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I'm pretty sure it was someone here who once mentioned the adage/law/maxim I'm trying to find. It was kind of a corollary to Hanlon's law ("never ascribe to malice what can be explained adequately by stupidity") -- it was along the lines of "before you decide to be offended, give someone the benefit of the doubt". I keep thinking cooperative principle, but that's Grice, and his maxims put the burden on the speaker (to be succinct, to be clear, to be coherent) and less on the listener.

Anyone have any ideas? Does this ring a bell for anyone?

For some inexplicable reason (it's either the hair, or helping Zania with her female-Loki helmet for ComicCon, or Idris Elba, or let's be shallow & say it's the hair), I'm feeling curious about the Thor movies. Except doesn't he show up in like several other movies, too? If I just wanted to watch two or three without requiring too many braincells (of minimal level, true, since we are talking comic book origins here, but still), where should I start?

Hell, for that matter, I wonder if/how I do Netflix on my computer. Not having a TV nor cable and being too lazy to bother figuring out where I could rent a hardcopy, and just not up to the torrenting risks on a Sunday afternoon.

Went to see Pacific Rim (ohmygodholyfuckthatwasawesome). Had been letting lots of it stew and leaving the intelligent conversation to so many better commentaries across the web. Then

margrave had some stuff to say about it. What tweaked me into posting was specifically this part:

It was why I loved Transformers; it was part of my childhood, and seeing Optimus Prime in an live action film was amazing. But it still didn't hit the spot because there was NO human pilot. It also lacked the parent-and-child theme that almost every giant robot series had. The need to do better, to be different or the same as their parent, to live up to, or to surpass their legacy, and just, it was such a Western film.

My take:

Bay's Transformers was a love letter... if the person writing had only ever read Letters to Hustler. That kind of ~~lust~~ love letter, complete with "it was SO BIG" and random exclamations of ridiculously physically-impossible feats concerning ridiculously numbers of orgasms. And big boobs.

Del Toro's Pacific Rim is a true love letter, paying homage to what's good and casting a forgiving eye on what's bad, and taking all the everyday things (like cliches) and seeing them as something to celebrate.

For me, though, being in tech and having to deal with the constant sense that if I want half the chance of the guys around me that I have to work twice as hard and prove myself three times more often, I think the point where I felt most despondent (in a "yeah, so not surprised") sense was when Raleigh asked Mako about the simulations and she admitted she'd gotten 51... out of 51. And yet not a pilot! Up to that point there had been only hints about the father/daughter relationship (and throwaway lines about how she'd re-engineered the Gipsy Danger and we'll ignore the quiet racism in that name), and I was all, well of course she's proven herself three times over and still gets no credit or chances. Then things move to the sparring scene and she proceeds to kick Raleigh's ass (without stripping down or getting her clothes ripped, no less) -- and I was totally expecting a sudden jump to the left, where she's the cocky rookie and Raleigh would be all like, no way are you sticking me with a rookie and somehow the story is about him learning to give her a chance and how he grows by leading blah blah blah.

But when they finish and she's won, there's not even a single instant of him being upset at being beaten. Instead he looks thrilled, so when he said (really loudly, too), this is my co-pilot. I was all like FUCK YEAH RECOGNIZE. There was no conflict apparent on his part, no worries about being shown up, but there also wasn't any machismo (the flip side of 'no worries' when Average White Guy Hero isn't intimidated because hey, he's the guy, he's naturally the best and doesn't have to prove himself the way everyone else does). It came across as pure and simple respect for Mako, and nothing to do with being a girl (or not being a girl) or being sexualized or not. She's his match and then some, and he doesn't require any intense soul-searching to want to be partnered with her, nor any agony on his part about not being the best himself. She is, and after that he doesn't waver from wanting to partner with her. Which makes sense -- if you know you're outgunned, why waste time with egos, you want the best chances to survive -- but that kind of common sense rarely enters the Hollywood equation. This time it did.

It was just icing on the cake to see that reaction to someone who is NOT the usual Average White Guy counterpart, the pinup big-boobed blonde leggy supermodel -- but a WoC who's petite, intelligent, a little introverted, self-aware, and ambitious. Let's be honest, the few women who ever get recognition (outside of the extreme outliers like Ripley) are inevitably ones who fit into the slender-and-leggy-and-white mold. Usually with long hair, at that.

( Paragraph o' mild euphemistic spoilers behind the cut. )

Now if only Del Toro had made the two scientists women, the movie would pass the Bechdel and be truly flawless. I'd be sending the man a love letter myself if he'd made one of them of color while he was at it. In my head, the german scientist is actually an Indian woman educated in Berlin and the american scientist is a short round black woman from Chicago. But if we get a sequel, maybe then he'd get to push things a bit farther, because from what I've seen of him in the past, he's not ignorant of women on-screen (as if Mako doesn't prove that ten times over). He just needs to add more women, and if there's any director who might (and do it well), it might be Del Toro.

( ETA more thoughts. )

Also, in the Japanese theatrical dub, the woman voicing Mako Mori is not the actress, Rinko Kikuchi, although she is native Japanese and an experienced seiyuu -- idk, maybe work schedules played a role in her availability? Anyway, the seiyuu selected is, drumroll, Megumi Hayashibara -- who also voiced Rei, from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

It's like the recipient of the love letter just wrote back and said, the feeling is mutual.

In what appears to be another case of unplanned synchronicity: much like

starlady, I also had dental surgery last week, also spent the past few days happy on vicodin, and also downloaded something for pleasant watching while mindless on the aforementioned vicodin. Except in my case, it was Fuurin Kazan, and... uh.

Alright, so I like Uchino Masaaki enough to watch despite his sometimes overacting (I adored him as Ryoma in Jin), but at least he can act. Compared to Ichikawa Kamejiro (who plays Takeda Shingen), who sometimes seems to think that "dramatic acting" really means "dramatically widening and narrowing your eyes" sometimes punctuated with "dramatically raising and lowering your eyebrows in unison". A truly dramatic scene was ruined with Kamejiro raising and lowering his brows about six times in rapid succession. All I could do was burst out laughing. It was not the vicodin's fault, trust me on this one.

But then we get to Uesegi Kenshin, played by Gackt. Yes, that Gackt. Except apparently he was under the impression that he was playing the lead role in Tale of Genji, because he's dressed about a hundred years out of date (read: like a court noble, not some local daimyo). As if the ultra-old-fashioned dress and loose, barely-tied hair weren't enough, the first few scenes his makeup was so dark around the eyes and so pale everywhere else that in comparison to his generals -- who all look like tanned men who, y'know, actually go outside and do general things -- Gackt looked more like a corpse. Not even a warmed-over one. More like 'dead for several days'.

Between the out-of-date clothes, hair, and the ultra-pale complexion, it's just icing on the cake that Gackt holds his mouth and enunciates in such a way that I keep expecting to see fangs. (Or maybe he's just talking about mouth prosthesis, I'm not sure.) Holy crap, Kenshin wasn't a woman, he was actually a vampire.

This realization is reducing all of Uesegi Kenshin's scenes to total camp, except for the fact that none of the other characters seem to be aware of the wierdness.* Only me, the viewer. Just call me Van Helsing of Taiga.

*truth is, this just makes it more painful to watch, as though the rest of the actors were forcing themselves to pretend like Gackt's total wrong-for-Kenshin treatment is perfectly fine. I mean, I thought Hiroshi Abe was miscast as Kenshin, but clearly I had no idea of the heights of miscasting that could be achieved.

So there's been another round of women-in-speculative-fic, and plenty of really good commentary. Highlights (if you missed them) include Fox Meadows' Realism & Outliers, which followed up on her masterpiece PSA: Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical, Tansy Rayner Roberts' Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy. Let’s Unpack That. and Kameron Hurley's 'We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle and Slaves' Narrative and its especially awesome cannibalistic llamas analogy. [ETA: I thought someone did a roundup, but I can't find a link. If I do, I'll add.]

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that someone would have to come along behind them and do the apologia, internalized misogyny reply. This time it was provided by Felicity Savage's Girl, You’re In the Army Now, which incidentally is also listed as Amazing Stories' 3rd most popular post in the past week. I would hope this is because there's a lot of people like me, who read it mostly to point and laugh, but my cynicism tells me otherwise.

I'm going to skip Savage's little apologia dance-moves. They're the same as what you'd find men writing, so nothing new here. What makes me roll my eyes the hardest are thoughtful observations like this: "It’s hard to imagine how any significant number of women could be spared from these vital tasks [of domestic duties like child-bearing/rearing], except for ideological reasons in a society that is violently breaking itself to remake itself, such as Maoist China (pre-industrial in the remoter regions then)."

Maybe war is different in Savage's reality. Anywhere else I can think of, war by definition is a break-or-be-broken situation. Revolution -- from Japan to Russia to France to the United States -- is just a domestic/internal version of the same. Ideology is a luxury; for those at the front lines, ideology takes a back seat to survival. The next generation is important, of course, but pretty much pointless if the current generation's about to get broken beyond repair.

( A little more from Savage, and then onto Wrexler and the G's rehashed women-as-fighters arguments, and how you can get a totally useless answer by asking a totally wrong question. )

rushthatspeaks did a review of The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects by Renée L. Bergland. I am so getting a copy of this, but in the meantime, if you have any interest in pop culture, ghosts, cross-culture ghosts, American History vs Indigenous peoples, and so on (and I daresay the metaphor could easily be extended to the centuries of being haunted by our past as a slave-owning country, as well), at the very least, read the review.

From the Amazon description:

Although spectral Indians appear with startling frequency in US literary works, until now the implications of describing them as ghosts have not been thoroughly investigated. In the first years of nationhood, Philip Freneau and Sarah Wentworth Morton peopled their works with Indian phantoms, as did Charles Brocken Brown, Washington Irving, Samuel Woodworth, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others who followed. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Native American ghosts figured prominently in speeches attributed to Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Kicking Bear. Today, Stephen King and Leslie Marmon Silko plot best-selling novels around ghostly Indians and haunted Indian burial grounds.

Renee L. Bergland argues that representing Indians as ghosts internalizes them as ghostly figures within the white imagination. Spectralization allows white Americans to construct a concept of American nationhood haunted by Native Americans, in which Indians become sharers in an idealized national imagination. However, the problems of spectralization are clear, since the discourse questions the very nationalism it constructs. Indians who are transformed into ghosts cannot be buried or evaded, and the specter of their forced disappearance haunts the American imagination. Indian ghosts personify national guilt and horror, as well as national pride and pleasure. Bergland tells the story of a terrifying and triumphant American aesthetic that repeatedly transforms horror into glory, national dishonor into national pride.

And a bit of quote from Rushthatspeaks:

Why the change in the American ghost [from the European ghost]? Well, partly because of the rise of the modern scientific method, and the development of ways to test the empirical validity of the supernatural. And partly because colonists in the Americas could not take their ancestors with them, moving from a built-up landscape full of folklore and traditions they understood to a landscape they could not see as fully settled, full of folklore and traditions they did not know. And partly because of the rise of interiority and subjectivity as useful societal concepts, and the intersection of interiority and subjectivity with the newly-minted American Dream. Bergland is literally the first writer I have seen mention that the United States began as a colonized country and became a colonial power, and that the second required systematic repression of the knowledge of what it had been like to be the first.

In short, ghosts represent that which has been forgotten/ignored (ie a crime), and call out for justice -- and the American history is one long history of injustices, so it's no surprise we'd have a ton of ghosts. The crux lays in the fact that a lot of our ghosts are still also very much alive, too, where the crime lies in actively repressing a past (and ongoing injustice).

I can't explain it all that well, but there's much food for thought. So first go read the review and then go buy the book.

For all the women I have loved who were dragged through the mud, an essay on hating-female-characters in fandom:

To be clear, we’re not talking about female villains. ... This is about people hating Hermione, Ginny and Luna, but loving Harry, Ron and Neville. This is about how ambiguous male antiheroes, like Snape, Zuko, or pretty much any male vampire protagonist can get away with walking that fine line between good and evil and not only remain sympathetic, but be even more beloved for how ~tortured~ he is, but when a female character is morally gray that bitch has to die.

So you can’t tell me it’s okay that you hate Sansa because you also hate Joffrey and he’s a dude. They’re not comparable. It isn’t even comparable if you pick a female antihero. Let’s do this apples to apples, here.

We all know that fandom does this. We all know that it’s fucked up and symptomatic of internalized sexism. What’s really fucking weird about it, though, is that the women doing this hating often aren’t ignorant. These are feminists. These are women who can go on meta-analyses of the writing. Some will hide behind pseudo-feminist reasons for their hate—oh, it’s the writing, we just aren’t given strong female characters! ... I’ve seen women who denied being sexist, but couldn’t name a single female character they liked. And it’s always that the female characters aren’t good enough, even when they obviously have a double standard, and they’re measuring women on an impossible scale full of contradictions and no-win binds, while the men are just embraced and loved pretty much for existing.

Read the whole thing.

...on behalf of someone else (who is not me, really! for total true this time), does anyone in the GW fandom (then or now) recall a rant about how butter is not meant for certain past times? As in, diary product + orifice = misery. Moffit's trying to track it down, and I recall it vaguely but not enough for the google fu. Anyone else remember that post?

(Also, Moffit thinks there might have also been mention of glitter, if that helps ring any bells.)

Currently writing a scene in which the pivotal/cultural religion of the story's world takes center stage. This is rather odd for me, and I'm wondering if it is for anyone else.

For the most part, I'm an apatheist. For me, I don't disbelieve a god, nor believe; I just don't care. I live my life according to ethics and principles (not morals), and try to do good in this lifetime with no hope nor care for any after-life rewards. If there are, fine; if not, fine. Which really amounts to: I don't like ritual, I don't like organized religion, I don't care much for massive displays of faith/belief, or the trappings of either. I kind of look at all of it... not with a jaundiced eye so much as a disinterested one. Some people require ritual, especially of a social nature. I'm not one of them.

No surprise then that the religion I've devised for my central culture is a relatively ritual-free religion. It has a lot in common with Shinto, in that very few elements are public (no weekly sunday get-together), most of it's not just personal but also private/solitary. But for the story, it's also crucial that this religion have an obligatory aspect, as well. Certain people are considered automatically priests, and it's not always within the person's say. It's somewhat like the old European tradition that the youngest son always entered religious orders -- there wasn't much choice to the role. It was pretty much set from birth, fated.

Which, seeing how I'm rather lukewarm about ritual, it wouldn't be a surprise that obligatory ritual gets my goat even faster. Yet here I am, doing a scene in which a culture explains and justifies its obligatory ritual. And for the story's purposes, it's not right for me to subtly imply via the narrative that this is a wrong thing; to be true to the story, this must be seen as a right [for that religion and its adherents] thing.

It'd be very easy to write a story in which religion (any religion) gets its comeuppance, or gets dissed or shown to be wrong in some way. I've seen that, too, when some religions -- usually ones written as seriously-close analogues to existing/real religions -- are portrayed by authors who don't believe in that religion. It feels like a failure of empathy on the author's part, because they'd rather demonize the non-Christian (or non-Pagan, or non-Western, or non-Eastern) religion than see it from the other side. (For the record, I hate those stories even more, oddly. I don't like any religion demonized, even if that sounds strange given my intro.)

It actually feels harder to write -- believably -- characters who really do cherish, and respect, and feel obligated to fulfill, a set of religious precepts. It's like I can't quite see ever being so deep-down in it that I couldn't understand how one could not be, or believe, such-and-such. Like people I knew in college who tried desperately to convert me (since apparently Episcopalian doesn't really 'count' as A True Believer) -- they were absolutely flabbergasted, even genuinely hurt -- that I couldn't seem to see how So Very Important the issue of "what you believe" really was. To them, yes, but to them, their belief was an all-encompassing thing and thus I, as someone whom they otherwise felt something in common with or whatever, must therefore also have the same something inside me that would call me to belief just as strongly as it called them. If that makes sense. (It did in my head.)

That's really hard for me to write. I can't write strong-faith characters believably. (I could say fanatic, but with the caveat that my personal attitude kind of skews the grading curve; I'm so far below "casual religion" that someone who does church once a week and sometimes on Wednesday night get-togethers is practically a fanatic in comparison.) I have an even harder time writing someone trying to justify their fanaticism, which on a good day might just be Very Strong Belief.

Anyone else deal with this in stories, or read a work where you get the idea the author's dealing with it? Or the opposite -- an author with Strong Beliefs struggling to write non-believer characters? Any tips, ideas, something to help me make sure I'm not dissing characters who in all other ways deserve to be non-demonized and treated respectfully?

I manage/design/dev an NFP's site for their annual festival. Last year the traffic was MASSIVE, and we nearly shut down the servers. I told the NFP we'd need to switch to a REAL hosting service, one with mirrored servers who could handle a million hits in the course of eight hours.

Well, they waffled and put it off, and were like, oh, yeah, but still. I ran into issues with the service in October, November, and December, and said, no, we really need to switch. They finally got around to dealing with it early January. After some deliberation, I suggested Dreamhost to them -- should've gone with my own isp, 1and1, even if it's more expensive & doesn't have NFP breaks, WHATEVER -- and it was hell doing the step-by-step process to switch hosting.

EXCEPT. The domain reg company WOULDN'T TRANSFER THE DOMAIN. Even when the domain owner paid $15 and faxed in info to update her email (whut!?), and talked to them ON THE PHONE and when we'd put the request through from Dreamhost, it'd get denied. WHUT!? We tried twice, and finally the NFP was all, oh, we can't deal with this right now, it'll be fine.

Hello, it's 830am on the day of the festival, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR SITE IS.

It's down. Crashed. Gone. Unobtainable. Error establishing a database connection KTHXBAI.

( stab stab stab stabbity stab stab )

CAPLOCKS OF RAEG DOES NOT EVEN BEGIN TO DESCRIBE ME RIGHT NOW IDE

ETA: guy messages me on facebook.

Guy: Hi, I'm a manager at [largest server-farm hosting company in city]. Looks like you're having trouble with your hosting. Get in touch with me, we'd love to help out!

Me: NOT NOW JAMES WE'RE BUSY.

(no, actually, I was nicer than that but the general ALL CONNECTIONS BUSY PLEASE TRY AGAIN IN A FREAKING WEEK was probably pretty clear.)

I'm almost certain I've seen this somewhere, but now I can't recall and I can't seem to google it without getting a bazillion hits on stuff I don't want. I thought there was a study or white paper on women, tech, and performance bonuses -- something about how when companies set up a bonus system based on "value" (not just flat-breaks into percentages) it's minorities and women who always end penalized in some way. This makes sense; what isn't valued doesn't get marked as valuable enough to warrant an equal share of the bonus pie. But I can't find the study or white paper, or even a reference to it.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

Recently I read a post about writing a relationship between an ace (asexual) and a heterosexual. One of the points made was that asexuality wasn't really defined/specified as a way of being until relatively recently in history; previously an asexual woman would've been raised to a) not even think of sex because Good Girls Don't and b) to expect that at some point, she'd find The One and then it would all just happen like everyone says. So asexuality could easily have been buried under the social assumptions, especially for women.

I mention that because the topic has been bubbling in my head since the early plotting stage of my current story, and now I'm at the point where the character (to whom this all applies) is on the page. She's not POV for other reasons (and not because I don't want to get into her head, just to make that clear), but I've slowly solidified my certainty that she's definitely asexual. I'm less sure that she's aromantic, but that's mostly because my impression is that "aromantic" means "neutral/lukewarm about falling in love" though I'm not sure I have that right. She does have immense capability to love, and would very much like a loving relationship (what others might call an abiding, deep, platonic friendship), and is probably quite affectionate with close friends. She's not standoffish in that sense, and she's about as far from "socially inept" as you can get. She also very, very much wants to be a mother, and would probably be an amazing, nurturing, instructive mother for whom her children are the central point of her life.

( A few more notes about the character, general outline. Am I on the right track, or am I unwittingly writing a stereotype? )

(also, screening comments since this is a public post. if you're okay with your reply being public, just let me know.)

A friend passed this along, and now it's all ya'lls turn. Watch. It's amazing, powerful, heart-breaking, and yet hopeful. It's been a long time since the internets have shown me something that really, truly, spoke like this spoken-word poem.

A hosted link with notations: Bullies Called Him Pork Chop. He Took That Pain With Him And Then Cooked It Into This.

This evening I ended up reading a long essay (originally a speech) which is currently the center of a shitstorm in Britain, wherein a renowned female author appears to criticize the Duchess of... whatever Kate Middleton's the duchess of. Read the whole thing here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies

It's really a well-written and thought-provoking speech. A few parts jumped out at me:

( ruminations on writing/understanding royalty when I haven't the faintest RL experience or much more than a vague clue. )

I know there's some of you out there, so if you have any ideas:

I've got a character who was poisoned. Think a milder, survivable form of strychnine (I think that's the one I mean), where the poison freezes the muscles up. He got a small dose, but it was still close, and as a result his heart's going to take awhile to recover from getting stomped like that. The analogue I've been using is open heart surgery, which apparently does a fair bit of heart-stomping. So I've had the character gradually work his way back to some form of moving about, following the advice given post-surgery to heart patients: walk a bit, then rest, walk a bit more, rest, work your way up to walking up a flight of stairs, lots of rest, etc.

However, the story takes place in the equivalent of the 16th century, so well before any of our fancy modern medicines. Doesn't mean there's no medicine, just that the reasoning might be off (even if the end results work), like thinking aspirin works because of humours, or whatever.

Anyway, so I've got a bit where the character has exerted himself too much, and from what I could tell of the warnings to post-surgery patients, this is why patients often take blood-thinning medicine, to make it easier on the heart. Extrapolating from that, seems like the heart would tire out, can't pump but the body's demanding it, and suddenly you have lack of enough blood, ergo, passing out.

Here's where it might get tricky: the medical person's logic is that a drunk person bleeds twice as much as a sober person from the same-sized wound, so alcohol must make blood run faster and/or be thinner. If blood is normally thick, and the heart is weak, then thinner blood would be easier for the heart. Thus, alcohol is the make-do medicine for someone coming to after dizzy spell, whose heart continues to beat too fast.

In discussions with one of my beta-folks, the point was made that alcohol also raises blood pressure. I know it's a sedative (calm down the heart?), and I thought I found something that mentioned it's also a kind of blood-thinner, so would those positives outweigh the blood-pressure increase? Or would the addition of two shots' worth of alcohol make no substantive difference, or would it actually just kill the character outright?

Anyone? even wild guesses, if there aren't any doctors in the house. tia!

In Tsiu's great-great-grandmother's time, navigators had mapped the entirety of Nasoyunukona's six mountainous islands. The southernmost island was roughly diamond-shaped, with a massive bay carving out a mouth from its southwestern corner. With countless atolls ringing the bay like ferocious fangs, some poetic navigator had been inspired to label the island the dragon's head. On a map large enough to include the Khoyokona archipelago, the poetry gained a sense of truth; the thousand islands of Khoyokona resembled a dragon's beard, running five hundred miles southward across the Jheu sea to end in a feathery tip a little over three hundred miles north of the Heichunh archipelago. Carrying the poetry to its logical end, Heichunh earned the label of the dragon's pearl. Frankly, Tsiu would have rather tossed the pearl over his shoulder and kept sailing.

I dropped anyone who didn't explicitly request to be kept on, but this is a double-check in case you just missed the post. (I probably should've followed up sooner, since I stated that no-response would be a polite "thanks, I'm full".) If you want back on or want a pdf of what you've missed, just ask. And if you haven't been on and are curious, you're welcome to read, too.

Does anyone here have Hostgator (or know someone who does)? What's your take on it? Worth recommending? or not?

A year (or two?) ago, there was a conversation online about the experience of growing up as an immigrant, with Mom's homefood for lunch and the reactions of (native-born, white) Americans to seeing the unfamiliar food. I cannot recall where that conversation occurred (community? someone's journal?) but if you do, pass along this link.

Is it Fair for Chefs to Cook Other Cultures’ Foods?, Francis Lam and Eddie Huang. Two immigrant sons hash out what it’s like to have your food shunned and celebrated in America

Some interesting, err, food for thought, in terms of how that childhood experience bears on the adult experience of two non-white American chefs/foodies and the question of -- when a non-American cuisine becomes 'popular' -- who has the right to cook it.

branchandroot and I have commiserated in the past about this obsession over Making Code Look Nice (Just On The Off-Chance Someone Might See). I've always applied that rule. I mean, it's not like it's my own hair, which ostensibly I should be making Look Nice but hell if I can see it myself, so I don't have to look at it. But I do have to look at my own code when I'm working on it, so I try to keep it clean and organized and legible.

So I had a benchtest for an FED position, and naturally I organized the code like I normally would (although the commenting was more than I'd usually do, since it was a benchtest). I didn't fully minimize it for live-level presentation, but was still mostly legible. During the follow-up interview both the PM and the lead were highly complimentary about how nicely organized it was, that it was the highest level of clean, simple, efficient code presentation they'd yet seen.

I was all complimented until they added that other benchtests they've gotten back have consisted of a) the original png, sliced into large chunks and arranged on the page via basic css, and even b) a digitized, pixelated flat-image version of... the original png.

I'll take the original compliment as-is, but it's still hard to see yourself as that awesome when you find out the competition was that low-grade. It's like being proud of getting an A on what you thought was advanced calculus only to find out the most anyone else did was sign their name. If they're grading on a curve, that A might not have been so awesome, after all.

But that could just be me. Still going to keep organizing my code neatly, as a matter of pride, at the same time I wish I could pay someone to interview for me. I really do suck at extemporaneous on-the-spot questions.

whois

锴 angry fishtrap 狗

to remember

"When you make the finding yourself— even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light— you'll never forget it." —Carl Sagan

October 2016

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cry havoc

~ if you're going through hell, keep going

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thor 1, thor 2, thor, uh, help.

yes, I cheered in the movie theater

it's the popular thing to do

askerian: this one's definitely for you

what use is the answer when the question was wrong

this turns so much on its head and yet makes so much sense

fandom women vs fictitious women

oh ye of the old-tyme GW fandom

religion and non-religion

I have to say this SOMEWHERE.

question for the geeks

tell me if I've got this right

watch this. just watch it.

thoughts on things like kings

you medical people on my journal...

carrying onward!

hosting company?

pass this along

uhhhh, thanks?

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October 2016

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