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Podcast 68 Transcript

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A transcript for Episode 68: Best Post Contest Results

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


Transcript

jingle: theme music, then

music - Auld Lang Syne, ragtime fingerstyle arrangement by The White Hat

jessamyn: I think it's worth starting off -

jessamyn: - as always, with being like, "December was full of amazing things, and it was of course completely impossible to determine the sort of betters or worsts or whatnot." But like many of the other past contests, it was really fun to actually have a good excuse to just soak in the wonderful posts that were December 2011. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but the couple times I actually sat down to just go over stuff, I was like -

jessamyn: - "oh my god! So many good things!" I learned so much, great conversations.

cortex: It's seriously overwhelming, yeah. I think I felt like this last year when we did it too, and I wasn't sure if I was just having a year with a poor attention span that December but now I feel comfortable saying the problem is not me. The problem is just, it's a ridiculous sort of task - I don't have a month-long attention span. Whenever we do a podcast, the stuff I remember best is the stuff from the last week.

cortex: I favorite sparingly, and I go back to my recent activity, see what I was commenting on. And I can pull together "oh I liked that, I liked that," but at least in that context it feels like half-assing it's okay, "here's some bullshitting about some stuff I like," but now it's a contest, and I've got to try and distribute my attention across an entire month and sort of get that back into shape after the month's over.

jessamyn: Is this the "but how does this affect me" argument?

cortex: No no no, I'm just saying, I feel like I am fundamentally -

cortex: - not up to the task of giving this the fair distribution of attention and judgment that maybe a proper month-long contest deserves. It really exposes how difficult it is to watch the whole site, let alone trying to objectively rank everything that happened on the front page in a month.

jessamyn: Right, well the good news is that this doesn't have to be objective at all.

g;Well yeah, granted.

mathowie: Yeah, yeah, I definitely feel like we are people at a dog show -

mathowie: - looking at hindquarters.

all;[laughter]

mathowie: The people listening to this cannot see what we're seeing at the teeth level with our fingers inside the dog's mouth. This is completely subjective.

jessamyn: Well I was going to say, they can see exactly the same stuff. I guess the only thing they can't see is, I don't know, flagging, deleted comments, whatever.

mathowie: A lot of this is all tweaks in our brain, whatever we personally like about stuff.

jessamyn: I have to say, I did not feel that there was as maybe as much pandering as maybe I've felt in the past.

mathowie: [laughs]

jessamyn: like I felt there were very few softball posts lobbed at mine or Josh's particularly niche, niche-y, niche interest area as I have historically. I don't know how...

mathowie: There wasn't a roguelike round-up, no?

jessamyn: What?

mathowie: Was there a roguelike round-up?

cortex: I don't think there was anything incredibly conspicuous either. I mean there was gaming posts but there's gaming posts every single month, you know, and -

cortex: - I'm not sure one or two gaming things may have actually sort of made my shortlist, but for the most part, "Hey, awesome gaming post, but uh, maybe not the best Metafilter."

mathowie: Yeah, yeah. Oh no, so yeah, I love the best post contest that gave something for everyone to do for the month instead of get aggro about their family and holiday stresses -

jessamyn: Yeah, things were looking a little dicey there at the end of November.

mathowie: But everything was awesome and it's kinda, part of me is like, "Oh, we should have this every month," and then I'm like, when you sit down and try to pick out the best, like, there's no way -

mathowie: - I can't keep up. The site would be exhausting if it was this awesome every day, strangely.

jessamyn: I feel like we mentioned this, maybe the last time we had the best post contest thing, but it would kind of be nifty if users took it upon themselves to say, "Hey, I've got whatever dopey prize to give out to my favorite for blah month," or whatnot -

jessamyn: - like themed stuff, I would only be worried that the themes would wind up being, you know, problematic in their own right, possibly, you know?

cortex: It could be, it could be, yeah. I both like the idea and worry about the [laughs] implications.

jessamyn: [laughs] Well, and we should talk also about how we're doing this slightly differently, that we let every mod pick kind of their, their favorite in addition to having kind of, our, our overall contest winners. So you know, restless_nomad and taz and -

jessamyn: and pb all got to pick one that they particularly liked, in addition to the hash it out podcast discussion that we're going to have.

mathowie: So, should we just launch right into it?

cortex: Let's do it!

jessamyn: Sure.

mathowie: Should we go best overall first, or save it for last?

cortex: I think we should come to that last, cause I feel like that will congeal from what we discuss, since it's not like we've put together a -

mathowie: Well, in another strange

mathowie: judging dogs on how they look twist.

jessamyn: Ahh!

mathowie: I had a couple of - I only have two in the best overall that I will not put in any other category, like they are too good for any other category. I'm not -

jessamyn: I lost my chat window again, could you possibly -

mathowie: Ugh, I'm not going to consider them for like, best megalink -

jessamyn: Oh wait, I found it

mathowie: [hearty laugh] Ahh. Best use of Skype goes to...

cortex: [chuckles]

mathowie: Oh yeah, wait, here's the, this is public, the best post for December, yeah, that was

mathowie: Oh yeah, wait, here's the, this is public, the best post for December, yeah, that was -

jessamyn: Yeah!

mathowie: So I'll link that in the, umm, chat discussion -

jessamyn: Now that's the thing we made a couple years ago? But just stays around?

mathowie: Paul just changed the query to this year, so the old links are now linking to that new query, but yeah -

jessamyn: So we got to use the 'what other people have favorited, uh -

mathowie: Metric?

jessamyn: page, but also, I mean spent a lot of time, I don't know about you guys, looking at my own favorites, being like, 'what did I like when I saw it the first time?'

jessamyn: looking at my own favorites, being like, 'what did I like when I saw it the first time?'

cortex: Yeah, I went through my favorites, I went through my recent activity, for stuff like I'm commenting in, because that's a good sign it was something I engaged with, and

jessamyn: Right

mathowie: I made a point, to like, anything I liked I would favorite but yeah, I basically spent an hour categorizing, and I had hardly anything in best multilink. But why don't we start with best single link post?

jessamyn: Best single link post! Well, I had one that was, that was my, my 'Jessamyn's Choice' runner-up, um, that nobody particularly liked but was really, really, great

jessamyn: um, that nobody particularly liked but was really, really, great, um, which was Fizz's post, "I can't stop acquiring books," which is just basically like a easy-peasy single-link, 'guy talking about his book collection' and he's, you know, one of those collectors that has teetering piles of books everywhere in his apartment and... you know, it had eight comments and eight favorites and it was just a very pretty little video and that's it.

mathowie: Hmm. Nice.

jessamyn: So I had, I had one single-link - like, I had one post that was more 'My Jessamyn's Favorite' but this one was

jessamyn: definitely my runner up.

mathowie: Hmm. I, uh, I didn't think of YouTube but I think single-link and YouTube go together pretty well, but the 'Best Pole-dancer Ever'...

jessamyn: Ughhhh!

mathowie: [evil laughter]

jessamyn: So like, 'good news, bad news'

cortex: Yeah, that one I kept off my list just because it was like enough, sort of like a, a little bit of a clusterfuck of a thread, like the reception was sort of weird and complicated enough that it didn't really like seem like a clear, 'Oh, that was just a great single-link

cortex: sort of thing. But yeah, it was really, it was a great dance routine and it was an interesting thread, but it was kind of a heated one too, so I wasn't sure how to feeling about it.

mathowie: I think I followed the first half but the second half was more fights about stripping versus pole-dancing -

cortex: Well, and, and -

jessamyn: Well, it's like pole dancing is like acrobatic or -

mathowie: Yeah

jessamyn: is it just kind of, yeah, basically stripping with a pole.

cortex: And in a competitive dancing environment, is the target audience the general audience with their pre-conceived notions about stripping or is it, you know, athletes who

cortex: do competitive pole-dancing, I mean, how does that affect the reading -

mathowie: It's weird!

jessamyn: Because the woman is clearly this amazing athlete

mathowie: Yeah

jessamyn: And yet when you say 'best pole-dance ever' you think, you know, porny porn porn.

mathowie: Yeah, yeah, that was my first thought and I even said that in a comment, like, uh, 'I think the name pole-dancing kind of cheapens it, what they're doing'

jessamyn: Right

mathowie: It's more like modern dance and fitness stuff, and, but then someone else had like pole-dancing pride, I remember

mathowie: before it was like someone going 'This isn't about stripping, this is an actual thing, there's dudes that do it, like -'

cortex: Yeah, it's this complicated, you know, the perception -

mathowie: Why are they even in strip clubs? Like, I don't even - seriously, even, like, if this post didn't exist and we were talking about

jessamyn: Because you can hang upside down with your hoo-ha in the air and you can't do that without a pole.

mathowie: I guess. I don't know, that was the weirdest part of a strip club world thing is, well, everything is weird in strip club world

jessamyn: [laughs]

mathowie: but pole-dancing is like the least erotic thing, it's just

mathowie: like weird and goofy and -

jessamyn: Maybe they haven't been doing it right where you've been,

mathowie: Yeah, I guess so. Though one drunken night I did it.

jessamyn: Hee hee. When you pole-danced?

mathowie: [chuckles] Yes, yes.

jessamyn: Because, really, that's what I want to see on ??? next

mathowie: Gotta eat somehow.

cortex: He's a monster on the, on the pole. Uh, I like this little short commercial film by David Lynch about coffee.

jessamyn: Oh, I didn't see this, tell me about it.

cortex: It's, it's exactly that. It's David Lynch doing a short, sort of, I don't even know if this was like an actual commercial that he did for someone who was willing to have David Lynch make a work commercial, or if it was a bullshit pretend commercial, but he's made weird, actual commercials before. But just him, uh, having a cup of coffee and a conversation about it, you know, with a fakey voice, you know, he's holding a -

jessamyn: He's so weird!

cortex: The whole shot is just a close-up on a Barbie doll head

cortex: you know, that the entire thing, he's clearly holding the Barbie doll head

mathowie: Dude!

cortex: right up to the camera and you know, having a conversation with this Barbie doll head

mathowie: It's real!

cortex: Is it?

mathowie: You can buy David Lynch coffee for real, like a pound of it.

cortex: Nice. Anyway, you know, he's done all this weird, fucked-up little things over the years and I always like it when people start looking at that because, like, you've got his actual big films, but then there's all this weird short films and stuff he did, so I enjoyed it. But I have a soft spot for David Lynch

cortex: so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people were like, 'Really?'

jessamyn: Hee hee.

mathowie: I liked uh -

jessamyn: THAT WAS MINE TOO!

mathowie: Free Cabin Porn! An awesome Tumblr blog of just beautiful photos and -

jessamyn: Was it a Tumblr?

mathowie: Yeah, it's Tumblr.

jessamyn: OK. Damn, I looked at the URL and was like, 'As long it's not one of those fucking Tumblrs!'

mathowie: [Laughs] I mean, if you're gonna go single-link, it's gonna be Tumblr or YouTube, man. That's -

jessamyn: No, I got one that isn't, I got one that isn't!

mathowie: That's true, but just saying

mathowie: Wow, some of these photos are brilliant!

jessamyn: Right, this is like big picture style little houses.

mathowie: Yeah, but, I mean half of them are a crazy architect's weekend spot and they're so far beyond what normal people have, so... eh, it's cool.

jessamyn: Well, and that's, I mean, I think that's the allure of the whole cabin thing, right? Like there's that 'I want to go there' feeling, but it's not that I want to go live in a cabin, exactly! I mean, sonascope actually, um

jessamyn: now I've got to find it, sonascope had this really great comment, I think in that thread, about talking about how you don't wanna be... You know, Thoreau didn't want to go live in the middle of freaking nowhere, you know, like he wanted to -

mathowie: Yeah, I did see that comment.

jessamyn: That there's this romanticism to cabin, I don't even think it's in that thread, I think it's somewhere else.

mathowie: Well you, I think you had a long thing about, 'Hey everybody, let me remind you of the world of mice'

mathowie: and how there'll be mice everywhere, all the time, but I thought it was in that thread, where someone was like 'I live, whatever, an hour from'

jessamyn: Well, I talked about my house, which is, you know, 800 - not where I live now, but the house that I'm trying to sell desperately, for almost no money, um, and yeah, you deal with mice, you deal with the elements, you deal with crazy, crazy neighbours. Like, it's a great vacation destination, but like you know, living some place where you have 44k dialup and your neighbours

jessamyn: are weird noisy, kind of louts that you don't quite get along with, and you have to dig your car out and you're totally automobile dependent, etcetera etcetera etcetera, you know, it loses its charm, so the thing about cabins is that fact that it's not where you live all the time, like there's the tiny house movement people who really want to go live in a tiny house

mathowie: Yeah

jessamyn: but, uh, cabins are, are, are -

mathowie: Occasional

jessamyn: I think

mathowie: This is cool, that they also

jessamyn: Oh, sonascope's thing about off-the-grid daydreams, it was in the MetaTalk thread about good comments

mathowie: Oh, cool.

jessamyn: but basically talking about, you know, the daydream of living out in the middle of nowhere and the reality of living out in the middle of nowhere, it was, it was great. It was in a totally different thread in October about somebody living off $20,000 a year. Like, you can totally do it, it just -

mathowie: It sucks

jessamyn: has to be your thing.

mathowie: Yeah

jessamyn: You know, you can't do something else and do that.

mathowie: The blog also linked to this other Tumblr blog called 'My Cabin in the Woods' which reminds me of that one blog about the guy who drove like a 1929 Ford for a year every day in Detroit, like even in the winter, in that, oh my god, it's so much work. It's basically a blog of all the work they did to build it and live in it, it's like, it's way more

jessamyn: Yeah, I mean it's cool, it just becomes your job

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: and if that's what you want your job to be, that's terrific, but if you had something else in mind to do with your day you can't.

jessamyn: That's nice. I like that little building. With the canvas walls... it looks like it's completely covered in mildew! (pronounced, mildooooo!!!)

cortex: [hearty chuckle]

jessamyn: That is pretty great. But! We should move on.

mathowie: Yeah!

jessamyn: Here - since we're talking about, like, what's not a Tumblr and what's not a YouTube, I would like to give you the 'Seeking the elusive call of the endangered Cthulu which is listening to the deep ocean environment' which is what I've been reading all morning.

cortex: Nice!

jessamyn: It's just a page and

mathowie: Oh my god

jessamyn: you listen to

mathowie: the cats

jessamyn: the ocean, by Burhanistan. It is great.

cortex: That is very nice.

jessamyn: It is great. It was totally underappreciated, it was one of those great nine comment

mathowie: But this isn't single! We're in single!

jessamyn: Yeah, it fucking is! I mean

mathowie: It's two links! There's a via.

cortex: Yeah, it's, it's, you know, then we have a real taxonomical problem, because there's like a question of what really counts as a single link in spirit versus literally having one link, because this, like, does a via link really count as it's not a single link

cortex: anymore, whereas

mathowie: And other projects

cortex: the Neptune counted as, the uh yeah, and yeah, it's tricky

jessamyn: Historically, we've given single link awards to things that had more one link in the post.

mathowie: Really?!

cortex: I'm comfortable with that as long as it's linking to one thing

mathowie: I'm drawing a line in the sand!

cortex: You know, if you're

mathowie: It's in the title! Single! [chuckle]

cortex: I feel like if you're linking to one thing

mathowie: There's so many choices!

cortex: and it's not like some crazy roundup, then, you know

mathowie: There's so many choices here that it's easy to stick with just one link.

jessamyn: Fine with me!

jessamyn: I just wanted to say I liked it!

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: It's nice to see you guys finally deciding what the rules are - in January.

cortex: Hey, I agree with you. Uh

jessamyn: [Giggles maniacally]

cortex: I, uh, I liked the pro, pro-cat, pro-catonator - I can never decide how to pronounce it.

jessamyn: Oh my god, there's a typo in the title of this and now I'm dead.

cortex: [Chuckles] But, uh, yes, as a supreme sort of like

jessamyn: Tell me about this. I did not see this.

cortex: As is described in the post, it's random cat gifs plus random music.

jessamyn: Wait wait, what?

cortex: It gives you a screen-sized animated gif [pronounced as 'Jiff'] of a cat and some music.

jessamyn: Matt, how do you pronounce G I F?

cortex: or gif [pronounced as 'Giff']

mathowie: Giff. Graphic, graphic hard-G giff!

cortex: I pronounce it, I pronounce it - use ping!

mathowie: Giff!

cortex: Anyways, it's cute, it's adorable and I liked it!

jessamyn: Oh yeah!

mathowie: Oh my god, the jump one! I never saw that one before! [Laughing] Sorry. That was good.

jessamyn: Anyway, that was kind of cute.

mathowie: I think I

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: I was going to go with Free Cabin Porn, but maybe serendips--what, is that supposed to be 'serendipity' misspelled?

jessamyn: It's supposed to be serendipity.

mathowie: Eugh, I'm thinking that cat one is the winner to me.

cortex: It could have been serenderpity.

jessamyn: So you guys can't hear that I'm listening in yencat?

mathowie: Nope, nope.

jessamyn: [evil laugh] Oh, they're both really good.

cortex: I like that one an awful lot, but it's actually not one of my top picks.

We're still in runner-up territory for me.

jessamyn: The cat one?

cortex: Yeah, the cat one.

jessamyn: Oh.

mathowie: What's your best single link? I'm done with single link.

cortex: Oh, well--

jessamyn: Oh, I've got a couple more.

cortex: Oh, okay. Well, one of my others--I liked this, it's just an understated little post, was one artw did of a short essay on how to write a 6,000-word adventure story. It's just a nice, tight little bit of someone with a strong, "This is what I do, and this is my opinion, and take it and suck it sort of--",

you know, it was not a big exploration in essay form of the writing form, it was just like, "This is what I do, and this is what you do--"

jessamyn: --This is how it works--

cortex: --and boom, it works, you got an adventure story."

jessamyn: It goes to dynamite.

cortex: And I like it when writers say, I'm going to just distill down what I do, and boom! this is my thoughts, so. I enjoyed that, I thought that was a nice little post.

mathowie: Plus he's been dead for fifty years--

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: --so he's not giving away any secrets.

cortex: Yep.

jessamyn: And then you can't fight. Well then, here's another one of mine that wouldn't have worked at all, because there's actually a second link in it [mathowie and cortex laugh], but it's basically a link to the movie Carts of Darkness--

mathowie: What? Oh yeah.

jessamyn: Which is a guy who's a snowboarder and a filmmaker and he got into an auto accident which ended his career, but he came across a group of homeless men--

mathowie: Oh!

jessamyn: --who collect bottles and ride down hills on carts, and it's a one-hour movie at the National Film Board of Canada.

cortex: Nice.

mathowie: I really wanted to wanted watch that.

jessamyn: But I guess it doesn't count [mathowie and cortex laugh], so that's okay.

mathowie: Those homeless people, stay homeless!

jessamyn: But hippybear, you did good, sorry about the second link!

cortex: You know, there's two of us and one of him, Jessamyn, I think we can do whatever.

mathowie: Yeah, I think we can do whatever.

jessamyn: One of Matt, you mean?

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Psh!

cortex: No, well, one guy with a cart, let's go get that guy with a debilitating injury!

jessamyn: [laughs]

cortex: Let's see, what else...

jessamyn: And I just think there's so much good stuff that part of what this does is just generates ways for us to talk about things in a more structured format anyhow.

cortex: Yeah. Okay, well, one of my actual top two for the single link: I liked

sort of like the cat thing, almost, in terms of presentation, but the Hug Cam--

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

cortex: --the Nicest Place on the Internet, with just the random people walking up and giving the camera a hug.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: And I feel like I'm not the specific target demo person for this, because, I mean, I like a hug, but I'm rarely sitting around on the Internet thinking that the thing I need the most from the world right now is a hug from the Internet--

jessamyn: Aaah! That lady stuck me in her armpit!

cortex: Yeah, you gotta watch out for that.

Anyway, I thought it was a nice idea. It's a very aggressively personal presentation of a simple idea.

jessamyn: I would not have paired you with that website.

[Laughter]

cortex: Yeah, I don't know. I just--I liked the idea. I thought it was a--

mathowie: You know, it kind of reminds me of Internet exhibits in museums, someone does some sort of installation that makes you uncomfortable.

jessamyn: Right. It sounds a lot like that, it's got that kind of sound to it.

cortex: You know, instead of like

jessamyn: [laughs]

cortex: doing, some weird, how do you react to being given this weird or disturbing input, it's just like, "Hey, hugs!" So, I thought that was pretty great.

jessamyn: "Hey, hugs!" I like that.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: I liked--VikingSword had a really interesting one-link news post--not really news-y, but it was, like, a BBC thing--about a submarine escape! [cortex and mathowie laugh] From 70 years ago! Which was basically about a guy who escaped, he did the deepest escape from a submarine that had ever been recorded, but he died before his

story was finally verified.

mathowie: Wow.

jessamyn: And it was just kind of fascinating, and it was one of the few kind of news-y--I mean, obviously it isn't news; it was 70 years ago--but, one of the few single-link usual suspects, like, news sources, that I thought was really good, and, for whatever reason, didn't have a lot of discussion. There was some people chit-chatting about how to get out of a submarine.

mathowie: [chuckles] Important practical knowledge to have.

jessamyn: Whaa-- You never know until you go!

mathowie: I never knew you could open a hatch under water--I thought that was impossible... [trails off]

jessamyn: [fiercely] That's how you got [sings] to read it; it explains it!

mathowie: He fired himself out of a torpedo? [laughs]

jessamyn: You have to--the upper half shuts, you open a flood valve--

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: --then you open the other--it's cool. So he did this crazy escape, and nobody believed him.

cortex: I guess, you know, you could go to--at OMSI we've got the U.S.S. Blueback--the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry--and I suppose you could get trapped in there. Although it wouldn't get very far down even if it's

sunk, because it's right on the [???]

jessamyn: Is it in the water? It's in the water, though?

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Oh, neat! I don't think I've ever been there.

cortex: I've never--

jessamyn: But yeah, that was just a runner-up that I liked. And my last one, which was a single-link YouTube, unless you wanted to--

mathowie: No, go for it.

jessamyn: --is, this guy makes boxes.

cortex: I did not see this.

jessamyn: It's just a really short thing about a guy who has an Exacto knife and a piece of cardboard and some tape and goes zip-zip-zip-zip-zip, here's a box.

cortex: Nice.

mathowie: Eugh, an ad! I can't watch it--

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: because a fucking Mitt Romney ad.

cortex: Ohh.

jessamyn: What are you even talking about? What ad are you seeing?

mathowie: When you play something on YouTube, sometimes they have pre-roll ads?

jessamyn: What? I never see those.

mathowie: [shocked] What?!

jessamyn: Do you not run--

mathowie: I don't run AdBlock.

jessamyn: I never have seen one of those. I have no idea what you're talking about.

mathowie: A pre-roll ad on YouTube you've never seen? I just had to watch Mitt Romney for ten seconds before I was allowed to hit skip.

cortex: I only had to watch for five.

jessamyn: No! No. I have never seen one, literally. I don't know what you're talking about.

mathowie: Wow, I wish I lived in Jessamyn-world.

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: Maybe they're illegal in Vermont.

mathowie: Maybe it's, like, digital divide in Vermont, so you don't get the extra ad.

jessamyn: No, seriously. So it's an ad just that YouTube randomly runs on--like, I've seen it on Hulu...

mathowie: Yeah. Yeah, it's very much like Hulu.

jessamyn: But I've never seen it on YouTube.

mathowie: All the time.

jessamyn: What?

mathowie: This is really slow. I'm watching this, and he's, like, very carefully making a box.

jessamyn: Josh, do you see them?

cortex: Yeah, I do see the ads sometimes, yeah.

mathowie: I thought this box would be, like, you know, magical and fast.

cortex: Well, see, it just got over-hyped--

jessamyn: [sighs]

cortex: --because, you know, he seems to be doing a competent job of--

mathowie: [incredulously] It takes two and a half minutes!

cortex: Well, I mean, it's a box, you know.

mathowie: Meh, okay, let's move on.

cortex: Anyway. [laughs]

My one other one that I really liked--and this is, I liked this partly for the post and partly for the thread that came out of it--but the--

jessamyn: Fuck y'all, it was a cool box.

cortex: [laughs] It was just too hyped!

jessamyn: [laughs]

cortex: I liked the dull rock 'n roll anecdotes post.

mathowie: Wow! I never saw this.

cortex: It's a Tumblr blog, of course, full of just dull rock 'n roll anecdotes. "Rock And Roll Tedium" is the name of the blog.

jessamyn: [laughs, with mathowie] Oh, yeah, I saw that when it up!

cortex: But then it turned into an entire thread of people telling dull rock 'n roll anecdotes. Which are basically my favorite kind of rock 'n roll anecdotes.

mathowie: Like the time I went to the first Lollapalooza tour and was taking a piss and Ice-T pulled up to the urinal next to me and we

said nothing and we went about our separate ways. That was it. I peed next to Ice-T once.

jessamyn: Neat!

mathowie: [laughs] Eh. Mundane!

cortex: So I don't know. I like the participatory nature of the whole thing. That makes it an extra-good post as far as I'm concerned. Because as much as it's about the links, it's also--

jessamyn: Because the thread was all chatty. I had a bunch of multi-link posts like that.

cortex: I have another one that doesn't go in the running, but the same theory is the "MMMHop" post. nickthetourist made a post about--

mathowie: Oh yeah. Hanson beer?

cortex: Hanson's beer. And it just turned, possibly partly my fault, into a very long series of bad puns about band names versus beer and other alcohol. Brauhaus? I just love that.

jessamyn: Keg Zeppelin.

mathowie: Brauhaus?

cortex: I like Brauhaus.

jessamyn: --Brews Traveller. Brew Oyster Cult. Amy Winehouse?

mathowie: Vanilla Ice House.

jessamyn: Beergarden. De La Stout.

mathowie: [laughing] The Red Stripes.

jessamyn: Suzanne Kega.

mathowie: Smashing Pumpkin Ale.

jessamyn: Beerhoof.

mathowie: This is good.

jessamyn: Yeah, that is good. So yeah. I enjoyed that.

mathowie: I count four links in the original post, but that's all right.

jessamyn: Goddammit.

mathowie: [laughing] We'll call it single-subject from now on.

jessamyn: I think single-link is probably better to keep it at.

mathowie: Single-link's a good idea; we're just being clear about the--

jessamyn: We should just maybe nail down some rules ahead of time. I know you guys hate that kind of thing, but whatever!

mathowie: Whatever. Whatever. Rules, man...

jessamyn: Whatever!

cortex: Well, I'm out of single links now.

jessamyn: Me too. That was all of the ones that I got.

mathowie: So what's the best one?

I don't--here's the thing. I don't want to pick out--one or two of these I saw everywhere, like the hugs, and actually the cats and the music--I saw on Twitter, I saw on Facebook, everywhere.

cortex: They're sort of like Internet posts, so--

mathowie: I want something that's unique, like, I didn't see Free Cabin Porn anywhere, I didn't see MMMHop anywhere else.

jessamyn: I think you're making a compelling argument for Free Cabin Porn. I enjoyed that one. Besides, middleclasstool, I like him. And, he, you know, I receive no compensation for

this.
[laughter]

cortex: I would feel uncomfortable with that reasoning. Because I kind of assumed that one had been everywhere, but I didn't latch super strong into it, so I didn't go looking. But if that one really hasn't been going around everywhere, that might be a good tiebreaker sort of argument against the other cool stuff.

mathowie: I mean, it is a Tumblr blog that's public, so it got everywhere, but I didn't see it anywhere else before I saw it there, so.

jessamyn: That sounds great!

cortex: All right.

mathowie: All right, Free Cabin Porn Wins. Badooo!

jessamyn: Single-link: middleclasstool, come and accept your prize.

mathowie: All right. Maybe we should try to go faster on the next, [laughter] since that took 18-20 minutes.

cortex: Longer posts, so we should talk faster about them, clearly.

mathowie: What do you have for--I was using the word 'slim' to describe a few links but not mega-links, but I'm not sure if--

jessamyn: I just did anything that was less than like 20.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: I have like six,

I think?

mathowie: I have two.

jessamyn: But many--well, go, Matt!

mathowie: Ahh--

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: And mostly I--well, I didn't know where to make the line, I mean, I guess we need to be better--

cortex: Just talk about some posts, we'll--

mathowie: Okay, shut up.

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: You shut up.

mathowie: And I hate to link to Quora or Reddit, because those are so weird, to link to another discussion. But the "What's it like to have an understanding of advanced mathematics?", because that stuff is beyond me,

like, calculus is as far as I went, and it hurt my brain every night.

jessamyn: And I'm impressed that you know calculus, because I've been trying to learn it as an adult person, and it's hard.

cortex: Calculus kinda sucks.

mathowie: Well, I had to take it in college to start when I was, whatever, 20, and there were fifteen-year-olds in the front row, because the high school didn't teach calculus--

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: --so they came to college to take it--

jessamyn: Oh yeah.

mathowie: And they were telepathic with the professor, like, he would just go, "What do you think, Kevin?" and he'd be like,

"Uh, x is going to go to 1," and he'd be like, "Right, Kevin." And like--

jessamyn: Aaah!

mathowie: --everyone else would just be lost. I struggled and struggled and got like, barely a B, C+s and Bs in differentials and derivatives, and eugh, so hard. So, this is good. The first answer on Quora basically talks about how it feels to--

jessamyn: I have noticed that Quora does do this kind of thing really well.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like, if you can get the one right person to answer the one right question, it will get voted way the hell up and then spin around the Internet, and you can really learn some stuff, which is cool.

mathowie: But it's oddly, like, Quora is really good at, like, Silicon Valley white guys that are good at stuff.

jessamyn: Right. "What's it like to be incredibly wealthy?" was another one that I saw on Quora that was really interesting.

mathowie: [laughs] What?!

cortex: [laughs] It's like a very niche IAmA subreddit.

mathowie: Yeah. And then Reddit's really good at geek male

mathowie: -stuff, but Quora -- if it has some connection with Silicon Valley, like mathematics would, with computer science, you're going to get great answers; it's so weird, Quora feels like a local Ask Metafilter for San Jose.

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: Let me see... my other one was the just giant Mozilla developer docs roundup of like every-

cortex: That was pretty cool, yeah.

mathowie: -great HTML 5, and HTML thing and the comments just made the whole post better by saying-

jessamyn: By schmod. Put together by schmod, which was very cool.

mathowie: By schmod, yeah. So those-

jessamyn: Hat tip to wackybrit.

mathowie: That's like ten-ish links, I tried to stay below ten.

cortex: I felt like that was kind of great as sort of Metafilter modern throwback post, like that would have been like the Most Amazing Post on the Internet, if it had been made, like, on Metafilter in Metafilter's first year or so, when there was still a lot of, bit more like heavily webby people and whatnot.

mathowie: Oh yeah, yeah.

cortex: Modified for the ability to have that content in a post twelve years ago.

cortex: Yeah, so that felt like the ghost of Christmas future Metafilter post or something.

jessamyn: That was a little "Blah blah GINGER" for me, although I appreciated that it was-

mathowie and cortex;[laughter]

jessamyn: -was good for other people.

cortex: Well, one of the ones I - I'm looking at my multilink posts and a lot of them have this sort of exception, one way or the other, like this is a post about VASSAL, which I think is...

cortex: ...a totally awesome thing: it's an open source engine for online board game playing, so basically you can implement any board game as sort of a module for this system. And then if everyone knows how to play the game

jessamyn: And by boardgame you mean: Ghost Stories, the Waterloo Campaign, Star Fleet Battle Force... not like, Scrabble.

mathowie: No, like Risk.

cortex: Well, in theory any of those: you could do Scrabble, you can do Monopoly, you can do crazy Avalon Hill stuff; anything that you can break down into, what are the pieces of this game

jessamyn: Legend of Zelda

cortex: 'cause the thing is, it's not like a game arbitration system; it doesn't know the rules, it...

cortex: ...it just provides an interface for-

mathowie: See the board.

cortex: -for everybody to know where the pieces are for whatever game you're playing. So, everybody has to know how to play the game, cause it won't tell you "No, you can't",

jessamyn: And keep score, and do all the stuff, and it'll visualize it kind of?

cortex: Yeah, it will do just the basic, keeping track of the inventory of stuff, so you can easily get together a game with people on the other side of the world who like, "Oh man we haven't played Diplomacy in forever, let's get a game together" and you all know how to play, so you get the module for VASSAL and boom, you're playing.

jessamyn: Cool!

cortex: So, it's kind of extra nerdy but it's also really awesome as sort of the right way to

cortex: ...solve a pretty difficult problem for people who are willing to put in a little bit of effort.

mathowie: [inaudible]

cortex: So I thought that was awesome but, it's a one or two link post but it's also got an immediate follow up from -- this is JHarris made this post -- he's got an immediate follow up comment with another dozen, dozen and a half games and so, it's like how many links is it? [pause] The answer is none. None more links.

jessamyn: None more links. What were you cussing about, Matt, or are you ok?

mathowie: Oh, I forgot a single link, and I think I was calling something multilink when it should have been single subject.

cortex: What was it?

mathowie: But...

cortex: That's all right.

mathowie: I forgot the single link post about the guy with the car, the Bug that had the original key? Like, the original owner was his Dad, and he found it for sale, and he ended up buying it and the key worked.

cortex: Oh yeah!

mathowie: I only love that because it introduced me to this blog called Bring A Trailer, which is just like old car-

jessamyn: Yes! I've been reading Bring A Trailer all month! You turned me on to Bring A Trailer, or somebody did.

mathowie: Yeah! It's just basically a best of Ebay blog, of like, here's this-

jessamyn: Best of Awesome Cars For Sale.

mathowie: Yeah, here's this bad ass 1972 thing that's never going to be made ever again, and how, like, there's just weird Japanese imports and stuff that's just on Ebay...

jessamyn: Mini trucks? Little mini trucks?

mathowie: And it's like, stuff that's going for five grand or something -- oh my god this crazy range rover I just linked to is like ten miles away from me -- and then you can buy them dirt cheap but

mathowie: you know, you have to work on them like crazy, and it's funny because they're like, every post has like fifty comments and they're from total car nerds who are just like "Oh, I think the lifter's out; I can tell if he talks about knocking, and the medium rpm bandwith...", and they just keep, it's really funny...

jessamyn: [laughs]

mathowie: There's all these, you don't think that there's Mazda rotary engine experts all over the place, but they all show up to these posts and talk to death about everything.

jessamyn: Well, and here's the thing, there's a post - the thing that got me totally sold is...

jessamyn: ...there's a post that has a picture of my first car.

mathowie: What? Oh my god I think my grandma had-

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: I mean not my personal first car but my first car was an Opel Manta that looked just like that one.

mathowie: I think my grandma had one of these.

cortex: It's a good looking car.

mathowie: Wow, it's in Eugene.

jessamyn: It was! Bright orange.

cortex: I have not seen those before.

mathowie: We can make the dream come true!

jessamyn: Hey, hey!

cortex: You don't see a lot of Opel Manta's on the road.

mathowie: Wow. [pause] Yeah so, this has just...created a new obsession-

jessamyn: Good story time.

mathowie: Yeah, sorry.

jessamyn: Alright, we should soldier on.

jessamyn: I had a couple that were just good but don't need talking about?

mathowie: Shoot.

jessamyn: "Best of 2011: Space and Astronomy" by Bora Horza Gobuchul, I enjoyed just because I personally like astronomy posts, so-

mathowie: That one's good.

jessamyn: It was stuff to look at in the space, in the space thing. Infinite intimation had a really good point, a really good post about how homosexuality basically became...

jessamyn: ...not a psychiatric disease, and it was only notable -- I mean whatever, it's interesting. And as well it had audio that you could download, but there's also a transcript so you could read it, and it just talked about the American psychiatric association's history with, dealing with homosexuality.

mathowie: That harkens back nicely to that discussion in Metatalk the other week about podcasts and how so many people are like "Yeah I'll read a transcript, but I won't listen to a podcast", so-

jessamyn: Right. Well that's what I thought, it reminded me of that, although I found that the conclusion that -- I think it was Artw? -- drew from that was "Oh, nobody listens to podcasts",

mathowie: [laughs] Well...

jessamyn: -which I don't necessarily think was totally correct; I just think that some people don't.

mathowie: Yeah, and people who don't are probably more likely to speak up and talk about it because it's like "Oh I, here's a thing that I can be vaguely contrarian about".

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: Okay well one that I like that doesn't need a whole lot of discussion but is a neat project is this attempt to get every single Fugazi show ever, available for-

cortex: Oh yeah!

jessamyn: Oh I saw this!

mathowie: -for a cheap download.

jessamyn: I thought this was single link, but whatever!

cortex: Yeah! I called it single.

mathowie: Yeah, it kinda, well in retrospect you know there's two...links. So it somehow got on my singl-

jessamyn: [laughs]

cortex: This is where I would bend the rules; it's in a, it's in a, parenthesis? The second-

jessamyn: Now he's bending the rules.

mathowie: Yeah, well, anyway...

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: I thought that was pretty cool, but, at the same time it's a link to "Here's a place where you can go pay small amounts of money for something" so it really didn't jump out at me as the platonic ideal of a Metafilter post necessarily, but it's a really neat-

jessamyn: I saw a few guys were doing this type.

mathowie: Well yeah and there's a few stories in there from people. That's what I like about it is the fact that you've got this huge show...ography, whatever you want to call that, represents so much collective experience at being at shows and you've got people popping in saying "Oh man, sweet, they mentioned this show where we opened for them back in '91", someone said in a comment.

jessamyn: Hey, here's the shows that I saw! Available: no. Ah, yeah I saw them in Olympia. Oh that's cool, very cool.

mathowie: So yeah, I thought that was cool.

jessamyn: Speaking of music, I enjoyed this pendulum music for microphones, amplifiers, speakers and performers.

mathowie: Oh yeah!

jessamyn: Which was a Steve Reich kind of "We make music by having microphones do this thing", and then there's some videos.

mathowie: Yeah, that was neat.

jessamyn: If you're into sort of feedback amplifier droney whatever music it was, I thought, an underappreciated post by misteraitch.

mathowie: And of course Alvin Lucier comes up in the comments, who's one of my favorite weird little sound experiment people.

jessamyn: Cool.

mathowie: He did the thing where, I am sitting in a room, recording the sound of my own voice, and then he fed it back through a microphone, through a speaker back in the room again and again and again until it just reduced to, like, harmonics. And it was a really neat, old project.

cortex: I remember seeing this post go up and thinking that it sounded like a Flaming Lips concept album or a MOMA-

mathowie and jessamyn;[laughter]

cortex: -installation, and it sounded so difficult I was like, "I'll get to it later", and I basically never played any of these videos.

mathowie: Now in poly-quadraphonic sound.

jessamyn: Horace Rumple did a great post about the Jefferson Bible, which

mathowie: Oh yeah.

jessamyn: -he created by cutting and pasting the Bible up; took Jesus' miracles out of it, and the resurrection, and cut and pasted it but now it's digitized and available at the Smithsonian.

mathowie: Which is awesome. And then there was a-

jessamyn: Enjoyed it; was pretty nichey interesting to me, but I thought it was a) a good post, and b) an interesting topic.

mathowie: Yeah, it's neat and I like the way it summons up the sort of precursor to... you know...that guy, you know, with the cutting things up? ...Burrows! yes.

mathowie: That aside failed.

jessamyn: [Laugh]

cortex: But yeah, I liked the "Next Time, on Lonny" as a fun little webseries thing.

jessamyn: I didn't even look at this.

cortex: It's just a cute gimmicky little show some friends clearly made. But it pretends to be a reality show, so the episode begins with the end of it where he's like, "Well, you know, and I talked to Shondra, and I really felt like it was

not an okay thing for her to say in front of people like that, but you know, we worked it out and whatever, we're copacetic, so, you know, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens tomorrow," and then it's like, "Next Time, on Lonny", and then it goes into an absurd thing like an alien invasion or a murder conspiracy and so on. It's hard to explain in a way that will be compelling, but it's a lot of fun, just a surprising sort of absurdity that rants off every time. And it's a lot of fun--

jessamyn: Hey, there's new episodes of--Awkward Black Girl, speaking of--

cortex: Oh!

jessamyn: --pseudo-reality things. Sorry.

cortex: No. That's okay. Anyway, so Lonny was funny--

jessamyn: But it was good, you enjoyed it, and--

cortex: And it was obviously amateurish, but it was also really well-done amateurish, and funny, like, that's the thing--

mathowie: yeah.

cortex: --like, they got the comedy down, it's edited well and shot well, they really knew their abilities and they made a very funny show, so.

jessamyn: Cool!

mathowie: YouTube people are like online comic artists, that they're usually good artists or good with a camera

but not with the writing part, so--

jessamyn: Sometimes, yeah.

mathowie: Yeah, that's awesome, when they can do both.

Any other multi-links?

jessamyn: Sure! I liked "Ask for forgiveness, not permission," which is how to travel on an airplane with your musical instrument.

cortex: Oh yeah. By Lara St. John, who I saw play back in the day.

jessamyn: I didn't have a lot of how-tos; because the mad jula cooking [sp?] thing was such a big deal last time, I was kind of expecting an explosion of how to do this, that, and the other. This is a post by flex, who made a lot of good posts this month

but, general tips on travelling with your instruments.

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: Which is just kind of summaries from websites that sell djembes or whatever--how do you travel with your djembe? How do people deal with it? How do people not deal with it? You know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

mathowie: Every time I've seen a guitar or a cello on a plane, it's always a guy going, like, "Oh. What? Oh! Yeah! I have a guitar with me! Oh, I almost forgot--"

jessamyn: [laughs]

mathowie: "--Yeah, sure if you want to put it in a special place, that would be great." Like, every time, the flight attendants are freaking out.

jessamyn: I assume that's a position thing.

mathowie: [laughs] But they're just, like, "Hi!"

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: They're just like, "What? Huh?" I've seen a guy with a cello walk down and get it in first class, like, in a closet, like, totally, like, "What? Oh. Yeah! And if you could do that that'd be great."

jessamyn: [laughs]

cortex: It's a tricky thing. Because you know, it's like, you don't want your shit to get ruined. And you know you're kind of imposing, but still.

mathowie: But they always act like, "What? Oh, yeah."

jessamyn: But they act like they just found out that they had a cello.

mathowie: Yeah, right, at the end of the check line [?].

cortex: [laughing] "Oh, sorry, I thought this was my McDonald's leftovers, [mathowie laughs] I must have grabbed the wrong bag."

mathowie: "I thought this was going to fit in, like, the little thing behind the seat [cortex laughs], but if you want to take it, sure."

jessamyn: And then my last favorite multi-link post was my favorite type of post in general, which is, person shows up who has no memory of who he is, and nobody

knows who he is. This was by vidur, and there was a whole bunch of noisy comments right off the bat.

cortex: Oh man, yeah.

jessamyn: But basically, a naked bruised man discovered behind a Burger King, he doesn't know who he is, they don't know who he is, and he continues to be missing.

cortex: See, I didn't dig into that, because I think I originally wrestled a little with the noisy comments at the beginning. And then I was so turned off, I was like,

cortex: arghhh, but uh...

mathowie: Wow, real life mysteries ripped from the headlines.

cortex: You know, it reminded me, like, something about, like, behind a Burger King made me think of the opening of Mullholland Drive, where there's sort of like a creepy situation with a crazy person outside of a fast food restaurant. Or something. It's been a few years, but, so I

jessamyn: Well, and

cortex: Well, I wasn't sure if this post

mathowie: This was... this was something like a viral ad for Burger King or something?

mathowie: I think someone emailed us

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: I don't even know what anybody's problem is. Um, but it also links to the sort of fairly interesting 'Doe' network which is a website that's all about finding, you know, unidentified missing persons, you know, victims that they discovered that they can't identify. Hot cases, what they've resolved, who they were able to find.

mathowie: Wow

cortex: Man, though, this looks really interesting, I wish I'd

mathowie: Network... that's creepy. Awesome. Anything else, or is that all

cortex: I had one more that was a

jessamyn: That was it for me.

cortex: uh... 'In the Cut', a short series of, basically video essays about film editing by a guy named Jim Henderson that he's been doing over the last while and he made the third post on the sixth, and so Vill?

cortex: made a post out of it. I just thought it was really nice because it was, you know, I'm interested in, you know, sort of film theory and editing theory, but I've never dug in deeply into it, so it's nice to have this guy sort of just take an accessible piece of mainstream movie-making and then, sort of cut through what he sees as being interesting about what's being done and what's confusing about how a different action sequence might be cut. And so it's like, you know, it was accessible, it's like reading a, a, god, what's his face

cortex: Awakenings, Musicophilia, uh... the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, that guy... Oliver Sacks!

jessamyn: Oh, yeah yeah yeah!

cortex: So it's like reading an Oliver Sacks book, sort of, experience, you know, it's not a technical reference but

jessamyn: Except that Oliver Sacks doesn't get the disease himself?

cortex: [Laughs] Well, uh, but you know, it's like that level of someone, like, talking about it at a level that, like, you know they can talk about what they're thinking about in a way that, you know, that you can sort of get at some of the nitty-gritty of it without having to have an existing technical education in the subject, so I enjoyed it as far as that goes.

cortex: I thought it was a nicely made sort of video essay about film editing.

jessamyn: Neat!

cortex: So, and that was several links, I guess, so

mathowie: Sweet. So

jessamyn: Solidly in the middle

mathowie: We don't have any Venn diagram overlaps here for the winner.

cortex: This is much more up in the air, isn't it?

mathowie: Yeah. Let me see, which ones did I love.

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: Anyone, anyone else

jessamyn: Is there anyone you feel you'd like to go to bat for, special?

mathowie: Yeah. I like the fugazi one, but that's just barely two links. Uh... game engine...

cortex: I think, the game engine, I like it as, I think it is the most potential timewasting of all the posts we discussed, because it not only wastes your time reading it but

mathowie and jessamyn;[laughs]

cortex: it may set you up to waste a lot more time. So in terms of bang for buck

jessamyn: I have to say, I like the game engine

jessamyn: because it also feels, and this kinda feels stupid to say, but the most Metafilterish, you know?

mathowie: Yeah. Yeah, although I wish the first comment was a 'more inside' instead

cortex: [Laughs] Yeah

mathowie: but it's splitting hairs

jessamyn: [Laughs]

mathowie: but I think, this is a one subject post

cortex: It's functionally

jessamyn: Matt, you're unpleasable on a Monday morning!

mathowie: Wah!

cortex: Let's, let's just functionally say, OK, you know

mathowie: This, this is a, you know

cortex: It's clearly part of the post, you know, it's clearly

mathowie: Yeah yeah yeah, but it's like

cortex: If there was something that shouldn't be in a post that was in a

cortex: comment, the post would've been deleted, you know, it's, we sort of treat it that way

jessamyn: Besides, Matt, I'm not sure if you've actually noticed that all the letters in these, in the word these are actually individual links.

cortex: Oh yeah, by the way

jessamyn: It does have more than one link

mathowie: Oh, OK, sure.

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: But it's like a twenty link post, but if you

jessamyn: Twenty's fine, multilink is like a hundred.

mathowie: Mega. I think mega, we said ten or more.

cortex: I think ten or more is too small a number on mega, we should really

mathowie: Yeah

cortex: update that to like a couple dozen. Or, you know,

cortex: It's like, is it

mathowie: The about page used to say

cortex: link to twenty different places on the internet, or is it links to twenty different, you know, bits of one thing on the internet, you know, that's sort of the difference.

mathowie: OK

cortex: Like some of the mega stuff I'm going to talk about is all stuff that goes everywhere to get the links, whereas some of this sort of middling stuff is 'here's a bunch on a specific subject', but you know, maybe going to the sort of best of a given site for examples, that sort of thing.

mathowie: Alright, so

cortex: This is tricky, someone should come up with some sort of formal theory for this stuff so we don't have to argue about taxonomy

mathowie: Yeah. Well, I think, I think

mathowie: It's just a matter of

jessamyn: I'm not, by the way

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: Since we've extended more inside, in the last two years or whatever, to be huge, you know, that things have gotten way bigger and we need to update that '10 or more posts, 10 or more links' to more than 20.

cortex: Well, so, are we loosely congealing around the Vassal boardgame engine thing as the

jessamyn: I am

mathowie: Yes, I think that's the winner

cortex: Let's do it. Congratulations JHarris!

mathowie: Boom!

jessamyn: Thank you very much!

mathowie: JHarris posted a million times

cortex: Yeah, he posted like every day

jessamyn: Once, once a day

cortex: Which

cortex: has its ups and downs, and I think he did a pretty good - like I can imagine that turning into a horrible mess, but I think he did a pretty conscientious job, so... way to not make a fucking mess out of that personal challenge there. Bonus points.

jessamyn: Right! OK. So. Megalinks. So to me, the megalinks are just, you know, the giant explosions, they're the ones that are either these huge stories or the 'here's a hundred more links', you know, in my mind I was thinking than fifty, kind of,

jessamyn: But then again, I think a single link post can have two, so I may not be the best, you know. Eh? Eh? Eh!?

cortex: [Laughs] It's, you know, it's flexibility, it's a hallmark of Metafilter moderation.

mathowie: I am, I am not gonna link, I'm not even gonna mention two that I think should go in for the running for ultimate, so [laughs]

jessamyn: OK

mathowie: We'll skip those.

jessamyn: Let me talk about some multilink ones that I really liked, then, since Matt you are having some sort of problem.

jessamyn: Infini made a really great post about Indian railroads.

mathowie: Really?

jessamyn: Yeah! It was about the Cape to Cairo railway. It was supposed to go completely against - across - Africa and then didn't for reasons, and so it's a really, really well researched, kind of fascinating - I don't know if it was underappreciated, I think it was appreciated by the people who read it, but I don't think a lot of people really, really dug into it, but it's completely worthy of

jessamyn: note and a fascinating little, like one of those linked essays, kind of things, that tells a story and each thing is linked to like more stuff you want to read about, which to me is like what you want the internet to be, kind of. So, I enjoyed it, just wanted to pass it on.

mathowie: That's awesome.

cortex: I enjoyed the -

mathowie: Did you see the -

cortex: Oh, go

mathowie: I was just saying, did you see the map of the rail network of Africa? It's kind of sad that nothing cuts across, really.

cortex: Oh yeah

jessamyn: Because that's the whole, uh... oh, who was the guy who did the big thing where he went across Africa with like the National Geographic team, it was called like, Trans... something, um. You know, it's just jungle in the middle there, and there aren't even roads, much less, much less railways.

mathowie: Ah, go Josh.

cortex: I liked that we got a, a, new post about

cortex: Mary Toft, the rabbit lady.

jessamyn: This is actually my 'Jessamyn's Choice' post.

cortex: Yeah?

jessamyn: This one is. Yes.

cortex: I thought it was pretty darn great. Uh...

jessamyn: Why don't you talk about this?

cortex: Well, OK, it's hard to summarize but short version is that there was this lady, Mary Toft, who for a while was running a pretty good con where she pretended to give birth to small animals.

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: And eventually people figured out that wasn't what was going on. But uh

mathowie: What year was this?

jessamyn: Oh, this was Mega Transect

jessamyn: is the African thing, FYI I was just looking it up.

cortex: Oh, OK. This was like [lots of people talking over each other] Yeah, I want to say it was 18th century.

mathowie: OK

cortex: And it's a really great summing up of the whole thing.

jessamyn: 1726.

cortex: Yeah. Back in the day.

jessamyn: She was basically, like, I'm giving birth to a bunch of baby bunnies.

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: And medicine was such that, like

jessamyn: people couldn't prove she wasn't, exactly... uh, and um, yeah but a lot of people know just kind of the loose outlines of the thing, but they don't kind of understand what medicine was like and who the people were and what different people were saying and what popular culture, you know, was talking about at the time, and so Kit Marlow just put the whole thing together, in a really

jessamyn: interesting

cortex: And I had originally, when I first saw that post I was like, we totally had a post about that but then I realised, the post we'd had, and this was a few years ago, was actually, the Toft thing was a tiny little side bar, I just remember the Toft stuff because it turned into everybody writing Mary Toft rabbit-in-her-vagina limericks that I ended up making a recording out of - and that was even back like 2007 and so I was like, when I realised, oh no, I only picked up little details of this from people's limericks, I haven't actually read the actual story

cortex: of this, this lady's con. So yeah, yeah, really great post. I was really impressed by that.

mathowie: Sweet... Awesome.

jessamyn: Yes, that is my Jessamyn's Choice post FYI, so I will deliver Kit Marlow a prize of my choosing somewhere from the house, probably a book about the history of smallpox or something.

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: [Laughs] Ahh

jessamyn: Sorry, is Kit Marlow a lady, wait a second, ah

mathowie: I loved the gigographies, like, this is a crazy post when you look at it. When I first read it, I was like, Oh, gigographies, did some band play some location ever, you know, here's a search engine for it. I thought it'd be like an IMDB of concerts, but really, it's -

jessamyn: Which is what we all want, right?

mathowie: Right

jessamyn: To try and figure out, remember that time when I saw Bad Brains some time in Boston and

mathowie: Yeah, and what, and who opened for him? So this is, this is a user

mathowie: Napser, Kinapser, who basically made a megapost of every band this person could think of using the concert database, classic rock concert sites, setlist.com, setlist.fm, like all these... so when you link to Crowded House or something, it's like a fan page, you know, there are all these different fan pages

jessamyn: Like the Prince Vault tour history, the Procul Harem tour list, the No FX gig

mathowie: And yeah, and I like

jessamyn: Waah

mathowie: I tested this out by going, Rage Against The Machine, which did this one special show in my college bar unannounced. Like they showed up at 4pm and then whoever was in the bar got to see them play in their first gig before a tour? And it's in there, giglist, like 1995, that they played this gig at this university bar. So like it works and this is insane, like, I assumed this was just search results and a single site, but this is this one user going out

cortex: Finding out all the stuff the stuff.

mathowie: Yeah, it's a monster amount of work and amazing.

jessamyn: Oh man, Phish is like this nightmare Flash site, I'll never figure out when

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: [Laughs] Echo and the Bunnymen is an Angelfire site that is still functioning and brings up at least two popup windows and it's white text on a purple background. It's pretty sweet.

jessamyn: Angelfire still exists, that's so adorable!

mathowie: I love the lead in, did Poco play the Poconos, did Roxy Music play

mathowie: ...the Roxy, Did U2 go to The O2?

jessamyn: It is a terrific, amazingly researched, just, yeah.

mathowie: This is the mega in mega-link.

jessamyn: Staggering, staggering.

mathowie: I thought that was awesome.

jessamyn: I would also like to, from a compilation standpoint, mention the "Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is being made today!" in which, Blasdelb I think, made a link to all the Youtube videos of Muppet Lab stuff with summaries and whatnot. Adorable.

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: What are you laugh-

cortex: I hadn't looked at it before, I'd seen that mentioned, like it got pubbed around Twitter a bit but I didn't realise it was specifically a collection of the Bunsen and Beaker stuff, that's fantastic.

jessamyn: Yes, yes, the Bunsen and Beaker's musical career and couple of other things.

mathowie: I got the first two seasons for Christmas for my wife and we watched four, five episodes of both seasons, and they are so fucking random, oh my god

jessamyn: [Laughs]

mathowie: Like, wow, they needed some editing when you look at it today, it's just all over the place.

cortex: Oh, you know, they were, they were forging new ground, they were being

mathowie: Also, Beaker was the scariest thing to me as a child ever.

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: Really?

mathowie: Yeah! The look on its face, and the meep meep meep, I had nightmares about them when

jessamyn: See, I totally identified with him, Beaker was like, that was me in the lab, like What's going on?, hurr hurr hurr!

mathowie: Oh, I hate - he was creepy for some reason

mathowie: it scared the shit out of me

cortex: I can see that, I mean, he reads, he reads pretty aggressively alien, I guess, as far as that goes.

mathowie: Yeah. Like animals are kind of scary to me, but Beaker was frightening to me

cortex: I guess I always found animal entertaining. Animal wasn't shrill, he was just loud

mathowie: Yeah, that's true

jessamyn: He was all Id.

cortex: I'm sorry.

jessamyn: Go ahead

cortex: I liked the post, the Crime of the Century post about thaw killing white and Nesbitt and this is

sort of like part of the story that Ragtime was based around, but it's just this, like, early 20th century drama involving a couple of rich, stuffy people fighting over a young woman, and one of them just straight-up murders the other during a theatrical performance, if I remember right, and
it's just a--

jessamyn: Ooh!

cortex: --it's a crazy fucking--like, it's the sort of thing that would make a great story, but you don't really quite see it being what actually happened, but, you know, those stuffy men with money--and guns.

mathowie: [laughs]

jessamyn: They believe themselves to be outside the law.

mathowie: Yeah. And nothing ever happens to him; he just shot a guy, point-blank, in the head, in front of a zillion people.

cortex: Well, he's, like, institutionalized for a little while.

mathowie: A couple years, yeah.

jessamyn: A little bit.

But that's hard if you're, like, a stuffy rich guy in New York.

cortex: Oh yeah, I'm sure it must have been a great insult to him, to not be able to enjoy being rich for a while like that.

So yeah, it's just, like, a crazy fucking story--it's such a, like, this was all of a hundred years ago, and it's kind of nuts that this was sort of a plausible, "this is what's going on in high society," sort of situation. But then I guess--

jessamyn: A terrific post by davidjmcgee.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: We're over an hour, so I'm just going to plug through my megas.

cortex: What else you got?

mathowie: Brandon Blatcher's both Apollo posts.

cortex: Ah, yeah.

mathowie: He did one on Apollo 15--

cortex: Sorry. [laughs]

mathowie: He did one on Apollo 17... that was pretty good. Where's the other one? There's 17. Those are pretty good. They're pretty self-explanatory.

jessamyn: [sings to herself in the background]

cortex: I really liked the Apollo 15 story. I didn't know about that at all. And, you know, the fact that the astronauts basically got busted for trying to

make a little on the side selling collectibles.

mathowie: [laughs] Yeah.

cortex: Because it's weird, because on the one hand, it's like, "Don't tarnish the fucking space program," but on the other hand, as the guys themselves pointed out, it's like, "You know what, we're not the first people to, like, try to make a little on the side from taking something into fucking space where we went, oh my God!".

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

cortex: I liked that it was a post both about this really crazy science and also getting busted over professional

philately.

jessamyn: The getting busted, yes, backdoor philately really drove that one home for me--

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: --the 15 as opposed to 17.

cortex: It was such a twist.

jessamyn: [laughs]

mathowie: My early favorite on day 1 of the posts was the cardboard bubblegum records, because I remember my brother grew up in the late '70s, early '80, this was the tail end of when you might get a plastic record on the back of a cereal box.

jessamyn: Right!

mathowie: And I think we still had a record player until about '84, so.

jessamyn: Come on, I still have a record player. Josh, you have a record player?

mathowie: I have one--I have one now.

cortex: I had a record player, but it broke when I was off at college and I never replaced it.

mathowie: I have a new one now, but this was awesome, because it was a round-up of, here's all the Super Sugar Crisp albums that came out, and talks about how these music producers made a living out of basically selling certain records to children through cereal boxes and stuff

like, Bobby Sherman, I guess did it, they talk about the Monkees did it. It's pretty cool.

cortex: Interesting. Yeah, that one flew by me. I'm a little too young for it. But also, really, 3 o'clock in the morning on December 1st? It's like, you know, let the month breathe a little bit!

mathowie: I thought--I woke up--

jessamyn: Six o'clock in the morning!

cortex: Whatever.

mathowie: In the first batch, I was like--it was the first batch of morning posts, I went, that's a keeper, that's amazing, I'm going to check that out later.

cortex: Yeah, no, that's neat.

jessamyn: I think we had some of those flexi-discs, because those were all my favorite cereals back then.

mathowie: Yeah. And then, I think finally--I think I don't know if this even qualifies for mega-link, this is probably a multi-link, it's all about one subject. I just thought this is the feel-good sports story of the season, the story of Olympians surrendering their first-place chance to save a fellow competitor and launching this whole award--

jessamyn: The International Fair Play Committee.

mathowie: Yeah, they give out an award every year for when a couple athletes do something awesome

and once a year or so something just weird happens where I've seen a bike race where a famous rider's bike explodes, and he's sort of behind all the cars, and someone gives him a ride, like, on his bike, like, I've seen two guys limping to the finish.

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: Are you even allowed to do that?

mathowie: Well, I mean, it's sort of like, the guy had to walk, like, 28 miles to the finish because the last cars had passed him, so someone saw him and basically picked him up on a bike, so it's funny. But these are just all awesome, like, letting your rivals

borrow your equipment after they don't have any, or stuff like that. It's just--I don't know, these are all just feel-good stories, but this is all--

cortex: Yeah, it's nice.

mathowie: --[???] even mega-link now.

jessamyn: Here were my two last mega-link ones, and they're both by filthy light thief, who I feel like had some real runaway amazing posts, one of which was one about Northern Calloway, who was David on Sesame Street, and what the fuck happened to him. Fascinating,

fascinating. He turned into a crazy person--not a crazy person, but he wound up with a mental illness trouble and was restrained by cops and killed and--very interesting. So, some Sesame Street history, some David history, and a little bit of what happened to this guy? And then, for a different "What about this guy?" post is filthy light thief's other post about Charlie Chan, which was just--I can't even begin to tell you how
terrific--he wasn't just this fictional character, he was in a ton of movies, he was played by eight actors, here's his story: he was Hawaiian, and here's the dude, and this is--et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, so. I just wanted to throw those both out there, I thought they were both sensational.

mathowie: Both pretty epic. I think I missed this, because--I don't know why, the Christmas nonsense.

jessamyn: [chuckle]

mathowie: I never even saw this Charlie Chan post.

jessamyn: God, really? Oh my gosh.

cortex: I would say the last week of December was pretty hard on my attention span [mathowie chuckles], so by then I was already struggling to keep up with stuff. But yeah, no, I remember seeing the Charlie Chan post. And I remember I deleted an ill-thought-out bad joke from the beginning of it, and I think again, it was one of those situations where it was like, I dealt with something annoying and so I was kind of done with it for the time being, so I didn't go back and give it the kind of heavy read that I would have liked to in more

ideal circumstances.

mathowie: So what's your--

jessamyn: See, I think I spent more attention at the end of the month than the beginning of the month, after the first week, but I was close reading for the last week and a half, so.

cortex: Well, I had friends in town, was part of the problem, so I wasn't sitting around at the computer all day so much as I was keeping an eye on stuff from my phone and so on.

jessamyn: You should have let us know that, that you were going to be away, and stuff--

mathowie: [laughs]

jessamyn: --that would have been really, really helpful information.

cortex: It was a little up in the air, when they were going to be in town

and plans changed several times, so.

jessamyn: But certainly you must have known by the time they got there that they were there.

cortex: True, true. Well, but, you know, I was constantly--I had my phone out the whole time. I just wasn't sitting and reading for pleasure, like, you know, the way I normally would during the day is I'm going to be sitting at the computer watching--

jessamyn: Right, drink tea and--yeah.

cortex: Whereas this was more looking at my phone every ten minutes where we were doing stuff, so.

jessamyn: Right.

cortex: Which was mostly eating and looking around Portland, so--

jessamyn: Yay, Portland!

mathowie: I had a child vibrating for the last few days before Christmas.

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: [sings] La-la-la la-la-la-la la-la-la-la la-la!

mathowie: --with anticipation, so yeah, it was hard.

jessamyn: I was just preparing for my nasal surgery, so I was just hanging around.

mathowie: Ohh. So, Josh, do you have any mega-links left over?

cortex: You know, I've got that, like, I think this is the one that everybody may be expecting to have show up, but the "O Brother, Where Art Thou" post from Rhaomi, I really liked, because it's a nice sort of--

jessamyn: It was another great original research post.

cortex: Yeah, let's do some

serious annotation thing. And as much as the soundtrack itself kinda got played and tired because it was like, that was the most recent bluegrass revival whatnot, it was also right when I was getting into bluegrass for the first time, so it's like, extra meaningful for me. I really internalized that soundtrack a lot. And yeah. So I thought it was an awesome approach. I really like the fact that it's a collection of the different takes on these songs, because that's one of the things you get with this, especially with the stuff that's actual
old folk music, is you have all these different takes historically from very different artists doing the stuff, so instead of it being that song from the soundtrack, that song is just one of the versions that the Coen brothers had to choose from. And you see that even in the film itself; different takes on the same thing show up in a few different places. But this is the perfect way to look at it, and say, well okay, here's where that came from, and here is how it sounds like in a different context, or how it sounded
fifty years ago, or a hundred years ago.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Agreed. That was my favorite thing about this. Because a lot of those songs I'd known sort of, from somewhere, but not here, like Man of Constant Sorrow--it was great to hear the other versions and be like, "Oh, yeah, right." And having them all together like that.

mathowie: Also, it was cool that it's a modern movie using all this old music, and I remember thinking the soundtrack was amazing, and I usually didn't think I even liked this kind of music. But then

mathowie: knowing that there's some history behind it, especially the "Big Rock Candy Mountain" that came up early with Hodgman, like, I think he used it as the butt of j--

jessamyn: He talks about it all the time, about how it used to be--

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: --a way to get kids to basically do your work for you--

mathowie: [laughs]

jessamyn: --if not prostitute for you.

mathowie: Yes, yeah, it was way, way worse, because he had all that hobo stuff--

jessamyn: It's a total pedobear song, it's gross.

mathowie: Yeah. He had that hobo stuff, and then the "Big Rock Candy Mountain", probably my favorite song of the soundtrack, and I've heard ten versions of it before, but then hearing the evil, dark--

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: --like, I mean, I don't know if that was a joke in itself--I mean, it sounds plausible that it is a creepy, pedo bait song--

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: --to sing around children near trainyards to try and lure them into your life to be your sex slave... Ohh, it's like--so, this post didn't even cover that, but it was awesome in that--

jessamyn: [laughs] Right, right, right.

mathowie: --I knew there was a story behind every one of these hundred-year-old songs like that.

cortex: My one complaint is the lack of discussion about Charlie the

Unicorn, and Candy Mountain, which clearly had some sort of time-traveling implications for the song.

mathowie: [laughs] You're saying it's not canon for the song.

cortex: Exactly, you know. [unintelligible]--"Charlie! Candy Mountain!" You may not have any idea what I'm talking about. Was that not as big of a meme as I thought it was? Charlie, Charlie the Unicorn?

jessamyn: No, it just sucked.

mathowie: Yeah, but it was kind of dumb.

cortex: Anyway.

jessamyn: [laughs]

mathowie: So, should we pick a--?

cortex: But I would say that was, that's definitely my pick, I think that was my--

mathowie: Should we

pick a best mega, or a best overall at the same time? Because my best overall is this and the Falco one.

jessamyn: And the what?

mathowie: The Falco one? The history of the guy who sang "Rock Me Amadeus"?

jessamyn: Oohh, I did not even see that.

mathowie: [laughs]

jessamyn: What was this?

mathowie: This out-Wikipedias Wikipedia. I mean, this is Falco's entire life history by hippybear, it's amazing, and only because my brother bought the first CD player

on our street, or in his school, or something--we have one of these very CD players, and for some reasons we have a Falco CD, when "Rock Me Amadeus" came out, or the one before, possibly? I remember having two Falco CDs, and basically for the next five years telling everyone he wasn't a one-hit wonder, because he had pretty good songs on two CDs that I had heard before, and he's not all about Rock Me Amadeus, I was trying to school everybody about his earlier works--

jessamyn: [laughing] I can totally see you

being like--

mathowie: Yeah. [laughs] But when people just think it's the butt of a joke, you know, it's like, Milli Vanilli, ha-ha, and you're like, "No, I actually own the album before it! It's actually good! He actually has more of a--!" And this is the entire life history, and he has this really weird checkered past, and he sounds like more of an entrepreneur than a musician, like, he really wanted to be successful, he tried everything, when he got a hit, he kept trying to remake a hit, and

he had problems, he ends up dying in--not Jamaica, but somewhere down there, in a weird car accident, and there's a seven-year gap between albums, and he's working on these--stuff came out posthumously...

jessamyn: After he died?

mathowie: Yeah, he died in, like, '97 or something? When was it, when did he die?

jessamyn: '98.

mathowie: Yeah, and he had multiple albums come out in '99 and 2000, because he just prints, he just recorded tons and tons of

material.

jessamyn: He died in the Dominican Republic.

mathowie: Yeah, he recorded tons of material he never--So, I thought this Falco post was the best post of the entire month for me.

cortex: It is pretty fucking epic. And I will say, as far as taking the populist side from other angles, not just looking at favorites--which has got a healthy chunk of favorites on it--but I think I probably saw more people randomly saying, "Oh my fucking God," on Twitter and other peripheral areas in reference to this than maybe any other post this month. Like, a lot of people I definitely noticed,

having personally zero investment in Falco whatsoever--

mathowie: [laughs]

cortex: --it was enough that I definitely noticed that everybody was pretty fucking excited about the fact that there was this exhaustive Falco exegesis going on on the site, so.

jessamyn: That sounds terrific.

cortex: So I don't personally have any feelings other than thinking it looks epic, but a lot of people seemed to think it was pretty amazing, so.

jessamyn: I would like to put in a strong support for Gigography as the best multi-link

post, and then we can maybe jockey over what people thought best post was. Although, let me know how you're feeling, gentlemen.

cortex: I think that's reasonable. Gigography, like you said, I think that's like--

mathowie: Oh yeah.

cortex: --it's sorta so classically "let's go find some stuff in the internet," and I love the fact that it's that crazy labor of love where it's not just like, "Hey, I found these things and put the story together"--

jessamyn: It has incredible utility.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: And it's not--the weirdest part is, the Metafilter post is the source--I mean, it's like, there is no--I assumed it would just be links to a search engine somewhere, but it's really homegrown.

cortex: Yeah. Cultured in the lab.

mathowie: For some reason I was thinking best mega-link would be, like, runner-up for best ever, you know--to me Falco's number one and O Brother, Where Art Thou's number two, and maybe that's mega-link. But the Gigography is pretty spectacular. I don't know how, like, we have to--

jessamyn: We could have a

tie!

cortex: [laughs] And again, I don't remember if we're--are we explicitly saying we've each got a favorite, right?

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Because I would say the O Brother post is my favorite.

jessamyn: Perfect!

cortex: So if that--that sort of arranges the field accordingly.

jessamyn: Yeah, we each get a favorite. The rabid vagina one is my favorite, of course.

mathowie: Oh, I've got everyone else's favorites here, and mine too. But are you okay with Falco for the greatest of all?

jessamyn: I thought it was terrific, yeah, yeah, yeah.

cortex: I'm alright with that.

jessamyn: I'm alright with that.

mathowie: Okay, so Falco wins. Woohoo! And Brandon Blatcher. [chuckles]

jessamyn: And then, what about--taz and pb each get to pick, right?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: The way I think we were doing the whole thing is that every mod got to pick a mod favorite--and pb, I know he sometimes says he's a mod and sometimes he doesn't--and we'll wrap those into the post that we make on MetaTalk, right?

mathowie: Oh, well, I have them, I can just mention them really fast.

cortex: Do you have all of them, or are we still waiting on--

mathowie: Yeah, I have all of them.

cortex: Well, alright! This could be

tricky, if they picked something we already picked.

mathowie: Well, no, only one. So taz liked the Secret Parisian Painter, and I'll copy and paste the whole e-mail she sent me, but it's like, she loves art... [sing-songy] da da do do do...

jessamyn: [laughs]

mathowie: ...she just pored over every image and wanted to live in one of these paintings, and, like, elp [?], I'll post that, so that was her favorite. It had hardly any favorites and comments.

jessamyn: That sounds great. By adamvasco. Thank you, adamvasco!

mathowie: Paul liked something totally utilitarian, The One-Time Secret, because he's used that several times since it was posted to send passwords to other people.

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: It's a pastebin, it's temporary, you're only allowed to load it once, so you can send someone--

jessamyn: [excitedly] This solves a problem I've been having all month!

mathowie: Exactly, right? I use--

jessamyn: I'm writing my will--

mathowie: Aww.

jessamyn: And what I'd like to be able to do is give somebody the password to the Google document that's got all the passwords, or the password

mathowie: Oh, nice.

jessamyn: --to my LastPass. Like, one password, so that they can at a point get into all my other stuff, but I don't want them to have it until--you know what I mean.

cortex: Yeah, yeah.

jessamyn: It's a difficult problem, if you're serious about security.

cortex: Better than sending someone an e-mail, who knows what they'll do with it and whether they'll be careful with it.

jessamyn: Yeah, well, Jim and I were talking about this, and he's like, "I could send you an e-mail and then you just wouldn't open it unless something happened to me," and I was like, "that won't work." [cortex and mathowie laugh]

mathowie: Well, we just set up new servers, and we had a member who's a Linux admin for us, and we had a couple consultants who were good at SQL and good at ColdFusion pop in, and they're like, "So you need to send me a log-in for it, but we can't do it over IM, we can't do it over e-mail. If you could put a [silly voice] ROT-13 file in a shared Dropbox--", like, it just gets ridiculous, so this one-time password is actually useful. The other thing he liked was Rules for Games, which I never even saw--

jessamyn: He doesn't get two!

cortex: Well, I had two! [laughs]

mathowie: Russell Snowman [?] had two favorites.

jessamyn: I guess I get a second one, then.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Well, we're making up the prizes for the mod choices, so--

mathowie: Yeah, I don't know what--they'll have to chime in with their--

cortex: Like, I think for the O Brother thing, maybe I'll record something not very hard of Rhaomi's choice on the banjo.

mathowie: A big rock candy mountain?

cortex: [laughs]

He can tell me what he wants.

jessamyn: I'm going to send kittenmarlowe a book. So what is this?

pb's second thing?

mathowie: Yeah, it was Rules for Games, he just thought it was useful.

Jeremy liked the Mundane Rock Stories--

jessamyn: Oh, terrific!

mathowie: and she also liked this one--I didn't see this one either--

jessamyn: [sings, underscoring mathowie] La la la la la la la la la...

mathowie: Welsh tradition of... oh, it's King Arthur stuff.

jessamyn: [laughs]

mathowie: She says she's a sucker for King Arthur crap. So it's a mega-link post on King Arthur stuff.

jessamyn: Also by kittenmarlowe! kittenmarlowe

I think is getting much love.

mathowie: I think Jeremy owes someone a free sword of some sort!

cortex: [laughs] I guess we can find a strange one in a pond.

mathowie: Yeah. My favorite was the guy--I made a joke in Twitter, and a guy makes a post on Metafilter, about Drive looking like it was shot through Instagram, I thought.

jessamyn: Oh yeah, I saw you saying that.

mathowie: I finally saw the movie eons later and the guy tweets back at me

going, "Oh dude, I dug up this bizarre cinematographers' quarterly magazine where they actually admit that the DP was using Hipstamatic, which was the Polaroid-looking thing for the iPhone--

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: --which was pre-Instagram, and they loved the little set shots that they took with that so much they made the movie look like it, purposely.

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: --and they talk about how--

jessamyn: That is hilarious!

mathowie: So this is basically a joke I made on Twitter

spawned this guy, and he had a Metafilter log-in, and I was like, "Dude, you should totally make a post about it," and he was like, "Is it a self-link, since--?", but yeah, we had to work it out, but it's basically, my joke led to this awesome post that's actually--

jessamyn: Wait, so it's not a self-link, right?

mathowie: No, no, no [jessamyn and cortex laugh], nothing, no, this guy is some sort of--

cortex: Hold on, I gotta go ban that.

jessamyn: Whenever you say 'work it out' like that, I'm like aaaaaah! Don't say it out loud!

mathowie: No, it's just like, "Hey, from your Twitter reply

mathowie: Oh ho, is this like

jessamyn: Don't say it out loud

mathowie: from like, hey, from your Twitter reply, can you make this a post or something

jessamyn: Right, right

mathowie: so I can link to it on the web and say, see I was right, people. Um, and the other one was the weird chicken, rice, halal recipe on Serious Eats that got everywhere.

jessamyn: Oh yeah yeah yeah, I saw that too!

mathowie: This was one of the top favorited things! I think that's just if you've been to New York and eaten it it's awesome and you can't tell why, and like this is perfect. So it's just a goofy little free thing, so.

jessamyn: Serious Eats gave me one of the, they gave me a saving, I've been using them for recipes more because I've been cooking at home more, and oh my god. I, you know, all their stuff is great, I don't know why it took me this long, but yeah, I'll be looking forward to trying this delicious chicken.

mathowie: There's a good, uh, interview with Ed Levine, the founder of it on uh, Jesse Thorne's thing, like last week.

jessamyn: Oh cool.

mathowie: And it's really cool.

cortex: Well I

mathowie: Uh, so yeah, I don't know what I owe someone something, I guess I

cortex: You'll have to come up with something, if we're ever, we're

cortex: ever going to have a second mod choice then, uh, I will mention something that wasn't otherwise quite gonna hit any of the thresholds but uh, what if Sonic ran like an idiot which was just

jessamyn: Oh, I love this one!

mathowie: Yeah, I love that one!

cortex: Which was this dumb little thing that turned into a blog and oh man, I love that shit.

mathowie: Why do people hate it, like so many of the comments are like

jessamyn: OK, my second choice is David from Sesame Street then. But go on.

cortex: Alright

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: Way to go highbrow!

mathowie: Some of these comments are like, some of the comments are like, two of those are funny, or something, I just thought they were all hilarious and dumb and

cortex: It's you know, it's intentionally bad

cortex: animation, and then yeah people are, 'I don't like that intentionally bad animation', it's like, ah you know, that's OK, you really, there are other things you can go like, if you want.

jessamyn: No, I found it was great, and of course, since I listen to like, you know, Sonic the Hedgehog music when I go running, this is extra

cortex and mathowie;[Laughs]

jessamyn: Because it's perfect running music, because it's all like boop boop

mathowie: I think

jessamyn: you see the little thing running in your little head

mathowie: I think Anil

jessamyn: you're like, that's me, I'm blue, whoop doop doop a boop boop. It's cool.

mathowie: I think Anil and Elaine(?) a joke that they had a running power song of the 'dee deeda la dalla dalla' of, uh, Super Mario when you get the star

jessamyn: Yeah! Videogame music is some of the best running music because it's got this consistent, really, you know, I feel like sometimes I should run to Space Invaders except it's too slow. You know, it's just like

mathowie: Derrnt. Derrnt.

jessamyn: Dut.

mathowie: Derrnt.

jessamyn: Dut.

mathowie: Derrnt.

jessamyn: But, it, you know, tells you when to put your feet down and then you don't have to think about it.

cortex: You should get yourself some shoot-em-up, uh, music, like you know space games like... uh... like... sorry, I can't name any of them

jessamyn: [Laughs] If you think

cortex: Yeah, like sorta like force of Gradius or

cortex: you know, or Ikaruga, or all these other

jessamyn: Send me some links to them, I don't know much about them but I'd be interested to learn.

cortex: You should also, ahh, who is it, ahh, Daker, or I can't remember... there's a couple of serious chiptunes people on Music who you could just like grab everything they've posted to the site and be set for a while, too, because it's fantastic videogaming music, so.

mathowie: Oh yeah.

cortex: Well, hey, there was a shitload of good posts this, this December!

mathowie: Yeah!

jessamyn: I enjoyed

cortex: My takeaway

jessamyn: December, I enjoying having the contest to think about so that I could look at stuff more than I

jessamyn: might normally, and without just through my, you know, moderator glasses. There were a lot of new names, which I thought was really cool, and you know, our old favorites but also a bunch of kind of new folks doing whatever. I'll probably even mention more in the comments once we put it all up there.

cortex: Oh, I'm sure, I think it'll turn into a big chatstravaganza as people start to talk about what they like too, so

jessamyn: Yeah, I've been enjoying the um, the favorite comments thread, just that was put up on the first also.

cortex: Yup.

jessamyn: Oh, we should tell pb to turn the queue off if he hasn't already.

cortex: Oh yeah

mathowie: Oh yeah!

cortex: I feel like we need a mod-facing thing, like as part of the admin interface that says the queue is ON, so we'll see it and say, oh shit, no, that's not supposed to be

jessamyn: Right, I just wanna see a red switch

cortex: Cos yeah. Because we don't see anything when it's

mathowie: Uh, on/off

cortex: for people wondering when the queue is on, we don't know it's on other than we don't know we turned it on, so we don't get posts submitted

jessamyn: We know pb turned it on, I don't know how to turn it on

cortex: So there's nothing reminding us other than the relative quiet of MetaTalk when there is relative quiet, it's like, oh right... so yeah.

mathowie: Very cool.

mathowie: Alright, yeah, it was a great month, and uh

jessamyn: pb says it's off.

cortex: Yay [laughs]

mathowie: [laughs]

jessamyn: People are just happy.

cortex: We got the inside scoop, folks, don't worry

mathowie: We should just

cortex: the queue is off.

mathowie: you know he's like, he's waiting for the Rose Bowl to start right now

cortex and jessamyn;[Laughs]

mathowie: He had to go down to Eugene to watch it, uh, but wow, OK.

cortex: Alright

mathowie: Awesome

jessamyn: Alright team, happy new year, we'll meet again in a couple of weeks, do a real podcast podcast, uh, and uh

jessamyn: This was great!

mathowie: Alright, see you guys!

cortex: Bye bye!

jessamyn: Goodbye!

sfx: Jingle Bells by flapjax at midnite

sfx: Jingle Bells by flapjax at midnite

sfx: Jingle Bells by flapjax at midnite

sfx: Jingle Bells by flapjax at midnite

sfx: Jingle Bells by flapjax at midnite

sfx: Jingle Bells by flapjax at midnite

sfx: Jingle Bells by flapjax at midnite


Credits

  • Adrian Hon: 3:30, 4:30, 5:30 to 16:30, 42:30 to 54:30, 55:30 to 56:30, 78:00 to 85:30 (end)
  • beryllium: 17:00 to 29:00, 38:30 to 42:00, 57:00 to 77:30
  • ceribus peribus: 2:30, 4:00, 5:00, 24:30, 29:30 to 38:00, 55:00
  • Mike McNamara: 2:00, 3:00
  • Pronoiac: 0:00 to 1:30
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