104: I've Got Wheelhouse In The Head Now

Hey hey hey, it's episode 104 of the podcast. Recorded Wednesday May 6th, Matt and Jessamyn and I yammer for nigh on two hours about a bunch of great stuff from the last month and also complain about cell phone reception.

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Misc stuff

Jessamyn’s postcard from ColdChef

draguns spotted in Pittsburgh courtesy of Chrysostom

cortex’s Boy Meets Girl thing

JACK SPRAT: TEACH THE CONTROVERSY

a man on a pig, and other oddities

WoW vs. sports chatter

Do It For The Vine

Jessamyn vs. portraiture

MeFi Jobs

Online Community Manager

San Francisco cat-sitting

Zipcode wrangling

Pronounce a list of words in an obscure language

MeFi Projects

Fuck Shit Up, a web page enfuckener by ignignokt (MeFi post)

word.camera, an automatic image-as-AI-muse text generator by TheMadStork (MeFi post)

of which, see also INTERESTING.JPG, discussed in episode 101)

MODERN HORROR TALES, a comic by The Whelk (MeFi post)

Cf. teacup pigs and Great Danes

Wavelist, podcast playlist tool by bwerdmuller

Ending Harassment in Punk by Juliet Banana (MeFi post)

Pluto "Facts" by Devils Rancher

Star Wars vs. Dirty Dancing mashup by ericbop (MeFi post)

Metafilter

Brunching Shuttlecocks retrospective megabits

1991 Sizzler promo video

Hilltop Steakhouse demolished (amazing signage)

gravitational planetary system toy

The Mountains of #Mouthness (see also voar.io and the problem of 14-year-old dinguses)

Neko Atsume, aka That Japanese Cat Game Everybody Is Playing On Their Phones

Why Silent Hill Mattered

The Real Purpose of Libraries

Gul Dukat, Brony

Fuck Off Books, aka The Neil Cicierega Thing Cortex Won't Shut Up About This Month

The Singamajig Symphony

Bruce Jenner on transitioning

2400+ comments about what the hell is going on with the Hugo nominations

On being a blind architect

Ask Metafilter

Harvard BUR RI TOS t-shirt

actors nailing it on the first try (p.s. Mads Mikkelsen is so great)

streaming, positive TV shows?

Actual Social Justice Warrior outfit ideas

confronting your own anger problem

turtle-proofing your weather balloons

great comment about being a hairy dude with BO on purpose

What should I keep in my home for overnight guests?

Houseguest etiquette and expectations

funeral home question ft. ColdChef dropping knowledge

Quotation marks and terminal punctuation: in or out? (spoiler alert: yes?)

why is mobile call quality so terrible?

Throwback to 2004: toilet paper strategies

MeFi Music

Chicago, a Sufjan Stevens cover by threeants

Breathe/Pigs Medley, by Devils Rancher prog rock tribute band, The Yes Men

Big site-wide Music challenge: record a song about a city, any city, a cover or an original (see also the Metatalk thread)

MeFi FanFare

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine rewatch

a bunch of great Better Caul Saul analysis

posted by cortex (staff) to MeFi Podcast at 5:11 PM (78 comments total)

Oooo, FanFare! <3 this. <3 this hard.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:29 PM on May 6, 2015

I don't know if this is the place to talk about the oldest story thing, but a cheap way to do the permalinks is store the seed value for your random number generator in the url, and just rebuild from that.
posted by jonbro at 5:35 PM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

I am googling that "104 is the smallest number of unit line segments that can exist in a plane with four of them touching at every vertex." thing and coming up with nothing. Would be obliged if someone could help me.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 5:38 PM on May 6, 2015

That sounds underspecified in the "four of them touching at every vertex". Can this be stated more precisely?
posted by kenko at 5:40 PM on May 6, 2015

My guess was that it's saying: for a given set of equal-length line segments, arrange them in a connected graph such that both endpoints of each line segment share a vertex/node with exactly three other line segment endpoints. And that 104 is the minimum number of line segments with which you can create such a graph.

I'm imagining some strange donut-like arrangement of line segments, but that might just mean I'm hungry.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:48 PM on May 6, 2015

I think it's saying you can take 104 toothpicks and arrange them on a table so that each tip of each toothpick touches 3 other toothpicks' tips. I think the middles of the toothpicks can't touch, otherwise it would be really fiddly to actually do.
posted by aubilenon at 5:52 PM on May 6, 2015

It's 52 pick-up squared.
posted by clavdivs at 6:04 PM on May 6, 2015

It's the Harborth graph. Cortex's explanation is correct. It is believed, but not yet actually known, that 104 is the fewest edges such a graph can have. It was recently proved that you can't do this with each vertex touching n matchsticks when n is a number greater than 4.
posted by escabeche at 6:42 PM on May 6, 2015 [6 favorites]

Neat, escabeche. And that Harborth graph could be a sort of fucked up donut, after all.

Also, wiki wandering lead me from there to the concept of a Matroid, which I don't understand but am going to assume was followed by Matroid II, Super Matroid, and eventually a Gamecube release called Matroid Prime.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:21 PM on May 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

Kitties!
posted by Artw at 7:49 PM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

OMG don't even get me started on matroids I love those little fuckers
posted by escabeche at 8:04 PM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Lipstick Thespian is super psyched to be called out as a Shazam of smells.
posted by Miko at 8:24 PM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thanks for mentioning the Pluto Facts. I'm REALLY excited about the upcoming New Horizons flyby, so I've been thinking a lot about good old Pluto. I came up with something like 20 facts on a Saturday & another 10 the next Sunday morning, so I had a good stockpile when I started out, & am trying to keep ahead with enough material to last through the flyby in June or July.

I need to check on whether Pink Floyd mentions Pluto in Astronomy Dominie. We could get some synergy going there! (Even if it doesn't, that's a Pluto fact)
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:38 PM on May 6, 2015

This is so exciting!!! My first mention on the podcast :D
posted by ellieBOA at 12:45 AM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

yessssss our fight made it on the podcast

yessssssssssssss
posted by rorgy at 2:47 AM on May 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

ALSO: much like the pronunciation of GIF, the "g" in "rorgy" is soft.
posted by rorgy at 2:51 AM on May 7, 2015 [3 favorites]

Why the Brunching post: basically, a few months ago I was feeling very say that so many things I like had ended, and decided to celebrate one of those things, partly as a way of cheering myself up, and also nurturing a secret hope it might inspire Lore to create something new, because people out here in Internet Land still remember him. At first I aimed it for December, but then figured maybe I was aiming for the contest, and I could wait a bit longer and make it better. Then I basically forgot about it for a while, and it sat in my text work folder along with the hundreds of other files in there.

Then I did the trial for a shareware meta-word-processing program, oriented towards large document planning, research, structuring and production, and figured a good test of what it could do would be finishing up one of those dusty megaposts. (By the way, it worked pretty well for that purpose I think; I bought a license, and look forward to it helping me with posts in the future.)

So to reiterate -- there was no special reason other than remembering that Brunching Shuttlecocks existed, that I and some friends loved it once, and figuring that I should act on that love, to actualize it, because a feeling that exists only in the mind is as nothing, and both to commemorate it and hopefully encourage more stuff like it.
posted by JHarris at 3:21 AM on May 7, 2015 [4 favorites]

Okay, okay, but like, our fight was a completely and utterly intentionally tease-y move on my part.

Because we gotta thing goin' awn.

It was also to prove I'm right. Because I so am.
posted by ourt at 3:45 AM on May 7, 2015

Literally nobody in this history of this web site has ever been wronger than you, and there was a dude who thought that sending a woman a romantic banjo was a good idea to do.
posted by rorgy at 3:51 AM on May 7, 2015 [5 favorites]

Also, on it being good that megaposts are rare things: they take so long to put together that I think it's safe to say that I won't be increasing my own rate at making them anytime soon, heh. I am considering increasing my rate of making normal every-day posts though.
posted by JHarris at 3:53 AM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Currently accepting banjos via anonymous donors. Pm for address.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:01 AM on May 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

BANJOSTARTER

Kickbanjo?
posted by Chrysostom at 6:04 AM on May 7, 2015 [3 favorites]

The Social Banjo. Starring Jesse Eisenberg as Béla Fleck.
posted by rorgy at 6:07 AM on May 7, 2015 [3 favorites]

Oh, my user name is a reference to St. John Chrysostom. Who was just a *spectacular* asshole.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:21 AM on May 7, 2015 [3 favorites]

much like the pronunciation of GIF, the "g" in "rorgy" is soft.

You lost me with that first part.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 6:46 AM on May 7, 2015 [6 favorites]

Jessamyn, you "bow ba bow"-ing when discussing the music challenge was my favourite bit. It's literally impossible not to do that when singing that song.
posted by greenish at 6:51 AM on May 7, 2015

"104 is the smallest number of unit line segments that can exist in a plane with four of them touching at every vertex."

Yep, I don't think that Wikipedia statement is completely accurate, because you need to add the qualifier that the line segments are not allowed to cross for it to be true. A graph which can be drawn with all edges as unit line segments is a unit distance graph. A unit distance graph which can be drawn with no crossings is a matchstick graph.

So the Harborth Graph, as posted before, is the smallest known (not proven, as far as I can tell, and as that Wikipedia statement might imply) matchstick graph where every vertex connects four edges. But there are much smaller unit distance graphs where that is true; see for example the rightmost graph in Fig. 17 (p. 22) in this PDF, which is the generalized quadrangle (2,1), and has just 18 edges.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 6:51 AM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Then I did the trial for a shareware meta-word-processing program, oriented towards large document planning, research, structuring and production, and figured a good test of what it could do would be finishing up one of those dusty megaposts. (By the way, it worked pretty well for that purpose I think; I bought a license, and look forward to it helping me with posts in the future.)

STOP THE PRESSES

What software?
posted by zarq at 7:30 AM on May 7, 2015

zarq, if you've got a Mac the two I like the most are Scrivener and Ulysses. Ulysses in particular is one of the best-designed programs I've ever used; it's a real functional design inspiration for me.

(I don't use either, though, because Notational Velocity and its slightly more powerful cousin nvALT are the greatest things since sliced bread. They're not meta-word-processors, however.)
posted by rorgy at 7:38 AM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Remind me to hug you the next time I see you. :)

Thanks, rorgy!
posted by zarq at 7:43 AM on May 7, 2015

Puppy coat?
posted by Going To Maine at 7:50 AM on May 7, 2015

When I heard "enormative dialogue" I horse-laughed, and then felt my English degree roll over inside me in sympathy like a sleepy chest-burster, biding its time.

WHAT HO, &c.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:51 AM on May 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

In the midwest, the Sizzler competitor was Ponderosa. For a kid, it just seemed like some kind of Viking hall of abundance.

I hadn't gone to one since the early nineties, then when we were moving to Boston, we saw a Ponderosa in upstate New York and stopped there.

Holy shit, it was depressing. Salad bar was worse than a company cafeteria. Steaks were hockey pucks. Everyone looked glum, like the extras in an old monster movie set in an Eastern European town.

Also: What ho, podcasters!

Also also: Just noticed cortex's pronunciation of "drag" at around 45:00 is consistent with his long-A pronunciation of "dragon"!
posted by ignignokt at 9:16 AM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ulysses in particular is one of the best-designed programs I've ever used

It's a sign, I tell you - an omen!
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:52 AM on May 7, 2015

zarq: I didn't want to mention it right off lest it look like I was promoting it or something. rorgy already mentioned it though, it is Scrivener. I like that it can rapidly turn a series of individual entries in an organizer-like view into a complete document.

And I'm sorry if that comment above seemed stream-of-consciousness-y, it seems when I'm about to go to sleep that my ability to structure coherent thoughts in text doesn't quite measure up to what I think it is.
posted by JHarris at 10:44 AM on May 7, 2015

Is there a link to the transcript?
posted by Chrysostom at 10:45 AM on May 7, 2015

(And to rorgy: Ulysses, eh? Will keep an eye out for, although Scrivener has the advantage of being out for Windows.)
posted by JHarris at 10:46 AM on May 7, 2015

Ulysses comes very close to my dream text editor. It's a Markdown-powered processor with robust support for tagging, organizing, and publishing, and can do fancy things like automatically merge multiple documents into a single visible file without actually removing the document structure. If you're writing a 20-chapter book and want to publish the thing as a single PDF, you just select all 20 chapters, and Ulysses loads them as a single entity.

But mostly it's just that it has the best-crafted text design I've found in any program, enough so that it makes writing in it a joy to use. It also uses a Notational Velocity-esque approach for listing all your files, which, post-Notational, is pretty much a must-have for me and text editors, and is one of a couple dings against Scrivener. (The other big one is just that I find Scrivener's organizational philosophy runs counter to my own, in some egregious ways.) It's a powerhouse that feels utterly lightweight, which is fantastic.

The downside to Ulysses is its reliance on proprietary text formats, an issue which Scrivener shares. Partly I just don't feel comfortable with any program that makes getting my shit out of it difficult; partly it means I can't use it on iOS nearly as easily as I can use a program that lets me Dropbox-sync all my stuff. Ulysses for iPad is out/awesome, but the only iPhone solution is Dedalus, by the same company, a quirky and annoying program that I can't use effectively to save my life.

The coup de grace, however, is that the actual best text-editor I've ever used is Editorial, which is so well-designed that it makes typing on an iPhone touch screen nearly more convenient than typing on a full-size keyboard. When you combine it with a good Bluetooth keyboard, it basically becomes my dream text editor — I will gladly overlook its general ugliness for its absolutely brilliant utility. (That it doubles as a to-do organizer is just icing on the cake.) And Editorial supports plaintext and Markdown, so now the ultimate benchmark for me and any app is, "Can I use it with Editorial?" If the answer is no, then the app must go.

(Not even gonna pretend like I'm offering useful information to y'all at this point. I just love prattlin' on about writing applications. It's amazing to me how little developers have paid attention to the writing workflow, just because a keyboard and plaintext editor technically "does the trick". I'm not counting publishing engines like Wordpress or layout programs like Word here, since neither one is focused on the actual thing that matters to me, and that's understanding writing as an art as structured as music or painting, but with tools about a hundredth as good at conveying that complexity on account of fuck everybody, I don't even know. Good writing programs make me weep happy tears, that's all.)
posted by rorgy at 12:05 PM on May 7, 2015 [5 favorites]

It's okay, prattle away! Although I understand that under the hood Scrivener actually uses RTF files in directories, which while not plain text or anything can still be opened in many word processors. I can't compare it to Ulysses, but I've been pretty satisfied with it.
posted by JHarris at 12:51 PM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

Is there a link to the transcript?

Pronoiac was out at a thing last night, so he may not have set it up yet.

Man, I have used (and enjoyed) Scrivener but couldn't get past Ulysses' twee "voice" on its FAQ and general web pages. But I'm not in need of an editor atm so I'll just keep listening. I use Taco HTML edit the way some people use emacs.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 1:29 PM on May 7, 2015

Men on pigs, previously on metafilter
posted by moonmilk at 3:35 PM on May 7, 2015

Taco HTML edit? I have not heard of this. I'm always looking for things that help me write <a html="CTRL+V">link title</a> better/faster/less problematically.
posted by JHarris at 4:28 PM on May 7, 2015

(What, Mac? Boo.)
posted by JHarris at 4:29 PM on May 7, 2015

ALSO: much like the pronunciation of GIF, the "g" in "rorgy" is soft.

OMG NO PICTURES ARE NOT PEANUT BUTTER!!! D8<
posted by Deoridhe at 12:04 AM on May 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Wait. Serious question. Once line segments cross on a 2D plane, don't they basically become the equivalent of 4 line segments that converge on a point? Like, the end points of the line are A-B and C-D, and they cross at X... don't they basically become A-X, B-X, C-X, D-X?

No, a unit line segment is still a unit line segment even if it is crossed by other things. I.e., if you have a unit line segment AB, and plop down a point X along that (possibly because another line segment has crossed it at X), you've created line segments (with length less than one unit) AX and XB, but that doesn't stop AB from still being a unit line segment.

Is the point of this exercise that all the unit line segments never meet at a 180-degree angle because at that point they could be considered the same line?

No, not necessarily. If you have unit line segment AB, and unit line segment BC, and they meet at a 180 degree angle, then you also have line segment AC with length two, but AB and BC are still unit line segments. In fact, in the Harborth graph a number of the line segments involved meet at 180 degree angles.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 5:28 AM on May 8, 2015

Man you never know where these podcast discussions are going to go. Unrelated: not_on_display just did that word.camera thing on a picture of us. So nice.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 6:16 AM on May 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well, I was hoping the discussion would be all about how wonderful I am, but AS USUAL people have gotten distracted.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:41 AM on May 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

A picture of not_on_display? Antonysterical!
posted by moonmilk at 7:01 AM on May 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

and I yammer for nigh on two hours about a bunch of great stuff

Skunked again!
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:09 AM on May 8, 2015

Oh, man! Now I want a Harpoon IPA! Talk about intersecting lines on display!
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:11 AM on May 8, 2015

It's amazing to me how little developers have paid attention to the writing workflow, just because a keyboard and plaintext editor technically "does the trick".

This is the case because programmers have a different relation to the plaintext editor than most people. I've spent 3 years learning vim and will probably never plumb all of its voluminous depths or use its outrageous power, and emacs, no matter its faults, I must say is deeper yet than vim.
posted by curuinor at 10:43 AM on May 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Here in Germany they are absolutely called Deutsche Dogge as an everyday thing, and when it's pronounced correctly by a German-speaking person in Germany it makes total sense. It's also more fun to say than 'Great Dane' (at least in my terrible German accent).

There's no link to the doge meme here because, firstly, it's pronounced differently and secondly, that meme doesn't seem to have any traction here (at least amongst the people I know, which is a very limited sample).

Also they come in the same colours as my cats so I have a not-so-secret fantasy of getting matching pets.
posted by shelleycat at 2:37 AM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Or at least, I've never seen any link to the doge meme even after having a couple of different conversations about these dogs, doesn't mean it doesn't exist elsewhere of course. I don't speak German so I'm not exactly integrating.
posted by shelleycat at 2:53 AM on May 9, 2015

Hey jessamyn, Mads Mikkelsen and the guy who plays Petrov on House of Cards are brothers.
posted by donajo at 8:07 AM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Mostly a Sublime guy, because I acknowledge GUIs exist and we have mice and stuff now.
posted by Artw at 8:28 AM on May 9, 2015

I've moved from vi to Sublime for any of my more involved programming efforts in the last years and I'm really loving it. vi is still my go to from a shell, but having, yeah, actual modern tools to help interact with code turns out to be a pretty nice deal, even if I panic when I accidentally hit Sort Lines on a thousand lines of JS.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:36 AM on May 9, 2015

Mads Mikkelsen and the guy who plays Petrov on House of Cards are brothers.

!!!!!! it all makes sense now.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 9:55 AM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Sublime looks interesting, with that parallel operation thing shown off in the GIF on the front page, but I dunno. $70 is a lot of money when Notepad++ (my most-used plaintext editor) is free.
posted by JHarris at 1:32 PM on May 9, 2015

"Someone has it registered somewhere, I'm pretty sure, oh well. /clicks 'do it later'" - lots of people in lots of offices with Sublime.

If you use it you absolutely should cough up for it, but there's little practical barrier to trying it out, DRM, indefinitely.

Atom and the new multiplatform VS look interesting also.
posted by Artw at 1:54 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, it'll just nag you periodically if you haven't paid for it, so giving it a go for a while for free is a totally viable thing. I balked at the price at first two, but it turned out from giving it a long test-run that it's really that good.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:58 PM on May 9, 2015

Atom and the new multiplatform VS look interesting also.

Atom is just fine for most things, but its current inability to handle files larger than two MB is a real killer.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:12 PM on May 9, 2015

I dunno though, I feel bad about using shareware without paying for it, and nag screens threaten to turn me into some kind of hulk. Not an incredible one, though, in fact one that is generally quite believable. Actually, not a hulk so much as me but slightly red-faced and making noises like grrrr.

Notepad++'s pretty swell anyway.
posted by JHarris at 4:56 PM on May 9, 2015

I should probably make a donation on that as well.
posted by Artw at 5:03 PM on May 9, 2015

The transcript is open! Have at it!

Also: Textmate <3
posted by Pronoiac at 9:38 PM on May 9, 2015 [3 favorites]

/pours one out for Allaire Homesite.
posted by Artw at 9:39 PM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Programmer's File Editor, mourn you 'til I join you.

If you're like me, you like to edit C source with a tab size of 4, plain text with a tab of 8 and text wrapping enabled, and HTML with all the tabs inserted as spaces. Oh, and we'd like C source to be red on blue, but HTML looks much nicer as cyan on yellow, if you wouldn't mind

OMG, huge tab sizes are like the big hairdos of another era.
posted by ignignokt at 6:11 AM on May 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

We're using a tab of two round our way. Mind you were using some languages where whitespace counts*, so it would be awful otherwise.

* I have mixed feeling about this personally, but it's what everyone here is using so.... /shrug.
posted by Artw at 6:59 AM on May 10, 2015

Yup, you gotta go with the flow. Commercial software engineering: Where You Swallow Your Feelings to Exchange Conflict for a Fine Mist of Dis-Ease.
posted by ignignokt at 8:21 AM on May 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

/pours one out for Allaire Homesite.

It really was as good as I remember, wasn't it?

I've just learned that the HTML/CSS class I will be teaching in the fall will likely be taught in a classroom without computers (with weekly computer lab time available). Not sure whether to refuse to teach, turn this into a hilarious "HTML taught by puppets" experiment or just see if I can get a camera crew to follow me and turn it into a reality tv thing.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 8:53 AM on May 10, 2015 [4 favorites]

Well, ideal for a podcast or a tumblr, certainly.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:10 AM on May 10, 2015

Yup, you gotta go with the flow. Commercial software engineering: Where You Swallow Your Feelings to Exchange Conflict for a Fine Mist of Dis-Ease.

I'm gonna be passively aggressively harshing at you, anything that hints at Coffescript or Slim in future job listings.

(which, I've discovered, heavy Ruby buy-in may be a sign of, so that's probably out.)
posted by Artw at 9:40 AM on May 10, 2015

I appreciate that! Usually, listings are loud and proud about that kind of thing. I've been able to filter a lot (maybe too much!) by seeing OverwroughtWasteOfEnergy.js as the first bullet point.
posted by ignignokt at 6:45 PM on May 10, 2015

Another great podcast, and I'm always available to serve as Mathowie's Joan Rivers.
posted by ColdChef at 11:10 AM on May 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

If you want to watch Mads Mikkelsen in something that isn't Hannibal or Casino Royale, I rather enjoyed the relatively recent Danish film A Royal Affair, which is a period piece set during the enlightenment (and based on historical personages). It also has Alicia Vikander, who is currently gracing American cinema screens in Ex Machina.
posted by ocherdraco at 6:15 PM on May 11, 2015

Pusher, the film that launched his and Nicolas Winding Refn's careers, is well worth a watch.
posted by Artw at 6:32 PM on May 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

BRIEF was the bee's knees back when I was doing semi-serious work on DOS.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:23 PM on May 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

jessamyn: I've just learned that the HTML/CSS class I will be teaching in the fall will likely be taught in a classroom without computers...

Jessamyn, you could get some magnetic tape or big Post-Its and use it to make cards with HTML primitives (you know, opening and closing style tags: <EM> one one and </EM> on another), and then stick those to your whiteboard to surround some Lorem Ipsum text. (Simulating reflow when the style changes might be trickier, though…)
posted by wenestvedt at 5:54 AM on May 18, 2015

I wanted to ask, "has anybody ever made a magnetic poetry supplement that's just a bunch of self-contained and matching opening and closing html tags, so you could mark up your magnetic poetry explicitly?", but I think just asking it is kinda silly because (a) maybe they did but no one knows, and (b) maybe they didn't but how would anyone know that their personal lack of awareness of it is actually definitive of it not having happened, and in any case (c) while I'm sure you can still buy the stuff in gift shops and such, it seems like as a consumer phenomenon it has fallen way, way off the map from twenty years ago.

But anyway maybe you could buy and use that, Jess.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:40 AM on May 18, 2015