266: The Misspeaking Community

We don't have time for faffing around because we've got a lot to talk about this episode. Are you actually adopting faffing? As you say, faffing about? Is that how you say it? How do you say it? I don't actually know, but I do know it's Britishism. And I'm wondering if you've adopted that or are you...

I think it's something I've heard you say. I don't know. It's from Taskmaster, I'm sure, or one of those British shows you watch. I don't think they say faffing about it. Don't they say it like a noun, like it's a faff? Oh, I've heard of a fab. That sounds a little bit like larfing off. Or as you say, getting a wankster. You're thinking of the washroom, not larfing. I think you're thinking of the loo. You know why it's called that?

Because you skipped to it? Yep. Because in most public buildings, it's room 100. Is that true? I don't care. Hey, everybody. It's Reconcilable Differences. Was that in the bathroom reader book when you were a kid? We have a lot of fun. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Reconcilable Differences. I'm officially dead inside. Just so you know, John, I think I'm still going to be able to do a good job. Well, you know, considering, uh, with the things that I do, but I'm officially dead inside. Uh, just FYI.

Hey, everybody. It's Reconcilable Differences. And on the other side of the microphone is John Siracusa. Hi, John. I'm Merlin. Filmographies, directors, and what we do is we get together every fortnight. to faff about for you. And what it's meant to be a place to talk about are emotions, which is spelled with a U in it. Because there's no I in emotions, especially if you are bad at misspelling.

Hey, everybody. And what we do is, you know, once a month, every other, every alternate fort. Mm-hmm. Bi-episodely? Bi-episodely. Which means every two episodes or twice an episode. There's probably a Greek word for 150 seconds. or one 26th is the 26th of the year Okay. So anyways, you can join up. You go to relay.fm slash rd slash join. You get stuff, wallpaper, newsletter, discord. But it also means if it's an even numbered episode like this one being E266.

That means there's a little extra stuff at the end for our friends who support the program. You get this part you're listening to gratis, as John says. And then there's stuff after that. Now, I used to call it a bonus episode. What do you call it, John?

I don't know. Extra stuff is a good thing. It's almost like a whole second episode, but it's not a second episode. It's just a continuation of the first episode. And sometimes it's not a little stuff. Sometimes it literally doubles the length of the episodes. There's a lot of things you're not hearing if you are not a member. Oh, John, call.

the cops it's where it's where we let our hair down yeah you know and just just get real and uh john uh see now i feel like we've got a lot of stuff we're supposed to talk about in a regular show but uh what's the rough uh strongman plan uh for talking about this is part of the excitement of the after show portion never know of these episodes uh is that we

plan on talking about something the app show usually we do especially if it's a very specific thing but sometimes uh we play it by ear anyway the current plan for the app show of this episode is we're going to talk about the wisdom project

Book. You may have heard of the Wisdom Project if you listen to this program, and you may be thinking there's a Wisdom Project book. Aren't you going to put a big question mark after that to be dramatic? I was hoping you read it. That's right. The Wisdom Project book. Book? A talking cat. That's right. Exactly.

We'll see how that goes. These things do tend to kind of slide off the plate late in the game, but we'll see how it goes. But in any case, we would always appreciate your support at relay.fm slash RD slash join. And it looks like you jammed in some breaking news up here, as well as refolding, re-unfolding the topics, et cetera. It's got to be unfolded, yeah. This is actual breaking news. This happened moments before I sat down to record this podcast.

I got some breaking Flophouse news. Oh, boy. I love that show. Yep. The Flophouse podcast is a bad movie podcast that I've been listening to for a very, very long time. It's really good. You should listen to it. It's on the Maximum Fun Network, which is a different podcast network. Anyway.

a little while ago i watched uh it was back when i did like the incomparable episode where i was talking about that uh that animated series the love death and robots animated series on netflix and after we recorded that episode i'm sorry who produces that it's somebody interesting right isn't it like Isn't somebody like Steven Soderbergh or something?

It's an anthology and an animated anthology. Yeah, I think they got a bunch of big name directors to do individual episodes, but I don't know who's responsible for the whole thing. But anyway, after the episode, one of my co-hosts on that episode of The Incomparable, I forget who it was.

probably tony but i don't remember um said hey if you liked this thing you might also like this series on amazon prime video called secret level which is made by some of the same people or like you know the it's another animated anthology series so the individual

episodes are made by random people but the people responsible for the overall series are some of the same people from love death and robots i love animation i love anthology series so let me check it out secret levels premise is that it's based on video games anyway there was an episode based on the uh warhammer 40k uh

franchise and it was confusing to me and you know what i thought when i watched it if you're a fan of the flop i see that you know you know who knows about warhammer he's my he's my foul card on 40 what's called 40 40k whatever it's called yeah stew is my foul card on that because he does beautiful

of the little light men. Does the little man interest? Yeah. Makes the little light men. Yeah, yeah, little guys. What do you call those guys? Not the little guys. I call them little guys. I used to call them Ralph Arthurs, but I think that's like cornflakes. But you have a name for when you 3D print your things. What are they called? I call them the little guys. The little guys. The little guy.

I don't know. My little guys. My little guys. And I used to paint my Marl Parthas with a little pod of Tester's red paint. Yeah, this is not. This is not. Anyways. And it's funny because I did see that episode go by. I haven't listened to it yet.

but tell me i'm now you also that's so here's the thing here if you're jumping to the end here so i saw i saw that episode of secret level i saw all the secret those it was some of a good summer bad anyway anthology series love them uh and i uh skeeted at stew and i said

I just watched this, uh, you know, animated anthology episode about Warhammer and couldn't make heads or tails of it. Can you explain it to me? Or I need you to explain it to me. And that was a while ago. I didn't think anything of it.

And I'm in the process of catching up on the Flophouse because I got very far behind. Today, I just finished the Garfield episode, which is maybe three or four episodes back. And I said, you know what? They watch a bad movie and they talk about it. And that sounds like it was a pretty bad movie.

Yeah, although I have to say, I've already complained about this directly, but like the Garfield episode mentions a restaurant called Mama Leone's. Oh, I see. Saving his pennies for someday. See? See, Elliot? That's how it's done. I'd said Mama Leone's. I waited 1.5 seconds and Merlin's got the reference. He's not even from the Northeast. He's not even from there. I used to work not too far. I worked at Mr. Catchtory's down on Sullivan Street across the medical center. That's what I'm saying.

You left a note on the door. It's right there. Anyway, this was an episode. This was an episode where they mentioned multiple times the Mama Leone's restaurant. Oh my God, and nobody, that's like when you guys say priority. And Elliot, not once. I don't expect it from Dan or Stu. They're from the Midwest, whatever. Sure. But Elliot should be there. Johnny on the spot with that Billy Joe reference. He can't stop it. He's worse than us.

He's had. Yeah, he had an off day. He didn't. And seeing as they said it a few times, he didn't do the reference. I'm like, well, maybe it'll maybe it'll come up later. Later in the episode, the restaurant came up again by name. I'm like, this has got to trigger him. It's got to happen. Nope. It wasn't activated. That's weird. I think he's very distracted. Do you think he might be, like, dehydrated?

I think he's overworked. I think he's too tired. He's overworked. He writes a lot of things, huh? He's doing everything he can. He's got the kids. No, I know. I know he works a lot. Everybody's busy. He's got a lot of jobs. He's writing the Harley Quinn comic books. He's got children's books.

you people, I think at least one of those people listens to the show, hey, you know, tell Elliot, you know, force fluids, please. We need him. We need that guy. He's like our Steph Curry. Yeah. Anyway, so I'm catching up. We Griffins have to stick together. I am not caught up. And so what I was thinking after I finished the Garfield episode, I said, you know.

I should actually because I think they one of the earlier minis they talk about getting the ideas for minis or whatever. And like, you know, I should actually write in. I haven't written into the flop house like officially like write a letter. I should write in a letter. I'm like, I don't know. I want to pitch this as a mini because it sounds like I don't think they would do it as a mini. It's probably too too much.

of a pain but let me at least just write a letter that say hey i would love stewart could explain this episode because yeah i i skeeted it at him on blue sky but whatever you know social media things go by i don't think he spends a lot of time there right Yeah, right? So let me do it officially. Let me go through official channels. Let me go to the Flophouse website. It's flophousepodcast.com. The Flophouse chain of command, yeah. Yeah. And let me send an actual legitimate letter.

to the Flophouse mailbag and say, hey, secret level is a thing. It's on Amazon. There's an episode about Warhammer 40k. Can Stuart explain it to me? I sent that letter and I got a reply that said, guess what? You're in luck. We already did it. And linked me to Flophouse Mini number 132, Stu Brings Down the Hammer, in which, you guessed it, Stuart Wellington explains the episode of Secret Level that I asked him about.

Oh my God. You know, those guys generally don't like it when he talks about his hammer. No, no, that's, that was the pitch of my letter, which is like, I'm sure you two would love to hear him explain. I said, I need him to explain it in as much detail as possible.

I love that they each have this in their quiver, that there's something that each of them can in a given moment just explain in way too much detail. Multiple things. I mean, like I'm guessing just, I mean... maybe maybe warhammer for stew you know maybe maybe uh check new wave movies you know for also elliot elliot i just listened to a mini in which elliot was explaining galactus and the fantastic oh oh is that the one he did by himself

No, everyone else was there too, but all of a sudden, Elliot is a font of knowledge, so he has no leg to stand on when complaining about Stu explaining Warhammer. Yeah, yeah. Or like the way Casey doesn't like when you guys talk about computers. Yeah, especially big, powerful computers. You can't handle it. But do you think Dan could probably do a Titan on Garfield? Probably, right?

He's got a lot of knowledge in his areas of expertise as well. They all do. Cartoon strips. Comic strips, we used to call them. He seems like he knows a lot about comic strips. That's right. I should get him on board with some stuff I'm working on. Anyway, I'm excited about that. That's awesome. That's awesome. It's a Flophouse miracle. I wished a thing would be in the universe. I wrote a formal letter. I feel like I'm sitting down with a quill and writing it out and sealing it with my wax.

steel and everything and put it in the official letter mailbag and it turns out they already did it unbelievable you know manifesting what does that mean but you definitely did will it into being

Retroactively. I feel like I put in the work. You know what I mean? Yes. I did a formula. I tried to keep it tight. Yes. I tried to keep it pithy, right? I also downloaded... uh a copy of the episode and put it in a google drive in case they didn't have amazon prime and didn't want to pay for it they could just download that one episode and watch it i also re-encoded it in mp4 yes yeah in case they can't play an mkv because you know not everybody can play mkvs merlin you think

Everybody can, but not everybody can. I don't know. Is that right? Everybody, that's a package really more than a format, isn't it? I know. It's just a container format. You think, well, who can't play an MKV? MKV, you'd be surprised. It's like when those Nigerian men keep sending me .piff files. So I re-encoded it as that MP4, you know, hoping you'll have the best chance. Did you compress it afterwards? I tried to get...

I tried to get FFmpeg. I loosely told Billy about our first ever email exchange and how it perfectly set the tone for our entire relationship. I tried to get FFmpeg to change the container format to MP4 without recompressing the audio in the video. And I failed. Really? Huh.

And yes, I did ask ChatGPT and I did ask Google Gemini and I tried it multiple times. For stuff like that, I generally just open it in iFlix just because it's really fast. You mentioned, I think, that app that I always forget the name of. Let me look it up again. It starts with an S. The one that integrates in Finder and let's... you do uh like uh lm stuff what is that one called sub stage i use i also use

substage to do it where you just like select the file on the finder trigger substage and say please change this to this is the thing you guys talked about on atp and when you install it you get the option of flipping on a little one-line window below each finder window that's basically a terminal prompt. For an interesting mix of things, it can take more or less natural language things and do it to files and selections, which is better than...

Gemini for Gmail. But anyways, um, you, um, you could do stuff. And like, I've had little, like slightly uneven results with it where like, I'm getting so many, is this okay things? I might as well just do it, but. What you're describing, I think that's kind of the on-label use, right? If you don't want to go list deep, you can know just enough of this stuff to say, like, you know, do these, recompress all of these as medium quality.

uh m m4 mp4s or whatever right and i've had success with it in the past it's just this time like it did it it said i said please change this to an mp4 container without recompressing the audio and video and it said okay i'm gonna run this ffmpeg complaint command is that okay with you i'm like yeah totally go for it

did it and it produced a file but the problem was when i double clicked the file quicktime player couldn't play it because i think inside the mkv container the actual video track was in a format that quicktime Like that AV player wouldn't play. Anyway, I figured it out. It's like a Trojan horse with a door that won't open. Like it'll get you in, but you can't do anything with it.

yeah in the end i just use handbrake manually and i made an mp4 i mean handbrake i really wish handbrake had a dumb guy mode like because like i can get it okay enough but the one reason i have not ripped everything i've got and i bought the I don't want to say Snell approved, but the Snell suggested BD Ripper for 4Ks that'll rip to, that'll actually use hardware acceleration. I got the flashed.

It's great. But like handbrake is just way too much for my brain. I feel like no matter what I'm doing, I'm getting something wrong and I forgot to select the subtitles and all of that. Yeah, there's a lot of options. Yeah, there's a lot of bits to flip that don't stay persistent. Do you have like a like I'm sorry, I'm not trying to go on.

this off of you but if you just arrived at settings at length that get you what you want you just use that no so that's that's one of the worst things about handbrake so I do have a couple of settings. And it's a great app. Listen, I'm not dissing the app. It's a great app. Yeah, it's great. MakeMKV and Handbrake are a really powerful combination.

yeah they're they're they're power tools like i do have two presets for my playstation 5 recordings because i you know i get them from a certain format on playstation 5 and it's a weird format i need to change it and i came up with the preset for that for my just destiny videos but every other thing i do i it and there's some preset selected and I'm like I don't care what the preset is and I just go to every tab and I select the options that I want and then it always says like

1080p, 30 frames per second. I could just leave it on 1080p, 30 frames. I've updated this thing so many times over the years. I could just probably leave it on that one and it would be fine. But I still end up doing six tests. of a chapter of a chapter before I rip the whole thing see the thing is I never quote unquote leave it on that

But it always stays on that because when you start making changes, it thinks you're making a modified version of the 1080p 30 frames a second. And I've changed everything about it. It's no longer 1080. It's no longer 30 frames. You're a functional sin eater.

Yeah, so it is not efficient, but I did it. But all this is to say is that I put in the work. You did the work, man, yeah. Part of Manifest is I put in the work to say, I'm going to make this as easy as possible for the Flophouse guys. You know what they say? They say luck favors the well-prepared, John, is what they say.

Yeah, and it turns out it didn't matter because they had already done it. 38 minutes ago they recorded that episode. Did I get it right? 35, 38? I mean, time is complicated, and it's hard to know. how causation works and i'm not going to look it up but i think you you definitely did so and like i really also just think your connection to them i think they're probably always just still because of all the mini letters over the years all of the all the things they never asked for that you told them

Oh, the many letters. Yes. Not the many letters. Yeah. And I feel like. I misparced it. Do you think you might be the one with the intransitive accent? Because the Flophouse has minis, you see. You said minis. It's explicable. You said minis. Because I say minis. I do that. Yeah, sometimes I hear it. Sometimes I hear it. Sometimes I hear that I unintentionally lean pretty hard. In an Eenie sort of way. Mm-hmm. Eenie.

Real-time follow-up on FAF, by the way. The Oxford English Dictionary. Oh, dear. Okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Easy. The students might not like this. You should run that by now. Yeah. The 2024 example does use it as a noun. They said this is their example sentence.

As for how to clean oven racks, which we'd argue is even more of a faff than cleaning the interior, there are various methods to try. So they're using it as a noun there. That's the common way I hear it. You know a good one? I think roughly the same. Dottle. I still use that.

That's a noun. It means something easy. Or I guess it's someone from New York. This is weird because he's taking a tradition. Someone from New York would say dawdle. You mean like that's not your son? Dawdle. Oh, my daughter Dawn? Yeah. Well, not yet. I don't know. I'm going to definitely keep looking into that. But hey, you know, that's a great show. And I enjoy them. This episode of Reconcilable Differences is brought to you in part by Vitally.

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and all of RelayFM. Next topic. I was listening to... Okay. So you do this other podcast called Accidental Tech Podcast and you've got all these funny brand names for crap you do. And one of the things you do, like sometimes you talk about movies or you yell at people about food or whatever. You can do these, what do you call them? You call them sidelines, after boys. What do you, what do you.

call the special episodes member special member special that's one a month there why does every podcast have members now merlin oh i think members is almost the you know the colon double colon bit with analogies, like on the SATs, I worry that that's going to become a little bit like content. You know what I mean? Like, cool stuff is to content as cool people is to members. But because we can't say the real thing otherwise because of CSAM and CSAM Run and Jane versus Dick.

1978, all that precedence. When you do things like that, I have this brief moment of empathy for future AI-based transcription services trying to transcribe what you just said. Do you know how many tokens that's going to cost somebody? Because even as a human, I'm...

like well i could i could trans i could transcribe that the way the joke way you meant it but it's i know somebody comes back from a late lunch and it's like and it's like a chuck jones machine it's got like if it had ears it would have smoke coming out and swirling around so it's okay it's okay buddy what's And he goes, do you want me to keep trying? Okay. Yeah. Merlin was talking. Words sound like each other. Elliot.

Words sound like each other. Is that the official correct way? Words sound like each other. Words sound like each other. I've been saying it wrong this whole time, I think. I sometimes say words sound like other things. which might not even really be a cromulent sense. The most popular one, as evidenced by episodes of the Flophouse, is words that sound like other words, I believe. Oh, that's C. It's so far off, so far off. Oh, no, no, no, not if you misspeak.

We who misspeak in the misspeaking community find that a very understandable thing. It's understandable. Hey, everybody. I was listening to, uh, one of those bananas, wackadoo, haha, funny name shows you do. Cause I give you money for your program. And, uh, and you did a thing on pizza toppings. Uh, and.

It's really, as you can expect, it's really fun. It's fun to hear these three. I think I texted you guys within like a minute of starting and I was just like, I love that you guys do this and that you're willing to be vulnerable about how idiotic you each are with each other. It's just a delight to be around and get to be your make-believe friend on that program. But here's the thing. And I'm not even going to try to begin to understand, explain to you. I'm not going to try to understand to you.

See, maybe I start doing that now. John, maybe I start moving parts of speech around. You like that? Sure, why not? I heard somebody say a big, I heard somebody use ask as a noun probably eight times today. Within like a couple of minutes on a, what a big ask it is. And it's gotta be the right size ask. Right. And what was that? What was I trying to understand as people?

Oh, so it's about pizza toppings. John has rules that are so difficult to understand, but here's what it comes down to. So easy to understand and so well explained, I think, is what you meant to say. So I'm listening to this. godforsaken program and um as this see if i treat this slightly it's going to be not fair because you and i think marco and probably casey and y'all work really hard to do like cool stuff with show art for these things by which i mean i guess chapter art so if you have

By y'all, you mean me? You wanted me dead inside, and now I'm dead inside? And now you don't get jokes anymore. You used to get jokes, but you mismanaged jokes. You did that. You just did the whole CSAM riff. What's that? If not a joke. Are you talking about the legal precedence or the children's reading book? Did you ever have SRAs? Did you ever have MRAs? Did you ever have MIT? No. MRE, Meals Ready to Eat. Meals Ready to Eat. Okay. Oh, I had an empty seltzer there.

Hey, everybody. So I guess somebody will put this in notes. But what they do is they do this clever thing where it's like, OK, we're going to talk about our favorite video game systems or our favorite SIM cards or our favorite T9 numbers or whatever the hell you guys have some weirdly strong opinion about.

Pretty accurate so far. My kid just bought a Barbie flip phone. My kid is off the grid now. So we just got my kid a mobile card and has now put that in a pink, a gorgeous pink Barbie phone and has a flip phone. My kid now types in T9. Because, of course, why wouldn't you? With everything we've got. It'll be an important skill in the aftertimes. Not making fires, but you know. Pray for mojo. And...

There was art for all of these. And so I'm flicking through and pepperoni, cheese is not cheese. But for each one of these chapters, first of all, they created chapters for each one of the toppings that they were talking about. And for each one of those chapters, there was a beautiful piece of art. And because I'm me.

And I've admired John Syracuse for over a decade. And I guess the other guys. Yeah. No, just in this case, I thought this has Syracuse all over it. So I'll let you, I'm going to throw to you from here. This is your topic. But I just want to say I was really impressed because you had a whole bunch of pizza toppings and there was custom show art for each chapter and topping. And I think there was probably more to it than I first realized.

And I'd like to hear B, how you did it, but A, how you approached it before you did it. in any way you want to talk about it, I am, as you know, John, endlessly fascinated by these processed things. So how in the heck did you make all that beautiful pizza topping show art for your recent ATP overbite series? Yeah, if you want to see a list of these, you just go to atp.fm slash specials and you'll see a list of all of them. We have the naming convention for the specials is...

ATP something colon something else. And the ATP something colon, there's a set of prefixes. One of them is ATP tier list, where we put things into tier lists. And we've done, I don't know, five of those. By the way, you got to mention that the tier lists have their own different set of rules.

yeah i mean i think oh because it becomes really important when you know what you think should be an s tier and not and then the other guys have to just plead with you well no because play s tier s tier has to be unanimous that's the rule we go by Other tiers, we basically average things together. I think in T9, probably, I don't have it in front of me, but I'm going to say probably two. Because isn't two A, B, and C also?

I think so, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that would be, would you think it's S-tier as T9 goes? What do you think the S-tier T9 key is? Nothing about T9 is S-tier. I hate that system. Okay, so do you get multiple F tiers, though, like CGP Grey does? Yeah, yeah, no. You give it an FC, I bet. We just get one F. But anyway, all I'm saying is I've done a bunch of these episodes.

And and the tier list ones are the ones that have a graphical component, because even though it's a podcast, we actually make a video version for tier list because part of the fun of tier list is seeing. the typical tier list template showing S, A, B, C, D, F. And then you drag little pictures from the bottom of the tier list and you slot them into whatever grade you think they get.

And that's what we put as the video portion of that. It's there on YouTube and unlisted URL. If you're a member, you can find the link in the show notes for the episode. And so there's a visual component. And because what we do with all of our podcasts is we have we have chapters in them and we have chapter images very often.

or just images in general at various timestamps and ATP, because if you're not aware, that's something that most podcast players support while you're listening to a podcast. If your podcast player shows the show art.

You can embed images in the podcast so that when we get up to a certain thing and we start talking about a topic, the image, the show art image will change to a picture of whatever we're talking about. Just as you play the podcast, you don't even need to tap links or whatever. So we do that for our regular podcast. But for tierless. Quick, quick comment.

Can I just say that the way you guys, you men, you magnificent bastards do it, and other people have done that, that might be arguably better than most PowerPoints you've seen in the last 10 years. In terms of using visuals to underscore something that's largely a spoken medium, personally, I would never give a talk that I needed slides for.

I mean, that's, you know, to me, that's anathema. But in this case, like, it's so visually fun if you choose to to follow along, especially if you're going like, oh, is that Pismo? Is that Wall Street? You know, is that PS4? Is that PS5? Like, whatever it is, and you can really see. specifically oh this is that kind of thumb drive they're talking about or whatever because it it's exactly that nerdy and the way you guys do it makes me happy that's all i'm going to say

Yeah, so for example, the new OSs, the OS 26s that are coming out now, we're often talking about the appearance of some aspect of one of the betas. And we'll put in the show notes a link to an image that... So, like, we're all looking at this image, and if you want to look at it too, you can click this link. But it's so much easier to just also set it as a chapter image. And by the way, Marco does all of that.

embeds it in the mp3 file the images are literally inside the mp3 file so that when it plays the podcast player will show the image and then you can follow along like if you don't want to follow along you can just leave your phone in your pocket and listen to us talk about it we'll try to paint a word picture but you can also take out your phone and

just look at the player app and you didn't even have to tap any links. You could just look at the image and now you're looking at the same thing we are. And so when we're talking about it, you know what we're talking about. So for tier lists. There's the video portion where you see us dragging things up into the tier list. But if you're not watching the video version, if you're just listening to the audio version, each...

thing that we are tiering let's decide about this thing it's represented by that same image that we're going to drag but we put that image in or marco puts that image inside uh the episode as a uh i was gonna say as a chapter image but they don't have to be on chapter boundaries they could be literally anywhere i think

So I have made all the tier lists thus far, and I'm the one who uses I'm the one who's in control of the mouse when I'm dragging things up, which gives me a certain privilege of being able to control how that goes, which is great. And also. I make all the images for the tier list because I have to make the tier list template like ahead of time. This is terrible tier maker website that has more and more ads and I have to use like ad blockers to.

delete and i just inspect element and delete and hide nodes from the dom until so i can get it to a state where we can record where that adds all over but anyway um i should really make my own tier website but it's we don't do it often enough to make it worth that But yeah, I got to make all those images. And we've done ones like we've done like connectors, storage media, iPods. The storage media one was so impenetrable and yet epic.

Yeah, every iPod, every iMac, like we've done tier lists with a lot of items. If you ever wonder whether people that you know and admire have like surprisingly strong and sometimes emotional responses.

to i'm not trying to sound dismissive about inanimate objects like i do too but like it is so fascinating to listen i mean like imagine you and me getting into an argument about um like maxell xl3s versus memory you know what i mean like imagine us getting into like a cassette tape argument now how people would just be like

What are you get on your iceberg? What are you two talking about? And but for somebody who was there, it's really fun when you guys get into the weeds about CDRWs or whatever. That's part of the fun of the episodes is we intentionally don't know until we recorded.

is this going to be a one where we have strong conflicting opinions or not we find out in the moment just like everybody else because you can't really predict it um some of the ones we think are going to be contentious we end up in agreement and otherwise anyway i just looked up at the uh let me see

I think the storage media tier list, for example, had like 31 or 32 items in it. So every single one of those needs an image. And often the images are like, if you're doing like every iPod or every iMac or whatever. I like to put text in the image as well, because especially with like the CDs, DVD, DVD minus RW and DVD plus RW, the image doesn't look any different. So you need text. So all this to say is that I probably made like at least a hundred.

Well, my first one, just with the pizza ones, even just in particular, it almost struck me as like, it would be probably overstating it to say you have a design language for this. But if I knew I were going to, excuse me, for lack of a better word, templatize something, I would think about all the things a lot of people think about. Like, what is required for this? Like, you know, is there a title and an image? Is there a subtitle? How big can the thing...

be is there a bleed is it okay if that there's if it's cut off on the left side but not the right side and then you do like the german test title like what happens if we have to put german words into this amount of space right And just knowing you, I'm imagining you must have done some things like that. It probably wasn't just pointing things at a folder and hitting a Perl button. Do they have buttons? I do. So when I started making these, I forget which the first one was, but...

uh had a couple of constraints first is that um uh i keep calling them chapter images i'm just gonna use that term but again i don't think they have to go in chapter boundaries but i may be wrong with that anyway chapter images embedded in mp3s uh when displayed in like, you know, as replacing the show art in a podcast app like Overcast are square.

So square aspect ratio is my first constraint on the images. I believe the tier maker website either wants you to make square or requires you to make square. And it used to be 300 by 300, but yeah, I mean, it's any kind of square, but I always do it in three, sixes, nines.

wells yeah so i so square image that's constraint number one uh constraint number two is that for it to work as for it to work best as chapter art and in the tier maker website uh i opaque background seems safer like trying to do transparent background is leaving yourself at the mercy of the podcast app of whether it's going to ruin your image by showing a transparent image on top of a background that you didn't expect and making it unreadable you know what i mean absolutely opaque

I'm so glad you thought of it, but I could imagine not just making that CCC or whatever. Yeah. Um, and so, and I went with the white background initially just because that's my, that's my default for an old school Mac guy. It's a dark text on a white background, uh, text. I included again, because a lot of these tier list things.

just the image isn't sufficient for you to identify it so i need to put text in it that's difficult because the little squares are really small on the tier list website a lot of time you can't even read the text especially when it's heavily compressed in a youtube video right but in the chapter art the images are bigger. So already I'm saying I'm going to make a square and I'm going to make it sized big enough. But this is kind of what I meant by the German test because...

I mean, I don't I didn't I I'm trying to remember because I wasn't looking at art during the combinations part. But did you have art? Did you have writing on the combinations as well? Yeah. So like I make the images big enough. So that the text is readable when viewed on my iPhone in Overcast, essentially. But if it was like pepperoni and pineapple, that's a fair amount of text. Yeah, I used a plus instead of and to save some space.

I could word wrap them or whatever. But anyway, how I physically do it is...

I have a Photoshop file. I usually just duplicate the previous Photoshop tier list file. And in the layers palette, I have folders. Oh, wow. That's so much better than what I do. I do all my fake subtitles in the same. file i've been using for six years and i just do layers layers layers layers

I mean, you could do that. But see, with the tier list, again, if I'm doing 30 things for a tier list. No, no, no. This is so much smarter. I really admire looking at people's Photoshop who like know how to do. This is in designer, but yeah. I'm not dab under a stickler, but I do. I make a folder. That's the way to go, man. If you ever have to do anything.

twice it's the way to do it yeah and for the pizza topping one so within the the folder is called pepperoni and within the pepperoni folder there's one layer that has the text and there's one layer that has the picture of pepperoni okay

Right. And I've changed. Sometimes the text is right aligned. Sometimes the text is left aligned. Sometimes the text is on the top. Sometimes the text is on the bottom, depending on my mood or the shape of the images that I think are going to fit in there. But anyway, for the pizza topping wine, it was. Text on the bottom, right aligned. Black text in like a San Francisco font to try to be legible. And then I have to find the pictures.

Right, because every time I make a new one, like if I could do pepperoni, sausage, olives, I duplicate that folder in the layers palette, and I just delete the image and change the text, right? So that way I know the text is always in exactly the same place. Keep your structure, but with just no content.

Yeah, exactly. But now I need to find pictures of stuff. And that's just Google image search. And what I tend to do in the Google image search is I will... Okay, this is one. I was wondering if you tried to automate this somehow. No, I just look it up. You wouldn't leave that to automation. You'd want the right pineapple. Well, yeah, because I sweat over it. Like, I look at all the... Really? That's shocking to learn, John. Yeah, I just type in the word pepperoni.

And then I look and I say, okay, do I like any of these pepperonis? If I don't like them... But like when you bring up sausage, you know it's got to be the kind of sausage you like with the crumbles and not the discs.

You're right. But even just for pepperoni, if I don't like the looks of what I'm seeing, in particular, if they look like they're like... I've originally discovered the ones that are little cups. If they're like... They don't start as cups. Anyway. That's the style, is little cups. Those are really good on party cupcakes. Do you know why they cup?

Do you know why? I think probably because of an overly high heat from above. That would be my guess. No, no, I don't know why, but I would guess that's why. It's quickly drilling out. They still have the casing on them and the casing shrinks? Oh, that would make sense. But I was thinking, yeah, it shrinks more than the meat.

Because I can cut pizza ovens like over 600 degrees, right? It's like when a pork chop comes. You ever have a pork chop cup on you? Oh, I've had some cups. I've had that happen with skinny ribeyes.

And I've had that happen with hamstrings. And how do you fix it on the right side of the workshop if you want to make it not cup? Well, if you have the problem, it's already too late. I mean, it's like trying to get salt out of your stew. If you're anticipating the problem. Oh, I have a large pressy thing.

But no, is there a different way? Is there a better way? Yeah, so the same thing that's causing the purpurone to cup is also causing your pork chops to cup, which is that it's made of dissimilar material. So there's the meat part in the middle, but like on a pork chop, they'll be fat. John, is it oleophobic?

There'll be a fat strip around the edge of the workshop, right? Yes, and hence the phobia. So you have to score that fat strip because the fat strip will shrink. Because it's grabbing it like a rubber belt. It will shrink at a different rate than we need. No, right, that totally makes sense.

So if you score it vertically, so you put cuts in it, then it will cup less. And same thing with the pepperoni. And this is also why when you get those gift steaks from your weird relatives that are wrapped in bacon, those can be kind of strange. And also they're a little mealy, if you ask me.

I think those are not the best meat, personally. Yeah, so I think the pepperoni that's cupping has a casing still on it and the casing is not scored. It's continuous and the casing shrinks and it makes it cupped. But you didn't look it up. Yeah. Anyway, the one setting I'll change in Google image searches, I will go to like the tools thing and select large images only because I want it to be high res. And then if I'm really desperate, like.

And I want like more specifics. I'll put like pepperoni on a white background. I'll literally type those words into Google, you know, or sometimes I'll go for transparent pepperoni on a transparent background and then I'll just flood fill the white point of information. In terms of single ingredients, please tell me, remind me and tell our audience, how many single ingredients did you need photos for? For the pizza topping one, it was...

15, I think. 16? Or maybe just 13. Proteins and you had the vegetables. But on their own, which is also your favorite song from Les Mis, on my own, about 16, I think.

Yeah, something like that. Like I said, other tier lists have more. Sometimes they have less. Actually, this is probably the smallest tier list we've ever done because we did it twice. If you listen to the episode, you'll understand why. So it wasn't that many images, but you're right. You didn't automate much of the creation of this.

Well, sausage and meatballs, you're right. Those are the two most difficult ones because I was looking for the image. When you said very specifically what you're talking about with a meatball, it's not what most people call a meatball. And by the way, you're still continually very wrong about the ceiling and floor on meatballs. Please continue. No, no.

You are so, you're so, you're lucky I'm dead inside because you're what you say. There's some bad meatballs out there, man. Bad meatballs. Okay, but that's a very high floor for a meatball. And just an almost unlimited ceiling. You can eat all you want. Anyways, I'm sorry.

I got some feedback about meatballs, and people essentially are willing to... You get feedback about pizza toppings. Yeah, it's a big tent when it comes to meatballs as far as the people who are sending us feedback, because they're willing to say essentially...

Just chucking ground beef on top of your pizza that counts as meatball in these people's books. Well, I'm going to tell you a secret right now. I'm going to tell you a secret. And this is a secret that I know about. And it's a secret that still has a huge impact on my life.

Almost every restaurant has a steak on the menu. And I'm going to tell you why. Because if it's a steak place, obviously they've got steak on the menu. But almost every place you go to, they've got a steak on the menu. Because there's always a guy, and it is a guy, there's always a guy in the group who just wants the steak. Kind of like Bill Tench in Mindhunter. You give that man a steak and a baked potato and a stool and just leave them alone.

Let him just eat his steak. He just wants to go to the lamplighter. He doesn't want to have to talk about this. Do you understand? I'm the same way. I have fallen victim to that. Are you ready for another SAT analogy? Meatballs are to pizza as steaks are to men.

See, the thing is, if you're the kind of guy who just goes into a restaurant and orders a steak, even if it's a sushi place, you're probably also the kind of person who just, like, you order what is called the meat lover's pizza, probably. And if you just dumped... a third of a pound of lightly sauteed ground beef on a pizza and called it meat, that person would be out. You don't have to be any more specific than that. Just meat. Can we surprise you, sir? Yeah, why not?

What kind of meat? You'll find out. Probably. Yeah. I mean, there's probably not going to be like, you know, use time was when you go to the restaurant and get a steak. They put a little plastic stick into it. that had done this on it. And they had a color and a name that would say, is this rare, medium rare, medium, medium well, well, all the way, right? You know, maybe a similar thing could happen here. You could say these are our cup dronies.

you know, for the people who like a party cut. And we'll do half that and then half pineapple coconut. Like you used to have, like those bagels you used to enjoy. Pineapple coconut. So the so the anyway the Photoshop layout here is basically like a there's a full square of white at the very bottom Then there's a bunch of folders with image each folder has image and text in it

And then to export all of them, I did have a Photoshop action that would do save as web on each one of them. Save for web on each one of them. Although that seems to be messed up when I tried to use it this time. So I just did it manually. I just do the save for web and then I then I export each one as a ping and I give it a file name.

Then I upload all those file names to the ATP, CDN, CMS thingamabobber. Do you just give like a text file to Marco or are they just named in a way where it'll be intuitive what goes with what?

Oh, actually, these ones I don't need to upload because they're not going to be linked in the show notes. But what I basically do is I take all the PNG images, I put them in a zip file. Is he doing forecast? Is he just dropping in forecast? Yeah, I think he uses forecast to put these. But yeah, I give him a zipped folder full of pings and he...

puts those in when he's editing the episode and I, and I upload them to the tier maker website to make the tier list thing before we start the episode. So they're all there. So yeah, so they show up as very tiny. on the tier maker website and anything but they're actually pretty large i think they're probably like 600 by 600 or something like that that's

So cool to hear. And I'm sorry, I'm being quiet because I'm just really quickly. I learned something about you and I learned something about me. One thing I learned about me is in my head. If I were planning this, I would go into make-believe John Syracuse mode and think about whether there's a way to have a folder called assets. And inside of assets, there's a folder called I for images.

At that same level, there's a folder called probably something pretentious like manifest or, you know, Kodak or something. And then a bunch of text files. And I would be thinking about a way. to like automatically with a script generate and kick out all of those. So the thing I learned about myself is that, A, that's how I would have done it, which is interesting because B, that's not the way you did it. That taught me something that I should have already known about you.

which is you would want to make sure, it's not like, you're not making 3,000 of these, right? Yeah, we do one of these tier lists like once every four months. But also, you see what I'm saying, there's like, but okay, this might differ if you had...

a lot more of them. If I was doing one of these a week, yeah, I'd do it differently. Well, just a lot of these and another factor where you'd have to like, you know, be able to replicate it in some way or other. But it also goes to show you how like a little Syracusa. is a dangerous thing. Because if I had taken what I perceived to be an attitude about how you would do this, it would miss the mark with how you want your care on the actual images.

So I, so I do have, I have a folder called inside my ATP folder. I have a folder called member specials, and then I have a fold sub folders called like pizza toppings. And then they have a sub folder in there called sources, which are the images I download from the web. Okay. And then I have a folder called images, which are my final.

pings and then i have the screenshots of the the final tier list and i have the recording video that i upload to youtube so it's all organized into folders in that way but then i also have the pizza toppings.psd the photoshop file that has all the things so i save I save the sources as the raw source of like whatever the heck I downloaded, probably some stupid web P from the internet or whatever. And then the images are the, the final pings that I export from Photoshop.

And honestly, the most time consuming part of this entire process is picking the images from Google image search because I am extremely picky and I spend. A ridiculous amount of time. You don't want to get one that doesn't, when you're doing things that are an array or a sequence or whatever, you don't want a weird one that doesn't look like the others. That sounds silly, but if you want a vegetable on a background.

Or a sausage on the background. Or white. You know what I mean? Like, if you want something that you could knock out if you had to with a magic lasso. That kind of thing. Like... And then you come across one, like it could be exactly the pineapple that you want. It's just that it's at a luau and there's a flame and there's, you know what I mean? Like that, that doesn't. And sometimes the thing that takes me a lot of time is I'll find one of those and I'll bring it into Photoshop.

try to mask out the luau and fail and then start over and go back to image search and say, my Photoshop skills are not good enough to do this. You just grew a little because you said, you know what? My skills are not good enough. It's not that I don't care enough, but I need to put my care into the choosing rather than the trimming. Yeah, because I can't do it. Like it doesn't, like I'll trim it and it'll have that matte lines around it. I know, I know, I know.

I know. I think I saw some weird matte lines in Hunt for Red October this weekend. But I wouldn't hold it against it at all. Anyway, this is a thing that anybody who actually knew how to do Photoshop could do in their sleep. But I can't. So I spend too much time. Exactly, John. And I'm not going to make a big thing about it.

But that's what a lot of people face all the time is trying to figure out, like, I don't know that much about this thing. But it sounds like you've used skills that you brought from. Now, can I ask you the really big question, please? Here's a really big question. Counselor, is it fair to say. that you made this and saw this as kind of a one-off. Like you've done stuff like this before. You will do stuff like this again. But well, let me just ask it as an honest, non-trick question.

As much as this was probably something I'm guessing that you produced as a one-off, how much thought, intentionally or otherwise, how much thought went into thinking about what if I had to reuse this? What if I had to change this? The reason it's a kind of leading question is because it seems to me that I'm kind of like this, and I think you're really like this.

is like, even though I have no reason to think about how this, you know what? It's called fatherhood. Hey, everybody else just sits around assuming everything will always be perfect and it works out. And sometimes it isn't terrible. And that's because somebody went and did something about it. How much do you think ahead about how you might reuse, repurpose, return to this and how you think about stuff like the length of things, the amount of space? How much do you think about that in this?

Also, that's part of the reason I save all the original sources. in the folder i save all the final images and i save the photoshop file so if i want to tweak any of these things oh you know the extra cheese image is masked poorly i should find a new thing for that i just got to go find the new extra cheese put in the new source bring it like i have the pieces And the old one, or just Cheese B-A-K.

and just overwrite it. Yeah, I'll just make a new, I always duplicate that folder and the layers thing and make a new one and, you know, like switch off the little eyeballs to make the stuff look like. Yeah, you got a folder called New Cheese. Yeah, I do the same thing for the screenshots for like my apps. When you upload an app to the Mac App Store, you have to...

write screenshots in a special format or whatever and it's a photoshop file with layers and the layers are like folders for like version 1.1 version 1.2 version 1.3 and sometimes i can composite pieces together of like the desktop background from 1.1 but then the the thing from you know like i have all of the

At least you have some control over that as opposed to the OS X reviews. Yeah. Yeah. Like making my own and the screenshots don't have to be real. Like you can put whatever, as you see on the Mac app store, you can just put like advertising marketing art in there or whatever. But, but yeah, I saw we save all the pieces.

And I have the recording because now I'm using QuickTime player to record my screen. And I have the final YouTube thing that I upload. Like I save all the pieces. And so like I'm never probably going to do anything with this again.

but you know to give an example the next time we do a tier list i'm going to make a new folder called whatever it is and i'm going to copy the pizza toppings.psd into that folder rename it go into it delete all the folders except for one and leave the white background and start like that's how i've made all of these you know your brain work

And you know where you left off. So when you come back, you could pick that back up if you needed to. The really bad thing, here's a terrible thing about it. for what an atp we use dropbox to share stuff that's like we upload our recordings and stuff we do the same thing for reactives um just because they're these are old shows and dropbox was the way to do it back then we just keep doing it because it works anyway so i have a folder

this is going to sound so awful you would never have guessed this but it's true and i just i think about it and i just don't do anything about it um i made a folder in my dropbox called atp a long long time ago the folder is just a capital a capital t capital p then I guess probably a day or maybe hours later, Marco made a folder. Somebody sounds like the air traffic controls. Marco made a folder in Dropbox called ATP and shared it with me and Casey.

And you know what happens if Dropbox, like you already have a folder called ATP, but someone shares a folder with you that's also called ATP. Do you know what Dropbox does? What? Overwrites it?

No, it makes the shared one that just arrived in your Dropbox called ATP space parentheses one close parentheses. Oh. that's not as cool as the old conflicted file yeah so for like what 14 years i've had two folders on my dropbox one called atp which is my dropbox folder for atp stuff and then one called atp space one space for open parentheses one

close parentheses, which is the shared ATP folder. Yours is ATP actual. Yeah, exactly. So that's been, that's been for over a decade. That has been true, but wait, it gets worse. I also have one too. No, I also have a folder in my documents folder. called ATP. Oh, dear. That's right there on your Mac. So now I have three places to look for ATP stuff might be.

And I can never remember. And there's a system to it. You're right. A, that does not sound like you, but B, that's not the worst thing in the world. Well, I mean, there is a reason, like, for example, the stupid QuickTime recording. Because if you get too cute about that stuff, you end up losing things.

I just like everything to be in one place. But the problem is I don't want to put like gigs of screen recordings in my Dropbox folder. You know what I mean? Absolutely. So those are in my documents folder. I think there might be a fourth ATP. No, it's not a fourth ATP. There's, I also have a folder in my documents. What did you go on Google Drive too? No, I don't have any Google Drive. I have a folder called websites and it's like, where is the ATP.fm stuff? Is that for your MAMP setup?

No, because it's like, it's, it's a taxonomy. Like is ATP, is it a podcast? Is ATP.fm? Should it be in the websites folder or should it be ATP website or should it be websites? Yeah. Anyway, there's a little bit of a disorganization, but eventually I find stuff and I have all my things and I back everything up. And anyway, that's the system. It's it's more.

it's more manual i think almost everything i do is way more manual than people think it is and it's mostly because as a programmer i am very aware of how much time can be sunk into making an automation and i'm constantly doing the math in my head to say if i spend 25 hours getting this automation to work plus 1.5 hours per year debugging it.

Right. Well, I come out ahead after 10 years. Well, and I think the important part in some ways is you, and I'm not trying to provoke you about this, about last week's topic, but like, you want things to be right. Like you want things to be correct. You want things to work. So whereas somebody like me or another average bear out there might do what is, you know, what Danny O'Brien calls a life hack, which is like, just get this thing close enough.

to do a thing but the thing is whatever value you would get out of the automation can put you in particular might be potentially offset by the amount of time you'd spend making sure it works the way or correcting it like oh it did it but it didn't do it the way i wanted it so now i'm simple

like I'm doing it twice, but also writing the automation and debugging the automation. I'm very, so aware of like the, essentially the maintenance costs. It seems so simple. Just like, like I was saying, like, like, like, like what I would call in PHP an array, just like, like simple, simple stuff. Like there are, or like.

you talking about like you know time zone stuff just the ways that there's stuff that when you've done this long enough you realize there's these weird cases that can pop up for anything right and so like i you know it's there's a good xacd comic that i should try to find about the uh

Someone asked the programmer to pass the salt and they come up with a general purpose system for passing salts because that's how programmers think. And it is how we think. And in my job, I often did that because I'm like, look, if I'm setting up this company for the next two decades, I'm going to make a system and it's going to be regimented or whatever. But when I'm doing stuff manually, it's.

it's like it's like getting like solar panels it's like okay am i gonna buy 100 grand for solar panels that are gonna take me 300 years to to make up the price for or are solar panels gonna get cheap enough where now when i get them i run them on my house for one year and they pay for themselves

That's where I got to with, to an extent, cast iron pans. But you remember an exchange we had a couple months ago about just nonstick pans. And I was basically on, long story short, I was on the Horns of a Dilemma, which is like I've previously bought like pretty nice.

calphalon or like whatever kinds of pans but i was looking at those like this is the last pan you're ever going to need to buy fancy pans and i ended up just replacing the you know, nice, but not impossibly nice pan that we used to have because I sit there and I look at stuff like, I mean, like really for like 50 bucks, we could have a brand new pan.

And like, I just, I don't want, it's like, I don't know, like buying a Bentley or something. Like you're going to get a ding on and suddenly it's not a fun Bentley anymore. And with this stuff, like, you know, I've learned how to clean this particular pan, how to use the bartender's friend on this.

which does sound like a euphemism. But I think you're absolutely right. And it's analogous to my thing of like knowing what not to print on a 3D printer. Like, you know, generally speaking, don't print a box. Don't print a chair. Don't print a trash can. Unless it's a trash can that makes you extremely happy, you can get all of those things at the container store or maybe at a drugstore. So you really don't need...

Because then once you use a 3D printer long enough, your brain also becomes a little weird. Like, okay, well, I've got my 0.4 nozzle on here right now, and I'd really rather not go through $20 worth of filament.

on this $30 nozzle that I'll have to, you know what I'm saying? Like the wear and tear, which eventually makes you an insane person. You're like, no, I'm not going to drive you to Little General because you're going to buy domestic beer. And that's not worth the chances of me wrecking the car and needing to pay insurance on something.

You do unconsciously, I think, though, make those decisions about what kind of sort of just basic wear and tear, even if it's on your own time, is worth it to get what it is that you want. Right. So don't, you know, don't print boxes and don't make automations for something there's two of. Yeah. And obviously 3D printers are like a fun hobby type thing. But if you were more, you know, if you're very mercantile about it, you could say like.

when does this 3d printer pay for itself uh in like things that it got me that i would have had to pay for elsewhere i was like trying to do the math on it like so i put invest up front amortizing i i just i love that word yeah yeah and that's that's always what i'm thinking that's why i have so little automation for things that i only do like once every four months or whatever like i would have to live to be 120 uh for this math to work out on trying to like

You know, write a script to use a graphics pack. I've done it a million times before in multiple different languages of like, I give you a folder with, you know, I give you a file with text, a folder with images, compose them into little squares. deposit them, output things in a particular format.

For my e-books, remember when I used to do the Mac OS X e-books? I had a whole automation for those things because I built that book like hundreds of times, tweaking, building, tweaking, building, tweaking, building, even though I only did like five or six e-books.

No, it was all custom Perl scripts. Come on. You wrote custom stuff instead of Pandoc. I don't even know if Pandoc existed back then, first of all. But second of all, yeah, because I knew... I remember I worked at the Evo company. Pandoc is... To just talk completely out of my personal ass. Pandoc. Boy, this is a very analogy-heavy episode, or series, as you say. Pandoc is to text documents as FFmpeg is to video files.

Very accurate, yes. And they have just as many flags and attributes as Lauren. Yeah, and it might have existed, but the thing is, like, I... Like my web pages, because I worked at the e-book company, I'm essentially hand creating my e-books in all the formats that they're in. That's how I do my drums in GarageBand. So my Perl scripts are outputting exactly...

The text that I want them to output. Exactly. I'm making the EPUB version. I'm making the Mobi version. And that was worth spending that time on. I'm making the HTML version. And because I think I put this in the stats, but I think I talked about ATP once or maybe on my website.

how many literally hundreds of times I built my eBooks during the course of writing the thing, because I would build it, look at it in 17 different devices, tweak it, build it, look at it in 17 different devices, tweak it. I have my Kindle. I have my iPad. Because you didn't find a weird combination, in my case, with doing this with a wizard.

project i you don't and that's again that's a very short thing but like with people the whole ass book it may not be i mean i don't know if this will make sense to you it may not be until you see an h2 followed by an H3 on a short page, did you realize that you could be handling that better?

It's not like it's the craziest thing in the world, but there'll be weird issues like that. It was so bad back then because like the old Kindles look different than the new Kindles look different than the books. The iBooks app on the iPad look different than the web version. And because I'm making seven versions of the same.

thing if I didn't have an automation that ran from source files I'd be doing tweaks in five places every time instead now I do a tweak in one place and rebuild so that automation paid for itself a million times over that's an example of where I will automate

But yeah, for the tier list, there's no automation. But again, the biggest time sink is not that part. The biggest time sink is me looking for the right image. And during that, like I was tempted with a couple of these. I think also both sausage and meatballs. I was tempted to say, like, I can't find I can't find the right sausage or meat.

ball image so i have two options one i make this type of stuff i don't make the meatballs but i make the sausage for the pizza why don't i just put it on my counter and take a picture with my phone i was almost in that desperation And two, can I just, an AI generated image of sausage if I describe what it's supposed to look like? Because in the end, no one cares if it's a real sausage or an AI generated image of sausage. Especially just saying, forgive my saying, sausage in isolation.

yeah but i didn't get that far eventually on like page seven of the image results with some big giant query about like sausage but not in not in links but crumbled but like you should see these image queries i'm putting it to try to find like an image somewhere on the web i'm still just stuck on the

booleans where like i'm i always do the main part i always do the main part of my uh request uh search at the front and then i do ors because all those are implied ands and then i'll do the ors after that

And in time, it gets pretty silly, and especially because it isn't as good at it as it used to be. You've got to try a lot harder to make the bullies. Yeah, I'm mostly writing English sentences at this point, like the same thing. Yeah, just banging on the keyboard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crumbled sausage. on a white background not sausage links and not in tubes and not sliced into this sausage sausage young net worth feet yeah feet yeah

So, all right, that's tier list. That's how I do it. The slow, painful, manual way for tiny images that most people will never see. Do we still have time? We could. We can talk about the Billy Joel thing. Well, or we could also... I mean, I'm excited to talk about the Wisner Project thing for my own absolutely selfish reasons. Not promotional reasons. That's the after show, though. I'm saying we still have time in the main show if we want to just...

Briefly do the Billy Joel thing, because like I said, I haven't watched it, so we could just... Well, okay. Can this be a topic? Mm-hmm. Okay. I've been thinking about this all afternoon, because I'm trying to develop...

a theory of mind about you. And that's very difficult. It seems simple, but it's not to develop a theory of mind about John Syracuse. But here's what you'd written down. May I say? you have a bullet that says uh billy joel documentary and then a sub bullet john hasn't watched it yet should he and this is i just if i may say in the personal context of the fact that i think it's Fair to say, I think we're on record. We both really like Billy Joel and his music. And we have both been aware.

Well, we're both, see, like the thing is, I hate to be that particular guy. I sound like a sweaty podcaster, but we just like Billy Joel. It's not because of anything. It's just because of Billy Joel. Okay. Oh, for me, it's because of something. That you like Billy Joel? Yeah. Oh, because Long Island. That's right. Okay, sorry. It's in the water, as they say. Yes, but some 50 years after he first became popular on Long Island...

It's not because he's ill. It's not because he's rich. It's not because of a scandal. It's not because of a blah. It's just because I listened to the stranger. I sent you my thing, right? I sent you, I broke the stranger into four acts. I like to do this with albums. I listen to a lot. I like to break it into acts. Excuse me. Anyways, we heard there's going to be this.

big sweeping HBO documentary. And we both saw it advertised during the Gilded Age. So Billy Joel is on, I think, between that and his brain medical problem. He's kind of in the news a little. He's a little bit of a headliner. He just finished his big residency, as they say, at Madison Square Garden, right? So he's in the news for that as well. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I'm not trying to... How does one try to sound cool about how they like Billy Joel for the right reasons?

But we both have been looking forward to that. We saw that came out. So here's what you said in this documentary. You said, Billy Joel documentary. John hasn't watched it yet, should he? I'm here to tell you, I watched Dan Date. Like the second that it came up, I flipped on HBO and watched it. So I would love to talk about this. I'm not quite sure how to frame it, but I figure if you ask me this as a topic, I feel like...

I don't know if you're really asking me, if you are asking me why you should watch it, I'd like some context for what that question means. But more to the point, I get the feeling that you've got something to say about Billy Joel if you made this topic. That's my theory of mind about you.

is you would be open to talking about Billy Joel at this point. Am I getting this right? You correctly got the first bit, which is my assumption that you have watched it, so I'm glad I was right about that. Well, I mean, I'm sorry, John. I was kind of surprised that you hadn't.

And I was kind of surprised that you asked whether you should. And can you understand theory of mind with me, and this is the problem with theory of mind, you understand, is you don't know. It's a mind. It's a terrible thing to...

I was kind of surprised that you hadn't watched it, I have to say. And I was very surprised that you asked why. The main reason I hadn't is because I've been busy and I've had a lot of podcasts because I'm about to go on vacation and you know how it is. Podcasts get packed in. Of course, of course. And I've been busy.

And so I haven't, essentially I haven't had time to watch it. Okay. But you have had time to watch it. It really is a simple question. It's not, when you say like, should I watch it? It really is, you know. But you made it a topic, so I figured you want to talk about it. You follow what I'm saying? Because if I just give you the answer of yes or no, or I don't know, that's not really worth a topic.

You may be overthinking it, but basically I'm just saying, well, I didn't have time to watch it. I watched it, and I would love to talk about it. So I want to get your opinion, and if you tell me, actually, it sucks, you shouldn't watch it, I won't watch it. Can I give you an answer and briefly tell you why? Yep, please do. Okay. My briefest answer is that you should watch it because you like Billy Joel and it's full of Long Island stuff at the very, very, very, very least. Okay? But...

Without spoiling it, I'll give you a couple other things I like about it. It looks fantastic. Spoiler for Billy Joel's life. Be careful. Be careful. Be careful what you say. Wait till you see who he marries. What was your phrase?

Wait a minute. Hubba hubba. Wait, what did you say? I would never, I would never let, what? I would never let my wastrel son waste my fortune or something like that. What was it you said? it's really funny it doesn't sound familiar but uh what was the context yeah i texted you um oh yeah i think i started watching dragon slayer oh the gilded age i said here's what i said um

Let's see. Can I read this? Yeah, go ahead. I said, we're going to watch in 20 minutes. I said, I just want Gladys to be happy. Then I said, I also want Oscar to be happy. And then you said, maybe he should have tried harder not to.

lose all his family's money. And I said it happened to a lot of the greats. And then a few minutes later, I said this first to my family. And then I thought I should write it to you. Because I was watching the Gilded Age and I realized that I'm Ada and you're Agnes. As Van Rynes go.

And then what you said, sorry, I would never let my layabout son lose all my money. Yeah, like this is just mismanagement because her whole deal was her money. And I know women didn't have that much control over the money. I'm talking about Bransky. Yeah, she had enough control over the money that she was essentially head of the household when her terrible husband's dead. She's got her son there, but she...

Essentially, the son had the ability to lose her whole fortune and then did. And I feel like she should know her son well enough to not give him the ability to lose their fortune because he did it. Don't you think that's a little bit of a comment on what's the opposite of patriarchy, the suntriarchy?

Yeah, because basically she had no choice because he's the son. He gets access to all the money anyway. But still, again, saying for myself, I would not allow that to happen. He is a layabout. He and Bransky. Both look like characters in almost every Oscar Wilde. He's one of the least conflicted.

closeted gay people in an historical drama ever because you think it would weigh on him, but it doesn't. Try rewatching Mindhunter. Just all three of us, every scene. Jonathan Groff does something amazing and we're all like, oh my God, he's so gay. Like he can, you know, have you tried? Have you tried not being the king of England? And so... What's the son's name again? I always forget. You'll be back? No, the son's name on Gilded Age. Oh, Oscar?

Oscar. Yeah. Oscar. Oscar is, he's a layabout. He's not. And like, and Oscar Van Ryan. Yeah. In this, this season, they're like, Oh, I'm going to help you give you some money to get back in the investing. No, he's bad at it. Don't, don't give him any more money. Everyone stop. Like, I'm sure he has skills, but I don't think investing is one of those. He should spend his whole day trying to make Gladys happy and punishing Mrs. Armstrong. Now, um, and here's the further reason I say that.

You know, it's always if you're like me and you like, you know, like I came up at a time that doesn't matter. But like you get exposure to stuff that's like outside the mainstream, whether that's like celebrities at their worst. or, you know, stuff in like Research Magazine or like punk rock VHS tapes of shows that get passed around or for that matter, Mystery Science Theater. But you get this very lo-fi way of looking into a culture and you really imprint on it.

Like when I think about watching REM play South Central Rain on Letterman before it had a name, like I think of that as really looking like, you know, my little, my little tiny color TV screen. This thing looks great. It's got a ton of really great looking old footage. It's got a lot of great stuff from his childhood. It's got a lot of great performances. It's got a ton of him talking about it.

But here's my pitch, specifically, that I think is not a spoiler, but will give you a frame. To somebody who's a casual fan of Billy Joel, you would watch this and go, it's really cool. It's about Billy Joel's career from, you know... from his birth through a little after Glass Houses, right? Like a little before Nylon Curtain. You're saying there's one episode. It's a multi-episode documentary, and you've just seen the one episode. I think it's over two hours.

pretty long. All right. So it's a two hour long episode, but there's going to be more of it. Correct. So, so, so like I say, the casual fan, the Dr. William Joel's more casual fans will say, Oh yeah, it's pretty cool. It gets his career up to like right before. nylon curtain. But you know what it's really about? It's about his life and his career through his separation from Elizabeth. And Elizabeth is incredible. And she is all over this.

She's still, forgive my saying, gorgeous and sharp as a tack. And the woman who basically made and saved and made Billy Joel's career is a big piece of part one. and they get ample access to her, and he talks about her, and she talks about him, and there's Liberty DeVito, and I think it's worth your time. And there's him in the Hicksville shirt, which they're already selling.

That's good to hear, because, like, I don't know what your documentaries I've watched recently. Here's my problem. This is what I thought about all afternoon, John. Is there a way in which I would recommend this to you and be missing why this is something, not something that you would watch? No, it's basically just because I think I've watched some documentaries recently that I've just...

that were real stinkers. So even if I'm interested in the topic, if they like- It's not incredible, but it's not like Pee Wee Herman level, but it's very well done. It has like him reading from what sounds like a memoir at parts. He does smoke a kind of weird cigar vape, so be ready.

You're going to see a vape. This is a good enough review that I'm definitely going to watch. I probably was going to anyway, but I can't stomach, especially about a topic that I care about, like a bad documentary. I texted you this, but just getting to hear his accent in the late... I was listening to a thing on the TV today where they're interviewing the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein's brother. Jeffrey Epstein's brother has an incredible accent.

Not like a preposterous. He's not like a taking of Pelham one, two, three guy. But like he has such a like Manhattan accent. And like in this case, you get to hear a lot of really good Long Island accents. Yeah, I enjoy that. It makes me, you know, it gives me worn feelings about my childhood. Yeah, yeah. And that's still Ramon's motorcycle, and you may be right. Yeah.

I don't know if this is the right turn of phrase here, but I do kind of feel like I come by my Billy Joel fandom dishonestly. What? In that... I had no choice to be a Billy Joel fan. It's like people from New Jersey basically have no choice but to be a Bruce Springsteen fan if they're a certain age. Like it's geographically mandated. It's impossible to grow up there and not.

Like, it would be really hard. Even, like, the most hardcore goth I only listened to, like... dark music and wear stockings and black lipstick still likes billy joel if you grew up on long island when i did because it's impossible not to we were all just so proud of him and he had hit songs and they were catchy and it's like it's mandat you don't even think about it it's like thinking about santa it's like

Do you care about Santa? It's like, well, of course, every kid does. Who doesn't care about Santa? Yeah. It's just, you know, even Jewish kids care about Santa and they are annoyed about him. But it's Long Island, so the Jewish kids and the Italian kids are sometimes kind of hard to tell apart. It's 50-50. Half the world is Catholic and half the world is Jewish. Do you think they're Italian? The guys who look like you from Hicksville. Do you think they're probably Italian, right?

The Deaderias, I think they're called. Yeah. Yeah. That's like, you know, well, so like I said, the makeup of my long childhood was half the world is Catholic. Half the world is Jewish. And people, people either Irish or Italian. Yeah. And we all say log and dog in a way that they don't rhyme and everything works. And when you talk about Christmas and you wish it wrong, people think that you want to become wedded.

What do you mean Merry Christmas? I'm not going to Merry Christmas. We didn't have that problem. No, I know. There was no confusion. No, it was so much easier then. But anyway, it's much... Things have changed since then. But that's part of the reason. They're killing time.

I remember the bad documentary, by the way. There was a documentary on YouTube, which not to say it's bad or anything, but I think it was like essentially not a non-professional one, but I think it only existed on YouTube. And it was about Levittown and it was bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I haven't started watching these yet, because I do think about bands, and I post things on the internet about bands like Bad Finger.

about, you know, or like somebody we lost today, Ozzy Osbourne. The Ozzy Osbourne behind the music. I don't know if y'all remember that. That's the one where he talks about, where Motley Crue talks about him snorting ants like cocaine. There's that one. There's the one on Bad Finger, which is very, very, very sad. And I'm trying to think, how do I feel about cracking open a behind the music on anybody? Because I'll bet there's a behind the music on Mr. William Joel.

Because of what happened with his money and whatnot. But because of the age of the franchise behind the music, it is incomplete. Exactly. Well, and you say, you know, MC Hammer was on top of the world, but, you know, they still come back after the break. Yeah. Yeah. Um, uh, what was the other thing I was going to say about Billy Joel? Um, yeah, I, I've been, I've been listening to him an awful lot and I, I think, I think it's kind of special.

And I think Long Island, there must be something in the water. They got the bagels, they got the pizza. And then they got the people playing instruments. I think you'd enjoy it. And if you do watch it and want to talk about it, we could bring that back and discuss it on the program. Yeah, I totally will. When I do watch it, maybe when it's entirely aired and we'll both watch all of it, we'll probably talk about it again.

Yeah. Okay. I'll probably mostly just talk about, uh, and thinking about the Billy Joel stuff and like his career and my childhood is, it is just. perfectly positioned to be and i think i think you're because you're a little bit older than me i guess you had this but slightly different but you know the older brother john john it's because i was a little bit older than you at a certain point it's so difficult to talk about but that's why i'm always saying stuff like our what

Is it eight years? Our eight years can be so amplified at certain points. And my cousin... Getting 52nd Street for Christmas in 1978 is just indelible. He got that, and I think he got Chicago, whatever the current Chicago, Chicago 79 was, or whatever. You know what I mean? I imprint on that kind of stuff as well. Whereas I was 12 or 11 or 11 or 12. You're like four. So like your, your Billy Joel must've come along then. Well, it's the older brother effect because.

All the people who are my age and my grade. But you would hear like the stranger. The people who are my age or in my grade who were into, for example, let's say Def Leppard. The reason they were into Def Leppard. was because of their older brothers or older sisters. Oh, absolutely. It wasn't their music. It was the music of their older siblings, siblings that were probably your age. And that older sibling culture...

took on a talismanic importance because it was liked by- That's how I learned about Led Zeppelin. That's like three different ways I learned about Led Zeppelin. Yeah, because it was your older sibling, because it was, or even like an upperclassman or whatever, because it was somebody older than you that liked this, it was-

a little bit before your time so you weren't you were three when 52nd Street came out or whatever but because your older siblings were into it when you sort of got the age to think of music it's like well this is my older siblings it must be cool because the older kids are into it I have that relationship with Billy Joel and that

I, you know, I was born in the mid seventies, so I missed a lot of that stuff. I was too young for a lot of that stuff, but it was my parents' music and it was the older kids' music. Like, and that's, that's my relationship to a lot of media that it seems like I was too, why would this?

Why would you be a fan of this? You were too young. I mean, I was too young basically for Star Wars. I was born in 74 and it came out in 77. I made that amazing playlist, if I could say. for one of our very first episodes of the show, which I think is called Merlin's world of music. And where you, you kindly asked me about like, gosh, you sure like music talk about like your history with music. And like, I, I'm going to stop overusing that word in print, but, um,

There's certain songs that just landed on me hard. And like, it isn't like you're sort of, I'm not saying it's an error, but you're sort of implying like, well, how much exposure would you need to rock to the song, rock the boat before you knew how you felt about it? Well, like. I didn't need to hear just the way you are that many times to know that it was special.

I didn't need to hear piano man that many times to know it's special. You know what I mean? Like, but then again, knowing that's got the imprimatur, the sort of like approval of somebody who's. taste or status you trust you know kind of amplifies it and and people are kind of like legit like proud of him there right that's the thing yeah i guess i'm thinking of a better analogy maybe it's like you've heard of songs referred to as standards yes you know

There are certain songs that would be sung by lots of artists. The American songbook, stuff that's in the real book. Billy Joel's songs are essentially the standards of Long Island. Sure. They're in the terra firma. They're in the infrastructure of the culture of people who are around me. Just the way you are. How is that not played at a wedding in Long Island? That's literally my wedding song. I believe we've discussed this in the past. That was my first dance song was Just the Way You Are.

Yeah, because I married someone who also likes Billy Joel. I wanted mine to be Kid Charlemagne by Steely Dan, but that was next. I told you about this. I think we're done, but let me see, because this could be fun. I sent this to you. I hope you don't mind. So I've stopped using AI. I've decided it's a bad idea, and I'm going to look down on anybody who uses it. If only.

rest of the summer, John. I'm done. I'm done. You're never going to hear it from me again. But back when I used to use it, even though it's very bad and I criticize people who use it, I was looking up famous people from Hicksville. Now what's your relationship with Hicksville?

It's a place that I'm aware of. We played them. You've seen the sign a lot. In high school sports. When I ask you about Lemon Twigs, you told me you'd seen the sign. I drove to stores in it, yeah. Okay. How far is that roughly? Without compromising OPSEC, how far? Is that a...

meaningful distance away from where you grew up. You could drive there in a short period of time. If you had a girlfriend there, how often would you see her? You don't have girlfriends in other towns when you're that age. It wasn't a trick question. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, I'm going to mark down here. I've written this down. You're unqualified. So I ask you for a list of notable people from Hicksville, New York. Back when I used to use this. I won't use this anymore. Billy Joel, the legendary singer-songwriter. Did you know that the actress...

from goodfellas the other ones you couldn't even sit in yeah lorraine brocco did you know lorraine brocco is from hicksville well you sent me that uh screenshot of it from chat gpt and i still don't know whatever it's called i don't remember what it's called but because i didn't know if you checked

If I checked on these? No, no, no, no, no. That's why I won't use it anymore. Now, Mick Foley, you know him from an early episode of this program. And if I remember correctly, the title of that episode was called Hell in a Cell. Because in an early example of me not pronunciating things correctly, I was trying to say hell in a cell. And you thought I was referring to a woman named Helena.

Yeah, because they... Like the My Chemical Romance song. Words sound like each other. Yes, the other things. Steve Guttenberg. Wikipedia says Lorraine Brocko grew up in Hicksville, so okay. Oh, well, did you Google that? In the theory of mind, you're never going to hear this. She was, she was, she was born in Brooklyn, by the way. Yeah. I also have a theory of mind. I think I finally figured you out and I think it's going to really help our relationship. Um, Steve Gutenberg.

You know, who controls the British pound? You know, who makes... Steve Gutenberg? What's the line? Who keeps the metric system down? Something Steve Gutenberg. What's the line? Who made Steve Gutenberg a star? I don't know if that fits solo-wise. Remember he's eating ribs? And he wipes his hands on the thing. Remember that? And the lemon twigs, Brian and Michael D'Addario. I was talking to my friend today, who's the drummer in Meat Puppets, and we found...

we we've made our way to the lemon twigs through two different ways. I found them because they're a band and he found them because they did an album with Chris Stamey. It's not all connected, but a lot of it is related. The first line of their Wikipedia entry is, the Lemon Twigs are an American rock band from the Hicksville neighborhood of Long Island. Hicksville is not a neighborhood, but whatever. Okay, fine. That story checks out.

Now, what do you think of them? That's not really your cup of tea. I don't think I could identify a song. from them well i joke about this john whenever i see somebody that looks like you and you know ordinarily because of my work i don't compare people's looks to other people but there is a guy in this band who's one of the brothers his name is brian and he

Kind of looks a lot like you, but here's the music. The music is sparkling, gorgeous power pop that reflects some of my, you can hear Todd Rundgren. you can hear so much great power pop in this band. And they're right there from Hicksville. Now, Billy Joel, though, he lives, he would take his helicopter flights to Madison Square Garden, but he lives on the far side. Is he over near West Egg?

He's near East Egg. Is that right? He's very far out, isn't he? Hicksville is to the south of the eggs. Did you ever see The Kid Stays in the Picture? No. Because it kind of starts, the movie kind of, this documentary kind of starts, it's not a great opening. It kind of starts a little bit like The Kid Stays in the Picture and a little bit like Citizen Kane, where you learn about his house.

Because houses are important to a lot of these big shots and all the people that you knew at Elaine's. Now, do you know about Elaine's? No. But you heard of it, right? It was a famous place in the 70s. Nope. Do you know who that song's about? I do not. See, some people think it's about Elizabeth. I think it's about Bianca Jagger. Hmm. No, no, no, no. What's your favorite Billy Joel song? Don't overthink it.

I think we talked about this before. I don't care. I don't care, John. It seems from an Italian restaurant, probably. Oh, bottle of white, bottle of red. That's a really good song. There's tight grouping in like the top five or ten. You know what I love? I love... What's the line? The specific line is something about we wave goodbye to Brenda and Eddie. Yep. Can't tell you, Marcus. I told you already. We've probably discussed this, John. Have you ever realized that he does that line twice?

And it means two different things. When he says they're waving goodbye to Brandon and Eddie or something like that, that's when they're getting married and leaving. And then a verse or so later, he says they're waving goodbye to Brandon and Eddie, and that's because they were breaking up. He's not a very good lyricist, but sometimes he gets les mots just. Yeah. He's very workmanlike. He can be a very, you know what? I'm going to drop the bet. He can be a very good lyricist.

He's got some very dumb lyrics, but a lot of his lyrics are actually pretty good. I think Piano Man is a very well-written song. I'll just say that. Now, would you like a good copy? You can find it on YouTube. Have you watched the 1978? uh old gray whistle test performance no it's really good it's 78 it's english and he does a really killer version of a bunch of the tunes including um moving out

And you can watch that on YouTube. We'll put it in. Somebody will put that in notes. Where can people learn more about you, John, and what you're up to? I'm trying to write 1978 Billy Joel. It's in my history. It's a wonderful British TV show. I think it's a BBC show called old gray whistle test. And they would do long performances by like interesting.

I mean, they were kind of like, they were a little, it wasn't like, obviously Top of the Pops is just, you know, their hits show on Thursday nights. But I'll find this for you. Is that the end of the show? Yeah, probably. Do you think Jim can find a way out there? Thank you.