185: A very wearing my bathrobe all day day

May 31, 2022 12:40 PM

It's episode 185 of the MeFi Monthly Podcast, with Jessamyn and I talking for a good chunk up front about the whole process over the last couple months of figuring out transferring ownership of the site from me to her. We also talk about, like, good stuff from the site for most of it.

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Once again I am gloriously doing almost no work in causing this post to be here; thanks again to eotvos who has once again done all the actually fiddly bits in turning Jess and I rambling on mic into an actual mix down and pile of text as seen below.

Projects
- I made Some Tools by bondcliff.
- The Daily Brief -- News as Information by jkrobin.
- ... a look back at your Amazon shopping history by ph00dz.
- Every .horse domain by Shepherd.
- Dark Patterns Now Available on Android and iOS by cosmic owl.

Metafilter
- Mechanical Watch by Devils Rancher.
- blank blank in the blank of blankety blank, blank blank? by Ten Cold Hot Dogs.
- The "FU" is how you answer the phone when the man tries to bring ya down by not_on_display.
- The Uselessness of Phenylephrine by brainwane.
- Something Went Very Wrong by cavenet.
- Things that Make White People Uncomfortable by box.
- The Mefi-wiki page about Givewell.
- Now you know your A-B-Trees by secretdark.
- You're welcome, Matt, by zenon.

Ask Metafilter
- Everything Everywhere All At When? (streaming) by fleecy socks.
- How should I learn Linear Algebra? by cortex.
- Expressing a line figure as a set of triangles by Tell Me No Lies.
- Advice on Art Appraisals, by Saxon Kane.
- Navigating complicated grief for alcoholic father by showeringsuns.
- What happened to the squatters? by wesleyac.
- Is saying “I’m proud of you” patronizing? by Dressed to Kill.
- Is it wrong to use these antique postcards as postcards? by The corpse in the library.

Metatalk
- Paperwork & Bodywork: short virtual anti-procrastination calls by brainwane.
- [MeFi Site Update] May 25th by loup and staff.
- MetaFilter: A Utopia of Rules? by General Malaise.
- A MetaFilter User Survey by curious nu and the transition team.

Music clips
- Bigass Pizza Blues by CarrotAdventure
- Look At Me by transitional procedures.
- One Month Dragon by srednivashtar
- For Each One To Discover (AO) by q*ben.
- End Credits by CarrotAventure.

posted by cortex (staff) to MeFi Podcast at 12:40 PM (32 comments total)

Cortex: I guess we should start with the big news, bondcliff made cow tools..

Well played, short-timer!

Also, such juicy behind the scenes details of the epic boardroom showdown that resulted in the transfer. ok, not really, but still interesting for how low-key it seems it was.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:02 PM on May 31, 2022 [6 favorites]

Also, such juicy behind the scenes details of the epic boardroom showdown that resulted in the transfer.

You all didn't get to hear the hour long pre-roll discussing the complicated blackmail and intrigue that allowed Jessamyn to seize power and force cortex to resign while saving face. (To be clear, that's a joke and entirely untrue.)

Since I'll forget it if I don't mention it now, I note that jazz.horse shirts are made by the Greatest Generation Star-Trek podcast crew, who are very much aware that it's absurd. It's the phrase they used on the podcast two or three years ago to refer to their habit of playing the Red Dead Redemption video game without trying to achieve any goals, usually while listening to music and eating "jazz gummies," which is the podcast phrase for pot edibles. The layers of inside jokes run deep. I wear that shirt the the gym pretty often. Nobody's ever asked me about it.
posted by eotvos at 1:19 PM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Speaking of faffing around in video games, it speaks to the momentous recent events that I spent half an hour chatting about site ownership and governance and burnout stuff instead of talking for an entire half-hour about V Rising, my current vampire game obsession in which I have been contemplating an Ethical Vampire playthrough and what that would look like in terms of gameplay constraints.

Maybe it's time for another "hey what are you playing?" MetaTalk.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:24 PM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Maybe it's time for another "hey what are you playing?" MetaTalk.

I thought "YES I mean it's always time for one of those!" and then remembered I made the last one. I like the idea of them coming up a couple of times a year, and we're at the midway point!
posted by curious nu at 1:52 PM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Automated transcript!
posted by Pronoiac at 3:39 PM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks, Pronoiac! (I meant to do that. I'm grateful you did.)
posted by eotvos at 3:54 PM on May 31, 2022

I think the HTML in this post got a little fucky somewhere around the "every .horse domain" link which currently points to
https://projects.metafilter.com/6051/a-look-back-at-your-Amazon-shopping-history%3E...%20a%20look%20back%20at%20your%20Amazon%20shopping%20history%3C/a%3E%20by%20ph00dz.%3Cbr%3E-%20%3Ca%20href=
which I am sad to report does not contain any .horse domains
posted by churl at 3:58 PM on May 31, 2022

Indeed, churl. Sorry! That should go to this.

(Today, I'm learning that previewing html is useful. Thanks.)
posted by eotvos at 4:00 PM on May 31, 2022

Ahh. And it destroyed the next amazon-related link as well.

I claim this is a test for the listener.
posted by eotvos at 4:10 PM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think I got that all fixed up. Missing quotation tag, looks like.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 4:50 PM on May 31, 2022

The "Things that make white people uncomfortable" link comes right back to this page. Unless... maybe there's something you're trying to tell us about the podcast?
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 5:00 PM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Unless... maybe there's something you're trying to tell us about the podcast?

I am not. Reload the page, it should be fixed.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 5:34 PM on May 31, 2022

Also: oh my gosh how did I miss the Futel post?! There's one super close to me, and one of the local alt-weeklies (but not the good one) did a story on them and we had kids showing up all-hours swinging by for weeks to try it out, which was kind of cool.

This is a great podcast. :)
posted by curious nu at 5:38 PM on May 31, 2022

My jury duty tomorrow got cancelled so I’ll probably do the video game MeTa tomorrow.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:42 PM on May 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

Eotvos:
You all didn't get to hear the hour long pre-roll discussing the complicated blackmail and intrigue that allowed Jessamyn to seize power and force cortex to resign while saving face. (To be clear, that's a joke and entirely untrue.)

I am completely ready to believe in an hour-long pre roll.
posted by janell at 7:47 PM on May 31, 2022

I think the HTML in this post got a little fucky somewhere around the "every .horse domain" link which currently points to
https://projects.metafilter.com/6051/a-look-back-at-your-Amazon-shopping-history%3E...%20a%20look%20back%20at%20your%20Amazon%20shopping%20history%3C/a%3E%20by%20ph00dz.%3Cbr%3E-%20%3Ca%20href=
which I am sad to report does not contain any .horse domains

Mathowie's first bug!
posted by geoff. at 8:14 PM on May 31, 2022

eotvos, much better on the mix and such. Still put it at like 80% but there were a couple of toddlers and parents playing right outside my door, so much, much better.

I would probably try to automate the link generation like I do everything else, write a script that turns URLs into links with titles and authors and any other formatting to standardize on. Applied laziness.

I do miss the sometimes intro or rabbit chasing links when jessamyn and cortex are just being all random and not necessarily full into the whole MetaFilter proper topics.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:52 AM on June 1, 2022

I am honored and just a little bit confused that Cow Tools was a bigger topic than the ownership change. If only my classmates and teachers at Midvale could see me now.
posted by bondcliff at 6:03 AM on June 1, 2022 [7 favorites]

Thanks, zengargoyle. I compressed it until it sounded obviously bad to me and then backed off a bit - but perhaps even that isn't far enough. (Spot checks sound pretty good to me on a bus on a highway. . . but, admittedly, with partially-sound-blocking headphones that are much flatter than perhaps most people's small speakers.) When time allows, I may post a listening test with a few options on metatalk.

Automating the post generation is definitely the right thing to do. I haven't actually scraped web pages in any language I still want to use, so haven't gotten around to doing so yet. I will happily spend two days automating something that I could have done by hand in two hours, which is often silly. But, since it looks like I'll be doing this for a while, it's probably worth it.

I couldn't decide whether or not to include links to the non-metafilter stuff or not. I'm still not sure what's best. Maybe collecting them all in their own section makes sense.
posted by eotvos at 8:19 AM on June 1, 2022

We've got a janky internal tool for auto-linking that I have used in recent years that we should check with frimble about making accessible to you, eotvos. It's not fancy but it does the basic job on various kind of mefi urls in a way that saves some manual fiddling, so that the link editing becomes more about cleanup than manual labor.

And yeah, that's how I ended up doing the "Misc" section over time: anything that wasn't a site-internal link I just bubbled up to the top of the post and threw together. Not something that can be as easily automated since there's not a title-and-byline format to pull from.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:30 AM on June 1, 2022

Hi! "One Month Dragon" is by srednivashtar, not me.
posted by brainwane at 9:15 AM on June 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks for letting us know, fixed.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:28 AM on June 1, 2022

As long as you're fixing mistakes, " Mechanical Watch by Davils Rancher." has a typo in Devil Rancher's name.
posted by bondcliff at 9:45 AM on June 1, 2022

I would never have noticed.

I was all “look! I made a post! And people like it!” (Both rare for me)
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:11 AM on June 1, 2022 [3 favorites]

the Davils in the datails
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 10:14 AM on June 1, 2022 [10 favorites]

Devil's Ranchero!
posted by Oyéah at 10:48 AM on June 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Whoa, thanks for throwing one of my tunes in there. I'm seriously honored.
posted by transitional procedures at 12:45 PM on June 1, 2022

We all shit, we all cry, and ultimately, we all die.

Then our shamefully electrified corpses arise from our graves or, where appropriate, recoalesce from the dust and gravel of our cremations and shambolically stagger forth across the landscape
posted by y2karl at 1:17 PM on June 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

I am really glad that you did not get so burnt out that you stopped loving Metafilter Josh Millard. You have always been an excellent member and it is so clear that this is the right and good thing for all of us! Thanks, cortex. Thortex.
posted by Meatbomb at 1:27 PM on June 1, 2022 [4 favorites]

Yeah, after a quick look at the View Source, there's enough meta information there to make scraping easy, but a tool on the back-end could easily take care of the metafilter ones directly. Shouldn't be janky though.

Actually (lol), pulling URLs out of the text chat (as it were) and web scraping them to form links, and doing more with the ones from metafilter (even keeping order) and bucketing external and internal things into list 'o links to be edited and pared down....

Shouldn't be that hard to pull off into a 'press button and wait a moment' sort of starting point.

I haven't actually scraped web pages in any language I still want to use, so haven't gotten around to doing so yet. I will happily spend two days automating something that I could have done by hand in two hours, which is often silly. But, since it looks like I'll be doing this for a while, it's probably worth it.

There's an xkcd for that I'm sure.... :) And Come To The Dark Side and learn Perl (evil breathing). No loss, IIRC MetaFilter is like ColdFusion or something otherwise dark and scary.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:50 PM on June 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hehe, zengargoyle, I'm a little ashamed to admit I *was* actually thinking of Perl. No shade on the language. I've used it as a complete amateur in the past for similar projects (populating a wiki devoted to a radio show) and it really was efficient and easy to learn and perfect for the job. it's just so far removed from my professional and hobby work today that I hesitate to add yet another thing to learn. (I'm probably going to look into available python libraries if I do it myself, 'cause having a limited number of tools means you know how to use them well. Or, at least better.)
posted by eotvos at 8:03 AM on June 2, 2022

My default place for notes sometimes turns "quotes" into “smartquotes”, which silently breaks links, in a non-obvious way. This has pushed me towards using Markdown more, honestly.
posted by Pronoiac at 11:57 AM on June 2, 2022 [1 favorite]