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Podcast 193 Transcript

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A transcript for Episode 193: What was previously my discretionary time (2023-08-14).

Pronoiac ran the podcast through Whisper: whisper.cpp 1.4.0, large model, small tinydiarize model.

So far:

  • it doesn't do summary keywords
  • it splits by speaker, but it doesn't try to label
  • no timestamps
  • no custom dictionary

Transcript

♪ Medical to podcast, medical to podcast, just a live in cortex, please commence the show. ♪

Hey. Josh.

Hey. Hey, it's it's Jasmine. Hi.

Good to talk to you.

It is. It's been it's been a fucking minute. Uh

Mm-hmm.

And I think you're also in full-on-summer and uh

Yeah I feel like my summer is fuller on than yours 'cause it's not noon yet and it's like ninety here.

It's tremendous. Yeah.

And and you know move, fans around the house and stuff like that.

yeah. Yeah the the he he pups were great like, I think at some point we're probably gonna pursue more of that for our house 'cause we've got one upstairs that we had put in several years ago, and it basically made it possible to sleep at night, in the summer which is great But. like yeah. But even then it's still sorta like daisy-chaining fans and whatnot because of the placement Like. if we knew na if we knew then what we know now, it absolutely would have just been in the bedroom uh instead of uh in the hall that sort of serves all of the upstairs but, none of it very

whole.

Yeah I mean there's definitely some variability like my friend who has a much smaller house who lives nearby me um, she got heat pumps installed and basically just got kind of one downstairs and one upstairs 'cause her house is smaller and so theoretically that should be fine but what it means is she's either gotta have her bedroom door open or she's gotta like get gradually hotter at night when it's hot here which is not as often. Oh.

Yeah.

But I send you a picture you can kinda see my house looks like some weird circuit board.

Yeah yeah that's that's very exciting we've, got a little bit of that because of ours but it's just like in one spot so we don't have the whole yeah sorta integrated circuit feel.

I'm just really happy uh it matches my trim because otherwise it would be super weird instead of just a little weird and like the people who installed it were like oh you can paint it and I'm like come on I'm not gonna paint it like sure thank you I could. Uh

Couldn't there be and if if your paint job is brand new then the paint'll even sort of match.

Let me tell you my paint job is so not brand new.

Yeah that's kinda the same thing with ours are like uh I think I ended up painting some of it but uh but yeah it's like it's a weird thing.

So should we do a official sort of intro 'cause I think it should probably be on the uh on the like unofficial pre-roll or whatever the recorded unofficial pre-roll I? forgot how to do all of this.

Sh

to Cortex Millard. And this is a meta filter podcast uh which we didn't actually mean to stop doing but I p the the other big thing that happened basically at the same time as the last podcast came out is I started a new job and it turns out starting a new job and then working at that job is a very weird and distracting change in your life so that's really eaten into my ability to plan literally anything else.

And because Cortex's schedule and my schedule means that the convenient times for me to record a podcast are before eight P_M_ and that's about when he's getting off work at his very nine to five each job. So Oh sorry but, Hey it's, fundraising month. Um please uh feel free to chip in a little We're. doing a very mellow fundraiser uh this time around We. just wanna kind of work on attrition while we work on some other sort of business schemes in the background You. can read all about that in

Um but this is um Medi-filter podcast one ninety three. And uh I guess our last one today is what August thirteenth our last one was recorded on March fifth again. Sorry. Uh

Well try not to go for a month between them.

Yeah well and I was like I'd been meaning to like oh Josh is busy maybe I can talk to Brandon and then I didn't get off my ass to do it because I would really like to also talk to Brandon I think that would be great he's, all shown in.

I would love to hear that.

Yeah he's, been uh at sort of besides moderating he's, been keeping up our uh F_A_Q_ and he's been um keeping up the Facebook I just noticed as I was doing kind of a little tour around Medi-filter properties uh on the larger web and he's been doing a good job. So if you happen to be somebody who's still on Facebook uh you can follow along with some interesting Medi-filter stuff on Facebook too. I mean obviously.

Mm-hmm.

in slowly um what's the word exactly? I've been um trying to get myself off of like the stuff that I don't need to be attached to in my world of stuff, so like I've talked here before about how uh I used to be one of the kind of volunteer moderators for um uh A_L_A_ think tank, which is like a group of like fifty five thousand librarians uh on Facebook which like I I

absolutely love Like. it's super fun. But as a moderator you just get kinda wrapped up in the same moderator stuff that you get wrapped up in anywhere, and I was a little bit like uh you know, uh this is taking up a lot of my time and like people kinda argue about it uh on the weekends when I don't wanna argue and what am I like there's other moderators, right. I can just maybe walk away. I've done this for long enough It's. fine Uh. but then I kind of looked on

book and saw how many other groups I'm also nominally 'cause I would still be getting all these alerts like somebody's being a jerk in your group and I'm like somebody else'll deal with it. Somebody's still being a jerk in your group and I'm like ah. So I just kinda walked away from it which felt fine and actually worked fine. I think sometimes uh people feel like they can't walk away from things that they're doing because no one else'll be able to do it but in point of having other people are able to do it. But then I looked at some of the other

pages that I'm attached to uh you know my local library they've, got a social media person now I. don't have to be attached to it I. don't have to get local questions I. don't have to notice that our local librarians are not super responsive to the questions other people ask I. can just walk away. But like MetaFilter still good still attached to and um Brandon's doing a good job keeping up on it and maybe TAS two I. haven't looked to see if TAS was also uh was also on that. But yeah you, can follow best of me phi on Facebook if you want to.

Thanks.

Yeah. And I started a new like super temporary job um which hasn't taken up a lot of my time but has sort of taken up a lot of what previously was my discretionary time. I think you need to have

a

Yeah basically I'm uh working with the Flickr Foundation as their community manager uh which essentially is working with um I mean Flickr still around, it was bought by smugmug um and then there's this thing called the Flickr Commons which is basically a group of cultural heritage organisations that have free accounts on Flickr uh and it got kind of spun up in I think two thousand eight

And then there were kinda people paying attention to it for years. And then Flicker got bought by Yahoo. And then it got bought by S-Mug-Mug. And it just kind of stuff just wasn't being attended to in the same way.

Lot of people kind of drifted away and now they wanna kind of revitalize it, which is great. But what that means is there's a lot of groups that are like we even have an account there? What? Who? Or or they don't care. And so the first order of business for me is to contact all these groups. And these are groups like the National Library of Ireland, you know the, San Diego Air and Space Museum, the you know this this and that group there's like a hundred groups about half of which maybe a little over half of which are active.

So a lot of times I'll email people being like hey you've got an account it's here your pictures have had five million views over the last ten years. Uh if you're interested we have a chat every Wednesday at the beginning of the at the beginning of the month or get in touch with me or whatever.

So I'm working with George Oaks, who basically was one of the original Flickr people who designed open library for the internet archive, and has done a whole bunch of other grea grea to design stuff.

And so she's the boss. I'm employee number one. I believe we're hiring a tech lead like this week. I don't know who they are Uh. I'm excited about it and um yeah, we're we're gonna see how it goes. So I I do the b I do the blog I. keep up um on social media um with uh with the group. I'll send you a link 'cause it's it's actually fun like I posted like a thing

oh, one of our groups is doing this, that or the other cute little tiny thing, and I posted like a thing that was just like pictures of a lot of people's end papers up, from these books that was collected by uh the fire.

And for whatever reason it just hit a nerve among like Macedon art people, book people I. do I'm not even sure who they were and it just kinda took off in a weird way which was actually kinda fun. Um so it's been just kinda that venturing out into social media, sending a lot of email maintaining, a blog. Same old same old.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. There it is.

Yeah.

It it feels like the lack of a moderation aspect to it is one of the things that probably makes it possible for it to be really super part time. Like if you're you're just working up content instead of having to also manage the the the t actively manage all of the tails off of that content all the time.

Mm-hmm.

know send you a bunch of D_M_s that are like hey what about this thing or hey what about that and like I'm on Slack all the time anyhow just 'cause like I have friends I hang out with there, and so it's been interesting learning how to sort of either compartmentalize or just break I'ma ignore that until I'm on shift tomorrow, or do I read something and then put it on my time sheet for fifteen minutes, you know what I mean which is like money, so yeah I, don't know it's, been it's been interesting figuring it out uh the jobs got a little

bit of scope creep because I'm the only other employee. Uh I think the ones we once we have a tech lead who I believe is also gonna be full time, that should ease out a little bit more.

I

I can hear you scrolling.

Yeah No. I'm I'm I'm I I'm I'm Condepla one of the one of the tricky things about having had a bigger gap is like my my podcast like collecting my links to get out of the process is always involved sorta like the last thirty page window with like recent activity and stuff. And like I know that there's yeah like like the I mean well it it works on a monthly schedule, then I can just like filter my recent activity by sub-site scroll, through that, and say oh what what what w what did I like that feels like a interesting or fun thing to talk about on the and that works great 'cause it's all within the last month. But it's

been you know like there's stuff that I enjoyed I'm sure in May that is not gonna show up in this last thirty day window.

Yes. Yeah for me it's all stuff that I've favourited for the most part. Um

I've been trying to favourite a little bit more liberally over the last couple of years um 'cause I was like I literally wasn't dyed in the wool I, used them basically as bo bookmarks person. And so uh like being like yeah but I could also use them 'cause hey I like that tha that's a good comment concept but but yeah.

I wonder.

Now I'm looking at um meta filter jobs and there's not that many jobs I would like to encourage people post your jobs or post your availability. But uh the last one that happened right before we talked, or right after we talked, was Woodvine's looking for an R_V_ for Burning Man, which is coming up in a couple of weeks and I hope they found someone.

And then there's couple uh writer's editors, federal government administrative support specialist wanna work at the federal government's best place to work and protect the entire retirement of security of millions of workers and retirees?

Uh if so you should talk to Kinsey who is uh looking for a person.

It's the pension benefit guarantee corporations office of policy and external affairs. D_C_ based gotta be on site once a week. Um but yeah sounds neat and uh more recently although still probably a month ago, AMP_ though's looking for somebody to uh translate a fire into Spanish to invite Spanish speakers to join um Artisan's co-op.

Where are they?

Yeah. Oh that's another thing I've been doing uh with my discretionary free time that is not uh getting yelled at by grumpy librarians on the internet is I've been uh getting into my Romanian again. I I decided yeah I decided I I really need to kinda work on brain plasticity and so you know I used to speak Romanian in the early nineties mid nineties and uh I'm just on Duolingo where friendly owl encourages me to uh

learn it again.

Yeah. Yeah, I know like I was I was wondering about that 'cause has it really ha ha have you touched it at all really since the since the nineties?

No I mean I I occasionally like c you know I occasionally will email with somebody who I'm working with like doing volunteer stuff at the internet archives and they're Romanian and so will like you know hey thank you you're welcome kind of stuff but man other than that no haven't touched it but it's also a lot like French which I did do um for a couple years in high school. So some of it comes back and then s like the vocabulary and then some of it doesn't because it's got um

pluralization is really confusing and it's got um gendered uh

The word for two is gendered, so it's it's it's like the la lathe thing in French.

Oh two is in the the uh um

Mm.

Yeah, so it's like doi this or doa this, depending on whether it's uh feminine or masculine or, high

I I think it's

not. I believe it's not because the word the if you say like you know bus it's, autobus and if you say the bus it's autobus-ul you, know you, just add the yule to the end of it and I don't think that's gendered Oh. god somebody who actually speaks Romanian please don't uh we'll get letters but um it's been it's been fun to like learn a thing instead of just kind of you know massaging the things I already know or kicking things around the internet you, know.

Yeah yeah,

I am always l like I I I'm always

happiest in a sort of like ambient feeling sort of fulfil way when like I've got a thing that I'm actively like finding new territory on Like. I I love the things that I already know and love and do and like it could be very comforting to just sort of do the familiar thing but, like

that comfort can become like a real sort of complacency where I suddenly realise I haven't really like pushed on something I haven't like figured out something new in a while I've, just been you know doing the things that I already do uh and I get a little bit hungry for like I I want you know I want the new thing I. want s I want something to really yeah sink my teeth into.

Yeah, exactly exactly, and uh you know especially like this last year like I've moved I've, started a new job I've, done all the things and I'm like alright I can I can maybe keep keep on this momentum because I feel like maybe it's good for my brain Maybe. it's not good for my brain I don't wanna hear about it.

Yeah.

But yes I think that's it for jobs um I've been looking through projects there's a couple projects I think um are b fun I think one of them is uh nothing's giant eagle puppet build did, you see this?

I did not.

I mean I think what I got uh attached to, we were talking on uh pre-roll was that um Jim uh not on display my, partner uh he got his student loans forgiven because he works in public service I guess when you work at one of the largest universities uh w we mumble a lot about the place he works having you know more money than the entire global South of the planet.

Okay.

but uh it does count as uh work for the purposes of getting student loans forgiven so, we got a chunk of cash and he did a couple things, including he got himself a bicycle which was great get, a little, you know, fitness stuff, got an Apple watch and then he also went on a trip to Iceland, where he um just, on his own spent three days and sorta two half days there he saw um he saw cowrie, he saw c katulas katalas, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, Corey lived

he live sort of part-time there, I guess, and maybe part-time in Finland and, you know, has a family and like everything was just kinda neat. And uh he and Jim manage to just knock hook-up, like and go have coffee together, and it was just like the coolest thing But. as a result I'd been a little bit more plugged into sort of Iceland stuff And. uh in Iceland's for Iceland's National Day, uh nothing was the

technical designer and I don't think Jim I think Jim c I don't remember if Jim communicated with nothing or not, apologies nothing if I have forgotten, but this giant eagle puppet is just amazing. Just

Yeah I'm watching I'm watching a video of them like puppeteering it at the end and it's it's huge and it's tremendous like this is so great.

Yeah yeah I mean those things are just super cool super cool to s to see and uh I think Jim managed to just miss miss Iceland's national day, but he did have a great time like took a bus tour went in a went in a hot spring uh ate a bunch of forbidden foods and uh yeah all that kind of stuff so this is gorgeous and yeah it's just a

articulation on the the the head movements and the and the beak is in a really nice extra detail and it's like three people puppeteering the thing. Um there's also a little uh m moment late in the video here of uh couple guys wearing uh like giant flamingo costumes where they're on stilts and they're like writing but also piloting yeah yeah it's like it's like a five second blip but that's a nice little bonus.

Hey those guys.

Yeah.

Neat.

That's great. Um I liked uh I well I should say I have been liking, I I've not uh been keeping up well on projects because again, like the regular podcast is a regular part of like my going and looking but, uh Adrian Hahn has been doing uh a gaming blog called have you played where it like it sound. It's sort of like him talking about like oh, hey here's here here's um some stuff about games every week talking about sorta like like a mixture of like review and

criticism type stuff. Um I really enjoyed his uh

Oh god where, was it I've? got it here somewhere. He he did a uh entry about PEGLIN uh which is a great idea that I wasn't sure how well what would work in his takeaway and it was basically um well you know, PEGLIN uh I think it's like a goblin but, it's PEGL is is the idea behind it so, did you ever play PEGL?

Oh oh oh, I'll I'll find PEGLA.

Yeah.

per usual What? No no no worries.

I do remember when PopCap was a huge thing.

And it's just like it's it's like a strategic pachinko-type game. Like you you fire a ball and it bounces off pegs and hits blocks and you're kind of like doing a blockout style remove, all the blocks to beat the level thing. Except instead of like bouncing it up towards the top of the screen with your paddle at the bottom you're firing balls down into the pachinko pegs and gi trying to get them to bounce just right to take out all the bricks with, you know, whatever, the ten balls you have to use. And it's a great little game Like. it was it was better than it needed to be kind of a sort of an enduring thing

Then they put out PEGL two as like an x_ box exclusive for some reason that I think still has never gotten outside of that. So I've never played PEGL two, which woulda been like uh I'm absolutely gonna play the hell out of this. Uh and then sorta the whole PEGL thing sort of fell by the wayside I think as a result of that. Uh and then fifteen years later someone, put out a game called PEGL it, where it's like what if it's the same idea but, it's like a little R_ P_G_ thing where like you're a goblin fighting his way through enemies and you hit them by hitting specific little blocks down in the pachinko area to trigger

damage or, trigger healing or, whatnot. Y as it's a nice little idea, I neighbourhood when I first heard it was gonna happen and then I didn't get around to buying it and Adrian's take on it as like thoughtful and a little bit like dissuading of like, hey this, is a great idea and, you know what you have to do with a great idea is figure out how to actually make it fun.

And Paglen kinda maybe doesn't really figure that out. So like it's it's amusing, it's a nice idea and, you sort of end up feeling like okay, but this doesn't all gel, which is always a challenge when you have like a what if we stick these two unrelated ideas together like, you know, it's so much easier to have an interesting idea than it is to make every piece of that idea work. That it sounds like they, you know, didn't get as far as they wanted, but you know this is th this is the takeaway of like a thoughtful post by Adrian talking about you, know w

why you know you know how how it feels to play why it feels like there's missed things you know and so it's good criticism is like you know what I thought this was gonna be full-blown food you know it's like it's it's like good yeah which I mean it's not shocking that Adrian is writing good you know game design thoughts.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

a s a a a a a a a slice of the world that I know enough about to be interested but not enough to feel like I have any sort of like expert knowledge or anything.

Yeah. And I haven't talked about this about this at all but I kind of assume part of the reason this blog is this is this be because that book got done it's like well now what are you doing what are you doing all your writing about games and your chea

Right well and I see him sort of chit chatting a little bit on uh Macedon although not anywhere near as much as Dan uh who's his brother.

Yeah.

Very chatty.

Dan is voluminous I. appreciate it. I think he's a good follower.

Yes.

Well I have a couple more projects uh some sort of low key and some uh little bit more. Uh this one is just uh super nice hey we've got a YouTube channel about our backyard and it's Joanne Miriam and uh not a hundred percent sure if this is the backyard of hers that I have been in um but uh I have been in one of her backyards and uh it's just a videos of critters. It's just let's look at

deer or rabbits or the occasional coyote, or here's the squirrel on the feeder. I don't know if you've uh seen on Malt-Chop, but um no I wasn't expecting to mention his names, so I'm not thinking about it right now, but there's a there's a uh guy on Malt-Chop who figured out how to set up this kind of raspberry pie-ish trail cam that one can build themselves and is using it to get some pretty

close-up shots of birds on their bird feeder. But it's made out of like soda soda bottles and let me see if I can trail. This is just not gonna work at all is, it? Absolutely it's not.

Never does. Never does.

wait, w maybe if I look for D_I_Y_ Nope. I forgot it. I give up Um. but he's got just trail camps are neat right, Especially if you get the feeling that they're not intrusive or invasive, so you just have to look at animals being basically animalish Although. obviously if they're in your yard they're not being quite as animalicious if they weren't in your yard. Uh but yeah I um I just thought it was nice I. like looking at the videos I. always enjoy

those.

Yeah, excellent.

And then the other thing I was gonna mention, which is a little bit more in my personal wheelhouse, was uh B_ Wordmler. Ben um did a thing called band book club Basically. is a kind of a reload it preview Like. it'll show you a book that's been banned some, information about it and, then a preview of it. I uh I believe um stuff that comes from Google books uh and then some

links to buy it and then Paul SLADE uh published it actually to Metafilter. Some people had uh some problems getting it to work, but I I do really think it is really important that we pay attention to what's been going on in this country which, is a very small faction of as far as I'm concerned lunatics are behaving like they are a huge organized I mean they're very well organized, but there's not that many of them?

and are really trying to uh sort of control what people can read, especially what children can read, especially about things that uh have to do with sort of BIPOC lives and rights and um gay and trans uh kids teens and adults And. it's and it's a problem. Uh it's a very big problem. So the more people can pay attention to it uh, the better that is. I appreciate more people talking about it. It used to kind of be a thing where I

always get on the American Library Association to ask because they'd be like, these books have been banned And. I was like ahh, have they somebody just challenged them in a school library But. now no that's actually what's fucking happening. And um it's a problem right, If you're a kid in Florida uh, you have significantly less access to books about being a gay kid than you would if you were here in Vermont Um. couple people have reached out to me just over the last couple months to ask like what can I

I do so, I did write up a blog post that's on my own blog talking about kind of what you can do what, you can do to help Uh. it's a little inside baseball about the American Library Association people, may or may not care about that Uh. I definitely still have some critiques of the American Library Association but I do think an organised response is important and the American Library Association is at least organised so they're a good place to start, if not with your own state's library

who's probably dealing with some shit, especially if you're dealing if you're in states like Montana, Arkansas, Iowa, Florida, um some of the some of the bigger ones that have been dealing with uh bigger Louisiana uh bigger challenges lately.

Yeah.

Yeah and, I think at first I just started kind of ignoring that horse shit because I was just like it's just a couple cranks, whatever. Like there was a big thing that just happened, it's what, it's August thirteenth now, a big thing that happened um, August fifth, when like Kirk Cameron, you might remember him, um him and his assholes decided they were gonna kind of harass public libraries into letting them use meeting space to do a quote, unquote, story time um with their book that

was sort of a very Christian, super-Christian book, and again, nothing wrong with Christian books, books about Christianity, books that tell kids about Christianity, but this was a little bit more kind of evangelical, there's one way to be a person and it's probably not the kind of thing that a public library would have used for their story time, and as well we don't just have randos from the outside do story times in libraries, they're usually run by librarians blah blah blah, and so they were basically like we are just gonna

really push libraries to let us do story times there with our super evangelical book. And if they don't, which actually a lot of them were sort of expecting, we're gonna go on a rampage and go to the press.

Mm-hmm.

Fucking hey out of the fact that oh hey we're being oppressed because they didn't say yeah do this bad fucking idea that you know we're gonna say no to and it's yeah yeah yeah.

Yeah, so definitely a problem and uh I appreciate people who are working on it I. just noticed there is another um I made a bird feeder thing uh in projects from Markey Uh. it's a bird feeder not, a D_I_Y_ camera but uh you'd probably like this, especially Josh, uh it's a sort of a Frank Lloyd Wright style lamp, and then turned it into a uh turned into a

cool looking bird feeder.

Yeah, a little sort of prairie style uh framing there. That's clever. That's a that's a nice little thing.

One of the things that's kinda weird about my house is I don't have a really ready place to um hang birdfeeders that isn't right over my porch, which is just kind of a birdshit like nightmare. Like I I need to get a little bit more clever having like a a birdfeeder that hangs a little bit over my like plantings and not over my porch. But tricky. So I've been working on it, I have a suet uh cake that's out on my porch

and I just hose it off regularly, the porch not, the suet cake. And yes, it's a little bit a little bit of a mess. Well the more I scroll through projects the more I find to talk about on projects so, I would also like to talk about um an L_P_ an L_P_ player, this is by Meta Tuesday streaming, an endless loop of songs from the Boston Public Library collection on archive dot org.

This is me not talking about the lawsuit

against the archive dot org and their L_P_ collection uh but this is a really cool program and a a really cool thing Uh. I believe Meta Tuesday has had other projects that are similar um

similar sort of massaging things I. thought I had seen this one before. Clearly not. Or maybe I saw it somewhere else. At any rate it's cool, I like it, more positive library stuff and spread around the positive value of libraries. Hell yeah. Hell yeah.

Anything else in your projects viewing?

Uh no, not not at the moment.

What was that noise?

that's uh I don't know I. I I think I think that was that was that was a my new job noise uh because I do a lot of like uh a lot more talking on audio in particular you, know sometimes, video, but but you know a lot more video calls with people throughout the company and there's like you know two, three hundred people in this company and I interact with reasonably speaking only like probably forty or so of them um but it's it's still a lot and it's it's a very weird change from

Like. you know, uh working at MetaBoost or working with the same like, you know, a handful of people for years and years and mostly via text, and now I'm like, having audio conversations with people I don't know nearly as well i i in general. Um and so I've I've definitely been developing a slightly different set of like non-committal but appropriately responsive noises for fo for for calls Uh. and uh uh yeah. And I think that was one of them. I think that was sort of like a hey, okay, clearly we're not gonna move on until we have a

always it acknowledges that we need to move on. But also, I don't have an answer for you, so wuh uh um it's weird to think about. It's weird it's weird bringing a skillset very sideways into a different context uh is one of the things about it.

didn't explicitly say this, but along with uh it having been a while I can't currently this morning locate the mic I usually would have recorded on. So I'm recording on a webcam mic so, I'm probably gonna sound a lot more roomy than I usually do on the podcast. And also I keep doing mic discipline things for a mic that's not there. So I keep like backing off slightly from the mic when I realise I'm gonna laugh loud. But the mic isn't two inches in front of my mouth, so I don't know what that's gonna sound like in the balance either Hopefully.

like anything special to me. So hopefully it's alright I'm using the same headset that Matt bought me um ten eleven years ago. Little pieces of black fuzz are falling off into my head as we as we speak. But like the microphone parts w I can see exposed copper wiring that I haven't yet covered up and uh electrical tape. Like I'm amazed this thing still works. But uh seems to still work.

Yeah.

Uh

uh links to pictures of their battered audio hardware 'cause I'm looking at like two different sets of fucked up headphones in my office right now.

Right. Yeah.

Sort of like a a a special discology thread. We should do a discology thread really, it's been a long fight to talk about that.

general meta filter community sense not, not not not trying to confide into the the participant's numbers are going yes, but people listening to this and the people that they like to poke and you know like like let's spread the love around, somebody to it. I I like I like that there's been the move towards like more broadly doing uh chatty thread posing like meta talk-tale threads and and free threads on the blue like, that that moving to like just whoever doing it is uh feels like a really really nice sort of uh redistribution of effort.

I'm ch ch she has said she has been and uh I think the only thing is if if somebody doesn't step up then maybe it doesn't happen, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

seems too immediate and I just wanna like leave a comment and then come back and see if anybody said something later.

Yeah, I recently joined the uh th Today in Tabs uh discord uh which which I'd been needing to do for a long time and I'm sort of like noting when I did so like the other week that like it's really dumb that I didn't do it like a year previously when I was then unemployed for several months and had all the time in the world to fuck around on a discord. It's like oh no, I'll wait till I'm like actually busy with a job and then then I'll try and keep up with a new discord and it's, you know, it's it it's a fun place I, like it uh but it's a little bit busy the way discords are just like by their nature like, even when it's not

busy it's scattered across a bunch of channels and you know it's a bunch of people talking in in unpredictable moments about different things so it's it's a it's a little bit it's a it's a little bit of a lot but it's a pleasant a lot. But like there's something about having like a a like a forum thread style thing like on Metafilter where like that pace feels much more manageable like you don't

rate Yeah. no totally I didn't I don't discord I do not have a c a discord community that I interact with like there's a librarian discord community that I know about and I used to kinda dip in and out of it but then I was just like when I was kind of smallening my connections I was just like nope, discord's just going I, just don't use it. It's like the way I don't go to Twitter anymore for the most part and like yeah you know I spend a little bit of time on Blue Sky I spend a lot of time on Mastodon now and uh

Yeah.

you know having, fewer places to check in but I reconnected sort of with the the one one four two crowd who's now mostly on Slack. Pardon me and um like that's fun 'cause it's like a group of people I met on Metafilter fifteen twenty years ago I, don't know how long ago and um they're all grown ups now for the most part and it's just it's really fun to kinda have a place to sort of bullshit with people who know you that's small in addition to Metafilter the place to bullshit with people who know you that's big.

Yeah, and there's uh uh and I think about that. Like, you have that long running side community is like everyone is used to that concept of like a chill pace too. Like if you d y you don't have the sense of like, you know, fervent, irrepressible energy going on that you get from like uh discords for like new things Like. like my only real big discord community experience other than like starting to hang out with the today and tabs people is um that I was on the Blaze ball discord 'cause that was where so much of the

discussion of Blaise Ball happened uh what what was going on um which it it like it is formally over now I. think that happened since we last talked, but now it's like officially Blaise Ball is done um.

Mm-hmm.

Sure.

it it's really hard to deal with lightning in a bottle and that's what they had when Blaise Ball started and it really just was the moment and the thing and it was way too much for them to deal with and they spent a few years trying to figure out how to make it sustainable and it's just like

just wasn't. Um so uh, you know I'm sad in the sense that like this thing that was this really amazing few months of my life didn't like end up being a long-term part of my life, but also I think they made the right call in saying hey you, know we're not we haven't figured out how to make it work. Um but that was like a very very very busy Discord just like a ton of people, just so much like fun creative energy and also a certain amount of like the discourse happening around the edges depending on which channels you were in because it was also a lot of like

relatively young people who have that young person energy to really, really be like I I I'm definitely someone who has been very online for a long time, but like increasingly in a sort of like yes but, I can pace myself sort of way and like you know you get you you get teenagers and and twenty somethings who are just like chock full of energy and you get that they haven't sort of worn themselves out yet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

it was a very fun, very intense, very creatively charged place that I really enjoyed. But I would enjoy having had it been not on a Discord exactly. Like a lot of a lot of the stuff that happened there also got externalized out to like Twitter and Tumblr and blog so, it won't all go poof if the Discord goes poof, but like Discord is a bad archive. Like that's the biggest downside to it becoming so dominant in gaming discussion spaces and software like like open source software discussion spaces is like it ends up being like oh yeah,

to the Discord for information on this and hope that it's still active and hope that it still exists and hope that you can find an answer somehow by searching back through months or years of conversation instead of looking for like threads. You know, it's just like it's a bad way to catch up on things even though it's great for chatter in the moment. And I think that's gonna be a real challenge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If if the goal isn't chatter in the moment it can be difficult, yeah.

I th I feel like people are gonna more broadly really feel that like five ten years from now as like the long term archival weaknesses of that really become visible more broadly. But uh but the problem is there right now and it's like it's a worrying thing. Like it's it's definitely a worrying thing in terms of thinking just like the health of sort of community web stuff 'cause it's not at at this point it's decidedly not web stuff and that comes with a lot of costs. So

Right right right right. Interesting that's an interesting way of thinking about it actually. Like I think of Slack as like kinda web stuff um but I don't think of Discord as web stuff at all even though it can run in a web page the same way I believe but, Slack can right,

Yeah.

I also the main thing I use Discord for is just as an easy way to organise uh co-op audio when I'm like gaming with my my friends. Um you know you you can just yeah like yeah like we've got a Discord space that we use for that but we don't use it for anything we just like oh this is this is how we Skype 'cause it's easy and it's gaming oriented it's the way it was designed so it fits well. Um but yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Anyway uh should we talk about Metafilter I guess.

Yeah and it occurs to me as I'm looking through my um favourites, which is how I sort of um check this, all the things that happened over the last like 'cause, I think we initially didn't talk because there was also that stuff going on with figuring out what was happening with the steering committee, and I don't wanna like go into a whole thing about it but, I feel like I should mention it even though I feel like anybody who's listening to the podcast probably knows this whole story. But is th is that

if I just take a brief derail for that?

No not, a derail, no not, going up on a tangent on this point.

Yeah.

when we were looking at nominations for the steering committee and it had become clear that the s

initial steering committee had really put in sort of more time than we uh thought the project was gonna be taking and, in many cases it was just too much time, frankly. Uh there was a lot of sort of discussion about whether or not that was even okay to have people volunteering time for a for-profit company, which MediFilter is despite the fact that's not how we use the money, but it is definitely how I could use the money Um. and so there was a lot of sort of conversation I. talked to my lawyers,

like blah blah blah and we had to suspend the steering committee because we couldn't essentially have um volunteers volunteering for a for profit company without being potentially in violation of labour laws which tons of companies do it but that doesn't mean it's okay and we just sort of decided that that was kinda how we were gonna move forward with this and it's been a while. I have given some updates uh in various meta talks

uh speaking to lawyers figuring out kind of what the plans are uh appreciate the hell out of the work the initial steering committee did one of the reasons we're not doing like a huge fund-raising push right now is so that we don't I mean number one we don't have uh sort of volunteers helping us out but also number two we're kind of looking at maybe doing some kind of a reorg.

much of which has already been shared in MenaTalk, but I did want to at least kind of mention I think one of the reasons we initially didn't have a podcast is, you know we were doing a lot of figuring out what the hell's going on. Um there were some kind of random here and there, kind of menacing comments that made me be a little concerned that we might have imminent threats to the site um itself and uh we just sort of decided to go dark for a little bit so that we could regroup instead of sort of going public

in uh doing what I love to do the most which is shoot my mouth off so I sort of was protected from myself a little bit Um. and if people wanna kind of read the uh just the one or two uh fund-raising uh posts or the site update you can get a little bit more details You're. welcome to reach out to me personally if, you want to I'm justman@gmail.com. But that was I forgot that that had happened right after our last podcast and I just wanted to acknowledge

it that that has happened and is happening and is a thing that I've been uh pretty actively working on. So that's that's all I have to say about that I think Anything. else you have to say about it? I don't think so.

Yeah.

Fils' birthday July, July fourteenth. That's that's coming. Um people were watching those cast and those kids.

Yeah.

But we did uh we did uh do a little sort of uh meta talk post and next year is gonna be the twenty fifth. We will see how we are feeling about that. Oh my gosh just seems like a lot but there is kind of a nice little like let's just chat about the site thread that's still open if you wanted to uh just about the site or how you met people or what we did or what you did or we got catscan dot com uh up and running again and it occasionally is not up and running.

Uh and it's up and running again and yeah uh me and Luke kinda made that post and then other people have been chiming in in the thread. Yeah thanks for the reminder.

Um uh let's see but in the just random posts uh there was a very recent post about the Jeopardy uh strike bullshit. There was a nice enter and made uh a run.

Oh okay.

Uh it's it's a it's a just a shortish article Etrigan linked uh on the front page uh talking like like like quoting and talking about the position that a bunch of former Jeopardy uh contestants got put in by producers for the show trying to get them involved in like current shooting for like a hey second chancer tournament which is like you know in abstracting.

Because they don't have any content because they're trying to

Mm-hmm.

and so they're like hey yeah you wanna come do this thing you really really wanna do in like a completely ethically unworkable context hey what do you think about that and it's basically talking to people who got that put to them and how much that sucks and the various ways that it's you know a shitty position to be put in and and basically everyone ending up with like y and also no nope can't do it. That's wrong.

Right. So did they wind up did they do you know did they wind up not doing it? Because people

rarey still. Like so like like whether this does end up happening basically probably comes down to whether they can find enough people who are actually willing to say yes, which who knows. But like the article's more reporting on it as a current thing that is happening in terms of like jeopardy production trying to make this happen and and sort of putting this terrible bargain in front of former contestants. Um so we'll see, we'll see what happens. You know I. think that's one of the things because it's an ongoing strike and people don't really know whether and when it's going to be resolved, like how do

we plan around that exactly from from either end. Um but yeah, this it's an interesting discussion in there. Um

And yeah, we have a lot of trivia people on the site. Uh Thea Delight is one of the many people in this shi be like well, I was gonna be on Jeopardy. But well, maybe I'm not. Um

and there's so many meta filter people who have been on Jeopardy. Like it's the overlap between meta filter people and people who have been on Jeopardy is decen decent sized.

yeah. It's it's it's it's definitely disproportionate.

We're a Jeopardy! kind of site I guess. Um but in in more pleasant weird random current internet stuff there's also a post from uh Al Swigert about Sqe-Biti toilet which is just a surreal weird little computer animation thing that I'm not even gonna try and explain. It's just it's contemporary weird memory and uh if that sounds like your thing go watch it. If it doesn't sound like that thing go watch it so you can complain about how much it's not your thing but uh it's

just it's it's straight up contemporary meme shit I. like it I. appreciate it uh and that's all I'm gonna say about it. It's just like it's a weird thing I do that. I bet Jim would love it Yeah. that that feels about that feels about right uh for my knowledge of both of you.

Like things that showed up in newspapers that are typos or whatever but they got into print because you didn't used to be able to fix that stuff and it's just kind of a dumb tumbler blog.

Well at any rate like I feel like Jim and I talked about it and I don't remember where it came from um

between the two of us but I'm sure it came from actual somewhere but wow that sentence okay. Uh.

It's like we've come full circle like well I don't know if it's full circle exactly but like that that that probably used to be a thing that people would like you know find and and share with their friends if they saw something from the local paper and then it turned to like this is Jay Leno's day job and now it's something you know what this is we're just posting shit on a blog you know.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

which also comes up to uh so that's posts that Jim made we usually talk about one post that Jim makes and then this is a post that I made uh in the last uh time which was notable just for having eighteen favourites and one comment. Um but basically it's uh Alice Wong who if you know uh sort of disability history or sort of San Francisco history or whatever she's uh um activist and uh went through some pretty serious shit with her health uh

Yeah.

Uh I'm trying to think how long ago I'm not sure how long ago either early this year late last year.

In the last year or so like yeah I've been up to the time.

Yeah.

and essentially she um was interviewed by uh like San Francisco MOMA is doing a they've got a podcast called Raw Material and they've got Alice Wong to share uh episodes from her disability visibility podcast which is really good. Alice Wong is just hot shit, she's really good at everything Um. she because of her uh health concerns she now has a um not sure exactly what it's called, she's got a a voice

it's not her own voice that she uses to speak and that definitely sort of affects like what her podcast is like. And it's interesting because it's a very she has very visible disabilities, but talks about people who have visible and invisible disabilities and a lot of disability activism and like her voice is just great. It's really great. And so this was an interview with her and then also kind of a lead-in to uh the podcast series that she did and um I just I just thought it was great I. just thought it was great to listen to I. d I I can't

enough of sort of Alice Wong on social media and the things that she talks about and uh I was pleased to share it with the Modifilter community.

Yeah that's, great.

Yeah.

Um dipping into older posts I I did go looking into my favourites to find a few things that I could pull off of and one interesting post I remember from May this was a post that Fizz made about the I am a surgeon uh meme which was definitely a thing of like April May of this year and I I haven't seen really any reference to it any time recently. Um and so that's the way it means about th okay well Fizz's post sums it up pretty good.

Mm-hmm.

Guy is the main character of a show called the Good Doctor which is a network television show about a very neurodivergent uh doctor which is a nightmare of a sentence to me even here. Yeah he's, he's having sort of a meltdown because like he's f fucked up at work and he's been taking off t taken off of surgeon duty and sort of busted down to you know private again or or whatever but, yeah yeah, like like like he's a like it's

I don't watch the show I've, never watched a show I. I was vaguely aware of it and I have a comment I think in a thread about like oh I had been assuming I was misinterpreting something I'd see 'cause it's really not just a straight up oh what if there was a you know autistic uh tropish doctor who is great surgeon but has a hard time and boy that's I guess that's exactly what it is and it's network television and it's sounds like it's real bad. But

Oh okay, so this isn't like oh great representation this is like actionable.

The impression I get is it has like been a fodder for discussion in like you know autistic, neurolife divergent like you know chat communities, but not in a oh they're really knocking it out the park for us on this one sort of positive thing. Um but anyway, that turned into a weird network of memes remixing that and riffing on it and what not and Fizz basically made a good round-up of that at what felt like kind of the high-water mark of when that was uh sort of metastasizing and going

through the increasingly strange galaxy brain variations of of memory Um. and it is such a moment in time 'cause I remember that of being like all over like TikTok and and social media stuff for a little while and I haven't thought of it, in months uh and suddenly I'm like oh right, that was that was an interesting post about an interesting thing that happened on the internet, that happened one month earlier this year and then it was then it was over 'cause that's the way things work. Um so there's a bit of time capsule.

another bit of time capsule from uh May was uh a post uh it's a post I made but it's like a v a video I liked which was Simone Gertz the uh bad robot uh person like she makes terrible robots famously um and actually she makes them very great.

Yeah like,

Yeah yeah in this case it's she she decided to make a stained glass robot which I was like you know t m m couldn't be more on-brand for it was fascinating to watch but like she's fantastic and she does just she makes stuff they, tend to be Roboddy things or other crafty things uh but you know she's been in n on you know, YouTube and doing stuff for years um she had a whole uh tumor and and and brain surgery scare a few years back that came out perfectly well which is fantastic. Uh she's she's ho she's

Yeah.

Oh.

Yeah.

I'm she's she's she she's awesome and like every video she makes is good and this one is really nice because in part because it's like frustrating for her like she t trying to do this shi with stained glass is like what a wrinkle and she's relatively new to doing stained glass stuff and and this is probably everyone is relatively new to making stained glass robots. Um so it's one of those things where you you see her not just like having an idea and wrestling with a little bit but like actually really struggling with some of the execution uh and she's a v good thoughtful the interesting person to watch when she's thinking through ideas

and when she's struggling with frustration. So um I really liked it um not just because of the staying lost but because uh someone was great and it was a good video. Uh but yeah.

who really got uh for lack of a better word, search working, um with computers back in the nineteen seventies Um. it's a long article, but I do think it's a really interesting article, talking about kind of really before we could search stuff uh wh how did it how did it work How? did people start us being able to search things? What did it mean and who was the woman uh Pauline Cochran

really started it through her work um uh at what Syracuse I guess like there's a whole bunch of like kind of classic computer pictures uh some of which are her and some of which are not but it it it talks about kind of the the decisions people made in order to be able to make these search things uh way back in the day and she's really interesting and uh librarians or people who are interested in the history of searching I think would um

would would really like it and speaking of so these three all line up together.

I love a good cluster.

Yeah um Alex Hollander talking about the redesign of the Wikipedia desktop interface which launched in January and there's some notes on the project although now that I click through I can't get to Alex Hollander's website.

Okay.

I mean this is just a post by uh Etrigan from March.

Oh.

Yeah.

And so people are talking in the thread a little bit about like you know here's here's some stuff that's interesting about this or that's not interesting about that, and one of the things Brainwayne shows up and has some really good feedback about actually if you don't or do like the interface there's a sp bunch of stuff that you can change if you log in and um so they've got a really good set of things that you can that you can do um. Well I'm kind of wondering what happened to Alex Hollander

website Um.

I'm I'm wa I'm way backing machining to see if there's any like recent s snapshot of any reference there, but

Good. And then Brainwain wrote a um post that's really interesting basically uh linking to an article by Susie Dorman called writing for the bad faith reader. Talking about, in general how, it's really easy if you're doing writing to sort of

bury everything in caveats so that people won't come at you with their kind of bad faith interpretations of what you're trying to say because you're all used to the internet and used to people doing that kind of stuff. And talks about how maybe it's better, especially when you're just doing first drafts, to try and think about ways of writing to the best faith reader and realise that every single person isn't gonna necessarily like your like your

Um and it's and it's interesting because people talk a little bit about what does it mean to be a bad faith reader specifically Uh. is it is it just somebody who doesn't like the book? Is it somebody who just kind of ignores what you're trying to do with the book? Uh it's just a nice brief discussion about it um and a post that was that was really good from uh just about a little over a month ago.

Yeah I saw that I s I I I remember seeing that post go by it and had wanted to check it out and it slipped by so maybe we could have uh

Yeah I recommend I recommend a read I. think the conversation was good in addition to uh just the article that Brain, Main Links is very good. Did you figure out what happened to Alex Hollander? Alright.

Yeah.

Yeah.

was uh well Alex Hollander's website is up.

Oh I had assumed Alex Hollander was a dude. Terrible. Alex Hollander is a woman.

Oh if this is even Alex Hollander.

I mean oh god.

I mean it's Alex Hollander but it's Alex Hollander Yeah. Anyway maybe we'll find out what happened to that website from that post. Um

Yeah there is some Alex Hollander who is female who does media strategy brand stuff and whatever but has a different U_R_L_ than the other Alex Hollander and I'm not sure if there's the same Moving. on. Go ahead Josh.

it's just a post I it it's a video I like this uh cover of Evan Essen's uh bring me to life but done on automatons and it's fucking delightful which is why I posted it I guess.

Is that another word you say different from me?

Automaton?

Oh uh and that's different from automaton.

Yeah no, this is thi this is oh oh automaton which is a specific new uh musical.

Oh Christ. Alright I just clicked your link I. got it.

Everybody go watch it I. I don't know anything else to say it's just it's very good and very funny it's, a weird little instrument that I own and never play 'cause I'm bad at it but I should pull it back out.

Uh the automaton is

this video and then I'll watch it.

you you click and you'll immediately see you've probably seen one before just 'cause it's a weird instrument that you can never but yeah it's a little uh you know musical instrument that has a sliding uh sort of tone strip along the uh the length of the staff of the musical note that it roughly represents and then it's got a l a mouth that you can squeeze to get sort of wah-wah expression of Jim. Jim this seems like something Jim should have.

He has every other instrument I, swear to God.

I mean a a little one's cheap. Like again they're hard to they're hard to play well but so is the theremin and that never stopped anyone. Um

He wants his theremin very badly.

Oh he should get one. He should get a D_I_Y_ kit one.

He should not get a D_I_Y_ kit one. So people are D_I_Y_ kit people. He is he is not a D_I_Y_ kit person. Yes.

I've got a bunch of others that I can sort of throw out. Uh here's just a random comment that I favourites uh a month ago or so. Uh this is a comment in a thread about elevators and it's a comment from user unearthd who just like dropped some oh yeah I used to clean up uh elevator lift shaft interiors um and drops like you know four paragraphs of just like first person experiential stuff with weirdness about the inside of elevators and I found that delightful. Poster's nice too There's. some other good discussion there about that thread in part of go

that comment was like oh this is this is that good good stuff. This is that oh I happen to be a bit of a elevator lift maintenance expert myself.

I'd scout the shaft during the day.

Another comment in a different thread entirely that I enjoyed uh was this uh stanza from Difflogugh Difloggistated Difloggistated? Is that a soft G_ in? Dif flog like fl floggiston I I think so yeah okay. Difloggistated. Difloggisticated posted in a thread about the Fallout boy sort of remake of Billy Joel's We, didn't start the fire um the meta filter theme stanza of

plum poem mega thread. Period for someone dead. Surely this and plate of being sitcom with paint roller scene. And it just I I loved that to death as a bunch of inside uh meta filter jokes. But all sorts of five thread real Oh. good yes, Th. the th the thread itself is fun and uh amusing and grumpy and equal parts like not grumpy grumpy, but people being grumpy about like Billy Joel or the quality of the song writing here. But yeah, followed boy did a yeah, we didn't start a fire cover with more contemporary references and

It's you know what it's exactly what it sounds like and it's like whatever you feel about these, if you feel ab about it. But combination of Billy Joel remakes uh we didn't start the fire and just general song riffing made for a a fairly fun thread.

Well and I saw like when people were sort of talking about that and

Yeah.

I I remember when it came around a little over a month ago.

it's it's one of those things it's very easy to talk about way more than like it merits you know it's it's it's it's r it's yeah it's it's a very lightweight sort of oh that happened. Here's here's a pop culture, you know, incident. Um what happened to Alex Hollander's website? Is there anything that was

know I think it moved to Alex Hollander dot info maybe and I think that was a different one and I don't know if this Alex Hollander uh is uh male female or non-binary because their uh user page is just picture of a goat.

Oh there's goat.

Um mayb maybe maybe dot com or whatever was in the link was an old alias that just since lapsed. Maybe maybe that would explain it. Anyway.

Yeah yeah yeah yeah. Entirely possible Anyhow. glad we tracked it down.

Yep. Um there is also gosh re the Reddit thing happened. That was a whole thing that happened.

Oh my God yeah.

Um let's see, where's the where's the thread for that? I think there were multiple threads, but this is the one that I had something favourite to think. Um which yeah, if if somehow like this didn't get your internet radar uh, Reddit took a page from Elon Musk which is like one of the worst sentences in the world and decided to put their A_P_I_ behind a tens of thousands of dollars uh a a month uh pricing scheme basically which, means everybody who runs a

third-party app that depends on the Reddit A_P_I_ basically is thought.

Including many apps that were the only accessible way to interact with things like Reddit's moderation functions.

Yeah, or or just yeah like, i in general accessibility quality in the native mobile app is not good uh which is something that a bunch of people uh in this sort of accessibility inclusive design community use.

thing that Reddit got away with because there were other apps that people could use they, just gave up on the native Reddit app but, then all of the sudden those were going away. Yeah, this was a very like drama in real life watching it happen and of course Rami made the post which, is a great delicious post you, know of, Rami's with tons and tons and tons and tons of links to stuff. Um but man it was fun talking about it with people who really knew what they were talking about.

It's kind of a it's kind of a perfect Rami post too 'cause like it's like like his whole style of doing a thorough in-depth like round-up on something but, also he's been an active Redditor for a very long time too. It's a sort of sorta got t feet planted very firmly in in in both worlds um which I think added to the degree to which he was able to round things up like very sort of clearly and and and thoroughly.

Adorable comments in there right, Like here's somebody who's like just been away from MetaFilter forever and just decided to like come back you, know. I hey I got married I, had children I, bought a house I, learned to garden I, can't spell my MetaFilter user name like, I was away and now I'm back it's, adorable.

Yep.

I can't pronounce their username either, S_, draw, cab. It's backwards backwards basically.

Yeah yeah,

Yeah.

I I think just saying backwards backwards is good. It's got a real like A_A_A_A_A_ that's six A_s at gmail dot com energy.

Right I know which McSweeney's post you're talking about.

Yeah. Classic. Classic.

Yes but, yeah that, was great and it was really interesting and one of the things that I thought I mean I really felt a little bit like maybe we didn't capitalise we I guess me and team MetaFilter didn't capitalise enough on hey we've, read it come here because, I think a lot of people were like going to Lemme or they were doing other things and uh nah.

Mm-hmm.

the general discussion on it was like how non-tribulos actually like transplants someone to a new space like, as a group versus like yeah, people are gonna scatter, you're gonna have a diaspora but like steering that or having a one to one replacement is not something that you can just sort of gin up immediately. So yeah, you had people going to a bunch of places including, you know we, had a few yeah, medicals people were sorta like oh yeah, oh yeah I used to hang on a MetaFitter, I'll uh I should go back to doing that, you know. But like

guys Yeah.

it would be disastrous to successfully get a Reddit exodus to land at MetaFilter. Like m most of the people showing up would not be super tuned into MetaFilter thinking and so finding the middle space of like how do we make it easy for like the hundred people leaving Reddit who like would feel most like MetaFilter's a great slot in replacement, how do we get them, that would be like you know it'd be a good thing to pull off if you can but but also like the last thing you wanna do is have ten thousand people who don't particularly get the deal and are used to

Reddit and it's very different like you know variation in boundaries and expectations just Cam girl up the place um which boy that's an ancient fucking reference. That's not a that's not a diss on Cam girls that is a call back to the early two thousands when there was in fact a small Cam girl invasion of MetaFilter like God I don't even remember any of the details anymore. This was like two thousand one something like that.

Yeah.

um unrelated but you know hey time stamps uh.

Yeah well and then we did have the conversation I'm trying to think of where it is 'cause there was a conversation in MetaTalk about well what kinds of things on Reddit would be good on MetaFilter and

Yeah I remember seeing a little bit of this stuff there.

name something like you know what what lessons should we learn from Reddit something like that I think was the title of our work.

W what what does it it's it's here let's see if it's this I think uh this is the one I remember anyway um here there.

We're very good at this.

why could I not find that? So yeah, it was a good post from Bottlecap um basically just kind of hey you know, site activity's a little reduced and what do people like about Reddit that made them enjoy it there that maybe Metafilter could take some lessons from. And uh you know I, felt it was mainly constructive a little bit of stuff being like yeah well, if we were owned by Kanye Nast, we would do that yesterday but, we're not. So we'll do what we can But. I do think we we collected some some feedback that was useful about

Like what what a modern expectation is for a website in twenty twenty three that meta-filter's not meeting that we should work on and what things are just kind of meta-filter's quirkiness that maybe are not gonna be worked on. Yeah.

Yeah.

And things don't always move fast places, eh? But you know, yeah, when you have kind of NAS money, maybe they should. Maybe it's more of a

we were discussing a little bit before like on pre-roll just about like working at Flickr and like you know flickr.org the, Flickr foundation um helps kind of maintain communities that live on flickr.com. Flickr dot com is owned by Smugmug. SMugMug has their own priorities sometimes it is not the easiest thing to get them to fix a thing from fifteen years ago that's not even their code so that your you know tiny historical society in Upper Ontario can get

comments more easily on their pictures you know what I mean and so some of that kind of stuff you know how do how do you figure out how to get fractional dev time to do the most useful stuff is challenging even with big companies and uh extra challenging um with teeny companies.

Yeah.

you, know, probably fifteen devs who are full-time devs on like a few different teams and, you know, watching them try to manage the scheduling and and, you know, working through agile sprints and then interrupt them with things that come up super sudden and that's a d that's uh w like you, know, an order of magnitude more resource than than Meta filter or have dev time and they have some of the same sort of like okay but, how the f do we actually get this done and stop getting distracted by this other thing that also is super important.

So there's something comforting about seeing that play out with people at scale that's like oh okay, so it i it is actually just it's hard no matter what. You have to figure out how to do it no matter what um.

Right.

Huh.

a thing because uh more of us have access to the code base but, by the same token the only dev or I think we have two devs that can push code and they're really only available on weekends and you have to D_M_ them special so, hope they're available in t for take downs for emergencies but, beyond that yeah, it's a little more hit and miss.

Yeah.

Um the what uh uh

Should we pivot to ask Meta filter 'cause we've been we've been doing it for the past I. know people miss us but,

I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna fire off uh without elaboration four more links. Uh the one that we would dig into if we were gonna to dig into it was the room temperature superconductor thing lately which has been f fascinating but yeah it sounds like it's kind of a nothing. So that's a bummer but, also f everyone's sort of expected to be a bummer.

Mm.

enjoyed some of these other videos that have been posted on Metaphilter. But anyway, this is a fascinating hour and a half long sort of treaties on a long running story-line with a WWE wrestler character called Roman Reigns, and it's way more interesting than I thought it would be, which is a nice thing that happens when people post stuff I don't know if I'd be interested on Metaphilter. So if you want an hour and a half of interesting uh discussion of the complicated, liminal reality and unreality of plotting professional wrestling that everyone knows is fake,

but still is a business. Yeah. And it's it's it it's a great video. It's really good Um. I in

'Cause it doesn't really know whether it's a comedy I mean whether it's like it's dark in places like really dark. And then in other places it it hits joke notes and so it's a little hard to see like Jim asks me a lot about shows I'm watching. Like is it a comedy, is it a drama, is it and I'm like I have no idea like I like it but I couldn't tell you what it is.

s guy Suicide. squad films is my understanding. Yeah. Um so it doesn't surprise me.

Okay.

Yeah anyway, uh well yes yes yes, Cena comes up a bit around the edges in that as well. Um 'cause Roman Reigns ended up being sort of like the guy they threw all their weight behind as a company after they'd moved on from like throwing all their weight behind Cena for a decade or whatever. Um so yeah I, dunno it's interesting stuff. Uh there's also this post um uh the Pluto gangster made a post about the Kansas City, Royals, George, Brett, Pintar, bat stuff.

I saw that zipping around the internet again. Yeah oh, that's great.

Mm-hmm.

And then coming back to the thread to to psych chapter and verse the bit they were talking about saying, well no actually, I don't think it is in fact ambiguous and the rules have stated at the time and it's uh it's perfect perfect meta-filtered baseball, rules lawyer uh it was a good time. Um and the one other thing I wanna mention just because it came across my brain uh recently in some discussion was this post from twenty nineteen about the nineteen ninety nine rock paper scissors tournament which, was a computerized uh

like round robin tournament for rock paper scissors blots uh and there's some fascinating stuff that came out of that in terms of like how people built bots that were able to out-compete other bots doing this very simple game and you know how you had to come up with a like a dominant strategy to deal with all the other strategies you didn't like about both.

Exactly. And it's it's I it just it came back to me that this was a thing a lot of the links are broken but you can find 'em on archive org at this point. Um and uh this is a nice blast from the past. Like I remember reading about this in ninety nine. Like I d I've tried and failed to find a slash dot post about it. And then I ended up finding of all things a meta-filter post from a few years ago. Exactly on it. So it's like yep, system works. This is why I like it here. Uh anyway that's that's it. That's the rest of my spree. Tell me about ask meta-filter. Just me?

well, I don't have like a ton of stuff on Ask Emo to filter 'cause I've been less active there than normal just because I've been busy talking to uh organizational people but um there're a couple that are amusing. This one uh,

That really sounds like Venkatif Rao.

are you sure you didn't? And and basically Macron's like, yup. I was googling incorrect variance of his name and of course that didn't work, thank you very much, you know, good-bye, and it's adorable um, as as we're all essentially getting older. Um and similarly, uh posts about names. This is a post by John Gorin. My five year old wants to know if there are ever any living rhinoceros

is named Clara.

Huh Alright.

answer yes, and uh Schnellup and Mr. Know-it-some uh basically sort of figured it out uh, but I thought that was kinda cool, was asked and answered uh fairly quickly uh, I enjoyed it and um let's see and another like bookish one which of course are just sort of low ball lobs to me this, is um White-wall is looking at the bottom reading a

book, and at the bottom of one page there is this little uh sort of set of letters and dashes. What is it? And um it turns out it's a sort of a signature mark.

And people sort of talk about it and then other people who have books from the same era of Penguin uh off fog of fog sort of specifically says hey you know I have a couple versions that have different different versions of this and they sort of talk about it and then it's a whole bunch of people talking about um like little squirrely things they find um written in books and especially in their own books.

Oh that's great. Oh this is

Yeah. That's a fantastic dialogue topic.

Mm.

Yeah.

This feels like the sort of ask meta filter that someone should just go and like make a post about like hey check out this conversation on this wood and green slide. Oh that's fun. That's very cool.

Mm.

major things that I had bookmarked was John Forty-Four just being like, Hey I, need to stop using Twitter It's. bad for me, and this was in March. Uh g g g g give me some sources of information uh or like other advice like I quit Twitter and my life is richer for it, stories. And so there's a couple uh people talking about Mastodon, people talking about quitting Twitter, people talking about things that might be helpful. Um and I

I appreciated it for that.

Not very long. Uh still open if people wanna talk about uh

reasons they quit Twitter. Uh how their life is how their life is better for it. Oh wait, one more one more one more ask me. Um which is just uh I wanna read More Biographies of Brilliant Women by Underclocked.

Mm-hmm.

They're looking for well written, readable biographies. Women who have worked in like STEM stuff preferably, women who aren't super well known um, but you know, m, major historical figures are fine. Also not looking for artists not, looking for sports women of, uh any gender not, looking for um politicians really and, uh so there's just a lot of uh good different biographies of women that uh look like they might be really

interesting.

This?

Yeah.

That is some that is some solid list generation right there.

Yeah. Do you have anything from Ask Medical Girl?

Um literally the only thing I have is a question I asked uh recently um because I bought a Dremel and I wanted to know what else I can do with a Dremel. Um

And uh

Yeah I mean I I I need to start a grazing shit just doing grazing shit I. got it for soapstone primarily which I've been enjoying getting back to you but I'm gonna

work you've been doing it looks, cool.

Yeah but I will I will just like reserve that for another episode 'cause I'm not gonna add another ten minutes of me to what's already in our half episode of this Yep. I have lots to say and I've been enjoying it but uh next time. Um any bits and pieces in particular you want to note uh from uh Fanfare, MetaTalk?

Oh.

check on the old um after party season two. It's been interesting uh let me let me actually get those links out. It's been interesting um

Like I've I've I read through some uh

I often am watching uh shows significantly later than other people are watching shows, and so sometimes it's kind of fun to go through later and see just what people had to say about the shows, and sometimes it's fun to actually peace marker, nope, sometimes it's fun to actually go through and like leave comments in a thread that's like pretty old and be like hey, because uh you've probably seen on fanfare but dirty

old town has been doing a fundraiser and uh linking to a bunch of trailers uh so if you wanna like look at dirty old town's stuff there it's actually uh there's a whole bunch of pretty interesting stuff.

Sorry I just noticed one of the things doesn't have a cover for whatever reason and so Fixing something on the fly. What happened to ever notice anything on the front page of uh fanfare that doesn't have uh like a box cover where it shows the recently added stuff Drop. us an email because we can we can fix it.

But yeah I think I just finished um

oh uh Mrs. Davis, have you seen Mrs. Davis?

Uh no. I'm not sure I even know what Mrs Davis is.

like eight episodes, one and done, mini-series about a woman. Like it's a possible future where there's kind of an app thing that kind of just takes over everything, a powerful A_I_ and, then there's sister Simone, who's a nun, and then her ex-boyfriend and there's a whole kind of quest to figure out what's going on and how to take it over and, it's just very like high concepty um T_V_ I guess is

on Peacock I think. And um just very well acted, a lot of people you kinda recognize from this and that. Very um

sort of larger than life in some ways. So it's like a sci-fi show, has a lot of um religious aspects to it um and a lot of aspects of religion in it. So if you're not religious don't worry about it. Um if you're very religious uh th I saw like one review of it on I_M_D_B_ and it was somebody who was very religious and they were very bad at how a certain character was portrayed and you know sorry about that uh, but I think a lot of people would find interesting stuff about it. And it was really fun to talk

to uh various people about it on Fanfare uh through April and May which was when it was on T_V_.

Nice yeah, no I I should check that out. I I'm a big fan of like you know high concept uh sci-fi mysterious shows. I've just been uh recently watching uh Silo. But

Oh I've read all the books I. haven't um

we didn't even know there were books like actually watching the first episode and watching the the credits for it and that based on the books by the way we all go ooh. So that's exciting.

Oh interesting.

Yeah I, don't know.

But this this one at least was like that. I just read a different book by him by Hugh Howie not, Andy Weir um about like

people who live in the desert and sort of a post-semi-apocalyptic America and people learn to like scuba dive in the sand like, where it's from, and they can and they can move around around the sand and kind of go deep diving for like former American stuff that's buried underground. And it's uh it's very good.

That's a good fucking why not of a presen premise I I like that.

it's a it's a weird premise and it's a couple books and it's pretty good. I mean, I don't know if I would go so far as to be like oh, it's amazing everyone, should see it, but like or read it. But it's pretty good and it would probably lend itself to some good television. Um speaking of television, there's a ask meta filter thread that I've been reading along with, but haven't really put on my to watch list, but basically it's somebody who's noticing that like Wonderful is like everything I've been watching is set in the U_S_ or England and, then there's a couple things in South Korea. I would really

Yeah.

a bunch of recommendations, some of which are kind of well, Canada or Wales or Scotland, but then some of which are in d uh sort of other farther away places and um it's a really good mix of good mix of things.

Yeah, nice.

Um I've also been watching uh Fourteen Fire as like dumb comfort uh stuff uh the last while and it's a weird show. Like if it's it's a bladesmithing show. You know, not a blacksmithing show a, bladesmithing show let's be clear But. you know it's it's it it it occupies that place of there's enough sort of interesting craft and stuff happening on screen that I can enjoy that aspect while it's also still enough of an American like reality competition show that

like it sucks in a lot of ways too. My biggest complaint with it is that like they just don't really talk about process nearly as much as I would like which is what I usually like out of a sort of a crafty competition show. Um I've talked about watching uh blown away the glass blowing show um and I have complaints about that in terms of like American reality like production stuff, but it's way better in general about that stuff than forest and fire. It's like you get more of like good photography and process notes where this is like very meat and

most of them. Um but it's also very watchable It's. like I dunno It's. like we just like fuck it let's watch it And. uh it's been okay. Like it's uh it's it's it's easy to watch it without worrying about it too much which is nice And. it's like a different crew of contestants every episode instead of like a

season long thing. So to the degree that like boy this guy is just fucking annoying or a little bit there I, don't know. You don't have to keep seeing them for like an entire you know stream of episodes. But anyway, that's what I've been watching. I've also been playing a hell of a Baldur's Gate three which I will also not even start to get into because we shouldn't take that out.

Good I, won't even ask you about it. So I'm I'm hope you're enjoying it.

I am very much. Um and yeah I, don't know. Uh oh there was one other there was a nice post on MetaTalk uh just after we we let talked last that uh was a post from from Brooklyn um suggesting the idea of an annual sorta Memorial Day for uh people who have uh moved on or died and and what not. And uh I thought that was a very nice idea and there was a

Yeah.

Mm.

Well in uh The Shoes Full of Dust I think you probably saw uh I just passed away in June and Corrid when uh did a post and uh Dylan was really really into the site and uh it's just always sad. But I I think of annual Memorial Day would be good and I'm gonna put it on my to-do list because I really feel like we should actually do it.

And to be able to like do it with intention is nice 'cause that's one of the things that I feel like came up in this thread a bit is like you know usually when we end up talking about it's because it's a shock you, know it's because we suddenly all found out rather than being able to intentionally take the time to say hey let's do some remembering on purpose at a moment of our choosing. So I think it's a really nice idea. I mean yeah I, would love to see that happen. Um

Yeah.

Um stop having up and doing this.

Yeah.

No no, but we don't have to break a record or anything. Also I turned off my air conditioning an hour and a half ago for this and I'm starting to like feel the ninety four degrees seeping into the room. So

Mm.

Nice.

Yeah. Go get go get cool.

Will do. Well it's been fucking delightful talking to you I'm I I regret it's been so long and I'm looking forward to doing it more often again.

Fantastic let's, make a blend.

Alright.

Good.

[Music]

Mm.

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