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Podcast 89 Transcript
A transcript for Episode 89: "Bookie Clicker" (2014-02-06).
Pronoiac set up a Fanscribed page, and this transcript came from there.
Transcript
jingle: (theme song)
mathowie: This is episode 89 of the Metafilter Podcast. I'm Matt!
jessamyn: I'm Jessamyn!
cortex: And I'm Josh!
mathowie: And we are covering everything from mostly January up until now.
jessamyn: And a little of February.
mathowie: Have a good winter? Having a good winter?
jessamyn: It's snowing like the bejeezus outside, that's always great.
- So if my power goes out suddenly, I may not be back.
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: It snowed twice in two days here, which is the Portland version of snowing like the bejeezus. None of it stuck, but still, there was actual snow falling from the sky.
jessamyn: That's pretty exciting!
cortex: It is!
mathowie: I drove up to Portland yesterday, and it was blowing like crazy, but it was magical. It was 38 degrees Fahrenheit, but it wasn't wet on the ground, but there was no snow on the ground. It just sort of vaporized.
- Like it was fluffy flakes that just went to nothing.
cortex: It wasn't actual snow, it was just a screensaver.
mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)
cortex: It was completely ephemeral.
mathowie: It's all jQuery.
jessamyn: It's just a windshield effect.
mathowie: It was weird. It's weird that it's not wet everywhere, because that was precipitation, but I guess it's so slight. That was a little strange.
jessamyn: Yeah, there's a lot more water in rain than there is in snow, as you might expect.
mathowie: Density!
- If we jump right to Jobs, there's a pretty cool job down at Oregon State University, in Corvallis.
jessamyn: Neat!
mathowie: They have a really famous open source lab, that's been there since (I think) the early 2000's. And I'm guessing they probably started as a place to download open source apps and the latest Netscape in the old days, and then sort of spun it out into - they write their own open source software and it's really cool.
mathowie: That's--
jessamyn: I think I have a friend that used to work there. Yeah, it's cool down there.
mathowie: Yeah, it's kind of--
jessamyn: I don't know this guy who works there, but that's neat.
mathowie: Yeah, I didn't even know people down there... uh... this is like a really cool job, and there's not a lot of cool computer jobs in the sticks of Oregon.
jessamyn: What is "yum-based" mean? "Proficient with at least one yum-based and one apt-based Linux distribution"?
- I thought I knew things, and I don't know that thing.
mathowie: I barely know what puppet is just from mrzarquon.
cortex: Uh, APT is a package management system. It's what Debian traditionally used.
jessamyn: Oh, ok. Is Yum a different one?
cortex: I guess.
jessamyn: Ok.
cortex: Yeah, I haven't paid any actual attention to Linux since, uh, like 1999-2000 maybe?
mathowie: Oh?
jessamyn: I got off the bus at Feisty Ferret Ubuntu. But, uh--
mathowie: That was the year it was going to be king of the desktop...
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: ...that you quit, Josh.
- I think Yum is the, uh, I think it's like a window manager, like Ubuntu stuff -- I don't know, that's my guess. I have no idea. (laughs)
jessamyn: Oh, like GNOME or something?
mathowie: Yeah, but.
jessamyn: I'm sure just, just, you know--
mathowie: --four people are--
jessamyn: idly speculating
cortex: I think it's a dog related thing. It's actually, it's a way of organizing dogs.
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: Puppy Linux?
cortex: Yes, exactly.
jessamyn: Yellow Dog Linux?
cortex: Instead of using a traditional kernel, you just throw a bunch of puppies in the server room.
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: I told my landlady about the puppy bowl this weekend.
mathowie: Uh huh?
jessamyn: And the look on her face -- like she loves dogs and hates football. And I was like "Oh, puppy bowl!"
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: And she was like, "What?!" Like I had made up her dreams for her, and was then showing it to her on the television. Although the puppy bowl was like 3 hours before the game, which was kind of weird... But she was very happy.
mathowie: Oh the puppies like to nap -- you've got to get them up early.
jessamyn: Who else likes to nap? Jessamyn!
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: I also like this job, um -- that's a joke, I don't actually like to nap at all --
mathowie: You hate puppies, too.
jessamyn: No, I love puppies! But napping, I--
cortex: I actually like to nap, I just never do it. Like, the circumstances have to be very special. Mostly I have to be completely exhausted.
jessamyn: I am not a good napper. Yeah. I have stuff to do, and usually if I'm sleeping during the day it's because I'm not eating right or I'm sick or something.
mathowie: Hmm.
jessamyn: Jim's a good napper, so I always, you know -- He naps and I laptop and we're very companionable, I just don't sleep.
- So. klangklangston has this job working at Equity California. They do a whole bunch of really good stuff surrounding LGBT equality, and it's fun to hear him talk about it.
jessamyn: And they're looking for a graphic designer, part time, to do some stuff. And they're not going to pay enough, but it's going to be a good job.
mathowie: Is that where klang works, or volunteers?
jessamyn: Works. He's got a job-job.
mathowie: Cool.
jessamyn: Yeah. He's useful in a lot of the LGBT threads, specifically because he's like a big bearded cis guy, talking about stuff -- why it's important for everybody, and I think he usually does a pretty good job.
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: Yeah. So it looked like an interesting job.
mathowie: (singing) Jobs jobs jobs jobs.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: (hums a tune)
mathowie: (sings) Jobs jobs jobs jobs.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: (hums)
mathowie: I think that's about it; pretty light weight on the jobs.
jessamyn: Yeah. I mean there was a whole bunch of acronym-y, you know, techie jobs also.
mathowie: If you're collecting acronyms there were a few.
jessamyn: (laughs)
cortex: I kind of want there to be a, like, Jobs theme song now. Says the guy who still hasn't managed to produce a new recording of the actual theme song.
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: Do you think you have a novelty-seeking problem, Josh?
cortex: Maybe. Maybe, I think I might. I'm very distractble that way.
jessamyn: I mean, you've been doing great with LARP Trek, so don't get me wrong, this isn't like a rag-on-Josh thing, I was just sort of curious.
cortex: No, no, no.
mathowie: Oh god -- how old is LARP Trek by now?!
cortex: It's over a year! I've been doing it for like, upwards of a year!
jessamyn: It's like what, a hundred and fifty episodes or something? How many episodes are there?
cortex: I just posted 178 today.
jessamyn: Oooh, I am sorry.
mathowie: Jesus!
cortex: Although the last couple have actually been the start of a sort of panicked author insertion arc I'm doing, because I've been a little bit, uh...
jessamyn: I like the little picture of you, because you refuse to send me pictures of your damn haircut.
cortex: I didn't -- I didn't mean to refuse to. I just, the timing--
jessamyn: --didn't--
cortex: --worked out wrong.
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: I've got one picture, that I use when I go to get a haircut now. I've used it once or twice to say, hey--
jessamyn: "Make me look like me, only six months ago."
cortex: Yeah. Cut it back to this.
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: I've realized that like, what I want to be able to do, is, yeah, I want to be able to go to a ... barber -- I almost said dentist! "I want to go to a dentist, and say 'cut my hair'!"
jessamyn: (laughs)
cortex: But you know, I want to be able to go in and say, "Hey, uh, so I just want you to like, take, you know, two or three months off this."
jessamyn: Exactly.
cortex: But it doesn't, you know -- that's kind of unreasonable. I mean, they try, and they've never done a terrible job or anything, but it's always never quite right because they don't know exactly which parts of my head grow at what speed.
jessamyn: Like the Jetsons. You just go in the head-thing--
mathowie: Yeah!
jessamyn: and you press "haircut" button and you get your old haircut back.
mathowie: I think it took me 5 years of owning an iPhone before I made an album called "haircuts"
jessamyn: (laughs)
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: ...because, like, I'd take a photo of the two cuts I've ever liked in my life. And they're not great! Like, there should be a haircut app that like takes photos as you fan around your own head, and tries to stitch them together or something.
cortex: Well you know, I think--
jessamyn: That's an interesting idea. Well I think both of you guys have hair that looks mostly good, so...
mathowie: But, like--
jessamyn: But I mean some people have hair that's a problem.
mathowie: Yeah.
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: But no, when you've got like, simple--
jessamyn: I have a cowlick.
mathowie: When you have simple, straight hair, like a half inch here and there can ruin your whole two months, before you get another haircut.
jessamyn: Right.
mathowie: Like, the worst--
cortex: I've got a pretty serious cowlick on the back of my head, too.
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: Ooooh.
cortex: But I sort of -- I... that's... the way I tend to wear my hair runs with that fairly well. But, uh, but yeah. There are days when I'm like--
jessamyn: See I got a cowlick in the front that gives me instant 80s hair if I don't do anything about it.
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: Whoa!
jessamyn: I know! It was useful in the 80s, and then has had diminishing usefulness ever since then.
mathowie: (laughs) That's like an eyeliner tattoo from the 80s.
jessamyn: I know!! Only it's on accident.
mathowie: "It was perfect for a few years!" And now it's a liability.
jessamyn: Now I have a hat.
mathowie: Um, how about projects. Projects?
cortex: There were--
jessamyn: There were a couple great--
cortex: yeah.
jessamyn: I mean whatever; projects is always delightful.
cortex: People keep making things.
mathowie: There is a lot of creativity.
cortex: We talked a bunch about Doge last time, so why not talk about it some more this time?
cortex: But this -- just like the day after we recorded that podcast I think -- zackola posted--
jessamyn: Awwwww
cortex: "doge for all", which is like an easy, DIY doge maker that ended up getting pasted, er, posted on the front page.
mathowie: Oooh neat.
jessamyn: I though those were already... I thought I already had one of these. But whatever, it's great.
cortex: There might be more than one, but yeah, this one is, uh, you know, as they say in the thread: wow. much easy. very thanks.
mathowie: This must be a CS101 "Hello World" app at this point. "Everyone go make a Doge maker!"
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: That is true, right. I mean--
mathowie: It's like basic UI controls plus image handling. It'd be a cool little project... to force on people.
jessamyn: With cute dogs, right?
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: Like, what else is there?
mathowie: Whoa!
jessamyn: I know, right?!
mathowie: much text
jessamyn: much text much text much text
mathowie: Um, I saw this--
cortex: Someone even worked in a William Carlos Williams riff in the thread, so...
mathowie: Oh yeah.
jessamyn: Ha! Cutey! maryr! She makes delicious snacks.
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: Um, there was a cool, weird, cool... It was like a, browser extension that, like, points out cool progressive causes on your web pages.
jessamyn: Totally confused by this.
cortex: You know, I scanned past this--
jessamyn: I saw it go up, and was like, "blah blah computer"
mathowie: So it's like--
cortex: I thought it was like, going to do progressive browser standard--
mathowie: Heh. No.
cortex: Like it was going to start treating it like you were using IE3, and then just sort of march forward.
cortex: And so yeah, I completely misunderstood.
jessamyn: Do you want to explain it, Matt?
mathowie: Yeah. You add this little app to Chrome or Safari or Firefox, and then you're doing Google searches and it just adds icons to things that are like, a B-Corp, which is kind of a cool thing to be.
cortex: Wha?
mathowie: Like etsy, and Warby Parker -- B Corporations, which are like Earth friendly and stuff. If you're at IMDB, there's a little green check mark by any movie that passes the Bechdel test.
cortex: (laughs) Nice!
jessamyn: I just learned about B-corporations. That's crazy!
mathowie: Oh yeah. Have you ever heard of them?
jessamyn: How did I even know about this?
mathowie: Oh, and then any advertiser -- any ad you see anywhere -- if it advertises on Rush Limbaugh's show, it tells you. Like, "avoid this ad right here." Which is kind of cool.
- Oh, there's unionized hotels, when you're searching for hotels.
jessamyn: Is B-corporation a real thing or just B just stand for bullshit?
mathowie: No, it's ... kind of a grey area, where it's kind of slightly self-applied right now, and they're--
jessamyn: So it's like Dolphin-safe?
mathowie: Yeah, and there's like coalitions that have defined what it means to be 100% B-corp. It's kind of like getting LEED-certified as a building.
jessamyn: Got it.
mathowie: You can do that -- but do architects or the state you live in care? Like, not really. So they're trying to write laws. I think maybe in New York, you can actually register as a B corporation.
jessamyn: Ok.
mathowie: But like, it's only recognized in a few states, and they want it to be like an S-corp. S-corp -- the shorthand is like "the S stands for stockholders", right? Like, you always have to be maximizing stockholder value.
jessamyn: I get it.
mathowie: And a B-corp (I don't know why they called it B) is like for the planet -- what is best for the world.
- So they're supposed to -- it's just about stockholder, uh, stuff. So, I thought it was a cool--
jessamyn: My--
mathowie: I like the Bechdel test on IMDB. I thought that was awesomest part.
jessamyn: I didn't know there was enough movies that had actually passed that.
mathowie: It's not as bad... it's something like... If you asked me right now how many, of everything on IMDB, you think passes it, I would guess it's like a single digit percent. But I think--
jessamyn: Yes.
mathowie: I think the last time we had a post about it on MetaFilter, it was something like 20 percent, and I was like, blown away. But maybe it was, like, really liberal interpretation of that.
jessamyn: Well, and there are a lot of chick flicks too. So theoretically -- and kid movies
mathowie: Yeah.
cortex: And to some extent, when you get, maybe a little bit more into indie stuff -- which Netflix, you know, to the extent that their catalog is strained at times in terms of the stuff people really want to see --
jessamyn: Right, right.
cortex: -- sort of balances it out with a bunch of other stuff that, uh, maybe is not on quite the same production pressure to systemically uphold the very problems that the Bechdel test is a reaction to.
mathowie: Yeah.
cortex: So that could be it.
mathowie: Yeah.
cortex: And stuff.
mathowie: Anything--
jessamyn: And stuff.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: I enjoyed -- just getting started looking at this, but -- user tmcw did this project, Map School.
mathowie: Oh yeah!
jessamyn: He -- I think he's a guy? ... yes, Tom MacWright. Aww, cute picture.
mathowie: Nice picture.
jessamyn: He works in maps but feels like the way people teach maps is ridiculous and so he is trying to make educational materials that talk about maps, and how you can learn about it without having there be a whole bunch of corporate bullshit and everything else.
- It is a beautiful looking, very slim, nice looking website that talks about what a lot of the wording means and one of the stuff is, and you know, if you want to get started learning it, it's a great place to go look, and it looks very nice.
mathowie: Yeah, I took a couple quarters of GIS stuff in college and one of my friends from college still does it to this day, like full time.
mathowie: And this is -- this is like, two years of geography, like advanced geography information systems, whittled down to like a long one-pager. And you can download it as a PDF and stuff. It's pretty cool. It's the shortcut, things to know for pretty much all the types of information you've come across in GIS stuff.
jessamyn: Yeah, well, especially because more and more that's where the stuff is.
jessamyn: Like, the number of times I wind up somewhere on the internet that's like "blah blah blah", that includes some sort of a map of something. You know, more and more that's how people are getting their data represented.
mathowie: (agrees)
jessamyn: So not only being able to understand that, which is one set of stuff, but being able to create that stuff and understanding what goes into doing it accurately and effectively: big deal. So, yeah, I thought this was great.
mathowie: I was a little surprised it doesn't go deep into the, like, USGS's Tiger files. There's like all these different representations that are like free from the government to like, the mapping that's done by the US government. And then--
jessamyn: I thought that, Tiger--
mathowie: Yeah, isn't it--
jessamyn: like, Tiger used to be like free-free, but then I felt like they did something weird post-9/11 with it.
mathowie: Oh, they might have.
jessamyn: Because I used to have an old web site that queried it, like a website that was like, "You dig through the center of the Earth, where do you wind up?"
mathowie: Oh right.
jessamyn: And it used to have a Tiger map as part of it, and then, Tiger was like, "Nope."
mathowie: I saw nelson in that thread was saying he wished there were more code examples, if you do some live -- 'cuz if you -- And the thing with GIS stuff, it's all owned by one giant mega-corp, which is Esri. Like, all the GIS software in the world, practically, is made by that one company.
jessamyn: Really?
mathowie: Yeah, and you pay them for like a week-long seminar, or months. Their training is like a huge part of their business. So this is cool that someone's just trying to make an open source-y kind of like one-pager.
jessamyn: Yeah. Well, especially, if you, yeah, if you don't do it for a job, you just want to understand more about the world that you're interacting in.
mathowie: Yeah, I like the thing with the projections, how to project a 3D lumpy Earth, like, if you have to be super-accurate is super-hard.
jessamyn: Great, great.
mathowie: That's never even occurred to me, but of course it would be.
jessamyn: Great.
mathowie: Did you guys see the crazy Picflood?
jessamyn: That was another one where I was like "Seems cool, I don't ... I ... what is happening?"
mathowie: Basically it's like...
jessamyn: So it's by user quarantine. I'm gonna give his name, guys.
mathowie: I don't remember, like, people used to do LiveJournal where they'd query the API and just grab the last X photos.
cortex: Yeah.
mathowie: The last 100 photos posted to any LiveJournal.
jessamyn: Oh, good lord.
mathowie: And it, like, they were random. These are looking...
jessamyn: These aren't even random, it's just girls!
mathowie: Is it? It's like Twitter firehose. It's usually, I don't know...
jessamyn: Guys pooping into each other's mouths...
mathowie: Wow! Wow.
cortex: What keyword did you use?!
jessamyn: Nothing! I just clicked "Flood"!
mathowie: Butts!
jessamyn: It's like a cartoon, I mean it's not a...
mathowie: It'll stop in like a minute or two when it catches up.
jessamyn: Miley Cyrus... this is horrible!
mathowie: It catches up, and then it changes slowly. It is a ... it's just a nightmare. Just... But it's interesting, like. It's just looking at the Twitter firehose, and looking at people that upload an image, and then, just, there's a.... Oh, but they all have attributions, so you can find the tweet that mentioned it, which is weird. Um ... but, yeah. It's just a free-for-all. You have no idea what's gonna be. I guess there's one for every service. There's Instagram ones, and stuff like that.
jessamyn: I just started using Instagram again this week. If anybody wants to be my friend on Instagram, please do, because I suddenly realized it was something I might enjoy.
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: I can't remember if I have an Instagram account. I think I almost set one up at some point.
jessamyn: Well I've got a friend who's in Sochi for NPR, and my favorite way to figure out what's going on in Sochi is to look at his pictures, and so I was like, "They're only available on Instagram, so I guess I'd better handle it." So, yeah.
mathowie: I think I explained this: Like, a year or two ago was when I finally tried Instagram, and it was only because I looked over Kottke's shoulder and saw, like -- he doesn't use it to take photos, he uses it to catch up with like 30 people.
jessamyn: Right, right. Well that's what I--
mathowie: It's kind of cool as like a visual twitter.
jessamyn: --I take a couple pictures, yeah. But people like them, and then I have an IFTTT thing that posts it to Facebook, and I normally don't --
jessamyn: I read Facebook, but I don't interact a lot.
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: So it's just ways to get people [mimics speech] talking about whatever.
- You know, it feels like it's snowing everywhere on the planet now, but it's really not, and so for places where it's not snowing, those people sometimes like to look at pictures of snow.
mathowie: Sweet.
- My last project is -- posted, like an hour ago --
jessamyn: (laughs)
cortex: I haven't watched this yet, yeah!
mathowie: Watch it right now! edlundart
cortex: I don't watch stuff to[?] the podcast, then I'm all zoned out and not paying attention.
mathowie: Just wait--
jessamyn: edlundart
mathowie: It takes about 30 seconds to get to the awesome dancing members of Downton Abbey.
jessamyn: I'm looking at it.
mathowie: edlundart has posted a zillion projects.
cortex: He's faboo.
mathowie: He's an animator for MTV and stuff, it's on his twitter bio. It's crazy. This is beautiful, beautiful animation of like, Straight Out of Downton, is--
jessamyn: He did that wacky cat thing too, right?
mathowie: Yeah. It's like what you'd think it would be as a -- AAaaah, the noise!
mathowie: Sorry, pre-roll ad was super loud.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: Pre-roll ad?
mathowie: Yeah, it launched into some crazy pre-roll ad.
jessamyn: Who even sees those things?
mathowie: Straight Out of Compton with Downton Abbey themes, and it's funny. There's a twerking Dowager that's amazing -- like that's the highlight of the whole thing.
jessamyn: Well good, since I've stopped watching Downton Abbey it'll be interesting to get my Downton fix from somewhere else.
cortex: Spoiler alert! She totally twerks -- nah.
mathowie: (laughs)
- Oh man, UPS.
jessamyn: What?
mathowie: UPS just showed up, but I don't think they need a signature.
jessamyn: I had one more thing that I enjoyed. This was adamrice (one of the two Adam Rices I know in real life) from MetaFilter did a thing called Circle of Useful Knowledge, which was basically an old self-published book from 1888 which has a whole bunch of odd home remedies and other random nonsense.
mathowie: Wow. (laughs)
jessamyn: He's just posting them into a ... adorable little Tumblr blog.
jessamyn: I don't even know if it is Tumblr. It's not Tumblr, it's probably something that looks like Tumblr.
mathowie: Whoa. They had cocktails back then? I thought cocktails were a post-whadyacallit, Prohibition thing?
jessamyn: I don't... think so?
mathowie: Or maybe that's when they got famous, that's what people talk about -- that the liquor you made in your bathtub was so terrible you had to mix it.
jessamyn: Probably...?
mathowie: Wow.
jessamyn: Excellent question. I know nothing about when cocktails became famous.
mathowie: How to drive--
cortex: I will probably get some sort of angry email from mrzarquon once he listens to this thing. "None of you know anything!"
mathowie: Oh, I just went to a bar once that specialized--
cortex: Well of course none of us know anything!
mathowie: I went to a bar once that specialized in like, drinks from 1919 - 1926, and they were all kind of ... not awesome. They were ... uh ... they all had, like a kind of gasoline aftertaste to them. And he was like, "Oh, this is what it was like! It was awful! We're period correct."
jessamyn: (laughs)
mathowie: He was telling me a story about, like, that's when cocktails took off, that people just liked straight booze until then.
jessamyn: Interesting.
mathowie: It was so terrible they had to mask it with cranberry juice or something.
cortex: (laughs) I also liked one other one, this project called Openings. It's basically just a blog collecting first lines from books, and poems, and songs, and movies, and so on. From user c95008.
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: ...who was a long time AskMe lurker who signed up to post this project.
mathowie: God this is beautiful!
cortex: Yeah, it's a really slick looking ...
mathowie: What is that--
cortex: I always like the, sort of like, you know ... there's something sort of atomic about a first line from something, where it may or may not be a brilliant piece of writing on its own,
mathowie: (agrees)
cortex: as a self-contained thing, but there's something about the ... the promise, the possibility of a first line.
mathowie: And some of them are songs, they're not just all epic books.
cortex: Yeah.
mathowie: It's pretty nice.
cortex: Good. I thought it was cool.
mathowie: Ugh, it's got Jack Handey's book on it.
cortex: Oh no!?
mathowie: I love Jack Handey, and he came out with a book after being silent for like 15 years, and then... I had a whole bunch of friends say, "Oh this is the funniest thing ever! Oh my god, Jack Handey!" And everyone loves Jack Handey's one-liners, but it's 300 pages of one-liners
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: ... that are marginally funny and they're all strung end to end
mathowie: I basically put it down after about 20 pages.
cortex: Awww.
mathowie: I wanted to set it on fire.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: Wait, he's a real guy?
mathowie: Yeah, that's his real name.
jessamyn: That Deep Thoughts thing?
mathowie: Yes.
cortex: Yeah.
jessamyn: I always thought that was something Saturday Night Live made up.
mathowie: Yeah, he's an actual writer.
cortex: Saturday Night Live just used, yeah, his stuff.
mathowie: It was like, Deep Thoughts from Seth (... what's the guy who's just left? laughs)
jessamyn: Seth Meyers
mathowie: Seth Meyers, right. It's just he had a funny name.
jessamyn: Huh.
mathowie: But yeah, his new book ... it gets exhausting really quick.
jessamyn: Well here was my transition project, which was kbrower3's OnlyTheBestRecipes.com.
mathowie: Oh yeah.
jessamyn: Which was basically a big database of recipes from popular recipe sites that are top rated, and it only takes--
mathowie: four or five star
jessamyn: --yeah. And then feckless fecal fear mongering posted it to MetaFilter.
jessamyn: Where, of course, because it has to do with food and good food, everybody's really into it. And he's really into food also, so ... in fact he didn't really super-over-moderate that thread, but it got a lot of people talking about delicious things.
- It was one of those things: 39 comments, 142 users marked it as favorite.
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: Wow. And kbrower3 has posted like a zillion projects around recipe sites. (I assume maybe it's a 'he'? Probably like a Ken or something?)
mathowie: Kris?
jessamyn: Just click, click, click it.
mathowie: It says Kris -- I don't know! There's no gender field.
- So, kbrower3, iterating on what can you do with recipes, so it's pretty cool. I think this is a great concept. Like, everything that's -- every amazing lamb recipe. Like, that's pretty useful. All the stews you can make with lamb, and I just clicked the word "lamb". Pretty cool. Very cool.
jessamyn: Nice.
mathowie: A million favorites on MetaFilter.
jessamyn: Yes.
- (laughs) AskMe tags: google, band. For kbrower.
mathowie: Oh. (laughs)
- Ummm.... [searching for next topic] God, I've got a billion.
jessamyn: So that was my MetaFilter segue, so now we're on MetaFilter.
mathowie: We're on MetaFilter!
- Craigslist Mirrors came out [chuckles] in the last month.
jessamyn: What? I don't even know -- what?
mathowie: Did you see this?
jessamyn: What? What?
cortex: Oh I, what?
jessamyn: Is it just pictures of mirrors?
cortex: Ooooh.
mathowie: Yep. Just someone scouring Craigslist recent listings that have: they're for mirrors, they have a photo of the mirror in them, and they just pluck the photos out of context.
- They're just ... haunting, amazing, they're just everything all at once. Mirrors.
jessamyn: Wow... Wooooow. More interesting than you would think!
mathowie: Yeah. I thought, "Oh, they're going to do the joke of, you know the famous eBay joke of the teapot -- of there's like a nak--"
jessamyn: The little naked man, having his little junk hiding in there?
mathowie: Yeah, the naked guy. Thank god this--
cortex: What's the name for that? What's the name for that? There's some sort of ...
cortex: Someone had a name for that.
mathowie: Accidental nudity? I don't know.
jessamyn: For what specific thing?
cortex: I think part of it is that it's often times not so accidental.
mathowie: (agrees)
cortex: Basically dick-bombing reflections in photos for...
jessamyn: Aaaaah!
mathowie: (laughs) "Dick bombing"! Frightening.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: I enjoyed this quite a lot, plus I could use some more mirrors.
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: When I moved, actually, mirrors were one of the things the people wouldn't take
jessamyn: because they have silver in them maybe? Or, I don't even know. But basically they would take a whole bunch of things, but they would not take mirrors.
mathowie: You mean if you put it out with the word "free" on it?
jessamyn: Well no, but like when I had the people come and take my extra furniture
mathowie: Oh.
jessamyn: I had a bunch of, like, bookshelves and kitchen stuff because I was moving into my place with my things, and this was like extra things. And they were like, "Nope! Not taking the mirrors." I was like, "Seriously?" And they were like, "Yep. Nope. Nope."
mathowie: That's weird.
jessamyn: Yeah.
mathowie: Huh.
jessamyn: Oh, this one has a dog and cone in it.
mathowie: Cone dog.
jessamyn: Adorable.
- Yeah, no, but that was enjoyable. The MetaFilter thread was mostly a bunch of people, like, "I like it!"
mathowie: Yeah. There was nothing contentious.
jessamyn: Via [the user named] Hey Dean Yeager! Dean Yeager? Guys?
cortex: Hmmm... let's see...
jessamyn: I feel like NASCAR maybe?
cortex: Yeah, I would say, well, I dunno.
mathowie: hey Dean Yeager...
cortex: Is he related to Chuck Yeager?
jessamyn: Oh, maybe that's what I'm thinking. Maybe he's an astronaut.
cortex: (laughs) I don't know if Yeager was ever an astronaut. But he was a test pilot. But, uh...
mathowie: Chuck Yeager? Wasn't he an astronaut?
cortex: Was he? I don't know.
mathowie: [vocalizing the typing of a search query] Chuck Yeager
cortex: I think he was a ... stratonaut?
jessamyn: Oh, Dean Yeager was from Ghostbusters!
cortex: What in Ghostbusters was Dean Yeager from?!? Who's Dean Yeager?
jessamyn: [reading] Dean Yeager was the administrator...
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: ... who was going to cut their funding.
cortex: Oh -- the one who...
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: Oh! Oh! Dean Yeager, the Dean. Okay, okay, yes.
jessamyn: (laughs)
cortex: Right at the beginning.
jessamyn: Yeah.
cortex: Sorry, I'm catching up now.
jessamyn: Like, his name isn't Dean, his job is Dean.
cortex: Yeah, I was thinking of the EPA guy, but I was like, "I don't think that was his name."
mathowie: Of course there's a Ghostbusters wiki! Of course.
cortex: (laughs) Heck yeah.
jessamyn: Dude, these wikis are great!
mathowie: I know.
jessamyn: Especially like, if you watch any television at all, especially like, trying to figure out, "Who's that guy?" and, "What did the thing do?" and "I've forgotten all the that." So great.
mathowie: Where did I just see someone tweeting about Ghostbusters and they're saying it was about racism and feminism -- like white man's fear of both. Like it was, oh I can't remember it. It was so good.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: I had a Ghostbusters related trivia question where there was just a picture of kind of a long-haired Sigourney Weaver staring at a countertop and people were like, "What brand of confection is she staring at?"
- And I was like, "Bam! Stay Puff Marshmallows!"
mathowie: Yeah, Stay Puff.
jessamyn: Very excited. I do lousy in action movie trivia.
cortex: See, and I forgot that she had the marshmallows there, because it was like, "An egg isn't a confection! Why would you call an egg a confection?!"
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: (laughs)
mathowie: Ug.
- Did you see, there was a weird thing I've never heard of, MetaFilter teaching me something every day, there's something called Slow TV.
jessamyn: Oh I love this! This was on my list too, from zarq.
mathowie: Yeah, from zarq. Which is, I guess it's a reddit/subreddit, called Slow TV, and these are hour-plus long videos of something. The camera's on for an hour or more, there's almost no sound.
mathowie: And so there's a lot of train rides. You can watch, there are some, like, eight hour train rides from Zurich to something else, and they cut through the Alps.
- And then there's, god the beach one is amazing. There's one of just a Hawaiian beach.
jessamyn: It's just watching a beach, is that--
mathowie: Yeah. And it's called, like, "60 minutes relax." And it's just, someone plopped a camera on a tripod on a Hawaiian beach, and that's it. It's just filming, there's almost nobody in it at all.
mathowie: And I don't even know what to do with these. I guess some people say they go to sleep to them or something. It's just like a ... I didn't know there was a such thing and it's pretty cool.
jessamyn: I use to have, like, there's a couple eight hour waterfall videos.
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: And I ... sometimes when I'm just like really stressed out and I don't want to listen to music, I'll just put them on in the background.
- Jim did a post back in March last year which was all drivelapse stuff. And some of those are like, super long also. I don't totally understand, but especially if you work in an office...
cortex: (chuckles)
jessamyn: Like he's got an office, and you can like put these on in like the lobby camera, and it's kind of like watching TV, except there's no obnoxious commercials, and it's just a thing people can kind of look at. It's like the fish tank of this decade.
mathowie: Hmmm.
- Why am I getting a little gas pump on--
jessamyn: Cuz there's a little gas pump; I get 'em too.
cortex: What? What are we talking about?
mathowie: Did we edit that post?!
jessamyn: I didn't edit it!
mathowie: It's a Chrome extension?! What? Weird.
jessamyn: It's not a--
cortex: I have no idea what you guys are talking about. [laughs]
mathowie: If you load--
jessamyn: Click the link Josh!
cortex: Which one?
mathowie: The drivelapse.
jessamyn: The last one.
mathowie: The drivelapse one. Do you get a bunch of little gas pumps next to everything? [chuckling]
jessamyn: I get a bunch of little gas pumps; I'm using Firefox.
cortex: Oh I get a bunch of little squares.
jessamyn: Awww. What are you using?
mathowie: Oh it's emoji?
jessamyn: Yeah, I think it's emoji.
cortex: Probably.
mathowie: Oh, I'm--
jessamyn: What are you using Josh, Internet Explorer?
cortex: No, Chrome.
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: Chrome on OS X.
jessamyn: Huh.
mathowie: I run, uh--
cortex: Maybe I'm just missing a font or something.
jessamyn: You need it.
mathowie: I run an emoji pack for Chrome. Got so tired of boxes in Twitter.
cortex: Yeah, I can't--
jessamyn: Yeah, I have an emoji pack just so that I can send hamburgers over instant messenger.
cortex: I can't actually see the alternate URL for mine and churl's podcast, The Crapshoot, where he -- I may have mentioned this -- he actually registered
mathowie: Umlauts?
jessamyn: On an emoji URL?
cortex: image-of-poop, image-of-gun dot tk or something like that
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: [breathes out] How cool is that?!?
cortex: ...as an alternate... yeah, so you can click on that. But I can't see it! So as far as I know, we registered square, square dot tk.
jessamyn: (laughs)
mathowie: (laughs) Does it work on an iPhone? Cuz that has pretty good--
cortex: I think it does
cortex: I think it does, I think it does work on iPhone.
mathowie: How do you type a gun emoji?
cortex: You clearly don't, that's the thing, it's like--
jessamyn: You go to the emoji keyboard. You can do it. On your phone.
mathowie: Oh right, on your phone.
jessamyn: You guys know how to get to emoji on your phone, right?
mathowie: Yeah.
cortex: I will admit I've never, ever used an emoji on my phone.
mathowie: Aww.
jessamyn: Are you serious?
cortex: I'm an old man. I'm starting to ...
jessamyn: I would send you a text with one ...
cortex: ... at some point in like 2009 I think I started to ossify into my old man bones.
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: ...except I've got two Joshes in my phone, Josh and Not-Josh.
cortex: And I'm starting to find these new things annoying.
cortex: Oh just send to both. That'll be fun.
jessamyn: (laughs) The other guy's a little sick of me. I'm like, "Oh, sorry Brian."
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: He's like, "How do you know my name?" I'm like, "Because I called you two years ago."
- "And I don't know how to get you out of my phone, Josh's-old-number." (laughs)
mathowie: Ummm...
jessamyn: But yeah, no, I enjoyed the post by zarq even though I only sort of dilettantedly clicked across a couple, a couple little links.
mathowie: The amazing "editors rewriting famous book titles to sound like Upworthy headlines" spawned the most amazing
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: Oh my god did I love this!
mathowie: spawned the most amazing thread
jessamyn: By divabat
mathowie: "It Was The Best Of Times. You Won't Believe What Times Followed That!"
jessamyn: (laughs)
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: And then there's a MetaTalk thread by divabat where there's like ... where is it? They compiled all of the funny headlines from comments in that thread.
cortex: Yeah.
mathowie: And then, they did something more with that.
jessamyn: I don't even remember this -- it must have been a weekend I was gone.
mathowie: Oh yeah, here it is. Here, I'll link to the MetaTalk thread, and it's ... here's a live spreadsheet, like on Google spreadsheet.
jessamyn: Oh, the Sporcle thing that Eyebrows did. Yeah.
mathowie: Yeah. And you could start animating these, or making these book covers if you wanted to, but it's kind of amazing. Very, very, very funny.
jessamyn: It's one of those, like, life imitates art, right?
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: 'cuz, like, Anil was just on Twitter recently, like, "Can You Guess Which State Has the Most Rapes? The Answer Might Surprise You!"
mathowie: That was real!
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: THAT'S CNN!
mathowie: Yeah, that was the worst. Oh, god.
jessamyn: So bad. I like to think maybe that's someone on the inside who's kind of like making a joke at CNN's expense, except it probably isn't.
mathowie: Yeah. Ugh.
jessamyn: "They Told This Guy That He Couldn't Simply Walk Into Mordor. What He Did Next Will Inspire You."
- (all laugh)
mathowie: Oh yeah, and then there's a quiz
cortex: I loved that one.
mathowie: Oh yeah, and then there's a quiz, so that was the--
jessamyn: the Sporcle quiz
mathowie: This went from, yeah, the Sporcle quiz where, yeah. It's really hard. I've heard if you misspell, like, 'Iliad' or something you don't get credit; or you put 'Odyssey' instead of 'The Odyssey' you don't get it. But...
jessamyn: Right, it's just pattern matching.
mathowie: It's something like 25 of the book titles, and most people are getting like 80% of them right which is kind of amazing.
- But very funny. Life imitates art, and then becomes a game, which is great.
cortex: Yep.
jessamyn: Here's another thing that I really liked. You don't have to click all the way right down to the comment, but Knappster made a post about a thing I had never known about before, and I'm so happy as a grownup to have learned about it. Snowy neckdowns, or "sneckdowns".
- Basically showing ... so, you know, it snows. And then the snowplows dig out kind of where you can drive. And then there's these big parts, kind of that aren't quite the sidewalk but aren't quite the road,
jessamyn: where you don't actually need to drive. You can actually sort of expand the sidewalk into those areas to make roads safer for pedestrians.
- And there was a whole bunch of people talking about where these work in big cities. And it's the concept of snowy neckdowns, and it kind of goes hand in hand with that "desire path" idea,
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: ... where you can wait and blahblahblah.
jessamyn: So if you can wait for it to snow, you can figure out where you don't need to drive. And et cetera.
mathowie: You know what's crazy
cortex: Good luck, Florida!
jessamyn: (laughs)
mathowie: (laughs) You know what's crazy is, I saw that same concept talked about today -- an article in a completely different, not the BBC, like nothing in this post -- a completely different article showing New York snow; they were calling it "snow desire paths". Showing the same way that they could extend the sidewalks in this corner and this corner, like the cars never drive there.
mathowie: The street is way too wide here. That's amazing, everyone stumbling on this concept at once.
jessamyn: Yeah! Yeah, I thought it was interesting. I learned some stuff, and then of course I drove home in the snow, and you know, you really take up a lot less of the road...
mathowie: ...and you think...
jessamyn: Yeah, well when you're driving very timidly and carefully, and paying a lot of attention.
mathowie: With the desire paths, people famously say
mathowie: With the desire paths, I know people famously say, "If you're starting a new college, just plant grass everywhere, wait a year, and then just pave what's dirt." Let people decide where they want to walk.
jessamyn: Right.
mathowie: I wonder if anyone's ever actually done that. I saw -- my school would do that, I think Berkeley (UC Berkeley) was famous for changing desire paths in the sidewalks after... like that's where their architecture school picked up on this. I think they sort of invented the terms.
jessamyn: Uh-huh.
mathowie: But I wonder if, like a real, new college campus has ever tried that. I'll have to look that up. [chuckles]
jessamyn: Look it up!
cortex: Find out, man.
jessamyn: But yeah, I enjoyed it and it's always cool to learn something new about snow.
mathowie: I think we should talk about the Patreon launch video from Jack Conte, the half of Pomplamoose -- funny song guy, and he makes amazing Youtube videos, and he's kind of a Youtube star.
mathowie: He decided to make his own personal sort of Kickstarter for these weird independent Youtube-famous people. Which is like, instead of having to... If you become famous on Youtube, what do you do with that? How do you make a job out of that? And sometimes, in the past, people like, whatever, they're sponsored by Pringles or something, or they do something weird, or they do a national commercial or something. He came up--
jessamyn: Which is what Pomplamoose did, right?
mathowie: Yeah, right. They did a Hyundai commercial I think. It was kind of a...
jessamyn: Right, for the holidays.
mathowie: And so, his idea was, why don't you just use that ten-thousand-fans idea that Kevin Kelly talks about to let people say, "I'll give you a buck." Like, I'll sign up to give you a buck, and this basically is an accounting system that automatically takes the buck from you every time he'd upload something to Youtube.
- And he shows -- it's great, this video's from the last XO conference -- he describes how he came up with it, how he went crazy working on his own, and how he bankrupted himself, and how he came up with the idea and he launched it.
mathowie: I think today, if he launches a new video, he gets something like $7,700 instantly into his account.
jessamyn: Which works, how? What's the model? I'm still completely not understanding.
mathowie: You sign up--
cortex: People basically pledge like a run-a-thon, except for it's content creation. So you say, "I'll give you a dollar every time you..."
jessamyn: So they're like, every time -- Oh, I get it. I misunderstood.
mathowie: Yeah, and so he has so many thousands of fans--
jessamyn: ...which is what Patreon is. Sorry, I heard you say it, and it made no sense to me
jessamyn: Sorry, I heard you say it, and it made no sense to me, and because I was thinking 'patriot' only with an 'n' at the end. Now I get it.
mathowie: Oh yeah, yeah, it's a weird word.
cortex: (laughs) Let's talk about the Patriots! Let's talk about the Pats.
jessamyn: I know, I was like, football, what?
cortex: [jokingly] They should have been in the Super Bowl.
mathowie: Patron of the arts, but Patreon was probably what domain he could buy.
- I'm just mentioning it because it's kind of hitting a critical mass, and someone's asked us, hey, are we going to ban all Patreon links? And there's only been two or three...
cortex: Yeah, there was a discussion in MetaTalk the other day about that.
jessamyn: Oh, we were talking about it, yeah.
mathowie: There's only been two or three I think to date, but I'm seeing it mentioned on Twitter where everyone I know who does weird one-off pieces of art, they like, "Signing up for Patreon!" I don't know what the world's--
jessamyn: So wait, how does Patreon get paid?
mathowie: Uh, they might keep five percent or something, kind of like Kickstarter.
jessamyn: Ok.
mathowie: But you put a limit -- you say, like, let's say I'll say, "I'll give five bucks to everything, whatever... if you're making Youtube videos. But there's a limit of 20 a month," or something like that.
- So even if you made five or ten videos
mathowie: So even if you made five or ten videos, you'd only pay--
cortex: Yeah, you can't just fleece people by going suddenly crazy or whatever.
mathowie: Yeah, it's weird when I think about... I mean there are a few people I've actually backed, like Adrian Holovaty who does these really cool gypsy jazz guitar videos.
jessamyn: Uh-huh.
mathowie: He does them for fun, but they take up months for him to work on, so he tried it out, and I did it for a while.
- Then he started pumping out a lot of videos and I was starting to think, "Man, if I was backing like ten internet people I love
mathowie: I was starting to think, "Man, if I was backing like ten internet people I love, I'd have like a $50/month bill to Patreon, to disperse to them."
cortex: Yeah, it's--
jessamyn: How much you spend on the internet?
mathowie: Yeah, I know, like...
jessamyn: How much you spend on coffee?
mathowie: Yeah.
cortex: I spend very little on coffee at this point, actually.
mathowie: I like coffee, but you know...
jessamyn: Tea?
cortex: Tea? Well, I spend very little on that too, because I buy it in bulk [chuckling] and make it at home.
jessamyn: (laughing)
mathowie: (laughing)
cortex: I spend like five bucks a month.
mathowie: (laughing) What about petits fours?
cortex: Metaphors cost me a bundle.
jessamyn: What's your vice, Josh. Scotch?
mathowie: Heroin?
jessamyn: Ah, you know... beer
cortex: Ah, you know... beer more than scotch. I love scotch and scotch is expensive, but I drink scotch real slow.
jessamyn: How much you think you spend on beer in a month?
cortex: Now I've got to think about--
mathowie: A week? A day.
cortex: ...both think of the answer and decide whether it sounds problematic.
jessamyn: (laughing)
mathowie: How much is a six pack? [laughter] a six pack a day?
cortex: I don't know, we probably spend maybe 40 - 50 bucks a month on beer.
jessamyn: Just say it.
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: And there's nothing wrong with that. But like 50 bucks a month isn't like a crazy amount of money, is my point.
cortex: Yeah, totally. For people with jobs. And I like the idea, too.
mathowie: I thought it would be interesting if your support of the arts
mathowie: I thought it would be interesting if your support of the arts is getting to, like, your cable bill. That'd be an interesting problem to have.
cortex: Yeah.
jessamyn: I tried to search for Vermont and they said there's nothing there, which means I have an opportunity.
mathowie: (laughter)
cortex: Ha-hah!
- You know, I've--
mathowie: Vermont's number one Patreon.
cortex: I've been talking to Waxy about podcasting stuff a while back, and was talking about how it would be nice to slightly improve my equipment, but at the same time, that's just sort of spending money on
cortex: that's just sort of spending money on a non-money-yielding hobby. And his take was, "Oh well do Patreon" and I was like, "What is Patreon?"
jessamyn: That's kind of what hobbies are for, Josh, otherwise they'd be jobs.
cortex: I know, I know.
mathowie: (laughter)
cortex: It's just more the idea of, like, dropping a bunch of money on...
jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
cortex: ... setting up a podcasting studio, so that I can then just bullshit while drinking beer. It's harder to work it out.
- But that was the first I'd heard of Patreon when he sort of brought that up in reference to that. Obviously he's a little more tuned into that whole
cortex: Obviously he's a little bit more tuned into that whole sector than I am, what with the kickstarter roots and all.
mathowie: Whoa, a couple of weeks ago, there were those weird tintype style portraits done at Sundance of famous people?
cortex: Oh yeah.
mathowie: That is the last photo of ... Philip Seymour Hoffman
jessamyn: Philip Seymour Hoffman
mathowie: Yeah, it's like a, haunting photo. The William H. Macy photo is amazing too.
jessamyn: That was my favorite one of all the--
mathowie: Yeah. Very cool. I don't know how the heck you make them.
jessamyn: Did you read the link?
mathowie: No.
- [all three burst into laughter]
- No, I mean I looked at the photos, I didn't see like a backstory on it.
- God, every time I see Jesse Eisenberg, I think of Facebook and how much I don't like it. [chuckles]
jessamyn: Every time I see Jesse Eisenberg, now I think of that magician movie.
mathowie: Oh.
jessamyn: I didn't use to.
mathowie: Every time he comes up, I go, [grumbling] "Fucking Zuckerberg, god I hate him." That's not right.
cortex: I think of Zombieland, and how I probably have too negative of an opinion about Zombieland.
mathowie: What?!
cortex: Because it was a fun enough movie, but...
mathowie: You hated Zombieland?
cortex: I think--
jessamyn: I never even saw Zombieland. Should I?
mathowie: It's dumb fun! It's great.
cortex: It is. I think I was going in with slightly incorrect expectations.
jessamyn: I like fun.
cortex: I think it is fun. That's the thing, I think I have a really bad attitude towards it, and I think it's like, it's my fault for expecting something for no particular reason and then not getting that, and I feel like the movie also maybe, it was originally going to be a TV series, was the plan?
mathowie: Oh.
cortex: And I think some of the things that annoyed me most about it are things that are mostly a reflection of the fact that
- the structures that might set up a TV series rather well don't necessarily fit quite as well in a single feature film? So his rules for survival would be a great gimmick--
mathowie: Ahh.
cortex: Every episode you have a different rule, but instead in the film it kept feeling something that they just kept coming back to but not in an interesting way, particularly, and the character development and the dynamics were all just sort of wacky.
jessamyn: So this is the TV--I'm sorry, you guys, but this is a TV show or a movie?
mathowie: It's a movie.
cortex: It's a movie. It's a movie with Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg and
mathowie: Zombie apocalypse happens.
jessamyn: And it's called Zombieland.
cortex: Zombieland.
mathowie: But it's silly.
cortex: It's silly, it's funny.
jessamyn: Is it from 2009? Oh, that movie. Alright, I haven't seen it.
mathowie: Yeah. It hits a weird note which is kind of like, maybe the Pirates of the Caribbean?
jessamyn: Augh.
mathowie: Which is like, we know this is kind of goofball, and we're in on the joke. It's not super serious.
cortex: But we still want you to be really worried about people when they're in peril.
mathowie: (chuckles)
cortex: Even though it's obviously going to be fine because of the type of movie.
mathowie: Yeah. It's hard to do a little bit campy and you're supposed to care, and I thought they did a pretty good job, because I didn't take it too seriously. But you're right, the first ten minutes they're trying to be so fucking cool and all those rules where it's like, it's the coolest Adobe After Effects work I've ever seen.
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: It's beautiful fonts, and it's such, it's really clever and cool.
cortex: Yeah, it's really nicely composited.
mathowie: And then it goes into a goofy movie which is kind of like, I guess like Shaun of the Dead but not as funny, but yeah.
jessamyn: Well, and that's the problem, right? Shaun of the Dead is so good.
mathowie: Yeah. This is the idiot American version.
jessamyn: They kind of nailed that, and so anybody else trying, yeah.
cortex: Yeah. It just doesn't have the same sort of clarity and sense of consistency and purpose.
mathowie: But I couldn't hate it. It was fun.
cortex: Well, I didn't hate it. I just, again, bad attitude is all, yeah. I should watch it again sometime.
- (laughs) Another Metafilter post--
jessamyn: You know what movie I hated?
cortex: Yeah?
jessamyn: Have you guys seen The Colony?
cortex: No, I haven't.
mathowie: No.
jessamyn: It's one of those, it starts snowing and it never stops, and eventually people run out of food and they have to move underground and blahblahblah.
mathowie: Whoa.
jessamyn: And it starts out with this awesome post-apocalyptic kind of theme-y thing! And then it turns into some sort of, oh, and then there's zombies--
mathowie: Ohh.
jessamyn: And then it becomes this gross splatter-core disgusting movie.
cortex: You don't say. Hmm.
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: And it looked like it was going to be totally great!
mathowie: Larry Fishburne! Wow.
jessamyn: And Fishburne's in it! And a whole bunch of other people you've heard of who are really good. And I was so let down by how completely hackingly gross it was.
- Even though--
mathowie: Uh, Zombieland's a little bit gross. (chuckles) But it's comically bloody.
cortex: Zombieland's zombie trope gross. It's gross in the way you'd expect a zombie movie to be, so.
mathowie: Okay.
jessamyn: Yeah. I mean, I have no issue with that. This was like hacking people to pieces to eat them who are still partly alive kind of gross.
mathowie: Ohhh. That's worse.
jessamyn: I know! Like, super gross! (in a shivery manner) Eughhh. Eughhh.
mathowie: To take our minds off that--(chuckles)
cortex: [??] on my 'to watch' list. I really liked this post because of course I would.
mathowie: Oh, god, of course.
cortex: The guy who makes Cookie Clicker has been working on a make your own Cookie Clicker-like game, that now that there's a--
jessamyn: I noticed there's some visited links in this post.
cortex: Yes.
jessamyn and mathowie: (laugh)
cortex: So there you go. We've reached the end game, and at this point, you can actually make your own Cookie Clicker clone, which--
mathowie: How hard is it? Is it just like a text file and you put in parameters?
cortex: Yeah, it's a text file for, it's really not too bad, basically.
jessamyn: So you can make up like cards and card catalogs and books and shelves and deep storage and make up all the stuff?
mathowie: (laughs) Oh, so you could have a Click Librarian.
cortex: Yeah, exactly. [??] You should totally make Library Clicker.
jessamyn: I actually like my friends.
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: Like, "You've reshelved 10,000 books."
jessamyn: Aughhh!
mathowie: I don't know.
jessamyn: I would feel bad. I would feel bad. But that is an awesome post.
cortex: Yep.
jessamyn: Who made this post? Do you guys just not like to tell?
mathowie: iridic [əˈɹɪdɪk].
cortex: This was iridic [ˌɪəˈɹɪdɪk].
jessamyn: iridic [ˌɪəˈɹɪdɪk].
cortex: iridic [ˈɪəɹɪdɪk]? iridic [ˈɪəɹɪdɪk]? iridic [ˌɪəˈɹɪdɪk].
jessamyn: iridic [əˈɹɪdɪk]. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
mathowie: Oh, I should go--
cortex: Maybe it's like, "I, Ridic."
jessamyn: I do like mbrubeck's... I wasn't meaning to pick on your pronunciation at all.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: mbrubeck's thing at the end?
cortex: No, I was just feeling--yes, yes. Which I feel like, you know, it's only that I've been busy that I feel like I haven't basically done this already.
jessamyn: Thank God you're busy. Thank God you're busy.
cortex: Because it seems like it [needs ?] doing.
jessamyn: And then you put it on Patreon [pəˈtɹoʊn], and then you get some good microphones--
mathowie: Patreon [ˈpɛɪˌtɹiɑn].
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: And then, yeah. Goodbye.
cortex: Yes. Every time--(laughs) every time you make a cookie, I get a dollar. That's how it works. And then, yeah.
jessamyn: Fractional dollar.
mathowie: Wow, I just logged into my Cookie Clicker of meth production, and I'm a 60 quadrillionaire right now. Wow.
cortex: That's a pretty good number.
jessamyn: I'm a little even afraid to check my Cookie Clicker stats.
cortex: I'm checking my situation right now. I gotta fix some Wrinklers here...
mathowie: [??]
jessamyn: (snickers)
cortex: Let's see. I'm doing 5.6... let's see, how many is that?
jessamyn: With a bunch of zeroes. You can type it into Google and it'll tell you.
cortex: Is that quintillion? 5.6 trillion cookies per second at this point.
mathowie: (chuckles)
cortex: Yeah. It's going pretty well. It's going pretty well. Making those cookies.
mathowie: pjern made a cool post of one of my old favorite things, someone just has a gallery of really cool old stuff, and it's just like...
jessamyn: Ohh! Beauty.
mathowie: The greatest locomotives of the last hundred years. All these Art Deco, just beautiful, gorgeous, gorgeous locomotives that were
- streamlined and they have awesome paint jobs and it's just really, really cool stuff.
jessamyn: Beautiful.
mathowie: I guess they were going for the speed records in the early '40s and stuff, so they're trying to make them--
jessamyn: Beautiful.
mathowie: --slip through the wind when they didn't know aerodynamics very well, but they're just gorgeous. Some of them are just total Art Deco masterpieces.
jessamyn: Wow. Wowwww!
mathowie: (chuckles)
jessamyn: This is cool. I did not see this when it went up, somehow.
mathowie: Yeah. So fun.
cortex: Those are pretty dope.
jessamyn: Ninth of January. I also very much enjoyed, a lot of people, I think, this was another one. Very few comments, lots of favorites, needs a little explanation, but Eyebrows McGee posted about this town in Belgium, Geel [ˈgil], Geel [ˈjil]? Whatever. Geel [ˈgil]. Basically, it's a town where Saint Dymphna was from, who, blah blah blah, church was built that took care of
- people suffering from mental illnesses, blah blah blah, and then the church overflowed with the people, and the townsfolk brought the people in, people with mental illness to live in their homes, and that's become part of the town.
mathowie: Hmm.
jessamyn: And the church took care of it until the 1850s, and now the government does it. And so there are families who just take in mentally ill people in the town, and they live with them, and the town
- pays and takes care of it, and there's just a beautiful article about it, and a photo gallery, and it's lovely. It's super lovely.
cortex: That is really neat.
mathowie: Wow.
jessamyn: Yeah.
mathowie: So it was like the saint of the town gives them the theme for what it is? Huh. That's cool.
jessamyn: Yeah, and then there's a couple people in the thread who talk about, maybe their family did the same thing, or
- people talk about the, teams are assigned to people, so every person has a, every team has a doctor, a social worker, and a therapist, and the families are sort of part of the caregiving for these people who have these mental illnesses, and you've got people who have been living with families for several generations. It's just beautiful. It's beautiful, it was neat, Eyebrows McGee made a neat post about it, and yeah, I just thought it was nice and a thing I didn't know about.
mathowie: "A tradition that led to widespread tolerance in the town for the mad and troubled."
jessamyn: Yeah!
mathowie: It's, like, 150 years ago, those were like medical terms. "Oh, you're mad and troubled." (chuckles) Like, so crazy.
jessamyn: Yeah. We have a school in my town that's now the Vermont Technical College, but it used to be The Normal School.
mathowie: (chuckles)
jessamyn: Because it was for the normal students as opposed to the non-normal students who went somewhere else.
mathowie: Oh my god. Lan-guage!
cortex: (chuckles)
mathowie: Crazy language.
jessamyn: I don't know! I'm just...
mathowie: Did you see the Jamie Casino crazy personal injury lawyer ad from the Super Bowl?
jessamyn: I...
cortex: No, I saw references to that. Just local...
mathowie: That was amaz--like, it is the highest production value local commercial you've ever seen, with tons of metal music and you watch it and you're like, why, why is this guy even...?
jessamyn: So this is a thing I would have seen if I had been watching--I mean, I saw the Super Bowl. This is not my "don't have a TV."
mathowie: No, yeah, you'd have to be in Atlanta, Georgia, I think, to see it.
jessamyn: Okay.
mathowie: It was a loc--he bought four local slots so he could play a two-minute movie of him. It's--when you watch it, it's just unbelievable. It's like, I mean, he'll probably get a reality show, right? Of crazy small-town lawyer who's into metal. And retribution.
cortex: (chuckles)
mathowie: I'll just say it: it is not to be missed. Of all the local commercials that are crazy and go viral, this is the most of all those.
jessamyn: Wow.
mathowie: It is crazy. I guess iMovie is getting better and better, too. (chuckles) The production values are amazing.
jessamyn: Did you guys part--you guys didn't participate in any of the Super Bowl threads, did you?
cortex: No, not really.
mathowie: No.
jessamyn: I did not either.
mathowie: Was there sort of a live one? I was on Twitter making jokes about the bad commercials, so that was about it.
jessamyn: Heheheheh.
mathowie: I had fun with that.
cortex: Yeah, I think I made a couple just background radiation jokes. Like, I wasn't watching the Super Bowl, but I was watching enough people watching the Super Bowl--
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: --that I was able to throw together a couple jokes just based on--
jessamyn: Well, and after a while you kinda knew how it was going to go.
cortex: Yeah.
jessamyn: Like, I watched the whole thing and was just like, "Oh god."
- And nickyskye on Facebook was kinda like, "Can someone explain this sportsball to me?"
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: And I was like, "Well. In the first twelve seconds, the ball went over Manning's head, and he never got it back. Lalalala."
mathowie: Which was crazy.
jessamyn: And she's like, "You know lots of sports!" And I was like, "Not really. It's just a different way to tell a story."
mathowie: It was the first time I think I've ever watched the Super Bowl where I wanted someone to win and they really, really, really won.
cortex and jessamyn: (laugh)
mathowie: People were like, "That was a terrible game!" I was like, "It was actually kind of awesome if you
- wanted the Seahawks to win. I mean, it was brutal and weird and never stopped being weird, but they won the hell out of that game."
jessamyn: (laughs) The last time I saw the Seahawks play, they were in the Kingdome.
mathowie: Oh.
jessamyn: That cement monstrostity that no longer exists and they blew it up.
mathowie: (chuckles)
jessamyn: So I was nominally cheering for them. So yeah, same thing. Although the Patriots have won while I have been rooting for them in the past.
mathowie: Oh, I think I've been disappointed every Super Bowl ever.
cortex: You know, I did read one Super Bowl thread.
- It wasn't the Super Bowl thread, but it was the Breaking Madden Super Bowl thread, which--
mathowie: Oh, yeah.
jessamyn: I skipped this entirely. Tell me about it.
mathowie: It is amazing!
cortex: You know, I don't know if we've mentioned this before on the podcast. I might have mentioned it previously. But Breaking Madden is this column this guy named John Bois? does. He writes for sbnation.com, and he also does a GIF round-up. But basically, he's been taking the game Madden 25, which is just a recent iteration of the
- Madden football franchise video game series. And he's just been doing weird things with it, like creating weird players or creating a stunt team that can do one thing but not another thing, and it's hard to convey because it's all in his execution, but it's just wonderful. He created this guy named CLARENCE BEEFTANK for one episode--
mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)
cortex: Who was just this bowling ball quarterback who just did nothing but drive. A bunch of other things, and the post rounds up
- some of the classic ones. The BEEFTANK one is great. But so he did a Super Bowl where he replaced all the Seahawks players with seven-foot-tall, 400-pound monsters who were good at everything, and replaced all the Broncos with like five-foot-six, 160-pound dudes who could do nothing.
mathowie: [??] (chuckles)
jessamyn: Hobbits.
cortex: He wanted to get like 1500 points in a game, and he might have except for--
mathowie: Or he started it.
cortex: Yeah, he was on track.
mathowie: He started, he got four hundred points in the first quarter and went, "Whaat?!"
- (chuckles)
jessamyn: (laughs)
cortex: Well, and the game glitched out and froze, and then he was like, okay, fine, it's amazing, so. Anyway, I thought it was wonderful.
mathowie: Yeah. And then the Super Bowl happens, he did this two days before the Super Bowl--
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: --and it looks just, he shows the Broncos in his game are so bad, they don't even know how to snap the ball, like the ball just bangs off their helmet and they hit each other. And then the safety to start looks exactly like a scene from his game.
jessamyn: Oh, no. Oh, no.
mathowie: It was funny as hell. Oh, and then BEEFTANK was inspired by a real guy that I did
- a post on! Which was also on sbnation I guess a few days ago, and it was all the--
jessamyn: Oh, (laughing) I saw this post! I was surprised at it.
mathowie: Yeah. Jared Lorenzen, a three-hundred-pound quarterback and American folk hero--
jessamyn: In fact, I added the jaredlorenzen tag, because you skipped it.
mathowie: Oh, yeah. So BEEFTANK is him. He's always been an almost three-hundred-pound quarterback, so he's always too slow for the NFL, he never got to play much. But he's some sort of weird Kentucky football
- awesome guy who's been pushing the little minor league football teams, and he became their commissioner, and he owned a team, and then he became a quarterback for it, and there's all these amazing videos that basically, because he's 300 pounds, he plays in these little arena football stadiums which have half the space, so it's not about running fast, and so he's not at a disadvantage because of his weight.
- But he can plow through people. He's basically like a defender, he's so big. So there's just these amazing videos where he bounces three people or four people off and scores touchdowns single-handedly. He's just amazing. And I guess that's what inspired--
jessamyn: The Northern Kentucky River Monsters.
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: (laughs) [??] name for a team.
mathowie: I didn't know there was minor league football. Like, minor league indoor football. But that's a thing.
cortex: Why not, man?
mathowie: Yeah, it was fun.
jessamyn: I enjoyed that post. I didn't even notice at the time that you had made it.
mathowie: I just saw that the videos also look like Breaking Madden. He just plows like the glitched-out video game was happening.
jessamyn: Like they just don't exist.
mathowie: Yeah. Like, how is that possible? We should probably move to Ask Metafilter.
jessamyn: Well, here's the last post that I haven't seen yet, but looked like it was going to be really good, and I would like to see it, which was the "Why White People Are Funny" by Rumple?
mathowie: Hmm.
jessamyn: Basically poking fun at the ways in which Inuit people have been treated as exotic documentary subjects.
mathowie: Oh. (chuckles)
jessamyn: And I've only gotten five or ten minutes into it, so I can't really talk too much about it, but it's by the National Film Board of Canada, and it's just, not a lot going on in the thread, though there's people talking about it. But I just finished reading... oh, what was the name of that book? Hold on one second. Da-da-da!
mathowie: I love the concept of this. I heard the concept of it and it sounded so funny.
cortex: Yeah, I'm in the same place with Jessamyn where I just--
jessamyn: I just finished reading the Give Me My Father's Body book, which was basically about when Peary was heading into Greenland, there was a whole bunch of what he called "polar Eskimos", and he brought some of them back with him to New York. This was kind of turn of the last century, a little bit before that. So he brought a whole bunch of people from Greenland, where they lived, to New York to kind of show them off, and a whole bunch of them died, and it was just this terrible, awful blemish.
mathowie: Euh.
jessamyn: And the Museum of Natural History in New York kept the bones of one of the kids'
- fathers, who... the whole story's awful and appalling and lots and lots of white people acting appalling. But basically it's about this young man who is young when he comes to New York who grows up in New York and then goes back to Greenland and kind of doesn't really speak the language anymore, and eventually winds up going back to America.
- But, long story short, he wants repatriation of his father's bones, and they don't wind up getting it until like the 1980s?
mathowie: Whoa!
jessamyn: 1990s? Just this super shitty, oh my god, so awful. And so now I really want to go watch this video, because it's sort of on topic and I'm curious about if they mention it or how it all goes. And everybody should read this book, because it's really interesting.
cortex: Yeah, I was going to say I'm in the same place on that video where I managed to get a few minutes into it and take an interest but then there was enough other stuff going on that it's on my 'to watch' pile at this point.
jessamyn: Right, right, right.
mathowie: It's like an hour long, right? Someone said--
jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And fascinating, and looks pretty good. I just, yeah, I want to sit down where I actually have some time and watch it like I would be watching a movie. Can't be worse than Colony.
mathowie: It's so weird that that used to be a thing a hundred years ago, or geez, even 50 years ago. There always had to be humans inside of museums. They'd always get the most exotic humans. Like, you know--
jessamyn: Well, and the laws were just shitty, right?
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: That you just believed that you were allowed to take certain people's things because they didn't have
- whatever, jurisprudence that said you couldn't. And it's really literally only been the last twenty years that "Oh, you took those native people's things. You have to give them the hell back. I don't care if it's a hundred years later and they're valuable."
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: "You never should have had them in the first place. Shame on you."
cortex: Yeah.
jessamyn: And it's interesting watching that sort of percolate through the museum community, to the extent that I understand about it. Miko talks a lot about it, and I've learned a lot just from listening to her talk about it.
mathowie: On the West Coast all the museums are famous for having local Native Americans sort of living in the museum? Like even Yosemite, one of the museums in Yosemite Valley, they sort of kept people--I mean, you know, not jail, but they lived there for like thirty years or something, but wearing almost no clothes, you know, wearing a piece of leather and making bread each day, just--
jessamyn: Right.
mathowie: People would stare at them in their hut, kind of. Which is weird. I remember going to the Museum of Man in San Diego where Grant Barrett works?
jessamyn: Yeah.
mathowie: And he would talk about, because my wife grew up there--
jessamyn: [gnomish ?], right? He's gnomish, I think? Or is he [grantbarrett ?] on Metafilter?
mathowie: He might be grantbarrett. [transcriber's note: Mo Nickels?]
jessamyn: Okay.
mathowie: My wife grew up there in the '70s, they just had a Mexican woman who made handmade tortillas live inside the museum and would hand one to you as you walk by a thing about Mexico, but she was beloved by the entire city. But he talks about, like, yeah, it was kind of disturbing that we did that, but then people
- loved it so much, and she liked it, and it's not as awful as people living on the property, but people every day asked them to bring her back, kind of, because it was the highlight of the visit.
jessamyn: Weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
mathowie: Yeah, so he's like, [he ?] is dicey.
jessamyn: Well, and, yeah, it becomes part of people's childhood on the one hand, and then on the other hand it's like, "Well, sorry your childhood was based on... euh."
mathowie: (laughs) Some weird, weird, stuff. Do you want to move to Ask Metafilter?
jessamyn: Sure!
cortex: I had one other one I just wanted to mention real quick, which we don't need to talk about in detail because
- how would we, exactly?
jessamyn: Aaah!
cortex: But me3dia's crazy collection of national Twitter accounts.
mathowie: Oh, right! Yeah. I forgot about this.
jessamyn: Thank you for bringing this up! I was just thinking about this because of the MetaTalk post about do you make a blog post about your Metafilter post? And me3dia, I think, also had posted this somewhere else as well, but he clearly made it for Metafilter, but then posted it elsewhere.
mathowie: Oh, yeah, he probably put it on Gapers Block.
jessamyn: I think so. I don't even remember. But yeah, this was wonderful. It was basically Twitter accounts of all the countries of the world and whether or not people are using them, what's going on with them or whatever. This was wonderful. Wonderful post. Amazing!
mathowie: Yeah, the Sweden experiment is really bizarre. They're still doing that, right? Where a citizen gets the account every day? Or each week?
jessamyn: What was that? Sweden?
mathowie: Yeah, Sweden's famous--
cortex: Yeah, yeah, Sweden's still doing that.
mathowie: Oh, cool.
- Wow, this is like three hundred countries. This is insane.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: Well, there's what, 298? I mean, how many countries are there? Mental math.
mathowie: He also did the post on all the single-digit Twitter people.
cortex: I think there's 206, one for every bone in the human body, is that how it works?
mathowie: Oops.
jessamyn: Oh, shut up.
mathowie: Haah!
cortex: Like, if you break your bone, a country's economy goes in the crapper? Maybe it's just me?
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: There's 196. 196.
cortex: Well, see, there we've got the spare bones, so.
mathowie: According to the CIA World Fact Book, if you believe that.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: Depending on whether you count Taiwan or not. Aughhh!
mathowie: He also did the post on all the single-digit, which is 37 accounts with a single digit? On Twitter.
jessamyn: Is that what you linked to?
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: Ohhh! That's kind of nice.
mathowie: Because they're, the famous story of the @n person got their account stolen famously. And it's a fascinating story of how it was socially engineered out of two different companies.
jessamyn: Wowww.
mathowie: Which is sad, if you just call one company and say something, you can--
jessamyn: Right.
mathowie: Convince company #2 to give you control of domains and people's credit cards and it's awful. It is awful. Does n still not work? Ohh, it's still there. Jesus. Wow.
- Do you want to go to Ask Metafilter?
jessamyn: Sure! I liked this question. Because I didn't really know or understand it.
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: Ooh.
jessamyn: "How come some Olympic sports are listed as 'ladies events while others are 'women's'?"
mathowie: Is there an answer?
jessamyn: Well, the ultimate answer is the IOC doesn't use the term 'ladies'.
mathowie: Oh.
jessamyn: But it might be Russian translators. Basically, but, like, yeah, so he was like, "How come ski jumping is for ladies and ice hockey is for women?" Which I thought was a good question, but the answer is probably weird translation and not anything else.
- But feeling listless, a long-time user, asked, and I was like, "I wonder!" And I was totally going to show up and be like (shouts) "I have no idea, but!" And then I'm like, "What are you doing? You don't know! Shut up."
mathowie: (laughs)
jessamyn: "Someone will tell you." (with a laugh)
mathowie: I tend to think that all--
cortex: Well, we can wait until they have an Olympics in Texas, and then if it's translated as 'gals'--
mathowie: (chuckles)
jessamyn: Just stop.
cortex: Then, you know. (chuckles) I was going totally G-rated there.
jessamyn: (laughs) I didn't think-- (laughs)
cortex: I was just going to say 'gals', you know.
mathowie: I think all the major events come out as women's sports, but it depends on the locality and how they des--like, it's always the newscasters who go, "And now, on to the ladies' competition!"
jessamyn: Right, right.
mathowie: Where you're like, that's kind of gross. Don't do that.
jessamyn: Right.
mathowie: I just heard an adult male in Europe call everyone 'girls'. Call 40-year-old women at the top of the world sport called, "Well, you know, the girls' events just aren't attended as well."
jessamyn: Eughhhh!
mathowie: I'm just like, "Oh my god, you asshole."
jessamyn: Eughhhh!
mathowie: (chuckles) So yeah, that's good that it's women everywhere.
jessamyn: Yes.
mathowie: But if that's the official Sochi site calling them 'ladies', weird.
jessamyn: Well, that's exactly it, yeah.
cortex: Well, and people have been saying weird about a lot of things (laughing) about, so it's not exactly [??].
mathowie: (laughs) Or, you always hear figure skating or gymnastics, right, called 'ladies'. But everything, just because I guess it's more feminine, or I guess it's putting them down more? Augh.
- Oh, language.
- Oh, yeah, this happened!
cortex: Yeah, so if we're going to talk about AskMe we should talk about the decoding cancer-addled ramblings one, since that turned into a huge sitewide phenomenon.
jessamyn: By JannaK, hello!
cortex: (laughs) You mean famous television personality JannaK?
jessamyn: What? Yes.
cortex: Well, because she was on TV, you know, so.
mathowie: Oh, right!
jessamyn: Keep going. Keep going.
cortex: Anyway, yes, this (laughing) for anybody who apparently doesn't
- watch ABC World News, this is a question she posted saying, "Hey, there's these cards that my grandmother had that we've never known what's on them. It's a bunch of handwritten letters, it looks like a code or something."
mathowie: And she couldn't speak.
jessamyn: She had been sick for a while, she couldn't speak for the last part of her life.
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: And she had these little cards with these cryptic letter arrangements on them.
mathowie: And this was twenty years ago, right?
- Like it's, yeah, almost 20 years ago that she, the family's always wondered, "What is this code?"
cortex: And then within something like 14 minutes, I think? Fifteen, fourteen minutes?
mathowie: (chuckles) Thirteen minutes!
cortex: Yeah, harperpitt made a connection, said, oh gosh, you know, on the back, those are the first letters of each word of the Lord's Prayer. You know, OFWAIH is Our Father Who Art In Heaven and from there people were like, "Oh, and...!"
jessamyn: "Oh, wait, and this other thing means...!"
cortex: Yeah. So you had people decoding it going off the prayer thing and looking at it. I liked the fact that people were saying, "Okay, well, if we're talking Lutheran, here's some more likely prayer book possibilities and whatnot," and using that to sort of dig into into further. And it was really neat, and it was one of those things that was really neat because of what it was and then someone posted on MetaTalk to say, "Oh, wow, this is really neat!"
- And that's usually as big as the event gets, it's neat enough and accessible enough that it gets a MetaTalk post saying, "Hey, this cool thing happened on AskMe," that's kind of like your typical
- baseline for a big deal. And then the entire Internet noticed and...
mathowie: Did it start with the On The Media guys? Like, two of the On The Media guys...
jessamyn: That's the first place I saw it that wasn't Metafilter or just people's Twitter.
mathowie: Yeah, I think a couple On The Media producers are on Metafilter or watch the Twitter account or the Best Of blog.
cortex: Yeah.
mathowie: And I think it ended up there and then exploded in 24 hours.
cortex: Yeah.
jessamyn: Right.
cortex: And we were--
mathowie: And they say radio never goes viral.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: They do say that.
mathowie: Yes. But apparently they are pretty good at it when they want to be.
jessamyn: Well, but people read the blog, basically, I think.
mathowie: Yeah.
cortex: Yeah.
jessamyn: But yeah, no, that was fascinating, and... and well, and both JannaK and harperpitt were just very nice about it. Like, a ton of people joined the site and were like, "Hey, did you notice it's the Lord's Prayer?" and [they were like ?], "Yes. Thank you."
cortex: (laughs) It's like, yeah, just go back and--
jessamyn: I mean, they were very sweet about it. Like, I think it's sometimes hard when you get that level of Internet attention to be graceful.
cortex: Yeah. Like, it definitely tipped over at some point from being "Hey, this is neat," to "Oh my god, is this still happening?", I think.
mathowie: Oh, we had like a hundred people to just--
jessamyn: In just a couple days, yeah, yeah, yeah.
cortex: Yeah, an extra hundred in like two or three...
jessamyn: And then they showed up in the thread, and we were just deleting all these random comments that had nothing to do with anything.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: But it was just people who didn't know how the site worked, which is fine.
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: But yeah, it was kind of an odd crazy explosion.
mathowie: (laughing) Someone signed their deleted comment with a little Jesus fish. That's awesome. (laughs)
jessamyn: People love Jesus, yeah.
mathowie: It was amazing to see how the television news sausage gets made. Like, what was it, maybe this happened Wednesday, I think? And then Thurs--
jessamyn: Right! People were e-mailing the contact form, Diane Sawyer tried to get ahold of us, Fox News emailed us...
cortex: (chuckles)
mathowie: Yeah! But it was Thursday morning Diane Sawyer's people were like, "Hey, can you get us in touch with JannaK?", we do, and 5 p.m., I'm sitting down to dinner, or 5:30,
- I get a text from an old friend going, "Hey, Metafilter was just up on the TV here, what happened?"
jessamyn: (laughs)
mathowie: And I went, "Oh my god, that e-mail from eight hours ago is television at this point! That's amazing!"
jessamyn: Right, right, right!
mathowie: Like, they move fast!
jessamyn: Yeah.
mathowie: That's what a news cycle is. Jesus.
jessamyn: Yeah.
mathowie: And it's so, it's just such a tiny little nice story. Yeah, it's strange. You never know what's going to go huge.
cortex: Yep.
jessamyn: Never would have thought it. Never would have thought it. Super interesting.
mathowie: I wonder if the... the old famous amazing story, the guy who got his grandpa's address in Vienna, if that happened today--
jessamyn: yankeefog.
mathowie: Yeah, that would probably be a humongous deal.
cortex: Yep.
jessamyn: Well, maybe. It didn't have the kind of, "let's all crowdsource an answer."
mathowie: True, that's true.
cortex: Yeah.
jessamyn: It was mostly that he got connected to arco, who works at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
mathowie: To the most amazing human. Yeah.
cortex: Yeah. It was done and done when the impressive thing had happened, whereas, yeah, this had this... I think that's part of it,
- is like, and that's part of what got people signing up to mention the Lord's Prayer.
jessamyn: Watch the mystery get solved, right, right, right.
mathowie: Yeah.
cortex: Yeah, yeah, and being part of... so yeah, no, I think that's a really good point.
mathowie: Yeah. Cool.
jessamyn: I like, I feel like I have to pick a book-themed one every time.
mathowie and cortex: (laugh)
jessamyn: And this time was user Stacey.
cortex: Oh my god! You could call it Bookie Clicker! You could call it Bookie Clicker!
mathowie: Aughhh!
jessamyn: Wow. You're right, I totally could.
cortex: Yep. Sorry, please continue. (laughs)
jessamyn: I mean, I'm not sure I strike the right tone there, because on the one hand, that's a really cool and awesome idea. On the other hand, I was fucking talking about something completely different. That nobody is paying attention to.
cortex: It just, it bowled me over. It bowled me over like [??] in an arena. Or BEEFTANK. But please, yes, sorry, I'll shut up. (laughs)
jessamyn: (laughs)
mathowie: This is a good thread!
jessamyn: So this was Stacey posting about interesting wide-ranging books on seemingly
- mundane topics. So a lot of people are familiar with Salt, Cod, Blah, The Pencil--
mathowie: Mary Roach everything.
jessamyn: --The Toothpick, but it's just a nice list of the good ones of those kinds of books. In fact, I'm a little surprised I didn't comment in this thread, because I love those books and I've read most of them, but I think I have read a lot of them, so yeah. If you want to read about the potato,
- oysters, the banana, eels, oranges, et cetera, this is a great thread to get your great writing on mundane topics list.
mathowie: (chuckles) Oh my god, the Salt guy has written Cod and Oyster as well. (chuckles)
jessamyn: Really? Kurlansky?
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: Or is Kurlansky not the salt guy?
mathowie: No, he's the salt guy.
jessamyn: He wrote about oysters?
mathowie: He wrote about oysters and the fish that changed the world, cod. "Big Oyster: A Molluscular History of New York."
jessamyn: I did not know! I kind of fell off him after reading Food of the Younger Land in 1968. I should probably get back on that.
mathowie: I was just wondering...
jessamyn: Because he's a really, really readable guy.
mathowie: Yeah. That's the first thing I thought of when you described this question, and it's the first comment. Salt!
jessamyn: Right. That guy. That guy.
mathowie: And it's good everyone mentions Mary Roach has written a bunch of fascinating books on very specific--
jessamyn: I don't like her.
mathowie: What?!
jessamyn: She's jokey.
mathowie: Yeah, I like it, she's funny.
jessamyn: She thinks she's funny, and she's not that funny.
mathowie and cortex: (laugh)
jessamyn: I don't know. Do you ever have people like that? Like, you think you're funnier than you are, reading you is painful.
mathowie: Mary Roach is going to be the villain in your Cookie Clicker app.
cortex: (laughs)
jessamyn: Yes, exactly.
mathowie: She pushes over your shelves randomly.
jessamyn: And my other book thing was media and book recommendations for a gender non-conforming three-year-old boy.
mathowie: Hmm.
jessamyn: So not like, "Oh, we've definitely got a trans kid on our hand, but here's a boy, he doesn't like
- the normal boy stuff, I would like to have books that help him feel good about being a boy, but also that aren't necessarily doing stereotypical boy stuff. In fact, he likes princesses and et cetera." And a lot of people chimed in with good things a kid could read.
mathowie: Whoa, Ma Vie en Rose is like that song La Vie en Rose, but they both describe completely different concepts, which is
- looking through rose-colored glasses is sort of the song, but living life in pink is the other song, it's like a gender-based book/movie. Wow. That's French, man, they gotta work for everything. Wow.
- Oh, we got a cool topic, or e-mail. Oh, we never got the update, but.
jessamyn: What?
mathowie: I wanted to mention this late 2012 post about one of those, oh, I moved into a house
- with a bunch of dudes, and I kind of like one of my roommates. How do I, we've known each other for six months, we hang out a lot, how do you--whaa?
jessamyn: And everyone's like, "Aaaah!"
mathowie: "Just do it! It's going to be rough, but sit down on the couch and just say, 'hey, I kinda like-you like-you, and ohh, it's going to be painful, you might lose a friend or a roommate.'" And then it goes extremely well, like the roommate's like, "Yeah! Awesome! Let's go on dates!" And I think we just got an e-mail saying they're getting married, right?
jessamyn: I think so. I don't remember exactly, but yes.
mathowie: They didn't give us the final, final, you know. I think we asked him for a definitive paragraph to end the thread with, but they didn't get back to us. But I think they're getting married, which is just awesome.
jessamyn: Yeah. Happy story!
cortex: Yay!
mathowie: That's a good ending to a Metafilter, Ask Metafilter.
jessamyn: Especially one of these "I'm not sure if I should do the thing," "Do the thing!" "Oh, I did the thing and it actually turned out okay." Like, that's always nice when that happens.
cortex: Yep.
mathowie: It was also interesting to hear it from the woman's side, you know, because it's
- a stupid classic guy thing, like, oh, I fall in love with my female friends, bleh. But yeah, it was interesting.
jessamyn: Anything else from Ask Metafilter? We're already running a little long, so maybe there just wasn't a lot there? Josh, anything?
cortex: I got nothing else.
mathowie: All I had was this old GE ad that's so wonderful and beautiful I think they accidentally posted it, lukemeister posted it to the front page of Metafilter I think by accident? Which is where I saw it, as we were deleting it. But it's just an awesome
- teenage girl thinking of space, sort of pro-STEM education early-'70s, where can I get more of these? And the only results are "Contact GE's corporate archives," but it's such a cool ad, if you follow the link.
jessamyn: Oh, yeah! She's got a space shuttle in her room, and a kitty, and a stuffed bear, and yeah, they were like, "Woohoo! You can go to space!"
mathowie: Yeah.
jessamyn: Although maybe now that we've mentioned it, people will know other good examples, because yeah,
- that would be neat to find them.
mathowie: Yeah, like, yeah. Where were all these posters, there was a series of them in the '70s, I'm trying to find them. But yeah, it's pretty cool.
- Is that about it? Anything huge in MetaTalk this month?
cortex: There were a couple nice happy things. The Metafilter Interactive Fiction Contest number 3 is now officially underway, so I think it probably [??].
mathowie: Oh, yeah.
jessamyn: Does it go for the month? Is that...?
cortex: Yeah, I think it's for the month, although it's one of those things
- where no one's going to look at you funny if you decide you like writing interactive fiction later in the year either. But yeah, the contest such as it is, with a few simple prizes, is on.
jessamyn: Prizes from griphus and corb and the quidnunc kid!
cortex: So yeah.
mathowie: Wow, where do you see them when they're... are they playable, when people are sort of done?
jessamyn: Yeah! Yeah, yeah.
cortex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a bunch of different tools you can build them in, and the previous post about it,
- I'll go find--oh, it's linked from there--has a good round-up of various tools you can write interactive fiction in!
jessamyn: Because the tools are getting better and better and better, that's my understanding.
cortex: Yeah. Yeah, there's a growing selection of ways to work on it that's pretty nice, because if you're a programmer type there's things that are more program language, if you're more like, "I have never written a program in my life but I want to do it," then there's stuff that's a good fit for that, Twine's really easy for folks who don't really have any experience because it's pretty visual and intuitive. And yeah. So that's going on,
- so that's a happy thing.
- There was also the post about the new Sappho poems discovered recently, and some...
jessamyn: I was having a hard time understanding exactly what had happened. The poems existed and then our guys translated them? Or they just found the poems?
cortex: Yeah, I think the poems were discovered, like the actual existence of the poems is a recent discovery, and they're presumably in, I don't know, Greek?
- I'm not (laughing) up on my literature at all.
jessamyn: Ancient Greek?
cortex: But yeah, Bromius and languagehat were working on it, and so there's...
mathowie: Wow.
cortex: It's a neat thing. It's not quite my thing, just because I'm terrible about my classics and I'm terrible about my poetry and so I'm like, "I have nothing to contribute here."
jessamyn: Heheheh. So this is a perfect storm of not-you. Yeah.
cortex: (laughing) Exactly. It's like, I both think this is fascinating and can offer nothing. But it's cool! It's just some neat stuff happening there, so.
mathowie: Sweet.
cortex: There was the Metafilter LinkedIn group post, for anybody that Matt Haughey hasn't already accidentally, you know--
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: (laughing) Spammed, back when that terrible UI thing got you. So if you're feeling [??] about that, there's that.
mathowie: Awesome. (laughs)
cortex: It's, I think--
jessamyn: Oh! You know, I just went to LinkedIn. I think, not because of that,
- but... I found I had like 700 requests that I didn't kind of know about, because I told LinkedIn to stop e-mailing me, and now there's a whole bunch of people who tried to be my work friend, you know, a year and a half ago, and I'm like, "Oh, hey!" (laughs) "Now's a good time!"
- So I should join this, I guess, huh?
cortex: I guess, yeah.
mathowie: Whenever someone famous-ish adds me, like Tim O'Reilly added me to LinkedIn the other day.
jessamyn: Whooo! Whooo!
mathowie: And I was like, "Why? What? Are you planning something?
- Why would you...?" And then if you, I e-mailed... or it was Biz Stone added me, too.
jessamyn: Whoo!
mathowie: I went, "Hey, why did you add me?" And he goes, "Oh, I thought I was replying to something you sent to me in the interface."
jessamyn: (laughs)
mathowie: "Like, it said, "Matt Haughey something." I was like, "Okay!" And when I hit 'okay', it sent an invite to you and I went, "Oh, I've made a terrible mistake.""
jessamyn: (laughs)
mathowie: Kind of like he was tricked.
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: And so now when anyone famous, I think a day later Tim O'Reilly added me,
- I assume he's connected to Biz Stone and probably went, "Oh, hey, they're connected to Matt Haughey," he went, "Wait, what, is that a message to me, or...?" (laughs)
jessamyn: (laughs) Oh, good lord.
mathowie: So... it's just dark patterns all the way down.
jessamyn: Right. Right, right, right.
mathowie: Oh, god.
jessamyn: Alright, team, I think that's it. Good lot of chatting, it's now dark outside, so I can't give you any snow updates.
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: (contemplatively) Snow. You should walk around because it's so quiet and awesome, right?
jessamyn: I want to go eat an eggroll before my shift starts.
mathowie: Alright. Sweet!
jessamyn: Just enlightened self-interest, you know me.
mathowie: (laughs)
cortex: You should go carve yourself out a little snow den.
mathowie: Haaah. That's funny.
cortex: Yeah.
mathowie: Because of two words.
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: So, should the title of this be "Bookie Clicker"?
cortex: Clearly, clearly.
jessamyn: Of course. Of course.
cortex: (laughs)
mathowie: Okay. Awesome. Alright!
jessamyn: Some things we all agree on. (laughs)
mathowie: Yay! Alright. Thanks, team.
cortex: See you guys next month.
jessamyn: Nice talking to you guys.
mathowie: Bye.
jessamyn: Bye!
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Credits
- beryllium, 130 segments
- Rhomboid, 92
- Joshua McGee, 4
- Pronoiac, 4
- quarantine, 1
