Podcast 175 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 175: Don't Throw The Banana Peel In The Toilet (2021-08-01).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 I can't find the podcast theme song file Zoo. Yeah.

Jessamyn 0:06 Where are they?

Cortex 0:07 Speaking? Speaking of add type things? Yeah, we should probably Yeah. Just just just before. Just before we started recording, I had gone into the kitchen to throw a banana peel. And it's spilling away. Well, no, no, no. But what happened was I was walking towards the kitchen with with a banana peel in my hand. And this Kleenex is gonna throw me in the kitchen, because going in there to get a glass of water anywhere because we're gonna podcast unless you can, you know, I kind of need to pee. So it's up to you. And so I swerved towards the bathroom, banana keys on hand, and I did not throw the banana peel on the toilet. Don't throw the banana peel on the toilet. And you've you're already ahead of the game for the day. So that was my, that was my close shave accomplishment. So

Jessamyn 0:48 wait, did you just like pee with one hand and then hold the banana? Oh, no, no,

Cortex 0:52 I know, like, I stopped before I got to the toilet. turned around, went back to the kitchen nice with a banana to appeal and toilet, then went back to the bathroom and peed. And so it was all very successful. No one would have known except for me. But this is podcast. And also I tweeted about it because boy, you know, sometimes you just have to

Jessamyn 1:13 always gyms thing. Like he's always like holding too many things in his hand. And then he needs to do another thing. And it's not going well. And I'm always like, put some things down. And he like turns around at me like, like, you know,

Cortex 1:26 this has been a surprisingly hard lesson for me to learn in my life. Like, you know, there are things that are very hard to do at the same time that are very easy to do one at a time. And if I can convince my stupid brain to stop trying to hyper like economize,

Jessamyn 1:42 right, like, right, like, what are you saving that time for?

Cortex 1:44 Yeah. Like, I can set this down, open the door, pick it back up, or I can try and open the door while holding this and then potentially spill a fucking drink everywhere. Like that's what is those three seconds? And hey, I did a couple of really lazy squats too. So it's exercise, right? Yeah. Anyway,

Jessamyn 2:04 lazy squat. Whatever you gotta do.

Cortex 2:07 I gotta start this podcast, because it's episode 175 of the metal filter, monthly podcast and cortex Mullard.

Jessamyn 2:15 And I'm Jessamyn. And

Cortex 2:16 here we are. We've been having a nice, nice pre roll chat about essentials and everything.

Jessamyn 2:25 De preroll chat. Well, I gotta say, I'm very sorry for the women who have had to have these public mental health like discussions and struggles like Simone Biles most recently, but Naomi, Osaka and that kind of thing. Like, obviously, we should not be sacrificing our female athletes of color just so we can have constructive mental health conversations. But since we're having constructive mental health conversations about this kind of stuff, like I am here for it, you know? Yeah, like, Yes, take care of yourself. It's not worth it to do like what that other gal did, and you know, to do your jumps on your broken ankle, and then have to retire at 18. Like, good on everybody for taking the mental health time that they need. Like, a lot of Olympics coverage I've been seeing has really been talking about the emotional toll of this last weird year of Olympics prep, you know, it's not just like, oh, go America, everything's amazing. It's been a lot of people being like, yeah, it's been really difficult. And here's how I dealt with that issue. Which is, I appreciate it.

Cortex 3:37 Yeah. It's, it's, it's a shitty context in which to have that conversation, because part of the reason like it feels weird and revelatory to a lot of people is because that's not a conversation that happens in public a whole lot. But it's still good that it's happening. I feel like I've been exposed to too much like Twitter, pointing out the worst reactions to it. And so I have this sort of like really, kind of shitty online toxic, like vibe about it, which is a shame because I sure there are good, genuinely thoughtful conversations going on about like, oh, yeah, what if we thought about a person as a person first and foremost, and not as someone to whose performance we are entitled? What you know, not that that's not a thing that happens in a fuckload of other content,

Jessamyn 4:24 you may know well, the mainstream news responses that I've been seeing, because one of the things about this house where I'm sitting is, there's a tiny TV that has Apple TV, which has more TV than I have at home. And so, you know, I've been watching some coverage of the Olympics, that we're doomed the Olympics. And the commentators have been surprisingly calm and supportive about these things, which I don't really feel like we would have maybe seen 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. Yeah, like Good for her. She doesn't think she can do that effectively. She's been under a lot of stress. Good people are understanding. We'll get over it. It's fine. Good. Yep. Thank you for all you've done so far. Get some rest.

Cortex 5:08 That is good to hear. Yeah. Yeah,

Jessamyn 5:11 it's been really nice. It's been also fun to watch like, you know, weird random sports like, you know, Volleyball, volleyball where they get to wear clothes, not that other volleyball. I refused to watch that other volleyball on principle.

Cortex 5:25 Are they still doing that with beach volleyball with the require?

Jessamyn 5:27 Yeah. And it was the Norwegian team. I think this year was like, we're not doing it. And people were like, well, you're gonna get in trouble. And it's, you know? Yeah, awful. So we just watched what I call normal volleyball. And yeah, it was fun. It was interesting. The American team did well the Chinese team was also very good and whatever it's a nice way to kill some time while you're snuggled some cats

Cortex 5:53 Yeah, we were watching some some table tennis preliminaries on on replay.

Jessamyn 5:58 Jim really wanted to watch table tennis we didn't. We didn't wind up finding it within like the app that we were trying to figure out how to watch.

Cortex 6:06 We ended up paying for like the month of the premium Peacock, whatever. So good while trying to Roku and it's it's still it's it's kind of a mixed bag. Like, I need to figure out whether that's embargoes on when replays of stuff we missed happen or what, but like they're happening in Japan, I'm not going to be watching most of the Olympics, like during the actual stuff happening if I'm watching it at all right? Yeah, it's,

Jessamyn 6:32 it's a little confusing for me too, because like I had heard the news about Simone Biles, but then I was watching the finals, that she was still in before she left. Yeah. And nobody was commentating on like, after this next jump, she walks off the field, even though I knew that and so it was very confusing. Yeah, we are. We've got an Apple TV with the NBC Sports app and my sister's login, which seems to work most of the time. But like, eventually, probably won't you know what I mean? So yeah, it's like the Netflix login, like your cable TV company, if someone pays for cable TV seems to be shareable. Yeah, maybe a little bit. I only have one thing to say about the number 175. Okay, the article about 175 on Wikipedia, may contain excessive, indiscriminate or irrelevant examples. So you know, anybody else can read it, it's not super interesting. The thing that I kind of liked about it is that in base 10, if you raise the digits, 175 to the powers of one, two, and three, it equals the number. So 175 equals one to the one seven to the two and five to the three, which is kind of neat, I guess, something as puzzle. Other than that, it's the number of a bunch of subway stations and one of the 911 planes and some other stuff.

Cortex 8:04 So it's a new limb, or I don't know how you say Dallas love Williams name, but it's a new love number, but I don't remember what those are either. But I remember that those are things so that's that's exciting.

Jessamyn 8:15 I mean, it's a hyperlink. That's an integer sequence.

Cortex 8:19 Yeah. So you know,

Jessamyn 8:20 standard Coolum sequence starts with you to the one equals one out fucking

Cortex 8:25 Yeah, I'm not going to read it on like, yeah. I'm sorry. I was I thought I was just commenting on it. I forgot that this is a web podcast, where we click on the links

Jessamyn 8:37 also. I'm very, yeah,

Cortex 8:39 yeah. What's what's 175 and Dewey Decimal? I have no idea. Why

Jessamyn 8:45 not? Do this to me.

Cortex 8:47 I mean, you could conceivably, no, I don't actually assume that, you know, or that anyone else has memorized all that because what was doing even up to but like, you know,

Jessamyn 8:56 ethics of recreation and leisure.

Cortex 8:58 Hey, that's kind of interesting,

Jessamyn 9:00 don't you think? Hey, next podcast is going to be the ethics of sex and reproduction.

Cortex 9:06 Okay, so the 170s is like the ethics section idea. Your guess

Jessamyn 9:09 is as good as mine. I'm just good at like duck duck going nice.

Cortex 9:12 It'd be fun if those were the only two ethics, right?

Jessamyn 9:17 You've got you've got to ethics everything needs to need to jump into one of them. Yeah, I just I got out of library school without really knowing Dewey, I think I've mentioned this podcast before like, I took computer classes instead of cataloging classes will biting me in the ass a little bit. Now that I'm working in an actual library, where I have to figure out how to do original cataloging for for Fish and Game magazine. Because no other

Cortex 9:42 books have sex and reproduction. Like

Jessamyn 9:45 normally we do copy cataloging, right you find a library that's got the thing, you copy their record and you change parts of it that refer to your own library, which is fine if any library in the system has that, but for fishing game magazine, apparently which is exactly what you think it is, may not be held by another library in the state. So we have to do original cataloging and I don't know how to do it.

Cortex 10:13 Well, that's that's that is a tricky but interesting.

Jessamyn 10:18 Yeah, totally. And the community has 1200 people in it. So if people show an interest in for Fish and Game magazine, which I just love saying out loud, they can just take it fucking home with them. I don't care, you know, like, like, what are you gonna do steal it? I guess like, I just it's not in the catalog. I'm like, Take it please bring it back when you're through and people do so whatever.

Cortex 10:42 Man, I'm just fucking now I'm looking through the fucking Dewey

Jessamyn 10:46 lienau goes in there. So the F bomb and now you're right there with me. It's

Cortex 10:50 It's so bad. Like, it's like, it's just like, I understand that this was this guy sort of like trying to say, Oh, what are the 1000 topics that could be in books, but like,

Jessamyn 10:58 no, he was a bad guy. And it's reflected in his bad system.

Cortex 11:03 But 0403049 is not assigned are no longer used. That's kind of exciting.

Jessamyn 11:08 I yeah, sometimes those are things.

Cortex 11:12 Like, was it something terrible or something that people were only writing books about? Like, when do we was like in high school around?

Jessamyn 11:20 Normally, there's like little expansion areas, you know, that you can use to put things in them anymore? I don't as much know, and maybe some of the Nephi Birreria breatharians can chime in about like, do we numbers that were removed?

Cortex 11:35 Yeah, yeah. If you're, if you're if you're a librarian, and you listen to this, and you have some knowledge to drop, please.

Jessamyn 11:42 And you're just gnashing your teeth, like listening to Jessamyn be like, Well,

Cortex 11:48 I think that should have been the Dewey binary system, and all of the numbers would be much longer,

Jessamyn 11:54 or the binary system and everything is either zero or one.

Cortex 11:58 You know, the Dewey hexadecimal system would have a lot more compact. Well, everything would be 01. But that's the thing. Like if you have like 1000 categories, and you've got like, a 10 digit binary string instead of a three digit decimal number,

Jessamyn 12:09 you know, I already can't stand shelving children's books, because they're so narrow. And if they're nonfiction, the Dewey numbers are usually wider than the books themselves. So it's very hard to figure out where they go. Also, the library that I've been working in, really needs a good weeding. And as a result, everything's jammed in really tightly and so there's no good answer to how to stick a book in a shelf that's already jam too tightly, except move everything around. But there isn't more space. So yeah, nah, nah, no good answers. Well, speaking

Cortex 12:50 of librarians Metafilter Hey, hey, bring it back to the website. Yeah, it is it is working on towards the end of July here is where we are as we array and there's nothing nothing to speak of on jobs. Anything that came has also gone

Jessamyn 13:09 there. I think I'm gonna put something on jobs if you live in Metro West and have a truck I need some things moved around. Nice. Yeah. And now I was talking to you about this. I don't know if it was pre roll or post roll but basically we have a thing that I thought I was going to be able to put off till later that I can't put off till later which is moving a couple things around Metro West Massachusetts. I may know a guy with a truck but if you're a me fight with a truck Yeah, I will. I will put a job up.

Cortex 13:37 That's why you have a truck so that it can be put to use because otherwise why have a truck unless you just like accidentally killing children I guess what that was, trucks have gotten so big and like to the point where there's like 40 feet in front of like a big new Dodge Ram where you can't see anybody over the hood of your

Jessamyn 13:56 it is really one thing about the Olympics is I am learning a lot more about trucks because there's so many truck advertisements. Like there's basically three advertisements there's one that's about Paralympian you know, where there's this like phone call telling this woman like we've got a baby that you can adopt, but she has a rare genetic disease. So it's going to be a problem and you see this like, tiny girl with like, no legs below the knees, and it's a very like, you know, her life is going to be really hard and you know, it turns out she's an Olympian in the Paralympics and like Way to go, but it's it's cloying, and I don't

Cortex 14:35 inspiration porn sort of vibes.

Jessamyn 14:37 It's got that vibe even though it doesn't say that. Because like whatever Paralympics like it's a fine line between being like this Paralympian is amazing because they're amazing at Olympics,

Cortex 14:47 but that was the commercial What if you're like, Look at this fucking athlete,

Jessamyn 14:51 right? And instead it's not it's all about somebody being like, like, this is going to be bad and then it turns out to not be bad and I find that If not just there's a Slack advertisement that uses the slack Knock knock. You know, like alert noise that that all the time. So if you're in another part of the house and your laptops open and somebody makes it that that noise, you're like, oh, fuck slack. And then you're like, Nope, it's a TV ad. And they have one ad and it's definitely like some like 20 Something woman being smug about how great slack is. And

Cortex 15:25 that isn't super fucking heavy rotation on YouTube right now, too. Yeah.

Jessamyn 15:31 And then truck ads, which is where I was going with that, which is like, they're just very large. And the people who are using them don't seem like they need a truck that big.

Cortex 15:42 There's, I mean, it's a whole fucking thing that I'm sure there's been a Metafilter post or three about this. But basically, yeah, like, there's the reason car manufacturers keep making bigger and bigger vehicles and sell SUVs and make bigger trucks is because people are buying them, you know, so and in strictly capitalist terms, that makes sense. But why people are buying them when they don't particularly need them is much more interesting and depressing if you look at a question, because maybe what it comes down to is, the psychological proprioception of having a big vehicle makes people feel less insecure about completely unrelated things in the world lives. And so as a result, they're buying bad vehicles and those bad vehicles are being made more and so they're buying them and simply put up anyway. So yeah, that was jobs. We are thoroughly in summer doldrums, projects had three posts. This summer, I had one that I should have made, and I didn't got to remember to do that sort of thing. But we do have three projects. And so we will mention them. One of them is D and G who has been responsible for the violent penguin who has come up previously in some other comic stuff. Also wrote up a story about summer and siblings about penguins. Not about penguins, not about penguins.

Jessamyn 17:05 Hey, I love I love summer stories. Yeah, so

Cortex 17:09 there's that. And

Jessamyn 17:11 it's, it's our 50th projects post.

Cortex 17:13 Yeah. Big numbers. Yes.

Jessamyn 17:16 I liked the quarantine happy hour thing, which was basically like a ton of videos livestream stuff on Facebook. And people did concerts, people watch concerts. It was great. But finding stuff on Facebook. Surprise, surprise, is VO worst. And so Hades, made a webpage that basically helps you find stuff. Deep in Facebook. If you're a person that still uses Facebook, you can go watch a whole bunch of quarantine Happy Hour stuff that otherwise would have been unfixable and on manageable, neat little project.

Cortex 17:59 Yeah, that is that is that is nice. Cuz, yeah. Facebook.

Jessamyn 18:05 I know. I mean, here's another Facebook thing, I have been meaning to put this on AskMe Metafilter. And maybe I will. And I don't know if this had happened last month, I used to use lists on Facebook the same way you use lists on Twitter, you know, like, Oh, I'm gonna look at just a tweet thread, or a, you know, Twitter page of all the people from Vermont, you know, and lists makes that easy, right? Great feature for Twitter, though, kind of buried, but it was a was an essential feature on Facebook, right. So I'd have a list of like all my family members from like, one side of the family, or like my favorite family members from the other side of the family, or like people from Vermont. And so, you know, historically before I would like, go do a get together, I would do a quick scan of like what had been happening with my local friends. You know, obviously, there's the friends I talked to a lot, but then there's the friends who I have, you know, a lighter acquaintance with who I haven't seen at all, you know, because of COVID. And so the list would allow me to just look at a Facebook page of just local people. And that was great. And then one day, the link I would click to go to the list just showed me the 150 people like their profile links. And it no longer went to like a Facebook wall of just their posts. And I don't know, like I went searching through the help, which of course unhelpful, and so I'm not sure if Facebook, just turn that off. And that's no longer a thing you get with Facebook. Or if you have to get to it another way. And it's still there. Either way, I miss it very much. So I'm hoping because you know, whatever. I'm a person who uses Facebook, so I would like it to still do some things. And this project was another great way of doing that. Given that Facebook exists. How will you and other people use it and maybe you want to use it? How will you use it?

Cortex 19:55 Yeah. The one other one dimension and I am excited about this and have not made a chance to listen to it yet but a generative album, from Ignat Nacht who is back on the

Jessamyn 20:09 site. Yeah, me too. Jim three.

Cortex 20:12 Yes, yes. Yes. Yet another Jim.

Jessamyn 20:15 We got Jim on there, Jim and Jim three. So yes, yes, this is a,

Cortex 20:18 as he says, an ambient concept album. And you can listen to a recorded version of it. But the neat thing about it is it's actually a generative album, and you can play it live from basically the web app he built for it. And it will be different every time and it's an ambient album. So it's, you know, kind of a, it's going to be a sort of chill space, sort of, to be listening to. But I love the concept, and I'm looking forward to putting it on because this sort of thing tends to be my jam. Well,

Jessamyn 20:51 and on his bug, he sort of explains it, like Yeah, music works, even if you don't pay attention to it, put it on, listen to the first couple minutes, and then go about your day and just let it go. Yeah, just have it in the background. So

Cortex 21:04 that can be that can be a very nice thing. Especially if you have a brain like mine, we're having having some noise that also you don't have to like try and parse is sometimes very good. Like, like, if I if I'm sitting around not listening musically, oh, boy, it's way too quiet. Like if I put on some music, oh, no, but now I have to have reactions to this music or think about this music or I'll be distracted by the music or I'll think about the lyrics or or like the the vibe is wrong. Or, you know,

Jessamyn 21:30 I know I have exactly the same problem. I found a couple like really long streams on YouTube that are now like predictably, okay, for certain times, I want to be listening to music, but not too much music, which has been nice. And if you scroll down on Jim's blog, you'll get BONUS email content, including a picture of who I think is bonus cat.

Cortex 21:53 With a taco. Taco or a taco. Shell.

Jessamyn 21:56 Yeah. waiting waiting for their taco.

Cortex 21:59 Yes. Which is classic. Khan, who fucking wrote Waiting for Godot. I really fucked that joke up. Yeah, waiting for Taco. Brecht. Sure. Breck sounds like the name of a playwright that that would be by.

Jessamyn 22:15 Well, let's see. I will. Dakota go it.

Cortex 22:18 I mean, it's obviously beckon. Okay, I, Becca, I was kind of reaching for Beckett. Like, just because not like, I don't know plays at all, but Well, no, because like I, we, we had, my dad had a couple of books of Beckett plays in our like little, you know, home library bookshelf growing up, including end game, which I thought was going to be something more interesting than it was when I was a kid. It's probably interesting. I haven't I haven't read it in adulthood at all. But I poked through it at some point, but, but also there was like Waiting for Godot in there. So I like I know of Waiting for Godot as a backup play. Even though I can't really tell you much else about it. Other than maybe it's some sort of allegory about, you know, the search for faith and the absence of God.

Jessamyn 23:05 Well, if you click the link that I sent you, you'll get an introduction to it from discovering literature. 20th century by the British Library.

Cortex 23:12 Oh, nice. I will I will not put in the links, and I will read it later.

Jessamyn 23:16 Don't make promises don't make promises. I will I will

Cortex 23:19 read it later at the soonest. But that I will not be reading it now. I'm not going to I'm not going to read it out loud. To you.

Jessamyn 23:29 I mean, that would really be a dramatic left turn for this podcast.

Cortex 23:33 Just like maybe you know, we're gonna be doing fundraising soon. And maybe maybe I'll put out like, dramatic reading goals someone can pay for, you know, pick the text. And and I'll give it my my best go as a bonus. I

Jessamyn 23:50 love it. You know, I always thought that would be you know, a good thing for the podcast. Again, bringing in voices who are not just you and me is having people read whatever, like reading tweets about something like and like having something that's like, built in kinda short. Yeah, but also, you know, gets more voices Hi, it's me, you know, this this name on meta filter. Here's what my voice sounds like. Et cetera.

Cortex 24:17 Yeah, yes. Yeah. Should come back to that. Yeah. But that's projects. That's projects Shall we shall we discuss Metafilter proper?

Jessamyn 24:30 Sure. Let me see I like I told you over email I kind of like because I you know, moved on from having my regular Sunday Monday shift. I wanted to like give myself a break just so I wasn't kind of like acting like a mod without working. And so I haven't this is like one of the times I just haven't spent as much time on the site as as usual. So you may have to be the sort of lead on This and I can

Cortex 25:02 can do because I

Jessamyn 25:03 have a lot of stuff from AskMe edit filter because that's where I hang out even. Yeah, even when not but like metal filter I spent more time on when I was working. And

Cortex 25:12 I think I think we can safely Jack's breath that's

Jessamyn 25:16 fantastic

Cortex 25:43 so one thing that I really liked is pull out

Jessamyn 25:45 the library comments wala ball Yeah.

Cortex 25:49 Just yesterday, there was a post from the success brains out about things called bitfield patterns. And if you if you if you click on the main link, it takes you to a tweet that shows off sort of a canonical example of it. This is this is the thing I really liked. I was delighted by this post, because it's the thing I got really excited about three months ago when this tweet thread that it's about originally came up. A bitfield pattern is just literally saying imagine a black and white bitmap, like it's literally white black pixels and a rectangle, right. And the pattern is just like literally the pattern of where there are white pixels. So you could draw anything you want a very simple bitfield pattern would be a checkerboard where like, you know, the first pixel on the top row is white. The next is black, white, black, the next row down the first pixels black, the next one's white, and you just do that and you get a very tiny, dense checkerboard pattern. But what if you use a little bit of a mathematical formula to make which pixels are white and black, more complicated than a checkerboard. And there's basically infinitely many ways you could in theory do that. But some of the ways you can do that are very, very simple to articulate in mathematical notation, and produce really interesting looking patterns. And so a guy named Martin Clippy made a post talking about some stuff that he had come across somewhere or had sort of stumble on himself. So basically, if you take the x and y coordinates on a grid, and you do a little bit of math to those like binary arithmetic, in this case, using the XOR function, and whatever number you get out of that, when you like, basically, sift those two binary strings together, if you've got a new binary number, that's just a number. And you take that number in you say is this number divisible by nine cleanly and you get a white digit, and if it isn't, you get a black digit. And you just do that for the whole grid. And you get this amazing fucking looking sort of circuit board cityscape kind of thing that just emerges naturally from this weird little bit of math. And he goes on to post a bunch of other examples in that vein, and then other veins, but like, the whole thing is like you, you describe this entire process as x caret y percentage sign nine, there's just very short mathematical and programming shorthand for the name of that x. Yeah, do an exclusive OR, versus the number y and then divide that by nine and see if there's a remainder. And like, it's so succinct and, and it produces a whole bunch of really cool, different, different patterns. So yeah, I was excited about this in April, I did some programming, and I made some plots with it. Because I just got my plotter at the time, too. So it's just like, it's on metaphor, like, Oh, yay. And so I jumped in with a couple explanatory comments early on in the thread. But there's a bunch of good chatter in there. And people talking about different ways you can do it jeddak has put together a tool, so you can actually just like fiddle with it. In real time online, there's a couple other tools like that linked elsewhere. It's just neat math. It's neat math, and it's pretty math. And this is the thing, this is the this is a thread for two different sorts of people. This is a thread for people who are excited about weird little concise, like bitwise operations and mathematical logic. It's also a thread for people who like looking at pretty patterns, you do not have to know or give a shit or be able to parse any of the math. There's just a bunch of cool pictures attached to this too. So like, either one of those works. And I think we have like an over representative of the math nerds in the actual comments in the thread because that's kind of what there's a talk about but, but it's also just really cool to look at. Like it has, I think maybe more favorites, definitely more favorites than commenters because there are people are like, Hey, this is cool,

Jessamyn 29:34 right? But I don't really know about the math or whatever. I just like to look at it and thank you.

Cortex 29:38 So yes, you too may find this cool. I liked it a lot.

Jessamyn 29:42 Well, I had a now that I'm sort of digging around. I had a couple posts that are just kind of newsy on meta filter where like I like to get my news, not like breaking news, maybe but like kind of, you know, bigger, bigger news, stuff like that. Well, let me just I enjoy an example. Yes, there was a vote that on the right to repair. And the Federal Trade Commission basically said, Yeah, you should have a right to get under the hood of your car, or your thing that has little brain in it. And even if that brain has proprietary stuff inside it, you should be able to fix that thing without having to go through, you know, the original manufacturer, who can then sort of charge you an arm and a leg things, things need to be fixable by, you know, mortals, and I think this came out, originally, you know, with those little plugin things that you can put in your car and get the code so that you know, what little thing is broken if you're somebody who's handy with automobiles, but there are other other things, you know, computers sort of especially. And I think it's really been getting forced by, you know, the idea of self driving cars, I don't know if you saw like, the most recent like, Oh, my God, but like, the moon was so great in the sky. The other day, that's some of the time it was a yellow light, thought it was a yellow light and just kept driving slower and slower and slower pointed towards the moon. And so and it's tricky, right? Like, like me and Vermont sort of talks about this like, like, there are certain things that maybe it makes sense to have proprietary fixes for because they have standards, and they need to be inspected, and blah, blah, you know, elevators, like, maybe you have the right to fix your elevator, but it probably still needs to be checked out to, you know, be Yeah, sort of legit and legal. But it's a really nice thread from people who often know what they are talking about, to, you know, talk about why it's important that we have the ability to do it. It's one of those things like EFF has been really behind it. And that's good, good news in that direction. And I'm happy about that. Oh, sorry.

Cortex 32:08 I was just I was I was happy to hear about it. I heard the news sort of in passing, but I haven't seen that thread yet. And yeah, it sounds like an interesting read.

Jessamyn 32:16 Well, and I think I don't remember, Schneier, somebody like somebody, oh, freedom to tinker was the blog that I always used to read. Let me see if it's actually still there. It was the blog that I used to read about this general topic, here we go. That like can tell you kind of what some of the crucial issues are, that are kind of telling you, you know, what the what the flood, you know, fear, uncertainty and doubt about this topic that's going around, you know, a lot of ballot stuff. If we can't figure out what's going on inside a voting machine, how can we trust the results of our elections. So it's a really interesting topic, generally speaking, and this was a move in what I consider to be the right direction. And speaking of moves in the right direction. The other big newsy news that like I kind of read on Twitter, but I really wanted to read more about on meta filter was Nicole Hannah Jones, and Tanisha Coates joining Howard, and they're creating a center for journalism and democracy. And, you know, Hannah Jones was the person who got denied tenure by a very racist University of North Carolina, in this just shocking, even, even by North Carolina standards, piece of news. She's the person one of the people behind the 1619 project. And it's just amazing. And so then being in UNC, where, like them being at Howard, where they will not only get the support that they deserve, but also I think, being in a more collegial atmosphere of people that appreciate the hell out of what they do, which I think many people do, is just sort of good news for the world. And I'm happy about it. So this was posed by Nelson. Thank you. Awesome. Yeah. And, you know, one of the larger issues is, you know, the critical race theory attack. The only reason I mentioned it is because one of the ladies who runs like a very small library in Vermont, that's kind of outside of Brattleboro notice that there was this big poster for you know, critical race theory being taught in our schools a debate kind of thing. And, and the person who was sending it around was a local I don't even know a polite way of saying this like she's a local nut from my town. You know, like she's the anti marijuana campaigner but not on any like real reason you might be against marijuana but on a bunch of made up shit that isn't true kind thing. And, you know, she comes to drop in time I know her. But for whatever reason now she's all, like loaded for bear on critical race theory. And so I've had to have, you know, slightly weird conversations with my colleagues about what Critical Race Theory is why it's not being taught in schools. Why if you're, you know, in favor of, you know, diversity inclusion initiatives you should understand about this, but also understand the talking points to dealing with these people. And I just, I thought we'd have more time, you know, like, like, I thought we'd have more time before people started trying to like pack the library boards in Vermont. And to be fair, I don't think this is going anywhere in Vermont. Like, I think it's a bunch of uninformed people who are going to be pretty obviously, debunked is uninformed. But it's aggravating to have to pay attention to this. While there's other things that could use our attention. You know what I mean? Yeah. And

Cortex 35:57 in the meantime, it just sort of saturates into sort of the background radiation of weird reflective culture war bullshit. So even if it doesn't go anywhere, it also it's not going to go anywhere. Like, if nothing big comes of this weird big pantomime freakout about CRT, you're still gonna hear about CRT from people, 10 years from now in this game of telephone sort of bullshit about oh, well, you know, when I hear, right, right, well, and it's exhausting.

Jessamyn 36:25 As you wind up with a whole bunch of people who are just not very well educated, who take their talking points from places they probably shouldn't take their talking points from. And around here, especially, they're your neighbors. So you have to kind of find ways to like, have a conversation without being like, Only an idiot would think that or, you know, whatever, like, appropriate way to talk about somebody who has a lack of education or cognitive understanding of this, while at the same time trying to be empathetic, that, like, if you have a lack of cognitive understanding about it. That's a difficult place to be right. And so, you know, as librarians, we're talking about how to combat misinformation. But in a way that kind of leaves the door open for saving face or whatever else. Meanwhile, the sort of like, people who are being all, you know, angry about CRT are not doing the same for, you know, people who don't agree with them. And

Cortex 37:23 yeah, that's difficult. That asymmetry is just hugely frustrating. Like, you know, it's it's one thing to feel like, well, yeah, but you should do the work and you should reach out and it's another thing to say yeah, but is you're not meeting in the middle, you are holding up the entire

Jessamyn 37:42 Right you are, you are my way or the highway. Meanwhile, there's lots of people, especially young activists, who are making incredible strides in helping people understand racial inequality and a whole bunch of other things. And this is fiddly bullshit for them, but they have to kind of address it because it's just part of the water that other people are living in. So yep, yep. Yep.

Cortex 38:07 Well, have you ever heard of a whammy? clavinet?

Jessamyn 38:10 What is Well, are you setting me up for some bad joke? Josh? No,

Cortex 38:13 this is this is just an ex post. It's clavinet as an instrument, it's a it's a keyboard instrument. I don't remember how they work. I want to say it's some sort of like,

Jessamyn 38:23 is basically clarinet except with a different letter. Does it have anything to do with clarinet?

Cortex 38:28 No, I think it has to do with, like clavate chords and QLab years. It's a keyboard instrument. I don't remember what the deal is with him. But I believe it is an analog electronic.

Jessamyn 38:39 Jim was talking about this because it's played in some Stevie Wonder song.

Cortex 38:44 So yeah, it was probably it was probably played in a lot of stuff in I presume the 70s, I think would have been sort of like the heyday like the pre digital synthesizer, electronic, you know, analog, synthesizers, and other variously clever electronic keyboard instruments. So this is of that ilk. I don't really I can't tell you anything else about a clarinet off the top my head. But most of them did not find

Jessamyn 39:13 Stevie Wonder sound the Chronicle has told me now.

Cortex 39:18 All right. I mean, I think I think this year, but I know sound was sick is a really good musician, but

Jessamyn 39:24 the Chronicle is. Yeah, but but like, I thought, Jim and I were talking about this because I was like, Oh my God, that funky bass in that thing. And Tim's like that's not a bass. And I'm like, what? Because he knows the answer to musical things, right? Like, I don't know if I think a thing. And he says, I'm wrong. It is true. What he says, but he's like, oh, yeah, no, clavinet why Yeah. So go on

Cortex 39:49 to say clever that you take. You take this musical instrument that's, you know, it's a keyboard instrument. And then you attach a whammy bar to it, which show whammy bar for anybody who doesn't know what a whammy bar Er is is a thing usually attached to a guitar down at the, at the bottom of the guitar at the bridge, I think that's the bridge, I play guitar. But you know the strings down at the bottom near near the right hand and you know, you attach a bar to that and you make that bridge itself like sort of spring loaded and then you can take the whammy bar and wiggle it back and forth to raise or lower the tension on the strings and thus raise or lower the sound of the strings. And a common thing to do with the whammy bar in that sense is to like be playing a note. You're fretting a note with the left hand and then use the whammy bar to throw on some heavy Verado or Yeah, some big up and downs. Jimi Hendrix really, really really used the hell out of the whammy bar on his guitars. It's a big part of his sound and part of how he gets a lot more complicated and swooping sounds in his solos. Versus like just fretwork which tends to sound more like arpeggiation and

Jessamyn 40:55 yeah

Cortex 41:00 your metal roofing so the wire

Jessamyn 41:03 Steen. Thank you. I know one thing

Cortex 41:10 Eddie Van Halen, although he used whammy bar for stuff too, but like you know, anyway. So basically, you attach a whammy bar to a clavinet. And all of a sudden you have the ability to play wammy on this, this keyboard instrument and like add heavy vibrato and sweeps and whatnot. And that's what this is. This is a post by Harold 74 that has a cover of Jimi Hendrix voodoo child by Lockley. doli, who I'd never heard of, but I guess he's a musician who has a whammy cabinet. And then also has more info about that. And doli like talking about the instrument, but it's fucking great. Like, it's just like, it's a great cover, like, and it really it sounds like this guy is playing a Jimi Hendrix song. But somehow he's doing it on a clavinet instead of a guitar. I mean, it helps a lot that you then feed it through guitar effects pedals to really get that distorted sound and he's got a wah wah pedal and everything, but it's great. It's, it's a very, very good cover. And it's such a weird way to produce it. And it's a neat instrument. And I liked I liked watching it. I liked listening to it. I liked the post. I liked the discussion. wammy clarinets, man,

Jessamyn 42:18 neat. And now I've learned to think so I kind of enjoyed Oh, I'm supposed to mention to you from Jim. That the Exquisite Corpse that is two steps from done. Is that something you're a part of?

Cortex 42:40 It's, it's I have been part of exquisite corpses in the past, there could conceivably be one that was going around. That is still two steps from being done.

Jessamyn 42:48 But it's not. It's not on your

Cortex 42:51 I literally cannot remember the last time I was participating in one. Like, like, I don't think it was 2021. Yeah, who knows?

Jessamyn 43:00 I don't know, Jim, I could be wrong to send me a cryptic text. I don't know. So speaking of like, interesting discussions, but somewhat complicated ones, this was a pretty interesting post by grandi sore about a guy, Jason, who just decided money was bad and hasn't bought anything with money in 18 years. And you know, it's kind of a combination of like, thoughts slash life experiment, and probably some kind of slightly obsessive tendency to, you know, being a refuse Nick about this to prove a point. And the thread is lively.

Cortex 43:46 Yeah, this is this is a thread I will say I know of this thread. I have not read any of it. Because the many flags and a couple of mods notes that happen. None of them happened during times I was on the clock. So I know it's out there. Right. And I know it's got a couple 100 comments and has had some business but

Jessamyn 44:03 super bad, but there was definitely like, kind of a back and forth about like, Well, I think this guy is like being a burden on other people and other people being like, Yeah, but isn't everybody kind of interdependent in some way this guy's just interdependent in a money way, which I think like sets off certain people and not other people or people enjoy the idea of the experiment, or other people or like he's a parent you don't get you know, live a life experiment if you have kids. And then some people being like, Why are you mad? You know, why are you putting down on this guy?

Cortex 44:39 I can see a lot of potential angles from which people would come in having a reaction to to the post. So yeah, that that does not surprise me that it's

Jessamyn 44:50 well and and I do think it's interesting in the conversation, honestly, for the most part. Hey, eyebrows McGee is in there with a wall of philosophical chatting. which is nice. But basically kind of talks about, you know, the philosophy of parenting, which is great. She is She is great when talking about parenting, I think I mean, among many other things she is great at talking about and then, you know, it turns into a pretty lively but not yell at each other conversation in a way that I don't think you would get from like social media. But you can get still from people in the future having sort of talking to one another. So it was Yeah, I was I was interested to read about metal filters take on this guy, where I think if I was reading a non metal filter take it would have devolved much more quickly to people yelling at each other.

Cortex 45:42 Yeah, you don't you don't get the rapid context collapse. I mean, that's, that's a funny thing. It's it's tricky. I've been thinking about what kind of meta filter threads I very freely recommend, and which ones I recommend with like a little bit of like, disclaimer, and the disclaimer is usually, you know, oh, by the way, it gets a little bit bumpy, because people are having a conversation that's multifaceted, and, you know, occasionally stumble. And like, That's not that bad of a description. It's not like it's like, yeah, I mean, it. There's a ministry discussion, but also look out for all of the, you know, the racial slurs and the Trumpism as like, oh, no, actually, yeah, I, I worry too much. I think about threads being perfect, rather than threads just being like, better than you would expect, you know, better than you expect is a good quality. So

Jessamyn 46:28 well. And I think you and I share that feeling right that like sometimes the thread will diverge from being maybe constructive or useful, but because the site has moderators, it can be re railed and then turn into a discussion that, you know, not only I don't know, if the word is has better potential, but is more useful for all of the people in it, you know, it isn't held hostage by one person's, you know, kind of aggressive beliefs or it doesn't turn into one like minutia nitpicking, most of the time. Not always. But most of the time. I mean, it's one of my favorite things about just Metafilter, generally, is the ability for things to be rerouted sometimes by the moderators, and sometimes just by the community itself, being like, let's, let's get a little more, you know,

Cortex 47:15 yeah, I mean, honestly, that happens a lot. And it's something I really appreciate about, you know, many filters. Membership is like, a lot of people are willing to sort of see the thing that could easily be the tipping point for a big stupid derail and say, you know,

Jessamyn 47:31 let's not let's move on.

Cortex 47:32 Yeah, let's let's, yeah,

Jessamyn 47:34 or just, hey, I appreciate that. Those are your feelings, but I think you've made them clear. And we're not going to keep wrestling with you on this particular topic. And that can be nice. Which I think, you know, bears mentioned the one post, I thought you made this point post, but I guess you didn't. I guess it was Melis Mata,

Cortex 47:55 I was I was holding off like, I will, I will make the birthday post. If no one else gets around to it. And it's getting late in the day. But I

Jessamyn 48:02 always think the birthday is on the 18th for some reason that I cannot immediately conjure but a right. I backed into that story, but Metafilter turned 22 and Melis Mata made the birthday post. And we saw, you know, it's kinda like, it's kind of like homecoming, in a way because a lot of people who have not been on the site at all, you know, not only in the last year, but maybe in the last several years, like they'll show up and make a comment, you know, and it's nice to see. It's nice to see you know, it's nice to see the people who aren't aren't around a lot, but will show back up and be like, hey, oh, I commented with my baby Jessamyn account, which I don't think I saw then maybe a decade.

Cortex 48:49 I actually had to stop and wait, was this justments? Or was this someone who was like being shitty? No, no, Jasmine? Yeah,

Jessamyn 48:55 yeah, I don't I don't think I met the last comment I made with that account was in 2015. And it was identical. The last comment I made that had any words at all in it was a decade ago. So yeah, that was adorable. And I don't remember who drew that picture. I think it was either Greg Nagar. John, love it. What was Jon Lovitz Nan John Levitt name at count? Oh, God, the welke thank you the work yeah, so it was just fun. See people do very little amount of grass in this. Yeah, Christian is in there. I haven't seen for a long time. I mean, a lot of these people I see other places. You know, I see them on Twitter. I see them you know, in random other blogs. I see them at newsletters. Dhruva Sudama was just cool. The cool people and

Cortex 49:47 that's the thing. I mean, like that's why they end up showing up is like, you know, like whether or not you're spending the time on metal filter, there is this larger ecosystem of sort of, you know, extremely Social Network. Yeah, people who are online and they still see each other until like, the birthday post comes around and someone will share it somewhere and somebody Oh, yeah, it's not that they're setting their calendar for the 14th. Which I guess you could do if you if you really just Well, I

Jessamyn 50:12 don't know about you, but you probably set your calendar but like I saw it on Twitter, right? I don't even know if it was you on Twitter or somebody else. I was like, Oh, yeah. Hey, you know,

Cortex 50:22 I haven't very memorized because we ended up using it. Well, I mean, partly because I on the site, but partly because we ended up using it as the baseline birthday for our cats too, because we didn't know exactly when they were born. And you sort of have to pick a birthday for the vet for them to record it. And, and it was about right, because we got them as kittens in Ireland No, February of one year. And so it's like, and they were like, maybe six, seven months old. Okay, well, that could have been born on 2014. So, okay, it's the cat's birthdays too.

Jessamyn 50:51 Can I just say to that? One of my like, I do this meditation in the morning. And one of the things they say is like, you know, thank someone for someone that they something they forgotten that they maybe did for you that picture of Bodie in pajamas that you drew that Grace's my refrigerator makes me happy. Every day, Josh, every day, so I'm so very glad. So thanks for that. I think I removed the middle finger that you sent me in an envelope one year. Ah, yeah, but maybe I didn't maybe that's there too. But at any rate, Bodiam pajamas. Love it. Love it.

Unknown Speaker 51:26 That was it. That was that was a nice don't get me wrong, like the other cat

Jessamyn 51:29 too. But don't you have a painting of the other cat on my on my fridge?

Cortex 51:34 Yes. I liked this post that I have to scroll down because it's so long to find out who put John P 72. made about TikTok riffing on apple bottom jeans.

Jessamyn 51:50 Wow, I must have seen this like psychically in like in passing and not seen it specifically. Because like back before TikTok existed. And people were just doing this stuff on YouTube. I remember somebody had taught their parrot how to sing it. And just watching a parrot say boots with the fur over and over and over again. Like one night I fell asleep with that and at the you know, in my mind, and I don't think about this song that often though I do enjoy it. So yeah, tell me more.

Cortex 52:24 Well, that song low by flow writer. People started doing covers of it, taking the lyrics and basically putting them in other musical contexts and posting snippets of these on I saw it on Tik Tok, and maybe it's TikTok centric, maybe it's been YouTube centric. Maybe it's been both who knows. But anyway, that's the whole thing. People just started taking the lyrics to Apple bottoms, or the lyrics below and putting it into the style of various other songs. And that's the whole pitch. Either you will find that amusing or you will not

Jessamyn 52:57 align to the Motorhead version. Oh my god.

Cortex 53:04 So yeah, John, John.

Jessamyn 53:07 Over, I have to click every link. Thanks, everybody.

Cortex 53:10 Yeah, it's fantastic. It's just an excellent internet goofing phenomenon. And I really, really fucking loved it. And I really appreciate John P. 72. putting together this post. Rounding a whole bunch of them, but definitely not nearly all of them up. So yeah, if you want some good TikTok baby. chuckles This is your post,

Jessamyn 53:34 baby. chuckles And I always do. Oh, Jim has clarified. You haven't participated in exquisite corpse but if you want to, oh, it is it is there and fun. And I think you know, just like, hey,

Cortex 53:49 ya know, I, I would probably very much enjoy that Jim should email me instead of making you

Jessamyn 53:55 Oh, my God, it is such a thing. Like, I love this man, as much as one can possibly love another human being who is a human but like, the extent to which I fall into this social coordinator thing, which I know can be like a very sis at gendered thing. So I'm always like, yeah, why don't you drop them a note? Well, you're talking to him right now. You know, why don't you guys like arrange to see each other? Well, but you talk to both of us more than and I simultaneously like it's easy for me. But I'm also I, you know, if it's not easy for me, because my days been really busy or something. I resent it. And I will tell him to email you and that would be great. Yeah. Because apparently it was fun.

Cortex 54:38 Yeah, I know that also how on earth you're going to convey all the detail. Yeah. So yeah,

Jessamyn 54:42 anyway, well, and part of it is I think the reason it's on JIM'S MIND is because he is overdue for sending his exquisite corpse. 30 seconds or whatever it is back to Anbu or whoever else he is doing it with Anbu ASAP, ASAP and Anbu That's a that's a good crimefighting team right there. So I think that's him maybe slowly motivating to do the thing. Um, another metal filter thing I see I you know, once once I realized I had nothing, I decided to have everything. So

Cortex 55:15 I'm genuinely gonna have nothing for AskMe Metafilter Oh, well,

Jessamyn 55:17 good. I'm just gonna talk and talk and talk. Unlike the first half of this podcast where I was upstairs assignment, wallflower, fuck, and wallflower. I haven't yet responded to why to Carl saying that if we, we could fund the site entirely with swear jar. Yeah, this last podcast was very scary.

Cortex 55:36 Yeah, but who's gonna pay like, Well, exactly right? Out of Pocket on that like, like, if everybody else will put $1 in the jar every time I curse on the podcast? Yes, we are set. Yeah, I can go for it.

Jessamyn 55:46 And it'd be a fuck tacular podcast. But yes, otherwise, I mean, I made up my mind monthly contribution. But that may be it. Yeah. So this post

Cortex 55:57 by currently, if anyone would like to just make me independently wealthy, I would you know, what to do if I

Jessamyn 56:03 drop dead Josh? You know, some of some of my, some of my filthy lucre will probably wind up with Metafilter. But you should really hope that I stay alive.

Cortex 56:14 Yeah, no, I want I want you to be in triple digits and the site to be an absolute dinosaur that is still hanging around before we get there.

Jessamyn 56:23 Yes, that is that is my feeling. But I do kind of think about that, right? Like, I want to give the library some money just so they can feel bad about paying me $13 an hour to teach technology to people who are very bad at technology. And maybe they can name a chair after me or something. It's funny, I don't you know, I have no kids. So like my legacy, I don't think about it that much. But every now and again, I'm like, you know, some little plaque with my name on it just somewhere, just somewhere. would be, you know, would be nice. I think I should I should a good ask Metafilter question. When I'm when I'm back around spending more time on the site. I should ask about that. Because me and my sister think about that a lot. Right. And you know, we we did some things for both of my parents, but like, Where are the kids? So that's what you do, right? I don't I don't know otherwise.

Pat, at any rate, this post, sorry, turn the corner. Jim. Jim's like not allowed to do that. Right. Like, we're just sort of hanging around. And then all of a sudden, he'll be like, Yeah, so the wildfires are getting really bad in Montana. And I'm like, what? Why are you? We were just having a nice time. And like not that you shouldn't talk about those things. But I'm like, do you want to have a conversation about it? Where can we go from that? Because I don't know. Did you guys have like the really weird, hazy, smoky? I'm not talking about this post. I don't know what's wrong last year? No, no, no, like two days ago.

Cortex 58:08 We have not had super weird, hazy in Portland like it's been in the vicinity.

Jessamyn 58:12 We woke up the other day in Vermont. And it was smoky and hazy out because of wildfires in Canada and the general way the air has been streaming from the West Coast. And the wildfires and it was, you know, I'm not gonna lie like it was disturbing. Especially because that's what everybody then talks about. And then you're just kind of stuck in that thing.

Cortex 58:35 Yeah, you're all sort of living in a weird, accidental Silent Hill cars play together.

Jessamyn 58:39 Right where you talk about, I don't know anything about Silent Hill.

Cortex 58:43 It's, it's very foggy. Okay. Don't,

Jessamyn 58:45 don't don't like everybody's like, I'm really bummed out about climate change. And don't get me wrong. I am too. But trying to figure out how to have like, a social conversation about that, like, you know, with some people, I'll be like, Yeah, let's talk about it. What are we doing? How can we help blah, blah, blah, but with just kind of acquaintances? I don't know where to go with that. Yeah. Turning anyway,

Cortex 59:05 so So the Appalachians are in comprehensively hold on like

Jessamyn 59:09 that. I saw this on Twitter, which was basically like a tweet thread that everyone's like, you must read this. And I react negatively to anybody telling me what the fuck I need to do with my life. But if it's people I really trust I will read a tweet thread. I got through most of this one before I was like, I hope Metafilter is talking about this because this thread is too long. And I read Twitter on my phone. So like, you move your finger somewhere and suddenly you're reading something else. But basically, the Appalachians are super old. And there's not fossils there. Because of how like the continents used to be. And so there's basically you know, fossils of like the little old mushy fish and former a Uh, I don't know, smushy things before things had bones, basically. So it's a really interesting Twitter thread. But then, you know, we have sort of some of meta filters, resident experts talking about, you know, what they know about sort of fossils and stuff. You know, the rocks are so old that they will meet they were made before the animals in question existed kind of orcas is talking about and and people just talk about how pretty Skyline drivers and the Blue Ridge and et cetera. And I didn't really know this right, like I didn't know, one mountain range was older than another mountain range or why you find fossils in some place and others and it was nice to have a smart person on Twitter to kind of explain it in a way that makes it easy, basically, yeah,

Cortex 1:00:48 yeah. Yeah, that is I have not I've not seen this read, but I knew of it. And I've been meaning to look into it. Because like, I've my, I've gotten a lot of ambience, sort of geology because Angela is a geologist.

Jessamyn 1:01:05 Right. I'd be really interested in Angeles take on this telling of that story.

Cortex 1:01:13 Yeah, no, I'll try and point it out to her. I don't know if she saw it independently. But we hadn't talked about it. So. But but but yeah, like I have, like, to the extent that I have a bit of a grounding in like second hand geology, it's very Pacific Northwest oriented for the most part, because that's the stuff we can go see. And so I'm more familiar with the processes specifically, that led to sort of the state of the northwestern United States over over the very long timescale. And yeah, the relative youth of our mountains. You know, we have like vault volcanoes. dormant and, and otherwise. But those those you know, that's the thing about pointing mountains, which are the mounts I sort of grew up being aware of as like the Cascades and the Rockies, is like, you know, they're pointy, because they haven't had time to not become pointy because they're relatively fresh. You know, if you make a volcanic volcano of a cinder cone, and you have stuff coming up up top, yeah, it's gonna be pointy. If if you give that like you're very, you know, hundreds of millions of years to get resettled, it's probably going to lose a little bit of that sharpness. But yeah, anyway, yeah, I would be curious to read this. And yeah, I should point it out to Angela. Because geology is neat. It turns out if you all you need to do is be married to a geologist. And you'll find out that geology is neat, even though you never cared about

Jessamyn 1:02:32 it before. Right.

Cortex 1:02:36 I have one other post from the blue I want to mention. And then maybe we'll move on the asked metaphor. That sounds great. Really liked this post from Jay Harris about the world's first 1541 disk drive graphics demo. Now if you want

Jessamyn 1:02:52 to be more and send me a link, I pleased

Cortex 1:02:55 to Oh, no, I mean, show note, dammit. There's a

Jessamyn 1:03:00 guy that backed up.

Cortex 1:03:01 Can you see the show note? Notes. I'm going to I'm going to Can I paste an image into this? No, I can't. I will text you that Fuck it. I'm not going to bother. I don't. There's an there's an extra Show Notes field that I could use, I guess as the coast to make notes about the show.

Jessamyn 1:03:21 Oh, so being like, cut this part. Yeah,

Cortex 1:03:24 I think that if I if I want to do lightning live, I just want to complain about you endlessly throughout the year. I learned never use it because it is it has no utility for us. Like we don't pace these notes raw. I filter them when I make the post. So that's it, but it's there. And it's on top of it. And yeah, so I've probably done that before in the past. And we've had confusion about it, too. But anyway,

Jessamyn 1:03:44 I mean, post doing how many podcasts and I just found out about the show notes.

Cortex 1:03:49 Yeah, yeah, like it just doesn't add up. Anyway. The 1541 Disk Drive is the disk drive that was for the Commodore 64 computer. And it's, you know, it's a floppy disk drive. Yeah, Jim had one and use that for blah, blah, blah. Like it does absolutely nothing except for read a disk unless you're a maniac, in which case it does a lot more. So the demo scene for anybody's like demo of what demo scene is people finding ways basically make computers typically older underpowered computers do cool things through clever aggressive programming. Sure, there's a whole history of posts about it on the on the site and a lot of stuff out there. But basically this guy, Matthias cram created a demo that just runs on the disk die of disk drive of a Commodore 64. Like one of the first things he does is disconnects the computer from the monitor, which is pretty much not how you would show, you know, stuff on a monitor during a demo because the computer is I think, doing anything but he managed to make the disk drive do all the work and put it little little program into it. And then the disk drive produces graphics. And it produces music because the mechanics of the disk drive like there's no speaker types, either. It's just like, using Drive noises Smith's to create, you know, music. Oh my god, it's, it's very cool. It's like it's cooler if you'd have a little bit of context for why it's cool, because otherwise it's like, well, these graphics are amazing. And this music isn't amazing, but like, no, it's fucking, it's fucking great. It's a great trick. This is

Jessamyn 1:05:29 a wait, wait, where does it graphics? The graphics show up? On the monitor that's attached to the disk drive? Am I understanding that correctly? Okay. Yeah, it's attached to something. It's not.

Cortex 1:05:40 Yeah, I think he splices together some connection between the monitor cable and the output of the drive. Like the cable there. Well,

Jessamyn 1:05:48 and these threads are so interesting, right? Because if you read people's comments, like you read like rum soaked space hobo, and he's like, you know, the drive is really a 1541 to, you know, late 80s 1541. Because Baba, Baba, blah, blah, blah. And but I mean, that's cool, right? Like, he's not well, actually, they are not No, it's

Cortex 1:06:08 just like, there's, there's, there's lots of interesting details like this stuff is always a bit over my head, because I was not like, I was not, I've never been a demo scene person. I've never been like a hardware person. The amount of knowledge involved in making this stuff work is always very impressive me and I know enough about some of the sort of micro architecture of computers and like instruction sets and things like the busses that are, you know, where data runs back and forth between different components that can kind of understand the ideas going on with them. But I'm always absolutely floored by the depth of knowledge and the depth of detail involved in figuring out how to do crazy stuff like this. That was never intended to be supported, never intended to be how it was used. It's just people saying, Hey, I see this technology. I see this bit of hardware. I could do this thing with it. I will do this thing with it.

Jessamyn 1:06:59 Done, right. Yeah. And then

Cortex 1:07:01 and then the entire demo scene is kind of a long series of hold my beers where it was like, okay, yeah, but what if you did this weird thing with that hardware that it wasn't meant to do? So yeah, it's great. It's fun to watch. There are currently exactly 69 favorites on the post. Nice.

Jessamyn 1:07:18 You can just trust Yeah, to say that.

Cortex 1:07:21 I feel like I'm still navigating that all right. It's it's not distrusting you. It's me just feeling that I don't know. feeling responsible.

Jessamyn 1:07:29 I basically changed my mind about how deep shitty inappropriate I think that is. And now I think it's okay.

Cortex 1:07:36 I'm glad. Yeah. You didn't have to change your mind. But I

Jessamyn 1:07:40 wasn't you it was just kind of being like, this is just 100% An internet thing and not like a weird, pervy thing that I'm somehow partaking in if I continue, although the last Bill and Ted movie sucked.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:54 I think we talked about that, that link and that's all I have to say.

Jessamyn 1:08:00 wasn't any good? They got older, their wife stayed the same age moving on.

Cortex 1:08:06 That new M Night Shyamalan film, old I think it's just called Old. I've really only experienced it through Twitter jokes. And like one

Jessamyn 1:08:17 Twitter jokes if

Cortex 1:08:18 he has, he has a new movie out. And apparently there's a beach and if you're on that beach, you age very quickly, and that's that's the setup. So there were lots of jokes about aging and whatnot and beaches and

Jessamyn 1:08:33 IMDB. Speaking of aging poorly, like they did they did a redesign, and I do not love it. But I'm sorry, go on.

Cortex 1:08:41 I someone took the scene from dazed and confused. I think we're Matthew McConaughey saying that's the thing about high school girls, man. Oh, yeah. And older, I stay the same eight or I keep getting older, they stays the same age and just turn that into some sort of joke about the beach and getting older and whatnot. I think it was like, that's the thing I love about girls who are not on this weird beach with me. Yeah, okay. Anyway, that's all that's me badly reporting secondhand. A meme about a movie I probably won't see. Let's talk about AskMe Metafilter. Okay, well, you got great.

Jessamyn 1:09:14 Well, um, well, one thing right up front, is the Pluto gangsta came to Vermont. And we gave them they wanted to go to Vermont someplace. They didn't say specifically, but maybe my town and they're travelling companion has mobility issues. And so what's fun to do in this sort of loosely, a amorphous area in Vermont, given that somebody has mobility issues, so we're probably not going to go for a big hike. But we'd like to see some things that are cool about Vermont and so a bunch of us from Vermont talked about things that are good. And they reported back on the 26th that they went and got maple creamy He's in my town, which I'm about that did not have great weather. So sorry about that. But oh my god, we're happy for the rain. And, you know, I recommended like, here's a place you should go and get maple cream ease which are kind of our thing like it's maple soft serve. And they got it from the silhouette farm which is I've spoken about it at length as the place to go to get maple syrup, maple creaminess, Maple candy, like you name it. And then they also went to the American precision Museum, which I don't know if any of us recommended, but is a dynamite place to go. Not a lot of walking. And you can see an old like belt driven, you know, lathes and weird old machines that they keep in really good order. And I don't remember what his username is on Metafilter I think it's SJ Alec something something something, his father runs that place, and is the mechanic at that place. And I met him once when I was working in a library around the corner. So at any rate, it was a fun thread. And I was really happy that they had a good trip. So I'm very happy. And they went to see the quarry. I mean, you know, you're in a weird state when you're like, where should I go? See, I don't know, the quarry? Like, Oh, hold

Unknown Speaker 1:11:12 on the ground? State. Cory? Probably Cory. Yeah. Yeah, see the court.

Jessamyn 1:11:19 So I was happy that they had a good trip. And then the second one that I wanted to lead off with was slightly new Metafilter user, Oracle IA, who has been asking some questions about actually, they're not a super new user. But I've seen them asking a couple questions recently. Who wants to know why? questions that are asked on Ask meta filter get answered and get lots of in depth answers compared to places like Reddit and Cora Yeah, asking about it, you know, not not like trying to like pick a fight about it or whatever. I mean, it's a question that could have just as easily been in meta talk. But yeah, there's a lot of people talking about kind of what they what they think works here. And I appreciated that.

Cortex 1:12:06 This is a funny one, like, I really liked this thread. And it was nice to read through it. And I'm gonna say like, straight up, like, vulnerable moderator commentary. It was really nice to read through the thread. And yes, because I think one of the challenges like a couple of people did flag this as basically a shouldn't this be a meta talk, right, in terms of our typical practice, meta talk would be more appropriate because it's meta filter related. But on the other hand, if this had been a post on meta talk, we would have gotten meta stock flavored answers. And instead, we're hearing from people who kind of interface with the site significantly through AskMe Metafilter. And that's a different set of answers. Like, it's not necessarily a wholly different set of people. There's definitely overlap there. But the context in which people are answering is not like, well, let's really talk about what is and is not successful on Metafilter. And let's discuss, like whether it's actually accurate to describe this as high engagement and people probably likely to come out and kind of hobbyhorse and bring out well, here's something I'm unhappy about. And like, it would just be a very different discussion. And

Jessamyn 1:13:04 I got to moderate it. And I'm still mad, kind of the moderate,

Cortex 1:13:09 blah, blah, blah. Yeah. So it was nice to see people answering from an AskMe and filters perspective about

Jessamyn 1:13:17 stuff, right, and you saw things like I have, I have a rare cancer, or I'm dealing with this kind of complicated parenting issue, or I've got this sort of special needs person and you don't want people coming in being like, well, I don't know anything about cancer, but, you know, you just don't get those kinds of answers. For the most part. You know, obviously, there's people who are new in any community who maybe don't sort of understand it, but I do think the rules more or less make sense. Not always, but mostly. And so you do get a lot of, you know, people who are really trying to be thoughtful about it and not a kind of a for the lulz upvote me stuff or that stuff doesn't stick around, which is also completely okay. Yeah, yeah. So I liked it. I just, it was neat to see, you know, I don't I don't do as much thinking about like, you know, metal filter as metal filter, kind of. And it's just, it's just good to see other people having having given those done those thoughts and etc.

Cortex 1:14:15 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's nice to sort of get outside my own head on that sort of thing. Right. We'll take two which is good, right. I liked this linguistics ish question from

Jessamyn 1:14:29 Oh, this one was so weird. Yes. Go on.

Cortex 1:14:32 This is this is like it's a messy linguistics question is what it is like, you know, like, there's

Jessamyn 1:14:37 nothing wrong with the question.

Cortex 1:14:38 Do you know that? It's a good question? It's an interesting question. And it's a messy. It's not that the question is messy. It's that it's it's a hard question to write in a super clinical way because the thing they're talking about is weird and confusing and inconsistent and depends a lot on context. And that is they're saying basically, why I'm trying to think that none other question is I'm trying to think of a noun that can't very logically be preceded by the and the only one I can think of right now is outerspace democracy one. And the thing is, this is really tricky. Like, you know, there can be contexts in which you refer to something as a as a countable or uncountable thing there can be practice that makes something sound weird or sound normal like they the common example, someone brings this up right away is like, you know, you say, I'm going to the hospital in the United States, in England, you would probably say, I'm going to hospital,

Jessamyn 1:15:39 you definitely do. Yeah.

Cortex 1:15:42 And it's not like, there's not a logical reason for this, per se, this is a matter of practice. And like, it's two contradictory answers to the same question in, you know, two places separated by a common language. And that's sort of gets to some of the difficulty like you can not to say there aren't things you can talk about either. And people try and pick through what they can sort of come up with examples that illustrate what common trends are and what what exceptions are, and basically try and tackle it a little bit more structurally a little bit more generally than just the specific core question in there. But it is, it's a mess. It's linguistics is interesting. Language is interesting. And oftentimes, it's really hard to get to a satisfying, discrete answer to a question, because the answer is like, boy, we just are winging it, or Sachs.

Jessamyn 1:16:32 It really depends. Yeah, like, on whatever, because people are like the horticulture, but they're like you, but you would say the horticulture industry, you know, or like my example like democracy, I don't think you would say the democracy. But that's because it's a weird kind of now not because it necessarily fits this pattern the users describing. Yeah, so interesting.

Cortex 1:16:54 Yeah. Anyway, I liked it. It was fun.

Jessamyn 1:16:57 In the Jasmine talks about the library posts. This was a post by Claire de Lune, who checked out a book from their local public library, and found that it was signed and inscribed by kind of an important American writer, like, do you think the library knows? Should they know, this might be valuable? What should I do about this thing? You know, I might, maybe, maybe they don't know this, what's going on? And you know, so there's a bunch of people who are like, hey, you know, these books are yours. Like, they belong to the community, goodbye, waffles has kind of the first like, Hey, I'm a librarian. Comment. And you know, you can let people know, but they probably know, and it's probably okay, like libraries don't public libraries, especially, like, look at their collection, and they're like, this book is valuable, let's just sell it and buy a cheaper version of this book. Because, you know, we need to optimize the money up angle from this, you know, from our, from our content, and not the whatever thing. So it's, it's deep, but basically, it was a collection of plays by August Wilson, they mentioned it later on in the thread. And it's inscribed to a person. And, yeah, so it's just kind of, hey, you found a neat thing at the library. Cool. You don't tell the library just in case, but probably it's okay, that that book is just on the shelf. Because, you know, I say this over and over again. But like the books in the public library belong to the public, you know, even though some libraries don't act that way. You know, I feel that the more we understand that we're just stewards of community information, the better we have relationships with our larger community for the most part, so I enjoyed that thread.

Cortex 1:18:45 Nice. Yeah. Who I have. I do have one other question. I have an update on I mentioned this, I think last month, but the what is the song question from trespassers, William. I love that username. So much. Yes, yes. And now I remember that it's a poor thing. Okay, but not a poor thing. Anyway, there has been one new comment I think, since we last discussed

Jessamyn 1:19:08 it weenie whose middle name is the? Yes.

Cortex 1:19:12 In England, they just say Winnie the Pooh. Is it give me hope, Joanna by Edie Grant s Concordia and we do not yet have a response from trespassers William on the subject, maybe next month. I can follow up with another update. But that's the What song is this update?

Jessamyn 1:19:27 Great. Well, speaking of sounds,

Cortex 1:19:31 I saw this nice transition.

Jessamyn 1:19:33 Thank you. I enjoyed this post, just because I liked thinking about it. By FTM. Again, basically trying to compile a list. It's a list generating questions. Also some of my favorite radio announcer clips, you know, they make it sound kind of ame I think the example that I always think of is like rock and roll radio, where, you know, this is rock and roll radio like bird and then the song goes Pan and antenna and and, and so, you know, you get that you're kind of listening to the radio, but also as part of the song. And so, you know, they were like we built the city and Rock Me Amadeus, what are some other ones? And it's just a great list of, you know, people generating songs that have this little sort of trope in it. In fact, there's probably like a TV Tropes version of it or whatever, but there's a lot of people and there's a big the end of baby driver by Simon and Garfunkel, like it's been around for a while. And, yeah, it's a very long thread of songs that fit this specific. This specific thing 63 answers, pretty close. Now. Oh, sorry.

Cortex 1:20:48 Oh, died today. I tend to I am kind of a sucker for that move in the production on a song. And also, like, I'm not that super deeply listened in terms of my music, like coverage. So like, this is the sort of thing where I mean, like, search for the two examples that popped to mind. And they were both mentioned, so I don't need to do anything

Jessamyn 1:21:08 evil. That was kind of me. I was like, I thought of a couple examples that I could think of, but they were all there. So I was like, great. Yeah, but I hope they got a lot of good songs.

Here's, like a asked me question. I'm really hoping there is a update to but essentially Swink heard sounds coming out of their iPad, in the middle of the night, where the male voice with an Indian accent says, Hello, female voice with an American accent says can you believe we have control over the microphone?

Cortex 1:22:00 Well, that's not well,

Jessamyn 1:22:01 nerve wracking. Right. And, and it is kind of interesting. Because, you know, it felt like like a, like an audio call. The iPad was closed. You know, what's going on? Like, it felt kind of like a hallucination. But also, I mean, and this is really tricky, right? Because if somebody said this to me, like a friend, my first thing would be like, you were asleep and dreaming, because Jim has sometimes had these kind of like, he's awake doing a thing, but he doesn't, you know, at all remember it. And, you know, that's just how some people sleep, right? And then other people were like, well, maybe there's like, an app you put on it that like, you know, has malware and the malware kind of makes you feel like your iPad is being taken over. But it's not really being taken over. You know, they're running the latest OS, there's no beta stuff on it. Other people have mentioned having similar things. You know, maybe it's like this weird new spyware, that night recordings upon hysterical mentions. And I would really like to get an update about this. Because yeah, you know, it's just like, it's a little not believable, but also that person says, that's what happened to them. And I would like to know if there's sort of a non don't trust your technology update. And of course, you know, there's a ton of people who are like, never trust your technology, of course, kind of which are not really super helpful answers. But yeah, I would like to know, what is what is going on with Squinkies. iPad, and they and they, they restored it to factory settings. And the problem hasn't happened since. But, yeah. Yeah, interesting question. And if somebody knows anything about that, it would be really nice. If you could let them know. It'd be nice to get to the bottom of Yeah.

Cortex 1:24:03 Freaky deaky. Right. I think it's the technical term.

Jessamyn 1:24:06 Okay. I've got a couple more. Lay mommy, speaking of freaky, artificial lard moved to a new place. And their gas bill is off the hook high. And there was you know, they did some construction when they moved in the gas had to be re attached and metered, old unit, blah, blah, blah. You know, basically, all they did was boil water and took showers. And then, you know, they called Con Ed. And Con Ed was like, well, we'll take a look. Maybe it was estimated, and basically they're just kind of like, I don't know what to do with this situation. And, and it was nice because people who also live in North Carolina basically DESE North Carolina What the fuck? Live in New York. Senator happy like your Rolodex just gets stuck like one before one after what?

Cortex 1:25:14 I've never misspoken in my life vibrating crystal of perfect diction and recall and my wires are never crossed.

Jessamyn 1:25:26 That must be nine basic. I'm basically a God must be nice. Must.

Cortex 1:25:30 It's a terrible burden.

Jessamyn 1:25:33 So

Cortex 1:25:35 you were saying North Carolina? Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:25:36 people in New York who know how to interact with Con Ed are like you've got it like you can do this and do this don't take their no for an answer. And it has a really nice wrap up basically the next day. Like, you know, I got through the person and I called and they were like, your bill is definitely wrong. So let's, you know, adjust it, you have to wait for a month, but that should work. Okay. Like they basically did got historical billing for their unit that indicated, you know, that. Yeah, they were basically they had a gas bill as if they had a giant house and they had a tiny apartment. Yeah, so good news.

Unknown Speaker 1:26:13 Happy about resolution. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:26:15 that's excellent. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I only have a couple more just to like, you know, quick notes on because I was either interested in them or commented in them. Friends, anxiety makes me angry, slash anxious. Somebody who's managing their own anxiety and who has friends who maybe are either not managing their anxiety as well, or have worse anxiety, but kind of dump stuff on them. And they find that this makes them really anxious, but then they feel like a bad friend, if they're like, please don't dump your anxieties on me. Because you know, all all their friends are, have various levels of anxiety. And so trying to figure out what's, what is an appropriate way of working with your friends. So you know, if you bust your ass to not like, dump your anxieties on your friends, but you feel like maybe they don't do the same in response. It's an interesting thread of how to manage it, I have this problem, like, you know, I try really hard to manage my own shit. I feel like I deal with a couple people who maybe don't either try as hard or don't have as much luck, or maybe just aren't as far along the path. Right. But sometimes I feel like maybe they're not trying but you don't know, you know what I mean? And it's hard, because I find I can sometimes only do well, if I stay away from those friends. And then I feel like a bad friend. Right? Yeah. And so trying to manage that I have a long comment about this. And also, then they had the person who asked this question. Unicorn chaser, also maybe has some friends who are just jerks, you know, and that's a different problem. But one of the things I think that thread is helpful for is there are people who are like, yeah, that friend sounds like it may be just a jerk. And it sometimes it's helpful to have somebody be like, No, it's okay for you to not put up with that. But I think it's hard. I think for you know, anxious people, boundary setting can be difficult,

Cortex 1:28:12 because it's one of those things where like, you probably hope to find an outcome where the thing that is a problem isn't and like, the hope is that it's like the ideal case. And this is the case I've I've found myself is finding out how to sort of navigate those mutual anxieties and mutual boy, I'm stressed and can't quite deal situations. So you can sort of trade off and set a boundary is like really useful. Like, it's much, it's much better to be able to say to someone, hey, I'm sorry, I really, I'm having a hard time right now. And I can't really do the listening and support thing on this at the moment, and have them be able to understand that as like, Oh, that's a legitimate thing. Okay, we'll both be stressed out independently for a little bit,

Jessamyn 1:28:54 right, that what you're saying is not right now not knowing that you're feeling?

Cortex 1:28:59 Exactly, you know, and if that works, that's great. And maybe if that's not working with someone, part of the problem is that they aren't even going to try and make an argument because, hey, maybe that's kind of shitty, maybe maybe that's you're not really giving a shit about me just wanting an outlet,

Jessamyn 1:29:13 or not being able to for various reasons, right? Like, I have a friend who grapples with this a little bit and I really liked her. But part of the thing is, she kind of requires me to be constantly setting the boundary, you know, where I'm, you know, like something basic, right? Like, I can't really have a phone call more than half an hour right now. Because whatever, I'm really busy, I don't have that time available, whatever. And so if we have a phone call, which I already don't like, I think, but I can do it. Like, you know, I tried to get over myself and not be like, I will never talk to you on the phone. But then, you know, I'm like, okay, half an hour and then you know, 29 minutes I'm like, I'm gonna have to get going soon. And then like 31 minutes like she's kind of still like really not wrapping things up 35 minutes and I'll Be like, Look, I just have to go. And she'll be like, Okay, goodbye, kind of. And I'm like, you know, I, it's not fair for me to every single time be the timekeeper when I've already indicated what the time is. And I understand I have to be part of it. But like, that's kind of my example, right? Like that. And my friend acknowledges that like, Oh, I'm so glad, you know, you set that boundary. And I'm like, well, but it's really stressful for me that like, you can't, once I've set a boundary, you can't help me meet it. You know, but I'm not sure. Right? I because of being an anxious person, like, I'm not sure how much is appropriate for me to, you know, just do I just say, I gotta go and, you know, 30 minutes and hang up. That's what I definitely do at zoom calls where I tell people, like, I got a hard stop at five. And if people are still talking at five, I'm like, sorry, I got another meeting, click.

Cortex 1:30:47 But ideally, it is a situation where it's more of a casual friend. Of course, you shouldn't have to announce hard stuff. Like that's, that is

Jessamyn 1:30:55 my feeling. But again, you know, because whenever I was raised by wolves in some ways, and I was always supposed to be attentive to like, what my parents wanted, and it doesn't matter what I wanted, like, Sorry, kid Jessamyn. Like, that was hard. How much of that is my responsibility is open question I have a hard time with and so I enjoyed, maybe enjoy. It's not the right answer. But I reading the other answers made me feel better about some of the decisions I've had to make with friends who are both people I love and also sometimes difficult to interact with in ways that are not improving. You know,

Cortex 1:31:32 it was it was gratifying and reassuring to see evidence from others of experiences you yourself if

Jessamyn 1:31:37 Yeah, and I like getting to, you know, answer for people being like, yes, that is also something I grapple with. That is a real thing. It's okay that you feel like a weird bad friend, you know, here are things that would be bad being a bad friend in my read, here are things that are just you being you know, setting a boundary. Yeah, yeah. And so another thread that I thought was good, but also like challenging along the same lines, was was a Rehnquist who is a straight female woman, person of color. really feels like, they're not going to find a life partner and want to simultaneously get to a better place about feeling that way. But also just kind of like, here's the things like they like their life, you know, like, they live someplace, they like they have friends that, you know, they've got a job that they like, I think, you know, but they're introverted, and single, and are trying to feel like, how, how do I do that, you know, I'm, I'm just quoting, like, I'm black, overweight, slightly weird, introverted, ugly, it's not going well, for me. And like, that's hard. I mean, it's hard both to feel that way, which obviously has some subjectivity to it, but some objectivity to it, and hard to be like, maybe I didn't try enough when you're already feeling like you've tried kind of as much as you want to try. And, yeah, it is a very supportive and not, you know, denial based, like, I'm sure you're fine. You know, there's, it's another thing I like about metal filter, right? Like, people will try and be like, you feel how you feel like maybe, maybe there's some negative self talk that you could work on, but also your feelings or your feelings, and they are real. And there are a lot of comments, some from like, people who've been single for a long time, some from people who weren't, or who met somebody significantly later in life. And also like, hey, you've really got some really good things going for you not to diminish your feelings. But it's, it's it's such a supportive thread. And I liked that. I mean, you know, me, like I had like, kind of one partner who was a terrible fit when, you know, back in the early days of Metafilter, and, honestly, I met my current partner who I do not live with. And, you know, I think that is the key to our loving relationship, you know, at a meta filter meetup when I was 39. And different people hit different milestones at different parts of their lives, which is a thing to know, while you can at the same time be like, Yeah, but I don't really feel good about where I am with my milestones right now. And it's, it's a sweet thread. And, you know, I'm sorry, Aaron Kosis, like, not only struggling, but just is feeling this way. But also there are people single people on the thread who are like, well, here's how I look at it. Bla bla, bla, bla, bla, bla bla, and it's helpful. So I appreciate our friendly helpful in their community, especially for stuff like that, which can be harder for nerds, I think. And, you know, I say that in the nicest way possible. But yeah, it's a good challenge. And it was really nice that that people could could help them out. So I think that's my last my last. My last note from AskMe Metafilter that I had in my in my queue. Alright, you guys don't have like an Olympics, catch all in fanfare or anywhere else do not.

Cortex 1:34:59 Sure we talked about it there was there was a thread for the opening ceremony. I think we were talking about doing a open sort of catch all fanfare thread can be I'll follow up on that today. When I'm clocked in later.

Jessamyn 1:35:10 Yeah. I mean, I really liked having a catch all thread, especially in fanfare just because I think that's what fanfares for but you know, me and this is my hobby horse. So I don't want to bug you. Say it belongs to you. But that might be a way oh, I also have to mention I really enjoyed sneaky pet slash kid stories, the metadata. Yes, that lobster mitten posted kind of in the middle of July only because I always love a chance to trot out the my cat shot in my grandmother's shoe story from when I was kid.

Cortex 1:35:42 Yeah, I'll do a quick sort of go over of of Meditec stuff like the big the big sort of policy? Well, to to like as policy related threads. One is literally that there is a formal privacy policy. Now we finally got done with the process. gratulations working with a legal team to get that put together. And yeah, it's, it's like it's excitingly boring, right? Like, no one, no one on staff is excited about the privacy policy, no one on the site is going to be perfectly excited about the policy per se. But it's good to have gotten this done. Like it's a meaningful and important sort of modern step for the site to take to have this document. So it's great to have that in place. And we've talked a little bit about some of the implications of it in terms of like legal language versus actual practice on the site, and so on. So that's good. The other big announcement was budget is real tight. And so we've moved to a 75% coverage model for the time being

Jessamyn 1:36:36 really sad relationships, like the calendar, but it seemed like yeah,

Cortex 1:36:40 it's it's roughly that so it's like, you know, there's, and that's spreading out over the course of the week. You know, it's a little bit more than that. On weekdays. It's basically halftime on on weekends, like three hours on three hours off. And as

Jessamyn 1:36:53 someone who used to work on Sundays, like they're quiet, they can they can range from nicely Verbling, which is how I describe them, you know, a little babbling brook like, boop, boop, boop, or dead. And then I always felt like bad about taking better filters money, you know what I mean? Because I just be like, I'm not even sure what I can work on. Like, I can do the FAQ, I guess, like, yeah, and I think that's challenging. Because obviously, the jobs are well paid. And they will continue to be that way. But you want to find other things moderators could be doing if the site's not really happening, or not have as much coverage during those times if they're predictable, which it seems like they were.

Cortex 1:37:33 Yeah. And so for now, we're going with not as much coverage. And we'll see if we can change that in the long run, depending on funding and whatnot. Like I said earlier, we'll talk about fundraising soon. But in the meantime, it's yeah, it's an adjustment for the mod team, because not directly handing off every time is a big social change compared to how it's worked forever.

Jessamyn 1:37:52 Right? Although it's really nice that you guys have the slack, which means people can get notes and other stuff in a way that people can catch up on. I did always enjoy the like, sort of hand off. Like, you know, at the end of the day when I work nights, I don't like Taz, a lot of times or lobster mitten or eyebrows Biggie, like just be like, Oh, sleep well, and it was just very sweet. But, yes, yeah.

Cortex 1:38:15 So yeah, it's basically it's going on. Okay, the biggest concern I have is like something will hit at a time when no one's scheduled, and no one's sort of loosely around, and like, spin up into a mess. But I mean, you and I both remember working on the site, back in the late 2000s, when like, that was kind of every single night and also sometimes during the day. Yeah, sorry. I don't mean to make you think about it too much.

Jessamyn 1:38:40 Every time I see a Slack advertisement during during the Olympics, Josh, I shake my fist at you know, what leadership we could have and did not have. All I will say about that.

Cortex 1:38:57 It's a it's a weird, it's a weird professional life we've shared together Yes.

Jessamyn 1:39:02 Very specific.

Cortex 1:39:06 So that's, that's something we'll continue to talk about. I'm sure. That was kind of like the news but they're also like there were nicely there's a meta stock stuff, the metal cocktail stuff. There was an interesting thread that bendy posted earlier in the month, which is I actually put a initial note in just sort of reminding people this is a public site, because you know, hey, talk about your budget in detail. That's a cool thing to do if you feel comfortable but also remember that you're talking about your budget in public in case you're not comfortable with

Jessamyn 1:39:33 that this was so fascinating to me because I find money really interesting, right? Like just it's just a topic that is interesting to me how people deal with it, how people don't deal with it, how people with it, deal with it, how people without it, deal with it, you know how people attribute other things, two things that are money things and so just watching people kind of talk about like, you know, what things cost what what things in their life cost like how how things may have changed. If they're comfortable with it, obviously, you don't have to be comfortable with it, it is okay to not want to talk about it at all, or to want those things to be private, that is fine. But it was just interesting. I derailed it a little bit, because my maple candy budget, it's about five bucks a month. I included the link earlier in our discussion, but like that really was part of like, you know, COVID, for me was spending money locally on stuff. And part of that stuff included a pound of maple candy every, you know, six weeks or five weeks to keep morale up. Or like now that thrift store is a little bit more accessible to me, you know, going in buying sort of random, random clothing. And it's interesting to see like, who has, you know, like, Darlene, Darlene breed? Arlene Bry, you know, they have a certain amount that they spend on dog walking, you know, because they have dogs. And that's just a budget item. And yeah, it was fascinating thread.

Cortex 1:40:58 There was also, let's see, this was the other one I wanted to mention, which was interesting as a two parter because it started off as this was cursed, asking, Hey, do you respond directly to an ask from the anonymous account? Versus Oh, yeah. Which is an interesting question. And this is this is where I was, I love this sort of meta talk question. Because it's, it's such an experiential, like, what's your model of metaphysics in your mind? And what's your model other people's mental models and meta filter? And how do you factor that in? So I've had people talking about, like, how they react to these different things, and whether it affects how they answer and whether it affects, you know, whether they engage, but it also had a thing that came up with it turned into like a digging through prehistory and fixing an old. Oh, god. Yeah, some things short, and you mentioned, hey, you know, I just can't use the anonymous feature. And you know, I've asked about it before, and I don't know what's up. But I just, I just can't use it. And I went looking because like, that didn't really sound right.

Jessamyn 1:41:55 Right. I was told I was using it too much. And I was not allowed to use it. And yeah, can't

Cortex 1:42:01 Yeah, yeah. And the that conversation we've had with users a few times over the years, I guess, I would say it literally comes up every two or three years, maybe max, but it happens every once awhile, you'll see someone like really overusing that when they should know. Okay, so I'd have a sock puppet for your privacy related questions. This isn't how much we expect somebody uses Right? Or somebody

Jessamyn 1:42:19 who needs something to be even more anonymous than you can make it. Like I need this to never be traceable to me is not a thing. You know, the owner of the site can always trace it if they need to, but only literally by piecing the pieces together as a puzzle kind of. Yeah.

Cortex 1:42:38 So I ended up like I ended up like talking through that process in detail. After it was flagged up as Oh, hey, cortex, can you come? See what's up with this? Right?

Jessamyn 1:42:47 Well, also, because I was like, we don't know who asked the questions. And children are like, well, actually, and I was like, Oh, shit, right. Like, we don't know who asked the questions, but we know who's using it a lot because of how the weird process used to work.

Cortex 1:42:58 Yeah. Yeah, we know who has asked a question, but we don't know what question they asked. And we don't know, the database doesn't know who asked it, and so on. Basically, if you're interested about the details of this, someone read this. I'm going to there. Because yeah, and one of the things is that back in the day, we did tell throat injure. Hey, you know, you need to use the anonymous feature last maybe set up a sock puppet and we had a conversation over email, and I thought it was resolved. And I think you thought it was resolved. And it turns out it was not resolved because Matt or PB did not undo that at the time. And then fucking years later,

Jessamyn 1:43:33 or emailed somebody didn't reply, which happened more than it does now.

Cortex 1:43:39 And yeah, this was this was Yeah, again, like 2009 2010 When we did not have a good policy for Hey, try and follow up on every contact form. Try

Jessamyn 1:43:49 follow up. Yeah, well, I mean, it's still

Cortex 1:43:53 you the policy has tried and you could still fail seems like every once a while something will slip through the cracks for whatever reason, possibly. policy can be like you but if the expectation Yeah, the expectation is you do it, then it's a lot more likely to happen. Anyway. So it was a weird like, it was a combination, interesting culture discussion, and a weird trip throughs like old email archives for me and laying out some of the details of how the anonymous question system works. And yeah, that's all that was a it was a pile amount of talk is what it was. I think that's about it. Like, you know, there's there's metal cocktails, there's occasional fun threads. And there's a couple of Seattle meetup Seattle

Jessamyn 1:44:31 meetup coming up, maybe IRL meetup. It'll be interesting to see what the rest of summer in the beginning of school looks like. And, yeah, I'm gonna pay a little bit more attention to Metafilter I was taking a little bit of a break, and

Cortex 1:44:50 we'll come back to the fold. Hey,

Jessamyn 1:44:52 hey. Oh, there wasn't. There was a great question. Actually. Speaking of the fold about hold on I will find this really quick I promise

Cortex 1:45:01 origami? Laundry. No, no newspaper editing No. The religious yes excommunication

Jessamyn 1:45:13 sort of, basically, this was a question I had this marked, and then I just moved on from it, but it fits in here. So well, charity garfein basically asked, like, how commonplace is it to cross your arms to communion, to receive a blessing instead of the Eucharist in Catholic churches, and I knew about this because I used to date a former Catholic, and I am Jewish. And so he would, you know, and we went to a wedding, like have, like a Catholic wedding where they actually do communion during the wedding, or I'm sorry, if there's different words for it, I don't know it. But you know, people go up and receive the sacrament. And, you know, I was like, I don't want to just sit in the back to the fucking church while everybody lines up. And he's like, Oh, that's okay. You can just go up and cross your arms in front of you. And then they will bless you, but they won't give you you know, the wafer or whatever. And that way, you're not kind of pretending to be Catholic, which is probably a good idea, because it's against the rules, law, whatever, however you put it for Jews to receive Communion. And I was like, that's fine. I didn't want it anyhow. But the question is really, like, is that a known thing? Because basically, they were raised, knowing this thing, but was wondering if it's kind of true for Catholicism across the board, you know, what's your experience, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? And I think I actually have the last comment in there because I was like, Oh, I remember doing this at Blake stirs wedding. He's an old school metal filter person. But yeah, was interesting. I'm sure eyebrows McGee can show up and know a whole bunch about it. I don't think I saw her in that thread. But I often think about her as the person I go to with my questions about Catholicism.

Cortex 1:46:55 Yeah, yeah, man. And I grew up. I was raised. Catholic mom, Jewish dad, right. So there's a lot of Catholic Church and my like, you know, pre teens or pre, pre. When I was a teenager, yeah, yes. Yes. My single digits, I guess. Yes. And I don't practically have any member memory of that maneuver. But I know sometimes there would be people who didn't get communion. I think they just sort of looked near the Pew instead of going up, but, but I don't know. It's been a long time. Well, okay, cool. I think it's a podcast, I think I think we got a big meaty podcast and absolute unit here

Jessamyn 1:47:34 fan freaking. I'm gonna go and help someone learn to use your iPad and then I'm going to talk to someone from sports reference about Wikipedia. That's what my day looks like. And I'm looking forward to it.

Cortex 1:47:44 Sounds exciting. I'm gonna do put on the air conditioner now because it won't be noisy in the background podcast and it's getting warmer

Jessamyn 1:47:51 and go to work right.

Cortex 1:47:53 Now for a little bit though, okay. Have some lunch first.

Jessamyn 1:47:56 Okay. All right. There's lunch. I better have some lunch before I help someone on their iPad.

Cortex 1:48:01 Launch. It's the most important meal of the middle of the day. Yeah. All right. Good talk.

Jessamyn 1:48:08 Likewise,