Podcast 27 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 27: Bigger than a breadbox (2008-05-30).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary keywords

people, post, totally, thread, shoes, mixtape, weezer, gary snyder, filter, thought, nice, web, mention, favorite, set, running, big, read, handbrake, super

Transcript

Unknown Speaker 0:00 and gentlemen, welcome to the Metafilter odd dysfunctional families they produce dyslexic presidents destroyed the resonance of bop bop bop bop bop bop bop just to keep our brains inside

mathowie 0:45 Welcome to Episode 27 of the Metafilter podcast this week includes recaps from Jessamyn and myself

Jessamyn 0:57 I've got a Weezer song stuck in my head because I was looking at that Weezer post again

mathowie 1:03 Oh, I missed it. These are ways or ways

Jessamyn 1:06 oh you are sad it was good you got the music's that I sent you right yeah, sounds I thought were good. Oh, yeah.

mathowie 1:16 Video

Jessamyn 1:19 Yeah, and it was just a fun I don't know it's sort of it's like Raphel con and like a three minute video.

mathowie 1:24 Yeah, it was a I think it was half loved and half hated online it seemed and I'm sure metadata

Jessamyn 1:32 Well, yeah.

mathowie 1:34 Yeah, you were like oh, that's so cool. Bunch of you know, web memes the other half like Oh, stupid old corporate been trying to be relevant but a scam and a bunch of people don't even get paid for being online and stuff.

Jessamyn 1:50 Well, except part of the thing was I mean, did you notice about that video that like they actually had the people in the video doing their thing? It wasn't just like they did screen captures of their YouTube video. There was actually Chris Crocker with the Mentos and Diet Coke guys. Yeah, fucking around. Yeah, which I thought took it to a new level. People mentioned that the Barenaked Ladies did a version of it earlier and I have to say, Yeah, Barenaked Ladies got their first Weezer did it best and it's a fun stupid song. Yeah, people who hate pop music. I'm suspicious of them. Don't you think?

mathowie 2:23 Yeah, yeah, it's it's exhausting. Who's got the time to hate pop music. Supposed to be I didn't see Miss South Carolina. She must be Oh, alright. She has a sash and she's

Jessamyn 2:37 she's she's blending. She's using the blender from Will It Blend?

mathowie 2:41 Oh, yeah. Such as such.

Jessamyn 2:45 You can actually watch these things and talk whereas I have to just describe them or maybe draw you a picture using sketch or something. My broadband my stupid broadband um Up Up, up, up. So what are we on? 2627 2827 ish.

mathowie 3:10 There's probably been a ton of meetups. I saw one in Vermont.

Jessamyn 3:16 Yeah, we had a meet up. Oh my god, we had a totally fun meet up this weekend. It was like, I don't know seven of us. So it was like terrible and turtle girl who live up the road. And then stinks No. And the pink superhero were in town. Like doing kind of country things, which is always funny when you take people from the city and set them loose in the country. And they're like, Oh, my God, it's really quiet here. Oh my god. It's full of bugs here. But it was totally fun to hang out with them. And then Googly and pickled bird came down from the mountains. They like work in Montreal, but they've got a house near here. And of course, like Googly and I know the same people from Seattle from like, 1993 and probably knew each other. And then I know and then sequential rode his bike up from Connecticut.

mathowie 4:01 Oh, that's what I remembered. It's been notable. 70 miles each way to get to a meet up. That's pretty cool.

Jessamyn 4:10 Yeah, well, he kind of like lifts sort of, he's got stuff in Connecticut, but kind of lives in Boston area, and was coming through to see people and I was like, Yeah, whatever. You know, I've got this sort of House of guestrooms and so yeah, he totally rode his bike up and, and yeah, then we sat around eating like french fries with Alfredo sauce and bake in some delicious beer. It was good did and then. And then we just sat by the river and hung out and then went back to my place for beer. And then yeah, it was not a not a super late meetup. But it was really fun. There's lots of pictures called chef sent me and I'd hit that T shirt, which I wore proudly in one of the in one of the pictures which I feel like I should mention. Thank you cool, Jeff. But yeah, it was just it was just like whatever at dinner and beer meetup It was totally fun. Wow, there was a point where me Meet Up giant Portland meetup.

mathowie 5:01 There's a New York meetup on the same day that New Yorkers were not. I

Jessamyn 5:05 know we were gonna call them. But you know what, none of our cell phones worked where we were

mathowie 5:10 about so far out of the way you are. I mean, there's six people. Yeah. Yeah.

Jessamyn 5:19 I have to walk to the end of my driveway to make a cell phone call now, now that all the leaves are up on all the trees. Yeah. I don't know why it should matter. But it seems to

mathowie 5:29 lead. It's kill. But yeah, over stations dead. I can't believe Yeah, I was. Bummed I missed the Portland meet up. I guess I should have told people I'd be in Chicago. But there was just a

Jessamyn 5:41 taco filter right? Or barely? Or were you talking about making money making money online? sort of

mathowie 5:49 it was sort of like making a business without taking money.

Jessamyn 5:55 Oh, without being a VC dick. I remember. Yeah.

mathowie 5:57 Without taking on in this. So the scary thing was like, when I was doing research for it, I was tons of VC people came up to you. Yeah, what? No, I was talking to Andy Bell, we were like, Let's think of the most successful projects or it's just like one person or two people or little three person companies. And we sat around for like an hour or just throwing out names. And we you just search for the name, space and then bought or funded. And it was like everything big, super successful, that ended up taking 3 million or $5 million, or $10 million to get bigger. Or they sold NBC or something like it was unbelievable. I couldn't think of anyone making you know, anyone with like, 1,000,010 million hit site that wasn't so that didn't sell out in quotes.

Jessamyn 6:49 Dude, that's like you and Lyndon LaRouche, you know, he went to jail because he wouldn't sell you out.

mathowie 6:56 So the talk was okay, it was pretty good. But there's only like, 20 people in it. I felt like man, like I was at none of them blogged it because everyone's twittering now. Fuck. Like, I did a Google blog search just for web visions, the name of the conference super unique. There's like maybe 10 blog posts on the entire web about like, Hey, I went to weird visions. There's a billion things on Twitter. Yeah. Like Twitter is killing blogging. I mean, it kills my own blogging. I'll admit that, you know, Flickr killed my photo blog, like, Twitter just kills blogging. They're just like, it's so low efforts, like, oh, I can just 20 seconds to drop something, even an SMS and I'm done. I don't like research something, write paragraphs and make arguments.

Jessamyn 7:42 It's really the writing paragraphs. It's the killer, isn't it? Although I'm always surprised anytime there's a Twitter post on meta filter, whether it's an asked Metafilter I guess there's been one today that grouse did that hasn't been destroyed yet. But like, these people, like come in, and they're like, and I'm like, Dude, what the fuck like you don't like segways? Don't ride them, like problem solve, you know, like that this sort of anti Twitter like, why even bother hating it? Like there's nothing there? You know what I mean? Like you like it, or you don't like it? Who gives a fuck? I don't? I don't, I don't know.

podcast 27

mathowie 8:30 Has there been any new stuff? Oh, yeah, we added the public comments to projects. So projects a lot more lively.

Jessamyn 8:39 And yeah, people seem kind of stoked about that. Actually, I thought that was pretty nifty. I thought

mathowie 8:43 people would be like, Wow, but I thought they'd either be saying I told you so. Or they would be saying, like, I don't know, this is shocking and horrible change. And you didn't prepare us for it. But it's not to confuse

Jessamyn 8:56 people before to have like, private, private comments. Yeah. So yeah, I just feel like this sort of fixes a problem and makes the site more consistent and doesn't break anything. I mean, whatever. There was, like one person who was like, Can I post my thing again? So that I can ask

mathowie 9:15 you Yeah, yeah, we've, I've had an argument offline with someone about that to about like, it posted something a month and a half ago, but they rewrote the entire thing. And they launched relaunched it last week, but it had looked like it had looked for like two years. I'm like, Yeah, but you just like the same post? Well, it's the same exact URL, you know, is on projects that look like the person just made a new post a month later to the same site. But actually, you know, it was the old site a month ago, but I was like, just wait three months, maybe I don't know. Like you had your channel

Jessamyn 9:52 and one of the things we did learn, yeah, from that post is that like, very few people are reading projects and maybe this will make more of them. Read it. Yeah. Oh, and the other thing that's coming up actually, is that we're gonna have a music challenge for June I've been working flapjacks at midnight basically handled the organizing, choosing the themes and everything else. And so cortex and I are figuring out exactly how to link it and put it up there. But we've got one in the hopper, it's going to go live on June 1, and there's going to be like, a real, a real music challenge back again. So that's going to be cool.

mathowie 10:26 So we're gonna do it like we did before, like call out at the top and link to some discussion.

Jessamyn 10:32 I think so yeah. But there's three different choices. So we're gonna, there may be a page for like, extra info, like there was last time the cortex had built cortex and are going back and forth on that. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, June, there'll be a new challenge. I don't know what happened to me. It just went away from me, but June's coming up. June one new challenge. Oh, and for anybody who possibly missed it, though, I don't think anybody really could. We have a midnight mod in a different timezone now. All right, yeah. Back up peaks kind of a big deal. And my, that's how I pronounce it. But that's really good news. Not only because Ricardo is awesome, but also because he's in London, which means that he is occasionally awake when all of us are sleeping.

mathowie 11:25 Yep. And it's already worked out once or twice a week since it started.

Jessamyn 11:31 He's put out a couple fires caught a few doubles and, and he's just the like, the most good natured, super nice, super even keel. Like I was amazed. Nobody, nobody in that thread was like, brah. He said, some crappy thing to be one time, you know? Never, like unassailable. I didn't even think you could have been on the site for this long without. Yeah,

mathowie 11:53 I was worried a slightly somebody. Somebody would say like, yeah, why him? Not me. But nobody? Nobody did that.

Jessamyn 12:04 No, well, you know, there was some people in the thread that were like, How about my crazy friend, and it's pretty easy to be like, ah, your friend is crazy. So I think I think that was okay. You know what I mean, though, like, every now and again, somebody's like, what about this person? And nobody ever says anything? Because it's totally like, no, that person is totally nuts. I'm not thinking of anybody in particular, I just recall reading the thread and being like, yeah, no, not that guy. Yeah, so

mathowie 12:30 that router in the middle of the night. He's not drunk on power, although he is very good at deletion reasons already. They grew up so right to grow up so fast.

Jessamyn 12:43 He may be one of he may be the politest of all of us. Is that possible?

mathowie 12:50 Possibility. He hasn't been worn. Like we have

Jessamyn 12:58 any has no enemies. So I think cortex and I are going to start like, like, be like, I'm not gonna do it. You could do it. I'm not gonna do it. You do it. Let's get back up into to do it. Back into jobs?

mathowie 13:15 Should we eventually have comments on jobs?

Jessamyn 13:20 No, I don't. I don't see why. Yeah, I don't think jobs are supposed to be a community part of the site.

mathowie 13:26 Yeah, it's just sort of a poster board. It is what it is.

Jessamyn 13:30 It is you say that a lot. Now. I think that's the weird new like, whatever. Have 30 Something set? It is what it is, man.

mathowie 13:41 Well, sometimes you got off and let things just run their course.

Jessamyn 13:48 Yeah, and I don't think anybody really complains about jobs. People seem to be pretty happy with it. Yeah, I'm happy with it. I don't check in that often because I'm employed. But if I weren't employed, if I weren't employed, I would be looking for this job. Intelligent female American voices wanted. Oh, I think it's like, oh, that tiny web hosting. free web hosting in exchange for some wav files. It's like a little part time you kind of job I kind of like it. So they

mathowie 14:15 don't want to scare off American customers.

Jessamyn 14:20 They're based in Australia. So they need American voices for their voicemail system for some reason.

mathowie 14:26 Yeah, but what's wrong with you know, heavy Australian accent saying dial two for technical support?

Jessamyn 14:36 Come on, dude. Every time you call for tech support, and you hear somebody who's like heavily heavily accented English makes you feel like they're in a different country. Yeah, I get a sinking feeling a sinking feeling. Even if they've got heavily accented English that makes me worried that they might be American but in prison. I'm concerned.

mathowie 14:56 Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I I asked

Jessamyn 14:59 people that all the time when I'm making airline reservation airlines

mathowie 15:02 and Americans are always like, yeah, they're prisoners.

Jessamyn 15:08 Like, I always ask, Hello, are you in prison? Yeah, right.

mathowie 15:13 It's pretty much united and American Express. I think I've always talked to people in prison.

Jessamyn 15:18 I guess they're not allowed to tell you that they're in prison because you're of course giving them your credit card information. But I'm curious about that. There's probably some good website of

mathowie 15:27 prisoners on.com. Well, like

Jessamyn 15:30 whether or not they can tell you or what they're supposed to say, or that whole idea like giving, I don't know, just having to give like lots of personal information to people in prison who you know, maybe those are decent jobs, but I don't know. It just seems weird.

mathowie 15:44 No, it's weird, like indentured servitude, because they don't really have a choice. And you know, they're trying to get out.

Jessamyn 15:50 They don't get real money. They don't get real money and Americans get to totally

mathowie 15:54 private prisons, hiring people, for private corporations for nothing on the dollars. It's ugly.

Jessamyn 16:02 It's sketch right? Did you know that one of every 99 Americans is in prison right now? Yeah, it's like the worst behind bars ratio of all time, anywhere.

mathowie 16:11 It's one or it's hovering percent of all Americans, right. Like it's bad.

Jessamyn 16:17 Yeah. And like you said, the, the private prison industry makes that extra sketchy because people stand to make an awful lot of money if more people stay behind bars. Yep. How did we get talking about this? This is depressing. Oh.

mathowie 16:36 Intelligent female American voices. One white female. What's up with that? It just sounds nice.

Jessamyn 16:42 We sound nice. Okay. Yeah.

mathowie 16:44 I guess you don't want having women be like can Yeah, you don't want the bitchy IT guy who knows Linux and more than you say,

Jessamyn 16:51 say can I help you and try to sound you know, appealing?

mathowie 16:55 Help you? What do you do this time?

Jessamyn 16:59 Exactly. Did you cut your hair yourself?

mathowie 17:02 I'm gonna format this and put something real on it.

Jessamyn 17:05 Let's talk about metal filter.

mathowie 17:09 What are your favorites for this?

Jessamyn 17:12 Well, I had a bunch this time actually, last time this two weeks I think two of them are kind of like, just like hippie people posts, which I enjoyed. So they're kind of like thematically linked. The one of them is about I don't think I mentioned this in the last podcast, but it was right on the brink was the the Gary Snyder. Post just about Gary Snyder by Digga. Man digest, man did I mentioned this last time

mathowie 17:40 in? Do you remember? He's the dude that works at Wired? He's like a editor of Wired magazine or associate editor. Steve? Oh, shit. Really? Yeah. Did you mean did you have?

Jessamyn 17:53 Well, I just knew he was really into kind of, oh, you know, sort of Buddhist poetry this, that and the other. Let me double check and make sure I didn't. Yeah, no, I didn't mention that last time. It was just a really nicely put together post about Gary Snyder. And yeah, he won. Gary Snyder won this big poetry prize like 100,000 bucks, like totally awesome. And just a lot of people what would you laughing?

mathowie 18:18 Big poetry fries. just funny.

Jessamyn 18:23 This is why you need to be reading these posts, Matt. But there was just a whole bunch of like happy people in the thread who posted like their favorite Gary Snyder poem, and this that and the other and I always thought Gary Snyder was great. So it was happy. Like it was cool for me to like, not only be like, Oh, wow, he won this prize. That's to me just to see a bunch of people on metal filter. I met him Yeah, I met

mathowie 18:43 him. Wow, cool.

Jessamyn 18:46 He was yeah, he read a poem at my uncle's wedding.

mathowie 18:49 Dude, that's pretty cool.

Jessamyn 18:53 Well, welcome to Moran. You know,

mathowie 18:55 most people just Xerox off something they read in a book.

Jessamyn 19:01 Yeah, but so like, that was kind of cool. And then a similar post which was actually just from a couple days ago was the Utah Phillips obit post. It was just kind of a short post by Pope guilty love. The post is actually about as little of a post that you could possibly have. But grey Mouser who is another sort of old timer user took the sort of non post post and then instead of bitching about it just made like, here's places to go to find out more about Utah Phillips who was like a folk singer and an activist. I WW guy and his music was really inspirational and, and so a bunch of people posted like links to music. I had a friend who emailed me a whole bunch of like YouTube video interviews, the official obituary and it was just nice like, it was like no snark nice thread and just I don't know it like it's what no bid thread can do and people like make an effort and give a shit Tell it made me happy. I mean as as these things can so those those two were starter starter, my favorites. What else? What else? I had a couple more that I kind of liked. But what else did you like?

mathowie 20:11 The ones I liked are super popular. The one of the guy who took a Polaroid every day for 20 years before he died. Awesome, fascinating, crazy, awesome project. A lot of people like that one. So he was 1970 marchandises. Yeah, and that was that was someone's first

Jessamyn 20:33 on TV. Yeah, we

mathowie 20:35 were like remember Mike

Jessamyn 20:35 on TV? Oh, is this guy Yeah. And it turned out to just be a really really great

mathowie 20:41 site went down because it just started getting linked to everywhere but looks like it's back. So it still works. But yeah, there's just sort of the sad tale like someone goes in the hospital looking like cancer and then they started deteriorate. And you see this through Polaroids. It's just kind of, of someone you've never met. It's just really fascinating. The Chinese earthquake one was crazy. couple getting married, you know, it's what happened on like a Friday or Saturday afternoon, didn't it? You know, getting wedding photos taken and all sudden the humongous earthquake hits and the photographer keeps taking photos. And it looks

Jessamyn 21:24 like God, I didn't I did not actually see that. I think I was yeah, like

mathowie 21:29 the first. The first one is, you know, normal picture. And the second one is stuff falling from the sky. And then it looks like this fake poke post apocalyptic movie set. And you're like, that can't

Jessamyn 21:41 be because everything's just totally fallen apart and broken. Yeah,

mathowie 21:45 everything is completely obliterated. Everyone's covered in dust. Like sad wedding dress. They gray with dust like that. It just looks like stage. It's so amazing. But you know what happened?

Jessamyn 21:58 Oh, God, I'm looking at them right now.

mathowie 22:01 Yeah, that's fascinating. Wow. I mean, you can't really fake it. It's just the insane my other pictures your totally favorite metaphor.

Jessamyn 22:13 I thought you were kidding about stuff falling from the sky.

mathowie 22:16 No, it's pitcher stuff falling from the sky. And then everything's obliterated. And it's just like, holy cow. It looks like a movie set. Because it's also like, it's a really good photographer who's like, you know, contrast it and you know, the photos look amazing. It almost looks like a movie set. Yeah, you know, photos taken a movie set by a professional photographer. My last favorite on lighter note is the web 2.0 vaudeville just the silly ridiculous to sound five single use pages with sound files on him. One of them does the rim shot for jokes. But

Jessamyn 22:55 the other one does. Can you can you put it in? You can tell.

mathowie 22:58 I'll put that in what was the other one was the sad trombone came up? That was good. Oh, the post. Or like that just totally. Didn't know there was sad trombone. Yeah,

Jessamyn 23:13 it was. Yeah, it was one of those things where like the post itself was like, but then like, and well, and the jokes all came from AskMe meta filter. And then everybody added their own jokes. And

mathowie 23:24 that's great. Yeah, every, like popular. catchphrase the sound. It's awesome.

Jessamyn 23:33 Well, and speaking of popular catchphrase you sound that brings up the sort of dorky Weezer post that I enjoyed, which was just whatever. It's Plutarch post. It's Weezer's stupid video, but it's got like, lots of internet memes in it. And I kind of enjoyed it because the thread is a bunch of people talking about like, Who's that guy who's the girl in the rainbow? Socks? And it's always kind of fun when people try to explain. No, she's really popular because like trying to sort of like put into words what like some stupid internet meme fame thing came from, and there's no Tron Guy. Yeah, and then people point to like, really, really good lists of really good lists of, I don't know where you can find these things, which I always want to know. Oh, and lastly,

mathowie 24:23 what I was looking at the Barenaked Ladies one they actually got some of the same people. So now I was first I know I heard I heard early on like, Weezer totally copied Blair and I didn't know it was barely accolades they said the song title and I was like holy cow they actually had the Diet Coke guys you know a year before. Interesting. Right?

Jessamyn 24:45 Well, it must be kind of great right like like it fills in that that in between line between do your stupid thing on the web and like number for profit? Yeah. Because like that's what you do. Right. You have Weezer. Hi Are you to put you in their video and then but a bing bada boom has there ever been Yeah,

mathowie 25:04 has there ever been a round up of web memes that like one or two wasn't new to you at least

Jessamyn 25:12 know this in the Weezer video there was definitely like two I had I swear never seen before.

mathowie 25:18 Yeah, I think it's Kelly from the shoes video I have no idea what the hell that is.

Jessamyn 25:23 Is she the one with the rainbow socks?

mathowie 25:25 Yeah, I never seen her.

Jessamyn 25:28 Yeah, no, I hadn't seen her either. And I think some of these are like literally like YouTube only kind of or it's like you'd have to be reading like one website to really get it and a lot of these I only get from like Rafa Khan or like reading meta filter. I think David Weinberger did a post about Rafa Khan like a kind of a wrap up post about it. And one of the things he talked about was that he felt like kind of an old guy because all of like, his web memes were like my hear or may hear or whatever. And these new web memes, he's like, what, what who are when, you know, because he's like, got a family and a job and writes books for a living and so he was a little bit like, how much time you have to spend on the web to know all these people. But that's why like the meta filter thread because you can just ask like or who and I love that someone will tell you

mathowie 26:17 someone that raffle con they had like a video stars panel. And it was people are actually at the conference, the jail Congress, I was at, you know, a day before. And they were introduced this sort of like YouTube celebrities, and I've never heard of them, which just cracks me up. Like, as if you know, my god or celebrity exists in their own head kind of, you know, but then whatever. They have hundreds of 1000s of views of these silly little joke songs. But I suppose a weird title guy

Jessamyn 26:45 that does like dances of the world or whatever, the dance. Yeah. His pitch video has been seen what 83 million times that's like, if one of every three Americans has seen that video.

mathowie 26:58 Yeah, it's like it's at the top of the most viewed page, like for the last two years. I mean, everyone has seen it.

Jessamyn 27:06 Yeah, and of course, that's kind of self reflexive because people see it at the top and they're like, click what is that but 83 million? That's like a huge number. Yeah, that's crazy. So yeah, I mean, I feel like some of that is real and some of it's just yeah, made up made up crazy nonsense. Oh, and because I would be remiss if I didn't include some excellent reference tool, the MCSE find, oh, so that you can actually search mixtapes running that's gotta get killed by the industry quick as much tape still running or as MCSE fine no

mathowie 27:38 MCSE next tape is kind of on shaky legal ground MCSE fine design way shakier ground like way worse.

Jessamyn 27:47 How come because it searches

mathowie 27:49 because it allows you to go like I want a new Weezer song right now that I don't want to pay for what there's no Weezer. What? I haven't gotten. It's broken. Yeah, I haven't gotten a good search. I haven't gotten this search to work but I was trying a bunch of obscure bands. But now I'm getting nothing on Weezer, so that can't be right.

Jessamyn 28:11 Music and I got nothing

mathowie 28:13 they took it now only searches for work and the names or URL so it's probably a user's just but I'm

Jessamyn 28:23 looking for my own mixtapes. No, Jasmine returned to nothing. Yeah, nothing.

mathowie 28:28 I knew much time for this world.

Jessamyn 28:35 Too bad. Too bad. I didn't even get to use it too much. Yeah, I have example.mixtape.com which I use to like, show people about it. So they don't all make fun of my musical tastes. Yeah, I guess. Now they can. So let's see. Does it say in the thread like oh, yeah, cuz people were like, how did it work?

mathowie 28:55 Wow.

Jessamyn 29:00 I mean, that's kind of a sweet idea. I don't know how mixtapes still stays alive to tell you the truth. I would like to talk to those guys.

mathowie 29:07 Dude, they added that little by the song option to Amazon that's like Oh, I know right? Could be making that 10s of 1000s of dollars because Amazon just recently like just a goose their music store like we're paying people something like 20 cents on the dollar for every song sold. So they can be made Yeah, usually Amazon pays you like a nickel on you know $1 For or two cents like for referrals but they were like 20 cents per dollar referral. So yeah,

Jessamyn 29:42 they can do that like before after mixtape like arrived on the scene.

mathowie 29:46 It was before it was in the last month or so. But like I noticed Yeah, like after a week or something most tape suddenly had a buy this option. And now I know because

Jessamyn 29:55 everybody was always wondering like, what's your business model? Yeah, I love to watching what Mike FTW go through and like email his favorite people in bands and be like, Hey, there's this new website called mixtape, oh nine if I put your song on there, because he knows, like musicians and so he had this Flickr Photo Stream, I'll have to track it down this Flickr photo stream of his emails to bands being like, is it okay if I put your song up there? Because of course the joke is nobody asks anybody to put anything up there ever. Yeah. And

mathowie 30:27 I think there's it's an on mixtape or some side. allusion to that, like, you know, I don't know if this is legal go and ask them if you want or something.

Jessamyn 30:38 Yeah, yeah, they're like, and when you upload there, say I, I agree that I have permission from the band or whatever. And it's like, of course, you don't have permission from the band. Shut up. Metallica would never give you permission to do anything. Yeah. So yeah. Oh, and my very last post that I really liked was just Carsten B's Table of Contents post.

mathowie 30:57 Oh, yeah, that was lovely.

Jessamyn 31:00 Yeah, it was just really pretty. It was like good looking tables of contents from books in a little exhibit. And it looked nice. And it was very bookish and nerdy. And it was wonderful course on

mathowie 31:12 some of these. I felt like me watching the fashion show or something where I'm like, I like that one's ugly, or that one doesn't work at all. Why are people like

Jessamyn 31:24 I can't read that fails as workable.

mathowie 31:28 Clearly, like, over half of these are obviously beautiful. And then some of them are like, what makes that good? That's confusing. It's classic, but it's ugly. I don't know why. Yeah. Sometimes,

Jessamyn 31:44 yeah. So like Johnny novec. Oh, sorry. What? Well, Johnny Novak and I both of us came to meta filter to post that post and found that Carson B had already done it. But one of the things that was cool, like a lot of these things is that they set up a Flickr photo set to be like, hey, add your own, you know, yeah. Yeah. Which I kind of like about about these sorts of things

mathowie 32:07 up. There's no quality control. So those could just be Oh, if these are sets that they've selected.

Jessamyn 32:15 Think so.

mathowie 32:16 Then they have like an open tag they want everyone to use or something. Table of Contents, probably Oh, they have a table of contents. Cool.

Jessamyn 32:25 Yeah, that totally

mathowie 32:27 cool. There's like a Nike annual report. That's a clean look at the table of contents tag is fun. Well.

Jessamyn 32:38 Yeah, see? See? How nerdy Are you? Alright, did anything else in the world of metal filter that you just found pleasing?

mathowie 32:47 No. Nope, that's it. Nope. That's it.

Jessamyn 32:51 Because I had a whole mess of them that I'd like but that was I think that was totally it.

mathowie 32:55 Oh, AskMe Metafilter stuff, but

Jessamyn 32:59 I have fewer and AskMe in a folder. I mean, I think it's just because like I like asked me to filter all the time. So like, having something be like above the threshold of like to like it that much bores is difficult, because I just like all of it. But and and the problem is I sidebar some of it. And so then I'm always worried, right?

mathowie 33:20 Yeah.

Jessamyn 33:23 rehashing the sidebar, but I just feel like yeah, we have lots of entry points. But when I, I was down in Wisconsin, I did this, like five hour training for library. Whatever,

mathowie 33:34 I was just blah, blah, blah. I was just about to mention. And

Jessamyn 33:36 so I favor this favor. I came back after lunch, right? It's one of these things where you have an hour for lunch, and then people take you out to kind of a fancy restaurant and you're like, What the fuck, like, I can't eat here in an hour. And you have to like eat soup and then run back. And, you know, I got back like at one. And of course, like, there's three people there out of like, 40 And I'm like, fuck, this isn't, you know, what do you do? Right? Like I'm on a schedule. And so I'm like, Well, should we get started? I feel like we should wait for people and people are like, Oh, show us ask him how to filter because I talked to them about you know, collaborative information and group problem solving and whatever. And I'm like, because I had introduced some of the questions earlier like Do you know why a cat moving his hand on the trackpad doesn't work. Yeah. And they were like, What? What? No, and so I got to show off like this question. Why can't my cat work the trackpad on the MacBook and it made everybody totally happy. And you know, for people who aren't used to online forums. The whole like, Oh, haha, it was asked by Dr. Wu. And then the first answer was from Mr. President, Dr. Steve Elvis. America, just already makes people like giggly. I don't know why, like I'm just used to these names, but I guess there's a weird

mathowie 34:52 Yeah, this is super fascinating. I don't know some of the idle curiosity is always interesting on AskMe Metafilter like, well, Just

Jessamyn 35:00 because people go and try it Yeah, like you know Googly tried it with his cat

mathowie 35:06 dog. Dogs work there's a joke about horses

Jessamyn 35:13 some people can use it

mathowie 35:16 someone makes a mention of CAT scan, you know the original post ever a metal filter that was googly. That's my neighbor up here I've been trying to buy CAT scan to redirect it to metal filter so medical throw implode and create a black hole in the universal folding on itself but someone in China

Jessamyn 35:35 that's pretty good bad I don't understand what your problem

mathowie 35:37 is. It's just like cats.

Jessamyn 35:41 They're not giving it up.

mathowie 35:43 There's just it's just some guy it's a domain squatter, you know with like 1000s of domains and like email though generic email address going hey, do you want to sell this I'll buy it. Give me 100 bucks

Jessamyn 35:55 we started a letter writing campaign where we all try to pretend to be seven year old kids

mathowie 36:01 that would be affected. I would like to see this game

Jessamyn 36:03 everybody get your favorite crayon? How he really wants to vote. That would be that you know I rarely think of like what my million dollar money making scheme would be but like setting up a little cottage industry generating hundreds of fake letters from preteens for whatever your cause celebrities

mathowie 36:26 you could do the Mechanical Turk with the Amazon thing pay people to make kids

Jessamyn 36:30 pay somebody two cents Yeah. And then you and then you deliver the entire package of legitimate seeming Yeah, that would be a lot grassroots nonsense.

mathowie 36:39 That'd be a lot of money for kids.

Jessamyn 36:44 But you know, you just be working for like pro lifers and, like obnoxious Astros astroturf first probably. Yeah. I don't think there's any way to harness those powers for good

mathowie 36:54 kill babies. Yeah.

Jessamyn 36:58 Yeah, I like it. It's an idea though. A notional idea. But yeah, that was totally fun. And people totally asked and people wise asked the hell out of the thread, which was annoying, but whatever.

mathowie 37:10 Here's another bizarre idle curiosity. The two that the fattest twins in the Guinness Book World Record sort of iconic from the Macquarie's the McCreary Yes, I didn't know what about them from the Guinness Yeah, I didn't know one of them. I loaded that thread. I didn't know one of them died in a motorcycle accident of heart failure or something like that it Niagara Falls it was just like what what are they doing and like it's not even on that's terrible. I know it's so it's like fascinating. I didn't know one died one live like for decades more like oh my god, that's so weird. I'd never heard that part of the story. He just saw this

Jessamyn 37:50 with his earning potential greatly reduced. Can you get unemployment for that? If like you're part of a twin performance team and your twin dies?

mathowie 37:57 No, it's like 50 Yeah, that's like a disability almost.

Jessamyn 38:03 Maybe you have to like get insured with Sotheby's

mathowie 38:05 Yeah. 21 more whatever. Lloyd's of London. Yeah, their tag team wrestlers and carnival stunt shows.

Jessamyn 38:14 No, no, I totally remember. I mean, I remember reading about them and just for girls records when I was a little kid, I have a Guinness World Records all the time. Yeah, same

mathowie 38:22 here. Well, it's a sport. Yeah, they have a gigantic tombstone. That's like 13 feet wide with little mini bikes on them. Funny if you follow them that's really

Jessamyn 38:31 big. Although we have gigantic tombstones around here a lot just because there's all these like granite Carver Oh yeah, fancy granite Carver people ones shaped like Easy boy recliners and big cars, stuff like that. Greetings from the world of marble

mathowie 38:49 there was this was kind of surprising. I don't know if I should even mention it because he didn't want to unleash the core category outrage but the person in charge of HandBrake like the coolest like DVD Ripper in the world, you know, open source

Jessamyn 39:06 product. Yeah, no, I know him.

mathowie 39:09 You see this like somebody selling like a $20 version of HandBrake with like a new name and they just sort of wrapped it around handbrake and the guy like ran through some code parsers and he can

Jessamyn 39:19 oh my god so against. The code is totally like

mathowie 39:23 handbrake handbrake, handbrake, all the files are referencing handbrake.

Jessamyn 39:28 And then there's a registration director. Yeah, it's sort of like,

mathowie 39:31 yeah, there's some So some companies charging 20 bucks for handbrake, basically. And it turns out, there's a whole bunch of like free lawyering available for GPL projects, and people pointed him out to him. And somebody put on Digg and he was like, no do that. We don't want to like start like it's actually part of the docks at the GPL law firms are like, don't get all the geeks pissed off. That just makes everything messy. So

Jessamyn 39:55 yeah, and impossible to then sort of work on Oh, that's really cool. Yeah, I mean, I hope it works. I hope I hope they post a follow up and we can figure out what happens. Oh, you know, a similarly sort of geeky oh, what?

mathowie 40:07 Oh, wait, wait, what was the name of it? And we'll see if it's still up. There it is. Okay, go ahead.

Jessamyn 40:14 Just another really geeky, really short post. Why is the only.arpa website about unicycles?

mathowie 40:22 Wow.

Jessamyn 40:25 Check it out. It's a really interesting, very short thread,

mathowie 40:29 huh? That's like the original addressing of the web, right? Yes. And why is it unicyclists.org?

Jessamyn 40:41 Well, if you look, somebody looked at the zone records, and it's like reverse DNS setup. But then there's like the a record and you can kind of see if you if you look at the the best answer,

mathowie 40:52 Oh, someone could set up ARPA for metal filter. Let's see.

Jessamyn 40:57 Yeah, they have an A record for unicyclist in the zone for their subnet. So theoretically, you know, yeah.

mathowie 41:07 Freaky. Wow.

Jessamyn 41:09 If I if I understand it, but yeah, it's just it was just a funny, like, dark corner of the internet question.

mathowie 41:16 I thought this was there's a zillion food questions that were the most popular. I mean, pretty much. There's like, favorite Indian Recipes. Favorite. There's lots of recipe questions. Tofu tofu recipe. Recipes are super popular. This one was good. This was like, I just, I'm gonna become a waiter at a restaurant. A nice one. I don't know anything about wine. I'm only like 19 or 20 or 21. Like, where do I start? Here's my first principle.

Jessamyn 41:44 I don't even I don't even really drink. Someone links,

mathowie 41:47 you know, the best answer in that thread. Links to like, all sorts of common, you know, nice roundup of common rules of wine, and guides to wine and yeah, it was great. Like, if someone else was a waitress and said, yeah, get a wine tastings at restaurants and take notes galore. And you'll get the hang of it. Oh, and how to present it to people and stuff. Which I always thought that wine presentation so ridiculous. The bottle drank

Jessamyn 42:18 a lot of wine so I don't really know the Yeah, the Hokey Pokey about it. Yeah, it's just like, yeah, they show you the bottle.

mathowie 42:25 And then the cork and then the taste it first only once in like years and years has like bad wine come to a table where someone actually tasted it. Oh, god, that's vinegar. But yeah.

Jessamyn 42:40 Take it away, please. Yeah. I sort of liked this one. Which reminded me of the Oh, so you do this for a job. What about this? It's, it's, it's a little hacky? Like, I don't know, like a little sketch but generally okay, like, how do you how do you manipulate the system to you know, how do you know exactly what to say? So that the people on the other end who are you know, some hidden secret chart so like you've got to say your pain threshold is at seven if you want to get medication in the in the in the hospital? Or you know, how you get a discount on the refrigerator? Or how to add your Universal Life Church credentials to your driver's license. It's not a very long thread actually.

mathowie 43:28 Oh tricks of the trade is what's his name? Matthew Baldwin in Seattle is also another filter. Effective Yeti members Metafilter username it's really old. Oh, Shadow

Jessamyn 43:39 keeper Yeah. Or shadow spawns shadow

mathowie 43:42 shadow keeper sounds right? Yeah.

Jessamyn 43:45 Yeah, defective Yeti it I just added him to my Twitter recently he's got like one of the most consistently interesting to read blogs Yeah, of all time trade trickster and he's done it. Yeah, he

mathowie 43:57 was gonna make a book of this done it.

Jessamyn 44:00 Right. I remember I gave him some librarian tricks of the trade. But he's managed to still be an interesting blogger even after he's had kids. Ah. You know, and he calls his kids squirrely the squirrely er and yeah, yes, it's good. And two more cultural weirdness questions. The How do you tell the difference between a bag in a purse which of course turns into the blob, blob, man purse man purse, joke joke joke joke joke, but it's sort of interesting seeing what people from all over the like the country or the world really think of as the difference between a person a bag, I think about it because in my mind, I sort of know what they are and like that's all

mathowie 44:44 like a one gallon bag of ziplock bag. Anything bigger than that? A bag. I think smaller than that to purse. bigger than a breadbox that's a bag smaller than bread box the purse.

Jessamyn 45:00 bread box but like how big is a bread box was a bread box anymore? Oh

mathowie 45:03 for bread What else you got that it?

Jessamyn 45:10 Oh, just the the long long thread about shoes?

mathowie 45:15 Oh yeah,

Jessamyn 45:15 you know needs to be corralled a little bit because everybody just wants to like talk about shoes. But I had no idea that like, it's generally speaking, at least according to sort of what I've read sort of cultural tradition in Canada. You take your shoes off when you go inside Canada, and yeah, I mean, according to the Canadians who chimed in on this post and that for Americans, it's really all over the map, depending on kind of where you live. Yeah, like Americans in New England where I am like, you never take your shoes off. It's freaking freezing inside the floor is freezing and covered in fucking nests. And like, what about snow? Actually, it's like with giant nails that stick up out of the floor. But and that's why you wear shoes indoors.

mathowie 46:00 But what about when you come in? That's what mudrooms are for to dump off your snowy shoes and muddy shoes.

Jessamyn 46:07 I actually mentioned mudrooms I actually mentioned mushrooms but yeah, I don't know. But like when you're not in snow season like still, I don't know. It would never occur to me to like have like guests take their shoes off and stuff like that. On the other hand, my floor is dirty. When I was a little kid. And in my house, sort of in northern Vermont. If you don't wear shoes, you get nails in your feet. Like it's just these wood floors with these nails that stick up like what do you

mathowie 46:36 do as a kid in Southern Cal listen to people Yeah, when I was a kid in Southern California everyone kept their shoes on all the time. Like it was just the weird Japanese people that would be like take your shoes off please leave them outside. But now as an adult, I never wear them in indoors. I mean if it's going to someone's house that I'm familiar with I just take them off and everyone's got this stupid white outfit in the light carpet and they insist on it

Jessamyn 47:01 that's the thing once like my dad moved someplace with like white wall to wall carpeting and he was like shoes off please. And I was like what what but he used to travel a lot to Japan and so it made total sense for him and I think he was just waiting for a time when he could like lay down the lot there seems like now people are taking them

mathowie 47:18 people are saying it might be generational and I think it might have shifted when I was a kid in the 70s growing up like nobody it wasn't normal take off his shoes everywhere he went and now in the 2000s just like yeah family parties and stuff there's lots and lots of people taking your shoes off is pretty much a rule

Jessamyn 47:40 yeah and I'm surprised at that but I yeah I socialize less I guess than I did before although like thinking about the people whose houses I go over to Yeah, I don't you know it there seems to be no pattern to me it's one of those things where it didn't even occur to me that there was kind of a pattern going on all around me and then reading the thread and then the meta talk thread about the popular thread which once again was sidebar it and maybe maybe sometime we should take up things that we don't think everybody's already seen but it was really interesting to to yeah, see that all you yawning Am I

mathowie 48:14 Oh no, it's Yanni go get lunch but real quick on have mentioned the last two fascinating comments like super comments. One of them by shiv, amazing photographer to shiv on how primaries work. I mean, this is insane. This is like a wiki pedia post a schooling on Democrats killing themselves in primary season over the last 50 years. It's just like eviscerating like Clinton's insistence on carrying this through to June, and how every time that happens in the last, you know, five elections, we the Democrats lose badly. And it's just awesome because

Jessamyn 48:57 they want a fraction fracturing their own party. Yeah, describes a little bit about how the superdelegate thing works. And what's going on with that, if I recall correctly, and

mathowie 49:05 why Obama seems to be doing nothing about it is probably the smart thing and all this other stuff. That was good. Yes.

Jessamyn 49:12 No, that was amazing. Awesome. 62 favorites.

mathowie 49:16 And the other one was the one I linked to in my own delicious feed was this awesome thing on the Wii? Wii Fit and the Wii in general? The Nintendo Wii. It has this jokey. Oh, no, I saw that. I saw that. Yeah, it's got this jokey. I mean, it's jokey as an adult to like, play a game and you lose and it goes to lose and the guy's head like falls down like massively depressed. Wow. Yeah. And it's like, okay, I mean, I'm 35 it's kind of funny. I can see that they're kind of being over the top. You joke about your own meat beard. Yeah. But like as a nine year old, that's actually crushing. And mother shock, who I think was a guest Well, a few months ago.

Jessamyn 49:57 She was she was she did the dangerous thing. Dangerous book for boys. Yeah,

mathowie 50:01 girls, and she talks about her boys. No girls, how her daughter and son like react to it. And like one of them was considered fat according to Wii Fit, and it's like 30 year olds. It's funny and the

Jessamyn 50:14 other one wasn't. And then the kids started ragging on each other. Haha, you're fat and I'm normal.

mathowie 50:19 Yeah. And that, yeah. When you think you're doing pretty well goes, this really isn't your forte. And that actually has happened to me, you know, like, I'm trying some yoga moves. I'm like, finally starting to get it and it goes, your balance is terrible at the end of it, you know, like, Oh, God, Oh, I think it might be Japanese versus American culture thing that you know, you have to be really easy on people and body image issues are involved. Or, you know, it's

Jessamyn 50:43 all that Nintendo like brain exercise. Your guy makes fun of you all the time, too.

mathowie 50:48 Yeah. And that's fun. Drainage game. Yeah. I always thought that was light hearted. But I wouldn't give it to like a 10 year old, you know, they would probably wouldn't get the joke of that.

Jessamyn 51:01 Right? Yeah, no, I read this. I read that. I read that comment too. And I thought it was really sort of interesting, because yeah, it seemed harsh and, and other people are sort of talking about it. You know, one of the reasons I was a little bit afraid to sidebar because then people started talking about it. Like, if you're defensive about it, maybe you do need to lose some weight. Oh, God.

mathowie 51:22 I thought it was just like, opened my eyes up to a whole new perspective. I didn't think about which is like my six year old boy thinks of all this, you know, and like, then you lose and bow in your head and you're a loser and there's like a white one sound you're like, that's pretty horrible. That's not like that's

Jessamyn 51:40 an adult person. You're like, screw you machine. I'll totally or Yeah,

mathowie 51:44 are you? Ironic, you know, like, oh, yeah, they're playing the sad trombone because that's from 60s, you know, goofball comedies. That's funny,

Jessamyn 51:52 but it was like, back to the slot. The sad trombone. Yeah, like,

mathowie 51:56 it's like a seven year old. You're like, wow, like, this is supposed to be fun. Why am I wasting time doing this? And screw this? I'm gonna go ride bikes.

Jessamyn 52:05 Right? It's not really a fun game when you have a Wii Fit,

mathowie 52:08 right? Yeah. And yeah,

Jessamyn 52:12 I've never even seen one. It's like,

mathowie 52:15 it's a wireless touch sensitive pad that can like weigh you in it, like you can knows how you're distributing your balance. So it has a whole bunch of mini games with that, oh, hula hoops, you have to like move your butt around. And it and it knows to sense on the past. Weight needs to go from left foot, the right foot, the left foot the right foot, you know, around in circles. So yeah, it's Yeah, and they just come up with a whole bunch of games. I mean, the push ups and stuff, they have no idea if your form is good, that they show you a trainer doing it. So but yeah, and it gives you little rewards first, you know, keep all that you know, you've been exercising for 30 minutes. Here's a gold coin you know, to kind of keep you going. But it's a lot like Brain Age, but essentially with fitness. Oh, and you can run in place holding the controller like in a pocket or next to you and it's actually exhausting. I mean, it's like running on a treadmill. It's like, Oh, man. I ran for five minutes. It was like adwind

Jessamyn 53:16 which is hilarious because you ride your bike everywhere.

mathowie 53:19 Yeah, but it's yeah, it's really strange. bikes and running are completely different. The muscles are totally different. But yeah, I can ride a bike for four hours, aimless five minutes or running or kill me. It's the

Jessamyn 53:29 same with swimming too. I can swim for an hour and people who can bike for four hours for like 10 minutes or like

mathowie 53:35 yeah, dead. Yeah, totally, totally past my limits on soybean. All right, I think that's probably about it. Anything else?

Jessamyn 53:46 I think this will be a nice a nice normal length. No, I don't think so. We should think about

mathowie 53:50 next time getting some calls to interview Yeah,

Jessamyn 53:53 I'll get some code want to take calls next time? Yeah, we need to why don't we Why don't we mention on this podcast that we'll do it next time? Yeah, I just have to be taking calls next time.

mathowie 54:02 I have to set up some sort of Grand Central and central drop empty threes into a certain place thing didn't make that work. But yeah,

Jessamyn 54:10 yeah. AskMe Metafilter how to do it if you don't know how to do it.

mathowie 54:13 Oh, I'm not wasting my question.

Unknown Speaker 54:27 Love is long. No one can live. It's full of charts and figures and instructions for dance. I love you to me You can really love house music and fat dogs music is just some of it is just mud Love is love its flowers when you give with names and you give me