119: We're Very Helpful You're Here

Jessamyn and I take a break from house guests and election madness, respectively, to chatter about great stuff on MetaFilter from July 2nd through August 4th. We also take a super quick guided meditation break in the middle! We both ate our figurative Wheaties; this episode comes in at a fulsome hour and fifty-two-ish minutes.

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Helpful Links

Podcast Feed
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Direct mp3 download

Misc
- jessamyn on the Crapshoot
- Project 119
- jessamyn's old Shot Tower post
- Combustible Edison Lighthouse's Infodumpster
- on KC Green's This is fine comic
- jess on MeFi on aaroads.com on MeFi
- the flossing thing apparently
- Rooooooxanne, you don't have to turn on a red light


Jobs
- Art Commission for Fiasco RPG Playset by ursus_comiter
- Webmaster by LegallyBread
- help me figure out a bass tab by thereemix


Projects
- Louie the Dog Horror Movie Posters by Uncle Glendinning
- Pokémon in Space, Pokémon in the NYPL by ignignokt (MeFi Post)
- I Split on 'your grave' by suetanvil
- The Supreme Court Database by jedicus (MeFi Post)
- all GRSSK to me by duffell
- Six years of masks by komara
- Men's Long Hair by xingcat


MetaFilter
- The Weed Route by zarq
- in which a comment by jessamyn
- "imagine the rotary plow's fanwheel blowing a cloud of snow 40 feet in all directions" by jessamyn
- POKEMON GO THREAD Y'ALL by prize bull octorok
- Ah, Mister Garibaldi! by doctornemo
- The Nintendo Entertainment System is coming back to stores by porn in the woods
- Was Diane Arbus the Most Radical Photographer of the 20th Century? by mandolin conspiracy
- this is not fine by rebent
- ...and rise above by Artw
- If I had to sum it up in a single word, I'd say "signs" by jessamyn
- You think they ever get backed up at the gates of Heaven? by You Should See the Other Guy
- The current state of CG and motion capture by gwint
- Happy birthday, Metafilter! by Melismata


Ask MetaFilter
- How To Troubleshoot Anything (but mostly IT) by Doleful Creature
- Does this minor chord progression (i-III-VI) have a name? by Seeking Direction
- How is black and white cookie made? by bq
- What happened... In the Woods? by meese
- How do highway signs get (incorrectly) made? by cortex
- Is "How did you sleep?" like "How are you?" by jessamyn
- Examples of "regional" common knowledge by hankscorpio83


Music
Featured in this episode:
- Angeline the Baker by lucasgonze
- Through the Ocean by ageispolis
- List Four by scruss
- Somethin by signal
- Instance - go with it by Annika Cicada


MetaTalk
- Books in Fanfare by Greg Nog
- Metafilter, FOR SCIENCE by orrnyereg


FanFare
- per above, books are go!
- hey go watch Stranger Things, it's pretty rad

posted by cortex (staff) to MeFi Podcast at 4:41 PM (21 comments total)

As ever, enjoyed the podcast. The 2012 Olympic opening ceremony in London was indeed pretty awesome. The NHS section, which delighted, baffled or enraged depending on your political alignment.

Speaking of which: four years ago, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II jumped out of a helicopter to open the Olympics. Good luck with your opening ceremony tonight, Rio...
posted by Wordshore at 7:36 AM on August 5, 2016

cortex, if you want to make a Markov generator (or some other neat thing) based on the Supreme Court, you can get some really neatly XML-formatted oral argument transcript data from Oyez if you ask them nicely (or I can send you a link; the data is CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).

If you want to use the actual text of opinions or the raw audio files, I recommend Court Listener's excellent bulk download API.

Somebody should really (ab)use the oral argument transcript and recording data to make a Supreme Court Soundboard where you can make the justices say whatever you want.
posted by jedicus at 10:15 AM on August 5, 2016

I was able to restrain my judgements in the actual black-and-white cookie thread, but, yeah, those people are wrong.
posted by bq at 2:12 PM on August 5, 2016

I know right?

also it's so weird that there are so few comments in here.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 2:29 PM on August 5, 2016

it's kinda freaking me out too
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:37 PM on August 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

The yogic meditation for transcribers in the middle is also helpful for those of us who knit and listen.

I especially liked the laughter meditation moment at the end.

I'll take advantage of making an actual comment to say: thanks Josh and Jessamyn for doing this every month. I look forward to it.
posted by jaruwaan at 2:33 PM on August 6, 2016 [7 favorites]

That is cool, what a fun thread.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 3:33 PM on August 6, 2016

Oh man, that's been on my "I should get back to that list", along with a few other things, but I never quite got to it. I love a good music-I-don't-really-know thread for the random skimming of links. Seemed like a ton of people dug it.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:12 PM on August 6, 2016

The transcript is open! Enjoy!
posted by Pronoiac at 12:38 AM on August 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Transcript link added to post. Thanks, Pronoiac!
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:55 AM on August 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

Topatoco is in the Eastworks building in Easthampton. Last year they ran a convention in Eastworks called, unsurprisingly enough Topatocon (unfortunately, Topatocon 2 has been cancelled). A lot of artists, many (if not all?) who publish through Topatoco, came in, including K.C. Green, Danielle Corsetto (Girls with Slingshots), Clay (Sexy Losers), Dante Shepherd (Surviving the World), The Doubleclicks, Lex Cornell, and many more. Some were local, but my impression was that most were not.

I used to work in the Eastworks building a floor above Topatoco. One of my co-workers saw an interesting t-shirt he wanted to buy and when he saw it was Topatoco, he just walked downstairs to see if he could pick it up and eschew shipping.
posted by plinth at 7:52 AM on August 8, 2016

Glad to hear Ursus Comiter mentioned at the top of the show. He is, indeed, a good guy, as Jessamyn says -- and in fact I hired him a few years ago thanks to a MeFi Jobs posting!
posted by wenestvedt at 6:18 AM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Haven't finished yet but had to pop in to be gutted for cortex that jessamyn missed his terrible flossing pun! Or maybe she just...flossed over it.

I'll see myself out
posted by billiebee at 3:21 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

Nope, I heard it, still not dignifying it with a response!
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 3:53 PM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wow. Jessamyn is so very non-commercial and non-video-gamey that there is no way I'd believe she was playing Pokémon Go unless I heard it from her.

Someone should let Niantic know! In their presentations about audience reach, this could be their big reveal!
posted by ignignokt at 6:18 AM on August 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

Fun!
For posterity's sake on the Crapshoot episode mentioned at the beginning and the extended trivia bit excised from same: 1. It was a spontaneous idea and outrageously fun to record, but due to lack of preplanning on my part (I failed to come up with a sufficiently clever system for 'buzzing in' or alternating the questions between Josh & Jess), it ended up being a lot of bouncing between dead air and everybody talking at once, and sifting it into a comprehensible flow in the edit was taking impossibly long (about half an hour per minute of finished audio), so it was ultimately with regret that I shelved that whole section, with plans to revisit the idea with a better-designed and more 'radio'-friendly format, and 2. Jessamyn did win
posted by churl at 5:52 AM on August 15, 2016

Hey, I know that the child survived that Harambe situation! Thanks, cortex!

I had only seen people celebrating Harambe in the timelines of a few horrible Twitter users (that I found out about because they were grousing about being autoblocked by a bot) while also tweeting all sorts of racist and misogynistic things. It sounded like Harambe had actually killed a child, and I didn't want to read about that, so I declined to search. It's a pretty sad situation, but it's better with the toddler arrive, and with the worst of Twitter not celebrating a child's death! As far as I've seen.
posted by ignignokt at 7:00 PM on August 15, 2016

Fun fact: it is illegal to turn right on red on the island of Montreal!

Apparently this used to be the case in the whole province, but the rule was changed in the rest of Quebec, and only persists on the island.
posted by snorkmaiden at 4:10 PM on August 21, 2016

The MetaFilter Podcast: Now usable as yoga background audio! That was pretty surprising. Did this idea just come out of nowhere?
posted by ignignokt at 5:55 AM on August 22, 2016

I have a confession: I have totally just skipped straight into the transcription at the point of the meditation break, because I so wanted to transcribe Jessamyn being all calm and soothing and grateful to the transcribers. And also the phrase "woooodley-woot jazz shit".

And if any of you reviewers quibble with my spelling of that one, I'm just gonna lose all the tranquility I gained during that minute, so you think long and hard about that before you go fiddlin' with my oooos.
posted by penguin pie at 3:00 PM on September 3, 2016 [2 favorites]

Whoa. Welcome to me checking in really late to find out that you all discussed my mask photo. I'm flattered that you thought highly enough of my photo to include it, and thank you for the nice things you done said.
posted by komara at 9:18 PM on October 4, 2016