Podcast 184 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 184: Sentences are music (2022-05-08).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:08 This is episode 184 of the metal filter monthly podcast. I am Josh cortex Mullard.

Jessamyn 0:16 And I'm Jessamyn.

Cortex 0:17 And we are here talking. Oh, it's April 28. And the last one we did on, like April 10. April 11. We were late there. We're getting in early here. We don't know for sure. It was it was it was.

Jessamyn 0:33 Well, I'm glad we got it done.

Cortex 0:35 Yes, exactly. And now we can now we can have a nice condensed one in terms of timespan that doesn't mean we won't talk for 90 minutes. But you know, who knows? But yeah,

Jessamyn 0:45 I'll pretend I have a hard stop at four. But I don't. Okay, that sounds good. 184 is a magic number.

Cortex 0:53 Is it? Remind me what a magic number is? That seems like

Jessamyn 0:57 the Wikipedia article. It's the number of nucleons such they're arranged into complete shells. All right, but it's not one of the seven most widely recognized magic numbers. I guess it's a less widely known magic number.

Cortex 1:18 Okay, just gotta fucking look it up. What is ultra magic number? Oh, they

Jessamyn 1:22 are magic. It's the lowest higher magic number.

Cortex 1:25 This is magic numbers for like physics. Physics you did. But like I heard, I feel like magic number is also like a mathematical. It is term and I can't remember. Yeah. Well, it's

Jessamyn 1:38 a chemical term too. I guess. Like, scientists really liked the idea of calling something magic because their lives.

Cortex 1:51 Boy, yeah, I should not just sit here and read a Wikipedia on air.

Jessamyn 1:54 I mean, you can right. Judgment zone here. Yeah. But you know, but then I'll start talking about what I want to talk about this week is fair use.

Cortex 2:07 There's also a Wikipedia article about highways numbered 184. I'm gonna go ahead and link to that. Fair Use. Tell me about fair use. Well, I tell me what's on your mind about fair use. I

Jessamyn 2:18 know I'm going to Canada tomorrow. Which, you know, sounds like a lot. But it's actually a little it's easier to get to Canada than Boston, with the one exception of having to download an app in order to go to Canada.

Cortex 2:32 Which is a little weird. What so is it like a passport supplement app? Or

Jessamyn 2:38 it's like you answer a bunch of questions via the app, and then you get a QR code, and then they can kind of determine what they still need to know from you. And it also includes like your vaccination status, and you know how you're feeling today. And, you know, all these all these things. So I'm going to Montreal, which is close for the young lawyers division of the Vermont Bar Association's winter thaw. I'm the keynote speaker. It'll be the first public talk I've given since 2019. Like two people as to Zoom's Sure. I'm pretty excited about it. I don't have the accompanying terror that I feel like I should have. But maybe this is I'm two, three years older now. And maybe that doesn't happen anymore. And they were basically like, what do you want to talk about? And I'm like, what? Like, that never happens. Usually, they're like, We want you to talk about this. And usually, it's something I only kind of want to talk about, and I make it work. But this time, I'm like, I don't know. How about fair use. And so I'm going to talk about like my different experiences and fair use, including malt shop getting sued by copyright trolls, Wikipedia being against fair use in some substantive ways, because it's not free enough. And watching a friend of mines Facebook Live stream gets shut down as soon as they started playing a little video on their phone that had copyrighted music in it. Like literally the entire thing, just like, stopped and kicked everybody out. And everyone was like, what happened? And then you had to find your way back to a new stream.

Cortex 4:23 It's insane. Yeah,

Jessamyn 4:25 so fair use is a land of contrasts. And and it's weird, because Fair Use isn't the same in Canada, but I'm speaking to American lawyers. This is kind of a like a, like a social slash continuing ed thing for them. Yeah. And so they do it in Montreal. So they bring their family up, and it's fun. Nice. Yeah. So my thoughts about fair use, and it's only like a 30 minute talk. 45 minute talk, which for me is like as you know, just getting started. So I've had to really keep it, keep it tight, which is good. Not not my not my strength, but I'm looking forward to trying it.

Cortex 5:03 Yeah. It's it's it's it's useful in educational to be forced into concision?

Jessamyn 5:10 I think so, and the toxic 11. And, you know, we can argue about whether it's useful to try and force yourself into waking up early so that you can get paid a lot of money for work. And I think so. But you know, I usually wake up at 11. And this talk is at 11. So we'll see how that goes.

Cortex 5:32 Well, let's see. Yeah, that seems worth it.

Jessamyn 5:35 Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's definitely worth it. Or I would have said no, but like,

Cortex 5:40 Oh, if only that were always true about things in life. If we could just say with confidence every time, you know, I would have said no, if this wasn't worth it, you know. Simpler world,

Jessamyn 5:51 sometimes you don't realize until a little bit later. Yeah. Or sometimes as often happens to me. Like I would have said, No, if there was another living person who could have done this, and now I realized I have to teach other living people how to do this. But for now, I'm just gonna do the thing. You know, we have to up late upload the agenda for the Conservation Commission meeting to the town website within 48 hours before the thing or else it's illegal, because, you know, open meeting laws, and our secretary is taken a couple months off because she's doing work stuff. She got a new job. So it turns out nobody else knows how to do that. But me, so I guess I'll do it.

Cortex 6:40 All right. All right. All right. Okay. Just channeling my inner Peter Falk there, I guess.

Jessamyn 6:49 And it snowed yesterday. Oh, yeah.

Cortex 6:52 I guess that that seems less shocking for Vermont

Jessamyn 6:57 than somebody not being able to use a website I don't Well no,

Cortex 7:00 no, no, no then then snow yesterday would have been here although we had snow this month so who knows? Yeah.

Should we talk about some metal filter stuff? Like metal filter? I mean, if you want to we don't have to. We can. We can just go for that. We can go full uncle. What is it Uncle Grandpa? Bad Grandpa, Uncle Grandpa. I think I don't know what you're talking. I've got on a swerve. But okay, so this is this is a this is a self serve. self fulfilling tangent. So I've mentioned my brother, my brother and me before podcast, I enjoyed listening. I got some

Jessamyn 7:57 points for knowing those guys existed in a mini league on the trivia

Cortex 8:01 nice, beautiful. Yeah. They, their usual format for the podcast is they'll just sort of start talking about something for, you know, 510 15 minutes up front, like, they'll get into some sort of goof and they'll sort of run with it. And then they'll like, fairly organically decided, okay, you know what, we have to actually start the podcast now. And then they did one where they started talking about a movie that maybe was called Uncle Grandpa. I don't know, maybe. But anyway, something grandpa. Maybe Uncle Grandpa is the name of a band, something involving grandpa that they ended up like talking for like 10 minutes about like, Okay, we should get to the show. But you know, another thing about this movie is, and then they talked about anymore, and then like, pretty soon they were a half an hour in and they still hadn't started the show. And they just like committed and they just spent the entire fucking episode they did nothing that they normally do. They just kept talking for like, 45 minutes an hour about, like, whatever that bad movie was. And so I was gonna say we could pull. We could pull like an Uncle Grandpa. But a, I don't know if Uncle grandpa's even the name of the thing be, why would you or anyone else necessarily get that reference? And see, we probably shouldn't because it's not like we have a juicy thing to talk about here to get distracted for an hour

Jessamyn 9:30 on No, absolutely nothing juicy that we could talk for. I mean, we're starting this podcast at 240. And we've just been dishing about various things before we hit record, none of which we are going to continue to talk about I apologize to our listeners.

Cortex 9:48 You know, there's there's there's one of the nice things about having a, you know, decade and a half long you know, friendship and working relationship is you can do a lot of disgust Seeing and venting about nitty gritty stuff in a way that is, you know, appropriate for like that sort of friendship situation are not appropriate for talking on mic to the entire Internet.

Jessamyn 10:09 So sorry for broadcasting and you know, in an indelible always going to be there fashion. Another thing somebody could start, this is also the first podcast, we're going to have somebody else help us do sound engineering. And the reason I mentioned that is because at some future point, it would be nice to be able to get back to having transcripts again. So if one of our 11 listeners is interested in helping that that might be a thing Pronoiac could help set up but I think doesn't want to manage, you know, because that's how it was working before with whatever that wacky software was that we had.

Cortex 10:46 Yeah, well, well, you know, yeah, had been, there was some software for like doing group work bit by bit on transcripts and stuff. And I think that's still out there and still available. And it's just like, it's a fair amount of work. Like, it just takes a while to transcribe stuff. So like, a 90 minute podcast means, you know, a lot of hours of volunteer labor doing the listing and typing, which if people are down for getting back to it, fucking day, that's great. There's also stuff like otter.ai, that I was unhappy with, like the results when we threw it at it, because it was just like, it felt like so much of a mess. But also, I don't need to be the person making that decision. If it's if it's more useful than nothing, then like making a point of doing that regularly,

Jessamyn 11:26 right? That it might actually be a great idea, like maybe somebody else would feel, pardon me, the amount of work it would require to do something like that might be better, like, like tidying up something like that might be better slash easier than doing it by hand, maybe I don't know.

Cortex 11:45 But you know, like, in the spirit of, you know, trying to think more about like, direct community involvement and stuff and making volunteer label labor a more practical part of stuff like that's, that's a good fit for it. Because it's like, it's not something that requires a great deal of commitment. It's not something that requires a great deal of wrangling. It just takes, you know, someone doing a little bit of setup work and a bunch of people doing a little bit of work just because they have the time and inclination.

Jessamyn 12:16 Yeah, you don't have to know how to code and it'll increase the level of accessibility of these podcasts, which, you know, I'm always happy when podcasts have transcripts, so why wouldn't other people?

Cortex 12:26 Yeah. So we'll see what happens here. But yeah, no, I'm excited about that. Yeah. We'll, we'll see how the whole process goes of having someone not me do it.

Jessamyn 12:36 Right. I don't want to call them out yet. Because maybe it works. Thank you.

Cortex 12:41 They're like, you know, actually, then, yeah, Want

Jessamyn 12:43 them this was on the record as a disaster.

Cortex 12:50 But, uh, but still, that's that's the plan. And I'm looking forward to it. And, yeah, one more, one more thing off off the plate. I'm increasingly i I'm very close to being like, done with responsibilities now, which is, so you say? So I said, well, but yeah, I've checked off a lot of boxes, there's, there's still little things to do. But like, you know, most of this stuff that would have had me as an intermediary, or a bottleneck is now not

Jessamyn 13:19 and well, that's awesome. The next bottleneck seems

Cortex 13:22 like stuff without a site, depending on me. And that's yeah, that's just that's a good change. And like one of the necessary useful things here. So a lot of that is done, which is great. You know, there's still other stuff to do, but, but it's not everything hinging on me, which is extremely good. Extremely freeing for me. And I've been getting a lot of reading done, I've been making some art playing some video games. And just sort of like adjusting. Like, it's weird. It's weird not to be working mod shifts, right. Let's just like the way I have thought about structuring my day around like when I'm working, and some of the sort of like mental gymnastics that go with, like, you know, being ready for dealing with this or that and thus, like, you know, not wanting to get into this before, you know, or whatever, like, yeah, there's a lot of that the headspace management you do around like, what you have coming up that like, a lot of that headspace management feels very baked in place, even without the like, job shifts now, so it's kind of a weird thing of unpacking, like the things that like I'm doing to like, you know, work around a shift, it's not there. It's like, oh, I don't need to do that structural work around that. I could just like, you know, write I write, like, in principle, do whatever the fuck I want today in practice, you know, brains a little more complicated. I got to sort of figure out how that's gonna work. But I just doing it sitting on the couch and reading has been happening a lot more, which is like, a nice change. Nice.

Jessamyn 14:52 Yeah, I bought two big bags of apples when I went to the supermarket earlier this week, because I make applesauce pretty much regularly but then I didn't make up Besides yesterday or the day before, which means really, because I'm gonna be gone for a couple days today is probably the day. But also, you know, I've got some international travel coming up and so yeah, we'll see how that goes. It's windy as hell outside though so not as appealing for a really long walk.

Cortex 15:17 You know if you if you spell applesauce with a B, stop, you could call it applesauce. Does that mean anything to you? No. It's not TikTok a bunch.

Jessamyn 15:29 I'm just not a TikTok person.

Cortex 15:32 I'll see if I can find a

Jessamyn 15:35 apple sauce.

Cortex 15:36 I have no idea. I

Jessamyn 15:37 have no idea to me.

Cortex 15:38 Well, okay, I'll I'll, I'll find I'll find a video with it.

Jessamyn 15:42 No. Words.

Cortex 15:45 It's you know the words I said. Imagine, imagine someone singing those words to think it must be a lil NAS X song. Here's, here's, here's, it's, it's just, it's, I have no idea where this came from. It's like a 10 second long, random bit of data gouffre and it shows up in a lot of TikTok videos because that's the perfect like sounds to put behind a random TikTok. And that's all I can tell you. If you spell applesauce with a B, you can call it applesauce. That's the entire thing. That's the entire thing.

Jessamyn 16:24 I have now watched the entire thing. I don't know what I just watched. And since comments are turned off, I definitely don't know.

Cortex 16:31 Yep. And I have no idea if that video is in any way the source or just yet another person doing something with that audio, which seems likely anyway. I'm sorry. What the fuck are you talking about?

Jessamyn 16:43 I was just talking about the Canada making applesauce is probably a thing I have to fit into the remaining hours of my day which shouldn't be that difficult but maybe let's get a move on.

Cortex 16:53 Right okay. Yes, let's let's let's project making this applesauce.

Jessamyn 16:57 Jack seen a bunch of old timers in there that I appreciated including Ron G is making Moonmilk is making these little guys little little entron animal sculptures look very similar in some ways to the little guys from last month. I believe that hedgehog is not dissimilar but I checked the date and it's not the same. Yep, just different weird little guys. Yeah. And then I'm Derek fraying who you remember from a million years

Cortex 17:30 ago

Jessamyn 17:31 basically, you know made websites did community was just dealing with a bunch of shit left the Bay Area started growing hemp and now him and Heather do a bunch of CBD stuff farm stuff. This goes to their actual farm but you can kind of also follow them around on on Instagram and a bunch of other places a lot of a lot of cute cute animal pictures goat and goat I gotta all you fascists born to lose bound to lose, which I don't think is available on their website anymore. But you can get an aura goatee in bumper sticker work hard keep going sticker and patriotic Americans get vaccinated sticker. And I was just happy to see. Happy to see Derek around.

Cortex 18:32 Yeah, he's a he's an excellent guy too. So I've had a social contact with him over the years. Yeah, that too, which is nice.

Jessamyn 18:41 And I interact with him on that Birzeit and he's funny there a lot of times or interesting or whatever.

Cortex 18:52 Boy Yeah, there was a what was catching my eye. Well, there's actually a very nice little game from malevolence is is one thing. This little game called okay. Oh, yeah.

Jessamyn 19:04 That was on my list too.

Cortex 19:05 Yeah, it's just the you know, it's it's a nice simple little game made as a you know, quick little short timeframe thing and and yeah,

Jessamyn 19:16 every time I see the full WTF URL, it just makes me smile. I love it. And speaking of other old timers Gross is here with some sciency science thing.

Cortex 19:33 Always with the science the science I always like seeing across post because I never know what the fuck is actually going on with it because I don't like nothing about like practical genetics shit, but but he's always doing it.

Jessamyn 19:46 Yeah, basically, it seems like it has to do with figuring out which parts of a gene like viruses, I think attached to are in something It looks super cool. I don't understand it. He's the PI on it. Good for them. And it speeds up a whole bunch of stuff that previously took forever. And it's on GitHub. So, here's some quick starts. The FAQ has one question. And yeah, if you're a sciency science person, you should check it out.

Cortex 20:29 Okay, then on that sequence

Jessamyn 20:35 what happened?

Cortex 20:37 I've just, I'm full of free associations today. I just reminded me and I was, I was starting to tell the story and then starting to wonder if I had told the story previously, for some reason. When Grif they had a kid named Helio. And, you know, I'd been like DMing him, you know, some sort of congrats, thing about it. And then I'd said, or I guess I could say, you completed the Helios sequence. And he was like, I don't know what that means. I was like, Oh, wait, the Helios sequence is a local band. You wouldn't know who they are. That's not a joke. Oops.

Jessamyn 21:13 That's not a joke here. Speaking of Grif Did you see that Griffin bond Cliff saw each other?

Cortex 21:18 I did. It was like a magical sigil showing up on my fucking like, you know, social media feeds like, How is this possible? How are these? How are these two good boys in the same place?

Jessamyn 21:29 I don't even remember if it was. If I saw it on Griffiss Instagram or other gyms.

Cortex 21:39 Yeah. But yeah. Bond Cliff was going to see

Jessamyn 21:45 it was on Chris.

Cortex 21:46 As as he is want to do.

Jessamyn 21:50 And, and yeah, well, and I think that was like they were New Year's shows that were postponed. And so he was kind of in New York on a random time. Yep. And yeah, I didn't I should have known but I kind of didn't know they knew each other. Like, it makes sense that they would know each other but I don't think I've seen them interacting like a lot.

Cortex 22:13 Yeah, yeah, no. I would have to I would have to think through my my Twitter conversations like there's a post from valorous some some baseball content. It's been a while since I've talked about baseball, but is an album called reunion tour that they contributed some songs to along with a bunch of other people that is a collection of baseball and music by people other than the sort of accidentally official baseball band the garages who have also put out a ton of albums about baseball that I've talked about in the past, so yeah, get some baseball content, get some get some baseball music there.

Jessamyn 23:00 Did something. Is there? Like is there i Suddenly I suddenly saw, I also want to apologize in advance if my sound is fuckity because like, it was too loud. And we installed like a little thing that will hopefully keep chrome from like auto adjusting, but maybe it means it's all screwed up. So sorry.

Cortex 23:25 Some reason installed make me think like, like, like a stent or something. Yeah, I don't know why. Ah.

Jessamyn 23:34 Oh, um, did baseball like start up again? Or something? Like yeah, it's been it's been really just saw a bunch of baseball content in the last like, week or two.

Cortex 23:44 It's been off and on like, they've been taking big breaks. I don't know that it has started back up. But there might have been some other thing going on. I guess we're gonna look@baseball.com and see if it's saying anything. Yeah, so they're still they're still on a break right now after I think maybe there was some stuff earlier this year. I know. There was some stuff last year. But yeah, they've been kind of doing it like with intentional, like, stuff happening. And then a break and then stuff happening and then a break. So yeah, I don't I don't know why there would have been a big whip up lately, but who knows? Yeah,

Jessamyn 24:19 I mean, it could literally just be like one or two friends of mine from Twitter that were like, hey, you know, I'm excited about this this week for some reason. But

Cortex 24:29 yeah, yeah, I don't know. I've been I've been not keeping like real close track. But I'm looking forward to the next time it spins back up and trying to get back into that firehose of creative, weird energy. It's a good time to remember I had any other specific things I wanted to pull out. Oh, Jay Harris is starting a new blog or has started a new blog set Side B. J. Harris is like a bigger rope like nerd than I am. Impossible. Well, that's the thing. Like, absolutely. Handily, far and away has always been a good source of

Jessamyn 25:14 roguelikes you're just like you're a little dude in a dungeon carrying a sword and you pick it up and push it down.

Cortex 25:20 Ah, but more so but yes. That's I, it's boy. It's a it's a whole complicated thing.

Jessamyn 25:27 Like, I mean, why is it complicated?

Cortex 25:29 It's complicated because the history of people talking about what roguelike means has,

Jessamyn 25:33 Oh, I see. There's an overweening fan group. Yeah, like,

Cortex 25:37 well, if like 1520 years ago, you said like, what's a roguelike? There was like a very straightforward set of answers. And they mostly had to do with like, terminal. text based games. Okay,

Jessamyn 25:48 and don't get me wrong. I have played and understand rogue. I just wasn't sure if roguelike encompassed.

Cortex 25:55 Well, yeah, that's the thing. So like, 20 years ago, wrote, like, encompass games that were very much like rogue, you know, and people would have arguments sometimes about well, is Diablo a roguelike? And other people be like, No, it's absolutely fucking not just because there's randomly generated dungeons and items doesn't mean that like, it's a roguelike. You know, there's, here's just like criteria is, well, and here's the thing. In the ensuing 20 years, there has been this renaissance of people using roguelike. And then roguelike, like, or Oh, my God, Light to describe, oh, my

Jessamyn 26:25 god racing

Cortex 26:26 elements of these in a much, there are games that get called roguelikes that are arguably less of a roguelike than Diablo is. But there's also this sense of understanding of roguelike at this point, meaning not games that are like net hack and Rogue so much as games that contain significant elements of shit randomize maps, or permadeath, or randomize items, or sort of like emergent, you know, generated

Jessamyn 26:53 permadeath means you don't respond. Right, right.

Cortex 26:58 Exactly, yeah. And the tons of games are using different bits of these elements in a lot of really fucking wonderful ways. And then like, if the cost of that huge blossoming, of fantastic sort of game programming ideas, and just fantastic indie games coming out is like losing the specificity of that one fusty old term, then that's a good deal. So like, I've given up on caring at all about what roguelike means, per se, outside of the specific confines of having a good natured argument about it with like, fellow idiots who are in that hack, but like, you know, if it's not, if it's ever if everybody's not on board with having that specific kind of narrow academic conversation that I just kind of like, just shut up about. So MJ Harris is one of the people that like I would be willing to have that like, academic conversation with, because I know he's coming from a place of like, genuine knowledge and love about it. So right

Jessamyn 27:56 and also able to kind of talk about it without it turning into just some ugly nerd fight.

Cortex 28:01 Yeah, yeah. And so we started New Haven bug, there you go. Back around.

Jessamyn 28:08 There are two jobs. Are you done with projects? Yeah. One of them is very long. It's from rockin data,

Cortex 28:17 the post or the duration, the post, actually,

Jessamyn 28:20 it's, you know, it's a government job. And it's the USGS water, USGS water mission area, hiring multiple IT people term information technology, but they call it it not Htet, for reasons. But there's some specialist positions for doing usability research. And it sounds cool. It's a very long post. So you'll have to check it out. But it's like a government job it pays from medium to good. Maybe not for it work, I don't know, seems good. They've got some pretty serious diversity and inclusion, transparency, requests and requirements. And then it's a bunch of blah, blah, computer words. But if it's right for you, it's a nice civic job, and it pays really well. And then, in contrast, this teeny job from megami Mikami. Helping upload some stuff to the CMS just copying and pasting doing a little images. 12 chapters. Looks nice. In London, contract job, the end. And those are all the jobs.

Cortex 29:39 Good. Good job report. Thanks. That's what that's what they mean when they say the government put out the jobs report, right. It's just like, Biden sits down and reads through some job openings.

Jessamyn 29:49 Sure. Yeah. In fact, I am reading a book right now. Where part of like the central oh, we're not alone on this frozen ice planet. conceit is, like, it's told from the perspectives of the people on the frozen ice planet and the people who are in the little pod circling above the top. And the whole way they become aware of each other is because there's like a little radio station on the planet. And one of the things on the radio station is they just have somebody who reads the news. And the people like in the little pod above the planet, pick up that news, and are like, listen to this. And, you know, they hear, like the lady reading the news, and they're like, she's really good at this kind of, like, I'm early in the book. But it's pretty good book so far. And it's kind of adorable to have like, a little, like people listening to the radio while they're discussing, you know, while they're on sort of huge interplanetary generation ship level missions, yeah.

Cortex 31:11 Let's see, shall we discuss the posts of metta filter.com?

Jessamyn 31:16 Sure, let me the one thing I did not do in all this time we were talking was bring up my faves. So why don't you start, I'll bring up my faves. And then we can continue?

Cortex 31:29 Well, here, here's a pair of meta filter posts from 11 days apart. The first one is Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter. And the second one is, Elon Musk is gonna buy Twitter. And those are both had a couple 100 Plus comments. And that's like, this is like, this is this is the sort of thing that like, I almost don't want to just like, not bother putting up like mentioning other podcasts because it's just annoys me. It's just stupid. We can edit stupid, no, no, no. I mean, I've made a decision to like, you know, say, Hey, here's the here's some things like it's been a huge

Jessamyn 32:06 because Jim will sometimes say a thing that he regrets. And when it becomes clear that the thing he said didn't land the way he wants to, he'll be like, just rewind, pretend I didn't say that. And I'm like, that's not how language works. But I say it enough that I assume maybe lots of people had that problem. So I just wanted to, you know, give you that option.

Cortex 32:26 Yeah, no, I appreciate that. No, no, no, it's I'm gonna talk about it. Because it's, it's this huge, inescapable, stupid thing. And, you know, it's like, what if, what if you had a guy who was like, really, really rich and also just shitty? Like, that's kind of the premise of a lot of stories, I realize, but it feels like Musk is like, really trying to carve out like, you know, Hall of Fame status on this shit.

Jessamyn 32:51 And I think part of Musk's issue, right is that like, he's neurodivergent. He's deeply embedded in internet culture. He's also wildly rich, mostly because his parents were like, shitty emerald mine shitty people from South Africa. He's not American, but he's in I mean, he's probably American now, but like, he's not from America. So he comes with a slightly lateral set of perspective perspectives. And yeah, he's also kind of a shitty person. And he's a loudmouth, which I feel like, yeah, it's,

Cortex 33:28 that is one of the things is like, there's a lot of like rich shitty people who like, have either just the lack of empathy reverse or the good sense to not, like, endlessly be loud about it. And yeah, anyway, so who knows what will happen with a Twitter thing? You know, it's, it's gonna be a mess, no matter what, probably. And there's a lot of conversation about it, if you want conversation and those two threads, a lot of movement towards like, people saying, Okay, time to try Mastodon or try Mastodon again, or go do another thing or whatever. And I'm really just not looking forward to this being a thing that's going to be like a topic of conversation for the next several months, at least, which is probably the kind of timeframe that an actual, like, completed purchase process would look like, like six months. Yeah, like, like, that seems like a reasonable sort of take on how it would normally work, which normally is such a loaded word in this case, because who fucking knows what's normal, but it just feels like, it feels like the Trump candidacy of bullshitty acquisitions, you know, like, like, anything you want to say about well, but obviously X won't happen because there's like, Well, is it obvious at this point? Is it actually clear can we actually reasonably say, because of institutional, you know, momentum and expectations, blah blah blahs, because that didn't work. Great. The last time we all tried to It, like rely on that. So, anyway, that's my big random ranty blah, blah, blah about that. Now let's talk about stuff. That's fun. Let's talk about posts that I actually,

Jessamyn 35:12 I don't know how I even feel about it other than I wish it hadn't happened. But like, you know, I'm probably one of those people who's like, I am not sure if I can go somewhere else, you know what I mean? Like, like, I interact with a whole bunch of kind of not friends there in ways that, you know, a social network that's more based on friends, friends would be difficult for me like I have a mastodon account, and I looked back, you know, add it to remind myself what my login is, and a whole bunch, I think I'm awkward on that social of all things. But yeah, I just, I don't, I don't know, you know, I can simultaneously be like, Elon Musk, terrible person, his acquisition of Twitter, terrible news for a number of reasons. And also being like, I might still be there. And you know, that feels weird to think about, and I'm sort of deferring big decisions, and also not dwelling on it. But, you know, I did give it some thought, No, I'm not really sure what I think beyond that.

Cortex 36:18 Yeah. It's one of the things where, like, there's not, there's not a simple one to one mapping where you can just like change cable providers, like, if you live in a town where you can change cable providers, like, you know, there's and I don't, yeah, there's a point at which like, you, you kind of have to decide, am I going to just go without this thing, more than you can just say, am I going to, like do this a different way. And like for me, Macedon has been nice. And I actually have been consistently using it for several years now. But like, it took some effort. And it wasn't just like replacing Twitter for me, like, I've stayed active on Twitter as well. And I've got a bigger footprint on Twitter. But like, you know, I found people that message on it, like some medical people came over to Mastodon, most of them didn't stay active. But I found other people who were there who were like there because they wanted to be there rather than because they were wanting to not be somewhere else. And so I've got my own sort of thing going there. But it doesn't it certainly doesn't replace the Twitter network. I have. It's just a different separate place that I also like, that has a little bit of overlap. And yeah, like that's, you know, those are two different things. And yeah, there's things that I would not be able to easily replace if I just like, nuked my Twitter account, which is frustrating, but also, I'm kind of in the camp of like, you know, I will be here and tell Elon Musk to go fuck himself, whatever the thought occurs to me. And, you know,

Jessamyn 37:38 I did chime in on one of his, you know, zillion comment threads on Twitter being like, I don't think you understand the First Amendment.

Cortex 37:46 Yeah, because I kind of he's so fucking carnies guy. He's sorry. He's got to be so loud and so incurious and have like, billions of dollars to throw around in support of that it's just so it's it's a stupid world. We live in a stupid world where stupid people are rewarded for stupid acts. And that's, it's it's frustrating when, when one lets one's mind dwell upon it. I'm going to start saying everything using one, I'm going to just slip into this super fusty Hi high register, one can go fuck oneself. Let's talk about harder drives. This is not a post I made because someone else had already made it a couple of weeks earlier, as I found when I went to make it like a day or two ago. This is post Zen gargoyle made this this is a half hour long or so video by goes by Tom seven. I've seen him his name around. But I don't know much about him. But he makes fun engaging weird content, basically. And this is a video where he proposes three different methods for making sort of bad hard drives for no good reason using unlikely devices. And so one of the things he uses is the internet using the fact that ping carries information with it. So you could use his hard drive by sending pings out to servers with like high latency so it takes them a while to send it back. So you don't actually have to be storing that information while it's enroute to the server you're pinging and coming back and so you can just treat all of that stuff that's in transit store memory and storage. Is this real? This is real like it's

Jessamyn 39:34 it's I mean, it's I understand that it's also conceptual, but like he's not just goofing

Cortex 39:39 No no, he made all of these like it's definitely it's like it's absolutely goofing but it's like goofing on the square, you know? Yeah, he's he's doing like the video is like him documenting the process of working out each of these things as actual proofs of concept. You know, the other two things are using Tetris emulators to store or memory by creating specific arrangements of solid and empty spaces on a Tetris board and doing that for like 4000 simultaneous Tetris emulators, which let him create enough memory to store the ROM data of Tetris itself and then run that on an emulator. Which is a nice goof. And then and then. Oh, yeah used, used COVID-19 tests, little microchip in enabled one, wiring a shitload of those together to be able to have chips. Some of them do like, these are fancy ones, like, cost prohibitive, like 200 bucks for the tester box, and then 65 bucks for each one use plastic microchip laden. It's goofy. Anyway, the video is delightful.

Jessamyn 40:50 It's like his voice.

Cortex 40:53 Yeah, he talks good. He writes good. It's just it's very good. I enjoyed it a great deal of videos a lot of fun to watch. It's a case where it actually is a half hour video, that's like, a half hour worth of video content, rather than just someone taking, you know, a 10 minute long piece of text and reading it on camera. It's, it's very nice. I enjoyed it a great deal, and you should go check it out. That's my take. Good, let's see,

Jessamyn 41:23 thank you, I have a shorter list this month than usual, partly because this month was shorter for us than usual. I really liked this post, partly for the conversation from dancing leaves, about doctors dismissing concerns of women of color non binary people, and how you can deal with and manage that medical gaslighting, and it's nice, I like it because it's kind of a big tent thread. Because it's sort of initially about you know, women, people of color non binary, but other people chime in with, you know, concerns that they have, like with dentistry, you know, pelvic exam specifically, you know, have like, both of those things have a need for like a trauma informed perspective. There's people talk about that in the thread, you know, people who are fat often get like, gaslighted by their doctors, and, you know, it's a conversation obviously, it's slightly difficult. Obviously, and there's a, it gets a little too much talking about dentistry maybe but um, just in general, it was kind of a friendly, friendly conversation about you know, how you can make sort of medical and dental procedures less, less. More, just, I think, is actually the better way to put it, right. Like there's a lot of doctors who get this right, but there are many who get it very wrong and who are in positions of power where you know, you have a bad experience at the doctor you see this a lot NASSCOM edit filter. And a lot of times people are like, I'm not totally sure how to deal with this, like, you know, they're my regular doctor, maybe, but they did this thing that was completely inappropriate or problematic, or, you know, I have some complicated health issues, and they just dealt with me as if I was some, you know, root one person with root one issues. I don't appreciate that, like, you know, it's not malpractice, but it's definitely of concern. And I think a lot of people have a hard time figuring out how to manage that. So I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I appreciated the threat.

Cortex 43:29 Yeah, yeah, I really like it when there's a good conversation like that. It's like, it's one of the things that feels like uniquely really nice. As far as like the kind of conversations metadata can produce, like I enjoy goofing about stuff with people, like that's kind of my whole posting inclination most of the time. But there is something there is something a little bit special about being able to get into like a sort of harder and more revelatory conversation like that with the with the competence that like it's not going to just immediately inherently turn into like the worst kind of shit show and like, it's depressing that that feels like a like discerning feature discriminating feature.

Jessamyn 44:14 I know what you're saying like

Cortex 44:15 it's it's true you know, it's it's a good thing it's something I appreciate a lot.

Jessamyn 44:20 Yeah, difficult issues without a whole bunch of people being like, have you tried yoga kind of shit? Which definitely find on the larger internet.

Cortex 44:28 Yeah, I mean, you like it's still people use there's still like things that feel like the obvious someone's gonna say that but like it's nine steps up from like, this sort of shit you see and replies on Twitter every single fucking time in bold. Yeah.

Jessamyn 44:43 Well, I don't see it on Twitter because librarian Twitter isn't like that, but

Cortex 44:47 I don't see a lot of it directly. I mostly see it when other people I know who have different standards of impulse control for engaging with shitheads and up to likes to highlight when my friends respond to something shared so then I get to see it in a sort of second order way and yeah

Jessamyn 45:07 I definitely have a couple like old man yells at clouds friends on Twitter and it's it's hard because you know I respect their right to do that that is one thing the bird site is for but also I'm like Twitter stop shoving this in my face and don't yeah nobody has to tell me how I can adjust the four settings that Twitter has to make it not do this because yeah, it's unbalanced I'd rather have it than not have this feature but still

Cortex 45:33 yeah

here's a post by curious knew about this crazy sort of leaf calligraphy thing. Doing basically gold Arabic script on the desiccated just the remains of leave, it was just, it's like simple but not easy. Like it's a simple concept. And it's just like a Twitter account collecting together a bunch of examples of this stuff. A lot of which from some poking around I think was like this may be some of it more contemporary. Some of it is you know, older. But it's just like it's a great concept. And it just looks gorgeous. And it was anything that I had never seen before. So that's that's a pretty good outcome.

Jessamyn 46:29 Oh, man, what a what a what a interesting throwback. I think I told you that like my then husband got a one of the Sultan signatures tattooed on his shoulder. And the thing that only kind of a 20 some odd year old white man could do and I'm very curious kind of if he still has this tattoo, though, we're not still in touch. And looking at these they're very evocative of, you know, I mean, I get it, you kind of fall in love with a swirly pattern, if you're somebody not from that culture. But that was a thing that maybe 30 years ago, you might then go get a tattoo of wares. It's a thing nowadays. I think most people wouldn't, you know, yeah.

Cortex 47:10 Stop and think about this.

Jessamyn 47:14 Yeah, stop, stop and think. But it still has it evokes that for me. And also, yeah, Ramadan. Passover Easter. Yeah. If I was broken to you, since I don't think so. I think that was in between. Yeah, I

Cortex 47:29 went to the first one. Because you were talking about going to?

Jessamyn 47:33 Yeah, and it turned out, okay. I took my COVID tests, the first COVID tests I have taken during this whole thing. Jim took his COVID tests, we were all fine. We went to a 12 person, everybody double tested. Passover. And I was a little concerned it was going to be weird. And it turned out to be great. We met like my friend's daughter's boyfriend who was lovely. And I got to sit next to and he told me all about his watch collection. And I was like, You are my kind of nerd kid. And, you know, he's like, 20 he's got a watch collection. What? Like him and his girlfriend are wearing wristwatches. What, like it was just, and you know, food was good. Jim can read Hebrew, which is cool. So he got to read all the parts of the Haggadah that were in Hebrew because he was the best Hebrew reader. I was so proud of him. And it Yeah, just it was just a really nice time. And so I was I was grateful for it. Nice. And now all the Easter candy 75% off. So I've got so many chocolate eggs stashed around my house.

Cortex 48:36 You know, I got I there's so much Easter candy that I don't actually particularly like, oh, yeah, most of it's awful. Yeah, it's like a it's a mixed bag. They're

Jessamyn 48:45 cheap, though. Yep. Yep. I like this hippie bear post that just has opening numbers for Tony Awards, when Neil Patrick Harris has hosted and they're just all fun. You know, and they have hippie berry links to some of his like the some of the opening numbers he's in some he's not. And you know, his opening monologue and it's just you know, if those are the things that you love, oh my gosh, what a fun bunch of joy. They were short threads. You know, not a ton of people yammering in them, but just you know, what a great thing to track down, link together and share with people.

Cortex 49:33 Yeah, that's nice. I was I was really happy to see a post. Olympian made a post about the 40th anniversary of Laurie Anderson's big science.

Jessamyn 49:47 Oh, that's why people were tweeting about her a couple days ago.

Cortex 49:52 Oh, okay. Yeah, I didn't even perfectly notice that. But yeah, that would make sense. Yes, this is an album that I really love. Yeah. Yeah, me too. I am sure I've talked at length about aspects of it on the podcast. I'm not even gonna get into it. But you know, it's it's the album that oh Superman is on, which is like the one Laurie Anderson song that people generally know if they know any. Right, but aren't like a Laurie Anderson fan. But the whole thing is very good.

Jessamyn 50:20 And retreat. You did the cover of it.

Cortex 50:23 Yeah, I did a couple of Superman like 13 years ago, I think it was which Jesus fucking Christ I know. But, uh, but the whole, it's a great album. It's a great album to listen to today, because a lot of it is like stuff that feels like just as resonant as it was at the time. And also, it's got such a unique and stripped down sound that like it's not an album that sounds dated. Like if you think about like, oh, yeah, that's that album from the 80s. A lot of albums sound like they're from the 80s. But this album doesn't sound like anything else. So it just sounds like big science. It sounds like Laurie Anderson doing her very specific thing. Right, which is great. Well, and

Jessamyn 51:02 Buffon Bhuvan, mentioned the Laurie Anderson Norton lectures that she did at Harvard really recently. And in fact, it was one of the things that Jim and I saw during, you know, sort of, it felt to me, but maybe it wasn't sort of like heightened COVID restrictions. She did these lectures, but they were specifically on Zoom. And so it was kind of cool, because obviously, she's a great speaker. But she really made the, like, making the talks be very Laurie Anderson ish, over zoom. Yeah, was its own cool thing. And it was weird, because one of the things she talked about in one of these lectures, the one that I attended, and they're all recorded, and you can go see them, and you should, was public libraries. And so it was very interesting. She had one specific set of negative interactions, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Network of Public Libraries works in this country, which is not surprising. But she talked about it. And it was really interesting for me, because I was like Laurie Anderson misunderstood that. And then she went on to make some sort of comment. And the comment was a slightly negative commentary on something, not libraries, but just kind of I thought libraries would be cooler. And in fact, they're less cool than I thought. And then I was like, Ah, now everybody's gonna see that. And then I had to be like, you know, I think I'm maybe just gonna let it go and not be like a grumpy person on Twitter being like Laurie Anderson, who's like 99%, lovely, you know, misunderstood a thing that I happen to know a lot about. And, you know, but it's interesting, because it's really stuck with me, like, I took a screenshot of it. And I still think about it, sometimes it had to do with the things she wanted to do at libraries, she couldn't get uptake from a couple big libraries for this thing she wanted to do. And then kind of extrapolated to all libraries that they they're not interested in this thing. And it was just weird. Like, I just felt weird about it. I continue to feel weird about it. But the lecturers themselves are just astounding, in kind of what you can do on Zoom. If you give a shit, you know what I mean, for artists and creators and musical people. So I highly recommend it. And yes, this thread, cool. Another thing that I liked, because I first read about it on metal filter, and was very confused, and I sort of appreciated dirty old towns. Framing was the onion getting permanently banned from Twitter, and tweeting about being permanently banned from Twitter. And it was the kind of thing that really felt like an April Fool's joke, or that it was maybe true, but you were misunderstanding it. But in fact, it was just a great Jeep. You know what I mean? It was just it

Cortex 54:24 was it was it was, it was like, it was the most native to Twitter. The agenda has ever been in terms of execution of a joke, and it was fucking perfect.

Jessamyn 54:37 Yeah, because, you know, the onion is funny, in general, but I often think about them not as necessarily being as medium aware, you know what I mean? Yeah, that they just, they're a website, kind of who can also tweet kind of, but a lot of their tweets or just tweets and stuff from the website, and this was one that I interact with. I don't interact with them like a ton. But this was Just so yeah. Oh my god. Yes.

Cortex 55:06 I continue to see people with like onion strong icons on their Twitter icons. Love it. There is another post that someone beat me to is, this is this, I, I always worry that I'm gonna sound like I'm like cheesed off. I'm actually just like recognizing the territory of thinking about posts and seeing things that again, Oh, that'd be good for Metafilter. And it's like, it's always a good proof of the system working when I think this would be good for metal filter, and I go to Metafilter and someone else already had that thought. So this is not this is not me being like you know, fussed about it. I enjoy having this relationship with some posts. Yeah, I didn't have to make the post. And the post still got to exist because I wanted it to exist. So this post specifically is by furtive it's a animation called summon demons. That is a one bit black and white animation video is now private. Oh, is it? Well, maybe I can find a different one and put it in. Because it's extremely good. I wonder what happened there. I'll have to try and look it up. Anyway, well, take my word for it. It's a beautiful, you said

Jessamyn 56:21 you had a different YouTube URL when you were initially posted. So maybe

Cortex 56:26 I can find that he might have also just like, updated what the available thing was, but just just to link to something for context. It's a guy

Jessamyn 56:36 tell me more.

Cortex 56:40 The there's the whole thing has sort of like a summoning a demon vibe of like, just a girl sitting on the floor in a room and like doing an incantation of a pentagram. And then it goes like, sort of Through the Looking Glass and into a big hallucinogenic and psychedelic journey through a land of like demons and strangeness. And that includes some brief male and female nudity among some of the people and demons involved. But yeah, anyway, yes, this guy named Munna Morales has been doing really, really great black and whites art and weird stuff for a very long time. So I'll link to his website in the thing here, but yeah, anyway, I really liked that thing that maybe you want people to watch. But maybe I'll remember to like find it and fix it.

Jessamyn 57:32 Pixel nudity. Yep. I like this very short and to the point posed by a Trojan, a Trojan. And basically, Damian young, black man, writer contributes the Washington Post. Sometimes people email him, one guy basically gave him a bunch of weird shit about you know, you do good work, don't, don't try to sound like you are still in the street, because he used the word like, ain't. And he said dumb white boys, instead of those white boys. And basically, David Young writes a response, not at all interested in habit. And the first sentence is, I am better at this than you are at everything you do. And then up just goes down. And it's just kind of a takedown about, you know, this is why I'm writing this, like, come on. Bla bla bla bla bla. And it's just, it's a great combination. And I always appreciate people who were like, yeah, let me just own how good I am at the things I do. And let me just tell you, how good I am at the things that I do. Or, you know, as they say, clapping back.

Cortex 58:58 Well, speaking of things that I don't know how to make a Segway work, this is a dumb post I made of the the introduction to Half Life video game from 1998. That's like, you know, big, influential piece of videogame history. And one of the many things that were sort of interesting that it did was it had this opening sequence that was like, a credit sequence where you just wrote a tram into and through an industrial facility, before the game actually starts in series just getting through like a tour of the facility, much of what you will then find your way through on the way so it's

Jessamyn 59:33 just kind of showing you what what you're going to be seeing as Yeah,

Cortex 59:37 but it's like it's staged as like a introductory tram ride into a facility as if you are an employee, which you are in the game. You're an employee who works here before everything goes crazy and it turns into a shooter. But like it was done with a sort of computerized ish sounding voice, giving this like boring tour essentially and reminding you of your essay FDA guidelines and whatnot like it's intentionally not an exciting scene.

Jessamyn 1:00:03 Right? Right. It's just it's just a scene setting. slomo. Yeah,

Cortex 1:00:07 yeah. Which was kind of like a clever thing for them to do at the time. Anyway, someone recently re made a mod for half life that replaces the original voice acting with the TikTok voice, that text to speech voice, the one that talks like this, you know,

Jessamyn 1:00:22 I know nothing about this.

Cortex 1:00:24 If you watch some tiktoks, you will sometimes hear a slightly mechanical usually female chipper voice reading text that appears on the screen, because you could do that you can, instead of having to actually talk, do voiceover or whatever on your TikTok video, you can just use text to speech or have the app talk instead. And so we've got like, you know, a Siri like,

Jessamyn 1:00:49 voice read stuff. Yeah,

Cortex 1:00:51 and it in classic AI. For Forgive me for saying AI in classic computer generated fashion. Like the, the actual sound of the voice has gotten better and better over time. But its ability to capture inflection is completely absent. So like, you know, if you wrote something like, you know, oh, my dad died today and had text of speech, right? It was like, my dad died today. You know, like, there's just like this vague uninflected sort of cheerfulness that runs through it. So like having that read through the intro, Spiel from half life is weird and unsettling and funny enough to make a post about, but also something that like, makes me wonder, like, is this gonna land at all the same way for someone who didn't play half life back then? As it is for someone who's got like, like a specific cultural memory too? Or is it just gonna sound literally like, oh, well, yeah, that's what it would sound like if they had it talking. I don't know. Like, it's this is the thing that I need to like, mine the brains of like, you know, 19 year olds on TikTok. To really Yeah, right. Right. Right. Anyway, yes.

Jessamyn 1:02:07 So I You're gonna talk about your dumb post, I'll talk about my dumb post. Yay. I made two posts this month, but one was a long time ago and I do not like it as much as I like this post, which is basically about two young dudes who flew, modified Cessna around and around the desert for 64 days to set an endurance record in 1958 through 1959 absolutely out of control ridiculous I heard about it on futility closet podcast that kind of summarize the story and then I went and tried to track down aspects of the story in different places on the internet and of course one of the things that's so great is people in the thread you know know more about planes than me or more than is actually written you know, in these posts and could bring you know, more more information to to the thread itself which I which I enjoyed and yeah, what's what's the line next that one of the guys people talk to him about it later, you know, ever thought about doing it again. He's like next time I feel in the mood to fly endurance I'm going to lock myself in a garbage can with a vacuum cleaner running and then have Bob served me t bone steaks chopped up in a thermos bottle. That is until my psychiatrist opens for business in the morning.

Cortex 1:03:42 Yeah, yeah,

Jessamyn 1:03:43 it was uncomfortable.

Cortex 1:03:48 Yeah, man.

Jessamyn 1:03:50 By all accounts

Cortex 1:03:53 that's a terrible idea. I mean, go them but also Yeah, Jesus Christ.

Jessamyn 1:03:58 Yeah, it was just you know, trying to raise awareness about playing safety and also advertise for a Vegas hotel at the same time, because of course

Cortex 1:04:07 too traditionally closely coupled

Jessamyn 1:04:10 Of course it was. So yeah, I have to thank again whoever it was in my recommend me some podcasts question for recommending futility closet because even though it's a like not any not there anymore podcast in fact, I can figure out who this is and I fire fleet suggested this was basically like, you know, it's not, it's not there anymore. It's, you know, they don't make new ones but there's a lot of ones old ones to listen to scuze me scratching my ear. And they also have these lateral thinking puzzles. You know, where there's kind of like a weird situation. Someone describes it. You asked yesterday questions to figure out what's actually going on. And Jim and I like doing those. I've been on a losing streak with scrabble lately, which is just making me sad. And like it'll come around again. But like when I'm busy I don't maybe feel like losing a Scrabble game right then. So having sort of a, you know, little puzzle thing when we can we can play where there's not really a winner or loser. Yeah, it's good. And so those are fun. And so I heard about the story. I made the post about the story.

Cortex 1:05:19 Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I had no idea Well, I think unless I list like five more posts I made this month which I don't need to do. We should probably just move on to AskMe Metafilter sounds great.

Unknown Speaker 1:05:33 Ma she they load for the city by only load is loaded. She thinks he only loaded she notice she

Jessamyn 1:05:55 won these great list generating questions. What have you got in your pocket? By Robin of frog? Sully? Basically like sure we all like pockets. We all want pockets. But are there things you regularly keep in your pockets? Not like the stuff you have to shove in your pockets because you need them. But like other things you keep like I think I've mentioned this to you before, but my sister always keeps a buck for a buck 50 and quarters in the front pocket of her pants. Yeah, always. I mean, she says always. And it's not actually always which is itself very interesting. Because it's like her thing. And she says I always do this. But every now and again. I'm like, Do you have a quarter I did it for she's like, I don't? I'm like What about the buck? 50 in quarters? You're the but yeah, so you know, people carry like handkerchiefs and rubber bands and camping cups and dog treats and, you know, glasses, wipers, receipts, you know, chapstick, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it's like kind of an interesting and interesting thread, where you kind of learn about how people handle their pocket. I like it.

Cortex 1:07:08 Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I keep anything in my pockets is like a what? Like you? Well, yeah. I my phone. My phone is usually in my pocket. But that's yeah, that's like, you know, and I put my keys in my wallet, my pocket if I'm leaving the house, and then when I come home, I take them out of my pocket and put them on my desk. Every once in awhile, I will have a a hair clip in my pocket. If like my hair is down, but I'm expecting to put it up. Yeah. And that's kind of it like yeah, I don't have stuff I carry around in my pockets. Besides that,

Jessamyn 1:07:41 ya know, for me, it's like stuff I find during the day so like, you know, change I find in the street change I get for stuff like receipts, but I don't leave the house with stuff in my pockets except, except for like, again, my phone, like a handkerchief to wipe my drippy eyes when I'm outside in the wind kind of my mask, obviously.

Cortex 1:08:07 Yeah, I usually have that in a coat pocket. So that I guess I guess those count to

Jessamyn 1:08:12 Well, I have like a mini backpack. I carry around a lot that. I believe I told you. Someone said I look like a kindergartener with it. Thank you very much, friend. Um, but yeah, and I have a whole bunch of stuff tossed in that, in fact, part of my plan today for my trip is getting everything out of the tiny backpack and making sure it's in my laptop bag, because I'm bringing my laptop with me.

Cortex 1:08:35 Thanks. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:08:37 Oh, and I did want to mention one meta filter posts that I enjoyed a lot this past month, which was we all dish on Netflix. Because there's a lot of people, you know, meta filter, I feel like more than an average community has a lot of people that are heavily involved in online content, you know, and their content consumers and a lot of cases. And so a lot of people both are heavy users of and also kind of sick of Netflix, but also use a whole bunch of other, you know, like, you know, maybe they've got HBO max or Apple TV plus plus, or CNN plus, plus plus, or like whatever these, you know, properties of Hulu. And so it was a really good thread of people who know, talking about, you know, streaming online content, and I learned about a online content streaming site that I didn't know about, which is having or was having a sale, which is called MHC choice, which has a whole bunch of really interesting stuff on it, and I may actually drop my net Netflix down to a lower category, start picking up MHC choice in a very nice me fate offered me access to his Plex. So thanks for that. And soon I'm that's how I'm watching before a nurse again. Yeah, but it was a fun thread a lot of people talking about Netflix. I appreciate it.

Cortex 1:10:15 Did you get around to actually watching severance?

Jessamyn 1:10:18 Not yet. It's still on the to do list

Cortex 1:10:20 you should so we can talk about it because I finished watching it and it's really good.

Jessamyn 1:10:23 How long is it?

Cortex 1:10:24 It's like nine episodes.

Jessamyn 1:10:26 Okay, that's not bad. Yeah, no, I was busy. Finishing watching our flag means death.

Cortex 1:10:31 So gotta watch that.

Jessamyn 1:10:33 It ends on kind of a like, like, there better be a second season because the ending is fucking grim. If there is no second season, you know what I mean? But if there is a second season, that ending is okay. But there isn't a second season schedule the at. So yes, very stressful. Yeah. But yeah, severance next.

Cortex 1:10:59 Yeah, do it. Do it. And I'll watch the pirate show. Okay. All right. Good talk. Let's see. Oh, I did I got around to asking the question that I said during last podcasters asked and then forgot what it was. And then someone eventually reminded us in the meta talk.

Jessamyn 1:11:16 Oh, yeah. And then you asked the question in the weirdest way possible, so nobody could figure out what you were looking for. I

Cortex 1:11:22 you know, here's the thing. I, as I asked it, I found myself trying to explain exactly what I was looking forward and realizing that like, it's, the idea in my head is a little bit fuzzy and undefined. And like, I

Jessamyn 1:11:36 understood it when we talked about it last month, but then I read this and I was like, what?

Cortex 1:11:42 So and that's the thing. Like, I don't know, if I don't know if I had conveyed it last month. I guess it was still this month last podcast, whatever. Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. Like, I feel like I sat down and wrote this and rewrote a little bit. And it's like, am I going to make this clear? And like, Nope, this is what I got right now. I'm just gonna go for it. And you know, I got

Jessamyn 1:12:02 answers that were useful to you. Ya know, there

Cortex 1:12:05 were a couple things I remember, I'd have to go through and like, read through it, again, to pick out the stuff that felt like it was most onpoint. But there were a couple things that hit the specific thing I was looking for, as well as a lot of people sort of talking usefully about things that are like, maybe not quite what I was asking, but fall into the same general chair.

Jessamyn 1:12:22 And for people who aren't reading, but are just listening. This was about core Cortex talking about recordists. And how that was a weird both general term and not a term that would be used by people who are actually hyper specifically working in the field, kind of was that accurate?

Cortex 1:12:37 Yeah. Yeah. And like, what other things are like that? Where do you have that sort of thing of a utility catch all term that is sort of distinct from rather than just also covering the individual roles, which is, it's a weird thing to pin down like, it's,

Jessamyn 1:12:53 I liked porpoises answer, which was just compliance, because I do think of that as being weirdly similar to how I took you to be meaning. Yeah.

Cortex 1:13:05 Yeah. Well, and I think there might be like, I still don't know what the fuck consultants do. Like, I mean, well, okay, let me let me be clear, like, I know what consulting is as a concept. And I know Oh, but You mean, like, if you're somebody that you're like, Yeah, I've had like, friends who's like, their job is, oh, what do you do? Oh, I'm a consultant. You know, I'm in consulting. And like, I can talk

Jessamyn 1:13:29 and they work for me as a consultant, which is different than what I do, which is like freelance nonsense.

Cortex 1:13:35 Yeah. And it's like, it's it's one of those things that just like, it has remained outside my field of experience enough that I still don't feel like I know exactly what the fuck half the people know. I

Jessamyn 1:13:45 think their business consultants, they just don't like to say business consultant, because that makes it boring. Yeah, they help businesses be more businessy.

Cortex 1:13:53 Yeah. Anyway, so I did that I did the thing. I asked the thing, and people did their best to answer my strange question. And

Jessamyn 1:14:01 thank you, those people. All that went,

Cortex 1:14:04 yeah. Thanks, folks.

Jessamyn 1:14:05 I enjoyed this question that was from just yesterday from evil mom, lady, oh, I may have linked to the specific comment, but you can remove the cruft at the end of this or why don't I just move remove the cruft and now it'll be there twice? Yeah. So

Cortex 1:14:18 basically, boring thing here is that, that no one needs to know about but I'm gonna tell you because it's managed to come up is that when you paste, individual comment like that with the inline thing on it, it totally breaks my parser and I have to like exercise it later. So you're helping Well, it's, it's not a reasonable thing to expect you to worry about, like you're pasting a URL from our

Jessamyn 1:14:39 podcast. Okay. Now,

Cortex 1:14:46 I'm gonna I can't make enough noise with my ads for the choke. Okay, this is terrible stuff.

Jessamyn 1:14:52 Is it a MSR ASMR I don't know what it is.

Cortex 1:14:55 Yes, Mr. A synchronous meridian response. or something? I think so I'll look it up.

Jessamyn 1:15:04 Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. I've already looked it up. Who are you talking to here? Oh, no, I don't get that pleasurable tingly sensation. Let me just tell you that right now. In fact, it makes me aggravated because I can't hear very well. And I'm always like, What? What? Fuck?

Cortex 1:15:23 There's a whole fucking like. I mean, there's a shitload of ASMR content on every platform, basically, you can find very weird, like, algorithmically generated premises for ASMR content like, that are clearly how these channels are generating their content, right? But on TikTok, too, like, I'll be looking through TikTok and sometimes it'll bring up someone's like, live stream. And like, half the fucking time, it's somebody doing ASMR where they're just sitting at a microphone looking into a camera and like crinkling some paper or pulling their fingernails over the mesh on the microphone is like, this must be doing it for someone but that's not content. This is right. This is like this is like, I mean, honestly, I never ever come across a live content thing on TikTok that isn't shit. It's that or it's someone opening packs of Pokemon cards, or it's someone streaming a movie Sideways. Like just straight up like, oh, I guess maybe people say oh, it's Lion King. Oh, watch Lion King sideways on

Jessamyn 1:16:28 this with this other person. Yeah, it's such it's such a

Cortex 1:16:31 strange pile of like chum on a platform that already has like, you know, way too much content and then there's a specific way that people are trying to let that I don't understand it. Like it's just strange. Anyway,

Jessamyn 1:16:47 yeah, so sorry for whispering but basically evil mom lady has a house guest house guest wants to make soup. Evil mama lady pulled out in appropriate cooking vessel and said this is my biggest kettle. And the houseguests was like a kettle. That's a pot and there starts discussion about whether where you're from and whether to you a kettle can be both like a pot kind of thing more like a cauldron. Or just like a thing you boil water in on the stove to make tea kind of thing.

Cortex 1:17:20 Interesting. Like I'm firmly and like no a kettle is a thing you boil water in like to eat well and I'm

Jessamyn 1:17:25 familiar with a kettle as being like like kettle corn like a huge cauldron kind of thing that you make like sugary popcorn and sample. Yeah, but I don't ever use it like that. To me. It feels like an archaic word. And so there's just a lot of people chiming in and evil mom, Lady literally eight minutes ago. There commenters Today I learned that one of my regular everyday words is mostly considered quite old timey, rural, archaic and possibly a little bit Swedish. I am not entirely

Cortex 1:17:55 displeased. That's an OK outcome. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:17:58 so that all worked out. Nice.

Cortex 1:18:01 I guess kettle corn and then like cuddling as like an abusive police tactic are?

Jessamyn 1:18:06 Oh, yeah. You know, the only person I know who talks about that is Cory Doctorow. If you've read these books, there was one of them that he wrote that just talks about kettling like a lot. And I'm like to get it like it's a it's a cop tactic.

Cortex 1:18:22 Well, he you know, he just like He gathered a lot of discussion of cuddling in one confined space. I have a I have a a asked me from 2005. That I want to mention, because he linked it in response to me asking about like, trying to fit, trying to source flat, heavy, cheap things like that's the title of this question is heavy, flat and cheap.

Jessamyn 1:18:56 Oh, did this light come around again? Because Glenn F on Twitter was trying to figure out just the heaviest possible priority mail box.

Cortex 1:19:04 Yes. Well, and specifically, yeah. Whoever that came from, I probably probably clan, but but figured out in fact that it was impossible to go over the weight limits

Jessamyn 1:19:16 with anything on this planet?

Cortex 1:19:18 Yeah, like we have, we have no known substance dense enough that if you filled up a priority, a small Prime Material box entirely with it, it would exceed the 75 pound weight limit, or 70 pound weight limit? Yeah. osmium, which is you're not going to find cheap, presumably. But if you could find, you know, 75 cubic inches of it and cast it into one of those, it would still only weigh like 60 pounds. So there's nothing on the planet that can violate the weight limit on that. But that got me thinking like, Okay, well, but if you wanted to do it cost effective, what would that look like? And you know, what are the sort of like the good choices and so I was asked about that and then bond Cliff was like, Oh, hey, here's this asked me from 2005

Jessamyn 1:20:02 band Cliff looking for a hammock and then somebody told him how to lie in a hammock and he complained about it on Twitter, which I respected. But I'm also like, just linked to your question, dude, come on.

Cortex 1:20:14 Yeah, get some answers while you're at it. Great. That's the entirety of my Ask Me content. Okay,

Jessamyn 1:20:22 I have a couple different ones. This one from Jeff sack. A, basically, like, I'm rereading a book I hadn't read in 20 years. I remember it at the time hitting me one way, but now it hits me in a completely different way. Like, what, what what content that you liked? And that you still may be like, but you're understanding it different, like, not like, oh, I read this, but now I realized that guy's a creep kind of thing. And so basically, you know, tell, tell me what you got. And it is a great thread of people re experiencing literature, often from their childhood or young adulthood. And, you know, how would hit them? How would hit them differently? Or what what they think about differently, like, you know, I used to think Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes, his dad was kind of weird, but now that I'm older, I'm realizing he's actually pretty cool. That that kind of thing. You know, Breakfast Club, I found everybody unrelatable. But now I watched it again. And I really felt differently. You know, I felt it in my gut now, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just a great thread of lots of people. And you know, and it's, and it's great. Everybody gets a favorite, or a best answer. And there's just a lot of really interesting rereads of stuff from Star Trek to Calvin and Hobbes to the hobbit to Grizzly Man to

oh, just I'm reading grizzly what somebody said. But yeah, and then along those same lines, just in terms of media, you experience read Nikki is like, look, I'm sick, I'm not able to really read a lot. Right now we've got a sick pet, I'm really wanting to interact with content that is lower stakes, less murdery. Not very intense, not super loud. It's not vet related. And you know what I'm trying to, you know, what, I'm what I'm trying to find, so like, gentle, you know, maybe reality stuff, but not animal related. What's calm for me right now. And so it's a nice, you know, everybody says Detectorist, Steven Universe, Kim's convenience, that kind of stuff. But there's a lot of there's a lot of good suggestions. And my guess is red Nikki's probably not the only one who could use that kind of a suggestion. Right.

Cortex 1:23:04 Everyone else is doing great, every one fantastic time. The world is a carnival of delight. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:23:16 And I think those are mostly it. I did want to point out the if you are somebody who's interacting with our flag means death. Season One is on fanfare and you know, not a lot of conversation, but some useful conversation about kind of how people how people felt about this. I think we absolutely need to say hearty goodbye. And thank you for everything two eyebrows, in case people missed that. I don't know if there's a single person who listens to the podcast who doesn't follow metta talk, but I just want to say Lord, you have been a delight to work with I wish you every happiness and where you're going. And I hope everything works out great. And the transition team actually made a post of their own in case people are curious about how Transition Team things are happening and what they talked about and and how that's all working.

Cortex 1:24:14 Yeah, yeah, there was an I'd had a post sort of pre staging that talking about like, the sort of bootstrapping conversation we had leading up to that. And yeah, this is yeah, I guess it's been a busy couple of weeks, hasn't it? Yeah, yeah. eyebrows, eyebrows. Finding a job that is going to be like a full time new sort of passion thing is really great because I know it's it's something she's been trying to sort of like look at for a while and it's sort of finally came together which is fantastic. It's it's weird to be in a position of not having as much of a I will miss working with you when I've already sort of like covered that for my with her. I with my own departure, but like it is, it's a weird sort of, it's always such a weird sense of like changing of the guard when someone leaves from the mod team because it's it's such a small team. And it's such a sort of close working relationship and how we deal with all this complicated stuff in the community. So it's fantastic for her, it's kind of a tricky, weird thing for the rest of the team to have even more institutional knowledge going away. But but you know, she'll be around and, and, and I'll be around, so it's doable. And yeah, the transition team stuff, this is like one of the big sort of check marks, I think we were like, pre roll still. And it talks about, like a sense of getting stuff off my plate. But like, that's been the whole sort of ongoing project. And the transition team is a big part of that were getting them going and letting them sort of just take the wheel on stuff is a huge relief, like not like, like, there's, there's the relief of like, moving away from my responsibilities, which is like, at a personal level, but it's also it's a huge relief, in terms of feeling good about letting go of something that matters so much to me to, like, have a sense of people in motion, who also really care about it in the same way and are not just hoping for stuff to continue or to improve, but like, digging in on it. And that's that's really great. And so I'm really excited to see what they get up to and to, you know, be be available as is useful, you know, to advise on stuff. But like, the whole point is it's not my not my circus to run. So I'm I'm glad that they have stepped into the ring. Did I pull that metaphor off?

Jessamyn 1:26:45 I don't understand. Yeah,

Cortex 1:26:47 I don't know. I'm looking forward to see what they get up to. And I'm glad they're getting up to it. And it's it's a it's a big relief and a useful thing for me that they are Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:26:56 thank you for everybody on the transition team or who's just been constructive and Meditec to helping you guys make those plans.

Cortex 1:27:03 Yeah, it's good. And yeah, I guess we had a mastodon thread in meta talk on the tail end of the Twitter stuff. So if you're interested in seeing where other people are on Mastodon check that out.

Jessamyn 1:27:21 Are they all on? Mastodon are people in other places,

Cortex 1:27:25 people are in other places, too. But Mastodon Mastodon is the most Twitter like, alternative out there. Like you could go spend your time doing something else somewhere else on some other social media platform. But if you're looking for sort of the Twitter feed kind of thing, Macedon is like much more straight across than spending time on like, you know, whatever. Instagram

Jessamyn 1:27:46 whatever Instagram, yeah, whatever. Yeah, I saw somebody had like a really good, like, you know, how people have linked trees. Sometimes that like, just can have like a bunch of links to stuff because I guess people don't have websites. Yeah, I saw another one of those that of course, I signed up for recently and probably forgot what the hell it was called. If I if I think about it, I will toss it in the in the podcast thread because it was an easy place to be like, these are my websites. These are my socials. These are my blog, and you can leave like a really short, easy sort of, this is where I am. Go find me.

Cortex 1:28:29 Thank you. That's ringing a bell actually. I'm trying like I

Jessamyn 1:28:33 am on or something like that something? Not in my support file. I'll never know I guess.

Cortex 1:28:44 There's also a sort of Oh, where to find me for years of oh, that sounds right. It's where

Jessamyn 1:28:50 to find out me.

Cortex 1:28:51 Yeah. Sparky buttons, buttons that's been going on for four years. And that's rad. It's a just it's a monthly send what you can send receive what you want to receive sort of card exchange that goes all year round. And if you like sending and receiving cards, go fucking check it out. Because it's great. And it's been going well for four years now. Thanks so much for doing that working buttons. It's a nice thing.

Jessamyn 1:29:17 Now, man, I've already forgotten my password or login or whatever it is on where to find me. So are you buttons thank you so much Card Club is a delight. And yeah, I'm happy to continue to be continue to be part of that. Getting mail is fun and having me fights to swap. Low, low stakes mail with his spin. something I enjoy.

Cortex 1:29:46 Yeah, it's good stuff. All right. Well, I think we've hit the the 90 minute mark. Perfect. Out of here. We'll we'll go with your pretend heart out at four. I'll find out what happens when I press the button. On this strange double text box algo who's algo? Box? Yep, yeah, so if if the last thing you hear is unearthly screaming, and metal chains flying through the air, then I've been trapped in a Hellraiser situation which will be a very ironic death for me.

eotvos 1:30:43 Friends this is eotvos, I'm the new audio producer, editor, sound guy, something like that, that our hosts were very thoughtful not to call out by name earlier in the podcast, which I think means there must now be exactly 10 people listening to this recording. I have three requests for you. First of all, we're looking for transcription help, either as a transcriber or better yet by leaving the transcription project. Second, I'm looking for music that might be interesting to insert into the podcast. If there are musicians out there who want to record a 10 or 22nd podcast related audio clip, that would be great. Also, if there are things in metal filter music from the past that you think would be great for the podcast, please let me know. Finally, though, I'm very happy to be doing this job. If anyone wants to compete with me for it and or share it with me please don't hesitate to let me know I won't be jealous. Cheers to everyone and our mods and and the site