Podcast 55 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 55: "Minecraft all the way down."

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

Transcript

jingle: (theme music)

jessamyn: Episode 55 of the Metafilter Podcast.

mathowie: Whoo!

jessamyn: Our last podcast was recorded on August 25th, so this will be, as usual, about the last month of stuff.

mathowie: (pondering) September.

The Eternal September episode.

jessamyn: Oh god.

mathowie and cortex: (slightly stifled laughter)

jessamyn: I promised I wasn't going to say anything.

mathowie: (laughs) I haven't noticed any downturn on Metafilter.

jessamyn: You clearly are not paying attention, then.

mathowie: (laughs) I look at the world through rose-colored glasses.

jessamyn: (laughs) You look at the world through a tiny phone.

mathowie: Oh, I didn't pick anything good on IRL. Dammit. I failed.

cortex: People meetin' up!

mathowie: Jobs! Let's just jump right in here.

jessamyn: Cool! Jobs seems to be picking up, and had we started the Jobs Wanted section before the last podcast?

mathowie: I teasered it last time - that if you are looking for a job, you can list yourself. It looks like fifteen people, maybe, have used it so far.

jessamyn: Is it up in public? Can people see it yet?

mathowie: Yep! It's on the front page, just below the map, on the right side. The left side is Jobs.

jessamyn: I have not looked there, because I -

mathowie: Actually, the entire site now is split: the left side is job openings and the right side is available people, so if you--

jessamyn: Oh sweet, that looks nice!

mathowie: If you go to any category, it's jobs on the left, people available on the right. If you go to a specific job, we have a little sidebar below tags now that shows people in that category that are available.

jessamyn: That's great! Well, more people should be signing up for it, then. If you are looking for work, please sign up in the 'Members Available' section.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Does it have a, is there a place,

an obvious link where people can sign up?

mathowie: If you go to the New Post, you can post--

jessamyn: Oh, I see it.

mathowie: --either a job or an availability.

jessamyn: Super terrific!

mathowie: So that's cool! I noticed there's a few jobs, one that looked cool was working with YoungAmerican on The Sound of Young America as an intern. There were a couple intern jobs. There was a lot of social media jobs.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: I liked the Australian silversmithing job.

mathowie: Whoa, I didn't see that!

jessamyn: Yeah, it's Kerasia [ˌkəˈɻeɪsiə], Kerasia [ˌkəˈɻɑsiə], I don't know how to pronounce her name. She runs a Wild Opals website--

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

jessamyn: --and what they're looking for, I think, is somebody to work with their opal supply to help make it into more jewelry-looking stuff. But you can work anywhere in the world, as long as you've got reliable postal service.

mathowie: So they have to mail you opals and then you turn out jewelry.

jessamyn: I think so, yeah. She had a neat little shop in the Christmas shops thing or whatever, holiday shops last year. And it was sort of neat, so.

Yeah. That was cool.

mathowie: Oh, she's in Australia, where there...

jessamyn: Are opals.

mathowie: Yeah. Wow, cool.

jessamyn: Yeah, it is kind of neat.

mathowie: It's different. Projects?

cortex: Well, I wanted to go through one other Job.

mathowie: Alright.

cortex: The Circle Into Square internship that sleepy pete posted about--

jessamyn: Ha!

cortex: It's a local basically music label-like thing.

mathowie: Our intern needs an intern. What?!

cortex: Yeah, I know. (chuckles)

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: I think he's been sort of helping out with them, to some extent, so yeah, the fact that--

jessamyn: My nurse has a nurse, that makes sense.

mathowie: I guess. My dentist has a dentist.

jessamyn: (laughs) My barber has a barber.

mathowie: Can't cut your own hair.

jessamyn: Always go for the guy with the better haircut in the messy barbershop.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: So order fulfillment of, what, CDs?

cortex: I don't know a whole lot about it. I'm not looking for an internship myself (mathowie laughs) so I didn't really read it for comprehension. But I like what Circle Into Square does, and hey, it's someone I know, so that's kind of neat.

jessamyn: Unpaid position, must not have any cat allergies.

mathowie: Yeah. That's cat-ist.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: No, must not have any cat allergies.

mathowie: (descending whistle) Oh, anti-cat-ist.

There was a lot of good Projects.

jessamyn: I enjoyed Projects a lot.

mathowie: There's a... shit-ton. And I'm going to take one down that I didn't like that everyone liked, probably the highest-rated thing in the last month, was the Not Lorem Ipsum generator, the Fuck Lorem--

jessamyn: No, that's on my list! It wasn't the Not Lorem Ipsum, it was the Fuck Lorem Ipsum.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Well, I was just getting at the...

jessamyn: What is this, a family show, Matt?

mathowie: No, no!

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: I was just getting at the subject matter before I got the actual name of it, but...

jessamyn: I see. You didn't enjoy this.

cortex: He's burying the lede.

mathowie: No, no! Because I used to hate Lorem Ipsum also, because it's stupid and pointless and Latin or whatever, and I would just copy and paste articles off CNN or something and drop them in because it looked more like natural language and content.

jessamyn: Copyfighter.

mathowie: I have sat in several meetings where someone went (lowers voice, trailing off), "And then Bush voted on those tax cuts..."

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: You know, "I don't like this design, I don't know what you put in there, I don't like that article, that's not representative of our brand," like, augh.

jessamyn: But they can't get beyond it, right.

mathowie: Yeah, I was just like, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: "You're not sup... fuck it, it's Latin from now on!" Like, I gave up a long time ago.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: So what you're saying is, there's a real point as to why you have stuff that other people cannot read because they won't get distracted by looking at the content of the text.

mathowie: Yes. Like, when you're in a medium with non-design professionals showing up in design, you have to

remove every variable possible, so if you're just going, "We're only talking about colors today," or layout, or...

jessamyn: They'll be like, "Those buttons are round. I like square buttons."

mathowie: Exactly. Shut up! That's not what we're talking about.

jessamyn: (laughs extendedly)

mathowie: So putting like, I just loaded it up...

jessamyn: Any words people can recognize.

mathowie: Yeah, that's just gonna throw people off their mark. This is like The Addams Family summary from Wikipedia is what I'm looking at, and people are going to be like, "Oh, I hated that show, I don't like this design," like, aah.

There's a reason for bullshit Latin text, that's all I'm saying. Sorry davelog, guy who made this.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Well, I mean, you know, I'm sure it works for other people. I enjoyed the Project, so, you know, just saying it won't work is different from saying, "davelog, you suck," which I think we're not saying.

mathowie: I would have been behind him until I had a bunch of stupid clients that can't focus on a single thing, or...

jessamyn: Oh, I know. Well, I have the opposite problem, dealing with people who have basically never interacted with

the Web before, they look at something that's supposed to be general, and they're like, (fast higher-pitched voice) "What the fuck is this, Latin?"

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: And I'm like, "Just ignore it!" You know, but the fact that it's not English they can't get over it. So this would actually be helpful for my people who like to believe that the Web is made of English, which it isn't anyhow but yeah.

mathowie: This is way back like ten years ago when I was at UCLA, I used to just write "blah blah blah" and then copy and paste that like a hundred times, you know, just quick Command-V-V...

jessamyn: Sometimes you gotta see how your design works with kerning, though, Matt.

mathowie: I know, I know. People would be like--

jessamyn: Ascenders and descenders!

mathowie: People had a problem with like a page of the word 'blah'. They'd be like, "What is the... what? I, no, what, huh?"

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: So then I came around this Latin is awesome thing eventually, after...

jessamyn: I think our takeaway is that irritable people are irritable.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: (laughs) There's nothing you can do.

cortex: On this we can all agree.

mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)

mathowie: Alright, your picks that are good.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Alright. This is going to make me switch to Chrome, I swear to God.

mathowie: Oh, yeah, that was fun!

jessamyn: It's an awesome thing that null terminated made. And remind me, he had something to do with one of our Infodump projects, or no? I feel like he did something...

mathowie: Yeah. He--

cortex: He, I think he was the first person who put up a second-hand utility.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: He made a SQL shell around it, but then it was a pain in the ass to keep running for a variety of reasons, so that ended up going by the wayside. But yeah, he was the first person out there early making it easy for people to play with it without having to process the raw text files.

mathowie: Yeah, he made it web-accessible.

jessamyn: So this is a really interesting thing that basically

sees what happens to your Gmail inbox, I think?

mathowie: Yep, just Gmail.

jessamyn: I'm trying to figure it out, because I don't have Chrome, and I'm trying to figure out do I need Chrome?

mathowie: Yes.

jessamyn: But the real question that I, yes, the real question that I have always wanted to answer for me personally is "How many e-mails do I write in a day?" But because of Gmail's threaded bullshit, it's actually really difficult unless you're keeping a little hashlist by you to figure that out.

mathowie: I don't know if this will solve that problem. This is more like a

search engine that graphs instances of your search terms, which is kind of cool.

jessamyn: Oh, really? It can't graph how many things go into your sent box?

mathowie: It doesn't give you just general statistics, it's really search-based. But he has all these screenshots of it, and you can see--

jessamyn: Oh oh oh, I see, I see.

mathowie: So everything from--

jessamyn: So shit I bought on Amazon, shit that whatever.

mathowie: From Facebook.

jessamyn: But I could still do searches for some of the Metafilter subject lines and figure out--

mathowie: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like 'anonymous'.

jessamyn: You know, 'Re: [MetaFilter Contact Form]' or something like that.

mathowie: Yeah. I graphed 'Christmas', the instances of the word 'Christmas' and the instances of e-mails from Amazon to see if there was any correlation, and it was pretty weak. I had ordered from Amazon all year--

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: With slight Christmas peaks, but not really.

jessamyn: I ordered from Amazon once at my birthday. (laughs)

mathowie: I mean, I did all the searches I could think of, 'Obama' vs. 'McCain', oh, 'Palin' vs... and you could see, there's a November spike that's gigantic, and every other November, you know, it's really

cool to see. It was a fun little utility, I played with it for a day or two and gave up. (chuckle) It takes a while. It takes like, you kind of run it in the background, you have to wait a minute or two to get most of your results.

jessamyn: A minute? That's like a hundred years in Internet time.

mathowie: Well, you just click away and you look at other blogs and you go back to it and it's done, so.

jessamyn: There are other blogs?

mathowie: There's other things on the Web. Shiny things.

jessamyn: (chuckles) Josh, anything else that you saw?

cortex: I saw, there were a couple things

that I want to mention almost more for the Get Your Own Blog thing working as anything, because there was a MetaTalk thread where we were talking about, I think sort of, it may have been partly the writing thread there was recently, where someone was like, "Hey, we should start a WritingFilter sort of thing." And that led to a discussion where a couple were like, "Wait, so I should actually just get my own blog?" And it was like, "Yeah! Put it on Projects."

jessamyn: And put my writing on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

cortex: Yeah. And so there were two of those. patheral [ˈpæθɜrəl], who I'm assuming is, that's how they pronounce their username,

did a post about basically her short stories, and then bukvich did one that I think it may have been sort of been already ongoing project--

jessamyn: Oh, I saw that!

cortex: But yeah, he's just, you know, writing about all kinds of stuff. As he says, "literature, philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics" [??].

jessamyn: And he's writing really really regularly, was what I... you know, it seemed like it was a good project for him because it had him doing regular writing projects too.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah, I looked at both of these.

mathowie: Did you guys see Marlowe the Monster?

cortex: I did not see that.

jessamyn: Urrrr... burburdebur!

mathowie: Oh my God. Prepare to be dazzled.

jessamyn: I got as far as 'asexual reproduction' and was afraid.

mathowie: This is essentially a one-panel comic, but made with a clay--

jessamyn: Oh my God! (laughs)

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: With a very cute, silly clay figure, and it is really funny and really awesome.

jessamyn: And it's from user sawdustbear, who I cannot recall having

any previous association with. Like, you know, you know a lot of the sort of usernames.

mathowie: Yeah. I've never, yeah.

jessamyn: And hers...

mathowie: I've never, yeah. It's never been on my radar, but oh my God.

cortex: Well, they're relatively new.

jessamyn: Yeah.

cortex: And yeah, they don't post very much, looks like, so.

jessamyn: She, it's a lady.

cortex: She.

mathowie: These are hilarious.

cortex: Everyone is gender-neutral in my Metafilter world, just to keep it safe.

mathowie: (laughs) Post-gender.

cortex: If your username was like 'I literally have a penis,' I'd probably be like, is this... do I take that literally, or?

jessamyn: Ironic?

cortex: Or yeah, is this some sort of political statement.

jessamyn: And on her personal blog she's made some moss--well, actually it's lichen, technically, but mossy stuff, and she sells... I should put her, yeah.

mathowie: Oh, moss figures into one of the panels!

jessamyn: (rising pitch in discrete steps) Hahahaha! I should stick her on the Metafilter user--

mathowie: Yes!

jessamyn: --pages blog that's fairly poky.

cortex: You're totally in the bag for terrariums.

mathowie and cortex: (chuckle)

mathowie: You're advancing your radical terrarium agenda. [??] Pro-moss.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Well, the whole goal of the Internet is to be like 'that [blank] person,' right? Like, whatever the thing is.

cortex: Yeah. Pick a thing and just do it.

jessamyn: Being on the Internet means you have to be...

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Josh is like 'that Roguelike person' or 'that snowclone person'.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: It's really more JHarris, yeah.

jessamyn: Matt Haughey is 'that recumbent bicycle guy'.

mathowie: (chuckling slightly) Right, sure.

jessamyn: And, you know, I need something, so terrariums, that would be okay.

cortex: No, it's a good thing to have. I give you shit mostly because I enjoy being the one giving the shit.

jessamyn: (laughs) Well, okay, okay. But yeah, I think that's nice, and at any rate, it was a fun little Project.

mathowie: God, these are so good! Here's one... like one Marlowe that's just like, oh my God, that's so art-y and well-lit and done in a dollhouse and she changed the figures, like ohh, it's amazing. It's really good.

jessamyn: Yes. It's super terrific. And cuddling is great anyhow, so win.

mathowie: (short laugh) Yeah.

jessamyn: Marlowe the Monster. Cool!

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: That was what I had for Projects.

mathowie: Are there any interesting IRL things you've seen pop up?

jessamyn: I went to a non-IRL Metafilter meetup and had a good time, and met a user who then posted a Job.

mathowie: How did you know it existed if it wasn't on IRL?

jessamyn: Because he MeMailed and was like, "I'm in town, let's get some food!"

mathowie: Oh.

jessamyn: So then I invited terrapin and turtlegirl along and we got some food and then he posted a Job. Oh! Which is actually kind of a cool job, I don't know why I didn't mention it.

He works for... lalalalala!... Renesys, they're Python people and they do IP and mapping stuff? And there's sort of an interesting telecommuting job that they have.

mathowie: Hmm.

cortex: Huh.

mathowie: There is a very successful, I never know if these things are going to actually work, but there was an ice cream meetup in L.A., and you think, you have to bring ice cream to a meetup, and then

mathowie: ... you are outside and you have to keep ice cream working, you gotta ...

jessamyn: Disaster!

cortex: (laughing)

jessamyn: Disaster is what I think!

mathowie: Yeah! Recipe for disaster! Definitely. And it looks like Mike Pusateri cruftbox - it was a success. Look he even printed up his own labels. You can see his little cruftbox logo on his ice creams. He made several like strange ice creams.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Great! Mike Pusateri who is argyle? Or?

mathowie: Yeah. Yeah that's right.

jessamyn: Oh. Okay. Sorry. Cruftbox is his website.

mathowie: That's right but that's his like twitter, thingy icon

mathowie: shown on like ..

jessamyn: Wholly crap! I'm looking at these pictures! It's amazing!

mathowie: He brought like a giant, you know, ice chest filled with ice cream and other people did and it actually worked out. It just sounds, you know, sticky, messy, melty (laughing) You know. Not the greatest thing in the world when someone says, "Let's have an ice cream swap outside in the heat!" But, looks like it's a success!

cortex: You're favorites, uh,

mathowie: Oh God.

cortex: screen is totally (unintelligible)

mathowie: (laughing) I know. Sorry.

cortex: Ice cream, ice cream, topless woman,

jessamyn: Wait! What?

mathowie: Dude the topless woman is a metafilter photographer!

cortex: Yeah?

mathowie: mgoer1 ... guy in Vancouver?

cortex: Oh yeah!

mathowie: He takes like crazy art photos. I like the lighting even though there's boobs in it. I swear.

cortex: (laughing)

jessamyn: You are allowed to like boobs, Matt.

mathowie: No. No. It's more like ...

jessamyn: (laughing hard) (mocking) No! No! Shut up, it's the lighting!

mathowie: Me and Paul were talking about how desaturated photos look like magazines from the Seventies (1970's) and they are all awesome like ..

cortex: (laughing)

jessamyn: That are left out in a window for too long? I cannot even load this page. Flickr and me are not

cortex: Aww.

jessamyn: (Big Sigh)

mathowie: Oh well.

(silence for a few beats)

jessamyn: I will just let it run in the background.

mathowie: (laughing) Just like Raptor inbox.

jessamyn: (laughing)

mathowie: So (laughing) is there anything else? Anything big MetaTalk related or site related we need to ..?

cortex: Well there's ...

jessamyn: Well what I want to do is point out a couple happy stories.

mathowie: Sure!

jessamyn: Well medium-happy stories concerning three metafilter members who are only.... One of whom is a real posts-all-the-time metafilter member and two are much more tangential.

jessamyn: One was the Hoder story

mathowie: Ugh

jessamyn: Which did not have a particularly happy ending .. except for they were maybe seeking the death penalty and now he's only been sentenced to nineteen (19) years and a half years in prison? Not awesome, but ...

mathowie: Not death?

jessamyn: ... better

Not ... Yeah.

And the Canadian government appears to be on it slightly more than we thought. Um user drewb who does the completely awesome molecular cell animations

jessamyn: that were the topic of a thread, and then he showed up to comment, and then POW! a week later he won a MacArthur grant, which was kind of amazing and I don't know, it was sort of nice. And he says that Metafilter is really one of the only--

mathowie: Places. (chuckles)

jessamyn: --blogs he comments, which I thought was kind of sweet and adorable, and, and I'll find the link for that in a second, and, I don't know how to pronounce this guy's name, avoision [ˈæ.voʊ.ɪʒ.ən]? avoision [.əˈvoʊɪʒən]?

cortex: I think it's [ah-voy-shun]

mathowie: Avoision!

jessamyn: OH!

cortex: He's a mefite club guy. I should really, I should try and get an (unintelligible) game up sometime and just ask him and say ...

jessamyn: But basically he is a metafilter member who is a FINALIST in the Month At The Museum Contest which was the thing that we had an old metatalk thread about. Well. I guess this was the old metatalk thread. There was a metatalk thread - Oh! On my birthday! - about like, "Hey! Whatever happened to the Night of the Museum thing?" And one of the metafilter members said, "Actually what's happening is I am a finalist!"

jessamyn: and one of the Metafilter members said "oh actually, what's happening is I'm a finalist; go vote for me."

mathowie: What!? You lived there for a month?

jessamyn: You live in the museum for a month. You're like, their, kind of their dog and pony show; walking, talking, puppet guy. You blog and post and tweet about the whole thing.

mathowie: And if movies have taught me anything it's that everything comes alive at night and chases you. Every night for a month that's got to be stressful.

jessamyn: Exactly. Well, I think what would be stressful--and so there was a whole--I didn't apply because there's a drug test involved in it in addition to a whole bunch of other obnoxious things. Um...

jessamyn: Um. Yeah. I mean they are clearly looking for a certain type of person... (laughing)

mathowie: Do you sleep in a terrarium?

jessamyn: I don't know. Somebody who's not going to, like, smoke up in the Appolo 10 capsule ...

mathowie: (laughing)

jessamyn: .. or whatever. But there's five finalists and one of them is OUR GUY!

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: You can see his page at the Museum ting and people can go vote for him and so we side-barred it.

mathowie: We've got 'em all! (laughing)

jessamyn: I was just ... Yeah! (Laughing) I was just totally stoked for him! So that was

jessamyn: Great News! Good News! And NOT shitty news from MetaTalk.

mathowie: My vote goes to felix. I just voted. Thank you for voting! That was easy! We could probably (laughing) bot attack this if we wanted .. (laughing)

cortex: (laughing)

jessamyn: Hush. Hush. Hush.

cortex: (laughing)

mathowie: (laughing)

jessamyn: (to matthowie) You never said that.

(Matthowie and Cortex continue laughing)

He's on metafilter and digg. He even mentions it. Oh cool. Yeah. He's cool.

Yeah!

mathowie: He is a real science geek! Here he is with like crazy robotics craziness. Awesome!

jessamyn: And he's got a bunny called Mr. Snugglesworth.

mathowie: Oooohhh (creepily)

jessamyn: See? Delicious bunny.

mathowie: Did he create a small monocle for Mr. Snugglesworth?

jessamyn: (Laughing)

mathowie: And a top hat?

jessamyn: Maybe we should get him a t-shirt? I think we should gear him up if he actually DOES GET this? To make him wear like metafilter t-thirts and like sneak them in like secret phone and stuff like that?

mathowie: And also .. uh ... (laughing) roll some joints ...

jessamyn: (laughing)

mathowie: (laughing)

jessamyn: Yeah! Care packages! Care packages!

mathowie: Yeeeah, some pot brownies, so we can mess up the museum and their drug testing. That's so weak.

jessamyn: He'll probably just snooze a lot.

mathowie: That's true. And laugh.

jessamyn: That's just me. Okay. All right, moving on!

mathowie: (laugh) Oh. Did we talk about the Hoder thing? It went bad.

jessamyn: Basically, they were seeking the death penalty, which made a bunch of people really "oh shit! we need to do something right now!" But what he received was nineteen-and-a-half years of prison, which really sucks, because -

- actually, he's a citizen of Canada, but he's a joint citizen - Canada and Iran, Iran doesn't recognize dual citizenship, so once he came back to Iran, they were like "we've got you now, fucker." There's a bunch of activism that's going on surrounding that. There's Metafilter people and other people working on this. There's a couple petitions to sign. But really, Canadians should be putting pressure on their government, probably the number one way -

- that they can get some movement on this whole thing. It's a shitty situation.

mathowie: I've seen some more popular articles. That Worldchanging Ethan guy, I forget his last name.

jessamyn: Ethan Zuckerman! Yeahyeahyeah!

mathowie: He just wrote an article about it that was in some big thing. I think the best we can hope for is, unfortunately, in a year or two we'll just hear he's been released, hopefully through some sort of bargain. Ugh, it sucks. He's already been in jail for almost two years, in solitary, which is just fucked.

jessamyn: I guess his mom's been able to visit him. It's one of the many things I've been paying attention to, but it seems like a very difficult situation.

And touchy, because it's Iran.

mathowie: And they're the boogeyman today.

jessamyn: (Love the?) boogeyman.

mathowie: Should we do Metafilter, Ask Metafilter, something something?

cortex: We should do something.

jessamyn: Let's let Josh pick!

cortex: Uh. Well actually, I had a couple more little Metafilter topics -

jessamyn: You're playing Minecraft right now, aren't you?

cortex: No no, actually I closed it down, because they're going to reboot the server to do some testing.

jessamyn and mathowie: (laugh)

cortex: But no, I think this all happened -

mathowie: Didn't you build Metafilter Music in Minecraft, maybe?

cortex: Haven't gotten there yet, though people are working on building Turing machines.

mathowie: Sweet! Oh, right!

jessamyn: Oh, right!

cortex: This sort of happened after the last podcast, but scody went in for surgery, and it turns out everything seems to have gone really well, but it was sort of a couple of days of us sitting around, watching the thread and watching her blog, to see how she was doing -

cortex: blog to see how she's doing and occasional updates from her boyfriend when there was information, and... and yeah.

mathowie: I've been following her since early this summer when she went through chemo with flying colors, and then had this end of summer surgery looming on the horizon, and it happened and it seemed ok. She had a little bit of recovery issues, but seems to have bounced back.

jessamyn: Yup. She's got a second, hopefully lower-key surgery scheduled for middle of October.

mathowie: Ouch, bummer.

jessamyn: And she's got her blog which was a project from a couple months ago at least and she's got a volunteer calendar and

jessamyn: couple months ago, at least. And she's got a volunteer calendar and a wish list and whole bunch of other stuff, so if people want to--

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

jessamyn: --wish her well or interact with her, please feel free.

mathowie: People are cool enough to make her dinner and stuff and bring over food and last I heard--

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: --them mention it it was like they were all booked up, like, people were bringing food every day.

cortex: Nice. Well, there's a bunch of good people down in L.A. So..

mathowie: scoffs Not many. laughs

cortex: laughs

jessamyn: Ohhhh...

cortex: Well. And they all belong (inaudible)

mathowie: There's 23 million assholes and then there's a bunch of good metafilter people, I think. (chuckles)

cortex: We're holding the line, that's all.

mathowie: (chuckles) Exactly. Keep them out.

cortex: In completely unrelated news, there was the MetaTalk thread recently--

jessamyn: (whistles)

cortex: --that smsranch started to sort of try and look for a new person to manage the Music Challenges over on Music that we do every month, because flapjax at midnite has been doing that for, God, a while now.

mathowie: A year or two.

jessamyn: Forever, right? Yeah.

cortex: Yeah, at least a year, probably more than that. I'm just, I'm bad at keeping track of time. But yeah, he'd been doing it for a good

long while and then he was finally, "Uhhh..." Because, you know, it's just a total volunteer "Hey, help us organize the random thoughts for what the challenge could be next month" sort of stuff, and "Remember to poke Josh when he doesn't update it," (mathowie chuckles) is pretty much the entire job. So it's not a big deal--

jessamyn: Politely, yeah. (chuckles)

cortex: --but it's still nice to have someone on the spot there. And I think snsranch in fact got nominated as our new challengemeister, so we're all of a month into that, but yeah.

It's just one of those things where it's like, it's one of those things that I think a lot of people don't see Music very much, and so every time it injects itself into MetaTalk it catches my eye a little bit more. But yeah. Go snsranch, because he's a mensch.

jessamyn: Great!

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: Thanks, flapjax, for your tireless...

mathowie: Efforts.

jessamyn: You know, efforts, efforts. And snsranch was always a big cheerleader whenever I would manage to get something up on Metafilter Music, so.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Couldn't have been a better guy.

mathowie: Sweet.

Ahh, what's next? Anything else? Metafilter, Ask Metafilter?

cortex: Oh, I've got plenty of Metafilter stuff this time.

jessamyn: I've got some of both!

mathowie: Alright. Let's go Metafilter.

jessamyn: (cheering) Let's go, Metafilter, let's go!

cortex: Okay.

jessamyn: Okay. Here's the best thing you guys have definitely not seen, because I just read it right before we talked.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: googly, who's--

mathowie: Ripped from the headlines! Sorry.

jessamyn: (laughs) googly, who's an actual real-life friend of mine, but also Metafilter member--actually, I met him

through Metafilter so, yeah

mathowie: spicynuts?

jessamyn: posted a thing about cave diving, you know people who go diving around, scuba diving in caves and stuff like that. so people talk about swimming in caves and whatever. And then spicynuts had this amazing post about going to a caving group and...let me see <buhbuhbuhbuh>

mathowie: upstate New York?

jessamyn: In upstate New York but it's about the story is then told...It's one of those somebody tells a story about meeting a person and then that person tells the story.

mathowie: oh god.

jessamyn: But basically he was caving in Hungary, and there was a rumor in Hungary about a cave that held an entire group of Jews during WWII, and they went to hide out. And this guy who was leading the caving trip in upstate New York was telling the story about tracking down where that cave was and who the people were and bringing

them back to the cave to tell their story about living in the cave during the '40s and hopefully turning it into a documentary and it just sounded like a pretty interesting...

mathowie: Wow... wow.

jessamyn: Yeah, right?

mathowie: Wow, cave diving is super dangerous, oh my God, it's dangerous.

jessamyn: Super dangerous, super scary, all the stuff. But I really liked that comment a lot and would probably put it on the sidebar but I figured I'd talk to you guys about it first.

mathowie: No, that's awesome. Yeah, well, I mean, we don't like to go

"Hey, another Nazi story, everybody!"

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: But it's an awesome...

jessamyn: As the Nazi stories go, this is probably one I can put the sidebar without people losing their shit.

mathowie: It's almost Tarantino-esque, if you will.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: It should be a documentary.

jessamyn: We should go back to getting people to read some of their posts on the podcast--

mathowie: Yeah!

jessamyn: Because the killer line is, "Now, how do you get a 90 year old man down a 100ft vertical shoot without

breaking every bone in his body? Who knows, but Chris was going to try."

mathowie: Yeah, cave diving is fucked up in so many ways, like, have you ever taken a scuba class?

jessamyn: No, I'm afraid of scuba, in fact.

mathowie: Like, it's dangerous to do the cave thing, just the hiking and the going in and getting stuck and the claustrophobia. But then there's actual physics of pressures, where you could die in seconds if the pool goes underneath the ground and has all this

pressure on it you can't even tell, and you're like... like, you think you have 20 minutes of air at surface pressure, and that goes down by how many atmospheres of pressure that are pressing on you as a multiplier, so you could have one-fourth of that, one-tenth of that, and that's how these people die often diving. And the worst part is always when you hear someone's stuck in a cave dive and rescuers go in and you'll hear five people died trying to save a guy.

jessamyn: There was a very creepy Metafilter thread months ago, maybe last year, about a guy that died and then the guy that went down to rescue the guy?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Not rescue him, I mean, just to bring back the body, and I believe he died? And then somebody managed to get them both, both the bodies out. It was horrible, horrible.

mathowie: Yes. It's super--

jessamyn: And it just gives you the creeps to even hear about... oh, speaking of the creeps to even hear about...

cortex and mathowie: (chuckle)

mathowie: I like where this is going.

jessamyn: The, "I climb up these really tall towers"--

cortex: Oh God, yeah.

mathowie: (descending whistle) Yeah, that video.

jessamyn: Really, just a video of somebody climbing to the top of a transmission tower to fix it just got lots of people really interested, lots of people favoriting, and got us to the point, again, where somebody was like, "Oh hey, I did this for a job." And everyone's like, "What? You what?!" (laughs)

mathowie: And didn't he say he's not properly tied in, it is actually scary what he's doing, and he's just sort of free climbing, and yeah, you could die at any second.

jessamyn: Yeah, well, that you're supposed to clamp in all the time, but it's really slow and really awkward, and so a lot of people don't. And if you watch the video, you can see the guy taking his clip off and putting his clip back on, and just sitting there being like, "Holy shit, you're not attached to

anything and you're really high up there! And there's a dude below you,"

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And yeah, so that was the comment.

mathowie: I'm not afraid of heights and that video was creepy as hell.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Well, and there's the "I'm not afraid of heights, I'm afraid of jumping!" You know, there are different reasons with why heights freak them out.

mathowie: (chuckle) Jumping, I never heard that.

cortex: There's also a couple of fine William Carlos Williams parodies in there too.

mathowie: What, what?

cortex: In the thread.

mathowie: Ohh, ohh.

cortex: "I have eaten

the plums

that were on

top of the 1768 ft tall transmission tower."

jessamyn: Oh, yeah. Haha! Boy, am I sick of that poem.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: So. Josh! Set the stage. Bring us into the world of Minecraft.

cortex: Minecraft.

jessamyn: Oh, is now when we talk about Minecraft?

mathowie: This has come over my winter...

jessamyn: And now Josh with Game Nerd Corner! (sings bleepily) Do-do-doo-doo do-doo-do!

mathowie: This has swept...

jessamyn: We need some little 8-bit music.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: Minecraft has swept over everyone I know, like a wave that can't be avoided. I played it--

jessamyn: Not me. I'm going to Google it right now to see what you guys are talking about.

mathowie: I played it for 30 seconds on a bad day when the servers were down or something and it was just kind of boring, but I could see what was...

cortex: Yeah, well, it's... it's one of those games where yeah, you aren't going to be sucked into it until you realize you're sucked into it. And my take on it is, it's one of those games where you really, really can't convey why it's interesting successfully, someone just sort of has to play to find out if they like it. I mean, with caveats there, if you're talking to someone who is very much

a gamer you can probably put it in context of other stuff so they'd have a better idea. But it's one of those things where if you play it for an hour and afterwards you're like eh?, you probably just aren't going to like it so much, but if you play it for an hour and then it's like dawn and what happened?, then yeah, it's...

mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)

cortex: And that seems to be a really common thing with people. It's one of those things where it just sneaks up on you and you just get sucked in. And I've found it really, really, really engaging when I started playing it.

mathowie: In my old-school slightly casual gamer mind, it seemed like Wolfenstein from 1990-something, combined--

cortex: (laughs) It looks like Wolfenstein.

mathowie: Yeah, it looks like Wolfenstein, the movement's like that, but it's also like Super Mario Worlds Of Yore, and then there's stuff you can do.

cortex: Graphically, it's really intentionally unsophisticated, you know. The world is made of large blocks. You're about two blocks tall. A block is functionally a meter cube, as far as the game world's concerned. And you play it from a first-person

perspective, so you're walking around in this world full of blocks. And when you generate a brand-new world with it, it creates this naturalistic terrain, to the extent that you can have naturalistic terrain made out of meter cubes. But there's dirt with grass growing on it, and there's trees that have meter cube trunks and then meter cube leaves coming off of it, and there's ocean and sand and clay, and if you dig down you get down to more natural rock, and there's ore in there, so you can find...

jessamyn: And the goal is what?

cortex: There really isn't a goal at this point. It's very much an open-ended sandbox game. You go and...

jessamyn: Do you get points for something?

cortex: No, no. You get the satisfaction of... of accomplishing...

jessamyn: You just fuck around and dig in a hole? I don't understand.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Build stuff.

cortex: Yeah, I mean, you go caving, you find materials--

jessamyn: Oh, it's like a builder thing.

cortex: --you build stuff, but it's not like you have to, there's no goal at this point, it's not like, "Build the foo," it's just, "Go build stuff because it's totally sweet to build stuff."

mathowie: I heard someone say it's like what Second Life was supposed to be but as if it was programmed in

1986.

cortex: I've sort of heard of that comparison. I've never played Second Life, so I mean I'm aware of it, but I didn't really get into it.

jessamyn: It's not a game.

cortex: Well, yeah. It's the same sort of thing.

mathowie: Well, it's like, you walk around, you build stuff, you share stuff, you interact with people.

cortex: Yeah, it's a big shared world.

jessamyn: You listen to music...

mathowie: Is there a chat room element?

cortex: Yeah, there's a basic chat function, so you can talk to each other while you're doing it.

mathowie: There's a Metafilter server...

cortex: There is. Well, there's MeFight Club, the sort of gaming community spinoff.

jessamyn: Augh.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: This isn't fun at all!

cortex: (laughs) Are you playing it right now?

mathowie: So... well... there's...

jessamyn: Yes!

cortex: (laughs) It... (dissolves back into laughter)

jessamyn: I'm an orange block that's digging a hole.

cortex: Yes. There's a nice Wikipedia article about it, or a wiki for it, that talks you through some of the basics. Part of the thing, I mean, the deal is, this is a game that just, it's been around for, I don't know, a year and change.

jessamyn: (gasps excitedly) I reached the center of the Earth!

cortex: You just kept going down?

jessamyn: Yeah?

cortex: Good, well... That's fine, but you may have trouble getting back up, is all.

jessamyn: (gasps) That's a long tunnel.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Fock!

cortex: But yeah, so there's this guy, his nickname is Notch, he's a guy in Sweden who started building this a year and a half ago, something like that, and there's actually been a couple Metafilter posts over that year or so that were like, "Hey, there's this free game, and it's Java"--well, it's not quite free, actually, you have to pay to play the current alpha, but...

jessamyn: Does this game have music?

cortex: A little bit.

jessamyn: Something is playing music.

cortex: But he's just been developing it himself, and then the last month it exploded, it went from being some little Java game that he's building that had some fans on the Internet but nothing huge to, like, he's sold 250,000 copies of it now, and he's selling like 10,000 copies a day, and it's like, you know, ten euros to buy it, and so it's like 13 bucks or something US right now, so the guy's sitting on three million bucks that he's made just from people liking and buying this game in the last month or two. And it's insane. So he's starting a proper little business and everything and buying an

office and hiring people. But it's huge. It's this crazy phenomenon, and there's so many people hitting it now that the authentication server that lets you log into the game is a total bottleneck, and if it goes down it stays down for hours, so people just can't play, and oh, it's been this crazy fun horrible adventurous nightmare in independent game development the last few weeks as he's been so overwhelmed by the popularity and the response to the game.

mathowie: Yeah, I heard he was making 250,000 dollars a day right now.

cortex: I don't know if it's quite that much, but it's somewhere in that order on a good day, yeah. I mean, it's a nuts amount of money. He's just pulling cash.

mathowie: But it's been out for a year and a half? Or it's been out for like a year?

cortex: The game has existed for over a year, but he's been working on an alpha version that's better, basically, a proper go at it over at the last few months, and that's really what's picked up steam, and it's got this nice multi-player survival element to it as well, there are zombies that can kill you and stuff, so it's not just a pure creative sandbox, there's actually more of a feeling of a living world that you're trying to

make your way through while you build your large structures.

jessamyn: I broke through to the center of the Earth!

cortex: Well done.

jessamyn: Now I'm just in a bright orange room.

cortex and mathowie: (laugh)

mathowie: I think it's had its online meme moment in the same way that World of Warcraft had with the, what's that, Henroy? Leeroy Jenkins' video?

cortex: Ah.

mathowie: And that's the, and someone showed me this, the video of the guy who built a meticulous cool house with a fire in the middle who accidentally--

cortex: Oh God.

mathowie: --sets his house on fire?

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: And it's just.. It sounds like a parody but it's legit

cortex: Yeah, yeah! It's adorable. They guy's like, "Oh" and he goes on to give an example of how to make a fireplace. ...

mathowie: And uh.. but he's just like, "Oh!" It's ...

cortex: .. and he catches his house on fire (laughing)

mathowie: (laughing) Yeah just the nerd, it's just the nerd like .. "Well I put a lot of time in this. Oh. This isn't supposed to be happening."

cortex: He's being so chill. (laughing)

mathowie: It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

cortex: Especially just like this "oh bother" sort of reaction.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: He's not flippin' out, but he's like, "Uh. Uh. Oh man. I uh .."

mathowie: (laughing)

cortex: "..Oh Shit.. uh "

cortex: (laughing)

mathowie: It .. (laughing)

cortex: Yeah there was a metafilter post about it and that sort of turned into the big ..

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: ... metafilter discussion after the metatalk post about, you know, "Hey let's have a sever."

mathowie: Oh yeah.

jessamyn: I am going to have to go read it.

cortex: Yeah. It's great stuff

mathowie: Ahh .. yeah.

cortex: And people are sure to talk about ...

jessamyn: This is completely inscrutable to me.

cortex: It... it's .. it.. again ...

jessamyn: (exhales heavily)

cortex: Again random guy in Sweden, so yeah.

jessamyn: I dug a hole...

mathowie: I wasn't won over. I don't expect you to be.

jessamyn: There is a zombie in it somewhere?

cortex: Oh yeah! Somewhere ..

mathowie: Oh, wow.

cortex: Yeah there's zombies and spiders

jessamyn: I could walk around for a while and then start digging. There's no zombies in the center of the Earth.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: It's easier to do this if you build tools. Cause then you can dig for stuff a lot more easily.

jessamyn: How much more easily? I dug all the way down.

cortex: I don't know. I ..

jessamyn: There's no zombies. I think I won!

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: I .. You

know, you might be playing the classic version? I haven't tried that one. That might be a difference. I don't know.

mathowie: (??)

jessamyn: Hey! This one of my favorites too, Matt!

mathowie: Yeah. Girl on a whaling ship is awesome! I just love this exists.

mathowie: Eighteen sixty-eight (1868) a six year old girl from Massachusetts went on a three (3) year whaling voyage with her family and she kept a diary. And it looks like - was it the library or something? Scanned the entire thing in. There's audio versions.

jessamyn: The Martha's Vineyard Museum. Edgartown's in Martha's Vineyard.

mathowie: Oh. Okay. What's also fascinating is when she's a six year old she writes in very basic words and sentences in letter forms and then like three years into the trip,

mathowie: She's writing like.. you know, she's nine or ten and writing cursive like beautifully and there are long passages and stuff. It's just really. .. It's just a really cool relic.

jessamyn: Well the uh, uh, - that's it - girlonawhaleship.org

m: (laughs)

Which is kinda cool and a lot of the drawings are really interesting, too. Just cause, you know .. I mean what the hell do you have to do? You sit around and draw pictures of whales all day cause it's, you know, dull.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah I enjoyed this a lot! There were some neat photographs and um and it was just cool that they - that they scanned the whole thing in.

mathowie: Yeah. It's got a real easy interface. Just page through and boom, boom. boom, boom, boom. It's really cool.

jessamyn: And WOO-HOO the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities for, you know, funding this thing in the first place. There's a ton of people that are involved with the project.

mathowie: Yeah it looks really cool. Fun!

jessamyn: Yes. Enjoyed it!

mathowie: Girl On A Whale Ship sounds like an early Smiths title.

jessamyn: (laughing) (singing) "Girlfriend on a whale ship I know..."

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: (singing) The rendering smells terribly"

Mathowie and Cortex: (laughing)

jessamyn: Serious antho-chris (phonetic ??)

mathowie: The enterprise drops .. oh god .. so much money ..

jessamyn: What?

mathowie: I was just looking at our old minecraft links again.

cortex: Oh yeah. The enterprise thing has just been going around last couple of days.

mathowie: (sighs)

cortex: And that's -- if you read the thread about that -- there's like this debate about, you know, building stuff by hand

cortex: vs building stuff by importing and using a map editor. And I have developed strong feelings about this

jessamyn and mathowie: (laughing)

cortex: because I've been building this giant map of ...

mathowie: (laughter)

cortex: .. the overworld (??) like Zelda.

mathowie: (Continues to laugh through)

cortex: And I am doing that shit block by block and I could use some sort of program to important... but eh ... where's the craftsmanship? Where is the sense of satisfaction that you put every fucking ..

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: .. square of dirt and water and sand and stone in place on this thing. So .. That's also what I have been doing for like the last two weeks. So ..

mathowie: (audible sigh)

jessamyn: Do you have a God complex?

cortex: What?

jessamyn: I was wondering where you've been.

cortex: Yeah. Pretty much.. yeah.

cortex: Every time you've been like, "Where the fuck is Josh?!" (laughing) I mean ...

mathowie: Where the fuck is anybody I know?

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Minecraft is the answer. I heard it is big with children even.

cortex: Oh yeah.

mathowie: It's so easy to use.

cortex: Yeah there's not that much to do and the basic way of doing stuff is fairly intuitive and just digging and building in particular is very simple even though there's slightly complicated other things you can do as well. So yeah, you give a kid this and give him, you know, five minutes of guidance, if they even need that, and boom!

jessamyn: They're off to the races!

cortex: And it's totally family-friendly. There's not.. there's no gritty story of a murdered wife and, you know, violent revenge on the criminal underworld. It's, you know, go dig a hole in the ground and make a fort. So ..

jessamyn: I did that!

cortex: And well done! That's the way to be.

jessamyn: Thanks! All right, moving on from minecraft. This was another thread that I thought was gonna maybe be weird and it turned out to be fascinating? It was a guy who maps the top 40 US (United States) Cities by race using

jessamyn: Census data? And so you can look at dots and he put them all up as a flickr photo set - it's one of the few flickr photo sets that I have seen that I thought was, you know, the absolute best way to represent the data. So he took forty big cities, and he put dots on them. Every dot is twenty-five people and they are split up by race. Although census 2000 does allow you to list multiple races. And so you can look at individual cities - big cities - which involves lots of

jessamyn: lots of ah, lots of metafilter people live in these US Cities, unfortunately only US (United States) and you can look at these pictures and you can zoom in to actually figure out. You know, for people who know the cities there's a lot of interesting conversation about what in the picture the racial outlines sort of were as a result of. Like, "Oh! There's a whole bunch of uh .. You know there is an Asian population here. Oh! I think that is where MIT is or this that and the other.

And instead of being lol overgeneralizations, you can actually figure out by looking at streets and whatnot what the racial makeup is and think about why, and lots of different people were talking about the maps of their cities and talking about them, and I thought it was interesting.

cortex: That is pretty neat. Yeah, I missed this before, so I'm looking, I'm having fun trying to guess what some of the cities are just looking at the thumbnails on Flickr.

jessamyn: Yeah, yeah. And it's just really, really fascinating

by seeing which cities are completely, the races are much more intermingled versus they're much more split up and if they are split up, why, or what the different neighborhoods are, and what that's about.

mathowie: I wish that we had historical detailed data for the last hundred years, to see how... you know, like San Francisco was pretty well-integrated, but Portland is pretty well segregated.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: Most major cities are segregated, but

I wonder, were they way worse 40 years ago, or is it... how many generations does it take to shake, you know, shift from 50 years ago.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Well, the Census since 1790... well, 1790 Census was basically white people and...

mathowie: Not-white people.

jessamyn: Slaves.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: No, seriously, slaves. And then in 1820 they start talking about colored people and foreigners, and then 1830, white people who were not naturalized foreigners, and then

slaves and free colored individuals, and then it gets sort of split up, it isn't really until 1890... Oh! In 1870 you had 'C' for Chinese--God, this census is horrible!

mathowie: (chuckles) Do they have cripples?

jessamyn: Well, in 1890 you wind up with mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon.

mathowie: Oh my God. What?!

jessamyn: I know! They removed mulatto by Census 1900--I love Wikipedia so much.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Census 1910...

mathowie: I'm just saying, there isn't a consistent data set of these four or five categories we're looking at today.

jessamyn: Well, and part of that is because the Census has been so fucked trying to...

mathowie: Change.

jessamyn: Well, be finally more reasonable and appropriate. And, of course, you know, the idea of race is slightly made up in the first place!

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: So 1940 they no longer used Mexican and instead they counted Mexicans in with white people. Hindu wasn't a race choice in 1950.

mathowie: (laugh)

jessamyn: Part-Hawaiian was an option in 1960... It's, yeah, it's a disaster, which is one of the reasons

I think we... well, it's a symptom more of a reason why we have a difficult time (laughing) having these conversations in the United States.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Not that other countries are necessarily better, but the United States appears to be supremely bad.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: I was just thinking that economics and social norms change way faster than architecture and people picking up and moving. There's so much inertia with where you live that

decisions made fifty years ago are influencing these color boundaries today.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Well, and there's especially more inertia in lower-class people anyhow because moving is expensive.

mathowie: Yeah, yeah, true.

jessamyn: And a big social issue and you can't move away from your social safety net if you're low-income, because you don't have any other safety net, like, rich people can just move around and pay for whatever the hell they want.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: In a different way. But yeah, no, I think the whole thing's really interesting.

cortex: I'm looking up the photo for--oh, sorry.

jessamyn: Oh, no, no, that was it. Go on.

cortex: I'm looking at the photo for Portland, just because I was curious to see [??].

jessamyn: Oh, and people drew little things on it.

cortex: Yeah, someone went through and made a bunch of boxes, someone with Flickr named tomdenco went in and added several little squares around the few spots that can accurately be described as areas of Portland where you won't see all white people. So it's like Gresham and downtown Beaverton and around Intel and North Portland near I-5.

mathowie: Whoa, [out on the ?] coast? Wow.

jessamyn: And as near as I can tell, all this guy has done is signed up to Flickr to sign... he has no other Flickr presence besides...

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Oh, what was that derogatory remark about Lake Oswego? (chuckles)

cortex: Oh my God, I don't remember Lake Oswego as...

mathowie: Oh, it's Lake No Negroes, is what I've heard people say.

cortex: Ahh. Whereas downtown Hillsboro is Hillsburrito, because hey, there's Hispanic people there.

mathowie: Oh, really? Oww. That's horrible.

cortex: You didn't go to high school in Portland. You didn't hear all these.

mathowie: No, no.

cortex: Yeah. Oh, but on a Flickr thread, too, down below, the first comment from someone who's saying, "As a Portland comedian said, Portland is so whitebread that the black neighborhood is called Albina", which is a pretty good line.

mathowie: That's true.

cortex: And the next comment is from msalt saying, "Hey, that's me, I'm the comedian."

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: He's, you know, msalt from the site, so. (chuckles)

mathowie: Ha-ha!

jessamyn: Does one of you guys have a foghorn going off by your house?

cortex: Yeah, there's construction going on like a block from here, so yeah.

jessamyn: Oh, okay.

mathowie: (chuckling) Is the sea angry today at your house?

cortex and jessamyn: (laugh)

jessamyn: (imitating foghorn) Whoa-waaw.

mathowie: (chuckles) That map just... any more Metafilter posts?

cortex: I had a couple things I liked. One was--and this is just sort of general nerdity, but I loved that this post was a roundup of shuffling, so it's funny meme--

jessamyn: Don't you always pick this thread every time it comes up?

cortex: This is the only shuffling thread that I know of, thank you very much.

jessamyn: We had a... no no no, we had a discussion a couple podcasts back, about...

mathowie: (laugh-chuckling)

jessamyn: Oh, I'm sorry, that was sorting.

cortex: Yeah, that's different. This is actually literally shuffling cards.

mathowie: That reminds me, we have a randomizing thread.

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: This is applying concepts of...

jessamyn: I'm not telling you I don't think it's interesting, because I do think it's interesting, I'm just saying.

cortex: (chuckles) But yes. Definitely a similar thread of interest on my part there.

jessamyn: It's the blah blah blah Ginger Math thread.

cortex: But I thought that was cool. If you're interested in card shuffling and/or algorithmic shuffling, that's a neat thread.

jessamyn: And what's the main link about? I am of course having an impossible time reading it for whatever reason.

cortex: Well, it's a collection of a whole bunch of different shuffling techniques, so it's more of a roundup than anything where there's a...

jessamyn: And is shuffling necessarily card shuffling?

mathowie: Yeah, just cards.

cortex: Well, I mean, that's kind of the...

jessamyn: Like, shuffling means you have a deck of cards, it doesn't mean something else. Or does it?

cortex: No, it means deck of cards.

jessamyn: Okay.

cortex: I mean, this is stuff that could in theory apply elsewhere, but it's mostly in the context of literally shuffling cards.

mathowie: [All the ?] fancy shuffles...

cortex: Because you know, I mean, aside from fancy trick shuffles and whatnot, there's also professional shuffling stuff. If you're gonna work in a casino, you have to know how to shuffle to some extent, you know.

mathowie: But all these... these shuffle videos look like I'm being set up for a magician to show me, like, "And here's your card!"--

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: Like, everyone looks like...

jessamyn: Well, there is one from Ricky Jay, lower in the...

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Oh, sweet. But it looks like bullshit, like "This is how you could trick people," not "This is how you actually"... do they do number randomization? Like which one is the most random [??].

cortex: Oh, there's definitely analysis of... well, it's not just which is the most random, but how quickly you get to random and how you get there, if you really want to look at it in detail? I mean, there's different...

mathowie: Josh, let that freighter go by! Dammit.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: I know! Don't you sort of feel like Josh is like a lighthouse keeper today?

mathowie: Yeah. You're hogging the tugboat, that's all I'm saying.

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: Yarr.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: America's Deadliest Podcast.

jessamyn: Hey, did we miss Talk Like A Pirate Day on Metafilter entirely this year?

mathowie: It was like on a Sunday or something, or a Saturday.

cortex: Yeah, I don't really mind if we did. I like it enough when it comes around, but I also, I don't need it.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: (sung on G-sharp, with pitch rising at the end) Get out of the way! The trains are coming!

mathowie: (chuckles) Can you close your door?

cortex: I also liked this project, the Gamecontrollers: A History.

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

cortex: It's, these people are taking just... like, it's not someone made a random blog post where they're like "Here's the 23 different game controllers I bought at a garage sale"--

jessamyn: 'Cause I'm used to that one.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Yeah, and that's, you know, that's amusing enough, but these people are going fucking nuts. I mean, I think they're making a book, and it's like, they're seriously, if a game controller existed they put it in a genealogical chart of game controller design development, you know.

jessamyn: Love.

mathowie: Also, like, here are prototypes from the factory where they developed the theory of how that controller would work, which is awesome.

cortex: Yeah. It's just...

mathowie: Shit that never got released.

cortex: It's tremendous.

jessamyn: You know? This is a next - a nice segue into my first favorite AskMetafilter thread, but do you have other things that you would ... ?

cortex: I do, but I can litter them throughout if you would rather sprinkle some AskMe.

jessamyn: Well, it doesn't matter, you know. I won't die for want of a good segue. So ..

cortex: Okay. Well. Well then, look. The other posts (laughing)

jessamyn: In fact this will probably be fine. (laughing)

cortex: (laughing)

jessamyn: You can probably guess where I am going with this. But what is this that you have for us, Josh?

cortex: I liked.. there was a post recently ..

mathowie: Don't go off the cliff with your segue.

cortex: .. the authorized guide and companion to Dune.

cortex: Or the Dune Encyclopedia., which is a ...

jessamyn: So does everybody remember how to pronounce this users username?

cortex: [RAY-oh-mee] ?

mathowie: Mmmmmmmm

cortex: [R-ow-mee]?

jessamyn: No. It's NOT [RAY-oh-mee] ...

cortex: Ah! Damn it! [R-ow-mee]?

jessamyn: .. cause we said it wrong before.

cortex: [r-OW-me] ? [r-OW-me] ?

jessamyn: I think it's .. I think it's .. [ROAM-EE] ?

(Clarification insert: spelled as Rhaomi)

cortex: It could be "Roamey" That makes me think of Romy and Michelle.

mathowie: yeah.

jessamyn: I don't care what you're thinking about.

mathowie: (laughing)

cortex: But anyway. The Dune Encyclopedia is something that a lot of people have seen and some lucky people happen to own and happen to have sold at a garage sale at some point in the ensuing years that it was something

cortex: But uh, it was something that was written by a good friend of ..

jessamyn: Rhaomi! It sounds like Rhaomi.

cortex: .. of Frank Herbert .. uh Rhaomi, okay. And it's just seven hundred (700) fucking pages of essentially sort of world building based on what Frank had already written and to some extent - what with this guy, you know, knowing Frank and working with him - and it's just It's fantastic and there's a .pdf available that's just great and I've been slowly cracking through the thing ever since this post at the beginning of the month?

cortex: But it's also one of those things where it sort of clashes with the existing prequel stuff that his estate has been doing with his son and ..

jessamyn: OOhhh!

cortex: .. whoever he starts working with...

mathowie: (laughing) That's not cannon!

cortex: .. to write these terrible shitty prequels.

mathowie: (laughing)

cortex: Well yeah and so it's a thing where it's like this is, arguably as far as Frank probably was concerned, this is more cannon than the shit that his son has been churning out. But his son is the one who is not dead, so they've pretty much faded out the Dune Encyclopedia which sucks because it is awesome. But anyway now you can read it easily

cortex: because it is available as a .pdf and man! It's just.. it's really tremendous. It's a great, great document!

mathowie: I wish I could patch pb in for one minute, because he's in the middle of reading Dune right now.

cortex: (laughing)

mathowie: I wonder what he thinks of the Dune Encyclopedia. I never even actually read it.

jessamyn: You should just call him and put it in later.

cortex: You just set him down for two minutes and yeah ...

mathowie: (laughing)

cortex: .. and just stick it in later: "And now pb"

mathowie: Let me see.. where is my skype out?

jessamyn: I like this thread because every time Josh talks about it, it sounds like he is saying, "The Dude Encyclopedia."

.. which is something I would want.

cortex: (Laughing) Someone should do a whole series of parodies. The God Emperor of Dude ..

jessamyn: I can refer to it in these contentious AskMetafilter threads and say shut up! It's in the encyclopedia!

cortex: (Laughing)

mathowie: (Laughs)

jessamyn: I don't care if you don't like it.

mathowie: (sounds out "all boush" ?? )

cortex and mathowie: (Laugh)

cortex: So what did you like on Ask Metafilter this month?

jessamyn: Oh! oh! oh! The thing I think that's probably my favorite AskMetafilter thread - maybe of all time - just in terms of content? Is called The Old Man and the C Drive?

jessamyn: Basically it's [user] theodolite

mathowie: Ohhh yeah!

jessamyn: Who is one of my favorite newer users for whatever reason. Just in one of those like, "Spirit Of Metafilter!" kind of ways. But basically, like, "I like comprehensive one-topic websites maintained by cranky old people." And then goes on to say ..

cortex: Oh yeah!

mathowie: (snickers)

jessamyn: ... you know. I don't care if they are cranky. They don't even really need to be old people, but like, all about ONE incredibly narrow topic.

mathowie: (Laughs)

jessamyn: And [user] zamboni chimes in later in the thread to say

jessamyn: I refer to these as WTIIF: What The Internet Is For.

mathowie: Exactly.

jessamyn: And it's essentially a huge list of, "The Singing Insects of North America!" "Learn About Clocks!" "How about, you know, learning about various technology museum-type pages?" "How About Tea and Biscuit Reviews!" "How About the Viking Answer Lady!" ... but it's just all that stuff and like if you are up late and you can't sleep or you're having a bad day or you wanna say like, "Does the internet have something for me today?"

mathowie: (snickers)

jessamyn: You can dive in and read about abandoned and little known air fields for ten or fifteen minutes and feel a lot better. I love this thread.

mathowie: (laughing) If you show up at work on Monday morning and you go, "Internet? I challenge you! ..."

jessamyn: (laughing)

mathowie: "... To keep me interested and not working all fucking day!" This is what you need. This entire thread is awesome.

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: This is what I always told people the internet is for. Like people with an obsession that write everything down about what they know about

jessamyn: And other people can be like, "WHOA!" But you don't have to be that obsessed. You can just sort of dip in and out of it.

mathowie: And there's like a couple of comments with like, "Here's twenty awesome sites about, you know .."

jessamyn: Right! Zamboni was like, "Oh! I keep a list of these..."

mathowie: (laughing)

jessamyn: ... and so there were a bunch of people who were really, really into it in various ways.

cortex: And it's funny because this used to be sort of like - there's the "what the internet is for" argument which, yeah I am totally behind that, too. But it's also sort of like what the internet

cortex: used to be like.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Right!

cortex: You know before there was so much consolidation and so much of an effective sort of link aggregation culture and what not ..

jessamyn: Well before everybody and had a blog and you tagged everything and whatever. Like it's a lot more interesting reading .. my contribution to that thread was the ... oh God what was it?? Uhhh.. the guy who does everything about teletypes or whatever?

cortex: (Chuckles)

jessamyn: I don't even remember. But basically everything's in a frickin' list. Yeah! It's W1TP dot com.

jessamyn: Scientific Instrument Museum's the History of Telegraphy and whatever. But there's no blog and you click on the tag enigma machine and see all the enigma stuff. Like it's this guys textbook and you just have to search through a whole bunch of different HTML pages, which unfortunately means it's less (I believe) indexed or indexable by google and so you really have to dig around cause you're not going to be able to just do a random search and pull it all up that way.

mathowie: I love when you stumble into like a sub-genre where there's not just one guy, but there's zillions of people that are obsessed with like ... Have you ever stumbled onto the train world? The World of ..

cortex: (Laughing)

mathowie: "... Dudes..."

cortex: (laughing)

jessamyn: I did a post on train snow blowers!

mathowie: That's right! That was like a year ago ..

jessamyn: (Laughing)

mathowie: Like ... Ahh.. I would say guys that are about sixty years old. They grew up with trains as being like a glorious mode of transport. Where like .. I mean there's flickr groups, there's like still active usenet

mathowie: Where they are just like,"This is a 1938 diesel electric Forrester 2000. Like a photo I took yesterday of it, you know, going down the track."

jessamyn: Every time I put a train picture up on flickr ..

mathowie: (laughing)

jessamyn: Usually [user] pjern or one of his buddies is like, "Oh! This is a .. blah blah blah .." and I am like, "Awesome!"

mathowie: I just thought it was a train!

jessamyn: Choo! Choo! Choo!

mathowie: I used one of these ... I used a similar site last night. I couldn't sleep from two until five am (0200-0500) and I had this sudden memory of something from nineteen-eighty-three (1983) and I was like, "Did that really happen?"

mathowie: I google searched and found someone's like .. it was a motocross-related thing (laughing) Like a winner of a race in nineteen eighty-three (1983) I just could not get out of my mind.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: I found like an old motocross museum where a guy just basically had everything from nineteen eighty-three (1983) that happened. Like, in detail. Like almost to day-by-day of who won, what race and stuff and I could look it up. It was unbelievable that someone keeps that text alive somewhere.

jessamyn: Yay!

mathowie: Cranky old men!

jessamyn: And ladies.

mathowie: Yep.

cortex: I have a thread that I .. this is actually really kind of via my wife. So Secretariat's favorite AskMe of the Month ..

jessamyn: Oh this is great!

cortex: The handy craft ... what can you do that is sort of a cheap holiday project thing and and ...

jessamyn: And it's nice because it's in frickin' September so people can actually

cortex: Yeah. Plan ahead. Instead of ...

jessamyn: Not "What can I do in two days?"

cortex: Yeah. (Laughing)

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: "I can make that out of construction paper! They'll love it!" (Laughing)

mathowie: (Laughs)

cortex: Yeah it's just a whole bunch of crazy stuff. And we've got - we actually last night just peeled the zest off of a bunch of lemons to make some Limoncello.

jessamyn: OH! Limoncello is great!

mathowie: (Laughs) Oh wow!

jessamyn: People in the neighborhood here make it. It is amazing. It's a great gift! Great gift for drinking friends.

mathowie: You are going to take down Danny DeVito and his own ..

Cortex and Mathowie: (Laughs)

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: I was thinking about maybe making vanilla from one .. there was another AskMetafilter thread about how you can make vanilla from either vodka or bourbon and vanilla beans. And again, you have to start about two months early.

mathowie: Wow! Birdhouses! I wish I had friends that made me a birdhouse.

jessamyn: I'll make you a birdhouse!

mathowie: Make me a bird .. don't put any moss in it!

jessamyn: (Cracking Up!)

mathowie: Sorry.

cortex: (giggling)

jessamyn: Birdhouses are great! In fact, I have a birdhouse! I'll just disassemble it and mail it to you.

mathowie: I have several birdhouses but that was one of the ideas

mathowie: You know, we built birdhouses. That's like a cool gift.

jessamyn: What you guys need is a window feeder. That's what I have and it's terrific. You can like stick it in your window of your room or offices and birds will come up and tweet tweet.

mathowie: Will they?

jessamyn: Yeah. Yeah they do!

mathowie: They are so skittish! No I am watching them right now, man, and I've got Cardinals like six feet away from me.

And I need a window feeder!

jessamyn: But I am kind of in the trees and you're a little bit more in the plains, right?

mathowie: But we've got like a super bird-friendly back yard and there will be like eight or nine birds there every morning like using the bird ..

jessamyn: Oh! Yeah! Window feeders are great. Fiona will love them, too.

Cats love them.

mathowie: We'll have to sneak up on it to not freak 'em out.

jessamyn: You just ignore them!

cortex: I get squirrels clinging to the outside of the screen on my office window.

mathowie: D'oh.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: I had a squirrel rampage on my porch when I got back from Boston.

mathowie: Aw, that was so great. I saw the photo.

jessamyn: (laughs) I left a little bitty bag of birdseed because it wouldn't fit in my cooler that I keep the birdseed in, and I came home, and I'd forgotten I was going to fill the feeders before I left, came home and it was just like,

Bleeahh!, like seeds, like sunflower seeds everywhere--

mathowie: Wildlife kegger! It was a...

jessamyn: --squirrel piss on my porch--

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: There were squirrels climbing up the porch for the next two days trying to chew their way into the cooler--

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: --like wildlife on drugs. It was, oh my God.

mathowie: And the great thing, your tweet was, it was like the aftermath of a wildlife kegger.

jessamyn: I know.

mathowie: And then I imagined what that looked like, and then lo and behold a day later it was on Flickr, and it looked as bad as I had imagined it.

jessamyn: (laughs)

jessamyn: Yeah. It was, uh, it was crazy! So...

Hey! Josh has got the band saw running now!

mathowie: (Chuckles)

cortex: Yeah, it's pretty exciting.

mathowie: Is it your neighbors fixing the garage that someone took out at the last podcast we recorded?

cortex: You know, it could be. Yeah. Oh God that's right....

jessamyn: Oh! Right! I forgot about that!

cortex: ... that was during the podcast that she knocked on the door wasn't it?

jessamyn: (Laughs)

cortex: They've been ... they've dug out the foundation on like two sides of it and yeah they may be working on it right now. I dunno. It feels like that would be even louder than this is, though.

cortex: That would be right next door. But maybe it is.

jessamyn: So you don't even know what it is? Hearing your like basement...

cortex: I am in the office but my window doesn't face the right way so I wouldn't be able to see without walking around and craning a bit.

jessamyn: Without turning around?

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Without moving?

cortex: Plus it's probably louder for you guys than it is for me because I've got my Sennheiser's on and so they are really enclosed so I am dimly aware of it but you notice it more than I do.

jessamyn: Stirring your stumps?

cortex: Yeah. (Laughing)

cortex: Well, uh, that's about all I got.

mathowie: Let's see..

jessamyn: I have a couple .. I have a couple more.

mathowie: Hey wait! I got one! This is ... There was a lot of .. there's a lot of dramatic, I think, posts on AskMetafilter this month. But this one was ...

jessamyn: That was the most polite way you could put that.

mathowie: (Laughing)

jessamyn: Is this the one about the shawl?

mathowie: The one about the shawl is hilarious!

jessamyn: Yes! Would you like to sum it up, Matt?

mathowie: We're on the correct side of this. Yes! This is a person asking this question

mathowie: Has thrown a dinner party, husband's an accountant or a lawyer? Lawyer at a prestigious firm?

jessamyn: Her husband is a partner. Yeah.

mathowie: Partner! And they are bring in a new guy ..

jessamyn: Associate.

mathowie: A new associate and his fiancé comes and she sounds like the worst dinner guest ...

jessamyn: Of all time.

mathowie: .. dinner guest from Hell. The worst. And so at one point .. they are on a big farm or something? Big property and the associate and the fiancé go for a walk around the property.

mathowie: They have trails.

jessamyn: They were like, we are going to go for a walk around the property and the person who ..

mathowie: Said, "Stick to the trails" and they traipse off into the woods. She comes back and her cashmere shawl has burrs in it?

jessamyn: Burrs in it!

mathowie: (Laughing-hard) And so she sends her the horriblest email in the world about how she deserves it to be replaced as one-hundred percent (100%) cashmere, something that is nice, you know.

jessamyn: It got ruined because she was outside ...

mathowie: On your property. Also cash would be fine

mathowie: You know, I don't want a gift card anywhere. It's just like. Sounds like the worst train wreck in the world when you read the question. But then when you ...

jessamyn: So you can imagine the pile-on that ensued.

mathowie: (Laughs) Yeah and we .. in the follow-ups, everyone's like,"You are a cheap ..." and then she's like, "Is this normal? Did I offend? Did I owe this person a.. " You know ..

jessamyn: And keeping in mind in AskMetafilter fifty percent (50%) of the time people are going to be like, "You're completely fucked up. Of course you should pay for it." Or whatever.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like half the time people say, "Is this normal?" people say, "No."

mathowie: Yeah.

mathowie: And it's a hundred percent (100%) No. This is not normal. This person is a psychopath like also like the fiancé, the new associate's job should be in jeopardy? (Laughing)

jessamyn: (Giggles)

mathowie: .. because if they have to attend like work functions and she acts like this ..

jessamyn: She's a total liability.

mathowie: Yeah and then it comes out that she is only twenty-three (23 years old) which is mind-boggling that she wanted a very specific wine and then she didn't end up drinking it.

mathowie: and that who has knowledge of wine and fine cashmere at age twenty-three?

cortex: Well if you've got nothing else going on maybe. I don't know.

jessamyn: She seemed to be having an anxiety attack, too. I mean really, she was just fuss, fuss, fuss, fuss, fuss .. everything was a problem.

mathowie: Yeah. Complaining about the menu and they had lobster bisque and coq au vi? Like those are .. that's a pretty good menu.

cortex: So my theory here is, this is actually. ..

jessamyn: (Chuckles)

cortex: .. This is a new service for the wealthy.

mathowie: (Chuckles)

cortex: Where, when you want to make the kind of impression that you really can't manage to make of your own volition at a party

cortex: You can hire someone specifically to be unbelievable.

mathowie: (Chuckles)

cortex: And they come along and then.. and then you can maybe, I don't know, spin that to your advantage somehow by, you know ...

mathowie: (Laughs)

cortex: having some sort of change to your situation ..

jessamyn: She called their baby fat!

mathowie: Like a nine month old baby. (Laughs)

cortex: Well that's not inexpensive. You have to .. you have to pay good quality ...

jessamyn: Extra!

cortex: .. to get someone willing to put on that kinda performance. You know. I think ..

mathowie: So you are saying there's some sort of cluster-fuck service for ...

j: (Laughing)

cortex: Yeah. It's like, "I really. really need this party not to go well."

jessamyn: Nuke-My-Job !

cortex: Like and maybe the new partner hired her. Or maybe someone else trying to sabotage the new partner hired her. Either way. I'm thinking like Mission Impossible but for awful people instead of solving crimes.

mathowie: (Laughing) But the ..

cortex: At the end of the party she rips off her mask and it's actually Tom Cruise and ...

mathowie: (Laughing)

jessamyn: He's real short!

cortex: Wow that's really boring (Laughs)

mathowie: Jessamyn as you point out there's and awesome ending to this. Which is the ... Her husband takes the guy aside

jessamyn: Takes him out for a meal, actually!

mathowie: Yeah, that's right. Away from embarrassing him at the office.

jessamyn: Like takes him out to get him away from the office and was like, "Hey ..." (jessamyn laughs)

mathowie: Yeah it's just, "Check this out! Check out this email my wife got about this shawl? This is crazy."

jessamyn: Like, "We're sorry if you had a bad time, but .."

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: The engagement was very much on the rocks long before this weekend. He assured my husband she would not, under any circumstances, [jessamyn laughing] be around clients any time soon.

cortex: (Chuckles)

mathowie: Yeah and it sounds like the relationship was even on the rocks as a result. Or was before and this is like... yeah it was good. Sounds like a crazy person.

This reminds me of someone's answers were - some of the answers that are mentioned in MetaTalk the other day. In that, how do you turn people down politely? Or one of those .. you know.. it was one of those P-R word thing? It ws just yesterday.

cortex: Oh! The .. that was not turning someone down politely. (Laughing) That was how to beat shit without admitting it.

mathowie: (Laughing)

jessamyn: "Bless your heart and other backhanded phrases"

cortex: Yeah a way with words did a segment one day..

mathowie: Yeah. So wait. So one of them was .. what was the like Miss Manners way of dealing with the shawl thing was like, "I'm sorry that is just not possible." Or "This isn't happening.."

jessamyn: That's her line. Her line is, "I'm sorry. That's not possible."

mathowie: "I'm sorry. Not possible."

jessamyn: Or just, "It's not possible." Like ..

mathowie: I just love the like delightful.. it's just like, "Oh I am sorry, SHUT-II-DOWN!" (Laughing) Like the way it comes across is like, "I'm sorry! That is just not possible!" Ah. It's beautiful. Which reminds me of the passive-aggressive

mathowie: Shit. I'll have to look it up.

jessamyn: Well here was

another one of those like give-me-a-list threads that actually made it into MetaTalk because somebody sort of misunderstood it? But I thought it was really neat because I didn't misunderstand it? Where .. (laughing) It's a guy who's a paramedic and sometimes has to take people long distances in an ambulance? So like he's the ambulance where if you need to go from like a hospital to another hospital. Long distance patient transfers. And so he wants to be able to ask his patients

jessamyn: what kind of music they like and have a stock good example of every kind of music. So basically ..

mathowie: Wow.

jessamyn: He's like, "I want to know a musical genre and the quintessential album from that genre." That's it. And so it becomes this really long list of like, "OK! If you like modern blues, you'll like this. If you like ambient, you'll like this. If you like new age traditional, you'll like this. If you like grid corps, you'll like this. "

mathowie: (Laughs) I love the musical

mathowie: hairsplitting in this.

jessamyn: (Laughing)

mathowie: I am sure a lot of, you know, infirm patients are asking for not metal core or hue gazer but...

jessamyn: Math metal.

mathowie: Yeah. C'mon. (Laughing)

jessamyn: (Shouting) It's nice!

mathowie: You need like jazz and classical. Well you need some classics.

cortex: Plus the best part is if you got essentially the ..

jessamyn: I was surprised people weren't fighting about it.

cortex: If you got the quintessential album for any genre, that's gonna be somethings that's sort of known in that genre so they'll say, "Oh yeah give me some math metal."

cortex: And then you play it and it's, "Oh my God those guys are so over done." So, you know ..

mathowie: (Laughing) I said third wave ...

jessamyn: Right. I want alternative classics .. Jane's Addiction again?!

cortex: (Laughing)

mathowie: I said third wave ska people! C'mon!

jessamyn: (Laughing)

mathowie: That is actually listed here.

jessamyn: It's a nice thread. It's nice.

mathowie: It's awesome. I am just amazed at how specific this stuff is. Post minimalism?

jessamyn: And that is what the thread is so great for, right? Early century expressionism. Lutosławski's got it down.

mathowie: Here's some general ones: Merengue Salsa House Reggae

jessamyn: Cuban. You know. The Buena Vista Social Club.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Someone who like Cuban music will... that will be fine for them most of the time.

mathowie: West Side Story for musicals? Blech.

jessamyn: (Starts singing "Jet Song") ... 'When you're a jet....

mathowie: (snickers)

jessamyn: ... you're a jet all the way! '

mathowie: Is Oklahoma too cheesy? I guess that is too much.

jessamyn: Maybe a little too cheesy. All right guys, let's step on it! I gotta teach some email to some old people.

mathowie: Sweet! I think we are done.

jessamyn: No! Wait!

mathowie: Nope.

jessamyn: I had one more thing that was good only because it's one of those like warms-your-heart kind of things: Is there a little app that allows me to count up to a set number with a big infographic? Kind of similar to gaming experience points and watching your bar code go towards level up?

mathowie: I didn't see that.

jessamyn: But it's just somebody who's just trying to get shit done?

mathowie: uh huh

jessamyn: And then [user] artlung makes it. Builds a little thing.

mathowie: Oh! Joe Crawford! My old friend! Awesome!

jessamyn: What?

mathowie: I know him.

jessamyn: You know art?

mathowie: Yeah. [user] artlung. I've known him for like twelve years?

mathowie: I knew him in LA [Los Angeles]

jessamyn: Really? Do I know Joe? I mean I know him from the website, but not enough to ..

mathowie: Ahhh. I doubt it. He used to live in LA [Los Angeles] and when I lived in LA [Los Angeles] and we were on this like very tiny web designer - LA [Los Angeles] web designer list and we'd meet up sometimes.

jessamyn: Oh. Cool. Well at any rate, he just built a little thing. And it was just nice cause the thread didn't have ...

mathowie: Url?

jessamyn: Wha?

cortex: (Chuckles)

mathowie: Url, please? I didn't see this.

jessamyn: Gah. Sorry.

mathowie: (Laughs) I'm curious what it looks like.

jessamyn: Counting... It doesn't look like anything, really. No offense to [user] artlung. But like it's just a little thing.

mathowie: Wow. Oh I see. You just click it yourself? Wow! And it ..

jessamyn: If fact, it doesn't .. it doesn't work for me for whatever reason.

mathowie: Oh. In chrome it works. It's HTML5. You're using (unintelligible)

jessamyn: God damn chrome! Alright.

mathowie: Chrome is awesome!

jessamyn: I know!

mathowie: Yeah. You click it and it goes up!

cortex: (Laughing)

mathowie: Oh this is so fun! I'm just clicking. I'm going to get to a hundred! (Clicking sounds)

jessamyn: (Laughing)

mathowie: I am almost there! (Clicking sounds)

jessamyn: (Laughing)

mathowie: I've rounded the seventies.

jessamyn: Why should I do it? (Answer) You'll get points! Points? Points!

mathowie: I got one hundred points! WOO HOO! A hundred points!

jessamyn: Win! I dug a hole to the center of the universe. This has just been great. So successful podcast!

mathowie: Wow. And if you reload it .. if you're in HT ... it's HTML5, but ...

jessamyn: (snickers)

mathowie: .. reload it and it remembers your number that you're at using local storage.

cortex: Ahh!

mathowie: That's cool.

jessamyn: Awww!

cortex: And also stores a marketing bug that will .... (pause)

mathowie and cortex: (Crack up!)

cortex: .. track your every purchase henceforth.

mathowie: And send it to Mark Zuckerberg.

cortex: Yes.

mathowie: Thank you! You're welcome!

jessamyn: My landlady brought up a New York ..

cortex: And then he can click on the numbers to count out how many dollars he's made off of you.

mathowie: (not quite a chuckle)

jessamyn: She brought up a New York Times clipping about the FaceBook Movie. She's like, "Have you seen this??"

cortex: (Laughing)

jessamyn: "What's this about?" (Laughing)

mathowie: (Laughing) Wait..wait..wait.. wait. (Laughing) I just want to get this clear.

Someone comes up your stairs to show you a newspaper ..

cortex: (Laughing)

mathowie: about a movie about a website? (Laughing)

jessamyn: And that website is FaceBook. Yes. (Laughing)

jessamyn and mathowie: (Laugh)

jessamyn: Clipped out of the paper! She did not even bring the whole paper.

mathowie: Ahh.. that's right.

mathowie: If she mailed it to you, though, that would make one better.

jessamyn: She is eighty-five [years old]

mathowie: I know. Yeah, yeah.

jessamyn: (Giggles)

cortex: Someone should make an app where you can like take a random piece of text or a blog post or something? And then you throw it into the ahhh... grammafier? And what we would do is take the text you want and throw it in as like a ..

mathowie: (Chuckles)

cortex: .. a two-column inch side-article on the front page of a fake newspaper?

mathowie: (Laughing) And then cut if out of that newspaper.

cortex: And then you can cut that out or circle it with highlighter ..

mathowie: (Laughing)

cortex: . and send it to your tech-un-friendly-relatives and then they can cut it out. And then it's like, "Oh look at this nice blog post!"

jessamyn: Oh, Josh ..

mathowie: I did use a service that turned a twitter post into a telegraph ..

cortex: (Laughing)

mathowie: .. with like the word "stop" in it.

cortex: (Still laughing)

mathowie: .. and mailed it to someone. It was really cool. Cost a couple bucks, but it was worth it.

That's all I can say. That's all I can say, like ...

jessamyn: That's kinda great. And josh I think you should make that immediately.

mathowie: (Laughs)

cortex: It would be a good thing. First I want to make an echoness remix .. uh .. scripted ....

jessamyn: What?

cortex: .. automatically creates a dance-dance-revolution track out of any song you put into it. Because I think that would be fuckin' killer. But that's its own story.

jessamyn: Hey, can I play a Wii on my iMac?

cortex: No. It's not a Wii.

mathowie: A what? What?

jessamyn: I can't plug it in and use it as a display?

cortex: (laughs) That's... that [wasn't even a question ?]. I don't know, actually.

mathowie: Oh! Oh, no, yeah, there's no... you can't use the display as like a TV.

jessamyn: (sighs)

cortex: Yeah, I think you can only use out to an external display, I don't think it can take in.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: No, like if I had a Wii I could plug it in to my computer and have my computer be the display?

cortex: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I don't think you can use a computer as an external...

mathowie: Yeah, you'll have to go get a TV monitor.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Goddammit!

cortex: Well, I mean, you could buy an external stand alone monitor that'll take stuff like HDMI.

mathowie: Yeah. Two hundred bucks.

jessamyn: But not the Mac.

mathowie: It'll cost as much as the Wii.

cortex: But yeah. Your average laptop doesn't want to volunteer to be an external monitor.

jessamyn: No, not the laptop, the iMac.

mathowie: The iMac! The iMac is a computer. It wants to be a computer.

cortex: Oh. Ohh. Oh. Yeah, probably not. I mean, there might be a software solution or something? But I imagine it'd be futzy.

mathowie: Ehhh, I don't think there is. There's no inputs.

jessamyn: (sighs)

cortex: There's gotta be some sort of... it's gotta have USB or some shit, doesn't it?

mathowie: Can't you borrow a tv off of someone?

jessamyn: I live up a tall flight of stairs. They are heavy. Yes.

mathowie: I will clip out a coupon for a good tv and mail it to you.

jessamyn: (Laughing) Yeah if you wanna send me, you know, your old tv, I'm sure I could .. uh ..

mathowie: (Chuckles)

jessamyn: I don't have a lot of space. But yeah I was just curious. I figured you guys would know.

mathowie: Yeah. All right. I'll cut this part out ...

cortex: (Laughing)

mathowie: .. and then wrap it up!

Everyone: (Laughing)

cortex: That is the quality I am talking about.

jessamyn: Did we have any music? Did we talk about any music at all?

mathowie: No.

cortex: I have been playing minecraft instead of listening to music.

mathowie: Oh. Geeze.

cortex: Although we did just hit five thousand. Actually, just ... I made a song post the other day..

mathowie: what?

cortex: ..that was like the five thousandth post to music so that was kinda sweet. But it was just kind of a dumb cover ..

mathowie: You made the even one? (short silence ..)

jessamyn: Josh did you actually specifically wait to make the five thousandth or is just one of those happy accidents ...

cortex: It was a happy accident thing.

jessamyn: ... because you hang around all the time?

cortex: I looked and I was like, "Holy shit! It's 4999 and I recorded this yesterday. Fuck yeah!" So. It was just.. it was exciting.

jessamyn: This is great we all win! Everyone wins. Matt's got a hundred points. I've got a hole in the center of the universe. Josh has the five thousandth

jessamyn: music post.

mathowie: Oooh. You made a Nathan Fillion theme song?

cortex: Oh yeah. And you know the mother fucker didn't re-tweet it. And I am assuming that it was just an oversight because he's, you know, like busy and things.

jessamyn: Who is he?

cortex: Nathan Fillion?

mathowie: ..because he has ten million followers.

cortex: Yeah. But he re-tweeted a bunch of other ones and it was ..

mathowie: Oh.

cortex: He's ... he was Mal on Firefly. He's on Castle ..

jessamyn: Oh! Okay I actually do know who he is.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Just not by name.

cortex: Captain Hammer from Dr. Horrible. And I made him a theme song and he did not re-tweet it.

jessamyn: (Makes a howling sound)

mathowie: Awww.

cortex: I am a little sad.

jessamyn: (makes howling sound again) You gotta work on your posse.

cortex: I guess. Well I kinda didn't want to be, "Hey Nathan Fillion what's the fuckin' deal?" Ya know? I didn't want to be a shithead on twitter about it (laughing) it's kinda defeating the whole purpose, but ahh.. yeah.

jessamyn: It's that the whole purpose about twitter?

mathowie: (Chuckles)

cortex: Well... you know. I like fun, happy things. And I think he likes fun happy things, too. So I am just not worrying about it.

mathowie: (Laughing)

cortex: Anyway! Why you bring me down! (laughing)

mathowie: (Laughing)

jessamyn: Come on!

mathowie and cortex: (laughing)

cortex: Go play some minecraft.

mathowie: (Laughs)

jessamyn: I'm going to go walk to work is what I am going to do.

cortex: Oh, whatever.

jessamyn: (taunting sound)

cortex: I tell you, if they ever ..

mathowie: Oh! How are the leaves? Leaves Report!

jessamyn: Oh! Leaves Report? The leaves are awesome! Where I am, up in the trees, they are yellows and greens a little bit of reds. And it hasn't ...

mathowie: Photos please! But iPhone photo.

jessamyn: iPhone photo? All right.

mathowie: Take an iPhone photo.

jessamyn: Well there's like three pictures that are already up on the flickr. You could use one of those. But I'll take a picture out of the window.. But!

jessamyn: We haven't had the big rainstorm or the big wind that starts knocking all the leaves off? So it;'s still a really good time to come look at leaves. And! When I was going to bed last night I could actually hear them?

mathowie: (Chuckles)

jessamyn: I could actually hear the leaves falling?

cortex: (Laughs)

jessamyn: Like it was just a little windy and I'm like, "What's that noise? Did it start raining?"

mathowie: Tiny screams?

jessamyn: But it's just leaves falling through, falling through the trees. It's great. It's really great. Autumn in Vermont is really terrific.

mathowie: But still probably a week or two from the peak of awesome?

jessamyn: Ahh.. depends

jessamyn: .. depends where you are but, yeah. Yeah we've still got some time left unless there's a crazy bonsoon windstorm that knocks all the leaves off. Sometimes you just get this like stunted autumn because there's rainstorms and so the leaves fall off as soon as they change? And we haven't had that yet this year.

mathowie: (with a smirk) Sweet.

jessamyn: That's my report!

mathowie: Awesome! Vermont!

jessamyn: Awesome!

mathowie: All right! Go teach old people stuff.

jessamyn: I will! Talk to you guys later!

m' All right. I have to hang up. See ya'll!

Bye!

cortex: Buh-bye!

jingle: 5000th Music Post - Cortex's Strange Attraction (Cure cover) PLAYS

jingle: Strange Attraction (Cure cover)

NOPE --- not doing the lyrics.

:)

jingle: Strange Attraction (Cure cover)

jingle: Strange Attraction (Cure cover)

jingle: Strange Attraction (Cure cover)

jingle: Strange Attraction (Cure cover)

jingle: Strange Attraction (Cure cover)

jingle: Strange Attraction (Cure cover)

Credits

• tangerinegurl, 94 segments
• beryllium, 90
• Pronoiac, 11
• bluefly, 3
• Danny Jacobs, 3