# (4) 23 May 2012, 11:45PM: A Local Maximum:
By the way, I got promoted. It's quite an honor.
Wikimedia Foundation's new Engineering Community Team, which I lead, is a renaming of the TL;DR group. We've written a draft summary of our goals for July 2012-June 2013. There's so much to be done! (Of course, we're hiring.)
In open source, we share our vulnerabilities and our milestones, so of course my boss announced my promotion to a public mailing list. I was surprised and delighted when colleagues and contributors in my community responded to that announcement with congratulations, privately and publicly. It is as though they believe I am doing a good job! Take that, impostor syndrome.
I'm thinking about the thirty years of influences that got me here. As a teen, I volunteered for the Peace and Justice Network of San Joaquin County, and met my mentor John Morearty, whom I saw this past weekend. Before I knew Sam Hatch, and before I knew Seth Schoen, even, I knew John, a teacher who took his values seriously and was always ready to teach. He led volunteer communities that aimed for inclusiveness and viral change. He modeled grit, open-mindedness, and compassion, and I saw in his example that another world was possible, another mode of being. He wrote a fascinating memoir that you should check out, if you like twisty life stories.
John had twin sons, Mike and Brian. I got to meet Mike on Sunday. On Monday he got write access to Wikimedia Labs, Git, and Gerrit. I find this confluence pleasant yet dizzying, like the bushels of jasmine in John's garden. There's so much to be done, and the abundance of my world may yet provide. As John reminded me this weekend, we cannot build the new systems we need; we must cultivate them.
# (3) 17 May 2012, 10:58AM: Mysterious Dependencies:
The more I thought about buying a smartphone the more my sentimental side rose up in protest against buying an Android device. So I got a Nokia N9. I've compared the N900 to the Apple Newton. I don't know yet what I'll compare the N9 to.
Geeky details follow, for use by future searchers who happen upon this entry if they find the same mystery I did:
My N9 came running MeeGo 1.2 (Harmattan), PR 1.2, 30.2012.07-1_PR_005. When I went to manage my applications, I saw that various updates were available. But when I hit Update, I got this warning: "to complete updates, conflicting applications need to be uninstalled". Even when I just tried to update the User Guide to 0.3.5+0m7, I got the message: "Dependency notice: To complete updating User guide, conflicting applications need to be uninstalled".
However, there was no way to actually figure out what the conflicts were. I talked it over in the #n9 channel (thanks, mgedmin). I hadn't yet installed any new apps from the Ovi Store, so it couldn't be that. I tried enabling developer mode so that I could just use apt-get to check the dependencies, but got "Dependencies notice: To complete installation of developer-mode, additional applications need to be downloaded and installed. To complete installation of developer-mode, conflicting applications need to be uninstalled...." so I would have run into the same problem even before being able to use apt-get. So I didn't accept that offer.
So I decided to just inventory my user-visible applications and then check to see whether any of them disappeared after the update. It looks like none of them did. For reference, these are the apps visible on the app screen (NOT in order of how they appear on that screen -- generic stuff first, then branded stuff like Twitter):
- Phone
- Contacts
- Search
- Web
- Messages
- Mail
- Calendar
- Clock
- Camera
- Gallery
- Music
- Videos
- Maps
- Music Store
- Store
- Accounts
- Settings
- Calculator
- Documents
- Feeds
- Notes
- User guide
- Wi-Fi Hotspot
- YouTube
- Skype
- Track & Prot. ("Protect")
- AccuWeather
- Angry Birds
- AP Mobile
- Drive
- Facebook
- Galaxy on Fire 2
- NFS Shift
- Ovi Music
- Real Golf 2011
- Twitter
Sometime soon I'll enable developer mode and see whether the logs tell me what got uninstalled today. Until then, if anyone has insight, please feel free to mention it in the comments.
# (5) 09 May 2012, 09:34AM: Common Sense:
When I was young, my family told me, over and over again, that I had no common sense. It still hurts me to think about this. When I didn't understand how to do something, or why, or I did some household task wrong or whatever, they told me that I didn't have common sense. (I have no memories of the mistakes or of any other correction and help, just the "no common sense" complaint; my memories are as jumbled and incomplete as anyone's.) They never told me how I could learn common sense. It was just this urgently necessary knowledge that everyone else had and I didn't, and it was connected to their belief - which I accepted - that I was inherently unable to get along by myself "in the real world."
In the nineties I saw a PBS series about computing that mentioned Cyc, the effort to just tell a computer all this stuff, and it stuck with me. I sympathized so much with that computer; in retrospect, I think I was envious of it, because someone was systematically trying to give it all the data it would need.
To this day I hate phrasings like "common sense" and "real world," because of their inherent assumptions and implicit exclusions, and I try to be generous with newbies in my communities who don't know our specific practices. See the "no feigning surprise" norm. Today's xkcd approaches it from an unimpeachably quantitative point of view, and I hope that helps prevent some of the qualitative hopelessness and despair I felt. Kids want to learn; don't belittle them for not knowing something already.
# 05 May 2012, 10:25PM: Hiking Lessons Part II: Trekking:
More long walks. A few weeks ago, hiked Sweeney Ridge (south of San Francisco) with my friend Susan McCarthy. Last weekend, circumnavigated Central Park. Today, walked from Astoria to Flushing, took the 7 train to 111th Street, walked the rest of the way back. (Took a break to tour Louis Armstrong's old house on 107th Street.)
- I like hiking and trekking! I like hills better than level ground, semi-tame nature better than streets, and mostly-residential streets better than all-storefront thoroughfares. And hiking with a naturalist like Susan is fantastic; it's like having a curator give you a museum tour.
- Susan brought an extra plastic grocery bag with her just to pick up trash on the trail. Genius!
- I am now the target market for podcasts. Today, richly enjoyed Marc Maron's WTF show for the first time, specifically Mindy Kaling's interview. So interesting to hear her recapitulating Trollope's legitimate anxiety that the diligent don't get as much critical respect as do creators with zero project management skills. Also catching up on This American Life, BBC's The Now Show and news quiz, and You Look Nice Today.
- I got blisters today. I need to figure out how to prevent and treat them. I hope my new hiking shoes are not irreparably at fault, because then I'd have to return them via mail to San Francisco, which blargh.
- Our durable water bottles leak! I think they were both freebies from Foo Camp. I will be acquiring lightweight collapsible ones (sadly lost the one with a built-in carabiner that I got as a random Google gift last year). Or I may take Selena's suggestion and turn into a camel! (Selena, maybe we could hike together at the end of Open Source Bridge weekend?)
- My meh flask, on the other hand, which I received as a gift from AN ACTUAL PERSON and not a corporation, holds up just fine. However it only holds 5 ounces, which doesn't feel like enough water to bring for a multi-hour excursion. I therefore reserve it for sipping whiskey.
- The OSCON freebie backpack is still holding up fine. Kinda wish the outer pockets were deeper & had zippers or other closures, though. Oh well, free.
- I can probably afford to cut down on the food I'm bringing, depending on my environment. I don't need a pound of trail mix AND dried fruit if I'm walking in Queens and I can just get dumplings for lunch.
- I get freaked out when I see a small animal trapped in a plastic bag and struggling to get out. (It was a bird, and it got out on its own, as I was cautiously approaching with a stick to help.) I adore seeing birds living their self-assured lives, preferably further away than arms' length from me. Rodents will freak me out within about 5 feet.
- People in the middle of Queens are more laissez-faire than I'd like about leaving their dogs off-leash.
- There are at least two benches in Central Park whose dedication plaques mention that this is "a bench for a mensch."
# 02 May 2012, 03:39PM: Stand:
I write this while standing up. I'm using a couple of yoga blocks to turn a desk in my living room into a standing desk. In this I'm copying a few folks (including Mel, Rob, Guillaume, Sue, & others). It's pretty great!
I feel more energized. This is partly physical -- the mild exercise of simply supporting my body, plus some pacing and stretching -- and partly psychological. Instead of sitting on a couch or a chair that I associate also with relaxation, I'm telling my body that it's time for work mode. And then, when I take a real break by sitting down with a meal or a book, it feels more refreshing. Overall, my mood is better.
The setup forces me to keep this desk at least somewhat uncluttered, so I'm doing better upkeep towards a pleasant work and living environment. And I find it easier, standing at a desk, to keep a glass of water nearby and sip from it constantly, so my hydration's improved.
I've done this for about 10-15 of my last 40 working days, so it still feels novel. But I think I'll keep it up.
# 27 Apr 2012, 10:29PM: Good Thing:
I find it humorous that it's eight years ago today that Leonard retracted his mockery of Wikipedia.
# 21 Apr 2012, 09:50AM PST: Consequences:
One thing I love about this Breaking Bad fanvid is that the music and certain shot choices make you think about Breaking Bad as a modern-day Western. (The song is "The Ecstasy of Gold/L'Estasi Dell'Oro" by Ennio Morricone (Bandini remix), from the soundtrack "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".)
And Jesse's speech ("I want nothing to do with you!") reminds me of John Rogers on noir (and on Breaking Bad).
# 16 Apr 2012, 09:14PM: Shoptalk:
It is probably only a matter of time before someone makes a "Wikipedia memes" Tumblr -- I've already found a couple posts that we could just repurpose from existing open source communities.
These inside joke sharing mechanisms may saturate the market for my stand-up comedy! Which is fine.
# (2) 12 Apr 2012, 08:48AM: She Was a Buuuuuuuuug Filer, Defect Ticket Yeah:
So this morning I discovered, while chatting with Leonard, that "(Now) I'm a Believer" by the Beatles has the line "Not a trace / Of doubt in my mind," where I had gone three decades thinking it was "Not a trace / I'm out of my mind." My feeble arguments led to:
L: I think you should take this up with the Beatles.
S: I already did! In Beatlezilla. The Beatles' bug tracker.
L: And what did they say?
S: They said, "We love you, yeah yeah yeah, we love you, yeah yeah yeah." But I think that was an autoresponse.
Postscript: Leonard told me he was filing a bug report against this very blog post as "I'm a Believer" is by the Monkees, not the Beatles. Given that I evidently filed my bug with the wrong tracker, Leonard suggests that "We love you, yeah, yeah, yeah" is the Beatles' equivalent of WONTFIX.
(The Monkees use IBM Rational ClearQuest.)
# (1) 09 Apr 2012, 09:08AM: Hiking Lessons:
I didn't grow up hiking, but I enjoy it when I can do it as an adult. Saturday, Leonard and I took the subway to the George Washington Bridge on the west side of Manhattan, walked across it to New Jersey, walked around in the Palisades, eventually found the Visitor Center and its neat Revolutionary War artifacts, and then reversed and went back home. We had a lot of fun! We watched an oriole (we think) for like 10 or 15 minutes, and that was amazing.
Lessons I learned:
- I need hiking shoes that really fit. I got my boots nearly new for $20 at a thrift store just before I went to work on a farm for two weeks in 2007, and it was fine that they're a quarter to a half size too large. I just double-layered thick socks, and I was fine doing ag labor in them. But walking in these shoes for hours produces blisters. So, new shoes time. Five years, twenty dollars -- pretty good value.
- I like doing this! I like walking on a trail in semiwildness, puzzling over a map with my partner, waiting till we get to a big clean rock before eating lunch, seeing pretty flowers.
- I prefer not seeing cars while I hike. (The bit of the path that we hiked was mostly within eyesight distance of the highway.)
- The ultralight backpack OSCON gave its attendees in 2011 is good for something!
- Not only is water heavy, it's heavy enough that water for me for a day might weigh more than everything else I need to carry.
- Tucking my pants into long socks works better than tucking the pants into the shoes.
- The George Washington Bridge is too loud, and the pedestrian/bicycle path is too narrow and busy, for a really pleasant walk. The Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge have better affordances for strolling.
I'm interested in doing similar day hikes, but it's offputting to have to take an hourlong subway ride and then walk for half an hour to get to the trailhead. Friends with cars might make this easier -- or you could recommend quasiwild park areas within 45 minutes of walking and transit from Astoria. I welcome your suggestions!
# (9) 01 Apr 2012, 08:22PM: Request:
Post a clever and funny joke in the comments?
# 27 Mar 2012, 09:30AM: Additional "Constellation Games" Commentary:
Chapter 17: Leonard writing the phrase "flashy desperate jewelry" far predates the day we watched the episode of Breaking Bad where one character accuses another of "obvious desperate breakfasts." Still funny (to me).
By this point in the novel, it's amusing to ask: what scifi film/novel do the major human characters think they're in? Fowler thinks he's in Triple Point. Krakowski thinks he's in like a Crichton or Tom Clancy novel. Ariel is acting like he's in a Neal Stephenson or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy thing. Jenny... Nancy Kress? (Leonard jests, Neon JENNYsis Evangelion.)
# 26 Mar 2012, 05:53PM: Announcements and Reading:
 I'll be keynoting the Open Source Bridge conference this year (late June, Portland, Oregon, USA). It's an honor to be asked to give a keynote address to this exciting and inspiring conference.
"<body> <img> -- the anxiety of learning and how I am beating it" is my newest post at Geek Feminism.
Enjoyed in the last several weeks: Naomi Kritzer's "Scrap Dragon," a short story in the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. "Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas," a short story in Strange Horizons by Alberto Yáñez. "Things Greater than Love" by Kate Bachus, another story in Strange Horizons. Past Lies, a graphic novel by Christina Weir, Christopher Mitten, and Nunzio DeFilippis.
# (2) 21 Mar 2012, 09:23AM: Non-Patent-Encumbered Web Video Dream:
Dreamed last night about a series of web videos created and distributed by an anarchist educational collective, filmed on a set meant to evoke thoughts of Oxford/Cambridge/Hogwarts, and with circus-style feats of strength and skill. And science. I guess it was a cross among Steve Yegge, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Cirque du Soleil, and Khan Academy. Oh and it was partially funded by the People's Republic of China, and I think much of the dialogue was in Chinese dubbed or subtitled into English.
Also dreamed that one of the founders was Zach P., that guy I'd had a crush on in middle school but whom I haven't seen in a decade. We compared notes; he focused on underground work, glad it never hit the authorities' radar. I'm with Wikipedia, and say "outreach" a lot, and our free licensing positively invites commercial reuse. Zach was an old punk now, hair highlighted in green and orange but faded wrinkled black shirt mirroring the faded wrinkles on his face. "Women leave me," he confessed. A Dutch couple walked by. "I give all my time to the school." I felt bad for him. Also at this point I remember a sense of grand ecstatic revelation that this is an allegory for the browser wars but upon awakening I don't think that makes sense.
# (4) 18 Mar 2012, 01:29PM: Patdown:
When I leave my flat, I usually check to ensure I have my phone, wallet, and keys. They each have a specific spot in my pockets so I can feel the pockets to make sure they're there. I often say "keyswalletphone" or "phonewalletkeys" under my breath as I check. Do you have a ritual chant like that? Does the ordering make a pleasing rhythm?
# 18 Mar 2012, 11:21AM: Rosie the Riveter in Space!:
NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, Expedition 20 flight engineer, works with the Combustion Integrated Rack (CIR) in the Destiny laboratory of the International Space Station.
Constellation Games, Leonard's research into spaceflight, and Wikimedia Commons have caused me to see a lot more photos per week of astronauts than I otherwise would. I don't mind.
# 15 Mar 2012, 02:40PM: Everybody Loves Raiment:
As a certain variety of corporate-office woman knows, it's great to have a variety of black trousers. (Or, as time goes by and one does not replace them when they fade, a variety of fairly-dark-gray trousers.) Non-denim black slacks go with a lot of tops, look professional, have pockets, hide stains, and so on.
Today I ran into a wrinkle (ha!): I pulled a pair of black drawstring sweatpants out of the bureau. They looked kind of familiar but I do not remember acquiring them. They fit, so they're probably mine. Did you give me a pair of black drawstring sweatpants, sister N.? This seems like the kind of nice thing you would do and have done -- you know, like how you gave me the black hoodie that (until Wikimedia gave me a Wikipedia-branded hoodie) was the only hooded sweatshirt I owned.
I decided to wear the sweatpants. Leonard and I sang the traditional putting-on-black-pants song, a filk of Soundgarden's "Fell on Black Days":
Put onnnn ... black paaaaants....
Put onnnnnnnnn .... blackpantssssss....
How could I know! That these would be my paaaaaants....
How could I know! That I would wear these .... paaaaaants
Leonard also can't remember getting the jeans he's wearing now. "Their origin is shrouded in mystery," he informed me.
S: And where did you get that shroud?
L: Turin.
S: Did you get it from Kenneth Turan?
L: He gave it four stars.
(Rejected titles: "Garb Gab," "Slack," "The Wrong Trousers.")
# (1) 13 Mar 2012, 05:04PM: Shondes Music Video ("Give Me What You've Got"):
I'm in the end of this music video for "Give Me What You've Got" by The Shondes. It features my pal Fureigh, whom I think of primarily as a Drupal developer but who also rocks out more viscerally with, you know, actual rock 'n' roll. Enjoy the catchy song!
# 12 Feb 2012, 07:51PM: What Does A Volunteer Development Coordinator Do?:
A giant wall of text follows, giving a snapshot of work I do. I nurture the software community that supports the Wikimedia movement. So here's a big swath of stuff I did between February 1st and today.
Wrote and posted a blog entry about the San Francisco hackathon. Still need to do more followup with participants.
Handed over the MediaWiki 1.19 deployment communications plan to Guillaume Paumier, WMF Technical Communications Manager. He blogged a summary of the deployment and of our efforts and that's just the tip of the iceberg; he also set up a global message delivery and improved the CentralNotice maintenance message and did even more to make sure that we thoroughly communicate about the upcoming deployment to all the Wikimedia communities. I also shared information with various folks regarding testing of site-specific gadgets on 1.19.
I sent at least 285 work-related emails. That's 41 per workday but I definitely sent some work-related email on weekends.
Some patch queue work, responding to contributors and getting experienced developers to review the patches. I'm just trying to keep our queue from growing while code reviewers are mostly focused on getting MediaWiki 1.19 reviewed, polished, and deployed. But I do want to take care of all parts of the volunteer pipeline -- initial outreach and recruiting, training, code improvement, commit access, continued interest and participation, and debriefing when they leave -- so the patch review queue is a continuing worry.
Some work preparing for the Pune hackathon and for GLAMCamp DC, neither of which I am attending. I wrote or edited some tutorials and made a tutorial category which pleases me. We have more good material for workshops and stuff now, yay! And I helped the GLAMCamp people a bit in talking through what technical goals they wanted to achieve during the weekend.
Got dates from Wikimedia Germany for the Berlin hackathon, 1-3 June, and started trumpeting it. Also worked on planning for it and did outreach. For example, I reached out to about 13 chapters that are pursuing or interested in some kind of technology work like, say, funding or working on the offline Wikipedia reader (Wikimedia Switzerland), or usability and accessibility for Wikisource (Wikimedia Italy), or the Toolserver, a shared hosting service for tools and stuff that hackers use to improve or make use of the Wikimedia sites (for example, Wikimedia Germany & Wikimedia Hungary). We hope they can convene, share insights and collaborate at the WMDE hackfest.
Told at least 30 contributors to apply for Wikimania scholarships because the deadline is 16 February.
Talked to some Wikimedia India folks about planning technical events, and contributed to a page of resources for upcoming events.
Worked on some event planning & decisions for a potential event.
Passed the word to some friends, acquaintances, and email lists about some job openings at the Foundation.
Google Summer of Code has been announced, and I am managing MediaWiki's participation. I have started -- flyers, emails, recruiting potential students, improving the wiki page, asking experts whether they might mentor, and so on. I'm trying to start a thing where every major women's college in North America gets a GSoC presentation by March 15th, to improve the number of GSoC applications that come from women; let's see how that goes. MediaWiki still needs to apply to participate as a mentoring organization and acceptances only go out after that, but I'm comfortable spending time preparing anyway. And the women's college outreach will lead to an increase in the number of applications for all the participating open source projects, instead of just aiming a firehose at MediaWiki; that's fine. Like Tim O'Reilly says, aim to create more value than you capture.
Related to that -- I set up a talk for one of our engineers to give at Mills, a women's college that has an interesting interdisciplinary computer science program (both grad and undergrad, the grad program being mixed-sex) and I think it may end up being a really amazing talk. Ian Baker is going to talk about how CS helps us work in Wikimedia engineering, how we collaborate with the community during the design, development, and testing phases, and what skills and experiences come in handy in his job. I'll publicize more once there's an official webpage to point to.
Had a videoconference with a developer and my boss about our conversion to Git. I prepped for it by collecting some questions and getting preliminary answers, and then after the call we ended up with all this raw material and I sent a fairly long summary to the developers' mailing list. There's a lot left to do, and the team needs to work on some open issues, but we have a lot more detail on those TODOs now, so that's good.
Saw a nice email from Erik Möller publicizing the San Francisco hackathon videos and tutorials/documentation, yay!
Talked with a few people about submitting talks to upcoming conferences. I ought to write some preliminary Grace Hopper, Open Source Bridge, and Wikimania proposals this week.
Various volunteer encouragement stuff (pointing to resources, helping with installation or development problems, troubleshooting, teaching, putting confused people in touch with relevant experts, etc.), especially talking in IRC to eager students who want to do GSoC. Many of them are from India. I wonder how many of them see my name and think I'm in India too.
Commit access queue as usual.
Saw privacy policy stuff mentioned on an agenda for an IRC meeting on the 18th, so I talked to a WMF lawyer a little bit about privacy policy stuff for our new Labs infrastructure. We set up a meeting for this week to iron stuff out.
Helped with the monthly report. I have a colleague who wants to learn more about All This Engineering Stuff, so every month we have a call where I explain and teach the context of the report, and for this month's call I suggested we add another colleague who also wants to learn how the tech side works. Who knows, maybe this will turn into a tradition!
Followed up on the GSoC 2011 students who never quite got their projects set up and deployed on Wikimedia servers, and looks like two of them have some time and want to finish it now, yay! Updated the Past Projects page.
Checked in on the UCOSP students who are working on a mobile app for Wiktionary and told them about Wikimania, new mobile research, etc. Also got some feedback from their mentor, Amgine, on how they're doing.
Started an onwiki thread to discuss the MobileFrontend rewrite question(s).
Talked to Oren Bochman, the volunteer who's working on our Lucene search stuff, and followed up on a bunch of his questions/interests.
Ran & attended meetings.
Suggested to the new Wikimedia Kenya chapter that maybe we could collaborate, since they're interested in helping schools get Wikipedia access via offline reading.
Looked into the code review situation by getting a list of committers with their associated numbers of commits, reviews, and statuschanges. It's just a first pass, but it's a start for discovering who's been committing way more than they review, so we can start efforts to mentor them into more code reviewing confidence. I also saw who's been reviewing way more than they commit, and saw a name I wasn't familiar with -- looks like I've now successfully recruited him to come to the Berlin hackathon. :-)
Put two groups of people in touch with each other: did a group-intro mail to people at various institutions working on Wikimedia accessibility, and another to people who want to work on a redesign of mediawiki.org's front page.
And there was other miscellaneous stuff, but this is already sooooo TL;DR (too long; didn't read). (Which is funny because that's the name of my team.) Monday awaits!
# (1) 05 Feb 2012, 09:30AM: Yet Another List:
This weekend I have gotten to spend some lovely lengthy quality times with my pals Camille and Julia and Nick, and met Nick's friend Jana. Yay! We talked about the standard things: work, relationships, books, Battlestar Galactica, software development, art, volunteering, activism, &c.
In between, I caught up a bit on comic books. I went to Midtown Comics, my usual haunt, and got the most recent trades of DMZ and The Unwritten. The staff weren't that helpful in my explorations, though -- for example, when I asked about what Alison Bechdel's been up to, I got basically a shrug.
The next day, I visited Forbidden Planet south of Union Square, and the staff seemed far more helpful and sympathetic. When I got up the nerve to ask, "What comics have people who look like me?" they were actually interested in figuring it out and loading up my arms. "OMG you haven't read Love And Rockets?!"
(Doesn't it suck that so much of the Virgin India line is just crap?)
So, since it's on my mind, some comics that feature women of color as interesting characters:
- Amar Chitra Katha series -- the comics I grew up with, telling Indian history, myths, legends, and fables. Draupadi! Savitri! Parvati! Sati! And so on.
- Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. I read the whole thing, I loved it, it's what got me back into comics a decade ago. Most of the characters are women, and I'm thinking especially of 355 (African-American), Dr. Mann (American of Chinese and Japanese ancestry), and You (Japanese).
- DMZ by Brian Wood, which I read avidly. Volunteer medic Zee Hernandez isn't the main character but she's in there and important.
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, her autobiography about a childhood in Iran. A modern classic, and can you believe I'm only reading this now?
- Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers. Ditto. (I'm a Philistine!)
- Aya series by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, about a family in the Ivory Coast. I haven't read it yet but it's come recommended.
- Lots of stuff by Lynda Barry. I like her stories (but find her art style a little overwhelming).
- Patrick Farley's The Spiders stars the African-American soldier Lt. Celicia Miller, and The Jain's Death is about Anuradha, a South Asian woman.
- I hear very good things about Carla Speed McNeil's Finder but haven't started it yet.
I don't much care about superhero comics so I'm leaving out Storm from X-Men, etc. Should I read Frank Miller's Martha Washington stuff? I should also sweep through my household's shelves, especially our three binders of indie stuff we've bought at MoCCA, to find more recommendation-worthy books and one-offs, especially by women and people of color.
(Random shout-out: Mel Chua's engineering education comics "What is Engineering?" and "What is Education?")
Crossposted to geekfeminism.org.
# 18 Jan 2012, 04:14PM: Ducts:
I've had two astonishing experiences in the last few days.
The first was watching the film Brazil for the first time. If I had watched that at 16 it would have changed the course of my life.
 The second is still ongoing. I am at Wikimedia Foundation headquarters today, and I was here when the word came back that the community had decided to globally black out English Wikipedia in protest of SOPA and PIPA, and I was here when we flipped the switch to do that and some music player started blasting "We're Not Gonna Take It."
This morning a stranger thanked me for working at the Foundation, as though thanking a soldier for her service in a war.
In Brazil we see everywhere ubiquitous ducts, maintained badly -- sometimes sabotaged -- by Central Services, as heroic volunteers make up the difference by secretly installing workarounds. I write this at my temporary desk, seeing the exposed HVAC ductwork on the third floor of a nondescript San Francisco office building. The more vital duct is the Ethernet cord connecting me to the Internet, to that communally maintained "series of tubes" that gives me work, community, free speech, and the collective wisdom of civilization.
Right now someone needs to save our ducts from sabotage, and the volunteers of the Wikimedia community have courageously decided to sacrifice a day of Wikipedia in the hopes of decisively ending a great threat. We Foundation workers have the privilege of helping.
I oppose SOPA and PIPA. Will you join me?
# 14 Jan 2012, 11:48AM: Five Things Make A Post:
In February and March, I will probably want to go to a lot of the Museum of the Moving Image's Muppet-related screenings, in case that piques your interest.
You can tell Leonard rewrote the introduction to MediaWiki's web service API because it now includes "Let's pick that URL apart to show how it works."
Words I used yesterday that I intend to use more often: "blunderbuss," "sarcophagus".
Why in the world is my Congressional representative, Carolyn Maloney, cosponsoring a bill to reduce public access to publicly funded science? I'm pretty angry and will be following up on this with her.
Because I saw David Costabile (Gale Boetticher) on the train this week, and because I think it's pretty, a montage of the scenes in Breaking Bad shot from an object's point of view (shovel, floor, Roomba, dryer...).
# 07 Jan 2012, 02:30PM: Lit On My Mind:
 Light fun: Charitable Getting by Sam Starbuck, free to download. It's a dramedy about the employees of a nonprofit and "a secretive blogger who might be one of his staff, a journalist determined to uncover who it is, and a client who not only doesn't want to pay their fee, but wants to sue [the firm] for telling the truth." I laughed out loud and was satisfyingly right in predicting the identity of the secret blogger.
More light fun: fanfic from the Yuletide challenge, 2011. A few of my favorite stories cover Casino Royale and Billy Elliot. Also check out Star Trek: Deep Space Nine heartwarmers "The Life That Is Waiting" and "In the Files".
I don't write fiction, but it's fun to read writing advice from authors because sometimes you get funny anecdotes. This is basically why I read Stephen King's On Writing memoir, and why I've been splashing through Jane Espenson's blog archives. At the Emmys:
...even the very end of the night was fun because there was this crush of people all waiting for their hired limos to come pick them up and everyone was in the same situation even though they might be, say, Vanessa Williams. Bizarrely egalitarian, the limo-waiting process.
(Jane Espenson majored in computer science at UC Berkeley, so I should add her to my list.)
For the same reason, I'm reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, whom I used to read in Salon. Restful & inspirational without being glurgy. (Example piece on her eating disorder.)
Book recommendation blast from the past: Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives by Dr. Anna Fels. Slate review, Broad Universe review. Fels points out that the childhood or adolescent desire for fame is often a precursor to a more nuanced ambition, combining the urge to master some domain or skill with the desire for the recognition of one's peers or community. She also notes that women, especially, feel the need to hide that wish for fame instead of developing it into a healthy passion to guide our careers. This book blew my mind in the best way when I read it a few years ago, and massively helped me guide my career development. It now informs my emphasis on explicit encouragement and mentorship of new MediaWiki volunteers.
|
