Every morning upon waking, I promptly disentangle from blankets, husband, and cats in a frantic search for my phone. Half blinded by the light, and yet to achieve verbal coherence, any outside observer would categorize my existence as that more closely related to any number of burrowing, slithering organisms as I groan and ineffectually throw my mass at the direction of my bedside technology. When I have, by determination alone, grasped the phone and unlocked the screen to look into the depths it can reveal to my hungry, information-starved brain, I'm so exhausted that I fall asleep again. My fingers wrapped gently around the device as I pass into slumber.
Every morning.
It's so ingrained, so automatic that it's passed into the realm of near ritual. I can't get my post-sleep nap without going through all this. My mind worries at it like squirrel with a nut. Or me with Myst before I realized there was an Internet with walkthroughs on it. (Lies. I didn't figure out the walkthrough trick until Riven.)
And this whole thing makes me deliriously happy. I'm now even unconsciously making decisions that lead me to my eventual full-technological integration. I may look ridiculous with my HUD goggles, and I may move awkwardly, laden with too-many technologies. But I'm going to live in the future, dammit, and it will be awesome. Also probably lit in blue.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Thursday, May 16, 2013
The Summer-Break Work Schedule
I spent the early part of the day on the design of this blog. Which I also consider to be work. And exercise.
Fact: Photography requires that you contort the body into a variety of unnatural positions to look as natural as possible while simultaneously manning equipment with the atrophied stump that is the non-dominant hand. It is similar in form to a yoga/tai-chi hybrid.
Fact: Blogger's automatic background image scaling algorithm is the devil whose ever-shifting requirements are both mysterious and a surefire way to devolve oneself into a protohuman state of mental cohesion.
So in a fit of uncharacteristic motivation, I threw myself into CSS education. After a tenacious 12 minutes, I took a Reddit break for four hours.
I name this day a success.
Fact: Photography requires that you contort the body into a variety of unnatural positions to look as natural as possible while simultaneously manning equipment with the atrophied stump that is the non-dominant hand. It is similar in form to a yoga/tai-chi hybrid.
Fact: Blogger's automatic background image scaling algorithm is the devil whose ever-shifting requirements are both mysterious and a surefire way to devolve oneself into a protohuman state of mental cohesion.
So in a fit of uncharacteristic motivation, I threw myself into CSS education. After a tenacious 12 minutes, I took a Reddit break for four hours.
I name this day a success.
Friday, February 22, 2013
The Legacy of the Geek Clique
http://www.psmag.com/blogs/time-machine/radio-gender-women-technology-sector-52050
Is it comforting that this “girls aren’t allowed in my tech-geek club” thing has a long and prestigious history? I mean, radio, that thing changed the world!
It does make me question how deep the gender hegemony rabbit hole goes, however. And more I see the righteous indignation about this “fake” geek girl, the fear that she has infiltrated our precious exclusive club and the rage at her presumption, the more I wonder about the gender-based implications of this. I have heard nothing of the “fake geek boy”. Is he a thing? Because I have seen no such memes on Tumblr yet— maybe I’m following the wrong individuals.
That said, let’s pan out a bit and look at this from a broader perspective. Let’s talk about the fake-geek versus the real-geek and ignore gender entirely for a moment. I know that this group was once fairly small and exclusive, founded on the precepts of liking-something-odd, liking-that-thing-too-much, and not-much-caring-about-the-effect-it-has-on-my-popularity-ranking. And our numbers have swelled to much larger than I ever assumed we would. We found the coolest things ever, but no one else got it and we couldn’t understand why. And then we were shunned, became social pariahs, banished to the far end of cafeterias across the nation and forced to surreptitiously sneak into unoccupied classrooms to roll new characters for the weekend’s campaign. Before it was a subculture, geekery was a clique, and not one you wanted to be in. And it was painful, but we wore that shit with pride when we got on the other side. WE SURVIVED.
But now more people are recognizing how cool those things are. They are joining us in our liking-it-too-much sort of way, and wanting to talk about it and learn the cannon, and write fanfic, and omg did you hear that Joss Whedon is coming to SXSW to discuss Much Ado? We broke that ground for these up-and-coming geeks and now they can like the things that we like and share it with this giant, (usually) accepting community. We should be happy how far we’ve come and be proud that we carried these precious relics through the metaphorical Dark Ages until the rest of the world caught up and saw it for how awesome it is. We helped promote share this with the world and that is ridiculously fantastic! And clinging to the pain-that-was, the exclusionary concept of if-you-didn’t-go-through-real-ostracism-you-aren’t-a-real-geek is the most negative and undeserving way to characterize ourselves. Geeks and geekery is too mindblowingly fantastic for that to be our defining characteristic.
Is it comforting that this “girls aren’t allowed in my tech-geek club” thing has a long and prestigious history? I mean, radio, that thing changed the world!
It does make me question how deep the gender hegemony rabbit hole goes, however. And more I see the righteous indignation about this “fake” geek girl, the fear that she has infiltrated our precious exclusive club and the rage at her presumption, the more I wonder about the gender-based implications of this. I have heard nothing of the “fake geek boy”. Is he a thing? Because I have seen no such memes on Tumblr yet— maybe I’m following the wrong individuals.
That said, let’s pan out a bit and look at this from a broader perspective. Let’s talk about the fake-geek versus the real-geek and ignore gender entirely for a moment. I know that this group was once fairly small and exclusive, founded on the precepts of liking-something-odd, liking-that-thing-too-much, and not-much-caring-about-the-effect-it-has-on-my-popularity-ranking. And our numbers have swelled to much larger than I ever assumed we would. We found the coolest things ever, but no one else got it and we couldn’t understand why. And then we were shunned, became social pariahs, banished to the far end of cafeterias across the nation and forced to surreptitiously sneak into unoccupied classrooms to roll new characters for the weekend’s campaign. Before it was a subculture, geekery was a clique, and not one you wanted to be in. And it was painful, but we wore that shit with pride when we got on the other side. WE SURVIVED.
But now more people are recognizing how cool those things are. They are joining us in our liking-it-too-much sort of way, and wanting to talk about it and learn the cannon, and write fanfic, and omg did you hear that Joss Whedon is coming to SXSW to discuss Much Ado? We broke that ground for these up-and-coming geeks and now they can like the things that we like and share it with this giant, (usually) accepting community. We should be happy how far we’ve come and be proud that we carried these precious relics through the metaphorical Dark Ages until the rest of the world caught up and saw it for how awesome it is. We helped promote share this with the world and that is ridiculously fantastic! And clinging to the pain-that-was, the exclusionary concept of if-you-didn’t-go-through-real-ostracism-you-aren’t-a-real-geek is the most negative and undeserving way to characterize ourselves. Geeks and geekery is too mindblowingly fantastic for that to be our defining characteristic.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Husband on: Calendars
Me: You want to go to this party on Saturday?
Husband: Sure.
Me: I'm going to make a create a calendar event so I don't forget. I'll add you to it. Which calendar do you use?
Husband: The Julian Calendar...?
Me: /loses it
Monday, December 31, 2012
Friday, April 20, 2012
Internet Personalities
I was one of those that backed Ze Frank's A Show project on Kickstarter. I'm a fan of both of these things so their union was a beautiful melding of not-dissimilar worlds. I chipped in as much as my student budget would allow, and did some sort or wiggle-shimmy hybrid dance in anticipation of having a consistent dose of Ze again. Not long after, I received an email giving me links to my goodies and asking me to send a picture so that it could be posted on his Wall of Thank.
Right.
A picture.
This is going to be a thing.
Whether intentional or not, the nature of the internet allows for crafted personalities. We post pictures we want people to see, tweet things that we want others to think that we think are interesting. When a friend posts an embarrassing photo of us on Facebook, we experience that very special panic that never existed prior to the advent of social networking and photo tagging. Factual example: I once did a bit about 85+ days of heat. I did not have that information hiding out in my brain anyplace. If you look at my original draft, it says that the Season of the Heat was divided into 14 different eras based on the ruling families and technological advancement during that time. Once husband assured me that this was not true and (based on the amount of time that actually passed) could only theoretically be possible for strains of bacteria, I came to accept my need to Google a bit. But I sounded like I knew precisely how many days had passed. I portrayed myself as the sort of person who pays attention to temperature trends. Or who reads weather statistics. Or makes a tick on the wall every time there is another day of blistering heat like some sort of post-apocalyptic survivor searching for anything meaningful to keep her sanity.
This leads to interesting possibilities of turning a personality into art form. Finely controlled content diffusion, each piece being formed and shaped to support the whole. Like a mosaic. Or collage. Except instead of glossy magazine cutouts, it's photos of your vacation, and tagged body bits at a party, and tweets about your day, and bits of speech that would have been brilliant and cutting if only you had thought of it in the moment.
And let's be honest here-- it's not just the internet. Human beings are always posing for the persona camera. People meeting for the first time often list what they want the other person to most pay attention to. Because we attribute various values to different life achievements. A Harvard graduate "wins" over being community college degree holder. A chef is "better" than a customer support representative. A doctor beats everything because DAMMIT, THEY SAVE LIVES. Rarely do we describe ourselves on a first meeting as having failed fourth grade or as currently suffering from IBS. That said, the internet is uniquely capable of giving us fine control over this natural tendency. We gain control not only of what we choose to say, but craft precisely how we want to say it, in what venue, and how we look while we do it.
(I'd love to datamine FaceBook to see what the things we post actually say about ourselves and our culture. I would make charts. They would be in fantastic colors.)
So I was asked to provide a picture and there was nothing that I already had that felt like it portrayed who I really am. Or rather, who I think I really am that I want the everyone to see and think I really am. I go through this every time I have to upload an account picture. I'm get scared of random non-issues like what-if-I'm-the-only-one-with-a-serious-picture. That's like showing up to a beach party in formal wear-- I have no idea how to play that off. (And then I get self-conscious and awkward and then no one asks me to dance.)
So I thought about doing the classic phone-camera-in-the-bathroom shot-- I could say I was being ironic. Or that I was trying to craft a postmodern homage to 2005 social networking. (But then I don't think it would stand up under critique.) I do have a lot of sillyly pretentious hipstamatic photos, I suppose I could use one of those. But is that still cool? Or is it not cool? Has it become so cool that it's not cool now? Can it be ironically cool to like a thing that was once cool but isn't cool anymore? If I pretend that I don't care that it's cool, is that cool? (I never actually fully understood the science of cool-- any cool that I might have displayed in my life cannot be claimed as purposeful, so I am abandoning it.)
But then I remembered that I just got my fancy new camera thus providing the excuse to play around with it. I took many many photos of myself exhibiting different facial expressions, none of which I am certain any human creature makes in real life.
Have you seen these faces?
I eventually settled on the photo I've currently been using on social networking sites. Maybe it's not the honestest picture ever, but at least it says something about how I currently feel about how I think I should be portrayed. And that's some sort of meta-level of honesty, I suppose.
Right.
A picture.
This is going to be a thing.
Whether intentional or not, the nature of the internet allows for crafted personalities. We post pictures we want people to see, tweet things that we want others to think that we think are interesting. When a friend posts an embarrassing photo of us on Facebook, we experience that very special panic that never existed prior to the advent of social networking and photo tagging. Factual example: I once did a bit about 85+ days of heat. I did not have that information hiding out in my brain anyplace. If you look at my original draft, it says that the Season of the Heat was divided into 14 different eras based on the ruling families and technological advancement during that time. Once husband assured me that this was not true and (based on the amount of time that actually passed) could only theoretically be possible for strains of bacteria, I came to accept my need to Google a bit. But I sounded like I knew precisely how many days had passed. I portrayed myself as the sort of person who pays attention to temperature trends. Or who reads weather statistics. Or makes a tick on the wall every time there is another day of blistering heat like some sort of post-apocalyptic survivor searching for anything meaningful to keep her sanity.
This leads to interesting possibilities of turning a personality into art form. Finely controlled content diffusion, each piece being formed and shaped to support the whole. Like a mosaic. Or collage. Except instead of glossy magazine cutouts, it's photos of your vacation, and tagged body bits at a party, and tweets about your day, and bits of speech that would have been brilliant and cutting if only you had thought of it in the moment.
And let's be honest here-- it's not just the internet. Human beings are always posing for the persona camera. People meeting for the first time often list what they want the other person to most pay attention to. Because we attribute various values to different life achievements. A Harvard graduate "wins" over being community college degree holder. A chef is "better" than a customer support representative. A doctor beats everything because DAMMIT, THEY SAVE LIVES. Rarely do we describe ourselves on a first meeting as having failed fourth grade or as currently suffering from IBS. That said, the internet is uniquely capable of giving us fine control over this natural tendency. We gain control not only of what we choose to say, but craft precisely how we want to say it, in what venue, and how we look while we do it.
(I'd love to datamine FaceBook to see what the things we post actually say about ourselves and our culture. I would make charts. They would be in fantastic colors.)
So I was asked to provide a picture and there was nothing that I already had that felt like it portrayed who I really am. Or rather, who I think I really am that I want the everyone to see and think I really am. I go through this every time I have to upload an account picture. I'm get scared of random non-issues like what-if-I'm-the-only-one-with-a-serious-picture. That's like showing up to a beach party in formal wear-- I have no idea how to play that off. (And then I get self-conscious and awkward and then no one asks me to dance.)
So I thought about doing the classic phone-camera-in-the-bathroom shot-- I could say I was being ironic. Or that I was trying to craft a postmodern homage to 2005 social networking. (But then I don't think it would stand up under critique.) I do have a lot of sillyly pretentious hipstamatic photos, I suppose I could use one of those. But is that still cool? Or is it not cool? Has it become so cool that it's not cool now? Can it be ironically cool to like a thing that was once cool but isn't cool anymore? If I pretend that I don't care that it's cool, is that cool? (I never actually fully understood the science of cool-- any cool that I might have displayed in my life cannot be claimed as purposeful, so I am abandoning it.)
But then I remembered that I just got my fancy new camera thus providing the excuse to play around with it. I took many many photos of myself exhibiting different facial expressions, none of which I am certain any human creature makes in real life.
Have you seen these faces?
I eventually settled on the photo I've currently been using on social networking sites. Maybe it's not the honestest picture ever, but at least it says something about how I currently feel about how I think I should be portrayed. And that's some sort of meta-level of honesty, I suppose.
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