Feature
Everybody Knows You're Not from Here
I've known Josh for about 3 years now. He's a mod at the website Metafilter, has a vast media empire (that he needs to update... definitely check out Mulder's Big Adventure), and plays banjo like the dickens (he's a one-time Harvey Girl). I sent him a few questions via e-mail and he sent back some great answers. Unlike most of the subjects of EKYNfH, Josh has actually lived here since he was a kid, so it's kinda like he's from here.
1. How long have you been in Portland? Do you think it's changed much over that time?
My family moved to Portland in 1985, when I was seven; folks bought up an old I think 1915 craftsman-style house in the Mt. Tabor neighborhood in SE, which they're still in. I grew up there, went to the nearby public schools. Went to college in Worcester, Massachusetts, which made me being to appreciate Portland tremendously for the first time. Fell in love, finished
school, came home, moved into an apartment downtown near PSU, lived
there for six years, got married in the interim, then finally moved to North
Portland near St. Johns last October when we bought an old 1910
craftsman-style house of our own.
I didn't really get around town much when I was a kid, so most of my
impressions of Portland from before I went to college are of the Tabor area
and other nearby bits of SE. My old block has changed very little over that
time (aside from house prices skyrocketing); Hawthorne has definitely gotten a bit more built up but it was already kind of the It Place in SE when I was in highschool. My impression is Belmont and Mississippi both have really boomed much more, but I didn't spend much time on either as a kid so that's more town lore than a personal impression.
Downtown was really kind of exploding with new construction the whole time we lived there, though; I can't think of a time when we couldn't see at least one or two cranes from our corner apartment window. Which is good and bad -- it's great that there's a lot of civic development going on, the Big Pipe thing and the new MAX line going in while were living down there, but it's also fucking people for housing since the pressure to go condo with existing apartment properties has been so strong for several years. We were lucky not to have our building sold out from under us while we were renting, and even at that our rent really shot up a lot in the years we were there.
2. What's a fave memory of Portland from back in the day?
I loved the old Mt. Tabor Arcade, which is now the Mt. Tabor Theater and
Pub, up on 48th & Hawthorne. When I was in grade school it was a nickel
arcade of the best kind -- low cover charge and all the games set on free play, no need to fuck with nickels at all. I killed hours and hours there with my best friend Chris, in a period where arcade machines were still just plain more kickass than home consoles (which the two of us also killed hours and hours on). It had some shitty theater screens in the back that were always running second run movies.
We started going to the Avalon nickel arcade, another old theater over on
Belmont, once the Tabor made the first of however many transitions it's made between owners and business models over the year, but the Avalon made you use actual nickels and sometimes two or three per credit and that was just kind of bullshit.
3. What do you do for a day job nowadays? Since I know what you do, please explain some daily duties/routines for you on the site.
I work on the internet, as a moderator and administrator of the community
website Metafilter.com. It's a kind of generalist collaborative blog, but on a
really big scale -- we've got tens of thousands of members, so the content folks put up is really diverse, with folks posting links to interesting content, asking questions of the community, sharing original music, etc. My job is a mix of keeping things from breaking, keeping the community informed about policy stuff, and removing problematic content and containing disputes between folks on the site. Herding cats, essentially, where the cats in question are a motley crew of generally smart, articulate people of all kinds of stripes.
On a given day, I'll probably remove a dozen comments out of the couple
thousand that get posted, answer a couple of questions about why those
decisions got made, write a dozen email responses to site members, join a
couple of conversations about cool things folks have posted, and shout
"Hugs!" when something fighty has more or less resolved itself.
I work from home, which is fantastic. I had worked for Metafilter part time,
basically moonlighting at my dayjob where I had a lot of free time most days, for a year and a half or so before things lined up such that I could quit that and work on nothing but Metafilter. I feel ridiculously lucky.
4. Can you name your top 5 memories of metafilter? These can be as a mod or as not a mod.
I once wrote a song on a kind of implicit dare, called "matthewchen Is
Spamming", after a user named matthewchen was caught spamming.
Someone made a joke about that sounding like a song title, and I ran with it
and had cranked out a recording within a few hours, which delighted the hell out of people and THAT delighted the hell out of ME. That was the first of a handful of site-related songs I've recorded over the years.
Back in 2006, this was before I worked for the site, I ended up putting
together a compilation album of original recordings by Metafilter members,
and we sold several hundred copies and raised close to two thousand bucks
for a music education charity. I'd never done anything like that before, and the enthusiasm from other folks on the site to collaborate and make it all work was just stunning and cemented for me somewhat the reality that this was a community and not just a bunch of nerds yelling at each other on a website.
The site owner and my boss, Matt Haughey, ended up launching a proper
Music subsite a few months after the compilation project got going, and
there's several thousand recordings posted now by hundreds of different folks on the site. I've always valued the musical feedback I've gotten personally via Mefi in a variety of ways, but having a whole shared community space is a huge thing and, again, it's made the place a little more concrete and special for me and I've had the chance to collaborate with a few people musically who I'd otherwise never have connected with. I guess this whole music thing is a theme here.
In a sort of perverse love/hate way, the 2008 general election and
specifically (and almost entirely in retrospect) the way some of the
discussions of the whole Palin clusterfuck went down is something I'll never
forget. We had an epic thread that started the day the McCain campaign
announced the VP selection, it went on for over five thousand comments and lasted a month, which is like ten times the size and duration of even the
occasional Really Large Thread on Mefi. It was a ridiculous, sprawling thing, and a huge headache for any number of reasons, but it's also this great big living document of how a grand mishmash of people can react to and track an event over time. Election season is kind of hell on mefi, for users but especially for us moderators, because everyone's passions are high and tempers are short and it can be miserable to try and just keep people from being their worst selves and going after each other, and that thread is kind of a monument to the entire zeitgeist of the site at that time.
I also like the time I clogged the toilet in my then-new apartment and didn't
have a plunger, and I asked Metafilter what to do about it and the community basically said "go buy a plunger!", which, really, yes, that was the thing to do. People are allowed to ask foolish questions on the site, and by and large the community is pretty good about answering those gently and in good humor, which is something I really like in general about the place and about our community members.
5. How did you get the gig at Metafilter?
I had been on the site for years, joining in 2001, but I became really active in the middle of 2005 when I got laid off from the job I'd had since 2002 and
suddenly had a lot of sitting-around-with-no-pants-on internet time on my
hands. I spent the next couple of years being regularly very active on the
site, particularly in our sort of backroom metadiscussion/policy area called
Metatalk, where folks discuss how the site works and deal with conflicts and
sort of collectively interact with the state of the community itself. I found all that fascinating, and was more and more inclined to speak up when folks
asked questions or newbies expressed confusion, basically trying to help get
something answered early on even if the moderators weren't around.
Then in early 2007, one of the two moderators, Jessamyn West, was going on a real no-internet vacation for a couple of weeks, and Matt Haughey was
worried that he wouldn't be able to keep on top of the site all by himself
during that time, so they talked about helpers and I got the top nod. Matt
asked me if I'd like to help out for those two weeks, I said hell yes, things went well, and they decided to make me a permanent member of the team after a few weeks.
6. So you just went on a big tour of America without taking your guitar. What, where, why, how, etc., etc.
jetBlue was doing a "fly all you can in a month" stunt, six hundred bucks and you just do whatever, so I ended up buying one of those passes and flying around the country to cities that I had mostly never been to to meet up with members of the site. Metafilter has a pretty active meetup scene in general, with any given week seeing probably two or three cities planning a get together to drink beers and chatter about things internetly or otherwise, and I really enjoy meetups. So it was kind of a natural fit, if an insane one: go to like fifteen or sixteen different places, get drunk with my fellow community members every other night, take lots of pictures and notes.
I had a tremendous time. Tons of fun, very much an adventure for a
homebody like me, folks in random cities putting me up, meeting a couple
hundred new people who in a lot of cases I've known on the site for years. Exhausting, though. I don't think I'll ever do something quite like this again. Maybe a week-long jaunt now and then, and bring my wife along at that so that we don't end up miserably lonely again like we were during this one.
7. What you gonna do with all the stuff you gathered travelling around?
I shot a lot of video while I was on the road, though just from a little
point-and-shoot camera and just as I was wandering around mostly. I'm
trying to get my head around how to turn all that into a nice little
travelogue/documentary of the trip -- I did do short improvised interviews
with a number of folks in various cities, so that should help -- but I don't
really know precisely what form that'll take yet. Sifting through this amount of raw footage as someone without any real video editing experience is daunting.
8. How is the music going these days? What are you up to musically?
I just bought a drumset a few months ago, so that's my big crush right now. I'm good enough to play bad drums at this point -- I would have been brilliant if I was sixteen and starting a shitty highschool rock band, basically -- and I'm enjoying using that on recordings, since I've always wanted to be able to include proper rhthym section stuff on my own work and I've never taken a shine to programmed drums. So that's the big thing; I'm not playing with anyone regularly and haven't done a whole lot of recording in any case in the last six months, but I'm hoping to get back on the wagon and really start recording a fair amount again.
9. Top three favorite nerds either in real life or pop culture and why?
Linus Torvalds was my hero in college; I was a serious Linux zealot for a
couple years there, when the OS was coming up and starting to be a real
presence in the world. There was a brief period where being a linux nerd was actually worth a sliver of cred with non-nerds, and I was right there. Linus is just this guy, you know, and that's one of the things I like about him. Just unassumingly created an industry because he was bored and had a good idea.
Douglas Adams was one of the greats, hugely formative figure for me when I was a kid. I don't know if he'd really have described himself as a nerd, but he's certainly nerdbait with the Hitchhikers books and his inclination toward the passionate pursuit of the things that interested him is at the core of all that I think is good about nerddom.
And Alan Turing, poor old brilliant fucking Alan Turing. We'd have gotten
computers eventually one way or the other, but he did a lot of the heavy
wunderkind lifting at a time when timing mattered globally, and was rewarded for his trouble by being haunted into suicide by a priggish world. He deserved better than he got, and that the world fifty years later is in many ways the better place he should have been able to live in is a kind of
comforting coda to that awfulness.
10. Coulton: Kiss or kill?
Kiss with poison lipstick, then skin and use his husk as a disguise. Jonathan
Coulton is doing exactly what I might imagine myself to have been doing if I'd been ten times as driven and at the right time and place, and I respect the hell out of his ability to be so productive and organized and clever and funny and oh god i just want to PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE.
11. Anything you'd like to add?
Seriously, right in the face. Or open for him, that'd be okay too.
Categories
Newest Posts
Not Quite 20 Questions with Eric "Mean" Melin
Hiram talks to Eric "Mean" Melin about rockin' an air guitar, reviewing movies, and opening for KISS. | READ ARTICLE
Posted in:
Circle Into Square's First Monthly Giveaway
As a thanks to all our supporters and folks on our (Circle Into Square) mailing list, we're having our first giveaway! | READ ARTICLE
Posted in: Contests, Giveaways
Not Quite 20 Questions with Bill Goffrier
Hiram talks to Bill Goffrier of The Embarrassment and Big Dipper about art, music, and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. | READ ARTICLE
Posted in: Interviews
Profile: Herman from Grimm Image Records
Circle Into Square profiles Herman from Grimm Image Records. His new album, 'In Color,' comes out August 20th. | READ ARTICLE
Posted in: Interviews
Not Quite 20 Questions with Stephen Dodson
Hiram and Melissa from The Harvey Girls ask the brilliant Stephen Dodson from languagehat.com about brawling, music, scatology, and his hilarious book on worldwide curses, 'Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit: Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs, and Curses from Around the World'. | READ ARTICLE
Posted in: Interviews
Not Quite 20 Questions with Someone from Someone Clothing
Hiram discusses art, clothing, and the homeless with Someone (Matt Kenitzer) of Portland-based company Someone Clothing. | READ ARTICLE
Posted in: Interviews
Photo Essay: Alantl Molina's Buenos Aires
Alantl Molina walks us through his current home, Buenos Aires. | READ ARTICLE
Posted in: Photo Essays
Not Quite 20 Questions with Blue Cranes
Portland outfit Blue Cranes discuss jazz, touring, and their upcoming summer release 'Observatories'. | READ ARTICLE
Posted in: Interviews
Not Quite 20 Questions with E*Rock of Audio Dregs Recordings
(photo by Anthony Gerorgis) E*Rock talks about his labels Audio Dregs Recordings and Fryk Beat. | READ ARTICLE
Posted in: Interviews
Daedelus: Buttons, Tunes, Dublab
Tom from cars & trains talks to producer Daedelus. | READ ARTICLE
Posted in: Interviews
