Podcasts about Organ Trail

Join Weird West Radio as we delve into Organ Trail (2023), a frontier survival thriller directed by Michael Patrick Jann and penned by Meg Turner. Set against the icy Montana wilderness of the 1870s, the film follows Abigale Archer (Zoé De Grand Maison) as she battles to reclaim her family's horse from a ruthless gang...

Join Weird West Radio as we dive into The Pale Door, a 2020 horror-western where a botched heist leads two brothers and their gang into a ghost town haunted by witches. We explore the film’s eerie atmosphere, its mix of family drama and supernatural tension, and the chilling impact of its unsettling villains. Host(s) Mike,...

FULL EP HERE: https://www.patreon.com/slopquest Ryan taunts Andy with 2012 Los Angeles home prices. Then Ryan talks about the organ thief conspiracy facing hospitals while Andy talks about how to measure fat guy's inseam. Then Andy wants to work out at dude's only naked gym but he can't seem to sell O'Neill on the idea. Then they talk about how showing the b-hole is the ultimate path to financial freedom. Then Andy f's up a friend's joke he's trying to plug. Then they talk about how gross wearing sneakers inside during the 80's and 90's was. The gang read's Elbert's Freddy Got Fingered review and lose it at how mad it made Ebert. Then O'Neill brags about eating French cookies that only have 4 grams of sugar in them. Then O'Neill borrows one of Andy's DvD and sticks it in a toaster. Then the boys come up with an idea for medicine that works BETTER when you drink and O'Neill talks about how bad old people blew it.

Mark & Lynn Scotch are a married pair of cyclists and living kidney donors. They chose to donate to strangers after a chance encounter in a bar, and share in-depth about the testing and donation process. Now Mark cycles the country, raising awareness about the need for more living donors.  This is an episode of Let's Talk Hope from our friends at Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network. Learn more about living donation on our website at nkfi.org/be-a-donor

Millennials, come here. We are talking to you. Walk with us. Remember in the 90's, being in school and heading to the library or computer lab and playing Oregon Trail? Remember naming your in-game family after friends, real life family or even celebrities that were hot at the time? Ash, J3RMZ and special guest Mike Unofficial do! The crew hopped in the wagon and talked about 2023's Organ Trail. Did the crew make it to their destination in on piece or did Ash get cholera? Did J3RMZ die from dysentery? Did Mike catch that pesky typhoid fever? Let's just say one of these 3 didn't make it out alive. Stay tuned to the end of the episode for an announcement. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ash-caldwell/support

⚫ JUMP AROUND 0:00 - Top Of The Show 14:03 - Nick Swardson 27:30 - Meineke 35:15 - Seattle Comedy Drama 49:30 - Sam's Jokes ⚫ FOLLOW SAM MILLER: https://www.sammillercomedy.com Youtube @sammillercomedian https://www.tiktok.com/@sammillercomedian https://www.facebook.com/makeolympialaughagain https://www.instagram.com/sammillercomedian ⚫ FOLLOW JES ANDERSON: https://jesanderson.com Youtube @coachsmoach https://www.tiktok.com/@coachsmoach https://www.facebook.com/coachsmoach https://www.instagram.com/coachsmoach

In this episode, Marion sits down with Mark and Lynn Scotch, avid bikers and remarkable living donors. Mark and Lynn share their inspiring journey from meeting in high school and raising a family to making the life-changing decision to donate their kidneys. They talk through the moment that sparked their decision and the profound impact of becoming living donors.Learn about the critical need for living donors, the statistics behind organ donation, and the misconceptions surrounding organ donation. Discover the important role of the National Kidney Registry Voucher Program in their donation process and how it has made a significant difference in organ donation.Listen as they discuss the unexpected encounter that led Mark to donate his kidney and the ease of becoming a living donor, emphasizing the minimal impact on donors' lives. Hear about Mark's post-donation bike ride and the creation of the "Organ Trail."  Join us for an episode filled with compassion, awareness, and the extraordinary story of two ordinary people making an extraordinary impact.Guests: Mark and Lynn Scotch, Living Kidney Donors. 

This week Mr. Pold tells about his trip to Texas. Consumption: Mr. Pold - Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Avatar: The Last Airbender season 1, Oppenheimer, The Grand Tour: Sand Job St. Jimmy - Death on the Nile, Organ Trail, Voyagers D'Viddy - Fantastic Planet, Avatar: The Last Airbender season 1, The Grand Tour: Sand Job, Blue Moon Investigations: Cases 7-9 Master Z - Six Nations: Full Contact Music Provided By: Greg Gibbs / Most Guitars Are Made of Trees The Clientele / Impossible The Prefab Messiahs / Don't Go to the Party

Randy takes in a double feach at The Plaza, Clark mostly talks about water slides with “Zone of Interest” and Russell begrudgingly took the “Organ Trail”. Films: The Sweet East (2023), Monster (2023), Acute Misfortune (2018), The Zone of Interest (2023), Self Reliance (2023), Underground (2023), Organ Trail (2023), Cocoon (1985), The Girlfriend Experience (2016 Series) Hey, we're on YouTube!  Listening on an iPhone? Don't forget to rate us on iTunes!   Fill our fe-mailbag by emailing us at OverlookHour@gmail.com   Reach us on Instagram (@theoverlooktheatre) Facebook (@theoverlookhour) Twitter (@OverlookHour)

Boooooo! Kids.....Paul and John continue our spooktober Halloween series with Organ Trail. A spin-off of its Apple IIc version Oregon Trail. Join us and listen in where all pods are cast.

Movies discussed: Perpetrator, Organ Trail, Juan of the Dead, Floor 9.5 (short) This time around, we have a middling set of movies, which leads to many diverting tangents as we seek to avoid talking about them. The takeaway: Alicia Silverstone should play more ambiguous/villainy roles as she ages. Next episodes assignments: The Feast Feast Faust (1926) The Itch (short) Watch along with us if you like and we'll see you next week. The post Episode 464 – Captain Slaptits' Wahoo Hullabaloo appeared first on Horror Show Hot Dog.

Patrick and Jan B. talk about science fiction movies. Download this episode here. (41.3 MB)Listen to F This Movie! on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts. Also discussed this episode: 65 (2023), Princess Mononoke (1999), Bottoms (2023), You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitvah (2023), Matinee (1993), Organ Trail (2023), Outpost (2023)

We drink Joyful Lazy Swirls by Ten Bends Beer and Set & Setting by Barewolf Brewing. We talk beers, Emily finally sees Get Out and TJ talks about Organ Trail (it's not the movie you think it will be). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

No, this isn't the old computer game, nor is it a true horror film (according to TFGAG, anyways).  Saddle up for our review of this western flick that dabbles in gore and doubles down on the Wild West.  Ways you can support the podcast! Leave us a review on iTunes! Join our subreddit and leave us feedback!  (Doesn't cost you a dime, just a little bit of time!)

I scream, you scream, we all scream for a brand new episode of The Grave Plot Podcast! Come and join us for a magical adventure through Horror Business, including a Real World Horror story about a perfectly preserved nun corpse, the upcoming film Boy Kills World (no Topanga, sorry), and of course, Nicolas Cage. We also discuss a spooky movie based on the famous Queen Mary, a new version of The Invisible Man, and the third installment in the All Hallow's Eve franchise. For our film reviews, we take the Organ Trail to New York City and talk about the sexennial (yeahhhh) Scream movie, as well as a western thriller with no organs. So grab your cowboy hats and your I HEART NY t-shirts because nothing makes any sense and the points don't matter on The Grave Plot Podcast.

Flesh Wound Horror Live, with brand new reviews, news, and out of control shenanigans. On this episode we cover the brand new Western Horror flick, ORGAN TRAIL, the sexy new Culture Shock Blu-Ray, DEBBIE DOES DEMONS, the slasher movie, I'LL BE WATCHING, Mondo Macabro's insane new release of 80's cult horror, DR. CALIGARI, & the highly anticipated ENYS MEN . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbXI-_wWFaI

The wild west can occasionally be an understatement....On this episode we are back in the wiles of VOD country as we dive into a brand new offering available on all major platforms today.  It's time for 'Organ Trail'.Abigale and her family fall victim to a ruthless gang while making their way across the Oregon Trail. As the only survivor, she will do whatever it takes to retrieve her one earthly possession, her family's horse, from the clutches of the bloodthirsty bandits.It's a thrilling and intense ride and we had the unique pleasure of spending a few minutes with one of the stars of the film, Olivia Applegate.  We asked her about getting the job, the challenges of working outdoors and so very much more....

Hey everybody, I'm Greg Sowell and this is Why Am I, a podcast where I talk to interesting people and try to trace a path to where they find themselves today.  My guest this go around is Mather Zickel.  He's a professional actor who started life in NYC, and with multiple tries, finally made the migration to LA.  He's started in theater, and as expected moved to TV, and movies; he's actually been at it for over two decades now.  When asked if he would ever teach it was a resounding ‘“no”, but for someone who doesn't want to teach he seems to understand much of the psychology and method that it takes to be successful; sometimes those that are the most reluctant make the best teachers; maybe a little food for thought for all of us.  I hope you enjoy this chat with Mather. Help us grow by sharing with someone! Please show them some love on their socials here: https://www.instagram.com/matherpzickel/?hl=en, https://www.vudu.com/content/movies/details/Organ-Trail/2311345, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18071972/. Find more info at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://whyamipod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. If you want to support the podcast you can do so via ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/whyamipod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (this gives you access to bonus content like the Fantasy Restaurant!)

Show Notes: We reconnect with previous guests on episodes 160 and 169, Mark and Lynn Scotch, whose chance meeting during a leisure trip to Louisiana, saved another man's life through the living kidney donor voucher program. You don't want to miss the updates to their remarkable saga and learn where The Organ Trail has taken this inspiring couple now. Then we chat about different stages of change, and honor hero Keith Savoie.

Justin & Bill discuss the latest weird news headlines including no regret monkey theft, being not quite dead yet, kids with deep pockets & more.

Langston and David answer a listener's email about organ donor and harvesting speculations in the Black community. MILF Manor is discussed and we all are devastated by the world. Send your conspiracy theories, music drops, and any problematic talks to mymommapod@gmail.com You will not want to miss My Momma Told Me LIVE! at The Elysian in Los Angeles, California. Show is on Thursday, February 16th at 7:30pm. Get your tickets here! Not in Los Angeles? Catch the show LIVE on Moment! Get your MomentHouse tickets here! We are now on YouTube! Listen & Watch episodes of My Momma Told Me. Subscribe to the channel here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My guest this week is Mark Scotch who is a kidney voucher donor and founder of “The Organ Trail” which raises awareness for the need of kidney donors, especially living kidney donors, and to show people that even with one kidney you can lead a life full of activities.

Revues et podcasts hebdomadaire en direct ! Venez nous voir ! Site web: https://beacons.ai/mindedmetal Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MetalMindedCan Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindedmetal/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MindedMetal Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/14BH6eJjqqyLEUGRNriwTL Discord: https://discord.gg/S8aGTEj Nos partenaires : Horreur FM: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKVHDSO6WOIoqbs5V6oIdIQ Melogy Musicraft: https://www.melogymusicraft.com Boutique Broue HAHA: https://brouehaha.com À la dérive brasserie artisanale: https://aladerivebrasserieartisanale.ca Cordonnerie chez Gerry: https://cordonneriechezgerry.ca Le Fanzine Crypt of Dr. Gore: https://cryptofdrgore.wordpress.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/metalmindedpodcast/message

This week we are joined by Michael Patrick Jann, director of the upcoming film Organ Trail and member of The State, to watch John Hughes' all-time classic teen drama The Breakfast Club.  We talk a little about fashion, a little about lunch, and a lot about the ego, Jungian self, and gestalt therapy.  And, it should be said, crass sex jokes. If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing René Clair's I Married a Witch (1942).

Join us this week with Erica Berger. She's been a long time Casting Director and been an integral part of casting on such shows as Mayor of Kingstown, Hart of Dixie, Revenge, and the upcoming HBO show Love and Death and films such as Hocus Pocus 2, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Organ Trail. From her first casting gig on That's So Raven to Wu Assassins Erica has worked on Comedy, Drama, and everything in between. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Erica Berger ⌲ IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1497024/ ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ The Moving Spotlight Podcast ⌲ iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-moving-spotlight/id1597207264 ⌲ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7cjqYAWSFXz2hgCHiAjy27 ⌲ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/themovingspotlight ⌲ ALL: https://linktr.ee/themovingspotlight ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ #MayorOfKingstown #ThatsSoRaven #HBO #LoveAndDeath #CSA #Casting #HartOfDixie #HocusPocus #HocusPocus2 #Clifford #RedDog #CliffordTheBigRedDog #OrganTrail #Agents #Mangers #CastingDirectors #WuAssassins #Emmys #TVTime #iTunes #Actor #ActorsLife #Believe #Success #Inspiration #Netflix #Hulu #Amazon #HBO #AppleTV #Showtime #Acting #Artist #Theatre #Film #YourBestBadActing #Content #CorbinCoyle #JohnRuby #RealFIREacting #TMS_Pod --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-moving-spotlight/support

 The Stephen King Terror Timeline Part 2 is back and we watched all 6 hours of The Stand (1994) to talk about one of the masterworks of Director Mick Garris and one of the more popular King TV events ever. Plus musical guest Organ Trail returns courtesy of Horror Pain Gore Death Productions (HorrorPainGoreDeath.com)

On this Netflix special, we're hiking through hog hell with permanent boners. So raise your seltzers to shitting in a hole, and crushing the taco with a fat hog. 

 (As always 1 day early for our beloved Patrons) The devil has come to town to open up a pawn shop, no not Dan.. we mean Max Von Sydow! You can get your heart's desire, it will only cost you your soul. This week we're covering NEEDFUL THINGS (1993) on an all new SHV as the Stephen King Terror Timeline continues. Join us for a discussion about nepotism and turkey shit. Plus special musical guest Organ Trail appears courtesy of HorrorPainGoreDeath.com performing the song "Trachea Stomp".

It sounds like the beginning of a joke: two guys walk in to a bar. However, the conversation that took place was no joke and forever changed the lives of Mark Scotch and Hugh Smith. After talking about general topics like sports, politics, and the weather, Mark was surprised when Hugh got up to leave. Mark kidded him, saying it was still early enough in the day to enjoy another beer, but Hugh explained he needed to get home to begin a dialysis routine. Although Hugh never brought up living kidney donation, Mark thought that it was something he could do. As Mark began researching living donation, he was shocked to learn about the critical need for kidney transplants. He felt more could be done to raise awareness for this need, and he wanted to give an example of life after living donation. Listen as Mark shares his unique experience riding his bike on the Organ Trail.

Kidney donor, Mark Scotch, is this week's guest on the Energy Stoners™ Cafe podcast.  He discusses why he became a kidney donor, and his 1600-mile bike ride at 65 years-old. He has termed his journey, ‘the organ trail' to improve awareness of organ donation. As he shares his fascinating story, he also discusses the benefits of organ donation.   Guest: Facebook ‘the organ trail' www.theorgantrail.org www.nkr.org   national kidney registry   Host:  toniquesttv@gmail.com

Show Notes: Mark Scotch rode a bicycle across the US to raise awareness for living kidney donation and registration as an organ, tissue and eye donor, and now he's right here on episode 169 to share the details of his journey. We welcome Mark along with his wife, Lynn, and his kidney voucher recipient, Hugh Smith, to hear their update. Sara leads a conversation about how pessimism can deter motivation. Then we honor this episode's hero, Rachelle Leger.

Hailing from Raleigh, North Carolina, Vassia Kouprianov joins me for today's podcast. He's a busy man, and that's putting it lightly! Not only is he in four different bands actively, he also plays multiple instruments across those four bands. He plays guitar, bass, drums, and has even been credited with lead and backing vocals in bands like Pathogenesis, Basura, Rale, and Organ Trail. The man is married to the game, people! He's constantly writing, performing, and recording music and his work rate is something to be admired. How he juggles all of that while working multiple jobs is beyond me. We talk about each of his bands, the regional scene in the Raleigh/Virginia area, and I mistakenly bring up Arch Enemy. WHOOPS. 

Waynesboro, Pennsylvania boys Tim Ulrich and Dylan Potts of deathgrind legends Organ Trail join me for a podcast to cover a wealth of subjects. We talk the art of naming songs in death metal, baking with dismembered animal carcasses, the riff life, and much more. We even chat a bit about their upcoming studio album that they just shipped off for mixing and mastering. And I couldn't let them go without talking about one of my favorite songs ever recorded, "That's My Mother You're Pissing On." Give yourself a challenge and see how quickly you can say "Flagrant Fucking Filth" without getting your (worm) tongue twisted.

Show Notes: We connected with Mark Scotch from Wisconsin, whose chance meeting during a leisure trip to Louisiana, saved another man's life through the living kidney donor voucher program. You don't want to miss this remarkable story and how it led to the creation of The Organ Trail. Then we chat about what true mindfulness is and honor hero Cameron Dice.

After Star is swallowed by the giant eel the rest of the party is forced to continue the battle with Jerrin's forces as they rush to complete the mysterious ritual. Check out our Patreon for sweet sweet bonus content! Then follow us on social media and send us your favourite moments from the show and we'll gift a character inspiration and give you a shout-out! @wondernblunder Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

This week, Ryan and Elliot take a bite out of Zombie Video Games. We talk about tropes, loss of hopes, and sidekick dopes. Topics include Resident Evil 5, Lollipop Chainsaw, and Gwyn, Lord of Cinder. Plus, Who's Your Post-Apocalyptic Daddy? and Thunderdome! Check your friends for bite marks and bar your windows. It's going to be UNDEAD.Check out Old Firehouse Books: https://www.oldfirehousebooks.com/Check out Ryan's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw2likeSic3viV5oDobLbvQFind Michael J. O'Connor's tunes: https://michaeljoconnor.bandcamp.com/And don't go hollow!!!

In this episode Matt and Enn recap episode 21 of Law & Order, Sonata for Solo Organ. This episode appears to be the GENESIS for the urban legend of kidney thieves, but is it really an urban legend? Listen to find out...

This time on Soundcheck, Michael, Andrew and Ben join forces with Brendan Valentine, resident video game expert and host of fellow CM Life podcast the Raving Geeks to talk about what makes video game music so important. The regular hosts also discuss their personal favorite video game soundtracks. I got one word for you: Gamer! | Featured Artists (and games): Jack Wall, Mass Effect 2, C418, Minecraft, Sugarcult, Burnout Paradise, Awesome Snakes, Skate 2, ConcernedApe, Stardew Valley, Junichi Masuda and Go Ichinose, Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald, Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, Jeremy Soule, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Ben Crossbones, Organ Trail, OFF!, Grand Theft Auto V, BADBADNOTGOOD, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Lou Reed, Whirr, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Buckner & Garcia.

Sedg has been playing Assassins Creed, Light killed us all in Organ Trail, Ctrl was scaring ghosts in VR and Twi is working on a D&D session.   Sedg: Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/lordsedg YouTube - Sedg Gaming Twitter - https://twitter.com/LordSedg CTRLFr34k:Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/ctrlfr34k Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ZeGuruReview/ Lightsaber: Twitter https://twitter.com/KingKagle Twilight: Deviant Art: https://www.deviantart.com/midnightdirewolf          Music: 8 bit onward by Heatlybros

Join Scotty and Mark Scotch for ten junk miles in which they discuss his life in endurance biking and cross country skiing, his path to participating in Arrowhead 135 and Tuscobia 160, and his decision to donate a kidney to a complete stranger.  Mark is also planning a bike event from Madison to Lousianna to raise awareness about organ donation next year, so stay tuned! Learn about the Organ Trail here:https://www.facebook.com/hughsmithmarkscotch/ This espisode brought to you by our friends at Goodr : https://goodr.com/pages/ten-junk-miles?utm_source=ten_junk_miles&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=none&utm_content=hostfavs Website: http://www.tenjunkmiles.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tenjunkmiles Twitter: https://twitter.com/tenjunkmiles Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tenjunkmiles/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TenJunkMiles/

Ryan Wiemeyer is an indie game developer known for Organ Trail and Max Gentleman: Sexy Business. Ryan also founded Indie City Coop, a co-working space for Indie game devs. Ryan talks about his journey as an indie and the games he made along the way. Find Ryan online at: https://hatsproductions.com/ Indie City Co-op: http://indiecitycoop.com/

Welcome to our soft reopening of the Dating Ourselves Podcast 2020 Season. Co-host Brian has locked himself away as Adam and Paul to a play-through of Organ Trail, a retro zombie survival game that mimics and parodies the educational text-based video game series: The Oregon Trail. Give this one a listen as Paul outlines how … Continue reading Episode 53 – No, You Heard That Right: We’re Planning on the Organ Trail →

We decided to remaster and re-release our first episode of Mothership! The audio quality is drastically improved, and the raw audio was re-edited, making for a significantly improved listening experience. If you enjoy it, consider supporting us on our Patreon, where we will be releasing more episodes of Mothership in the coming weeks!Check out our Patreon and our Instagram!Host, Warden, and Editor:  Peter JohnsonVisual Artist and Musician:  Carl BelueBooker, a.k.a. "Organ Trail" is portrayed by Carl BelueFrancis "Flank" Larcen is portrayed by Nathan WintermuteDr. Suvi Anard is portrayed by Chris CashE.L.I. is portrayed by Jacob Frank

This week the topic is... The Red Market! You know, illegal organ trading. Super interesting, true crime filled, and extra gnarly!

This Week's Episode Mazie tells us the tale of the major crime that happened the year she was born - Lorena and John Bobbitt. If you find yourself in a situation where you don’t feel safe at home, you can seek help with the Domestic Violence Hotline - 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Sources - Ranker - Amazon Prime Docuseries - LorenaCheck out the people we love - Blank Slate Labs - Use code ‘murderblows’ for 15% off - @blankslatelabs - (https://www.blankslatelabs.com/) Arcadian Grooming Use code ‘murderblows’ for 15% off @arcardianofficial (https://www.arcadiangrooming.com/)! Check out these podcasts - Nature is Wild https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nature-is-wild/id1472454830 Stream Weavers https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stream-weavers/id1469936796 The Snck Pck https://open.spotify.com/show/2OKfSNNKK7iFl9K8q9aTJJ?si=Cqb9dwBvR96_r2Me3WUEuA Other Titles - A dimension I didn’t expect - It’s in the land - In an icee?!Follow Us! (just not home) - Twitter - @murderblows - Instagram - @murderblows - murderblows@gmail.comThanks for being part of this journey y’all! Support Murder Blows by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/murder-blowsThis podcast is powered by Pinecast.

Warning: Minor Story Spoilers  Caroline and Marko fight through the Organ Trail. Caroline wants you to HEY! LISTEN! Marko is making me concerned about our next road trip. Both welcome to you Review for Spook! Transition music this week was from the Organ Trail soundtrack. ---------- Welcome to Review for Two! We're Marko and Caroline and we review video games. Oh yeah, we're also dating! That means we mainly play games that would be fun with someone on the couch next to us. Graphic by Julia Gang 

Load up your wagons, we're heading west! This week we're bringing you some tails from the Oregon Trail.    We started a Patreon! You can find us at patreon.com/thispodcastishaunted    Find us online: Twitter: @Haunted_Pod Instagram: @ThisPodcastisHaunted Facebook: This Podcast is Haunted  Email us your listener stories: thispodcastishaunted@gmail.com

Welcome to a special recording of the Charisma Check Podcast! This is the initial session of the Mothership RPG system where we begin the module Dead Planet by Tuesday Knight Games. Our crew begins a scientific research mission that immediately goes awry, stranding them in space along with dozens of derelict spacecraft. Can they navigate the dangers of unexplored space and make it out alive?This initial episode will be free for all listeners, but if you enjoy the content, we will continue the series as a reward for supporting our Patreon!Host, Warden, and Editor:  Peter JohnsonVisual Artist and Musician:  Carl BelueBooker, a.k.a. "Organ Trail" is portrayed by Carl BelueFrancis "Flank" Larcen s portrayed by Nathan WintermuteDr. Suvi Anard is portrayed by Chris CashE.L.I. is portrayed by Jacob Frank

The hysterical Kent Rees, fellow Minnesota homie, brings a bottle to the session resulting in the first episode done under the influence of tequila. This high octane show veers off on strange and fascinating tangents including, but not limited to: Prince's ashes, Minnesota nice, child barfers, "Operation Don't Raise A Douchebag", Organ Trail, TV marketing, Fathers Day, messing up Mother's Day, existentialist cats and is supper elite? 

In Episode 217 of All Day Paranormal, Manny and Krystle recap "The Dead Files" and "Ghost Adventures," discuss haunted castles, and mental illness and the paranormal. -- SHOW NOTES: - DID and the cosmic universe: https://tinyurl.com/y7vn5hez - Haunted castle for sale: https://tinyurl.com/y845hsto  

This week on the Marble Forest Podcast; How do you correctly pronounce Oregon? Don't know. But Jessi covers the ghost mining town of Golden, her salty-ness of ghost adventures and the Wolf Creek Inn. While Amber takes us down south to the Moon River Brewing Company to tell us about a creepy ghost that hangs out in corners.   Please rate and subscribe to our Podcast! Podbean: https://marbleforest.podbean.com/ iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/marble-forest-podcast/id1393373843 Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izmeyzbvch2bqvi5hoc2ssvi2ia?t=Marble_Forest_Podcast Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=191966&refid=stpr Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/39jk1lJj2RIzDU8O4XWKeK   Follow us on Twitter: @TheMFCast Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarbleForestPodcast/ Follow us on Instagram: @marbleforestpodcast Email us your personal experiences at MarbleForestPodcast@gmail.com

A continued discussion about music in the church. Featuring Erik Hylko

We place eight games to get the list back to the proper number after striking out some bummers. This was such a hellishly long episode to record and to edit, just take it, ya filthy animals. YOUR GAMES THIS WEEK ARE: Aero The Acro-Bat 2, for Genesis, SNES and Wii; Elf: The Movie, for Game Boy Advanced; Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, for GameCube, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox, and PC; Pac-Man Pizza Parlor, for PC; Go! Go! Birdie Chance, for PC; Organ Trail: Director's Cut, for PC; Terranigma, for SNES; and Star Wars: The Old Republic, for PC. You can find the up-to-date list of placed games at bit.ly/letsplace.

Hosts Mat Bradley-Tschirgi and William Thrasher discuss Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the second in the long-running series of live-action films based on the action figures by Hasbro. Sam (Shia LaBeouf) is a college boy now. He plans to stay in touch with his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) through webcam while enjoying higher education, but the Transformers have something else in mind. As secrets reveal the history between Earth and the Transformers reaches back further in time than anyone could have guessed, Decepticon The Fallen (Tony Todd) brings Megatron (Hugo Weaving) back to life. Metallic chaos is afoot, but is Sam even interested in being a hero or is he better off being a college slacker? Mat likes the hip 1980s soundtrack and cinematography of Atomic Blonde, a spy thriller starring Charlize Theron and James McAvoy. He's also enjoying the computer game Organ Trail, an amusing pastiche of George A. Romero and retro educational gaming. Thrasher found the low budget cartoon feature Deep to be weak, but feels the animated animal musical Sing a delight with great animation and some surprising song choices.   Listen to this episode while talking to robot gods for maximum enjoyment. Follow the show on Twitter @Sequelcast2 Like our Sequelcast 2 Facebook Page The theme song to the Sequelcast is written and performed by Marc with a C. Sequelcast 2 is delighted to be a member of The Batman Podcast Network. Hear more great podcasts here! If you like Thrasher on Sequelcast 2, watch his tabletop RPG video show d-infinity Live!.

In this episode, the gang is all here to talk Mockbuster ridiculousness. Apocalypse Z is a shammeful rebranding attempt to steal some viewers/fans of World War Z, which is a far superior movie. This movie had its moments, and it had some other moments too.. The gang also discusses their recommendations - Star Wars, Jumanji, Organ Trail, etc - So join in on the fun and thanks for listening!! As always, rate and review us on iTunes. And hit us up at Moviedummies.com for comments and even recommendations for future episodes. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/moviedummies/message

Le monde est entré dans nouveau millénaire : celui du jeu mobile. Il faut maintenant l'admettre, le jeu mobile fait parti de la vie de tous, du gamer néophyte au plus hardcore d'entre nous. Assumons notre plaisir coupable et venez voir les meilleures suggestion de l'équipe! Marc-André nous partage son amour pour une série produite ici-même à Montréal, les jeux "GO", mais continue sa rafale en parlant aussi de Organ Trail et South Park : Phone Destroyer. Martin, fidèle à son habitude, nous parle d'un jeu à ne pas manquer : Monument Valley 2. Pierre nous donne de la variété en présentant Dynasty Warriors et VOEZ tandis que Simon sort du lot en présentant une production indie d'ici complètement folle, […]

ZOMG! Damian Legion and suedepup are living large with some colossal topics this episode! Is Devolution the next big PA comic book? If not, Post-Nuke is simplistic fun online. Left 4 Dead 3 rumors blip the radar. Deadbolt, The Final Station, and Organ Trail bring a retro look to Z-gaming. Is Metro 2033 heading for the big screen? The Cloverfield universe expands! More zombie animals are headed your way! WWZ 2 takes a step back. And are The Division, Homefront: The Revolution, and Attack on Titan really ZR worthy? Damian and Pup talk it out. Did Hitler play Atari? Who has Zeasonal Affective Disorder? Press play now! So much info in this episode even a girl's pants will get tight with excitement! As always, thank you for tuning in and subscribing. Please leave us a review and follow us on Twitter and Facebook between shows! Stay safe out there, survivors! (Email: zeddradio@icloud.com / Twitter: @ZEDDRadio / Facebook: ZEDDRadioPodcast)

Z.E.D.D. Radio doesn't have the word "zombie" in it to find more survivors out there. Time to fix that! Suedepup goes comic book crazy and reviews Zonbi, Lesbian Zombies from Outer Space issue 3, and Raise The Dead Vol. 1! Damian Legion takes a look at The Lazarus Effect to see if it qualifies as proper ZR material. Z Year One is worthy of Pup's money. Mumm-Ra...WTF?!! Dead Town needs you! I Am A Hero...are you? Organ Trail has arrived on consoles, and Moving Hazard suggests you don't kill zombies. Huh?!! Andrew Lincoln needs to take a good look at himself, but won't! Empire of Corpses sounds amazing! Y: The Last Man is coming! And Capcom just doesn't get it. Much, much more! Get inside where it's safe! Hurry! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook between shows! And thank you for listening and subscribing! We love you! (Email: zeddradio@icloud.com / Twitter: @ZEDDRadio / Facebook: ZEDDRadioPodcast)

THE CASTLE DOCTRINE. SUPER AMAZING WAGON ADVENTURE. KINGDOM OF LOATHING. ORGAN TRAIL. interview: SLOTH QUEST! WIN PROTEUS AND DEAR ESTER. steamID: clockface and dybno

Evo, the annual fighting game competition, concludes this week. Emilio and Chad play the trading card game Hex: Shards of Fate, which resembles Magic: The Gathering. Also Emilio plays Guild of Dungeoneering and Organ Trail. Bobby tries the new MMO SkyForge in it’s beta form, and we’ve got more listener questions.   ::: Website :::  Twitter ::: Steam ::: Youtube ::: Twitch :::

THE CASTLE DOCTRINE. SUPER AMAZING WAGON ADVENTURE. KINGDOM OF LOATHING. ORGAN TRAIL. interview: SLOTH QUEST! WIN PROTEUS AND DEAR ESTER. steamID: clockface and dybno

THE CASTLE DOCTRINE. SUPER AMAZING WAGON ADVENTURE. KINGDOM OF LOATHING. ORGAN TRAIL. interview: SLOTH QUEST! WIN PROTEUS AND DEAR ESTER. steamID: clockface and dybno

Mike & Theresa discuss indie games.  Games discussed are Hammerwatch, Organ Trail, Legend of Dungeon, Evil Apples, Chocobo Tales, Kingdom Rush, Sentinal 3, Wii, WiiU, Road of Kings, Animal Crossing, Zork, Math Kingdom and more.  Learn more, subscribe, or contact us at www.southgatemediagroup.com  Be sure to rate this episode on iTunes.  It really helps other people find us.  Thanks!  

Brent, Rohan, Adam, and Ryan hear about Rohan's XBox One experience and talk about a ton of other games, including, but not limited to, A Link Between Worlds, Legend of Grimrock, Dragon Force, Shiva, Organ Trail, Last of Us, Hearthstone, and Magic the Gathering. Another busy week! Send us your questions and we'll read them on the show! podcast@bigbadaboomgames.com

In this strikingly directionless episode, learn about video data storage, Extra Life, and new features of the Humble Indie Bundle. Plus, Cody reviews Organ Trail (Android) and Jon teases his review of Gone Home (Steam). They both also launch into several tangents, so listen, learn, and have fun with us! Click here to download this episode of Unqualified Gamers

Ethan returns to Exile but not before “finishing” Skyrim. Justin joins him and brings along a deck building game that he doesn’t understand. Jason gets excited among about dark wood 1.7 other new things. Plus, bad nacho advice and hole digging simulators. Night Force Action Report – The editorial video game podcast where the HorribleNight.com cast gets caught up on the games they’ve been playing, new releases, brainstorms original material for the site, and pitches a few game ideas. This show was recorded live on Twitch.tv/HorribleNight. The final video will be available on YouTube.com/HorribleNightTV. Show Notes Cast: Justin, Ethan, Jason Topic Summary 00:16 – Intro and Off-Topic 18:29 – Path of Exile 28:08 – Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft 35:58 – Minecraft, Organ Trail, Civ V, XCOM: Enemy Unknown 45:43 – How to Survive, Indie Games, Skyrim 1:01:29 – Foul Play, BioShock Infinite 1:12:38 – ACTGamers.org Charity Marathon Nov 2nd 1:15:14 – New Releases 1:22:14 – Game Pitches Subscribe to The Horrible Shows – New Episodes Weekly RSS iTunes Related posts: Night Force Action Report #110 – ExCon The Fourth Night Force Action Report #115 – Encroachment Night Force Action Report #112 – Shut It Down

Jason quickly learns that the HoNight crew may not do so well on the Organ Trail. Ethan not only survives Gamescom but also a run in with Dota 2. Justin is being hunted so he digs deep into the 3DS. And everyone asks, “Should Saints have super powers?” Night Force Action Report – The editorial video game podcast where the HorribleNight.com cast gets caught up on the games they’ve been playing, new releases, brainstorms original material for the site, and pitches a few game ideas. This show was recorded live on Twitch.tv/HorribleNight. The final video is also available on YouTube.com/HorribleNightTV. Show Notes Cast: Justin, Ethan, Jason Topic Summary 00:16 – Intro and Off-Topic 24:30  – New Releases What We’ve Been Playing 35:35 – Saints Row IV 52:12 – Torchlight II, Organ Trail 1:03:54 – Dota 2, Gunpoint, Orcs Must Die! 2 1:19:26 – Skyrim, Steamworld Dig, Sir You Are Being Hunted 1:35:06 – Editorializing and Livestreaming 1:43:00 – Game Pitches Subscribe to The Horrible Shows – New Episodes Weekly RSS iTunes Related posts: Night Force Action Report #117 – Low Quota Night Force Action Report #115 – Encroachment Night Force Action Report #104 – Cute Massacre

The Steam Summer Sale has concluded and we talk about our booty, yarr, including Torchlight 2, Shadowrun Returns, Organ Trail, Surgeon Simulator 2013, Prison Architect, Antichamber and others. Chuck attempts to find some fun with Grand Theft Auto 4 (spoiler: he doesn't) and Maki gives both that and Saints Row the Third a whirl. And … Continue reading "NQcast53 – Captain Laptop's Teabagged Maps" The post NQcast53 – Captain Laptop's Teabagged Maps first appeared on No Quarters dot Net | A MFVGP.

This month, Emrys recounts his bloody journey along the Organ Trail, Kevin reveals several adorably gory Dumb Ways to Die, and Marc ponders the questionable fan service of Project X Zone. Later, we pay tribute to Kevin’s Mega Man skills as he takes on the GameBoy classic, Dr. Wily’s Revenge.

Here's Communitoid Episode 018 - Blowjobs from a Dog Playing a Guitar!  In this episode Conor talks about his white-boy dreads, Aaron is like a dumb thing billowing forward, and guest host Jamie aka jodaniel3 talks about how his father forced him to play videotapes as a child.  We also give you Organ Trail strategies from people who haven't actually beat the game yet, we tiptoe around spoilers for The Walking Dead: 400 Days, Conor puts up a $100 bounty for a hummer from K.K. Slider, we pronounce Shin Megami Tensei correctly, and Conor and Aaron are terrible at history.  Enjoy! Break song: I KILL PXLS (aka: GuitarAtomik) This is Destructoid (http://mp3bear.com/i-kill-pxls-destructoid-theme-its-time-for-destructoid) Follow us @Communitoid (http://twitter.com/communitoid) on Twitter and join our Facebook group! (http://www.facebook.com/groups/546211208756141/)  If you'd like to be a guest on a future episode or want to submit a community promo, email aaron@destructoid.com! Talk about us on the Forums (http://forum.destructoid.com/forumdisplay.php?59-Communitoid) and follow us on the Cblogs: (http://destructoid.com/blogs/communitoid) Subscribe via RSS (http://feeds.feedburner.com/communitoid), iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/communitoid/id570116319), or download via the direct link (http://traffic.libsyn.com/communitoid/Communitoid_Episode_018.mp3) Opening and closing themes by Adam AcH (http://www.bravebeat.com http://soundcloud.com/ach-cue). Show logo by ZombiePlatypus. Cblog banner by TheCiderMan. Full show notes available at communitoid.libsyn.com. ------------------------------- Cblogs: Sega Channel Made Me The Coolest Kid in 5th Grade by TheDustinThomas (http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/TheDustinThomas/sega-channel-made-me-the-coolest-kid-in-5th-grade-257798.phtml) The Wonderful World of Knock-off Gaming by Handy (http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Handy/the-wonderful-world-of-knock-off-gaming--257922.phtml) I'm Alphadeus, and I'm an ACNLcaholic by Alphadeus (http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Alphadeus/i-m-alphadeus-and-i-m-an-acnlcaholic--258098.phtml) Why does it have to be about race? By Brothadom (http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/BrothaDom/why-does-it-have-to-be-about-race--258258.phtml) Rouge Legacy: A Huge Mistake by AboveUp (http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/AboveUp/rogue-legacy-a-huge-mistake-257838.phtml) Forums: 2013 Completed Games Thread by digtastik (http://forum.destructoid.com/showthread.php?27286-2013-Completed-Games-Thread) Interviewing Gorilla Gravy and other Dtoiders by LeSamourai (http://forum.destructoid.com/showthread.php?31237-Interviewing-Gorilla-Gravy-and-other-DToiders) Meet Ups: August 16: AnamaNARPaguchi for Dtoid NY/NJ on Friday, August 16 by Changston (http://forum.destructoid.com/showthread.php?31751-AnamaNARPaguchi-for-Dtoid-NY-NJ-on-Friday-August-16) August 30-September 2: PAX Prime 2013 by Mr. Gobbldigook (http://forum.destructoid.com/showthread.php?28877-PAX-Prime-2013) Are you going to PAX Prime 2013? Let us know! (http://www.destructoid.com/are-you-going-to-pax-prime-2013-let-us-know--252569.phtml) September 27-28: Cherry NARP by GlowBear (http://forum.destructoid.com/showthread.php?31606-Cherry-NARP) Jan 2-5: MAGFest 12 by Dyganth (http://forum.destructoid.com/showthread.php?30815-MAGFest-12!) Other Stuff: Review: Final Fantasy XIII by Jim Sterling (http://www.destructoid.com/review-final-fantasy-xiii-167136.phtml) Minotaur China Shop (http://blurst.com/minotaur-china-shop/) Flamoctapus’s Werewolf game is finished, Humans win! (http://forum.destructoid.com/showthread.php?22001-Let-s-play-Werewolf-on-the-forums!&p=1180091&viewfull=1#post1180091) THANKS OBAMA in Dark Souls (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQKrgA6Ye2g) If you host a community podcast, please send an email to conor@destructoid.com!

Join Alex and Tigs as we they about their short attention spans when it comes to games, Bioshock: Infinite, Guacameele, Bioshock, Mass Effect 3: Citadel, Organ Trail, Aliens: Colonial Marines, Papo y Yo, Gears of War: Judgement, Metal Gear Rising, Prison Architect, Warframe, Lego City: Undercover, Peekaboo, One Night, League of Legends, DOTA 2, Guardians of Middle Earth and more, somehow, on this episode of Griefed! Recorded on April 10th 2013.

Kole, Dennis Bot, Ben, and David talk about the Metal Gear Solid 5, Bioshock Infinite, and Organ Trail. The Brief Metal Gear Solid 5 announced. David Hayter fired from being Solid Snake. China develops "Glorious Mission". N++ announced. The Grind Ben: 30 Flights of Loving. Bioshock Infinite. Kole: Bioshock Infinite. Organ Trail. David: Improbable Island. The End Boss New Car. Haiku. Boring.

Wherein we discuss our favorite April Fool's Day jokes, Neverwinter, really long games, Life's Too Short, This Is the End, Game of Thrones, scary movies, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Iron Man 3: Chinese Edition, the DC and Marvel movie universes, The Organ Trail, Doctor Who (spoiler warning!), and the latest crazy Metal Gear Solid hoax. Starring Ryan Scott and Ryan Higgins, with special guests Alea Garbagnati, Olivia Jane, and Chris Noyes.

Join Alex and Tigs as they discuss their time at PAX East 2013, The Dream Machine, Bioshock: Infinite, Spec Ops: The Line, Organ Trail, Fahrenheit , English Country Tune, Metal Gear Rising, Thomas was Alone, Revolution 60, Boot Hill Heroes and more on this episode of Griefed! Recorded on March 27th 2013.

Ryan Wiemeyer, co-founder of the indie game company, The Men Who Wear Many Hats, joins me to talk "The Organ Trail," their zombie parody of the classic Apple II text-based game that a whole generation of kids grew up on.Ryan talks about the origins of the company, developing Flash games and for iOS/Android, their experience with Kickstarter and the future of The Hats.Organ Trail Director's Cut Gameplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHg4Oq2Sb4cThe Men Who Wear Many Hats website & blog: http://hatsproductions.com/The Hats Twitter: http://twitter.com/HatsProductions Music on this podcast brought to you by Music Alley: http://music.mevio.comArtist: urbanspacelab - Song: Picture Perfect

Planes that turn into robots are awesome. In this week's episode, Mike and Drew AND Rebecca get all meched out with Super Dimensional Fortress Macross and Macross Plus. Talk Nerdy to Me: Mike finishes Arkham City, plays match 3/RPG 10000000 and Organ Trail. Drew watched the Scott Pilgrim movie and plays Hero Academy for the PC. This week's challenge: (Courtesy of Drew) Watch the first four episodes of Super Dimensional Fortress Macross and Macross Plus! Next week's challenge: (Courtesy of Phil in Connecticut) Watch Big Man Japan! A mockumentary about kaiju battles. As always, be sure to like us, follow us, and subscribe so you don't miss out on all the fun shenanigans and hijinks!

HELLO EVERYONE AND WELCOME TO WOMGS THE PODCAST!  This is the show about phil and tyler two sexy guy that just like to talk. Video games, movies, tv, cartoons, netflix, and half iced & tea half  lemonade epicness. You can email us and we will read it on our podcast  at womgsthepodcast@gmail.com  or visit our youtube channel youtube.com/womgthepodcast And make sure to be awesome today. But will the host make it to tomorrow as they face there greated challage yet...... OLD PC GAMES! ......Again!

HELLO EVERYONE AND WELCOME TO WOMGS THE PODCAST!  This is the show about phil and tyler two sexy guy that just like to talk. Video games, movies, tv, cartoons, netflix, and half iced & tea half  lemonade epicness. You can email us and we will read it on our podcast  at womgsthepodcast@gmail.com  or visit our youtube channel youtube.com/womgthepodcast And make sure to be awesome today. But will the host make it to tomorrow as they face there greated challage yet...... OLD PC GAMES!

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: There’s been very little innovation and research more generally into what is a good interface for inputting equations. So I think most people are probably familiar with Microsoft Word or Excel have these equation editors where you basically open this palette and there is a preview and there is a button for every possible mathematical symbol or operator you can imagine. 00:00:28 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac. This podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined by our guest Sarah Lim, who goes by Slim. Hello, hello, and Slim, you’ve got various interesting affiliations including UC Berkeley, Notion, Inc and Switch, but what I’m interested in right now is the lessons you’ve learned from playing classic video games. Tell me about that. 00:01:01 - Speaker 1: So this arose when I was deciding whether to get the 14 inch or 16 inch M1 MacBook Pro and a critical question of our age, let’s be 00:01:10 - Speaker 1: honest. Exactly, exactly. I couldn’t decide. I posted a request for comments on Twitter, and then I had this realization that when I was 6 years old playing Organ Trail 5, which is a remake of Organ Trail 2, which is itself a remake of the original. I was in the initial outfitting stage, and you have 3 choices for your farm wagon. You can get the small farm wagon, the large farm wagon, and the Conestoga wagon. I actually don’t know if I’m pronouncing that correctly, but let’s assume I am. So I just naively chose the Conestoga wagon because as a 6 year old, I figured that bigger must be better and being able to store more supplies for your expedition would make it more successful. I eventually learned that the fact that the wagon is much larger and can store a lot more weight means that it’s a lot easier to overload it. Among other things, this requires constantly abandoning supplies to cut weight. It makes the roover forwarding minigame much more perilous. It’s a lot harder to control the wagon. And yeah, I never chose that wagon again on subsequent playthroughs, and I decided to get the 14-inch laptop. 00:02:12 - Speaker 2: Makes perfect sense to me and and what a great lesson for a six year old trade-offs, I feel like it’s one of the most important kind of fundamental concepts to understand as a human in this world, and I think many folks struggle with that well into adulthood. At least I feel like I’ve often been in certainly business conversations where trying to explain trade-offs is met with confusion. 00:02:35 - Speaker 1: They should just play Organ Trail. 00:02:37 - Speaker 2: Clearly that’s the solution. And tell us a little bit about your background. 00:02:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’ve been interested in basically all permutations really of user interfaces and programming languages for a really long time, so this includes the very different programming languages as user interfaces and programming languages for user interfaces, and then, you know, the combination of the two. So right now I’m doing a PhD in programming languages, interested in more of like the theoretical perspective, but in the past, I’ve worked on I guess, end user computing, which is really the broader vision of notion, I was at Khan Academy for a while on the long term research team. 00:03:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and there I think you worked with Andy Matuschek, who’s a good friend of ours and uh previous guest on the podcast. 00:03:24 - Speaker 1: Yes, definitely. That was the first time I worked with Andy in real depth, and I still really enjoy talking to him and occasionally collaborating with him today. So, I guess, prior to that, I was doing a lot of research at the intersection of HCI or human computer interaction and programming tools, programming systems, I guess. So, one of the big projects that I worked on as an undergrad was focused on inspecting. CSS on a webpage or more generally trying to understand what are the properties of like the code that influence how the page looks or a visual outcome of interest, and there I was really motivated by the fact that you have these software tools have their own Mental model, I guess, or just model of how code works and how different parts of the program interact to produce some output and then you have the user who has often this entirely different intuitive model of what matters, what’s important. So they don’t care if this line of code is or isn’t evaluated, they care whether it actually has a visible effect on the output. So trying to reconcile those two paradigms, I think is a recurring theme in a lot of my work. 00:04:30 - Speaker 2: And I remember seeing a little demo maybe of some of the, I don’t know if it was a prototype or a full open source tool, but essentially a visualizer that helps you better understand which CSS rules are being applied. Am I remembering that right? 00:04:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so that was both part of the prototype and the eventual implementation in Firefox, but the idea there is The syntax of CSS really elides the complexity, I think, because syntactically it looks like you have all of these independent properties like color, red, you know, font size, 16 pixels, and they seem to be all equally important and at the same level of nesting, I guess, and what that really hides is the fact that there are a lot of dependencies between properties, so a certain property like Z index, you know, the perennial favorite Z index 9999999. Doesn’t take effect unless the element has like position relative, for example, and it’s not at all apparent if you’re writing those two properties that there is a dependency between them. So I was working on visualizing kind of what those dependencies were. This actually arose because I wrote to Burt, who is one of the co-creators of CSS and was like, Hi, I’m interested in building a tool that visualizes these dependencies. Where can I find the computer readable list of all such dependencies? And he was like, oh, we don’t have one, you know, we have this SVG that tries to map out the dependencies between CSS 2.1 modules, and even there you can see all these circular dependencies, but we don’t have anything like what you’re looking for. That to me was totally bananas because it was the basic blocker to most people being able to go from writing really trivial CSS to more complicated layouts. So I was like, well, I guess this thing doesn’t exist, so I’d better go invent it. 00:06:12 - Speaker 2: Perfect way to find good research problems. Now, more recently, two projects I wanted to make sure we reference because they connect to what we’ll talk about today, which is recently worked on the equation editor at Ocean, and then you worked on a rich text CRDT called Paratext at In and Switch. Uh, would love to hear a little bit about those projects. 00:06:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. So I guess the Paroex project, which was the most recent one was collaboration with Jeffrey Litt, Martin Klutman and Peter Van Harperberg, and that one was really exciting because we were trying to build a CRDT that could handle rich text formatting and traditionally, you have all of these CRDTs that are designed for fairly bespoke applications. They’re things like a counter data type or a set data type that has certain behavior when you combine two sets, and we’re still at the stage of CRDT development where aside from things like JSON CRDTs like automerge, we don’t really have a one size fits all CRDT framework or solution. You still mostly have to hand design and implement the CRDT for a given application. And it turns out that in the case of something like rich text, it’s a lot harder than just saying, oh, you know, we’ll store annotations in an array and call it a day, because the semantics for how you want different types of formatting to combine when people split and rejoin sessions and things like that are all very complex and it turns out that we have a lot of learned behaviors that arise, even from just like, Design decisions in Microsoft Word, where you expect certain annotations to be able to extend, certain annotations to not extend, things like that. Capturing all of the nuance in that behavior turns out to be really difficult and requires a lot of domain specific thinking. But we think we have an approach that works and I would really encourage everyone to read the essay that we published and try to poke holes in it too. This was like the 5th version of the. algorithm, right? So like months ago, we were like, all right, let’s start writing and then Martin, who has just an incredible talent for these things is like, hey, everyone, you know, I found some issues with the approach and, you know, oh no, 00, and sort of we fix those, we’re like, all right, you know, this one’s good and just repeat this like week after week. So I really have to give him a ton of credit for both coming up with a lot of these problems and also figuring out ways to work around it. 00:08:33 - Speaker 2: We talked with Peter a little bit recently, Peter van Hardenberg, about the pencils down element of the lab, but also just research generally, which is there’s always more to solve, you know, it’s the classic XKCD, more research needed is always the end of every paper ever written, which is indeed the pursuit of the unknown. That’s part of what makes science and Seeking new knowledge, exciting and interesting, but at some point you do have to say we have a new quantum of knowledge and it’s worth publishing that. But then I think if it’s just straight up wrong or you see major problems that you feel embarrassed by, then if you want to invest more. 00:09:09 - Speaker 1: Right, exactly. I think in this case. There was a distinction between, there’s always more we can tack on versus we wanted to get it right, you know, and in particular, the history of both operational transforms or OT and CRDT for rich text, just text in general is such that it’s this minefield of I guess to use kind of a gruesome visual metaphor, just dead bodies everywhere. You’re like, oh, you know, such and such algorithm was published and it’s such and such time and it was new hotness for a while and then we realized, oh, it was actually wrong and this new paper came out which proved like 4 of the algorithms were wrong and so on. And so with correctness being such an important part of any algorithm, of course, but also kind of this white whale in the rich text field, we thought it was important to at least make a credible effort to having a correct algorithm. 00:09:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, I can highly recommend the Paroex essay. One of the things I found interesting about it, maybe just for anyone who’s listening, whose head is spinning from all the specialized jargon here, CRDTs are a data structure for doing collaborative software, collaborative documents, and then, yeah, rich text, the Microsoft Word is the canonical example there. You can bold things, you can italic things, you can make things bigger and smaller. Well, part of what I enjoyed about this paper was actually that I felt, even if you have no interest in CRDTs, it has these lovely visualizations that show kind of the data representation of a sentence like the quick brown fox, and then if you bold quick, and then later someone else bolds fox, you know, how do those things merge together. But even aside from the merging and the collaborative aspect, which obviously is the research, the novel research here. I felt it gave me a greater understanding of just how rich text editing works under the hood, which I guess I had a vague idea of, but hadn’t thought about it so deeply. So, highly recommend that paper. Just give them the figures, even if you don’t want to read the thousands of words. 00:11:05 - Speaker 1: I’m glad you like the figures. They were a real labor of sigma. 00:11:08 - Speaker 2: Perfect, yeah, so. 00:11:10 - Speaker 1: The one thing I would add is that CRDTs are a technology for collaboration, but the way they differ from operational transforms or OTs is that a CRDT is basically designed to operate in a decentralized setting, so you don’t need a persistent network connection to all the parts. you don’t need a centralized server. The idea is you can fluidly recover from network partitions by merging all of the data and operations that happened while you were offline, and this turns out to be really important to our vision of how collaborative editing should work because we think it’s really important for people to be able to do things like not always be editing in the same document at the same time as everyone. Maybe I want to take some space for myself to write in private and then have my changes sync up with everyone else thereafter. Maybe I’m, you know, self-conscious about other people editing. are seeing my work in progress, but I think that it would be interesting and helpful to look at what the main document looks like and how that’s evolving while I’m working in private, and you can have that kind of one way visibility with something like a CRDT versus with something like Google Docs, where it’s just sort of always online or always not editing in your own personal editor. Conversely, maybe I’m OK with everyone else seeing the work that I’m doing in progress, but I just find it really visually jarring to have all these cursors and different colors jumping around and People inserting text, bumping my paragraphs down the page. I’ve definitely been there. I’m not particularly precious about people seeing my work in progress, but I just cannot focus on writing when the page is just changing all around me. So in that situation, maybe I would want to allow other people to see my work in progress, so that we don’t duplicate effort or something like that, but I just have like a focus mode where incoming changes don’t disrupt my writing environment and these kinds of fork join one way window. Microgit style branching paradigms are really only enabled by a technology like CRDTs where you have the flexibility to separate and then come back together. 00:13:12 - Speaker 2: And I’m incredibly excited by the design research that needs to go into that. Now at this point, I think we’re still on the technology level, you know, one way to think of it is Google Docs came along, I don’t know, 15, it’s almost 20 years ago now, I can’t even remember, let’s say 15 years ago, and this novel idea that We could both have a shared document or several people could have a shared document, all see the up to-date version and type into it and get, you know, a reasonable response or have that be coherent was an amazing breakthrough at the time and has since been kind of widely copied notion, Figma, many others. But now maybe we can go beyond that, much more granularity, like you said, maybe borrowing from the developer version control workflows a little bit in a lightweight way, giving a lot more control and flexibility, and giving us a lot more choices about how we want to work most effectively. But before we can even get onto those design decisions and how do we present all these different things to the user, what are the different options? We need this like fundamental underlying merge technology, hence the endless fascination that we have the lab and increasingly the technology industry generally has with CRDTs because it has the potential to enable all that. 00:14:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, when we were working on the Paratax project, Peter was pushing really hard for, don’t make this just a technology project. It’s a socio-technical endeavor and we need to invest a lot of time in the design component, also just doing user interviews, identifying how people interact with and. How people collaborate in the status quo on text and Jeffrey and I actually did do a bunch of user interviews with people from all kinds of backgrounds. We’ve talked to people who write plays, people who produce a dramatic podcast kind of in this style of Night Vale. I love Night Vale. Yeah, people who are in the writer’s room kind of working together with their collaborators on that, people who write lessons, video lessons for educational platforms. And there was a ton of really interesting Insights into user behavior around collaborative text. We ended up just torn because we had this 12 week project and we were like, how should we best spend our time? Clearly, this is not just a technical area and we need to invest a lot in getting the design right, understanding what the design space even looks like since it hasn’t really been explored. I really want to avoid, and this is a recurring theme in my work, I really want to avoid publishing or shipping something. And having it be this like, very broad, very shallow exploration into all the things that are possible. I think that this kind of work plays an important role, and there are a lot of people who do this well, just fermenting the space of possibilities and getting these ideas in a lot of people’s heads, who can then go on and do really cool things with them. My personal style, I never want to feel like something is half baked, I guess, I would much rather ship this cohesive contribution like, here is an algorithm for building rich text. We think that this is a technical prerequisite to all of these interesting design choices, but the alternative with a 12 week period, and in fact, you know, this, the correctness and revision phase extended way over that. So thanks a lot to Martin and Jeffrey for leading during that part. But it’s just already so hard to get it correct that trying to tack on a really substantive design exploration that does the area justice on top of that, I was just really worried it would stretched too thin. So absolutely lots of room for future work in this particular. project. It’s very much a challenge in any area where you have simultaneously this rich design space that’s just asking to be explored with tons of prototypes and things like that, and then also to even realize the most simple of those prototypes, you require fundamentally new technology. 00:16:53 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ve been down that same path on many research projects as well, and often it’s that I’m excited for what the technology will enable, but also that in many cases it’s a combination, you know, some kind of peer to peer networking thing, but with that will enable us to provide a certain benefit to the user and I want to explore both of those things, but then that’s too much and then the whole thing is half baked exactly as you said. I’ve never found a perfect or even a good. Way to really manage that tradeoff. You just kind of pick your battles and hope for the best. Yeah, definitely. Well, I do want to hear about the equation editor project, but first I feel I should introduce our topic here, which I think folks could probably have gleaned is going to be rich text and rich text editing, and maybe we could just step back a moment and define that a little bit. I think we know that texts, you know, symbolic representation of language is a pretty key thing, writing and the printing press and all that sort of thing. We wrote about that a little bit in our text blocks memo, which I’ll like in the show notes. But typically, I think computers for a lot of their early time and even now with something like computer code is typically plain text, that’s the dot TXT file is kind of almost the native style of text that you have and then rich text typically layers something on top of that. I don’t know, so maybe you could better define rich text for us to have a more concrete discussion about it. 00:18:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think rich text for most people basically evokes things like bold, italic, underline, the ability to augment plain text with annotations that are useful in formatting, actually, I think. Notepad to word pad is the archetypal jump in software, if you’re thinking about it from the old Windows perspective. In the past few years, I think we’ve started to see a real expansion of what rich text can look like. So, of course, we started out with something like Markdown, which is, of course, a plain text representation. But it’s designed to be able to capture more nuance in plain text and be rendered to something like HTML which very much supports rich text. So in Markdown, you have not only these kinds of inline formatting elements like bold and italic and hyperlinks as well. You also have support for images, which you could think of as more block level rich text elements, I guess, and I don’t think there’s a real clear consensus across editors on how block level rich text elements should be displayed. Of course, in between you have things like bulleted lists and those tend to be handled in a fairly standard manner with nested lists and so on, but it quickly becomes like a question of taste. Which kinds of annotations you support. So in editors like Coto or Notion, you have all these different block types where the block is really the atom of collaboration and editing, and then you can have things like, you know, file embeds or even database views, things like that. So I think we’re at a point now where both block-based editors, I’m using block based editors in like the text or writing sense, not the structured editors for programming sense, although I have other things to say about that, but we’re at a point where you’re starting to see these block-based editors appear and I think that there are a lot of really interesting patterns that this permits that the paragraphs via linear sequence of characters, including new lines and whitespace does not permit, or at least doesn’t allow you to build as structured tooling around. 00:20:30 - Speaker 2: I’m trying to think what is actually the core of the difference between a block-based editor, that’s a notion, a RO uses working on its own block text implementation and a flow of characters, so that’s Microsoft Word, Google Docs, maybe even text editors. I guess it’s sort of like paragraphs are separated by like these sort of nested. Elements or have a parent to the document versus like two new lines embedded in the stream of characters, but I don’t know, that seems too unsophisticated, maybe have a better definition for us. 00:21:03 - Speaker 1: So, I actually think about this very similarly to in the like programming languages and editor tools space. There is a distinction between structured editors and regular plain text editors for programs. The idea is that you might have a text-based programming language and you can write that perfectly fine in any buffer that allows you to put sequential characters, often AI is sufficient for some languages, and then on the other hand, These programs might have a lot of inherent structure. A simple example is with lisps which are built out of these parenthesis S expressions, everything is, you know, an S expression. You can think about like the structure of the tree formed by, I guess a forest, formed by having like these S expressions with subelements and stuff. that, and then you can do manipulations directly on the structure in a way that allows you to always have a syntactically correct program or at least a partial syntactically correct program by doing things like I’m just going to take this subtree, which is a sub-expression and move it somewhere else where there’s room for another subexpression. So, I think of block-based editors as capturing a very similar zeitgeist to structured editors for code, because instead of just having this linear buffer of characters that can have, you know, formatting or things like that, you can have new lines, you actually have more of a forest structure where you have lots of like individual blocks, and then you can have blocks that are children of other blocks and so on, and that allows you to Do things like move an entire subtree representing an outline to another position in the document without selecting all of the characters, you know, cut them and then paste them somewhere else. So things like reparenting becomes a lot easier, things like setting the background of an entire subtree becomes a lot easier. Just in general, you have more structure and there’s more things you can do with that structure, I guess is how I would phrase it. One of my favorite things that you can do with this model in notion is you can change the type of a block very easily. So let’s say I have a bullet list item, and then I hit enter and enter these like subnote or something like that as children of the initial bullet list item. I can turn the bullet list item into a page, and then all of a sudden it’s just a subpage in the document, and the sub bullets that were there before are just like top level bullets in that page. And this is particularly important for my workflow because I care a lot about starting out with something like really rough and sketchy and then progressively improving it or moving up and down the ladder of like fidelity into something more polished. So you might, for instance, start off with just an outline list or even a one dimensional list of to do blocks when you’re trying to do project planning or something. And then later on, let’s say I want to put these into like a tasks database with support for like a conbond view or something like that. I don’t actually want to sit there and like recreate all of these tasks in Jira. I’ve been there, you know, I’ve been the person making all the tasks in Jira after the meeting and then assigning them to people. What the workflow that I think notion is poised to enable and can certainly do a better job in this regard, but already offers some benefits on is like, can I just highlight all of these blocks because everything is a block, move them into some existing database and have them match the schema. That kind of like allowing people to do fast and loose prototyping with very unstructured primitives and then promote them into something more structured like in a relational database setting or similar, I think is the sweet spot, structured editing provides the sweet spot between like just completely unstructured text and these very high fidelity, high effort interfaces that allows you to kind of move between them. 00:24:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I really like that direction and framing, and if I can extend it a little bit, I think we can also look at a continuum of richness in terms of the content itself. So you have plain text, what you might classically call rich text with links and bold and underlying. And then you maybe start to throw a few images in, and then what if you can put it in videos and what if you have a whole table, and that table is actually a database query, and you can nest the figment document, and this way you can see that there’s sort of continuum on the richness of the document. One reason I think Notion has been so successful, they’ve been pushing along that continuum while maintaining a sort of foundation of rich textness, which is very familiar and the important basic use case for a lot of people. A related idea is that I think we’re seeing a lot of the classic document types converge. So if you look at a rich text like a Microsoft Word and a PowerPoint and increasingly spreadsheets, those all used to be 3 distinct Microsoft Office applications, and we’re seeing the value of them being in or being the same document. This is actually one of the motivating ideas behind Muse and a lot of the research we’ve done in the lab, and the kind of something Slim was saying, you want to take your idea continuously through different media and different modalities and different degrees of fidelity, and you don’t want to jump between different applications do that. You want to be able to do it on the same canvas. That’s by the way, one of the reasons I like Canvas. It’s not only because it’s a free multimedia surface, but also it evokes this idea of like flexibility and potentiality, and I think that’s one of the things that’s really excited about these mixed media documents. 00:26:16 - Speaker 2: And I know if Jeffrey were here, he might jump in and say that one downside to our current application silo world is that the only way to have this deeply rich text where it’s images, video, a table, a database query, something like that, is to have the Uber application, to have the everything app, and certainly notion has probably gotten pretty far on that, but others kind of in In some ways are forced to do that, like we have to do some of that in Muse as well. People come in and ask for all these different types here as well, and there’s more of like an open doc inspired or Unix inspired future that maybe Jeffrey and others, including me, would hope for, which would be more that applications could be these individual data types and you could put them all together through some kind of more operating system connection. But that is so completely reversed from kind of how all our computing devices work today. It’s hard to see how we might get to that. 00:27:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I’m certainly sympathetic to that concern, although I suspect the way out is through, and you get platforms from working killer apps. And so the way we got the whole unit ecosystem was they wanted to build a computer for, you know, writing and running programs and then eventually got all this generalized text processing stuff, but it’s not like they started in like, oh, I’m gonna make a generalized text processing machine. I don’t think that was really the way that they approached it and developed a success. So, I’m still hopeful we could do this, but I think you got to extract it from something that’s already working as an app, but it always helps to have an eye towards that, and I think we’ve done some of that with Muse. 00:27:46 - Speaker 1: I was just going to say that it’s not me talking about texts, unless I bring up my favorite piece of software of all time, which is Pandok. And I think that Pandok actually is very relevant to this discussion. So for those who aren’t as familiar with it, Panok brands itself as this Swiss Army knife for document formats, and it’s sort of headline contribution is that it allows you to convert between all kinds of documents. For instance, I can take a Word document and convert it to a PDF Word documents to something like, I don’t know, IPython notebook, Jupiter notebook, back and forth across this incredible bipartite graph of formats, but I think that the subtler contribution that Pandokc makes, which is extremely significant, is that Pandok has this form of markdown called Pandok markdown that essentially aligns and supersedes all of the different fragments of markdown that we’ve seen before. So the problem with markdown basically is that the original specification is sort of ill-defined. There are several cases in which the behavior is not super clear and then on top of that, it’s not very expressive. There aren’t very many constructs. So things like fenced code blocks, which many people associate very closely with Markdown today, that was only added by GitHubb flavored markdown, which is certainly widely used among the programming community, but not everyone is on GitHub, of course. And then you have things like table formatting or even like strike through really strike Through wasn’t defined in the original markdown specification either. And so you have markdown and then you have like GitHub flavored markdown, common mark is sort of this unifying effort remark down all these different is the markdown cinematic universe. I tried to make a joke about this. I had this joke ready for the markdown Cinematic universe when the last Marvel. Movie came out. But then like, it didn’t get nearly the traction in my timeline as the Dune did, perhaps understandably. So really, I’m just going to have to wait till the next movie comes out. It’s a real, real tragedy. No, but like, I guess you have this real pluralism of forms and it becomes very difficult to use markdown truly as a portable format because the way it renders in one editor or even parses can very much differ from editor to editor. So, Pandoc provides this format that essentially serves as an IR or intermediate representation between all these kinds of documents using a markdown supersets that somehow magically encapsulates everything. 00:30:18 - Speaker 2: And that includes not just markdown, but also like PDFs or Microsoft Word, that seems. 00:30:24 - Speaker 1: Well, so the way it works is it’s this compilation pipeline, I guess, that allows you to go from a markdown document. It compiles it to PDF using PDF Lawtech or something. It outputs Lawtech, it outputs HTML various things, and you can think of it as being this intermediate representation because you start with this like Word document, you can turn that into markdown and you can go from that markdown format into any of these output formats, which turns out to be like really powerful because the main issue with these kinds of conversions is that it’s often lossy, there are features that are supported by Law tech, for instance, that aren’t supported by the web natively, there are features that are part of like Word documents that aren’t necessarily supported by HTML and so on and so forth. So Pandok serves this role of like basically saying, OK, what is an intermediate language that can encapsulate all the different implementations of the same concept across different input and output formats. And what I think is so remarkable about it is that oftentimes when you are using an AP. of software and you’re like, oh darn, you know, now I need to support this other thing too. You quickly end up in a situation where you have the snowball and things start to feel tacked on. So you’re like, Oh man, it’s very clear that they just glommed on this additional syntax for this feature. And with Pandok, everything feels like very principled in its inclusion. And at the same time, whenever I’m using Pandok and I’m like, darn, I really wish there was a construct that I could use to express this. particular thing, I look up in the documentation and it’s always supported. So, as one of my favorite examples, one of the output formats that Handok supports is various slideshow frameworks. So Beamer for people who use Lawtech and Reveal JS for people who use HTML and CSS and these slideshow frameworks basically allow you to replace something like PowerPoint, Keynote, Google slides with essentially like a text-based format. I really like doing slideshows in Pandock markdown. There are a few reasons for that. The first reason is that it’s really useful to be able to reuse some of the same content from like my blog post or essay even in the slideshow. There are some really minor and almost petty, but really significant reasons. Like, I like to have equations or code blocks with syntax highlighting in my slideshows, and there’s not really a good solution to putting like a syntax highlighted code block in Keynote right now. 00:32:39 - Speaker 2: Last I remembered, the gold standard at the Ruby conferences I used to frequent was to take screenshot of Textmate and paste that in. 00:32:47 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s awful. I don’t want to see your like monochai editor with like the weird background that contrasts weirdly with the slide background. I just, ah, and it doesn’t scale on a huge conference display anyway, I digress, but The other reason why I really like doing my slideshows in text is actually that there is often a hierarchical structure to my presentations, right? I’ll have like these main top level sections and then I’ll have subsections, and then I’ll have like sub subsections and all of these manifest and slides. But in the gooey thumbnail view of most of these existing Slideshow editors like PowerPoint or Google slides, it reduces it all to like this linear list. It’s like, here are all of your thumbnails in order. And it makes it very hard, as soon as I have like an hour-long conference talk, how do I like jump to this subsection that I know exists, aside from like scrolling past like 117 thumbnails and trying to find the right one, right? And moreover, let’s say I want to Reorder a certain part of the talk because I think it better fits the narrative structure. Now I have to like figure out which thumbnails I need to drag to which other place or worse, go into the individual slide, select the text from that, move that somewhere else, and it’s just way, way clunkier actually than reordering some text in like a bullet list outline in my editor. And then the other part is that I was talking about how Pandok has really great support, expressive support for idioms of different formats, and one thing you often have in slideshows is that I have some element on the screen and then I press, you know, the next button again and then another element will appear. So in Pandoc you can denote this with just like an ellipsis basically so like dot dot dot and then if I have a slide where I have a paragraph and then the dot dot dot and then another paragraph, it will render with just the first paragraph visible and then I press next and then like the subsequent paragraph comes in. And that’s like just a very lightweight way to handle these stepped. Animations compared to going to the animation pane and then clicking the element that I want to animate in and so on and so forth. So it started off with me being like, I’ll just prototype in this format, but then it ended up supporting columns, it supports all these things that you actually want. And I was like, this is in many ways a more ergonomic way to handle long technical slideshows. Anyway, I have to chill for Pandok anytime I talk about rich text, I’m contractually obligated to do so. 00:35:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a great piece of software, use it here and there. I think I was doing some Asky doc kind of manuals many years ago and yeah, just in general, it’s also worth looking at the homepage that you mentioned the plot they have where it shows all the different formats that can convert between is quite fun. You click on that, you can zoom in. 00:35:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I had this really elaborate plan when I decided to go to Berkeley, that I was going to print out a door-sized poster of like that graph that shows all the formats they convert between and then show up at John McFarlane’s door and ask him to sign it. But then the pandemic interfered with some of those plans. Nonetheless, it remains on my list. 00:35:48 - Speaker 2: Good bucket list item, pretty unique one at that. 00:35:51 - Speaker 1: Also, I found my tweet, or I found the draft of my tweet, which is about eternals, and I said, directed by Chloe Zhao, the latest entry in the Markdown Cinematic Universe features an ensemble cast of multi markdown, GitHubb flavored markdown, PHP Markdown Extra, R Markdown, and Common Mark as they joined forces in battle against mankind’s ancient enemy, Doc X. Nice. 00:36:12 - Speaker 2: Wow. You would have gotten the like from me. 00:36:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’ll see if it ever sees the light of Twitter.com. 00:36:20 - Speaker 2: You briefly mentioned there equations and La tech, and maybe that’s a good chance to talk about the equation project you did for notion. And part of what I thought was so interesting or what I think in general is interesting about equations is that they are obviously an extremely important symbolic format, but in many ways extremely different from the pros we’ve been talking about. So English or other languages, even languages that are right to left or something like that, they all have the same kind of basic flow and the way that we represent sound. So with these little squiggly symbols, even though the symbols themselves and sounds vary and how we put them together into words across languages, that’s a common thing. If you go to the mathematical realm, you have symbolic representation, but equations are the whole own beast, and I think one that has gotten a lot less attention from kind of the software and editing world. So tell us about that rabbit hole. 00:37:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so just as context for people, notion and many other applications actually have long supported block equations, an equation that basically takes up, you know, most of the page horizontally. What is much more uncommon in editors is support for inline equations and so this can be something as simple as saying, You want to type let X be a variable, and X should be formatted or stylized mathematically. Being able to refer to elements of a block level equation in inline text is a prerequisite for being able to do any kind of serious mathematical writing, yet because this is kind of this niche area that has historically been the purview of Overleaf and other law tech editors, it’s really not implemented. In most editors. So I pushed really hard to add inline equations and inline math to notion, because I was like, there’s a huge opportunity for people to write scientific or mathematical documents that take advantage of all of notion’s other features like being able to embed FIMA or embed illustrations and things like that, right? So, it turns out that it’s kind of difficult, exactly as you’re describing to do this equation format. There’s been very little innovation and research more generally into what is like a good interface for inputting equations. So I think most people Probably familiar with Microsoft Word or Excel have these equation editors, or even like operating system level sometimes where you basically like open this palette, and there is a preview and there is a button for every possible mathematical symbol or operator you can imagine. And then for composite symbols like the fraction bar or integral or something like that, you find the button for that, you click it, and then you click into like the little subboxes and then you find whatever symbol you want and you put those there too. So it’s kind of a structured editor, but like in an unimaginably cumbersome interface. This is what I used to do my lab reports in high school, for example. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have things like law tech. Law tech is basically how everyone in at least in computer science and mathematics chooses to typeset their work, typesets complex mathematics. One of the real selling points of law tech, I think is that It turns out that operator spacing is really important, and there’s a big difference between, say, a dash that’s used like a hyphen or a dash character that’s used in text, and a hyphen or a dash character that’s used as a minus sign in an equation, the spacing is subtly different. And one of the big things that Lawtech does is it basically allows you to declare certain operations in certain contexts as like a math operator versus just a symbol versus just like a tagged group of characters, and it correctly handles the spacing depending on what kinds of characters are around the operator in question. And so Lawtech basically produces really nice looking mathematics at the cost of this markdown which looks like I kind of smashed my keyboard that only had like 3 characters. It’s the exact opposite of the equation editors instead of having a button for every imaginable character, you only have 3 buttons. The buttons are backslash, open curly brace, and closed curly brace, and somehow like permuting those characters is supposed to get you like any possible mathematical outfit. There’s just two ends of the spectrum. 00:40:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I used to do my analysis homework in college in law tech, and I remember when I first looked up how you would input in law tech these formulas, like, that can’t be right. This is not the best way in the world to do this. In fact, that’s it, that’s the one and only way. 00:40:53 - Speaker 1: It really is, it’s terrifying. It’s the one and only way and the wild part is there are people who are like super, super good at law tech. They can like live tech their lecture notes. I was never nearly like that fast, but some people can do it usually with extensive use of macros, which macros are another selling point of law tech as you can define these kind of custom shorthand for operators you use a lot. But anyway, yeah, so you have a lot of tech sort of at the other end of the spectrum, like really quite unreadable, oftentimes, like, it’s like a right only format, many times. 00:41:23 - Speaker 2: And of a regular expressions come to mind on that as well, yeah. 00:41:26 - Speaker 1: It’s exactly the same zeitgeist, I think. It turns out that figuring out how to have like a combination, gooey, plain text interface that allows you to be like in a rich text editor like notion, then. into an inline equation field to have like an inline symbol and then go back into the GUI editor was like just very unexplored territory. And it kind of makes sense that lots of people don’t prioritize this because many people that notion rightfully had the question like, oh, is this something we should be working on? But first of all, it turned out that if you actually tallied up like our user requests, inline math was like near the top. Of editor feature based requests. And then more generally, it turns out that because this is like a prerequisite for many researchers and for students, you can get a lot of people on your platform who rely on it, you know, as a student to take notes and something like that, because there’s literally no alternative. And then they are able to stick around and use the platform for all kinds of other things. So this is just kind of a plug that more editors should implement this. But Yeah, I thought that this project was really interesting because in the interaction paradigm, you want to capture a lot of the things that are very fluid about editing regular text. So for instance, we knew it was important that you should be able to use the arrow keys to move left and right, kind of straight through a token without editing it if you wanted, or if you wanted to be able to go. Into a token and edit it using the arrow keys, you shouldn’t have to like use the mouse to click, although, of course, you should also be able to use the mouse to click. And when you have this formatted equation, we made the decision that the rendered equation would be represented as this atomic token. So if you were highlighting text to copy and paste and move around, it would be like highlighting a single character that would just be like the whole equation. But of course, you could go in and edit the equation. Any way you want it in kind of this pop up text editing interface. I think another thing that’s the subtle interface challenge here is that like Mark was saying, there is often a Uh, disproportionately large number of characters used to represent the equivalent of like one character with a formatted output. And so that’s something you don’t really take into account. The output is like X with a hat in San Sara font, and then there’s like 25 characters of markup that goes into that, and you just need to like scale the interface appropriately to take that into account. But I think that it’s really interesting because It shows the power of combining different input and output formats in like the same atom, right? So you have like a single line of text, and you want to have rich text that’s formatted and stylized and so on, hyperlinks, and then also equations or whatever inline rendered output of another input format that you have. I think that that’s really where GUI editors and whizzy wig editors can shine is being able to combine these like, Input formats and output formats like in the same line in Chu, yeah, I guess you can’t really do that at all with the terminal or something like that, and I say this as someone who uses like CLIIM for everything. 00:44:34 - Speaker 3: This is bringing back so many memories. I wish I had notion with equation support back when I was a math undergrad. It’s so nice. 00:44:41 - Speaker 1: I’m like the notion math stand guardian, I don’t know, something like that. And I’m always keeping track of like all the cool things people are doing using equations and notion. A lot of people are doing like math blogs in notion, which is really awesome for me to see. Also, I just feel like they’re having tried lots of other things. They’re just like really isn’t. A good alternative short of like actually writing lots like for your blog, which no one really likes. And yeah, I mean, certainly it’s the kind of thing that I implemented originally, kind of, I was like, I’m gonna do this for myself, and then realized that lots of people would be able to benefit from it. It’s been really cool to see a bit of reception it gets, like the inline math tweets on the notion, uh Twitter account overwhelmingly get the most engagement and interaction. And initially, like the marketing team was shocked. They thought this would be the super niche feature, but no, it turns out that people love math and like, they may not be the most vocal proponents or they’re used to no one caring about math type setting, things like that. For a while, I think it was the case that when I did find an editor that had support for equations of some kind, to me, it was overwhelmingly obvious that the people who implemented it did not regularly use equations for writing. I think you can often tell that with different features. So I think that having that kind of Representation is not quite the right word, but being able to see a feature that was designed by someone who really cares about using it themselves is really cool for people who are interested in typesetting, students, researchers, people who are interested in typesetting more mathematical text. 00:46:11 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it’s really important, like you were saying that it’s mixed media because you’re combining the equations, the inline equation and the block equation, by the way, in the world class form, which is a lot tech based with a world class rich text editor with text and images and stuff. It’s really nice. I do think there’s still one frontier here, especially for math, which is the fully gradual process from you’re taking handwritten notes and you’re working out a problem and you’re drawing squiggly diagrams all the way up through your finished homework. I remember when I was at math undergrad. I would basically have to do the homework twice. You do it once on paper. Nobody could read that, including myself, so that, you know, do it in lot again. And I always wish there was a way to do it incrementally. You sort of changed equation by equation and diagram by diagram into the final product. And I know there has been some research on uh turning equations into lot tech formulas with machine learning. I don’t know if I can do handwriting, but perhaps someday we’ll get the new support for equations and you can go all the way to the end. 00:47:02 - Speaker 1: Yeah, like you, I share exactly the same frustration that you have to essentially do lots of things twice, and the relative position of everything is ambiguous, and Lawtech is what allows you to do things like have subscripts of subscripts, which would be really inscrutable in most people’s handwriting, including my own, and, you know, subscripts of subscripts along with super scripts and things like that. There are just so many ambiguous details and it turns out in my experience with like, anything that tries to automate the transition is that I always end up Going through and like really rewriting all of the details to be structured in a readable way. You have this other problem which back in the days of like Wizzy Wig web editors like Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front Page and things like that, you would often end up with this problem where you try to do like any edit in the Wizzy Wig side and then you look at the generated HTML and it’s ridiculous. There’s just like 16 nested empty span tags, and no one would ever be able to maintain that. And my worry is basically that when you automatically create Markup for something that has a very complex graphical representation, it’s really like one way, you know, maybe it will help you produce a compiled output, but it doesn’t actually help you go back in and like edit and tweak the representation later or it’s just so inscrutable if you do that it’s kind of also a reg x type situation. I think we really need to get to some kind of like good intermediate representation that allows you to flexibly go both ways. And that goes back to something that I think Adam and I were chatting about earlier, which is that a lot of people gripe and complain that like law tech is the best we have and, you know, I’m one of them, but It really is the case that, you know, lottech was just this like monumental effort by really a few people and amount of effort that would be like considered really impressive if I were to try to do the same thing but better today and not a lot of people just have like spare time to do this all in one text formatting, packaging, document representation project, even though it would have huge impact on the way people write and publish these kinds of documents. And so in many ways we’re sort of just bottlenecked on the fact that It’s hard to do incremental improvements to this particular area. We really depend on these like software monoliths to keep us afloat. 00:49:19 - Speaker 2: I’m not nearly as mathy as either of you, but I can’t help but make the comparison on these equation editing to what you mentioned earlier with kind of structured editors and programming, where whether there’s lightweight help from your text editor, things like code folding, syntax highlighting and autocomplete, or full structured editing, some of the visual programming stuff we talked about with Maggie Appleton, like Scratch, for example, or these flow based systems that are fully graph. and you sort of can’t have it in a bad state. And I can’t help but to think there might be some direction like that that is not necessarily the right only inscrutable tech, but is not the Microsoft Word one button literally for every symbol you might ever want. It does seem like there might be some other path, and yeah, I agree it’s a monumental effort, but I mean, mathematics is so important and foundational and so much of human endeavor that certainly seems like one worth investing in, although perhaps hard to reap a profit from, and that makes it harder to put concentrated capital behind it. 00:50:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that there’s definitely very clear demand for I think something exactly like what you’re describing, which is somewhere in between the two extremes, and it is really relevant because ACM, which is the Association for Computing Machinery, the academic and professional body really for computer science, they are currently undergoing this. Fiasco, maybe, I probably shouldn’t go on the record as calling it a fiasco. The ACM is currently undergoing this initiative called TAPS, which is the ACM Publishing System, where they are attempting to revise the template by which all computer science research is published and disseminated, and the idea behind this is that right now, computer science research is published to these PDFs. Initially they were all two column PDFs, now I think there’s some one column PDFs. They want to output HTML as the archival format for various reasons, including that it offers much better reading experience on different screen widths, so like phones or tablets, which are increasingly how people are reading papers, not just printed out. And they are much more accessible than PDFs. PDFs are just like really quite inaccessible, especially to screen readers and other assistive technologies that are trying to parse out all the different math or whatever arbitrary formatting you’ve decided to use. The upshot of this, I guess, is that there are currently a group of very smart people who are trying to figure out how in the world we’re going to get people to start writing all of their papers and outputting them in a different format, in a world where everyone is already used to preparing. Their publications and preprints in law tech. And turns out that even if you solve the problem of like what the input syntax should be, rendering math in the browser is like an extremely unsolved problem. 00:52:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, isn’t the state of the art that it like generates PNG and sticks it in the web page? 00:52:09 - Speaker 1: Not exactly, but like almost. OK. So MathML, which is like an XML dialect or like mathematical markup language, was this effort to build. HTML XML style syntax for typesetting mathematics. Naturally, it is only implemented in Firefox, so that’s really unfortunate. So in terms of the state of the art, there are basically two libraries that you can use to typeset mathematics. There’s math Jack and Caltech. Mathjax supports basically all valid law tech, including, you know, different. Environments and equations and things like that. The problem is that Mathjacks is very slow. So if you ever go on math overflow or another like related stock exchange and you see like all of these answers with like weird gaps, and then as you watch before you, the page starts to like load all of the rendered equations like bumping everything down one level at a time. That’s math Jackson action. And oftentimes it is doing what you’re describing where it is outputting like an SBG or a PNG or something like that, and it’s just like reflowing the page with every equation. So then you have Caltech, which was a library developed at Konn Academy where they realized that math Jack’s performance was basically just like not satisfactory for their exercises and things like that. Sootte supports a much more limited subset of all of Law tech syntax, but it does it all using CSS basically, and it doesn’t reflow the page for every equation. It’s basically instant surrender. So tech is what we use at Notion, it’s also what’s used in like Facebook Messenger, which supports equations if you ever tried that, and many other websites, and basically it means that your options, if you want to render math are only target Firefox. Use a limited subset of math that’s supported by Kottech and Consign yourself to like extremely slow, dozens of reflow, full expressive power rendering to inline PNG’s. And so that’s just not like a great situation to be in, and we haven’t even gotten to the question of like how people write math. So I would say that people underestimate like how open this problem spaces. 00:54:17 - Speaker 3: Yeah, man. 00:54:19 - Speaker 1: Just take a moment of silence to like recognize the gravity of the situation. 00:54:23 - Speaker 3: This is an aside, I don’t know if you want to put this in the episode, but now I’m curious. It sounds like both of those are interpreted in the sense that the equations are rendered at load time instead of being compiled down to some like HTML and CSS that you can render without JavaScript. Like, basically, do you need JavaScript to render these pages? 00:54:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, basically, I should say you also need JavaScript, unless you’re doing the pre-compied to MathML and then hope that people are using Firefox. 00:54:47 - Speaker 3: Man, I feel like there’s no way that that stuff loads in 10 years, but we’ll see. 00:54:52 - Speaker 1: I actually had this exact argument, again, I don’t know if you want to put this in the episode. I had this exact argument with Jonathan Aldrich, who’s on the taps committee when we were talking about this, and I think the point was not so much that you can guarantee that the artifact loads. Exactly the same way in 10 years, but that the representation is rich enough that one could feasibly build software that renders it the same way in 10 years. So it’s more about the fidelity of the like underlying representation where like a team of, I guess, digital, you know, archaeologists could recover the work that we were doing and not so much like we trust in the vendors to like keep everything stable, which is obviously never going to happen. You know, the only reason like PDFs are stable is because how many trillions of dollars of IP depend on being able to load the PDF the same way as it was written, you know, 30 years ago. 00:55:45 - Speaker 3: Yeah, interesting. 00:55:46 - Speaker 1: Nice. Going back to this idea earlier that Mark mentioned of the spectrum of like plain text, rich text, Wizzy wig editors. One recurring theme for me is thinking about decoupling this spectrum into like what is the format and then what are like the editors and tools that we can use to interact with this format, so they structured, unstructured, etc. I want to call outAR, which is a native application for Mac OS and iOS that does a really great job with this, which is that Bear is basically Something in between a whizzy wig and a plain text editor in that you’re always editing markdown documents and indeed, when you have something that’s bold, you can see the like asterisks around it that delimits that character. But all of these standard, you know, Control B, U, editor shortcuts work as you would expect. And more importantly, you can see like the formatting applied in real time. So That when you do star star, hello star star, he suddenly becomes bold face in this gooey. And so in many ways it combines like the fluidity and the real-time preview of a rich text editor or previewer with the flexibility of like ultimately just writing plain text characters. And I think this is like really unexplored area. I don’t just mean something like Open VS code or VIM and type characters and then see like different formatting labels attached to the results. I mean like a native application that’s really designed like for end use or end users, that doesn’t fully obscure the input syntax but does real time rendering in place. It’s not even like in monospace font, right? It makes it feel much more like this is actually the output that you’re targeting. And not just like an input step that needs to be pre-processed. I think that there is a lot of room for applications that are kind of in between and in that same spaces where it doesn’t entirely obscure what you are writing, but it does give you a lot of the benefits of previewing things and having like a GUI application outside of the terminal in terms of like capturing the richness of the possible results. 00:57:52 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I like the bear approach a lot. Now, are there particular domains or types of documents that you think would be susceptible to this approach, or it just for rich tech specifically? 00:58:01 - Speaker 1: So I was making a list of like all of the different traditionally graphical outputs that have corresponding plain text representations and a lot of them I was thinking about, for example, in engraving sheet music, right, traditionally you would use a desktop program like Finae or Sibelius nowadays you have options like new score and flat, which are more web-based editors, but you see the staff and you click notes. In the staff like corresponding to where you want the note, and you know you use the quarter note or the 8th note cursor to pick the duration and so on. And then at the other end of the spectrum you have Lily Pond, which is kind of like law tech I guess for engraving sheet music where you type a very like law tech-esque syntax and out comes, you know, beautifully typeset sheet music. For me this