Zephyr Dear

I still want to talk about what “good” loyalty looks like, but we need to get the medicine part out of the way first. This post is the first in a three-part series about that medicine.

Emergency Action To Take Immediately If You Are Comfortable At Your Job

Perhaps complacent might be a better word here. I’m not going to talk about jobhunting or boundaries or even loyalty today–well, that’s not true. I’m going to touch on all of them a bit. And all of this will be advice to invest loyalty in your own self first, and to be honest, I think this will make you more valuable to your employer.

So let’s start by talking about you quitting your job.

Know Where The Emergency Exits Are

How on earth does talking about quitting make you more valuable to your employer?

There are two kinds of people who don’t worry about burning to death inside a movie theater: People who don’t believe theaters can burn, and people who know where the emergency exits are.

If you know where the emergency exit is for your current employment, you no longer have to worry about losing your job. You can focus on the task at hand and be productive, even if the company is facing tough times. Managers don’t like me much when they try to “sell the dream” because I don’t buy it. But on the day when the main investor pulls out or the biggest customer switches to a competitor and all the employees are milling about in a blind panic, managers love me. Why? Because I don’t buy the nightmare, either. I can smell smoke in a theater and remain calm, because I know where the exits are.

Important loyalty note: This is not the same thing as watching the exits. I’m not saying you should try to always have an alternate job offer waiting. I’m just saying you should know what you’re going to do if you lose your job.

And let me be a bit more specific: the thing you are going to do if you lose your job is this: draw on your professional network.

And yeah, that means you’re going to need to have one first.

Build Your Professional Network

I think this might be the single most important piece of career advice I can ever give anyone: Have a professional network. When Evans & Sutherland laid me off, I didn’t even know what a professional network was. But once I started building mine, my fear of ever being unemployed vanished. Why? Well, because being unemployed vanished. I think I spent about six weeks jobhunting once in 2005, but not counting that fluke, the longest I’ve ever been unemployed since 2001 is ten days. The shortest? Four hours. And that’s only counting the gigs I’ve left cold, without anything else already lined up. I mean I walked into work, found out I was unemployed, and by lunchtime I had a job offer to start the next day.

As a result, one of the weird things that loyalty means to me is that I never jobhunt when I’m working for a client, even when I know my contract is almost up. It’s just not worth the headache to me, and I have absolutely no fear of walking out of work with no idea where my next paycheck will come from. Because I know it is coming.

I credit this attitude entirely to my professional network.

What Exactly IS A Professional Network?

A professional network is simply this: a list of people who know you that you can call when your chips are down. To build it, you make friends with people outside your company. You help people. You tweet funny things. You join organizations. You take old coworkers to lunch. You contribute time and effort to your professional community. Then, when you need a safety net, you let those people know you’re available. Since they know who you are, and what jobs you’d be a good fit for, you suddenly have 50 or 100 or 1000 pairs of eyes looking for your next job for you. All you have to do is get the word out.

A professional network is NOT a linkedin profile. That can certainly be part of it, mind you; linkedin is pretty popular right now and I recommend keeping your profile current. Just make sure that whenever you’re using the site, that you’re not thinking about “your profile”, but instead about the people in it. They are your safety net. LinkedIn is just a tool to reach them.

Build It BEFORE You Need It (This Means RIGHT NOW)

You cannot tie a net and fish with it at the same time. Your network is a group of people who know you well enough that you can ask small favors of them. You earn the right to those favors by investing time in those people–by sharing time with them as mentioned above. If you meet a stranger and ask them if they know who’s hiring, you’re just a stranger who needs something. But if you’ve met them before or had lunch or contributed code to their project, you’re not a stranger anymore. You’re a member of their “loose acquantances” tribe. And people love helping each other out in that tribe.

I cannot stress this enough: If you are employed, you need to be investing time outside of work in other people.

The time to build your professional network is before you need it. There is only “right now” and “too late”.

But What If I Need It Now? (I’m Asking For A Friend…)

Okay, so… let’s say you didn’t take this advice or, like me in 2002, didn’t hear the advice until it was too late. First, you need to embrace the bad news: You cannot tie a net and fish with it at the same time. This will not stop being a thing that is true, no matter how bad you want it to. You have to embrace it. You’re going to have to fish without a net, which means jobhunting the old ways you’ve used before, without a professional network. But more importantly, it also means you have to spend time tying your nets while you’re starving.

Do lunches with people. Contribute to projects. Attend professional meetups. Make friends. Here are three rules of thumb I use, but they all boil down to the same thing: when you’re meeting people, decide whether you are fishing or tying nets, and do only that and not the other.

• In a professional social setting, I tie nets. I focus on contributing rather than jobhunting. It’s actually relaxing and more fun to stop worrying about the jobhunt for a little while, which in turn makes me more fun to be around. So if I’m in a user group, I’ll speak up if I can help someone. Sometimes I know a clever answer, but people appreciate it even more when I offer to pitch in on their project and help. In a 1-on-1 lunch, I ask about the other person and what they’re working on. Even if I don’t have great insights into their situation, just listening to another human being is a great way to connect with them–and letting them talk it out often provides them with their own answer. If someone has come to lunch with me, and they’re worried about a tricky problem at work, and I blather on about myself and how I need a job for an hour, at best I may give them a distraction but at worst I will annoy them with my problems when they have their own. If I want to tie nets, I have to tie nets. I cannot try to fish.
• The exception: when you’re tying nets with someone, you should mention that you know how to fish! I DO tell people whenever I’m looking for work, but I try to be casual about it. In a big meetup I’ll introduce myself to the group and mention that I’m available, and that’s it. In a first-time 1-on-1 lunch, I don’t worry about it, because one of the first questions we’re going to ask each other is “So, where do you work?” No need to bring it up special. When I tell them I’m between clients, they’ll often ask followup questions about what I’m good at, and I’m happy to talk about that, but I try not to let it turn into an interview. Even if they say “Oh? We’re hiring, you should apply!” I will respond with “Really? Cool! What’s your company like? What are you working on? What do you like about it?” and turn the conversation back to finding ways to be helpful to them. I have to remind myself: “I am not fishing, I am tying nets”. Oh, don’t worry–I won’t let them leave without asking them who I should talk to at their company for more information! But I always try to remember that my goal for the lunch is not to get a job. My goal is to have this person want to have lunch with me again sometime. I am not fishing. I am tying nets.
• Lastly, if you are fishing, fish! Don’t do this instead of jobhunting. Building your network will pay off huge in the long run, but there’s no guarantee of any payoff in the short term. When you’re unemployed, your full-time job is to get a job. And just like you should continue to build your network by doing things outside of work when you’re working, you should build your network by doing things outside of jobhunting when you’re unemployed. Time spent building your professional network doesn’t count towards the time you need to spend jobhunting.

I have spent a decade building and maintaining a professional network that I feel very comfortable with, so now my jobhunting looks a LOT like networking. But it’s fishing, not tying nets. I call people and say “Hey, my contract just ran out, wanna grab lunch?” They know I’m gonna chat and be friendly and ask about their kids, but they also know I’m gonna hit them with fishing questions, asking them about who’s managing who and what teams are working on what. But they’re okay with that, because we’re friends, and they want to see me get back on my feet.

How To Use Your Network

A lot of people talk about building a professional network, but I very rarely hear people talk about how to USE that network when you need it. Probably because it’s rare to find a jobhunter that HAS a network to begin with, but I think it’s also true that once you know a bunch of people, you stop thinking of them as “your network” like it’s some foreign thing. Once you figure that out, you realize that you don’t “use” them. You don’t need an instruction manual to know how to talk to your acquaintances.

Actually, wait. There is a mistake I made early on that made it harder on myself than it needed to be. I would call or email people and ask them if their company was hiring. The tech recession was hitting Utah in the early 00′s, so the answer was always no, and that was the end of the conversation. I had to learn the hard way to stop asking yes-or-no questions. But then I made another mistake: I would ask them who was hiring, and they would always say they didn’t know anyone.

I had to learn to ask questions that would get people talking.

Here’s my secret weapon: I just ask people who they know that’s working with a technology that interests me. “Who do you know that’s working with HIPPA?” “Who do you know that’s doing credit card payments?” “Who do you know that programs in ruby?”

That may seem silly and a bit stupid, but I kid you not: I literally turned an exit interview into a job referral with that last question. I was subcontracting for a software-for-hire shop, and the client I was assigned to pulled the plug unexpectedly. It was a tight economy, and the shop didn’t have anything else for me to work on, so they had to cut me loose. My manager was a good man, and he felt bad that he had to let me go with no advance warning. At the end of the conversation, he glumly said, “I know there’s probably nothing I can do to make this easier, but I have to ask, is there anything I can do to help?”

“Actually, yes,” I said immediately. “Who do you know in town that’s programming in ruby?”

He thought for a moment, and then started listing names of companies. I already had a pen in hand, and I started writing. After each one I’d ask “what do they do?” and “who do you know there?” I never asked if they were hiring. I would occasionally ask “do you think I could talk with that person about who else in town is working in ruby?” He listed maybe a dozen companies. But even better, halfway through the list he said “You know, I’m friends with the CTO at that company. I’ll introduce you.”

The introduction included a heartfelt recommendation, which got me a lunch meeting with the CTO, which got me an interview with the team, which got me a place to report for work the following Monday. Even though they weren’t hiring.

The trick to drawing on your network is don’t haul on it. You’ve made friends with these people. Just be human, and get them talking. (And it doesn’t hurt to work for good managers who try to look out for their people.)

That’s It, Really

No, seriously. I’ve got two more posts to talk about “the medicine”, but if you only read one, this is it.

Go tie some nets. :-)

State by state data has long shown a strong correlation between rates of gun ownership and rates of suicide, but whether there is a causal relationship, well, that has been harder to discern. A variety of factors influence suicide rates, including poverty, population density, and crime. For example, I'd probably kill myself were I forced to live in Wyoming, even if the state didn't rank tops in gun prevalence.

But now a new study conducted by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, and published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, concludes that, controlling for other factors, the strongest predictor of how likely a person is to die from suicide within a given state, is in fact, whether they have a gun in the home:

[S]uicide attempt rates were not significantly related to gun ownership levels. These findings suggest that firearm ownership rates, independent of underlying rates of suicidal behavior, largely determine variations in suicide mortality across the 50 states. Our results support the hypothesis that firearms in the home impose suicide risk above and beyond the baseline risk and help explain why, year after year, several thousand more Americans die by suicide in states with higher than average household firearm ownership compared with states with lower than average firearm ownership.

The full text of the paper is behind a firewall, but you can hear an interview with Dr. Matthew Miller, its lead author, on this week's edition of Science Friday. Dr. Miller makes the point that rates of suicide mortality are not much related to rates of major depression, rates of substance abuse, or even rates of suicide attempts. Statistically, the impulsive and fleeting nature of suicide—a quarter of all attempts occur within five minutes of the initial impulse, about half within the first 20 minutes—combines with the lethality of guns to overwhelm all other factors.

To be clear, easy access to firearms within the home does not increase one's risk of attempting suicide, the study found. It merely increases one's risk of succeeding. Dramatically. Victims who attempt suicide using pills or cutting are 100 times more likely to survive, says Miller, whereas "you don't get a second chance when you use a gun."

And since less than ten percent of suicide survivors go on to make a second attempt, it is easy access to firearms within the home, at that fleeting moment of impulse, that ends up having the single largest impact on suicide mortality rates.

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The takeaway from Brian Palmer's Slate piece: if a business uses loyalty cards to retain customers, it probably sucks.

[C]ompanies that think they can’t compete on service or quality are not trying hard enough. Take a look at grocery stores. A few chains, including Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, attract customers through superior quality or unique products. It’s no coincidence that these stores don’t have loyalty programs. They don’t need them, because they’ve given you a compelling reason to shop with them. Grocery outlets with harsh lighting, cheap flooring, and signs handwritten in marker—you know the ones I mean—almost always have some kind of club program, because they can’t think of any other reason for you to walk through their noisy, unresponsive sliding doors. (Wegmans is alone among premium-quality grocery chains in having a loyalty program, but it dates back to 1990, before the chain surged past its humdrum upstate New York competitors.)

Ditch Your Loyalty Cards

Over the past 18 years the life expectancy for white women who didn't finish high school has dropped precipitously. Today, those women can expect to die five years earlier than their counterparts a generation ago. It's one of the biggest magnitude losses in life expectancy ever recorded, and nobody knows what's causing it. At the American Prospect, Monica Potts reports on scientists efforts to untangle the knot of correlations at the heart of this public health mystery and tells the story of one woman, Crystal Wilson, whose life and death mirrors the statistics.

As we’ve discussed, bombing Syria seems like a bad idea, and its international legality is dubious at best. Still, it’s possible to make a case. The proposed action is directed against the military forces of a dictatorship that has killed thousands of its citizens, and Obama seems willing to comply with US law for once.

That would be a lot more convincing if it weren’t contradicted by the continued provision of aid to the military dictatorship in Egypt, following a coup against the democratically elected government. This is in direct violation of US law, and has emboldened the generals to engage in steadily more brutal repression.

There are some reports that the Administration is quietly suspending aid, or that it plans to do something after the Syrian bombing has been approved (or not). But there’s plenty of resistance as well, most notably from AIPAC.

As long as the US continues to prop up murderous dictatorships for geopolitical or economic reasons, it’s hard to take seriously the eruptions of moral outrage about those, like Assad’s, that have fallen out of favor. Obama may move on Egypt. But the US still supports autocracies throughout the region, most obviously Saudi Arabia and Bahrein, home of the 5th Fleet.

nofoodnolove:

thinking about life

Link: logo.thatsaspicymeatball.com. Created by @bertrandom.

* Notable runner-up: Andrea James.

Catachresis is a free horror game and you should play it as soon as you have access to a quiet, lonely room. You’ll know within five or ten minutes whether you want to stick with the story, and the whole thing takes less than an hour to complete. Terrible things are happening but, instead of jumping in your face and going ‘BOO’, the horrors reside in words and the gaps between them. It’s a side-scrolling adventure rather than a purely textual game, but most of the action takes place off-screen. This allows designer Cameron Kunzelman to suggest terrors both local and cosmic, and to toy with expectations. The writing reminds me of excellent British indie film Skeletons and the work of Charles Stross, a blend of humour, horror, paranormal investigation and bumptious bureaucracy.

(more…)

Broodhollow: Book 2 begins in October.

Andrew Chambers was a paid informant for the DEA from 1986 to 2000, says Brian Sonenstein of Just Say Now, a cannabis legalization organization. "During that time he collected more than $4 million from the federal government and gave false testimony at least 16 times during that time period."

AZCentral reports that Chambers was "featured in 2000 on the ABC News broadcast 20/20. He admitted giving false testimony about his criminal history, saying, 'I just lied about it. I didn’t think it was that important what I did.'”

Naturally, the DEA has "reactivated" Chambers.

Here's a petition you can sign to ask Congress to look into why the "DEA employs a discredited serial perjurer as a paid informant."

Here's Robert Arthur's comic about the origin of the DEA:

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I’m nearly 100 percent positive that boars are orchestrating a takeover of the gaming industry. Case(s) in point: First there was Flying Wild Hog with its cleverly non-boar-related subject matter, but now Whole Hog Games is hogging the spotlight with blatantly pro-boar propaganda. Full Bore is an exploration-based puzzler about boarkind rising up from both its “darkest hour” and, er, underground. Overcome this abyssal labyrinth, unreasonably aggressive pig monsters! Employ your superior strength and wits so that one day you may (quite literally) eviscerate the bourgeoisie and claim what is rightfully yours. The surface, the sky, the light.

(more…)

Erik sez, "Three years ago, Musopen raised nearly $70,000 to create public domain recordings of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, and others. Now they're running a new campaign with a simple but ambitious objective: 'To preserve indefinitely and without question everything Chopin created. To release his music for free, both in 1080p video and 24 bit 192kHz audio. This is roughly 245 pieces.'"

They need $75K. $75 gets you a letterpress listening guide. As with all crowdfunding projects, be aware that they may not deliver, though this team has a good track record on similar projects that speaks well of their chances this time. Caveat donor.

We are asking for your help to free the life's work of Frédéric Chopin.

Why now?
It is 164 years after Chopin's death. His music is well into the public domain, yet most people consume it as if it were still copyrighted: from CDs, iTunes, or Youtube videos (many of which are copyrighted). We think Chopin deserves better.

Why Chopin?
Most public domain music is limited to the classical genre (1920's and before), but the goals of Musopen are not limited to one genre, so we want an artist that has broad appeal. Among the most enduringly popular composers, Chopin stands out. He also composed an amount of music which is manageable for us to record. If we had chosen Mozart, our funding goal would have to have another zero at the end.

We also wanted an artist that would be versatile, enabling many projects to make use of his music.

It doesn't hurt that he just celebrated his 200th birthday three years ago. This is a belated gift but one we think he would appreciate.

Set Chopin Free (Thanks, Erik!)

There are many downsides to hydraulic fracturing and the natural gas it's used to harvest, but for the people who work in America's booming oil and gas fields there's a positive that outweighs a lot of the problems other people worry about. At High Country News, Jonathan Thompson writes about the financial benefits fracking holds for families, especially those where the people working don't have a college degree. With fewer and fewer well-paid manufacturing jobs, hydrocarbons are one of the few industries left where your job can improve your kid's chances of reaching a higher income bracket.

victyrion:

crown-of-weeds:

define-space:

i really admire the design for these stairs and how they incorporate a wheelchair access ramp. in a world were barrier free design is essential to living a full and happy life, its amazing to see landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander has taken literal steps to design stairs AROUND a ramp, instead of the other way around.

This is beautiful.

Form AND function excuse me while I die

…Isn’t this going to kill people?  It seems awfully easy for someone to have a wheel go over the side and have a really nasty fall. There’s a little bit of a “curb” on the lower side of the ramp, but not enough, and zero protection keeping a wheel from going onto a stair on the upper side when someone’s going downhill.

If this were in the US, it would violate the ADA; the 2010 standards require a ramp this size to have railings.

I like the idea of integrating a ramp with stairs, but the execution here is terrifying, and frankly seems to be putting “ooh so clever and sensitive” over the actual safety and ease of movement of disabled people.

The economy is currently sick, as yet another month of weak job growth shows. But is it sick in a “walk it off” kind of way, where, even though it looks like a commercial for flu medication, it’ll eventually get better on its own, or is it sick in a pneumonia kind of way and will just permanently stay that way?

The technical term for this sickness is the output gap, or the gap between what we could be producing and what we are producing. It’s been remarkably constant through the “recovery.” As Neil Irwin wrote earlier this year, professional projections from the Federal Reserve have argued for several years now that a recovery -- in which the economy closes this output gap and job growth soars -- is just around the corner. And as of this year, they’re still insisting a turnaround is imminent. Once again they are saying that economy is weak right now, but it’ll close the gap in a year or two.

But what if the gap never closes? What if it could stay on this parallel track forever? The answer matters. It matters for how, or whether, the Great Recession will end. Thus it matters for government policy. But it also matters because this question has historically been one of the most contentious in economic theory. It is what separates John Maynard Keynes from his predecessors, and it is what separates “Old Keynesians” from “New Keynesians.”

Let’s start with the latter group, which is dominant in the academy. According to New Keynesians, everyone knows their lifetime income and what the economy will look like across the future. As such, they pick a path for their spending. A recession is when some failure (often called a “friction” or “imperfection”) prevents people from taking that path. However, since this problem causes less spending now, it must cause more spending later. So efforts to pull that future spending toward the present can make everyone better off.

These economists are particularly certain that the economy must recover to its potential, given enough time. As Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director of the Atlanta Fed, argued, “Forecasters, no matter where they think that potential GDP line might be, all believe actual GDP will eventually move back to it given an output gap — forecasts will include a bounce back in GDP growth above its long-run average, at least for a while. That’s just the way it works.”

That is not what Keynes thought. To understand how Old Keynesians would view this, it might be worthwhile to look at what they said at the beginning and the end of their reign over the economic establishment. Let’s start at the beginning, with Keynes’s 1935 essay in The New Republic, “A Self-Adjusting Economic System.”(also here).

In it, Keynes distinguishes between two camps of economists. The first were those who thought the economy must eventually return to full employment on its own following a recession. They were “those who believed that the existing economic system is in the long run self-adjusting, though with creaks and groans and jerks, and interrupted by time-lags, outside inference and mistakes,” he wrote. Although there are frictions, this camp argued, they will eventually be overcome by the economy.

The “other side of the gulf,” where Keynes placed himself, “rejected the idea that the existing economic system is, in any significant sense, self-adjusting.” He acknowledges, in 1935, before he has written the General Theory, that believing this places him among an “isolated group of cranks.”

Harvard economist Stephen Marglin defines this as the crucial difference between Keynes and both what came before him and what exists now. “Keynes himself thought that there was no automatic tendency towards full employment. Even with flexible prices and wages, even if competition reigned, the economy could get stuck. High unemployment can last for an indefinite period of time.” The labor force would then do the adjusting, with people simply giving up looking for work.

You can see this debate when we jump forward to watch the surrender of the Old Keynesians to the forces of the New. In a 1992 symposium talk titled “Price Flexibility and Output Stability: An Old Keynesian View” the Nobel laureate James Tobin addressed several recent New Keynesian papers that were declaring victory over the old order. (Tobin’s speech reads like the final defense of someone who has just been convicted of a war crime by a group who ran a coup d’etat.)

Tobin wanted it to be clear that the Old Keynesians he represented thought the “economy’s natural market adjustments in restoring full employment were weak, possibly non-existent or perverse, and needed help from government policy.” Interestingly, Tobin argues that those who think the interest rates can simply take care of monetary policy shouldn’t get too cocky, because “the zero floor on nominal interest rates is still there.”

So why might an economy get stuck? As Roosevelt University economist J.W. Mason notes, “in the old Keynesian vision people can’t know the future, so they go by the present.” As such, there’s a relationship between current income and current expenditures. Instead of frictions holding us back, we’ve just settled at a lower rate of economic activity given our resources. “If you think, like Keynes did, that aggregate spending mainly depends on current income, there is no puzzle. Consumption is just as high relative to disposable income as it was before the recession.”

This divide can help explain the boldness of more conservative, non-Keynesian economists who argue that we are just permanently poorer, or that President Obama’s policies are responsible for the country’s problems. Because if you see the economy as a person who knows his or her entire future, and you play down frictions but still observe that people are spending less, it must be because the economic downturn and government policies just made them permanently poorer.

It also explains the crucial concept of hysteresis — the idea that short-run recessions can lead to long-run damage to the economy — which is an area where the Old and New Keynesian overlap. As University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Peter Skott argues, “after a period of high unemployment, you’ll have workers leave the market and firms reduce their investment. So the output gap will collapse because we can produce less, and it will become that much harder to break out of our current cycle.” Some New Keynesians have also flagged the hysteresis issue as well.

This is important to understand in light of the declining percentage of people involved in the labor force. Friday’s job numbers showed yet another drop in the labor force participation rate. Many people keep asking what the normal rate of participation should be. But hysteresis crucially implies that there is no “natural” labor force participation rate -- it depends on the historical evolution of unemployment.

Now, there may be little to explain. We’ve been through European chaos, austerity in state and local government spending, a close call with defaulting on our debt, federal austerity in tax hikes and spending cuts, and more upcoming GOP threats, all while monetary policy has tried to gain traction at the zero lower bound. For every step forward there’s been a step back, which could explain the economy’s slowness in returning to full employment.

But while that analysis tells us it will eventually recover, another perspective suggests this is just hope. A renewed focus on unemployment and actual, sustained expansionary policies wouldn’t just help -- it may also be necessary.

Mike Konczal is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where he focuses on financial regulation, inequality and unemployment. He writes a weekly column for Wonkblog. Follow him on Twitter here.

“I play my 3DS with the 3D on”

- the strongest of humans. the iron-fisted. the cobalt-willed. those who reduce mountains to rubble with fell swings (via hellajeff)

For more than a decade, our friends at GAMAGO have created some of the most delightful, inspired, and fresh characters around for t-shirts, toys, and other bric-à-brac. Along with everyone else who has known the magic of the GAMAGO Yeti, I have wished for this mythical beasty to come to life in narrative form. The wait is over! GAMAGO and Chronicle Books have just published "Yeti, Turn Out the Light!," a marvelous children's book that truly embodies the creativity and craft of GAMAGO proprietors Greg Long and Chris Edmundson.

As you'd expect, the full-color illustrations by Wednesday Kirwan are absolutely fantastic. The story is a delightful bedtime tale of shadows, monsters, and magic sure to please all children, and the adults that cuddle them. The hardcover edition of Yeti, Turn Out the Light!" is just $11 from Amazon. Below are two spreads from the book. Congratulations, Greg, Chris, and Wednesday!

Glenn Fleishman posts a passionate defense of the value of good graphic design. Even if you don't give a crap about the new Yahoo! logo, you should give a crap about why design matters, and Glenn explains why. "Graphic design is about understanding the way in which type, color, shape, and other factors may communicate specific feelings or facts," he writes. "It is about legibility, optics, psychology, and more."

You know... at first I was going to write, "This guy is trying too hard." But you know what? THE REST OF US ARE NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH! Keep up the good fight, Unicycling Darth Vader with flaming bagpipes!!

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one thing i see privileged folks struggle with is not making stuff about them

not even recognizing what that means, in fact

i see this as related to the problems of individualism: every individual must be the best they can be, must be responsible, must be pure, etc etc. when they are not, they are failing as an individual and then experience guilt

thing is, the guilt does nothing except reaffirm that you somehow could fix it just by yourself. you can’t. that’s what we mean when we call you out for “making it about you”

but we aren’t doing that to say you are selfish.* because again, it isnt about you! the wonderful secret in all this is that you can actually take a step back and not be responsible for ending all of white supremacy or other intersecting oppressions

the only thing you are responsible for is understanding why those things exist, so that you can contribute meaningfully to the work of creating social relations not using those things

and sometimes the best way you can understand things is by shutting the fuck up and listening

*in fact, it is in the interest of the dominant culture that you only conceive of yourself as an individual so that you can be controlled. it is very easy to control individuals. so the issue is not your selfishness. the issue is that you have been tricked, and we are trying to help you come into the fold so that you can start to see yourself as less alone

cthulhu-with-a-fez:

sammiey:

filharmagic:

deersatan:

I STILL CANT BELIEVE  THE LONGEST PIECE OF LITERATURE EVER IS A SUPER SMASH BROS BRAWL FANFICTION

it’s longer than war and peace and les mis combined, plus two pride and prejudices.

it trumps the world record for longest piece of literature by over two million words.

what a time to be alive

AND IT’S INCOMPLETE AND RECENTLY UPDATED WHAT THE FUCK

Via Andrew Sullivan Matt Sitman, the look of music.

In a study by Harvard graduate Chia-Jung Tsay … nearly all participants — including highly trained musicians — were better able to identify the winners of classical music competitions by watching silent video clips than by listening to audio recordings. “In this case,” says Tsay, “it suggests that the visual trumps the audio, even in a setting where audio information should matter much more.

I thought Eddie Izzard already proved that.

1. Liberals are for full employment. Conservatives are not. Rich Yeselson recalls how conservatives crushed Upton Sinclair’s call for a full-employment policy in California. Giving the unemployed jobs was then, as now, viewed with contempt as just another “hand-out” to the undeserving moochers. That’s what makes Rep. Steve King’s call to punish the unemployed, like children who refuse to do their chores, so vile. Don’t do your chores and we’ll send you to bed without supper. But it doesn’t matter if you’re begging to be given chores, we have no chores for you to do — and therefore you must be punished. Steve King really is an evil little wart.

2. Conservatives do not understand what “consent” means or why it matters.

3. Matthew Hagee, like his father John Hagee, is a prominent white evangelical in Texas. But he sure ain’t no Baptist: “Now when individuals say, ‘I believe there’s a separation of church and state,’” Hagee says, “I would give them this response. I would like to see what God’s opinion of your position is when you meet him in eternity.” Roger Williams, apparently, is in Hell, because only theocrats can go to Heaven.

4. Any discussion of Joss Whedon, theology and Paul Ricouer wins a link from me. But Julie Clawson misses one key point Mike Ryan makes in seconding Joss’ comment on “that thing in Temple of Doom where they revisit the shooting trick” — Temple of Doom is a prequel. We can remember the scene in the first movie, but Indy can’t, because for him the scene in the first movie hasn’t happened yet.

5. Religion News Service has a good round-up of ethicists and/or experts on the idea of military intervention in Syria’s civil war. Here’s Stanley Hauerwas, because these days if you want to understand the just-war tradition, you have to ask a pacifist:

The language of intervention and no-intervention is meaningless. America has hundreds of military bases around the world. We’ve intervened. The question is what are the limits of American intervention? Right now there doesn’t seem to be any.

6. Conservatives do not understand what “consent” means or why it matters. (Trigger warning on that link.)

7. Happy Birthday Lewis Black (video is, of course, NSFW):

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

Dear Captain and Crew,

I have a lighter question for you. What do you do when you are nearing the completion of your creative project, and it just feels weak? In my case, I have been working on my first novel on and off for just over a year. I am in the privileged position that I both have friends in the arts whose expertise and honest opinion I can rely on, and am able to afford a non-biased editor. With their support, this thing has been battered to hell and back, and I am now in a place where I can look at it and say that this is the story I originally set out to write. There are a few minor gaps still to plug, and then it needs polishing up, but, essentially, this is it. The problem is that, now that it actually exists, I’m less than enthusiastic about it.

I’ve done plenty of stuff over the years which I haven’t been happy with, but it has always been because I did it half-assedly and the end result didn’t match what I had in my head in the beginning. This thing, on the other hand, I’ve diligently ‘done right’, and it does match the feel of what I originally wanted to create. So why do I feel so meh about it? It’s making me really sad, especially because it was a story I really wanted to write for myself, the kind of thing I like to read but can’t find much of, rather than something I was potentially going to make money off of. My friends say finish it before passing final judgement, and I kind of want to, just to be able to say I’ve done it, but every time I sit down with it I just feel sad and awkward. I did take some time away from it, it didn’t help.

Thanks for any advice,

Amateur Writer

Dear Amateur Writer:

You have no idea how close to home this hits, and how much time I have spent thinking about this exact question as an artist who is not quite where she wants to be with her art form yet and as a teacher of artists.

And here is where I am with it, or where I am trying to be.

Your job is to do the work and then send it out.

That’s all.

You have to love the work enough to do the work, and then you have to let go and send it out and let it be what it will be in the world.

It’s good to revise and it’s good to self-critique, and I’m not gonna tell you that people have never written a thing only to tear it up and write a better thing.

But I think it’s normal to have a postpartum let down after completing a project, when the creative energy and adrenaline dissipates and the initial “LO, I HAVE FINISHED A THING!” sense of accomplishment fades and you’re left with this thing that you made.

I think people understand the letdown that comes when you compare the actual, imperfect work to the theoretical, perfect work you had in your head. Ira Glass talks about it in his piece on creativity and beginners. When you start out wanting to be an artist, your taste is “killer”, your ideas are amazing, but there is a gap between your taste and your skill level. And because you are a self-aware and intelligent appreciator of good art, you are able to measure, in exquisite discouraging detail, just how big that gap is.

Worth watching in its entirety:

(There is no transcript at that link, but the text appears on screen as the video plays, so it should be OK for hearing-impaired folk).

The thing I would add to this is that every piece of creative work you make teaches you how to make the next one. The problems you couldn’t quite solve? The voice you couldn’t quite find? You’re probably going to solve those things the next time around, because now you know something you didn’t know before about what you are really trying to say. That next piece of work will have its own insoluble problems, and so on, and so forth.

So, when you finish your thing, you’re not only comparing it to things your idols made, and to the thing you wanted it to be when you started, you’re also comparing your past self – the self you were before you made it – to the one who knows what you know now. So of course this piece isn’t your BEST work, you are capable of so much more! How can you possibly be judged on this work? People will see the mistakes and not know how very beyond them you are now! Better put it in a drawer, then, like I did with my Directing III film, because I could only see it as proof of what I hadn’t quite accomplished yet. Better start over.

What you need to do is compare this completed, created work to….nothing.

“First, when there’s nothing…” the song starts. I am skeptical that “Flashdancing” is actually a thing-distinct-from-stripping that was popular in working-class Pittsburgh in the 80s, but I do think that all creative acts start there.

First, there is nothing.

And then there is you.

And then there is something that didn’t exist before in the world.

And this language that we have, this way that we create things to tell our stories and to move and inspire and delight each other, is a gift we were given and a gift we give back.

Amateur Writer, finish your novel. Give yourself a deadline to make any last edits, and then decide it is finished. Then send it out and let others make of it what they will. If it gets picked up and published despite being not quite what you wanted, you will have good problems. If it doesn’t, you will likely get some good feedback in the process that will help you next time. Most people are not Harper Lee! You are allowed to grow and experiment and evolve over time as a creator. You are allowed to see this novel as a first step.

You didn’t ask about publishing or financial success, so right now this is a battle between You and You, but let’s do a quick thought exercise:

Quick, think of a published, professional novelist or other creator who isn’t necessarily the best at it. Don’t tell us, just picture them: Your artistic nemesis. Picture their not-very-good book selling in bookstores, with their smug jerkface grinning from the back cover. Picture their book tour, signing for fans in bookstores, going on TV, getting paid to speak. Reach out to the Dark Side of the Force and let the envy and the certainty of their inherent mediocrity really fill you up. Got it?

Talent matters, connections matter, timing matters, many aspects of privilege in terms of looks, education, race, class, money, location, celebrity, etc. matter and I’m not going to pretend that those things don’t matter. BUT there is exactly one controllable difference between you and this successful person that you resent. That difference is that this person finished their work and worked hard to get it in front of other people. And if it didn’t work the first time, they improved what they could and tried again, or moved on and made something new, and tried again, and again, and again until something stuck. Scratch most overnight success stories and you find a good decade of scrappy rejection and perseverance.

I can’t tell you if your book will be good, or if you will ever feel better. But I can look over the rims of my teacher glasses and say:
FUCKING FINISH YOUR BOOK.

Even if you feel weird and sad.

And then send it out and see what happens.

Make no apologies or excuses for it. Just let it be what it will be, and let other people receive it how they will.

And then maybe write another one, knowing what you know now.

Postcard from the Party

You have to be invited, and there’s nothing
you can do to be asked. Headlines and bloodlines
don’t help. It’s a long way from home but I’m
here, the view much better than I’m used to.
How did this happen? Dumb but good luck,
right place and time, the planets aligned.
No contract, no deadline, no risk. And what
did I do to deserve this? Slept with all
the wrong people, gambled too much on friends
of friends with light bulbs over their heads.
Wrote every day no matter what.

Wyn Cooper
Postcards from the Interior
BOA Editions, Ltd.

This poem has been a manifesto for me since I read it. The first line is dead wrong, actually – There IS something you can do to be asked to “the party.” It’s called: Write. Finish things. Send them out. It’s the only part that you absolutely can control.

I’m very sad: there are people out there playing Starbound and they are not me, and unless you part of the development team, some of the Yogscast, or an evil hacker, then they are most likely not you. Are you sad, too? Would that sadness you’re feeling to end? I can’t really help with that, because a hug from another sad person is usually wet and broken. Best I can do is post an hour of footage of the game and fake a smile. This is taken from a presentation at Insomnia Gaming Festival, where three of the internet’s popular Let’s Players gave the first proper public demonstration of the space-faring co-op adventure game.
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kyronea:

annieskywalker:

soulbrotherv2:

TCU admits 11-year-old first-year student

First-year student Carson Huey-You wants to become a quantum physicist. He scored a 1770 on the SAT, and he was co-valedictorian of his senior class.

This semester he is taking 14 hours. His class load, which includes calculus and physics, has him moving between Beasley, Bass and Winton-Scott Halls.

His mother, Claretta Huey-You, is never far away.

That’s because Carson is 11 years old. He was admitted to TCU when he was 10.  [Continue reading at AAReports.]

He’s going to change the world!

I did not realize things like this happened outside of fiction. Way to go Carson!

Poor kid. :(

I started college at 15 with a 1580 (back when they were out of 1600) SAT.  It was not awesome.

You know how much college social life people are going to want to include a 15-year-old in?  You know what your dating prospects are?  You know what your networking prospects are? You know how much a 15-year-old, even a smart one (or especially a smart one) knows about what’s really involved in choosing and preparing for a career?  You know how easy it is for a 15-year-old to be assertive in seeking help from professors and administrators when they have a problem?

And oh God, now imagine it for an 11-year-old.

I don’t know, I’m sure someone out there can do it, maybe this kid is totally confident and savvy in addition to being book-smart, but in general, I feel really bad for any kid trading accolades of “genius” and “prodigy” for the chance to have a full childhood, because I’ve been there, and I’ve still got psychological scars.

Sound the alarm and lock up your wallets, those gents and gentesses at Humble Bundles are roving for your cash once more. After the stratospheric success of the Humble Origin Bundle, you’d think they’d calm down a bit. But no, their ever hungering need to supply you with cheap, brilliant games has flared once more. Paradox are up for it this time, with a selection of their titles available for a dollar an up, two more at six and every game they’ve ever published (excepting Europa Universalis 4 and DLC) for $125. Value. More details and what RPS thought of the various games after the cut.

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"We couldn’t find a simple, clean, beautiful mechanical keyboard that we truly loved," write Weyman Kwong of WASD Keyboards and Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood, " So we created the CODE keyboard. "

Ultra-rare Cherry MX Clear mechanical keyswitches are the heart of the CODE keyboard. These switches are unique in the Cherry line because they combine solid actuation force with quiet, non-click activation, and a nice tactile bump on every keystroke. These hard to find switches deliver a superior typing experience over cheap rubber dome keyboards – without deafening your neighbors in the process. We know you live and die by keyboard shortcuts. We do too. On the CODE keyboard, up to six keys can be pressed at once, which is known as 6-Key USB Rollover. Furthermore, Ctrl, Alt, and Shift do not count towards these six keys, making it possible to to hold up to nine keys simultaneously – sufficient for even the most arcane keyboard shortcuts.

It's LED backlit, gamer-friendly, convertible to alternative keyboard layouts (e.g. Dvorak and OS X), has 5-way cable routing channels on the underside, comes in 104- and 87-key models, and is $150.

CODEMechanical Keyboard (Ships 9/16-9/23) [WASD]

P.S. Another project of Jeff's is, of course, the new open-source forum software Discourse, which powers our own forums here at BB

The Justice Department will not challenge Washington and Colorado’s new laws that legalize marijuana use among adults. Huffington Post’s Ryan J. Reilly and Ryan Grim report:

A Justice Department official said that (Attorney General Eric) Holder told the governors in a joint phone call early Thursday afternoon that the department would take a “trust but verify approach” to the state laws. DOJ is reserving its right to file a preemption lawsuit at a later date, since the states’ regulation of marijuana is illegal under the Controlled Substances Act.

The Department also, per Reilly and Grim’s report, sent a three page memo to governors of all states outlining federal priorities for enforcing marijuana laws. This included “the distribution of marijuana to minors” and “drugged driving and the exacerbation of other adverse public health consequences associated with marijuana use.”

Regulating recreational use of marijuana is not on that list.

Justice’s decision comes at a time when public support for marijuana is at -- excuse the pun -- an all time high. Gallup’s most recent poll showed that 48 percent of Americans think marijuana ought to be legalized, up from 34 percent about a decade ago. This still isn’t a majority of Americans, but its edging pretty close.

Now, Colorado and Washington will likely move forward with the actual business of regulating marijuana which is actually a pretty difficult task. Mike Konzcal wrote a piece for Wonkblog in June, Washington was grappling with the best way to move forward, and whether its better to have large players dominate the marijuana industry or smaller businesses be on top.

As Chris Marr of the Liquor Control Board argued , “How do you prevent a Microsoft millionaire from getting this idea and deciding that — playing by the rules — they’re going to dominate the market?” And if that is the concern, what can economics inform us about how this new market should be set up?

Colorado has moved forward with setting a legal limit on active THC -- the psychoactive chemical in marijuana -- in the blood stream while driving, something akin to a blood alcohol limit. In other words, the state has had to figure out what counts as too stoned to drive.

Those who do not reside in Colorado and Washington may also notice an impact of legalized marijuana in those states: One expert I spoke with late last year predicted that the legal supply in these two states would likely drive down marijuana prices across the country.