Podcast 18 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 18: The MeFites Have Been Drinking (2007-11-06).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary keywords

people, blog, filter, thread, post, book, talking, totally, metal, put, meta, friends, thought, person, big, user, day, year, costume, email

Transcript

mathowie 0:07 Gentlemen, welcome to the metal filter podcast. Welcome episode 18 of the metal filter podcast this week we feature recaps from the past couple weeks of metal filter

oh my god there's so many good things in the metadata thread the food nuts Oxford know this. The Med talk thread on Halloween costumes are so good. I didn't even get a chance to go through everything.

Jessamyn 1:02 To even see it.

mathowie 1:03 Let me see. Yeah, I

Jessamyn 1:05 must have seen it. But

mathowie 1:06 where the hell's the chat stuff? Think?

Jessamyn 1:11 Oh, the Halloween costume? Yeah. You know, because it was before Halloween.

mathowie 1:15 Yeah, it was one of those like, oh, open thread excuse to talk about ourselves. And I was like, Oh, this could go badly. But then there are so many great costumes. Do you see?

Jessamyn 1:27 I saw the one that you posted on your blog for web goddess.

mathowie 1:31 That was That was hilarious. And then there's another one. Oh my god. Grumble be Did you see his fucking that right now? His cereal? Dude, how the fuck did he make it? It's amazing. Was it Captain frankenberry or something?

Jessamyn 1:48 Very In fact, there's a there's a meta filter user who's not grumble be? I'm pretty sure he's not girl will be who that is. Twitter icon. dirt, dirt. And so well. That's his Twitter name. I'll have to look for him on Metafilter.

mathowie 2:02 But maybe he just bought it. But I thought it was that.

Jessamyn 2:06 I think he made it. That was pretty nice. Look at Frank and very character like every day. Oh, yeah. Wow, that's really cool. I saw one Michael Jackson trick or treater, but that was like the costume thread was like after everybody's Halloween parties on the weekend and then before actual trick or treating. Yeah, I have to be friends with Grant will be on Flickr. Hold on. Okay. We didn't. Yeah, but no, that was a totally fun thread.

mathowie 2:37 Yeah. Also, I didn't go through all of them. But I was amazed at the creativity. Ghostbusters is not bad

Jessamyn 2:52 it was recommending the metal filter, metal filter Halloween contest. Maybe maybe next year we'll get together and

mathowie 3:01 yeah, we should do like a Yahoo Yahoo Flickr group or something? Because these are funny if they're all just in one place.

Jessamyn 3:09 Right? Well, and I'm always happy to hear of like people that got good ideas on AskMe edit filter. We didn't have half this many. It didn't seem like half as many costume questions this year as we as we normally get.

mathowie 3:20 Yeah. Yeah, I think I think that was that

Jessamyn 3:28 sexy badger you know, you always take whatever it is. And then yeah, put it in stockings. And

mathowie 3:34 um, I think as the years go on, oh, there's also great like, people are showing off their pumpkins. Pumpkins. No way Tobias Fuquay Oh my God, dude. What what? So it's from the show Arrested Development. And one episode. It was David Cross. This character. He like turned blue. This dude went as a character from the show in blue. That's fucking commitment.

Jessamyn 4:05 I saw that picture and I had no idea what the hell it was. Oh, I get it.

mathowie 4:09 Yeah, it's very funny.

Jessamyn 4:11 Well, I love that picture too because clearly the guy needs a friend

mathowie 4:17 like with a mirror

Jessamyn 4:18 respond although you know that was an old asked Metafilter question that I really love

mathowie 4:22 my god Adam Savage saw it the the person going as him

Jessamyn 4:27 Oh great. Well goddess Yeah, the girl the girl going

mathowie 4:31 yes sexy Adams

Jessamyn 4:37 asked Metafilter thread about how do I put suntan lotion on my back? How do I put moisturizer on my back? How do I put the anti each cream I don't even remember what it was they'll they had these like little spongy things that you use in the shower but everybody had like these different ideas. You know you put the attack the sponge to a wall and then back up to bid and do what you got to do.

mathowie 5:04 I guess we should talk about there's a billion things coming out from metal filter soon. And I don't think we don't always announce this stuff on metal

Jessamyn 5:14 sleeve we never announce it. Well, I

mathowie 5:16 mean, if there are major changes we do, but I think I've laid out little teasers. And if you don't, like buried in some metadata thread, you're probably missing stuff.

Jessamyn 5:27 Or if you're checking your Flickr Photo Stream, which is how I learned about all the changes.

mathowie 5:32 Yeah, we don't even keep everyone on the loop. Like I was just telling, Paul that like, the stuff me and him talk about in my office is how we come up with basically every feature in the world, but but we should probably we're almost at the point where we need to do like a weekly call with like you and cortex just to get that was my suggestion. But then I was like, This feels like a real job at that point. That's kind of depressing. That's like, Monday at 10am. Get your coffee everyone be here, we have to talk.

Jessamyn 6:02 He just sent out an email, it says what you guys are working on. The hard

mathowie 6:05 part with email is like, if we just, it's there's so much explaining to do, because like, we'll talk for an hour about like, how this new feature is going to work and all the pitfalls and then I can never remember them. And you'll always mention a few pitfalls. If you send out the screenshot, I'm like to what the fuck? No, it's always like way, way, way we've already talked. That would happen. We know that'll happen. I just haven't gotten to it yet. It's like exhausting to write it out. So yeah, it'd be better as audio. But um, so let me see what's coming up. So we've got image uploading. Where's the let me look at the demo one, I think image uploading for your profile. Yeah. So profile image, nothing huge. Just 140 by 140 pixel imaging put on your profile? I think I'll do good things.

Jessamyn 7:02 Yeah, upload it from from your computer, can you upload it from the

mathowie 7:05 web? No, you

Jessamyn 7:06 got to upload it from a file. If you have it on Flickr, you have to save it and re upload it.

mathowie 7:11 Yeah, most sites make you do that. And we've got a really cool uploader that, like lets you crop it, if it's bigger than this size, like visually, you know, to put some more exponent explanatory texts around it to say like, you know, we force the stretches like maximize that the size of the image will be

Jessamyn 7:32 it has to be a square, right? What happens if you have a square? Because

mathowie 7:35 we're going to turn them into thumbnails? And do god knows what down the line? Does a

Jessamyn 7:39 rectangular image just get space? Or does it get stretched?

mathowie 7:43 You get the cropping tool, and you can crop it any way you want. If we put something up that's smaller than 140 by 140, I haven't tested it yet. I think we just display it as is. Okay. And then what else? I guess I, so we have to there's a slight refresh to the user page to reflect your new user image.

Jessamyn 8:05 But nothing changed to made it look nicer. I mean, yeah, don't take anything away.

mathowie 8:10 I moved the functionality for contact, adding and taking away and added editing. Also, I made that front and center because the next feature is the

Jessamyn 8:19 meta filter as Facebook model. Yeah, the

mathowie 8:23 Facebook II thing. What what was, what are people calling this like they call news streams or live streams or updates? There's some timeline timeline timeline. Yeah. So it's like a Facebook timeline of what all your contacts have done on the site recently. And I don't think we're gonna run into the, like Facebook, privacy problems, just because it's really useful stuff. Like, it's just awesome for discovery. So if you've marked off 10 people you like, if you haven't done so, just go ahead and do it right now. Because then it'll make sense on day one, when we launch it. What happens?

Jessamyn 9:03 You don't have any contacts. Do you get a blank space?

mathowie 9:05 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, linked to the fact on what's contact adding even mean and stuff? I mean, we're kind of mired in language here with contacts. We probably should call it friends. But it was no, I

Jessamyn 9:19 think context is good, though. Because a lot of the people that I linked to are other librarians that I don't even know but I can mark them as colleagues so that I know you know there are a lot of

mathowie 9:29 people have the fact like for the non What do you call that reciprocal linking, there'll be like, you have a new fan from this person. So it's less than a friend when you write less following more like they're a fan of your work. So the cool thing is so basically the changes metal filter be on the front page, like the little side Blog area on the front pages, I guess of all the sites that have it will just be like a stream of like the last five returned items.

Jessamyn 10:01 Oh, you're not just gonna put it on metal filter. Dude asked me to filters gotta have like tags and stuff on top.

mathowie 10:06 Okay, they'll just be on metal filter. I guess that's sort of like the main. Yeah, I guess we could just be on metal filter. Yeah, we

Jessamyn 10:14 haven't needs to have the meetups on the sidebar that kind of

mathowie 10:17 that works really well. And metal filter side blog is are like me. So

Jessamyn 10:23 what you need is you need widgets so that everybody can add whatever they want to their sidebar.

mathowie 10:28 Oh, yeah, I mean, yeah, we'll definitely do that down the line. So let's say it's just gonna be on metal filter. Last 10 things that have happened and there's a big prominent link to the whole stream, which goes on and on and on. So it was it list it lists like,

Jessamyn 10:44 oh, you added or who added? Who added who was a contact?

mathowie 10:48 Yeah, a whole bunch of stuff like contact, I'll just say friends. So I'll show you any friend that's posted anything like a post not comments, we because that's just people posting 50 comments a day, but posts because I think it's pretty substantial. When someone makes a post or asks a question. They're a friend of yours you're probably interested in like, as I've already like, I had no idea like two or three friends answered asked questions. And I went in there and went through it. I just totally flew by and RSS, you know, but it's that person. Yeah, my real life friends. So I'm gonna leave a, you know, a thoughtful answer. Yeah, the thing is the gal that's how you found out that gal, no idea Miguel even touches the site anymore. Like people post new jobs and your friends, you might want to help them out, you know, and finding someone for it. It tells you when I love the best answer tells when your friends have wrote something that's the best answer and ask metal filter, like totally oddball, but great. And you'll find the other thing too is the, if you get over a threshold, I think it's 12 or 15. favorites on anything a post or comment, it gets listed.

Jessamyn 12:01 It looks like 10 on the version you have on your Yeah, I

mathowie 12:04 think we upped it to like 12 or 15. But yeah, it's probably a good, but it's good for like, especially a funny comment from a friend. You're like, oh, I would have missed that. Otherwise. We also do do the friend tracking of the thing it's great about it's great for discovery because it'd be like, I trust my friends. That's why their contacts in the app. And then when they're adding more contacts, I probably know those people but I didn't know you know, I

Jessamyn 12:32 never maybe you didn't know they were on the site or Yeah,

mathowie 12:35 so I'm find it really useful. I see a friend come in and bloom Bulk Add like 10 or 15 people just like in Facebook. I'll just go Oh, that guy's here. Oh, yeah. Oh, I should? Uh, yeah, of course, I'll add that person. So

Jessamyn 12:49 I haven't Facebook like keeping track of who's on it, who maybe wasn't on it the last time I checked them against my email.

mathowie 12:55 Yeah, we I think we've only been tracking it for like a week. So it doesn't go back forever. But if you have like 30 contacts, or so you're gonna have plenty of like things here filling up your screen. I guess

Jessamyn 13:10 I may need to pare back my contacts.

mathowie 13:13 We limit for people that I meet we up the limit for you. I guess I shouldn't meet everyone I've met at a meet up I should keep track of. But um, I think yeah, this would be I think this is just be super handy. And just a way to like, catch the things you might have missed. I think it'll be great at that.

Jessamyn 13:37 I think it's great. What else you guys adding was that? Those are the two major things.

mathowie 13:41 Yeah, I guess further down the line got a billion things in the hopper. Finally, being able to change your password on the site. You know, there's this whole, like security rewrite of the user system required to do that. And we've already started to do that.

Jessamyn 13:56 So that's required people logging out and logging back. Yeah. And so it'll be it'll be a big messy day, right. That's why

mathowie 14:03 we've been trying to get tighter about email. Everyone who signs up for as a new user now is like asked to authenticate themselves, but we'd let them post before that. But we asked people authenticate themselves. If you want to change do anything to your email at this point, you have to authenticate and go through this whole thing. It's just so we have reliable emails to start sending out stuff like you want to change your password. Here's a secret URL, you know, it's got to be emailed to you. Stuff like

Jessamyn 14:31 launch. Just do a meta talk thread that just as like, Hey, everyone, yeah, check your check your email address and put it on the main site on a banner or something just so that was built on game day.

mathowie 14:43 I mean, there's gonna be so I mean, there's, there's a whole bunch of features we'll be doing around do user accounts, but when we like rewrite the way the cookies are completely done, that's the day like everyone has to log in again to get a new cookie. And that's when like, everyone's gonna be forced to have to remember their past password, but

Jessamyn 15:01 we should hire extra staff you should bring me out to the coast and we'll just have a 24 hour, you know, password. I thought at Matt's place. Yeah,

mathowie 15:09 the problem is it takes like 10 or 15 minutes right of email back and forth to be like, Who are you again? Because they're like, I don't remember anything. Well, can you give me something like that's an email that's emitted out of your day? And then they come back with like, I think my email might have been this, and it might have had a username like this. And then so you have to go digging, then when you find the account that matches, you have to ask them questions like, you know, there's no way to automate this crap.

Jessamyn 15:37 Like the person who was emailing the who was like thinking about getting an account. Like I couldn't even figure out what that was.

mathowie 15:43 It was English, not as the first language. But still,

Jessamyn 15:46 it was extra crazy. Like, do I have to pay extra for my sock puppet? And you're like, what, what? Well,

mathowie 15:52 yeah, I mean, if you never heard of the site, and you read the entire fac, and then everything is at the same level in the facts of importance. So you're like, right? Yeah. So yeah. Is my sock puppet going to a meet up? Or you're like, Wait, what did you just throw in the back in a blender and read it back? That's what it sounds like. Great. So yeah, there's travel filter. I'm almost done with all the cosmetic crap for that. And then we have some back end stuff to do

Jessamyn 16:23 smokin hot searches my next Yes, yeah,

mathowie 16:25 we totally have to retool search from the get go. I'd like to finally make a double post search is something that can make it afternoon, but something that definitively help you never do a double post again. Like do we can do lots of search stuff. You know, searching on tags searching in your favorites?

Jessamyn 16:48 Boolean. Yeah, just searching in here for what I guess.

mathowie 16:51 Yeah, that's like stalking searches. I would guess I think of that, like it had to be tagged with Apple. But it was only talking about this open ended text field, which would be I'll say keyboards, you know, or something, right?

Jessamyn 17:04 Or this user posted it. I know, I read something by what?

mathowie 17:07 Yeah, yeah, users? Definitely. Yeah, we definitely have to completely Yeah, in fact, the site was good search.

Jessamyn 17:16 Because I think that'll help a lot of the other stuff we've seen coming up and meta talk where it's like, please look, roommate questions up, please look, gift questions up like, whatever. Yeah, some people are just never gonna do it. But I think a lot of people would like to be able to, you know, have a Google global search of the site, even though Google powers the search, there's still a lot of cruft that comes up in the results.

mathowie 17:39 Yeah, I think, what do you call it be interesting travel filter in that. It's just a like, it's as if we totally blew up the archives into something way more complex and cool looking? And retrievable. Right? So I would say like, yeah, like, we could kind of use travel filter as a testbed of what might come with one we, you know, not only search, but archives, like how to surface stuff really well. Right? And I have a feeling that won't be like, What should I do in New York questions as much anymore? Because there's like 85, previous detail

Jessamyn 18:18 my way for going to New York, you have everything,

mathowie 18:21 every combination, you can go, you can drill down to just New York, just what to do. And then you can see them all on one page. You can see like, Oh, here's the one that just a couple. Here's one just about babies like that. And there's already been these long drawn out things where everyone's suggested hotels and stuff. And yeah, there's really, I mean, I found myself not asking questions, because there's a lot of stuff I could find easily.

Jessamyn 18:45 Right? Yeah, no, me too. Same thing here.

mathowie 18:48 So let's do the best of metal filter stuff.

Jessamyn 18:51 I have six posts that I liked over a billion.

mathowie 18:55 I just want to talk about the sidebar thing. It just happened the writer's strike.

Jessamyn 19:00 Oh, yeah, the cortex and I both posted within an hour of each other sidebar.

mathowie 19:04 This is awesome. Because I think this is where I think blogs can excel in that. I was just telling you, Neal all about this, my theories of why shit on the internet doesn't work when you're talking about stuff is that there's one big obvious idea, and everyone gloms onto that, and then there's always like a subtle or way to look at it to be like, Hey, there's this thing with that big obvious idea. And it might make you rethink your position on it. I think blogs I always thought of as being really good at doing the but you know, second part,

Jessamyn 19:38 and like I'm a dude that works in the industry. Maybe it hasn't occurred to you that blog,

mathowie 19:42 or you know, anything on earth, you know, and unfortunately the stuff doesn't really scale you know, online, especially blogs now zillions of you know, anonymous comments people kind of stick to the big obvious thing. But this is a great this is like you know, writers go on strike, strike. x in general, they're gonna affect you know, regular people's daily entertainment lies aren't very good. And people always, you know, the big obvious thing is like, Oh, they just want more money. They're a bunch of greedy bastards like

Jessamyn 20:13 that about the baseball strike. People say that about Yeah, anytime,

mathowie 20:16 people. And then this is a great subtle like, this is a totally nice explanation of why writers have no rights when it comes to all the various avenues in which they sell their stuff. And everyone else gets paid over and over and over again, actors, directors, producers, they all have this percentage basis that goes through, you know, something that's online, something that's on a DVD, they always get the same amount. But for writers, they just get like, either nothing, or a small flat fee. Right. And you can kind of go all the way back,

Jessamyn 20:51 you know, the intellectual content, you can argue at least a good chunk of it. Yeah.

mathowie 20:55 And you can go all the way back to things like what's his name? Darth Vader's CNN voice guy, James Earl Jones, James, Earl Jones did all the voice work for Star Wars for $800? Because that was a one time license fee. That's the way the artists rights were in 1970. In six, seven, he made 800 bucks for Star Wars. That was it. I mean, amazing. It nothing is there's no contract. It was just a flat rate for higher kind of thing. And these kinds of things that are happening the writers today, but not to actors and directors or producers anymore. This is just awesome. Like, here's the real backstory on that big obvious thing that might make you think rethink it.

Jessamyn 21:40 Well, that was from this morning. Some of the ones that I found that I really liked were from like, right after the last podcast. Actually, one of them I don't remember if we mentioned this in the last podcast, but pkce book came out. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the Odyssey, which he posted two projects. And then of course, it got picked up and became a,

mathowie 22:00 I never looked too deeply in it. What is it exactly? Well, he

Jessamyn 22:03 basically has a blog, just a, you know, regular old blog that goes through online archives of like book art stuff, mostly illustrations from old books that he finds it like library websites, and digital archive websites. And he puts them up in a blog format. And it's beautiful. It's totally beautiful. He picks these beautiful things, and everybody loves them. And I guess he worked with some people to actually fuel design to actually print some of the best images with some text and annotations in this great introduction, and publish it as a book. And so he had to go around and get permission from all of these archives.

mathowie 22:44 That sounds good. I'm asked like, Oh, no. But when I

Unknown Speaker 22:47 got it, I was like, Is this one big copyright violation, he sent me a copy of the book. It's beautiful. It's so lovely, because it like coffee table books, like just well, it's normal size, but it's got like this kind of guilt looking cover with this cool image. And, and the images inside the reproductions are really nice. And there's this really nice intro,

mathowie 23:06 is there a text? Or is it just page after page of images,

Jessamyn 23:09 but there's text sort of explaining what the images are and where they came from? I mean, they're, they're usually from really old books. And you can you can follow the blog if you want to, and just see, you know, the kind of stuff that he does.

mathowie 23:21 Oh, yeah. So it's kind of like the O'Reilly book covers in that you find 150 year old wood cut, so there's no copyright on it. So it's okay, for the most part.

Jessamyn 23:31 Yeah. And a lot of times, he just had to negotiate with the archives for the rights to fix the item. I mean, you know, to fix it in print in order to put it in the book. So part of the introduction of the book is talking, which is what fascinates me with librarians and archivists about printing a book with a picture that's from their archive in another book that was published in the 1500s. It's just kind of interesting.

mathowie 23:53 Oh, and people like to there's sort of a contention in law that if you grab a 500 year old book and scan it, the JPG file from the scan is considered a new work that you own the copyright to, like, there's some weirdness with that

Jessamyn 24:11 as well. And you see that with libraries who put you know, public domain stuff online, but they have copyright over the JPEGs that they created.

mathowie 24:20 Yeah, I'm not so sure. Yeah.

Jessamyn 24:23 New York Public Library has come under some some heat for that.

mathowie 24:26 Yeah. Oh, this also reminds so the other big book from a metal filter user would be the the girls the derry

Jessamyn 24:36 o Right, right. Right. So

mathowie 24:39 last summer, I guess is when the what was the boys book called Dangerous book for boys. And it was kind of funny, kitschy throwback to like, here's all the, you know, science fair in a box and like how to make wacky smoke bombs. And yeah, it was very cool. You know, here's how to like, please send

Jessamyn 24:58 it to me in the mail. I don't even No, why I have it. It just showed up at my house.

mathowie 25:02 So yeah, the SOS boys book comes out, I think it was like huge hit. I think it was right to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. And the first obvious question was like, well, where's the girl's book? Like, where's the girl power? Like, you know, come on. So I guess the publisher scrambled. Got a girl's version out. It's just came out two days, Monday or Tuesday. And then one of the authors is Metafilter user, which I can't remember username right now.

Jessamyn 25:34 Oh, cool. Yeah. User mother shock. She's, yeah, it's in the Skype window.

mathowie 25:39 Okay. Oh, yeah, there it is.

Jessamyn 25:43 And she had actually asked him questions in AskMe, Metafilter. That was the parts of it. Yeah,

mathowie 25:48 I took a picture of the exact page from the metal filter one. I didn't see the acknowledgments. I didn't check for him. But this is pretty much the product of AskMe edit filter thread in the book.

Jessamyn 26:01 Hey, well, you know, if we're talking about books, my favorite project was actually a book from a metal filter member. Oh, it was from a couple days ago. It's called One day the soldiers came. And it's all about children's reactions to war by a metal filter user cal 71, who of course, is a contact of mine, because he thinks he's a dude. Yeah, because he's going to library school.

mathowie 26:27 Holy shit. That's cool. Oh, yeah, I did see that.

Jessamyn 26:33 It's a neat looking project that goes along with this blog. That's really nice. And 60% of the royalties go to refugees International.

mathowie 26:40 60%. That's awesome. Yeah.

Jessamyn 26:42 Well, I mean, royalties, God only knows what like,

mathowie 26:46 was just words. Like, I think I really want to see what look like inside the book, like, is it just articles or drawings? Or photos? Or? I guess it's just stories from Kid. Now, I

Jessamyn 27:00 think just trying, I think there's drawings inside. And if I start I don't want to, like, be

mathowie 27:09 I think part of the scrolling your scroll? Yeah.

Jessamyn 27:14 I think part of the deal is the book has a bunch of drawings from children, and then they're collecting more of them. And they're gonna put a lot of those drawings actually on the websites so that people can kind of see, you know, how, how war in conflict, look through children's eyes, because, you know, everybody knows, like, war is not kind for children and other living things. But I think people don't really kind of grok that kids just understand the stuff differently. You know? Yeah. I just need from user cal 71, who's just been a member for a year and a little bit.

mathowie 27:51 I haven't seen like an awesome job. Did you see the library job? That was kind of weird.

Jessamyn 27:56 Yeah, my friend Jamie posted that.

mathowie 27:58 That was funny. You should move

Jessamyn 28:00 on call librarian in British Columbia. 30 bucks an hour. Yeah,

mathowie 28:04 not bad.

Jessamyn 28:06 I would love to move to Canada, but British Columbia is like really far from here.

mathowie 28:11 That's true. Um, I think my favorite job was Justin halls that mentioned this last one. I don't think so. I don't think so. Justin Hall, you know, Jesus Christ. You know, he's cro-magnon of blogging. Right? Right.

Jessamyn 28:27 It all started with Justin pretty much pretty much

mathowie 28:29 he invented sort of the personal web personal websites 94 Five like so right now he's doing this wacky, passively multiplayer online gaming. And it was just sort of he was looking at his friends are obsessed with World Warcraft and stuff. And the hell these points and they all these ratings, and there's all these sites where you're, you're ranked everywhere. And he was like, I just don't play that, you know that much. So you know, missing out on all that. So I came up with a sort of cobbled together version of where we could all be, oh, he players, the thing he liked about the world Warcraft thing is there's this suddenly this absolute, like, metric, they can walk around and just say, Look, I'm a level 70 about this. You need to listen to me.

Jessamyn 29:16 I'm a level 38 Paladin. Yeah.

mathowie 29:19 So it's like real life. woofie you know, from Cory Doctorow, whatever. So he's like, how can we do this with the web? Because I mean, there's so many experts. And so he created this, like, I think it's a Firefox plug in that just sort of follows where you go, Oh, this would be the scary part. Yeah, it basically uploads your time on certain sites like Flickr or delicious or Wikipedia or metal filter or whatever. And so, and he has, like, all he came up with like, you know, 20 different sort of archetypes of of users. And you could say like, I'm a level 70 Wikipedian, or researcher because I spend X amount of time Wikipedia, my profile automatically says so. It's object. Yeah, yeah. It's like, I'm basically on dictionary.com and Wikipedia all day. And so I must be a really good researcher. And there's like, you know, king of blogs or whatever, he has all personality.

Jessamyn 30:18 Maybe all you're doing is complaining about lots, maybe all you're doing is griefing.

mathowie 30:23 It's really fun. The whole thing is just silly and fun. And like, you basically do what you do. And then all sudden, at the end, you have this like ranking. It's not like there's, there's no incentives to try and be number one. It's just sort of like, I think I thought when I saw his demos that like, it was interesting to like, get a profile of yourself. You're like, oh, yeah, I guess I am really good at that. Yeah. I never thought that or

Jessamyn 30:47 beta testing it. I noticed, like, I go to the page, and it's just looking for betas right now.

mathowie 30:51 Oh, no, it's just I saw him give demos of it before and maybe all the way back to, like, posted the job. Yeah, I think he started as like a school project. And so it turned into like a company. I told them, like, you know, this is fun and goofy, but like, there's something there like it's, there's something addictive and like, you know, collecting charm sort of way. Like there's something there's something there and I'm like, to turn this into a comp like, I think he showed it off at South by Southwest a year or two ago when it was still like school project. And so yeah, he got funding and I think he has three or four employees and they're trying to build out and they need a rest Ajax Ruby on Rails guy. What do they need? Oh, yeah, they need Ruby on Rails developers. He needs a lot of infrastructure to basically train shitloads of data and then he has to crunch the data and then spit it out. And he wants everyone to have like a widget on their blog says like, I'm a level 60 You know, blogger. And I think people love I mean, it's,

Jessamyn 31:54 it's level 70 porn star

mathowie 31:57 might sound stupid, but like it's it's just all based on goofball fun. No, I think it's a neat idea. And he's just wacky dude, and probably be hilarious to work with. So I thought that was pretty cool.

Jessamyn 32:10 All right, real quick rest of meta filter. Baby porcupine eats a banana and has the hiccups.

mathowie 32:16 Oh, I didn't see that I saw on someone's personal blog. I didn't have time just

Jessamyn 32:20 turned into like one of those fun threads on meta filter where everybody posts their favorite cute animal videos. Cool. That's it. Here's a little porcupine, it eats a banana. And it has hiccups. That's it and I only found it because people flagged it like what the fuck. But it was it was kind of great. And my only content the one that I really love for content. I also like remix the flags of the world only because people are people did all sorts of flags. It's one of those like, oh, you know, the image tag would make that a huge clusterfuck but it was pretty good. But pious exactly three I also I actually saw this post first on I know it's a good username to but I saw that first meta chat and it's just one of those kind of long essay type.

Unknown Speaker 33:08 Oh yeah.

Jessamyn 33:10 Sure posts about the Buffalo State Hospital in Buffalo, New York total rustbelt, but not only is it like look at these awesome pictures of this crazy building, but the more inside again like go go more inside talks about it was actually an example of this kind of plan for mental asylums. Like, back when people thought a lot about this stuff people were making plans and like how do you get people to get better and blah blah blah. And so it talks about how this was actually an advance this fallen down wreck in mental institution design at the time and he has a whole bunch of links and it was very interesting. Yeah,

mathowie 33:47 yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like cutting edge

Jessamyn 33:51 cutting edge at the time and now it like looks horribly antiquated and ridiculous but pies exactly three I saw him posted on meta chat and I was like, I hope he posted on Metafilter also, because one of the ways I see like what's up on meta filter is meta Chad's got a sidebar for what meta chatters have posted a meta filter so you can kind of look at just like it's like Yeah, it's

mathowie 34:11 nice having someone track that by hand. Or they just look for matches.

Jessamyn 34:16 It must be somebody's contact list or something. It's cool looking.

mathowie 34:21 Here's the thing. I've never seen that a recent post by minute they probably do they think they just do a simple match in the RSS feed you can probably automate this

Jessamyn 34:33 they might It's neat looking whatever it is and so then you know pies exactly three posted and onto onto Metafilter and it was just his third post. He's been a member for two and a

mathowie 34:45 half years exactly three reminds me of point 999 equals one which I won't even get into but it was a funny thread of classic internet arguments or if you just rail against each other forever.

Jessamyn 35:02 I do not remember that one. I love it. I love it. Great thread.

mathowie 35:07 Yeah, this is pretty much everywhere. I mean, it's basically the blue and the gray man, it just never ends. People like this is the most popular thread for a while. We haven't mentioned it before, but it's from like a month ago. I thought the coolest YouTube post I've seen in quite some time was this. This one British comedy television guy doing a bullshit style Penn and Teller's bullshit, kind of programmed with like, here's the real deal with television, and totally breaks it down to everything. Here's why it cost so damn much. Here's why. You know, reality TV is complete garbage. And here's how editing work. So they they film a scene and then he shows you the editing how they could edit it six different ways to make up a story to be totally different. Yeah, reminds me I was just listening to interview with someone who is a reality show TV writer and you're like, what? Like, don't they just point the cameras and it's done. It goes, no, if we take people for a week and nothing happened, we would bring in the writers and the writers would come up with a script, they would come up with an idea, oh, we'll have a show arc where someone is, is bad to another person. And someone wants to beat him up. And then they will record off screen banter that they will paste into the show to provide the story. So they've taped two people sitting in the room, they might cut away to you know, a bookshelf and just go, Hey, I hate your guts, like record that in studio and tack it on to the program to create a story is mine. Yeah, it's mind blowing. You kind of know this happens, right? But then you don't know till someone puts it all together for you. And it looks like it was a BBC show. You know, people in the UK have probably already seen this. But if you just watch the very first link, it's 30 minutes. It's like the entire 30 minute show with the commercials ripped out as just funny as like it's funny and shocking and just really good. Like, oh my god, like TV blows. And they make fun of TV stars a lot about how shitty they can be to each other.

Jessamyn 37:30 I'll have to download it and put it on my stuff to watch next time I want to play

mathowie 37:34 tube sock that yo tube sock right tube sock is awesome.

Jessamyn 37:39 I do not I'm still trying to figure out easy news. What's the

mathowie 37:42 tube sock is a freeware YouTube sucker down or maybe it's 10 bucks. I don't know. It's totally worth whatever it

Jessamyn 37:50 is. I usually use Vixie. But yeah, I mean, you

mathowie 37:52 just basically launch it and then just paste in the URL and it does everything for you. And it puts it in iTunes and you could sync it to your iPod like it's really like a set it forget it kind of thing.

Jessamyn 38:04 I put this video

mathowie 38:07 not yet. Right. This was good. This one. The Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired going off on PR email. And he basically he gets a lot of this lame PR pitches, PDFs and junk just every day fill in his inbox. So he just said he had enough. So he published the actual email addresses of the 300 people he's blocking now.

Jessamyn 38:38 You know, I've always wanted to do that on my Brian dotnet. Like the number of people who send me like, you need to have this book in your library. And I write back to them and I tend to write back the first time. Yeah, thanks. But really, you should like get to know my blog. It doesn't do book reviews. I thought blah. And sometimes I get these totally bitchy defensive emails back. I mean, a lot of times people are like, yeah, no problem, or they just delete me or whatever. But occasionally people are like, look, I found your name, whatever. And I'm like, Oh, dude, you know?

mathowie 39:09 I mean, I don't know. I don't know if anyone even Chris even accurately described the problem. So the thing is, he's at he's the editor in chief of wired. So he's unique position. But what's weird is if you have a blog of any like, this isn't like Oh, A listers bitching about their, you know, phones ringing off the hook. It's like, if you have a blog about any subject on Earth that has, you know, more than 10 readers. You might start getting hit with these PR people, they just do a scattershot search for you know, I get probably more for PVR blog than meta filter being like, in charge of that. Every dumb video company in the world sends me a press release every single fucking day. I mean, I get five a day at least. They can be totally in consequential, but marketing people have no idea. I mean, they're paid to just blast it to the world. And at first, like two years ago, it was fine. It's like one person goes. Oh, you know? Yeah, I see you cover the subject, you know that really thoughtful or actual personal emails?

Jessamyn 40:19 Right? And even though they're marketing people, yeah,

mathowie 40:21 they're like, look, I read your site, you know, I'm working with a client who's doing this thing you might want to mention two years ago, or three years ago, I would like sometimes it'd be like, oh, you know, that's pretty cool. You know, I don't do that. Or, or maybe that's yeah, I'll mention it. And then at some point, something just broke like a year or two ago, maybe a year ago, it's just worse. And they're not personal messages at all. It's just you just get blasted with the text of a press release. And so it happens just hundreds of times. I can imagine librarian dotnet would just get tons. Yeah, it does. Five or 10. Every morning, it's it's just, it's horrible.

Unknown Speaker 41:00 I get I get like three or four. But it's always like, you know, huge PDFs. And like, it's not even like, even if you read my blog, and you're like, look, Jessamyn I really think you would like this. It's like, Dude, you have a website I could link to do you have a blog that talks about this? Like now? It's just a huge PDF, and, uh, you should tell your readers blah, and I'm like, Dude, my readers hate you. They hate your guts. Like, we hate your company. Stop.

mathowie 41:27 Yeah, and the favor. And it's not just spam is completely different than spam. Because like someone actually did this. I'm gonna actually put my name on a list somewhere thinking oh, anything remotely about internet video send something to mad at how he.com And you know, someone flipped. Like, it was spam. Like people don't even like robots do it. So whatever. I have no problem with spam, spam spam. This is like a human said. Hmm, this isn't just vaguely related to what I do. I'm going to blast this person with my PR cannon. And I found once I get one about something remotely related, I will become part of that agencies list for anything. I will get an email about like Paris Hilton's dog DVDs or something because someone else TV right? It's horrible. No, it might not even be video at all. It's just that's a client of theirs. You know, something someone making a joke book about,

Jessamyn 42:26 I suppose people the spam assassins website sometimes. Like, because sometimes they'll get enough of a censure that. Yeah, notified, they're put on some black hole. And that actually gets in the way of their

mathowie 42:40 I will know. I have like an email template to send back going please remove Matt howie.com for your PR list. Thanks. And like, I don't know, half of them will respect it and say sorry, for your time. Thanks. I will the other half don't never email

Jessamyn 42:56 back. Right? Or you just get more spam from them.

mathowie 42:59 So the interesting thing to circle it back to medical there finally, is that there's a there's a whole bunch of marketers on this. On metal filter, they're explaining like, how this is embarrassing to their profession that like they work in PR, they really, you know, they're so sorry about that, stuff like that. And like, you know that these are the young idiots in my office, you know, that just think they're being paid to spam the universe and they don't care. And so yeah,

Jessamyn 43:34 what their job is. And then yeah,

mathowie 43:37 this is a bunch of thoughtful, and I actually mocked someone that just sent me a press release while I was writing a post and the person actually replied, like, over email, like Sorry, like, they read this thread like they had, they just been scaring Metafilter looking for a contact form. And then they somehow stumbled on this where we're bitching about PR, which is super funny. Like a minute after I said it, the person apologized.

Jessamyn 44:03 Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that if you don't have like kind of a big blog on your own, you may not kind of realize but like the churn and the amount that that comes up like really quickly, you post something mentioning someone and then you get email from them. It's like this Summon, like magic wands that you have you talk about somebody and the chances that they're going to show up in your comments and be like, Oh, I

mathowie 44:23 think everyone thinks everyone's doing like ego feeds now or they're, like, you know, tracking their last name or something in Technorati

Jessamyn 44:32 or first name if you're me. Oh, yeah, you

mathowie 44:34 got pretty unique. Yeah, find the most unique thing about yourself in search. Search it to death.

Jessamyn 44:39 It's me and the other gentleman. Yeah.

mathowie 44:43 What else? There's a ms three key that Ms. T 3k. Lincoln dump that seemed pretty popular. Like clips from like, Jesus. 256 people marked as a favorite. Yeah,

Jessamyn 44:57 I saw that. And it was also like, I was kinda like Is this gonna be one of those things where they just copied and pasted it from somebody's blog, but they actually, like, found the stuff hyperlinked it like they took the list and then went and found the episode.

mathowie 45:14 Yeah, they basically took like an episode guide was cognate and then looked up everything they could possibly find anywhere.

Jessamyn 45:22 It's another another Lawrence Kansas person. There's lots of Lawrence, Kansas doing amazing things

mathowie 45:28 with Lawrence. I'm thinking Manhattan, Kansas, the little

Jessamyn 45:32 that's where I was, but Manhattan is where I mean Lawrence is where the Harvey girls were from. Oh, yeah, that's where her bank lifts.

mathowie 45:39 Yeah, um, let me see what else I thought this was hilarious. The show this is popular on the internet. So among all blogs, the Van Halen off key thing is awesome. Don't miss it if you missed it on any other blog.

Jessamyn 45:57 Oh, yeah, I totally missed this. So they have they have recorded

mathowie 46:01 keyboards for some songs like jump because Eddie Van Halen played the keyboards in the song, but then he's got to play the guitar on stage, whatever recording of it and do to the someone. There's a link to the guy. Yeah, the links on the post are to a like music musician, breaking down exactly what went wrong like to the nth degree of science nerdness. But the keyboard sample was recorded at 44.1 kilohertz in playback like 48 kilohertz. And nobody knows damn guy checked it like before the show. So this is in the actual show. And this is what happens on apps metaphors are actually people that encode their stuff at odd rates. They'll playback weird and weird. Music me Yeah. On music that metal filter.com. Like, yeah, yeah, like once a month, someone will send us the problem with their song because it was encoded a weird. I mean, every like standard stereo. Music Sound is 44.1 is like, perfectly fine fidelity. So yeah, so it's off by like one and a half measures in music terms. And like, there's no way you can recover from it. Like you can't move up a key because not quite right. So it just sounds horrible when you hear it. Like it doesn't get any better. And they just try and muscle through it. And it's just, it just sounds wrong.

Jessamyn 47:28 And then somebody gets fired. Yeah, sure. Sounds

mathowie 47:31 gonna get fired. It's just really like, you'd never think oh, that's not that big of a deal. But then you listen to it, you're like, that is just fucking wrong. And

Jessamyn 47:39 that is not song and

mathowie 47:41 music. And these people paid $70 to stand there and listen to it. Oh, good God. I guess that's it for Metafilter

Jessamyn 47:54 Well, AskMe Metafilter AskMe Metafilter full of great stuff.

mathowie 47:59 Let me see. I see popular cooking ones as usual at the top. But well, and we

Jessamyn 48:03 should probably mentioned the thread that came up in meta talk where everybody was like, we should really put together all the awesome cooking threads. And we set up a page on the wiki.

mathowie 48:16 Oh, you did cool. Oh, you didn't see it? No. Dude, it's awesome. Sweet guy saw the thread and I was like, oh, yeah, everyone was pointing out recipes I didn't see and stuff is great.

Jessamyn 48:28 Now check this out. It's awesome. It's called Eat me. And it's like broken down Me and a couple other people trying to think cunning linguist helped and Heather and me and freshwater prawn just grouped everything into like, is it about cooking? Is it about food? Is it about we even put a group of can I eat this post at the bottom? So can I eat this wasp? Can I eat this week old chicken? Can I eat this sandwich from the car? Freezer died for 48 hours but it's awesome. It's just a list and all the like good restaurants from different different towns or cities deserts. I have too many bulk items all the vegan vegetarian gluten free recipe. How do I learn to like cooking? It's just great. It's a great sort of wiki page. So I think one of the AskMe Metafilter

mathowie 49:26 two questions. This is awesome, isn't it? It's like you basically created a cookbook on the fly in several categories.

Jessamyn 49:35 I know. And it was really like, as near as I can tell somewhere between four and five of us just organizing alphabetizing and making a little

mathowie 49:43 two days. Yeah, I saw there was a good Halloween one. I guess this wouldn't be the Halloween episode because it didn't come out in time. But why does Why is a white sheet associated with a ghost and why why do we say boo or the hell that that come from

Jessamyn 50:00 that was a I saw that what was the answer? It was something Scottish. Right? I read it. Well, this pulled

mathowie 50:05 up like the word Boo is used to start at all. They pulled up like 1430, where people first started talking about it. So, yeah, they pulled up the blue part, the white sheet. They kept talking about the Klan. And I tied it back to I

Jessamyn 50:25 don't think the Klan aren't that. I mean, the popularity of the Klan wasn't that

mathowie 50:32 200 years. Yeah, like late 1880s. Examples of white sheet ghosts before that, though. I don't know. Yeah, I

Jessamyn 50:41 think I have to I saw somebody who went is like the Charlie Brown failed ghost with the like, cutout eye over the sheet. I was like, extra candy for you, young man. That is an awesome. That is an awesome costume. I also like to on the Halloween thing the does anybody drive their kids to different better neighborhoods?

mathowie 51:01 Oh, yeah. I saw that last night because I think I live in a better neighborhood now. And there's lots Well, you were

Jessamyn 51:05 talking about on Twitter or whatever that like you had masses of kids. Yeah.

mathowie 51:09 When I was a kid, we did it. Once my white trash parents took me like Southern California. Let's go to like, it was 15 minutes away. Let's go to Anaheim Hills, which is like the high end, right? Like baseball players like California Angels. Baseball players live there. Like, go up there and get some big ass candy bars. Remember being cold and lots of walking because big houses have humongous yard. So you're just walking.

Jessamyn 51:34 We're saying they're like you can't go to the super fancy neighborhoods. You have to go to like the EDM, upper middle class neighborhoods.

mathowie 51:40 I think I realized the opportunity cost of the size of McMansions on huge plots of land. Yeah. So people are talking about like, I think you need like an upper middle class, but tight old neighborhood where it's easy to get to like 50 houses.

Jessamyn 51:55 Well, then you get like a neighborhood feel where all the neighbors do a thing together. And everybody decorates their porch. I mean, where my friends were basically you put a pumpkin out on your porch with a candle in it if you were part of the trick or treating scene, so you don't have to turn off your lights and hide. You could just either have the pumpkin out Yeah, come on kids. Or no? Yeah, I went to the next town to give out candy because I lived on kind of a busy highway and

mathowie 52:20 oh, it makes sense. Where you where you are currently there's no trigger train, you'd have to go into town. I think people are kind of split. I don't know. Maybe 75% were like cool with it. Maybe 25% seem to be pissed at it. The like everybody

Jessamyn 52:34 that was from a neighborhood that brought kids in was cool with it. As long as the kids had costumes and weren't taking more than one piece of candy. Yeah.

mathowie 52:41 People give out money.

Jessamyn 52:45 We gave out UNICEF money.

mathowie 52:46 Oh, what was that? Like?

Jessamyn 52:49 What do you mean kids come with like the UNICEF money.

mathowie 52:52 What?

Jessamyn 52:53 It's for UNICEF? It's to help kids.

mathowie 52:57 I didn't I have no time we're talking but like, I come to your door and you give me something to go get donations with?

Jessamyn 53:06 Well, there's two things like when I was a kid you used to be able to get we would get in school, these little cardboard boxes. And with a little slot in them, and you'd bring it around and you go trick or treating and you would get oh

mathowie 53:17 the trick or treaters had the box. Yeah. And

Jessamyn 53:21 and then you'd also collect money for UNICEF.

mathowie 53:23 I thought you were like, I thought you were looking at Dennis giving out toothbrushes. I was like, Wait, where's the candy? I come up to your door and you give me a donation over UNICEF bucks.

Jessamyn 53:34 No. And so you just give kids you know, your spare change or whatever. That's

mathowie 53:38 cool. I would have done that. I didn't get any of that. I think I only had I had pretty good costume kids this year. I only had like one I'm reading this thread. There's some people were like kids in normal clothes yelling at me and kicking stuff on my lawn. Like,

Jessamyn 53:51 there was that person who was like, you know, if the broke ass kids are coming to your town, they may not have like families or costumes, like just think about? Yeah, I mean, like some of the kids that didn't have costumes in our neighborhood were like the the sort of developmentally disabled kids who were like, you know, the people who were either their parents or their their sort of their sort of aides, were kind of taking them around so that they could have a real Halloween experience. But it was clearly like, getting them into costume was not going to happen. And so you had to kind of be like, oh, yeah, that's that kid. I know from the pool. Don't hassle about not having a costume. Like it's cool that he's walking. Oh, yeah.

mathowie 54:28 Although, I mean, when you break it all down. It's like they get candy, which isn't that good. But I mean, yeah, I feel fine with. Yeah,

Jessamyn 54:38 yeah. Right. But it's part of this part of the kid the kid tradition. Plus I did

mathowie 54:42 it. Yeah, I guess I did it a little bit, though.

Unknown Speaker 54:45 Yeah, I have no I took a trade in the country. Dude, it was scary. You just had to walk down like these dark roads in your outfits and hope that there weren't other kids from town that were going to come beat your ass. It was always like a fear factor and trick or treating when I was little Okay, like when I got old enough to not trick or treat with my parents, you know?

mathowie 55:03 Yeah oh there was always like I had no idea that people didn't have sidewalks I mean you grew up in the West Coast everything's new you know 20 years old there's sidewalks everywhere yeah terrifying like huge neighborhoods with no sidewalks and kids walking in the streets it's crazy

Jessamyn 55:20 right do you have sidewalk where you are? Yeah,

mathowie 55:22 I think we finally completed the sidewalk sidewalk because it was like half constructed when I moved in.

Jessamyn 55:29 I remember when you first moved there and you gave me your address and I google mapped it and it was a field Yeah, it

mathowie 55:34 still is they haven't updated the photo. I'm still some trees in a field. But yeah, now we have a continuous sidewalk so it actually makes sense but and there isn't a mile between houses because there's no house right? There are some cool stuff there's the Cuba thread which is just naive outsider why do we still hate Cuba again? Pretty well though, considering Yeah, it was good. And there was a previous question which was really good which was like hey, I can go to Vietnam it's not that hard. I can even go the northern part you know by just you know, booking a trip but I still can't go to Cuba what's up with that?

Jessamyn 56:14 One that spawn the meta talk thread that everybody got in a big fight?

mathowie 56:18 Probably it was from like last fall or something but

Jessamyn 56:20 oh, no, no, this was like from three weeks ago.

mathowie 56:23 Oh no. I thought about the wars the previously oh, maybe it was Yeah, I think it was two months ago I don't think it was the cube freakout thread though. I think there was another one probably it was just a good one to like explain yet again. Like seems like it was a small minority that don't want to go to that don't want Cuba free and yeah,

Unknown Speaker 56:50 right. This was the one that like as far as like once threads that helped me do stuff the I just got my calendar thing all set up. What recurring events do I need to put on? Calendar? Yeah, and it was like stuff like you know, why don't you just put change the batteries on your smoke detector on your calendar? Because like daylight savings time is like all fuck this year because all the Windows machines set their clocks back last week. Yeah, that happens. All the unpatched Windows machines, all right, an hour earlier or where I am, because they fell back this past weekend.

mathowie 57:22 Yeah. And my car

Jessamyn 57:25 locked down.

mathowie 57:27 My car sets itself based on the rules from five years ago. So the time was off in the spring and the time switchback class I still had I had an iCal I just subscribed like apples general holiday list, you know, for IKEA.

Jessamyn 57:44 I was just telling a student of mine. She's like, I want a calendar. We're like I can put a bunch of holidays on it and whatever. And I was

mathowie 57:50 playing nipple ones. Yeah. But it said time changes. I was like, subscribe. There was a time change was listed as last week. That's why I put on Twitter like woohoo, big 25 hours Sunday. Yay. You were talking about I saw that. Yeah. And then I was like, wait, because it was on my phone. It said like iCal told me like today was the day and last week and it wasn't

Jessamyn 58:15 right. Except it was in Europe. Like it makes the like time stuff between Europe even more confusing.

mathowie 58:22 Home like time changing has virtually no effect on energy use. So it's really weird that bush pushed through like movie two and three weeks in different directions to save energy

Jessamyn 58:33 up control freak. That's what I think.

mathowie 58:36 I don't know. It's just so stupid. Exactly. No, Cuba. We did. I was gonna do the recurring calendar. This one was awesome. The round the world trip, how to make it more meaningful.

Jessamyn 58:50 That was oh, yeah, I totally enjoyed that. I also

mathowie 58:53 cool because it's sort of like, you very unique position and an awesome,

Jessamyn 58:58 basically took a year off. Right?

mathowie 59:01 They lived the dream, right? They saved up money for years and years, they quit their jobs dropped everything. And we're like, we're traveling around the world for like, a year or something. And we spend it all over the world. But then they realize, Hey, Are these like Western or tourists everywhere? And this is kind of getting us fired?

Jessamyn 59:17 And we'd like to do something more productive. Yeah.

mathowie 59:21 Like we'd like to be residents. And we'd like to actually help people instead of just being these like wacky tourists.

Jessamyn 59:28 And the thing that's so interesting is how many people in the thread were like, Oh, when I did this, or some version of it, that who I mean, I love like, what a well traveled, group, you know, people have been different places, and they share their experiences. And so there's other people like, Oh, I did this and this is what I did. My wife and I took a year off I traveled and so there's a lot of really good feedback in that thread the same time. Yeah, yeah. Monkey avocado.

mathowie 59:56 Ooh, cycling for a cause as mentioned, awesome. I love that kid.

Jessamyn 1:00:00 The one that I liked was the big spoiler thread, which is good examples of books where the protagonist dies unexpectedly. Like he got a little sort of all over the map, but it's kind of interesting, like stories where part of the plot device is killing the main character when you don't expect it and what happens. Oh, yeah, how do you recover? That's on Metafilter are really interesting, because once again, people have read all sorts of different crazy stuff.

mathowie 1:00:28 I didn't even see this one I really liked. This is awesome. I don't care for television. But I want to appear as if I know what's going on in popular culture.

Jessamyn 1:00:40 That's my problem. That's my problem. I don't have a TV and I need to be able to talk to people about

mathowie 1:00:46 Yeah, I read this. I was like, This is what I need, then I can get rid of the TV completely.

Jessamyn 1:00:53 I think I should start reading Television Without Pity it's Yeah,

mathowie 1:00:56 so yeah, they leaked to basically wrap up blogs and stuff. So you could be like, I mean, you're not going to remember specific things from episode but at least you'll know cultural references and stuff.

Jessamyn 1:01:07 Right? Well, when they're talking about house they're talking about a doctor not a building.

mathowie 1:01:12 Yeah, that's probably an adequate level of

Jessamyn 1:01:15 I didn't read like Entertainment Weekly on the plane or like USA day when I traveled I would miss half of this stuff to you know,

mathowie 1:01:22 what I found is like a year or two a year ago or so I set my TiVo to skip commercials completely. I used to fast forward through them so I can visually see them and stop all the time. So I said oh, yeah, no. So instead, it just jumps 30 seconds instantly so when you get to a you know, commercial break comes you basically hit it like five times and boom, you're back at the show. Did you five done I've gotten really good at it. And so I don't pick up any like I had no idea what head on head on like people make fun of like,

Jessamyn 1:01:57 I don't know what you're talking about either. Of course.

mathowie 1:01:59 There's this annoying commercial like all sudden I'm losing 10% of Stand Up Comedy now because they're making fun of like commercials on the I have no idea I have no idea what movies are coming like the other day I was looking at how it is it's so I haven't I still haven't seen it you probably like Google for it. I mean YouTube, but just some dumb really annoying I don't know what it was pain relief or something. But it's kind of like a fallen I can't get up it's like this addicted on

Jessamyn 1:02:28 it. Yeah, there it is on Google products attended for headache relief.

mathowie 1:02:33 So super repetitious and annoying and flashing at you and yelling at you. And like, it's just like I fallen I can't get up. But you can't get away from that stupid tagline because of the annoying commercial. So I am totally missing out on knowing commercials totally missing on movie previews. I have no idea what's coming out ever. Not that I go to the movies much anymore, but I don't know what to download. Right? Exactly. Yeah. So I thought this is super useful for at least getting some cultural meme information. I don't know if I would follow a totally daily TV blog. Like where people are obsessed with TV. Like TV without pity is great. But those people are obsessed.

Jessamyn 1:03:19 What are you talking about? Like when you were watching last but you were watching it like later than everybody else. I wish there was a way that you could go to talk about it without being like, Hey, I'm you know, way behind or I'm watching season two of the wire and where do I go? You know, where's the community? That's like talking about time shifted TV.

mathowie 1:03:38 Yeah. And yeah, and people have talked, there are actual communities for that, where you log into this forum for season two, episode four, and you go like, what was the deal with the pail of water? What are they gonna do with that? And nobody is there to say two episodes from now, dude. I don't know what that's Yeah, they're really good about that.

Jessamyn 1:04:04 Oh, wait, what?

mathowie 1:04:05 I was just sorry.

Jessamyn 1:04:07 Well, here's the other one that I like, which is the stuff a Holic one. And it's only kind of notable because it had like, almost as many favorites as answers. Just you know, somebody who kind of likes to shop and enjoys things, but they do a lot of stuff. And they're like, I need to like stop getting and start doing it's another one of those topics that like makes people really happy on AskMe Metafilter. Like, I have too much stuff. What do I do?

mathowie 1:04:32 Yeah, like decluttering. And in decluttering, it's a I have to write about this. That my brother in law, like went on a rampage a few years ago where he gave away something every day. And we're like, You're crazy. Dude, you are 365 things out of your house. What are you going to wear? But turns out if you own a house like Good lord, like I've taken truckloads of stuff to Goodwill this year just in the last Few months, there's still tons of shit here.

Jessamyn 1:05:03 Right? Nobody has that problem with

mathowie 1:05:07 it's really easy to find 365 Things you can get rid of.

Jessamyn 1:05:13 Sorry, I'm adjusting my little.

mathowie 1:05:15 Oh, you just said something about more favorites than comments. I was was the person that got the book deal? Oh, the indexed the Venn diagram blog, you know, the jokey Venn diagram blog. Now I'm talking Oh,

Jessamyn 1:05:30 yeah, tell ya know, another was that

mathowie 1:05:35 Oh, I posted a meta talk because she was interviewed and she said, I was discovered by a book editor on a metal filter post, like someone posted a metal filter and my life changed. So they have this funny Venn diagram blog. Funny diagrams, they draw they scan them in just a blog for them now they're making a book out of it and it comes out soon. So the thing about it is there's only like seven comments on the first post. There's a bazillion favorites and I was like hey, this system works like there's nothing to say besides this is really cool.

Jessamyn 1:06:08 Right and so people just favored it instead of being like me too.

mathowie 1:06:11 Awesome. It was last summer it must have been right when favorites were released or something because it was like wow it really really worked well.

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Unknown Speaker 1:09:36 NO

Unknown Speaker 1:09:39 NO