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Podcast 96 Transcript

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A transcript for Episode 96: The Great Flip-Offening (2014-09-05).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.


Transcript

Cortex 0:00 And welcome, Mat Howie? Gentlemen, welcome to the men of Bill to odd.

mathowie 0:12 So welcome to episode 96 of the metal filter Podcast. I'm Matt.

Jessamyn 0:16 I'm Jessamyn.

Cortex 0:17 And I'm Josh, aka cortex.

mathowie 0:19 Yeah. Everything works.

Cortex 0:23 We've spent the last 38 minutes trying to start recording this podcast and the

Jessamyn 0:29 audible versions of Skype, Skype recorder, headphones, microphones and some mystery problem that Josh had for no reason.

Cortex 0:36 I'm sure I had a very good reason for having that. inexplicable mystery,

Jessamyn 0:41 chat problems, video problems, what are their problems are their

mathowie 0:46 dates. August is supposed to be a slow news month and I've been thinking, Man, this is the interesting times people say May you live in interesting times, like the last month has been crazy.

Jessamyn 0:57 Crazy medicines are just crazy in the world, everything stacked

mathowie 1:01 on top of each other. It's just crazy, crazy crazy.

Jessamyn 1:06 You may have to hit me with some of this because I've just been living in the woods.

mathowie 1:12 Obviously, the slow news month, but man Metafilter has been exploding

Jessamyn 1:17 96 Before we get going is an untouchable number which is a new thing about numbers. A positive integer, but it can't be expressed as the sum of all the divisors of another positive interview integer. So like untouchable just means there's no set of factors of another number that can add up to mean this number. It's really grasping at straws and sort of arbitrary I think that I like the idea of an untouchable number. And I liked that it says See also weird number. But that's something completely different. I feel like mathematicians sometimes have to think up new kinds of categories to put numbers into. Yeah, no perfect number is untouchable.

mathowie 1:57 You gotta come up with a name for all of the first 100 numbers I assume so they have to stretch sometimes

Jessamyn 2:02 infinitely many untouchable numbers. No untouchable number is one more than a prime number.

mathowie 2:09 Gosh, and I can make an untouchables movie joke of any sort.

Cortex 2:13 I was I was I was being polite and waiting for a conversation.

mathowie 2:17 So you mean like Kevin Costner is involved as a mathematician or something

Cortex 2:25 they will tell you guys the to chop lay story.

Jessamyn 2:27 The one word,

Cortex 2:30 I was watching a movie. That that's the story. It's a I was watching a movie with my little brother and my friend Chris. This was like years ago, like I was college or high school. And we're watching it and the elevator door opens in the scene in this movie. And there's dead guys in there. And there's something written in blood on there and the camera does a slow pan across, because we're watching a VHS pan and scan version. So it does a slow pan across. And you see a few letters in each rectangular panel of this elevator that says and we're sounding it out me and my friend Chris together as we see as to who Cha play to chatting with the fuck is to each other. My brother's like it says touch of all. And it was like Oh, because we're watching the untouchables. And yeah, that's my story about the untouchables and to chop lay. It was cut off because the parents can say you think so? I mean, I haven't rewatched the film and proper format recently. So it's possible that it was even a pan in the in the original film too. But I'm guessing pennants canon was a big part of the problem too

Jessamyn 3:30 childlike kind of rhymes with Michael Buble. A, you could work that in there. That's

mathowie 3:37 that's like the time I worked at a pizza place in college. And I don't know why I was hanging out with a co worker. And I was mocking him for a black and white television. Like this is 1993 or something. He still had a black and white TV in his apartment. And we're watching what was it? Home Improvement? Right? The stupid as hell. It was like primetime TV at the time. And it was the one episode where Tim the tool man Taylor dips his hands into the green paint and they're green and there's a big laugh. And we're watching black and white TV. And I was trying to explain to him Oh, I saw this episode two months ago. His hands are green. And that's why that's supposed to be funny. He had no idea. We're sitting there going like watching a black white TV going, why is the audience erupting? And I'm like, that's amazing. The one episode watch at your house while I'm mocking your outdated television is the one that requires color for the joke.

Jessamyn 4:35 Colorblind friend who didn't know that our mutual friend had green hair.

mathowie 4:40 Wow. Everything's gray ash.

Cortex 4:44 If they're red green colorblind, then the distinction between red hair and green hair would be

Jessamyn 4:50 so you just kind of assumed that they have some variant of brown even if you think maybe it's a slightly different

Cortex 4:58 Yeah, yeah. Just like brown hair or something,

Jessamyn 5:01 I was like you didn't know his hair was green. Oh, why? Why would I say like well good point I get two

mathowie 5:07 red green dudes I know in my life both have to buy unique cars because they said they have real trouble if they bought like a Ford F 150 Or like, like a Toyota Camry they would never find it in a parking lot because they all kind of grayish to them.

Jessamyn 5:22 Just pull on those like daily boppers on the car antenna or do cars not have antennas anymore? Yeah, they

mathowie 5:27 said they tried to do something unique to their car so they can least they could spot it in a crowded parking lot with

Cortex 5:32 like a regulation basketball hoop on top. I think the home or movie you can always find your car. And you can always have a quick pickup game. Yeah.

mathowie 5:40 Perfect.

Jessamyn 5:43 has only been driving recently.

Cortex 5:45 I'm sure there'd be no problem. Like 17 foot clearance everywhere you go. Right. Right. is fully thought

mathowie 5:53 out. We should probably go to say jobs to start. Let's do it.

Jessamyn 6:01 Last month. Yeah, I closed it. So I don't know if it's there. And it's not what was the job? Oh, that's interesting. I can't see my clothes job. Can I see my clothes to job? If I go to my

Cortex 6:13 profile hosting page? Yeah, your posts are posting history

Jessamyn 6:15 do to do I guess

mathowie 6:18 we could have a close tab.

Jessamyn 6:21 really matter? I guess. But basically, I have some Booklist software. Can you guys see that?

mathowie 6:28 Let me see jobs. I see your job on your Yes, fix my RSS feed? Yeah,

Jessamyn 6:34 well, it was one of those crazy things where like, I had kind of this homegrown PHP book software. But I've been using it since 1999. And I finally had to move it off of corner host because basically the system and for corner host I don't know what his problem is. But he just kind of vanished. You know how that happens. So your site's down for like three days, and you never hear from anybody. And then it's back up. And you're like, how long was it? Of course, you export all your shit. And so now,

mathowie 6:58 what is the workflow? Do you just put in lists of Amazon URLs? And it does everything magically? No, it's

Jessamyn 7:04 a little thing where you just type in reviews. I mean, basically, it was before it was kind of pre blog.

mathowie 7:13 Pals, how does it do that? It says the PALS lookup.

Jessamyn 7:16 So here's the thing if it was built by like some ex boyfriend, so I have no idea how it does anything.

mathowie 7:23 Do you see when you want to add a new book is there just

Jessamyn 7:27 no title, date review, plus minus.

mathowie 7:31 So it's probably an ISBN lookup.

Jessamyn 7:35 Okay, that means that you know, people can buy from pals instead of from Amazon. And you know, when people use it, I get some kickback that rounds to nothing most of the time. But like, I like keeping track of the books I read. I feel like it helps keep me reading. But then I moved it to Steve champion server, and then it started kind of failing for no reason. And you know how that is right? Like, it's my problem, is it his problem is it bla bla bla bla bla, Steve probably

mathowie 7:59 put a whole bunch of weird limits. Script 32 seconds instead of 30.

Jessamyn 8:07 This is generating a lot of errors. It's looking for a fav icon that isn't there. And I'm like, icon in it and deep

mathowie 8:13 monitors his error logs more than his email. Absolutely. That's what it people

Jessamyn 8:18 do. He's great at his job. But I needed a sort of an independent person to basically quit it from breaking because there was some RSS feed generation thing that wasn't working and interface with like to do the job that I normally do. Like I understand tech and people who don't understand tech. So I'm the liaison, and I got Metafilter users. So S Oh, Scott Hepler, who actually lives in Vermont, to fix it. Talk to Steve to figure out what needed to happen with this, that and the other and it was great. I paid 75 bucks and a drill press. And

mathowie 8:55 whoa. You gave a drill press as well.

Jessamyn 8:58 Yeah, well, because old drill press of my dad's it's like a really nice drill press, but kind of from 40 years ago, so you have to kind of want that. But some people do. Because it's an old craftsman. It's amazing. And so I yeah, I got him a copy of my cousin's book about woodworking. And then I sorry, looking up the looking up the title. And yeah, I'm going to deliver him the drill press. He's from Vermont. It's awesome.

mathowie 9:26 So yeah, another success story from jobs. Yeah, it

Jessamyn 9:29 was perfect. I had a lot of people that offered to help, which was nice. But I got it all handled. So I was really happy. The whole thing.

Cortex 9:37 That's sweet. Though, sorry.

Jessamyn 9:41 Well, I was gonna say that's the book too, which is actually kind of crazy.

Cortex 9:45 I was just gonna say the other jobs post that jumped out at me was this board game art. That's sort of an ambitious thing from user Garm has got a board game they're putting into like beta and then going to do a Kickstarter and they're looking for Art for it. And it's an interesting thing because it's one of the things he's got like 120 cards that he needs art for

Jessamyn 10:05 money. I don't know if that's real money for 120 cards.

mathowie 10:10 Because the Kickstarter is successful.

Cortex 10:14 Obviously he's not gonna what? Yeah, yeah.

mathowie 10:18 Sounds like a fun game. It's fake elections. Like, that's fun.

Cortex 10:22 How can you call? But yeah, I've always thought that the economics of things because they basically saying yeah do 120 small paintings, which on the one hand sounds great but the other hand like as someone who doesn't produce art in anything more than the very very stilted very slow as the whim takes me and not at all sort of vocationally practice sort of way. I'm like Jesus Christ, it's also so much to try and but I've always liked that about games is like seeing the art on them. So I just kind

Jessamyn 10:51 of bucks for what might be a couple months work might not be bad, I don't even like I can't even imagine it in my head.

Cortex 10:57 mentioned a lot of it just has to do with your skill set. Because some people could probably really efficiently knockout conceive and execute a bunch of small paintings along those

Jessamyn 11:06 lines, you get a bunch of motifs, and then you kind of know what you're doing. Yeah. So

Cortex 11:10 if you have that specific skill set, that's probably a great opportunity. Whereas if you're more of a slow worker as far as how you put art together, that could be like just crazy. That could be 120.

Jessamyn 11:20 Some nightmare.

Cortex 11:23 Earning $7,000. Yeah,

Jessamyn 11:25 well, shame Hall and yeah, be

mathowie 11:28 months and months of work. But you got to wait until the Kickstarter is over before you even sure if you get paid. That's tough all around. But yeah, sounds like a lot of money and not enough all at once. Alright. That is the art world.

Cortex 11:44 Well, yeah, as far as that goes, I'll plug one last time, the Kickstarter, or it's actually an Indiegogo that made the Harvey girls we're doing for the album we're putting out we're close to the end. It's like another week and a half, maybe, and we're most of the way there. But we're basically pre ordering the album on vinyl, which is a weird thing to do. Because it's like, who listen to vinyl. But then again, a lot of people listen to vinyl. So

mathowie 12:07 I got a vinyl Player A couple years ago, it's the best thing in the world. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I've been meaning to write it up. Because it's so great. When you've been around digital music for like 15 years to be forced to listen to things in the tracks order. You can't really fast forward. Yeah, listen, the whole thing, the whole idea of aside, like, it's so weird and relaxing to just put an album on, you know, around dinner, instead of like, which playlists Should I pick out?

Jessamyn 12:33 And I did choose from one of 30,000 songs, and I hate them all.

Cortex 12:37 There's something nice about the forest constraints. Yeah, we got to enjoy this bomb. Let us bring home the old record player in her basement. We've been using that although it's it's kind of touching this point. So we're thinking about taking it somewhere to get serviced a little bit because it's there's some sort of ground loop in there, that's a problem.

Jessamyn 12:55 But we have the turntable and not with the house.

Cortex 12:58 Well yeah, with a turntable. Something that turns people gets very buzzy when you touch it the wrong way and the automatic starts and stops doesn't actually start to stop well like it'll start okay. But then when you go to stop it, it sort of picks up and moves halfway back towards the cradle and then stops and decides to start playing again. And so you have to keep doing that a couple times because it also locks in place when it's trying to be automatic. So it's a little tricky, so we're gonna

mathowie 13:21 vinyl like I bought a brand new record player a nice one and they're like maybe 199 bucks like they're maybe 300

Jessamyn 13:29 bucks been 199 bucks that's what's funny to me.

mathowie 13:33 It's around 300 was the nicest one I could find you know this not some technics DJ thing but the funny part is vinyl online is kind of terrible like it's it's flat and you can ship it but it's yeah to be gentle Amazon doesn't sell any vinyl kind of at all there is no I have found the Amazon

Jessamyn 13:53 cassettes

mathowie 13:55 I don't I was having trouble finding vinyl online that's not collector high grade and then so i Everything's on the internet I was surprised so then I got a vinyl I got a vinyl record shops now and like, you know, they make this like heavyweight vinyl like and they'll often include an iTunes like download the whole album is mp3 as well. But here's the record. And it's like 25 bucks, I would say is the average price of a new vinyl thick album. That it's it's like Whoa, it's suddenly more expensive than CDs because it's such a limited market. The other day I went to ask about a new I think Bob mould came out the new album. I was like Yeah, fuck it. That's something I might want to have in vinyl. The shop was like the cheapest they get it for us. $48 today. Why?

Jessamyn 14:51 Dummies of scale. Don't you understand capitalism?

mathowie 14:54 I just had no idea. You know, you just assume vinyl there was so much vinyl made over the last 50 years that there would just be a glut of it, and you could just get dollar albums.

Jessamyn 15:04 Happy with Bob bolt new album. That is true with vinyl. You probably I'm amazed there isn't. I mean, if you go to yard sales, that's where you could find them thrift stores the right thrift store. But because there's no margin, you can't make any money doing it. So there are people in the business.

mathowie 15:19 Yeah. I mean, I was like, where's the 22 year olds from Y Combinator making the next vinyls? I

Jessamyn 15:25 don't know what vinyl.

mathowie 15:28 I would say people who love digital music, you should try vinyl. It's great. Like I never I guess I had my brother had one of the first CD players in ad for like, we didn't have a lot of record albums made in the 70s. My parents went to eight tracks. It's really cool. Having a big vinyl collection.

Jessamyn 15:44 Yeah, we had CD player starting from my dad brought one home from Japan before they were even available in the United States. And we had like three CDs. Because you couldn't really get them in. I don't know what it was. It must have been 1980 1981. But it didn't really do anything. And my dad was like, This is great to fidelity. And I was like, but who cares? Like whatever I don't know. He's ease of use is what I like right now I just turn on African classics on iTunes and leave it on for 11 hours. But there's clearly no accounting for taste with

mathowie 16:17 me. African classics.

Jessamyn 16:19 Yeah, it plays like all these like classical African songs from different countries in Africa from the 70s and 80s. It's awesome.

mathowie 16:27 Oh, okay. That was jobs. Let's go to projects.

Jessamyn 16:35 Next projects was great this time.

Cortex 16:37 Yeah, I got a billion. It's been sort of like a last month for me. Like, I don't have nothing. I've got actually three games I wanna mention from product checks, but I've had this. I had I had dental work done, like, three and a half weeks ago at this point, and it has not gone well. Like it's just a couple of crowns crowns before. So yeah, basically, you know how like, maybe like, get a crown done or, you know, some deep fillings or some other work like that. And a couple days you feel pretty sure like you got like Jai IK and

Jessamyn 17:06 that's fine. Just give it some time. Your nerves are all angry. And I don't know, maybe there's something wrong. I don't really I'm not

Cortex 17:13 sure. Yeah. And usually it's like I do spend like two or three days be like, I'm gonna take some Vicodin. And then it gets better. And it just didn't get better. And so it was like two weeks before we we tried a few things. And now I've got the permanent crowns on with temporary glue. And it has gotten a little bit better. Like I've been sleeping through the night the last several days. And that's an improvement over the previous couple of weeks. I can like take a dose of Advil and Tylenol like three times a day and actually be totally functional. Pain is the worst. Yeah, it's like I don't know if it's gonna improve more over the next couple weeks. Like do we do a retail don't we? They worked on two teeth at once so they don't know what route it is. And the past has been like a radiating jaw thing not a specific owl that tooth hurts things so I can't tell them what tooth it's it's been fucking fucking shitty. And then like, had a nice time at the beach this weekend with some efforts we rented a beach house in Lincoln city that I was sleeping through the night and time for so that was nice but then came from from that and now I've had like allergies and maybe a cold. It's like fucking ah,

Jessamyn 18:18 I had a cold to I had a summer like I was aware I went to London and then I got a summer cold from like Jim came up to visit and he was feeling crappy. And I was like, Oh, just hanging out. I'll make you soup. Oh, you poor man. And then like he went home and then I was like, fuck, now I'm sick for four days. Damn it next time you just sit in your room and be sick alone. And yeah, yeah, I was convinced I was going to his pain because I have like anxiety about winding up with a problem like you have, like, I'm not near my dentist. And I think my jaw hurts. But I have 20 people coming this weekend. So so it's not really your level of thing. But I also had kind of lost.

Cortex 18:59 Yes. It gets disruptive enough that it's like, you know, throw you off your game and yeah, so in short, in short, I have plenty of things from Metafilter but I also have like large gaping holes where it's like all I was gonna do was my job that day.

Jessamyn 19:13 That happened that week.

mathowie 19:14 Between pain Yeah. Oh, where exactly was the house? Or what was the beach like because it was

Cortex 19:25 it was actually great. It was a nice mix. Well, it was great partly because it was like shitty Oregon Coast weather. And it's been super hot in town a lot lately and I don't like it when it's super hot. So we went out to the beach and it was rainy. It was sunny. It was overcast, it was windy it was all very reasonable temperature. So that was fantastic.

Jessamyn 19:43 Nice because you're not gonna like lay out and try and get a tan anyhow. Just want to hang out with people on

Cortex 19:48 exactly stuff. You know, we want to walk on the beach and we want to have an excuse to stay inside there was a hot tub. So we got a bunch of sit around, drink a bunch of beer and played a bunch of board games. It was really nice actually.

mathowie 19:59 I think that's it. A city ordinance every Coast house seems to have a kind of awesome

Jessamyn 20:06 kind of thing you get out here as much at all it's definitely a West Coast thing is a hippie

mathowie 20:11 hippie west coast.

Cortex 20:13 Well it's funny because it was like a it was like an Airbnb sort of thing. I don't know if it was specifically Airbnb or not because curious knew actually handled the arrangements. Curious me when and MIMO did. So I didn't actually have to do anything besides say Here, take my money. But it was weird. The place did not want to give us any information about the actual specific place until like 48 hours beforehand. Booking like three months in advance and sending them 1000s of dollars. Yep.

mathowie 20:37 Yep. I mean to like there's Yeah, you'll get some weird key instruction.

Cortex 20:44 Stuck in Wi Fi password. We spend like an entire day trying to figure out what was up with our Wi Fi. And finally, Michael went upstairs with my computer plugged in via Ethernet, and figured out that the password wasn't what they fucking told us what was an email saying Welcome to the beach house. You can imagine for everybody that someone has a picture of all of us staring at our phones at once being like what the fuck is going on?

mathowie 21:06 To that owner? It's like, oh, the the electric kettle is a little slow. That's how important it is to them. But to you guys. It's like life or death. There's no electricity.

Jessamyn 21:17 We changed it to password when those other people couldn't make it work.

mathowie 21:24 All right, best projects. Man, what are some best project I loved and it wasn't working. It doesn't seem to work. I wanted to out still pimp it but pimp it and then send them an email saying, so the first ones this DC tonight. And it was it was great. It was only made for iPhone. And it just told you tonight. They're like three concerts and one poetry reading and

Jessamyn 21:51 kill for something like that was a Boston it's the most amazing state of Vermont.

mathowie 21:58 It's the most amazing thing because it was just like giant colored bars and you just hit them on your phone and you got to the ticket page or whatever to get tickets. It was great. When I saw it when it was posted. I was like every city needs this. Like just there's no features to it. Except here's what's happening tonight in this major town. So maybe because it's what Wednesday today. Thursday. I don't even know what day it is.

Jessamyn 22:19 Maybe nothing's happening. Yeah, but it's playing Thursday September 4 for adjustments birthday.

mathowie 22:26 Oh my god. The parade it's also a Neil's birthday, two

Jessamyn 22:34 dashes birthday,

mathowie 22:34 much excitement on one day. It's gonna be great. Epic. DC tonight, I hope it gets fixed again. TMC W or maybe it's a slow night, but it was a really cool project.

Jessamyn 22:49 I enjoyed eyebrows McGee, who is basically starting to read Game of Thrones. And you know, she's sort of nerdy and trying to predict what will happen in Game of Thrones and then blogging her predictions, and then she has a page where she marks off her predictions. So sweet. If you don't really enjoy spoilers or that kind of thing, ignore this. Ignore this in general, but then filthy light thief made a well loved post about the project. And I'm uh, I don't care about spoilers kind of person. I haven't been spending as much time on fanfare lately, like fanfare got complicated once they did the book Walker reader true friend. I can't deal with it anymore. So this was a nice way to kind of check in on Game of Thrones without having to deal with any of the fancier stuff in eyebrows. Bill Gates thing is pretty funny.

mathowie 23:40 Seeing this show, right? This is just books.

Jessamyn 23:44 Well, I think it's predicting what's going to happen. No, no, yeah, it's just books. I don't know if it's been watching watching the show or not. It was like a week or so since I've dug into this. Okay. And, you know, if you're interested in Game of Thrones, this is fun and whatever. Because I mean, one of the things is like, Well, how did you know that thing? And some people are like, well, it was totally predicted, like, you know, I was watching whatever Parks and Rec and there was like, one character said that thing and I'm like, oh, that means bla bla bla bla bla bla bla. And Jim's like, what? And I'm like show it's not very subtle like that. That's what this means clearly, but for me, it was obvious for him it was like I did not really so project fun post about the project. Fun fun. So check them both out if you're interested. Lots of spoilers for the books.

Cortex 24:33 I'm gonna do a tripleheader rapid fire pimping of three

Jessamyn 24:37 games? Three things because I can't see them all in my tiny window on this Skype.

Cortex 24:43 I didn't mean like literally three at once. I mean, just like I have. I'm warning you that once you met three in short succession. I'm gonna do it. I'm going to do a quick trio. thing. I don't know why I'm setting this up so much. Well, I like this one project to game by A Mefi and McCoy called Dragon dot two that they've put out a demo. I

Jessamyn 25:05 just love hearing you say dragon streak and

Cortex 25:07 Dragon dragon dragon dot

Jessamyn 25:12 person like they're in Portland i i just noticed they are.

Cortex 25:15 I don't think I've met them? I don't think so. But anyway, yeah, they made this they made this game and they've got a demo that I played. It was fun. It's just a nice little you're playing Dragon that's represented as a dot and you're fighting ninjas and goblins and whatnot. And it's it's a nice light little game. And I'd say check out the demo and cool. So yeah, that one's cool. There's also this game by Dreyfus find UK. Dr. Finn Kane, I don't know that it's called dexterous. And it's also a neat little thing, which you can just go play on the web. That it's sort of like it's sort of combination of of Tetris. And what's that? Super, super hex Super Hexagon? Yeah, hexagon yes or no hexagon. What

mathowie 26:05 is hexagons impossible game that was the old is like a Flappy Birds. Like it's just impossible.

Cortex 26:15 Yeah. Terry, Kevin, I think you made the VB, VB VB stuff. And so yeah, and it's got about the same level of holy shit to it, actually, more so because VB VB VB has sort of a sense of exploration whereas hexagon just fucks you I tried

mathowie 26:31 to play this on mobile and it was super hotter

Jessamyn 26:34 than understand what is happening. Yes,

mathowie 26:36 top is easy ish. Oh, no. Why did I do that? This is hard.

Cortex 26:40 Yeah, it's like, pieces together. But you're rotating to determine where the overlapping pieces land. It's neat. It I did really bad the first time and Okay, the second time and no, okay. Or the third time? I

mathowie 26:54 don't know it's coming sorta or you put it on the wrong.

Cortex 26:59 It's sort of warranty was coming. I enjoy it. This is fun, but

Jessamyn 27:03 it only it only zaps away when there's like three and yeah,

mathowie 27:07 that's yes. Oh, done. Wrong. It's over.

Jessamyn 27:15 And then there's 45 points. That's fine.

Cortex 27:18 There's also 776778780 Bye Hello jet and he describes it as a surrealist video game featuring jet bikes, which I think is pretty much it. And it was a post about that. I think there's a post about extra too. But But yeah, another nice another nice little game from a nice little bomber he just found out I saw on Twitter he was talking about how he just found out that he's not gonna get his contract renewed after having sort of recently removed move to Seattle. So So that's shitty, so sorry about that. Chad that's that sucks. Somebody hired

mathowie 27:51 it's Randy The Macho Man Savage appear in the game. It's a screenshot of it

Jessamyn 27:57 387 points 68 points. This was great I'll check in with you gentlemen later

mathowie 28:06 extra this wasn't posted Metafilter oh it was became more us No, you guys wow.

Jessamyn 28:20 Probably 64 I'm actually good at this.

Cortex 28:26 What have you not and this is just like the one good game you have and then you stopped playing because we're on a podcast and you go back to play later. You're like, oh, no, I'm terrible now. I hate you. I just I have that sort of experience sometimes.

Jessamyn 28:38 Everyone's worst nightmare. Bad game. What happened? I lost the skill problems.

Cortex 28:46 Yeah, I don't know. I've definitely had like fluky good first runs on things and then you know, you come back later and you you have an unrealistic expectation of competence about it because you got lucky the first time.

mathowie 28:57 Well, let's see. What was the Flappy Birds follow up? It's the thing that came out. Yes. Super, super hard to get. But it sounds like Todd. I it took me an hour to get one point. That's how hard it is. My daughter got two points on her second try. That my life and I've tried it for a couple hours. It's so hard swing copters

Cortex 29:20 swing. Yeah, it's horrible. To try at some point. The greatest

mathowie 29:25 project of the last month and possibly the year is overlapping. Elvis is Speaker of the House, just daily sketches of John Boehner is so great, because you know, John Boehner is very tan so the way John Boehner space gets colored in is amazing. It's just like 30 sketches of John Boehner. Just kind of funny. I would love to see this go on for years and years.

Cortex 29:54 That was pretty great. That's great. That reminds me of what was it Derek drawers, Derek I'll see if I can find

mathowie 30:03 his self over. Yeah, it

Cortex 30:06 was so fun. Let me play here it is. Yeah, I was so excited about it. I started drawing pictures of him drawing pictures of himself. And then I think Rupa started drawing pictures of it as well. Yeah, anyway sketching,

Jessamyn 30:22 I enjoyed, because I am going back to school, sort of, I mean, whatever I teach adult ed classes, and I'm terrible at learning people's names. Like, I feel like if I have a class of like eight people, I will learn for people's names. And for people, I will never learn their names, I cannot keep them straight, and then I get embarrassed. And so I just never refer to them by name for the entire rest of the season, which is terrible. And I'm just trying to own it like, and I used to draw like little cartoons of them next to their names so that I could remember who they were. But then that's bad, because then somebody sees a cartoon to them. And then they're like, wait a second, you think I look like that, and then that's bad. So having an app like name that student which is made by a Maron, which will help you learn your students names flashcard app, is something that would super helped me because Oh, my God.

mathowie 31:14 So the only thing that's awkward about I thought, This is great. I'm surrounded by college professors everywhere in my life. I've, you know, I know dozens personally, I see them all the time. And this is great. They always complain even college professors complain about at a small college, you know, you only have 20 students at the most. And

Jessamyn 31:31 you've got seven kids named Jennifer.

mathowie 31:37 Britney, Britney, Britney. So, but the weird part is you got to take a picture of every student is not a little weird. That's

Jessamyn 31:46 an iPad class. It's normal, though. Like, most of my classes are technology classes. So I hear what you're saying. But

mathowie 31:54 that would take if you had like, 30 students, you have to go Hold on a second. Everyone click

Jessamyn 31:58 click. Yeah, I saw that Jennifer Lawrence thing. Put the picture in the cloud.

mathowie 32:05 Right. I thought this is the greatest idea in the world.

Jessamyn 32:07 I'm like, you saw that? I can't. Yeah. I can't even

mathowie 32:11 say great idea. Except for the having to get a photo of every student

Jessamyn 32:16 might be difficult with eight people. That's not so bad.

mathowie 32:18 Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I thought that was cool.

Jessamyn 32:21 Yeah. And I thought it was a good. Yeah, I was I was excited. And I learned about App Inventor, which I didn't really know about, which is the block based programming system, which I might be able to use to make my 251 Club app, which would make me really happy.

mathowie 32:34 Oh, yeah. And it makes like an Android app for you. Neat. Cool. I guess that's like PhoneGap or something. Nothing technical mumbo jumbo I loved. This is the greatest thing in the world. There's a famous a parish runs that's classic twitter bot called every word which is tweeting. Oh, right. Word, which I guess came to an end. It was just reading the dictionary file. So someone Moonmilk made every curd which is hilarious, because just a different cheese every day. It's just names of cheeses. They're already up to B's like so. It's pretty good. Like

Jessamyn 33:14 pictures, just names. It just goes to and I just go look at to explain the Internet to me.

mathowie 33:21 Goes to Wikipedia. So it's a list of every cheese on Wikipedia. Twitter sign up. Wow. Oh, you're in the wrong?

Jessamyn 33:30 No, I'm just not signed up. For I'm on this different computer. Cool. No, no says neat, fun stuff.

mathowie 33:36 Every record every word. Everything's funny. It's all funny.

Jessamyn 33:40 i The one thing I liked that we didn't mention for Christ's sake. Okay, it's just a article for Mental Floss. But it was a really good article it was done by my name is Luca whose username I always like. And it was just basically talking about what And Frank's arrest looked like, lots of votes, no comments. One user marked it as a Crayford that users may. So it's just it was just talking about what it really would have been like in you know, in Amsterdam, when the Jews got arrested. So I was interested, I was interested in reading it. I saw

mathowie 34:22 that and that was it like time slot, you know, time by time by time conjecture, like

Jessamyn 34:29 sort of published stuff about what they know about other arrests. Yeah, super chilling. Super. Yeah, I thought they wrote about it really well. And I thought it was a good project.

mathowie 34:41 Yeah. Is it Mental Floss all those like, I thought it's one of those goofy viral sites. This is this seems like a slow, methodical

Jessamyn 34:51 kind of bullshit turned into a kind of an online magazine. Like they used to be this fascinating zine. And then they parlayed that into online care. An interesting blog I don't see maybe confusing them with

mathowie 35:03 opening the front page and three of the four top stories are have a number in the title 16 facts about line which is your job 10 Ridiculous documents from I feel like they're tweaking

Cortex 35:15 it for I think that's it like I remember. Yeah. And welcome metta filter.

Jessamyn 35:22 Don't even get me started. Don't get me started.

mathowie 35:25 Stonehenge was

Cortex 35:26 this Yeah no I remember Mental Floss being around for a good long while Yeah, and yeah, I think they probably are having to react to stuff like BuzzFeed but I feel like specifically what's going on with stuff like BuzzFeed is it saying hey, what if we did this but without the thoughtful long form and a lot more listicles

Jessamyn 35:43 history of dentistry Josh

mathowie 35:50 the magazine I thought it was like

Jessamyn 35:54 zine magazine. And then and then it also remember when like Yahoo had their magazine anyone

mathowie 36:03 yeah Yahoo life or something?

Jessamyn 36:05 Yeah, this is kind of but it but that was only internet focus. But it's like that level of kind of like a fun People Magazine me but like it's not heavy duty. But it's interesting. And it's facts that you're interested about? I think. So I'm interested in Mental Floss and you writing for Mental Floss does not mean necessarily anything about

mathowie 36:25 your Oh, yeah, I'm just kidding my site to mix it up. Anything else in projects? I'm done with projects. I

Jessamyn 36:32 think I'm done with Project Metafilter.

mathowie 36:35 See,

Jessamyn 36:36 filter.

mathowie 36:39 Wait, why am I in meta talk?

Jessamyn 36:41 No one can answer it. Probably because you're checking your recent activity.

mathowie 36:45 I was looking at my recent favorites, and I click the wrong thing. Okay. Oh, yeah. I thought you posted this Jessamyn the, the X ray animals they what is so great.

Jessamyn 36:57 I posted it to Twitter. Did somebody posted too

mathowie 36:59 many photos on metadata? Yeah, a couple days before? Before gooped scooped?

Jessamyn 37:06 Well, I never know what to do when I find something like that. And it seems like it's some random place. But then I put it on Twitter. And people are like, Oops, I'm gonna filter three days. I have to break it to you. I don't always do a close read. It's not a filter. This is

mathowie 37:19 the greatest thing in the world. I found out about it on milkshake because someone just upload one of the funny images. Was it it was like, Yeah, go.

Jessamyn 37:28 Oh, maybe that's how I found it. Whatever. I'm sorry. It's

mathowie 37:31 funny. Awesome. It was a weird X rays in pets and animals contest.

Jessamyn 37:40 It's nice because all the stories are okay.

mathowie 37:43 In this cute little skewer the dog's belly is scary as hell but sounds like

Jessamyn 37:49 there's a contest and X ray contest for prizes for X rays of unusual stuff in pet stomachs. And then the blog, which shows all these pictures also tells like kind of slightly funny stories which are only funny if you know that the animals were okay. Obviously, it's super not good to be like this dog ate this crazy thing and then died and you're like, oh, so

mathowie 38:13 funny. Or the rubber duckies that are swallowed, partially digested or something suggests there Well, I don't know. I guess they have something on their heads or something. These are great. Yeah, these are mostly

Jessamyn 38:26 the thing is amusing because you know, there's a frog that eats all the rocks in its habitat. And then the last line of the thing is the owner wisely decided to remove the remaining rocks from the frog habitat. But yeah, you can kind of relate to you know, the little, the tiny Barbies banana Barbie Dreamhouse banana,

mathowie 38:48 one quarter and 104 pennies were removed from the stomach.

Jessamyn 38:52 Oh God, those ducks do look really gross for special like lion ducks or something like that. Oh

mathowie 38:58 yeah,

Jessamyn 38:59 every time the mom got a new duck that every time a duck disappeared the mom would just get a new duck and not think for a second.

mathowie 39:06 The 43 pairs of socks is just incredible. Like wouldn't you kind of think something was up after

Jessamyn 39:14 no reason before the

mathowie 39:16 pears amazing maybe you just

Cortex 39:20 think you go through more socks and you do like you develop this at some point you realize that you know I need to buy socks more often I'm really wearing my socks out and then you get used to the idea that you're just really wearing about and then 40 pairs later you're like man yeah I really am I really go through socks I don't remember throwing away but I guess

Jessamyn 39:38 I just you know while

mathowie 39:41 we're Whoa, I kill my window accidentally anywho

Cortex 39:46 incredibly predictable things that I like. I like this post from JP fed about Google and CSU who was I can't remember who CSU is anyway. Colorado, eight So, anyway, Google and CSU teamed up to advance the state of artificial intelligence is the title for a post about using genetic algorithms to evolve computer generated clock gates. So they figured out I can't even talk computer to iteratively figure out a way that humans actually cheat at coop, like the computer didn't get good at coop, it only got as good as cheating humans get, which is you start to get down in the splits and nudge your way along until you get to the hurdle. And you're like, Oh, my God, there really is a hurdle. I thought people were joking. And then you give up. Or maybe you sort of knock the hurdle over and keep scooting along on your butt anyway, until you get to the 100 meter line, and then you find out there's a long jump and you

mathowie 40:40 automated later.

Cortex 40:43 It's fantastic. It's it's clearly just right after my heart. So it's a nice paper and there's a video of it working. Oh, man, I just like it. That's the sort of thing I would wake up and say, Oh, I just had the funniest dream about metal filter. But nope, that actually happened. So

mathowie 40:57 there we go. They're all from Cal State Sacramento. I don't know why people don't say which of the nine campuses of Cal State something's from

Cortex 41:06 well, I like it when people say OSU and I assume that they're talking about Oregon State University because everybody says like, no, it's Ohio. It's Ohio. Sure,

mathowie 41:18 sir, the Ohio State University. If you've never known anyone that went to the Ohio State University, they won't mind you.

Cortex 41:26 I now know that there's a Miami University in Ohio. Thanks to the newspaper comic strip, Gil Thorpe, where a character is leaving Milford or whatever the name of the shitty losing town and Gil Thorpe is out of college somewhere else. I'm not saying Milford city, I'm just saying they always lose in the comic strip about them.

Jessamyn 41:51 Notice comic

Cortex 41:52 guilt or Oh yeah. It's guilt.

Jessamyn 41:54 Junkie winker been?

Cortex 41:56 No department 3g, but for football. It's like it's you seriously,

Jessamyn 42:01 and you read it? You're that guy?

Cortex 42:03 I read coverage of it. Soap Opera strips I would never have been reading otherwise that

Jessamyn 42:11 we didn't I I'm looking at it. Now. I have no I don't. I didn't know it.

Cortex 42:16 Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I even knew about it before it. It wasn't in our paper either. When I was growing up,

mathowie 42:20 oh my god, the future of comics is plastic in your page in 17 ads, trying to find the comic apparently. Holy cow. I can barely see the comic. Yeah. All the ads are my recent searches for bike equipment. You should see my browser it is just bike gloves and shoes.

Jessamyn 42:41 It's like a perfect bike shoes by now.

mathowie 42:43 Yeah, but I'm trying to find the perfect shoe and glove combo for my big tour. So I've

Jessamyn 42:47 been doing research. Research is that what you call it? Yes. Research. You know, research used to mean something Have I gone on this tear lately is pissing away money. No, but now it just means looking something up on the internet. Like there's a thing called research

Cortex 43:01 like research as a discipline versus research as a verb for looking. Yeah.

mathowie 43:07 Research.

Jessamyn 43:10 Beef with you. It's my beef with the world. So I very much enjoyed this one post that I also thread that I posted extensively in the internet. Can the nerd hangout my other nerd Hangout, the trivia league online, which has lots and lots of Metafilter people got written up in the Washington Post, which was surprising and kinda cool and whatever. And it gave it the title the coolest weirdest internet community you'll never be able to join, which was a mistake. Because nerds hate that. Visionary other than the people who mocked about the fact that it sounded like it was a cool kids thing, which is hilarious because this is like the nerdiest group of nerds outside.

Cortex 43:58 Cigarette smoking Leather Jacket wearing cool trivia online nerds. I

mathowie 44:02 see you in MIT's parking lot equations.

Jessamyn 44:05 It was a fun thread because I found out how many metal filter people who weren't the metal filter people I knew were on learned leak and there was a bunch of random questions. And trivia is funny. So the thread was enjoyable for me. And the article is kind of interesting too, talking about what goes into being sort of an honor system online trivia

mathowie 44:24 leak. So weird. I didn't see this on meta filter. I think I saw someone on Twitter saying I'm the guy in that photo in the article. Like I

Jessamyn 44:33 turned into a meta talk thread. Because basically with the sort of, oh, it's so fancy. You know, people were like, Well, no, it isn't. Let's just all get together and if you need a login, or if you have a login because you're learning league name is your real name. Like it's your real last name and your first initial or something. So like I'm West j. So I'm not a big cipher because everybody knows what my name is. But if you don't know my name, And you wouldn't even know like, I've been playing against me fights and not knowing they were me fights this whole time. So then there's the meta talk thread about, Hey, are you in that? Blah? So it was a fun threat.

mathowie 45:12 This is the like, weird MIT trivially thing you do. That's a

Jessamyn 45:16 puzzle hot, which I stopped doing because I just couldn't handle it anymore was too nerdy for me. I wasn't good enough.

mathowie 45:24 Pretty high stakes. Crazy. Yeah, well, the thing is,

Jessamyn 45:27 when you win at the MIT puzzle hunt, you just get to do the puzzle next year. So it's, you know, winning means a lot of work. In this case, winning means you get a little flag or something I don't even I wouldn't know because I never win. But it's fun for me, because I'm not very good at it. So it's, I think it's always good to have things in your life that you're good at, but things that you're not good at so that you can try to get better, because otherwise you just sit there with your things you're good at. And you're like, Alright, I'm done. So it's fun to keep going.

Cortex 45:56 It's a good policy.

Jessamyn 45:58 I think so. And the thread was fun, because me fights are fun.

mathowie 46:02 Yep. Cool.

Cortex 46:05 I don't remember this, this would have been right on the cusp. I think this came after our last podcast. But tell me if this sounds familiar. There's a post by Genesis about some MIT folks who figured out how to recover sound from video footage of just random objects in a room.

Jessamyn 46:25 So I remember us talking about this, we talked about some other esoteric bullshit having to do with video stuff that

mathowie 46:32 I heard about was on Twitter, the potato chip ban. Yeah, so basically, what they did was,

Cortex 46:37 they started with a high speed camera. So you're shooting something like you know, 3000 6000 frames per second. And they just shot like an object like a potato chip bag. And then they did a video analysis to analyze the vibrations in that bag at a sub pixel level moving back and forth.

Jessamyn 46:56 Looking at it, not listening to it. Yeah, just

Cortex 47:00 looking at it. They analyze the way it was vibrating at frequencies at high frequencies, through some clever video analysis and recovered a recording of basically the sound being made. So like the recovering speech in the room with a potato bag by videotaping the potato chip bag, which is fantastic. And it's this is not totally new idea or anything like it's classic spycraft to fire a laser at a window and record the audio in the room by checking the vibrations that the laser but this is this doesn't require a laser. This requires, you know, a high speed camera and a bag of potato chips. Yeah, it doesn't require a bag of potato chips. Yeah, basically, in theory, anything that's a little bit of a membrane that would vibrate from air moving around. Which is pretty great. And the really neat thing is not only did they make it work with a high speed camera, which is kind of a big ask, because it's like, oh, well, all I need to do to spy on people is buy a camera that can shoot 6000 frames per second and a long enough lens to you know, but uh, but they also figured out that they could even do it with like commercial, like DSLR stuff, or they may have even used some, because what they did is like it doesn't work nearly as well but rolling shutter on these things because a lot of cameras that shoot video aren't shooting video by grabbing literally a full frame every 60 seconds, they're doing a rolling shutter where they grab a little like the first line of the frame and the second line the frame and the third line frame slowly moving through time, they can cheat that to pull a little bit of information at a higher scale than the actual you know, final framerate of the output video. So they were able to actually get some audio not as good but still some even from basically a cheap consumer camera which is really impressive. So yeah, I don't know it's just a it was a really cool experiment in sort of the creepy oh boy, you know, the advancing of the ambient surveillance state sort of way of course, but but still a really a really neat piece of work a really good proof of concept for some some cool sound recovery stuff. And a cool post. Yeah, yeah, so apparently, I guess apparently I did like that one. That happened back in the days before the dentist so it's like another word.

Jessamyn 49:17 So it's crisp and clean in your mind, right? You really were on like by getting that stuff? It's just

Cortex 49:23 I was taking Norco which is I think with less Tylenol per dose. Oh, nice. So it's like you're less likely to kill yourself if you OD.

mathowie 49:36 On some drug I've only heard of through bad news stories from Florida like Oh, Noriko that's always meant.

Jessamyn 49:44 I didn't know that Norco Vicodin were the same thing. So I'm gonna have learned a thing. I don't

Cortex 49:49 remember if it's the same thing as something like Vikas. It's the same as one of those and I think it's like it and it's hydrocodone is the Norco and I think that's what's invited into the words are See as oxycodone? I don't know. I'm not a big expert on the painkillers. I

Jessamyn 50:04 just code on paracetamol. Yeah, that person's name is Lortab. Norco or Vikas. Yeah.

mathowie 50:11 Okay, so it makes the pain go away and you get a little high apparently. Yeah, it's

Cortex 50:15 awful. It makes me Spacey. I don't really mind it but it's not like whoo fun stopping taking that and just moving to straight Tylenol and Advil because one of the things it does is constipated a little bit like, I'm in pain and I'm not pooping, that's dumb. That's just

Jessamyn 50:30 got to eat lots of crunchy fiber in order to be able to solve that problem. And my teeth are the worst. Nightmare Night.

mathowie 50:38 Once after a small surgery, I don't remember it. I don't remember any joy coming out of it. I watched a bunch of TV and I sent some regrettable emails to artists with family members are like you know, stuff I've been painting for 20 years. It's like you know what, you're a fucking mooch. And you should. Like I was I was informed and never email while I did it ever again. And I don't remember any of it.

Jessamyn 51:03 So that's not necessarily a bad thing.

mathowie 51:06 I don't remember like a high aspect of it at all. It's just, I just felt normal to stop the game. My email game was not strong. My favorite posts of the month was a post where I was moderating the site and it came up and it got flagged a bunch and I was like, Screw you guys. This is funny and shit. And it's just got that one. Yeah. 30 seconds of video of someone walking into the Time Square Guitar Center when he's playing all at once. And it sounds like hell, like the depths of hell. Everyone is melting their faces off with their guitars at once. It's so great, is the funniest thing in the world.

Cortex 51:45 It is. And it's just like, a big open, you know, the big open spaces where people can plug in and play stuff. So it's yeah, it's it is caffeine. It's just sort of the nature of the beast.

mathowie 51:55 And I've been to a few guitar centers in the last six months. And in Oregon, there's one guy trying to you know, melt his guitar with, like trying to do an Eddie Van Halen thing. And it's funny to hear 12 people at once doing it

Jessamyn 52:09 not has like a good point later in the thread where he's like, look, I don't want to defend these guys. But I do want to point out you're not there to play music, you're there to test the equipment. And so if you're like a Noodler you got to get your noodle on or else you're not going to play the thing the way you would need to have the thing work

Cortex 52:27 exactly, but she's totally legit. I mean, that's every time I've been I've been two or three times with Guitar Center, you know, because that was where they happen to have the thing I wanted to try and yes, you got to play whatever you're going to play because you're trying to figure out how it sounds so that's I got in the big argument it's a demonstrate

Jessamyn 52:47 all of your like long comments in this thread that I've seen you see on the site and months before the pain

Cortex 52:56 this might have been right at the time of the start.

Jessamyn 53:02 Started talking about comorbidity I bet,

Cortex 53:05 probably, but I may have actually been on my first dose of this read. I don't know. I mean, the stuff I was saying I definitely stand by but I feel like it was just one of things where I sort of I got off on a tangent and then I ended up arguing with people who thought I was arguing the main point was like, No, I'm not saying that. People shouldn't play stuff in Guitar Center. I'm saying that you know this thing about tabs and people who blah blah blah music and yeah, I was like it was a lot of words in service of something that wasn't really the topic of the thread and I afterwards I was like man, I really

Jessamyn 53:34 testlets showed up with his own fuck guitars comment. So helpful.

mathowie 53:41 I was in Times Square last week and wandering around trying to get to a Broadway show and there was Guitar Center I almost wanted to go in just to experience this in real life. Exactly like it was

Cortex 53:54 a specific sonic environment and interesting

Jessamyn 53:58 every Guitar Center is like that as long as you have enough people Yes.

mathowie 54:02 Monica one used to be like that it

Cortex 54:04 was hilarious. I've been in one that's actually been like it's like a slow day or slow hour and it's actually quiet and yeah, there's like one or two guys. It's not a problem. But if it's busy, it's busy, you know and people brought up like non Guitar Center boot and they're sort of like the fuck boutique guitar stores. Go to which which is which is awesome.

Jessamyn 54:22 And a guitar store.

mathowie 54:25 How could you not like indie guitar?

Cortex 54:28 Well, it's it's a mixed bag because

Jessamyn 54:30 I like indie. Indie anything half the time because I feel like you must be this snotty to ride this ride

mathowie 54:36 Yeah, I mean independent like small like if you think if you think yeah, if you think Guitar Center is Amazon or something. Yeah,

Cortex 54:43 well, it's it's a total mixed bag because like I've been like there's great music shops in Portland. I've been to over the IRS and depending on what you want to do, it can be perfect or it can be not what they're trying to do either. Like I went shopping for an app one of the times I went to Guitar Center in that same shopping process, I went to a local news As a company, and I wanted to try out a guitar that I wanted to buy, but one of my issues with the guitar was it was a hollow body electric. And those tend to feed back real bad, depending on the circumstances. So I wanted to really see how it respond to volume. And like, it's me and one other customer in the store and three salesmen and I wanted to turn the amp up, and they were really cagey. I was like, I don't know. That's pretty nice. Like, it's a fucking guitar amp. I want to play rock music with it. I need to turn it and I had to, like, I had to convince them that was okay for me to turn up their amp before I paid them several $100 Right. It's like this is nuts. So you know it really it is two different things like Guitar Center has turned that shit up to 11 they're gonna be like, whatever. You do that because like it's already cacophony who cares? So it's yeah, it's a weird thing. There's all sorts of different aspects of this cacophony. Cacophony.

mathowie 55:49 It's probably, I went to a great acoustic only guitar shop in Ashland, Oregon a couple months ago. And the best part was when you open the door, door like ringer is like a four string old ukulele that was added to purpose. So every, like 30 seconds, you hear like, boop, boop, boop, boop. Like when someone walked in. I thought that was amazing. Good gracious. nerd.

Jessamyn 56:16 I enjoyed. I don't know if enjoyed is the right thing. But BKs ngang er, who made the he was the Inga yoga guy and was like just one of the most big name Yoga people you've heard of died, there was a really nice obit post. And it was nice listening to a couple people talk about yoga. And I actually learned more about BKs younger than I had known previously and I thought Dean ash made a nice, respectful, short post and die majestically. That was his thing

mathowie 56:55 that he popularized yoga basically,

Jessamyn 56:58 basically, is one of the bigger people of the kind of yoga that people do in the states that isn't like hot yoga or whatever, but his whole idea was, anyone can do it, you don't need special shit to do it. And the important part is having good form. So you learn how to get into the poses, right there's a lot of like the teacher walking around making sure you have good form, but very much like everyone can do it. It's for everybody, which was nice you don't have to be some special stretchy person

Cortex 57:31 Yeah. I very much enjoyed as I do with all these things apparently, a Twitch stream of Street Fighter two being played by a pair of goldfish these guys marked off an aquarium into like a nine equal squares like a three by three grid assign controls, like pressing punch or kick buttons or up down left right to the various quadrants and then just every half a second or so it figures out where each of the two fishes and translates its position into the appropriate button press on the game and so these two fish just go at it all day they just play Street Fighter two against each other

Jessamyn 58:16 don't they eventually what die

Cortex 58:19 well yeah I mean given rounds are gonna last like 90 seconds max if if someone doesn't kill the other person first but they just keep playing rematch after rematch and they just automatically select new characters by swimming around and then they fight and then a huge ongoing tournament between these two fish

mathowie 58:35 like you can just use a webcam from the 90s to do this sort of like what quadrant are they in?

Cortex 58:42 Recognition is just like logos to fish and tell it apart one's like orange and one's black so it's it's it's Yeah,

Jessamyn 58:50 but then they link to salty bet but I can't get salty bet to load what is that

Cortex 58:55 ah salty that oh man. Salty but no it's it's this salty bed is this thing there was a post about there was a couple posts about I think over the years but it's a it's a weird automatic fighting game thing that uses a whole bunch of AI is that just fight each other automatically and you can bet fake salty bet money on it. And you you win money if your guy wins, you lose you lose. Salty bet is a huge conference. I think we had a pretty previous podcast where I talked at excessive length about it.

Jessamyn 59:21 I don't remember that at all. Maybe I was not there. Maybe you just

Cortex 59:25 maybe just rightfully reclaimed. I'll see if I can find the previous podcasts post. But yeah, basically another this is like salty bet if instead of every fighting character you can think of possible being controlled by robots. It's a limited set being controlled by goldfish. Otherwise pretty much the same thing.

mathowie 59:43 Neat. Guys, watch this video about a guy in New York who is a a crush on DRO plastic dwarf. I think that's some sort of like chrome have his own thing that caused it dwarfism. He just films like with a hidden GoPro he kind of camera walking through New York City one day and it's edited. And it's crazy. How many people give him shit for being basically, you know?

Jessamyn 1:00:16 Just give him a weird look

mathowie 1:00:18 or why you watch it. It's unbelievable. It's

Jessamyn 1:00:20 another Time Square.

mathowie 1:00:23 It's like people someone quotes about his dick being big because he's short someone someone makes like people are being offensive just left and right. And they're taking photos on the slide. It's he edits it to show that like, this crap I have to endure every day. Oh, and that he grew up in a really like, supportive small town where like, nobody ever made a big deal about it. And everyone in New York is like, Hey, are you on that show? Little People? Hey, do you have a big dick, dude, like all this weird, crazy stuff?

Jessamyn 1:00:54 totally inappropriate.

mathowie 1:00:56 Any coffee? Stop. Someone says, Do you see a lot of little people and the guy goes, Man, I'm from Oklahoma. I don't know what that means. It's so weird. It sounds like that's the most offensive thing. I don't even know what like that was supposed to be that people just seem weird. And yeah, they're staring at them. Kids are freaking out. He captures like the kid faces like basically exploding, like when they catch eyes with him. And it's like crazy. I had no idea how bad a single day in New York could be. And this is a guy who like, you know, the first 20 years of his life was in like somewhere in Ohio or something where everyone was awesome to him. And he got to go to normal high school and everyone treated him. Well.

Jessamyn 1:01:41 I mean, why wouldn't you go to a normal high school?

mathowie 1:01:43 Oh, yeah, I'm just saying like, every like, he wasn't dumped on. He wasn't bullied. He said he grew up awesome. And it's weird to get in New York as an adult and be treated like crap.

Jessamyn 1:01:53 Well, and especially because in New York, there's a million different kinds of people and you would think all different kinds of people people would be used to dealing with.

mathowie 1:02:00 Yeah. So that was a cool short video about that.

Jessamyn 1:02:08 Nice. I will go check that out. That may have been it for me on Metafilter. I had a couple of AskMe Metafilter.

Cortex 1:02:17 I've got a I've got one more Metafilter post that I mentioned then, alright. Because it's a game about it's a post about an incremental game. And it's the thing a bunch of us have been playing lately. And it's like, what's incremental? Like what does it mean? Clickers like, yeah, clicker slash? Clicker. Wow. It's it's more like I would say like candy box was then then it is like Cookie Clicker. But still in that same spirit, either way, like, you know, do things get more things, but it's, it's, again, I feel ridiculous saying this. It's It's surprisingly hardcore. Like, I feel like a lot of people have come up with clicker ideas that are like, okay, click a bunch. And then you get a thing and then click a bunch

mathowie 1:03:01 1000 things to get the first thing I have to click 5000 times. First level for them to click 5000 times. It says cat that field is 5000. I don't get anything until I can refine my cabinet. Yeah,

Cortex 1:03:17 there's, anyway, it's neat. It's I've been playing it for like two weeks. And I'm still trying to find a way through the first playthrough at this point, I've got a fair amount of events technology, but I'm not producing nearly enough titanium yet.

mathowie 1:03:32 technology to reduce cats. Do you get cats?

Cortex 1:03:37 Yeah, you're a captain. You're basically I guess, starting a civilization.

mathowie 1:03:42 Exhausting.

Jessamyn 1:03:44 Soon, pretty soon.

Cortex 1:03:46 So yeah. And

Jessamyn 1:03:48 it's funny pictures in it. No fingers.

Cortex 1:03:51 It's all just tech stuff like this. The guy is still developing. It's getting close to version 1.0. But it's not quite there yet. And, and yeah, it's pretty great. But it's super, it's a lot more protracted. Like most clickers I've played, I get the idea in about five minutes, I get a clearer picture of where it's going in about an hour. And then after a day, I'm like, Yeah, okay, well, that was cute. But that was just another, whatever another.

Jessamyn 1:04:13 This is good. Because it's confusing.

Cortex 1:04:15 It's confusing and protracted. So if you like, if you like the idea of having to figure out a little bit something new every day about goals. Yeah, you may not like this one so much. It's, it's, like I say it's a relatively hardcore clicker such that a thing can like that can even exist. This is, I guess, the example. So anyway, I've been I've been enjoying it. There's been a bunch of chatter about it. And, and hopefully I'm ruining at least a couple dozen people's productivity in the next month by bringing it up here. So I guess, you know, I feel like in a completely less cheerful note, but as far as stuff has been going on in Metafilter, there are a couple of giant threads about the Ferguson thing that that had been a big part like Matt talked about this being a crazy month. This is part of why is this has been a real, real big pile of attention on the site. And, you know, both of these threads are huge at this point. I think there's a new thread that's sort of tangentially related. That's kind of where people have taken the conversation at this point. 1000 comments, liking? Yeah, yeah, don't, we should put a note super long threads on these in the podcast notes when we post them. But it's been a bunch of conversation. And it's, you know, been, unsurprisingly, somewhat fraught at times. But generally speaking, it's been really good job of people collecting together resources and talking about the way they some sometimes do with big events on Metafilter. And see the lodge is

Jessamyn 1:05:40 one of the good things when it happens. Yeah, there can be good at this.

Cortex 1:05:43 Exactly. I see a lot of chatter on Twitter and elsewhere about people were like, holy shit, this is a really good resource for this stuff. Because like, hey, these people are like taking their time and picking out sources and talking about their provenance and what the hell, what's that about? It's like, oh, yeah, it's like, if you're not just doing it 140 characters at a time, you can put together a little bit more cohesive of a picture of what's going on in the situation. So anyway, kind of kind of a downer, because it's a terrible situation. But it's also been nice to see people looking hard and thinking and talking about it.

mathowie 1:06:13 And yeah, sweet. Yeah.

Cortex 1:06:17 That's me for Metafilter. So you want to move on to ask you want to what do you got?

Jessamyn 1:06:23 My favorite while there's couple favorites, but two that were closely related. Were? Can you smell the difference between sugar water and saltwater? Can anyone do this? This was by then jarred to need. Like, regard to knit PLO. I always thought this was vegetarian pie. And now it's occurred to me it's not anything like that at all. But basically, can you tell the difference between a cup of water and a cup of normal water, salt, water and sugar water by smelling it? And how and this is a person who can't smell and has asked this question and it's causing a debate and so it just turned into kind of a fun discussion by a bunch of people about what they could do and people ask their friends for science and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I enjoyed that. And relatedly I didn't have that. You can totally smell the ocean.

mathowie 1:07:26 No fur is the marine odor maybe.

Jessamyn 1:07:29 Unlike rotting. Yeah, slime

mathowie 1:07:33 I guess organics and ocean beaches that are decaying yeah

Jessamyn 1:07:38 yeah well I'm it's windy neither there's all sorts of stuff but this is just you have a glass you smell it? Yeah. And then there was this related thread by phone NCC about smells that don't exist anymore, or are harder to find in real life. So like you know, the smell of wet phone books from a phone booths.

mathowie 1:07:59 Leaded gas

Jessamyn 1:08:00 or yeah leaded gas

mathowie 1:08:04 Yeah, the tires for

Jessamyn 1:08:07 special shampoo. So I just enjoyed it because lots and lots of people had different you know ticker tape new Barbie smell seriously, you'd never think about it but like I remember that smell because smells you know imprint a lot on us and yet you know, they don't smell that way anymore. amoxicillin Dimetapp paper mache these things it just depends where you move to like a lot of the real smells. I still get them all the time, but if you move to the city, you might think that they just went the way the dodo and don't exist anymore.

mathowie 1:08:45 Bus exhaust Canada. That's yeah. If you lived in the sticks, Tacoma

Jessamyn 1:08:53 it turns out to bring things bring things full circle Mental Floss had an article only a couple days afterwards. 11 smells that are slowly disappearing. Hahaha.

mathowie 1:09:06 Things that smell before you die.

Cortex 1:09:11 Something that smells funny.

Jessamyn 1:09:14 It's kind of weird, right?

Cortex 1:09:16 It's not it's not hard to sort of

Jessamyn 1:09:19 see see does appear to be a real person. Yeah, cool lives in case on city, the Philippines, which was an answer to one of our trivia questions.

Cortex 1:09:27 Well, I'm not I'm not assuming that it's like person using asked me for research necessarily. I think it's also just as plausible that you know, someone on the internet like, Oh, here's a fun question. Someone was like, Oh, hey, I could use that for a thing.

mathowie 1:09:42 There's a lot of names for ditto machines, spirit duplicators.

Jessamyn 1:09:46 A lot of them were different kinds of things. Like maybe the spiritedly hitters I think are different from I'm not totally sure.

mathowie 1:09:54 No, that's what that blueish purple thing you do to make copies with a big roller kind of that's pool and it comes out wet and smelly.

Jessamyn 1:10:03 I think that's a Mimeo machine but I think isn't spiritual creating something else

mathowie 1:10:06 we call them ditto machines no spirit. They said the same thing. Okay.

Jessamyn 1:10:12 I did not. It seems

mathowie 1:10:14 like a British ism version of it spirit duplicator

Jessamyn 1:10:18 they call them abandoned machines in the UK I had no idea. We just call it dittos they coexisted along the mimeograph which was different. It was different. But did oh machines and spirit duplicators are the same and mimeographed are different. Dough fascinating. Love it. Love it. Hey, here's a list of duplicating processes. See? Come on, dude. This list is amazing. There was a pen developed by Thomas Edison. Oh, yeah.

Cortex 1:10:57 That's probably developments. Teslin he killed tight.

Jessamyn 1:11:01 All right. All right.

Cortex 1:11:02 I liked this. This hugely popular, asked me pose. But I was delighted as everybody else was by just the sort of premise of it. I'm a boring person. I want boring music to go with my life. This is a question that G Haynes posted. He's just saying I want I want I want boring music that doesn't do anything, you know, music that you'd hear in an old madman episode music that just sits there and dooby doo. And gets to sort of

Jessamyn 1:11:25 ambient music. You know, I read that question. And I never went back because I was like,

mathowie 1:11:29 I got an answer for it.

Jessamyn 1:11:31 I felt like oh, I see. Sorry. It was above mine.

mathowie 1:11:34 I got an answer. Have you know when you play threes? That generative music that plays it threes is perfectly boring but perfectly? Like it's not offensive at all?

Jessamyn 1:11:45 It's just It's music. Are they okay with just

mathowie 1:11:49 they want to just music to go with the boring life.

Jessamyn 1:11:51 Music not just like Beep boop beep boop people Oh, but it's such

mathowie 1:11:55 a lovely like loop. You know, I could listen to that. Apparently you can buy the soundtrack that threes now but

Jessamyn 1:12:02 the box used to be really good for people

mathowie 1:12:05 like Kenny G and Philip Glass. No classes. Yeah, maybe music for airports would be a nice background sound.

Jessamyn 1:12:16 A lot of people feel really, I don't know if a lot of people but like, you know, have this sense of calm being in places that just have kind of ambient very mellow. Like, wasn't there a joke about that? And like, there's these killers, and they have to go and like kill someone. And they're like running and the Blues Brothers. Yeah. But then they're in the elevator and it's

Cortex 1:12:42 so much. Yeah, it's it's crazy. It's such a it's such a well established film trope now.

Jessamyn 1:12:47 Yeah, and you can get a Buddha box iPhone iPad app that does that kind of just super quiet, loopy, ambient Symphony thing. Maybe I'll put that in that thread. If nobody's mentioned it. Do it. Now nothing. All right, good. Yeah, I enjoyed reading that thread. I just didn't learn it the beginning and then never check back. Ba ba ba ba ba ba

mathowie 1:13:14 that was a great yeah, this is a super popular posts right 190 favorites. I think that's

Jessamyn 1:13:20 kind of popular as popular as he gets the what features

mathowie 1:13:23 would you want your dream house? What's great about us, someone say like,

Jessamyn 1:13:27 get to design a portmanteau and a storm could use us

mathowie 1:13:31 and saying like, you know, like little features in the house. But not just that if you can do anything you want. It's great because it's like the Homer designs a car Simpsons episode. Because it's like, you need a secret passageway that goes to a Bell Library that also doubles as a sonnet. Like it's so great. They're they're actually some amazing ideas and weird things people built into their house that were, you know, a lot of this I was reading I was going whoa, you can do that. Like they actually did that. Wow.

Jessamyn 1:14:01 I think that turns on when you step on the pedal. That's like one of the awesome things that this house doesn't have and should.

mathowie 1:14:08 Oh, my favorite thing in my house that was weird is all the heat registers in the kitchen are in the kick planets in this house, too. So when you're doing like dishes in the winter, your feet are getting like warmed it's so great.

Jessamyn 1:14:22 Well, you have a cat right? Doesn't your cat like sit totally in front of it? And it's like, this is where I live in the kitchen now.

mathowie 1:14:29 No, they're not that smart. Wow, yeah. So just like tons of crazy like accordion folding doors and ideas and weird stuff. It's It's good if you're gonna design a house someday or if you had some chance to do this. There's 300 amazing ideas here.

Jessamyn 1:14:50 You guys didn't delete the hot chicks room comments in this thread. Really? I really wish. Somebody links to an up Great Citizens Brigade thing you probably didn't even see it, but it did get flagged. So you know, I would have deleted that the Dreamhouse

Cortex 1:15:07 thread.

Jessamyn 1:15:09 Yes. It's a link it says this problem has been solved. You'd have to follow the link to know that it goes to some hot chick joke

Cortex 1:15:26 Have you have you been feeling a lot of you want to do like post mod real talk? If you've been feeling a lot of

Jessamyn 1:15:36 you know, non passive aggressive. I

Cortex 1:15:39 mean, practically speaking as if it hasn't been weird. Do you know what's

Jessamyn 1:15:43 been great is flagging and moving. For the most part, there's like one or two cases mostly earlier in the summer where I was like, Dude, you dudes should handle that dude. But you know, sometimes I think it's just a little like, slower for the, you know, the recent drama and meta talk like, that got handled differently than I would have. But the end result was the same person who gives a shit, right?

Cortex 1:16:04 Yeah. Plus, I can blame everything from the last three weeks on dental pain. So

Jessamyn 1:16:08 yeah, you know, and I think that's a pain is a pretty good excuse for most things. Because all you're trying to do is mark time until it stops and so nothing matters except for like, I gotta make it till bedtime. All right, I gotta make it till I wake up. Okay, I gotta make it like, everything is just like, let's go, let's go. Let's go.

Cortex 1:16:25 Yeah, there's zeroing in one day at a time thing that is not my normal way of

mathowie 1:16:30 I learned this. I learned this about PBS, my father in law, he was like, in the military, his whole life around exploding things. And is he had tinnitus just come on, like one day, like, you know, in his ear 24 hours a day. And it made them miserable. And he's just checking, like, painkillers and Advil and sleeping pills. Just, like every waking moment is terrible. And, and, like, I guess he had been dealing with it for like, a month or so. And, and his wife PVS wife's, like, you know, you should go see, like a professional doctor, like at the VA hospital, you know, like, and they like, went code read on him. They're like, we call this the suicide disease. You know, when you were in Vietnam that like that, they're just trying to sleep and take downers to get away from this horrible noise in their head. And yeah, I have no idea like that it could happen or that the app like and they just went full on commando and it sounds like he's getting help but like,

Jessamyn 1:17:35 because there's treatments I mean, none of them are awesome, but I mean, I had sort of sudden onset tinnitus and I spent like with like with the dental plan, like all you want to do is like not think about it and all you can do is hear this noise and you're like, I'm going deaf. My life is over. Bla bla bla bla bla bla bla you know, I can only imagine if you were a war vet how much worse and terrible it is because it's crazy making?

mathowie 1:17:58 Yeah, yeah. Man.

Jessamyn 1:18:01 So he got help in is

mathowie 1:18:03 doing better. So yeah, like, just say like, you know, your waking hours are just between pain episodes. It's got it sounds horrible.

Jessamyn 1:18:12 Was it painful? Or was it just super noisy?

mathowie 1:18:14 I guess it was noise and pain.

Jessamyn 1:18:19 And the worst thing about tinnitus the very worst thing is it doesn't go away. You can sever your auditory nerve and you can still hear it. Like crazy.

Cortex 1:18:29 That's yeah, he brings a fucking you know, thing.

Jessamyn 1:18:34 Fucker. It's the worst. I once I read that. I was like, Well, I guess I have to learn how to calm the fuck down then because

mathowie 1:18:41 it's kind of like what's the floating things in your eyeball thing that never go away ever?

Jessamyn 1:18:46 Yeah, they I freak out about those occasionally when I'm like lying in the backyard staring at the sky. And I'm like, box

mathowie 1:18:52 floaters? floaters. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:18:55 inside and you don't see them anymore. They're in your vitreous fluid for whatever you

Cortex 1:18:58 just found those sorts of fascinating like, as a kid when I figured out that that was a thing. I was like, Ah, okay, that's me.

Jessamyn 1:19:04 Once I realized it didn't mean incipient death through some sort of AI or brain. I can learn to live with it almost always. Assuming it's gonna start killing you. It's like the tooth pain. You know? If you know it's going away, it's a different problem than if you're worried you might have to just live with it forever.

mathowie 1:19:27 There was this really interesting post and this is a post like an someone was asking to identify a song on Twitter and I saw Neil go, Hey, man, you Strasse metal filter this person did and they had to wait a week and they posted it and it's really hard. You hear it and shazam doesn't

Jessamyn 1:19:42 work, listen to this and was like, What the fuck? I was like, Oh, I'll totally be able to know.

mathowie 1:19:50 Let me crack my knuckles and get going. And it's hard and people who grew up in Canada who new DJs are like this is really hard. Like this is some The no outgroups

Jessamyn 1:20:01 answer yet as of yesterday, yeah, Victoria, I remember this song, no idea. But now yeah, it reminds

mathowie 1:20:10 me of a song I heard on a like a snowboard video in the early 90s from also Canadian band out of Vancouver. I've never I don't think they ever released an album. I think they maybe had a demo, but I've never been able to find the song ever and but I kind of know the name of the band and the song, but I can't find a recording of it anywhere. But this one's just super hard. It sounds like a thing. It sounds like there's enough of a sound there.

Cortex 1:20:37 If they've got the recording, then you know it's not it's not one of the things where someone's like, I'm pretty sure to had the words and I'm pretty sure it was. Doo doo doo doo. Yeah, no, yeah, this is like, here's the recording. So you know, obviously the thing existed, or it's an incredibly clever arg by Valve. Three, but you know,

mathowie 1:20:55 it's kind of a bad recording. It sounds like someone recorded a radio speaker in a room, but it was

Jessamyn 1:21:02 30 years ago. How did you do all your high fidelity reporting back then?

mathowie 1:21:07 So I would say that's why maybe Shazam is, I can't even I just can't

Jessamyn 1:21:12 even like the most popular million songs like it's really not good for obscure, random older stuff, especially stuff from non US countries is what I found. I had Shazam

mathowie 1:21:23 work in a sushi restaurant with a really bizarre Japanese recording of like an 80s Broadway soundtrack in Japanese. I could not believe it figured it out. Like I was like, Whoa, but then you can't even buy it. Because it's all like, it gives you Japanese characters. So I don't know the name.

Jessamyn 1:21:42 Like word lens on your phone.

mathowie 1:21:44 I think if you press like, buy this now it tried to take me to the Japanese iTunes Store that said I wasn't allowed to use it like it was. I couldn't get a copy of the thing actually wanted. At the beach.

Cortex 1:21:55 I had brought my ukulele along and I was idly playing some stuff. And I I started playing some theme from some movie or TV show. I couldn't remember what it was. And I was, you know, plinking this out fingerstyle and curious knew was like singing along with things like, oh, yeah, what does that look like? It's not Jurassic Park. It's not Battlestar Galactica. And he pulled out some sound identifying app, I want to say SoundCloud, but I don't know if it's SoundCloud because it's like the playback service. I don't know. Anyway, whatever it is, I was really surprised because I thought most of the things like Shazam just worked on like, trying to sort of identify the actual recording, even in a low quality circumstance. Yeah, so I'm playing, I'm plugging this out. Fingerstyle on a guitar. I did not expect that to work, but it totally found it. And turns out it was the theme from Top Gun. And yeah, but I was so impressed with that work. There's like a technology. Now the old man saying, Oh, it's magic, but a

mathowie 1:22:50 danger zone.

Cortex 1:22:51 So workable. So? Yeah, no, I love this. Well, the thing about this question is to its it, no one's coming up with it. And it's like it exists on the far side of this cliff, that like, you know, we are just now at this point, starting to be a pretty healthy distance from the cliff, you know, which was somewhere in you know, its cliff is maybe too strong of a word, because it's a gray area, but somewhere between the 90s and the early aughts, you know, where it stopped being the case that something would disappear, if everybody actively thinking about it, stop talking about it. Like at this point, you know, the same song if it had been put out in 97, someone would find it somewhere online, you don't have some way to find a playlist from a radio station. But 1984 In Canada, you're just gonna have to find someone else who was also in Canada in 1984, listening to that station, who for some reason, has information and is paying attention to the fact that you want to know this. And how do you

Jessamyn 1:23:42 well, and there's no those resources? Yeah, there's no, like, maybe

Cortex 1:23:46 try and find someone who's a DJ at CK LG and 1984. And see if they happen to remember. I mean, that's, that's like the strongest lead I can think of, and how are you going to do it? How are you going to find DJs from CK LJ in 1980, Boreas. Like, go through resumes searching for references to the radio station, it becomes like you say, this is now actively a research project, you know, we are researchers. It's not just Google. And so yeah, that sort of blog called not just Googling and talking about just Googling, you know, research.

Jessamyn 1:24:23 That's a good idea. Actually. This was a good asked Metafilter thread, I thought because it was super helpful. Basically, it's Eric H. 2000, who is trying to go to Copenhagen and stay and wants to stay in Airbnb and keeps making booking requests that are being declined. And they're like, why, what is going on? What do I not understand about the system? And it turns out that it's sort of an interesting combination of ways you could make yourself look more appealing and understanding that it's actually kind of different from booking a hotel as much as Airbnb tries to make it look like booking a hotel, you're really just kind of asking, blah, blah, blah. So I mentioned it because I put my place up on Airbnb and, you know, I don't, I'll a lot of times be like, oh, sorry, not available, whatever. And if you understand the system, it makes sense. And if you don't, it doesn't end it wound up with a happy story because they wound up actually

mathowie 1:25:23 got sounds like getting booked, beefed up their profile. So what there's more identifying information,

Jessamyn 1:25:29 and they put more identifying information in it, they email

mathowie 1:25:33 beforehand and say, Hey, is it open during those

Jessamyn 1:25:36 some places will let you automatically book based on availability, and some places want you to send a message first, anyhow, and some places you can send a reservation request, but it might still get rejected. So there's a whole bunch of different ways to make it work. I've been like looking for places to go stay in London in February, March, I want to go back with my sister and everything I want to see like stay in is on like a houseboat. So now I gotta see if like she wants to or like one of them is like a garden cottage. But the bathroom is in the main house. I don't think my sister would go for it. But maybe I can get her to stay at a hotel and I can stay in the garden cottage.

mathowie 1:26:14 I heard from someone that recently stayed in the Airbnb houseboat in Amsterdam. It was super gross, because it's all like moldy and stuffy, and it's on water and rotting away. And it was

Jessamyn 1:26:25 terrible. What different people expect different things from how much like you've got to kind of figure out what market rate is. And like, this thing is like the bed, you've got to be less than six feet tall. And I was like, because I'm super less than six feet tall. But you can see if you were like a normal size person. That would just suck ass right? Like immediately it would just be awful.

mathowie 1:26:46 But people have mentioned VRBO which I feel is like old people Airbnb. It's so great. Everyone I've ever rented a house from is like, retired. It's like a vacation house of theirs or something. And it's always it's so straightforward. You know, the person's just like, there's the key. Give me my money. Stay there. I'll clean it up. You know? No, like every time we use Airbnb, it's been super wishy washy, because it feels I don't know, a little sketchy here.

Jessamyn 1:27:14 Yeah, well, Airbnb can be half House tours. VRBO is usually it's not like a room. VRBO is pretty much always an entire place. And they cost real money. But if you're going on vacation, paying real money for like a place with four bedrooms is perfect. So there's more money on the line, as opposed to like you're paying like 25 bucks a night to stay in somebody's boss in the middle of a field in North Carolina, which I have done and was super great. But you know, not everybody's up for that.

mathowie 1:27:44 My favorite thread was this one on how to you make a hacker sambil in the hacker space, and I want to make it female friendly. Because I actually had to Tiki and I brainstormed with my former alma mater, like people contacted me and I thought, got member a couple years ago, I asked you like why would you? Why would my college be like we need to have like a coffee meeting in Portland because we're traveling and meeting.

Jessamyn 1:28:11 I remember you asking about that. Because they're asking you for money.

mathowie 1:28:15 Right? I was like, I assume they want like a check for $10,000. It turns out, they were like, Oh, you're kind of famous in the tech circles. And we're trying to build. We're rebuilding our main campus library, like the central library, because I was always in the science libraries and then rebooting the famous 60s It's like this architectural masterpiece, or gutting the inside, take it down the studs starting over. And we're going to put a hackerspace in the middle of it. But what can we do to make it welcoming to like, not just the the electrical engineers would love it, but we don't want to look like a radio shack. And it's kind of like this where yeah, they we sat down for like an hour brainstorming about how do you make like a makerspace? Yeah, but I never thought of half of the things in here to make it more female friendly, which was super good. I did push them on mentors being super important. It can't just be well, there's a 3d printer and a bunch of desks and Wi Fi. So go nuts kids, like it has to be like kind of direct.

Jessamyn 1:29:13 It's so tough, right? Because you don't want to just go into the stereotypes and be like, well painted, again, pink, you know, but you also want to acknowledge that, like women may be looking for different things from a from a space or they may have childcare concerns. Even though it's stereotypical to be like the mom has the kid, they may still it may still be true. And you may need to find ways to deal with that without being Yeah, like you want to be helpful and supportive of women without putting them in a new box. And you know, they were getting a little bit of pushback from the hackerspace lady who's like, well, we've done some of that, but we don't just want to exclude dudes in order to be able to be more welcoming to women and different people had kind of different way.

mathowie 1:29:59 Women specific nights have mentors and role models or women, I told them the library thing at my college, like, whoever you choose to direct the place is going to make or break it. Like it's got to be a, you know, an open, inclusive kind of person with lots of empathy that really wants to bring people into the space. And there are lots of, you know, introductory kind of classes and stuff,

Jessamyn 1:30:22 right, they got to be in the outreach is one of the main purposes of the place, much more than just,

mathowie 1:30:28 they really didn't want to set up like four desks, Wi Fi and Dropbox and leave. That's what I mean, they kind of I think the school just wanted to put as little resources into it as possible. And I was like, man, it's gotta be someone's full time job to run this thing. And

Jessamyn 1:30:44 co working thing, right, like, everybody looks at co working spaces, and they're like, oh, yeah, we'll just put a keypad on the door, and lots of Wi Fi and a yoga ball and a lot of outlets. And it'll run itself, and it's just money generates money, and you're like, oh, but if you want to do it, right, you got to have a person there, blah, blah, like, that's what I want to do. And like my sort of next career is like, Be the person who helps make the hackerspace or the co working space, awesome, you know, where you can hang out and just noodle around and do whatever you do. But you can also be super proactive and help. I mean, librarians in some ways, totally get to do that. And in some places, totally don't.

mathowie 1:31:20 Yeah, I thought this is fascinating. There's a lot of stuff,

Jessamyn 1:31:24 and a lot of really good feedback from a lot of different people who had very different perspectives.

mathowie 1:31:28 It's hard to make a space, you know, that's, like electrical engineering and 3d printing can happen there. And yarn is going to be there as well. And, you know, like, it's, that's, that's a really big tent, it's hard to, you know, to know what to even provide to people,

Jessamyn 1:31:46 well, and you can't do everything. And so every time you make a decision about what you're going to do and what you're not going to do, there are going to be certain people who feel more included in certain people who feel less included, you just want to make sure you're not always having the women or whatever the people you're trying to attract accidentally being on the less included line. But if you don't think about it, it happens by accident. Always.

Cortex 1:32:14 Nice, little thing, just a example of the super late follow up thing working in asked me that we had added a while back, got an update four years later from tomorrow fool saying, Oh, hey, the Fineman lectures that were mentioned four years ago.

Jessamyn 1:32:35 Because the last comment in the thread was mine in 2010, telling people to shut up your update and I was like, a long time ago. And sure enough, it was a really long time ago.

Cortex 1:32:46 So if you want to watch some Richard Fineman lectures online for free, you can now do so. So that's that's happening.

Jessamyn 1:32:51 Thank you to the final update option.

mathowie 1:32:53 Yep. The final update.

Jessamyn 1:33:00 I can still add a final update to this, even though there's already a

Cortex 1:33:03 theory, we could keep file updating indefinitely. We just don't, because that'd be silly. So someday, someday we'll come that there'll be a second final update somehow. Eight years.

mathowie 1:33:15 No. Final, final update.

Cortex 1:33:20 The final or update? Yes. That's one dimension, just this one roll for initiative, this question from who was it? Joy Sam machine choice.

Jessamyn 1:33:31 And I think it's joy choice.

Cortex 1:33:34 Makes more sense. Choice.

mathowie 1:33:36 Choice. Yeah. Basically

Cortex 1:33:37 saying, Hey, give me some games that could work okay, for two people that are cooperative and ideally sort of role playing but could work for larger too, because basically, we've got slack in our schedule for our gaming group, which I think every gaming group probably has to deal with. It's a nice collection of some interesting games. I like to play games, because it's really easy for me and my wife to sit down play a game compared to getting people together.

mathowie 1:34:00 As d&d, like for enough.

Cortex 1:34:03 I guess, d&d really works better when you've got a GM at least a couple of other players

Jessamyn 1:34:07 because somebody asked to be a dungeon master. And so basically, you're only there's one person on a question. That's kind of ridiculous. If the two of you really do

mathowie 1:34:17 rain, people seems light still right? For five or six is better.

Cortex 1:34:23 I think four or five is your typical table four or five, maybe six. But yeah, it depends on the people too. You can make it work if you're into it. There was a mention in here of a game I had not heard of before called fiasco that looks really exciting. And I want to I liked some time, it's sort of a Coen Brothers role playing simulator. Like, you know, like, Brothers film, sort of thing, like sort of larger sort of heist films gone wrong, that sort of thing. It's all about three or four or five characters who have conflicting needs and relationships that leads probably to things ending badly for almost everybody. It's more of a storytelling game. The mechanical game like d&d that has a lot of structure to like combat and whatnot, but looks really neat. may try and get a game of that together with mefite soon. So

Jessamyn 1:35:12 a couple more random games this weekend, we had people who brought games over. And I didn't even know about the whole cooperative game idea until I had like, Metafilter. Gamer night like, so I was very, like, that's a new thing I totally want to know about now. And so now people are teaching me all their favorite cooperative games, many of which, ours Yeah, some

Cortex 1:35:31 of them are kind of to explain.

Jessamyn 1:35:32 So I'm not sure if it's just like these people. And they're explaining this, or it's just that games are long, and I'm impatient.

Cortex 1:35:43 But it could be a mix of us a lot of a lot of games that are, you know, there's there's games that explain pretty quick, but then there's some games that are pretty like famously Arkham Horror, which I really like,

Jessamyn 1:35:53 was the joke that we didn't even think about. But people said, AR is notorious

Cortex 1:35:58 takes like three or four hours to explain. And then another three or four hours to actually play through your first game. And it kind of, if everybody knows how to play, and everybody's played before, and you really dig into it, you can go a lot faster. But it's, it's a lot to front load. And it's a lot to ask people to sit through. So it's kind of

Jessamyn 1:36:16 when you ask somebody to explain a game to you and they get 20 minutes into explaining it and you realize you hate the game and be like, Oh, this was not enjoy this game. And they're like, and then what happens is you move to Phase Two, and you're like, oh, fuck, because you know, I have manners. And so you don't want to be like, stop explaining it immediately, because I've checked out but then I don't know. Yeah, it's a whole new world of etiquette that I don't know how to deal with. Yep. Oh, do stop explaining this right now. I'm never gonna play this game.

mathowie 1:36:51 We should probably button up soon. But no.

Jessamyn 1:36:55 Well, we can talk about if you're done with AskMe Metafilter. A couple of nice meetup threads for meta talk. Yeah, including Peter, who came around New England and went to meetups with a whole mess of us, including a meetup in Martha's Vineyard, a meet up with me. I meet up with my mom and the trivia me fights in Boston. He has a grandson who is joining the army, I think and is going to basic training. And they went on a road trip before basic training to sort of show the kid a little bit more of the world spans. So he came through and it was super fun. Nice. And the Chicago crazy people did 29 straight days of meetups in July, but of course didn't write about it until late August. And Amon Daly talked a little bit about some of the crazy stuff they did. It sounded

mathowie 1:37:50 dope his liver, it goes to a museum Sunday for that

Jessamyn 1:37:56 mini golf tournament, there's blowing stuff up a walking tour of Chicago's moving bridges. They saw Top Gun they spent Top Gun

Cortex 1:38:06 that's probably why it was in my head. I don't know sympathetic vibes across the across the nation.

Jessamyn 1:38:12 But it was neat. It was kind of the last rappy up the thing of the MO move. 15 You know, the month of meetups, actually, nobody uses that. Comp statically ever

mathowie 1:38:28 was Peter like a truck driver or something?

Jessamyn 1:38:31 delivery guy so he had a van and would do kind of long distance delivery. So like your history and your thing broke and you need a new thing basically, immediately. So FedEx is too slow. You pay a guy with a van beaucoup bucks to deliver it to you.

mathowie 1:38:48 I thought it was I assumed he must have been shipping something to Maine or something. But I was like that's kind of leisurely to stop every night.

Jessamyn 1:38:57 He's retired it up. Yeah. Sweet,

Cortex 1:39:00 relatively recently. So yeah, that was just driving to dry. Yeah, no, he

Jessamyn 1:39:04 also in a car, not even his wacky van.

Cortex 1:39:08 He called me on the phone the other day and I was not on my phone and I missed it. I was like Phil's calling for some reason. And I felt bad that I missed it and I checked my voicemail. It turns out that he was actually trying to dial a different Josh who's related to him. Oh, hey, I didn't mean to call you but I'm calling you so hi. Just let you know I didn't mean to call you. And I tweeted back to him saying hey, I got your message. Sorry. I missed your accidental but call. Okay, it was about mowing my lawn. And I was like, Well, I want to I really wish I could but I got a thing. I got a thing to do here in this other state. So yeah.

mathowie 1:39:43 Beat meetups meetups meetups,

Jessamyn 1:39:46 but I didn't get was it? Yep.

mathowie 1:39:50 All right. Talk to you guys next month. Yes,

Cortex 1:39:53 I look forward to not having been in pain.

Jessamyn 1:39:57 Not getting in pain in the intervening months. And I'll be a year older. So I'll have all sorts of new numbers to talk about, you'll be so much wiser. Oh, that was the thing I should probably talk about on this podcast is that it's called Jeff's birthday. And he would like, let me see if I can find

Cortex 1:40:17 it. He wants photos of people giving him the bird basically, is the, I think the short version. He likes. He likes pictures of people flipping,

Jessamyn 1:40:28 flipping him off.

mathowie 1:40:31 The better, the more appropriate, the better. If you can get like, I don't know if you've been planning to

Cortex 1:40:36 fuck a goat. Now's the time to do it and get some of the take a picture of you flipping the bird while you do it.

mathowie 1:40:42 Take a picture of the Pope.

Jessamyn 1:40:43 So you would make cold chef very happy if you would send him a picture to his Twitter or his you can't send it on me mail. But you could, I guess send it send him a link of the way you send pictures. A link of you or somebody else flipping him off because it's his birthday and we'd like him.

Cortex 1:41:07 Now we should really get together in the next couple of days and flip him off together.

mathowie 1:41:11 Yeah, what's that? Oh,

Jessamyn 1:41:13 well, Google Hangout and have everybody all on

mathowie 1:41:18 top of a mountain flip off. I

Cortex 1:41:20 don't know. It's just like you and me and PB and we could do a human pyramid and we're all flipping it off or something like that.

mathowie 1:41:28 I thought you're gonna say Human Centipede, which is a lot.

Jessamyn 1:41:33 You can make a human centipede joke and it would make him so laughing

mathowie 1:41:42 Oh, doctor, yes.

Cortex 1:41:43 Everybody flip off cold chef. Happy Birthday call Jeff.

mathowie 1:41:46 Yeah, and then I wish I

Jessamyn 1:41:48 wish I had some sort of request along those lines. But you know, there's just a you can pick up culture for my birthday. That would be

mathowie 1:41:56 my birthday wishes forever as people please try to be decent to each other. All right, cool.

Jessamyn 1:42:04 All right. Nice talking to you guys. As always, yes.

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