Podcast 191 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 191: Thoroughly insinuated into the normalcy of our life (2023-02-11).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary keywords

thread, nice, weird, post, good, mentos, bit, feel, fucking, people, yogesh, electric kettle, thought, run, interesting, happened, transphobic, idea, slime mold, mentioned

Transcript

Unknown Speaker 0:03 To the podcast. Please come

Unknown Speaker 0:19 to light Yeah,

Cortex 0:20 no, I'm just I'm letting I'm let it ride. I've I've officially forgotten my secret off tape discussions. Because Because yeah, it's time for episode. We're falling slow sort of getting out the gate. So so we're recording this more like February 10. But February is a short month. So it seems like a good one to get the test starting

Jessamyn 0:42 later is a larger percentage of the month gone?

Cortex 0:44 Well, but it's also it's also I'm not sure how to spin this in retrospect. February is fucked up. So you don't want to do here's the thing. Here's the thing, February on a non

Jessamyn 0:57 Josh, take it back.

Cortex 1:02 Why would you do me like I don't know where you're going. I don't either. I'm trying to find my way. Okay, here's the thing. Just the thing about February, February on non leap years is 28 days, right? And so February is really weird. Because if something happens on like, the second in February, it's Tuesday or whatever, then in March, the second is also Tuesday, you've got a whole fucking, like Groundhog's Day. So you have to do things on the wrong day in February. So that March feels like it's all month. That's, that's why I get it. That's what I'm saying.

Jessamyn 1:36 I get it. Yeah, I mean, my thing is like, February ends quick and abruptly but like January doesn't January seems to be two months long. Yep. At least it to me. We were talking to payroll, I woke up and my power was out today because there's exceptional wind storms in Vermont. And it came back on after not too much time. So I was able to have coffee like a normal person. But wow, I was concerned. I was like, How far am I willing to drive. But the fact that it is now what double digits in February makes me feel good about the fact that I might live through this winter. So

Cortex 2:12 yeah, you're most of the way there?

Jessamyn 2:14 I think so.

Cortex 2:15 So by Vermont's standards in Portland standards, yeah. I

Jessamyn 2:18 mean, I can't remember if winter actually lasts through April or last through May. I feel like it just starts getting muddy in April, but mostly not as cold.

Cortex 2:28 See, it was stunning. And 60 here yesterday, like those Abrons, but it got there, they managed to do that in like, you know, early February.

Jessamyn 2:36 I mean, it is melty out today, which is unusual for us for February.

Cortex 2:41 It's premature maltiness a problem at all. Like if it's going to be cold again, or is like a little

Jessamyn 2:48 bit depending because what can happen is like last night, I was out at work. And then I came home in the dark. And it was like with that wintry mix shit that nobody likes. Like sleet and snow. And maybe it's raining also at the same time how? But then what can happen is if you get that kind of stuff, or premature melt, and then it freezes, like really freezes. You can just get like slick ice everywhere. Yeah. Which isn't like anything above 20 degrees is fine, because the salt works on it. But if it gets super cold, and it's been melted before that which has been known to happen, then you get this ice you can't do anything about and that's not great.

Cortex 3:32 That's That's right. You guys have any actual snow infrastructure whatsoever. So you hear a lot of snow infrastructure, if it gets like above freezing, and then below freezing again, we're kind of a little bit fucked just because it's a rainy place. And there's nothing is going to do anything about the ice other than like, right, you

Jessamyn 3:47 don't have just piles of salt in warehouses.

Cortex 3:50 Yeah, like the grocery store will sell out there like front area, you know, and a few people will maybe try and scoop their, their their sidewalk. We try and do that. But yeah, no, it's just no stay inside for a couple days.

Jessamyn 4:03 Right. Right. Well, and we had very dramatic. Last week. I think two weeks ago, we had a negative 20 snap for about 36 hours.

Cortex 4:14 Wowzers Yeah,

Jessamyn 4:16 and this was my first super cold time in this house. And like, you know, you get worried because you don't know. I don't I'm not like super chatty with the people I bought the house from and so, you know, I don't know how much this is, uh, oh my God put space heaters in here. All the sinks and how much it's just like, turn the heat up a little, you know, and it turned out more like the latter than the former. But Jim was coming up and I was like, Look, I'm just telling you it's gonna be cold in here. You're welcome. I mean, I'd love to have you here but and yeah, it was pretty much stay the hell inside it was. It was ridiculous. But then it was over and now it's 45 So kind of wild. 60 degrees warmer.

Cortex 5:02 Excuse me. That's a that's a verb to announce that this is episode 191 of the metaphorical podcast. Josh cortex Mullard. And I'm Jessamyn Jessamyn. Chairman west as we established. And yeah, such is pretty good. It's pretty good.

Jessamyn 5:23 Yeah. And we got the last podcast a little later. So actually, we're pretty much on target for when the podcasts actually come out. We're just a little late for recording.

Cortex 5:33 Yeah, maybe we'll get turned around real quick. Who knows? Or maybe we'll come out of March. Who knows? Nobody knows. Because the future is

Jessamyn 5:40 not gonna come out in March because I can mix them myself.

Cortex 5:44 So we'll come out Sunday. Yes, and yeah, here we are. We're doing the thing. It's, it's I'm having a very scattered morning. Like, it's, I would say it's because of like coffee and tea. It's actually probably more a lack of coffee and tea, or our water boiler, or water heater boiler machine, like the Zojirushi little kitchen top thing? Oh, yeah. is disintegrating. The Lives just Like coming apart. So we've got a new one on order. And it's sorry, it's weird how thoroughly it has insinuated into the normal, see if our life because like, whenever we like, go somewhere, the fact that it's not there doesn't feel too weird. Like if we if we should go go on vacation or something like yeah, there's probably going to be a kettle and we use a kettle and it's, it's of a piece with everything else is a little bit different, because you're somewhere else, right? But at home, it's fucking weird. Like, it's what you're used to. And it's just sitting there. Empty and headless, just waiting for a new lid to come. And like, you know, in the meantime, it's just there this weird, like, you know, inert corpse of this machine as like, Oh, right. i If, if I want hot water, I actually think ahead slightly, instead of just immediately having it and like, I, you know, it's something that Angela wanted, like your birthday a few years ago, and, and, and at the time was like, Oh, sure. I mean, if you want it, let's, let's get it. And I

Jessamyn 7:08 got like, 181 degrees or whatever. Yeah, I

Cortex 7:10 mean, we keep it up at like, 208. Because, because we're hardcore. But that's options. Like, you know, you can pick usually like three different temperatures. And if you want to, like make your tea, and then very immediately drink it, then like, you know, do it like yeah, 190 or whatever. Anyway, it's fucking

Jessamyn 7:26 raining. If you weren't very immediately drinking it, I'm sorry, I missed.

Cortex 7:31 Well, if you wanted to, like steep it, and then like, immediately begin drinking it, you might want it to be a little bit cooler, or if you really care about the specific temperature,

Jessamyn 7:39 because otherwise, you'd be steeping it for a while, and the water would be cooling off while that was happening. Yeah,

Cortex 7:42 exactly. I get it. Plus, I like a ridiculously stupid hot cup of tea. Like, I enjoy it the best at that moment when you can just barely start to sleep at it. Like properly hot beverage.

Jessamyn 7:55 This is very interesting that this is happening to you. Well, because I just got my first for this house electric kettle. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And spent because, you know, there's only so much you can do about power consumption in the house. You know, like, the pellet stove goes all day. And like, I've got a space heater to keep the boiler from running all the time in my office and blah, blah, blah. But like one of the things is like turning on the oven range. Just to heat water for coffee seemed like a bad idea. Right? Like, it seems like there's the most efficient way to go. electric kettles are good. Technology is pretty great with them. And so I spent a little bit of time poking around and decided to get like, you know, not not the cheapest, but like a kind of cheap electric kettle. And the biggest important part was getting one that didn't have like a blue glow led at all times. And then it turned out the one that I bought had a blue glow led, when you flip it on, you know, and then it goes off, the thing automatically turns itself off when your water is boiling. But like, I don't know about you, but like there's some kind of blue LED that just makes my eyeballs hurt. You know, like, you look at it, and it's too bright. And

Cortex 9:10 yeah, this weird sort of Halo. We feel Yeah. Yeah.

Jessamyn 9:16 This had that. It was against the rules. And once I dug into the like the Amazon reviews, I was like, oh, there's somebody complaining that the light is too bright, whereas none of the pictures even have this light in it. And so the good news was, I was like, Oh, I could take it apart. I'll fix this right? I'm a maker. And then the bad news was it required like a specific screwdriver that I didn't have and I've got like 30 Different kinds of screwdrivers, and I didn't have this one. And fortunately my neighbor forced the engineer had it we took it apart. We clipped the LED out and now it is perfect.

Cortex 9:50 Nice. Yeah, I this is a problem I would solve with electric tape. Usually.

Jessamyn 9:55 I can't, like I can't take a brand new thing and make it like you Nike sticky, like, electric tape never goes on sticky to me.

Cortex 10:06 Yeah, no, it's I'm not saying it's the correct way to go. I'm just saying that's that's what I'm thinking. Or you know, maybe maybe like, you know, a little bit of like acrylic paint maybe?

Jessamyn 10:15 Well, anything that was flat, that's how I would do it. But this is actually on the little lever that you turn it on and off with. Yeah, yeah. If it was just a little flat light. Yes, absolutely. I agree.

Cortex 10:26 All right. Well, well, I'm glad you got it sorted out. The two places are electric kettle. Yes. And

Jessamyn 10:31 good luck getting your that thing. Russia.

Cortex 10:35 Yeah, it's like the week of like ground shipping from California. So it'll be back. And then the meantime, we gotta take a week from California. timezone. I mean, ground shipping is slow. And also, they're just sort of slow getting stuff in the pipeline, I think is part of it. It's also free shipping. So like, fuck it. Yeah. I bought this thing years and years ago, and it's like 35 bucks for a new hole lead piece, which is like, not bad.

Jessamyn 10:58 That sounds much my entire electric kettle cost, but it only has one temperature.

Cortex 11:02 Yeah. And, yeah,

Jessamyn 11:05 I think I think

Cortex 11:07 if we didn't have the Zojirushi I think an electric kettle would have happened because like having something that just does that one specific thing works very well.

Jessamyn 11:16 So do you even have like a stovetop kettle like what are you doing right now?

Cortex 11:19 Yeah, no, we've actually got a little little like maybe like two cups of tea kettle that we had been cleaning out some like crannies in the kitchen. And we're going to take out to the camping supplies in the garage and we just didn't get around to it. And then that's Oh, to redo went on the plane because like, oh, we'll use this thing. Okay. Hey, I think we've got a slightly better one downstairs somewhere too. But like this one was already in the kitchen. So fuck it, and it's doing fine. And like, Yeah, it's weird. It's weird, remembering a lifelong habit of like, beating it like full speed to the kitchen. beating it this is not the image I was running full speed to the kitchen all of a sudden when the whistle starts going off. And like if you're lucky, you hear it when it's getting ready to go off and make a difference. And you can get there before really

Jessamyn 12:09 Yeah, you will as you sprint across the house. That was like

Cortex 12:12 a defining part of my childhood was like, you know, screaming down to the kitchen from upstairs on the other end of the house and like, you know, coming down 16 Narrow steps as fast as possible and trying to Yeah,

Jessamyn 12:24 yes, yeah, I was like, and I was a coffee household. So that was not part of our part of our things. The Screaming teakettle was usually when my mom had friends over, and she would she would sit around and blah, blah, blah with them.

Cortex 12:37 Yeah. We were I think we were sort of mixed Coffee Tea household and also like, you know, hot chocolate hot cider. I guess we liked a hot beverage when I was a kid. I guess it's it. I don't know where that falls between ingredients and prepared. Exactly.

Jessamyn 12:54 That was fascinating conversation that we can get back to later.

Cortex 12:58 We'll get we'll get there. Do you want to talk over any job stuff?

Jessamyn 13:03 Um, you know, I haven't looked at jobs and I probably should have because I am now officially since my mother's. Well, there's only one job. Since my mother's house is officially sold. I am now officially on the job market. Alright. This job is in Canada. So

Cortex 13:22 congrats. Because like that happened since we last Yeah, yeah. Right

Jessamyn 13:25 after like basically it closed the day we were expecting it to. And especially with this recent cold snap. It has been great not have to worry about not my own house.

Cortex 13:38 Did you? Did you end up getting that Bob?

Jessamyn 13:41 Yeah, I did. I ate the whole thing myself. Nice. So good. Chocolate Bob, because really the best. But yes, J Chan has one job to be a lead product designer for a company called perch that helps people buy houses. I think I'm not super clear what it does. But it looks interesting startup environment know about mortgage and financial services. pays pretty good, I think and you should look at it. But then again, this job lined up almost a month ago. So not sure if it's still there.

Cortex 14:17 All right. Check it out and see. There's a there's a small bar in my neighborhood called The Purge. It's probably not that. Oh, that's a name for a bar that's got a little owl on the side. But yeah, I'd like to imagine that. That is just chock full of.com people making. Yeah. Anyway. Let's talk about projects. Yeah, it

Jessamyn 14:43 looks like you got a project and projects a ton about your project.

Cortex 14:46 I made a stained glass piece. I've been doing a bunch of string lessons and it's been nice, but I had this idea to do a stained glass piece based on a mathematical sequence known colloquially as the toothpick sequence. which is just a nice little thing where you like put down a toothpick, and then you put another toothpick centered and perpendicular on each open toothpick. And that's left. And then you repeat and repeat and repeat and get this thing that grows up in interesting sort of chaotic looking fractal way. And it's part of a whole family of things like that. But I was looking at it thinking, you know, it'd be nice to do something about the rectangles and squares and getting closed in the process of this thing growing. And I did that. And I ended up using sort of a red light blue yellow thing and doing it as for like a Mondrian pastiche. And so yes, it's nice. It's one of the couple people mentioned, that seems more classical than most of the stuff I make in terms of like the look of stained glass, which I think is true. Like it's, it's a little bit more grid based. It's not like prairie style. Exactly. But it has, it has a little bit more of like a formal stained glass look rather than like Guy obsessed with Menger sponge who happened to find some stained glass, which a lot of my stuff ends up looking like, yeah. But in no way we're happy with it. It's like it came out nicely. It was it was a good project, it was simple. The rectangular, everything, 90 degrees, sort of grid of stuff, made it a little bit more of a challenge to like, feel totally satisfied about how straight everything was laid out. Because like because if it's a little off, you can really, you can see in a way that you wouldn't see with something that's a little bit more curvy, or chaotic or whatnot. And I was happy enough with how it came out as far as it goes. Like it's not perfect, but staying left doesn't lend itself towards being like perfect in that way. So yeah, I think for my skill set and the relative speed with which I made it happen, it came out really well. And yeah, like it was fun.

Jessamyn 16:38 And so you describe yourself also as repeat victim of nerd sniping. What is

Cortex 16:43 nerd sniping is a phrase used, I run into mostly with like, like math nerds and computer nerd people on Mastodon and Twitter formally. But basically, the idea is someone in your feed or someone in your, you know, realm of acquaintance mentions probably mostly in passing some idea, some like mathematical sequence or some computational notion or some puzzle or, you know, whatever, some some thing. And then they were just sort of like passing by, and then you hit that, and you're like, Oh, ha, oh, ha. And then there goes your fucking morning because all of a sudden, you're like down three Wikipedia holes. And you're like, learning everything about this thing. And like,

Jessamyn 17:29 to me, that definitely happens to me. Yeah,

Cortex 17:32 so that's getting nerd sniped. Like, all of a sudden, you're like, oh, man, from out of nowhere, a bullet has hit me in the, you know, the the idea brain and? And yeah, I'm just taken out of commission, because I gotta fucking think about this now. And that happens to me a lot. Like, it's one of the joys

Jessamyn 17:49 for dinner, because I'm trying to figure out the answer to this question is definitely a thing. Yeah. Yeah. To me more often than I care to admit.

Cortex 17:58 Yeah, exactly. So you know. And this, this, this was one of those things. I was actually reading a post that I'll mentioned, where we had met a filter that was about maybe, yes, anyway, that's something from guy named Neil Sloane. And I will get into this later. But basically, he's the guy who created and run Ron substantially the online encyclopedia of integer sequences, which I'm sure I've talked about before. Yes. And I'm familiar with it. Yeah. And the toothpick sequence is one of the ones that he is particularly fond of just as like a neat sequence. And I had not really run into it before reading about this, you know, a few weeks ago. And I was like, oh, and yeah, just boom, that was that was then what the next couple days was cuz I got nerds typed. So yeah, that's nerd sniping. All right, good.

Jessamyn 18:48 I've learned I've learned a thing. So I liked this project, which is a 16 Minute Video by over glow, which talks about the new dungeons and dragons license, and how the problem isn't really Dungeons and Dragons licensing, but like, the problem is how capitalism kind of expands to eat everything around it. And also, there's things people can do. So I have not seen it. It looks interesting. I'm interested in Dungeons and Dragons, because when I do drop in time at the library, I am there upstairs and downstairs. There are two very active d&d campaigns going on one for little kids and one for tweens. And one of the guys who does the tween one, like brings all his little figures and like 18,000 dice, and it's a very, very popular library activity. So now I've been more interested in dungeons of dragons and news about same.

Cortex 19:54 Yeah, I want to watch that as well because like I've been vaguely aware from the periphery worry that there was this whole fucking open gaming license, whatever thing and everybody being basically fucking unhappy with wizards for fucking things up, but I haven't like dug in on any details. So yeah, I could use a I could use a sort of Roundup on the situation as well. Yes. Similarly in things that I'm excited to consume, but have not yet there is a narrative game from Tsar Conan called isle of beasts that I had like one minute to glance at and was like, okay, but it's basically a we probably talked about the dark room years ago, but basically, you know, this is like, it's a text game and it is a sort of working your way through a narrative with like, complicated choices built into it, and there's different endings to find and and yeah, I'm excited about because legs are Conan's I've mentioned other stuff, too, and you can see docked in the thread there. Really enjoyed it, which is a good endorsement. So So yeah, I need to get to that at some point, but I'm excited to see it's there. Let's see what else

Jessamyn 21:06 I liked. Only sort of conceptually, at least, Andrew Stevenson's Atkinson dithering. Yeah, a web thing that makes your pictures look like desert pictures, which used to be the only way we got images on the internet back in the back in the hippie days. And so it's very, it feels very nostalgic in a way which I guess it's sandworms first comment in the thread but also was when I was when I was just looking at it.

Cortex 21:37 And I think I might have seen this like via Macedon without realizing it was also projects post. But ya know, it's great and like there's dithering as neat, as just like a whole solution to like trying to use very small images like it's a great solution. And it's also one of those like art and science sort of meeting in the middle in terms of like how you decide to do dithering. So like, you know, Atkinson dithering is a kind of dithering. But fundamentally, dithering is just about like filling in sort of a gradient between two things without having access to colors in between, like you need to like, you know, like stipple drawings are a kind of dithering.

Jessamyn 22:18 Right? But they imply the picture without giving you all the information and

Cortex 22:22 yeah, yeah, and I think I think in this sense, dithering is more about like the overall approach to performing it rather than like the individual Datsun pieces. But yeah, yes, I thought that was very neat. And I like I like the interactive bits. It's like, just enough to like, really sort of get a good idea of how it works well, and not so well in different contexts at different settings. And, yeah, yeah, it was a very new project. Good job, Andrew Stevens.

Jessamyn 22:49 Yes. Those were my those were my top ones. Do you have other ones?

Cortex 22:56 There is one just from today that I haven't even had a chance to play with. But I liked the look of which is from literary hero that vaccines are paper machines, which is apparently a JavaScript reimplementation of a kind of thing they used to see in Seoul back in the 90s. Just like

Jessamyn 23:13 read Korean, the buttons are in order scissors, paper.

Cortex 23:19 Was there. There's one other that I had in mind, and I can't remember where it is. I'm just not gonna worry about it. I'm gonna I'm gonna let go and just just move on with it. But there's a bunch other stuff go check up especially since we got like a a month and change of stuff this time. Yes. Change, as always. Yay, projects. Yep. Yeah, making projects, posting projects, sharing projects.

Jessamyn 23:40 Yep. If you've done a thing, you want to share it with other mefites projects is your place. I feel like I was mentioning in the last podcast or something I wanted to put on projects, then I promptly forgot entirely about it. And now all I have is the shadow of that memory. I didn't listen to the full last podcast the way I usually do. Like I got derailed doing something and almost always I listened to the whole podcast. So this was this was an anomaly. And so now I'm out of sorts. But now

Cortex 24:11 you fractionally are in the same boat as me. So that's exciting. Some glimmer of Yeah. Every every day is a new day. Every month is a new month, every podcast is the first podcast we've ever recorded. That's that's the life I'm trying to live

Jessamyn 24:28 work out with your mortgage.

Cortex 24:30 Oh, well actually, you know, they sent me reminders so that works. I mean, the way it works my mortgages I give them like you know 1800 bucks every month and and then somehow I have to do it the next month again and again for as long as I can remember. So you know, it's very It does feel precisely a Sisyphean as it sounds but but yeah, yes. Let's talk about metaphor. Let's talk about the blue.

Jessamyn 24:57 So windy outside, find stuff to

Cortex 24:59 talk about. Here's the thing. I like this is a post by cardioid. About security envelope patterns, which is oh boy show

Jessamyn 25:10 this on the internet and did not see it on metal filter. Ooh,

Cortex 25:14 yeah. So you know, security envelope, it's an envelope that also has some like printing on the inside to obscure the readability of the contents, very straightforward concept, hold up a security envelope and to a light. And you can see that there's something in there, but you can't trivially read the contents like you could if it was like just a check or a short letter, or an invoice or something. But you know, you have to have a pattern inside the security envelope for it to work. And so what pattern to use? And the answer is, well, one of at least 600 or so that have been documented so far on this site, which what perfect, beautiful web content that is just an archive of all the different security and a little patterns they've been able to collect, along with information on how to get them more. And the best way to do it. And some nice images laid out of like, all this stuff, I've made like an immediate Sol LeWitt reference in here, because a bunch of squares with different kinds of cross hatching is like an extremely solid vibe. But there's also a lot of interesting sort of color and texture stuff that's actually very on. And so

Jessamyn 26:18 many of those look, I mean, essentially, to me the same. Oh, sure, you know, that I'm like, how is that one different? I mean, I guess I get it, but Oh, yeah.

Cortex 26:29 So well, it's also one of the things where, like, you know, are they are they different? Because someone was making a real effort to create differences, or are they different, because like, 500 different, like people solve this problem for their own envelope pattern generating needs. And what we have is like the sum of like, or, you know, like maybe 20 or 30 groups of people generated 10 or so patterns. But like, yeah, it's like, there's not just the one and it could easily be just the one in theory, but instead, we've got all this variation

Jessamyn 26:56 on a whole bunch of branded stuff. So like, you know, different companies change the way they do their security envelopes. And it's, you know, you assume they're just purchasing it from, you know, blah, blah, blah envelope company, and

Cortex 27:11 yeah, fast hexagonal ones, man. I love that. I love a hexagon.

Jessamyn 27:16 Yeah, no, those are cool.

Cortex 27:19 Anyway, I love that. It's just it's, it's how perfect like, it's just like, this is a cool thing of courses exists. Of course, I'd never even occurred to me that someone would collect it together and document it and someone is and that's that's the world the way it should be. That's, that's the stuff.

Jessamyn 27:34 Yeah, yeah. And the website looks nice, too, which as we were talking in pre roll, like, I tend to not like websites. And so when I like a website, I'm always kind of pleased because I'm like, Oh, this is this is nice. It doesn't have any of those weird upside down eight problems. That like, looks weird. The this part doesn't work. That you like, you know, can't do anything about but still are. Buggy. That's how Jim and I sort of described that kind of aesthetic thing. It's like, very upside down eight. Because like, you know, eighths are a little tub here at the bottom than they are at the top. Yeah, well, depending on the date, but yeah, generally Yes. Yeah. Like your average eight is either exactly the same on the top on the bottom or bigger on the bottom. It's rare that an eight is

Cortex 28:20 my thanks my stupid fucking brain. Here's what happened. There's all right. Well, actually, but not in the font on on the new baseball site, which they intentionally created a font with the waiting in the letters wrong to fuck with you, but it existed I know about it. So that's not true. Just

Jessamyn 28:36 let me remind you how much baseball is dead to me for exactly this kind of reason. I guess.

Cortex 28:43 It's all the content I've got for you. That's That's my entire bliss ball.

Jessamyn 28:47 Oh, well, I was actually going to mention baseball once we got to fanfare but um, so that's Jim's in my shorthand for something that aesthetically kind of it's like nails on a chalkboard? You know, like, yeah, very upset on eight. All right, but I do have other stuff to talk about. One of my favorites is, you know, another sort of my st. Post which is tiny frying pan talking about this page that is a slime mold for your wrist. So it's basically a little like kind of phaco wristwatch thing you can get. And you can put little oats on it and your slime mold moves around it. And you know, it's Tamagotchi, like and it's essentially like exploring the idea of wood we feel different about our kind of, you know, all the plastic and gadgets and stuff in our everyday life if we actually had to attend to it the way you would like a living creature. So it's really it's really interesting and it becomes a heart rate sensor once the slime mold has grown between between the two parts. And so it's, it's neat and then of course, there's a someone someone showed up in the in the thread being like grump

Cortex 30:15 Alright, someone was grumpy the thread on the internet I don't believe it.

Jessamyn 30:18 Oh, yeah and, and the internet on metal filter. Oh yeah, it was just somebody who didn't read the article and then was like, here's my concerns and like, man really, really? But yeah, it was a fun little thread I'm really interested in slime molds and it's always fun to see them in in new environments. Nice. Yeah.

Cortex 30:40 Let's see got I've actually got a bunch of stuff

Jessamyn 30:42 I can mention that much from metal filter this month. So

Cortex 30:45 well, let me let me talk about the let me talk about my new Blaze ball.

Jessamyn 30:50 New Blaze Bob Blaze boss still exists,

Cortex 30:52 it does feel like it's going again. But another thing that exists as much more recently that's also weird is nothing forever. Oh, this a Twitch stream that's just a constantly endlessly generated Seinfeld episode

Jessamyn 31:08 and watches this on YouTube. I mean, he doesn't watch it watch it, but like he found it, saw it and enjoyed it briefly.

Cortex 31:14 Yeah, it's it. It's a Seinfeld episode simulator in a very rough sense. Like it simulates conversations between characters in Jerry's apartments, and also bits where Jerry's doing stand up like he does at the, at the start, in particular, of episodes, just in front of a mic at a club. And just sort of goes between those and like the shot outside the apartment establishing shots, and little bits of generated, boom, boom, you know, faux slap bass stuff. And it's, it's using like chat, GBT. It's like using that, or one of the related natural language generators to generate Seinfeld like material, basically, to very, very, very rough graphical, like low poly playstation one era, sort of graphics, with very bad animation, like, the whole thing is extremely janky. And honestly, that's the main reason it's compelling is because it's janky and weird in surprising and, you know, entertaining ways if you are entertained by that sort of thing. And I was just like, dying, laughing watching it the first night, I found it, like, I just like, just sort of that thing where you're wheezing and and she was asleep on the couch. I didn't want to wake her up. So I was trying to like, keep the laughter quiet. And that, you know, just becomes a self reinforcing thing.

Jessamyn 32:32 Right, right. Right, right.

Cortex 32:34 But yeah, so just just, it's just weird data. It's broken. It's funny, because it's broken. It's funny because it's broken in specific ways. It's funny because the Twitch stream chat has a lot of people who are enthusiastic about it in various ways related to its idiosyncrasies, like, one of the things that happened so much like most of the sort of segments of the episodes are, like, you know, one or two minutes long, and they start with one of the characters standing in Jerry's apartment saying like, Oh, did you hear about the new restaurants? Yeah, no, it says, sounds like they have the best muffins in the whole city. And this new restaurant, new cafe, new joint, New place, new, new, new, new, whatever happens, like that's the start of like, half our conversations. And every time, you know, someone says, oh, did you hear about the new cafe, then the chat just explodes with people yelling a new cafe in all caps. Like that, you know? There's like little repeating themes that come out. I don't know. It's, it's dumb. And it's wonderful in the same way that like, you know, Twitch Plays Pokemon was wonderful and stupid words, like, this whole idea is bad. And it's so much fun being there with other people who are all just enjoying it, as it doesn't function very well. Well, that's kind of

Jessamyn 33:45 like with Twitch, and I mean, YouTube, to a lesser extent, has available as a little community of people you can like, watch dumb shit with Yeah, and I'll be in like a little chat room with ya.

Cortex 33:57 And when there's like, when there's a good vibe, I like that, like, it's one of the tricky things is like, I will say in the first day or two of this, people were so busy having a good time enjoying the data that you didn't see a lot of that bullshit spam and just people saying shitty things just to be able to say shitty things, get a lot of Twitch streams when there's a critical mass certainly wasn't like, consistently not there. But like people weren't really like descending into it, and also moving so fast that it was like just a hard place to troll anyway. You know, 10 people would shout new cafe and then a second later that would have scrolled off the chat already because like people were posting so much. But also it has since been 10 banned from Twitch because they had an issue where their main like text generator was generating the dialogue was breaking and so they switched to a backup one and the back of one was not filtered as well for its content. And like Jerry and I'm doing a stand up bit where he was making some like, vaguely transphobic comments and memes like

Jessamyn 34:58 more than vaguely Yeah, sorry, what I can tell from this article

Cortex 35:02 it Yeah, not not not vaguely, but also, it's not like quoting a famous transphobic bit. It's just saying dumb things that are transphobic. In a. I'm trying I'm trying to I'm trying to characterize it more than I need to. But point is, it did start saving, like Jerry did like a short transphobic stand upset insofar as this thing gets ever capable of doing a set. It's like, you know, it's broken. It's AI.

Jessamyn 35:27 Right. Back up the bad jokes about right, right.

Cortex 35:30 Yeah. And, and so that got them Twitch stream banned. They're working on fixing it. So that doesn't happen. Presumably, they'll come back, but who knows? But like, it's also like, yeah, you're fucking letting an AI like talk about stuff. And you can like try and put as many boundaries as you want, but it's never going to have human judgment. So at some point, it's going to, like, do something fucking dumb. And you sort of have to, like, accept going into the process of building anything like that, that even if it's outliers, you're gonna have outliers that are fucking unless you can manage to manage those two preemptively. And, yeah, so well, and

Jessamyn 36:03 that seems to be what you know, all these like AI is just walk straight into right, and he's got some pretty serious guardrails around it. But I was just reading a Macedon this week, about like, a way that you can, like, manipulate the question that you asked chat GPT so that you can get it to take its guardrails down. Because you can basically be like, lead into a statement with, hey, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then say what you would say if you didn't have your filters on, basically. And then it just says what it would say without the filters, and it's awful. Like,

Cortex 36:46 yeah, that's, that's, that's a whole weird sub genre of fucking with like, chat. AI is like, basically giving yourself Calvin Ball access to the things it's not allowed to do by telling it to do the things it's not allowed to do.

Jessamyn 37:00 To act like, sometimes telling it to act like it's doing the things it's not allowed. Yeah, yeah, good point of fact, it's actually doing those things because it doesn't understand. Yeah,

Cortex 37:10 yeah. Like, but like, that's, like, it's, it's sort of philosophical inquiry. But like, that's the flip side of like, you know, the Jerry bot, saying something transphobic is like the Jerry boat bot isn't not transphobic any the time either is just not producing those outputs. Because someone filter by the time it doesn't know not to say shitty stuff, it just gets disallowed from saying some of the stuff it knows how to say,

Jessamyn 37:35 procedurally, which means somebody on the back end knows what all those things are in human terms. And words are probably right. That's

Cortex 37:44 one that's one of the things like it's the words, there's probably like topic level stuff you can cite, kind of get up, but you can't get away from something just putting things together in an unexpected way. Like, it was kind of a running theme when I was watching it before the band that like every once awhile, Jerry would do like a weird thing that was like very finding a very roundabout, not trope ish way of saying something that sounds like Wait, was that kind of homophobic and look, chat would just erupt with Larry is canceled, Larry just can't but like, it was like taking it in the well, that was a weird, mild thing, when like, if you take those two words that don't normally go together, and you have a human brain, you can say Wait, was that was that like code for like something fucking homophobic? No.

Jessamyn 38:23 And that just kind of drives home? How like, you know, the people who create these things don't care at some very real level that that that that's a likely

Cortex 38:36 Yeah, like there was a decision made.

Jessamyn 38:39 But every time people are like, Oh, we're gonna use chat GPT to like answer the phone or whatever you're like, Yeah, but can you get it to answer the phone and not be accidentally homophobic because it needs to be in order to answer the goddamn telephone.

Cortex 38:52 Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of fascinating mess. I love the actual thing itself. And also, yeah, it's there's a certain ethical responsibility you have once you turn the fucking AI loose to make sure that it doesn't do shitty stuff. Right. Right. Anyway, so that yes, that's, that's my whole. That's my most internet phenomenon for the last couple of weeks was was that

Jessamyn 39:16 fascinating. And on a list of like things I saw on Mastodon, this one, I turned it into a Metafilter post, because it's about Scrabble. And I sent this to you special, I think, because I thought you would like it because it's basically a guy who does data visualization for jobs, basically playing Scrabble for I don't know, a year and doing different data visualizations of how those games went. And it's not just like number stuff. Some of them are cool. Some of them aren't as cool, but it's a very describe B way of talking about of talking about kind of how you could represent something like this. And I just I just thought it was really neat and interesting. I was surprised the thread was so short because I think of Scrabble as being more of a thing, but maybe,

Cortex 40:14 I think maybe the data visualization thing. Yeah, people were

Jessamyn 40:17 like, ah, blah, blah

Cortex 40:22 blah. I have, well, there's a nice roundup from fizz.

Brain that's Roundup is a post about the live service game bubble. What what the live service game bubble looks to be versus the lead article. But there's several other articles in there as well. Live service

Jessamyn 40:48 wondering what a live service game was. Thank you, Zamboni.

Cortex 40:55 Okay, yes, it's Dan probably gets at it too. But basically, it's live Service Games, the surfaces games that are sort of living online, like they're generally always online, they tend to be things that are sort of MMO ish, they tend to have regular updates over time, they have things like, you know, seasonal content that comes along. And it's something that you don't just buy and play once, it's something that like, it's designed like an MMO, to continue being played, they tend to be sort of lifestyle type games, it was like, this is the game you play a ton of, and we're gonna keep putting out new content, and we're gonna keep supporting it as long as it's profitable. And the thing about them is they're expensive to make, because you have to both make them and engineer them for lots of players and support over time. And also, you have to, you know, provide servers and support them over the long run. So you're not just pining for like, oh, well, we've spent two years make we made the game? Yeah. Did we sell enough copies make her money back? Okay, we spent two years, you know, making this game and setting up the architecture. And now we're going to run it for another three, four years, maybe. And it'll need to keep making enough money over that time to support staff. So it has to offer the hosting and whatnot. Yeah, that's gonna be big enough. It has to be, you know, popular enough. Like, that's the thing of if you just doesn't hit a critical mass, you're just like, Well, what do we do set cash on fire for the next year until we run out of like, the ability to bleed money?

Jessamyn 42:17 I am familiar with the problem. Yeah, yeah.

Cortex 42:19 So anyway, this is this is a roundup about like, there's been a lot of things sort of like shuttering or announcing a shuttering? And is this like a contraction of what was, you know, a lot of growth of people trying to launch big service games that then just didn't find their audience didn't find the critical mass? And so yeah, it's it's an interesting sort of gaming situation, territory, and there's some good, there's good stuff in this stuff is wrote and a bunch of good discussion in the thread. And yeah, so if you're interested in that phenomena, that's the post for you.

Jessamyn 42:49 Right still open. Yeah. And of course, Jim made a post that I liked about the vacuum cleaner Defense League, which is just a one off joke that dogs don't like the vacuum cleaner. And I feel like this is an older post. But the thing that didn't used to be here as much, I mean, because everything on the website is three years old, right? But there's a whole bunch of O meet the members, where it's just a whole bunch of adorable pictures of dogs, talking about their feelings about the vacuum cleaner. And of course, it's all you know, super made up, but it just, it's a good laugh in delightful if you're interested in lots of pictures of very good dog ghosts, who very much hate the vacuum cleaner. Because I think Jim and I were talking about this, because before I got my hair cut, which you may or may not have seen, but like I cut all my hair off.

Cortex 43:54 I don't think I don't think he did. I think I think I saw you mentioned it, but I don't think so

Jessamyn 43:57 I have a very nice, very short haircut now. And I am so happy with it. But part of the thrill of it is I don't have to blow dry my fucking hair anymore. Which is great, because I don't like it because I don't like the blow dryer the way I believe dogs don't like the vacuum cleaner. Like it's too loud. And I just can't I'm agitated the whole time it's on even though it was necessary. If you live in a house in Vermont in the winter, that is school that you need to blow dry your hair once you get it wet because otherwise you die. And I was explaining this to Jim and he was like, I don't get it. Like he just goes to sleep with wet hair because He's different from me. And I was trying to explain it and I was like, you know, vacuum cleaner defensively. He's like, I've never heard of this thing. And I told him about it and showed him the website and then he thought it was hilarious and posted it to my filter.

Cortex 44:44 success success all around. Yeah, no, that's yeah, I mean, good web did I mean there was a post that introduced me to a word that I guess I was sort of familiar with the idea but knowing K N O L L to know

Jessamyn 45:00 Oh, oh, yeah, I know all about knowing I am a Knoller.

Cortex 45:03 I had I had not encountered that word before. Really? Yeah. Yeah, for whatever reason, I'm

Jessamyn 45:08 gonna go, look. And now show you were on malt shop. You should have seen me use the word before. But yeah, I

Cortex 45:14 might have, like, I haven't. I didn't. I hadn't internalized it. Certainly, I would be curious to see if Yeah, there was someone right had specifically seen it. But anyway, this is a post from Bella Donna. And it is. It's got an article talking about rolling, and then several other nice links. And it, it's basically rolling is the idea of laying things out in a organized and aesthetically pleasing way.

Jessamyn 45:43 I have not used that word there. But here's a good example picture. All right.

Cortex 45:47 But basically the idea of like taking like the tools for a thing, my understanding the core, like utility idea of it is like taking the tools involved in a workspace or work process and laying them out in a visual clear, sort of squared off way.

Jessamyn 46:05 And then taking a picture of it kind of from the top almost.

Cortex 46:08 Yeah, well, this is so this is the thing, I feel like knowing like,

Jessamyn 46:12 knowing this now, not the picture of the thing, it's

Cortex 46:15 like knowing itself is like this sort of like workspace oriented, neat, visible arrangement of tools. And then there's this whole category of sort of aesthetic stuff that grew out of that, that is varyingly actually futile. varyingly just pure aesthetics of like, laying things out in a neat way and taking a picture of it. And a lot of that ladder is like very, very Instagram friendly stuff. Like some of it is art photography. Some of it's just people creating content. But it could also be something you're doing with the actual tools in our workshop,

Jessamyn 46:47 right? The studly tool chest as the original kind of, it's a tool chest that has everything like laid out, like completely amazingly. And people like to take pictures of it. My father has a picture of this tool chest on the wall of his bedroom of all things. Oh, wow.

Cortex 47:02 Look at that thing. So yeah, yeah. Lincoln, because wow. Yeah, we're seeing that before heard of it. But yeah, like that's, that's kind of getting at the idea. And the, the discussion in that thread was really intriguing, because people were like pulling all sorts of things about this and trying to like, make the connection there to sort of like, you know, Marie Kondo stuff,

Jessamyn 47:21 which she's been in the news lately,

Cortex 47:24 as well. I

Jessamyn 47:25 mean, there was a little bit of thing that slipped around the internet, which is like now that she's got three kids, she kind of has given up on, oh, well, being super tidy. And the whole bunch of other people then showed up, and we're like, ah, and then other people were like, That's not what it was ever about. People just like to hate her because et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right, there's there's a lot of back and forth.

Cortex 47:43 Secondary condo discourse. Yeah.

Jessamyn 47:46 Which, you know, that was fairly interesting. Just because I'm therefore it but yeah,

Cortex 47:51 yeah, I think there there were, there were some discussion of kinds of stuff. I don't think that whole mess came up in this read but like, you know, different people different takes on the nature of organizing and workspaces and aesthetics, whatnot, and I really enjoyed it. So yeah, that's a good one. I feel like I feel like I should do like just a power drop of a bunch of

Jessamyn 48:13 stuff from AskMe edit filter and you know, fanfare

Cortex 48:16 Okay, speed run I'm gonna speed runs through like, six posts. That's all I know. Right? But I can't just dwell on them all. So there is a post by May Kasahara about the Mentos theme, you know, fresh goes better. Those but and I saw this on the front page. I was like, Wait, is this post seriously? Did someone just make a post that was just like the Mentos theme, and I clicked through it to be like, Oh, wait, no, three minutes long. Oh, it's an entire song. And it's an entire song. That's a Mentos theme, but without the Mentos branding. The lyrics are slightly different anywhere it would mention Mentos and then the inside of the post. This is to be clear I looked at this post with like, great skepticism when I first saw the front page and in retrospect, I think it's a great fucking post. Good job make us a Hara. Inside has got a bunch of links to like ad compilations, the Mentos FAQ from like, Usenet days, and a couple roundups and some info on the music production behind it and the thing but the thing that really blew my mind about this was the fact that there was this full length pop single version of this that like doesn't have the metals burning and I wanted to see if I could find out any information about like, specifically how that came about and I never did. Like there's probably no big mystery she's like, oh, yeah, we came up with a theme and we did a full length pop version and also we ended up like, you know, selling the actual theme and

Jessamyn 49:32 well, like, but like without the okay. So it was a song and then they put the Mentos

Cortex 49:41 See, that's the question like, was it a pop song that someone like had in the can and like, oh, we can turn this into the Mentos theme.

Jessamyn 49:49 Right? not that unusual Coca Cola love to do that. Right? This is what but then

Cortex 49:55 you end up with Yeah, with a with a pop link version that's not about the product even though it's Absolutely identifiably the same thing says like, what was the details of that? How it happened? Didn't get an answer. Didn't find an answer. We may never know. But I like that it exists. It's like a weird fucking Berenstain Bears. Thing that like there is like, someone could build an alternate universe around this being a hip hop single in a world will Mentos never happened, you know, and I think it would be functional. And the guy who wrote that theme also has at least two albums from like, the early 80s. Of like, minute long, jingle stings, like is that an album called hotspots with 77 tracks on it, all of them, like almost all in like 20 to 40 seconds long and they're all just like, kind of shitty little like since compositions it's,

Jessamyn 50:45 like makes them shitty. Are they not?

Cortex 50:48 What No, no, no, no, no shitty, like the production quality is worse than the Mentos song. Like, they're very definitely like, this is something that guy worked out with like, out too much fancy equipment and too much extra polish on them. Like they're fine, but they sound like stings from like sitcom themes that never existed, or from like, video games old enough to need sort of like MIDI synth table music on them. Like they don't, they don't sound polished. And they're all they almost none of them have lyrics. They Yeah, they're just like, they're rough around the edges. Like it feels like it feels like a demo reel that got distributed as an album in some small amount as well, for some reason. Anyway, it's all on thread, go look at it, I did a very bad job of speed running that one. So the rest of these are going to be genuinely speed runs. There was a nice post by Etrigan about the stink a, which is to say, text with diacritics that the diacritic itself, the macaron the bar on the top is missing from the font that was used. So you get this weird mismatching Helvetica font with the character instead. And talking about this from the perspective of specifically Maori indigenous language that uses that and then seeing it like used in like Australia and New Zealand text, I think in particular, but just how generally this is a problem where you see this lack of these extended characters or good handling of them in various fonts leads to these ugly sort of signifiers that jump out and sort of say, Oh, hey, yeah, whoever did the design work on this did not care or try or notice enough to realize that they are fucking up this thing that is very obvious to someone who, you know, reads a language that has this diacritical addition, but isn't in like, you know, English and in French and the other most major, like Western textbook, but especially English and, and English, it is a text. So it's nice. There's a good cartoon in there. Some good discussion, some talk about Unicode. It's a nice thread.

Jessamyn 52:55 So somebody's talking on Macedon about like, how to how to write the I don't even know how to say because I only know it from reading. Okay, now Okina, the little the little, like, glottal stop. piece of punctuation that's in Hawaiian. Okay. Oh, they sucked his brains out, has mentioned it in the thread, because a lot of people use the apostrophe. But it's not an apostrophe. It's a different thing. And it's, yeah, it's interesting. Yeah.

Cortex 53:26 There were two posts about the film, Groundhog's Day, and someone's probably watching it every day. I'm linking to logic punks, which is the second one and I think maybe everyone refrain from linking to the first one. But anyway, it's delightful. It was it was a great thing where someone made an obvious joke, he double post and basically no one flagged it because they got the joke. And I found that delightful. Ah, yes. And both threads have some nice discussion of Groundhog's Day and other related media. So yeah, there is

Jessamyn 53:58 nobody even like flagged as Zago post usually.

Cortex 54:02 I feel like it was like a flagging armistice in there. Everyone's like, you know what, we know what's going on. Everything's allowed no gods no Masters is happening, which I appreciate that. I appreciate that happening for something utterly harmless. Like that's, that's exactly how it should be. Exactly. And there was a post another post for metric and actually about Yogesh route.

Jessamyn 54:22 Oh, I know, you'll get you'll get this in my trivia leak.

Cortex 54:25 Well, he was on Jeopardy and then he lost it Jeopardy after three games and wrote some angry stuff on the internet about it. And it's, it's a weird sort of, like, this is this is for the Jeopardy people. It's like, I don't even know what how to feel about the whole thing. He had a lot of critical things to say and people have, you know, argued over whether like there was good substance to that

Jessamyn 54:45 I perceive. Both. Yeah, Yogesh basically maintains like a list at the end of every trivia season, of which questions you would know if you had read Yogesh his blog. The and he literally outlines every single thing. A lot of this trivia comes up on his blog, but it's also a little bit like, buddy, buddy. Oh, this is interesting. I did not know the story.

Cortex 55:10 Yeah, so it's it's an interesting story. It's an interesting thread. And it's also like a lot of people in the thread. Some people have like quiz anecdotes, Jeopardy anecdotes, Yogesh, no jokes. And some people like wait that quizzing community. And so it feels like there's a real collision of different things in here. So I think if you missed it, and you are a quizzing person in particular, go check it out, because what a weird, dramatic development in jeopardy.

Jessamyn 55:36 Wow, that is really interesting. And again, like I said, I know Yogesh because Yogesh is very involved in the bulletin boards on learned league. And yeah, and, huh. Somehow, somehow, they didn't talk about this, which seems surprising.

Cortex 55:54 It feels it feels to some extent one of those things where like, it managed to get some traction outside of like people normally talking about quiz stuff, and might well not have gotten that traction within like quiz committee stuff. Because like, everyone already knows everyone's big quiz nerds with feelings. So yeah, I don't know. There's a nice post from Buffy 12, about the year 2038. Plug. Which is like y2k, except for 32 bit Linux systems, or Unix systems. Ah, which is the way they count time in Unix is the number of seconds since like, midnight, January 1 1970. And like, you know, that is that that date is called the epoch and you count up one second at a time to track like, date and time.

Jessamyn 56:42 If you need absolute time, that doesn't have to do with time zones or anything else. Right,

Cortex 56:46 right. Right. Right, right. Yeah. So like, that's just like the number of seconds since that is how it goes. And the thing is, we use a 32 bit number 32, ones and zeros, the number of different values you can store before it becomes all ones and then has to wrap around to all zeros again, that you run out of road sometime in 2038. The year 2038. It'll go from 32 ones and then wrap back around to 32 zeros and all of a sudden the computer thinks it's January 1 1970. Again, same thing is y2k different reason? And back remember when y2k was happening? A lot of Unix nerds, Linux nerds were like joking about Oh, yeah. Now we got to figure out why 2.038k bug, but it is an issue. It's a potential issue. Especially for weird forgotten systems is where it becomes an issue.

Jessamyn 57:36 Right? So you're not even sure who's maintaining those systems or Yeah,

Cortex 57:41 yeah. So this is a nice thread of discussion about that y2k memories sort of arguments about like, was a catastrophe avoided, or was there no catastrophe, the you know, digging in, and there's some nice links to other time based bugs and issues? And yeah, so I enjoyed that. I enjoyed CGC, three, seven threes post about the mystery of the dune fun, where he found a article talking about that font, which is Davison Art Nouveau, and the article is gloriously not coy about it. It's just like, Well, what do we know about this? Here's what we know about it. Here's some details. There you go. That's nice. And I like that font I like doing that, too, are very closely related. And there's a bunch of other nice links in there too to other stuff about the font and other stuff about dune and book covers. So that's nice. And finally, in the speed run. There's a nice post from Dewey in about a series of posters from a guy who does a lot of like mathy design stuff. Doing a visualization of

Jessamyn 58:43 weight scrabble guy. This is the Scrabble this guy.

Cortex 58:47 I thought maybe it wasn't I couldn't quite put it together. Yes, there we go. That's why it was the same guy. Yeah. So so this is also and it's just some very pretty math, art. And there's some discussion thread about like, well, whether it's really like math, math, and I left a lot of comments being like, well, you know, if it's math yard and gets people excited about math in an artistic way, it doesn't have to do anything else. It doesn't have to be doing math, it just has to be letting people think about math and art in new ways. So but I thought they were very pretty and yeah, that's it done. Done with my speed run.

Jessamyn 59:18 That's cool.

Cortex 59:21 Only 12 minutes after I said I was starting it. So two mins for posts. That's not great, but it's not terrible. It's not terrible. Let's talk about us. Metafilter. Okay.

Jessamyn 59:29 Ah, I like this question from Jack bishop who, whose wife really likes those fireplace videos. And she uses an app and they're like a continually burning fire, but like the woods never consumed and like obviously they're on a loop but like how does that work? What am I what am I looking at? Like? I don't understand. Explain like I'm five years And there's actually some really good links to where you can learn more about how, how, how that stuff works. Yeah, well, cuz it's fire. Right. So there's ways of kind of masking a loop a little bit because there's a lot of overlapping.

Cortex 1:00:23 Yeah. Some blurring, because like, yeah.

Jessamyn 1:00:27 But yeah, it's one of those neat, like, I didn't know, I wanted to know a little bit about it. And now I know a little bit about it.

Cortex 1:00:34 Yeah, exactly. That's great. A very

Jessamyn 1:00:37 much longer than I expected it. And I won't get into it too much as I'm not a parent, but a question from now house about how to handle non negotiable extracurriculars. So basically, they have a kid, they want the kid to play tennis. How, and you see a lot of AskMe Metafilter people with their own personal feelings about what a non negotiable extracurriculars like in the context of whatever their childhood was. And it gets clarified at least a little bit, what the what the original poster is actually looking for and or talking about, and then there's some actually good advice about parenting styles and ways to make this work if what you're really trying to do is, you know, help get them to enjoy like tennis specifically, or you know, other other stuff, generally. And I just thought as a as a nonparent, it was really interesting for me to read it about, you know, lots of different people's approach to sort of a slightly tricky, slightly tricky question. Nice. And the other main thing I had from asked me besides something because I've now like, I've finally sort of gotten over myself, and now I'm sort of back involved in AskMe, Metafilter, not like aggressively yet. But at least I'm like, looking at it regularly, which, as you'll remember, I wasn't for several months, and, you know, happy to be happy to be back there. But I have been sort of reading and noticing things, at least a little bit. And this was, Oh, I think there's some extra cruft at the end of that link. This was a thread by Alanson. Basically, I'm not having trouble with the IRS. But I'm really curious how in God's name, this stuff works. What is the what is the job? Like? What is it? What is it like, be in there? Blah, blah, blah. And there's not a ton of comments. The question just went up yesterday. But there's like an interesting article about how they deal with tax returns, there's a memoir by someone who used to work at the IRS. And somebody ks Chang, was a temp there for a while. And just, you know, was more information than I thought I wanted about how the Internal Revenue Service works, because as you know, I spend a lot of time dealing with various taxes. And I'm always sort of curious, like, if my if my if my effort matches up with the efforts of the agency, and it appears that the IRS is still dangerously underfunded. And very much in the dark ages, mainly because that's kind of the way the way some of that stuff needs needs to

Cortex 1:03:31 happen. Yeah. That's a Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a weird, it's like, the IRS is such a strange, like, conceptual creature. I feel like in the American imagination, too, like it's, I remember knowing that like, the IRS was like, oh, and taxes were a pain in the ass, blah, blah, blah, as a kid before I had any context whatsoever for any of that. And it's, but it's also just this fucking agency full of people doing this job that they need to do, because it's part of how shit works. And like that. I don't know. It's like the IRS managed to be like, simultaneously like the most boring government agency, bureaucratic, whatever thing and also like the mafia in like, some version of the public imagination, and it's such a weird thing. So like, yeah, thinking about like, okay, but what's it just like? I don't know. I like that. I like that. I like that. Curiosity. I like that. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:04:40 And then, and then the one I think we were gonna get to, I don't know if you had other stuff on AskMe Metafilter. Before we

Cortex 1:04:48 got a couple of little things, but like, let's, let's let's get to it. Okay.

Jessamyn 1:04:51 This was the ingredients people idea. So this was Shady Grove, basically saying there's that concept of People who are quote, ingredients, people, you know, meaning you have stuff in your house in your kitchen that you can make other things from like, you know, basic like, do you have like flour? Do you have, like, you know, baking supplies? Do you have, you know, whatever? Where did this idea come from? Can someone provide me a link blah, blah, blah. And so when I read this question, I was like, oh, yeah, it's just, you know, low on the food chain. People. A lot of people did that when they were hippies, like, during, during sort of the hippie era in the 70s. But then the more I read the thread, the more I realized it's kind of like an internet thing. Now, like funny to like, know, your meme, like an ingredients household, and it's become this weird virtue signaling thing, even though you know, I mean, I consider myself very lucky that I grew up without a lot of like, food related virtue. external field feelings, you know what I mean? Like, like, my mother was a little bit like, right, you got to eat certain kinds of food and not other kinds of food in a mom way but not in a like you're a bad person. If you don't, you know, eat good, eat bad, eat whatever. But I guess now it's like an online like, ooh, ingredients. Household lodging was like

Cortex 1:06:13 a TikTok thing. I guess I haven't run into it. But Angela had run into it on like, just her TikTok feed, and had brought it up because of that. And she's like, oh, somebody ingredient house with him. It's like the what? And yeah, yeah, it

Jessamyn 1:06:25 was like a TikTok thing. And it's funny because know, your meme is basically like, a household that only keep stock of food uses ingredients and larger dishes such as chocolate chips, marshmallows, peanut butter, graham crackers, and dried fruit. And I'm like, what? Those are such weird examples, you know, like, that's like snacks, but I think they mean, I guess not, like, pre made like cookies and

Cortex 1:06:47 yeah, stuff like that. Yeah. Not like potato chips and hot pockets and whatnot. Well, that's the thing like,

Jessamyn 1:06:55 but like marshmallows, I don't know.

Cortex 1:06:59 It's it's a, they asked me is just as slightly bumpy and weird as you would expect it to be such a beautiful setup for people disagreeing with each other on like seven different things about things that because they're tied to childhood, especially, like they have strong feelings about right, like it's not a tire fire of an Aspie. But it's like it's a little bit bumpy. Like it's bumpier than just Oh, that's a weird thing. I hadn't thought about that way, sort of thing.

Jessamyn 1:07:21 Right? Right. Well, because there's the inherent like value layer on top of the actual fact base layer. classism, because feel those values and other people can only see them, but don't feel them kind of Yeah,

Cortex 1:07:36 yeah. So it's interesting. And there's willing to meta talk that came out of this, which was longer and more fun, generally speaking, just because it's not traveled by like the needing to focus on answering the question, per se thing and ask me that has a lot of people sort of talking with more context about like, you know, their, their childhood in their household,

Jessamyn 1:07:57 right. Like, when I grew up, we were like this and like that, but now I'm this other kind of person. Or maybe I'm the same kind of person. Well, and you and I were gonna spend at least 30 seconds complaining about carob

Cortex 1:08:09 Oh, yeah, exactly. I made that joke in the meta talk specifically, because I thought I remembered having an argument about carob. Or not an argument but like, you know, a great fest about carob on the blue at some point, and then somewhat linked to a thread that was on the blue that had that that apparently the only thing I ever did. It was like delete someone's comment. So that's why I remember it.

Jessamyn 1:08:31 Was carob ever supposed to be actually healthier. That was the thing I had the hardest time because I, we were in a care of household, but I had friends who were in a care of household and care was terrible. Yeah. But like, I couldn't figure out if it was terrible, but it was supposed to be healthier, or if it was terrible, but it was just supposed to be not chocolate. Well, and

Cortex 1:08:53 yeah, I feel like I feel like it was probably sort of a health fad thing in the US. You know, it feels like a 70s 80s health fad. Is the vague sort of reconstructed, like, you know, context, I'm putting

Jessamyn 1:09:06 margarine versus butter, like maybe healthier, long one trajectory, but not less healthy and a different one.

Cortex 1:09:14 Yeah, well, and one of the things I've never looked into is like, I have no idea of carob was a much more established thing. In some other regions or cultures. Like, it might be that there are like places in the world that are not the US where caribou is just like it's always like, oh, yeah, Kara. Yeah. No, it's not chocolate. It's Kara. But like, you know, it's part of whatever. Right? Right, right. It feels like the US like, had like carob had its moments. And then everyone's like this. This is the worst chocolate I've ever had Fuck this. And now carob still exists, but no one like it's not. Like it's something we joke about your childhood drama about instead of like, necessarily,

Jessamyn 1:09:46 right? And there may be people who can't eat chocolate for terramin reasons or whatever. Who knows. Sure that carob is acceptable compared to nothing, but yeah,

Cortex 1:09:58 and it's probably one of the things we're honestly You're using carob because it tastes like carob. And cooking it like, in that context is probably completely fine. It's just like the Oh yeah, it's like chocolate. No, no, it's not like post them is not like coffee either. I kind of like post them, but it's not fucking, it's not coffee is never going to replace it. Like it's just its own thing and you know, and that's so true for so many, like, sort of alternative food products to like, you know, I've really warmed up to oat milk and you know, almond milk and soy milk over the years. It took me a while to get there because I really just

Jessamyn 1:10:27 wanted it to be milk, right? No, I'm just saying drink milk

Cortex 1:10:31 at this point at this point, like, yeah, oh, no. It's different, but it's fine.

Jessamyn 1:10:35 Yeah, I didn't used to be an alternative milks person as much, but now, I don't know exactly. Like, I just don't drink milk fast enough anymore. And so having alternative milks on the occasional time I need to cook with it or bake with it or whatever, like, you know, accounting for how they're slightly different and cooking and baking. has really and I have half and half. So that's like, it's not a no dairy thing. But yes,

Cortex 1:10:59 it's a lactose intolerance thing for me. I just like it's not that's not going to end well for anybody if I'm drinking milk. I can cook with it. Like we can make like popovers or German pancakes. And that's not a problem, but like, milk and cereal is not worth the trouble. Yeah. But yeah, also not trying to like replace milk in place, but instead use something that tastes different and is different. Like okay, that's fine. Anyway, interesting thread. Meta talk. yammering is fun as well. Great. I will give you my two other small ask me things. One is I think this was like just after we recorded last podcast, cheese graters looking for a sci fi technobabble parody. And they got their their answer, I believe are close answers. I'm not sure we didn't get a best answer. Follow up. But anyway, it sounds like it was this David Weber thing that a couple people mentioned. So niche niche question got an answer. Nice, niche,

Jessamyn 1:12:01 niche niche.

Cortex 1:12:03 I've come over to niche. I think I think I, as the book readers dilemma, I came up with niche. And I think I had that reinforced to some extent in some contexts when I was younger. And I've since come to like, well, it's really its niche, its niche, and niches, like, you know, a slightly nicer word to say to so like, hey, yeah, niche fine, but you haven't deprogram myself from being uncertain sometimes. The other aspect I was going to mention was this question from unknown command about, you know, they're trying to figure out why they were so blown away by this performance of wrecking ball that Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton did together live on stage, and sort of asking about the musical interview intervals and harmony involved. And why it hits so hard. And it's, it's, like, I think, like eight different people gave a different takes on aspects of it talking a little bit about the like harmony and a little bit of music theory. And also just like, hey, you know, to some extent, like you have a good dramatic setup and a couple of good singers. It's gonna hit hard because the performance is there. Like, it's not necessarily there's nothing magical

Jessamyn 1:13:05 about the two people are going to top of their game. Yeah.

Cortex 1:13:09 And I think it's like, I think it's a little bit of both, I ended up putting my own comment talking about what I thought was interesting about this specific harmony, but like, but also like, yeah, like, you could do that same thing with a couple of people who are not perfectly good singers for a song everyone didn't know and didn't have a giant crowd, holding their breath waiting for the chorus to land wouldn't have the same effect. Like even if you had the exact same harmony. So it's kind of the sum of the parts, I think, but I think there's something interesting going there. And it's I'm just always excited whenever it's some sort of, like, sort of musical theory and musical thought question shows up with ask. So I enjoyed that one, too, as a good performance.

Jessamyn 1:13:41 Yeah, I bet. We gave a I was at a Library Association Conference online couple weeks ago, and we gave Dolly Parton honorary membership to the American Library Association. Oh, nice. Yeah. For her work with libraries. And yeah, she's just terrific.

Cortex 1:14:03 And that that was my contributions to the Ask Me side this time, but I had any because one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking about how you had not been on asked was it can I should? I think we talked about it. I think I was like, yeah, maybe I'll try and do that. And I did for two days. Two days. I went to ask me every day, and actress and stuff, so you know, it's baby steps. Good baby steps for me. And it was nice, you know, I enjoy it. I just forget to do so many neglected things. So so yeah. So your strange journey through being away from ask prompted a baby step on my part back towards paying attention to it and I appreciate that. How

Jessamyn 1:14:40 nice Well, that was it for me and ask I spent you know, I'm getting back into it, but I'm not super back into it yet. But, you know, I did want to mention the return of Blaze ball which has a thread from about a month ago in fanfare

Cortex 1:14:59 right? did not see that there was a fanfare thread.

Jessamyn 1:15:01 Yes. Virus Firas a rousse. Virus. How risky is it? Is it L? Yes. Fall risks? Yes. Yes. Made a made a little thread. There's just not that much there. But for people who are interested in baseball, you should know, it's going back on. And I have been working my way. I don't know if I mentioned this last month, but go for it. Anyway, I've been working my way through killjoys, which is a sci fi series that basically started and ended a couple, like started, I don't know eight years ago and ended three years ago. And 10. It's a Canadian, sort of, I don't know, bounty hunter type show really interesting. And it's been fun to like, finish an episode be like, Oh, what did I just watch kind of and then go into, essentially, like a five year old thread on fanfare, which is still open if I feel like chatting about some with people, maybe aren't still there. And talking about it?

Cortex 1:16:07 Yeah. Nice. Yeah. No, I don't remember this. I don't think you mentioned before.

Jessamyn 1:16:10 Yeah, I finally wrapped up leverage, I think, which may have been when I talked about last month. And I was showing up in old threads about leverage talk about it. Now I'm reading along with old threads on killjoys.

Cortex 1:16:20 I'm pretty certain we didn't talk about it, because I immediately tried to start thinking of some sort of joke about Canadian Space bounty hunters. And I couldn't come up with something. And I also couldn't remember failing to come up with something previously, this is

Jessamyn 1:16:30 a fascinating show. For people who like this kind of stuff. Because it's Canadian, it means it's not like a rapey gore fest, like it would be if it were if it were American expanse, and there's a lot of, you know, it's about like these two people. And then his brother, like, it's woman, man, his brother joins. And there's a lot of sort of interesting inner relationship stuff. But then there's also just lots of, I feel like I talk to you about this, but maybe I was talking to somebody else about it. There's a whole bunch of weird, interesting issues about consent, like, not just like, Oh, are we going to have sex or not? How do you feel about that, but just different, they encounter different people on different planets who are having different relationships to stuff like, you know, one, one planet is all like, you know, women who are basically chosen to be quote, unquote, vessels to, to incubate the babies of the ruling class. And at some point, like our bounty hunters were like, Let's get you out of here. And a lot of the women who are like, you know, it's an honor to be chosen, and I was raised to be this, and I'm actually happy to do that. And it becomes like a really interesting pivot point, because you obviously get the bounty hunters, like, you don't just want to be a human womb for someone else, blah, blah, blah. But then, you know, if the women are like, and they're grown women who are like, I'm good, thanks. Like, there's an essential, interesting tension there. And there's a lot of those moments in the show over like the four seasons I've currently watched where, like, you look at someone's situation, and you're like, clearly they want to be rescued from that situation. But realistically, but realistically, maybe they don't, and what does that mean? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I, I enjoy it specifically for that, because it's, you know, it's written by a woman and I don't know if that's specifically why it's more like this than a lot of other sci fi shows. But so as a result, the relationship seemed more interesting to me personally. And, and, and it's neat to read along with the fanfic threads because a lot of mefites See it similarly. So it's, it's fun to because sometimes it's hard to get that across to somebody who's not looking for kind of social justice themes in their sci fi shoot them

Cortex 1:18:49 up show. Yeah, sure.

Jessamyn 1:18:53 But yeah, that was my that was my fanfare, I think. And I'm also reading watching Abbott Elementary, but I haven't been too involved in the fanfare threads for that.

Cortex 1:19:03 You haven't gotten to that yet. It's fun to watch TV. It's too much TV. It's fun. I did start watching a poker face the new Natasha Leone series that Rian Johnson produced oh me sort of like the the like her Colombo remake except for it's not but you know, there's like a real good sort of vibe of like, like it's it's definitely its own thing but like you can it's very much on display why people were saying hey, we should have a remake of Colombo with nostril Natasha Leone because like, ya know, she's great. And I've only seen the first episode for so far to it's a it's a good opener and sets up trouble down the road. But yeah,

Jessamyn 1:19:36 well, I like Rian Johnson. So yeah, good. Good. Good advice, because I will be wrapping up Abbott elementary really soon. So

Cortex 1:19:44 well, you can get on that. Yeah. Two other Mettaton things. One, bummer. One, a nice thing. The bummer is Fs passed away.

Jessamyn 1:19:54 Oh my god. Yeah.

Cortex 1:19:55 Which you found out like you found out out of the blue from someone contacting you Got it. And

Jessamyn 1:20:00 it was like, I'm looking for the producer of the metal filter podcast. And I was like, ah. And I didn't know where that was going. And then it was a friend of America who told me and I was just awful gut punch. And there's for people who were maybe in that thread early, but haven't come back to it. There's a full proper Oh bit about him posted towards the end of it. That's really worth a read.

Cortex 1:20:23 Oh, good. I actually I had nothing. I think I ended up cleaning out some of my recent activity just to get my mind off stuff. But yeah, yeah, no. Okay. Yeah, so a lot of a lot of nice stuff in that a lot of nice comments from folks and some references and links to stuff. He was just he was, you know, around and he was, yeah, it's one of ours. But on on a more pleasant thread stopper, there was also a fun thread from fizz last month, just about hey, what are you listening to? That? You know, it's like, it's like an ask me list generator without any nominal premise. It's just like, hey, laid on me. And there's a whole bunch of good stuff in there. And I've been trying to like, mix up my music listing a little bit more actively in the last year. So anything that's sort of like, hey, well check out this thing you've never heard of is nice. So yeah, I liked that. It was fun. Both.

Jessamyn 1:21:20 That's what I've been listening to.

Cortex 1:21:22 I still need to check them out. Well, I still haven't gotten around to it. You would like them. I know a couple people who were like, super into that, but I just like it hasn't quite crossed the threshold yet. But yeah, maybe maybe I'll try and listen to some of this very, this very morning. Yeah. And the remaining 18 minutes of it.

Jessamyn 1:21:40 Hey, my morning is way way gone. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's 242. So yeah.

Cortex 1:21:49 Oh, I guess that's pretty straightforward concept. Well, that's slow on the uptake says I'm definitely done. This was a this was a good time. I enjoy talking to you. And it's fun being friends who have this thing in common. Yeah. How do you like that for some brief, straightforward but heartfelt comments.

Jessamyn 1:22:08 I love it. I think that's nice. I appreciate it. As you know, I appreciate you. It's fun. What? How's that again?

Cortex 1:22:17 I don't know. I don't know.

Jessamyn 1:22:19 Oh, my self sabotaging a little buddy.

Cortex 1:22:21 Yeah, I'm really bad at this. Should we stop talking?

Jessamyn 1:22:27 Stop talking, at least you should. Bye.

Cortex 1:22:29 Bye, everybody. See you sometime soon.

Jessamyn 1:22:33 See you next month.