Podcast 174 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 174: Knobs and Dials (2021-07-02).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Jessamyn 0:00 Oh man, Jim has a fitness armband that will take texts from the phone. And like give him parts of him on his wrist now. And normally that's just kind of like, you know, nothing any of us pays any attention to, but I got home and texted him and I was like, I'm grinding coffee and fucking Glynnis was parked in the driveway and and so Jim gets a text that basically says, I am grinding coffee and fucking Glynnis. And he was like scuze me and he knows who Glynnis is. So he knows that was really unlikely. But now I've got to be mindful of Yep. He says, Hi, by the way. Oh,

Cortex 0:45 hi, Jim. I said, I sent a friend on the site a text yesterday, and like, fully 1/3 of it was just a string of nonsense, where, like, autocorrect went wrong. And it's just like, Okay, I'm not fixing it. That's just that's what I'm sending you. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:00 I mean, that's pretty much us in general.

Cortex 1:03 It didn't have any implication of you know, bizarre infidelity. So

Jessamyn 1:08 right, every now and again, you know, I read some AskMe Metafilter thread that realizes there's all sorts of weird ways relationships can go badly. And I make Jim like, re up Ark, kind of, like, I know, we're monogamous. But that also means this crazy edge case that happened to this AskMe metal filter person that I never thought of before. Can you just find this goddess know that says it includes that? We're good,

Cortex 1:31 right? This isn't this isn't the thing that I'm the only one who doesn't know isn't going on? Right?

Jessamyn 1:37 Well, exactly right. Every now and again, I read one of those things. And I'm like, what? Or the alternative, right? I think my husband's cheating on his wife because he's trying to play footsie with me, and you're just kind of like you know, it's different footsie isn't infidelity. It's just bad judgment.

Cortex 1:58 It's it's Yeah, I would say like without an established understanding. It's weird. Yeah. But

Jessamyn 2:04 it's weird, but it's not like this relationship is over problematic. It's just like we'd have a talk about footsie. Yeah, I mean, I can't even imagine Jim playing footsie with me, much less another person, much less another woman much less on purpose. He doesn't know where its toes are, you know what I mean? Like, but, yes, that was the example that I was thinking is

Cortex 2:25 weird. Like, like, like, there's nothing wrong with footsy per se, it's an activity but the fact that footsie has a specific kind of cultural cachet. Like, just I guess, because it's the only thing you can, like do completely under the table, so to speak, in a subtle way in a random public setting,

Jessamyn 2:42 but it's back when tablecloths were more of a thing. Let's be honest. Yeah.

Cortex 2:45 Yeah. A little bit more. A little bit more masking.

Jessamyn 2:49 Yeah, but yeah, no, I agree. I can't even like I remember footsie being a little bit of a thing. Like, maybe when I was in high school, you know, where like, you wanted to express interest with someone in a completely 100% plausible deniability way. Yeah. Because Because high school, but since then, no, like, the only thing I would occasionally do is like, if Jim and I were at some event, and you know, we were at some table, and somebody at the table was being ridiculous. And we couldn't even roll our eyes at each other because it's rude. But we could, like, you know, tap the other person on the foot and be like, oh, boy, am I right?

Cortex 3:26 But it is like, it's just good. CommSec at that point.

Jessamyn 3:29 Oh, Josh, can I tell you my InfoSec thing that I can't actually like, say in public?

Cortex 3:36 Like, do I have to edit this? Or? No, you don't have to edit it. Okay. Well, then let me do this. You can. Welcome to mp4 of the Metafilter monthly podcast, which we forgot to introduce ourselves on previously. I'm Josh cortex Mullard. Hey, and I'm Jessamyn. And there's nothing interesting about the number 174 adjustment says, Please tell me your InfoSec story.

Jessamyn 3:55 But there is something interesting about my bank. So Josh, this interests you as a co person at malt shop as well. I am I am interested? Yes, I am moving malt shops bank from the stupid bank that we signed up with originally to a local community bank so that we have a better bank, frankly, once you know, and I did that, and it was fine. And I was like, What am I supposed to get a debit card in the mail? And they were like, oh, yeah, sorry. And I was like, Well, I really kind of need that debit card. This isn't even the thing.

Cortex 4:26 So. So they said, bro, we'll get that to you real soon. Well, they were like

Jessamyn 4:30 seven to 10 days. And it had been two weeks. And I was like, what what is up? And they were like, oh, sorry. And I was like, Can you like, can I get it faster? Like it's one of those things where you're like, I'm pretty sure you can get it to me faster. Oh, yeah. So they sent it to my bank and I walked to my bank yesterday and I got the debit card and there's a little sticker on the front that's like hey, you need to remove this sticker and use this on an ATM before you can use it online and literally the only thing I want to use this debit card for is online. So I was like, let me just stick it in the ATM right now to get this out of the way. And then I was like, oh, wait a second, I don't remember if I set up a PIN for this or not. And you know, I've been super absent minded Professor lately, as always, for the last year and a half, really. And so just like last year and a half, I was like, Maybe I set up a PIN for this. And so I use the pin that I would have always used for a debit card, and it didn't work. And I was like, okay, so I don't know the pin for this. Clearly, there was one and I don't know what it is. I walked back into the bank, the young lady there. I'm like, Hey, I've got this business debit card, but it's not working in the ATM, can I do I need to set the pin up with you first. And she just looks me in the eye. And she's like, it's business card, right? And I'm like, yeah, she's like, Oh, the default PIN on all of those is 1234.

Cortex 5:50 Pin an idiot would have on his luggage.

Jessamyn 5:55 It's 2021. Like, really? And maybe that was internal information that she knows and I wasn't supposed to know. I don't know. But I want marched right back out to the ATM. 1234 totally worked. I changed the pin immediately. And I went home and wrote a senior an email to the senior vice president being like, um, you need to fix this like yesterday. And then of course, I got a you know, jovial email back from him. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I've had it. I sent it to our, you know, they don't even have security your fraud people or at least not obvious ones. You know, I've sent it to the head of the branches and I'm like, What the fuck is she gonna do? All right. Fuck it. I'm talking about it on Twitter in a week. That's my plan. All right. Yes. But it is horrifying. Right?

Cortex 6:50 Yeah, no, that's that's that's fucked up. Okay. That's super, that's like, incredibly terrible.

Jessamyn 6:55 Because sometimes I get all riled up about shit. You know, ala gave my email address to a vendor, and people are like, what did you expect was going to happen when you registered for the conference? But like, this seems like a bigger deal.

Cortex 7:08 Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. All right.

Jessamyn 7:12 Well, that's, and I didn't name the bank. So you know, it's at least a little security. Security for now. But

Cortex 7:21 yeah, that seems like the reasonable way to go.

Jessamyn 7:24 I think so. Give him time. I think so. So have you been not not as hot anymore? I hope.

Cortex 7:34 No, it's it's it's gloriously normal. It was overcast earlier this morning and cool. It's sunshiny out and probably warm, but I'm staying inside. Yeah, no, we made it through the heatwave that was shitty. Like, it wasn't terrible for me and Angela, because like, we've got a mini split upstairs. And I've got a shitty little AC unit for my home office here. And so I just blasted like that constantly. We don't have any power outages, which was kind of the big worry, but Portland has a well regulated electricity grid. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it was it was it was fucking hot. A lot of businesses were just like, correctly like fucking were closed. Which would feel maybe slightly more like a thing if it weren't like, you know, coming off of the pandemic, but but still,

Jessamyn 8:21 right. Really? You could work during is Portland. Yeah.

Cortex 8:25 Yeah, yeah, Portland. And I mean, the Pacific Northwest in general. Like it was bad in Seattle. It was it was bad everywhere except for San Francisco. San Francisco was ISIS hit the heatwave out. So go with them.

Jessamyn 8:35 Right. I noticed that like a weird little circle on the map they

Cortex 8:38 have they have that amazing microclimate. Like I've said before, San Francisco is probably like the only random city I've been to, I can think of that I would like be comfortable moving to climate wise. I really liked. I mean, how

Jessamyn 8:48 do you feel about rents there, though? Yeah, that's

Cortex 8:51 the thing I could never possibly move to San Francisco. But if I found myself living in San Francisco, you know, I'd probably be okay with the weather basically. Yeah,

Jessamyn 8:59 yeah. But,

Cortex 9:00 ya know, we the heatwave seems to pass a bunch of sea air came up a few days ago, and, and sort of brought everything down and we're back to normal summertime sort of weather, which is a humongous relief. We had something like five dozen plus heat related deaths in the state. That seems one of those three days seems like a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot like well, you know, the Pacific Northwest is not equipped for extreme heat. I mean, no, like, anywhere that isn't consistently experiencing, you know, extreme heat every year is generally not equipped for extreme heat. But even the stuff that places that are routinely pretty hot, you know, do doesn't happen infrastructure wise in the Pacific Northwest, because we don't need it and there's not sort of like that expectation. So you don't have nearly as much you don't have a plan C. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, we've had we had cooling shelters. There were a lot of groups doing good stuff to try and create spaces. for relief for people experiencing homelessness and and people in poverty who don't necessarily have the ability to go out and just like buy an air conditioner if they're even available on short notice during a fucking Heatwave, right. So, you know, people were doing what they could but you're still not everyone's going to have access to that. And not everybody's going to be clued in and I don't know how much of it came out to outside of city limits stuff, but like probably people in rollers gonna have less chance to even make any use of those resources. So yeah, yeah, it turns out that, like, record high heat, for several days in a row is a really fucking bad thing. And yeah, well, I

Jessamyn 10:38 think people are more and I may just be wrong about this. But I think people are more aware of the downsides of extreme cold. You know, they get like, freeze to death. And they get, you know, just go sit in a McDonald's for a while or ask around kind of things. But I think for heat, people are like, oh, I'll just write it out. But you don't always and yeah, especially if you have, you know, various co presenting problems. I mean, one of the things I saw all over Twitter was people talking about the difference between heat exhaustion and heat, frustration, I guess, or heat stroke. I think heat exhaustion and heat stroke, right. Like

Cortex 11:17 you said, you said, you said frustration, frustration. I was like, Well, yeah, I mean, the heat is frustrating, but like, that's what I experienced was frustration.

Jessamyn 11:24 Yeah, no, I mean, me too, because it was hot here, but not like that. But But the difference between heat exhaustion and heatstroke is the difference can be like a life or death difference if you understand what is happening to you. And it's like, no, I'm not just hot, my body's shutting down. But you know, not not everybody's got that kind of body literacy or whatever the thing is, you need. And yeah, I mean, here, it was just, you know, chase the fans around the house, occasionally get in my car and go drive somewhere, you know, drink lots of liquids. But when I worked at the library, which is essentially a terrarium, you know, it's completely covered in these big ass windows, many of which don't have screens, there's one ceiling fan, you know, I just showed up in a dress and was like, this is just gonna be bad. And a woman from the town hall, who's also on the board of the library was like, you know, I think there's an air conditioner in the basement. I was like, really fill us Tell me more. And it turned out they had been loose little roll around kind of robot type air conditioners, you know, with the hose that goes out the window. So we got the guy from the country store across the street to bring it up the rickety stairs. And I plugged it in, and it kept the place from you know, going off the deep end. And so we got to basically tell people like, Hey, where are your cooling center? Thank you guy from the store. Otherwise we wouldn't be

Cortex 12:45 Yeah, I saw friends posting in town how like, thanks to their window unit. They were managed to keeping it down to 91 Inside I

Jessamyn 12:51 can't even imagine. Yeah.

Cortex 12:54 I mean, we were like our house. We've got an old large like 1910s house that we did get like a like eco refit on a few years ago. So is that why you got the split in because I don't remember. Yeah, yeah, we yeah, we got the split in upstairs because it was always very hot upstairs whenever it was kind of hot in Portland, which bedrooms upstairs. And so that was not great. Right. So now we can keep it pretty reasonable. But pretty reasonable. Like during the heatwave was like we managed to keep it to like the high 80s. Yeah, once the temperature was like under 85 outside, once that car was coming up with like, open all the windows, it's like, oh, this is great. It's it's barely warmer than I ever want to be instead of, you know, right. Warmer than that. Dangerous. Anyway, yes. But that happened. And that's done. It did feel like a weird sort of, it felt like a weird really blink three days in what's kind of like a phantom month like it's really just like June happened, apparently. And here we are in July.

Jessamyn 13:52 Dude, I showed up to work at the library yesterday, and I wasn't on the schedule. Because I forgot. Like that I had only given dates for, quote unquote, June and even though I work Wednesdays and Thursdays usually right now I'm subbing until they find a full time replacement. Like I had been like, I can work June 30. And then I was like, Okay, starting in July, I can work July 8, and just or whatever it was the night just didn't even occur to me. I wasn't working that Thursday, but I wasn't on the schedule. So I was opening up and then another librarian walks in. And I'm like, hi. She's like, Hi. I'm working today. That was what I mean, when I say absent minded. I mean, absent my did. And the good news was, I was like, Well, do you want me to work? I'm happy to she's like, No, I'd really like to work and I'm like, Well, I'm fucking happy to go home. So you know, it was a drive back home over the mountain but whatever. I got my laundry done. Nice, but yes, July snuck up on me.

Cortex 14:58 July here we are Hi, here we are with man like, I don't want to keep talking about heatwave and stuff, but like I do. Like I guess we could just

Jessamyn 15:06 I don't even have any current.

Cortex 15:09 Why was curtains? I did

Jessamyn 15:11 write up on the second floor. Well to keep the bear from looking at me, apparently. Yeah,

Cortex 15:16 fuck that bear that peepee bear peepee bear. I actually don't know, I don't know about the people. I didn't mean PPE either. Like that's that seems like something I would have done on purpose. What's going on with this bear? I don't know about this

Jessamyn 15:26 ladder to eat my bird feeders on the second story of my house and looked at me in the window and I

Cortex 15:36 I mean, that's terrifying. But also I'm not even mad like That's right. He's making the effort.

Jessamyn 15:41 That's a great story. Meanwhile, I'm talking to zoom. And I thought there was a raccoon on my roof and I was going to go look for it. And you know, I screamed and Jim was like, call the game warden. Couldn't find my house. But mercifully, my neighbor, my mefite neighbor actually texted me about 15 minutes later, because I was like, Okay, I believe a bear can climb up a ladder, but I'm not sure I believe a bear can climb down a ladder. And honestly, I should have taken that ladder up months ago, but the contractor left it up, and I was just mad about it. And I didn't want to bears

Cortex 16:18 are essentially large cats,

Jessamyn 16:20 I guess. Aren't they large?

Cortex 16:22 Raccoons? Probably I don't know. I don't think a raccoon

Jessamyn 16:25 just climb down a ladder.

Cortex 16:27 I feel like raccoon could accomplish a lot of shit. But I think that might be more of a raccoon thing than general mammalian chassis. Good point.

Jessamyn 16:35 I mean, it was the scariest thing that has happened to me in a non human world. You know what I mean? Like, I know that's fucked up. Like it looked at me in my second story window. And then the neighbor texted me again, my me fight neighbor, but I don't know if she wants to be out as my me fight neighbor. And was just like, hey, there's a bear in our compost. And I was like, Oh, I guess he managed to get the fuck off the roof, then.

Cortex 17:02 You could I'll tell you. I'll tell

Jessamyn 17:05 the game warden to stop by your house because maybe he can find it. Which he could actually. Yeah, but yeah, maybe now I get curtains. But yeah, otherwise, I live in the woods. I don't need curtains. But if I had them, it would be cooler in my house.

Cortex 17:19 The problem is, every time the curtains closed, you don't know that there's not a bear there.

Jessamyn 17:23 You know, that's a really good point. And it's a real Twilight Zone situation. It's one of the reasons I kind of don't have curtains, I kind of would prefer to look out the windows than not know what sells the windows. And you shouldn't

Cortex 17:34 you should you should just get those occasional curtains. Like keep them open most of the time. Not like permanent.

Jessamyn 17:42 In my bathroom, I have that like kind of clingfilm stuff that's opaque. And so that cuts, uh, you know, down the middle, so like, I can see out in the top panel, but the lower panel, no one can watch me while I'm like, on the can and that's decent. Yeah. Again, there's no one out there but

Cortex 18:02 But what if, right? We we keep we keep, we have like a frosted like, Storm window, and then a screen and we keep the storm window like, cracked like an inch in the bathroom? Just so like, you know, whatever, a little bit of air flow in case you needed. Our fan is much better than a window at this point. But you know, still just on general principle. Well, I see. But I the absurdity that someone would be like looking through the window, through an inch crack in a window is like, you know, obvious on the face of it. And yet everyone's I'm sitting on the canister, like looking out through that crack and

Jessamyn 18:41 you're like, I can see.

Cortex 18:45 It's like the opposite of a kid like closing their eyes so they can't be seen. It's like, what if what if a sniper paper? What if a bear with extremely precise intentions, looked through his tiny window of class and made eye contact with me? What then? Let's talk about metal filter.

Jessamyn 19:04 I think we've kind of run this one out. If I can think of anything else from my you know, like, the week then the month vanished and yet a lot happened. So

Cortex 19:14 yep, it was Pride Month. Happy happy happy post Pride Month.

Jessamyn 19:18 Thank you hippy bear for making all those great posts there's yeah the top thread about that I don't want to back into this podcast but

Cortex 19:27 let's do the whole thing backwards.

Jessamyn 19:28 That was Oh

Cortex 19:30 yeah, no, that was a nice that was that was a nice run up posts. And yeah, and all the corporations have gone back to their normal colored logos now so Oh,

Jessamyn 19:41 fuck IKEA. Did you see those couches?

Cortex 19:45 No. Oh, Jesus that Yeah, I saw a lot of noise specifically about the bisexual couch. That seems to have caught the imagination. Treat

Jessamyn 19:52 yourself to the rest of the couches. Or I've seen the whole set Yeah,

Cortex 19:56 it's it's quite it's quite a collection and I don't know. I don't know what to do. there, but, but hey, I liked that it was like a weird corporate pride stunt at least instead of like, a really, really super conservative, weird, banal, like, corporate pride stuff. That's great, still very much corporate,

Jessamyn 20:15 I did see some people on the socials who thought it was kind of neat and cute and amusing. You know, like, that doesn't necessarily mean it was okay. But in many cases, especially in like, you know, big corporate entities you've got you know, nothing about us. Without us, you've got people from within those groups who think this is a, you know, a good and interesting idea. And so, you know, I am not in that group, but I wouldn't want to holler about it being terrible, because maybe the people who created it are, in fact, within that group, and they have their own affinity people, but then there's other people who don't like it, which is fine. But it's been curious thinking about that. I've seen a lot of people yelling at the American Library Association for not being anti racist enough, and I super respect that. And yet, like all of leadership are people of color. And so I'm trying to kind of figure out what the message is, you know, what are they saying about leadership? You know, where's my part in all of that? Blah. So it's been a thing I've been thinking of visa vie those couches?

Cortex 21:21 Yeah. Yeah, no, it's complicated. And I guess like, the thing, the thing that I mostly take away from that kind of situation is like, well, it's even if I don't know exactly how to track it, it's good that like, people are at least having those conversations. Yeah. Like,

Jessamyn 21:38 it's just that conversations that really cause harm. And I think like future coaches are mostly not doing that. I mean, again, I am not, I am not within that group. But that is the vibe that I get people feel free to tell.

Cortex 21:53 Ala thing, I would say, thing in terms of like trying to figure out like, what's being accomplished and who leadership is and whatnot, it's like, well, that's a way better thing than like, I'm I'm dissatisfied that, like, the all white leadership of the ALA is yet again, refusing to even discuss the concept of anti racism, which really

Jessamyn 22:10 was the problem maybe five years ago.

Cortex 22:13 Yeah. So what's your progress?

Jessamyn 22:17 It'll be interesting. It'll be interesting to see. I think, I think.

Cortex 22:22 Let's talk about jobs or job. Let's talk about the job. Yeah,

Jessamyn 22:27 there's a filter job.

Cortex 22:31 Which did change it. So like, if there's only one in the current month? It's okay. Yes. Anyway, there is a technical project manager job that was posted by Oh cenc. Back on the eighth looking for pm role in a FinTech company. It is remotes, it's a full time job. So if that is your wheelhouse, go check it out.

Jessamyn 22:54 It's a good looking job to be honest. Like, you know, a lot of times there's like, kind of a random you know, this or that job, but that's a good one. Yeah, also, I should put out my own like, not even quite a job but definitely if this is you idea, at some point over the next couple months, I'm going to need some people to move some heavy shit around my mother's house, which is in kind of suburban Massachusetts. It's in Boxborough. But it's near kind of Concord Lexington Lowell areas. If you aren't Massachusetts, people, yeah, if you are in that area, and could use a gig getting paid decently to move heavy boxes up and down stairs, you should get in contact with me. Because I have finally gotten over my particular issues gotten in touch with my sister who's willing to work on her own issues, and we're really going to sell this house

Cortex 23:46 but a lot of magazines then what a lot a lot of you've got a big stockpile because you've got your issues she's got her issues. Thanks guy, Josh. Move all of them sorry. Every month comes around we record this and I realized how much I've missed making terrible jokes. I really I value your friendship so much partly because you put up with this shit. What are my kids I don't know. Burn the whole thing to the ground. You haven't reached a burn the whole thing to the ground stage with it. And that is that's the biggest sort of times I can receive

Jessamyn 24:21 Jim is like you but in some ways worse. So it just in terms of jokes and you know, wanting a reaction and explaining them to me multiple times while I fail to understand them.

Cortex 24:36 You don't understand how rarely I hear that.

Jessamyn 24:39 And I like jokes. I just rarely understand them as you tell them so it's you know, I think it's a bit basically. But yes, everything on the first floor got cleared out when that pipe burst. And so unfortunately all we're left with is second floor shit. And I you know I'm not I My knees are too pretty for stairs and boxes. So someone else someone younger than me. But you know, we'd pay. This isn't like do it because we're friends kind of thing. So yeah, no, put that up. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know yet when it will be so I'm mostly fishing at this point.

Cortex 25:20 That's such an appropriate time. Yeah,

Jessamyn 25:23 I don't I don't feel like jobs is really suitable for like helped me assemble a list of people who might help me at some time in the future. It seems rude but a fin tech job looks great. And I need to remember to Yeah, start start nosing around and looking at this kind of stuff. Because man remote jobs such an opportunity nowadays, right?

Cortex 25:45 Yep. That's the time for it. Nobody wants to work anymore. Unless it's for a company that isn't a restaurant that pays shitty.

Jessamyn 25:52 My sister's trash company is having that same weird problem. And so her trash isn't getting picked up regularly. And it's like a you know, local trash company who can't find enough people who want to work at the trash company. And my sister is irate at this number one because she now is a trash problem, which means she has a maggot problem and a you know, Raccoon problem. But it also means that because she's like me, she's like, Look, you fuckers you have to start paying people more or offering better working conditions. I don't want to hear nobody wants to work anymore. You're full of shit.

Cortex 26:26 That's it's funny, because like I associate perhaps wrongly, but like I have this general association with with trash work as like, reasonably well paying to and I don't know if it's like, reasonably with an asterisk or if these guys just,

Jessamyn 26:40 I think it's cities to be. And but I think in small, small towns, you've got 8 million fussy people with their fussy problems. And as well, it probably doesn't pay that. Well. You know, I honestly don't know. And I don't know what she pays to be honest. Like maybe her trash collection has always been too cheap. But yeah, they definitely were like no one wants to work anymore. She's like, I don't want to hear it. I'm gonna keep calling the news. You know? Because she takes after my my dear departed Mother. Listen, you fuckers Oh,

Cortex 27:18 you know, I? This is exciting. I, we were talking earlier about how long it takes to reboot my computer. And I actually don't know if it takes as long anymore because I did finally update my OSX from being like

Jessamyn 27:30 Mojave to whatever's current. Yeah,

Cortex 27:33 Big Sur I think the current thing and I stayed in Mojave because I had a couple of things that I do

Jessamyn 27:36 too. Yeah, it's tell me how you got over it,

Cortex 27:39 I decided that I would just find something other than Photoshop Elements to use for photo editing. Because broken,

Jessamyn 27:46 I know how old Photoshop Elements is, oh my God.

Cortex 27:50 Oh, like this was back when you can buy a piece of software in Adobe and you get to keep it, I remember. And I think I got it free. At the time with something this is probably in the mid 2000s. Honestly, some shit like that. And it it was going to break. A couple other things we're going to break when I updated to and so I just kept putting it off to not deal with that. And then more things were broken because I hadn't updated then would break if I did. So I've updated it didn't fix nearly as many problems as I hoped it would with my computer Inkscape still runs like absolute shit on the 1.0 branch which is terrible. But it means GarageBand runs again, which I haven't been using for a year now. And so I've been doing it which I really don't like working with and it's much more of a pain to edit with. Which is part of why I haven't been like music bumpers mostly and music cues other than like maybe at the very beginning and ending because like editing with it was physically painful for me like just like it was I was having a bad overall like stress reaction to trying to figure out the fucking interface. I hear that so now we're now we're back to GarageBand is what I'll edit this with, which means I can do things like say, oh, we should take a break real quick. I need to go get more water. And then I'll come back and edit it out. So I'm just going to leave myself a little message here saying, by the way, edit shit out at what are we 34 minutes. That's I typed the wrong number entirely anyway, I'll

Jessamyn 29:22 grab a live example. You're actually going

Cortex 29:25 yes, I'm actually going to go do it and probably cut most of them. Or maybe leave it all I don't know. Okay. I'll be back. Doo doo doo doo

Jessamyn 30:00 Okay, so Jim got air pods, right?

Cortex 30:05 Okay, cool wireless.

Jessamyn 30:07 Yeah. And he and I chat all the time, you know, when we're not in person hanging out. And, you know, he also hydrates. I think more than any human being needs to hydrate, but his. It's his thing. And so that's fine. And so often he'll be like, Oh, I gotta pee real quick. And I'm like, great. And occasionally he'll just wander off with his air pots in into the bathroom, which I appreciate. But now we've gotten to the point where, you know, I'm yelling at him, like, god dammit. And he'll put it on mute. But like, he'll let me continue to talk in his ear. And so I'll tell him jokes. You know, like, I'll literally look up like a million dead jokes and just start telling him dead jokes. While he's nominally in the bathroom peeing, I don't know what the hell he's doing. And then he'll come back and you know, unmute and be like, hey, like, Hi, how's it going, but I don't have air pods. So if I walk away from the computer, I am not listening to it.

Cortex 31:07 I think that's a good plan. Like I use, I have some bluetooth headphones, I got a while back because I was tired of getting the headphone thing caught on stuff in the kitchen. The Wire, that's the word for that. But actually, it's the cord, I guess. But it's not that I got tired of getting the cord stuck. Because I'm a clumsy person, I get cord stuck on things. It's actually that I got tired of ever since they went to the fucking lightning port on the newer iPhones that doesn't have a like headphone like it comes out much easier. And I realized the implication of catching my headphone in a sudden jerking motion on like a drawer handle and it not coming out probably implies potential damage to one or another part of that whole signal chain, but it usually didn't come out. And it didn't interrupt whatever the fuck I was listening to while I was trying to get shit done. And it ruined my flow and right. It turns out that was a that was a problem. So I bought some wireless bluetooth headphones. And they're they're really good for not getting cord stuck on things. And I could do phone calls if my mom calls and that's all good. But I also don't have very good sound. I see that part of me is pissed off about that

Jessamyn 32:13 I got some and the audio fidelity is not good enough for me. But like iPods cost

Cortex 32:18 a fortune. Yeah, but I can't imagine playing. I don't even like your butts. And I don't know

Jessamyn 32:22 if the knockoff versions like, like, just look the same, but are terrible or look the same and basically are the same. I have no idea. This,

Cortex 32:33 this feels like someone, there's got to be like a shitty wire, like a sketchy wire cutter. Right? Like it's a wire cutter. But they include sketchy ass products. Right? Like, you know what this is like, you might not even get it and half of them are broken. But for $40

Jessamyn 32:47 You can get these from ally express that are essentially, you know, air pods, you know, roll the dice.

Cortex 32:55 Yeah, the things that are bad about them are not bad in a product functionality way or whatever.

Jessamyn 32:59 I used to AliExpress for the first time to buy my sister a pair of cat trousers. Yeah, not trousers for her cat but trousers for her that had cats on them. And my user experience there was incredible. And I got Jim a very inexpensive hoodie. And my user experience was also incredible. But the hoodie felt like it was made out of like, you know, those hotel blankets that are made from soda bottles. I had assumed it was cotton, because what else would you make a sweatshirt out of? And in fact, it's made out of this soda bottle fabric, which Jim loves. And so whatever, it's a great gift. But like I was horrified and didn't even want to touch it. So I may try it again, Mary are from netfilter it really suggested I try some try some stuff if I wanted, you know, random, sketchy stuff. Man, we've been talking for 40 minutes. We've shared one link.

Cortex 33:52 Let's get on the project. Let's talk about medical projects. All right.

Jessamyn 33:56 Well, I saw the one that you probably also saw because I saw you commenting in all caps in it. But Uber muffin did a penrose tiling quilt.

Unknown Speaker 34:08 Yes.

Jessamyn 34:10 And yes. And there is basically it links to a tweet and some pictures. And it looks amazing. Like like not only is it a cool, I mean, would you like to share with the world but penrose tiling is if it's possible, no people don't know this.

Cortex 34:32 Well, no, I'm sure tons of people don't know it because it's kind of a weird little bad thing but a Penrose tile. A penrose tiling is a specific kind of combination of two different shapes. There's a couple different ways to do it, but like two different shapes that end up having sort of five fold rotational symmetry but no actual planar symmetry, which is to say you cannot like take a big, you can tile this thing out to infinity. You can keep adding shapes and you'll never get to a point where you can't add Another one of the shapes you're using. So it tiles to infinity, which is tiling the plane is a big thing in, in mathematics,

Jessamyn 35:06 right, what is it combinatorial? Mathematics? Is that what it is? Or is there a different? Is that a different math?

Cortex 35:13 It's, it's not really combinatorial. Exactly like tiling. It really is its own thing like tiling and planar tiling. And, you know, it's a subset of geometry. And I'm not, I'm not I love tiling. But I'm also I don't know a ton about it. So I wouldn't be the best to like lay out the whole context in mathematics. But, but this idea that you can take a shape, like a very simple tiling is take a square, but take a square, put it down, and then put another square next to it and another square next to one of those and without even making any decisions. If they're meeting edge to edge, you can tile the plane infinitely with squares, they're very well behaved.

Jessamyn 35:48 Right, and everybody knows that. Yeah, like

Cortex 35:51 that's just a grid. That's a checkerboard. That's the, that's a very intuitive idea. And what it means that you can tile the plane with the squares is say you pick one square, like imagine you're on a checkerboard, and you take the bottom left square. I don't know my chest terms enough, so I'm not going to guess which column and row that is. And then you sit at that bottom left square, and then you take another square that's maybe on the far right side of the board and up a couple squares. Now imagine this checkerboard goes on to infinity. And every direction is a chessboard. Yes, chessboard, whatever, either way, a grid Josh, just run with me. I'm trying to keep it short, I swear to god, okay. So take that other square at a random point on the board, and move it to where the original square was. And again, like this is going off into infinity. At this point. It's unchanged. After you make that move. You translate it by some amount on two different axes. And then you have the exact same infinite checkerboard, like no shape in there changed, no matter which direction you go, no matter how far you go. Yeah, so that's infinitely tiling the plane. The interesting thing about Penrose tilings is that they are a periodic, which is to say you can't do that you can take these shapes. Usually, there's like a couple different rhombuses or there's a dart and a kite. You can look these up. There's links in the post. Yeah, nothing made.

Jessamyn 37:15 does a good job in the thread to of explaining it, which is nice. Yeah, not not that you shouldn't also explain it. But

Cortex 37:21 no, but like, yeah, definitely go read up if you're like curious more about this, because we've run lays it down nicely. And also lays out a bunch of other examples of this sort of stuff in quilting, which is fantastic. But anyway, like the deal with the penrose tiling is you can tap, you can keep building the tiling out to infinity. But there is no translation of that sort where you can pick another shape and move it to an initial shape and have things unchanged. Yep. Which is a fascinating property that like no one had, like established before Penrose did in like the 70s or something. Which is great. So it's a very neat thing. It's a very neat property of tiling, and there's all sorts of other stuff going on with a periodic tilings. But like, the Penrose tilings are like this really wonderfully intuitive able displayable like simple concept. You can do things with weird shapes to do this as well. But like the shapes and the penrose tiling are very simple. And like the property that they are periodic, is simpler to understand because that so anyway,

Jessamyn 38:24 and this quilt, like if you look at the final quilt, like not only is it cool, and you can get an idea of what this is in the real world, but the colors are gorgeous, too. Like I'm very color sensitive, you know what I mean? Like, it's literally one of the ways I fall asleep now is like I think of like chunk sets of colors that go well together. And that makes me happy. And I'm just like, how would that how would that work? You know? And so looking at this quilt to is just it's a it's a great Oh, man, my earrings are making Wiggle Wiggle noises against the headphones. It's just a great implementation of the idea and the colors that they chose also are cool.

Cortex 39:05 Yeah, no, it's fantastic. I'm really pleased with it. I am delighted to see that pop up on projects.

Jessamyn 39:11 So yeah.

Cortex 39:13 Another thing I was delighted to see propped up on projects was Mr. Sleight of Hand did some piko eight utilities which Oh, great. Pastors how much a fan I am of

Jessamyn 39:24 something I still don't understand. Python. programming language.

Cortex 39:29 It's an imaginary counter slash consoles. Something like what but it's,

Jessamyn 39:35 I'm looking right at it. It's,

Cortex 39:37 it's a fantasy console. It's it's it's, it exists only in software. It was invented in the last few years who like wanted to capture sort of the spirit of like Nintendo Commodore 64, that sort of early 80s era of computers and video games

Jessamyn 39:55 without building like a hardware thing. Right, right. So

Cortex 39:58 it's a fully functioning Virtual Yes, it's virtual. It's it's a it's a Virtual Console. And it's fantastic. I love it and I have talked about it before on the podcast, especially back in like the mid 2000s. I was doing a bunch with it,

Jessamyn 40:10 right? But anyway, that was is that what the little, little you made a little game? The little Luigi game?

Cortex 40:17 Oh, on Weegee. Wait. Yeah, that was a microwave game.

Jessamyn 40:20 Okay. So I am Traco.

Cortex 40:23 So basically Mr. Sleight of Hand has made some utilities for piko aid. And it's hard to sell it beyond that, unless you're really interested in it. But I'm super fucking delighted by that. So hey, that was nice to see come by.

Jessamyn 40:36 That's cool. Speaking of super fucking delighted, I would like to give a shout out to for string riot, who is a data engineer, I think, at NPR. And they launched a thing that's just called NP RS Joy generator, which is basically a kind of a web based application where you can click on things and you get little stories about the things that delight us or the things that give you joy. And you can put on headphones, and it sounds good. And it teaches you some things about science. And yeah, I just I just think it's nifty. I have not played with it. But I have looked at it and poked around. And it's just cool. I love it when like big brands get to do smaller personal stuff, you know? Yeah. And this was one of the things I enjoyed.

Cortex 41:31 That's very nice. I like I like electricity is doing a project about murderous objects. I like that premise is little comics drying project. So they've got a, they've got a initial post up on that doing a Patreon for it, but they've had a couple things that are publicly viewable. So I'm, I'm increasingly vocal about like, yes, do weird, creative projects on Patreon. So I was I was happy to see that. Yeah. Oh, my

Jessamyn 41:59 God, I saw the those little postcards that you made for your last kind of, I don't know what subscriber bonus benefit.

Cortex 42:07 I mean, pear and bucks a month gets a postcard.

Jessamyn 42:10 Yes. They just beautiful. They look really cool.

Cortex 42:13 I was really happy with them. There's a bunch of stuff I want to come back to that's part of what happened with June is like, I really went superduper hard on plotter stuff in May. And then I was like, Oh, I'm exhausted. Break it though. No, I didn't know I, I bought an extra part. Because I was worried that it was gonna give out there's a little rotor that lifts the pen up.

Jessamyn 42:31 Because I felt like I looked at some picture and you were like, Yeah, this is where the plotter hit the bed or something. But maybe I was

Cortex 42:39 it that may have happened to user error. There's a part on it that that's like the one likely to break user serviceable part on it. It's like an $8 Little rotor and

Jessamyn 42:51 but if you didn't have it, you had to wait for it to get delivered. And you're in the middle of a project. That would be bad.

Cortex 42:56 Yeah, so instead, I ordered a couple ahead of time and then I haven't worn out sufficiently since I ordered them so I've had to replace it yet. But yeah, yes, doing stuff, doing stuff. And yeah,

Jessamyn 43:10 well, I'm not like I'm a fan of your art generally. But like those in particular because you know, the nature aspect of it. I think I liked some Forget it. I don't remember where the rest of that sentence was gonna go. I like I'm just going to end

Cortex 43:25 it. I'm excited to play with that more. I want to do some more line Oh, cut and, and leaf imprint stuff. I think it's got a lot of potential, I was sort of starting to find some specific things I really liked during that little run the other day. So what happens and

Jessamyn 43:41 speaking nature, I am sitting right next to my window where my bird feeder, I have all those little window feeders, but like it fell off of one of its little suction cups. So it's just there's a bear no, no bear, but it's just hanging there kind of by one suction cup, which means it's sideways. But the birds are still coming to it because it's a good day for birds for whatever reason. And so as you were talking, I'm basically three feet away from this Rose Breasted Grosbeak, which has like one one funny little feather that's like sticking up weird from its head, which is how I know it's like the same one. And you know, they get kind of jumpy, so normally if you walk around your house, they'll fly away. But since I'm just sitting here, only talking to you. It was just sitting there jumping on some seeds, which is Yeah.

Cortex 44:26 You know, actually random shout out to a guy named Michael Fogelman, who's at full Hilbert on Twitter all in CUDA link, who I would credit as getting me into the plotter stuff to some extent because he's done a bunch of like, math and plotter type things, bunch of math stuff that sort of nerd Style Me. But he's also it's full Dilbert because he's like a huge birder. I started paying attention to that stuff. So his Twitter feed right now is just like nonstop birds. So if you want some extra bird content, he does a lot of like, bird photography and stuff.

Jessamyn 44:55 I probably do you see a metaphor person or just like internet off, I think just represent. And eastern North Carolina. Cool. All right. Good. Follow through.

Cortex 45:05 There you go. Good. Shall we talk about Metafilter? Ah, yeah.

Jessamyn 45:10 I just also wanted to mention Adam races in the bike race. Oh, yeah. I always I always appreciate this, you know, is competing. And we'll be posting updates. And I hope it goes or went. Well,

Cortex 45:29 I guess I think it's still going. He's live. But I'm not. I'm not totally clear. But he's posting. He's posting blog entries, and I haven't caught up with it. So I don't know exactly what the timeline is like, like, to some extent, like, cross country on a bike started in June, he could be done by now. I don't know that I would be done by now. But I also wouldn't try riding cross country on fucking bike. So I don't really know how to judge that. Maybe he's done. I don't know.

Jessamyn 45:55 I'm not. You could

Cortex 45:56 probably read his website to find I

Jessamyn 45:58 am. There's no on it. All right. Thank you. I can read a ba

Cortex 46:08 uncleaved. This is just bad radio. This is why it was I was gonna like

Jessamyn 46:11 it's not radio. It's a podcast and it's fine podcasting.

Cortex 46:22 Okay, well sit in silence while you read his blog. But after that,

Jessamyn 46:26 I'm reading about his ass hurting, I should probably move on. Oh, he had problems with Achilles tendons. And so we had to, he had to scratch it early. Unfortunately. I am sorry, Adam rice. But we'll we'll read more about it. And I just he, I mean, I met him. We met him I think at the meta filter meetup in Texas. And if because there's two Adam races, and he is one of them. And I've just always appreciated his communication style. So I will look forward to reading this later. Nice. Yeah, sorry about your tendon. Adam race.

Cortex 46:58 Yeah, that's a bummer. It's a bummer. But it's good that you're looking after your tenant instead of pushed on? Because that's

Jessamyn 47:06 Oh, yeah. Well, because he's a grown up. So yes. Yeah. Well, I

Cortex 47:12 mean, that's, that's not enough.

Jessamyn 47:13 He's like me, really, but you got to take more care of your body, like every decade, you need to

Cortex 47:19 but that doesn't mean everybody does. So like, I'm being supportive of the decision to like, do that. I understand. Yep, that's I flex my shitty shoulder in it's gonna fine. I actually your

Jessamyn 47:32 exercises? Not really. But I'm the tracker.

Cortex 47:37 I really should, I should, I should figure something out. But I've been a little bit better about it. And I've been generally taking good care of it. I did something stupid to it earlier this year, to the point where it was like a really fucked for a couple days, I remember that I had done something really bad. Yeah. And then it was okay. After a few days, I guess took it easy. And let it let it recover. So

Jessamyn 47:53 do your exercises. I will

Cortex 47:56 do find something with stretching, find several milestones that are good,

Jessamyn 48:00 and do the exercises while you're doing the thing that you love. And at no other time.

Cortex 48:05 There's almost nothing that I love doing that doesn't involve like moving my arms around. So it's tricky. Really. You don't

Jessamyn 48:10 have like media you like to consume? Come on.

Cortex 48:14 I could try and make a better job of like doing it while watching like TV or movie with Angela. But like I really like sinking into.

Jessamyn 48:22 I understand that. Just like for me doing my dishes in the house is a thing I have trouble with. But I have like a favorite podcast that I love to listen to that isn't sure yeah. And so I only put it on mostly in like, either when I'm going for long walks or when I'm doing the dishes. And yeah, then it's it associates positive feelings. Whereas my arm exercises take two minutes and so it falls under the five minute rule. If you can do it in less than five minutes. You have to just do it and shut up. You know, if it was longer than five minutes, I would have to incent myself in some way. But Well, I'm glad we're glad your shitty shoulder is doing better.

Cortex 49:01 So it's doing fine all things considered.

Jessamyn 49:04 That NPR joke

Cortex 49:07 Oh, no, but I've little been. Yeah, it's it's a no wait, wait, don't tell me. Sir. Thank you. There's a spider three inches from my face to my left. He's just hanging there. Okay.

Jessamyn 49:19 Oh, I thought hang in there was the name of another NPR show. No. Dude, I don't listen to NPR. I don't know what the shows are. Except for those two.

Cortex 49:28 I don't know. I don't know their entire run. That's for sure.

Jessamyn 49:31 I'll tell you guys planet money or the other one.

Cortex 49:34 How do I get it to fucking focus on the spider

Jessamyn 49:38 you got it? Sometimes put your finger on the screen. But you're not asking me.

Cortex 49:44 Yeah, how do you do focus lock. You put your bad radio and

Jessamyn 49:48 you put your finger on the screen. A finger on the screen finger on the screen. Finger, screen finger. Finger screen got this

Cortex 49:59 picture Spider. I'm gonna post it on Twitter while we're recording and I'll link it in the show notes. And it's not a it's a tiny spider too. I'm just gonna leave it there. It's gonna hang out. It's our co host. Good.

Jessamyn 50:08 Well, I will reply Mr. Spider with a picture of my Grosbeak hanging out in my birdfeeder All right, because I wouldn't post it to my own Twitter because it's just a picture of a bird. Your Twitter's a little more freeform.

Cortex 50:27 It's my I would say my Twitter is very freeform. To the great regret of anybody who follows me for anything in particular on Twitter.

Jessamyn 50:35 I'm not sure if I unfollowed you

Cortex 50:37 or you might you might have muted me at some point. Now I don't

Jessamyn 50:41 mute anybody that seems like the coward's way.

Cortex 50:44 Well, you know, I go on, like 40 tweet sprees. When doing an art project. No, don't

Jessamyn 50:49 tell me I know that sort of thing. Well, I must have unfollowed you.

Cortex 50:55 That's possible. I wish there was a way to like, include a hey, you might want to mute this thread button in the first tweet in a thread. Because I feel like that wouldn't be a real service to people I know who followed me who may not be in it for everything. But you can just say that this doesn't feel complicated. I know I can say that. But then that's still telling people that hey, you know, you've dumped me you might want to you might want to go into the interface and take this action that requires effort from you get

Jessamyn 51:20 a thread is not super difficult relative to doing almost anything, but

Cortex 51:25 it's still it's still it's still a little bit of effort. And for a lot of people it's more effort than they usually make.

Jessamyn 51:31 That is a damning indictment of most people.

Cortex 51:34 No, that's that's a realistic assessment of friction in interfaces. Like that's that's I'm not saying people are lazy. I'm saying you're too specific. No, I'm saying that people are not I would say the person who knows to mute a thread on Twitter because it's going to be too noisy for them is a small power user outlier within the Twitter interface. Like not judging their computer competence or anything just judging how specifically engaged they are with the UI tool sets of Twitter I think most people don't know to do it. Interesting. I could be wrong but that's my impression.

Unknown Speaker 52:13 See a gap open take a chance taking right now. Hesitate stumbling fumbling want to come down believe marine life if you believe your feelings

Jessamyn 52:44 clip in your hair from yesterday have a googly eye on it.

Cortex 52:47 It does that's a little like fly. My wife got me a couple of fly clips because I was changing my hair. And so she got me a couple little fly clips that are like black with white, like filigreed wings and googly eyes are

Jessamyn 53:00 very cute. And you need to post a picture of the spider because I'm waiting for you now.

Cortex 53:05 Oh, I'm sorry. I was I was I was gonna try and arrange a thing. Twitter's asking me who can reply to this. This is the first time it's ever done that. I'm just gonna, okay, I'm just say I'm trying. I can't progress. Let me process more than one like verbal stream at once. So as long as I'm talking,

Jessamyn 53:22 I stopped talking.

Cortex 53:24 Yeah, but then instead here, I was gonna try

Unknown Speaker 53:26 and say I'll start talking.

Cortex 53:28 Okay, I've made the tweet. It's a picture. It's not very good. And it's just as podcast biter. I'm done with that part. I'm going to talk about Metafilter. And you can post whatever you want to post there. An interesting thing that I saw on meta filter this month, was this post about the mystery of who in a small town won $731 million in the Powerball why? This is a post that Jen fullmoon made. And it's about a lottery winner in a pretty small town. Like maybe 1000 people, I think. And yeah, no one knows who it is because no one has, like, come forward publicly to claim it. Because why on earth would you but also, it's a small enough town that like out of 1000 people in a network of curious town members, you can really sort of scrutinize a bit so it's basically about that, like it's an interesting, weird mystery, like a group won the lottery. And like people were trying to figure out who won even though no one's come out and saying I won, because why on fucking Earth would you

Jessamyn 54:29 write?

Cortex 54:31 Well, wow. But also, it's in one of the only states where you're allowed to anonymously collect rather than being obliged to so everybody

Jessamyn 54:39 can pretend it's not them. Even cluding the person who it was them.

Cortex 54:46 Yeah, or the or the group. I think it was like some number of people, but also how many people that is maybe a total mystery to I don't remember exactly. Anyway, it's interesting. Like the lottery is weird. A lottery is a fucked up thing. Lottery wins are weird stories about people having to herbal lives. After winning a bunch of money, the lottery is like a standby.

Jessamyn 55:04 Well, and this stretch has everything because it has a ton of people talking about many of those different aspects. Right?

Cortex 55:10 Exactly. Yeah. So it's a nice sort of discussion of all those different aspects and some speculation. And yeah, I enjoyed it. It was a nice read.

Jessamyn 55:19 I heard a lottery story on this trivia podcast that I listened to while doing the dishes. And they told a crazy story about Sorry, I'm trying to remove the word crazy from my vocabulary to the extent that I can.

Cortex 55:34 No, I thought you meant like from your tweet as you were typing. Oh, it's like,

Jessamyn 55:37 no, although I was going to tell you, you should use alt text on your on your tweets.

Cortex 55:41 I should, but I'm gonna be gone for the podcast for like two solid minutes.

Jessamyn 55:45 I know. I know. I should

Cortex 55:46 be spider picture. I'm trying to do that more in general.

Jessamyn 55:49 Yeah, it's great. And I have a plugin that allows you to actually see what other people's alt text is, which has helped me make my Altair. Oh, nice. I think I should do that. Yeah,

Cortex 55:58 I will see if Macedon is very good about that. In general, it's like very baked in and as a small child really

Jessamyn 56:03 needs to get with the program and build that thing. But I can't build that thing. So I'm hoping when we do the little change up that I don't remember how I wanted to do maybe we can add that into the little changeup. At any rate, I've completely forgotten. Oh, the podcast, does this little told a little story about some very tiny village where like, everybody went into like a national lottery thing. Except for like, the one guy in town, who like, I don't remember what the situation with the one guy is. But basically, they all won. So like, everybody in town, won the lottery, except for one guy. And this was probably like, I don't know, 3040 50 people, and it was everybody in the town. That's not the one guy and I think it was one of those things like, either he hadn't lived there yet. Or maybe he had told him to go fuck themselves, like, I don't remember. And the outcome and the import of this decision are different depending on which one of these things was, but Oh, my God, the story is riveting. Because, you know, everybody wins. Oh, except not you. You know?

Cortex 57:17 Well, this, that that is worse than being the one person not in the office pool like that's,

Jessamyn 57:22 well, because office pools are always small, you know, like you miss out on a couple 100 bucks, I would assume, but not, you know,

Cortex 57:31 except for that one time,

Jessamyn 57:32 not one time. Not one time. Right. Right. Right, right. Well, that's a great thread. And I'm looking forward to checking it out. And the thread that I enjoyed, which was just kind of, like a low key thread that got a bunch of people talking about a lot of different things was this one from the middle of June by Le VOA, which was linking to a story that was somebody's you know, very short substack article talking about the errand hang, like, you're just going to do an errands and you ask your buddy, if they want to go with you. And obviously that was a thing that during COVID was not as available to people but is maybe available now. And you know, you you as as this post says where you hit your homie up to accompany you while you tend to the tasks that come with adulting you know, whatever the whatever the crap is, right? And there's a lot of really different vibes about this, that people got out of it. Like to me, I'm like, oh, yeah, this is great. I wish I had people that like, do errands with all the time. It's super, because I live alone, right? But then there's other people who like live with their families, and they have like, you know, busy lives, who are like, Why would you deny yourself the chance to like, have some uninterrupted alone time. And you know, other people being like, Dude, my life is uninterrupted, alone time. So, you know, and other people being like, I don't want to hang out with you while you do your shit. That's not That's not the fun befriend time and other people being like, I don't want to just sit across from you at a meal or sit next to you at a movie and not talk about things. So it just it was just an interesting kind of long thread from people talking about. You know, these ideas basically.

Cortex 59:19 Yeah, no, that's great. I, I am pro errand hang, but it's interesting. Like, my childhood was very much anti that concept, because that was like, the thing my family would do is like,

Jessamyn 59:32 Oh, hey, like, we're gonna have family time you get into the car while I do all the shit I had to do anyhow.

Cortex 59:37 Yeah, exactly. That's, that's no, let's say I want to just fucking say, Oh, I'm playing Nintendo.

Jessamyn 59:41 Right, right. No, we're gonna do in the post office.

Cortex 59:45 And then like, you know, my sister became an adult

Jessamyn 59:49 and young adult, right?

Cortex 59:53 Yeah. And so like, Hey, let's go do a thing. And then we turn into that and she's like, oh, yeah, no, I just need to go do this as a fuck you because this was It wasn't negotiating, you know, it was like, hey, I need to do these things you want to come I was like, Oh, hey, let's do this thing. Oh, but let's do these other

Jessamyn 1:00:06 now you're gone for four hours. I'm gonna go visit my boyfriend for a while because mom and dad, parents.

Cortex 1:00:12 Exactly. And so like, at this point, adulthood, I'm like, I'm okay with the idea there and someone's getting a haircut, they want to like, you know, tool that I mean, I wouldn't go sit through their haircut, but like, you know, like something.

Jessamyn 1:00:25 Magazine. You know,

Cortex 1:00:27 why if some, if a friend asked me, Would you please Come be with me and my haircut, I would go to that. But like, generally speaking, it's more like, I'm going to be in your like neighborhood because I'm getting a haircut and I need to pick up this thing is like, Okay, well, I'll meet you after the haircut, we'll pick up the thing, we'll get a beer or whatever, right? I like the idea. I'm for it. Even though I also feel that people like, Oh, I just want the alone time. Like, I feel like me. And I definitely navigate like both sides of that, like, depending on how busy we've been and how social we've been during the day is like, you know, sometimes it's like, hey, yeah, let's definitely like go drive to this dumb thing a half an hour away, because we need to pick up something. And there seems like no, you definitely can just go you do

Jessamyn 1:01:00 it. And I'm not doing it. Well, it's it's interesting with me and Jim, because like, by definition when he's here, because we don't live together. I'm kind of not doing errands, you know? And definitely he's not doing an errand while I stay home. But you know, it is there is a sense in which if he's here for three days, and I'm like cooking dinner, and I'm like, Ah, shit, I'm out of whatever. I'll be like, oh, yeah, there's another person in the house. I'm like, can you go to the supermarket and get the thing. And it's like magic. And so even though I love having him around, like the whole idea that I have, like, essentially an extra set of hands, because there are two of us, is like just a minor miracle. And, you know, during COVID, Aaron tangs were a lot of how like, I would interact with people because their errand was walking the dog. And my you know, but as well, it meant I could hang out with a friend, you know, yeah, in a completely safe way. But it was, you know, it was sort of neat, but, you know, I get why people wouldn't like it or don't think it's a cool idea. And definitely suburban errands have a different vibe to them than rural errands or city errands. Like I don't want to get in and out of the car and look for parking five times. That's a nightmare. But like, you know, getting some exercise walking around looking at some stuff. Sure.

Cortex 1:02:19 See, and I'm much more about the urban Aaron, but at the same time, because I don't have a lot of friends who live like right by me. They don't happen nearly as easily. So

Jessamyn 1:02:27 right, right, right, right.

Cortex 1:02:30 All right. Well, I'm feeling excessively chatty, but we should probably mentioned for Metafilter meet links. So I'm going to mention this post discussing the fact that the Broken Earth trilogy is going to be adapted to visual media, which is vague phrase. There's these three books by an author named NK Jemisin. Oh,

Jessamyn 1:02:49 okay. I have not read those. But at least now I know. You

Cortex 1:02:51 should totally read them. They're very good. No, I

Jessamyn 1:02:54 Why have I not read them? I feel like there's a specific reason. Because I've heard she's delightful. She She looks great. She's achieved championship, right? Yeah. Okay.

Cortex 1:03:04 Yeah, that's a black woman. And the books are great.

Jessamyn 1:03:10 Fantasy or sci fi or a sort of fantasy

Cortex 1:03:13 sci fi. Okay, but I don't know. I I know you you enjoyed the southern reach trilogy, which I would not compare these two directly. But I think very much did though. But in terms of the sense that like, that was also kind of sci fi. And it also wasn't like sci fi, sci fi. These are fantasy, but they're not like fantasy fantasy. Okay. Makes sense. They're just very good. Well, and

Jessamyn 1:03:37 I've heard you're wonderful. But I'm sorry. Yeah, turning this into it.

Cortex 1:03:40 No, that's fine. It's gonna be a TV series or a movie series. It's not totally like, adapted to visual media is a weirdly vague phrase. And so like, even in the thread, we weren't sure what was going on. So I'm kind of waiting to hear more about it. But it's good news. And if it's cast, well, and Jemison is gonna be directly involved in writing it that sounds super fucking great. There's also a lot of talking around in this thread. This is sort of like a spoiler for vague meta spoilers thing. There's a lot of discussion, a thread of how to deal with a certain plot point from the first book, which is not super vital to the first book. But if you're one of those people who can't stop thinking about what a spoiler might be, because people are avoiding talking about it. slightly dangerous. I don't think it's really a problem. Yeah. But people were generally good about not saying what it was but if you needed absolutely like, yeah, if you want to go in absolutely cold just start reading the books because you won't stop Jim and

Jessamyn 1:04:31 I have this problem with taskmaster. I think I've mentioned this before, where he'll be like, Oh, God, I love the way they did this in this season. You haven't watched yet. And I'm like, Look, buddy, buddy.

Cortex 1:04:42 Yeah, we're still catching up. I would be slightly annoyed by that. But taskmaster is not the kind of show that I would care if

Jessamyn 1:04:49 it's funny. I wouldn't think I would care because normally I don't care about spoilers at all. Just tell me how it ends. That's fine. Like to me like you know, stressful books where there's been industries, I often just want to kind of know, Is everybody okay? At the end of it? Does the dog live like just just

Cortex 1:05:07 like? Yes, it does it does the dog die talk.

Jessamyn 1:05:11 I recommend it to so many people who, you know, have aversions because of specific things. I use it to look for Nazis. I don't like to read about Nazis. Like,

Cortex 1:05:23 oh, they cover a lot more than dogs now, don't they? Oh, yeah. Like, is

Jessamyn 1:05:27 there weird dental stuff like there's a whole it's great. At but it's, you know, it's user user feedback. So it does definitely only it has coverage for most popular media. But if your stuffs a little more obscure, it might not be there. But you know, I'm always kind of asking about this stuff. But for some reason, on taskmaster, I love to go in completely cold. Like, I don't even want to know who's on the next episodes, or if they do well or poorly. And Jim really wants to talk about it. And I totally understand, like, you love a thing, you want to share it with the person you love, who is two seasons behind you, you know, yeah,

Cortex 1:06:04 but that's for them. That's like, yeah, you gotta you gotta you gotta synchronize on the stuff that like you're mutually into.

Jessamyn 1:06:12 I know. And the great news is, when he comes to visit, we'll watch episodes that he's already seen. And I haven't seen and have a great time watching it together. Because his memory is shit. And he can not. It's amazing. He can't remember what happened a season and a half ago, but he'll remember some obscure point just to ruin it for me. Like he doesn't do it on purpose. It's just how his brain works. And I'm like, don't tell me that. And you can't look at the people who are on it up on Wikipedia, because Wikipedia will tell you if they want or not, you know?

Cortex 1:06:45 Yeah. That's tricky.

Jessamyn 1:06:49 In conclusion, congratulations NK Jemisin. Speaking of taskmaster, no, I'm not speaking of tech taskmaster, but it's funny. The perfect segue well, because they have different slang. They're right. And so they'll call people like a knob or a bell end or something. And it's their way of saying a dick. We've got British slang. Yes. And so then. So then when they talk about the tactile beauty of buttons, meters, knobs and dials. The inner beam is in me, just goes TV. But this was another thread of almost exactly the same length as the other thread, the Aaron Tang thread, but it's just like a thread about people who like control panels and knobs. And it's it's a fun thread about people who are often in many cases interested in kind of analog tech that has stuff like that, you know, yeah, twiddle or things.

Cortex 1:07:48 It's kind of it's kind of a croutons petting sort of thing. Yes, I think. And yeah, I know that. This is I like analog controls. And also I don't have much of anything with analog controls that I liked that it has analog controls, if that makes sense. I don't I like knobs and things that are twiddly I don't like the uncertainty of having to chase back down a bunch of settings on analog it was I think this is why I never got into like analog since well, thank God.

Jessamyn 1:08:18 I mean, following you, but

Cortex 1:08:21 let's say Okay, let's take a practical example like like a Mogae keyboard. Let's let's take an analog synthesizer from Vogue, which other

Jessamyn 1:08:30 people may know as Moog but I'm aware I'm aware that you're pronouncing it correctly. I just it's I finally reread my own bread I learned that isn't much older person. Yes. Me too.

Cortex 1:08:40 I think it was in my 30s when I found out that my dog was moved not moved. I was I believe that who is more fun to say honestly. And that's part of the

Jessamyn 1:08:48 problem. Yeah, it's like there's a cow joke in there somewhere. Yeah,

Cortex 1:08:51 but anyway, like imagine imagine like a 70s 80s synthesizer and it's got a bunch of knobs on it and you know, there for adjusting like filter and oscillator rates.

Jessamyn 1:09:01 Oh, I see where you're going and all those. I love

Cortex 1:09:04 those knobs and it's fun to play with them but if I'm thinking musically and trying to like find a sound that I like, I want to set those knobs and then be able to just say, Oh yeah, that's the one keep it I love a digital synthesizer in that sense, you can dial something in hit you know store this in memory bank B two, and then it's there forever with an analog synth you just have to keep fucking track of that and my brain is not gear shop, that kind of thing. So I find them kind of terrifying to try and work with I've worked with digital ones that I still find frustrating that way even though I can save presets on those right

Jessamyn 1:09:34 well it's I mean it's like things with cars right like setting my father always used to be like a complete pill about this like he would like me to drive as he got older. But if but I wasn't allowed to adjust the seat, you know, because he had it set up perfectly. Yeah, and I was like, Dad, I can't see or reach the pedals if I don't adjust the seats and it would just I mean I get it it but it would just make him twitchy and fidgety because He had it set up perfectly. It's like It's like the shower, you know, like knowing exactly the right temperature mix of hot and cold water. And in many cases like cars nowadays, especially fancy cars have handled that by like, there's actually like a button you can press that'll move all the stuff. I remember the first time I saw that, I was like,

Cortex 1:10:24 wow, this is this car we bought I might need to have this is

Jessamyn 1:10:28 how Wells live. Yeah, well, and that's

Cortex 1:10:31 the thing. Like, I'm not sure how expensive your craft to be to do that. Right. And like, so like, maybe it won't, but like Angela's a foot shorter than me, like, you know, every time one of us drives the car after the other one does. We have to adjust the seat in two directions and adjust the mirror. It's not a big deal, right? But also, it's like it's fucking annoying. Right?

Jessamyn 1:10:48 Well handed off and then you can't see through the mirror. And that's dangerous. Yeah,

Cortex 1:10:53 yeah, exactly. Like, fortunately, I'm not gonna forget the seat because like, there's literally no way I can fit in the car. Right? It's set early, like I opened the door, move the seat back, then sit down, then lower it and you know, that sort of thing. And vice versa for her like she wouldn't able to see the fucking road if she didn't like bring the seat up. So yeah, yeah, anyway. knobs and dials and buttons are great, though. Should we mentioned briefly, have you been watching Loki? No. Okay, well, I will just mention in passing that I have been watching Loki I'm enjoying it. But also it has an end credit sequence that is just full of like 70s 80s Industrial corporate tech, that's all buttons and meters and nozzle styles. Probably I didn't even see him talking about but

Jessamyn 1:11:41 I just saw like one tweet that went by that's like, if you're watching Loki, there's an end sequence. That's just wow. And I don't know if that's what he meant.

Cortex 1:11:50 I Oh, no, I did see that. And I think that's a different thing. He was mentioning like a I think it was like an end of credits after credits thing that was like a big Yeah, oh my gosh, what's going on. But also the credits themselves are just like just a bunch of Oh, I see what you're saying. Kind of like it's it's good. Anyway, that's rad. Well,

Jessamyn 1:12:08 and I'm such a fast budget that I like analog controls. Because in many cases, for me, they don't break as fast as like digital. Like, I think I've told you that there were a lot of like things at my father's house that would have worked except their little touch panels eroded and all I wanted was like a knob that you could turn the thing on or off with and what I got was a touch panel that was non responsive to me even though all the insides worked fine. And a new touch panel was expensive. And I was like well anyway and so now I'm always like looking for stuff that Scott but I like your use case makes 100% sense to me.

Cortex 1:12:50 Well, I mean that's that's the other thing is like those old sins still fucking work right? Because you can repair the like if you need to repair a pot. Okay, fine. Like New potentiometer it works again and that's that's part of the reason that those things are fucking still around among the weirdos who collect them. I say so lovingly. A couple more medical term links. And then I think

Jessamyn 1:13:11 yeah, I have one more metal filter one but talk to me about this one.

Cortex 1:13:15 Which one that appears. This is a post that I made, but it's really a post about unicycles because oh my

Jessamyn 1:13:21 god bond cliff and Jim went unicycle riding together last weekend.

Cortex 1:13:27 I didn't know Jim was in on it. Both Jim Jim and others.

Jessamyn 1:13:31 He lent Jim lent Jim his unicycle key because he has multiple unicycles but I'm sorry, tell me what this is.

Cortex 1:13:39 Bob bond, Clift bought a new unicycle, which is a slightly higher, slightly larger unicycle, right. He previously had a unicycle. And so he's

Jessamyn 1:13:48 wondering what happened in the snails or the Koren train or like

Cortex 1:13:53 they're still there? I mean, I don't know about the snails but the trains probably says, Hey, this is the way it works. Some of us you just have to like fritter from one thing to the next just keep your brain busy so you don't like lose your mind at the existential nature fucking every

Jessamyn 1:14:05 I get it. I don't know how I manage that. I think by getting irritated at other people who can't stay on track.

Cortex 1:14:13 Everybody finds their own specific like, you know, maintenance process.

Jessamyn 1:14:16 Yeah, when he PDF vote for a fee. Additions

Cortex 1:14:20 I got maybe I got curious about the idea of like race unicycles and cured unicycles based on some comment Jim made

Jessamyn 1:14:26 on Twitter or as we call them, turns out their attempt.

Cortex 1:14:30 Yeah, other Jim bond cliff. And I found a blog about geared unicycles I think I had said it's really interesting. You should go read it. Tell me what Okay, so so some of them. There are ratio gear unicycles that are still a fixed gear but it's like a two to one but then there are also unicycles that have like a built in thing. I don't understand unicycles well enough to like I read this whole

Jessamyn 1:14:57 handlebars. I know that much.

Cortex 1:15:00 Some of them do. Um do actually have a like a little like seat side handlebar I think specifically to

Jessamyn 1:15:06 the seat size handlebar handlebar,

Cortex 1:15:09 that seat side. It comes up next to the seat that sounds

Jessamyn 1:15:13 like something to get nailed on.

Cortex 1:15:15 I mean, I don't own a standard unicycle I'm not buying one of the fucking you know, gear hub. But

Jessamyn 1:15:21 Jim got one for like 10 bucks at like a, you know, garage sale up here.

Cortex 1:15:28 That's what you want is a $10 unicycle well, and he had a whole way

Jessamyn 1:15:31 that he would practice in and then he moved. He moved to a place with no hallway and hasn't brought it out. And that's why him and Jim because it was too hot to like, actually do what they wanted to do, which was play frisbee golf. And so instead,

Cortex 1:15:46 how are you in cycling?

Jessamyn 1:15:47 Yeah, how are you?

Cortex 1:15:50 Okay, well, what's what's your other Lincoln, then I'll toss one more.

Jessamyn 1:15:52 Oh, and this one is in the pantry adjustment category. It's a great post by brain Wayne, about, I don't remember what her humbug metal filter hears or humbug, who's basically she's a library school educator. And she basically requested the records of her library usage data, published the data set, and essentially gave this to students as like an assignment, look at this data, and make a library like make use this data to show that I am the worst person on earth. You know, like, Oh, look at my checkout data to tell a terrible story about me. And it's just, it's really, really interesting. Like, she's super smart, and very good at her job, but also kind of like me a bit of a library crank, you know, she's like, why do we do things this way? Why don't we do them better? Why is this so wrong? And, you know, it's just, it's really interesting sheets in the she's in the, in the thread, talking about stuff. So to know, hito is in it, like, at once been like, well, libraries should do this. And I'm like, Yeah, but come on. There's reasons they don't blah. And there was actually really good conversation that came out of it. And I was really pleased that Dorthea showed up in person to talk about it because you just get so much more out of a thing. So thank you brainwaves. And thank you everybody who was in this read?

Cortex 1:17:28 Yeah, that's read. Yeah. That reminds me, indirectly you

Jessamyn 1:17:33 mind us unicycles What is the title of this?

Cortex 1:17:37 I feel like I know I kind of I thought that when I was writing I was like, You know what, I'm just gonna make the post this is one of my tricks is like I make posts by not getting caught up on whether or not I made

Jessamyn 1:17:48 a post right? That's actually very smart. It's very smart. You like

Cortex 1:17:51 I feel like sometimes right? unicycles and I feel like a unicycle is in a sense a Miami thing, even if there's not a direct mind.

Jessamyn 1:17:58 I think if it is a thing, and momstart Cloud Yeah,

Cortex 1:18:03 I'm I'm it's just an avant garde clown and not that avant garde honestly. Clown really, you know, I'm pissing off so many minds and clowns right now and unicycle riders probably too. You know, another thing jugglers

Jessamyn 1:18:19 jugglers riding you to cycles?

Cortex 1:18:22 Yeah, that's juggling his clown ish. How? I don't know. I'm curious. I would like someone to present a Venn diagram of clown mime juggler. unicycle.

Jessamyn 1:18:33 Okay. I mean, not challenging, not Challenge accepted. Okay, but just like, Okay, I

Cortex 1:18:38 will allow it. Oh, okay. Next, next next season of taskmaster. The one thing I want to mention was this amusing and also kind of dumb, but was like the post is fine. This is a sec, this brings out posting about the website carbon calculator, including links to the meta filter.com analysis. And this is a site that purports to take sort of the I think infrastructural footprint of a site based on like, page weight and number of visits and service provider and tell you sort of like what its carbon footprint is and the obvious comparison to go with his metal filter. And we do very well on this thing. And honestly, I think because there's

Jessamyn 1:19:15 no images, Josh.

Cortex 1:19:18 Well, I mean, that's a big thing. We do a really good job of not serving up a shitload of data, because we don't have a pile of images every page load and we don't have a shitload

Jessamyn 1:19:24 steel. Everybody has a script bullshit. Yeah. Yeah.

Cortex 1:19:28 Like if you load the site, there will be some JavaScript attached but it's not a fucking like two megabytes of it. And it's not a bunch of privacy tracker, ad tracker bullshit. So we legitimately do well there like per page load. I think we are probably way 99th percentile as far as like, you know, websites that aren't literally a static text page. But also, I feel like all the numbers on the site are kind of weird. Yeah. To some extent, I feel like they're giving Amazon way too much credit. We use AWS for some of our servers, I

Jessamyn 1:19:58 would hardly call them a sustainable you Yeah, so but who

Cortex 1:20:01 knows? But anyway, it was kind of a fun thread anyway and eyebrows and eyeballs got to make a joke about me drinking way too much today.

Yeah, it was amusing. That was all

shall we talk about?

Jessamyn 1:20:46 Sure. There was a bunch of stuff. I saw an AskMe folder. I enjoyed AskMe Metafilter this month. I mean, I feel like I enjoy it most months but like, some months I can like remember enjoying it, you know? Sure. This mainly to my own comment, which I definitely don't necessarily mean but like frown or frown or makes pasta and foreigners pasta is unsatisfying. They want new and exciting sauces. Vegetarian, please. They know how to make it kind of one way. Let's talk about better pasta. And there are some great recipes I included one that was for this kind of lemon garlic pasta, because you may remember I got all those lemons that one time. And there's some like eggplant versions that look amazing. And it's just a great recipe thread of like really good ways to make wasteful butternut squash Alfredo sauce. It looks really good. So thanks browner for asking the question. And thank you mefites for having good recipes. Yeah. What else you got? Did you? Did you look at AskMe Metafilter at

Cortex 1:21:58 all? Not very much. I moderated. inasp Metafilter. But I didn't do a lot of pleasure reading in there this month. So okay, well, I've got one but I want to space it out.

Jessamyn 1:22:06 So you can space out one Josh?

Cortex 1:22:11 Well, I can I can I can put it in the middle if we didn't discuss the fact that I was doing that.

Jessamyn 1:22:15 Oh, sorry. Did I just did I just blow your cover? You blew

Cortex 1:22:19 up my spot. You blew up my spot. All right. Well, my dog spot Why did you explode my book? What?

Jessamyn 1:22:25 All right, well from Rhode Island, one time fees that are worth it. There are things where you can buy lifetime memberships, which of those things are worth it. And there's actually some pretty good examples, uh, one of which I think that I think the two things that I applied that I have are like a library thing, lifetime membership, and like a Soma FM music membership. And people talk about different apps. They talk about some different websites where you can join like coops, food coops, a lot of people choose. Jane the brown talks about her dad got a lifetime subscription to National Geographic in the 60s. And just they came forever. And just it's a neat thread. And there's probably what am Charlie says you can't do it anymore. But I snagged that sweet BMG record club where I got two free CDs a year for life until they begged me to stop. They finally went out of business. Very satisfying, but I just I just liked that thread. Because, you know, I think I think there's you know, there's overarching themes and asked me to filter you know, there's questions that are like mid asshole or is this other person, there's like, you know, helped me generate this list helped me do food better help me do adulting better. But you know, there's a there's a subset that are all like, help me be more practical with my money. And that can be a lot of different kinds of things. But I think this was one of them, like, Help me, help me think helped me think about ways to you know, buy a lifetime membership to a thing that's actually worth it and not just you know, helping helping some business with their bottom line. So I enjoyed that thread a lot. Nice. And are you ready?

Cortex 1:24:18 I is now is a post now the time now's the time everybody brace yourself for this amazing reference to a an ASP Metafilter question I thought was interesting. was just for me even but I don't think we would have known it was as interesting in May because it was like one of those unresolved questions that was not yet. We mentioned this early, unresolved. Maybe Maybe we did well, I

Jessamyn 1:24:40 meant to because it totally made me laugh.

Cortex 1:24:43 I know we talked about trespassers William and we may have talked about

Jessamyn 1:24:46 because I had to explain to you. Exactly, yes.

Cortex 1:24:50 And I made a joke about the Puna verse. Again, so this is already worth it. I wasn't planning that but I'm gonna take it anyway. They figured Get our follow up. Nope. Oh my god, they sort of they followed up with thoughts about the things that people posted and whatnot. So there's like, I guess if you want to go for like the bonus round on this, what's the song that I can't remember, but remember things about thing you have some fodder to work with, based on

Jessamyn 1:25:18 that very tricky. Specific kind of helped me remember the thing, because in libraries we know, people ask, and they often have some detail wrong, but they don't know. And they don't think they have it wrong. And that's normal. As long as they don't get too feisty about it. Like we're up for it. But it is a tricky, a tricky thing. So yeah, please go into this thread, and see if you can help trespassers, William, find their thing.

Cortex 1:25:51 Later if it got a resolution, and that's why we keep asking these open for a year, by the way, so you can fucking get in there.

Jessamyn 1:25:57 Yeah, get in there real time. Get up after it. Yes. I like this thread, which I think comes under a sort of loose asked Metafilter self care heading, like, I'm an impatient twitchy person. How do you learn, to practice to not be? How does that work? And basically, this is Nick nishka, nishka. If you're someone like me, and you learn to be patient, what did you do? And you know, people are like, we're meditation is that the other? And they're like, I just can't be meditating like, and which is normal, and how everybody feels. And so there are some people who have some really good feedback about it, and they're trying to figure it out. And no, I just, I just, I like hearing lots of different people's ways of explaining things that worked for them, basically. And so I enjoyed that thread. Partly because I'm a meditator. So I like being like, I really did find it helpful, because I did find that there's a lot of hurdles when you start. And then having a practice over time makes it easier for some people. And for some people, it's no good. Don't get me wrong, like, yeah, it's like yoga. Some people hate it, and that it is an acceptable way to feel about yoga.

Cortex 1:27:19 See, I think I've never gotten into yoga, but I tried a little bit a couple of times. And mostly my issue was like, I was not in good shape for it and didn't want to, like, Be the person conspicuously holding back everyone else from doing their fucking Yoga. But like, there's a physicality to yoga to where I can think of it and think like, Okay, well, at least I know exactly how much I'm trying to succeed. I know, it's getting in the way of succeeding at what I want to do here. I'm not a meditator, because like, I'm right there with with newskin in one of their follow up comments of like, guilt. Meditating for me is sitting down and just my brain fucking going for it. And like, right, I've never, I've never tried like, I've never, I've never made an effort of trying to make anything remotely resembling a practice, but and I should probably try at some point. But I'm also super sympathetic, that thing that like, the idea of meditation is doing a thing that your brain specifically doesn't do if you're me,

Jessamyn 1:28:10 right? Well, I do have other things. I feel like that can help get your head out of other places. You know, you do your art you Yeah, blind downtime that seems to work well for you like art

Cortex 1:28:21 and video games. Like I do a thing. And I find sort of a flow state there. And that seems to work better. But, but also, it'd be nice to I would love it. If meditation did work for me. Basically, I would love it if I could just sort of like actually make myself go, okay, brain time to change gears and have that work. But I've never really tried. So I don't know. Yeah, I'd be interested to read this.

Jessamyn 1:28:41 I had somebody I think I've mentioned this before, like somebody on Facebook. I was going through I don't remember what it was a rough patch. I don't I don't even know it was a long time ago, I don't even remember. And like, you know, my uncle's a Buddhist monk. So like, it's difficult, right? Like, you know, he's like, of course, you should be meditating all the time. Like me, I'm super good at it. Like he's a Buddhist monk. And yet, he's also passive aggressive, like, and so but I had somebody on Facebook, being like, you know, I've been using, in this case, headspace, which I think is a lot of people's like, door opener. And she's like, you know, I can just give you a free month and you can see what you think. And one of the things that I felt was useful about it is this nice British sounding dude kind of guides you through what it even means to meditate. And so you kind of can learn how to do some of the parts and most importantly for me in this journey, God listen to me was understanding that being bad at it is most people's initial reaction, you know, and that all you're trying to do with whatever session you're having doing is practicing to get a little better at it and like there's some things Like with meditation, I don't do I don't do it sitting up because I get into all fidgety with my posture, but I can do it lying down because then I'm just lying down, you know what I mean? And I, there was a meditation thread a long time ago and asked me to filter where there was somebody who talked about like, yeah, sometimes I'll just stop in the middle and have a little something to eat. And, you know, I'd be like, you can do that like, because there's obviously like hardcore jerks about it, who are like, you have to do it this one special way. But I think most people and you know, Buddhists are pretty good at this is being like, you know what, doing it in the way that works is the most important part, like a lot of people do walking meditation. So like, you know, they they listen to maybe a guided meditation when they're out on a walk. Like there's a lot of different modes. Same with therapy, right? Like, some people are good at couch therapy, some people need cognitive behavioral therapy, some people need Tell me about your childhood therapy, like whatever it is. And to me part of meditation, if it works, and again, it doesn't work for everybody, because there are some people who are you know, dealing with depression and like being alone with their thoughts isn't actually a very helpful. Well, no, I mean, it's a real

Cortex 1:31:10 because this is kind of my thing about the idea of meditation even though like I know, I haven't explored it. It's like, oh, I should just be alone with my thoughts. Oh, that's a great fucking. Like, my thoughts are the issue, you know, and I think, which is more from an anxiety than a depression thing for me for the most part, but like still like either way. It's like, yeah, my brain is a fucking Lemond racecar. Right? I should definitely like put it in a box by itself and hang around with it for anxiety, it

Jessamyn 1:31:36 can be helpful, because you can help nudge your brain away from doing that. To me,

Cortex 1:31:42 I like the idea of that. I like the idea of that for sure. But, you know,

Jessamyn 1:31:45 if, especially for people who are dealing with depression, it's often not helpful. And so it's definitely worth that caveat for people who are like, oh, yeah, depression, and it works for me. It'll work for everyone. Is that it? Very definitely. Won't. Yeah, it's

Cortex 1:32:00 more like it worked for me. So hey, it works for me. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:32:03 And there are some inroads into it that work better. And, you know, headspace was good for me. Right now. I do like a guided meditation, which means I just listen to this very nice Irish dude. Different dude. You know, talk about how we're going to do our day, right? In the morning, you know, and that's what gets me out of bed. Like, we're gonna do our day, right? We're gonna be nice to people. We're gonna try and hold it back when we're super pissed off at everything. I'm paraphrasing here, but that's how it sounds to me in my head. Sure. And that helps me like set an intention. And then, you know, and then I just sort of fuck off and don't think about it too much. And but the days that I don't do it, I feel like now I notice, you know, like, Oh, I forgot to tell myself to not be a dick. And then I'm like now, which is weird. Yeah. And yet, works out. Okay. So yeah, yeah. That's like listening to me. Listen to you talk about video games.

Cortex 1:33:01 Which I have, I've have several to talk about. And I'm just not gonna, because like, we've got plenty to talk about. That was, what else do you have from AskMe.

Jessamyn 1:33:10 And I have a couple of things that I liked. But you can you can also talk about them.

Cortex 1:33:16 Well, we mentioned earlier, but now that we're in meta stock section, instead of doing it backwards to do it forwards, the post that Zamboni made about heavy bears run of pride posts. Yes. In June, it's pretty great. So that's a nice roundup of those and a nice sort of like, yeah, this was a, this was a good thing.

Jessamyn 1:33:37 I enjoyed in the pantry to Jessamyn category, summer book bingo, by the corpse in the library, which is essentially encouraging people to read outside of whatever their well worn paths are by having a bingo card and trying to either get a straight line or fill it all out or whatever. But it turned into a really nice thread. And it's and you got all summer. And it turned into a really nice sort of like people making suggestions

Cortex 1:34:06 of, you know, it's gonna say probably a bunch of good book suggestions in there.

Jessamyn 1:34:09 Yeah, like bipoc Food writing. Well, what are some good books about? That? You know, who were who were some good people like black joy? I am not sure who I would read if I like I know, some bipoc food people, right? Or people, but Black joy. I'm not sure who I could. Who I could read. I can I have some ideas, but I don't really know. And it would be nice to hear from somebody who had some suggestions. And so there's a lot of really good suggestion sports writing, like I've read some good sports stuff. But you know, for a lot of other people that might be a direction they didn't have a good idea. So yeah, some really some really good ideas.

Cortex 1:34:49 Yeah, nice. Yes. There was a post from shaitan tance talking about ways to make posts more accessible for nerdish divergence. Oh, that was

Jessamyn 1:35:00 super helpful. I read that I thought it was great because I'm the same, like, not really neurodivergent. But oh my god, don't make me watch a video if I could like read a thing.

Cortex 1:35:10 Well, and that's one of the things too is like, you know, everybody's brain is different. And there's a degree to which people sort of like become aware of that in a actionable or diagnostic way. And then there's the reality that also everybody's brain is a little bit different. So what what shaitan tans was getting at was basically, hey, there are things that may be helpful. And let's discuss things that may be helpful right to make posts more accessible to a broader audience by thinking in part about like, what's going to work well, for neurosurgeon, divergent folks, including things like you know, transcripts, or alternate text links for stuff, that's pure video and timestamps directly to the relevant bit of a video, things like that. And yeah, like you said, it's a good discussion, just something worth reading and thinking about. And taking into account as you think about how you're framing your posts, it's going to depend on the post. But oftentimes, there is like a little bit of extra you can do in the post, or if you didn't think of until after the fact like in a follow up comment to sort of add further resources and further sort of context, to make it possible for more people to enjoy the thing that you want to share with people. I'm going to filter. Yeah. So I thought that was really nice. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:36:14 no, I thought it was super helpful. And I learned some things. And as somebody who really prefers reading over watching, and definitely would watch over just listening, I appreciate it all these things.

Cortex 1:36:31 There was a post another one, that's like a good thing to read in terms of thinking about how you're posting on the site. There had been a thread recently about vaccines. Oh, yeah. In particular, one user had used the word more on a lot, a lot of other people have been quoted that a lot, in retrospect, a lot. And so lemur made a post on meta talk basically saying, Hey, can we avoid this sort of casual use of moron and other words like imbecile an idiot, on the point that these are really basically pretty historically charged ableist terms and they carry that charge forward, even though we're not necessarily super aware of that if you're outside of that specific experience, or community. These are words that like, very much were about classifying and othering and downgrading actual people with cognitive difficulties or

Jessamyn 1:37:20 mental illness based on their perceived level of intelligence. Yeah,

Cortex 1:37:23 yes. Which also has all kinds of other interesting fucked up, shit, he charges right tied to it. So it's a good discussion it, I left a comment in there expressing some of my frustrations with some of the comments that tend to come up in this kind of discussion about like, Okay, but what if? Yeah, so there's some stuff in there, I was like, it was kind of frustrating to see, but not surprisingly, because this comes out of a discussion where someone's like, hey, from the perspective of someone in a minority or oppressed or underprivileged class, this is the thing that bothers me and people from outside that class saying, okay, but my experience doesn't comply. Right, that's not your experience, because you haven't dealt with it. So it's like, we'll always deal with that, at any kind of discussion like this on the site, it's part of people sort of catching up. But these kinds of threads at least help people catch up. And maybe as they go on, people will be more caught up, the next time one comes along. Anyway, it's a good thread is worth reading, it's worth thinking about. And it's worth thinking about how you casually use those words that might not stand out to you as marked, if it's not something that you have a personal tie to? Well,

Jessamyn 1:38:27 and you and I have talked about this, and I left a brief comment in that thread where like, I'm really working on my use of the word crazy, which is a word I use all the time, and I need to stop doing it. And it's hard for me, because, you know, I use it for decades and decades and decades. And I'm trying to get more conscious about my language number one, and I have a close family member with severe mental illness that does not I mean, he personally doesn't care. But like, in a general sense, I feel like when I use words like that, it's specifically saying something about him in a negative way. And that's no good. And I don't want to be that person. And so it's challenging, right? It's challenging to try and figure it out. It's also challenging to think about, like, well, what other words that maybe don't affect, like people directly next to me, but do affect people in my, you know, community of people in the world are doing those exact same things. Right. And I don't know, I don't feel diminished by using different words. You know, I don't care.

Cortex 1:39:35 Like I mean, the human brain is equipped to do amazing things in terms of generation of novel phrasing, and word use. Like we have an ideal machine to cope with avoiding a word,

Jessamyn 1:39:47 right? I mean, I'm not always great at having a problem. I wish I were better at it. I wish I could be more conscious about my language more often. But especially in the library world where you know, we make a lot of, we jump up in down a lot about how the library is for everybody. I mean, this was the hugest, if I can just sidetrack for, you know, 90 seconds, I was at the American Library Association Conference this last like four or five days. And one of the things that we actually had as an action item, meaning something that we all at counsel, all 150 plus of us 180, I don't know how many people a lot 165 voted on was the Library of Congress, as you know, has subject headings which describe what books are about, right. And the subject headings evolve over time. But sometimes they're antiquated, right? It took a long time to move from, for example, Negro to Afro American, to black. And that lagged behind. How real life people in the world were making language changes, you know, and in some cases, the words they used were never the right words, you know, within communities, but maybe were the words that sort of, you know, white supremacy culture used, right. And so in this case, the subject heading is illegal aliens, used to describe basically anybody who's an undocumented citizen, and it's garbage, and it's bullshit. And to be honest, it was never okay. But it was in line with how government documents would use to describe this group of people that they were trying to identify. And and in fact, with governments, the point was, to be shitty about it, you know, the Library of Congress just was unthinking and uncaring about it, which is a different kind of problem. And so during the Trump administration, they thanks to a lot of lobbying, including I don't remember what his username is, but there was that documentary that was made called Change the subject, which was all about soy joy, something like that soy boy, look it up, kept on Yeah. And which made a very strong argument for why this needed to happen. And the Library of Congress agreed in, I think, 2017, or 2018, but because of the incredibly toxic political climate of the last administration, really couldn't do anything. Right. But now we're six months into the Biden administration. And the librarians are like, look, I totally understand why you couldn't do this under the previous administration. But tick tock, you know, you should have done this years ago. Let's move on it. And so there was a resolution to basically tell the Library of Congress do the thing you said you do. But then it became this weird conversation where people who worked at the Library of Congress were like, Hey, this is going through channels, everybody just calm down. Whereas, you know, specifically Librarians of color were like, No, this language harms people. We've been waiting. I don't care if you know, the This hurts the Library of Congress's feelings. How do you think I feel? And so it was a big, contentious discussion. And there were two resolutions, one of which was for the Library of Congress to be more transparent about these things, how these things happen in the first place. And the Library of Congress staffers were like, well, we are transparent, we're just not good at communication, being like, but but but, and then the resolution itself got referred to the Committee on Legislation. And so if it's true that this is in process, and was only going to take another couple months, we should see some movement on it, you know, before autumn, and if they're just blowing smoke up our ass, it'll be a lot easier to come back in January and be like, Look, we fucking had it, had it. And you know, because for every kid that is in a library, wanting to look something up about, you know, undocumented people who live in this country, looking up illegal aliens is gross and shitty and demeaning. And we should we should do better, right? And then the library's like, we're for everyone. And they're like, Well, why do I have to look up my, you know, stories about people like me under this racist heading?

Yeah, so in short, nothing happened. But I was very excited to get to, to get to, you know, yell at other people not yell, but just be like, No, it's past time. And, yeah, you know, I stand with the people who hate this not with the people who are like, Oh, we move through channels. But it's tricky, because there's Librarians of color on both sides, because there's many who work at the Library of Congress. And they're in an awkward position, right. So the whole thing was very interesting. In short, don't use words like moron or illegal aliens and the conscious style guide is always a great way to stay up to date on language usage, which I'm always recommending Yeah, did you find the guy or did you?

Cortex 1:45:03 I did I linked it. It's soybean. And I linked to the projects post, we'll have that in the show notes.

Jessamyn 1:45:08 Oh, fantastic, good and kind of style guide. I left the link in there, too. It's really worth reading every time.

Cortex 1:45:14 Every time I listen to a podcast where there are show notes, they've mentioned the show notes. And like I've told you, so not even mentioning that because like, it's an assumed part of the show. But we do have show notes like the podcast post we make every month. And you're not reading meta talk, go to meta talk. There's a link about the post. And yeah, like, I don't know, maybe that's the thing we should put more emphasis on.

Jessamyn 1:45:37 I mean, we could put a banner up. I say, I say we but I feel like I should also mention that I'm cycling off of regular metaphysical roster.

Cortex 1:45:47 So you have zero because I do put up a sidebar post every month. We should we should get back to like, I want to find a way to make sidebar stuff more sitewide visible for like asked me banner primary readers and so on. So banner,

Jessamyn 1:45:58 yeah, you hate the banner. I know I

Cortex 1:46:01 want to rework the better. Okay, this is this is getting off into the fucking weeds. Anyway, I've got a couple more meta talks I mentioned. And then we will wrap up. There was one other sort of advisory discussion about what the deal is with the Guardian, about LGBTQ stuff, essentially, which is that the UK Guardian has a really shitty stance on that along with on

Jessamyn 1:46:23 on that transition, did you? Did you

Cortex 1:46:27 transition in particular, but no, no. Trans trans issues, LGBTQ stuff? Sorry, sorry. Basically, they are bad about queer stuff, and really bad about trans stuff. And so is mostly UK press. But the Guardian as an international publication that has a US brand,

Jessamyn 1:46:43 otherwise doesn't have a terrible reputation. Yeah,

Cortex 1:46:47 this is one of those things with like, the shitty editorial side versus like the perfectly reasonable news side. So the takeaway from this cc bc, made a post asking about a deletion we made. And then we ended up talking about in that thread and sort of explaining it and a few users expanded on the issue. It was kind of a fraud thread, like it was a lot of stuff a metaphor, it was fine in a bumpy way out of the thing, however you want to sort of characterize that, but people explain stuff pretty well. And what it comes down to is like, it's really hard to trust the Guardian on like, queer issues and trans issues, especially. And so as a source for story on that stuff, in particular, a great choice, right? Find something else to use, like, it doesn't mean that nothing that the Guardian ever publishes is like newsworthy, or reasonable news. But think about context, basically, is where we are with as like, this is not the source to go for, if it's this thing that they are routinely terrible about, on an editorial level, right. And that's something that's not on a lot of people's radar, like, yeah, that's a thing that you may not be aware of, unless you're aware of it. So

Jessamyn 1:47:51 yeah, I was mostly aware of it, because, you know, JK Rowling notorious, terrific, turfy, terrible person. You know, I know about her particular stance, and some of how I know about that as the guardian reporting on it in what isn't a look at this fucking idiot way, which I would expect. Yeah. And, you know, yeah, there's

Cortex 1:48:12 a lot of, there's a lot of shitty sort of accommodation and signal boosting of transphobic and turfy positions in the UK press

Jessamyn 1:48:20 as if it were like, kind of, on the one hand, on the other hand thing, which it very much

Cortex 1:48:24 is, on the one hand, do you deserve humanity on the other hand, Whoa, yeah, it's horrible. So anyway, that's another thing maybe give that a read if you have no idea what we're talking about, because that is a thing. Hey,

Jessamyn 1:48:36 Michael Fogelman is following me on Twitter now. Oh, nice. Hey.

Cortex 1:48:42 The other job Fogelberg.

Jessamyn 1:48:44 I just wanted to talk about the Maeda cocktail hour from the middle of June which I enjoyed very much about that random object that's been on your desk table or shelf or objective for too long.

Cortex 1:49:00 I came up with that and I posted that and I still haven't read that.

Jessamyn 1:49:02 Oh my god, it's so fun. Are you kidding me?

Cortex 1:49:05 I'm it's in my activity. I'm gonna go to it. But I just like heaven, I need to set aside like an hour and a beer. And like dig

Jessamyn 1:49:11 it is it is a delight. Because everybody's got those things. I derailed it a little bit by talking about my drawer of teeth. And for that I am truly sorry. Well, now you've got to read it. Now you've just got to read it.

Cortex 1:49:24 Like, cuz you're like number three on my list of friends who have too many teeth for some reason.

Jessamyn 1:49:29 Speaking of which, your other friend that's on that list. Kamara was the winner of my weird janky first aid kit that I found in the drawer of the library that had like stuff in it that was first aid oriented that had mercury in it. And he backchannel talk to me, and he was like, you shouldn't have it at the library, but I really want it if you send it to me, I will send you a new first aid kit for the library. And we worked out a deal. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Oh, that's what's in my packet. I'm glad we had this time together. Yeah, so he sent me a first aid kit for the library that is new and I sent him the sketchy first aid kit for the library. That is

Cortex 1:50:15 old. Nice. I think so. Alright, I've got one more metal talk to mention because it was this is the thing I did this month I guess. I feel like it you can actually look at the gap in my posting in this thread to sort of figure out where my month got distracting but there was a post made by dirty old town

Jessamyn 1:50:39 dirty you'll

Cortex 1:50:42 know, you know that, you know, I'm sure

Jessamyn 1:50:45 that's where his username comes from comes from Doug probably

Cortex 1:50:50 every time. That's where it comes from. Every time I discover the concept behind somebody's name, I'm so excited. Like we talked about prude I go last month. And I was so realize like, I know what that is because that's a username. So if ya know, I know wicked little town from Hedwig, but

Jessamyn 1:51:08 I don't know that one. Although I saw Hedwig I am including a picture the first aid kit just FYI.

Cortex 1:51:14 You should. You should watch or listen to him pretty good.

Jessamyn 1:51:16 I should Are you kidding? I started to watch things again.

Cortex 1:51:20 It's so good. Like listen to it put on the soundtrack put on the I watched

Jessamyn 1:51:24 the movie when it when it had its Vermont premiere at the Vermont Film Festival.

Cortex 1:51:31 Okay, it was great. It's very good. And the soundtrack is so good. It's just it's a great fucking set of songs. So

Jessamyn 1:51:37 dirty old town did a thing

Cortex 1:51:39 dirty. posted about a random thread on the blue five years ago about like nerd culture mashup T shirts, it was rightfully, it was just some link rightfully. I remember Doctor Who and Star Wars and sticking together and boom. That's a teacher who's

Jessamyn 1:51:53 talking now kind of thing. Yeah. Just made that one.

Cortex 1:51:58 That was seen any Did you participate in this?

Jessamyn 1:52:01 Oh, absolutely don't need shit like this in my recent

Cortex 1:52:06 there's we have a tool that we haven't looked at on the admin page. That's the most regretted reds tool never looked at in a while. But it's basically that's right that the most people have removed from activity.

Jessamyn 1:52:14 And it's Friday and great jokes. Yeah,

Cortex 1:52:19 yes. Like I bet this is like high on the list. If not at the top of the list recently. I'll go look at a sec. But anyway, dirty old town was one of the participants. I was also one of the participants, several other people were one of the participants in that thread five years ago, and we had a very fun stupid month long time posting a couple 1000 comments of just stupid mash up puns. And very deliberately on my part, at least that happened again, with this thread and we spent the last month just making stupid fucking pawns. And I think I posted something like 5000 or 500 comments in this thread which I think breaks my record for the previous thread but I may not have made the most comments in this read. I don't know I did take that like couple weeks off in the middle. So anyway, it's a very stupid thing. And I loved it very much. And I love metal filter. And that's the whole thing I liked. It's also warning I'll try to remember put a warning on link it is 2000 comments long. It takes a while to load.

Jessamyn 1:53:18 Yes.

Cortex 1:53:21 And one last thing we mentioned I mentioned Loki and yeah, people have been enjoying Loki. Loki is fun. It's a nice, it's a TV show about Loki. It's a Marvel Universe show. So it involves more fistfights than it strictly needs to but Tom Hiddleston is great. And the aesthetics of the show are pretty good. And I'm curious to see where it's going. And yeah. So yeah, if you're interested in some TV, there's Loki that exists.

Jessamyn 1:53:46 Awesome. And that

Cortex 1:53:47 I think I think that's the whole of my content.

Jessamyn 1:53:51 I think that's the whole of my content. I mean, it's been quite some time. I think we can get it in under two minutes. If we stopped talking two hours if we stopped talking in the next 40 seconds.

Cortex 1:54:02 We a little preroll too. So we've got a little bit room and

Jessamyn 1:54:05 edit this out when you went and got your glass of water. Exactly.

Cortex 1:54:08 So I think we're going to come in at a solid 150 I think we're gonna keep it nice and tight it one hour and 50 minutes. But that's the podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for talking about this as

Jessamyn 1:54:21 always a pleasure. Mother's.

Unknown Speaker 1:54:25 Day