A Deadly Education

Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education is the reasonable, correct, logical sort of magical boarding school novel, which has considered the implications of magic, and childhood development, and boarding schools, and societal systems, and wants to lure you in to considering these things, too.

The overall premise is this: magic is real, and only some people can use it. (Standard so far.) The use of magic, and even merely the access to magic, draws magical predators, who are varied and horrifying and want to consume magicians --- but of course, adult wizards are in control of their magic and strong and so their creamy, gooey center is well-guarded and hard to predate. Adolescent wizards, though, are just growing in to their magical powers, and so are relatively easier to devour, plus they are not as good at hiding themselves or defending themselves.

Given these stakes, surviving to adulthood is unlikely. So the magical community built a giant fortress-cum-boarding school (located in the UK of course) which is hard (but not impossible) to attack. Unlike the Harry Potter-verse where students are whisked into a world of whimsy when they turn 11, kids in this world are unwillingly teleported at age 11 to inside the school if they are lucky enough to receive a seat. (The unlucky try to survive pubescence outside the school and generally... don't.) The school contains no adults and runs on eldritch machinery, slightly broken and haphazard since it has been impossible to service. Upon graduation, the class of 18-year-olds (who lived through years of attrition-by-monster inside the school) are forced to fight their way out through all the too-big-to-sneak-inside monsters, who have been waiting outside all year to eat them.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of them also don't survive.

But overall, the odds of surviving to adulthood are better (but still horrible) if you attend the school than if you don't.

This was a really great read (I consumed it in one day!), and the slow reveal, through the narrator's sarcasm, of the delicate details of the world was fascinating and terrible. Our narrator is a 17-yo social outcast, trying to keep her head down to avoid the ire of the popular kids but still have enough loose social connections that no one feeds her to a monster in her sleep. This is a boarding school where the usual social pressures and uncomfortable alliances of puberty are writ large: whether you have a buddy to watch your back as you brush your teeth is the difference between life and death. Every day. Every student is stressed and tired (not to mention vitamin-D-deficient and undernourished), and on top of that they are all, continuously, furiously studying magic to try to level up in time to survive. There are the usual dramas (good vs evil magic, disastrous teen flirtation, who sits at which lunch table, rooms and staircases moving around unpredictably) and some completely delightful unexpected ones (the school automagically sets your lessons, so if you get uppity it gives you harder assignments; "no one wants to be in honors classes... the school puts you in them against your will" p. 96)

The writing was great, the characters had depth and were interesting, I was not sure what would happen next, and the twists and turns of the plot felt legitimate and also incredibly catchy. I am still thinking about the choices that were made, and the ones that still remain in the future. As soon as I put the book down --- that last sentence! aaaiiiieee! --- I looked up the release date of the next book. I now impatiently await.

Highly recommended.

This post's theme word is urticaceous (adj), "relating to a nettle; stinging." Immediate identification and distinguishing between lethal and merely dangerous urticaceous growths from the dormitory ceiling is a mandatory survival skill.

Phallacy

Emily Willingham's Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis is not what I expected. Based on the cover art and the subtitle, it seemed packaged as a popular science book, so I thought it would be a little biology, some interesting research anecdotes maybe, and (of course) the mandatory discussion of bedbugs and slugs ("traumatic insemination" is an extremely clickbait-y phrase).

The book did include those things, but they were side notes --- its true focus was humans, and particularly the way that we (esp. in the west) have structured society in general and scientific research in particular to ignore things that are female-affiliated, even when that is an obvious detriment to scientific knowledge and research advancement. Plus there was an always-uncomfortable, but straightforward and unforgiving, broad consideration of toxic masculinity.

I think in retrospect that it's mostly "life lessons" and only sort of tangentially about "the animal penis", especially since the book itself contains so many descriptions of ways that various animals transfer gametes that are not a penis. The tone overall was straightforward but wry and unquestionably a woman's voice: it unflinchingly and repeatedly drew parallels to the animal kingdom and pointed out how hollow and stupid and full of preconceived notions those parallels were. It was sprinkled with absolutely fantastic footnotes and asides. Willingham has a wonderful authorial tone and a gift for introducing neologisms and puns, casually adding references to popular culture and ancient history, and overall just making me wish that I was her friend so we could cackle together.

My notes overall ended up being mostly phrases or sentences that just struck me as awesome:

• simile used when discussing evolution: "You can be as fragile as a dictator's ego and still have attributes that prop you up, keep you alive in the current environment, and lead you to successful reproduction." (p 14)
• "When it comes to evolutionary studies of sex, gender, and genitalia, guess who the "winners" are?* [footnote: *Men. It's men.]" (p 15)
• "In this work, they used what they called "haptics" and every one else calls "dildos"" (p 30)
• "Lest I come across as unamused and far too earnest, I do think that genitalia and fart jokes can be hilarious." (p 46)
• "Frogs collect of an evening round the pond," (p 65)
• "Given that the human penis couldn't stab through a perfectly ripe avocado," (p 77)
• "The genre of "arthropod (and invertebrate) sex films" is small but mighty." (p 77)
• "This is a very fighty kind of bird, considering that they all apparently agree to go condo together." (p 84)
• "Who hasn't needed, at some point, to reach a neighbor with a lengthy protrusible organ, even if it was just spraying them with a water hose? If you're a barnacle, ..." (p 86)
• "[footnote: *The noise that they make is called "orgling."]" (p 106)
• p 132 she discusses her previous teaching and describes herself as showing slides and "intoning" and then says "I was obviously electric in the classroom."
• some great neologisms like "intromittens" (used frequently) and "tuatararium" (a terrarium for tuatara, p 216) which often is accompanied e.g. by "[footnote: *Yes, I made this word up.]"
• on p 288 I was caught off-guard by the phrase "squad goals" used w.r.t. mites
• "got his Twitter account... suspended for violating Twitter rules, which we all know is almost impossible to do if you're a white male." (p 243)
• "Lest I attract unnecessary derision (only necessary derision, please), no, I do not really think that..." (p 257)
• "This particular, not especially long (in words, but oh, the psychic pain lingers) paper uses the word "penis" more than a hundred times and the word "phallus" sixty times." (p 268)

Overall the book was interesting and suggested new ways of considering and engaging with these issues, and I liked it. I probably wouldn't have read it if not for the squid on the cover, though, so I know my own vulnerabilities.

This post's theme word is lepodactylous (adj), "having slender fingers or toes." I will not be able to consider mittens for the lepodactylous without thinking of arachnids.

End-of-year cleaning: podcast subscriptions

It's the end of the calendar year so I'm upping my recurring donations to charities and artists. And suddenly... my hard drive is full? This seems ridiculous because I haven't done anything data-intensive in months.

A short investigation later...

A truly incredible 119G of memory stores unlistened-to podcasts. In a year of actively subscribing and donating to things, this 2020 garbage fire of using my attention and privilege to do better, it is time to unsubscribe from some stuff.

Podcasts from which I'm unsubscribing, sometimes hundreds of episodes behind:

• David Tennant Does a Podcast With...
  David Tennant interviews various guests and makes them say like two sentences and an anecdote for every separate fact he extracted from a whirlwind tour of their Wikipedia/IMDB page. This just never held my attention enough for me to listen to the episodes.
• Dissect
  This is a really fantastic music analysis podcast but it requires a lot of attention and the host's voice and production values just didn't ever push it to the top of my queue, so it has languished for several years. Alas, pruned! I'm still subscribed to three other music analysis podcasts so if some truly incredible song comes along I will hear about it, even in my digital monkish seclusion.
• Jordan, Jesse, GO!
  The original podcast. An extremely good way to feel not-lonely and not-isolated when in grad school abroad, but in the years since it has not held my attention. At one point the hosts themselves called out that they are a stereotype of "two white guys discussing their childhood video games with no particular agenda" and over time I've developed more varied and diverse podcast interests. (Sometimes their guests promoted the guests' podcasts, which I subscribed to and found more interesting.) And I guess I no longer feel America-sick, since I live back here now.
• Social Distance
  The pandemical podcast from The Atlantic. In March was comforting to have a daily podcast of people also worrying and sharing information, then they exhausted the low-hanging fruit of topics and became less interesting and less relevant, then I had enough mental space to do my own research and reading and I haven't listened in several months. (I still read some related columns but they are much faster to get through than the podcast.)
• This American Life
  I found other things more interesting and haven't listened --- there are more than 8G of these episodes alone. I have since heard some spot-on parodies of the tone and style that were so perfect that subsequent listening to the actual show is dimmed in comparison.

Several others are on my watchlist --- doing inventory reminded me of my interest in the podcasts, but I hadn't listened in a long time. If I don't listen to them by the end of December, I'm also going to unsubscribe and delete all those files.

This is what happens when I've already KonMari-ed my excess clothes, books, furniture, childhood memorabilia, shoes, electronics and cables, and piles of miscellaneous cruft. My documents are in organized folders, my photos are sorted, my finances are in order. If I were any more responsible it would ooze out my pores and be even more repellent than my already-achieved levels of disgusting competence. \end{humblebrag}

This post's theme word is autotelic (adj), "having purpose, motivation, or meaning of itself; not driven by external factors." Autotelic cleaning and organizing gets its own chapter in my autobiography, but blogging just gets an incomplete sentence fragment footnote... if I get around to it.

Sabriel

Garth Nix's Sabriel is a YA fantasy novel; it came to me highly recommended so I will summarize reasons why, reading it in 2020 as certainly an adult, I did not like it and don't recommend it. I don't mean to cast aspersions on youthful readers who enjoyed the book, but it has... issues.

Nominally, it is about a teenage girl who has magical gifts that allow her to enter the realm of Death and, variously, make things more permanently dead or bring them sort-of back to life. That's all you need to know.

The book is going through puberty SO HARD RIGHT NOW

This is my conclusion based on the nails-on-blackboard effect of unwelcome pubescent interjections into the otherwise adventure- and magic-based narrative.

We learn that because "there was minimal sex education" and "None of Sabriel's friends had reached puberty before her, so in fear and desperation she had entered Death" (17%) which seems a pretty dire thing to do in lieu of, I don't know, borrowing a book from the library or walking in to town and asking some responsible-looking adults about it. This is a truly horrible fantasy-world characterization of sex education, general education, learning, curiosity, puberty, and how serious necromantic magic is. Every single time that she enters Death it is given the stakes that she might die ("For Sabriel to enter Death seemed madness, temping fate." 66%), so I HOPE there is literally any other recourse to getting information about puberty.

The descriptions of the glaringly obvious romantic interest start with him being discovered, fully nude. The circumcision status of his penis is described; my personal reading notes say "this had better be significant later". (NARRATOR: It was not.) Later we get to hear about how his thighs are so muscled that he cannot put on pants. Even later we are treated to a gratuitous description of his rippling abs --- under his clothes --- during a fight scene.

Then for the rest of the book we just hear about people getting "flushed" and, occasionally, kissing each other on the forehead or sneakily intertwining pinkies to hold hands. It's as if the narration wants to be erotic, but is constrained by the imagination of a not-particularly-well-read 10-year-old. (They do kiss at least one time in order to COUNTERACT THE MOST POWERFUL DEATH-MAGIC THAT EXISTS IN THE WORLD; one teenage kiss is apparently sufficient, suggesting that the true magic is horniness.)

Everyone is constantly running, and extremely exhausted, but somehow manages to run even harder than before

This did not work to heighten the stakes any of the times it was used. It did heighten my irritation. After discovering previously-unbelievable athletic depth after the last handful of times that they were so-exhausted-they-could-run-no-further, why would I now feel any tension at the mention that they are so-exhausted-they-could-run-no-further? If anything, it just alerted me that they would, in fact, be required to run a bit further, because: drama.

Forced bathing scenes

At least twice, we have to read meticulously-detailed descriptions of scenes where Sabriel is forcibly stripped and bathed. This was uncomfortable and served no purpose except to repeatedly detail that it happened --- we don't even get any internal monologue or self-reflection to justify it. Yikes.

Unpalatable writing style

• Every single character was blindingly Obviously Significant to the Plot.
• The bad guy's name is a good guy's name, reversed --- oh, wow, it turns out they are the same person after hundreds of years of sinister magic!
• Sabriel has read the obviously significant Book of the Dead but can't remember pages from it except under duress in situations where suddenly magically remembering a page of a book would solve the problem; this is true even though she is literally carrying the book with her for most of the adventure.
• Putting earrings into already-pierced ears is an action that is described as causing bloody smears all over the ear-region (personal reading note: "not how earrings work").
• The characters, even those whose inner thoughts we got to hear, were extremely boring and flat, with no actual personality. First impressions and stereotypes were 100% accurate.
• There were two consecutive chapters where characters had to narrative-dump the entire plan of Team Evil Kill Everything And Live In Zombieland AND the entire plan to countermand it by Team Good, Chaste, and Hand-Holding. This despite the fact that the entire plot had been signposted SO HARD in every other clue and revelation for the entire book. Youthful readers are smart and I felt condescended-to on behalf of literate preteens everywhere.

At one point during some completely unjustified anger at the father she has literally spent 70% of the book questing to rescue, we read "He hardly seemed to notice her, except as a repository for numerous revelations and as an agent to deal with [Bad Guy]." (73%) My personal notes read: "I feel same." It was just not possible to start caring about any of the characters, or the stakes, or even whether it was an interesting set-up.

Maybe YA books are not for me

To be clear, I abandoned this book with maybe 10% left so I cannot tell you if it has an incredible conclusion that makes it all worthwhile. (The Wikipedia plot summary indicates: it does not. She's not allowed to die for narrative reasons!?!? Argh.)

Also, though: the world is teetering in such a fragile way... the destruction of ancient magical contracts is described as releasing so much uncontrollable magic that everyone will die and Zombies Will Rule Forever. So it's not clear how the ancient magical contracts got established in the first place, since the baseline level of magic is constant. This is the most charitable review I could give this book: the worldbuilding made no sense (and everything else about it was terrible, shallow, and bad). The conclusion seems to be: follow the rules that adults give you, do the work they assign, don't ask questions, don't think independently, don't make any choices, and despite getting stellar grades at expensive boarding school, you will still be atrociously bad at everything, but: shrug. You get to take baths and sometimes hold hands with a boy!

This post's theme word is verbigerate (v intr), "to obsessively repeat meaningless words and phrases." The word "charter" is verbigerated so often that it quickly reached semantic satiation.

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi is a novel in the form of a series of journal entries; the character who is writing is, by turns, unreliable, forgetful, and unclear. But because the novel would truly suffer from continuous vague recollections, he also has perfect memory for dialog and for visual descriptions of scenery and surroundings. Does this seem contradictory? Yes, but lucky for us, it doesn't matter because nothing in this book particularly matters.

The novel takes place inside a giant House --- a truly enormous House --- a possibly endless House, consisting of a series of marble-lined, colonnaded halls, vestibules, staircases, and passages. While the narrator uses the word "House", readers and other incidental characters come to understand the series of rooms as a labyrinth: not connected in any predictable way, challenging to navigate, and full of distracting detail. There is no obvious entry or exit point, though the action is centered around a vestibule (also the origin point whence the narrator indexes all other rooms). The narrator is vague on details that seem significant (how does he remember navigation directions perfectly when others get so easily lost?) and incredibly specific on details that no one else cares about (how many daily-use goods will he fashion from "fish leather", where is the best room to go bird-watching from, what is the Platonic Ideal Good Action for him to take in any situation). He confusingly both denies the existence of a world outside the building AND knows lots of words that refer to things that exist in our world, but not in the House.

This sounds mysterious, and it is. Clarke is a good writer and this book has many excellent moments --- e.g. the wink to the reader on p. 60,

I realised that the search for the Knowledge had encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if we ever discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.

This was unfortunately prescient, as the cleverness of presenting the core labyrinth/mysteri as "a text to be interpreted" was excellent, but indeed once the puzzle's answer was revealed, it was not very satisfying to consider the continuation of any part of the story or setting.

The cover blurbs portray the book as a sparkling gem of prose, an all-absorbing world full of beauty that will irresistibly entice the reader, and a fascinating puzzle. I found the book to be well-written, but describing things as irresistibly beautiful and actually invoking the impression that they are beautiful are two different things. The book does a lot of telling (repeatedly, "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable") and not a lot of showing; mostly we come to understand, gradually, that the narrator's seeming-unreliability all has completely predictable causes, and actually that everything he reports is true. All mysteries are solved, every single clue that I noted was tied up neatly in the most obvious conclusion, there were zero twists and few reveals, no characters had any subterfuge or depth. Everyone was exactly as they seemed on the surface.

And finally, my observation of several books I've read recently: I get the impression that the book's conclusion was written under duress, with the publisher demanding "just finish the book and turn it in!", and not given any time to develop into something interesting or satisfying. The book definitely ends, and that is what can be said about it: in the last page there is a feeble grasp at Greater Meaning which falls completely flat and ends the book on a gaspingly sour note.

My recommendation: if you want an atmospheric book about a mysterious, endless house, read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. If you want a book told by an unreliable narrator, then I strongly recommend Tamsyn Muir's recent release Harrow the Ninth (and its preceding book, Gideon the Ninth). If you want a book that explores, in a fun novelistic way, the boundaries of human knowledge and the notion that modern scientific rationality has cut us off from access to certain domains of knowledge and maybe even certain actions and physically real spaces, then I recommend Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland's The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (which also includes an improvised modern Viking saga!). And if you want an excellent book written by Susanna Clarke, read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

This post's theme word is heterography (n), "a spelling different from the one currently in use." The vaguely timeless ambience would have been more interesting with heterography.

Quote board, fall 2020

Inexplicably, people keep talking around me and my brain keeps latching on to the strange ways they arrange words and ideas.

K: "96% of your quarantine room capacity is available."
Z: "Book now and save!"

(assorted chorus of voices): "Did you get the spoiler for the back to cut down on air resistance? can it pop wheelies? how much does that keyboard bench?"

K: "You're getting feature requests from a feral cat?"
Z: "Yeah."

Z: "But your parents aren't there, right? As far as raucous house parties go, feeding your dog bacon to get her to like you is, like... fine."

Z: "Our hot take is that you need to just lubricate the freshmen so they have snail trails and can't actually get close to each other, they just slide off... we want to make McGill Walk into a slip'n'slide."

K: "I'm not a colonizer."
F: "It's widely regarded as a mistake."

R: "I once realized I was a WASP and was shocked."

F: "When Lenin was young and the revolution was strong, THAT would be the way to take power."

Q: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

F: "Sometimes it's a conjunctive AND and sometimes it's a disjunctive AND."

F: "It's the prosperity gospel of tenure lines."

D: "Tiny houses intended for birds: very cute. It is a truth universally acknowledged."

K: "Have you tuned the wheelbarrow?"
L: "I've been trying to hit it with a hammer. I'll post it on YouTube."

F: "I've been appreciative from the beginning. And I'm waiting to receive one more... make it blue to match my eyes."

? (from a 66-person video call): "That is a way not to have a coup: you think you're on private chat but you broadcast to the entire school."

? (on 142-person call): "I look forward to meeting some of you in person one day."

L: "I don't exactly understand the science of Wifi --- I know it's little elves that fly through the air and whisper the voices of other people..."
K,M, and O (simultaneously): "You basically got it."

R: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

L: "In the sewing room --- well, in the third sewing room, ..."

S: "If you don't like my build infrastructure, we can talk about that offline." FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Z: "[Q] has been on sabbatical for the past 10 years, so..."
Q: "from future import *"

N: "I have to say, for me, experiencing it on film was sufficient."
Z: "You don't feel the call to the southern pole?"

D: "Some would argue that this 'premium content' is not, in fact, content. But I would argue that it takes time to watch and is unedited."

D (in response to me): "Lila, did you lose your Zoom premium? I'm getting ads." (I did a funny bit!)

Z: "Extend the cat a line of credit. [beat] Step 3, profit."

R: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

I: "Is that your foot in front of you?"
N: "That's his face."

C: "Can the system keep the chipmunks out?"
D: "Are the chipmunks committing identity fraud using your credit card?"

N: "I succumbed to the lure of firecrackers in my youth, so I remember the attraction."

F: "I found a way around it."
N: "He naturalized the bayonet."

R: "Plus their proprietary blend of whatever they think almonds taste like."

C (distantly, off-camera): "Ooooh! Ow ow ow!"
N (distantly, off-camera): "I gave birth to three children, it hurt more than this."

F: "That was when the sun didn't rise. That day."

K: "I have a +1 resistance to emotional damage."
F: "I need to activate that."

D: "Our first thought was to go to Denver. But it's far away and on fire."

Z: "I lightly overshopped because I was excited about the squash."

M: "What is the saying?"
A: "More money, more problems."
M: "Oh. My first thought was, more children, more problems."

D: "Here's my backend. Please engineer it to something useful. I wrote... no test cases."

D (on Zoom): "I'm streaming this on Instagram Live right now."

L: "If I misunderstand something, you can be almost sure I didn't misunderstand it."

N: "Congratulations on assembling those Ikea shelves."
Z: "It is what I was raised to do."

U: "I don't know how much we can train people to be nice."

F: "You've solved the dilemma! I'm going to die in a warehouse fire."

K: "If you lose by 5 pants I will be very interested to see how that plays out."

D: "You definitely shouldn't buy a vintage electric blanket."

K: "I like to turn the cereal box off and on again."
L: "On the cereal box, they hide the controls."

Z: "Do I not know my own course number?"

F: "It's not screwed over in the sense that... I could have played better. But I didn't."

L: "Rampantly floating with pubic hairs."

J: "Bread is the bread of life."

D (faintly, with astonishment): "Oh, Mom, you added me to your friends."

D: "It's your turn. Disappointingly, I am prepared to talk you through beating me."

J: "It's about the journey. The slow, inexorable journey."

K: "I can't believe we're moving past 'arbitorium'!"
L: "Arbitrarium!"
M: "Arboretum?"
N: "I got it, clearly: Lab of Ornithology." (<-- this was, unbelievably, correct!)

Z: "I just think --- and I hear myself saying this as it comes out --- when people ask questions they don't think about what they don't know."

K: "How'd you get out of the pentagram?"
F: "It's a demon-backed demon trust."

Z: "It's hard to both get off at the same time. It's also hard to both go down at the same time." (IIRC this was about internet service uptime but WOW)

F: "A mountain of lawyers, in a giant mech suit, as another lawyer. With missiles."

Z: "We're just multiplying matrices by vectors in my course, man, I'm not touching that third rail."

Z: "The other thing --- there are lots of problems bathroom-related --- living with my sister..."

Z: "They came up with 2 major options to save money. One was to demolish the building."

R: "If you decapitate someone, it's rated R."

This post's theme word is heterophemy (n), "the use of a word different from the one intended." It's easy to get on the quote board by accidental heterophemy in earshot of me.

How 2020 feels

Basically the only way I can engage with the horribleness of modernity, politics, society, economics, and human-built institutions which degrade everything about the human condition, is through other people's senses of humor.

For example, Tycho of Penny Arcade on the Google monopoly lawsuit:

There's a lot of odd dialogue that surrounds this stuff, like if you hate the naked exertion of monopoly power you're just hating the player or some shit. That you have a problem with people winning or something, issues with the concept of profit fundamentally. What an incredible rhetorical dodge! We're not talking about profit, and even if we were, it matters how the profit was generated. What we're talking about is a Draconic hoarding of wealth, collected in a vessel made from illegal mergers and filled by illegal acts.

... You can't really make the case to younger people that "capitalism," broadly writ, is gonna do shit for them. ... if money is allowed to pool like this, devils grow in it. If you don't fucking govern, if you don't moat these things in a circle of salt, they will invariably become something uncontainable - something too big to fail, part of the walls.  

Or Alice Fraser on reasons that the money-vampires who rule us hate the idea of minimum wage:

In the news today, debates about minimum wage rage on in America despite the entire economy collapsing in all directions. Because if you can't argue about how much money you shouldn't be paying the employees you're itching to replace with robots, how can you even call yourself a bloated blutocrat? 

Isn't it actually more insulting to pay someone a minimum wage that they can afford to feed their children with, than have them work for free while sucking at the milky teat of a rhetorical belief in forward momentum to a Trumpian future? Do you even want a job if you don't want to work for free? Have you ever thought that working for tips is just charity by c**ts who can refuse to give it to you if they don't like your smile, and let's be honest, you've got a shitty smile 'cause you can't afford teeth in your goddamn mess of a country. 

European countries have suggested that if you can't afford to pay your employees then you shouldn't have employees, if you can't run an economy on businesses that can afford to pay their employees, your economy is a lie, and if you're paying your employees in hopes for some sort of amorphous future advancement, you're not a business, you're a religion. (The Last Post 248: Arts in Crisis, 1m59s -- 2m51s, bleeping in original)

... or basically any episode of TRASHFUTURE, although I warn you that listening to educated people describe the state of the world has flung me into intense despair several times. (The hosts do lighten it with comedy but it's very much a sarcastic look at how horrible everything is.)

If you want something hopeful instead, I suggest following Cory Doctorow's excellent advocacy work, for example  the several articles, books, and links offered here.

This post's theme word is scamander (v. intr.), "to take a winding course." Most dystopias do not reasonably portray the slow scamander preface.

Gianni Schicchi

I enjoyed the all-video chat performance of Gianni Schicchi by Opera Ithaca. It's a quick, cute comedic opera, so having it set as a family video chat call worked for the story and setting.

The audio recording was surprisingly clear (my ears kept expecting laptop-microphone quality and being impressed at the actual recording of voices and orchestra), and the video editing included some unexpected surprises, like when... everyone's singing faces were live-photoshopped onto a flock of chickens running around? The lines of libretto that explicitly describe taking actions (like hiding the body, or putting on hats, or passing around the will) were all handled cleverly as a video call, and while it wasn't clear if everyone was supposed to be in different rooms of the same house, it overall worked and was adorable.

This post's theme word is equipollent (adj), "equal in power, force, or effect." The potential heirs found the profits from forgery to be equipollent with the dangers of exile.

The Twisted Ones

T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones is a novel in a genre I don't like --- maybe "haunted gothic American mid-South"? --- and it is not a good book to read alone in a quarantine. It's creepy, but the narrator's voice is reasonable and well-written. So I read it for that reason, and because it was recommended to me, and because the narrator immediately disavows the entire narration and publicly disclaims that it's going to be an unreliable-narrator sort of deal. The narrator is also a professional editor, so the tangents that she wanders off into are direct comments on the text she is writing, or on the words and punctuation she encounters in the world, and that was interesting.

There was one interesting clue early on: the use of the word "voorish" (p. 92), which I had to look up, and which led me down a rabbit-hole of references to Arthur Machen's "The White People", a horror short story which included enough clues that it was obvious that The Twisted Ones is derivative/referential and exists to reply to "The White People" in the same narrative universe.  I found this discovery comforting, as reading the summary of the short story gave me a hint about what horror might be hinted at in the book.

BUT I don't like being creeped out. I didn't like this book, but I read it to the end so that I could expurgate the tension from my brain. Otherwise it would inhabit my brain and claim brain-cycles worrying about when a haunted reanimated deer-skeleton would knock on the windows of my house late at night for unspecified creepy reasons.

Not recommended! Too creepy.

This post's theme word is numen (n), "a divine presence." "I believe them to be some kind of spirits, perhaps the numen of a place, expressed in physical form." (p. 175)

Dealing with Dragons

Patricia C. Wrede's Dealing with Dragons is a cute, quick young adult fantasy novel. It was suggested to me as an amusing and light chaser after a series of depressing book recommendations. (Parse that as "books with a depressing effect, which books had been recommended to me" as opposed to "the recommendation itself was depressing").

The premise is that Princess Cimorine is a nonconforming princess --- sneaking off to learn magic, fencing, Latin, and other topics not traditionally on the princess syllabus. Her parents are extremely conforming royalty and do not seem capable of predicting that their one daughter who has already secretly tried to learn magic, and been explicitly forbidden from it, might next try to learn some other unexpectedly unprincessial topic, and so the story opens with a sequence of them being surprised and astonished every time they find that, forbidden from the last interesting topic, she has simply found a next interesting topic, instead of sticking within the lines and learning exclusively courtly manners and embroidery. Cimorine's parents, never subtle or clever, make it extremely clear that she will be forcibly betrothed and also married to Prince Therandil, who is a complete dullard and not at all interested in breaking out of the narrative conventions and fairytale strictures of his life.

So she lightly runs away. I say "lightly" because everyone in all the surrounding kingdoms seems to immediately get the update on her status, and she gets all kinds of mail-forwarding (physical mail? no. knights in mail? yes. yuk yuk) at her new address, which turns out to be as an assistant-of-all-purposes to a dragon.

The book was over in a flash --- just a tiny jaunt into the traditional fantasy/fairytale Cimorene's nonspecific vaguely medieval European world --- and did manage to keep me on my toes. The ways that Cimorene chose to subvert others' expectations were not... well, what I was expecting. She was also oddly compliant in some situations, e.g. just going along with dragon culture sometimes and persistently questioning it other times.

I liked this book, and would recommend it as a palate cleanser and something playful and short. (My book-recommender said that the subsequent books in this series had diminishing returns, so I moved on to other things in my concave-up to-read stack afterwards.)

This post's theme word is toxophily (n), "the practice of, love of, or addiction to, archery." Sourdough bread is passé; the latest idle at-home craze is indoor toxophily.

Every Place I Cry

Every Place I Cry was an improvised emo concert, whose direct-to-me marketing absolutely worked because I love Jess McKenna and Zach Reino (of the terrific Off Book: The Improvised Musical Podcast -- watch e.g. this live performance of "We Object to Fear").

It was great! I've appreciated the artists who have managed to set up the tech and broadcast live performances from social-distance-ville; it has broadened the variety of art available to me here in my house (and even in my city).

There were lots of little nods to the emo genre, familiar from middle and high school and possibly not even accessible to anyone of a different age or background, but... just... so... completely... delightful! to me. And kudos to them for their many consistent character choices (including emo artist names on each performer's Zoom byline), set dressing (crows! perched on everything! terrible shirts and hair!), and on-stage banter as if in an in-person venue, including ending the night with "thank you"s and "Be safe on your way back... to the other rooms of your house."

This post's theme word is heteroclite (n), "a person who is unconventional; a word that is unconventionally formed." Inventing an emo band is stereotyping heteroclites: curiously contradictory, but verbally delightful.

Quotes, summer 2020

I jotted down many quotes in this time interval, because every. single. social. interaction. now feels deeply meaningful and like a carefully conserved resource. Plus they're all happening over video chat, so my notebook is always at-hand. Here is a selection (some quotes were expurgated for being too personal, or too crass when out-of-context); my apologies that my name-randomizing algorithm does only one letter/person, and so has a lot of collisions in the namespace.

M: "I'm super-enjoying not owning things."

Z: "I'm sure there's middle-management goats."

M: "I have the, like, the limping-along ovary."

Z: "Moving online is just an endless stream of apps that stink."

B: "We're DnD role-playing millennial fantasy: we all have stable jobs and healthy relationships with good communication."

B: "Climb the clocktower?"
K: "That's the kind of thing I should wait until AFTER I have tenure to do."

J: "Filibuster #4 has been my favorite"

I: "I am confident our future department chair can be nimble and flexible in the upcoming Battle Royale."

Z: "A lot of this makes no sense."

K: "We learned: everything is bad and nobody is happy."

K: "I can't wait to read your bestselling business novel about How Not to be a Craven Bootlicker." 

Q: "Basically everything the administration does is a giant fuck-you to student culture."

Y: "... not disappointed with the decision, more disappointed with reality."

Y: "You can't compress coding time."

I: "What happens in a COVID year stays in a COVID year."

Z: "I have to look up what is legal or not legal in Pennsylvania."
Q: "Most things are legal if you don't get caught."

N: "[name redacted] stepped on my glasses. I'm trying to fix them."
N': "With a pine cone?"

Z: "All KINDS of things can happen!"
Q: "Meteors?"
Z: "Hurricane season's just getting started."

M: "Oooh, all this talk of working out, I'm sweating."

Z (offhandedly): "high-functioning democracy here"

M: "In theory, anything can be ruined with any move."

N: "If you go by feel you'll know what to do."
Z: "You might be setting your expectations of [name redacted] a bit high."

N: "Winter is coming." (w.r.t. self-haircuts)

Z: "Koi are domesticated carp. They'll eat trash. They're aquatic goats."

Z: "We need to think about how to teach our classes. We can't spend all our time doing other people's jobs."

M: "I don't like shoreline poop."

D: "To Americans right now, euros are fantasy currency."

N: "When I began my homeowning episode..."

Z: "I got the email that Swarthmore ran out of electricity." (i.e., power outage)
Z': "I like that phrasing."

Z: "Postmodern algebra... it's like Bauhaus meets rings and groups."

C: "[name redacted]'s like, this is lovely, I love being so confused."

C: "I tried to write 'an exercise left to the reader' in my homework."
Z: "In physics you can totally just insert a random minus sign to make it work."

C: "I ended up playing with my tmix configuration for a day and a half."
Z: "Quarantine life! ... why do something in 4 keystrokes when you could do it in 3?"

N: "He had it apart several times this week, doing exploratory surgery." (re: the dryer)

N: "You're living the life! Tomorrow you'll be 90 and you found a secret medication that lets you eat salami!"

Z: "I snoozed the email and hoped it would go away in a week. It has not gone away."

K: "We had a really similar form that was much shorter but still as stupid as this one."

N: "The serger so ups the quality of your sewing."
F: "It doesn't if you don't use it."

F: "Bike doula."
K: "I think you mean 'sherpa'."

K: "You're very badly-behaved children." (re: some adults)
F (parent): "They could be worse."

Z: "For upper-level courses I have no problem offering both, and if one of them just dies a natural death, that's fine."

N: "The 38th is conventionally the bandsaw anniversary. ... the 39th is the home security system for birds."

I: "We don't get updates because the policy is changing, we get updates because the slogan is changing."

Z: "Thank god there's a deadly virus around so we don't have to focus on Brexit anymore."

I: "That crisis only affects teenagers, so we don't care."

Z (product pitch): "Each week you get a box of foods that people won't purchase even in an emergency."

Z: "Thank god for climate change and the death of the amphibian."

Z: "Could the Ottomans competently administer a test to teens? I say, welcome to our new Ottoman overlords."

Z: "Someone pored over the outline of the eagle thing. Gotta get paid somehow."

Z: "Everybody universally hates the robot, which is the appropriate response."

Q: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

Z: "I was uncomfortable because I'm an idealist."

N: "It's a circular saw at the end of a string trimmer."
M: "Wait, like... Mad Max?"

[D joins the video chat]
All others: "Good morning! Welcome to Vasectomy Talk."

Z: "I have walked less than 20 steps today & all of them were on this camera."

D: "Whoever is playing the video of my voice, can you mute it?"

Firstborn: "Everyone knows I'm the one who inherits the titles and lands."
Secondborn: "And I have the right to marry a divorcée."
Thirdborn: "And I'm supposed to go into the clergy?"
[laughter]
Parent: "I love my children! That was the best possible answer! Perfect!

Q: "They'll only hear your yowls of pain when you're shocked for typing on the keyboard wrong."

This post's theme word is lithophone (n), "a musical instrument which is sounded by striking pieces of stone." It's easy to fall down a quarantine video rabbit-hole and watch many modern and ancient lithophones played.

Poesy the Monster Slayer

Poesy the Monster Slayer, by Cory Doctorow and Matt Rockefeller, is a charming illustrated book telling the story of Poesy, an imaginative and resourceful girl, and her battle against various fantastical nightmare creatures. It hits a delicious middle point between the kid's perspective (fight monsters that only rise up when the adults are asleep!) and the adults' (please will this kid just sleep through the night without getting up to loudly play).

I liked the illustrations, the creativity, and the double-reading: it offers a storyline for kids and a sly behind-the-scenes storyline for grown-up interpretation.

This post's theme word is picaro (n), "a rogue; an adventurer." Kids' books often cast the starring child as a picaro, when it is plain to any observant adult that they are a chaotic villain.

Live theatre, sort of

WHEREAS the ongoing pandemic and various other elements of environmental, social, political, economic, and biological disaster loom large, and

WHEREAS the rational fairly strict self-quarantine (of those who are able) has, since March, severely limited occasions to socialize and gather in groups for the purposes of mutually enjoying culture and company, it is

HEREBY ACKNOWLEDGED that having so many performers shift to an online method for displaying their art to a geographically disparate crowd has, in fact, WIDENED this reader's ability to financially support the artists she loves while appreciating their performances in real-time.

Everything's on a screen, and frankly having to see my family only in delineated, buffered, pixelated windows feels much more limiting than having to see live performers in windows. Realistically these performers would have been mostly inaccessible because they were not touring my locality; so I find a tiny sliver of redemption for 2020 in the broader access to live art. The rest of 2020 should consider itself still on blast for its shortcomings.

This post's theme word is rort (n), "a wild party." I have tickets to watch shows three nights this week, from the comfortable pajama-clad rort of my own sofa!

Mosquito resolution

 After many months of living at the end of a narrow internet pipe, my bits finally stopped flowing (the pipe was blocked? ok, metaphor) and I caved and signed up for fiber. Now I have a much bigger pipe! Bits are freely flowing as never before!

Importantly, I am now viewable as many pixels, often even in motion, for my many, many, video calls. My life (and many others) now consists mostly of taking video calls in different parts of my dwelling, and my interlocutors can now see me in smooth motion and continuous audio! What luxury and decadence, etc.

The pixels are in fact so delicate and rich that yesterday during lunch on my porch, my interlocutor was able to see the mosquito that I chased in and out of the frame, as it hovered around me and tormented me with the threat of stealing my blood. This was nice, because I got reassurances that I wasn't completely insane (another person validated the visible insect!) and that I didn't look completely insane (chasing an invisible phantom).

Today I received a belated housewarming gift: a giant citronella candle. Emphasis on the houseWARMing, and also on the acknowledged battle that owning a house is: battle against my house being washed away, battle against incursions of snow and mice, and the personal battle to keep all of my blood --- which, I want to emphasize, I am currently using to support vital life operations --- inside my body. I don't plan to burn it indoors, but hopefully this will resolve my outdoor mosquito deliciousness problem.

This post's theme word is henotheism (n), "belief in or worship of one god without denying the possibility of others." Welcome to my henotheistic house; over there is the citronella shrine.

School planning chicken

Many schools are now announcing that they will be 100% remote in August/September when they begin, replacing their previous hybrid/fancy rotating schedule/other half-measure plans.

The patient impression:

School administrators are trying to make the best decision they can, for safety, education, financial, and legal reasons. The information available to them keeps changing, so they keep updating their plans. This is a challenging task and they are doing the best they can with limited information and no control over many external factors that keep changing.

The skeptic's impression:

Schools initially panicked, followed by a period of prolonged scramble, and are adjusting their plan to balance exactly on the knife's edge of [safe enough that the employees will not riot] and [still normal enough that the students and parents will not riot]. They'll continue to make new announcements to maintain this balance, so the announcements are interesting mostly to (1) to teachers, students, and their households, and (2) as way of tracking which riot has more potentiality.

The pessimist's impression:

Schools are inadequately-adjusted. Why do they keep announcing plans which are wildly optimistic and have dependencies on local/state/federal guidelines or international vaccine development? The institutional lock-in to a rigid schooling system means that even the most clear-eyed administrator is not allowed to make reasonable decisions or announcements, as the Overton Window in March did not really allow (for example) a superintendent to announce that public school was going to be 100% at home for the next two years. Or announce that all school was cancelled. Or any of the other things that I can imagine, in future-retrospect, as having happened (or as being equivalent to what will have happened).

So here's where we are, in a repeated game of chicken. It's asymmetrical, and maybe chicken isn't the right game-theory model to use, since we know which strategy to pick in order to lose, but not which strategy to pick to win. And also it's not mutually-assured destruction. And viruses aren't considered sentient, and have never been observed to drive cars around steep one-lane mountain roads...

This post's theme word is palmary (adj), "of supreme importance; outstanding; praiseworthy." A palmary plan is educationally elusive.

Cobwebs

I went outside and discovered a spider had built an extensive web across the rear entrance of my house, spanning the door, deck, and stairs. This is some sort of arachnoid commentary on human self-quarantine and it struck me as both sticky and humorous. (Zeugma!)

This venture into the horrible humidity was made in order to chip away at emptying my office, which I'm not-really-using, for sabbatical so that someone else can not-really-use it. (Everything is wonderful, the world is totally fine, don't look too closely.) My two most neglected plants stubbornly hang on in what is surely the most arid, frigid, inhospitable summer that southern Pennsylvania can artificially offer to indoor plant life. An enterprising indoor spider, hoping in vain to capture prey in the abandoned, sealed, locked building, had constructed a foolishly hopeful web from the ceiling down to the desk chair, completely blocking off the shelves and the keyboard. This struck me as sticky and a silly emerging theme.

Are spiders everywhere just constantly walling in everything, and only the entropy of weather and large fauna keeps pathways clear?

Given the prevalence of webs, the visible black cloud of mosquitos that chased me from my car back into my house seemed incongruous. YES, I had to pass through a partially-reconstructed deck-spanning web to reenter the house. NO, it did not appear to dissuade the accursed vampiric horrors. Please, can we get some mosquito-eating bats to colonize my block?

This post's theme word is durance (n), "confinement or restraint by force; imprisonment." In this grimdark modern fairytale, the protagonist is self-quarantined at home and entirely encased in cobwebs and loneliness so thick that the quarantine becomes permanent; "Dream Durance" is rated NC-17 for psychic damage inflicted on readers and anyone attempting to engage in concurrent political discourse.

Thank you class of 2020

'Tis the season where graduated seniors' student email accounts are turned off, so I am receiving a lot of "thank you and here's my future email address" notes. They are, overall, quite sweet --- it's nice to hear reflections from students on what they learned and how I was able to help them achieve their goals and work on interesting projects.

And.

Every once in a while...

... one of them really tickles me. Usually I just hang on to these and post them on the wall of my office, but since (1) physical notes, and (2) being in the office are both currently infeasible, it's going to be a blog post. Of course.

Judge this for yourself (which appears amid several very laudatory paragraphs):

Unlike most Math professors, you were not generous with hints, which forced me to question and correct myself repeatedly. The experience was not instantly satisfying, but I'm happy that I learned a lot and felt a sense of ownership by the end.

This an absolute gem. Every other sentence is direct, straightforward praise, and it rolls off my sincerity-repelling feathers like water off a duck. But these sentences? These, which could quite easily change in meaning depending on tone and delivery? These strike me to the core, make me so proud and happy, reassure me that the work I do is valuable, and are a pure expression of the goal I am always subtly angling towards: student independence.

Thank you, class of 2020, for sticking with it through this completely bizarre culmination of your college experience!


This post's theme word is hyponym (noun), "a more specific term in a general class." Students are great; hyponymically, the class of 2020 are excellent!

A hundred days of quarantine

We've passed 100 days of self-isolation but, in the tradition of this blog, I missed it exactly and will just post some half-finished thoughts here to expurgate them from my mind. Welcome to approximately the 112th day of solitude. And unlike grad school, there's no end in sight.

I miss people. It turns out that many of my pastimes actually required people, or at least the passing proximity of others, and are now extremely ill-advised and mostly unavailable. Board games are so great in-person as a way to escape into a shared brain-space with friends; at a distance, board games (and pretty much everything else) take a lot more effort and yield a lot less feeling of shared camaraderie. Ditto rock climbing, but extremely more so. And forget singing along during road trips --- the travel, the singing, the enclosed space, all of it is now verboten to the pandemic-pragmatic.

I miss the full-bandwidth promise of a real-time in-person conversation, one where no one drops out, no one freezes, talking over each other can be moderated by subtle physical and social cues, and my headphones do not leave a grooved imprint of my glasses on my skull.

I miss the fantasy I once held, maybe a decade ago in the midst of my extremely academic studies, that I might be living in a golden age of rationality and scientifically-founded decision-making. I miss the feeling that I might be effective or a positive influence on others, and I'm struggling to see how to "pivot" (eugh) my skills, which are almost 100% cultivated for in-person activities, to be effective and useful in a permanent pandemic world. I miss feeling like I can be effective at all, beyond donating my money and privilege to try to ameliorate the many ravaging horrors of our age. From a distance, of course.

Positively: I've cleaned my house, and it's staying quite clean. (I'm the only one who can enjoy this or pass judgment on inadequately-dusted ledges, anyway.) All houseplants are flourishing. I'm doing yardwork. I'm 2 full weeks ahead on my workout plan. I'm working on a lot of solitary at-home projects that would otherwise have languished. I'm contemplating what I want to do with the rest of my life to try to have a positive impact; I'm answering emails, letters, and postcards, and pumping the snail-mail system full of words, feelings, and time-delayed connections. I've learned to bake cheese in pastry crust. I've reworked my budget to enable more donations. I'm watching performances from artists I would never get to see in-person, as everyone has been forcibly shoved online, so they are effectively closer and more available to me than previously.

I'm waking every morning to shake my fists at the Gods of Bandwidth and propitiate the Lesser Deities of Lag and Latency.

I wonder...
... when was my last hug? I remember one pretty late, but was that truly my last hug?
... when was my last handshake? Will that be the final handshake of my life?
... when was the last time I ate in a restaurant? I don't remember. Maybe that will never happen again.
... when will I next see my family? Paradoxically it will probably not be enjoyable to see them because of the apprehension that the very act of meeting will impose a danger on everyone involved.

I think I could last a long time, a psychologically inadvisable time, in socially distant isolation. Comparing it with the risk of transmitting disease, contributing to transmitting disease, or myself becoming sick, and remaining isolated looks like a moral imperative. Whether by my example or by the incidental impact of self-selecting out of the situations where transmission occurs, this seems like my only acceptable mode of conduct. YMMV.

Don't worry. I'm not a hermit. I have an extremely healthy correspondence; I am an active letter-writer. And of course, now as always, I am a being that consists 80% of Simply Being Online.

Plus ça change.

This post's theme word is empanoply (v. tr.), "to enclose in complete armor." We are advised to empanoply ourselves at home, and I have empanoplied this cheese in flaky pastry.

Quote board

I usually write notable quotes on the whiteboard in my office, which over the course of the semester accumulates a border of these snippets of wit and strangeness. This semester we transferred to a remote-everything model in which people still say strange things. So the metaphorical whiteboard has still been accumulating quotes; I copied down all the actual whiteboard quotes before abandoning my office for plague-avoidance reasons.

D: "This head's got a lot of other s*** in it."
L: "It really doesn't."

L: "Where those ninjas at"

A: "Life is an endless series of we trying to entangle things"

Z: "That sentence is surprisingly technically correct."

Z: "It is oftentimes the case that if people in my class don't learn what I'm teaching, they learn a valuable lesson instead."

D: "Dude, our network can't support five baboons!"

M: "I promise I'm not evil, but I do blame you for the development of my evil thinking skill!"

K, on our first Zoom call: "I just think that it's a lot easier to get things done if we're in-person." DUH

Z: "It's not an instructional cooking show. It's a show of me, cooking."

D: "saber-tooth tigers or gtfo"

I: "Damn you, linguistic prescriptivism. I cannot be free."

Y: ""It's never been written down.  It was just kind of something I was told.": every long-standing Swarthmore College policy"

I: "This is the co-recognizer sleight-of-hand where you make the looping go into the co-recognizing part." (I'm charmed by the idea of co-recognizable sleight-of-hand, where it sometimes fails and that's all you care about, not the successes! It's a magican's trick that is broken!)

L: "Sounds like a corner store in Mordor."

Q: "Quarantine is the perfect time to take up falconry."

O: "I had a lot of thoughts, but then I came up with a proof and the thoughts went away."

Q: "I started eating it as a power move"

S1: "Imagine a room that is a perfect cube..."
S2: "I can't imagine anything! I've been inside too long!"

I: "the dangers of emerging from my small, hegemonic area of dominion"

K: “I picture you as a birdlike person with twigs for bones”

Q: "my main photo editor is Microsoft Word... graphic design is a passion"

S: "I think we're a department of pretty reasonable people. Externally."

Q: "Internally, all bets are off."

I: "You don't have to share my feelings about math, but... nothing you've done is wrong. Yet."
L: "That's what we love to hear."
C: "It's been years since I saw this many numbers."

L: "This is so much worse than proving that something IS big O of something."

O: "I'll just be a Piazza fool."

K: "I accept that your answer is unconventionally correct."
I: "That's the best kind! [maniacal laughter]"

Z: "I had mistakenly thought that in our whole system, the section with the most history would have their... act together. [But instead they have] The most trash fire!"

S: "We should not be planning to kill ourselves to this extent."

Z: "I should've been thinking..."
J: "We should get that on a shirt for you."
Z: "Cruel but justified."
Q "... and that's on the back."

I: "I obviously shouldn't be in charge of the world's supply of moon rocks."

It's been a long and strange semester, conducted half in isolation and yet with much more explicit acknowledgments of the Interactions That Matter. Thanks everyone for sticking with it this long, and for chatting with me even though I am badly-surreptitiously taking notes and writing down your quotes as we go.


This post's theme word is kythe (v tr), "to make known; to manifest; to show; to declare." I kythe that the spring 2020 semester is over!

Not enough flamingos

There were a lot of landscapers cleaning up this yard, but I walked by too late to see what must have been an incredible Flamingo Setup Period.

an unlikelihood of flamingos

This post's theme word is homochromatic (adj), "having one color." The hovering flamingos provided an ambient homochromatic layer of unlikely pink.

Reality dissonance in POV

One of the continually fascinating and renewed interesting things about being... alive? Just about being a person, just about being, is of course that my first-person experience is incredibly different from everyone else's impression of me.

Obviously yes: how could it be anything else? I have access to lots of extra internal state information, plus the impression of free will to affect my actions. And on the other hand, everyone else can see information hidden from me, for example bugs crawling on the back of my head, or involuntary nervous tics.

Obviously no: whoever I am, that's who I am. Who I feel I am is who I appear to be, it's just that there's a change of perspective. How could they be different? There's only one objective reality, and we're in it. I'm myself and you see me; when I take an action, you see it. This is consensus reality, and no one has yet been able to escape it (as far as we know).

Every once in awhile the contrast of perspectives is thrown into sharp relief, and I just had one of these moments of reality-dissonance.

Here I am, innocently tootling along and doing a language-learning exercise which is trying to teach me new Japanese vocabulary. It brought up a word I definitely think I do not know --- "stylish" (adj), "oshare(na)" --- and I look it up. As soon as I pronounce it aloud, I start to rap in Japanese in my head. Why? Well, it turns out that 15 years ago I memorized some Japanese pop-rap entirely phonetically, with no regard for word breaks, grammar, or in fact content, and not only does my brain still have that stored somewhere (team: Never Garbage Collect), but it is still indexed by phonetic lookup and also immediately available. And also, now that I am hearing the sounds I memorized in my head, my brain is cross-referencing with a lot of new vocabulary I've learned in the past year and translating the rap.

I look down. My phone screen has not yet timed out, so this entire revelation - realization - translation phenomenon has taken < 30 seconds. And now I just know a verse, in English, of a series of noises I memorized without linguistic structure 15 years ago.

This just happens, sometimes.

I have been told that I give the impression of being "quick", very clever, very smart, always ready with an answer and a call-back reference. Intelligent. The first-person experience of this is that I am strapped in to an involuntary rollercoaster, my brain whipping me through tangentially-relevant memories in a barely-controllable whirlwind. It's just lucky that I set myself up in situations where "here's a  related memory" so often contains the nugget of truth that I need right now.

Also possibly I am dissociating because it feels very unreal to be still performing my extremely socialization-based job but also to be completely isolated from all other humans.

Hello from my isolation to yours!

This post's theme word is mimsy (adj), "prim, feeble, affected." This blog post gives the impression of a mimsy humblebrag: oops.

One-person projects

It seems to be a season to do one-person projects. Naturally, I have chosen to move a fainting sofa through my house and down some stairs.

It was ... challenging. As a one-person project, it encouraged me to be creative about tool usage, problem-solving, and how not to crush myself to a paste beneath a sofa on my staircase.

This post's theme word is inquiline (adj), "an animal living in the nest, burrow, or home of another." Tired of quarantining alone in your home? Cultivate an inquiline pet!

Jokes about finite automata

I try to lighten test anxiety by making my exams (1) feasible in time-constraints, (2) interesting, and (3) fun.

Yes, that's right, actual students (many of them!) have reported after taking them that tests are fun in my classes.

One thing that I do fairly consistently is to offer 1 bonus point at the end of the test if the student writes a joke. Usually I ask for a joke that is about the content that was being examined in the test, but I accept even the weirdest CS-themed puns.

The prompt was: Write a joke about finite automata.

Actual jokes according to my own peculiar sense of humor:

• How much does an automaton weigh? An automaTON
• Why did the NFA go to 4 corners? So it could be in multiple states at a time.
• How did the NFA choose which classes to take? It took all of them, and then picked the ones it liked best.
• We're all computers (b/c we answer yes + know)
• Q: What do you call a robot working in the winter coat department? A: A push-down automaton.
• "Want to hear a joke? DFA" - a rather mean-spirited Turing machine, probably.

Some people wrote a thing which was definitely on the part of the paper where I requested a joke:

• Can't think of one, can you choose the best answer nondeteministically?
• Why did the PDA get in trouble? He was on his PDA in class.
• Finite automata are so finite that even humans get them.
• I couldn't come up with a finite automata in the finite amount of time of the test. 

The prize for overall best joke that will definitely stay funny in new ways as the semester continues goes to this one:

"How does a finite automata decide where to eat? It accepts nondeterministically wherever it will be the most satisfied."

This post's theme word is metathesis (n), "the transposition of letters, sounds, or syllables in a word, for example aks for ask." The regular languages are probably closed under metathesis, if we cared to rigorously define that operation.

What is the worst security account question?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the worst account security question? (Previously: 2016.)

Students came up with some bad ones, mostly classics:

• name of 1st pet
• favorite teacher's name
• what is your name
• hometown/first school
• your password
• hometown
• I hate all of them
• mother's maiden name is a classic
• first vacation
• what is you username?
• where were you born
• first job
• what street did you grow up on?
• 1st pet name?

The only outlier was the unusually-personally-invasive:

• What was the first name of the first boy or girl you kissed?

This post's theme word is elutriate (v tr), "to purify or separate, especially by washing or straining." The account security question did nothing to elutriate spurious logins from authentic ones.