Podcast 2 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 2: Cortex Interview (2007-02-22).

Part 1: cortex transcribed the first half or so. Part 2: Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Summary Keywords

people, filter, cd, music, archives, question, sleep, asleep, read, thought, play, favorite, nap, cortex, neglect, comments, metal, blogs, grew, site

Transcript

from cortex

[music - snsranch's "Saturday Night at the Ranch"]

M: That was snsranch with Saturday Night at the Ranch.

J: Well--and snsranch's stuff is great just because it's so--all over the map. Like some of it's just like really great music and some of it's just these noise collages and some of it's just like crazy "I played this on my porch"...nonsense, and, ah--just in general, you know he's got his kid and sometimes he does things with his kids and you know its--his stuff is generally my favorite just for interestingness whether or not it's my favorite for listenability is--is something totally different.

M: Fo' sheezy. Fo' sheezy. Uhh, welcome to the Metafilter podcast the second episode, a ten minute long interview with cortex coming up at the end. The first one went pretty well, it was a little long, we'll try to make this one a bit tighter. Oh, and all the questions people asked about, I think we'll pick out a couple there. What was the Ask Metafilter post you wanted to talk about, Jessamyn?

J: Oh, well my favorite Ask Metafilter post on this week was the, ah, how to fall asleep on command, or rather the question was why can't I fall asleep on command. Like, I don't wanna take drugs, I don't wanna, you know--whatever. I need to figure out how to fall asleep. Five minutes, fall asleep. And--cuz we've had a lot of sleep, like--I've got insomnia, I can't sleep, I need help questions, which I always read because they're totally useful. But this one was really like--"how do I tell my body it's bedtime and fall asleep immediately" and a whole bunch of people favorited it and there was a lot of, a lot of really good advice including join the army, become a doctor, ahh--you know all the things that sort of sleep-deprive you. But you know people had different--different tricks that you don't normally find when you sort of read the I Can't Sleep books.

M: And there was no magic bullet, right?

J: No, there's no--[laughs] sorry, there's no magic bullet.

M: Aww.

J: But I like the idea of like a favorite napping couch or accidental yoga naps or, ah--

M: I wait until I'm tired and then I can clonk out. I actually probably fall asleep in less than five minutes now, but I usually go to sleep well after when I should.

J: See, if I wait till I'm tired until I'm up for like two days.

M: That's true. Also, never do anything in your bedroom at all except sleep, so I never read ever, um, in bed. So the moment I go in my bedroom is pretty much, walk over to the bed and fall asleep.

J: Lights out time.

M: Yeah, otherwise you get used to "oh I'm gonna read four chapters and then go to sleep" and then it just never comes.

J: So no laptopping in bed, is that what you're saying?

M: No, it's very rare, and I've been napping like crazy and I'm surprised it doesn't really affect my sleep too bad.

J: That's right, you said you've become a big, ah, advocate of the Churchill style nap.

M: Right. Not just the regular--not just uh, falling asleep on the couch, but you got to fully--

J: Proper nap.

M: A proper nap, like get ready to go to bed for a while. But it's only like 20 to 40 minutes--

J: See, this answers the question that I was probably gonna ask from the--from the list of questions, which, "how--how's Fiona changed your, uh, changed your metafiltering" and probably the day time nap is part of that

M: Oh yeah, she's a...awful sleeper, she goes to sleep like clockwork at like between 7 and 8 pm. But she gets up, like, we just cant--we've tried everything, we can't get her to sleep past...barely 6 am. She likes to get up at like 5 am, and when she's up she's up.

J: And she's how old?

M: Uh, uh, a year and a half, a year and three quarters, something like--she'll be two in a few months. Um--

J: Uh huh.

M: Yeah, she's sure to learn to sleep through the night, that--that's the part that probably sucks, is that sleep deprivation is--never end in two years. Um, over on the Metafilter side it looks like, uh, everyone loved the chocolate chip cookie one, and mostly I think it was just to argue over which chocolate chip cookie is the best.

J: People like to talk about food.

M: Yeah--

J: Especially people like to talk asbout food when they're at work...you know--

M: [laughs]

J: I'm not saying--I'm not saying anything about anybody particular but I think we do have people who sometimes like to, uh...Metafilter while they're at work and uh--

M: And food, that's like, that's uh, a dub?--forbidden things you shouldn't do at work, eat chocolate chip cookies all day--

J: Right, blogging about food.

M: That's awesome. If you can mix sex in there and you can get the trifecta somehow, of things you shouldn't do--

J: Not that we're recommending that.

M: No, that would be awful. The other big post is the...Craig Ferguson on the Late Late Show doing the Britney Spears thing, um--

J: Well except that it wasn't a Britney Spears thing.

M: Right, yeah, it was mostly a speech on, um...being sober and...and being gener--well, I mean, it did come around back to Britney Spears and--that it was uh, you know, that he was generally concerned about her and said, you know, we should stop gawking at it, and he actually felt bad as a comedian, which is pretty good to hear, making the cheap--

J: Right, because it's an easy cheap shot.

M: Yeah.

J: That thread also gave us the tagline, "screeching eyeball stupid shitbox clownshoes", which I appreciated.

M: Wow. [laughs] That's a looong tagline. Oh, the one thing wha--I couldn't stop thinking about when I watched it was how annoyed I was at the audience. Um--

J: Cuz they were laughing in all these weird place--

M: Yeah, because it's nervous laughter and it's weird and you're in a studio where you're supposed to be laughing and it's cold and they do all this stuff to make you laugh easier...yeah, I mean--I--I just kept thinking back when you're, when you're watching someone doing something out of the ordinary and people aren't reacting correctly, you know there's probably five people in the audience that are giggling but I couldn't stop thinking, dude, you guys are ruining this moment, like, shut the hell up, it's not--he's not trying to be funny. He would insert little jokes as a relief to people, like every couple minutes like a good comedian does, but, yeah--

J: Because that's what he'll do, he'll just take off and talk about stuff.

M: I've never actually seen his show, I feel so bad, um--

J: Are you serious? It's great.

M: I know! I'm reading all these comments and everyone's like, "he's the best guy", like--uh, Conan, for me, was, like, you know whatever, five, ten years ago I watched Conan all the time and I didn't watch anything else because I thought it was crap. I've never seen his show ever. And now I feel bad.

J: Well, you can probably catch up on YouTube fairly quickly.

M: Yeah, yeah, it's--I mean it's gotta be helping him because I think these are all official CBS uploads, and who the hell is up at 12:30 in the morning watching CBS. So. I mean, YouTube is making the long tail work for--for Craig Ferguson. I was amazed at how long it went. I'd seen every blog on the web talking about like how great this was. And I just thought it'd be over--

J: And you were like, who's got this kind of attention span.

M: I was like, wh--I was surprised the blogs, the--people on blogs have this kind of attention span, but it's obviously something different and special. I guess that's about it on this post. I mean, did you see anything else, um--off of metafilter...

J: Those were my favorites. If we're trying to keep it--if we're trying to keep it down...

M: What was the question I was gonna ask you...oh, I thought the loaded question about, um, how do you rectify the situation in your head between being a librarian that has to archive all human knowledge, and that you delete a bunch of crap out of Ask Metafilter.

J: Well, the question was interesting, actually, because it had to do with, you know, do we have a complete copy of Metafilter anywhere, ah--but, but I sort of feel like unless you're following everybody around with a tape recorder and you're one of those guys who wears the little video camera on your chest, like, you know there's certain stuff that's kind of designed to be, uh--ephemeral, at least, at least in 2007 and at least right now and so the same way, ah--I would clean it up if you took a dump in my living room and not saying, "but it's human knowledge", you know, what--you know, I--

M: Well, don't you think your...librarian duties are to preserve the archives and isn't removing the, the garbage from the edges like, isn't that help make better archives, better information--

J: Well, it depends, I mean archives are alla bout supporting the institution whatever the institution is in the real world. Like, yeah, exactly what you said, I mean, no archive has everything. Almost no archives except maybe the Internet Archive and even then--

M: [laughs] Yeah--

J: --realistically...ah, even, even attempt to get everything and so I guess it's sort of a balance between, ah, you know preserving every adorable utterance and, ah, having a useful, you know, a useful sort of...informational knowledge base or whatever I mean you know we're not going to try to turn this into some wicked crazy knowledge base but--

M: Well--

J: The idea that Ask Metafilter actually works better if people aren't making the, uh, you know, lol butts jokes all the time, no offense cortex...

[music: cortex's At the Open Mice]

from otter

mathowie 9:12 claps today we're speaking with cortex are just Mullard

Cortex 9:18 Well done, sir.

mathowie 9:21 Cortex crazy prolific on the site lately? More favorites than me? Yeah, lots of favorites. Lots of comments, lots of songs, lots and lots of songs. So I guess the most obvious question I had was, how on earth do you find time for everything seems like you're everywhere on the site and you're producing original songs all the time and

Jessamyn 9:41 you have multiple sites of your own most of which you maintain at least somewhat? Yeah,

Cortex 9:45 that's, that's a good way of putting it. There's probably like four or five specific concept blogs at this point. And at any given time, at least one of them is being collected and I think the short answer is a kind of go through Like wacky, creative manic phases, and I really enjoy sort of doing new things, I tend to start things up and inevitably neglect them. But as far as commenting on Metafilter, I, I have a day job that permits a certain amount of slack time. But I think that's probably the case for a whole lot of people on the site. I think that's what powers the site flag jobs and slack employer theft. We're subverting America's future success for our own entertainment on metal filter.

Jessamyn 10:29 And so your your wife and brother also on metal filters that right?

Cortex 10:34 Yeah, both as a fairly recently, my wife read it for a long time, we oftentimes will find ourselves on a lazy weekend morning, telling each other about something that the other person just read in the same thread. And so she's been a reader for a long time. But she got an account recently, actually, when Matt started the guest account thing. And my brother has been reading for at least a couple years now, too, so he just got an account recently for the hell of

mathowie 10:57 it. Couldn't you tell us about the metal filter CD? Like how it's going sales wise? Yeah. And I want to ask you specifically, like, Why the need to do a CD in this day and age? Is it really like, I mean, I know it's

Jessamyn 11:11 metal filter music didn't exist yet.

Cortex 11:13 Yeah, well, I

mathowie 11:14 should. I've never I've never explained this. But like, the CD was a big driving force to launching music, and I had hoped to do it before the submissions were done for the CD, but it happened to overlap like right after. But I've been telling you had been bugging me for like months, like we should do. That was

Cortex 11:34 a pain in the ass about that. No, no, it's totally. You've taught me the wrong lesson. No, no, no, I

mathowie 11:39 people bug me with ideas all the time. They're great. And they're usually things I already have been thinking like someday I'd like to do so. It was the proper kick in the pants to actually finish it like, but I had hoped to finish it maybe a month earlier.

Jessamyn 11:51 But we were talking about Josh and the CD. Yeah, exactly. So

mathowie 11:55 I want to know, like a CD to go into be on metal filter music, or do you get something more out of like the physical object, but care that goes into engineering it and

Cortex 12:05 I'm really big on that. I mean, to give sort of a capital summary of where the CD is right now. Mefi comp.com is a good example of one of the blogs I've been neglecting mispronounce what you say MEPhI you guys seem to catch Jesus Christ. Yes. Yes, I say MEPhI. Anyway, the the website for the Metafilter compilation album has been a little bit neglected the last month third and a half. But uh, the CD has done well. It's really sales have trickled off. We sold probably about 250 copies so far, which is really great. We've definitely recouped. I'm kind of embarrassed to be vague about it, because I'd haven't done the accounting yet. But I think we've raised about 900 or $900 or maybe 1000 So far in net profit to send off to the mockingbird foundation. So yeah, it's done. Well, in that sense, we could totally do these every year with that sort of sales. And never have a problem with money. But the Harvey girls would end up with four boxes every year of CDs in their basement unless we moved the rest up. Yeah, we did 1000 Because that's kind of where the money was. We could have done 500 For slightly less money so so yeah, it's doing well but people should buy about 750 more copies of it. And and yeah, I don't know I really do like the the physical format of a real CD. I thought Interrobang did a fantastic job on the art and looking at it online. It's pretty cool. But actually holding that booklet is just fantastic. And I always had the CD to someone.

Jessamyn 13:41 I was carrying one around in my bag all weekend. It was really it's really neat on the inside especially.

mathowie 13:45 Yeah, CD booklets really cool I just wanted like the middle ground I had to worry about shipping and it

Cortex 13:52 sounds like people were kind of into that so we could probably try and work something out like that I wouldn't be chomping at the bit personally to start another physical one right now anyway

Unknown Speaker 14:06 do your ask how you are then as hot are moved your nice hot comments. You're asked how comments

Jessamyn 14:22 all your music stuff. Josh, where did you are you self taught are you this is just like your hobby thing? Did you go to school?

Cortex 14:30 I did not go to school for music. I when I went to school, I actually have a bachelor's in computer science but I was going to double major in music and I realized

Jessamyn 14:41 that a soil science degree like a real man.

Cortex 14:47 Anyway, I basically figured out pretty early on getting a degree in music didn't have anything to do with what I liked about music so I let that go but I took a bunch of classes but ya know, I grew up in a fairly musical family. My mom has been and sort of a campfire style guitarist and singer for a long time and was a music minister in one sense or another in Catholic churches for basically my entire childhood. So the family would go and play sometimes. And my dad played some bass and my two older sisters, and the older of them would sing a lot. I have seen them on the internet. Yeah, so you have you've seen my sisters I suppose on Flickr. They're hotties let me tell you.

Jessamyn 15:23 He's got hot sisters.

mathowie 15:24 Oh, man URL, please.

Jessamyn 15:27 Look it up. Keep talking.

Cortex 15:29 I find the picture one of my sisters. Yeah, I sort of grew up in that context of being pretty musical. And I was a pretty quiet internal kid growing up. So I learned to play piano just plunk it on our piano and, and yeah, I guess I've always had a pretty good ear for music. So I've just sort of run with it. And in the last few years, especially, it's really started to gel where it can work really quickly and sort of come up with an idea and execute it.

mathowie 15:51 So are you in bands now?

Cortex 15:52 Yeah, I'm actually I'm in two bands at the moment. I'm in a band called The Man so cool, which was named by our front man's eight year old daughter and playing piano with that. And I'm also in the Harvey girls right now. Also featuring legacy members, Melissa Mae and sleepy Pete and SeaMonkey has recently started playing keyboard for us. So it's a crazy metal filter band at this point. Wow. That's terrible. I used to play a little trombone or some shit for them. So

Jessamyn 16:21 when they were in Kansas, yeah. Before they moved to Pacific Northwest, yes. As all right. I was just, I was just in Lawrence. Yeah, I took a picture of a street sign that I thought was near inteiro. Banks house and I was off by about 10 blocks.

mathowie 16:35 Pretty good on those countrywide.

Unknown Speaker 16:38 I thought so. You grew up black. In the dark, black. You don't give a damn and doing the journalists?

mathowie 16:53 Should we have like standard questions for people that are part of the site? Like how did you find

Cortex 16:59 that? That'd be cool. If you did that. If you had like, Yeah, almost just like the three Metafilter questions.

Jessamyn 17:03 Well, how do you pronounce it is questionable? Yeah. It'd

Cortex 17:07 be a big one. Yeah. It's it's MEPhI. It's mefites Mehta filter. V five mefite. And I know it rolls off the tongue.

mathowie 17:16 Yeah, like a turd. Um, so how did you find the site? I can make fun of the people who are interviewing it's funnier. It's called

Cortex 17:24 camaraderie fuck I found at some some point in 2000 or 2001 A friend of mine pointed me to it I'd been reading meme pool pretty regularly back when you could actually do that. And and meta filter was like meme pool but you know with comments at the time great.

Bellows became a legend rest in peace John MCs, the Everyman. He talked a lot to say the least a theory of lies a feminist who spoken lengthy paragraphs or the quickness was some other guy who might to play the site for laughs

mathowie 18:10 thanks, cortex for the interview. And thank you Jessamyn for being with me here and I want to thank all listeners. This is the second medical tech podcast See you next week.