Podcast 40 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 40: scatterplots and baseball porn (2009-04-21).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary keywords

game, people, post, thread, filter, awesome, link, pickle, buy, good, digg, site, fucking, great, put, podcast, basque, read, play, big

Transcript

mathowie 0:00 Hey Jessamyn Welcome to the metal filter, odd. All right podcast for T the big four. Man over two years of these things. We just had the first music podcast that was great pastic

Jessamyn 0:23 that was terrific. I thought it was terrific. I listened to the entire thing you want to tell the audience at home? Josh, what exactly you did if they haven't listened to it yet? Well, for those

Cortex 0:32 for those of you who missed the mysterious extra podcast between this podcast in the last podcast, we got to talk and after that podcast about doing some way to feature more of the music from music.metafilter.com. And because we use bumpers, and we always have for the main podcast, but people were like, man, you know, I hear 30 seconds of the song, and I wish I could hear the whole thing. But at the same time, we don't want to throw an extra 30 minutes into this podcast just to run songs at full length. So I sat down and put together a podcast, really just focusing on the music and playing several tracks through and then I had a little interview with one of our mefite musicians, corduroy, and played some more music after that. And so whole thing came out to like a little over a half an hour. And people seem to really like it. So I think I'll keep doing that. And we'll sort of see how it shapes up. And, and maybe in the long term, we'll split it off into its own podcast feed if it feels like it's working well, and people would rather have them as two separate things. People were kind of asking about that. Yeah, exactly. And it seemed like, opinions were sort of mixed on it. But in the long run, it probably would

mathowie 1:43 make sense. Yeah, you can avoid, you know, shows in a podcast and most podcast players pretty easily. Yeah,

Cortex 1:51 it's probably not that hard just to get past it. So I'm not I'm not a big podcast subscriber. So I kind of Yeah, I kind of recuse myself from from the debate. As far as that goes. I don't really care either way, but to

mathowie 2:04 know, yeah, I guess I follow three or four podcasts. And if I see a lame guest or something, I'm like, yeah. And sometimes most of the guests are lame. And I'm like electively downloading only the ones I like. The mix. And that's like another way you can do it. If it you know, this

Jessamyn 2:21 is a problem settings can solve.

mathowie 2:23 Yes. Right. Right. I really love the improvised theme by the guest. Yeah.

Jessamyn 2:30 That should be a regular feature. Yeah.

mathowie 2:31 Make that a feature. Yeah. Do you think you have to change up the format at all? I kind of liked it the way it was

Cortex 2:37 pretty good the way it was. I don't know if I need to change it up too much. One thing

Jessamyn 2:41 I only suggestion would be to have the interview kind of demarcated when you do the list of all the stuff, you know, yeah. Because I wanted to hear the interview first. And then I went back and listen to the music. And I wasn't sure where in the kind of schedule the interview. Yeah,

Cortex 2:56 exactly. Because I know I ended up marking out the, the timeline for the songs to play, but I didn't really do that with the interview. And I should make sure that I sort of timestamp that as well.

mathowie 3:07 We could actually there was also another idea to do like, use the playlist player. So you could jump to any song in a player. But I guess you could also cut up the interview as a segment. You know, that'd be a little more editing time after

Cortex 3:21 that. And yeah, that was that's the thing we're like, you can do that with things you see.

mathowie 3:26 Like the apple chaplet

Jessamyn 3:27 timestamps in between like in any sort of way you can link to the middle of a YouTube video now

mathowie 3:33 Yeah, well, it's with this a you know, the AAC file format, any iPod any Apple playback device would be awesome to have it have chapters, but it's you don't get like a raw mp3 that you can play easily.

Cortex 3:48 Yeah, well, I think the thing there as far as I'm concerned, because I I could give a talk for AC I probably wouldn't end up using it myself. But if it works for other people cool, but if if it's easy enough to put out that chapter version, and also just the plain Jane three version then hey, yeah, that's fine. So yeah, I'll

mathowie 4:06 take a look at the podcast spec to see if we can stuff like high quality low quality versions or something like that. Oh, that'd

Jessamyn 4:13 be cool the way you used to be able to do that with gifts way back in

mathowie 4:18 JPEGs progressive than normal. Yeah, yes. What else is there talked about up front. I guess we're still working on the anniversary stuff. Me and Paul we're hashing out screenshots and

Jessamyn 4:32 two months left buddies you gotta get

mathowie 4:36 I think it'd be done for me first.

Oh, I forgot to mention the beginning that We have our first Metafilter baby. Oh great Norton DC and only connect to I think might have met at a meet up

Jessamyn 5:07 many needed to meet up they

mathowie 5:08 totally met at a meet up was it like Baltimore or something?

Jessamyn 5:13 Oh or DC I don't remember.

mathowie 5:14 Oh yeah, it's probably a DC meetup in 2003 or something. I got married a couple years ago and that was kind of cool. I think it's probably one of about five or six marriages. But then they just had a child which is kind of cool. I need to get him like a metal filter onesie or something.

Jessamyn 5:27 And the baby's adorable, adorable baby.

mathowie 5:30 Yeah. Very cute baby.

Cortex 5:32 Like connecting Norton DC, a blanket, or a Sluggo or blank rollers. That asked me I think we talked about it like three or four podcasts ago, there's and asked me someone asking about like, blanket notices. That thing is still fucking going like, every month, someone else pops and say, oh, yeah, I tried these and I like this one the best. And it's not like sketchy spammers coming in to plug them it's just people eventually getting around to like, searching asked me for slanket or snuggie or whichever got down when they want and it's bizarre. It's like a honeypot of non spam Enos. It's,

mathowie 6:10 I just think it's very similar war between highly absorbent cloth ShamWow versus the Shama Rama or something. Okay, I guess we should move to metal filter stuff. What were your favorite posts in the last two, three weeks?

Jessamyn 6:28 Do you want to run through jobs and projects first? Oh, yeah. I forgot. Job. Work in pickle factory. No way. Yes, way

mathowie 6:38 that would never stop being fun.

Jessamyn 6:40 But well, it would never start being fun. It's unclear. But that's like an actual paying job. But then sound of young America is looking for an unpaid intern. But you do get a free T shirt. That's something and you get to work on a public radio show and get real experience and you get to work with Google. What's his name? Jesse and I bet that would be cool.

mathowie 7:08 I wonder if you really take to pickling become become like an artisan Pickler? You can pickle almost anything if you got to pick all day.

Jessamyn 7:17 I assume actually, you totally can. I'm really surprised that kind of the hipster foodies haven't really started you know, esoteric pickling. There was like a Kool Aid pickle thing kind of took off for a while cold chef had some pictures of some Kool Aid pickles.

Cortex 7:33 Yeah, I remember that. I don't know. Maybe I bet it's out there just hasn't you know, it hasn't hit the front page of like, you know, Gourmet magazine or or whatever.

Jessamyn 7:42 I think it's just too damn healthy. If you want my opinion. You can't Why me? You could deep fry a pickle, I guess. But like, you know, there's not a bacon or excessive cheese to it.

mathowie 7:52 Well, there is the economy pickling to save your vegetables for a very long time. Totally. There's an angle there. There's an angle there.

Jessamyn 8:01 Well, I'm kidding. Picking pickling and canning generally, but yeah. Or, or I don't know. But working in a pickle factory in Michigan. Who knows? Maybe fun. Oh, yes. This was moving on to projects. This was also one of my favorite projects. She has talked about Yeah, Josh, would you like to?

Cortex 8:19 Yes, no, it's it's it's yeah, the cert critter T shirts. Basically just a What was it like nine t shirts and each one's just a nice line drawing of 160. And now 1616. Man, I am innumerate. Anyway, there's a bunch of T shirts. And yeah, it's all just classy animals. Just tech made.

mathowie 8:42 Yeah. And he's the one the science shirts. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like his latest thing and it's a deconstruct the humor to animal plus monocle plus top hat plus white gloves. Gloves. Equals hilarious.

Jessamyn 8:58 Like surf mantis. For example.

mathowie 9:00 I really want the manatee. Where'd it go? Is it gone? Oh, there it is. Oh, yeah, I really want

Jessamyn 9:09 I think if I were gonna get one, mine would probably be the groundhog. Because the groundhogs are like all over the place now and they're adorable. Sweet. And yeah, that's just tech.

mathowie 9:20 Yeah. And the internet interactive fiction contest is over now.

Cortex 9:24 Yes, it's over. And I think the judging has taken place as well. There was a follow up meta talk thread a while after the project's post went up. And yeah, it seems like it went pretty well.

mathowie 9:37 Are they like playable? Yeah, like winners. Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, all

Cortex 9:41 everything that was submitted is playable. And that sort of it came up in the meta talk thread after the contest itself was over, or during the judging maybe that not all of these were easy to beat because I mean, these We're all develop pretty rapidly. And so there tends to be bugs. And that can be kind of frustrating because like, well, I should totally be able to do this thing with this x and this coffee cup, but it just doesn't work. Why not? So people were sort of talking about some of the bugs and fix them as I went. But they also added a walkthrough section for the whole site. So anybody because we put one up can just pull up a walkthrough. So if you get stuck, you can look at that and figure out what to do next. Yeah, cheat. So so that was that was nice. So yeah, the whole thing came together pretty well. And I, I bet it's something that will sort of happen again. The overall turnout in terms of number of stories submitted, wasn't huge, but there was, you know, there was so much enthusiasm for it. And people seem to like the idea so much that I, I could see this sort of thing, sort of recurring in one form or another.

Jessamyn 10:48 Yeah, well, and there was definitely a lot of people who were interested, but it wasn't the right time or whatever, whatever, whatever. And so yeah, being able to sort of promote it more, or whatever, I think would be terrific.

Unknown Speaker 11:00 Yeah. Yeah.

mathowie 11:01 I would love to like play it. The winner.

Cortex 11:04 Let me I know I've got the results somewhere. Let me track them down. There they are.

mathowie 11:12 Three, I love the third comment. Is someone who removed all their valve.

Jessamyn 11:19 Rock writer rock writers in the lead, yes. Jeffrey, the homicidal maniac is close behind. A lot of ways to win and only a few ways to lose. That's kind of nice for

mathowie 11:35 so you're supposed to be in the metal filter world while you're in the setting of the game.

Cortex 11:40 Most of them didn't have anything to do with metal filter. And they were just, it's metal filter people doing it. So yeah, the final after the voting was over, Jeffrey, the homicidal maniac came in third. Eric's Bender came in second. And the winner was rock writer. Rock writer. Really nice, too. I played through some of it and and, ya know, it had a very, it felt very much like, if written by someone who really sort of understood and, and loved if so. So, you know, yeah, it's easy to write this stuff as an amateur and just sort of get the idea there. But you can tell it feels a little rough around the edges. But rock writer really felt like, Okay, this is, I'm just playing in if, which is, I guess sort of high praise for being able to master both just the writing side of it. Because you know, you have to be a decent writer to make the game work. Because otherwise it reads like reading someone's really stumbling prose or something. But it also has locked together and gel in a way that I think is maybe a little bit elusive to people who haven't worked in the format before. So

Jessamyn 12:47 I wanted to give a quick project shout out to Pete gern, who I think used projects to kind of the best end to get his photography site up and running, like, posted it. Here's my photographs, got any feedback. And you know, the thread turned into a whole bunch of people being like, hey, yeah, looks great. Why don't you try this. And he got to kind of fix it as people were helping him. And the site he wound up with looks really nice. I mean, it's a basic photography site that runs on WordPress, but we made a filter community really kind of helped him hammer out some of the bugs. And it was nice.

mathowie 13:20 Yeah, I didn't know you could do this with WordPress. This is awesome.

Jessamyn 13:23 See, I didn't know either. And yeah, I was

mathowie 13:27 like, what what plugins did you use? How did you make this etc?

Cortex 13:31 Yeah, you can you can, I mean, you can get a lot of function on WordPress, if you're willing to put the the muscle into rewriting some of the code underneath, especially blood sweat and PHP. Yeah, exactly.

mathowie 13:44 This is cool.

Cortex 13:46 So I had one other project, which was the home of the underdogs post, Lord Paul.

mathowie 13:52 Oh, explain that one to me. Because I didn't know. Yeah, I heard people saying it was really incredible. If you were like part of some form of a long time ago,

Cortex 14:01 it's a venerable thing that well that for a long time, there was a site called Home of the underdogs, and I don't know the the pre history of it. But basically, what it was, was a site that had information about and where available links to sort of old software, like abandoned where games was the key thing, these are, these are games that are like 510 1520 years old, and you can't really, in most cases, go out and buy them anywhere, you know, they were put out by a company that's no longer selling it or doesn't even exist anymore. And you know, there were small games, by and large, you know, classic, you know, old game like XCOM, which I have a tremendous amount of love for, but that's kind of an exception, because you can actually still buy that at this point. Oddly enough, yeah. But you know, the site was just a collection of all these games and a bunch of information about them, you know, images of the original box arts, all kinds of stuff. And it's just a huge, huge, wonderful reference for sort of nostalgia tripping plus, where there were downloads available. Hey, you can just play this game that you haven't played in 15 years and you've suddenly remembered because of a dream had last night or whatever. And then eventually, somehow or other, it just sort of went to poop. I don't know if it's financial issues or legal issues or blood, but how many 100 Dogs ended up shutting down. And then Lord Paul, I guess basically just decided, you know, fuck it.

mathowie 15:14 I'm bringing it back and how long it had been gone.

Cortex 15:17 I don't know. I want to say it was a couple of years or something, but I wasn't paying super close attention. I think they had

Jessamyn 15:22 a really long comment in the metal filter thread kind of talking about what what he did.

Cortex 15:27 Yeah. Which was probably definitely like, dropped

Jessamyn 15:31 back from the internet archives. I mean, it was crazy. He did. Yeah.

mathowie 15:36 This is all like copyright gray area.

Cortex 15:38 Yeah, it's weird stuff. Because it's like, you know, if it's a game that no one is selling, no one's making money off of there's no real market for and it's just gonna sit there in Oblivion and die

mathowie 15:48 otherwise, yeah. 1985, Commodore 64 game I love. There's basically no reason why it shouldn't be like, you know, something I can freely play today. And yeah,

Jessamyn 16:00 yeah. So that's right. That was uh, oh, sorry. Go ahead. I

Cortex 16:03 was just gonna say, yeah, so that's kind of the conundrum with the whole thing. And it's kind of neat that he's sort of willing to bite that off and jump back into it. So I'm hoping it doesn't run into trouble.

Jessamyn 16:14 In trouble, we should pay his legal defense.

mathowie 16:16 You know, it's funny, he used the Internet Archive to get backups of the old website. But I remember the last time I was at the actual internet archive at Brewster's offices, there was a guy on staff who was like a Usenet expert, who was trying to track down every 80s game ever made ever. Like for just an archive of like, we gotta keep this stuff around for God knows why or how but like,

Jessamyn 16:43 we have to keep emulator things you do if you have the giant server? Yeah, that

mathowie 16:47 like it was one guy and I remember we were exchanging easy news tips, you know, which I'm using for like, I'll go ahead and mention this in public that, you know, usually getting like TV shows off of us that using some sort of, you know, helper Apple site, like easy news, and he was using it to dig up like old. I mean, it's like pirated wares games, but they're from 1985. And I thought that was really cool. Yeah.

Jessamyn 17:12 Did you guys see a meta filter user cash mins? Asked meta filter posts like cash man is my favorite game. How can I play Cash pen without an emulator? He didn't have a lot of luck. I mean, it runs on a Color Computer. I don't even exactly understand it. But I did never known that his username was cash man because he likes the game cash man. And then he asked a question about cash man, of which I am now adding the tag cash man. But it just seemed apropos of what we were talking about.

Cortex 17:46 Hell is a Color Computer. This is This is Laura. I am not familiar with.

Jessamyn 17:51 I'm old that I don't even know that one. I remember

mathowie 17:53 emulators are rough even on modern computers. So

Cortex 17:57 this depends on what you're emulating some work really well. Some of them aren't so great. A big part of the difficulty is whether or not there's a lot of available hardware and specs. I remember the whole Nintendo emulator scene when it was first sort of crawling out of the ooze. It was real sort of slow fitful process as different people working on it managed to, you know, emulate correctly, one chip or another and there were a couple chips that were just so weird and mysterious, and they showed up on like four or five games that people could never really satisfactorily reverse engineer them. Like Rad Racer was one of the that that was like the big Nintendo racing games. And I think it had some specific custom chip that that made it possible to do sort of the road turning left and right and that was used on like four games ever and there was no documentation and people spent years trying to reverse engineer the fucking thing or something like that love cubes you love your comments? Always what I'm doing

mathowie 19:19 I guess we go to meta taki things.

Jessamyn 19:22 I will find my frog Well, what's going on in meta talk

mathowie 19:24 anything? No. Beard. Oh, yeah.

Jessamyn 19:27 Damon's a man's beard was the beard off. Right? Yeah, I'm trying to figure out where when that happened. I mean, if there's anybody who doesn't know, he was doing a lifting thing with his beard. And you know he's been promoting it over and over and over again but love it the last week or two was when the beard did its final lift. He wound up raising $1,000 And there was supposed to Mettaton was wonderful.

mathowie 19:53 He lifted a child 50 pounds he lifted

Jessamyn 19:56 a child with his beard which I was totally like Not gonna lie. watch it because I was so totally afraid. Yeah.

mathowie 20:02 Oh II but yeah, we did. We're so April 1 mildly. We mildly welcomed April 1, but they descend Valley thread that disemboweled you.

Jessamyn 20:16 Oh, yeah, we were I was traveling, we were kind of exhausted. I think most people are okay. I think it's not like you know, some sites where they're like Grace or Well, it's

mathowie 20:26 hard to strike a balance between abusing your audience and lightly poking fun at them. So yeah, exactly.

Jessamyn 20:33 We did pretty well, last year. I still have plans for next year, but April one is, you know, right in the middle of kind of busy time for me, so it's never a good time to make plans. Yeah, if it were in February, you know,

mathowie 20:46 we got plenty of time. Well, from now on, let's

Cortex 20:48 do April 1, joke's on you on a day in February. that'll that'll get

Jessamyn 20:52 them. Wow.

mathowie 20:53 There's a there's also this thing where stuff we did five years ago, that seemed to be funny at the time. You see people doing it today, because they're just new to web blogging. And you think that's so stupid and overplayed and over done, even though I did it the same stage of my development. Like, oh, God, like it's stupid, stupid, like TechCrunch was bought by a serial provider because it had the word crunch in it as just like a guy. So a four year old,

Jessamyn 21:25 saying, Yeah, you kind

Cortex 21:27 of need to get away from the weaver BOD thing unless you actually have a really good something beyond. Wouldn't it be ironic if we were in fact, bought by this blah, blah, blah, you know, that's such a high concept stuff, guys.

mathowie 21:41 I mean, we did corrosion like five years ago. And then if you went to read it on April 1, it looked exactly like Digg and if you went too far, it looked like Facebook. And it was like, oh, that's exactly what we did five years ago. And man, I was lame. Like, holy crap.

Jessamyn 21:58 You were ahead of the curve. It's different. But remember, we're all lame to most of the rest of the world. So really, wise kind of posturing honestly.

mathowie 22:10 Yeah, to keep that in mind. All right. mad at filtery stuff.

Jessamyn 22:18 I had just a couple couple posts on Metafilter that I thought were terrific.

mathowie 22:23 You guys only had one. Only one only had one.

Jessamyn 22:28 Tell us because maybe it's one of my okay. My

Cortex 22:35 well played I was just you know, that was that was good work there.

mathowie 22:39 I don't even understand. My favorite one was the mike 50 Top microbreweries in America with a map 50 Top craft breweries by volume. And there's a great list on this post. And the thing that killed me was I've been to probably I'm not even that huge of a beer drinker. I've probably been there like 10 of these. Just the last,

Jessamyn 23:01 like 10 of them too. Can I point out please that three of them are in Vermont, the second to least populous state in the entire country.

mathowie 23:10 Counting the Oregon's but there's a shitload. There's one your population

Jessamyn 23:13 is like, you know, there should be Oh, cool.

Cortex 23:17 I think we can agree that it's good that both Oregon and Vermont have Yes. Good breweries. And I mean, we should just Yeah, we should just feel good about

Jessamyn 23:25 a lot Colorado, not to Colorado. I don't associate with like good beer, but I also associated with just Coors, corporate as well. Well,

Cortex 23:35 that might set up decent infrastructure for its seem, you know, if there's a lot of brewery capacity there already, because of the majors. Maybe that makes it easier for miners to sort of set up I don't know, it's probably it's probably also relatively friendly to beer. Which which might contribute to I kind of wonder what they're like beer taxes are. There's a big thing going on in Oregon, actually, right now about there's 404

Jessamyn 23:58 in Colorado. Yeah, in California,

mathowie 24:03 is there a new beer tax

Cortex 24:03 or some they're trying to they're trying to raise it. It's kind of funny, there's there's not really a middle ground thing on the way it's being handled right now. Right now we have like the lowest beer tax in the nation are something that's like two bucks a barrel. And they're trying to raise it to like 50 bucks a barrel to generate a bunch of revenue, but that's like, it's $100 million for the state and it's also completely bending the Brewers over a barrel so to speak. And, yeah, basically, nobody's happy with the whole thing and I don't know if it's been resolved or if it's still sort of going on. If something's come up like every couple of years, I think for like years now since like the rates were last set in the 70s or something.

mathowie 24:41 Yeah, it's kind of I love this post, mostly because this sets up the ultimate road trip. Just drink and drive and hit all 50 baby and like by, by the, I mean, when you're drunk enough you're gonna drive to Kona brewery in on the Big Island of Hawaii. You can make it from California if you go faster.

Jessamyn 25:00 So the visualization map is really interesting too, because New Hampshire is one of the two top drinking states along with Nevada. And there's no microbrews in New Hampshire to speak of and like what is it about New Hampshire? Is that what living free is all about?

mathowie 25:17 Libertarians love their beer. Yeah, I don't know crazy what their beer like they're government independent as hell.

Jessamyn 25:26 So wait, what is this Josh that you

Cortex 25:27 this is this is just a post that I liked. It's also about alcohol. But this one's about whiskey and Scotch basically, it's kind of unassuming. It's, it's just, it's a good resource entirely.

Jessamyn 25:40 What

Cortex 25:41 tell us about its kind of beer advocate for for Scotch is all you know, it's the same sort of idea. It's a site are really three sort of sites that are a little family. That's just a bunch of sort of information about single malt scotch and other whiskies. And I really liked that stuff. So. So yeah, it's kind of like it's kind of microbrew except for way more expensive. So the Scotch you mean, it's kind of harder to you don't really go out and get a few rounds of single malt scotch, the same way you do with beers, but I think that's wrong because

Jessamyn 26:20 it would take you longer to assemble this kind of data set is what you're saying maybe

Cortex 26:24 yeah. Well, no, no, no if you really put your mind into it. And by mind I mean stomach by put drink, I don't know.

Jessamyn 26:40 From from a pure like, making a good post about history kind of stuff. catalyst or catalyst. Did this really great. Basque Arbor glyph post about people who carved things into trees that included a whole bunch of history links and a little short documentary and some other some other nifty stuff that if people haven't checked it out, they should. Well, we guys talk about your your beer and your Scotch. This is my tree hugger?

Cortex 27:09 Well, you know, I overlap between between

mathowie 27:15 northern Nevada. Wow. Out there,

Jessamyn 27:18 except a pocket of Basques carving trees and raising sheep and eating eels.

mathowie 27:24 Wow, do you know the Basques? I was just reading about the bass the other day, like the only unconquered original people in all of Western Europe, they sort of heard that.

Jessamyn 27:33 He wrote a really great book about the Basque culture for anybody who's really interested in learning more about that you scare.

mathowie 27:41 Yeah, I've always wondered about the, the, there's a strong Basque heritage in cycling from like all the guys who are good mountains. And I've always wondered why they have such a strong identity and like, it's a huge, I mean, people are rabid about being Basque. But now I understand. You've gone through hell and survived.

Jessamyn 28:06 Totally. And they have lots of x's in their language, which is. Josh, what is this that you?

Cortex 28:13 Oh, okay, so there was a post. This was this must been just a couple days after the last podcast, but a post just about sort of baseball, statistical analysis. And the main link was, it's a site called Beyond the box score. And this is one of those things where, you know, I've never really cared about baseball, and I don't keep track of it at all. You know, we don't have a major league team in Portland, we've got a we've got a minor league team. And I've been to a couple games, so I usually enjoy it in a hey, I'm drinking a bunch of beer. And this is a novel situation sort of way. But, but I really sort of gotten into baseball commentary and analysis in the last couple years. And it's really kind of weird because yes, I like the analysis even though I don't care about watching the game. It's really kind of a twisted poser II kind of position I found myself but I don't know

Jessamyn 29:02 I wouldn't statistics. Yeah,

Cortex 29:04 I don't know. I just, I love looking at how people manage to sort of take another angle on it. You know, I think it's partly I was exposed to a certain amount of sport chatter growing up and in some of my previous jobs that were sports fans and I don't have a problem with people wanting to sort of chatter about it, but I don't really take an interest in the sort of really blunt Oh, yeah, but he did a really good job at this game and you know how many hits he had this year? So a lot of that yeah, it just feels kind of like I don't care and I can't keep up and there's nothing MIDI to grab on to just throwing straight numbers back and forth. Well, this guy's batting average was whatever, but when people really take this and they say, Okay, I want to take this and put it against this and really analyze the hell out of this data and produce this specific sort observation I think that's really awesome. You know, when it when it starts to look like real pornography in this post, there's no actual pornography. No, it's called baseball statistics, pornography, but that's just a figurative Description. Hopefully, I'm not as bad, I guess was what I say.

mathowie 30:05 This is on sports blogs nation, which is like what rusty and corrosion and daily cost guide did as a joint venture. Yeah, and nerd stuff that statistics nerd dumb,

Cortex 30:22 whatever reminds me I really got turned on to some of the sort of baseball commentary when I started reading fire Joe Morgan, which I tripped across at some point. And it was just this wonderful site that was like it was mostly just sort of humorous, frisking of, of Bad Sports Journalism and a specific focus on on Joe Morgan's commentary. But they actually they shut down in the last year, they just sort of said, Hey, we've done as much as this as we really feel like we're gonna, so we're just gonna stop doing it. And that sort of broke my heart because I just sort of started getting into the site. So I think some of this stuff is rare. Like, it's, it's nice to get back to at least some of this sort of nerdiness even though that that site is gone. I mean, the site's not gone. But there's no new content. So

Jessamyn 31:05 I think a lot of people will see oh, sorry.

Cortex 31:09 A lot of people were sort of sad when that when fire Joe Morgan, called it quits. So anyway, yes, I did see this, this sorting,

Jessamyn 31:17 sorting algorithm animations, I didn't even again, didn't understand this post, very popular.

Cortex 31:25 Now, it's great. Well, sorting is a, it's a big, sort of fundamental problem, computer science, you, you end up with data. And you need to put it in order in a variety of contexts under a variety of constraints. And so there's different ways to do it. And whether or not you need to do it in a really like lean fashion, like you don't have much memory to work with, or you you've got a very large or very small set of data, are there spirits, like specific attributes of the data that change, you know, all these things can sort of drive how you decide to do it. And also the difficulty of implementing an algorithm. But that's more of a CS class problem than a real world problem, because in the real world. So someone has implemented this, and they've done a really good job, and you just use a library that already exists. But when you're learning to program, you sort of have to learn the fundamentals, just to understand what's going on. So everybody knows how to write a bubble sort. But a bubble sort sucks. And that's, that's one of the things that's really cool about this post is it sort of makes just a real simple visual, introduction to how some of these work at how much more efficient some why they're good and why, yeah, cool. And it's just kind of nice, I can look at if you don't care about any of the computer science too. But yeah, there's a bunch of there's a bunch of great links in there. And I ended up linking a PDF in the thread, to a white paper about a famous algorithm called the BOGO sword. From from, from the word bogus, and the word sword, it's BOGO MIPS, it's like the worst possible way to sort, or one of the worst possible ways to sort you, you can imagine in terms of take a deck of cards. And the way a bubble sort might work in a, in a deck of cards, is you go through the deck one card at a time, and you find the card that should be on top, and then you put it on top. And then you start from the second card down and go through the whole deck and find the next card and put it underneath that the second one. Yeah, it's stupid. You know, there's so many better ways to sort it. And that's a good way to think about sorting for people who don't worry about computer science is you know,

Jessamyn 33:34 if you don't worry about it at all? Well,

Cortex 33:37 so the way a BOGO sort of works is you take the deck and you look at it and go through it, they say is this an order? And if the answer is no, then you shuffle the deck. And then you look through it and say, Is this an order? And if the answer is no then shuffled. Your CPU

Jessamyn 33:49 was like really, really fast. That would actually be the best way to do it. Yeah, if

Cortex 33:53 there was no cost whatsoever in in some of these things, but you know, that's that's never going to be the case until we get to, you know, the future where quantum computing has changed the face of everything, maybe. But uh, but yeah, so there's this actual paper on a careful analysis of BOGO sword and a variety called Bozo sword that does something slightly different and it's just really awesome. That whole post was awesome. I love this shit.

mathowie 34:17 Nice. At my seventh birthday party, Bobo the clown showed up. He was just really confused.

Jessamyn 34:27 Liar. All right, Matt mentioned you've mentioned your two comments. Oh, yeah.

mathowie 34:31 My two favorite comments. I've been trying to remember good comments worth mentioning. Rayo homies. Awesome. mastery of the pre tag plus mocking the subject of the post which is like lame homework for kids, which is a very contentious thread. Whether or not kids should have tons of homework. But Ram is amazing fake school, one page essay that he had to write that is awesome.

Cortex 34:59 That's I totally missed it that's

mathowie 35:02 creative in that is creative, nice mocking the subject the same time showing a insane level of total mastery mastery over the arcane filtering we do on metal filter to strip out most HTML. I don't know how he did this. This must have been like four hours of work to preview preview. Yeah, he got he got the whole three hole punch paper in the right spot on his visualization. Yeah, freaking amazing. Terrific. There is a very small there was this controversial guy who claimed his logos were stolen, and he was being unfairly billed for his own logos. And then

Cortex 35:44 oh, god, yeah, that John angle. Oh, right. And it

mathowie 35:47 got all over Twitter. That's where I saw it, like, a few days before, like, all these people are starting like an Amazon failed type, you know, supporting this guy. And then there's a great comment, basically breaking it down, have someone on metadata going?

Cortex 35:59 My designs are in his portfolio. Yeah, that person is dying. They specifically to, to jump into the conversation about it.

mathowie 36:04 Yeah, that was great. And this is another great comment. These links are all the metadata,

Jessamyn 36:12 or that? And by we, I mean, I did

mathowie 36:15 the which one, the Go set one. Okay. Yeah. And then the there's, there's an awesome thread about like, the new levels of hacking that they're getting, you know, there's like spine shit from the 60s is now happening online, we just don't really ever think about it. And

Jessamyn 36:33 people are sending kind of phishing emails to like political organizations with like, in depth knowledge of what they're actually doing, trying to get more information on them and kind of, yeah, yeah, we're,

mathowie 36:46 we're used to like hacks and exploits being like blankets to 20 million users and who'd has unpatched ie that might fall for it. But this is like, hacking six people in an NGO or something in Washington, like you're, there's, you're literally a spy hacker trying to fool like one of six people sitting at a very specific computer that you're attacking, but you're using half social, it's like, I never thought this stuff happened. And then I mentioned a couple posts down. A friend who has a friend who works at the Pentagon, talking about how the Pentagon basically got rid of every USB port on their computers that aren't connected to the outside internet, because people started targeting their use on drives. Yeah, USB thumb drive,

Cortex 37:37 like you give out thumb drives at a conference or something. And people take them say, Oh, hey, it's free swag. And then maybe they take it to work, and they use it for, and it's got a payload on it. And, and they in their computer. And so they end up doing speaker net, again, without realizing what's going on. Or yeah, some sort of,

mathowie 37:57 I've heard people were actually writing virus exploits for IE, that would write to a connected thumb drive. So they're just trying to attack these specific people at the Pentagon that would later put that thumb drive into something. And yeah, you know, it's just, it's mind boggling.

Cortex 38:12 It's one of those things where I mean, you're right, with the idea that, you know, it's something that you sort of think doesn't happen, because it's so outlandish. Yeah, but I mean, it's sure it's going to happen, someone's going to try it, if the stakes are high enough to be worth the effort. The only problem is that people then hear about this. And then they get these delusions of sort of grandeur or, or paranoia, however you want to look at it were like, well, and it's happened, it's clearly going to happen to me, when I'm using my AOL to read my stories about unicorns, and you end up with a stupid sort of media narrative, half of it where people are like, worrying about, you know, 20 million people are gonna get targeted like this instead of, you know, some secret. Yeah.

mathowie 38:50 And if you're listening to us talk about, you're like, Oh, that would never happened to me. Like, I'm not my, you know, elderly father who falls for any sort of wacky attachment. But you read Jamie's story, it's like, it's insane. It's like, the email looks like it came from their boss. The attachment was a PDF, that looks that was something they read two days earlier. This is like insane levels of effort. People are doing to like socially hack you, but through technology.

Cortex 39:22 So there was a there was the whole Amazon thing this this last weekend. And it seems like it was really interesting to me watching this unfold, because I didn't really have a stake in it either way. And I knew people who at least had some sort of notion of what was going on a technical side. But the whole thing was presented as basically, hey, it looks like Amazon is suppressing gay literature. And yeah, and people were really upset about

Jessamyn 39:51 D and D ranking it and we don't understand what's going on. Try this search. And you'll notice these weird results that don't seem right. Yeah, exactly.

Cortex 39:58 And so people sort of started focusing on specifically this set of stuff that was affected. And it became a big argument in part of whether this is a correlation or causation thing, whether Amazon actually is specifically targeting these groups or whether something is happening that these groups are part of what's targeted. And whether was intentional, or whether it's a cock up and what the deal was, it seemed like it turned into eventually,

Jessamyn 40:24 because it's the internet, everybody is like, whatever their perspective exactly,

Cortex 40:29 well, it's a perfect it's, I thought of this because we mentioned the John angle post. And it's the same sort of phenomenon where it's really easy to throw a lot of momentum at the controversy, independent of what's actually going on. So I kind of get the impression what it comes down to is there actually was basically, someone made a really shitty call about deployment, right before

Jessamyn 40:51 dude in France, skipped it, like didn't understand, they thought, didn't understand like a word in English versus the word in French and made a judgment call based on a slight misapprehension of the difference between I don't remember if it was erotic and sex or something like that. And then oh, flipped, flipped a flag in the database before Easter weekend?

mathowie 41:16 And yeah, I was gonna say, I don't really have a satisfying answer after so many fake answers popped up. Like, what's the real? Is it the real answer a cataloging error by a French contractor? Is that the real answer? I think it's a

Jessamyn 41:31 French. I think it's a French employee. But yeah, I think the real answer is an ever with not the right kind of follow up. That took too long. Yeah. I think it's hypothesizing that it has to do with the different verbiage. But it was just definitely a mistake, the mistake was corrected. And it had nothing to do with anything except for the fact that Amazon does not rank I think porn ebooks, but they do rank erotica books and a lot of the GLBT books, which weren't necessarily erotica either had tags that seem to be affected by that, or categories that seem to be affected by that. And now it's fixed.

Cortex 42:16 And everybody's happy. So, so as long as we're talking about huge arguments about what happened on the internet, and people angry about stuff, the whole dig bar thing, there was a post on the 10th. About

Jessamyn 42:33 Nothing about this, nothing. Tell me what Oh, yeah. Thank God. Do you do?

mathowie 42:41 Oh, yeah, I'll do it. So dig, dig, introduce a way to make Digg, easier to use for not just their users, but everyone. And they introduced a framed bar over every link, every link on Digg became a dig short URL. And it had a frame at the top, it shows you how many people have delegate and you can jump to the

Jessamyn 43:05 like the way it does when you click on a link that somebody puts on Facebook. Yeah. So yeah,

Cortex 43:09 same general idea.

mathowie 43:11 And then if you went to look at the comments, there's also a nice big 300 by 250 ad. And then like, it comes out and they're like, What, wait, what is this 1997 And like a day later, dig as opposed to going? Our dig bar is a fantastic success. Oh my god, we got 30% more traffic, we've got Oh, so we're making some money on ads is like everyone's like, everyone's like, we hate you. It's like their CFO basically wrote a post about how great it was how much money it made them. And it's like, with no concern for the user. And like, you know, half a Diggs population is 15 years old and doesn't remember, the other half is like, this is like framing content from 1998. And if you remove the frame, and you click three levels down, it goes back, you know, it's like, all the original problems with framing. Yeah, it will come back.

Cortex 43:59 It was just it was really, it was really crappy handle, it's a sort of thing where the way they actually roll it out. It's hard to look at that and believe that people familiar with the internet and the things that are good and bad about it actually looked at this and said, you know, this is this is this is serving the internet rather than Wow, this is a great way to further monetize Digg and you know, if you're, if you're just really going to be nothing, but for the bucks, that's cool, you can be a douchebag like that, but you know, at least be honest about it. But uh, but they have walked it back like in the ensuing days. Like a couple days ago, they they kind of said hey, so despite the fact that the big bar is totally awesome and nobody really had a problem with it. We're gonna make some changes anyways, so I'll tell you what, here's

Jessamyn 44:42 for logged in users and yeah, yeah, make

Cortex 44:45 me read ahead. Yeah, just just making it only for login by default is a huge huge improvement because it means it's not

Jessamyn 44:54 totally up to everybody else who Yeah, assaulting the entire inner Yeah,

Cortex 44:57 if you want to if you want to do shitty thinks your own user base, you know, go fucking crazy, but I don't use Digg and I don't want to have to deal with Digg just because someone links something through it. So, so yeah, they seem to have improved it a lot. And as far as how they're handling it if they'd launched it the way it is right now, I think they would have avoided all of this grief. Yeah, but, but they didn't. So Good job, guys. That was neat.

Jessamyn 45:20 I just wanted to mention the really long fun, the 137 Uncomfortable plot summaries proposed by Wendell, which at this writing has 422 comments. It's just basically, I mean, a lot of people kind of got it wrong. In fact, the website kind of got it wrong, but it's like a movie that if you were summarizing the plot from a different perspective. So like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which maybe is one of those things that only old people watch. You know, instead of it being like, you know, this wacky guy and his wacky high jinks, you could summarize it as amoral narcissist makes World Dance for his amusement. Lord of the Rings midget destroys stolen property. Harry Potter celebrity jock thinks rules don't apply to him is right. And it's fun because the website whatever, it's kind of a throwaway, but it gets kind of the brains of metta filter, making lots of funny jokes together. So I enjoyed it. That is all

Cortex 46:19 it was funny. I liked it too.

mathowie 46:21 It was a little cynical the original post I thought the follow up comments are awesome but the original post is like half of them are like the most cynical reading possible of a plot.

Cortex 46:31 It has its own charm. I really like the idea of that even though I like some of the slightly less Black takes that the people took on it to when they sort of started just looking for idiosyncratic way to describe it rather than necessarily like the least charitable possible one.

mathowie 46:47 Right. Passionate that Christ shows up. Where did it go unemployed carpenter a lot of a lot of law.

Cortex 46:57 And after Blanco jumped in with a Glengarry Glen Ross joke which is an easy way to make me smile but description is failing business reduces office expenses by limiting coffee consumption.

mathowie 47:11 Passionate Christ unemployed carpenter ironically dies and bizarre carpentry

Jessamyn 47:19 just in time for Easter.

mathowie 47:22 And just in time for summer movie season. Exactly. So for Twitter.

Cortex 47:30 Yeah, no, yeah, he's going around a lot on Twitter. I saw that. Just flying around after after it started hitting the blogs, the blog

Jessamyn 47:40 filter because I gotta go pick up my dinner at the high school in half an hour.

mathowie 47:44 All right. That makes sense. That sentence.

Jessamyn 47:48 There's a culinary arts class and they put together a dinner that you can get like Friday after work and like take it home. Oh, cool. You can buy it from the culinary arts kids.

mathowie 47:58 Do you trust 15 year olds touching your food?

Jessamyn 48:03 cleaner than the people at the restaurant because they've got a teacher watching their ass. Oh true.

Unknown Speaker 48:09 So as Metafilter

Jessamyn 48:11 I really should I do with 240 porn magazines?

Cortex 48:14 Oh, wow, that was a pretty good question.

mathowie 48:17 It sounds like a good Saturday

Jessamyn 48:23 the pile the funniest thing about that thread, which is really kind of you know, as amusing as you think is that user porn in the woods. Basically has the the winning comment of AskMe Metafilter which is leave them in the woods for some kids.

Cortex 48:39 We we let people get away with some some flexibility with this thread. Oh yeah, it is it's just it's it's

mathowie 48:49 perfect. To that is the awesome build up for a joke.

Jessamyn 48:53 Like they were they became a member after the porn in the woods through AskMe edit filters right? Did you ever find porn in the woods and they've been waiting so I'm sorry Josh, what were you What were you

Cortex 49:07 say? I think I think this is an example of us showing a little bit of flexibility with a guidelines for the sake of the nature of this read.

Jessamyn 49:14 No, no, no that bit the guideline was adhered to the guide

Cortex 49:20 and against the guidelines I just say I think it's it's an example of a thread that's a little bit on the funnier side of points then people would necessarily imagine it is when they're like oh, Ash me so this area is bought out that's you know, and then people call me on the phone and sound just like that.

mathowie 49:35 Right they call he's calling the medical care helpline Exactly.

Jessamyn 49:40 To somebody said keep them in occasionally jerk off to them, which was the other popular answer was like, It's great because it's also a perfectly acceptable answer.

mathowie 49:49 Yep. Oh, I love this other one, the buffoonish accent

Cortex 49:55 Yeah, it's I mean, it's not even a long thread or anything but it's it's It's genuine asked me answer getting for one of those things that just occurs to you you know where does where does this accent that everybody does have sort of like the you know confident jock business guy Whatever dude with a square chin you know Zapp Brannigan from Futurama, Mr. PETERMAN from Seinfeld. Were a couple of examples and yeah, basically comes down to probably Beverly Hills. Well, yeah, but as far as like the recent popularity, probably Phil Hartman and God the other guy. I think it's mentioned in the thread. But basically a couple guys who really were doing that at the time probably made it really popular. Henceforth, but yeah, it goes back. Probably decades to the material. They got that from, from like, radio stuff,

Jessamyn 50:50 newsreels. Yeah. Oh, yeah,

mathowie 50:53 the newsreels definitely sound like Lauren, Yura Deborah. Yeah, this someone linked to the Sam Spade like CD for sale from like, 1946 radio drama. And if you listen to this, take the time to listen to it, I guess. So I'll splice in a cut here. The advertisements are fucking awesome. Like, they're just like, they're just bizarro world. It's 1946

Unknown Speaker 51:21 by wild rose cream oil hair tonic, the non alcoholic hair tonic that contains lanolin wild road cream oil, again and again. The choice of men who put good grooming first.

Jessamyn 51:33 Well, well that's the stuff that Prairie Home Companion is kind of making. Like yeah, fine, sort of are

mathowie 51:40 written to Yeah, I've heard so many jokes for the last few years, especially with steampunk instead of people being purposely anachronistic and stuff but like to hear the source material just it's the funniest shit in the world. Because it sounds like someone joking like haha, I'm gonna be old timey and you're like, Oh my God, the truth.

Jessamyn 51:58 I'm really really trying to

mathowie 52:01 do the truth is so much funnier and more bizarro and esoteric about you know, whatever moustache wax for the man on the move. Man so good. Let me see what was my favorite? Oh, I guess our big humongous traffic draw the metal filter this month was The I used to do Yeah, I used to do blank. But now I do blank on the Internet for free. So fill in those two blanks for me. Like a lot of people like I used to rent movies. I used to go to the movies a lot. Now I just use YouTube on the Internet for free to watch shows

Jessamyn 52:36 or I used to pay for quicken and now I use Yeah, mint or something. Yeah. And it's just like go to people's houses. But now I use Dropbox. Yeah, it's

mathowie 52:45 like 140 useful like Internet things that are save you time money.

Jessamyn 52:51 It's picked up by life hacker. Yeah. Even originally linked to it.

mathowie 52:57 Yeah. Yeah, that was brilliant.

Jessamyn 53:02 I also enjoyed this post about cootie catchers. Why Teemo things or whatever the heck you call them. You know, you fold them out of paper. Maybe it's

Cortex 53:13 totally broken. But there were girls at my school when I was growing up. So I

Jessamyn 53:18 knew girls.

Cortex 53:21 Girls, I don't think any guy in the school knew how to fold one. But yeah.

Jessamyn 53:26 You had sisters? You just had a brother, right? Yeah.

mathowie 53:30 But I had girls asked me one question and then give me a really debilitating sort of take on the rest of my life. Like green, you're a fucking loser. I'll never melt anything. Like I'm paraphrasing.

Cortex 53:51 That's gonna have a workload.

Jessamyn 53:54 That was one of those things where everybody chimes in with what they call them and what region they were from. And it was just kind of a neat little, you know, a neat little a neat little thread.

Cortex 54:02 Let's see. I'm looking through the thread. And people are mentioning mash. Like, that got conflated with you somehow, but mash was a totally separate thing in my experience. Oh, well, you wrote like, ma sh Yeah, and you know, three places you want to live three people you want to marry three cars, you want to drive whatever the fuck? And yeah, so you would go around and just like numerically isolate things based on the number you pick at the beginning and end up with your fate that way. And I was really confused. I remember I had this conversation with I don't know if it's on Metafilter if I was mostly just talking with like Melissa Mae, I feel like I was talking to you about this to Jasmine but mash notes. I had never heard of the notion of, of mash notes or mashing on someone as a slang. And I thought people were talking about the game mash and I thought that was so weird. That was such a cultural standby. And then I found out I was just completely wrong. You didn't read enough Judy Blume? Yeah, apparently, I missed out on that. That that vein of of youth literature

Jessamyn 55:00 We're all gonna go move to Detroit and help user Michael Roberts with his $8,000 mansion.

mathowie 55:09 There had been posts on all kinds of blogs and meta filter about how the economy's in really bad shape, especially in the Rust Belt of Michigan, to Ohio to Pennsylvania and that

Jessamyn 55:20 people have been asking, like, why shouldn't I buy a house in Detroit?

mathowie 55:24 Yeah, and there have been people have been saying, like, Detroit's going to turn in this art community where people you can buy a fucking mansion for $8,000 and go nuts and like, make it a huge art studio. And there's, they're like, photographers from Germany, like high minded concept pieces, they're gonna buy whole blocks and go crazy. So everyone's fantasizes about, like, what do you do like Is that for real? I mean, there's stories of houses selling for $1 literally sold for $1. So someone from medical care just said, Fuck it. I'm gonna actually do that. And he bought a house for $8,000 in

Jessamyn 55:58 Puerto Rico, and he's coming back to the States. Yeah, and yeah,

mathowie 56:03 so you go through this post it's like okay, now what I actually did it I actually own it I actually have the title to it. And this is pretty good like a great back and forth people have done some renovations and they're just like, here's a punch list of everything you need to look for termites attic insulation, like yada yada yada there's like 200 things like always wear a respirator while you're doing the work and like here's the best respirators and here's where your dogs

Jessamyn 56:27 to read I'm going to come with you while you do this. Yeah,

mathowie 56:32 it turned into like this you know 100 comment how to on how to basically renovate a major project like this how to approach it step by step by step and it's like you know, I think every nerd fantasy to like, you know, buy up some crazy thing you might have imagined from like the movie clue or Goonies or something, you know, some humongous old mansion, he kind of

Jessamyn 56:53 thing I felt that way until I bought a barn right now I don't feel that way anymore. Yeah, the

mathowie 57:00 romance is gone, right? Like you have a 40

Jessamyn 57:02 I am so happy to live in my little apartment. And not the house on the side of the highway with 40 acres in northern Vermont, though there's other mefites who are moving in there this week. So Lord, we Lord love them.

mathowie 57:14 You know, I found that every time I talk to someone, every I think every homeowner Josh can probably chime in with like, everyone owns a standalone house kind of fantasizes about having acres like maybe two acres or five acres or 10 acres of just goofing around space until you meet someone that's like oh yeah, three fucking acres of lawn it was the stupidest fucking thing I ever did it's a fucking waste you know my energy and water bills were and I had a fucking ride a mower for like two hours tax

Jessamyn 57:41 property text. Yeah, totally is killer. Like, like, do you really want to pay with it? Yeah, you just look at it and go walk around it and hope that somebody doesn't step in a hole and break their ankle.

mathowie 57:52 But everyone fantasizes everyone in the small house fantasize about having acreage and then you meet someone they're like, No, it's stupid.

Cortex 57:59 I have to say I specifically not a big lawn was on my my list when we were figuring out what we did and didn't want the house and one of my things was I don't want a whole bunch of lawn because I'm gonna mow it and I don't really like mowing and what the fuck are we gonna do with all that extra grass? You know, so we've got we've got like a we've got a decent little backyard and and Secretary it's turning it into we've got a garden patch that she's working on, turn it in just like you know, something like 50 square feet of the backyard and the rest is just grass and there's our standalone garage shed next to it in the driveway that runs all the way along the house. And yeah, it's great. It's like it's enough lawn that we've got some grass we can hang out and walk around in but not a crazy amount.

Jessamyn 58:45 And the grass is six feet tall and moose walk through it but I don't play with it. And I think you know you I wish there was some way you could like timeshare your backyard, right so that I could go like, let other people go hang out in my like 40 acres and pretend it belongs to them for a week and all they'd have to do is like mow the lawn you know, which is sort of the deal I have now. But yeah, there's definitely that feeling people that share land like that.

mathowie 59:12 Exercise thing Have you ever heard of that? People? It's sheep dogs that live in cities, they like drive out to the country and let their dog Chase sheep. Like they pay to do this.

Jessamyn 59:22 That's awesome.

mathowie 59:24 Yeah, you'd have to have sheep and be able to provide them like you just open the gate go make your dogs run after sheep. Like that's something sort of weird and like timesharing property. Also psycho dog owners that pay $100 to do this? Yeah.

Jessamyn 59:40 Hey, maybe I should start talking to them. You say they pay money. Yeah, I don't know the sheep but I've got friends with sheep. They've got llamas though.

mathowie 59:49 There is there is a that also touches on like all this like urban homesteading stuff. There's like these groups that will garden for you. They'll come to your house. If you have space for like some raised beds, will come to your house help you plant gardens and then periodically check in, you know, make sure watering is going fertilizing is working. Then actually pick the bounty out of your backyard. And like leave your box and take the other half, you know to sell at farmer's markets and stuff. There's like these volunteer organizations that do like all the backyard gardening for you. I can't, I can't remember what they're called. But that's also something maybe not for Super rural Vermont, asked me taught me that there's actually Trojan viruses for the Mac, I had no idea. People actually fall for, like, install updates to flash and it's like, it actually breaks your DNS and send you to gambling sites. It's horrible, pretty amateur shit, but like, wow, that's a possibility.

Jessamyn 1:00:54 I have no idea. Josh. Did you just link to this other than Barbie horse adventures? Oh, I

mathowie 1:00:59 did. That was a pretty cool, like, give me

Jessamyn 1:01:02 joy. I enjoyed this post to actually,

mathowie 1:01:05 because it's exactly how I think about video games. I can't stand first person shooter playing it for people who okay. Yeah, it's like we're some video games like with unique gameplay elements.

Jessamyn 1:01:15 Just like you have to kill it on coming zombie horde.

mathowie 1:01:19 Yeah, something between, you know, the Doom sort of first person shooting people in the face and something you do but not so far that's like missed, or you know, even or

Jessamyn 1:01:29 World War. Confusing. You have to learn a whole world before you can have any fun. Or you had to walk

mathowie 1:01:34 over the entire planet to gather keys or a gold or something. Yeah, like what's in between. It's just kind of cool and fun. So there's lots of fun games explained in there and why they're great.

Cortex 1:01:44 Yeah, no, I totally missed this. But I'm glad to see a couple of people mentioned shadow the Colossus and Ico which was the game that came before it because those were those remain in my eyes a couple of the the best pieces of art as video game that's that has happened. Ico was this wonderful title for the PlayStation two fairly early in when it came out. It was a game that I go Ico and you played a you played a young boy with horns who got I think sort of, I don't remember the exact way they conveyed the plot, partly because it wasn't done very verbally, it was mostly just visual. But you're a young boy with horns that gets like locked up in a sarcophagus in some ancient temple, as I guess some sort of sacrifice, probably because of your horns. And but then there's like an earthquake. And so you get out of your sarcophagus instead of presumably dying in there. And then you wander around the castle and fairly early on, you find this girl in a cage sort of covered in black goo. And it's kind of actually puzzly, you do some fighting mostly with a stick you find. But most of its sort of exploration and puzzle stuff. And so you've managed to get this girl in a cage and then you lead her around and the whole game, you get her in a cage or out of a cage, you get her out of a cage that you find her in initially. And then you just try and find your way out of this castle. And it's it's like 10 or 20 hours of basically wordless gameplay, the only words you really hear is when you occasionally call out to her in some vague non language. And you have to lead around by the hand most of the time he or she seems sort of Shell sock, or just not super motivated. So you're dragging around by the hand, but sometimes you have to let go over to go do something. And the game becomes about all of these puzzles and sort of navigating this giant epic castle and getting this girl safely out of it. It's just, it was just a really wonderful piece of work because it was so so sort of like artistically minded it was it was done with such a strong aesthetic. There was no sort of macho gameplay aspects to it, it was just your kid leading another little kid around this castle for no clear reason and just trying to find your way home. And it was just it was a wonderful piece of work. And then shadow, the Colossus came out years later, same company, same sort of feel, but not the same story or anything. And once again, you've got a an older guy this time, like, you know, late adolescent, probably, and this girl who he brings to this mysterious castle, and puts on an altar and presumably is trying to heal her or something. And so you end up riding around on your horse, and it's just you and your horse, and again, totally nonverbal, except for some occasional words from some disembodied voice in the temple giving you general instructions as a rider on your horse on this gigantic sort of sweeping awesome landscape. And every once awhile you find a colossus, and you fight it, and the classes are giant, and the boss fights with him, you're climbing all over them and sort of navigating the classes itself trying to find a weak point that you can attack with your sword. And it's just it's so minimal, but it's so frickin like beautiful as the game goes. It's it's really awesome. So I'm glad people mentioned that in the thread. No other people seem to have gotten there first, but To

mathowie 1:05:01 a lot of explanations of shadow classes, people mentioned Fallout a lot isn't that a shoot people in the face game?

Cortex 1:05:08 It's a turn based shoot people

Jessamyn 1:05:10 love to talk to people it's a post apocalyptic thing.

Cortex 1:05:13 Yeah, yeah the combat in Fallout and Fallout two was it was part of the gameplay but you know, there was so much story you know, it's fighting to do some

Jessamyn 1:05:21 time feelings. Yeah,

mathowie 1:05:23 every time I see a screenshot or the cover of the box, it's just like an alien face and I'm like, Oh, this is the thing I'm shooting people in the face like yeah,

Cortex 1:05:30 I've done well and then that's when Fallout three came out recently and that one's a little bit more shoot people in the face compared to the previous two which is one of the problems with it but still it's pretty good

mathowie 1:05:41 is that about it for this podcast?

Jessamyn 1:05:45 It's it for me I'm gonna go get my Mexican dinner I will upload this this afternoon

mathowie 1:05:50 Mexican

Jessamyn 1:05:55 you take it you can get around here you know

mathowie 1:06:02 progresses to the zombie bought army from

Jessamyn 1:06:06 the future from the future from the future from the future

mathowie 1:06:19 too many songs in the filter

progress of the bot army

Jessamyn 1:06:44 the future don't worry you're not part of the zombie bot army people like I bet you identify with the toad and you think frog is intrusive and rude.

mathowie 1:06:55 Having snacks all night at a bar and a zombie army from the future to 45 year old honey for championship actual?

to 45 year old man drinking having snacks all night at a bar I want a total dork you put too many songs on Is there anything to talk about and then so?

literally had to like stay up for two days where we can having snacks all night at a bar.

Jessamyn 1:09:41 Don't worry, you're not part of the zombie bot army people are like