Podcast 35 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 35: Overeducated and underpaid (2008-12-08).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary keywords

people, thread, post, apples, talk, game, music, meta, anonymous, filter, song, totally, read, cover, play, npr, podcast, bad, dice, problem

Transcript

Unknown Speaker 0:07 Gentlemen, welcome to the metal filter podcast.

mathowie 0:12 This is episode 35 of the podcast last one was in mid November so this is the last two ish weeks or so and Thanksgiving ish time for Americans

Jessamyn 0:30 like late, late November holidays and other countries that are like things like you know how like Christmas there's like Christmas and Boxing Day Kwanzaa and Hanukkah and Solstice but like they're giving

mathowie 0:42 harvest festivals right like Canada has Thanksgiving in October, doesn't it? I mean a virtual Thanksgiving.

Jessamyn 0:49 Yeah, that's what orange swan was say.

mathowie 0:51 Yeah, like there's like a month before. Ish probably because totally fucking colder.

Jessamyn 0:57 Well here to really harvest festivals. We're mostly we're mostly that. Alright, so maybe not this was the other Oh, well. Hi. Hi, Josh.

Cortex 1:09 How you doing? Pretty good. You I'm good. I've been I've been solid.

mathowie 1:15 So I guess let's jump right into music. Josh, Give us the music report. And I should like tap a typewriter somewhere so official.

Cortex 1:25 In music the last couple of weeks people have been posting songs and they're good.

Jessamyn 1:30 And the challenge

mathowie 1:31 November challenge re Kelly. Oh, yeah. Well,

Cortex 1:35 yeah, we kind of talked about that. It got off to a pretty quick start. Last time, like in the first couple of weeks, were already a bunch of stuff. We talked about the podcast and and that sort of kept going. So there's been some more more short songs, anything you know, if you go back to the last podcast and click through the tags, you can see it's sort of still flying along. Lots of cover songs too. Yeah, a lot of those covers still going on from that request. Right? There's been actually one of the ones that one of my favorite songs since we did the podcast was posted I think like the same day we recorded that one. Choco cat actually made my day and answered my request to cover watching the detectives by Elvis Costello. Oh,

Jessamyn 2:16 that sounds great. That's really great.

Cortex 2:19 He just really knocked it out of fucking Park and wonderful

Unknown Speaker 2:25 shrink wrap so dogs under watching

Jessamyn 2:46 was he the one that did the cover of that violent FEM song to there was another cover that I really really liked.

Cortex 2:53 I don't know if that was him.

Jessamyn 2:56 Let me let me check real quick. Keep talking but

mathowie 3:00 and then December's challenges probably holiday music.

Jessamyn 3:03 You know, I have actually heard holiday holiday music.

Cortex 3:07 I didn't look at the challenges yet. for December. I was just the one because I knew

Jessamyn 3:14 the music recap.

Cortex 3:16 I'm new at this

mathowie 3:18 fired music that's

Cortex 3:19 what I was gonna say is I hadn't looked at the theme but I pretty much figured it out when I saw all these songs about like Satan you know that pretty much gave it away you know but fuck Baby Jesus is but yeah, so yeah,

mathowie 3:37 request cover of rock jingle bell

Jessamyn 3:41 jingle rock Bell

mathowie 3:43 Yeah. Tell by somebody else maybe I can implode the metal filter music university should do that just go into thread and throw

Cortex 3:49 down that's what it's there for.

Jessamyn 3:51 Exactly. And it's linked at the top of music This was the other thing that chocolate cat duds it's a it's a violent femmes cover from a long time ago. But it has this total wind comment in it because he got his daughter to holler for it because there's it's all about somebody pushing his daughter into the well and so he talks about how he got his daughter to scream as if you were pushing her in a well. That's right. Yes. Funny. Wow.

Unknown Speaker 4:20 She pushed me for my my poster for my love through my child into bottomless pit

Jessamyn 4:35 screen and the cover was just wonderful. And it's it was a great song. Yeah,

Cortex 4:41 there's a guy. The covers are just making me really happy but I kind of feel bad because I want to encourage more of the random you know, original stuff but but Mexican did a cover of my own personal Jesus. That is just it's I kind of have a hard time describing it. It really is. It immediately struck me when I was listening to it it's like it's like Laurie Anderson and Peter Gabriel like got really high and decided to try and make Depeche Mode cry because it's it's yeah I don't know you just this real sort of low state and voice sort of thing over this really frenetic like marimba backing track I don't know

mathowie 5:40 wow, that is lush.

Jessamyn 5:45 That's terrific.

Cortex 5:46 And Mexicans have been doing that. He did a really bad cover of are you gonna go my way I think or maybe one of his other goddamn endless repeat pops on but yeah, he did that and he was talking about doing more bad covers like not just like completely awful but you know intentionally sort of fucked up and so I think this is another entry in that test

mathowie 6:32 covers. Oh, yeah, he did the immigrant song there's Are you gonna go my way? Yeah,

Jessamyn 6:37 that's the come from the land of the ice and snow song. Yeah. Fantastic yay for music Well, and I think the cover thing is good. Because for some people, they might feel sketchier about starting with their own stuff for whatever reason. And so it gives them a way to ease into the community. And everyone's like, Oh, my God, this is awesome. And then, yeah,

Cortex 7:15 that's and that's great. I mean, anything that's gonna get someone sort of comfortable jumping on. I just remember when we first started, we were like, well, let's not do covers. And now it's sort of like gotten more and more where it's not just okay, but kind of people are like, yeah, covers, and I'm really enjoying it. But I feel Yeah, wandering to that tricky territory where, you know, we're exposing ourselves to some sort of, yeah, ability from an angry label or some bullshit

mathowie 7:38 like that chances of ASCAP coming down hard on us is so ridiculously low. I don't even log visits to mental health because I can't even tell how many things have been played because at worst, they'd want like whatever nickel per play or something kooky.

Jessamyn 7:51 They'd want a nickel per play of everything you've ever played Ever.

Cortex 7:58 Which, which, you know, now that we don't have play counts anymore. Haha. You check for nothing.

mathowie 8:03 who's representing the artist now?

Jessamyn 8:07 Zero times 3000 is still zero.

Cortex 8:11 Okay, so a couple other things that are actually that are original stuff. There's the small town news affiliate themes. Oh, yeah. From duck gosto that's a tour de force. Yeah, it's just spot on. Oh, you

mathowie 8:25 got like 30 seconds long.

Cortex 8:52 The first time I listened to it, I put it on and I was reading something else. So I like like hit play and then tabbed over like I usually do when I'm just listening to stuff at random. And by the time it was over, I'd forgotten what I was listening to. And why because it's like, I just left like a TPM. Like a talking Yeah, video clip open and they had been playing a cable news steamer so I had to exactly

Jessamyn 9:11 like to work the

mathowie 9:14 same experience. I'd like 10 tabs open I just sort of opened it a tab and was playing it and then I was like, what is there a YouTube tab of like, you know Atlanta Channel News Nine on or something? Yeah, I was had to double check all my tabs. And I was like that kit no animal. Yeah, you can't make that kind of music with a modern computer. But you can.

Cortex 9:36 Yeah. Stunning endorsement of how well done that was. And it was also there was a song from user Jenny is crafty. She's been

Jessamyn 9:45 all over the site. Like all months, she puts stuff in the store and I've been like reading her stuff other places, too. I didn't know she was even in music. Yeah, no,

Cortex 9:53 she she posted. She was finally I want to say she's posted a couple things over there before but she just posted a song that was basically her singing Don't like really, really minimalist thing this, but singing a poem her mom wrote in that she's like putting this together as a Christmas present or whatever. And it's just really great. I mean, it's really it's really simple. It's kind of an understated little thing, not something that would necessarily pop out in the masses. You know, it's it doesn't have the catchiness of punch him in the deck as far as that song to listen to, but it's really great. It's just a really nice piece of work. So I definitely wanted to mention that

Unknown Speaker 10:37 rock

mathowie 10:45 that's it like a crossover eventually. With AskMe Metafilter threads on cheap handmade presents, you can get a family that is that are unusual in art eschar for something like, you know, singing a poem someone else in your family wrote is probably pretty cool. Yeah. Sounds kind of haunting. The second tag on is depression.

Cortex 11:12 It's not a cheerful song.

mathowie 11:14 We swear it's good. I

Jessamyn 11:15 also, I also like this one song, which is just another one of those kinds of really late. It's a classical guitar kind of thing. If we were looking for more like lead in or lead out music. Yeah. Instead of depression. It's called lead back, which I think is

mathowie 11:31 cool. Oh, that's yeah. Perfect. Very pretty good. bumpers.

Jessamyn 11:38 Exactly. Exactly. That's

Cortex 11:39 our NPR music.

Jessamyn 11:41 Well, exactly.

mathowie 11:43 So let's move over to like projects and jobs, jobs. It's just web jobs. There's been like five web jobs. That's it?

Cortex 11:50 I don't think yeah, it's been really there's been like, well, there's been like, five jobs period.

mathowie 11:53 Well, ya know, and they're all little tiny web gigs. But, I mean, it's a reflection of the economy.

Cortex 12:00 But, you know, the most recent one there it's Brad Sachs needs a his website needs a tune up, I guess so. So if you want to make Brad's sucks site suck less red sox.com? Yes. Brad is doing ok.com This Brad guy, I'm, I'm having second thoughts.com You know, something like that?

mathowie 12:22 Every band person not to every person with their own band site. It's just a nightmare of 10 different, you know, piles of pieces of code. You know, I tried out a forum, I'd have this music streaming thing. I'm running WordPress, but it's like 10 versions back.

Jessamyn 12:40 Here's here's my MySpace and a sidebar widget from a company that doesn't exist anymore. My label wants me to try this.

mathowie 12:47 I would totally be all about you know, paying someone to just clean slate the whole thing. Yeah.

Jessamyn 12:55 The nuclear option. Yeah. Because you

mathowie 12:57 know, DIY musicians are like, Hey, what the hell Why don't you know it's one little PHP thing to drop in. Not to denigrate the current Brad's sucks or every

Cortex 13:10 but yours is yours is great frenetic,

mathowie 13:12 endless tinkering. What was your favorite projects? My the free Where the hell is the project? Oh, my favorite project was something I'll never use or need.

Jessamyn 13:26 The animated advent calendar. Oh, the girl that

mathowie 13:29 was the cufflinks. Yeah, a blog about like talking about your niches but you know, someone who likes cufflinks has no reason to wear them. Doesn't even buy them. Just like notes, the cool ones online and surprisingly cool and useful when you get our two d two cufflinks or Obama O's or whatever you want.

Jessamyn 13:49 Come on, those are beautiful. This is a great site. It's just one of those sites like that shoe site. Yeah. It takes interfaces that suck and makes them beautiful. And then people are like, I would like to buy some of these recycled biochem coupons. What? Awesome. Yes, it's very cufflinks.

mathowie 14:07 Very browsable in a good way. Yeah. I don't know how they did have a crazy blog template or something. But it's pretty cool. With WordPress. Really, like just a wacky. 10 posts 12 posts per page and you make them into boxes. Interesting.

Jessamyn 14:29 And they all just line up that way. Yeah, that's cool.

mathowie 14:33 What was the Holy Grail?

Cortex 14:36 I had it's m Maskull. You know, just sort of did a little bit of deep linking under the hood to provide some RSS functionality where NPR hasn't necessarily done a great job of that. So basically, you can get it the fees for the podcast for various shows. You know, it's not like

Jessamyn 14:54 this stuff very polite.

mathowie 14:58 NPR is like the Thomas law. dot gov Have you know giant archives that are completely fucking useless to modern technology kinda but could use a little help?

Cortex 15:09 Yeah, exactly. So yeah it's one of those things I mean it's kind of a understated practices like here are you know making access to podcasts slightly simpler but you know it's at the same time it's a great little thing a podcast

mathowie 15:19 for every single person on NPR and I just found Catherine you at the bottom. Wow. Oh, really? Member? Yes. Every time she has a little music plug in it has the songs Cool

Jessamyn 15:35 Metal filters on Yes.

mathowie 15:36 Metafilter zone we own her.

Jessamyn 15:39 Oh, so wait is my friend Robert there to that. I have a buddy who works there.

mathowie 15:43 Robber. Let me just do a find in page which is broken. Smith. Diane Roberts Roberts.

Jessamyn 15:52 No, no. Robert Smith. Correspondent national desk. Yeah, I've got my friends.

mathowie 15:58 Does he have a nice boy?

Jessamyn 16:00 I think so. I mean, he sounds like everybody else on NPR.

mathowie 16:03 Didn't we have him do voiceovers for this.

Cortex 16:05 We'll see if he wants to do like a one off staying for one show. It can be the official.

Jessamyn 16:15 We haven't I don't even think he's on meta filter. But he used to come to like open mic nights I'd have in Seattle. And he did a great thing about what it was like being a radio guy covering the implosion of the kingdom. Because it's all like radio, right? So you can't take amazing pictures of the destruction. You have to just put microphones near it and be like, yeah, that's it falling apart.

Cortex 16:40 What's gonna be like, you know, sports play by play on the radio. Right? You know, it's, it's great, right, you know, the, the collapse of a large structure, you know, the girder tosses it to the supporting Oh, the

mathowie 16:53 humanity. Oh, and

Jessamyn 16:55 the rats fleeing? Yes, exactly. I'm going to send this to him. He'll be happy

mathowie 17:03 to read it themselves, or

Jessamyn 17:05 did you read a sparrow girls latest project, like it's really it's recent, I woke up. Yeah, I

mathowie 17:14 woke up this morning and proved it. She was trying to do some research on what happened to people in an internment camp during the war, but I didn't have time to read what she had gotten to so far. Or she's trying to assemble it, or she has it. I couldn't tell she

Jessamyn 17:29 has the information. She got it from a certain Holocaust librarian that we know. But she got somebody to find a German translator and then did it for cheap and then it's online because she had it put online at the Jewish genealogy database. At any rate, it's a happy story and you should go read it.

mathowie 17:56 In relative terms, I guess we can just get a meta filter stuff. Super meta filter slips. Let me see from like November 17. On

Cortex 18:10 there was a I think I said something about the Asperger's thread that grumble be posted the take the Asperger's test. Yang in the last podcast is sort of like the ultimate meta filter bait for pulling in this weird sort of self reflective discussion of everybody's proclivities and there's like the the the non psychological version of that. In the last couple weeks there was this thread about dice manufacturing, from a manufacturer of gaming dice on you know, the problems with round edge dice and your

Jessamyn 18:47 dice molds. Yeah.

Cortex 18:50 It turned in sort of the same thing except for like every everybody with any sort of hand in either role playing games, or apply giant geometry or sort of casino match that do a pull down on these weird little angles, because, yeah, you had people just sort of geeking out over every aspect of it, I learned about metal glasses, which was something I had no idea about from the thread when someone pointed out that you could you know, try and get dice manufactured from these special alloys that have incredibly high elasticity because of the strange method by which they are produced. You know, there's like there's just like there's 20 different tangents all of which are like just ridiculous sort of, you could spend the day reading about this thing all out of this thread about about how the 20s that other people make artists because the D 20s. That the guy in the in the link makes.

Jessamyn 19:48 Yeah, it was just an interview with this guy talking about dice and it turned into this amazing yeah, multifaceted.

mathowie 19:58 metaphor for wandering a time lapse you to video of a guy rolling at D 20, like 10,000 times and showing minor statistical anomaly

Cortex 20:06 No, but there are discussions in the thread about statistical anomalies in diet that the guy actually had designed. Somebody did 5000 And something trials to determine that there was a bias towards the poles of a nearly spherical D 100.

Jessamyn 20:23 That wouldn't be the chords right?

Cortex 20:26 You know it's yeah, it's comes up. You know, corporate holiday parties

mathowie 20:29 wouldn't be that hard to make like, like a Lego Mindstorms dice rolling hand bot that takes like a digital photo of the final like when you have a sound Yeah, ha, man, you can build this with like, tabletop stuff. That's

Jessamyn 20:45 listen to the sound sad a random number. I

mathowie 20:47 don't know. Take a photo do like recognition for number of dots and record it like in an Excel spreadsheet? Yeah,

Cortex 20:54 you'd be building still die rolling robot so that you could let it run by itself for 24 hours. So yeah, I would die. 5000 times yourself.

mathowie 21:01 Yeah. Pick up drop. Listen for no sound, then take a digital photo, and then pick up drop and just repeat.

Jessamyn 21:09 I think Mechanical Turk will do that for

mathowie 21:13 you. Yeah, but they're bored college students. There's no

Jessamyn 21:17 how does this help save the planet? That is my question.

mathowie 21:22 I just wanted to hear you. craps. Save the environment. That's pretty cool.

Jessamyn 21:30 So can anybody explained this post that I think is probably brilliant, but I don't kind of get it. But the people who loved it seem to really, really, really love it. Oh, yeah, this purple? I can't. I can't even pronounce the word. I was thinking cortex, maybe? Maybe a little bit of your see if I went to college? No, actually,

Cortex 21:56 I noticed talking about and if I had actually read the links, I would, I would probably have something useful to say, but I don't remember. Well, I don't know what was in the actual original length, because I jumped into this thread in the middle after some, some kind of pissing match about halting. I don't actually know what the premise was. But it is a really interesting problem and a really interesting discussion. So I enjoyed the thread a lot, but I can't tell you a damn thing about why it all came up.

Jessamyn 22:25 Okay, your understanding then is the same as mine.

Cortex 22:29 Pretty much. Yeah. Well, I mean that the halting problem is, well, I don't think I can actually explain it concisely. So I would just go on for five minutes. And then there'd be a bunch of problems with what I said. But it's really interesting. From a computer science perspective,

mathowie 22:43 condense it down in a Twitter post.

Jessamyn 22:46 Well, except I didn't understand the Twitter. Yeah, here's here's the Wikipedia. It seemed like for the people who did really understand it, it was like this brilliant kind of jokey attempt to find somebody to solve a problem. This troubled people since time immemorial.

Cortex 23:04 It's a perpetual motion problem, you know, I mean, there's no solution for it because of the nature of the system. And, and yeah, just just as you've had people who have a clever gadget that runs on Steam and, you know, creates more energy than it consumes, you know, magnets, yeah, magnets, magnets are very important. You know, it's the same thing with the halting problem. You know, it's, it's, it's a basic mathematical, you know, problem, and it can't be solved as far as we know, it's rigorously shown to be unsolvable. But people are like, Oh, but no, I've got a system and I'm gonna make it worse.

Jessamyn 23:37 What am I by my stock?

mathowie 23:40 What am I sure signs that I know it's gonna something's gonna be over my head is when blasdell not only understands it fully, but he's making jokes about it.

Jessamyn 23:52 And it's cheery about sort of what I love. It's a wise happy not sad. He's

mathowie 23:59 the wise old sage, Uber nerd dumb who won't explain things but like, mocks me for not knowing enough about things, but I don't think he's old enough to drink.

Cortex 24:09 Now, he was at the he was at the he was at the eighth anniversary party. He must be. Yeah. At least in his early 20s. Right.

Jessamyn 24:16 Yeah, he was 19 when I met him, which was a couple years ago. Maybe

mathowie 24:22 he was in a bar, but it was a private party. I thought they kind of did everyone.

Jessamyn 24:28 Now, they just checked him against the list. I don't know. We'll have to ask him. He's a metal talk. So I'm shocked to

mathowie 24:33 find out and he'll give us like when and where we have to solve it for his age.

Jessamyn 24:39 But remember, he's the one that has the little sister who's 14.

mathowie 24:42 Oh, Burr. I'm trying to think what I loved. I loved the apple thread.

Jessamyn 24:52 How did that turn into like such a thing?

mathowie 24:55 I don't know. Yeah, I

Jessamyn 24:56 don't you made a Twitter post about making the person you You invented honey crisps that king of making all food more awesome. Yeah. And I was like oh I like those apples and I did some research and found an interesting story. I love the

mathowie 25:09 backstory on it. Yeah and then about how to just talk about the apples and then people like to nerd out on like all the small varietals of apples that are better but of course but this is sort of a national Apple type you can find everywhere that's really like all the really good parts of many apples combined into one

Jessamyn 25:32 I didn't really understand what went into making like a special varietals you know that like you have to kind of nurture these trees for a really long time until you figure out if your hybrid cross is any good at all because all apples come out as crosses from from other apples and they don't even know where the dad of the Apple came from. And they had to wait like a really long time to see if the Apple was worth a damn and I kind of like it because unlike the new like the frost free variety or whatever the hell it was. It doesn't have like a trademark name after it which I think is going to be the death of you know people loving Yeah, people loving apples there was like frost What the fuck was

mathowie 26:12 everything is patented.

Jessamyn 26:14 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like the new versions. There's like a frost something and something. Oh, whatever. I'll look it up. Yeah, but yeah, I don't want an apple that's got a trademark name after it. Fuck that. Yeah,

Cortex 26:26 I totally missed this the first time. I want to shout at the people who like the wrong apples. Yeah.

mathowie 26:32 Oh, it sounds like the people hated them. Got some really bad ones sound like people had spoiled apples and like mealy vinegary, I'm like that's that's something like a month old.

Cortex 26:41 I once ate something that had gone bad therefore the thing is bad. Yeah.

Jessamyn 26:47 Well, and the honey crisp is supposed to be good because it stays you know, it stays better longer, I guess. But yeah, what the now I need to figure out what those trademark apples because I think they suck and then somebody talked about the grapples which that look like apples but tastes like grapes and they're supposed to encourage kids to like eat more fruit

mathowie 27:12 that's weird cuz

Jessamyn 27:13 the fuck

Cortex 27:14 like you know, you know what they need they really need. They need a mascot. Ideally, an anthropomorphic animal on a skateboard. Those grapples

mathowie 27:22 with the grapple love and dog. If we can make all homework about dinosaurs, trademark

Jessamyn 27:28 Apple, they're giving away a free soccer ball. But they're horrible. Like what's wrong with apples? Like do grapes tastes better than apples? quick survey Matt grapes better than apples?

mathowie 27:38 Oh, not really.

Cortex 27:39 But it's like comparing apples and oranges. Oh they're good for different things and apple. You know, I'm never gonna want warm grape pie. But you know, sometimes you want to. So

Jessamyn 27:55 like, Yeah, different apples for different. Oh, God, it was horrible. I didn't even know those existed. So thanks. I think G Man for opening opening my eyes here horrible grapples.

Cortex 28:07 So there's this comic, the abominable Charles Christopher that I completely missed out on. That's been going on for like a year in something. And it's like a weekly comic. There's a lot of things. I

Jessamyn 28:18 love it already. I love it already. Oh my god.

Cortex 28:21 It's one of those things where you're gonna kind of know if you like it from the first one or two. It's, it's just like this wonderfully, wonderfully drawn just absolutely fantastic illustration of this sort of really, really slowly moving story about some animals in the forest. And this abominable snowman, I guess named Charles Christopher, who is just just sort of this wonderful mute character who's sort of weird i don't know wild simpleton wandering through the forest. And having

Jessamyn 28:55 a moustache, all the other animals talk. Yes, this

Cortex 29:01 it's kind of hard to elevator pitch it but just go read it. It's gorgeous to look at and it reads really well. It's it's one of situations where you've actually got you know, this is further proof that the notion that web comics are a weird thing that people who can't draw do died sometime in the in the late 90s.

mathowie 29:17 Yeah, this is gorgeous. Like, you can't this looks like somebody's hand through the art and then did watercolor, like you know, black ink or watercolor? It's beautiful, but I guess it's got to be digital. Like,

Cortex 29:33 I think I think it is a coloring shop if I'm remembering what he was saying about his process. So he'll he'll ink this stuff. And then scan it and then do the coloring and Photoshop to

mathowie 29:44 coloring loci like real runs of watercolor?

Cortex 29:48 Yeah, I think I think he does a few passes on a really, really low opacity sort of watercolor brush in Photoshop. And so just layer some of that on to give it that nice sort of the faint depth to it,

Jessamyn 30:03 I think got a server unavailable message. I think we killed it.

Cortex 30:07 You know, it really it was it was struggling pretty hard when the post went up, I was afraid that was just going to die outright. It managed to keep kicking along. But I think he's maybe just been experiencing difficulties ever since that big storm came in, I don't know. And speaking of good drawing, there was a post about Nancy, which is not so well drawn, but a sort of a well, the post describes it as a NEO data game invented by Scott McCloud and the tradition of exquisite corpse, which is a pretty good description. It's just the whole notion as you take random panels of a comic Nancy, and string them together in order to create a new comic strip as sort of a weird, you know, surrealist competition slash cooperative thing. It's, it's one of those things where if you like Exquisite Corpse, you're probably gonna look at it and say, Oh, that's awesome. And if you if you don't like Exquisite Corpse, you're gonna hate it. And if you don't know what exquisite corpse is, you should really go check it out, because at some pretty good shit. But yeah, Exquisite Corpse, it's a it's an old, it's an old data

Jessamyn 31:20 game data game, where the

Cortex 31:23 idea is you sort of take turns continuing some sort of creative work based on a very tiny slice of context from the previous bit. So the original was, you would like take turns adding a word to a sentence, but you can only see like the previous word in the sentence. So you

Jessamyn 31:39 can play it with kids and like you fold a piece of paper so that you only see like a little part of the other drawing and you draw it like the the Wikipedia pictures got it? Good. Yeah. Basic, Basic example.

Cortex 31:51 There's been some good Exquisite Corpse Post section Metafilter before and an overt meta chat. They've actually done some exquisite corpse sort of Photoshop chains. actually participated in a couple. Oh, I've seen those. Those are really cool. Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's a great little idea. And this is sort of playing with that, but using instead of the wide range of creative expression, just instead single panels of Nancy. So it's, it's great. And there's some good discussion in the thread as well about Ernie Bush Miller and, and some of the sort of background context on it, too. So

mathowie 32:25 when you first mentioned this, you said Scott, something was behind it. I was like that fucking Dilbert guy. This is gonna sound like a cloud. This is I loved it. I was like, holy shit. That's Scott McCloud lettering. This is gonna be awesome.

Cortex 32:37 I would love to see Scott Adams. Fanta surrealist game. Right. It would really like to see

Jessamyn 32:44 a realistic game. I mean, level.

Cortex 32:49 I think that might be giving him a little too much credit for esophageal motivation. Actually,

Jessamyn 32:58 this was the one Oh, sorry. Go. bunny hopping. That was the only other posts that I just thought was totally delightful. This was right after the podcast. Oh shit. It's people who run around with their bunnies on leashes and then the bunnies do like steeplechase jumps only littler because there's bunnies

mathowie 33:21 that's that's what we're serious. It's because I'm watching one I never what how do you make wow that's like a dog agility horses but I thought it was bunnies

Jessamyn 33:35 on leashes with like Swedish girls in shorts. Like,

mathowie 33:39 training a rabbit was like a million times harder than a dog. See?

Cortex 33:45 Some people have a lot of time on their hands. Dude, that's

mathowie 33:47 like four feet. Geez, I

Jessamyn 33:49 know. I kind of think there's something to like pulling up on the leash. You know? Like yeah, it's it's no speedy. I didn't think rabbits could be that spinny unless someone was trying to eat it.

mathowie 34:02 Whoa, someone did a distance one of like five feet. And it's got this horrible Swedish ballads in the background as music. Oh, wow. You

Cortex 34:11 know, someone really wanted to take it up a notch. They'd have a rabbit jump over a Volkswagen Rabbit.

Jessamyn 34:16 That would I don't get it.

Cortex 34:19 See kids do different things. It's a it's a fun it's a play on words.

Jessamyn 34:27 It's just like that programming thing I didn't understand. Yes, yes, this is the

Cortex 34:31 halting problem

mathowie 34:35 that's the only I was I was happy to see a why looks posts show up on Metafilter a crazy old classic games why like post on a crazy hotel from the Midwest. That's been I'll spoil the ending has been like, completely leveled and removed from the world. Ah, but just beautiful. Yeah, it's just got Like the craziest awfulest interiors, if you go through the entire tour, there's probably like 30 pages to it. I enjoyed every single one. I mean, there's horrible carpeting choices and but cool architecture crazy wacky out there.

Jessamyn 35:17 These are places that I try very hard to stay when I travel.

mathowie 35:21 Yeah, it looks if it was cheap, too. Yeah. It's a bummer. It's gone. It's so great inside rotating bar, purple chairs. And there's a nest at the top of the bar that doesn't spin or something. It's crazy.

Jessamyn 35:38 Oh, my God, this was amazing. I was just reading it looks as somebody who participates on FARC because I was reading the FARC Wikipedia page. And, you know, they claim a lot of the same sort of well known celebrities as we do.

Cortex 35:54 Yeah, but they they like us better. You think so? Hang out with Park just Yeah, it's an obligation. It's like going to a Christmas party. You have to show up as far as Farkle be all passive aggressive. The rest of the

mathowie 36:06 park is to do the Christmas party who insists on a fist bump and you're like, Oh, come on, dude. You're 35 Do you have

Jessamyn 36:14 I just want to have a few drinks and go home.

mathowie 36:18 He was on meta filter a long time ago till someone made a really shitty comment about his daughter. And then 911 changed everything. And he became kind of an angry right winger and hated us. For hating America. And that's the end of this.

Jessamyn 36:32 I went to FARC. Yeah. Okay.

mathowie 36:37 No happy indeed.

Cortex 36:39 Yeah. This is this is a fun thing. There's, there's there's all this stuff when I wasn't really paying that much attention to sort of the the underlying drama of the site for the first couple of years I was here. Yeah, like 2001 or 2003, or four is kind of a blur for me for most of the people who were old schoolers at the time. So

Jessamyn 36:57 I feel that way about those years generally. Yeah.

mathowie 37:02 Oh, we should mention this is the best post of the Month Contest going on all summer. So Oh, yeah. They've already started to trickle in one of my early favorites. Is this thing about Jerome? Arizona. I think this is someone trying to win.

Cortex 37:15 Yeah, that actually that's the first thing I say do you get you can see people

mathowie 37:19 are getting a little encyclopedia. Like with their posts, which is just just like they're piling on the awesomeness. Maybe it's getting

Jessamyn 37:28 beginners first post though.

Cortex 37:29 Was it? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, cuz

Jessamyn 37:32 that's how you saw it. Oh, yeah.

mathowie 37:34 Well, no, no, I saw it. I saw Jerome on the front. And when I was a kid, we went to Jerome, Arizona, like three summers in a row to just sightsee and hang out. And it was just this thing we did from Southern California was drive to Jerome, Arizona. And, and look at mines and look at old shit.

Jessamyn 37:52 Wow, neat.

Cortex 37:53 See, which is you know, I saw that post, because it was the first post Oh, my first reaction to it was what I always do, which is okay, now which of these links should I check the who is on To find out if it's a safe link, but it didn't really feel like one so

Jessamyn 38:09 and bikinis are been participating all over the site to I see her him and asked me to filter a lot, too. I usually lay people don't lay into people if they seem to.

mathowie 38:21 If they have a history. Yeah. If they have any history at all, really, we're mostly have a hair Twitch reaction to the fly by nighters. They've been here for a week with three exactly comments. They're often just wanting to spam us with something.

Jessamyn 38:37 Well, always except the times we can't figure out.

Cortex 38:40 Well, yeah, and that's, I feel bad because like, it's, it's such an effective kind of indicator that someone's up to something but at the same time when someone isn't, you know, people on the site, you know, have the same sense. And to some extent, it's probably people who hang up minute talk and have heard us talk about, specifically what stands out when someone does something bad, but also people just have that general horse sense where they see someone just signed up and doesn't have much activity period. And then you get these problems where people are like, Okay, so what's the deal? Like? What do you mean what's the deal? It's my first post I'm sorry, you guys are mean? Yeah, it's I feel a little bit bad when

mathowie 39:18 I look at old grizzled cops sometimes now I'm evaluating every comment to any blog I run and and people who add me on Twitter just looking for what's their angle? Like Yeah, are you there's like people or leave legitimate comments on my blogs, but their user, but their name will be like, you know, insomnia in the link goes like insomnia meds, but it's like a totally lucid like two paragraphs. And I'm like, you've fucking brilliant comment spammer you ask?

Jessamyn 39:51 I don't even pay attention to people follow me on Twitter. Is there a reason to pay attention?

mathowie 39:55 I just hate like all the marketing douchebags who are just like I'm a social media man. ArchiCAD influencer and I follow 20,000 people and I'm like, fuck, I'm not helping you this asshole be a bigger asshole like I just

Cortex 40:07 yeah, yes people. Yeah, I know a couple of people who keep an eye on anybody who joined yeah ads on Twitter and if that person appears to be just sort of like a friend spammer Yeah, even if they don't do anything I mean, there's nothing. There's nothing that's going to happen to you because somebody who's a random song is following you, but they sort of capitalize on that whole look at the size of my social networking. Dick thing. Yeah. So a lot of people are

Jessamyn 40:30 talking about your dicks already.

mathowie 40:33 What is the cooter o'clock?

Jessamyn 40:36 It on I turned off yesterday.

Cortex 40:39 It's it's somebody

mathowie 40:42 dressed in dolls chick that was

Cortex 40:44 that was that was that the thread that came up in the

Jessamyn 40:47 the meta talk thread about that, which was actually boo boo being like, Oh, hey, look, what's your name showed up? That's cool. And I was like, Yeah, after 10 Different people said they wanted to Boehner. But she was nicer about it than I was. So I just figured, I just figured it was about time we were into 2009 already. And can you avoid points made? I'd like to do something else. You know,

mathowie 41:09 she's on a web series. She knows she's wandering into a forum. She's probably just totally used to it. I mean, you know, far could link to her, it'd be a million times worse than other blogs. Yeah.

Cortex 41:17 It sounds like people were saying she's been pretty active. Online. So it's not all that unusual for her to show up necessarily in a discussion. Well, and

Jessamyn 41:26 I do think, yeah, if you're one of those people that walks around, like, being being sexy and selling your records to boys, it is a little bit unfair to expect them not to be like you're pretty. It's just a question of where you draw that line appropriately. But yeah, she was totally classy about it. And it was cool to see her show up in that thread.

Cortex 41:44 Yeah. And then Dan Kaminsky, of course commenting. We had those two back to back

Jessamyn 41:49 a in the DNS thread who guess right, yes,

Cortex 41:52 I want to say a few just but I don't know why I want to say that.

Jessamyn 41:57 Tempus a few just we should ask him. And that's why time is tight. Still reads meta filter. Thank God. Yes. That's this comment. Yeah, I like him.

mathowie 42:06 This is a this is a repeat of I mean, there was a meta talk thread about him. And I think we mentioned on the podcast in the summer when this first happened. Like, oh, my God is one of our own.

Cortex 42:17 Great. So yeah, that was cool. That was nice. Yep. Cool. What else? Oh, okay. So no one's gonna care about this, except for the people who've already seen it, probably. But just in case there's a few who haven't. Diplomacy, the classic board game,

Jessamyn 42:36 I'm not listening to you anymore. What's going

Cortex 42:38 on on filter, and it's, it's a, we've got a couple games going. And it's it's good. So far, I can't really talk about the game I'm in we're trying to be good and play what's called gunboat, where everybody remains functionally anonymous for the draft, like,

Jessamyn 42:58 what is that? I don't know.

Cortex 43:02 Okay, so obviously, really, really briefly is it's kind of a tactical World War One era, seven headed battle. So you've got seven different powers in Europe, fighting for domination of the continent over a period of usually like 10 to 15 years of game time.

Jessamyn 43:21 And finally recording this so that I can fall asleep to it.

Cortex 43:27 Girls don't get games. The interesting thing is, you know, people think everybody knows about risk and risk, you sit down and you enroll a bunch of dice. And whoever rules the best wins. Basically, it's not a very played really green games. It's really old school non Ajax game.

Jessamyn 43:45 Well, there's that card game, the risk card game or something that we talked about on the podcast a couple months ago, the go on Josh. But anyway,

Cortex 43:51 so so the thing is risky play with dice, diplomacy, there's no dice, and all the units are basically tactically identical in strings. So you actually have to do clever things with getting other players to do stuff to help you out if you want to accomplish anything. And since everybody's vying for ultimate domination of the game, that means you have to make alliances with people who expect you to try and fuck them over. But you know, you also can't get anywhere unless you do work with people at some point in the game. So it's kind of this game of lying well, and convincing people it's in their best interest to do something that is inherently not in their best interest and you've got seven people doing it to each other the whole game until someone wins. Or you gonna sound stalemate sounds like the entire world of cash gifting on YouTube Yeah, I would I would love to see how cash gifting guys played diplomacy you know? Who would win and who were the

mathowie 44:43 guys at the top of the pyramid baby

Cortex 44:46 Yeah, so there's there's there's you can play it online via email and there's a thing called flock dotnet that actually will adjudicate the the game so that you put in your moves and then the computer does all the okay who wins and Hulu Since in this particular conflict kind of thing, which is really great because it speeds up the game in that respect. And yeah, we've got a we've got three games going on. And I think we may start up another and we'll probably keep it rolling. But it's it's a really good time. So anybody who really likes war games and wants to lie and be lied to definitely check out that threat.

Jessamyn 45:17 What if you don't like board games? You just like lying? You could probably

Cortex 45:21 team up with someone who likes war games, but is a lousy liar and double headed.

mathowie 45:25 Excellent. Let's move to AskMe edaville over to AskMe Metafilter. Time is up. I'm just gonna make up imaginary deadline.

Jessamyn 45:39 Oh, thanks. I didn't look at any of the popular favorites but my like favorite just oh my god, I learned something I didn't know was like one post and one comment post being what is downstairs on a plane? When you're on those like big planes? Try to figure out like, where the lights go. And blue mustard links to this huge page that's just totally full of crazy pictures of the insides of planes, which I did not know exists

mathowie 46:13 40 sevens and up probably right seven.

Jessamyn 46:16 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's like crew quarters that look like those little like, they look like old, like old school planes when you used to sleep on continental flights, or you know, overseas flights and stuff like that with little little bunks just like on the trains. And it's it's cool looking. That was number one. Number two, what happens to my iTunes music that I share with my wife when I get divorced?

Cortex 46:41 Talking about the 21st century,

Jessamyn 46:43 well, seriously, two people one iTunes account now we're divorcing and people gave the guy like, you know, oh, here's my idea. Here's my idea. But then he totally emailed apple and in four hours got, here's, here's the answer. And here's how to here's how to make it work. Basically, you know, you have to take your credit card information off of it and do this that and the other and but it'll totally work. And I thought it was cool.

Cortex 47:09 Wow. That's a that's customer service right there.

Jessamyn 47:13 I know.

mathowie 47:17 The everything was a reference like list and I favorited. Like what what are the best public domain books and what should be in my kitchen are? There's one good one about what? What should I read to like, look at before I plunked down money on an iPhone app. Like every

Jessamyn 47:37 you totally love all those things that would otherwise be like on life hack.

mathowie 47:43 Yeah, no, no, I hate that shit. Here's the only one I like, I'll tell you the only one that's like useful. I've seen 1000 of these like, you know, they'll be your favorite kitchen gadget. This one was like I love these every time they come I know these come up a lot like helped me shop for some cool stuff. This one was special to me because it was like I splurge on special sheets. And a special showerhead and special shower. So worth it changed my life. Tell me just like money is no object literally the few life luxuries that make life better that actually weren't telling me about. Yeah, well, and

Cortex 48:19 yeah, it's great. Because I mean, it's, you don't think about that stuff necessarily. You don't. It's the stuff that you don't realize, can be such an improvement until someone who's however, you know, tripped across that figures it out. And, you know, people don't have the option of spending lavishly on every aspect of their life just to find out what works. Yeah. So it's nice to be able to get that sort of heads up from somebody who really nailed it on the chair issue or the the showerhead issue. Yeah, hell when I looked at that's the one thing that's driving you crazy, you can say yes. Okay, and last

Jessamyn 48:50 is the chumby. Really the awesomest alarm clock. I was just looking at that. Okay, it's

mathowie 48:54 kind of clunky. I hate having no No, I'm okay with it. Kind of I found that to be you have one Yeah, I bought one when they were like in beta. But like you felt like auto debits like you couldn't set up scripts to like figure out when the sunset is and when it should dem itself and like oh, that's kind of stupid. I know that you did

Jessamyn 49:15 toilet seat

Cortex 49:17 seat you know, and I gotta say the alarm clock is one of the things that I can't imagine being worth my money like that's something Yeah, never. You know, I need a better alarm. I want the shittiest alarm clock I can go if I really have one of those mornings where I'm gonna hit it. You know, I want it to cost five bucks. I'm gonna go to

Jessamyn 49:36 bullet proof or bounce double alarm clock. That's what runs away. Yeah, it's blocky. You drop it on the floor and it goes and hides under your under your dresser.

mathowie 49:47 I mentioned this link that has popped in the chat window because it had the trashcan upgrade. And it's something this is perfectly something you never think about something you just might accidentally pick up this knowledge. It's good to share. I have the exact Trash Can they link to a simple human trash can. It's like, you use it and you're like, oh my god, someone's spent like six months of their life thinking about every perfect thing about a trash can. Like, you know, when you put the bag in, there's a place to hold the bag, the extra bag, you know, Slack, and I'm like how it cinches down. You drop it in, and it has holes for air to shoot up as the sleeve goes in. So there isn't a weird air pocket holding it down. Like it's not gonna surprise

Jessamyn 50:29 any of you guys that I have that trash. I mean, it's it's a little different. And my great it was my grandma's, but it's the same damn thing.

mathowie 50:38 I just remember thinking like, wow, someone like totally over engineered a trashcan in a million wonderful ways. Wow.

Cortex 50:46 Yeah, that's the end. Yeah. And I actually I grew up in a trash can is in the cupboard under the sink family. So I've always I've never really had a place in my life for sort of step on it limited trash can. But that's, that's good to know. If I ever find myself going through a crisis of identity. I can I can

Jessamyn 51:05 go by that one. Don't even ask. Don't even question.

Cortex 51:09 And you know, you mentioned the Yeah, heated toilet seat. That's, I don't think we really need that because our bathroom doesn't get that cold. But you know, adjusting to the new house, we were in an apartment for years, that had radiator heat, and it was always warm, like it was the biggest problem was it would get too warm. And there's some times that we have to crank down the heat and open up the windows, if it was, you know, getting away from us. And this house is much bigger than that, and a lot colder that and the upstairs. For the first time in my life. I think I'm actually considering the merits of an electric blanket as possible,

Jessamyn 51:45 not just even get a blanket, then you lie down on top of it. And it makes you more that's the suggestion in that thread.

mathowie 51:54 Yeah, that's the only thing I like about electric blankets is leaving them on for like an hour or something then going to bed and having a warm Yeah.

Jessamyn 52:02 But they're shitty as blankets, leave your blankets as blankets and then get the mattress pad warmer for like 40 bucks. And you can have two sides. So one side can be hot and the other side can be cool. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we just had to be asleep in the middle of the bed. But they're actually pretty great. There's something

mathowie 52:18 weird and foreign about having like a blanket with a bunch of wires inside it module Exactly. Actually, around your private parts. I remember being a kid. I was like eight years old, and I stayed at someone's house. And I was like, This isn't right. This is weird.

Jessamyn 52:34 And you have cats? Yeah. I would worry.

Cortex 52:40 My The only thing I had picked out from asked me, actually, it's a thread for I think it just got posted last night. But it's not any fun. It's actually someone saying, hey, the thought of my impending death and the nothingness ensuing after there is terrifying to me. And I saw you in that thread. Yeah. And it's like one of those things where it's Yeah, I don't I don't tend to talk much in sort of introspective or sort of philosophy of life threads, because I don't know, I just don't enjoy that much. But this is one of the things where it's like, you know, I totally hear you. And I said, you know, my take on it is more or less, you know, well, it sucks. But I try not to think about it. But it's interesting, looking through that thread you have everybody has all these different approaches to the problem of, you know, how do you deal with this? And, you know, my cynical angst? Yeah, my take on it. I'm really kind of a cynical grump about it. I, I personally don't have any use for the notion of trying to talk yourself around it, but But you know, that mean, that's me, I'm also sitting here being, you know, grumpy atheists. So, you know, obviously, there are more than one way to approach it. But it's interesting seeing all the different ways people sort of approach the problem from trying to actually deal with it logically, like think about why it must not be a big deal because hey, you didn't exist before you were born right? To people talking more about sort of religious aspects of it or, or whether or not it's good to distract yourself from it versus sort of plow into it and sort of take it head on. So it's really kind of interesting to read, because everybody's just sort of like this slice of personal philosophy popping out. that I thought was kind of cool. Yeah, we all have to come you know, in a contemplating deaths. Yeah, all

mathowie 54:27 atheists have to go through this. Reckoning and figure out how to deal with the confusion. I just gotta say it's an anonymous question. If you haven't just browse the anonymous anyone listening hasn't browsed the just the all anonymous questions page. Like they're just like, amazing shit lately. Just like mind blowing stuff up. Something's gonna blow your mind in that list like that. Yeah, I didn't see the one about hacking. The found a credit card database like,

Jessamyn 54:57 cortex and I were talking about that. that this morning, somebody found a PHP myadmin interface to a some major multinational corporation database. And that's all great, right? Like, oh shit tell someone but then they deleted themselves from it. Well, and then

Cortex 55:15 cortex. Yeah. And then they then they deleted a bunch of other rows they mentioned and that's the thing that I can understand what I mean, yeah, they're talking about what they found it because they were like, just like googling their their partner's name or something like that. Now, honestly, if I was there, and it wasn't something where it had a really good reason to want to keep that name of the database. I might, I might delete, like, my wife's name too if someone was doing this, but I wouldn't then say, you know, why don't I delete some more while I'm at it? Let's just Let's just randomly remove some people from this database that probably won't bother anybody because yeah, it's my favorite

Jessamyn 55:49 part of this whole thread is Falcon red pops in the the guy asks or the lady asks, Could what I did be considered hacking? Falcon red is like, I'm a criminal defense attorney. The answer to that is yes. Like, yeah, not even like I'm not a lawyer. I'm not your lawyer. He's like, Oh, yes, I'm an attorney. You're in trouble.

mathowie 56:09 Why if it's public like it's like an attractive nuisance thing like that's really the person that didn't password protected is the one Yeah.

Cortex 56:21 Make a defense just that they could reasonably you know, come after you probably, I guess, as stupid as some of them unlock store something. You still

Jessamyn 56:30 eating shit. It's not the looking at shit. Well, what

mathowie 56:33 would you have done? Like,

Cortex 56:35 I mean, I was sent an email. I would just I would I would me.

mathowie 56:42 Drop all

Cortex 56:46 start spamming Usenet. There's been

mathowie 56:47 a lot of crazy. I just can't even pick one. There's been so many crazy. Yeah, anonymous posts.

Jessamyn 56:53 No, wait. Here's one non anonymous update that I just wanted everybody to know about the gal who was going home for Thanksgiving with her boyfriend. And she was really afraid that everything was going to be sketchy and scary in the Midwest, and she just posted an update that everything went fine.

mathowie 57:12 Snowman beat those pictures and

Jessamyn 57:16 and there's pictures and Flickr. And it was adorable. And so yeah, happy story.

mathowie 57:22 I asked the question looking for tamales. And I went to a tamale shop suggested yesterday and had wonderful tamales. Oh, shit got resolved in my world yesterday.

Jessamyn 57:33 Did you update it? Yeah,

mathowie 57:35 I said Jeff. And and someone said, go to this place if the awesomeness tamales but the guy who owns it's a fucking dick and I hate him. And I was like, he was the nicest person I've ever met. Like, it was crazy. Nice. I don't know. I don't know if I went to the wrong shift or wrong. I met the nicest person on the planet. They're serving somebody saying he was a dick. Yeah, so I definitely had to update.

Jessamyn 57:59 The only other thing I wanted to mention, oh, what is this on?

Cortex 58:05 Yeah, on this subject just on the subject updating. I actually got my first of our new Hey, you should go update your post. Emails. Me too. Yeah, and this was for when I asked about how to scrape Twitter for sort of daily aggregation of my Twitter output when I was doing the Twitter an add on rival novel Yeah. And man that that that ended up being a non issue.

Jessamyn 58:28 I think unsubscribed to you. I think I still need to.

mathowie 58:31 It's not that hard to copy.

Cortex 58:32 You probably didn't even unsubscribe, you wouldn't have needed to because I just stopped I stopped in mid sentence and started playing games instead.

Jessamyn 58:41 Now I'm already following you. Okay,

mathowie 58:43 yeah. Oh, I saw this.

Cortex 58:45 A bunch of people actually did finish if you check back on the NaNoWriMo thread and meta talk people are still talking about their wrap up. Bunch of people did end up crossing the 50,000 word threshold. So

Jessamyn 58:55 put it put a link to that or find it can we find that? What did you say

Cortex 58:59 mefites Call them

Jessamyn 59:04 call them fired?

Cortex 59:07 Yeah.

Jessamyn 59:11 This is a job for tags. Oh, except I did the Nano Remo tag and I found the Nano Remo meta tag post from 2005.

Cortex 59:21 So you give me guff for mefites and you say nano Remo rhyme rhyme Oh,

mathowie 59:27 right. Right, right.

Cortex 59:29 Not national reaming month.

Jessamyn 59:33 I'm not feeling it. Yeah, whatever.

Cortex 59:36 But uh, how are we going on tagging? I haven't I haven't checked in on the progress on the metadata. It's

Jessamyn 59:40 it's slow and sad. But we're doing fine. Thanks for

mathowie 59:44 opening it up at this point. Cuz I know some of my old posts have great tags and it's probably we should

Cortex 59:49 really let people who want to go back and take their own Do It. That's the one thing that strikes me as probably Yeah, I think that's why can I tag my post?

mathowie 59:57 I would just yeah, we can just add them like just add the Word add tag, you know, in the sidebar to all the old ones and your friends can do it as well. Just like

Jessamyn 1:00:05 Yeah, I mean, this is just meta talk, the rest of the site is tagged. isn't rocket

mathowie 1:00:09 surgery? It's

Jessamyn 1:00:11 no, no, but what I mean is the rest of the talk has the like, you know, the subject, but the reason it was slow is because you have to kind of read the thread to figure out what happens. And yeah, trying to stick with a little bit of control vocabulary so that everybody didn't call everything. tons of tons of different stuff. Yeah, but yeah, yeah,

Cortex 1:00:32 yeah, but it may be.

Jessamyn 1:00:35 Fine. Ryan? Well, I

Cortex 1:00:37 think I mentioned it in the previous podcast, so it's probably the links there. So yeah, you know, I actually, I had a really bad idea. And I don't know if this will ever actually happened. But talking about the anonymous list, I had this notion a while back of going through all the anonymous questions, and just sort of picking out general demographic information included in the question description. So male versus female, general age and relocation, a few other things, and trying to put up a big sort of aggregate graph of the demographic identity of anonymous. And that was something if I really got organized and we finished with the meta talk thing I could maybe turn the backpackers on if they want something kind of weird to do. But I always thought that'd be kind of funny to find out, you know, Anonymous is 57% female and black and you know, is missing 3% of one I you know, just everything they specify other than, you know, Hi, my name is right, and just sort of get this picture of of what anonymous looks like. I thought that would be a fun project, but it's a massive amount of data, obviously. So I don't know if that'll happen anytime soon.

mathowie 1:01:41 I was surprised speaking of that, I randomly found this Quantcast this is like sort of like the new Alexa kind of thing and it has tons of amazing data that's really accurate on tons of sites like the traffic data is really close to accurate.

Cortex 1:01:59 This is this is just based on IP analysis and the demographics of the areas IPS resolved to geographically.

Jessamyn 1:02:05 IP analysis tells you male or female, there's no chance MAN Yeah.

mathowie 1:02:10 seem low. Right. I was like, that's really close. Oh, that was laughing it go scroll the bottom of that. Will you make like no money, uh, years, almost the most popular. But then you look at education. Everybody's in everyone. Yeah, grad school and finished college. So we're all starving, graduated. I thought that was brilliant.

Jessamyn 1:02:31 And we all live in California. And we're your looks like which surprised anybody?

Cortex 1:02:38 on whether or not you have a TV?

Jessamyn 1:02:43 Where does this even come from? This makes no sense.

mathowie 1:02:46 I mean, if you look at the summary view, it's actually quite accurate. I will say from looking at, like, my own view of the real data and like five different services trying to get the data really close.

Jessamyn 1:02:58 54% Male you think? Well,

mathowie 1:03:01 I have no idea on that one. But yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. But the traffic stuff is actually really close to realistic. Or this complete outside company has never talked to me in my life.

Jessamyn 1:03:12 Yeah. 82% passersby? That's pretty interesting.

mathowie 1:03:15 Yeah, the 70 to 80 is pretty normal. That's the right ad 20. Right. That's like the AskMe edit filter. Random looking for shit on the Internet people.

Jessamyn 1:03:26 Right. And I found you on the first page of my Google search results. Yeah, can I briefly mentioned this chocolate chip cookie post?

mathowie 1:03:32 Yeah, that was fun when I sign off.

Jessamyn 1:03:36 My kid wants to make chocolate chip cookies with chunks of chocolate chip cookie dough in them. How do I do it?

mathowie 1:03:44 I like the one of just making them with holes in the middle and then slapping in some chocolate chip cookie dough. Yeah, but some Yeah, freezing balls and putting them into the batter.

Jessamyn 1:03:55 We didn't we didn't get a whole bunch of people freaking out about uncooked eggs to which I was just I was expecting

mathowie 1:04:03 I think the last 10 years of cookie dough ice cream and cookie dough. Eating has sort of mellowed everyone out on that danger.

Cortex 1:04:13 Well yeah, and you know I don't want to the problem with raw cookie dough is the eggs right? And the problem with eggs is salmonella right? Is my understanding and Salmonella is not really one of the things you die from so much as you just get a really bad day on the toilet.

Jessamyn 1:04:33 You die from it if you're if you're a little kid or an old lady or if you're immunocompromised.

Cortex 1:04:38 I'm not any of those. So I guess what I'm saying is I'm not gonna start grabbing no you can't lick the batter but I am clearing out this bowl.

mathowie 1:04:50 Well, so there's like super hyper pasteurized eggs now They're magically I don't know irradiated or something in the shell. There's also no Lately like ultra pasteurized it goes bad like in the next presidential administration. It's crazy.

Jessamyn 1:05:07 That's coming up in January, man. Oh, right. Well, that's like in three weeks to clear out the fridge. I just bought milk right now I just bought milk on my way here, but if you don't like that super normal,

mathowie 1:05:19 it'll stick with cool, you know non GBH and all that other crap. Like, the ultra pasteurized stuff is good for like, honestly a month, a month and a half. It's just it doesn't seem natural.

Jessamyn 1:05:32 It's like that milk in a box. Yeah, and it's a funny it's a funny white color too. I think I always look at it and say or melamine.

mathowie 1:05:43 All right, I think they'll call this one done.

Cortex 1:05:46 On that