In contrast to the relatively plain and straightforward Zen literature of the Tang dynasty, Song dynasty Zen literature is convoluted and artful. This is not regarded, in Zen terms, as a development in Zen, but as a response to a more complex and pressured society and individual. The Zen adepts of Song times did not regard the reality of Zen as any different in its essence from that of classical times, but considered the function of Zen to have become complicated by the complexity of the contemporary mind and the rampant spread of artificial Zen based on imitations of a few Zen practices.

The proliferation of false Zen was stimulated by the enormous impact of real Zen on Asian civilization. After the Tang dynasty, there is hardly anywhere one can turn in Chinese culture without seeing the influence of the Zen charisma.

The ill effects of the resulting influx of insincere followers into public Zen institutions are already noted in the works of great masters of the latter Tang dynasty, and these Zen Lessons contain top-level notices of an even greater decline in quality of Zen institutions and followers in the Song dynasty, in spite of Zen’s unparalleled prestige in cultural terms.

There is even reason to believe that the creation of new Confucian and Taoist schools using Zen methods was especially encouraged by Zen adepts because of their awareness that the original Zen Buddhist order had become seriously enervated through the attachment of worldly feelings to its forms and personalities.

From the point of Buddhist historiography, this sort of involvement is predictable: a period of true teaching is eventually obscured by imitations, and even these break down into remnants with time. The Mahāparinirvānasūtra, or “Scripture of the Great Decrease,” among the classical scriptures traditionally most studied by Zen adepts, outlines these phenomena very clearly.

The false ideas about Zen and Buddhism that scandals at Zen centers have both arisen from and in turn re-created in many minds within and without these centers are also predictable and have existed ever since “Zen” became consciously articulated. Almost the entire literature of Zen, in all of its astonishing variety of forms, deals with nothing but misconceptions about the reality of Zen, which is said to be extremely simple in essence though complex in function or manifestation. The apparent complexity of Zen teaching and function is due to the complexity of the human mentality, as Zen perforce acted in more intricate ways to unify the threads of the contemporary mind.

Replace Zen with your favorite learning that you feel is widely misinterpreted; I’ll go with ‘agile’.

This would not be a tragedy if it occurred. Video games have been important to me since we got our first computer back in 1982, but their importance has waxed and waned. Certainly books have been much more important to me than games over the years, I think on balance music has probably also been more important to me, and in school (undergrad and grad) I spent more time watching movies than playing games, though that was somewhat of an anomaly. (That’s what happens when you’re dating, I guess.) So perhaps the pendulum is swinging away from games; and, indeed, I’ve explicitly been making more time to read books, to make and listen to music, and ever since we got our new TV, I’ve been watching more movies. (And they look fabulous on it!) Given that, maybe I just don’t have time to play games other than Rock Band, and maybe I’m completely okay with that.

That was my tentative hypothesis earlier this year: I felt disconnected at GDC this March, and suspected that I wouldn’t be going back next year. (I now realize that this year’s GDC has had huge, unexpected benefits, so I’ll certainly be going back next year, but most of those benefits aren’t directly game related.) Thinking about it more, though, and in light of subsequent experiences, the situation is a lot more nuanced than that.

In retrospect, the main change may be that I freed up time to read books in part by cutting down on my web browsing, and in particular I stopped reading any daily video game news sites. For almost half a year, I’ve been quite out of touch with current video game releases, not reading reviews of the vast majority of games or even being aware that they’ve been released at all. I still hear about some new games through non-news blogs and through people on Twitter, but the volume is less; and those fora almost never expose me to preview coverage, and people talk about old games quite a bit as well on them. I’d thought of myself as abnormally good at avoiding the pull of the new, but in retrospect I underestimated how much I’d been affected by the novelty-driven news cycle.

Cutting down on browsing has freed up time to spend on other art forms when I want to; but the removal of that news cycle surface current has allowed deeper currents to manifest themselves, and some of those deeper currents are unquestionably video game focused. I recently played Mass Effect 3 and Journey; they’re both wonderful, wonderful games, and they are both very much what I wanted to do at that time, I wanted to play them more than read any book or watch any movie. (Though not, as it turns out, look at any painting.)

They’re also both new games; so I’m not as free from the lure of the release cycle as I’d like to pretend. I suspect, however, that they’ll largely be an aberration in that respect in my game playing over the summer. The games that I want to play next are Rez, Child of Eden, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, probably Jet Grind Radio, maybe Dragon Age 2, maybe even Shenmue or Shenmue II or Space Channel 5. Some newish games, and nothing ancient in there, but generally older games, generally games I’ve played before and want (need!) to experience again.

And they’re generally games that have something in common. (Besides the obvious link, namely the Dreamcast!) I wish I had a better analytical category to put them in, but in the absence of one, I’ll just say it: most of those games are games that speak to something deep in my soul. They’re not just games I enjoy, games that I’ve learned something from, games that I will learn something from the next time I play them. They’re games that have their hooks deep inside of me, games where replaying them will feel like returning to home. But more than that: most of them are games where I suspect playing them will make me feel like a better person, and also feel more like me, letting me learn more who I am and giving me hope that the real me is a pretty good person.

So yeah, games are still important to me. That’s not exclusive to games: I can think of plenty of books, plenty of pieces of music that I feel the same way about, and I hope I’ll spend a lot of time oven the next year or two immersed in those art forms. But games aren’t going anywhere; I’m just going to do a better job of listening to the voices of games that are quietly calling me.

Having said that, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to get out of the conference. The blog and podcast focus on a Christensen-style disruption analysis; that’s something I’ve been interested in for a while, maybe I’d learn something about how to apply that analysis in practice? Also, Dediu thinks a lot about how the strengths, weaknesses, and historical baggage of various forms of presentation, I’d be curious to see him rethink how to best use and rework the conference format, learning something about the case study method if possible.

The conference was designed as a series of four case studies, on the mobile industry, Hollywood, finance, and learning; I like active learning instead of just listening and reading and thinking by myself (all of which I can do with his blog and podcast, so I fully support a conference format that takes advantage of the fact that there are 150 people together in person), and those are all topics that I’m interested in. Though that’s also pretty ambitious: are we really going to figure out something about four topics in a single day, with only 75 minutes per topic? Dediu seemed to genuinely think so; he’s a smart guy with a lot of vision, maybe he’ll design a structure that will allow us to carry it off.

That’s what I had in mind coming in; how was it in practice? I had some interesting conversations with other attendees while waiting for it to start; and Dediu led off with a rather interesting history of Amsterdam through the lens of disruption. And then we started the first case study, on the mobile industry; each participant got to actively participate in one of the case studies, I was assigned the first case study, and I actually ended up being the first person from the audience to chime in.

So: yay! The thing is, though, it was an interesting conversation, with smart people, but we didn’t figure out anything. A pleasant way to spend an hour and a bit, I like talking to and listening to smart people, but that’s all it was for me.

And the conference continued that way: interesting conversations (I particularly enjoyed a lunchtime discussion about the link between Christensen’s notion of “jobs to be done” and interaction design), interesting bits happening on stage, but nothing that made me sit up and take notice. I’d hoped to learn more about applying disruption analysis techniques concretely; the only specific new technique that I noticed was picking a couple of axes in which to analyze a space, plotting existing participants along the resulting graph, and looking for blank spaces. Which is certainly useful, but I was hoping for a little more along those lines, or figuring out something surprising about one of the domains, or something.

(Also, one strange thing: the gender balance was really far off, and I say that as somebody who is used to going to programming conferences and video game conferences. I counted 6 women out of 120 participants; maybe there were more women that I missed in my survey, but I’d be shocked if the percentage was as high as 10%. No idea what was going on there, and I certainly don’t want to draw any conclusions from it, but it surprised me.)

So: I’m not going to second-guess going, it was a reasonable use of time and money, it was a pleasant and interesting way to spend a day. But I’m certainly not going to go attend the next Asymconf unless it’s in the Bay Area (which is a possibility, they’re planning to hold it on the west coast of the United States), and probably not even then unless I can understand the vision better, get a better idea of what I’d like to get out of it.

On which topic: I don’t have experience with the case study method, but I do have experience teaching using active, group-based classroom methods. And, when doing that, I would try to help bring students partway into a topic, then give them something fairly large to struggle with and enough room to work at understanding it better, and be available to help provide a bit more context/support if necessary but not get in the way otherwise.

Dediu did a great job with the last point there: he spoke up when appropriate, repeating and amplifying points, without inserting himself inappropriately. The middle point, though, I’m a lot more dubious about. I was a math professor; an hour and fifteen minutes is enough time for a class that has been together for a few weeks to get their hands dirty with a specific mathematical technique, but it’s not nearly enough time for a group of people that have never met each other before to figure out anything about a huge topic. E.g. looking at Tuckman’s group development model, maybe it’s enough to get through forming and into storming, but we didn’t get to where we were seriously chewing on specific ideas, let alone make it into any sort of performing groove. So, from that point of view, spending the whole day in a single group looking at a single topic would have been a much better use of the time than four groups working on four topics; though the number of participants would have made that extremely unwieldy, I have no idea how to reconcile that tension.

And then there’s the first point, helping bringing students partway into a topic. If the topic that we’re trying to learn about is disruption, then everybody there has seen Dediu’s disruption-based analysis, so we’re coming from some sort of common understanding. But I could have used some more specific support in that regard, more of a helping hand in the transition between seeing others apply disruption analysis to applying it yourself.

As I said above, I don’t know much about the case study method; this article, though, says that one aspect of it is that “Unlike lecture-based teaching, the case method requires intensive preparation by the students, before each class.” And that’s something that was almost completely lacking in the conference: techniques aside, we need to know about the data of the case! (Maybe the most striking aspect of Dediu’s blog is the wonderfully data-driven nature of its analysis.) He wrote one short blog post on each of the first three topics, and nothing about the fourth. Admittedly, the blog talks so much about the mobile space that we had a lot of data to work with there; the other topics, though, are only touched on much more irregularly. If I’m remembering correctly from what he said on his podcast, this lack of prior background for participants was a conscious strategy on his part, but it’s not a strategy I would have adopted.

Still, I don’t want to end on a down note. I was going to say that Asymconf was a conference unlike any other I’ve attended, but actually there are hints of the AYE Conference in the approach that Asymconf took. And AYE was one of my favorite conferences that I’ve ever attended! Asymconf isn’t nearly there yet, but this is only the first iteration, and one the most notable aspects of Asymco is its focus on learning and iteration. So if I had to bet, my guess is that Asymconf is going to be a lot better in a couple of years (quite possibly even in six months!), and I still think it’s got a real chance at figuring out something about how to learn.

This is Femme piquée par un serpent, by Auguste Clésinger; because, of course, we all know that, when a woman is bitten by a snake, her immediate reaction is to contort her body in a way as to make herself look as stereotypically fuckable as possible. You can see the snake in this view of the statue, which also demonstrates another classic male gaze aspect of the statue, namely the way she twists her body so the viewer can simultaneously get a good view of one of her breasts and her ass. (And we all love the way the snake harkens back to the Garden of Eden mythos, where women are simultaneously patsies and the source of the fall of humanity!) Admittedly, it could be worse: the artist has a rather better grasp on female anatomy than many video game modelers, and I suppose one advantage of nudity in this context is that it makes various clothing fails impossible. Still: not awesome.

This is, fortunately, in stark contrast to the rest of the museum, which is one of my favorite places on the planet. Not a contrast because of the nudity—there’s that everywhere you look in the museum—but much of that nudity is rather more interesting, and for that matter rather more foreign to the video game experience. Lots of straightforward, less problematic nudes; lots of nudes that are more interesting, too. Or more confusing; I still don’t know how to analyze Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, for example:

At least it’s something I don’t get from video games, for better or for worse.

I have rather fewer misgivings Manet, whose Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe are two of my favorite paintings in the museum:

I’m not entirely comfortable with the politics of either of those paintings, but there’s a lot more going on there than in Clésinger’s statue. And while I’m not going to claim that male gaze considerations are absent here, in both examples the gazes that the women present are fascinating:

Which isn’t to say that I spent all my time in the museum looking at female nudes. Sticking with Manet, we have his portrait of Berthe Morisot au bouquet de violettes, and there are male nudes as well! (The one below being Antonin Mercié’s David.)

Though the most surprising nude of the day was this Académie d’homme âgé nu from a special exhibit of Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s work. (Or Axel Gallén, as he was known at the time that he painted this picture.)

Anyways: enough nudes, on to video games. The nudes, of course, remind me of character models in video games, and there are plenty of good non-nude character models in the museum: Corot’s La jeune femme à la robe rose, Amaury-Duval’s Madame de Loynes, Degas’s Petite danseuse de quatorze ans (also known as Grande danseuse habillée), Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer’s La Sorcière. (Certainly that last one would be very much at home in a video game!)

But games don’t just model people, they model buildings, they model spaces, they model everything that appears within them. Here are some models of buildings, both by Monet, namely his Gare Saint-Lazare and Rouen Cathedral:

In that last example, Monet shows the cathedral in various different lighting scenarios, and that sort of dynamic behavior is a very video-gamey thing to do. Some of the building models had an implicit dynamism of a different nature, however; my favorite example of that was Corot’s, Le moulin de Saint-Nicola-lez-Arras:

When looking at this picture, it’s impossible not to imagine yourself standing in the woods in the front, walking through them to the building in the back, walking still further to cross the bridge. This isn’t a static model in a video game, it’s a level that demands exploration. (And, of course, I’m doing this within the Musée d’Orsay, which is itself a space that demands exploration every bit as much as any video game I’ve ever played!)

So we’ve moved from models of people to models of buildings to locations to be explored. And, if we combine those, we get paintings with implicit narratives: Henri Regnault’s Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade (which, as a bonus, returns us to our video game theme of politically problematic positioning that we led off with, this time with Orientalism instead of male gaze!); Paul Huet’s Le gouffre, paysage; George Desvaillières’s L’Ascension du Poilu; Gustave Moreau’s Galatée. (Male gaze so strong that our lustful onlooker has three eyes! Male gaze was everywhere in this trip: even the Lion King posters in the subways were full of it.)

I’m sure Roger Travis will say it’s no coincidence that the paintings that I saw that gave me the strongest video game vibe were illustrations from epics: Adolphe William Bouguereau, Dante et Virgile aux Enfers and two Kalevala scenes from the aforementioned Akseli Gallen-Kallela exhibit, namely La Défense du Sampo and La Forgeage du Sampo. That last pair brings us closer to video games in another way: just as games are rarely about a single event, instead presenting a linked chain, here too we have linked scenes.

A couple of years ago, I took inspiration from musicals and proposed that narrative video games should present themselves as a sequence of set pieces that are as well-crafted as possible, with just enough connective tissue to let you go from set piece to set piece without being jarring. And my experiences in the Musée d’Orsay gave me a new perspective on that argument: each of those set pieces should have the unity and impact of a painting. There should be a vision, a scene, an interaction at the core of each set piece with the rest unfolding from it.

I’ve been playing Journey recently; it’s a beautiful game, a powerful game, and that power comes in large part from this focus. Imagine a sequence of paintings: your first jump after receiving the scarf, looking up at the broken bridge with a companion, investigating a ruin in a desert, surfing the sand together with your companion through a sequence of gates, going through a blue tunnel and trying to hide from the searchlight of an overhead terror, looking up at a tower to climb, huddling with your companion for warmth against the cold and wind, soaring gloriously through the sky. That’s what each level is, and each level does nothing more than what is necessary to bring life to those visions, ending just as you’re feeling satisfied with that experience. The levels never drag on; energy that might be devoted to extending the levels or connecting the levels more broadly is instead devoted to making each level more beautiful, to make each level speak to something surprisingly deep inside of you. (Not that they neglect the connective tissue between levels: as with the musical example, connection is necessary, and the tapestries do a beautiful job of that.) Scene after scene in that game emanates from a vision that would absolutely not be out of place in my favorite museum in the world.

The converse is not, however, true: there were several pictures in that museum that are showing me something that I’m not yet getting from video games. I’ll close with Millet’s Gleaners and Strindberg’s Vague VII, in hopes that one of these years I’ll encounter games that hit those parts of my soul.

But I also have an opposing desire, one for following agreed upon procedures. I’m actually not sure where in my psyche this comes from—maybe the same part of me that wanted to be a good student and do well in contests? Tracing back through my post-academia history, though, it’s possible that it first came when I became fascinated by the rules of TDD and by the specifics of refactorings, and more broadly by XP’s prescriptiveness. It’s certainly explicit in the agile tradition more broadly in the notion of a retrospective, and lean puts it front and center.

The result is that my anti-hierarchical bent comes out in a desire for consensus as much as in a desire for autonomy. And consensus in a specific way: explicit consensus as a foundation for experimentation, so we can all get on the same page for something to do now, see how it works, and then accept/change/reject it.

At least that’s the theory; I haven’t yet been particularly successful at accomplishing that. Which is fine: right now, I’m at the stage where my brain is reminding me that, yes, this is somewhat important to me, but that I need to brush off / improve my consensus-building skills. (And my communication skills more broadly.) In the short term, it’s leading to somewhat odd interactions, where I see something that I interpret as a plan that we’ve agreed on, and then I see signs that we’re not acting as if we agree on the plan. Right now, I’m behaving in a not particularly productive way when I see that, instead acting a little grumpier than I’d like; now that I’m aware of my own behavior, though, hopefully I’ll be able to stop that and redirect it elsewhere.

The first step to that end is communicating where I’m coming from; this blog post is an effort to get that straight in my own head! In particular, I think I should be more explicit that I’m not pushing plans of record in to have my point of view win, and in fact I’m not wedded to always having a plan of record at all. So I’m happy for us to agree to follow a plan in some area, but I’m also happy for us to be explicit that we don’t yet have a plan of record in that area, or for us to agree that we had one but we’re modifying it, or that we’re following it in general but making an exception in this instance, or that we had one but are rejecting it. Much of the time, all of those are fine outcomes for me, I’d just like to know which one we think we’re doing in a given context!

Also, the other thing that I should make clear is that I’m not interested in plans as rules, I’m interested in plans as experiments. (I think Taiichi Ohno once said, when confronted with a standardized work document that was old enough that the paper started changing color, that any group who hadn’t changed their standardized work over the last thirty days was stealing from the company.)

With that understanding in place, the next question is: to the extent that I do want to poke at this issue, how to poke? And, in particular, how do I want to position myself in that effort? For example, one relevant role that I enjoy is acting the part of the fool: adopting an explicit pose of lack of power, noting that I’m listening to multiple people in positions of greater power and that I’m hearing them say different things on a topic, and naively wondering which one of them I should follow.

That role of fool works well to tease apart latent disagreements between others in more power; it doesn’t work so well to set up plans in areas where we don’t have pre-existing discussions, and probably doesn’t work as well when dealing with disagreements between people who are my peers. In fact, working with peers may, in an odd way, actually make building a consensus harder rather than easier: the existence of hierarchy gives planning discussions a place to start, and you can use hierarchy as a lever no matter which end you’re on. Maybe the real lesson there is that there’s no point in worrying about plans if you don’t have some sort of lever that you can push or pull; hierarchy is one such lever, but it’s not the only one, so for example the existence of an agreed-upon problem is another lever that you can work with.

And, stepping back: the general goal is to promote an experimental mindset. Having me pushing towards coming up with plans in areas that I care about is one tactic to that end; but if I can help other people push towards plans in areas that they happen to care about more than I do, then that will be even more effective. I’ve seen some interactions recently where somebody has identified a real problem and proposed a solution which hasn’t gotten traction; I should be more alert to those situations and see if I can help people in such situations drive the team towards some sort of consensus, by stepping back a bit from the details and focusing on what we agree on (the general problem space), what we don’t agree on (the details of a solution), and figuring out what’s going on with that disagreement and where to talk next.

Which is something that I thought about a fair amount when I was at Sun, and not so much since then. Probably time to revisit the relevant bits of the lean literature: in particular, I should take another look at the A3 report book. And I’m also tempted to use this as an excuse to revisit the Theory of Constraints thinking processes.

Though I’m not completely sure that the latter are directly relevant for this: I can’t remember how much they’re directed at groups coming to consensus versus individuals finding unexpected solutions to problems? Probably a bit of both; and to the extent that they’re focused on the latter, I should be able to get some personal benefit out of them right now even if they won’t suggest strategies for dealing with this specific issue.

And that’s despite the fact that I missed the first ten minutes or so, because I had a very long lunch with Michael Abbott! About which I have no regrets: that lunch was both quite pleasant and sorely needed for personal reasons. Fortunately, I came into the talk just at the end of the intro (as far as I can tell); judging from the slide I saw, the intro probably said something about (awareness of and conscious use of) frames being important but able to be used for good or evil, but I could easily be wrong. As a partial substitute for the intro, I’ll quote the talk’s abstract:

This talk is about leading well by doing two things: communicating effectively and maintaining perspective. Conversations obviously bear meaning on many levels beyond explicit words; here we’ll talk about frames, the assumptions and context we bring to our interactions. Skillful framing is worth the practice, as it can inspire, motivate and energize, help you navigate the shores of professional power dynamics and strengthen relationships of all kinds.

Of course, it only does those things if you want it to, which brings us to intention, the motivation behind your every action. It’s deceptively easy to believe we’re acting for one reason, often a noble one, when our true intention is something else. When we do that, our behavior often ends up causing harm and sabotaging our true goals. We’ll talk about the work involved in staying aware of your intention and steering it in a direction that’ll yield the right results.

(Edit: Brian Sharp was kind enough to leave a comment with a summary of the part of the talk that I missed.)

Archetypes

The place where I came in was a section of practical tips. These are based on archetypes of situations that he’s collected over the years: so he’ll run into situations that remind him of these archetypes, and that will give him a suggestion as to how people are interpreting the situation and how to proceed to improve communication.

Archetype #1: Collaboration

Specifically cross-discipline collaboration, where you’re working with a member of a different team because there’s something you need to get done together.

First, keep in mind that both of you are trying to solve constraints. Framing the interaction this way helps because it leads to thinking in terms of “you and me versus the problem” instead of “you versus me”.

Still, the water can get that rough. To help navigate that roughness, he brought in an idea from Deborah Tannen: you can plot people’s views of their relationship with somebody else on a two-dimentional chart, where one axis is hierarchy vs. equality and the other is closeness vs. distance. Your view (conscious or not) of where the two of you are on the chart is a framing; you then make moves (again, conscious or not) trying to get the relationship to a place on the chart that you’d prefer. Problems arise when you see the other person as moving you around on the chart in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable.

In cross-team collaboration, he has a strong preference for moving quite far towards the equality side of that axis. But anywhere on the closeness/distance axis could well be acceptable, depending on how he views his relationship with the other person. And, in this situation, that latter axis is more likely to create mismatches in how the two of you are framing the situation: so if one person sees unexpected/unwelcome closeness, then they might act more coldly than they otherwise would to move the interaction to a more distant place on that axis. Conversely, if one person sees unexpected distance, then they might act unusually friendly/chummy.

Again, he sees any place on the closeness/distance axis as acceptable; relationship damage comes from misalignment in how the two of you reed your actual and desired positions on the chart, multiplied by the length of time that you let that misalignment fester. So try to read the situation accurately at the start, and to respond quickly to changes.

(Reflection: thinking about this has helped illuminate some of my own interactions. I can see the tension arising from people changing their mind about where the two of us should be on the closeness/distance axis, and working to change that positioning; I can also see different people as having a wider, narrower, or simply more mobile band of desired positions on that axis, leading to additional opportunities to surprises arising from framing mismatches.)

Archetype #2: Hierarchy

This is about collaboration between people at different levels of the org chart.

Hierarchy reinforces perception: if you hire somebody as a junior team member, you’ll see him as junior. Perception reinforces hierarchy: if you see him as junior, you’ll be less likely to give him advanced work, and hence give him fewer opportunities to move up the org chart. We’re all prone to confirmation bias; this loop reinforces that.

To become more senior, you need to do more senior work, of course. But that alone isn’t enough. People near you (your team members, your immediate supervisor) already know what you’re doing; senior people who are more distant from you have no idea of what you’re doing, however. It would be nice if they then had no feeling about you (since, after all, they have no high-quality data about you!), but in practice they have a hierarchy-mediated opinion of you, and will need active convincing to think otherwise.

So, to change a more senior person’s perception, you have to change that person’s framing. Most people accept the frames they’re given; and, in particular, both you and he will tend to go with his frame.

For example, say a more senior person sends you an email like this: “Sounds like things are running behind a bit. I need you to send me the current schedule so I can figure out how it impacts my team.” This sounds reasonable enough: it’s not rude, it’s not an active power play, it’s a request for relevant information. But implicit in it is a power dynamic: his view is accepted as correct (that’s the first sentence), and he can tell you what to do (that’s the second sentence).

If you want to change the relationship that the two of you have, you need to change his frame, e.g. to one where he treats you as a peer. The first step is to convince yourself, to internalize that frame yourself. The second step is to act like a peer would act, to project that frame outward. When doing this, you might even act a little patronizing.

So, one possible response to the above e-mail is something along the lines of “that’s funny, I was about to ask you the same thing. I’d be glad to make some time to help you understand this side of things. Maybe we can grab coffee this afternoon?” This actively works to change the power dynamic, to project both of you as peers: his view isn’t accepted as correct, he’s not the only person who can ask for information, and you’re suggesting a meeting on more level footing.

This is hard. And people reject frames that are wildly different from their own. For example, don’t treat the CEO as a buddy!

(Reflection: interesting thinking about this one in terms of my own experience. I have a fairly strong preference for sticking my nose in lots of places, for believing that I can contribute to any part of the code base and that I’ll be able to say something worth listening to when discussing, say, team organization. I don’t generally see this as an explicit ploy to change my position in the hierarchy (and, indeed, I’m not a big fan of hierarchy in general, I’m perfectly happy for everybody on the team to stick their nose all over the place!); but, in hierarchical contexts, I am projecting a view of myself as not on the bottom of the hierarchy, at the very least.)

Archetype #3: Caring

Many people claim to care, but act like they care about your work result or care that you’ll be happy so you don’t quit. In contrast, caring is caring about you. As frames, these views are mutually exclusive: one or the other is what is important at any given time. You don’t want the latter to be perceived as the former.

To this end, carve out a separate space for personal caring. If you’ve just been working on a project with a colleague who is frustrated, expressing caring right then will be interpreted as caring about work. So put a bit of distance, both temporally and physically, so you can express personal caring and be interpreted as doing such.

This is why it’s important for a manager to have one-on-ones with the people who report to him/her. But don’t have them be status updates, other than as a jump starter for further conversation: talk about the other person as a person.

(Reflection: definitely useful to keep in mind. When I’ve held one-on-ones in the past, I’ve generally left them fairly open. (At least I think I have, it’s been two and a half years.) Which is good in that it at least doesn’t convey an active view that I see them as status updates or that I see the other person through a purely instrumental lens, but I should be more aware of the options and subtexts here.)

Wisdom

That’s archetypes, techniques that you can use. Now on to wisdom. You may fear that the above is overanalyzing and/or prone to being used for scheming; he believes, however, that this sort of analysis tends to lead towards goodness.

He then talked for a while about working in his mom’s workshop, working with the tools there. This taught him respect (and a bit of fear) for the tools; respect (and even love) for the wood. Each piece of wood was different; he was collaborating with the wood.

It takes craft to make art. Communication is a craft. But: in communication, unlike other crafts/arts, we are the medium. So it’s scary to use these communication tools: they can work on us in powerful, unpleasant ways.

Fear is good, but it shouldn’t stop us: fear itself is communication. It lets us know that we should be careful, but it doesn’t mean that the tools or the tool users are evil.

What about people who do use it for evil? When he sees people like that, it breaks his heart. They had opportunity to use these tools for such beauty, and they aren’t. A meditation he likes to use in such circumstances: “when we do not know happiness, and fill its void with pleasure, we suffer”.

Communication teaches us the true nature of people; the more we know their true nature, the more we love it. We’re scared of that, because we don’t want to know our true nature: we’re afraid of being vulnerable, we’d like to pretend that we’re purely rational.

Update: The video and slides of the talk are available for free in the GDC Vault.

I didn’t want to jump back into the fray immediately: for one thing, those struck me as the sort of mistakes that would require some amount of thinking to have any hope of digging out of, and, for another thing, I’d just started reading a book that is directly relevant to those issues. But now it’s three weeks later, so hopefully my subconscious has done a bit more processing; and I have a few thousand words of quotes to refer to when I feel like I’m going off the rails.

Before I dive back in, however, an apology: to the extent that anything that it felt like I was saying that you shouldn’t feel that an attribute of yourself makes you fundamentally different from people who don’t share that attribute, I apologize. It is not my desire to tell anybody else whom they should feel different from or similar to.

With that out of the way:

The key to how I was acting weird was in this sentence:

I have a very hard time accepting the gloss of “fundamentally different” with “a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion”.

This was referring to Corvus’s saying that exploring someone other than us in games is “most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion.”

The important word in understanding what my brain was doing here is “gloss”: I was interpreting the dash as setting up an equivalence, i.e. that people who are fundamentally different from ourselves must be of a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion and that, inversely, people who are fundamentally the same as ourselves must be of the same gender/sexuality/race/class/religion. This straw man is easy to knock down—I certainly have no trouble coming up with pairs of people of the same gender/sexuality/race/class/religion who are far from clones—but, of course, it’s only a straw man, there are many other interpretations of that dash that are much more generous and plausible.

So yeah, that was a pretty strange interpretation. But I can understand why it took me a little while to notice how strange it is, because of (one aspect of) the way my brain works: INTPs will, I suspect, fairly naturally jump to definitions/equivalences like the above. (Or maybe mathematicians will, or maybe those mathematicians who are INTPs.) So it’s not a pure derailing tactic (and it certainly wasn’t a conscious derailing tactic, I hope I’m not that much of an asshole); or, perhaps more accurately, it’s a derailing tactic that a quirk of my psychology makes me more likely to slip into than most people. (Than normal people, perhaps I should say?)

A more natural interpretation of that dash in Corvus’s sentence would be: these are examples of fundamental differences. And sure, they’re good examples on that score. They are, of course, not chosen at random: they’re all categories linked with oppression and power dynamics, categories that have a strong impact on how others treat us before getting to know us, categories that continue to have an affect on others’ behaviors towards us even after they get to know us, and that even have an effect on our behavior towards ourselves. That’s pretty damn important.

As important as it is, it leaves out lots of other ways of slicing and dicing humanity. Divisions based on mental approaches and temperaments, for example: the MBTI classification that I touched on above, or where people fall on the autism spectrum. Age-based divisions: what historical events you lived through (c.f. Strauss and Howe’s generational divisions), what stage you’re at in your own life. That last one raises the question of whether it makes sense to call something “fundamental” that isn’t constant across your own life, and I agree, that’s an argument against applying that label; but child me is different from teenage me from young adult me from me as parent of a young child from me as a parent of a soon-to-be-teenage child.

I’m sure each of you can continue with examples of differences. The examples from the last paragraph aren’t chosen at random, however: they’re divisions that are related to times where I’ve felt most alien (least normal, to return to a word that I was uncomfortable with above) over the last year. And yes, it does seem a little odd to feel that being a parent of a 12-year-old means that I’m abnormal; normality is a product of both yourself and context, and, in both Silicon Valley startups and the community of video game bloggers, having a child of that age marks me as unusual in ways that directly affect my experience and ability to fit in.

In contrast, of Corvus’s five categories, I fit well enough within the dominant group in my country in four of them to accrue real benefits; and, in the fifth category, I spend most of my time within subcultures where my status is accepted without comment, even expected. So, while I do at times feel a little uneasy on two or three of the his dimensions, my response to his list was unquestionably coming from a position of privilege: when thinking about differences, I’m less likely to interrogate dimensions where the dominant culture supports my status, and more likely to look at dimensions (such as introversion / extroversion) where the dominant culture makes me feel like more of an outsider.

Returning to flying my mathematician freak flag: part of what this points out is that fundamental differences doesn’t form a partitioning of humanity, because the notion of fundamental similarity isn’t symmetric. I may feel that you and I are fundamentally the same at some level; you may, however, disagree with that. And yeah, that’s probably more likely to happen in situations where we differ along one of Corvus’s dimensions than along less politically-charged dimensions: if you’re a woman, you might be more inclined to see our gender as a significant difference than I am. (And, to return to what I said near the top: you might feel that we’re different for all sort of reasons; that’s your labeling decision to make, informed by your perspective, not mine.)

To make matters more complicated, not only might I disagree with you about what constitutes a fundamental difference between us, I might disagree with myself. “Fundamental” is a word that lends itself of many interpretations, and that pulls towards extremes: I might use it to focus on one dimension, I might use it to pay as much attention to each of us as individuals as possible, I might use it to emphasize our common humanity. I might do that based on my mood at the time, but I might also do it for political reasons; and that’s an area where Corvus’s categories are very much a double-edged sword. Because, while these categories can be used to emphasize respect for others’ experiences, they can also be used to mark people as Other with a capital O, with all the evil associated therewith. What I would hope I wouldn’t do is shift between these different meanings purely for sophistical reasons, but “fundamental” is a slippery enough term that it wouldn’t be hard to do that without intending.

Though that tension between different interpretations can be wonderful to explore in its own way. That’s one of the reasons why I liked Whipping Girl so much: in one paragraph, the author would talk very thoughtfully about femininity versus masculinity, and the real power and effects that that difference has, but then say, in the very next paragraph, that “it is not enough for us to empower femaleness and femininity. We must also stop pretending that there are essential differences between women and men.” I really enjoyed that juxtaposition of viewpoints, and I appreciate it as a helpful reminder of the dangers of falling too in love with a single philosophical lens. And I think it’s also quite possible that the book’s author isn’t actually intending to give me whiplash, that she instead comes from a rather wiser point of view that has allowed her to synthesize these concerns into a coherent world view. Beats me; it will be interesting to return to the book in a few years once it’s percolated through my subconscious and experiences a bit more. (Hmm, I should probably think about The Mad Man‘s interrogation of roles in this light, too.)

Enough meandering for today: I’ll stop here, as an expression of my fundamental identity as someone who writes loosely-constructed 1500-word blog posts. And I’ll doubtless have regrets soon after hitting publish on this one, too; fortunately, my friends are generous types who are willing to look past my considerable warts, and I love you all.

In a world where masculinity is assumed to represent strength and power, those who are butch and boyish are able to contemplate their identities within the relative safety of those connotations. In contrast, those of us who are feminine are forced to define ourselves on our own terms and develop our own sense of self-worth. It takes guts, determination, and fearlessness for those of us who are feminine to lift ourselves up out of the inferior meanings that are constantly being projected onto us. If you require any evidence that femininity can be more fierce and dangerous than masculinity, all you need to do is ask the average man to hold your handbag or a bouquet of flowers for a minute, and watch how far away he holds it from his body. Or tell him that you would like to put your lipstick on him and watch how fast he runs off in the other direction. In a world where masculinity is respected and femininity is regularly dismissed, it takes an enormous amount of strength and confidence for any person, whether female- or male-bodied, to embrace their feminine self.

But it is not enough for us to empower femaleness and femininity. We must also stop pretending that there are essential differences between women and men.

(pp. 18–19)

Acknowledging this variation is absolutely crucial in order for us to finally move beyond overly simplistic (and binary) biology-versus-socialization debates regarding gender. After all, there are very real biological differences between hormones: Testosterone will probably make any given person cry less frequently and have a higher sex drive than estrogen will. However, if one were to argue that this biological difference represents an essential gender difference—one that holds true for all women and all men—they would be incorrect. After all, there are some men who cry more than certain women, and some women who have higher sex drives than certain men. Perhaps what is most telling is that, as a society, we regulate these hormonally influenced behaviors in a way that seems to exaggerate their natural effects. We actively discourage boys from crying, even though testosterone itself should reduce the chance of this happening. And we encourage men to act on their sex drives (by praising them as “studs”) while discouraging women from doing the same (by dismissing them [as] “sluts”), despite the fact that most women will end up having a lower sex drive than most men anyway.

While many gender theorists have focused their efforts on attempting to demonstrate that this sort of socialization produces gender differences, it seems to me more accurate to say that in many cases socialization acts to exaggerate biological gender differences that already exist. In other words, it coaxes those of us who are exceptional (e.g., men who cry often or women with high sex drives) to hide or curb those tendencies, rather than simply falling where we may on the spectrum of gender diversity. By attempting to play down or erase the existence of such exceptions, socialization distorts biological gender difference to create the impression that essential differences exist between women and men. Thus, the primary role of socialization is not to produce gender difference de novo, but to create the illusion that female and male are mutually exclusive, “opposite” sexes.

Recognizing the distinction between biological and essential gender differences has enormous ramifications for the future of gender activism. Since there is natural variation in our drives and the way we experience the world, attempts to minimize gender differences (i.e., insisting that people strive to be unisex or androgynous) are rather pointless; we should instead learn to embrace all forms of gender diversity, whether typical (feminine women and masculine men) or exceptional (masculine women and feminine men). Further, since some attributes that are considered feminine (e.g., being more in tune with one’s emotions) or masculine (e.g., being preoccupied with sex) are clearly affected by our hormones, attempts by some gender theorists to frame femininity and masculinity as being entirely artificial or performative seem misplaced. Rather than focus on how femininity and masculinity are produced (an issue that has unfortunately dominated the field of gender studies of late), we should instead turn our attention to the ways these gender traits are interpreted.

(pp. 73–75)

Thus, any model that attempts to explain human gender expression, sexual orientation, and subconscious sex must take into account the fact that both typical and exceptional forms of these inclinations occur naturally (i.e., without social influence) to varying degrees.

In order to reconcile this issue, I would like to put forward what I call an intrinsic inclination model to explain human gender and sexual variation. Here are the basic tenets of this model:

1. Subconscious sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation represent separate gender inclinations that are determined largely independently of one another. (This model does not preclude the possibility that these three inclinations may themselves be composed of multiple separable inclinations, or that additional gender inclinations may exist as well.)
2. These gender inclinations are, to some extent, intrinsic to our persons, as they occur on a deep, subconscious level and generally remain intact despite social influences and conscious attempts by individuals to purge, repress, or ignore them.
3. Because no single genetic, anatomical, hormonal, environmental, or psychological factor has ever been found to directly cause any of these gender inclinations, we can assume that they are quantitative traits (i.e., multiple factors determine them through complex interactions). As a result, rather than producing discrete classes (such as feminine and masculine; attraction to women or men), each inclination shows a continuous range of possible outcomes.
4. Each of these inclinations roughly correlates with physical sex, resulting in a bimodal distribution pattern (i.e., two overlapping bell curves) similar to that seen for other gender differences, such as height. While it may be true that, on average, men are taller than women, such a statement becomes virtually meaningless when one examines individual people, as any given woman may be taller than any given man. Most people have heights that are relatively close to the average, but others fall in outlying areas of the range (for instance, some women are 6 feet 2 inches and some men are 5 feet 4 inches). Similarly, while women on average are more feminine than men, some women are more masculine than certain men, and some men more feminine than certain women.

Because these inclinations appear to have multiple inputs and show a continuous range of outcomes, it is incorrect to assume that those with exceptional sexual orientations, subconscious sexes, or gender expressions represent developmental, biological, or environmental “errors”; rather, they are naturally occurring examples of human variation.

(pp. 99–100)

This is one of the most difficult aspects of transitioning to describe, as there are so few words in our language to articulate “body feelings” of any sort. I’m sure that this lack in language is related to our cultural tendency to dismiss or discount the way that our bodies feel to us. Indeed, many of us tend to think of ourselves as brains or souls crammed inside of a shell—a shell that is our body. We delude ourselves into believing that the shell itself is not important, not connected to our consciousness, that it’s merely a vessel that contains us, or a vehicle that we move about with our minds. But the truth is, our bodies are inseparable from our minds. This becomes evident whenever hunger, thirst, or physical pain grows to the point where we can think of nothing else, or when mental grief or stress manifests itself in physical aches and exhaustion. All of us who have experienced the physical difference between feeling healthy and feeling ill, or perhaps most profoundly, between pre- and post-puberty, have a deep understanding (whether we acknowledge it or not) that our body feelings make a vital and substantial contribution to our senses of self.

(pp. 220–221)

These days, I recognize the huge difference between sexual desire and sexualization. Sexual desirability is something that we all hope to have to some extent. When other people express their sexual desire for us, it can be extremely empowering, so long as such expressions are reserved for the appropriate time and place—i.e., from the right person and when we have signaled our openness or willingness to reciprocate. Sexualization, on the other hand, has the opposite effect: Rather than empowering the person, it’s used to leverage power over them. This can be seen all the time in the media, where women often appear not as fully formed human beings with their own thoughts, feelings, and opinions, but as purely sexual objects used to sell cars, beer, and other commodities. Some might naively argue that these women have power—specifically, the power to lure men—but it’s a power that only serves heterosexual male interests. After all, how much power is there in being a carrot on a stick dangled in front of someone? Such depictions exist in sharp contrast to media expressions of sexuality that center on real-life women’s sexual desires and perspectives, such as The Vagina Monologues or a Margaret Cho show.

The fact that sexualization is an attempt to dehumanize and disempower women is even more evident in remarks we get on the street, which invariably occur when women are presumed vulnerable (when we are alone or outnumbered) and often go unchallenged solely because the men who make such comments are physically stronger than the women they harass. Perhaps it’s only one in fifty or one in a hundred men who stoop to the level of catcalls (or worse), but over time they take their toll and achieve their intended effect: They make us feel like we are targets. Indeed, the sexualization that occurs in both media imagery and public harassment reinforces a power dynamic between the sexes in which men are invariably viewed as predators and women as prey. This predator/prey mind-set makes it virtually impossible for us to imagine that a woman has the potential to be a sexual aggressor (evident in the common disbelief about, and inability to articulate, instances of woman-on-woman sexual violence or female fetishism) or that a man can be a sexual object (as seen by the tendency for people to view young boys who are seduced by adult women as being “lucky,” as opposed to being victims of statutory rape). In fact, the only instances in which adult men esem to have the potential to become sexual objects is when they are sexualized or coerced into sexual acts by male aggressors.

(pp. 254–255)

Indeed, the ongoing and hotly contested debates over whether femininity and masculinity are biological or social in origin have, in my view, served primarily as a distraction from a far more pertinent issue—namely, what meanings, symbolism, and connotations do we assign to different gender expressions? While I disagree with the notion that gender expression itself is entirely social in origin, I do believe that the way we perceive and assign values to feminine and masculine behaviors is primarily, if not exclusively, a social affair. In our male-centered culture, two forces most often shape our interpretations of femininity (as well as masculinity): oppositional and traditional sexism.

Oppositional sexism functions to legitimize feminine expressions in women and to delegitimize feminine expressions in men (and vice-versa for masculinity). So while all people are capable of expressing feminine traits, oppositional sexism ensures that such expressions will appear natural when produced by women and unnatural when produced by men. In addition to creating the perception that female femininity is “real” and “right” while male femininity is “fake” and “wrong,” oppositional sexism may also influence the “doing” of gender expression. Exceptional gender expressions are regularly dismissed, even stigmatized, in our culture, which may lead some people to hide or curb their own gender-variant behavior, further exaggerating the assumed, apparent differences between the two sexes. In these ways, oppositional sexism creates the assumption that feminine traits—which occur in members of both sexes—are inexorably linked to female biology, and therefore, to one another.

Traditional sexism functions to make femaleness and femininity appear subordinate to maleness and masculinity. This is accomplished in a number of ways. For example, female and feminine attributes are regularly assigned negative connotations and meanings in our society. An example of this is the way that being in touch with and expressing one’s emotions is regularly derided in our society. While this trait has virtually nothing to do with one’s ability to reason or to think logically, in the public mind, being “emotional” has become synonymous with being “irrational.” Another example is that certain pursuits and interests that are considered feminine, such as gossiping or decorating, are often characterized as “frivolous,” while masculine preoccupations—even those that serve solely recreational functions, such as sports—generally escape such trivializations.

In addition to placing inferior meanings on feminine traits, traditional sexism also creates the impression that certain aspects of femininity exist for the pleasure or benefit of men. Take, for example, the concern for, or desire to help, others. While those who have this quality of empathy or altruism often express it toward all types of beings (i.e., children and adults, strangers and friends, animals and humans), it’s often recast in women as a maternal, “nurturing” quality that is meant to be directed primarily toward one’s family. Thus, this thoroughly human trait has been twisted into the expectation that it’s women’s “natural” duty to take care of their male partners and children, and to carry out the bulk of family and domestic chores.

(pp. 325–327)

So why has the artificializing of femininity become a preoccupation for many feminists over the last several decades? I believe that it has to do with the fact that many of the women who have most strongly gravitated toward feminism are those who have found traditional feminine gender roles constraining or unnatural. In many cases, this is due to their own inclinations toward exceptional forms of gender expression. Because their personal experiences with femininity felt uncomfortable and contrived in comparison with their experiences with androgyny, masculinity, or other gender expressions (which they found more liberating and empowering), they mistakenly projected their own experience and perspective onto all other women. While not necessarily done maliciously, this extrapolation was nevertheless an act of gender entitlement, one that denied that any diversity in gender expression might exist among women arising out of their very different class, cultural, or biological backgrounds and predispositions. By arrogantly assuming that no woman could be legitimately drawn toward feminine expression, these feminists permanently relegated femininity to the status of “false consciousness.”

The feminist assumption that “femininity is artificial” is narcissistic, as it invariably casts nonfeminine women as having “superior knowledge” while dismissing feminine women as either “dupes” (who are too ignorant to recognize they have been conned) or “fakes” (who purposely engage in “unnatural” behaviors in order to uphold sexist societal norms). This tendency to dismiss feminine women is eerily similar to the behavior of some lesbian-feminists in the 1970s who arrogantly claimed that they were more righteous feminists than heterosexual women because the latter group was “fucking with the oppressor.” It is an extraordinarily convenient tactic to artificialize, and even demean, an inclination (such as femininity or heterosexuality) when you personally are not inclined toward it. Indeed, this is exactly what straight bigots do when they dismiss queer forms of gender and sexual expression as “unnatural.” When we feminists stoop to the level of policing gender and start inventing etiologies to explain why some women adopt “unnatural” feminine forms of expression, there’s little to distinguish us from the sexist forces we claim to be fighting against in the first place.

While femininity is in many ways influenced, shaped, and enforced by society, to say that it is entirely “artificial” or merely a “performance” is patronizing toward those for whom femininity simply feels right. Indeed, one would have to have a rather grim view of the female population to believe that a majority of us could so easily be “brainwashed” or “coerced” into enthusiastically adopting an entirely contrived or wholly artificial set of gender expressions. In fact, it seems incomprehensible that so many women could so actively gravitate toward femininity unless there was something about it that resonated with them on a profound level. This becomes even more obvious when considering feminine folks who exhibit no desire whatsoever to fit into straight society, such as femme dykes (who proudly express their femininity despite being historically marginalized within the lesbian movement because of it) and “nelly queens” (who remain fiercely feminine despite the gay male obsession with praising butchness and deriding “effeminacy”).

The idea that “femininity is artificial” is also blatantly misogynistic. While a handful of theorists in the field of gender studies have more recently begun to focus on how masculinity is constructed, the lion’s share of feminist attention, deconstruction, and denigration has been directed squarely at femininity. There is an obvious reason for this. Just as woman is man’s “other,” so too is femininity masculinity’s “other.” Under such circumstances, negative connotations like “artificial,” “contrived,” and “frivolous” become built into our understanding of femininity—indeed, this is precisely what allows masculinity to always come off as “natural,” “practical,” and “uncomplicated.” Those feminists who single out women’s dress shoes, clothing, and hairstyles to artificialize necessarily leave unchallenged the notion that their masculine counterparts are “natural” and “practical.” This is the same male-centered approach that allows the appearances and behaviors of men who wish to charm or impress others to seem “authentic” while the reciprocal traits expressed by women are dismissed as “feminine wiles.” Femininity is portrayed as a trick or ruse so that masculinity invariably seems sincere by comparison. For this reason, there are few intellectual tasks easier than artificializing feminine gender expression, because male-centricism purposefully sets up femininity as masculinity’s “straw man” or its scapegoat.

(pp. 337–340)

In retrospect, I would say that the assumption that distinct identities would automatically lead to exclusivity was entirely misplaced. After all, an identity is merely a label, a descriptive noun to express one particular facet of a person’s experiences. And if we look beyond gender and sexual identity politics, we can find many examples of flexible and fluid identities. For example, if I were to identify myself as a “cat person,” nobody would be outraged or confused if I said I also loved dogs. Further, when I tell people that I’m a “musician,” no one makes unwarranted assumptions about what instruments I play or what styles of music I prefer. Nonpoliticized identities like “musician” and “cat person” allow us to see that the recurring problems in gender and sexual identity politics arise not from identity per se, but rather from opposite-think (e.g., that a cat person cannot be a dog person, and vice versa) and from a sense of “oneness” (e.g., the assumption that all musicians are or should be punk rock guitarists.)

(p. 353)

Some might argue that it’s simply human nature for us to assign different values to different genders and sexualities. For example, if we tend to prefer the company of men over women, or if we find androgynous people more attractive than feminine or masculine ones, isn’t that assigning them a different worth? Not necessarily. There is a big difference between rightly recognizing these preferences in terms of our personal predilections (“I find androgynous people attractive”) and entitled claims that imply that there are no other legitimate opinions (“Masculine and feminine people are not sexy, period”). Similarly, there’s a big difference between calling yourself a woman or a genderqueer because you feel that word best captures your gendered experience and using that identity to make claims or presumptions about other people’s genders (e.g., assuming that “men” or “gender-conforming people” are your “opposites”).

Some might also argue that there is such a thing as “bad” gender—for instance, a woman who feels coerced into living up to stereotypically feminine ideals. As someone who was closeted for many years, I can understand why someone might be tempted to describe genders that are enforced by others (e.g., stereotypical femininity or masculinity) as being “bad.” The problem is that there is no way for us to know whether any given person’s gender identity or expression is sincere or coerced. While we experience our own genders and sexualities firsthand, and thus are capable of separating our own intrinsic inclinations from the extrinsic expectations that others place on us, we are unable to do so on behalf of other people. We can only ever make assumptions and educated guesses about the authenticity of someone else’s sexuality or gender—and that’s always dangerous.

The thing that always impresses me about human beings is our diversity. Even when we are brought up in similar environments, we still somehow gravitate toward very different careers, hobbies, politics, manners of speaking and acting, aesthetic preferences, and so forth. Maybe this diversity is due to genetic variation. Or maybe, being naturally curious and adaptive creatures, we invariably tend to scatter all over the place, exploiting every niche we can possibly find. Either way, it’s fairly obvious that we also end up all over the map when it comes to gender and sexuality. That being the case, if we take the subversivist route and focus our energies on deriding stereotypically feminine and masculine genders, we will inevitably disparage some (perhaps many) people for whom those genders simply feel right and natural. Furthermore, by critiquing those gender expressions in an entitled way, we actively create new gender expectations that others may feel obliged to meet (which is exactly what’s now starting to happen in the queer/trans community). That is why I suggest that we turn our energies and attention away from the way that individuals “do” or “perform” their own genders and instead focus on the expectations and assumptions that those individuals project onto everybody else. By focusing on gender entitlement rather than gender performance, we may finally take the next step toward a world where all people can choose their genders and sexualities at will, rather than feeling coerced by others.

(pp. 360–362)

If anybody is looking at the source code: the main way in which it’s not representative of how I normally program is the fact that most classes don’t have unit tests. This sometimes happens to me when I’m gluing stuff together: there’s not much in the way of logic, and the ultimate test of a fair bit of that code is how it looks in the web browser, so I’m not sure where unit tests would be useful. In situations like that, though, I do like to throw in some kind of overall acceptance test that at least detects whether or not I’m inadvertently changing the HTML output. And, of course, it’s much smaller than software that I work on at work! Other than that, though, it’s reasonably representative: functions and classes are pretty small but there’s room for further shrinking, I’ve taken a bit of care to remove duplication, but I wouldn’t present it as anything like a shining, polished gem.

I’ve also added a front page for the site, so you can see the fragments (at least the most recent 20 ones—no pagination yet) without having to go to the feed. (Incidentally, Safari isn’t correctly doing feed autodetection right; I’ll look into that eventually, but if somebody happens to why that isn’t working, please tell me.)

It’s turned out differently from how I expected it to be. In particular, I labeled it as a “microblogging platform” above, but you’ll see if you look at the front page that that isn’t accurate, that “miniblogging” is more the size posts are turning out. Also, in the original post, I talked about “mosaics”; support for them is still there, but I’ve only written one, and that one was a proof of concept instead of something that I really felt compelled to do. So, instead of figuring out how to represent mosaics on the front page, I just left them off the front page entirely, and am not advertising the mosaics RSS feed, either; I’d be surprised if I ever write another one, though who knows.

What does seem to be the case is that the fragments blog is turning into my ‘morose blog’. Something about the fact that it feels hidden—very few readers (almost all of whom are people I know and feel quite comfortable talking to in person), combined with a complete lack of comments and an almost complete lack of analytics—makes it feel more private than it actually is. (Because I don’t want to kid myself: it’s on the web, it’s accessible by search engines, so any mistakes I make there will be available to be uncovered!) The result of which is that I spend some amount of time digging into in-person interactions, and the in-person interactions that I think about the most are ones where I feel out of place. That gives entries a morose tone, to the extent that I end up backtracking on that within the blog itself, because I certainly don’t feel like a morose person the vast majority of the time! Still, I think I’ll stop backtracking/apologizing for that within the blog: this paragraph is the context you’re going to get for the tone, the fragments themselves should be minimal and unapologetic.

And, unless something changes, this post and its predecessor is all the talking I’m planning to do about the fragments blog: it’s been a successful enough experiment that I’ve added a link to it to the right-hand column on this blog, and I imagine the fragments will spur ideas that play out here in a larger scale, but in general I’m going to leave it tucked away. No more discussion of it here, no automatic forwarding of posts there to Facebook or Google+ or whatever. I doubt that the vast majority of you reading this would find anything at all interesting there: it’s primarily targeted at myself (which, admittedly, is the case for this blog, too!), and I don’t think people who haven’t interacted quite a bit with me would find anything of interest there.

Any advice is appreciated.

Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.

The problem is, I disagree quite strongly with the premise here: I have a very hard time accepting the gloss of “fundamentally different” with “a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion”. My gut feeling is that there’s a core to myself—the way I think, the way I relate to people, the way I approach problems, what fascinates me—that would persist if I were of a different class, religion, race, sexuality and gender, and that this alternate David would be much more similar to me than a random atheist upper-middle-class white male who isn’t entirely sure whether bi or straight is a better label for his sexuality but leans towards the former. (Though, if we accept the third possible labeling of my sexuality as “besotted with Liesl Bross”, then yeah, that narrows things down quite a bit.) I have a hard time even typing the following, given the considerable amount of respect I have for Corvus, so I’m sure I must be misunderstanding him, but I think I find that gloss to be actively offensive on a political level: am I supposed to accept the notion that somebody else would be fundamentally different from myself by virtue of being Muslim? I don’t see any good arising from that line of argument.

Which does raise the question of what I think “fundamental differences” really means. The contrast that the theme gives is kind of interesting: it contrasts “fundamental differences” with “external circumstances”. And that contrast I’ll agree with; it’s just that I think of class as an external circumstance, religion as largely an external circumstance, and race as only important because of external circumstances. Gender and sexuality are more interesting, but for both of those the weight that society places on them has a huge impact on how they affect us. So what all five of those have in common (and are different from the examples of exploring alien worlds and swinging broadswords) is that they’re all categories that have a strong impact on how the societies we live in view us, how people treat us before getting to know us (with that impact continuing after people do start to know us as individuals), that that impact makes itself known from the moment we’re born, burying into our own psyches.

So, in particular, I certainly don’t want to get genetic deterministic: who we are is strongly shaped by external factors as well as genetic traits. But there’s a lot more to external factors than broad societal divisions—one’s friends and family, for example—and there’s a lot more to genetic traits than whether one of 23 pairs of chromosomes falls into the broad bucket labeled XY or the broad bucket labeled XX. (Or into neither of those buckets at all, and of course not everybody’s gender is best expressed by those chromosomes.) I realize that I live in a society where the checkmarks that I get in Corvus’s classification mean that I don’t get actively reminded of how society treats differences in that classification as frequently as people who get a different set of checkmarks in that classification do, so if somebody who gets a different set of checkmarks wants to make a case that those checkmarks really are what I should associate with the idea of fundamental differences, I will do my best to listen with respect and an open mind. (I’m certainly curious what the friend whom I had coffee with this afternoon will think about this post—she has a rather more informed insight into how fundamental a difference gender is than I do.) But right now the idea seems pretty strange to me.

Setting that aside, I’ll try to play along with the theme a little more. Though then I run into another possible difference: are games really most powerful when letting us identify with somebody fundamentally different from ourselves? That’s not implausible, but on reflection I’m not sure I agree: maybe games are most powerful when they allow us to learn something new about ourselves. I’m not sure which way I go on that, and upon rereading I’m probably misinterpreting that statement: I guess it’s saying that, when games are exploring differences, then that exploration is more powerful the more fundamental the difference is. And that sounds plausible enough.

So: what games have allowed me to “experience being other than you are”? That’s kind of an easy question to answer: I have a hard time thinking off the top of my head of any games that did any sort of fleshing out a character where I felt that the character was particularly similar to myself. Looking through the last 25 games I’ve played, Professor Layton was the only one that had a character that I particularly identified with; I was just watching Miranda play Portal, and it’s also not a bad example of a game where I feel a bond with the main character, albeit one whom we don’t learn much about. (I realize that, above, I haven’t given any specific examples of what I actually do consider to be fundamental differences or similarities; as those two games suggest, though, my enjoyment of solving abstract puzzles feels more important to me than my class, race, religion, or gender, though I would never suggest that other people should feel that way about themselves.) Actually, non-narrative games often speak to me more strongly than narrative games do: in some sense, I feel more myself when playing go or Tetris than basically any narrative game, and the same goes for Rock Band. And that last example has an interesting relationship to Corvus’s list of characteristics, given that, when I’m playing myself in Rock Band, my avatar is sometimes gay and sometimes straight. (Always myself, though; and yes, my relationship with music also feels more central to myself than my class, race, religion, or gender.)

But there I go again, refusing to answer the question at hand. Hmm, if I’m looking for game experiences where I felt rather different from the character I played in game, I guess Catherine was the best recent example? Which was a fascinating game, and my fascination was indeed driven in part by that difference. Not so much because of the specifics of Vincent’s nature, though (and certainly not because of any of the characteristics from Corvus’s list, where Vincent actually lines up well with me), but because of the way of dividing up the world that the questions in the game revealed: what an odd list of dichotomies to present, what a strange set of priorities it implied!

And what a strange topic for the BoRT. But it’s gotten me to write something; is that the covert goal here? Which, actually, makes it similar to Catherine: in both places, much of my interest is being presented with a foreign set of dichotomies, one that seems so misguided to me that I’m actively forced to think about something else. And there’s good in that, certainly.

Update: I felt uncomfortable enough about this post to follow it up with another where, I hope, I step back in several ways.

Because, looking back, I’ve been thinking about contingency a lot over the last half year. The place where this appeared most strongly in its abstract glory was the way my fascination with Ascension has played out: as I said at the time, “always, always be aware of the web of possibilities”, and that’s a web that I’ve been feeling as an almost physical presence around me for months now.

That web has manifested itself in many ways. My mind has been focused on sex more than normal recently; the specific direction in which it’s been probing the most, though, has centered on my identifying as bi more than two decades ago. Within quite short order after that, my life went in a direction that means that I’m not actively exploring the ways and extent to which I am attracted to men (or at least not actively physically exploring that!); how would that aspect of my life be different if I hadn’t gone in that direction twenty years ago? I have not the faintest idea. This is a mostly abstract question for me, but the one thing that prevents it from being a completely abstract question is my being told the summer before last by a friend of mine that he ended up being quite surprised by what he learned about his own sexuality a few years back (when he was noticeably older than I am now); I certainly don’t expect that to happen to me, but it’s a reminder of the possibilities that surround us, possibilities that in many cases we’re not really aware of.

Then there’s last year’s job search. Any job search is going to lead to you being confronted with possibility after possibility, and this one, despite its short length, was no exception. Fortunately, the possibilities in question were quite happy, and I ended up having a choice between either staying in a job that I basically enjoyed or selecting from multiple new possibilities that all seemed quite interesting. But: the job offer that I accepted was with a company that I didn’t even have my first interview at until I had an offer in hand from another rather attractive company; if my current employer been even a single day slower in that process, I would be working somewhere else, doing completely different programming, with a different number of quite different coworkers, taking the train to work every day instead of walking to work every day.

And certainly many of the details about why I enjoy my current company aren’t at all what I expected: again, surprises, possibilities that I wasn’t even aware of. In particular, my coworkers are reminding me of the power of contingency, of futures unfolding: as I get older and stay in the tech industry, I spend more and more time with people who are younger than me; and the fact that Miranda was born when I was 28, while not making me anything like a young father in historical norms, does mean (given the mating habits of the circles I move in) that my kid is noticeably older than the kids of most people my age. Being an active video game blogger also means that I spend a lot of time interacting with and being aware of the lives of people who are quite a bit younger than me; though it’s almost certainly not a coincidence that a couple of the bloggers I feel closest to are my age or a bit older.

Actually, many of my current coworkers are fairly close to me in age. But, of the two coworkers whom I’ve spent the most time with socially, one is five-eights of my age and hence has (from my point of view) basically all of the interesting parts of her life ahead of her (including events that I have no reason to think about in the context of my own future); and the other, while quite close to me in age (younger but, from my point of view, within the margin of error), has had some changes in her life over the last few years which make one (make me, certainly!) unusually aware of how paths can diverge, how one’s life can play out.

It’s not just this job change, though: whenever I think about job searches, I remember my last academic job search. At one point, I had a job offer in hand for a school that I would have enjoyed working at, an offer that I was going to accept: that school pressured me a bit more than I wanted, though, and a few other schools wanted to fly me out for interviews, one of which seemed like a better fit for me and sent signals that they thought I would be a good fit for them as well. That plus a non-academic job possibility that seemed interesting gave me the courage to turn down that first job; eventually, though, none of those jobs panned out.

Which I am extremely grateful for: there were some unpleasant aspects of that experience at the time (unsuccessful job searches are never fun), but even in the short term it worked out fine, and in the long term I’ve had zero reasons to regret that sequence of events and many reasons to be actively grateful for it. Still: things could have been quite different. And I’m not at all sure why things turned out the way they did, and in particular why I didn’t end up getting offered the job that seemed like a better fit: I didn’t have the courage to really probe that failure at the time, but my best guess is that my subconscious was dubious enough about me continuing with academia to sabotage my performance in that interview. A fortuitous series of events, even if I’m not sure why things happened the way they did or just how much chance was involved.

Contingency is one half of where my brain has been focused over the last year; the other half is narrative. Again, returning to Ascension: when I play that game, when I’m doing well in it, it’s because I can tell stories about how the game has gone so far and will go in future turns. (Not traditional stories about characters and what not: stories about the gameplay events and ways in which cards’ powers relate to each other.) The same goes for how I’ve been playing other board games; and the worlds created by my obsession from the first half of the year, Minecraft, are all about starting from contingency and crafting a narrative out of what you’re presented with.

And the same goes from all of the other examples above. In fact, my brain latched on to the narrative aspects of job searches before it latched on to the contingent aspects of those searches; and, while I say above that I’m quite glad that I left academia when I did, I’m sure that, if matters had turned out differently, I would have crafted a narrative that led to that result being the inevitable course of events instead. (I spent more than a decade and a half crafting that narrative, after all!) It’s not at all difficult to see one of the aforementioned coworkers as an example of the wonderful power that appears when you tell your stories properly, either.

In all of these examples, then, I’m not dealing with a web of possibilities as a manifestation of chaos. That web of possibilities is instead a manifestation of unexpected possibilities of coherence, of beauty. And narrative is the way that my brain is currently choosing to express that coherence, to help me understand its existence and meaning.

Why is my brain particularly focused on these topics right now? It could, of course, be pure coincidence—one lesson this year is that brains just do weird stuff some times, sometimes quite a bit weirder than I’m entirely comfortable with!—but let’s take a lesson from the narrative side of that focus and make a story out of that sequence of events instead of treating it as unexplained randomness. I turned forty near the start of last year; round numbers are an excuse for introspection, so it’s probably not entirely by chance that I’m looking back more than usual right now.

And looking back in a certain specific way. Forty is a traditional age for people (men in particular, perhaps?) to have a mid-life crisis; my guess is that the above is how my brain is choosing to express some of those symptoms. It’s a natural time for me to be looking back at what’s happened; being around young coworkers encourages that, and having a daughter who is going through major transitions of her own, forming certain mental habits in ways that I expect will strongly influence her life over the next years (decades?) is quite something to behold. (I didn’t expect middle school to be as much of a phase change as it has been, and I certainly didn’t expect the details of how it’s playing out.)

Also, Zippy’s decline and death happened this year (his decline started earlier, but it made itself year much more strongly this year than last year), so I’ve been getting hit by age as well as youth. And what both Miranda and Zippy have in common is: I’m realizing that we only have six more years living with Miranda (and she’s already much much more independent than she had been), and all of a sudden we don’t have any dogs to look after. So Liesl and I right now have quite a bit more freedom than we had over the last twelve years, and a dog-free window of opportunity to experiment with the even greater freedom that we’ll have in the quite near future when Miranda leaves. (Six years once seemed like a long time to me, but no more; compare that in particular to the twelve years that we’ve had with Miranda so far.)

Side note: one funny thing about looking at my mental state through a mid-life crisis lens is how unlike a traditional mid-life crisis it is in many ways. I’m wondering about different possibilities, and even wondering about possibilities of an explicitly sexual nature: the truth is, though, that my brain doesn’t even seriously consider any possibilities that wouldn’t have led to my spending decades with Liesl in the past and continuing to do so in the future. If I think about it intellectually, I can point to the unlikeliness of the coincidences that led to our meeting and falling in love, in the same way that I point to coincidences that led to me having the job that I have; but it’s a purely academic exercise, my brain is essentially unable to take seriously possible past histories that wouldn’t have led to us spending the last two decades together or spending the next four decades together. (The same thing goes for Miranda: an important part of what makes her her is formed out of 46 coin flips, so there’s a lot of room for randomness to manifest itself, but I am completely unable to imagine what it would be like to have a child who is not Miranda.)

Another traditional aspect of mid-life crises: looking back with some amount of regret. That I am also completely lacking in: there have, of course, been negative surprises over the last four decades as well as positive surprises, experiences that I didn’t enjoy at all at the time; not so many of them, though, and my brain is happy enough to not worry about them in retrospect, to see them more as sources of information and curiosity than anything else. And I don’t see any reason to think that my best years are in any sense behind me: I’ve had a good run so far, but very little that I did in the first two decades of my life had an impact beyond my immediate friends and family, and while I’m happy enough with what I’ve done over the more recent two decades, I don’t see any reason to believe that I can’t do a lot better over the next several. My life may be half over: but having four decades ahead of me is a long, long time!

My lack of regret doesn’t mean that I want to be blase about the future, however. As I said above: let’s make a story out of the random events in my past, and then let’s extend that story to see where my life might gracefully go next. I would be perfectly happy if my brain could spend the next year churning away on that issue, coming up with a grand plan going forward. Not a plan for the rest of my life, certainly, or anything even approaching that, but maybe a broad sketch for the next decade that will help me have an impact in ways that I haven’t so far?

Or maybe my brain will learn something from responding to the rolls of dice, the draws of cards in board games (the unfolding of moves in go!) and step beyond that narrative crutch. The way you can go isn’t the real way, the name you can say isn’t the real name; if I can move from being the ever-wanting soul who sees only what it wants and turn to being the unwanting soul who sees what’s hidden, I’d be happy with that as well. Mystery of all mysteries indeed.

I think what got to me the most was its take on seeing the future in the form of viewing multiple possible appearances/actions that a person might have. (Will have? I’m fairly sure that they’re presented as possibilities in the book, but I could be wrong.) It’s not emphasized in the book (indeed, one of its strengths, like any good fantastical work, is the strength of the world-building in directions that aren’t the main themes of the book) but these views of the future directly ties into my brain’s current obsession with contingency. I think I’ll write a separate post about that one, though, because my response to this aspect of the book has rather more to do with where my brain is than with the book. (In particular, my brain right now is at least as focused on contingency in the past as on the future.)

Then there’s the title concept of a ‘lifelode’, a sort of true calling. Which is a little bit of a banal idea, and one that smacks too much of the notion of “hero of destiny” that infects fantasy literature. (And science fiction, and video games.) The good thing about Lifelode‘s approach to the concept is that it accepts a wide range of possible lifelodes as equally worthy: for example, looking after a household or making pots are as respected lifelodes as anything else. Also, the book at least addresses the possibility of people coming late to an understanding of what their lifelode might be; which is good, because if you’d asked me what mine would be, there are decades when being a math professor would have been the answer, which in retrospect has clearly proven not to be the case.

Partly because of that last experience, this is perhaps the area of the book that I’m mostly dubious about: I fear that it smacks of an essentialism that can be actively harmful. But it’s also one that I find seductive, and that I don’t understand at all in the context of my own life: I’m fairly sure that there’s a certain coherence in my activities and interests (both in my various employments and my various outside interests) that hints at a lifelode of sorts, but I’m not sure exactly how to put my finger on it, or indeed whether it would be an actively good idea to put my finger on it. And I’m also not sure whether analyzing that coherence in terms of a lifelode would be useful, harmful, a curiosity, or a distraction! So: lifelodes are something my brain likes thinking about right now, but is that good?

I support rather more unconditionally the book’s openness towards relationship possibilities: a society accepting of both primary marriages and very strong side relationships, of communication among the various parties necessary to make that work, and also the way the book nonetheless showed the unquestioned love, devotion, and focus from another that we all need sometimes. Side relationships are not, in general, the way my brain works at all, but I was thinking some about what ‘family’ meant a few months ago; that context has waned and that part of my brain has calmed down quite a bit since then, but still: I like to see an open discussion/acceptance of more possibilities of what it means to be a family.

Also, on the relationship note: one character gets described as “flirting as easily as he breathes” partway through the book, in a context that points out how unusual that is within the village where the book takes place. Which really struck me because I hadn’t noticed his behavior being all that unusual, and it made me realize that I’m more blind to certain aspects of “men hitting on women” behavior than I’d like to be. And also got me thinking about my own flirtatious behaviour: flirting was, for better or for worse, something that I think I basically didn’t do at all back when I was in search of relationships (and, to the extent I did it, I’m positive I was horrible at it); it’s something I do more now in a few contexts, with a few people—it’s fun and is essentially a zero-pressure activity for me now that I have no desire for anything at all to come out of it—and I suspect that, with the right sort of person, I’m probably no longer tragically awful at it? (I could easily be wrong on that latter bit; I suspect I would be awful at it with most people, and that I’d be rather worse at it if it mattered to me now, but that’s fine.) But reading that line in the book makes me wonder: do I flirt more often now than I think of myself as doing?

And then there’s the whole concept of moods. In the book, moods are presented, in part, as being brought through the air; also, it’s possible to set up defenses against being overly affected by these airborne moods. Which is a lovely idea, concretizing the notion of being swept away by an unwelcome mood (or a welcome but unexpected one!) for no clear reason, and of realizing that you’re acting in a way that you’d rather not be and trying to figure out what to do about it. These airborne moods are, at least at times, sent by gods (or by people acting on behalf of gods); I really like how the concept of personified gods seems like one end of the normal fantasy spectrum as you start the book, but then the personified gods turn out to be less and less like what the word ‘personified’ would make you think even as the book shows you more and more of how people become gods. (And that’s also tied to an unusual feature of the world’s geometry—there’s a bit of a Flatland, or really more Sphereland, vibe to the book as well.)

Like most fantasy novels, it talks about changes of an excessively cataclysmic nature, but here too it comes at it from an unusual nature: on the one hand, presenting these changes as part of an ongoing rhythm (so more a vibe of Buddhist changes of eras than a climactic victory of good or evil versus the other), but also shows how these changes can be delayed and caused to take uncommon courses without negating the idea entirely. Huge changes in fantasy novels generally have a strong martial feel; in Lifelode, though, that martial feel takes an Aikido vibe, with an emphasis on redirection rather than blocking/counterattacking (and also rather than evading them completely, of course), and with the acceptance of circularity.

A short book (which is refreshing for a fantasy novel in of itself!), but one where every ten pages turned up an idea that was both interestingly unusual for the genre and tied into something that I’d been thinking about.

After which, I decided I’d been remiss in reading Walton’s recent work, so I decided to catch up and go through Among Others as well. Which was a delight from start to finish: I ended up livetweeting my reading (and being gratified by how many of the people I know like quotes that speak favorably of interlibrary loans), because I don’t think I’ve ever read a book which speaks so directly to the experience of being a (very!) bookish teenager in the late 70′s. (I wasn’t a teenager by then, but I was close enough that the literary references were almost all familiar.) And, specifically, a bookish teenager whose tastes run strongly towards fantasy and science fiction but who is willing to dive into other specific recommendations, including those from adults you meet whose tastes you learn to trust.

Here, by ‘specifically’, I mean: author after author is mentioned, book after book, including the delights of discovering a wonderful book by a new author, learning that they’ve written more, finding somebody to talk about that author, and going to the library and checking out another ten of their books. (Or: putting in an interlibrary loan request for every single one of that author’s books.) All sorts of wonderful little touches, like the protagonist’s enjoyment of Tiptree, then discovering 50 pages later than Tiptree was a woman, and her having opinions about specific Tiptree stories instead of about Tiptree in the abstract; or her giving Plato a try on the recommendation of a (much) older friend, really liking the Symposium but being more dubious about the Republic, and relating the latter to The Dispossessed and Triton. It’s one thing to recognize a similarity of feelings and experiences in the abstract; but it seemed like on every page of this book I’d run into a specific artistic encounter that I went through myself 25 years ago. Amazing.

Though, now that I think about it, perhaps I should revise my expectations. I might also use the term ‘life-affirming’ to describe the Kushiel trilogy, for example; and, while that series is not pornography, there’s quite a bit of fucking going on it. No piss drinking that I can recall, but lots of pain inflicted as part of the sex in those books; still, the result is something that I very much see as on the side of the goodness in humanity. I’m fairly sure that, by the end of this blog post, it will be clear that that isn’t a coincidence, that there’s a reason why my brain interprets both books that way.

Anyways, back to The Mad Man. Like I said: pornography, piss drinking. The latter is far from the only sexual act in the book, or far from the only substance consumed: the protagonist spends a fair amount of time going down on other men (as does Delany himself, of course), so semen certainly shows up frequently. (One might even say that it spurts forth.) In fact, in general, if a substance comes out of a body, it gets consumed in this book: while the protagonist is not in this number, a couple of the side characters have a fondness for eating shit, to the extent that we run into people in the book who claim never to go to a bathroom, they just hold things in until they run across a friend who will dispose of their waste products for them.

I suspect it’s a manifestation of Delany’s love of symmetry (or a hidden desire to be a management consultant?) that he completes the quadrant: we’ve sexualized the production and consumption of solid and liquid waste products, and we have semen: if we wanted to make the latter solid, what would we do? The answer, of course, is to have characters who have stretched their foreskins to abnormal extents, and who like to whack off and then leave the semen hanging around in there for a few days; eventually, it apparently takes on a more solid, cheese-like texture, becoming a different sort of delicacy to be consumed by its aficionados. (The protagonist becoming one of those aficionados.) Who knows, maybe that is a thing, maybe this is simply Delany reporting.

Because report he does. I said above that the book is pornography, and if I had to pick a single genre label for it, that is the one that I’d choose. But it crosses genre boundaries in ways that, for example, his Equinox doesn’t: and one of its other themes is to provide a picture of what life could be like as a gay man in pre-AIDS New York City. And what life could be like is: you can get laid all you want, and if there are particular behaviors that you eroticize, you can easily find people to engage in it with you, should you so choose. So, for example, he goes into a fair amount of detail about a bar that regularly had evenings devoted to the consumption of piss, with loving descriptions of the care taken to make sure that your clothes are wearable, the way people replaced urinals in the bathrooms during those evenings, the effects on your insides of having large amounts of urine flowing through your system.

Of course, pornography is (frequently) devoted to entirely imagined portrayals of sexual excess, but that’s not what’s going on in the above descriptions. For one thing, they’re called out as reporting instead of pornography within the book itself: while the book describes a trip of the narrator’s to that bar, it frames that trip in the context of a letter from the narrator to a less-cosmopolitan friend of his, giving context about the possible life of a philosopher that the narrator is describing, with the tone of: you clearly don’t realize what the range of quite reasonable possible behavior for a gay New Yorker is, so I’m going to explain it to you. (And, as I do a bit of googling, Delany didn’t even construct a fictional bar as a composite of real examples: the Mineshaft, the bar he described, existed and was much as he said.) It’s explicitly marked as reportage in the context of the book, and Delany these days clearly feels that it’s important for him to speak out accurately about the variety and quantity of sex available for those desiring it: the interview that leads off The Polymath has him talking about a typical day of writing in the early sixties where he’d work on a novel for a few hours in the morning, then go to a bathroom in Central Park and blow four or five men, then go home and write some more, then go to a movie theater for more sex, then grocery shop and go home and cook dinner for his wife, then write some more, then go off to the trucks to give another five blow jobs. Easily hundreds of sexual partners a month, thousands a year.

Those movie theaters show up a lot in The Mad Man, too, and he’s written a quite good nonfiction book about them, too, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. That book is partly about the destruction of those theaters, and what we’ve lost by that destruction. A theme that comes up in The Mad Man, too; and while I won’t say it’s the reason for their destruction (or for the shutting down of the Mineshaft), AIDS is one of the main ways in which the city government justified their actions in that regard. The Mad Man straddles the boundary of the appearance of AIDS, and explicitly addresses that transition.

Addresses it not just in terms of what was lost in terms of institutions, but in much more personal terms: of having friends suddenly die, of living in fear not knowing that you’re going to die, of living in resignation assuming that you must be infected, given the number of people you’ve fucked, so what’s the point of taking precautions? And it’s written in (in my view entirely justified) anger at the scandalous paucity of solid research into what behaviors lead to what levels of risk of catching the disease. There’s way too much unsupported “sex is scary and bad, especially gay sex” talk out there, and on the sex-positive side way too much “sex is very dangerous without a condom but safe if you have one” talk out there; Delany’s survival (those thousands upon thousands of men he’s gone down on weren’t wearing condoms) gives anecdotal evidence that the truth is rather more nuanced than that, but anecdotal evidence isn’t research. The Mad Man contains, as an appendix, a 1987 Lancet article entitled “Risk Factors for Seroconversion to Human Immunodeficiency Virus among Male Homosexuals”, which is a start; Delany claims that it hasn’t (or at least hadn’t at the time the book was written, say by 1994) been followed up in anything approaching an appropriate fashion. That is part of the context of the sex acts that are featured in the book: Delany wanted to write about people having (lots of!) sex in ways that could plausibly not lead to their getting AIDS.

So yeah, there’s reportage in there, and well-done polemically-informed reportage at that. And, uh, reportage that’s kind of hot. Which is one of the interesting things about the book: trying to figure out what’s pornography, what’s fiction that’s describing people that fuck a lot but in realistic rather than fantastical ways, and what’s reportage. That division isn’t simply something I’m reading into the book: as I mentioned above, the book explicitly addresses the existence of reportage, and it also explicitly addresses pornography, in the form of events told by narrators who prove later to be unreliable.

And this variety of narration, coupled with an even wider variety of sexual acts that are described, means that when reading it, I’m always asking myself: is this something I like to do? Is this something I would like to do, but haven’t done? Is this something that I kind of think I would like to do but I’d need to get drunk to have the courage to do it? Is this something that I think is hot to read about but that I really wouldn’t want to do in real life? Is this this something that is so obviously fictionalized pornographic excess as to be too ridiculous to even think about in real life? Is this something that I wouldn’t want to do about in real life, but am completely comfortable with the idea of? Is this something that I’d honestly rather not think about too much, but that when I do think about it seems fine if that’s what you’re into? Is this something that seems wrong to me? There’s stuff in the book that I’d put into each of those categories, and mercifully little that I would put in the last of those categories; and one side effect of (re)reading it is that the number of acts that I’d put into the next-to-last of those categories is shrinking.

Which is one of the reasons why I find the book so life-affirming. It sends a strong message that: whatever you’re into (well, almost whatever you’re into), that’s okay, and you’ll find somebody else who is into that, too, you’ll find sexual satisfaction. And that’s a glorious statement! And another message, that worrying too much about fitting yourself into boxes or what the correct labels are to apply to yourself just isn’t necessary. For example, we frequently see in those theaters (and elsewhere) men who label themselves as straight but who really enjoy being (frequently!) blown by other men; the novel may gently poke fun at them for that label, and suggest that those men would be happier if they weren’t so attached to it and could take a more honest look at their lives, but ultimately the fact that those men are finding sexual fulfillment is what matters.

Also, the book is equally strong on the flip side of that message: whatever you’re not into is fine, too. Even if you label yourself as gay, that doesn’t mean that you have to be into doing anything that another man wants. So there’s little or no anal sex in the book, for example (mirroring Delany’s own preferences), and generally characters in the book have a fairly strong leaning towards going down on other people or towards having other people go down on them. (Delany generally prefers the former.) It’s fine to want to do A a lot, to never want to to B, to want to do C once or twice a week, to be happy enough to do D if you’re with a partner who prefers it but to stay away from it otherwise, to have wanted to do E ten years ago but to not be into it these days, to not be quite sure yet if you want to do F or not. That, coupled with an equally strong message that people with complementary preferences are out there somewhere, is something that I find rather wonderful.

So far, I’ve been mostly focusing on different kinds of sex acts. But, of course, there’s a lot more to sexual desire than the act itself: doubtless there are people out there who would be happy to fuck anybody with the appropriate set of orifices/organs/desires to match their preferences in sex acts, but most of us get turned on/off by other specific physical characteristics and behaviors as well. And this too is a strength of Delany in general and of The Mad Man in particular.

Any Delany fan is well aware by now of the frequency with which Delany’s main characters get turned on when seeing somebody else with heavily bitten fingernails; this is one of Delany’s own fetishes, but it also goes back to the life-affirming nature that I mentioned above: whatever you are into is okay. (Though, just to be clear here: I am not saying that I approve of all forms of sexual behavior, consent is crucial to me. I’ll get to the intersection of desires with politics in a bit.) There is no need to feel shame; think about where your desires might come from, if you wish, but if you have a preference for something, that’s fine. I honestly can’t remember how much bitten fingernails show up in The Mad Man, but there’s one key character who has quite the interest in the details of feet, for example.

And equally life-affirming (actually, probably more life-affirming) is the converse: there’s going to be something out there who is into you, even into aspects of yourself that society suggests you should be ashamed of; and, for that matter, just because society marks something as negative (or as positive) doesn’t mean that anybody should care about that one way or another! (Again, I’m talking about sexual attraction here, not politics.) The book reinforces that last point in a rather direct way: a lot of the people that the protagonist has sex with are homeless. (And not some sort of pornographically fantastic attractive young homeless people, either: homeless people who have had a rough time of it, who have been aged by the process.) It’s not that the protagonist has a fetish for homeless people; he just doesn’t care about that the way that society expects him to. I don’t want to portray the book as autobiography, because it’s not, but this isn’t some sort of abstract political statement: Delany has been living for the last twenty years with a man he met while the latter was homeless. (See Bread & Wine for some of the details about that one.) Think about what’s important to you (sexually, yes, but in a partner more generally), and try to see that without being blinded by what society tells you. (And, for that matter, try not to get too attached to those initial hypotheses if you haven’t actually checked them against your behavior and feelings towards real people.)

That’s the physical side of attraction, of eroticization; what about the mental side? This is actually the area in the book that gave me the most pause, as it turns out. To take one example, I hope I don’t make a habit of calling people stupid in the real life, but I’m sure I’d be more likely to do that than to, say, drink piss; when reading and thinking about those two actions in the book, though, I end up realizing that the former bothers me rather more (and at a more fundamental level) than the latter.

It is very much to The Mad Man‘s credit, however, that it’s helped me think through these issues, to understand where my boundaries lie and what’s good about my disquiet, but also to appreciate the positive aspects of what he’s describing. In general, if you’re calling somebody stupid, you’re just being an asshole. (At best: at it’s all-too-common worst, it’s actively destructive, potentially to the point of leaving scars for life.) I’m coming around to understanding, though, that in an explicitly marked fantasy zone, that can be okay behavior.

In general, I’m not hugely into talking dirty as an actual part of sex (though I’m pretty strongly into verbal play in general, and I’d be very unlikely to be attracted by somebody who didn’t appreciate and wasn’t capable of some level of verbal gymnastics), but I can see (I can feel!) the pleasure of talking dirty. Also, in general I’m not into power play in sex (and there my sexual preferences mirror my non-sexual preferences), but I’m not so blind as to deny the existence of that one, either. And, to be honest, I suspect that I’d be perfectly happy to experiment with being on the submissive side of a sexual power dynamic, though I’m also perfectly happy giving it a miss and I doubt that I’d want to either go too far in that direction or make that a particularly frequent part of sex.

So: if modeling power relations turns you on, if insults are part of that, and if for that matter you get turned on by being called stupid, then that’s totally up to you: your preferences are your preferences, your turn-ons are your turn-ons, and if you find a partner willing (even eager) to play a complementary role, then that’s great. (That partner just won’t be me!) Unlike some of the stuff I’ve talked about above, I’m not going to uncritically accept most power dynamic sexual preferences as being innate to your brain chemistry (in general, I’m sure there are exceptions); but even if it is the case that those sexual desires are shaped in part by societal forces that I think are bad, even evil (which I’m also not going to uncritically put forth!), that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to try to repress those sexual desires. Work with them, figure out how to find pleasure; and if they bother you, confront that, figure out what’s going on, and it’s my (quite uninformed) guess that you’ll have more luck dealing with what bothers you in areas outside of sex first.

(At least that’s my current tentative working hypothesis. I really do not claim to have a well-informed opinion about all of this, and I’m almost positive that there are ways in which I’m being a condescending asshole here. And just typing the words “brain chemistry” above reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a couple of months ago that I should pick up again: she has a much more directly informed opinion about how brain chemistry would affect some of these issues than I do!)

Returning to our specific example: in the grand scheme of things, calling somebody stupid is a relatively mild form of power dynamic; Delany confronts some power dynamics that are a lot worse, and where I’m glad that it’s a black man who is writing about them. The more intense the power dynamics get, the more he goes out of his way to emphasize the boundaries of where they’re acceptable and where they’re not, to emphasize that enjoying something in the context of sex does not in any way mean enjoying something in a different context, and that desiring a label in the context of sex does not mean that that label is either welcome or accurate in other contexts. And even with that, there was one place in the book where I was intensely grateful a certain bit of narration was revealed to be false within the book’s internal context, a bit of internal pornography. Which relates to the distinction I mentioned above between sex acts that you’d enjoy actually doing versus sex acts that you get turned on by reading about them: just as (consensual, always consensual!) interactions during sex are in a different space from interactions in other contexts, so too are explicitly fictional descriptions of behavior different from real-world behavior.

Phew. Quite a book; quite a lot to think about. It certainly hits on my taboos—I finished my most recent reading of the book more than two months ago, and it’s taken me most of that time to accept that, yes, this book really is important enough to my brain that I’m going to write about it even if that means writing about characters who are turned on by eating shit. (And this hesitation isn’t purely academic: one real-life friend had asked about the book a couple of times, and when I finally gave in and started talking about it, got squicked out in quite short order by my description.) And, as is obvious from those last few paragraphs, it hits at issues that I’m still not comfortable thinking about.

But the book has also helped me become surprisingly comfortable with a wide range of scenarios, and did so a way that points uniformly towards acceptance of and glorying in the wonderful variety of human behavior. And, equally important, in a way that paints a wonderfully optimistic picture of opportunities and acceptance that’s out there for you! Delany’s world is a fascinating one, and one that I like more and more as I’m getting to know it better.

Which omission we remedied last month. And: a wonderful movie, as it turns out. (With a lot of very attractive men in it, no surprise there.) And one that is moving in ways I hadn’t expected: I’d forgotten the details of the subplot involving George going blind (and I have a different context for that subplot than I did back in 1994), and Richard Burton’s transition over the course of the movie touched me much more than I’d thought it would.

But, for me, it still comes back to the songs. So:

First and foremost: Pop-A-Boner. I am a sucker for that sort of close harmony, and the lyrics are charming and witty; seeing it doesn’t add too much to listening to it, but the participants are certainly easy on the eyes. I don’t have a lot to say about this song, but it has been and will remain the main reason why I listen to the album as frequently as I do.

The second song that had stuck with me is the Butthole Duet. I can’t find a video of it to embed here, which is very sad: if there’s one thing better than a musical starring Patient Zero and Richard Burton, it’s a song in a musical that’s sung by the assholes of Patient Zero and Richard Burton!

I’d mostly liked the song in the past because I thought that idea was very amusing; musically, it’s fine, but nothing special. (Though the harmonizing in the bit about assholes, phalluses, and patriarchy crumbling is nice.) In the context of the movie, though, it’s quite a bit more poignant than on the CD.

Just listening to the song, you learn that Richard Burton isn’t into anal sex (at least receptive): he wants to be open-minded, but dislikes the idea at a fairly fundamental level, and puts an overly intellectual spin on the situation. Patient Zero, of course, approaches the topic with more enthusiasm and in a much more straightforward manner.

Which is all well and good, but the movie’s framing adds quite a bit to that interpretation. To begin with, before the song starts, Richard Burton shows up in bed covered head to toe in plastic. Which is great for a laugh, but it adds more depth to the scene in a couple of different ways. For one thing, he’s not rejecting the idea of anal sex out of hand: he’s presenting himself as willing to give it a go, he just wants to make sure he’s protected. (And, of course, looking ridiculous and de-eroticizing the situation in the process.) Which leads to the other thing, that there are (at least) two reasons why he’s reluctant: the scene opens up with him not wanting to die from having sex, and it’s really only as we get to the song that he starts to be more honest about his feelings, that he might have other reasons for his misgivings. And even the nature of those misgivings needs exploration: as he sings, “my taboos run very deep”: how much of his misgivings are culturally conditioned taboos versus personal preferences that are inherent in his nature?

So we start from Richard Burton presenting himself as wanting to give it a go but not wanting to die as a result; that facade starts to crumble almost immediately, but picking out what’s really going on in his feelings is hard, he has mental defenses that mean that it’s probably not even particularly clear to himself what’s going on. And, as somebody who overintellectualizes a lot of situations and who started first having sex at a time when AIDS was relatively new and was a death sentence, I can very much sympathize with this: it’s one of the tragedies of AIDS (albeit a small tragedy in the grand scale of that disease) that its presence makes navigating your sexual feelings, your sexual awakening that much harder. The emotional waves that sex is tied up with are bad enough when you’re not used to dealing with them (and if you’re pretty uptight to begin with), and of course non-AIDS diseases are problematic enough, and (switching over to straight sex) pregnancy is staggeringly important; antibiotics and contraception made those manageable, but then AIDS came along.

But even that isn’t the end of the story: just listening to the song misses the framing that the movie provides at the end as well as the beginning. Because Richard Burton really is starting to fall in love with Patient Zero; I’m not sure exactly what the two of them would work out physically, but my guess is that they’d find something that worked for them. Getting Richard Burton’s feelings about sex out on the table is important, but that doesn’t mean that he has to be ruled by his initial fears: talk things out, try things out, and something good will come of it. Again, though: AIDS makes this a lot harder. (Setting aside, of course, the fact that Patient Zero is a ghost who will disappear again soon!)

The last song I want to talk about is the one that plays during the opening, Just Like Sheherazade. Again, pleasant enough to listen to, and I actually didn’t think about it too much while I was watching the movie, either.

In the weeks since then, though, my brain has been coming back to it more and more. Because that song is all about telling stories, and that’s what my brain has been obsessed with over the last year. It first hit me when I was trying to figure out what was going on with my job search; since then, though, I’ve watched my feelings shift in different directions in response to the different stories I’m telling myself, I’ve seen mysterious behaviors on my friends’ parts come into focus once I learn what stories they’re telling themselves, I’ve seen the problems (and the potentially productive clashes!) that arise when different participants in an interaction are telling different stories about a given situation. So yeah, Sheherazade: tell a story.

And, of course, that’s a very powerful theme for a movie about AIDS. Because if you try to pretend that AIDS is simply a disease, that we can understand what’s going on by looking at it through a scientific lens (indeed, if you believe that the notion of a scientific lens is unproblematic in that context), you will be acting willfully blind. (In which light, I suppose it’s no coincidence that the movie has a subplot about going blind.) Because wherever sex and gay people show up, the country’s (I say writing as an American, though of course it’s a Canadian movie) puritanical streak will raise its head; and also wherever sex shows up, desire will start to swamp reason; and AIDS is not just any disease, if we don’t figure out how to cure it or at least control it (which we very much hadn’t back in 1994), lots of people will die, your friends will die, maybe you will die. It’s impossible to think about AIDS without multiple stories playing out in your heads; and you’d be sticking your head in the sand to think that you can do science without being affected by these stories, that (for example) the people participating (or wanting to participate!) in your experimental drug trials don’t have stories that are powerful, that are worthy of respect and admiration, to forget that they’re entrusting their lives and the lives of their friends and lovers to the success of your research.

Which means that, indeed, they may have zero patience for stumbles, for missteps, for prejudice, for greed. But wishful thinking isn’t enough: whether that lack of patience will transform into progress is not so clear. And it’s a mercy to occasionally relieve that lack of patience with a return to the pleasures of bathhouses, bodies, and three-part harmonies.

Music is forcing its way into my life again, and I’m very glad for that. But I keep on looking wistfully at my bookshelf, and asking myself why I’m not spending more time with them. For example, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jane Jacobs recently, and in particular it’s well past time for me to revisit Systems of Survival; or I’ve been talking with a friend of mine recently about Buddhism, thinking it’s time for me to revisit that. (I suspect I’m the only person in my circle of bloggers who studied Pali for a couple of years in college and who has 45 volumes of the Pali Canon sitting on his bookshelf; I’m particularly fond of the elephants on the spines of those books!) It’s not that I don’t read books at all, and in fact sometimes an author will still grab me and I’ll read several of her books in close sequence; but it’s far too common for me to go multiple weeks without finishing a book.

And that’s not good. So I have to make more time to read. Regularly carve out time in the weekends to read; but I should also carve out a weekday evening a week to read too, I think.

That, of course, means that something has to go, especially since I’m spending more time than I had been on music. So, the first step: re-examine my long-term ongoing projects. Do I want to continue studying Japanese, do I want to continue learning guitar? The answer to both of those is yes, so they’re staying.

Do I want to continue to read and write blogs? I certainly want to continue to write; in fact, I’m hoping that I’ll start blogging more about books! I don’t want to stop reading blogs, either, but that’s clearly an area where I can do more pruning, and constrain my blog reading more: I don’t want to have evenings where I start reading blogs, then do a bit of this and a bit of that, and end up feeling unhappy with myself. (I’m totally fine with spending evenings doing bits of this and that if I end up feeling happy with myself, though: sometimes I’m just feeling blah, and should recognize and embrace that.) That alone may actually be enough to help me carve out one evening a week.

Do I want to continue to play video games? That question gave me pause, but I think ultimately the answer there is a clear yes: Christopher Hyde I am not. But, as with reading blogs, I should be more aware of what I’m playing. It’s time to stop playing games just because I feel that I should, and instead to play games that I feel are calling to my soul in some way. So fewer sequels, more returning to old favorites (I just got a refurbished Dreamcast: here I come, Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Shenmue, and of course the PS3 Ico and Shadow of the Colossus remakes), and when considering new games, I’ll lean towards games that I hope will speak to something deeper within myself (Child of Eden, presumably preceded by Rez HD; Dragon Age 2). (Actually, if my brain is telling me to spend more time on music and on Buddhism, then Child of Eden is probably a rather good fit!) It’ll be a while before I start any games, though: I imagine I have at least another year of Rock Band 3 in front of me, Ni No Kuni DS will probably take me a couple more months, and one non-Rock Band game at a time is my limit.

And then there’s the possibility of new creative projects forcing themselves upon my brain. Fortunately, right now I’m at a bit of lull in terms of feeling that I need to program something at home (doubtless helped by the fact that programming at work is rather interesting); if that changes, though, I’ll embrace it and re-evaluate. Hmm, thinking about games, I wish I were spending more time playing board games, too; and I should be spending more time with non-family members outside of work. In college, I watched movies a fair amount; I miss that, but I’m comfortable enough having that stay by the wayside for the time being.

So: a balancing act. But it always is, and it always comes down to: what is my soul telling me to do? Right now, my soul is telling me to draw strength from friends, and that the friends I’ve been neglecting the most are books.

It took me quite some time to get around to writing the post, however; and, when I started typing, I realized why. To dig into Apple’s place in my psyche, I had to explain my history with Apple products, and indeed with computers in general. And, as it turns out, that takes a while. The result is a post where the tail is rather wagging the dog; interesting to me, at least, but one that could most charitably be described as ungainly. (Feel free to skip ahead to the Apple bits.)

At any rate: the computers I have owned, and why I am fascinated with Apple.

Prehistory

My parents bought us an Apple ][+ in May 1982; I was in fifth grade at the time. That was the only computer we had at home through at least 1989, when I went off to college (my brother got a computer when he went to college a few years earlier); hard to imagine these days. I'm not sure when my parents got a second computer, and I know they continued using the Apple ][+ for several years after I left home, at the very least to run a program they wrote to help manage their finances.

I programmed some on that Apple ][+ (the high point being a text adventure that I wrote), but my memory is that I didn't program particularly seriously on it. I used it to write papers (and for some other writing projects, I went through a phase when I wrote short stories and a novella). And I played quite a few games on it, high points being various Infocom games and the first four Ultima games, but I also think fondly of Robot Odyssey, Le Prisonnier, Lode Runner, and Wizardry.

In 1987 (my junior year of high school) I started hanging out more at Oberlin College, and I spent quite a bit of time in the various computer clusters in the school library. I got to be a rather fluent VAX/VMS user, and (presumably through some of the math courses I was taking?) started hanging out with some computer science majors. They got me interested in learning to program in C and Scheme, and in the 1988–1989 school year I started using Unix more. I also remember helping one of them install GNU Emacs on that VMS cluster. (At the time, the computer science’s Unix cluster actually had Gosmacs installed instead of (or at least in preference to?) GNU Emacs.)

Oberlin College could send e-mail to other institutions via Bitnet, and had a DECnet connection with a half-dozen or so other colleges. (DECnet was pretty cool.) It also had Usenet feeds. It was not yet on any of the TCP/IP-based networks that became the internet.

College

When I went off to college in the fall of 1989, my parents brought me a Macintosh SE/30; I used it to write papers in non-technical subjects, play games, and do some amount of programming. (I wrote my papers on technical subjects in LaTeX; I’m honestly not sure whether I mostly typed those on my Mac or on one of the clusters mentioned below.) Continuing my habits from the last two years of high school, however, I spent much much more time on the various computer clusters around the college. I begged an account on the math department’s Sun workstation cluster, though the sysadmin and I had an iffy enough relationship that I didn’t spend very much time there. I begged an account on the computer science department’s Sun workstation cluster as well, where I spent more time. (There were probably Ultrix machines in that cluster, too?) And I got a part time sysadmin helper job on the general school cluster. (Mostly Ultrix machines, initially with dumb terminals but X terminals showed up fairly soon.)

I probably spent most of my time on the general school cluster: programming, playing around, and doing system administration work. Coming out of that, I was much more comfortable on Unix than in any other computing environment, and had installed various bits of free software (mostly GNU tools of various sorts) over and over again. I also had a friend from Oberlin who was then working at the Free Software Foundation, so I was getting a strong free software philosophical dose from him as well.

I took a couple of computer science courses (an intro theory course, a compilers course), but not many: mostly because I could learn how to program computers just fine on my own, partly because I had enough other interests competing for my course time. Also, at that time Harvard’s computer science department didn’t have the buzz that I’d gotten from Oberlin. (Though there were students and faculty members that I learned a lot from, don’t get me wrong.) I was into programming languages and compilers at the time: I did some sort of undergrad research project on compilers, I was a course assistant for a few courses on programming languages and compilers, and I spent three out of my four summers during that period doing programming-related work. (One summer at MITRE, one at DEC, one being a course assistant at Boston College; the fourth summer was spent at a math research program whose main benefit was that I became a not-hopelessly-incompetent cook.)

During this period, I had access to TCP/IP-based networks: ARPAnet had evolved into NSFnet, with the internet coming. The web poked its head out right at the end of this period, but it certainly wasn’t clear to me that it was anything more than a peer to the various other network protocol that were floating around at the time.

Life as a Mathematician

Then, after a year’s interlude, I went to math grad school in 1994. I still had my old Mac, Jordan bought a new Mac (that I played Marathon on), Liesl bought a 486 machine running Windows 3.1 (I played Myst, System Shock, and Dark Forces on that), and at some point I was given an X terminal that I could use at home. Most of my computer time was spent on the math department machines, though; and I essentially wasn’t programming at all during this time period. Also, a friend of mine gave me an NES, which started me on a spiral of depravity that I still haven’t emerged from. (One of the first things I did after getting my postdoc acceptance letter was to get a Nintendo 64; good thing my thesis was almost completely written by then…) Actually, though, my dominant leisure activity during that time period was reading books, I averaged more than a book a day over the course of grad school.

I can’t remember if I moved my old (9 years old at the time!) Mac with me when we went to Stanford in 1998; we moved Liesl’s computer, but I’m not sure if we ever turned it on. In general, I did my computing on the machine in my office at the math department; I can’t remember its specs (though I believe it had 4 GB of hard drive space?), but it was running an early Red Hat Linux version. I still wasn’t programming significant amounts: I was busy being a mathematician and a parent (Miranda was born in 1999), trying to figure out how to teach well, and playing video games, doing the latter almost exclusively on consoles instead of computers.

Returning to the Apple theme that triggered this post: during this period, my interest in Apple was quite low. I had a Mac, but barely used it; I certainly wasn’t going to use Windows machines, but really my focus was on Unix. (So, in terms of recent computing deaths, Dennis Ritchie’s is a lot more relevant.) I was at least partly anti-Apple at the time: the Free Software Foundation and the League for Programming Freedom had boycotted Apple because of their use of user interface patents, and that had an effect on me.

Transitioning

In 2002, academia and I came to a mutual decision that we weren’t as good a fit as I had thought. Fortunately, the Stanford math department was willing to let me hang around for another year; so I spent half my time that year teaching calculus and half my time brushing up my programming skills. I learned C++ and Java (object-oriented programming was far from dominant when I was an undergraduate), and contributed a fair number of patches to GDB.

It also became clear that I wouldn’t be able to depend on my employer to provide my computing resources; so I bought domains to use for my various internet presences, and, for the first time since 1989 (13 years!), acquired a new computer. It was a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop, a behemoth that was barely portable (and that, fortunately, I rarely needed to carry anywhere); we set it up to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and I spent the vast majority of the time on the Linux side.

Also, befitting my academic nature, I started reading books and going to talks. A lot of the books that I read were C++-specific (and I learned a lot from them, C++ is an extremely interesting language); in terms of non-language-specific books, the refactoring book had a big impact. The talk that had the most impact on me was one that a couple of researchers in a local corporate think-tank (?) gave about their experiences with something called “eXtreme Programming”; that was my first exposure to Agile software development.

The GDB work led to consulting work at a startup called Kealia, and I started working there full-time when I left academia in the summer of 2003. We got acquired by Sun a year later; soon after the acquisition, I became a manager, albeit a manager who spent a lot of time programming.

Agile

I spent a lot of time trying to understand Agile software development over the next five or seven years. At first, I was just trying to do this on a personal level, practicing refactoring and trying out test-driven development. Kealia’s legacy code provided some interesting challenges on the former front; the company also already had a bit of a testing culture when I showed up, and we experimented with going farther in that direction. And becoming a manager got me interested in other aspects of Agile: the more explicitly people-focused aspects, the planning aspects. And, as part of planning, the idea that programmers don’t make all of the design decisions (which was quite a change from working on GDB!): other people have a better idea of what the end users really value, what will work well in their context.

As an academic, I’d been quite ivory tower (at least aside from my interest in teaching); that changed. I was working at a startup which got acquired by a larger company that had suffered a lot over the last few years; part of startup life is trying to figure out how to make your business work, and Sun was trying to figure that out at a larger scale. Sun also put enough resources behind StreamStar (Kealia’s video server project) that we had quite a lot of room to experiment with different business strategies, trying to find one that would stick. (Far too much room: the fact that Sun didn’t cancel StreamStar years before I eventually left was a sign of Sun’s own management problems.)

My boss was a big fan of Clayton Christensen’s disruption theories, and I got to see both sides of the difficulties of disruption first-hand. Sun was a large company that was already far along the path of being disrupted by commodity hardware running Linux, and was trying to figure out how to deal with that; StreamStar was trying to disrupt the existing broadcast television infrastructure, replacing it with IP-based solutions. In neither case did we navigate the difficulties well, but I have quite a bit of sympathy for both sets of difficulties: surviving being disrupted is extremely difficult, and when it comes to broadcast television, you have to deal not only with the existing technological infrastructure but with the existing broadcasters and existing content providers. So it’s not surprising that we failed to disrupt broadcast television delivery, whereas Youtube was much more successful with its end run around the last two issues.

During this time, I won an iPod (one of the hard-drive based models), and a couple of years later, an iPod Nano at company raffles. I wouldn’t have bought the first iPod on my own, but its presence made my jogging a lot more presence; I probably wouldn’t have bought the iPod Nano on my own, but I was quite surprised how much more I liked its small size, the lack of skipping, and the general elegance of its design.

Our Dell laptop died in 2006, and had been showing its age enough by then that I was already planning to replace it. For my own Linux use, we got a Sun Ultra 20; to have a computer that Liesl could use and that I could run iTunes on, I got a MacBook Pro. This was the first model after the Intel transition; I felt more comfortable going back to the Mac instead of having a Windows machine around, and the fact that there was now Unix underneath MacOS was a real bonus. (Incidentally, back in 2003 I’d turned down a job offer working on GDB for Apple: I like Unix and the GNU toolchain, but I wasn’t really interested in specializing in the latter.)

At some point while I was at Sun (probably in 2008), I got an iPod Touch. That was really a revelation to me: it was wonderful having a little computer in my pocket, one that was already fairly versatile and was becoming more so every year; I had Wi-Fi access most of the places I spent time (there was even spotty Wi-Fi available from Google when wandering around Mountain View), but I could tell that having a phone network provide almost constant network access would be so much better.

But more than that: Tweetie made me sit up and take notice. That was the Twitter client that eventually became the first-party Twitter client; and despite running on this quite small device, I far preferred using it to any Twitter interface I had available on computers that didn’t fit in my pocket. That didn’t make much sense to me; clearly there was something going on with design that I didn’t understand and that could make a real difference.

At this time, I was also getting more and more tired with having Unix on my desktop. I love Emacs, but it’s stuck in the stone age in so many ways: what really drove that home was once when I fired it up on a machine where I didn’t have my standard .emacs file and realized that, by default, Emacs put the scroll bars on the left. That may have been a perfectly reasonable decision when it was first made, but it wasn’t any more and hadn’t been for at least a decade; did I really want to be working with tools that were so willfully ignorant about design conventions? GNOME had helped civilize X Windows, but it had only brought the experience up to a minimally acceptable level, and even so there were too many non-GNOME applications around.

Reaching the Present

So, when I started work at Playdom, I asked for a Mac for my work machine: that way I could have a Unix command line and tools combined with a GUI that accepted the idea that design was a virtue. Which the IT department was oddly hostile to: you’d think that a company with a large contingent of graphics artists that deploys software to Unix servers would be a natural fit for Macs, but Playdom had its quirks, and its IT department was definitely one of those quirks.

At around this time we got a second Mac laptop at home, and I got an iPhone. (My first cell phone; I am a luddite at times.) The Ultra 20 died; I decided that I wanted to continue to run a Linux server (e.g. to host this blog), but that I would prefer to interact with it through an ssh connection, so I got a virtual machine at Rackspace. Also, I was getting older, and carrying around a laptop during GDC 2010 put a surprising strain on my back; the iPad had been announced, so I decided I’d get one the next time I went to a conference. Which happened sooner than I expected, since I decided to go to GLS later that spring.

My back thanked me for the iPad purchase; but my psyche thanked me as well, to a surprising extent. I found that I preferred reading e-mail on the iPad to reading e-mail in a web browser, and that I far far preferred reading blogs in Reeder than through Google Reader’s web interface, whether I used the latter to go to the blogs’ web pages or stuck with the RSS feed. In both cases, the iPad acted like a wonderfully adaptable piece of paper: the words I wanted were right there, with enough style to be pleasant (unlike the Google Reader web interface) but without any surrounding crap (unlike blogs’ web pages). Having a screen that was much smaller than computer monitors that I was used to, and that was in portrait mode instead of landscape mode, turned out to be excellent for letting me focus on what I was reading. (As it turned out, I even slightly prefer reading blogs through Reeder on my iPhone over reading them through a web interface on a standard computer, despite the rather-too-small size of the former’s screen.)

In early 2011, one of our laptops died; rather than replace it with another laptop, we got an iMac and a second iPad. Our current technology roster is an iMac and a MacBook (one of the white plastic ones); two iPads (one from each generation); three iPhones (one from each of the last three generations, though the oldest one is being used by Miranda as an iPod Touch instead of as a phone); a virtual machine located elsewhere running Linux; and half a dozen game consoles. (My rate of technology purchases has increased enormously since 1998.) Also in 2011, I started working at Sumo Logic; as is typical in startups around here (at least judging from the ones I’ve interviewed at), it’s largely a Mac shop for development (with deployment happening on Linux virtual machines), and my coworkers generally prefer various Apple products for personal use, though there’s more variation on the personal side.

So: that’s the computers and other technology that I’ve used over the course of my life. Apple played a large role when I was young and more recently, but in the middle there was a long phase where my norm was Unix + GNU toolchain, with a strong free software ethos. Why did I shift out of that, what’s behind my recent fascination with Apple’s products and, increasingly, Apple as a company?

Habitable Software

The first is the concept of “habitable software”. I talked about this last year: the idea is that there is software that my brain shies away from using, and there’s software that I actively look forward to using, where the thought of using it relaxes me or brings a smile to my face.

I actually think that console gaming gave me my first nudge in this direction. You stick the cartridge into the machine, you pick up a controller with a relatively constrained set of inputs, you turn on the machine, and it just works. Note too that a console controller, unlike a mouse and a keyboard, is explicitly designed for the task at hand: yes, gamepads may have a few too many or too few buttons and sticks for a given game, but at least it’s focused on the domain of playing games. (Hmm, maybe the controller/game match is why I think back on text adventures with so much fondness?) I keep on installing Windows on machines with the thought that I’ll finally play the many important PC games that are missing from my background; and I keep on deciding that no, I really don’t want to put up with the crap that PC gaming makes you deal with.

But shifting from X Windows back to the Mac also gave me a huge shove towards being sensitive to habitable software; and going from the Mac to iPhone/iPad software like Tweetie and Reeder was, in its own way, just as large a leap. Every time I use X, I find something that feels wrong; a Mac feels neutral, but I don’t generally look forward to turning it on; Tweetie and Reeder make me actively happy. It’s not just software that I’m learning from, either: I was surprised how much happier I was with the iPod Nano because of its small size, light weight, pleasant screen, and lack of skipping.

The Unix command line also makes me actively happy. It’s wonderfully coherent; for certain tasks related to writing and, especially, deploying software, it’s just what I want, I love the interface that it presents to me. So it’s no coincidence that I do my programming on machines where a Unix terminal window is one key combination away, and that I use virtual machines running Linux to deploy software on: I feel completely at home in those contexts when working on those tasks.

Designing Software

Habitability is how I like to express the importance of design in software to me as a user. But I’m a programmer as well, so I see design from that side as well.

When I was younger, I spent much of my programming time concerned with tools for programmers: thinking about programming languages and compilers, working on GDB. In those contexts, I didn’t have to think too hard about design: I was an acceptable proxy for the end user for the software, so if something felt good for me, then that was good enough.

That’s a relatively unusual subset of software, however; as I started to work about other kinds of products, I realized that my design instincts wouldn’t do a very good job. And, at the same time, I got interested in Agile: and one of Agile’s main tenets is that design concerns (personified as the “Customer”) are paramount when deciding what to work on. Not that the technical details aren’t important as well—you get great benefits from keeping your code flexible and well-architected—but ultimately it’s not programmers’ jobs to decide what’s important to present to the users.

Even though it carves out a space where design can happen, Agile isn’t actually very good at giving you advice at how to design well: specific recommendations are much more focused on the programming side of things (e.g. refactoring, test-driven development) or the programming/design interface (estimating, iterating) than on the design side of things. Also, my talents and instincts are much stronger on programming than on design: I still have a lot of room for improvement, but I’ve got some understanding of what’s involved in writing code that’s clean and functional from a technical point of view, whereas I have much less understanding of what’s involved in developing a product that people are actively happy to use.

And, to produce really great products, I’m not convinced by Agile’s engineering/customer representative split. The Lean concept of a Chief Engineer who’s immersed in both worlds seems much more powerful to me, and I see around me wonderful pieces of software written by single individuals, or startups (including Sumo Logic!) run by people with both a vision for what they want to produce and the technical chops to help bring that into existence.

Apple can probably be argued as providing evidence on either side of the argument about that split, but there are clearly individuals who made a huge difference in its products. Apple also points out how ludicrous it is to label the designer as the “Customer” if you really want to produce something new and great, and at the limits of the analytics-focused mindset that I saw so much of at Playdom; in general, Apple’s approach to iteration seems interestingly different from yet related to Agile norms. And their systems approach gives Apple many more design knobs to turn than they would if they were exclusively a software company. (Or exclusively a hardware company, of course.)

Business Success

Back in my academic days, I didn’t care about practical applications of my research. When I started working for startups, though, that changed: if you don’t have your eyes on how you’re going to make money out of your startup, you’re doing the wrong thing. (Not that startups don’t have a heavy dose of ego satisfaction in them, of scratching your own itch.)

Once I started paying more attention to making money, it turns out to be totally fascinating: if you like complex systems, capitalism is full of them. Just figuring out cash flow: where money is coming in, where money is going out, the difference between those two in quantity and in in time. So many possibilities there!

Apple’s business success over the last decade is staggering, of course. But they are fascinating far beyond their simple profit figures: the consequences of their systems approach to design, their use of their savings to buy vast quantities of parts from their component vendors (and even to allow those vendors to purchase tooling!), the role of their physical stores, the list goes on and on. There’s still a stereotype of Apple as making overpriced products, but their competitors are finding it very difficult to build products with the hardware quality of the iPad or MacBook Air while maintaining any sort of profit margin at all.

Of course, lots of startups aren’t focused on being profitable: Silicon Valley is full of company that are trying to get eyeballs, hoping that profitability will come somehow, and perfectly happy to sell the company to somebody else who can worry about that problem. We see echoes of this in the Android / iPhone fight, and these days I’m generally more interested in making money than having users without a good business model; but the iPod shows that you don’t always have to compromise, that you can win on both fronts.

Disruption

I mentioned Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory above: living in Silicon Valley, there’s no end of startups trying to remake an industry, no end of once dominant companies that stumbled, got bought, died.

Apple looked like it was following that latter trajectory; it pulled out of its decline like no other company. And did so in a very interesting way: not only did it disrupt other industries, it also disrupted itself, with the iPhone cannibalizing iPod sales and with the iPad cannibalizing laptop sales. This is extremely difficult to do: existing successes almost always lead to institutional antibodies that attack new products, leaving that success to newcomers.

Over the last decade, we’ve all become aware of disruption; the companies that can figure out how to repeatedly harness the powers of disruption will be the ones that flourish (the ones that survive at all!) over the next few decades. They will have to learn from Apple. And if I’m going to continue to build a career working at exciting companies, I’m going to want to learn from Apple, too, to help me figure out what sorts of qualities to look for the next time I’m on the job market, to pick employers that will disrupt successfully!

Repeatable Creativity

Disruption aside, though, there’s something amazing about Apple’s run of products over the last decade: one interestingly new product after another. I wish I knew how they did that.

It’s easy to ascribe this to a solo genius theory; but, while I don’t want to minimize Steve Jobs’s contributions, I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here. Pixar is another relevant datum: they’ve also managed to be consistently creative, and they continued to do that after Jobs sold the company to Disney. Perhaps because of the domain, people don’t credit Jobs with the same influence on Pixar’s repeated creative success as they do with Jobs; but, to me, the two companies suggest that Jobs has learned something about helping groups to innovate repeatably in a way that goes well beyond his personal contributions.

Over the last couple of years, stories have come out about some sort of Apple University, which seems to be trying to systematize those ideas. This reminds me of Toyota’s conscious efforts to improve themselves as a learning company; Apple is, sadly, much more secretive than Toyota, but I hope more of Apple’s methods will become public over the next decade. And, of course, I hope that Apple will be able to continue to innovate over the next decade, that their innovation really is due in part to a systematizable process.

Bad Apple

During the mid-90′s, I was down on Apple. I hoped that had gone away with the new decade, however: their user interface patents had gone away, and they were active open source contributors, though that clearly wasn’t the company’s main focus.

Unfortunately, those problems have come back in spades. By far the one that I find most distasteful is their aggressive use of patents: I think software patents are bad for the industry, bad for the world, and while I’m more and more bored by other companies that seem to largely be trying to produce knockoffs of Apple’s products, I very much support allowing those companies to do so.

Apple’s recent systems are also much more closed than computing platforms I’d used before then. I would expect that to bother me; for whatever reason, though, it actually doesn’t particularly. Certainly it would if I didn’t have ample access to other computing platforms, or if the tools to develop for iOS platforms weren’t so readily available; and while Apple teeters on the edge of behaving in a manner I find unacceptable in their application approval process, for whatever reason I generally think they’re okay. (I’m actually more worried about Amazon’s behavior in that regard.)

I’m being ungenerous in saying this, but: these days, when I read Richard Stallman complaining about Apple’s closed systems, part of my brain interprets that as RMS wanting it not to be his fault if other people don’t have software they want to use: RMS has made an open system, it’s other people’s fault if they don’t take advantage of that. These open systems are, in all serious, a great good: but actually having good software on your computer is also worthy, and having software that’s a joy to use is a great good. It’s fine if having well-crafted software for the non-programming public isn’t RMS’s concern, there’s no reason why it should be; but I see him as a single-issue voter whose issue is no longer dominant to me, and who is willfully blind to other issues that are important to me.

To those of you who have read this far: I salute you. And to those of you who don’t like Apple’s products, who don’t care about what Apple has done as a company: that’s great, there’s no reason why others’ interests should be my own. And there’s no question that company has flaws, does things I really don’t like. But I’m fascinated for many reasons by what Apple has done over the last decade, and I fully expect to be trying to sort out the implications for much of the next decade.

Some Jobs-related posts that I particularly enjoyed:

• John Shook asking Was Steve Lean?
• Another lean-focused post, this time from Evolving Excellence
• Horace Dediu on what Steve Jobs didn’t do.
• A podcast reminiscence from John Siracusa.

Even at the end, he was the sweetest person I’ve ever known. It’s been wonderful being with him over the last seventeen years, seeing what changed and what stayed the same. When we were living in Somerville, he was always very mere; and throughout their shared life he was always quite happy with Yosha being the dominant dog in that relationship. But when we moved out here and Miranda was born, Zippy got another purpose in life, and developed a little more backbone: it was his job to help raise the new puppy.

Yosha’s death was very hard on Zippy for a couple of months: Yosha was the love of his life, and Zippy had never spent more than a few hours in a row apart from Yosha since he was three months old. (And he would go for months, maybe years, without even that happening.) So he spent a lot of time hiding away in the darkest caves that he could find: underneath sofas had always been one of his favorite places to spend time, but he got more creative for a little while. Fortunately, as he got older, he also got tougher: when he was younger, the slightest twinge would set him yowling, asking to be taken to the vet, but when his body really started to go wrong, he held up amazingly well. He was blind and mostly deaf for the last couple of years, and the Cushing’s meant that he wasn’t very steady on his back limbs and that he was achy, but he stayed in remarkably good spirits the whole time.

Liesl found a mat that helped Zippy stand up in the kitchen; that made a big difference. And glucosamine kept the worst of his achiness under control. Over the last four or so months I’ve only slept through the night a couple of times, because he would wake me up with aches and/or a need to pee, but it was manageable. He wasn’t moving a lot, mostly wanting to cuddle with us or hang out in known spots (or to eat human food, which he could do a lot more after Yosha died), but he was happy.

But those problems also made it clear that the end was approaching; and now it has come. He will be missed very much, but it was clearly the right decision. And I’m sure that we’ll get other dogs in the future, but not just yet: I’d like to remind myself what life is like without having to always make sure that we’ll be home at appropriate times to look after dogs, so we can find out what parts of that life we want to make sure to preserve. And when we do get new dogs, we’ll be very lucky if they’re as wonderful as Yosha and Zippy were.

The contents would probably fit in fine on Tumblr, but I decided not to go that route, for better or for worse. For one thing, all things being equal I’d rather have my writings show up on platforms that I control; for another thing, it lets me experiment with form more than I could otherwise. The posts on the fragments blog are extremely bare, completely devoid of bloggy apparatus such as links (not even links to the next/previous posts) and comments; I’m curious to see what effect those formal concerns will have on the content. It lends itself to a feeling of isolation, reinforcing a certain morose nature of the posts there; I’m okay with that for now.

The software allows me to assemble these fragments into “mosaics”: those mosaics consist of chains of fragments, with optional nesting. Part of my motivation there comes from my fascination with sutras and commentary: the form supports that, though it supports other compound forms as well. To be honest, I’m not at all sure how often I’ll write mosaics: if my brain is in a mode where it’s thinking about writing content of that length, I may find that my brain is really composing a post for this blog instead. We’ll see; the possibility is there.

Right now, it exists only as RSS feeds: one for fragments and one for mosaics. (Both feeds contain the full text for the posts in question, so there’s very little reason to actually go to the website.) You can go to the top level page for the site and the index pages for fragments and mosaics, but you’ll currently get a blank page if you do any of those. I plan to fix that at some point over the next month or so, but doing so isn’t a top priority for me. (And I’m not at all sure what those aggregating pages should look like in the first place.) I’d also like to improve the presentation of fragments and mosaics on the iPad and (especially) the iPhone; doing that is a slightly higher priority.

As is probably clear from the above, I rolled the software for the new blog myself. It’s all quite straightforward, using a markdown-to-HTML converter plus a bit of Ruby glue. (I used atom-tools to generate the RSS feeds.) It uses plain text files as the source, and spits out flat files that are served up by Apache: no databases, no run-time web page generation. I imagine I’ll throw it up on github once I’ve teased apart the presentation parts from the text for the fragments themselves. Though I’m also not entirely sure what I’ll get out of doing that: I doubt anybody else will ever want to use the software, and it’s not particularly representative of my programming style, in particular containing rather fewer tests than I normally write. It’s certainly nice how easy it is to roll your own blog these days, it’s just a few hundred lines of code in total if you don’t count the libraries that I’m depending on.

In general, I expect that the audience for these fragments will be quite small: certainly I doubt that most people who read this blog will find anything interesting there, and I’m not committing to writing there long-term at all. It’s probably only for people who know me personally, and not even for most of them; there’s a pretty good chance, in fact, that I’m the only audience member for the fragments! If interesting thoughts come out of my writings there, those thoughts will make their way over here.

I’ll use this as an excuse to write down all the places where you can find me. Besides this main blog and the new one, other places where I write are:

• Twitter.
• My linkblog.
• My gaming diary.

You can also find me online playing games and talking about games on Thursday evenings with the Video Games and Human Values Initiative. (Which I highly recommend, the conversation over the last few months has been great.) I’m malvasia bianca on Xbox Live and “davidcarlton” on Game Center; I have PSN and Steam accounts, but never use them, so I’m not even going to go to the effort of looking up what the account names are. And I have accounts on Facebook and Google+, though the content there is a subset of the above, so there’s no particular reason to link to me on either of those networks. (In particular, my Facebook wall consist entirely of forwarded Twitter posts and links to the posts on my various blogs.) If you’re particularly obsessed with the minutia of my life, you can look at the list of games I’m playing (all of which eventually get mentioned on this blog anyways) and books I’m reading, but I recommend seeking professional help instead of going that far.

Neither of those groupings lasted, however: Jordan and I took academic jobs on the opposite side of the country when we got our Ph.D.s, and the Garcia-Tobars moved to Crete. Both friendships are going strong—Jordan visits the Bay Area frequently for conferences and knows that we’ll happily drive over to pick him up for dinner on a moment’s notice, and the Garcia-Tobars recently moved back to the Bay Area with Miranda and Vi picking back up like they hadn’t been apart. (Skype video calls are great for staying in touch if you’re half the world apart from each other!) But it’s not the same as having them be right there without even thinking about it.

Which isn’t to say that we don’t have lots of good friends, and lots of good friends living nearby! I don’t make friends particularly easily, but we’ve been living out here for 13 years now, and there are several people we’ve met in the interim that we quite enjoy spending time with, that we care quite a lot about. (And, for that matter, several friends from our prior lives who have moved out here, too.) Also, so much of my life for the last several years has been spent online that many of the people I feel most drawn to live somewhere else entirely: there are certainly several people that I really wish I lived closer to so I could just spend time with them making dinner and chatting.

At any rate: if we wanted to spend every weekend hanging out with friends, we could. The thing is, though, we don’t do that. Not that we’re recluses by any means (though that tendency is pretty strong in me!), but there’s effort involved. We have to make plans, to pick times in advance, to compare calendars, to plan a meal for everybody, to (generally) pick a game to play to provide a social context. I enjoy the results, but it’s an active choice, an active effort. And it lacks the casual intimacy that we had when we were living with Jordan: we’d know we’d see each other on a regular basis, we’d cook food together, we’d hang out together and chat about what was on our minds (and we wouldn’t worry about not seeing each other if we were busy for a few days!), our lives would permeate in ways that only happen to me with Liesl and Miranda these days.

There are, of course, people outside the family that I see on a regular basis without having to make an effort, namely my coworkers. And I’ve been very fortunate in where I’ve worked since moving out here: I’ve always had coworkers that I’ve quite enjoyed spending time with. In general, though, work is work and home is home, and while sometimes I do socialize with coworkers at home, contact at work doesn’t generally translate into a blurring of boundaries.

Part of that is an explicit strategic decision on my part. Startup culture generally involves spending quite a lot of time at work, including during activities that would normally be family / social occasions. (Meals in particular.) The problem that I have with that is that it doesn’t augment my family interactions, it instead supplants my family interactions: every dinner I have with my coworkers is a dinner that I’m not having with my family. (Unless, of course, I invite coworkers home, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.) And that is a tradeoff that I refuse to make.

And part of it is my introverted tendencies: too often, given a choice, I’ll eat lunch by myself at my desk rather than with coworkers. I don’t actually consider this a good thing, and I shouldn’t have given into this tendency nearly as often when I was at Sun, or when I was at Playdom. I started getting better about eating communally at Playdom (and playing games over lunch sometimes certainly helped); fortunately, at Sumo, there’s a strong presumption that everybody eats together (and the smaller company size makes a huge difference, it’ll be interesting to see how that changes as the company grows), and that’s helped me be a lot less actively antisocial. (Again, playing games helps; there too, I’m curious to see how that will change as the company grows.)

In general, coworkers within Sumo are surprisingly close to each other, but there are of course stronger and weaker interpersonal ties within the company. I’ve been particularly fascinated recently with one trio of colleagues: the three of them have been quite close for a while, and now the four of us are finding (I think a bit to all of our surprises?) that I seem to fit rather well into that group, too. So the result is that, over the last few weeks, I’ve been spending a lot more time with them than I had been doing with friends and coworkers, with much more of an undercurrent of an assumption of togetherness than I’m used to over the last several years.

I’m still trying to navigate this, and figure out what it means to my life. Just considering the four of us: a group of four people has a lot of subsets, and in this particular case I think all but one or two of those subsets has its own distinct character. I’m still the newcomer to the group, and my evenings and weekends are (I think?) significantly more constrained than those of the other three; I very much enjoy hanging out with them at the end of work days (my work days, which don’t always end at the same time as theirs) or in stray bits in the middle, but it’s not exactly clear to me where I should be blurring boundaries in my life to help ease this process.

In particular, one boundary is between them and between my actual family, namely Liesl and Miranda. (And Zippy!) I imagine Liesl and Miranda would get along well with all three of them, but I’ve only tested that so far with one of them; probably I should drag the whole trio home at some point to figure that out. (We’ll all be getting together over Thanksgiving, at least, I’m certainly looking forward to that.) Of course, dragging home three people makes the house rather more crowded than dragging home one person, and who knows how Liesl would feel if I made a habit of that; but it’s something to talk about, not something to shy away from in fear.

So: the groupings that I’m part of are in an abnormal state of flux right now. And maybe the sign that I see this as abnormal is, itself, a bit odd—this kind of give and take would have been completely run-of-the-mill when I was in high school or college, say. But it’s been quite a while since either of those are the case; I guess thinking about this doesn’t make me so odd, then, or at least doesn’t rank too high in the grand scale of my idiosyncrasies? But that’s the short term; my family ties are changing on a longer scale as well.

Because: Miranda turned 12 this year. When she turns 18, she is presumably going to head off to college. I certainly wouldn’t try to predict exactly what the future will bring, but right now it’s a reasonable assumption that we’ve spent two-thirds of the time that we’ll ever spend in close proximity with her.

Which is bittersweet: Miranda is a wonderful, wonderful person, but of course she’s a wonderful person who is going to make her own life, who isn’t going to be tied down to Liesl and me any more than we’re tied down to our own parents. Concretely, what it means is that Liesl and I are going to have space to fill in our lives in the not-too-distant future that we’re not at all used to having to fill now.

All sadness about Miranda’s distantly impending departure aside, I’m not at all worried about this: Liesl and I very much enjoy spending time together, we’re hopelessly in love with each other in ways that don’t depend at all on Miranda’s mediation. And having a bit more freedom to explore that sounds nice!

I am curious what will arise out of that freedom, however. How much will we use that space to deepen ties between the two of us (doing the sorts of things we used to do when we were dating, perhaps?), how much will we use that space to deepen ties with other people, how much will we use that space to figure out more who each of us is as an individual?

And it raises questions that I’m not at all used to thinking about. We’ve been living in Mountain View since before Miranda was born; we like it here a lot, and one of the reasons why I’m glad that I left academia is that it let me set down roots sooner rather than later. Recently, though, I’ve been surprised to realize that my roots here aren’t quite as deeply set as I thought: I imagine that we’ll be here indefinitely, and certainly we’ll be here for as long as Miranda is living with us, but there are other cities that I miss, and for that matter I miss the idea of big city life at all to some extent. And there is one particular luminous city that has its hooks in my brain to an extent that I should probably confront at some point; it’s a city that Liesl enjoys visiting but doesn’t feel the same visceral pull towards that I do, which makes exploring that particular attraction a bit more, uh, interesting? than it would otherwise be. Also, as I said above: some of the people I’ve felt closest over the last few years are people I largely know electronically, which raises another set of possible tensions to explore.

A long way off, and I’m certainly not spending too much time thinking about any of the details of how our life will change once Miranda is gone. Liesl and I have done a very good job of constructing our life together so far, and whatever happens in the future will be something that I’ll welcome with open arms. Everything flows, nobody steps into the same river twice; but those rivers have their own coherence, are networks with their own wonderful strength and power.