Tablesaw!

I found the mobile-friendly new-entry page again. I didn't think this would be possible without it.

One grandparent-in-law is in town, with the other arriving tomorrow, so we should be getting visitors.

The last two weeks, Psyche and I visited the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood to take part in their Nitrate Festival. The Egyptian is one of very few theaters that is allowed to project nitrate prints, and they haven't done so for a few years because they were closed for renovations before and after the pandemic. We saw two Hitchcock films, Rebecca and SpellboundRebecca, an archivist from the George Eastman Museum talked about nitrate prints. There were some things I already knew. I learned how vivid the images can be when I saw Casablanca, and I learned how the silver emulsion can catch the light when I saw Laura. The archivist stressed how because nitrate prints are generally stronger, the images on the print are usually closer to the negative retaining subtler "colors," while later printings start to develop higher and higher contrast. This was incredibly apparent when watching Rebecca on what was one of the first printings of the film, previous in the private collection of producer David O. Selznic. It was unbelievable how good it looked for preserved (not restored) film that was about 80 years old.

Spellbound wasn't as impressive, either in the print or the content, but the Dali sequences looked really good, as did Gregory Peck. I try to get the preview screen whenever I see something at the American Cinematheque, but I missed the one for Rebecca. Here's the screen for Spellbound.



(I needed to post an image hosted on DW in preparation of talking about it with dedalus_1947 before seeing Dune: Part Two at the Chinese Theater.)

I'm not even done with this article and I already want to blog about it. Well, mostly I just want to blog. Well, mostly I want to put something on my DW. (And a little bit I want to play Spelunky.)

I've been thinking about blogging vs. Twitter for a little bit. I've been aware that there are lots of aspects of Twitter that make me quieter on it. Obviously, there's the length restrictions, which I react to pretty strongly. I find it hard to make statements that comprise more than one tweet. But there's also the speed of tweet/retweet/response (Tumblr has a similar cycle), which I just have a hard time keeping up with. But there's an also an issue of time and speed. I also know that it will add to my blog's accruing history (which I see is going to become important in the part of the article I am still getting to).

As I said, I'm still working my way through Vance's article, but the portion about form and content as regards Twitter polarized me on that matter, highlighting the exploitative structure of its form. One of those things is the way that Twitter is obsessively focused on the "now".

Consider all the reasons why our intrepid capitalists of yesteryear replaced the (almost) timeless Holy Bible with a newspaper whose time is always the present; consider the political redefinition of 'content' to mean consumable rather than everlasting. A Tweet™ spends no more than a day or two in public view before vanishing into a database somewhere. Once our Tweet™ has been consumed and forgotten we make another and another, never Tweeting™ the same thing twice without dedicating 5 characters to an apologetic "ICYMI" (in case you missed it). The 'form' of Twitter, like that of the newspaper, demands a constant stream of new things to bury all the old ones.

On Twitter (and Tumblr), I do feel that pressure of having to put forward quantity a quantity of "content" that's more than I can really sustain in order to have a "presence." And as a result, existing on those sites makes me feel like a ghost, passive. Writing on a blog—my blog—give me a sense of place, and also lets me slow things down to my own speed.

There's also the fact that Dreamwidth remains a noncommercial open-source system, which I can depend on to stay relatively true to its mission statement (though there are, of course, ways that the structure still affects how I write). It just feels like a more comfortable place to be right now, even if I don't think anybody's going to be around to read it. (He says, knowing that once he posts this, links to it will be posted on Twitter, Tumblr, Livejournal, etc.)

So this week didn't work out so well.

After an initial flurry of activity filing for unemployment insurance and sending a few e-mails to staffing agencies, I fell into a funk of avoidance, leading to a mini freak out on Thursday. I talked with friends and family who reminded me that it's ok to be freaked out about being unemployed for the first time in over a decade, and that a few days of not doing anything productive is fine.

I'm going to try to set myself onto a daily working schedule come Monday. While it's nice to sleep in until 11 or noon, I'm not actually productive when I stay up late. Once it nears sunset, I start feeling like my work day is over, and I stop doing other things. I think that forcing myself to at least be awake by nine every morning will add a few hours to my "working" day, at the very least. More measures will probably be forthcoming.

I did manage to do a lot of nonproductive things, though. I entered a local crossword puzzle tournament and participated in a sudoku contest at Logic Masters India. boardgaming night (played Roll Through the Ages), role-playing-game night (beta-testing a game by Josh Robern), a party to read and mock Fifty Shades of Grey as a group, and an NPL party. And in addition to that, I saw a bunch of friends at different times. I joined the site Quora despite its "real names" policy, by hacking together a form of pseudonymity out of its nascent system. And I sauteed chicked without freaking out.

Starting Monday, I'm going to add DW to my list of daily things to do. For reals.

LiveJournal's having site problems, which means it's time to announce Dreamwidth invitation codes:

HKV4Y367RZ52DAAAD4F8
YKS5M6SGFB3B3AAAAK5R
ZABK8NX3PEZJEAAAAK5T

Invite codes can always be found and requested at dw_codesharing
Also, zvi has almost a hundred on one page.

Post if you take one, so that we don't get signals crossed.

The links keep on coming. For those confused by my recent failk, here's an executive survey of "PervySurveyFail" (so dubbed by someone ithiliana can't remember).

Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam have landed a lucrative book contract (publishing grapevine says US$250,000); as part of that project, they designed a survey to find out more about slash and fandom. The survey, their handling of it, their interaction with fans and critics has been both stupid and offensive in multiple ways.

There are, essentially, two lines of outrage in this whole thing. There's the political outrage at the horribly sexist, heteronormative, transphobic attitudes of Ogas and Gaddam in their survey and their interactions. And there's the outrage about the horribly bad science—the lack of clear methodology, patently biased questions, an ignorance of previous research in the area, etc.

The political outrage has played out in form much like other BlankFails. Which is not to say, again, that it is unimportant or uninteresting. rm has pointed out some very good threads about the harmful assumptions Ogas and Gaddam have been making about transsexuals and people who otherwise fall outside of the male/female sex/gender binary. Earlier today, Ogas and Gaddam (apparently in response to objections to their construction of "transsexual" in their work and the use of the word "tranny" in discussions) "corrected" their FAQ to replace "transsexual" with "shemale."

As rm said, "You have not yet begun to see wrath, although the cat macros are now out to play." And in apparent response to the escalation of failout, Ogas has now locked all of the posts that were originally intended for feedback and discussion of the project (thus rendering over a thousand comments invisible).

But because of the ostensibly scientific and academic roots of the survey and the project, many fans who are also academics soon began taking issue with the incredibly shoddy "research" being conducted. Objections were raised that there was no control preventing minors from participating, there did not seem to be adequate safeguards protecting respondents, that questions were being changed while the survey was still continuing. (Sadly, most of these discussions that I know about them are currently unavailable, because they were made in Ogas's journal.)

Eventually, the Institutional Review Board of Boston University was reached. (Ogas identified himself as "a cognitive neuroscientist at Boston University" in his initial approach to eruthros.) The IRB is responsible for maintaining ethical standards when researching human subjects (including when that research involves social, not medical, science). In the words of deadlychameleon, they responded that Ogas "is no longer in any way affiliated with Boston University, except as a recent graduate. They have asked him to stop using his official Boston University email address in connection with this project, or his website. He is officially on his own, and this project is NOT IRB APPROVED."

Deadly Chameleon continues:

The problem with this is threefold:

1. The researcher has no expertise in the area he is researching, nor has he recruited anyone to give him guidance.

2. The researcher has substantial profit motivation to produce work in this area (book contract with Penguin) which may lead to unethical conduct/a tendency to misrepresent his results.

3. The research is in no way overseen by any external body which can examine it for potential unethical conduct.

In addition to all of these, the researchers have now alienated their participant population, who are now very likely to become unreliable participants.

This explains much. Many people, myself included, wondered how two scientists or academics could behave so unprofessionally. Our error was in assuming that "scientist" or "academic" was their actual profession. It is clear that they are not. But if their profession is "hucksters peddling junk science for profit," it really would be unprofessional of them not to act the way they have.

Finally, this has been a surprisingly creative -fail. In addition to my own offering, there have been macros, parody surveys, Ogi Ogas/Sai Gaddam slash fic.

Other key posts:

• "please don't take the fanfiction survey," eruthros. This is the post that brought the issue to most people's attention.
• "don't take the fanfiction survey," thingswithwings. Shorter Ogas (sadly the links do not currently lead to actual discussion).
• "Ten Steps to a Perfect Fanstorm," Hoyden about Town. An early summary of the Fail, and one of the first mentions outside of LJ/DW.
• Screencaps of ogi_ogas. This includes some screenshots of the threads on individual questions of the original survey. The original posts on Ogas's journal received over a thousand comments before he locked down the entries, removing the criticism from public discourse.
• "Wearing the Juice: A Case Study in Research Implosion," N Pepperell. Asks whether Ogas and Gaddam are simply too incompetent to realize how badly they're doing.
• "Why Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam Are Phrenologists," neededalj. Examining the fine line between good and bad science in the field of neuroscience, and how Ogas and Gaddam are far, far away from the line where you can even see the line between good and bad science.
• "Fandom to researchers: We are not your lab rats," FeministSF, The Blog. Summarizes Ogas and Gaddam's interactions with fan academics in the month before the survey was posted.

If you have several cross-posted journals on your friends list, you should expect to see this happening a bit. Dreamwidth has added the ability to see how many comments are on a crossposted entry. So I'm testing to make sure that works here.

If it doesn't work the first time, I may post and repost for a little while until I like it.

Update: I think I've got it. Fun fact—updating the entry seems to also update the footer.

Dreamwidth got a big update last night, with new styles (I may pick a new one), updated importer (it won't duplicate entries that you crossposted anymore), and e-mailed comments threading correctly in Gmail.

Coming down the pipeline are an expansion of the current search abilities

In particular, we've made it so that when you create a content filter and add someone to it, you can now set options on which content, exactly, you want to see. For example, with the new system, you can do the following:

• Create a filter, name it 'Tech Stuff'
• Show posts by mark with ANY OF the tags: perl, code, computers, tech
• Show posts in dw_dev posted by a community maintainer
• Show posts in dw_biz
• Show posts in randomstuff with Safe For Work content

After some delay, I bought a one-year Dreamwidth account. I've lost track of what that gets me, other than more icons, so I guess I'd better go looking for more icons.

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Adam Cadre has a very good analysis of Election:

But what's interesting is that Tracy spends the whole movie seething that she isn't appreciated by others for the hard work that she performs on her own behalf. And that, I think, is a pretty astute observation about American culture. People are very reluctant to let go of ideologies that make them feel good about themselves. Given the choice between psychic rewards and material rewards, they will choose the latter... and then whine because they want both.

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Chimatli at the LA Eastside blog rebukes the New York Times for discovering "a new culture district in Los Angeles" in Highland Park.

Here’s the thing, no matter how much they may try to re-write our history and impose ideas of culture on us, Highland Park is not Silver Lake. It’s an old neighborhood of Chicanos, immigrants and working-class White folks that have some of the fiercest neighborhood pride in the Los Angeles area. This area is deep with tradition, culture and dynamic energy.

(Discoverability? Didn't I . . . I'd better pull those notes out before they rot.)

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It was ojouchan's birthday this weekend, so we did a bunch of things. We went to see Harry Potter, we went to see Tori Amos at the Greek Theatre, we ate at the pop-up restaurant Ludo Bites, and we sang along to an apparently rare public screening of "Once More, With Feeling." That was actually quite a lot of things done, and all of them excellent.

It's Open Beta, and every full Dreamwidth account received a bunch of invite codes. I already sent mine out to the people who asked a few weeks ago, but if any of those bounce back or if we get a new batch, I'll set up a new list.
The plan was to offer invitations to everyone with e-mail–verified Open IDs, but I think that got screwed up due to massive scrambling to fix the Paypal stuff. (ETA2: piranha, has the details on Open ID invites.) In the meantime, I think dw_codesharing is going to get started soon.

The promotion hasn't kicked into the paycheck yet, so I haven't purchased a paid account just yet. I knew this was going to happen, so I gamed the inactive icons system a bit to get the ones I wanted. In the process, I reported some glitchy behavior and explained what I did. I realize this information would have been more helpful to most of you a few days ago, but that's the way it goes.

I am looking forward to buying a paid account later this month. Ever since ktempest posted asking about comment avatars featuring characters of color from genre media, I've wanted an icon of Gaff. I can't decide whether it should say "Azonnal kövessen engem bitte" or "Then again, who does?" With 61 slots to fill, I guess I could do both.

And once again, my DW circle is in badly organized flux, so don't feel slighted or confused if I don't subscribe/grant access to your new account. There's no method to the madness. Yet.