Podcast 51 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 51: "Human Centipede" (2010-05-05).

Pronoiac set up a Fanscribed page, and this transcript came from there.

Transcript

jingle: (theme music)

mathowie: Okay, it's podcast 51. Whoo!

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: This is amazing.

mathowie: Hey. I've been meaning to ask you, Josh. Did you go to that crazy meetup, at that sad, shitty amusement park, down by Eugene?

cortex: No, I ended up not making it out to that. It's been re-scheduled, in fact. They just had a quiet little, normal meetup -

mathowie: Ohh.

cortex: --because like half the people who were planning on going ended up having other obligations.

mathowie: Yeah, it's pretty far.

cortex: So that'll be sometime this month or next month. I don't know what's going to happen.

mathowie: Alright. Cool.

cortex: So yeah, no news. I did go see the Blazers, though.

mathowie: I did go to New York.

jessamyn: How was the Portland meetup that I didn't go to?

cortex: It was good. It was a good time. It was very pleasant.

jessamyn: Nuts. Nuts.

mathowie: You didn't go to a Portland meetup when you were in Portland?

jessamyn: I wasn't in Portland!

mathowie: Oh.

jessamyn: Remember, my plane got hit by lightning?

mathowie: Oh, shit, that's right! First volcanoes, then lightning.

jessamyn: Yeah. So I was totally bummed. No, the lightning was before the volcanoes.

mathowie: (chuckles) I know. I was conflating the two. Two's a trend!

jessamyn: (sighs)

mathowie: Let me see. I just came back from New York, and I talked about Metafilter to the Gel audience.

jessamyn: How did that go? Did you put your slides online anyway? I heard you were good.

mathowie: No, I didn't put them online. There was... eh, maybe 10% of the room had ever heard of Metafilter, I think?

cortex: (chuckles quietly)

mathowie: It didn't seem like a lot of hands went up. I met four or five different members, so that was fun,

and a lot of people, unfortunately, Mark made a pitch after it, like, "Everyone here should go sign up!" and I was like, "Nooo! I just gave a talk!"

cortex and jessamyn: (laugh)

mathowie: I just gave a talk saying why we turn so many people away, because we like it to be manageable! So so far.

cortex: I like how that just doesn't... that never, no one ever really grasps that we are not trying to find some way to get a lot more people to sign up.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: It's, I guess, so fucking counterintuitive that...

jessamyn: Right. It's just not capitalist.

mathowie: Yeah, and then, so, I've gotten a few e-mails from people who are like, "Really excited! Just signed up!", and some people would tell me in the halls, like, "I'm going to sign up as soon as I get back to my house," and I was like, "Dude, you know there's like a week waiting period where you're not allowed to do anything? Try not to get mad."

jessamyn and cortex: (laugh)

mathowie: But the talk went well, the talk went awesome! I basically told seven or eight stories from Metafilter, because I couldn't figure out anything else to do, but--

jessamyn: Well, that's kind of what Mark said, right?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: He was like, "figure out the thing you think is awesome about this and tell people about it."

mathowie: And it sort of broke down to, "here's an awesome thread, I'll just tell the story of that thread in like two minutes, and I'll tell the story of this thread," and I used them to illustrate points, so there was like all these things... I had no idea it would be so funny, like, people were just rolling like five or six times unexpectedly. I think I had one spot where I was like, oh, that's kind of a funny turn of phrase and people will probably laugh at that. So I would be a shitty comedian, because I had no idea that people would just be rolling over stuff--

jessamyn: Or a great comedian, because you just, you know, you've just got whatever it is. (laughs)

mathowie: No, I have a shitty delivery, because I don't know when to pause. Like, what, why are you laughing? I have the rest of the thing!

jessamyn and cortex: (laugh)

jessamyn: Are you laughing at me? (laughs)

mathowie: And then there were two points where people choked up, and I sort of choked up. That was weird. I had no idea that would happen. Oh, man.

cortex: Well, it's good to do that, because you can make better contact with the ball.

jessamyn: Oh, come on, which was your choke-up thread?

mathowie: I was telling the grandpa fled the Nazis phone book story.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: And like, I mean, I didn't want to bring up Nazis at a fun, creative event, but you know?

jessamyn: Well, and I love how you've said that, you've turned it into a six-word thing that evokes no emotion whatsoever.

mathowie: (laughs) I know! I--

jessamyn: Grandpa Nazi phone book, you know? (laughs)

mathowie: Like, the guy who wants to know where his grandpa fled from Nazis going to Europe, and then someone who worked at the Holocaust Museum got him a phone book and the documents from his grandpa, and then I finalized it with the photo of the guy standing in front of the building, and it was like, as soon as I said that, I started to lose it. It was weird.

But [??] right into, "Does Roadrunner say 'meep meep' or 'beep beep'?" and everyone fucking roared. It was great.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Like it just went from pure sadness to joy. It was great.

jessamyn: That's so great! I'm glad it really, I'm glad it really went terrific.

mathowie: Oh, and I mentioned bondcliff's Death Star Halloween costume.

jessamyn: Totally awesome.

mathowie: And people just cheered so much for, I played the video of the Death Star costume working with the sound, because he rigged a greeting card

to play the theme inside it, it was awesome.

jessamyn: I remember.

mathowie: And other people referenced it in their talks, like, "Someday I'd like to get a Death Star costume."

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Dude, you should drop bondcliff a note, because he's just this nerdy Massachusetts suburban dad.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And he's a hero on Metafilter, and I think he has no sense of how awesome he is.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Because I know him a little bit, and I just think he's awesome, but he's always like, "Euh, euh, whatever."

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

jessamyn: So you should tell him that you mentioned this in front of a room of a whole bunch of thrilled people who were thrilled.

mathowie: People who loved it. And the best part is, like, when you read the thread, it's like, he needed help building the costume, but then he's like, "Oh, and then I grabbed a spare doorbell, and I ripped open a greeting card with electronic music, and I rigged those together so you could have push-button music inside the costume," I was like, oh my God, that's awesome.

jessamyn: Right. Right! That's so great. I'm glad you got to share that with a wider audience.

mathowie: Yeah, and you know what my wacky idea was today? Like--

jessamyn: Uh-oh. Uh-oh.

cortex and jessamyn: (laugh)

cortex: Brace yourselves!

mathowie: Ha, exactly. It's going to be something big! And stupid! And ill-conceived!

jessamyn: We'll call it TravelFilter!

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: No, no, it's not that bad.

mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)

mathowie: No, you know, people have approached me like every year for the last ten years going "You should make a movie about Metafilter," and I'm always like, "That's stupid, people clacking on keyboards"--

jessamyn: I thought Josh was making a movie about Metafilter.

mathowie: Oh, yeah, Seeing Metafilter.

cortex: I've been making a series of brief things, yeah.

jessamyn: Is two a series?

mathowie: Brief trysts with Metafilter. It's a trend!

cortex: I've made more than two. I've made like four or five.

mathowie: (laughs) My idea was, my seven or eight great stories--

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: Are you still here?

mathowie: Yes, exactly.

jessamyn: (laughs) Matt who?

mathowie: [??] the tangent vote is gone.

cortex: No, please continue.

mathowie: You know, I told seven or eight good stories, and I was like, "I could have recorded five minutes of bondcliff, me asking him to describe the costume and people's reactions," that would be like great little videos.

jessamyn: We'll call it Metafilter TV.

mathowie: Exactly.

jessamyn: I think it's a great idea!

mathowie: Yeah, I just need to--yeah. That would be a documentary I would watch, something with awesome stories from some thing, not really like--

jessamyn: Well, and especially with a thread that kind of goes through them all, even though it's a bunch of different people doing awesome stuff but there's this unifying theme thing, even if it's a dopey funny-colored website. I think it's a great idea.

mathowie: Yeah. Yeah, so that's in my 'someday' pile.

jessamyn: Love it.

mathowie: Whoo. Anything else in the Metafilter-related news lately? (chuckles)

jessamyn: Euhh. Euhhhh...

mathowie: Any good meetups? Anything?

cortex: I just had a stimulating conversation with a guy who lurks at MeFi [ˈmɛfaɪ] but is mostly a Redditor last night.

mathowie: Auh.

cortex: And I think that may have led to him becoming more actively MeFi-curious [ˈmɛfaɪ ˈkjʊərɪəs], so.

mathowie: Is that a word? Redditor?

jessamyn: MeFi [ˈmɛfaɪ]?

cortex: Yeah. MeFi. [ˈmɛfaɪ] Shut up!

mathowie: Eh, wow, that's... I thought 'blogger' was bad.

jessamyn and cortex: (chuckle)

jessamyn: I promised I wouldn't make fun of you in this podcast.

mathowie: I know.

jessamyn: That's my promise to myself.

mathowie: Redditor. Eugh.

jessamyn: (chuckles)

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: You know, Adam Savage is a bigger Farker, and I try to bring him back to the intelligent space of Metafilter, but he's more of a Redditor, I guess, now.

cortex: Yeah, what do you do.

jessamyn: Aww. Aww.

mathowie: Sometimes you lose some. Should we jump into Jobs and stuff?

jessamyn: Jobs is the only part of the site I didn't look at, so why don't you boys jump into Jobs? But I have lots of them from the other parts of the site.

mathowie: There are almost no Jobs! Have you seen the economy? It's horrible out there.

jessamyn: (chuckles)

cortex: Yeah, it's pretty dry there.

mathowie: There's only one a week, maybe, there's one awesome one, I know who this is and it doesn't say what the company is but it's a really cool company, I hate to be coy, but there's a job making like twenty bucks an hour being some office assistant tech writer in the Bay Area that's with an awesome cool company, fun people.

jessamyn: Sweet!

mathowie: Everyone should go apply for it, if you're jobless in that area.

jessamyn: Who's the user who posted it?

mathowie: esperluette [ˈɛsˌpɝˌlʊt]... eugh, I don't know, looks French. No, let me see...

cortex and jessamyn: (laugh)

jessamyn: You are the worst.

mathowie: How do I pronounce that?!

jessamyn: Just copy and paste it!

mathowie: esperluette [ˈɛspɝˌlʊɛtɛ]? (chuckles) I don't know.

jessamyn: Paste the link.

mathowie: Oh! I already did. It's in Skype. Where the hell are you?

jessamyn: Oh, I'm in the other Skype.

mathowie: Yeah, you're supposed to be in Skype.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: esperluette [ˈɛspeʁˌlyɛt].

Oh, I saw this Jobs post.

mathowie: That's dodgy but fun.

cortex: Yeah, this is the other, this just went up, what, like yesterday? Yeah, "ship me small pieces of wood," which is, that's kinda, that's pushing it for what Jobs is really for.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: But I don't know, I kind of like the idea of someone getting pieces of wood shipped to them, so I want them to run with it.

mathowie: It's kinda cool!

jessamyn: Right. We liked the idea, so here...

mathowie: I thought it'd be woodblock100, but somewhere in Brooklyn.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Your thing got to stay. He doesn't need small pieces of wood! He has wood.

cortex: He's rich in wood.

mathowie: [??] from Japan.

jessamyn: So to speak.

cortex: He's got a vault full of wood, like Scrooge McDuck, he goes swimming in.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Has an assistant pull out all the splinters.

mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)

mathowie: Ouch.

sfx: (Music: Hotel California (cover) by cortex)

mathowie: Best Projects ever?

cortex: Oh, man. [??]

jessamyn: P = NP Proof/Conjecture.

mathowie: Oh, for real?

cortex: I was so debating whether or not we should even mention that.

mathowie: I thought that was a fight that we weren't allowed to... oh.

cortex: It's... you know... (chuckles)

jessamyn: Well, here's the thing. I don't understand what P = NP means--

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Is that the classic--?

jessamyn: --and I'm sort of fascinated by the fact that there's this huge fight that I can't even begin to understand.

cortex: You know, and it's--

mathowie: Isn't that the classic computer science unanswerable question or something?

jessamyn: Yes!

cortex: Yeah, that's one of the great unanswered questions of complexity theory.

jessamyn: It's like perpetual motion, functionally, right?

cortex: Well--

mathowie: As soon as I saw the Project go up, some guy's like, "I solved it!" and I was like "Oh, this will be awesome, nerd. Nerd fight."

cortex: Yeah. It's not like perpetual motion. I mean, the--

mathowie: It is.

mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)

cortex: --in principle, P = NP... well, I mean, the question itself isn't perpetual motion. But it is, yeah, the approaches are sort of classically, it's one of those things that people come up with flawed solutions to. Same thing with Fermat's Last Theorem, and so on.

mathowie: But it's the math nerd equivalent of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

If you just walk into a room at MIT and just go "I solved P = NP!" everyone will just mob you and beat the shit out of you and say you're bullshit.

cortex and jessamyn: (chuckle)

jessamyn: Is that true? Is that--?

cortex: Kinda, yeah.

mathowie: (chuckle) Yeah.

cortex: It's a big topic.

mathowie: So the best story ever--

jessamyn: I've just never seen anything get 66 comments in Projects in my life with zero votes.

mathowie: Yeah. I know, not a single person liked it. (laughs)

cortex: I know. Yeah, it's a stark outlier. And it's interesting.

jessamyn: So I'm sorry if it's picking a scab, but I just felt like I needed to mention it because it's so weird.

mathowie: The best P = NP story ever is from Joey the accordion guy in Toronto, what's his, deVilla?

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: Have you ever heard his story of the fraud girlfriend? He meets some girl--

jessamyn: Yeah! What does that have to do with P = NP?

mathowie: Get this!

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: He meets the girl, she's the girl of his dreams, she's like, "Oh, I know PHP, I work at this awesome start-up, you're hot, yeah, we should date!" And it's going good for a month or two, and then someone tips him off, like,

"Dude, she's a serial lier and bullshitter," and he's like, "No, there's no way!", and he confronted her, and she was like, I mean, he had like five or six pieces of evidence, like, "You weren't at that thing! I called the company, you hadn't worked there!" And everything she had an excuse. Like, "I'm a freelancer! They're not allowed to say, because I'm not on a top-secret project."

jessamyn: (chuckles)

mathowie: She had an out for all of them. And then he said, I thought of a Columbo trick from the TV show, where you say something that's bullshit to get the person to reveal their

bullshit cards."

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: And he goes, "Oh, well, you said you went to McGill, right? And you studied with famous blah?" And she goes, "Yes." And he's like, "Do you remember the lecture about when we solved P = NP?" And she goes, "Yeah, I remember that lecture!" (chuckles) And then he goes, "A-ha!"

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: (chuckling) Like, that was it. And then he dumps her and yeah.

cortex: Well, that is a pretty good use of P = NP in a layman context, so.

mathowie: Plus '70s crime drama.

jessamyn: Yes.

It was very dramatic.

mathowie: I do remember... and I just never forgot that there's no such thing as P = NP after that.

jessamyn: Right. I remember that there's no such thing, but also that many people like to think there is, like the car that runs on water.

mathowie: Yeah. Or the guy that doesn't eat.

cortex: (chuckles) Jesus.

jessamyn: The guy that doesn't eat, that's a favorite one. Breatharians.

mathowie: Yeah, that just came up on--(laughs)

cortex: Art stuff, there's this nice "Every day, I draw on a 3x5 index card" one.

mathowie: Yes.

cortex: And I think that got a front page post, but I don't remember.

mathowie: Yep.

jessamyn: I don't think I saw that one!

mathowie: It did!

cortex: Yeah, it did. It does what it says on the tin.

mathowie: This thing is screaming book deal already.

cortex: It's just a bunch of nice little daily sketches.

jessamyn: Wait, wait, wait! They won a library card catalog?! Aww.

cortex: I guess, yeah.

mathowie: And they're desecrating it.

jessamyn: Where was I on April 22nd? I missed this entirely. This is terrific!

cortex: You were failing.

mathowie: Volcano.

jessamyn: I may have been--yes.

cortex: You were reading the P = NP post.

jessamyn: Jess vs. the Volcano.

mathowie: I liked Gentleman's Gentleman, the put this on blog as visual comic, like COBRA!

jessamyn: Oh, yeah, this was great!

mathowie: It had man's tips in comic book format. Very handy and cool.

jessamyn: Yeah. And really well-drawn, and it sort of, yeah.

mathowie: You should send this to Jesse, this is pretty much good advice.

jessamyn: Yeah, Jesse would totally love this. I also liked the Business Raptor comics, at the other end of the spectrum.

cortex and mathowie: (laugh)

cortex: Yes.

jessamyn: You know, as kind of a Mac Paint sort of thing. I mean, some of them are actually funny, but it's, yeah, it's 8-bit raptors. Most of them end by the raptor eating someone.

mathowie: Let me see. Oh, Tea Party Jesus was the most popular Project. It's not as bad as it sounds, I mean, it sounds to--it's not, (chuckling) when I read the title I was like, "Oh God, what is this?" Like, what obvious--

jessamyn: EarBucket is very talented.

mathowie: It's awesome! It's just old pictures of Jesus, pictures of Jesus, and word bubbles with quotes from prominent news articles that are just unbelievable.

jessamyn: "I actually support microchipping illegal immigrants."

mathowie and cortex: (laugh)

mathowie: [I know, Jesus ??]

jessamyn: As an example.

mathowie: "There is a war here at home against illegal immigrants and it is even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan," he's saying from the mountain top. It's so insane.

jessamyn: Oh, now I remember where I was on April 22nd! I was in Arizona.

mathowie: Aah! [??]

jessamyn: Yes.

mathowie: I guess that's Projects, eh?

jessamyn: No, wait! I liked a couple more. Projects thrilled me this month.

cortex: It was a pretty good month.

jessamyn: There was also the very stupid small iPhone app that translates phone numbers with letters in them--

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: So you can just type in the letters and it'll make the phone call.

mathowie: Oh, it's like PhoneSpell.org, but an app.

jessamyn: Yeah, but it's not like, "How do I find a cutie-poo phone number?", it's like, "Somebody told me the number's 1-800-FUCK-YOU but I

don't know what the letters stand for, so fuck you, I'm just going to type them in."

mathowie: Oh, right! And it's free.

jessamyn: Yeah!

mathowie: I always hate that, the stupid ads.

jessamyn: And it's ignignokt.

mathowie: I always hate stupid ads that are like, "Call us at 1-800-COMPAQ-HR" or something, it just takes like an extra thirty seconds to hunt and peck for the stupid numbers.

jessamyn: I just call Google Voice all the time and I don't even remember phone numbers anymore.

mathowie: (laughs) You call Google... oh, you use Google Voice, you just type in letters and it does it for you?

jessamyn: You just, like, they're on my speed dial and then you're like, "I want pizza in town!" And they'll be like, "Pizza in town is boop boop boop boop boop! I'll connect you." And then they make the phone call for you.

mathowie: Aren't you putting humans out of business by that? Is there an angle?

jessamyn: Only humans with shitty, shitty jobs!

mathowie: (chuckles) You prefer robots.

jessamyn: (chuckles) I prefer robots for many things.

And one more that I just really, really liked was Gael's

Generation Xtinct: the lost tastes, toys, and trends of the '70s and '80s. This may be because I--

mathowie: Ooh, I totally missed that.

jessamyn: I am older than you gentlemen.

mathowie: No, no. I like Gael. All Gael's World of Nostalgia is always awesome.

jessamyn: Yeah. Gael just has her finger on the pulse of my nostalgia, which is probably meaning that she's exactly my age. But, like, Friday, April 30th. "What about prom, Blane? WHAT ABOUT PROM?"

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: And so it's a link to 1980s prom dresses and that kind of stuff.

Molly Ringwald wears a dress that looked not entirely--hey, and here's a can of chocolate fudge soda, which in fact I was drinking quite recently, but apparently...

mathowie: Ohh! There's a whole post about Cookie Crisp's mascot, which was a running joke in the show Community, which only made sense to people that were alive from 1981 to 1986.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Oh, is Community good? I've never actually.

mathowie: Oh, it's... the first two suck, maybe the first five are painful, there's some dumb parts, and then it's

gotten great.

jessamyn: Okay. Because I love everybody that's in it, but I haven't delved into it yet, and I wasn't sure if it was totally worth it or not.

mathowie: I think I loved everyone except Joel McHale, the main slick dude who I can't stand, and he's kind of an asshole in it.

jessamyn: Oh, because I kind--you don't like his acting, or you just don't like the character?

mathowie: I don't like the character and him. I've seen him on comedy podcasts, and he's a douchebag in real life.

jessamyn: Really.

mathowie: Yeah. He's just like a cocky asshole. He's not playing very far out of his

normal character. And I'm kind of sick of him, but this show is great. The last episode was amazing. Totally worth it.

jessamyn: Good!

mathowie: Better than 30 Rock, I would say. It clips 30 Rock to me.

jessamyn: I sort of don't like 30 Rock very much.

mathowie: Yeah, I think they're getting kind of lazy.

jessamyn: Liz Lemon, too annoying.

mathowie: Euhh. Yeah.

jessamyn: It's like, she reminds me of Julia Louis-Dreyfus from Seinfeld.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like, if I want to go look at annoying, neurotic women I'll, you know.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: Look in the mirror. Bing!

jessamyn: (sigh)

mathowie: Hahahaha. Sorry.

cortex: You kinda set that one up, though.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: I set these up for you, Matt, so you can feel funny.

mathowie: It was like a t-ball.

cortex, jessamyn, and mathowie: (laugh)

mathowie: Ouch! (laughs) Oww.

cortex: (still laughing)

jessamyn: You're the one who's complaining. I think you're very funny. (mutters) Looking.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: (cracks up again)

mathowie: I actually spent all week in New York apologizing for our podcast, because everyone kept going, "Oh, I listen to that all the time!" and I would go, "What?"

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: "Don't you have actual enjoyable things to do?"

jessamyn: Oh, shut up. I listen to this podcast too half of the time.

mathowie: But lots of our friends like to listen to it, because it's like we're in their living room talking to them.

jessamyn: You know, they could just come over. They never write, they never call.

mathowie: Or call, yeah. Alright, let's go to Metafilter.

sfx: (Music: Don't Stop Kazooin' by cortex)

jessamyn: Well, there was a clear--there were several very clear awesome posts on Metafilter. So I don't know what you guys thought was awesome. Oh, and I'm supposed to mention that what's-his-name, mccarty.tim, is not allowed to post about Lady Gaga anymore? I was supposed to mention that in the podcast?

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Oh, finally!

cortex: (descending whistle)

jessamyn: It's just against the rules. mccarty.tim, you are done. No more Lady Gaga posts for you.

Thank you.

mathowie: How many did he do?

cortex: User, you have been warned.

mathowie: Yeah. There's been a lot.

jessamyn: (chuckle) Right. Two. Maybe three, even. And an Adam Ant post that says Lady Gaga in the URL.

mathowie: It's been too much!

cortex: I know! She's not's that great.

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: I'm just calling shotgun on this post, because there's a good chance that you two might have seen it as well, and I want to not be beat to it. So the Bohemian Rhapsody post from zarq, which is just fucking amazing.

jessamyn: Oh, I didn't actually see this one. This was not on my list.

cortex: It's a, yeah, it's a...

jessamyn: Oh my god. I thought he had a job.

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Go figure.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Oh, I've been meaning to someday watch all these videos, but never got around to it.

cortex: Yeah, no, it's a really excellent collection of covers and the lead on it is a BBC documentary about Bohemian Rhapsody that I haven't even't gotten around to watching that yet, that's in my bookmarked for a rainy day pile.

mathowie: So it's like an hour about that song.

cortex: Yeah, presumably like making of and whatnot.

mathowie: Interesting. That looks voluminous [ˈvɑljuˌmɪnɪs]. (chuckles)

cortex: (chuckles) Well said.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Voluminous [vəˈlʊˌmənˌəs], you mean? Voluminous [vəˈlʊˌmənˌəs].

mathowie: That's it. Sorry. (chuckles)

jessamyn: That's alright! Hey.

mathowie: I just had a little pet... first one was, I guess it used to be called Piano Hero, and they had to rename it?

cortex: Oh, yeah.

mathowie: They had to rename it or they'd get sued. Was it Synthesia [ˌsɪnˈθɛɪziə] or something? It's like...

cortex: Synesthesia [ˌsɪnɛsˈθiʒiə].

jessamyn: Is your reading mind broken this week? Like, these are just words!

mathowie: (laughs) How many times have we done a podcast, and how difficult...?

jessamyn: I'm not allowed to make fun of Josh!

mathowie: (laughing) We find pronouncing things difficult every time.

cortex and jessamyn: (laugh)

mathowie: So it's basically Piano Hero. So, using gaming theory to teach people how to make real music. Not fake fucking guitars, you know, kicking over furniture in the living room acting like a bad-ass, but actually grabbing a real piano. There's some awesome videos, if you look at the videos for it.

You can get, like, your favorite Journey song, the guy has done a video about, and he shows basically the video screen above his actual keyboard, and you just do, you know, go to blue, go to purple, go to blue, you know, do what I'm doing on the screen, and slows it down, and there's a way you can just step through each note at a time until you get good at it, you can do it faster and faster and do a full song.

jessamyn: Oh, so at the end of it you wind up actually sort of knowing how to play an instrument? Is that right?

mathowie: Yeah, yeah.

jessamyn: Wow!

cortex: That's the idea. You're actually learning, you're doing it on an actual keyboard, so yeah, it gets rid of the abstraction layer that you see in the

actual Guitar Hero guitar.

jessamyn: Of the fake-y buttons, yeah. Huh!

mathowie: Yeah. It's pretty cool. I mean, it's using the game, the well-established game mechanic, but with real instruments. You have to get kind of an expensive USB-compatible keyboard. I think you have to spend two to four hundred bucks to get a keyboard that'll work with most OS software.

jessamyn: Uh-huh.

mathowie: But then you're actually really learning how to play the piano and playing a song from a game, which is cool and awesome, and it's free, I think, right?

cortex: I think so, yeah.

mathowie: Pretty amazing.

jessamyn: That's dynamite. That's so great!

cortex: And I mean, that sort of idea has been done before, I mean, it's not totally new, but the specific interface is not necessarily the common one, and it gets away from the notation thing, which is kind of nice for people who don't already know notation, because notation can be a real sort of terrifying thing to try and work with as a musical newbie.

mathowie: Oh, yeah. Yeah, like that's what, when I show it to someone, that's the first thing they said. It's like, "They don't teach you how to read notes! You just learn purple goes here, blue goes there." But no, just--

jessamyn: And you're like, "That's the awesome part. Thank you."

mathowie: Well, there's actually an advanced mode where it actually changes into notes and then you realize what E-flat is and all... and it teaches you musical scales, which is, if you stare at musical scales, it's kind of like Guitar Hero, you know, when you know what it says.

jessamyn: That's cool!

mathowie: So [??] game comes around.

jessamyn: I would like to complain about Rhaomi's post. I think Rhaomi is always awesome, to the best of my memory, and makes awesome posts, but they posted a link to my favorite

Calvin and Hobbes full-text searchable site, which is now dead.

mathowie: Awww.

cortex: You know, and I saw that thing go up, and it was like...

mathowie: We usually are told to take them down immediately.

cortex: Yeah, well, I think the ones I can remember in the last couple years have both been things where we just sort of killed it immediately, because it was like, hey, you just linked to a tarball of...

jessamyn: Well, and this site's been up for years.

mathowie: Hm.

jessamyn: The S and S, or the whatever it is, s-anand.net, has been up

forever!

mathowie: Wow.

jessamyn: But Rhaomi made a post--which was great, and I don't mean to diss on it, but augh, now the site's not up anymore.

mathowie: It actually killed the site!

cortex: Yeah, it's one of those, yeah, can you post about a thing without the destroying the thing sort of problems.

jessamyn: Yeah. And I don't really know what happened, but there were a couple people who mentioned in the thread, like, "Aaah!"

mathowie: "Don't do that!"

jessamyn: But, you know, people didn't flag it. In fact, two hundred people favorited it, so.

mathowie: I thought we'd have gotten a MetaTalk post

immediately, because we usually do, going, "Augh, Calvin and Hobbes is copyrighted, Bill Watterson wouldn't want it, we should take it down."

jessamyn: Well, this is actually a search engine that just points directly to the content that's on that site.

mathowie: Oh!

cortex: Yeah. So it's a little bit...

mathowie: So it's just like a metadata search.

cortex: Yeah, it's kind of a grey area thing, and that's why it's sort of like, it's not quite the same thing as, "here's a tarball of every strip ever, go download it."

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: It's not people passing around a torrent.

jessamyn: But I think it does hotlink to the images, and not the...

cortex: The images host on GoComics or whatever, yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah. So it points to the images, but it doesn't, I don't think, link to the framed images or something? I don't even remember. All I know is there was a couple Calvin and Hobbes strips, the one like, "You walk like this! Aggle-aggle-aggle!" [sp ?] and I'd go to this site and type in "aggle aggle" and I would find the comic I was looking for.

mathowie: Hey, Jessamyn, what do you think of the Granite State of Mind New Hampshire post?

jessamyn: That...

mathowie: Video.

jessamyn: ...video is awesome.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: I spent an entire weekend looking at all the other state of whatever posts.

mathowie: Uh-huh.

jessamyn: And that's the best one! It's better than the one that Jay-Z does. It's just so good. They're very funny. I watch everything else those guys did.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: You know, in the winter you have got to, "it is good to know a plow guy."

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: It's awesome. It's exactly what, you know.

mathowie: There's some syrup references in it, too, even though it's New Hampshire.

jessamyn: Well, you know, the big secret is that New Hampshire and Vermont are the same state. With different taxation policies, you know what I mean?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And so most of the stuff that he talks about is stuff that applies to both, and then there's like New Hampshire beach stuff, which anybody who grew up in central Mass, or eastern Mass, you always went to the beach in New Hampshire. So those stories were, yeah. Legend.

mathowie: Awesome.

jessamyn: Was that this month, actually?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Oh, yeah, "In February it is good to know a plow guy." Oh, that was not_on_display's. Yeah, you know who showed him that video? I did.

mathowie: (laughs) Oh, friend-linker. Banned.

jessamyn: (laughs) They're not my friends!

mathowie: Suuure.

jessamyn: They make this other video called Cry Like a Bitch, which is actually really funny?

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: What?

jessamyn: I mean, I would never have thought those words would have crossed my lips.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: But it's actually like a totally funny video, because they're these innocuous New Hampshire guys.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: But I looked at the other ones, like the Tokyo one and a Minnesota one and a whole bunch of other ones.

mathowie: Ehhh.

jessamyn: This is the best.

mathowie: It's hard to do, yeah.

cortex: I have a post from back in the beginning of March, which I think I just forgot to mention in the last podcast because I didn't see it in the write-up.

jessamyn: Oh, did you make it yourself?

cortex: No, see, that's why I didn't notice it. (laughs)

mathowie: Oh, is it a complicated game that requires minutes of explanation and still?

jessamyn: Better you than me, Matt.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: It's actually, it's a very complicated game in the way it's set up, but it's actually a really simple thing. It's basically a point-and-click adventure game type thing, except for it's sort of a one-on-one roleplaying approach to it.

jessamyn: (gasps) I love it already.

mathowie: Wow.

cortex: So one person is playing, like they're playing a little point in the game, and trying to do things, and the other person

is running the game.

mathowie: Ohh!

cortex: You know, they're actually basically DMing an adventure game graphically and speaking for the characters and putting things in the scene and doing things in the scene, so if the player's like, "I want to light that chair on fire," the person running it can just sort of use a toolset to quickly throw some flames on the chair and have the character say, "Holy shit, my favorite chair!" You know what I mean, hopefully they'd do something more entertaining that that, but.

mathowie: Everyone has been talking about this everywhere I go!

cortex: Yeah, it's a fantastic... I haven't had a chance to actually try and do it, but I really, really like the idea, that it's a wonderful sort of approach to melding the whole computer game paradigm with old-fashioned role-playing storytelling, so.

jessamyn: And something vaguely social? Like, do you play with somebody you pick, or do you play with some...

mathowie: No! It's like Chatroulette Zork, kinda, right?

jessamyn: Aaah! (laughs)

mathowie: There's no cock!

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: I mean, I think you could set it up as--

jessamyn: (laughs) With cock?

cortex: I think--well, if you want a cock-based game, I think cock can totally happen.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: I thought strangers are the other side, right? Or are they friends?

cortex: I think you both have to own a copy of it, so I think it's actually more likely that it is you and a friend, although they may find ways to have you play with a random DM or something too, but again, the mechanics side of it I haven't seen in action, so I can't really comment on, but the idea of the set-up is good. And the post has a link to an 180-page slideshow that just walks through frame-by-frame the idea. And it's actually, that sounds big, but it's like five minutes of reading and it's actually pretty

impressive to see what's going on there, so.

mathowie: Sweet.

cortex: So yeah. I liked that. That was neat.

mathowie: In my crazy old history that's kind of depressing but I didn't know about file, something comes up like once a month on Metafilter that blows my mind, but this one... is about a documentary about bigots in college women's basketball, and women's basketball in general, even the pro leagues,

trying to eradicate lesbians from their sport. Which, you know, there's sort of the old stereotype that most of everyone in the WNBA is gay, and, you know... but there's like some--

jessamyn: WNBA is very popular among gay women.

mathowie: Yeah. And it's about a couple ruthless coaches that... I mean, the stories are so crazy, where it's not even, they have codes of ethics where you're not allowed to be a lesbian on this coach's team, and

all your other teammates will report you and get some sort of reward if they out you, and then you're kicked out of the team, kicked out of school, and then you're blackballed from ever playing basketball ever again with any other college, and they do their best to make sure you don't get admitted to any other college. It's so insane.

jessamyn: Horrible.

mathowie: Yeah. And Carol Anne had apparently known a ton about it and dropped a few good comments explaining the whole thing and the history behind it and it's like

oh, god. Like, it's so sad that in 2010 this exists. It's just so crazy. Fucked up.

And that was that.

cortex: On a lively note, I thought this was a really funny comment. But it's only a funny comment if you have read the book House of Leaves, which is itself sort of a contentious issue, since a lot of people are annoyed by the book, in part because of other people who really like the book, and so some people get annoyed that the other people

are overhyping this book.

jessamyn: House of Leaves is what again?

cortex: It's a book that came out, I don't know, like eight or ten years ago, I want to say, something like that, by a guy named Mark Danielewski, which is Poe's brother--Poe the musician. And he, it's just a, it's this big thick book that has this multiple-level narrative going on. So it's in theory a book being written by--

jessamyn: Alright, I hate it already.

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: --a guy named Johnny, he's writing about the papers of--

jessamyn: No, no, no, I'm done.

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: --a guy named Zampanò--

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: --who wrote a book about--

jessamyn: No, I hate it!

cortex: (laughs) It's... anyway, I'm one of the people who actually likes it. But I understand why people criticize it.

jessamyn: Alright.

cortex: But anyway, it's full of footnotes. And like nested footnotes, and this comment--

jessamyn: Oh, I hate it even more!

cortex: --is wonderfully capturing that whole thing.

mathowie: Augh.

cortex: In the context of arguing with someone who claimed that no one else had made a House of Leaves reference in that thread before, so it's just kind of an epic joke.

jessamyn: What's not to hate?

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: No, I don't know what your problem is.

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: Why you gotta be down on non-linearity in fictive works? What the fuck?

jessamyn: Because I'm really linear.

cortex: I bet you--

jessamyn: I can't follow it, and I get confused and fall asleep!

cortex: You're like, "William Burroughs sucks," aren't you, you're like...

jessamyn: No, no. He's just a horrible misogynist. I don't mind his non-linearity.

cortex and mathowie: (chuckle)

mathowie: A footnote's a footnote, come on. That's exhausting.

jessamyn: David Foster Wallace is the only person I will ever forgive for footnoting the way he does.

mathowie: Ehh.

jessamyn: Even Oliver Sacks, you know, I just can't quite do it.

cortex: Man, I had no idea you were anti-footnote-ite. That's... I'm re-examining a lot of assumptions here.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: How do you feel about end-notes? Can we talk about end-notes?

cortex: End-notes, you know, end-notes are okay, but to have to go back there...

mathowie: So much page-turning.

cortex: I mean, that's the thing. Wallace was all about the end-notes, and you had to have two fucking bookmarks to read the book, and that's, you know, kind of annoying.

jessamyn: See, like, whatever ADD is, I have the opposite of it. And so footnotes take away from my ability to pay attention.

mathowie: Yeah.

(pause)

jessamyn: They're fine for other people!

cortex and mathowie: (laugh)

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: I have to go now, I just--(cracks up)

jessamyn: (laughs) So do I.

cortex: Anyway, I thought that was a funny comment. Thank you. That was... that is...

mathowie: We should do best comments ever. Let me go to...

jessamyn: Oh, wait, one more, one more!

mathowie: Well, the best comment--

jessamyn: Oh. The best comment. Is that netzapper's comment?

mathowie: Navelgazer's comment about Stephen Baldwin, who doesn't completely--

jessamyn: Navelgazer. God, I confuse Navelgazer and netzapper.

mathowie: Ahh. How could you?

They're so similar. I don't know, we point out probably four, three to five times a week a great comment somewhere on the site on the sideblog, and we hardly ever remember to mention them here, but there is a, I will leave a link on this podcast notes that there's a link to someone who, there was sort of a mocking Stephen Baldwin thread for turning--

jessamyn: Because he's out of work and evangelical, is that it? I didn't even read most of the thread.

mathowie: Yeah, yeah, let's raise money so we can go do God's work or something, and so

there's the usual sort of ha-ha, LOL non-evolution bashing stuff. But then someone's like, "You know what? Stephen Baldwin's pretty fucking awesome,"--

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: --and they said they were lost in the middle of nowhere and parked on a dangerous street and he pulled up and was like--

cortex: And [??]--yeah.

mathowie: Yeah. And he pulled up and was like, "What the fuck are you parking here for? You're going to get killed!" And he's like, "I'm lost!" And he goes, "Okay, follow me," and the gist of it was, Stephen Baldwin took a half-hour, an hour out of his day to drive this guy

back into town.

jessamyn: This poor schmo off the side of this crazy hill and get him where he was going.

mathowie: Yeah, and he led him with a moving truck exactly where he needed to go, then turned around and had to drive a half-hour back to where he was to go do his thing. It's just like, Stephen Baldwin ain't that bad! (chuckles)

jessamyn: And he was also like, he walks the talk, you know.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like, that he was like, maybe he's this goofy Christian to a lot of people, but yeah.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And then somebody bitched me out for including that on the sidebar.

mathowie: Well, whaa? That was great!

jessamyn: Because people think I put a bunch of stuff on the sidebar that's from the LOLChristian threads.

mathowie: Oh, okay.

jessamyn: Remember, there was the mitten comment....

mathowie: Yeah, but that flipped it on its ear, like that--

jessamyn: I. know!

mathowie: That was the exact reason we have a sideblog, so people don't fall into lazy, you know.

jessamyn: That's my feeling.

mathowie: Exactly. Stay true! Stick to your guns, Jessamyn!

jessamyn: Thank you.

mathowie: Alright.

cortex: Did I mention The Room last time? The Tommy Wiseau film?

jessamyn: I don't think so!

cortex: This is a post from--

jessamyn: It's ringing no bells. Remember, we had kind of a short podcast, because we talked to Frontalot too.

cortex: Yeah, that's right. That's probably what happened to all this stuff.

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: Well, it's this movie from like 2003, I want to say? And the post I'm linking here is from 2006, but I only found it after I went back looking. I was so disappointed that it turned out to be four years old because I couldn't join the conversation about it.

jessamyn: I think this is your new role, Josh, is to be the, you know, the From the Archives guy.

mathowie: Content diver.

jessamyn: Yeah. "Here's this post from before we had a podcast, and before I was a member!"

cortex: It could work.

jessamyn: Sure!

cortex: It's... there's a treasure trove, I'm telling ya!

jessamyn: (chuckles)

cortex: Anyway, the movie is terrible, but it's kind of a cult film terrible at this point, and...

jessamyn: "Softcore porn blended with a Tennessee Williams stageplay." (sighs) Huhhh.

cortex: There's not a whole lot of softcore in there. But there's a little bit, because the guy... yeah, it's totally--

jessamyn: I don't need to know.

cortex: The film is this horribly-made mess that's basically obviously to some extent autobiographical in intent, because the star of it

played by the writer and director, Tommy Wiseau, is totally this Mary Sue who is wronged by the universe and, you know, he's just a good man done wrong by everyone around him and blahblahblahblahbuhblah. And it's really, really terrible, and he's got a weird accent, and I'm not even sure where it's from, but he's like, (in accent) "Oh hai, Denney!" and it's... it's hard to convey, but people should definitely see it, because it's really bad but in a good way.

jessamyn: And it sounds like the post about it is terrific, and there's a whole bunch of...

cortex: Yeah, it's kind of a great big epic post from a few years ago, and it's...

jessamyn: By boost ventilator.

cortex: Yes. And yeah. So that, I wanted to pull that one out, because I enjoyed the post and I enjoyed the film, and people should definitely see it.

jessamyn: I wanted to give a quick nod to World's Ugliest Statues thread, not because the post... I mean, the post is fine, right? But the thread turns into this terrific, "my favorite ugliest statue" thread, and Chocolate Pickle had dropped us a note to be sure to notice this.

And I did notice it, and it's really funny. So I just wanted to...

mathowie: Dude, did they get the Stanford thing on there? I hope they did...

jessamyn: Which Stanford thing?

mathowie: The Buddy Christ version of Father Junípero Serra that someone built like a 20-foot horrible statue and gave it to the university of Stanford, and they didn't want it, so it turned into a rest stop area statue.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Which is just west of Stanford, and it's so ugly and stupid and not even well-formed.

cortex: Well, I'm not finding it. But the thread's still open, so maybe you should just add it as a comment there.

mathowie: Yeah, I took a picture, I used to call it--he looks like Buddy Christ, like he's shooting the guns with his fingers.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: And this is supposed to be like the main, whatever, missionary that helped conquer California.

cortex: Nice.

jessamyn: Yes. There's a lot of good lulls in this thread. And everybody just seemed to be into it.

mathowie: Wow.

jessamyn: You know, it's one of those great things where everybody can laugh at somebody, and nobody ends up feeling bad about it, I think, if that's possible?

mathowie: Bronze casters.

jessamyn: (chuckles)

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: You know, they may be an under-represented minority on... or un-represented.

mathowie: Actually, I think that Jersey teardrop is actually kind of cool. I don't know. It doesn't look bad. It looks kinda cool.

jessamyn: Well, people have different opinions, but nobody, you know.

mathowie and cortex: (chuckle)

jessamyn: Aehh! (chuckles)

mathowie: I'm not saying you're wrong.

jessamyn: (chuckles)

mathowie: Alright.

jessamyn: I just enjoyed the thread, is all I'm saying.

cortex: I also wanted to point this one other one, an Everything is Terrible post of a grade-school kid doing a hand-made video of him lipsynching to With or Without You with typed-in messages over the top, and it's one of those things that turned into sort of a discussion of cringeworthy childhood memory-type things, and I really thought it was kinda sweet and awkward in its various things that are brought up in the thread, so.

mathowie: Wow, Everything is Terrible. I haven't seen this in eons. Wow.

cortex: We have a post like every two weeks. (laugh)

mathowie: Oh, I didn't see the them asking for copies of Jurassic Park on VHS. And that was them! Huh.

jessamyn: Wait, what?

mathowie: There's a guy building a wall of Jurassic Park VHS tapes. I have no idea why, but.

jessamyn: What does this have to do with fifth grade? Oh.

mathowie: It was Everything is Terrible.

jessamyn: Oh, oh! I thought you were

complaining. I forgot there was a blog called Everything is Terrible.

mathowie: Oh, I was actually muttering the phrase 'everything is terrible'.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: (shouts) Yeah! And I was like, "God, Matt."

cortex: "Fuck your post."

jessamyn: Nothing like an afternoon at the Montessori school to...

mathowie: (chuckle) Wow. Thank god I didn't have a video camera when I was in fifth grade.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: No joke, right? I'm really kinda happy I can put basically everything prior to college just away.

mathowie: That was the undercurrent of Star Wars Kid. Like, besides that, I mean, 90% people viewing it were just laughing at the fat kid being funny or something, but for most people it was like, "Thank god I never taped anything I did like that, and it never fell into the wrong hands." Like, good god.

cortex: Yep.

mathowie: Awesome stuff.

cortex: I also want to mention real quick the post about the Human Centipede--

jessamyn: Aaaaah!

cortex: Which is a terrible, terrible film--

jessamyn: Aaah!

cortex: It's a horrible premise for a horrible horror film.

jessamyn: Ohh, eugh. Eugh!

cortex: That I think is coming out soon, actually.

jessamyn: Eugh. Euuu. Euuu.

cortex: Anyway, I just wanted to throw it out there, if anybody really wants to feel terrible about something, you should check out--

mathowie: What the hell is it?

jessamyn: Auuugh!

cortex: (laughs) Apparently you guys haven't seen this one.

jessamyn: I've seen it.

mathowie: Some sort of joke movie or something?

cortex: No, no, it's an actual movie. It's an actual schlocky horror film.

jessamyn: No! It's the worst, most horrible idea for a film ever. Read the text, it's the worst!

cortex: The elevator pitch is that they--

mathowie: Oh, he's sewing dead people together?

cortex: No, no, they're alive!

jessamyn: Nooo! God, it's worse than you can even imagine, Matt, you poor naïve fool!

cortex: Mad scientist out in the boondocks conspires to perform reverse Siamese twin separation surgery on some people lost whose car broke down or whatever, and so he sews them together to get a three-person long--

jessamyn: Three women.

cortex: Well, it's two women who got lost and then I think some guy who he had already captured.

jessamyn: Is there a dude in it, too?

cortex: I think so. I think there's like...

jessamyn: I think it's... no, I think it's... well, I'll check while you explain this to our boss.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: Oh, [??].

cortex: Anyway, so he's crazy and wants to make a human centipede, and so he basically kidnaps some people and then apparently surgeries them together in a chain and creates one long uninterrupted digestive system.

mathowie: (chuckle)

jessamyn: Mouth to butt, Matt! He connects them mouth to butt.

mathowie: [??]

cortex: Yes. Ass to mouth.

jessamyn: It's the most disgusting thing ever.

cortex: The film. So yeah.

mathowie: Why don't they just call it Anilingus: The Movie?

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Aaah!

mathowie: And then everyone would run, run, run.

jessamyn: Because anilingus people actually enjoy. Nobody enjoys this. It's horrible.

mathowie: It's really stupid. Jesus. Yeah, I see the money scene at the very end of the trailer. It's so dumb. It looks so fake and cheeseball.

jessamyn: Is it three women, or is it two women and a dude?

cortex: I think it was like two women and a Japanese dude or something like that. From what I can remember from the trailer, yeah.

mathowie: That's what it looked like, yeah.

cortex: I admit I have not tried to find a bootleg of it yet, so, you know.

jessamyn: See, you know, this is really fucked up but I feel slightly

differently about it that I know it's not just like lady torture porn?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like, if there's a dude in it it actually makes it a different level of gross and disgusting?

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: And that thread is still going. The thread started on April 6th and there's still people commenting in it today.

cortex: Yeah, it just picked up a little bit more, actually, because someone actually got a review of the actual film, so.

jessamyn: And?

cortex: It sounds like it's a shitty movie.

jessamyn: (chuckles)

cortex: Shocking.

jessamyn: Color me surprised.

cortex: Yeah, no, it's amazing.

jessamyn: Oh, one more plug for people who are exactly my age, again. The 120 Minutes archive?

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

jessamyn: An archive of nearly every 120 Minutes show and playlist. 585 episodes.

mathowie: When alternate music was actually alternative to something and hard to find and get to?

jessamyn: Yeah! And you would see things on MTV and be like, wow, I need to go buy that record, because I'd never heard of it before?

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Yeah. I know. I know! I know. But I loved this post by

CharlesV42, and I feel like in some ways we're mentioning the same old, same old people, so. CharlesV42, you may live in Brooklyn and be 26 years old, but this is your first mention on the podcast.

mathowie: (chuckles) Every time you praise a 26-year-old male in Brooklyn, his mustache grows an extra curl.

jessamyn and cortex: (chuckle)

mathowie: His ironic 1890s mustache. (chuckles)

jessamyn: 1890s were a good decade for mustaches.

mathowie: Hell yeah! Are we going to move to Ask Metafilter at some point?

jessamyn: Yes! I'm--

cortex: I have one more title to plug here.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Blast it!

cortex: This game where this guy basically sat down and he made Super Mario Brothers, like the original Super Mario Brothers, but he coded it in Flash with the choice of several different characters from various classic Nintendo games. Which is something that you totally talked about on the blacktop in 1988, you're like, fuck yeah, it would be totally sweet if you could play the Samus and you're shooting the Goombas, and then this guy, as a labor of love, actually made that happen, and it's really sweet and you should go check it out if you

have any NES nostalgia, because it will blow your fucking mind. That's all.

mathowie: Alright. So you play the game as... oh, I thought it was like, play the game as a mushroom, you're standing there and then you get crushed, and so--

cortex: No, you're playing it as, you can play Simon Belmont from Castlevania, or you can play Samus from Metroid, or you can play Bill from Contra, and it's...

jessamyn: So wait, it's like Mario Brothers only I can play Sonic the Hedgehog as a character?

cortex: Yes, but not Sonic, because Sonic's [??] and that's bullshit.

mathowie: But you have the capabilities of that other person?

cortex: Yeah. Yeah. And it's really faithful to the mechanics of the original games, too, so moving through Super Mario's world as a different character feels really, really bizarre. I've got a lot of muscle memory that this game sort of fucks with in bad ways. It's really kind of exciting.

jessamyn: That's good for your brain. Like Sudoku for older people.

cortex: Yeah, no, it's... yeah.

mathowie: (chuckles) Nice.

sfx: (Music: Complicated (Avril cover) by cortex)

mathowie: Alright, Ask Metafilter.

jessamyn: Alright! I was a little dismayed, speaking of our 26-year-old friends, that the "I'm turning 30 and handling it poorly, give me some advice," thread, it didn't receive a ton of comments but 90 users marked it as a

favorite?

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: I thought I saw that. Yeahhh.

jessamyn: Nine. Zero. I don't know what that means, but I just felt like I needed to mention it, because gosh. What does that mean about, you know--

mathowie: Dude, look at the most popular for the last month. There's two others, one's like, "I get really depressed by Sunday night because I didn't do anything all weekend," and that has like two bazillion favorites, and there's another one going like, "I'm 35, my girlfriend left me, I'm not even like a real adult, what do I do?" and there's a bazillion favorites and

it's like, oh no.

jessamyn: I did not even see those. Are those...?

mathowie: And the favorites far eclipse the number of comments, (chuckling) it's just ohh, bummer.

jessamyn: I vaguely recall the Sunday night one. What did people say about that? Like, don't worry about it? It's okay to not do shit on the weekends?

mathowie: Yeah, I think it was like, come up with a system that gets shit done Friday night so you can relax or something.

jessamyn: So you can actually have some free time to do some stuff.

mathowie: Yeah. Wow. Turning thirty... I saw this one, this was one of... I thought this one was fascinating. This one points to a real need. "Who are your favorite Etsy artists who sell large-ish prints at reasonable prices?" Seventy-seven people marked it as a favorite. There's only ten comments. Like, well, you know, Etsy obviously is not meeting some needs for people. They need to step up their game on discovery of art.

jessamyn: I wonder about that with Etsy. Like, I went to Etsy looking for a iPad case, because I just wanted a sleeve.

mathowie: Ohh. Yeah.

jessamyn: And it was... and I love Etsy. But it was really difficult to drill down through their system to be able to be like, "I want to look at individual stores who are selling iPad cases. I don't want to see 17 of them, I just want to see one from each store, and I want it to be an iPad case, not an iPod case, even if they use the word 'iPod'," and

I was surprised.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like, they could really benefit from an even more killer search. Although to be fair, they're probably doing totally fine without my helpful advice.

cortex and mathowie: (chuckle)

jessamyn: But, like--

mathowie: It's like the Walmart of craft stuff, but it's about as useful, or it's about as convenient as a Walmart, which is, you have to wander and wander and wander before you stumble on it. Like, they need--

jessamyn: Or you've gotta want something that's got a really specific keyword that you can attach to it, like when I was looking for

moss terrariums, it's actually pretty easy to look that stuff up, you know, through tags. But if you don't have a specific keyword, it's really challenging.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: So, like, I just want to look at cool prints... eh? Good luck.

mathowie: I know. Art, print... like, there's tag search, there's col--yeah, they have a zillion different searches, but none of them are awesome. They almost need human-curated...

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: I guess they let people mark stuff as favorites, and they could probably show you search results

with the most favorited stuff, so that maybe it's like really awesome stuff? This tweedy one should work, right? (chuckles)

jessamyn: But yeah, this iPad search, you're looking at the stuff and it's like, a car holster, a Darth Vader sticker to put on your laptop, a...

mathowie: Yeah, there's what, like, 30, on each screen, like two of them are actually spot-on.

jessamyn: Yeah. I wound up buying a thing that I was actually really happy with, but.

mathowie: Wow, the felt one's cool, but 48 bucks, what the fuck?

jessamyn: They're nice! They're nice-looking things. What is that, masculine? Oh, the masculine iPad case.

mathowie: But it's like tweedy. Funny-looking.

jessamyn: Oh, 'tweedy'! I thought you were talking about Twitter and I just ignored you.

mathowie and cortex: (laugh)

mathowie: Kids today with their Facebooking MyFace Twitter!

jessamyn: Their MyFace Twitster!

mathowie: (chuckling) Yeah. Yeah.

jessamyn: Speaking of which, I gotta find something to wear to this fucking party.

mathowie: Oh, you don't have to.

jessamyn: Saturday night!

mathowie: I have some tweedy goods I could wear, but I think Josh has already [??].

jessamyn: (chuckles)

cortex: I actually went shopping.

mathowie: I saw that.

cortex: Which is not normal for me, but it sounded like a fun idea, and so I've got a little bit of an outfit.

jessamyn: I have an old lady gardener outfit.

cortex: It's very vintage store mix-and-match, so it's going to be, I don't know how well the holding's going to hold together, but...

mathowie: How could a country estate is so dangerously close to a steampunk convention, you know?

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Auhhhh.

mathowie: You know, it's like, we're just wearing different socks, kind of, you know? I don't know.

jessamyn: It's a bunch of white people dressing up like white people!

mathowie: White-r people. (chuckles)

jessamyn: Nooo. It pains me. Pains me.

mathowie: You don't have to. Last year it was supposed to be prom, but he didn't really--

jessamyn: Oh god!

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: He didn't really tell anybody, so it's like five people were all prommed out and everyone else wasn't, so...

jessamyn: Well, and you know Jesse, so you probably know how it's all going to be. These people are all strangers to me, so I am of course nervous.

mathowie: Yeah, well, he'll do it over-the-top and everyone else will be a pale comparison and half of them won't be dressed up, so.

That's what I expect.

jessamyn: So we'll be fine, is what you're saying.

mathowie: Yeah. Yeah, we'll be fine.

jessamyn: This was actually my favorite thread of the entire month. marxchivist [ˈmɑɹksˌkɪvɪst], whose name I can never pronounce--

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

jessamyn: --basically was like, "I was too cool for school during the '80s and now I want to listen to the poppy '80s, because I was busy listening to the Stooges."

mathowie: (chuckles) You know who this reminds me of?

jessamyn: And, you know, he's like, "Suddenly I like listening to the Bow Wow Wows and Walking on Sunshine."

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: And it's just a thread full of summertime. It's delightful.

mathowie: Do you know who's a carbon copy of marxchivist [ˈmɑɹˌkɪvɪst] on this? Paul Bausch, pb.

cortex: Yeah. See? Big nut for--

jessamyn: Really?

mathowie: We ditched work one day--

jessamyn: He was too cool for school?

mathowie: We ditched one... he was like a guitar player, man. Like, we...

jessamyn: You ditched Metafilter work?

mathowie: We ditched Metafilter work one day and saw Hot Tub Time Machine.

cortex: (laughs) That's like skipping out of a free study period.

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: It's like, wow, yeah.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: It's like skipping out of free ice cream day to go get a free pancake.

jessamyn: When you mean 'ditched', do you mean 'left your iPhone at home'?

mathowie: (chuckles) No, of course it's with us!

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: So we see Hot Tub Time Machine, and I'm like, and on the trip home I'm trying to dismantle some of the aspects of the film and going like, "It's supposed to be 1984, but I swear I heard a 1987 INXS hit," and Paul's like, "I didn't listen to any of that. That was actually good. I didn't listen to any of that back then,

I was too cool for it, and I thought it was all garbage, but."

jessamyn: And he was a guitar player! Or is a guitar player.

mathowie: Yeah, like he was in metal bands and stuff, so. You never heard this story?

cortex: I was four--

jessamyn: You know, he said his favorite color on Twitter was like 111111 or something like that. Like, it's basically black.

mathowie: Almost black. (chuckles)

jessamyn: And I was wondering about that, because he always seems cheery to me.

mathowie: Well, now he likes '80s music. He's trying to get back into it.

jessamyn: Well, he should go to this thread, then!

mathowie: Totally!

jessamyn: Make, you know, grab everything on this thread and put it in a playlist and play it when

he comes over to work tomorrow.

mathowie: Maybe we'll ditch work and just listen to these songs.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: I remember when you went to Hot Tub Time Machine something broke while you were there.

mathowie: Something always breaks!

cortex: Well, yeah--

jessamyn: (laughs) Not when you just sit home!

cortex: That was the day where, like--

mathowie: No, like, once a year we go see a movie instead of working, and the worst, was it 8 Avatar? No, District 9! We had total server meltdown and we were in a cell phone dead zone and the server was down for two hours because we were in this stupid fucking movie we kinda hated.

cortex: That was a good day. I enjoyed that day.

jessamyn: I remember that being unpleasant. Josh and I missed going to District 9 because it turned out it was playing at the drive-in the week before, not that week.

cortex: Yeah, that was bullshit.

jessamyn: I'm sorry.

mathowie: Awww.

cortex: It's not your fault. It's just--

jessamyn: It was actually my fault.

cortex: Well, it wasn't your fault that they weren't playing it.

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: It was your fault for making me think they were playing it.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: We went to go get snacks instead.

cortex: But the point is...

mathowie: It's a movie best left unwatched, I don't know. (laughs)

jessamyn: Is that true?

cortex: I think it's the sort of thing that I would like, actually. I will get around to it at some point. But I kinda like dreary

sci-fi, so, you know.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: I can see not enjoying it, but my impression is that I will be glad I have seen it once I have.

mathowie: [??] lazy racial messages, you know? Done by white people annoy me.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: That's pretty much why I won't watch... what was that movie I wouldn't watch?

mathowie: It's like the movie Crash as a sci-fi.

jessamyn: Oh, District 9!

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: No, Crash! Crash was terrible!

mathowie: Yeah. Imagine Crash with aliens, that's what you get.

Let me see. I only had one other favorite. Let me bust this out.

jessamyn: I had one other favorite also.

mathowie: The funnest sources of history of a word, how a word becomes a word...

jessamyn: Is this one of these threads where languagehat shows up partway through and yells at everybody?

mathowie: I don't think so! I don't think he even showed up. But there's a--

jessamyn: Probably because he was staying at home holding his head.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: He may have just expressed tremendous restraint. I know he does that on a regular basis.

mathowie and jessamyn: (chuckle)

mathowie: [??]

cortex: Thank you, languagehat, for...

jessamyn: "I am so not telling you what I think of you, fucknuts!" (laughs)

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: So it's a question just going, what are some great word histories that you've heard? Some of the people clearly don't know if it's actually for real or fake, and other people were pointing out that other stories that they're sharing are fake. But here's one, two of them went together. Oh, denim. Denim comes from "de nimes [ˈdɛ ˈnɑɪmz]"...Nimes [ˈnɑɪmz] was the French, Nimes [ˈnimz] was the French town where the fabric was manufactured, and then "jeans" comes from the French name for Genoa, where

sailor's clothing was made out of rough blue fabric, like, those both words with interesting stories that go together. But there's a whole bunch of stuff like that. What was the one about snobs? There was one about the word snob.

jessamyn: Control-F!

mathowie: Middle ages... students started... oh, middle class--

jessamyn: Oh, 'sine nobilitate'.

mathowie: Yeah, no nobility, 'sine nobilitate'. And then it got shortened to snob.

jessamyn: Without nobility.

mathowie: Those are people, yeah, non-royalty that got to go to college in the

Middle Ages. But could be fake. But there's a bunch of good stories there and how words came to be.

jessamyn: This is the last one that I really liked, which for some reason didn't have any tags, which makes no sense? But it appeals to me personally. "Please share your systems, rules, habits, and routines," to make you kind of do things you don't want to do without having to make a decision, kind of, you know, like, get up, make coffee, brush teeth,

floss, that kind of thing. 191 favorites, 60 comments, whole bunch of people just saying how to make a choice stairs vs. elevators, how to make a choice what to buy, how to make a choice what to eat, how to make a choice to decide whether to have dessert, etc., etc., etc. And it appeals to the MeFi demographic, because everyone's like, either I'm a totally rule-governed individual or I'm an ADD person who finds these rule-governed things appealing and yet ultimately unobtainable, and

I don't know. I liked it.

cortex: This is totally going to show up in a Lifehacker round-up.

jessamyn: Agh.

mathowie: Yeah, this is like pure... I mean, this is like actual life-hacks. "Always buy pink toothbrushes. I don't know why I started doing it, but it has always saved me stress from option paralysis."

mathowie and cortex: (chuckle)

mathowie: That's so rockin'.

jessamyn: Oh god, that's very funny.

mathowie: Plus, when you go camping, I don't know, showering in some weird public place, your pink one is always yours. No one else is going to have one, at least the men's side.

jessamyn: The two minutes it takes for my shower to warm up, that's when I floss.

mathowie: Ohhh! Not bad.

jessamyn: See? Perfect! Perfect. That's, for me, the three minutes it takes to make coffee, that's when I'm brushing my teeth. And if my coffee's done and I'm not, if I'm done brushing my teeth and my coffee's not done, I haven't been brushing long enough.

mathowie: Doesn't that mean that your coffee tastes weird because your mouth is full of toothpaste?

jessamyn: I have strawberry toothpaste.

mathowie: Doesn't that make for worse coffee enjoyment? (chuckles)

cortex: (chuckles)

It's like a fancy latte.

jessamyn: No! It's better. Haven't you ever had blueberry coffee? Blueberry coffee?

mathowie: Sure.

jessamyn: You haven't. You're just saying that.

mathowie: No, I hate coffee.

cortex: Oh.

mathowie: Really?

cortex: I like coffee but I like my coffee like I like my coffee.

mathowie: (snickers)

cortex: Black. Yeah, I don't know where to go with that. But yes.

jessamyn: What?

mathowie: I like my jokes like I like my jokes: self-referential.

cortex, mathowie, and jessamyn: (laugh)

cortex: Who was that? Was that [??] or someone? I saw that going around on Twitter.

mathowie: Yo dawg, I heard you like referential jokes, so I put a referential joke in your referential joke. Alright, we can stop here.

jessamyn: Is that still funny?

mathowie: No. I don't think so, to anyone.

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: I wanted to mention a couple other things on other parts of the site. There was a Music Talk thread.

jessamyn: There aren't any other parts of the site. Ohh.

cortex: Shut up! Music totally exists.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Have you picked some songs for us to listen to? Have you listened to a single song this month?

cortex: I've been write-only this month. I recorded something like seven or eight songs--

mathowie: Have you been arguing about gear?

cortex: --on my iPhone, because the laptop was broken, and so I couldn't record things properly. And so that was fun, but in the meantime I haven't listened to other people's stuff, so I really need to get caught up, so.

mathowie: Wait, all those covers you did were on an iPhone?

cortex: Yeah, yeah.

mathowie: Like, no multi-track?

jessamyn: They're pretty good for on an iPhone.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: No, it was just nice little four-track software that does a four-channel multi-track thing like an old tape four-track machine.

mathowie: Wow.

cortex: And it's really, the songs are all really sort of rough-sounding because I totally blow out the mic because there's no gain control on the iPhone, you can't turn the microphone gain down, so

when I play drums they just explode. Which actually sounds pretty cool, but it's hard to work with. But yeah.

mathowie: Do you know what this podcast is going to get? A whole lot of cortex covers from April.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: I specifically said he couldn't pick his own stuff!

cortex: I didn't! I didn't.

mathowie: I'm picking his own stuff.

jessamyn: Ohhhhh!

cortex: I wash my hands of it. Anyway, this Music Talk thread was what I wanted to mention.

jessamyn: The glass ceiling!

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: The Music Talk is about people talking about how they do songwriting and recording and whatnot, and a bunch of us just sort of like--

jessamyn: Oh, cool!

cortex: --went on for a few paragraphs each talking about different aspects of how the whole songwriting and producing process works personally.

jessamyn: Ooh.

cortex: Yeah, it turned into a really nice discussion. And it was just sort of an off-the-cuff thread that MajorDundee posted, and since nobody ever looks at Music Talk, I thought I should give it some attention on the podcast.

jessamyn: I take back everything I said.

cortex: So it's a really nice thread. And it's a fun read, if you're curious how people do music.

jessamyn: And it has some of my favorite MetaTalk musicians in it.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: Or my favorite MeFi Musicians.

mathowie: Awesome! I think that's podcast 51.

cortex: Oh, also, one quick plug.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: (sound of exasperation)

cortex: The--I'm sorry, there was so much stuff this last month! But--

mathowie: Podcast 51 was brought to you by This Last Thing.

cortex: (laughs) The Interactive Fiction Contest.

jessamyn: Brought to you by Oh, And One More Thing.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: The whole interactive fiction write or play a text adventure thing is going on. I think I just sidebarred this today too, but if you want you can write a silly little

game, and other people will play it! Or you can go play the silly little games that other people have liked, so if you enjoyed Zork back in the day, you should definitely check this out, because it'll be fun. And it was fun last year.

mathowie: Online at brandonblatcher.com/meficommunity/metafict/.

cortex: (chuckles) Right. I didn't pick the URL, I just plug it. (chuckles) Anyway.

mathowie: Alright!

jessamyn: Okay, team!

mathowie: Until next month.

sfx: (Music: La Isla Bonita (cover) by cortex)

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sfx: (Music: La Isla Bonita (cover) by cortex, end)

Credits

• beryllium, 146 segments
• Pronoiac, 1