June's probably too soon to go to Canada, given all the COVID stuff. But, you know, people had some other suggestions. And you know, I offered some I don't know if I offer feedback in the thread, but I did send you some email well, with just a suggestion, and whoa, I hope they wind up having a really good anniversary. I know it's kind of a difficult time for an anniversary and they have a lot of kids so getting a little getaway I could imagine especially this time of year would be something they would want

Cortex 1:22:34 Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:22:38 Anything else I got one more thing.

Cortex 1:22:40 I got no more asked me. Shall we do a final ask me to that was what? There's a little bit of a written riff but also just completely didn't work. I'll go for it. What riff my brother my brother and me. You know, I

Jessamyn 1:22:55 don't listen to that podcast. Well, yeah.

Cortex 1:22:57 But it goes back to the Yahoo Answers thing because it's a recurring bid on their show. They end every episode with like a final Yahoo.

Jessamyn 1:23:03 Jim does, totally backs into some segue that makes no sense. But it's about the thing we talked about three days ago.

Cortex 1:23:12 I think if you review the audio record, I was already giving up and backing out of it before I even tried to.

Jessamyn 1:23:17 Dude, I started recording our zooms last night because he insisted he said a thing he did not so I feel like a horrible person. I had to apologize this morning, but I was just so cranky about oh, I'm sorry, man, I should have trusted you. And you know, into interiorly being like, but you didn't say that thing. But I still shouldn't have been a pain about it. Yeah, moving on. Anyway. I loved this thread on AskMe Metafilter Beisner person, basically like watching North by Northwest and there's this like train seduction scene, where like the Cary Grant character and the blonde lady character are like, kind of talking about stuff, you know, and, and it's kind of clear that they're gonna, like, get together. But like, that scene where they don't get together goes on for a rather long time in modern circumstances. And so snares and found this scene, just unbearable way too long. Maybe old people think it's romantic, but I can't stand it. Just be like, come on. You guys are gonna bone everyone knows it. Come on. And then a whole bunch of people sort of talk about how they view it and also like Hitchcock was weird creep. And so maybe that has something to do with it. But also like there was like the, you know, the movie ethics of the time. Wall buffet winds up with the best answer for it kind of really spelling it out. But it's me because the thing is, the scene ends with literally like a train driving into a tunnel like it is not in some ways, but it was interesting listening to different people talk about it, both talking about sort of the morality of the time Hitchcock's weirdness which you know, In a modern day contextual sense, Cary Grant being, you know, gay and not particularly out at the time, although people who knew him knew, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So, just a fascinating little thread, I thought,

Cortex 1:25:13 nice. Also a film I still have not seen Josh, treat yourself. Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of classic cinema sorry

Jessamyn 1:25:20 for the spoiler on the songs.

Cortex 1:25:25 I mean, I know he gets like, chased by a fucking plane at some point, too. So it's not like I'm not.

Jessamyn 1:25:29 It's a fun movie. I mean, you know, it's not withstanding, it's a, it's a really, it's got a plot that holds up.

Cortex 1:25:36 Yeah. And carry grants. Great to watch. So is. Well, I think we're pretty much wrapped up one notable thing from at a talk, we've updated the graphical style of mod notes made a post about it outlining the change. When

Jessamyn 1:25:53 you're listening to the podcast, you probably also read metta talk, but this is a change that got made that I think we're all really happy with.

Cortex 1:26:00 Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Jessamyn 1:26:05 Why don't you? Why don't you continue? Sorry.

Cortex 1:26:08 We had the brackets, square bracket. And small Tex has been like the style of mock notes forever. And it was useful as a distinct way to make them visible. But it also makes them harder to read. And it doesn't make them super visible while scanning a thread. And so we've moved having like a graphical border around them. Full Size text. So something that stands out is like unique, can't be easily mocked up by a user. So we don't have confusion over whether or not someone's a mod, which didn't happen a ton. But everyone's Well, you'd see someone post a mod note style comment is equate, but what

Jessamyn 1:26:43 kind of make it a joke. But also, it's confusing for newer users, which is, you know, it's a tug of war, right? You don't want to be obtuse to newer users. But you also don't have to have everything, presume everybody's a new user kind of Yeah, inside jokes are fun, but also they can be alienating and isolating.

Cortex 1:27:01 Exactly. We want people to be able to feel like they know what's going on when they when they joined the site. And it's got a mod notes, like a little mod note, text prepended to it, when seen in a text or screen review. So that provides something that replaces the graphical cue.

Jessamyn 1:27:19 Yeah, if you're somebody who uses a screen reader, please let us know if it works for you, or it doesn't work for you. Because, you know, we found a couple really bizarre bugs that got introduced that I think we're all done with now. But

Cortex 1:27:33 yeah, you know, from fribble, test what they can up front on as many browsers and whatnot. But that's always the problem. It's like, you know, one person tried to cover the bases, we're gonna find bugs in the broader sphere of browsers and OSS, and views and whatnot. So it's always super helpful to get that post rollout, feedback on Oh, here, here, there's an issue on this, this particular case, which people been doing, that's great, and we've polished it up, and it should be rolling out on all of the site soon. We rolled it out in Metafilter, and AskMe, edit filter and Fanfare for now. But we'll see it on metal talk and music and IRL, and so on. So yeah, yeah, I'm happy about that. It's been nice. It's felt like a good change. It's nice to get that done. We've been talking about for a long time.

Jessamyn 1:28:13 Yeah. I mean, I just think, you know, we were all hoping this day would happen when furball would wind up having enough free time slash mental energy to be able to attack some of the things that have been back burnered For a while, and we're slowly getting to that point, and it's been nice to see things working. So I think we're all a little pleased with that.

Cortex 1:28:33 And I think that's about it. I think we're in about our usual hour and a half. Short and sweet. So yeah, that's a podcast, I think. I think. I think we did

Jessamyn 1:28:47 it. Fan freaking tastic. I'm gonna pick up my you know, free dinner from the tech center free dinner. I paid for that dinner Dinner from the tech center. Chicken Cordon Bleu made by the culinary arts students. It's gonna be great.

Cortex 1:28:59 Nice. That sounds excellent. I'm gonna go play with my plotter now, which I managed to not talk about for an hour and a half next month. Josh,

Jessamyn 1:29:05 can you talk about your plotter at all? I

Cortex 1:29:07 didn't. Hey, everybody got a plot or talk about it next month? All right. We'll

Jessamyn 1:29:10 have a plotter corner next next month.

Cortex 1:29:12 Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, hey, good podcast. Nice talking to you.

Jessamyn 1:29:15 Nice talking to you.

Cortex 1:29:17 Go get your chicken cordon bleu.