Podcast 26 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 26: Equine Stylist (2008-05-09).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary keywords

people, post, talking, filter, totally, favorites, question, sidebar, metal, year, thought, sounds, memes, link, comment, jokes, awesome, whole bunch, day, insane

Transcript

Unknown Speaker 0:07 Jessamyn Welcome to the metal filter podcast.

mathowie 0:12 Welcome to Episode 26 of the metal filter podcast this week features recaps from around metal filter with Jessamyn and myself.

Didn't even get a chance to look at jobs.

Jessamyn 0:54 I didn't look at jobs either. But jobs just like really slow moving. Like I feel like jobs just kind of doesn't sound

mathowie 1:01 so many like web jobs. So I see them all fly by. But I'm always like, Yeah, another web job. Another web designer.

Jessamyn 1:10 Oh, here's a question. When was our last podcast? Just so?

mathowie 1:13 Sure. Well, we record April 11. And we put it out on the 14th. So 14 Fish on count. Every single job has something to do with WordPress or doing things on a computer. Did you have any favorite projects? Well, my

Jessamyn 1:32 favorite project is pretty much is pretty much everybody's favorite project. But maybe we should mention it in the podcast just in case somebody didn't see. cortex is her from turf metal filter analyzer.

mathowie 1:43 Yeah, I had that. That was one of the ones I was gonna mention. Yeah, that's yeah.

Jessamyn 1:49 I don't really know what else you can say about it. Except that Oh, my God.

mathowie 1:55 Thing that cortex does is like I could I used to spend half a Saturday doing things like this. I just didn't write it down. Like, Well,

Jessamyn 2:06 maybe you did. Right. Who knows? Right?

mathowie 2:08 This is awesome. Like the Wow. Yeah.

Jessamyn 2:12 I mean, it was as popular as as Metafilter comments versus YouTube comments, and the bicycle tutor. In fact, just sort of remind people that the popular projects page is actually kind of a a good way if maybe projects is too busy for you, and you need slightly less popular but top 10 the top 10 projects is really a kind of a great page that everyone should remember.

mathowie 2:37 Oh, yeah, I forgot this existed.

Jessamyn 2:41 Exactly. Exactly.

mathowie 2:43 That bug on April 3. Yeah. Okay. I'll fix that. was some sort of bug there or something doesn't have a title. Gar. Oh, it doesn't have a title. That was there. Oh, well. They're not doing it right. Cupcake. Cupcake. Yeah. I lost it. But I have like 50,000 tabs open now. I've totally lost it.

Jessamyn 3:10 Yeah, how many? You know how many I have opened three. I used to metal filter asked me to filter and metal talk.

mathowie 3:17 Oh, I just like loaded up every one I want to talk to you just pre loaded it. I have just 30 Yeah, this

Jessamyn 3:23 is insane. This is sounds efficient. And yet

mathowie 3:27 I know it's not because Firefox only can show somebody at one time. I wonder how big you can adjust that go to life. Yeah, to fix that. Put 100 tabs across then they get tiny.

Jessamyn 3:39 Nothing ever satisfies you does it?

mathowie 3:41 Nope. Now I'm looking at my old silly her after butter eater jokes. Wow.

Jessamyn 3:48 Oh, you know, that reminds me. You were at Raphel. Con. Yeah. On on the panel. How did I never talk to you after that? How did that go? From your perspective? Did you have good time on the panel?

mathowie 3:59 I was okay. Like, I guess we should probably talk about raffle codes I missed the first day was overall I just sort of my only I saw a great keynote on day two. And then which one was that? I

Jessamyn 4:13 saw the great keynote on day one. Oh, the

mathowie 4:15 NYU woman talking about micro celebrity. It was awesome. It was like really, truly killer talk.

Jessamyn 4:23 I saw David Weinberger opening opening keynote which was pretty good. But it was in a funny room. So if you were sitting on the side, you couldn't see his slides, which were kind of like punch lines to a lot of what he was talking about. Not a disaster, but just not perfect. I like him so

mathowie 4:38 so the the woman who opened was off she was just incredible. She's like, she's like the Dana Boyd of the East Coast. Like someone who's totally studies the internet and to the to the nines, like knows everything forward and backward. And was just talking about like she had like, generally grouped meme types into like a taxonomy. Do You'd like that taste great. Yeah. So you taking this awesome scientific sort of librarian approach to how these memes are. I mean, it all broke down. And she like talked about the motivations behind certain memes and the themes present. And there's a lot of like meanness, there's a lot of homophobia. There's a lot of and like,

Jessamyn 5:16 oh, maybe I got that just from being there. Oh my god, god.

mathowie 5:18 Yeah, that was so that's the thing. Like, essentially, if I'm gonna write, like, I haven't written like a review of the conference on my site, because I really didn't like most of it, to be honest. Like, I hate to say that, but because the people behind it, they're a wonderful

Jessamyn 5:34 people. Yeah. And they're good people. I feel like

mathowie 5:37 yeah, they're awesome. super into it, like undergrads through a fucking, you know, national conference is pretty awesome. Like to undergrads, you know, on a lark six months ago, or like, yeah, what the hell, let's do this. And,

Jessamyn 5:49 and then, totally popular. And everybody Yeah, it just grew insane.

mathowie 5:53 But like, you know, there's so much. So I mean, it's part of like, the culture itself, right? Like, it's all in jokey. And it's kind of mean sometimes. And it's definitely like, homophobic. Her, like, at the end, she was like, you know, here's some certain themes, there's a lot of mean stuff. There's a lot of homophobia, there's a lot of, you know, talking about people as the other. Right, and a lot of this like, we're all fucking nerds, right? We all got beat up by bullies at some time in our life. So we go online and we become bullies. Like, what's up with that? So her message, her message at the end was like, We can do better. Like, you know, like, all you guys like Tron Guy, you know, whatever. Whoever the next Tron Guy is, like, you know, whatever you're a part of in the future. I mean, try to be more inclusive, more diverse, you know, nicer.

Jessamyn 6:40 Tron Guy was actually exceptionally gracious. And yeah, I saw him like, ask questions on panels that were like, totally interesting. And he really, you know, for like a odd old dude in a Tron suit. Like he really was like the best of like, nerd dumb as opposed to him. Some of the 4chan people who were really like hostile, alienating horrible people. Not that some of the other Fortune people weren't. But like, oh my god, at the very end, I don't even know if you stuck around for that when they like, came down with their boombox. And we're like singing racist songs into the microphone. Like, it's one thing to be on the internet and doing that. And it's totally another thing to do it in front of human beings who are looking back at you and being like, I cannot believe you're doing that in public. You're embarrassing.

mathowie 7:29 I had to leave during the second Alas, talk with the 4chan and the X, Y. KKX. Case. XKCD. And the dynasty

Jessamyn 7:40 that that like, that panel was really good.

mathowie 7:43 Yeah, I believe in last 1520 minutes, because the questions were so insanely insider baseball, like did you did you pick up on like, how incredibly insane like someone's question was like, honestly, question for Randall up. Are you gonna move to upstate New York? And like took two hours of googling to figure that out that to figure out what the fuck the question was? Yeah, the question was a reference to the very first meetup. He wanted to organize as a joke, which he did in a comic panel, as a meta comment,

Jessamyn 8:16 except gratitude, longitude, latitude, longitude, he

mathowie 8:19 got the GPS coordinates wrong. And then he updated the image to the correct ones 20 minutes after it went up. So here's something that happened three months ago for 20 minutes. And his question was in reference to the GPS, which he actually you know, looked up, it was like, and nobody explained any of these things. And everyone like went apeshit they were so they thought it was hilarious. When he asked that, well, they were so happy, right? Because just like, I just felt like a casual observer of Star Trek at trek con. Like oh my god, I'm so not one of these, like, I don't even understand the fandom here.

Jessamyn 8:56 Right? And, you know, I must admit that having there be this like human level to that sort of geeky level of meta interaction that I only find by like, co favoriting crap on meta filter with other people that I have these inside jokes with. It was neat to like sit in a room with people like that for a while. But yeah, there was a sense. I mean, the guy from 4chan was hilarious because it was clear that like he really does hang out in his basement all the time and kind of command this team of nerds and you know, and he and that's okay with him you know, random and row and dinosaur guy What was his name shrine?

mathowie 9:32 Ryan? Yeah, sounds right.

Jessamyn 9:34 Yeah, like all of them, you know, claimed that which was cool and yet yeah, it was so weird. And

mathowie 9:42 I guess as a as a conference as a whole I want it to be like about, like the, it would have been more fun if it was more like that first keynote with like, some dry mechanics of like, what worked and why and like, what brings us together? What like, Why do memes take off like what not so we can get Amen. I'm in like, because that's the other part I really didn't want to see. Thankfully, there wasn't anyone like that. I didn't want to see how do you? Yeah, people from New York ad agencies showing up and being like, yeah, how do we, like make memes take off and shit?

Jessamyn 10:15 Oh, there were people like that at my panel at South by Southwest and I was yeah, good go away.

mathowie 10:21 Yeah, so but I was thinking like, I really want Rafo con to be like this dry discussion of like anything that'd be on waxie.org Like some sort of like statistics and like, how many downloads did it take before you got on the Today Show? Like you know why? Why is the today's show still matter? Does New York Times matter? Are there enough forks of the world to like raise that

Jessamyn 10:43 I saw the day before with like the jib jab guy and the I traded my paperclip for a house guy and, and rocket boom, did actually talk about some of those numbers, which was actually pretty interesting. It was like seven guys, I think seven or eight guys from like, different Oh, the Chuck Norris. Facts about Chuck Norris guy. And they actually did like spout some numbers about like, yeah, we get this much attention. And it parlays into this kind of ad revenue and, and it was some people who were making a living and it was other people who were like, Yeah, whatever. I'm internet famous. And I'm amazed to even be here today and the paperclip guy, the Saskatchewan paperclip guy. I mean, he bought a house in Saskatchewan. I was of course just in Saskatchewan. So I'm particularly interested in it. But um, you know, he was just sort of talking about like, yeah, the internet kind of help, but I'm just kind of a deal making guide generally. So all it and and he has like a job and a normal life and a girlfriend. And so he's like, this was just a small part of me being me. The internet just means lots of other people get to kind of watch that. Yes. So that was actually a panel that was sort of more, more like, I think what you're talking about the day before?

mathowie 11:55 Yeah, the second day, it was just lots of fandom and I don't know how my panel went. I was so tired of all the boob jokes from the fart guy like, God,

Jessamyn 12:04 why isn't he just like that? I know, lazing that like Drew Curtis is FARC in a dude that actually came up

mathowie 12:11 in the talk, right? And I've told people for years, like people are a reflection of the communities they create. When people talk about art, you know, all communities like their Creator. I'm like, Drew Curtis is FARC. Like, Oh, totally is Marlon boobs and beer like?

Jessamyn 12:27 Yeah, totally. And the other guy was like 4chan, although, you know, I feel like you're like the sort of Metafilter Genesis, you know, which is now kind of grown to actually be lots of different kinds of people. Yeah, maybe not, maybe slightly differently than some of those other communities. But like, Neil did a really good job. I thought moderating and I thought you were one of those people who are like, Yeah, we just kind of like to hang out and talk together. You know, like, you weren't like Metafilter it's internet sensation. We were like it's okay.

Okay, so I have my two tabs open three, if you count recent activity. Four, if you count the admin page,

mathowie 13:25 I'm looking at the popular favorites. And there's a whole bunch of comments I hadn't seen. So I'm starting off with. I did this. I was there. I met that guy.

Jessamyn 13:35 What are you even talking about? Where are you looking at this? Can you get the popular favorites? Yeah, only look at my own favorites.

mathowie 13:42 I know I do. And then I like sometimes I listen to podcasts and like, I totally forgot some humongous thing at 200 People favorited because I didn't happen to see it. So I tried to check this once in a while.

Jessamyn 13:52 See, I just look at my own favorites. Yeah. Okay, so I have

mathowie 13:56 three of my own for my own favorites.

Jessamyn 13:59 All right. Tell me about that.

mathowie 14:03 Green porno. super popular, not just on metal filter also on blogs.

Jessamyn 14:10 You know, metal filter is a blog. Yeah.

mathowie 14:12 I just meant I saw this 35 places at the moment. It went up on metal filter, like in the same hour. Sundance Channel did a thing with Isabella Rossellini acting as if she is a bug meeting. Like various bugs in bug suits. She actually directed these little bits like it's so shut up. It's so off the wall and awesome and Isabella Rossellini is so awesome already. It's just just click on the green porno. And you can like view the little three minute basis. Like she's like, she's gonna know what you're saying. Yeah. And she's like in a suit going. I'm a praying mantis and my mate will start to eat my head and I can't stop and she's actually like, dry humping someone else in a green suit. Oh my god, the earthworm one. There's like a hostage. She was married

Jessamyn 15:00 to Martin Scorsese. Yeah, no idea. And she has an identical she has a twin. No way. Wow. And she's Ingrid Bergman's daughter. Alright. Alright. Sorry.

mathowie 15:11 This is so off the wall and insane and awesome. Which is this is yes. Yeah. The widescreen promo link basically leads to goodness.

Jessamyn 15:22 Great. And that's a I don't know how you how do you pronounce this guy's username? S T ball back?

mathowie 15:27 Oh, no, I don't think I met him. No. Yeah. Got me. st I don't know. Black

Jessamyn 15:38 back all box below? I don't know. He consistently posts like really good stuff. Oh, yeah. Um, I just thought I, you know, Hey, shut up.

mathowie 15:46 Sweet. What was your favorite others?

Jessamyn 15:51 Ah, let's see, too to

mathowie 15:59 see, I would have them in tabs already.

Jessamyn 16:02 What do you mean, you'd have them in tabs already? I don't understand why my favorites. They're like marked favorites, according to when I favorited them? Yeah,

mathowie 16:10 I think so. Yeah. Because

Jessamyn 16:12 here I've got one from Platt from 2003. But I think I mentioned that last time. One of the ones that I really liked was a little dorky, but it's about sort of local history. And it was on Patriots Day we have that like stupid holiday. Yeah. Massachusetts, and Eric B did this really good post about the the shot heard round the world and the American sort of overcoming the British colony. And it was just nice, because like Eric B does a lot of those kinds of like newsy posts, which I'm like, Oh, whatever. But like when he applies that same kind of dog ID pursuit of really interesting stuff on a topic. He actually put together something that I found personally fascinating. And since I grew up right near like Lexington, Concord,

mathowie 17:03 yeah. I learned from Meg like in the year 2000. She was like, we don't you know, she was explaining Patriot Day and how you got day off in April or something.

Jessamyn 17:12 And that was Boston Marathon. And yeah, I

mathowie 17:14 was like, What? What are you talking about? What the fuck is a Patriot Day? Like, I had never heard the term my life. Well,

Jessamyn 17:20 it's idiotic, right? Because we have like Patriot Day. And then I think 911 is now patriots. Day should be like, against the rules, right? Like, I'm sorry that holiday fails because it's too close to the name of another holiday pick again, but they didn't. And so now you say Patriot Day and people are like September and you're like, No, April,

mathowie 17:40 people. Love Patriots Day. That's so weird.

Jessamyn 17:43 One of them's Patriot Day, and one of them's Patriot today,

mathowie 17:47 I don't know if it should be a day aside from 911 day you know, like

Jessamyn 17:51 patriot. Its Patriot Day if you Google patriot. Patriot today,

mathowie 17:57 I would turn it around to like Day of Mourning not something to celebrate, but maybe STF you and stay home. Yeah, turn off CNN.

Jessamyn 18:07 Right. Don't buy anything. Oh, I'm sorry. But ya know, there's the Google article. So there's paper or Wikipedia. There's Patriot Day and Patriots Day? Yeah. Patriot Day is ours. Patriot ours. Massachusetts. Patriot Day is 911 stuff. Well see Moreno Oh, wait, Patriots Day is you? I see is me. Well, is is the topic of Eric B's post.

mathowie 18:38 It day. It was no, that's what people are trying to call 911 which is ridiculous. Okay, well, they

Jessamyn 18:43 are George Bush was totally like, that's what it's called. Yeah,

mathowie 18:46 20% of the country would agree 80% wouldn't.

Jessamyn 18:51 I know. You know, the other posts that I really liked and I have a hard time sort of even putting my head around it except that just it makes me sort of enjoy the medical community for talking to them about stuff was piece Mealies lightbulb post. I didn't see that. Well, it's um oh, let me let me sort of remember it's on my it's this kind of fancy flash website about this sort of flash website about

mathowie 19:26 getting rid of incandescent

Jessamyn 19:28 ink. Yeah, incandescent bulbs and it's unscrew america.org See, to funny joke, right? Yeah. So it just sort of amuses me and it's, uh, let's see. hit spacebar to navigate it plays music and

mathowie 19:46 it looks like the Yellow Submarine kind of artwork crazy.

Jessamyn 19:54 Yes, it's just and it's just sort of thoughtful, but then there's a whole bunch of people talking about it. sort of the nickels and dimes, the nickel and diming dealing with compact fluorescent and LED bulbs and I actually learned a whole bunch of stuff about light bulbs. Yeah, why I love metal filter.

mathowie 20:13 Every time it comes to people. Yeah, yeah, every time it comes up on AskMe filter I learned about like lumens and color in death indices and like how many Kelvins like the color of you should look for in your bulbs to get them to look like incandescent and stuff?

Jessamyn 20:29 Yeah, yeah, no, totally. And so So I I sort of, I sort of really just enjoyed it. And you know, piecemealing I believe he stormed off in a huff briefly. And it's now back and I'm happy to see him back. I wanted to mention,

mathowie 20:44 I'm trying to think what should I do next? I love this like, bizarro art project based on something everyone's familiar with in America, which is just someone right drawing pictures on money that are kind of funny. And it was

Jessamyn 21:04 oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Peanut Butter Washington. I enjoyed

mathowie 21:07 that. I was about to like, I was gonna post this I guess three hours after it was posted like I didn't see the post yet. And I saw it on Flickr or something. I was like, oh my god, this is so funny. It started yeah, there's so many great ones like Greenland's

Jessamyn 21:22 stupid Peanut Butter Jelly Time.

mathowie 21:27 Their level these are all this thing is so awesome. I guess this is all technically illegal, but it's totally awesome.

Jessamyn 21:36 defacing the currency you mean? Yeah.

mathowie 21:40 This is like so crazy. It's just, it's just like pens and Sharpies. And it's so funny as shit.

Jessamyn 21:47 And there's so many like, kinda air like, Oh, here's like six beautiful pictures on Flickr. It's really fun to see people using Flickr to do crap like this. Yeah, it's like, here's something I made and I think you'll like it.

mathowie 22:01 Here's 150 Like highs so funny. Screaming money.

Jessamyn 22:07 I mean, peanut butter, Washington. That's hilarious. Yeah, that's the banana.

mathowie 22:12 Zombie Jackson. Let's see the zombie one. Like John Waters. They put a little pencil mustache on him.

Jessamyn 22:20 Spider Man Washington. That's pretty good. Zombie Lincoln. Yeah, it's just a yes. So hilarious. And that was a charming post. I agree completely.

mathowie 22:29 Do you have any other metal filter favorites? I got a couple metal filter favorites left? No, I

Jessamyn 22:36 have more asked me favorite.

mathowie 22:38 Under the like, all time favorite category of metal filter posts, which is shit I didn't know existed before. I saw some insane encyclopedic. Yeah, Encyclopedia ish.

Jessamyn 22:50 PDF. PDF,

mathowie 22:53 a really good post about someplace I'd never heard of, or something that happened I'd never heard of. So. One of them was awesome. The Tunnel Town and Alaska is kick ass. There's this town.

Jessamyn 23:03 Let me let me guess who this is by? Oh, no. Is it by one?

mathowie 23:07 It's the it's Oh, that's an interesting story.

Jessamyn 23:10 We met we met him at the meetup. Yeah, it's

mathowie 23:13 Raphael guy from the Boston meetup. And Ella Lello. One of the links goes to Alan Taylor Co Co G Ach, or however you say that he was also on the site who used to live in Alaska, who was supposed to go to the meetup or something. But I forgot to invite him and said Raphael Anywho. This is not to invite him to the meetup. It was about to and I was like, Ah, I forgot I was in town. I've always wanted to meet him. Yeah, but so it turns out like four or five people on metal filter have been there. And they had these awesome stories. And oh, cool Kodiak Island to love Jack. He left a big comment. So it's yeah, it's this bizarre tiny what like war, World War Two town. It only has how many residents 182 But it has room for like 1000s of people from a long time ago. But you can only get to it through a train tunnel that only is open twice a day to traffic for a short window. And it's this this most isolated place in the world kind of and it's only something like what like 50 Miles 60 Miles from Anchorage, but there's mountains in the way and it basically takes like days to get to it and back. Ah, oh yeah. You couldn't even get a car there until the year 2000. Like that's when

Jessamyn 24:30 you know doesn't have any roads that go there and Junos you know, big

mathowie 24:35 Yeah, this is a place with not a single car until like eight years ago.

Jessamyn 24:39 Oh wow.

mathowie 24:40 And so it has this two mile train tunnel that you get like you have to wait in between these two trains is when everyone can go like drive right now drive drive drive before the train. Or you get there by boat like, like cruise ships and stop there. So all these people have these awesome stories of so there's just awesome for like something I didn't know exists. Did

Jessamyn 25:01 that sounds great? Oh, I found the one of the thing that I liked was the Brodsky's ways of seeing posts. I don't know if this is something that everybody sort of had to deal with, but like going to like liberal arts college in New England, like everybody had to read ways of seeing, and it was all about, like, you know, the semiotics of kind of the watcher and the watched and the other and whatever. But it sounds like a whole bunch of sort of wanker. Yeah. You know, in college, it kind of seemed like it. But there's actually a BBC documentary that was written and hosted by the guy who wrote the original book. And it's, it's up on YouTube and a whole bunch of in a whole bunch of little short bits. And so it was like one it was cool this, check that out on YouTube and being sort of older than I was in college being like, oh, there's some really interesting parts to this. And then also, once again, just a bunch of people having actually sort of intelligent, interesting conversation about it. I enjoyed it. That's cool. Shout out to Bronski.

mathowie 26:06 Lastly, for things I didn't know existed, I had no idea there was a green movement in the world of golf. Like myself golf posts, oh, my sad golf posts go up, I go, Oh, this is gonna end badly because it's like putting up an SUV post like, LOL golfers. Yeah, but it was all about like, how can we add? How can we inject like some sort of, you know, good environmental principles into like, you know, the care of golf courses. They're like one of the worst abusers of pesticides and water and all sorts of bad stuff. They're

Jessamyn 26:39 less absorbent than asphalt.

mathowie 26:43 They're like, there's actually it's actually like at the US you know, Golf Association like this isn't like some crackpot hippies trying to take down golf courses. This is like the actual golf Association's themselves going like Hey, dude, like we need to lighten up and we need to like change the way we do shit and like,

Jessamyn 27:00 well, and I suppose if you're a professional golfer, that's got to be like a weird have a light hazard to know that your ankle deep and pesticides like you know, six days a week seriously, I bet they get all sorts of ankle diseases. Don't you think? Yeah,

mathowie 27:13 it's probably

Jessamyn 27:16 Yeah. And the the thread is? Well,

mathowie 27:19 it is it is but like I just didn't even know that this world exists. I didn't No idea. There's anyone talking about ethics or environmental ethics with golf. That wasn't you know, what you guess?

Jessamyn 27:32 Yeah, I remember reading about that somewhere else. So magazine that I picked up and I was like, Oh, interesting. Insert that on the list of shit I've never thought about before. So, yes, used,

Unknown Speaker 27:43 it makes me Cast it down as provoking Mona's at least the DJs let them choose it, don't rely on the radio we gave up many years ago, there's a lot of good music that never gets used, it makes because typing down is provoking Mona's. And these the DJs let them choose it don't rely on the radio we gave up many years ago, there's

Unknown Speaker 28:04 a lot of music that never gets used, it makes me cause my cheek owners provoking Mona's at least

mathowie 28:10 over on AF Metafilter. What have you got?

Jessamyn 28:13 I have to Well, I have a couple like things that I liked on on AskMe Metafilter, just because there was a whole bunch of kind of hold on one second, nice. People contributing, including did your family seeing together? And you didn't see that? No, I didn't see it. And it was just a whole bunch of people talking about Yeah, did you grew up sort of singing with your family? And how old are you and whatever, because my family always used to like, sing a bunch, like my dad would play guitar and people would sing. And I didn't have any sense of whether that's something people do, or people don't do. It's just kind of a nice thread about people talking about it.

mathowie 28:52 That's always like, childhood stories and songs. Like, you know, I guess if dad plays a guitar that makes it a lot easier. I can't imagine I ever sang with my parents after the age of like, two.

Jessamyn 29:05 Yeah, well, and a lot of people talked about, like singing with their like little, little children. And then yeah, the question is, how do you how do you sort of keep that up, or, or keep doing it? And then in another sort of noise and sound related post, there's the I'm looking for, oh, I saw a white white noise recording. And Joshua, who I met at the San Francisco meetup actually was like, oh, here, I made this five years ago. Take it home. And how

mathowie 29:33 long is it I saw that I was like, man, that'd be awesome out like an hour. I want the an hour of the actual beach like waves crashing for an hour. Like from Hawaii,

Jessamyn 29:43 we do that you probably do that. This one's rain. And it's not that long, but I downloaded it and I've been listening to it actually, when it's not raining here and the neighbor's dog is barking or whatever the heck like it's really nice to sort of put on and just

mathowie 29:58 sure I'll just have to like splice it in for this I think I should get a coat. I think I have to. Okay. I saw that I was like, Yeah, I was. And you know, I was in New York. I did this like sound walk thing through Central Park blindfolded. It was with a sound engineer who basically goes out and makes recordings like this. He goes out and records birds in nature. Sweet. Nice. So yeah, he always has like, awesome stuff. Like, here's Alaska. Like, just sounds incredible. You soak it all in. And here's, he's like, David Attenborough live, you know, he's like, here is the googoo bird doing its mating call and plays it and it's always amazing. But definitely made me think like, I want to like, take recordings of vacations. And then when I get home, I can play whatever

Jessamyn 30:53 it really loud volume so that you can't hear you

mathowie 30:56 know, I'll just like remember everything from the vacation. Like, here's what Hawaii sounded like for like one hour on a Tuesday or something. Even if it's you know, nothing.

Jessamyn 31:07 Right? I get that way. Sometimes just watching the dosai commercials, you know?

mathowie 31:12 Oh, you think Corona? Yeah.

Jessamyn 31:14 Oh, Corona. Their branding is shit. Yeah. But just being like, oh, yeah, I remember this when

mathowie 31:21 mine hit this one was cool is I met this person at a party like last year. So if someone doing like a I mean, it's kind of weird skirting the lines of?

Jessamyn 31:34 Well, I guess it's Gus. Gus. Gus is my friend. Yeah, I

mathowie 31:38 met him at a party last night. She said lady lady, right. I was like, ask us doesn't seem right. It's a guy. Chilean chili? Yeah, it was a girl. Yes. So I met her at a party last Christmas right after the metal filter meet up with Adam Savage one. That she said, yeah, she found my posts like a year ago, where I was like mocking people who fell into some blog post thinking that they were talking to someone on a TV show. And then people started responding to me as if I was on the TV show, even though I was clearly mocking other people. And it was all we just talked for, like an hour about, like how people just don't read and, and how, like, the internet is an appliance. So like a lot of people, it's presented to them that way that you and people type anything into a bar, go to Google, you type some stuff into the box, you push the button that tells and like if you wanted to talk to Marlon Brando, even though he's dead, you know, you put more I want to talk to you push the button in the you're talking to him, like and if you see a comment form, you are talking to him. It's just like email in heaven. Yeah. So you know, I mean, a lot of this is natural. And she's trying to figure out like, is it an age thing? Is it a knowledge level thing? Are these all new users? Are these all very old users that aren't learning much? Or something? Like, what is the thread that binds the people that would think a blog post about a TV show was, you know, written by the person who's on the TV show?

Jessamyn 33:06 Well, we get that a lot in the comment form on AskMe. Edit filter, people just type their question into the comment box. And we're like, no, it's a blog. Yeah, you closed a question.

mathowie 33:16 Could you imagine I mean, but you know, if you've never programmed anything your life, you'd think I guess if there's 100 questions on asthma filter day, they're probably all just mail them in and then the post and for those people, and I'm going to do the same like, I'm always amazed, and we will just get like an email saying, I need this very specific part to this refrigerator. In in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Which refrigerator repair store should I call like, they're like insanely specific and weird. And think that's what how metal filter works. Which is

Jessamyn 33:50 right. I think the the contact form we think we got today was like, I need to know how to translate this into Spanish for the best mom ever.

mathowie 33:59 It was like, you could just use Google. It wasn't that long of like a single sentence.

Jessamyn 34:03 And I was like, your mom has done a bad job. Yeah, you do not understand anything. I'm sorry. Give me your mom's email address. I will call her on the phone. I mean, I hope that like that's an 11 year old. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Oh, wait. Oh, wait. So wait, sorry. Okay.

mathowie 34:24 Back to gas. So this thing was she's collecting stories from people that have found um, there's zillions of these instances on the web

Jessamyn 34:32 where websites like GM baby I think it's LinkedIn or profile Yeah.

mathowie 34:35 And she's always looking for you know, stories that she can so she collect more data essentially, is this for I think a PhD thesis of you know, if you stumble upon a post or someone's like, you know, I hate Montel Williams in the comments are all like, Montel you shouldn't have yelled that girl today. Like, someone just clearly isn't getting it like, drop it drop her line it was it gum baby.com or something It

Jessamyn 35:00 just Yeah, it's in our it's in her profile or.org or something. It's

mathowie 35:03 It's like she was trying to come up with like a honey pot experiment to like put up the perfect blog post to attract people from Google that think that she is someone from TV or famous. Interesting. And she can get their email and talk to them about it like, you know, a week later, like, hey, remember that time you thought you're talking to Lionel Richie? Well, it turns out I'm a student doing this project. And why did you think it was Lionel Richie? And you know, right. Well,

Jessamyn 35:28 good luck. It's hard to do that stuff. Yeah. She went back and forth with me helping her kind of craft the question just to make sure it wasn't just like, please answer my survey. Yeah. And I hope she got she got some good. Some good advice from

mathowie 35:41 Yeah, everyone I know, who's blogged a long time knows a story of this. But like, she was quizzing me at this party, and I was like, ah, you know, I had to look up some of the stuff. I remember this one, like, you know, I couldn't imagine if I could find them ever again. But

Jessamyn 35:56 well, then it's hard to then dig them up. Because all you remember is that it was crazy. But you can't, you know, it's very difficult to sort of remember why.

mathowie 36:04 Yeah, what was that funny thing six months ago by someone who thought someone was on TV, like, you can't even remember what the show was or the person or

Jessamyn 36:11 the words and yeah, I did. I blogged about it. Yeah, exactly. Oh, and so favorite. How can I convince my wife that living in a yurt would be fun while I'm in medical school? Oh, yeah. That was cool. It was cool. Especially because I put it on Twitter because it made me laugh. And then the guy who posted the question was like, Hey, I mean, he was fine with it, obviously, but like, and his wife sounds like a very nice person. But all the answers were like, Dude, don't don't

mathowie 36:43 you're just going off down Oregon coast, a year, the word like what your means is got such a variance. Because it's just sort of like taken off on the Oregon coast with the National Parks state parks national parks have your to can stay in. Yeah, but some of the state parks have like these crazy yurts with carpeting, electricity, heat and air conditioning, like their hotel rooms that just happened to be there. round circular. Yeah. And then other parts are like it's, it's, it's wood with Canvas in a circle. That's all you're getting. It's essentially a permanent tent. But then other ones are like, yeah, drywall. It's like, it's a hotel room.

Jessamyn 37:24 Think drywall means you're not. Yeah, that's what I

mathowie 37:27 think some of these yurts are insanely nice on this kit on the coast of Oregon.

Jessamyn 37:32 They better be their freakin expensive. I was always like, looking to go hang out with one I wanted to have it. You're up in my place in Vermont. Well, to buy one No, but like to stay on one and the Oh yeah, they're actually cheap to buy. But the thing is, they cost 10 grand, but then you've got to like build a platform, insulated, do all the stuff. So like, you know, you're looking at a lot more cash to actually have one and then whether zoning is gonna let you I wanted to have one in Seattle. And it's like no, against the rules against the rules. And then by the time I got to Vermont, I was like, you know, living in a year with like three feet of snow on top of it, and maybe not my dream as much as I had thought. Yeah. But I enjoyed the thread. And I thought people were good natured with the guy. Generally speaking. I've got one more that I was in love with. That was the your oh, what

mathowie 38:26 I was just thinking the your thing wasn't so crazy. It was like asking if you should go live in a trailer. Like the most during medical school? Yeah. Well, you know, instead of an apartment, like should you throw your money in an apartment, or she'd throw your money,

Jessamyn 38:39 like asking if you should live in a tree.

mathowie 38:42 It could be stable enough to be lived in, but that's fine.

Jessamyn 38:47 But that it would take a lot of effort. And I think that's what people said, they're like, dude, if you're totally committed to it, good. But if you're thinking your girlfriend's just going to enjoy it when you're off doing medical school stuff. Think again, it'll be labor intensive. I think that's what mostly people submit. So this is my last favorite one. Oh, you're a member of insert profession here. How insert wacky generalization and misguided curiosity here where like, people ask you what you do. And then they ask you some question based on a total non understanding of what you do. Yeah, like, Oh, so you're a social worker? Do you have to take people's kids away from the first answer? Tons of librarians and then do you have

mathowie 39:29 a librarian one like, do shush people all the time?

Jessamyn 39:32 Blah, blah, blah, Dewey Decimal System? I have a really overdue library book. Why do we need those when everything's on Google? My first librarian was a total bitch.

mathowie 39:44 Is my wife's in psychology but like crazy, like, you know how neurons fire in your brain psychology?

Jessamyn 39:53 Researcher Oh, hello.

mathowie 39:54 You are in psychology. What is your favorite Dr. Laura thing like what was If God was my personality like or like wish, right you do therapy like it's, it's, it's a name. It's always about like radio psychology every first thing I hear.

Jessamyn 40:13 Yeah, and that was Dr. K total. Like, I have a real job I

mathowie 40:17 get it like people go like, Oh, your wife's a psychologist. Oh, is she trying to diagnose you all the time? God?

Jessamyn 40:27 Yeah, well, yeah, there was somebody who's like a grad student studying philosophy, which is really kind of cool. And everybody like makes fun of them. You're gonna be a

mathowie 40:35 philosopher. What do you do? Ask people if you want fries with that all the time?

Jessamyn 40:40 Oh, my God, the fried jokes. totally obnoxious pizza delivery jokes. That's that's sort of Oh, you have a PhD? Oh,

mathowie 40:47 air traffic control? Yeah. Do you wave signs on the runways? Or do you sit in the tower?

Jessamyn 40:55 Right, but right, because those people are really air traffic controllers. But it was just totally fun. Because there's a lot of people like there's this user poll was actually like styles horses hair for a job, just

mathowie 41:07 scroll down. Was that a joke? comment to tell to get people off your trail? No, that's really what they do.

Jessamyn 41:15 equine stylist, epidemiologists. Mathematicians. It just always makes me like really happy to see all these fascinating things that other people that other people do also. Bartender so when are you going to get a real job?

mathowie 41:31 Yes, do this anymore. Oh, yeah. What do you do for a living? I tell people run this website and make money on the internet kind of. Oh, so you run a porn site. Like that's what I get. Like, if you make money on the internet equals like, porn. That's the only way to make money on the internet.

Jessamyn 41:51 Or scam scam. Scam artist,

mathowie 41:53 right, right. Yeah.

Jessamyn 41:55 So they're actually complimenting you by implying that you're doing a porn

mathowie 41:59 site better than an SEO person, but I'm a porn person.

Jessamyn 42:04 We should make some good T shirts.

mathowie 42:06 Stay at home. Mom do Oh, man. When are you gonna go back to work? That's horrible.

Jessamyn 42:11 It is horrible. It's like I raised two wonderful children Shut up.

mathowie 42:16 Yeah, I don't know. shitheads like your kid. Oh, I know. Urban Planning I make maps. Wow. People ask Dr. Dan's about traffic. I'm remember remember? Me saying My favorites are like this is just damn handy. If you're sick of the city, you want to move away and you want no sight lines of any building of say 100 meters in height. 100 feet tall. How far away do you have to get? Oh, it's actually answered on Wikipedia with the math and everything. It's like 36 kilometers away from 100 meter building. I think you'll never see it like the curvature of the earth will make up for that.

Jessamyn 43:05 That's pretty sweet.

mathowie 43:06 This person want to know like how far out in the suburbs do I need to go to never see the city ever again on the horizon? It's like 22 miles. We'll probably do it. It's It's pretty awesome. Oh, all I've got left. I thought it has like five things with metal filter saved. I've got no

Jessamyn 43:26 see I was happy because I had like two or three in each section, which seemed like a normal amount.

mathowie 43:30 All I have left is this thing. This is super popular. Whoa, yeah, basically on and I totally missed that. Like what are some links to some great online nonfiction pieces. I never even read the post. It's based off this post is probably the most popular thing in the last month on meta filter. It's insane piece about following a soldier who died from Baghdad all the way to Indiana. It's like, you know, 10,000 words. And like I couldn't even Yeah, start reuse. So

Jessamyn 44:05 Oh, and by Darren Burfoot, who's a generally good poster now

mathowie 44:09 and Esquire, which is got lots of good things. I think I hate Esquerra. Because if you load it, it was loading a giant ad over this over the article, and I couldn't get rid of it. It's not doing it to me right now. But

Jessamyn 44:22 there's the most stuff I print subscription to Esquire. It's the

mathowie 44:26 most obnoxious when you load the page. It's like, subscribe to Esquire. It's covering the title and half the page and there's a tiny club. Oh

Jessamyn 44:34 my God, tell those people to talk to Paul Ford.

mathowie 44:37 And then and there's all these weird casino looking ads on the side just boobs everywhere and I'm just trying to read about like a dead soldier. So yeah, lark and it's like 11 pages long so it's pretty fucking insane. Anyways, people thought it was the greatest like writing in a while so sure. So this person was asking I suppose I'll turn like were some other off Some online things like cool things, they're all online. And you know, you don't have to wait for Amazon to show up. You know, just click on you can just like, click through that. Yeah, I mean, there's like, hundreds of hours of things to read here.

Jessamyn 45:13 Wow, that's cool. That's really cool. I should just go through with some like, down them all Firefox, put them on my laptop for the next time I travel,

mathowie 45:22 like your laptop will be another pound heavier with the 10s of 1000s

Jessamyn 45:27 Wasn't there and asked Metafilter post about that at some point like, like, whether or not having stuff on your hard drive is actually heavier than not having

mathowie 45:36 someone asked that that's funny. But like

Jessamyn 45:39 a long time ago, it's a classic, you know, what is the weight of the human soul kind of thing? I'll have to see if I could track it down. Not in a long time. Like the

mathowie 45:47 physical bits on the discs actually gained weight. That would be interesting. I guess

Jessamyn 45:53 we shouldn't if I look up, wait, I'm just going to find a whole bunch of Yeah,

mathowie 45:57 we should mention those super popular comments on the sidebar in case anyone missed it. The THC one, the drug screener, person who worked in one of the prominent drug screening labs telling you how drug screening works with urine and hair. And like if you smoke a lot of pot how you basically can't why you can't kind of escape it. But what are some things you can do to kind of temporarily thwart it if you just were at a party or tried at once or something like that? Fascinating information.

Jessamyn 46:30 And the oh hey, the sidebar on meta filter? Do we I think we answered a meta TOC question fairly recently about where the link is for past sidebar stuff.

mathowie 46:42 Oh, did I even I never got a working archive of all the posts.

Jessamyn 46:51 We should go get one at some point that would be

mathowie 46:53 I couldn't figure out I couldn't figure out like a way to make blogger output a proper archive showing all the months. blogger has like a whole new weird template system. You know where you have like one template for everything? And

Jessamyn 47:09 am I an admin on the sidebar? Yeah. Can you hear it out? Okay. I'll take a look. I think it was so there's others. Oh, what

mathowie 47:16 it wants to publish a single file. I can't seem to find it on the file system like sidebar, archive dot HTML, and I can't find it showing up anywhere. So I have no idea how it would be. All right, we'll go we'll go look for

Jessamyn 47:29 work. But yeah, this was somebody talking about the consumer price index, this other link that you're talking about, about how the consumer price index changes. And this was somebody who actually says the project was a major undertaking for an understaffed office in an agency that stores its production data on a Vax, in New Jersey running SS six, an old version of faff. Yes, it's a very old version of SAS. And faxes are ancient and everything else. But this is somebody who actually helped do the math that went into the consumer price index explaining why the article that's linked to doesn't really have its numbers.

mathowie 48:10 Yeah, we got a lot of like a alarmist. I mean, I don't think just on metal filter, just in general, people love talking about the economy and how our, you know, setter setting ourselves up to another 1929 Does disasters depression any day now? It's gonna happen. So I think you can sell newspapers saying that, and I think we're, we are we've messed up a lot of things lately, in this decade.

Jessamyn 48:34 But a lot of not you and I personally, people

mathowie 48:38 to tarp, money and lowered interest rates for the hell of it. But yeah, a lot of the posts on metaphysics are like, kind of doomsday. Like, this is why and they turn into a lot of like economy fights with people, you know, on metal filter going, you know, this one's too pessimistic. This one isn't optimistic enough for you know, this is great to hear like inside. I'm the guy that wrote the software that this article is based on is complete bull.

Jessamyn 49:09 Right? Yes, no, I thought I thought that was very good. And people should pay attention the sidebar or read the RSS feed, which we do have in the or the Twitter feed. In the FAQ, is a Twitter feed the Twitter feed of the sidebar, you don't have that? What are you even talking about?

mathowie 49:30 Twitter. Let me find it. It's like mi fi side blog is the Twitter name. But let me find the When did you set this up? Where have I found an RSS to Twitter parser like eons ago, and I was like, hey, this would be kind of useful. So I think about 50 or 100 people nofilter members, follow it on Twitter. So like, you know, there's only one post every what, two, three days at the most, which works fine for Twitter. It's not like people asked, Hey, why don't you put all All of why don't you put Oh, it's just me fi versus mi fi on Twitter. Here it is twitter.com/mi fi, and it's just the sidebar. And since it's only like once every two three days it works out awesome for Twitter. It's not too much people wanted every Twitter post going every day as medical to our medical posts going to Twitter, and I thought that was kind of crazy.

Jessamyn 50:25 That sounds horrible. Yeah, no, this is great. This is great. I had no idea this exists. Yeah, so

mathowie 50:29 some people think some people like using Twitter serve as an RSS feed reader they're asking me to do this sounds like I don't even want to do that. And then as I was looking at the tools to make it automated, I was like, Oh, here's like, I can just plug the sidebar feed into it and that would be

Jessamyn 50:45 sporadic. And that makes this cute little widget. That's nice. Yeah.

mathowie 50:49 That's pretty useful. Cool. And if you click on a link junkies if you click on a link now you end up with like this weird just it doesn't click to the link that's being talked about but it just clicks to the post from the sidebar and then you can figure it out.

Jessamyn 51:06 That's okay. Yeah, I think that's okay. That's cool. Very cool. Fun. Fun.

mathowie 51:14 I think that's about it.

Jessamyn 51:15 Sounds good

Unknown Speaker 51:33 this time be strong. This time, there will be wrong this time this time she'll stay now, ball has no summer star I still I still love she feel the same way she feels the same. This town this town has changed. She don't she don't feel the same take me away way. Take me home with you. Take me anywhere but here. Make stay sober this town has gone down I love this town. This town this time of year. is cold. And she is not here. She feels the same. She feels say this town. This town has changed. She don't she don't feel the same. This town this past change. I did feel safe