Podcast 93 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 93: "Midlife Crisis Machine" (2014-06-04).
Pronoiac set up a Fanscribed page, and this transcript came from there.

Transcript

mathowie: Before I start the podcast, I want to thank everyone for the last couple weeks of our fundraiser. We talk about it extensively in the show, but I was still in the "holy cow I can't believe this is happening!" kind of mode when we recorded. So again, thank you for all the generous support of the site. And now, to the show.

jingle: theme music

mathowie: Did you look up the number 93?

jessamyn: Of course I did!

mathowie: (singing) Sweet!

jessamyn: And I've been getting lost learning about cake numbers. Josh, do you understand cake numbers?

cortex: I don't think I know cake numbers, no.

jessamyn: Dammit! So 93 has all sorts of interesting things about it. My favorite part is that in base, what is it, it's 333 in base 5, so it's a repdigit -

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: - that's kind of exciting, and in classical Persian finger-counting, 93 is a closed fist.

Like did you guys ever learn to like count on your fingers in binary?

mathowie: No.

cortex: Yes. Well I mean I -

jessamyn: And so binary -

cortex: I decided to -

jessamyn: What?

cortex: I decided to at some point figure out how to -

jessamyn: Well so binary four on your fingers is like giving somebody the finger.

cortex: Right.

jessamyn: Which is awesome. Right? So you can swear at a very small subset of nerds without doing anything. And so in Persian finger counting 93 is a closed fist. And so in old Persian poetry if you weren't

a generous person you would say that their had made 93. That's my uh reading from Wikipedia right now.

cortex: Interesting.

mathowie: Oh. I never mentioned - It's Episode 93!

jessamyn: [Laughs]

cortex: [Laughs]

(unintelligible)

jessamyn: I'm Jessamyn!

mathowie: That was a good cold open.

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: Oh you guys! I'm Jessamyn!

cortex: I am Josh.

mathowie: Oh. I'm Matt.

jessamyn: [Laughing]

cortex: Well that - laughing - nailed it!

mathowie: Boom! Swish!

mathowie: So nothing happened last month at all. Not much.

cortex: Nope. Pretty quiet.

jessamyn: No I got a lot of sleep and uh -

mathowie: Pretty quiet.

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: I hope we have something to talk about.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: Um so yeah! Well that was a big month. Um . Man.

jessamyn: It was a big month. I mean we could start with a romp through MetaTalk, I guess.

mathowie: [Laughing] Well there's eight or nine threads about all sorts of stuff. Jesus.

jessamyn: Just some sprinting. Some sprinting through the metatalk. But yeah. I mean, whatever.

It seems like by the time we're talking now the news is mostly improved?

mathowie: [High-pitched] Yeah. Yeah.

jessamyn: [Laughs]

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: What is that, you know, up-talking I like so much?

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: I mean it seemed like you made an announcement on the fundraising thing that stuffs going fairly well. GoodNewsForTheInsane is coming back for nights so that Taz isn't working seven days a week and, you know, We've gotten nothing from Google which is not surprising at all.

mathowie: Well I got hand waving like maybe someday, but yeah.

jessamyn: But you didn't get a direct response to any direct questions was the take that I got.

mathowie: Yeah. They have to be "we will never comment on a specific site or instance."

jessamyn: I mean you got to appreciate that they have actual boundaries, but yeah.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: It's frustrating being on this side of it.

mathowie: Yeah. And the TL;DR podcast came out last night and uh -

jessamyn: Yeah I didn't listen to it. I just read the thread about it. Or saw the thread about it.

mathowie: Yeah it was good because Alice Goldman and PJ Vogt have been like members for a long time and PJ Vogt got his job

from AskMetafilter!

jessamyn: What?

mathowie: He - they admit this on the show that his fist use of Metafilter was in like 2009. He wrote how do get a job at NPR?

jessamyn: No way!

mathowie: And he worked it. He's a producer for On The Media now. Like it's crazy.

jessamyn: Come on. That is awesome!

mathowie: Yeah it was totally nuts. But uh it was good to get like an interview with someone who really knows their stuff and I'm not explaining, you know, what the site is.

jessamyn: Or what google is -

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: - and how SEO works.

mathowie: And a bigger problem was we talked for like about an hour and 10 minutes or something like that and then it's NPR-ified down to like 5 minutes of me which is like rough - I mean I felt bad for them but -

jessamyn: Right because you said that you sounded a little bit more strident than you meant to sound.

mathowie: Yeah probably because we talked for 20 minutes about that subject and they just clipped out two that were juicy.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: But that's - that's the way you make -

cortex: Well yeah for people who don't know TLDR it's very much a short podcast.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: I mean they do like ten - twelve minute episodes

so yeah (laughing) you kinda you're only going to get so much out of any given -

jessamyn: So the busy internet people can just - yeah.

cortex: Yeah so if you were - if you had not checked it out because I don't know if I've got time for another podcast - it's nice.

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: [Laughs]

mathowie: It's not an abhorious ramble like this thing that goes for an hour and a half. [Laughing]

jessamyn: People like that though.

mathowie: I know! Everything I complain about the length people go I wash more dishes or I drive more hours and I wish it was five hours long.

which is nuts.

jessamyn: Well I mean that's the way I feel about the one podcast I listen to besides this one which is Marc Maron's podcast. He had Aasif Mandvi

mathowie: Oh yeah.

jessamyn: - from the Daily Show and I just wanted to listen to those guys talk forever because for people you only know from like tv or whatever, you super wanna know what - "tell me about what happened when you moved to Florida from Britain" blah-la-la-la-la Like I'm super into it. I'm surprised people want to listen to me or you talk that way but -

mathowie: The Maron podcast is weird because two hours - the first hour is every other interview ever. Right? It's all basic stuff. And it takes an hour to get through that wall that people have up before he asks them a real honest like personal personal question.

jessamyn: Right. Right. So! Tell me how you cam up in the blah-de-blah. yeah.

mathowie: It's funny that like nobody - nobody does that. Like pushed through that wall like Maron.

jessamyn: Yeah! Well because Maron spends the whole first part of the podcast just talking about his damn self.

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: You know? I mean obviously they are recorded in different bits but the expectation is it's really Maron as processed through several hundred famous people.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Not anything else. But I listen to them out of order because I don't really like the guy that much so -

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: I only listen to who I really want to listen to so I'm like did he and Moon Zappa break up?

mathowie: What? They dated? Huh.

jessamyn: Yeah and that was like a thing for a long time because he's like a Frank Zappa super fan boy.

mathowie: Whoa.

jessamyn: And they are both, you know, about the same age

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And so it kinda made sense. But then he was talking about going through relationship issues and we're not talking about metafilter at all....

mathowie: [Laughing]

cortex: [Laughing]

jessamyn: [Laughing] Sorry. Sorry.

mathowie: So metafilter's doing pretty good.

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: We've raised - I mean we didn't even -

jessamyn: [Laughing]

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: The great part is we didn't even try to raise money. I mean when I did the back of the envelope calculations I thought maybe we could make 500 bucks or a 1,000 bucks or 2,000 bucks.

jessamyn: Can I just say - I'm not going to say anything in the thread because I have manners but I told you so.

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: I told you so. I told you the community would lose their minds helping you out.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: A little faith. Little faith, Matt Haughey.

mathowie: I mean I just saw like Andre kinda fail at it with mlkshk with passionate users because he -

jessamyn: But the mlkshk scenario is different because it's not - it's unclear what Andre's trying to do with it. And I still kinda feel like there's going to be some Phoenix from the ashes mlkshk solution.

mathowie: I know.

jessamyn: Because I don't totally understand what's wrong with mlkshk? You know?

mathowie: Well yeah I guess the whole thing

just was costing him money and he was losing money but -

jessamyn: But a lot of it seemed to be time? Also?

mathowie: Yeah. I mean so the problem was I didn't want to go to the community asking for money straight up because it was too ill-defined?

jessamyn: No I understand. I understand.

mathowie: But the flip side of saying like things are changing in a bad way - then people going oh shit!

jessamyn: Yeah. We prefer to not have to do this to you but - yeah.

mathowie: Does money help? Like it's a - I don't know.

jessamyn: We have some of that

We are actually grown up people with jobs.

mathowie: Right. But it's almost like -

jessamyn: For the most part.

mathowie: I guess in a way I am sort of like I don't know. It made it so much more apparent, right? That like shit was actually happening and b money was an issue so money came in. I don't know. Like six months ago if I said Hey! It'd be helpful if you guys gave money for, you know, virtually no reason or something like that but um yeah.

jessamyn: Dorothy Day from Catholic Worker always says you are just supposed to give away what you need

and then it winds up coming back to you. And it's kinda woo sounding but eh?

mathowie: That's not that bad. That is a good one. So yeah that was - it boggles my mind that it's like 50 grand that has come in in like two weeks. That's just like totally nuts.

jessamyn: It's nice. Very nice. Civilized.

mathowie: Yeah. It makes the stress go down severely but -

jessamyn: The next step is to admit that your stresses do not actually have a one to one correlation with anything that's actually going on.

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: [laughs]

jessamyn: I'm just saying! Now thatI can speak freely! [Laughing]

mathowie: I'll come around to that. So yeah things are looking up and yeah it's going good. Going good.

cortex: It is super heartening.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: It is nice to feel like you know, what ever else happens over the next like year or whatever revenue wise that we're not sitting on a spring. Because I remember when we got to the point of saying

okay we have to do something now, you know, a few weeks ago when, you know, it got to that point. It was kind of like okay we can do something. Now we can reduce costs and now we'll be okay if nothing additionally terrible happens. It's kind of nice to know that now okay well even if ad revenue, or whatever, slips a little bit we won't be immediately saying okay next crisis. It'll be like okay well we've got this community support

jessamyn: Right. You don't get the circling the drain feeling that I think you have if you just don't - yeah.

If you are just in your own head about it.

cortex: Yeah. So.

jessamyn: Yeah.

cortex: And it is nice being able to just sort of like talk about it with the community too. And it's kind of a - it's in one way like the least big deal part of it. But at the same time I think there was probably a huge thing for all of us is the fact that you know we were trying to sort of find a way to make this work and contain it so it didn't become a big dramatic thing on the community but that meant just not talking about it and for my part so many of the people who are the people that I talk to about stuff that is stressing me out

are metafilter people -

jessamyn: So wait. You didn't talk to everybody on the back end about it? Secret talking?

cortex: No, no. I -

jessamyn: Yes you did. You must have. I mean I am not accusing you, I'm just askingg because I totally did.

cortex: No. No, no. I talked to my wife about it. I talked to a couple of people who I am really good friends with in town who like my level of good friendness with exceeds by a huge margin the metafilter connection. But I didn't want to - part of it is I didn't want to put it in a place where I was putting it on someone else to have to sit on it too.

You know?

jessamyn: I hear that.

cortex: And then that's maybe me being overly conservative. But I didn't want to be like hey local meet up scene you all have to keep a secret now. You know?

jessamyn: But see that's easy because you can ban them if they won't do that.

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: True. I may just have -

jessamyn: I'm just saying we have different tactical approaches to the problem, but no that's cool.

cortex: Yeah. But yeah it's nice to be on the other side of that.

mathowie: Yeah. Definitely. Um .. Should we move on? [Laughing] Is there any more to say about it?

It's been super -

jessamyn: Well you guys have the Metatalk queue going on which appears to be going okay?

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Yeah. So far.

jessamyn: You approved that Game of Thrones spoiler thread.

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: So I feel like everything's --

cortex: Clearly, yeah.

mathowie: [Giggles]

cortex: So far it's been a non-issue. It'll be interesting to see if we do discover - like you kind of made the point in the thread that the one thing we don't know from previous uses of the queue is how it actually does end up playing out long term. Like if we will, I'm curious, discover that there's any habits or friction points

that come from having it full time.

jessamyn: Sure.

cortex: Versus previously when what we could say is like well it's a busy weekend -

jessamyn: Just give us two days we're eating a hamburger. Yeah.

cortex: Exactly. So now instead of give us two days it's like well let's, you know, see if there is something immediately holding it up right now. And if not, it just.. yeah.

j: I can help you guys stay honest with that.

[Laughs]

mathowie: Yeah I mean -

jessamyn: Don't you lie.

mathowie: - maybe three years from now we might tell someone dude you posted like eight times. Like really do we need a ninth about the same subject?

jessamyn: Well and I think that's the real point. Is that there's a whole bunch of people who are kind of serial crabby I don't even have a thing. I'm just crabby? And that's different from hey I really want to talk to the community about a policy issue and over time you can tell the difference. But each individual post you sometimes can't.

mathowie: I mean like yeah. That is the only edge case I can think of we would be editing for content kind of. It's like when something gets to be

jessamyn: Well not editing, but sending it back for revision.

mathowie: Well I mean but the queue itself was sort of censoring or something.

jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

mathowie: I mean it's weird

[Laughing] I mean I didn't want to flip out on people but the people that are terrified of it I was like - here is one thing I will say. You'll never see the N word in a new MetaTalk post. We will always ask someone to remove that, right?

jessamyn: There is the meaning use distinction.

mathowie: Well yeah but -

cortex: Well Yeah I would say -

mathowie: As a rhetorical device you'll never see it again and I'm like is that really what you want to defend

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: Is that the hill you want to die on that someone can -

cortex: I'm looking forward to the conversation about this in metatalk next week [Laughing]

jessamyn: [Laughing]

mathowie: That was the only immediate -

cortex: [Laughing]

jessamyn: [Laughing]

mathowie: - you know? That was the most immediate.

jessamyn: Sure. I know what you mean now.

cortex: As an example it makes it. Really there is definitely that long standing tendency that part of the thing with Metatalk is, you know, people would sort of go nuts there. And as much as I appreciate where people are coming from in the perspective of it's nice to have a place that we know is where the buck stops as far as talking about stuff. Which I think is very much, you know, what it will remain. It's not really necessary to super say

If someone can't have a fucking meltdown clearly, you know, something is wrong with the nature of speech.

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: Because no -

jessamyn: Clearly you are a fascist.

cortex: Yeah I mean there is a lot of meltdowns that don't happen today compared to, you know, ten years ago on the site. That the site is not worse off for lacking other than straight up popcorn munching. Honestly I can sort of sympathize with that as someone who munched plenty of popcorn in my time. But uh that's not a way to make community policy. You know.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Well and it doesn't grow the community so you have to sort of ask yourself what the utility is.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: I mean there is not going to be a utility-based assessment of things coming into the queue and people should still be able to be like, you know, flame out on their own terms. But something that's just I'm having a bad day versus I'm having problems with what I perceive to be a bad website. That's real distinction with a difference that I think matters. To me, anyhow.

mathowie: Yeah.

Oh. We almost hit three thousand. We are six away but I actually have a stack of checks from the mail so I think were officially -

jessamyn: A stack of check in the mail! That's adorable! Do you deposit them through your phone? Do you have a phone where you can -

mathowie: No!

jessamyn: Dude what is wrong with you? You are in like the last century.

mathowie: It's Wells Fargo! But there business is different. Like if I had a consumer account I think the iphone app would work for that. But uh they - the business accounts are on a separate old fashioned 1960's system, so.

jessamyn: Oh my God.

mathowie: Yeah. It's super super lame.

So I think I'm going to have to walk in-

jessamyn: I am so sorry.

mathowie: Here's one fascinating part. People use sort of a automated bill pay, sort of system for it?

jessamyn: Sure.

mathowie: And one envelope would show up with like eight checks in it from anywhere from like five dollars to fifty dollars -

jessamyn: Dude that is so much smarter than having eight envelopes with eight -

mathowie: [Excited] I know!

jessamyn: - checks sent on the same day going to the same person.

mathowie: I'm frankly surprised and amazed that some check writing company realized they could save so much on postage to do this.

jessamyn: That some bean counter was like

we can save three bucks.

mathowie: And it's probably five minutes a programming to day oh hey 24 hours.

jessamyn: Well especially if you think about who's got a business account, right? Like you got the Red Cross or whatever and during their fundraising they get like eight thousand ten dollar checks.

mathowie: Well what if you're doing bill pay to like, you know, AT&T? You know?

jessamyn: Right. Right.

mathowie: You're going to get - a thousand can fit in an envelope maybe? They must have limits, but it's fascinating. I was - I was like wow! Hey! That's a little nice. That's cool. But, yeah.

jessamyn: Still not talking about Metafilter.

mathowie: HA HA!

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: It's sort of metafilter.

jessamyn: Sorry.

cortex: I enjoyed the check wrangling the other day. I went down to (??) to try and hash out some admin interface revamp details and fanfare stuff with Matt and PB in person since I never get down there and it seemed like a good thing. And yeah there were some checks that we all sort of simultaneously tried to figure out who would have sent it - because people didn't necessarily think to say oh by the way my user name is --- and here is my user number thing on that so.

mathowie: Yeah we asked the people in the future.. yeah.

cortex: [Laughing] A hunting process to try and cross reference email and stuff.

jessamyn: Did you just like dick around in your old gmail? Or?

cortex: Yeah, yeah. Gmail and, you know, various search fields on the admin page.

jessamyn: Neat.

cortex: We did pretty well actually.

mathowie: We tracked down most.

cortex: Lack of info on a lot of them.

mathowie: So um -

jessamyn: Yeah you might want to make an open post about that? Like tell people like by the way if you are completely inscrutable through your bank, if you want to, you know, get credit for this feel free to [chuckles]

mathowie: Yeah we asked people to add their username to the check somewhere. Like the memo field or something?

cortex: Did we put that on the donate page?

mathowie: Yeah it's on the page. If you are a member please add your username to the check . [Laughing] and we -

jessamyn: I'm sure there's some user names where that's a total non starter, right?

mathowie: Oh. Like it would - is there - [Laughing]

jessamyn: I don't know. KillThePresident username or something.

mathowie: [Laughing] Is there a username called void? [Laughing]

jessamyn: [Laughing]

mathowie: cause that would probably be problematic.

jessamyn: DontCashThisCheck that's a great new username.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: ThisIsNotReal. PublishersClearinghouseJoke. We could have that user.

jessamyn: [Giggles]

mathowie: I guess if we move on - um -

jessamyn: Sure!

cortex: This is a short window compared to the usual we're what like a little over like two and a half three weeks since the last one? We did the last one the middle of last month.

jessamyn: Yeah. Last month was on the tenth? The ninth?

mathowie: Oh. Right.

cortex: I want to say the thirteenth we posted it, but -

mathowie: Uh yeah. It was from the twelfth so

like everything from the twelfth on? Hmm.

cortex: All right.

mathowie: There's only been two jobs since then. And one of them was like writing environmental science blog posts which is a little more interesting.

cortex: Yeah. That's kinda neat.

mathowie: But, it's been slow.

jessamyn: You have an environmental science degree, Matt.

mathowie: Right. I do. [Laughs] And I throw away batteries for some reason.

jessamyn: [Laughing]

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: Um .. yeah yeah my dream job in like the year 1999 was to be like the EPA's webmaster or something like that. [Laughs]

jessamyn: Oh good Lord. I know some people who used to work for the EPA. That was not a fun job.

mathowie: I actually looked into it. You know, I would of had some shit job for shit pay and been trying to scrape along in Washington, DC. I had to be in Washington, DC if I wanted to work with any like non-profit, you know?

jessamyn: Ugh.

mathowie: And it looked painful and expensive and hard.

jessamyn: EPA librarian. Worst. Job. Although I think p-smeely-what in God's name is his actual user name? I think he does environmental

sceinc-y web site stuff.

mathowie: Oh yeah. Someone did that science kickstarter that's a big metafilter user. Which was like based around science blogs? Someone from science blogs on metafilter.

jessamyn: Paul Meeley (phonetic)I think he does like EPA-ish stuff. I think he's in Portland. I think you guys should hang out with him.

mathowie: Huh. Good job. Um.. oh projects, projects. I have a million projects.

jessamyn: I did not spend so much time in projects this month. Let's take a look.

Tell me what you got.

mathowie: Yeah. Is it hard? This is the first non-employee podcast. Is it like - is is going to be drudgery to set aside an hour or two?

jessamyn: No! I mean that's the crazy thing. I hang out on metafilter all the time anyhow. it always used to just be a bonus to get paid for it. But projects because I'm not doing like checking out random flags?

mathowie: Uh huh.

jessamyn: There are some part of the site that I don't use very much that if I don't go looking, I won't look. But like I'm in Ask Metafilter all the time anyhow.

mathowie: Right.

if I don't go looking, I won't look. But I'm on Ask Metafilter all the time anyhow.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: Answering questions--

mathowie and jessamyn: (laugh)

jessamyn: Stuff. I also didn't prepare for this, because I'm not getting paid for it, so...

mathowie: (laughs)

jessamyn: Let's see how that is! Let's see how you like it.

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: There was a nice post about a time-lapse movie, was it four or five months on Georgia Bay?

jessamyn: Oh, wait! That was the one that I pulled out. Of course!

mathowie: Haah. And it got posted on Metafilter, too, by

kaibutsu. And here's the Metafilter post. It's just beautiful HD video of the winter going by. It's super calming, super awesome, super beautiful.

jessamyn: Well, and you guys saw my wacky video about being on iced-over Lake Huron in the beginning of whenever it was that I went there. That was where I was going to, different part of the lake, but--

mathowie: Wow!

jessamyn: Iced-over Great Lakes are truly amazing.

mathowie: This is a really awesome video, and it doesn't change exposure so much as most dumb time-lapse long-term, you'll see, white snow will blow out the exposure and stuff. But if you go down farther on the actual blog post about it, there's all this image manipulation going on, too. Mellow out and do image correction, so that's why it's so professional-looking.

jessamyn: Because they actually worked on it. He, they, Tom. Tom is a man. Okay.

mathowie: Yeah, because if you just set up a time-lapse GoPro, it's gonna be all over the map, especially over months and months. The white balance would just go crazy.

jessamyn: Right. Right, right.

mathowie: So it's nice-looking.

jessamyn: Yeah, no, I thought that was great. That was actually my favorite of the things that I looked at. Oh, and you guys launched the Metafilter Radio app, too.

mathowie: Yeah, that actually got to the App Store, and we added a little nag banner thing to Music,

if you hit music.metafilter.com in a iPhone, the little official Apple banner says, "Hey, do you want to download...?"

jessamyn: Right. "You can buy a thing."

mathowie: Well, yeah, you can have it for free, but it's basically--

jessamyn: Oh, sorry, get a thing.

mathowie: --what you see on this page, you can have in an app instead. We thought that was... and you can always close it and never see it again. I thought that was a good use of it, too.

jessamyn: Yeah!

mathowie: So I have no idea, I should ask Scott what the downloads are like. But it's just kind of a useful little thing.

jessamyn: I also have to promote, I did not know this was on Projects, but good for Jordan, my friend the math nerd, just published, "How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking", which is about math. It's really cool, Jordan is really cool, and everybody should basically go get it for their library, if not for themselves.

mathowie: Is it an intro for math people, or do you need to know a lot?

jessamyn: No, no! It basically talks about popular topics through a lens of math, basically. You can see the opening section that's up on the Penguin blog. But basically, how to really use math in your real life to help solve problems, which I think a lot of us actually do, but we don't necessarily think about. I mean, this is a niche topic that I love, because it's a pop math book--the best.

mathowie: (chuckles) Well, statistics are definitely used to mislead the public like crazy.

And if you have a basis--

jessamyn: Yeah! So it's a little bit about that, a little bit about picking stocks, a little bit about baseball, a little bit about... you know. So little essays on a lot of different things that all point back to math. And he was just on NPR I think yesterday also.

mathowie: Oh, neat! [The lens of ?] math. Maybe he'll be up on the Colbert Report someday. (chuckles)

jessamyn: Yeah, that would--well, the Colbert Report is ceasing to exist as Colbert goes to...?

mathowie: Oh!

cortex: Yeah, once he goes to [??].

mathowie: [??] start until next year, but I think he's going to end at some point this year, maybe in the summer? He should take a few months off.

jessamyn: Yeah, yeah, no joke, right? And then he starts up with Letterman and then they have the Minority Report.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And then John Oliver does that whatever, The Week That, whatever John Oliver's thing is.

mathowie: Weekly, Last Week with John Oliver.

jessamyn: Yeah, it's on HBO. So I only just started seeing it on YouTube, but was, man, he is the funniest.

mathowie: Yeah. It's so good.

jessamyn: Listening to him bitch about net neutrality was about the funniest thing, Metafilter must have talked about that.

mathowie: Heh. The whole show is really good.

It's really good. And I think [??] Carter, who used to be on the [??] Show, is doing some graphics for it, so he's the Photoshop jockey that makes the funny images, I'm pretty sure.

jessamyn: Nice! Oh, yeah, it did actually wind up getting posted to Metafilter.

mathowie: The Internet--

jessamyn: That--

mathowie: Whoops, sorry.

jessamyn: Well, I was just going to say, that is the one thing that sometimes I'm like, after the fact, "Oh, I want to talk about that with Metafilter people," and then I find out it was posted four days ago. I'm like, "Hi! I'm in this conversation!" (laughs)

mathowie: (laughs) Yeah, I think the John Oliver people are pretty sharp about Internet-ness of their things? They're putting out segments on YouTube, and the best chunk of, I'll watch the show, I open up, it's [??] on at midnight on Sundays, so I'm usually asleep, but Monday morning I'll watch and be like, "Oh my god, that was the greatest six minutes on the Indian elections," or whatever, and boom, of course, it's already passed around everywhere.

cortex: Yeah, and it's even smarter for them, since they're on HBO, compared to, Daily Show has been doing that sort of thing, and Fallon has been doing that thing--

jessamyn: But you can also watch it through--

cortex: Yeah, it's not as hard to get your hands on it, so you don't necessarily have the incentive to make the jump, whereas with HBO it's like, "Oh, if I'm going to pay for this," although for a lot of people it's just like, "Wow! I've really got to start torrenting this."

jessamyn: Right, right, right.

cortex: But still, you know.

mathowie: (chuckles) Yeah. It gets the word out.

I loved this one Project, where is it, the Internet Directory, rottytooth, which was--

jessamyn: He always does really good stuff.

mathowie: I know! It's a data--this was made on behalf of someone, some non-profit paid for this. Who was it? God, I forget--oh, there's [??]. So got a database, oh, so Webby Awards paid him to do this, it seems.

jessamyn: Nice!

mathowie: Gave him a database of, like--is it two million, or two billion? No, 115 million dot-coms. Those are every dot-com ever. They're just listed, and it's autoscrolling, every single one of the 115 dot-com million domains. And it takes two years to finish.

jessamyn: Doing this is crazy already. It's crazy already.

mathowie: Yeah, there's just all these 0-0-0.com, and--

cortex: Yeah, I always wondered what the IP address for 0--001-cellreversenumberlookupfree.com was. This is--

mathowie: Holy cow, I jumped to Metafilter, and there's all the Metafilters misspelled, without an e--

cortex: (laughs)

mathowie: [metafinn ?], metafilters, I have metafilters.

jessamyn: I'm looking at all the jessamyns now.

mathowie: Oh, how many are there? Oh, how many Haugheys are there? haugheyfamily...

jessamyn: Well, there's...

mathowie: haughey without a y...

jessamyn: jessamynharter, jessamynandchad, jessamynandchris, jessamynandersonresume, jessamynart, jessamynbailey, jessamynblakesley... there's a lot of jessamyns.

mathowie: There's a haugheyshorehouse.com? They must be a vacation home for somebody. Wow. There's a--

jessamyn: But the fact that you can drop into the middle of this is what makes it amazing.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like, scrolling through domains, whatever. But just watching it gently... there's jessamynnorth.com, my archnemesis!

mathowie: (chuckles) Heehee. This is amazing. Yeah, this is a super good find.

jessamyn: Well, you just want to... I mean, I want to make it--what are those things called, widgets? Whatever the stupid thing Apple used to do on the dashboard [??].

mathowie: Oh, dashboards, dashboard widgets?

jessamyn: Yeah! A little dashboard thing so that my desktop is just this going by.

mathowie: (chuckles) In two weeks it'll be on the Bs or the Cs, yeah.

jessamyn: Well, he says, what, it takes 599, what was that, years?

mathowie: Yeah, no, days, so it's almost two years to go through the whole list.

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: So it would take a while. Each letter is going to take a couple months.

jessamyn: So crazy. So crazy.

mathowie: [Chuckles]

jessamyn: I love it! I love it!

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah you are right. Thank you for pointing that out. It was delightful.

mathowie: Um how not to be wrong. I already had that. Oh here's a nice- another nice photography site which was just Lorin a newish user? Nah. Been here a while. Ah just lovely.

jessamyn: Two word review.

mathowie: Lovely lovely photos. I can never get enough.

jessamyn: [To herself] Invalid audio file. Once you .. oh wait sorry I am thinking ahead.

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: Whut! Whut!

cortex: That's so good. Oh God. [Laughs]

jessamyn: Lorin. Yes.

mathowie: Yes lovely photos. We need more photography on projects. I love it.

cortex: I remember like this -

jessamyn: yeah that's a really good idea. Projects can be, you know, anything. Show us your stuff.

cortex: Yeah we should have like a projects awareness drive at some point.

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: Well I mean you know we've talked about this before

mathowie: [Still laughing]

cortex: I think it's something - I feel like we really almost

should have like a monthly newsletter metatalk where we just pick a thing that's something neat about metafilter but not everybody looks at.

jessamyn: That's this podcast.

cortex: Well I know but -

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: - this podcast tends to be all over the place. Where as, you know,

mathowie: All over the place.

cortex: - it's easy to get a thousand people to read a metatalk thread over the peiod of a week or something.

mathowie: Like we just have projects appreciation month or something?

cortex: Yeah like HEY! So projects is a thing, you know. And then the next month HEY.. so -

jessamyn: Well and it could be like the AskMetafilters you are not really allowed to post. Like what's your favorite project?

cortex: True.

True. It could be sort of a kibitz station, too.

mathowie: [Laughs] Part of our eight part series on better know us uppsite.

jessamyn: What is better know a from?

mathowie: Uh, Colbert.

jessamyn: I remember we did a better know a Taz. What?

mathowie: That was a Colbert joke. Better know this trick to where he interviews congress people.

jessamyn: Oh. Okay. Yeah. Those pictures are beautiful. Okay.

mathowie: What is the disintegrator?

cortex: The disintegrator!

jessamyn: Oh it's a thing that makes noise -

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: [Laughing]

jessamyn: - it probably plays a (??) in the background.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: [Laughing]It's a clicker!

cortex: It's a little audio

jessamyn: [laughs]

cortex: -thing that two word review built. It's like a simple little web audio html5 thing where you put in an .mp3 or I guess a .wav ect; he says. But uh really .mp3 is probably what you have sitting around. You load it up and you hit play and it just plays it back and it's slowly ticks up the level of sort of white noise distortion added to it over time so you get this increasingly sort of like fuzzed out, weirded out broken version of whatever

you are listening to. Which is - it's a very simple idea but it's actually really neat if you enjoy a little bit of weirdness in your music because it does strange things to the sound of the familiar song.

mathowie: Is it slow? Does it take like several minutes to start getting wacky?

cortex: I'd say you tend to start hearing it really present itself like, you know, probably 20-30 seconds in and then it sort of continues to amp up

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: Over the next couple of minutes. I like throwing like relatively soft stuff through it? Because that's where you start to hear really

big change. Because if you throw something that's like just a wall of distorted guitars all ready and then distort it? Eh. It just sounds like a shittier recording.

jessamyn: Right.

cortex: But if you take something that's like real sort of soft tones or acoustic and then you start throwing a lot of fuzz on that, it gets really sort of interesting weird. So.

mathowie: I want to put Bon Iver in and get -

cortex: Bon Iver would probably be great.

mathowie: - And Finland death metal out the other side.

cortex: Or Bon Eever (phonetic) Whatever.

mathowie: Bohn Eevar!

jessamyn: Bon Eevair!

mathowie: Ugh.

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: But yes.

jessamyn: You sound like drunken uncle.

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: (Says something with slurred speech)

jessamyn: [Laughing]

cortex: (With slurred speech) Well ask (??) patreon.

mathowie: [Still laughing] We throw a quarter at the weird guy.

cortex: We act like morons and ask for beer.

mathowie: [Laughing] I think that's it. Oh!

cortex: Our SNL interpretation.

jessamyn: [Giggles]

cortex: I did want to mention one other little thing uh Puppy Space Pirates! A 24-page comic by hellojed.

mathowie: Oh neat!

cortex: - who uh he also is a video gamer. He recently moved to the Seattle area

I think for a job.

mathowie: Neat.

jessamyn: From?

cortex: I don't remember from where. From not as nearby. I haven't actually met up with him or anything but now it's more possible. I think he's a regular on MeFite Club and he does video game stuff, too and -

jessamyn: This was great!

mathowie: There was one project this thing called Ren's List, right? Okay, so it's like all the dog things to do in the Buffalo Niagara area. And it like [chuckles]it's really interesting cause it looks like a fully fleshed out site

like here are all of the dog meetups you can go to. And all the dog parks and all the groomers in this -

jessamyn: Look at that little cutie...

mathowie: Yeah. In the one metro area. It probably-maybe it's a test? Like they would make it nationwide eventually? I don't know. It's really kind of like - it seems over built for like a specific town. But I mean Buffalo's pretty big, right? It's probably a couple hundred thousand people. But, I don;t know. It just feels like it should be a national thing and maybe that's why it has

like a CraigsList kinda name. Like it could be? But it- I thought it was fascinating and like amazing and but so -

jessamyn: Buffalo, NY has over a million people.

mathowie: Really? Wow.

jessamyn: It's huge.

mathowie: But so specific. It's so specific.

cortex: He has very few buffalo. It's-

mathowie: HA!

jessamyn: But I think the thing is too like it's a perfect niche? You know, it's like, it's like you find a thing that people like and then you do the parent guide to it?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: You know? Because there's so many parents and they are really into things for them?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And you know. I mean look at Wren. Look how cute he is.

mathowie: It's a cute dog. So like is a million enough to make - is that to get a critical mass of like 50 dog owners would probably be enough to make this thing chug along. I don't know. It's cool.

jessamyn: Well because you can also get targeted advertising if you're looking for that of every pet person in the area because there's probably a lot of bad examples of this and this is a good example.

mathowie: Maybe if it was nationwide from the bat. Like it would be someone in Florida -

jessamyn: Did you just bring this up to pick it apart?

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: No! No! I just

jessamyn: [Laughs]

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: wanted -- it's fascinating! No I think it's super fascinating to like as a web builder myself like how far to you set your sights? Like when you launch a thing? Do you make it super specific so you find the three people that are way into it? Or do you make- or you try to shoot for the moon. Like, I can see like if this is nationwide all dog news it would just be noise, right?

jessamyn: Well then is would be dogster and then it would crush under it's own weight and kill it's communities off. And basically give everyone the finger

for loving it.

mathowie: I mean I liked this so much I hope it takes off. I hope everyone in the Buffalo Niagara with a dog like finds it and it goes and then it, you know, spreads. Like it looks like a really cool niche thing. And like it could be nationwide. I don't know why.

jessamyn: Yeah and it's got events and ads and stuff like that also which I think makes it super useful. Like if you're a gung-ho dog owner int he Buffalo area I can't imagine a better site for you.

mathowie: Yeah. Yeah.

I hope this does really well. I hope a million people I guess- I mean yeah. So I'm interested as like where do you aim this thing? This good idea. Do you aim it at the world? Do you aim it at your community?

jessamyn: Right.

mathowie: And I hope it works out. Looks cool.

jessamyn: My landlady's dog killed a groundhog this week.

mathowie: (??)

jessamyn: No. He got off his leash and like attacked the groundhog that lives under the neighbor's garage. Nobody expected it. My landlady also claims that there's a timber rattler snake living in our backyard.

mathowie: Eeee.

Wait oh what kind of a dog was it? Are they like the ones that are designed for killing little things?

jessamyn: No! No. It was like some medium sized fluffy dog but I think he got tired of being on his leash and seeing the groundhog basically giving him the finger from next door.

mathowie: Squirrel! Squirrel! Squirrel!

jessamyn: [Smiling] yeah and as soon as he got away he was like fuck you groundhog I've had it!

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: I mean that's my best guess. He's not talking, but -

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: That's my dog story. The end.

mathowie: Um let me see. I guess Ask Metafilter.

Is where we usually go next.

cortex: It's -

jessamyn: Ask Metafilter my - oh. Sorry?

cortex: I'm totally okay with going to Ask Metafilter next but Ask Metafilter is where we usually go next only for definition of what we did last podcast. We traditionally gone Metafilter, Ask Metafilter.

mathowie: Oh! Right. Sorry.

jessamyn: Are you serious?

cortex: I'm totally serious.

jessamyn: There's a traditional order?

cortex: Oh yeah.

mathowie: Oh yeah.

cortex: We've been doing Metafilter, Ask Metafilter -

jessamyn: And you guys both know about it?

cortex: Yeah. I know, right?

mathowie: How did I get it backwards?

jessamyn: [Laughing]

cortex: I don't know. Apparently Matt didn't totally know about it because he -

mathowie: I forgot.

cortex: He's flipped it over. It's like the Earth's magnetic field just suddenly switched

and nobody noticed except for me.

jessamyn: I used to worry about that as a kid.

cortex: [Laughs] Yeah?

jessamyn: I was worried that it would come early and I wouldn't be ready for it and something really bad would happen. It's like I know it's 16 thousand years off but -

cortex: Is there even a way to be ready for it if it did? I mean do we know exactly what happened? I mean it seems like it would just be anywhere between mildly distruptive to terrible and uh and then we'd -

jessamyn: I think that's a good Ask Metafilter question.

cortex: Ooh. There you go.

jessamyn: See, I didn't know, I didn't know there was ever an order. I thought we always just

randomed around.

cortex: It's been pretty consistent but uh -

mathowie: I forgot. I forgot last time.

cortex: I say let's run with it. Let's see what happens.

jessamyn: As the only person of all of us who listens to the podcasts, I'm disappointed in myself.

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: I listen to it. I have to listen to the whole thing at least twice.

jessamyn: To edit it.

mathowie: Editing and doing all of the building of it. And yeah.

jessamyn: All the building.

mathowie: Well whatever. The HTML stuff. It's a pain.

jessamyn: You assemble links?

mathowie: Yes. While you listen you have to look up every single thing and yeah.

jessamyn: I look forward to how irritable you are going to be with an almost full time moderating job.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: [Chuckles] Yeah.

jessamyn: And then I'll feel bad. But in the mean time it'll be amusing. So I'm fine with Ask Metafilter. Gentlemen? Is that okay?

cortex: Yeah. Do it.

jessamyn: Good. I like this teach me how to tumblr post from jitterbug perfume because I don't really know how to tumblr.

mathowie: Hmm.

jessamyn: And so I mean I think for people

who use it, it's second nature, right? Like of course you do this and you do this. But like I found a post on tumblr that mentioned me that I liked that I wanted to reblog onto my tumblr and I fucked it up and I was just like God Damnit! Eleven year old know how to do this!

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: And so I really appreciated this actual post about explaining it. And people who use it explaining why it's useful. It's a really short thread. It's not particularly - there's not a ton of stuff there but I found it useful and eye-opening.

mathowie: It is weird when you get to look over a shoulder of a heavy tumblr user and how they use that tumblr dashboard as their like recent activity sort of? Do you- ?

jessamyn: Well yeah. Exactly.

mathowie: It's different than - you think it's a blogging tool but the way - all the reblogging it's almost like twitter. And there's -

jessamyn: Well a conversation happens more through reblogging. Like I was like why can't I leave a comment?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And they are like well you reblog something. And I'm like I don't want to reblog it. Well that's how you leave a comment.

mathowie: But you have to reblog and leave a comment. Yeah it's the only way you can -

jessamyn: Or you can just reblog it. Well some of them also have comments.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: Yeah I was fascinated to learn how it worked.

cortex: Yeah. Well yeah. The ones that actually have comment comments

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: Like if you want to include like a proper comment system you have use disqus -

mathowie: Yeah

cortex: But that's never really taken off and -

jessamyn: Ugh.

cortex: -it's sort of messy third party bullshit thing to do.

mathowie: It probably doesn't.. yeah.

cortex: I feel like at this point I'm pretty conversant in like tumblr UI and and adding sort of social interaction -

jessamyn: Well you use it for Larp Trek, or?

cortex: Yeah I just rebroadcast on tumblr for the hell of it.

jessamyn: Okay

cortex: With links back to the site. We use it for- me and the (??) use it for or griphus rather-

jessamyn: We have such things?

cortex: Yeah we have such things and I was using it mostly when I was doing

mathowie: Contact mail.

cortex: Well yeah. That, too. That has very little interaction though so it doesn't really matter.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Very little interaction.

cortex: Mapstolgia I built on it too back when I was doing that - oh geeze- that was a couple of years ago now.

mathowie: I was fascinated when Yahoo bought it and they said this was like the number one teen network and that did like

what??? That doesn't-

cortex: And yeah. I feel like that sort of makes sense to me that - there's stuff in the tumblr design that I don't like. The weird sort of lack of proper commenting system and the way that it's all kibitzy? Like you just sort of like reblog reblog, you know, cross posting stuff.

jessamyn: It's like hot potato. Internet hot potato.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Yeah it felt really weird to me but I think it feels weird to me in a classic get off my lawn sort of way?

jessamyn: Ha ha ha. Right.

cortex: It does not surprise me that like it's maybe popular with teens who didn't necessarily have a previous blog paradigm

that they were locked into.

mathowie: Right.

cortex: So for them it may be more like oh no this is just how you do it. Where as for us it's like what the fuck? Why can't I x and y and z?

jessamyn: Right and for them that's like you just leave a comment in the middle of nowhere? And then maybe go back to it? Later? Sometime? If you remember? Really?

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: But I guess for everyone 30 and up it's like it's a blogging engine! And everyone below 30 it's like it's pinterest. It's a thing that I just pin things I like to share. Like it's two different beasts all in one. It's weird.

So I totally understand the confusion around tumblr.

cortex: Yeah it's something where it really feels like what you have is usage patterns coming out of the structure of it and sort of making it what it is because of that rather than having a super duper clear sense of how you are supposed to use it. And so people are using it for links.

jessamyn: Well if you are somebody who is in a job situation where you're like do I use this for my job? How do I use this for my job? I don't blah blah. It would be good to understand it before you dive in and you're like I'm the face of New York Public Library.

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: - trying this thing out. Blah!

mathowie: [Laughing] I guess that's why every small organization says we hired a young intern they are operating our tumblr. And like I have heard that phrase a lot this year.

jessamyn: A young intern, or -

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: - operating our tumblr?

mathowie: Both of those together. A young intern operating our tumblr.

jessamyn: [Laughs]

mathowie: So we're now on tumblr. It's like -

jessamyn: Our young intern.

mathowie: We got a young person to understand the internet for us and now we are on it! Um .. this was weird.

Have you seen this everywhere? It's a post from 2009 and it's like what have you learned in your career that you wish the general public knew? Um for some reason I saw this everywhere.

jessamyn: We didn't mention this when it happened?

mathowie: We might have when it happened but I think it hit the popular page like recently. Like maybe it was in Metatalk. There might have been a what's your favorite threads ever post? Like a few weeks ago? For some reason -

cortex: Oh yeah.

mathowie: This was spreading on twitter and stuff like in the last week.

cortex: There was that Metatalk thread about what things have you learned from

Metafilter is where it probably came from.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Because yeah that had people dredging up a bunch of stuff.

mathowie: So I think a bunch of new comments on an old thing got it popped into the popular system which got it into twitter which got it spread all over the place on twitter and I -

jessamyn: That's funny. And weird.

mathowie: I was just about to mention it going like this is a fascinating thread - oh wait- it's from 2009!

jessamyn: [Laughing]

mathowie: Huh! You know the hits just keep on coming!

jessamyn: Well that happens. Did we talk about - well you guys talk amongst yourself. I can actually answer this question myself.

cortex: [laughs]

mathowie: Well that was a metatalk post.

cortex: There we go. Yeah that was the metatalk post I was thinking of that we just linked into a chat window. (Long pause) Awesome podcasting!

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: Ahh - there is a question I was tickled by. Which was Ipsifendus asking Is the Emperor in Warhammer 40,000 dead?

jessamyn: Didn't even understand it. Explain?

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: Yeah. Whut?

cortex: Warhammer 40K is a gaming setting like a pen and paper RPG setting originally

jessamyn: All right.

cortex: And Warhammer 40K is one of the top sort of miniature base. So if you know people who are like doing dudes fighting with little miniatures on a big battleground they have laid out on a table in their basement -

jessamyn: Sure.

cortex: 40K is a likely candidate for what they are playing.

jessamyn: Yeah because they have a librarian thing and I have to specifically say when I am searching ebay for librariana stuff - not the damn Warhammer things.

cortex: [Cracking up]

mathowie: Whoah. Those are those little metal men you sometimes see at like

toy shops or something?

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Oh. Wow.

jessamyn: I wore one set of them.

cortex: [Laughing] You just pissed off so many miniatures gamers with that description, too.

mathowie: Is that what that is called? Miniatures gamers?

cortex: Miniatures is what the -

mathowie: When you have it.

cortex: - the things are called and usually what people refer in general. That's a common way to refer to that style. Versus a lot of game -

jessamyn: And people who are into it are super into it. Like you paint your things -

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: - and like there are people who will specifically like kit out your group of miniatures. Like there's a whole second hand economy

that goes through it.

mathowie: Yeah. Are they all sold like raw metal and you have to paint them? That's like a thing, right?

cortex: Generally, yeah.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah.

cortex: Yeah, There's a big craft aspect to it, you know?

jessamyn: It's like making models. Like -

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: - It has a lot it common with models.

cortex: Yeah the fact that it shows up in hobbyist stores makes even more sense than, you know, the fact that hobbyist stores have sort of glommed together with sort of game stores in general. It's like it's kinda really close to the bone there historically. But anyway, 40K is this crazy ridiculous setting where it's like, you know, 40,000AD and in the dark furture of Warhammer 40,000

there is only Wars I think that - big motto. Um - and you know, this was all dreamt up by someone, you know, decades ago and has since become this, you know, really popular franchise they are trying to get a lot out of. But they also - when they first were writing it - it was ridiculous. I mean not that it's not still sort of ridiculous in it's own way. But hey SciFi and fantasy are fun -

jessamyn: Sure. Sure. Sure.

cortex: But like um a lot of like - my brother has spent some time with it and he's talked about some of the ridiculousness of it and some of the dumbest names in the world were written into the original stories.

And so they've had to sort of work around the fact that like all the historical figures in the groundwork of 40K have really [laughing] stupid names.

jessamyn: [Laughs]

cortex: Just like stuff that he would come up with if you were like sitting in a basement and you were 15 and you were -

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: - listening to you know, metal and trying to write a really bad ass name for a future space warrior or something. Ah - but anyway, so I liked the fact that there's this giant tall pile of history in this setting. And that you can get down to basic philosophical questions like is this

particular central figure dead or not? Which is what this question is. It's like, you know, it's almost sort of like a does - did Jesus exist question, but for the -

jessamyn: Oh! Which reminds me -

cortex: - Warhammer 40K

jessamyn: - an awful lot of the GregNog Aliens question?

cortex: (Pause) Oh! Ah! God! Yes!

jessamyn: I don;t usually dick around in the Admin panel but I can go find it.

cortex: Yeah. Go for it.

jessamyn: [Singing] Da-da-da-da-da ...

mathowie: So is this like a Tyler

Durden Fight Club question? Like was the whole [chuckles] you know, was Bruce Willis dead the whole time kinda question?

cortex: I think that's sort of the feel. Like -

jessamyn: I think he's like based on the cannon (pause) is there any - Do we know this?

mathowie: But does it matter for game play? I guess it doesn't, right? It's just sort of -

cortex: Probably not. Like yeah -

mathowie: - in the lore.

jessamyn: Totally doesn't.

cortex: The way my brother finished his comment in the thread- because I threw this - I saw this and I threw it up and said [chuckling] I know you people have answers here. And French Fry, you know,

did say, you know, I can tell you one thing. If life or death would sell more miniatures games workshop would pick that one in a fucking second.

mathowie: [Laughing]

jessamyn: [Laughing]

cortex: [Laughs] Which I think is pretty fair. Other people point out that it's harder to answer definitively because there's been, you know, a red-conning by games workshop over the years. So, depending upon which version of source books you want to go to you can answer differently. But -

jessamyn: Right. Right. Right.

mathowie: Huh. So is there like -

jessamyn: Here.. here.. here's the - oh sorry. (To Mathowie)

mathowie: Oh no. Go ahead.

jessamyn: Well I was going to say here's the GregNog Can nuclear weapons

actually kill Xenomorphs?

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: Where Xenomorphs are the actual thing from Alien. Um - and he's like He keeps it, rescues it from the jaws of chat filter by saying, you know, please support this by siting some part of the Alien [??]

mathowie: [Giggling]

cortex: And then claims he's an actual busy person, which -

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: - is

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: [Laughing] This came up in Godzilla because of the -

jessamyn: Well I thought Xenomorph was a generic term

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Not a specific term.

jessamyn: I was like well Godzilla. Why's everybody frickin shooting at it? That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

mathowie: Well if all you've got is a hammer [chuckles] You know?

jessamyn: You go hide in the basement!

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: [Laughs] You don't go hitting things with it.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: [Laughing] Well if you're military you just launch missiles -

jessamyn: Ugh!

mathowie: - at things. That's how you get to know people.

jessamyn: Ugh! I really enjoyed fanfare talking about Godzilla. And! You know, all the other movies that I've been talking about there. But Godzilla specifically because it was like It was so good and yet so bad! Help me! And -

mathowie: [Chuckles] But popcorn movie. It was good. Yeah this is good -

jessamyn: We ate lots of popcorn during it and like I said it was at the drive-ins so we saw it in the middle of the night which is probably the better time to see it because you don't think too hard about it.

mathowie: [Chuckles] I saw it at IMAX which was amazing but it's pretty much really lous bass is all IMAX is aside from the monsterous screen. Like it was the loudest bass-iest like crazy like -

cortex: Like Count Bass-iest?

mathowie: [Chuckles] Like you're in a -

jessamyn: (softly) shut up.

cortex: Big jazz sound [Laughs]

mathowie: Like you are in an 18 year old's lowered

pick up truck. It's just like ridiculous sound. But it was pretty good for a dumb movie.

jessamyn: See? And I actually was it the back of car listening to this on a, you know, single speaker radio- that was hoping the batteries - we actually brought extra batteries.

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: Just in case because it was triple feature-

mathowie: Oh. Yeah.

jessamyn: But I think I lost a little bit of the awesomeness.

mathowie: It's great when it all envelopes you. I mean it's like wearing an Oculous Rift on your face kinda when you go to a 64 foot screen like a few feet away from you

with super loud - it was good.

jessamyn: Yeah I haven't been to an IMAX in a long time because there's not really one near here. But I should -

mathowie: Are they all in Boston. maybe? Or New Hampshire?

jessamyn: I guess so. There's probably one in Montreal?

mathowie: Ooh.

jessamyn: I can't think where one would be in New Hampshire.

mathowie: You can drive to Canada where you're at? Everything's so small. [Chuckles]

How far is Montreal?

jessamyn: Ahh - well Canada's about 2 hours and change?

mathowie: Oh. Okay.

jessamyn: And then Montreal is another 45 minutes - and hour? Yeah when I went to the Upper Peninsula I actually flew out of Montreal because

it's shorter - it's a shorter hop to get to Traverse City then from Burlington or Providence or Boston. It actually made more sense.

mathowie: Do you have like the Canada fast pass thing?

jessamyn: Yeah, I do.

mathowie: Sweet!

jessamyn: I mean I have like a driver's license but it's an enhanced I.D so that they - it's special hard to get. I mean not special hard. But you know - costs more money -

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: - and they check more shit

cortex: [in a taunting voice] Look at my ID - it's so special.

jessamyn: [Laughs]

mathowie: [Laughs] I did the TSA whatever precheck hold system?

jessamyn: Oh! Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have not done that.

mathowie: But I talked to a

Mounty for 30 seconds so I have a - it's officially called a Nexus pass? So I can jump across the border super easy to get -

jessamyn: Oh! Nice! Yeah this is basically I don't get any special whatever, but I don't have to carry my passport.

mathowie: Oh. I get to like drive in a special lane. Like in Vancouver. Like whatever the border crossing at the US border. I can drive through the special Nexus lane. Which is faster.

jessamyn: Do you still have to stop?

mathowie: I don't think so?

jessamyn: [laughing]

mathowie: But there isn't like a 45 minute stop and get -

jessamyn: You don't even know!

mathowie: I haven't done it yet. You know, I did this like a year ago

but I haven't driven up there. But it was literally 5 dollars and 5 minutes to add the Canadian part of it. So I was like okay. Yeah. Sure.

jessamyn: Wow.

mathowie: It was fun. [Chuckles] (talking to self) Can nuclear weapons kill Xenomorphs -

jessamyn: So back to other ancient Ask Metafilter questions just since we are talking about it. Another one that came up- this may have been during the last podcast but I checked and it didn't seem like it. One of the things people were saying they learned from Metafilter too was about this palmaris longus muscle?

cortex: Oh yeah.

jessamyn: Did we talk about this?

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: I think we did.

mathowie: Yeah we did.

jessamyn: Okay. I went looking for the link to it and I did not see it. But at any rate, I have these.

mathowie: It might not have come from the last one. It might have been from the one before it. Like two months ago? But yeah-

jessamyn: Yeah because I knew it was an old thing and [??] was talking about - talking about this stuff.

mathowie: Oh! I loved the question about the weird stuff in Washington, DC? Because -

jessamyn: That was the other one that I loved! I thought we had talked about that last -

mathowie: Did we? It is from a day or two before we did it.

I just found your weird photo of a - what was it - one of the US Capitol columns sitting in a park for fifty years all moldy and stuff?

jessamyn: My photo? Oh! Yeah! I got that from this thread.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like I put that photo up on mlkshk.

mathowie: Yeah and I saw that days later and was like WHAT? There's just rotting -

jessamyn: The Capitol columns at the arboretum and the bits that didn't move to the arboretum are still inexplicably still in the woods at Rock Creek park.

mathowie: [Laughs] That's fascinating. You go see a part of

former Capitol.

jessamyn: Did we talk about that in the last podcast?

mathowie: I don't know.

jessamyn: This is all very weird. I have very little memory of the last podcast.

cortex: [Chuckles] It's been - it's been -

mathowie: So much crap has happened in three weeks -

jessamyn: Well, yeah.

cortex: And last podcast we knew what was up and it - what our general plan was for telling people but hadn't told people, too. So.

jessamyn: I would like to apologize in advance for not being able to tell anybody about that.

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: [Laughs] It's - it's a weird thing.

jessamyn: It's Matt's fault. Yeah.

Yeah we did talk about the palmaris - whatever.

mathowie: Sweet.

jessamyn: But I don't think we talked about DC.

mathowie: Well find the- I'll have to locate the mlkshk photo cause that's the most fascinating part to me.

jessamyn: Yeah; I'll go find it.

mathowie: It's just rotting relics of our nation sitting in a forest that you can just go walk up to. it's crazy.

jessamyn: Yeah like really nice kinda carved columns and they are just growing mold or - Moss! Sorry.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: And it's really - and it's really cool looking. Oh yeah! Right above the ah Hello I am an armchair made of human fat.

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: [Chuckles]

Oh Jesus this one.

mathowie: Chatty ridiculous question.

jessamyn: Ahhh! This question drove me crazy.

mathowie: If you are going down the worlds largest water slide and you poop at the same time, will the poop be like be right next to you ? Would it go slower? Would it go faster?

jessamyn: People got hung up on that's -

mathowie: It's a poop.

jessamyn: I mean what he should have said is like if you go down a water slide with a rubber duck -

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: You know, because whatever, you defecate in your swim suit? Give me a break. You know what happens.

mathowie: But the funniest part was it reminded me of The classic physics question

if you are going the speed of light and you turn the headlights on what happens?

jessamyn: I do love that question.

mathowie: But it was a poop version of it which was hilarious and [laughing] I mean yeah you can do it with a rubber ducky. It should go the same speed as you? But I mean there's mass.

jessamyn: Ad Josh had to step in and be like, come on guys.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: There's only so many but jokes.

jessamyn: Come on!

cortex: Yes.

mathowie: Yeah this would have been a lot funner if it was just a rubber ducky next to you.

jessamyn: Or on another website.

mathowie: Yes. [Laughing]

jessamyn: Well seriously

where people can just goof. Because you can't really goof and so you have to kind of pretend goof which I enjoy, but -

mathowie: But this is almost like a - does a plane take off? It's a hard question. Like there's a lot of forces at play.

cortex: Well, it depends upon what you have been eating, really.

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: Stop.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: [Laughing]

jessamyn: No more. That's the line. Don't cross it.

cortex: We accidentally made the number 2 joke last time. I want to make sure this time it's very intentional. I just want to get back on the good side of -

jessamyn: Oh the Dumb and Dumber thing. That's the one thing I do remember from the last

podcast. Accidental poop jokes.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: Hey! We surpassed 3 thousand people just now.

cortex: Yay!

mathowie: 3 thousand and 1.

jessamyn: It was like minutes ago.

mathowie: Yay! Well this was the first time I loaded the page and saw the top.

cortex: It will be old news by the time we get this posted so. We can just pretend.

jessamyn: So another thing that I liked just because I - I mean here's the book question of the month. Somebody ecorrocio

mathowie: Ecorrocio? (Trying to determine pronunciation of username)

jessamyn: I don;t know. Ah basically I'm looking for fiction set in medieval times but not epic battle kings queens, whatever. I just want actual descriptions of actual people who lived back then.

mathowie: Huh.

jessamyn: Give me some suggestions. And there's a lot of really good suggestions. Like I like that kind of stuff. Like period pieces that aren't just like oh Downtown Abby everybody's fancy and nobody ever poops and blah, blah, blah, blah.

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: I just heard Mark Twain wrote a book about King Arthur because he read all of the King Arthur stuff and was like nobody sneezes in armor? Has no one covered this? How is that possible?

cortex: [Chuckles]

jessamyn: Is that where the Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court is?

mathowie: Yes. It was based like him like going back and laughing at all the old timey stuff, I guess? I don't know.

jessamyn: Nice! yeah but I enjoyed just a list of suggestions and obviously there's a bunch of people who uh share the same thing. Like I enjoyed this book called The Doomsday Book which like sends time travelers back and you're like yeah but that's

science fiction time travelers. But they are all really concerned with like being completely accurate so that other people don't twig to the fact that they are from the future? Because you fuck everything up that way and so-

mathowie: [Chuckles]

jessamyn: I don't know. It was good. I like that kind of thing, so I would like to read more books like that.

mathowie: It's all medieval but I mean is the general theme in all medieval times stuff is about famous people living opulent lives because 99% of the world was just sitting in mud barely making enough -

jessamyn: Yeah well and history's written by the winners and I mean, you know,

you think some crazy things about America if you thought everybody was like the, you know, watched on Dallas or Dynasty or any of those fancy TV shows

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: -before reality TV took hold.

cortex: Plus let's be fair blogging software back then was pretty rudimentary, so -

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: [Laughing] I have to send my comment on a donkey!

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: I was lucky if I got a -

cortex: Wait! But if I want to comment on your donkey -

jessamyn: [Giggles]

cortex: Do I have to get my own donkey? Or do I - I don't ....

jessamyn: [Laughing] You'd wait your whole life to get re-donkied.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: You seem mad today.

Well I woke up with three angry comment donkeys -

jessamyn: [Laughs]

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: - out front of my land. Which like ruins a day. Quickly

jessamyn: [Snickering]

cortex: [Snickering]

jessamyn: Well here is another question another book Ask Metafilter that didn't- I don't know what happened last month. But we missed all sorts of good stuff. So this is like homesteady country life books.

mathowie: Hmm.

jessamyn: Like - like Little House on the Prairie butkinda how-to-ie kinda talking about. So it's more like recent Americana than ancient

medieval stuff. But people had good suggestions -

mathowie: But less -

jessamyn: And I was like -

mathowie: - less fiction. More non-fictionish?

jessamyn: Yeah. You know how you do country life and homesteading things. Because I think one of the things people really liked about Little House on the Prairie was - it was hard to relate or even understand what the westward expansion was about or like if you are sort of a typical American kid in the 70's or 80's. And so figuring out, you know,

how those people went and got water, how they got food, what the things were they had to worry about, what going places on a wagon was like-

mathowie: [Laughs] Yeah.

jessamyn: When you are a kid it's like super extra interesting. And, you know, as a grownup, some people are still really interested in those things. And so that's kind of a generated list of them.

mathowie: Cool. And as a sheltered city kid, it wasn't until I was in Oregon at like an Oregon Trail Museum that I realized that wagons weren't for people, really. [Laughs] Like you put your entire house on the wagon

and it bumped along and one person sort of rode it to control the horses. But like the little kids walked from you know, essentially Missouri to Oregon.

jessamyn: The medium. The medium-aged kids. Yeah.

mathowie: Yeah like everyone was sort of - well and the adults, too. Everyone walked! And I just assumed oh they all jumped in the wagon. It's just like a car. It's like a car trip. It's not a big deal.

jessamyn: Just slow.

mathowie: Let's just go to Oregon. Yeah. We'll all ride along. And really it was a death mark [chuckles]

cortex: Oh yeah. It was -

mathowie: Two thousand miles

or twenty-eight hundred miles on your feet ahhh, man. Like hiking you can barely do like, you know, 20 miles a day is really ambitious.. so yeah. Now I understand. I mean it wasn't until I was an adult that I went "Wholly crap! That was a lot harder than I thought it was as a kid. I just assumed.

cortex: Yeah, you just buy a thousand bullets and always you know -

mathowie: [Laughing]

cortex: Cock and float. That's -- that's how you do it.

jessamyn: What?

mathowie: Hunt for bear when you are hungry.

cortex: Ah the Oregon Trail video game was the -

jessamyn: No, I played Oregon Trail, I just didn't understand that last thing you said.

mathowie: [lightly chuckling]

cortex: Oh just ah everybody had their own version of how you should cross rivers and -

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: So if you caulk and -

jessamyn: Oh! caulk - with an L.

cortex: Yeah, you know, you just buy some bullets and you cock everything - [laughing] you just fuck your way straight to Oregon. That's how it works.

mathowie: [Chuckling]

jessamyn: [Laughing]

cortex: Make friends of all the animals.

jessamyn: Horrible.

cortex: [Laughing] I'd like to apologize to everybody listening to the podcast.

jessamyn: [Laughing]

mathowie: [Laughing] Thank you.

jessamyn: [Laughing]

mathowie: Any other Ask Metafilter questions?

jessamyn: One!

mathowie: Shoot!

jessamyn: This was just one from mcbeth? So, you know, FIOS is taking the world by storm?

mathowie: Oh, yeah.

jessamyn: So, what happens to left over phone stuff? This is basically somebody who's working in a company that sells caption telephones and she (I think she) is trying to sort of get her head around exactly what happens when you move to FIOS. And in fact there's still an open question in that -

mathowie: They rip it out.

jessamyn: - so if you are smart with those kinds of things come back and help her.

mathowie: Huh.

jessamyn: So just trying to help people who are dealing with, I don't know, voice over ip? Who even knows what's going on. She's trying to figure out her thing and asking questions at Ask Metafilter about what's going on.

mathowie: They basically rip the copper off the side of my house? I guess there's still a pipe of fiber and copper leading to my house. But they ess-

jessamyn: In a lot of places they just take the copper out entirely which is some crazy bullshit.

mathowie: Well they kind of took it off the wall outside of my house and just did fiber-y stuff

and they said well this is kind of - you can't go back- and I was like I want this so badly. Sure. I'm okay with that. But ahh it's not voiceover ip. So everything works. Like I have a 1953 phone that worked on it so I think they are asking about fax machines and stuff? Everything works. It's just -

jessamyn: Oh. Through FIOS telephone service not voice over ip

mathowie: Right, yeah. My telephone service is just telephone. There's nothing really special about it. It just -

jessamyn: But it come in on fiber?

mathowie: Yeah. It's just delivered over fiber but it

acts exactly like the old line. But I can't - If I quit FIOS I - can't - I don't think I could get a whatever AT&T

jessamyn: Well you would have to get new copper into your house.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Which is some bullshit.

mathowie: [Chuckles]

jessamyn: [Singing] It's some bullshit ..

mathowie: [Chuckles] I think the side of my house box would have to be replaced with something that speaks copper, but yeah.

jessamyn: Your nid? Your network interface device.

mathowie: [chuckles] Is that what it's called? Okay.

cortex: But hold on. You have a phone from 1953? Uh yeah I bought it on ebay. One of the old Bells

This one's from ahh - it's green - avocado, sorry - and it's from Minnesota? I think? On the area code.

jessamyn: Wait 1953 avocado was not a color in 1953. I call bullshit.

mathowie: Well it's green. It's more - it's military green.

jessamyn: Okay.

mathowie: Yeah it's not the 70's avocado.

jessamyn: Take a picture of it.

mathowie: It's beautiful. But then I finally turned off my landline phone line, so. That was the other thing - FIOS (he said it like FEE-ohs) required you to have a landline in 2006 or something when I signed up which I thought was total bullshit. Because they are like Hello we're part of an old business

model. You know? Like we want to wipe out your - our competitor -

jessamyn: I think I pay five bucks a month for my dry loop which is also some bullshit.

mathowie: Well they required like- I was like- I just want fast internet and HDTV. I don;t really care about the landline. It was a requirement at the time. So i had to buy this package with like -

jessamyn: And they are like a bundle! You need a bundle!

mathowie: Yeah. So I had to bundle - it was a hundred and twenty-two bucks so they could make more money. The funny thing is, after I guess a few years, they rescinded. Like nobody wanted a landline. It costs us forty dollars a month to have that landline.

Which we never ever used. Like one call a month.

jessamyn: Horrible. Horrible.

mathowie: Yes! FIOS (he said it FEE-ohs again) it's weird.

jessamyn: FI-ohs?

mathowie: FI-ohs. Yeah so they would rip out the copper so you can't go to your other phone provider and they would make you get a landline with them and pay for it to supplement their income and then yeah. It's kinda crazy but it's worth it for a fast internet that's stable and doesn't degrade.

jessamyn: This is America.

mathowie: Yeah. I mean I only did it for the -

jessamyn: [Laughs]

mathowie: thirty-five megabit down and I think it's 25 megabit up. Like i can upload this podcast in fifty-six seconds or something even though it's like -

jessamyn: I don;t even want to hear about it.

mathowie: [Chuckles]

jessamyn: It will take me twenty minutes up to leave the house because it just sucks up all my outgoing bandwidth. And I've got seven megabit which is pretty awesome for Vermont!

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah upload is still slow and mine some in on copper because I've got DSL.

mathowie: Yeah. Yeah so it's got some drawbacks.

jessamyn: Which will lead us nicely into the thread

about Comcast the evil archvillains um and the John Oliver bit which just everybody should watch.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: I don't think we have to talk about it. I haven't even interacted with the thread at all.

cortex: See I was hoping this was going to be a segue into like a pot about Hunger Games cause Matt said drawback and it's like Bo.

mathowie: Whaaaa ?

cortex: [Laughing] oh sorry.

jessamyn: Did you feel like people didn't really understand you in school, Josh?

mathowie: [Laughing]

cortex: Yeah, yeah, yeah -

mathowie: [Laughing]

jessamyn: [Giggling]

cortex: It took me a while to find my ah -- find myself.

jessamyn: Cause Lord knows I have that problem.

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: [Laughing]

cortex: I discovered the trick was to be around people who were okay with the fact that they didn't understand me and that we would call or get along on that basis.

mathowie: Man. Um -

jessamyn: A group of people who all enjoy explaining jokes to each other?

cortex: Yeah. Exactly.

mathowie: [Laughing] I've been enjoying this poolside radio site? Which is just bizarre but 80's sounding new music and -

jessamyn: Wait! This is your own post?

mathowie: Yeah. It's my post. Because it -

jessamyn: Phsst.

mathowie: - I saw it like two months ago and I was like wow

this is a wacky thing. And I forgot about it. And then the other day I found it again and went, Oh! I bet this was on metafilter and I wondered what the people said about it and I [chuckles] started a new post to find it and it was like never posted before so I was really surprised.

jessamyn: What am I even looking at?

mathowie: I know! Exactly. It's just clips from -

jessamyn: I'm watching like BMX tricks and I'm listening to..? What am I listening to?

mathowie: It's like synthy - it's like synth sounds. I mean some of it is modern music made to sound like 80's music sometimes.

jessamyn: Well that was my question.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah.

mathowie: Sometimes you get actual 80's songs but and you can fast - you can change the video and stuff - sometimes there's clips from John Hughes movies? It's just really- it's just a bizarre - the whole thing is like a bizarre experiment. Um and it has beautiful sort of 80's Miami-Vicey graphics kinda.

jessamyn: I'm going to add the Poolside Radio tag so it doesn't get posted again.

mathowie: Yeah it's weird and it'a ahh yeah. I just thought it was a fun weird afternoon diversion.

jessamyn: Well and it seems like everybody loved it which is - oh no. Except for Conrad-Casserole

cortex: {Cracks up laughing)

mathowie: [Chuckles]

mathowie: Well people were hung up when I said it was 80's music. I meant like - It's you know, as a genre.

jessamyn: Yeah yeah. Eighties provocative music.

mathowie: It's like in air quotes "80's music" it's not- you are not going to hear Pat Benatar every time you are going to hear like a new song sounds -

jessamyn: [randomly singling] "hug my heart. swallow my tears"

mathowie: God there's so many good posts.

jessamyn: [still singing]

cortex: I was going to post this and then we were podcasting instead it has been posted while we were podcasting and now I feel like a fool so I'm just going to mention it as the most prompt link ever in a podcast --

ahhh- One Tap Quest is this game that I saw Waxy mention yesterday on twitter and I went and played it. It's super incredibly dumb and simple and sort of brilliant and you should try it sometime. You just click once to pick where your guy's going to start walking up the screen?

jessamyn: [Yelling] My guy got a beer!

cortex: Yay!

jessamyn: He got friends!

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: He killed dragons!

mathowie: Oh! Darn! And this is supposed to be like an entire D&D thing in one click? [Laughing]

jessamyn: He died.

cortex: Well yeah [laughing] just one click and boom!

jessamyn: I scored 1400 points.

cortex: that's not bad.

mathowie: You can't make it across, can you?

cortex: You totally can

you need to play it sometime.

jessamyn: I made it almost all the way across.

mathowie: I had no idea what was going on and I hit a big guy like after killing five small guys.

cortex: That happens a lot.

mathowie: So. Yeah.

cortex: Anyway I'm shaking my tiny first at schmod for beating me to it even though I had, you know, like 16 hours to get to it so I have no one to blame but myself. But ah it's amusing! I like it! It's a cute little thing.

jessamyn: I can;t tell which things kill you and which things you can kill.

cortex: As you level up you can kill more than one thing -

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: So it's part of picking a route where you are going to hit lower level stuff enough

to kill them to level up to be able to kill the higher level stuff when you get there.

jessamyn: I like it when my guy gets a beer.

mathowie: Did you guys try this -

jessamyn: -or whatever that is.

mathowie: -Washington Post how well can you spell spelling challenge?

cortex: I did.

jessamyn: Was this in anticipation of the spelling bee ? Or was it?

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Oh yeah.

jessamyn: I watched the spelling bee flash on twitter - ahh -

cortex: Yeah I think they were just riding bee buzz.

mathowie: Yeah. Spelling bee was last week and this came out after but it's like

deceptively simple but like fascinating and super hard game. Surprisingly hard! I don: t know. These are just totally normal words. And it's - they're all kind of trick set-ups. Um where sometimes there's sort of an extra letter purposely or an E instead of an A in the middle of a long word but it was just really hard to spot them! It's - I was just really surprised. Cause they are all ordinary words I spell and use everyday.

jessamyn: I don't know how to spell bizarre. Oh! This is fun! I didn't see this. Um -

mathowie: It's kinda tricky

like they are playing on - right - like bizarre is spelled bizarre. And you can never - I never pay attention to how many R's there are.

jessamyn: I just have google tell me.

cortex: That's funny because bizarre is one that I had no problem with. But there's -

mathowie: The hard part - you have to find them? So sometimes I would get two of them right but I forgot one? Like I didn't notice it. Or you think it's a trick when there's only one misspelling in a sentence. That usually - if you are playing a game almost everything has two or three errors in the sentence? So when you get one you're like am I sure I'm right? You start to doubt yourself and it's hard.

mathowie: So It's surprisingly hard. I don't know why it came out so much harder than it should have been. But it was hard.

jessamyn: Well I think also and I don't know about you but I' m kinda used to the computer telling me what's misspelled nowadays.

mathowie: [Laughing] Right!

jessamyn: Seriously!

mathowie: It's so hard to help my daughter with spelling because she'll quiz me on her quiz questions of spelling? And sometimes I'll be like oh that's just a word I am terrible at and I wait for the red underline and then I right click.

jessamyn: Yeah well or I typo the same things over and over again

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like I write form instead of from basically always. And so yeah figuring that stuff out. But like accommodate? I just don't know how to spell that one.

mathowie: Oh. Yeah. Embarrassment and Harassment -

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: Yep.

mathowie: I just wait for the computer to tell me. Like I don;t know if it's two R's two S's two A's! Whatever! I - the computer is a computer. It will always tell me.

cortex: I can get my muscle memory to produce them correctly? And that was the hardest thing for me about it is like I did reasonably well on it, but the things I missed? It was a mix of

a couple of like just genuine errors on my part. A couple of errors that I knew were coming just because I know those are words I can't deal with and a couple where I psyched myself the fuck out on words that I know -

jessamyn: Ahh! Ha ha!

cortex: - I have trouble with have learned by wrote

mathowie: Yes.

cortex: - to get around them but then in this context it was like so out of context it was like UGH! But ah yeah I think I switched up harassment and embarrassment despite having at long last - actually nailed both of those down -

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: - because I over thought it and put it in just the right order to fuck with me unfortunately, so.

mathowie: [Chuckling]

cortex: And actually this thing made me slightly angry.

mathowie: [Laughing]

jessamyn: [Laughing]

cortex: Partly because it was not pristinely constructed. People really rightly pointed out the weird thing with jist. I still - I didn't get thrown by Gist and I went ahead and clicked on it but other people rightly people didn't click on it.

jessamyn: You mean being spelled both ways, or what?

cortex: No the fact that like mark all the words that are you know spelled incorrectly that start with the letter G and then they spelled jist with a J.

jessamyn: Oh! Oh!

mathowie: (J Groan.)

And people were like But it doesn't - you didn't spell it with a G! I shouldn't fucking click on it!!

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: And now you are marking me down for not clicking on it. I followed your instructions you fucking quiz! You know -

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: [Laughs]

cortex: - and there were a couple of little things like that in there but that was the big one.

jessamyn: You fucking quiz! [Laughs]

cortex: Seriously. I got kinda a quiz snob thing going on I realized. It's like I know people enjoy these and I enjoy poking at them with some degree but I really don;t want to engage usually and post about them unless I think it's like really superlative piece of work because it feels like- it's sort of like the buzzfeed of the so you think you are smart, you know -

jessamyn: Right.

cortex: -move towards click engagement. Like you know it's really it's a lot easier to get people to take

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: -a fuckin quiz than it is to make a good quiz and I feel like 95% of the time stuff doesn't quite pass my i don;t know quiz hipster bar.

mathowie: I liked this one because a little bit diabolical and it reminded me of the one or two professors that were really good at multiple choice tests. Basically because they had a bag of tricks and like it took years to figure out what their tricks were

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: To get you to like - which sucks right? Like I know the book - I read the book. I know the subject

but I couldn't get through the gauntlet of tricks that this professor set up for me. Like I had couple professors that I mean students used to practically protest them because they were like I know the subject matter but he asks everything in a backwards way with double negatives and like he's such a jerk about it.

jessamyn: [Strange groaning sound]

mathowie: [Chuckles]

jessamyn: Unfair.

mathowie: So you had to like know it and double know it so you can get through the gauntlet of difficulty. Like ugh. So I kinda liked it because a little diabolical.

jessamyn: A little sneaky.

mathowie: Like the jist with the J and a G was yeah tricky.

cortex: I guess that's sort of related to that. That's part of the thing that bothered me and this is not necessarily the quiz's fault, but I felt like I was being -

jessamyn: Phssht.

mathowie: [Laughs] You are still upset! Still upset! [Laughing]

cortex: [Laughs] I feel like I got led astray a few times by trying to apply sort of gaming sensibilities. Like when you are playing a video game one of the things you sort of need to learn to do is read the way the games are designed. The way the level is laid out and the way

clues are set out there.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: And so you get into a really sort of meta analytical place a lot of times where you're not just thinking about what the game is showing you, but you are thinking about what the game is likely to show you. Which maybe a criticism of repetition and the way the games are structured, but I was sort of like looking at the quiz and trying to define define from the quiz what it's intentions were based on the things I had come across so far. And so I think I - that's part of how I ended up second guessing myself. So it was like based on what I had seen so far. What do I expect the quiz to throw at me? Do I expect it to be consistent or do I expect it to be

intentionally inconsistent? You know the number of incorrect words that they are going to show, ect: . I have - apparently strong feelings.

jessamyn: Did you switch to coffee this month?

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: Ahh you know actually I had a cup of tea this morning but ahh I think I just - I think this quiz just really fucking - it just got me.

mathowie: Well speaking of arcades! There's an - AH HA!

jessamyn: Wait!

mathowie: There's an amazing arcade story - (sees something in the chat?) [Laughs] Oh yeah that was pretty (??)[Laughs]

jessamyn: Im just on the subject of pronouncing things that start with G's and J's.

cortex: [Laughs] The comment

that World War G comment. Like yeah.

jessamyn: But I am sorry, Matt. What were you saying?

mathowie: Uh ah there is an amazing arcade story from Blazecock Pileon posted this about Steven Frank who is the half co founder of panic software who as a kid got to somehow miraculously get his own dragon lair cabinet in his apartment that his Dad bought for like -

cortex: [Chuckles] Yes, this.

mathowie: - cheap. And then he mastered it? And then he - it's just the greatest story ever of the highlight of like 1986 being a kid who knew

everything about Dragon's Lair. Like I would be him in - I'd be the kid in this story if I had access to a Dragon's Lair. Um and it reminded me of the first time I ever saw Dragon's Lair in an arcade.

jessamyn: Dragon's Lair is which game? Or why don't I just.. why don't I just google this.

mathowie: It's a laser disk one. It's a laser disk one with a little the you know guy with the sword and you have to - it's all timing. You have to -

jessamyn: So gauntlet?

(Mathowie and Cortex together) No!

cortex: It was a Don Bluth game

mathowie: It was a Part two.

Don Bluth's animation as a video game but it was basically a simon game. It was an overblown, you know,

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: -simon game using laser disks animation um so --

jessamyn: Oh! Okay. Okay.

mathowie: So it looked better than anything, you know, ever because it was like a cartoon you were playing. Like for 1984 graphics -

jessamyn: Right. It had amazing graphics when we were all just playing Battle Zone.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: And it all started at fifty cents and I just remember that seemed like a whole dollar to me? Like it was insane.

jessamyn: It was a lot of money.

mathowie: [Laughs] Yeah so like

so the first time I ever saw it in an arcade I watched a guy go all the way to the end and I thought, "Wow! Anyone can do this!" And I put in like I choked it down, put in my fifty cents and like oh my God this is so much money and then you last 3 seconds if you haven't memorized all the movements. Ah because it's like millisecond timing.

jessamyn: Yeah. Yeah.

mathowie: You just - and so I was blown away because this story is basically him yet going to the end in public and getting a crowd around and nobody's ever seen the end and that was my first experience!

cortex: Yeah everybody else knew the first six deaths really well.

mathowie: [Laughs]

jessamyn: [Laughs]

mathowie: But I had this overblown sense that it was a possible - it was a doable game. It was a real game because I saw some guy, you know -

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: -play it for twenty minutes!

jessamyn: because you knew it was endable.

mathowie: Yeah and I was like I watched the guy. I think he died on the very last thing witht he dragon. And it's twenty minutes to get there and I watched you know fifteen of it and I was like this is the most amazing graphics. This is the most amazing game play. This is awesome. I can totally do this.

Yeah and I lasted five seconds.

cortex: Yeah. Turns out the secret was the game play was total shit. Like seriously it's a DVD menu.

mathowie: And you had to be - yeah. Yep you just have to be amazing at memorizing timing and like ugh. The only way you can do it is if you owned one, so. Yeah.

jessamyn: This is probably a good place to mention the Metafilter Meetup that I went to this weekend? So I went tot two meetups on Saturday -

mathowie: Whoa.

jessamyn: I faced-timed into a London Meetup because people just wanted to say hi. And then at night I went to Bondcliff's house?

mathowie: Oh there is the Death Star! [Laughs]

jessamyn: -where we had game night which was mostly like board games? And it was great! It was a great bunch of people. A lot of new people I hadn't met before. Shout out to peacheater and sarcastic and zinchat who are all new - new friends and their delightful partners who they dragged to this thing? But in the basement Bondcliff has in addition to the Death Star which he built for his son as a costume, the mid-life crisis machine?

mathowie: [Chuckles]

jessamyn: -which is basically a cabinet machine that he built that has every game on it.

mathowie: That's great! He did the controls right.

jessamyn: Every game.

mathowie: He has trackball.

jessamyn: He has Temptest and Polaris and Centipede and whatever the hell you want to play. So you could just some downstairs and you'd be like what's your favorite video game? And you'd be like um you know i used to play this Polaris game in the bowling alley when I was twelve -

mathowie: [Chuckles]

jessamyn: -but I never saw it again? Oh. We have that. Ging-ging-ging there you go! And you play for free which I don't even know people with video game machines at home? So even playing for free is still exciting -

cortex: [Laughs]

mathowie: Oh yeah.

jessamyn: -and on a cabinet console game?

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: So it -

mathowie: I built my own MAME machine and so I used to be part of this whole thing? Theyused to release - like you used to be able to fit every 80's gave ever in a torrent until they started doing late eighties games which got larger and larger.

cortex: Yeah.

jessamyn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well and I've played them on my desktop machine.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: But you know, getting them to play on a cabinet with those buttons?

mathowie: Yeah the proper controls-

cortex: I've never quite done the building he cab thing but it's something I have thought about before because it seems like it would be kinda great

mathowie: Yeah so like in the world of MAME cabinet building everyone can do a joystick and a couple of buttons? And that covers like 80% of the games? And then you can add in a trackball and if you -

jessamyn: Missile Command.

mathowie: What was that?

jessamyn: For Missile Command.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Yeah.

And then you do the trackball so you can do Centipede for me and or Missile Command and then -

jessamyn: And the rotator for Tempest.

mathowie: The rotator is going the extra mile. And there's probably one or two other sorts of things if you want to do every single game ever with the double sticks

jessamyn: Well like multiple sets and if you wanna- yeah, yeah.

mathowie: The double - yeah and a lot of it is wiring so you can play what? Robotron with two joysticks from different players but they will register as one player.

jessamyn: Right. Right, right.

mathowie: Like this looks like a beautiful cabinet like done up right.

jessamyn: It's a beautiful cabinet. It's called the midlife crisis machine

mathowie: [Laughs] That is so great. The graphics.

jessamyn: -and then right next to it is the Atari 2600 where Jim and JPdome played combat.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: Oh God. The graphics are so awful.

jessamyn: - was the answer to an actually hard trivia question from our online trivia league

that week. And you know jpdome is a youngin so we were like no let's - let's show you what - and it had a hard -

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: -get rate? Like a lot of people didn't know that game? So we were like oh let's show you. So at any rate thanks bondcliff for having us over at your house. We had a good time.

mathowie: [Chuckling] That was super awesome.

jessamyn: Yeah.

cortex: Well speaking of arcades uh I found this -

mathowie: Yes?

cortex: - random that I made a post about the arcade -

jessamyn: Wait! Is everyone just posting their own posts?

mathowie: [Laughing]

cortex: Apparently. Apparently.

jessamyn: Why didn't you tell me?

cortex: I don't know - I - I - I made a couple of posts in the last few

weeks.

mathowie: I was going to tie this post into the arcade post.

cortex: Oh. Nicely done. Well, I'll defer to you. Go for it.

mathowie: Yeah, no. Go.

cortex: Oh okay.

mathowie: It's great.

cortex: the arcade font writer! Which is a something a guy put together that us just lets you pick a arcade font from a ton of classic arcade games and then pick one of several styles for it and then type whatever you want. Render it out as an image. So uh if you need something -

jessamyn: This is actually funny because of the World War G thing uses this.

mathowie: [laughs] Yeah.

cortex: Oh? Does it?

jessamyn: I think so.

mathowie: It totally does

in the title card.

cortex: I guess that totally actually works. Yeah.

mathowie: But like this is also funny in that I don't - if you quiz me on the street - hey what are some 80's game fonts? I'd be like .. I don't know. Maybe that blocky one that's italicized roughly? But then there's like a dozen and they all look like games. Like you can choose multiple -

jessamyn: Cause they are all like 8 bit, right? I mean, basically .

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: But with someone making fake -

cortex: They are all little bitmap fonts that -m; It's really believable like they all look like from they are from actual games all the fonts they have there. Like nothing looks faked.

Like it looks super real.

jessamyn: Aww that's so nice. That is a great website! And I assume people enjoy - ahh no image tag!

cortex: [Laughs] I thought about it.

mathowie: [Chuckles]

cortex: I thought about it but ah - that would be wrong, so.

mathowie: [Chuckles]

jessamyn: WELCOME THRILLHO.

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: I liked this um post about CitiBiker because it's just like a dumb project of a guy who blogs um - that the city bikes in New York City have - I did not know this -

a little I.D - at the - like the chainguard or something? Or on the frame?

jessamyn: Oh! So they are all numbered.

mathowie: Yeah so they are all numbered and there's something like, I don;t know, ten thousand of them or I don't know - a few thousand? And so his quest is to get ride every bike under a hundred and he takes a photo, a selfie, every time he finds a bike that's like -

jessamyn: Awww..

mathowie: 32! Or number -- I think he's down to number 6. that's his - yeah. That's his lowest ever. And uh he rides it around.

jessamyn: He just has to find them? I mean you can't-? There's no-?

mathowie: No. There's no way to track them so it's just random. And I think the same thing as in Chicago

they have a red bike system? Is it? Or is it a blue bike system? They all look the same, right? And there is one magical bike that they painted differently? And so-

jessamyn: That sounds familiar.

mathowie: I know someone had a blog of like their quest to find the red bike or the blue bike in the middle of Chicago. Yeah he has - laughs- I never noticed the numbers they are so big. I should have noticed that before when I rode one like those are very large numbers. But yeah. He's stoked about that. And someone talked about the German tank problem which I didn't know about

World War II. That all the German tanks had an I.D number on the side which was the number they built? So the Americans would just capture one and go -

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: Oh! Hey! There's this many tanks.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: Which was great. [Laughing] It's like a great dumb thing the German's accidentally -

jessamyn: Observing the serial numbers in the field and then using math. That's awesome. That's awesome.

mathowie: Yes. So good.

jessamyn: Well my favorite as opposed to just - a - mean - blah- (laughs) a post that I liked because it related exactly to me was

Room 641-A's post on Dr. Tongue's Evil House of Pancakes.

cortex: [Chuckles]

jessamyn: Which was an SCTV ahh sort of skitch - sketch that you know, they would do these Dr. Tongue Evil Houses of whatever and this post was basically about Bill Oakly just talking about. You know. I mean it's one of those big things on for splitsider?

mathowie: Uh huh.

jessamyn: That's just talking about what is it?

Why is it so important? The jokes that come over and over and over again. Um just why is it so awesome? And for the people who are really into SCTV, huge. Huge.

mathowie: Was it making fun of Vincent Price's show and Elvira's kinda fake horror - ?

jessamyn: Yeah. I don't - it may have even pre-dated Elvira. But, yeah. that kind of schlocky horror thing and it was funny, too, because SCTV unlike Saturday Night Live,had some characters that were the same characters through different sketches?

So um what's his name? Count Floyd was also - The Joe Flaherty character was also from somewhere else and kind of played a similar part between sketches. Which made it extra funny if you knew the back story for it, which is part of what the splitsider article talked about.

mathowie: Hm.

jessamyn: But for people who loved SCTV - that article and getting to talk about it with other people was terrific.

mathowie: I think splitsider did a

history of SCTV last summer? That was really good. Like one of those long oral histories that's like ten zillion words. And they talked about how it was like fulfilling some Canadian broadcast rules? Like some of the -

jessamyn: Yeah! Yeah. Yeah.

mathowie: - things. The whole- Yeah the great white north thing was making fun of it? But they actually got like money to make the show based on it being actually Canadian made and stuff?

jessamyn: You have to have a certain amount of Canadian content or -

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Or you did. Supposed to. And so basically

they made great white north in order to be like See we have Canadian content !

mathowie: [Snickers]Yeah. It's blossomed into that. Yeah.

jessamyn: I should probably make sure that's actually true and not some kind of crazy.

mathowie: I think. I think that rule was in effect when I was in Australia that like Australians are telling me uh don't turn on the TV like if its not an American show it's absolute dreck -

cortex: [Chuckles]

mathowie: -because we had some rule that went into effect that we had to have like you know

25% of all shows on TV need to be Australian made? So they were just shoveling anything they could. Just to meet those limits.

jessamyn: There's the wikipedia article about it.

mathowie: Canadian content. I'm sorry.

jessamyn: Sorry. Sorry.

mathowie: So anything else on metafilter? Anyone got?

jessamyn: That was my whole -

cortex: No that's aboot it. [chuckles] um -

jessamyn: That was my whole - aboot!

mathowie: [Laughing]

cortex: [Laughing]

jessamyn: You can;t even mispronounce - ugh -

mathowie: No! It's about!

cortex: I'm correctly mispronouncing aboot.

mathowie: Yes.

cortex: Aboot is - I mean [laughing]

mathowie: Aboot is out joke way of making fun of Canadian's but a-boat is how they actually say it.

cortex: Well and there maybe some racial variation

jessamyn: When's the last time you went to Canada?

cortex: - is the thing.

This is - Heather Champ, Canadian Montrealer told me this to my face.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: She;s like aboot is not funny . A-boat is actually correct.

cortex: I think part of the thing here maybe that Canada is a very wide nation. It's as wide as ours.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: And so it's possible there is a reasonable variation there.

jessamyn: You guys touch a different part of Canada than I do.

cortex: Yeah. Yeah exactly.

mathowie: Well Vancouver people don't sound like Toronto people at all. They sound like people from Seattle to me but yeah.

cortex: A couple of little things HR Giger passed away.

jessamyn: He died.

cortex: Nd uh we had a post about that.

and her was - I left a big comment in there just cause like he was sort of like the definitive weird artist of my childhood. But ah nice collection of things from people and just uh-

jessamyn: I added the obit tag. Which apparently nobody seems to bother with anymore.

cortex: Yeah. [Laughs] We should ah we should see about making that more consistent maybe.

jessamyn: [Laughs]You commented in the thread and didn't add an obit tag.

cortex: I don;t look at other peoples tags unless there is a problem. I don't ah you know, don't usually say something or something.

mathowie: I'm going to start tag judging people now.

cortex: Or maybe people won't say something and it's a problem I have to look at more. But ah I like to - you know.

jessamyn: by Zarkonnen. Is that a game?

cortex: Um no but he's a MeFight Club guy. He does gamey stuff and Zarkonnen is almost Harkonnen which is one of the big houses from Dune which Giger was involved in the failed Jodorowsky film project force so it all ties together nicely.

mathowie: Hm.

jessamyn: How nice!

cortex: Also the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

were on Oprah one time and someone found a VHS -

mathowie: Oh! God!

cortex: -of it recently and put it up on the internet and it's-

mathowie: Have you watched like -

cortex: I couldn't watch the whole thing.

mathowie: Just watch five seconds of it - it's all you need to know. It's -

cortex: Yeah I got through a few minutes, but it's ahh -

jessamyn: I didn't watch it. Can anybody give me the - I watched this so you don;t have to recap?

mathowie: It's strange.

cortex: Imagine you are watching the Oprah Winfrey show before it really got huge and she became Oprah, Oprah.

jessamyn: Sure.

cortex: And then imagine you've got four guys wearing bad Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes and Mike's really-really overacting

as a not very convincing ninja turtles in front of a crowd full of parents and young kids for 45 minutes.

mathowie: They played music? Oh my God. And like -

cortex: It's really amazing and terrible. And -

mathowie: Like their nemesis shows up in the audience for no reason.

Just load it up in You Tube and jump around.

cortex: He was their - he was their -

jessamyn: He was their friend?

cortex: He trained them He found them when they were just wee mutant turtles.

mathowie: The audience is filled with children. I would like an interview with the adults that had to endure this as children.

cortex: [Chuckles]

mathowie: Like what kind of warped lives do all these people that were in the audience grow up to have? Man. And it's at like 1989 aesthetic which is like the jean jacket with the cut off sleeves and some leather with studs for no reason to make you seem edgy. Oh man.

jessamyn: Right. Back when eating pizza was edgy.

mathowie: [Laughs] Yeah. We survive on pizza! Cause we're nuts.

cortex: Also there was kind of an interesting long thread just full of a lot of comments people discussing stuff

about google's self driving car!

mathowie: Hey!

jessamyn: I have opinions about that.

cortex: Yeah this was posted by some guy named mathowie.

mathowie: Mathowie.

jessamyn: Math-owie.

mathowie: Apparently I was the only one impressed buy the demo video.

cortex: maybe it's M. Athowie.

mathowie: [Laughs]

cortex: Like maybe it's like Mark Athowie or Mark A?

jessamyn: And Marc Anthony?

cortex: Oh! That could be! Marc Anthony Thowie, maybe.

mathowie: It's based on video again. I was impressed with the self driving car. People were laughing at because it's so ridiculous looking

cause it's ridiculous looking but I am impressed that they did a no steering wheel. Like that's - it's ambitious. It's ambitious.

jessamyn: End of times.

cortex: [Laughs]

jessamyn: I am not even watching the video. This is where I get off the future train.

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: No! The video is cool because they have blind people basically showing that they will have mobility. That they can call a car and go to the library or whatever and press a button and enjoy the wind in their hair. It's kind of touching.

jessamyn: Pandering. Pandering.

mathowie: [Laughs] It is.

It's engineered to like get a cry, a feels out of you. But it's a delightful video and I thought it was pretty cool. And it was fascinating. The most fascinating part of it? Was the person talking about trucking? Did you see that comment?

cortex: Yeah.

mathowie: Josh?

cortex: There was a bit of a discussion about that and the implications about long haul trucking when most of long haul trucking is really boring predictable driving and all of a sudden

jessamyn: But it only goes 25 miles an hour.

mathowie: And dangerous.

jessamyn: How's that going to work?

cortex: Well that's the current regulation for the cars on the street

jessamyn: I love it! The car is limited to a maximum speed of 25 miles an hour. that speed covers most driving in most cities.

mathowie: Eh. Yeah.

jessamyn: Do you realize that I cannot even get to the grocery store with 25 miles an hour?

cortex: [Laughing]

mathowie: Well like yeah. That's a California law I think or something like that.

cortex: Yeah I don't know that that's a limitation on the car per say so much as it's a legal limitation for the street traffic at this point? But ah -

mathowie: Yeah. And the weird- google's been lobbying states to lift their bans on robot cars. Apparently they use Nevada

as a test case and like they are really like relaxed laws in Nevada apparently? Because -

jessamyn: About all sorts of things?

mathowie: Yeah, well google - google just sort of shoveled money into the coiffeurs of the Nevada people and they got all of these laws passed. So I think that's where we will see it the first time maybe? I don't know. But the long haul truck was fascinating because its arduous, dangerous boring work. You know, filled with, you know. So if it was all robot controlled people are like okay can you imagine robots

trains of trucks cruising the nation 24 hours a day? Someone said there's three - if you look it up- the trucking industry claims there's 3.5 million Americans that work as truck drivers. Which boggles my mind. That's over 1 percent of our nation is a truck driver. And imagine those are all robots now. Also we don't need trains necessarily? Because you'd have these perfectly- you'd have trains that can go anywhere being like a truck.

jessamyn: You're on drugs.

We don't need trains?

mathowie: Well if -

jessamyn: Trains serve a completely different purpose! This is -

mathowie: I don't know - economically -

jessamyn: This is how it all went wrong, Matt. This is why the people who made the car took apart the perfectly working public transportation that we used to fucking have! And ruined it and turned us all into petro dollar sucking lumps! Terrible!

mathowie: Well I think that they are talking about does it economically make sense to have like a huge train network when you have like a -

jessamyn: I understand the sort of re-subsidized Amtrack

kind of issue.

mathowie: No.

jessamyn: But I think also the -

mathowie: Well it made me think of South America like Gary Hustwit, the guy who did the Helvetica documentary did one on city design?

jessamyn: Uh huh.

mathowie: He talks about- I think it's called Columbia? I'm guessing? Like one of the cool like progressive South American cities when they provided public transportation to all they realized they made buses seems like trains? Like you went to a platform and you never even saw the wheels like the doors slide open

like a subway.

jessamyn: Sure. Sure. Sure.

mathowie: It was so much cheaper and you could have a bus go anywhere but they treated - and the buses like they stop and get in they take off. Like it's almost -

jessamyn: Well buses are completely different issue than individual cars. You know? Like cause you are still bulking up. I mean one person sitting in a car that holds four people is different than one bus that holds twenty people that's holding fifteen people.

mathowie: Yeah but I was thinking more like a robot truck with like maybe three trailers starts to seems like a train kind of? And you don't need as much infrastructure and if it's

you don't have to pay -

jessamyn: I mean maybe you don't need to transfer cargo. I mean the whole deal with trains though is what? It costs - what do they say? A dollar to take a ton of stuff a mile. I think?

mathowie: It's probably a lot more expensive than a truck.

jessamyn: But it is fairly inexpensive. The issue is it's just being subsidized by the government which I think is what kind of the libertarian folks wanna -

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: - get away from.

mathowie: But if you took the truck driver out if it can you get a ton of stuff moving that cheaply? Probably not quite but you get more flexibility. I don't know.

jessamyn: Because the great thing about a train is you get one

person driving it. Or three people driving it.

mathowie: Right.

jessamyn: And you already have the infrastructure but the infrastructure falls apart. I mean I just think it's shifting costs around. I don;t know if it's actually saving costs. But I should probably RTFA and then we can talk about it. Next month!

mathowie: [Laughs] Well people also talked about what if car insurance was 1/10 the price if you were driving a robot car because it never made mistakes. This is all perfect world utopia stuff. But like- and what would it be like to get onto a crowded freeway that was like 90%

robot driving. And you'd be the weird -o and it would be hard and probably cost a lot of money. Like we're talking 3 years from now or something. And there's probably be like an NRA kind of like, you know, natural car drivers that say everything is worth it and stuff. It would be - it's going to be weird. Things are going to get weird.

jessamyn: I mean I would really love to sit in a car and not have to drive it. I feel like I would get more done and a whole bunch of other stuff. But from a societal perspective I have, you know, different feelings about the whole thing.

And I do think there's so many people on the internet who are just like, you know, I want this being different from society it could use this. You know what I mean?

mathowie: Yeah. I think it would just change car ownership, you know, if you never - if you didn't need to own a car, if you had a robot car. If they were a lot safer. People weren't dying -

jessamyn: I would love to not own a car.

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Like if there was a Citibike for cars?

mathowie: Yeah.

jessamyn: Different feeling.

mathowie: Well it's basically like you tap - I mean I guess that's why google put so much money in uber. It was like future ubers would be robots. And you just go

Hey I need to get over there. That costs a dollar and then when I come out of it I go Oh hey I need to get home- and there's just robot cars orbiting at all times.

jessamyn: Well and imagine the sort of arbitrary price fixing you could attach to robot cars as opposed to uber which still have human that can see what you are doing.

mathowie: Right. True.

jessamyn: I dunno.

mathowie: Yeah it - uber pricing is - yeah- completely mystifying and they charge whatever they want.

jessamyn: I mean we don't even have it so what do I know about it?

mathowie: Yeah. Um anything else? Is this about it? Or?

jessamyn: Um I'm trying to think if there was anything. No it was, you know, a fair ly lively month with all things considered. Ah josh you will pull out some stuff for music, I hope?

cortex: I will try and find some stuff.

mathowie: Sweet. Some stuff. [Laughs]

Um alright. Cool.

jessamyn: Nice talking to you gentleman.

mathowie: Yeah.

cortex: Indeed.

mathowie: And I guess we will do this next month.

cortex: All right!

jessamyn: Terrific!

mathowie: All right. See ya.

jessamyn: See ya!

jingle: Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Song plays: Collisions by Wolfdog

Credits

• tangerinegurl, 211 segments
• beryllium, 17
• Pronoiac, 2