Podcast 190 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 190: New Year, New Me... Fi (2023-01-08).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary keywords

game, fortnight, thought, post, book, thread, talk, weird, people, feel, year, called, bunch, good, day, library, couple, interesting, bit, problem

Transcript

Jessamyn 0:13 I hear you slurp. Mr. Tea.

Cortex 0:15 That's coffee this time I'm gonna be I'm gonna be a fucking rocket. Should we start the show? Maybe? I guess. Okay, it's it's this is episode 190 of the Metafilter monthly podcast. It's what you're listening to I am Josh cortex Mullard. And I'm Jessamyn and I am going through just a darn liter of tea or coffee and and we'll see what kind of energy level that brings to everything that happens for the next however long.

Jessamyn 0:45 Yes, I have had I've had my coffee. I have had my breakfast. The last podcast we recorded on I think December 6, maybe

Cortex 0:54 about a month ago. I think we're back on the About a month schedule, which is good. Yeah. And yeah, yeah, here we are. How are you? Let's pretend we didn't spend 20 minutes a preroll. Chatting,

Jessamyn 1:10 doing good. You know, it's kind of like weird melty weather here in Vermont. I don't know if you heard but we had some weather a couple weeks ago. Yeah, I heard about that somewhere. Which is different here than in Buffalo, which we'll talk about a little bit later because I have proposed to mention, but yeah, we got about 20 inches of snow power was out for almost a day. And it was pretty dramatic. And so digging out of that took some time in the last couple of days have been really nice and melty, which means I've been sort of outside in my wet snowy driveway, sort of getting everything off of it so that the next time it freezes up my driveway is in a skating rink and it's been going well. I mean, this is first year with this driveway. So learning how to Yeah, be winter house has been pretty interesting.

Cortex 1:54 Nice. We also had weather but Portland style. So you know, there was snow and there was ice. And there were a couple of days where it's like, well, maybe just don't go anywhere. But mostly because no one's equipped. And no one has no house knows how to drive rather than because there was any substantial obstacle beyond you know, that fact. Yeah. So, you know, we stayed home for a couple days and had to sort of like, arrange some plans and cancel some plans around that. For like, you know, I was gonna go over to my parents house and do like, last night of Hanukkah with them. But the weather we should he was like, yeah. So next year,

Jessamyn 2:35 this this year, I didn't really I didn't do much of Hanukkah. I mean, like, you know, I sort of waved and celebrate it with Jim and Kate. I had Lucky's over the Sacco it's just like I always do but other than that, like, I have to like Christmas friends now who do Christmas stuff. And so we I because Jim has COVID I mentioned or he's he's better now, but he wasn't. So he's been missing from holiday festivities this year. Went over there. And we had chat GPT right, a bunch of holiday themed plays for us to perform and then performed them which was fascinating. I kind of don't care about check GPT and I find people who want me just to read random shit at GPT is written like that doesn't interest me. But yes was really interesting because it was like kind of a fun sociable way to do

Cortex 3:26 that. There you get this weird like semi improv performative element like you're doing more than just like digesting AI chat logs, you know? Yeah, that's

Jessamyn 3:39 and figuring out where the edges are right? Like, like it won't do like an erotic or, or even a rom com story, but if you tell it to focus on the sensations of a particular thing, you can make it do that when it doesn't even know it's doing that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Describe the Holocaust as quote sad, unquote. Which I feel it's missing the point like, like it clearly has programmed into it.

Cortex 4:08 Yeah, it's it's not that it won't chatbot What was her name? They made a chatbot a few years ago and it like was learning from the internet and immediately started saying like, terrible racist stuff.

Jessamyn 4:20 Yeah, yeah,

Cortex 4:21 shut it off. Yeah.

Jessamyn 4:23 Yeah, one of those except the opposite like it's just clearly got like Governor modules on it that are like, don't talk about this at all.

Cortex 4:33 Yeah, yeah. There was a couple of Oh, speaking of lockers. I did not have lockers. We were going to have lockers. We thought we were going to have lockers, maybe like two three meals, bought a bunch of potatoes and onions and I was shredding him up. And I shredded up all the potatoes we had, getting ready to like, bring Latka makings over to my mother in law's house and when I first started doing this and food processor, and when I first started up I heard weird grindings like, oh, and like I opened up the food processors and good news. Like it wasn't like the motor failing or anything like there was a screw in it. Yeah, no, but I left I left the I left the sort of, I don't know how to describe different attachments, like the basic like the column with a couple wavy blades at the bottom, your basic food processor that just spins around. I left that inside the food processor with the sort of top blade for grading. Also Oh, right. So like, I do a potato and like boy, that's that does not sound right. And I open it up like Oh, this isn't there. Okay, I'll pull that out. No, the cloud is not damaged Lee looking at that blade as I pull it out and put it back, put the shredder back in, shred the rest of potatoes. Pull out the thing, put the potatoes in a bowl, look at the shredder fixture and it's got sort of like the tall column that keeps it up at the top of the food processor and I see that a bunch of the plastic of that column had been shredded away. Oh no, i The other tool that was in there. And so there's just like just enough plastic in this giant bowl of all the potatoes we have that like C or not. We just so we'll probably make some lockers sometime this month just to just sort of console ourselves but

Jessamyn 6:18 it was so like you can toss it in your compost I guess but like you can't do anything with it. Yeah,

Cortex 6:23 yeah, this is now just junk because there's that's too much plastic. Like probably people would be fine, but I'm not gonna fucking make plastic lockers.

Jessamyn 6:35 Right or you're the one who ruined Hanukkah by you know, Mom chokes on whatever

Cortex 6:40 Yeah, exactly. So yeah, that's my locker story. That's That's why no luck because last month but yeah, other than that we had we had like pleasant Loki holidays as well, I I did get a cold. So I ended up like not meeting up with friends for a little like boxing day get together. Because like, you know, I feel like shit and I'm going to you know, potentially give other people a cold and these are both not good. So I'm gonna stay home and play video games. Yeah, I left for a couple days. But then I then I got better if certainly no COVID So

Jessamyn 7:12 New Year's Eve. Did you do anything?

Cortex 7:15 If they went to bed before midnight? What we didn't we you know, we had a nice chill evening at home. And we like watching TV and some reading play some video games. Both getting sleepy by 11. And like, you know, what is the bed and sort of expected to be woken up at midnight by a bunch of noise. But that didn't happen either. So let's just woke up in the in the new year.

Jessamyn 7:36 That's the Yeah, I went to the same Christmas people's house for New Year's. And it's nice. Like I miss Jim there for two reasons. One, because he kind of brings the party with his vibe for whatever reason, like people just adore him and miss him when he's not there. But also because when he goes he's also my age. And most of these friends are younger by about 10 years. Like it doesn't really matter. But like their younger friends are younger than me by 20 years, you know? And so that can be weird. They'll talk about something on TV they were talking about land beyond time. I think some like dinosaur television I may not even have the name right because all I know is that okay of Land of the Lost.

Cortex 8:20 Yeah, so there's there's The Land Before Time, which was like a Don Bluth. I want to say animated dinosaur films when I was a kid. Yeah, it's so yeah.

Jessamyn 8:32 So I was already a grown ups. I mean, I thought I was growing up at that point. But so they have all of these, like, you know, inside jokes about that. Which is fine, but then I'm just kinda like, oh my god, I'm incredibly old and then like got home really late, which is great. But then it's weird in this house because it means the house was cold and then you have to heat the house up but then it's late and you're hot and then my routine. So it's pretty interesting. It's the latest I've been up at this house since I've lived in this house and nice. Yeah, but it was like a good time and I you know, I survived so hey,

Cortex 9:10 yeah, you lived we lived in 2023 So

Jessamyn 9:14 back on my back on my program the next day you know, you're always I don't know if you're me, you're always afraid like if you disrupt your routine it's going to take you forever to get back on your routine turns sure was not the problem

Cortex 9:26 that's it that's good. Yes. No, I just I just have trouble forming habits in the first place. So you know,

Jessamyn 9:31 yeah. I have the opposite problem. Whatever exactly the opposite problem is,

Cortex 9:38 I mean, I think I think really like I also have a whole creature habit routine thing it's just a lot of the time I don't really recognize it even necessarily as routine so much. There's like an assumption that only I notice is being violated when it's violated. Like oh, wait, oh, wait. Oh, I guess I do always do that that way. I guess I do. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah, well, and, and hey Metafilter yeah filters here in 2023 That's pretty exciting. Yeah. New year new me fi it's Mefi why? But, but yes. me if I really that pronunciation really creeped up on me as a consequence of ownership was an interesting thing.

Jessamyn 10:31 Because talking to other people about it all of whom said it your way? Yeah,

Cortex 10:34 I think so I think that's part of it. Like I also needed to not get an argument about it every time I brought it up, which would mostly be be me getting in an argument of myself, probably, but like, you know, it's like, no, I should just call it whatever I'm going to call it and I will acknowledge that ni fi has, I think a is like a phonetic cow path on this word. Like I do still in my heart of heart. It's MEPhI. But MEPhI is a little bit more like linguistic parkour, it's a little bit more mouth mouth work. And mi fi, like, does flow, something's wrong. Well, you know,

Jessamyn 11:14 there's that problem, the wrongness problem.

Cortex 11:17 So this is just, you know, waving your, your your ownership stick around. Because you don't want to say what's right, exactly what.

Jessamyn 11:26 Thank you for recognizing my ownership stick. Yes.

Cortex 11:29 But yeah, yeah, let's, let's, let's, let's talk about some Metafilter stuff. All right,

Jessamyn 11:34 there's no job. So next night, um, but what I would like to do actually is do a thing we don't usually do here and just briefly talk about fanfare. Do it because like, I think fanfare is amazing. And I really feel like more people should use it. And I feel like over time, possibly this year, as we get sort of code committed together and start thinking about that, we can start thinking about ways to make fanfare more useful. Because I think people really like talking about TV. I think there aren't a lot of good places to talk about TV. I think the fact that it's a synchronous, or not, depending on what you want, is really useful. And I've started using it asynchronously, because I'm watching leverage rebooted. Do you know, leverage it all?

Cortex 12:26 Have we talked about this? I only know of it like, sorry. Yeah. I never watched it. I never saw any of it. But part of it takes

Jessamyn 12:36 place in Portland the old show. So basically, it was a show that was around, you know, kind of a hasty kind of keeper, individual aper.

Cortex 12:45 I remember I would see, like, filming location filming something. Yeah. And

Jessamyn 12:49 so the first couple episodes, first couple seasons were in Boston. So that was awesome for me, because I'm like, Oh, I know, all these places. And then they moved to Portland. And I was like, I know, actually some of those places. And then it stopped. And then it got rebooted in a show called leverage redemption without the main character who was Tim Hutton? Because he, I guess, was problematic. And oh, yeah, there was some like, you know, maybe he raped a person 30 years ago, but it was not satisfactorily resolved. And maybe he wanted to move on anyhow. And it's kind of good, because his character was kind of like a weird drunk, and you were supposed to believe he was some genius. And I don't know, I'm happier without him. And so then they brought in a couple new characters, and now it's in New Orleans of all places. And now I'm like, Oh, I know those locations. So that's fun. But it's been fun to like, show up in these threads. You know, brain Wayne and Jen fullmoon. You know, people, people, you know, from, like, I guess leverage redemption is a little bit sooner. It's a little bit more recent, but like to show up in threads from like, a year ago, and be like, Oh, hey, I thought that same thing, kind of when I saw this later, and it's not like you're necessarily talking to one another. But you can be in a community of mefites, who are talking about a thing?

Cortex 14:15 Yeah, there's, there's that sense of, sort of continuity over time. There's that sense of like, you know, this is this is a, this is a this is a shared resource that like, you know, is part of the weird spiderweb network. That is the nature of being in a community like yeah, it's, there's, it's not just like, you know, anyone who shows up a month later a year later, it's just on their own so much. It's like, okay, well, we might not be sitting around a coffee table, talking about this, but we're effectively being able to, you know, make make that connection and have some connective tissue between these different moments in time. And yeah,

Jessamyn 14:51 and theoretically, you know, you could sort the front page of fanfare different so that you could see which threads are active as an example. Yeah. And you know, then people would know that there's somebody chatting in the leverage redemption threads. Hey, it's me to sort of talk about that. So I just think fanfare is sort of a diamond in the rough and encourage people who maybe haven't been over there to maybe go over there because there's books, there's special events. There's, there was some, you know, end of the year stuff. There's a there's a whole talk side of it. And yeah, it's neat. So that was that was my little law. And there's a really interesting mix of stuff. And it can also be kind of a neat discovery. Like, what are nerds watching? Yeah, that maybe you didn't know, was a thing nerds would be watching.

Cortex 15:41 Like, I didn't know stepfather 316. Just seeing Miss lipid and Lapin probably posted a movie from 1982 called stepfather three, which is presumably the third stepfather film

Jessamyn 15:56 but not a I do not know anything. It

Cortex 16:00 looks like a shitty horror thriller, which is like right up my fucking alley. So after escaping from an insane asylum and having his face surgically altered the psychotic serial stepdad from the first who was another woman, this time with a wheelchair bound son awful. Predictably, things do not go to plan. Yes. That could mean anything. I wonder what's Yeah, anyway? Yes. I agree. And and I'm, I'm excited to hear that as an aspiration because yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I think I think with the with the right. Resources and gumption, like the usefulness, and like like approachability fanfare could really improve in a way that would make more people appreciate what is in fact there.

Jessamyn 16:48 And would be another place for community to sort of hang out in a place that was meaningful to them. Yeah, exactly.

Cortex 16:54 Yeah. Well, let's talk about projects.

Jessamyn 16:58 Sure. Ah, horse. There's many relevant to my interest projects, including this one by Horace Rumpole, otherwise known as John Overholt, he's a curator at the Houghton library. And they set up a online version of an exhibit that you can actually go look at, it's kind of a 3d slightly queasy defying, if that's not really your thing. way. But it's, it's neat. Basically, it's 40 examples from Holden's collection of early modern portraits of named people of color. So basically, you know, a person of color who they know who they are not just like, this random person, that random person, this incidental person who shows a picture. And I saw, I think I saw the web page for the exhibit. But this is this is a whole, this is a whole other thing.

Cortex 18:00 Yeah. It's like it's like a Google Streetview for the inside of a museum exhibit. vibe of like, you're navigating around. Yeah. And yeah, and it's really neat. I thought that was excellent. It's, it's, it's a nice appropriate use of that sort of thing. I think so like,

Jessamyn 18:23 right, you can't come to the library in person. So yeah.

Cortex 18:30 There's, there's some weird little bit of psychological weight to having, you know, a view of other people looking at art that like, you know, is interesting. It's interesting little touch versus just like, like, whatever slide one light box, that's, that's the word I'm looking for, for that kind of, like, default gallery thing where you have just like, you know, a series of images that pop up.

Jessamyn 18:56 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That like over the dimmed background kind of thing.

Cortex 18:59 Yeah. Oh, speech has its merits too. But you know,

Jessamyn 19:04 yeah. Speaking of looking at art, I would like to give a shout out. And thank you to Captain Renaud, who was driving semi nearby here to go to Mass MoCA Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as a couple other like museums and things down here. And he lives in Canada and Toronto, where I met him and his sister's a librarian. And him and his mom were somewhat near here. And he, he stopped by, brought some snacks, said hello. I gave him a tour of the house was really cool to see him. And, yeah, I just wanted to say thanks. It was neat. Nice. They put a ton of really cool pictures of Mass MoCA up on his Facebook, as well as like pictures of my house. I was like, yeah, that's picture of my house. It was neat. Yes.

Cortex 19:54 So it's still gotta get to Mass MoCA at some point,

Jessamyn 19:57 you really should. I mean, so excited. serenely up here St.

Cortex 20:01 Yeah, well, I think they still have and I think at least for a couple of years, a huge Salah whip installation there. And like I was thinking several years ago, I should Well next time I get out that way, and then COVID happened and I haven't been flying out to the east coast to see my my brother and friends at all. And so at some point, at some point, that'll happen. But ya know, it's, it seems like a really cool Museum and I would like to finally actually see it, and I feel sort of dumb about never seen it when I was in college. But in college, I didn't know that I was into, you know, contemporary visual art, right? I guess cuz I wasn't yet. But maybe it maybe would have been How could you know, right? Yeah. I like this nice project from Gurpal. Because this is like, this is jam stats, data analytics for roller derby games, where Gurpal has just literally written together a tool for doing analysis of data from roller derby, like, like score data. And this is like one of the things we're like, you know, if you're sitting around, if you're into this, you're like, Oh, I wonder who did what or wonder of what this looks like? Well, you do some data analytics. Well, how to do that, Paul, I guess you fucking write your own code. Well, god dammit gerbil did. So if you are specifically into roller derby like sabermetrics. Gurpal has made this possible. It's like it's a very, it this is like a baseball thing to me. Which is funny because like, you know, because it's really special sport. Yeah, yeah. People People do this for like, you know, mainstream sports sports too. But like, you know, baseball is like its own weird thing. And I think you probably know a thing. It's, it's in a complicated place.

Jessamyn 21:37 Come on, man.

Cortex 21:38 Cool. Cool. We're cool work. Gurpal let me let me I will wrap up

Jessamyn 21:42 with a curveball. This was neat. And I love it. You can see like penalties by skater because I feel like that kind of thing really helps you learn to tweak how your team works in order to win more games, right?

Cortex 21:55 Yeah. Like this is this is the kind of stuff we're being able to just take a little bit closer look at, like the, the not just top line stuff, or the like rememberable play by play stuff, but like the actual like, gooey stuff. Like that's, that's that's, that starts to get interesting. That's where I start to say, Okay, there's something. There's something cool going on here. There's like a Moneyball sort of vibe, you know,

Jessamyn 22:16 right. Right. Right, right. I love the testimonial section of this GitHub page, too. Because it's like, bless you says somebody on Reddit go you This is great. Somebody on the Facebook score.

Cortex 22:30 To answer your baseball question, baseball is still around, and it's still coming back. And it's in a weird place where they took a bunch of time off, they got I think some actual like, you know, investment from someone who wanted to like make it more of a thing. And they've done a couple little events over the last while but it hasn't like really been back in full force in a while. And they announced that it was coming back late last year. And then it came back that day. With the first of many once a week brief events that were more of announcements than anything, and just kind of a bummer because like I was ready for like that come back and says like, Hey, we are back to starting to tease whenever we actually get back to Blake then it's like, like I stopped takes time and you want to you want to keep people's like attention. But it's it's rough because yeah, they had such a, an unanticipated lightning and bottle thing in the first place with it that they're in such a difficult place of either do we say Oh, well, that was great. That happened and we're never gonna get back to it? Or do they say we're gonna put in a bunch of work and try and find a way to, you know, create a new lightning rod that's more durable and won't get fried. And it's such a risk like, like, like, I'm, this is all I'm deeply sympathetic about all this because like, it's so hard to say, Okay, we're gonna decide to really slow play this thing that the thing that made it happen in the first place was this out of nowhere crazy momentum. Because you don't want to throw away the momentum. And you also don't want to burn yourself trying to just keep going, going going, which I think they were basically doing the entire first run if it was like they were just right,

Jessamyn 24:06 right. But there's only so much you can tease people before they're like, ah, yeah, so all that's happening here. Yeah, like

Cortex 24:14 there's there's not a you don't have weird things happening as results. Like you don't have weird emergent thing to happen happening with the events that have been happening like this is more like, here's here's sort of taro deal level weirdness, which is like, Okay, a little bit of something's happening every Friday. There's something to sort of peek and say, Oh, hey, it's that player who I like and they're back from the nether realm or whatever. But there's like, there's no games happening. There's no weird glitches, there's no surprising and they're not

Jessamyn 24:42 even telling you about the status of the actual games or players I assume.

Cortex 24:47 Yeah. Well, I think though, there's no games happening. So players are sort of like coming back to the stadium from from from the void, essentially. So it's like, it's like if instead of having a new season of baseball, what you had was a season of Ross Your announcements periodically.

Jessamyn 25:02 Like the Olympics are that it's like 50% roster announcement type shit. And then 50% Olympics actually watching the sports. Yeah, because you have all these backstories and looking at people's Yeah,

Cortex 25:15 yeah, yeah. The what's the phrase? inspiration porn, I guess?

Jessamyn 25:23 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think of inspiration, porn that specifically targeting the disabled community, but I may be

Cortex 25:30 just that is what I most I feel like I'm not finding the word I want. Like, it's related idea, but I feel like there's another phrase for it. That's

Jessamyn 25:41 right. It talks specifically about that thing. Yeah. Like,

Cortex 25:44 like, like, we're definitely gonna get into some emotional tragic backstory and whatnot. And now, you know, this is something that I associated specifically. And the phrase I'm failing to track down, is, I was watching American Ninja Warrior, which I got too late. Like, I didn't watch it. Like when it first started. I've only

Jessamyn 26:01 seen a couple episodes of it, but I know enough to be conversant in it.

Cortex 26:05 Yeah, well, like, it's really interesting. Because like the first like two or three seasons, it was this weird, scrappy, low budget show being put out by GE for. And it was like, we got a bunch of weirdos together to wait in line all day at this, like thing we built in LA. And now they're all going to try and not fall down. And a few of them will manage to not fall down. And it's going to be goofy and weird. And look at the costume this guy's wearing. And let's talk to this board surfer who's hanging out with us. And it was like, it wasn't great. But it was kind of great for being so scrappy. And it was a lot of people falling down and training every course. And then like at some point, they got money at some point someone else bought it like a bigger network picked it up. And then it went like really high gloss and all of a sudden, instead of like, Hey, this guy drove 17 hours and has had nothing but coffee today, and now he's going to face plants in the first trial and ploy. Okay, next guy, instead of like, Okay, time for the tragic backstory time for the insight into

Jessamyn 27:09 it seemed to be like when I watched a later season of it that like, the people were like professional Ninja Warrior. People, like training specifically to do this as opposed to just like, Man, I'm kind of fit then.

Cortex 27:23 Yeah, let's see. It's been running long enough that yeah, you have people who are specifically in sort of that kind of thing. And

Jessamyn 27:31 I run warrior gym.

Cortex 27:34 And because they're not churning through a bunch of weirdos with limited commentary, they churn through less people. So we we don't see as much of the like, very, very doomed. Also RANS and yeah, yeah, it's just yeah, anyway. I know. So once again.

Jessamyn 27:51 Oh, my God. Yeah.

Cortex 27:53 Yeah. I liked I clicked on the wrong thing. I liked these Christmas tunes that I'm seeing in retrospect, I think I posted the blue but didn't get linked back. Sean strock. Put out a lowercase t collection. It's the the band name. They're doing it with a very ape at Christmas. And it's nice chip Toony you know, old school video gaming sounding Christmas tunes, which, you know, score for anything that is more or less noble than just actual standard, you know, 40s 50s era Christmas music recordings. All right. I enjoyed them a great deal. It was nice.

Jessamyn 28:35 That's funny. I'm wonder why was posted the blue EMIC. Maybe somebody didn't use the tool, I guess.

Cortex 28:39 Yeah, someone just doesn't use the button. When I catch them, I'll usually sort of thinking about afterwards. So I think I'll maybe do that on the slide while we're on the on the call here. So can you talk about another project?

Jessamyn 28:50 Okay. Well, the one that's totally up my street. The other one is by back Tench who is a library person who just defended Hold on one second. defended their dissertation. And just again, sorry, I'm just grasping for pronouns, because I think I know that I want to make sure I am not getting them wrong, basically. Not sure that, um, so basically, Beck just defended the dissertation. And they have a toolkit of resources for library workers to design and discover what they call restorative environments. So basically, it's ways of kind of, I mean, you'll, you can see but like sort of helping people manage stress help people understand environments that are causing stress, how can you use design skills, which is something I have frequently mentioned that libraries could definitely use more of? And I like it, it's very like like the best part Lots of self care, and especially for library workers and people who work in libraries. And I just I just thought it was the neatest, Beck's a really good follow on social media. I'm not sure if they've made the move to Macedon, but I follow I follow them on on Twitter and glad I do.

Cortex 30:20 Well, a dissertation is basically a book. And so this is also a book. So that's a segue. Hogshead wrote a book called everybody wins. Oh, yeah, I saw that. That looked neat. Yeah, it's a book about sort of the history of modern board games and like, you know, coming out of the euro and German game movement, and yeah, it's, it's nice. It looks really cool. It's a as they say, it's a big, chunky coffee table tome. And that's, that's the best

Jessamyn 30:53 chunky coffee chunky coffee table. Yep. Like that's

Cortex 30:57 books book books should come into categories of size small enough to not be a pain in the acid big enough that like it's worth it. Yes. Like, I'm definitely over hard bound copies of Stephen King novels, which, you know, when I was younger is like, yeah, oh, yeah. Go I want to get an hardback stick. No, I don't I want to fucking paperback. So I can hold the thing up while I'm reading in bed. But if you're gonna go coffee table book, go coffee table book. Give me chunky. So yes,

Jessamyn 31:22 yeah, I need a coffee table. I kind of have a coffee table. But some people books on it. Because it was it was something a friend built out of the door of my old barn that I have been carrying around with me since I sold that place a long time ago. And I've been meaning to make it into a table and just man. Turns out, it's not really where my where my heart is. But I had a friend turn it into a table. But now I have to finish to the top of it. Like finish meaning just put some finish on it. And yeah, it's too cold. It's too cold to do inside projects that are not in my office. Yeah, so I'll get there. springtime. Last project for me, I think is way to go delicous for co authoring an article in JAMA psychiatry, talking about legislation of psychedelic drugs and psychedelic drug reform. It's a really interesting article. And it sort of talks about, you know, drugs are becoming accessible in the US what does that mean for how we treat people or use them? therapeutically or not? Or how legislation works? It's a it's a serious article. And yeah, I just I just thought it was neat. Nah, way to go. jetskis. It was published a month ago.

Cortex 32:51 Yeah, nice. Let's see. All right, well, let's, let's move on to Metafilter.

Jessamyn 32:59 Okay, I feel like, oh, yeah, I made a post to Metafilter. And I'm aware this podcast is not just about me talking about my posts. But I was interested in this because it was one of those things where like, I just read something. And I was like, ah, Metafilter would like that. And we'd like to talk about that. And they did a little bit. And also, it's about gaming, which I thought you'd be interested in.

Cortex 33:24 So I saw this go by, and then I realized I lost track of it and didn't like dig in there.

Jessamyn 33:28 Well, I'm so glad I could show it to you. And it turns out, you know, I thought it was going to be a very chatty thread. And it was not as chatty, which also fine. But basically, in short, Epic Games, who makes fortnight has to pay an awful lot of money, because they were violating the privacy of children, and making it too difficult for children, especially to not pay money being upsold and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's a massive, fine from the FTC. I mean, as we keep waiting for the FTC to drop the hammer on Twitter for various violations. It was pretty interesting to see this because I think a lot of us talk about dark patterns, right? They up the things where you want to click No, but it's easier to click Yes. And yes, is what the company wants you to click kind of thing. And this is a real analysis of exactly what Epic Games did inside fortnight to incent children. Teenagers, I guess, but you don't children to you know, spend money or stay in the game or giveaway personal information. And, yeah, really interesting. And it'll be interesting to see if it shifts. How gaming companies especially do that, right because people love games and they should love games, but this aspect of them is trouble.

Cortex 34:57 Yeah, like it's such a It's such a tricky territory because like, you know, I think it's good that Epic is getting smacked down on this because fortnight has been so huge. And I think it's partly because they've been successful enough to sort of just run with the profit making side of it. And they like this is not the only sort of dodgy decision they have made in the flush of cash. They've been flooding in the last few years. But it's, it's also like, you know, it's I thought I had more of a point that I did, and I don't, I'm just gonna abandon it. But basically, yeah, it's, I think the short version is that games are so often structured as sort of an interactive, you know, feed of satisfaction loop that like the line between exploitative, like financial dark patterns, and the core sense of like, addictive or engaging game loop is less clear than if it was like a novel, right? Like if you were using weird dark patterns to exploit people who read novels. That aspect of it, that dark pattern stuff is more clearly separate from the basic form of the thing, like, you know, if Amazon was doing something really nasty with like, prime reading incentivization or something, you know, it's easy to say, Okay, well, this part is the book and this part is the

Jessamyn 36:25 fun stuff. You remember, like old old paperbacks used to have sometimes, like inserts in the middle? That were just weird ads?

Cortex 36:35 Yeah.

Jessamyn 36:37 But it was clear they were ads not the book.

Cortex 36:41 Yeah. And it was clear that it was fucking like, like, no one come on, come would come across out and book and not be like, well, this is some fucking advertising bullshit. Right? Right. Right, right. But with games where like, being excited about finding a rare bit of loot is oftentimes a part of the gameplay experience, then, when you start to structure sort of

Jessamyn 36:58 not unless you make it a problem, like exactly have a game where that's a non problematic aspect.

Cortex 37:04 Yeah, I mean, a lot of the games that I've been playing lately, I've had like, I like a game where I scavenge. I like a game where I scrounge and everyone's gonna find something nice and it's the trash and that's fine. If I'm just doing literally I'm choosing to spend my time on that because I feel like it but if the company decides Okay, well yeah, but what if you could get something better if you gave us a few smackeroos and which is a huge aspect to varying degrees of problematic miss in, in the games industry in general, like it's anywhere between like, you know, an understandable alternate way to fun games instead of charging for them upfront to just really fucking shitty gambling and irresponsible like baiting and odds juicing stuff to get money out of people. And yeah, so it's, it's weird. But yes, I think I don't feel feel like AAA gaming and major gaming behemoths are really hurting right now. So epic feeling a little bit of hurt for being shitty. There's probably

Jessamyn 37:57 Yeah, half a billion dollars of hurt. Yeah, well,

Cortex 38:00 that's the thing. Like for a lot of companies, that's an impossible remedy for epic that is,

Jessamyn 38:06 it's going to be a pain point.

Cortex 38:08 Yeah, it's gonna be a pain point. That's gonna really cut into the you know, that's gonna cut into the trillions total of you know, fortnight revenue, which is insane to think about but anyway, yes, yes, it's a fascinating thing. I am a little bit surprised it didn't get a bit more discussion but also had another player specifically in it. Epic I don't feel like is super, I don't feel like epic is as well known as fortnight is, is kind of the thing like fortnight really blew them up from being this like middling company that was not triple A put out some games

Jessamyn 38:39 they acquired or sporting something they built. fortnight is

Cortex 38:43 this is the weird increasingly forgotten history at this point, made a game called fortnight years ago, and it was a game where you would as a co op, like a group of a few players who would play together to sort of build up a forts over the course of the day and then not the night and that night the zombies would come and they would break in and like there was this whole game built built before build your fortifications, get yourself armed and supplied and then you know the zombies or whatever I don't even know if it was zombies but it probably was because it's always zombies would come and you know, attack and try and break through and either you would like manage to hold them off or not and then rinse and repeat and there's a whole thing and like it by all reports I never actually played it but it was it was fine. Like it didn't like the world on fire. And then the battle royale thing came along with player unknown battlegrounds and that everybody was like gonna make a battle royale and epic like took their assets from fortnight and said well let's make a battle royale mode and so they put out fortnight Battle Royale is like

Jessamyn 39:41 so you and your friends still buy build the fort but then you're fighting to get into other people's forts.

Cortex 39:46 There is more that there was a little bit of fork building still but it was mostly running around shooting each other and trying to be the last person alas squats.

Jessamyn 39:54 The one where you make up a dance?

Cortex 39:56 There's a lot of dances in fortnight. So this is yes, this is this thing. So like They make fortnight Battle Royale that explodes it becomes insanely successful and suddenly they are a company making hundreds of millions of dollars and like they started their own game store. There's the epic game store now that they've been running for the last few years basically, because of all the cash they were flushing from how much fortnight Battle Royale blew up? No, and people still weren't playing fortnight like, you know, whatever. It's like it was still whatever little afterthought or not a successful game they put out. So now fortnight Battle Royale is just fortnight and fortnight is a forgotten, you know, book on the shelf in their dusty library. But ya know it, they just sort of happened and they have made a ton of money off it and successfully managed that blow up success and become sort of like the preeminent Battle Royale game in the world. Even though, you know, punk that was the huge starter one and a bunch of other people have like, tried to get in that arena too. But yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy how how much money they've made off it and the fact that half a billion dollars is you know, a lot of money, but it's not all of the money. Right? Right. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy.

Jessamyn 41:08 Fascinating.

Cortex 41:09 It's wild. Let's see. What do I have from Metafilter? I've got a bunch of things. There is there's a post by Janelle where I made the first comment joking about how I should show this to Janelle because this is the way it works is she posts fascinating things about fiber art and, and textile art. And then I immediately think of her and then I took the byline by this book about I post about book chakras, which are a kind of compact spinning wheel. With has an interesting like history.

Jessamyn 41:50 Okay, sorry.

Cortex 41:53 Yeah, it's,

Jessamyn 41:54 I've learned a word,

Cortex 41:56 basically watch it, watch it, watch a video from the post, because it's a very cool little machine. And it just, I was just over at her house the other day, and she showed it off to me and Angela. But it's like it's a small, great wheel, which a great wheel is an old school type of spinning wheel that had a big wheel that you would use as the primary driver for the spinning motion. That made the spinning possible. But this one is like a tiny little crank. And it all folds up into like a good sized hardback book shaped box. It's fascinating. It's just neat. Like, I I have seen a lot of spinning, I've still not gotten at all into it personally, like it just doesn't click with me so far. But like the technology that has existed at different times to accomplish it is really fascinating. And people are familiar with like, spinning wheels more generally, I think in sort of like Western culture and Western literary killing,

Jessamyn 42:47 especially like in New England, for Pete's sake, like, yeah, it's one of those things that screams colonial New England in the United States.

Cortex 42:55 Yeah. But but the history sort of before and after, and adjacent to the sort of classic spinning wheel is like there's all this other stuff too, because like, it's really important to be able to make, you know, string and yarn and whatnot. And so people came up with all these different ways to do it. But the history and the specific sort of 20th century context of this one is fascinating to like, it's it's a cool machine. And it's cool how this was kind of a specific invention of India in the time of Gandhi as sort of utilitarian and maybe economic, you know, Justice solution to so yeah, cool posts around cool machine that I did not know about. Good job. Janelle. Don't forget to check out this post that you made, because I think you'll like it.

Jessamyn 43:43 Yes, thank you. I enjoyed this post by 10 called hot dogs, which was one of those things where like, you see something on another site, and then you come to meta filter to see if people are talking about the thing. And and they were this is a short 30 minute documentary on YouTube called works. And it's all about like those kind of, I don't probably every culture has like a different name for them. But those kind of like festival hippies, who basically like you know, they used to be deadheads, right, follow the Grateful Dead around and you sell peanut butter and fluff sandwiches out of your trunk and you use that to buy acid and food. And then that's what you do for months. In fact, one of the things we spent some time doing at Hanukkah was the guy who was hosting Hanukkah, who's also one of our state legislatures, and one of the new guys to Hanukkah, who is the new boyfriend of one of the neighbor ladies turned out to have both like gone on tour with the dead. And so they were both talking about their blah, blah, blah, touring with the Grateful Dead stories, which I always enjoy because we're all old and fusty now, and this is very similar. It's about those kinds of like, you know, psychedelic take Seeing dreadlock having like, odd philosophy doing, but similar to you may have seen the documentary this guy did about the Juggalos. It's very non did

Cortex 45:12 not know what's your Yeah, I know that when you're talking

Jessamyn 45:15 about Yeah, the juggler, one just you know, the the overarching theme is like, Hey, we're all family. And we know people look down and crap on us. But like, we're here for each other in a way that's kind of nice. And the sort of books I guess I've never heard that expression for me either. But it's a very kind of a non judgmental look at some of the things they think and some of the things they believe mostly by sort of listening to them talk about this, that or the other. And it's very good. So yeah, I suggest watching the video and commenting it in thread, if you want

Cortex 45:53 to check that out. That sounds good, I think you'd like it. Here's a very lightweight thing that was just a nice little post from Etrigan. Like, here's two funny minutes from an old episode of Qi. And it is a very funny couple of minutes from an oldest I knew this thing, because like I'd seen it before, because it's hilarious. And it's just Stephen Fry, stumbles over some words, and then everybody starts being goofy.

Jessamyn 46:15 I would 100% Love this. So I will make sure I check it out. Because that's like, you know, there's a whole bunch of like, in the UK, they do more like Christmas and New Year's theme television. You know, like panel shows. There's like big fat quiz and taskmaster does a New Year's treat. And so I tend to spend more time this time of year engaging with sort of UK content than I might otherwise. And yeah, the thread is nice, because there's some other stuff,

Cortex 46:48 too. People are linking to other other little bits and whatnot and related ideas. And yeah, there's even a little bit of discussion of like, well, what other kinds of panels show stuff is there? And is there any really like American version of this, which is like that, and that really? No, it doesn't

Jessamyn 47:00 really do that kind of stuff in America, and it just doesn't take America has game shows. Like they don't have panel shows where like, you don't really win anything.

Cortex 47:10 Yeah. Which is which is, which is a shame.

Jessamyn 47:13 Oh, just means you can watch stuff from other cultures, which I appreciate. Yeah, but yeah, I know what you mean. It would be fun sometimes to see like your favorite American actors, although often, I mean, at least on the big fat quiz. Often there's like an American.

Cortex 47:27 Yeah, there. Well, yeah. And yeah, that happens on the British stuff, too. Sometimes you'll have, you know, an American comedian, living in the UK who's available to sort of do

Jessamyn 47:37 recall, Deseret Burch. There's a whole yeah, there's

Cortex 47:41 whole desert has been on like, did we talk about the newer? Fuck is it called

Jessamyn 47:50 it at 10? Cats?

Cortex 47:52 No, the one the one that Richard IoT is hosting? Oh, I

Jessamyn 47:56 don't know. But okay.

Cortex 47:57 I don't Richard IoT has been hosting a show for the last couple of years that feels like it's in it's in the sort of taskmaster panels show goofy realm where people have to. It's like a quiz quiz team. Maybe I'll I'll google question team. Question team. Yes. Okay, there we go. Because I Googled him so you should watch it. It's great. It's very fun. It's a bunch of him and it's a bunch of other bands and st like like desert bridge has been on there. God she's so good. She's fantastic. Anyway, yes. So yes, that's that's some stuff at some stuff. Good interest. Interesting arguments sort of post like it's a it's a hard cases make bad law situation where like, it's a longer thread specifically because people are arguing about a bunch of details, but there is a lawsuit against the studio that produced the film yesterday, the one about the guy who woke up and was the only one to remember the Beatles, I guess. Oh, yeah, I never saw that. I did not see it by here was fine. Like it sounded like it was better than it could have been and also not as good as the trailer did what the problem is one of the trailers included footage of Ana de Armas, in a scene that eventually ended up getting cut or a subplot that ended up getting cut from the film. So she was in one of the earlier trailers for it, and then she wasn't in the movie and some fans are suing the studio because they were deceived into seeing the film on the belief that Ana de Armas was in it, but she wasn't. So it's a false advertising. To

Jessamyn 49:28 be fair, if you put someone in your trailer and they're not in your movie, that is some bullshit.

Cortex 49:33 It is rights like and this is the whole thing like I don't know how the suits gonna come out. I don't know what's gonna happen is it's not like they won their suit. They're just being permitted to pursue it. Got it, you know, so who knows what's gonna happen, but the the thread is a bunch of people sort of trying to like talk through that and talking from somewhat different positions on like, what they think it should be and yeah, it's it becomes a nice sort of like, not contentious metal filter thread, but like, you know,

Jessamyn 49:58 there's a lot of ways to view that issue, I think, yeah, it's

Cortex 50:01 an argument from several different positions. And there's no clear, obvious answer other than like, boy, it's a little bit tricky. I'm not sure how we resolve this satisfactorily, which is like, yeah, that sounds like a. That sounds like an edge case lawsuit.

Jessamyn 50:14 Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

Cortex 50:16 I enjoyed that conversation.

Jessamyn 50:18 One of my favorite things. The turn of the year is public domain day, which is January 1, and a whole bunch of new stuff has copyright protection expiring on it. expiring?

Cortex 50:33 Yes. Can

Jessamyn 50:34 you ever do that you just say a word. And you're like, that's not how that works? Yeah. So all the Sherlock Holmes stories, metropolis, a whole bunch of stuff. There's a great post on the Duke website that really kind of talks about it, I got involved in a very brief Mastodon discussion, which was now my first use of the mute tool on mass. Because what I always do is I always go over to hockey trust, and I find stuff that's in the public domain. And in this case, there's a whole bunch of different books about, you know, historical people of color, like these books used to be a lot more popular, like, Hey, here's 100, black people who have done something with their lives, you know, not that that should be news. But that what it meant was you got a book that was all accomplished people of color, at at a certain time, in this case, 1927. But what it does is it comes with often with photographs or pictures, and you can take those pictures that are now in the public domain and use them to illustrate the probably their Wikipedia articles about those people, many, in many cases, there aren't pictures of them, or in some cases be like, we should write an article about this person who doesn't have an article because they were this notable person who nobody would have known about if there hadn't been this famous black people of 1927 book. And so I always get burried over at Hathi Trust on New Year's Day, looking at all this stuff, because half the trust really kind of I mean, it's it's kind of like the Internet Archive, and that they're a huge repository of sort of scan digital stuff. But they're kind of not like the Internet Archive in that they're a real business. And they work with a bunch of academic partners and and on public domain day, they've already got, like a compilation of the stuff that's going to be in the public domain, which is great. Right? Yeah. And, you know, so I headed over there. And then I mentioned something about that on Mastodon, and then brucer, from the archive was like, I really wish they would make their stuff available for mass downloading. And, and, you know, it was like, Yeah, well, whatever. Like, it's public domain. So theoretically, it's your right to get it. Right. Yeah. And he's just weird about it. You know, I mean, this is kind of why the Internet Archive is so great. But also so oddly problematic is because Brewster really wants to make everything available to everybody. And if there are barriers, like institutional barriers, he just kind of it's like, but everything available to everybody kind of Yeah. And so he was getting sticky on that point. And I didn't want to have an extended conversation about it. So I moved on. And I'm not sure if the conversation moved on without me, but it moved on without me.

Cortex 53:28 That's that's really like you can decide it doesn't need to be your problem anymore, even if everyone else doesn't, like actually agree, like they can keep yelling at the cloud. If they want. You don't have to,

Jessamyn 53:42 like I don't disagree with his perspective, I just don't think there's anything to be said about it. Like what you need to do is come to the table like grownups and figure out a way to negotiate not like, just show up in the public sphere and complain that your needs aren't being served. I feel like and I feel like they do that. But yeah.

Cortex 54:04 Well, this is this, this thread also, I will say, is of a similar note, like one that's it's more of a thread, partly because people are arguing about stuff, then like because there's not that much to say about public domain, like developments here other than like, okay, those those are in the book debate now. Great. You know, that that would not be, you know, several dozen comments that would be like, Oh, nice, you know, but instead, hey, let's talk about the nature and purpose and functionality of copyright, though, and what does it do and what is important about it, and

Jessamyn 54:33 well, and a lot of people have had copyright arguments, other places on the internet or with other people in the world. And so they kind of come with opinions about how how this is supposed to go right. And it's it's tricky, right? Like content creators need to get paid. At the same time. The public domain helps culture create stuff, those things are in in intention.

Cortex 55:02 I've got a couple more from the blue. One is this post from fizz hype is, is about a guy did a video roundup of his process of killing every NPC in the video game Skyrim. Older school scrolls five Skyrim, which is a lot, that's, that's it's a lot of them. And it's this, this particular idea is like, you know, it's like, if you're into watching someone, like talk about how they did a sort of weird, tedious tasks video game, it's a fun video. The whole concept of is also sort of like, I won't repeat my comments in there. But like, I've done a similar sort of thing on a couple of occasions. And it's a weird thing to try and figure out how to do it, you're sort of exploring, to some extent how the game was designed, and what intentions the game was putting into how it dealt with the idea of, like death of characters of varying importance, whatnot. So it's like, it's an interesting way to explore a system as well. But it's also like, inherently, such a bleak, tedious thing to do is like, Oh, I gotta go kill that person. Nope, gotta go kill that person. And not like, not the people that you're supposed to be killing, like, not not not a game. Just. Yeah, it's like, it's a bunch of like people in villages and like, you know, people who by and large are probably just supposed to people you talk to, but Skyrim makes it possible to basically kill everyone. And they've got a whole radiant quest system thing that like, reassigned side quests to different characters and whatnot. So if someone did die, someone else will be the person is like, oh, I need you to go get this horse from the east. So there was like it was built to kind of allow this. But whether or not it doesn't well, is a whole other question. And whether or not you feel good about doing is a whole other question. Yeah. Anyway, it was close to my heart. It's it's a weird sort of aspect of like, maximizing your exploration of video game systems. And I thought it was interesting, and the video was fairly music. Also, the post of mine that I will share from this month is this collection of weird gender web forms. By Oh,

Jessamyn 57:07 yeah, I saw this. And, yes, I saw this. I enjoyed it. But I was also like, you know what I mean, like, to me, who is cisgender? I'm just like, Oh, ha, ha, ha, hilarious. And then I was just like, I don't know if I would feel that that was hilarious if I was somebody who was trying to fill out my gender, which wasn't one of the two binaries, and then had to deal with all this weird shit, because some of these are funny. And some of them are just people doing a terrible job.

Cortex 57:37 Yeah, no, I there's absolutely that aspect of like, I feel like the target audience for this is probably trans and non very binary people who, like are already familiar with this shit and want at least the dark chocolate and like Effie falls into that category. Yeah. But yeah, there's, you always wonder a little bit like, is someone doing this right? And is someone doing this? Well, and in this case, like, I was, like, it looked as like, yeah, no, I feel I feel good about how the who and how on this. But also, there's that intersection of gender stuff, and also just terrible information management. So like, there's a little bit for every buddy. And, you know, if it was like, 1015 years ago, I'd probably be pretty worried about a post like this. I know, it's an interesting, like, reassuring thing in the change in time that like, I didn't post a metal filter, being worried about what people would say in the comments. And like, if I had a time machine to 15 years ago, I wouldn't make this post, you know, shots, that it's a reassuring sort of

Jessamyn 58:41 10 years ago.

Cortex 58:42 Yeah, 10 years ago would have been dicey. Yeah. Yeah. So hey, to progress and also Hey to excellent curation of weird bullshit people run into on the internet. And weird both of the people who actually affects, you know, have to deal with

Jessamyn 58:59 Yes, male female, I have no plans to purchase a new vehicle. Yes, well, box made a pair of posts that I don't like I've been not spending a lot of time getting deeply involved in the what's going on with libraries. Under this weird, Christo fascist set of people trying to do terrible things to America, but it's a problem. You know, it's less of a problem in Vermont, or New England than other parts of the country. But it's a real problem. And so, box basically made two posts over a couple of days, one of them how to ban 3600 books from school libraries, and the other one called the horrifying war on libraries, just talking about people's attempts to control libraries and what are in libraries and what programming live Please do because people have very narrow band visions of what a library is. And there's a whole bunch of right wing lunatics trying to really fanned the flames of low information people in order to get them pissed off about this stuff. And one of the things that I did or have been doing is, so there was a book that got banned from a ton of libraries over the last like year or two called genderqueer. Right. And it's basically a memoir about somebody who is questioning their own gender and trying to figure out ease on gender that use E i are pronouns, which I'm not super good at, but I'll do my best. And there's basically a couple, it's graphic novel, it's very well done very interesting, because he goes through some fairly complicated thought processes, trying to figure out how he feels about stuff. And there's a couple graphic panels, you know, like one of which you're envisioning, being on the receiving end, I believe, of a blow job, you know, so it's a little graphic. But like, I because I had only saw, like the haterade, on the internet about it, I had thought this whole book was graphic. And like, there's nothing wrong with a graphic novel that's graphic to some of them are amazing. But I could understand why people would have concerns about children reading them if the whole thing was like this. But now it's just like two panels, slightly graphic, not a big deal, a non issue, and I finally read them so that I know. Yeah, and the end, the discussion of gender issues is so important, I think, especially for young people. Because it's not even like, oh, you know, some people are straight, some people are gay, some people are asexual, some people or whatever, but it really discusses kind of your own thinking about yourself. Maybe not even fitting into like those categories and how you deal with it and how you talk to your family and how you deal with relationships and blah, blah, blah. Very good. Yeah, yeah. But the hitters go nuts on it and make it seem like it's essentially a sex manual. And it's totally not. So I figured one of the things I had to do was start reading and box has done a really good job of making these two posts. And I hope he continues to.

Cortex 1:02:25 Excellent. Let's see, I have one more post to mention, which I might have mentioned, depending on the timing, last, last podcast, who but it's it's Advent incremental post by juvenile. And now it's it was an advent calendar idle game, where there's like a new thing every day. And now it's done, then you can play the whole thing, which is nice, because everybody who's playing along, over the course of the thread was running into the reality that the developers ran into bug problems. And we're doing this as a spare time thing, and weren't able to keep up day to day with the calendar itself.

Jessamyn 1:03:00 After a certain point. We did talk about it last month. But

Cortex 1:03:03 But yes, anyway, it's done now. And it was it was an actual thing. And you can play the whole thing through without having to wait day by day if you want to, like chew through it more. So yeah. If you like idle game light stuff.

Jessamyn 1:03:14 Yeah. Because it's like, what's an idle game? And you were like, it's

Cortex 1:03:18 right, right. That's a clicker.

Jessamyn 1:03:19 And yeah,

Cortex 1:03:20 yeah. This thankfully is not a very cliquey idle game. So you don't have to do a bunch of clicking on stuff too much. Good luck. But also, also, this is a rare endorsement of an idle game. It has an ending like, you know, once you finish it, you finish it, it's not like that. Okay, now time to do it all over again, but slightly faster, again, and again, again, forever, which is the usual sort of proposition with idle games. So yeah, anyway, I enjoyed it. It was a nice fun time. It was fun, sort of going through the thread with people and being collectively frustrated things that were a little bit wonky, or the drama of the developers not being able to get the days out in time and having to catch up and yeah, it's good time.

Jessamyn 1:04:00 All right, how about over to AskMe gonna filter

Cortex 1:04:03 I'm gonna I'm gonna mention two comments first, because like the curse May I some I never mentioned comments, but like, just dumb jokes that I liked it that I favorited instead of waiting for a meta talk post about I'm just going to mention them there's a nice joke from Fuki that's a riff on the I don't know why she swallowed that fly. And there's

Jessamyn 1:04:24 it's funny. Yes, and there's

Cortex 1:04:25 there's also a comment from House goblin in the thread on goblin mode being the word of the year and I always love it when

Jessamyn 1:04:32 someone asked me what problem mode is.

Cortex 1:04:35 Goblin mode is

Jessamyn 1:04:36 this link will it tell me

Cortex 1:04:39 a little I mean, I'm sure it will. It's like it's it's it's a accumulated like folk term from this year for like, you know, sort of going feral, sort of like,

Jessamyn 1:04:49 Rails people talking about it at Twitter after Twitter had laid a bunch of people off, but that was the first time I heard about it, and so it's hard to extract it from me anything that was going on at Twitter, it goes

Cortex 1:05:02 back to I believe the origination was a fake headline about Julia Fox talking about having when she was dating Kanye West that he didn't like it when she went goblin mode, which someone just made up this headline and it seems like a plausible thing. It's

Jessamyn 1:05:18 like blow job talk.

Cortex 1:05:20 No, no, no, not not. I understand wobbling.

Jessamyn 1:05:23 I understand. But still,

Cortex 1:05:25 no. Well, I mean, it helps to contextualize it in terms of Julia Fox being like, sort of, I don't know who that is. Nobody, like like not nobody, like lots of people do but also nobody does. It's it's she's just, she's someone who I think has effectively been a little bit famous this year for being famous. is kind of the whole thing. And she's like, does conspicuous stuff she she wears. Trademark very elaborate black eyeliner that looks like something off of like Blade Runner,

Jessamyn 1:05:55 Julia Fox you say?

Cortex 1:05:58 Yeah. Oh, her name now?

Jessamyn 1:06:01 No, no. I get it. She was an uncut gems.

Cortex 1:06:05 Yes, uncut jobs. Which is the other thing that she was sort of on the radar before it was

Jessamyn 1:06:10 so Goblin is negative.

Cortex 1:06:13 It's not even like I think people claimed it. Like I think maybe negative if you don't like goblin mode, but people I think it took off because people liked the idea of identifying. It's like the, I'm not going to get dressed. And I'm just going to eat, you know, potato chips out of the bag. And that's my day, sort of, I'm going to cease engaging in normal human responsibilities. I'm going to forget about niceties. I'm going to go into cease doing the dance of human civilization to some extent.

Jessamyn 1:06:38 But you're a little braggy about it. Maybe.

Cortex 1:06:41 Maybe, yeah, let probably a little bit. It's sort of like Manic Pixie trash. Panda. Like it's a little bit like, you like being the raccoon in the darkness digging through the trash can sort of, yeah, that sort of thing. So anyway, I think it all came out of that ended up people just ran with it. And it became this thing, which is, as far as that goes, that's a good choice for, you know, your Word of the Year because like it very much is its own thing, rather than just like this terrible thing happened. And now we have this word about it.

Jessamyn 1:07:13 And then how Scotland shows up in the thread, which was how we started this

Cortex 1:07:16 exactly. I like it when someone shows up to comment on their like, there's a pawn hysterical, and then there's like, just straight up like, why are you guys talking about me, which is like the best genre. Anyway, that's it. I wanted to mention those two comments, because they're good comments. And I don't mention comments. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:07:34 I have a tendency to fake comments and not posts and then I am always trying to remember it. Like does it the comment that I like just on its own? Or did I save it because I'm really paving the posts and this was a good comment in it or something?

Cortex 1:07:47 I don't know. Yeah, yeah. My favorites on comments are almost universally a collection of like, jokes.

Jessamyn 1:07:55 Color me surprised.

Cortex 1:07:56 I will favorite posts that I find useful and interesting. But comments is almost like, Oh, that was a good pun. Oh, that was a good pun. Oh, that was a good pun. Whether or not people would agree with me that they're good is other people's problem. I am correct. Yes. S Metafilter.

Jessamyn 1:08:10 Yeah, I still haven't really been able to get back to s Metafilter for reasons that are entirely my own. And I don't know what they are like, like, I love this Metafilter and I've been avoiding it and I don't know why. But I you know, poked around there a little because of course there's always stuff there relevant to my interests and COD's post about good just good. What's good internet radio stations? And yeah. Music from The rockier end of the roots music spectrum. What are your favorites? What's going on? And as somebody who spends a lot of time listening to internet radio in fact, I've been making more of an effort in 2023 to try and listen to some of my own music for a change like that even music I make just music on my computer. Just because I like it and I should but there's a lot of faves in here. Good, good, good. Good. Good suggestions. And if you're somebody who's looking for some internet radio that's really where you should go look.

Cortex 1:09:16 Yeah, that's excellent. It's nice round up

Jessamyn 1:09:22 I mean, maybe I've been on asked Metafilter more than you

Cortex 1:09:26 Yeah, I'm sure you haven't I have I have one in the hopper question from ethnic knocked about why is it called a counter

Jessamyn 1:09:37 so I do have to say that ethnic knocked as we mentioned in the last podcast, I thought he was moving to my sister's town and he is not which is too bad because I already had like this great, you know, just fantasy future where they all like hanging out and we're friends. But alas, it was not to be.

Cortex 1:09:54 You've already created a set of elaborate traps. You're gonna get him this Time.

Jessamyn 1:10:01 They couldn't, they couldn't move to that clinic town. But yes, guys.

Cortex 1:10:06 Anyway, he has a question about countersinks, which has significant autism posts are like sort of clinical floor out at the top of a hole that's drilled for a screw. And he's like, why the fuck is a call a countersink, though, and the thread is collection of comments helping answer that question and sort of talking about can I hear you? Oh, you can. I didn't know that. He has Bodie, a boat. Jasmine says Hi, Bodhi. Yeah, she's been answered properly in different rooms doing different things. And that's, you know, she's like, Yeah, I've gotten so used to tuning her out that like, you know, it didn't occur to me. She'd even be audible. Yeah, anyway, it's it's a nice discussion of Etymology and whatnot, and sort of the the evolving language of some of the tool use stuff involved, too.

Jessamyn 1:10:56 It's a good month when we could talk about the odd a lot. Yeah, yeah. And we learned to think, yeah, oh, man, Jim found some random drillbit in his house. Like, we've been on a race to be like, who's the most unpacked because we moved in the same week in August. And he finally got some shelves at Home Depot, which really helped him organize some of his stuff. But he found like this weird drill bit and he was like, what is that? And I wasn't sure I asked my friend forest and forest what words this kind of countersinking blah, blah, blah. And I was like, hey, it's this kind of countersink and Jim was like, we're and I was like, I don't know why you have it. You. You do not use tools. It must have come with a set of something. But yes, countersinking so elegant.

Cortex 1:11:46 I was gonna try and put together a drill bit tailor joke, but then I realized I didn't really have a good like interjection for it. And B, I don't actually remember who or what drillbit Taylor is talking about drillbit Taylor, I swear to God, that is a thing of some sorts like Taylor. Conversion. No, no,

Jessamyn 1:12:03 no, no, but Taylor. Yeah, it's like a movie.

Cortex 1:12:07 You have maybe three high school characters and

Jessamyn 1:12:09 bullied. All right, and Owen Wilson is in it. Huh? All right. Owen Wilson plays drillbit Taylor, in the movie. drillbit Taylor wants a deep cut. It's 14 years ago. All right. I've never heard it. And thank you all go watch that dumb show.

Cortex 1:12:27 I know nothing about it. So you know, don't blame me if it's bad. No,

Jessamyn 1:12:31 absolutely not. I understand what your tastes are. So this post I really liked, because it is also relevant to my unpacking interests. Like basically, I have two sets of things that are not unpacked yet. And everything else is unpacked. One is toiletries, because my bathroom here has less storage than my last bathroom. And I have to make some decisions about toiletries that I'm not ready for yet. So there's just a couple extra boxes of toiletries, and I shouldn't have them but I just can't right now. And the other is just boxes of frickin paper. Like I swore I was going to try and unpack everything and not just stash it in the basement or the attic, because this house has both a giant basement and a giant attic. And I feel like I need to touch everything before I do that. But where do I put my boxes of like old letters that I want to keep but I don't really need and so this is happy frogs question. Basically I've called my wardrobe bookshelves furniture clutter, but I'm haunted by boxes of paper ephemera? How do you you know art done by exes? Yep. I have that are out of magazines, God that bank statements. Now I did get rid of those old journals never had journals, old tickets that reminded you of trips. You know. And so it's it's difficult, right? Like, I think a lot of us, even if our current life when this is what's going on with happy frog, even if our current life does not collect those things, our past life maybe did and it feels weird to just pitch the stuff. And so some people scan stuff, some people, like pick a couple notable things and frame them. And then whatever, some people and some of that stuff I do actually go back through personally, I don't know about other people. I think people vary. But you know, there's a lot of kind of really good caring advice about how to how to think about this concept as well as sort of how to deal with it.

Cortex 1:14:30 Yeah, yeah, that's it is, it's weird, because it's going to be such a sort of personal thing for any given person to like, where the priority is there and what the motivation for keeping it or calling is going to be that like, talking about it as like a framework from a bunch of different people's perspective is especially useful here. It's not like there is an answer. It's more like yeah, there's ways of thinking about it and being able to look at like, you know, a couple dozen different people's different ways of thinking about it. Maybe Got a lot more useful for someone than just like, you know, well, here's what I do. That's what you do go do it.

Jessamyn 1:15:04 Right, right. Yeah, exactly. And for certain people, like, you know, replacing scan items with digital items is one of those now you have to problems things. And for other people, it's a, it's great, you know, like Jim Jim scan stuff in order to get rid of paper. But then he does wind up having a digital stuff, issue, because the problem is he's just not super organized. Like different people have different levels of organizational acumen. He is on the less organized side of the spectrum, no big deal. But part of that is like the self knowledge to know how, how much you're going to use the system you want to create, so that you can actually create something that's meaningful for you. Right? Yeah, and I think that's really one of the trickier things is people like coming into my house, because they're like, ooh, it's so tidy. And I'm like, well, that's just because I'm not letting you into the room completely. Like, you know, I know, people are going to look at this, you know, like, that's part of this. And so it's, it's always interesting, talking to people about about their various things. And I just found that thread really interesting. It was great. Similar thread. Because for me, and also for my neighbor, who lives next door forest, we both spend a lot of our kind of idle time doing like tidying and organizational projects. And that's kind of fun for me, you know? And so this is escape from the potato planet, asking, what are some hobby projects that you can do indoors? And I'm thinking about things like mushroom growing kits and farms like bonus bonus for something maybe I didn't think of before, you know, ordered caterpillars online and watch them turn into butterflies. Like, I don't really want to do art stuff. But I am interested in these other things. What would be cool about that? And there's a nice little thread about things you can do. Yeah, it's cool making Christmas stars from soda straws. That's more interesting than I thought it was gonna be. Neat.

Cortex 1:17:05 I feel like, Yeah, it's interesting. Like, everything I tend to think of here tends to fall into sort of like an arts and crafts territory. Yeah. And that's just like, that's just just, that's just who I am. That's what I had to, like, get busy with. But finding, I feel like for people who don't really identify with that stuff that manages to not feel like do art, so much as like, make a thing with your hands might still be appealing. And it's interesting to think about, like what the sort of boundaries of that are, like, is doing origami type stuff too artsy, or is that a satisfying physical thing? You know, there's probably a lot of complicated baggage, both in general and in my head about, like, what falls into or not into arts and crafts, but yeah,

Jessamyn 1:17:52 well, and one of the things that's sort of my favorite about it is the different people in the thread being like, Oh, I'm doing this. So like, you know, as real Brown is making corn coin rings, like you cut out the middle of a coin, and then you fold it over. So you have a ring that you wear on your finger, but it's made out of a coin. Like I have one of those from the state of Vermont, like state of Vermont quarter. And it's probably one of my favorite things I own right, my sister just got it on the internet, you know, but like being able to, like make those like what would that even be like, you know, like, like, so, so interesting and so fun. And so I like I like knowing kind of what other people's interests are. You know, Raspberry Pi's stuff escaping the potato planet is already done. Yeah, it's just it's neat. It's neat to to look at the things that other people like in that area. Yeah.

Cortex 1:18:45 It's a nice pile of stuff I had a thought and I lost it. They went away. It's gone now. That fled from me.

Jessamyn 1:19:00 Well, I don't have other I mean, you know, I have a couple other like, you know, books stuff. Like I have to make sure I'm reading vacatio wants books in media with neurodivergent representation. So it's a kind of a list making lists making thing newish post actually, I felt like I read one of these earlier as well but there's you know, there's some pretty good I think it's the only use of the neuro spicy tag that I have seen. But yeah, just just interesting. Like Help me Help me find these reading lists all of these. Like books, books, threads are always interesting ones to me, like Yeah, help me read this because I'm always looking. This one's another one just about write books about writing nonfiction books. By Muslim Muslim de Mesonet Muslim New York, maybe?

Cortex 1:20:07 Maybe Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:20:10 You know, helped me help me change my fanfic reading habits is another one. And then the last one, which was interesting, helped me figure out which edition of a library book I've read. So they know what the book is, but they want that specific edition, because it's got specific illustrations. I'm not 100% sure if they actually, this was a sir Ceridwen COVID? One, correct one. Ah. And, you know, trying to figure out which one it is gene has some has some good advice. There's some information from Ursula Hitler and from opposite.

Cortex 1:20:53 Oh, Ms. laminae is a transliteration of a Ukrainian word for unbreakable or indomitable?

Jessamyn 1:20:58 Oh, how interesting. Yeah. Yes, that's it for me for AskMe Metafilter. I think one of my New Year's resolutions will be to try and get a little bit more involved in AskMe Metafilter. For the next broadcast,

Cortex 1:21:13 I think maybe I'll try and do that too. Because I keep thinking to myself, I should just try and make a little bit of a, like, intentional, like, I I intentionally go and look at the blue, you know, on a regular basis, aside from like, like, like, explicitly oh, I want to go see that thread. So yeah, I'm just gonna go take a look. And I've never really built up that habit with ASP Metafilter. Like, it was always more of like, this is something that I'm looking at because, you know, professional obligation moderating. And I think I would enjoy making more of a point of just like, looking for stuff on ASP metaphyseal. But like, again, with a habit forming, it's, you know, the guy got to start doing anything I don't normally do. It's impossible. But maybe it's also possible. A couple quick meta talk things. Yes. At least one. Okay. Well, mine are mine are both cards, swapped things. There's the Holiday Card swap had happened. And hopefully everybody's got their in the mail. But also, if you're that person who's listening, and you're like, oh, man is seven put in the mail. It's okay. Just get them in, get them in the mail. There's always a bunch of people who are gonna be like, laid out there, I was kind of laid out the gate myself, and but there's a threat of people saying, Oh, hey, thanks, these were nice. And then on the flip side, if you feel like planning to send some mail, there is going to be a Valentine's card exchange. So if you're interested that go sign up in swap some cards. And it could be any kind of card it doesn't have to be, you know, Valentine's Day Valentine. It doesn't mean technically speaking, you could probably just absolutely refuse to acknowledge the existence of Valentine's Day as long as you get your card sent. But you know, you do you

Jessamyn 1:22:50 Yes, and if you're somebody who wants to write to somebody in particular chief the chief is doing a pump Hall project writing a handwritten letter a week to friends acquaintances and family members. And you can sign up I received a email from from them and very much very much like that. Nice my other thing, which just came in yesterday, and I had thought maybe it was gonna be about one thing and it was about something completely different was very funny post from why to curl, which is like a midfielder usernames post. Yeah,

Cortex 1:23:35 it's delightful. I admit, I saw that in passing and my first class is like, fuck what? I wasn't sure. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:23:44 so just talking about like all the users that have the word goddess in their name all the ones that have the word Empress or emperor or queen or king

Cortex 1:23:52 Angel and and then

Jessamyn 1:23:55 other people like you know, Chip pitch in with their own you know, all the Pope's all the nerds, all the spoons and plates. It's adorable. It's adorable. It's a fun grab as of a thread. All the all the people with dead in their name all the people with happy in their name, which I guess you can get from the info dump. Is that where people are getting them? Are they just?

Cortex 1:24:20 Yeah, probably. Yeah, there's a usernames file in there. That's probably the easiest way to sort of skim for ideas, more boxes than a

Jessamyn 1:24:28 UPS Store. Grab that, grab it, grab it and grab it.

Cortex 1:24:33 Grab it and grip it 2023 Grab it and grip it. Oh, that's a second replace our other title. I'll throw it

Jessamyn 1:24:42 in there. I don't remember what that other title was.

Cortex 1:24:44 New MEPhI new year new me fie me five.

Jessamyn 1:24:48 You could almost put them all together because they're not very long.

Cortex 1:24:51 Yep. Yep. Yeah, maybe maybe maybe a big elaborate title. All right. Well, yeah, anything Also you want to mention, I was going to get inspired to pull up the fanfare thread for a movie called grim Kenny that I just watched it later. But there's not a fanfare thread, so I might have to make one. Yeah. Because it's a very soso horror movie based on the MOMO challenge. moral panic from the last couple of years, I want to say you

Jessamyn 1:25:20 know what you're talking about?

Cortex 1:25:22 I'm gonna go find Angela didn't either. I think this is something that like, just you knew about it, or you didn't. But I'll see if I can find it. I'm sure there was a meta filter post about it. It was a online hoax about this. People were putting this content into videos and places online and kids were seeing and it was brainwashing them into like, doing bad things. Bad things like what? Like, like cutting themselves. Other people

Jessamyn 1:25:55 really bad things. Not not like yeah, okay. Yeah,

Cortex 1:25:59 but I'm trying to remember, I might just have to throw in the thread later, because I'm not immediately finding, I'm pretty sure there was a post about it. But anyway, someone made a horror movie about that meme. And it was not terrible. It wasn't amazing. And in the audio on the file, we had broke about 10 months from the end. So this horror movie that depends a lot on soundtrack stuff and had a running ASMR theme. Suddenly, we were watching with just subtitles, because otherwise it was impossible to watch it with the off track audio, which was an interesting experience. But I don't know maybe I'll try and find that. Maybe I'll try and make a fanfare post about it, just in case anybody else would like to watching. So So movies with internet themes.

Jessamyn 1:26:39 watches it as well. Sounds good.

Cortex 1:26:42 And yeah, I think I think that's all I've got. So yeah, I think it's a podcast. I think we did it. Fantastic. Well, Happy New Year to everybody. And thanks for being here. And happy new year year to you. Jessamyn. And thank you for doing all this being here and own and stuff and stuff.

Jessamyn 1:27:01 Sure. Yeah. Glad to Happy New Year to you. And, you know, I'll check in after we do the taxes. See how we're feeling.

Cortex 1:27:11 It'll be exciting. It'll be fun. It'll be a thriller minute. Nothing like nothing like corporate taxes to you know, raise your spirits. Anyway. Yes. All right. That's that's a podcast. I'm going to stop talking about the all in one.

Jessamyn 1:27:26 Cool