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Podcast 83 Transcript

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A transcript for Episode 83: "Legally throwing up on the subway" (2013-07-26).

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

Transcript

jingle: (usual theme music)

mathowie: Episode 83 of the Metafilter Podcast! Yay!

jessamyn: Terrific!

mathowie: Do you have any instant good memories of 1983?

jessamyn: 1983, that would have been the first year of high school? No.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Not a single one.

cortex: Why 1983?

jessamyn: Wait, I think I saw Rush. I saw Rush.

mathowie: Because we're... oh, that's not bad.

cortex: Oh, podcast 83.

mathowie: Podcast 83--last week I thought of it.

cortex: I'm a quick one!

mathowie: Last week was 82 and I thought of 1982 when we started recording, had good feelings, and I have no feelings for 83. I think I was in--

jessamyn: It is the sum of three consecutive prime numbers--

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: --as well as the sum of five consecutive prime numbers, which is kind of cool. And it's also this thing that I never knew before, which is a highly cototient [ˌcoʊˈtɔɪʃənt] number. Josh, do you know what that is?

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: Cototient [ˌcoʊˈtɔɪʃənt]? Can you spell that?

jessamyn: Cototient [ˌcoʊˈtɔɪʃənt]? I put it in the chat.

mathowie: Cototient [ˌcoʊˈtoʊsiənt].

jessamyn: "A positive integer that is above one and has more..." What?!

mathowie: How do you have all this math knowledge in the chamber almost instantaneously? It's amazing.

jessamyn: I'm really, really good at research, because...

mathowie: Is it just Wikipedia? Like...

jessamyn: Yes! It's weird. It makes...

mathowie: There's a Wikipedia entry for every number that's ever existed?

jessamyn: Yes!

mathowie: Oh, man.

cortex: Well, and there's independent sites that also do specifically math sequence and number facts stuff, too, that's

cortex: and it's sites that also do specifically sort of like math sequence and number facts, too, that's probably part of where the Wikipedia stuff's pulling from.

mathowie: Yeah, I mean.

jessamyn: But a lot of stuff is just being able to type quickly, read and analyze stuff quickly, and turn it into English quickly. I amazed somebody by understanding that ducks were cannibals and finding a good citation from the government of New South Wales. And they were like, "How do you do that?!" I'm like, "It's the sixth result on Google! All I did was copied and pasted it quickly." But I don't understand this cototient [ˌcoʊˈtɔɪʃənt] number at all.

mathowie: Is it a highlighted link on Wikipedia that would explain?

mathowie: Is it a highlighted link on Wikipedia that would explain what cototient [ˌcoʊˈtɔɪʃənt]...?

cortex: Well, it's-

jessamyn: Yeah, there's a whole page and it doesn't make any sense to me.

mathowie: Oh my god, they have "The Number 83 in Music" and it's, like, M83 and Frank Sinatra charted 83 times, like, this is so kooky that they-

jessamyn: Well, here's a thing I did not know: when you reach 83 in Judaism, you can celebrate a second Bar Mitzvah. Who knew?

mathowie: Dude, why not.

jessamyn: Josh, did you know that?

cortex: I did not know that.

mathowie: That would be a hell of a party, an 83 year old's Bar Mitzvah.

jessamyn: Don't you think?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Or Bat Mitzvah.

mathowie: That would be a hell of a party, an 83 year old's Bar Mitzvah.

jessamyn: Don't you think?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Or Bat Mitzvah.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: I should go bug my landlady about it. I don't think she's Jewish, but she is over 83!

mathowie: Wait, it's supposed to signify becoming an adult, right? What does it signify at 83? Going back to not an adult? Or a super adult? Are you like a mechwarrior adult that you assemble five other people?

jessamyn: Leeeeet's take a look. Apparently second Bar Mitzvah redirects directly to Bar Mitzvah.

mathowie: D'oh.

jessamyn: Okay!

jessamyn: Okay! 'Among some Jews, a man who has reached the age of 83 will customarily celebrate a second Bar Mitzvah under the logic that, in the Torah, it says a normal life-span is 70 years, so that an 83 year old can be considered 13 in a second lifetime. This practice has become increasingly uncommon.'

[laughter]

mathowie: Awesome.

jessamyn: 'Increasingly uncommon' as if it were ever common? But, uh-

mathowie: Never heard of it, yeah.

jessamyn: But here's a citation from J Weekly.

cortex: Maybe it's become proportionately less common as more people have actually lived to 83, and so instead of just being some shit you talked about that happened like maybe once every 30 years in your village-

jessamyn: I get it.

cortex: -it became a thing where like four or five times a year, you're like, 'So, uh, so, Heiman, you gonna have the second Bar Mitzvah?' And he's like, 'Are you fucking kidding me.' You know, and-

jessamyn: Oh, here's a thing that I learned, too! Speaking of Jews, did you know that, like, royal people got their babies circumcised, even though they're not

jessamyn: Jewish because it was like a class marker?

cortex: Like English royal babies?

jessamyn: Yeah, like people were all talking about the new royal baby, and about how it was an open question whether they were going to get him circumcised because they're not Jewish but like the royals used to get circumcised although...whatever. The princes aren't circumcised, but Prince Charles is, and like that's a thing.

mathowie: Huh.

jessamyn: It's like a class distinction, and I just learned about it on Metafilter, like, yesterday.

mathowie: I thought, like, most Europeans, like...

jessamyn: They don't! That's what's so interesting!

mathowie: And I also thought that they like had a problematic relationship with the Jewish people in general, going from country to country. Why would they-

jessamyn: Well...

mathowie: Why would royals be into it?

jessamyn: Let's see. 'The tradition of circumcision for British princes was initiated because Queen Victoria declared her belief that she was a descendant of King David, who was, of course, Jewish.' So it began in 1841 and it went to 1983.

jessamyn: When Diana was like, "This is some crazy. No." Thank you, Yahoo!Answers.

mathowie: No way. So the queen thought she was a descendant? Like, that's crazy.

jessamyn: Well, a lot of people still do that kind of stuff with genealogy.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: And I got that information, linked from Yahoo!Answers, from MohelJoel.com.

[laughter]
An eighth-generation mohel.

mathowie: The mohel with the mostest.

jessamyn: We should probably start talking about work, huh?

mathowie: Yeah, why not. We've covered-

cortex: (singing) And they'll be mohels, mohels... (spoken) That's right.

mathowie: We've covered our weekly circumcision talk.

jessamyn: But I am so fascinated! I mean, I had no idea, like, I feel like I understand this stuff, and then there's a whole, you know, hundred years of circumcision tradition that I didn't know anything about.

mathowie: I like the part where the queen just goes, like, "Yeah, like, I'm the son of God or something." That is so wacky.

jessamyn: Well, King David was a dude, but yeah, I mean, all sorts of people do all sorts of

jessamyn: stuff like that.

mathowie: Genealogy seems like bullshit, right? You have someone in your family that's way into it, I bet, right?

jessamyn: Yeah, and I'm like a medium into it person. Like, I'm interested in my sort of direct people, like people I have photographs of? But we don't- basically, and then it's like, 'And then we're back in Europe and we have no idea what happened.'

mathowie: I have, like, I'm not a fan of the genealogy just cause I'm not a big tradition guy, and I think, you know, most traditions should

mathowie: And I think, you know, most traditions should be put to rest, but

jessamyn: So your daughter doesn't do birthdays or anything?

mathowie: I'm just saying some things! It's just, I have an uncle, and my dad was obsessed with genealogy, and I was just thinking, like, it's so selective, right? Like, you think a family tree goes back and it contracts, but it actually expands, because you're picking up every double family that made a kid, so you can kind of spider out, like, in a wider path. So when my uncle says, 'Uh, yeah-

mathowie: 'Uh, yeah, this 15th cousin once removed was in the Civil War and was on the Plymouth Rock' and I'm just like, that's bullshit. Like, it has no-

jessamyn: Civil War was not that long ago.

cortex: Right.

jessamyn: First of all.

mathowie: Tracing us back to the Pilgrims is very selective. It's like one tiny branch, you know, that slides down some cousin's line. Maybe.

jessamyn: Well, and the crazy thing is that means you get things, like if you're a Daughter of the American Revolution, which is like, you know, your ancestors were in the American Revolution, you're eligible for like scholarships.

mathowie: What?

jessamyn: And all sorts of crazy stuff.

mathowie: But it's weird that, like- I know my great-grandma was a Russian Jew from Russia. Like, so...

jessamyn: Hey, my great-grandma was a Russian Jew from Russia, that's exciting!

mathowie: So, right, but when the-

jessamyn: Matt! Maybe we're related!

mathowie: Well, the same uncle goes, 'We go back to Plymouth Rock if you, like, totally go down the in-law route.' You know, every in-law alley- it's so far from what I am today, and it almost has no bearing.

jessamyn: Well, and it ignores all the inconvenient people who don't, you know, who aren't fancy people.

jessamyn: Basically.

mathowie: Right, right.

jessamyn: That's the part that I always found kind of obnoxious.

mathowie: Oh, right.

jessamyn: Like, 'One person did this crazy thing, and fuck all the rest of y'all.' And you're like, 'Those were all the rest of my relatives!'

mathowie: 'Nope. Peasants. Don't count.'

jessamyn: Right. Who cares.

mathowie: All right. Metafilter time. There was one cool job. If we'll just get it out of the way.

cortex: Just do it.

mathowie: On July 1st-

jessamyn: Wait, wait- okay. We have to make- Josh has to specifically have music to

mathowie: Oh, you want to do music?

cortex: Yeah, I've got a whole

mathowie: Oh, you want to do Music first?

cortex: I got a whole set of things. Do you want to do Music first? That's crazy!

jessamyn: Oh, no, no, no.

mathowie: We usually do it last.

jessamyn: I just wanted to make sure we were paying attention.

cortex: Yeah, no, we got it.

jessamyn: Usually we do it last because you've been looking them up while doing the podcast, cause I'm chatting you like, 'You better look some stuff up.'

mathowie: Wow.

cortex: No no no no, if I haven't looked them up, I uh, I won't even- I don't like the looking them up during the podcast, it's so distracting, it takes me out of the conversation thing. I either- I've done my homework or I haven't done.

jessamyn: Really?

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Oh, wow.

jessamyn: That's so interesting. We're so different. Unlike Matt and I, who are related.

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: Yes, exactly. It's the close relationship you have through your generational Jewish blood that ties you.

mathowie: That's true. I forgot that we put available people automatically, slap 'em up on a Job on the Jobs page. So here's a Jobs page--

jessamyn: Right, I was looking at these people, and I'm like, "Did they...?"

mathowie: Yeah, I was like, "Did they tag it?"

jessamyn: "Favorite it", right? (laughs)

mathowie: Like, when did we add voting? Like, why are these people I recognize on the sidebar?

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: And had forgot that we match up software, people who listed their

availability as software people, are tagged on the software jobs. So it was a software job in New York C--

jessamyn: That's very nice. By abulafa [ˈɑbʊˌlɑfɑ]. abulafa [ˈɑbʊˌlɑfɑ].

mathowie: abulafa in New York City, working at tinypass--

jessamyn: abulafa [əˈbʊləfə]?

mathowie: --which just looks sort of a paywall software, so, which, you know, is good and bad, but it's good in that creators don't have to carry tons of advertising. Looks like a really slick site, too, so pretty cool.

And it looks, sounds like a pretty low-level web development job. So, cool.

jessamyn: Great!

mathowie: Do you think we should--?

jessamyn: "You'll code full stack during the interview." What does that mean?

mathowie: What was that?

jessamyn: It says "Skills & Requirements: You'll code full stack during the interview."

mathowie: Oh, that means they might pitch you a question, like, "Oh hey, so we got this thing and we're going to add this feature, walk me through how we'd add that feature," and they expect you to be from, "Well, I think it should be a blue button on the page, and then also, this database table needs to be added, and then I'd write code to update that

database table with this flag," like, go all the way down the stack to the actual--

jessamyn: Oh, neat!

mathowie: Yeah, the actual data all the way to the UI.

jessamyn: Nice! Great. Thanks for explaining that.

mathowie: Which is, that's, not a lot of people know a little bit about every part of it, but yeah.

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: Yep.

jessamyn: Code full stack. Neat!

mathowie: Cool. So Projects, probably, next. (laughs)

cortex: Pr-ojects!

jessamyn: Oh my God, was Projects the gift that kept on giving.

mathowie: I only have one marked Project for the last--

cortex: Well, what's your Project?

jessamyn: Well, then, step aside!

mathowie: I know. Last month I had ten. I don't know what happened.

jessamyn: I have at least three, so why don't you go with yours first?

mathowie: Well, mine's just a continuation of last year's, last month's podcast, which was the RV blog that desjardins was asking about in Ask Metafilter is now a full-on Project, and check out the blog, and her adventures are beginning on the road.

jessamyn: Movin' Right Along is a great, great...

mathowie: Yep. I can't say those words without thinking of the Muppets.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Wait, wait, so they've got cats? In the RV, they're on the road with their cats.

cortex: Well, it'd be rude to have the cats outside of the RV when they're on the road. I mean, that's like Romneyesque.

jessamyn: Mosquitoes...

mathowie: It's fun. She talks about the low end, things that suck the most, and it's like "shower pressure," and I went, "Wow. That is borderline dealbreaker." You know, like, for the rest of your life you'll never have a high-pressure shower again. I don't know why, but it's such a luxury, it's nice to have.

jessamyn: Well, although, did you look at the picture of the shower? It's a nice-looking shower. And, you know, that's probably one of those you can just build in super-annoying pressure builder nonsense with it.

mathowie: Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty big inside.

jessamyn: Wow, that's a cool rig.

mathowie: She said she was going to write about how they handle mail. (chuckles) And I was dying to know. What do you do? Where does it go? Do you cancel everything? Like, because...

jessamyn: Well, because weren't you looking at that crazy thing that was up on

Potluck, what is that crazy website?

mathowie: Yeah, what was it?

jessamyn: There's the people that'll pick up your mail for you and then scan them?

mathowie: Oh, God, yes. (laughing) Yes. It's so... it's so ridiculous.

jessamyn: If you live in San Francisco. It's one of those things like Uber.

mathowie: It's called Outbox, because I was just laughing about this the other day with a friend.

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: I had something like PayMyBills.com in the year 2000, and all you do is tell all your mail people that you have a P.O. Box in Virginia or something, and that's them scanning it for you.

And it's weird. It shows up on my credit report that I lived in Richmond, Virginia once or something.

jessamyn: That's kinda awesome. This is the thing we're talking about, Josh, incidentally. outboxmail.com.

mathowie: Yeah. But Outbox is odd in that it's like, "No, you keep your address, we drive a Prius to your house three times a week and we get your mail and we scan it," and it sounds like the most--

jessamyn: And they charge you five dollars a month. Like, there's no way you can make money doing that.

mathowie: Yeah. And it's also

like, the most, I don't know, upper-crusty, kinda, "the peasants are reading your mail for you so you can check it three times a week." It's so weird. I don't know. I find the whole thing kinda creepy.

jessamyn: I thought it was a joke.

mathowie: Yeah, right, it does.

jessamyn: I thought it was an April Fools', getting-even-closer-to things-that-might-exist joke. Because I'm a person who would love that. Like, right now, I just realized, the tabs for my car registration are in a pile of mail in Vermont, and I'm in Massachusetts.

mathowie: Ohhh.

jessamyn: And my registration expires in three days. So

I can do a complicated thing where I call the post office and send a friend over and then the friend mails me the mail, or I can just be an outlaw and say the heck with it until I get back. But it's a risk, right? I would love to have my mail in some central location and have one of those little yellow things from that movie, Despicable Me, what do they call it?

mathowie: Oh, minions. (chuckles)

jessamyn: Yeah! Like, have an actual robot or something.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: A little monkey. Put my mail into the mail. But I feel like an asshole having a human do it.

mathowie: Oh, God.

jessamyn: Because who am I?

mathowie: The only reason I knew it was real is because I heard trusted people in San Francisco saying this is actually a great service. It looks ridiculous, but it's actually amazing. I went, "Really?" Like...

jessamyn: Well, and the thing that cracks me up is if you look at their mail, if you look at their website, nowhere does it say, "This is only for San Francisco."

mathowie: Yeah. I don't know...

jessamyn: I mean, until you get to the point where you sign up.

mathowie: I don't think it could possibly scale, ever. It's so crazy.

cortex: But see, it seems really, yeah. I mean, yeah. I don't...

jessamyn: They're not available in my neighborhood yet.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: I don't think they're available in my time. zone. My time zone!

mathowie: I mean, I watched the demo video, and the people in the demo video are kinda (laughing) stuck-up assholes.

jessamyn: Awww.

mathowie: All their personas are like, "I am a rich CEO with no time for stupid shit," like...

jessamyn: Like opening a letter.

mathowie: I know, like it's so hard. I mean, I know I only check my mail every few days and my mailman gets pissed, because we get batches of huge Kickstarter crap, and...

jessamyn: At the P.O. Box, or at home?

mathowie: No, at my normal home. Like, I just...

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: It's like a quarter-mile away, so it's a pain in the ass to go to the communal box way at the end of the street. Like, I have to ride a bike.

jessamyn: Oh, you don't have one at your house.

mathowie: No, no.

jessamyn: Oh, interesting. Okay.

mathowie: It's way more efficient to just hit a neighborhood in one location. But this is so, I don't know. It just seemed, eh. Whole thing reminds me of San Francisco's

incredible income disparity. It's disturbing as hell when you're there. Augh.

jessamyn: See, I have a P.O. Box, and they complain that I don't pick it up often enough, and I'm like, "That's why I pay money."

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: "Just hang on to it."

mathowie: I check it once every three months, the Metafilter P.O. Box, and sometimes I miss stuff, and it cracks me up that they sometimes have been have holding something for six months, and they're like, "Yeah, you might need a bigger box. We were holding so much stuff."

jessamyn: You're like, "Maybe!"

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Five bucks a month sounds right. (chuckles)

jessamyn: Although I got something delivered here in Massachusetts from eBay, and I wasn't going to be here for a week, but I was like, it's little, so it'll just stay in the mailbox. My mailman, actually--mail lady--let the package sit in the mailbox for five days, and then returned it?

mathowie: Whaat?

jessamyn: Just of their own initiative!

mathowie: Ohh. They should have done the little slip or something. That's weird.

jessamyn: I know. I know.

At any rate, desjardins and her husband have a great blog.

cortex: (laughs uproariously)

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Which I've now been able to read since we've been bitching about the mail.

mathowie: Welcome to our podcast. Tangents. (chuckles)

jessamyn: But yes, I'm looking forward to them talking about this. Because I, of course, want an RV. This is like my future dream.

mathowie: Yeah. It's cool.

jessamyn: But a little RV, because I'm a coward.

mathowie: It's cool that they're late-30s, early-40s. Because that's probably unheard of. I wonder if they even get to meet [??] at these RV parks

and stuff.

jessamyn: Well, I remember when I was traveling just in a van that had a bed built in the back of it and stuff, everybody's really, there's a lot of camaraderie in these places.

mathowie: Yeah. A young.

jessamyn: People were like, "Oh, look! You're a pair of young'uns, travelling together."

mathowie: (laughs) So Josh, I bet you want to tell us about Twitter Anagram Hunter.

cortex: Oh, you know I do.

jessamyn: What?

mathowie: This is crazy!

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: How did they build it?!

cortex: It's one of those things where the engineering on...

jessamyn: Okay, so it's by cmyr (spelling it out).

cortex: cmyr. (doing likewise)

jessamyn: Another username we can't pronounce.

cortex: Yes, and--

jessamyn: But I guess his name's Colin.

mathowie: It looks for a tweet, and it looks for a tweet using the exact same letters in the other tweet, and then puts them side-by-side. But how do you do that? Like, the Twitter firehose is like 5,000 a second.

jessamyn: Aaaah! This is amazing.

cortex: It's actually not that, it's not that hard in theory.

jessamyn: We're done. We're done.

cortex: It's just a good idea to do it, so you, I mean, the naïve way I would do it, and I haven't even tried to implement something like this, but with, you take every tweet that you suck off the firehose

and then you just make an entry for that string in essentially a hash that's using as the key--

mathowie: Oh, okay.

cortex: --the alphabetized letters.

jessamyn: Oh, you alphabetize it and then you just match it.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: I get it.

mathowie: Oh, and he--

cortex: And any tweet that falls into that bucket is another entry in that hash, and then you can look at those, and then the Tumblr that they have for this, they take the results from that and they look for the entertaining stuff and they post those in pairs on the Tumblr.

So I think they get a lot more results than show up on the Tumblr, but the Tumblr's for like the "Hey! These are the ones that are actually a little bit funny, too."

mathowie: Yeah, it's, I just felt like Lisa Simpson the first time I read this, you know, when she has to go to the smart school and they play the anagram and (laughing) she just, she just can only transpose an 's' or something.

cortex: You know, oh-- (squealy laugh)

mathowie: I was like, "What is going on?" Yeah, like, I mean, I wasn't even aware these were, you know...

cortex: Yep.

jessamyn: Right, right, right. It's very, very cool.

mathowie: And I'm going to trust the algorithm that these work--

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: --because my brain isn't even that sharp.

cortex: Well, it's interesting, when you look close--

jessamyn: Some of them are short and you can tell, yeah.

cortex: Yeah. And some of them, it sort of disregards punctuation but also disregards non-alphabetical characters, so sometimes it's not quite perfect because someone'll use 8 in l8r and then the other tweet won't have an 8 in it because it's just ignoring it. So yeah, there's little bits where it's imperfect because it gets the job done the way it is. But yeah, no, it's great. Now, that Lisa Simpson thing, I was just talking about that scene the other day, because I've

got a friend in town who's a big puzzler.

mathowie: Oh, God.

cortex: Like, she goes to puzzle conventions and all that. And we went to a game night with her and some friends who she knows in the area, but we sort of thought it was like game night, "Let's go play Agricola or whatever, let's bust out Arkham Horror and spend three hours chasing around Cthulu." But it turns out it was actually more like, "Hey, let's do some complicated metapuzzles."

jessamyn: Yes. Yes!

cortex: So me and Angela were sort of like, we were both like not... like, we were game for it, and we

had a nice enough time, but we were not remotely [??], because we don't sit around doing puzzles at all. It's just not the specific thing we spend time on, so (laughing) we're trying to sort of keep up with these people who are all super excited and hungry to do this puzzle adventure. And we're like, "Oh... oh, I think I might..." Because it's like you have to learn the mechanics of the puzzle in the first place.

jessamyn: And the puzzles become other puzzles--

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like, you have to solve puzzles to get to another puzzle level?

cortex: Yeah, exactly.

jessamyn: That's the difference between me playing Scrabble a couple times a week with Jim and going to a Scrabble club?

mathowie: Oh, wow.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Which I talked about before. Like, I was playing a guy from Nigeria who did not speak much English at all, and he mopped the floor with me because he knew every single word in the dictionary, and probably not any others.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: It was just amazing. It was a beatdown.

cortex: Yeah. So yeah, I was very much having that Lisa Simpson thing.

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

cortex: Where, yeah, I think she goes over to her new smart friend's house, and the dad's like, "Oh, yeah, let's play the Anagrams game."

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: "We come up with names of celebrities and then anagram, rearrange the letters to create a description of them." So it's like, "Here, here, honey, Alec Guinness," and she's like, "Hmm. 'Genuine class.'"

mathowie and jessamyn: (chuckle)

cortex: And it's like, "Okay, Lisa, your turn! Jeremy Irons," and she's like, "Uhhh..."

mathowie: Jeremy Iron?

cortex: "Jeremy's Iron"?

mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)

cortex: Yeah. It gives her a ball to play with. Yeah.

mathowie: I've been somewhere where someone said, "Oh, hey, you want to play a new card game?" And I was like, "Yeah,

right, it'll be this Carcassonne kind of thing," and it was like, "Well, I wrote it myself, so let's," and I was like, oh my god, lost.

cortex: Yeah, you just have to make sure you're operating at the same scope. Because I think, I mean, I think puzzling stuff is awesome, I just don't do it, and constructing games is more in the territory of what I have direct sympathy for, but at the same time, there's a big difference between, "Hey, let's play this game that's been really iterated and published and works really well," and "Hey, let's playtest this game that I've been working on," you know, it's like, euhhhh!

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Those are two different sort of things.

mathowie: I think I understood, Jessamyn, your MIT puzzle games once for five minutes.

jessamyn: To be fair, I did not understand many of them either, but I often have the ability to structure how to solve them and work with a team that made me useful.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: Because I couldn't do them half the time either. Other people were significantly better. But yeah, MIT--

mathowie: So you're not a great military mind on the battlefield, but you're good at running the radio and getting the troops where they need

to be, maybe? (chuckles)

jessamyn: Absolutely. Absolutely.

mathowie: Because I was reading up on your winning team stuff, I was like, oh my god, I don't have a clue how to answer any of these questions.

jessamyn: My team actually won two years after I stopped playing with them, to add insult to injury.

mathowie: Augh. (chuckles)

jessamyn: And they all got these crazy 3D laser-cut cube things with their names on them and I was like, dammit! And then I was like--

cortex: You laid the groundwork. You showed them the path forward.

And it took them awhile to, you know.

jessamyn: Well, we had this super-complex wiki that we put all of our solutions on, and I was the project manager who kept everything on the wiki so that we knew what was solved and what wasn't solved. Because a lot of times the people who have that single focus aren't good at big picture stuff. Not always.

mathowie: So Anagrams [??]--

jessamyn: Here's the awesome--okay.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Here's the best Project, I know it's a little early, but I think of

2013. I don't know if you guys saw Gnomeland?

mathowie: Yeah! I was trying to figure out what it was. (chuckles)

jessamyn: This is basically kaszeta, which is, I believe Rich Kaszeta is his name, and he is a guy I know in real life, and he had a co-worker that went away, and while they were out of the house they turned her entire house into Gnomeland, New Hampshire's Premier Gnome Destination, by making five

hundred four-inch-tall hand-painted concrete gnomes, and hiding them all over the property, and they put up a Gnomeland banner and a Gnomeland website. And she came home and was like, "What. What? What?!"

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Yeah. It's pretty awesome. I just wish there was an overview or a video of just walking through the house.

jessamyn: Well, there's this set of pictures...

mathowie: There isn't a good single page explaining it all. Like, that was the only thing I was...

jessamyn: Yeah. Well, he talks a little bit about it in the Metafilter post ThePinkSuperhero made that actually has some photographs of her showing up and whatever. They're making kind of a "how we did it, how other people could do it," page for later.

mathowie: Yeah. Oh, I thought it was the awesomest story, it's like, but what's in the Projects post explaining the whole thing isn't really on the site, I mean...

jessamyn: That's a good point. You have to...

mathowie: That was the only thing. I was just like, this is so awesome, the build-up on the Projects page, and then it's not in the...

jessamyn: They replaced all the photographs in the house with pictures of gnomes traveling to tourist landmarks.

cortex and mathowie: (laugh)

mathowie: It's pretty good.

jessamyn: But yeah, basically, there's a Flickr set, and it's got 600 pictures in it. So it's a little, there's a bunch of stuff in it, but you have to kind of dig for it.

mathowie: It kind of reminded me of the classic practical jokes you play on people at work, like covering up the whole desk in aluminum foil, or every individual item. But I was like, the site just doesn't quite have a photo of the entire office, it's like, here's little pieces of it.

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: But it's a really cool idea. (laugh) Hilarious idea.

jessamyn: Yes.

cortex: There's also a comment from user gnomeloaf that's just all-caps "FUCK YES".

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Well, and a lot of us who kind of knew this was going on before he put up the blog officially

made up gnome names and left comments, like, "Can't wait to come see this premier tourist destination in New Hampshire!" kind of thing.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Which was fun. But yeah, I agree, an overview thing would be an added bonus.

mathowie: Did you guys see--I lied, I forgot about this crazy, amazing crazy creative thing. It's Prosthetic Instruments for Dance and Music Performance, by

ianhattwick, and it looks like this person designed prosthetic instruments. So imagine a weird plastic...

jessamyn: Like something you wear, or that...?

mathowie: Yeah. But you wear like a wing that's made of clear plastic, and as it bends, it goes "brrrrooo!" It makes music. And they give them to professional dancers.

jessamyn: Ohhh!

mathowie: So they're moving their bodies around, and there's a little one-minute teaser video that just blows my mind, that's just like, I'm like, this stuff is amazing and

mathowie: incredible and how did you think of any of this? And it's all wedged into this one minute teaser video that shows like dancers running around doing it. It's fan - it's crazy!

cortex: Neat! Yeah, no, I'd seen the title of the project but I hadn't looked at it yet.

mathowie: Yeah I kinda assumed from the title, I was like (in a reading voice) "Oh what is this like dance dance given by..?" You know. "People different different disabilities? Or Something?" like and "How are they making music? What?" And then until I watched the video I was just like

mathowie: Oh it's like they made these instruments that are like attached to your body and just the movement of your body creates sound. It's like, it's fascinating.

jessamyn: Wow. That's neat!

mathowie: I mean it looks like really cerebral theater. (Laughing)

jessamyn: (Laughing)

mathowie: And experimental as hell. Like crazy. I thought that was a-mazing!

cortex: That is keen!

jessamyn: There was one more that I liked. History is a weapon has a great website where they put information about various historical things

jessamyn: and uh .. (mumbling) and basically following up on ask metafilter question. I was surprised that Ho Chi Minh's various messages to America couldn't be found online, so I made it.

mathowie: (Chuckles)

jessamyn: Here it is. And he thinks maybe, he or she, they think there are more of them. But it's interesting. It's a little summary of who Ho Chi Minh was for people who don't super know and the letters that he wrote to America...

jessamyn: .. on the span of his life and a website that is really easy to understand and interact with.

cortex: Neat!

jessamyn: Yeah! Very well done.

mathowie: History -

cortex: I have another that I - oh sorry.

mathowie: Oh I was just going to say history is a weapon dot com is sort of a nice, like uh, site with all of these. I think it's like a universal document viewer with various collections, kind of. And this is ..

jessamyn: Yeah. It's beautiful.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Beautiful. Very well done. Very easy to navigate around.

mathowie: It's cool.

cortex: Yeah come up on the site a few times, I think.

I liked ...

cortex: Jessamyn was going to mention this thing but, ah ...

jessamyn: Yes! This was my other one!

cortex: The Millers Crossing twenty years later thing that komara did which is just taking a locations - cause Miller's Crossing shop in New Orleans.

mathowie: Oh wow.

cortex: And they showed it back in 1989 and so they are like, "Hey! It's been ..."

jessamyn: This is the 80's podcast, totally.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Yeah totally (chuckles)

jessamyn: Was 89 a better year for everybody?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: It was a much better year for me.

cortex: Well if I have any memories of it at all -- so that makes it ..

jessamyn: (Laughing)

cortex: Like in 83, you know I was, I think the only thing I remember from 83 was

cortex: my brother being born. Like I was vaguely aware that that was occurring.

jessamyn: Wait. Zelda's dad?

cortex: Yeah. Yeah.

jessamyn: Good Lord.

cortex: I was four. He was zero.

jessamyn: I keep forgetting. Okay. Sorry. Go on.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: I never saw Miller's Crossing.

cortex: Anyway so Miller's Crossing. Miller's Crossing was a documentary about my brother being born in 1983

(Everyone Laughs)
[inaudible] took a bunch of stills sorta matched up from the same place and angle as just locations

cortex: in the film! And it's funny because like the film itself is a period piece so of course, even the locations in '89 were dressed up to look like they weren't 1989. But still

jessamyn: Right.

cortex: It's the same place and on either side of Katrina where that is relevant for the different parts of the location shoot -- but it's neat!

mathowie: Oh cool.

cortex: It's just one of those cool looking at it side-by-side looking at what's structurally the same, what's not over time. And ...

mathowie: I thought like, "Wow! How in the hell did he find all these locations?" But found the production notes

mathowie: page which actually named like half the locations.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Because some of them are famous. Like I've walked down two, three of these streets; I have similar photos. But some of them, there's so much action in the scene, you're like, 'Where would that be?' The one with the fire, you're like, 'There's so many just nondescript streets with tree tunnels.' You know?

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

mathowie: How would you shoot that? So there must have been hints.

cortex: That's cool.

jessamyn: Well, and it's cool looking at the trees, that are the same trees only bigger? Like, I don't know. I just thought it was cool.

jessamyn: But yeah, I love this one.

mathowie: Is this like their second movie?

jessamyn: Coen brothers?

mathowie: Yeah, like "Blood Simple," then- or wait, '88 or so was "Raising Arizona?" This must have been after that. For some reason I haven't seen this. I don't know why.

cortex: You should see it; it's good.

jessamyn: Wait, you haven't seen "Miller's Crossing?"

mathowie: No, and I don't know why I would have missed it.

jessamyn: Wow.

mathowie: Like I had seen their stuff from, like, I thought the mid-80s on.

jessamyn: Yeah. Basically, "Blood Simple," then "Crime Wave," "Raising Arizona," "Miller's Crossing" was their fourth.

mathowie: Okay. I think I s---

jessamyn: Their fourth movie.

mathowie: I started at Raising Arizona and skipped. Dang! All right.

jessamyn: And then you would have had Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo .. Yeah I haven't seen The Naked Man. I haven't seen Crime Wave.

mathowie: Fargo was my first date movie with my wife. (Laughs)

jessamyn: Are you serious?

mathowie: Yeah and it's a perfect litmus test, I think, for a date. You know? You know of someone is going to run screaming out of the theater

jessamyn: (Laughs)

mathowie: Or say, "Oh --"

jessamyn: During the wood chipper scene

mathowie: run screaming out of the theater, or say, "Oh-

jessamyn: During the wood chipper scene.

mathowie: Yeah, yeah, or, "I didn't get it," or "That wasn't compelling," like- it was pretty good. It was shocking to be on a first date to that movie.

jessamyn: Sure.

mathowie: We had both heard nothing about it. And it was, like, this weird special like one month before it was going to be released one night screening, and we were like, 'Yeah, guys from "Raising Arizona," this'll be funny.'

jessamyn: Oh, god.

[laughter]

mathowie: It was amazing.

jessamyn: That's great.

mathowie: Any other Projects?

jessamyn: Great story. I think that was the bulk of my- let me double check, because I voted for a whole bunch of them.

jessamyn: this month, so I just want to make sure. La la la- nope. I think that's it for me.

mathowie: All right. Uh, I guess Metafilter proper?

cortex: (aristocratic) Metafilter proper.

jessamyn: (singing) Metafilter proper.

mathowie: I've got a thousand and one, god, trying to pick my favorites.

jessamyn: When was the last podcast? When did we record the last podcast?

mathowie: It was right around the 1st?

cortex: The 1st? Yeah.

mathowie: So anything-

jessamyn: Recorded on the 1st, okay.

mathowie: Anything from July counts, pretty much.

mathowie: Uh, I'll just say, just one from a couple days ago of the robotic gymnasts. Did you watch it?

jessamyn: No. No.

mathowie: This is literally a guy in his basement building robots for no reason, for the fun of it, and then he goes through like 16 different robot prototypes and the 16th one, all it does is jump up onto a bar, so it's like a single bar, and then it can do the, like, the leg motions to make yourself kind of

mathowie: do that, where your whole body's going around the bar. And then it-

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

mathowie: And then it gets speed, it gets speed, and it does a dismount. It does a quadruple back flip to a perfect landing, and it's awesome. But then the guy's YouTube channel shows like-

jessamyn: I'm now just going to watch this while you're talking about it.

mathowie: Yeah, and the YouTube channel shows, and I'll put it in the thread, the YouTube channel shows every failure that led up to this, you know, but when it works. The first link in that post? It's amazing.

mathowie: the first link in that post? It's a-mazing because just, "Fuck Yeah!" And it's just such a rough robot. It's just going ker-kunk, ker-kunk and like that's enough movement to get movement. Ah. It's amazing.

cortex: This guy needs a high speed camera.

mathowie: Yeah, yeah. It keeps slowing down.

jessamyn: Great! Get that guy a GoPro!

mathowie: Lousy video. Or yeah, shoot at a higher frame rate.

jessamyn: Which reminds me.. other videos.. there's a lot that I of course can remember in the last three days, but I don't know if you guys would have cared about or would have seen

jessamyn: this ridiculous video movie? But it's basically three French guys in spiky heels dance to a Spice Girls medley?

cortex: (Laughing) I didn't actually watch it. I was pleased enough just by the description. I was like, "Okay! That sounds great!"

jessamyn: Well, it's fun and it's specifically kind of interesting because it's - whatever. It's, you know, sexy guys dancing around, uh, but it's also.. there's lots and lots of jump cuts and I think the reason there's

jessamyn: There's lots and lots of jumpcuts, and I think the reason there's all these jumpcuts is because they fall down constantly, although I haven't looked to see.

mathowie: Oh, because of the heels?

jessamyn: Yeah! Because- yeah.

mathowie: The heels are crazy.

jessamyn: Yes, the heels are totally crazy. Cause there was the other post, I'm not sure if I can find it, you know that "good girl" video with all the, uh...

mathowie: The actual one?

jessamyn: Sorry, I'm typing.

mathowie: The more detailed?

jessamyn: Yeah, (singing) "good girl, you know you want it, and got a[?]..."

jessamyn: Well, there's a female version of that that's actually quite good, which of course I'm never, never going to be able to find. Searching for "good boy" on Metafilter is impossible.

mathowie: Of course I was thinking of the "Single Ladies" with Justin Timberlake that you posted.

jessamyn: I linked to that in the thread!

mathowie: So great.

jessamyn: But basically there's a female version of that video which is also men in heels dancing around. So it was a very good month if what you liked

jessamyn: to watch on the Internet is men in heels dancing around.

mathowie: Here it is. Just go to Google and search for, you know, "gender swap Blurred Lines Metafilter."

jessamyn: You're seriously telling me how to use Google.

mathowie: I'm telling you, barely- well, you weren't telling yourself, so. Oh, I'm sorry.

jessamyn: I didn't know it's called "Blurred Lines." How did you know that? How would I have known that?

mathowie: It's come up a bunch. I don't know how I would know specifically, I just happened to see a few discussions of it, so...

jessamyn: (singing) "Blurred lines, you know you da da, da da da da dah..."

mathowie: It's a great example of a song that just as pop noise, it's fantastic. It's a great stupid little-

jessamyn: Just don't listen to it! At all!

mathowie: Semantically, like- incredibly douchey, even like, and it's interesting, cause I've seen the defense come up a couple times, Klangston for example has made the defense that, you know, it's not as douchey as people may assume because in fact it seems to be essentially-

jessamyn: And I agree.

cortex: What?

mathowie: -romantic agency. But you know it's like-

jessamyn: I agree with that.

cortex: What?

mathowie: if you guys are gonna [?], 'I'm gonna narrowly grant the shit out of your agency with my dick,' you know? It's like, 'Eh, you're still....

mathowie: kind of sound like you're a horrible fucking creepy jerk.'

cortex: Wait, yeah, wait, didn't you just say, "Blurred lines, you know you want it?" Or something like that?

jessamyn: Yeah, but you're allowed to want it; you're allowed to be a lady and want it.

cortex: Yeah, but to tell someone, "You know you want it?"

jessamyn: Oh, I see what you're saying.

cortex: That's creepy.

mathowie: It's all very- it's all very complicated, it's-

jessamyn: I find that there's a lot of pop music that's kind of like that. All the, like, 'Oh, she didn't know she was pretty til I told her she was pretty, so rah-la-la.'

mathowie: That's every pop video with the five boy bands?

mathowie: Five guys?

jessamyn: Oh God. One Direction.

mathowie: All of them.

jessamyn: They're the worst.

mathowie: Like even back to kid -- New Kids On The Block their videos would be like, "Oh. Hey girl." (Laughing) with the ponytail and the glasses? Take them off. "Gasp! You are beautiful!" Like that was the premise of pretty much every video I think they ever did.

jessamyn: Yeah so the discussion in both of those threads was just kind of fun and interesting. You know? You can kind of appreciate them without the sort of unaccompanying like her derfery

mathowie: (Chuckles)

jessamyn: that often shows up in

jessamyn: some like us.

mathowie: I'm just surprised someone would sing a song like that in 2013 seems kinda kooky.

jessamyn: You know? Do you not listen to much Little Wayne anymore?

mathowie: Not much.

jessamyn: Like I feel like there is like a bifurcation of like music you hear on the radio and then music that they can just barely play on the radio because (in a snooty tone) "it's disgusting" and a lot of people who just listen to kinda mainstream stuff don't even know that stuff exists anymore? But it definitely exists and there's a lot of it

mathowie: Well I listen to a lot of

jessamyn: Little Wayne is gross.

mathowie: I listen to a lot of - I listen to like Hood Internet. Mixes. You know? And it's pretty much all

jessamyn: Sure!

mathowie: all the most popular hip hop of the day (Laughing) and half the lyrics are like, "Holy shit. People listen to this all day?" Because just about like fucking bitches and crazy shit like that and like whatever. Life is is pimp? Like ugh.

jessamyn: The pimping thing is the part I think that I have the most issue with because that's a definite, yeah. Lack of - lack of agency problematic

jessamyn: because that's a definite, yeah, lack, lack of agency, problematic blar de blar de blar stuff.

mathowie: God, filthylightthief was on a streak this month. Did you see the 83 year old grandma drummer? Sixty-three year old.

cortex: Sixty-three.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: I was gonna say, she can get a Bat Mitzvah!

[laughter]

mathowie: "Get a new set of drums!"

jessamyn: No, I didn't, tell me.

cortex: It only mentioned the dudes in that Wikipedia article, so.

jessamyn: Oh yeah, that's a good point.

mathowie: But there was a cool post about a mysterious elderly woman would show up at like basically a Guitar Center- oh, a drum shop in Wisconsin and just rip the drums.

mathowie: play Wipe Out, and then walk out. It took like six months before they stopped her and realized she had been a drummer since she was 16 and, yeah, she was in rock bands.

jessamyn: But she would just sort of come in and...?

mathowie: Yeah, there's just some shaky iPhone video of her, like, "duhduhduhduhduh," going through like a whole set.

cortex: Come in every once in a while and, you know, play drums for a few minutes.

mathowie: It's pretty cool. Very cool.

cortex: Which-

jessamyn: The thing that I just saw, which- oh, sorry, Josh.

cortex: No, no, no no, go on.

jessamyn: Well, I was moving on.

cortex: Yes, go on. Proceed.

jessamyn: It was just a terrible joke you were going to show us or something you thought the better of?

cortex: Yeah, it wasn't even that; if it was that, I would go ahead and lay it on you, but it was like-

mathowie: Well, let's workshop it!

cortex: a half-formed thought.

mathowie: Let's workshop it. Okay, we've got Social Security, we can make jokes about that.

jessamyn: Stop it! Stop, stop, stop.

cortex: Social Security distortion.

jessamyn: Matt! Matt!

mathowie: Yeah? Yeah?

[laughter]
The geriatric monkeys? Uh...

jessamyn: Well, speaking of bad taste, here

jessamyn: was a post that I did not like even having to watch for my job.

mathowie: Why are you listing this? Yeah, I turned it off.

jessamyn: Well, here's, but here's what happened. So it's scientifically accurate DuckTales. DuckTales is...what? Can you guys help me out here?

mathowie: It's Disney 90s after school...

cortex: Yeah, Disney cartoon starring Scrooge McDuck and Huey, Dewey and Louie and Donald sometimes, and also a number of-

jessamyn: Oh, seriously, that's really what it is? Okay.

cortex: Yeah, yeah.

jessamyn: And so

cortex: And the title was post [?]

mathowie: And there's a whole- the funny part is, I know, I mean, it was too young for me, cause I think it was an after school cartoon from the 90s and I was already in college-

jessamyn: Yeah, yeah.

mathowie: But like I've heard 25 year olds have Duckaverse? Like, what is canon and not? Like, did Scrooge- apparently, did DuckTales exist in like 1940, same as Donald Duck movies, like everything actually exists in a Duckaverse.

cortex: Well, it's also, it's trickier still, because there were plenty of like Duck family comics before DuckTales was ever a show.

mathowie: Right.

cortex: Like Angela's got a bunch of like Duck family comics before DuckTales was ever a show.

mathowie: Right.

cortex: Angela's got a bunch of like Scrooge McDuck comics that she had as a kid. They're like, you know, these things go back decades, so, even before DuckTales became sort of canonized as a thing.

jessamyn: I knew it as a comic book.

cortex: Yeah. And there was a-

jessamyn: And so so-

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: So-

jessamyn: And so here's the thing. The video's gross, and it's all like rapey and full of poop jokes and-

mathowie: The whole thing is about what, like, a duck has a anus that's also like a vagina or something? That's the entire premise?

jessamyn: Well, that's a cloaca, that's what- birds have those.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And echidnas.

mathowie: So that's where the video starts.

jessamyn: So the duck's got like a corkscrew penis, but then they like projectile shit on everything, and it's gross. But like you can see why it's interesting. It just wasn't my thing? But the thing that was cool about the thread is, the writer and vocalist of the piece is now on Metafilter, or was on Matefilter already, and talked about how, you know, the stuff gets on Fox, and

jessamyn: linked to one about Spiderman, scientifically accurate Spiderman, which has got to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen. So. Scientifically accurate DuckTales, not really my thing, little rapey. Scientifically accurate Spiderman? Where his dick falls off and like he's got eight eyes and he's covered in hair? Really, really funny. So I-

mathowie: That's actual like spider venom symptoms?

jessamyn: No. No, like, I don't know. That's how spider penises work. I don't know.

mathowie: Oh, oh, as if he was a real

mathowie: spider. Okay. I thought they were gonna go with the whole-

jessamyn: Scientifically accurate.

mathowie: I thought the origin story of Spiderman is he's bit by a spider or something? I don't...

jessamyn: Yeah, bit by a radioactive spider, but, so-

mathowie: Right, I thought they would go that way, like his hair falls out and he actually dies.

cortex: I feel like, see, I thought I had seen some scientifically accurate duck thing that was like...I may just be like completely inventing this out of nowhere, like misremembering something, but I thought I saw one that was more like.

cortex: more like sort of documentary footage rather than weird animation but with the same general idea, and I'm wondering if this was the. I don't know, I'm so confused. I've gotta do some research, but when I saw someone saying something about this post somewhere, and I saw, you know, I think I saw your email to someone saying, "Uh, can we go NSFW on this thing about DuckTales? It's grossing me out." "Oh, yeah, it's gross anyone would want to watch that."

jessamyn: It was super gross.

cortex: But I think I was thinking of something that I obviously did apparently get linked in to

cortex: the thread shortly thereafter by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabbadi Champion '94, he's got the word "horrible" in his comment, is the other horrible DuckTales related video that I assumed you guys were talking about, that's just disturbing in its own completely different way, but also sort of like terrible and weird.

jessamyn: And now that I've gone and spent more time on the Internet, here's Skepchick talking about how his dick doesn't fall off at all, it's just funny.

jessamyn: for the video.

cortex: Ah.

mathowie: Hmm.

jessamyn: Which is good, I guess, because I thought it was funny for a whole bunch of things that weren't true. This is you know by somebody who's actually got a PhD. in entomology talking about how scientifically accurate Spiderman isn't actually even Spiderman. Isn't even actually scientifically accurate. But it is really funny, so.

[laughter]
So.

mathowie: So, DuckTales.

cortex: That was pretty great.

jessamyn: It was just a thing I enjoyed.

jessamyn: about Metafilter. And I was happy that we had the lady who made it around. Just because she seemed like-

mathowie: Yeah, that's awesome.

jessamyn: She seemed like a nice person and was pretty game that our nerdy nitpickers were like, "BUT!" She was fine.

mathowie: I didn't, uh-

jessamyn: I appreciated that.

mathowie: I like this thread about the Pixar theory. Oh, wait, no, I was thinking of something else. The Pixar theory is funny and amazing.

cortex: Just all the crazy cross references they snuck in as little-

mathowie: Yeah, that basically, that Pixar

mathowie: is- that the storyline of all Pixar movies exists in a single timeline, like "Brave" happened first, and then, like, and that there are callbacks to all the other- it's a really goofball, hilarious thing. I was thinking of the thing about the movie, God, I had clicked on the wrong favorite. The thing about movies; it was like a Slate article about why movies are all the same, because they're all following this formula from like

mathowie: 198, five years ago, God, where did it go? I guess I didn't favorite it. It's something that, once you hear it, you can't unhear it? Which is like that, uh, there was this book written by this famous, well, somewhat famous popular screenwriter who just broke down, like, "This is how you should"- to the page, you know, to the minute.

jessamyn: How do write a narrative for the movies?

mathowie: Yeah, and it wasn't just there should be Act One, there should be Act Two, there should be Act Three. It was like, "At the end of Act One, this needs to happen. Halfway through

mathowie: Act Two this needs to happen." And I realized, and I'd been seeing a lot of movies lately, all the summer blockbusters, and I realized I was getting tired of the trope that, like, 18 minutes before the end of the movie, there is no hope of anything going right. The whole thing is sunk. It's over. We're never gonna do it. We've failed. We have failed. And then they are miraculously, you know-

jessamyn: Pull it out of their butt.

mathowie: Turn a corner. Like, I was like, "God, that it's always darkest before the dawn theme is just getting fucking old."

mathowie: And then once you read it- I gotta find the post! Once you read it-

jessamyn: You're like, "No surprise. It's always like that."

mathowie: Yeah, and they say, "At 78 minutes, you have to- you know, that's why 'Monsters University' is like this, that's why 'Fast and The Furious' is like this, that's why." And they go through every movie. I'm like, "Oh, yeah!"

cortex: I kinda wanna say yeah, I mean, not to discount the scholarship or whatever the writing was involved in that, I don't know, maybe this is just me doing a lot of paying close attention to like movies as

cortex: structural entities, but yeah, I mean, that's- ther are some very predictable structural tropes if you're not, if you're not trying to do something particularly weird or specifically, you know, outside of the genre confines of a-

jessamyn: The no happy ending stuff.

cortex: Yeah, I mean, it's- yeah, this is like, yeah, this stuff is effective, and so you emulate it, and you know, I mean, some of this goes back to just basic three-act structures, and yeah. So yeah. I guess this.

it does not surprise me to hear that someone put together a good collection of examples of this, because, geez, they're everywhere.

mathowie: Yeah. I still cannot find it. It was a Slate article... eh, go on.

jessamyn: Slate?!

mathowie: I think it was Slate.

jessamyn: The worst.

mathowie: (chuckles) But if you read this article, yeah, it'll probably ruin your movie-going for the next few years.

cortex: (laughs) You just--

jessamyn: You know what ruined my movie-going for the next few years? Hollywood ruined it.

cortex: (laughs) Hoy-oh!

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: All I want is two ladies that talk to each other.

mathowie: Yeah. Oh, how about this, Jessamyn? Would you like to see a comic book, a movie based on a comic book? Because we've got fifty. Augh, I cannot believe the comic book movies.

jessamyn: I actually do like comic book movies, because it makes them fake.

mathowie: (chuckles) Yeah.

jessamyn: You know. See, now I'm looking it up too. Let's talk about something else while you look that up.

cortex: Segue! Let's talk about a video of someone addressing the question of women and comics.

jessamyn: Oh, I just watched this last night!

cortex: And geek stuff. Yeah, this is--

mathowie: Oh, Doubleclicks.

cortex: Nothing to Prove, by The Doubleclicks. Who I totally know!

jessamyn: (with surprised delight) Do you?!

cortex: Yeah, I said this in the thread, but Aubrey--

jessamyn: They're totally talented! I just saw this movie. Their little video.

mathowie: I know friends of friends of them. Friends of theirs.

cortex: Yeah, they're great! I was in a band with one of them for a while.

mathowie: Wow!

jessamyn: Are they Portlanders?

cortex: Yeah, yeah.

mathowie: Are they [??]?

cortex: Yeah!

Well, I mean, Aubrey for sure is, and Angela I assume is as well, because, I mean, they're playing in the band and whatnot. But I don't know actually if they will, but Aubrey I've been friends for a while with them, and then they started doing this thing, and it's great, and I've seen them live a couple times, and they're super fucking funny, so.

mathowie: And they do, so I have some friends in L.A. that are friends with them and come up here all the time to see them play, and they did Trek in the Park or something last summer?

cortex: Yeah! And I think they might be doing a little opening thing for them again this summer, too. Hoping, anyway. That'll be awesome.

mathowie: Well, this is a really cool video I watched the other day, because them and all their friends were hyping it, and it's great because there's a stupid trope, and it's actually in Portlandia, the first season, where they make fun of fake geek girls. Like, "Ohh, you just saw a comic book movie, that doesn't make you a geek," or "You only played a few video games, that doesn't make you a total nerd. I'm a real nerd." Like, asking...

jessamyn: I kind of missed this when it happened, but what are people alleging that these fake geek girls get

out of this?

mathowie: The allegation is--

cortex: You know, attention and positive reinforcement that they haven't earned through actual investment in the hobby to which they are...

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: But, like, from who? Geek guys?

cortex: Yeah, I guess.

mathowie: I guess?

cortex: I don't know. It's...

mathowie: Yeah. It's really--

jessamyn: Really? That's your best shot, girls?

mathowie: I know, it's low-stakes.

jessamyn: It's totally not happening, right? Like, it's just a made-up, it doesn't... it's not true, right?

cortex: It's just weird shitty poorly socialized--

mathowie: Nerds.

cortex: --territory-staking. It's people not doing a very good job of thinking through their discomfort with having something that they

have a claim to, feeling like someone else is getting in on it or something? I don't know. I mean, I think it mostly just comes down to poor social navigation and it's just manifesting in a systemic ugly way.

mathowie: I mean, some of it's--

jessamyn: But like, people who are alleging that this happens--

mathowie: Misogyny. (laughs)

jessamyn: Like, this isn't actually a social phenomenon that other people acknowledge, right? This is just infighting among nerds?

mathowie: Mostly, yeah. I mean, I think the thing is that people think it's cool, kind of cool, to be nerdy about stuff now, and

nerds used to get beat up, so now they're kind of pissed off that a good-looking chick claims to be a nerd, so they...

jessamyn: Oh, I get it, I get it. So the whole thing is, they act like people are--

mathowie: So, yeah, they're like, "You haven't struggled like we struggled, and you weren't there in '92 reading the worst X-Men series of all time like I was," like... so, this song--

jessamyn: Being a social misfit.

mathowie: Yeah, this song basically jokes about how women don't have to prove their geek status or cred to get the geek status or cred.

jessamyn: Yeah, and there's a whole, there's a bunch of women, young girls, and then there's some dudes that you know, like Adam Savage and jscalzi and... I kind of felt like I was supposed to know more of the people in it than I did?

mathowie: (chuckles) Some of them were just sent in from random people that were rocket scientists.

cortex: Yeah, it was largely just, you know, I think random people being like, oh, yeah, we'll do that. Little three-second thing with a sign for those two. It wasn't necessarily star-studded.

mathowie: Yeah. Famous people.

jessamyn: I felt like some of them were famous, and I only recognized a couple. But at any rate, it was badass and I liked it and the thread was nice, I thought, right?

mathowie: They played at Comic-Con, and I almost went to go see them, because that was one of the free nights I had, I could have went and seen them. But I heard this was kind of the theme of Comic-Con this year, was like, "Don't be a jerk to chicks," was this running theme through lots of presentations and events and stuff, which is--

jessamyn: Neat if true.

mathowie: Cool.

jessamyn: I would like to hear. Did you go to any Comic-Con stuff? I know you were down in San Diego kind of seeing if

there was stuff.

mathowie: No. Yeah, no. Every year I'm there for a family member's birthday, and it always happens during Comic-Con--

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: So I'm there every year, but I've never had a ticket, and everything was happening at night when there was birthday dinners I had to go to, so it would have been like, I go to a 10:30 concert or something, get home at 1 in the morning while my family sleeps, which was a little weird. So I never ended up doing anything. I just met up with some people for lunch, but that was about it. I think next year I'll actually try and get a pass.

jessamyn: I was trying to figure out if the thread turned into one guy arguing with everybody.

cortex: (laughs) In bits and pieces.

jessamyn: And... sure enough!

mathowie: Drink! Everyone takes a drink.

cortex: There was the... (laughs) Oh, I did. I did.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: The collective Internet has to take a drink.

cortex: Yeah, no, there was some of that. But it went okay, even though. It didn't turn into crazy whackadoo stuff, it was just more like, "Eh, yeah, but your point is kinda off the point, because you're kinda..."

jessamyn: Or it's your point, but now you leave it alone.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Because there's ten other people trying to talk about something else.

cortex: Exactly. So it wasn't bad. It wasn't some amazing mecca of

no forehead-furrowing, but still.

jessamyn: Yeah! And I did get to actually, I saw the video last night and was happy with it. It made me happy. It made me smile. You know, I appreciate that. As did (with increasing excitement) Giant Concrete Arrows That Point Your Way Across America!

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

jessamyn: This was the best post by Confess, Fletch. Just basically saying back when air mail first got started and people really kinda didn't know how to

do this stuff, there were these giant concrete arrows that were sort of created on the transcontinental airmail route, and some of them are still around today! The end.

mathowie: Yeah, that's awesome.

cortex: I kind of expected them to be a little bit bigger based on that description.

mathowie: I know. They're kinda smallish.

cortex: I'm [??] the link here, and it's like, I don't know, maybe six feet on a side for the triangle and the arrowhead.

mathowie: It's probably like pieces of sidewalk, kind of, that were poured?

jessamyn: I think it's a little bigger than that. I think they're twenty, thirty feet.

mathowie: Well, there's a car.

cortex: Yeah, I guess. Yeah, it might just be... yeah, I might be guessing wrong on the perspective. But I don't know, I guess I was imagining like five hundred feet wide or something.

jessamyn: And so people were like, how come... people were like "How come you can't see them?" and so other people were kind of digging them up, like, "Here's one!"

mathowie: Wow.

jessamyn: And it's just one of those neat things about America that you wouldn't have known was there.

mathowie: Oh, I'm in the wrong map mode, how do I change it? Ew, Maps, I hate you, Google! What?!

jessamyn: I didn't... when they said, "Jessamyn, would you like to try new Maps?" I was like, "We've been here before. No!"

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: "No, I totally don't. Thank you."

mathowie: "I never do. Stop asking me." Augh. It totally doesn't work in new Maps, of course.

jessamyn: But I'm surprised somebody didn't make a thing.

mathowie: Well, yeah, how would someone even start to do this research? I'd think maybe they're flying

over something and were like, "What the hell was that?" and then they...

jessamyn: Yeah. Or some of them are places you can drive to, it looks like?

mathowie: It's pretty cool.

jessamyn: But yeah, so, and somebody pointed out, adamg pointed out that in Roxbury, Massachusetts, there's a little rotary--you know, like a traffic circle--near Logan Airport, and back in the day when Logan was a teeny airport, somebody planted shrubs that formed an 8 and pointed to the airport

and it's actually still there!

cortex: Huh.

jessamyn: Which was my favorite comment, other than my own comment, which just told a funny joke.

So I loved it. I loved that post. The post was what Metafilter's about, as far as I'm concerned, and thank you, Confess, Fletch, it was great. I enjoyed it, the conversation was fun.

mathowie: I loved this post by Miko about pen drumming on a desk, I mean, everyone's done that as a kid in middle school or whatever,

jessamyn: Whoaaaa.

mathowie: --and maybe in high school, in college, you met someone that could do that 360 spin with the pin on top of their first finger and they could do that--

jessamyn: That's how I think you can say that you have geek cred.

mathowie: Right. (chuckles)

jessamyn: If you know how to do that thing, if you just go up to a random person--whoa, that's fricking loud. Okay.

mathowie: Yeah. If you watch some of the videos, this is basically someone who is a expert percussionist with just desks and a pen, a ballpoint pen.

Like, just amazing sounds and rhythms and beats. And it's so far beyond just (laughs) tapping your pen on a desk, which we all did at one time.

jessamyn: Constantly. Right, right, right.

mathowie: Yeah. It's pretty cool.

jessamyn: Wow. That's fun! That's really fun. And this is a really intensive, well-put-together post.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Would you say the pen is ultimate?

mathowie: Ohhh. Mightier than the sword.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Did you hear that buzzing sound? You know, you see here, Josh, [??] hear this annoying mosquito noise in my ear.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Do you smell toast, or are you having a stroke?

jessamyn and cortex: (laugh)

mathowie: There was another great post, Six Months in the Merchant Marines, the other day, I don't know why, I just chilled out because I saw some blogs, his is pretty good, it's like a 25-, 30-minute video of a totally random dude who just wanted to go figure out how to get on those container ships and see the world, and so he takes a six-month

contract, and I guess he had been on little boats here and there in his life, so he easily got a merchant marine license, is what you need, and then you can just basically go to work on these ships.

jessamyn: Oh, and he made a little movie about it!

mathowie: Yeah, and the movie was shot entirely--

jessamyn: I didn't see this post at all.

mathowie: Yeah, the movie was shot entirely with a tiny Canon, you know, SureShot, one of those little 300-dollar Canons, and it's like, you know, he had these romantic notions, and he explains what the merchant marines mean, it's not really like

a wing of the military, it's more like--

jessamyn: They're not Marines.

mathowie: Yeah. It's more like a union of workers that can work on ships, that proves you have a designation that you can do this. But he goes into it slightly romantically, like, go and see the world, realizes it's kind of drudgery, but then all the five guys or six guys that he works with are all great, and how he actually liked the camaraderie, even though he gets essentially one hour off work a day.

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

mathowie: He has to sit in the control tower and just watch for problems from midnight to 8 a.m. and then I think 8 to noon he was scrubbing the ship and then 2 to 8 p.m. he's working moving, he would constantly tighten things, the containers, the straps, and then you're sanding and painting the ship constantly because you're fighting rust.

jessamyn: Right, because the sea just eats things, yeah.

mathowie: Yeah, and then you sleep for eight hours, and it's like literally--oh, he's a painter, too, and so he had like one hour a day to paint and relax. And so--

jessamyn: Well, because then you have to go to your bunk and go the hell to sleep, right?

mathowie: Right, yeah.

jessamyn: Is it one of those boats where you share a bed with the two other guys because nobody's in it for more than eight hours?

mathowie: Yeah. I don't remember if he even had his own space. Yeah, he might have been sharing the bunk, too, like twelve hours a day it's his and twelve hours a day it's someone else's. But his watercolors are beautiful, although they turned into just scenes from the

ship, which he didn't want to do at first. (chuckles) He thought--he thought--I mean, I think in the first five minutes, he narrates the whole thing, so he's like, everything I'm thinking is all these shots of the water. It's just a nice little 20-minute video on, you know, if you've ever dreamed of the whole container ship thing, this is a good insider view in understanding what's going on.

jessamyn: Nice!

mathowie: Because I have some friends, like my wife's a professor, and another professor, they take

famous sabbaticals every few years. And this family, this professor's family, they took a semester at sea, and they basically ride on a container ship, they don't have to work on a container ship, they ride on it around the world, basically, for six months, and then get dropped back off where they started. And it was like, he was saying that they didn't really interact with the workers, you know, because there's like a dozen dudes that run the ship, and they don't really have time to talk to you or hang out,
and that, you know, you're just sort of a passenger on this thing, and it's kind of weird, but when they get to land, you know, you get a day or two in each port and stuff. So, yeah. This was pretty cool.

jessamyn: Neat!

cortex: Nice.

mathowie: A nice way to spend 20 minutes.

jessamyn: I--sorry, who was that by? Monsieur Caution.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Is that some joke that I don't get?

mathowie: I don't know. It's just overly fancy.

jessamyn: (very French accent-y whisper) Monsieur Caution.

cortex: He's the nemesis of Carlos Danger, presumably.

mathowie: (low-pitched buzz-rumble)

jessamyn: Good Lord. Good Lord.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Well, that--!

cortex: I didn't even know that was all going on, because I just thought people were deciding to make Anthony Weiner jokes again.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: It took me like two days to realize, oh, he must have actually gotten caught again doing something, and...

jessamyn: Well, and he's right, is the big deal.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: And that's been on the Daily Show and those people are making a lot out of it.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: I haven't seen any of the John Oliver Daily Shows. Are they any good? Are they good?

jessamyn: He is very, very good. Like, his style is a little bit different than Jon Stewart's, and he's a little bit more in your face, which is kind of funny, and especially with the royal baby.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Like, he has just been on fire, really, really good. Like, I catch up with them on DVR days later.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: But you should check them out. Louis CK was on just a couple days ago.

mathowie: Ooh, neat.

jessamyn: And I saw a couple other really good ones recently, so yeah. I think so, yes.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: So, speaking of the merchant marine--oh, sorry, Josh, well? No.

cortex: (laughs) No, well, if you've got your segue, run with it.

jessamyn: Mine's--I got a segue! I also really enjoyed, this was one of those single-link New York Times things, basically about Jason Everman, who has the unique distinction--

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: --of being the guy who was kicked out of Nirvana and Soundgarden before either one of them got really popular, and then he became an elite member of the U.S. Special Forces! And this was an article in the New York Times Magazine about

him, and kind of his challenges and struggles, post is by Rangeboy, and I just, it's one of those articles, I read it all the way through, it's great. (pause) That's it.

cortex: Well, good. (laughs)

jessamyn: I mean, as somebody, I guess, who was kind of around Seattle during that time listening to what happened, it was sort of--

cortex: Yeah. No, I feel bad that I just have nothing I can say about it, because I haven't read it so it's like, yeah, yeah.

mathowie: Oh, I heard about it, I was just worried the thread would be people's problematic--

jessamyn: Relationship to our military?

mathowie: Relationship with our military, yeah.

cortex: Well, we deleted a couple--

mathowie: And authoritarianism.

jessamyn: There was a little bit of that.

mathowie: My first thought, because I, I think I--

jessamyn: Not that you can't complain about the military, you just need to not be like, grrr, baby killer.

mathowie: I think I skimmed the New York Times, and I was like, "Wow, this guy's really into the military. It's weird to come from (laughing) grunge rock and go into buzzcuts and be into that world," and then I thought,

"Augh, people might be kind of dicks." (chuckles) But thank God, they weren't.

cortex: Worked out okay.

jessamyn: They mostly weren't.

cortex: I really enjoyed this video by serious Australian actor and illusionist Claudia O'Doherty.

jessamyn: I gotta turn my video down for [??]. Okay.

mathowie: I didn't see this.

cortex: It is a post by, this was made by EXISTENZ IS PAUSED, but it's a spoof video by an Australian comedian who's going under the shtick that she is

travelling to the UK to make some viral travel videos for her family's ailing travel agency back in Australia, but they're actually terrible at that, but good at being funny. Although it's interesting, a few people in the thread were like, "I just don't get it." And it just killed me, and she's posted a couple more since that are mentioned down at the bottom of the thread as well. But yeah, it's just like funny four minutes of sort of straight-faced absurdist humor that I found humorous.

mathowie: Is it making fun of England, or Australia, or just...?

cortex: I think it was just making fun of herself.

mathowie: Oh, okay.

cortex: It's really just a character study in someone, she's playing a character of someone doing something completely hopeless in a incredibly self-regarding and clueless way, so, you know. But it's got jokes about England and Australia, a little bit, but it's really just her taking herself as a character, and it's pretty great.

mathowie: (chuckles) She's like a high-functioning idiot, like Stephen Colbert kind of character?

cortex: Kinda, yeah. So yeah, I thought that was funny. So... it's funny, go watch it. That's pretty much all there is to say about it.

mathowie: [??] is a lot of things. I loved this post on paleo--what was it called, paleoartist? I don't even, how do you pronounce--Zden [ˈzɛnˌdɛ], Zdeněk [zəˈdɛˌnɛk] Burian.

jessamyn: Zdeněk [ˈsdɛnək]. Zdeněk [ˈsdɛnək].

mathowie: Post by brundlefly.

jessamyn: Well, let us see!

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Wikipedia actually tells us how to pronounce things.

Oh, no, they don't. Fuck 'em.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Okay, sorry.

cortex: Hoist by the petard there. I don't know.

mathowie: If you look at the Flickr. Look at the Flickr site that was--

jessamyn: What? I don't have a petard.

cortex: You... you... I don't know.

mathowie: Oh, this guy died! Wow. He was alive from 190--

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: How to pronounce Zdeněk [zəˈdɛˌnɛk].

mathowie: --5 to 1981. If you go to the Flickr set, it's just amazing. Just amazing.

jessamyn: Zdeněk [ˈsdɛnˌjɛk]. Zdeněk [ˈsdɛnˌjɛk].

mathowie: Zdeněk [ˈsdɛnˌjɛk]. I know a Zbigniew [zəˈbɪgˌnʊ] [, but not a Zdeněk [zəˈdɛnˌjɛk].

jessamyn: Do you really?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: So. Paleoartist meaning he does pictures of paleolithic animals and events?

mathowie: Stuff, yeah, like mammoths and dinosaurs, but really colorful. If you go to the Flickr set, it's pretty awesome.

cortex: The occasional portrait of a...

mathowie: This can't be... I mean, this is still under copyright, so it's slightly dodgy, I guess, but.

jessamyn: What are you talking about, the Flickr account?

mathowie: Well, the guy died thirty years ago, but this stuff would still be under copyright. But it's a Flickr account acts like it was posted by him, or I guess this is a set titled Zdeněk [zəˈdɛˌnɛk].

jessamyn: I have a hard time with the new Flickr for exactly this reason.

cortex and mathowie: (laugh)

mathowie: Yeah. Who owns it? What's going on here? Okay, yeah, this is some guy with a fan of a guy, vintage illustrations, I don't, yeah.

jessamyn: How do you get to the profile page? How do you even get to the profile page.

mathowie: (chuckles) I know. There's like...

jessamyn: Seriously! I have no idea. I'm an intelligent lady.

mathowie: I think it's the mysterious three dots in the lower right or something.

jessamyn: What lower right? It's one of those endless-scroll waterfall [??].

mathowie: Oh, right, if you click a picture you'll get the guy's... Ryan Khatam is the person who posted it?

jessamyn: Ryan Khatam. Okay, I know how to get to the profile from there.

mathowie: Yeah, it's... yeah, new Flickr.

jessamyn: New Flickr is the worst.

mathowie: It's doing a lot of things it wants.

jessamyn: Although I look at a lot more pictures now on Flickr than I used to, so euh?

mathowie: I do like the sets now. Like, there was another good post this month of the

baseball caps, right? Did you see the baseball cap one?

jessamyn: I did, I did.

mathowie: And the set, because they redesigned the sets, it was actually great that you could just look at one page on this post and you can just go, "Oh, yeah, I see everything they're talking about, all at once."

jessamyn: So this is just all copyright violations, this thing.

mathowie: Oh, the guy's art, yeah.

jessamyn: Well, I'm asking.

mathowie: I would assume so, yeah. But the hats, they're all shot exactly the same, they actually look really cool.

jessamyn: Oh, so they grid up real nice.

mathowie: Yeah. Grids up well. I went to--

jessamyn: Oh, look, here's some paleo people!

mathowie: I went to a Tufte seminar, Edward Tufte seminar, and he, one of his old man cranky things was he can't stand borders between images in image search. He personally makes a userscript CSS style to remove all padding so that all the images slam up against each other, because he's like--

jessamyn: That's better?!

mathowie: To him, he's like, "10% of my [??] was taken up with these pointless borders!"

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: "And I can get one more picture in, and I can get more information!"

jessamyn: So wait, here's a question about new Flickr. Does this happen with you guys, where it starts loading all the pictures, and then it readjusts the pictures, so that they all become just a little bit smaller to have the scrollbar fit on the side? Or is that just something weird about my broken shit?

mathowie: I think it's yours. I've never seen that.

jessamyn: Alright. Alright.

cortex: I haven't really gone there enough to notice lately.

mathowie: Any other Metafilter stuff, or should we move on to Ask Metafilter?

cortex: I've got a couple things I can mostly [??] in passing.

jessamyn: My stuff's mostly in Ask.

mathowie: We're at like an hour. (chuckles)

cortex: There's a--

jessamyn: Now's your chance.

cortex: There's a weird, some sort of ARG seeming to be spinning out some sort of--

mathowie: Oh, from the pronounce--?

jessamyn: Which is what? Aggravating Real-Life Game?

cortex: Yeah, I think that's what it stands for.

mathowie: Hahahaha! That's good.

jessamyn: I don't know!

mathowie: Never heard that.

jessamyn: Seriously, what does it stand for?

cortex: I think it's Alternate Reality Game, is usually what it is?

mathowie: Alternate Reality Game.

cortex: It's for the fact that they tend to be doing some sort of

elaborate world-building through a variety of websites and sources that you have to collect stuff from.

mathowie: We know who we can ask. We know who we can ask about that.

cortex: Wikipedia?

mathowie: The inventor of the term, Adrian Hon.

cortex: Oh, I guess, but what does that guy know?

mathowie: (chuckles) I don't know.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: But yeah, I thought you were going to pull up the Pronunciation Book guy's name.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Alternate Reality Game. I thought it was Augmented Reality Game.

cortex: Well, I think that's something more like Ingress, like the ones where you're playing something where you look through your phone and you see the world plus some stuff on top of it.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: I get it. I get it.

cortex: Wheras this is more storytelling.

jessamyn: Okay.

mathowie: And Alternate--ARGs launched with a lot of video game titles and movies, so it was an alternate reality, it wasn't in the video game universe or the movie universe, it was you running down the street collecting fliers or whatever the heck it was.

cortex: Yeah, or whatever. At some point we're going to get to the point where you have [consistently ?] alternate augmented reality games, where you try and read websites through your phone in 3D. Then things are going to get real.

Anyway, this is sort of neat. It looks like probably there's this YouTube channel--

mathowie: [??]

cortex: --Pronunciation Book that's been running for three? four years now? three years? three and change?

jessamyn: Three years.

mathowie: And it's just like, it's a new word every day, and this guy pronouncing the word and using it in a sentence and then pronouncing the word, and it's really simple, and I always, when I noticed it was a thing that people were into, I was kind of like, I don't even really, I don't know, I mean, nothing wrong with it but I don't really get it. And so I'm feeling a little bit better about

the fact that it seemed like a weird thing for someone to just so steadfastly do without explanation, because it may have been something that someone started doing three and a half years ago as the long haul fucking set-up--

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: --for whatever they're gonna try--

jessamyn: You've gotta admire that. You've gotta admire that.

cortex: Yeah, no, that's some forward-thinking quiet banality that really serves to make a twist when you actually do something, like, who does the set-up for that? And, well, you ask a magician, that's the same way tricks work. It's not that you do something impossible, it's just that you do something in a way that nobody

would expect you to take the time and effort to do it that, and that's how you pull out a trick.

jessamyn: Right. "Who does that?!"

mathowie: Have you ever stumbled upon this? I've stumbled upon these in searches, while searching for how you pronounce something, and I got YouTube videos. And then I get meta joke YouTube videos, like--

cortex: See, that's the thing. The Pronunciation Manual is great.

mathowie: I was like, is this the... right. I was like, is this real? Is this sincere? Because there's so much insincere pronunciation meta-joking on YouTube, where you search for something,

and it's like, you know, it's somewhat coöperation, you know, with the two dots over the 'o's, and they go, "How to pronounce coöperation," and they'll go like, "Clusterfuck. Hahahaha!" And you're like, "What? What did I just waste five seconds on?"

cortex: And that's like, Pronunciation Manual is the joke account that has been doing that for a long time as specifically a reaction to this.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: And they are very consistent about just like, yeah, coöperation, show the word, it'd be something like, coöperation [ˈcoʊˌpɛɹɪʃən]

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: Co! Or! Perition!

mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)

cortex: Corporition. You know, which, I always loved that, and so there's... anyway, I'm enjoying looking at people trying to...

mathowie: The wrong emphasis [ɛmˈfæˌsɪs] on the wrong syllable [sɪˈlæˌbəl].

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Heheheh.

cortex: So anyway, if you feel like you're, if you're weird trying to figure out what's going on and figuring which [??] is being sold thing, that's sort of shaping up, and it's kind of interesting and there's a bunch of fun theories in there.

mathowie: Yeah, three-year [??]. Awesome. So are they still at two months away or so?

cortex: Yes, still like sixty days to go.

jessamyn: Yeah, because this was just a couple days ago.

mathowie: (laugh) So I love reading about these things when it was done two weeks ago. That's my preferred read about.

jessamyn: Right. "And so something happened, but we forgot to check back."

mathowie: "Turns out it was a ski resort, you know, instead of--"

cortex: Yep. Yes, Ski Taos got mentioned pretty quickly in the thread there, so all is right in the world.

mathowie: Yeah. Like the original B.S. Ask Metafilter thing we all experienced eons ago.

cortex: Yep. The other two things I'm going to mention--it's just one thing, but it's two threads, they're sort of related--which is, there's been a bunch of discussion about free to play

mechanics and distance models lately--

mathowie: Ohh, yeah.

cortex: So there was a thread right near the beginning of the month, and then just another one a couple days ago that both involve--

jessamyn: Can you explain?

cortex: Okay, so free to play is a reference to a style of video game distribution where instead of you having to pay two bucks on your iPhone or fifteen bucks on your computer to download and play the game, the game itself--

mathowie: It's free.

cortex: --is free, like, you know, you can download it and start playing it immediately without paying any money, but then there's usually some sort of

micropayment system within the game that lets you pay to unlock maybe more content, or maybe more abilities--

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: --maybe more characters, so like the Marvel heroes game that launched pretty recently you can play for free if you're okay with being one of like five characters, but none of them are Spiderman--

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: I get it. I get it.

cortex: And if you want to play Spiderman, that's going to cost you 20 dollars to buy the Spiderman.

mathowie: Having the Spiderman.

jessamyn: And then that's an in-game purchase.

cortex: Yeah, exactly.

mathowie: Having a child with an iPad has taught me so much about this.

cortex: Oh god. (laughs)

mathowie: Because there's a whole world of iPad pricing, and the video game industry kind of hates it that everything has to be 99 cents or $1.99 and people freak out if the game is $4.99, like, that's insane.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Even though we're all used to paying 55 dollars for an Xbox game, and we always--

jessamyn: 'We all'? What's this 'we'?

cortex: Well, we console gamers.

mathowie: Well, pretty much, yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: Any, if you go into a GameStop--

jessamyn: Gamer people.

mathowie: Everything costs 50 or 60 bucks, and even PC games used to be 30 to 50 bucks, so why are we freaking out about anything over two bucks? And they put, you know, five million dollars and a year of effort into, you know, whatever new Angry Birds, and so a lot of these things are free, because you'll be number 1 on the App Store, and then every time my daughter's like, "Can I download this game for this innocuous TV show I like that they made?" and it's always free, right, and then you always read the column on the App Store and it'll say

anything significant about the title, and when I see "Number #1 in in-app purchases," I'll go "fuck no."

jessamyn: Aaah!

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Crooks!

mathowie: Because I've played these games myself where you suck at the game unless you put in five bucks for more abilities, and that if you don't pay them, some of these are rigged where if you don't pay them you can never get very far in the game.

jessamyn: Okay, well, that's great. Now I understand. I actually turned all that shit off on my phone, and then I couldn't upgrade my Mark Maron podcast because it's an in-app purchase in order to upgrade.

mathowie: Ohh, yeah.

jessamyn: And they're like, "It just fails," and I'm like, "What?!" and I'm sitting there glaring at my phone, the new enemy, and then I realize it's because I turned that thing off just so I wouldn't get stuck on this by accident?

mathowie: Yeah. I mean, there are games that I have played that are free, and I've gladly put in about ten dollars worth of stuff just because I wanted to see what it's like

to play with unlimited resources in a game, and then you realize--

jessamyn: Sure. And it's still ten bucks.

mathowie: Yeah. And it's still not, yeah, it's not that bad. But some of these are just rigged, and there's a whole ethical issue, and that's what these threads are--

jessamyn: Because it's like a gambling addiction issue, right?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: I mean, because people are like click-click-click-click-click.

mathowie: Also, this is my one pet peeve on the kids' games, because I've looked at so many of them. I like to go to the store, the in-game store option, and I like, this is what

I think an ethical software house will write, an in-game app store where the prices range from one dollar to ten dollars for various shades of abilities in the game. I have pulled a kid game where I went to the App Store, the in-game features expansion and stuff, where there's a 99-dollar option.

jessamyn: Aaaah!

mathowie: That a child might hit.

cortex: Yep.

mathowie: And that the parents would pay, you know, if you put in the password once, you kind of get--

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

mathowie: For the next two hours you can purchase anything you want. That is so messed up that there's a 99 dollar option in a children's game, like that's, augh, those guys should rot in hell.

cortex: Yep.

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: So that's some of the stuff that's in these, you know.

jessamyn: Well, and this should be a plug for our member seanmpuckett, who is in the process of figuring out how to promote his not free to play pattern-matching game that looks fun, by the way. This was something I saw in Projects,

and, you know, I've listened to you and now I think I'll pay three dollars and try Sean's game.

cortex: Oh, yeah, I haven't picked that up yet.

jessamyn: Because he actually also posted an Ask Metafilter thread, which was "Help me promote this without..." I mean, doing all the right stuff. Without being like, "Help me promote!", link, link, link, link, link.

mathowie: This kind of looks like a '70s game I played once? Like a board game thing? It's not Parcheesi, what? Eh. It looks slightly familiar.

jessamyn: No, Parcheesi is the worst game in the world, so it wasn't that.

mathowie: (laughs) It looks like some '70s thing, you know, that I played. I just can't remember. Huh. I'm terrible at these games.

jessamyn: Well, I think it reminded me of like Qix or something like that. Like, there was an arcade game that was--

mathowie: Right. Q*bert? No. Qix.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Well, Q*bert and Qix both did similar different stuff.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: I actually have a version of Qix--

mathowie: They both start with Q. (chuckles)

jessamyn: Shut up!

mathowie: They're exactly the same.

jessamyn: It's like color matchy-matchy stuff. I have a version of Qix for my PS2

that I haven't gotten to work yet because it's a minidisc, and I don't have the... make it bigger...

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Adapter thing? I'd like to try it.

mathowie: Minidiscs.

jessamyn: Yeah. So I'm sorry, Josh, was there other stuff you wanted to talk about? Free to play stuff?

cortex: (laughs) That was it. I just wanted, I just thought that that was ama--

jessamyn: I appreciate you explaining it to me.

cortex: There's some good articles about some of the free to play stuff in those two links, and some good discussion in the post, that's all.

jessamyn: Great!

cortex: So yeah. If you're intrigued by the stuff we were talking about and want to hear people talk about it more and also call developers names--

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: --those are your threads.

jessamyn: What if I don't like hearing people say bad things about developers because they're not great?

cortex: Oh, just scroll past those comments a little. I mean, it's not terrible or anything, it's just, it's, there's--

jessamyn: Scroll past comments?

cortex: I know. I know, it's--

jessamyn: You can do that?

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: My mouse can. It's a newer mouse.

jessamyn: Can you actually do that?

cortex: Yeah. I can, actually. If we're asking about reading technique, I actually have gotten okay at just... I used to not be able to

so much, because I really wanted to be super completist about reading the thread.

jessamyn: Sure, for sure.

cortex: But at some point I realized, you know, that's more a thing of a philosophy to pursue--

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: --than an actual cheevo to get.

jessamyn: Cheevo! I love it when you say cheevo. Cheevo!

cortex: It's not going to give me an award for having physically read all of the comments.

jessamyn: Cheevo.

cortex: Yeah, I'm okay reading 95% of them or whatever, you know, so.

jessamyn: Cheevo!

mathowie: [Fomo ?]!

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Cheevo! That's what I'm going to call the little robot that reads my mail.

(pause)

mathowie: So do you want to go to Ask Metafilter and wrap it up?

cortex: Let's do it!

jessamyn: Cheevo the Robot. Augh, you guys.

cortex: No, no, I think that's adorable. You should do that.

jessamyn: Alright.

cortex: You should in fact name your robot that and let it scan your mail.

jessamyn: Cheevo. Cheevo!

mathowie: Oh, I want to know... was there any follow-up? Shit, no follow-up. No follow-up on my favorite question of "How do I ride all the subways in one day? How do I plan?"

jessamyn: Oh! I enjoyed that very much.

mathowie: That was really cool. And I guess people--

jessamyn: "My kid wants to ride all the subways."

mathowie: Yeah. And there is a link to a story of people doing it, like a 24-hour day where they rode every line, they rode the Staten Island Ferry, like... it's really cool that there is precedent for this.

jessamyn: Right. The kid didn't want to do every stop on every line.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: He just wanted to hit all the lines.

mathowie: But some nerds did that. (laughs)

jessamyn: Of course, right? I would want to. You know, I'm working my way through all of--I went to a new town in Rhode Island, which means I only have about 31 left to go.

I mean, to be fair, there's only thirty--

mathowie: (laughing) Because it's so small.

jessamyn: There's only 38.

mathowie, jessamyn and cortex: (laugh)

jessamyn: So this one we just missed for the last podcast, or maybe we mentioned it but I don't think so. A hundred years ago, if you had an infection that we would treat today with antibiotics, what was the typical prognosis? Would you die?

mathowie: Oh, wow.

jessamyn: And this is k5.user, which, I've always liked that username, because that was when you could get an account from k5 and then...

mathowie: 5k?

jessamyn: 5k?

mathowie: I thought they were a kuro5hin user that left kuro5hin and hated Rusty. (chuckles)

jessamyn: Maybe?

mathowie: That was my understanding. I don't know.

jessamyn: I thought they were somebody who snuck in.

mathowie: No, it was a kuro5hin user. It's in their bio.

jessamyn: Interesting, interesting.

mathowie: Anywho.

jessamyn: So at any rate, people just talk about old medicine, and I enjoy old medicine discussions, because our doctors will show up and be doctorly without being like, "Euhh, I can't really talk about this." So I enjoyed it.

mathowie: I assumed it would be what's happened to me, where I've had a weird doctor who, like, I just had a cough for two months, and they were like, "Well, it's viral, nothing we can do," and I imagined, "Oh, this must have been what it was like a hundred years ago."

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: You were just always, you were always a little bit sick or recovering from some injury from six months ago that just never--

jessamyn: You just had to rest or...

mathowie: Yeah, like nothing ever completely went away. (chuckles)

jessamyn: And, yeah, you died.

mathowie: Fun times. (chuckles)

I thought this one was interesting. It's this ethically problematic question, which was--

jessamyn: No, no, no, I loved this. This was one of my posts on my list too.

mathowie: It got flagged while I was moderating, so I think someone thought they were trying to steal a bike. But it's a bike lock that has letters instead of numbers and the person just said--

jessamyn: And four wheels. And four wheels.

mathowie: Yeah, four possibilities, there's about ten letters per wheel, and I remember it was a word, that's all I remember, but I don't remember what the word was.

Sounds like you're trying to steal a bike, kind of, but someone figures out the command-line crazy OSX dictionary regex to find every word and spit it out as a text file that could be made with these letters, and there was about 500 words or so, and the person--

jessamyn: The right answer. Oh my god.

mathowie: Yeah. The person who owned the bike was like, oh my god, it was like, it was word number 436 out of 500, and I got it, and it worked.

cortex: Science!

jessamyn: The word was 'tarp'.

mathowie: Yeah. I thought that was super clever, that there was a software way to do that.

cortex: Yep.

jessamyn: I loved that thread. I loved that thread. It was short, simple, to the point.

mathowie: I guess it would be shocking that someone could probably make an iOS app that you could stand next to a bike and put in the letters and do this for you. Like, if it's this easy to do from the command line--

cortex: Well, I mean, there's a lot of really weak security stuff that you can break pretty easily if you know what you're doing at a command line and just using some really simple tools, so.

jessamyn: And the basic whole deal is, don't choose a word, right? I mean...

mathowie: Right, yeah. Yeah, that's what everyone said, if you really want to be secure with those kinds of locks, you do a nonsensical thing.

jessamyn: Or like, four words, you choose four words that make a phrase, and you have the first letter of each, or something like that.

mathowie: Right, yeah, your favorite song, first, yeah.

jessamyn: Right

cortex: But even practically speaking, I mean, sitting around with your list of 18, you know, 818 words that you know could be words that they could use,

that's 818 that you gotta go through on someone's bike lock hoping that you come across the word that they chose, assuming that they chose a word. It's not the worst low-level security. I mean, it would be a lot faster to just cut the chain, you know?

mathowie: It's not a high-stakes game.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Right.

cortex: This is something you use to slow down people who are not professional bike thieves, not...

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Right. Professional bike thieves are past this.

cortex: Speaking of the New York subway system, though, one question that I got a giggle out of partly because it

came up because of a podcast I did, Bugbread asked, "Is it legal to throw up on a train on the New York subway system?"

mathowie: What? How is it illegal?

cortex: Read the question. I mean, I'm not--(laughs) I'm neither asking nor answering, I'm just pointing to the question.

jessamyn: Well, because where was I reading that cabs will charge you extra if you vomit in their cab?

cortex: Oh, yeah, that's like super standard.

mathowie: Well, that seems normal. That seems...

cortex: It's like a $50 surcharge.

jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, yeah! Yeah.

cortex: But the thing is, yeah, I mean, the cab is a slightly different situation from a subway.

jessamyn: Sure, sure.

cortex: So, practically speaking there's maybe enforcement versus law.

mathowie: (laughing) So how did this come up on your podcast? Did griphus puke somewhere?

cortex: Yeah, he puked on the subway. We were talking about--

jessamyn: griphus puked on the subway?! Why would you do that?

mathowie: From the flu, or motion?

cortex: At some point. I don't remember the circumstance. We were pretty deep in the [??] of Hellraiser.

jessamyn: See, because that's the thing. Sick with the flu, but you know.

mathowie: Public vomiting cannot be a crime.

jessamyn: But, like, you know, wicked drunk. Right.

mathowie: Yeah, right. If you are drunk, yes. Public Drunkenness, but vomiting! It's ....

cortex: Yeah. I think, I think .. I don't remember ... I don't remember if he was sick or it might have been really bad food or something that caught up with him, but yeah.

mathowie: I guess.

cortex: So yeah, he was like wondering about it.

mathowie: I was going to make the 'it's natural defense,' but then peeing or pooping (Laughing)

cortex: (Laughing)

m: .. is also quite natural and that is ... kinda illegal. ...

jessamyn: But 'involuntary' is the point made in the thread.

mathowie: Oh! That's true! Involuntary, well....

jessamyn: For the most part.

mathowie: I mean, yeah. (Laughing)

jessamyn: Nerds. Nitpickers! Nitpickers all ah ya!

mathowie: (Laughing)

Why would you think it was illegal

mathowie: Did griphus get busted?

cortex: No, no.

jessamyn: Griphus lives in Japan! Maybe you go to jail in Japan for that.

mathowie: Eh. Yeah.

jessamyn: Ehhhhh ...

cortex: Yeah, I mean I don't know. It's .. it's a tricky thing because there's definitely a line between like, yeah obviously you should not vomit on the subway. But ah obviously if you are going to vomit somewhere it may not be something you plan. So yeah. It's a tricky thing. Yeah.

jessamyn: Sort of a guideline unless of a [???]

mathowie: Ah - I thought this one ...

cortex: And I mean it is sort of like J-Walking like if it is a rule ..

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: it doesn't mean you are

literally going to get arrested for doing it, even if potentially observed by a police officer. I mean, I've seen plenty of people jaywalk past cop cars without getting called.

mathowie: Arrested.

cortex: But never doing it stupidly. Like, I imagine if you go streaking across a busy street like an idiot and a cop sees it, you might be having a conversation real quick. But if you're jaywalking on a quiet street where it's obviously safe and you're attentive, then who's going to give a shit unless there's really, really a quota, you know?

mathowie: Well, you're a white male that makes it easier to not get busted for tiny infractions.

(Chuckle)

cortex: Yeah, well, yeah.

jessamyn: (Small laugh)

mathowie: Ah this question about subscription boxes saying like, "Hey! Do you know what would be a good subscription boxes" is noteworthy to me because I had no idea there was an entire world of gift subscription boxes. Like ...

jessamyn: Me neither! I just learned it - NOW!

mathowie: I've only heard - I've only heard of quarterly dot co because

mathowie: like Jason Kottke like you can pay like ten bucks a month and Jason Kottke will send you something in a box that's designy that he likes. And he'll send you a letter of why he picked it. And I see that they've done ...

jessamyn: Are you serious?

mathowie: Yeah they've done -

jessamyn: He's so weird.

mathowie: (Laughs) They are kinda cool. I did it for a while last year. And like, there's a whole bunch of like web designers and stuff. Oh! Heather Armstrong from dooce is doing one. The swissmiss woman Tina Eisebberg started this whole thing

mathowie: and I subscribed to her once and it was cool, cool designy stuff like something in my house I still have today. It's like one of the coolest things she sent. But I had no idea there was this entire world of like dozens of companies that you can ... like you get a mystery box of something awesome, kinda. And like, you know, for some small rate.

jessamyn: I should totally send out mystery boxes of something awesome.

mathowie: I know!

jessamyn: This is great!

mathowie: You should probably talk to the quarterly co! Like, if you have any web presence, you know, they will sign you up and you fans can

mathowie: subscribe to you, kind of.

jessamyn: I do have a little bit of a web presence.

mathowie: Yeah so thought would be ..

jessamyn: Fascinating! I thought you said like Jason thought this up as opposed to

mathowie: No. No.

jessamyn: he works through a service.

mathowie: He sorta, yeah.

jessamyn: That makes sense. That makes total sense.

mathowie: Someone tapped him and said, "Hey would you like to pick-" the problem is that you have to pick something that you can get like twenty of. So ...

jessamyn: Only twenty?

mathowie: Oh. I am imagining your average subscription base is probably like, you know, a few dozen people pay for ...

jessamyn: Right. Right, right.

mathowie: You can't say this one amazing object I'm going to send it

mathowie: to this one stranger in Massachusetts cause you've got to get twenty or thirty of them so you can send them to everybody who pays.

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: So you can't - I mean you would be a cool, you know .. I don't know ...

jessamyn: Wiry stuff!

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Pencils!

mathowie: Or the stuff they rip out of, libraries like the card catalogs (laughing)

jessamyn: Shhhh!

mathowie: that we don't use anymore.

cortex: Or asbestos!

jessamyn: We're happy to ship! Happy to ship.

mathowie: I love these stamps inside the front panel that go back to like 1940 or something that they - you know it's all electronic

mathowie: now so we can ignore it. Like the last stamp was 1985? Like I love getting an old book.

jessamyn: Oh! Mark Frauenfelder! I know him! I'll ask him what his experience has been with it.

mathowie: Yeah. Like I did it and paid for two or three people for maybe six -

jessamyn: Monteiro. I know these people.

mathowie: (Laughs) Monteiro. Monteiro sent - oh my god -

jessamyn: I am afraid of Monteiro. What he would send.

mathowie: Monteiro sent a broken things. Like here's a beautiful object I smashed with a hammer. It represents loss. (Laughing)

jessamyn: Oh my God.

mathowie: And people are like - people are -

jessamyn: Oh my God.

mathowie: I saw people tweeting him like, "WHAT THE FUCK, MAN! I paid you twenty bucks for that, punk."

jessamyn: And I am sure he is like, "Don't you know who I am?"

cortex: (Cracks up laughing)

jessamyn: (Cracks up laughing)

mathowie: Yes. I am an asshole and an artist. Like, you're going to get asshole art out of it. (Laughing) So it's awesome. Wow. I had no idea they had so many people. God, there's like literally fifty options -

jessamyn: That's very interesting. And the thread was very interesting. Perfect!

mathowie: You can subscribe to Pharrell Williams! Like a gift box featuring Pharrell Williams.

cortex: (Snicker)

mathowie: (Laughs) Jesus. That guy's on every song now. But, yeah. There is a whole world. So there isn't just that one company but their are dozens of companies that do it. And they all have themes? Some of them are just women's stuff. Some are just dude stuff. It's crazy.

jessamyn: See, like I am familiar with the dollar whatever the raise your people are - Dollar Shave Club!

mathowie: Yeah. Yeah this is a mystery box.

jessamyn: I think we are coming full circle with the mail. It's too bad I have more stuff to talk about

c, (Laughing)

mathowie: (Chuckles)

jessamyn: because this would be a nice tight

jessamyn: wrap-up. But ah, wow! Interesting! Very interesting. So diverging from this, slightly? I enjoyed the, "How would you feel about buying the neighborhood murder house?" thread.

mathowie: (Chuckles)

cortex: Oh yeah.

mathowie: (Laughs)

jessamyn: From extraheavymarcellus, who is relocating to the mid-west, and him and his wife were thinking about buying a house where there was a murder-suicide. extraheavymarcellus you might want to know I am getting an internal server error trying to look at your blog.

mathowie: Wow. This isn't -

jessamyn: So basically

mathowie: This isn't someone saying, "Oh it's a Victorian that looks like those things in movies." This an actual --

jessamyn: Although we did link to that on the Best of Blog. I really tried hard to not link to any of the Best of Blog stuff in the podcast.

mathowie: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

jessamyn: So that, if you are interested in that, please read the Best of Blog

mathowie: What?

jessamyn: But this is - we found a perfect house but there was a murder suicide there in September, what do you think?

mathowie: Holy shit.

jessamyn: And they got a lot of really good feedback from people whether they would care. What the neighbors

jessamyn: might think. Stuff to do. Etcetera. Fascinating.

mathowie: I wouldn't. I mean if I never lived in that city I wouldn't care. And I think the neighbors would be stoked that somebody's trying to clean slate start over.

jessamyn: It kinda depends how gross the situation was? And how weird the people were?

mathowie: Oh.

jessamyn: But, yeah. I agree.

mathowie: I mean the neighbors are probably glad the person's gone and the normal people from another state come by that's probably good.

jessamyn: Well that's the thing. People from away who don't have their own baggage

jessamyn: with it might

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: be just the thing. But -

mathowie: Similar to marriage.

jessamyn: But people will also like talk 'em down because that is going to affect resale value if you are not planning on living there for twenty years.

mathowie: Oh, yeah. Totally.

jessamyn: Totally.

mathowie: Wow. So, yeah. Yeah this ties into the "Why are Victorian houses always the murder house?"

jessamyn: The monster house, not the murder house.

mathowie: The monster (laughs) Well bad stuff happens.

jessamyn: Please.

mathowie: Bad stuff happens at the big house on the hill.

jessamyn: Yes! And why do we think that? And so there was a really great thread about that

jessamyn: on the Best Of blog.

mathowie: Yeah. There was a not totally satisfying to me as a lifetime cluttery person. If you are a long time messy person then but you changed at one time? How did you -

jessamyn: Are you really a messy person, Matt?

mathowie: I - when I read this thread I thought back to my first two years of college. I became a neat freak just because I thought it would be a like a weird affectation, like -

jessamyn: (Laughing funny)

mathowie: You know what? You know, it's college. I'm trying on new personality traits. I'm going to be a neat freak!

mathowie: And my shit was so - everything was impeccable. Car was always clean and cleaned out. Desk always perfectly clear. And it was only because I had extra time because the first two years of college weren't super hard. Once college got hard, I became you know, I lived in a pig sty. But I remember meeting a girl and she just thought like I was a clean freak my entire life and I never -

jessamyn: In a good way? Or in a bad way?

mathowie: Yeah! Yeah. No thought like Oh! Like let's bring it to your house. Your house is always clean. I was like (Laughing)

mathowie: Yeah, right!

jessamyn: (Laughing)

mathowie: It always is. That's me! It's always like that. So someone's asking -

jessamyn: Cause your house now is clean. I've been to your house.

mathowie: Yeah, it's clean-ish.

jessamyn: I mean you have kids so there is a certain amount of kid not-clean-ness but I think of you as clean.

mathowie: Eh. I wish my - like you can't even sit on - I have a couch in my home office that I bought. Seats two people and no one can sit on it now it has so much crap all over it. Like, that's ...

jessamyn: Maybe you need a subscription box?

mathowie: (Laughing)

jessamyn: And you can send that crap to people.

mathowie: More crap.

jessamyn: Mathowie gives you a new bike!

mathowie: So, yeah. There is a thread on How - If you are a long time messy person and you became good at keeping things clean, what was the secret. There weren't that many -

jessamyn: Yeah I was slobby in college and became kind of a neater person as an adult lady. Although it's all for show. Like when I am just alone I am not neat, but if anybody's gonna look at my shit, it - I clean up in a jiffy - for the most part.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: My clothes are in a pile on the floor but my bathroom and my kitchen is always clean.

mathowie: Surprising number of questions mention

mathowie: I started taking meds for -

jessamyn: AH!

mathowie: basically psychiatric reasons and suddenly things got better in my life. Wow.

jessamyn: Well, I mean, that's - that's kinda true for a lot of -

mathowie: That could be a cause.

jessamyn: people that grapple with depression and stuff like that.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: You can get yourself into the shower. And you got the energy to make your bed and keep your kitchen tidy and whatever. I mean it's not that all messy people are depressed, but that some depressed people are messy.

mathowie: Yeah. There was another like

mathowie: not- I wasn't super satisfied - but I really wanted this to be awesome which was like I just got a mini projector that's hand held -

jessamyn: Ah! I saw this!

mathowie: What can I do with it?! And I really wanted to see stuff that would blow my mind but there's a bunch of like good normal ideas. Like projecting movie -

jessamyn: Well because the upshot is - nothing. It's just a projector.

mathowie: Well sometimes - I thought someone had mentioned art projects. I have seen people do like wall paintings? You know? You project a picture you like. Like, you know, what's like a classic silhouette - those like - Japanese

mathowie: like branches with the - what - cherry blossoms or something? You can kind of project it on a wall and paint it and it would look really cool. So I thought there would be more idea along that line - those lines - but not really.

jessamyn: But not to much.

mathowie: Isn't that how you pulled it off, Josh? The sunburst?

cortex: You know, I was thinking about it but I ended up just doing it - I ended up just eyeballing it with a -

mathowie: Tape? (Chuckling)

cortex: With tape and a ruler and a lot of patience. If I'd done anything

cortex: that wasn't just straight lines and like a vertical thing I would have gone ahead and done that. But I ended up not needing to.

jessamyn: Like just use a projector and then outline it, and then -

cortex: Yeah. Or, or even not even a projector probably - because I didn't have a spare mobile projector lying around or anything. but I was thinking I would try just cutting a design out of a piece of paper and sticking it in front of a light bulb. Which is like a really shitty -

jessamyn: Oh! Neat!

cortex: projector unless, you know, the show you want to watch -

jessamyn: Of one color -

cortex: Yeah - If you want to watch a movie it's a terrible projector.

jessamyn: (Laughs)

cortex: If you want to put a

cortex: silhouette on a wall, it's not so bad. You know. It's a lot cheaper. It's not HD, but ah, you know. It'll do.

jessamyn: Or maybe it is - of the snowstorm!

cortex: Ho! Ho! Yeah!

jessamyn: Ho! Ho!

mathowie: Ha. Ha. Ha.

jessamyn: All right. We are getting a little punchy!

cortex: (Laughing)

jessamyn: Last - Last suggestions, gentleman.

mathowie: Umm...

jessamyn: Here is another full circle one - 'I'm going to go on a road trip with my family for five weeks. Give me some suggestions.' I mostly like that -

mathowie: That is a long time!

jessamyn: Well, I mostly

jessamyn: liked because there were actually a bunch of people who have done similar things and had some really good advice. Like you would think that's kinda esoteric but people had good advice for this post.

mathowie: Oh neat! Oh neat! Like weird out-of-the-way places to go. Sweet. Um.. (Laughing) I liked this strange question because it's as if I was reading a question of aliens talking in another language which was like, "When do I mention in dating that I prefer to be in open

mathowie: relationships?"

jessamyn: Oh for God sakes.

mathowie: Just because this is foreign lands to me as someone who has been married for fifteen years. And it's such a weird, thorny issue, right? So everyone is disagreeing with everyone about like when is the right time. And a lot of people are like -

jessamyn: Right because the people who are -

mathowie: "Put it on your profile! Don't let anyone even take you on a date without knowing this!" And then a lot of people are like, "Don't even tell them on the first date. Wait for the third date." Which is weird to me, but. Yeah.

jessamyn: Well, that's the thing. The people's preferences are really strong

jessamyn: along those lines. Like monogamous people tend to not really want to experiment and polyamorous people maybe don't care if you're monogamous as long as you care that they are poly and yeah. I enjoyed reading that thread. But I was surprised at the answers.

mathowie: I just thought of it in like the whole like post-dan-savage-world and we're all gonna try everything once, sort of like. I was just like, "Wow there is still a humongous difference of opinion on this very basic stuff."

cortex: Yep.

jessamyn: Well, I think a lot of people did try

jessamyn: it once and maybe didn't like it. (Laughing)

mathowie: (Laughing)

jessamyn: And so then they would really like to know right of the bat because those people should be dating the people they should be dating. You know?

mathowie: Yeah. I was laughing the other day when someone on twitter was pointing out like a former prominent developer of some open source software and I was like, 'Oh. When did they build ...' so I go their page and go to their about page cause they don't do software anymore. And their about page was like a thousand words? And like nine-hundred and fifty of them were about how their

mathowie: they are REALLY into open relationships. And at the bottom was like, 'Oh yeah, by the way, I wrote this famous software.' (Laughing)

jessamyn: Ah! (Laughing)

cortex: (Laughing)

mathowie: I was just like, "Wow." Like what kind of -- that's pretty awesome that that's your entire about page is like --

jessamyn: Well for people who are really into it -

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: They're often really into it.

mathowie: Yeah. It was literally. It was like, 'Hello I am Bob and polyamory is important to me and here's why. '

jessamyn: Well and then he needs to deal with a bunch of shit all the time from people who are like, 'Weeeer -- it's weird' like as somebody who has at least some friends who are in long term committed

jessamyn: poly relationships, it's gotta be just such a constant headache. You know?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: With trying to go somewhere with your family and having people being like (in an annoying over-the-top drama wonking tone), 'Bleh - Bleh - Bleh - Bleh - Bleh!'

mathowie: (Cracks up laughing)

cortex: (Cracks up laughing)

jessamyn: Constantly. You know?

mathowie: (Laughing) Might as well get it out there.

jessamyn: If that were my thing? I'd have nine hundred and fifty words about it, too!

mathowie: (Laughs)

cortex: (Laughs)

mathowie: Any last questions, Josh? You liked?

cortex: I? No, I think I am good.

mathowie: Sweet. Oh! -

jessamyn: I don't -

mathowie: Music! Music minute before we're done!

cortex: Oh! Right! Right. Okay! Well ..

jessamyn: (in a creepy tone) You people!

cortex: We got ah .. we got ah .. we're .. we're doing this summer long Ziggy Stardust cover thing.

mathowie: Sweet.

cortex: Not a whole lot in - and yeah there was - flapjax at midnite did a nice cover of Suffragette City

sfx: (Music Plays)

cortex: Ah .. that was pretty good I think

mathowie: Neat.

cortex: He and [???] have actually posted something yet. But it was .. you know. The deadline is September so it's early days. People are taking their time. There was a tune by Wolfdog just the other day ..

sfx: (Music Plays)

mathowie: Cool.

cortex: It was nice to hear from him. He hasn't posted anything

cortex: in a little while. I think he took time off from the site and is back as of recently.

jessamyn: Neat!

cortex: So I liked that. frecklefaerie has this great little like minute long 'I fucked up and now I am gonna unfuck it' ah montra ah as they described it.

sfx: (Music Playing)

sfx: (Music Playing)

cortex: (Smiling heard in his voice) It's just kinda adorable and yeah it's real simple and probably worth memorizing because - hey!

jessamyn: We could all use that.

cortex: Yep.

mathowie: Oh. This is neat!

cortex: erikgrande posted a recording called, "You Never Laugh" it was like an experiment he did a few years ago? He just never really stuck with the idea? But actually it's really nice little song. So ah ....

sfx: (Music plays)

sfx: (Music Plays)

cortex: So that was cool.

jessamyn and notondisplay posted ah ...

mathowie: (Chuckles in the background)

jessamyn: HEY!

cortex: a song about Boo Radley which is an adorable little song about jessamyn's sisters' recently deceased cat?

mathowie: Aww!

jessamyn: She had to put her long-time [bunk?] kitty to sleep.

jessamyn: I wrote a song about him because he was a cat of high character and I didn't - I can't - you know I am one of those internet people I don't know what to say or do or anything! So we wrote a song for the kitty and it had just sort of the right effect, I think.

sfx: (Music Plays)

cortex: That was really nice!

cortex: And you mentioned that and I assumed that was like something that Boo Radley had written. But then, no. But he did show up in the thread. To say, "Hey!" He saw that. And it worked out well.

mathowie: (Chuckles)

jessamyn: That was .. that was pretty good.

cortex: Sh .. there's ah -

mathowie: Is Boo Radley like the character from To Kill A Mocking Bird?

jessamyn: (the librarian - answers quickly, almost shouting her answer) YES!

mathowie: Oh. Okay.

jessamyn: Because Cain had two cats. One of them was called Boo Radley and the other one was called -- some other literary name. Um ..

mathowie: Abacas? (Laughing)

jessamyn: I don't .. I don't remember but then that cat died a long time ago and so then she just had this one cat

jessamyn: with the funny name which was slightly funny. We call him Boo for short.

mathowie: Sweet. How old was he?

jessamyn: Seventeen? Eighteen?

mathowie: Ah!

jessamyn: I mean he was a - he was all bones and fur.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like, 'HAPPY! HAPPY!' but like very - you just watch him todder around and be like, 'Oh God!'

mathowie: (Snickers)

cortex: (Snickers)

mathowie: (Laughing) There should be a You Tube channel that would just promote crying in people and it would just be old

mathowie: animals walking and you see the hip. Like UGH it breaks my heart to see an old dog with bad hips or an old cat like creeping around.

jessamyn: Right. Right.

mathowie: Like Ah there could just be a twenty four hour loop of just - oh man.

jessamyn: Adorable.

mathowie: Please don't build that. Nobody build that.

cortex: (Laughing)

jessamyn: Nobody build that! Yeah I enjoyed - I am good with lyrics. Not so good with music, so.

mathowie: Well is there a such thing as a fretless banjo? That sounds maddening.

cortex: There totally is. Yeah it was Green Corn Jig of something out of a book

cortex: that usonian worked out on a fretless banjo. Which, yeah. I was like, "Oh My God"

jessamyn: He is a talent!

sfx: (Music Plays)

sfx: (Music Playing)

mathowie: (Laughing) How many notes are on a fretless banjo?

jessamyn: (dreamily) All of them!

cortex: All of them.

mathowie: (Still Laughing) All of them? Like ten million? God! A normal banjo is baffling.

cortex: Yeah. I never really tried playing. Well I mean we've got the upright bass but that's a whole different sort of scale and not like chording. I have a hard time imagining playing not a guitar or a banjo without frets because I feel like i would just play

m. (Laughs)
not a lot of quite in tune notes and chord forms.

mathowie: (Laughing harder)

cortex: I mean I am sure if I worked at it I could get it. But, yeah. It impresses me.

mathowie: I've heard real musician talk about having like a fretless six string guitar as a novelty item that they realized is completely and utterly pointless. And awful.

cortex: Yeah I think what it is like if you -- if you -- just happen to be the sort of person who really is going to dial in those like, like fretting positions and chord forms

mathowie: (Chuckles)

cortex: there is no reason you could not make it work and then if it compliments your style to have a little bit of wiggle - THAT'S GREAT! But, uh, I am not one of those people, I don't think.

mathowie: Yeah. (Sounding astounded) Fretless Banjo

cortex: And finally by tmcw a song called 'oh' which is this really nice sort of chilly, acoustic thing with a great sort of drum sound on it that I liked and there is your music corner!

mathowie: Wow. There are .. these are all good!

cortex: Yep. And this is just - I was talking in metatalk the other day when it came up that like talking about trying to figure out a [???] challenge. For me I haven't been doing a lot of music stuff lately and it's - unfortunately if I am not careful - that will affect my attention to music so, you know, that's when I sometimes come unprepared to a podcast, it's like I just haven't been engaging

cortex: much because I haven't been thinking about music and then I am like and I am thinking about how I'm not happy if I am not engaging with music enough, doing music stuff and so I get all

jessamyn: It becomes a vicious circle.

cortex: Yeah. I start avoiding it because I don't want to go to music and note how I don't know what's going on and I haven;t been posting anything - BAH! So I am getting back on that horse. But it hasn;t been real hard to because there is a ton of stuff, so.

jessamyn: Nice work! Cool!

cortex: Good job, MeFite musician people.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: I also wanted to mention I don't know much about what's been going on in metatalk but we moved

jessamyn: the metafilter wiki over to it's own domain?

cortex: Oh. Yeah.

jessamyn: And all of the links should still be working. But if they are not working let us know. SO we can fix it. But now you can find the metafilter wiki at mefiwiki dot com.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And thank you to all the folks who helped with that. To RichardP, and Adrian Hahn who hosted it forver and Pronioac who did a tremendous amount of working this all out!

jessamyn: He's the one who is actually hosting it now and it's just great and it's just great. It's great!

cortex: Yep. It's Great! There's greatness.

mathowie: Yeah. Someone asked in the thread, 'Why was it always a third party site?' And I didn't get time to answer it and now I'm remembering. It was because the wiki existed to say metafilter is down.

(Laughing)

jessamyn: Right. Right. Right. It had a status-y thing.

mathowie: Like Adrian got tired of, you know, like 2002-2004 the dark ages of metafilter and cold fusion errors. Like there was a running wiki. The front page of the wiki was all

mathowie: the down time. Which was like several times a day.

cortex: (Laughing)

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: So you just go if it doesn't work like that was the downforeveryoneorjustme feature was -

jessamyn: Right! Right. Right.

mathowie: Go to the mefiwiki. See if it was down. So that's why (Laughing) it exists.

jessamyn: Oh! Well we should mention the site did turn fourteen this month.

cortex: Yeah!

mathowie: Yeah, that's true.

cortex: Quiet. Uneventfully. It's like in website years it's one of those awkward years

mathowie: (Chuckles)

cortex: where it doesn't -

jessamyn: In between years

mathowie: (Chuckles) It's getting braces.

cortex: Yeah. It doesn't want to talk to anybody about it. It's just like, 'Hey. Well.'

jessamyn: (Moaning sound)

mathowie: This is walk ten feet in front of me I don't want

mathowie: people to know I am with you.

jessamyn: (Laughing)

mathowie: (Laughing) All right. Cool!

jessamyn: Gentleman, it's been delightful talking to you.

cortex: It's been a pleasure.

jessamyn: Any last minute things? Everybody is good?

cortex: I'm good.

mathowie: Nope.

cortex: I am great.

jessamyn: I hope I don't sound too much like I am at the bottom of a well (transcriber's note: She did.) Sorry for not having a headset.

cortex: Nah you're fine.

mathowie: It sounds good, actually.

jessamyn: All right.

mathowie: Have a bitchin' summer! Weee!

jessamyn: Wee! You too!

cortex: Stay safe!

sfx: oh by tmcw (outro music)

sfx: oh by tmcw (outro music)

sfx: oh by tmcw (outro music)

sfx: oh by tmcw (outro music)

sfx: oh by tmcw (outro music)

sfx: oh by tmcw (outro music)

Credits

  • beryllium, 151 segments
  • tangerinegurl, 91
  • Snarl Furillo, 46
  • Pronoiac, 1
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