Podcast 183 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 183: Severance, not Succession (2022-04-11).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:08 Hey, here it is. Hey, as as previously discussed Off mic, it's episode 183 of the metal filter podcast. I am Josh cortex Mullard. And I'm Jessamyn I sort of ran out of breath halfway through my name there. I didn't plan that.

Jessamyn 0:22 It's not a very long name.

Cortex 0:23 I know it's like, well, I didn't I didn't leave space up ahead. I just like didn't take a deep breath before starting the intro. I just sort of try and rolled into it and that's a big mistake. Rookie mistake. You know, I I'm a singer and a Recordist I should know better about like, you know, pacing my breath. Unless you want every lyric to sound like that guy from that word. That's that's the word that like recordists have taken using Oh, shut

Jessamyn 0:46 up.

Cortex 0:47 Yeah, I mean, at home Recordist as a longer form. It's just like, it's, well, it's weird. Because okay, if you like record music at home, you do a variety of things. And one of those things is right to being a musician and the act of playing and singing since then. There's like all the tech part. Yeah, like, yeah, like, there's the engineering side of it. There's the mixing aspect of that. And there's all this setup and whatnot. And like that all sort of rolls together into like, Oh, what do you do? Oh, well, I record doesn't work. But hey, I'm a Recordist is at least less ambiguous. I think that's probably where it came from.

Jessamyn 1:18 But I mean, to say you're a musician like

Cortex 1:21 that, but that doesn't tell you anything about the fact that I also record. Yeah, it's just it's, it's not. I think it's, to some extent, it's like one of the things that like, you know, people who are in the recording industry probably don't care about as much because they like, you know, they are established enough and probably like at the more hobbyist, yeah,

Jessamyn 1:43 you call yourself a recording engineer. And that's a job actually. Exactly. And that's a specific job and like, you know, people know what that guy does, or they know

Cortex 1:51 I'm merely a Recordist but But nonetheless,

Jessamyn 1:55 man that's like, hey, gentlemen, you know, I hear you do a lot. I like baking. Yes, but I'm also a delicious.

Cortex 2:01 Yes. Well, yeah. That'd be like, Oh, yeah. Well, really, I'm a culinary and, you know, it's I don't just bake. I also, you know, like, you know, there's no, I bet. I bet there are. Yeah, I'd be curious to like, that'd be good asked Metafilter. Question is like, what are the sort of umbrella terms for specialized subdisciplines if you do the jack of all trades aspect of it,

Jessamyn 2:24 right. Like a lot of people I think, within librarianship don't think about cataloging as an actual, like, really specific job that may have no public facing aspect to it, for example. Like, every librarian knows about it as a job. But like, many people outside the discipline, just have no idea and they just assume every library and works with the public. At some level, the academic public, the business public, the public public.

Cortex 2:51 Yeah, exactly. There's all these layers once you dig into it. Hi. You

Jessamyn 2:56 know, I was so busy today. Fucking around talking about animal crackers that I forgot that I have a question and maybe have a question just even for you. All right, you pass over.

Cortex 3:08 Yeah, lazily? Sometimes, depending? Well, I got invited

Jessamyn 3:10 to my local friend's place for Passover. And I'm excited about it. Because I like these guys. And I go to meals with them often for the Jewish holidays, but I don't think I've ever been invited for Passover. And so I'm gonna go and maybe Jim's gonna go if he's up. And I like these people a lot. And I would like to maybe bring something but I don't know if that's weird. And of course, when I went to look this up on AskMe Metafilter. I found my own Goddamnit from 10 years ago, but it was talking about a different aspect of the Seder. This was like Drakkar was going, Oh, I'll link to it actually. But like drafter was going to their first Passover Seder and wanted to not screw it up. And there was some, you know, special aspects to it. Yeah. But like, I don't drink wine. So I always feel weird bringing wine.

Cortex 3:59 I mean, it's kind of like if they drink wine that's the point. Yeah, I think you know, like there's something very natural upbringing something you want to drink but there's also something very normalized about bringing a bottle of wine you know? I would say like whether or not there's anything

Jessamyn 4:18 kosher for passover not just kosher

Cortex 4:21 Well, I mean, that also kind of depends. I guess what the intent is the intent we're gonna crack this sucker open right now. Question I never understand I think this depends on the people like this is the thing like like I'm sure there are several different Jewish perspectives on the subject but like I think this guy lands on your friends not on like because unless your friends are going to be like very specific about it then whatever like you know, I grew up like my family the Jewish side is like very chill reformed Jews. So like, right? Almost nothing that's like real stand on ceremony is part of you know, my my personal experience. You Right. So like in that respect, ya know, if I was, if I was not my parents as son, but they invited me over for Passover, I would probably be bring a bottle of wine because hey, why not? And then I wouldn't be like, and now you'd have to open it and drink it and brains. Just

Jessamyn 5:16 like here. Thanks for having

Cortex 5:16 me about kosher rules. Yeah, it's like whenever you go over to someone's house, right, so there's probably there's probably more specific and thoughtful and traditional ways to do it. But you know,

Jessamyn 5:26 up a little bit in this old AskMe edit filter question from 2010. But yeah, I may ask another kind of updated question because like, I'm, I like these guys a lot. But not only do I it's been a really long time since I've been doing Seder. But it's been a really long time since I've eaten food with other people indoors. You know what I mean? So for my like, but I'm excited about it. May ask her, I may ask Metafilter for a little sort of shot in the arm, and I've been reading all those Rabbi small books. I think I told you about remote. It's like Saturday, the rabbi left town Sunday, the rabbi blah, blah, blah. They're these books that started in the 60s and wrapped up in like the 80s or 90s. They take place in like a small community in the North Shore of mass. Oh, okay. Yes, yes. And there's like a rabbi who kind of sometimes helps solve crimes. Right, right. Right through like Jewish question asking. It's adorable. I love them. But it's like 12 books, and you can just plow the hell through them. Yeah. But it's made me a little bit more like, Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, I didn't know. I don't know any of this stuff. Like, oh my God. Because there's a lot of like, didactic, like, oh, in Judaism, we, you know, not not just talking about like kosher food or whatever. But like, you know, the values inherent in the religion, and I enjoy that. But I also became clear how little I felt like I already had no, yeah, they're great books, by the way.

Cortex 7:02 Yeah. And I I'll toss a link into the thread, as much as I think for my own reference, but But yeah,

Jessamyn 7:10 yeah, Rabbi, small mysteries. Very, very readable. And

Cortex 7:17 I'm imagining it as Peter Falk. Now.

Jessamyn 7:21 It's funny, he looks like Peter Falk, in my mind. And I don't know if you're looking at the Wikipedia article or whatever. Like there was actually a television show done. Briefly. That was called Flanagan's rabbi. And of course, Lanigan is the Irish Catholic cop and they are friends. But of course, like it couldn't just be like a rabbi show. It had to be like an Irish cop as a Jewish friend, which Yeah, obnoxious. But I still want to track down that show and go watch it.

Cortex 7:54 Yeah, yeah. I was not aware of that. But yeah, I remember I remember you mentioning them at some point.

Jessamyn 8:00 Yeah, I started reading them in February. And they just go real fast. So

Cortex 8:04 yeah, well, maybe I'll see if I can get them on my Kindle.

Jessamyn 8:07 I am I am on the last one. And you probably will be able to, I mean, they're not like great reads. And man, especially in the early ones, the sexism, exhausting, and not like sexism, like people are sexist. But there's gender roles, and people don't vary from them very much.

Cortex 8:27 Yeah. Well, I'm rereading dune Messiah right now.

Jessamyn 8:30 Oh, nice.

Cortex 8:31 So I'm enjoying that. Speaking of books from the 60s that also have some inherent sexism in there. Oh, my God, or construction?

Jessamyn 8:39 Is doing Messiah just do a second one. It's the one fire strikes back of Dune.

Cortex 8:48 Yes. Although, depending on how you want to look at it. Maybe it's the Return of the Jedi? Because somatically it's part of the Empire. I mean, it's hard to make these comparisons because like, nothing like the hero's journey happy happens at the end of these books, right?

Jessamyn 9:05 I just found it's like Jaws to Yes, this

Cortex 9:08 is the second book. It's the second book, but it was sort of originally part of the first book. Oh, really, in the way that it was originally plotted out by Herbert, but then it ended up being published as a second book to keep doing from being I think, as long

Jessamyn 9:21 Herbert, his last name is Herbert.

Cortex 9:23 Yeah, Frank Herbert.

Jessamyn 9:25 I have a confession to make. Yeah, I always thought his name was Hiebert. Because when we were kids, there was candy placed near here. It was like Hubert's candy mansion. And my dad had that book dune on his nightstand, like most of the time that I can remember for whatever reason, and I just always assumed he was had the same name as the candy place.

Cortex 9:47 Could you get like mix and match collections of different candies in one bag? Ah,

Jessamyn 9:53 I think so. And also they were known for having like an amazing sundae bar. So like It was a place that you went, if you were a little kid and you had a birthday party, you know, you have like, make your own sundae situation. And it was really pretty excellent.

Cortex 10:08 Yeah, I was really just trying to set up a candy Melosh joke as a spice joke on Dune. But now I'm glad to have learned more about your childhood.

Jessamyn 10:20 I haven't even read dune. So like, I don't really know. I just know the memes.

Cortex 10:26 Oh, you should read it. All right, obviously, you know, read like 10 books for every book I read. So read it.

Jessamyn 10:33 I'd be really sleep. Josh, I would read less if I slept better if that helps.

Cortex 10:39 I mean, that just that sounds like kind of a bummer. Well, I mean, are you sleeping enough? Are you like, yes. Okay, well, then fine. That's great.

Jessamyn 10:45 I just like I'm up too late. And I can't sleep until late and so I do a lot more reading. And that shifted with the time and I don't know why. You know, like, I used to go to bed at 130 every night for years. And it shifted to 230 like a month and a half ago, little before the time change. And I appear powerless to fix it. So I just do more reading.

Cortex 11:08 Well, yes, we do. And I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts on it. Maybe we can talk about it next episode and, and plow through the first 50 pages or so because like they're not unrelentingly awful. But like, I do feel like it gets an oddly bumpy started remember a book that I really liked

Jessamyn 11:24 it when I was a kid. And like my parents read a lot of books that I found interesting. But that just wasn't one of them. And I think that may be why I didn't read.

Cortex 11:34 I mean, in general, it's a give it some time, but because like he really does spin out a whole bunch of stuff over the course of the book. That's really great. But like, I think some of the worst writing in the book is in the first 15 pages. That's, you know, just saw the movie, the first movie, and I thought that movie was very good. Yeah, it seemed

Jessamyn 11:51 all right. I don't remember much of it. But I remember the plot being compelling.

Cortex 11:54 Yeah. Well, the book will make some of the stuff you were like, What the fuck was that? Like a little bit more? Because it's a fair fit. Well, oh, you're talking about the David Lynch movie.

Jessamyn 12:06 Was there another movie?

Cortex 12:08 The will the one that just came out recently? Yeah. The older one. Yeah. Okay, sorry. I miss her too. Well, then the new one is very faithful the book and I think very good. The David Lynch movie is insane. And it's the purchase of a book. And also I love it to death. And it's a huge mess of a movie. But it still came out. Yeah, it's it's great. I need to watch it again. I did a couple years ago, and I was happy to. But the new ones good, too. Anyway, this has been doing talk with cortex. Jessamine. Here we are.

Jessamyn 12:39 Oh, my gosh. And it's a Sunday afternoon, which is really not a time we're used to talking to one another.

Cortex 12:45 Yeah, this is this is sort of like an odd, calm moment in the week. But. But hey, why not? Also, this is another episode of the podcast, which continues to exist, which was, I think that I feel a little bit bad about people having been worried about after my announcement and meta talk on a week and a half ago, something like that. Was it time is weird. It's really hard to tell. It must have. Yeah, must have been. Yeah. Anyway, if you're listening to this, but missed that basically, ended up making the decision to transition away from being responsible for running Metafilter essentially, antastic,

Cortex 13:26 which is, you know, big weird change for me and something I'm still sort of like figuring out the details of and figuring out the details for like the mod team in the site and whatnot. But my main plan is to get me out of here without otherwise affecting day to day stuff, you know, let things sort of keep rolling as they are while people figure out what's next. Which is, yeah, that's it's a whole it's a whole fucking thing.

Jessamyn 13:49 Congratulations. Thank you. Making decisions like that is hard. And yeah, I mean, you and I had been kind of mumbled mumbly about it for a while, but I really feel like not only was it like a good choice for you, but I feel like, while it may have felt too late for some people, I feel like it wasn't too late for you, you know what I mean? Yeah. It's

Cortex 14:12 like, like, I mean, I talked about this in the meta talk thread a little bit itself, which was more of like a structure and this is what's happening in announcement than me like, talking about my feelings per se. Like,

Jessamyn 14:23 that's probably actually the way to do it. Like Like, I'd rather have things

Cortex 14:27 sort of like mostly taken care of so I can kind of relax and decompress a little bit and stop compartmentalizing quite as much and then actually just talk about feelings like when the work is done. But yeah, it's like you know, I've been basically I've been very, I've been very burnt out for a while, and also the person who ultimately needs to keep everything moving. That's a bad combination is really it's been wearing on me and it's been a hard several years for variety reasons for everybody and a pandemic for a couple of years. And boy, it just, it's one of those things where Like simultaneously, the reason I've sort of kept putting off this decision is, you know, the reasons that I should have gotten ahead and made this decision.

Jessamyn 15:08 Right, which is very hard. Yeah,

Cortex 15:11 exactly. You know, and I feel good about, like the process of trying to figure out how to, like, pass it on. But it's still also, you know, that's stressful in its own right. And it's hard to, it's hard to really fully just, like, feel like, oh, everything will be fine. And I can just like, let go of this thing that is so important to me. But, but also, I think it's going to be good for the site, it's definitely going to be good for me. So, right, just doing it. But that it had come up in the previous podcasts read a few days into this month when this one might have come out if it was coming out promptly.

Jessamyn 15:45 That right, and that was part of why this one is not out properly. Yeah. There was other stuff going on. I think I remember that. You were just like, I just can't think about that right now.

Cortex 15:56 Yeah. Yeah. Like, well, and yeah, like I announced, like, a couple days before the end of the month, and then you were like, on vacation for a few days visiting your sister.

Jessamyn 16:05 Oh, that's right. My sister's birthday. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's

Cortex 16:09 no way this was gonna happen before sometime. This last week anyway, and today's the day actually worked for us. So here we are. But there are people that someone had mentioned in the previous podcast, right? Well, I, I hope the podcast will still be happening. And I really will. I didn't say anything about it not happening. But also I'm stepping away raises a lot of people, you know, yeah. Like, like, what does that mean for my presence and my involvement with stuff, which is basically like the podcast is gonna keep going. I like the idea that someone else will sort of take over responsibility for

Jessamyn 16:42 this into more active language. If you are a person who would like to help us with the production of this, which is not actually very difficult. Let us know, because it would make it easier for Josh to just do the podcast without having to produce the podcast. And we're actually pretty easy to handle. Yeah,

Cortex 17:00 it's very easy for me to show up and talk. That part is effortless.

Jessamyn 17:03 For me, being able to do it for all these years.

Cortex 17:07 I've been a little bit jealous, because I sort of like think about that dynamic. So you know, that's probably something that should even be better talk post.

Jessamyn 17:14 We can mention it to the 11 people that listen Yeah, exactly.

Cortex 17:17 If any of you are like whom I want to do an hour of podcast editing. Every month, I would

Jessamyn 17:23 really like to jump into a functional podcast that already exists is 183 episodes.

Cortex 17:29 Yeah, I use the word editing with a great deal of morality. Right, I really I compile pre roll.

Jessamyn 17:38 So you can hear about, you know, our various vagaries. And then yeah, and maybe putting more music background. Yeah.

Cortex 17:46 And honestly, it's not that hard to put the music in. But also my shit has been fucked as far as anything. That's like, that's why that really fell by the wayside.

Jessamyn 17:54 I should have been fucked. Is that a mental statement? Or is that like, in

Cortex 17:58 this case, I mean, technologically. Like, my, my computer's, like GarageBand was not functioning for oh, so I was using Audacity, which works, but it's not nearly as nice to edit with. I mean, GarageBand isn't great. But it's, it works well enough for the simple things I want to do with it. And so at that point, making music cues was just like fucking terrible. And now we've got like, things changed in GarageBand. It's working again. But like, I've been getting I've been making sure things get done to minimal viable rhotic viable product level. So music Yeah, that's fine. An Unnecessary extra, but I like them. They're good. It's I like having the stuff from the music sub site there. I like the mix up. So someone editing who has the patience. Do that extra 20 minutes of work? Every episode would be great.

Jessamyn 18:43 Yeah. And it's once a month. It's never going to be more than that. Yeah, turnaround in a couple days. No one really cares how fast?

Cortex 18:52 Yep. Great. And yeah, it's also something that like, it's not hard for me to keep doing in the meantime. So like, this is I'm okay. If like, all of my official business duties and moderation management duties go away, and I still have to do the podcast. That is an okay, sort of, like level of compromise for me in terms of partial transition. Yeah. So yes, podcasts. We'll keep going. We'll keep doing it. Right. And, and yeah, we'll go from there. Cool. But yeah, anyway, that's, that's what's going on. I've been I've been doing a lot of work to try and get things moving. And there's this irony of trying to accomplish this complicated transition process bootstrapping new things. And I'm doing that partly because I'm leaving this job partly because I'm just out of gas to be able to, like, do complicated things. So you know, it's moving along. It's just it's a little bit

Jessamyn 19:47 there would be a transition team in Yeah, you know, just world

Cortex 19:51 Yeah, exactly. And I'm kind of hoping with the steering councils thing I'm trying to get together. I'm kind of hoping that can be part of it is that for us can fall

Jessamyn 19:59 for that by way, like speaking as someone not on the steering Council, I'm not 100% sure how it's working. But I know you've talked about it.

Cortex 20:07 Yeah, well, and it's still it's still kind of coming together, we have enough candidates who expressed interest that I'm going to reach out to folks and try and set up an initial meeting. So as far as that goes, we're not hurting for folks. But like, there is the possibility for more people to be involved in different people to be involved. And that is something that I expect to sort of come out of that, like this. The whole thing with bootstrapping, this is I can either try and get everything perfect. Or I can try and get things moving. And I'm going to aim for getting things moving. Because I trust the people in the medical community who are involved to then figure out how to get it closer to like an ideal form and the sum of their energies versus me just trying to scrape something out the bottom of the barrel, like that's a good, that's a good direction to move that, that process in, get it out of my brain pan and into a bunch of other people's hands. And then yeah, get them talking about like, how do we, how do we make Metafilter work for the future? How do we make, you know, community in moderation, collaboration work? Well, et cetera. I'm excited about it. And I'm excited for other people to be doing most of it. Both of those in in superposition. That's kind of how I feel about all this transition stuff is like, you know, there are possibilities here, there are good things that this can lead to, and also someone needs to do the doing and most of them not gonna be able to be me. Right. But uh,

Jessamyn 21:30 but yeah, I mean, you're sticking around while this happens. It's not like the you know, Mike drop, Matt, how we would you and I have spoken about at length and are not doing so yeah,

Cortex 21:43 we're not no, we're not we're not this is not the drag Matt Howie podcast. It I'm still on good terms with Matt. He's like mad. I'm glad he's not my boss anymore. But I have, in some ways, a little bit more sympathetic to I think some of the position he was in while, you know, changing back

Jessamyn 22:05 to slack. And now he's moved on from slack. Yeah. And I wasn't sure what he was doing. He's kind of out of my orbit now. So

Cortex 22:13 yeah, I don't know. I don't think he had a specific plan. But But yeah. Yeah, maybe, maybe. Maybe we'll get him back on the podcast. It'll be like an all Emery rightous. That would be funny. That would be Yeah, Matt would have no idea what's been going on. I met a filter for several years. And so we can just like make stuff up and convince him it happened.

Jessamyn 22:33 Oh, man, can we talk about words that you've only known by reading?

Cortex 22:37 Yes. Like, like, right now specifically, just

Jessamyn 22:40 I just had one that I just learned about because I heard on a podcast, plural of octopus.

Cortex 22:47 Octopus code. Octopodes? octopi,

Jessamyn 22:50 propodus, or octopus ship. Now I've forgotten, but it's like it's a Greek word.

Cortex 22:57 Is it on top of these copies?

Jessamyn 22:59 Yeah. I shouldn't have gone down this.

Cortex 23:07 Like that. We've established that it's a problematic word, but we did not come

Jessamyn 23:11 to parties. It's it's not I always thought it was Octopodes. And it's not. Not that. I'm looking. I mean, I'm okay.

Cortex 23:23 Yeah, no. I want I'm I'm gonna lay down my fictional $5 On October 80s. As I think that was reading of this, because it's definitely second syllable stress. And that's a schwa on the third. So that's an octave top DS and yeah, I don't know if that's yeah, no, if that I and then like little partial try forces at these.

Jessamyn 23:51 But I always thought Octopodes, I don't know why.

Cortex 23:55 Yeah, well, I did do that. Yeah. I mean, that's how you would, this is how we learn language man, you know, we learn new words. And we we apply rules that we have like intuited based on other, you know, words and we do that. So this is a thing this is a fascinating thing about the way kids learn to speak and why you see a very curious phenomena happen sometimes in early childhood development where a kid may learn an irregular like plural noun or an irregular verb, like you know, they might learn, they might learn from context that you say I went there, instead of I go because I go there and then they will later start saying, I go there, because at that point, they have more incorporated the rules have regularized past tense, you know, conjugation and they've learned that, oh, you take the verb and then you add a D or an E D sound, and that's how you make it so they the sort of unlearn went and I don't know if this is actually true for like the Go

Jessamyn 24:57 Crusher shop, but in general sense

Cortex 24:59 is This general sense like, you know, kids will learn this specific thing in isolation from context. And then they'll get a better understanding of sort of the verbal regular rules. And then they'll apply that to create, you know, a, quote, incorrect verb form instead using those regularization rules. And like, yeah, if you're an English speaker, and you're looking at Octopus, octopus these, it looks like what do you do when you have a plural that ends with an S or an ES? Well, it's, it's, you know, an Octopodes, like it's an octupole Octopodes, and you know that it's like octopus, not octopus pode. But maybe Octopodes, just another way of saying octopus and then you add an s, and then you get Octopodes. And yeah, okay, sure, you know, Tom compatible and sort of powerful bit of brain stuff going on there, even if it produces like a wrong answer, in some strict sense that a

Jessamyn 25:47 lot of people thought it was octopi, because that's what you would do if the word had Latin roots. Right? And I'm just repeating what I said, like this are what I heard, this is not anything I know anything about. So I was really interested in that because I was like, oh, yeah, I love learning things. Even at this age. You know what I mean? Because every now and again, I just worry, I can't learn anymore. I don't know if that happens to you or not.

Cortex 26:10 I, I worry sometimes about like, just not having as much energy for it. But like, No, I

Jessamyn 26:16 worry about my energy. I am just worried about my ability of my brain to put anything else in

Cortex 26:23 focus, I worry about focus. I don't worry about focus. Like I'm not I'm not concerned about my ability to learn stuff. But I am sometimes concerned about my ability to to decide to learn something. And if that makes sense. It's like, Yeah, but I could play binding of Issac or reload Twitter or you know, worry about things and

Jessamyn 26:42 stares, why don't reload itself, honestly,

Cortex 26:45 things change, and so it doesn't anymore. Like, which is great, because it sucked. It was really bad. And then eventually, they changed it back because everybody kept saying This sucks.

Jessamyn 26:54 So automatically, so now. Yeah, and

Cortex 26:56 your stuff would just go away? Yes. Like where the fuck is that thing I was reading? Oh. So now instead, like it's like a new comments on a meta filter thread, like, you know, you hit a

Jessamyn 27:06 button where you get the new stuff.

Cortex 27:09 I swipe down on mobile.

Jessamyn 27:12 I rarely look at Twitter on mobile.

Cortex 27:14 I do it a fair amount. I do it probably more than I should. Like Doom scrolling is definitely a thing. Oh, I

Jessamyn 27:22 don't Doom scroll at all.

Cortex 27:24 I've done better at it. I trimmed some of my feet and and stopped like following. Like unrelated. A lot of people who I didn't really have a real connection to but I had followed at some point. And then all they do is like, just absolutely feel bad. On Main, like, Sure.

Jessamyn 27:40 And like it's a viable way to interact with the world. I it just doesn't work for me. Yeah,

Cortex 27:46 yeah, like it. What it does is makes my Twitter feed like this place that I'm always gonna feel like extremely unhappy. Whereas I probably following people who I have some connection to and talk about, like, things that are bad and things that are good. Like, I want to know, like, the things you're excited about. And the things that went well for you this day, or this week, along with the things that are difficult or hard or have you upset like, right mix is a good human thing like that should be there. It's not like, I just want rainbows and puppies. It's just that I want like a normal kind of human balance of like, your shit, like you as a holistic person. And not just like, the thing that needs yelling about the most loudly. And only that all the time. Like it's it's complicated. Yeah, but yeah, but that's you curate your feed for what you want. Like,

Jessamyn 28:33 yeah, I mean, I have often gone off about library and Twitter being an actually nice place to hang out a lot.

Cortex 28:43 Well, we've probably talked about this too, but like, that's kind of my experience with TikTok to like, I'm pretty sure you can find like, messy drama holes to go down on Twitter where people are having like social media, beef or yelling at each other. But like, it's doesn't lend itself to the Doom scrolling thing so much. So I can kind of go there and not worry that it's going to be like, fucking up my day, the same way that like, you know, looking at my phone first thing in the morning and checking out Twitter could potentially Yeah, so yeah, there's something to be said. For better jokes there. I feel like you know, it's like, it's kinda it's tricky. I think Twitter does better with the written word, with it being a text medium, but that's my that was one of the things I would say about TikTok. I appreciate that like fucking everybody seems to be trying out material and running with riffs and memes and whatnot. But like, there are some genuinely funny people. And there's a lot of people who are just sort of like doing a real hack night job. And I think I've tuned my Twitter feed, to mostly be people who are like, when they're trying to be funny, they're very funny, and they also know what they're trying to do rather than just like jumping on the latest. Yeah, sort of trend, which is a fun thing about TikTok but does not always make for quality content from everybody who's

Jessamyn 29:58 right, right, right. Did you just say hack died.

Cortex 30:01 Yes. hackneyed hackneyed.

Jessamyn 30:02 I don't know, I was just,

Cortex 30:05 I'm gonna look this up and see if I can. I think it's hackneyed, which is how I think I originally thought it was. And then at some point I decided to like, oh, but maybe it's hack night. So yes, happy.

Jessamyn 30:16 I can see it both ways. All right. Good to know. Yeah. Let's dive into jobs before we start talking. Sure.

Cortex 30:23 Yeah, I guess I guess we could talk about like the website.

Jessamyn 30:27 I like this website, too.

Cortex 30:32 Yes, there are a couple jobs for March and something from April.

Jessamyn 30:37 The jobs for March are are the March and April job, our library jobs. Oh, and they look and they look cool. Like this. The main one is like distinctive collections coordinators. So they'll oversee operations and Villanova University's digitization Lab, which looks the coolest. And if I lived nearby, I would I would love it. I had a friend who did that kind of a job at Boston Public Library. And oh, my gosh, it was just a happy place. And then they are also hiring for an entrepreneurial and technologically adept, distinctive collections librarian slash archivist, which is basically kind of working that stuff out with kind of some of their rare and special collection. Materials. Salaries are not public. So but it just, it looks really cool. Both of those look really cool.

Cortex 31:35 There's also a listing from flock of Cynthia birds who is looking to get submissions for women's writing for an anthology 15 to 5000 word. Pieces. 1500, I

Jessamyn 31:48 should say, Yeah, and it pays.

Cortex 31:51 Yeah. And quarterly deadlines when for June one for September. So yeah, check that out. If you're a woman, and you're writing and the

Jessamyn 31:59 deadlines aren't super quick, so you know what's on the natural world coming up? And then toxic workplaces in September?

Cortex 32:08 Yah.

Jessamyn 32:10 Yah, it just looks cool. So yeah, if you're a writer you like to write about personal essays, written by women, great. Do it relatable voices, engaging stories?

Cortex 32:24 All right. Projects. Let's see, when did we record I'm trying to figure out if I'm going to duplicate. So this went up March 7.

Jessamyn 32:33 Last, I feel like we were three days before three or four,

Cortex 32:38 something like that. So system from the first or second, we might have covered already anyway. But yes, other stuff. Since then. I have not been paying as much attention to the podcast queue this last month. This is the running theme is like, well, you know, I've been busy. So I'm trying to remind myself what I have seen.

Jessamyn 32:59 Well, the thing that really interested me, like I was talking sort of on the preroll gym, and I saw this movie called The reason I jump, which is a documentary nominally about kids with autism. And it's a little interesting and tricky, because the kids in this movie are all nonverbal. And some of them interact using Facilitated Communication, which is not a scientifically supported, yeah, method of doing things. And there have been, you know, abuse allegations and whatever. And these kids are doing fine. Like they're with, you know, their, with their people. And they're, they're well supported. But it was, it raised a lot of thoughts, because, you know, essentially, it was based on this book that was quote, unquote, written by a nonverbal autistic kid who use Facilitated Communication. And so what a lot of people said about the book was as really a lot more about their parents. But like, the Cloud Atlas guy, did the, I believe English translation and he was involved. He's got a autistic kid. And you know, he's interested in this idea. And so the movie isn't just about this. The documentary is not just about this one kid. But it uses that as a little bit of a sort of a background. But the reason I'm talking about this at all, is, you know, Jim's son is schizophrenic and not nonverbal at all, but very lateral in ways that are a little bit difficult to kind of figure out what the best way to talk to him about things are. And you know, Jim's very lucky because kid is happy and healthy and which is not always true with people who have schizophrenia at the level that he does. But, you know, figuring out techniques to communicate stuff when you need to communicate something that's important, is sort of always a challenge. I was really interested in this project by Lily Tatiana, who was the writer for writing about this idea of a, like a VR schizophrenia simulator. Yeah. And you know, it's a it's a it's a thing talking about, I haven't read through the entire essay. But basically, you know, it sort of interesting. You know, I went to a psychiatrist who told me that people with schizophrenia were not usually worried that they had schizophrenia, which is something my therapist tells me frequently about the things that I think are wrong with me. She's like, if you're that concerned that you have the thing, you probably don't have the thing. So it was, you know, an interesting, an interesting idea. Tanya basically entered this sort of VR simulator thing and came across this thing called Goliath, which is like a VR experience that Tilda Swinton narrates of all the things that has one person to talking about schizophrenia, and also kind of encountering it. So it's an essay about what what that experience was, like, which I just, you know, I'm always interested in different ways to approach that, that idea, right, that people who are like very neuro atypical, trying to find ways to understand what they sense really experienced to try and figure out if there's ways that you can achieve better communication, and, you know, facilitated communication, not a thing that works, but it was it did come up in this movie, and it made me think about that idea, but not that solution.

Cortex 36:54 Yeah. I looking at real project because there's several things I'm excited. One thing that I liked, is this niche video game content. But it Nick knocked, started a blog called anointed, which is about the game no EDA or Noida. I've heard people pronounce it different ways. I like no EDA, it's got a nice flow to it. But it's a great little game where you are like a wizard making your way down and down and down through the earth and various temples to try and you know, probably defeat some huge evil at the end. But I've never actually gotten there because it's very hard. It's a like roguelike ish thing where you're like doing this wizard fighting with a wand, killing beats and collecting treasure and collecting more one departs and switching from one one to another, and the ones can do all sorts of different, weird little explosive and projectile and elemental damage effects. One of the most common ways to die in Noida is to kill yourself with your own wand.

Jessamyn 37:54 Just by accident. Yeah, because I've just had it you have to like go use the bathroom. No, no,

Cortex 38:00 no, by accident, like you accidentally blow yourself up or set yourself on fire or drop the ceiling on yourself. Or, you know, set off some Rube Goldberg Ian set of effects that leads to you know, magma pouring out of the ceiling onto you. It's it's a chaotic and wonderful, weird little game. And so sort of documenting it seems like a good call. And that's what good doctors doing. And I'm very glad about that.

Jessamyn 38:25 I like the idea as as somebody who now spends far too much time playing some mantle, which we'll talk about when we get to that part of the show. I really liked this project by a My name is us, which is basically spelling bee that New York Times game except not that with their own word lists, and more food and plants, fewer chemicals and fish and no words that would embarrass anyone playing with their children. Free no ads, no shared data, just for fun. And I just thought it was great. And not only that, but you know, a My name is in the thread being like, Oh, hey, I'm so glad you liked it. Like just, I don't know, I always appreciate it when people are like interactive. Yeah. And

Cortex 39:12 it had come up to like they had dropped us Atlanta contract form specifically because of some discussion about word or whatever on the loo and being like, Would it be okay to mention this in the present? Yeah, no. Do that. Make up projects? Pros? Yeah. So it's okay, this system worked. But yes, they were being very conscientious about it. And I appreciate that. And also, yeah, no, absolutely. Go for it. And they did.

Jessamyn 39:38 I just clicked the link for Jobs's hermit crab pictures. Oh, yeah. And now I am so cute, the hermit crabs of Paradise Cove Vanuatu. And they're just gorgeous pictures. Basically Dobbs lived there for a couple months, I think is what he said before. For the pandemic, and took some pictures, and yeah, basically, I believe we mentioned the tool sheds that he took pictures of before. So yeah, yes very good photographs. Nice little nice little page

Cortex 40:21 and get your crab content today and crabs. Yeah. I like this from range. He did a recording himself. So he wrote program we're performing audio engineer video editor. I feel like he could have just Recordist but even recorded himself playing six different tracks on his trumpet and used audio editing, to change the sound of them to cover a broader range of brass sextet, instruments, because

Jessamyn 40:56 you know, what if trumpets but not trumpets, well, yeah,

Cortex 40:59 like record trumpets, but some of them you turn into like, like, tune down to like being like a trombone or Flugel horn or I don't remember if he did you phoneme in there, maybe tuba. But yeah, these all all these brass instruments, like, you know, part of the deal with them is they cover a broad range of voicings, and so they're each like, you know, higher and lower, like, you know, violin, viola, cello, bass, etc. But what he did is like, Hey, I can't get together to play with my group because there's a fucking pandemic. And so I'm going to play with a sextet of instruments with just by trumpet and some clever editing. And the resulting is a very nice sounding brass piece that he recorded with himself. Enjoy, listen to him. I liked I liked the sort of idea behind it. That's great.

Jessamyn 41:55 day finding ways to do music. I enjoy Jimmy's hedgehogs.

Cortex 42:00 Yes. Those are adorable

Jessamyn 42:04 pokey boys. Yeah.

Cortex 42:06 Good. Froggen there, too. Yeah. I guess we just say making ceramics and metal sculpture stuff is what Jimmy's doing. It's a project that's rounding up that work that she's been doing.

Jessamyn 42:21 Right, right. All during during pandemic time, I think. I mean, I think a lot of that is kind of the theme, right? So we should we should encourage people more specifically, if you put something together during the pandemic, or you are doing it now or whatever, we would probably be interested in seeing your stuff and you share that that would be cool.

Cortex 42:44 I feel like everybody's got this is me talking about a meme from a show that's not been on there for a little while. But uh, Ben Wyatt holding up a doll and saying Could a depressed person make this? I feel like all of us are Ben Wyatt. And you know what if you've been fucking making something, yeah, show it off.

Jessamyn 43:02 Like that succession guy. Now.

Cortex 43:04 This is really interesting. I love Adam Scott. Like the he like he's great. And I haven't separate it's not succession. Oh, right. But I haven't watched reference at all yet. And now that's succession is a different show. That's the one with like Brian Cox and everybody wants daddy's money. I guess I've never watched any of succession. But it felt sort of like inescapable for for a while. No severance is a different show that I know nothing about. And don't tell me because I want to watch it. But because it's got it's got out of Scott in it. And it's got fucking Christopher Walken in it having

Jessamyn 43:37 the one I think is possible, which is the one that is so called Coco's little brother.

Cortex 43:46 That is succession.

Jessamyn 43:48 So I should have been watching separates this whole time. And I thought it was the same show.

Cortex 43:55 Did someone really sell you on severance and then he started watching succession, I saw

Jessamyn 43:58 people talking about severance. And I was like, Oh, I wish I could watch that show. But it turns out it's disgusting. Because I watched like the first four minutes of succession and I couldn't do anything. Oh, Josh, thank you. There's something tiny and broken in my brain. It's really funny. Like I see it occasionally come up, where there are two things that are semantically stuck together that are not the same. You know what I mean? And I can't differentiate them until something happens. And so succession is everyone's I was convinced for the same thing. Oh, this is so great. Josh. I've got a TV show that I can watch now that I thought I couldn't. I didn't remember Adam Scott being in the oh, this is gonna be so good. Yeah.

Cortex 44:48 All right. Well, I'm glad to have accidentally solved that problem for you.

Jessamyn 44:51 I can also say that since I am looking at the severance Wikipedia page, I noticed that it is starring 10 actors only one of which a woman is not. Does not have a Wikipedia page. So maybe I'll do that tonight. Oh, interesting. Nice. Yeah. Jen Talak Do you know who that is? Not a fan. All right. Oh, I thought you said not a fan. And I was like,

Cortex 45:18 not a fan. Thank you. More like Gen bollocks. The fuck was that? I'm especially weird right now. One more project, I will mention it and we're 45 minutes into the episode, we should probably get the rest of the site. I mean, or not. Who knows? Anyway, this, this is something that I am excited to mess with and have not touched it yet. But this is from around me. It's guests, the AI jukebox artists, which is a great setup because AI jukebox is this thing that will use basically machine learning to try and make up additional content after some source clips. So you give it some of a song and it'll try and keep making that song. Oh, and this, I feel like that has come up on the blue before.

Jessamyn 46:09 So wait, I have these 10 second clips from the throat singing concert I went to last night could I feed them into this robot and it would just give me a longer song.

Cortex 46:19 You can certainly try. I have no idea would do. I don't think I ever played with it very much. But I liked the idea. So anyway, Rami sang was like, Okay, let's take this and make it like, you know, a quiz like, okay, let's name that tune based on I think the content after the part that already existed.

Jessamyn 46:35 Oh, I see. So the AI made this song. What did it start out as? Yeah,

Cortex 46:40 like you give it like, whatever. 10 seconds and then it goes on for another minute or whatever. Like if you only listen to that stuff that generated without the initial stuff. Can you figure it out? I think that's the idea here. But I'll play with it because I'm delighted by this notion. I love it. Go Rami cool. And that's it. I'll stop talking about projects. We talked about metal filter,

Jessamyn 47:01 fine. Metal

Cortex 47:05 metal filter proper.

Jessamyn 47:06 I can never i

Cortex 47:09 i believe you and I refuse to believe you is like the weird like shroud in your box. I've had to just make my peace with on the subject of this. Like, I have all kinds of weird, you know, mental blind spots and odd things. So it's like, I have no trouble believing you absolutely that like oh, yeah. No, I believe you that we do it. But you know, I don't know. And like, Okay, I buy that. But also that's so weird. It's so weird. And I think it's partly because i What are you talking about? The order that we do the sub sites? Oh, that I can't remember them? Yeah. Yeah. Like, like, it's, it's so odd to me. Like, it's such like

Jessamyn 47:41 I told you there's a very tiny part of my brain that doesn't work. And that's part of it. You know? I don't know if I left from my right. I don't know east from West. I don't know succession from severance, and I don't know what order we do the podcast in and I cannot remember.

Cortex 48:00 Well, and that's part of the thing is that, like, it doesn't matter, right? Like, who fucking cares? I care because like, I've decided that that's the direction we go through it. And but, I mean,

Jessamyn 48:08 there's probably parts of my life where things I don't know, like this matter, but this is not one of them. Like, the listeners care.

Cortex 48:18 Yeah. Cuz I, you know, actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say I bet the degree to which listeners care depends on the listener, and they're probably people who have just as much of a Oh, but what's the structure gonna be thing? You know, that is my brain has and then probably a lot of people like, no, it's just that's the fact that you just talked about the site. It's fun.

Jessamyn 48:35 Yeah, it's funny, because I've been listening. I think I told you this last month, like listening to more podcasts that are new to me, and some of which have segments. And, you know, come to think of it. I don't know the order. They come in. They're either, like, I don't know. Like, there's like a main segment. And then there's some little other segments, and I don't remember what order they're in. Huh? Yeah. Well, good. So I made a post this month. And I'm gonna make another one probably this week. But this one based on the podcast that I like to listen to, was this goofy thing that happened in the 1950s, where this advertising executive was trying to find like a gimmick to get people to buy more oatmeal. And so they bought some land in the Yukon in Canada, and then printed up deeds to a square inch of this land that they bought, put it inside oatmeal, and it was supposed to also be promoting this like Sargent Preston of the Yukon show. And then they had these deeds, and they gave them away to children everywhere. And so the land really existed, but like the deeds didn't really go to any particular part of the land, but it became this really interesting sensation. And you know, you can buy those He's now on eBay for 40 bucks sometimes and it's just a funny thing that I heard about that there wasn't actually a lot on the internet about which was interesting.

Cortex 50:10 Yeah, nice. There is the idol Game of the Month post I'm going to say is this is something that loquacious posted, it's just a game called the idle breakout, where you buy more balls to bounce around and break breaks automatically to earn coins to buy more balls to break more breaks, etc, etc. Very simple. Either you'd like that sort of goofy thing or you don't I love. So yeah, go check it out. That's how well it's not it's not bullet hell, because like bullet hell, it means you're having to actually dodge bullets, whereas this is good. Yeah, it's it's an idle game. It's, I would say it's not even a clicker. Really, there's not that much clicking involved. But anyway, it's good. It's a fun, dorky time. And it led to a bunch of discussion, including at the tail end thread, I wrote like a micro essay on, you know, design or lack thereof in IO games based on sort of people talking about what didn't didn't work and what not, but it's, it's that good old, let's play some video games on the internet and complain about them together. And I like happy way sort of yay,

Jessamyn 51:17 that's fun. It's been nice to see loquacious around more to Yeah. I liked this post by storyboard. I'm talking about plain language. It's an animated and animated guide. And it's one of those things that I think a lot of us who are like hyper verbal, you know, Hey, I like to talk I like to write I like to explain things, whatever. don't often think that there are ways you can make your language more straightforward. Using, you know, simpler sentences, more basic vocabulary and clearer structure, so that more people can understand it. And I first got introduced to this, because I pay a little bit of attention to like plain language, Wikipedia. I mean, they call it like simple Wikipedia. But it's also like plain language, Wikipedia. And, you know, it's really interesting, if there's a topic on Wikipedia that like is just over my damn ad. Sometimes I can find the plain language version of the simple version, and at least get enough to know what I need to know about it. You know what I mean? And so this is just an animated guide to how to do it, and you can toggle switches to see sort of the difference between these things. And you know, I, I feel like it's really useful. I am definitely a discursive writer. And, Josh, maybe you are, maybe. But that's fine for many things, but it isn't always I'm trying to get ideas across in a way that is clear to as many people as possible. Yeah.

Cortex 53:00 You know, I mean, like to sort of like, pull several threads together, they're really this is something that came up explicitly when we were working on the newer site guidelines, and that

Jessamyn 53:12 I was just reading those again and marveling at how good they are.

Cortex 53:15 Yeah. And like the the, the first draft of them was a little bit worried, again, a little bit less focused on concision in plain language, and that is something that focus on the site where like, it'd be great to, like, make this more like, not like, college essay text. Yeah, like, it wasn't terrible, but it was still, you know, there was ticks there. And some of that was like, you know, my, my tendency and writing like, it wasn't just my work. But you know, I was part of that. And that's something that loop actually focused on in part in some of the rewrite that we did when we rolled out the revised version of it was like, okay, yeah, let's focus on sort of get the idea across and let's make the language plain and readable, and more accessible to everybody so that the guidelines are more useful in a very direct way. So

Jessamyn 54:01 yeah, well, I was just looking at them again, because somebody referred to them in a meta talk thread. And I was like, Oh, this is pretty good. Like they should be more front and center even because I do think they they sum up a lot of tricky aspects decently well.

Cortex 54:16 Yeah. Here is a thread that I think the thread is better than the study it links to basically, but this was going around that day on the internet of some scientists doing a study showing that mushrooms may communicate with each other using up to 50 like word like patterns, which is a very exciting

Jessamyn 54:38 it's a sport based thing right? Or is it not a sport based thing?

Cortex 54:42 It's it's some some sort of thing. I don't know I read the article. I did not read the article. I got to the part where people were complaining about the article not being very good before I got around to the reading. So so then I was like, You know what, I'll come back with someone's like here has a good follow up to that. Basically, it sounds like maybe like this is a got a bit of a reach of a conclusion based on what may or may not be meaningful stuff. But also it was a lot of fun to have a thread joking about mushrooms. So why I enjoyed the thread and Etrigan got in with the first comment, which was exactly the comment I thought of which is the Tumblr meme about you cannot kill me in a way that matters.

Jessamyn 55:22 From like, drinking around in a while.

Cortex 55:25 They just recently came back actually.

Jessamyn 55:28 Fantastic. So

Cortex 55:30 there you go. Yeah. Anyway, I enjoyed that. Fred. It was fun. Cool. What? Study is probably bunk thread is fun.

Jessamyn 55:41 And there's probably something to the study, but maybe not that right. Yeah.

Cortex 55:45 And and one of the things people talk about is like the context of it, which is nice. Like you can learn about sort of some of the surrounding situation and previous work by that guy and whatnot. Couple of people had good sort of professional opinions on why specifically the bunk might have occurred. So it's like it's educational. It's,

Jessamyn 56:02 I love being around a whole bunch of like, smart people like that, right? Yep. So lucky. So lucky. We are. So I promised I would get back to talking about Samantha. And here I am. Jim's is about some mental, which is actually a word game that you're gonna hate. And I'm sorry, I told you about it. But me

Cortex 56:26 specifically? No. And I have opinions. Okay, good. Please continue. Do you hate it, though? No, but I have feelings about it. Oh, good.

Jessamyn 56:35 I bet you do. Yes. But but it's made by a novellus underscore d t. Who's a me fight who's not around that much, but around a little bit. And

Cortex 56:47 catch that. Oh, really? He said, Yeah, that's great. I don't think I saw this thread.

Jessamyn 56:53 Yeah, I mean, well, because Samantha has been around. I mean, I think it's been around what, like 70 days now, so far, 70 some odd days. And, essentially, the idea is you have to guess the secret word. It's kind of like, you know, like, we all enjoy stuff like Wordle. But it uses semantic closeness. Using this word to veck thing, which I'm sure you can talk about more at length, based on sort of a corpus of like news articles. And so you type in a word, and then you get a number back, that tells you how close that word is to the secret word. And then if you're in the zone of within 1000 words, of the secret word, you get like a little green bar, kind of and that's close. And then the goal is to be you know, to guess the secret word. And often the secret word is like a word that's got kind of multiple meanings, you know, like bank or something like that. So that you can come to it from one direction or you can come to it from a completely different direction like one one day recently river

Cortex 57:59 would do well with bank and so with money, but like river money have fucking nothing to do with each other. So

Jessamyn 58:05 right and if you get if you're, if you're going in the river direction, you may be like river alluvial, sand, silt stones, fish, you know, and all of those are just like not, you know, they're, they're scoring a little bit, but if you also knew, you know, money storage vaults, safe, whatever, it would help you narrow down what was like, it's actually kind of fun to try and do it with someone else. Like, a lot of times, Jim and I and it's new word every day. Yeah. And, you know, there's a little Share link where you can, you know, share your stuff socially if you want to, there's a Reddit group that I actually spend time in. No one is more surprised than me. This. Also I found somebody on Reddit who's just talking terrible shit about me very recently. Oh, wow. Yeah. Like, regarding something I said a minute filter 10 years ago. Yeah, well, yep. Sorry. was weird, though. I'm not used to that anymore. They think I wrote my own Wikipedia page, that kind of thing. Just.

Cortex 59:15 Yeah, well, I mean, that's, that's, that's the paradox of race.

Jessamyn 59:18 It was all I can do to not be like, I'm right fucking here. Like, do you want to talk? Here's my phone number, like we're friends. So at any rate, Jim made this post. And then a lot of people talked about how they did on the various days or how they felt about it. And I love it. I have to tell you, like I hate, love it. There's a new word every day at 8pm My time. If I'm lucky, I can flail around and get the answer within like half an hour and my average number of guesses is 100. Yeah, just It's wacky.

Cortex 59:53 I have won it a couple times and lost it several more times.

Jessamyn 59:57 Well, you don't ever lose it.

Cortex 59:59 You give up? Well, you Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't mean that. I haven't lately. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:00:03 I don't mean like be a dick about it. I've just

Cortex 1:00:04 No, no, no, but it's a good comparison. Like, that's one of the things that's interesting about us like with Wordle, you've got six guesses. And if you didn't get there, boom, you're out of guesses. Some Antal no such construction, you can guess 1000 times if you want. I feel like I give up when I'm starting to feel like that's what I'm gonna do. Like, I feel good if I get up into like, the high nine, hundreds out of 1000. And then I'm like, Okay, I've basically won. Like getting the actual word would be like, bonus points. But like, you know, I did a good job of thinking about word associations. Right? Good for me.

Jessamyn 1:00:35 Well, so what are your thoughts about it? Because I mean, there's some like Bayesian nonsense going on on the back end. And I kind of think that's your middle name.

Cortex 1:00:42 The technology, the word to veck approach is really cool. It's a very clever way to do it. I I'm gonna link to a Twitter thread I wrote, like a week

Jessamyn 1:00:51 or two ago speaking about this. I feel like I follow you want Twitter?

Cortex 1:00:55 Yeah, but I post, you know, a lot of stuff. I don't know. Anyway, my thoughts summed up or there were basically like, I like some Antal. And it's also very frustrating. Because the way you have to try and find your way to the actual answer, the actual target word is different from how we as humans do word association. And this is the brilliant thing about Word to veck is you can feed it up corpus of words, and it will create this big high dimensional, like, vector space of associated words and how they're related to each other. But it's not doing it in a thoughtful way. It's doing it in a very computational way. And this is, this is what computational linguistics is great for being able to deal with a million words, instead of like 50. You can actually like let the computer do a bunch of stuff, but it has those limitations. And the thing with word Tyvek, is it comes up with a set of associations that are not always going to be intuitive to humans. And it is not going to make somebody associations that will be intuitive to Cuba. Well, that

Jessamyn 1:01:56 is the thing that I think everybody like, you know, one from a couple days ago might have been yesterday, but whatever it is, it's not today was I don't think it's today, well won't be by the time this is posted, is it was word bar, right? And alcohol didn't score in the top 1000. Words, because you don't use the word alcohol. A lot of times when you're talking about a bar and conventional speak, but everybody knows there's alcohol in a bar. That's exactly the purpose of a bar. But yeah, it's it's a

Cortex 1:02:29 good example of a word that has like a very strong cultural association that it's hard for us to play down because like bar also exists in a whole bunch of other contexts. Like, yeah. Whereas if the word was alcohol bar would probably score fairly well, because in the context of alcohol bar does get used a lot. I think like, that's one of the things is, I don't think the way this works would necessarily lead to totally symmetrical distributions of commonality. Right, right. Right. But this this is, this is the point where I start reaching past my general dilettantes familiarity with like word Tyvek. And some of the computational stuff into like, oh, well, now I'm just making assumptions that I have not tested. But anyway, it's

Jessamyn 1:03:10 David Turner, who's novellus underscore dt, you know, he, it's been interesting watching him iterate. You know, watching the game get better, or the stats get different. I mean, it's still doing the same thing. But he's, like, changed the front end a little bit. And he actually made a version that he just mentioned in the Reddit group, where you can like give someone a some mantle with a word you've chosen.

Cortex 1:03:38 Oh, neat. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:03:41 I love to see somebody getting engaged that way, right. I could totally see me doing that to Jim right. Just get out.

Cortex 1:03:49 Yeah, but then what if they just can't fucking exactly frustrated? Like this is like this is the Kiss Cam gun, wrong thing, but for like nerdy internet vocab games,

Jessamyn 1:03:57 right, right. Right, right. But the thread is fun. And, you know, it's it's often fun to like, introduce people to it, if it's the kind of thing they like, because there aren't a lot of things like this that

Cortex 1:04:09 I own. Yeah, that's the thing. I think you'll kind of know after like, one, maybe two, like I concluded, that's the kind of thing I like, and also I'm not going to make a regular habit of playing it because I find it too frustrating to not be able to, like find my way to the end or everyone's want to find my way to a start. This is one of the things about Samantha was like it's such a broad category of all semantic content in common language, right. So pick the pick something that's close enough to it, there's like, oh, it's something like this. That can I've gotten 30 Guesses without like getting into like the top 1000 Beat. The fuck am I going like, Okay, well, it's not like a horse and it's not like God, and it's not like I

Jessamyn 1:04:47 like to see. I mean, I'm always like fish democracy building office lunch, Green Street. Yeah, like I have like a set of Things that I tend to use to cast a wide net,

Cortex 1:05:03 I was speculating maybe in that Twitter thread, maybe in a different Twitter's mantle, about the idea of being able to like come up with like, good, like 12 Good guesses or 15 Good guesses that would like be distributed throughout the relation space in such a way that like, one of them would always be within 1000. Like, you know, how many how many wouldn't have to be and how doable even is that? Is the question that I invite someone else to do the work to figure out because I'm not gonna write but it's so interesting. Yeah. And I suddenly probably is like, I just I haven't been looking for the answers either. But anyway, yes. So mantel, it's great and terrible.

Jessamyn 1:05:39 Yeah. And thank you, Jim, for making that post. He told me he's like I made a post about it. I'm like, That game's been around for like a month already. But apparently,

Cortex 1:05:50 yeah, it's the things you need to get up and around. Yeah, word of mouth. I made a I've made a few posts. And I'm happy about that, because I like to make being post about things I like. But I want to mention this post specifically. Because it was just a little thing from a book I was reading called. It's an artwork called 100 boots, which is like a 51 photograph, photo essay by a woman named Eleanor Antin made in the early 1970s. It was just a bunch of pictures, black and white pictures of a bunch of rubber boots in a bunch of staged setups, I assumed

Jessamyn 1:06:21 it was going to be 100 pictures of a pair of boots. And this is not what I was expecting.

Cortex 1:06:27 And it's it's, it's delightful. It's very fun project. And there's some good context for it. But find out about this originally, I was reading a book recently on 60s and 70s. Art. I was

Jessamyn 1:06:40 sorry, for Internet posts, in my opinion. Yeah.

Cortex 1:06:43 Art books are good, because like, they won't spend enough time on anything I find interesting. But then there's the internet. So it's like, oh, okay, here's 100 ideas, none of which you've covered to my satisfaction. But that's because you're a book and not the entire Internet. So yeah, I went and found this and put together a post. And then I mentioned it not like like the post is nice, you know, go look at it. But Christie showed up and asked a bunch of interesting questions about it. And then when they showed up and provided answers to some of those via her grandfather, who or their grandfather, who I think was directly involved in some of the production of it. It was like, it's like a five common thread, but it's got this fantastic. It is great. Yeah. So that was that speaking of smart people hanging around on the site, well, exactly things. So I thought that was kind of great.

Jessamyn 1:07:32 And then lapolla at the end was saying, Oh, she was my teacher at UCSD. I was I was in a film she made about Rasputin. Yes. Nice. Yes. So cool. Yeah.

Cortex 1:07:46 One more medical two posts for me briefly, a short story. One of the many bits of sci fi brainwave has been posting. This one is story called tomorrow's dictator. And I thought it was very good. And I enjoyed reading it. And I think other people will enjoy reading too. That's it. It's a short story. So talking about it all feels like getting into spoiler territory. But

Jessamyn 1:08:07 I also enjoyed your scrabble post, which I feel like I don't even have to mention just tell people to go freakin read it. It was awesome. I was literally playing Scrabble. When I saw this post.

Cortex 1:08:18 I very much thought of you when I was making up. But that's that's me for Metafilter anything else on the blue? Where do you want to go on? Okay, hit it, hit it hard on ask this is all on you, I think oh, great for everything.

Jessamyn 1:08:30 Um, well, beach, or at least this is how I pronounced their username. Um, it's like, I gotta go to a funeral. I'm autistic. I really, you know, don't know how to talk to these people. And I could really use a lot of advice. Thanks. You know, because basically, you know, they're not super close to this person. But just the art was kind of appealed to them once a long time ago, but really wants to push through that and do good at the funeral. And it's just a very nice compassionate thread of people talking about ways to handle the stuff that is hard about this kind of social communication. And I'm always happy when when people do a great job this great long comment by Jane the brown. Haven't heard yet. how it went, but Beach, please let us know how it went. But you know, funerals are hard and complicated. Funerals are harder. And I could I asked a very similar question about I don't even remember what it was. But it was it was a you know, grieving etiquette question and, you know, there's lots of people who have been there and so it's really nice to have people he'll be able to help you out. I think, yeah. Oh my god, this. There's a great there's a great library question that that wound up not having like the result. So it's by Pedro, soy. And basically, somebody's clearing out the house for parents lived in. There's a copy of this magazine, somebody wrote page 29 On the cover page 29 Wasn't there? How do they figure out what was on there? And they wound up writing to a Library and Archives Canada, who wrote back what was on the page. And it wasn't necessarily anything specific. So, I mean, it's an interesting, it's an interesting quest. I had hoped, you know, because, like with a lot of these library things, I'm like, Well, I have access to a lot of stuff. Maybe I'll be the one who can help. I had nothing here but I was interested to see kind of how it how it worked. Or, you know, didn't work basically.

Cortex 1:11:18 Yeah. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:11:21 Yeah. Ah, the Dobbs has a another one of these kinds of perennial. Ask me questions that are always good. Like, what's the best blah? Yeah, I liked it. It's got 100 answers. 200 favorites. I think I mentioned what I thought the best I don't even know what I had opinions about anymore. Oh, yeah. Bag balm, my old Kindle, which I think is good. The pens that I like, and the clogs that I like, but everybody's got you know, good recommendations for what they think the best is and why they think it's the best and it's really good. It's a really good thread.

Cortex 1:12:07 See seat. Do you know

Jessamyn 1:12:11 the fuck, yes. Yes.

Cortex 1:12:16 I was gonna make a joke about the song. You're the best around nothing's ever gonna stupid. And then I realized I didn't know anything about other than that chorus. I don't know that song at all. I don't think it looks like maybe it's by Joe Esposito. And it looks like it was on the Karate Kid soundtrack. It's only in my head because it's part of a song off one of the Nielsen Iriga mouth.

Jessamyn 1:12:38 That guy.

Cortex 1:12:40 I love that guy. I know those albums. But I won't talk about it again. Right now. I'll wait till the next album comes out. But I actually I did have a couple of questions. So I can actually I can participate in this bit. It turns out one of them's like the lookup why No, I can I'm saying I feel like brought stuff. Yeah, let's go me. No. So I asked about, you know, they're looking for sounds that shout their gender. Like the idea that there is like a macho or a femme like, sound feeling. Oh, it sounded like an objective way. But you know, it's

Jessamyn 1:13:18 like, what what are sounds that did feel masculine or feel feminine to you?

Cortex 1:13:22 Yeah. Which is like, you know, it's a it's an interesting it's an interesting question, because like, there is so much like association we do with sort of gender coding that we don't even fucking think about a lot of the time. That like, yeah, this Yeah. Anyway, so I thought it was an interesting sort of trip into that sort of phonetic and sort of psycho semantic territory psychosomatic Sure. Let's say that psycho linguistic maybe

Jessamyn 1:13:56 linguistic is a real word. Psychosomatic probably is but

Cortex 1:14:00 psychosomatic attic insane? What's that from? It's like, it's something from a fucking song. It's like I was gonna say it was like maybe the Cypress Hill thing or whatever. So I'm gonna Google psychosomatic attic. Insane. Please talk about another question.

Jessamyn 1:14:15 Well, I was interested in specifically since we're talking about octopod ease. There is an absolutely unrelated asked Metafilter question by Dorothy Hawk about interpreting what modernities says about charity. Basically, somebody putting together a financial plan. it'll involve giving away money. You know, they're unobservant ly Jewish, but they really like the whole idea of I don't know how to pronounce this word, to sadaqa sadaqa. Maybe somebody can tell me but just about, about how to give to charity. Basically, You know, like, there's different levels of charitable giving. And, you know, they're trying to kind of figure out how to, you know, some of these are like, for instance, mutual anonymity to give to the poor without knowing to whom one gives and without the recipient knowing from who he received. And so figuring out how to do that, and so there's a lot of interesting and as I've said, I've been reading all these Rabbi books, I'm interested in, you know, different parts of Judaism, Rabbi smile in the books is really into my mind at ease. And there's just people's reflection on how that's supposed to work and how you could make it work for you. Yeah, that I enjoyed because charitable giving us the thing that I think about I told you about our weekly bbka that we do.

Cortex 1:15:50 Still go over time. You mentioned that I want Bob, still going

Jessamyn 1:15:53 strong. Well, maybe Josh, when you fully extricated yourself from this messy Octopodes piece of metal filter, we can we can talk about BCA. So but yeah, I'm just thinking, thinking about charitable giving and thinking about how to how to make that work for you is, to me a really interesting topic and people came in with some really good ideas.

Cortex 1:16:15 Nice. Yeah. It was prodigy, by the way, it was the breathe. And it turns out, this is an absolute revelation to me, because I never paid any attention to this. The Lyric is not the psychosomatic attic insane, which is I'd always somehow decided it involved being in an attic. Like maybe it makes sense in the belfry. It's psychosomatic addict. Insane, which also got actually mad. Right. So okay, it's like, okay.

Jessamyn 1:16:44 nother list generating question. Ah, let's think about outdoor art installations. Cyndago basically wants to find out door exhibitions that they can see in the summer. Like, what are your favorites? And there's a nice list of places you can go and look at art outside and I got to mention my favorite D. Lemon fair sculpture park up here in rural Vermont. Excellent. I don't know why it's called lemon fair. But Jim, and I found it by accident when we were like, just going to look into town. So it was really cool.

Cortex 1:17:21 Nice. Well, I have an art question as well. This was a question from Ando at MP. This is one of those usernames I've never actually tried to parse other than visually. I don't

Jessamyn 1:17:33 know. Yeah, I don't know, either. But yeah, I remember this one. Sorry, go on.

Cortex 1:17:38 Yeah, the question is, like, have there been art shows where the art just didn't exist? Where are the other textbook questions, you know, like, you know, empty picture frames, projectors that aren't running stands for sculptures that aren't actually on those stands. And then descriptions of the art, which is an interesting question. And like, it made me think of a bunch of stuff, but nothing that was like, specifically that. But, you know, I called out a couple of things that I was familiar with. And a bunch of people had other things, including one mentioned was like the Museum of nonvisible art, which is like, I think about as on the money as anything in here. But there's a bunch of good examples of like, yeah, these are this way of thinking about sort of deconstructing the notion of like, a physical art piece in place, like, people have done lots of things in that general territory, like the idea of doing something to sort of, like, comment on or expand away from, you know, the assumptions you make about, you know, objects on the walls, or sitting on stands. So, there's a bunch of basically, there's a bunch of cool stuff that people ended up mentioning in the comments. And I thought that was fun. It's a fun question. Yeah, yeah,

Jessamyn 1:18:47 conceptually, really interesting. I liked a lot of these responses to this question by Juby. Basically, thinking about hunter gatherers, and, you know, once they were done catching their will to beast or whatever they were doing, like, did they have more free time? Did they have more fun? Like, obviously, they, you know, died earlier had more diseases, but, you know, let's talk about quality of life has modern day civilization actually made our life force and there's a lot of you know, sort of feedback about that and other things you might want to read and, you know, Jared Diamond calling farming the worst mistake in human history. Jared Diamond, but there's a lot of other Daniel Everett's book, don't sleep, there are snakes about a guy who goes to Brazil to convert a, you know, quote, unquote, Stone Age tribe and actually found that they were doing fine. It didn't make sense to him to want to change their lives, you know, and so, looking at different cultures, ones that exist now that don't have a lot of modern technology, ones that used to exist and how did that Go. It's just a really thoughtful, you know, thoughtful thread that I enjoyed reading about.

Cortex 1:20:06 Yeah, that's excellent. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:20:09 I just finished reading a book that I've forgotten the name of, but it's basically was recommended by another mefite about kind of a stone age tribe, like literally they, you know, made Flint's and traded them with other with other groups in order to kind of meet their needs. And then the Bronze Age came. And it was it was literally just on the cusp of, you know, they were they were the best stone maker, tool makers in the hole in the land. And then suddenly trade was falling off and they were having a hard time figuring it out. And then yeah, they figured it out. Great story. Great book. Oh, good for them. Yeah.

Cortex 1:20:50 I asked a question this last month. Specifically, what the hell is this thing? That's it this tweet thread where someone had pictures of a thing? I don't know what the hell it was. It's around plastic II thingy. And oh, with an answer, and I want to fucking re up. It's just that that gets all right. Like someone, someone is going to be able to look at that thing and say, Oh, I know exactly what that is. But like so far, it's only been people saying, oh, you know what it looks like? Is this or that? Which are apparently not the things that we they still don't know what it is. I should check back on. You know, this is on me. I didn't check back to see if they got an answer in the Twitter thread. I was hoping one one would just show up.

Jessamyn 1:21:28 I just looked and I didn't see one. Weird.

Cortex 1:21:33 Yeah, I see. I see updates from people saying once again. Hey, no, that's thing already said. It isn't. But yeah, yeah, I'm not. I'm not seeing. I'm not seeing an obvious answer. Twitter's threading is like terrible. So who knows? But can be turned? Yeah, I think I think I think it's still an open question. I don't know what that is. And I see your face on on on Twitter when I go back to my main page. But someone was tweeting about your meet the librarians?

Jessamyn 1:22:03 Oh, yeah. Very famous. The Internet Archive really likes to trade on my reputation. And sometimes I let them was National Library Week last week. You know, I'm not going to say I'm the most photogenic person in the world. But that picture is eye catching. And yeah, they just talk. It's

Cortex 1:22:23 it's a good picture, you get a nice face.

Jessamyn 1:22:25 A nice place. My last one from AskMe Metafilter. Is this thing by BDC? 34. Have the things you find on the ground changed in the last 30 years?

Cortex 1:22:39 If no, they're all made of plastic, and they're

Jessamyn 1:22:41 one of those great, almost everyone gets a best answer. Yeah. But people talk about like what they see on the ground and how it's different.

Cortex 1:22:51 You did not actually paste the link in by the way, so just oh, what take your word for it so far.

Jessamyn 1:22:56 Oh, it's just there. I just had to editor

Cortex 1:23:00 Yeah, podcasting. I know, I know. I know. But me not editing. Hey.

Jessamyn 1:23:08 But yeah, you know, people are seeing like more dental flossers. Now they find less money. There was more match books. Nobody sees cassette tapes anymore. That kind of thing. So yeah, it was just kind of an interesting and interesting thread about like, hey, what's what's on the ground now?

Cortex 1:23:27 That's great. Like that's, it's a weird little, like, pile of doesn't matter details. But it's also like it's part of your atmospheric sense of the world as you move through it. Yeah. I saw I actually I saw a fucking unraveled cassette tape like a couple of weeks ago, and it was the most exciting there was like, holy shit. A fucked up cassette tape. So like, you know, yes. I'm feeling like it was it was weird because it had been so long that like, yeah. And it was just like a like, Maxell 90 minute thing. So it wasn't like something that I could say I know what this is. It was just unlabeled. Wow, though. I was not gonna pick it up and wind it up and bring it home and try and feed it into a cassette deck that I think I have somewhere. It's like that would have been too much work.

Jessamyn 1:24:07 Cassette tape. I'm looking at my sampler right now. But I don't listen to cassettes that often. Every now and again. I like having it.

Cortex 1:24:15 I've always kind of wanted to pick up one of the old four track cassette recorder stations. Oh, man,

Jessamyn 1:24:21 Jim got rid of his probably five years ago. Yeah,

Cortex 1:24:25 I mean, they're not great that the sound quality is not great. You know, they're inflexible. cassette tapes don't really do a great job of handling multitrack audio like that. But also, it's kind of great. It's kind of great. And maybe I'll get one at some point. If I can still find one that isn't like, you know, either completely broken or Oh, you want this piece of vintage audio recording equipment to you okay, right.

Jessamyn 1:24:47 It'll cost Yeah.

Cortex 1:24:50 Changing, touching, touching, touching. It's more normal. Yeah. Oh, I have a couple of brief update ones. Some posts that have received a late update, one of which was M Park was looking for what song was in a video, like five years ago. And it turns out it was Madonna, immobile by Verdi. So cool. It was it was very. And then another one that I think is even more of a callback, there was a question from Jim and two T Aw, asking how to buy a copy of the 1979 Dutch film appname. And he asked us back in 2007, and he recently founded for sale on a site called Rare film m.com Oh, 18 years later, answered his own question.

Jessamyn 1:25:45 Oh, my God, that's great. I love it. Oh, I really like the fact that 15

Cortex 1:25:49 years later, an old film is more available rather than less available, which is the prevailing fucking wins. That is

Jessamyn 1:25:56 interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Also, I mentioned Josh, I should probably tell you that I told somebody, you would give them a good reference if they wanted to adopt a dog.

Cortex 1:26:07 Okay. Is that a lie? Or?

Jessamyn 1:26:12 No, you will. This is this is user space cadet and okay. And they lost their

Cortex 1:26:18 dog. Like if it was Elon Musk as he's like, no, no.

Jessamyn 1:26:22 And they lost their dog recently. And they're looking for a new dog. And, you know, there's an adoption process and sometimes they want, like, a reference, you know, and they're like, Who do we talk to? And so, they had a funny question, like, Who do I ask my therapist, pharmacist, doctor, internet friend? I've never met in person.

Cortex 1:26:42 Yeah, no, thanks.

Jessamyn 1:26:45 They ended it with your name. And so I just mentioned Yeah, we totally do.

Cortex 1:26:49 I would fuckin absolutely vouch for a pet process for mefite. That's, that's a fancy. That's that. Okay, I'm gonna add that to the list along with the podcasts and things I will still do, even though I'm trying to otherwise transition away from former. There'll be a reference for a pet adoption. Let me know I will I will step up. And yeah, well, we're just about at 90 minutes, which feels like a good oh, we better fucking stop point. Yeah, I will link for good measure to the metal talk, announcements, thread. And otherwise, there was stuff on meta talk this month. Feel free to go look. There. We did meta talk.

Jessamyn 1:27:30 I think that sounds good. sun hasn't even set here. I do like springtime.

Cortex 1:27:35 Yeah, it's kind of nice. Portland has been all over the fucking place right now. It feels like it's going to get dark here just because it's really moved in. But I don't mind that. Yeah, all right, podcasting. We did it. We did it again. And we'll do it again. Again.

Jessamyn 1:27:52 Fan freaking tastic. Turn it around. I look forward to listening to it. And I hope you have a good rest of your weekend.

Cortex 1:27:57 You too. Cool. I'll talk to you later friend. Bye bye friends. Bye, everybody.