Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2019 June

# 12 Jun 2019, 08:55AM: Some Recent Films: I saw several movies recently!

I LOVED Booksmart which is in conversation with Election, Legally Blonde, and (at least visually) maybe Brick. It's hilarious, moving, sweet, and precise -- a delightful confection of a film. As with Clueless there are no villains and everyone gets to be a person. The parable of the laborers in the vineyard (not explicitly), a "Lean In" joke, feminists like me onscreen whose politics are core to their character, a friendship between a straight girl and a queer girl who love and want the best for each other -- so much fun. I went to see this mostly on the strength of knowing Sarah Haskins had cowritten it, because I have loved her for a decade because of her "Target: Women" segment from Infomania. Brendan was the one who informed me that she'd cowritten the earliest version of the screenplay in 2009 and that it'd been on The Black List of best-liked unproduced screenplays (Franklin Leonard's TEDx talk is pretty interesting if you haven't heard of that spreadsheet).

Always Be My Maybe is a cute, sweet romcom that will mean more to you if you are Asian-American or have ever lived in San Francisco. I'm always happy to see Randall Park in something (I've loved his silly face since his IKEA Heights videos) and the intergenerational dynamics in his character's family rang true to me.

I enjoyed Mindy Kaling's Late Night because of Kaling's and Emma Thompson's performances, because I've been the only woman or the only nonwhite person in the room so many times, because of a particular exchange between Thompson's and Kaling's characters about tokenism that took me right back to a particular meal in San Francisco many years back when I had a very similar conversation, because I'm still a softie for the fairytale fantasy of making comedy that millions of people laugh at. The movie sort of feels like a 100-minute sitcom on the level of its characters, dialogue, and plot -- people speak their subtext a lot, it brings up an issue that it doesn't then deal with satisfyingly, there are Big Gestures that solve things. But I still had fun.

Funny-but-not note about that last one: one of the trailers before Late Night was for After The Wedding. The first several seconds of the trailer show us a young white American woman working in an orphanage in India. OK, sure, yes, Late Night will attract a lot of Indian diaspora people, so it makes sense to advertise a movie set in India to us. But then that white woman talks with the older Indian woman who runs the orphanage about their financial needs and, seeking a big donation, goes back to the US and gets involved in a whole messy situation with a rich woman and her sketchy husband. And that's the rest of the trailer and probably what most of the movie is about. And I was sitting there thinking -- look, there are other donors you could talk with! Are you seriously the development director for your nonprofit, and if not, have you talked with them about how much trouble this donation is turning out to be? Also, the Indian woman who runs the orphanage -- what's up with her right now? What does she think and what other sustainability leads is she pursuing? By the end of the trailer I was much more focused on questions like "have they already looked at the grant listings at the Foundation Center?" than "will Billy Crudup's SECRET be EXPOSED?" which is a long way of saying that I am probably not going to see this movie.

Oh also the Museum of the Moving Image showed the 1997 John Woo action classic Face/Off which I have now seen for the first time and I may not need to see another action movie again for multiple years because how can you top it? I feel like there are no words for the utter infernokrusher spectacle of Face/Off; it transcends any articulation outside of its own cinematic achievement. And the escapism! As the credits rolled I asked "did I like this?" and realized that my face hurt from smiling, so, yes.

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# 12 Jun 2019, 10:43AM: Hey, You Left Something Out: Of course not all the responses I get to my work are positive. Sometimes I get criticism. And a subset of that criticism says more about the person giving it than about the quality of what I've made. I try to keep a thick skin about that but I don't always succeed.

One particular kind of response has piqued my interest lately. Some of the feedback I get means to be praise, but contains a kinda-joking complaint about something that the person thinks I left out. I saw this recently in a recommendation of my PyCon 2016 talk, "HTTP Can Do That?!", and in another commenter's response. And some commentary of the "they/you left x out" variety is straightforward criticism.

At its most loving, I think this kind of commentary means to be a kind of "yes-and" response, sharing the experience of enjoying something and extending it by recommending another related thing. (I have been working on this blog post, on and off, for a few months; the day I am posting it, I see a perfect example.) And I can empathize with that!

But, a lot of the time, this kind of response comes with an explicit marker or implicit connotation of complaint: the author/speaker did not mention the thing that I think should be mentioned, and therefore, something is wrong.* Perhaps a more useful approach would be to wonder, in a genuinely curious way, why the author didn't mention it? Was it out of ignorance? Was it a deliberate choice, and, if so, to what purpose?

Marco Rogers's recently observed: "A lot of men seem to have been conditioned to think that telling someone that you disagree is the same as asking them a question. Like the way they learn to engage is by *creating a conflict*." Maybe that plays into this.

And as Josh Millard notes,

There's a lot of this sort of detached entitlement out there.... "I want content generated to my tastes" collides with "I'm making something with my bare hands" in such a way that the folks in the more passive former camp feel somehow totally comfortable asserting the high ground on the people in the latter.

Personal taste is personal taste and everybody's got a right to it; criticism is useful, at least when it's useful. Beyond that, though, there's a lot of Why Am I Not Being Correctly Entertained out there in the world that manages to get off the leash for no good reason, and from the doing-the-work, learning-the-craft, making-the-content side of things that does get awful tiring.

And maybe that plays into this too.

Compilation-makers, list-makers, etc. run into this kind of criticism frequently, as fanvidders discussed in a Vividcon panel about multisource vids. Perhaps some readers read any list of things sharing particular characteristic as an attempt to make the one canonical list, and thus read any publicly shared list as implicitly inviting corrections and additions toward this goal.

Last year bironic commented wryly,

I love how many multifandom vids lately come with explainers about scope, as we brace for people to come in and yell about someone who was included or left out.

And I appreciate vidder thingswithwings's response:

...there are so many selection choices to make, and only so many seconds of song . . . I think it's good to make it clear that we're making these decisions thoughtfully...

That's the spirit I see in thingswithwings's vidder's notes on their joyous, spirited and dancey vid "Gettin' Bi" and eruthros's vidder's notes on her excellent, moving, incisive vid "Straightening Up the House". And that's the spirit I'd like to inhabit as I make and share recommendation lists, compilations, etc. going forward.

And in that spirit I'll address here the praise-complaints of my own work that I linked to in my second paragraph. I scoped "HTTP Can Do That?!" to discuss underappreciated real, working parts of HTTP and share examples of things that work, even if they're bad ideas, as illustrations. I didn't show the cover of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in my talk because -- as I mentioned during the Q&A -- I think it's fine to leave that particular connection as a bit of an Easter egg so some people have something to figure out when they look up response status code 451 later. I didn't include the teapot response code (418) because it's already fairly popular and well-known as a joke response code, and I wanted to spend my time on stuff folks weren't as likely to run across in other fora, and because it's a joke that isn't in the HTTP standards. I made a tradeoff between concision and nuance. Similarly, I didn't use the word "neoliberal" in that post about feelings of overwhelmption because that wasn't the point.

People who want to compliment work should probably learn to give compliments that sound encouraging. As one writer notes: "I think Twitter, for all its good qualities, can very much be a Killer Of Work exactly because people don't know how to say "that's so awesome!" or lift creators up in the idea stage." And people who genuinely want to submit you-left-something-out bug reports about someone else's work** should probably spend a few moments checking the maker's stated criteria and purpose, and reflecting on whether they perhaps had an interesting reason for the exclusion or omission, or on how much the gut biomes of the creator's intended audience matches the reader's gut biome. "I'm curious about the choice you made" may sound passive-aggressive, but I'd rather hear that than something that's just flat-out aggressive.

(Oh, and to be tiresomely empowering again: a human created the thing you're responding to; you're a human and you could make a thing, too.)

* "You forgot Poland" always comes to mind, even though a face-to-face debate is such an unusual context compared to the ways I usually get feedback like "you forgot x".
** even something tiny like a single joke

Thanks to Mindy Preston and others who commented on drafts of this idea & piece.

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