419: ISIS Pickup Lines

ISIS Pickup Lines

[00:00:00] Introduction and Greetings

[00:00:00] Christina: You’re listening to Overtired. That’s right. We’re back with another episode. I’m Christina Warren joined as always by Brett Terpstra and Jeff Severins Gunzel. How’s it going guys?

[00:00:15] Brett: Really good.

[00:00:16] Jeff: Good.

[00:00:16] Brett: It’s like Sunday. Hey Jeff, thanks that last episode with Merlin, that was great.

[00:00:21] Christina: That was

[00:00:21] Jeff: You’re very, very welcome. It was very fun. We, we, I made a Spotify playlist because so many songs were either mentioned or sung and it was a total of 36 songs.

[00:00:31] Brett: Oh, put, give, put that in the show notes.

[00:00:34] Jeff: I will. I will. Um, yeah. All right. I’m excited to be with you.

[00:00:41] Brett: Yeah, we’re all excited.

[00:00:43] Jeff: Let’s do this.

[00:00:44] Weather and Asheville Crisis Discussion

[00:00:44] Jeff: a beautiful, I know, who wants to talk about the weather when you’re not even gonna listen to this the day we recorded it, but it is a beautiful, beautiful day out, and I have not experienced a beautiful, beautiful day, by my standards, in some time.

[00:00:57] Brett: It’s like 65 degrees here, [00:01:00] what do you got?

[00:01:00] Jeff: Yeah, yeah, same, same up here, up north, up north on the Mississippi.

[00:01:04] Brett: Meanwhile, holy shit, have you guys seen videos out of like Asheville?

[00:01:08] Christina: I about to say, I was like, of whether it’s awful and like there’s, it sucks. Um, I, I know some people there are kind of in that area and, um, you know, I know that they’re doing their best to get. Uh, aid to the region and all that, but Jesus Christ, like it is just really, really bad.

[00:01:30] Brett: I sent multiple hundreds of dollars to a mutual aid fund, uh, that was going directly to people on the ground.

[00:01:38] Christina: Yeah, I, I did too. Um, I used, um, what was it? Samaritan’s Purse because I’ve, I’ve heard from people on the ground that they are actually going out there and getting stuff directly to people. Um, so it’s, it’s hard to vet those organizations, but, but it was important for me to find one that’s like, if you can anyway, that’s, you know, 5013C because then you could do employer matching. [00:02:00] So, so

[00:02:00] Brett: Oh yeah, I should, I should do that. I should, cause I bet you Oracle has a,

[00:02:05] Christina: I’m sure they

[00:02:06] Brett: something, cause they have like a whole search engine for like things you can donate to that they’ll match.

[00:02:10] Christina: Exactly. It’s probably Benevity. That’s what most of the corporations use, but

[00:02:14] Brett: I will, I will double up. I will gladly donate it again.

[00:02:18] Christina: Yeah, that’s what I did. I, I, well, yeah, all, all you usually have to do is like find your receipt and they’ll match. Um, I actually donated weirdly. I usually go directly through the site, but in this case, like I went through the portal because I gave them 500 bucks and I was like, you know what?

[00:02:33] Take it out of my paycheck because it’ll also count for me. Cause like, this is our giving month, like October. And I

[00:02:37] Brett: Oh yeah.

[00:02:38] Christina: I was like, perfect timing, but this way it’ll, you know, whatever. And then, um, you know, so basically I was able to give them a thousand dollars, which is great. My favorite is when, and, and this is just a pro tip for anybody out there who’s ever wanting to donate to stuff.

[00:02:52] If you’re a corporation, which if you work at a large place, um, There’s a, if it, at least in the United States, there’s a good [00:03:00] chance that for tax reasons, if nothing else, that they will do, you know, um, employee matches. So check into that, but obviously the size of the company that you work at, you know, not guaranteed.

[00:03:10] But if you work at a place with an employee match during some giving months, which are usually like October, November, um, sometimes even December, um, some organizations will also have their own matches that will be put up by. other, you know, like benefactor, other people or whatnot. And you can like basically, essentially get a triple match out of that.

[00:03:32] So like the Internet Archive and the EFF, both of them have in the past had, um, match periods where they’re like, Hey, if you donate, you know, 500 to us, we’ll We’ll get a thousand. The way that that works is that you can’t do the quadruple match where, you know, the thousand would become two, but you can have like your 500 become 500 from your employer.

[00:03:55] And then also get the 500 from, you know, whoever is doing the matches. So it can go [00:04:00] 1500. So those are just pro tip out there. Be on the lookout for things like that. Cause That way you can really benefit, like, multiply the amount of money going to, um, organizations you care about.

[00:04:12] Brett: This year when I was in Asheville, I, we, we started before we left, we started immediately making plans for our next trip

[00:04:21] Christina: Oh, that’s right. Cause you guys were just there.

[00:04:23] Brett: Yeah. Just in March or don’t know. May, I think. Um, yeah, I’m like, we’re not gonna build a C Asheville again like that for a decade. Um, it’s gonna take the arts district just completely washed away.

[00:04:40] And, I mean, death count, Is horrible and seeing that much, uh, beautiful, artistic, um, like communal property just washed away is. It’s kind of devastating.

[00:04:57] Christina: It’s completely devastating. And it, and it’s, [00:05:00] I don’t know, like a lot of people like to discount climate change and you know what I mean? I’m sorry. I’m like, you see things like this that happen. You’re like, yeah. Like, okay, some of this might be inevitable regardless of what we were doing to our planet, but not.

[00:05:15] Yeah. Not this much, right? Like it had gone from, you know, like they’d, you know, knew a storm was coming and then it changed like so fast into, into hitting them. And then just because of where it’s located and, and how high up it is, just devastating. Just absolutely awful.

[00:05:31] Brett: I have a friend who’s worried about their son, um, because after the news hit about this, he started going on about weaponized weather.

[00:05:43] Jeff: Oh boy.

[00:05:44] Christina: Oh,

[00:05:44] Brett: was like, yeah, I’d be worried

[00:05:45] Jeff: Marjorie Taylor Greene just tweeted, they can’t control the weather. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:50] Christina: Jesus. Fuck off,

[00:05:51] Brett: you serious? Like for real?

[00:05:53] Jeff: Yeah.

[00:05:54] Brett: I thought that was a joke. Oh my

[00:05:56] Christina: know if it was or not. And

[00:05:58] Jeff: I thought it was serious. [00:06:00] I’ll go look it up. So, it’s true.

[00:06:03] Christina: she was not joking, be very

[00:06:04] Jeff: Either way, it’s true. Either way, said it.

[00:06:07] Christina: yeah, to be clear, I’m sure that she was not joking, I’m saying, like, I wasn’t sure if you were joking, not, I was like, I was like, I bet he’s serious, because that does seem like the sort of insane shit she would say,

[00:06:18] Jeff: Yes.

[00:06:19] Brett: Is she relevant anymore?

[00:06:22] Christina: I mean, she’s still a congresswoman, but, after

[00:06:25] Brett: hear about her at the rate I used to. I it’s election season, all the news is diverted.

[00:06:31] Christina: exactly. Like she’s definitely going to win her seat. Lauren Boebert might lose hers. Um, and, uh, you know, she’s the other crazy who got in the, the cunt fight. Um, like, like, like, like, like my turn of phrase there.

[00:06:45] Jeff: Sounds

[00:06:45] Brett: don’t get it.

[00:06:46] Christina: Uh, because, because, um, one of them called the other one a cunt. Um, on, on, on, on the, um, on the floor of Congress.

[00:06:56] Brett: This what we’ve become.

[00:06:58] Christina: It really is. So yeah.[00:07:00]

[00:07:01] Brett: Uh, I bet C SPAN had a blast with that. All right.

[00:07:06] Mental Health Check-In

[00:07:06] Brett: So, mental health check in. Um, how you guys doing? Jeff, you want to tell us how you’re doing?

[00:07:12] Jeff: Um, sure. I, uh, I’m doing good. I had I spent all morning in my Workshop, which I don’t always get to do. And, um, and, uh, and I’ve been perpetually cleaning it out for years. Um, sometimes I feel like all I do is go in and move things around and don’t actually get to do projects, but, um, it’s clean enough now that I can kind of go in and I was, I started a daunting project, which is, um, sort of refurbishing a one ton, hundred year old lathe for machining metal that can’t even be moved an inch without an engine lift.

[00:07:50] Christina: Jesus.

[00:07:51] Jeff: and, uh, it’s a terrifying tool in the first place. And so taking it apart, in little pieces and cleaning up those pieces and putting them [00:08:00] back is a little nerve wracking to like, what will this whole thing be when it’s done? Because it is, you know, I mean, like, for people that don’t, like, here’s a way of kind of really, and I’m getting to the mental health part, but like, a lathe, a metal lathe is like a tank because it’s, it’s made to carve metal, right?

[00:08:16] Like, essentially. And, and so you don’t want like, um, screws that aren’t quite right. Screwed in right when you’re carving metal. Um, but I think I trust myself. Uh, anyway, so there was a point once years ago when my wife walked into the garage workshop when I was in there and she was like, you know, there’s no other time that you are this landed.

[00:08:40] And, and it is true. I like, I feel so completely landed when I am surrounded by especially old tools and, uh, and, and have an amazing local community radio station on. And I have like a two car, like a two garage door garage in my old South Minneapolis home that [00:09:00] actually faces towards the house and away from the alley.

[00:09:02] So I have this like kind of compound and I can just open up these two garage doors and I have

[00:09:07] Brett: How do you,

[00:09:08] Jeff: Workshop in there. And it’s like, it’s unbelievable. It’s like,

[00:09:11] Brett: do you get a car into that garage?

[00:09:14] Jeff: we don’t put cars in the garage. Cause there’s a, there’s a one ton, a hundred year old lathe in there. Um, the thing is like, the thing is this garage is so funny.

[00:09:23] Like, um, I am totally doing the Tim Allen total like thing of taking over a garage. But like. You can’t actually get a car in there, right? And so it just works out in my favor.

[00:09:36] Brett: There you go.

[00:09:38] Jeff: But anyway, it’s, uh, I truly, I mean, it’s like there is a, it’s better than any of my medications. I just, it’s so calming.

[00:09:47] Brett: I like this term, landed. Um,

[00:09:49] Jeff: I liked that term too.

[00:09:52] Brett: tell me more.

[00:09:53] Jeff: Um, sorry, turning

[00:09:56] Brett: walked away.

[00:09:56] Jeff: It’s just, you know what, I’m going to go back to workshop. [00:10:00] Um, landed like, um, just, uh, light, um, on my feet behind my eyes. Uh, and, and just, I mean, for me internally, I can’t really say exactly how it projects out and what made her say that other than what I understand about the internal feeling is like totally at peace, just like totally, totally at peace.

[00:10:22] Um, and, and that’s whether I’m building something or just You know, schlubbing around.

[00:10:29] Brett: Nice. Alright.

[00:10:30] Jeff: yeah, it’s wonderful. And so anyway, and this is the time of year when it’s really great, because we’re just leaving the part of the year when it’s too hot to go out there and be in a garage. It’s like 90 degrees or something, and it’s insulated, so it just holds the heat usually.

[00:10:43] Um, so yeah, it’s beautiful.

[00:10:46] Brett: Awesome. Hey, Christina. How are you?

[00:10:50] Christina: I’m pretty good. Um, I, uh, not too much to kind of update. I’ve been under the gun with some work stuff. So I’m trying to [00:11:00] kind of get a bunch of things done that way, GitHub universes in a few weeks. And so kind of coming under the gun with that. So I’m a little stressed about trying to get all my work things done, but other than that, uh, pretty good, pretty good.

[00:11:11] I went to San Francisco for like a day and a, for like two days this week, um, for OpenAI’s dev day. That was pretty fun. Um, And, uh, yeah, just, oh, I saw Megalopolis, uh, which was terrible as, uh, as it’s been rumored, um, but I still think probably better, at least more fun to watch than Joker 2, not real sure, um,

[00:11:34] Jeff: I’m bummed about both of these being apparently not great.

[00:11:37] Christina: I mean, same, but, but, I mean, Joker 2, I think we, look, what, did, it did not need a sequel, and the fact that it got one, and, and then the fact that, like, apparently it’s a courtroom drama, mostly, which is

[00:11:51] Jeff: a musical.

[00:11:52] Christina: and a musical, but then the musical, it’s like, It’s like the American songbook.

[00:11:56] Like, it could not be more [00:12:00] poorly aligned for its target audience and target demographic, which is, I mean, I kind of appreciate the troll in that. But anyway, I mention these things because these movies make me happy and that does help my mental health.

[00:12:13] Jeff: Nice.

[00:12:14] Brett: haven’t seen a good movie in a while. I feel, no, I feel like I loved the last movie I saw, but my memory is such that I don’t remember what the last movie I saw was.

[00:12:25] Jeff: I had a good run, like a month ago, I watched I think five different, like, noirs from the 40s and 50s, and

[00:12:31] Christina: Oh, hell yeah. I

[00:12:32] Jeff: so awesome.

[00:12:35] Brett: Oh, it’s like, there’s something like twinkling in my memory that I found on I don’t remember. I did, I did enjoy the Deadpool Wolverine movie.

[00:12:48] Christina: did two actually. That was one that I was, um, I was not expecting to enjoy that the way that I did. Um, it was very, very funny. It was, um, the [00:13:00] music, uh, the needle drops were great. Um, it was overly indulgent, but it worked. And then what I,

[00:13:05] Brett: Totally.

[00:13:06] Christina: well, what I really appreciated about it and, and like, cause I, I’ve seen like all the Deadpool films now, but I didn’t realize until I watched that movie that I also, because I guess it was the 2000s and this was probably my heaviest, you know, movie going experience, especially going in the theater, because I would literally go every week, um, and sometimes multiple times a week, um, sometimes multiple times a day, um, but, um, I, I think I’ve seen basically it.

[00:13:33] Every one of the Fox, you know, like, um, uh, Marvel films, um, for, for better or worse. And in most cases, let’s be very clear, it was for worse because the Fox Marvel films were not good, right? So for, for people who don’t know, those were the, the X Men series. Fox had the rights to, to those, and they had the rights to, uh, Daredevil and, uh, whatever the fucking

[00:13:54] Brett: Green Lantern? Was that, was Green Lantern? Yeah.[00:14:00]

[00:14:01] Christina: Ryan met and cheated on their respective partners together, and now they’re married.

[00:14:06] Hey, look, you know what? No shade, because honestly that one worked out.

[00:14:10] Jeff: That’s showbiz!

[00:14:11] Christina: mean, look, Daredevil is where Jennifer Garner and Matt Ben Affleck met and cheated on their respective partners, or at least she cheated on hers. I don’t know if he was with anybody. And then whatever the Daredevil sequel was, which I, Elektra.

[00:14:25] I don’t It was bad. Um, and, uh, not to mention, um, you know, obviously like Logan being kind of like the highlight and, um, uh, both attempts at, uh, at the Fantastic Four films, like those were all Fox. And so, um, but what was kind of great about, um, uh, Deadpool, um, uh, versus Wolverine is that in many ways, you know, it was kind of a continuation of kind of the, the Deadpool kind of trope, whatnot, but it was also like a love letter, to those Fox films,

[00:14:54] Brett: Totally.

[00:14:55] Christina: which I really appreciated.

[00:14:57] Like the, this isn’t a spoiler for anything, but like the, the final sequence, [00:15:00] like during the credits, they like show a lot of the behind the scenes footage basically from like the year 2000, like onward of, you know, the cast and crew from those films, which is fucking crazy because you see like the mini DV fucking video that they’re using, you know, to capture the behind the scenes stuff.

[00:15:16] And like, everybody looks so young and like, you know, it’s just. I don’t know. I, I, I very much appreciated that because nobody, including myself, as I just like went on a rant, gives the Fox films any love because you shouldn’t. Almost all of them are terrible. Um, but, um, it also, cause the Fox studio doesn’t exist the way that it did.

[00:15:35] They now all have to be kind of Marvel fied and, or, you know, Disney fied and all that. And I thought it was really, uh, it was very nice and, and kind of classy, you know, to kind of give all those, those films, um, both in the story and then in the, you know, Post credit stuff. A wrap up. thought it was nice.

[00:15:53] Brett: So, someone sent me, and it might have been one of you two, I’ve forgotten, but there was, uh, there [00:16:00] is an animator for Bob’s Burgers that is now a producer of Bob’s Burgers, but still does, like, um, fan, fan art. Uh, like animations of like the characters from Bob’s Burgers, and, and he did one that was the youngest girl, whose name I’m blanking on, um, in a, Louise.

[00:16:24] Louise in a paper plate Deadpool mask doing the Backstreet Boys dance almost its entirety just like the movie.

[00:16:34] Christina: It was NSYNC. It was NSYNC,

[00:16:35] Brett: NSYNC, I’m so sorry. How could I ever confuse Backstreet Boys and with 98 Degrees? Like it just, how do you,

[00:16:44] Christina: Well, here’s the thing. You actually

[00:16:47] Degrees for either of them, but Backstreet and NSYNC absolutely make sense to confuse because literally NSYNC was created to be the backup band for Backstreet I’m not joking. They like, they like, yeah, so, so it’s the [00:17:00] same exact management team, same exact thing.

[00:17:02] You start at them and then they lied to Backstreet Boys, like didn’t even let them know that they were working on this other group too. And, and then all of a sudden Backstreet Boys are burnt out and can’t do this Disney special and NSYNC are like, yeah, we’ll do it. And they become like very famous.

[00:17:18] Jeff: Yes. I love

[00:17:21] Christina: there, there are two great documentaries if anybody wants to get into this stuff. One is called The Boy Band Con, which I, I, I’m sorry to give him credit for this because he’s my least, well, no, that’s not true. He’s my probably third least favorite, but he’s definitely not in the top tier of favorites, but like, um, Lance Bass produced it and he actually did a good job.

[00:17:37] And it’s a documentary about Lou Pearlman who, um, died, but, but he was a famous, um, purveyor of Ponzi schemes and other stuff. And it really kind of goes into. The machine and how hard all of them worked and how much, how little money they made until they, they sued him. Um, and that’s on YouTube. It was a YouTube original.

[00:17:56] And then Netflix put out a three part series [00:18:00] also about Lou Perlman, which is also pretty good. And then there is a great book called The Boy Band Con, um, about Lou Perlman, um, that came out like 15 years ago. So anyway,

[00:18:13] Brett: drop those in the show

[00:18:14] Christina: I will.

[00:18:15] Brett: cause I’ll never read those. I don’t have the attention span to care,

[00:18:19] Christina: no, but it was super fascinating because the guy that created both of those bands, like, he was, until Bernie Madoff, he was the purveyor of, like, the largest Ponzi scheme history.

[00:18:30] Brett: Yeah, no, that’s, that’s interesting. I, uh, I just have a backlog of nonfiction that.

[00:18:35] Christina: Oh yeah, no, and I’m not saying should read it, I’m saying that this is like an actually, it’s like a notable weird kind of thing because you wouldn’t think, oh yeah, the boy band guy, You know, who, there was also some questions about, um, his, uh, sexual interest in the boys, which was not great, and some of the things that he, maybe, things there, but the, the thing that he actually went to jail for, and died in jail for, was the [00:19:00] Ponzi scheme, which was, uh, yeah,

[00:19:03] Jeff: Wow.

[00:19:04] Brett: I’m currently listening to an audiobook about a gay hornless unicorn and a gay wizard who’s in love with the prince who’s engaged to the chief knight and it is the bitchiest novel I’ve ever read. Red.

[00:19:28] Jeff: I assume is Lord of the Rings fanfiction? Hehehe.

[00:19:34] Brett: No, I really, I enjoyed, I enjoyed a book from this author and I thought, Oh, I’ll try another one. And it turned out to be just like, I picked him because he was like a queer sci fi fantasy guy. Um, and there’s not a lot of that out there. And this one just turned out to be like queer to the max. Like almost every character, there’s one, there one bisexual [00:20:00] character.

[00:20:00] Christina: Well, know, I

[00:20:01] Brett: Fluidly sexual character. Everyone else is just straight up

[00:20:05] Christina: else is just like, sort of gay. I love that. Uh, and quick correction, the book was called The Hit Charade. BoybandCon is the documentary, but Hit Charade. Yeah, I got it in the show notes.

[00:20:15] Jeff: was the unicorn born without a

[00:20:17] Brett: No, it was, I haven’t, like he lost it at some point and he’s working to get it back. That’s like a subplot.

[00:20:23] Jeff: okay. Okay.

[00:20:24] Brett: Um, so anyway, my mental health, um, things are, things are overall pretty good. So like for almost six months, I was waking up every day at like three, 2. 30, 3 a. m. and just unable to fall back asleep. But I would go to bed early enough that that would be six to seven hours of sleep.

[00:20:44] And I kind of just was existing on that. And, uh, I had a couple of. Like, runs of bad nights, but I never felt manic, not in the way that I’ve come to know mania. And, [00:21:00] um, I was just being pretty productive and waking up early and, and it lasted way long. Like my manic episodes are like three to five days long, and this was six months long.

[00:21:12] And it finally crashed. Um, I, I was like, I don’t know if this is mania or not until it ended and I hit the depression and I was like, Oh, that was mania. And I’m just praying that the depression doesn’t last as long as the mania. Because I’m used to like five days of mania, then two weeks of depression and then a period of stability.

[00:21:35] Um, so if I have six months of mania and then I have like two years of depression, shit’s going to go bad for me. Um, but maybe the depression will be as like, hypo as the mania was. Um, but anyway, I got passed over for even a token bonus at work. Um, and, and that feels honestly like [00:22:00] So, you should get rewarded for, for doing a good job, but you should also get a token reward for existing at the company for a year.

[00:22:11] Um, and that, and you should get at least a cost of living raise. And I haven’t gotten a raise in three years, and my last bonus was piddly, but it was a token bonus. Getting nothing feels like punishment.

[00:22:28] Christina: hmm.

[00:22:28] Brett: It feels like they’re telling you you did a bad job. And I asked why I wasn’t getting a bonus, and they said it was because I had only been meets all expectations on my review.

[00:22:42] And to

[00:22:42] Jeff: Were you like, what about the point where my manager disappeared for four months? that, is that a dark, is that a dark period in reporting?

[00:22:52] Brett: Oh, it was, so I got, I was annoyed. I started shopping around, um, but after a few days of [00:23:00] being just like, fuck this, I’m bummed out. I came up with like a really good idea, um, for, to like turn my job into something I actually enjoy and also get visibility. And so I wrote, I wrote a little script, almost. An app for, uh, the Docs team at work that converted their Confluence, uh, like their compendium of Confluence documentation into, uh, like GitHub ready Markdown, and they were spending, they were spending two hours per page to do this, um, and plus like JIRA ticketing and Wrike ticketing and everything.

[00:23:46] And it was taking forever. And they were looking at six months. Uh, to do this current project and I wrote them a script and they’re done. Like they’re done. And, and this [00:24:00] didn’t show up on my review. Like I did this kind of after hours on kind of off hours. I did it for another team with no permission from my manager.

[00:24:09] I didn’t mention it on my review.

[00:24:11] Christina: shit, you should have, you still should

[00:24:12] Brett: Uh, well, so I got a letter of commendation from the team that I’m going to present to my manager and definitely include in my quarterly review and, um, yeah, I, cause I, I saved the company thousands of hours. Like when you look at this total project,

[00:24:30] Christina: No, save them thousands of hours, thousands of, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, you know, hundreds thousands if you really want to, you know, calculate it that way. Um, yeah, I’ve, and I say this as somebody who’s bad at, at doing my own reviews. Um, so I, but yet I can see the flaws. Um, that I make, uh, with others and encourage them otherwise.

[00:24:52] Yeah, something like that, whether you got permission or not, if you’ve made that sort of impact, like that’s what review things are for. It’s for bragging about [00:25:00] yourself. Nobody will ever,

[00:25:01] Brett: Well, so I

[00:25:02] Christina: no manager is ever going to look at anything, no matter what they tell you. They’re never going to be like, Oh, well, you didn’t mention these things, but I know you did them.

[00:25:10] And so I’m going to you

[00:25:12] Brett: well, and that like my first, my first manager at Oracle told me that like, it was status quo to just rate yourself three out of five across the board and then let your manager like, uh, promote you. And that worked when I had managers that were good at promoting me. But my current team leader, we don’t even have a manager anymore, but my team leader, um, is not interested in that.

[00:25:45] Um, I, I will not say anything else about him. He’s a good guy. He’s a stand up guy. Um, anyway, that’s, that’s, that’s my mental health update. We got to take a quick sponsor break. We got to squeeze this in before the [00:26:00] 30 minute mark, cause we got a note last time that 38 minutes in

[00:26:06] Jeff: See, you don’t, I don’t think you should say that. I if you’re responding to

[00:26:09] Brett: it. But I said it.

[00:26:11] I said it. And we’re, we’re, we’re following, we’re following direction.

[00:26:14] Sponsor: Pika

[00:26:14] Brett: So anyway, blogging is making a comeback and Pika is a great way to get a blog online fast. Jeff can attest to this. 20 seconds from sign up to blog post.

[00:26:25] Jeff: Yeah, wait, just, it was actually, it was amazing. I was like, all right, let me try this thing out before we go on. And I didn’t even mean, it wasn’t a test to see how quickly I could post, but literally within 20 seconds I had a post published. It was awesome.

[00:26:38] Brett: There you go. So visit pika.page/overti. That’s pka.page/overti to get blogging. Not only is PIKA a great way to start blogging, but it’s also a great way to build a personal [email protected]. You can customize your homepage and easily add pages to your. [00:27:00] The beautiful editor is great for writing your pages as well as your blog posts.

[00:27:05] And you don’t need a master’s degree to work with PICA’s simple theme and customization

[00:27:10] Jeff: Wait, that’s true, because I don’t even have a high school diploma.

[00:27:13] Brett: ha ha ha ha! With a PICA Pro plan, you can add an unlimited number of pages and blog posts to your site. And overtired listeners. Visit PICA. com. Pika. page slash Overtired to sign up, and if you decide to become a Pro member, enter the code Overtired20 to get 20 percent off your first year of Pika Pro.

[00:27:38] Yes, 20 percent off, Pika Pro’s already reasonable price, and you get unlimited pages, blog posts, guestbook entries, and the ability to add your custom domain for a truly personal website on the internet. And this is miles more affordable than Squarespace. Oh, and you have to see this guestbook feature.

[00:27:57] Guestbooks are a throwback to the, a throwback to [00:28:00] the aughts, or maybe even the 90s. Back then, people would connect by signing the guestbooks on each other’s websites. Christina remembers this.

[00:28:08] Christina: Yes.

[00:28:10] Brett: With Pika, not only can people write in your guestbook, but they can also draw you a picture. How cool is that?

[00:28:17] I’ve looked into some of the drawings on Pika’s own guestbook and there is an impressive amount of artwork people can make with this little tool. Also surprising, uh, surprisingly few dicks.

[00:28:30] Jeff: Oh, man. Okay. Oh, wait.

[00:28:34] Brett: Visit PICA. PAGE. OVERTIRED, again that’s P I K A, to give yourself a chance to experience the personal internet as it was meant to be. Again, P I K A. PAGE. OVERTIRED, and remember to enter the coupon OVERTIRED20 to get 20 percent off your first year of PICA Pro.

[00:28:56] Christina: Fantastic.

[00:28:57] On Dick Drawings

[00:28:57] Brett: us Jeff, what want to interrupt?

[00:28:59] Did it have to do [00:29:00] with

[00:29:00] Jeff: about blogging, and one is a penis item. Um, at the State Fair two years ago, they had the Ford F 150 Lightning, the electric F 150. And my wife,

[00:29:13] Brett: better than the Cybertruck even.

[00:29:17] Jeff: So my son, uh, my youngest has an amazing thing he does to Cybertrucks now. And it’s, it’s a little, it’s like, I’m a little bit like, should I let him do this? Cause he’s going to get his ass kicked. Maybe. I don’t know. Is that if he’s, if he’s on the sidewalk and a Cybertruck goes by, he just extends his arm with the thumbs down and goes, Boo! Uh, and I, I think that’s amazing. Anyway, they have like a, an app on the, like, you know, stupid computer screen in the F 150 Lightning where you can draw. And there were two boys in there that we were waiting for them to leave so we could check out the inside of this truck. Sure enough, we got in there.

[00:29:53] Dickenballs, uh, it’s just like, you couldn’t, I mean, granted, it’s also an F 150. So maybe it came, maybe it just came [00:30:00] with that. Maybe that was just like the sample art, like,

[00:30:03] Brett: Built in truck nuts. Digital

[00:30:05] Jeff: built in truck nuts. Do you know that my dad thought he invented truck nuts? He, he did actually, without knowing about the fleshy ones, he came up with this idea of hanging giant, like nuts, like, like, uh, nuts and bolts nuts.

[00:30:19] And, and he was so disappointed. Um, he also invented something that ended up being a SkyMall, uh, uh, product called, um, Crocker, which is a combination of soccer and croquet. And see, he would have never seen that. So he

[00:30:32] Brett: and that’s how your family got all their money, right?

[00:30:35] Jeff: how my family got all that public school teacher money.

[00:30:38] Um, Yeah. Okay.

[00:30:39] Blogging and Personal Writing Reflections

[00:30:39] Jeff: So anyway, here’s the thing about blogging. I, that I, I recently, um, resurrected like my ghost account just because that’s what I’m trying and Pika, maybe I’ll move to Pika. We’ll see. But like I had, I’ve started blogs over the years. I’m like, Oh, I just want to blog. I want a place to write again.

[00:30:56] And I’m, I’m divorced from the desire for any kind of audience. I [00:31:00] just want to write at this point. Um, but what I, what I realized is my need for blogging Now is I want to be able to point to something where I’ve written something longer. Specifically, I want to, um, I want to use, I want to just kind of like publish excerpts of things I wrote over the years and publish that I thought were fun parts of a story, but I actually don’t want to publish an entire story.

[00:31:22] So as an example, I put up, I did this, cover story on the Hold Steady for City Pages, the alt weekly here in like 2007 when they were like a huge band. And I had, I had known those guys forever. We came up in the same scene and, and so it was easy to just kind of talk them into letting me follow them around for an evening or afternoon.

[00:31:41] And the opening scene of the article is like the side stage before they go on at this pretty big theater. Um, and it was the first time that it was the biggest show they had ever played in Minneapolis. And a few of them were from. Here and from this scene and stuff and the crowd, like their crowds are so excited.

[00:31:58] Um, and, [00:32:00] and so I had never been side stage where there’s a band that’s about to go on and the crowd is so, so anticipating it. And the curtain is down and the band maybe peeks around to kind of check out what the crowd looks like. And the whole opening scene is just me standing there. I mean, it’s like, I’m describing what they’re doing.

[00:32:19] Like their, their singer hasn’t showed up, then he shows up in an elevator. Like there’s all this just little stuff. The, the security guy comes over to yell at the guitar player. Cause he has a drink and ends up bumping and spilling the drink on And like, there’s just like all these little moments and it’s not a long intro, but I loved rereading it.

[00:32:35] And I was like, well, this is really fun. And it’s like a peak of something. And actually the way that ended was, I was so. Um, kind of committed to my observational role that I was like on their heels as they actually walked on stage to the point where I realized I was visible and looked like a member of the band and like quickly turned around, but I got that feeling of what it’s like to walk on to a screaming giant crowd and it [00:33:00] was very disappointing to turn around anyway.

[00:33:04] So that was like a. A blog need I have all of a sudden is like, I want to be able to post on Mastodon to my 14 followers, which I think is up to 89, um, that I have this thing and, uh, and on threads. Cause I do threads. I like threads. I can’t, I wish I had a thing that felt like

[00:33:19] Brett: I used to like and then it got real, it got real weird. My feed got real

[00:33:24] Jeff: I should say I like it enough.

[00:33:25] Um, I will never be as happy as I was on Twitter when Twitter was a place to be happy. Um, is, you know, uh, I, I just, it’s, I, I long for it the way I long for Tumblr at its height. Like how that felt. Oh God, it felt so good. I met so many People through Twitter that I should have never been able to meet or develop a relationship with.

[00:33:48] And I got an, I got a byline in the New York times because I, I connected with like a, a New York times reporter on Twitter that was reporting on the same thing I was reporting on it at [00:34:00] American Public Media. And he’s like, Hey, do you want to write something? And it was just like, Twitter was insane. Um, anyway, we all know this, this is an old story, but I, I like this idea of having a place where I’m not trying to direct people to the blog, but I can post to something that I’ve written and, and say, Hey, this was fun.

[00:34:16] Go, go look at it if you want.

[00:34:18] Brett: Nice.

[00:34:19] Jeff: Anyway.

[00:34:20] Cybertruck and Twitter Musings

[00:34:20] Brett: I, uh, speaking of Twitter and the Cybertruck, um, we, all, we’re all aware of the many shortcomings of the Cybertruck, but I learned something this week that just blew me away. Blew my mind. Um, you can shift gears on the Cybertruck using the digital, like, touchscreen, which is weird enough, uh, to not have a

[00:34:43] Jeff