238. Desk of Theseus

AlexThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast. This week's challenge, watch Q into the storm.

Zoom loves to be in the front of everything.

MerlinI was just thinking the exact same thing. If it's not obvious, I'm doing many things right now with computers. And it requires a lot of things to do the things. Oh, but I got a call coming up with my buddy Alex. And of course, you know, I think Zoom, you know, I'm going to say it. I'm going to speak my truth. I think Zoom as an application service, I think Zoom is a little bit presumptuous to say the least. It's like if Rick James were an app. Rick James comes in and he puts his feet up with his dirty boots on your white leather couch

and starts grinding them into the couch and then denies it. Oh, no.

AlexOh, no. No, I hate it.

MerlinJohnny Murphy.

AlexNo.

MerlinWelcome to Dubai Friday, a show where we do bits. I figure we'll save it for the after show. Do we still have a show? We're still doing a show, right?

AlexI think we're still doing a show. Are we not doing a show? Yeah, we're doing a show.

MerlinI don't know. You're going to tell us.

AlexOh, I see. It's a very special episode. I'm in the dock now. Or wait, am I?

MerlinBack in the 90s, I was... So... I was doing great like 20 minutes ago. I'll tell you about my journey later, but suffice to say, this is an almost entirely new setup. This is the Desk of Theseus title. The Desk of Theseus, because is it really the same desk when almost everything on it is different?

AlexOh, no. No, no, no.

MerlinIt's not. It's a chicken and egg thing, except the chicken in this case is a table that I stole in college.

AlexYou are very proud of that, and I don't mean that disparagingly.

MerlinWhich now has a Vesa arm strapped to it real hard.

AlexOh, is this different than what I saw yesterday? Oh.

MerlinWith a new monitor, with a new Mac, with a very pretty padded desk pad. Oh, did you notice in the photo I sent you that you like to zoom in on like a creep? Did you notice the light over my monitor?

AlexOh, did I not? my goodness all right zooming zooming yeah see i'm i wish okay zoomer i come on alex that's kind of funny oh you're kind of funny i was i was i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i didn't laugh at your bit i was looking at the lights as well as looking at the photographs behind the lights which are just adorable so i got distracted by those oh let me send you the

Merlinwhole thing. So I can't tell you sent me this thing that looks like a captcha. Had you zoomed in on the Google Doc I inadvisably had in the foreground? I didn't do very well. I didn't

Alexdo very well. But I think it'll still be fun. Oh, I think it I you know what? I know it'll still be fun. I think, in fact, you should have an advanced listener and send it my way. I can probably do that. Mostly because I'm out of shows to listen to.

MerlinHey, listen, if you enjoyed the show, you can go to relay.fm slash RD and you get commercial free versions of all of the Reconcilable Differences, but you also get our annual member episode in which we talk to a member, often someone cancelled.

AlexNot this year, as far as I know.

MerlinIt came up after we finished recording.

AlexOh! Sorry.

MerlinAnd it was our guest who brought it up.

AlexOh, well, I mean

Merlinreasonable. I didn't want to say it on the show, but I wonder if this means I'll be cancelled. Because apparently he's Doctor Who. I don't...

AlexI don't know. I don't know. Oh, Chim Chimney, Chiru. And Mary Hoppins. Mary Hoppins. I'm sure it's been done, but now I'm just looking and I'm imagining a cute frog.

MerlinMary Hoppins? No, no.

AlexMary Hoppins. They were supposed to go to Ireland,

Merlinbut they were asleep when Olivia Colman was going to accept it? I'm so confused.

AlexMary Hoppins, everyone's favorite anime character. Quid pro quo, Clarice. I'm very nervous about this microphone. Oh, gosh.

MerlinWhat's your microphone? What you doing?

AlexOh, it's the same one you have, the Dickerson. The Dickerson?

MerlinI changed my roll off. I took off my base. Well, let me – here, you tell me what you like. Okay. Just listen. This is a Pepsi challenge. This has been my day every day for days. Let's see. Okay. So sample one is me talking. Sample two is me talking. That's me talking. Here's the first one. I think I like the first one better. Here's the second one. Do you hear a difference? Of course you do. You're a Zoomer. You can hear differences.

AlexNo. I mean, maybe you sound a little bit.

MerlinFirst one's a little more Dickerson, right? This one's too bassy.

AlexOh, I was going to. Oh, interesting.

MerlinI'm count bassy.

AlexYou're right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fuller, but I don't know which one I like more. I don't know. I truly don't know.

MerlinBefore we get to our very special episode. Oh, God. We watched the Hooray Todd episode this morning. Oh, my God.

AlexOh.

MerlinGod, I love Todd so much.

AlexBut Mr. Peanut Butter, am I right? Mr. Peanut Butter. Mr. Peanut Butter. there's something i haven't told you about bojack horseman in that i have not finished the second half of the final season because that show has affected me on such a level same same with the sopranos still haven't watched the last episode of the sopranos i just it's because then it's over

Merlini can't i i never i never watched the all of the final episode of adventure time and i think there's resistance in me because that show is so special to me uh-huh you know partly just because I watched it with my kid, but also like that show, like, how do you talk about this pantheon of shows where even if you say to somebody, look, it's a dumb cartoon that makes you feeling, feel feelings that are improbably strong, but also it is just a dumb cartoon. And somebody tells you that about, about an adventure time, you know, you know, you try

and explain that there's, there's an insane ice scientist and his vampire daughter and their relationship is going to make you want to never have lived.

AlexYep. Yep. Basically.

MerlinMaking your way in the world today takes everything you got.

AlexOh, Simon.

MerlinRemember that when he puts on the cheers and then he hits the chicken soup?

AlexClambulance. Clambulance.

MerlinBojack, I was warned by everybody I know. You should watch this dumb horse show. I was like, I get it. It's going to be like the meatball show. I'm not going to understand it.

AlexThe meatball show? What the fuck?

MerlinWell, you know, okay. Like talking with my daughter. My daughter likes to explain things to me. She laughs. And then she tells you about something that's funny, as I've explained.

AlexWell, she's smarter than both of us. So, you know, I mean.

MerlinOh, my God. I got a photo for you from this morning. But and then she, like I said before, she has to explain why it's funny. So she has to explain to me like how how we like Lin-Manuel Miranda, but we make fun of Lin-Manuel Miranda because the lip. I know that's an old one. But there's another one where she's like, oh, my God, this is so good. She's like she's showing it to me. We're walking, walking to breakfast. And she shows me and the photo I'm going to send you is her trying to find this on her phone. and I was like oh you look so cute I gotta take a photo but she is looking at her phone and she says oh yeah oh my god what's the video game

not Among Us what's it called? Among Us

Alexis the one where there's an imposter yes there's Roblox which is sort of like an AR of Minecraft

Merlinno no I think it's Among Us oh my god you've got to see this this is so funny this guy's making fun of Among Us and it's totally clickbait and you know how she's obsessed with clickbait and we do fake YouTube images now. And oh, you've got to see this guy. And he's like, oh, look, check this out. And like, don't order Among Us Happy Meal at 3 a.m. And I'm like, I don't understand. I mean, which part of this is funny? She says, it's all funny. And I said, do you know which part of this is funny?

So is this guy making fun of clickbait YouTube videos that are meant to attract kids and be weird and telling them to chime in down in comments? I feel like I've laughed at a lot of stuff in life. And sometimes it's what at the time is considered sort of unusual humor. But I'm, I was like, can you tell what about this is funny and why you think it's funny? And I'm not saying it's not, but I'm, I'm really, I was like, Emma, I am really adrift right now. And I was reminded, I was quoting her the scene from Homer Palooza with the two kids in the audience.

Check out that cannonball guy. he's cool and the guy goes are you being sarcastic he goes i can't even tell anymore um anyway i don't you know but that dumb fucking horse show i love it so much hold on hold on i

Alexoh you said you were going to send me an image oh yeah i'm working on it right now oh all right

MerlinPre-PC. God, I have such a fucking O. Henry text story for you. It's going to break your heart like a college-aged deer.

AlexOh, no. Don't. Don't bring it up. Welcome to Dubai Friday, a show where Alex and Merlin talk about cartoons that have profoundly affected both of them in strange and unfamiliar ways.

MerlinYeah, it's really true. I've got to fix this pre-PC. Oh. Okay. Well, this is just going to be a teaser. I'm sending you this.

AlexOh, God, the PC is still off. You there? Yes, yes. I am here.

MerlinOkay, okay, okay, okay. While I'm sending you this photo of my daughter, can I tell you the O. Henry, the surprise? You can get more of this in the after show where I talk about how incredibly, wonderfully, actually happy and excited I am about my new setup.

AlexAre we going to do another incidental computer show? Okay, that's not that funny. Okay, after show, we're going to talk about computers.

MerlinThings are funnier when I'm doing something else. that's what she said but it's funny that's uh or as my friend uh tony used to say to me huh it's really funny i'd say well then why aren't you laughing you go that funny um the this i i get the feeling that's the kind of thing like if you're in like the snl writer's room you know that's the kind of response you might get is like huh that's funny okay so so here's the very fast version of this oh henry story uh and anybody who's well nobody's followed this really but like in this

history of the last, I don't know, three, six months of my project of projects, my Uber project of stuff related to computers.

AlexOh, that's your theme, a period of projects.

MerlinHey, come on. You trying to sell me a notebook? And that's called a teaser in the business. But you know where this all started? And I talked about this with Dan on Tuesday, and I'll probably talk about it here because there's a lot to talk about that some people might like. But, you know, if you go back and, you know, like they say, like, you know, sort of like an old lady who swallowed a fly type situation or like for one of a nail, the kingdom was lost. This all started in some form or fashion.

Well, technically it started in the last two or three years where my wonderful Retina iMac, 5K iMac from 2015 was, it was working great. It was actually working just as well as it worked the day I got it, right? It's almost like buying a Honda. My friend Michael bought a Honda in 1991. And even when he got a dot-com job and stock options and stuff, he still wouldn't buy another car because he was so mad that his Honda was so dependable after 10 years. His Honda Civic two-door, it was like an $8,000 car.

He's like, I really want to commute. I really would like a better car. But this thing is still perfect, right? That's the problem with the Honda title. Yeah. So my Honda here, Go Little Honda, is my iMac, which has been working great the whole time, right? But like I say, here's the most basic one. There's no honest way to do USB-C with that computer. There's way more than that in the long run. But if you need a reason why Merlin was getting frustrated with a six-year-old Mac, it's because even though it worked great, it didn't work enough.

And it didn't work in a modern way. and the limitations of thunderbolt 2 uh oh that's right you didn't even have

Alexof course gosh no usbc definitely no oh wow the thunderbolt that i had was that one that looks a

Merlinlittle bit like a display port not display port but um you know what i mean the like uh mini just whatever the fuck it's called that little dumb two it's a sandwich of uh a nothing sandwich with two white pieces of bread that kind of that kind of uh dingus yep yep yep and i bought adapters no adapter i ever use with that would ever do fuck all for thunderbolt let alone usbc but i can deal with it it's fine it's okay like it's not a problem but um then so that was the the bigger pattern the smaller pattern then was i've had this yen to get something different than

the usb pre-2 uh and if you care and you don't it's the dingus that i use i'm speaking through right now where the microphone goes into this little piece of hardware and then that sends that into the computer. And when I bought this thing, which was cost more money than I had wanted to spend, the word on the street was, this is the one, this is the good one, right? To get this one. And it's been great. But like, I struggle. When I say pre-PC, what that means is there's a knob on here that controls, without respect to how loud the recording is, it governs how loud

my side of the conversation is in my cans versus everything else in my cans. and I have to change it for every fucking podcast episode I record which is not a lot but like ah disagree but you'd like to put it on lock and have it work right there's even there's a separate knob for how loud the headphones are going to be why separate knob why separate knob but then so I've wanted for the longest time I wanted to get like a better piece of equipment and

oh god i fucked this up so bad anyway that all started with me wanting to get a better one of those well i got so now i've got all this modern stuff and i got a scarlet focus right which is not very expensive well no not at all that's what i well now i need to tell you now i need you to tell me the next one to buy no no no i didn't tell you to

Alexbuy this one i just got it because it's the cheapest no no what's the one shaheed got what's

Merlinthe nice shaheed one which one is that oh i don't even know i'm looking slack the uh and so i got it yesterday right and like oh my god this is it this is my coronation i'm the good tech boy i've done all this stuff i've got all the things i'm thunderbolting all over the place everything's going great everything's coming up millhouse i even got a fucking light over my monitor it's very pretty we should talk about that we'll talk about this in the after show this is not the show no no no i put it in this morning what's the first thing i do daddy comes in early i watch the horse show with my daughter i eat my bagel and then i i say i gotta bounce because i gotta go set up this

dingus and i set up the dingus and i even had the presence of mind for once in my life to keep the usb pre to set up as always in situ so that like if you had an emergency and we had to start recording at 7 45 i could just go ha flip a switch oh dude you totally cut out it says my internet

Alexconnection is unstable oh okay you're you're back which is weird it says my internet connection is

Merlinunstable which i never get it me uh no i talked about computers and now it broke yeah spiteful

Alexlittle dick

Merlinand so daddy uh where'd i leave off i was leaving off at daddy had to get in early

AlexYou, Daddy, Daddy had to come early and then Daddy had, I know.

MerlinKeep it friendly.

AlexI have a clip of that. Don't worry. But then you said you had everything set up as usual and then bye-bye, Daddy.

MerlinOh, Henry, ending is I set up the focus right and I did what anybody would do. I opened up Sound Studio. I recorded some samples. And you've been on the business end of this before where I record different things different ways and go, huh, these all sound the same to me because I'm deaf. Not deaf, deaf. Sorry. that was not nice but i i my hearing is extremely bad and my extreme hearing is extremely not sensitive and like anybody who played in a rock band i'm really fortunate that i don't have tinnitus but like i have i think lost a fair amount of the range of it said that you lose

the range of the female voice first which feels important i'll just need to start going on

Alextestosterone to do this show.

MerlinOh, man. Like a pubescent boy. It's not that your voice changed. It's that everybody else's did.

AlexIt's a thinker.

MerlinSo the O. Henry ending is I put in the Focusrite. I did the things. I tried to roll off. No roll off. It has this thing, this proprietary thing that's kind of cool called air.

AlexMaybe I should. I don't use that.

MerlinMaybe I should. It sounds a little more fluffy. And I listened to it. And then I was reading how they recommend on the Focusrite, they recommend you crank up the gain all the way and then kind of like turn it down as needed. It was clipping real bad. And of course then in my comparisons I noticed USB Pre 2 was not clipping. And it didn't occur to me for a second something that I knew and forgot. So I'm going, huh, what if I can overdrive this bitch? And so I'm going, I'm screaming and USB

Pre will not overdrive. The Focusrite overdrives fairly easily and guess what daddy forgot? But USB Pre has all those fucking dip switches that do stuff.

AlexOh, yeah.

MerlinAnd I do have the limiter on.

AlexOh.

MerlinSo I think for now I'm going to keep what I've been using, which was the prime mover in some form or fashion of me wanting to upgrade all of this stuff. It's the Blackmagic camera all over again.

AlexOh, well.

MerlinGifted and Agile.

AlexMm-hmm.

MerlinI did pull. I finally had my break is over. I pulled the Blackmagic out again. and I've been playing with it a little bit.

AlexOh, fun.

MerlinYeah, I'm not going to make anything. I don't fucking look stupid on video. I updated my flat top a little bit yesterday, and I think it's a little problematic.

AlexYour flat top? Oh, the hair. Flat top. The hair. Flat top. Top.

MerlinDid you see my BenQ lamp?

AlexThe BenQ. Oh, above your monitor? Yes.

MerlinAnd it points it away from the screen. So if you want to be mostly in the dark, you can have this light up here. I'm not totally sold on it, but it's pretty cool. so it's got four things it's got power, color, brightness but it's also got like an ambient sensor of like just trust me I'm the BenQ, like I'll decide what the light should be and it works pretty well

Alexokay, where can I

Merlinwell let's find it for show notes Alex, where do people find show notes wait a minute, that's a different show, this is California King IT Hoop Skirt, for whatever episode this is of your Do My Friday program

AlexI'd like to think of it as the people's program sees the means of potting yeah yes yes queen speak your truth uh-huh yeah you can go to give us your no that's the wrong one you can go to dubai friday dot f dot com slash 238 never gets easier does it yes 23 that's right right and you did such a good job forwarding the what did we have to do the dns was off to oh i'm always fixing that stuff

MerlinI hate dealing with that. I got to tell you, man, SSL stuff and domain stuff, not a fan.

AlexNo.

MerlinIt's the worst kind of tech in some ways because if it works flawlessly, no one notices. If it fails slightly, everyone notices. It takes a fair amount of effort to get it to work right because it's difficult, at least for me, to know what's gone wrong. And then on top of it all, like when you make a change with DNS, then you just sit on your ass and wait to see if it didn't work.

AlexYeah, I got a lot. I got a whole lot of screenshots of 4044. I'm like, I know, I know. Everyone calm down. It's fine. Did you get the RSS feed? Everyone? No. Thank you, everybody who let me know.

MerlinWhat broke? What broke?

AlexOh, for for maybe an hour, the Dubai Friday dot com because our. Oh, yeah. Daddy did fix that last week. That's right. I did fix that. I did. You did. Yes. Yeah. And it was only for a short period of time. And I really, well, I like that folks actually visit the website, which if you wanted to find show notes, would be DubaiFriday.com slash 238.

MerlinWell done.

AlexWhere we put together a lot of links. And then I put the links in hopefully the order in which we talk about them because I'm weird.

MerlinIt's hard to do, though.

AlexYeah, I think I mixed up a couple last time.

MerlinNo, no, no. This is a reference I didn't get. you know if we had a staff i know you know guys i know people want a transcript and there's really good reasons to want a transcript someday i'll talk in detail about why i for non-ableist reasons i hope don't like doing transcripts of shows and the quick version is if you walked into the theater and expected francis ford coppola to give you a copy of the script of the godfather you wouldn't be watching the movie yeah um but you know for i guess for accessibility reasons it's a good idea but I don't have the resources to do that, right?

AlexYeah.

MerlinAnd the problem is if I do that, if I just run it through Descript and then put it out, you know what I'm going to hear then?

AlexThat you have to ask it, yeah.

MerlinThis transcript is wrong. The transcript is wrong.

AlexUh-huh.

MerlinAnd it's like I'm not, I can't, and everybody's like, well, it's just really easy to do. You just pay and you have somebody do it. It's like.

AlexI can't.

MerlinI don't know the cycle. I can't do the shit, the dumb shit, the dumb easy shit I do now is already too hard for me. Or if you want, you know what, if you're a person with hearing issues or another kind of, you know, challenge thing, we'll be happy to do something else that you'd like occasionally. But I don't want to stop doing the thing I already don't do all that well and to add other things that I know I don't do well.

AlexThat's the thing. It just feels just respect. I don't know. I don't like comparing, obviously, any disability with sexuality, gender, or race. but like it always feels like you put a flag outside of your bank like it doesn't it's like all right well fine what does the get where where's my interest rate parade like i i don't know

Merlinso i've been a not a web developer i've been a web designer and i was still doing primarily web design when zeldman's orange book came out and it was a revelation for me because he just made the pitch of saying like when you're all you're doing really you're here's what you're doing you're putting words and images into onto a server where a computer can look at it and like if you're

doing stuff with words you know what there's so many good reasons first of all to have markup that validates because if you have markup that validates and you know the thing is browsers at the time bent over backwards to accommodate broken markup what would for for a non-technically inclined

Alexperson, what would a broken markup be?

MerlinWell, for, okay. So for example, for the longest time before the more like modern XHTML, like back in the early, let's see, even in the nineties, the sort of, the sort of markup that we did was pretty shake and bake, like pretty straightforward and wasn't intended. So like there were people who sweated making sure that their markup worked. And what that means is that like the way HTML works, like a lot of languages, you have tags. So you would say this is a paragraph.

And that paragraph is identified by a P in brackets here. And when it closes with a slash P after, that means this part is done. The paragraph is done. This equals paragraph, a paragraph. And so back in the day, we didn't have closing tags for hardly anything. Partly because browsers would just accommodate that. because they knew how crappy everybody's markup was. And that's where you get stuff like a break tag didn't need to have a slash to terminate it because it wasn't really, I mean, it was computer code in some ways,

the most basic kind of computer code, but like browsers just mopped all that stuff up for you. But then of course the slide becomes everybody's markup gets weaker and shittier. So that sucks. If you're somebody who uses a JAWS reader or similar in order to like turn words on a computer into spoken text, like that sucks. At this point, we're not even getting to image maps or anything more descriptive. I mean, people using alt or title, nobody used to do that.

Why would you do that? At best, on a browser, you could mouse over and see the alt tag. But nobody did that, I don't think, mostly. In terms of the garden variety user, people didn't even know about that stuff. They didn't need to know. You got Shockwave to play your audio. You got QuickTime to play your postage stamp size video. None of this shit worked together. The thing that was brilliant about Zeldman's book, which he's such a good writer, it was so lucidly put together. He says, look, if you make your code so that it validates, what you're basically doing is you're defining this

as a structured document. And there's going to be so many benefits to that. And here's two big ones. The one you may not care about, but you should care about, is that means this is now something that will work with a JAWS reader or similar. Which is, you know, like I say, Because now I can understand that's what this is. This is a header. This is H1. This is an H2. This is a P. This is a UL. This is an OL. This is a BR. Like whatever that is. But the one, I have to be honest, the thing that blew my mind for me is up until 2003, CSS was a joke to me. Because CSS, cascading style sheets, were this bananas, interesting, but very bananas idea for being able to abstract the way something looks from the way something's structured.

And what Zeldman said was, look, you make this document, you can look at that document with no adornment, and it'll still make sense. You're going to understand. The browser in this case understands that's an H1, so that's bigger. But here's the other thing. Everything can now be semantic. So things mean things. H1, there was a time when we would use H1 just to make text big and bold. We didn't mean to make it. On Netscape, you could use a center tag, And center means different things in different places.

And boy, you learned that lesson. But if you have this document that is semantic and compliant with whatever you've declared as the code in that document, which you can just leave off for a long time. You don't even need a header back in the day. It was insane. But now guess what? Now you got CSS. And this leads to the Doug Bowmans of the world who are able to do stuff like you abstract the design and adornment completely. So things that seemed impossibly subtle,

virtually meaningless at the time, there used to be a tag called B. There used to be a tag called I. B, make this text bold. I, make this text italic. But you know what? How about instead of I, we use EM for emphasis. So there is a difference. There's a difference between abbreviate. I mean, and this is not merely just semantic. This is meaningful. Like, abbreviation does not mean the same thing as acronym. know that's not only good for writers to know that's good for web web designers to know or developers to know because then now anybody can read it it's going to work on every device or

dingus much like a squarespace site and now you can decide how it looks because you're using css abstracted and guess what on top of that now more things become meaningful now we're able to employ things like what is a name versus what is an id one id there can only be one of that kind of thing on a page. Name can be anything. So any element that you've defined, you can now give a name to, which lets you do stuff. Like if you're using names and IDs, you can have anchors on a page, like Octothorpe Alex. And you jump down to the section that semantically means Alex.

And like the scales fell from my eyes. I'm fucking St. Paul reading this book because my Damascus was, I have a way, if I can be a little bit tight wound about this stuff, I'm going to make something that makes everybody's life better. And it felt great. It felt so good to, like, in the most anal retentive way, keep running your document through a validator, have it come up okay, and know that as long as your browser isn't broken, this will work for you. And, like, you know, the benefit of that in there is, like, suddenly a lot of people got to read stuff on the internet that they couldn't read before.

And it was a benefit for everybody.

AlexAnd people could make things that previously couldn't because I knew HTML and vaguely how to use CSS. But then I was suddenly like, oh, OK, this isn't just for the magic wizard boys. Like, I get more of this now.

MerlinBut to have it, it's one thing to be able to make it not be broken and another thing for it to be right. And then that did really become a journey. And when I say that about Squarespace, it's the truth. Like, I cannot tell you how glad I am to not have to worry about what this looks like on an eight-month-old browser in Belize or whatever. Like, because there would be stuff that just broke. And so what do you do? You have all these hacks. You have a one-pixel invisible GIF that enables you to do, like, this graphical layout. And it was hacks on hacks on hacks.

But then you get something like Doug Bowman, who, in passing, is the reason 43 folders exist. and also probably the best web designer I've personally known. When I used to work with him, he would say, you know, you got a lot of tips about Quicksilver. It's fun to talk about that at lunch because he was clean used to it. It's fun to talk about that at lunch, but you should go make a website. I'm like, that's a good idea, Doug. But Doug had a stop design. Doug's site, he did the Wired site. He did all these sites. But Doug's site was such a –

AlexDid he really? Oh, wow.

MerlinIt was such a fucking marvel because you go to Doug's site and it looked really cool and it was super clean. But like the sections of his site, what you would think of as the menu sort of, you know, six big like silos of his site, each had like a different color scheme. And I don't mean just that it's got a different header, graphical header. No, it was all done with text. Like so basically he was able to say if ID for this section equals about, make the entire theme of this page green. You guys think that's table stakes now?

Holy shit. you go look at his code and it looks like a website it's so basic you turn off css it looks flawless as it should but the whole reason that's able to work is because of that abstraction

Alexjesus christ i have reached peak boring i what no no what you have have done is what my spouse calls gotten very horny for computers which is something that uh has a new phrase in our households when I'm doing various things.

MerlinI don't want to exclude people from anything. And I think somewhere in the top 40, 50 phrases for this show is accessibility is good for everyone.

I love folding. Do you ever fold?

AlexNot code, no.

MerlinNo, but like in a good IDE or text editor, how you can like fold sections.

AlexOh, yeah. Yeah. Well, now in Obsidian, there's a plugin for that. Woo. I see what you're saying.

MerlinI just, on Casey's urging, I downloaded, of all things, Microsoft Visual Code.

AlexWhat?

MerlinIt's really good. Visual Code is really good. Well, it's their IDE slash text editor. But it's really good. I mean, you know, there's a million of these. like there's but some of them like used to be back in the day if you wanted to use eclipse like that had to run on java and no thank you 2000s java on a mac was not fun um but then that you get further along you get stuff like adam right you probably play with adam like that's pretty clean but you know stuff you only on a mac you only really got in a gui from stuff like

text mate and before you add me well yeah you can do that with sublime text uh yeah i don't want to edit my preferences in a text file thank you very much or like i don't want to you know um bb edit is great but it's really not for the graphical oriented user but visual code is good i was um i was updating my um my dot less file for my test paper or for my um marked to formatting last night.

AlexI don't know. Wait, wait.

MerlinLess is kind of like it's less is a fancier version of, not fancier, but less basically you do this more program-y way of doing CSS.

AlexOh, God. Do I have to learn another thing

Merlinalong with YAML?

AlexJay Miller, you've won. I'm learning

Merlinmore code.

AlexYeah, I'll put that in show notes. Jay Miller, fantastic. Put it in show notes. and you know where to find show notes jay miller oh yeah uh dubai friday dot com slash 238 238

Merlin238 um there used to be a my go-to for css god damn it what was it called i want to say

Alexsomething like css rabbit or something like that that sounds familiar what was the plugin for dream we like there was something with dream weaver is that what i used when i was a kid

Merlinit was in like a box dreamweaver was adobe's eventually adobe's um it was something else

Alexbefore but it was adobe's uh yeah adobe bought it and then uh it was good it was good i had the

Merlinversion where i had the version where you could use like um i would use it with microsoft access databases so janky but it worked um so anyway my here's my suggestions for you uh visual studio just at least give it a spin it's pretty cool it's not super pretty um but my suggestions would be i don't know if you use set app but you might want to check out espresso because that's what used to be css rabbit and espresso is really good for doing css now just go google espresso yeah

but no it's it's very it's very um it's got a gooey it's real nice and when you're dealing with stuff like fonts in css it's nice to have a gooey yeah because you you want to know what the color looks like you don't want to leave off you know like i find myself leaving um what's it

Alexcalled font whatever the fucking font app is oh isn't it just font font book font book font book

Merlinyeah but font book i leave that open because i can copy and paste the the correct name of the font consistently but if you're using espresso it does that for you you just get a pull down it's so much easier than trying to do it manually and then what was my other one visual studio pretty damn good um oh shit what was the other one espresso well i like all i like all the great apps someone's building a website isn't he no what the fuck are you talking about no i like

Alexoh i no no no i don't know do you use task paper uh not not as much anymore actually

Merlintask paper has style sheets and marked two has style sheets yes and when when i've gone and grabbed a bunch of new fonts i'm always excited about a font i don't talk about it here nobody cares. I get excited about fonts and I'd like to see it. And so what I do is I go, I go and I make a copy of my demo.less style sheet. And then I go in and I use the fonts I like so that when I'm looking at marked, it's real pretty. You've seen me do this. You've seen what I sent you a screenshot.

AlexI think you've actually said, what's that font? Yeah. I use a, what is it? JetBrains Mono for

Merlinpretty much everything. JetBrains Mono is actually my, my Mono spaced everything too. But like, Let's say, for example, you wanted to make a fake logo for something called Kenny Rogers City Fuck. My wife and I, yesterday morning, as we record this, Tuesday morning at 5.30 in the morning,

We had the hugest unending gales of shared laughter that we have had in years because I told her a dream.

And but I'd gone through and all these tales like, oh, God, I just had the worst nightmare repeating a story. But I had the worst nightmare. There was this mall and you and I had a huge fight and you left me there, which is a dream I have a lot of being left.

AlexOh, no. Oh, yeah. Same.

MerlinBut like, no, but you left me. You left me there. left yeah yeah yeah she no she left me at the mall that's also the mall is also where she left me okay yeah yeah but it's this huge mall and then we used to like to go there ironically because it's the old mall it's the janky mall and then and you go to the mall and you get in for far enough and you get we're getting so excited because we're getting to the area of the mall where the museums start and there's these museums inside the mall that are huge like like almost like hitler's plan for berlin huge like huge no no no but like like impossible i don't know

Have you ever seen what Hitler had planned for what was going to be the Bundestag?

AlexYeah, it looks like Nazi Disney World, basically.

MerlinIt would have had its own weather system. It's so big. There are those buildings that are so big that you get misty rain inside of them.

AlexThis dream mall, does this also exist in the... Is this just your upside down or is this also a real mall? Okay, all right.

MerlinYeah, it was a real mall. I went in there and ran my credit card. I don't know. So you get to the part of the mall where the museum starts and we're getting giddy because this is where it gets really good because it's a very unselfaware mall. It doesn't really know that it's not the good mall anymore, but it has all these museums in it. It even has – you know, this is incredibly disappointing. Let's say you go to like a shitty state park and it has like a little museum by the gift shop and you go in and it's mostly just stuff painted on flats. You know what I mean? the museum exists as like basically just just like um tableau or whatever you're like god this

museum sucks they had a whole area inside the mall's museum the first first museum in the mall uh that just talks about when the mall was better and so then you go in further and then you walk in further and then that's where you discover that there are more malls inside of the museum part of the mall and so forth it sounds pretty fun now and then it was a terrible nightmare i ran and my friend Michael, our best friend from college, and Michael was marrying a 60-year-old African-American woman, and his ex-girlfriend was the best man, which seems strange.

And it was a very 70s sort of mall. And then I paused for a minute. I said to Madeline, and the thing is, there was this one store, and it was a store where rural men could get assistance finding more urban partners. Oh, okay. It's called Kenny Rogers City Fuck.

And we both laughed in bed, laying there. The idea of, like, imagine the Kenny Rogers Roasters logo, except it's called Kenny Rogers City Fuck. And I fucked this up in the art, but it actually was Colonel Sanders on the sign in the dream. And then she left me at the mall. She left me at the mall.

AlexIt shouldn't be this, one, it's not that funny, but two, it is a little bit. and just be

MerlinKenny Rogers City fuck

Alexleft me at the mall

MerlinI should go to Kenny Rogers City fuck

Alexoh god should we start the show oh god this is just

Merlinso this This one, though, I had to – so, of course, I did – I thought I wanted Zap Chancery, but what I actually wanted was BrushScript. I did BrushScript, and then I did – I don't know if it was Clarendon. I did – and then I had to do Drop the Bass Line really far. Drop the Bass Line. And I did that in Affinity Designer, which is a very good app.

AlexOh, so many. You're doing so many apps. Oh, there's the logo. Oh, here's the logo.

MerlinYou got to zoom in to see his face.

AlexI do. I see his little face there. Hello. Oh.

MerlinRuby. Don't take your love to town. Let's start the show. Closing my pee.

AlexDing.

MerlinHey, did you like that photo of Emma?

AlexOh, my God. So.

MerlinDark, quiet death. Where are my shoes? Where are my shoes? Those are my shoes.

AlexGod, what a. She does not know how privileged that there is a similar shoe size in your house.

MerlinOh, you know, you know it. I mean, do you remember? I don't know if you did this in high school. It probably might have been a guy thing. but there's a guy thing in high school where you used to swap shirts like it used to be a thing you'd do no uh did you ever share clothes with people was that ever a thing you did well yeah i

Alexmean the the normal people i guess yeah i'm not gonna wear someone's fucking shirt no no this

Merlintouch there and cleave it no no no what if oh what if it was clean what if you knew it was

Alexclean and folded do you how do you know that it's clean how how do you know that you can sniff it

MerlinYou could sniff the shirt.

AlexThe, um, well, um, no, no, no, no, no. Why am I even, no, I'm not entertaining this.

MerlinWould you want to, would you want to swap, would you want to swap shirts with me?

AlexOh, I, you know what? I've grown as a person, so I, I wouldn't even.

MerlinIt'd be clean. It'd be clean and folded, Alex. Clean and folded.

AlexExactly. I wouldn't even sniff it. I would just throw it on right away. Be like, yep, yep, yep. I, I trust you. Merlin Mann is a person in advice and clothing. And yeah, we'd, we'd go from there. But also I think your shoes would be too small for me.

MerlinUm, my, my feet have gotten fat.

AlexIs that, I hear that's a thing.

MerlinOh my, well, at first I just thought, oh, they're growing. But I mean, if I'm being honest, I think it's just that my shoes, that my feet got fat. I mean, I was a really strong nine and a half for most of my, whatever, adult life.

AlexOh, my shoes. Okay. No, we could share.

MerlinBut no, the point being, the point being, I could just go in and without even trying them on, which I like to call a Madeline. I've decided by Fiat that this is Emma's size. Yeah, you need to update that and still make the child try on clothes. I don't know. These pants are small on her. Yeah, you know why? Because it's not 2014 anymore. I was a strong nine and a half. And I can tell you one way I definitely know that is that I fucked up on my first pair of Doc Martens, which I bought whilst in San Francisco in 1997.

And I didn't know about English sizes.

AlexOh, boy.

MerlinAnd I was feeling very ebullient. I was in a very good mood. I want to get some shoes. And you know what I did. You can guess what I did. I got the I basically got the equivalent of a nine. And then I had to walk up. Yeah, I had to walk up, walk up Fillmore. And shoes were too small.

AlexOh, no.

MerlinOh, they have stuff now that you can get. Emma had this for her combat boots. There's stuff you can get to like ease up Doc Martens. But there's still if you get Doc Martens that are too small. And boy, this is really a lesson in life, Alex.

AlexYes.

MerlinIf you get Doc Martens that are too small, you're SOL. Unless you're going to do some kind of like, you know, foot binding type situation, which I wouldn't recommend. But they're pretty unyielding. That's actually one of the performance characteristics. And then what I learned was I was at the Nordstrom's at the mall one time. And guess who's in there? A guy who's actually a rep from Doc Martens was in there. I said, boy, I love these shoes. I'd love to get them. But I'm a hard nine and a half.

And he says, well, show me what to do. And he says, because it's Nordstrom's at the mall.

AlexIt's like, what if it's cold?

MerlinWell, that's what she said. And so the person at the counter says, give me some of this. And grabs these little, like, you know, very inexpensive, like, insoles. Like, here, let's try a 10. We put in two of these. Try those on. Fit perfectly.

AlexIs this guy looking for a tip? Why did the...

MerlinBecause he understands the brand.

AlexWas this also a dream?

MerlinHe works for Dr. Martin. It's a doctor, Alex. How do you know?

AlexHow do you know?

MerlinDr. Martin wears a stethoscope and has a lab coat with the Dr. Martin written on it.

AlexOh, that's true. That's true.

MerlinThis is the turmeric that I like. I'm Dr. Martin.

AlexHi.

MerlinTry my air walk shoes.

AlexAre you a lesbian? No. Keep listening. I promise.

MerlinSo that's the thing is if you go try this, go try this. When you go to places again. Oh, today's the first day I didn't wear a mask outside. It felt weird. wow yeah and so what you do is go grab this you could do this with try this way you could do this with socks you could do this whatever go get the dr martens that are a little bigger than your size and you can find a way to have uh them accommodate your feet you can't go the other way but now here's the funny part and this is why i think my feet are fat is that now if i put on any shoes that aren't my size 10 doc martens or crocs everything feels too small i get pinchy my

Adams are pinchy. Oh, interesting. My ASIC, and you know those. I lace those like an invalid. Like you lace the shoes of an invalid. Loose with a tight knot. Loose lace, tight knot.

AlexYes.

MerlinThat's how you lace an invalid. So I do that. I do that, but I'm still pinchy on the Adams end. And then, you know, even my ASICs, my beloved, extremely comfortable, old man, quote unquote, running shoes. i gotta take those i gotta take those off i think my feet got fat have your feet gotten fat

Alexoh well that's the thing is i have always been a a strong women's 11 men's nine and a half wide so we can totally share shoes yes exactly but i'm here okay wait i so i have uh i believe in adam uh what am i doing i guess i'm gonna take a picture of my shoe now uh oh no are you

Merlinlike the lady with the beams oh oh i'm gonna 404 beaming feet feeling hot cat is healthy

Alexthese well well i have not gang stalked by adams i i believe adams has a lot oh god this is the weirdest i i i i've never congratulations merlin i've never sent a picture of my feet to anybody before but there you go the other nice thing is

Merlinout of this you still haven't talked about your very special episode but we're going to record long enough this week that i think this could turn into four very bad episodes oh it could it

Alexcould you know what if you listen we still don't have transcriptions but we have four episodes that

Merlinare even worse it's gonna cost you 40 to hear this but but i i'm going to recommend to you

Alexthe brand kizix and i thought i was gonna be in an adams like an adams apple for life i love

Merlinthem loved the fit i have an adams i have i have all my masks are adams masks adams masks breasts

Alexit's adam's masks adam's adam's mag yeah i i before i could get the kn95 i i double i uh whatchamashits i just doubled with adam's you fouchied yeah yeah yeah um but but kizix which were uh i know i know it's a challenging pronunciation episode kiz kiz kiz kiz it's okay just type it with words but uh it it uh i can't type it there we go uh they are hands This is Adam's claims to be hands-free slip-ons, which I found to not-

MerlinThey're too squishy. They're too squishy to be walk-ins.

AlexBut the Kizik's, no, no, no. They are quite pleasant. These are easier to slip on than my beloved Mack Weldon slippers. Are we just advertising everything for free?

MerlinI love the Mack Weldon slippers. I also, I finally found exactly the right Doc Martin to be a walk-in. like she's wearing my old doc martens which i call fact i cop shoes because they look like the kind of shoes a fat guy or a cop would wear uh-huh i have slightly different ones they're more matte in their finish and they're lower in their in there and i'll send you a photo send a picture of my shoes oh let's send each other photos oh no did you send it the i did i did there's there's

Alexmy foot oh those are also the the pants that you told me to get what am i doing the worries aren't the amazing oh they these are literally not just the most comfortable but the best fitting pants i

Merlinown and i don't really know why oh my god i feel like i feel like some kind of ballet ninja in them yeah it's so weird i feel like i could move in ways i probably shouldn't even try to move

Alexright and also these are not like a woman's fit like i just got and i'm like does this are these I think I am part. You have created a sisterhood of the traveling pants situation. Is that right?

MerlinI had no idea I was doing that.

AlexYeah, I think so. Yeah, these pants are magic. They can fit anybody, I guess. That's what happens when you buy very expensive sweatpants.

MerlinOh, you got pants to fit. That's the boy, Dr. Thorpe pants.

AlexRight, right?

MerlinI'm going to send you my shoe, but I'm not going to have my foot in it because that's a little familiar. Check these out. These are nice. You can see my cow digit. I went back to the cow digit. I wasn't loving the OWC. It was being a little bit wonky for me.

AlexOh, my goodness.

MerlinIt's probably just me.

AlexI don't know. I returned both of mine because I was like, all right, this is so boring. After show.

MerlinNo. No, this is the show. If you don't like this, I can't help you.

AlexOh, boy.

MerlinThere's my shoe. There's my shoe. Oh, and you can also see my pad on my desk, my new pad.

Alexnow is it highly absorbent or

Merlinnope nope I'll send it to you I'll put it in notes

Alexooh that's a very you know what these

Merlinand it comes with a free little cuff that I gave to my wife and she likes it I don't know why it comes with a thing that's like a bracelet I don't know if you're supposed to use it to roll it up she's wearing it as a bracelet it looks really cute it's reversible it's yellow on one side and blue on the other and it's a little bit padded I'll send it to you I'll put it in notes

Alexwhat I enjoy is the thread

MerlinWhat I enjoy.

AlexMatches. What I want is a shoe that matches my gigantic mouse pad.

MerlinA bastic of panados.

AlexI don't even know what that means.

MerlinPracticed in a bastic. Oh, that's John's daughter who he's not supposed to, who's pronouncing, malaprops and mispronunciations he's not supposed to talk about on the show.

AlexUh-huh, uh-huh.

MerlinBut we say bastic of panados now. Or breakfast.

AlexIt's so. Want to start. Oh, big, big fault.

MerlinDid you ever read The Wasteland? did you ever read the annotated version of the wasteland with all the footnotes uh no no you're

Alexnot missing you're not missing much okay all right um is it what am i oh that's a big boy oh you've sent me the amazon link to your it is refers oh i like a good name it's called moco

Merlincomputer desk mat pu large extended gaming mouse pad non-slip keyboard mouse pad mat uh waterproof office writing desk pad protector 31.5 by 15.7 by 0.08 inch uh dash double side royal blue

Alexslash yellow. You know what? You are watching BoJack Horseman. You've got a computer, Matt. I think you're a gamer. Oh, God. It's going to happen.

MerlinBoy, you are horny for Rick and Morty. You really want me. You're talking about it publicly.

AlexI am publicly. I've always been so horny for Rick and Morty.

MerlinI like Back to the Future, and I think Back to the Future 2 is underrated. My daughter loves Back to the

AlexFuture 3. That is my spouse's favorite movie. Back to the Future 2.

MerlinIt's House's favorite movie?

AlexMy spouse matching my house. My house matching.

MerlinDr. House. Your pill-popping partner. It's not lupus. This show sucks.

AlexIt's so bad.

MerlinI don't know why I'm so full of beans. I'm just so mad about my Scarlet Focus.

Alexright i'm just so mad i well well i don't understand what you wanted what's the fancy

Merlinone i want what i want one thing i would want i think i think i need to buy a nice one and there's that one it's not the one that dan likes with has a single knob on it there's the one that comes with i think it's actually thunderbolt not usb but there's one the one she he got i gotta go look it up but it's the one where like it comes with all the really good software and you do and this comes with a bunch of like demo where bullshit and Ableton light, you know, uh, consumer. Um, but there's the one that comes with that amazing software where you get like a

rack of effects on your Mac and like it works and it's good and it's got lots of headroom and stuff.

AlexI don't think I have that one. I don't know.

MerlinLet me see if it's on my wishlist. I tend to add things to my wishlist.

AlexI, I, I, uh, well, I, I don't put my, my house spouse occasionally pops in to be like, Hey, is there, Are there any gifts we can get the man child? And I'm like, do you mean the man child?

MerlinOh, the man child.

AlexOr the man.

MerlinOh, stay out of my wish list. Oh, God, Focusrite Scarlet is on the list. Need to delete. I showed her first episode of Always Sunny.

AlexWhich one? Which one?

MerlinSweet D is dating a special person.

Alexoh oh i mean that's that sure is

Merlini love when charlie's been snort when he's been huffing spray paint he's under the blanket dennis walks in in the outfit and and he's he's in the dark playing his his day man song and and then this is so funny to me he looks at dennis and he goes he points at his head and he goes what's going on up here you hold me down with your strong arms night man night man you come

inside me night man marry me i've got a lot of rorschachs i've got a lot uh boy i need to update this old okay so maybe i'll go look in slack um alex uh i don't know do you want to talk about a

Alexthing which are we oh where's that doc hello doc do you want to i mean do you want to talk you don't

Merlinhave to if you want to oh i can you'd well you had wanted to and i wanted to afford that i thought first we'd warm up with an hour and a half of fucking bullshit oh yes indeed well i feel like

Alexsome of that will be in the after show i don't know uh either welcome to the after show or not

Merlini don't fucking care i'm not gonna hit this sorry quinn the yeah sorry which quinn which Which queen do you mean?

AlexI don't know. Which queen? No, no. Ding. I mean, okay, all right.

MerlinI got a lot of Jean Grays in here. I must really like Jean Gray.

AlexYou don't say. Well, are these Dark Phoenix Grays or?

MerlinWell, I got a lot of dark dolls. I'm looking more for collectibles. This one's $359. That's a lot of money.

AlexHoly.

MerlinAlex, what's going on in your life?

AlexWell, I mean, if people have listened to, if people are, sorry, sorry, hold on. I just, I just searched for Merlin Mann in Amazon because I don't actually know how to find wish lists. But then a number of products pop up, none of which that are, oh yes, this is free in Kindle Unlimited. Yes, yes. Oh, what a good.

MerlinOh my God. I've never seen this. Oh my God.

AlexYes, yes, yes.

MerlinThis looks terrible. Is this a joke?

Alexthis no no i mean i'm sure it is a joke i wish this version still existed the ver oh sorry the

Merlinversion of getting things done it's on bookshelves now is the revised edition that's not near not it's

Alexnot nearly as good they should go back they should throw it out and go back to the old edition here well and and they could they could do like a vintage i was showing off i was showing off to

Merlinmy kid at barnes and noble i was saying hey count the number of folders there you ever heard of that and then i showed pictures of me sitting of us sitting with david allen playing with his dog she's like why are you showing me this why is this why is this cell phone is this so old

Alexis this funny why is it funny why is why is this funny well my next action is you suck

Merlinwhat does that even mean that's not what she used to say when she was three that's not funny that's not even a joke getting shit done the art of feeling good about doing nothing yeah all right it feels kindly i started reading john cleese's book about creativity isn't it good

AlexSorry. Yeah.

MerlinSomebody mentioned it. Was it you?

AlexProbably. I mean, I enjoy it very much.

MerlinBecause his talk on creativity, which I will find four notes, his talk on creativity with the weird Danish subtitles is one of the best YouTube videos ever.

AlexYes. Agreed. Agreed. Agreed.

MerlinHe talks about the four things you need to be creative. Something time and time. So good. So fucking good.

AlexBut Merlin, why is it shot on such an old, bad camera?

MerlinYeah, is this supposed to be funny?

AlexYeah, why?

MerlinAnd it's all framed with light bulb jokes.

Alexremember that yes i know it's in uh my my alex happy place playlist i believe well that's also

Merlinthe video that got me into looking at i think his name is stewart brown which sounds like euphemism for pooping but the guy the guy the play guy as featured in my uh in my ranty video

Alexthe i i'd love that i'd love that are we are we talking about old butcher procrastinating

Merlinforgetting who we are oh and neil and neil dash oh gosh and neil dash was very very concerned about

Alexme at the time oh you you mean your your breakthrough my my very no no my very close

Merlinfriend who keeps me honest with his things he claims to believe um the thing is alex what's

Alexgoing on with your life oh uh oh oh we're talking about that one time at one time at a dinner i

Merlinmade a joke about somebody a few tables over and he he looked at me very earnestly and told me that that was an ageist thing to say. And I said, I said, ageist, ageist. What I said was not ageist, but he did use the opportunity at a personal dinner to tell me I was being ageist.

AlexOh, weird.

MerlinNot how he was there.

AlexWeird.

MerlinI felt bad about it. But I did have a drink with him one time in New York and it went really well. I took a good photo of him. I'll send it to you. He's a good guy. He's a good guy. I like his family.

AlexI keep getting distracted by this, closing that tab of getting-

MerlinWhat? You're looking at my wish list?

AlexNo, getting shit. I can't find it, but getting shit done lady who is just like.

MerlinIt looks kind of like not Elizabeth Olsen. Peggy from The Office.

AlexYes, yes, yes. Handmaiden's Tale.

MerlinHandmaiden's Elizabeth.

AlexGosh, I didn't realize the new season was out.

MerlinI know we were going to catch up totes and like we're not even done with season one. You can only watch so many of those in a night.

AlexOh, yeah. That's a that's a like.

Merlinwhen you get sad from that you can go watch the funny horse show

Alexoh no disaster why

Merlinorb is horse I'm going to find my wish list what's going on with you

Alextransition we'll start the very special episode

Merlinsegue

Alexmy favorite kind of scoot scoot so the other day I called you and said you're not in trouble but what I am going to be doing And I don't know if this is going to affect Dubai Friday. Probably not. People are listening. Don't worry. Everything's fine. But people seem to react poorly. When I tell them this.

MerlinYou'd be amazed how unreassuring it is.

AlexI know.

MerlinWhen you say you are not in trouble, nothing in my life feels more like an accusation than you doing the thing I ask you to do, which is always begin by telling me I'm not in trouble.

AlexI'm going to open my Diet Coke now. It's that kind of day. Listen, you guys.

MerlinThis is not bad news. It's opportunity news.

AlexI am taking a brief what is technically called a disability leave from my jobby job, which basically means that for the next month or so, my jobby job becomes my mental health, which might mean that.

MerlinAlex, is it because of your job that you took the break?

AlexOh, my God. No. Yeah.

MerlinOkay. Thank you. Continue.

AlexOh, no, no, no.

MerlinIt just saved you five agonizing nights.

AlexOh, yes. No. No, actually, this is something I have been thinking about doing for a year or so. Because, I mean, we talk about it kind of on the show. It's no secret. But I'm bipolar, which is a big old bummer.

And this month, I decided, all right, I'm not. The thing is, when people take a break from their jobs, often it's because of burnout. I'm the opposite because when you're bipolar, I wish I could burn out. Yeah, exactly.

MerlinPlease stop. This sweet release of sleep or death.

AlexAll right. I'm probably making people worry. I want to just get through this. But but I'm so I am taking an opportunity to basically reset my body in terms of changing up all of my prescribed and supervised medication, which, as most people know, it takes at least two weeks for psych meds to kick in, let alone see if they work. So yeah, I'm just taking basically a break from work, which would only be possible if you didn't give us your or if you.

Wow. Words. Thank you, people, for giving us your fucking money and supporting our Patreon.

MerlinAlex's Alex's health health break is sponsored by listeners like you.

AlexIt's sponsored by Dubai Friday and Dr. Martin. But yeah, I don't think it's going to affect the show unless I have to do some inpatient time, which in either case, it's I see it feels weird about talking. It feels weird talking about this because it is not a big deal, but it seems a big deal to folks because as we have embraced like, yeah, depression and anxiety is totally like a thing that people can experience in their lives.

sometimes their entire life, sometimes for a short amount of time. And ADHD now, I think, is becoming much less stigmatized, and I hope it continues to be. But I'll try to find this for notes. There was a great article about what some people, including me, refer to as the big scaries, which is like being bipolar or being BPD, which is borderline personality disorder or schizophrenic or schizoaffective, which is now like the same thing on the big old

DSM-5, which I know...

MerlinSay the big scaries?

AlexYeah, the big scaries. So the ones that if I was not financially stable, I would literally be homeless. That is just the reality of some mental illnesses. And it sucks. It sucks so much. But, you know, part of like working for or like fighting for labor rights and stuff is actually using it when you can. Like the like the reason that the ADA exists is so that people can take care of themselves before it is an emergency.

uh so i don't know i feel i felt like i'd be a fucking hypocrite not to be like all right my mental health is not great right now because i'm like manic all the time and well hypomanic

Merlinso you but you just you um you did you notice it as the re-emergence of something uh uncomfortably familiar i mean i don't know if i'm putting that well but like did you go like whoopsie doopsie here it comes like this is that thing I don't want that again yeah it it I thought you know

Alexthis was just you know my uh like maybe this is brain fog as I I don't really know what brain fog is because uh I don't experience it I just like miss whole periods of time like I completely forget like oh I literally don't remember this episode that I'm re-listening to and taking notes for yeah no but that's that's the thing nothing that that's why i feel so weird to talk about because this is not a health emergency i am not everybody don't worry i am

not a threat to myself or others this is not like an alex needs to go to the emergency room and maddie needs to write something very weird on a form um fam yeah we need to talk about alex listen

Merlinbut like the listeners like i think i don't know i'll speak for myself as a listener i i appreciate i appreciate your i think the phrase i used was vulnerability or rawness i i think without i don't know if you realize it or not, but you help a ton of people, including me, which is like,

so all I'm trying to say, I don't mean to interrupt you, but like, I think people, that's one thing people love about you. It's you're like, hey, this is it. Like, you're looking at it. Like, this is what you get. And that is not only, I think, enjoyable and entertaining, but it's also something where it's like, shit, man, like, maybe I should take advantage of that thing that I've got, or maybe I should talk to somebody, or maybe I should whatever, setting aside the fact that people would really worry if we were like knitting our brows about, oh, where's Alex? Why hasn't anybody said anything? It must be,

it must, I have intuited that it must be this because of my priors and guesses, or I have intuited it as this. I think it's just, if I may say, sane and healthy and cool for you to tell our listeners about this, because it might help them as well as entertain them.

AlexPeople just share really lovely things with me. And if I haven't ever answered a message, it's probably because it made me happy cry. And then I was in denial about it. and uh i hate my feelings i apologize um but i one thank you uh that was very nice to uh too because it's always two genders with me uh i feel i felt like i i often worry about sharing things because i'm self-conscious about looking like i want attention and i'm like i'm like alex shut

up that's dumb because you know where were you where you were almost 10 years ago in the same place totally miserable listening to podcasts and wow those parasocial relationships and that kind of stuff really helped you to see other people see uh hear other people be vulnerable and not just vulnerable but like still okay like the world didn't end nobody ate you and also and also for

Merlinsome people, I can't tell if you're talking about me or not, but like also with some people, it's like, you know, it's a little bit Kierkegaardian in some ways, like, you know, the sickness unto death almost, which is like, you know, the tragedy is that we survive everything until we don't. But it is, I find it really buoyant when somebody is able to say this really sucks. But, you know,

Alexas Elaine Stritch says, you know, I'm still here. Yeah. And that's the thing is right now, things

Merlindon't suck for me because they're not an emergency but the idea is you keep them from becoming an

Alexemergency that's the whole yeah and it it i again like if i'm gonna be on my high fucking horse about uh preventative care and and our health care system and prioritizing mental health i should probably do that uh myself and it's not that i haven't like um it just whenever i've been feeling wonky i figured a pandemic which you know because a lot of people are feeling wonky and But then it was like, oh, this is clearly a pattern that I saw in myself previously, and I ignored it to an unhealthy degree.

And that leads from hypomania to actual mania, which is the kind of big scary that you don't want, that I had in college.

MerlinYou run for office.

AlexI mean, and I've been really lucky that, like, you know, on my, I don't want to go back to spending all night on the train journaling compulsively. Like I was and the reason, again, like that I talk about this on the show as well. Yeah, it I hope that it helps people to know that not just that you're not alone, but it can be normal to have your brain chemistry just not be. It's OK if your brain gets fucked up.

I know we're not supposed to say crazy, but sometimes I feel crazy and then I then I work on it. I don't so much. Um, and I, I swear I've talked about this more eloquently before. And I, in fact, I've done talks about this, but I didn't take notes for this. Uh, I don't know. And yeah, I've been talking about not just Merlin, but like Syracuse too. And all the podcasts I would listen to just in when I didn't have the words for something

and when I did not want to have words, just listening to smart, kind adults. makes and not that i am smart and or kind but i don't know it would also feel super weird trying to talk around it on this show because uh as you like to say kind of vulnerable for a living so like i i didn't want to skirt around it's man it's gonna be a fucking weird not like doing my jobby job for a month it's so weird i already miss it which is weird but yeah anyway the so

if things sound different, uh,

Merlinor like if I could just jump in real quick,

Alexlike if please do, I'm just all floundering.

MerlinI, I, I really, I hope you're listening to this right now because it seems like you are. And thank you very much for listening. And I, uh, what is it I'm supposed to say? I hate your ugly face. What do I say to you instead? You have a stupid, you have a stupid face. You have a stupid face. That's my new word that makes you maybe not hang up on me. But, uh, I, I would, I would almost want to, I'm not going to refer people to this episode. because it was a terrible episode up till now. But I also don't want to feel the need to do backflips and give updates. I am not a penis lawyer and I am not a brain lawyer.

Please do not look to anybody for constant updates about how things are going. That's so nice of you. Unless you want that. If you want that, give people the avenue. But this is one of those things like it's the opposite of the library, you know, having to sign up about search warrants. You know that thing? The canary warning. So like in libraries, they started doing this thing after the Patriot Act, librarians would hang up a sign that says, the government has not served a search warrant here in the last month or something like that. And when the sign went down,

so like in the spy show I'm watching, where like I'm just, I don't want you to say anything. I want you to just, I'm going to, it's like, you know, so like all the president's men, I'm going to keep asking you questions. And when the question I ask you is yes, hang up the phone. Right. You know what I'm saying? Like it's the opposite of that. Like just please, please assume good intentions. And please assume Alex's health. And please definitely internalize the idea that unless they tell you otherwise, I'm speaking for you, please forgive me. Please don't assume that they will be available, that Alex will be available to give you constant real-time updates to keep you reassured.

The way to be reassured is that Alex knows what they're doing and is surrounded by cool people. And I'm just – I want to – let's give Alex some runway to do their thing. So if we miss an episode, it could just be because, I don't know, I did something autoerotic that didn't work out. Just assume that. I just don't want you to have to constantly be doing a ticker tape to a thousand people to let them know that you haven't gotten a search warrant.

AlexYeah. I mean, literally, that's the thing. It's literally – if we miss an episode, it's probably that I ended up waiting too long in the doctor's office. Like it's – and I –

MerlinBut the goal of this from my POV, and you can please correct me if I'm wrong, the reason for the taking time off work is it seems twofold because it's always twofold with you. One is that you don't need the stress of having to have a job that can be very demanding just in the work that you do. But it's also that, as you described, there are times where you're just going to have to go sit in a chair and people are just going to watch you and make sure today went okay. And you need runway to do that. You know what I mean?

AlexYeah. Like that's that's the other thing is I would not be able to take care of myself if my job didn't. Well, one, if we didn't have this amazing show and two, if my job didn't offer the benefit of being able to do this, because it's like going to be like a full time. Well, I mean, I don't completely know yet, but yeah, you spend like seven hours waiting for doctors.

MerlinIt's just you're it could there could be days where your health does become a full time job.

AlexYeah. And right. Exactly. There is a future because this being, again, unfortunately, I probably won't ever be able to raw dog my mental illness.

MerlinExcuse me? Pardon me? Raw dog your mental illness? What? Say again, I really super need to hear that. What was that?

AlexDidn't you tell me this? Raw dog a mental illness? Like, just go full off. Some people don't do meds.

MerlinI'm taking a leave of absence from podcasting for my screaming Mimi.

Alexoh i will report back if i see a padded room because i've i've uh i've been like hospitalized before again folks this is not that everything's okay but also if you ever need to be hospitalized that's okay too but the biggest disappointment for from a from for me is that our psychiatric system seems to sometimes treat people as if they're humans and there are no more padded rooms

MerlinI want a padded room right? Shit man I'd want to be at somewhere like Bedlam. I don't know if you've ever seen like drawings of what it was like or if you ever saw Amadeus like basically like where Salieri was except he got his own room

AlexOh I haven't seen that but

MerlinOh but it would be so great I'd love to do it like where they put you in a cage. That'd be kind of hot I bet in Germany they do that and people pay for it

AlexRight right yeah no no people yeah God

MerlinMy hypomania is really quite upsetting. Perhaps I should be treated like a how you say dog

AlexI could have a leash.

MerlinPerhaps if you installed a catheter and made me pay you financially, that's something that would help with my mental health, perhaps.

AlexYes, just sip this.

MerlinI could drink your urine. It would be maybe helpful for my mental health.

AlexThese pills look a little like poop. I want to check. What am I doing?

MerlinYou're doing you. You're being normal manic.

Alexgosh the oh

Merlinmaybe you're mezzomanic

Alexmezz

Show notes

Transcript

238. Desk of Theseus

Show notes

Transcript

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