epershand

Rebroadcasting from E-Cube #8

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 08:36:56 GMT

* * IF YOU KNOW VIDEO, WISCON NEEDS YOU * *

For the past several years, WisCon has done a live video feed of Sunday night's guest of honor speeches. The feed is sent live via the hotel's network to a monitor in the Conference 1 room so that those with severe allergies or other access needs can view the speeches in real time with the rest of WisCon's members. Traditionally, an A/V volunteer with video production skills has worked with our Internet Lounge coordinator to make this happen for WisCon members.

This year, WisCon does not yet have a volunteer with video production experience who is willing to do video for the guest of honor speeches. As a result, there is a real possibility that we will not be able to provide the live video feed, thereby denying full access to WisCon members with special access needs.

If you have experience with video production, please consider volunteering a few hours of your time to insure that we can make WisCon fully accessible to all its members. Volunteers receive a nifty gift and can qualify for a rebate on their membership. If you can help, please send an inquiry to concom36@wiscon.info.

**We also still need volunteers to assist with WisCon's daily A/V needs, such as looking after microphones, projectors, and screens. Insuring that A/V equipment needs are met insures that WisCon remains accessible to all of its members. Again, if you can help, send an email to concom36@wiscon.info.

I'm going to be wrangling A/V volunteers at-con, but my video knowledge is basically nil. As the e-cube post mentions, A/V helps meet some of the major accessibility issues a con has, and we can use all the help we can get.

Thanks!

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Woah

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 03:11:12 GMT

Apparently there's a whole concept of videos on youtube that are Fantasia numbers with new or different scores.

For instance, three different interpretations of "Flight of the Whales" from Fantasia 3000:

Flight synced to DJ Tiesto "Ten Seconds Before Sunrise" and Sigur Ros "Untitled 6". No disrespect towards the original score. RESPECT Tiesto.

I composed this music as a rescore to the "Flight of the Whales" portion of Fantasia 2000. This was written while I was a student in the Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television program at USC.

The orchestra (65-piece, medium size) was recorded on the Eastwood Scoring Stage at Warner Brothers Studios.

This is for educational purposes only, not for commercial use.

I freaking love the internet.

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WisCon!

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:58:16 GMT

Huzzah! I am starting to get my WisCon logistics in hand! So with no further ado, my 2012 WisCon logistics post!

I'm arriving in Madison on the evening of Tuesday, May 22, and leaving freakishly early on Monday, May 28 (No Monday programming for me. Sadface.) The delightful were_duck is putting me up for the duration \o/. My early arrival means that I'll actually get to do things like karaoke--yay!

(Madisonians - if you have time, l'd love to have pre-con hangouts with you Wednesday or Thursday. And if you're looking at this and speculating that I will be available to help you with last-minute convention prep tasks, then... that is possible. As long as your task doesn't involve dust.)

I'm currently on the following two panels (I've offered a third, but have no idea if I'll land on it)

Feminist Open Source Fandom Sat, 4:00–5:15 pm

There have now been several excellent Open Source projects that both adopted explicitly-feminist policies and addressed pressing needs of fandom, most notably Archive of Our Own and Dreamwidth. It is proposed that fandom offers an alternative to the established open source software culture, one that is more welcoming of feminist ideals. How have these projects succeeded? In what ways did their feminist stance enable that success? In what ways do their products reflect these same ideals? How do open source and feminism complement or conflict? What can we, as both participants and users, do to extend, build on or replicate these successes? How can we extend this consciousness to other axes of oppression and under-representation?

Gender-Variant Characters in SF (moderator) Sun, 8:30–9:45 am

Let's explore how gender variance and/or variant/trans* characters are represented in Science Fiction. How often are gender-variant characters used for the purpose of examining the experiences of cisgender individuals? How often is the variance of these characters integrated into a character/individual level experience? The example of the former, a planet-of-hats scenario (such as was done on Star Trek) in which a whole society is genderless/gender-variant, comes to mind. Mass Effect is an example of the use of a "mono-gendered" (yet hyper-sexualized) race, the Asari. How about a story where a whole species is genderless or gender-variant? Dragon Age 2 has one of the most prominent examples of a trans* character, Serendipity.

Note: I would love your suggestions of books and other things I should take a look at for Gender-Variant Characters in SF. I've got some existing favorites but would love more.

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FUCK YOU I LOVE BELLA SWAN

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:01:20 GMT

This morning I got my ranty-pants on on the subject of Bella Swan. The following is presented almost entirely unedited; though I've removed my interlocutor's portion of the conversation to protect the innocent.

mostly i am just bitter people keep bashing bella swan in favor of katniss
bella swan's my GIRL
I FUCKING LOVE BELLA SWAN, and everyone needs to step off

every time I read another article that is like "this katniss is awesome unlike that wet blanket bella swan" I am like :((((

I really need to write my IN DEFENSE OF BELLA SWAN essay

LOOK EVERYBODY TWILIGHT IS A SERIES OF BOOKS ABOUT A NORMAL GIRL UNDER INTENSE PRESSURE TO BE PERFECT WHO HAS TO PARENT BOTH HER PARENTS
AND THEN NOBODY TRUSTS HER WHEN SHE TELLS THEM WHAT SHE WANTS AND SHE IS LIKE "FUCK YOU" AND TAKES IT ANYWAY
BELLA SWAN KICKS ASS
and then when she gets her vampire super power it is SUPER-PROTECTIVENESS

and she is an atheist who mostly wants to get laid and the only time edward does things she doesn't like it is romantic things
and she is like BACK OFF I CAN TAKE CARE OF MYSELF. DON'T GIVE ME A CAR RADIO
SCREW YOU I DON'T WANT TO PUT ON A PRETTY DRESS AND GO TO PROM
and then she is like GIVE ME SEXIN
and edward is like BUT YOU ARE A DELICATE FLOWER
and she is like FUCK THAT NONSENSE
and he is like OK I ADMIT IT I AM ACTUALLY THE DELICATE FLOWER
and she is like AWWW OK I GUESS I WILL GET MARRIED BUT ONLY TO GET LAID *rolleyes*
bella is the best

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Bandom Reverse Big Bang Fanmix

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 05:07:19 GMT

I created the Fanmix "All the Wrong Turns" for Bandom Reverse Big bang and was lucky enough to get the really incredible story The Stumbles and Falls by fifteendozentimes.

Paul didn't know the mix was mine when he claimed it, but a month or so after claims I gave in and came out to him as his mixer, and I've loved getting the chance to watch his creative process. It's a really great story--it hits the emotional tenor of the mix squarely and does the thing that I love the most about his Jon fic--it's a deeply empathetic view of someone who makes a series of bad choices and refuses to talk about them and in doing so screws himself over even more. And then gets a happy ending anyway.

(Plus bonus Ian/Shane--how could I resist THAT?) (Never let it be said that fifteendozentimes doesn't know how to target a story to his audience.)

I'm so grateful to the BRBB mods for the hard work they put in--this challenge was run so well. Their organization has knocked my socks off.

[link to mix]

Track listing:
01. Bittersweet - Panic! At the Disco
02. Might Tell You Tonight - Scissor Sisters
03. My Phone's on Vibrate for You - Rufus Wainwright
04. Closer - Covered by Richard Cheese
05. Toxic - Covered by Nickel Creek
06. Sugar, We're Going Down - Covered by Goat
07. Careless Whisper - Covered by Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright
08. Don't Look Back in Anger - Covered by Devandra Banhart
09. From a Motel 6 - Yo La Tengo
10. We're Just Friends - Wilco
11. Together - Patrick Wolf
12. The Luckiest - Ben Folds

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Feminism, sex-positivity, and sexual prescriptivism

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 08:57:21 GMT

I put more time than I probably should have tonight into being unhappy about the comment threads on the Feministing post An Asexual Map for Sex-Positive Feminism.

There were two things that bugged me a lot. The first was seeing a bunch of sex-positive people acting like assholes in all the ways that people who don't like the sex-positive movement always claim sex-positive people act. I really, really hate it when people in movements I feel strong intuitive agreement with start making the straw man arguments that our enemies put into our mouths. I've already had to significantly renegotiate my relationship with feminism on that front; sex-positivity, you're on notice.

The other thing that frustrated me was... when various asexual members of the conversation said things that pushed my sex-positive buttons, hard, and made me want to jump down their throats. /o\

So, there are two big things that I think were happening in that comment thread. The first, as several people in the comment thread noted, is the ambiguity between the statements "What you're saying is at odds with my intuition and so wrapping my head around it is going to take some work--please explain further!" and "What you're saying is unintuitive and incomprehensible--explain yourself!" and the ease of saying one when you intend the other.

The other is, I think, a bit more deeply rooted in sexual identity politics and the nature of conversations about them. The normative range of human sexuality is a very narrow segment of the available spectrum, with the normative female range drawn even more narrowly than the normative male range (see: virgin/whore complex). Any level of sexuality outside that range is marginalized; though the vocabulary is different for each end of the spectrum, the overall effect is similar, and anyone whose normal level of sexual interest falls outside that range is likely to have internalized a set of hot-button phrases that set off defensive "my identity is being attacked" alarms. Unfortunately, it turns out it's really difficult to explain life on one end of the spectrum without stumbling onto phrases that are often used as weapons against the other end of the spectrum.

Further, people who live outside the norm, especially when they gather together into communities, tend to develop narratives that center their own experience in opposition to the norm in ways that are just as marginalizing not only to people who are non-normative in different ways than they are, but to people who happen to be normative as well.

Normative people are not the problem. The systems that describe the norm, coerce people into it, and punish those who don't comply, are the problem. People (and companies, cough legos reference cough) are a problem to the extent that they engage in enforcement and punishment. But compliance with a rule doesn't necessarily imply being duped by it. And enforcement and punishment can come just as often and just as vindictively in defense of counter-cultural norms.

So, for instance. Let's talk about me a little bit. I'm a fan of talking about me. I'm the grand-daughter of a Women's Studies professor. I grew up in a former commune surrounded by environmental activist feminists. I grew up and went off to a women's college, where I came out and started dating. Then I graduated and moved to San Francisco and found a home in the LGBT, fannish, kinky and poly communities, with their substantial overlap.

In my head, the most transgressive sex I've ever had was penis-in-vagina missionary position sex. I was 25 before I ever tried it out, and WOAH was it a head trip. There were all these unspoken, non-negotiated power dynamics that played out in fascinating ways. There was a fascinating ritual of specific actions that happened in a specific order. There was never any trading off of roles like in normal sex! (Ok. Eventually there was trading off.) And it had all these fascinating inherent risks--like, there was just this thin latex bag preventing me from a life-altering mess of hormonal and other biochemical changes that would result in another human being growing inside me like in Alien.

Seriously, it was so trippy. Also it was really fucking hot. Unfortunately, it came along with all this intense emotional baggage about being a bad queer or maybe even a bad feminist for enjoying it so much. And while part of me found that guilt fascinating and transgressive and hot (lol masochist), it was also really, really hard to process.

Somehow, while they tried to help me out, my grandmother and mother and very many practically-aunts; and all the picture books about suffragettes and female scientists and how women could do everything; and Our Bodies, Ourselves and Sociology 101 and hanging out in the Jeanette Marks house and with my gay chorus and in fandom had... taught me an additional set of norms. One that's just as insidious and pervasive as the first set, even if what they said was different.

And while I've been working to neutralize them, to figure out how to pick and choose the ones I value and the ones I want to leave behind, I keep bumping unexpectedly into their strange and slimy trails and the fascinatingly sticky bits where they cross over one another.

I never told my parents about that boy I was having missionary PIV sex with (and never considered myself to be dating him) for fear that if I admitted I wasn't 100% gay they'd assume I was straight; it's highly likely that the only reason I was as comfortable as I was telling my parents about my current boyfriend is the fact that he's trans. (And yeah I know exactly how fucked up and lesbian gender-essentialist that is; trust me. Definitely working on that one.) I'm way more comfortable talking about my sexual interests when I'm in a toppy headspace, not just because I'm more confident when I feel in charge but because talking about my interest in control feels less shameful, less iddy, than talking about my interest in submission. I obsess over my body hair, and my pubic hair in particular--normally I shave it all but if I'm likely to have sex I suddenly get thrown into a tizzy--what assumptions will my partner make about me if they see the bare skin? Will they see, as I do, intentionally created vulnerability and a swath of highly-sensitive skin; or will instead they see a bad feminist a dupe and capitulation to patriarchal infantilization of women? I always, ALWAYS simplified any explanation of one of the most important relationships of my life, one that shifted back and forth along the spectrum between complex more-than-friendship and a deep romance where the sex thing only rarely hit wavelengths that worked for both of us, for fear that it be reduced entirely to friendship.

Because apparently when I was learning norms, I picked up "non-normative is better than normative" right alongside "masculine is better than feminine." Which left me believing not quite that masculine was better than feminine but... that I needed to be more masculine than feminine to defy norms appropriately, no matter what was intuitive, and no matter what my fantasies insisted.

So yeah, when I see an asexual person talk about how they don't understand why some women sexualize themselves, I get pretty damned defensive. I've been hearing the same thing from my internal Good Feminist monitor (and from many internet feminists) for ages and I'm only just learning to silence it. And when I hear sex-positive people claiming that coming up with a million categories to splice apart the complexities of sexual attraction and romantic attraction and intellectual attraction is nonsensical and pedantic? I get defensive about that too.

(And I get very grateful that there are intellectually curious and didactic people like Julia Serano and Hanne Blank and Clarisse Thorne to write very clever things that help me sort this all out in my head.)

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In defense of Lego Friends

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:20:54 GMT

So I just watched this well-done video on the new Lego Friends line, from Feminist Frequency:

Over the course of the video I went from peeved at Lego to actually really impressed with what they've done and grumpy at all the hate they've been getting for it, the exact opposite of what the video was aiming for.

I know! It's horribly gender-essentialist, all these pink and purple sets designed to help build houses instead of cities, with their human figures that look more like dolls than the iconic lego figurines.

But it's *exactly* the sort of thing that might have gotten me started playing with legos as a kid. I was never really into legos. I loved lincoln logs--I used them to build doll houses. I loved blocks--I used them to build doll houses. And I loved erector sets and chemical bond model kits (look I was the grandchild of a nano-physicist ok????) and mostly I really, really, loved cardboard, which I could cut and fold into ANY SHAPE I WANTED to build things with. (Mostly things for my dolls to live in and/or use.)

Legos always seemed horribly limiting. They only came in rectangles, for one, unlike things like erector sets and all the neat toys at my grandparents' you could use to build elaborate crystalline structures. And there were never enough vertical panels so if you wanted to build a doll house you had to build all your walls out of bricks, which just wasn't that fascinating an activity.

And those lego figures--they're pretty neat, I'll admit, with their different hair options and differently-colored shirts and stuff. But they're anonymous. They're not really people--they're just another shape of brick that you can use to decorate your scenes.

Lego friends introduces a set of distinct *characters* with names and personalities and identifiable features. That's an inroad to being able to use them to tell stories. And if there was one thing that I liked more than designing and building elaborate dollhouses out of everything I could possibly find for that purpose, it was acting out stories with my little sister and our dolls. Lego Friends would have let us do that, and hey, if we needed more pieces or wanted colors other than pink or purple we could have then turned to THE ENTIRE REST OF LEGO-KIND.

The uproar is about the fact that these are being marketed as "legos for girls", and I keep seeing this image being passed around the internet as a preferred marketing campaign:

And that's great for girls who want to play "like boys". But what about girls (and boys, and others) who want to play "like girls"? Lego Friends isn't necessarily Legos for Girls. It's Legos for Feminine Kids. And I'm sorry, but I can't be angry at Lego marketing itself to feminine kids and giving them a doorway into the broader world of playing with Legos. I created my own inroad with erector sets and the other "masculine" toys I played with, but not every kid does that on their own.

The path "forward" doesn't necessarily have to be a brave march forward into an increasingly "gender-neutral" future where masculinity is the norm. That's not gender-neutral. That's masculine. Sometimes girls don't need to be given the freedom to "act like boys". Sometimes they need the freedom to "act like girls", damnit. (This is the part where I really want to insert a pithy Julia Serano quotation but if I tried it would wind up being everything she's ever said. If you want to pause at this point and get a copy of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity and read the entire thing I don't blame you--that would be an excellent life choice. But there's only one more paragraph and you can go read all the Serano after that.)

Twenty-ish years ago another toy company did the same thing--they took a toy traditionally sold in neutral colors and created a pastel version, with a set of unique characters, each with their own personality. That was My Little Pony, a toy that's increasingly in the news as it gains more fans of all genders. Can we give Lego the opportunity to do the same?

(OK GO READ ALL THE SERANO NOW. TRUST ME.)

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Hi there dreamwidth waves

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:45:29 GMT

Hi!

I'm alive, I promise! The last month or so has hit me like a ton of bricks, with the net result that I've been avoiding all but the most superficial forms of social media, and have been using *those* to an extreme degree. (Namely, lots of tweeting from 3pershand, actually using ars-amatoria after having it unused for a couple of years. Uh, yeah.

But Dreamwidth, honey baby, honey doll, I'm totally back, I'm totally here to be with you.

I'm going to start things light, by sharing some fannish works from the last stretch of time. I was massively creative in late December/early January (and I'm hoping to get that creative energy back between now and when BRBB is due D:) with the following results:

I participated in bandomstuffsit and it was awesome. I got a really sweet Panic at the Disco university werewolf AU, You Say We Can't Be Perfect by estei.

And I wrote "Trade Mistakes" [LJ link @ stuffsit] [AO3 link].
It was a really fun story to write. I'd started it ages and ages ago and promptly wrote myself into a corner. After starting down a couple of paths that didn't quite work out for stuffsit (one of which I will eventually turn into the novel it deserves to be), I pulled this out and dusted it off. fifteendozentimes helped me out of the corner, and lierdumoa gave me really helpful last-minute feedback.

I love the body-swap trope so much, and even more than that, I love poking at tropes and weirding them, and I think I did a pretty good job of that here. And it was fun to write something that was all banter and sex and no plot. Who cares how they swapped and how they get back? It's when they're in that state that's the fun part, I swear...

I also posted two stories in the Brendon/Shane/Ian universe that's been living in my head lately:

Take Your Time was a gift for fifteendozentimes, and it's sleepy domestic fluff, probably the fluffiest thing I've ever written. girlpearl was my superbeta. And. AND. fifteendozentimes podficced it and the podfic is awesome and I think sets the mood even better than the story does and I go all *____* every time I listen to it.

I also posted a notfic in the Brendon/Shane/Ian universe that sets up how they got together and establishes the world a bit more. It was the first set of notes I wrote for the universe, and it's sort of fun and silly and cements my newfound habit of writing a piece of pornography about every social media site/tool ever. This one has skype porn; I seriously need to finish up the twitter humiliation kink fic :P

SO ANYWAY HIIIIIIII.

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Running in to say this and then running away again

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:56:15 GMT

Meme seen everywhere: Pick up the nearest book to you. Turn to page 45. The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012.

"TIP: Specifications should detail the desired behaviors, not the specific implementations."
- The Web Testing Companion by Lydia Ash

Yup, that sounds about right.

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Yeah, that conversation totally just happened

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 06:24:43 GMT

Scene: We are watching community.

Abed: ... the brother of the guy on Entourage.
oliviacirce: Rahm Emanuel?
me: No, the brother on Entourage.
oliviacirce: What?
me: Remember the character Merlin was in the Merlin Entourage AU? In the TV show that was the actor's brother.

Yes, I just explained one of Abed's pop cultural reference with a fanfiction AU reference. \o/

(And in 37 minutes it will be 2012 here in US Mountain Time)

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Hey look, an end-of-year meme.

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:24:44 GMT

Via likeadeuce, ( fannish year in review )

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Domesticity meme time!

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:46:14 GMT

Snagged from fifteendozentimes

Comment with a pairing I'm invested in and I'll tell you:

who is the big spoon/little spoon
what is their favorite non-sexual activity
who uses all the hot water in the morning
what they order from take out
what is the most trivial thing they fight over
who does most of the cleaning
what has a season pass in their DVR
who controls the netflix queue
who calls up the super/landlord when the heat’s not working
who steals the blankets
who leaves their stuff around
who remembers to buy the milk
who remembers anniversaries

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I adored the new Muppets movie but I was confused by its meta-narrative

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 03:02:47 GMT

( discussion includes, shockingly, spoilers )

TL;DR Jason Siegel I adored your self-insert muppet fanfiction a lot but suspect you of being crafty.

Also: The last time I was in New York, brainwane and I saw the Henson exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image, and it was really amazing. It's open through January and I strongly recommend going to see it. (I inadvertently wound up wearing a Museum of the Moving Image t-shirt to the movie today and only realized when I took off my sweater after getting home.)

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I warned you about stairs bro

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 18:34:38 GMT

I am at my parents'! For a week! Today I am going to the wedding of a high school friend! Hurrah for vacation!

Except. um.

The first thing I did when I got home was to carry my bags upstairs to the bedroom I grew up in. And then on the way back I... kind of fell down the stairs a little? Like maybe 8 of them, roughly the second half of the stairwell?

It was a mostly-controlled fall--I grabbed the bannisters a lot. I didn't actually lose control until the very end, and even then I sort of twisted around a bit so I didn't go all the way down to the floor but stopped on the third stair up. I don't seem to have twisted or broken anything is the important part \o/

But, yeah. I took the brunt of the landing on my kneecap, and it is, unshockingly, stiff, sore, and still a bit swollen.

Sigh. I hope there is lots of sitting at this wedding.

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Fun with Yuletide fandoms!

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 07:06:25 GMT

I have now completed my annual "snarking about yuletide fandoms" ritual. I enjoy that a lot, I think it might be one of my favorite parts of the challenge. It is just so cathartic.

Except normally I do it privately on chat with oliviacirce. And this year instead I spammed my twitter feed with it. Sorry guys! I... hit the hourly usage limit two hours consecutively. And learned that that doesn't actually keep me from tweeting. It just keeps me from viewing new updates on the page!

Anyway, the annual Hilariously Large Fandoms That Slipped Through The Cracks Due to Clever Tag Usage:

Captain America (2011) - 183 stories on the AO3

The Avengers (2012) - in the last day, up to 215 stories on the AO3. (Let's ignore the fandoms Marvel (Movies) - more than 1000 stories; Marvel Avengers Movies Universe - more than 1000 stories. They're separate fandoms, although presumably with a lot of overlap)

The Social Network RPF - 68 stories on the AO3. So... I take it they're an LJ fandom?

X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF. 53 stories on the AO3. Ditto?

Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album) - 115 stories on the AO3. Presumably most people are tagging their Killjoys fic only with My Chemical Romance and not including the album listing?

Presumably most of these will get cleaned up in the next couple of days, but I am just so fascinated by what the net result of moving from the old qualitative process to the new quantitative process has been. The old method didn't scale, obviously, but the new method has some fascinating loopholes.

Also: BEST FANDOM NEW I DISCOVERED WHILE TRAWLING THROUGH THE LIST? Michael Fassbender With Pugs (tumblr). That link is to the tumblr. Which is AMAZING.

(OMG I JUST ACCIDENTALLY DISCOVERED THE BROWSE TAGS BUTTON ON THE BETA DREAMWIDTH UPDATE PAGE. BEST.)

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Lololol it's not like this was unexpected

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:57:33 GMT

True to form, I left my yuletide nominations half-complete in a tab for too long and didn't submit them in time. \o/

Me and Yuletide: we are like water and oil.

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This post is really only vaguely about the OTW.

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 08:01:37 GMT

I am frustrated, on an ongoing basis, by the value we're asked to place on "hard work." It's a puritan virtue that seems to stick around with people a lot. Any time an employee is honored you hear speeches about them working late into the night or crunching all weekend to get a project done. When things go wrong, we remind ourselves that someone was working really hard, so we should have sympathy for the fact that the results still had problems.

The thing is, in my experience the majority of time I find myself working particularly hard it's a sign that I'm working *wrong.* The environments where I've personally had to work long hours have all either been the result of bad planning on my part or a destructive environment that required it. Certainly, with the exception of a few adrenalin-fueled rushes, there has always been an inverse relationship between the overall numbers of hours I've worked and my overall productivity during those hours. And every one of those stretches was the result of a bad system design.

The thing is, basically any engineering work is about system design. The goal is to optimize your resources (processor power, memory, bandwidth, disc space, number of complicated operations such as disc reads and writes or database access, etc.) You don't necessarily want to minimize your use of them all, but you need to use them in appropriate amounts such that if there is a sudden change your system can handle it (that link is to Maciej Cegłowski's account of how pinboard handled the day the "delicious is going away" slide leaked).

And people are part of any system. Developer time and energy is something that a good tech manager manages as much as they manage memory usage and runtime complexity. (I cannot *count* the number of times I have heard the chestnut about Ruby and Python development being about optimizing developer time at the price of computer time in a world of cheap computers.)

I was lucky, early in my career, to have a mentor who taught me the value of virtuous laziness in the form of an obsession with automating boring tasks in order not to have to do them. (My current coworkers are probably sick of hearing the sentence. "But... why is a *human* doing this?" from me.) Later mentors, and my own trial and error (soooo much error) and also my therapit, taught me the value of setting appropriate expectations for what I could accomplish, not promising to promise more than I could do in a given time period, efficient process management to keep myself working steadily rather than in a rush, etc. I have to admit, a lot of my own personal anguish in watching the first forty-eight hours after the last AO3 launch unfold was the bitter reminder of disasters of my own on that scale or larger.

Every time I hear "but I worked hard" my heart screams out that working hard is the WRONG THING TO DO. Communicating about what you're capable of is the right thing to do. Asking for help when you need it is the right thing to do. Offering help to someone who is overworking is the right thing to do. Re-setting launch dates around what is posible is the right thing to do. Making sure that time-sensitive updates are uncoupled from other updates is the right thing to do.

Preventing cultures where heroism is not only the norm but mandatory? Is the right thing to do.

Look. I know it's easy to backseat quarterback. But like. These are not new problems. People have worked out the answers before. (Oh yeah, that's another general vice/virtue thing I take issue with. A lot of the time copying someone else's answer is ABSOLUTELY the right thing to do. Of course, in that context it's called "following best practices"...) You can learn things the hard way if you want. (Some of us need to learn things the hard way in order for the lesson to stick.) But. Take the lesson when it is given to you, rather than defensively claiming that you worked hard and that the people criticizing you are doing so with unnecessary vitriol. (Yes, some of them are absolutely using unnecessary vitriol. But having worked in customer support as well as in software development, I'm a big believer in the right of customers to bitch unproductively and the right of engineers to be filtered from the bullshit while getting the productive stuff. That's what, wait for it, good tech managers are there for.)

And the pain of watching someone repeating your own past failures in ghastly slow motion in front of an audience of thousands? Is a pain like no other.

ETA: when I use the word "failure" I am not referring to launching some code with a few bugs in it. Everyone does that shit. I'm talking about the communication and process management failure around it and the fact that it cost their project a developer who, according to the AO3's impact chart has been responsible for a MINIMUM of 10% of the code in the archive. (Because of whatever emergency push process juggle led to last week's mess, for instance, none of the skins code is credited to lim in that report. I don't know what other code Naomi's committed on lim's behalf because the practice in question makes that impossible to determine.)

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Fluff diversion: High-contrast bandom pic/videospam

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 23:10:27 GMT

IT IS TIME FOR A FLUFF DIVERSION.

This post started out as a comment in roga's past art class prompts. But then it got somewhat large, both in the sense that there are a bunch of things in it and in the sense that parts of it are layout-destroyingly large.

So here it is, as a post on its own, properly behind a cut tag and everything!

( it's ok, bandom, midtones aren't really necessary )

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Let's talk about AO3 skins

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 18:16:25 GMT

And how awesome they are.

In particular, let's talk about how fundamentally what lim did there was RE-WRITE LJ'S S2 ENTIRELY IN CSS. Hands down it is the most technically-impressive and well-designed thing I have ever seen come from the AO3 development team.

It's really fucking sexy, guys. Like. A lot. A whole lot. I've been playing around with it since it launched and I KIND OF WANT TO HAVE ITS BABIES.

Yeah, ok, the initial skins that launched with it aren't the best ever, especially to eyes that are used to the sexy layouts that most web2.0 social networking sites provide in advance. And yeah, there are some bugs in them. But the change this represents? Is probably the single thing I've wanted most from that site forever.

For the first time, the AO3 is offering its users a way to customize part of the site from the ground up and submit that change back to them so they can make it available to everyone. (No, the previous skin system did not do that. The previous skin system provided a way for people to override the look-and-feel of the site if they were willing to fill their code with painful overrides and forcing mechanisms.) And that is a very good sign of things that could come.

I am not an AO3 coder, and am very unlikely to become one any time soon. But now I can do really cool things with the AO3 and bend it to my will (visually, at least) without having to become one! And so can fandom's very many awesome designers--I've seen what people can do with an LJ layout, and I'd love to see what fandom will wind up with if those people are let loose on the AO3 and given encouragement and incentives to play with it. I'm competent, but so many people are BRILLIANT. (And while it's not great for a lot of *other* AO3 users, it's pretty swell for me that the set of available skins right now is really just a set of tutorials/examples for ways you can modify different parts of the site.)

Fundamentally, the revolution in social media in the last five years is "do not try to be everything to everybody. Build a solid foundation and give people the tools to bend you to be what they want." This, IMO, is the primary factor responsible for the success of Twitter (via replacement apps), Facebook (via add-on apps), etc. This skins launch isn't perfect, but it's the AO3's first step down that road, and it makes me more happy than you can imagine.

(Now if only they offered an API for bookmarks and tags. The things I would do with that! The glorious, GLORIOUS things I would do with that. (By which I mean, the fun I would have playing with that...))

EDITED: To remove the passive-aggressive block. This is a positive fucking entry, damnit.

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I need help with a Yuletide nomination

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 06:56:52 GMT

Other people who have read Among Others, ( what names do I put down for main characters? (warning: potentially spoilery conversation behind cut and in comments) )

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Heeding the Call: A Fanmix for "Epistrophe sta asteria"

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:44:40 GMT

This year I had the good fortune to make a fanmix for imagined_heaven's really charming Star Trek Big Bang story "Epistrophe sta asteria".

It was a lovely story to read and a fun mix to make, so I hope you enjoy! You can download it here.

( Full track listing + liner notes below the cut. Warning: spoilery for the narrative of the story )

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Twitter found poetry

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 05:25:45 GMT

I have been oddly silent on DW lately, while I spam twitter. But this evening during commute I wound up writing a found poem constructed entirely of things on my twitter feed during said commute, and I thought I'd share it.

#odetopopculture

When you say effigy, I think of voodoo dolls
all with newborn novels at once, all hammering out plot arcs and character
yours is .. left blank on purpose?
    nope just vaguely stoned and watching captain america!
    and also with a truly regrettable mustache

I just don't think I understand the point of Glee
This is torture and I know how it ends.
    oh no wait, that's the sulfur smell of new jersey

The future is made of me being punched in the face.
Everyone. Must watch.
self indulgent guitars! And ps: the jewfro is BACK!
    (Let's pretend I don't know that.)

Spoiler alert: LL Cool J does not actually speak Japanese.
Steven Tyler meets Fall Out Boy meets Robert Pattinson from Twilight meets My Chemical Romance
    and no sparkly lip gloss

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THE DEAD: BEST ZOMBIE MOVIE

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 08:13:34 GMT

GUYS GUYS GUYS! kuwdora talked me into going to see a zombie movie tonight and it was the best zombie movie that I have ever seen! Not that I have a wide range of experience with zombie movies but HOMG UH-MAZING.

I used up all my clever quips about the movie in conversation with paperpenguin so I have cleaned up the conversation for you below.

(As I tweeted: "Best thing about The Dead? Probably intell. honesty. Expecting anything but White Guy Survives Zombie Apocalypse Africa is your own fault.")

( imperialism! Africa as metaphor! zombies as balancing force of nature! competence porn! raw masculinity! manpaiiiin! )

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&California;

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:30:00 GMT

My friend/coworker W is applying to business school. He just turned to me from his desk.

"Funny thing about parents and applications. Both Harvard and Columbia had form elements for 'Mother' and 'Father.' Stanford had 'Parent 1 Name', 'Parent 1 Gender', 'Parent 2 Name', 'Parent 2 Gender'. I love California."

I don't know why they need to know parents' genders. But I too love California at times like that.

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Poe ruins everything

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:28:52 GMT

This morning in the shower I was wondering about the history of Latin scholarship. Presumably folks were running around ancient Rome using the ablative because it felt right and being innovative and playful with it for the heck of it. That's certainly the vibe I get from, say, Catullus or Ovid.

What, then, was the point when people decided it all needed to be codified into ridiculously elaborate rules to memorize, with distinctions, say, between the ablative of means, ablative of manner, dative of agent, etc? Was it during the middle ages when they were coming up with equally elaborate terminology for any metaphysical doubt one might possibly have? Or was it some folks in the Renaissance who looked back at all the Latin written during the middle ages and blushed at how embarrassingly straightforward it all was? (Not that Renaissance Latin is any less silly, grammatically speaking, but they at least *try*. Sort of.)

Which would be an interesting thing to research, I think. Except what actually happened then was that thinking about silly Latin from the middle ages totally diverted me and put the following mash-up poem in my head:

Bibat ille, bibat illa, bibat servus et ancilla
With the rhyming and the chiming of the
Bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells!

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