157: That's The Title, Everyone Get Back To Work And Thank You

November 1, 2019 1:54 PM

It's our Halloween episode, which is not particularly spooOOOOooOOoooky because I accidentally left it out on the counter overnight after we recorded it yesterday. But jessamyn and I catch up on the last month of MeFi stuff and you can't prove that there wasn't also a ghost on the call. Runs about 90 minutes.

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Misc
- Jessamyn went to trivia as a kangaroo
- eyeball humanoid street art
- on the subject of RIP blogs
- Beware of Mr. [Ginger] Baker
- No Context No Context Twitter Accounts
- the MeFi wiki's Hey, That's Me! page

Jobs
- Old Photo Retouching by kathrynm
- arXiv.org python developer by bdc34

Projects
- Printable Totally Real Birds of the World 2020 Calendar by COBRA!
- Orange Grove Tool Sheds and Utility Boxes of Oliva, Spain by dobbs (MeFi Post)
- ??, an emoji adventure by NMcCoy
- Images in Detail by rory
- All the Buddha Boxes: 70 Songs for 70 Years of China by beijingbrown
- What Is Your Deal With Carly Rae Jepsen? by Maaik

MetaFilter
- Christians (actually) hiding secret messages on vinyl records! by jessamyn
- 80×25 by cgc373
- Basketball is basketball. You know what I’m saying? by cashman
- Thinking Outside the Plane by aws17576
- Nice Is Different Than Good by The Whelk
- TIL... how to do picture descriptions in twitter for blind/sight-limited by hippybear
- The Mystery of the "Terminator" Theme Time Signature by WCityMike
- 🎲🤏🏾 by Fizz
- Ginger Baker is gone. by Freedomboy
- Then it happened. Tyler finally croaked. by Atom Eyes
- Tour Halted Immediately After Scandal! Willie will never perform again! by 3j0hn
- 38 people are looking at this FPP by Vesihiisi
- In spite of present difficulties, hold on and give me optimism. by eotvos

Ask MetaFilter
- Orca-moose predation by jeather
- Finding Canada Post parcel lost in the US by skycrashesdown
- Music for a Winter Garden by sciencegeek
- An Edible Curse by Acheman
- How to deal with finding out decades later that mom was an alcoholic? by Anonymous
- Tonight's NCIS - what is going on? by lungtaworld
- Surgery vs. natural remedies for osteoarthritis by htm
- Examples of overly simple solutions that were wrong by amtho
- Fun feminist songs by hotchocolate
- Every Photograph of Frederick Douglass by The Blue Olly
- What's the origin of "Portland Orange"? by cortex
- 🛑 Unique Road Signs From Your Neck of the Woods 🚸 by Fizz

FanFare
- Saturday Night Live: Chance the Rapper/Chance the Rapper by jessamyn

MeFi Music
Featured this episode:
- chords 'n gourds by CarrotAdventure
- A New Flame by srednivashtar
- Invocation by Wolfdog

MetaTalk
- Rolling out some updated site documentation by cortex
- Post Your Name Month! by Orange Dinosaur Slide
- non-ascii tags in posts by signal
- secret quonsar: can you take over? by julen
- The Internet 50 by progosk

posted by cortex (staff) to MeFi Podcast at 1:54 PM (23 comments total)

Also, I ended up not using some pre-roll where Jessamyn opened up a care package, but here she is with the contents, including some leftover goofy swag from Portland's 20th Anniversary party, a wee abstract stained glass favicon I made, and, by far most notably, a from-scratch re-engineering by janell of the mysterious triaxial scarf discussed back in April for episode 151. Which I got to sneakily discuss and see in progress weaving stages in the interim, which was delightful in its own right.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:59 PM on November 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

Also also: I'm putting some time into experimenting with some free and very cheap transcription services for this month's audio. I don't have any text yet but I'll update the thread as stuff comes along; I have based on past experiences fairly low hopes for cheap transcription that will be actually usable without a whole bunch of followup labor anyway, but, hey, I'd rather go ahead and give it a shot and see what's what than just be pessimistic, so let's see what happens!
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:01 PM on November 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

Well and if we put the cheaply transcribed stuff up on the Wiki, we could at least then edit it if it's fixable. Yay for transcription.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 2:14 PM on November 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

I hear what you're saying jessamyn (hah! the podcast has just started here at my house) but what cheap transcription really opens up is the opportunity to taunt cortex with the idea of using the cited posts as corpus material to seed a Markov chain generator producing inputs for genetic algorithm based content checker that uses Levenshtein distance (at a word level instead of a character edit level) to simplify the task of improving the transcription output.

In theory.

Double points if the output run through the interpreter of your choice turns out to be Quine.
posted by mce at 2:28 PM on November 1, 2019

So as a very basic starting point on the automatic transcription, here's two tests.

1. full episode via otter.ai
2. first half via temi.com

Note these are just raw cut-and-paste output and I don't yet know whether I'd be able to export them in any cleaner format with some more poking around, need to spend more time with it. Some previous automated transcriptions linked on the podcast transcript page of the wiki include breakouts by speaker and it's not clear to me whether that's in theory doable with either of these setups and I missed it at a first go (many of the previous automated transcriptions were Otter, after all!) or if that was a bit of cleanup work done by Pronoiac after the initial generation.

If the automated Temi version seems on review to be significantly better than the otter.ai version, the cost for that service is low enough that I wouldn't even need to think about it, probably ten bucks a month for our needs.

I'm gonna give these a look from within their on-site editing tools and see how manual cleanup that way feels, though as something that we'd probably need to crowdsource and divvy up to get done consistently monthly I'm not sure how useful it'd be to depend on an interface internal to a service that folks would need accounts on or to coordinate between. But, again, gotta poke around some more to answer some of those questions.

If anyone is feeling gungho about tackling cleanup of some combination of those raw dumps, I'd say just mention it in here so we don't end up with duplication of effort.
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:08 PM on November 1, 2019

The meadow filter monthly podcast! [says the automated transcript]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 3:19 PM on November 1, 2019 [4 favorites]

Okay I would totally listen to a podcast about meadows. Skipping through different meadows in different seasons, finding clovers or daisies, the wetness or consistency of the ground, and the smells in the air.

Also, you blew my cover!
posted by cashman at 3:37 PM on November 1, 2019 [5 favorites]

here she is with the contents

I saw this on mltshp and before I saw the explanation above, I thought that it sort of looks like jessamyn
(1) got back from a cortex or MeFi birthday party (which I guess is reality!)
(2) is welcoming tourists to embarking on the metafilter podcast - please follow along with this demonstration on how to handle the MF logo and put on your 8-bit glasses for optimal experience
(3) just won as MeFi star baker.

Looking forward to listening this weekend!
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 5:35 PM on November 1, 2019

In the excluded pre-roll Jessamyn gasp-laughs for like thirty uninterrupted seconds at the stained glass piece because it looks like the worst map of Vermont and New Hampshire ever executed by human hands, which I found pretty delightful.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:57 PM on November 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

Jessamyn, what was the thread you were talking about re: a person with depression considering kids? (at about 58 minutes)
posted by curious nu at 7:36 PM on November 1, 2019

This thread from a few days ago.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 7:40 PM on November 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

In the excluded pre-roll Jessamyn gasp-laughs for like thirty uninterrupted seconds at the stained glass piece...

One is disappointed as this is decidedly not a thing to make mirth and mischief about. One should respect the art and design of stained glass windows; here, for example, is a fine specimen which should only be considered with serious undertaking.
posted by Wordshore at 1:48 AM on November 2, 2019 [3 favorites]

SQ update: the Secret Quonsar sign-up is going to go out later today, I just need to finish confirming some assistants and we'll be set.
posted by curious nu at 6:41 AM on November 2, 2019 [3 favorites]

here, for example, is a fine specimen

Ah, yes, Jesus's Holy Hog. The worst thing about that piece is it's not even actually a real leaded glass window; there's a number of totally impractical design elements there if you had to cut glass. So someone managed to produce that as an ersatz glass-like illustration, blessedly free from the linework constraints of actual glass cut lines, and still managed to render themselves implied messianic dongery.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:07 AM on November 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

Hey, they could've taken the glass to a shop with a waterjet cutter and a willingness to look the other way in matters of taste.
posted by moonmilk at 6:10 AM on November 3, 2019

Just got around to listening to this and was delighted my sheds were discussed. Thanks for the kind words.
posted by dobbs at 10:19 AM on November 3, 2019 [1 favorite]

Speaking of transcripts, are the lyrics to the theme song written down somewhere? I can't for the life of my understand anything before "it's the Metafilter Podcast."
posted by faethverity at 12:40 PM on November 3, 2019

rbj's nearly got it; the line with the ? is actually

like paper slips in your lap

Which I don't think is anything idiomatic anywhere, just an image that came into my mind that day when I was writing it of sorting through notes quietly, arranging a bunch of little slips of paper each with a thought on it to get 'em in the right order. Was a point of confusion back when I debuted it, too, in fact!
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:27 PM on November 3, 2019 [1 favorite]

At least in my field, arXiv is definitely pronounced "archive." It's one of those shibboleths that probably alienates newcomers while providing no benefit to anybody. (It's also a fantastic resource and every academic field should use it or create something similar, despite the goofy name.) Still, it's better than LaTeX ("lah tek"), 'cause at least it isn't a real English language word that we've chosen to intentionally mispronounce.

I enjoyed the podcast, as always.
posted by eotvos at 8:39 PM on November 3, 2019 [2 favorites]

I did a literal spit-take with "There was a US...SR?" and "I found an old globe!"
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:51 PM on November 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

Thanks for another enjoyable podcast. Alternate episode titles:

- Is That a Cat, Or Is Something Wrong In Your House?

- Dun-dun dun-dun dun-dun dunn dunn! Dun-dun dun-dun dun-dun dunn dunn! Bee-dee-dee, beee beee beee dooooooo

- Not a Thing! No Way!

If I were a betting person, I would have bet that at least one of these human relation AskMes would have come up on the podcast; I don't think they were referenced (unless I missed it), so I would've lost. But they're still fascinating, so in case anybody didn't see them:

- from end of September: I hug to the right. Am I hugging wrong? by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow - I literally had never thought of a default acceptable hugging direction until this question.

- from October: Cheek kissing as a greeting in the US by OrangeDisk - I wish I'd seen this when I was a student, when people in one of my classes did this and I had no idea what the heck was going on.
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 7:03 PM on November 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

Jessamyn, Little Mix are great! My favourite song by them is Strip.
posted by ellieBOA at 6:02 AM on November 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

That was fun, tho you've gotta love a video that is all about people seeing you without your makeup and then you show up just wearing "natural" make up which is still basically make-up.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 10:58 AM on November 9, 2019