Podcast 97 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 97: The Perfect Hermit Crabitat (2014-10-07).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 And welcome mat Howie Jessamyn. Welcome to the metal filter odd.

mathowie 0:12 Welcome to Episode 97 of the metal filter Podcast. I'm Matt Howie

Jessamyn 0:15 Jessamyn West.

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

mathowie 0:20 So what do we know about 97?

Jessamyn 0:22 It's the 25th prime number, and it's the largest. A lot of the 97 stuff is kind of bullshit. Like it's the largest two digit prime number in base 10. Like, so it's competing with 9798 99. It's not really. But here's the thing I like about 97. There is no integer, integer that added when you add its own digits up, it adds up to 97. So 97 is what's called a self number in base 10. Is the thing I did not know, every single time.

mathowie 0:56 16 And somehow that represents 97.

Jessamyn 0:59 Well, no like, like, if you have the number 16 one plus six equals seven, right? So seven is not a self number, because you can make it by adding integers of another number. There is no number that exists. That's an integer where you can add the numbers together and get 97 Oh, that's interesting. It's vaguely interesting.

mathowie 1:22 Wikipedia authors are rich and I get it.

Jessamyn 1:24 Yeah, but yeah, I like how they specify base 10 though, because that's, you know, super, super important when you

mathowie 1:32 said when I heard 97 All I thought it was hot 97 I think that's like New York City's big radio station. That's the first thing I associate with it.

Jessamyn 1:40 I think of the old 90 sevens which are that country band who took their name from the song The wreck of the old 97 which I think was that flame rain

mathowie 1:48 probably Yeah. Yeah, there's a big train Lord folk music history

Jessamyn 1:56 on a lot to sort of talk about you know,

mathowie 1:59 rack of the all 97 That's the best song in the mail train. The mighty winds soundtrack of the mighty wins was the like Spinal Tap of folk music. They did a song about a train wreck that wrecks into a train that goes into a mind and starts a fire and kills everybody as the greatest Classic is the greatest train tragedy train slash mind. They combined two genres of folk music, and it was cut from the movie, but it's on the soundtrack and it's fucking epic. I would suggest everyone I'll find the link.

Jessamyn 2:31 That's, that's great, because I did love that movie.

mathowie 2:35 I don't know if it holds up. But yeah, it was funny at the time. Yeah. All right. jobs jobs that I saw a couple decent Professor jobs like real tenure track. Real good thing and where is this in Michigan? Big Rapids. What school? Is that? Ferris?

Jessamyn 2:52 Do? You mean? Grand Rapids?

mathowie 2:53 No. Big Rapids. It's Ferris State University.

Jessamyn 2:58 So there's a big rapid in the Grand Rapids. Do you think those people fight?

Cortex 3:02 The people from big representative? Grand Rapids are real Lottie da Oh, yeah.

Cortex 3:13 Big Rapids people. They're like, you know, the only reason to call it Big Rapids is you couldn't think of a three letter word for rapids.

mathowie 3:18 So much. Fists, Ferris State University wouldn't get the FSU fuck shut up.edu Because that's Florida, right? Or heard of that before? Never function up. It's like, all 80s punk rock is Fs you've seen FSU graffiti all over? I'm sure in the 80s and you've probably just wondered it's when right I don't know fuck the world right? That's what used to be.

Jessamyn 3:46 That's something totally different. Yeah. FTW fuck the world.

mathowie 3:49 FSU. People love to wear Florida State University shirts like weird you know hardcore punk you guys because it's funny to walk around.

Jessamyn 3:58 Just so you guys that are local tagger in town here. his initials are m FMF graffiti all over Randolph Vermont, which is super weird.

mathowie 4:09 What kind of graffiti artists works in Randolph, Vermont.

Cortex 4:14 It's an untapped one probably.

mathowie 4:17 That is a very specialized skill set. Yes.

Cortex 4:20 I can go to the big city and tag something it's you and 1000 other tags you go to Randolph Vermont says Well

Jessamyn 4:27 that really is true. The guy

mathowie 4:29 literally a small fish or what big fish small pond. Yeah.

Jessamyn 4:34 I just scroll and now all my map is on Madagascar.

mathowie 4:38 There was there's a lot of little website design help needed kinds of jobs.

Jessamyn 4:46 And the international legal foundation is looking for a deputy program director, a lawyer with criminal defense experience. That's pretty cool. They do. They do cool work.

mathowie 4:57 I O F The National Legal Foundation so it's kind of like a doctors without borders of lawyers maybe?

Cortex 5:05 I think it was asking in the the existential sense. What is it really though? Well,

mathowie 5:10 they weren't there at home, Paul, Afghanistan, Tunisia, that's pretty sweet, noble advocacy, conflict lawyer, I guess.

Cortex 5:21 I really, really hope that someone will take subs up on the job listing for designing and creating a custom crosshair sampler based on the horse ebooks, tweet, Everything happened so much. Because I want to see a picture of the finished product. I still like

Jessamyn 5:37 to have email interaction during the design process. Like a threat doesn't matter.

mathowie 5:46 negotiable so go up, the more interaction there is.

Cortex 5:50 I've still got hanging on my wall, you know, forever, it will hang there as the it's not a cat thing. It's a won't thing. Cross Stitch that pirate member. Yeah. And so I at this point, I'm strongly in favor of internet related cross stitch stuff. It just seems like

mathowie 6:05 cross stitch is the best. Internet, cross stitch is the best. I guess we should move on the projects.

Cortex 6:13 Projects. There was a bunch of stuff. I feel like I feel like the the end of summer coming around and people getting back to school. Oh, yeah, like,

Jessamyn 6:22 procrastinate hard now

mathowie 6:25 to build my own CMS.

Jessamyn 6:28 So the last podcast was when was the

Cortex 6:32 term month I want to say yeah, it started September,

Jessamyn 6:35 because I like went in strong and was you know, favoriting and voting and stuff like that. Oh, it was posted on my birthday. Which meant that wiggling hands which was my favorite project is fair for this one. Oh, it's for robot hero. I don't know if you guys saw it. But it's basically like a joke. video that has all those like I'm a hand and I'm writing a thing on the whiteboard to try and explain it to you. Because for some reason that makes more sense. And so yeah.

mathowie 7:04 Oh, those are the the Lila fever thing from Seattle. It's Common Craft. He's the guy to draw. He's the cause him I guess paper craft or something. He does little characters and the explainer videos. Yeah, he was kind of like The Godfather that. Really? Yeah, I told him like, Hey, are you worried that Instagrams Hyperlapse came out because you can kind of do this now cheap and easy. Like you just set up a phone with the hyperlapse app running and it speeds everything up and smooth it out in such a beautiful way.

Jessamyn 7:37 Wait, so that's a feature that Instagram has now? No, yeah, they

mathowie 7:41 made it they made that new Hyperlapse app. I'm sure you might have seen videos of like, sure. Oh, well check out Hyperlapse it's actually insanely cool. It is it is like it's a time lapse video. But it's really smart about seaming everything together and stabilizing the camera in a totally incredible way. So it's not like shakey cam, but it is like I'll show you one I did one cool one on my bike trip.

Jessamyn 8:08 I saw something from your bike trip. I just

mathowie 8:11 didn't mean to the coast. But one was I purposely focused it on a on a object and it looks cool when it stated the

Jessamyn 8:19 stabilizations around it change it would be I would have to set

mathowie 8:23 up a tripod, you know and shoot video for X minutes to make it work. Like in the old days. Here it is try this video really quick when it goes around the statue. It's amazing. So Hyperlapse you could you could aim this at a wall and you could draw stuff and it would just seamlessly put everything together and make it almost ran those people over. It would it would make it would make a pretty cool way to do that. So the I didn't get to watch the video. I think I was like, on my phone and I didn't like turn up the volume to hear like Is it a joke? Like, is it just silly?

Jessamyn 8:57 It's funny, but it's but it's it's it's pro done. So it's like, like it's funny but done by people who actually know what they're doing. I enjoyed it. It's been a while since I've seen it. But what I want to come out of this is a wiggling hands. Song.

mathowie 9:17 Fred Berger, crowdsource cloud based drone popsicle delivery solution?

Jessamyn 9:23 Uh huh. Yeah, well, cuz that's the thing. They're like, what if I mean, it is because those videos are idiotic after a while, like you see one and you're like, that's super cool. And then you see 15 And you're like, these people have never had an original idea in their lives.

Cortex 9:34 Well, they're spending a lot of time doing something more quickly. That specific

Jessamyn 9:40 machine basically,

mathowie 9:42 yeah, the thing that I think angered the Common Craft people is they were like the kings of this and they did it like 20 of them and they're all really I mean, they spent six months on each one talked about serious topics to like, let's explain why the deficit sucks or why why health care shit Yeah, but then like some Christian organization made one using their same like drawing characters and it was like, here's why you should never get an abortion and they had it was like aimed at 15 year olds on YouTube and it was like all this you should you know shame pregnancy you shouldn't ever have an abortion when you're 15 and they had to like a chick stop having sex that'll solve everything had a cease and desist them because it was gross because it looks they use the same like there's an explainer video on you know, never getting pregnant. And it was horrible. So, that put them in a weird position. Speaking of getting pregnant, I don't finish that sentence pregnant. The guest is a real movie. The guest is a real movie done by

Jessamyn 10:47 Keith. All those words you're saying and I have no idea what they attached it was

mathowie 10:51 a project by is it Keith Kaldur. He's like, he's like a real film producer on IMDb with like all these little small horror films. And this apparently is kind of like a sort of horror film, but like also an adventure thriller or something. And it's like a real movie that's been at festivals and as a crazy high Rotten Tomato score that I think comes out like this week, or last week. Great. Congratulations. I totally want to see it. Like this is a pretty big project for projects.

Jessamyn 11:23 Well, the video is of their star actor being asked how many American actors he had to beat off for the

mathowie 11:34 think they were in Britain. And that was just some unfortunate wording in it like Good Morning America show. Good Morning Britain show.

Jessamyn 11:40 It makes me laugh a little bit. It's fantastic.

mathowie 11:44 I have a civil war map one, but I don't remember it.

Jessamyn 11:48 Josh should talk about the anthology of the best short stories that was put together by dances with sneetches and posted a meta filter by Joseph calm and others fully awesome. But basically, in 1914, there's a New York Times article 26, writers were asked what's the best short story and 1914 those are all old enough their public domain for the most part. And so this person, put them together in a three volume series of what these best stories were and put them in little groups. And it's just a really cool, really cool project. Great stuff to read from 100 years ago.

mathowie 12:29 That's what I wanted to do like five years ago, and like 30, Kindle self serve stuff came out. I was like, I should find public domain stuff that's good to like, learn how to like markup the typography, like just make nice looking ebooks. But it's hard to tell what people just want really popular stuff. And everyone's already released that on ebook, you know, like the

Jessamyn 12:49 Julesburg wind up making bad shops to do it once you can find the original texts.

mathowie 12:58 And short stories are hard to find good ones, lots of

Jessamyn 13:02 them, pull them out of other stuff. And so the instance was teachers did a whole bunch of copy editing, which is also one of the problems with older stuff. Like I know what the archive all of our shit is Kanki like, the OCR is done by robots, not by humans. And so it needs a human eyes to clean it up and deal with it.

mathowie 13:20 So yes. The other day, some situation remind me of a short story. I've written fifth grade and I remembered like, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, we all have these short stories in the language arts books that were just like five 600 Page monsters with little four or five page stories and I'm like, I want to buy a fifth graders short story like those are the best stories because it was like minimal commitment. And they were like, I'm still remember, you know, a sci fi story. I read their high interest

Jessamyn 13:49 even when they're sort of low readability level, which is what they're chosen for my mother used to, like build those anthologies when she was a textbook writer.

mathowie 13:56 And I was like gonna use asthma fillers and like it was there in the future and there's an amusement park and you win a pass to it but it's basically the lottery right like someone on the roller coaster is not there at the end of the ride and they never talk about the death angle.

Unknown Speaker 14:12 She didn't get great story and really when

mathowie 14:14 a day as the valedictorian to a to Disneyland it was really like thinning the herd. And at one point, she stumbles on like piles of bodies. It's really gross. And that's when it's like, that's the very end of the story. But I was a little kid. I didn't understand metaphor and stuff. And I'm like, wow, why is that seat empty? That's really strange. She's having a great time though. The other day? Yeah, man. Where is that? I need to ask Metafilter Oh, my favorite project of all time. Last couple of months.

Cortex 14:46 Immediate walk back. Yeah.

mathowie 14:49 Go ring in that hyperbole is a under viewed which is awesome. It searches YouTube. For default file names like format Yeah, the format of junk you dump off of like little Panasonic cameras and little Sony cameras and GoPros and iPhones. And then it looks for movies with like zero to like 100 views and you just a randomizer and you hit it. They're very strange and voyeuristic and personal because it's usually like two people in a house filming a cat or something. But once in a while, it's just random. Like, often another language weird. She's a puppy in a bathtub. I got like people yelling at each other in maybe tie over a car crash on the street like and sometimes you get ones with like one view or zero views that kind of gives you an extra point is that a chicken fight on the front? Like there's just super random weird stuff. And it's kind of it's awesome for just weirdo discovery.

Jessamyn 15:52 There's a kid at a Warner Brothers theme park. This is awesome. I love this and it gets close to the metal filter.

mathowie 15:58 Yeah, it's the best time sink in the world. And then apparently, there's a Reddit subreddit for this. But there's also a subreddit for someone came up with the idea like a year or two ago. I forget what it's called. And so someone's in the metaphors that they referenced the other thread. I mean, the other subreddit where people just dig up, like really rare, really amazing videos that more people should see. So it's kind of like a content discovery engine that's

Cortex 16:25 like how something like this comes along. It feels like something in this thing blows up like every year because people are like, oh yeah, this sort of thing is fucking amazing. Then everybody loses like a week to it used to be like the newest images uploaded to Live Journal feed. I remember though, like a big thing and and there's similar sort of searching for the the default file name, but for like pictures on various like, you know, blogging platforms. Back in

Jessamyn 16:53 the day, that would be like, a day for like typos. Oh, you know, like, you could find plan pilots. I know. I've talked about this before. And the high price too. Yeah. Because they're not in the regular market of marketing. Yeah, well, these are fun metal filter threads, too, because then people just dig up their favorites. And they're like, check this out. And then somebody's like, I feel bad for other people. Because whatever. And then

mathowie 17:18 I think this hits a middle perfect middle ground where it's like, it's like found art. It's like going through a junk drawer but someone else's so slightly voyeuristic. It doesn't feel too weird. It's not gross. I mean, you would think there'd be more like, I don't know, accidental selfie videos or something. But there's not that many.

Cortex 17:36 It's usually really kind of shows just the broad like, you know, boring vacation photos. nature of how people are mostly using stuff. And I think that's kind of Yes, I like there's nothing voyeuristic about the presentation within the project. I mean, there's nothing that you can do to stop someone from them going, Oh, look at this is the most embarrassing

Jessamyn 17:53 stuff. I think we're letting you flag them for titillating. Whatever. Yeah,

Cortex 17:57 exactly. And you know, someone who really wants to do that can DIY and very easily, you know, there's no shortage of people on the internet willing to like, you know, sit around. And do you know, the manual work of being weird about other people's public but private, you know, stuff that they share guilelessly. So

mathowie 18:13 well, when you think of the core aspects of the project is I am searching the default file names of of cameras. And then it's kind of like, did those people know they press the upload button at that point? Like maybe they turned it on at some point, or like it's synced to the cloud? Because that was the built in feature? You know, it asked them for a sign in they didn't think about it like,

Jessamyn 18:34 videos, the default feature is to cloud eyes all this stuff. Yeah.

Cortex 18:41 I explained cloud to but to some friends the other week, because we had been going to I don't remember how it came up. Exactly. I think I made a joke that depended on getting that reference. And then they're like, Well, why are you talking about clouds? It's like, oh, well, there's this filter where you can change every instance of the cloud into my button. So you read the internet like yeah, upload your data to my buddy,

mathowie 19:03 Stephen Frank at panic and Portland did that Chrome and Safari plugin and he like screenshots it about once a month, just amazing ones.

Cortex 19:11 So I explained that to them. And it turns out if you if you explain a joke about butts to a bunch of musicians who are about to go on like a three day road trip they apparently spend that entire tour making jokes about sticking things up my cloud and so on. I wasn't there mind you, but the bassist who was not at the gig that I was with them at doing video stuff was with them for that whole weekend. So I assume she heard like that just fucking constantly. Not having to live with the results of my reference but

Jessamyn 19:45 the Harvey girls again, I am I am.

Cortex 19:49 Recent. It was last summer actually.

Jessamyn 19:53 So no, not at all. Well,

Cortex 19:55 it's not super recent, but we haven't really been playing out or anything. So we ended up spending a bunch of time working on a record and just practicing at home because just logistics and health issues. Both of them had back surgery last year. The way it works is we ran back surgery and then we'd arrange another dig like after the recuperation period and the other one the the backs so yeah, it's it was like a terrible string of bad luck. But at this point, we're actually getting ready to gig we're going up.

Jessamyn 20:27 I saw the video you linked who knows where and I was like, oh, that's Josh. Oh, that's the band. He didn't used to be it wasn't and then wasn't. And then I guess now he's back. You know, it's like you see your friends out and you're like, Wait, did you guys get back together?

mathowie 20:41 I thought the three of you

Cortex 20:43 again, yeah, just the three of us. And then yeah, we've got the album coming out complicated ladies coming out.

Jessamyn 20:49 And I did love that blue velvet theme video. It was trippy and we I was just that

Cortex 20:53 was higher was like hey, let's just let's just sweet blue velvet. That was like okay, and then he just like, did the whole thing. It

mathowie 20:58 was impressive. Sweeting, man, it was still a big thing. Wait, what does that mean? That's waiting.

Cortex 21:04 It's making sort of January fan like Lo Fi versions of movies it came from thank you for are be big Bitcoin rewind I think was Jack space. And

Jessamyn 21:23 like SW e ti ng.

Cortex 21:27 Why? It was from the plot of the film, they accidentally erased every single video in the videos, trying to say then they made their own version of Ghostbusters. Like, this is weird. I don't think there's

Jessamyn 21:42 love with it. Right. So

mathowie 21:43 what's this Star Wars and now we have our strikes back? Yes. fanmade?

Cortex 21:49 Yeah, the new empire version? Or Empire edition of the 15 seconds at a time, Ban crowdsource remake? Yeah. Oh,

mathowie 21:58 have you seen it? Jessamyn. It's like some are really well done. And some are horrible. It's great. Just cut.

Cortex 22:05 Seeing that live at XOXO.

mathowie 22:07 i This may hit

Jessamyn 22:08 the who's got time limit for me. You know what I mean? Like, I love you crazy nerds and you're crazy projects. But watching a full length

mathowie 22:16 movie. You just sweep through randomly, you'll just see random stuff. You just jump around on YouTube sounds

Jessamyn 22:23 like something you'd like to keep on the screen during a party when you were doing something else.

Cortex 22:27 You just like holding down the screen like playing a

mathowie 22:30 gig? Actually, yes, that's the new Harvey girls backdrop.

Jessamyn 22:34 Hey, go. Bam.

mathowie 22:36 I love this Creative Commons thing of the day that roll truck roll is doing because I worked at Creative Commons. And we always wish someone would do this. And it's it ginormous amount of, you know, time commitment to basically blog, all the creative commons things in the world the best things. So some of these are images. Some of these are videos. Some of these are stories like that's I mean, there's not really good search engines for it's it's hard. So I thought that was a good first attempt to do something like this. It looks like Tumblr.

Jessamyn 23:10 Has a Creative Commons searcher on their images kind of. Yeah. Well, and didn't roll truck roll used to work at Creative Commons. I don't think he does anymore. Maybe he still does think so.

Jessamyn 23:24 Maybe? I mean, I know the guy. Elliot.

mathowie 23:28 Yeah, he's only still work there. Three pages of stuff on this. Flickr, Flickr stools are amazing. I don't know how you'd get XKCD did some stuff or at least. Oh, Jonathan, man, that's right. He does. He's the daily song guy. And he does all his music under licenses. So this like, gives you something to look at plus teaches you about it in a nice way. Like this is something I always wanted to see Creative Commons do like 10 years ago.

Jessamyn 23:54 Yeah, they don't say Creative Commons on the Google image search. But you can look for reuse with modification, reuse, non commercial reuse with modification, which is basically licenses. There's some

mathowie 24:04 super duper advanced view that I'm sure nobody can get to easily on Google where you can search Creative Commons stuff. And I literally, it literally came out like six months ago. And I went to meetings in 2002 with my head of Google Search,

Jessamyn 24:19 Google images or Google regular Google regular. I think like they had a dedicated dig in the Advanced tab for advanced

mathowie 24:26 Yeah, you can get only Creative Commons results and like we had days and days of meetings in 2002 over this since like, they released it 12 years later. Yeah. But I mean, they, you know, everything's big and hard the problems they solve. So really organizing the entire world's information. They

Jessamyn 24:48 would like you to think that but really, I think it's a question of priorities. They're the largest advertising company in the world through really

mathowie 24:59 I think them most popular thing was the pay the piper thing I didn't use it, but it's supposed to be a Chrome extension that blocks you from. It's like a to do list that blocks you from like time wasting sites and stuff. Ralph top Ralph top

Jessamyn 25:16 posted a meta filter by Joseph Conrad is fully awesome. So that's to Joseph Conrad Philly awesome bumps to Metafilter. So what does it do? Did you try

mathowie 25:25 it? No, I didn't try it out. But it's a to do list thingy. I mean, everyone I saw this on Twitter, people are like, This is amazing.

Jessamyn 25:35 So basically, you have to complete a

mathowie 25:39 task, like, oh, gotta

Jessamyn 25:40 do the dishes before I can browse? Metafilter,

mathowie 25:42 right. So like a you click, I did the dishes and it goes, awesome. Let's load up some fun sites for you.

Jessamyn 25:47 And it just encouraged you to lie to your computer.

Cortex 25:50 I always kind of worried about that sort of thing with me and this sort of thing. Because I like I think this, this seems like a great idea. But reading, getting things done at some point seems like a great idea, too. And they're both things that I get as far as thinking through how it would be good if I did that thing. But it would also be something I'd be tempted to not do a good job up. And so then I just don't do it. Because I'm like, Oh, but I might not, you know,

Jessamyn 26:16 the shame Hall. Yeah, it comes a shame Hall.

Cortex 26:20 Exactly. And so like, I like the idea of this, but I think I might get I think

mathowie 26:25 it blocks you when you're goofing around and says, Hey, you know, you should work on some of your tasks, which reminds me of a idea someone had a long time ago is to make AdBlock insert ads that are exactly what you need. Like stuff off your to do list or reminder list. So like it'd be surfing New York Times and the ads would still be there and the ad sighs but be like, don't forget to get milk when you go home from work tonight.

Jessamyn 26:52 Like like, oh, like personal motivation. For you

mathowie 26:56 like messages to yourself to like, don't forget. Don't forget your daughter has belay at five o'clock. And like if you just see it all day over and over. You'll never forget like, Yeah, I wish someone would build that. Maybe let's just get it out there in the world. Are there any other favorite project? I

Cortex 27:16 liked? This clickbait quiz? Is it a clickbait headline or spam email? Crazy trick by See 95008 Simple zip code? I don't know. I don't know. Okay, I'll tell you what, I'll I'll describe the project and you plug that number into Oh, is it Upworthy basic? Exactly. It's just, you know, gather guess with whether each of these things is subject to a spam or is a news headline from Upworthy or one of those various clickbait type things is real simple. It's exactly what it sounds like. It was kind of fun to play with. And it's a little depressing.

mathowie 27:57 It's hard.

Cortex 27:59 I love like their comment on the folders. I learned that browsing known clickbait offenders for headlines was less pleasant than browsing my spam email.

mathowie 28:06 Wow. Why isn't it one crazy trick.com Q you and your I love subdomains yeah you do wow

Jessamyn 28:16 you're an optimizer

mathowie 28:20 don't think there's my last one is vintage visualizations which was from Soma LK had posted before about a bunch of cool Civil War maps and now they put it together in this like thing and I think he by posters of ancient maps need like 1700s maps like the really cool the predominating sects of 1890 that looks like it's going to be all male on the west coast because they're all minors and stuff. Am I N E R s

Jessamyn 28:59 wow these are surprisingly lovely. And I like

mathowie 29:03 the like I don't know if this is fellow but the yellowing of the paper makes the posters look awesome and old right away these are all you know public domain posters and maps being I guess printed what are his printing them? Looks cool. I'm gonna say this is

Jessamyn 29:21 another metal filter person that we have who's doing really cool Mappy stuff right like don't we have like a map salesman dude also like J J. J. J i j. J Baca

mathowie 29:31 think so yeah.

Jessamyn 29:32 J J J J J J Ah, those are beautiful. Distribution of depth deaths from scarlet fever illiteracy.

mathowie 29:48 24 by 36 for some

Jessamyn 29:50 reason Oklahoma's just right there in the middle without Hmm.

mathowie 29:54 Oh my god, you can get them framed. That's the best. I wonder what the I still can't tell what the SIR This is this a front for a service but

Jessamyn 30:04 wow ecommerce software by Shopify or is that not what you meant?

mathowie 30:07 Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Well, I just wonder if there's the front end for some sort of Cafe pressive posters that we do the Brooklyn brain are

Jessamyn 30:15 you guys? Okay? I thought I recognize that guy from somewhere else.

mathowie 30:19 Oh, then they Yeah, they probably built it all themselves. And it's amazing. Yeah. And

Jessamyn 30:23 they're like, since these atlases are from 1870 1880, and 8090, some of the languages on the charts is a bit anachronistic and awkward.

mathowie 30:30 How bad is that? I want to know, that's the problem that

Jessamyn 30:34 I have with Open Library, right? Like I pull stuff out of it for the Twitter stream, and, like, you'll get the fascinating books, but they're racist, or sexist, or like, they're just terrible. And regardless of whether they reflect the stuff at the times, I feel like if you drag them up to be like, You should look at this and then it's like, some horrible racist thing. You have to really be careful and you know, in a tweet, how can you I need some like for character? Sorry, we know it's racist. The pictures are good

mathowie 31:03 or dangerous truggy guy and the word racist in the middle of the head. Like, is there there's got to be like a wiki pedia timeline of terms we've called Native Americans for the last 200 years, you know, like, God, I think of like, a dozen weird ones. And they used to be acceptable, you know, I guess savage. Right. That's just,

Jessamyn 31:25 it was just the general. I mean, that's a colonialist issue with you know, the the colonized for everywhere like that wasn't America, we

mathowie 31:32 wish we'd come up to Canada. Like, you know, when you visit Canada, they have the coolest term ever First Nations is like a beautiful, like, remind you that you weren't here first. They were like, I like First Nations.

Jessamyn 31:45 Well, they have good sort of lobbying groups who are like, Yep,

mathowie 31:51 yeah. Well, you want to go to Metafilter stuff.

Cortex 31:57 Sure. Let's do it. Alright,

mathowie 31:59 Boom. Done. Oh, because I've been enjoying Star Trek. Original for the first time my life I really enjoyed the Star Trek and widescreen. Then it was this is like what I thought Star Trek would be like someone made a Tumblr blog of like, they're piecing together frames from old star tracks and like up in up the saturation making them beautiful. So these like, epic widescreen classic films, they have awesome look to them. And that's about the only downside with like, watching Star Trek, the original series on Netflix on a modern TV and stuff is you know, you get the crunch, a little mini box, you get the four three and you know, does the set design, I mean, everything's in you know, 10 ADP to me, and, you know, it's, it's you can see that

Jessamyn 32:48 blind to all that stuff. And Jim's always like, you can't tell it the aspect ratio is just

mathowie 32:54 an aspect ratio. Yeah, it's definitely a thing but

Jessamyn 32:57 tell four 316 whatever the other thing is, I just don't notice it.

mathowie 33:01 It's it's weird to watch something it's like so expansive, such a huge part of culture it was blew people's minds and then it's this this little goofy thing with cardboard sets, you know, when you watch it. And so these images look more like how I thought it would be, which is like, you know, this epic space battles and, and it's just like, gorgeous imagery of, I guess, lifted from just taking multiple frames when they pan around the room.

Cortex 33:27 Like they're just taken like relatively,

Jessamyn 33:29 from the people that attract core. Yeah. Epic.

mathowie 33:34 Look at this. Look at this triple post. I mean, come on the triple pile, to amazing.

Jessamyn 33:40 See, I mean, I get why you're excited. And I'm just kind of like, it's a it doesn't look different to me. I understand what happened. And yet,

mathowie 33:49 yeah, like in 2014. watching Star Trek for the first time, you're like, this is this is low production values. This is, you know, I thought, in my mind, it'd be so much greater but because I'm used to crazy ass sci fi, CGI, blah, blah, blah.

Jessamyn 34:04 So if you've been going through and like doing it through fanfare, or are you just doing it just to do it? Oh,

mathowie 34:09 yeah, we did through fanfare so it's Star Trek Saturdays. We've posted on new Star Trek. I have a couple Star Trek's behind already. Like it's as if it's a podcast so other people are making the posts now but yeah, it was good. It starts out a little rough and I kind of blown away that this was like eight o'clock on a major network in like 1964 or five the plots of pretty complex sci fi crazy stuff that would have blown people's minds I would think you know, like people are shape shifting and and controlling your thoughts and you know, it's a completely new sort of,

Jessamyn 34:46 right and you didn't have like 100 Other sci fi things to be like

mathowie 34:49 to compare against Yeah. And it's funny to see the show like get its legs pretty quick. At first there's like a gym and it seems massive and switches people walk around normal clothes and then like a To me, yeah. And then a couple episodes in I guess that never happens again ever. You know, it's more of a small military kind of, you know, smaller ship a smaller crew. The first couple episodes Yeah, I think people say that there could have been 300 people aboard and there's all sorts of rooms they talk about.

Jessamyn 35:17 Hey, did you guys know that there's no Saturday morning cartoons anymore?

Cortex 35:20 Yeah, just I saw that going around. I did not. I

mathowie 35:26 did that when the seems like that happened a long time ago to me.

Jessamyn 35:30 Well, I haven't been Saturday morning cartoons for me since I was in college. But I you know,

mathowie 35:35 but I mean, literally, if you turn on a TV at 9am in like the late 90s, it got pretty bad in early 2000s. It's always like the omit the amazing miracle grow hair cream, like everything is paid programming.

Jessamyn 35:47 Like you're mixing your metaphors. Well, maybe not. I don't even know.

Cortex 35:50 It's really amazing.

mathowie 35:52 Everything was paid programming, you know, like NBC needs to get rid of that stuff. They pre sold to some cheesy outfit. So I haven't seen a Saturday morning cartoon. Even broadcast neons

Jessamyn 36:06 Yeah, I guess I never think about it. Because if I'm watching cartoons, it's like Cartoon Network or adult swim or something.

mathowie 36:12 The world is on demand now for kids so lucky.

mathowie 36:20 Any other good metal filter posts? Oh, gosh.

Jessamyn 36:24 Oh, sure. I enjoyed this completely pedantic argument with a whole bunch of nerds

Cortex 36:29 do we do like one post? Like you mentioned one post to like, Matt then asked if there were any. I feel like you're pacing is a little bit.

Jessamyn 36:40 This was this was Jim's post. And you know, I liked your turns, because I like Jim, but 123 people favorited it, which was crazy. But basically, it's like a Doofy little website that you can send stuff through and it'll fix stuff. This it'll do rot 13 stuff, it'll pick random lines, it'll take a column out from staff. But for me, it solved a problem because I'm constantly taking people's crap from email and having to turn it into a document or taking documents and having to turn it into email. And removing hard line breaks is a thing that I've always done with like, a series of finding replaces because I'm not smart enough to put it together with a script. And so it was interesting to see this, but it was almost immediately derailed by nerds talking about the shell environment. And so

mathowie 37:33 God Yeah,

Cortex 37:34 was it all for Bash is like a one liner. Yeah. Like a party inside of me that wants to scream that but I'm like, shut the fuck up. That part of me. That's for you. But it's like, an arcane way to go. Yeah,

Jessamyn 37:49 denying the fact that like 90% of the world uses gooeys. And there's nothing wrong with that.

mathowie 37:55 These these things every like two years when I have to like reformat someone's website. And it's amazing when people send you like, an RTF file of the content of their site and the shit you have to do to clean it up to just what exactly it right. Yeah, this is super useful as a utility, like to put them all together.

Jessamyn 38:15 I mean, how much time do you guys spend in the GUI compared to the command line?

mathowie 38:18 Oh, God, I run to terminal once a week for eight minutes. Like,

Jessamyn 38:23 you know, I've used terminal more in the last six days because I'm talking around till the till the but other than that, like, never I go in and update my movie list by hand, because I don't know. But other than that, so at any rate, this post was fun, immediately derailed and turned into one of those metal filter fights you could really only have with middle aged nerds on the internet on metal filter.

mathowie 38:48 So Josh explained to us randos what beer those are talking about, like, you can cut out your bash shell to do these things with like, like shortcuts or something like

Jessamyn 39:00 that. And then you take like three random letters, and it'll just do it all for you.

Cortex 39:05 Yeah, shell scripting is a long and proud tradition. going back decades

mathowie 39:11 input file, here's the action I want to take output file and it's like instant I'm sure there's websites that do this. Yeah, well, there's a bunch of little

Cortex 39:19 like, shell utilities like yeah, and yeah, you can piping in piping around stuff in shells, you could you could really build up kind of any little text filter you want fairly efficiently from just like a few passes through these things. If you know that like if you spend the time to really get to know how that stuff works. You can get a lot done and very few keystrokes

Jessamyn 39:44 lazy nerd thing because you learn it all once and then you set it running and then it just runs Yeah. Remember, you

mathowie 39:55 are Yeah, I was trying. I was up for hours in the middle of the night. The other night and I was trying to research a blogging a command line blogging app for the Tildy club. And I got to like the install docs

Jessamyn 40:07 up using speaking up.

mathowie 40:09 I used a desktop app, but it's crazy. But it's like a dream weaver, like competitor, but there's some like no js app. And it was like, Oh, this thing does everything for you. In the back end. It's like, it's like JavaScript and PHP, but you don't need to worry about that. Because it's magic. And it worked great. Except for, you had to put in a long command and run it. And it was like, what they like, and I'm blanking on the like the command like shortcut command from anywhere in your system to launch it, like the super basic, you know, like, whatever the hell that's called. And it was like, an instruction, the instructions like you just do it. And it's like, everyone should know how this is done and a link to like an obscure, someone asking on Stack Exchange and not getting a great Like, it wasn't even handling, I got a stack shade. It's like, this is how you add some of the bash shell at launch is anything. Don't ask this. Like, that was the most voted up answer. And I was like, oh my god, like, why isn't someone just write down the command? Thank you peek

Jessamyn 41:10 through the door, and then you just shut the door again. Because you're like, if this is what I have to do to do this, I'm just super not interested. I'm totally fine. Just so

mathowie 41:19 the first four paragraphs of the answer are about the Unix history of how we even got to this point, which is also what I love not hearing when you ask someone a question? Well, there's several schools of thought on that. Let's go back to the Stallman so yeah, like, just God, how do I make this work? Anywho These are awesome to love.

Cortex 41:39 Utilities are great. Yes,

Jessamyn 41:41 they are. I use a JavaScript word count web utility. And it's probably like the most frequent web utility. So this this appealed to me. But I felt bad for Jim because he found the thing and I was like, Oh my God, that's awesome. I posted it. And was like, That's so awesome. And then a whole bunch of nerds were like

mathowie 41:58 beautifully favorite. formatted it with underlined, underlined, properly used a long time. Nice and lovely post. It's so lovely. And nerds. Yeah.

Cortex 42:10 We should we should we should explain till the club but we should probably. First we chose Hello. Yes. So Ella, is this thing that's been lately and nobody really knows where it's going. Exactly. And it's

mathowie 42:24 it's Twitter plus, Tumblr. Really? It's kind of

Jessamyn 42:28 Facebook for it's not?

Cortex 42:30 Yeah, it's sort of

Jessamyn 42:32 that's including me. I don't I'm not, you know, othering. That's not me and my friends. The

mathowie 42:39 the images are nice and big. And you can write as much as you want. And it's it's designing

Cortex 42:46 designers on sort of a social media platform. And it's missing a lot of features. So far. It's not really anything. It's it's Yeah, well, they added that, that. Yeah, they've been slowly adding stuff. But yeah.

mathowie 43:01 Joke is, once you get a ham radio that since the joke was I have a ham radio is everyone's transit transmissions. My ello feed is like, says, Allo? Do I even like this, you know?

Cortex 43:14 Well, because everybody showed up once because it became the big tizzy, like, what last week or the week before? It is like, everybody's like, Oh, Allah suddenly went from being like, oh, yeah, I'm just now you want to invite No. Okay. And that sort of chatting around to like,

Jessamyn 43:26 we'll never charge you will never advertise. Because it was it was like, you know, friend of a friend. And at some point friend of a friend hits this, like, Spark flash point. Where, yeah,

Cortex 43:37 yeah, all of a sudden, whether or not you can actually keep those promises and continue to having a functioning place is a good question. And, you know, in their defense, maybe what they'll do is get to the point where if it gets unmaintainable, they'll say, Oh, well, it's unmaintainable. I guess we better shut it down. Yeah, I think they actually say, Oh, Tom maintainable. Let's break some promises. Let's get some money for having to explain how we're not technically going back on

Jessamyn 44:02 what Andy said, right? I started with a bunch of VC, and then pretended kinda like they didn't like. And then the guy's like, I totally listened for mine. And I'm like, you totally live in Brooklyn. And

mathowie 44:16 oh, you know, I actually talked to Andy a bunch about that. And I went, like, you know, I think you're a little harsh on him. Okay. They took a little money, but it seems like a cool thing. It costs money to build these things. And these guys seemed cool. And then he then we dug into it for about half hour. And then we realized, I think it was a lot worse than he made it sound. Like, they got four or 500 grand in January, and they have 12 engineers, and I'm like, I know how much it costs to run a business. Like, I think they're out of money. And I think they went public, and they became huge, so they could get a lot more money to keep going. Because like, they keep saying, Oh, we don't care about money, man. They'll never be ads and

Jessamyn 44:57 we're gonna add little boutique II features

mathowie 44:59 if you run the numbers Like the 1% people that pay for things, it's like you need 10 million users to get the 1% that would pay 20 bucks a year, and then your money number $2 million is all you can barely make payrolls. hostings gonna be like half a million. Like, it's really rough to just say that, you know, you can make users pay and they'll totally add.

Jessamyn 45:21 Doesn't seem like a plan so much is an aspirational statement. Yeah,

Cortex 45:25 like like that could happen. That could totally be a motivational poster. But it's not necessarily a sound business plan.

mathowie 45:33 Right? We'll never have ads.

Jessamyn 45:36 But yeah, but here's the thing that we're not calling it. Photos are

mathowie 45:40 nice. And they're big. I wish twitter facebook took a lead from like, yeah, removing half of the interface actually makes more a nicer looking site. They made some weird choices. But it's, I like the big images. That's about it. I haven't posted

Jessamyn 45:55 anything there yet. But I do have an account there. So moving on from Allah. So Allah was like, two weeks ago,

Cortex 46:01 yeah, two weeks ago,

mathowie 46:01 two weeks ago. And then I made a joke on Twitter about TLDs. And Paul Ford is procrastinating on his book deadline. And now

Jessamyn 46:11 because he does, yeah, I

Cortex 46:14 have trained. Yes.

Jessamyn 46:16 Yes. Me fight and who have

Cortex 46:19 finally actually met in person at XOXO. Oh, yeah.

Jessamyn 46:23 Love. He's one of my favorite people. Super great talk.

mathowie 46:26 And yeah, that was a so till the club. It's weird to his club in it because it makes it very clumpy. But

Jessamyn 46:34 no Club was a top level domain until I saw this thing.

mathowie 46:37 That's kind of a running joke among friends. Just buying the dumbness, new top there's like 300 options. They're so dumb, you can get like Jessamyn dot dentist, if you really wanted to. I just bought Matt dot fitness for no reason, because it was so stupid. And it links to my Strava account. So there's so many dumb ones Strava it's like my fitness tracker site. But it's just so it's so dumb. So yeah, he bought till the club. It's kind of a funny name. But and I spent

Jessamyn 47:11 this everybody needed an explanation of what the Tildy thing is. Back in the hippie days, when you had no space, you bought it from a company and all you would get was a Tildy account. Like I was an eskimo.com tilde Jessamyn for the longest time and jessamyn.com lived in that little space.

mathowie 47:31 Sometimes you're dumped on a server and it was like users dot company name.com/till The your username?

Jessamyn 47:39 Or if you went to college during a certain amount of time. Yes.

mathowie 47:43 students.school.edu/tilby. Whatever. Yeah, yeah. And that was usually your email, like, you know, named before the at symbol two in the same integrated system.

Jessamyn 47:54 You know, that's a good I forgot about that. So you

mathowie 47:57 can figure out Yeah, from what you see

Cortex 47:59 pages or whatever, just by guessing and see if they put anything there? It would because like I still a little bit dark arts at the time, like yeah, just because you have internet access doesn't mean you're ever going to do anything with your shell account.

mathowie 48:11 But and my first, my first web pages on an old Digital Alpha server in graduate chem lab, and like, I wasn't, I couldn't like I had to do everything in vi by hand. And like, this was like the first two nights I was playing with my TILBY account was exactly the same. It was amazing. Like remembering all the VI dumb commands.

Jessamyn 48:34 I'm using nano.

mathowie 48:36 Oh, we should get

Jessamyn 48:40 the PICO editor it's actually significantly easier.

mathowie 48:43 Just remembering the very basics. You know, Vi is hilarious.

Jessamyn 48:47 wq Colin wq. Yeah, no, I felt like it was helping my little synapses like older generation people do Sudoku, we fuck around in the, you know, Tildy accounts, trying to remember how to do the stuff.

mathowie 48:59 And then the creativity that launches from this incredibly limited thing is this incredible, like, and then the whole I didn't know wall Unix wall commands, like it turns into like Twitter of just people until the I don't know, like the terminal app has a little badge on it for how many unread messages you have.

Jessamyn 49:19 And there's an IRC channel and you can make a little webpage and there's a web ring. So at any rate, it filled up immediately. And now there's a waiting list and Paul's in over his head. And

mathowie 49:32 he knows a lot of sis admins and he's trying to get it onto it, you know, a box with volunteer workers. And it's funny because it's so dumb and simple and retro and fun. I guess everyone has a pine email account.

Jessamyn 49:45 Paul sent me an email somebody else sent me an email to I haven't checked

mathowie 49:49 my account yet. I should run pine on it because I can't remember how to run

Jessamyn 49:56 mainline In fact when you log in if you log in SSI yakking about tilde club on me fi podcast Josh what? So I go to login because we're talking about logging in and Josh is already logging in and he's on wall.

Cortex 50:13 I just this is how I deal with Shell accounts. I just never log out. Server timeouts.

mathowie 50:19 Pa pine does that mean now can get email or it's probably emails. Tweet inbox zippity doo.

Jessamyn 50:29 Know what, you know what's even less interesting than fucking around in the show

Cortex 50:33 talking about anyway it's awesome it's wonderful and I'm looking forward to seeing how things go with it because someone's setting up a mud I think someone has actually set up a mod after, probably independently of but still after I was hectoring thread to do it.

mathowie 50:49 I forget what mods are like Texas,

Jessamyn 50:52 Josh likes where you walk around around a bunch of little ASCII characters. See a dragon? No,

Cortex 50:58 that's like a muddy, muddy like a dragon. Like a roguelike. except for instead of D, it actually says there is a dragon it's it's much harder to hear. That's crazy.

mathowie 51:10 So someone after I script for that mud, that's gonna be complicated.

Jessamyn 51:15 And then we're back to you know, somebody will write a GUI for it. And then everybody will complain.

Cortex 51:20 No, I actually have I hope I have hoped for some sort of done little mud scene coming together? Well, partly because I love the whole wall aesthetic. But people who have never used Unix shell and seen while happening, what happens? Is it reply type wall, whatever your message is, and then everybody who's logged in who is not suppressing messages, gets this text just blasted onto their screens and broadcast message.

Jessamyn 51:42 Message like system is shutting down now because that's what it used to only be used.

Cortex 51:49 We're shutting down. Yeah, we're using a chat. We're using a chat room that's obscuring everybody's screen. And that's fine. If you're just sitting around like I've got it sitting there and I can watch the chat come in very slowly. But what if you were doing something? Yeah. So you have to pop out of what you're doing. I can turn off messages and then go back to it.

mathowie 52:07 Once you can get the prompt back. Oh, geez. That's the wonderful part of this entire DOM experiment. URL is your screenplay. It's purposely anachronistic and it's fun and goofy. It's exciting. It's

Cortex 52:19 a great little thing.

mathowie 52:20 We're like writers, cutting edge writers using stone tablets. Again,

Jessamyn 52:24 we're not like cutting edge anything. Guys really?

Cortex 52:29 Guys are cutting edge in the sense that like this is back before OSHA regulations. So there's lots of sharp things you can fall on.

mathowie 52:35 Yes. Cutting edge. Don't mess with the Gibson. So I like this

Cortex 52:43 little game. I'll just mention it quickly called compact conflict. Martin vissa. Posted that's just a little sort of risk like game or K dice or dice words for anybody's ever played those. It's a real simple sort of like try and take over the map by taking your turn to move little army dudes around and you get more based on how you're doing

mathowie 53:04 is needed. today. It's like crazy HTML five animations. This is only 13 kilobytes. Do you remember the 50k contest?

Jessamyn 53:13 It made me think of

mathowie 53:15 5k bloatware, bloatware that this is like three D transitions. Like it's amazing what you can do in 13 kilobytes,

Cortex 53:25 like half and half the thread is an argument over you have

mathowie 53:29 JavaScript

Cortex 53:31 plus all the libraries. Right.

Jessamyn 53:37 And this is by Martin Wis. Weiss

mathowie 53:39 posted this.

Cortex 53:44 There are two different clicker posts. And I've already decided not to mention one of it because I just didn't like the clicker enough.

Jessamyn 53:50 You realized by mentioning it, not mentioning it. You mentioned it? Well, yeah.

Cortex 53:55 I'm not gonna plug it. Okay. At this point, it's gonna be really lame if I just don't mention anything. So I mentioned the one that I thought was a little bit more interesting, which is rebuild the universe, which it seems like a bunch of people were playing in the middle of that last month, where you're like buying quantum foam and then like, larger, larger particles with objects and eventually galaxies, and then the entire universe. And it's, it's interesting, because it's a really nice looking clicker. Almost almost all incremental games seem to basically designed in the sense of, I have an idea for the moving parts. Let's attach it to some really basic HTML elements or

Jessamyn 54:32 last month was just basically a ASCII clicker, right? Yeah, I

mathowie 54:36 recall correctly. looked that way. Like it on

Jessamyn 54:39 this one. I learned my lesson. This one

Cortex 54:42 super shiny. It's not even I like the UI is not great. Honestly. Eventually, you have to like scroll down and click on stuff and then you want to read about it but then you have to scroll back up but you have to avoid mousing over any other live element, or replace the descriptive text at the top with the text for that one, and then you can't find out what you were scrolling up to look at It's

Jessamyn 55:01 not really sure what's happening here.

Cortex 55:03 You just click on things and then you get more things, you get the big bang at the end, or do you get like biology? You collapse the entire universe at the end? I think so. And then you get a big stat screen. And it's, you know, it's it's got some, it's got some nice little ideas playing with a form. It's not just a cookie clicker clone, but it does the thing that a lot of them do, where it's like, okay, I bought enough of a thing that I've got enough money to buy the next thing, and then it just iterates like that, without any surprises. There's no like, there's no point where you unlock this thing. And suddenly, now there's oh my god, what the fuck is this? It's like, oh, okay, I bought and now I can buy n plus one. And then that becomes the new end. And then you can buy the new n plus one, and it just sort of keeps going up. So it's kind of, I'm always disappointed when a clicker doesn't like take any swerves. And this one doesn't really take any swerves. But it's got some nice little feedback mechanics, because there's tabs up at the top where you can buy like upgrades and bonuses, and those all feedback and each other and make things more productive and

mathowie 56:00 felt like real money. Like

Cortex 56:06 someone at some point, did not do that. Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure a bunch of people have, in fact, tried this already. But at some point, someone's gonna actually have a successful like, like, really successful, successful, I don't know. Someone's gonna make a sufficiently popular and successful, like clicker game that's going to incorporate an in app purchase type thing. And I feel like the entire internet is going to melt down in real money in app purchase. Yeah, something like that, which seems, the thing is, it doesn't make any sense to do that, because most clicker games are just running in JavaScript that you can edit from the console if you want to. So it has to be something that feels like a phone clicker. And I feel like that's not really the home of a clicker because like it's something about it being in a browser tab that makes it what it is. Basically, I'm trying really hard not to start a blog about clickers, because why would I do that? But I have to just occasionally rant or write a short essay to exorcise the demon apparently. That's what I'm doing right now. So anyway, it's kind of it's very short essay with your mouth. Yes, exactly. Yes, it's a it's a mouth whole essay of word things. But it's very pretty. I thought it was a notably pretty looking bit of

mathowie 57:14 Yeah, it's a pretty clicker, because the clickers are kind of ugly, but that's part of the aesthetic. I like this thread about the Tylenol murders of 92 no idea about

Jessamyn 57:25 this by Alonzo Mosley, FB

mathowie 57:30 three Oh, that's so I was gonna say I didn't even read the long oral history or that nobody's ever found out who actually did it. But it's just everyone's remembrance. This is like the loss of innocence. I was totally there's totally loss of innocence. drugstores aren't safe. This is like we need to lock our doors for the first time in our lives kind of thing. Like metaphorically like I remember we didn't trust anything after that like that. That was so chilling.

Jessamyn 57:56 Like before this drug pill bottles were easy to open.

mathowie 58:00 Yeah, they just kind of like high shelf to keep

Jessamyn 58:04 plastic and crap in my slide like Kid protection, but not like all this special safety garbage.

mathowie 58:10 My dad could get the heebie jeebies off of cotton the cotton ball and that was my job in the house is to remove the cotton from all the bottles so he could use the pills inside. Can you tell

Jessamyn 58:22 me more about these cotton ball? heebie jeebies?

mathowie 58:25 Do you ever get that sometimes it makes my skin crawl to like rub

Jessamyn 58:30 but like oh this is not a thing I have just totally

mathowie 58:32 just fingers touching you'd be like law.

Jessamyn 58:38 Sometimes like that was like weird like hair conditioner and stuff like that. He says he can fill it feel it like filling in his fingerprints and it makes them all squeaky

mathowie 58:48 I have I've gotten it before if I hit it weird, but I can stick my finger and volunteer it out really quick. But yeah, he could not do that. He should have gotten chopsticks really? But I remember Yeah, man you are three holy cow.

Jessamyn 59:01 Yeah, I was in junior high and it was like a huge

Cortex 59:05 aspirin I would have been

mathowie 59:08 like imagine something at the supermarket could suddenly randomly kill you and we poison

Jessamyn 59:12 in it not kill you. Like it's not like being afraid of chicken where it's like you can do risk management to keep yourself

mathowie 59:19 safe instant cyanide death and this is the supermarket the most this is where this is the womb of an adulthood you know where you go to get food to live in

Jessamyn 59:31 a pretty amazing thing that Tylenol was able to bounce back from that actually yeah and

mathowie 59:35 then people talked about like it's amazing they still sell Tylenol since you can like screw up your liver not Tylenol, ibuprofen which one's the one that you're right, you're right. Yeah, you can deliver over the counter if you're not if you just take

Jessamyn 59:47 two you're not careful. Like if you just take slightly more than then you're supposed to you can give yourself some pretty serious liver damage.

mathowie 59:55 Yeah, so yeah, I didn't actually read most of the links on this but it was great to commiserate with everybody about like, wow, that was brutal. I mean, it was like the Cold War. You know, is that important? I think how much it changed us. So weird. I wish it was three

Jessamyn 1:00:12 Cold War, but I'm just

mathowie 1:00:14 saying I was I was worried about getting killed by something in the grocery store and Russia bombing me the next day.

Jessamyn 1:00:20 Like when I was in junior high my concerns really were. Yeah, like strangers, vans, nuclear bombs, and Tylenol. And like,

mathowie 1:00:32 you know, people are reminiscing about 84 Because it's 30 years later, right. And 84 is this greatest year music great year for movies, the Ghostbusters and stuff and, and like the Olympics happened that year and like this, just the most 80s year of the 80s. But then I was like thinking like, all these prints, records came out and fucking thriller came, it was so great. But at the same time, I was like, constantly, you know, crapping myself over like, we could die tomorrow, like I really thought, you know, nuclear war,

Jessamyn 1:01:04 because we're probably significantly closer to dying tomorrow now. We have grown up so that we don't worry about it in that kind of minute by minute worrying.

mathowie 1:01:15 And there was no end to the 1984 anxiety, right? Like, I mean, there was the Berlin Wall falls, but it just sort of like, like the Cold War kind of it kind of like went to the back of my mind where I no longer worry about it.

Jessamyn 1:01:28 End unionized and I think that was the big.

mathowie 1:01:31 Yeah, it didn't feel like a sense of like, that's over. Especially because it seems like it's always constantly wanting to start up again. But right, yeah, Tylenol man. Any other medical three posts, there was

Cortex 1:01:46 a leak, and now confirmed by the dev team, that net hack has a new version. Possibly it might actually be out now. I am ashamed of how I'm thoroughly I've read on this, but I've just been distracted by other things. But ya know, it's for real z reals, and that it's actually coming up.

Jessamyn 1:02:08 Okay, so a little bit of backstory for everybody who's not just completely up on what to get you for Christmas net? Is

Cortex 1:02:15 anybody who gets me met hack for Christmas is achieved?

Jessamyn 1:02:18 text based? It is it is it

Cortex 1:02:21 is the roguelike that got me interested in roguelikes. It's a Yeah, it's it's like one of the first video axion wandering around attacking various alphabetic and

Jessamyn 1:02:31 new releases very often. And there's been 11 years since the last release. Yeah, we made people just assume that somebody had died.

Cortex 1:02:38 Yeah. And unlike a lot of other projects, net hacks never really sort of like oftentimes, if a project really, really slows down, what happens is the person maintaining will say, You know what, I'm just not maintaining anymore. And the either they'll say, so fuck y'all, or they'll say, so here's the code, have fun with it. And the code for net hack is like available, so you can do your own work on it. And there have been forks scheduled in the post, in fact that there's, you know, people have tried to take their own, like development take on it to keep it moving.

Jessamyn 1:03:10 So it's closed source. I mean, it's, I mean, it's not an open source project. So you have to actually wait for the dev team to come out with a thing.

Cortex 1:03:20 I think it is a notch. I don't know how its licensed. Like, it may be like, it may be like, open BSD license or something like that. It may be that it's not out there. But somehow it's out there. But people look through the code a lot. I think I've looked through the code and I don't think I had an in with anybody. So it must be it must be to some extent open source. Whatever the license on the source code is.

mathowie 1:03:42 equivalent of it. George RR Martin releasing two books or three books like this is humongous. This is

Cortex 1:03:49 this is all like George RR Martin rumored dead shows up to publish like, you know, a couple extra chapters that is the

Jessamyn 1:03:56 General Public License GPL. Okay.

Cortex 1:03:59 And yeah, so this is like an incremental release, like this is basically from 3.43 to 3.44, essentially,

Jessamyn 1:04:05 and you waited 11 years like Snickers.

Cortex 1:04:07 Yeah. So the question is, is the dev team actually composed entirely of of immortals who are intentionally ducking with humanity by increasing the release? Like the next one is going to come out in 73 years. And it'll be unambiguously from the same team. And that's when we'll realize that our overlords are among us. But ya know, it's it's simultaneously not huge news, because there's just an incremental update of the game. But it's also huge because like, oh my god, really, everybody did kind of think, Okay, well, maybe the dev team have all died,

Jessamyn 1:04:39 right? Like the updates not going to be that groundbreaking or awe inspiring, but it is just cool that there's an update.

Cortex 1:04:44 Yeah, it's like there is signs of life. It's kinda like Pink Floyd putting out a new album. Turns out it's been like 20 years and they're just

Jessamyn 1:04:53 suddenly just like all the other albums. Yeah, they do. Like the tags on this death by trickery should be only available on planet Earth. Are squirming in your backpack. Would you say that?

mathowie 1:05:04 They should only release new albums in planetarium formats. You gotta get high and go to a planetarium to see it.

Jessamyn 1:05:13 I haven't been to a planetarium in a long time and I should go again.

Cortex 1:05:17 I was near a planetary very recently,

mathowie 1:05:19 I have some friends that smoked a bunch of pot for the first time went to Pink Floyd at the planetarium. Grownups like two weeks ago, 40 year olds, like they said, let's just do the most cliche thing possible. And they're like, that was the most enjoyable, relaxing thing in the world. All those, you know, burnouts in high school. Were right. Like, this is great.

Jessamyn 1:05:44 The burnouts in high school had shittier pot shittier pot?

mathowie 1:05:50 Wow. Oh, I guess last thing for me would be the vintage Disney Parks is amazing. I grew up about 20 minutes from Disneyland. And this is like, insane.

Jessamyn 1:06:01 Like going all the time was not like the thing like you have a driver's license, it just let you go for

mathowie 1:06:06 this sort of introduce that in the 90s. So in the 80s, like an annual pass was only I think 200 bucks, it was kind of expensive for the 80s. But it was cheap, because it was you know, like 30 to $50 a day you'd waste on it. So I mean, if you live nearby, it wasn't that bad to buy a pass, we had to pass a couple years as a kid like, non consecutive years. So I just remembered spending oodles of time there in like 1985. And like, it was the late 80s. Like, I was in fifth grade. And then I was like in early high school. And it was amazing. And there's just all this amazing stuff in the 50s and 60s. And someone unearthed that people move her documentary because that was my favorite part. That was 48 minutes long. And I watched the entire thing. And it was amazing about how Disney made this like self driving cars exhibit for a World's Fair. And then they just took the cars away and put these little pods and they sort of imagined the Epcot Center and Walt Disney World be covered in these things as transportation and then it just, you know, it's gone now.

Jessamyn 1:07:10 So it's, these are fun pictures. I was looking to see if I could find the old like magic shop or Steve Martin got his stuff.

mathowie 1:07:17 Right. And there's a lot of like ticket books like I remember in the late 70s They still had tickets like E ticket ride straight out of Disneyland. When people say that in it. Yeah. And there's a lot of like, there's basically family photos from like the late 50s or 60s.

Jessamyn 1:07:31 So they've all got that like I'll old crazy color. And um, and

mathowie 1:07:35 yeah, and I guess these guys scour like here's a Flickr image of Mission Control Room from Mission to Mars. I think those are all animatronic dudes. Like that was this side of the ride. It was awesome. Like it's planetarium, you just sat in a chair, and they told the story, you're going to Mars and they would deflate the chairs, like the bottom of the chair air was in it. And you felt like you were like, oh, and like in your everyone's staring straight up at a video of like going through space. And you'd be like, Oh, we're moving. So cheap, like 1959 technology.

Jessamyn 1:08:11 Wow, that is awesome.

mathowie 1:08:13 So that was a fun romp.

Jessamyn 1:08:15 And it's just a little a little thread. Cute little thread. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't have a lot for a minute filter. This month, we can scoot on over to AskMe edit filter.

Cortex 1:08:25 We have a literal metal filter Music Minute, because I didn't have time to round up. Careful. But I'm gonna mention something just on pop policy trying to make it happen. All right. So the metal filter music song of the podcast is B real by invite a priori, because it's just this fun little sort of synth funk groove thing. But it's also their first Mefi music post. So yay for doing things for the first time. And the

mathowie 1:08:46 real I found it is awesome.

Cortex 1:08:49 It's a great little loop. I feel like we could use that for every break. We do the podcast, just like

mathowie 1:08:55 that. That's good. Oh my god.

Cortex 1:08:58 So yeah, good job he made a priori. It has a theory.

mathowie 1:09:01 That's amazing. Wow,

Jessamyn 1:09:04 got a question to ask you guys. This everything from Metafilter music wind up on hype machine.

Cortex 1:09:11 I can just basically grabbed the RSS. I don't know exactly. Yeah. Does.

Jessamyn 1:09:18 Well, Jim made a song that was a cover and whatever. And people were in the thread, like, Oh, I like it. And somebody else was like, Dude, I found this through hype machine. And then I came over to Metafilter

mathowie 1:09:28 Oh, wow. Nice. I mean, we had had those weird reports once every couple years or someone's like, I put something weird in the ID three tags. And now it's on hype machine. And I want them to remove it. But they said I have to get you to remove the source file and I'm like, What is going on? And I think yeah, hype machine or somebody was like indexing our RSS feed or something.

Cortex 1:09:51 Yeah, well, yeah, we've seen that with a few different sites and it's like, it sucks. I mean hype machine it doesn't practically suck because they don't strike me as claimed. be anything else but like yeah there's there's there's been a few Fly By Night things and the bright side is a fly by night so it never goes away but the downside is yeah it as much as we don't really want to renew remove a song unless we really need to if someone really needs us to we can do that. But we can't do anything about like it being indexed everywhere else.

mathowie 1:10:19 Checks Yeah,

Cortex 1:10:19 short of making my music non public, which is like that doesn't. Yeah, that's a weird thing.

mathowie 1:10:26 Sweet, awesome song.

Cortex 1:10:29 Metafilter Wait,

mathowie 1:10:30 what Jessamyn did you have

Jessamyn 1:10:33 the club's Jonathan Zacks would like us to give a shout out to his friend, Megan.

Cortex 1:10:38 Hey, Megan. Here's a shout out coming to you from the pedophile podcast via your friend Jonathan on tilde club.

Jessamyn 1:10:44 Hi, Megan. I hope you enjoyed listening to the last 58 minutes of us talking. Here your name, Jonathan, this one's for you.

mathowie 1:10:53 And pop that in the chat that in two to three days he'll get the chance to listen to 15 minutes to get that mentioned. Till the club style everything's slow. If we go to ask Metafilter I just want to say this is the ultimate nerd sparring showdown. It was amazing. This was like lobbying. It's so great. Because like lobbying the question into a crowd of people and 50% of the room goes to one side and 50% goes the other side and separation by Saiki Lorem. Yeah. And the question is like, I was attending a academic talk, and in the lights were a little bit different. And not like in a bookstore. Right? And that somebody pulled out a phone and was tweeting, possibly, and I'm sensitive to bright light. And I didn't want to move like should I have moved? I've yelled at the person. Like, what is it? For them? Basically, yeah. Is it socially acceptable to pull out your phone in a slightly academic setting that slightly dark, it's not dark. And this isn't like a class. And this isn't a movie theater. So it is a like super middle ground gray area. And you're

Jessamyn 1:12:03 not like taking pictures? I don't know if they were taking pictures. But

mathowie 1:12:07 if people like was tweeting, was it writing down notes? Like sometimes people do that. And so half the crowd, I think was like in the room split. The crowd is like data is totally normal. Like, you know, people could take notes, people can get bored, like people have work, they need calendars, like, just let them do it, man. The other half are like, no, no, everyone turns out their phone and they put it in a pile the front of my classroom like No, ever. It's so rude. So it was interesting.

Jessamyn 1:12:36 I didn't have a strong feeling about the question. But it was really interesting for me to learn that other people did.

mathowie 1:12:43 Yeah, yeah. And I'm a big fan of the triple click to move into reverse mode. Talking about you turn on accessibility. Oh, get this is great. Turn off, you go into like general accessibility on your iPhone. And you can enable triple click the home button to launch any accessibility shortcut. And the one I do is invert colors. Oh, nice. I get it. So you can like check the time or check Twitter or check a notepad in mostly dark black. Yeah, black with white with the gray text. So if I'm in a dark room, as I pull my phone out, I can triple and it's pretty dark.

Jessamyn 1:13:25 I'm not an annoying life hack that actually sounds like it would be practically useful.

Cortex 1:13:31 Like that this is the way out the home button on your phone.

mathowie 1:13:35 Once someone showed me, I used it once in a day. And now I find especially at night, you know, I can go to sleep and you know, use it use it three to four times a day. Now I like dims out your phone. Like it's an amazing way.

Jessamyn 1:13:48 And then you can How do you do you have to go back into settings to undo it

mathowie 1:13:51 or it's triple click.

Jessamyn 1:13:53 And it's white toggle?

mathowie 1:13:55 Yeah, it's a really good one. I would say do it. So yeah, this is a great, yeah. I love the sort of social aspect of everybody answering to the death to this.

Cortex 1:14:07 This is the kind of this is the kind of question that that I think is a great question that I kind of don't want to read unless I have to because something about the specific setup. Like unless I'm taking a very specific anthropological interest in the question. I know I'm going to be like vaguely stressed out by people having this civil but emphatic disagreement about something that isn't actually resolvable. It's just like, you know, it's like, I don't want to be at this dinner conversation. You know, it's like,

mathowie 1:14:36 well, I like I like when you read a question you go, I guess I've wondered about that. And your situation is really down the middle for me and I don't feel strongly let's see what they say. You know, the crowd and then you're like, Wow, lots more into this than I am like, and it doesn't make makes me question like, Am I still a middle ground guy? I think it pushed me over to that now it's cool man kind of side of things like laugh because the people who hate it are so hating it. And I'm like, I think the world is moving along without them on the people look at screens a lot. But it was a very interesting thing to read.

Jessamyn 1:15:16 I enjoyed this very brief question about if I were American CEO level rich. Are there laws against having a wood burning fireplace in a private train car?

mathowie 1:15:30 Isn't Woodstone different?

Jessamyn 1:15:33 A fireplace? Yeah, yeah, open flame versus little wood stove shirt, totally different. Use and sent the question asker monochrome to the website of the American Association of Private railroad car owners. Where it turns out there are private railroad cars with wood burning fireplaces. But then Dr. Tang came in lately later and said you know, you kind of wouldn't want to because it doesn't actually make any sense. So maybe you need a little woodstove and blahdy blahdy blah it was very short, but I enjoyed reading about private railroad car owners and their wacky

mathowie 1:16:09 P journey to come in with like he has lots of private railroad car experience

Jessamyn 1:16:14 well he's got mostly public railroad car experience like he used to drive like a train train these are like wealthy people who own a railroad car that like lives in a railroad yard and then every now and again they like tie it up to a train and go for it.

mathowie 1:16:28 That's what he knew about he was like look, sometimes we had to hook up to crazy Pullman cars like past he sort of knew about he said like the fees will kill you. You do not want to sit in an expensive overnight like I guess it was Yeah, because someone asked the for I think a year or two ago about like, what is it like is that a real thing private train cars and he sort of schooled everyone on it that it was it's actually cheap to travel by train it's parking them overnight like in Portland or New York currently cost hundreds of dollars

Jessamyn 1:16:59 right it's like sailing a boat like the actual sailing stuff is pretty low cost but the parking the boat when you're not sailing the boat is a killer.

mathowie 1:17:06 Yeah, that's cool. Fireplace my train. I saw that was laughing at that joke in Archer that like one of the employees is ultra it's like some sort of tycoons daughter and that they always travel by train in the show on her private several cars at the end of the train. It's hilarious.

Jessamyn 1:17:28 Oh, maybe that's where it came from then because I was like who's thinking about private railway? But you know, travels by train is really fun. Yeah, like it's slow. You can have wireless you can sleep it's reasonable it trains are so noisy that there's not like weird random noise. I don't know.

mathowie 1:17:44 Oh, wait, noisy, kinda like

Jessamyn 1:17:47 to turn to junk. And you just Yeah.

mathowie 1:17:50 keep wanting to do it someday. But it's just so like, you need four days to do things that take you know, three hours on a plane or something.

Jessamyn 1:17:58 But what do you got to do?

mathowie 1:17:59 That's the point. Yeah, you can add a filter from a chair, right?

Jessamyn 1:18:03 Yes, in fact, that's how you're supposed to mod minute filter

mathowie 1:18:07 is Wi Fi good on those things.

Jessamyn 1:18:09 Acceptable. But if you've got a phone, you know that I'll compensate most of the time. If you're if you're in the you know, quarters, I don't know about like crossing Montana.

mathowie 1:18:20 Montana was like, amazing LTE in the middle of nowhere and then 30 miles and nothing amazing LTE. Like it was amazing. I could not believe it like 4g Internet there in spots.

Cortex 1:18:32 There are people living in portions of the state so well, I mean, like, cows got nothing to do out

mathowie 1:18:39 there on Twitter. Just thinking like the single single cell phone tower is can't be that great. So it's like, must be so costly to cover that state.

Jessamyn 1:18:53 Flat in some parts. You know, it's like Oklahoma. It's not that tough because it's flat except the hilly parts. They're just like, whatever, you get nothing.

mathowie 1:19:01 Yeah, you can save it for the other side of the hills. I liked your post Jessamyn about the stay in histories. so helpful. Actually the weirdest this stays in histories you know of and like there's tons of stuff I'd never heard of. So

Jessamyn 1:19:16 weird so much. But like I do this kind of goofy Twitter this day in history Open Library thing, like here's a day in history here it is illustrated from a thing from Open Library and whatever. It's nice and small, and I like it. But you go to Wikipedia this day in history or New York Times this day in history, or Smithsonian this day in history. And it's all like what were the white men up to who was being terrorized by the white men you know, like it's just it's all like men and wars and whatever and that's not all the history there is but I was just having a hard time finding other ones with my with whatever my searches were and I got a really nice, like I asked a pretty special Epic question. And I got a really nice short set of answers, some of which I'm using, like all the time, like, I forgot totally about the daily bleed, which is from Seattle. And I used to read it constantly when I was there, and then forgot totally about it. And it's actually great people's history, the radical Women's History Project. And so I've actually been able to use those things to compile the posts

mathowie 1:20:23 history, or like this day for the year 1920. This is really cool. Yeah. And

Jessamyn 1:20:28 so you learn a little bit more about your world and the Twitter feed. I mean, you know, whatever, nobody pays attention this Twitter feed we, you know, we add like 50 people a week. But it's it's a neat way of adding a discovery layer to open library, which is otherwise somewhat opaque.

mathowie 1:20:44 Well, you can click any data history orb and get the history of that date over hundreds of years. This is amazing.

Jessamyn 1:20:51 I know. Right? I mean, Wikipedia has a good mechanism, but it's only as good as you know, wiki PD is what Wikipedia finds interesting. And it's really interesting because they're structural. Like the information on how to create the this day in history pages on Wikipedia actually does kind of prioritize in Preferences to wars and famous dudes basically, like,

mathowie 1:21:22 I mean, a lot of these are obits today. Like is August October 6, Alfred, Lord Tennyson died today in 1892.

Jessamyn 1:21:30 Chester Arthur was born in Vermont yesterday. That was my big thing. But like yesterday, Arthur. I fight you.

mathowie 1:21:39 Favorite unimportant president could fight you? Yeah. Yeah, say cool mustache. Cool sideburns. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:21:47 But ya know, it was super helpful. And everybody who gave me advice. I'm like, it was just a nice short, asked and answered. Thank you very much. Perfect. Very happy. Very cool. And I since we're, you know, just kind of doing the log rolling in our times thing, enjoyed cortexes wife, Secretary ATS question about going to a conference. She's an undergrad student. She's a member of the professional association. Like, do you go? Is it stupid? Is it worthwhile, whatever, I might like to do this stuff. And there was a whole bunch of people who go to those things, who chimed in with really good advice about how to go to those things. And it was cool. It turned

Cortex 1:22:30 out to be really useful, because I think it was like the two of us were talking about like, Well, do you think I should go? I don't, because I mean, I'm very, very mixed feelings about like, the conference, things I have been to

Jessamyn 1:22:39 us went to South by Southwest was crazy. Yeah, with Echo Echo, which is its own thing.

Cortex 1:22:45 It was great. But that was from

mathowie 1:22:50 a conference everyone does. It's part of your job kind of in academics. And like I mentioned in the thread algo, to best answer that. I went as an undergrad. And it was refreshing because I had to go to a couple more after it. And I had to do everything else. I had to give a presentation, I had to give a poster session. Like it's it's stressful and hellish. It's like South by Southwest as an attendee versus a speaker. And like, like for the rest of her life, she will have to go as a speaker, and it's stressful, but it's actually fun to go and not have to have stress out about anything. And you kind of enjoy it. And some of the stuff will be over your head, but it's not that bad. So it's

Jessamyn 1:23:29 a great way to kind of informally meet people more at a level where you're all kind of equal, like aside from like the keynote speakers or whoever, like, you know, the people who are doing poster sessions or presentations don't, they're not fancy. And this is like a chance for you to meet them. Introduce yourself, you know, maybe get on a committee to do a thing. Like when I started going to Ala when I was in library school, that was the hugest, big deal, because you met people and they're like, Oh, do you want to be in charge of this committee? And you're like, hell yes. And then suddenly, you've got a thing that makes you look like you're involved in your professional organization, like some of the people that I met my first like, two years of going to professional conferences back when it was cheap mind. were, you know, people I'm still in touch with in the library profession nowadays. I couldn't speak highly enough of going to these things. But I didn't know anything about GSA. So I did not chime in. Well, I

Cortex 1:24:23 think it was useful because that's part of where like, it's like, does it make sense to go to this if you're not doing it in like an actual I have a reason for being there capacity. So that was part of that was, I think so useful to sort of hear other people's take on it.

Jessamyn 1:24:35 But that is the reason like there are reasons you just don't know that you have those reasons. Yeah,

Cortex 1:24:39 exactly. So we're going off to Vancouver a couple of weeks. I'll chill out in some Airbnbs and she'll do geology stuff and tell her routine,

mathowie 1:24:49 taller to like scan the titles and find anything remotely related to what she does. And you'll like always learn a ton more about it like

Jessamyn 1:24:58 the talk and it's shitty, you just walk All right back out here. And it's no big deal like people expect you to kind of do that. But I think in a lot of ways, it's a chance for you to figure out what interests you about the profession.

mathowie 1:25:10 Yeah. And it might help you immediate like I studied copper cycling in an environment. So anything that had copper mentioned, even if it was completely cyclic, I meant like the cycle of copper, how it moves through an ecosystem. So mine was like, people are applying copper sulfate to ponds to kill the algae. And then it was collecting the sediments and becoming slightly toxic. And we're wondering, where does it go from the sediments and that was kind of my gig. But like, I'd go to anything about copper be like, some guy working on rocks of copper and a mind still did some weird isotope stuff, though. That was cutting edge in my world. And I was like, Whoa, how's that work? And I've learned lots of stuff and figure out like people at the edges of what you work on.

Jessamyn 1:25:50 We have a superfund copper site in my town or in my in my part of the part of the part of Vermont.

mathowie 1:25:57 People need Danny's not anymore. All right, steel, Fanny's cool.

Cortex 1:26:03 I'm gonna continue to log role then. Secretariat like this question by you and I had a flame about building a Bichon crabbet tat for Herman

mathowie 1:26:15 tat has an awesome word.

Jessamyn 1:26:17 Yep. And it got a crab named Matt. Yep. MATT The crab and the crab attack.

Cortex 1:26:21 So a lot goes back around the mat. Boom. times. Yes, and you know, basically you probably know already whether you not want to read it because it's a question about building a habitat for crab but, but that seems pretty.

Jessamyn 1:26:35 New tomorrow is a total you know,

mathowie 1:26:39 crab it all just kind of a Holic.

Jessamyn 1:26:42 She's got six hermit crabs and a giant aquarium for the dozen years and they all live so she's you can get little litter litter scoopers tiny little litter? Oh my god. Yeah, because hermit crabs poop and so you can go through and pick up their hermit crab poop, which was not a thing that I knew. I didn't know what they existed until right now. Okay, beautify tomorrow. If you put a gun to my head and said is this crab poop? I'd be like, I don't know. Yeah.

mathowie 1:27:14 I was cracking up when I go to the pet store and that they do have hermit crabs there and they paint the shells ridiculously that's how they get people to buy him. Like they put like college. Yeah, this shit. It's just a shell. It's not like they eat the shell or anything. So they put paint on like Oregon Ducks and Oregon State like as the crabs are walk like they're like hot.

Jessamyn 1:27:37 Little advertisements. Yeah, they look like little racecar

mathowie 1:27:39 snails kind of like they're amazing. So cute. And it makes me look and notice them every week. That is cool. And I liked it. No, they live so long. It's crazy.

Cortex 1:27:49 Jamal's answer is also kind of like the perfect classic AskMe Metafilter thing, because it's like I have a specific question about an expert. Yes, I

mathowie 1:27:57 Yeah. So it's nice. It goes from the bottom of the tank to the top. Here's our channel with betting. Okay, here's what you want to take design. Here's what you're gonna want at the top.

Cortex 1:28:07 You've got to do have an order. Otherwise, you know, you're just in trouble. So last,

Jessamyn 1:28:12 I enjoyed this asked Metafilter question about how did peasants in the village survive the winter? Although I'm trying really hard to ignore the last comment which asks me for citations for the things that I said that I read in a book, because that always makes me furious. But it is sort of interesting, right? Like, what do you do for the winter? Like, you basically got to like, get all your food ahead of time. And then like, what do you do? How did you stay healthy? What was the thing?

mathowie 1:28:39 We all read that Little House in the prairie series where they had that one bad winter and almost died? Right? Yeah, that was normal all the time. Every winter?

Jessamyn 1:28:49 Well, we all like you know, look out the windows of our heated apartments and be like, you know, if, if something happens to my furnace, I've suddenly got to make some difficult decisions. I'm sure they think the same thing in Arizona in the middle of the in the middle of the summertime, humans were not supposed to be here.

mathowie 1:29:08 This is one of the most popular posts last month I was gonna mention. It is on my favorite list for last month. I never got around to it. But that one, yeah. Oh, sort of like I need to read this. This sounds amazing.

Jessamyn 1:29:21 For like citations, not just like raw Shut up. Bar. You know, here's what I know about nothing. Bah. And this month, a food post. As always, I've been on a soup kick. My meager store of recipes has been exhausted soups, easy, healthy, cheap. And unlike most of the 123 you can have easy healthy or cheap but not all three. You can actually have easy healthy and cheap soup. This is Kota Corolla it's a great thread about soup.

mathowie 1:29:50 Soup, a good candidate

Cortex 1:29:51 for hitting the Troika there. Yeah, that's cheap soup soup.

mathowie 1:29:55 I'd say the most popular thread of the entire month and something already passed around to a few people who saw this was not what's your favorite podcast? What is the single best episode of your favorite podcast? So it's really like the Jim's like, give me the biggest gems of, you know, podcasting. I don't know anything about podcasting tell me the exact, you know two episodes of This American Life. You know people always say radio labs amazing radio labs amazing are this American life's amazing and they just have hundreds of choices. Listen

Jessamyn 1:30:26 to it, you might or might not get a good episode because yeah, they've got hundreds of episodes and they may be good,

mathowie 1:30:32 especially Radiolab is really idiosyncratic with the crazy edits and the cuts and people are like, Oh, well, you gotta go listen, like eight or nine before you'll get this joke about radio lab. I can't really point out one episode, but it's good. I remember hearing Stephen Tobolowsky his interview with Marc Maron was amazing. That was one of the last things on there. I listened to Robin Williams on that.

Jessamyn 1:30:59 I listened to that. Yeah, kind of when it came out, and it's poignant in contrast, of course,

mathowie 1:31:05 now he's pretty open about his drinking and cocaine. Drinking is

Jessamyn 1:31:09 mental illness struggles and a whole bunch of other stuff.

mathowie 1:31:13 Yeah, so that was that was an awesome, awesome thread. Anything else? Josh?

Cortex 1:31:19 I think I think I'm out of ask me. I think I'm so now

Jessamyn 1:31:22 that we've been talking for hours. Why don't you guys talk a little bit about the redesign? Oh,

Cortex 1:31:27 yeah, that's just I've gotten so used to the new theme. I just don't,

Jessamyn 1:31:33 I don't even use it. So it's dead to me. But why don't you talk about thank you for letting me stay. You know, my stick in the mud.

Cortex 1:31:41 Came around seemed like a very important thing. So yeah. Yeah. It's the new recites. It's all responsive and shit. So we've got a single theme that works across very responsive

Jessamyn 1:31:53 for the folks who didn't is what 2.0

Cortex 1:31:57 school, it's over three point over. It's it's a theme that actually accommodates what it's displaying on the screen at to a fine level of detail on the size of the screen. So that size of the window, which if you're using it on a desktop, they're

Jessamyn 1:32:11 like, Oh, you're on a little phone. Let's not make this look shitty on your little phone. Yeah.

mathowie 1:32:18 Yeah, mobile, mobile says,

Cortex 1:32:20 the mobile theme that just like looks different and worked fine on phones. And you could sort of choose between, well, do I want the desktop theme? Or do I want the mobile theme? And they were different layouts that adapt to

Jessamyn 1:32:31 different functionality, right, like the desktop was full featured in the mobile version was not?

Cortex 1:32:35 Yeah, we added pieces to it,

Jessamyn 1:32:37 which made sense when you started it a million years ago? Yeah, right. No one tried.

mathowie 1:32:41 I tried like two or three years ago to do a responsive all classic theme version that was responsive. So we didn't have to maintain two different templates. Like when you add something, you'd have to add it to two files in all these locations. But it was like really complex, like we had to basically rewrite all the HTML to make it to work. So I sort of tabled it. And like, it's basically like the mobile I guess it's like last month, there's about 20 million pageviews. And like, nine and a half million of those were mobile based, which is like blows my mind. It's 45% now and growing mobile.

Jessamyn 1:33:20 Do you guys take the admin views off of that? Or does that count the people who work there? You know what I mean? Because like, I could just be you.

mathowie 1:33:30 Though, I don't use very much. I don't use mobile very much.

Cortex 1:33:34 I don't think we're filtering it out. But yeah, I probably wouldn't be surprised. Single percentage point of the total usage.

Jessamyn 1:33:43 Again, users are just randos.

mathowie 1:33:44 That's everything everybody included in like hitting the server.

Jessamyn 1:33:49 For for logged in versus not logged in. I'd

mathowie 1:33:52 be curious. I hadn't looked at it. But I was amazed that it's getting so high when you look at the top level view of just mobile versus desktop. And that includes tablets, so which isn't really sort of mobile, you know, you can almost get an entire desktop sized screen you have

Jessamyn 1:34:06 a responsive design for the Vermont Library Association website, which was just a WordPress plugin. And it breaks on tablets, kind of because it's trying to be responsive in a phone way. But the tablet works different tablets or edge Casey.

mathowie 1:34:24 We supply our menus and you really have to get the phone size before you get the phone only sort of header. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, in mobile, it was basically like, it was a nightmare pile, you know, the footer on mobile. And the classic view is just a night. It's just a ginormous pile of things. And it was getting

Jessamyn 1:34:41 started on stuff right? Because as people would add stuff, you just add it to the bottom of the list and what happens another

Cortex 1:34:45 menu item that's another menu, like asking for other features to be added to the

mathowie 1:34:49 Enable posting, like enable posts and you're like sometimes you need a desktop to fill in like the 14 form elements and like can you upload a a music file from a phone. I don't think you can based on the limits of like mobile Safari. But so yeah, we'd always punted on that stuff. But But yeah, so are we tried to re attack this thing is like, let's take one of these old templates that was, you know, pretty good actually looks modern. I mean, I stumbled on this like six months ago and just went like, oh my god, it really looks like that thing. Yeah, iOS seven ish. Like it. It really looks like today, and I should, let's try it. And then I found a programmer, who does mobile, responsive design stuff. And I was like, can you make our old janky weird, like we have br is everywhere and spans and divs. And it's a mishmash of soup. Can you make that work in a single template? And using like a nightmare amount of JavaScript, it's totally possible. So we didn't have to update, you know, the, like, 200 actual page template files on the server much at all? Nice. In order to apply this like sexy new theme, you know, does

Jessamyn 1:36:00 a great job like working with everybody's nitpicky? Like this doesn't totally work. And this is a little broken. And I think this space is weird and error,

mathowie 1:36:09 or having a top level strategy that's like, here's this crazy world changing option, but it's gonna be an option, like, nothing's gonna change on you. And we'll maintain the old ones. Since it's the same code. It's not that much

Jessamyn 1:36:22 time you rolled in the contact page that had everybody's like pictures on it, like, Do people still use that? Because people have the option to keep the old one. And then you can see take to it or not, right? I mean, the proof is in the stats.

mathowie 1:36:36 Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I think it's like an easy rollout. Because you can ignore it if you don't like it. And it definitely solves our mobile problems. It's like, it's amazing on mobile. I mean, even like the consensus, most people like it. A lot of people had some nitpicky problems that are like, legit, and that we're working on. But it's been nice, because everyone's like, I hate this. But on mobile, it's incredible. Yeah, it's

Cortex 1:36:59 been all over the board. But it was like, it's like 1100 and something comments at this point. And then it talks about it's all been generally pretty supportive, like not not very

Jessamyn 1:37:08 few I pain complaints. Yeah.

Cortex 1:37:12 Yeah. And yeah, I mean, people, people whose have been like, Hey, I don't really like it. But hey, I appreciate you did the work or, you know,

Jessamyn 1:37:20 a lot of work to like, it's clearly trying to anticipate a whole bunch of things and improve a bunch of things that from before, so I think people respect that, even if they don't agree with some of the choices. Yeah.

Cortex 1:37:30 And I think being able to just say, it's not working for me, I'll stick with the old one is, helps with that. Versus

Jessamyn 1:37:38 illegitimate. Yeah, that's a legitimate decision. Yeah.

mathowie 1:37:41 And I think I mean, it's such a monster project that I'm kind of bummed. We can't roll these things out faster. But like, there's, like, you know, changing the fonts around and hiding the titles and stuff will come in the next couple of weeks. And I can't really dark mode was such a hit.

Jessamyn 1:37:55 You said that out loud. Title. Couple weeks?

mathowie 1:37:59 Yeah, the talk is really ticking. Someone's working on it right now. I think it's like we're attacking these Vader bombs. But the thing that killed me was every screenshot I've gotten from members is in dark mode, dark mode. I know. But I thought like dark mode to be like, Oh, is this you? selja

Jessamyn 1:38:19 it? What is dark mode? Dark mode is the weird colors.

Cortex 1:38:23 It just Yeah. Brings the colors back into the page versus the white. But Jessamyn you've been like a white background person forever. Right? Yeah. So like for you is like the new theme. If you had liked it would have been just like normal.

Jessamyn 1:38:34 Yeah, I just I don't like it more than what I'm currently using. It just seems like I mean, like you said, it's got a ton of JavaScript. And so to me, I noticed that with page load times, and I just, it doesn't solve a problem for me, but I could see why it's awesome. So whatever.

Cortex 1:38:49 And yeah, I feel like I feel like the dark mode thing for everybody who's like more in the territory I've been where I've always stuck with the kind of theme I used. I used I used white mode at my last day job for a while when I was moonlighting there before I went full time at metal filter. And, and that was fine. You know, it's like, I can do it. And I was fine with a white mode, like the default on the new theme while we were testing that too. But I kept thinking, Yeah, I kind of wish it was colorful. So I was really happy with the dark mode thing. I think a lot of people are in the same boat. We're like, Hey, I like the idea, this new theme, but I also want the comfort of my familiar metal filter colors. I like

mathowie 1:39:24 the colors. I guess we don't track that in the database, though. So I can't like tell. But I don't check what the Dark Mode isn't like a database toggle. It's kind of like a cookie toggle. So it's outside of that. I should put some little listener in. But like on click or something.

Jessamyn 1:39:42 You can definitely definitely track it. Yeah, everything's trackable. That's what's so awesome.

mathowie 1:39:48 Yeah, it's just not native tracked in the day, like everything else. But yeah, though dark mode is fun.

Jessamyn 1:39:54 But so you guys are happy. From your perspective. The rollout seemed to go mostly okay. It's been so positive. Because of people yelling at you, and

mathowie 1:40:01 yeah, exactly, yeah, it wasn't that bad. Like having the like, I can turn it off if I don't like this helps. So people maybe weren't so mad. I don't know. I don't think

Jessamyn 1:40:11 most people were mad, honestly. But I just didn't know from your because I mean, I was one of the beta testers. So I knew this was coming eventually. And I just, you know, it's like, alright, it's coming eventually. Excellent.

mathowie 1:40:21 You kept saying good luck.

Cortex 1:40:24 Depression, PB has been just like, sort of hacking away at non stop, to my impacted me at launch in terms of keeping an eye on that metadata thread. And talks about didn't turn into a fucking clusterfuck. So I was

Jessamyn 1:40:35 like, that's what I noticed. Oops, that's not the Yeah, that's what I noticed that thread was mostly good. I thought the announcement went well.

mathowie 1:40:42 Yeah. Yeah, it's been it's been really positive and really successful. Yeah. And like the weird outside randos I mean, every day, I get like, 10 tweets and people just going, Wow, it's like the first time

Jessamyn 1:40:57 filter been on my life. Your life has been blue and probably, yeah,

mathowie 1:41:02 it seems approachable.

Cortex 1:41:05 I'd say like for every eight tweets, where someone's like, oh, wow, Mefi got a great new redesign. There's like two firms like meta filter. What the fuck happened. This is like real weird sense of like, different people with different circumstances.

mathowie 1:41:19 Back to those people that you turn it off, or you can go a lot of people that people have had a beef, it's usually that's white. There's a dark mode button, click the dark mode button than the

Jessamyn 1:41:29 websites have a white background now, but they like unlike Metafilter. They also have like 8 million pictures, videos and clickbait giant headlines that you don't have. So you notice the white more?

mathowie 1:41:41 Yeah. Yeah, I'd say so. Like conky is similar to it. Amazingly, I did not set out to make it look anything like Kottke. But khakis kind of, you know, pretty similar. Although I guess there's lots of images.

Jessamyn 1:41:54 There's not a ton of images. So because I think you still mostly single column with them, right?

mathowie 1:41:58 Yeah. But I was surprised scrolling down how many images but most of it is just plain text. Plain text plain text. Yeah. So we have gone an hour and Jesus 40 minutes.

Jessamyn 1:42:10 Where does the time go? Oh, you have something to do. And like yeah,

mathowie 1:42:14 I got in about 20 minutes and I had a breakfast meeting with a psycho computer people at my daughter's school.

Jessamyn 1:42:21 Oh, I bet that was delightful.

mathowie 1:42:24 Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:42:26 I set my alarm for this podcast.

mathowie 1:42:31 It's amazing. You guys.

Cortex 1:42:32 I knew I'd be out there. I mean, wasn't till like 930 I got up, fed the cats drink some tea. went for a walk with Angela, you know.

Jessamyn 1:42:42 That's cool. All right. As always, bye bye.