We go cross eyed to bring you this episode about visual illusions, before going on a tangent about social media (again) and whether our podcast is cool or warm toned.
✍🏻 View the transcript for this episode
We go cross eyed to bring you this episode about visual illusions, before going on a tangent about social media (again) and whether our podcast is cool or warm toned.
Social media
Toast & Roast:
Georgie:
Geoff:
Geoff 0:00
Hi and welcome back to another episode of Toast & Roast. I am your co host Geoff and as always, I’m here with Georgie. Hey Georgie.
Georgie 0:19
Hello. It’s me.
Geoff 0:23
It’s me. It’s you. It’s, is it Maybelline.
Georgie 0:27
I don’t know, I was thinking of the Adele song.
Geoff 0:29
Oh. “Hello from the other side. I wish I had 1000”... something. Guys?
Georgie 0:38
No, what?
Geoff 0:44
One sec, one second I’m gonna bring up my iCloud notes.
Georgie 0:45
Hello from the other side.
Geoff 0:48
I wish I wish I had 1000 guys.
Georgie 0:52
No, Geoo—you’re making like your own like mondegreen?
Geoff 0:58
Yeah.
Georgie 0:58
Is that what you are doing? Yeah. Oh, actually I have a. I don’t know if I’ve said this before. So I’m really sorry if I’ve said this on the podcast before but I made one up. You know the song “I Touch Myself”?
Geoff 1:10
Okay, woah, woah, where are we going with this?
Georgie 1:12
Do you know the song?
Geoff 1:12
Where are we going with this?
Georgie 1:15
No, do you?
Geoff 1:15
Yeah, yeah, maybe, touch—
Georgie 1:18
It goes, “I don’t want anybody else”.
Geoff 1:20
Uh huh.
Georgie 1:21
“When I think about you I touch myself”. It’s by Divinyls.
Geoff 1:23
Oh, that one, that one.
Georgie 1:25
I think they used to in a breast cancer awareness campaign.
Geoff 1:28
Oh, yeah. I think I do know that one from the breast cancer campaign.
Georgie 1:32
So I made this joke at home. And it was kind of unexpected because of the pace of the song. And I said “I don’t want anybody else. When I think about you. I touch someone else”.
Geoff 1:49
(laughs)
Georgie 1:49
It’s just like, unexpected, anyway.
Geoff 1:52
Yeah.
Georgie 1:52
So Adele does say “Hello. It’s me.”
Geoff 1:55
“Hello. It’s me”. No that’s not the tune at all.
Georgie 1:59
“If after all these years you’d like to meet”. And then you were singing the chorus, “Hello from the other side. I must have called a thousand—“
Geoff 2:06
“I must have called 1000 times”. Oh, not that I want 1000 guys.
Georgie 2:12
There was another one, isn’t there? Hello from the... oh no, she says that...
Geoff 2:15
Yeah. Hello from the... outside?
Georgie 2:19
“At least I can say that I’ve tried to tell you I’m sorry for breaking your heart”.
Geoff 2:24
Yeah.
Georgie 2:25
Jesus Geoff, you just changed the entire... you know what this reminds me of, you know, Weird Al Yankovic?
Geoff 2:31
Oh, yeah. See, when I heard about his first song, I think it was like, actually not the first one was Polka Power. That’s one of my favoruites where he mashes together a whole bunch of stuff, but in in a Polka tune. I don’t know how to describe what a Polka tune is.
Georgie 2:48
Like a little dance.
Geoff 2:50
Yeah (hums song) And then, my real favourite, my absolute favourite is Amish Paradise. For by—
Georgie 3:02
For Gangsters...
Geoff 3:03
Yeah, the one that he does Gangster’s Paradise. I know way too many lyrics for Amish Paradise. I can probably sing it from beginning to end. Actually, on that, do you have a song that you can off the top of your head?
Georgie 3:19
Oh man.
Geoff 3:21
Almost 100%. We’re not going to go like super accurate.
Georgie 3:23
I feel like I used to. But now I’ve sort of lost the touch.
Geoff 3:30
Oh no.
Georgie 3:30
It depends. I yeah, I think now if somebody asked me, I don’t think I know.
Geoff 3:37
Yeah.
Georgie 3:38
Yeah.
Geoff 3:39
I’m like Bohemian Rhapsody is close as well, in terms of other songs that I can do fairly.
Georgie 3:46
So do you mean if I asked you to sing it from scratch, right? Because the music can help you to like remember the words but—
Geoff 3:53
Yeah.
Georgie 3:54
Straight up without music. I kind of struggle to do that as well as I used to, yeah.
Geoff 4:00
No, I Yeah, straight up without music. I can do probably most of Amish paradise and most of Bohemian Rhapsody. But I may get the verses wrong. In Bohemian Rhapsody. I might sing like one of the verses before the other because they repeat the tune.
Georgie 4:17
How can you do that?
Geoff 4:18
Yeah I know.
Georgie 4:19
I think it has distinct segments like such that it would be less likely that that would happen.
Geoff 4:23
I’m trying to think of what like, but I have to actually start singing it in order for the lyrics to come to me. Like I can’t. I can’t just sing like the middle of the song. You know what, um, like.
Georgie 4:35
You have to kind of repeat the beginning for remembering like, yeah, what the second verse is?
Geoff 4:41
Yeah, actually. So I thought I was thinking about this during the week, and it’s something that low key annoys me about YouTubers and we haven’t talked about it yet, which is—
Georgie 4:54
Oh, okay—
Geoff 4:55
Just amazing. Right? Is the number of domain names they make for their channel. Like, I watch Philip DeFranco. And every new thing he does, he has a brand new like domain name for it. So he’s like uh, like, if he does merch he’ll do PhilipDeFrancoMerch.com? Or if he’s doing a promotion for I don’t know. Not promotion. What was it? But they always do. They always put their like channel name and then they have like an extra word, and then they get the .com for that. And I’m like, why? Why don’t you, PhilipDeFranco.com, slash—
Georgie 5:34
Yeah, I was yeah, I was gonna say the same thing. I never noticed this pattern, but I was gonna make the same suggestion. Why don’t they just do that?
Geoff 5:43
Yeah. Oh my God. So they they keep coming up with new ones. I know, like, I know, maybe two or three channels that will constantly but just making brand new domain names for everything.
Georgie 5:57
And this is always like, the like the name of the brand plus the word, .com.
Geoff 6:02
Yeah, yeah yeah.
Georgie 6:02
It’s not just some separate project. It’s actual—
Geoff 6:06
Nah. It and then they’re like, highly repetitive and I’m thinking I remember back in the day, we were really in on the whole subdomain thing right with the—
Georgie 6:16
Oh, yeah.
Geoff 6:17
We do merch dot.
Georgie 6:18
Yeah. I love that.
Geoff 6:19
I mean, GeoffreyChong.com or something, dev.
Georgie 6:23
Dev. Do you know I did. I did “by”, by.
Geoff 6:26
Oh “by”.
Georgie 6:27
It, because it was cool, it was like, stuff by Georgie and then yeah, it wasn’t always limited to dev.
Geoff 6:33
Yeah, I mean, your one is like hi dot Georgie. Right? Dot nu. That was—
Georgie 6:38
Hey.
Geoff 6:38
That’s like domain.
Georgie 6:39
Hey dot Georgie.
Geoff 6:39
Right? Oh, hey dot Georgie, right. But yeah.
Georgie 6:45
I can make hi! For funsies.
Geoff 6:49
So so yeah, I remember it being important that you did subdomains and slash domains, because of security reasons. Where, like, you wouldn’t go to commbank transactions .com. Like, that’s ridiculous?
Georgie 7:03
It, yes. It’s a whole other domain that you have to worry, I guess. So from like a tech perspective. It’s gonna cost more.
Geoff 7:12
That’s true. Yeah.
Georgie 7:12
I mean, like for people who just think oh, yeah, just spin up a website doesn’t really work like that. Like, it’s a whole other thing.
Geoff 7:21
Yeah.
Georgie 7:22
Unless, have you tried going to this website, like I was saying, gonna say, unless there’s a redirect, and it just goes to?
Geoff 7:29
Oh, I’ve never tried.
Georgie 7:31
Yeah.
Geoff 7:31
Okay, let me try one of these. Wait, that’s the wrong one. Anyways, yeah, I’ve never I actually, does it... I’ve never actually gone to them, maybe it is a redirect, that’d be better. Is it a redirect? It is! Did they just redirect it?
Georgie 7:54
How do you spell his name? Philip DeFranco, Merch. I typed in the wrong URL.
Geoff 8:04
Maybe, maybe I got it wrong. Anyway, so yeah, I just found that really interesting how, like a lot of YouTubers just—
Georgie 8:15
Oops.
Geoff 8:16
Yeah, just go to Twitter. I was reading—
Georgie 8:19
Oh, wow. Look at his tweet. “Sex is cool. But have you ever closed 47 Chrome tabs at once?” You know what, in my whole life, maybe I’ve never opened 47 Chrome tabs because I don’t use Chrome.
Geoff 8:33
You don’t use Chrome. God. That’s not a—here we go. So there’s also a website called TrashTastesTour22.com. So I’m like, why did you make a huge? It’s just a brand new domain name. Just do Trash Taste...
Georgie 8:49
Yes.
Geoff 8:50
TrashTaste.com/tour. And have it always point to the latest tour. That’s also another pro tip for anybody out there trying to do branding. But yeah, domain name recognition was quite a big thing. I don’t know if it’s a big thing anymore.
Georgie 9:05
Maybe it’s more targeted at trying to get people to remember, easily, easily remember the URL now, and there’s less focus on an existing website and trying to drive the traffic there or something like that.
Geoff 9:20
Yeah, that is actually interesting, right? We used to, I used to like pitch, you know, to clients and stuff like that having these domain names as sub, like you said, drives traffic to the original domain name, but maybe they don’t care. Maybe it’s a whole new world out there. Since—
Georgie 9:37
I think it is. So you know, Lizzo the singer?
Geoff 9:41
Yeah. Yeah.
Georgie 9:43
So she released her own shapewear brand. And it’s called Yitty, Y, I, TT, Y. And if you and she, when she promoted it, she said go to Yitty.com but then people who are big fans, I mean, I’m a big fan of her. But people who wanted to go and buy this shapewear they went to uni.com. But it redirects you to Yitty dot Fabletics dot com. And fabrics is like an existing activewear brand. So a lot of reviewers on YouTube, were saying, it just redirects you to Fabletics. And then they are have existing opinions already about Fabletics. Like they’re not a fan of their membership model, and things like that. And they were like, questioning, like not judging her, but like, why you shouldn’t do this, you know, why did she choose to go with this brand? And get them to like, make this shapewear and then it kind of affected their view on on her label?
Geoff 10:39
Oh no.
Georgie 10:39
Because because of the existing like Fabletics, like membership model, which is obviously designed to get you to just pay every month for like stuff. But yeah, that was quite interesting.
Geoff 10:52
Yeah, that I mean, yeah, the recognition thing makes sense as well. So you just, you just have to remember that you want it to go to the tour, that it was by them. And then like, oh, what year is it, 22?
Georgie 11:09
But what if you couldn’t remember it? That URL, and you just searched it in a search engine?
Geoff 11:14
Yeah. But yeah, like, oh, maybe it’s for SEO. Just making a bunch of domain names for SEO.
Georgie 11:20
But would they, but I was gonna say the opposite. Like, wouldn’t it actually not work as well, if you just keep spinning up new domains? Like it takes some time for it to come up on the search engines? So...
Geoff 11:32
Yeah, also, like, I guess, if you’re not constantly updating your original website, then you also lose ranking, theoretically. So if you keep spinning up a new one, that that thing’s like, got nothing on it. Yeah. Then Google just push you into oblivion. Oh, yeah. Did you want to talk about your, this?
Georgie 11:54
Yeah. So okay, so on my screen, I have this. This is I was trying to, I’m trying to sell my old MacBook, which is the 2015.
Geoff 12:03
Which I think is very optimistic.
Georgie 12:06
Okay, we’ll get there—because I did have a squiz on eBay to see what people were selling it for. 2015 old piece of shit. And I said to Geoff, before this podcast, seriously tempted to just put it in the bin. Yeah. So I was following the instructions on how to erase the contents of it. And then long story short, it went wrong. And when I restarted and tried to reinstall the operating system on it after erasing it, it just kept coming up with this error. And then I was trying to get Nick to help me figure out what was going on. And I realised that I had read the instructions kind of wrong towards the end.
Geoff 12:51
Uh oh.
Georgie 12:51
So okay, so there are 10 steps on erasing the Mac. Pretty much up until step nine, I had done everything correctly. So Step nine, says “Quit Disk Utility to return to the Utilities window”. Step 10 says, “If you want to start up again, from the disk you’ve erased, select Reinstall Mac OS in the Utilities window, then click Continue and follow the on screen instructions to reinstall macOS”.
Geoff 13:17
Oh, no.
Georgie 13:19
Okay, so. So at number, so when my eyes was scanning this and I wasn’t in like a great big rush, I was gonna go out to brunch, but I wasn’t like rushing rushing. And I read it, I was like, you know, these instructions on the Apple support website are actually pretty succinctly written they’re, like not too bad. But my eyes went straight to this blue link, “reinstall macOS”, which is broken, for some reason, it’s split into two different links, but it still goes to the same page.
Geoff 13:46
(laughs) Yep.
Georgie 13:47
So I look at number nine, Step nine, and I kind of gloss past it, or look at step 10. I kind of don’t really read it, but it says, “reinstall macOS”, like and I’m like, well, that’s what I want to do. So I went and clicked that, where it subsequently tells me to restart my computer and other stuff.
Geoff 14:03
Oh no.
Georgie 14:03
So I restart the computer instead, all Step nine, quitting the disk utility to go back, and then doing it from there. So I think I’ve pooped it when I restarted, like when I restarted it. And it’s like, I can’t even say read the fine print. Because it’s like, this is the standard print.
Geoff 14:22
This. This is. This is Yeah, classic classic for anyone who is not in like the design world, is the use of bright colors to attract attention to specific things. And that’s basically I guess what happened to you got distracted by the shiny blue thing that said the thing that you wanted it to work. We had a developer at work who tried to kind of replace—they, they were given the task, a very, very blank broad task to just replace their current UI or user interface with new components. And so they’re reading through the documentation and through no fault of their own, they started applying different coloured buttons to things that they wanted to stand out, or not even stand out, just for an example, is that they have a s—they have like a search button, which is the regular blue that will catch your attention. And then there is the cancel button, which they applied red. So, yeah, they’re thinking and rightly so, reading the documentation that it said “the red is for actions that are critical and that you do not want the, the user to be clicking as it may be destructive”. And they were like, okay, I’ll just apply that to the cancel button. And leave the submit button blue. See, what this does is that now the person looking at it goes, oh, my God, red button. I’m going to, I feel like I gotta click the red button.
Georgie 16:06
So they see red and blue at the same time?
Geoff 16:08
Yeah, red blue—
Georgie 16:09
Yeah.
Geoff 16:10
Just below it is actually the outline blue button. And like an orange button warning, like the like, we don’t want the people to click this one either. So we’re going to make it like the brightest-ass yellow ever. And I’m like, alright, I get where you’re going with this.
Georgie 16:24
Yes, we actually removed the red. We call them danger buttons, but we removed them from our UI at work, because it was just like, too alarming. Almost.
Geoff 16:37
It’s also hard to figure out like the design pattern just by looking at it. But the idea here is if you click something like, cancel, you’re supposed to have a modal that comes up. And it tells you doing this would be destructive. And then you highlight the delete button or whatever the true button that does the thing in like red.
Georgie 16:58
To come—oh, okay, yeah, you did that too. But we’ve actually moved away from that. And we’ve just given them like I said, the confirmation modal dialog that says—
Geoff 17:07
Yeah.
Georgie 17:08
“Are you sure you want to do this?” And so the CTA, which is the primary action is still green, but it says, “Yes, I’m sure”. And so like, there’s no sort of, I guess, you can say, sort of confusion with the user. But then again, like red and green, and just read, like, if you’re colourblind, you might not be able to see red. So you can’t rely on that alone. Like the actual text should say explicitly what what it’s going to do.
Geoff 17:37
Yeah, I have seen some buttons recently, where they put a whole, like, five letters sentence in the button that like, “Clicking this will delete the”, will delete, or something like that. Or, or, and I’m like, okay, that kind of is good. Because like you said, the colour blindness and putting like, as much context into the button as possible. In case I guess, someone skips straight to the button via focusing.
Georgie 18:02
But then the other pattern for that is you can have a checkbox that says “I understand”. Or “Yes, I really want all of my lists and subscribers to be deleted”.
Geoff 18:11
I just want all my website to disappear.
Georgie 18:14
Yeah. And then you go, yes. I’m sure.
Geoff 18:17
Yeah. So this is a bird in the bush...?
Georgie 18:20
So yeah, I pulled up this is kind of an optical illusion. But the fact that I kind of skimmed through the last two steps of that Apple support page made me think of this illusion. So what does this say Geoff? There’s a tri—so there’s a triangle with some words in it. A few lines of words. So what does it say?
Geoff 18:41
It is a red triangle? It says “a bird in the bush”.
Georgie 18:45
No it—
Geoff 18:45
“The the bush”, oh my God, it says “the” twice.
Georgie 18:48
So it says “the” twice. But because the “the”, the word “the” is on separate lines. So it’s on the, it says—
Geoff 18:56
Oh yeah, it’s “a”.
Georgie 19:01
“Bird” on the second line, “in the” on the third line, and the last line, says “the bush”, so it actually says “a bird in the the bush”, but most people who look at it, will just read one of the “the”s.
Geoff 19:15
Yeah. Wow. At least my two, two runs through that. I read the without the second “the”. This actually reminds me about how people’s brains can autocorrect sentences when they’re reading it.
Georgie 19:30
Yeah?
Geoff 19:30
I can’t remember what the phenomenon is, but yeah, if if something’s like grammatically incorrect—
Georgie 19:35
Oh, yeah, yeah!
Geoff 19:36
Even though it’s grammatically correct, you’re like, people will read it just fine. Because they like autocorrect it in their head.
Georgie 19:43
Yeah. I think it’s something like the first word and the last word are correct. But all of the words in the sentences are all mixed.
Geoff 19:51
Oh that’s it, yeah!
Georgie 19:51
Yeah, or the last letters in a word, a first and last letters in a word. And I think it’s the phenomenon is because we read words as the whole word not as like the individual letter.
Geoff 20:03
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, it’s it’s really trippy when you when you think about your brain’s autocorrect. I also use this as an as kind of a description of whenever someone is just like ESL, and they’re like typing to me. But in general, you know, I can understand most of the sentence regardless of the grammar or the change in words. Just because I trained myself to, “Oh, if you can read this you have a strange mind too. Can you read this on these? Only some people...” I actually read that it’s “only smoe people”, yeah, we smoe now? We’re smoe. “I couldn’t believe that I could actually understand what I was reading the phenomenon where the”—what? “Power of, phenomenal power of the human mind according to research at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter what order the letters in a word are. The only important thing is that the first and last letter be in the right place. The rest can be a total mess. And you can still read it without a problem”. That is pretty cool. “This is because human minds not read”—human mind does. They forgot a space but I still corrected it! “Mind does not read every letter by itself but word as a hole, amazing how I always thought spelling was important if you can read this”.
Georgie 21:35
Yeah, yeah, I came across this ages ago. Also like for context, though what Geoff just read is actually written as (incomprehensible garbled English). So where all of the all of the letters in between the first and last letter are like jumbled.
Geoff 21:54
Yeah. My cousin actually told me one time I had a while a few years ago, they did they send me a text? I can’t remember, they were showing me something they wrote. And I’m like, this doesn’t make sense. Like, you haven’t actually written it in proper English. And they said to me, “So?” I’m like, “So? You should you should write, you should text in proper English”. They’re like, “if they get the idea, then why bother putting so much effort into English?” And I just couldn’t answer that. I’m like, oh, my God, I guess? I guess is that evolution of language? It hurt me. But the optical illusion.
Georgie 22:45
Can you see this? I was going to annotate on my screen, but I can see it.
Geoff 22:50
Does it say bad eyes?
Georgie 22:53
Yeah. It says bad eyes. So—you can see it, why, what’s the point in me...?
Geoff 23:00
Yeah. Did you ever do those? Like optical illusion puzzle books?
Georgie 23:06
Are you talking about the ones where you have to hold it up to your face? And kind of—or you just talking about ones like this?
Geoff 23:15
No, you got to go cross-eyed, those ones. Yeah.
Georgie 23:18
Yeah. I hated them. And they freaked me out. So—
Geoff 23:22
(laughs)
Georgie 23:22
I was like, I think I when I was in kindergarten, I got one of those books. Maybe not as a maybe it was a present. But I think someone intended to give it to me when I was a little bit older. Because like when you’re in kindergarten, you’re you’re like five years old. And maybe you don’t yet know how to cross your eyes and look at a book. And I remember not really understanding how it worked. And my dad was saying, you gotta cross your eyes, and then look past look past and like look at the book? And I, and when you’re a kid, you just don’t understand this. It’s sort of like when you have to explain something to someone who doesn’t have that knowledge. And a lot of parents who whom I work with, they always talk about how their children like, you can tell that they’re understanding, or they don’t yet understand why they’re crying, but you know that they’re sad, and things like that. It’s like they don’t quite understand fully, but you can, as an adult, you can like empathise with them. So anyway, obviously like now as an adult, I’m like what my dad said makes sense, like to look past, and look at the—but I was like, “How can I? I am focusing on like crossing my eyes!”. And then one day I got it to work and I saw the, illusion pop out or whatever, the resulting image pop out of the page and I was so freaked out that I’m pretty sure I had a nightmare that night after that.
Geoff 24:42
Ahh man.
Georgie 24:43
And I never wanted to do it again. Because it just felt like something was—
Geoff 24:47
Demon magic!
Georgie 24:47
Something was really, really popping out of the page. Yeah,
Geoff 24:51
It’s too real. It’s too real. Yeah, it took me a little bit as well. But once I got it, I was like, oh, that’s cool. So just, I kept doing it. Like yeah, I was like, oh, yeah.
Georgie 25:02
You know the sausage, sausage between your fingers? Sorry, I know that sounds really wrong.
Geoff 25:07
Sausage between my fingers?
Georgie 25:11
No. (laughs hysterically)
Geoff 25:13
The sausage.
Georgie 25:14
Okay, so it’s—
Geoff 25:15
I don’t know what kind of sausages you have between your fingers, but...
Georgie 25:17
(laughs)
Geoff 25:17
(laughs)
Georgie 25:20
Oh my God. Okay, so, you, it’s just a stupid trick. You put your two index fingers together.
Geoff 25:27
Yeah.
Georgie 25:27
And then you like put them close to your eyes.
Geoff 25:30
Yeah.
Georgie 25:30
And you look past them at the wall.
Geoff 25:33
Yeah.
Georgie 25:33
And so you see like—
Geoff 25:34
Okay, yeah, I get what you mean.
Georgie 25:35
You see, you see a nail like you see your um—
Geoff 25:38
Yeah.
Georgie 25:39
Fingers cross. And it’s almost like you see a third finger with two nails on each side.
Geoff 25:44
Yeah, yeah. (laughs)
Georgie 25:45
Yeah, so it’s so rudimentary. But—
Geoff 25:50
Woahhh. It’s pretty trippy.
Georgie 25:50
Some people call it “the sausage between your fingers”.
Geoff 25:55
That’s pretty trippy.
Georgie 25:57
And like, because because kids are so silly. I’d say, like, to my friends. And this, when I say kid, maybe I was more like preteen. So like ten, like maybe 10, 12 years old. I was like, “Did you know there’s a sausage between your fingers?” I was like, “everyone has a sausage between your fingers”. They’re like, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about”. I just tell them, just do this, put your index fingers together, and look past.
Geoff 26:19
I find it... I find it really interesting. Like, adjusting the focus of your eyes.
Georgie 26:26
Yeah.
Geoff 26:27
It’s almost like something that we have that everyone kind of does naturally whenever they look up, or whenever they just want to look forward. But if you just like sat there, looked at the corner of your monitor or something. And then you adjusted your focus to look at the thing behind it. It’s pretty trippy.
Georgie 26:43
Yeah.
Geoff 26:45
And when I, I was like, oh, this is like, I guess I was learning about how lenses do it. And I’m just like, and then one day, I just went, wait a second, I can just adjust my own focal length. And—
Georgie 26:55
Yeah.
Geoff 26:57
And then it’s like, pretty, pretty weird. But it’s cool. I like it.
Georgie 27:03
Wait, are you doing it right now?
Geoff 27:04
Yeah, I’m doing right now. Just like looking beyond things. But crossing your eyes and looking beyond things. It definitely does, does a weird thing to to your eyes.
Georgie 27:14
Yeah.
Geoff 27:14
Especially that sausage thing.
Georgie 27:15
(laughs hysterically) Sausage thing. I only, that was the first time in a while, I’m gonna go and tell people that now.
Geoff 27:26
HR, HR! HR! It’s actually funny because my company when it was in like startup phase, it didn’t have HR. So they have like, they have like a panda. They have a toy, stuffed toy, like ultra large panda. They call it that, the HR. So you complain to the panda.
Georgie 27:48
Oh wow.
Geoff 27:48
But yeah, HR is a panda. Something, something interesting I read as well today. Not today, actually this week. This tweet that said “as an elder millennial who came off a, came of age when Google became a verb, I had difficulty grasping that 40% of Gen Z’s use TikTok search, TikTok for searching”.
Georgie 28:15
What?
Geoff 28:16
Yeah, here are the three takeaways. TikTok shows them relevant content faster than Google. So the algorithm, the algorithm knows them so well. And they love that. And the other the other takeaway was that the Gen Z focus group, participants weren’t concerned about misinformation on TikTok. They know it exists in and will avoid content on the platform that can be easily false. And I think the most interesting, or other interesting thing, is the Gen Z for focus group. Participants don’t want to read to find out information.
Georgie 28:57
Mmm?
Geoff 28:57
Yeah, they will have they have to, but if they can find a quick video with the answer, that’s what they prefer. Now, the most interesting thing is actually part of her video, which is these aren’t the top, these aren’t the greatest three things, but I thought the great thing, great thing was that when you look at videos on TikTok—which I don’t do very often—that is pretty much it, let’s say per her example. You you’re looking for, you know how to put on foundation.
Georgie 29:26
Yeah.
Geoff 29:27
Her example. She had side by side, one was someone Googling “how do I put on foundation” and like scrolling through results to figure out how to do it. But TikTok, it’s literally like three seconds the person has showed you how to put on foundation.
Georgie 29:43
Yeah, yeah.
Geoff 29:44
So I’m like, okay, that kind of makes sense. You know?
Georgie 29:47
But I still feel like it taps into the, that people don’t want to, like people have short attention spans which are just—
Geoff 29:53
Hundred percent.
Georgie 29:53
I still find just not great.
Geoff 29:57
100! The, the fact that we can find out this information even quicker than Googling something which we do every day is pretty crazy.
Georgie 30:08
I guess the plus side is that it’s time efficient.
Geoff 30:12
Yeah.
Georgie 30:13
I guess?
Geoff 30:13
You’re trying to do your eye wings or something you want some, want to see an example, you just click on TikTok, instead of—
Georgie 30:19
Yeah.
Geoff 30:19
Trawling through a bunch of weird top 10s. You know?
Georgie 30:22
Actually, now that you mention it, right, like because I have like hooded eyelids. So like I have these folds in my eye, that make it a little bit difficult to do that eyeliner wing thing. So I was like, trying to look up how to do this if you have hooded eyelids, and I spent a very long time, like—a very long time—like 20 minutes.
Geoff 30:40
Wow! Talk about short attention spans!
Georgie 30:43
But I guess like, so my personal preference is like, I don’t want to open a video, or go on YouTube and watch a tutorial. A lot of videos on YouTube aren’t obviously the length that that TikTok and like, Instagram reels are, they’re a lot longer. I didn’t want to do that. So I don’t even think of going to YouTube because I didn’t want to, so I start trawling through these articles to find details like pictures and writing, because that’s just the content I prefer, like the form I prefer to consume in. And then I think I actually got a quicker sort of idea by someone sending me a link on Instagram to a short video, or someone’s profile even, that just had a whole bunch of pictures of what I needed to copy. So yeah, I don’t know, your mileage may vary.
Geoff 31:28
Yeah, yeah, probably depends on what you’re looking for. Like if I wanted to, I mean, if I usually just Google stuff to code, so I don’t think Googling, I don’t think looking up a framework on TikTok is gonna be super helpful.
Georgie 31:46
Err. You’d be surprised at how much nerdy tech stuff is on Instagram, I think, there’s like—
Geoff 31:51
But helpful is the key, if they gave me like a six second video on the on, like the top five things that are really cool about this one framework, then I’m like, but how do I do the thing that I want to do? Like, I have to go look at the documentation anyways?
Georgie 32:06
It’s like learn react in six seconds. That’s not happening.
Geoff 32:08
Oh, my God. Learn how to be a full stack developer in five easy steps. Actually, we talked about this, I think, like, there’s a Graham Stefan video on like, how to get rich, he looks up TikToks and lots of TikToks are trying to teach people how to get rich, but all of them are like “step one, start your own business. Step two...”
Georgie 32:34
Ah, like you just, it’s just breaking it down into manageable chunks. But then you still have to action, the actionable chunks.
Geoff 32:41
They’re not even actionable. I think the, I think the steps were literally like, “start a side hustle” or something like that, “invest in stocks and profit”, right? And that gives you no information. But what they do do—haha, “do do” (laughs)—
Georgie 33:01
(laughs)
Geoff 33:01
Is at the end, they go like, “follow me to find out” like, extra steps.
Georgie 33:08
Oh no, yeah, I’ve seen this on Instagram reels. It’s like, here’s some of the things I do for blah, blah. Follow me for x. So one that I got targeted with. And I think Nick got targeted with it as well, which is really weird. It was a woman who was a trichologist so I think she’s a hair specialist. So she was sharing like hair hair tips. And she’d be like, “here’s five things you shouldn’t do to your hair to prevent hair breakage” and she gives some things in the whatever, 10 second video, and then it’s “follow me to learn more”, points at the doobly doo. But not doobly doo because we’re like, in 2022 not 2016.
Geoff 33:54
Man that was ages ago, hey.
Georgie 33:56
Love vlogbrothers.
Geoff 33:58
But but then like, this is a huge scam because they don’t actually tell you any more than what they’ve done when you follow them. You just look at all of their, all their—
Georgie 34:08
You just digest all their videos and their content and stuff?
Geoff 34:10
No, all their TikToks are exactly the same thing. Just phrased differently. They’ll, they’ll give you the same three steps, but in like 100 different ways. Not not telling you like index funds, like which index funds might be useful or, or like what side hustles make the most money or you know. It’s just useless.
Georgie 34:31
Also that’s subjective.
Geoff 34:31
Yeah, exactly. But either way, it’s useless information. They’re just telling you like, you know, of, getting a second job equals more money. Hey, whoa, whoa, how did I not figure that out before?
Georgie 34:43
Yeah.
Geoff 34:44
So.
Georgie 34:44
It’s not super like, practical.
Geoff 34:47
No.
Georgie 34:47
I guess.
Geoff 34:48
Zero.
Georgie 34:48
And then they just get all the engagement from you.
Geoff 34:51
Yeah.
Georgie 34:51
Viewing their things.
Geoff 34:52
But apparently TikTok doesn’t actually pay much.
Georgie 34:55
No, they don’t. You know Hank Green actually did a video on his personal channel, like I think was a 36 minute or so video about, I think was called “Why TikTok sucks”. And he talked, he talked in detail about how much money he actually gets per like, view or on TikTok and it’s like 0.00 something cents, it’s just, it’s just shit.
Geoff 35:20
It’s just shocking.
Georgie 35:22
And then he compared it to YouTube who always pays their creators.
Geoff 35:26
Oh.
Georgie 35:27
Yeah.
Geoff 35:28
Even the shorts aren’t making money for YouTube anyways.
Georgie 35:32
I don’t understand the shorts thing. I feel like they’re making short videos that should have just been on Instagram and then just, I don’t know. Or they repost.
Geoff 35:40
I mean, we’re back, we’re back to the back to the change.org petition to get Instagram off videos.
Georgie 35:51
Oh, speaking of reposting. Like, that’s a whole thing. But it just reminded me of Tumblr when you reblog stuff.
Geoff 36:00
Oh yeah reblogging.
Georgie 36:01
And then when people reblogged, or something was reblogged so many times you couldn’t even find like the original.
Geoff 36:10
Yeah.
Georgie 36:11
Yeah. And I hated how it was so nested, it would view like in a really nested way because it was reblogged like 31 times or something. And what I would do, is I’d find the original post person who posted it and then just reblog it from there. So it was just one level deep.
Geoff 36:25
That’s loads of effort. Like—
Georgie 36:28
Is it though? I don’t—
Geoff 36:29
Yeah, I can’t even find my own name on the thing that I posted that I’m the original, the author of, you know.
Georgie 36:37
I thought it does a skip and it goes to the person who very, who first posts it, unless it collapses everything now, but I haven’t used Tumblr like so long.
Geoff 36:45
Wait, where’s my post? Yeah, see, I can’t even find the post that I’m most famous for. But—
Georgie 36:53
Oh my God, does my Tumblr even exist?
Geoff 36:56
Tumblr is...
Georgie 36:57
What was my...
Geoff 36:59
Where’s my post? Haha I got a message. “FYI, not my question. Who is who is your friend that cosplayed as Captain America”? Oh. The, yeah, people are just wow, people.
Georgie 37:16
Woah.
Geoff 37:16
What do people use this for these days, hey?
Georgie 37:18
Tumblr. I don’t know but it looks like Twitter.
Geoff 37:21
Oh, you’re right. You’re right. I didn’t even make that connection.
Georgie 37:24
So I think my most reblogged Tumblr thing... Do you remember you remember Wong Foo Productions?
Geoff 37:34
Yes.
Georgie 37:35
And, actually was it Wong Fu? I think actually, you know, Ryan Higa.
Geoff 37:40
Yes.
Georgie 37:40
He did. Was it him who did Agents of Secret Stuff?
Geoff 37:45
Yes.
Georgie 37:46
Yes. So that came out. It was like, I guess you could say it’s a short film, was like, I think it had two parts. So it had Ryan Higa and Arden Cho. And there was like, some funny interaction with him and Ian from Smosh.
Geoff 38:03
Yeah.
Georgie 38:03
And do you remember, do you remember this scene where he’s like, “What are you looking at?” And he was like, I’m looking at her. Her knockers, like her tits or something. And he’s like, “oh okay”, like, he thought he was like, trying to like, follow her or something. Oh, my God. Spoiler alert. Sorry.
Geoff 38:20
Sorry.
Georgie 38:20
Yeah anyway.
Geoff 38:22
You won’t remember this.
Georgie 38:22
Yeah.
Geoff 38:23
I don’t even remember this.
Georgie 38:25
You don’t! And you’ve seen it. So I took some screen caps. And then I made one of those montages that show like, it’s almost like a comic strip.
Geoff 38:32
Ohhh.
Georgie 38:33
Yeah, I made one of those to like capturing the different—to basically illustrate the scene but in like static form.
Geoff 38:41
Yeah.
Georgie 38:41
And then I also did it for the I think the end scene where—(laughs) let’s just say, just in case I’m spoiling, for the very like, last scene. And those were probably my two most reblogged things because I did it like right after it was released. And I was like, I’m gonna go viral.
Geoff 38:58
I’m gonna go famous.
Georgie 39:00
Well, that was the idea. But anyway, I don’t have Tumblr anymore.
Geoff 39:04
I, so, my most my most popular post ever on the internet, I think, is this picture of “Did you know? Japan’s flag is also a pie chart of how much Japan is Japan.” And it shows a flag with the big red dot. I mean, rectangle with the big red dot, which is Japan’s flag and then it has the square. Like the, the, what’s it’s called, the legend? It’s like red square, “Japan is Japan”. So that’s, I took that photo in Japan. It was on a menu. I can’t remember which place it is.
Georgie 39:42
Wait, send me the link.
Geoff 39:43
Oh, yeah, I’ll send you the link. bIt took me forever to find this because obviously I couldn’t. I couldn’t just find—oh, is there a link here? God, Tumblr’s just so bad.
Georgie 40:00
(laughs)
Geoff 40:00
But yeah, I posted it, and it has—I just put in the chat. It has a total of 158,000 notes.
Georgie 40:12
Holy shit.
Geoff 40:13
86,000 reblogs 72,000 likes and 14 comments.
Georgie 40:22
It’s so funny because it’s not even that miraculous if you know what I mean?
Geoff 40:26
Yeah, I mean—
Georgie 40:27
It’s not like, you know.
Geoff 40:29
2014, Tumblr was a different place. But—
Georgie 40:34
Yeah, wow.
Geoff 40:35
A lot of people are like, did you know that in Japan, in Japanese slang one term for the moment when you get your period is the day of the flag? (laughs)
Georgie 40:49
(laughs) Ah, that’s pretty funny.
Geoff 40:50
Day of the flag!
Georgie 40:53
At least they’re recognising that period blood is red, not blue like in those fucking commercials back in the day. I think they’re improving—
Geoff 40:59
Shit, no way, that, I’ve never heard of that.
Georgie 41:02
What? You don’t know about the—okay so, I think it’s changed now, but on a lot of ads for like tampons and pads and female hygiene product,s sanitary products. They would show the, the blood as like, just this cartoony blue colour, like, okay, what if I go, period, advertisements, blue, liquid. It was like such a, such a thing. Why is my computer so slow? It’s not.
Geoff 41:38
Oh, no, you gotta throw it out. Oh, it’s tragic. New laptop time.
Georgie 41:44
Trying to... This is my new laptop! Okay, so this one is, this one is actually showing it, like, as red liquid. Because it’s because it’s like—
Geoff 42:00
Whoa.
Georgie 42:01
Period blood is red. Right? So you’re saying “whoa”, because probably, I’m pretty sure back in the day.
Geoff 42:06
I mean, the thing is—
Georgie 42:07
Seen ones that we’re like—
Geoff 42:08
I mean, not like woah-ing, it’s just that that I’ve never seen period ads?
Georgie 42:13
Like look at this, like this is so unrealistic.
Geoff 42:15
Oh, I think I’ve actually seen this. This whole blue thing, I never really like thought about it as if it were actually period blood. I never made that association. This is the colour they do for all germs and all liquids, right?
Georgie 42:29
Yeah. Yeah, and so there was a whole movement around like companies should stop like making periods so taboo, and making it so like clinical. Like it’s a very real thing that people who menstruate go through and—
Geoff 42:46
Yeah.
Georgie 42:46
So yeah, I think I think in this day and age I don’t because I don’t have I don’t have free to air television or we never set it up so I don’t watch it, so I don’t know what they look like these days but there have just been more ads showing it red—
Geoff 43:00
What if people are squeamish with looking at blood. You know?
Georgie 43:03
That’s the whole, that’s the whole point. It’s like, it’s just a movement to normalise that this is a normal part of many people’s lives.
Geoff 43:12
Yeah, but blood is blood, let’s let’s say, you like, for a plaster ad, you’re going to expect them to just literally cut themselves and have blood like oozing out of them?
Georgie 43:21
Well yes, you do see like on those—
Geoff 43:24
You do?
Georgie 43:24
On those plaster or band aid ads you do see like red coming out. Or you see people getting punched—when they like even like violence related like ad, domestic violence or something—not not necessarily domestic violence.
Geoff 43:35
(laughs)
Georgie 43:35
Maybe sport injuries or something like that. Like that’s, that’s still, what do you call it, G rated? Like you still see blood coming out of people’s nose? So...
Geoff 43:43
Yeah.
Georgie 43:44
It’s the same thing. It’s like why should it—yeah.
Geoff 43:46
No, my my argument here is that, no blood right because what if people are squeamish just seeing generally blood not not menstrual blood is no different from other blood.
Georgie 43:57
But everyone’s walking around-
Geoff 43:58
We should sensor all the rest of the blood?
Georgie 44:01
Everyone is walking around with blood in their body and it’s like?
Geoff 44:03
But blood is blue until it exits your body, in which case it turns red?
Georgie 44:10
Oh my God you don’t have to get like—but no one ever sees it blue?
Geoff 44:13
No one sees a blue except for when they see their veins.
Georgie 44:18
Wait, you know there’s this whole thing about, so you’re saying when you look at your veins you see blue?
Geoff 44:24
Yeah, yeah veins are blue, right?
Georgie 44:26
They’re not always. So it depends on your skin tone.
Geoff 44:30
Oh shit. Oh, that kind of makes sense.
Georgie 44:32
Yeah, so there’s because like I, there’s a there’s a test to see like what what colour suits you better like gold jewellery or silver jewellery?
Geoff 44:40
Yeah.
Georgie 44:41
And it’s like gold is better for people a warm tone because it complements the warm tone. And silver is better for people who are cool toned. And so if you’re cool toned, you do this bloody vein test when you look at your veins, and if they look blue, then you’re cool toned, if they look greenish, then you’re warm toned. Now the caveat is that this is actually, not very good for people who are like, coloured people.
Geoff 45:05
Yeah.
Georgie 45:05
It kind of only works for people who are Caucasian. If you’re like if you’re Asian or like if you’re dark really dark skinned, like it’s hard to tell because beyond just having cool or warm tones you have this like either like a yellow undertone or like a brown, like, you have a different undertone to someone who is just like Caucasian and very like pale or lighter.
Geoff 45:27
Yeah, and you know, you know what the ne—the tone of the ending of this podcast is going to be?
Georgie 45:36
It’s blue.
Geoff 45:39
It’s a cool tone.
Georgie 45:41
Oh I see what you’re doing there. Wait hang on, we’re Toast & Roast.
Geoff 45:43
We’re Toast & Roast, I just thought of it just then. We’re gold then, everybody, gold. So you can catch us—you can follow us on @toastroastpod on Instagram and Twitter mostly Twitter—
Georgie 46:00
TikTok?
Geoff 46:00
And our never-to-be released TikTok.
Georgie 46:06
And you can find our episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the big optical illusion.
Geoff 46:13
Ooh. And new episodes every Monday so—
Georgie 46:20
See you next week!
Geoff 46:20
Bye.
