Podcast 38 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 38: Zombie Bot Army (2009-03-02).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary keywords

people, post, filter, comments, site, youtube, meta, interactive fiction, read, thread, taters, dream, wrote, happened, cat, game, running, nice, metal, fucking

Transcript

Unknown Speaker 0:00 Hey Jessamyn Welcome to the metal filter podcast.

mathowie 0:12 So this is episode 38. I put in it's been officially over two years. Today's the 20 Somethings. Wow, we got to out in a week the two years ago. Wow, we used to care. episode, episode two a Cortex interview. Wow. Yeah,

Cortex 0:33 back in the day.

mathowie 0:35 Full Circle baby. It

Cortex 0:36 was nobody back then.

mathowie 0:38 Yeah, here's some door if you put too many songs on mine call you up tell you to stop. It's been a minute. Anything on the populace for the last 30 days works. That's an easy filter. Yay. Anything to talk about, I guess we should talk about

Jessamyn 1:00 the wording on the popular list so that now people can understand it right? Or favorites.

mathowie 1:05 Popular favorites. The great server hacking happened right after the last podcast. Yeah, that was pretty neat. And I was just telling Jessamyn, that it was kind of frustrating to listen to it and be like, oh, I want to see that thread. But the time that the podcast went up, I don't think

Jessamyn 1:24 you don't have like a local version that you can just like click around on

mathowie 1:30 SQL queries or listening to a podcast. That was wonderful way to spend. Yeah, I think there are parts of the site weren't up yet, or something like that, when when the podcast went up. So I was waiting for it to come back. It took a week. So the great server hacking, and I should talk about the server upgrade stuff, it's still sort of in progress. I probably left a wide, wide gaping open SQL tackable hole open from something I wrote eight years ago somewhere. And somebody exploited it and then put in a whole bunch of redirects to go some stupid Chinese site that installs some browser hack on your stupid machine, ie windows, and I think you just become part of a zombie bot army. And then I was trying to explain this to my aunt and uncle who was vacationing with at the time. How this makes someone money. Like, because they're like, the bot army thing. Yeah, I was like, and then they sell computer time in a zombie bot army of like, I have 4 million. I have 4 million hack PCs that I can have do anything you want. And then you get paid

Jessamyn 2:40 from the future.

mathowie 2:43 So they're like so they, what they exploited your database to put a JavaScript redirect, go to a website that exploits only Windows ie six unpatched boxes, which become part of a bot army, which some guy has to sell time on to transmit spam or whatever. Like, yep, like all those six steps have to happen. That's how people make money.

Jessamyn 3:06 You can actually do it. There's enough people on the internet that fit all of those, you know, things that you can make, you know, cash off it, I remember the first time I read about zombie bought armies in like the economist or Newsweek or something. And I had no idea that kind of stuff was going on. And now I'm totally alert to it. And it makes like funny stories that like computer class. Like you're just learning email, don't worry, you're not part of the zombie bot army. And people are like, what?

mathowie 3:35 And then, so we've patched things up, Paul, PB was a superstar and stayed up for like 48 hours straight and patched. Like, we had this tool that found exploits possible exploit points and code that needed to be locked down. And on the first scan, it was like 1600 problematic queries in 600 files. Paul literally had to, like stay up for two days and just fix 1600 queries to lock them down.

Jessamyn 4:05 He's a wonderful man, why didn't we have Mechanical Turk do that?

mathowie 4:09 Mechanical Turk was fixing like, Go dad be awesome.

Jessamyn 4:12 I would have chipped in 10 bucks. And then

mathowie 4:14 once everything was back up, we slowly brought the site's back online, the server was totally unstable. And the last time it was unstable, we upgraded hardware and software and everything was magical for a year or two, like totally stable. So I ended up getting like, more horsepower from the servers. It's like $1,000 less a month to host which is amazing. We have a better setup. Now we have this private rack with one firewall in front of it. And so I

Jessamyn 4:41 say you saved a shit ton of money by moving to a different server. Isn't that crazy? Yeah,

mathowie 4:47 they just keep bringing down the prices on the same you know, whatever, let me know. They have like good, better best and I always had the

Jessamyn 4:54 best. Find your mortgage. Yeah, right. Yeah. So so you're making like rent payment. So I like what you're saving on the server. It's wonderful. Yeah.

mathowie 5:02 So what cost 3000 A month no costs 2000 a month. And it's actually a better setup with more capabilities. So we have all the server stuff in the world. Unfortunately, when we moved over the new box, it wasn't the most stable, we wrote more queries, it's getting better. It hasn't laughing. I know, it's kind of sad. It's,

Cortex 5:25 I didn't have to do any of the work.

Jessamyn 5:28 I just sat around, and we're like, oh, man, we're so sorry.

Cortex 5:34 You guys are gentlemen are just keeping people posted via Twitter. The site's down, still still gonna be down for a while, but don't bother Matt.

mathowie 5:44 PB in the thick of it, it was all PV. And I was just like, cuz you don't really want two people at the same time hammering on code, because you're not sure. You know, Paul's gotta be kind of in charge of the code now. So it's like, you know, he doesn't want to

Jessamyn 5:58 Josh and I delete the same post at the same time.

mathowie 6:01 So I had to bail out and be like, are you done? Can I get you an orange juice or something virtually? Like, that's all I could possibly do? I had to be a cheerleader from the sidelines. So things are going pretty good. Now we have like slowdowns once every eight to 12 to 24 hours. But things are getting totally, totally better. They're almost back to perfect.

Jessamyn 6:22 I think getting to say that we're getting back to perfect is actually pretty nice. Yeah, as opposed to like getting back to limping along, you

mathowie 6:29 know? Yeah, I think I totally took it for granted, the last year or two has been so steady and

Cortex 6:36 reliable. Like it's really, really great. It's compared to how it used to be sort of j running this a lot.

Jessamyn 6:44 We don't even get the J run jokes. I

mathowie 6:47 know, I know that it was just me and things just didn't get better. I would chip away at this monstrosity, but it wouldn't get much better. Just remember from like, 11am to 1pm. Pacific Time, the site was just slow and crashy. And there's nothing you could do about it. And yeah, like the last year or two, I mean, like we had server. I mean, I think we went months without a reboot. Many, many months. Like even server restarts, we have this whole self fixing failover system where if it starts to slow down and crash, it will restart certain services to revive itself. And that didn't happen for weeks and weeks. It was crazy. So we're getting back towards that, which is good, but we're not quite there. That was a lot of boring. How was music for the last month? I haven't looked at we have some good music. Like what was the challenge for February?

Cortex 7:46 I think February was the broken one is the one I remember offhand. Let me go look it up. But it's also it's also the RPM. The album in a month thing that's happened for the last couple years. I got some cats, and I've been playing a couple of really fun video games. So it's going it's going pretty good.

mathowie 8:05 It's only two songs in the challenge. slow month. Well, it's a short month. Oh, true. Dead? Yeah. Usually 25 tracks come in the last three days, but they cut it off this month. So

Cortex 8:22 you know, I can see one of the challenges is just kind of time intensive period, the coral challenge. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's not asking too much. But it's enough. It's going to slow people down. You know,

mathowie 8:33 you got to get the robes and you got to get 30 members in the same room.

Jessamyn 8:37 How to anybody's choral piece. You know, I'll just sing my little part from here. Yeah, exactly.

mathowie 8:47 That's Mechanical Turk choir.

Jessamyn 8:52 She looks at you. You're full of good ideas.

mathowie 8:57 I saw Did you see I was looking at jobs scrolling through. And this is awesome. To relate to look at jobs. There are like one, two or three jobs posted in January. That was it. And then the inauguration happened and Boo. Yeah, there's like 20 jobs since the inauguration. And they're all web design. Almost all but there's Yeah, economy's on its way to recovery, according to jobs.

Jessamyn 9:24 As long as you like to Geek around online in New York

mathowie 9:27 color is a cool one with the design the cover for I mean, this is a weird volunteer help out metadata project.

Cortex 9:34 We should i It's probably incumbent on me to really try and plug that some because I was one of the people who submitted a chapter to that.

mathowie 9:44 Yeah, there's a collaborative tell us about the collaborative novel. It was it was an idea came

Cortex 9:47 together like, end of 2007, I think, along with a couple ideas, and the notion was, hey, why don't we just take turns writing chapters in a big sort of a bunch of mefites running a novella thing And it pretty much worked out. We were pretty good about deadlines. There were some bumpiness and some last minute replacements, I think but all in all, it's it ended up happening. And it's not a collection of short stories. It's one continuous story and everybody, just each person with whatever had come before. So we're currently trying to work through getting an editing pass from someone outside of the group of writers. And yeah, as long as long as it it's oh, gosh, I don't remember offhand. It's like, it's like a couple 100 pages double spaced 12 point in, in Word, something like that? I think so. It's, it's a short, it's a short book, a definitely not Fela territory,

mathowie 10:44 that you have to read everything before your chapter or

Cortex 10:48 only chapter four. So, but no, it wasn't like, everybody was reading everything beforehand, presumably. Yeah. So the people who came later had to do more reading ahead of time, but, but they also got a lot longer to sort of digest what was coming so well, yeah, we were sort of looking for ideas for illustration for the cover of it. And it's got sort of a sci fi metaphysics magical realism type stuff going on. So yeah, if you're interested, definitely hit effigy two dozen up and, and let them know that you'd like to get involved.

mathowie 11:22 So I'm seeing laser beams in space with robots doing it on the cover.

Jessamyn 11:28 Speaking of I should probably mention that the meta filter interactive fiction competition is starting, or I think is wrapping up on March. March 1, it starting on March 1,

Cortex 11:43 February was officially people are trying to record an album and learn how to write interactive fiction.

Jessamyn 11:48 Actually, it's not happening, right. Yeah. So so

Cortex 11:51 starting March 1, and for the whole bunch of March. Yeah, the interactive fiction contest will be running. And devilish is a setup a site for it that I don't remember the link to but it was

mathowie 12:04 tatty, even programs grips.

Cortex 12:07 The language he's encouraging is inform, which was actually what was used for a lot of the classic interactive fiction stuff. I mean, you think about like Zork. And Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and all those old games, leather goddesses of Phobos and so on, you know, is all that same as all that kind of general thing using Z machine, interpreters on inform code, which is, it's sort of it tries to be English parsable.

Jessamyn 12:34 About diplomacy again.

Cortex 12:37 diplomacy has done really poorly for me lately, I don't want to talk about it. But also, you, you can sort of like, the gazebo is a room in the room, you know, in the gazebo is a chair on the chair is sitting a letter, the letter says blah, you can sort of write it in sort of really simple constraint English like that. And then the interpret will actually go through that and turn that into the programming code. So it's kind of a neat way to do it, it's definitely very sort of accessible to first timers. If you feel like writing something not too ambitious, you can sort of at least make a simple Choose Your Own Adventure, sort of

mathowie 13:14 trying to make a meta filter game or just a game about

Cortex 13:18 a game about anything. I imagine, they'll probably be a couple of metal filter type things that show

mathowie 13:23 the metal filter demo game sitting at this URL that we will attach to this but yeah,

Cortex 13:30 okay. Yeah. So

mathowie 13:33 I wonder if there's a TextMate plugin for this kind of formatting. And already, somebody must have done that.

Cortex 13:39 Maybe there's, there's there's more than one kind of language out there to develop interactive fiction, there's a, there's a much more robust project called TADS. I don't remember what it stands for. But ta BS. And it, it actually is a lot more programming language like, which I find little bit more appealing as someone who's got a lot of programming background.

mathowie 13:58 So how do you run this? I guess, you just write up the

Cortex 14:01 game, which is these, you know, sort of programmatic descriptions of objects. Yeah. And then and then you just, you run it through an interpreter as the machine interpreter, which is, I think, delicious, has one setup or setting one up that just runs as a web client is like a, like a Java program. And you go to the website, and you just type in commands and the game plays and yeah, it's super simple, which is nice. It's really easy to port it to a new platform. So you can play these things on you know, freakin palm PC or whatever to

Jessamyn 14:30 I think I have Yeah, I have something that plays work on my iPhone. Yeah, it can't be totally different from that. Yes. And

mathowie 14:37 I played Zork over I did this over I am Oh, it's great over I am so great. Are the bots still up? It was Andy bale set up three Zork bots. They're online anymore, but they used to just be a piece of Perl code that was running, you know, on his home PC or something.

Jessamyn 14:57 You'd send it commands and it would send you back over it. Yeah, the next move because

mathowie 15:00 yeah, because you know, each move is only like, you know, two sentences. So just be like, Yeah, you're in a dark and twisty tunnel, and then you just write go north, and then it'd be like you're now in a giant field is great, right? Pig

Jessamyn 15:16 This is not undisplaced post that was about the finding pig interactive fiction, but that website has a whole bunch of interactive fiction games that are actually productive. That

Cortex 15:24 reminds me though, it's not quite interactive fiction, but it's it's intentionally in the old school video game a little bit of picture and mostly interacting via texting. There was a game posted a I don't know a week ago or two called don't shoot your pants. And the goal of the game was to not don't don't shit your pants.

mathowie 15:44 What's the term for that? The says what it is on the tin.

Cortex 15:50 Exactly, it very much. It's that scary. I'll see if I can find it. It's, it's you know, it's just a it's just a game about not shitting your pants. And if you're successful, you managed not to shoot your pants. That sounds like a deal you show. And there's more than one way to shit and or not shoot your pants. Although I never I never figured out a couple of the like 11 possible solutions. But I think everybody should. Oh,

Jessamyn 16:22 title and I just completely skipped.

mathowie 16:26 That sounds like a good approach. Yeah, know

Jessamyn 16:29 how to plug but I didn't even see Tiller keys. I was just like, can't No, no, this has been a very nice day so far.

mathowie 16:40 Why ruin it? Oh, we shouldn't real quick cover the best project ever from last month? No,

Jessamyn 16:47 there was a lot of best.

mathowie 16:49 The cat sorry, Josh. Although that's pretty awesome project. Thanks.

Jessamyn 16:54 Shut up. How could it not be the best? Oh, got the most got the most.

mathowie 16:58 The best is, you know raising heavy things with your beard for charity that raised 1800 bucks for this like cool. Was it like a Chicago Boys home thing or something? It's Yes, it's very cool.

Jessamyn 17:14 The street club in Chicago? Yeah, yes. It's incredible. And the thing that's the best about it, I donated some money to him because wonderful. If he made a little beard that you could cut out, like a PDF that you could cut out on the website and then you could cut it out and put it on your face and take pictures of your beard quote unquote, lifting things. And then he put them up on the website. Like the whole thing is just like super mega adorable.

mathowie 17:44 Oh, the best thing he has a sweatbands and his his wristbands his whole oh my god that like

Jessamyn 17:53 thing about Amon is he's gonna be like this in 30 years, and everybody's gonna think he's a kooky whack job and we're gonna be like, no, no, no, he was like that in his 30s also. Seriously, this website is terrific. Yeah, watching him and liftings is wonderful. Yeah, I would give him money. There's a beard font.

mathowie 18:13 It's the socks or do it for me. Like baseball pull up socks things. It's just awesome. That's commitment.

Jessamyn 18:20 I just like his crazy beard. Yeah, and big fan of crazy periods. This is funny Josh's look at this cat site got posted to me five but they didn't use the button. Oh,

Cortex 18:32 you know it's half the time they you know it's some people use a button some people just like her. Oh, hey, I'm gonna go What more

mathowie 18:37 do we have to do? It's a it's an oil that slide we need

Cortex 18:41 to make. We need to make just constantly flash No,

Jessamyn 18:44 somebody made their own post. Well, in fact, it was kind of funny. I actually wrote most of that post. But then Josh and I were kind of like, yeah, we kind of work together. So I posted it to meta chat and then somebody was like, that's terrific. And then they posted it to Metafilter so maybe that's why

Cortex 18:59 that's probably I think the

Jessamyn 19:03 nuts Yeah, the doughnuts and robot research that's my

Cortex 19:06 submissions have really dried up on it. I've got to upload like I've got to in my email since the last time I updated but submissions fell way off after the first few days.

Jessamyn 19:16 Yes. Somebody sent you 250 pictures.

Cortex 19:22 No, but someone did send me a zip file containing 253 pictures in 12 separate folders containing single or multiple combinations of individual cats. These were these were the best ones they picked and choose to give me just Yay yorvit

Jessamyn 19:42 Because that was the cat I was visiting and they it showed up when I looked at your website. You should

Cortex 19:45 you should throw them out a link to your vet so he knows what the heck we're talking about.

Jessamyn 19:49 Oh, yeah, your vid is Eartha and ginger beers. Kitty. Who's adorable and who I was visiting because I got trapped into Just go for an extra day because the weather was terrible. And I complained about it on Facebook and people from meta filter picked me up at the airport and took me to their home and fed me and I watched the Oscars with them.

mathowie 20:11 God. Service baby.

Jessamyn 20:14 My life is wonderful. It was so great. Thanks Martha and ginger beer. It was terrific. You people are wonderful and your cats are wonderful too.

mathowie 20:21 Was your flight delayed for a whole day?

Jessamyn 20:23 Well, it was delayed for three hours, which meant I would miss the only flight coming back to Vermont and it was a fucking hellish snowstorm. So it kind of made sense to just bag it getting stuck in Chicago. Yeah, although the great Amon Daly is in Chicago, so perhaps I could have seen him.

Cortex 20:39 So one other project that I thought was kind of awesome, but this is like one of those things that you're gonna love if you're a Unix dirt and otherwise you don't care I am. But J, which is this alternate sort of way to deal with directory history. It's kind of like an attempt at sort of the Firefox Super Awesome Bar in Firefox three, but for your bash history, and they call that this awesome bar or what it was it had some sort of crazy name, but it does, it pays attention to what you've actually gone to, with what frequency in your directory structure so you can easily jump to whatever actual directory is the most frequent when you visit that contains a specific substring you type so you don't have to type out a frickin you know, 4060 character directory anymore, you can just sort of type out the key word of the subdirectory you're trying to get to.

mathowie 21:49 So why don't we take out the last 12 minutes and go to like metal filter time or something?

Cortex 21:58 So the guy who invented tuners is dead except for he's not actually dead and he may not also have really invented tuners. Deuter it's like a Euro sort of,

Jessamyn 22:11 but understand that.

mathowie 22:15 Oh, that's spinning meet with the big blade. Dude.

Jessamyn 22:21 I've been pronouncing them wrong this whole time. Have

mathowie 22:23 you been saying donor? Donner Party?

Jessamyn 22:27 Donner like Donner party, you know, pile of strips of Yeah, it's

Cortex 22:32 a nice it's a it's a nice German word is dooner

mathowie 22:37 everyday or may not. It may or may not have died.

Cortex 22:41 Definitely didn't die at this point is what we figured out but and there was even a meta talk thread because someone was like, hey, so it turns out he's not dead. Should we delete the thread? And like

Jessamyn 22:53 that kind of stuff?

Cortex 22:54 We're not Encyclopedia Britannica. Anybody who relies on only reading the post on some bit of news ephemeral and meta filter really does not know manage their news

mathowie 23:05 comes up I think if dig dig has a don't they have a special flag for this is disputed material. And that was all well and good for the rare times they needed it. And then once it became a feature on their site, every single political post that's ever been on Digg is disputed because some like a Republican will say. Absolutely right. Not always right. And every single thing is like disputed it's it's basically becomes like a Wikipedia fight. to dispute something as fast as possible to get that flag on it. Sorry. Yeah. Anytime you know, people want a feature really bad. You have to think about the ramifications of it and like, Oh, God, it's been really bad, stupid. I

Jessamyn 23:50 could really use that to fight with people. Yeah. And I feel like things have worked out pretty well actually. I mean, our metal filter like because people in the thread are deputized to fix it update information, etc.

mathowie 24:03 And we rarely we treat people like adults they're gonna read the whole thread like sure the first comment might say that, you know, conclusion was wrong at the last sentence of the post, but you know, everyone read the thread figured it out.

Jessamyn 24:15 Yeah, unless we think people are acting in bad faith which actually doesn't happen that much. Yeah.

Cortex 24:21 Yep. Oh, and there was one Oh, where'd you go first hurt

Jessamyn 24:27 people. Letter People was my favorite.

mathowie 24:31 I didn't see it.

Jessamyn 24:33 These were basically these drawings that we had. This is like I learned the letters through these Letter People in like kindergarten in first grade. Well, I already knew the letters but like other people learning the letters. We had like big inflatable people like this in my like kindergarten and first grade classrooms, and they were called The Letter People and you can kind of see like, the B guy has buttons and The dye lady is itchy, the D guy is made of doughnuts. But it was another one of those threads where basically if you went to school during this like five year period maybe and if you were like watching PBS this was like part of your like, brain function was like learning all the letter people in Thin Lizzy basically made this terrific post with YouTube skits from all the letter people singing. And, you know, talking about the letters and and it was another one of those threads where like everybody who's exactly the same age gets in the thread in there like blah, blah blah Love it, love it love it, even though it didn't have like a ton of traffic. And so people like me who just had the inflatable Letter People in their classrooms could learn more about this looks

mathowie 25:47 vaguely familiar, but doesn't spark any memories for me. Like it was just the background of my childhood.

Cortex 25:52 Yeah, I may have seen those, but I definitely don't really know him. Yeah, it

mathowie 25:56 doesn't really ring a bell to me. It's weird. And we're probably the same age. Weird.

Jessamyn 26:01 We're not the same age. Close enough. The West Coast. Maybe it's an East Coast West Coast thing

mathowie 26:08 for 10 years later,

Cortex 26:10 some sort of slow obligation.

Jessamyn 26:13 Yeah, at any rate, I love this post because they actually did the research to find stuff on YouTube. But then there's a whole bunch of other stuff.

mathowie 26:21 My favorite posts of the month, for some reason was the MC nugget teeny post.

Jessamyn 26:27 I really enjoyed that one, too. So

mathowie 26:29 awesome. And only five people marked as a favorite. I'm surprised it's just so crazy. Dancing drinks and things to do with crap.

Cortex 26:38 I appreciate the idea. I just wasn't that thrilled by the actual, like, the actual link. And I don't know, I was like, I liked that they did it. And it's a cute idea. But maybe I'm just not quite the right target audience because I was

mathowie 26:50 too into it. Or you just don't like McNuggets or cute girls drinking McNuggets

Jessamyn 26:55 felt like it was the cute girls introducing blogs on the nightly news were like, Oh, here's something that only nerds did. And now pretty girls do it. And suddenly I feel icky. About

Cortex 27:06 a little bit of that. I hardly approve of pretty girls. But But yeah, it just felt it felt like I don't know, it just

mathowie 27:15 my first thought was, here's a web nerd is pretty good photographer who has like two cute girlfriends who don't. Friends who happen to be girls who, like aren't, aren't online at all. And like, well, I can take some really cool photos and make a funny post out of it. And they won't even care. Because they're very posed. And you know, it's over the top

Jessamyn 27:35 well, and they were clearly having a good time. And I thought it was funny. And the whole thing made me want to go eat and McNuggets which I never which

mathowie 27:41 is awesome.

Jessamyn 27:43 I know. Right? They made

mathowie 27:45 something revolting. Kind of awesome for a second, which was cool. Right? That's a success. That's that's in the win column for me.

Cortex 27:53 Fair enough. Sweet. Yeah. Which which came from the time thing. Yeah. So

Jessamyn 28:01 I was gonna say Please explain. Go back for people who may not understand the multiplayer last

mathowie 28:06 year, last year, Time Magazine named meta filter, like the third most best blog out of 25 blogs ever. And nothing came of it, except my accountant emailed me and went, wow, I've actually understand what you do now. Which is totally unprovoked. Like, I just got an email one day, I didn't even know it was online. I was like, What are you talking about? And he goes, Hey, you're in time like, you know, literally like a 60 year old man read Time Magazine and time.com and was like, Hey, you became you came on my radar. That's That's great work kid.

Jessamyn 28:41 My whole family very proud. Being in Slate this

mathowie 28:45 side from the accountant. Nothing happened last year. We kind of made fun of it a little bit too, because not only did they do that, but they also like you got some, like press release type email from someone asking like a link about it on the site. And they did that stupid voting thing was like, here's the 25 best blogs. But hey, all the user bases these blogs, please cast off the ballots. I made an evil joke on Twitter about it last year going like ooh, old media trying to be relevant because and someone noticed, remember that they're basically trying to copy cracked.com By putting out lists. Like it's just bottom feeding journalism, you know, you shouldn't even use the word journalism around it. So anywho they pick us for I don't know, fourth best blog this year. And it's everywhere. Like, like I have, you know, the metal filter news alert. It's like in Norway and Japan. Like everyone's making an article about the top 25 blogs. And yeah, now it's a big deal.

Jessamyn 29:43 But what did we get out of it this year?

mathowie 29:46 I think the Slate article is like the biggest thing that ever happened in metadata recently, but ya know, we got out of except some laughter Oh, there was this dumb joke at the end of every 25 Top blog where it said the post you wouldn't see They just were not funny. They're just dumb. They're like attempts to be these. You know, like Toby kind of Deaf like anti post for that kind of blog and what

Jessamyn 30:12 it was like except there's no such thing as a tone deaf anti post,

mathowie 30:15 or no depth. So we won't Plum is just what was the poster you ever see is the history of miniature golf.

Cortex 30:22 Yeah, well, yeah, it was like so then. Yeah. So after they put that other tagline people joked about a little bit and I think Miko threw out some resources in the meta talk thread, and someone else ran with it, and made this post and it turned into a really great post about the history of miniature golf. So

mathowie 30:37 I stumbled upon a very serious miniature golf book. Like someone toured the country made a coffee table book of the best miniature golf courses. I discovered a course near me in Southern California went and played it and it was very good it was like actual artists and crafted obstacles. And if you've ever been up at 3am Drunk watching ESPN three or four like you know there's actual miniature pro miniature golf is on TV once in a while and it is astounding. dudes wearing what Yeah, dudes wearing like, like, like real golfers shirts and sponsors and, and pants and they're like hitting their putting like 245 year old men putting for a championship. It's a sight to behold.

Jessamyn 31:27 My favorite comment in this thread actually was devil's advocate who were remembered the Games magazine inviting its readers to design a miniature golf course hole. And this was right when I was like reading Games magazine a lot. And somebody made the guaranteed hole in one which was basically elliptical. So it was like a funny joke. Because no matter where you hit the ball, if you hit it hard enough, it will automatically go into the hall. And I remembered that it made me very happy.

mathowie 31:55 Ah, there's the look at this cat. The most popular post looks like for the entire month was the crazy post about the President's desk. Right, what was that?

Cortex 32:09 Which what? Oh, the, the desk from the Oval Office?

mathowie 32:18 Yeah, talk about that before? No, it wasn't your last podcast is that it was right before, three days before it.

Cortex 32:27 This is I mean, this is sort of the coda to the previous desk. ology thing, is how I was thinking of it. So I think someone made a joke about this

Jessamyn 32:35 desk ology thing. Generally,

Cortex 32:37 you know, it's, it's, yeah, it's a thing is all it is. It's one of those things where people sort of like, talked about something trivial. And then I think it sort of went up a notch when someone else was like, That thing you're talking about is trivial. And everybody was like, oh, no, you fucking didn't. And so everybody started really, really digging into you know, trying to take the trivial thing really seriously. And, and so it led to this notion of desk ology, as sort of like seeing human history in society through the lens of the desks involved with the people in those societies and, and desk manufacturing.

Jessamyn 33:15 But it's like you guys, it's a better filter, say or not? Yeah,

Cortex 33:18 no, it came out of some random metal filter thread that doesn't exist anywhere besides metal filter, but okay, but yes, so desks are sort of just a thing. That that's sort of out there in the the, the zeitgeist of of metal filter at this point.

Jessamyn 33:34 Okay. Now, I know.

mathowie 33:37 Somebody suddenly dropped desk knowledge.

Cortex 33:41 Yes. So this is I see this as being sort of like, a follow on

mathowie 33:44 to that. So do you think the favorites are ironic? No, no,

Cortex 33:48 no, I think it's an epic post. It's a good story. Yeah. It's just it just happens to be a good story about something that was already sort of floating around in people's heads. So that I think was kind of a perfect storm as far as favorites. Go, you know, running with something people are entertained by on the site. You know, that's sort of that's a bonus thing. Epic posts. That's the story.

mathowie 34:08 It's good story. Yeah. So

Jessamyn 34:10 and Obama?

Cortex 34:12 Yeah. Yeah, throwing some like him.

mathowie 34:16 We should move on to AskMe edit filter. Is there any other meta filter crap,

Cortex 34:20 trying to scan through stuff from like the end of last month to figure out if there's anything else

Jessamyn 34:24 I had my favorites?

Cortex 34:27 Like at least half my comments in the last month on meta filter have been little bracketed administrative things. I haven't been commenting a whole lot so

mathowie 34:34 a cat that was a cat Oh, it says via projects, but I think they did that themselves. They didn't see mechanism for it. Well, you know,

Jessamyn 34:42 I did and I think a good burger would be okay with me saying that I actually wrote this post. Just so you know,

Cortex 34:50 but make sure you give attribution because

mathowie 34:53 yeah, it was steal that guy ever come clean and like be less good. No,

Cortex 35:00 it's funny. He just happened the last couple days on Monday this happened. There was a meta talk where someone linked to a user friendly strip user friendly is this comic strip that's been around since like, 1997. Yes, I saw. So there was there was a link to that.

Jessamyn 35:20 And it was what optimist chimes calm. It was really?

Cortex 35:25 It was, I think it was optimistic X. Yeah. So like, and Marty noticed this and says, Hey, this is weird. And you can sort of watch the the first few posts of the meta talk, thread people, they're just like, Oh, ha, you know, and I was in there saying, hey, this, that's kind of freaky. That's sort of lame, but I was like, it was just a one off bad idea.

mathowie 35:43 Every time someone

Jessamyn 35:44 does 400 comments before I even saw the airport or something like that.

mathowie 35:51 I'm like, the word. It's similar. But it's a pretty obvious joke that anyone can make you guys need to relax. I found three more.

Cortex 36:00 I think that's what most people were thinking. Or like, this was a case where maybe one guy had had a bad moment of judgment and had lifted a little too literally. And it's like, Dude, that's lame. Don't do when people showed

mathowie 36:13 up? He did three times and something that works for us. Yeah, you came up with this bullshit. Like

Jessamyn 36:21 one of ours. Yeah,

Cortex 36:22 it's actually he's been a member for a lot of years. Oh, and

mathowie 36:24 the funny part is I gave him a free membership. Because like when people when people sign up, and I've heard of them, I usually give them a refund. Like, Hey, I like your thing. Or you know, it's like

Jessamyn 36:33 I signed up Incidentally, I don't know what his username is so cool. I didn't

mathowie 36:37 see slight come across the wire. But his first guys the comic guys first response was Okay, I admit it. I did that once. All the other ones someone sent it to me. And then everyone went show us one of those emails or someone sent it to you. They went, Oh, actually, yeah, I did that the other times too. And yeah, I swear, I'll do something and repentance and I feel bad. But it's never like, like if he was just so if he was just honest. Like he was clearly via

Jessamyn 37:06 link or whatever, like I like

mathowie 37:09 his his publishing system won't allow it. So he'll have to think of something. That's why he kept saying over and over again, I can't do that. I can't I have no mechanism to do that. Even though I'm a programmer writing

Cortex 37:21 it, you know, and I yeah, if only

mathowie 37:26 frustrated by the whole problem. The problem is like when you get someone red handed doing something how they react basically tells you like a window to their soul. And his was just stonewalling and like half assed half apologies, you know, the whole, like, you know, the TV apology here now, like,

Jessamyn 37:45 I am sorry that you feel that way.

mathowie 37:48 I'm sorry, if you were offended, you know, like, if you feel bad,

Cortex 37:53 pick up your ass, he turned it around, within a few hours. And I can understand this sort of sense of panic. So at least he wasn't like, it wasn't like extended bullshit. But at the same time, you know, it started out with wasn't me, and then turn into Yes, I totally stole this stuff. And he made a post over on the sites over on user friendly, sort of saying, Hey, I did this. And I kind of thought he was going to not use just the draft he threw up there and not expand it. And he pointed out a few examples, but not all the ones that have been cited. But anyway, he you know, he did make a post saying, Hey, I did this shitty thing. Although he didn't say shitty because you can't cuss user friendly. But, but you know, he said, Okay, I did this thing. And I have no excuse. I'm a plagiarist. And then everybody on the site over there, and I understand that they liked the place and kind of their hero but every like, that wasn't personal or that even that he had said it people like well, I don't know. I don't think it really happened. I can't even find a thread on meta filter. So I think they're just trolling I think they're just bluffing and and besides, it's not plagiarism, and it doesn't matter anyway. It's not like Copyright applies here. And that's kind of super defensive not even thinking it through bullshit that as much as I'm annoyed at him for the plagiarism. Yeah, God damn, at least he was straightforward about it. Once he got caught on it. Everybody else over there was like, Oh my God, no super, super crazy denial thing. And I didn't try

Jessamyn 39:23 loyal political Matt, how we named you know, everyone's like, shut up. He's awesome.

mathowie 39:29 Nice and honest. And upfront. I don't have a like fucking robot army doing my bidding my key dead.

Jessamyn 39:36 Zombie robot army.

mathowie 39:38 It just reminds me of like, you know, Richard Nixon defenders in 1972 or something like they were they're bending over backwards to say he did nothing wrong. It's like, No, he did something wrong. He admitted it. All right. Where were we?

Jessamyn 39:54 We were talking about AskMe Metafilter. Yeah, I was talking about My favorites. What should I know before I shave my head? Wow. What is it like to dream? Oh, there was a couple others that I kind of liked. But these were good because they're like great ideas of like, why you need other people to kind of give you answers and reading books about the topic isn't really going to super help you like the people that gave this gal I believe she marked everybody.

Cortex 40:30 every once awhile, someone just does that.

mathowie 40:33 Then she went to lunch and she hasn't gotten to the last 17. But yeah, he's happy. I'm kidding. But

Jessamyn 40:38 there was a lot of people who had like really good, like, by the way, and one guy was like, I shaved my head. And then I call my parents up and ask them when they dropped me when I was a kid because my head is all covered in lumps. I see. Like, if you just watch like Pink Floyd's The wall or something, you'll totally fuck it up. Whereas if other people tell you like, do this, donate your hair, do these other things, blah, blah, blah, you get all sorts of good advice.

mathowie 41:05 I saw the dream thing, but I didn't read it. It was so weird. Is this like, is this person broken? Or is this a is this a thing that happens to a lot of people, they just remember. They remember their dreams when they were a kid. And now they don't dream at all? Does that really happen? I don't know, maybe in a stressful job where you don't get to relax at all. Like I'm thinking maybe there's like six month periods of school or I remembered I just never dreamed?

Cortex 41:32 Well, you know, I mean, I don't drink nearly as much as I used to either.

mathowie 41:37 A high pressure job now.

Cortex 41:40 I mean, compared to like, when I was 20 like the last eight years, I haven't had nearly as many trainers as I think I did when I was zero. This is like, no more than zero. I mean, I definitely have dreams occasionally that I that I remember. But uh, but still, you know, I mean, I can see it really going down. And I can see that going a little bit further to someone who hasn't like, you know, they have a dream every couple years instead of, you know, once a month or something like that sounds

mathowie 42:05 like a pod shape

Jessamyn 42:06 where you don't drink every night.

Cortex 42:10 Every night and if I if I sleep poorly, I tend to remember some of it but but no, I don't know. I think I think I've gotten so used to the normal rhythm of when I go to bed and when I wake up that my body's gotten used to sort of easing into waking up. Yeah. I make a distinction between like a real dream like something that's got some content, or just some sort of vague obviously I had something going on in my brain cuz the word bacon is on my mind.

mathowie 42:38 The Dream critic here is no character art. That wasn't a dream. I

Cortex 42:44 don't I don't think it counts. If there's just you know, neural activity. That's that's that's not a dream. That's bullshit. That's just that's that's that's daydreaming while you're asleep? That doesn't.

mathowie 42:56 I know. I'm right there with Jessamyn

Jessamyn 43:01 Reese single night, like, yeah, arcing things, but I don't wake up to an alarm clock. And maybe that's that could be part of you know, the, like people I know who like have to like get up and immediately go do something, have a harder time remembering their dreams, although usually they remember like, Oh, I didn't do something but then I had to go, you know, do something. But yeah, I found this thread really, really interesting because like, you know, normally you talk to like, whatever your significant other or whatever about dreams or maybe your parents but like, it's not like a normal topic of conversation. I remember I told a friend of mine that I dreamed about her dog. And she thought that was really like, odd in a way. I was like, I don't know, your dog showed up in my dream. What can I say? Like it occurred to me I don't talk to my adult friends about dreams that often. So it was interesting to me to read this thread. weird to see like what stuff a lot of people do and what stuff you know, a lot of people don't do.

mathowie 43:57 Where's the ever happened me in a dream was I dreamed about some person in my life from 10 years before it just as a blue. I hadn't thought of them in 10 years. That happens to me next morning. They are down the street. And I had not seen them in 10 or 12 years. It was freaky.

Jessamyn 44:15 And the pillow was gone.

mathowie 44:20 Like maybe I saw their card it didn't register earlier that day. I have no idea how that brain how that happened. I found metal filter met a talk I mean wow.

Cortex 44:33 Well there's gotta be some referral traffic that make it pretty easy. Or he could you know, have any any capacity for searching and looking around at all

mathowie 44:41 he knows about the author. Oh, yeah,

Jessamyn 44:45 we're friends of friends. He

Cortex 44:46 just commented, since we started to recruit you

Jessamyn 44:57 I can't help it. I was

Cortex 44:59 I was As I was explaining it for the people who couldn't read the item we're sending back and forth. But then you had to go and just take a big ol poop on that. Which, you know, which is which is basically what my cats have been doing on the floor, not the litter box.

Jessamyn 45:15 I've been reading I just want to bring

Cortex 45:16 that back, bring it back around to the cat's pooping because you'll laugh right, you'll

mathowie 45:20 laugh at this month of cat pooping. Yeah, I hope so.

Cortex 45:25 Oh, laughs sometime after I steam cleaned it was my music room before we got the cats and it'll be the music room again at some point, but there's a lot of prominent stains on the fucking floor now. And it's just poop get a darker red. The whole the whole main floor smells like cat poop, like disinfected? Let's know those cats are those cats. I'm doing the best I can dammit.

mathowie 45:48 20 Finance since that Slate article. Oh, Jesus.

Cortex 45:50 Yeah. And it was like, what? 129? Just on Monday, I think yeah, like another 60 yesterday. That was awesome. We

Jessamyn 45:57 got that sweet email from that girl who wanted to work with God.

mathowie 46:01 I can't I blew her off. Right? It wasn't nice. You were totally nice. It could have been so much nicer. Like, I felt like I was like, after I sent it. I was like, that was kind of a dick there. She wrote back when she wrote back and she said, Oh, that's unfortunate that, you know, I told her basically, you want to work as a moderator. And you were like it takes he said, like we hire from within from people that are really good at understanding how the community works. She wrote back going, Oh, okay. That's unfortunate, because I thought you guys were all into the crowdsourcing thing. And I just want to be a part of that. But thanks. I was like, yeah, why would you crowdsource moderation, which is the most important part to not leave?

Jessamyn 46:44 Reddit does, right? That's what Digg does, kinda. The secret is the all have, quote unquote, real moderators behind this. Yeah, also, but people act like yeah, they just run themselves, you just start them going. And well, it's

Cortex 46:57 just it's not a very granular term as a thing. You know, you say, moderation. And the scope of that, from site to site varies so much, you've got everything from I mean, we're kind of doing everything on meta filter, and it's a fair amount of work that, you know, is split up just between a couple people. There's a lot of sites that have people who call themselves moderators, and you know, there's, you know, one of them for every 10 non moderators on the site and it's much more distributed sort of,

Jessamyn 47:23 just like gaming fires have a lot more quorum upper level Yeah,

Cortex 47:27 like for moderation and yeah, so it's, it's, it's kind of hard to know what people mean when they say moderation and it may be that that Sophia may not have really had any idea of what moderation really entails filter.

mathowie 47:38 I didn't want to explain to her like power hungry moderators acting you know, callously making huge blunders are so possible when you make anybody a moderator, but

Jessamyn 47:49 I think in the future, we just need to have someone that needs to read the Lifestream monitors for metal filter mentioned, so that we can like, you know, seem responsive and like, you know, how every time you mentioned samples on Twitter, whatever, yeah, nice meeting dork from Zappos is like, Oh, hey, glad you'd like to shoes or whatever, that like, you know, in our future incarnation of metal filter gigantism, we'll have somebody that just gets to do that,

mathowie 48:16 that Andy bale showed me searches for the word meta filter at Yahoo Answers yesterday. Oh, God. Oh, God, there were two questions. One of them was, hey, does anyone have an account? They're not using know the answer that correctly. He didn't want to spend five bucks. And then the other question was, I hate metal filter. Why did they only let you ask one that week? It's still unfair. Like I like Yahoo Answers better. And the only answer marked as best didn't even didn't even mention metal filter had nothing to do with it. It just mentioned that on Ask Yahoo. You actually need five credits to ask a question, which is basically the same rule like you have to actually yeah,

Cortex 49:00 we use we use controllable commodity like time whereas yah, yah uses a bullshit commodity like, go make a bunch of fucking noise. If you can't answer if you can't ask a question right now on Yahoo Answers a solution is go to a random question and toss awesome bullshit and get some points. Yeah. Which I mean, I don't want to seem critical, but I'm not sure Yahoo Answers is really watching.

mathowie 49:24 Since we launched there people wanted Can I just can't we force people this to answer three questions before they get to ask one? And I'm like, No, you do not want that.

Cortex 49:35 That's one of those ideas that you I mean, you can understand the initial train of thought that led to someone asking it, but you can tell they haven't followed that train into the station. And so we ended up. I know, every single time that comes up, we kind of have to just shoot it down against like, see, we don't want the child to go to crap. Yeah, that's the problem. So that's that's the problem with your idea. It would turn medical

Jessamyn 49:53 is great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, do you guys read anything else at AskMe

mathowie 49:59 law likes to like when Kevin Kelly asks a question. It's always important because he's awesome. But the best way to order blog comments Jessamyn you're gonna be on like a panel at South by Southwest with someone from YouTube again,

Jessamyn 50:12 YouTube. And someone from YouTube is like, yes, there's pedal

mathowie 50:17 worst thing in the world because they put the newest comment at the top. So that just

Jessamyn 50:21 I made fun of YouTube last I

mathowie 50:25 tell you keep doing it, because it's like, that just so encourages like, Hey, I just showed up here. I watched two seconds of the video. I don't I don't know what anyone said before. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna read it. I'm gonna tell you what I think right now. And then like, you know, it's so pointless. It just devalues comments so much to have the newest at the top.

Cortex 50:47 Yeah, well, it's you know, I mean, that's, that's they're, they're, they're trying to develop a thread. They're putting it there because people want comments, and it'll get some of them to come back if they can comment. And I

mathowie 50:57 mean, nobody reads upside down. So everything is too long didn't read for everybody, because there's no way you can read the old comments

Cortex 51:04 for as long as anything is almost a self justifying decision, because who in God's name would read through entire throat on YouTube anyway? You know, if Yeah, if you're gonna go and engage in the comments, you're probably going to mostly just go find some random things someone said and call them a dork for saying it. And the cycle perpetuates with super short term memory,

Jessamyn 51:22 you don't have like racist word filters on? Yeah, amazing.

Cortex 51:30 I kind of I could go either way with that. Because on the one hand, a filters would significantly reduced the total volume of comments on a lot of videos, which I guess would be a good thing. But on the other hand, it's not like censoring out those comments will suddenly make the YouTube comments worth reading in most cases. So why not just like leaving people hanging out their fucking, you know, you know, freaky racist bullshit, you know, let it fly. And, you know, make sure that they don't accidentally improve the reputation of their, you know, commenters? I don't know I would be, I would be pleased and shocked to see YouTube actually make a fundamental effort to change the tone of their comments, but I don't see it ever happening. Be

mathowie 52:12 nice. Try

Cortex 52:16 to flip out and just say this is the new initiative, No more bullshit, let's turn this into a place where people actually would ever want to read.

mathowie 52:24 Because Youtube is so large and such a part of culture, like one tiny tweak, to put it into a better direction could be like immense in terms of the changes that could go positive changes that come out of it, like don't design your site to be optimized for a 12 year old boys, like making a joke with the N word in it, like, don't do that. And like, God frustrates me so much. To me, it's just basically mudslinging on this thing that's like this touchstone of culture right now. YouTube, you know, it's just like,

Cortex 53:00 it's such a bizarre way that it ended up happening that way that the site managed to be the one that sort of won the video war. Yeah. And I know there's other places that are making an effort right now. And I mean, I see a lot of Vimeo leaks around and that sort of thing. But nothing is YouTube. I mean, YouTube is definitely the king and at the same time, and now they wrap Yeah, the comment side, it's like my space it's like yeah, and we can hope we can hope that you know, things sort of go away it seems like MySpace is losing some of its glory with

mathowie 53:28 MySpace and Facebook, they became the kings and then they sat on their laurels and went like how can we milk this for cash? It will has like a higher purpose in mind like so you're the king of online video and you know maybe possibly the largest community site on the web. Why don't you try and make it useful or nice so the place or you know why make it a Wallis fucking wasteland of like, Ah, just stupid everyone's gay everything sucks.

Jessamyn 53:57 Well, that's exactly it and yeah, and your only options really are to turn comments totally off which a lot of people do because they're like I'm just not yeah with you. Dissing my foxes on trampolines fuck ya. Or to have it on and then just deal with it. I mean, you know your best bet is to be unpopular like I had one popular video on YouTube and oh my god the horrible things

mathowie 54:22 the video of me dancing you know, or no Star Wars kid with a laptop I had love it calm have it set to approve only so they'd have to, they could everyone could leave a comment but I had approved the ones that became public. And you know, I approved maybe like 100 comments out of 6000 Because every single everything came in like you are fat and gay. LOL You are stupid. Baggot lol I hope you drop your fucking Mac faggot lol like, there's just hundreds of them. That's crazy.

Jessamyn 54:56 That you should do that again. And then like get All of those comments and make like a fortuitous post about them or something like that. And talking about you know, just have it be like a wide metal filter is awesome or than anything else on the planet. Look at what happened.

Cortex 55:12 You know, an open letter to Google.

mathowie 55:14 Yeah, Google, I

Cortex 55:15 have been using your YouTube and it is neat with the videos. I do not know if you're aware of the comments, but please see a closed, please. Victus

mathowie 55:26 are your stupid faggot. Oh,

Jessamyn 55:32 man, Howie?

Cortex 55:36 Yeah. What are we talking about?

Jessamyn 55:40 Oh, YouTube comment, people, I'm looking forward.

Cortex 55:44 I want you to, like get contact info and and grill the YouTube person. And we should like, we should like have an interview with them or something. Because I would love to, like, get rid of the you know, assuming that they're like, you know, a sane person to be interesting to see the other side of it.

mathowie 56:01 Like Google's PRs tight they couldn't talk openly about

Cortex 56:06 well, maybe got anything well get them drunk and then grilled him? Yes.

mathowie 56:11 Oh, take like a pocket recorder. Good idea.

Cortex 56:14 Yeah, just

mathowie 56:15 record. Yeah.

Jessamyn 56:18 I've got a little camera that takes little movies.

mathowie 56:24 Oh, you know, well, there's a dangerous thing medical, there's awesome because it's all human powered. And it's it, you know, because it doesn't scale. Like we have the right size community. Like, I mean, the danger of like, all these awesome slate articles is that one too many of these slate articles and the whole thing falls goes off the rails. Like because you know, too many people asking too many stupid questions what's going to happen in six days when 200 is gonna be

Cortex 56:49 a rough week next week when influx gets their first questions and half of them have to get

mathowie 56:54 happy in that like, like, once every three, four days, someone will email me going they're pissed off about the one week wait. But the Slate article was like, here are all these huge hurdles. And here's why they're there. And here's why. It's great.

Jessamyn 57:08 That was my favorite thing about it. does take a week your shits gonna get deleted if it's crazy. Yeah,

mathowie 57:15 not a single person wrote me a shitty email, like, demanding a refund like they do every few days. Which is like, awesome.

Jessamyn 57:24 Yay.

mathowie 57:27 But yeah, it'll scale

Jessamyn 57:29 readers are? Yeah. Like Google blows it right? Because Google wants stuff that like, they can use their massive computing brains to scale, but they don't really actually have human, you know, humans to do more work there.

Cortex 57:46 Yeah. Well, and yeah, I mean, just in terms of the sheer scope of it, I can understand why it would, they may just see it as like a non starter of a thing to try and do because to do meta filter style, moderation to all of YouTube would require how many people? You know, how many, how many full time moderators essentially, for the size of YouTube, it'd be nuts. So I mean, I'm sure that's part of why it's not a solved problem yet, but it sure would be neat to see them try something. Yeah, I have. I have one thing from meta talk. I want to just get a link out there to before we forget the taters thing.

mathowie 58:25 Jesus. There's no way we could summarize this unless we're gonna try and summarize. I

Unknown Speaker 58:33 think, you know, I

mathowie 58:33 feel I don't even know if I even understand like, someone may often

Jessamyn 58:37 stand it. It's depressing. So what's crazy people it's a crazy person

mathowie 58:41 made an offhand comment about taters. mean by that?

Jessamyn 58:49 On the screen, but not

mathowie 58:50 hardcore cater soft, hardcore taters and softer rotators

Cortex 58:54 it was a weird thing. You know that the comment itself was weird. And it just led to people started talking about it, but that the thread, most of the thread is just people completely going nuts playing with the words and trying to share Etymology and linguistics.

mathowie 59:08 What was that call? Oh, Paul's restarting the server. Wow. What was that? What was at South Park where they all said something with the word over and over again, like Markov or Zarkov marklar marcar became or the mark Lars became this running joke where it could mean anything and everything you wanted it to mean. And it was funny.

Cortex 59:29 Yes. So yeah, taters. It's just, I feel like if if there was like, if we had like formal segments of the podcast, one of them that I would do is definitely meme watch, which is just be like, what has happened the last two weeks that's going on? That's the new lingo going around the site and stuff like that, because I've always found that really interesting. No, you're exactly and taters would definitely be the name of the podcast.

mathowie 59:55 Going into the Yeah, lexicon of metal filter for exactly.

Cortex 59:59 It'll never go away. There's a lot of metadata related photos on Flickr that are labeled taters at this point. stuff. Yeah,

Jessamyn 1:00:08 I've been away.

Cortex 1:00:10 Yeah. And it wasn't huge but you know, it was it was at least as big as desk ology so

Jessamyn 1:00:15 which I also

mathowie 1:00:19 remember a minor method of desk ology but yeah,

Jessamyn 1:00:23 yeah. Anything else friends?

mathowie 1:00:27 We only picked out one right?

Jessamyn 1:00:28 No, I

mathowie 1:00:29 picked out to Josh pick out for Mettaton you know for AskMe Metafilter. Feels like I already talked about you know, a couple more everything was help self help, like everything self help, like how do I learn to be a grown up? How do I learn to be engaging talk

Jessamyn 1:00:45 to strangers at a party. That was one that I liked, which is another kind of twitchy nerd question, but I enjoyed it.

mathowie 1:00:51 How can Oh, how about the how can I be a good grandfather from Miguel Cardoso? Oh, I thought that was sweet.

Jessamyn 1:01:02 I thought I thought that was very nice. Did he get good advice? Do not look because I really didn't care about being a good grandfather.

Cortex 1:01:09 I think it was mostly told to dump the children already dumped the children. You know, sometimes you tell a joke and you know, it's bad when you're telling it. And then you feel bad afterwards because you told a dumb joke. But then other people fail to even reject the joke correctly. And then it's kind of their fault instead of yours. And that's how I'm feeling so I blame you guys.

Jessamyn 1:01:31 I'm just smiling and shaking my head

mathowie 1:01:34 this is pretty cool. Give me every documentary about Masshole it's great. Yeah, that

Jessamyn 1:01:41 was great until people started talking about Al Gore and then it became like a moderation

mathowie 1:01:47 see, I just get through it.

Jessamyn 1:01:48 In An Inconvenient Truth is the most arrogant self centered asshole in any documentary I've seen recently. I thought so. Like did you not understand the question like fine if you don't like Al Gore, that's fine, you know, but like, yeah, then a whole bunch of people were like shut up and

mathowie 1:02:06 wow. Oh, I

Cortex 1:02:07 was I was worried that no one was going to but x mutex did mention claws Kaczynski which, which seems like kind of appropriate thing to mention in that context.

Jessamyn 1:02:19 Wait, what? Oh, the clouds can see like my best friend kind of thing.

Cortex 1:02:22 Yeah. In the dark. There. They're

Jessamyn 1:02:25 never heard Hertzog

Cortex 1:02:26 yeah

mathowie 1:02:30 I think that's about it maybe for the podcast

Cortex 1:02:33 I'm spent

Unknown Speaker 1:02:41 music Joe I'm 17 Last time I did this shit was 14 OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK BBQ someone told me what the the Q stands for God no. Music me via music me. Next section