Podcast 34 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 34: cortex drives the bus (2008-11-17).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary keywords

people, thread, post, election, filter, nice, favorite, film, feels, watch, comments, week, guess, puppies, metal, couple, run, totally, meta, jokes

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 But let's uh, you want me to do it? Yeah, sure. Shoot. Okay, let's, let's give this a shot then. Welcome, welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the filter, podcast.

mathowie 0:19 Love lovely.

Cortex 0:20 I should have had you yell out years adjustments names at the appropriate time.

mathowie 0:24 Oh, that's right. I totally forgot about that. Well, we'll

Cortex 0:26 get that next time, yeah.

mathowie 0:52 So this is episode 34 of the meta filter podcast. Jessamine lists, the first one ever, but with now with more cortex. Yes. And we'll try and do these things every couple of weeks instead of once a month. And we'll try and do them as hot three way action from now on.

Cortex 1:13 The Jessamine lesses is a circumstance of random faith. She is giving a talk right as we speak, I think was Oh, I thought it was air travel. Maybe she's traveling to the talk? I don't know. So you knows what she's up to that?

mathowie 1:29 Oh, he's crazy. librarian superhero. I guess usually we start with music stuff. It looks like November is super hoppin for music challenges. I think the challenge stuff kind of sometimes, you know, gets to be a bit much and people get burned out. And they don't upload that much. But November is on fire. And we're only halfway through it.

Cortex 1:51 Yeah. Well, you know, there's a couple of things going on. I think you'd noticed that the one of the challenges this month is less than one minute, which is a really great idea. Because people are putting their these these tiny little songs. So that's something I really love i I've done a bunch of that in the past back when was doing the aural timesing. It was kind of crazy. But but but yeah, people have been doing that. There's also been a thread, someone started an idea of, hey, let's start an open thread and music talk where people can just sort of challenge other people to do specific covers of specific things or request that somebody do a cover of song X or song y. And there's been a bunch of that to

mathowie 2:36 which thread is that? The thread? Is that home?

Cortex 2:42 There you are all here. Yeah, favorite song favorite MEPhI musicians? And yeah, it's got a bunch of comments in there. And people have been running with that. So if you're, if you check out the requests tag, or the the cover tag, there's a bunch of stuff in there, too. So I think between that and the the challenge is there's been a whole bunch of people just really active plus, you know, my theory is everybody's really really glad the election. So

mathowie 3:06 that's I was gonna say it definitely, like one or two uploads a day as normal. And then after what November 4, there's an explosion of creativity. Yeah. And it's like all this energy people are wasting on reloading. 538 is the now taken up by actually making music.

Cortex 3:26 Exactly. I think everybody's sort of crawling out of their hangover.

mathowie 3:30 And then terrible economy. Terrible news makes for good music. So exactly. The worse the economy does, the better off we are musically. So yeah, I guess we'll pick out some songs. Do you have any favorites so far? I still feel like I have to catch up.

Cortex 3:50 Yeah, it's kind of funny. I have gone through some of the stuff. It's morning. I've I've actually been kind of bad about the content of the site. This last week, I've been sort of adjusting to moving into the house stuff and working from home thing. And so I've been like paying attention to the flag queue and having stupid arguments in a few threads but not really paying attention, all that good stuff. So I went through some of the music stuff this morning.

mathowie 4:15 Yeah, there's a lot to catch up on. There's just so many Yeah,

Cortex 4:19 yeah. And it's a lot of really good stuff, too. You know, it ebbs and flows. Sometimes it's sort of quieter weeks, but this has really just been a monster. So yeah, there's this

mathowie 4:27 one minute songs will make it easy to catch up. Yeah, yeah. Quick.

Cortex 4:31 Yeah, you can get through a lot of those fast which is, which is pretty cool. Yeah, there's this. There's this cover of the pixie song. If you're coming to man, that alar they covered this just really fantastic. It's it's very different sort of acoustic take on it, which is just kind of wonderfully done. It's nice when someone does a cover and they really, you know, they don't just try and make a copy of the song. They do something different with it. And there's been a bunch of that actually in the last week because of that request thread. We're I think people have been really going in interesting directions with some of this stuff. There's also this, we should definitely throw a clip of this into get stuck in everybody's head. But the Inspector Gadget theme see Simpkins did a jazzy, Jazzy sort of version of it, that's really, really kind of awesome. And I can't get out of my head sort of way

mathowie 5:33 I guess we just move over to projects and jobs. There hasn't been that many jobs, interesting jobs posted lately. They're all kind of web design stuff. But there was one cool job just because it was with the short in New York in Manhattan. Just once a while you see, like a pretty cool, you know, longtime user with a job opening. And it's like, Hey, he's always perennially nice guy, and probably a fun to work with. And, you know, if you're in Manhattan, looking for a web or hardcore coding job, that looks like something to do?

Cortex 6:10 Yeah. Yeah, I really like it when I see jobs from people who I just sort of think of as a mathlete. And I don't really know them at all. And they, they go and post a job posting and say, Oh, they have a life. They exist in the real world.

mathowie 6:23 And every time I've heard like, a success story from jobs, it's always like, you know, longtime member hired another longtime member and I had an incident friend at work. And you know, there's of course the you can't fuck around too much at work, because the other person knows how you're wasting the company's time. Exactly. But

Cortex 6:43 well, you know, it probably depends. I mean, sleepy Pete was, was working for me for a while there, and we just kind of had a mutual understanding that both of us enjoyed mucking around. And it worked out pretty well. So but uh, but yeah, I can see how depending on the situation, that could be kind of a weird dicey, sort of extra social aspect to it,

mathowie 7:05 like hiring a meth addict. Look, I know, you're not going to be reliable. Sometimes you're going to show up to work with asphalt in your hair. And that's okay. Hey, favorite projects? My favorite was the design state project. By Gosh, how the hell do I say this username is curious.

Cortex 7:26 Yeah, I think of it as Securus

mathowie 7:29 cool, as you know, just sort of web design review site, but focusing on nothing but nonprofits. I think that's just kind of an interesting angle, because nonprofit websites are totally hit and miss because it's always like that. computer geek in the mailroom is the one who makes the website for that, you know, nonprofit because they have no money. So, you know, the quality is all over the place. And this is just highlighting, you know, good stuff. Interesting stuff. Yeah, tips and stuff. On on.gov And I think they're all.gov site to shoot for.org site, something like that.

Cortex 8:07 Apparently, the username is a reference to the the genus that contains most of the squirrels in North America and Europe. I was hoping for a pronunciation guide but

mathowie 8:19 but that's the squirrel. The Curse of the podcast is trying to say people's names when you just have to read them your whole life. I mean, the most popular project was this Channel Five documentary titled generator, which everyone thinks is hilarious, but I have no idea you know, it's like some

Cortex 8:39 no is it there's no context. It's sort of like a

mathowie 8:41 lifetime TV movie of the week title generator I've seen before you know, not without Meredith Baxter Birney otter or

Unknown Speaker 8:50 something. The wife is pretty one kid is gonna shop and the other Delmas grandma's in the basement and he Shawn does part three cameras.

mathowie 9:09 We always do metal filter First, don't we? Oh, okay. Yeah, we're totally off the rails shit. Let me see where's my meta filter posts? Lots of like epic comments

Cortex 9:21 did you see coop? Coop it's I just found it the other day and I think I missed the boat because this was a post that I think like Boo Radley made on yeah on Monday.

mathowie 9:36 Oh god. Yeah.

Cortex 9:38 Did you try it?

mathowie 9:40 Yeah, I had heard everyone bitching about it and being like it's the hardest thing in the world and someone posted a YouTube video to some guy sprinting like 100 meters but it didn't even look nice. And I yeah, I wasted is the most frustrating Flash game of all it's,

Cortex 9:53 it's fantastic. If you're listening to podcast right now, go find the link and play it while you're listening. is all the crap? Yeah, I defy you not to collapse into Google's about five minutes. And if you

mathowie 10:05 don't leave that lower keys, one, two for each leg and you almost feel like you can understand it, and then it and it's like it's right there between like playing solitaire and hitting your thumb with a hammer. Like it's just fine. This sorta is fun, but then it's incredibly

Cortex 10:28 frustrating. I guess I like this. Yeah, no, it was a

mathowie 10:33 it took me 15 minutes to get to two meters.

Cortex 10:37 I think I think Stavros mentioned that thread managed to get to negative 2.8 meters, which is the best failure. I think anybody has on record

mathowie 10:44 so far. Oh, yeah. After a while it was backflip, and yeah, I just started going backwards. Backwards is easier than forwards after a minute. It's just incredibly frustrating, but I mean, fine. Sorta. Yeah. It's kind of like, it sounds. It seems like, could you design the worst Flash game ever? And that was the contest winner.

Cortex 11:09 Pissed me off because I found out about that. And I was like, Oh, this is awesome. And I went look the front page and didn't see it. There's like, man I scooped up and I went to search. That's like, I was gonna I was gonna try and pull in a nice discussion of inverse kinematics and sort of the physics of, you know, body movement to yeah, there's all those like, it wasn't just a flash game. But

mathowie 11:27 there's all this flash games of falling down stairs where you control muscles and stuff, but they're not that interesting. Not that hard.

Cortex 11:35 The one where you throw the guy down the stairs. Yeah, well, that wasn't that was that was like an OpenGL game you had to download but ya know that but that was awesome. That was a there's like stairs or something. And then there was the dump truck. That was a sequel. Like you had to throw the guy through the windshield of a dump truck. Oh, man. Those God knows they're dumb. But those games just kill me. I love them.

mathowie 11:54 This one. This one felt much more difficult because it feels like you're like using quad and calf muscles with one button and like hamstrings and the other muscles with the other button. So it was just really complicated and hard. Yeah. There's just no rhythm

Cortex 12:10 and the music and it goes into this really sort of stirring. You know, kind of what does that Chariots of Fire sort of feeling music? That's really stirring as you're hobbling along on your knees with this like rag doll that's completely inept. And it's yeah, it's just it's kind of tone perfect. I think it's, it's pretty fantastic.

mathowie 12:32 The other most perfect thing of the day ever was the live webcam of the Shiba Nui, or Guney or whatever kind of puppies they are. On election day, a box full of puppies is just the best thing ever in the world. Yeah, it was absolutely perfect. I saw it a week before and I didn't post it. I was like, oh, that's kind of cute. As a friend who owns one of those dogs showed it to me. I was like, it's kind of cute, and they're constantly asleep. But on election day, they're like fighting and fighting and being super cute. And it was just it just hits the absolutely Pitch Perfect. You know, the first 12 or 14 hours of Election Day, there's nothing to do except sit on your hands and bite your nails and having a bunch of playful, super cute puppies was absolutely awesome.

Cortex 13:22 Well, there was also incessantly updating the election thread of the day, putting the sirens on. But yeah, even that was that was kind of nice, actually. I mean, it was still everybody sitting on their hands. But there were a lot of people reporting on sort of their voting experience that they're going in, which was really kind of cool are talking about their voting experience in the last few days if they've done early voting or whatever. So it was kind of nice to watch that sort of grow throughout the day. And I had to take solace in that actually, because I was still at the day job on election day. And our our corporate filter blocked the puppies. Oh, see them? Yeah. Everybody was like everybody's reveling in the puppies is like, oh, that sounds really.

mathowie 14:01 So this was your version of the puppies.

Cortex 14:03 Exactly. My puppies was metal filter people being relatively civil. Yeah. It's like It's like puppies. Kinda

mathowie 14:09 so anticlimactic to Oregon. I mean, I like it at home, but it's just doesn't have the punch of the actual day. The actual day means nothing.

Cortex 14:21 Yeah, exactly.

mathowie 14:22 That's the worst part is you get those fucking ads in the mail for like weeks and weeks. And I was done voting two weeks before the election in a still getting pitches to say yes and no to certain propositions. Yep.

Cortex 14:36 That was That was weird on us. We we watched election coverage on on just network TV, which is not something we do with a lot of and so we hadn't really been exposed to the inundation of political ads. And so we would watch the debates. And then the debate would be over and there'd be five minutes of like these awful local political ads national political ads. And it was it was just such a weird experience getting it dumped sort of on us in an Audio Video School format like that one I'm so used to seeing the stuff on everyone's wall the worst of the worst via like Talking Points Memo or something. Yeah, really weird that comes along

Unknown Speaker 15:20 gotta give you pause, why is Dr. Dre got to learn?

Cortex 15:30 I want to I want to mention this one more. It's just kind of a meta commentary thing, then for the thread itself. But there was a thread that will be posted a few days ago about online, Asperger's self diagnosis quiz type thing, which sounds like the worst possible thing in the world in the first place. I mean, yeah, get a bunch of people online to sit around discuss whether or not they have Asperger's. But you know, it's at the same time, you know, as a point of self reflection, I thought it was kind of a, an odd, fun thread. It reminded me of, you know, the Viking thread, you know, this is the new Is it a literal or metaphorical Viking, but down to the quack of just, you know, are you or are you not Asperger's? And is this test trying to diagnose you succeeding? And if you take the test, and it says, You're Aspie, and you don't think you're Aspie? Is that because a test is wrong? Or because you're an Aspie? It was, yeah.

mathowie 16:21 He admitted he was Asperger's. The

Cortex 16:24 Yeah, no, he yeah. He said in the post, in fact, you know, and I think he said before, he kind of suspects you might be sort of in that territory, mentally. I mean,

mathowie 16:33 I thought he told us like a year ago or something, somehow it came up and it was made so much sense because I mean, I don't know if this isn't like groundbreaking stuff to have to cut out of the podcast, but like, you know, early on, grumbled he was like one of the hardest people to explain AskMe edit filter to me and Jessamyn sort of explained things till we're blue in the face every time about what like, what makes a good question, what makes a bad question. I mean, it helped, it helped. He almost seemed like, you know, ridiculously clueless, over and over asking us to explain, explain, explain, but really helped us solidify the rules and stuff and come up with some sort of framework to be sort

Cortex 17:15 of having a sounding board like that something to sort of push against to really try and formalize. Yeah, because we were like, you want to describe and codify stuff.

mathowie 17:22 It was just like, what makes a good methodology? Like you know it, when you see it, it's good. Like, I don't understand what that means. So that really helped us sort of codify the, we really don't want casual was the term I always came up for it. I don't curiosities is like, the worst thing for us. Metafilter, in my mind, because he was loaded with idle curiosity. It's like, yeah, what is a few mean, as I think it was an early question we deleted and had to explain 100 times, like someone literally posted, it might have been him. How many is a few? Is that? Yeah, I mean, it's three to seven. You could go with several, maybe several starts at five? Is it three to five? And like, was it with you? It was like polling the audience. It was completely pointless thing.

Cortex 18:08 And, you know, it's it's like, it's a classic discussion, too. I mean, I definitely had this discussion a couple times in college. And it's fun to it's fun to talk about. But yeah, I think that's a good example of something that in retrospect is probably not what asked Metafilter is going to best serve. And it's

mathowie 18:23 early on, we sort of identified like, if you allow people just go nuts on the idle curiosities, like, what's the deal with meatballs? It would just be like, it would just be like, all this noise. And then you'd have to find the needles in the haystack that people actually want you to problem solved. And we were like, you know, I actually like it when someone follows a problem. And think of a way to just have that. I mean, without making it totally utilitarian, like, insert problem could chunk here's your answer. You know, something in the middle. So, yeah, it was really hard to explain how many Yeah, asking too many questions, etc.

Cortex 19:03 Yeah. Gosh, why

mathowie 19:04 is there space in your?

Cortex 19:06 I don't know. It's, you know what it is? I'm pasting from, from notepad. Oh, there it is. Yeah, I blame me. Yeah, so this was this was the one other medical posts that I really liked. And it was more of a happenstance thing, but it's a post, basically, just the, the you're getting left, I'm probably destroying his name, but a film called the perfect human. It's just a short experimental film that's very minimalist. And you can sort of watch these reactions of people watching it. There's a mix of people in the thread who have seen it and who haven't seen it. And it's like the stark differences and it turns into, maybe not too surprisingly, discussion of, you know, what the heck makes an experimental film good rather than just something you can point out and say, it's weird, therefore, I'm smart, because I say I like it. Which you know, it's a tricky thing, but I mean, I'm a very far thing from a film major. But I liked it. But I came, I became aware of it because of a film that came along years later that Lars von Trier, made with the director of the original film, called the Five obstructions were voluntary or challenged, you're getting to remake his film, according to five different sets of constraints that volunteer through it, and just to be a pain in the ass, basically. And then they made that into a film. So you've got these, these remakes of the film plus, plus the discussion between them as they're setting up these various interpretations. And I really enjoyed that. So that's been how I became aware of the film in the first place. And yeah, so it's, it's really, it's a fantastic little watch, even if you don't really like it, it's kind of compelling in its own way, regardless of I think your opinions on the overall value of it, or whether or not it's a good film or whatever, which is not an argument I want to try and get into here. But yeah, I thought that was really nice. And it's one of those things where it's, I've got real mixed feelings about, Hey, I found this video, watch this type post, you know, I think some are better than others. But I think it's an example of when it really does work well, because here's an artifact that, you know, it would have been relatively hard to find this movie, you know, before two or three years ago, and now it's just there on the internet on demand, you know, just go to Google Video, and boom,

mathowie 21:24 so yeah, it would have been rotting on a shelf in them. Yeah. Grad School film class. Yeah. My other favorite poses the mathematician jokes, just because I have, mostly because I have some friends to friends are math professors. But also, just because it's a good gauge of when people are gonna geek out on some subjects on metal filter, I get to realize where in the spectrum I get to place myself, like, half the jokes make no sense to me, because I don't even understand high level mathematics. But for the most part, I'm somewhere in the middle. But there's so many jokes that are just so far, like Heisenberg Principle jokes around like that again. But there's lots of funny, simple, even idiots who have only taken calculus can get into it.

Cortex 22:12 That's what that's what Metafilter is for helping you find your exact spot on the continuum of key code.

mathowie 22:18 Right on Oh, no. And it's many flavors. Yes. Along the various vectors. Yes, yes. Oh, yeah. Someone should draw this the infinite vectors of Geekdom. And where are your places on each? And then model it so I can figure out like a star graph. So everybody sits a polyhedron? either. I'm various points on the white leaf furry know nothing about Dungeons and Dragons, know a lot about recording equipment. Yeah, that would be cool. We could have numbers we could have, like, you know, an absolute number that represents you in the continuum of a zillion geek vectors. That that's

Cortex 22:58 that's both a wonderful in a terrible idea. I can I can get behind that. I

mathowie 23:03 think I'd like a universal constant metaphor to universal, the constant. Everything else and metaphor was just glad I saw closures, lab lab lab foreclosures.

Cortex 23:14 Well, there's there's some post election stuff too. Even even some stuff we didn't delete.

mathowie 23:18 Oh, yeah. Yeah, I thought the election stuff would be over. But people had to do a victory lap and post a lot.

Cortex 23:26 Yeah. Well, you know, it was gonna be such a huge moment catharsis. And I think I said something like this meta talk. But you know, it's not shocking that coming up to election day, people were actually really kind of focused on the election thread. And then once the election got called, there was like, the other election thread. And so we had like, 24 hours or so of people actually being pretty solidly in one place, and sort of on topic about it. And that was all there was no crazy election day storm of posts that we were kind of worried about. But then like the fifth and the sixth, it was like, Okay, now let's talk about everything else about the election, because I can't talk about whether or not you know, Obama or McCain is going to win anymore. And I've got all this energy. Oh, my God, oh, my God. Oh, my God, you know, and I feel like people were just kind of vibrating still. And so it turned into this giant flurry of posts, especially last week, but there's been some of it sort of spilling over this week, too. Yeah. But yeah, it feels like it feels like we've sort of come out the other side of it. Mostly now, though. People are mostly posting about just substantial stuff. And not just any old thing. So

mathowie 24:25 yeah, let me pull up my AskMe edit filter stuff in the last month. There's a metal filter. Anyone remember that? How do you find interesting things? How do people do it? Other people find interesting posts, and it's always like

Cortex 24:44 Oh, I totally missed that one. Yeah, it's

mathowie 24:46 me. It's almost like Hey, we should delete it. This is more meta taki but it's all like here's how to you know, follow a couple super bloggers. Here's how to troll them. Delicious. Delicious is still good. Read it. Digg is just too much though. Yay for no one marketing stumble upon is a good answer. Spammers stumble upon,

Cortex 25:11 you know, and it's it's not I'm not sure it's even StumbleUpon fault per se, necessarily do anything wrong there they've got a weird model. There's there's nothing wrong with that and it's it's been around for a while and they're stuck with okay. But it really is one of the things Yeah, it feels like sort of sausage making stuff here I guess but it seems like it's one of the stronger indicators we see when we google someone if they're going to turn out to be a self linker when they make their first post. Yeah, like, what's up with this person? StumbleUpon account? Oh, yeah. So not everybody who has a similar account is a spammer. But almost everybody's a spammer has a stumble upon?

mathowie 25:51 Exactly. My, one of my favorites was the family jargon thread. This is like the closest you can get the chat filter. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's someone like practically, like, I'd like to write a book or, Hey, let's all go first. Just you know, everyone's got their secret code. You got these, like shortcut jokes you use only among your family. And persons basically asked him for people to share him. And there's a lot of stories of like, you know, when Carl was my brother was five years old, he said something funny. And now whenever something horrible happens, we'd say, you know, you're pulling a car oil or something. And these things are hilarious when you read them out, and I shared mine. Hey, got the best answer.

Cortex 26:38 Yeah, they're just second.

mathowie 26:39 Yeah, totally. But yeah, like you've Yeah, we all have these, like code names for each other code names for situations, and there's just a lot of funny family crap in this thread. That was good reason.

Cortex 26:53 Yeah, yeah. It's, it's a good question. It's one of the things we I looked at it kind of strongly initially, because it's like, is this really just gonna be a big old chat filter? Nightmare? But yeah, the question is good. And the answer is good. That's one of the things where this is one of the times we almost kind of throw in and put up with the kind of nightmare of trying to moderate something like this, where, you know, there's gonna be stuff that's kind of just genuine chat filter answers, and we need to sort of have some of that in but then there's a lot of stuff that's more in that gray area. And

mathowie 27:21 I remember like an hour into it, there's just as many flags as favorites. And it's always it's always a good sign that something's gonna push boundaries in a good way. That like, exactly gonna annoy people, but it's also gonna have something worth keeping around. Yeah, I didn't see the did you see the viral book? Strange book in the mail thing? That was the most popular thing? I didn't see that. Yeah, I didn't read about except for people are just trying to track down like, what the hell Why did someone get a free book in the mail? Yeah, I get lots of free books in the mail. But it's always, always like these book people, promoters that just go through a list of bloggers, and

Cortex 28:02 I am going to talk about the election. One more time, but not really. But one of the asked me questions I flagged actually was a question about why we don't have national voting by mail, which I think the short answer was, well, we don't have national voting by anything. Because it's that's a state thing, as far as how they're going to implement their local elections, but but as one of the things where I look, I'm kind of like, yeah, we, in Oregon, we've had vote by mail for 10 years now. And it works great. And it's awesome. And I don't we have this. So it's kinda interesting to see people covering a little bit of the sort of existing sort of policy and arguments on it.

mathowie 28:42 Yeah, it does. It does take the process away from you and abstracted enough to make cheating easier. I mean, that's the I mean, the vote fraud aspect is the only thing I'm worried about the Oregon thing.

Cortex 28:55 Yeah, but at the same time, we've got explicit sort of, we do Scantron ballots, and so of the sort of non error prone and relatively verifiable stuff, it's not too bad either. So I mean, there's always a possibility so it's gonna pull off some vote fraud stuff. But compared to the the specter of the untraceable dipole tampering it, it looks pretty solid.

mathowie 29:16 Well, yeah, it does feel like sometimes. I mean, I dropped my ballot into a ballot box outside the courthouse It is sometimes it feels like it's been dumped into a black hole. Like if, yeah, if you lived in a blue County and you are red in the mind, you could just start don't 50 in the trash and do your side, you know, a favor. But I think, you know, massive scale fraud would be spotted, you know, it'd be like, Why are we missing 10,000 votes, etc. So yeah, maybe it's not so bad, but that's my only worry about it. But otherwise, it's great.

Cortex 29:51 Yeah. I wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised to see that pick up more in the long run.

mathowie 29:56 I thought there was a cool this time happens from time to time election wise when someone posts a question or a post on metal filter proper and and someone keenly involved, signs up just to answer it forwards and backwards. So

Cortex 30:14 there's a card you talking about the Howard Dean guy. Yeah.

mathowie 30:17 So there's a question about like, why is Howard Dean leaving this post? Does he hate Obama? But then, you know, this guy who works he was the chief of staff and what he is some guy signs up. Oh, here it is. He works for here's, here's the other ones had more information. Here's a guy who works for Howard Dean,

Cortex 30:41 say, internet director for the Democratic National Committee. And Alicia Yeah.

mathowie 30:45 And he's going like, here's what happens behind, you know, quote, unquote, closed doors. It's really no big deal. You know, he knew he was only going to be with it for one term. He has nothing against Obama. You know, you guys are making stuff up. And there's everything we're doing behind the scenes, you know, and it's great. I love it when, uh, you know, people sign up therapy involved. Sometimes. Yeah, it's once a month sometimes out.

Cortex 31:10 Yeah, we have a couple. Yeah, it's a couple people do that. I think this week, too. I mean, nothing, nothing mind blowing necessarily. Aside from Yeah, the Josh mcconachie for how he says the same.

mathowie 31:23 Oh, we forgot to mention the other big election thing. Steve this Devis John Tevez. Oh, yeah, John, Tavis, the metal filter user was running for an unopposed Republican seat in what state? Kansas? Congress. So kind of, you know, low stakes kind of election. But yeah, you know, he's just sort of, you know, ran, you know, what the hell, I'm just gonna do it, you know, funny to see, like all his campaign materials, it's like, you know, it has to be like, user interface engineer or something is like his profession. Having to explain that to people in Kansas. It was great, because six months ago, I had to dig up the thread, you know, it came up that he did the x k, the style comic to launch his campaign and get donations and he got all the donations he wanted. So he could outspend his opponent. But, you know, he sort of there was a great thread, I think we mentioned on five or six podcasts ago, this summer when it happened. You know, he kind of learned a lot in the meta filter thread and all the blog posts about his campaign about things like you know, other Democrats hated or liked about it and sort of formed his opinions. So it finally came down to brass tacks he lost by I think 400 votes out of 8000 or 12,000 something like that. That was a total bummer. Yeah become so far in not quite get it but for a place I think that votes super heavily Republican and and going against incumbent Republican it was just so close. It was yeah, that's kind of notable in its own right. It was just kind of amazing. And then he explains in this last comment, you know, an aftermath you know, from the start he was gonna be like you know, I'm happy so net savvy and put everything on the web is gonna be great Twitter, blog posts, everything but then he found out you know, small minded small town people, I think is what shakes out, you know, where you have to, like, just be completely protectionist. Like his only blog posts were like press releases, you could tell were vetted 100 times word for every word, there was nothing dangerous said everything. Yeah, neutral. And you could tell the basically, the opponents were watching him like a hawk. So he didn't, I was kind of bummed. And he didn't exactly do it as a total, like crazy, wild eyed blogger trying to run for an office. It was more like someone just protecting themselves from being exploited. And they still got so so sad that their opponent, like pulled up every dumb photo on Facebook of them from the last 10 years, then made some postcard going, Is this who you want running? You know, in Congress, this schmuck?

Cortex 34:05 You know, and it's funny, I kind of want to, I want to look at that and say that, you know, maybe that'll change, you know, generation from now, but it's not like this is new. It's just it's a little bit easier now to find random photos of someone. I mean, you still? Yeah. Yeah. How many pictures of politicians as college students doing something that looks dangerously activist have come up in elections? You know, in the last, you know, 30 years, so. So yeah, it probably won't change fundamentally. But I do kind of wonder if you know, there will be there's got to be a boring sort of cultural shift at some point where people will like, you know, every fucking one of us has a stupid picture on Facebook.

mathowie 34:41 I like to imagine we all know it. I like to imagine there's like, everyone's building up a database of themself. And now it's like, completely literal. You can see it now because it's all on the web. And I keep thinking that like 3040 years from now, basically, there'll be no such thing as skeletons in the closet because everything will be Google It'll be your entire life database is out there. And at some point, people will just give up on doing something.

Cortex 35:09 And maybe leaving, there'll be some sort of paradoxical kind of flip where all of a sudden, having really, you know, thorough and vegtable visible history of embarrassing normal human experience will become the new credibility. Yeah, at some point in just like, I Googled you and I couldn't find anything. What's up pod person, you know, and I'm not really convinced that will happen. But it'd be

mathowie 35:32 someday someone will win an election on the on having a more embarrassing Facebook of themselves.

Cortex 35:39 Here's me passed out on the campus police station lawn with a smiley face painted on my app, such as my dedication to you, America,

mathowie 35:48 we've all been there now put me in the White House.

Cortex 35:54 One other asked me what I liked there was, and this is it almost kind of hurts me to point out that I like this because I've been on a long, hard journey with the little calf. And I know I got some grief, I think at some point last year for deleting a couple of little cats posts. But I pretty much made my peace with it. And there was this asked Metafilter question asking about non cat non dog low animals. And it just became this roundup of all kinds of species, essentially. And it's really kind of a great resource of of a meme in action. Plus, you know, has that sort of cute animal photo side to it, too. So it's kind of an all purpose thread. It's

mathowie 36:35 the edges of the law. phenomenon, right? Yeah,

Cortex 36:38 exactly. The little fringe the

mathowie 36:40 Yeah. Oh, LOL tape, yours is my favorite. Somebody actually registered and built that site.

Cortex 36:52 It's a that's I love that about the internet.

mathowie 36:54 Yeah. Here's a useful useful thread if you want to become an alcoholic is one of the best liquor i do i What are the best liquors for the money? Like what's, you know, someone was saying, you know, I'm stepping up from super cheap well drinks and trying to buy nicer alcohol to have occasional sips of at home. And then everyone breaks down. There's hundreds of comments here about you know, here's my favorite $30 Whiskey or $40 Bourbon or something. It's like nice, but not too nice.

Cortex 37:28 I lurking the be behind the, the just sort of generalist web savvy. Who knows what a normal person surface of metal filter is? A raging pool of functioning alcoholics. And yeah, seems like anytime, anytime booze comes up, you get this wonderful wellspring of opinions. You know, it's almost like you know, it's like if Miguel Cardozo didn't exist, we would have to invent in terms of of this, you know that I almost wonder if you know, this is an attempt by someone to get him to come and hang around a little bit more again. But But ya know, I love this stuff. Because I've been doing the same thing to you know, I, I've been, especially Scotch in general have been trying to get into and I've been going out and every, every couple of months, or every few months, I'll go out and just buy a new bottle of scotch or something I haven't had before and sort of exploring that sort of middle territory. So yeah, it's great seeing stuff like this, where I can see people who've really put in their time I guess, with their booze given given a heads up on on what's worth checking out and what maybe not so much.

mathowie 38:39 Is there any other AskMe methods or posts?

Cortex 38:42 That's it for me on AskMe?

mathowie 38:43 I guess anything happened in meta talk this month, or last

Cortex 38:48 few things? There was a there was that, that what thing has metal filter made you by thread? Oh, yeah, that was that was kind of interesting. Yeah. I think it's like 150 comments or something last time I looked. So that was kind of fun. People just talking about well, I saw this on ask me or I bought this album from music or there was this post on on metal filter that I really liked. Yeah.

mathowie 39:09 All Over the Map. Yeah. I drink stuff. I saw a band. I bought a clock like incredible.

Cortex 39:22 And there was a it's National Novel Writing Month.

mathowie 39:25 Yeah. How's the winter project going?

Cortex 39:28 Let me tell you about the Twitter novel project. I took several pages of notes and a brand new moleskin I bought our moleskin moleskin. Oh, yeah, go? Yeah. That hipstery notebook. It's still it's a nice fucking form factor. So you know, get off my balls. Yeah. But I bought that and I made several notes and I did some writing on the first few days. And then I think I left my notebook at my day job after I quit. And, and I haven't written in it Since like the second of the month, on Twitter, and Fallout three is really good, basically, is how the novel's going to eat. Yeah, play Fallout three.

mathowie 40:11 My back of the envelope calculations was something you needed, like 80,000 8000 to 10,000.

Cortex 40:18 Yeah, depending on depending on how efficient I was with words, because you can get like 20 words into a Twitter. So like, if I was being super efficient, it could have been done in like 20 503,000 tweets, but I think something more like five or 6000 would be more likely. And who knows? Maybe I'll get excited about it and keep doing it. i It's not gonna happen this month. 1000 We're definitely here today. Yeah, you know, that wouldn't be

mathowie 40:42 five an hour, if you didn't sleep to one minute, while you without sleeping. That's bad.

Cortex 40:51 If you get on I mean, I write relatively fast. Once I actually start writing. It's the pauses in between sort of sense. Twitter almost makes more sense than sitting and staring at a word processor for an hour. But uh, but yeah, yeah, that didn't really someone's gonna figure it out. But a bunch of people are writing, there's a big pile of mefites. And they all sort of checked in on that thread. And Robocop is bleeding. already hit 50,000, which is the magical number for the month. Yeah, he did it like 10 days, because he's a dick. Wow. And, yeah, and a bunch of other people making pretty good progress at more normal human speeds, too. So

mathowie 41:23 I forgot to mention this is like the most favorited comment, the last yawn. Was that T Christ, right? Oh, yeah. TK Christ. Yeah, TK. TK Christ story of his dad not being the same after Nam. And one day, you know, becoming a bit on hands. It's just a wonderful, wonderful story. I would have contacted him haven't read it, but probably takes 10 minutes to read. It's totally worth it. I should check my favorites. I should I save a lot of the popular favorite comments in Google Reader. Because they're just so good. There's make for awesome stories. Me, Paul II shared

Cortex 42:13 while you're while you're searching a quick, another thread that came up in the last few days, sort of well wishing for ye Noxus who bailed across the front of a tractor, I guess when he misread a farmer's hand signal? Yeah, he's fine. And yeah, he actually checked into the thread fairly quickly. And it sounds like he got away really lucky. He's in pain, but mostly the pain that happens when you throw yourself off a motorcycle and slide 30 feet, but no real significant injuries, which is awesome. And yeah, he sort of talks about what went down in the thread and talks about his gear, and there's some good motorcycle talk actually in there. But yeah, that was kind of a Yeah, watch. Try not to try not to collide with tractors, folks. That's, that's, you're doing it wrong.

mathowie 42:58 Oh, here's the other thing. This is amazing, amazing comment. It wasn't meant to be a gotcha. But someone, obviously who did this, round me write to me, basically searched about a dozen metal filter members, who mentioned something about Barack Obama in January 2007. And then pulled up their last comment of November 2008. It wasn't meant to be a gotcha. But it comes out that way. Yeah, this going like, I don't think this guy can hack it in 2007. And the 2008 them going. This guy's the greatest. It's,

Cortex 43:36 yeah. Yeah. No, it's a nice sort of is a great little sort of artifact of, of how people sort of takes on on these things can develop over time, just,

mathowie 43:44 Oh, I'm so tired of this guy in January 2000. And then, you know, we made history a year and a half, almost two years later. But you know, I mean, you know, metal filter sets where it's close to chat. And you know, I mean, we can say a lot of embarrassing things. If you just put a microphone next year, friend. Oh, god. Yeah. So we just happen to have this stuff frozen in time. And it's just kind of hilarious to go.

Cortex 44:08 And some somebody found a couple of old mentions of Obama too. And I think civil disobedience called the election for Obama sometime in 2005. was pretty great. But then,

mathowie 44:20 in 2004, after his, you know, yeah. And going No way 2008 You know, I remember thinking 2012 Maybe, but God it was should be sooner than that.

Cortex 44:31 Yeah, well, yeah, I was looking, I was looking through one of the one of the old threads I think it was actually a thread that said the the first black president United States, Barack Obama in 2004. Which I guess counts as a good prediction too. But, but yeah, people talking there and yeah, they were all talking about, you know, 2012 It seemed like, and I was trying to figure out if that was, you know, he's not experienced enough. He's not gonna be ready in 2008. Or if it was, you know, this was like the convention right? So it's like June or whatever. So it's a people saying, hey, you know, Oh, Kerry's totally gonna win it so, you know, he'll go to terms and then in 2012 then then then Brock can run you know what it was? Yeah, it was a big thread this this whole two doesn't fall into it didn't read the whole thing start to finish but uh but yeah, I was really kind of interesting looking through all that and seeing various people's takes on you know what the implications of this guy coming out of the scene or god damn oh, we're talking about the elections. Yeah,

mathowie 45:24 now well,

Cortex 45:25 that's enough. Well, no, no, one more one more thing. Actually, we have to do just for anybody who missed it. The election prediction results talk if you're curious what ended up happening there and guess what? Definitely check that called a

mathowie 45:40 bit early. Like we're still counting Missouri or something.

Cortex 45:44 Yeah, yeah, there was there's a couple other calls I think the calls ended up being functionally correct. But I didn't guess so. I wasn't super invested in the outcome but I was sort of highly watching the results threads have developed and people saying well, yeah, but this state we don't know for sure. And

mathowie 45:59 the winner is still the winner. Like

Cortex 46:01 yeah, I think so. Missouri ended up going red after all. Yeah, it was I think what the call was so

mathowie 46:07 Okay, that's about it for this week. This two weeks and yeah, sometime at the end of the month. I guess we're after Thanksgiving. We'll try and do another one. And we'll have Jessamyn driving the bus finally

Cortex 46:21 come back we need you

Unknown Speaker 46:31 around and starving in my travels ordering up walking in Central Park to the singing after dark people have been crazy. I've been stumbling on my feet shuffling through the scenery, Asking