Podcast 189 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 189: Snowperson Trauma (2022-12-11).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary keywords

mastodon, post, twitter, macedon, thread, fucking, day, game, snowman, weird, write, feel, idea, happen, run, good, great, talk, math, turns

Transcript

Cortex 0:22 I'll hit the I'll hit the Start Recording button, which as buttons do now says stop recording, because that's what it would do if I hit it again. But there's a part of my brain that likes buttons. It's like, I don't have I don't have a better solutions. Yeah, well, I mean, just in general, like you know, it, this is the nature of any sort of like informational toggle is if the information you have is that it is or is not toggled, then it doesn't tell you things. So you throw a label on there, and then, you know, because like, this is not a problem with light switches. Because when you turn on the light switch, something happens, you can install a light switch, you can wire it upside down, so they'd like down is on and up is off. That's just me assuming that up is on as a universal experience. But you know, it seems to be the common thing. But like, it's not a problem for a light switch in a house because the light turned on, you have a

Jessamyn 1:13 light being on or off, although not in my house, Josh, not in my house. Like, I don't know what they do.

Cortex 1:20 In theory, in theory, like, you know, complications of wiring and whatnot aside,

Jessamyn 1:26 yes, but that's how it works. Yeah, you

Cortex 1:28 have a very explicit feedback. And there's, it's, it's hard to do that, admittedly, with like, an abstracted webpage thing, like I hit the button, and it switches color background, like to white text on red instead of red text on white and switches from start recording to stop recording. And like, most importantly, there's a counter going above that and all those things together. Okay, I understand recording interfaces, no, say okay, well, this is what's going on here. But there is something to be said for the fact that like, a universal thing in almost all like recording hardware and software was a red light turns on when it's recording a small round red light. And when it's on, you know, it's recording and when it's off, you know, it's not. And, to some extent, like the broadening and abstracting of these design communications to anybody's different version of a webpage or, or whatnot, gets away from some of those, like, consistent things in a way that like,

Jessamyn 2:18 well, because everybody's like, I'm gonna do something even clever and often

Cortex 2:24 doesn't actually, like it's pretty and whatever. And it's like, it's like this, this works fine. I'm this is prompted by a widget that I think in general does its job just fine. But it's still getting a little. Yeah. Anyway, this is episode 189 of the macro filter, monthly ish Podcast. I'm Josh cortex Mullard. And I'm Jessamyn. And here we are, we are back. We had a long pause for just like logistical everything reasons, between when we recorded the last podcast, and we posted it. So this time, we're just going to like, get back in there a couple days later and make another one and sort of try and make up for some of the last time.

Jessamyn 3:00 Yeah, we're worth it. This is sub optimal. And I hadn't been quite as aware that like, people were maybe nervous, the podcast stopped without, because that's how things work, right? It's like, Oh, this guy's a blogger, and then all of a sudden, you notice they haven't updated for two years. And you're like, Oh, I guess that's over are delayed, or whatever. And so this is us being like, yeah, you're right, we'll Yeah, we'll get back on it. And the note I was gonna mention is Josh's, historically, in the past, been the recording engineer assembling these, and then we've had some volunteer help since then. But we're always looking for more people who can help put a podcast together and kind of a doesn't have to be super fancy, slapdash way. We've got a couple people, but if you're somebody who's interested in trying this, we'd be happy to let you try.

Cortex 3:52 Excuse me, especially if you're someone with the the capacity to do some basic mixing and engineering and you ever listen to podcasts, you're like, you know what, I wish they would fucking do that. Now's your chance. Because I guarantee you over over the many years that I was doing the mixing and recording there were things I thought, you know, you know what I wish I would do you but I'm not gonna so well. And for

Jessamyn 4:15 anybody who listened to the podcast last month with the open source banjo music, opening it up just because I just had a little fit and was like, I just need this handled. And I guess I'm gonna handle it. I'm not totally sure how to handle it.

Cortex 4:29 Yeah. It's like it's not rocket science, but like, you need to have a little bit of a workflow for it not to be like pulling teeth. It's It's, yeah. Anyway, here we are recording. That was our obligatory two minutes of talking about being slow. Getting an episode which is like has

Jessamyn 4:50 like the two minute obligatory complaints about hardware or software. And so now it's

Cortex 4:55 a recurring feature. I feel I feel like someone could go through all the podcasts or the years and clip together. are a real solid episode of nothing but like variously you and me and Matt in the old days complaining about Skype complaining about browsers complaining about GarageBand complaining about Call Recorder.

Jessamyn 5:13 You know, favorite memories of Mattis just like getting on the call and having you'd be like, Yeah, I skate What if it was so predictable in a way that I don't think he saw that was pretty. See you and I

Cortex 5:27 met Matt has a capacity. This is the thing I actually find sort of charming about like, how he talks about stuff. In podcast conversation of sounding surprised about things he's absolutely not surprised about because we've had that conversation before. Yeah, yeah. There's there is some kind of like, I don't know, California surfer biker culture element of a, you know, blondes like sun bleached hair. himbo. Dude, inside of Matt, how we

Jessamyn 5:58 how we in any real way?

Cortex 5:59 Not generally, but like, there's that element. You know, there was a if there was a What was that movie with the emotions inside of people. Inside Out? Was that it? I didn't see one.

Jessamyn 6:10 Little colors that were all Yeah. Yeah. One of them special important things. Yeah.

Cortex 6:15 Yeah. Presumably. You know, maybe it was just like my dinner and Andre it again. I didn't I didn't see it. But I didn't see it. I didn't have like, not not out of like, you know, antipathy. I just didn't get around to it. I haven't seen Frozen. Man, I'd see. Which is funny because I did just since movie

Jessamyn 6:33 before frozen. Yeah, well, I mean, frozen has a bad fucking message. Well, yeah,

Cortex 6:39 but like, you know, you're a lot of my favorite movies have pretty bad messages. I mean, what's what's the message of 2001 other than aliens gonna fuck you up? You stupid.

Jessamyn 6:48 For a long time ago, frozen was when we should have known better to like, oh, sure, sister against sister for the purpose of drugs. Just very seriously, because I had a sister I really care about and I think creating this kind of artificial why they couldn't hang out for years and years. Just like if

Cortex 7:07 Kate wanted to build a snowman. You would make a snowman with Kate. Like that's just the way it would. Yeah. I understand that. That's a snowman trot and musical point. Yeah, like, like actual, like, real life or just from that film?

Jessamyn 7:20 No, no, like a little like when I was a kid building snowman. Like, we had a thing where my mother sort of ever the underappreciated feminist decided to put like breasts and hips on my snow, man, presumably to make it a snow woman. And I came inside and was like, What the hell are you doing? This is my snowman. Because I'm, I've always been this way. You know? Like, what? No, that's yeah. And my mother took it the wrong way, knocked the entire snowman over. And that was one of my formative early. Wow. Mom has mental health issues. Yeah, that was before I had any sophisticated understanding about gender. And I put a picture up of a neighborhood snowman on malt chop. And I said something about blah, blah, snowman, and somebody was like, we prefer to call them snow persons. Winky Winky. And I was like, I don't have time for this, like. And I wound up with some comeback. That actually worked out really fine. But it occurred to me in that moment, that I actually have some unresolved crankiness about snow people are so stupid, because my mother was, you know, bizarrely inappropriate for no reason. And just, I was tiny. And so I don't

Cortex 8:36 know, That'll teach you to, to to embody the patriarchy as a small child,

Jessamyn 8:41 I guess. Yeah. So wild. Right. And, you know, I was, of course, inconsolable and then probably never made another snowman at home again. Yeah, I love making snow people, whatever the hell they are.

Cortex 8:54 I was just, I was just doing some math art this morning that like at, in a way resembles snowman very slightly. Because of a weird series of half circles, arcing along a sequence of numbers. But I think I can bring that back with some context later.

Jessamyn 9:14 That'd be great. I would like to hear about it with some context later.

Cortex 9:18 Yeah, I just realized this is gonna be a long backwards haul from that starting point. So Oh, whatever, put a pin in it. Yeah. It would be inappropriate for us on this podcast to go on long tangents. Well, besides the parts of the site, anything on jobs you want to mention?

Jessamyn 9:35 Well, sure. I sure do. Shepherd who I feel like has had a lot of different jobs that we've mentioned in the past is looking at setting up a mastodon instance. But just thinking about it, not not like definitely going to do it. But I guess Shepard is at a university and likes the idea of Macedon a lot and I'm just sort of interested in a person maybe, who might be like a marketer and a moderator but not hosting, not the holster of a mastodon instance. And I just thought it was kind of an interesting potential job. Yeah. You know, it's got a pitch involved in it, which means probably not something I would go out for, but like the idea of moderating a mastodon instance appeals to me. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, it's weird, right. Like, we've definitely seen Macedon go a bunch of different ways. And people have opinions about moderation there. And I just think this is like a neat a neat opportunity to do some stuff from from the ground

Cortex 10:44 up. Yeah, absolutely.

Jessamyn 10:46 And, I mean, there's only three jobs so we can probably, you know, talk about all of them. Chief the has someone who can automate business processes with a bunch of tools that I've never heard of. And it's either based in Cleveland, Ohio, which, you know, I've heard of Cleveland, Ohio, certainly been there, or Framingham, Massachusetts, which is actually near me. And I believe I have a friend who works at the Framingham Public Library. So that seems cool, although it's also from a month ago. And then danza man is looking for an independent contractor, full stack, Rockstar, software engineer, good luck. But, you know, hourly probably pays well. Seems like a good thing. And I am looking for a job I should write down. But somebody who can do some Python stuff, because we want to build like a little module in malt shop. And when I say we, I mean me, and hey, it's owl who does a lot of really good design for us. And then we get hamstrung at the point at which we need to implement it on the site, because it's all volunteer coders and blah, blah, blah. If you're a person who wants to work a couple hours on a sort of spec project to do like an ad deck in Python, and a very simple website, hit me up.

Cortex 12:05 Alright, yeah, you should put that up.

Jessamyn 12:07 I should put it up because I don't even understand it. Like, well, it's like the blardy blar. Python the bar, I don't know what it is. And also, like, if I could just talk about how many things I'm dealing with, with like, nail idea, guys. And someone should implement this vague, limp, hand waving and me being like, Dude, it's literally just typing words on a piece of paper and hitting print. Are you serious with me right now, and they are serious. And so I'm just trying to keep it pretty.

Cortex 12:42 It's an interesting, it feels like a very universal thing across a lot of different sort of disciplines where you know, that having the idea and turning the idea into an actual spec is like the the gap that people generally aren't prepared to recognize how hard it is to close. Like, even if even if the spec wouldn't be super hard. You still need a spec. Like, this is something that like even when I just come up with an idea for a creative project, project myself, and like anyone who like gets harebrained brainstorms for creative projects will recognize this. There's the point at which you're like, Oh, that would be cool. If the thing that I'm vaguely imagining happened, and then you decide to make it happen, and you'll find out just how many hand wavy and then a miracle occurs, steps not involved. Because sometimes, like, sometimes I'm right there sometimes like, I'm like, oh, okay, so I'll do it this way. Boom. And it's great. And sometimes, like, Okay, but what, like, there's a bunch of questions that I just avoided answering.

Jessamyn 13:34 I've got to get to do the fucking thing. Yeah,

Cortex 13:38 exactly. And it's it, there's a real talent in being able to do that sort of like specification and making a concrete plan for an idea. And it's, it's great if that's something that you can do along with the implementing it thing, but if you don't have both of the skill sets, it's great to recognize the need for someone else to fill it in. And

Jessamyn 13:57 yeah, and like we talked about this probably every podcast but like, yeah, the idea of the admin involved in whatever a thing is, yeah, you know, the clipboard person. And you know, I'm good at it. But I just, I'm going to be on a panel, an all male but me panel at a library conference in March, and I'm, you know, zooming in from home, and I agreed to do it. And then I looked at the description for the panel, and it describes what all three men are doing on the panel and doesn't mention me at all. Jesus fucking, and I'm just homicidal, because like, this is my life always. And I'm like, really, I've also got to be the person who tells the person to not forget about me while being asked specifically to be on this thing. Yeah, and you know, I'm not even mad about it, but I was just like, Oh my God. And mercifully, the person who asked me to be on the panel was like, oh, like, horrified at the proper level. And so it's gonna get resolved, but it's just like, really 2022 You honestly.

Cortex 15:01 Yeah, that's that's

Jessamyn 15:02 garbage people. But I think that's every job. Alright. And I have a very nice, my favorite project. Pay me. It's the daily Merp. It's a cat blog from ethnic. And as you know, ethnic knock this personal fave anyhow because he comes up with a whole bunch of stuff, and I really like it. And also they have a cat and a bonus cat. And I also have heard that ethnic knock may be moving closer to where my sister lives, which would be cool if true. And I don't know more than that, because my sister ran into JP don't at voting. And they were talking and that may be the news.

Cortex 15:52 Nice. Yeah. These are some good cats.

Jessamyn 15:55 Quality cats. And it's just, you know, it's just sort of adorable.

Cortex 16:01 Wiley walking on the piano. Oh, hell yeah.

Jessamyn 16:03 Yeah.

Cortex 16:04 Good cat stuff a pic knocked.

Jessamyn 16:06 Yeah, and I think we should call out because I'm not 100% Sure you're gonna do it, even though you probably should. Was the finishing my grandfather's menorah thing that you made? Yeah. Which, I mean, let's Why don't you talk about it a little bit.

Cortex 16:20 All right. Well, yes. This was I did a write up. So I won't talk through the whole thing because like, you can go read the post that talks through the whole thing. But basically, several years ago, I started doing stained glass just on a whim and my parents found out they were like, Oh, hey, do you want your grandpa's stuff? I was like, what and what my grandpa's what? And it turns out that my grandpa milk my dad's dad had been doing stained glass before he died. And he died decades ago.

Jessamyn 16:46 Yeah. But you knew him right? Yeah, I

Cortex 16:49 knew him. Like Like, I didn't know him well, because like I was really just a kid. But like, you know, I have fond memories of him in sort of like a quiet paternal figure sort of way when we would visit them down in San Diego. But I had no idea about the stained glass stuff. I you know, I knew he played Oregon because I was like a precocious little musician. And so I was anytime I saw a keyboard I wanted to play it. They had an organ at their house and so he like tried to teach me some organ type stuff.

Jessamyn 17:13 Talked about the like grandpa's was working things we must have right because my grandpa was an organist.

Cortex 17:18 I don't know if we have Yeah, cuz yeah. fucking

Jessamyn 17:21 around with Oregon's when I was a little kid was like, super fun because they were so weird. Cooler.

Cortex 17:26 pianos. Yeah. I mean, they were different. It's interesting. I kind of prefer the piano to the Oregon as a musical interface just because because in archetypes, well, I like the touch sensitivity of a piano and like Oregon's, by default, don't do that, which kind of makes sense. It's not what they're built for. A lot of lot of digital synthesizers also, by default, don't really do touch sensitivity, although that's much more expensive to write. But like the weighted pneus of the keys in particular, like I have, like, I don't trust my ability to hold my fingers exactly in space where I want them enough to like manage to not depress a an unweighted key accidentally while sort of lining my hand up on a keyboard. So a piano was nice, because you got that little bit of pushback. Anyway.

Jessamyn 18:09 No, no, I get it. I get it. Yes,

Cortex 18:10 I've got another I have another set of grandparents who also had an Oregon so you know, it's like yeah, I think you know, having an Oregon was more of a thing back in the day.

Jessamyn 18:20 Very churchy thing which I yeah, we've lost are not quite as in touch with but that was like my grandpa's thing. Like he was like the church organist on weekends, kind of but also had an organ at home because he was fancy like that.

Cortex 18:35 Yeah, I think Grandpa like I don't know if you did anything in sort of a Jewish liturgical context there. But like, I think it was mostly like he was a jazz guy. So yeah. But yeah. So so my parents had been keeping his stainless glass stuff around, it moved a couple times after his death, and then after Grandma moved, and then after grandma's death, and I guess it ended up in their basement and so they brought it over. And I didn't know it was in it's like, I really didn't know what to expect. It was a bunch of stuff, including some tools that were useful and some tools that were junk, and then this a bunch of little finished pieces. And then this like, half finished half wrecked, stained glass menorah piece. And at the time, I just started doing stained glass and I was like this is I don't even know where to start. And then every year as winter came around, and Hanukkah closer is like, maybe this is a year I should do it every year. I was like, Ah, I don't know. I don't know how there's problems that I haven't figured out how to solve you know, I've got the idea but I don't have the spec you know? Yeah. And and then this year, I just fucking went for it partly because like I had a better idea of maybe how to proceed and partly out of just like a fucking cussedness if, like, you know, God dammit. I'm gonna at least start this time. And so I did and I solved some problems that had been intimidating me about how to proceed with it and, and I ended up just sort of motoring along You know, over the course of a few weeks, and I got the whole thing put together, and now it's this finished thing that is like half this thing my grandpa made and half this thing that I did to sort of elaborate that and try and both Intuit and respect his design decisions, while also like making the necessary changes and making my own choices for the unfinished stuff to you know, make it mine as well. And it's, it was a really, a really satisfying project, it was like it was because usually when I'm making stained glass, I just sort of like, I have the idea first, and then I sit down and design it. And then I, you know, sort of go from there, I pick what class I kind of through the whole thing, like, almost all of the decision making is happened. Before I like really start working on it. Yeah, this was such a different way of having to like, say, Okay, this thing's already in progress. How do I break it a little bit in terms of like, tearing it out of its old setup, just to be able then start figuring out how to proceed from there and make decisions as I go. And it's like, the sort of improvisational aspect of that was really interesting, if also sort of challenging and frustrating in some ways. And yeah, it was just like, it was it was, it was a real experience to do. And it was one of those things where, like, yeah, I was working at this on this at the same time that the steering council was trying to get some more financial stuff like organized for like the run up to the fundraising stuff, which is like fantastic work that they were doing. And it involved a lot of saying, Oh, hey, where's this? Where's that? And me looking up stuff and figuring out how to pull some, some old data and get that off to them. And that was all fine. Like, there's good stuff to have done that I'm glad that things are more organized in someone else's hands. Instead of like lurking in my archives, but it was the most I had thought about metaphysics, business stuff and metaphysics.

Jessamyn 21:45 Like, we need this, we need this, we need this. Like there's a lot they needed. And they wanted it kind of quickly, because we were in kind of a weird Jam,

Cortex 21:54 which like, fine. Yeah, that makes sense. Like, yeah, get it done. But the result of that, it turns out was to like, really hoover up a bunch of like, feelings that I had spent the last few months or like, trying to, like ease away from experience constantly. So like it was I ended up partly powering through as I think partly because like if I'm just like, head down hours a day working on this thing. I won't be like, you know, dwelling in my anxiety. Right? So it was both. Yeah, it was a little bit of like a coping mechanism, but also like, a nice upside thing to be producing during a time of stress. So yeah. I'm just really happy with how it came out. And hoping to get it over to my parents. Sometime soon, and let it probably live there. Have been hanging up during Hanukkah, which relate this year, it's Yeah,

Jessamyn 22:45 I got in a snit with my sister about it. Because we were both sure Hanukkah started at a different time. Is it

Cortex 22:50 like Is it is it? Is it the day it starts or is it the evening of the day?

Jessamyn 22:54 I mean, I was like the 18th. And she was like it's the 20 something. Oh,

Cortex 22:57 then she was wrong. And finishes up around Christmas.

Jessamyn 23:03 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I'm a person who's very sort of not as confident in my beliefs, always. And she's a person who can sometimes be overconfident in her. And so I remember it even more now because I was right. Damnit. But yes, great project posted over to Metafilter. And nice gone.

Cortex 23:26 Thanks. Let's see what else I I've been kind of light on reading project Smith. I'm trying to figure out which things I plugged into. But there were several things that I liked the look of.

Jessamyn 23:37 I liked the look of D melanogaster. Camilla Mullen, I guess there. We've talked about this, I'm sure. Growing in my gray, a graphic memoir that also got our part one, I guess, that also got posted to Metafilter. And just like, you know, I graphic memoirs can be tricky. I have been reading a lot of graphic memoirs that have just like come into the library, and a lot of them are written by people who are kinda young to be writing a memoir, like I don't tell people how to do memoir, you know what I mean? But it often feels funny to read a memoir by someone who is young, because you feel like especially if like it's not about a specific thing, or it's kind of about a thing, but they still have unformed feelings about it. And you're like, oh, you know, this will probably solidify as as you get older, right? I just read one called I think passport, which is about a young woman who grows up traveling around the world with her parents. She's not totally sure why she's always going in like new schools. And then long story short, it turns out her parents are like intelligence agents, but they can never talk about it. And so it's all kind of weird, and she's like becoming kind of a young woman from like, awkward tween and it's complicated. had that I don't get the feeling she's much older now that she wrote it. So she's like down on her appearance and all these ways where you're like, you know, eventually you'll probably learn to forgive yourself more and not describe yourself that way or you'll settle into your feelings. That just, it just felt like early for the memoir. And that's one of the things I really appreciated about this memoir is, yeah, it's about someone who's a little bit more mature in their outlook.

Cortex 25:31 Yeah. I did one of the things that I liked the look of was just the get blogging right up that oh, yeah, that b word Merlot are very similar. I don't know how he got, like, the German style would be like, very similar. But anyway, yes. Basically, a round up of different ways to get blogging and

Jessamyn 25:58 post it in the box. Have you forgotten about the box?

Cortex 26:01 Type that I miss? No, I put it content when I posted a note that fucking, I'm sure it's really useful for people who need it, but I never need it. And it just causes problems. It's not

Jessamyn 26:12 like a thing where if you are there, again, you could do with anything. So like, this is where it tests and I start dishing on Yeah, yeah, this user delete this. Yeah. Oh, that is helpful. Did you post any other groups? Because all I'm seeing is like you you you know,

Cortex 26:27 I think that's first one. Actually. I think that's just the first one I've posted. You've been doing good linking so far. Hey, thank you. Anyway, yes, it's a little bit pressured, because like the Twitter thing hadn't quite happened. And that happened. I mean, it's definitely happened. Elon hasn't actually taken ownership yet. I think it's the big sort of measuring point. Oh, I see. The before and the after, but but it was also looming of like, this is maybe gonna happen. So I think the whole the spirit is the same there of like, hey, you know what, you know, it's good. Just posting your stuff anywhere else. So yes, I appreciate him doing the work to round that up.

Jessamyn 27:08 A little weird to wax pancake shows up like stumping for substack in the first comment or not? Oh,

Cortex 27:15 no. I mean, it's kind of in the same. It's kind of in the same territory. I don't know like that. Wax. He gets excited about specific platform stuff he cares about so not weird for waxy but I could see if like, with just giving an absolutely cold. It might feel

Jessamyn 27:30 God first comment, and especially because I am solidly in the fuck substack you know?

Cortex 27:38 Like, yeah, yeah, so it just feels weird.

Jessamyn 27:41 It's like, oh, have you thought about truth that social when you're talking about? You're like, no, stop.

Cortex 27:49 I think there might also be a reflection of them being in more regular social media conversation. Yeah. Contact elsewhere to like to sort of wanders over here. Yeah. Because probably part of the reason waxie saw that fairly promptly was like, you know, been posting about it. Wherever. Anyway, but yeah, no, I get you.

Jessamyn 28:09 I was just asking if it felt weird to you, because it felt me but like, I'm not always the greatest judge of weird.

Cortex 28:14 I think if I erase all my context from it, I'd be like, Oh, that's kind of weird. But, you know, I have that context. I'm like, Yeah, you know,

Jessamyn 28:22 I have my own blog. Yeah. I have to

Cortex 28:25 Yeah, that'd be I mean, fuck substack too, because

Jessamyn 28:27 I get Yes. Don't Don't get me wrong. I don't think you're carrying water for them. I just wasn't sure if waxy was and it seemed odd. Yeah,

Cortex 28:32 I don't I don't think he's carrying water for them. I think he's just sort of like that's in the sort of zone of stuff where he is like, a little bit more like, Hey, okay, well, but this is this is this is a ongoing current Internet platform phenomenon. I'm interested and interested and I'm going to talk about it like, you know, it's, it's, it's, he lives in a slightly different place in the world than me as far as his relations to that stuff. So I think I'm also kind of used to like seeing, Oh, this is one of the things that me and I actually really agree on. And this is one of the things where like, I'm like it really, yeah, yeah. Anyway, another thing I want to mention is Adrian Hans book. You've been played. I have read

Jessamyn 29:08 this book. I talked about this. No, I guess

Cortex 29:12 we hadn't come out yet. They hadn't come out yet. I mean, inches. Yeah.

Jessamyn 29:18 Oh, in my tweet is in this post. Oh, man, I feel so bad because I was asked to be part of the Metafilter events, interviewing about this. And I was just like, at the time they asked me I was just way over tax and I was like, I'm so sorry. But like, if I'm also part of my own event, I cannot be part of this event, even though Yeah, the books amazing. Adrian did an amazing job. I was super into it, but I didn't feel comfortable being like an interviewer. Yeah, without doing extra work that I didn't have time to do

Cortex 29:51 you know, in the realm of writing checks that our ability to get our shit together. May not cash. We could totally have Adrian on the podcast one episode just Got a chat about it? That's a

Jessamyn 30:01 really good idea, actually, because he's very apt at podcasts. And so when

Cortex 30:06 he's at a F,

Jessamyn 30:09 I like it. But yeah, anyway,

Cortex 30:12 yes, I am in a weird spot of I have not yet read the book, but I can fully endorse it because I've been watching him sort of writing it in bits and pieces for years. Like, I've had a very thorough experience of Adrian, like collecting stuff together, and many moments of God dammit, now I have to write a new chapter when just shit keeps happening.

Jessamyn 30:34 So good. Like, because he's got so many different backgrounds, like he's made a very successful game that that relies on gamification and did it right, basically, yeah, written about games. And so he understands the gaming world. And he's got a neuroscience background. So he knows a little bit about kind of what's going on in the brain and can talk about all of them with like, a sense of humor and not a sense of doom, which I appreciate it.

Cortex 31:01 Yeah. Yeah. And we've talked about, I'm sure zombies run the game he has worked on for for so long, it's a gamified exercise, which is great. One of the healthier things you could use to like try and manipulate people's dopamine centers to get them to do

Jessamyn 31:19 what a lot of people would really like to be able to do and can't write one of the things this book talks about a lot, which I think is really helpful. Is gamification not done? Well, you know, places that do, you know, Amazon, trying to get gamification to get you to move packages faster, or whatever. And

Cortex 31:40 it's not even not done well, but done, sort of malice breeds and craving or maliciously like, you know, there's a reason like the term Skinner box is not like something that like, makes people feel happy when they hear it because like, you know, this was all about establishing just how much you can manipulate behavior, rather than like how you can make things good for people and like, yeah, there's so much Skinner box stuff and whatnot in the world that exists, not just because someone didn't realize would be a bad idea, but because they decided that the profit motive for implementing it was more important than like the obvious ethical issues with what they're doing well,

Jessamyn 32:17 and you also see it in this book with like, companies that create these games that they resell to the big companies. And so their whole motivation isn't even for their own business. It's just to create some turnkey lazy crap that Amazon will want to buy. So they don't have to build turnkey lazy crap of their own.

Cortex 32:39 Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Anyway, it's a good thing. It's Adrian who's writing it instead of someone less capable of like fighting through line because yeah,

Jessamyn 32:50 Adrian does manage to wrap it up in a way that doesn't just make you despair for humanity, which I appreciate it. Speaking of, I don't know, sort of gamified interfaces, stagnation, wrote more more info for Netflix. So if you're a person that watches Netflix on your desktop, or laptop machine, as opposed to like mobile, there's a whole bunch of clickety things that are irritating and the whole goal is to kind of draw you deeper into Netflix not actually help you understand what you might be wanting to watch. And this is literally a thing where you get an extra button to get the More Info stuff before you have to start watching the thing. Basically, just a little a little chrome extension. I love it. It makes me happy.

Cortex 33:50 Any other projects you want especially call out there's a couple months of stuff so there's no way we're getting through All right, anyway.

Jessamyn 33:55 Yeah, no, I think I think that's I think that's good for for now, but just you know, it's been nice seeing projects fill up with cool stuff, people do cool stuff. And I guess we should also mention the Mi fi mall, which nobody has been promoting because I guess it's my thing. But like, you know, there's a holiday gift shop thing, and you can submit your shop and Nick can get approved and you can get coupons to buy stuff for Metafilter people and it's probably a little late in the year for shipping. But the mall is there and it's kind of neat. I like

Cortex 34:28 it. Somebody ought to make a meta tag post you better shut up

Jessamyn 34:37 I am already putting together a meta tag post in my head thanking the steering committee for doing significantly more work than they signed on to do because all of this fundraiser stuff and then modify events stuff has been amazing.

Cortex 34:51 Ya know, it's been it's been really really pleasing to to sort of see that stuff going by the last several weeks, it's It's great seeing people getting the shit done, warms my worms warms my little heart to do some medical, if you will, okay? Shall we transfer to metta filter and talk about the Twitter thing because we probably both probably want to like curse about something or other sure

Jessamyn 35:19 I actually stayed away from that post, but I'd be happy to just talk about the idea. And yet, let's transfer to Metafilter. And also, I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I've got like a hard stop in an hour. Yeah. Which should not be a problem, but I didn't mention it. Because I have to go to work at the library. Yeah. Well,

Cortex 35:37 for for context on all this, I'll link to the original, like, sort of Twitter huge thread went to, like 1500 comments over the course of

Jessamyn 35:48 over the while, we didn't have mega threads anymore.

Cortex 35:51 You know? Here's, uh, here's the here's, here's the thing, specifically in terms of like, trauma responses. The Twitter discussion was so active on XOXO is slack, which I spent a lot of time on. There's a there's a channel there called tech culture, which is sort of about mostly beefing about like, internet and Silicon Valley and check culture. Although everyone's Well, someone post something that's actually good news. But generally, that's the beefing about stuff and like when NF T's were fucking an escape for a while, we started doing like a daily NFT thread over there. So people would just like Roundup links about terrible NFT and blockchain and crypto bullshit in one place. And they would post one of those every day or every few days. And with the Twitter stuff in the last month, it's been the same thing. It got to the point of like, we're gonna have a daily Twitter thread. And Annie McMillan, one of the guys who runs Echo Echo was referring to them as mega threads. I think just like, total coincidence, like, I don't think I don't think Macmillan is like a Mefi guy at all. And it's just like, it was like a dagger to my heart like, oh, no, the viruses. I know, we didn't invent in the context of the concept of making threads. I know. It's something that people could independently come to, like just calling it that. Yes. It's like, Oh, shit. Like, he was like, oh, no, it's my shitty exes back. But anyway, so yes, we have a 1500 comment thread that started with the run up to the sale or the sale itself. And then there's like a more recent one that's still open and active. That's only like, I don't know, 500 comments are something because things have sort of like, cooled down a little bit. But yes, if you need some, if you need a couple of medical threads about it's actually not bad as like metaphysical style, big rolling roundups of like everything that was happening over time. But yeah, Elon Musk bought Twitter, or was forced to go ahead and buy Twitter, I don't fucking whatever. The point is, he owns it. And he's like doing the shittiest job imaginable.

Jessamyn 37:48 A lot of people who aren't part of extremely online culture, the thing that I think is confusing to them is, they're like, Isn't he just like a shitty boss? And I'm like, Well, no, he took a public site, made it private, paid too much for it. And now is talking about how it's, quote, losing money, on quote, when it's just debt service, because he paid all this money for it, and is making some bad decisions because he's in a weird situation where, unlike the other companies who started Twitter had an existing infrastructure and nobody part of that infrastructure was not the protect the infrastructure from Elon infrastructure that like SpaceX and Tesla have hard coded into it. Right? A great comment about this, that I read on Tumblr that I actually just pulled out of this thread, which I think summarizes that part really well. And so my friends here barely used Twitter, or like, I don't get it. Like why is it such a you know,

Cortex 38:50 and yeah, why does it matter? Okay, yeah, okay, shitty guy owns or whatever. Like lots and lots of people in companies are shitty guys, right? Mostly to have dinner with them. And usually you don't have to, like hear them or read their fucking newsletter. But you know, whatever. It's, but yeah, Twitter, Twitter as a thing that has struggled for its entire lifetime to find a balance for some of the scale issues that it created for itself. You know, granted, like it's always had trouble with moderation. It's always had trouble with like, what the actual sort of culture and what the worst parts of the culture

Jessamyn 39:21 was, even when nominally well meaning people were more in charge. I mean, I'm saying nominally, I'm not saying I'm not carrying water for Twitter guys, either.

Cortex 39:30 But yeah, well, yeah. I mean, I will say this, I know for a fact had a trusted Twitter. Yeah, like trying to actually get some stuff done. I think it may have been like, you know, sort of a quixotic goal, even with the best intentions because you don't make something that big and then not have these problems. But you know, some people were trying and the trust and safety was trying, you know, and so Twitter has at least made some progress on some fronts over the last few years.

Jessamyn 40:00 Most of which has been rolled back in the last month.

Cortex 40:04 Yeah, Elon is aggressively fucking like throwing that shit out, like, you know, like, honestly, like there's there's a lot of Trump comparisons there, but like Trump coming into power and just like undoing anything he could that like Obama had done just to undo it, you know, that sort of vibe and like it's been, it has been an aggressive month of overt shittiness on Main from the billionaire who overly leveraged himself to buy this company. And in doing so, like literally everyone else who gets use out of that site and was hopeful about those aspects of the culture improving, is getting fucked by this sudden, like, explosive regression. And that sucks. It sucks so much like, like, insofar as massive scale public social media, or massive scale social media is a kind of public service public utility, like shitty guy buys, like the some random company and ruins their product line. Okay, that sucks. You'd like that product? Shitty guy buys the water bureau.

Jessamyn 41:07 Right or buys the post office. Yeah, all of a sudden,

Cortex 41:11 you know, you've got a different sort of problem and that's it's a very 21st century issue like we really haven't had this specific kind of shitty pseudo public space catastrophe play out in this way before you know usually it's the guy who started the thing before it got big who's fucking it up? Not someone wandering and later because they want to you know, shit on the kitchen table and someone kept telling them no. So yeah,

Jessamyn 41:38 yeah, I'm interested in it. You know, personally, just as someone who both you know, used and uses Twitter for stuff, you know, reaching librarians who I like to talk to, although I've still got Facebook for that of all things. But also somebody who's interested in like moderation and the way he you know, comms works at various companies and is someone who's really curious about Mastodon and found like, the library and Macedon, Oh, God. The other thing, is this all male panel at this library conference, one,

Cortex 42:13 right, that was pre roll.

Jessamyn 42:14 Oh, did I not mention? Oh, no, no, no. I mentioned it during the, I think you did, I think he did. But basically one of the three dudes who might be a metal filter guy, I don't know. But one of the things in the description was just like, hey, and learn about blabbity blah, you know, Macedon URL. That might be the new like destination for librarians. And I'm like, what, because like, there's already like a mastodon instance, called glamourous GLA M M. r.us, which is like galleries, libraries, archives, museums. And so it's cool, right? And there's librarians there, and it's fine. Whatever, you land where you land. But I was like, oh, is Brian doing one, two? Like, I should go look and see if there's any there there. And I went looked at it. And there's like six people?

Cortex 42:59 Yeah. Well, I

Jessamyn 43:00 mean, so technically, that happen.

Cortex 43:05 It's, you know, join us at fetch dot social. Well,

Jessamyn 43:08 exactly, exactly. But I was so mad because like, there's an existing instance, there's no reason, as we were talking about forks earlier, there's no reason to fork the library community. Like if there's already a place for librarians just fucking use that,

Cortex 43:23 dammit. And like, sort of a general thing there like, like, you get shitty situations like that. But one of the things that strikes me is you get those shitty situations, part and parcel with a more general sort of explosion of alternatives. That was one of the big things that like I find interesting about the last month is like, how much the idea of like, okay, well, where are we going? Yeah, you know, and what are we doing next has been part of like, the vibe. Like, I'll throw links to a couple other threads about other social media platform, things that we've had in the last month. There's one on co host, there's one on mastodon? Well, there's been a couple of messes on but i'll link one that I think is like the sort of the central discussion.

Jessamyn 44:10 Well, and it's really interesting, because I think for a lot of us, seems to me, like besides like TikTok, which was like, it wasn't like, there was a bunch of different tiktoks And you had to pick yours, like the idea of figuring out who or where your people are based on not that much information, to be honest, you know, because like the instances many of them are not that differentiated. Like I had initially when I signed up for Macedon signed up for octagon dot social, which was kind of one of the original ish kind of places and I like it and you know, it was run by kind of a trans anarchist person and I just really liked where they came from. But now that I, yeah, I'm really looking at maybe a post Twitter world in a way I wasn't then. I think I want to be on a place that has more librarians but I'm less paying attention to the moderation aspects. doesn't feel in the library community, it doesn't matter as much. But I think for a lot of people, that whole I mean, it's in a way in a weird way, like, it feels like home ownership, right, like, well, what things about this are important to me and what things about this, I feel other people think should be important to me, but aren't important to me, and what things are not important, you know, or what are important to me that people think shouldn't be important to me kind of thing. So what's fascinating, I think, like, you know, learning learning about your mind and learning about what you want now, as opposed to maybe when you started Twitter, which may have been, you know, 15 years ago.

Cortex 45:36 Yeah, yeah, that's yeah, that's, that's part of the territory. I've been finding myself thinking about a lot to like one of the one of the things I don't think I ever got around to putting this into like, a comment on a Metafilter thread, but one of the things that as I've looked at Mastodon especially, like, like, I feel like the dominant sort of discourse overall in the Twitter, any

Jessamyn 45:56 discourse is another great example speaking of but yeah, yeah,

Cortex 46:00 yeah. But the discourse discourse. Yeah, well, two different things. But I feel like there's been a real and maybe it's just been my perspective, but I think also this is maybe actually sort of one of the big three lines has been like Twitter to Mastodon will Macedon be the new Twitter? Will Macedon replace Twitter, people talking about? What's good about Macedon? People talking about how Macedon can't possibly be Twitter? You know, it can't do what Twitter does. And like,

Jessamyn 46:28 what a lot it's sort of think PC? Yeah,

Cortex 46:31 there's a lot of like, low hanging fruit if you want to, like have a take, like something built around that and a sort of like, some sort of, like, simplified binary take on the question is,

Jessamyn 46:43 who have said they were leaving Twitter and then didn't go? Yeah, yeah, that's which is not so many

Cortex 46:49 shocking, but boy, I have been, I have, I've, I've seen Twitter emigrations to Macedon enough times that like, like, a portion of the people stick around. This one is definitely like the biggest and feels like,

Jessamyn 47:03 I'm going to Macedon it's like, I'm never commenting here. Again, three days later, I'm

Cortex 47:10 self reflection, like, I have basically stopped using Twitter. And I really hate that. I feel like I need to do that. But my account still open. And I'm not declaring myself gone. I'm saying I've spent my time elsewhere, here is where, and just trying to keep myself from interacting, except for the specific cases where there's something that is an existing personal relationship, where that's the only way it's gonna happen. Like, I have a friend I DM with who, like, I don't even use Twitter DMS that much. But like I DM with her about, like, you know, our math stuff, sometimes. I'm not going to make her go somewhere else to contact me. Right until such time as like that. Like, I feel like the only thing I can do is shut down the account. But But yeah, I've been off it. And it's it's weird. It's a weird change, to not be to not be using it.

Jessamyn 47:55 Yeah. And I mean, for me, I've been off it. Not like a little not super much. I've been definitely like hanging there less. But, and trying to hang in Macedon more. And yet, there's couple things about masks. And I'm like, you know, I got called into some conversation about some metal filter thing. And I didn't want to be in it. Right, like, and that's not what I wanted my feed to be. And then there I was. Yeah. And there's no way to just mute a thread the way you can on Twitter, and

Cortex 48:30 stuff there is but I don't know offhand how to use

Jessamyn 48:33 a person. Yeah, I think it's I haven't had to do it on but I don't think you can remove yourself from a thread or at least I didn't see it in the mobile Mastodon app. And it may be like a feature that exists, but that isn't,

Cortex 48:44 yeah, but you have to know how to do it. Yeah.

Jessamyn 48:47 Yeah. So it was interesting. And I'm certainly not complaining about my son. I find it fascinating and interesting. But again, like I just, I have too much real world stuff going on. Like I

Cortex 48:59 just do a new thing, right. Yeah. And that's sort of thought I derailed myself from was that like, one of the things I see a lot of people saying is like, well, you know, on Twitter, I could do X, and it doesn't happen here. Or, you know, I was expecting X and X isn't here or things like that, where people are coming to it understandably, from a framework of like, well, this is what I'm used to and this doesn't do that. And I've heard somebody knowing fucking master evangels was like, well, that's you shouldn't want to do that which is like, Fuck you like people want what they want? Yeah, no

Jessamyn 49:31 full text search. That is I understand why it's not on Mastodon, but it is hard for me.

Cortex 49:36 It's a weird change. I mean, Twitter search kind of tended to suck ass but yeah, at the advanced

Jessamyn 49:41 search, you can massage it to get whatever you want out of it if you went to library school. Well, fair enough. Basic Search,

Cortex 49:47 but I feel like the the opportunity here if you're in that position is like to stop looking like how do I keep what I had and start saying, kind of what you were saying like, what do I actually wants now though, like because there are things that Mastodon doesn't do that Twitter does that like might be an actual problem or someone there's things that matter that doesn't do that Twitter does that might have just be like, you're just used to doing that. But also like, whether or not Mastodon is where this is, what's the place? It's doing the thing that you actually most want right now? And like, how are you going to get that out of that space. And like, if you're looking at that, I feel like it gets a little bit easier to do some of the sort of exploring and homesteading. Just like the river regretful refugee sort of feeling of like, Oh, I've stopped thinking about what you're losing with that start thinking about, like, what you want to find right now.

Jessamyn 50:35 And what's masks on on you actually have the potential to like? I mean, obviously, not everyone's a coder and open source doesn't do this for everybody. But it's more possible that what you have could turn into closer to what you want. Yeah, given that other people may want that as well. Yeah, exactly. And as opposed to Instagram, which is never gonna get any more like I want I'm pretty sure because me and meta do not want the same things

Cortex 51:05 exactly like meta and Twitter and Google, like none of these. Not that Google has, like, you know, valuable social media product but like anymore.

Jessamyn 51:16 I literally this conference, again, I hate to keep harping on it. But it asked you for what your social media tags were and you had four options, and one of them was Google plus, that's somebody who hasn't updated the website in a while. I mean,

Cortex 51:28 does it does does it totally not exist anymore? I can't remember who know I look like doesn't matter right?

Jessamyn 51:35 I can answer

Cortex 51:36 No one can tell. Like I'm pretty sure Google Wave is long dead I Google Chat turned into Google.

Jessamyn 51:43 Love to talk to you about this Josh except I'm looking at a full screen big page from $300 million endowment Wikipedia who could go fuck themselves? Yeah. Yep, let's see.

Cortex 51:55 But you know, that's slightly slightly less small banner at the top of meta filters.

Jessamyn 52:00 You can shut up about that banner or you can code it yourself.

Cortex 52:02 No, no, no, no, no. Like there's like there's the reason like if we hadn't like fussed with it more successfully earlier. It's a weirdly subtle little problem with the design.

Jessamyn 52:12 We've we've gotten some crappy Why isn't this working better? messages that have been a little difficult to deal with?

Cortex 52:19 I'm sorry, that sucks. Hey, people don't be shitty. I realized they're not being

Jessamyn 52:23 they're just not understanding maybe.

Cortex 52:27 I think I think at a certain point, like if you're not recognizing that there's a difference between your initial reaction to something and the truth of the matter. You might be being shitty just by not trying not to be shitty sanitary.

Jessamyn 52:39 Plus is indeed defunct. Okay, I finally got past the Wikipedia.

Cortex 52:48 Oh, here's a throwback. I saw Dave Weiner being really excited on Macedon about Macedon because of its support for RSS. Yeah, I saw that it's it's 2001 on metal filter again, except for Dave's happy instead of like, angry

Jessamyn 53:00 absolutely pissed off. Yeah. Oh, you want to hear another really interesting thing about Mastodon Jason Scott hasn't blocked me there yet. Oh, interesting. He's blocked me on all of their social media. And I don't even know why. Yeah, I

Cortex 53:11 don't know what he's up to. Because I preemptively block. Smart. Let's keep moving. Yeah, anyway. So yeah, I don't know. Dude, that was probably an appropriate amount of like, random freeform ranting about it. But I think and also

Jessamyn 53:26 just for people listening, I wrote a sort of a 1500 word article about how to get started with Macedon for Computers in Libraries magazine. But if somebody's confused and really feels like they don't know what the what is, feel free to send me a message. I'll be happy to send you a preprint of it.

Cortex 53:43 You should you should put that on projects. If that's it literally,

Jessamyn 53:48 is blank because the website for Computers in Libraries just clicks you through to a subscribe page and not the actual content

Cortex 53:56 bullshit. It's 2022 Josh, he's put it up on archive whatever I don't I'm great

Jessamyn 54:03 to it for another three months.

Cortex 54:05 Okay, well, well in three months you should put on project

Jessamyn 54:09 you know who has a lot of advice for me Josh men. Men have a lot of advice for me Josh

Cortex 54:19 so we talked about other things we liked I met a filter just to not make it all on Twitter top to bottom.

Jessamyn 54:25 Oh, yeah, but I just do have one more Twitter link which is the best of dying Twitter. Which is just it's funny. Yeah. This is what I enjoy about current Twitter the most is all of these wacky What the hell is going on? People make grab se jokes there.

Cortex 54:46 Yeah, there was some real good last day of school here comes summer feelings when people are like, oh, boy, this is gonna get fucked. Yeah, let's all just have a good time. I that was a that was Good a few days. Yeah. And now it just feels fucking weird. And also like a lot of people just sort of like existing in the substrate without engaging with the sort of meta commentary, which is understandable. If ethically complicated let's see, here's a post. Let's let's veer hard on my particular interests here in juvenile the other day of incremental game, an idle game called Advent incremental, which is an advent calendar style incremental game where you have a new incremental gaming and incremental games like Cookie Clicker, it's a game

Jessamyn 55:39 changer game. Josh,

Cortex 55:40 I learned that from you. Yes, clickers and idle games and incremental games, where basically, it's,

Jessamyn 55:47 like, forget it, I'm gonna try and explain a game I vaguely remember that you probably don't even know about so sure. It's like, it's like a game that has like, this is like an iPhone game. And you have like a little shape. And you have to do something around the outside of the shape. And then it expands, and there's another shape inside it. And you have to do a thing inside of that shape. It's like, it feels like Tempest, that video game where you have to perform something on the outside shape. And the inside shape comes from Yeah, fuck God knows you have to look at my stuff and see what the hell it was like this where there's always like, level level level level.

Cortex 56:28 Yeah, I like shapes. So I'm interested in general, incremental games, idle games, clicker games is sort of three words for the same thing. But there are enough sort of like mechanical sub genres in which in which kind of focus there is that like, people will sometimes use different specific words. But that's kind of all the same soup. The idea is, it's it's usually a fairly non gaming game where you aren't running a little dude around on a map. There's no action or anything like that. It's just kind of a spreadsheet game where you're clicking on this to make that number go up faster, which lets you click on this other thing more often, which feeds back and like you're making the numbers go up. Like that's really the whole thing. Cookie Clicker, you were making more and more cookies over time? Advent incremental, you're helping make toys for Christmas, I guess. So like, every day it unveils a new little mini incremental game that does something slightly different. And you know, the first day you're not I remember you're chopping down trees and planting trees to get wood and the second day, you're building a foundation for your thing. And the third day, or do you have a coal, the fourth day here, you know, it's like, it's just a little automatic thing that apparently they're developing in real time this year. Which is why some of the bugs that people were noticing, like on day one still haven't been fixed, because we were busy building day 10 Before the 10th comes around, but it's an advent calendar. So you get another one every day. And it's it's a very cute idea. And I'm enjoying it and hopefully, they'll fix some of the annoying bugs, but I've found it totally playable. And I'm having a good time and thanks juvenile for you know, scratching that particular rich.

Jessamyn 58:02 Man, you don't happen to off the top of your head know the key command for showing your purchased stuff. appstore Do you

Cortex 58:12 know I do not? Well, I can I can talk about another link if you want to keep love. Sure. There is a very nice post Pendragon made this post to a video by Matt Parker aka stand up maths, who I'm sure I'm talked about before, I probably posted a couple times before. But he's a Australian guy who just talks in an enthusiastic and accessible way about math ideas. So it's very, very fun to watch does a good job of explaining and being excited about math and making it not too opaque. And this is a video about folding the same net into two shapes, which if you watch the video, find out explain. And it's really interesting, but it's a weird sort of a problem. But when he says net, he means like imagine a cube okay, like take take a cube, a paper cube and then sort of like undo a bunch of the edges from each other. So you can lay it out as sort of like a flat set of six squares that are attached to each other that you could then fold back up into a cube. Right? Like like sort of like a Tetris PC vibe.

Jessamyn 59:16 Yeah, yeah, no, I get that part.

Cortex 59:18 Right. So so so so so laid out flat, but that's a net it's just it's a it's a foldable essentially collection of planes that then turn into something and any any shape you can make, you can cut the edges and turn it into a net if it has like flat faces. One of the things that is not obvious at all is the idea that you could take a single net and then fold it up in two different ways to get two different shapes.

Jessamyn 59:46 Oh, yeah. Okay.

Cortex 59:47 And this is about well, yes, you can. And Matt talks about like, hey, look, here is here is sort of how you get to that idea it is possible to fold this set of like this, this net of square As up and get two different shapes, which is like exciting and weird. You know, there's some caveats on that. But, but it's a it's a cool thing and he demonstrates it well. And then he demonstrates it's possible to do the same net into three different shapes for for a certain sort of setup. And it's a fun video. It's deep math, it's one of the things where like, you don't have to be a math person to get this stuff, which is really into it. And well, and because like, it's such a strong visual and spatial idea, like this is one of the things like I really liked the stuff he does, because it feels like it's a good level of accessibility. But also I think he kind of likes the same stuff I like, yeah, here's the thing, because like, I love I love math, I do math, recreationally. I make mathematical art. And there's a lot of math that I just really cannot fucking hack at all. Like,

Jessamyn 1:00:45 I don't want to go back to that. Like, why are all Wikipedia math articles? Impossible?

Cortex 1:00:50 Yeah, like, like I as soon as as soon as you hit basically, anything more complicated than x equals one in terms of symbolic representation, I just fucking glaze over. I can't, I can't do it. I like reading, writing about math. I like descriptions of mathematical ideas. I can't fucking read a formula without losing my mind. So Matt does a great job of like, explaining stuff. And he also picks stuff that tends to present Well, in a video. And this is a great example of it. It's very fun. You don't have to know fuck all about math, if you'd like sort of cubes, and you'd like origami a little bit. This is a good video to watch. And you might get excited about a thing because like, oh, it turns out even though it's math, yeah, I'm into it. So I really liked that. Thanks, Ben dragon.

Jessamyn 1:01:34 Yes, thank you, I figured out why I was having no luck on my desktop machine. It's because the app is an iOS app. And he's gonna have to figure it out at a later time, but I'll drop it in the thread. I want to mention Rumi's, specific post about north north Norse mythology, and cool sort of cloud stuff. Um, but also the sponsored post 2022 tag because me and eyebrows, I believe, all did a bunch of sponsored posts as part of the Metafilter fundraiser. And you can see 14 posts that are tagged with sponsored post. Yes. Did eyebrows make her posts? Doesn't mean she didn't. She didn't enter tags? If if she did. But yeah, there's a bunch of neat stuff that posted specific because for me, it was basically offering to do like big mega link posts, whereas I was just like, man, give me a topic. And yeah, I don't know if eyebrows has done it or not. So I'll follow up with eyebrows.

Cortex 1:02:47 Yeah. Yeah, that whole thing was very nice. And you made a major sponge post for me. And thank you very much. And like that was really

Jessamyn 1:02:54 just like a $50. Post and you decided to make it on something really complicated. I am aware it's not complicated for you. I was like,

Cortex 1:03:01 oh, what? See, but I learn things I know. But I'm sorry about that. But But I feel like I feel like it was a very good investment on my part. And we'll target one because here's my thing. $50, okay, I didn't pay for like the, the mega mega post, I said, Okay, well get a few links in there. And that'll be about as much as other people will want to read. Like, you know, if I was, if I was requesting this as like my last meal, I would want, I would want to get a bunch of mathematicians together to put together like, the most exhaustive things, so I'd see stuff I'd never seen before. But what I wanted was other people to see stuff at an accessible level. And I feel like you fucking nailed that you hit just the right amount of sort of here is some ways of understanding these things. Here's some basic accessible, sort of like, here's a starting point that other people would like get in a way, if I made a maker sponge post, I would be annoying about it, right? Like I'm just waiting to fucking up my own butt on on that whole set of objects at this point. But also, now you know a little bit more about this shifts next time I go off on it, I know I've got you a little bit more in the pocket in terms of like starting point. So like, I don't mind my pocket. I was also paying you $50 To take an interest in something that I'll discuss in future podcast. We really want to get into a terrifying transactional interpretation of it.

Jessamyn 1:04:22 So the game is called Kubrick's and it's a I found it, I found it on my phone. So basically, you have to like move the cubes around until you have a path that a little thing can follow. And then once you get that you it the outside expands and the inside becomes a new path that you have to make. It's really fun game actually.

Cortex 1:04:43 All right, I will I will make a note because I'm playing just absolute trash on my phone lately. Let's see. Other other quick things that I liked on meta filter there was this post from Taz. Hi, Tess. I have a game called Myrtle that is daily murder mystery logic puzzle. Which if you know what they are, you immediately know what they are. And if you don't any Look, maybe you'll recognize in this girl that was that was some of the puzzles that I didn't do in my my puzzle books I got as a kid because that's that was my experience with them.

Jessamyn 1:05:21 But puzzles, the ones where it's like Bob can sit next to Carol, but Carol can't sit next to Bill. But Bob and Bill need to sit next to each other. Where's everybody sitting on?

Cortex 1:05:31 Sort of, it's a more formalized specific format with like a sort of cross grid of like, you know, there's these five people, there's these five things they brought with him, there's the five rooms that they were found in five things they were saying at the moment that they were killed when their something exploded, or whatever. You know, murder mysteries, tends to be some sort of death going on. But yeah, it's just like, it's just like a daily thing. And yeah, if you're into that, it's great. I'm just sort of okay about it. I might go back and play some more of it. I posted a little bit of like, sort of thoughts and experiences with them historically. But But like, it's if you want to if you want to daily puzzle, boom, there you go. Good find,

Jessamyn 1:06:11 boom. I wanted to short call out just because the title of this by Etrigan, which is a single link post, to a fascinating article about streetlights and sourcing and single sourcing and LEDs and whatever. But the title, the sky over the city of Vancouver was the color of a television tuned to a prince conference calm. Yes, Prince concert is just such a fantastic call back to, you know, the first line of Isaac Neuromancer, right, I believe so. And I was just like, oh, yeah, we're all growing old together and made me happy. And the article is fascinating. And the conversation in the thread is fascinating. So it was like, good, good. And good. Thanks, Cedric in

Cortex 1:07:06 a couple of mappings that I'm going to call out, but not even get into because over time, we got, we got a hardstyle we got we got we got to get some AskMe in here before we're done. Gwynt made a nice post about Penrose tiles, and specifically a tool called pattern collider where you can explore them, Penrose ties, tilings and related tilings are rotationally symmetric, but non translationally, symmetric tilings, which is a whole thing and I won't get into it. But there's a tool to play with. It's very pretty. And there's some nice videos in the post, explaining the whole context of thing if you want to learn a bit a little bit of math, so that's neat. Good post, and also autumn a Tronic made a post about a very exciting, extremely niche. Oh my gosh, is Oh my God, everything in Conway's Game of Life can be constructed from 15 gliders, which is the news. And if you don't know about life means nothing. And to be clear, like, it doesn't mean anything about like life life. But Conway's Game of Life I've talked about I've posted about it is a 2d cellular automata a game, which is the one that people know, even if they don't know that they know it, because it's like, it was easy to make run on old computers. So there would be like, Game of Life implementations, but it's like little, little pixely cells growing and shrinking. And, and people have done amazingly complicated things with it, including building fully functioning, you know, Turing equivalent machines running in life. And this is about people figuring out how how much they could reduce the starting point from you, if you can just like paint an arbitrarily large machine out of like, millions of cells, then sure you can make anything you want that you know how to make. But you have to lay that out. And the question is, what if instead, we could just use 15 tiny little machines placed in this space, and just hit go and let them build arbitrarily humongous crazy things. And it's, it's, it's a fascinating sort of process of figuring out how you go, the write up has some information that is like, reasonably accessible. You know, it's a little bit inside baseball, because the people doing this are the hardest of hardcore life nerds, but they're still sort of like, well, we had to figure out how to do X. And then we had to figure out how to do y, which is equivalent to x, but like, you know, is more interesting to us. And then we had to figure out how to do z, which is equivalent to y was more. And so like that stepping along, x is painting a giant Grid of Things. And YZ QML you know, eventually you got several steps. Yes, this is me not getting into it. The point is like, it goes like a bunch of jumps and eventually it comes down to that thing where like, and that's how we use 15 gliders to make this which is equivalent to this, which is equivalent to this, which is collimated which is equivalent to making literally anything in the universe. It's fascinating. It's so great. It's It's pointless. Why did they do this? I don't know. But it's great. Read the thread if you want and if not, don't One

Jessamyn 1:10:00 last thing for me. If you missed my free to be you and me post, you should go read it. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's fine to move on. That's it.

Cortex 1:10:11 I do not know what's about so yes, yeah, it's fine. Yeah. And my one last thing, a big shameless catch up, bullshitting. Grab as thread with a bunch of links about takes by fears who has been posted. And recently, which I'm very delighted by. And that's awesome. Nice to see you back around sizes. And wait a way to start up, start like 20 Ketchup fights at once. And also we argued about mayo, I think. All right, that that's it for the blue for me.

Jessamyn 1:10:45 All right, I have a story to tell you about AskMe Metafilter. All right. So back in late October, when suddenly it turned out money stuff was much, much worse than we thought it was going to be. And we thought we had time that it turned out we didn't have time for and I was staying up at night with, you know, the fear that I'm sure you're very familiar with. Without getting into it. I kind of decided that if we were really in like a weird, potentially site ending jam. That, of course, was going to be a real problem for a lot of people, myself included. I wanted to kind of understand that a little bit more what that loss would be like instead of just pretending like it wasn't going to happen. And to be fair, we're now well out of those woods. And thank you to everyone who worked hard on that, including people who donate the steering committee who's worked their ass off the staff who's also worked her ass off. So I stopped going to ask Metafilter as a kind of, just, I don't know, like a penance. I don't know why, like, I just stopped going because I you know, I was there every day, I was answering many questions every day. And it just stopped going. And the thing that's been kind of weird is I haven't started up again yet, even though I'd like to, and I should. And it's one of my favorite places on the internet. But for whatever reason, I was holding it at arm's length temporarily. And it's been hard to get back to it. So I don't have as much for this section is my way of saying which is normally not me. So sure. Let you know that.

Cortex 1:12:23 Oddly enough, I have more than usual. Hey, good. You

Jessamyn 1:12:26 got 20 minutes. Yeah. All right. I have to work at the library. All right.

Cortex 1:12:35 Well, I asked a question. I do try to do a little bit more often. Okay. Yeah. I was. What is what is your check please hand signal. Because I was doing that at a restaurant. And then like, I was there with a friend. And we disagreed about what In theory, it means even though it obviously it meant Hey, please be in the check, because the check showed up. And then we asked the waiter and she was like, oh, yeah, no. And I think that means this third thing, and which is also the thing that most people in the thread were saying, which makes sense, because she's the one who's actually, you know, working the job and foodservice, and we're the two people thinking idly about it. But yeah, it just turned into an interesting pile of answers. Not all in agreement, but a real strong sort of consensus in general. On like, well, it's like you're writing in the air as if as if you were writing a cheque, or as if you were signing a cheque, or as if you were saying, hey, please write out my thing. Whereas if you're saying, like, you

Jessamyn 1:13:25 know, it's as if you're signing your credit card slip. But yeah, like, like, that's

Cortex 1:13:29 what I would think it would mean. And that fits like my experience of like, it's almost always been paying with a credit card and either signing the slipper full yet or signing the slip. But I've never really thought about it was like it was one of those osmosis gestures. So I was really, I was really satisfied to see a lot of people like having, oh, well, obviously strong opinions that like didn't always agree with each other. Right? Like, it's one of the things we all have to figure this out at some point. And you probably don't get taught it at any point.

Jessamyn 1:13:56 Right? You just watch other grown ups do it when you're younger, and then eventually you get it.

Cortex 1:14:02 Exactly. So thanks, everybody for participating that I thought was really interesting

Jessamyn 1:14:06 as well. And it's interesting at the end, Buxton, the red is like, oh, it's like, please bring the card terminal, which like, not a thing we have as much in the US for whatever stupid reason. Yeah, but in the UK, it's like the absolute normal way to pay like somebody brings over the little terminal, you run your own card, you don't just give your card to a stranger who wanders off with it for an in depth, you know, indeterminate amount of time. Yeah, very interesting. I did want to point out speaking of the hard work that everybody did, Reed bent, worked with. Worked with a steering committee staff, you know, volunteers to make the Mi fi gift guide 2022 Yeah, questions that help people find gifts and then a big metal filter post. that, you know, came with like press releases that went out to various, you know, social media and media people to give people some ideas about what you might want to be shopping for and it was a huge labor of love and it just wanted to say thanks, and it's cool.

Cortex 1:15:20 Yeah, good work I enjoyed this question. That's sort of like a Bookstein question, which seems like a very Metafilter sort of thing. This is a question from Justice guy, you know, saying his wife has a copy of oranges by John McPhee next to oranges are not the only fruit by Jeanette Winterson. What else could go on that shelf to this discussion?

Jessamyn 1:15:50 I miss asked Metafilter terribly for stuff like this.

Cortex 1:15:53 It seemed like a very user to question ah, ah, so it's fun to read. And if you have more to add, add it. I also this this was fascinating and feels like it should just turn into a post. But I didn't check yet to see whether it had the question what's up with these old French cars from sellin ized where they were watching something and there were cars driving around with gas cylinders stuck to their roofs what's going on with that? It turns out what's going on with that? Is there were a ton of cars in like, you know, World War Two era in particular running on something other than gasoline because like gasoline was expensive and being Oh, by state to you know, for military stuff, presumably. So I guess it was a very big thing in French but also other places. There was different forms of vendors like bags of gas that was like cylinders. There was firewood running things. Wow, it's bizarre. It looks like it really looks like something out of a weird, like made up steampunky bullshit thing. But this was just like, this was some like, you know, early mid century history and no reason you couldn't do it still now like it's probably for legal reasons. Oh, yeah. But

Jessamyn 1:17:13 like now but like, legal reasons or reasons.

Cortex 1:17:17 Let me let me restate there's there's no reason question engine in a near term, post apocalyptic situation.

Jessamyn 1:17:24 I don't think about near term post apocalypses

Cortex 1:17:28 I'm just saying like this, like this makes maybe more sense that Mad Max. So back to

Jessamyn 1:17:31 Twitter, you know?

Cortex 1:17:36 It's fascinating. It's fascinating, weird. And, and yes. If this has not been a metaphor for post yet, or have recently, someone should just go ahead and make one because it's so cool. It's such a weird, I had no idea sort of bit of history.

Jessamyn 1:17:51 The one other thing I have for AskMe Metafilter is not sci fi servi course from dark childre, dark Shel Dray, whatever, a dark

a librarian, their children, their children. I want to read through a list of classic foundational influential sci fi novels and short stories, but I got to make the list. What needs to go on the list. So it's a classic bliss generating thread. It's got 65 answers. It's still open. Classic sci fi go. Love it.

Cortex 1:18:35 All right. Yeah. I have one other as well, which is all from just this guy. You know, apparently I'm either stalking him or he's somehow pandering to my very limited lens into ask me, but, but he asked a few weeks ago, you know, could you run an LED light at night to track bugs and then somehow ingest those bugs to make an awful lot of electricity to run the light? And it got three answers to for Moonmilk and one from away from away for recruiting, which is a great

Jessamyn 1:19:05 play for regrouping. Yep. Love it. Love it.

Cortex 1:19:09 And yeah, so they there's there's there's not a whole lot of engagement. But there's a couple of attempts at real answers. And yeah, in theory, in theory, maybe you could sort of do it. It's, you just maybe need a lot of flies. So

Jessamyn 1:19:24 right, which is not actually how carnivorous plants eat their flies, or flies more like snakes eat whatever. Yeah, one meal digest for a day. But great question. Love it.

Cortex 1:19:37 Yeah. Yeah, that's that's what I have from ask. Is there stuff from meta talk? We should?

Jessamyn 1:19:44 I mean, I think just the ongoing fundraiser, there should be an update coming out real soon. I'm aware that it feels weird to people that there were three updates that came out relatively on time and one that is now delayed by a bit. But I think you know, US holidays and also the overlap of events with the fundraisers this causes that to happen. So I just asked people to please be patient, which I know is difficult. And it's not easy for me either. But do your best. And just that's been going great and has really been a lot of meta talk. And there's, you know, there's event stuff going on. I am talking next week, about like, let's talk to Jessamyn. About the internet on Tuesday, the 13th. In the in America, East Coast evening time. So if you want to come chat with me, come chat with me do it.

Cortex 1:20:39 There's metal filter method on server. Great Pronoiac has gotten up and running, and still sort of a work in progress, but it's actually working. The post about it was open for about a month, and now it's closed. And I think this might be just a normal pause to get some shit together. But if you're super keenly interested in that and missed the boat prior, probably drop Pronoiac A line. But otherwise, that's, that's a nice little experimental thing. And people are hanging out there. It's great. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:21:09 I've seen a lot of people, you know, in my socials on my librarian, Macedon, coming over from the Fae, social, like just you know, because obviously, it's part of the fediverse. And that's been neat. Really neat. Yeah.

Cortex 1:21:21 And we mentioned it earlier, but there was, here's the actual meta talk posts. I'll include the Mefi post for sale just for reference with what's going on there.

Jessamyn 1:21:31 Yeah, I think I raised $700 for the site just by doing sponsored posts for q&a. Now, I was pretty happy with that. And I may be, there may be one or two I have left to do. I'm not 100% sure like life intervened. Once the holiday season starts, everything falls apart. And a shout out to my friend bond cliff. Because we had Jim's Miss again, let this past weekend where my gym not on display and other gym bond Cliff who I met at the same day at a meet up and who both had the same day, month, year, birthday, and first and middle name. We all get together and celebrate the birthday. And we just did that last weekend. It was fun. Nice. Yeah. And Mary are would have come but was almost COVID.

Cortex 1:22:10 That's a good reason to stay home. Yeah, I thought so. There was a nice post recently from brain Wayne about what the oh yeah, this does. So if you're curious about that, and once more detail on sort of what the board does the history of it, etc. She laid it out really well there. So please go take a look.

Jessamyn 1:22:28 Yeah, they've been really I'm going back, I'm gonna go I'm going

Cortex 1:22:32 for it. So if you're not sure that you're actually interested, go read it anyway. Because if I could take an interest, yeah. And

Jessamyn 1:22:37 now I've got access to them if I get up and one of the things that was always like driving me crazy was that Nephi bipoc board didn't have dates by the meeting times, and you could like hover your mouse over and figure out when the meetings happened. But it became less clear when the last meeting was when the next meeting was blar blar. And I got to fix it myself. Okay, and go global BiPAP board, there was some nice discussion in that thread just about why it's called the Global bipoc board and what they're up to and what their priorities are and how you can get involved. And I'm excited about that. I

Cortex 1:23:11 can tell you something absolutely perverse. Not not having had enough time away from Metafilter stuff to like, really have taken off things like there's a part of my brain that has thought recently. You know, I can probably help out with some of the code because like, no, no, no, but that the brain went there. Maybe Maybe I'll revisit it next time.

Jessamyn 1:23:36 You feel like you could commit to helping with a project

Cortex 1:23:39 it let's be cool. That's the thing. We're

Jessamyn 1:23:42 not there yet. Yeah, no, and I don't want to hear about it anymore. Those are my two things. I love you like a brother Josh malarkey. But no more Glee at I'm not gonna help for now. Because it's a self help thing, that self care thing that you should be doing for yourself. But you can just keep those thoughts in your heads.

Cortex 1:24:08 I agree. And that'd be great. And it's the perversity. So

Jessamyn 1:24:12 but perverting doesn't mean this is gonna make you see read the perversity?

Cortex 1:24:16 Well, it's well, the imp of the perverse perversity? Yes. Oh, yeah.

Jessamyn 1:24:23 You know, I just read a book where there's like, ADHD protagonist, and he's got serious imp of the perverse problems in that way. And it's hilarious like it's, it's written very interestingly. Because it gets them into trouble. And yet, you also it also helps in some, you know, ways to remain ways to remain seen later. It's cool. But ya know, I hear what you're saying. Maybe later.

Cortex 1:24:49 Yeah. But that's, I think that's it. I think. I think we may get out with an achingly short at five minutes here. Hey, that's tremendous of us. Um, but yeah, hey, it's nice to do a podcast again. Yes, you know, this is gonna be weird because people are gonna be hearing one in a few days, but it's been it's been a couple months since we like had a good chatter and

Jessamyn 1:25:12 it's been over two months. So yeah, it's it's it's way past time and yeah, maybe we'll get Adrian on a future podcast. I think that'd be really nifty. And if you want to talk to me next Tuesday, sign up for Metafilter events.

Cortex 1:25:23 Yes, go do that. Go get go get more investment in your life and I'll make sure we get this posted before then. So this is a useful reminder Excellent. All right. Well, I'll talk to you later friend

Unknown Speaker 1:25:33 All right. Bye always build to start and sprinting in the sun drive waste.

Cortex 1:26:03 Away track and guide me