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Podcast 86 Transcript

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A transcript for Episode 86: "Attenblurrowed" (2013-11-02).

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

Transcript

jingle: (theme music)

mathowie: Okay. Welcome to episode 86 of the Metafilter Podcast. I am Matt.

jessamyn: I'm Jessamyn.

cortex: And I'm Josh! Or "cortex." That's right.

mathowie: Yay!

So we are back, talking about everything that happened in October, on this November first.

jessamyn: The last three weeks of October.

mathowie: Oh right, yeah.

jessamyn: We recorded on October 7th, a little late.

mathowie: Super lazy.

Okay. Sweet!

jessamyn: Sweet!

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: Alright, so, let me see, do you want to just go right into Projects? Or Halloween recap from last night? Anything good?

cortex: How were your guys' Halloween? My Halloween was like, we turned off the light and locked the door and put [??] and watched TV.

jessamyn: That sounds great! Did you watch Halloween-themed TV, or did you just...?

cortex: What did we...? Oh, we watched a couple episodes of House of Cards, actually, so, you know, politics is kind of scary.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: House of Cards gets scarier, actually. I think House of Cards is really good.

mathowie: Yeah, it's pretty good.

cortex: We're down to, we just got to the second-to-last episode last night, so it's been wrapping up well.

jessamyn: (gasps)

mathowie: Ohhh. Wow.

jessamyn: I won't tell you what happens, but yeah, it's...

cortex: (laughing) I appreciate that.

jessamyn: It's pretty good! I was surprised. I was like, 'Ohh, Washington intrigue for drama, I will hate this,' And, you know, I think Kevin Spacey pulls it all together, and...

mathowie: Oh, especially Kevin Spacey with a fake Southern accent?

jessamyn: Yeah!

mathowie: I was skeptical for the first two minutes, I was like, every friend says this is great, I put it off for six months.

jessamyn: Right, yeah, me too!

mathowie: Because I think it came out in January, because that's when friends started raving about it, and I didn't watch it until May or June.

jessamyn: Yeah. And it turns out it's a great thing for the gym, because it gets your heartbeat up, like, oh, these fuckers, what's going on?

mathowie and cortex: (chuckle)

mathowie: And then I guess there's a second season? That starts in January, that's around the corner.

cortex: Well, this is Netflix, so 'starts' means 'entirely comes out', I presume?

jessamyn: Right!

mathowie: Yeah, right, right, fully baked.

jessamyn: Yeah. And it won an Emmy, right?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: I think it was the first straight-to-stream series that won an Emmy.

mathowie: Was Orange Is The New Black also Netflix, or was that Showtime?

cortex: Yeah, yeah. No, it was them as well. Same [??]

jessamyn: I can't watch the lady prison dramas.

mathowie: Oh, it's pretty good. I waited two months.

jessamyn: That's what I've heard.

mathowie: Two months after that, I watched that, and was like, yeah, this is... But both of them are just cliffhanger-y, so you're like, 'Aah! Season 2! Give it to me!' and then you look it up on Wikipedia and it could be sometime in 2014.

jessamyn: Maybe. Right, right, right.

cortex: Yep.

mathowie: Yeah. Possibly, if they feel like it. Like ohhh, it's not great.

jessamyn: Well, Halloween we did our sort of annual thing where I go over to my neighbor's place and hand out [fearious ?] amounts of candy for about ninety minutes, and then we all go inside and eat pizza and hide out and talk about Halloweens past.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: And it was pouring rain here, too, which really put a damper on a whole bunch of different people's costumes.

mathowie: Aww.

jessamyn: And I had a good costume this year instead of just a half-assed costume from something that came out of my closet. And yeah, it was really good. But then I ate some candy and slept for twelve hours, so I'm a little discombobulated this morning.

mathowie: Nice.

cortex: (chuckles) Well, at least you did remember there was a podcast this morning, unlike me.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: (laughs) I was not gonna bring it up, but now that you've brought it up,

how do you forget that kind of thing? Do you need some productivity tips?

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Probably perennially, yes. But I was--

jessamyn: You know, the phone will give you reminders.

cortex: It was on the calendar twice, I just somehow, I was writing up LARP Trek for the morning, and I was--

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Nice.

cortex: I was actually trying to, I've got Chief O'Brien singing a parody of O Danny Boy--

jessamyn: (giggles)

cortex: --except about him being bored at work and wanting to get back to playing the role-playing game that he and the rest of the crew are playing that Geordi's running.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: And so I was like "Oh Miles-y boy," and so on. So I got it done and posted and then I was like, maybe I should record a version of this, but that didn't go very well, so. And then I got an IM from both you and from Matt saying, 'Hey, what's going on?'

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: And I was like, 'I don't know, what's going on?' (laughs)

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: 'Oh, podcast, shit! Alright. Okay.'

jessamyn: Well, it's going on!

mathowie: Yay!

I had a good Halloween. As a friend pointed out, it's the suburban dad holiday. I had no idea I fell into having to do so
things, like putting up lights and carving pumpkins the best way possible and time-lapse cameras and getting the best candy bars.

jessamyn: This is the suburbs! Exactly.

mathowie: Yeah. This is the big leagues of the suburbs. So yeah, it was pretty fun. We even gave out--

cortex: And you did the full-size candy bar thing?

mathowie: Yeah! I did four boxes again, which comes out to like a hundred and thirty-six bars or something, and I never think it's, I always think it's going to be too much and we're going to have Snickers for two weeks afterwards, but

eventually by 9:00 they're all gone, and--

jessamyn: Well, I saw Kay and Fiona's costumes on Facebook. Those were pretty terrific! This is like, are you guys figuring, is this the last year Fiona's going to want to dress up the same as her mom?

mathowie: (chuckles) Oh, yeah, probably. No, I think she'll be stoked with it for a long time. I can't imagine her not wanting to do everything Mom does.

jessamyn: Really.

mathowie: Yeah, but they just found Cleopatra costumes at Goodwill for five bucks or something a few weeks ago.

jessamyn: They were really nice costumes.

mathowie: Yeah. I mean, they're literally in a bag, brand new. Our Goodwill has weird brand new unused stuff sometimes.

jessamyn: Sweet!

mathowie: So that's what they did! And it was pretty good. Billion kids, it didn't rain, like, the standard Oregon costume is, what do you want to be at Halloween? Keep in mind you might have to wear a ski jacket or a hoodie. How does that work into the costume?

jessamyn: Well, it snowed two days ago, of course, here.

mathowie: Wow!

jessamyn: So keep it might either snow or rain or, you know, there was a monsoon one year. This kid's costume was my favorite, where he was basically a jellyfish by using a clear umbrella with a bunch of bubble wrap hanging off the sides of it?

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: Wow, smart!

jessamyn: Totally, totally.

mathowie: That is lifehacky.

cortex: I should go as Gorton's Fisherman.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: He's one of the nerdy neighborhood kids, so I was like, 'Way to go, nerdy neighborhood kid!'

mathowie: That's brilliant. They could have made it more decorative, like...

jessamyn: Oh, shut up, Matt!

mathowie: No! I'm just saying like pink!

jessamyn and cortex: (laugh)

mathowie: Portuguese man o' war-y, I don't know.

jessamyn: (chuckle) My suspicion is he had a different costume. Our first costume visitor was Doctor Who, also, which I thought was a pretty great thing about my neighborhood.

mathowie: Wow.

Some kid went as a toilet?

mathowie and cortex: (laugh)

jessamyn: Oh my god, do you want to throw candy into that toilet all night long. Totally.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: I don't know if you guys can see this picture, but it was like four teenage girls in the neighborhood basically went as websites.

mathowie: Aww. Aww. It shows up as unavailable to me. I thought we were friends on Facebook.

jessamyn: It's not my picture.

mathowie: Oh, right, yeah, friend of a friend.

jessamyn: It's my friend's picture. But it's basically four teenage girls, they're all wearing colored t-shirts, and so there's Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. Like, the t-shirts are drawn by hand, and they all went together and stood next to each other as apps, and it was very cute.

cortex: Nice.

mathowie: Someone on my Twitter stream posted a kid going as the healthcare.gov site still loading, or something?

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Oh, god. (laughs)

mathowie: And he probably has a scary Republican dad who hates it, you know.

jessamyn: Well, I was just reading about the healthcare... like, I saw the SNL send-up of healthcare.gov, and I was like, wop wop wop, but it didn't really occur to me, I guess, because I have health insurance and also Vermont, I believe, has their own state website? That the 30-plus sites that don't have their own state website all have to use that terrible website, and they were releasing numbers that said, like, only five people successfully signed up on the first day?

Like, five? Five.

mathowie: (chuckle)

jessamyn: I was like, that's gotta be wrong, right? It's like 5,000, or blahblahblah. No?

mathowie: Yeah. I think I heard nine as... and I thought it was a joke, but possibly not.

jessamyn: Yeah, it didn't... I was looking. Is this... six completed sign-ups on the first day, according to the Wall Street Journal.

mathowie: (chuckles) Wow.

jessamyn: Like, that's actually bad.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like, I thought it was like, oh, it was slow, it was a little inconvenient, whatever. I had no idea it was completely not functional.

mathowie: It's bad. Yeah, the Oregon one just kicks you out. You just go, 'What state are you from?' 'Oregon.' You're done with healthcare.gov.

jessamyn: Goodbye!

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: And I'm like, I wanted to know what everyone says is wacky or good or bad! And I can't.

jessamyn: Whomp whaa!

I posted a link to... so clavdivs did his annual, almost-annual, 'What are you gonna do at Halloween?' and a couple people flagged it when it first came in, and so I was like, 'No, no, no, you guys should know this is a tradition.' But I didn't really pay attention to it until I looked up
all of his posts, and he's... and I put a little link on Best Of.

mathowie: It's a long con.

jessamyn: He's been posting some version of this since 2001.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: He did 2001, -2, -3, and -4, skipped -5, did -6, -7, skipped -8 and -9, and did -10, -11, -12, and this year.

cortex: He, I'm going to say, he may not have skipped at least one of 2008 or 2009. I think I actually deleted one one year.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Oh my god, you monster!

cortex: I know. Well, and it's... it's clavs, so it's like...

jessamyn: It may have just been weird and making no sense?

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: It's kind of hard to read, and he doesn't tend to write in a paragraph saying, 'Oh, I think there may have been a misunderstanding,' I think it's just not his way of interacting with the site, so yeah, I don't remember [??].

jessamyn: I don't see any deleted MetaTalk posts from him.

cortex: We may not have been...

mathowie: [??]

jessamyn: Oh, that was before we...

cortex: That may have been pre-rework. So it's possible it was 2008 or something and I nixed one and then it was just magically gone. I could also just be

just imagining that I did that, and maybe it was a bad dream I had, but I don't know.

mathowie: Wow. This was a post about your favorite (chuckling) musical character, and then... is this Movin' Right Along? It's Raining Florence Henderson?

jessamyn: (sings) Doodle-oodle-oot! Ch-ch ch-ch! Footloose and fancy-free!

mathowie: A version of Movin' Right Along but Metafilter-themed? That's pretty amazing.

jessamyn: Dude, It's Raining Florence Henderson drove past my exit on the highway.

mathowie: How do you know this?

jessamyn: And was on vacation with his wife. Because he asked a question about Vermont--

mathowie: Oh.

jessamyn: --vacations in Ask Metafilter.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: I was like, 'You call me!' But it's like you don't want to be like, RAR, bring your wife over so she can meet the woman from the website you know.

mathowie: (laughs) Sounds completely legit.

jessamyn: (laughs) Yeah. So he just drove by and was like, 'You know, I waved at Exit 4.' I was like, 'You were a mile and a half from my house! It would have been great to meet you.' So maybe next decade.

mathowie: Aw, doot-doot-doot. So yeah, a lot of musical stuff.

jessamyn: Well, and they're just fun threads, you know.

Because not everybody goes out and does a Halloween thing, but it's a nice way for everybody to chit-chat about possible ideas.

mathowie: I did not wear a costume.

jessamyn: You didn't?

mathowie: No, I did not wear a costume. And then I was called either a hipster or a nerd a couple times.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: But you are a nerd!

mathowie: I know! I was like, 'Yeah, for 41 years. Yup. That's what I've been going as.'

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: A hipster.

mathowie: Oh, a nerd.

jessamyn: Do people think you're a hipster where you're from, Matt?

mathowie: I was wearing plaid and tight jeans or something? I don't know.

jessamyn: Unhhh.

mathowie: I came around. I came around--

jessamyn: And you got that new haircut, I saw. It looked good.

mathowie: Yeah. I came around on the skinny jeans. You know, I accidentally had some, and I was pissed, and I was like... and then a day later, after wearing them, I'm like, 'Hey, these are efficient! I'm not wasting fabric like I used to!'

jessamyn: Well, and they're comfortable most of the time, if you get ones that fit.

mathowie: Yeah. I've got some great stretch jeans, and they work awesome.

jessamyn: Just make sure you've got a buddy to tell you if you're going too far.

mathowie: (chuckles) Right. God, that's a great picture. Where did you find a bee costume?

jessamyn: We've got a yard sale Facebook page for my neighborhood, and somebody was selling a bee costume basically for children.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: And so that's why it has suspenders.

mathowie: Ohh!

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Because I had to cut the sleeves totally off, and the hat came off, and then I sewed the suspenders on, and that's why it only comes down to my knees. I think it's supposed to be a full-sized bee costume for children. But it's huge, right? So it can fit basically any kid.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And so I'm not that big of a person, so it fit me.

mathowie: It's kind of like you're wearing a barrel in those old photos of people [??]--?

jessamyn: Yes, yes, exactly! And then someone was like, you're like, IMA BEE IMA BEE IMA IMA IMA BEE, like the Black Eyed Peas song.

mathowie: Oh, right. I was wondering why you were apologizing to (laughing) the Black Eyed Peas.

jessamyn: It's always a good idea to stay on good terms with them.

mathowie: Yeah, that's right. They are very powerful.

jessamyn: But originally I was going to go as a zom-bee or something, and I was just overcomplicating things.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: I'm like, you know, I'm in the neighborhood where a kid dresses as a toilet

and most kids are ninjas.

mathowie and cortex: (chuckle)

jessamyn: The bee's gonna be okay. There was one other little bee, and we bonded, and that was very nice.

mathowie: God, there's so few recognizable costumes. Some kids are--

jessamyn: Do you think that's just because you're not watching kid TV, or do you think...?

mathowie: Nah, they just don't put much effort into it. Like, it's either a crappy five-dollar plastic grocery store kind of costume, or it's nothing at all, or stuff at home, or I'm a cowboy, which isn't very hard to do.

jessamyn: I like the cowboy costumes.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: I mean, I can remember being a kid and having it be really important picking the right two-dollar grocery store costume.

mathowie: Right, with the plastic face.

jessamyn: That represented your...

mathowie: (chuckle) Your worldview.

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

mathowie: There wasn't 20 Iron Mans this year like there was last year.

jessamyn: We had three Iron Men, which I thought made sense, because that's where we are in the series.

mathowie and cortex: (chuckle)

mathowie: We had zero, which was strange. Or maybe one. But yeah. Hmm.

I don't remember being dazzled by anything. Only a couple kids that were wearing a box, you know, something that was extravagant they had to sort of bump around in. Yeah, just not putting the effort in. Kids, disappointing me! Let's see.

jessamyn: Oh, hey, I just also have to include, just because it's Halloween, here's a picture of me going as a clown and my sister going as a Dracula from when I was eight.

mathowie: Aww, neat.

cortex: Aw, yeah, that picture!

jessamyn: From my mom's Flickr from a million years ago.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: It's better because I think the next year I went as a gypsy and so--

mathowie: Whoa! Sorry.

jessamyn: Roma.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: I went as--

mathowie: Flickr's not loading for me. Aww. I think Flickr's broken.

cortex: Darnit, Flickr.

mathowie: Having a panda massage.

jessamyn: (softly) Panda massage.

mathowie: Oh, wait, that works. What are you, a hobo?

jessamyn: I think so? A little clown. A little carnival clown.

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

cortex: (chuckles) I thought you said oboe.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: It's like, no, what?!

jessamyn: Dude, that would be great!

cortex: Just like a couple of reeds...

mathowie: 'I'm a bass bassoon, you idiot!'

jessamyn: (snickers)

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: We had one kid who went as a rock-and-roll guitar, and was with the toilet kid? And we thought it was some kind of complicated Elvis thing that we didn't understand? I'm still not sure.

mathowie: Ohhh! Huh. And his friend the ham sandwich also went? (chuckles)

jessamyn: I know, I know.

mathowie: Ohh, man.

Alright, so Metafilter Jobs. There have been no good--(chuckles) no good Jobs.

jessamyn: The Jobs were the normal jobs.

cortex: Well, no, they weren't bad.

mathowie: All the Jobs are Wordpress or web, they're all web...

cortex: They're just, yeah, there's nothing delightful to discuss on a podcast.

mathowie: If you know Arabic, there's one interesting one? You could translate a page. And Mark from the Gel conference is asking for people to make Word templates? I thought that was slightly a design challenge. Like, making a beautiful Word template? Because I didn't even know you can--what can you do with Word templates? But if you ever open a print design magazine, you can be amazed about what people can do with stationery, like sometimes they can make beautiful kinds of things...

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

mathowie: And you're just like, 'Wow, a letterhead?!' I guess you can still innovate there. And I never thought about Word, so maybe that one is a possibility.

jessamyn: I just taught a guy in my drop-in time how to use Save As so that he can actually make multiple letters and not just keep writing the same letter over the same letter because he wants to keep the letterhead that somebody set up for him.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: Oh, right.

jessamyn: Save As.

cortex: Yeah, that's an exciting development.

mathowie: Although that's going away in the newest Mac!

jessamyn: This is PC stuff. But yeah.

mathowie: Oh, okay.

jessamyn: I think it's well away in Mac is, yeah. It's a distant memory.

mathowie: Yeah, now... can you even save a copy anymore? I don't, yeah.

jessamyn: I think it's complicated [??].

mathowie: Oh, you'd have to teach him how to pull up every copy of it in Time Machine, so grab two months... Which is hor--

jessamyn: Aughhhh! That works really well in the lab, yeah.

mathowie: Yeah. (chuckles) I was thinking about Time Machine the other day, like, I used it twice when it first came out, and it saved me from some Photoshop disaster where

I'd deleted some layers, and then I found a file from two days before and saved the day, and I've never used it since.

jessamyn: You know, I use--

mathowie: I have this complicated 3 gigabytes, I have six months of every file I've ever had.

jessamyn: So you haven't had to use it, but you're still using it.

mathowie: Yeah, I just set up the WiFi time machine thing, so it backs everything up all the time. I looked up at it the other day and I had something like six months of archives of everything I've ever done, but I haven't used it in two years, the feature.

jessamyn: I think that's an optimal result, right?

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Yeah, I guess.

cortex: You want to have it and not need it.

mathowie: Yeah, that's where I'm at.

Let me see, Projects, what were you guys' favorite Projects?

jessamyn: Oh, oh, well, Projects! Very exciting. Because!

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: Summer's over and people are ramping back up.

jessamyn: Two things that I found out.

mathowie: Oh, yeah!

jessamyn: The Internet Archive has improved their Wayback Machine.

mathowie: Yep.

jessamyn: Which is cool. Number two, Raj, the guy who I have been working with to help

fix some stuff at Open Library, is on Metafilter, and I had no idea until I saw this post, and so now I have another way to communicate with Raj, and this just looks really nice! The Internet Archive has always suffered from being the most amazing, ugliest website. There is no website that is more amazing or less attractive, I think, although I'd be interested to see what people had to say about it.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And so the Wayback Machine is now glorious. It looks nice, it works well, there's a way to get citations from it, it's just really, really cool. So I was happy to see this.

mathowie: Yeah. I know Raj from friends with Leah, on Flickr I followed him, but if you look at his Projects page, he did last month's Project that we mentioned, which was the Kiva loan thingy. He's done a zillion cool projects.

jessamyn: Wait a second. Raj isn't... Raj and Ranjit are not the same person.

mathowie: Oh, wait. Is it? No, maybe not. Maybe I'm getting confused. Maybe I'm thinking of Ranjit.

jessamyn: Okay.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Huh. Wait, why does this person have a 17000 usernumber? Jesus.

jessamyn: Because they've been a member since 2002.

mathowie: Okay, I'm getting my Rajs mixed up.

jessamyn: Don't even.

mathowie: Sorry. Though one thing that was cool is Jason Scott pointed out this availability API aspect of it. Which was... and me and Paul thought about, we can't think of a elegant way to do this?

jessamyn: So it can fall back to the Archive version of it if the website isn't up?

mathowie: Yeah. So if you pull up a post from 2003 and the link is to Yahoo! News or whatever, you know it's going to be dead, but they might have a copy of it if you... but there's no elegant way to do the fallback only in the result of a failure. Jason Scott made it sound like, 'Hey, why don't you just rewrite every link from 2000--'

jessamyn: (chuckles) Your link handling.

mathowie: Yeah, change your link handler and just point first at the Archive, and if it's live we'll point it forward.

Like, it wasn't... it's not perfect. I wish it was... like, this stuff also has to happen within 50 milliseconds, and this stuff should happen...

jessamyn: Right, right, in order for it to be seamless, yeah.

mathowie: Right. It should happen in the plumbing in the cloud before it gets to the user, so we kinda want it to be smoother than it is, so we couldn't figure out a way to make this thing, but this new API basically exists to show, oh, hey, if you ever hit a 404 somewhere on the web in your blog or something, you can fall back to

the Wayback Machine.

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: And it's brand new, so I'm sure there'll someday be a Wordpress plug-in, maybe, for old blog posts that would tap into it.

jessamyn: Which would be pretty great, right? Pretty great.

mathowie: Yeah! Yeah, it's possible. Like, a lot of things at the Internet Archive, it's a great idea, and just the implementation could be spectacular if it weren't... oh, they also came up with a way you can just make a 404 page for your own sites that automatically pulls up the Wayback Machine.

cortex: Huh.

mathowie: So it says, if someone hits a random page in your blog, it checks the Wayback Machine, to be like, 'Do we have a copy of it from 2006 or something?' Like, here's how to do it. It was also in that post.

jessamyn: Neat! Yeah. So I was just very thrilled to see that.

mathowie: Yeah, it's pretty cool. That was on my list, too.

We always mention Jezztek's t-shirts.

cortex: (chuckles) Whatever shirt's going on.

jessamyn: Oh, right. You know, I did enjoy...

mathowie: So for Ada Lovelace Day there are Badass Women of Science, which was pretty cool.

jessamyn: Well, and this one's great, because it combines, right?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: To, it combines the rock logos with these women who did completely awesome things.

mathowie: Well, I think it's three, it's three different previous t-shirt things that were probably featured on this site, so it's the mustache t-shirts and the science t-shirts, just the ones that featured women.

So maybe this is like a Best Of album, kind of. (chuckles) Of all the previous designs that Jezztek has already done.

jessamyn: Well, they don't have monocles...

mathowie: That's true. They don't have mustaches.

jessamyn: Oh, but the hair, yeah, the hair one just makes me so happy.

Yeah, they're really cool. The whole thing I thought was great. Yay Jezztek, just in time for holiday stuff. We'll probably be ramping up the Metafilter Mall before the next podcast comes out, so.

mathowie: Oh, right, yeah!

cortex: Oh, right, right!

jessamyn: Look for an announcement in MetaTalk about it, but not just yet.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Get our Christmas on.

mathowie: I wonder how if our Etsy--

jessamyn: Our holiday time on!

mathowie: If our Etsy use has just skyrocketed.

cortex: (chuckles) Get our secular gift exchange period on.

mathowie: Winter solstice! (chuckles)

jessamyn: (chuckles) Well, because Hanukkah, of course, is the same day as Thanks--it starts on Thanksgiving this year.

cortex: Yep.

mathowie: That's crazy.

jessamyn: So it's just gonna be totally weird. And Hanukkah's going to be dead and over by the time people start really Christmasing it up.

mathowie: Didn't we look it up, and it's not going to happen for 10,000 more years that way?

jessamyn: 70,000.

mathowie: Oh my god, math! It's amazing.

jessamyn: It is amazing.

mathowie: That's crazy.

Josh, any good Projects from you?

cortex: Oh, I have a few things I liked.

mathowie: Roguelike? Alright.

cortex: I have two podcasts and two Twitter things.

jessamyn: The sidescroller!

cortex: The wha-what?

jessamyn: The sidescroller.

cortex: I don't know what you're talking about.

jessamyn: Uh-oh. Alright, keep going.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Well, I liked... there's this podcast that DaDaDaDave and RogerB are doing where they're, it's called the Sometime Seminar Podcast, and they're basically just talking about

various topics in a non-continuous... it's an episodic thing.

jessamyn: Discontinuous. Maybe?

cortex: Yeah, it's not a running series that depends on the previous episode. It's just like, 'This week we'll talk about Dwarf Fortress!' Or 'this week we'll talk about online universities,' or so on.

mathowie: Oh, it's loosely around culture, I guess?

cortex: Basically. I mean, it seems to be [??] media stuff, yeah.

mathowie: Because there's poetry, movies,

cortex: Yeah

mathowie: TV shows...yeah, this is all over

cortex: I, of course, predictably went straight to the dwarf fortress episode, but no, it's fun

jessamyn: Straight to the dwarf fortress!

cortex: They're digging it on stuff and I always enjoy hearing that sort of thing and it seems pretty cool.

mathowie: How long is a typical episode?

cortex: Uh, I want to say about an hour, but again I haven't sampled super-deeply. I've listened to a couple, but I'm slow about consuming my podcasts so I haven't gotten very far into it.

mathowie: Sweet!

cortex: But yeah, I like it. They are thoughtful guys. They seem to

chat around a subject together well. That's the sort of thing I'm into, so... There was also--

mathowie: DOH!

jessamyn: It turns out the scroller isn't a game. It's an art thing.

cortex: Are we talking about the Riker thing? Oh no, the ANSI scroller! OK, I know what you mean now.

jessamyn: Yeah, I read "ANSI Scroller" and my brain was like "Sidescroller! It's a game; Josh will like it."

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: And that's just wrong, wrong, wrong

It was cool looking, don't get me wrong, but...

cortex: It was actually really cool. Although it was also terrible when it kept getting posted on Milkshake, because it's like--

mathowie: Oh yeah, yeah

jessamyn: Aarrghhh!

cortex: 30 screens! You know, this would be awesome if I was sitting watching it scroll out of an ANSI terminal but on Milkshake it's just fucking up the page. It's just; it's gigantic.

jessamyn: It's just really, really long.

mathowie: I forgot to--

cortex: Yeah, every time somebody complains about that someone else is like, "Yeah but you can use "j" and "k" to navigate up and down." But that's not the point. That's not the point! That's not how I navigate.

mathowie: I might miss an animated "DOH!" key. [chuckles]

jessamyn: Dude, I don't know why those are so funny. Why are those so funny?

cortex: Because they're hilarious.

mathowie: I was actually yesterday going--

cortex: Such humor.

mathowie: like, "I think I've had enough of the Shiba-Imu-Doge s'meme. Like, of all the image memes, I'm like, I don't know, it's just kind of-- it seems like it's trying too hard or something.

jessamyn: My brain just flipped a switch where I was like "I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it. Oh my God! That's hilarious." and now I can't get back to my "I don't get it" anymore.

mathowie: I love this project from, let me paste it, Dr. Send, called "Fuck yeah, Greenhouses!"

So, it's just, you know, classic "Fuck Yeah, Greenhouses!" or "Fuck Yeah, Blank!" about tumblr.com. And it's just nothing but shots of greenhouses and plants and fancy palms in northern England and stuff where they shouldn't live, but-- Thank you, greenhouses.

jessamyn: Oh that's nice!

mathowie: It's just lots of nice pictures.

cortex: Bleh. Out of context flora porn.

mathowie: Yeah. [chuckles]

jessamyn: Some of them aren't totally greenhouses. Some are just fields.

cortex: Some of them are like, you know, it's like nature is a green house, after all.

after all, you know.

mathowie: [chuckles]

jessamyn: No. By definition it just totally isn't

mathowie: [chuckles]

cortex: The earth is the shape of a house and much of it is green. I mean--

jessamyn: No it isn't.

cortex: We all read the same off-brand text books in school, right?

mathowie: [chuckles]

jessamyn: No. No we didn't. Speaking of the outside, though, I really enjoyed Distorte's hilltops.ie. I don't know if you guys saw that. They hike around Ireland and they mapped a bunch of their photos.

and so it's this interesting visual thing where you look at it, and you see a bunch of hilltops with little dots on it,

mathowie: Oh! I didn't--

jessamyn: and then you click the dots, and you wind up--

cortex: Wow.

jessamyn: --like, right with one of them on, you know, some hilltop in Dingle.

mathowie: Nice! For some reason I didn't put those two things together. I just went, "Oh, some nice photos. That's a cool way out. I didn't know what was going on.

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: Do the colors mean something?

jessamyn: I don't know. You should probably do a comment and ask them. I think it has to do with

like, whether, who's in it? Let me see.

mathowie: Wow. It's beautiful!

jessamyn: I'm going to check the purple one.

mathowie: Shouldn't there be, like, an i-Phone app that does this for you, somehow? It's pretty cool.

cortex: This is a little bit of JAVA script away from being, like, a remake of MYST.

jessamyn: Right! Well, that's what somebody was--

cortex: Like, jumping from point to point, getting panorama.

jessamyn: I think somebody basically said that in the comments.

cortex: Yeah?

jessamyn: Yeah, yeah.

cortex: This is cool.

mathowie: Whoaa! There's like a weird--Whoaa!-- You jump from hilltop to hilltop!

cortex: That's what I'm saying

mathowie: I didn't do the time jumps.

cortex: Hyperlinks, baby!

jessamyn: Yeah, it's very cool.

mathowie: Wow! This is fantastic!

jessamyn: I know! Hilltops.ie Go to Dingle!

mathowie: And then look for the orange triangle to go down the rabbit hole.

jessamyn: Wait; I didn't see an orange triangle. What?

mathowie: Orange triangles unlock the mystery.

jessamyn: Whaa?

mathowie: Look for an orange triangle and then--

jessamyn: Are you making fun of me?

mathowie: No.

cortex: No, that's how you jump from panorama to panorama.

mathowie: it goes--- Yeah.

cortex: Aside from the individual zoom-in things, there's also-- you can also go to different vantages.

mathowie: Yeah. You can go to different hilltops. So you map out--

jessamyn: This feature-- This feature is not available to me. How do you do this?

mathowie: There's a-- Let me see. I'm on the original one. On the original one, if you start scrolling, in the third photo, the top has an orange triangle. It's called "Cruach Mharthain?"

jessamyn: I think maybe some of this doesn't-- Oh! There's more of it. I didn't, of course, notice the side scrollbar because I'm a goof.

mathowie: [laughs] Oh yeah, this whole thing is sidescroll-y.

jessamyn: [chuckles] Oh, nice! OK, thank you. Thank you.

cortex: [chuckles]

mathowie: If you follow the orange triangle on all of them you go to new hilltops, so it's new vantage points.

jessamyn: Thank you.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: Oh, that's wonderful.

mathowie: I thought it was just a sidescroll.

jessamyn: Even more wonderful than I thought.

mathowie: Yeah. It's actually bigger than it is. God, this could be like an app or something.

jessamyn: Well?

mathowie: Using like your i-Phone's GPS.

jessamyn: Yeah?

mathowie: Huh.

jessamyn: What's stopping you?

mathowie: I don't know. Like it. Love it.

cortex: We need Bruce Wayne to make an app that does this with everybody's phones without asking them, but then he'll blow it up.

jessamyn: That's a great idea, actually.

cortex: I like the Really, Nothing is Sadder" Twitter stream

mathowie: Oh yeah.

cortex: This is just Miss Jenny--

mathowie: It's funny.

cortex: --searching the Twitter firehose for people saying "Nothing is Sadder" than random banal thing and then replying with

something actually sadder, likes someone posts, "There is nothing sadder than a Monday morning Twitter timeline," and the response is, "Waking up from a coma to find everyone you love is dead is sadder."

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: And that's the whole thing. It's just constantly being like an aggressive downer on other people's hyperbole, and I was amused.

mathowie: "There's nothing sadder than an overcooked steak," and then it says, "A plane crash with no survivors is sadder." That's kind of funny. (chuckles)

cortex: Yep.

mathowie: God. This can't be, this is not automated, I assume.

cortex: No, no, no, I think they just, they automate the search and then they write up the tweets as they go.

mathowie: It's pretty good!

cortex: There was also another one--and these were both things that ended up getting posted to the front page, but another twitter stream, @HardSciFiMovies--

mathowie: Oh, yeah!

cortex: Which is posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94, I think it's sort of a collaborative effort from the IRC channel on slashnet,

like, tossing stuff into a Word document and then, or a Google Drive document, whatever, and then posting periodically, and yeah, it's great! It's all, let's take premises for sci-fi movies, but then let's actually treat them like boringly accurate outcomes instead of someone turning into Spiderman because he got bit by spider.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: "A scientist starts a human teleportation business. She goes bankrupt when people realize teleportation involves murdering the original body."

mathowie and cortex: (chuckle)

mathowie: This is funny because it was posted to Projects like the morning it went up, and so I got to see this Project as a baby in the universe, and it caught on like wildfire among my nerd friends who don't even use Metafilter, have no idea who East Manitoba is, and I saw these being retweeted by people in New York, San Francisco, Portland, like, that they loved the shit out of this.

cortex: Yep. It's a great premise.

mathowie: It's really funny.

cortex: And, yeah, it's got like, it's like 15,000 followers that account has now.

mathowie: Really? Like in two weeks? Jesus.

cortex: Yeah. Yeah.

jessamyn: Yes. It's crazy.

mathowie: That's--

cortex: 'You sons of bitches, I made you!' (laughs)

jessamyn: (chuckles)

mathowie: (chuckles) Have you guys ever watched Party Down, you know, the, I think it was on Starz?

jessamyn: No.

cortex: I've never seen it. The one with Adam Scott in it, the one he was on before.

mathowie: Yeah, yeah, and there are a bunch of out of work actors working for a, what do you call it, catering business, and so they hate their life, basically, and they're funny? But one of them is, what's-his-name, Starr from Freaks and Geeks.

What's his name? He was a mopey kid on Freaks and Geeks, and he's basically a mopey nerd, and all he ever wants to do is talk about hard sci-fi in the show.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Uh-huh. (laughs)

mathowie: Like, with women! Like, the way he's trying to pick up women, he's talking about his hard sci-fi screenplay that can't get made, you know, and how he hates most sci-fi, because it's not hard enough, and this reminded me totally of this. Like, I read all these in his voice. Starr... Martin Starr!

cortex: Right after--

jessamyn: I thought Matt was going to read something in his voice.

mathowie: No, Martin Starr.

cortex: My mailman just delivered some mail through the mail slot, so I heard 'thump thump!' and then everything was quiet. It's like he'd somehow killed you all with my mail. It was disconcerting for a moment. It's a Halloween hangover here. It's too spooky.

mathowie: Martin Starr. Martin Starr is who I was trying to remember.

cortex: Oh, yeah, him!

mathowie: Yeah. So he's very funny in the show.

jessamyn: Oh, that guy!

mathowie: Yeah. As a grown-up he's funny. (chuckles) And his character is totally like the made-up character that's writing these tweets.

Anything else in Projects? I'm all done.

jessamyn: That is it for me in Projects.

cortex: I'm gonna self-plug, because it's not just me, it's also churl--

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: --and I haven't done this in a while, but we're doing a podcast!

mathowie: Alright!

cortex: What do you mean, you haven't done it in a while?! You haven't done it since last month.

mathowie: (chuckles) That's a while.

cortex: I haven't really plugged anything hard for a while. Eh. It's been only three weeks.

mathowie: Did you guys interview Andy Baio for this?

cortex: We did! Yeah, we'll be posting that in a couple weeks.

jessamyn: Wait a second. How did churl post ASCII poops to this thread?

cortex: He's a wizard. We actually have that domain name, in fact.

jessamyn: You can--?

mathowie: Oh, those are - emoji works in the database, I think?

cortex: I guess. It doesn't display for me on my home Chrome, but it displays on my iPhone.

mathowie: Yeah. I had to put in an emoji extension to Chrome, and everything works great, because I was tired of Twitter friends posting box box box, hahaha!

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: I get it.

mathowie: So there is a Chrome extension.

cortex: Maybe I'll look into that. He apparently registered that emoji--

jessamyn: That domain.

cortex: --dot tk, so if anybody ever wants to visit that way they can technically (chuckling) get to the site for the podcast.

mathowie: Crapshoot.

cortex: But yeah, no, just, we've been bullshitting on mic and it's been fun. And it's been going pretty well. And yeah, it's weird, because we did record with Andy a couple weeks ago, and we'll be posting it in a couple more weeks, because we wanted to get a backlog before we launched to make sure we were actually able to produce these things.

jessamyn: That's a good idea.

cortex: But now we're taking a couple weeks off of recording to sort of let that winnow down.

Because in retrospect it's kind of weird to be like, 'Hey! Can you come do this thing? It'll be fun! We'll interview you! And then... you have to wait a month.'

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Which is like, augh. So we're gonna sorta...

jessamyn: That's how it works on Jeopardy!

cortex: Well, yeah. We're not Jeopardy.

mathowie: Yeah, but this is--

jessamyn: (chuckles)

cortex: We can get away with cutting it close to the wire.

mathowie: I think you tweeted that you had recorded something with Andy and I was like, 'Awesome! I got a drive tomorrow! Where do I download?'

cortex: (laughs) Yeah, I know, so...

mathowie: And now the crushing 'oh, [??].'

jessamyn: This is funny. This is like Opposite Josh.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Yeah, I know. It's like planning ahead or something? What is that about?

mathowie: Psssh.

jessamyn: Planning way ahead.

mathowie: You changed, man. You changed.

cortex: It's really, that's churl's influence. He actually is a little bit more thoughtful about trying to plan things before you do them, so we've been meeting in the middle on a lot of stuff.

jessamyn: (noise of enthusiasm that sounds almost but not quite like 'Nice!')

cortex: It's been I think actually really good for both of us to try and figure out ways to compromise on our working techniques.

mathowie: Oh, you got Brad Sucks. Did you interview him when he was here last month?

cortex: Yeah! Yeah, when he was in town for XOXO we got him to come over to my house and we talked for about an hour and yeah.

mathowie: Are all your interviews all three of you in the same room?

cortex: Yeah, yeah, we're literally sitting around my pool table in the basement.

mathowie: Sweet.

cortex: I wanted to do that sitting in the same room so that, you know, really good audio quality, actual eye contact stuff... I mean, this Skype thing obviously works very well if you know each other, and so if you've got a good dynamic enough over the mic like we do, you can get away with it, but if I want to have guests on and they aren't necessarily radio or microphone people, being able to actually make eye contact and sit around in a room seems like a good way to

help things.

jessamyn: Right, because they can then respond to you and have a fluid conversation.

cortex: Exactly. If they can sort of forget that the mic is there, it becomes much less of a production, ideally, so. So we'll see how that goes. But yeah, having fun with it, so.

jessamyn: Great! Congratulations.

cortex: Thanks.

jessamyn: Co-bullshitter.

mathowie: Sweet. I can't wait. I'll listen to the Brad Sucks and the Andy Baio one for sure.

cortex: Excellent.

mathowie: All the other ones can go - no. (laughs)

cortex: (laughs) Those guys suck. (laughs)

jessamyn: I'm still working through my WTF backlog.

mathowie: Oh wait, you got msalt on there!

cortex: Yeah, yeah, he was on the first episode.

mathowie: Every time I go to the Helium Comedy Club I hope it's going to be one night where Marc might possibly be there doing his super-duper local intro guy slot. But no, I've never gotten the chance.

cortex: Well, just check with him. [??]

jessamyn: You know, men can plan these things.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: You can just have him drop you a line. I think he has a mailing list or something, but.

mathowie: Oh. Yeah. Well, there's this standard, like, there's a nice comedy club in Portland, and they always use some local open mic-er as the very first slot, and so you never, I've never seen the same person twice there ever.

mathowie: And I know he kind of runs their open mic, so I thought someday I'd just randomly see him without having to tell him, but yeah.

jessamyn: This is all the podcast about plans.

mathowie: Very cool.

cortex and mathowie: (laugh)

jessamyn: Planning. How to plan.

mathowie: This really should be the January 1st podcast, right? Where we, we're turning over a new leaf!

jessamyn: Right. I slept late, Josh forgot about the podcast, we're, yeah.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Yep.

mathowie: The lifehacky podcast. Alright.

jessamyn: Oh!

mathowie: Go.

jessamyn: Well, I was just going to say, if we wanted to go to Ask Metafilter--

cortex: Do it.

jessamyn: And you know how stuck I am on good segues--

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: We had a very popular--it's true, though, right? I like patterns. So this was like your kind of standard, 'I need hacks for whatever!', but basically this is just triggerfinger, who's a user who was looking for hacks, blahblahblah. But what triggerfinger really means--I think triggerfinger is female? Oh god.

mathowie: [??] religion.

jessamyn: Which was basically looking for kind of just mantras, like 'look, you're having a bad day'--

mathowie: Oh.

jessamyn: --'and you just want to kind of say something to yourself so that you're not dwelling on whatever the bad day thing is. What do you say?' And so basically it's like many other list-generation Ask Metafilters. It's just a list of things you can say to yourself that help you get over whatever the little hump is that you're dealing with right now while you're waiting for all the other things you're trying to do to actually kind of work.

And it's kind of a nice thread full of--

mathowie: Hmm.

jessamyn: You know, one person's mantra is another person's platitude, so you can kind of figure out the ones that you really care about versus the ones that don't do it for you, but there's a lot of good list-generation, and I enjoyed it.

mathowie: Ooh. I like the, Chocolate Pickle actually wrote, like, ten years from now, are you even going to remember this stupid thing? (chuckles) Like, that's pretty good! Ten-mile-off view.

jessamyn: Yeah! Well, exactly! I think everybody who's got, you know, bad mood issues that they deal with that aren't necessarily crippling depression needs to find ways to... I mean, especially this time of year, right? The days get short, the time zones are all weird, holidays are ramping up, everybody's a little aughhhh! more than usual. And so these are helpful, I think. And it was a very popular thread.

mathowie: Yeah. This is a funny saying I've never heard. "Everyone fucks up sometimes - the trick is to not go over your quota."

mathowie and cortex: (chuckle)

jessamyn: Right, right, right. (chuckles)

mathowie: That's pretty fucking good! Never heard that.

jessamyn: Yeah! There was a bunch of them I hadn't really heard, and I thought it was helpful. I liked it.

mathowie: Oh, I saw your thread on a year calendar at a glance that looks nice? How did that turn--?

jessamyn: For Christ's sake, why is that the hardest thing in the world to do?

mathowie: Because I don't know, it's large?

jessamyn: I've been meaning to ask this question for the last year. I just want one big wall calendar that I can write in the boxes that goes on the wall that I put up in January and I never touch it again. And there's one!

mathowie: Do you? Whoa, that NeuYear one looks cool. It's dry-erase.

jessamyn: That's the one I'm buying! I mean, I was like, I'm using the wrong terms, I can't Google it, what's going on? Like, basically there's the ugly office one that you can get at Staples.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: That everybody buys, and I'm like, look, I'll just deal with that if I need to, but what I really envisioned was something a little design-y, but that costs less than fifty bucks, but I want... you know, like everybody, I have super nitpicky needs.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: It's gotta have months, you know, there's a lot that you can get that just have the months as these long stripes of days.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: And it was kind of an exercise in...

mathowie: Is it that nobody thinks of the year at a glance as a view they want to see, that it's too overwhelming?

jessamyn: I think people just aren't using paper calendars anymore, and the people who are are at the office and they have those desk calendars.

mathowie: I guess when I read it I went like--

jessamyn: I mean, if you've got a cube, you don't have a wall.

mathowie: Yeah. Right. When I read it, I went like, do those even exist?!

jessamyn: I know!

mathowie: Like, I've never even thought about... huh.

jessamyn: And so people gave me, like, 'Well, there's this one, but it only meets three out of four of your criteria, and this one meets three other three, other four,' but then there's basically one! There's the NeuYear calendar, it costs 25 bucks, which is expensive but not crazy.

mathowie: Whoa! It's...

jessamyn: And I'm going to put it on the damn wall!

mathowie: It's vertical...!

jessamyn: And next year I'm going to try and make my own!

mathowie: You can do it vertical or landscape, like, the same...

jessamyn: Isn't that smart?

mathowie: That's pretty amazing!

jessamyn: And they just have one item that they sell. I mean, they just have that, and you can, it's landscape, or you flip it

over and it's portrait.

mathowie: That's pretty cool.

jessamyn: But I think I'm just going to go into business and make them next year, after reading Mr. I'm-Going-To-Go-Into-Business-Selling-Calendars, that thread on Metafilter that somebody linked to.

mathowie: (chuckles) How about if, I wish Google Cal's lit up squares for me somehow, but it wasn't made of a giant screen. I wonder if (chuckling) there was some sort of hybrid way to do something.

jessamyn: What do you mean? Like, that you could print it, or that you would just see certain things glowing

in advance?

mathowie: Yeah, like if I just filled some stuff in six months from now, vacation, somehow it would appear there, or I could have a simple shortcut, like a stamp, or something--

jessamyn: Or you could see it glowing on the horizon?

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: That's what I would like. Like the horizon of my calendar is faintly glowing. Something's going to happen.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: But I don't want to have to buy a big-screen TV just to have a damned calendar.

jessamyn: You have a big-screen TV!

mathowie: Ohhh, man. Whoa, this is a guy who just made calendars? Whoa.

jessamyn: Well, and it's funny because you read... I mean, it's kind of a stupid article, but you read that whole post, this is back to Metafilter that somebody linked to in my Ask Metafilter thread, and it's basically, you know, it's one of those poppy, everything they told you about how to go into business is wrong. And, you know, it is and it isn't. You read his article, and he sounds like a pain, and the whole thing sounds annoying, but he actually goes into the numbers of his 'I decided to sell a wall calendar' thing.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And it's interesting reading how they actually work out.

mathowie: Huh.

jessamyn: I think he wound up with something weird because he had to ship it flat or something?

mathowie: It looks like he had changed packaging... yeah, he had changed packaging a couple times.

jessamyn: And it's a really nice calendar! The calendar the guy creates.

mathowie: I really wanted to make a post like this about that time we sold like 500 Metafilter shirts and how much, I had to do two months of research, I should have wrote it up. And in the end, you don't make that money and it's a shit-ton of work. And there are a bunch of great shortcuts

if you put it all together, but it takes a long time.

jessamyn: Well, didn't we have trouble hearing back from Topatoco, and there were a couple weird, like, we--

mathowie: Well, and before that, when I did it all myself...

jessamyn: Oh god, yeah, yeah, yeah.

mathowie: It was--I mean, I had to learn everything. I had to learn how to pick the packaging envelope, and why I would pick it, and how was it going to work with French international customs, like, there's so much crazy research you have to do.

jessamyn: Right, right, right, right.

mathowie: And you know, which label printer is going to

hold up to shipping bags being sent overseas and being dragged on floors and stuff like that. It was crazy.

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

mathowie: So, yeah, I should have done that. Now I've forgotten it all.

jessamyn: So thank you Nimmie Amee, zamboni, and barnone for pointing me in the direction of essentially the one calendar that fits my criteria, and I'm going to now go buy it!

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: And, of course, asking a question on Ask Metafilter means that I've now remembered all the other questions that I need to ask--

cortex: (laughs)

--immediately.

cortex: Yep.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: So I'm just itching waiting for my time to come around again.

mathowie: Of all the goofy chatty thoughtful questions, the 'Is there any man-made object that can't--'

jessamyn: Loved this!

mathowie: 'That's so long it can't be laid flat because of the curvature of the Earth? Is there something like...?' There's only a couple of places on Earth where you can see the curvature of the Earth, like, I've heard central--

jessamyn: Well, anywhere in the ocean, which covers 75% of the planet.

mathowie: (chuckles) Well, I heard like central--

jessamyn: Other than that...

mathowie: Central Australia, you can kind of see the horizon is not straight, because it's so flat and featureless.

jessamyn: Sure.

mathowie: But someone said the curvature of the Earth is eight inches per mile? That seems excessive to me. That doesn't... that seems like way too much. I thought it would be like a quarter-inch a mile or something very tiny.

cortex: Uhhh...

jessamyn: Well, I mean, you can do the math, right?

cortex: Yeah... shit. (laughs)

mathowie: Oh, right, like...

cortex: I don't want to do the math.

jessamyn: I can't both talk to you guys and do the math.

cortex: Yes.

Somenone could do the math--

mathowie: That'd be like dividing pi by 26,000 miles or something, and you'd probably get, whatever, the change in...

cortex: Yes.

mathowie: (chuckles) The rate of change, I guess. Yeah.

jessamyn: It's not a calculus problem, it's just a circle.

cortex: Yep.

mathowie: Oh, I can't even...

jessamyn: But basically the whole point is, the natural variation in ground elevation, which is what ook says--

mathowie: Right. Wild.

jessamyn: --is going to be different. To cut to the chase, the answer is 'no'. Wait, that isn't even a... that link didn't even go anywhere!

mathowie: That might not work in...

jessamyn: Oh, the link is broken!

mathowie: Is that...?

jessamyn: Or I did something wrong, probably.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: At any rate, it's a fascinating thread where people are like, 'Well, maybe...?' 'But what about...?'

mathowie: I mean, because there's bridges that are several miles long, you know, like, does that show up in the bridge engineering? But I don't think it does. I think the surface variability is too much.

jessamyn: Well, and most things bend.

mathowie: That's true.

jessamyn: Even things that are super rigid, and, you know, skyscrapers, for example, they go up straight, but they're intended to move a little bit in the wind specifically so

they don't have a big windstorm and they just snap, you know.

mathowie: And you also have like heat expansion slots in lots of things.

jessamyn: Right, right, right, exactly.

mathowie: Like every bridge.

jessamyn: Right! Like every bridge.

mathowie: Very cool. (whispers) Like every bridge. Every good bridge.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Ohhh.

jessamyn: Yeah, but I enjoyed that thread, because I didn't know the answer, and I just read along, like, 'I wonder about that!'

mathowie: There was a pretty good round-up of persuasive podcasts that showed up on

Ask Metafilter.

jessamyn: I didn't see this either. This is great!

mathowie: Where, give me podcasts that inform that also persuade, (chuckling) you know, that gives me... like stuff like This American Life or Radiolab or 98% Invisible, and there's a whole bunch of podcasts I've never heard of that I would love to check out.

jessamyn: Yeah, by Hoenikker, who's not a user... long-time user but not somebody I necessarily know.

mathowie: I saw a couple crazy travel ones that were awesome. One of these was tell us what to do in, where's the best place to see orca whales in the San Juan Islands, which is just kind of--

jessamyn: Oh, I saw that, yeah!

mathowie: Kind of a dream, just lots of good advice on high points and places to hang out and spend some time. ;And then there's this thread on going to New Zealand, it just said, like, 'Hey, help us fill out our New Zealand trip, here's a loose

itinerary, we're going to be in the North, we're going to be in the South, we're going to fly between the two islands,' and there's not that many answers, there's only four answers, but every answer is so crazy, it makes it sound like all of New Zealand is a giant movie set.

jessamyn: Isn't it?

mathowie: By Peter Jackson. There's this sound cruise. Go on this cruise in this fjord and it's so silent and echoey that apparently you just cruise out there and hang out in a boat for an hour or two and just listen to birds echoing through a fjord.

Like, does that...? I've never heard of anything like that in my life. That's so crazy.

cortex: Huh.

jessamyn: I would enjoy that very much. And this is aabbbiee, who we met at the MaxFunCon.

mathowie: Oh, cool.

jessamyn: She was the scholarship, the Metafilter scholarship student.

mathowie: Oh, cool!

jessamyn: Yeah! I think that's who she is. A-A-A-B-B-B-I-E-E-E. That's neat.

mathowie: Sweet!

jessamyn: You've been to New Zealand what, once, twice, Matt?

mathowie: Once? I want to go again.

jessamyn: And they're on their honeymoon!

cortex: Awww.

mathowie: So yes. Super sweet. They're doing a lot of things, if you look at that. I mean, they're seeing pretty--

jessamyn: Yeah. That is not my idea of a good time, but.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Going to Australia, too? It's actually pretty far between the two. It looks the same on a map, but I think it's like a five-hour flight.

jessamyn: Right, but it's like Chicago to Texas, yeah.

mathowie: (laughs) Probably like New York to like Utah or something, it's pretty much across the country.

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: I think it's like four or five hours, or a few hours?

jessamyn: And then when you get there, you're in Brisbane. Which, eh? I don't know. Maybe they have friends there.

mathowie: Eh? Oh, it'll be summer, so it'll be hot.

But crazy. New Zealand sounds like a fake thing that doesn't really exist.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: That's all I wanted to push. (chuckles)

jessamyn: I also enjoyed this brief and thematically appropriate, 'I'm a single dad and I'll be volunteering at my kid's Halloween party.'

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: 'I'm in a pirate suit. She's gonna...' I think he doesn't know that she's...

mathowie: Oh my god. 'I need a nautical opening line'? Oh, wow.

jessamyn: But it's unixrat. We know him. He's been around for a while.

mathowie: Yeah. (chuckles)

jessamyn: And I just enjoyed people trying to give him ideas, and then of course you've got the occasional nerd who is like, 'This is a bad idea!', and...

mathowie: (chuckles) Do not say booty. Do not go anywhere near booty right away.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: Do not... a lot of people are saying booty, but I would not shoot out of the gun with booty.

jessamyn: I would not either. But, you know, I don't know other people. I don't understand other people. So I just figure you give him a lot of advice and you figure he can make whatever...

cortex: (chuckles) Follow his heart.

jessamyn: Whatever decision he needs to make.

mathowie: My favorite Halloween post was about (laughs) someone researching a costume, my friend Joe Crawford, I've known for a long time in the L.A. web community when I lived there. He was being Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski, and he wanted to know, 'Walter's wearing dog tags. What, if I was going to make accurate, accurate dogtags, what should it say on it?' And it is a trip down, I've seen Big Lebowski a zillion times, I thought I knew everything about

it, but it's also military history and all the military rules around dog tags, and they're all different for each branch of the military, and Joe shares at the end what he finally put down, and there's some references to the movie on his dog tags that he made that are pretty funny.

jessamyn: And, not only that, one of the references, the number of times they say 'fuck' on The Big Lebowski--

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: --is (with rising excitement) the same as my user number!

mathowie: Oh, wow!

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Dun-dun-dun!

jessamyn: Dun!

Yeah.

mathowie: Jessamyn, presented by the Coen brothers.

jessamyn: I thought that was pretty great.

mathowie: And the number of times 'dude' is said, yeah. Yeah, and he had a pretty convincing Walter Sobchak.

cortex: That's a pretty good ensemble there.

jessamyn: It was a good-looking costume, yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.

I had two more things that I really liked. I loved Ask Metafilter this month. Josh, did you have any, since we've just been talking about [??]?

cortex: No, no, I, as often is the case, I mostly only see Ask Metafilter through the stuff I have to moderate there--

jessamyn: Alright. Alright!

cortex: Which rarely makes for a good con--it's like, 'Hey, I remember this thread, where people were really unhappy about this uncomfortable situation.'

mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)

cortex: 'Let's talk about that! That was great!' Yeah.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: What!

cortex: So no, please proceed.

jessamyn: Well, this is a thread by R.F.Simpson, who's a newish user, and it's basically, 'I've got a friend, they want to read something, he's a 40-year-old black man who grew up in the streets of South Central and has never read a book in his life.'

mathowie: Wow.

jessamyn: 'What do you recommend?'

mathowie: Wow, what do you start with?

jessamyn: And, you know, people go a lot of different directions with it. But it was just interesting for me to see what people suggested, what people thought people would like,

et cetera et cetera et cetera. It turns into a really interesting thread, I thought.

mathowie: I guess I would think back to the first time I ever read a book for pleasure, but not really, or any book I'd liked, but that'd be like maybe high school, ninth grade, or eighth grade, like when I sort of was given a full adult book, you know, to read.

jessamyn: And you could choose, yeah.

mathowie: Or I actually liked it and it didn't feel forced on me, which all of Shakespeare and most classics felt like.

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

mathowie: Like, I don't know, maybe Grapes of Wrath might have been the first thing I might have enjoyed slightly? Huh. I don't even know what you tell a 40-year-old to start with books. (chuckles)

jessamyn: Well, you send them to the library, is what you tell them, most of the time.

mathowie: That's like a 65-year-old person going, 'You know, I've never heard this rock-and-roll the kids are talking about. Give me one album.' And that'd be pretty difficult.

cortex: (chuckles) 'I hear a lot of people are enjoying this Fifty Shades of Gray, I mean, you know, it's...'

jessamyn: (laughs)

cortex: 'It's a real page-turner!' (chuckles)

mathowie: 'Listen, I've heard a lot about talkies. Can you suggest one movie about comedy that I might enjoy?' This is hard! It's all over the map.

jessamyn: Yeah! Well, it was interesting. It was interesting.

mathowie: I think you want to have that Princess Bride moment, right, where in the movie the kid doesn't want to hear a stupid book about a bunch of stupid things, and the grandpa says, 'Well, there's going to be adventure!'

jessamyn: Right. 'Maybe you can read a little bit more...'

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: That's what you want, the thing that sparks the, ohhh! Because I liked the Into Thin Air by Krakauer, which is totally out of left field, but is also

like, I couldn't put that down, you know, because--

jessamyn: Right, right!

mathowie: Every page you think you're going to die, so.

jessamyn: Right, because, well, you know how the book winds up. (chuckles)

mathowie: Yeah. (chuckles) There will be death.

jessamyn: For the most part. Very few people pick that book up not knowing that McCandless dies, so it's just figuring out how to get to it that...

mathowie: Yeah. Wow. I never heard of...

jessamyn: Oh, which reminds me! Well, wait a sec. The one other... did you have more, Matt? I had two more, I think.

mathowie: I only have one more, and it was pretty flaky. (chuckles)

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Because I enjoyed d. z. wang's "Make my home a factory for living", classic nerd, you know... "Assuming I don't care about hominess or aesthetics, what does industry have to teach me about--"

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: "--getting through all the little maintenance work of life with less time, effort, and attention?"

mathowie: Huh. And this is all focused on food and hygiene, but I'm thinking like vinyl and tile...

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

mathowie: Like changing your surfaces so you don't have to vacuum all the time, or...?

jessamyn: Yeah! But people talk about, like, you know, you set up, you pre-order stuff on Amazon and you subscribe to get toilet paper delivered, there's scientific management, you la-la-la-la-la-la-la!

mathowie: Huh.

jessamyn: So it's not just kind of like domestic hacks, it's more lessons from business that you can apply to your...

mathowie: Some people talk about, I see a Nest thermostat, I've been telling more and more friends keep asking me about it, like, I've had mine for...

jessamyn: I have friends who have one! Like, non-nerd friends who have one. And I'm like what the hell?

mathowie: Well, they're available... they're at the Home Depot, like the end of the aisles. They paid Lowe's or Home Depot to put up little... I was amazed, because I had just turned the corner once in a Home Depot and there was a big Nest display and I went, "Wait, these are normals! They won't understand how to do it or join their wi-fi network or re-wire!"

cortex: I have no idea what this is.

jessamyn: Oh, sorry!

mathowie: A Nest thermostat?

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: A Nest thermostat is designed by former iPod engineers. They started a company to try and re-make household objects, and so they started with a thermostat, which isn't very exciting, but it's just self-programming! And it's amazing. It's like a TiVo, like, the first week it's terrible, but then six months into it, it's absolutely perfect, and so...

jessamyn: It knows when you're in the house, so it learns what your cycles are, so it can turn the heat up when you're awake and down when you're asleep. And my friends were telling me that the wacky thing that it does is it

adjusts your high-end temperature down a degree every week or so.

mathowie: (laughing) Assuming you can handle it?

jessamyn: Yeah! So you've been in your 65-degree house, or 66-degree house, and then next week it's 64 degrees, and then next week it's 63 degrees. And so at some point you're like, "What the hell? It's freezing in here!"

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: And you turn it back up, but it saves... because they're really into, like, they're like, we need to save some damned money, basically.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And that's why they got it. Only, they don't care that it's a gadget, they don't care... they're just basically

like, we need to save money, period. And so it was interesting talking to them about it, because I come from it from the sort of design-y...

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: "Ooh, it's nice-looking!"

mathowie: And you can control it from your iPod, and yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, yeah! And they're just like, it saves us money because we were always leaving our stupid thermostat up or down or sideways or whatever.

mathowie: Yeah. It does two features amazing well, and one is, it turns on the heat fifteen minutes before I get up most days, which is absolutely awesome, and that's what

a computer should do, is figure out when I like to get up from past history and do it for me.
And the second thing is, if I... it works best for someone with a normal job, like, working at home...

jessamyn: I was going to say, yeah.

mathowie: Yeah. If you leave at 9 a.m. and you come back at 5, your house is ice-cold during the day, it doesn't waste a cent of electricity in the winter or summer. But if I just go out for three hours, it turns it off.

cortex: Yeah. This is sounding like less of a coup for me, because I, yeah. (chuckles)

mathowie: Right. But the best--

cortex: I'm at home, that's where I am!

jessamyn: Right!

mathowie: And the greatest thing ever--

jessamyn: You stay still too much and your house gets chilly around you.

mathowie and cortex: (chuckle)

mathowie: The greatest thing ever was going to Hawaii for a week on vacation, and it's December, and the thing is super shut off, because it hasn't seen movement in a week, and then at the airport I'll crank it up to 72--

jessamyn: That's what I want.

mathowie: And because I have a two-hour drive, so it warms up the house from 60 to 70 when I get there, and it's

awesome.

jessamyn: You live two hours from the Portland airport?

mathowie: Yeah, it's only like 45 miles or so, but it's kind of across the city, through the city... it's as far as it could possibly be in terms of, like, I have to go through ten cities that take forever. So it works out--

cortex: It's as the extremely fat crow flies.

mathowie: (chuckles) Yes.

cortex: The fat, slovenly crow.

mathowie: It works pretty good, the Nest is like, I can't believe how great... it's gotten so good where I don't even think about it, I haven't reviewed it in six months,

it's...

jessamyn: But you can check into it on your phone, and see how it's doing and what it's doing, and...

mathowie: Yeah. It shows you its recipes. It goes, this is what I think you do Monday through Friday, and this is what I do on the weekends. For some reason it really treats those completely separately, since most people have a separate lifestyle.

jessamyn: Right. Right, right, right.

mathowie: So, yeah. It gets a little warmer on the weekends, and it turns the heat on a little bit later on the weekends, and so yeah. It works great. It works really good.

cortex: Oh, interesting.

jessamyn: Neat!

mathowie: And it totally becomes a set it, forget it, and your home just feels better for having it.

jessamyn: And did you save money? Do you know?

mathowie: Eh, it's doubtful.

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: If I was out more, it would. But yeah, it shows...

jessamyn: (chuckles) Right. Well, work at home, what do you do, yeah.

mathowie: You get a monthly e-mail of how many days you saved, like, how many green leaves you got for saving energy.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: It basically forces, it's like, how many days I went out of the house and it shut down. And mine's below the national average, because most people have to leave their house every day.

jessamyn: Every day, I know!

mathowie: So I am net... it's helping a little bit, but not a lot. But yeah, if I worked downtown in a job somewhere it'd be awesome, I think. Probably save a lot of money. Yeah, that's the whole point, that it's like a $200 thermostat that's supposed to save you, supposedly, hundreds of dollars a year.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: And they just came out with a smoke detector that can kind of tap into it and...

jessamyn: It glows.

mathowie and cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: I don't think I, I'm not wild about smoke detectors, so I'm not going to try it out, but yeah.

jessamyn: (softly) It glows!

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: They show it above your bed. I'm like, "Who could sleep?!"

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: "Who could sleep?!" I don't...

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Even the tiny little blinky lights on those annoy me sometimes.

mathowie: Yeah, I know.

jessamyn: Aaagh! Exactly.

mathowie: It's best for a hallway.

cortex: Ever had like, you can't quite get to sleep, and for some reason...

jessamyn: Yes. Yes.

cortex: ...you feel compelled to stare at the smoke detector waiting for it to blink, and then be annoyed that it's blinking.

jessamyn: Yes. Absolutely.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Man.

jessamyn: Man!

cortex: Smoke detectors. Nothing but trouble!

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: RAAR!

And the last one that I really liked was just somebody, Thing, our user Thing, asked about genealogy in different countries.

mathowie: Huh.

jessamyn: Which is a thing I didn't really know about, because in England you can find your ancestors way back until whenever, 1600, and a lot of people through the 1400s.

mathowie: Wow.

jessamyn: And they were just wondering, in other countries, what that's like.

mathowie: Didn't... I mean, I hate to pull up a stereotype, but didn't Mormons revolutionize this whole world and standardize it, probably?

jessamyn: Mormons are very, very American, though.

mathowie: That's true.

jessamyn: And so they don't, I don't believe, have stuff that comes in from other countries.

So basically you're like, 'You go this far back in America, and then who knows what was going on in France.'

mathowie: But I've heard people say, like, before Mormonism became a huge thing in the '70s or '80s, that genealogy was really hodge-podge for Americans, and then suddenly, anyone in the country can trace themselves back to the mid-1850s thanks to...

jessamyn: And, to be fair, that's the same time that digitization was happening also.

mathowie: That's true.

jessamyn: So ancestry.com might have accomplished some of the same thing. But no, Mormons have been really, really on top of that.

mathowie: Whoa, Iceland, that'd be like... is there special Iceland (laughing) set-up? Someone mentioned Iceland. Because isn't everyone subtly related in Iceland, kinda? Like the genealogy is pretty well done.

jessamyn: The gene pool is less diverse.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And one of the things about Iceland is that the naming is patronymic, and so--

mathowie: Oh, right, -dóttir.

jessamyn: --your name is related to who you're related to, you don't have just a family name.

cortex: If your dad's Hargrimm then your last name is Hargrimmsdóttir?

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: Hargrimmsson.

mathowie: Westdóttir. I love that little o with the dots.

jessamyn: (chuckles)

cortex: The umlauts.

mathowie: dóttir. I wish all of my female friends were -dóttirs. That's pretty cool. But then everyone would be -sons, all the guys. That's pretty cool.

jessamyn: I don't know what the transgender Icelandic do.

mathowie: Yeah, right!

cortex: That's a good question. Let's have a 700-comment-long thread about it.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: I'm just leaving it there.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: I'm done. I'm done! That's all I was curious about.

mathowie: There's only 300,000 people in Iceland?

jessamyn: I know. It's half the size of Vermont. It's crazy.

mathowie: That's like a middling city, a single city in America, like... that's...

cortex: Well, there's also the much larger Ice World in Orlando, but...

mathowie: (chuckles) (inhales, exhales)

jessamyn: Ahh.

cortex: (exhales) Little Disney humor.

cortex and mathowie: (chuckle)

jessamyn: Ahhh.

cortex: Should we talk about some Metafilter? I guess that's the other thing.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Sure!

cortex: I liked, there's just nothing I can do but point to this and let you guys

chide me for nerdity, but this gigantic webpage talking about Sierpinski triangles is amaaaazing!

jessamyn: I don't even know what that is.

cortex: It's a fractal where you take a triangle--

jessamyn: Oh, it's that fractal triangle thing!

cortex: --and then, yeah, cut out the middle triangle, and then cut out the middle triangle of the remaining triangles, and so on.

mathowie: Wow.

cortex: So yeah, it's a real simple fractal, and it can be produced in a bunch of ways, but the guy just goes to town on it.

This is a post Jpfed put together.

jessamyn: Well, and it's basically math, right? So you can give somebody an equation and they can have a Sierpinski triangle.

cortex: Yep.

jessamyn: Like, they're mathematic.

cortex: Yeah, yeah. It's...

jessamyn: Whoa. Whoooa. Whoooa.

cortex: It's a collection of a bunch of crazy different ways to fiddle with this in terms of Mathematica code and such.

jessamyn: Whoooa!

mathowie: Yeah, is that Mathematica, or is that like Javascript? What is the code? Both? (chuckles)

jessamyn: I ran out of bandwidth.

cortex: I think... I think it's mostly some included Mathematica code, but yeah. It's crazy. It's fantastic.

And there's so many different ways you can actually produce a Sierpinski triangle, which is part of the interesting thing that it goes into great length on.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: But one of my favorites is the, there's a random dot drawing game, where if you take a piece of paper and you just draw three dots, approximating a triangle, like the points of a triangle, and then you pick two dots at random on that paper and find the exact midpoint and make a dot there, and then keep doing that for a while, just literally just picking any two dots you've got on a paper and keep doing that, you'll

eventually end up with a fuzzy approximation of a Sierpinski triangle.

mathowie: Whaaat?

cortex: Which, it's fucking... it's magic! Do it sometime when you're bored and have to sit still and can have pen and paper for fifteen minutes.

mathowie: Wow, I see that.

jessamyn: I am never this bored.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: Well, you know, doctor's office, something like that.

mathowie: If this guy was really committed to the fractal triangle, I would assume this page would never end? Like, you should just scroll--

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: It doesn't, I don't think.

mathowie: Like, I thought there'd be three examples.

jessamyn: Oh, there's the bottom.

mathowie: I'm amazed that there's... I had no idea how long it was, but I thought it'd be extra funny if you just did Javascript loading and it just kept loading more ideas. Like an xkcd joke, where it's like 10,000 screens long if you just keep going.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Wow, this is insane!

cortex: I thought that was fantastic.

mathowie: That's pretty fucking cool!

jessamyn: The author says, "It's also a fractal expression of just how carried away I get, namely, very."

mathowie: (laughs) It's gotta be awesome at parties.

cortex, jessamyn, and mathowie: (chuckle)

mathowie: Let me see, so we're talking... god, I've got a billion.

jessamyn: I am currently very much enjoying watching all the Metafilter people freak out about the Rob Ford document released by police. I haven't checked in since yesterday.

cortex: (laughs) Has it been released? Oh, they did release something. Okay. They didn't release the video.

jessamyn: They didn't release the video, but they released a document that talks about the video, and they also basically said, yeah, what people say about the video is basically true.

mathowie: And did they really recover it from a wiped hard drive?

jessamyn: That's what I don't know. I haven't...

mathowie: I heard a rumor...

jessamyn: I was enjoying it yesterday, and I haven't checked back in today, so I don't know what the new developments are. But there's a lot of Metafilter people who are very interested in it and watching them talk about it as it happens, especially because everybody's like, 'Rob Ford, what a fucking asshole.'

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: It's not like people are like, 'He got a bum rap!' or whatever.

So it's fun.

cortex: It's not real contentious.

jessamyn: Right.

cortex: It's not a lot of arguing about the basic premise. (chcukles)

jessamyn: Right. He lied and was horrible, and then really got caught, and it's interesting watching how it's all happening.

mathowie: There was a great tweet yesterday. "sounds like the writers are really tying everything together for the season finale of Toronto".

cortex, jessamyn, and mathowie: (laugh)

mathowie: I'm going to be in Toronto in two weeks, and I can't wait to see what it's like on the ground, if he'll be in handcuffs by then, or what.

jessamyn: Oh, nice! Toronto is awesome. That should be fun.

mathowie: Yeah. It's gonna be crazy. (laughing) Is he still the mayor? Oh, man.

cortex: IsRobFordStillMayor.com. Someone mentioned that in a comment.

mathowie: I just saw a random tweet this morning that he called into a talk radio show posing as somebody else, while drunk.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Going like, 'You guys should lay off Rob Ford!', and the host was like, 'This sounds like Ron Ford?' and apparently it was.

cortex: That's fantastic.

mathowie: Yeah, like, wow. This is kind of amazing.

(chuckles) That's funny. This is the story that keeps on giving. Man, it's been like--

jessamyn: Well, and that's exactly it. Which is one of the things that makes an ongoing Metafilter thread the place you want to be to figure out what's going on there.

mathowie: Didn't this all start like a year ago, maybe? It's been a while, right?

jessamyn: It's been in the works for a while, yeah.

mathowie: Yeah. Oh, man. I've got a billion favorites, I don't know where to start.

cortex: Well, just pick one. Just go!

jessamyn: Go.

mathowie: October 7... oh, if you know your shades of corporate blue, that was pretty good.

jessamyn: Don't know what that one is.

cortex: Oh, yeah! Yeah!

mathowie: The corporate blue? And the creator popped in to say, 'Oh, I overlooked Metafilter! Metafilter's now in there.' And I have some screenshots. Sometimes you hit something super hard like Metafilter versus, I think there was Facebook or Skype or...?

jessamyn: So wait, it shows you multiple blues and you have to pick which is...?

cortex: It shows you one blue and two names, and you have to decide which is the correct name.

mathowie: Yeah. And some of them are like--

jessamyn: Since when is LinkedIn blue? Is LinkedIn blue?

mathowie: Yeah, LinkedIn's... well, its logo is blue, but the background isn't.

jessamyn: Hey, I just got Metafilter!

mathowie: Yeah. Some of them are like--

jessamyn: And I got it right!

mathowie: Some of them are like Asana, which is a workgroup app I've used before... I don't even know what Atlassian is, is that some sort of code, GitHub-y...?

jessamyn: I'm 4 for 4, I'm skipping now.

mathowie: I got some wrong and then they repeat and you'll get better at it. (laughs)

cortex and jessamyn: (laugh)

mathowie: But it's, surprisingly, there's a lot of blues in a lot of popular sites that I had no idea. I never thought about it.

cortex: Yeah, it's weird. I don't know most of them.

jessamyn: Thank you antonymous. Who I have met! In Minneapolis, apparently.

mathowie: You've met a lot of people! I loved this, D-Link routers have a simple backdoor in their firmware.

cortex: (laughs) Yes.

mathowie: And it's like one of those standard, oh, there's a security risk, this is probably Ars Technica, or, no, it's not, it's some guy's blog. But it's so great, if you read the blog post, this is by curious nu. The blog post, the guy kinda like, 'I got some Mountain Dew and a weekend night off, and I'm going to go through the filesystem of the router and figure some shit out,' and it's a nice story where he's just reverse-engineering the whole thing, and he eventually finds that there's just this total hacky backdoor.

And it was 'edit by joel backdoor', it's all spelled backwards, the code, like a perfect string you can just fake your way into the administrator and change anything you want about it. And it's great how people in the thread also walk through 'Why does this happen?' 'How did this happen?' People were imagining all these hallway conversations between a manager and a programmer,
'Well, sometimes people don't know their password, but they're on their home network, and they just need to log on! So just make it happen, jerk!', you know.

cortex: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: You know, and so you have to put in these ridiculous things, and yeah, it's just kind of, the whole thing I found really fascinating. I mean, there's a humongous security hole, and reading this thread and reading the post, I could totally walk myself through how this all, this giant mistake happened.

jessamyn: Well, remember on a Mac, if you had a Mac and you forgot your admin password, you could always boot from a CD?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And go into the utilities and reset the password and be okay, and it was one of those things that, kind of a security hole, but you had to have the original disks, and they had to go with your hardware, so blahbuhblah? I had a person who came in to drop-in time with a MacBook Air that she'd forgotten the password on.

mathowie: Mm-hm.

jessamyn: And she'd just set it up. She's like, 'I set it up!' I'm like, 'So what's the password?' She's like, 'I forgot!'

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: And it's one of those things where you're like, 'Were you drinking?' Like, you set this up less than twelve hours ago!

mathowie and cortex: (chuckle)

jessamyn: But basically, she had a computer that she couldn't log into, and I'm like, 'Well...' And the Airs don't have CD drives, so I was like, 'Oh, it's gonna be a nightmare.' But it turns out, you just reboot, hit Command-R, go into the command line, type 'resetpassword'--

mathowie: Whaat?!

jessamyn: --and it pops up a password reset thing for you.

mathowie: Wow.

jessamyn: Like, it's, with no... anyone could do it! I mean, I guess I'm not surprised, because there has to be a way, right? Like...

mathowie: Well, I remember working with a paranoid Linux guy who used cash and eschewed

cellphones, like ten years ago.

jessamyn: Sure!

mathowie: And he was always like, oh, physical access, you're fucked. If you get physical access, I can get into anything if I get physical acc--

cortex: Basically, yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah!

mathowie: And I never thought about what that meant. That's crazy! But, I mean, it's useful. But crazy!

jessamyn: It is a little crazy. I mean, you know, I don't know what happens on your phone, like, nobody I know has had that sort of problem, but I was like, 'Yup, there you go, here's all your stuff, I just reset your password, it's now 'password', write it down.'

cortex and mathowie: (laugh)

mathowie: Wow, that's probably what the Genius Bar has to do.

cortex: They go home and type in P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D-W-R-I-T-E-D...

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Ahahahaha, right, right, right. Yeah, I was just surprised it was that easy. And then I had another lady who's like, 'All my photos disappeared!' And I'm like, 'What?' And I go into her account, I'm like, 'You have two accounts. One's Bonnie and one's BonnieK.'

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: She's like, 'What?' I'm like, 'I don't know, what did you do?' 'I don't know!'

mathowie: 'I just logged in!' Yeah.

jessamyn: So she's like, 'Can you combine them?' And I'm like, 'Absolutely not, no.

No. No, you cannot. No.'

mathowie: (chuckles) That's what I always hear when people go, 'My music disappeared.' And I'm like, you have two iTunes, or you have two accounts pointing to different iTunes acc...

jessamyn: Right. There's only one way this can happen.

mathowie: They're both on the hard drive, right, they're both on the hard drive, it's just they're under two accounts and they hide them from each other. They're like, 'That's not true!', and it's always true. (chuckles) And then there's never an easy way! Like, why can't there be just one iTunes library shared by multiple users? And there's no easy way to do it.

jessamyn: Reasons.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Digital rights reasons.

mathowie: Yeah... yeah, mostly, yeah. Hollywood and whatever.

cortex: It might impinge on perceived profit margin.

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: I really was delighted to see that there's a new video of that weird naked CGI mannequin popping along.

mathowie: Oh, yeah! The, what'd they call it, the QWOP, the QWOP-y looking thing?

cortex: (laughs) People seemed to...

jessamyn: Wait, what do you mean, there's a new one? What else is there?

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Well, okay, this post has two links.

jessamyn: Top comment: 'The fuck did I just watch?'

cortex: The first link is the new one. Yep.

mathowie: Yep.

cortex: So originally there was the going to the store one, and then the wait for a meeting one is a sequel.

mathowie: (chuckles) Right, and it's--

cortex: And I just love these things with all my fucking heart. I don't know what to tell you.

mathowie: (chuckles) They're so weird. It's like half-baked mathematics to make a human model walk down the street, kind of, but it just comes out gross and weird and...

jessamyn: So there's not a real person in this costume.

mathowie: No.

cortex: Right. It's just really nice CGI compositing combined with probably some intentionally lacked-out motion capture.

mathowie: But like purposely bad, so kind of like Hollywood CGI done with

crayons, you know, by a five-year-old kind of idea, but (chuckles) it's so funny!

jessamyn: It drives a car!

cortex: Yep.

mathowie: Just at walking. It's disturbing and strange and...

jessamyn: It drives a car?

mathowie: I guess this is the second one.

cortex: Yeah, this is the second one.

jessamyn: I don't understand the driving the car thing. It's weird.

cortex: (laughs) Don't try too hard to understand it. It's just a thing.

jessamyn: But...

cortex: But I love it, I love it, I love it.

jessamyn: I just like the music.

cortex: Yep.

jessamyn: (sings) Boop boop-boop-boop, boop-boop, boop-boop boop!

cortex: And the music being apparently diegetic so that it follows the... yeah.

jessamyn: What does diegetic mean?

cortex: Happening basically within the context of the story [?] the narrative, so if someone's like, if you're watching a movie and there's some Tom Petty playing and then someone reaches over and turns off the radio and it's off, that music was being treated at least nominally as diegetic. Versus, like, a song that plays over a montage is exegetic.

jessamyn: Sure, that's just completely external to the thing.

cortex: Yeah, yeah.

jessamyn: I get it.

cortex: And obviously movies may play with the transition from one to the other sometimes too.

But yeah.

jessamyn: So, speaking of Metafilter threads where the titles are all in caps--

cortex: Nice!

mathowie: Oh.

jessamyn: International Caps Lock Day was October 21st, and I always enjoy these threads. I don't know what 'crockety bloat' means. That's it.

cortex: No one does. It's lost to the ages, the secret of that. I completely missed Caps Lock Day.

jessamyn: Really? Where were you? What day of the week was it?

cortex: I don't know! I don't know. I was just, I was not paying attention to that, I guess.

mathowie: Oh. Someone--

jessamyn: 21st? That was a Monday. So you worked.

cortex: Oh, the post went up two hours after I got off the clock, is what happened.

mathowie: Ohh.

jessamyn: Oh, and then you didn't work Tuesday morning.

cortex: Yeah. So I missed the proper...

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: Whoa, caps lock anagrams? (chuckles) That's amazing.

cortex: Yeah, it's usually--

jessamyn: Yeah, and except for a couple occasional troll attempts, it was a super fun thread.

mathowie: (laughs) It's just bordering on noise, and it's great.

jessamyn: Yeah, but you know.

cortex: It's a freakout. It's a collective freakout. It's a fun time.

jessamyn: And people are all happy. No one gets mad.

mathowie: I really loved the shit out of a post that went up yesterday about how you make--

jessamyn: Oh! I loved this too.

mathowie: Yeah. How do you make Thomas Kinkade paintings better? You put some Star Wars in them. And it's just a gallery of amazing starship destroyers hovering over cozy little cottages. It's just great.

jessamyn: By user Joh.

mathowie: So good.

jessamyn: And AATs.

mathowie: (chuckles) Did you see the Ringo Starr takes a photo...?

cortex: Yeah, that was really neat.

jessamyn: Yes! I loved that thread!

mathowie: That was amazing!

jessamyn: Well, and it was funny, because everybody acted like it was like Ringo Starr's art project, but the Today Show were the people who actually tracked down those folks.

mathowie: Hmm.

jessamyn: But he was the one who I guess set the wheels in motion.

mathowie: That's really cool. Love those things.

cortex: Speaking of posts that have in their title the name of one of the keys on the keyboard that you press to toggle something on and off and thus it's called a lock--

jessamyn: I don't understand. You're completely locking me already.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: But I look forward to saying...

mathowie: As a golf-clapping segue.

Oh, yes, Scroll Down to Riker.

cortex: Scroll Down to Riker. Because Scroll Lock is also a key on the keyboard.

jessamyn: How do you pronounce this username?

cortex: xingcat [ˈzɪŋˌkæt] is what I say in my head? But it might be xingcat [ˈɛkˌsɪngˌkæt] or...

jessamyn: xingcat [ˈʃɪŋˌkæt]?

cortex: xingcat [ˈʃɪŋˌkæt], or xingcat [ˈd͡ʒɪŋˌkæt]? Yeah. Yeah.

jessamyn: I don't know. I was just curious. So what is this, Josh?

mathowie: Oh, wow, you get...

cortex: Well, apparently they say it xingcat [ˈzɪŋˌkæt], so hey, go me.

This is a very simple thing, if it works. If it doesn't work, it probably just looks like a picture of Riker and nothing.

mathowie: It didn't work for me, but now it works.

cortex: But if you scroll down, it animates through a real charmer of a smile Riker gives in some...

jessamyn: "I've only been there once, but they've got this great club. Even Klingons need love now and again."

cortex: If you just keep...

mathowie: (chuckles) Are these all in order, or are they just random.

cortex: Random.

jessamyn: They're random. I get the same ones over and over again.

That is cute! Again, I'm a little confused...

cortex: Anyway, it's... (laughs) It's just a little

dose of Riker. I don't know.

mathowie: It's an interesting Javascript.

cortex: I have no idea who made it or why, but I thought it was adorable and people on Metafilter did too, apparently.

mathowie: It was so slow-loading the first time I looked at it, all I got was the first frame and the last frame and the same message over and over and I went, 'Why do people love this so much?' (chuckles)

cortex: I mean, it's no Riker sitting down, but still.

mathowie: Right, right.

cortex: Man, someone should make a scroll down to Riker sit. That'd be a brilliant sequel.

mathowie: (chuckles) And you'd have to scroll up to get his leg to go over the chair?

cortex: Yeah. Yeah. Up and then down. Up and then down.

mathowie: (chuckles)

jessamyn: Confusing.

cortex: (laughs) Someone should make a Star Trek Track & Field game, where you just do various really, really dumb little events like that.

mathowie: (laughs)

cortex: So, mash A and B to get your leg up and over the chair and sit down.

mathowie: Track & Field...

jessamyn: I enjoyed this very brief post by filthy light thief, "Nothing makes a carrot more appealing than turning it into a centipede," which was basically a

look at an old book called Aunt Jo and Uncle George's Kritters of the Kitchen Kingdom from 1922.

mathowie: Ooh.

jessamyn: Which is all about how to make weird little animals out of stuff you find in your kitchen, but it's just completely crazy, and the pictures are nuts, and warning: a little bit racist. But it's basically a single-link blog post that I found completely delightful.

mathowie: Wow, the ghost pizzas are brilliant. That's mozzarella, and you probably use chopped black olives...

Why didn't I think of that? Oh, man, these are great.

cortex: I remember I saw this pig water around somewhere in the wild, but did not know the context.

mathowie: Oh, the lemons shaped like a pig? Yeah.

cortex: Yeah, yeah, the lemon thing.

jessamyn: Lemon pig, yeah, I was talking about lemon pig.

mathowie: When does it get racist? Oh, my god, it gets... (laughs)

jessamyn: Just... right. Just terrible at the end.

mathowie: Is that a beet or something?

jessamyn: I don't even know.

mathowie: Good god.

jessamyn: (laughs)

mathowie: It's 1922. A different time.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: Not a good time, but a different time.

jessamyn: But I appreciated that he put the warning in the...

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: In the thread, because I would have been bummed. But filthy light thief is kind of known for making these massive, detailed, epic posts, but this was just a great single-link, blog, you'll like it, and people threw in some things they liked and it was fun.

mathowie: Did you see the Game of Thrones bad lip-dub thing?

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: I... did not!

mathowie: I think I saw this a week after it was on Metafilter and I went back to Metafilter being like, huh, maybe I should post this, and then I found it. I don't know how I missed it the first time. It was so good. It's funny. It's actually ridiculously funny. It's very good.

jessamyn: When does Game of Thrones start up again?

mathowie: I don't know. Spring, I'm feeling, maybe?

jessamyn: Later?

mathowie: Wikipedia... another funny video that's hilarious because it fits the, it's a meta-movie, meta-comedy,

called Airboarders: the true story of a rags-to-riches sport invention thing.

jessamyn: Oh god, I saw this, yeah.

mathowie: It's just a dumb 3-4 minute video that follows every sports video you've ever seen, which is, oh, these guys are innovating something, I guess making fun of most of the skateboard movies like Dogtown and Z-Boys.

jessamyn: And it's basically guys who do little skateboarding with a business card and their fingers out the window of a moving automobile.

mathowie: (laughs)

In the wind. Yeah. It's funny for like thirty seconds, and then you're like, 'Wait, is this for real? Is this a...?'

cortex: (chuckles)

mathowie: Because you can't tell if it, was this really considered a sport sometime? But then you have the whole...

jessamyn: 'Did this happen?' Right. And then the band breaks up, and...

mathowie: You have the whole, 'I have an agent!' 'Yeah!' 'I have an agent!' 'You're not into it anymore, man.' And they have a falling-out, and it's so great.

cortex: You're getting all poppy, Matt. I don't know what's going on with your janky set-up, but.

mathowie: Oh.

jessamyn: You and your jank.

mathowie: Still?

cortex: Why you gotta jank? Well, no, no, it's okay now.

jessamyn: No, no, it stopped.

mathowie: Okay.

cortex: It was just there were several in a little row there.

jessamyn: It was like you were moving your head or something.

cortex: I think you were being too emphatic.

mathowie: I will try not to... move my head.

cortex: You need to deaden yourself. You need to lose all joy in the world, and it will help with our sound quality.

jessamyn: Euhhh. Euhhh. Euhhh.

mathowie: Euhhh. Let me think of Buzzfeed. Okay. I have no joy.

jessamyn and cortex: (laugh)

cortex: I have one more I think I wanted to mention.

jessamyn: I had one more too.

mathowie: (gets poppy again)

cortex: There you go again! Aah!

That's not it, that's the one you were just showing me. (chuckles) It's just the narrating copying and pasting podcast.
"The Incredibly Deadly Deku Stick" is a post Rory Marinich made about some guy beating a classic Nintendo 64 Zelda game called Ocarina of Time in just over 22 minutes.

mathowie: And it's supposed to be impossible, right?

jessamyn: Which I guess is speedy?

cortex: It's very speedy. Like, normally if you were going to play the game you'd spend hours and hours playing it, but... like, if you were playing the game well as a normal person you would still spend hours playing it, but this manages to play it by breaking it significantly to jump past almost all of the game

by exploiting various weird little broken things in it.
And it's neat, because not only, I mean, it's this guy playing this game, but that may not make a whole lot of sense to you if you're not familiar with the game, and it's a little bit by design jarring the way things happen on screen. But the guy's also actually narrating what he's doing as well as the past history of people doing these sequence-breaking speedruns of this game.

jessamyn: That's pretty cool.

mathowie: Hm.

cortex: So yeah, it's sort of like him giving an oral history of how it got to the point of him being able to do the thing he's doing based on all the work everybody else did before him. And this was all part of this charity fundraiser that raised a ton of money. I guess they do this every year, they just raise a bunch of money for charity by getting people to donate while watching live streams of people doing speedruns, so.

jessamyn: That's cool!

mathowie: [??], wow.

cortex: So the whole thing's neat, and as usual the thread fills up with links to fun other weird speedruns.

jessamyn: Other speedruns.

cortex: Broken video game things, and...

mathowie: Neat!

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Here was the last one that I had, which was a fascinating single article, mostly single-article post by Ouisch [ˈwiʃ], Ouisch [ˈwɪʃ]?

mathowie: Oh, wow, yeah.

jessamyn: The "I met a convicted serial killer and he made me feel more loved than anyone else in my life"? In short, it's about, there was this serial killer guy who used to pick up young Marines and hitchhikers on the West Coast and kill them, and he killed somewhere between ten and fifty people, and then at some point one of the guys, a guy who had been a young Marine and had met this dude but not been assaulted or

attacked or killed by him, wrote an article about what it's like to kind of have the attention of a sociopath on you and yet sort of escape unscathed. And it's an interesting article, and the thing that was the most interesting is that the author of the article actually showed up in the thread and not just said like, 'Oh, hey, that's me!', but stuck around to have conversations about the nature of sociopathology and whatever else.
And it was just a really, the article itself was interesting, and the thread was really, there was some discussion that happened that was kind of neat. If you're one of those people who likes long-form essays about complicated topics, you would enjoy this one a lot.

mathowie: Oh, yeah, you forgot to mention one aspect where I think he stumbled onto a story of serial killers and this guy was supposed to be more prolific than all the famous ones we know about, but he's just not famous for some reason, the serial killer? And he's on Wikipedia, he pulled it up and went, oh my god, that's that guy

I spent the day with. Like, that's the part where he went, 'Holy--'

jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, yeah! And basically, the guy had taken his picture, and he asked the cops who had... I mean, the guy's in prison now.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: But he basically sort of asked the cops, like, is there a photograph of me? Like, with all the photographs of the dead guys. And also, of course, you know, talking about how having the sort of laser beam intensity of this guy, you know, "he made me feel more loved than anyone ever before." Like, the guy listened and paid attention and was super...

It was a very confusing and attracting interaction that then being reconsidered in light of what he knew now became a very different thing to think about.

mathowie: Yeah. I read the whole thing the other day, and it was very compelling. The only thing that didn't jive with me was the author's insistence that maybe he was in love with that guy after one day? Like, and that it was this magic moment and he

swears up and down he completely lives a heterosexual life and this has always confused him slightly, and I was just like, (chuckling) I don't know. I don't know if I--

jessamyn: Right, right, right. Well, there's a lot of paths to go down of questioning.

mathowie: Yeah. I couldn't cross that bridge, I was like, it sounds like a pretty good day with a pretty interesting person, but I wouldn't say you fell in love, really? I don't know.

jessamyn: Well, and it wasn't even a good day!

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: I mean, they went back to this hotel room and had a very intensive set of interactions.

mathowie: Well, he talks about eight hours of talking back and forth, and that's always fun with a stranger

if you can actually connect that well? Like, I mean, the whole day, I mean, it ends oddly, right, at the hotel room.

jessamyn: Sure.

mathowie: But it sounds like it was a wonderful day until then. And even pushing the boundaries, yeah, the whole thing is weird. And then, yeah, when he breaks down how serial killers actually work, it's creepy, also, at the same time. Oh, man. Yeah, that was fascinating.

My last post, it would give you a small to-do! I liked this post with this little two-minute clip of Aziz Ansari doing a bit from the new stand-up special.

jessamyn: Oh, yes.

mathowie: This came out a week or two ago, and it's a funny little thing about how strange marriage is if you think about it in a completely, if you've never heard of marriage ever. It's actually, there are some strange aspects of it. But I was disappointed when this came out, because it's like, 'There's a new hour-long special! But you can't see it until November 1st.' But thank god today is November 1st, so I can...

jessamyn: So can we go pay Aziz five bucks and go watch this?

mathowie: No, it's on Netflix! The streaming.

jessamyn: I don't have the Netflix.

mathowie: Aww. Well, you can sign up for Netflix trial and watch it and cancel.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: But yeah, it's on Netflix streaming. I don't know why you can't--

jessamyn: Last time, I could give him five bucks!

mathowie: I know! He--sometimes they'll do a deal where two months after it's on HBO or Netflix, they're allowed to sell it, maybe?

jessamyn: Eh, I'll just wait for it. He's usually pretty good. Although I don't know.

Single Aziz was a little tougher in his last special than the one before.

mathowie: Yeah. He doesn't sell it. Nope, he's not selling it. It's only on Netflix.

jessamyn: Alright.

mathowie: But it came out today! So at least I can watch it, and it came out.

jessamyn: So at least you can watch it.

mathowie: Yeah. So I'm happy that I don't have to wait another day to see it. So I'll watch it tonight. And it'll be good. So that's it.

jessamyn: Great!

mathowie: Anything else?

jessamyn: I just wanted to ment--oh, sorry, Josh?

cortex: I was just going to say no, so. (chuckles)

jessamyn: Jim and I just finished our Music, Metafilter Music did, the music challenge was the request raffle?

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: And Jim pulled the one, "I have a very small friend named Evie. She's eight months old and would appreciate a child song with her name in it."

mathowie: Ooh.

jessamyn: And so Jim and I made a...

mathowie: What rhymes with 'Evie'? (laughs)

jessamyn: Nothing.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: We didn't even. But we made a kids' song that not only had her name in it, it's got the names of her dogs, and a whole bunch of doofy

sound effects that I was very pleased with, so people who are looking for...

sfx: (Music: Evie the Baby by not_on_display)

lyrics, sung by jessamyn on track: A B C D

E F G,
H I J K
LMNOP!
Q R S,
T Evie,
Evie the Baby
X Y Z!

jessamyn: ...goofy, goofy, goofy kids' songs.

mathowie: Whoa, you sang on it!

jessamyn: Yeah, I sing on it, I designed the music and then Jim played the music, and then we both scared up all the sound effects. It's a fun kids' song. Just in case somebody hadn't mentioned anything about Metafilter Music.

cortex: Hey, if somebody hadn't forgotten that we were doing a podcast, someone probably would have. (chuckles)

mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)

cortex: [says something unintelligible drowned out by laughter]

jessamyn: I'm just saying, I'm trying to help. That's all I'm saying.

cortex: No, I appreciate it. You're on it. Way to be.

mathowie: That's pretty cool!

jessamyn: Yeah. And Jim uploaded it like last, I mean, it was due November 1st or the end of October, so we uploaded basically the last night before, between the time I

went to bed and when I woke up this morning.

cortex: Actually, you know, I am going to mention one Music thing, because I remember being delighted by we are the music makers' post of a song called Pixelated Lines, which is--

mathowie: (chuckles)

cortex: --just this super, super weird interpretation of Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke, and it's fantastically creepy. All the more so if you've thought about the problematic nature of the lyrics of the original song.

jessamyn: I enjoyed uncleozzy's first comment. "I hate you, and I hate this." (laughs)

cortex: Oh, god. (laughs) Speak--

jessamyn: And then, in parentheses, "(It's wonderful. Really unsettling.)"

mathowie: Oh, wow, it's robots doing the lyrics? Ooh.

sfx: (Music: Pixelated Lines by we are the music makers)

cortex: Yeah, it's pretty great. And speaking of which, actually, uncleozzy also posted something awesome out of the request one, 'Are You Being Served?', the theme

song to that old British sitcom.

jessamyn: Sure.

cortex: With the people working in the department store.

jessamyn: Yeah.

cortex: And yeah, he did an awesome, awesome fucking reinterpretation of that theme song, so that was pretty damn great too.

jessamyn: Nice! Way to go, uncleozzy!

cortex: So there you go, there's a [??]. Yeah.

mathowie: (muttering to self) Video music awards... I saw a hilarious video. That's it, Attenborrowed. (laughs)

jessamyn: Oh, the Attenborough...

mathowie: (laughing) Yeah, [??].

jessamyn: The Attenboroughed version of the Miley Cyrus dance?

mathowie: Yes.

cortex: (laughs)

jessamyn: Which is hilarious. That was the first time I had actually watched the whole dance from start to finish, or at least part of it.

mathowie: (chuckles) It was so good.

cortex: Oh, they should have called it Attenblurrowed though.

mathowie: Ohh, snap!

jessamyn: Aughhh.

mathowie: That's like when someone said we should have called this the entire time the modcast and I went--

cortex: Yep. (laughs)

mathowie: I slammed my head against the table going 'Why did we not call it the...' That's so obvious!

cortex: Yep!

mathowie: So why isn't there a challenge page on the Music site for the... do you wait until the challenges are over, or someone...?

cortex: Or I forget and no one reminds me this time. (laughs) I thought I had put that up for...

mathowie: It's still, the top one is the Bowie challenge.

cortex: Yeah, no, it should have the raffle thing. If it's not there, it's just...

mathowie: Yeah, put the raffle one so I can link to it.

cortex: Yeah, no, I'll put it up there.

jessamyn: Put the raffle one so we can link to it!

cortex: Yes!

mathowie: Boom!

cortex: Now that we've got, especially since we've got a revamped, pb slightly altered the code so that it'll correctly pull in all the challenge entries over a period of more than a month.

jessamyn: So great! Thanks, pb.

cortex: Because we discoved that didn't, so yeah. So go Paul.

mathowie: Awesome!

jessamyn: Go Paul.

mathowie: Yay!

jessamyn: So, Windows updates tonight?

mathowie: Yep.

cortex: Yes, that will be exciting.

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Red Sox parade tomorrow?

mathowie: Really? I thought they already had it. No?

cortex: Every day. Every day for her.

jessamyn: No, it's tomorrow. Which I found out because I'm going down to visit Jim in Boston, and he's like--

cortex: Oh, Jesus.

mathowie: Oh, god.

jessamyn: 'Uhh, I'll try and get you at the train station, but it's, oh my god.' (laughs)

mathowie: Alright! We're done!

cortex: (laughs) Good podcast, everybody!

jessamyn: It was great to talk to you guys! Have a good weekend!

cortex: See you in a month!

jessamyn: Alright, bye!

sfx: (Music: Are You Being Served? by uncleozzy)

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sfx: (Music: Are You Being Served? by uncleozzy, continued)

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sfx: (Music: Are You Being Served? by uncleozzy, end)

Credits

  • beryllium, 221 segments
  • carmicha, 24
  • Pronoiac, 1
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