103: Strictly Non-Palindromic

Recorded on Wednesday, this is Matt's first episode as a civilian, and we basically couldn't shut up so it's nearly two hours long, covering a little more than a month from March 4th through April 8th.

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Misc

Matt's Fast and/or Furious synopsis

MeFi Jobs

Phone help with electronics questions

1930s movie theater job in Maine

MeFi Projects

Lil Friendys by Greg Nog (mefi post)

ORCWANKER, a swear generator by NoraReed

How to tie necktie knots, videos by xingcat

Books for (Washington) DC by waninggibbon

Gospel records blog by vathek (with some great notes in the Projects thread)

Everywhere in NYC that Movies were Filmed by mgalka

(that not-into-the-movie comic we referenced discussed)

WYRF, a fight scenario dilemma generator by oulipian

Every Non-Word by rottytooth

cortex's football thing in progress

Why Frogs Have Taken Over Passover by ericbop

Metatalk bits

Goofy Matt send-off thread by...Migs! (Who has a friend named Carlos Quevedo and people sometimes wondered.)

Women's March was fuckin' great

April Fools color-shifting "design test", cf. mefi post about That Dress

Metafilter

Lost in the Holacracy

General Ability: 100, re: veryman.expert

let it go?, farting & feminism

Papercraft Keyboard Cat (from 2009)

If Cats were on OKCupid (my pepperoni)

Snooker genius Ronnie O'Sullivan

Wrestling and representation

Sears' 1981 laserdisc catalog

What Makes an Electric Guitar Sound Like an Electric Guitar (of which, effects pedals made by sleepy pete)

Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good, aka The Neil Cicierega Thing Cortex Won't Shut Up About This Month

Ask Metafilter

What song features a chorus of "CEEEeeee JAAAaaay?

Lost/stolen safe deposit box; now what?

Why does a search for () return 0 results?

frozen mice, no freezer? (say what you will)

Vacationing in Spain, complete with vacapinta first answer

What happens if you're arrested when out, but you've left the oven on?

What are the best TED Talks?

Ambulances and traffic etiquette

How to recognize quackery as a layperson (also, The Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong)

MeFi Music

Meanwhile by dagosto

Ambush in Toyland by es_de_bah

Dizzy Gillespie Quintet f/ Skrillex - One Note Samba (1968, RARE!!), a from-scratch note-by-note synth cover!!! by jake

Antisocial Dance Party by TheNegativeInfluence (and don't miss the middle school dance story inside)

posted by cortex (staff) to MeFi Podcast at 4:03 PM (97 comments total)

The actual podcast is missing?
posted by aubilenon at 4:05 PM on April 10, 2015

Refreshed and now it's here. (???)
posted by aubilenon at 4:06 PM on April 10, 2015

YOU SAW NOTHING
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:06 PM on April 10, 2015 [8 favorites]

Yeah, that was exactly the problem!
posted by aubilenon at 4:08 PM on April 10, 2015 [6 favorites]

Argh, saw this on Twitter and you made me load MetaTalk! I broke my streak!
posted by mathowie (retired) at 4:13 PM on April 10, 2015 [16 favorites]

HA HA
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:14 PM on April 10, 2015 [10 favorites]

USER INTRODUCTIONS - yes! This is a good idea!
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:20 PM on April 10, 2015

('Rocket surgery'?!)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 4:29 PM on April 10, 2015

Look, it's not brain science.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:37 PM on April 10, 2015 [8 favorites]

look, aero not it's
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:44 PM on April 10, 2015

Unless you've sat in someone else's shoes, you don't know hard it is to catch all the details.

I actually used that once in all seriousness. Here.
posted by SpacemanStix at 5:09 PM on April 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

Man, and I felt bed about almost accidentally sticking an apostrophe in that word I misparsed outright.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:22 PM on April 10, 2015

The lady in the lake...
The mouse in the cave
The vole in the hole
The goat afloat in the moat.
The barn owl in the terry cloth towel.

All postcards would reach jessamyn, I'd bet.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:23 PM on April 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Rocket surgery'?

I once said "He's not the sharpest crayon in the deck."
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:28 PM on April 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

not about cortex, I hasten to add
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:35 PM on April 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Who is this Matt person? Another clueless newbie from the famous influx?
posted by Samuel Farrow at 5:38 PM on April 10, 2015

I'm almost through the podcast, but is flex's fart post the only Womens March post selected? Am I correct in that? Because if it is, this seems appallingly thin on the ground given the sheer volume and quality of posts in March made from this effort.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:02 PM on April 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

#krebslives
posted by poffin boffin at 6:09 PM on April 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

The wrestling post is also tagged womensmarch.

But still, only two posts out of ten mentioned for MeFi. Apparently WomensMarch was only 20% fucking great.

(And one of those eight non-WomensMarch picks was from SIX YEARS AGO. And four of them are from April. I don't think you're doing this deliberately, maybe more skewing towards posts-you-read-recently; but that recency bias really did penalize a lot of great earlier-in-March posts.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 6:19 PM on April 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

I made orcwanker's another button more clickable so you don't keep accidentally going to my barrl blog instead of getting more swears. Because sometimes you just need "douchefiddler" or whatever instead of another goddamn Dragon Age essay
posted by NoraReed at 6:32 PM on April 10, 2015 [4 favorites]

Apparently WomensMarch was only 20% fucking great.

I don't really get this framing. Women's March was great, the metatalk threads were great, we talked excitedly about it last month and mentioned it this month as well. I'm glad it happened and I'm glad so many people contributed and that new or infrequent posters felt encouraged to give posting a go. That's an unambiguously good thing; we've been really explicitly supportive of it.

But there's a ton of good stuff posted on the site that we end up not talking about on the podcast every month, because what we end up talking about is a tiny, tiny fraction of that month's content and we do it in a pretty organic and haphazard way because we enjoy getting together and bullshitting about the site for 90-ish minutes. That's true even for months that aren't extra odd or distracted on account of things like major site changes. Not getting mentioned explicitly or discussed enough on the podcast is never a slight; there's just too damn much stuff, and most of it won't end up fitting.

I didn't even manage to say anything on the podcast about any of the songs this month because we were jammed for time, for another example. Doesn't make them not great; doesn't make the songs that didn't get into the podcast not great too.

One of the good things I think about the podcast thread is folks can say "oh hey, here's another awesome thing" in here as much as they like as well. If you had a couple favorite posts, or questions, or songs, or comments, or or or, give 'em a shout out.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:42 PM on April 10, 2015 [14 favorites]

My plan to force Matt, Jess, and Cortex to try to say my name on a podcast by making a prominent post has once again been foiled! Curses!
posted by Deoridhe at 7:16 PM on April 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

I, um, hrrrm: Sorry. But I feel like "WomensMarch was a great thing" without mentioning many actual WomensMarch posts has a bit of a whiff of "well done ladies, but we still mostly preferred these other posts." I know this wasn't your intent; but it matters.

On things that don't make it into the podcast: Music rarely does, but FanFare never does! I've been enjoying the Better Call Saul posts which have had a lot of really great comments. (This theory by bleep on S1E5 totally paid off in S1E9.) Also zarq's Game of Thrones First Watch, which is hard to link to as a specific thing without mixing all the other GoT posts, but for example here's S1E10: these are a really good exploration of what a FanFare post can be.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 7:56 PM on April 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

maybe more skewing towards posts-you-read-recently

Yep. Just because posts are made by women doesn't necessarily mean they will be the tiny fraction that we decide to talk about on the podcast. One of the ones I mentioned was by my SO, one was from a librarian friend. They're both dudes. We didn't decide to do a "best of Women's March" part of the podcast because it's always pretty impromptu also. I'm sorry if some people found that disappointing.

We mentioned that there were a ton of awesome posts, we mentioned the project specifically (it was fully 30% of all MeTa links discussed with the two others being the annual April Fool's post and the other being OMG MATT LEAVES) and we talked about what we liked. Which is what the podcast always is.

"well done ladies, but we still mostly preferred these other posts."

Yes, we did. I did. So? There are thousands of people on this site and Women's March wasn't just for the three of us, which is how it should be. I picked maybe three MeFi posts out of hundreds. There wasn't a prize. The goal was to have more women making posts, period, and was handily accomplished which was cool and we said so specifically. If the goal was to get on the podcast, someone should have told us and we could have accommodated or had a Women's March corner or something. We didn't think of it and it didn't happen. I'm sorry it wasn't what you wanted.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 8:00 PM on April 10, 2015 [15 favorites]

Really saddened to read the responses of the mods, and the hard push back. Is it really so hard to understand that you might want more recognition for all this awesome month?

What a bloodless, limp response from the mods here.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 8:04 PM on April 10, 2015

Speaking as a woman, I'd feel more condescended to if the mods had gone out of their way to include some "meh" posts solely to beef up the "look, we're talking about posts by women" quota some of you seem to be keeping. Personally, I want the things I write to be judged on and praised for their own empiric merit, not judged on and praised for "and it was a woman that wrote this, isn't that dandy?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:40 PM on April 10, 2015 [8 favorites]

I am glad WomensMarch was not pandered to, and I don't think the podcast needs to be an activist activity. Jessamyn bringing up the Bechdel test in a way that's obvious she notices such things organically did make me miss her modly influence, however.

I haven't listened to podcasts other than the last one and maybe a few before it, but I was highly impressed by the musical interludes on this one. I don't know if that's a new cortex thing or a standard thing or just a random thing, but I enjoyed that.
posted by jaguar at 8:47 PM on April 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Is it really so hard to understand that you might want more recognition for all this awesome month?

I don't think it's weird to want to see recognition for a cool month of posts. I am glad there has been as much recognition and positive discussion of it on the site over the last several weeks as there has been, and I don't have a problem with there being more if e.g. someone wanted to do a post-event wrap up metatalk or etc.

But I do think there are way better ways to promote recognition for it than to scold us after the fact for not hitting some previously undeclared quota in one specific channel of site chatter where it has, for all that, in fact been mentioned and lauded two months in a row.

It's really weird and frustrating to me to see us having done the exact same laid-back, three-friends-talking Hey What's Some Stuff That Was Good Recently podcast we've been doing for like seven years now suddenly held up as some sort of back-handed dismissal of an event we've already been really supportive of. It feels unkind and ungenerous and basically foreign to the general spirit in which folks have taken the podcast over the years, and I do not understand why you are choosing to take this approach.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:11 PM on April 10, 2015 [43 favorites]

I'm not sure that "most mentions in the podcast" is really the best metric for success of #womensmarch. I think it was a success on its own terms -- new posts, by new posters -- and was enthusiastically referenced as such in the podcast.
posted by gingerbeer at 9:55 PM on April 10, 2015 [13 favorites]

Orcwanker just gave me the brilliant "swainanus".
posted by kenko at 10:13 PM on April 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

scold

Seriously: that's the word you reached for?
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:12 PM on April 10, 2015

Why is this a fight? Is this a fight? Does any of this have to be a fight? Is there any advantage to turning any aspect of the podcast into a fight?
posted by cgc373 at 11:25 PM on April 10, 2015 [10 favorites]

scold

Seriously: that's the word you reached for?

It does feel very much like a scold.
posted by SpacemanStix at 11:29 PM on April 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Hmm, I've never really viewed the podcast's purpose to call out the most worthy or significant things happening on the site, more a kind of fireside chat between the mods, teasing out different currents, interactions and happenings on the site over a given period.

I've never felt something's absence from the podcast was a form of disregard or scorn - far from it.

I would be disappointed to see something as awesome as Womens' March be retrospectively tarnished by something I don't really view as necessarily connected to it? I feel like it's reading a lot into an absence of a thing - and in doing so ignoring all the positive things the mods and others have done and said to support Womens' March.

I think if expectation on the podcast is that it's a representative cross section of all that's happened on the site between 'casts, that would be a heavy - indeed, insurmountable - burden for it to bear really, and I think would really kill the spontaneous nature of it as it currently stands.
posted by smoke at 1:22 AM on April 11, 2015 [12 favorites]

I've always wanted to have a post of mine featured on the podcast. Mefi dream come true.
posted by josher71 at 5:17 AM on April 11, 2015 [6 favorites]

Yeah, this complaint seems really weird. What is being asked for is essentially a sort of affirmative action based on the false premise that the podcast is a definitive "Best Posts of the Month" competition.
posted by The Gooch at 7:46 AM on April 11, 2015

scold

Seriously: that's the word you reached for?

Oh FFS, don't manufacture insult. He used scold as a verb ("to reprimand or criticize harshly and usually angrily," because that's exactly what you're doing), not as a noun ("a person fond of abusive language, in particular a troublesome and angry woman"). Give it a rest.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:56 AM on April 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

What a bloodless, limp response from the mods here.

One mod and two former mods who do the podcast for free because they love this place so much. I am sorry this upset you. In the spirit of setting expectations, however, it seems like you are wanting something from the podcast that it is maybe not going to deliver and was never really designed to deliver.

I have a longer set of thoughts about just the general situation-for-women on this generalist website and expectations versus reality versus the efforts made by people who are actually trying to make this a better place for women including the people who participated in, supported, or just plain old didn't tank the efforts of #womensmarch...

Everyone has to find their own comfort level with the interactions that happen in this space. It's hard when your expectations don't line up with what you get. I, too, am frequently disappointed by other people. At some level this is a problem with me, and not other people. At the same time one of the best lessons that I ever got from MetaFilter (besides the fact that I can be disappointing even with my best efforts and what I feel is my purest heart) was that there can be a lot of people who aren't wrong but still don't do things the way you'd do things if the place were yours. And they co-exist with you and will continue to.

I tried to make this place as "mine" as I felt was appropriate when it was my main job, it's hard to let some of that go. Everyone wants a better version of MetaFilter than the one they have, everyone. Again, I can understand the disappointment, maybe you didn't even know this is how you would feel until you actually felt that way. Part of what I enjoy about being away from MeFi (as a job) is that I'm actually more of an activist than the site is designed to accommodate. No big deal, just a bad fit for that part of my life. I do that stuff mostly elsewhere now, try to chime in here when I think it will be helpful. Don't know what the takeaway from this is for anyone who isn't me, but maybe it's useful for processing complex feelings about a complex site.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 8:34 AM on April 11, 2015 [40 favorites]

I would be more weirded out by the hierarchy of what the mods choose to highlight if they hadn't started with a rousing five-minute discussion of whether they prefer to have their hair cut on a Tuesday or a Saturday.

Oh, god, that resonated so much with me, though! I went from being a long-term grad student to having a 9-to-5, and the biggest shock to my system was what a pain in the ass it was just to get stupid errands done. Like, there are a bunch of things that now I can only do on Saturday mornings, and that means that I have to be productive on Saturday mornings. The best thing about having a 9-to-5 is having weekends, but the worst thing is that you have to do all sorts of things on the weekend!
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:01 AM on April 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

"If Only Once, It Would Be Nice If Hodor Said ‘Women’s Rights’"
posted by jjwiseman at 9:37 AM on April 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

OMG my FPP about wrestling and representation is talked about in the podcast?!?! I am so flattered.

I'll have to listen to it, but right now I gotta go to a Shimmer women's wrestling event. (Hi, my name is kaz and i have a wrestling obsession.)
posted by misskaz at 11:01 AM on April 11, 2015 [5 favorites]

But still, only two posts out of ten mentioned for MeFi. Apparently WomensMarch was only 20% fucking great.

The goal was to encourage more women to post; there was no requirement or obligation for them to use the WomensMarch tag, or even identify themselves as women.

With that goal in mind, I'd like to thank ghostbikes for her amazing veryman.expert post (it's the second one on the list above.) Keep posting more cool stuff!
posted by Room 641-A at 11:12 AM on April 11, 2015

Regarding the conversation about Matt's pronunciation of GitHub: perhaps, like many Americans, he speaks English with the pin/pen merger. (I know the South has this, but I think there are other places, too.)
posted by ocherdraco at 1:06 PM on April 11, 2015

Yeah, "gethub" jumps out at me every time Matt says it but I always forget immediately afterward to listen to comparable phonetic content in other stuff he says, which, if that's a consistent thing but I only notice it for that one word that's sort of interesting in its own right as far as why I'm tuned to it (or maybe more to the point tuned out of it in more common vocab).
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:23 PM on April 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh my god, my first mention on the podcast, and for my ridiculously silly necktie project! Thanks!!
posted by xingcat at 1:30 PM on April 11, 2015 [3 favorites]

"Bustin" is now stuck in my head.
posted by hellojed at 1:32 PM on April 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

Regarding the conversation about Matt's pronunciation of GitHub

It's not "gethub"? Huh.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:02 PM on April 11, 2015

*paging Dr iamkimiam*
posted by billiebee at 2:22 PM on April 11, 2015 [6 favorites]

I bet this is going to be a super-fun job for a kid. Or a hobo – maybe LeLiLo wants it, cause he lives out there...

How wonderful not only to be mentioned on the podcast, but also to have my lifestyle acknowledged. Actually, it would be hard (also very cold, most of the year) to be a hobo in Bar Harbor, because we don’t have any train tracks on Mount Desert Island to sit alongside and eat slumgullion out of rusty tin cans.

As it turns out, I have worked at that theater already; I’ve MCed a few concerts on the stage, and (some decades back, when my sister was helping manage the place) occasionally sold tickets out of the box office, using machines that also date back to 1932.

I’d like to hear more about this.

It is a fantastic Art Deco theater (supposedly, the largest screen left in Maine). I don’t know if there’s a Phantom living in the cellars, but a bootlegger’s speakeasy did operate down there at the end of Prohibition. And the people working there currently are really nice, although Jessamyn is exactly right to note that the job doesn’t “turn out to be quite as cool” as advertised.

As she says, all you have to do is find some place to live, which is extremely difficult – and quite expensive – to do in Bar Harbor in the summer, because of the huge influx of seasonal workers. The two big area motel moguls have started buying up other motels, or in one case, even trying to kick low-income residents out of their apartments, so that their own employees have someplace to stay.

This is the inaugural season...

Actually it’s not... just the inaugural season for the current group. Long story short: the eccentric old lady who owned the place should have allowed the manager to buy it – which he thought was the plan – after she died. I’m not sure why that didn’t work out, but in any case several groups have tried to turn the theater into an arts center over the last 15 years or so, and nothing has worked. (The manager, regrouping, went on to open another movie theater in town, Reel Pizza, in a former auto parts store.)

Bar Harbor was the fanciest place around (on the whole East Coast, pretty much) 125 years ago, but these days the wealthy summer people, like the Rockefellers, or the newer money crowd, like Martha Stewart or TV’s Dick Wolf (of the Law and Order franchise) live in the other parts of the island, and Bar Harbor is largely ice cream and t-shirt and trinket shops for the tourist crowd. It remains to be seen if an art center/movie theater will work in that old building that has been empty now for some time.

Regarding the conversation about Matt's pronunciation of GitHub

Matt for sure doesn’t know how to pronounce the name of our national park, Acadia (“uh-kay-dee-uh). There’s no ‘r’; Arcadia was in ancient Greece. (For the record, I pronounce my made-up user name “Lee-lie-low.” The first two syllables rhyme with “MeFi.”)
posted by LeLiLo at 3:46 PM on April 11, 2015 [13 favorites]

Giðub.
posted by boo_radley at 4:02 PM on April 11, 2015 [6 favorites]

this thread is now DIAMONDS
posted by poffin boffin at 7:16 PM on April 11, 2015 [4 favorites]

LeLiLo: "(For the record, I pronounce my made-up user name “Lee-lie-low.” The first two syllables rhyme with “MeFi.”)"
Only one of those things can be true.
posted by dg at 7:25 PM on April 11, 2015 [2 favorites]

Are the music breaks between categories new? I liked that. The piece at the end after the good-byes was great.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 8:38 PM on April 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

Greg Nog: "And I'm like, "are you thinking about the grandson's magic dick like i am""

There's your impossibly high bar.
posted by boo_radley at 9:36 PM on April 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, Greg Nog, how I love you!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:49 PM on April 11, 2015

And can we talk about how mathowie pronounces "sumo"?
posted by boo_radley at 10:07 PM on April 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

Github not gethub.
Meefie not some dumb wrong way of saying it.
The dress was white and gold. (I don't know why half the internet pretended like it was blue and black.)

I'm glad I could settle that for you once and for all.
posted by double block and bleed at 1:31 AM on April 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

Greg Nog's comment has made my day, my week, and quite possibly my year.
posted by nubs at 10:09 AM on April 12, 2015

I would totally post a project every week if that was allowed. So, probably best for everyone that it's not!
posted by ignignokt at 10:10 AM on April 12, 2015

I'm glad I could settle that for you once and for all.

I found a video of your comment.
posted by effbot at 10:51 AM on April 12, 2015

Why do you young whippersnapper mods have a problem with non-lining numerals? They are beeyootiful for People Who Like To Read, not so much for CPA-types like you guys. Sheesh.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:58 PM on April 12, 2015

I think it was more the oldbie former mods who were actively beefing about the numeral descenders; I think they can be a poor choice in some contexts where numeric parsing trumps aesthetics but I still kind of like 'em when used sparingly for pure style points.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:48 PM on April 12, 2015

The whole reason I listen to the podcasts are for improvements into what the mod interface looks like in my head. Yes I know about Matt's SXSW presentation, I prefer my imaginary interface where the word "Dillweed" appears over my post before it shrinks and disappears.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 6:23 PM on April 12, 2015

I imagine my emails arriving at Mod Central with the banner THAT FUCKING GUY AGAIN, THE NITPICKER.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:27 PM on April 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I got mentioned! . . . for calling Costco about freezers. But still!
posted by KathrynT at 6:33 PM on April 12, 2015 [2 favorites]

I was recently stuck in an infinite captcha loop because I could not tell whether the round symbols were zeros or Os. I think there were issues with my password anyway, so it's possible that captcha is more flexible in its entries than it appeared, but I was still longing for reliably slashed zeros.
posted by jaguar at 6:41 PM on April 12, 2015

The One Paper Towel Method has two steps:

1) Shake your hands twelve (or more) times;
2) Fold the paper towel in half.

Step two is critical; it's amazing how much more absorbent a folded towel is.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:44 PM on April 12, 2015

nubs: "Greg Nog's comment has made my day, my week, and quite possibly my year."

So, he'll be there for you, 'cause you're there for him, too?
posted by Chrysostom at 5:12 AM on April 13, 2015 [4 favorites]

Re: Bootstrap and SASS and jQuery – used everywhere, yes, but necessary? Quite often: No!

You can still make a good web page or web app with just plain HTML, CSS, and plain JavaScript in so many cases. Give it to 'em raw, Jessamyn! Then, they can pull in helper stuff like SASS as they need it.
posted by ignignokt at 7:02 AM on April 13, 2015

Samuel Farrow: Who is this Matt person? Another clueless newbie from the famous influx?

Well, he's been here so long, and you know how hard it is to fire anybody these days… I think they just did an "Office Space" and moved his desk to the basement Slack.


WHAT HO, MOD, MOD EMERITA, AND FOUNDER.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:56 AM on April 13, 2015 [2 favorites]

Oh! House minus dialogue.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:16 AM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

I laughed so loud that you left in "Don't talk"
posted by ersatzkat at 9:54 AM on April 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

So, he'll be there for you, 'cause you're there for him, too?

Provided we're talking about magic dicks, yes.
posted by nubs at 10:19 AM on April 13, 2015

Giðub

As in "Giðub Offa That Thing (and Dance Til You Feel Better").
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:28 AM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Cortex, could you reduce those musical interstitials from 10 minutes to something a bit shorter? Maybe 10 seconds? As it is, they're figuratively like cognitive nails on a blackboard with they way they interrupt the flow of the conversation.
posted by ursus_comiter at 1:23 PM on April 14, 2015

I can keep playing with it and seeing how people feel, yeah; I chewed on how long to make those for this episode a good bit while editing, actually, because my tendency as a musician is to want to avoid undercutting a song and while running the whole song for every break feels like it's probably asking too much, running 40 seconds or a minute at least gives the song a chance to breathe. (And with the exception of the outro song, at which point there's zero stakes in a long playtime, the snippets were all in that territory, a minute give or take.)

I find ten second snippets of songs to be really frustrating, personally; it's never enough to let the song show its shape or texture, just feels like a tease, like, why did you bother to make me engage with this and then take it away before I could. But that may just be me.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:30 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah I wasn't going to say anything unless someone else did but if they're designed to be interstitials (and not say "here is a song") they should be like 5 sec max. They're not supposed to be songs really, I don't think, and the podcast is plenty long.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 2:49 PM on April 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Is the music from MefiMusic? That would be cool if it was. I liked the length of the music clips. It's some of the conversation I would edit for length.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 3:11 PM on April 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yep, we didn't get around to actually talking about the songs in the episode itself, but I linked 'em up at the bottom of the post here. Music in the episodes is basically always tracks by mefites posted on Music.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:19 PM on April 14, 2015

I like the current length. It does let one get a sense of the song. The overall podcast was much longer than usual, so maybe that's why folks think the songs are excessive?
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:20 PM on April 14, 2015

My dragon lady of a kindergarten teacher was UNYIELDING on the topic of no "ands" in your hundreds. One hundred three. One hundred three. You said "a hundred and three" she was on your case. She would also not accept any fancy shit when you drew the number one. It's a straight line down. I'd have to use one of this | to make a one the way she wanted it even an l is too fancy. She even gave me shit when I drew a fancy number one on the badge for my construction paper fireman hat. I'm trying to be charitable but honestly looking back on that she was kind of a bitch.
posted by nanojath at 10:52 PM on April 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Two points: first, saying "and" in a number represents the decimal place. "One hundred and three-tenths" means 100.3, for example, whereas "one hundred and three tenths" is definitely not (103 * 0.1)=10.3.

Second: I have always heard British people pronounce "snooker" with a long, owl-like "oo" -- as if to rhyme with "hoop skirt." (N.b.: my memories may be unreliable, since I find snooker so boring that I usually passed out as soon as my right amygdala heard the word, in an effort to protect the rest of my brain.)
posted by wenestvedt at 5:42 AM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

If there was some attribution, the longer songs would be good because they wold be a showcase; as unattributed snippets, they should only be two breaths long.

Luckily I liked these, so the long duration was fine with me. :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 5:44 AM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

ThatCanadianGirl: It's some of the conversation I would edit for length.

*gasp*
posted by wenestvedt at 5:45 AM on April 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

> Two points: first, saying "and" in a number represents the decimal place.

So The One Hundred and One Dalmations is really about 100.1 dogs?! Eeek!
posted by rtha at 6:09 AM on April 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Antisocial Dance Party, the song at the end, was fantastic. It put me in some 80s cyberpunk that never existed and I am going to leave it on repeat this morning.
posted by curious nu at 6:35 AM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I have always heard British people pronounce "snooker" with a long, owl-like "oo" -- as if to rhyme with "hoop skirt."

Yeah, it's a long oo. I thought cortex's pronunciation was a little strange to my ears, but I wasn't sure if he was saying it like all people from the US say it or if it fell in the draygun category.
posted by billiebee at 6:55 AM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

saying "and" in a number represents the decimal place

My sixth-grade math teacher was very firm on this, but only in writing numbers out. I guess he figured he had lost the battle on colloquial speech. I think of it every month when I write the one check I write.

Yeah, it's a long oo. I thought cortex's pronunciation was a little strange to my ears, but I wasn't sure if he was saying it like all people from the US say it or if it fell in the draygun category.

I think most Americans say it like cortex does, with the first syllable rhyming with "book." And then someone who actually knows the game generally comes and corrects those of us who don't, but then we forget again because the game doesn't really exist here, and I can't think of any other word with -ooker that Americans would pronounce with with a long oo.
posted by jaguar at 7:03 AM on April 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, not that folks in the US say snookered-as-in-hoodwinked super often but part of it is that outside of parlor sports enthusiasts my impression is we probably still say that a lot more often than we say snooker-as-in-the-game, so there's not as much chance for the UK pronunciation to filter in via some corrective Well, Actually pressure against the hook/book/took/look associative weight as there might otherwise be.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:25 AM on April 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

*gasp*

You know that's my birth year word, right? I can only conclude we are the same age.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 7:32 AM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

rtha: So The One Hundred and One Dalmations is really about 100.1 dogs?!

Yeah, but they rounded up to the nearest whole dog.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:52 AM on April 15, 2015 [7 favorites]

Now that I"m finally listening to this - listening to the Jobs part reminded me: hey, what's the status of being able to edit and/or update your own post if you're looking for work?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:58 AM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's still on the to-do list; definitely seems worth doing.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:05 AM on April 20, 2015

Oh I forgot to mention, I opened the transcript. I got distracted while reading the conversation.

Transcripts aren't going so well, btw.
posted by Pronoiac at 1:10 PM on April 20, 2015

Got the link added, thanks. And yeah, maybe it's about time for a new Metatalk post about transcript stuff, see if we can get some fresh transcribers interested in helping out?
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:17 PM on April 20, 2015

Maybe; let me mull that over. I'm a bit overwhelmed elsewhere right now.
posted by Pronoiac at 4:26 PM on April 20, 2015

Getting pb back on some future podcast sounds like a great idea.
posted by dws at 1:41 PM on April 27, 2015 [2 favorites]