# (2) 02 Jul 2009, 02:48PM: While Listening To Kraftwerk:
The votes all request the New York As Religion hypothesis. So here goes some analogizing. Actual ethnographers, please correct the hell out of me.
The phenomena I wish to explain:
- New Yorkers feel at home when they can give directions.
- New Yorkers feel righteously angry when someone acts inefficiently.
- New Yorkers, upon visiting a less systematically coherent urban ecology, express condescension or angry bewilderment.
- New Yorkers feel numinous experiences of being at one with their city (yes, I know that happy residents of all places feel this as well).
What are the two things that specifically and disproportionately make New Yorkers angry?
- People moving slowly in public spaces and impeding others' efficient use of spaces and services (e.g., blocking escalators, getting to the front of a line and not knowing what one wants)
- Systems that have not been properly thought through (e.g., "It's just stupid that they don't have a sign up," "Don't waste my time doing x when you could just tell me y because you already know z")
New York is a city you can trust, the way you can trust certain rock-solid pieces of software. Millions of people have been using it to its limits every day; anything you want to do, someone else has tried. There is a blazed trail, a user interface, a well-known list of features and longstanding bugs and workarounds. Via intelligent design (grid of streets, subway system) and evolution (ruthless market forces for 400 years), this city creates an expectation in its users that things will make sense.
And New Yorkers grow to believe that systems should make sense, big systems like the subway and smaller systems like theatres or meetups or gardens. They live in a city where there is usually a reason why you are being inconvenienced, or why that restaurant has the following it does, or why that bit of infrastructure works the way it does. The explanation might refer to history, or to an arbitrage opportunity, or to the peculiar and customary crystallizations of our struggles with entropy. But, once you're thinking on the macro scale, things tend to make sense. It's unlikely we're on the efficient frontier, but we feel close to it.
Instead of feeling as though we're going it alone, in individual cars with routes we choose (ignoring the massive social structures embedded in car-based transit), we use openly social constructions. We depend on the subway and the line at the bodega. We do a hundred trust falls every day, delivering ourselves unto each other. No one New Yorker earned this trust, but we all gain from it. We have the smugness that comes with believing: the world makes sense and has a place for me.
So when someone or some organization does something that does not make sense, it's not just inconvenient, it's heresy. Inefficiencies go against the natural order of the world. It breaks the trust.
Visiting other cities, more "laid-back" places where people and organizations tolerate more inefficiency, we either pity the poor dears or get irritable and bewildered. We get angry, or we laugh, or we try to convert others, or we must consciously adapt to a new lifestyle. There is something in our preferences that we privilege above mere tendency, that ties into values and identity.
When others come to us, when tourists stand still on Manhattan street corners with maps, some pity the heathens, and some grumble that they're blocking the sidewalk. But some of us give directions. We get to show off our knowlege of the beautiful, elegant cosmos. We hope to convey the splendor of the grid, and its hospitality -- there is a path already laid out for you, and we made it for you before you ever thought to come here at all. We Witness.
# (0) 02 Jul 2009, 02:14PM: Small Mysteries:
In Moon: what's the song playing on Sam's alarm clock? Is it by The Strokes (video directed awesomely by Warren Fu)?
In old email: when and why did Leonard and I start using the endearment "factory bear"?
In recent note to myself: what did "bread overhead & The Secret Garden" mean?
# (4) 01 Jul 2009, 01:35PM: Cool Facts:
The Amazon Kindle and Garmin GPS navigators use GStreamer, a piece of software that my company, Collabora, maintains. (As colleague Youness El Alaoui describes, "GStreamer is a multimedia framework for constructing graphs of media-handling components. This means that businesses can easily create customized pipelines allowing media playback, transcoding, media streaming, video editing, etc.")
If you're connected to the Net from a new physical location or network, and suddenly you can't send email (but receiving works fine), try switching your SMTP (outgoing) port from 25 to something else, such as 587. Port 25 often gets blocked as part of spam prevention.
Collabora's Cambridge headquarters might be where Clive Sinclair, inventor of the ZX Spectrum, worked. Thus, our offices might appear in a new dramatic recreation of the battle between the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro, to be televised in the UK.
WisCon 34 wants ideas for panels. I am thinking of proposing "HOWTO Describe Nonwhite Characters Sans Fail" (a.k.a., "Her Skin Was The Color Of A Delicious Coca-Cola"), and/or something asking about the goals and effectiveness of Goodreads/LibraryThing/BookMooch/PaperbackSwap/Tor.com/Suvudu/Infinite Summer/50books_poc.
Update: I would be remiss not to link to Jed's roundup of links on describing brown skin tones and otherwise "indicat[ing] culture and ethnicity in fictional characters". And I may as well get these in while I can: "her skin was like a half-caf no-whip soy venti frappucino"; "her skin was the 85% cacao shade of the new Ultra Dark Dove Bar, $9.99 for a box of 12, in your grocer's freezer"; "her UPS brown fingers muted to an eight-grain Kashi GoodFriends hue at the wrist, but her elbow reminded me of a FedEx logo spattered with Aegean mud."
# (0) 29 Jun 2009, 11:19PM: Poker Tells & Sideshows:
I nearly laughed out loud just now at some dialogue I wrote:
"Yes! Tell me more!"
"Show, don't tell."
# (0) 29 Jun 2009, 04:15PM: Getting (Irrelevant) Things Done:
I am bikeshedding my own yak-shaving. This should win an award.
# (0) 29 Jun 2009, 03:04PM: Travel Schedule:
I'm going to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit next week. Developers, managers, and other free software enthusiasts in the GNOME and KDE communities get together on the Canary Islands, which are technically part of Spain but sit off the coast of Africa. Then I spend a week in Cambridge, England, working alongside my fellow Collaborans. Yup, it's all for work, and I won't even think about bringing a suit (other than a bathing suit).
# (0) 28 Jun 2009, 03:46PM: Four Cool Stories:
Tim Pratt's genre-subverting Another End of the Empire, Jeff Soesbe's quiet and moving Apologies All Around, Jennifer Linnea's eerie glimpse Second-Hand Information, and Sergey Gerasimov's hella Russian The Most Dangerous Profession.
# (4) 27 Jun 2009, 09:44AM: Nuts On My Pocky Like Grains Of Sand:
There are party games and then there are game parties. Last night: played Cartagena and Settlers of Catan for the first time, and got people addicted to Catfishing. Met Neil Sinhababu, who last year created a site explaining the ridiculous things we could do for the cost of the Iraq War, like buy two iPhones for every single person in the world. Also met a woman who works for Peter Jennings's widow; in her office there is a photo of the late Mr. Jennings, topless, holding a huge fish.
Traditionally in Cartagena, the player who most resembles a pirate goes first. Bill, a white guy with a huge beard, was the obvious candidate. But then I pointed out that modern-day pirates, in the Indian Ocean or near Indonesia, more resemble Neil. And then Scandinavian-looking Dennis noted that he most resembled a plausible member of the Swedish Pirate Party.
Settlers of Catan is a lot of fun. I nearly won! I should probably get over my distaste for learning new complicated tabletop games, because for ten years I've been going to parties and missing out when they brought out Catan.
Note to self: when trying to get someone to trade you a card you want, suddenly hitting on her or suggesting that "the game will get more interesting if you give me that sheep" or "I'll give you another card for it later, I promise" are not workable tactics.
# (0) 26 Jun 2009, 04:33PM: More Anthology Notes:
Two weeks ago I posted a long entry about Thoughtcrime Experiments (a scifi/fantasy anthology Leonard and I edited), the market for and marketing of short speculative fiction, and my interests in future projects. I mentioned that small publishers can market to readers via new technologies and communities, at the cost of some sweat and little or no money.
Case in point: In case you didn't want to deal with CreateSpace, you can now buy a print-on-demand paperback of Thoughtcrime Experiments for $5.09 directly from Amazon.com. (Note to self: figure out how to tell Amazon that Leonard and I are not the book's authors but its editors, and that people can download the Kindle version for free.) We've also shown up on GoodReads and LibraryThing.
I encourage anyone who enjoyed a story in the anthology to Delicious, Facebook, Tweet, Reddit, Digg, blog, mashup, podcast, email it around, and otherwise share your enthusiasm. Reviews on your blog or on LibraryThing/Amazon/Goodreads/etc. are very welcome and I should do a review roundup post next week.
Each story stands alone on its own page with its own URL. I assume that reading the anthology as individual webpages, or as a PDF/mobile ebook, or as a paperback, influences whether people see each story as standalone or as part of a whole. I wonder which view is better for this anthology, where there's so much variety in subject and style.
I also have some new, if weak, stats. Leonard usually articulates these kinds of musings on his own blog, but in this case I'm the one who broke out the spreadsheet a while back to get a very rough sense of the Thoughtcrime Experiments gender/ethnicity breakdown. (I was prepping for my WisCon panels.) Out of 200 distinct authors who submitted pieces, author names look like:
Gender
14 Hard to tell ---- 7%
59 Female ---------- 30%
126 Male ------------ 63%
Ethnicity
186 White ----------- 93%
14 Nonwhite --------- 7%
Of course, that's going by the names authors gave us, which might have been pseudonyms, and I can't tell anything about whether authors are transgendered or cisgendered from their names, and many people of color have names that I read as white. I wish I'd tried harder to recruit nonwhite authors; I wrote to a few relevant blogs/mailing lists/workshops/interest groups but not as many as I could have, and I got several bounce messages I should have followed up on.
We published nine stories. I believe four were by women and five by men, and at least two of the nine authors were people of color. Rachel did us the kindness of posting a review in a LiveJournal community whose goal is to get readers to consciously seek out books by people of color. Again, yay Internet!
# (4) 24 Jun 2009, 05:29PM: Distractions & Discoveries:
Dave Bort, a friend of a friend of a friend, used to do these awesome comics. A selection of my favorites:
Music that's been cheering me lately, other than fanmix CDs that Cabell gave me at WisCon: Songsmith remixes. I'm completely serious.
Songsmith vs. Queen: "We Will Rock You" as bossa nova? A big-band Songsmith of Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl". Bluegrass Eminem. "Synthpop is so 2008, so for 2009 the Killers are setting a new trend in light jazz." And best, Will Smith doing a bluegrass "Wild Wild West."
By the way, it turns out that when several of my friends give me access to their private LiveJournal entries in the space of a day, that day gets eaten, because I am obsessive enough to go through and read a few years' worth of job/relationship/hobby/family angst RIGHT THEN.
Sometimes I have trouble pulling that trick where I tell myself, "come on, just do this task for 5 minutes." Maybe that's because my brain knows that if I start, I'll work for hours!
Time to go back to that. Just five minutes...
# (7) 20 Jun 2009, 09:45PM: LiveJournal People, I'm Ten Years Late To Your Party:
Update to this entry: if you are on LiveJournal and want me to be able to read your friendslocked Google/Microsoft slash or whatever, you can add my externally created fake LJ account id to your permissions list. The relevant ID to add is http://ext-194791.livejournal.com; evidently brainwane.dreamwidth.org won't directly work.
The LJ feed for this very journal is http://syndicated.livejournal.com/sumanah/. That feed is also known as "the reason I have to take out smartquotes, accents, and weird hyphens every time I copy and paste something into a new post." When that feed acts broken and doesn't update for more than five days, usually that's why.
I have 23 subscribers on LJ? Since there's no way for me to see a list of all of you, feel free to delurk and *wave*.
# 19 Jun 2009, 06:05PM: "...if I could make it stay...":
Hugo Schwyzer today posted a short poem that struck me, "One of the Butterflies" by W.S. Merwin. When you're Surprised By Joy(TM) it passes through you, and you're always everlastingly too late to cherish that moment. Mark Twain said he could live on a good compliment for three weeks; to me, the joy of a compliment is like a dish of ice cream in front of me. I can't stop myself from eating it all as fast as I can, and then it's gone. I get terrible mileage.
All I'm left with is the empty bowl, the wish to feel that way again.
Those memories I most love won't be stewarded; they slip through my fingers like last week's dreams; they leak out the holes of my Pensieve faster the harder I press on them.
One wonderful thing about being with Leonard is that every day we're together, there's some small moment when we look at each other and our eyes soften and we smile and think, I am so lucky. I love you. You make me happy. We often say it, but sometimes we don't have to. Entropy falleth on the just and the unjust alike, the sieve empties gracelessly, but love keeps falling in, and sometimes even the sieve overflows. Love is a renewable resource.
# 19 Jun 2009, 09:05AM: 9AM And We Have A Quote Of The Day:
"I think the construction of gender in snowmen is beyond the scope of what I understand."
Update: "There's a new movie that a lot of people are going to compare to Eternal Sunshine."
"Is it Eternal Sunshine?"
"No."
"Then there can be no comparison."
"That's all right."
"'Cause I'm saved by the bell."
"Worst medley ever."
# (5) 17 Jun 2009, 09:34AM: The Cool Old Rhetorical Technique That's Sweeping The Discourse:
From yesterday's co-working session:
Toby was working on her novel. In one scene, she got stuck: she wanted to express one character's mental response to what another character said, but not actually state it out loud as "What she thought of what he had just said was blah blah blah."
I suggested paralipsis, perhaps in the form "she narrowly avoided saying [x]" or "'That's terrible,' she didn't say." Common examples of paralipsis: "I'm not going to say 'I told you so'" and the "I come to bury Caesar..." speech. I ended up bringing out A Perfect Vacuum by Lem as a reference.
It worked! Paralipsis: I don't have to tell you how great it is.
# (10) 17 Jun 2009, 09:25AM: Clothes Make The Man Feel Old:
Reflection upon dressing this morning: I've owned these pants for nine years. I bought them in that church basement thrift shop on...Dana? Bowditch? in Berkeley. Huh. I think I've had that purple tee shirt for more than half my life.
How old is the oldest piece of clothing that you regularly wear?
# (1) 17 Jun 2009, 12:00AM: Like Twitter, But All In One Handy Package:
Recent out-of-context quotes, nearly all from my sent emails:
Zenophiliac: someone who never quite gets anything done.
Not just A men, but like 5 men to that.
They can't all be gems used in lasers.
I got typed during a party at WisCon and am probably an ENTJ, or possibly an ENTP, or ENFJ, WAIT THIS IS HOROSCOPES WITH 4 BONUS OPTIONS.
Obama saying cautious things that display our desire for free & fair elections, while preserving our ability to engage with Iran no matter who wins this fight: dictionary definition of diplomatic.
Bibimbap is like the Mahabharata -- everything's in there.
Regular vegetarians need to be able to point at PETA and say "well we're not THAT" in an Overton window-expanding way, like MLK was to Malcolm X.
[Re: Swine flu] I'm moving to Madagascar.
# 16 Jun 2009, 11:43PM: I'd Let You Watch, I Would Invite You:
When I was a slip of a girl in Stockton, California, I saw a college production of Chess and found it very entertaining, though lyrics like "the queens we use would not excite you" whooshed over my head entirely. If I hang out with friends tomorrow night and watch the telecast on PBS, I'm sure I'll discover additional layers and chewy bits.
And yet! Tomorrow is also the best of the Sci-Fi Screening Room! Seven bucks, music, trivia, free snacks, prizes, and 99 minutes of obscure video one can't find on Netflix or YouTube. From a reminder email:
The killer line-up features MORE clips than ever before.
Featuring:
Michael Ironside as Batman
Pia Zadora singing
Baragon battling Frankenstein
Bionic Bigfoot
KISS Haikus
Live Pac-Man playoff
Video Game PSAs
The robots of Chopping Mall
The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island
The Transformers/Boogie Nights connection
And the saddest clip of The Incredible Hulk.
Whether I choose one or the other, I'm choosing to watch prerecorded video with an entertaining live context. Right now I'm leaning towards a scarcity heuristic. Chess is one monolithic piece that I can record on my PVR and watch again later, with friends if I can scrounge some up. The Screening Room has multiple elusive offerings, and it's not like I could get Kevin Maher and his special guests at will. Interesting how the value-added aspects of remix culture work.
# (6) 16 Jun 2009, 10:54PM: Readers' Choice:
Vote in the comments: you want my thoughts on New York City as religion, or you want me to finish and post the lyrics to "Ahmadinejad" (a song to the tune of "Dick in a Box")?
# (3) 16 Jun 2009, 02:30PM: On Dentistry:
I went to the dentist last night, specifically at the NYU College of Dentistry. I actually prefer the dental school experience to many private practice dentistries. The wait in the waiting room is shorter (2 hours per appointment actually spent in the chair, rather than an hour in intermittent waiting plus an hour in the chair), I get treated by eager-to-learn dentists in training rather than bored, laconic hygienists, and the student dentists are thorough and communicative. And they offer a 6pm-8pm slot. Very few private practices do.
Young student dentist Stringer was the one to phone me up to set up an appointment. He was more deft, gentle, and patient than several DDSes I've patronized. "Oh, you build up a lot of calculus here, because of your salivary gland. I have that too," he confided. He checked in with me about whether the ultrasonic cleaning dealie was running too hot and hurting me. "I don't like to use it, I don't think it's gentle enough," he said. He handed me the suction wand: "Raise your hand if you need me to stop so you can suction."
In further stereotype-demolishing, Stringer does not play World of Warcraft (nor does he wear Ira Glass glasses). My cousin-in-law-in-law Aaron, husband of Kristen, is on the road to full Dentistdom and enjoys WoW-style games. [pun about grinding omitted]
I told Stringer what his last name means in journalism; in retrospect, he has a new occupational surname, like Smith or Cooper.
I get curious about others' occupations. Firefighters, CAD designers, directors, transcriptionists, silversmiths, pastors, teachers, full-time caretakers, taxi drivers, deli owners, X-ray technicians, soldiers, construction workers, dentists. How does doing your job change the way you interact with others?
# 16 Jun 2009, 08:25AM: Eye-Scalding Green For A Good Cause:
My parents lived in Tehran for a few years in the seventies, before the revolution. They spoke Farsi and had Muslim coworkers, neighbors, and friends. My dad was a civil engineer. The saying is that mechanical engineers build weapons and civil engineers build targets.
It's been thirty years since 1979 and the people of Iran are saying, "Enough." And it turns out software engineers build weapons, too.
|
Sumana Harihareswara's
journal
