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(2) 03 Dec 2009, 04:19PM: Spare Ticket to Vienna Teng Tonight: I have two tickets to Vienna Teng's sold-out 7:30pm concert tonight at Joe's Pub near NYU. I found out today that my companion can't come. If you are free tonight, let me know ASAP and you can accompany me!

(2) 07 Dec 2009, 03:25PM: Der Lulzening (or, LOL): Happy-making web fun: that Mario Don't Stop Me Now video, absurd hip-hop lyrics and videos, that OK Go video, and B-roll.

Filed under: Comedy

(1) 08 Dec 2009, 05:35PM: Repurposed Email: Some of my ad hoc social writing recently has been to email lists. With a bit of editing I can decontextualize a few paragraphs into something to amuse you.

After a recent shooting:

Elliot Aronson's The Social Animal and Gavin de Becker's The Gift Of Fear made me think a lot about the role of the news media in basically encouraging copycat killings. Any loser with a gun and the will to use it basically becomes a role model. As de Becker puts it, the most important question regarding a potential assassin is, "do you believe you have the ability to kill [whoever]?" If the answer is "well, no, he has all these bodyguards, etc." then you don't have to worry about the nut, even if he's fantasizing about doing it all the time. If the answer is yes, then there's a problem. And so when an attacker attacks, the news media become a PR machine whose message is "this attack is possible" (the "plausible premise").

Cory Doctorow's "Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise" has the somewhat hyperbolic line "...we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it." This is incredibly encouraging regarding, say, childrearing techniques, bike repair, activism, crafts, entrepreneurialism, and travel. It means that initiative, resourcefulness, and not-being-oblivious pay very high dividends. But that goes for IEDs, too.

Nerdy humor recommendations:

Science jokes, just real groaner puns -- read the comments on BoingBoing for more. I have hearted Brian Malow for years and evidently was and am right to do so.

"Dear Mandy," a fairly nerdy and British political rap song.

Danny O'Brien! "I have volunteered to take the meetynge notes in the style of a 17th century essayist.... So up, and to Noisebridge, where I did attend the meetynge of the week, and was so pressganged there into beynge a recordist, and did solemnly type this at that time into my computationeristic automaton...." This includes "Steven, a cabler from this parish, did offer to fixe the cabling in our place, and did offer so to put his plannyng unto the wiki, the builde mailynge list and discuss."

Regarding the virtues of pain:

There is an aspect of temporary pain that's soothing to the self-loathing mind. "I'm not supposed to feel good; my default state is stressed, distressed, sad, somehow in emotional pain; that's how I know I'm working hard enough, being productive enough, struggling hard enough, not wasting time. If I feel minor physical pain (even if I have to deliberately incur it), it's like getting drunk. It numbs the voices telling me that I'm not doing enough. I must be doing enough, I'm in pain! If I'm in pain it means I can relax."

And there's Gate Control Theory (on pain & nerves)...

The virtue of pain is that it stops?

I once knew a guy who trained martial arts, a lot. He had a proverb he was fond of. He used to say "Pain is just the sensation of weakness leaving the body". And so he kept on training, even when it really hurt, because he knew it was just weakness leaving his body. And it worked; over a period of twenty years, nearly all the weakness left his body. When I last saw him, there wasn't enough weakness left in his knees or ankles for them to even bend. He walks with a stick, of course. Turns out that you probably ought to leave a bit of weakness in there.

On dress codes in job interviews:

I'm really wondering how much of this "oh you gotta wear a suit to an interview" is a male thing, a New York City/Eastern US thing, and a BigCorp thing. I'm glad I don't use that particular shibboleth when hiring -- I get superior access to qualified candidates who get turned down by other interviewers for stupid reasons, score! Some nice lines from Moneyball that get at my perspective:

As the thirty-fifth pick approaches, Eric once again leans into the speaker phone. If he leaned in just a bit more closely he might hear phones around the league clicking off, so that people could laugh without being heard. For they do laugh. They will make fun of what the A's are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job. - p115

"You know what gets me excited about a guy? I get excited about a guy when he has something about him that causes everyone else to overlook him and I know that it is something that just doesn't matter." - Paul DePodesta, p116

Sure, we're all playing the probability game, and if I were a male in New York City looking for a desk job at a publicly owned corporation, I'd probably put on a suit for that interview, in case I got a superficial interviewer. But let's be clear that it's about probabilities, and not some kind of handed-down-by-God Rule about who's hireworthy.

Relatedly, from a conversation about job interviewers asking personality-related or personal questions:

This discussion is reminding me of how different jobs customarily have different intake rituals and customs. The more creative industries expect a certain well-roundedness and ability to deal well with curveballs. Academics expect you can churn out erudite-looking prose, including a custom cover letter, basically at will. Software managers expect that developers can list a few dev jobs on their resumes, and might interview in an unsociable manner but can code in front of you if you give them a puzzle.

I used to interview really badly, so I didn't get various scholarships or into selective summer programs or jobs. I would always make it to the interview, basically never past it. Now I'm much better, but it's not because I specifically worked on My Interview Skills, it's because I (mostly unconsciously) improved my general people skills. And I can see a sensitive hiring manager trying to balance the need to get someone personable with the wish to help nervous people relax -- by, for example, asking them ahead of time for something personality-related that she can ask about in the interview, to get the interviewee speaking more informally.

We put a lot of emphasis on the ability to "communicate" - in person, on paper, etc. But just as a timed essay during Finals isn't the best test of my day-to-day intellectual abilities, an incredibly pressure-laden, ritualized submission process (double entendre intended) isn't the best way to see how a person communicates day-to-day. The abstracted crucible is sometimes easier to game, and is much less worthwhile than the work and skills it's meant to symbolize. I know every hiring manager needs a screening mechanism, but I don't want hiring managers to think that mastering the interviewing/cover-letter-writing kabuki dance is an unambiguous thumbs-up for a candidate.

By the way, here's a great cover letter we got while editing the anthology:

Dear Money Guy,
Sorry, I've had it out the arse with boring, yet professional, cover letters. And since the worst thing you can say is no, I figured what the hell. I hope you enjoy my 3500 word submission. But, if not, I look forward to hearing no from you soon. And feel free to be as brazen as you like. It's refreshing, I promise.

I haven't been writing much in the blog since work has consumed me. I may take requests, though.

(1) 10 Dec 2009, 08:55PM: A Mess of Geekiness Thoughts: Liz Henry's thoughts on geekitude got me wanting to post my own half-formed thoughts on the topic.

Evidently I have the capacity to continuously raise the standard for what makes a real obsessed fan of, say, Star Trek or Cryptonomicon or whatever. I read the Memory Alpha wiki (Star Trek compendium), but I don't contribute to it; I only know a word or two of Klingon; I haven't *memorized* more than, say, ten lines of Cryptonomicon. So I can always say, "oh, I'm just a regular person who happens to like this thing, there are OTHER PEOPLE who are really obsessed." But that's just No True Scotsman in reverse. These goalposts must be made of new space-age alloys, they're so easy to move!

But when I come across an enthusiasm more ardent than mine, there is a kind of intellectual squick, a cooler and more abstract horror. And there's relief -- at least I'm not like that, at least there's someone below me on this imagined hierarchy. Which makes little sense; to whom am I proving this alleged cool?

Obsession is a derogatory synonym of mastery.

Mel's post on how she learns tickled my brain. When I learn, I like to hypothesize internally consistent systems of rules. And then I take pride in the architecture I've built, in my mastery of my personal social construction, and bond with new tribe members when we learn that we share intersubjectivities.

New skills are tools and catalogs of tools. If you learn what I know, then you'll realize certain tasks are far easier than you thought. I can be uneasy with that power; it's like the disorientation of suddenly driving an SUV, getting used to a bigger, stronger body.

But an expert also confidently says, "No. That's far harder than you realize." While the fairy tales usually scorn naysayers -- they're just obstacles in the hero's way -- in our real lives, over coffee and beer, we shake our heads and say, "I told him it wasn't gonna work."

I had a dinner with an out-of-towner once, and happened to mention that Roosevelt Island's tram is a major means of transit for RI's residents, and that when it gets taken down for construction/maintenance for several months (sometime soon, I believe) it'll be a big hardship for those residents. It would suck to commute by car (that teensy bridge would get backed up real fast), and the RI stop on the F subway line will get uncomfortably crowded. She started making suggestions. Run more F trains? Well, that would probably throw the rest of the system out of whack. Get a bigger bridge? Probably not worth it for a five-month workaround, and besides, building bigger roads means asking for more traffic. She finally said in bewilderment, "Well, they should just fix it!" And I said, eh, it is complicated, isn't it? And we moved on.

I felt very superior and sophisticated at this - scorn is shorthand for status. There's a whole other thread here about urban systems, interdependence, respect for homeostasis. But basically, I'm ashamed of that impulse to snobbishness. Had I time, love, security, and patience enough, I'd be about sharing, not shaming.

I like being enthusiastic. I like sharing myself. My opinions, my judgments, and my ideas sometimes feel like an extension of myself, as much as my adopted culture says I should take criticism of those opinions impersonally.

But sometimes I have a snobbish geekiness, so complacent & happy to bond with one person by slamming another. Either because I have more mastery than her (e.g., re: transit), or less (e.g., re: Star Wars).

So, the Twitter version: Parallax sucks, and I love mastering worlds because I can't master myself.

12 Dec 2009, 12:15PM: And A Round Of Applause For Yourself For Coming Out And Supporting Live Theater: Sepia Mutiny got me to go see a bunch of Asian & black comics doing standup Friday night and it was great. Hari Kondabolu & Kumail Nanjiani were especially awesome, but I also enjoyed seeing Ali Wong's, Sheng Wang's, and Baron Vaughn's acts. (I'm now at the age where I suspect I've seen several of these performers before but can't remember unless they reuse jokes.) Now to get on a bunch of email lists. I only saw Aziz Ansari live once or twice when I had the chance, and now he's off Hollywooding; not again! Kondabolu made me point and say YES more than any stand-up I've seen in years.

Before that, I saw Mike Daisey's The Last Cargo Cult: fantastic as always, as good as the best Daisey. It's playing through the 13th and you should catch it if you can. I often have a hard time visualizing scenes, but Daisey made me feel like I was in a Maine college dorm, or on a bare-metal plane, or watching the John Frum Day celebrations, or in a car driving to the Hamptons. Some of his phrasings and lines stay with me, like splinters; some of the story has sailed through my conscious recollection and I'm not sure yet which appendage is bleeding.

Quick fun: Baron Vaughn on movie parent cliches and agribusiness, Kondabolu on "found" artifacts, and Nanjiani on Benjamin Button, or, the difference between science fiction and fantasy.

Filed under: Comedy

(5) 12 Dec 2009, 12:26PM: Charitable Giving Suggestions: For several years I've preferred people give to charity rather than give me Christmas or birthday gifts. This year I may also just donate rather than give gifts to anyone, up to and including my husband. I hope no one takes this as a sign that I don't care about them.

Some recent recommendation lists come from BoingBoing, Jed (from last year), and Charity Navigator's guide to holiday giving. The charities that really speak to me this year are about freedom, sex, and science fiction:

Leonard, per his request, will probably get a donation to Heifer International or Oxfam. I sometimes also give via DonorsChoose, and other friends have recommended to me several charities including:

(In talking with some people about this, I realized that "what charities are you giving to?" can be an awkward question along the lines of "what books are you reading these days?")

And please don't worry that I'm going all ascetic. I'm getting a huge end-of-year gift already, a free N900 mobile computer, from my bosses. Incidentally, this means I don't need to hunt down a Linux-friendly portable music player, but I do need to look for a guide to the best aftermarket tweaks and apps, along the lines of "Top things to do after installing Ubuntu Linux 9.10 Karmic Koala". Playing .ogg files would be nice.

(1) 13 Dec 2009, 02:49PM: To Consume: Last night, Leonard & I looked at recent Hulu uploads to see if we want to watch anything. Promising selections:

We also looked at recent New York City Craigslist posts for amusement, shock, sentiment, and "what does THAT acronym mean?" edification. A few (click soon, they'll disappear off the site in a few days):

An N+1 article on online dating by Katherine Sharpe had some great Craigslist analysis:

Reading Craigslist, I feel as though I am dipping my cup straight into the swift-flowing stream of human need. Laid-back is the only thing these people aren't. When I step back onto the "regular" dating sites, I feel like someone coming out of bright sunshine into a darkened room; it takes a while for my eyes to re-adjust. Everything's so … subtle. On Craigslist, people say what they want; on Nerve or OK Cupid, they say who they are, and you infer the rest. Craigslist is scattershot, confessional, desperate, and sleazy. It's like a wholesale thrift store where nothing is hung up, no two items are alike, and the savviest shoppers wear rubber gloves. The other dating sites are for discerning petit-bouregois who like to read Consumer Reports and make informed decisions. Craigslist's the insane, open-all-night corner store where you go at 3 a.m. for unhealthy snacks, where a bony cat roams the aisles and there's a permanent card game going on in back. You go there for what you want right now and will most likely consume in private. Or you go there because you just can't sleep, and you need somebody else to know it.

(6) 19 Dec 2009, 07:54PM: Everything I Knew (About Battery Care) Was Wrong: Today I learned that I've been working from an obsolete understanding of how to keep my cellphone and laptop batteries from losing gobs of capacity over time. A simplistic summary follows for your benefit.

The batteries in my phone and my work laptop are lithium-ion batteries. Check yours -- the "Li-Ion" abbreviation means it's lithium-ion. As detailed sources explain, charging/discharging battery care for lithium ion batteries is the opposite of the conventional wisdom I had in my head, left over from the old days of nickel-based rechargeable batteries.

It used to be that you'd want to run batteries all the way down before starting to charge them again, because otherwise the capacity might get messed up. That's not true with lithium-ion batteries; it's recommended that you only rarely let an Li-Ion battery run down below 10% of its charge.

Lithium-ion batteries lose capacity, in the long run, if they sit overcharging a lot, or if they run hot a lot. So don't let them sit plugged into a charger all the time, and if you usually run your laptop plugged into AC power, think about removing the battery and setting it someplace cooler.

The moment a lithium-ion battery gets manufactured, it slowly starts losing capacity. So buying a primary battery + a spare battery simultaneously might be a worse decision than using a primary battery, then getting the spare battery years later, when your capacity has substantially degraded.

This came up because I assumed I should let my new N900 run down completely (on the partial battery charge from the factory) before plugging it in, and I was annoyed that plugging in the USB-to-microUSB cable to transfer files meant it was getting juice while the battery hadn't totally discharged. But I was wrong to worry! Thanks for straightening me out, Sjoerd.

Filed under: Work

(3) 20 Dec 2009, 06:53PM: Some Follow-Ups: Drunken Master is fairly boring and the main character is offputting, although the Jackie Chan fight sequences are indeed very Jackie Chan-esque.

I only have first impressions of the N900 so far, like "how nice that copy and paste works just as I intuited it would!" and "hey, these speakers are really nice" and "I could use this video camera to upload reviews for the Rotten Tomatoes TV show" and "I think I need to install some more codecs so that random downloaded fanvids play properly." I have been spending much of the weekend happily playing with it.

I hear it's snowing in England, and am glad I'm not moving till the spring.

I upgraded to Ubuntu's latest big release, Karmic Koala, and everything seems fine; there was an issue interfering with resume-from-suspend but that seems fixed now.

I seem to be posting about once a day on Twitter (it just repeats everything I post to Identi.ca) and post comments twice a week on Ask MetaFilter.

Recently I saw a Kevin [Maher] Geeks Out holiday best-of (Kevin's site, including Muppets trivia), the German film The Lives of Others, and my friend John Stange on stage as Jerry in Albee's The Zoo Story. All three were ridiculously good, but I'm still trying to figure out what happened to my head when I saw John do that on stage. My jaw was dropped for a minute after. What do you do when a friend suddenly (to you) blazes like a sun?

(10) 24 Dec 2009, 08:43AM: Balk-eye Bartockomouse Here?: Vacation! I'm off work today till Monday 4 January. Leonard and I are staying in NYC and hella available to hang out, including perhaps a quiet New Year's Eve at our place with games.

Recently our friend Beth heard me order a pizza and give my fake name. It always causes amusement when people first hear me do it; I try rather hard not to lie, and I wonder whether that causes some of the incongruity. I explained that it's less trouble for everyone if random taxi dispatchers and restaurant hosts don't have to try to write down and repeat "Sumana." (Incidentally, this is one nice thing about call centers; they usually get my name right.)

[Vaguely relatedly, many acquaintances think my name is Sumanah, because my email address starts with sumanah@ and my chat nickname is sumanah. (The "more suitable anecdote" here explains why.) So I get email starting with "Hi Sumanah!" but don't usually bother to explicitly correct them, since they'll figure it out eventually when they see my signature.]

We told Beth that Leonard's fake name for these purposes is "Jake," although we haven't yet told her that some people therefore think Leonard's friend Jake Berendes is a hoax. Evidently, if Leonard gives the name "Leonard," the name he gets back is at best "Benard," "Winter," "Maynard," or "Ayers." At worst, he muses,

"Your name is LeRGHGHGAGH?" It's like they think I couldn't have that name. It's like I don't have a name. It's like I've cast a glamour over them to make them forget my name -- it's like the opposite of fame.

And I told her the eerie tale of the time we hung out with Ben and his gal-pal-at-the-time Irina, and discovered that they'd also decided on the fake names "Jake" and "Vicky," separately, before they had met us or each other.

Beth then surprised me by telling me that random phone people get her name wrong! They call her "Bev." Bev! So even fairly common US names get messed up by substitute teachers, telemarketers, taxi dispatchers, supermarket clerks ("Thanks for shopping with us, _____!"), maitres'd, and all the other strangers who have to grab hold of your name. What names are the most and least awkward handles to grab? And when such folks get your name wrong, what do they usually call you?

(Title from Perfect Strangers, in which the delivery guy always mispronounced Balki Bartokomous's name. If it's true that saying someone's true name gives you power over them, Balki and I are pretty lucky!)

(1) 28 Dec 2009, 10:23AM: Refracted Light: Glurge is a certain kind of inspirational story. It's unattributed, it's a honed anecdote honoring goodness and generosity and loyalty and stamina and often faith, and it has a kitschy feel that irony-aligned people of my cohort are allergic to. Gives Me Hope made tears come to my eyes, but the saccharine gets to me after a few pages.

And then there's another kind of inspiration, from another direction, a different color of light. It's the way someone tells their specific story, or celebrates an achievement, more expository than persuasive. The author didn't write it specifically to inspire the reader to generalized goodness, but basic empathy leads a reader to consider the lessons mentioned, perhaps raise her sights a little.

Things that made me want to up my game recently:

Mel, as always. In this case, the way she actively seeks out uncertainty, and her ability and willingness to frankly say that she's good at things. My reflexive self-deprecation nearly won't let me think I'm good at things, and certainly wouldn't let me say it out loud. I need to work on that.

N.K. Jemisin, principally on a clash between an amateur writer's and a professional writer's mindset, but more profoundly on feeling secure in your past choices:

See, I think a lot of the angst surrounding this debate is happening because some folks -- particularly newer writers -- are caring about the wrong things. They're basing their sense of themselves as writers on extrinsic factors like which markets publish their work and how much their work sells for and whether they've got any sales at all, rather than on intrinsic factors like belief in their own skill. So of course they get upset when someone disparages a market they've sold/hoped to sell their work to; this feels like disparagement of them, and their skill. They take it very personally. And thus a conversation that should be strictly about business becomes a conversation about their personal/artistic worth.

This will sound cold-blooded. But the solution is for these writers to stop caring. Or rather, care better. I think the shift from extrinsic to intrinsic valuation -- from caring about what others think to caring about yourself -- is a fundamental part of the transition from amateur to professional, perhaps even more than pay rates and book deals and awards and such. It's a tough transition to make, I know; how do you believe in yourself if no one else does? How do you know your judgment of yourself is sound? I could write ten more blog posts trying to answer these questions. But for pro writers -- and I include aspiring pros along with established ones in this designation -- it's an absolutely necessary transition. Otherwise you spend all your time caring about the wrong things.

A kick in the butt to care about the right things.

Desi Women of the Decade. I bet my sister will be on this list in ten years. I love seeing us achieving in politics, arts/entertainment, science and business. Kind of hilarious that Parminder Nagra got on US TV to play a doctor. Maybe that's only funny to Asians.

I saw this seven-minute documentary about an aspiring comedian via the Best of Current video podcast. We all know the glurgy slogans: the lessons of adversity, no pain no gain, that sort of thing. But it is a different thing to see this man on stage, and then find out where he was before, and to think, of course the worthwhile thing is hard. I am comfortable and I need to reexamine my little lazinesses. And more that I don't have words for.

Yesterday, in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal, I ran across these lines from Rabindranath Tagore, which somehow get past my kitsch shields because they are personal, confessional, yearning, desperate:

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.
....
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved but hope for the patience to win my freedom.
Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.
Filed under: Comedy Religion Introspection Reading

(2) 29 Dec 2009, 11:27AM: An Adventure Fifty-Five Months In The Making: Several years ago, I worked for Salon.com, had a weekly newspaper column, and contributed the occasional review to Bookslut. (The review of Clara's Grand Tour is by Leonard; every once in a while I ask them again to change the byline.)

I used these opportunities to interview cool people, like Diana Abu-Jaber, Christopher Kimball and Alton Brown, Trevor Moore and Jimbo Matison of Uncle Morty's Dub Shack, Wil Wheaton & Bjo Trimble (for a piece on the end of Star Trek Enterprise that never ran), and Ryan Divine of Maldroid. Where I have the raw text of those interviews (email or phone transcripts), you can read them in my new low-tech "interviews" file directory.

Most embarrassingly: in May 2005, I interviewed Eric Burns of Websnark and then didn't transcribe the tape for four and a half years. My friend and high-energy stenographer machine Mirabai Knight kindly transcribed it for me this month, so I offer you my hella outdated interview with Eric Burns. Includes predictions about the webcomics industry, me ordering jalapeno poppers for the first time, and Burns praising Anacrusis.

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