112: FUCK ALL THE REST OF THE LETTERS

For the first time in either the history of the Best of the Web podcast or maybe just the year 2016, we're going all out with four people on the podcast! Four J's, even: joining me and Jessamyn are long-time MeFites not_on_display (Jim!) and churl (Jesse!), as we talk about the month in MeFi, the Best Post contest, and the dark Jungian substrate that lies beneath the fragile shared fiction we call "reality". Also some bathroom stuff. With all this personality bopping around, we're ringing in the new year with a hefty 2 hours of show this time, covering December 1st through January 4th.

• play
• pause
• stop
• min volume
• max volume

Helpful Links

Podcast Feed
Subscribe with iTunes
Direct mp3 download

Guest facts!
not_on_display:
- lives in Massachusetts!
- has a very good beard!
- is totally Jessamyn's sweetie!
- is a musician!

churl:
- lives in Portland!
- keeps a pretty short trim on his beard!
- records a podcast with cortex called The Crapshoot!

Misc
- Ever dream this man?

Jobs
- MetaFilter is was hiring

Projects
- Airports (and more!) of New England (and beyond!) by backseatpilot (MeFi post)
- If You're Reading This again
- Goddam Facts, by ignignokt
- OlogyBot, by divabat
- HIBRYD HIBRYD, a superb 9-year callback by Faint of Butt
- A butt a day at butts.lol, by CharlesV42
- Final Consternation 4 again
- what Greg Nog has learned from a month of not eating raw chicken (MeFi post)
- Thank You Notes by raisindebt

MetaFilter
- Happy Birthday, Lemmy! by jbickers
- actually Lemmy's dead it turns out, notes Cookiebastard
- Of which, the tags vs. umlaut dilemma (but cortex later overruled it in a boring bid for searchability)
- are there two slightly different sized Luke Skywalkers, by Greg Nog (also, this video game character post from 2011)
- an alphabetized Oz, by Obscure Reference
- Barbiephonic from MeFi's own mhoye, by frimble
- Tubular feels, by a lungful of dragon
- Antique Molds by knuckle tattoos
- Whitewashing All of Mankind, by orticon halo
- on interacting with nature, by saul wright
- mathowie's s/gun/dildo/ project, by maxsparber
- the invention of basketball, by Etrigan
- NETHACK 3.6.0 RELEASED by OMG SERIOUSLY GUYS I AM HYPE sorry by Pope Guilty
- Dune sandworm bread and also many many Dune jokes by gregglind
- adult coloring books by Bella Donna
- the animation work of Phil Tippett by brundlefly
- A Dune coloring book that actually existed, somehow by ricochet biscuit
- on holding emotional (not parking) space by flex
- the confused Vincent Vega meme by entropicamericana
- a lengthy argument about Star Trek fan projects by doctornemo
- To MIDI And Back Again, A Mariah Carey Holiday Song's Holiday by overeducated_alligator
- on multiple frogasms by valkane
- Clickhole on manhood by schmod
- the post Jessamyn and Jim were betting about
- Jim's old Sifl & Olly post that Jesse remembered
- the Markovization of Jessamyn West by kcds
And lots more, it was the December Best Post contest, see MetaTalk below for a ton more!

Ask MetaFilter
- how to build a safe prop bomb by aaanastasia, for her SWEDISH CHEF REENACTMENTS OMG
- jessamyn wants to order glasses online without an eye exam tyvm
- What is that 80s sax song that goes "do dwee do dododo?, wonders kittensofthenight (and several other folks)
- your fave 90s alt rock videos?, by glaucon
- real words that don't sound real by acorncup
- movies that treat cash realistically by woman
- the joke about freebasing a cat by OrangeVelour
- that goddammed paint-roller-on-face-TV-show question still by sarcasticah
- THE BATHROOM SMELLS DISGUSTING by joyceanmachine
- of driving in Morocco by kingoftonga86
- rad gross gifts for a seven-year-old by pretentious illiterate
- who was that Star Wars torture critic? by mattoxic

Music
Songs used for interstitial music this month:
- Auld Lang Syne by aegispolis
- Uni, by ludwig_van
- I Got You Babe, tropical remix, by aegispolis
- Coventry Carol, by AppleSeed

MetaTalk
December was the annual-ish Best Post contest! Weekly roundups with winners:
- Week 1
- Week 2
- Week 3
- Week 4 and month-long prizes

Also: welcome aboard Eyebrows McGee, our new part-time mod!

posted by cortex (staff) to MeFi Podcast at 10:16 AM (63 comments total)

The echo on Jessamyn saying "NEVER BEFORE IN 2016!" is epic!
posted by ignignokt at 10:42 AM on January 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Ah, I'm back on the podcast again, and it just required hundreds of dildos to do it.
posted by maxsparber at 10:56 AM on January 6, 2016

What is that 80s sax song that goes "do dwee do dododo?

Oh man, I guessed right as soon as I read the title. (It could be, though, that there are only so many sax songs in the 80s.)

PS: It's raining here. It doesn't happen too often. I'm pretty happy.
posted by SpacemanStix at 10:59 AM on January 6, 2016

What ho, Large Podcast Team!

Oh, yes, I will readily admit that @goddamn_facts is not great, but I was like, "Hey, this is working* and I'm amused. Maybe one or more people going to projects.metafilter.com will enjoy it."

*After posting, it turned out to not be working…quite as well as I thought.

Re: "MacRumors": The way it works is it gets a random article from Wikipedia, then picks a random sentence this is not entirely MediaWiki markup or something. Then, it goes through the sentence classifying the words by parts of speech. There's certain swear prefixes it considers appropriate for certain parts of speech. So, the whole sentence there was just "MacRumors", and it couldn't figure out what part of speech that is, so it didn't do anything.
posted by ignignokt at 11:11 AM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

128 minutes, holy shit. Time to drag out the sipping scotch and wingback chair.
posted by boo_radley at 11:35 AM on January 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

(this is not a complaint)
posted by boo_radley at 11:35 AM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

HabitBull apparently listened.
posted by boo_radley at 11:48 AM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I look forward to this every month. Two hours? Woohoo!
posted by blurker at 11:49 AM on January 6, 2016

I look forward to this every month. Two hours? Woohoo!

Exactly what I came to say. And I rode the bus today so my commute home just got 100% better!
posted by quaking fajita at 11:59 AM on January 6, 2016

The echo thing is semi-audible throughout; it turns out that while we got pretty separate audio tracks from everybody, Jim's headset had a little bit of bleed from the earphones to the mic (not shocking given the accommodatingly Rube Goldbergian process he went through using two different headsets to get his mic away from his (luxurious) beard), hence other folks' voices showing up as quiet echoes and pre-echoes in the mix.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:13 PM on January 6, 2016

HabitBull apparently listened.

According to what? Where are you finding that? I'm still staring at this blonde girl's butt whenever I launch the app. This was my tweet to them, unanswered.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 12:25 PM on January 6, 2016

That's the android app! Maybe it knows I'm a dude, so I get mountaintop-dude-butt.
posted by boo_radley at 12:32 PM on January 6, 2016

WHAT HO, MODS.

So, will there be an individual letter featured on each future podcast episode now, the same way that the podcast's number gets a spotlight? It's like Sesame Street, in the best possible way!

Alternately, will guests be chosen by first initial? If so, I can't wait for…counts on fingers, then re-counts... February of 2017 when you get to the W's -- I will keep my calendar open!
posted by wenestvedt at 1:07 PM on January 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

Jessamyn sounds like she's stuck in the TV from Poltergeist! DON'T GO TOWARDS THE LIGHT JESSAMYN!!
posted by not_on_display at 1:21 PM on January 6, 2016

The echo thing is semi-audible throughout;

As unintentional artifacts go, it's not bad. In fact, it's pretty fun!
posted by ignignokt at 1:54 PM on January 6, 2016

Jessamyn sounds like she's stuck in the TV from Poltergeist! DON'T GO TOWARDS THE LIGHT JESSAMYN!!

ಠ_ಠ

So I just subscribed in iTunes so I can get this on my phone for my drive to Boston tomorrow, but the latest episode isn't there. Is this ... expected behavior?
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 2:03 PM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

FORGET IT IT'S FINE NOW
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 2:13 PM on January 6, 2016 [3 favorites]

iTunes is wack about caching sometimes, I dunno.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:38 PM on January 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

I, too, wanted glasses (as a child) because everybody else in my family had them.
posted by trunk muffins at 3:45 PM on January 6, 2016

I'm stuck in bed in hospital and was so looking forward to this, but I can't download it from the hospital wifi it seems. Boo!

(It's probably the hospital's fault)
posted by Dysk at 9:11 PM on January 6, 2016

eeeee my first bot! it was an idea I'd been mulling for a long time and I thought it'd be a single-serve site first, but then I saw NoraReed's awesome Twitter bots and went "duhhhhhhhhh of course it's a Twitter bot"

(such a pain in the ass with getting a phone number verified though)
posted by divabat at 5:59 AM on January 7, 2016

Pony request: Can we send in random words for the next podcast and have people discuss how to pronounce them?
posted by Etrigan at 6:54 AM on January 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

I don't see why not. Mail them to me around the end of the month, is my suggestion.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:01 AM on January 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

People do like to hear their name on the podcast! That was cool!

A couple of the library catalog cards Jessamyn sent said BANNED BOOK at the top, which I think is great in a general anti-censorship way and also rad in a collectible kinda way. They're like rares in a booster pack!
posted by knuckle tattoos at 9:04 AM on January 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oh sweet jebus that echo
posted by Going To Maine at 9:05 AM on January 7, 2016

Next time I'm gonna run the whole thing through a chorus pedal and an Echoplex emu.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:06 AM on January 7, 2016 [6 favorites]

For those of us who don't regularly shorten the word "emulator" that last sentence summons a very very weird image.
posted by benito.strauss at 9:09 AM on January 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

what's an emulator
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:10 AM on January 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

$20, same as in town.
posted by SpiffyRob at 9:11 AM on January 7, 2016 [10 favorites]

It was noted that I borked the link to the Greatest Video Game Characters post originally, which I've fixed now but I'm also linking it in this comment because I love it so much.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:23 AM on January 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

what's an emulator

A flightless bird in the future.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:36 AM on January 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

what's an emulator

A flightless bird in the future. Still faster than an emulatest.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:37 AM on January 7, 2016

What is that 80s sax song that goes "do dwee do dododo?

Oh man, I guessed right as soon as I read the title. (It could be, though, that there are only so many sax songs in the 80s.)

Darn, I went with 'Careless Whisper'. I chose...poorly...
posted by TwoWordReview at 10:49 AM on January 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

No, that goes "do dweeee do dooo, do dweee do dooo".
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:52 AM on January 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

I should've known better.
posted by TwoWordReview at 11:12 AM on January 7, 2016

I know you're not a fool.
posted by maxsparber at 11:15 AM on January 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

Needed about 20 minutes more Nethack discussion, imo.
posted by 256 at 11:18 AM on January 7, 2016 [2 favorites]

We are sisters from another mother! I mean I don't hate all jokes but I hate the ones where I am confused because I don't know why someone is talking nonsense and then they are like "Oh no it is a joke!" and I am like "I hate you"
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 8:09 PM on January 7, 2016 [3 favorites]

ಠ_ಠ
ಠ‿ಠ
posted by not_on_display at 9:03 PM on January 7, 2016 [5 favorites]

Baker Street is my ringtone.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 4:38 PM on January 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

Four guests was fun!

Does anyone else listen to this with instacast and have the issue I'm having, where I listen to this in chunks, but instacast jumps back to the beginning half the time? This is the only podcast it happens on.
posted by ellieBOA at 6:37 AM on January 9, 2016

Hey, I'm halfway through now! It's like the Star Wars thread of podcasts.

For people wondering about the Balls to the Walls talk: Metal line-dancing!
posted by ignignokt at 12:38 PM on January 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

I had Careless Whisper actively stuck looping in my head for like 90% of the day yesterday and I want to murder everyone.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:19 PM on January 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

I had Careless Whisper actively stuck looping in my head for like 90% of the day yesterday and I want to murder everyone.

You did that on purpose, didn't you? I hate you now.
posted by jaguar at 2:58 PM on January 9, 2016

Next time, invite all the people who ascended in the NH 3.6.0 thread.

I'm not self serving, I'm spoilered.
posted by eriko at 6:10 PM on January 9, 2016

If you get to the end of the Bach prelude in that "tubular feels" post and you're saying to yourself "Well what about the fugue?" you're welcome to scroll down to the bottom of this post and hit the "Bach celesta video" link to hear it played by Ethan Iverson on, yes, the celesta.
posted by in278s at 8:25 PM on January 9, 2016

I too was confused as to what money laundering actually meant when younger. I was therefore absolutely delighted with this news story from last year.

'Man caught drying laundered cash in dryer jailed'
posted by o seasons o castles at 11:48 PM on January 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm pretty sure I heard cortex pronouncing "flagged" as "flaygged".

I did some Serious Research a while back about whether Greg rhymes with egg
posted by moonmilk at 7:19 AM on January 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

I can't imagine saying it any other way except to make a point, yeah.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:25 AM on January 10, 2016

In the podcast, jessamyn is all, "rss!? lol" so my question is what has replaced rss for most people?

I still use an rss reader every day but I always like to know if I could be doing something more efficient.
posted by Squeak Attack at 11:30 AM on January 11, 2016

Mostly we're all just hanging out on Ello.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:50 AM on January 11, 2016

And don't get me wrong, I think RSS is still a great thing but it's become harder to get your whole feed of everything in there (because Twitter/Facebook/Social aren't using it that way in a lot of cases) and so I've found mysef using my reader less and less even as I still think it's a great idea. I mainly follow a bunch of people on Twitter and use lists to manage them into groups of interest. A lot of the blogs I read also just tweet their posts now so it works decently well.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 12:38 PM on January 11, 2016

Cool, thanks, jessamyn.
posted by Squeak Attack at 1:50 PM on January 11, 2016

Hey now
It's a transcript
Get your game on
And transcribe
posted by Pronoiac at 10:32 PM on January 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oh, hey! Re: A thing that plays all the video links in sequence: PlayAll
posted by ignignokt at 12:14 PM on January 12, 2016

Rad, transcription link added. All that glitters is go-ee-old.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:16 PM on January 12, 2016

(general laughter)

There was a lot of that!

I felt a little klutzy as soon as the recording was over, but on a listen I thought everyone coalesced fine. Between not being able to see each other's faces and the ~1/2 sec Skype delay, it's sometimes hard to know when you can jump in without talking on top of somebody, but everyone did really good!

Best part is, I didn't slip up and accidentally mention the Cabal.
posted by churl at 11:38 AM on January 13, 2016

Fuck.
posted by churl at 11:38 AM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

HA HA HE'S KIDDING, IT'S A—HE'S A KIDDER, A REAL—

Jesse can I talk to you over here for a minute
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:43 PM on January 13, 2016

[psst] It's pronounced "cable"
posted by not_on_display at 9:40 PM on January 13, 2016

I listened to this after getting out of surgery today. The echo was it was something awesome when one is a bit loopy from general anesthesia.

Also I think I'm in love with HabitBull
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 7:17 PM on January 18, 2016

I have flossed for 19 days straight. I don't even recognize myself.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 7:19 PM on January 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

Where those rage watermarked music videos on youtube are from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(TV_program)
http://www.metafilter.com/149156/RAGEagain
posted by onya at 4:20 AM on January 25, 2016 [2 favorites]