Podcast 98 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 98: A Land of Contrasts (2014-11-04).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Cortex 0:00 I'm Matt Howie Jessamyn Welcome to the metal filter odd

mathowie 0:12 Welcome to Episode 98 filter podcast. I am Matt Howie.

Jessamyn 0:17 I'm Jessamyn less

Cortex 0:18 and I am Josh Maillard aka cortex.

mathowie 0:20 So we to welcome to November.

Jessamyn 0:23 How are you guys doing?

Cortex 0:25 I'm doing well. Thank you for asking.

Jessamyn 0:27 Sure. Well, I rarely do I just talk about, you know,

Cortex 0:30 yeah, it's not really we don't really do like this specific pleasantry thing. I mean, I think we're just so comfortable with each other. That's like,

Jessamyn 0:38 nice Halloween. Well, did you? Actually what do you guys do anything to handle big candy bars was

mathowie 0:43 terrible. Like it rained like crazy. And we got maybe 20 Kids the entire night. So

Jessamyn 0:49 that means your house is full of candy.

mathowie 0:52 I have 40,000 calories sitting in four boxes like outside this door you need that?

Cortex 1:01 You can you can give it to me if you want next time you're in town

mathowie 1:03 case a candy company.

Cortex 1:06 My Halloween was excellent. In a I didn't celebrate it in any way sort of way. You were working. I was working. I just had a nice night and the site wasn't too busy and I got some creative work done. And you know, that was that was all fine. So we turned off the light. Well, you know, it's early or totally just totally like, Okay, so here's the here's the thing. Here's the thing, here's the here's, here's the actual downside is we were gonna get together with 100 Girls and hang out and watch a movie, but Melissa wasn't feeling well. And so we put the kibosh on that and said, Okay, we'll do monster movie some other time. And so then our evening had been we were going to do that and probably give candid hints. But that's like, you know, if I'm just going to be working, and Angela is going to work on some homework upstairs. I don't really want to Trump over the door and be sort of disinterestedly like, Oh, here's some candy. And so, and we don't get a whole lot of traffic. Even when we do leave a light on like, like, I would say on the average here. If we actually do the candy thing we get like maybe five knocks. Wow. Yeah, it's it's just

Jessamyn 2:06 it's really hard to plan. You can't have five pieces of candy. But you know, you can't have 500 I don't know.

Cortex 2:15 Yeah, it's tricky. So I

Jessamyn 2:19 I dressed in my bee costume like I did last year, but I had a sign that said justice of the BS because I'm running for Justice of the Peace tomorrow. I love this. So the few people who came through with their children who I didn't know personally, I was like, I appreciate your vote. We handed out maybe 500 pieces of candy in the neighborhood. Well, because it's crazy, right? Like the town is 4500 people, but there's like trick or treating downtown, where the kids kind of run around and get candy from businesses. And then basically the entire mob descends on this neighborhood, which is like it's not quite my neighborhood. I'm across the street. But like it's I go to a friend's house and then we hang out in the front thing and it's a thing we do every year so it's like Seder almost like we hand stuff out. And then we sit around and talk about every other halloween and eat good food.

mathowie 3:09 Oh, you had a Ninja Turtle? I had one ninja turtle that was modern and one from the 80s that came together. That was awesome.

Jessamyn 3:16 Yeah, we had a pack if there was frozen princesses. Oh, Captain America's spider men, Wolf men with like, plaid. flannel shirts. I don't know who that is. I mean, it's Wolfman. But like, is that a thing? Is that? Is it a game? It's

mathowie 3:31 the guy with the blades? Yeah, that guy.

Jessamyn 3:35 No, no, these are like Wolfman. Wolverine is a man. shirts.

Cortex 3:40 Sometimes. I guess. Yeah, well,

Jessamyn 3:42 Jack is

Cortex 3:44 he's Canadian.

mathowie 3:48 Sorry, I'm gonna kill you.

Jessamyn 3:50 And there's lots of nerds like enough so I was kinda like, is that a thing? Like, like there were enough people like girls with kind of big glasses and like flow. But I felt like it must be from like TV or cartoon or a game because there was too many of them to be like I'm a nerd. This is what a nerd looks like on TV.

mathowie 4:10 That's pretty weak.

Jessamyn 4:12 I don't know why I don't know. I think it comes from something.

mathowie 4:15 No, I was surprised. Sandy wise. I think you know him Sandy. From things his daughter went as wildstyle from Lego and it's so The Lego Movie. It's so easy. She had like pink and blue streaks in her hair and she wore black with some pink and blue on it and add a yellow makeup on her face. Awesome. Every kid go as more Lego Movie people you could like I was surprised that that was the only one I saw online

Jessamyn 4:40 like a movie. No, that was the

mathowie 4:42 summer right? Yeah, that was a humongous hit too. Interesting. And it was looked like a simple costume like that took 10 minutes. They put the she was wearing a black sweatshirt and they just put and she's like for something. They put like blue and pink ribbon on her black sweatshirt and they were done. You know like it was Perfect, like oh my god, that's wildstyle Why aren't there like a million wildstyle is really around.

Jessamyn 5:05 You know, that's a really interesting question. Probably because you can't buy them in the drugstore.

mathowie 5:10 License anything? Yeah, like

Cortex 5:12 and lack of lack of like, follow up marketing seems like Yeah,

mathowie 5:15 well, kits, but there just weren't costumes I guess.

Jessamyn 5:20 Because people here make a lot of their own costumes. And so

mathowie 5:24 it was brother number one movie this summer I was surprised they weren't more like Lego themed. I guess it's hard to make a giant round head to if you're gonna go all the way. Oh, you

Jessamyn 5:33 know now that I think about it. I saw somebody with a giant round head. But I didn't think they were Lego. I thought they were a transformer. It's kind of hard because with kids of a certain age if you kind of like fuck up who they are, like you guessed the wrong princess. That's not you know, God. I would never be that lame princess. I'm the cool princess.

mathowie 5:53 That's not canon. I heard that at one point.

Jessamyn 5:56 I saw that on Twitter right?

mathowie 5:58 Oh no, it was because yeah, we were like Oh, is that like Darth Maul? No, it's from Attack of the Clones. It's dark other things? Come on. Like seriously kid. Every evil Star Wars guy ever sorry.

Jessamyn 6:12 But you have a lightsaber I made a guess I'm a grown up

mathowie 6:16 wearing black your bad coin.

Jessamyn 6:18 Got the candy here sorry that

Cortex 6:19 you made the mistake of trying to maneuver within the Lucas verse. It's the Disney verse not the strongest aesthetic choice you can you know,

Jessamyn 6:26 that way lies madness.

mathowie 6:28 So what do we know about the number 98 Jessamyn

Jessamyn 6:31 Christ say sake. It's this bullshit number thing which I don't even understand. It's like a Melissa Etheridge number or what Wedderburn etheric ringtone, I'm hoping Josh, you can explain it to me, because it sounds like maybe it's cool. Only I literally do not understand it at an integer sequence named for this dude and this other dude, that can be used to count certain kinds of binary trees, which I know what a binary tree is, and I know what counting is. And then it's like, the first few numbers are 0111236 1123 46 and 98. And I don't how I don't like I need to I need this simple Jessamyn version of this Wikipedia page. I know that

Cortex 7:13 what that is I don't I don't I don't recognize Wedderburn. Etherington the idea of counting binary trees I've run into because it is sort of an interesting thing. What does

Jessamyn 7:24 it mean? A binary tree, it probably

Cortex 7:28 counting, counting, probably growth rate. Like if you have a specific pattern of growth to a binary tree, then being able to quickly and decisively calculate the rate of its growth, say, will tell you useful things about whether or not you want to use that tree to traverse it or how long it will take to traverse that tree if that's what you're storing information. So I'm guessing it's, it's, it's something along those lines, like if you really want to count? Well, one of the bullet points in here, that's interesting. That's maybe a quick practical thing is if you're doing a single elimination tournament, and you want to figure out how many how to branch out your tree to organize elimination, if you don't have a person

Jessamyn 8:05 in three weeks, or to have it done with the most matches or whatever, you

Cortex 8:09 did have the right amount of matches and have the right set of parents so that when you have something other than a perfect like power of two, you can still organize your tournament tree correctly. You know, you might use something like that. But But yeah, no, I yeah, I'm guessing it's basically for just sort of getting the the scope and speed of growth of of a different type of binary tree

Jessamyn 8:31 100 aq

mathowie 8:32 100 years ago, did mathematicians just look at number sequences, they're really strange, get high and come up with this stuff, this crazy sequence what it was, yes, 0111236 1123 4698. And then it goes crazy. And then all the numbers are big. That was the hardest kind of math problem when I was in like fifth grade or something, and they just give you sequences and go think of it. And there's always one kid in the class and be like, bingo, well, I

Cortex 8:59 was like those. I wasn't like, Oh, that was easy. I wasn't the fastest. But I always enjoyed because there's I don't know, for me, there's something about trying to take a sequence of numbers and figure out a pattern to it. It's kind of exciting. Because if you get into it a little bit, and you start sort of recognizing some basic sequences, it's exciting. People say, oh, oh, 1126 10 I know what's going on, you know, and so on. Yeah. So you'll, you'll learn sort of this small vocabulary, and then you start coming, you come across one that you can't figure out at a glance, and you're like, Oh, well, what's going on here? And it gets interesting to try and figure it out. And I feel like there's like two classes of sequences for that kind of problem. There's, there's the good ones and the bad ones. And yeah, and this one, this one seems real. What do you think this sequence is? Is probably stored up on the bullshit site. It's not that the sequence is bad, but it's just like,

Jessamyn 9:48 it's not something learn anything by figuring it out. Yeah, you

Cortex 9:51 kind of have to know the answer before you can know the answer almost for something with it's convoluted enough. Yeah, I hate that.

Jessamyn 9:57 It's an interesting thing that I learned about the numbers. 98 That's not this okay? It's actually the highest jersey number that you can have in the National Hockey League because 99 was retired for Gretzky and you only get one or two digit uniform number so the highest number you could be in hockey is 98. Are there

mathowie 10:15 multiple 90 eights before Gretzky?

Jessamyn 10:21 Multiple 99 To me,

mathowie 10:22 yes. Yeah.

Jessamyn 10:24 I don't even know that's the answer. The internet can figure out Canadian can tell us 99 jersey. That's funny.

Cortex 10:32 I'm suddenly having fat.

Jessamyn 10:35 Rick Dudley and Wilf paiement. wealth, wealth he was for the Toronto Wilf Toronto Maple Leafs. Wilfred probably. Wow. I mean, it's it's we'll fund the leafs. It's just and then Rick Dudley briefly in the Winnipeg Jets.

mathowie 10:54 Whoa, in 1981. There are three guys right around with number 99.

Jessamyn 10:59 That's pretty one of them's Gretzky. That is crazy. Right? But like how many

mathowie 11:03 20 I guess there's a lot of 20 threes in basketball besides Jordan,

Cortex 11:06 where they're at when they retired 99 For Gretzky, Was anybody else actively 99 At the time, I assume no, you

Jessamyn 11:13 can look at that thing and figure it out.

mathowie 11:16 I think Gretzky owned it by 82

Jessamyn 11:18 well and then they're on officially retired numbers have that have been removed from circulation but they're not officially retired. Like Paley Lindbergh from the Philadelphia Flyers number 31

mathowie 11:31 Yeah 123 Retired numbers would mean every single number has been retired.

Jessamyn 11:36 Exactly. It's all very confusing.

mathowie 11:41 Oh, right right.

Jessamyn 11:43 And then honored numbers most of whom are and then formerly Retired numbers. Were a team retires a number and then a family member wants the number give the number back

mathowie 11:56 oh man their family dynasties in hockey there must be

Jessamyn 12:02 or like a team that doesn't exist anymore in the Hartford Whalers

mathowie 12:07 what's the what is that? What's the what's the one with a great logo? I guess that is the Wailers right with an eight so well

Jessamyn 12:13 or is it Jim's got that whalers t shirt and every time he wears them people are like, That's so great.

mathowie 12:18 It's the most beautiful logo ever made in sports. Bob Marley picks

Jessamyn 12:22 them really, really most beautiful.

mathowie 12:24 It's so great. It's I mean, I

Jessamyn 12:27 do love it don't get they don't need this. Well, not anymore. They became the Carolina Hurricanes

mathowie 12:32 Carolina. Oh.

Jessamyn 12:36 And then there was a team known as the Connecticut whale. And now they're the Hartford Wolfpack which is pretty awesome. Oh, anyway, I can read wiki gentleman all day but we got a

Cortex 12:47 we competing to you gentlemen all day podcast where

Jessamyn 12:52 it's almost seamless. All right, you can almost hear me typing. grainy.

Cortex 12:56 Yeah, that's that's, it's, that's a whole that's a whole psycho acoustical thing. Actually, that's, that's interesting is if you need to mask a sound, and this is this may sound sort of obvious, but it's actually it gets interesting at a low level. burying a sound on another sound is obviously a good strategy if you want to, like you know, I don't know cough quietly while something's noise while you're on the phone. P while you're on the phone, just saying but but but as we actually perceive sound if you're making a noise that's like maybe 40 decibels quieter than another noise that's currently going on your noise basically doesn't exist someone's brain even though the sound waves are hitting their ear, we just we attenuate our sort of our roll attention. You know, we don't have that much dynamic range that we can pay attention to. Are yours gonna see that? So if you ever need to do something relatively loud, just arrange for something incredibly loud to be happening at the same time if you don't want people to notice, I guess. Yeah, yeah, a little bit.

mathowie 13:54 Well, I took a couple classes. If you need to fart in public throw a flash.

Cortex 14:00 It comes up in like, simple. If you think about like sound mixing, especially you know, for better and for worse, it means that if you've got some noise in the signal chain on a recording, if you're recording a rock song, it's probably not a big deal. Because even a sort of annoying hum is going to disappear under crashing cymbals and big guitars. People won't

Jessamyn 14:17 even detect it at all. Yeah, but on the other hand, that means you can make them consciously like do they unconsciously did they get annoyed by it? Or you know,

Cortex 14:27 I don't I don't I don't know. At that level. Basically, they don't perceive it consciously. You just kind of won't hear the sound that sufficiently quieter even if the sound waves are you know, still hitting your ears.

mathowie 14:39 Like focusing your vision on one object when there's 10,000 objects ahead of you, but I've met people who are terrible in a crowd like that. That's me. Yeah, like, like you're at a party. There's 75 voices behind you and just some people can't hear any kid or the one person say in front of them. It's just like whatever that that for The decibel floor is is different for them. Well, that's

Cortex 15:03 I think it's that and it's it's actually just like verbal processing to, like it's not necessarily even sound level. It's just different people do better or worse jobs of latching on to a specific verbal stream.

mathowie 15:13 Yeah, Justin, you're doing a terrible job

Jessamyn 15:17 in the country and it's quiet here, I spend my big old brain time thinking about things and not watching hockey on the television at the bar while you're trying to talk to me

mathowie 15:26 4040 birds at once that could happen.

Jessamyn 15:31 It's like a thing that they talk about with people who are rural, like you just go to noisy places, and you no longer have the processing ability to separate out 100 simultaneous conversations, which

Cortex 15:41 is very important to keep Order in the court. If you're a rural juror.

Jessamyn 15:45 The judge is eating beans.

mathowie 15:49 All right, yes. What should we do first jobs, maybe there were jobs? Yeah. Let's see October, October, October

Jessamyn 15:58 jobs. I enjoyed this brief one that I hope narrative Cody can find somebody for but basically, they're all going to be in the place for a wedding. And they want to get some photos taken because they're all going to be in the same place for the wedding, somewhere around Jupiter, Florida, which is one of the more interesting town names in Florida or perhaps the world. And everybody's not their style. So maybe that would be cool. And it'll be around holiday time. So if you're a photographer, and you're in the Jupiter, Florida area, please look up narrative priorities and help narrative priorities. Her Alison with her?

mathowie 16:33 Where is Jupiter? Florida? Looks like it's on the east. Oh, it's down by Palm Beach. Yeah, okay. So too far. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. And I guess Yeah, it's hard to find a photographer. That is cool.

Jessamyn 16:49 If you're in a place where maybe the style there is not your style, it's hard to find a person. I think, I mean, because that's really the thing. It's not that there aren't photographers, it's a she's looked at them, and they're really not her style. And she's a designer, Illustrator, and so cares about things like that. And

mathowie 17:09 I guess I know, a couple dozen photographers, it doesn't photographers pretty well. And everyone's pretty technically competent. Like, you know, there's small differences. I think equipment, so good now, especially digital, and you can experiment really quick. And so everyone's really good. It's just the one or two are really good at getting talking to you and getting like natural smiles out of you and taking photos on the fly, you know, versus the like, standard thing is like completely staging everything

Jessamyn 17:39 over there and shut up. I'm gonna take some pictures.

mathowie 17:42 Let me move this light versus stand in that alley and think of the word poop. And you know what? That moment is perfect. poop emoji that made me laugh. That was like the best. Stupid moment. Yeah. All right. Maybe projects.

Jessamyn 18:01 I didn't see anything else in jobs personally, but projects was full of awesome this time around. Yeah, I don't. And I felt bad because all the awesome things that I saw looked like they were all done by people I knew. And so I was like, how could that possibly be true, but I think I just have a lot of friends do a lot of stuff on metaphysics.

mathowie 18:21 I loved Horus rumbles. Your friends. Yeah, Horace Rumpole just doing a gallery of the first version of a Wikipedia page. And it seems like, oh, yeah, that's great concept. I don't know how that's gonna work out then you look at you're like, Oh, my God, that's awesome. When you see, like, what did How was Facebook described, the very first time

Cortex 18:41 I met to go back and look at this. And I never got around to because I liked the idea.

mathowie 18:46 And the funny part is you just dig into the versioning archives, and it's there for everybody to get to. And that's it's such a great, awesome idea.

Jessamyn 18:57 Yeah, and it's very simple. And you can just look at the thing. And it's yeah, I just thought it was great. You know, just what everybody needs another Tumblr. So let's see, you know, let's see how long it and now I want to know about the Jessamyn West Wikipedia page. First, the first version of that,

mathowie 19:16 and these are just screenshots of the first version and like I saw this everywhere as soon as he put it up like the Atlantic people loved it, too. Like all the Yeah, all the word nerds loved it. It was people were posting like all the, I guess he looked at like early web presences like Facebook and stuff. Like what was their first page ever? How was it described? And yeah, people are passing that around in tech blogs. Yeah, it was all over really quick.

Jessamyn 19:44 minds all about the article being

mathowie 19:48 up for web. Bloggers in the early 2000s.

Jessamyn 19:55 Like a thing in Wikipedia, like you're in Wikipedia for being a blogger fuck off.

mathowie 20:00 Fake thing. That's not a thing.

Jessamyn 20:03 Right? That's not rar I arrived. I've been getting more involved in Wikipedia. Let's look at yours. Josh, you do not have one?

Cortex 20:11 I don't. I've never, I've never quite tripped the wire that caused someone to make one as far as I know, or maybe someone did at some point. And that got deleted. I think. Actually,

mathowie 20:22 mine was one sentence for like five years, and then it was up for deletion. And then it was all because Dan Hartung, you know, work there or something. And he was like, oh, okay, I'll write a good one. And then you read a great one. And now it's sort of, you know, I think it was 2007 or eight. And that's

Jessamyn 20:39 a sad day, maybe we should do a little log rolling mat, and I'll fix a couple things on yours. And you could fix a couple things on my,

mathowie 20:46 Yeah, mine's a few years out of date,

Jessamyn 20:48 what's not wrong? You know, it's not even wrong. You know, it's like, it's not wrong, but it's not correct. But I'm not supposed to edit it. So

mathowie 20:55 you know, what this reminds me of, I was telling a friend the other day that like LinkedIn, you know, LinkedIn, if you have a profile there, your friends can tag you with things, right? That is like a slow motion description of me from five or 10 years ago, like, everyone keeps tagging me with like CMS expertise.

Jessamyn 21:17 Like, tags, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Like tags, like Facebook tags, tags, like internet tags.

mathowie 21:24 Yeah. And then like, if 10, you know, I don't know if more than x people say that, that shows up on your. So it's like, basically what your friends describe you as

Jessamyn 21:33 a controller to those things. It's all power laws, right? Like, if I was looking at your webpage, they'd be like, does Matt know about blogs, and I'd be like, click, but like, that's not what you're I mean, you know, what I'd be

mathowie 21:46 looking at my own profile going, I'm sort of about blogs, not so much CMS writer anymore. And like, like, it's,

Cortex 21:55 I feel like it's the like folksonomy you know, tagging categorization version of how your parents will ask you to fix their computer. If you ever did anything with computers in college. Just like till the end of time. It's that yeah, it's that sort of association about 10 years ago. Yeah, exactly.

Jessamyn 22:13 Yeah, computer guy come over here.

mathowie 22:16 Any other good project? Yeah, I'm

Cortex 22:19 gonna I'm just gonna get the stereotyping out of the way and mentioned Hexatronic exalgo row because oh my god, I love love roguelikes obvious but I also I love grids. Hex grids are one of my favorite things. We had a sidewalk downtown in the park blocks near our old apartment had hexagonal sidewalk tiles, which I was found delightful. For the entire six years we lived there and my wife has heard much about hexagons to her probably

Jessamyn 22:50 consider your favorite shape in addition to being

Cortex 22:53 just like hexagonal tiles. It's something like like square tiles or fives. I don't think we do know. Got some decals on her window. But yeah, I don't know I just I like I like the break away from standard square tiles. In terms of like video game navigation, you get some interesting different possibilities. When you go to a hex grid instead of a square grid. It's easier to have equidistant movement in multiple directions with a hex grid, because you get six different equal length steps versus a square grid, you get like four equal length steps, and then the diagonal steps to like diagonally adjacent squares. It's a different, it's like 1.414 Square to two districts instead of one. So you have a challenge with any game like that, where if you want to handle movement on that grid, do you say every step is exactly one step in length? In which case you can diagonally and move a lot faster across the diagonal of the square then you will be able to by moving like left and then up. You can have as many

Jessamyn 23:52 solid straighten that

mathowie 23:54 out. Yeah. So isn't settlers based on hacks that sellers use sex? Yeah, yeah. Oh, well, it's posted by Hexatronic.

Jessamyn 24:02 Which is super perfect. Yeah, I don't know. I

Cortex 24:05 would have put this on the front page just on general principle, but his was like the second half of his write up is spot on. Basically, it's a pain in the ass to get this to work in a modern browser. You really have to sort of like yeah, nudge Jocko willing to run Java? Yeah, Java

mathowie 24:19 was removed from the Mac like four years ago or something. So it doesn't run.

Cortex 24:26 I think I went over to my Windows box just to make it work and even then had to do like, you know, five minutes of futzing, which is crazy, because my whole computer Yeah, so so it's, it's tricky.

mathowie 24:36 Was it right once run anywhere? Eventually, it's funny

Cortex 24:42 because Java really was pretty good about that for a lot of time. Yeah. It's really just sort of ossified. Now. It's apparently, I guess it must be the first time I've tried to run like a Java applet in a browser in like years,

Jessamyn 24:53 or anything in browsers anymore. Yeah, not like that. I run

Cortex 24:57 lots of JavaScript in browsers. But that's a whole episode. because that's what you write a clicker. And if your god like I haven't said much about them in a couple of well,

Jessamyn 25:10 since the last podcast, maybe it

Cortex 25:13 has been that little. But anyway,

Jessamyn 25:14 I don't think there's any clickers up this time, right.

Cortex 25:18 I don't think I haven't No report. Surprised. Yeah. All right.

Jessamyn 25:22 I enjoyed Vaughn cliff because he's a personal, wonderful friend of mine who sent me. backstory, I got new checks. I think I told you guys, this is my new checks. They just say Jessamyn West lives in Randolph, Vermont, instead of having my address because I got them through an online check store. But then bond Cliff sent me a letter to that address just to proof of concept that I could get it delivered. So that was that happened. This might work. It totally worked. And had a picture of a turtle.

mathowie 25:52 Thanks. Bond. Close kid is like a big, small human. Yeah, no,

Jessamyn 25:56 he's a grown up now. And so bond cliff and his son are building a scale model train layout, because they live in 1968. And they're building a little small one. And he's got a blog talking about what they're doing. And they've got kind of a cool basement. I don't know. They're just nice people. And I was

mathowie 26:15 keen out like, basement to the best. They're picking out like houses from his childhood to recreate that so awesome. Like your first house? That's awesome.

Jessamyn 26:25 Yeah, it's just one of those great, like, how to be a great dad how to be great kid projects. And they're building it into a corner of a corner of the basement. And it's just the blog is so cool. And it's a cool project on top of it. So,

mathowie 26:38 yes, practice of things that require research. Like they're looking at House plan. Well, like research

Jessamyn 26:44 in power tools, what's a better combination? There is no better combination.

mathowie 26:50 To the San Diego San Diego Model Railroad Museum is like amazing. I've been to it a few times. So fun.

Jessamyn 26:57 Did you ever go through like a model railroad phase, or just kind of

Cortex 27:02 I'd only do it for like I never did. We didn't have like, any real railroad stuff at home when I think we had a little bit when I was very young. But we never really got into that my dad likes him. I don't know how seriously he was into them earlier in his life, but he's always sort of appreciated him. And he's he likes models in general. And I did some like model building as a kid, you know, ships and planes and cars and stuff. But we went to see there's a there's at least one model train sort of museums slash exhibit slash hobbyist club in town. And we went to them a couple times. And they have a big old sprawling thing and you know, some, like 5000 square foot space or something like that.

Jessamyn 27:42 Those are fun when you get to see like a really giant, like, when people really go to town.

Cortex 27:47 Yeah, when you get out of like, I made an oval, I made a figure eight, and you get like a series like someone built a giant 20 foot for 20 foot by 20 foot like mountain scape with tunnels through the side and switchovers. And yeah, it's kind of crazy. I appreciate it. Even if I've never really gotten into it myself.

mathowie 28:08 Do they like recreate certain California towns and areas, it's really cool. I forgot I grew up in such a small house, we had N scale, which is like the tiniest like thing, or yeah, they're tiny. So we just had N scale tracks and it was just sort of set it up one day and the take it all apart because that's the entire living room.

Cortex 28:29 Another thing I liked was this project from alt f4 This is this is a project for someone other than me because I'm terrible at typography. But it's called the measure and it's a new sort of just for the hell of it typesetting and design contest thing he's doing where every month, they'll take a different public domain book, just because that way the text is available everybody and everybody who wants to can typeset the thing or you know, the first chapter of the thing and send it in and then they'll give out you know, prize with this one they get to pick the next book and and so yeah, it's like just a laid back little nice design thing, but, but I feel like with me and typography, I'm like, oh, you know what, let's see should this should this use Helvetica or future and that's about as far as I can really get into it. But yeah, I know there are a ton of people on Metafilter who are much more actively into type and design so this seems like you

Jessamyn 29:26 could budget which is always been a big metal filter favorite.

mathowie 29:29 Yeah, I saw this on Twitter. I forgot it was on projects. This is awesome. It reminds me it's like the old CSS Zen Garden. Hey, designers like here is a here's a you know, whatever. 20 Page chunk of text make it look as good as you possibly can and we'll vote on it. It'll be for fun. I mean, this is something you know, I thought of in 1998 or something I was like I shouldn't like I should learn how to make nicer looking public domain books. So when you first stumble across See The Project Gutenberg, you're like, this should be so much nicer or something. So there's a cool project. And you can definitely if you I went through him one night, went through all of them. And sort of like some people make weird design choices. Some one of them some guy, he does highlights read words in the text. And I thought that was a crazy design choice. But

Jessamyn 30:21 some of it just shows how like some design can be personal. Because that's maybe what you want a thing to do. But then some of it winds up being just kind of better for everybody, you know, I mean, I sort of feel like design is subjective, in some ways, but objective and others because some stuffs really just easier to read than others and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, if

mathowie 30:41 you look at like, there's maybe 10 entries, and they're closed for the first month, and they're gonna do a second round. But in the first round, I would say, the 10 or so entries, like six or seven of them are just basically they pick two fonts, like a title, font and a body font. And they're just going from readability. And then like, there's one or two there. Like, they really tried to enhance readability by changing up the way block quotes work in the margins, and the page breaks. And the one I didn't like, which is like they went kind of nuts. And there's all that different kinds of fonts and colors, but like it's Yeah, I think, yeah, book design is like a thing, or typesetting is like a thing we don't really teach anymore. And then there's a really, yeah, it's super fun. Probably

Jessamyn 31:19 understanding typesetting is an aspect of design, when most people just pour a thing into, you know, whatever desktop publishing thing they're doing that has a bunch of presets that are acceptable. You know, it's cool watching when people really care like this is 12.7. Letting the 10 point type like, is it letting leading letting lead lead?

mathowie 31:41 Lead? Yes, actual bars allow?

Cortex 31:45 See, this is even how solid maybe both books are. I guess I guess you could even bring about the letting on the lead.

Jessamyn 31:57 You're dead to me. Okay. So

Cortex 31:58 I've been for years. Sorry, it's after Halloween. I also enjoy Thanksgiving themed

Jessamyn 32:07 jokes. Oh, yeah. That's coming up. Hello. Hey, before I forget, you guys gonna get the store up and running again?

mathowie 32:13 Oh, yeah, we should do that. Two days ago. Yeah, we should do it. That's

Jessamyn 32:17 why I go in tomorrow. All right. I'm free my data, which is just a really nice one off website by B word Mueller, which is like, Okay, I put all my stuff on all the places, how do I get my stuff out? So how do you export your data from Foursquare? How do you export your data from medium? How do you export your data from known which I've never heard of? Oh, yeah. But it also highlights who you can't export your data from? Although I thought you could get your data from Flickr. Oh, I guess maybe it's third party apps. But it's a really nice website that kind of it's very simple. It's looks very nice. Oh, it's brought to you by known. Maybe that's why I don't know what it is. Yeah.

mathowie 32:58 So known is like a new sort of open sources startup that's supposed to represent I think, the indie web. So there's been word Muller. I think he's been word on Twitter. I think it's him and Kevin marks like the early quick time. Yeah. And like friend of tomtec. And there's all these like, indie web, people are sort of getting together. I think that's what known is, and they're going to release a whole bunch of projects. And I think this is their first big project, which is free my data, which is nice.

Jessamyn 33:27 Well, I think it looks awesome. And now I'm gonna sign up with known and I don't know, do whatever known does. But yeah, I just thought, you know, I think a lot of people are interested in having to export your Instagrams. No, and it's a pain in the ass. I actually wrote a thing on that for Computers in Libraries magazine, because you know, you put a lot of content on there. Yeah, that's

mathowie 33:47 terrible. I guess it's on your camera roll. That's what they like as jerks think what Wait, Flickr, Flickr? Oh, you let you do that.

Jessamyn 33:57 Turn you access to it, but it doesn't have an exporting tool. So you feel like

mathowie 34:03 that can be a Yahoo thing. Maybe I could have swore

Cortex 34:08 maybe it's just that previously, it was easy to do because there was a really robust tool that would do it

mathowie 34:13 for you big heavy labs or something like that. Yeah, I guess you could, you must be able to move out of Tumblr, like with RSS or so you can export

Cortex 34:20 from it. That's kind of funny as I did that one time, and it was actually a huge clusterfuck to reliably transfer to like WordPress or something. But the the data is there, but yeah, it's good. Anyway, yeah. And then for them,

Jessamyn 34:35 yes. And then lastly, just a nerdy post by other person I know. Meta filter is a land of contrasts by Mary R, who is basically scraping together Tumblr of lands that metal filter is inconclusive, or in conclusion, what is the land of contrasts? You know, that stupid meme, but Mary has made a thing and it's a one off have a blog and it's adorable. And if you're super agitated and don't really want to wait for six months of Tumblr, you can view her till the club text file.

mathowie 35:14 Inclusion shrugging is a land of contrasts. Wow. Amazing. I can't believe you didn't build this, Josh. That seems right.

Jessamyn 35:22 No, it's old. Yeah.

Cortex 35:25 I'm glad that other people do the same sort of weird things that I would do if I decided to do them. So no, yeah, I was really pleased by that. That was what I was gonna mention, too. That's awesome. Instead, I'll mention my last project is many land by Philip. Philip P Philip.

Jessamyn 35:43 Philip Lenten

mathowie 35:44 film, it's Google blog scoped guy. Yeah,

Jessamyn 35:48 that's a great blog. So it wasn't like

mathowie 35:51 III boy, like you just run around forever. And it's isometric universe. It's

Cortex 35:56 a big, it's not isometric. It's just a straight profile view, 2d sort of platformer universe. But it's got it's a big collaborative thing where you can, you know, make stuff. Nice. And it's got a built in sprite editor. So you can like everything you see in there is stuff that various players have made. And actually, if you right click on stuff, you can see for like, who made it and who placed it and when. And you can grab stuff that you like, and go somewhere else. And MIT put copied me.

mathowie 36:28 Just played Yeah,

Cortex 36:30 it's a really cool pile of stuff. I haven't spent enough time playing with it. But I did jump in. And I was making comments in the projects thread about making a major sponge because like, that's

mathowie 36:42 this is like, like, game never ending or slacks.

Cortex 36:47 It feels like it feels like die. I mean, obviously, it's doing different things, but it kind of feels like glitch, but with the really, really free form creation stuff that I think a lot of people kind of wanted from from

Jessamyn 37:01 more gamey. Yes, yeah,

Cortex 37:03 it's the startup, they've got some logic in there. So you can do some basic sort of world interactions with blocks and stuff now, so you can attach scripting rather than just straight up art. So I don't know how much like game game there isn't there. But it just seems like a really cool creative space with just enough like bits of self determination and hints of interaction that you can script in that people are starting to make. And it's great because it becomes like this combination of a showcase of, you know, random art making and and of architecture and references to pop culture. Like there's a ton of pixel art stuff scattered throughout. You'll see any game you can think of if you wander along and if someone will have made you know, like, it's easy to find a little Mario sitting around somewhere but

Jessamyn 37:48 it just seems really and honestly find little things tucked around and yeah,

mathowie 37:52 I person you see running around is like a real person. Yeah, it's

Cortex 37:57 a big it's a big hole. You see him oh, five MMO. And the fact that it's not like you know, a combat MMO makes it okay, that maybe there's a little bit of leg or whatever, between different players? Because like

Jessamyn 38:08 you said, leg, leg,

Cortex 38:11 leg leg? Yeah, a big four leg and a dragons.

mathowie 38:16 Have you ever chatted with anyone on it isn't good or actually want to talk about ethics.

Cortex 38:25 I've seen a little bit of chatter that I haven't chatted with. I just haven't, I've spent like an hour with it and had a good time with it. But I need to go back and sort of

Jessamyn 38:33 look something up.

Cortex 38:35 If you just click on a tile and drag it over to the sidebar, you'll now have I think a copy of that.

mathowie 38:42 Announce Yeah, oh, by those little keyboard.

Cortex 38:46 The mouse is used for placing blocks and for drawing blocks, because you can draw your own art and make that into a block like a background or a solid block or a ladder to climb. It's a bunch of logic you can attach to them. It's interesting that it's confounding to me and I think I'm in favor of it just because I liked the fact that it sort of disrupted the way I think about stuff. But the the canvas for making pixel art, all the blocks and stuff is a 19 by 19 pixel canvas.

Jessamyn 39:11 That's great. So nothing can be symmetrical. Well, it

Cortex 39:14 can be symmetrical, but it can't Yeah, it doesn't divide by two. And so when I went to make the vengers Bunch, I was like, oh shit, but I this no, this won't work because it doesn't divide nicely. And I started to make a pixel perfect Menger sponge like with like the smallest square in it being three by three with a hole in the middle. And then I did the math and realized after I'd done about 10 of them that no I'm gonna have to do literally 361 different tiles. I want to create an actual perfect, large scale Zeis effort. So I made a sort of slightly Bachi one out of 19 by team and that went a lot better but yeah, no, it's just it's really mean I honestly I at the time, I didn't make it a post because I figured someone else was going to but now it's been like a couple days and so maybe this will be like maybe listen have become a post of the front page between when

Jessamyn 40:02 we record and make a post I mean you can nothing stopping you Josh Yeah, no

Cortex 40:06 it's want to say I'm saying I may make a post between now recording this and now when someone's listening to this a day or two later in the meantime post that didn't exist will have come to exist because I'd be like fucking I'm just gonna go do it so nice. I forget to do that. I'll seem like a jerk so I

Jessamyn 40:23 should set your own self up. Yep though, honestly. Exactly. No sounds like a personal problem. Yep. Oh, speaking of things that haven't happened yet, but we'll have happened by the time the podcast I want to wish a very happy 40th birthday to Mr. Bill. He has a birthday on Wednesday the fifth which is either coming up or just passed. And I just wanted to say happy birthday because culture have texted me and was like, You better send him a card and I was like, shut up. But I just figured I'd also say hi got

mathowie 40:57 that text too. And it is hard to find a postcard in my town. Everyone wants to sell you a

Jessamyn 41:01 card up. Do you have a printer in

Cortex 41:03 McMinnville? Right now. Hard to get by a regular card. Got half of it off. Get cut half of it off and your writing address on the back end put a stamp on there. It's a postcard.

mathowie 41:16 I want to support my local economy and get a nice local pitcher

Jessamyn 41:20 pitcher about your local economy and not do the barest amount of work to send Mr. Bill a birthday card.

mathowie 41:26 Today I got a stationery store I can't believe more stores don't have these have

Jessamyn 41:31 postcards.

mathowie 41:33 True. Yeah. Five.

Jessamyn 41:36 To make when you have a child there an endless supply of creativity.

Cortex 41:39 To order something from amazon.com sent me same day shipping. When it gets there. Cut out like four by six inches of the cardboard box. That's your postcard

Jessamyn 41:50 boom. Then take a photo outside to refrigerator and I had to take all the stuff off my refrigerator to get my new refrigerator which included a metal filter thing for the back of an iPhone for that I no longer have flipping the bird signed by Josh and a postcard of your feet. Matt Halley that you sent me from the internet from vacation from your phone. Oh,

mathowie 42:15 that's right to remember which app that was. That was an apple thing. Remember, it was called cards?

Jessamyn 42:24 Why are you remember? I don't know how you did it. I was like, wow, that's like the least effort possible. I

mathowie 42:28 wonder if Yeah. Yeah, like if I could send a text to a certain number and it just did all that for me. That'd be awesome.

Jessamyn 42:37 I'm able to. It's fun picking the stamp? No,

mathowie 42:40 I like picking I wanted to pick a beautiful card and it was hard to find postcards, but I know where to go today to get it. Yes, I'll solve it. metal filter stuff. My favorite posts of the entire month it was amazing. Was guar doing Pet Shop Boys cover for the AV Club series where they do silly cover songs. They

Jessamyn 43:03 didn't even see this I met a filter I saw this elsewhere on the internet.

mathowie 43:06 Yeah, they come up you know they the club every year comes up with like 50 Weird 80 songs and then throws them at sort of popular musicians and musicians have

Jessamyn 43:16 to pick right which means if you wait too long, but you're gonna do it you get a terrible song. Yeah,

mathowie 43:23 they take the songs out when someone sings them so there's no doubles. And so it's a it's a great and like guar you know the lead singer died last year to Rungus Yeah, they have two new singers one's a woman she's amazing. She's like some incredible engineer to on the outside of guar and, and and like petshop voices West End girls is way more metal than it seems like the lyrics are super metal and then the other second half of their set is like was that people who died signed up

Jessamyn 43:57 of Jim Carroll's people who died all about their friends who died or people they know who have died like they changed all the lyrics to be people they know

mathowie 44:04 Yeah, it was all started to lead singers of singers and other bands and stuff. It's good. I had explained guar to five or six people who had never even heard of guar How can you go through life not know it's sort of like the Weird Al of metal like it's good. It's fun.

Cortex 44:19 I saw that one time I thought I was going to 90s Night show or at night I don't remember the story I'm fucking it up carry on.

mathowie 44:31 I've heard their live shows are amazing just like everyone says go to weardale LIVE show it's always going to be a good time so

Jessamyn 44:37 a new kept telling you that Jim and I went this last two years ago and super worth it. Totally worth it for your kid and

mathowie 44:43 quar where they do leave the blast colored soapsuds on you or something. It's supposed to be a blast.

Jessamyn 44:49 Various appendages.

mathowie 44:52 And I think people think it's gonna be like a weird DGL and kind of disgusting horrible

Jessamyn 44:57 like, take a crap on you. Yeah,

mathowie 45:00 Unlike No, this is all fun fun. Like they're coming to Portland in like two weeks, and I'm seriously thinking about it.

Jessamyn 45:06 Dude, you should totally consider it. It would be a little outside of your comfort zone. I think you would really enjoy it. Right? I

mathowie 45:11 think it'll be fun

Jessamyn 45:13 for for Tron blood guys. Oops.

mathowie 45:18 So yeah, oh, and I went through the AV Club's entire series, they have like, you know, you scroll down there for years of archives of like 20 or 25 songs each year. And like, I listen to, you know, I listen to songs, you know, maybe a minute of each song for like, an hour or two. And, like, it's surprising what you find. It's like, people try to change it. But people that try to do it realist like do a, you know, like, just rendition. Yeah, faithful renditions usually go badly, because these are all iconic songs where like the lead singer was, you know, Freddie Mercury or something. And you're like, Hey, guy from Mumford and Sons. Credit, like, people aren't really good bands, or like, you don't have that definitive, you know, punchy, front, lead man sound. So the ones that are doing it faithfully are almost all terrible, then people who change it up. Most often they lost the joy of the song, they change it so much. They're like, Oh, that was a fun song before. Now. It's like slow and downer and it's in a minor key and even cool. And then there was rare, like, you know, 5% of them are much different. And just as good and super fun. Right? So

Jessamyn 46:28 you're like, oh, my gosh, this is actually a really good song and done by a different good band. It remains good.

mathowie 46:34 Yeah. And the only thing I found was my, like, the best one I found was whatever they called punch brothers. And they're sort of like mandolins and basses and violins and they did a car song from 78. That's all cynthy And they did it on a banjo and it's Santa Ana violin. It sounds amazing. It's as fun as the original. And then I'm like, I tweeted, I was like, oh my god is the best thing ever. And God who is now I'm blanking on the name somebody's been on meta filter for forever.

Jessamyn 47:02 We've been in the box and we can tell you and then you don't have to say it out loud.

mathowie 47:06 Was the brother we share the bond singer?

Jessamyn 47:09 I can't remember. I can't remember understanding me right?

Cortex 47:15 Yes. Tie this talk about the thing if you can't remember the name of the thing talk about the thing describe the thing.

mathowie 47:23 What do you mean the song or yeah

Cortex 47:28 yeah, if you can't remember if you're failing to come up with the identifier you want for a thing that you know you know what it is? Describe things about

mathowie 47:38 that guy Yeah, well like so the band is punch brothers the lead singer is Chris something Chris why sorts of the Chris teal Thile. And his brother is on metal filter as guys someone we like Gil rain, Gill rain, gallery's brother. And the funny part is is before the punch brothers they were called God what were they they were like a bluegrass kid band like they were like 12 years old and they traveled the country they're super popular. And and so Gil rain grew up as a kid on tour constantly is like a 12 year old with a tutor and living in a bus like it's so he just said it was a crazy upbringing. Like it was two families of like bluegrass kids, and they played music festivals just constantly. And now they're like, you know, 2530 years old. It's it's a fantastic

Jessamyn 48:32 so you mentioned that I met with I don't remember she

mathowie 48:35 just emailed me all this. Oh my god. He's like, Oh my god, I can't believe he just tweeted out my brother song. lead singers, my brother and I went, Oh, Paul was like, oh my god, I love the kid folk band. You know, 15 years ago, I was way into that the previous band and I went holy shit. Like what was that? Like? He said it was a pretty fun upbringing. So yeah, glorious cool.

Jessamyn 49:01 Car is a land of contrasts. There's a bunch of things. I'm going to filter that I like this month, but I'm the goofy one is starts from Mallory Ortberg what's the most dead thing your dad has ever done? dad's dad but their deadness? My dad wears a red shirt when he goes out for Italian food. So the stains don't show my dad pronounces tacos as tacos. My dad's save scraps of wood from skips because that's good wood but you couldn't use it as a kid because that's good, would it cetera, et cetera and it just becomes one of those adorable Metafilter threads where people are like, here's a wacky thing my dad does and it's funny and you know, standing on a bench in the fancy restaurant so you can get the angle for the family picture.

mathowie 49:50 Man, did you see the how, how conservative or liberal your name is? Because Jessamyn came I'm out at 100% liberal there are no more liberal. Yeah, yeah, I swear. And I, every one of the thread is trying to look for the 100% conservative name. And they only found one and it's like some old biblical name like Eustace or like, some man's name. As a you.

Jessamyn 50:19 Okay, back it up? How does this work? Yeah, you

mathowie 50:23 just put in your name. And I think it compares you to Facebook or Twitter or something like Matt is like, you know, it was the most popular name of 1980, or whatever. So it's like, I'm like 52% liberal or conservative is no big deal. Associated

Jessamyn 50:37 priorities. I don't even understand how this works. But I love what you're saying. I just I now

mathowie 50:44 know, Justin, you are like 100. You are the 10. Oh, like the checkout? Nobody is more than that. It's so funny.

Jessamyn 50:55 That's probably fair, right?

mathowie 50:58 Every Jessamyn was like some sort of freedom fighter in the past or so.

Jessamyn 51:03 It's just me.

Cortex 51:05 Maybe it's it just based on Mefi public record. Probably public records of political contributions. Oh, that might so you take every every every track political contribution, you take the money versus conservative behavior of the person things.

Jessamyn 51:26 And yet, still there. Is that is in the middle of a sentence there?

Cortex 51:33 Like you were saying something much more much more concrete sounding than I was? Yes. So anyway, it makes sense that the extreme on either end would be names that are less common, because the less common the name the more for outliers. Yeah, exactly. So you're more likely to

Jessamyn 51:55 people who are running or people who are voting for those.

mathowie 51:58 I think people give money maybe. Like if you put it in JSON, you get zero. It's in the middle because there's a billion Jason's. But if you put in I guess, something unique, someone said Africa comes in it totally liberal. If you put in Hey, Soos actual Jesus, it's slightly liberal. Shouldn't be more.

Jessamyn 52:18 Wow, I don't don't even understand this website. But I am pleased to please who have shown up where I show up.

mathowie 52:26 I just love that you broke the meter from the first

Jessamyn 52:30 and they can't find my conservative analog. I enjoyed that very much. That was cool. I should probably comment in that thread. That's adorable.

mathowie 52:41 lowest level ever arms up.

Jessamyn 52:46 I enjoyed this post about it's a it's a classic single link with a via by curious new, which is basically an article about this guy who was flying an sr 71. At full speed. It disintegrated. Yes. But the plane just tore itself apart around him. And he was flying along at Mach three without a plane.

mathowie 53:09 Wow.

Jessamyn 53:12 Almost say,

mathowie 53:14 like I there's a sr 71 You know, a few miles away at the Evergreen museum. And I look at once in a while and it looks amazing. I can't imagine that thing breaking up. Wow.

Jessamyn 53:26 No, I can't imagine flying Mach three. But like, yep.

mathowie 53:32 That thing is like a razor blade. When you look at it from the front. Like there's nothing for air to hit. Like everything is so sharp. Everything is so tiny.

Jessamyn 53:43 Oh, that's one of those crazy things. The black? Yeah.

Cortex 53:46 It's featured in the in the 1980s science fiction family adventure film, Darrell. Darrell, Dan, all this is, Darrell is experimental robots. He's like a little robotic boy who escapes somehow from like the government institution where he's being built and tested. And people are the first don't know that he's a robot. And so he ends up falling in with his family. And then he's all crazy. And like, they're really good at video games and stuff. And then he gets taken by the government. And then he escaped, and I think he faked his own death by stealing an sr 71. And then like ejecting from it, and crashing it, and so yeah,

Jessamyn 54:30 like he's dead, and then he gets to run away and live with his family.

Cortex 54:35 I think that's how it went. Yeah. But yeah, part of that is he ditches an sr 71. He steals an sr 71 ditches it. So it's like that's, that's a robot. He's like, Fuck your government. I'm gonna destroy you know, a billion dollar airplane. Just to stick it to you. Which, you know, none of that really comes through as I recall in the film, particularly, but thinking about F is like, oh, that's there's some weird fucking dynamics of this movie that I thought was awesome as a kid because he played like three video games at once. He was a version of pole position.

mathowie 55:07 Robot youth life for a kid. Oh, do you know anything about home struck?

Cortex 55:18 I Homestuck Homestuck and I know Rory Meritage fucking loves it with every fiber of his being and he made a giant post about it. And

mathowie 55:27 Megan post it's a is it a it's a comic that's like never ending it's been going on for five years. Yeah. And I have a hard time

Cortex 55:34 getting into a comic that I have to like read back through a year of archives

Jessamyn 55:38 for Children who start playing a computer game and end up having to save the universe, according to this post.

mathowie 55:45 Yeah, like Andy Bay was going nuts on this and I was like, like every Andy bale thing requires way too much backstory and like everything. It's just seems so

Jessamyn 55:56 this isn't Rory Mara niche. Oh, it is. He's got two accounts.

Cortex 56:00 I think he switched. Oh, yeah, he closed his old one. And he's back is whatever it is ragi. Hopefully, he didn't expect anybody not to make the connection because he's been pretty open about it. But bro, if I just outed your worst open secret ever. I apologize.

mathowie 56:18 It is. Yeah, mega, mega mega mega post. But about a mega

Jessamyn 56:23 mega. You guys allow 6000 word posts to tell you.

Cortex 56:27 As long as as long as it's real, real occasional thing. Anybody who tries to make a habit gets more of an issue. But once in a while for everybody to see it to say oh, yeah, that's a thing that can happen. Your

Jessamyn 56:39 favorites. Nobody actually read it.

mathowie 56:43 People. Halloween people are showing up to the door as Homestuck characters.

Jessamyn 56:48 Oh, one person say that? Did you see more than one person saying? Yeah,

mathowie 56:53 I saw one person say that. Like, I guess Homestuck so thing if somebody dressed up? I'd never heard of it before this post?

Jessamyn 57:02 Yeah, no, I'd never heard of it before that tweet, or maybe you retweeted it or whatever. I saw that one line and then was like who? And then here? Are they are very quick trying to make Homestuck happen?

mathowie 57:16 I'm sure

Jessamyn 57:18 I'll go read it now. Just to just to make sure I can stay up with the kids today. Yeah. Enough time just reading cartoons. Like, where there's not like a clear progression, like there's that great pony comic or go off or whatever. But it's very difficult to figure out how to like, go backwards, and then just read them all forwards and sequence because some of them are little sets. And then some of them are big, long stories.

Cortex 57:42 Yeah, it's really it's sort of haphazard in terms of like, any sort of overarching narrative, you know, it's there. But it's, yeah, it's not nearly as linear as something like, I don't know, questionable content or something.

Jessamyn 57:54 Questionable Content, I also enjoy, because then I can just go back and then be like, uh, you know, Mr. Bill, link to it on Facebook or something. And I'll be like, Oh, right. I like that. Click, click click,

Cortex 58:02 like an entire year. And it's a week earlier. And they're still having the same argument in the coffee shops. nonstop for years. But there. I have complicated feelings about it.

mathowie 58:18 Did you guys see a gift on YouTube?

Jessamyn 58:21 It hasn't been shown. Thank you.

mathowie 58:26 It's almost a month old. And it hasn't been shut down by YouTube, which is great. And I've used it four or five times already. I guess they shut down things that are similar to this, but you just added the word gift to a YouTube URL. So it's gift youtube.com. And like, in there's a little scrubber and you pick out your five seconds and how many frames you want. And it pumps out a file. And I learned that I think Twitter has a three megabyte limit. So it has to be like,

Cortex 58:55 I love that that is both constraining and also like it's an animated GIF. It should not be three fucking megabytes, but at the same time, like but

Jessamyn 59:04 we're talking about it

mathowie 59:06 but give you two isn't super hyper optimizing. So it's really junky because like it can shut out of five megabyte file, you know, in two seconds. It's

Cortex 59:15 just like it's Twitter won't allow you to tweet a GIF bigger than what you could fit across two floppy disks. Slow down, buddy. It's getting a little out of hand. You know, up until that it's fine. Up until that is a okay.

Jessamyn 59:30 This is useful and relevant to my interests.

mathowie 59:34 Yes, it's an awesome tool to put in your quiver

Jessamyn 59:38 to ask oh, this is completely unrelated but why did they call that thing a scrubber?

Cortex 59:46 scrubber yeah, I've known the term loosely for years and years, you know that i Whoever the first person I did some videos for was like Oh yeah. And then you

Jessamyn 59:56 can scrub with the playhead I'm reading now I don't I asked you guys,

mathowie 1:00:01 it's probably like a thing from like, you know, 50 years ago when you had a cut pieces of tape there, maybe 20 cents. So maybe you scrub it before you tape the two pieces together or like, that'd be like scuffing, I guess.

Jessamyn 1:00:16 Well, no. Okay. Well, that's my own question.

Cortex 1:00:19 Okay, I'll check that out. While someone else described the post they like

mathowie 1:00:24 I love the there was a post by rail me about Simpsons world coming out, and it actually came out and like I was watching any Simpsons you want is now instantly streaming from FX on like Apple TV. There's a whole Simpsons world and I could just, I was showing season three and four episodes in my daughter on the fly. They do that weird zoom in thing, which is kind of annoying to make it 16 Nine, but how? Why would you?

Jessamyn 1:00:53 Oh, I can't watch the

Cortex 1:00:58 worst of the frame, which is like the worst fucking thing in the world. And I didn't make you angry.

mathowie 1:01:06 25 years of The Simpsons, right? And I think 20 of them are not in HD so they just laugh that's the top and

Cortex 1:01:13 bottom people are fucking dumb. And that's the problem. The problem is people cannot deal with the idea that not their entire television is full of black bars, just fucking cardboard on the face of your TV to block off the black bars, that there's no content and just be okay. Jesus Christ. It's not like

mathowie 1:01:33 they could have they could have done that as like a promotional thing. Like, bye.

Cortex 1:01:37 Bye for an extra $5 month. Fuck up the I mean, it's ah, oh, I'm

mathowie 1:01:42 so angry. annoyed.

Cortex 1:01:43 I'm so angry.

mathowie 1:01:44 The episodes like the monorail episode is so good. You hardly notice it and it's fine. It disappears after I

Jessamyn 1:01:50 don't think Josh is gonna hardly notice any of this honestly.

Cortex 1:01:57 Well, we stayed at be in Canada, like the guy fixed the aspect ratio for it. And I was like, polite until he left so that I could really fix it again. Because like he'd done the same things like oh, wait, no, that doesn't hear. Let me There you go. That's much better. Like you just got rid of like 30% of the fucking picture, buddy.

Jessamyn 1:02:13 Television. Why did you even have them touching the television in the first place? He was

Cortex 1:02:16 just showing us around like he we were checking these like, TV. Here's this remote and he presses and press that. Here all you want to watch just like yeah. Do you live

mathowie 1:02:25 nearby?

Jessamyn 1:02:26 You thought you wanted to watch a hockey game?

Cortex 1:02:29 I don't know. It's like, the thing is he knew we were in from out of like out of this country, or up from like us. And he's still like, oh, you probably want to watch hockey. It's like, if you think I want to watch hockey because it's novel, or because you don't understand it. Basically, nobody in the US watches hockey. So if you're not the nobody watches it. But if you're going to look at random from the US and say, Oh, you probably watch sports

Jessamyn 1:02:54 hockey. What sport do you want to watch? Right? Yeah,

Cortex 1:02:57 yeah. The whole thing was just kind of funny. Also, I can't I'm having trouble finding a odd site for the specific use of scrub we're looking for.

Jessamyn 1:03:06 Oh, thank you for looking. Yeah.

Cortex 1:03:09 Because I was just angry.

mathowie 1:03:13 Jessamyn Can you tell us about your like that amazing thing of Victorian jewelry made out of hair.

Jessamyn 1:03:19 Baby gets that first haircut and Mother saves the hair. So basically, the met in New York City is doing a exhibit about mourning fashion, and specifically kind of Victorian like what people wore in Victorian times to indicate they were in mourning. And there's some pretty interesting stuff, just from a fashion perspective. And so there's this exhibit death becomes her. But one of the things that was super interesting, and it was in the article about the museum, but not like they didn't, they just tossed a picture in like, oh, it was no thing but they didn't really talk about it was this morning jewelry, which is also kind of part of a larger type of jewelry called hair work, where you would take hair from the deceased and have it made into kind of a brooch or a thing. And it's all just super interested. And there's a picture of this beautiful hair work in the article about it, and then they give no information about it whatsoever. And so I, you know, went looking around to figure out what the thing was about, and found a couple really cool pictures and of course, people in the thread. It was kind of a short but interesting. Thread got a lot of kind of random. You know, it was one of those things that had more favorites and comments for a very long time. Oh, no, it still has more favorites and comments was people talking about you know, hair work and people have hair brooches. Well, that was me I guess. But like people who kept locks of hair or whatever. So the whole idea of hair work like jewelry that you make out of hair, I don't think maybe gets enough attention. And so there's a couple build websites, goofy ones, the hair works society. And of course Lila's Hair Museum. And I think that's all I know about hair.

mathowie 1:05:09 Hair does it take to make like those two pieces they show?

Jessamyn 1:05:13 I don't think a lot of you do it right. Well, like I have, I have a brooch like this that my mother gave me. And, you know, there's not actually that much hair in it. I mean, it's not my mother's hair. She got it. I don't know where she got it. You know, because it's mostly just pasted down. I mean, you probably I mean, how much hair does the dead person need? I guess it's kind of a correlative question. Right. You can take all of it. Who cares? I think it'd be made into hair work.

mathowie 1:05:39 That like brownish rope stuff is that I don't think that's

Jessamyn 1:05:42 the hair. I think it's supposed to evoke hair. But I think the only hair hair is inside the little brooch in the picture that you Oh, okay.

mathowie 1:05:51 Okay, but they tried to match

Jessamyn 1:05:53 it. No, that would be crazy.

mathowie 1:05:57 Well, yeah, when you're saying something about like makers replaced human hair with horsehair is my way there

Jessamyn 1:06:03 was like a scam. You sent your loved ones hair away. You know, it's like people talk about like, pet crematories or whatever. Like,

mathowie 1:06:11 even human crematory there. Like it's mostly your person. Like we can't be 100% It costs extra. Buddy,

Jessamyn 1:06:21 titanium hip, you know, and yeah.

mathowie 1:06:25 Clink around. That I mean, that was amazing. When I saw that picture, I was blown away. And that's sort

Jessamyn 1:06:32 of what I enjoy making like random posts about I mean, you will remember that I did make the hairball post a while ago that people thought was completely disgusting. But this is basically the same stuff in a different format. And suddenly everyone's saying

Cortex 1:06:50 I've got a bunch of little music things from this last month. I mean, I mean, I've got stuff from Music dot metal filter dimension too, but I've got like, my metal filter posts a bunch of stuff I liked was music, including this secret songs mix from Ryan Hemsworth which is a follow up I probably mentioned in the comments of this thread. I mentioned PC music. We had a post a while back a few months maybe that I really liked and this is some more similar stuff. It's a really weird sort of glitchy I think I've seen the phrase future pop used to refer to it. It's just very some interesting very specific approaches to making pop music that I'm really digging, they're a little bit off kilter. Angela, Katherine person, I don't loot this stuff endlessly because it sort of sets her on edge a little bit. Which is interesting, because it's a very idiosyncratic sort of style, or slight.

Jessamyn 1:07:47 Asking about this on

Cortex 1:07:50 if someone was a little bit glitchy Some of it's just like really, really super dry and punctuated. You know, it's and it's a mix of a bunch of different artists on this, this compilation. So like you get a variety of different sort of takes in this general, larger genre. But

mathowie 1:08:06 I press play on one of the SoundCloud songs and you know, you can leave like comments when the player goes to a certain seconds, it was all emoji glitchy music. I've been speaking English.

Jessamyn 1:08:21 To hip for me. Yeah, it's,

mathowie 1:08:24 it's true. Ah,

Cortex 1:08:26 it's a very, yeah, it's, I really like it. But it's, it's definitely an acquired taste. I encourage people to give it a shot. And maybe then give it a shot again, like a day later, just in case. They didn't hit the exact cause once you've

mathowie 1:08:38 recovered, yes, I'm gonna file a file that word away in that I'm from this decade, like future pop, right? Sure. Yeah, I'm really in this feature pocket.

Cortex 1:08:50 Just call it contemporary. So on the exact opposite end of the musical spectrum, and equally, probably not for everybody. There was a post quizlets made about a project called tunings. 77 which is an hour and 32 minutes, I think, of just the tuning portions of every concert, the Grateful Dead played in 1977. And it's, it's, it's really weird. I put it on thinking, oh, man, it's gonna be kind of funny. And, and you know, I'll get annoyed after five minutes. But what actually happened is after five minutes, I don't know they have forgotten like three times that I was listening to it and oh, right, right. I put on that weird, Grateful Dead thing.

Jessamyn 1:09:35 You were waiting for the music. While I was

Cortex 1:09:39 waiting. I was waiting for bandmates to get finished tuning up essentially. It's weird. I didn't realize it until it isn't this but you know, 15 years of like doing music with other people on and off. I've gotten really, really used to just like the sound of ambient tuning like during practice. And so it's like I could have listened to that whole hour and a half if I hadn't like stopped it and done something else. But without even thinking about it, because it'd be like, oh, yeah, okay, well, yeah, we'll get around to playing a little bit here. But for now, people doing that's fine. I'll do whatever I'm doing while I wait.

mathowie 1:10:08 I exist between songs

Cortex 1:10:12 in between songs, like, you know, just from shows and you, they just clip the music from that entire year. And see, I just think together.

mathowie 1:10:21 I mean, I barely started to learn to play guitar, but you check those two notes that like, you know, they're right next to each other. This sort of sounds like they're doing just tinting. This is amazing. It's funny with a crowd like a soundcheck

Jessamyn 1:10:34 message in the Internet Archive saying that my browser's too old. Like it's playing the thing and telling me it can't play the thing. Yeah,

Cortex 1:10:43 this cannot happen, bro. It's not this is not me, but

Jessamyn 1:10:50 I can't get around trying to find a link to a support, you know, email address and there isn't one it's for supporting. I did. Oh, no, that's cool. I'm enjoying. I enjoyed the five seconds I listened to before I got angry and decided I had to email someone.

Cortex 1:11:10 So the third of my three metal filter music posts of weird music things. This post by homunculus about polyphonic overtone singing specifically by Anna Maria hafla. In this case, it's just a woman who can do overtone singing is when you you're singing a note like you normally do it you know singing a note vibrating your your larynx or your pharynx or whichever it is to, to produce, you know, ah sounds, but then you constrict the tissues in your throat and mouth and to some extent knows, to create a resonant chamber that creates a higher pitched overtone, based on that bass tone. And this lady has got it like down fucking cold. I've encountered this before as like to take on this. And that tends to be a little bit more sort of a rough tone to the fundamental note being sung. Whereas she's doing her like a really sort of like more pure, sort of Western major scale sort of thing with it. And it's really it's just great to listen to. It's neat. And there's some other links in the thread of her doing it in less isolated context to and it's just really neat.

mathowie 1:12:31 It's so weird. I'll come back to it. Yeah, it sounds better sounds better than Tuvan singing which is like a low like runner. And there's like a whistle at the top of it. So they're playing those. Yeah, it comes to knowing herds this kind of they're more mid Tony. They're closer together and sounds like singing kinds of thinking and knuckleball or something. It's just some weird thing only a few people can do. It's weird. Fascinating.

Cortex 1:12:59 So yeah, there's your trio of musical FPPS.

mathowie 1:13:03 Sweet. Ask

Jessamyn 1:13:06 Shut up. No. I just wanted to say that I miss Boston's mayor, Tom Menino. Shut up. Why are you laughing?

Cortex 1:13:14 I thought I liked I liked the interaction. i There's podcasts. For me. This is all about deja vu of tripod of interactions and

Jessamyn 1:13:26 things that make us feel joy

Cortex 1:13:28 just from Yeah, just just from the way we are as people.

mathowie 1:13:33 I was be at a time. Yeah. So I didn't even hear about this, that the mayor of Boston.

Jessamyn 1:13:40 He wasn't the mayor. I mean, he had stepped down and there's a new mayor now. But he's kind

mathowie 1:13:43 of like you're Ed Cartwright of New York like so

Jessamyn 1:13:46 like, well, except conch. A lot of people hated college because he, you know, did some reforms that I think people felt were not helpful, even though they may have liked him personally menino people that I know, and I know, people really liked personally. And he was pretty actually good mayor. I mean, I even have some beefs about the guy, but they're kind of minor compared to how awesome he was like, you know, you can't love a mayor entirely, just because they have to do politicking. But he made an impression on a lot of people in a really good way. And he'll be sorely missed. Yeah. And so I encouraged him to make an open post about it, because he was talking about it. And he's like, but I have never made no bid posts. And I was like, here's how you do it. And so I helped.

mathowie 1:14:33 The when was in the mayor from like, the 70s and 80s are a

Jessamyn 1:14:36 no, no, I mean, he just stepped down like you're a year or two ago. So like, basically for most of my grown up life, he was the mayor of Boston. And he did some stuff that I don't think people didn't expect, like he was very in favor of GLBT rights before. That was something you would expect and so like Boston notably has the St. Patrick's Day parade with is also notably, were jerks for a while, maybe they still are about having, you know, gay groups with gay themes marching and men I know was like, I'm not marching if you're going to discriminate, and I'm not marching, like, didn't make a huge stink about it but was just like I'm not doing it not cool, not cool and it was already a little edgy because he's Italian American, not Irish American, which is a little weird for Boston. But you know, he's super stepped up way before. People in sort of big political positions felt it was safe to do that, which I thought was cool. I mean, obviously, everybody could have done more earlier, but he was sort of early on there. And I think that was what a lot of people remember him fondly for

mathowie 1:15:45 was the Friends of Barney Frank. Maybe. So that was on his radar.

Jessamyn 1:15:50 Possibly, or I think it was just the right fucking thing to do. And he didn't care if other people thought it was, you know, I mean, possibly because Barney Frank, they were, you know, similar contemporaneous. But I think people thought that was cool, because he had to kind of stand up to the machine Boston St. Patrick's Day is like a huge thing. And he was like, Yeah, great, but I'm not marching.

mathowie 1:16:11 What year did you do that?

Jessamyn 1:16:13 I don't know what's in the post.

mathowie 1:16:18 Can we go to ask a medical term? Because I want to talk about the most fascinating thing in the world, which is like last month, last month was when we have that super contentious post that seemed on its face. Oh, that we slightly darken in a slightly darkened room? Is it rude or not to look at your phone number? And so this month, we had a similar thing, and I was thinking of us thinking of it. It's fascinating, because it's an seemingly innocuous question, but it splits everyone about 5050. And people just started fighting over something so innocuous thing.

Jessamyn 1:16:55 I just read Brock else's response and ignore everyone else. He knows how to drive a car.

mathowie 1:17:02 I have a feeling in me and you will probably disagree Josh doesn't count because he's only been driving for two

Jessamyn 1:17:08 ever driven a manual. So week and a half ever, never

Cortex 1:17:12 going. It's not like, you know, I'm gonna start driving. Finally, we're gonna buy an automatic but first, let's go get our hands on.

mathowie 1:17:19 Yeah, you should try it one. I would actually like

Cortex 1:17:22 to know how to like, I would like to have them like I understand at a very basic mechanical principle level, how to drive a stick, but I've never done it. And I worried I would destroy someone's clutch in the process of turning, you know, theory into practice. But I still kind of like to know just because it's, you know, it's a major part of automotive mechanical history. And if you

Jessamyn 1:17:46 like John Deere lawn mowers, and then you can learn to practice with a clutch that's also a brake. That's how I

mathowie 1:17:52 recycle. Like there's no such thing as an automatic motorcycle

Cortex 1:17:55 cycle.

mathowie 1:17:58 Well, the whole world is no manual transmission, except for us. We're lazy. But this is great. You're going 55 miles an hour is the stop sign coming up. What do you do? Do you pop it in neutral and use the brakes? Or do you downshift and like I never pop in neutral? Sounds crazy. And then people are like, Oh my god, brakes are cheaper to replace then clutches and transmissions which were out when you slow down but yeah, like Yeah, the time chain. No,

Jessamyn 1:18:25 that's the time on the same side on this.

mathowie 1:18:30 I only apply the brakes you know, like in second gear and below. You know, when you're coming to a stop, you can use the engine to

Jessamyn 1:18:37 slow does that neutral thing and I finally had to be like, I can't be in the car with you coasting down a hill in neutral like it makes me uncomfortable just used to not

Cortex 1:18:48 see, because I drive an automatic I just I just put a neutral and close my eyes. And you know, whatever happens happens I've got a very

mathowie 1:19:00 well, I mean, Josh, you're not missing much. It's fun, like on twisty roads. Like it's fun. It sucks in traffic. It's like it's lame. And cities a get tired of Yeah, so yeah, no,

Cortex 1:19:12 it seems like I'm perfectly happy with the idea of driving an automatic for the rest of my life. Like that's, I don't see an issue with it. I've got I've got to

Jessamyn 1:19:21 be limited. Yeah,

mathowie 1:19:23 yeah. Well, unless you go try to rent a car in Europe. Like they're

Jessamyn 1:19:28 trying to steer or trying to shift with my left hand. That'll be bad.

mathowie 1:19:32 That's super weird. Yeah. But like even Hertz Rental cars, you know, in Brussels or London or whatever. They're almost all manuals. It's like a special thing to get an automatic. But yeah, you'll probably never need the one in America or North America. But yeah, it was funny. I had no idea so many people are neutral people. That seems crazy. I've never known anyone to do that.

Jessamyn 1:19:55 Well either. Sorry, Josh. It's starting to tie which was just a bad pun that I've now

Cortex 1:20:05 you know, free association at

Jessamyn 1:20:07 this point not a week goes by that I do not think about that thread when I'm wiping my own but some people do this the wrong way.

Cortex 1:20:18 We were talking about bond cliffs post today right the working in the basement with his son blog and I think he was I think it was him who was like, and like years later like and then I thought of cortex, having an opinion about me standing to wipe my butt and yeah I love this website. Oh, my heart.

Jessamyn 1:20:41 Oh, and see fraud depot agrees with me. He's awesome. I think it's I don't understand how physics works. Is that possible? Dude,

mathowie 1:20:48 like Europeans love the whole clutch thing. The I mean, put in neutral thing, like I talked to him. Good news for the insane it was like, hey, what's the going thing in the Netherlands? He's like, Well, I don't drive much because I live in the city and I hate cars. And most people do but yeah, we pop it in neutral. And I'm like, You guys are crazy.

Jessamyn 1:21:10 I'll tell you guys about the time I went to Australia and we went on like the big road trip and it was super fun but my friend drove because it was Australia and he was Australian and he would put the brake on it stoplights because that's like the way he had been taught to be safer in an automobile is like when you're late

Cortex 1:21:31 and you know if you get rear ended because you know you got hit by a fucking car. And yeah, you don't I've never gotten that far but I've experimented briefly with putting it into park at a long light. Sure, but I feel like then I would try I would forget I did that because it was experimental and revving my engine park

Jessamyn 1:21:52 like a jerk Yeah,

Cortex 1:21:54 the thing I did change about how I deal with like stopping lights is we have to make a left at a light that we don't have a turn signal for to get back to our house if we're coming from one direction and so a lot of times sitting there waiting and the thing I stopped doing after the hearing about it maybe reading on asked me maybe someone else talking about it was I stopped cranking the wheel for the turn ahead of time so I pulled out like halfway to the intersection

Jessamyn 1:22:19 if you got rear ended you wouldn't go into traffic

Cortex 1:22:21 exactly so it's like it's bad enough to get rear ended but being rear ended and then shoved right into oncoming traffic would be much worse so i i keep the wheel pointing straight ahead until I've got the move for the turn and then I just go for the whole thing all at once there which is my little bit of like attempt to not get myself inadvertently extra killed at some point. Extra kill. Yeah. Being killed is done and killed don't get don't get killed.

Jessamyn 1:22:47 Well, I'm glad we got a thing that everyone could fight about that actually doesn't really even matter that much. And I don't care. I've met broccolis and I just think he's right about everything I don't even know spending by saying that. He just seems like a sensible guy driving race cars. Yeah, thanks for telling people to calm down that you did the right thing.

Cortex 1:23:12 We're running with my music theme from posts I also have music related asked me is this one is too late because it's like November now but on some nebulous asked about creepy. Yes. Asked about creepy 1920s 1930s music for a party, which is just a great paella. That

mathowie 1:23:30 so don't you just want creepy Halloween music? I don't even think of what decade is from I think the 50s I don't know from movies.

Jessamyn 1:23:38 They want vintage for a haunted speakeasy. See

Cortex 1:23:40 it's sort of fit the Yeah. During Prohibition, mark this for 11 months from now and you can start planning your sweet ass Halloween mix

Jessamyn 1:23:52 or surfacing of you know, X years ago, stuff like that, because that'd be awesome. Right? I want to like set a reminder like email this to me in 11 months.

Cortex 1:24:02 Yeah. Oh, right.

mathowie 1:24:03 The scarring party. That's me fine music. Yes. No more room in hell. I have that album and yep,

Cortex 1:24:10 yes. But the other music thing I'm gonna mention just because I like signal boost for these things. When it's like a total shot in the dark. Someone has like, please identify this song I heard once and can't get on my head that I have a fragmented decision. And this is from help. I can't stop talking. And as as of now, like, you know, two weeks later, they don't seem to have an answer. Turn. But yeah, so if you've got a if you've got an idea what it is go for it. I liked that. They

Jessamyn 1:24:38 stop talking. Yep.

Cortex 1:24:41 So yeah, there's some music stuff

mathowie 1:24:43 here. There was a cool thread of what is the Big Sur of Washington State and I have marked as a favorite because I just want to know what that answer is. And then I thought there should be a website of like, what's the Yosemite of Massachusetts? What's the Disney World of Missouri like? Like I want to know Yeah, where should I go in Washington in the world of Missouri, Joplin right. That's

Jessamyn 1:25:05 gonna bother me. Maybe

mathowie 1:25:09 like mystery aside of the blank of the blank, I don't even know what you'd call that. But I thought that was pretty cool.

Jessamyn 1:25:14 I think that's a great idea. And this is good thread. Orcas Island love push the Kino rainforest Whidbey Island.

mathowie 1:25:23 The Olympic Peninsula was like complete mystery to me. I've never been up there always. Why

Jessamyn 1:25:28 are you serious? Dude, you would love it. When I lived in Seattle. We were there like once a month. So fun.

mathowie 1:25:33 I thought it was like rainforests and dangerous and roads closed and

Jessamyn 1:25:37 no stuff just a rain forest and not dangerous and real roads

mathowie 1:25:41 freeze, I guess, right? It's just rain. It doesn't freeze. It's not bad.

Jessamyn 1:25:46 No, it doesn't freeze at all. And it's I think it's the only temperate rainforest in the continental US. And it's amazing, like, super beautiful. And there's a hall of mosses Trail, which is just all lost all the time. And you can say in swim, where it's not even that rainy, and then get up and have time to hit the rain forest. I used to go there all the time. You should totally go you would love it.

mathowie 1:26:07 Everyone I know from Seattle was like, Yeah, someday we'll go out there. Because it's far

Jessamyn 1:26:11 and seasonal affective disorder is real. But you should go. I have always

mathowie 1:26:15 wanted to go, I will take like seasonal

Cortex 1:26:17 affective disorder. Am I right?

Jessamyn 1:26:19 Not listening to you. Just a pleasant sound. Last Gosh, I'll just have to finish it up alone. I can't hear him anymore.

Cortex 1:26:29 I had a really good one, like 10 minutes ago, and then the conversation moved on. And I was able to get back to it. And I've tried to

Jessamyn 1:26:36 now let's talk about random numbers being not so random, because I know that'll bother everybody. This is from Volgen poet, sort of an odd question. But you know, wondering if a situation where there's a randomized computation, where there's ever been a string of unlucky random numbers, you know, like you flip a coin and you get like 100 heads in a row, which can happen and can be random. And has that caused a real world problem. And so people talked a little bit about I mean, it's, it's, it's complicated, because you know, the answer is, if you have something that truly relies on random numbers, theoretically, this shouldn't happen. You know, unlikely sequences shouldn't matter if you're doing a thing that uses random numbers. But it's interesting listening to people talk about numbers, because I like them would be cool.

mathowie 1:27:23 If like randomly like the NFL, like, let's say, 1978, it came up heads, like 75 games in a row.

Jessamyn 1:27:32 And then nerds everywhere would be like, but that doesn't mean it's not random. But I think the thing is beyond a certain point, it calls into question whatever the mechanism is, right? Like, right, is a random, but maybe there's something wrong with that coin? And my favorite answer is from somebody salt, who says, When the RAND Corporation published a book of a million random numbers, because you couldn't get like a calculator or a computer to do it. So everyone would use the first n numbers in the book, and blah, blah, blah. So I don't know, I just enjoyed it from kind of a thinking I like numbers perspective,

Cortex 1:28:07 are random numbers really random is one of like, yeah, that's a perennial discussion, because like, people have slightly different intuitive understandings of what random means in the first place. And so you get, I've seen a couple of really heated arguments about random versus pseudo random numbers, for people doing different things from the get go. But they didn't know all saying the same word. And

mathowie 1:28:27 yeah, I remember starting a nerd fight in the early 2000s by just saying, like, hey, how do you get random number in PHP real quick, and like, got 75 answers. And people arguing about this, the easiest way was not actually random, because everyone did it. So it always failed in predictable ways. The most

Cortex 1:28:49 common problem is you call some random function. And you don't see it with time. And

mathowie 1:28:56 so it was like the, I think the seed was that was supposed to be random was like everyone's computer operating system and browser, but everyone's using the same one. So the random wasn't 100% Random, because everyone was using, you know, Windows XP and Firefox 10 at the time. Yeah.

Cortex 1:29:11 And so then you get a thing where everybody's actually starting from the same seed. So they get the same sequence of random numbers. Would you like for most things like that really, really matters? If you're doing like security? It doesn't fucking matter for your JavaScript implementation until the bird you know, it's yeah, it's obviously it's just you

Jessamyn 1:29:28 name something randomly. I

Cortex 1:29:29 actually actually meant to say Flappy Bird and it's so embedded in my brain. Barely. But yeah, it's funny because I've seen people get super super like, literally, you know, it's a classic nerdy thing. I've seen people like really, really, really get into it over the importance of correctly seeding and not using a subpar pseudo random number generator for shit where it's never ever gonna matter. But, you know, it's such a thing in principle, that they just sort of really get into it anyway. Because like, no, no, you have to do this perfectly. directly otherwise you're violating you know you're weakening the herd immunity by using

Jessamyn 1:30:07 an even yeah it's it's

Cortex 1:30:09 it's odd I remember I remember the terrible joke that I decided not to tell and now I'm telling just out of spite which was when we were talking about the hair thing and us making fake hair and I was gonna suggest it was something about like well using using hair to make fake salmon and then that was also called locks of hair but I think the setup was at the time and I put it to bed because cuz that was

Jessamyn 1:30:39 like gonna be a fakir joke that would have been funny. Like it's fake. You're lying on a bed of nails. No,

Cortex 1:30:46 no, no locks, locks, locks of hair. But at least it's kosher so

mathowie 1:30:52 you know like an hour and a half

Jessamyn 1:31:00 we should go into lightning round. enjoyed getting to drop some science about why the local library doesn't have the books it says it has answer you're probably using the library wrong,

mathowie 1:31:10 but I was gonna send up the Jessamine signal for that one.

Jessamyn 1:31:14 I commented, I gotta

mathowie 1:31:17 go up. I was like Minda

Jessamyn 1:31:19 Chaminda Chamunda. So go around next.

Cortex 1:31:22 I liked this collection of soup recipes to use with a stick blender because you just Oh, awesome stuff. And you go out with a stick blender and boom, got this nice, smooth pureed soup. And we do that sometimes that is great. And here's a bunch of ideas. It's great. It's good. fall and winter food too. Because like especially like we got vegetables and whatnot. You can you know that you're not sure what to do with. Turn it into a soup, creamy soup, and then you just blend it so you don't have to worry about texture.

Jessamyn 1:31:48 I enjoyed kitchen organization hacks the same thread you're probably always expecting but I like reading new kitchen hacks so that I can hack my kitchen.

mathowie 1:31:56 I haven't seen Yeah, I was looking forward to this one. That looks cool. Yeah. How to store more stuff because hard to store stuff in the kitchen.

Jessamyn 1:32:04 If you have a little kitchen especially or like a bullshit rental kitchen, this is by Rena

mathowie 1:32:09 sweet. I asked about there's only one or two games I've ever seen that you can play with a phone on the table and people across from the table like you play like like an 80s cocktail arcade. I didn't know how to search for more of these because I don't even know what you call it. If you say the word tabletop everyone thinks like settlers. Yeah, there's probably

Cortex 1:32:30 right. Did you get a good answer?

Jessamyn 1:32:31 Means a different that's called Heads

mathowie 1:32:33 Up to up is what

Jessamyn 1:32:38 is available for this. That's awesome.

mathowie 1:32:40 So this is the best thing in the world to do at a restaurant when you're waiting for your food for like 10 or 15 minutes is like I mean, the best thing to do is to talk to each other. But when that runs out,

Cortex 1:32:48 strictly speaking, the best thing we could accomplish this

Jessamyn 1:32:54 weekend was waited for my food that would have been awesome.

mathowie 1:32:57 I want like 1980s style games that you know head to head you can play on a table with your phone flat and you don't need to spin it around and one person doesn't you know, play at the same time competitive or and there's like there's so many games you know, there's like 15 games mentioned I've only played like four or five of them. I still need to get to the rest. It's there's a whole bunch of good, awesome, it's fun to do.

Cortex 1:33:19 That is good to know.

Jessamyn 1:33:20 That is great.

Cortex 1:33:21 I like this thread. What are the weirdest alcoholic spirits you know have asked by random stuff came up immediately. And they're like, yeah, no, I have a lot. That's that's what made me think of it. After like four people had mentioned that. And yeah, it's a great big collection of interesting stuff. You know, it's funny,

Jessamyn 1:33:38 that national drink of hungry how many of these have I had? Wow, I am not much of a drinker and I have had a surprising number of these.

Cortex 1:33:47 Now you can have more.

Jessamyn 1:33:49 No, no, not yet.

Cortex 1:33:55 Class come up in there

mathowie 1:33:58 is a whole bunch of

Jessamyn 1:34:00 weird words. They've got gross names even. Ooh, cherry bounce.

Cortex 1:34:06 We made our own turnouts. It's actually pretty good. You didn't get we didn't get as much out of it as we thought we waited like it was a relic. Some of it went into the cherries and salmon

Jessamyn 1:34:14 flavor. Vodka. And I just wanted to mention two resolutions that were nice. The Margalo EPS asked for Slumber Party advice and then said the slumber party went well. Awesome about that. And there was a lady who the neighbors had a dog that was like stuck in the backyard and bark, bark, bark bark bark in and what should I do about it? And it is one of those kinds of touchy issues right? Because people are like leave your neighbor alone and other people are like what if your neighbors dead in a ditch? And you and I and a flame actually jumped the fence and fed and watered the dog because they were afraid that maybe the dog something had happened and it turned out and they called the cops just to make sure the dog was Okay, and then the new neighbors it turns out they had an emergency and had to leave their dog in the backyard for some reason, and they weren't really happy. So, Sparky, dog neighbor story and well, which never happened. So I wanted to highlight it because

mathowie 1:35:15 that's never Yeah. Wow, we have so many How do we shut up my neighbor's dogs? You know, man, that's good. That's so great.

Jessamyn 1:35:24 And there's different ways and some like I've got a barking dog and I'm not sure how to deal with my dog when I have to go to my job. things. I mean, they're there sometimes tough decisions, but a lot of times the problem with the stranger neighbor is you don't know if they're dicks or not until you first tried to talk to them about their barking dog. Maybe they're totally nice and are in a jam. Maybe they're horrible assholes.

mathowie 1:35:46 Yeah, that was great.

Unknown Speaker 1:35:49 That's great that we're happy outcome.

Jessamyn 1:35:51 But that's me for AskMe Metafilter. I do feel like there's a ton of stuff from meta talk that we should at least mention. Like the Halloween costume parade. You guys are like laughing like you didn't dress up this year Halloween costume parade. You just have to show up and be like, You all look lovely. And as well the username usernames which match expertise, which turned into a super fun thread. Because if you're the person who you know says halting problem solved, and then you say actually, I haven't solved the halting problem. But it was a good time.

mathowie 1:36:28 Of course. I love the Hazlet article, who was s. T. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:36:39 Us and wrote a really long sort of wide meta filters like a big family. Really good.

Cortex 1:36:45 There is the sort of ties in the music too. But the Metafilter music tribute to They Might Be Giants as flood collaboration project.

Jessamyn 1:36:55 I thought that that happened that right at the beginning of the month, I thought it had something to do with user flood. I mentioned again, even though I mentioned that in the thread, also good joke.

Cortex 1:37:07 It'll be the 25th anniversary of the album I think early next year and so this is sort of like getting it rolling ahead of time. So people have a couple months to actually put something together although we do have three tracks already posted under the under the project from people who got started quick. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing the whole thing because I think it's gonna be there's a lot of love for They Might Be Giants on the site. And I'm really looking forward to seeing everything people come up with. And I'm probably going to do two or three more myself just because like I like sweet. I like the songs.

Jessamyn 1:37:43 Nice. That'll be fun to go listen to that.

mathowie 1:37:45 Mo ramo started.

Cortex 1:37:49 Yep, and people are writing there

Jessamyn 1:37:52 you have a link to that lake.

mathowie 1:37:55 Secrets secret Santi stuff has already started

Jessamyn 1:37:59 the medical benefits or stores gonna be up any day now.

mathowie 1:38:04 Any day want to manage it? Or I think I can manage it. We just need to

Jessamyn 1:38:08 talking to me right

Cortex 1:38:13 now, I think maybe part of our duties as the people who actually work.

Jessamyn 1:38:18 I can tell you my RATE SHEET though, if you're interested. I thought it did a pretty good job last time. Oh, and I also enjoyed the meta talk love in number two, which was just hey, what's going what's going good in your life lately? And it wasn't all good. I mean, some people had some challenges, but they were dealing with them pretty well. But it was just kind of a nice thread of some some neat happy things that have happened to people over time.

Cortex 1:38:41 Yep. Yeah, it was nice. It's nice. Nice things are nice is my my my bold statement about the nature.

mathowie 1:38:52 There's a charity gift drive for and I think it's just Amazon wishlist for some kids.

Jessamyn 1:39:01 Metafilter crowd does this every year and it's always awesome.

mathowie 1:39:05 Yeah, and then the secret cons are Signups are open. Let me put that in the machine

Jessamyn 1:39:12 may not actually do it this year for the first year. I have always enjoyed it. But I think I angst myself into worrying about it and I may be a little too busy this year. See if you guys done it. I think I did

Cortex 1:39:23 it once or maybe twice and it's a source of anxiety. So I probably

mathowie 1:39:28 it's hard to think of a $20 under a gift that's cool and good and unique. I guess I've always done the the like mixtape trade stuff, but never done.

Jessamyn 1:39:39 Local stuff. You know, I mean, really, that you could put some metal filter swag in a box. True. True, and people would kind of be into it and you probably had some. Yeah, that's why I want the store to get up because I have a whole bunch of like Metafilter T shirts that don't fit. I have some that fit that I like and wear but I have some other stuff that I would love to give To win the fight who would enjoy it? You know,

mathowie 1:40:03 you sign up for the secret program. Program funds our program giveaway shirt.

Jessamyn 1:40:17 Right?

mathowie 1:40:18 So what's the secret? Nobody knows who you got and I don't know who I got. And then

Jessamyn 1:40:23 you can let them know if you want to or you can stay secret. And then the coordinators hook you up with a person

mathowie 1:40:31 and that totally randomized or do they think about

Jessamyn 1:40:35 it is random really?

Cortex 1:40:37 random bits you know,

Jessamyn 1:40:39 but they know it's not double blind if that's what you mean. Yeah. I hear you've got 40,000 calories with a candy bar somebody might enjoy those is what I'm saying.

mathowie 1:40:56 All right, cool.

Jessamyn 1:40:57 I think I think that'll be Thanksgiving. Next time I hope you have good holidays.

Cortex 1:41:03 Yes, yes. It should be hopefully pleasant.

mathowie 1:41:07 Well it seems like it's there's an extra week in November this

Jessamyn 1:41:12 year like because it was really really long Yes. Yeah. Like like Thanksgiving

mathowie 1:41:16 like three or four weeks. It's like an extra week away for some reason but it's practically

Jessamyn 1:41:22 in December but this is good because it means all the holiday stuff is more compacted and happening more at once you get more November to not be doing that.

mathowie 1:41:31 Saturday there were Christmas trees up in a store oh that I couldn't believe it.

Jessamyn 1:41:36 Oh and by nothing gay is November 28 this year so make sure you stay home and have pot all your stuff the day before and then you can just stay home with your loved ones. It's like the day that

Cortex 1:41:45 everybody is Jewish for a day and

mathowie 1:41:49 Buster musters version of Saturday.

Jessamyn 1:41:54 All right, cool. Okay, gentlemen, nice talking to you. Likewise.

Unknown Speaker 1:41:59 western lands beneath the song. The flowers may rise in spring. The trees may board the waters run the Mary Fincher sea over maybe it is closed last night on Swain beaches.

Unknown Speaker 1:42:28 Amantha brunching. Low helix Chinese and neither high in darkness buried. Beyond all time was strong up high. The unknown mountain Steve although foreshadows rides the song know the stars