Podcast 71 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 71: Best Concert Ever.

This started on the Fanscribed page.

Transcript

jingle: opening music

mathowie: This is episode 71 of the the Metafilter Podcast, the first in two months! This time Josh-less, but with Jessamyn - (pause)

jessamyn: Hi. Sorry, was that my cue?

(all laugh)

mathowie: - and Jeremy.

restless_nomad: (downbeat) Hi, guys.

(all laugh)

mathowie: Awesome!

jessamyn: Yeah, Josh is on vacation somewhere in one of the big states, and we just figured we wouldn't bug him to have to sit around with his headset on, and we'd pull Jeremy in instead.

mathowie: And it's been two months, 'cause I think the Best Of blog has sucked the life out of podcasting. I don't know, it's...

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: It's sort of...

jessamyn: We've just been really busy...

mathowie: Yeah!

jessamyn: I don't know about you.

mathowie: Yeah, but the best of podcast is like take... it's like when twitter killed my blog.

mathowie: Best of pod... Best Of blog has kind of killed my desire to podcast. And so we're kind of doing it every single day in little bits, but...

jessamyn: That sounds like a personal problem.

mathowie: Yeah...

restless_nomad: (laughs)

mathowie: If you haven't checked it out, "bestof.metafilter.com", and we're just highlighting the best... mostly comments, which don't get covered in the podcast, but some of the better posts, too, so...

jessamyn: Yeah, and for those of you who haven't either paid that much attention to it or whatever, you can like it on Facebook so you can get it delivered to your Facebook if you're one of those kinds of people or

jessamyn: - we find things for it just from things we see on the site or if you use the "fantastic" flag, we see that on the admin panel and we go sorta check it out. So, as much as you can favorite until your fingers fall off, the "fantastic" flag is really how we find stuff we otherwise might not have found and put it on the Best Of blog.

mathowie: Yeah, that's one of the best indicators. People keep trying to - I think that's just a natural human thing, but I got a zillion emails after the first couple of weeks of it

mathowie: - like, "how do you find things? I'm trying to guess what you're going to put up next!"

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: And they wanted to know what the early indicators are, and I'd never revealed it was fantastic flags mostly, but aside from that other stuff, but yeah.

jessamyn: Oh see, I mostly told people, or stuff that people email me. I don't know if we talked about this before, but one of the reasons for having the Best Of blog, is people still think of Metafilter as that big ugly blue website, and I think they have a hard time understanding -

jessamyn: - why we're so passionate and enthusiastic about it, because it just seems really texty and dense and hard to penetrate and so, Matt kinda talked about having a way to highlight the good stuff in a way that was -

mathowie: Accessible!

jessamyn: - Yeah, accessible, for non-True Believer Metafilter people to see what all the fuss was about. And that's more of a Tumblr-looking blog, it's got big pictures -

jessamyn: - it pulls out good comments - individual comments or really good threads, and there's a lot of content. There's something new usually every day or every two days, whatever.

mathowie: Yeah, I think I was solving the Reddit problem.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Which is, for the last ten years, people have been like: "Oh, I love Metafilter. It took me a while to get it, but now I get it. It's really great." I've been showing it to lots of friends. I've been sponsoring little local bike teams and stuff.

jessamyn: Right, right right.

mathowie: So I'm getting all these people who aren't web designers or core OS programmers, looking at Metafilter.

jessamyn: Or just heavy internet user people.

mathowie: And they're like "I just don't get it. It's impenetrable." And then on the flip side, in the last two years people are constantly saying, "Oh my God, Reddit's so great, you gotta check it out." Every time I check out Reddit, it's just a wall of text, I can barely tell heads from tails, and I'm the heaviest internet user in the world and I just have no patience for wading through -

mathowie: - especially, their threaded replies, which are ultra-threaded.

jessamyn: Well, and stuff can get voted up and down, so it's all out of sequence.

mathowie: Yeah!

jessamyn: I mean, I love Reddit, but I feel like it needs a time commitment that I no longer have for anything else.

mathowie: Yeah, and Reddit just seems baffling to me for the most part, but so many people kept saying "it's so great, so great," and personal friends would go "check this out!" and they'd give me a link, and I could barely tell what they wanted me to read out of that link, so, I realized, "oh my god, this is what Metafilter looks like to 98% of the population."

jessamyn: Well, there is the Best of Reddit thing, which is -

jessamyn: - sometimes really fun, but I find that just waiting for people to post Reddit stuff to Metafilter seems to work as well for me, also.

mathowie: "There's this thing called Best of Reddit." Oh, I never even saw that.

jessamyn: I think it's "Best of Reddit," isn't it?

mathowie: Yeah, it's like /r/ -

jessamyn: Because every time we start talking about this, somebody's like, "duh, Best of Reddit," as if you're making excuses to not like Reddit or something, whereas I'm just like, "I'm not making excuses, there's just so many hours in a day."

mathowie: Yeah, I just can't. I realized I could use the same thing, for -

mathowie: - Metafilter, and maybe make it a little more easy to digest. So yeah, Paul went to great lengths to make a mirrored Tumblr, and we mirror the posts on Twitter now, and it's crazy, so yeah.

jessamyn: Oh wait, there's a Tumblr too?

mathowie: Yep! It's a "Best of Mefi" -

jessamyn: Is it bestofmetafilter.tumblr - fuckyeahmetafilter! Is it!? Is it!?

mathowie: No, it's Best of Mefi.

jessamyn: Is it!? Aw.

mathowie: But it's pretty much exactly the same, just like Kottke, you know, how it looks exactly like Kottke -

mathowie: - and, yeah.

jessamyn: You know, there is no fuckyeahmetafilter.tumblr.com.

mathowie: (high-pitched) Should there be? I guess, there might, should be, possibly.

jessamyn: (laughs) Did you see the - oh, see, we're just going to start talking about the internet, but, did you see the "fuck yeah" graph of the - hold on now, I need to find it before I start going off on it. But it was basically a chart that shows the preponderance of the "fuck yeah" -

mathowie: No!

jessamyn: Oh, I'll have to figure out where it is.

mathowie: Someone made a "fuck yeah" giant infographic, and how they all relate?

jessamyn: Well, and just how they sort of - oh, here it is. I read about it on Mashable or whatever. Or, Mashable's probably linking to some actual website with content. It's this amazing infographic. You know me, normally I don't really fall for the "link to our infographic" thing. Oh, it's Laughing Squid, that's right. So it's Scott Beale, it is absolutely not -

jessamyn: - so Scott, Laughing Squid, made an evolution chart, it's all the evolution of Tumblr's big trends.

mathowie: I'm trying to think of the first one I ever saw. Oh wait, there it is - fuck yeah techno speed what, and girls, what?

jessamyn: What? What are you talking about?

restless_nomad: Techno speed and girls.

mathowie: I thought the first one was like, what was the weird first one I ever saw - Neil Patrick Harris, maybe?

mathowie: Or Lady Gaga? It was super, super early.

jessamyn: I feel like I saw Fuck Yeah Unicorns or something like that.

mathowie: Dude, 2007. They pre-date the iPhone. Amazing.

jessamyn: There were only 72 in existence in September 2008. And see, here's one of the things I like about the internet, there's 103,000 "Fuck Yeah" blogs and only 1177 "Fuck No" blogs.

mathowie: Oh yeah, it was "Fuck Yeah Cilantro" and "Fuck No Cilantro."

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: That was the first yin-and-yang version of that.

jessamyn: Didn't that get onto Metafilter, and weren't people like "someone used the f-word, it makes me uncomfortable?"

(all laugh)

mathowie: It was 2009, probably.

jessamyn: Am I just remembering that wrong. We should probably talk about our website.

mathowie: Yeah, probably. Let me see. I guess we'll skip Music?

(mathowie & restless_nomad laugh)

jessamyn: We're not going to skip Music, we'll add in some Music later. For some metatextual stuff, for all those people who are waiting, Jeremy and I were talking about this: the Infodump has been updated. cortex did it before he went on vacation, thank you! And so now, people who have just been itching to do stuff with new information, which is probably all three of you, but I know you're listening to the podcast! [ed. note: get out of my head, jessamyn.] The Infodump has been updated for the first time since January.

mathowie: Josh still does it by hand somehow? Huh.

jessamyn: I don't know.

jessamyn: Yeah, probably. I think he has to build it out of papercraft and then, um, I don't know.

mathowie: (laughs)

Man, that's a lot, wow - a 300 megabyte zip. Crazy.

Let me see, let's go to Projects, those are always fun.

jessamyn: I enjoyed Projects quite a good deal over the last couple months. There was just some really terrific stuff, including "Fuck You Broccoli," I guess if we want to segue -

jessamyn: - from what we were talking about to this. Metafilter user Mchelly has a blog that's just basically, "broccoli is gross."

mathowie: Aw, c'mon.

jessamyn: Well, it's really talking about other sort of healthy foods.

mathowie: Oh.

jessamyn: But it's funny.

mathowie: Broccoli is good.

jessamyn: And it's a very attractive blog.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: She talks about rhubarb and water chestnuts -

jessamyn: - and a bunch of other stuff. But I enjoyed it as far as just being, she still hates vegetables.

mathowie: I'm trying to find my votes. So, anything from mid-May on. Oh, wow!

jessamyn: Anything from April on, April 11th, dude.

mathowie: Oh wow, ok. Gosh, I have two Kickstarter-themed ones.

jessamyn: Stop talking about Kickstarter!

mathowie: I know!

jessamyn: I guess it's okay.

mathowie: (laughs)

Is it a shill post if I'm talking about Kickstarter?

jessamyn: Is it for your own thing?

mathowie: No, no.

jessamyn: No, if it's in Projects, it's okay, right?

mathowie: Well, there was this "ghosts with shit jobs" movie, that was -

jessamyn: I know nothing about this. Tell me more about it.

mathowie: Someone with a long username with numbers in it -

jessamyn: 5_13_23_42_69_666. It's not that long.

mathowie: I don't know how you pronounce it, though.

jessamyn: Just like that!

mathowie: (laughs)

I'm kidding!

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: They made this dystopian future film, kind of like Idiocracy. It's in this far-off future, well, five years from now or something, and they -

mathowie: - the American economy and the world economy has collapsed, and so, what do you do for money in the future, so it's just these ridiculous - "with fifty percent unemployment we had to make up new jobs." I think it's kind of a comedy sketch that's been stretched into a ninety minute movie, of human spammers. What were the other ones? I just remember the human spam, it was very funny. Someone walks around, mentioning brand names for money. That's kind of an obvious one.

mathowie: There's this other one, which was - I just thought this was great - programming, someone figured out how to find Kickstarters that are about to end soon -

jessamyn: Oh, I saw that!

mathowie: - that aren't quite done yet.

jessamyn: ecmendenhall.

mathowie: I sent it to the people inside of Kickstarter, and they were like "oh, that's pretty awesome! We tried to make one internally, that didn't work as well as this guy, this outsider's version of it," which was pretty cool.

jessamyn: And he lives in -

jessamyn: - Turkey, in Ankara.

mathowie: We're talking, some people that work at Kickstarter, they have access to the actual database, and they said they couldn't make something as slick as this. I thought that was pretty cool.

jessamyn: And it tweets endangered projects a few times a day.

And the guy did it to teach himself programming. (laughs)

mathowie: Yeah. And so it's kind of almost Kiva-like -

mathowie: - "save our last-ditch efforts to make a project work. We're so close to getting funding." It's kind of cool.

jessamyn: It's at kicksaver.net?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Well, one of the things that's so nifty about it, I don't know about you, but I've seen people who do this similar thing, if they're people I follow on Facebook, they'll be like "we need - whatever, $75, to go over the edge" and normally I might not fund something at that level, but to be the final person, to be like "yeeeah!" -

jessamyn: - has a completely different social import and feels even awesomer. I think that's really cool.

mathowie: Kickstarter has some cool stuff, and I've told people who desperately email me to calm down. I think once a project hits 50% funding, it's over 90% of them finish.

jessamyn: It's like if you live to 30, the chances are 90% that you'll live to, whatever.

mathowie: 60, maybe? (laughs)

jessamyn: There's some great math about it -

jessamyn: - why don't you keep talking, and I'll look this up.

mathowie: I tell people when they're at 65% funded and they have three weeks left, "relax!" For some reason, humans do not want to see failures at 98% funded. Apparently, I don't know what the psychology is, that everyone just pushes it over the edge. I've been amazed to see big projects that need a hundred grand, and they still need twenty grand the last week and it happens, and it blows me away that it actually happens. Lots of stuff I never thought would finish -

mathowie: - would have gone okay because of it.

jessamyn: Right, rightright. In the last sort of whatever.

mathowie: This Kicksaver possibly isn't completely necessary, but it's kind of cool.

jessamyn: Yeah, that one's cool. Way to go, our guy. Jeremy, Projects?

restless_nomad: No Projects. I never make it over there, which is very sad, because now when I'm doing the podcast, I read through it and I'm like "Oh! There's tons of neat stuff here! I should spend some time here!"

mathowie: We should have a leaderboard of things that got pushed over, right? I'm looking at the front page, and there's two?

jessamyn: At what front page, of Kicksaver?

mathowie: Oh no no, from Projects to Metafilter. It looks like three things! Four things!

jessamyn: I was going to actually mention one of them.

mathowie: Five, six! [imitates the Count from Sesame Street] Ah ah ah!

jessamyn: It breaks the way it's supposed to, it makes me very happy. There were two posts that I really liked that are kind of companion posts -

jessamyn: - in Projects, that are both parents that we have, Metafilter people who have special needs kids. One of them is Lokheed with a k, who wrote this really good post called "Snow White's Scary Adventures, a Retrospective." He's got a kid who's autistic and is really really into this ride, and did a post. He was thinking about putting it on the Blue and we were kind of "eh, maybe it's a little too close for the Blue," but made a great Projects post -

jessamyn: - about it, which was terrific, and then of course made it to the Blue anyhow, which was really cool, and then the related one is one that plinth has done. Plinth has a daughter, Alice, who has Down Syndrome, and has been writing a really neat blog about how to be a special-needs parent. I've been reading it anyhow because I know plinth, but I was happy to see that he posted it to Projects, because I just think it's really good. He's got a whole bunch of -

jessamyn: - a series called "So you have a relative with Down Syndrome, now what?" just talking about the different things that are helpful to know: how you can help your kid get muscle tone, what you can do with your kid for fun, blah blahblah blahblah, just talking about all the different things he comes across, and he's just a really good writer, so I thought it was a really good blog.

mathowie: Oh wow, cool. I'd heard little bits and pieces from his comments on the site and Twitter. He'd talked about his daughter a lot. I didn't know he made a blog for it. That's awesome.

jessamyn: Yeah, and it's really good and really readable. So I think those two are a neat hand-in-hand.

mathowie: I like how that Snow White one worked out, because Lokheed wanted to make the post because -

jessamyn: He knows more about that ride than anyone.

mathowie: His son has ridden it more than any other human being on Earth. I'm like "Well, yeah, that's interesting, but you have a vested interest here." When the ride was closing down -

jessamyn: Which was the impetus, yeah.

mathowie: And we didn't explain that they went there -

mathowie: - on a lark, on a trip, and it was the first time his son was ever animated, never felt emotion, so they actually dropped - I think they lived in Seattle - they dropped everything and moved to Orlando, Florida, right outside the gates of Disneyworld, so he could ride it on a regular basis.

jessamyn: Right, rightright.

mathowie: And it was this breakthrough thing that just, was the first thing in his life, where he started - things got better -

mathowie: - after he would be on this ride. He's like 16. This was all when he was 7 or 8 years old, I think he's 16 now and, and so it closing isn't the end of his world. He barely rides it. His dad makes it clear he only goes to it once a month in the last couple of years, and so he's bummed to see it go. When he was 7 or 8 years old, this was something he had to do almost daily just to be sort of be normal for the day -

mathowie: - I remember when I heard this story, it just totally opened my eyes to the weird special struggles of being a parent of someone with needs like this. And I thought it was crazy and awesome that they moved across the country for it. Apparently he used to talk about a subculture of parents with Asperger's or autistic kids in Orlando or Anaheim that go to Disney every day because that's -

mathowie: - ... it was fascinating. blows air So... I don't think Jobs has been nothing but web jobs.

jessamyn: Wait! I have one more! Sorry.

mathowie: Okay, what's last?

jessamyn: This was just interesting because it segued into an Ask Metafilter thread. This is dgran ("DG Ran? degran? D Gran?") just made this little thing that's called Wedding Connected. I don't know if you guys read Ask Metafilter quite as closely -

jessamyn: - but I think RolandOfEld got married recently, and there was a bit of a debate about how to get Grandma, who was - I don't remember how hard of hearing she was - to actually be able to enjoy the ceremony without having it -

So he had asked an Ask Metafilter question, or somebody else had gotten married -

jessamyn: - and was "we have a destination wedding, but we have people who can't go," or there was another wedding, I'll look these up later, but there was another wedding where "we want to have our wedding outside in 45-degree weather," and other people were like "aggggh, you killed grandma," so there's been a bunch of people who have had non-traditional weddings or weddings that were difficult to get to remotely, and this guy built this little thing where using technology you can have people -

jessamyn: - as if they were there, following along using internet, which I think is a tool that I'm surprised doesn't already exist. So I was happy with that.

mathowie: Yeah! I saw that and I thought that was interesting. Why didn't someone come up with this ten years ago? How do you do a video server remotely at a wedding with no wifi? I dunno.

jessamyn: You Ustream it?

mathowie: Oh, I guess you could use an iPad.

jessamyn: Don't get married anywhere without the internet? Yeah, I have no idea.

mathowie: guess you could use an iPad?

jessamyn: Don't get married anywhere without the internet? Yeah, I have no idea. So it was neat that this guy kind of looked into the different ways to do that and came up with this thing.

mathowie: Yeah, it's kinda cool. I thought, there was--sorry to mention Kickstarter again--there was a Kickstarter, this reminds me of--

jessamyn: I think at this point, Matt, you have to announce your affiliation with the Kickstarter, too.

mathowie: Yeah, I'm slightly affiliated cause I invested in them early on, but there was a Kickstarter for a robot arm that controlled an iPhone remotely and they showed the use case of being someone that couldn't make it to

mathowie: birthday party of a child and his grandma, on her laptop, she could control where the camera was facing. And I was like, "Do people do that?" Like, I've never heard of a grandma attending a birthday party remotely. It seemed like, it was a strange use case to me, but being able to do that at a wedding is pretty cool.

jessamyn: Yeah, well, especially these kind of one-in-a-lifetime things, and also where people kind of freak out about them, it's nice to have things, I mean I

jessamyn: I mean I don't know, I'd be worried about interjecting technology at all, just because if it fails everybody sort of freaks out. I can remember working for an ISP, people's DSL was down right when some big event was happening, and they were hollering in our ears, "You have to fix it because, once-in-a-lifetime event!" And we were like, "We're doing the best we can, but, you know, redundant backups..." It's challenging, super challenging.

mathowie: Yeah, it was kind of interesting

mathowie: stuff has come along so far, you can do things like stream video from your phone, it's just kind of amazing. I was playing with those iFight cards, and just amazed at what you can do with them. Shoot a photo, it creates a fake WiFi network that your phone can grab the photo from, and then you can post to Twitter or anything from it, all without any network at all.

jessamyn: I thought you said it didn't work that well though?

mathowie: It's super hacky

jessamyn: I thought you said it didn't work that well.

mathowie: It's super hacky, but when it works, it works.

jessamyn: Uh huh.

mathowie: But yeah, it's kinda hacky. I guess should we move on to... I don't know if there's anything big on the other subsites, but

jessamyn: There are like job subsites, music subsites,

mathowie: IRL...

jessamyn: I'm going to Charlotte, North Carolina, and we're going to have a meetup, me and Dr. Scientist. I don't even remember. I went and changed my... "Captain Science". ]

jessamyn: I went and changed my-- Captain Science! Me and Captain Science are having a meetup on Friday in Charlotte, NC if anybody's around. I'm just gonna go talk to some librarians, but other than that, no, IRL just kinda chugs along.

mathowie: I noticed Portland rocketed to the top. I think there are three weekly regular meetups now, so it's just, they are now at the top of the activity. I don't know how this came together, but there's a couple of different lunch meetups, and then there's a trivia meetup every week.

jessamyn: Yeah, cortex

jessamyn: goes to a lunch meetup, and yeah, there's a trivia meetup. Boston's got a regular trivia meetup too, which is kinda cool. Yeah, there's a bunch of these going on. IRL really seems to have exceeded our wildest expectations just in terms of being mostly functional, mostly low-stress, and people use it like crazy. Makes me really happy.

mathowie: I wish we had some ideas, what to do, more, to make it better.

jessamyn: Just leave it alone!

mathowie: No, I thought there's one tiny thing, slightly Foursquare-y, like if when you get to a thing, there should be a way to check in, somewhere on the website, so you don't have to do the whole, "Is Bob here?" "I'm in the back, I'm upstairs, I'm out in the patio." So you can say, who, versus like, six people are going to attend, two people are maybe, how many people actually showed up, just being a third category.

jessamyn: No, I hear you. And then you can do statistics!

jessamyn: Like that fucker who always says he's gonna go and then never shows up, and we have the numbers to prove it.

mathowie: Well, I didn't want to-- (laughing) I want it to be like--

restless_nomad: That would be me.

jessamyn: Really, you blow off meetups?

restless_nomad: Yeah, I have not been to an Austin meetup that wasn't during SXSW yet, and there have been oh, eight or ten. I keep being like--

jessamyn: Should we send you a fancy sash in the mail so you can wear it? Are they on weekends when you work?

restless_nomad: Sometimes they're on weekends when I work, and sometimes I'm just lazy. I like my chair, and I don't like getting up.

jessamyn: Jeez.

restless_nomad: and I don't like getting out of it.

jessamyn: Your chair is really nice. I like your chair.

restless_nomad: It's a nice chair! Yeah, after the last one exploded, this one's pretty excellent.

jessamyn: Jeremy has the most adorable office of all of our adorable offices.

mathowie: How so? Is it covered in kittens?

restless_nomad: I think I posted pictures. I think there was an office thread and I posted pictures. My office is my closet.

mathowie: Oh, my god! You totally have to post. Post it so we can put it on the podcast, cause I'm dying to see this.

restless_nomad: Yeah, I'll find it. I've got pictures up somewhere.

jessamyn: And I have actually seen it!

mathowie: (laughs) It's tiny.

restless_nomad: You slept in it.

jessamyn: In fact, my whole South By trip should be a tax write-off trip that should be reimbursed by Metafilter because Jeremy and I did lots of important team building.

mathowie: Yeah! Trust falls...

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Did she set up a ropes course in the backyard?

jessamyn: I got to play with all the cats, you know... We did some hiking, it's kind of like trust falls.

mathowie: Oh, OK. Anything else...ish to do?

jessamyn: I have lots of stuff from the rest

jessamyn: of the site too.

mathowie: Cool. Why don't we just go to... how about main Metafilter? We can do Ask Metafilter last.

jessamyn: I had some odd quirky ones that I liked on main Metafilter, and I don't... some of them I liked 'cause they turned into these, like they were like whatever posts that were kind of normal but then they turned into kind of fun conversations and maybe it's 'cause what I like, but one of them was deathalicious's Russian soft drink...

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

jessamyn: post, like it was

jessamyn: basically videos talking about traditional Russian soft drinks, and I have a friend who's Jim's like friend from college, Boris, who grew up in Russia and then moved to the states and he always drinks this stuff called kvass?

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Which is basically like, it's like rye, liquid rye bread with I don't... I can't even explain it. Like, I can't even think about it without like getting these "uuuggghhh". But he loves it. Loves it.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Like Jim drinks it

jessamyn: loves it, they're not, I believe, alcoholic, and there's a couple others. And they're just really odd sodas, you know? Thinking about kind of what your palate is like if you live in other places, 'cause we're kind of used to it, in the United States...

mathowie: Super sweet.

jessamyn: Yeah, we've got like Coke and 7-Up and Pepsi and Sprite. You know, all the boring ones. I mean if you tell people you drink Fresca or Moxie, people are like "whooaaah! weird!".

mathowie: I think root beer is weird to the rest of the world.

jessamyn: Yeah, good point. Root beer's pretty weird, birch beer or you know, that kind of thing is kind of weird, and so I always love when I go travelling, especially to other countries, is seeing what kinds of funny leisure-time soft drinks they make when they haven't been taken over by PepsiCo or Coca-Cola Co.

mathowie: I was just at a Peruvian place, and they're like "Try our national soda!" And I was like, yeah, what the hell. And it was like purple. And what

jessamyn: Ooooh.

mathowie: It was supposed to be

mathowie: - like, oh god, some weird fruit, like not a pomegranate but weirder and roots or something, and it tasted horrible. I thought of this post, some of these things -

jessamyn: Inca Cola!

mathowie: There's lots of cucumber-flavored stuff in Asia I know of, in sodas.

jessamyn: Well, a lot of people drink the Goya soft drinks that you can get in normal supermarkets and some of them are really -

jessamyn: - champagne colas. Is it Inca Cola? It's not Inca Cola? You don't know what it's called.

mathowie: I've heard of the Inca stuff, yeah.

jessamyn: I'm just googling "Peruvian national soda."

mathowie: God, I can't imagine a soda that tastes like rye bread being enjoyable. Ugh.

jessamyn: Well, it's kind of like beer, only not.

Oh, Inca Cola's lemon verbena flavored. It's kind of like beer, only not alcoholic, I guess. So, if you really are one of those people -

jessamyn: - that thinks beer is delicious.

mathowie: Yeah, not me.

jessamyn: Pisco sour is Peru's national drink. Grape brandy lemon egg white. I'm just making myself - I haven't eaten breakfast yet.

(mathowie and Jeremy laugh)

mathowie: One thing from Projects, I missed on Projects, from the end of April, is End Piece, the very last work of art before someone died, just a Tumblr blog.

jessamyn: Oh! I didn't see that! That's cool! By aniola. [ed. note: it's Jason and Laszlo's project. aniola posted it to the Blue.]

mathowie: Yeah, it's slightly creepy, but fascinating and totally, god, you wonder what the last thing people did was, and if it's different than their other stuff. There's that famous artist who got Alzheimer's and his art degraded over time. You can tell half of them, who did it. The Rothko looks like a Rothko, the Mondrian looks like one, and yeah. It's pretty cool. I think it's something I was always fascinated by, and someone went ahead -

mathowie: - and built it. There's only thirty posts ever or so on it. These can't be easy to find. Some of these are totally unfinished.

Where's the last Keith Haring? Oh, there it is. The last Keith Haring is pretty cool.

jessamyn: Link, link? Linklink?

mathowie: I am getting it. Weh-weh.

jessamyn: Copy, paste?

mathowie: Copying, (illegible)

jessamyn: Oh wow. Wow! That's really neat! What a neat little project!

mathowie: Yeah!

It's kind of like a living Wikipedia. You always wonder, "could someone just call from every Wikipedia about famous artists, what their last work was, and then find a picture of it, and then put it together on one page." Somebody did it.

jessamyn: Right. Well, and art's one of those things where it's actually not super complicated to find works of art on the internet because everybody's trying to sell you a poster of it, or whatever.

mathowie: Yeah. Jeremy, you got anything from Metafilter?

restless_nomad: Yeah, a couple of things. I really enjoyed, the Vulture did a list of all of Stephen King's books ever, ranked in order. The list itself - it's a list, you can agree or disagree - but the thread is fantastic because, it turns out half of Metafilter has read everything Stephen King has ever written.

(mathowie and jessamyn laugh)

jessamyn: I would never -

jessamyn: - have suspected.

restless_nomad: So there's a lot of really detailed bickering -

(jessamyn laughs)

- about all the different books, and why everyone liked all the different ones. I thought it was fascinating because I have also read everything Stephen King has ever written.

jessamyn: Really? Really?

restless_nomad: Because, it's a go-to when I'm flying, because all of his books are always in airport bookstores, and he's just really sort of unchallenging in a particular way.

jessamyn: Right. You know it will be a certain amount good, a certain amount not-good.

restless_nomad: Yeah, with a couple of exceptions on both ends. He's pretty reliable for something that will at least get me through a plane trip.

jessamyn: Right.

restless_nomad: And I read a ton when I was a kid, just, I don't know why.

jessamyn: Well, I read him when I was a kid.

restless_nomad: Well, I'll read a book by an author, and be like, "okay, I liked that. I'm going to read everything this author's ever written." So I went through my entire childhood town library collection of -

restless_nomad: - Stephen King. That was in mid-90's. And I've kept up with him ever since. And I like a lot of his stuff, and dislike a lot of his stuff.

mathowie: Have you ever heard about his book, "On Writing?"

restless_nomad: It's fantastic.

jessamyn: I think I've read that.

mathowie: That is the best thing ever!

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: I've seen all his movies, I don't think I've ever read a single Stephen King book, because it's so everywhere all the time.

mathowie: Like: I don't really read superhero comics, because I know, it's everywhere all the time, I'll hear about it or see a movie, and that's fine. But Merlin [Mann] had been pushing "On Writing" as a guide to writing. At first, it struck me as [disbelieving tone] "Stephen King? He just makes pulp fiction for the masses. What could he know about it?" And I read it. It's the most fascinating - the first half is just what, his confession of being an alcoholic half his life?

jessamyn: Sure.

restless_nomad: It's his autobiography.

mathowie: Yeah!

restless_nomad: "On Writing" is just an autobiography, and it's fascinating. He's a good writer, so it's interesting.

mathowie: Then he switches to hard-ass writing professor, and it's just so harsh about going back and just chopping every word. I had read it several years ago, when Twitter was brand new, and realized this is the bible for Twitter. He basically says, even in a thousand-page book, every fucking word counts, and you should cut every unnecessary word -

mathowie: - and it basically read like a guide to making the best Twitter post possible. "Scrutinize every sentence!" I had no idea, he writes for a month and then edits for months and months afterwards, and he's really brutal about it. It's one of the best books ever.

restless_nomad: Yeah, it's great, and it was number two on this list.

mathowie: Oh cool. (laughs)

restless_nomad: (garbled) is 1200 pages long.

jessamyn: "The Stand" is the number one one?

mathowie: Spoiler! I haven't read it yet!

No, I'm kidding.

jessamyn: It's good, you should read it! "The Stand" is actually my favorite book that he has written. I read everything he wrote up to "Needful Things," I think, and then stopped.

restless_nomad: That's not a bad stopping place.

mathowie: (laughs)

restless_nomad: Although I like the Dark Tower series.

jessamyn: There's going to be too much - I don't know, he crossed some line for me, where I was like "he's great, but maybe now that I'm older..." He's like, Tom Robbins was the same way for me. He was revelatory when I was younger -

jessamyn: - and then as I got older, the things he was revealing were no longer things that were that interesting to me. But I love reading Stephen King talking about writing, and I also love, he's written a lot of introductions for other books that are just so great! Again, kind of the same thing. But "The Stand" is really wonderful, really really wonderful. I would read more books like that. And it was really long, and I read it while I was living in Florida, and stayed up all night because there were bats that flew around in the place that I was staying -

jessamyn: - and I had to stay up and sleep during the day, and I read that book and it was perfect. Super perfect. I should read it again!

restless_nomad: Yeah! It's a good book.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: Yeah, that was kind of a neat thread.

restless_nomad: Yeah, it was fun! It's fun to see "oh! you felt the same way about that!" or "oh, you are terribly, violently wrong and yet, we're not actually going to hate each other if we have this disagreement."

jessamyn: Right, because people are just talking about literature. Worst case, you're quote-unquote "wrong about literature" -

jessamyn: - you can still be friends.

restless_nomad: Another literature-related thread was the P. G. Wodehouse automated quote generator, which was hilarious! And also, another one of those threads where people are just talking about books they really like. I had read one collection, "Okay, I see why everybody thinks this is hilarious. There are definitely some great quotes." The quote generator may be the best part, in my opinion.

restless_nomad: But it didn't quite hit for me. It was fascinating to read why it worked for everyone else, and the quote generator itself.

jessamyn: And Wodehouse, I never read him particularly. He's written, what?

restless_nomad: A bazillion books.

jessamyn: If you were like, "oh, Wodehouse, he's the guy who wrote, something." Anything?

restless_nomad: The Jeeves and Wooster stuff.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Okay.

mathowie: I think of him like Mark Twain. An old, hilarious writer that's -

mathowie: - widely known.

restless_nomad: Yeah, the 1930's version of Mark Twain.

jessamyn: It's like some weird little gap in my knowledge. I don't think I've ever read anything by him. Is that possible?

restless_nomad: It was for me, until last year, because someone on Metafilter was like "you must read this," and I was like, "well, okay, I'm going to the library tomorrow, so, I'll put it on my list."

mathowie: I loved the post about Curt Schilling. We've had, I guess, a series of posts about this -

mathowie: - but the Curt Schilling taxpayer-gaming nightmare story. The post is just a jumping-off point for the strangest story I've ever heard in terms of, "famous baseball player starts a video game company, it sorta works, and then he gets this massive tax credit, and he hires a whole bunch of -"

jessamyn: From the state of Rhode Island, of all the states.

mathowie: He had to move from Boston to Rhode Island to take advantage of it, Rhode Island gave him half of their entire state's budget -

mathowie: - for whatever, a small business loan, business generation.

jessamyn: More than half the money Rhode Island budgeted to stimulate job creation.

mathowie: Yeah, and then he basically runs the company into the ground, they never produce a thing, and he's denying it up until the day before they go bankrupt. And it's a loan, not a grant, so he technically owes the state $75 million back -

jessamyn: Is he though, if he went bankrupt?

mathowie: I dunno, and he's -

restless_nomad: He just filed for bankruptcy, so I think -

mathowie: Now he's going for protection.

restless_nomad: - I think the best base scenario is the employees get their last couple months of pay, a month-and-a-half of pay, which they weren't getting.

mathowie: And apparently he's a staunch conservative who hates government handouts.

jessamyn: They all are!

restless_nomad: That's the best part!

jessamyn: They all are.

mathowie: Everything in the story is wacky and crazy and just mindboggling insane.

restless_nomad: Well, the craziest part - this is my segment of the video game industry, this is where I know a bunch of people at both the Baltimore -

restless_nomad: - office and the Rhode Island office. And everybody who worked for him, still swears that this was a great company, that it was Rhode Island's fault, that everything was going great, that they were totally going to have a great game, at some point in the future, although they didn't have anything remotely playable after six or seven years.

Um, yeah. There was something weird in the water at that company. I've seen it happen -

restless_nomad: - before, but this seems really - some of these people, when they moved to Rhode Island, the company said, "okay, well, to help you move, the whole company's moving - we'll sell your old house, we'll take responsibility to sell your old house." But then they didn't, because the market's terrible, and then they just stopped paying those mortgages -

jessamyn: Aaaah!

restless_nomad: - which are still in the names of the employees.

jessamyn: Dude what?! And then what happened? So they fucked over all of the employees?

mathowie: Yeah.

restless_nomad: Yeah.

jessamyn: And the employees are still gung ho, or the employees are now like, "oh, the scales have fallen from my eyes," kind of?

restless_nomad: No, the employees are still gung ho, at least some of them.

jessamyn: Weird!

restless_nomad: Gama Sutra ran an article where they had some anonymous source from inside 38 Studios talking about - part of the problem, and they have a point - part of the problem is that because the governor of Rhode Island started trashing the company publicly -

jessamyn: Ooh.

restless_nomad: - and making all sorts of claims, they couldn't -

restless_nomad: - get additional funding.

jessamyn: Ooh.

restless_nomad: They basically scared off all the rest of the VC. And that is a problem. That was a political move by the governor that really did close off some possible avenues of at least continued life for the company. Because the fact that they got -

jessamyn: And what was the governor's problem, why did he think that was a good idea? Does it all lump into "well, Rhode Island."

(mathowie and Jeremy laugh)

restless_nomad: Well, I guess, the loan was made by the previous -

restless_nomad: - governor, and this guy was just anti-spending, or whatever, it's not totally clear. He is the other party, or I'm not even sure what party anybody is.

jessamyn: I think in Rhode Island it hardly matters anyhow. I was just in Rhode Island, and Slap*Happy's in that thread talking about it, because he's a native that-part-of-the-stater guy.

restless_nomad: Yeah. So I guess it was really - the current governor -

restless_nomad: - won, based on a campaign of "the last guy was an idiot, and spent money in stupid ways" and all that stuff.

jessamyn: And it was a three-way race, if I remember correctly.

restless_nomad: I don't remember. ...

jessamyn: Because I was watching it all on TV, because my dad's place is down there. It was dramadramadrama.

mathowie: Yeah, it was crazy.

restless_nomad: The whole thing is just ludicrous. And I feel really bad. I have a good friend whose twin daughters were born two months ago and is now out of work.

mathowie: Ugh.

restless_nomad: There are a lot of people. Of course, it's the game industry, everyone's used to getting screwed. And the rest of the game industry totally stepped up, and is like "okay." There was just an article that came out - Epic, I think, decided to start a new office in Baltimore, and hire the Big Huge Games studio basically entire.

jessamyn: Oh, that's nice! Super nice!

mathowie: Oh, nice.

restless_nomad: "Hey, we're looking to start a new studio, and -"

restless_nomad: "- here we get one that already works together," and the Baltimore office was the one that had experienced people who'd shipped products.

The Rhode Island office was - not, so much.

jessamyn: (laughs)

restless_nomad: (laughs)

And so, it's really cool, but the game industry - the fact that everyone's so used to it just sucks.

mathowie: Mm. Man.

jessamyn: Fascinating. Well, that's a really interesting backstory that I did not - I kind of read the headlines - "Curt Schilling business -"

jessamyn: "- gamers out of work," but I really didn't know that much more about it. That's really pretty neat.

restless_nomad: Yeah, it's quite a story, and it was a great thread. There's a lot of people chipping in, particularly towards the end as the new links came in. There's just link after link, with all the little details.

jessamyn: Right, ericb, who's from that part of the country, was like "here's more! Here's more! Here's more!"

restless_nomad: Yeah, it's good stuff.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: I also have to point out this - I guess we've got a couple -

jessamyn: - music-oriented posts, but koeselitz put together a really great post about the Grateful Dead (laughs) which was all about, basically, one of the shows that people think are one of their best live performances of all time, that happened at Cornell, which like, "whatever," right? It's kind of like "your favorite band sucks." But then he really puts it together with "here's Youtubes of all of the individual songs, and here's people talking about why they were so good," and unlike most -

jessamyn: - threads about the Grateful Dead, or your favorite band sucks, or whatever, there's actually a lot of people talking about it, and not "bleurgh, hippies, you suck, I hate you, whatever," it turned into kind of a neat thread, unlike other, similar threads, and it made me very happy. I enjoyed it.

mathowie: Whoa, four different people recorded it. There are full recordings of the entire show, from four different sets of microphones. That's awesome.

jessamyn: Which is not totally crazy -

jessamyn: - but it is, kind of. After a while, you just got people taping from the soundboard, and that was it. When you had more tapers. I just thought it was a neat post because it explained what the big deal is, to people who didn't particularly care. And so it wasn't just presuming, "oh, you loved the Grateful Dead, so, here's more!"

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And then people show up and they're like "shut up! I do not!"

mathowie: (laughs) I think when someone wants to talk about Phish or the Grateful Dead, I know I cross my arms and say, in my head -

mathowie: - "explain yourself."

(laughs, with Jessamyn)

jessamyn: "No sir, I don't like it."

Well, I actually made one of the posts in that thread, that was like "here's why I think people like the Grateful Dead. You don't have to like them, but, you know." Nobody is saying they're the best musicians of all time, but people had a really interesting scene.

mathowie: Make me understand why I'm supposed to like them as much as you, or not even close to as much as you, but somewhat, you know -

jessamyn: Why I'm supposed to like them -

jessamyn: - even if I don't like their music.

mathowie: Yeah. I've had people - there's a famous Mac developer, Marco, who makes Instapaper. He's tried to explain in detail to regular people why he loves Phish so much and it still boggles my mind (chuckles) that anyone could love Phish that much. He's like, "I have 45 gigabytes of Phish recordings -"

jessamyn: Phish also is a band like that, that has a scene. Those guys are all over Vermont, doing this that and the other, like especially if you're a local around here -

jessamyn: - people have strong feelings about them, one way or the other.

mathowie: Another music post that was amazing was hippybear's Jimmy Somerville post. All I knew about Jimmy Somerville was he's got that high-pitched voice and sings that cool -

jessamyn: He's the guy from the Bronski Beat.

mathowie: Bronski Beat, yeah. (high-pitched) "Run away! Run away!" I remember in the 80's, early MTV, that was on all the time, and even in my dense skull - I never pick up on lyrics, or what's going on -

mathowie: - I could understand that video is about being gay and alienated and running away from your family, your family being dickheads and finding your own crowd, you know. This is like that mega-Falco post from last year - I can't remember if it was hippybear or someone else that did that. But this is a megapost on Jimmy Somerville's entire career: every song, every album, reviews of and Youtube links to each song on every album, remixes, everything, basically -

mathowie: - and it all tied back into activism, Jimmy Somerville had been doing for some early AIDS-related organizations -

jessamyn: He was one of the first dudes who was really all over that in a very public way.

mathowie: And we heard from hippybear recently that the record company - this was one of the first posts we put up on The Best Of, and I was really proud to show regular people: "This is Metafilter."

jessamyn: He's a great regular contributor too. And some people on Best Of are like these one-off -

jessamyn: - "I happen to know about a little thing" and some people are just constant "I know a lot about a lot, actually, and I can explain it really well."

mathowie: Yeah, and if I wanted to show someone the ultimate Metafilter post, it was a good way to say this is as good as it gets. This is amazing. It's not dry, like Wikipedia, but it's as informative as Wikipedia but also, you're allowed to inject a little opinion and stuff, and it's fascinating. So we heard from hippybear that the record company noticed this post -

mathowie: - and wants him to write the liner notes on reissues of the albums.

jessamyn: So. Cool.

mathowie: Which is totally cool and totally crazy and insane and it's so great. I'm so glad the internet lets shit like that happen.

jessamyn: Yeah! That's neat! That's a happy story. I like it.

mathowie: It's the best thing I've ever heard of.

jessamyn: Yay, hippybear, you're good at Metafilter.

mathowie: And, music stuff.

jessamyn: And, music stuff. Oh! Which may be a good place to mention -

jessamyn: - there's a new Metafilter Music album challenge, in addition to a Metafilter mix CD swap. So for people who are really into music and Metafilter, and whatever, there's sort of two big fun projects, the Mefi Music album challenge and Mefi swap 2012 -

jessamyn: - The Swappening. If you're interested in either one of those, there's Metatalk posts about them, and you should go check them out. You still have lots of time, tons of time.

mathowie: Cool.

jessamyn: Yeah, I thought so.

mathowie: I noticed most of my favorites on Metafilter were for super-controversial stuff, that probably ended up in horrible threads full of people yelling at each other. But the stories that originally prompted the posts were fascinating -

mathowie: - and that's why I like them.

jessamyn: This has been a slightly bumpy set of weeks.

mathowie: Maybe I'll do a triple: There's the John Scalazi - aggh.

jessamyn: Scalzi. Scalzi.

mathowie: Scalzi - I've never had to pronounce it before. John Scalzi's "Here's how to explain white privilege to white men who don't understand it in a video game joke." It's funny.

jessamyn: I enjoyed that thread in a lot of ways. It did turn into several -

jessamyn: - "one person beating that person's chest and taking on all comers," but there were a lot of other people who were really excited talking about it, and I thought it was a really good metaphor, and Scalzi is the most -

mathowie: Awesome.

jessamyn: He's awesome and his blog is really cool because, I think he's a very good moderator of his own website. And I don't think that's true for a lot of people who like to talk about things that are difficult. Maybe you've got "you're a good writer, but you're not necessarily a good moderator" -

jessamyn: - and so he can. I mean, it's like Teresa Nielsen Hayden and her own website. He can moderate his people very, very well, which means the discussion is completely worth reading on his site because it doesn't devolve into the usual nonsense, and he's just really mellow about it. Like, "you're not allowed to start talking about this, this, or that, and if you don't like it, go somewhere else, it's a big internet."

mathowie: Yeah. I also love this post about the weird people in rural Appalachia who are dark-skinned -

mathowie: - and nobody knew what their genetic makeup was until we did DNA testing. This is awesome old history I'd never heard of, and fascinating, and it brings in race, because I guess it all ties back into slavery, right, I think was the final sort of thing that they weren't Portuguese.

jessamyn: Maybe? People thought they were from different places, and it may have just been that it was a long time - You can read the article, it was actually pretty interesting. That there's a whole bunch of people who clearly came from somewhere else -

jessamyn: - who had said that maybe they used to have Portuguese or Turkish background, and so then there was the DNA study. The thread got a little weird because there were some people going "well, I don't see why it's a big deal," and ugh, you're like "people thought it was a big deal, so whether you personally feel that way or not, it's a big deal, culturally speaking." No, I was really interested by it.

mathowie: I also loved the hostile -

mathowie: - nerd rant about "nerds, don't just be nerdy about everything. Try to be discerning about your nerdism." I just loved the essay and I knew it would turn into a nerd fight on Metafilter about, "just don't buy crap with robots or spaceships in it." I thought it was good. I'm so tired of the word "nerd" being extended to anything, right, like there's a running joke in the video game world that frat guys will say "I'm such a video game nerd. I play Madden." Yeah, so does everybody, that doesn't -

mathowie: - make you a Zelda expert, or a true nerd, or anyone who ever had to endure being called a nerd in a negative context.

jessamyn: Oh my god, I have a really good Youtube - we watched standup comedy over the weekend, and there's this - I don't remember what her last name is - Chelsea something? She's a female standup comic?

mathowie: Chelsea Peretti?

jessamyn: Yeah!

mathowie: That's Jonah Peretti's sister! Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed.com and Huffington Post and everything? Chelsea's amazing.

jessamyn: Oh, that makes sense then! So, she basically has this joke -

jessamyn: - where she met this woman who has an "I Heart Nerds" t-shirt. Have you seen this joke?

mathowie: No.

jessamyn: And she's like, "you don't really heart nerds. If you really heart nerds, I'd like to see you get in bed with an engineer with cystic acne and have sex with him for an hour. At the end of it, you'll be like 'oh no, I don't really like nerds, I just like good-looking guys who wear eyeglasses!'"

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: No, I didn't know that's who she was. She's very funny, very funny.

mathowie: Yes, she's awesome. She was in one episode of "Louie," Louie went on a date with her in one of the early episodes -

mathowie: - and it was the worst date of all time. It was good.

jessamyn: Maybe I saw it. She's just really very funny.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: It made me think of this thread, actually.

mathowie: (laughs)

That's awesome. Anything, Jeremy?

restless_nomad: Yeah. I'm surprised it hasn't come up yet, but this was in fact the best thread ever.

mathowie: Yes!

jessamyn: Oh right! I put this in the Best Of blog.

mathowie: I was waiting for you guys to mention it.

jessamyn: Oh shut up you could mention it too.

restless_nomad: Seriously. (laughs)

mathowie: Well oh yeah oh so well uh yeah.

I showed this to my wife, and she's obsessed with this stuff too. This is her favorite part of any makeover show, is when they go to a real brafitter. And my wife always goes "how do these people find these people?" Where do expert bra sizers - people don't really advertise it very well. There's a couple in New York that are known of, and that's about it.

jessamyn: You go to Nordstrom's, in your neck of the woods, but yeah.

mathowie: And I showed her this thread -

mathowie: - and the next thing I know, she's got a tape measure, and she's trying all these things for a half-hour, and she's "nope! same size as I thought I was."

(jessamyn & Jeremy laugh)

So it was very fun.

restless_nomad: It's fabulous. It's a great post, there's just a ton of information with a ton of different things to look at and different places to go look for bras if you're not that perfect. So, the clothes are made -

restless_nomad: - for the sort of ideal person. There's some ideal proportions, and they don't really make clothes for anybody who's too far off of that ideal set of proportions. And for all the comic book women, who have tiny little chests and enormous breasts, nobody makes bras for those people because there aren't all that many of them, so it's a small market segment.

jessamyn: So you've got a small ribcage and big breasts. So if you're a big woman with big breasts, it's easier to find bras.

restless_nomad: It's a little easier, although they are hideous, and there aren't very many of them.

jessamyn: And they look like armor.

restless_nomad: They do. That's sort of where I am -

jessamyn: That's where my sister is.

restless_nomad: There's one place in town that is the place staffed by - they're not actually little old ladies, they're often really attractive young women, which I find slightly disorientating -

jessamyn: (laughs)

restless_nomad: - they have to measure my - anyway.

jessamyn: Touch ya. Touch ya in the junk.

restless_nomad: Yeah. And they're super professional about it -

restless_nomad: - and everything, and it's great, because it's the only way I get bras that fit, but it's also a little odd. But there's one place in town where I can go bra shopping, and me and my other busty friend, make a date, every six months, to go out there together, so we're in separate stalls, we get fitted, we try on a whole bunch of bras, and we bitch over the stalls the entire time about how all of these are hideous, there are no options, and nobody is interested in serving this market -

restless_nomad: - so it was really nice to have a thread to vent in, and to be reminded that I am not alone.

jessamyn: Well, to talk about what some of the issues are, because what happens as far as cup sizes, which is the difference between your ribcage and where your breasts are, they go - everybody knows AA, A, B, C, D, and some places just start adding Ds for everything above D, so then you're "I guess I'm a 32 D, D, D, D," or whatever, it sounds ridiculous -

jessamyn: - and it makes it really complicated, and it basically makes every woman who has larger cup sizes feel like a freak. If you're wearing a EEE with shoes, it's the same kind of thing. flex links to some interesting articles that talk about why you need bras that have smaller band sizes and bigger cup sizes so you can go up to G or whatever, instead of this D, D, D, D, which makes people feel like they're the wrong size -

jessamyn: - which is stupid, if you're trying to sell them things. Because that's the thing that's so crazy, right? People want to sell things to you, and if there were good-looking underwear in the size that people actually are, people would pay lots of money for them. And the other crazy thing about underwear is how crazy expensive really good bras are in the first place.

restless_nomad: Sixty bucks. Sixty bucks apiece is the cheapest I think I've spent since I hit puberty. That's it. So if I need to have one every day, I'm spending $200 -

restless_nomad: - and they don't last that long.

jessamyn: They don't last that long -

restless_nomad: The elastic wears out, the underwires pop out, they're just not that sturdy.

jessamyn: As opposed to, if you're what they call the normal size, 32, B, C, D, you have many more choices, you have cheaper choices that are likely to fit you better, etc. At any rate, it's a thing. And so flex put together this completely amazing post, and it took me forever to find an appropriate picture on Flickr to link with it.

(mathowie & Jeremy laugh)

jessamyn: Because that's the thing, you start searching Flickr, and once you use the search all of your family-safe settings are gone, so there's tons of just naked ladies sticking their junk in my faces, really weird.

restless_nomad: (laughs)

You could have outsourced that to me.

jessamyn: (laughs)

Right, I'll outsource it next time.

But the thread was really interesting, and it had a bunch of men and women contributing without it turning into (imitating frat boy) "this is what kind of boobs I like" nonsense, which was great.

restless_nomad: There was a little of that -

jessamyn: A very little.

mathowie: Very little.

restless_nomad: There were two posts that got deleted because they were tacky, and horrible.

jessamyn: Well, and one of them wasn't even tacky, it was "here's how you type 'boobs' on a calculator," but since I couldn't figure out what the person was getting at, I was like "let's just not."

mathowie: If you need to bring this back to a dude's perspective -

jessamyn: And we do!

mathowie: I know! Well, you've got to see the world through the eyes of a dude, or it doesn't make sense right?

jessamyn: "How this affects Matt."

mathowie: In the world of tall dudes, if I buy a shirt with the correct-length sleeves, it's always for extremely large-around-the-middle dudes. So it's really hard to find tall, thin-people shirts, so I totally get the same thing. Some people tell you, having a big ribcage but small breasts, and that's also an impossibility, apparently.

restless_nomad: It's all about proportions. I basically can't wear button-down shirts. I just finally ordered one from a made-to-measure place in India -

restless_nomad: - and we'll see what they do with my measurements.

jessamyn: Dude, if that fits, send me the URL, because I need some nice button-up shirts, and I just have troubles.

restless_nomad: Yeah, they just don't really make them for people with boobs, so they're either tents, where they fit across my boobs, but then hang straight down, and make me look like a ship under sail -

(mathowie: "yeah," & jessamyn stifles a laugh)

- or they gap or don't button or whatever -

jessamyn: And they always have the buttons in the weird place specifically so they gap -

jessamyn: - I have this one women's shirt that actually has a couple more buttons down the middle, in front of my chest, and it's amazing! Why aren't all shirts like that?

restless_nomad: Yeah. So. This was probably my favorite overall post on the Blue in the last two months.

mathowie: I hate when people link to a business and it's their Facebook page. It feels like such a ripoff. (laughs) Like, checkout this bra shop in Portland, and it's their Facebook! But that's not even a real thing!

jessamyn: That's what businesses do nowadays. It's really weird. The internet's getting really weird.

mathowie: And the quote-unquote front page of the site is three or four little bloggy posts about what they think about something. I'm like "where are you located?! What are your hours?!"

jessamyn: You've got to click the "About" link.

mathowie: Oh, god, I hate Facebook. Facebook ruins everything.

jessamyn: Yeah, I know.

So, should we move on to Ask Metafilter, or is there any other -

jessamyn: - I'm surprised I totally forgot about the, uh.

mathowie: Forgot about what?

jessamyn: Oh, and there was the man boobs story thread, sorry, I'm just looking for something.

mathowie: I don't remember that.

jessamyn: It was just a man talking about what it's like to be a guy who has, you know.

mathowie: Is it a weird gland thing that caused it, or something?

jessamyn: Yeah, I think so! For a lot of guys, it's part of your physiology, maybe, let me see if I can figure out where -

mathowie: There's a lot of difference between putting on twenty pounds too much -

mathowie: - and having floppy man boobs or something, versus actually having too much estrogen in your body and producing breasts.

jessamyn: Yeah, but it had a really interesting set of conversations. (to self:) Man boobs, Metafilter.

mathowie: I can't say how much I loved ignorehitler.tumblr.com. It's so stupid, but funny. Oh god. I don't even know what the thread looked like. Did you ever see that one?

jessamyn: Oh yeah.

mathowie: Where it's screenshots of Draw Something and -

mathowie: - Hitler's in every one of them.

jessamyn: I never got to the Draw Something thing.

mathowie: Yeah, I didn't either.

jessamyn: "I am tits" was the title of the man boobs thread. It was short, but I thought it was really good.

mathowie: Wow.

jessamyn: But Ask Metafilter saved my life in this wonderful way by user bookdragoness, hates the new Gmail, like (singing) many of us! And just wants to figure out how to get it back to normal -

jessamyn: - and so often, this is a lot of people being like "lump it and suck it up," but, bookdragoness found a friend in flabdablet, who is a very detail-oriented mefite, who put together a - I think a user style for Stylish, I guess? - which, if you run it and implement it right, it actually can make new Gmail look a lot like old Gmail -

jessamyn: - which is all I ever wanted, and so it's very nice.

mathowie: What do you hate most about the new Gmail? Just that it uses more whitespace?

jessamyn: More whitespace, and what I really don't like is, there's internal scrollbars all the fuck over it now.

restless_nomad: Ugh. Yes.

jessamyn: Internal scrollbars, and it hides things, so there's two things. I hate it for me because internal scrollbars are bullshit and it hides things. And the buttons are a lot more context-sensitive now -

jessamyn: - so they change based on what you click on, which I'm sure is terrific once you get used to it. But for my students, who have been using Gmail, and who are really hesitant internet people in the first place: you give them a list, "click this, and then click that, and then click the other thing" - and telling them that the other button isn't going to show up until you click the first button - "if you're looking at a message, you have a completely different set of buttons, and they're all pictures -"

jessamyn: - so, trying to figure out which button they have to click if you can't go through the thing with them is really hard. And I kinda get why it's that way. It just makes my students really miserably unhappy. You know, I understand it, I understand it, I understand it. Having all the buttons change based on what task you're doing is very destabilizing for novice computer users. So that's my issue.

jessamyn: So I don't send my students through using Stylish and Greasemonkey, I just tell them how to suck it up and change the buttons to text and a whole bunch of other things. But it is really hard for them. So I just: bleh. It was nice to see somebody going through an effort to make some of the less usable things change.

mathowie: My favorite post was Plutor's "How can I actually program with punch cards" today.

jessamyn: Oooh. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

mathowie: People are like "no no no, you don't want to do it -"

mathowie: - "the punching of the cards wasn't even that interesting," and then he's like, "no, I want to know! I want to do that part! I want to do it all!" I think there's no settled - he didn't get to do it yet, but he got pointers to all the places he could go, and some people are saying, there's still some systems in use in different parts of America, so he might go to them. I thought it was fascinating and awesome. I'd love to know what that was like as well.

jessamyn: Yeah, yeah! I really enjoyed it -

jessamyn: - and Plutor is great.

mathowie: Can you imagine, some nerd fantasy camp someday, where you have to do all this weird retro - you can only check your email over a coupled modem, with a phone coupler that's terrible.

jessamyn: "Here's how you type in a video game to a cassette tape, so that you can play it on your Commodore 64."

mathowie: Oh, that's right! And "dude, we have to go to dinner, we have to turn it off, and you have to lose your game, because you didn't get to record it, and then you have to put in two hundred lines of BASIC again to play it after dinner."

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: These are things everyone needs to experience -

mathowie: - yeah. Love that.

jessamyn: I liked, just because it's one of those things that's so far out outside of my experience, it's a parent who has a kid with food allergies, and wanting to keep them safe. There's a very good entry comment from bondcliff, who has a kid who's got a peanut allergy, talking about "look, I'm not one of those freakout people, but here are all the things that we need to do -"

jessamyn: "- to help keep Shamus safe from dealing with nuts at various places." They have this elaborate swapping ritual for his Halloween candy, he brings his own cupcakes to parties when they can't be sure if the cake doesn't have allergens or whatever, it's just one of those things where I know about nut allergies in the general, but I don't know people who have them specifically, and I'm 25% built of peanut butter -

jessamyn: - so I have a hard time even imagining what this would be like. His comment really helped me understand what that's like from an "I don't expect the world to change for me, and yet, this is just something that realistically we have to deal with" perspective.

mathowie: Have you ever heard of John Gruber, the guy who runs Daring Fireball?

jessamyn: Yeah, yeahyeah!

mathowie: Have you ever heard of his son's dairy allergy?

jessamyn: Huh-uh, no.

mathowie: It is so far beyond -

mathowie: - it is like the urban legend, where a guy who ate a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, kissed his girlfriend in high school, and she died minutes later, which apparently sorta happened but might not have been from that, I dunno.

jessamyn: She died for unrelated reasons.

mathowie: They retest your children every few years. pb's son is nut-allergic, and every two years, he goes to the doctor, and they give him a little bit and see if he'll react, and when he reacts they jab him with the Epipen -

mathowie: - and everything's better.

jessamyn: Just to see if it's getting better or worse?

mathowie: Well, you're supposed to grow out of these things. Most people do, when they're found as a kid. So I guess his son was allergic to milk and cheese and everything, so deathly allergic. I had no idea it got to this point. I guess these humans didn't - their genes didn't pass on in the past, because I think they said a year or two ago, he was eight -

mathowie: - they're at a Philadelphia major hospital, and they gave him a dropper of milk - a few milliliters of milk.

jessamyn: For testing.

mathowie: And he started to black out and convulse.

jessamyn: Oh no!

mathowie: He blanked out for ten minutes, and they had to revive him, over three drops of milk. And they're like "what is that like as parents?" and the parents are like "we take anti-anxiety meds all the time and we have to -"

mathowie: "- watch everything that goes in his mouth, all the time." I guess in a normal world, he wouldn't have made it to eight. If they were not in that major hospital, he would be dead from the test. It was so crazy! Oh my god, I can't imagine things getting that bad, but that's possible, wow.

jessamyn: I think this kind of thing highlights, for people who don't have experience with it, they talk -

jessamyn: - about how every now and again, there's someone who's like "ahh, just give the kid a nut, it's not that bad," and they're like, "no really, it actually really is," and hearing people talk about it who you know, and are calm and composed, like: "no seriously, it's a thing, and let's explain to you, because you asked in good faith, what the thing is really like."

mathowie: After I read the story of Daring Fireball's kid - Gruber's kid - I was like "wow! I am never going to say 'oh hey, try a little bit,' or 'it just has a little,' I'll never say that again."

mathowie: Wow, I'm never going to say, "oh, hey try a little bit or just have some." I'll never say that again.

jessamyn: Right; or not just be incredibly fucking careful, basically, when you're around other people who might have whatever their different allergy issues are.

mathowie: Yeah. Um, click click Let me see...

jessamyn: I had a couple more Ask Metafilter things that I thought were interesting.

mathowie: Yeah, I think, this was super popular, "what's a Brooks Brothers shirt but cheaper?" and, you know, we always have a what's awesome, but what can I get cheaper version of it. But this is, like I saw this post on every probably fashion blog I've ever looked at. Like everywhere.

mathowie: Like everyone was talking about it. Where do get, like, really high quality men's shirts that aren't, like, 200 bucks each.

jessamyn: Well, yeah, because it used to be that Brooks Brothers basically just had the thing.

mathowie: Gold standard, yeah.

jessamyn: They were the gold standard. They were the best made shirts in the world. But they were also really fucking expensive. And now I'm not totally sure that that's even true anymore. We gave all my dad's old Brooks Brothers shirts away to the local thrift store, and I like to think all the people in town are now wearing, like, really nice

jessamyn: button-up shirts that they got for $1.50. But, yeah, no, it was a good; I mean there's a lot of good sort of list generating threads like this.

mathowie: Ah, man.

jessamyn: What're you ahing about?

mathowie: Go ahead; I'll snarfle my next post or my next mention, go ahead.

jessamyn: Well this is just one talking about "heeey, I've got a get an ovarian cystectomy and I'm incredibly worried." and it was just somebody who was just worried. And they had a lot of people who were, like, "hey I actually had"

jessamyn: They had a lot of people who were like, "Hey! I actually had one and here's the things that mattered and here's the things that didn't and you should do this .. " Whatever. And it's one of those like really short threads. It's twenty [20] answers. This was in April right after the last podcast. But at the very end the person was like, "Hey, thanks! I had the surgery. It went well. Blah blah blah .. I appreciate it."

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: So, I don't know. The system when it works.

mathowie: I like when the best answer starts out with your're going to be okay. I know surgery is scary

mathowie: and then it goes on ..

jessamyn: [laughing]

mathowie: [laughing] .. to tell their story and it's so awesome!

jessamyn: Yeah, well I think it's one of those things to where like you wouldn't necessarily know (that a whole bunch of women you know) have had cystectomies. But they're actually not that unusual and the chances that something really shitty is gonna happen is very low.. but you wouldn't know that because it's not something you talk about all the time.

It's like my sister had one removed but it was 25 years ago. She never talks about it. You wouldn't know it was "a thing" on her list of shit to talk about, you know?

jessamyn: But so it's nice in these situations where lots of people are like, "Hey! Yeah .. it's scary but... you're going to be fine. Go you."

mathowie: Yeah. So I marked these things as favorites like whatever a month ago and so I check them right before we are going to talk about them and see oh was there any like follow-up? And I was going "Ugh!" because there was no follow up on this one.. which was .... Why isn't there a tool

mathowie: This is.. I am posting this .. this person missed meeting Ron Swanson in their town. Uh ..you know.. whats-his-name ... Mick Offerman [phonetic] I guess appeared?

jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ...

mathowie: And that's the thing that kills me! When I hear a new band or I see a comedian I like and they were in Portland two weeks ago..

jessamyn: Totally happens to me all the time. Like, what?! Stand up comedian that I love the most was in Providence...

mathowie: Yeah ...

jessamyn: .. when I was down in Massachusetts and I could have .. ahhhh!

mathowie: And there's no tool! I mean I have shown this thread to Andy Vaio [phonetic] again and go, "Can you re-make-up

"Coming" and make it work? Because it's so hard to follow authors coming to Powell's because I got Powell's locally so we get every author. But I don't know, you know, their sched .. Nobody posts like a standardized schedule. Maybe if they had their own XML format or something? There is just no way to parse it. So I will remember every six [6] months to like go to Powells.com to see who's coming up soon. And I'll always be blown away ... when .. "Ah! That's the guy from that BoingBoing post last week..."

jessamyn: I want to see all those guys!

mathowie: Yeah and like "Ahh I should just camp out there."

And there's also good comedy clubs here. But then there's like new bands that I did not even know existed and then I miss them, but like, there's gotta be a combo of twitter and facebook or something

that like: Things-that-are-one-degree-away-from me that my friends might like, that I will probably like and they don't live in my town.. but I need a tool to tell me when those things are coming to my town. Like, you know, "Your friend Ryan Gantz's favorite band is going to be in Portland." Like THAT would be super useful.

jessamyn: Right. Or like

anytime I see a comedian on Comedy Central, tell me if they are going to be within a hundred [100] miles of me because I want to see stand up comedy but I don't want to see some random dude.

mathowie: [laughs] Yeah and there's like one amazing comedy club in Portland that's like nothing but comedy nerds go to it. There's no like drunken heckling and everyone is awesome and it kills me when .. yeah. I hear about it sometimes on twitter from people going, "Oh my God I got tickets to ___ !" And I'll be like, "Oh shit! I did not know that!" But man I wish

was a centralized tool. It seems like author, book tours and comedy tours ...

jessamyn: Wasn't Kevin Smoker working on something like that, that did book tour kind of stuff for authors?

mathowie: But that was more like blog book tours, so it's like using ..

jessamyn: Oh. I thought he was working on something that was more like ..

mathowie: traditional?

jessamyn: .. all the different book stores give us their schedules and then we ...

mathowie: Ah! I wish! God I wish !

jessamyn: [giggles]

mathowie: Yeah. But then I want.. yeah I want comedy. I want a little bit of music.

I know there are some music tools but nobody makes a tool for shit-matt-likes-that-he-wouldn't-know-otherwise. It just seems like a humongous hole in the market that somebody could fill and make a killer tool.

jessamyn: I hear that! It's sounds like a kickstarter.

mathowie: Ugh. So I read this thing and there's NO resolution. It's just like, "Well.. maybe you should try ... well there's some ..."

jessamyn: Well somebody has one called .. what? iConcert Cal or something that'll take music you listen to and and tell you if the bands are nearby.

mathowie: Yeah and I have heard of like 3 [three] other services that do that. It actually searches your iTunes database

and you give it a city and it tells you, yeah.

jessamyn: But yeah. Otherwise it's kinda tough.

mathowie: God! I hate the author tours, man. I just miss those constantly. Like, ugh.

jessamyn: Well especially because a lot of times when you see authors like they are reading for free or cheap ..

mathowie: u-huh

jessamyn: .. and those events are usually really fun and get you out of the house and all the stuff. I feel that way when I go down to Massachusetts. I'm like I have no idea what's happening around me because I don't like .. I mean at least up here I read the paper [laugh] but down there I just

jessamyn: uh, mysterious ...

mathowie: But like I don't know how a tool .. now that I am thinking about this more.. it's like Susan Orlean, if she was here, and I didn't know she had a new book and ..

jessamyn: She was at MaxFunCon and I did not know that.

mathowie: I know. She was awesome. She was super nice.

restless_nomad: I had breakfast with her at MaxFunCon and I did not know she was there..

mathowie: [laughs]

jessamyn: What?!

mathowie: Ha! Ha!

restless_nomad: [laughs]

mathowie: But it's like if she was coming. .. she probably only goes on a book tour every four years. Like I would want to know that. But how would a tool know that I haven't even looked at anything of hers in four [4] years .. that wouldn't be easy to do, but...

jessamyn: I just finished reading a bunch of her books.

So since we're friends, Matt. You know ..

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: It'd be like, "Jessamyn read a book" and then "The author is near you .. something.."

mathowie: Yeah it should tie back to good reads or something .. aww God I wish this worked. I wish someone would build this.

jessamyn: Let's think about it some more because I agree with you. I'd be a pretty trippy tool.

mathowie: It seems like it's on the tip of .. like it's almost possible and nobody's quite done it. Like. Oh man.

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: God, I wish ...

jessamyn: Back to the website! I enjoyed this post only because this is an Ask MetaFilter. Toekneesan has been invited an Ignite presentation?

mathowie: uh-huh

jessamyn: And the other thing that is interesting about this is, he is talking about the thing that I think got mentioned in MetaTalk .. let me find that .. but at any rate, he's like, "I've been invited to give an Ignite presentation. Give me some advice on good ones you've seen. Bad ones you've seen or whatever..."

And the thing that I thought was so interesting is there's a couple of people

who did Ignite presentations! And they linked to them and it was cool. So COD did one about home schooling and ...

mathowie: Oh!

jessamyn: ... I don't know .. there was one other one that ...

mathowie: Sweet!

jessamyn: .. I just thought was cool.

mathowie: Oh. And this is fresh enough where I can.. I've done 2 [two] and .. man, I've gotta like .. I only have links to them but I gotta tell them to practice THE SHIT out of it .. like ....

jessamyn: Well there's definitely some back and forth! Like, some people are like, "Be .. be REAL .. be spontaneous. DON'T practice the shit

mathowie: Oh God! No Way!

jessamyn: NO WAY!

mathowie: I've been to a couple nights of Ignite's. They are always bad when nobody practices. Like cause they are terrible on timing. You just get your timing down you can still riff, but ..

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: You GOT to practice .. I mean , I spent like .. the one that went WELL, I spent like a week on it, so I knew ...

jessamyn: What was it about?

mathowie: God. What was the first one I did on? Oh I cannot remember this was years ago.

jessamyn: [laughing]

mathowie: I did one on bike stuff and I did one on something completely different, but ..

But, actually he has a good one. Like the future book store?

jessamyn: Totally! It's awesome!

mathowie: It's a super fun idea and I can imagine it broken down into like really tight information dents, 5 [five] minutes ..

jessamyn: Well and some of this just has to do with how good you are in front of a group. And so, you know, starting with that .. I mean I could not Ignite. That would be really fun because I like talking in front of people and five minutes seems like nothing.

mathowie: Oh! But that's the hard part! It's like writing a

tweet about .. you want to get 10 [ten] points into 1 [one] tweet. It's so hard.

jessamyn: I don;t have this problem with twitter that you seems to have.

mathowie: [laughing]

Editing an idea down from like 2 paragraphs to a twitter post is so hard for me. Like trying to get all those ...

jessamyn: Who does that?

restless_nomad: Seriously..

jessamyn: [laughing]

mathowie: Lots of people ..

jessamyn: [still laughing]

restless_nomad: That's what I have a blog for.

mathowie: Ah! Exactly!

jessamyn: Right! That's why I have multiple blogs for.

mathowie: But like yeah, don't ever show bullet points. Bullet points suck period. But like in Ignite there's just no time

jessamyn: I used bullet points very successfully last week in Wooster in my talk about The Cloud, but, the cloud lends itself to it.

restless_nomad: [laughing]

jessamyn: Oh! I forgot! That was a completely random thing I just wanted to tell you guys. I was siting in the lobby at Wooster Public Library preparing for my talk that was also going to be at Wooster Public Library? And rollbiz walked by me and recognized me ..

mathowie: [laughing]

jessamyn: .. and said, "Hello." He's the guy who - you probably remember him because he's a Red Cross First Responder

and was around a lot talking about stuff during Irene? And then he got a job. He's the ACLU Regional Coordinator For Central Massachusetts. He's awesome and his girlfriend or partner is a librarian and uh .. we sat down and chit-chatted for a while. It was terrific.

mathowie: Sweet!

jessamyn: Shout out to RollBiz.

mathowie: [snicker] "Roll Biz!"

Jeremy do you have any favorites in Ask?

restless_nomad: Yeah .. I've got 2 [two] that were uh sort of interesting.

They sort of go together. There was.. there's a lot of, you know, I like this genre-what should I read next? Uh .. but this one is one I particularly liked because it's an issue that having read all the fantasy .. I .. that often comes up for me, which is, I want to read a fantasy novel that is NOT SET on some mocky-Europe.

jessamyn: [laughing]

restless_nomad: They're all set in like fake England or you know, fake France and I am looking for something

that's maybe fake Asia or Central America or something that isn't, you know, what everything else is.

And so it's a pretty good thread. There's a lot of recommendations.. there's a lot of ... It's funny because the original question says, "I don't really care if it's "good". I just want to know about it, but warn me if it's bad. So ..

jessamyn: [Laughing]

restless_nomad: There are some really good books and there are some books I am a little more skeptical of. But it's a REALLY GOOD recommendation thread. There's a lot of stuff that you wouldn't necessarily

have heard of .. um ...

mathowie: [snicker] Ursula K Leguin did a book on fantasy Northern California. That's awesome.

restless_nomad: [snickers]

jessamyn: Sure. I've read a couple of fantasy California books, actually.

mathowie: There's fantasy Polynesia-type island settings. That's cool.

restless_nomad: Yeah there's one that I just read that's Elizabeth Bear which is set in like the steps of Russia and Mongolia? Which was fascinating.

mathowie: Wow.

restless_nomad: There's definitely some good stuff. And there's a lot of good recommendations.

mathowie: There's 2 [two] books on Inuit fantasy settings.

jessamyn: I think that's awesome.

mathowie: That's awesome.

jessamyn: It's like a heavily kind-of restricted environment. That would be ..

mathowie: You just do a search and replace of castle when you put in igloo -- BOOM! [laughs] SO easy.

jessamyn: Dude ...

mathowie: [laughing] I know ... forget it. [laughing]

jessamyn: I heard some sort of knocking from one of you guys, incidentally.

mathowie: Yeah, is that you, Jeremy?

restless_nomad: My cat just climbed on my lap

it's probably from her.

mathowie: No it's like a tick-tick-tick from like a loose mic or something.

jessamyn: Yeah or like you have earrings on, but I know you don't have earrings on. But it's like somethings like click-click-click.

mathowie: How about each of us moves our head alot? Nope. Not me.

jessamyn: I just moved my head a lot. I am not wearing earrings.

restless_nomad: It's that?

jessamyn: Yeah. What's that noise.

mathowie: I heard one click.

restless_nomad: It seems to be my headset.

mathowie: [laughs]

jessamyn: Ahhh!

restless_nomad: [laughs] Yeah I can hear it now that I am listening for it.

jessamyn: [laughing]

restless_nomad: Sorry, I'll stay REAL still.

jessamyn: Okay!

jessamyn: We're rapping up pretty soon anyhow.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: You had another one from Ask Metafilter?

restless_nomad: Yeah. The other one which is similarly awesome [laughs] uh .. lemoncakeisalie wanted science fiction musicals that are non-campy.

jessamyn: What? There's no such thing!

mathowie: What? That's ... yeah!

r, But there is! There is a whole thread with tons of operas and musicals and plays ... and it's kinda great.

mathowie: A musical stage production of Metropolis? What?

jessamyn: The Flaming Lips made a movie called Christmas on Mars?

mathowie: Huh?

restless_nomad: [laughing]

jessamyn: You're right. This is awesome. Quit moving your head.

restless_nomad: Yeah

mathowie: [laughs] This is .. yeah I mean, I like camp when it comes to scifi musicals, but wow I did not know this was a thing. Real ones.

restless_nomad: Yeah there a re serious ones which is great. Like I knew of one, which is The Protomen which is the megaman rock opera. There was a post in The Blue about it a couple of years ago.

um.. and it's fantastic. I was like, "Oh there's going to be like three here." But nope there's a whole threadful!

mathowie: Wow.

jessamyn: That's cool! Super cool!

restless_nomad: Yeah. It was great!

mathowie: Were there any good, like, anonymous ones worth mentioning?

jessamyn: No.

mathowie: There was that one about someone's gonna die soon. What's the last things they should do... That was just kinda fascinating. It seemed like reddit, you know, "I'm gonna die, ask me anything"

Kind of sounded, but there's lots of, you know ..

jessamyn: Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Yeah that was about a month ago.

mathowie: Yeah there's lots of "enjoying the last few years, months.." thing. It was pretty good.

jessamyn: I was surprised. That thread went significantly better than I thought it was going to. So I was happy about that.

mathowie: Wow. Ask is up to almost fourteen thousand [14,000] questions to date. Wow.

jessamyn: I know! I know! So the last thing that I wanted to mention

if we are set with Ask, was I just wanted to give you a, "Thank you, Matt" for talking to the people at The Deck and not having that cat-in-heat tshirt advertisement?

mathowie: [chuckles]

jessamyn: .... in AskMetafilter anymore?

mathowie: [laughing]

jessamyn: I just wanted to say thank you from like women and men everywhere ..

mathowie: Oh, yeah yeah yeah yeah ...

jessamyn: Well I like The Deck ads. They are fine and yet most of them are just like little cartoons and then all of a sudden, "WHOA!" You know ....

mathowie: Yeah we had a back-and-forth where I said... you know two years ago I said, "Hey some of these are a little racy and annoying..." and they removed some of them? But then I was like, "You know what? It does not go with the rest .." There's like little iPhone games and like everything's like cool design-ey, you know ...

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: Program or kind of thing and then there's like these sexy girls on the ground with their butts in the air. It's so weird. I was just like, "I don't think clothing advertised on The Deck is even a good idea.

So they dropped them from us, but .. They also showed like .. Someone found like, you know, their new ads and they are all pretty tame ..

jessamyn: They are a lot more mellow, yeah.

mathowie: The old ads are way racier. The ones that are actually running, before we dropped them, so. They were pretty ... like half of them were just like kind of annoying. Yeah I found that they sort of bugged me.

jessamyn: So I appreciate that. And! Now that we are actually hitting the end of our discussion time we should probably mention that holdkris99 is not dead.

jessamyn: - discussion time, we should probably mention that holdkris99 is not dead.

mathowie: Oh, right.

jessamyn: There was a lot of back and forth about a member who claimed to have committed suicide and didn't, and you can read about it all on the website! I think finally that Metatalk thread about the incident is finally dying down. It's one of those interesting things - for me, figuring out at what point people check in to Metatalk, because the whole -

jessamyn: - "this guy didn't die" was basically two weeks ago, and we're still up until fairly recently, getting people being like "oh my god! I just found out about this!"

mathowie: Ooooh wow.

restless_nomad: I think there was one - what, yesterday, Saturday?

mathowie: Oooh man.

restless_nomad: Oooh yeah. So what do they do? Do they flip through the last several - because Metatalk threads fall off the page, within what? A couple of days? There's only five at a time -

restless_nomad: - so, you'd have to go looking, or somebody would have to - you'd have to find out some other way.

jessamyn: Maybe they'd read the Metatalk Twitter feed, or something like that. I think we show (counts) the last ten posts on the Metatalk page - so either they go back reading, or they read the Twitter feed, or maybe they read someone else's Twitter feed about it. But I'm sort of happy it's all finally winding up and dying down, because that was super fucking annoying.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: About all I have to say about it.

restless_nomad: I was commiserating with one of my other community manager friends. This happens all over the internet. This happens everywhere. In every online community, somebody pulls this stunt. There's nothing you can do to prevent it. There's just, no, way around it. It's just going to happen, and it's going to be a pain in the ass when it happens.

mathowie: Ugh. Yeah.

mathowie: I was super pissed off and jaded, right from the start, but it took me a couple of days to process it and come around to "oh, this is just the ultimate attention whore thing you could possibly do," basically to tweak people. Then, it was weird that someone just guessed "this guy mentioned his wife a lot, I wonder what she knows," and it seemed like the story in the end was she had no idea, and was really pissed off, about him speaking in her name -

mathowie: - was fucked up.

restless_nomad: Maybe, we don't even know that for sure, because of the sources.

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

jessamyn: Right. The source is so totally suspect.

mathowie: If I ever open a bar for writers, it'll be called "Unreliable Narrator."

(Jessamyn & Jeremy laugh)

restless_nomad: That would be a great bar name.

jessamyn: That would be a great bar name!

Jeremy, we're happy you could make it, because I know your favorite bartender is leaving town.

restless_nomad: Oh, it's killing me! So I don't go out much, but I have this one bar that I go to -

restless_nomad: - on Monday or Tuesday night, because I'm usually off, and there's this one bartender that I have developed a friendship with, and because it's Monday or Tuesday night, we're often the only people in there for big chunks of the evening. So we just sit and watch terrible reality TV on Bravo. I've seen so many "Real Housewives" episodes that I did not need to see. Just hang out and talk. And her boyfriend is a chef, and he got a job at this high-end restaurant in Napa -

restless_nomad: - in a hurry. So she found out about this ten days ago, and she's moving to Napa tomorrow.

jessamyn: Whaaa?

mathowie: Aw.

restless_nomad: So I'm very sad.

And I am never going to see "The Real Housewives" again, which I'm less -

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: That seems like a win, maybe, yeah.

mathowie: I think that's an upgrade in your life, actually.

restless_nomad: Yeah, but I'm going to miss her. And I don't know what I'm going to do on Tuesday nights at 10 o'clock any more.

jessamyn: Metafilter meetups, man!

restless_nomad: (laughs)

mathowie: To watch trashy TV somewhere.

jessamyn: Dear Metafilter people,

I want to go to a bar and watch trashy TV on Tuesday nights.

Hook me up.

restless_nomad: (laughs)

mathowie: All right, cool. I think we're about done, then?

jessamyn: Cool. Cortex, I hope you enjoy the rest of your vacation. Jeremy, I'm so glad you could be with us. Matt, I hope your trip to Italy turns out to be really fun.

mathowie: Thanks! Looking forward to it.

All right, cool! Good show, guys.

jessamyn: [laughing] Thanks Matt!

mathowie: [chuckles] All right, bye!

restless_nomad: See ya.

jessamyn: Bye!

Credits / Dibs

Contributors (in alphabetical order):

• bluefly
• Night_owl
• Pronoiac
• tangerinegurl
• zamboni

For more details, see the Fanscribed page.