MetaFilter's site and server can always use upgrades of hardware, software, and bandwidth, as well as more stable funding for continued support of its small but high-skilled moderation and backend team! If you'd like to chip in, you can donate to Metafilter.

Podcast 63 Transcript

From Mefi Wiki
Jump to navigationJump to search

A transcript for Episode 63: The Intern Speaks.

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

Transcript

jingle: theme song

mathowie: Welcome to episode 63 of the Metafilter Podcast! Today features an interview with the intern, Dom! Say hello, Dom.

Dom: Hello, everyone.

mathowie: Why don't we just get off and running with the interview part.

Dom: All right.

mathowie: All right! Hard-hitting!

jessamyn: Matt! How did you find this guy? He just showed up one day.

mathowie: Uh yeah, Dom. Um, lemme see. Fiona has gone to daycare at Dom's mom's house forever. She's ahh, been a great daycare provider and friend to all sorts of professor parents, um, which is where we found out about her. Um, so yeah, Dom ah, was graduating high school and ah, I think I heard second-hand that he was complaining he couldn't even find a ten, like a minimum wage job anywhere in

Dom: exactly

mathowie: ... McMinville and I said, "I could pay that kid ten bucks an hour to, like, hang out with me and we could think of things to do." I don't know. Um.

jessamyn: And you guys are taking a trip to New York?

Dom: Yes

mathowie: Yeah - next week - a week from today - woo hoo!

Dom: Very excited.

jessamyn: And you're going to do ... what?

mathowie: We're just working on the schedule now. Land, go to ...

Dom: ... The schedule is ...

mathowie: ... go to Shake Shack meetup Monday night.

Dom: Yup

jessamyn: Saw that.

mathowie: That'll be fun. I think I'll try and pay for everyone's Shake Shack if we can coordinate twenty people getting burgers.

mathowie: Um, oh - we gotta go to ...

jessamyn: Isn't it cash only? Isn't that gonna be crazy?

mathowie: No, they do credit cards.

jessamyn: Do they?

mathowie: Yeah - they're expensive. Ten dollar burgers. Like, it adds up.

jessamyn: No - I know. I've eaten there.

mathowie: It's good? Is it good? Or is it great?

jessamyn: It's delicious. I would like somebody else to pay for my burger there. (laughter)

mathowie: So, ah. So lemme see. Shake-Shack and then the next day is Tuesday we're hitting the New York Times. Wednesday we're hitting Gawker and Gothamist and hanging out with Joel at Gawker and Jake at Gothamist.

mathowie: Gothamist is kinda close to Metafilter but, ya know, more journalismy...

Dom: Yeah.

mathowie: ... And ah, David Gallagher is giving us a tour of the New York Times. I think we're doing lunch at the New York Times,and I'll be, I mean... I was thinking, like, I think someone early on in the MetaTalk thread said, "Hey, why don't we," um or "Why don't you try and show Dom around newspapers or something?" And then, you know, I just happened to be getting interviewed by the Willamette Week the next day or something and I was like, "Oh, hey that's not a bad idea!"

mathowie: And then I thought, "Well, we should go to like fucking ground zero of bizarro new journalism world, like, New York Times and Gawker.", and I looked through my entire summer when we had time. It looked like, you know, middle of July was about kind of a dead time.

jessamyn: That's cool! You know we got contacts at the Wall Street Journal and CNN also.

mathowie: Yeah, I was thinking about seeing what's-his-name at CNN. That would be kind of a weird fun thing to do. Um, who do we know at Wall Street Journal?

jessamyn: I'm not sure if he's "out" as his Metafilter user name.

mathowie: I know, I won't even say what he, what his name is!

cortex: "Someone."

(everyone laughs)

jessamyn: You know that guy!

cortex: Or girl.

mathowie: Who do we know at the Wall Street Journal?

jessamyn: One of the guys that was on trivia. I can go look it up in a few if you remind me.

mathowie: Eh, it's probably Rupert -

cortex: Well, you know Scott Adams has written for them.

mathowie: Oh ho, right.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Maybe we'll catch him in the hallway.

jessamyn: And grumblebee works at AOL now, I think, cause...

mathowie: He works in a well?

jessamyn: AOL! AOL!

(general laughter)

jessamyn: Man, that's going to be wicked fun! Dom, are you well-travelled?

Dom: No, I'm not well-travelled.

mathowie: First plane ride, I think?

Dom: Yeah, since I was 18 months old.

cortex: Rock and roll.

jessamyn: Dude, shut up, that's going to be so great!

Dom: I know! I'm super excited, right!

jessamyn: Make sure Matt gets you some very expensive noise-cancelling headphones.

(Matt & Dom laugh)

mathowie: I can't find mine! They're up here somewhere. Dom, that's your job today - to find my headphones.

Dom: Are they in Fiona's room?

mathowie: I don't think so.

(Jessamyn & Dom laugh)

jessamyn: Then you're going to have to let him out.

mathowie: I don't know where they are.

mathowie: Yeah, so, yeah, it'll be fun. The New York Times-

Dom: Yep.

mathowie: have you ever been in there, Jessamyn?

jessamyn: I haven't. I've seen their excellent building and it looks really cool. I think that's going to be great.

mathowie: It's a cool building, made for, like, the peak of journalism, and when you walk around, it's kind of like tumbleweeds everywhere, because they've fired...

jessamyn: Great.

mathowie: ...half of their staff, so it's weird.

Dom: (laughs)

mathowie: Because they occupy ten floors or something, still, but you know, there's hardly anyone on any floor.

jessamyn: Ask them if they'll let you see the basement.

mathowie: Is that an Alamo joke?

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: I just bet it's really cool.

cortex: Oh, like old --

Dom: (laughs)

jessamyn: That's what I do when I visit big libraries.

mathowie: You know what's awesome? Willamette Week, they took, they set up a makeshift photo studio in their storage room, and they have every Willamette week, a stack of every issue -

Dom: The covers of them.

mathowie: No, they had the stacks of an actual single issue of everything, going back to 2003 or something, and it was all in the same rack, so you could look: 2011 was white, and somewhere around 2008 they started to yellow a little bit -

- and like 2003 papers is perfectly...

Dom: It's basically their archive of their issues.

mathowie: But on this single rack is like perfect oxidation: super-fade, white to brownish.

jessamyn: Did you take a picture?

mathowie: No.

Dom: No.

mathowie: It wasn't perfectly... pitch...

Dom: The lighting was terrible.

mathowie: Yeah. But it was very cool to see papers like basically rotting in place over time.

jessamyn: So Dom, more about you. You've never been on a plane before, almost.

(mathowie & Dom laugh)

mathowie: You're thinking about journalism.

Dom: I'm thinking about journalism,

jessamyn: You're going to college, right?

Dom: ...but I'm not thinking about print journalism. Yes, I'm going to college - I'm going to the University of Oregon next year to major in journalism, but I'm also going to be taking a few computer classes that Matt and I have talked about.

jessamyn: Smart. Smart.

mathowie: Oh, yeah, we looked at the CS department and I steered him away from every like, everything that's low level in CS, because they're trying to train you to

mathowie: do anything.

jessamyn: Sure.

mathowie: But it's like Dude. Let's stick high level. Web scripting, that's it. All you need is Python, PHP, Perl. You don't need to know assembler code for, you know, 1960s ATM interfaces. You just want web scripting knowledge. There was, thankfully... not all colleges have come up to speed on, you know, the web. So thankfully they have three or four classes in like web scripting, building a web database, versus, you know

mathowie: knowing everything there is to know about databases.

jessamyn: Nice. Super nice. UO's in Eugene?

Dom: Yeah, it's in Eugene. Which is, uh...

jessamyn: How do you feel about Eugene?

mathowie: It's pretty boring.

Dom: I really like Eugene!

mathowie: You do?

Dom: Shut up, Matt. Yes, I like Eugene. I like how

jessamyn: Yeah, Eugene is an awesome town. You are so weird...

Dom: it's such a bike friendly town, and seeing how I have all these food allergies, with being gluten-free and whatever, it's such a perfect place for me to be living.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Because it's totally full of high maintenance hippies.

Dom: Crazy vegans, hippies, yeah, exactly!

mathowie: (chuckles) High maintenance hippies.

Dom: So, yeah.

cortex: Eugene is basically the Missoula, Montana of Oregon, and vice versa.

jessamyn: No, it is, it's great.

cortex: Oh, I know, it's funky little towns!

jessamyn: I saw the Grateful Dead there, it was terrific.

mathowie: "I'm allergic to WiFi, and microwaves..."

jessamyn: Dude, don't even start. People go into public libraries talking like that sometimes.

mathowie: "I only eat raw chocolate vegan, so if you could..." Yeah. Sorry.

jessamyn: Dark chocolate is vegan.

mathowie and cortex: [laugh]

mathowie: But not raw.

jessamyn: Everyone knows this.

cortex: I have to say, Dom, I'm curious about your experiences coming to Metafilter essentially cold. I mean, my impression is if you didn't really have much exposure to the site prior to becoming-

jessamyn: It's not like you had an account or something.

Dom: Mm-hm. No, no.

cortex: Yeah, you weren't like hanging about or anything.

Dom: No. I kind of, just 'cause I've known Matt's worked on Metafilter, and that's just kind of his thing, so I've looked at it a few times prior, and then... but I didn't really

delve deep into it, because I didn't understand really the whole point of the blue pages, posts-

jessamyn: [chuckles] This is-

Dom: It kind of just wracked my brain, and I'm just like, "Uhhh, I don't really understand..."

mathowie: Ohhhh. This is comedy gold. We should have recorded your first visit ever to Metafilter. Because everyone tells me, like-

jessamyn: I changed it to the professional white background.

mathowie: People just said, "What the hell? What's the point?" There's no helper text.

Dom: There's nothing to help you figure out what is going on.

mathowie: Yeah. Just, there's a wall of posts.

Dom: And normally sites, people are like, "Oh, and here are the interesting posts." No. This is just a wall of posts. [jessamyn laughs] And I had to just kinda click on a few and be like, "Okay, well this is interesting information, but is this what all of it is?" And so it took me a couple days to kind of figure out everything and how it worked. I still-

jessamyn: I hope you were on the clock during those days.

Dom: I am. I'm still way too nervous to post anything on the blue wall.

jessamyn: You could ask some questions on the green about your first airplane ride. That would be great.

mathowie: I was going to say, we should force you to ask a question this week, just so you can get used to what it's like. You made a MetaTalk post-

Dom: [chuckles] Force me to ask a question? I'm pretty sure I could come up with a random question.

mathowie: No! I mean-

jessamyn: Which was hilarious. That MetaTalk post was one of my favorite recent MetaTalk posts.

mathowie: [laughs] Yeah.

Dom: Which ones?

jessamyn: The one about Matt's broken wrist?

Dom: Oh, yeah. And people were saying it was weird, and I was like, but I thin

that actually could be kinda funny to see what people say [laughs] but yeah...

jessamyn: No you were totally right-- it was weird and hilarious.

Dom: [laughs]

mathowie: Yeah. It was-- normally we'd like delete a weird post like that, but like, it was fine and people... I think I-- as soon as I answered everyone got on track and actually did that, so.

jessamyn: [laughs]

Dom: Yeah [laughs] yeah.

cortex: Well and you're kind of in-- you're in this excellent, unique position where you are--are conspicuously you know, new to the site, but also sort of getting some attention

but not because you took a giant shit on the front page [all laugh] or something 'cause what how it usually works is someone shows up to try and sell their cash for gold scheme. Instead you know, you are, you know, working for Matt, so it's kind of a nice shift from what the normal reaction might be to "Who is this guy and why is he talking about whatever he's talking about on MetaTalk" so.

jessamyn: People are inclined to be positive. Have you been to a meetup yet? My apologies if I should know this, I just--

mathowie: No!

Dom: Oh, no--

jessamyn: --saw there was a Portland meetup.

Dom: --no no I haven't been to a meetup yet--

mathowie: Yeah so, trial by--

Dom: --so, New York'll be my first one.

mathowie: --trial by fire baby!

Dom: [laughs]

cortex: There's gonna be like-- on the 30th we're, we're going to Enchanted Forest, so uh--

jessamyn: Oh!

Dom: Really?!

cortex: --you should come to that, yes.

jessamyn: Those are really actually--

Dom: Well, seeing as I'm--

jessamyn: --kind of fun, from what I have heard.

Dom: --seeing as Matt broke his wrist and we can't go on the Gourmet Century--

mathowie: Oh yeah, maybe so.

cortex: [laughs]

Dom: --I don't have anything going that day, sooo [laughs]

mathowie: You know I was-- I was talking about... Enchanted Forest with someone just last week and they were saying that it was, you know, kitschy, and harmless fun, it had lots of little kid rides you know

and Fiona would love it. But I was like, well I've only heard about it from like jaded thirty-somethings who thought it looked like shit. Yeah!

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: It's full of drunk nerds!

cortex: What, it's kind of-- it's a it's a mixed bag, it's a you know a little of column A, little of column B. They've-- they've done a little bit of renovation work apparently last year, so when we were there last year, it was not as horrifying as we kind of expected. I was really expecting it to look like it hadn't had a paint job since I was there as a kid, but I guess they've-- they've managed to scrape up some maintenance dollars. So it's actually-- it's more entertaining for the weirdness of the place

at this point than any sort of like, desolate, abandoned, you know Chernobyl Exclusion Zone sort of thing.

mathowie: Oh it's not-- ah I thought it was down by Eugene, it's just south of Salem? Huh. That's not that far.

Dom: Yeah.

mathowie: Have you ever been Dom?

jessamyn: Yeah it's not that far.

mathowie: Was it--

Dom: Yeah I've been. And it's-- it's very centered around little kids--

mathowie: Oh ok.

Dom: --kind of things, so--

cortex: Which makes it awesome to be a giant group of adults.

Dom: [laughs] I know right?

cortex: Everybody's like, "WHAT?!"

Dom: I remember my best, my probably my best memory of Enchanted Forest

was there's this one tunnel, and it's like the Dwarf Tunnel for, I dunno, Snow White's Seven Dwarves. And so you walk into this tunnel and it's completely pitch black all the way through except for, like, tiny little lights that they have on the walls, like every thirty yards. And so you don't-- it's just black and you can't see anything and so we went in one way, my dad went in the other way, and we didn't know about it, and he was like laying on the ground [laughs] and he jumped up and grabbed
us by the back of like, the shirts and just pulled us--

jessamyn: Ahhh!!

cortex: [laughs]

Dom: --into like a huge hug and we all freaked out and there was no more going into dark tunnels.

cortex: [laughs]

Dom: That was kind of a one time thing. So. I mean I think Fiona would get a blast out of it, there's a lot of stuff that she could do. They have a lot--

mathowie: What about drunken, jaded thirty-somethings?

jessamyn: Nerds.

Dom: Um yeah they're just attracted to the weirdness of it. I mean I feel like it's kind of fulfilling that... I really wish I could go to some place that I've-- read about in these books, these fantasy

novels that I'm obsessing about. Let's go to Enchanted Forest, because that's about the closest thing you're going to find to it.

cortex: See, for me it's all about the fact that I have these childhood memories of it, and it's such a opportunity to really say, okay, I know how things get distorted in my mind, memory decays, and this is an approximation, it's a reconstruction of experience.

jessamyn: Right, because you're local, yeah.

Dom: And you have these-

cortex: So going back twenty years later, it was like, "I remember all of this and none of this." It's just a--the whole scale thing is all wrong, everything's

like, "Oh my God, I remember that-"

Dom: You went back on a rush of retrospection, and then you get there, and it's not all you thought it was. Yeah.

jessamyn: It's like me going to Canobie Lake Park and being like, this rollercoaster is really not scary, except Canobie Lake was more like just a park and not quite so much a theatrical experience.

Dom: The Big Timber Log Ride, that was the shit.

jessamyn: Ooooh.

Dom: I mean, anything where you go down a huge chute and hit water and it blows just all over the place, I mean, that's fun for any kid.

mathowie and jessamyn: [laugh]

Dom: The Ice Mountain Bobsleds, that was alright. That was like, you're sitting in these little train cars going around this track, and, I mean, that's cool.

mathowie: Everything sounds like a Disneyland ripoff.

Dom: Speedway bumper cars...

jessamyn: [laughs]

mathowie: Autopia, Matterhorn... and you described Splash Mountain also.

jessamyn: Is it cheap? Is that, I mean...

cortex: Yes, yes, it's fairly inexpensive. Certainly compared to a-

jessamyn: Relative to Disneyland, which is a nightmare.

cortex: A-list amusement park, yeah, yeah. It's probably too expensive for

what it is, but it was like 20 bucks a person?

Dom: For children's it's 9 bucks, and for adults it's 10 bucks.

mathowie: What now, that's-

jessamyn: Are you sure you don't work there, Dom? [mathowie laughs]

Dom: I have the website open right now. [laughs]

jessamyn: Are you're sure you're not moonlighting at Metafilter?

cortex: That is actually the other job you might have been able to get [jessamyn laughs] is being the guy who tends the Challenge of Mondor [laughter] and let me and other MeFites go through five times in a row.

jessamyn: Which brings me to my other question, Dom. You mentioned that you actually may read, and since my other background is library background

I have to sort of ask you if you're looking at journalism kind of stuff. Reading? Do you go to the library? Do you... what do you read that you like besides Metafilter? Online, offline, whatever. Just 'cause I'm curious.

Dom: I used to read a lot of books, like, some of my favorite books are- Well, my favorite book is Ender's Game, that's one of my favorites.

jessamyn: Hey!

mathowie: Oh no, you're going to turn into a weird libertarian Mormon... what did Orson Scott Card turn into?

Dom: I don't care, everybody

jessamyn: He started out as a Mormon, actually, Matt.

Dom: (laughs)

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: Everyone's upset about Orson Scott Card...

mathowie: Or he's homophobic!

cortex: being so different from Ender's Game,

jessamyn: Yes.

cortex: but Ender's Game is a perfectly nice novel.

jessamyn: Ender's Game is terrific.

mathowie: That's one of Kay's favorite books ever, so.

Dom: Yep, love Ender's Game. By 5th grade I had already read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy like four times,

jessamyn: Good man.

Dom: I've read... I mean I used to be really, really into fantasy...

so I mean I read all the Redwall books when I was really young. Something about animals fighting in armies that was interesting to me.

jessamyn: [laughs]

Dom: [chuckle] Then I kinda hit sixth grade and that wasn't very cool anymore. [mathowie chuckles] I definitely got my nerdy side out when Halo came out and I started reading the Halo books, just because.

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

Dom: That was interesting. But I guess it helped me understand the games a little bit better when they had crappy plotlines and whatnot. I don't know. In schools I don't like to

read things that I'm forced to read, I don't get anything out of it, so-

jessamyn: Sure. Would.

Dom: Exactly. And how our school is structured is they would basically assign you, read twelve pages tonight, and then we'll talk about it tomorrow, and it's like, but I don't read twelve pages at a time. I read whole books at a time.

jessamyn: Right.

Dom: So I refused to read until the week before books were due, like, I absolutely loved Great Expectations, that was one of the best, that's another one of my favorite books.

I don't know. I haven't read as much in the past few months just because I haven't had a lot of time.

jessamyn: I always got you on the Internet all day.

Dom: Well, yes, but I mean [jessamyn laughs], I was graduating, and there's just kind of a lot going on, so I haven't really had the time, and if I'm not--I mean, hanging out with friends, or I'm going for rides, or I'm in Vancouver seeing my girlfriend, so.

jessamyn: Vancouver, Washington, or Vancouver, BC?

Dom: Washington. Definitely not flying to BC!

jessamyn: Thank God!

mathowie: Canadian girlfriend!

Dom: Well, how would that even make sense? You know that I haven't been on a plane since I was 18 months old, so what am I gonna--driving cross-country?

jessamyn: Maybe you're like a crazy ride-the-rails hobo? I don't know. I don't know!

Dom: Yeah, I don't know, you never know. I guess there is-

jessamyn: Maybe on a train? There's buses.

Dom: Yeah, there is true, there's trains that go cross-country.

mathowie: Takes twelve hours.

jessamyn: I guess you could drive a car.

Dom: Yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah, Vancouver, BC's

north of you, it's not that far.

mathowie: Six hours, it's not bad.

jessamyn: Is it really six hours? I guess that's right.

mathowie: Yeah. Six hours.

cortex: Well, Seattle's like four.

mathowie: Yeah, and then it's just a couple hours after Seattle. Actually, you get stuck at the border for like 45 minutes.

jessamyn: Oh.

mathowie: Because they're so nice. "What are you here for?" [laughs]

cortex: Maple syrup, babe!

jessamyn: "You got the buns?" [?}

mathowie: [laughs] Oh, goodness.

jessamyn: What's been interesting for you about the Metafilter community that you never really expected?

jessamyn: What's been interesting for you about the Metafilter community that you never really expected? What were you surprised to find out based on what Matt had told you before you interacted with it?

Dom: Well, you know, I didn't really know what to expect. Like, I thought, I've read certain things, and I've thought that some of the threads were really really funny. And then doing my blog on Tumblr, and then having that post about my blog-

jessamyn: We've been enjoying that, by the way.

Dom: Exactly. I'm glad. It's terrible, because

I've been writing it at 11:30 at night are half my posts, so grammar's bad, wake up in the morning, alright, now I need to edit it what I wrote last night, re-edit it and submit it again, it's just, ugh. But it was really funny to see that post, by I think it was zarq did it, he posted in MetaTalk, my little "Welcome Dominic" thread, and I thought it was funny how people seemed to think I'm some sweet kid and I'm not sarcastic at all,
and then when people started talking crap on my post it was just kinda like, okay, I can throw in some remarks [jessamyn laughs], have a little edge, I'm not some some sheltered child.

jessamyn: That was very fun from our perspective.

Dom: I mean, I don't understand-

mathowie: They just wanted to pinch your cheeks.

Dom: I know, right? I'm an intern, yes, I'm 18 years old, but that doesn't mean I don't have an attitude and I can't be a little sarcastic every once in a while, so I just thought that was really

funny how they're just like, "He's finally becoming one of us!" Like, oh my gosh.

jessamyn: Right. "Oh, he's a weird snarky pain in the ass also!" [laughter]

mathowie: Do you have any favorite users already in your quick time here?

Dom: Not necessarily. I mean, a lot of people have been supportive, and I think I, I don't know, in one of my blogs I mentioned somebody who thought it was cool to have an Ask Dom feature on my-

mathowie: Oh yeah.

Dom: But I added an Ask Dom feature to my blog,

Dom: and no one's asked Dom a question besides Matt. [mathowie laughs]

jessamyn: Let's work on this. Let's work on this.

Dom: Exactly. I'd like questions. I think it would be really funny to just see random questions asked to me. And I mean, I guess that could be I'm not getting any questions because I have 32 followers on Tumblr and you can't ask a question unless you're registered on Tumblr, and people are just too lazy to make accounts.

cortex: That's one of the problems with accounts, it has to be the intersection of people who are watching your blog or are on Tumblr and understand how-

mathowie: It takes 30 seconds to sign up.

cortex: Yeah, but people are like, "Oh my gosh, another account, someone's gonna

hack in and look at all my personal information!"

cortex: And, you know, the worst thing about Tumblr is they irrevocably tie your identity with whatever you do first on Tumblr-

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: I have that problem.

cortex: so you're actually setting people up for being fucking annoyed. Like, I will forever be Meeting Metafilter, which is great if I'm talking about Metafilter-

jessamyn: If you ever finished it.

mathowie: [laughs]

Dom: So I'll always be MeFi [meh-fie] Intern? MeFi [mee-fie] Intern?

jessamyn: What? Wait, wait, what? How did you say that?

cortex: Exactly. If you, like-

cortex: Correctly. He said it correctly.

mathowie: How do you pronounce (spells) "M E F I". This is a big, contentious thing.

Dom: Is it "mɛfaɪ" or "mifaɪ"?

cortex: It's "mɛfaɪ". You gotta...

jessamyn: It's a good question. What do you think?

Dom: OK, because I've heard people say "mifaɪ" and I'm sort of...

cortex: They're crazy.

Dom: ...that doesn't sound right. It sounds like "mɛfaɪ".

mathowie: (laughs) This is gold for Kim.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: My favorite thing about Dom is seeing the world through Dom's eyes. He's doing every intro blogger thing we all did in the year

mathowie: 2000 or something, which is pay close attention to how many people are following you, and how many people follow you on Twitter, and like, I used to be obsessed with numbers, and "ohmigod, my technorati ranking went down!" and like...

jessamyn: Oh my God, remember Technorati?

Dom: (laughs)

mathowie: Or remember like the Beebo Popularity Index and stuff before that, before technorati existed.

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: And then blogdex, and all those things, and ohmigod, yeah. I've been trying to tell Dom none of this matters, but it's always funny when he drops things like...

"Thirty-two followers!"

Dom: When was the last time I've done that, OK?

mathowie: I know, that you just did it at all--

Dom: By the way, let me just say, Twitter is dropping thirty-four followers right now, it hasn't gone up in the last like, week.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: (laughs) That you know this is hilarious.

Dom: But I know it because I get an email every time I get anything.

mathowie: Oh.

Dom: So it's just like, "Oh, OK."

mathowie: Yeah, I turned that off completely. Because it's annoying.

Dom: Yeah, well, you probably get a million followers a day, whereas I'm...

mathowie: Oh...

Dom: "Oooh! Two a week!", you know.

mathowie: Twenty...

jessamyn: Matt's very popular.

mathowie: No I'm not.

Dom: Yeah, you are, shut up.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Anything else? Anything else? Final questions? Going once...

cortex: You should have made him write some questions for us to ask him.

mathowie: Exactly.

Dom: Write questions for you to ask me?

cortex: Exactly, you know.

jessamyn: What do you want us to ask you, Dom?

Dom: I don't know.

mathowie: Dom Allen. Great intern, or _greatest_ intern?

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Those are your only choices. I'm going to have to go with... great?

jessamyn: I hope you have a terrific time on your plane ride...

jessamyn: with your trip to New York, it should be wicked fun.

Dom: Yeah, I'm extremely excited, I'm looking forward to it.

mathowie: You're not going to develop any anxiety towards planes crashing into the ground between now and next week, are you?

Dom: No, I'm definitely not scared at all.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: Good, you shouldn't be.

mathowie: And if it goes wrong, you died doing what you loved.

Dom: Exactly, right? So...

jessamyn: If anyone said that to me, if I died doing _anything_, I'd haunt them from my grave.

Dom: (laughs)

mathowie: (laughs) Every time I get on a plane, you can haunt me.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: (spooky voice) "I didn't enjoy the plane crash!"

jessamyn: (laughs) "That's not what I love!"

mathowie: I think that's about it, maybe. Welcome, Dom!

jessamyn: Yeah, sure.

mathowie: We never really thought of summer long projects for him. That sort of...

jessamyn: And by we you mean you didn't? I gave you lots of ideas.

mathowie: Yeah, but none of them were actionable and like "hey, there's this."

jessamyn: (groans)

mathowie: Here's a discrete project...

cortex: You know, we've still never formally gone through and organized and digested the freeform answers

cortex: to the favorites experiment back in 2009, so we could make him do that.

mathowie: I don't know what that is, but sure.

jessamyn: (laughs)

Dom: (laughs)

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Sign him up!

Dom: That could be a problem right there.

jessamyn: You are the worst boss ever.

cortex: We'll be talking about it later.

mathowie: I'm great! I'm loosey-goosey. You don't want... everybody hates the bosses that are total dicks. Oh, thanks Dom for joining us.

Dom: Yeah, thanks for having me.

sfx: [music]

sfx: [music continues]

jessamyn: Welcome to episode 63 of the Metafilter Podcast.

mathowie: The proper Metafilter part.

jessamyn: The "we've already interviewed Dom" part.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: No blog posts, whoo! Should we go right to Projects?

cortex: Let's do it!

jessamyn: Yeah, let's go right to Projects. I only had a couple projects that I super liked. I did have a fun time going through them. I bet we liked some of the same ones.

cortex: I bet.

mathowie: I bet you not!

Go ahead.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Oh no, you only liked unlikable ones?

cortex: Okay, Matt, what's the one that you liked that you are most sure that no one else liked?

mathowie: How about Cosmos? I bet you did not download and start using Cosmos, the iPhone longterm alarm app.

cortex: Yeah, no.

mathowie: See, knew that.

jessamyn: No, though I should - that sounds like something that I would enjoy.

mathowie: I thought it was funny that someone made an iPhone alarm app that just says basically my phone will ring "blank blank" as a number... number field and then time frame as a blank from now.

cortex: Three months from now.

mathowie: You could set it for ten years from now. I need to get bone density measured at the hospital or something crazy like that, and I was like...

jessamyn: Oh, that's great

mathowie: --yeah so I just thought, um--

jessamyn: Link-link-link-link?

mathowie: Yeah I know I'm getting it.

jessamyn: Link?

mathowie: It was just hilarious to think of like, you know, have my iPhone buzz me in five years about that thing, or six months about you know oil change in my car or something. I mean there's actually useful things I just thought it was kind of hilarious to set something for several years on a device that's you know, going to only last most people a year or two.

jessamyn: By kamelhoecker! Hoecker? Having a baby, 3 months, that's adorable. I love it.

mathowie: Yeah. And it's just such a weird--I was like I just never thought of-- a Long Now clock for your iPhone, kind of. Or you know, whatever, three minutes, boil an egg.

jessamyn: Was that what inspired you to chirp on Twitter about the two-hundred-year iPad--thing--

mathowie: No I just woke up this morning--

jessamyn: --or was that something different?

mathowie: --I think I dented my iPad yesterday [chuckles] dropping it on the hard floor. Soft aluminum! Got a couple dings in it and I was just wondering like what would a--I mean somebody dug

one of these up, what would they even think it's for? Is it a-- serving dish? Like, what would you think of it in two hundred years. And then I thought, you know, how would Apple's design change. How, how would the designers' mindset change when they thought about these things lasting more than eighteen months. Since their release cycle is so damn fast.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: So go with your tried and true shared adventures in Projects.

cortex: Well one that I--

jessamyn: Uh [sneezes]--

cortex: --bet you guys didn't like or didn't, you know-- I, that's a terrible--

jessamyn: Excuse me!

cortex: --way to put it--"I bet you hated this!" is what that sounds like!

jessamyn: [laughs]

cortex: I like--

mathowie: Oh the hot-or-not?

cortex: --I like rottytooth's unichar (uni-kar) thing, yeah. It's--

jessamyn: Unichar?

cortex: --yeah it should be "char"-- sorry C programming I got used to saying "car"

mathowie: Uni-care?

cortex: --'cause it was a character.

mathowie: Characters?

cortex: But yes anyway it's a hot-or-not-- like which is the better unicode character pulling two random unicode characters. And it's... I've always liked that particular

mathowie: Well...

cortex: --approach to uh... sort of things.

mathowie: This is... I don't--one of the unicode symbols didn't even render for me so I got a box on one of the hot...or-nots.

jessamyn: Mine smiled at me!

mathowie: [chuckles]

cortex: Yayyy.

mathowie: And some of these--

jessamyn: I had a smile character.

mathowie: --some of these are like--

jessamyn: I got a box!

mathowie: --do I like an Asian character, or do I like a squiggle? Like, I don't know--

jessamyn: Or do I like the letter 'r'?

cortex: It's not some sort of like subtle racism test, you can just--

mathowie: I know yeah! Do you hate Asians or not?

cortex: --like the squiggle if you like the squiggle, it's not like... yes... Racist!

jessamyn: It's great! And it's by rottytooth who does neat projects occasionally.

cortex: Yes.

mathowie: [laughs] Not occasionally! That sounds like a qualifier!

jessamyn: Well he doesn't--

cortex: Stopped clocked, am I right!

jessamyn: --he's not like rolling it out all the time but I've seen other stuff that he does and it's good! He's talented.

mathowie: He does great stuff.

jessamyn: He's just not... spending all his time on Metafilter.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: Yeah!

mathowie: Anything else?

jessamyn: All right well this was--this was the one that I liked. I had a couple that I liked actually!

This one is just kind of your standard... it's like a game--

mathowie: (slowly) Project?

jessamyn: --but it's supposed to sort of drive home the point that like, poverty sucks, which, of course, it's something that you sort of understand in a general sense. And it was actually posted to Metafilter in advance of its Project posting--

mathowie: Hm.

jessamyn: Which was sort of interesting to me. But it's basically a flash game, you've got a thousand bucks, you're broke, you have to get a job. Let's see how your money lasts... through the month.

cortex: Oh.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Ouch.

jessamyn: And you have to make different decisions and whatever. And it's interesting I mean it's not gonna, I think for people who are aware of poverty issues it's not gonna drive home a point you didn't already understand but it's kind of a good way to-- sort of explain, like if you really don't have a lot of cash, you know, the nickle and diming that just having to have a job, and/or a family, and/or an automobile can really be devastating to somebody who's fairly close to the edge.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Wow. This would be good

to scare the pants off of high school students with or something.

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: Exactly.

mathowie: Should we tell Paul to link them up together even though, well, I mean, you don't want people to post it again. There's a big post this--

jessamyn: Um. Do you think anybody's gonna not read the comments?

mathowie: I don't know! Well it's always--it's always nice when--

jessamyn: Sure! Yeah! Tell Paul, it can't hurt!

mathowie: --yeah. It's always nice when they're linked up together.

jessamyn: Yeah! Yeah. And it was by missjenny so way to go missjenny, it was a really neat project.

cortex: This is--this feels like... something that's me repeating myself every podcast but hey, hermitosis started a blog that I liked.

jessamyn: [laughs]

cortex: In this case, DOOM CAKES which is a blog "researching the cinematic tradition in which any beautifully decorated cake serves as a harbinger (-ghur) of imminent catastrophe." And so he's sort of posting screenshots and writeups and video for movies where in fact there's the dramatic pairing of a beautiful cake and something terrible.

And that's the kind of--

jessamyn: The best part-- oh sorry.

cortex: --focused thing I approve of, so yeah.

mathowie: Harbinger (-jer)?

jessamyn: The best part to me of--

cortex: Harbinger (-jer) thank you.

jessamyn: --this post which I actually had read, is user troll, who is eager to prove that he is not an actual troll--

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: --made a really awesome comment in which he included five DOOM CAKE scenarios and totally helped hermitosis out with a couple of examples. And I just thought that was nice.

cortex: Oh all from the same film even. That's--

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: --that's fantastic.

mathowie: "Babes in Toyland." I've never seen that.

jessamyn: Yes, "Babes in Toyland"

which is also the name of a sex toy store in the Pacific Northwest, is in fact a movie that...

mathowie: Ha haaa!

cortex: Different--different from the movie. Somewhat different in tone.

jessamyn: Is it? I don't know anything about the movie. I hear there's cake.

cortex: If-if-if my dim memories of "Babes in Toyland" are correct it was not a porn.

mathowie: Riiiight.

jessamyn: [laughs]

cortex: I can't say reliably, I saw bits of it you know, many years ago, but uh, pretty sure--

mathowie: DOOM CAKES--

jessamyn: Not a porn.

cortex: --pretty sure.

mathowie: --DOOM CAKES was awesome, I mentioned that on Twitter as soon as I posted it because it was so damn funny

'cause yes, every time you see-- it's like someone needs to make a "watermelon cart and two guys with a plate glass window walking around" blog--

jessamyn: [laughs] Yeah.

mathowie: --you know like these movie tropes where a car bust--or people bust through things at high speed. But yeah, cake? Always, a decorative cake is gonna hit the floor.

cortex: Oh yeah.

mathowie: That's why it was shown on screen.

cortex: It's totally Chekhov's gun but for your mouth.

mathowie: [chuckles] Yeah.

cortex: But not in suicide by, you know. I'll... just stop. I liked also

[jessamyn and mathowie laugh]
robocopisbleeding started a blog called Drew's Infinite Reboot. Which came out of the discussion about the fact that DC Comics is doing a great big reboot coming in September. They're taking like fifty-two comic book series and starting them all at number one again. And they're changing the universe and whatnot. And it's a big hoofaloo and--

jessamyn: So using the same characters but having totally different plots and histories and stuff for them?

cortex: Kind of-- or somewhat different. Yeah it's-- the best case scenarios it's an ability to sort of start fresh with a lot of these characters and say

let's start telling a story from the beginning again, and let's go in some different directions. So, the idea is they wanna pull in fans who like, maybe would be into comics but like, oh my god, this is issue eight hundred of Batman? I have to read eight hundred fuckin' back issues? So instead it's like, hey! It's number one, I'm gonna start reading Superman, or Batman--

jessamyn: Right! Right now.

cortex: --and Batgirl, and Batwoman. And uh...

mathowie: But these are like ridiculous back stories made up right? For humor?

cortex: Well it's not even-- well actually what he's doing, he's kind of a comics nerd and so he's actually pitching what he thinks would be good reboots

so like, instead of whatever DC came up with, which in some cases sound interesting and in some cases sounds kinda shitty, he's saying, "Yeah, but what if you did it like this?" and it's... So it's pretty much, you kinda have to be familiar with DC to really get what he's going for, but it's really fun reading to the extent that the characters he's talking about make sense.

mathowie: Ahh. I saw the picture of Green Arrow on a fixie, and he's saying [cortex laughs], you know, could be a 20-something resident of Portland, Oregon, I thought it was a big joke, like kind of that--what is

it, the Lord of the Rings as comic book being passed around blogs last week - "Bro-ship of the Rings" or something...

jessamyn: Oh, heh, yeah...

mathowie: like reimagining them as 20th century dorks, stereotypes, basically, yeah.

cortex: This is more that Drew has a sense of humour, so it's not all like terribly dark and angry, you know, story telling, but it's more like "hey, here's some fun ideas."

jessamyn: He has a sense of humour and he's sincerely enthusiastic about the genre.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: As well.

mathowie: I loved

jessamyn: And he's a librarian, by the way.

mathowie: Sweet! Man.

jessamyn: He's terrific. And they got a... they got a little baby.

mathowie: Man, it's all coming up roses. I loved this Cold War video games that never existed- these are basically clones of popular video games from the 80s, but done with a, some flavor of Cold War...

cortex: Oh yeah.

mathowie: ...hysteria attached to it, like Space Invaders, it's you know...

mathowie: Soviet planes dropping missiles. There's another one that--

jessamyn: Here's a thing where you can bomb the White House with?

mathowie: That's supposed to be Soviets dropping or protecting Houses of Congress, and you have an air to... what is it, surface-to-air missile launcher.

jessamyn: Oh my god, this looks exactly like Atari.

mathowie: It's like Missile Command slash (pause) um... and it's all in HTML5, no Flash. Shit's crazy, and actually works, and runs and it's really cool.

jessamyn: Wow.

mathowie: It's technically cool, it's conceptually hilarious, and

mathowie: it's all pitch perfect, the way the gameplay works and looks.

cortex: Nice.

mathowie: And it's amazing that none of it works in Flash. I mean it's not Flash at all, it's really cool.

jessamyn: [unintelligible]

cortex: Oh my god, I'm sorry, I have to interrupt this important... my wife, my wife just emailed to me to let me know that because today is 7/11, 7-11 is giving away free slurpees.

jessamyn: Free Slurpee Day!

mathowie: Slurpee Day!

cortex: I know! I've lived a block from a 7-11 for

jessamyn: It's a free 7.11 ounce Slurpee.

cortex: three years now, and I haven't gotten a Slurpee yet.

I keep thinking I'll do the stupid thing and buy a slurpee, and it will be terrible, but now I can go do that for free, so...

mathowie: Ironically fun.

cortex: Back to the... back to the...

mathowie: Jeez, up to about six months ago I was having a Slurpee almost every day, it became this favorite habit. I had to wean myself off Coke slurpees. It was horrible.

cortex: That does seem like a problem. Glad you got help.

jessamyn: Yeah.

cortex: Good.

mathowie: I stopped.

cortex: There is one other project I want to mention which is the MetaCooler.

jessamyn: I've got one too!

cortex: I'll go first though.

jessamyn: Yeah, great. I haven't been to the MetaCooler.

cortex: It's nice.

jessamyn: Yeah.

cortex: If you go and look at it, the first thing you're going to see is like a phpBB board - you know, a typical sort of forum instance, but this was started in response to some of the discussions about

mathowie: Spoilers.

cortex: yes, spoilers on MetaFilter and how we don't really have a firm No Spoilers Allowed policy, and how that's a point of tension for some of the people on the site who really enjoy talking about pop culture stuff, and want to sort of talk about ongoing episode by episode stuff

cortex: but at the same time don't know that it's going to be a sure thing that spoilers will be carefully marked and whatnot, because that's just not how MetaFilter is done.

mathowie: So what do they do about spoilers?

jessamyn: Hey! It's quinn's birthday! According to MetaCooler today.

cortex: Yay!

jessamyn: Happy Birthday, quinn!

cortex: MetaCooler... PhoBWanKenobi put it together to basically say "OK, let's have a place specifically for talking about this pop culture stuff, and let's have a clear spoiler policy up front, and built-in spoiler functionality so you can easily

cortex: spoiler text stuff.

mathowie: Oh.

cortex: So it's just, you know, being very purpose built for that specific thing, which is kind of like the best possible way to make it a good place for people to talk about that stuff.

mathowie: (laughs) Four sub-boards just for Game of Thrones?

cortex: Yeah. The timing...

mathowie: Oh, these are sub-threads, not boards. It's...

cortex: No, they're like sub-boards.

jessamyn: Television is Serious Business.

mathowie: Yeah. What's a Torchwood?

cortex: Within the sub-boards there's various threads.

mathowie: I know TV, I don't know Torchwood is.

cortex: Torchwood is a spinoff show from Doctor Who.

cortex: (whispers) It's an anagram for Doctor Who!

mathowie: Ohhh.

cortex: About the Torchwood group who protect Earth from aliens, so they're you know,

mathowie: Yeahh.

cortex: mostly, like, humans hanging around... it's a little bit different tone - whereas Doctor Who's got the "wibbly wobbly", Torchwood has "everybody has sex with everybody", but it's still the same over-all world/universe.

jessamyn: (quietly) Wibbly wobbly?

cortex: Wibbly wobbly timey wimey...

mathowie: What the hell is "Adventure Time"?

cortex: It's a cartoon. About Adventures.

mathowie: OK, uh... Falling Skies? What's that?

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: I don't know, but it's got that guy who's in

cortex: ER - the skinny ones.

jessamyn: It's so great seeing you be a noob somewhere, Matt.

mathowie: I... I... I probably watch more TV than you guys combined and I don't know...

cortex: You just watch the wrong shows.

mathowie: [unintelligible]

cortex: The funny thing about MetaCooler is it just came... it just started up right at the end of essentially the TV season so it's

mathowie: So, uh...

cortex: going to be another like what, two or three months before everything

mathowie: [unintelligible]

cortex: starts showing new shows again.

jessamyn: Before stuff gets hopping. Although I hear USA Network has some of their own you know, summer shows

mathowie: HBO...

jessamyn: but I hear that it's not like spoileriffic type stuff that anyone cares about.

mathowie: Or they get in fights over what show should be worthy of being discussed, I suppose that's the first thing they'll start.

cortex: Well, we've, the thread on, there's actually a thread for just hey, what new shows, since it's not like it's a limited resource. They can always add a new sub-board for any show. So, yes, MetaCooler.

jessamyn: As long as people want to talk about it.

cortex: Go to MetaCooler and talk about stuff. It's awesome.

jessamyn: Yeah, it's cool!

Nice going, team. This was a blog, my last Project suggestion. This was a blog that I'd read because I saw jocelmeow ['jasɛlmiaʊ],
jocelmeow ['joʊsɛlmiaʊ]? answering somebody's Ask Metafilter question about something she's got, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?

cortex: Oh, yeah.

jessamyn: And, you know, pretty hardcore sort of bad situation. But she's also well-supported, she's supported by her mom or folks and her boyfriend, husband, somebody. And she's just a really good writer. And so she's got a blog talking about what it's like, what it's like having Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and having people believe you have a mysterious disease, or a fake disease, and

what it was like before in her life, and what it's like now, and how she deals with it medically, and I just thought... I don't know. I like it when people who live very different lives from me, or who have some fairly serious challenges, show up and say, "Well, this is what it's like," in kind of this plain, matter-of-fact, "This is just how it is," and I thought she did a good job on it, and I'd always been reading it, and I was happy to see it up on Projects.

mathowie: Yeah, yeah. I saw--I assumed this would come up, so I didn't

mention it, but it seemed like fascinating, and I really wanted to come back and read some of it. It's shocking, whether or not, I guess you--I mean, she came out of the gates, I don't want to debate whether or not whatever the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is real or not. Caterina Fake, right before they started Flickr she was bedridden for a while. I don't know whatever happened to that, if she--I mean, she somehow got over it, or some, I don't know. She was functioning
after that, but... this user's bedridden, has to write posts in small bursts, you know? Like only up and about for a few minutes a day, that's... ohh, it's rough.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah, it's super tough. But she manages to share what's up about it, and I always think that's really useful for other people who may be having the same problems but who don't have as good a doctor, as a good a support network, as good--whatever the deal is, and I just thought it was great to read, super interesting.

mathowie: Yeah. Plus...

jessamyn: I'm glad you posted it.

mathowie: Her two cats are named Mingus and Bootsy Collins, which is super awesome.

jessamyn: I know, right? (laughs) I thought that was pretty good.

mathowie: Best things ever!

Alright.

jessamyn: Alright, which next part of the site were we yammering...

mathowie: Ask, um... regular Metafilter? Ask Metafiler?

jessamyn: Either one. Either one.

mathowie: I don't know, your choice.

cortex: Want to talk about Jobs?

mathowie: Ohh, Jobs.

cortex: Because there's a job for someone who knows how to deal with Magneto, which I guess is

actually probably some sort of programming architecture something, but I wanna pretend it's just some like new--

jessamyn: And they were looking for a Systems Administrator for LibraryThing, though I may have mentioned that.

mathowie: You may have what?

cortex: Oh yeah, they do, yes. That's happening too. But that doesn't involve Magneto.

jessamyn: I may have mentioned it in the last podcast.

mathowie: No, no, we didn't! We didn't podcast before then.

jessamyn: Okay.

mathowie: It came in like the day we published.

jessamyn: Oh, it's Magento, I think, Josh, I don't even think that's Magneto.

cortex: No, no, it's Magneto, see. It's Magneto, because that's what makes it funny.

jessamyn: Are they DC comics people?

cortex: You have to misread--

mathowie: Magento.

cortex: And then be like... (chuckles) Magento.

jessamyn: I saw that movie at the drive-in this weekend. It was terrific.

cortex: That's marvelous.

mathowie: Which one? X-Men whatever?

jessamyn: X-Men: First Class.

mathowie: Oh, I just downloaded the Russian R5 video rip. (laughs) I'm sorry, what?

jessamyn: It was better at a drive-in.

mathowie: That was just some Skype feedback there, I didn't say anything actually.

jessamyn: (laughs) Buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz.

Magneto experience!

mathowie: LibraryThing! Sweet. Who doesn't want to work on an awesome project like LibraryThing?

cortex: Hitler, that's who.

jessamyn: Yeah. I've been really happy

to see them expanding and hiring people, and I think it would be a neat place to work, and I don't even think you need to be on the ground there, although I haven't seen it.

mathowie: Do you know them? Do you know them a bit? Like, how--

jessamyn: Yeah yeah yeah, I know Tim and Abby, the kind of two original employees there

mathowie: So how is it a thing? How do they pay the bills? It's just like a book...

jessamyn: They sell some little widgets to libraries that include recommendation engines and some other stuff so that you can buy...

So, okay. You've got a library catalog, right?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And if you go with a vendor who sells you that catalog product, they can sell you a...

mathowie: Plug-in?

jessamyn: Yeah, like a review plug-in. Or, you can buy the same thing from the LibraryThing people on, you know, tiny, tiny subscription basis. And it's totally inexpensive.

mathowie: It's like reviews that are sold?

jessamyn: Yeah, but it takes the reviews that their giant community puts together so they're a little bit

more... I don't know, grassroots, I guess? I mean, they have a couple other different little things that they do.

mathowie: That's fascinating.

jessamyn: Yeah, no, it is. The revenue model's really interesting.

mathowie: Like, cause Paul built a book blogging app in 2002 or something, that was a way that you could keep track of your own personal library and who's borrowed your shit but also be like everything I've ever read and what I thought of it and stuff, and it could spit out templates and HTML

to your blog, and then he basically never launched it because he was like, "I don't know how to make any money out of this, maybe Amazon kickbacks, but who cares?"

jessamyn: Well, and I think there's some Amazon kickbacks, but I think a lot of the people that they sell things to are libraries who are offering value-add to their patrons--

mathowie: That's awesome.

jessamyn: --and it's cheaper than you could buy it from--

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: --the giant toxic megacorporations that create the integrated library systems. So it's kinda win-win for everybody.

mathowie: Do they have, like, once you put in

five books you like, does it tell you what you might also like, so I guess that would--

jessamyn: Yeah. They've got a recommendation engine, too, which is really pretty good.

mathowie: So this is like Netflix What You Should Watch while you're sitting at your library.

jessamyn: It's got a lot of that same vibe to it, because they've got this huge amount of data and it's not--they don't have the same privacy concerns, for example, that libraries do.

mathowie: Oh my God, we should totally sell the Relationship category to eHarmony or something [jessamyn laughs] [cortex laughs], I'm like, "Here's what crazy people think

of relationships," you know. Chances--

jessamyn: Did you just call everybody in Ask Metafilter crazy? I know you didn't. I know you didn't.

mathowie: People that ask relationship questions, you know. People who have some relationship hang-up have asked about that before.

jessamyn: [laughs] It would be very interesting. I think we have copyright problems with that?

mathowie: Yes, yes.

jessamyn: Oh, and there was a Wikipedia job, but I think that came in... I don't remember if that came in last podcast, when did we put it to bed?

mathowie: Just run with it. June 9th?

Something like that.

jessamyn: Yeah! A Wikipedia job, also. Hey, did I tell you guys that I'm on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation advisory panel now?

cortex: Yeah!

mathowie: Does that mean you can delete people?

jessamyn: No, I can't delete people. But it's nice.

cortex: Cool.

jessamyn: Spreading the word about Wikipedia. Alright, moving on.

cortex: There were a couple of creative jobs, too. One--

jessamyn: This is like every job!

cortex: --crush-onastick is looking for a jazz pianist in Chicago in November.

mathowie: Is that a wedding or something?

Oh, cocktail party.

cortex: So if you play jazz piano, and you will be in Chicago in November, check that out.

jessamyn: There's gotta be somebody who can do that.

cortex: And the other thing is tumid dahlia is looking for someone to do a little bit of sequential art, do some comics work for like a four-page thing.

jessamyn: Oh, he's right, he's in Australia.

cortex: And he's in Australia, but you don't have to be in Australia, you could be a comics artist from anywhere. So, jazz piano--

jessamyn: Yeah!

cortex: --comics artist, get some fuckin' freelance work up.

jessamyn: Wikipedia, System Engineer, Magneto experience.

jessamyn: All sorts of great stuff going on.

mathowie: (quietly) Magento? Magenta?

cortex: (loudly) It's Magneto!

jessamyn: I think we should do...

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: I think we should do like flash... flash rounds Metafilter.

cortex: OK. You go first.

mathowie: Uhh...

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: where are my notes? (unintelligible)

jessamyn: I could go first.

mathowie: What?

jessamyn: Well, there was one post...

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: You didn't do a real post.

jessamyn: ...that was just... What?

mathowie: You didn't do a real Metafilter post yet.

jessamyn: Well, there was one post that was head and shoulders... uhhhh. When we say "flagged to hell", we don't usually mean anything positive by it, but occasionally, so many people mark something as a favorite that the term actually applies. I assume you guys saw this, the History of Rome podcast...

cortex: Yeah!

jessamyn: ...which sort of goes into a breakdown of a whole bunch of stuff about Rome.

jessamyn: I believe it's sort of one of those... I mean, it's one of these crazy things. It's got forty comments, thirty-nine comments, two hundred and twenty nine people marked it as favorite...

mathowie: Oh my god.

jessamyn: I know! And it's just...

mathowie: I didn't even see it.

jessamyn: Yeah. It's just all about Rome. It's by Bora Horza Gobuchul... does anyone understand that user name?

mathowie: Nope.

cortex: Nope.

jessamyn: Me neither.

mathowie: (quietly) Bora Horza Gobuchul...

jessamyn: And I mostly noticed it at first because he had asked me to fix a typo or something,

jessamyn: and then I looked at it and was like "Oh my god!". So, anyone who's interested in Rome, this post is nominally about this podcast, but it's about so much more. The guy put a lot of work into it and it's just really neat. It makes you want to learn more and more about Rome and Roman history, and I just think it's a terrific, terrific post, and it's just from what - two days ago? a few days ago? Yesterday?

mathowie: Dude! I would have thought that was the most favorites I've seen on Metafilter posts in like six months, and then there's one post with even more.

mathowie: in the last month, that one about Arrested Development. I didn't even see that one- I think I assumed...

jessamyn: Hey, wait, I didn't see that.

mathowie: I know, I just passed over this because I probably assumed "oh, it's probably... there's all these rumours about Arrested Development movie being sort of in production..."

jessamyn: Hey, Rory Marinich! I didn't even know he'd come back!

mathowie: But, yeah. Yep, I didn't notice three hundred posts about everything in the world about Arrested Development. So, yeah.

jessamyn: Oh, wait, I did see this, this was a while ago. Yeah, this was great!

mathowie: Well, this counts for this month.

jessamyn: 299 comments, 312 favorites.

mathowie: It's crazy. Let me see... lightning round?

jessamyn: I think so.

mathowie: How fast do we have to go?

cortex: You're already going too slow. Here.

jessamyn: Faster than this.

cortex: I liked the video of a industrial grinder grinding stuff up.

mathowie: Oh yeah, that was crazy.

cortex: Which is--it's like, it's totally, that's exactly what the Internet's for, and we've all seen that sort of thing before, and yet this one had its weird sort of charm, and I really liked it. So go watch it grind stuff up and be slightly confused by the

choice of tampons as one of the things.

mathowie: Hmmm.

jessamyn: I was... surprised, yes.

cortex: Yeah. (chuckle)

mathowie: I watched a full riding mower get torn to shreds, which was awesome and satisfying. It's pretty cool.

If you ever liked weird freestyle skateboarding in the '80s, you've probably seen

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Rodney Mullen, this crazy artistic skateboarder, and there's this new kid named... Killan?

cortex: Kilian, I think.

mathowie: Kilian! Martin.

jessamyn: Kilian. Like the beer.

mathowie: Who is... Yeah. And he is pretty much the exactly carbon copy, the next iteration, evolution, of what Rodney Mullen did in the '80s. He's doing all sorts of weirdo wheelie tricks on a skateboard and spinny stuff that is like nobody's seen for like fifteen years, and he's suddenly doing it at full speed, going across ten-foot curves, like sliding across them, doing this crazy stuff. It's just amazing.

cortex: There's a bunch of great little stuff in there. There's--at one point he

jumps off a skateboard, does a kick off a tree

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: and lands going another direction on another skateboard. That was an excellent moment, I laughed.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: (gasps twice)

mathowie: He does two double skateboard single-foot wheelies, I mean, it's just so freaking hard

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: like it's insan--If you broke down what he's doing and tried it on a skateboard yourself, or even if you've been skateboarding for five or ten years, every little thing, parts of his tricks, are insanely hard, and he's doing like five to ten things in a row, they're just psycho.

cortex: Yep, it's great.

mathowie: Super fun.

cortex: Jessamyn, go!

jessamyn: Okay!

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: This guy talked to a bunch of factories to make a error version of the product that they make, and then put them all together and made an art exhibition out of it, so basically took like factories that make a mass-produced object and say, "Give me a broken one."

mathowie: Ohh.

jessamyn: And they give him a broken one, and he also keeps all his letters, where he writes to them, about the broken stuff, and it's

just--you know, it's just kind of an interesting commentary about mass-produced stuff versus one-of-a-kind stuff, and it's called Art of the Factory, and... it's called the Art of the Factory.

mathowie: [laughs] Is the shovel real?

jessamyn: This--

mathowie: Oh, that's right. Okay. I saw the comb everywhere.

jessamyn: So, like, you know, here's a broken comb, here's a broken shovel, here's some broken sunglasses, and a lot of them are--

mathowie: Did he mess with these things, or are they really, they came off the factory floor this messed up?

jessamyn: The factory gave them to him when he asked for them.

mathowie: Ohhh.

Wow.

jessamyn: I don't know if they made the broken thing. I didn't read too deep into it.

mathowie: Like the shovel, come on, the handle's on backwards, which is hilarious, but--

jessamyn: The sunglasses. Look at those sunglasses.

mathowie: I know.

jessamyn: You know you want them! Except your nose won't fit in them. [mathowie laughs] [rising pitch] It's pretty terrific!

mathowie: That's pretty awesome.

jessamyn: So. I loved it. It was one of my favorite ones of the month.

mathowie: Josh, go!

cortex: I enjoyed this short film by Erik Fensler, best known for his Fensler Films, the GI Joe

redub PSA.

mathowie: Oh, God.

cortex: But this is a more recent piece of work from him [mathowie emits a descending whistle] titled HBS, which stands for Huge Basketball Shorts [mathowie and jessamyn laugh]. And it's a rollicking tale that takes a sudden dramatic turn halfway through. I enjoyed it for its dramatic miscues as well as for its song, Huge Basketball Shorts.

mathowie: Nice.

cortex: So there you go. You will either hate it or not hate it, which was pretty much how that thread went, so.

mathowie: Sweet! Here's another single-link YouTube. I had recently seen, since I have a child, the movie Tangled,

and in the movie Tangled, one night a year everyone in the little town where the woman is Rapunzeled out in a castle tower, everyone in the town releases these paper lanterns with a flame in them and they glow and there's thousands of them, and I thought, "Oh, that's an enormous fire hazard, no one would actually do that in reality, but I could see how the physics would work of heat making hot air rise and stuff," but this is people, a video of people in Poland releasing eight thousand lanterns
at once, and it's pretty much exactly like the movie animation looked like, but in real life, and it was really cool.

cortex: Neat!

jessamyn: Oh yeah, by crunchland. And here is another, speaking of post-Cold War whatever, this is a post by Nomyte, which was one of those monster epic posts about a... animated sci-fi adventure called The Secret of the Third Planet, which was released in the USSR in 1981, and

there have been all these different versions of it, like dubbed versions, versions with different music, Wikipedia wrote about it, and then Nomyte makes a big post explaining what happened and how it evolved and how it changed, and it's basically, this post is the quintessential report on this bizarre television show from the '80s in the USSR.

mathowie: Nice.

jessamyn: Nomyte did a very thorough and wonderful job. It was another one of

those posts, 23 comments, 97 favorites [cortex laughs], and... do we even know if Nomyte is male or female? I do not know. The post was amazing, and I would sum it up the same way elizardbits did in her first comment, "Holy shit what even is this awesomeness?"

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Sweet.

cortex: I enjoyed the Philobrosophy [fɪləˈbɹɒsəfi]--I don't know how to pronounce it--

mathowie and cortex: Philosophy Bro.

jessamyn: Oh, hey!

cortex: It's basically taking philosophy and then re-writing it in much more stripped-down

mathowie: Brospeak.

cortex: --contemporary terms, sort of brospeak. It's not as frattish as you might expect, but at the same time it's taking a very, like, "Dude, so here's the deal," approach to it.

mathowie: Heh!

cortex: Which I thought was great. And there's some other fun stuff linked in there...

jessamyn: Jim's son Milo was the one who turned him on to that.

cortex: Yeah?

jessamyn: Yes, yes, yes.

cortex: Oh, I didn't even realize that was Jim's post.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Philobrosopher.

cortex: It was just a post, you know? Whatever.

jessamyn: Yeah, it's a good post!

cortex: And someone mentioned Myths Retold in there, which I had not encountered, which does a sort of very

paint-huffing narrative style retelling various myths and fairytales, and I thought that was really fantastic as well and laughed my ass off.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: I enjoyed it. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would when it was described to me [cortex laughs], and I was like, "Oh God," and then I went and looked at it and it was quite good.

mathowie: Sweet. I loved, Everything is a Remix Part 3 came out! I got to meet Kirby, what's-his-name, Ferguson in New York. Last time I was there in April for the

Gel Conference he spoke there and he hinted at his third part would be coming out soon, about Apple, and it arrived. It's not, well, they cover all the stuff Steve Jobs stole.

jessamyn: I don't know much about this. Can you tell me what this is?

mathowie: Oh, Everything Is A Remix is a series by a dude who just, I don't know, he just sort of... So this is the third part, all three parts are in this link, which is great. They're like ten minutes each. What's weird is they're like two segments of about five minutes each, and there's like one minute of

credits in the middle, but then keep watching because there'll be another five minutes of content. I don't know why he's putting the credits in the middle, it's kinda weird. So it feels like two episodes in each one.

jessamyn: Uh-huh.

mathowie: But it's just basically, he's wrangling up--so if you look at the first thread ever about Everything Is A Remix, people are like, "Euh, I knew that," you know, half the comments are like, "Duh! Everyone knows that." It's just saying that, it's basically, this is like a layman's, he's like a filmmaker, and he's basically doing a layman's version of everything Lawrence

Lessig has ever said about creativity. But he's just going--

jessamyn: Okay!

mathowie: Like, look. Copyright's kind of crazy, we're not allowed to copy each other, but everyone knows, like, when you're young, and you're an artist, you copy your favorites, and then once you're really good at copying them you can make a clone of anything you love, you start learning new stuff and differentiating yourself, that there's this phase of creativity, it's like copying/parody, and then it's like

mathowie: innovation beyond that, and then you make new stuff that's yours, not unlike anyone else's, but you... all this was done on the shoulders of giants, you know, like you saw all

cortex: Sure.

mathowie: the previous work. So, one of them, he breaks down Star Wars, like, shot by shot, and I had heard people allude to "oh, Star Wars is just a ripoff of Kurosawa films" from, you know, Japanese films from the whatever, 40s or 50s or 60s, I forget... He breaks down scene by scene- this is from that, that battle is from this, and then he has them side by side in the video.

cortex: This really is basically The Hidden Fortress plus a little bit of Triumph of the Will, which is weird.

mathowie: And it breaks it down as like, clearly George Lucas was just a film fan student who came up with a list of his twenty favorite films and just copied shot for shot... I mean, there's like 16 shots in a row that are absolute clones of something from 30 years before. And he's just saying, "This isn't--I'm not trying to 'gotcha!' George Lucas, I'm trying to say even who we

consider to be the greats basically, you know, guess they kinda copy, they kinda riff on things, like, maybe we should rethink copyright because we're all riffing on each other's stuff, you know, remix culture." He's trying to say, when you think of remix culture, don't just think of the Beastie Boys ripping off original musicians. Think of George Lucas--

jessamyn: Or even sampling, much less.

mathowie: Yeah. Like, don't think that, because you can go, "Oh, I don't listen to hip-hop, therefore screw them. Yeah, they should be sued into oblivion, because I don't

like their music," But like, Disney, Star Wars, all these things are all about riffing and copying and remixing, and you know, everything Disney has ever done is take something from 150 years ago, because it's still legal, barely, and then turn it into a new thing. Like, I just mentioned Tangled, it's just the Rapunzel story retold as a new thing.

cortex: And this is why the Enchanted Forest has slightly different names for their dwarves.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Wait, what?

cortex: There's the Seven Dwarves

at Enchanted Forest because it's a classic folktale, but--

mathowie: No, it's between six and eight, it's between six and eight little people, come on, let's get it right.

cortex: But their names are still a little bit off, you know, it's not the canonical Disney names.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Stumpy.

mathowie: Dozy. (laughs) Surly.

jessamyn: Limpy.

cortex: (laughs) Drunky.

jessamyn: All right, so much for the fucking lightning round, you guys.

cortex: Yeah, well, I blame Matt.

mathowie: What?!

cortex: I liked--

mathowie: Did I ruin it?

jessamyn: Wait, wait! It's my fucking turn!

mathowie: He asked for more explanation!

cortex: Oh, I'm sorry, go, go, go.

jessamyn: Hot button issue:

"some say half of modern Orthodox teens text on Shabbat, that it has developed its own nomenclature keeping "half Shabbos," for those who observe all the Shabbat regulations except for texting." It's from user -->NMN.80.418, which is a David Foster Wallace reference that you can all look the fuck up! [laughter] And the thread was really interesting, and it was a great conversation. Josh, on to you.

cortex: I thought that was an interesting thread. You didn't actually paste it in, you should paste.

mathowie: Yeah, paste. Complete your keystroke.

jessamyn: I didn't? Oh, I just have to hit return.

I did actually paste it in.

cortex: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry, I misspoke.

I liked this post about--

jessamyn: Wait!

cortex: --The Human Centipede sequel, partly because it means, in yet another podcast--

jessamyn: I can't know anything about this!

cortex: I can mention the human centipede again.

mathowie: What? Ohh.

cortex: But also because it turned immediately into one of those dumb threads where everybody's just making up the stupidest pun-related titles they could. And it just goes on for hundreds of comments. And most of them aren't even any good! Because we're scraping the bottom of the barrel right out of the gate. But at the same time, if you want to keep reading

stupid puns--

jessamyn: "A Human Werecentipede In Paris"?

mathowie: (laughs) "Two Human, One Centipede"? That's good.

jessamyn: "Zack and the Human Centipede Make A Porno"?

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: "I Can't Believe It's Not A Human Centipede." (laughs)

jessamyn: "Zack and Miri Make a Human Centipede". (laughs)

cortex: "Clockwork Human Centipede." Yeah. So it's just if you need one of those stupid lightning threads where you end up laughing inappropriately at work or something, there's your thread.

mathowie: That was good nonsense.

jessamyn: I do miss them. Thanks, man.

mathowie: Alright, my last two in one, that's how lightning I'll be. Ferris Bueller's Last Day Off, a hilarious goofy

video of what Ferris Bueller would be like today, usually he's going to be arrested for a lot of stuff. And then the other thing, couple kids covering Foo Fighters' "Everlong", it's sweet and simple and cool and awesome.

cortex: Yeah, I liked that. That was a nice little cover.

jessamyn: Oh, I never saw that. I'll go check it out.

mathowie: That's it.

cortex: I have a couple more too, one of which is just per the earlier discussion of robocop is bleeding's reboot blog. There was an actual thread about the DC reboot, so if you're kind of curious

what's up, that may actually provide some more context about what the hell is going on.

jessamyn: Very popular thread.

cortex: Yeah, that went on for a while. And my other last thing is just a post that I liked that was talking about the game LA Noire, which was getting a lot of press in the last couple months after it came out, that had crazy facescanning in its recreation of 1947 L.A. with surprising fidelity, if not perfection. But again, it's one of those things where there's a lot of people talking about sort of the game, so if you're curious about it but aren't someone who owns

a 360 and sits down and plays video games, it might be interesting.

jessamyn: Uh-huh.

cortex: There's really nice stuff linked in there. "Press X for Beer Bottle" is a good...

mathowie: Did, uh--

jessamyn: Lovecraft in Brooklyn!

cortex: Yes.

mathowie: Did anyone cover the, I just heard a story the other day, a blog post or Twitter post about, apparently the development of LA Noire was so wrought--

cortex: (laughs) Yeah.

mathowie: --it took seven years, and like everyone was fired, and they abused employment laws, and like it's the most brutal project ever made.

cortex: Yeah. It sounds like Rockstar and Team Bondi won't be working together again.

It seems like it's a little bit rough.

mathowie: Oh.

cortex: Not so great.

mathowie: Problematic.

cortex: So there, I'm spent. I'm lightning-ed out. The clouds are dispersing.

mathowie: Anything left, Jessamyn?

jessamyn: No!

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: That was it. I have enjoyed Metafilter a lot, and the other stuff I've already kinda tossed up on the sideblog.

mathowie: So let's do Ask fast and then we'll be done.

jessamyn: All right. I have a couple. I had one that I liked that was sort of a paired Ask Metafilter. There was the "I like

showers. Do you have tips or tricks to make my shower experience more enjoyable?" and then... I'm trying to find the other one, which was, "I hate showers! [cortex laughs] Can you help me figure out--"

mathowie: Make them more enjoyable, but for the opposite reason.

jessamyn: Well just, "Can you help me figure out why I can't get my ass into the shower?"

cortex: Ohhh.

jessamyn: I have to find the link for that one, because I am sort of a sometimes shower-hater. Although I only hate bad showers, otherwise I--you know, the person was like

basically, you know, I'm not against getting clean (laughs), I just hate getting in the shower, it drives me crazy, I don't, you know, RAR RAR RAR RAR RAR RAR RAR. Let me see if I can find that one.

mathowie: Ohhh.

jessamyn: But I thought they were sort of--Oh. "Why don't I want to shower?" Here was the other one.

mathowie: There's a such thing as shower crayons? What?!

jessamyn: Yeah, are you kidding? I thought you had shower--

mathowie: I could be whiteboarding in there?! (laughs)

jessamyn: I thought you had parents, too. You didn't have these when you were a kid?

mathowie: No, I never heard of them.

jessamyn: Ohhh, dude, they are great. They're great!

mathowie: I don't know what there is--if people love showers, the way you make it better is just [chuckling] take a longer shower! I don't know what...

jessamyn: You get special shampoo and scrub it, and you get special things to cut the little funny parts off your feet, and I don't know, why don't you read it? There's all sorts of interesting things you can do.

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

jessamyn: You can get a better shower, for one thing. Better shower head.

mathowie: Upping the shower head pressure is always awesome.

jessamyn: Yeah, well, that's why I go

to the gym. Like the gym has probably the best, I swear to God it's almost like a pressure washer.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: And I've got really long hair, so in a trickly shower it's just a pain in the ass, but at the gym it's just like WHOOM! and just, all the soap, GONE! Put on conditioner, RRRM! It just doesn't take that long, and it's awesome.

You know, I always go looking around before we do the podcasts to see if I can find interesting unanswered questions, like
because obviously there's a lot of unanswered questions today, but unanswered questions from a long time ago--and Matt, Josh, I have to say, "Where can I watch the Tour de France in Portland?".

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Oh! I can actually answer that.

cortex: Well, why would I go?

mathowie: Holy shit, I could totally--

jessamyn: Well, it's fucking late.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: No, no, it just started, we're only one week into it. There was a round-up post--

jessamyn: They wanted to watch it on July 2nd.

mathowie: Ohhh.

jessamyn: This guy was on a bike tour from Portland to Oakland.

cortex: Sorry.

mathowie: There's a blog post--

cortex: I have no idea where you'd watch the Tour de France in Portland. I'm just going to go on the record.

mathowie: Ah, hold on, give me a minute...

jessamyn: You know to call Matt!

mathowie: Give me a minute. I'll find it, give me a minute.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Josh, were there any favorites?

cortex: There's this great broccoli recipe that Angela found. Honestly, I'm not a big broccoli fan. I went from being someone who didn't eat broccoli to, at some point in the last few years, eating some broccoli, I mean, hey, you know, broccoli's okay.

jessamyn: Hey, that's me too!

cortex: But I'm not thrilled with it or anything.

jessamyn: Just a little broccoli.

cortex: Yeah, a little bit of broccoli's good.

jessamyn: But not a lot of broccoli.

cortex: You know, we'll like steam it with some soy sauce or something.

mathowie: Didn't you have like Velveeta as a kid?

cortex: No, no, we didn't have Velveeta.

mathowie: Oh.

cortex: Velveeta was an alien substance that I didn't understand until adulthood.

mathowie: Oh, man, it was the '80s, we had it on everything.

cortex: Yeah, yeah.

mathowie: So what is the best broccoli in the world?

cortex: You roast it with some hard cheese, like Romano or Parmesan or something, and some chopped-up garlic, and some lemon juice, and yeah, you just basically roast it with

lemon juice and cheese and garlic. And I think it was a couple other little things in there too, if you want them. It's super good.

mathowie: It comes out crispy?

cortex: Huh?

mathowie: Crispy, a little?

cortex: A little bit, yeah, yeah. So it's like, because I'm so used to just steaming broccoli, which is okay, it's nothing great--

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: But between the roasting and the flavor combination it's so fucking good. So yeah.

mathowie: Wow. I'll try that.

jessamyn: Cool!

mathowie: I love broccoli, but I'll try that. Maybe I'll love it more.

jessamyn: I thought this thread was going to be horrible, and

instead it turned out to be mostly not horrible. The thread is called, "But at least I'm not from..." and it's by MsMolly, and it's one of those kind of vaguely almost chatty, but she's like, "Look. I've discovered that people from one place often think they're better than people from another place," so they're like, "Well, I may live in...whatever."

mathowie: Surrounding states.

jessamyn: "--Vermont, at least I'm not from New Hampshire."

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: And she was just basically trying to assemble a map of whether

these kind of stereotypes tend to all go one direction, you know, because we see how Metafilter--

cortex: Like, if there's a hierarchy of states at the top--

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: --it's like everybody loves South Dakota for whatever reason, and then down at the bottom of the shitpile is North Dakota.

jessamyn: Yeah. Or doesn't hate it. And people mostly kept to mostly just "These are the dumb stereotypes I have," and not "These people are a bunch of assholes," which is where people start, you know, getting really unpleasant. But it was just interesting

for me to read, it was interesting for me to see if other people felt the same way I felt, like, you know, like Vermont's not, we don't think we're better than people because we know we have sort of tourist issues, but there is this weird anti-Quebecer sentiment that makes no sense to me [cortex and mathowie laugh]. And other people were like, "Oh, yeah, kind of." And the thread was just interesting hearing people talking about that without being that way--

mathowie: Do people--

jessamyn: --if that makes sense, you know, that for the most part people weren't being

jerks and assholes. And I thought the thread was very, very interesting to read.

mathowie: That's funny. Josh, you grew up in Oregon. Did people say, "At least we're not from Idaho?" Like, those are country bumpkins?

cortex: I never really heard that, no.

mathowie: Yeah, it's too far away, I guess.

cortex: Really what I grew up with was people being very anti-Californian.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: And not like in a virulent way, but in a sort of grumbly coming here and bringing in their California money and their California attitudes--

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: --and fucking up the real estate market or whatever. But I felt like that was a lot

more potent, like I felt like I heard that more when I was a kid--

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: --than I have in like the last ten years, it's like people got over it.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Or maybe they just realized what a shitpile situation California's in right now and were feeling sympathetic

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: I don't know.

mathowie: So did in the end, did everyone say West Virginia sucks, or something? (chuckles)

jessamyn: Nah, I don't think so. I mean, there was a lot of people that slagged some of the Southern states, you know...

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: There were people who got kinda snooty about California, but I mean one of the things about California

is like, you live in California, which is kind of a nice place to live whether or not you like the politics or whatever. So, you know, it balanced out, I felt. But you know me, I'm one of those "you're all winners" dorks, so yeah, if something did come out on top I probably wouldn't be able to say it.

mathowie: Yeah, it's great that people weren't all fighty, that everyone did it in a joking way.

jessamyn: For the most part, for the most part they weren't.

mathowie: (laughs) The only one I marked as a favorite was, "Where does wolf-whistling come from?" Like, what is the

origin of the wolf-whistle, that--

cortex: (whistles, with ascending then descending pitch, to demonstrate)

mathowie: Right.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: What is the earliest recorded instance? Apparently it's a Navy thing. A boatswain's pipe makes this call... oh, to get all attentions on deck for an announcement. So the thinking is that maybe shore leave dudes did that to get attention of other dudes on shore leave as a joke, you know--

cortex: Mmm.

mathowie: --and a hot chick walks by.

But so we go, there you go.

jessamyn: That was--

mathowie: What, it dates back to ancient Greece? What? I didn't even see that one. Crazy.

cortex: Back when people were originally trying to

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: make sexual advances to wolves. It was a different sexuality back then.

jessamyn: Back in Romulus and Remus days, right?

cortex: Yes. They were a little bit more--

mathowie: Wow. I can't believe the "Help me, what should my playlist power song be while running?" got 100 favorites, but it did.

jessamyn: I was looking at that one, actually. Because, you know, I've been doing more running lately, and, you know, it really matters if you're, like, Jim tries, because he's got like a ton of music, to give me like, good songs for running, and I'm like, "Okay, it needs to have like a driving beat, it needs to be over 160 beats per minute, and it needs to--" and he's like, "What? What?" So he gave me like Romeo Void and like Hall and Oates, and I'm like, "No. Too slow. It needs to be really fast!"

And the stuff that's actually been most useful is like Sonic the Hedgehog soundtracks.

mathowie and cortex: (laugh with great enthusiasm)

mathowie: Oh my God. That's so awesome.

jessamyn: Because it's all like (sings) boop-ba-boop-boop, boo-ba-boop-boop!

mathowie: Yeah. (sings) Doo-doo-doo-doh-doh-doh doo-doo-doo-doh-doh-doh doo-doo-doh.

jessamyn: And, you know, it kinda keeps your feet going. But I think for a lot of people they just want somebody else, like, you don't want to fucking making a playlist, you just want to go running, and running is kinda hard enough to motivate yourself to do in the first place, and so trying to also put together a playlist is many people's just not idea of a good time.

So I think the threads--

cortex: You know, Echo Nest--yeah, yeah, by the same token there's the Echo Nest, which is a company that I'm fond of because they make entertaining music manipulation stuff. They also do a lot of metadata management, I mean, that's a big part of what they're doing, it's sort of like doing, making it possible to do really intelligent search and music recommendation. And one of the things you can do with their sort of toolset is say, "Yeah, I need this sort of range of beat permitted, and I need this sort of mood," and whatnot, and just get that pile of everything that's 180 beat per minute

and, you know, major key, and they'll just give you a dump that way. Which I feel is something that - it's like two different ways because obviously that person's asked me, or two very different ways of trying to solve the same problem, but...

jessamyn: Right, although, you know, that might definitely work. Like, I was surprised - I thought I knew exactly what I wanted, but when I tried to explain it, it just - it didn't work out right, and you know, Jim would be like "well, this is exactly what you said!"

And I'm like, "But... Raaar! It's not right. Whatever." And so, yeah, it's trickier than it appears.

cortex: Yep.

jessamyn: Oh, and I also have to mention the foodie post, maybe of the month, even though it's just from yesterday, is this "How do I cook with a buttload of ginger?"

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Go to Max... There was a running joke at MaxFunCon that apparently the bartender had ordered too much ginger that was going to go bad by Monday, because every single thing had ginger in it all weekend.

They were great cocktails, but

jessamyn: Mmm hmm.

mathowie: everything had a ton of ginger in it. Everything you drank, you'd be like "Whoah! That aftertaste is lots of fresh ginger!"

jessamyn: Because it's neat! It's a way to get a peppery style bite to your drink

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: without it having a pepper flavor which isn't what everyone wants. So there's some drinks, some foods, some... my spicy green bean recipe is in there, but, yeah, it's a fun food thread. I feel like we always have to mention one food thread every time we talk about this.

mathowie: This is so great. I don't know how I missed this on Ask MetaFilter. "What are the reading classics- What are the...

jessamyn: Oh, yeah yeah yeah. I loved it!

mathowie: ...reading tomes of the blogging era!" Like when dooce lost her job,

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: letsgo... letsgomendel, who I think is a newish... no, not a newish, not a newish at all user. James Torr.

mathowie: What are the classic posts... so great.

jessamyn: Well, and the funny thing is, I didn't even mention this

but, you know, all the things that I thought of, besides Rebecca Blood's thing... see, now I gotta go answer this this afternoon, because you know, I was like "where's camworld? Where's Jesse James Garrett? Where's Ben Brown's long format posting??

mathowie: Oh yeah.

jessamyn: Where's all that stuff? But I guess if you read Rebecca's, you'd probably get a lot of the rest of it. But I did find that kind of...

mathowie: Where's jesse? Isn't jesse mentioned- oh, Anatomy of a weblog, that's camworld...

mathowie: Rebecca Blood- I thought jesse was mentioned somewhere. But, yeah.

jessamyn: [???]

mathowie: What are some other classics, like I guess Kaycee Nicole sort of infected some blogging? Um, what other classics of blogging are there?

jessamyn: Well, there was...

mathowie: I guess technorati- technorati, beebo and blogdex as being these indexes of the best blogs in causing strife among everyone.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Or kottke... the time Kottke asked for donations in like 2002 or something

sfx: (pause)

jessamyn: There was...

mathowie: Like who...

jessamyn: ...Bard Graham's drive to get underwear to people in Katrina drive, which wasn't even that long ago, but I always thought of it

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: as a classic "let's all get together". There was April Fool's things from Wrong Way Go Back.

mathowie: Yeah. There's lots of - it's just funny. I can't believe I missed that. Anything else - are we ready to wrap it up?

jessamyn: I'm ready to wrap it up.

jessamyn: It's been nice chatting in the afternoon, actually.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: I feel awake and everything.

mathowie: Yeah. Yeah, I'm not rushing to get everyone out of the house and energy in my body, and yeah.

cortex: I haven't had to move my neck at all, which is really good for...

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Oh, so you were headbanging, Matt, you fell off your bicycle...

mathowie: Shhh... yeah. Stupid, stupid...

cortex: Injured mods come in threes!

mathowie: Ohhh! Up your life insurance!

jessamyn: I cut the tip of my finger yesterday...

cortex: Oh, OK.

jessamyn: ...slicing cheese.

mathowie: Fair enough.

cortex: That counts.

mathowie: Yeah, that counts.

cortex: We're not particularly hardcore.

mathowie: Yeah. Pretty cool! All right, we'll heal up...

jessamyn: Good!

mathowie: ...for next time.

cortex: All right.

jessamyn: Nice talking to you gentlemen. And Dom, what a nice guy.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Yeah, he's a nice kid.

cortex: He's a mensch.

(pause)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music)

sfx: (music fades out)

Credits

  • beryllium, 125 segments
  • zamboni, 88
  • twist my arm, 36
  • Josh Millard, 24
  • sarah_pdx, 14
  • Pronoiac, 9
  • motdiem2, 1
Retrieved from "http://mefiwiki.com/w/index.php?title=Podcast_63_Transcript&oldid=5741"