Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2015 June

# 07 Jun 2015, 06:49AM: On Wednesday Eve Was Not In Nyack: Yesterday evening Leonard and I watched a couple of Mathnet stories, including "The Case Of the Unkidnapping" (hence the post title), and including one I don't remember seeing before, "The Problem of the Dirty Money." The latter includes a Mr. Roark who runs a construction company called Roark, Atlas & Shrugged. Sadly no other Rand jokes are in the offing.

Watching as an adult, I appreciate George's particularly wacky attitude, the way Frankly and Monday thoroughly prepare a young viewer to enjoy Mulder and Scully, and the meta-message -- sometimes explicitly voiced -- that if you're going to solve a problem, you have to try a lot of approaches, and some of them won't work, and that's okay, and you keep trying.

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# 18 Jun 2015, 06:53AM: HTTP Can Do That?! and Comedy: On Wednesday of next week (June 24th) I'm presenting "HTTP Can Do That?!" at Open Source Bridge in Portland, Oregon.

I have explored weird corners of HTTP -- malformed requests that try to trick a site admin into clicking spam links in 404 logs, an API that responds to POST but not GET, and more. In this talk I'll walk you through those (using Python, netcat, and other tools you might have lying around the house).

I practiced this talk Tuesday night at the Recurse Center and it went well; people learned a lot about headers, verbs, status codes, and odd HTTP loopholes, and gave me constructive criticism so next week's version will be clearer.

I have also suggested a Birds of a Feather evening session called "Nothing Is Totally Incomprehensible If We Try Together" but don't yet know whether or when it will happen.

Then, at AlterConf Portland on Saturday, June 27th, I'll be performing some stand-up comedy for hippie nerds. I thought about trying to cram 100 punchlines into my 45-minute HTTP talk, but I don't think I'll be able to achieve that -- people need to understand something before they can understand a joke about it -- so it'll be nice to get 4 or 5 laughs per minute during the stand-up on Saturday.

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# 27 Jun 2015, 01:29PM PST: Apology: Earlier today, during my stand-up comedy act at AlterConf Portland, I failed at living up to the AlterConf code of conduct and to my act's title, "Stand-Up Comedy that Doesn't Hurt". I made a joke that hurt members of the audience. The joke was in a section about attempts to be perceived as a cis ally:

I try to be intersectional in the media I consume, and sometimes that leads to carbon credit-style bargaining, like, "How many memoirs by trans women of color do I have to read before I go see 'Avengers: Age of Ultron'"? [laughter] And then sometimes there's cheating on that diet, like, "Does 'Mrs. Doubtfire' count?"

In this joke, it is not clear enough that the cis ally narrator is completely wrong to categorize "Mrs. Doubtfire" as having anything to do with the goal of reading and supporting trans narratives. I won't make it again and I'm sorry that I made a joke that hurt.

For this act I practiced in front of audiences that included trans people, and I asked them for feedback, but I was not thorough enough about checking beyond that for offensive material. In the future I'll be more thorough.

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