Podcast 54 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 54: "The Ballad of Hardcore Taters" (2010-08-31).

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

Transcript

jingle: (theme music)

cortex: This is podcast episode 54.

jessamyn: Our last podcast was sometime in the end of July. We've got a whole month of website stuff to talk about.

mathowie: Yep. (stifled laughter)

cortex: Hey, you know we -

mathowie: Guh.

Go.

jessamyn: Reh! Ruh.

cortex: IRL is probably the first thing?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: It's great!

mathowie: Yeah, it's working out. We launched an events website called IRL, In Real Life, irl.metafilter.com. I have heard that it's slightly confusing in the nav to have IRL, because that's not really descriptive, but I don't know if the word Events would help, but... it's actually working out exactly as I envisioned it. It's pretty cool. I don't know... should we, we should probably try and come up with our favorite events happening in the next month for each podcast just like the other subsites.

cortex: It's not a bad idea.

mathowie: There are meetups galore, performances, people are on tour, people are doing...

jessamyn: And you were just talking about your own dog food.

mathowie: Yeah, and I have some goofy art shows I'll probably go to, and...

jessamyn: I had a very successful beach meetup in the last month using IRL. It worked out really well.

mathowie: What did you guys call it, BeachUp?

jessamyn: No, it isn't.

mathowie: Oh. (laughs)

cortex: You were incorrect!

jessamyn: No!

mathowie: Lake Washington! Oh, I just missed that, I was in Seattle.

jessamyn: What?

mathowie: They had a meetup on a lake in a boat.

cortex: Nice.

jessamyn: Oh! You know, they do the Lake Washington meetups occasionally, y2karl has always had the kayak canoe rental meetups.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: That are summertime, and they're usually pretty fun. I don't think I've ever been to one before, but I've canoed on Lake Washington before, and it is great!

mathowie: I was up there but I wasn't quite that far north in Seattle, so I couldn't even wave at them.

(pause) Everything is a lake there. I always think of it as the ocean, but it's not.

jessamyn: Well, there's the bay and the lake and the other lake, basically.

mathowie: Is the bay considered the ocean, or do they always... Bainbridge Island and all that, is that on the ocean, or is that on the...?

jessamyn: No. No, it's the sound.

mathowie: Ehh.

jessamyn: I mean, on the other sides of the islands is basically where the ocean is. But you can, there's the whole peninsula between the Seattle area and the ocean area.

mathowie: So IRL's working out with a billion things in New York as we thought it would play out.

cortex: Yeah, and there's nothing important so far. I mean--

mathowie: What?!

jessamyn: What?!

cortex: --there have been a couple people who went by. But there's been no, like, action in Portland. I feel like I need to finally start another band just so I can [??].

mathowie: There was a band show and two meetups. So that worked.

cortex: I didn't mean literally nothing. No, I'm excited.

jessamyn: Oh, you only meant sort-of nothing as opposed to the actual nothing that we have in Vermont?

cortex: By comparison to the just-recently-mentioned NYC... Well, yeah, but it's Vermont, no one's expecting anything, so.

jessamyn: (muffled noises of protest)

mathowie: Oh, and if you don't live in like New York City you can follow the RSS feed for an entire state, is probably your best bet to find things that are within a few hundred miles or something of...

jessamyn: Oh, I saw that! pb's been... pb's still... it's a work in process, and pb has been tinkering with it.

mathowie: A lot of people are wondering about discovery, "I don't want to miss anything that's nearby, I'm wiling to drive three hours," so it's like, "Well, follow the state! Follow the three states around you here in the middle of nowhere. Or follow your entire country, if you're in,

not in America, since most of them are in America." But yeah.

jessamyn: [??]

mathowie: (laughs) There's feeds for everything, so it's kind of cool. Like, if you're in Oakland and you don't want to miss San Francisco things you could just follow California and ignore the L.A. stuff, and, you know. There's ways.

jessamyn: Well, and I think it's great, too, because people can get as much as they want on their RSS, but the site itself, you can still at a glance kind of eyeball it and figure out what you want at the same time.

mathowie: Yeah. Oh, we do have, if you've stored your location, upcoming events within a hundred miles of you showing up.

jessamyn: And that's the thing pb was adjustimicating, right?

mathowie: Yeah...

jessamyn: Like, maybe 100 miles is like, eh, not that far.

mathowie: Yeah, we were going to make it 200, or we were gonna... oh, but we were trying to attach that to your people near you on the user profile page, so there's just one proximity adjuster.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: But then (chuckles) we grabbed a Manhattan person, and a hundred miles, they had 800 people near them including people like in Albany and stuff that they don't even

care about...

jessamyn: They might care about people in Albany!

mathowie: (laughs) No, they don't, clearly.

jessamyn: Haters gotta hate.

mathowie: Exactly. Okay. IRL is done, launched, go, it's fun, it's great [for traveling ?].

jessamyn: And people seem to mostly like it, and if you've got a gig or a thing that you're gonna be at or you want to meet other MeFites, go to IRL and try it out, let us know what you think. There's some ongoing discussion in MetaTalk.

mathowie: Oh, and we fully incorporated it in into MetaTalk, so all the proposed meetups...

jessamyn: Are on the sidebar.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And the picture thing works now, too--

mathowie: Yep!

jessamyn: So if you take pictures of the meetup they show up on the MetaTalk sidebar.

mathowie: Yep, yep, yep.

jessamyn: So great. You guys did a great job on that.

cortex: Seriously.

mathowie: [Which is ?] good. And it sorta works in iCal... in gCal, there's a whole bunch of little bugs we had to fix. I think those work. So you can add...

jessamyn: Did the time stuff get all sorted?

mathowie: Yeah. We make you select your time zone, I think, when you...

jessamyn: Oh, that's right, that's right, that's right.

mathowie: So we don't have to figure out on the fly where you're located and what crazy four hundred time zones you're in, you just tell us. You have to select from a dropdown of four hundred crazy time zones, and then...

jessamyn: But only once.

mathowie: Yeah. And then we--

jessamyn: Or if, like me, whenever you go somewhere.

mathowie: Yeah. Because the day we launched it, people were like, "Oh, that Saturday meetup shows up as Sunday night or Friday morning because I'm..."

jessamyn: Or like it already happened, or whatever, yeah.

mathowie: Yeah, right, yeah. And we're like, "Oh, sorry, stupid time zone bug." And actually Google was ignoring

a specification, and they weren't supposed to do that. Wasn't our problem. But we fixed it.

jessamyn: Well, it wasn't your fault.

mathowie: Fault, that's what I meant.

jessamyn: But it was your responsibility.

mathowie: It's our problem. Yes.

Oh, why don't we try Jobs and Projects?

jessamyn: Jobs was plugging along like Jobs is always plugging along, and--

mathowie: Oh, right, yeah! Should I announce new Jobs stuff? I should just announce new Jobs stuff.

jessamyn: Just mention that it's something we're slow-motion working on.

mathowie: Probably in the next--

jessamyn: And by 'we' I mean you guys.

mathowie: (chuckles) In the next week or two we'll probably be adding, I don't know what we're going to call it yet, Talent?

jessamyn: See, you always put those time things on it. Can't you just say like 'soon'?

mathowie: If I don't say 'two weeks', I'll have no reason to finish it in two weeks, so it'll take three weeks or four weeks when it should be...

jessamyn: I was thinking more like six months to a year.

mathowie: (chuckles) Exactly, that sometimes happens.

jessamyn: (snickers)

mathowie: So we're going to allow you to list your availability in a

categorized way, and you can specifically say what kind of jobs you're looking for, and we'll do our best to match up people looking for work with the current jobs by displaying them next to it, and yeah, so. And also...

jessamyn: And some little indicator on your profile page somehow.

mathowie: Yeah. And we'll also do a search, too. So if I'm looking for a Flash developer, you know, I should be able to search the word 'Flash' and figure out all the jobs available with the word 'Flash' in it and all the creative experts that are

available for work. So yeah. That's coming real soon now. My favorite job of the month was the weird--

jessamyn: Same as mine.

cortex: Yup.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: It's unanimous.

mathowie: I mean, Jobs has been around for several years, and it's only when something rises above the background noise of, here's a web job, here's a web job, here's a staff job. But here's...!: I want to be Tron Guy. I want to be Kif from Futurama.

jessamyn: Who is Kif from... well, why don't I just look up--

cortex: He's the green alien second to starship captain Zapp Brannigan. He goes--

jessamyn: Ohhh. Oh! I never knew his name before. Okay.

mathowie: Aughh. Is that his entire line?

cortex: Pretty much, yeah. And Zapp will be like, "Kif!" and he'll be like "Aughh," and then that's, yeah.

jessamyn: So does anybody else just when they see GTA think Grand Theft Auto exclusively?

mathowie: I always do.

cortex: Pretty much, yeah.

jessamyn: Okay.

mathowie: And then I had to go, "Ohh, Greater Toronto [tɵˈrɒntoʊ] Area," I think that's it?

jessamyn: Tronno [ˈtrɒnoʊ].

mathowie: What? I add [??]?

jessamyn: [??] the second 't.'

mathowie: To-ron-to [tɵˈrɒn.toʊ].

jessamyn: Trahn-no [ˈtrɒː.noʊ].

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Trahhh-nooo [ˈtrɒː.noʊ]!

mathowie: Maybe he wants to be the Toronto [tɵˈrɒntoʊ] Guy.

jessamyn: (laughs) You guys are the worst.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Projects! Projects!

cortex: I liked jontyjago [ˈdʒonti.dʒɒgoʊ] or jontyja [ˈjonti.ɒ]--I think we've talked before about how we don't know how to pronounce it.

jessamyn: Is this Singing While Driving?

cortex: Yes.

jessamyn: Yes!

cortex: That's not, I just pasted it wrong. But yes, Singing While Driving!

mathowie: Augh.

cortex: It's just such a perfect stupid little hyperfocused blog. "A blog devoted to scenes of singing in the car." And I liked the Ask Metafilter about it, it was one of those questions where people are like, "Oh, well, here's a bit of pop culture for you," and he sort of rounded that up and used it as a starting point to create a blog that's nothing but clips of people singing while driving in movies and TV shows.

cortex: And it's just kinda fantastic.

jessamyn: It's great!

mathowie: Oh my God! Three or four of these are my favorites! I could watch this Mos Def freestylin on the old ..

jessamyn: Oh! I remember that one!

mathowie: Hot Tub Time Machine car scene that's part of the entire movie.

jessamyn: I've totally forgotten that!

mathowie: This is great! I approved this. I must have done this on my cell phone and I didn't get to like try and ..

jessamyn: (Groans)

mathowie: .. try out the links.

cortex: I also liked this post from [user] JHarris, which is a sentence I probably say a lot. But uh..

mathowie: (Laughing)

cortex: He did a sort of epic write up for Gamasutra because he, you know, he writes about video game stuff a lot. And he wrote up an epic sort of write up about non-video gaming games in terms of kinda how that is relevant in a computer game concept. Which is ...

jessamyn: Is this where you work in Diplomacy?

mathowie: (Chuckles)

cortex: I don't know. I don't remember if he mentions that.

cortex: I think that Diplomacy was somehow a horrific .. ah ..

jessamyn and cortex: Oversight

cortex: ... in this case.

jessamyn: (Laughing)

cortex: But, you know, it's a fun collection of stuff and someone of it's very mainstream and some of it's more recent sort of German style board games. But it's good stuff.

jessamyn: And JHarris is a great writer, generally.

cortex: Yeah and so you really can't go wrong and this is kind of an epic pile of writing so he made a projects post and I think he was right to do so.

mathowie: Did you guys see the I'm-voting-Tea-Party parody shirts?

jessamyn: Yeah! Didn't? Was that the

jessamyn: person who asked about the Tea Party parody shirts in AskMetafilter?

mathowie: I don't know ...

jessamyn: Because somebody was asking for good slogans and other people were like, "Dude they are already a parody of themselves

mathowie: (Laughing)

jessamyn: They don't know.

mathowie: The other thing was .. let's see I'm going through recent questions. I don't see it. Oh! There it is! You are right! Holy crap!

jessamyn: Pow!

mathowie: Wow. From AskMetafilter to your chest!

jessamyn: Uh-uh-uh!

mathowie: I would never wear.. this is one of those things that are so funny but I would never go out in public

mathowie: with saying things that like blah, blah, blah Hitler on my shirt. I'm like, come on. But.

jessamyn: You're sort of asking for trouble, yes.

mathowie: The first one is funny-ish and ironic and not -- nobody would take you seriously: "Obama won't teach my kids that the earth is flat that's why I'm voting Tea Party" That's pretty non-scary.

jessamyn: Not nuking Canada, that's kinda funny.

mathowie: Yeah.

Yeah, [that's kind of the point. ?]

jessamyn: But yeah, they do look good and it's a neat idea.

mathowie: Yeah. I just would not want to be cornered with an actual Tea Party follower while wearing it.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Agreed.

cortex: It'd be a weird situation.

mathowie: Oh, I guess Put This On came out, that was great. The new Put This On episode is really good, about getting dressed for work.

jessamyn: Yeah, I was sort of wondering about that. Does this podcast come out rarely enough--

mathowie: Rare.

jessamyn: --that it's like "we finished an episode" is...?

mathowie: Yeah. It's like three to four months of work before they put one out.

jessamyn: Alright.

mathowie: They're supposed to do six, and so

this is on number 3.

jessamyn: Alright!

mathowie: And it's pretty good.

jessamyn: Speaking of getting dressed, I enjoyed the No Baggage Challenge, which is basically, Justin Glow is the camera guy traveling with Rolf Potts around the world in six weeks, and he's doing it with no baggage.

mathowie: And so this is--

jessamyn: He's stuffing extra clothes into his pants pockets, and I don't even know the rest of it.

mathowie: This is like the most professional looking

Projects site in eons.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: Is this like on the BBC or something, or is this really just a little website doing this?

jessamyn: Uhhh...

mathowie: BootsnAll is a sponsor, which is kind of like a travel website or something...

jessamyn: Justin designed the website.

mathowie: Yeah. But it looks like well... I mean, you can just tell by looking at it, it looks well-funded, right? Like, it looks like a thing, like a real...

jessamyn: Yeah, BootsnAll is funding it, and he explained it, there's somebody else chipping in. If you go to the About page it explains it

a little bit more.

mathowie: So what do they mean by 'no bag--' Like, do you need a backpack with... or you just wear--

jessamyn: No, you get nothing. He gets noth--

mathowie: The clothes--

jessamyn: He gets what he can carry in his pants.

mathowie: Oh, I see, it's sponsored by some travel clothing, so.

jessamyn: Right. They make a travel vest or something.

mathowie: Ohh! That's that company that makes that crazy stuff. They have a jacket with like 75 hidden pockets.

jessamyn: Yeah. And all these hidden pants and stuff like that that are hidden--

mathowie: Tactical pants, they're called. (laughs)

jessamyn: Yeah. And basically he's wearing a bunch of stuff, it's all stuff that you can wash, and it's funny that of all the things that's he's bringing and keeping in his pockets, like he's packing deodorant and laundry soap... like, he's packing a bunch of stuff that I think I would probably buy on the road or whatever, but who knows, who knows. Camera... passport...

mathowie: The photo of what's in his pants is like, you're like...

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: No way is that possible.

jessamyn: I've just put that link there.

mathowie: Yeah, like, "What? That's not possible!" (pause) But yeah, those pants have all sorts of hidden things. It must be a pain in the butt to go through security, but... hmm. That's pretty [fun ?].

jessamyn: Yeah, but I like the idea, the website looks amazing, and it looks like it's going to be a fun project for Justin, so awesome.

mathowie: What do you wear while doing laundry if you can't have a second pair of clothes? (chuckles)

jessamyn: I think you just wear your boxer shorts? And then you wash your boxer shorts in the sun... I mean, because what you do is you wash all your stuff in the sink the night before--

mathowie: Ohh.

jessamyn: --in the hotel and hang it out to dry.

mathowie: Oh, that's right, it's all nylon... yeah. Okay, that makes sense.

jessamyn: My other Project that I really liked, just because I've been following this Project and mentioning it every time it comes up, is MrMoonPie's wife...

cortex: Oh yeah, eviltiff.

jessamyn: eviltiff.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Has been also doing gay and straight marriages in DC and got the completely terrific URL marriagedc.com

and has now just set up her own small blog about what she does.

mathowie: Oh, sweet.

jessamyn: And it's a great website and they're doing good works and I was just psyched for her. And I think they... I think Ask Metafilter helped her.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Find that name or set up the blog or I don't remember exactly what the thing was.

mathowie: I think at the very beginning it was like, "How can I help when this marriage law goes down?" like a year or two ago, and then people told them where to meet and marry people and then it happened.

Right?

jessamyn: Yeah! Yeah. "MrsMoonPie wants to gay marry you, too! But, she needs a website, first." That was the Ask Metafilter question.

mathowie: Oh, I was thinking of something from like two years ago when this was first, like, [??].

jessamyn: Well, that may have been MrMoonPie's getting started and now they're sort of both on it. But it's nice!

mathowie: Sweet!

jessamyn: I mean, it's an awesome thing they're doing, it's a great way to make a little money, and it seems that everybody's kind of cheery about the whole thing.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Good on 'em.

mathowie: Celebrating love and...

jessamyn: Happy people in love.

mathowie: What would you call it? Freedom of marriage? Marriage freedom?

jessamyn: Marriage equality.

mathowie: Marriage equality. I like 'freedom'. Sounds more Ron Paul-y.

jessamyn: There's nothing freeing about marriage, as you know.

mathowie: Ha-ha, zing!

cortex: Hoyohhh! Ohh.

mathowie: Take my wife, please!

jessamyn and cortex: (chuckle)

cortex: I'm going to be predictable and point out something I did because it was a weird thing and I enjoyed it.

jessamyn: (snickers) Ohhh! Self-link.

mathowie: Dude.

cortex: It's been a crazy Music month, and yeah, so I did a project--

jessamyn: We were already going to talk about you later!

cortex: Well, I'll be brief.

mathowie: cortex bingo, man, wow.

cortex: Well, I just thought this was...

jessamyn: "I'll be brief." Alright.

cortex: Anyway, I wrote a little bit of code that uses the Echo Nest library that I've been playing with in the last couple months--

jessamyn: The what?

cortex: --and what it does is... it's Echo Nest, they're a company that does a bunch of crazy music processing--

jessamyn: What's that noise the little alien makes?

cortex: (sighs)

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Anyway, I've been using some code they wrote--

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: --and I wrote a little bit of my own code, so you take a song, and you throw it through this code, and it tries to make it monotone, it tries to basically keep it

all in the same key.

jessamyn: Doesn't that just mean it's a beep?

cortex: No no no, I mean, it's more complicated than that. It has sort of weird surprising results. But I kind of liked what came out of it, so I made a little Project post.

jessamyn: I'm going to go listen.

cortex: It kind of makes music boring, but in an interesting way.

mathowie: Is that the thing you've been doing all the cut-ups with, all the...

cortex: Yeah, yeah. It's the same thing I used for the Nine Inch Niles stuff. But different parts [of it ?].

mathowie: Can you slow down a Bieber song with it?

cortex: You could in theory, although it's not as good of a tool as the other stuff, which we'll talk about later, I'm sure. Anyway, I just thought

it makes for some amusing weirdness of familiar music, so I thought that would...

jessamyn: You and not_on_display should get together and share your weird music that doesn't really sound like music to anybody except music geeks music?

cortex: Probably. And idiopath, and there's a couple other people on Music who would be a good part of that cabal.

mathowie: Yeah. You should have a non-concert.

cortex: Well, it's funny, because I'm not usually into this stuff so much. I mean, the closest I've come to this sort of manipulation is--

jessamyn: I think of you as, yeah.

cortex: Is more like, I like mashup stuff, I like Girl Talk, but I don't usually do a whole lot of

music destruction stuff. But lately I've been having a good time playing with stuff. It's just made it really easy to dig into it, I think, is what's kind of cool about the Echo Nest remix stuff. Anyway, that's all.

mathowie: Wow, I just got invited to the Kiwanis [kəˈwɔniz] Club.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Kiwanis [kəˈwɑnɛs]. Kiwanis [kəˈwɑnɛs].

mathowie: Oh, is that what it is?

jessamyn: Aughh.

mathowie: I can never tell if those things are part of an RV club...

jessamyn: You're like one of those people who's all reading and no talking. Kiwanis [kəˈwɑnɛs]!

mathowie: (chuckles) Yeah, I'm already... I've never had to tell someone else about a goofy club. Because I was in that newspaper. It's like the local town... what is it again? Kiwanis [kəˈwɑniz]?

jessamyn: Kiwanis [kəˈwɑnɛs]!

mathowie: Kiwanis [kəˈwɑnɛs]. There's Elk Lodges and what's those weird guys with the secret society thing? Masons? Like... Kiwani [kəˈwɔni]... Kiwanis [kəˈwɔnɛs]?

jessamyn: Odd Fellows?

mathowie: Yeah. I don't know the difference between all those groups, but some old guy was asking me to join their secret businessmen club.

jessamyn: They're cool! I mean, they get a lot of stuff done. It just sort of depends

what you're into: some of them are more or less religious, some of them are more or less Republican, some of them are more or less whatever. They're neat though, service organizations, generally speaking.

mathowie: Oh. Service. I don't like the sound of that.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: I have to do something? Help people? Screw that.

jessamyn: Let's see. They "cooperate in creating and maintaining that sound public opinion and high idealism which make possible the increase of righteousness--"

mathowie: Augh.

jessamyn: "--justice, patriotism, and goodwill."

mathowie: I hate [it ?].

jessamyn: Come on, you like justice!

mathowie: I hate patriotism.

jessamyn: Ohhh.

cortex: As a Metafilter moderator, there's nothing that I could want more of in the world than extra righteousness.

jessamyn: And great justice.

mathowie: Great justice... with great justice comes great moderation?

cortex: Move every zig.

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: I was at a game store the other day and I'm buying a board game and the board game started to fall off the counter because the guy had set it down in the wrong spot on a slant, and I was like, "Oh my God, it's getting away!" and he was like "Run away, run away!" and

it was like, I am standing there in a hobby store and a guy just made a Monty Python joke.

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: It was a perfect moment, that's all. End of story.

mathowie: And then the conversation turned to, "Man, remember when we had sex eight years ago?"

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Awesome. Sorry.

jessamyn: Josh is like, "No, sorry, dude, I'm married."

mathowie: (chuckles) (beat) No marriage joke? Come on.

cortex: Hoyohhh!

mathowie: Yeah. Okay.

jessamyn: Josh likes being married.

cortex: I do. I enjoy being married very much. I occasionally yell at people about stupid marriage jokes, just because it gets tiring.

mathowie: Mm.

jessamyn: I've seen him do it.

mathowie: I have not.

We'll be back right after this break.

sfx: (Music: Landfall by ianK)

cortex: (musically) Bah-doo-be-doo-guh-gee da-doh-ba-goh-do-ba-geuh-ga dih-dih dih-dih-dih-dih, flum!

jessamyn: (also musically, overlapping cortex) Bum-bum-bum-bum, bum bum bum! Bum-bum-bum bum!

mathowie: We're back with Metafilter. Oh, Josh, did you have anything to say about Music? We haven't talked about Music in a while.

cortex: I actually, there was a bunch of music posted I liked. I've been trying to get more caught up--

jessamyn: (announcer voice) And now, Josh's Music Corner!

cortex: Okay, well! Ba-duh-duh duh-duh, ba-duh-dooo, dooo!

jessamyn: (beatboxes as underscoring)

cortex: Okay, Music Corner #1--

mathowie: Or challenges? Anything fun with the challenge?

cortex: I'... ll... I'll try to get caught up on that.

jessamyn: That's a loaded question, Matt.

cortex: Yeah, a post from eyeballkid.

jessamyn: Hey!

cortex: Flash from the past, and the only two people who have commented on it so far are me and jessamyn, who are both just sort of...

mathowie: He makes songs? I didn't know he made songs.

cortex: Well, this was... it was a cutup of some audio of Dave Winer back in 2004--

mathowie: What?

jessamyn: You know Dave Winer.

cortex: --talking about shutting down weblogs.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Anyway, he took the audio from that and used that to create an entry in a contest that waxy threw. Basically, you know, so yeah, this is from 2004, and it's Dave Winer set against

music and cut up and it's really just kind of amusing, so that's thing number 1.

Thing number 2, ianK has been posting some nice stuff to Music. He just posted something called Landfall like a week and a half ago or something like that I really like, and it's like one of three sort of in the same general feel. It's just really pretty, really lo-fi, simple voice and guitar recordings with a sort of charming

simplicity to them. So I really liked that, that was a very pretty song.

peterkins has been posting a bunch of great shit, and one of the things he posted was this thing called In the Orchard which was him fucking around with a couple... well, fucking around with a double bass, I think. But there's some crazy textual stuff--

jessamyn: To practice.

cortex: --and big, deep--

jessamyn: Ooh!

cortex: --bass sounds. And it's just really kind of neat, sort of abstract thing.

jessamyn: That's great.

mathowie: That reminds me of - what's that? - java island stuff with with the bells?

jessamyn: Cuban throat singing?

mathowie: (Laughing) No.

jessamyn: Gamelan?

mathowie: Yes! I love that stuff.

jessamyn: HA! HA! [??]

mathowie: HA! HA! Which is like just low tones. It's so good.

cortex: There's also the song from dacre? Day-Cra? I have no idea how their user name is spelled. But anyway, it's a cover of ..

jessamyn: Dock-cree?

cortex: "Listen To Your Heart" by Roxette but done in a total genre shift and I thought it was amusing as hell. So...

mathowie: Roxette! I haven't even heard

that word in twenty years.

cortex: [Laughing]

jessamyn: What? Roxette?

mathowie: Yeah ... (in a far away voice) .. I forgot .. she .. existed..)

cortex: That was real (snark)

jessamyn: Was that a band?

mathowie: What?

jessamyn: [Cracks up]

mathowie: Sorry. Music was rockin' over you.

jessamyn: Oh. I just thought Roxette was a band and not a lady.

mathowie: Oh. Wasn't there like a chick with hair up in the ..?

jessamyn: And there's the other dude in the band.

mathowie: Oh. Okay. That's like Paula Abdul and all that stuff.

jessamyn: She's a lady.

mathowie: Yes.

jessamyn: Not a band.

mathowie: I remember Roxette! OH! What was their big dumb song?

jessamyn: "You've Got The Look" ?

mathowie: Yes. Ugh. God I hate that thing.

cortex and mathowie: [Laughing]

cortex: It was classic, though.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: On the music talk-front there is a nice little thread that MajorDundee the other day sort of saying, "Hey, what's sort of stuff, what sort of mementos and icons and talismans do you sort of keep around with you. In your music making space or with your instrument, you know? And I basically could not come up with anything except for like

there's a bunch of shit on one of my guitars, but people were just talking about different mementos and stuff.

jessamyn: Oh my God! [user] man vs sun's rejection from the Yale Music School hangs on his wall.

cortex: [Laughing]

jessamyn: I love it! I love it!

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: [Laughing] I didn't know what the word talisman meant until you just said that.

cortex: Really?

jessamyn: Have you ever heard it spoken out loud?

mathowie: No. Obviously.

jessamyn: It's like, you know, the Talismanian Devil?

Everyone: [Laughing]

mathowie: Okay. Now you are just fuckin' with me.

jessamyn: [Guffaw] Maybe. Am I ....?

mathowie: A rejection letter from Yale School of Music? That's awesome! Dude, it's framed!

cortex: I think you should get closure on that by sending them a rejection album.

mathowie: Yes!

jessamyn: You know, my Dad has the rejection letter that he got from Digital Equipment Corporation? In the 1970's? When they said, "No thank you. You do not have enough computer experience to work for us." ?

cortex and mathowie: [Laughing]

mathowie: Oh my God. This might play right into that book? That famous ..?

jessamyn: Yes! Yes. And then be became briefly famous several years later.

mathowie: Wow.

jessamyn: So he keeps that letter around.

mathowie: Dude, that should be on ... like take a photo of that for flickr. Like your DFW thing.

jessamyn: Oh! That's a good idea. I should do that!

mathowie: It's a relic that should be digitized ..

jessamyn: And preserved.

mathowie: Yes.

jessamyn: So that a whole bunch of nerds can talk about it on a blog and make fun of me? What's what happened with the DFW letter.

mathowie: What? They made fun..? What are you talking about?

jessamyn: People were like, So what! She's just, you know ... this is a letter saying she's average. I'm like that's okay.

cortex: Yeah that was weird .. that's like one of those things that is awesome to have

that, but I am not sure i'd ever want that to be something for public discussion because it's too ..

mathowie: I just thought ..

cortex: .. It's going to be too many people taking some specific DFW thing or some celebrity or anti-celebrity thing and just throwing it at this thing. And it's like, "Ugh." It's like newspaper comments.

mathowie: That was at some other site?

jessamyn: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

mathowie: Yeah cause it's like everyone on flickr loved it. And favorited the hell out of it.

jessamyn: People on flickr did like it and that was totally fun. And then somebody, you know, linked it. Hot linked it without asking. And then I told then to take it down.

And then they did. But then they asked if they could put it up and I said yes, and ... By then people were like, "RAWR!" and you know. Just internet jerks.

cortex: People are so like, "RAWR".

jessamyn: "RAWR!" And then they were like, "RAWR! RAWR!" And I was like, "BRABRAHBAH!" And it just ... you know.

cortex: Yeah. But that's neat. I thought it was neat when I saw it, so.

jessamyn: I thought it was neat.

cortex: That's cool. I just wanted you to know. It's neat.

jessamyn: [Happy Chuckle] Thanks, Josh!

mathowie: A refusal letter from Digital is hilarious.

jessamyn: I thought it was pretty funny. I'll go dig it up somewhere. I think it's at my Mom's house.

So that may be tricky.

mathowie: All right! We done with Music? [Long pause]

cortex: Yeah. I think so.

jessamyn: Thanks for your report!

cortex: You're welcome. [Josh and Jessamyn mimic outro music]

mathowie: Can we come back after a break? I really do need to take a leak.

cortex: [Laughing]

jingle: "In the Orchard" by user peterkins

jingle: "In The Orchard" by user peterkins

mathowie: And we're back!

jessamyn: Hey!

mathowie: Best of Metafilter?

jessamyn: Sure!

mathowie: Alright.

jessamyn: Metafilter was great! Metafilter's been kinda great despite being somewhat bumpy ... ah ..

mathowie: [Laughing]

jessamyn: It's generally sorta great.

cortex: It was the best of months, it was the worst of months.

mathowie: I saw .. I saw other blogs going, "Why is August so crazy?" Like, I think it is just August. Between heatwaves and time-off ...

jessamyn: Well it's because people are on vacation.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: The weather's terrible.

mathowie: Some people aren't on vacation. Pissed off about it i would guess.

jessamyn: Back to school so parents are going a little crazy. people have guests. They have house guests because people are on vacation.

mathowie: Oooh. God. Yeah.

jessamyn: You know. It happens. Hey! That was gonna be my ....

mathowie: What? The best magazines ever?

jessamyn: Yeah. You know, I hate almost every list. You know.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: "Top (blank)_____ Ever" except for, basically, this one.

mathowie: Well because it is Kevin Kelly doing it on one thing. And it's actually really good. And the other thing is ..

jessamyn: And it's all

on one fucking page! One page!

mathowie: And the best thing to do is to - If you like to read stuff on your iphone or ipad. I like to read them on my iphone when I am bored. Load up instapaper, the little caching app that strips all junk out and just grabs the text? And basically pull up this Best Magazine Ever and I've added like fifteen long form articles to it. And then like a week later, I was sitting in a jetblue terminal for like

whatever in an aeroplane terminal for like two hours or three hours early. Some car or taxi dropped me off way early and I basically read like ten or fifteen of the best articles and I felt so knowledgeable and happy and ....

jessamyn: Well it's just one of the things that makes them the Best Articles is that they're a little timeless?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: They're not just like, "The Latest Wrinkle in the most recent bullshit".

cortex: [Chuckles]

mathowie: Yeah. Amazing story from 1992 that's still amazing!

jessamyn: Yeah. I mean this

Neal Stephenson article from ninety-six [1996] about trans-oceanic fiber optic cable? I remember reading that when it came out. It was amazing! I'd probably like reading it again. Jon Krakauer's Christopher McCandliss article that turned into the book that became the "Into The Wild" movie?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: I mean it's really -- and Kevin Kelly's just got good taste - and this is just great. Really really great. And there's some good discussion in the thread with the people being like here's some other stuff and blaher-de-blaher-de-blaher.

cortex: It's one of those things I see as like a good potential resource

for me? But I don't have as much of that nostalgia because my magazine reading historically was pretty much Nintendo Power.

jessamyn: [Laughing]

cortex: Amiga World.

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: And then .. ah .. you know. The sidebar columns in Harper's. I was not much of a periodical subscriber.

jessamyn: Some of this was in Harper's. Although ...

cortex: Well, yeah, and that one seems like it might do. I mean, probably not a whole lot reprinted from Amiga World.

mathowie: Some of these are cool in that, I was just scanning the list and going, like, Michael Pollan, I didn't know he wrote about blank like eight years ago! I'll read that.

jessamyn: Sure. Sure.

mathowie: So fine writers you already like doing stuff you never even thought about.

jessamyn: Well, and especially people who have written books you like may have gotten their start writing longer essay-type pieces for whatever, and sometimes the essays--dare I say it?--are better? Like, a Malcolm Gladwell essay in the New Yorker is so much head-and-shoulders better than any of his books.

mathowie: Yeah, he just [??].

jessamyn: Because it's like the one idea and the best supporting stuff around it, not

just like, "And another thing! And...". It doesn't have that filler aspect to it.

mathowie: Yeah. Yep. Sweet.

jessamyn: Sweet!

mathowie: It's like every sci-fi movie based on a very short story is, I always find the very short stories are so much better than the movie. Some sci-fi movies can be broken into little couple-thousand word essays and they're just so...

jessamyn: Well, and sci-fi a lot of times it's like horror, where it benefits from the unknown aspect of it that you make up in your own head.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: And so the less detail sometimes the better, rather than "He has a space suit. It looks like this! This is what the air lock looks like. Oh! Look at the alien! It's frightening! But not as frightening as it was in my mind," kind of thing.

mathowie: (chuckles) Oh my God, why didn't I... I'm looking through my favorites and...

jessamyn: Josh, do you want to talk about this Epic Coaster?

cortex: Sure! It won't take very long. It's a fun little Flash game where you are playing

a rollercoster, making jumps. And it's, as is referenced frequently in the thread, it's very reminiscent of the game Canabalt, which was a--

jessamyn: Have never heard of.

cortex: Yeah, but you might have seen it. You should just click through real quick and--

jessamyn: I am, I am.

cortex: Because yeah, it's a--

jessamyn: Oh, right! I got totally stuck playing that for like 45 minutes the last two weeks.

cortex: Yeah. So Epic Coaster, I'd like to think of Epic Coaster as sort of like the Nintendo version, you know, it's a little bit prettier and friendlier and not really quite so hard. But it's the same general

mechanic, and it's got the same sort of suck-you-in sort of feeling to it. I found it a little bit underwhelming because I played the shit out of Canabalt and got pretty good at some of the last-minute dodging stuff that you need to do with that, and it doesn't come up so much in Coaster, so you kind of feel like you're always waiting for the challenging part to happen and then it never quite does, but for people who found Canabalt just absolutely fucking frustrating, Epic Coaster might be perfect, so. Anyway, I liked it.

jessamyn: Great!

cortex: That was my only pop-out favorite thread on the blue. Well, aside from the ridiculous Steven Slater stuff, but that's--

jessamyn: Which we'll get to in a minute.

cortex: (chuckle) Yeah. But yeah, that's all I got. That's all I got for the blue this month.

jessamyn: I enjoyed the video about wanting to sleep with Ray Bradbury--

cortex: (chuckle)

jessamyn: --because it had a lot of good book allegories. And because it was one of those things which was sexy while at the same time not having a bunch of crazy pile-on hurf durfery in the thread, it was just people were like, "Yeah, I'm really into Ray Bradbury.

Yeah, that girl's pretty and she's singing a song about having sex with him."

mathowie: (chuckle)

jessamyn: "Awesome!" And it just, I don't know. It dodged all the potential pitfalls and became a fun thread about a fun video.

mathowie: I thought it was hilarious! I saw that the other day.

jessamyn: Oh, and! You guys may not have seen this yet. You know the Chilean miners, yadda yadda yadda--

mathowie: Oh, yeah, the miners.

jessamyn: So the Chilean miners, it's horrifying, they're stuck underground, they're gonna be stuck underground for forty days or something like that,

and there's some discussion about it. But, what you may not have known is that Metafilter user...

mathowie: twirlypen?

jessamyn: twirlypen! I get twirlypen and twirlip confused. Actually works in an underground gold mine, as a member of a mine rescue team, and so has been showing up in the thread with good information about mine rescues that really is fascinating. I mean, he's only made a couple--I think he's a he--a couple comments. But they're really interesting, and I

sidebarred one of them and it got a million zillion favorites.

mathowie: Oh yeah, it says he's a geology student, and he is a he.

jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

mathowie: So it's actually... I was like, "What are the chances? Come on."

jessamyn: Totally, totally.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: But I thought that was great, and everybody should read it, and the mine... I mean, I get the fidgets just even thinking about that kind of stuff, but one of the things twirlypen keeps saying over and over again, he's like, "These people do this for a job. Being stuck in a dark, enclosed space isn't the issue."

For them, you know. Like, you'd be thinking, "Aughhh! I'm stuck in a box!" But that's not their issue. They have other issues, but that's not one of them.

mathowie: What would that be like? Stuck in your home office would still suck.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: (chuckling) For a month. For four months. Yeah, wigged out by miners.

jessamyn: Four months with 20 other dudes!

mathowie: I know.

jessamyn: That's the worst part.

mathowie: Well, somehow there's a hole that they can get food and water from or something? I mean, they're alive.

jessamyn: Yeah, there's a hole small enough for food, water, medicine, a couple of the guys

have medical conditions. And there's a rescue chamber, which is a thing that has light and air conditioning and whatever that you can hang out in. And then there's just these big open spaces, but they have to basically dig a tunnel that's 27 inches in diameter, and they send down one of the little elevators, and then you have to get pulled up one at a time.

mathowie: Have you ever seen Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days on mining, where he was a miner in

Virginia for like a month, it's the TV show--

jessamyn: Yeah, no, I find Morgan Spurlock's [??] kind of weird.

mathowie: I know. Yeah, it's a little, his show's a little weird. But it was one of, you know, he had this show on for two or three seasons, and he would do one of the episodes like, you know, the whole Super Size Me.

jessamyn: Sure.

mathowie: But the mining one's just rough. Like, I mean, I knew it was bad, but oh my... the whole 45 minutes going down a tube, like, with rocks right by your face and you're just sitting there and you're not speaking

and you're just going at one mile an hour down into the hole.

jessamyn: And it's wet, don't forget that it's wet.

mathowie: Yeah. And how black you come out, and then he goes out and gets a black lung test with everyone, and it's like a badge of courage for some of those dudes to be like, "Eh, I've had black lung for years, and I'll be okay, I'm okay," and it's weird. It's just... augh. Horrible. And then you think of what they did to the workers and the whole company towns and basically it was slavery.

jessamyn: And I wouldn't past tense any of that. Like, that stuff

still goes on.

mathowie: Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I mean, yes, people are not making tons of money mining, it's just something...

jessamyn: They're just not getting quite as murdered as they were before.

mathowie: Yeah. Yeah.

jessamyn: And, in other countries, I would assume it's worse? Though I don't know strictly.

mathowie: Yeah. Oh, this is in the, what, South America somewhere?

jessamyn: Chile.

mathowie: Chile. Alright, cool.

jessamyn: So! Steven Slater. Very interesting.

cortex: That whole goddamned mess.

jessamyn: We had a post--

cortex: I haven't seen any interesting updates in the last few days, either.

jessamyn: I haven't either.

cortex: I think it just totally, with a whimper, is how it went. But that's getting ahead of it, I guess.

jessamyn: But there was the thread, and there were the lyrics, and then there was the song, and Josh, I think I saw you on the news?

cortex: (chuckles) You may have, if you were watching CNN that evening. Well, you wouldn't have seen me, you would have heard me.

jessamyn: I in fact was. ColdChef called me on the phone to tell me to go turn on the television, so I logged onto to my dad's

Slingbox--

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: --just in time to hear you singing on Wolf Blitzer's Situation--

cortex: The Situation Room, yeah.

jessamyn: Well, to hear them playing your recording.

mathowie: Yeah. And there's a screenshot of the ridiculous music.metafilter[.com]/astrozombie, I don't know where they got that, but I made it a redirect after they put that on the TV.

cortex: (laughs) Yeah, that's like, they just made up a URL. "Well, I guess if you put these words together it'll go to the Internet!"

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: Which was, yeah, that was, I was...

jessamyn: Tubes!

cortex: I was stunned by that. So yeah. But yeah, it was...

jessamyn: But nice job. Nice job, Astro Zombie, nice job, cortex, nice job... the whole thread was actually pretty interesting to me.

cortex: Yeah, it was a really, I mean, aside from the music stuff, it was just one of those weird developing things, and you know, it's, I still feel so weird about the fact that we deleted the first post about it--

jessamyn: By 'we' you mean 'you'. You did.

cortex: I deleted the first post about it, because it was just like a total random post--

mathowie: Awww. Yeah.

cortex: And it was not really framed very well, and it was not established that this was even a thing that was even going to be talked about, and then that lead to a whole bunch of drama with that--

jessamyn: A user.

cortex: --user, and a time-out, and e-mail. And yeah, so...

jessamyn: Anger.

cortex: And that was happening in the background along with it becoming this web meme that won't go away, and all the other stuff that came out of it. So it was a really weird sort of dual thing.

mathowie: I don't think I piped up enough, but I was like, "No, no, this is a real amazing thing."

Like, this is a crazy, once in five years kind of story. Even though--

cortex: Well, yeah, but I still think it was fundamentally News of the Weird. It's News of the Weird that got played just right and the media just decided, "Okay, we got nothing else and we can run with this," and

mathowie: But there's something... it wasn't just News of the Weird, it was News of the Weird that was kind of awesome, like, I think of News of the Weird as just being like, some super--

jessamyn: "Person Returns Library Books 100 Years Later."

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Yeah. "Paraplegic Runs From Cops."

mathowie: Remember Lorena Bobbit?

jessamyn: Aaaaagh!

mathowie: You don't identify with anybody in that story, but dude's so pissed off at work that he grabs beer, deploys a slide, goes home, is so awesome.

jessamyn: - has sex with boyfriend. Is caught in the act.

mathowie: fuck yeah dot tumblr dot com.

cortex: There's been 22 songs now. I actually found another one the other day, that went up after.

mathowie: I was going to say, go to Youtube, and for some reason, just the words together -

"Ballad of Steven Slater", there's a billion versions now.

jessamyn: Which is great.

cortex: Yeah, no, there's like eight or nine different--

mathowie: All the same thing! They always call it Ballad of Steven Slater?

cortex: Well, not all of them. There's like seven or eight that people would use that name, and then there's like another dozen, dozen and a half that aren't. I like the retired flight attendant named Judy who does her rap, that one's pretty sweet.

mathowie: (chuckle)

cortex: It's very "My name is Judy and I'm here to say..."

mathowie: Oh.

cortex: But it's adorable. I don't know. It's just totally adorable.

jessamyn: Hey, Josh! You're just going robot.

cortex: Am I? Okay.

mathowie: What? You sound fine to me.

cortex: It's definitely very situational. (pause) I can unplug and plug back in.

jessamyn: No, you sound okay now.

cortex: Weird. Okay.

jessamyn: It could be me.

cortex: I think it's, yeah, it's something, I don't know what the deal is. It's definitely weird. I wish it didn't happen. It doesn't end up on the tape, so it's okay.

jessamyn: Good!

cortex: Yeah, so that all happened, that was crazy.

mathowie: Songs!

jessamyn: (whistle)

cortex: Huh? Yeah. This is actual folk music, you know, it's...

mathowie: I liked your music video featuring your camera that does not shoot video.

cortex: (laughs) Well, it was easy to do it that way, because that way I didn't stop-motion without any complicated, I could do it a lot faster. I mean, I spent the day doing it--

mathowie: (laughs) Plus, the lip-syncing is spot on.

cortex: Yeah. That was an idea that failed.

jessamyn: Hah.

cortex: But I didn't have anything else to do, I should have found something else to put there. I was thinking about doing a stop-motion on a toilet paper roll, like, right-align, roll a little bit, right-align, roll a little bit.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: That might have been better than me doing terrible lip-syncing.

jessamyn: It's funny seeing you doing terrible lip-syncing, though, because I'm used to you just singing.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: So I'm like, "What's that thing happening where Josh moves his mouth but the... what?"

cortex: (chuckles) Oh, and the other crazy Music post from this month was the Justin Bieber thing that turned into a--

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: A huge meme for a couple days.

jessamyn: As well as another flameout.

cortex: (chuckle)

mathowie: So in the end, was this, someone was telling me this was fake, that it wasn't actually that song, and then other people were like, "Well, I analyzed the waveforms and it actually is the song," but... like, sped up 800 times it doesn't sound, apparently, like the original.

cortex: Yeah, no, when you change the... the slowing down, especially, is interesting, because it really takes out the sense of... you know, a lot of how we process music is temporal and there's a lot of short-term memory involved in listening to the changes from chord to chord and following the melody, so when you slow that down so much, like one-eighth of the original speed,

a lot of our ability to track what's going on goes away even with familiar music. I mean, I made a stupid little music quiz thing on my blog that day because I thought it was interesting throwing really, really famous music into it, and... it's hard. It's hard to to even figure out. You have to notice some little thing that you somehow recognize, oh, if that was going eight times as fast, it'd be this. So it has a really sort of fascinating--in fact, yeah, the software they used to put it through, to do that to the Bieber thing and then everybody started using over the next couple days

as well, it's this stuff called PaulStretch that just does clever specific audio processing to slow it down without it turning into just horrible robot chunks. So it does a bunch of smoothing, so you get these really slow onset and fade out things on sound and they transition from one to another really smoothly. So yeah, I made a Music Talk post, actually, that day, so we could just talk about ideas and play it with it more--

mathowie: Because if you straight-up slow it down it just turns into robots (makes robot noises)...

cortex: Well, yeah, if you literally just straight-up slow it down you get...

jessamyn: Right, it's all like Sisters of Mercy.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: So you have to smooth it, so it's like (sings) waaaa!, like, so it's harmonic or something?

cortex: Yeah. So a piano sound, instead of going, "Dong!" you get more of (sings, in a drawn-out and alien manner) "wooong, moo!"

jessamyn: (sings in the manner of a singing bowl) "Wooon-oong!"

cortex: Yes. Yeah. So everything is very ethereal. But it's neat. It's fun to play with. And the software, especially on Windows but I guess on Mac too, it looks like, is really easy to use. You just literally download it and run it and

point it at an MP3--

jessamyn: Plug your thing in.

cortex: Yeah. So you can fiddle with it immediately. You can have an half an hour of ambient music by throwing a random pop song into it. [??] few days.

mathowie: So apparently it's been some sort of follow-up, Justin Bieber likes it, his record company won't sue the guy who did it.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: And the guy who did it is happy, and the other thing is, the guy who did it's Twitter page, which I just linked, hilariously has Sad Keanu made out of every follower. That was amazing.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Someone did this on flickr I mean with the metafilter profile page? They wrote, "I hate flickr" across six pictures that showed up like this ...

cortex: (laughs) That's brilliant, yeah. (laughs)

mathowie: Like in order and everything. Like Yes. I guess there's ...

jessamyn: Oh I am getting it. That's pretty .....

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: ... neat!

mathowie: Thirty six sad keynew ...

jessamyn: It's Keanu, Matt.

mathowie: Yeah, sorry.

jessamyn: I know you don't talk to that many people.

cortex: Laughing

mathowie: Laughing

mathowie: My favorites were like here's quick bam uh I don't know why I stored these as favorites (mumbling: Not Nick Cage is everyone) but the Robert Downey Jr in old 40's (1940's) pop pin up art. It's just ..

cortex: Oh God yeah.

jessamyn: This was like that one that was like Sunsets and Pie and .. what was that other one?

cortex: Uh like Spock and sunsets and unicorns

jessamyn: Rainbow Sunsets and Pie?

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Nick Cage is everyone. Oh right right right right

Yeah it's really more like Nick Cage is everyone than like that. But it's the same sort of feel of a blog

where it's like...

mathowie: Yeah. Wacky.

cortex: Yeah. Very, here's a specific idea, let's just run with it.

jessamyn: This is the one you picked, as opposed to the crazy... all right.

mathowie: No, I thought that one was hilarious too. There we go, Journey Through the Canyons is probably like the amazing, it's just like HD National Park porn, like just flying through canyons in boats...

cortex: Oh God, the Satriani argument.

mathowie: Oh, right, that's...

cortex: Aww, God.

jessamyn: Wasn't that in a completely different thread? That's a completely different thread! Shut up about that!

mathowie: No, yeah, that wasn't this. Yeah, something else.

cortex: Oh, I thought we were talking about the canyon fly-through thing, sorry.

jessamyn: Click the link!

mathowie: This is similar but not. It's a, I just hiked through a lot of these canyons and it was awesome.

jessamyn: RTF...

cortex: Oh, time-lapse and fly-through, I see.

jessamyn: ...A.

mathowie: Features no Satriani. Yeah, lots of clouds flying by.

cortex: (laughs) Was this thread before or after the Satriani thread?

mathowie: It might have been before.

cortex: If there's not a bunch of annoying Satriani comments, it was probably.

jessamyn: There are.

mathowie: And the Mila's Daydreams. When you have artistic photographers, artist-type moms that are bored at home for hours a day while their child sleeps, what do they do but make art?

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: It's just hilarious.

jessamyn: [??] that crazy Anne Geddes nonsense.

mathowie: Yeah. She makes, I guess, dioramas out of her sleeping babies that are so sweet and funny and there's no fight over whether or not this is evil.

jessamyn: Right. It's not borderline porn or something. Look, here's a baby being eaten by an octopus.

mathowie: Right. It's just, everything is cute. And everything is loving and hilarious and she makes things [??] Yeah, it's just awesome. She should probably, I guess, end up with a book out of this.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Because this is totally coffee table stuff.

jessamyn: Or postcards or something.

mathowie: A friend of mine's wife just had a baby and she's an amazing photographer, it's like, she now has basically two or three hours a day while the baby's asleep to take photos, and the photos are amazing! And I'm so stoked that she's

doing creative stuff. It's similar, not as good as this, but oh my God, the bookworm one, holy crap. She put glasses on the baby. Good God.

Anyway, pure joy. Fun stuff. And I think that's all my quick favorites.

jessamyn: Over to Ask Metafilter?

cortex: Do it.

jessamyn: After this.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Ohhh.

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jessamyn: And, we're back!

mathowie: Sweet!

cortex: These commercial breaks are really - (laughs)

jessamyn: Ask Metafilter continues to just bring me joy all the time.

mathowie: Sweet. Bring it on.

jessamyn: My favorite one--and again, I keep bringing up the ones that I sidebar, so, you know, apologies if you've seen this--but "I found a list in my house, and I have no idea what these things have to do with each other." Oh, this is also twirlypen. (laughs) "And please tell me what this crazy list is."

mathowie: Oh, that was awesome!

jessamyn: Yeah, and I was like, "durr? (nonsense syllables) I have no idea." And basically somebody says, "Oh! I think that's a combination of '60s songs!" And then somebody mentions that, and then somebody's like, "Actually, here's all the songs that this was a list of in your weird sort of way."

mathowie: That's the awesomest puzzle ever.

Like, here's a weird found list.

jessamyn: Right. And it's my own found list, but my own lack of memory is inhibiting my ability to handle this.

mathowie: Yeah. And there's no theme! Like, it's really hard to pull '60s songs out of that list when you look at it. That's awesome.

jessamyn: Yeah, I thought it was great. Other things that are very favorited, of course, are our "How do I become a better person?"

social stuff, including, "How do I become one of those people that helps people smile?" It's a variation on the how to be charming, how to talk to anybody, how to... whatever, whatever, but with 143 favorites.

mathowie: I marked it as a favorite to come back to later and never did. What was the gist of the good advice? Because I've heard advice that's kind of cheesy...

jessamyn: Well, it's like, eye contact, listening... being able to talk about stuff that they're accessible to everybody...

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And there was also a "How do I make sure I'm not flirting with people?" which is also kind of a useful sub-thread to the whole thing.

mathowie: Oh, right, yeah. I've heard cheesy how to work a room advice that's like, you're supposed to enter a room and go shake hands with everybody, look them in the eyes, and say hello, and then start... like, waste thirty seconds with everybody, which I thought was weird and seems forced.

jessamyn: Well, and you'd know, I would think, if somebody were doing that.

mathowie: Yeah.

Hmm. And I thought this was also an impossible question, "How do I become one of those people that makes everyone feel great after I talk to them?" It's not just "How do I talk to people?" I also want to be awesome. Like, that's... well, first, step one: be born as George Clooney. Step two--

jessamyn: But I know people like that, though!

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Where they're just really good at being into whatever you're into, but not in a sycophantic or fakey way, and so you

after you walk away from them, you feel better about your own ideas, you know?

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Yeah. Sometimes I think that stuff always circles back to confidence or charisma that you can't really teach, that people--

jessamyn: Well, yeah, exactly.

mathowie: Have, or they don't? I don't know.

Yeah. That's pretty cool! This is the TV show version of the Kevin Kelly post, which is like, "What are a bunch of awesome TV series that I can learn something from?", like, from any time.

And I loved your first comment, Jessamyn, James Burke's--

jessamyn: Anyone who hasn't seen James Burke's Connections and thinks they won't like it because it's a million years old is wrong. The original Connections, not Connections series 2.

mathowie: Even that was pretty good, even though it was a little--

jessamyn: It was better than a lot of what we get for TV around here, yeah.

mathowie: But Connections, I think the original was like late '70s, early '80s? And then...

jessamyn: And looks it.

mathowie: And Connnections 2 was like the '90s? But this is like, before the Web existed, it's like live Wikipedia.

jessamyn: Exactly. So awesome.

mathowie: It feels like what hypertext feels like on the web as a movie.

jessamyn: Like, this thing goes into this other thing! And that combines so that...

mathowie: Right. It was in Hawaii!

jessamyn: ...people learning how to make the steam engine.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Actually... right. [??] the people who made the ATM!

mathowie: Yeah. And then he's standing in different parts of the world as he says this and it's amazing. And so this is great for tons of stuff

to throw in the old video queue and watch someday.

jessamyn: I'm really surprised, Wikipedia's actually got a really good list of the episodes, and I'm really surprised people haven't gotten even more thoroughly into outlining the...

mathowie: Oh, yeah. I think it was too ahead of its time. Like, I saw it in the mid-'90s or late-'90s when the Web was still new and it blew my mind.

jessamyn: Right! Yeah, yeah, yeah. I watched it in the mid-'90s too.

mathowie: I haven't heard a mention of it in the last ten years, really. It's just, you know, people... I think it was too early. It was too awesome and early.

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

What's this you're linking to? Josh?

cortex: I liked just this little question from unSane, who has been very active over on Music lately, too.

jessamyn: Didn't we talk about him last month, too?

cortex: We might have.

jessamyn: Didn't he have the awesome jump thing to jump, his kids jump into the...

cortex: I don't remember.

mathowie: Whaaa?

cortex: It's been a month.

jessamyn: You keep talking, I'll...

cortex: Anyway it's just, "Help me and my sons learn to play the drums." He's got a ten-year-old and a seven-year-old, and he's got some drums, and they're going to learn to play drums. So it's just a nice little thread with drumming advice for people who might be interested about learning drums. It's a decent little starting point. And as someone who is learning the drums, I find these things exciting.

jessamyn: Don't you play the drums?

cortex: I do. And I'm getting used it.

jessamyn: So how are you...?

cortex: I've been playing by ear.

jessamyn: Oh, okay.

cortex: And I'm pretty comfortable with it, but I've got a whole lot of work to do as well.

jessamyn: See, I remember you doing the snare drum roll-up for when we did the...

cortex: Oh, yeah.

mathowie: Yeah. (makes a low drum-like vocal noise) Yeah.

jessamyn: And so I'm like, "Josh, he plays the drums!"

cortex: Well, yeah, the drum-kit was, like, brand-new at the time. I had just gotten them.

jessamyn: Uh-huh.

mathowie: (chuckles) I think I've told my drum story, which was, a friend started playing drums in first year of college, and he was way into it in about six months, so he was starting to get decent at it. Like, decent from zero. And the first time I sat down I'm like, "Okay, I've watched

ten years of MTV. This cannot be hard. It's pretty simple, I can keep a beat."

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: And then I started playing, and I realized drums are the most crazy, confused, insane instrument. I've played a violin before successfully, and oh my God, drums are so hard compared to, augh. I couldn't move my legs independently of my hands. It was so much worse than I ever imagined. I just thought it would sound like basic drumming the first time I tried, but

it was terrible.

cortex: Yep. (laughs)

mathowie: And I have a lot more respect for drummers than I ever thought I would.

cortex: That's how it tends to go, actually, that whole, yeah.

jessamyn: That you're like, "Ohhh!"

mathowie: You know a whole...

cortex: You know the whole First Goatse thing?

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: I would love to make a video version of that that's First Drumming.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Just sit people down at a drumset.

mathowie: (makes drum noises)

cortex: Yeah, just make them... give them five minutes to do the best they can, and then just make a blog out of it. That'd be pretty sweet, actually.

mathowie: I think it's from the Muppets having an animal be the drummer. You always think the dumb guy is the drummer, and it must be easy. I think there's a stereotype. And when really, it's the bass player who's the dummy.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: As everyone knows who's ever known a band.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Shut up!

mathowie: Kidding.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Alright. Next.

jessamyn: Alright! One more that I have, maybe two. This was a recent one that I enjoyed, which is just somebody who's kind of a new manager and is trying to figure out how to manage and doesn't really know much about managing but

has at least one employee who could use management, and there's just a lot of really good advice that's kind of friendly, non-stupid-book-management-advice advice. And I enjoyed it.

mathowie: I have never really had a manager that... I've only had one job where I had a manager, the manager was... well, two jobs. They were terrible in both cases.

jessamyn: I have been managed poorly. I have been managed well.

mathowie: I don't think, I don't know what good management is like. I had one manager where they stole all my ideas and presented them every week at our weekly meetings as their own, which drove me bananas.

jessamyn: You should type into the Skype chat who that was.

mathowie: Haha!

jessamyn: (laughs) I've mostly had people who are like, "You have to do this," and I'd be like, "Well, I'm not gonna," and then we'd just stare at each other, you know, they'd be like, "We want you to do this!" and I was like, "Mmm. I don't think that's part of my job," and they'd be like, "Yes, it is." But what are they going to do? Fire you? I'm in the union.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: They wanted me to do stupid shit that wasn't part of outreach just because nobody else wanted to do it. But, I mean, it's tough, right? Because at some point part of what you do need to do when you manage is get people to do some of the stupid shit either you don't want to do or that you think needs to happen. It's not a "let's talk about your job," it's a "this is your job" situation. And management's really changed from the command-and-control days of 20 or 30 years ago to the more consensus-based

'what's the overall plan?' kind of thing.

mathowie: I always think of a manager, I mean, I was thinking it was like computer software teams, so the manager's the guy who's not, the guy or woman who's not coding, and is driving the ship, and trying to (chuckling) whip the slaves into, "Hey, let's get some lines of code!"

jessamyn: Well, but they also have to deal with the different parts of it, you know?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: That they have to deal with the marketing team, and they deal with the programmers, and they deal with the deadline, and they deal with the QA people. So part of it is that they have lots of

different things to balance, whereas if you're the coder what you're just supposed to do is doing the coding. Like, that's the nominal idea, even though it certainly doesn't always work that way.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: But yeah. They're the people that don't code. I was surprised... I used to have a ton of friends that worked at Microsoft, and I was really, really surprised that most of them weren't programmers. They were managers, software development project managers.

mathowie: If you have any people skills, they float you right out of the programming really quick and put you above the

programmers. That's what I've seen with friends.

I liked this... this is, aw, man, I guess it's just summer. Everything's in the 'to read' pile, 'to watch' pile, 'to do later' pile, but...

jessamyn: Because you're probably spending a lot of time outside! That's what I'm doing.

mathowie: Yeah. And then everything feels like...

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: There's not much going on, so you have all this downtime. There's nothing on TV all summer, and there's nothing... I don't know. I guess there is movies to watch, but meh.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: I've been watching Sherlock Holmes.

mathowie: (laugh) But that's like, it's over after four and a half hours of bliss.

jessamyn: That's a lot of time! You can watch Jason Scott's seven-hour BBS documentary.

mathowie: Oh, mine's in the mail.

jessamyn: No, that's Get Lamp, that's the...

mathowie: Yeah, my Get Lamp order is in the mail.

jessamyn: Oh, cool. I theoretically am going to get one because I donated to his Kickstarter campaign, but he's...

mathowie: I donated to the wrong campaign, or I didn't donate at a high enough level, so I ended up having to order it.

jessamyn: It's okay, because the people that donated at the high level didn't get any of the stuff they were supposed to get.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: At least not yet.

mathowie: Well, he e-mailed me and said he'd send me a low number of gold coin, which I didn't care what my number is, but apparently that's cool, so yeah.

jessamyn: That's nice.

mathowie: It's nice.

So this book thread of things to read that are like, "What mind-blowing books completely changed your perceptions of a commonly-held thing?" And they used Sex at Dawn, which is a book Dan Savage is pushing hard for the last few months, which

is saying that ever since the advent of agriculture, society changed in a way for the bad? Stuff is completely different these days, and not... it's pretty much unnatural, the entire world we've set up for how humans behave in the bedroom is completely backwards. And he points a lot at chimpanzees and bonobos [ˌbəˈnoʊboʊz] and how they're completely different.

jessamyn: Bonobos [ˈbɑnəboʊz]?

mathowie: (laughs) I do not have to converse with people and use these...

jessamyn: I may be wrong about that one. I'm just, (laughs) [sorry ?].

mathowie: Yeah. So there's lots of books that, a nice pile of books to blow your mind. That looked pretty cool.

cortex: Alright!

mathowie: Oh, yeah, they even linked to Jared Diamond. He calls agriculture the worst mistake in the history of the human race.

jessamyn: Oh! I've got this origin of consciousness book, and I haven't ever cracked it. Maybe that would be good.

mathowie: Mm.

jessamyn: Oh, and here is my, the last thing I really liked from Ask Metafilter from my female long-hair perspective--though Josh, this may be helpful for you--

cortex: Oh, yes.

jessamyn: Everyday styles for long, thick hair.

cortex: (chuckles) Styles.

jessamyn: Shut up!

cortex: You know, I have two styles. Sometimes I pull it back, sometimes I don't.

jessamyn: No, sometimes you tuck it over the ears and flip it down, sometimes it's just down, I notice it's a little longer in the front than it is behind the front. You have style, you're just pretending you don't have style.

cortex: I can't help but have de facto styles, but I put literally zero effort into it 99% of the time, so.

jessamyn: Well...

cortex: I let the hairs fall where they will.

mathowie: Why don't you just cut it off?

cortex: I like it long.

jessamyn: I feel like I need to sometimes put slightly more than zero effort into my hair, because sometimes I have to go clean up and talk to people.

cortex: Yeah. You with your public speaking. That's your mistake right there.

jessamyn: Ehh.

mathowie: Never leave the house. That's [??].

jessamyn: And I have a leave-the-house job in addition to this job. And I've got nice hair! So I should do something nice with it, but I'm not very creative. So I see people with cool hair, and I'm like, "How do they do that?" And sometimes it's because they have a cool haircut, but sometime it's just because they know how to do the soft bun, as an example, and I don't, and so I enjoyed this thread because I could learn how to do a couple

fairly simple things that make my hair look slightly more... like, there's a shit-ton of YouTube videos about how to take your hair and make it do the thing, and you can just kind of watch it. And so I just thought it was great because it gave me a place to go for more advice on what to do with my long, thick hair.

cortex: Cool, yep.

jessamyn: For cheap, that doesn't involve a fucking hundred-dollar haircut and eighty dollars worth of hair product.

cortex: Yeah, no, I liked that. I don't mean to be dismissive. I don't imagine myself to be a paragon of long-haired people.

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: I consider myself a very lazy person whose hair happens to be long.

mathowie: Those sock buns are like Leia's. Those are awesome!

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Well, and I didn't really know how to do them! I just saw people doing them and assumed they were really complicated, and they're actually only medium-complicated. The problem is, you've gotta watch a whole bunch of young women fucking around in their apartments with their hair, and some of the people are really good at how to do your hair videos, and some of the

people really aren't. And so you have to wade through a whole bunch of miscellany to get to the good stuff.

mathowie: Get to the working overtime part. Okay. I think we're all done. Eh? Anything else?

cortex: I think so. No, that's about it.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: This was great! It was a great bunch of stuff on Metafilter, I think. I was happy about it.

cortex: Yeah.

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Credits

• beryllium, 131 segments
• tangerinegurl, 28
• Pronoiac, 2