Pretty Terrible

Pop Culture Criticism by Natalie Luhrs

Links Roundup: 17 May 2018

Your intrepid reporter. Oh, and a mural by some guy named Diego Rivera.

My trip to Michigan was, overall, pretty good. Saw my sister and 2/3 of my nieces, spent time with colleagues, had dinner with an old friend, visited my mom’s grave, and spent time with my in-laws.

I was also able to spend some time at the DIA. The Rivera murals are an absolute treasure–I hadn’t seen them in nearly 20 years and they’re still heart-stoppingly gorgeous. I love the whole thing, but I have an especial love for the vaccination panel, which nearly caused the murals to be painted over.

I was also able to spend some time with Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes” and it was time well spent. The light in the painting is extraordinary and I found the quality of it to be superior to that of the Caravaggio a few paintings over.

Anyhow. If you ever go to Detroit, the art museum is one of the places you absolutely must visit. It’s wonderful.

No theme this week, just some randomness that caught my attention.

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Links Roundup 04 May 2018

Lots of things on my mind this week, but I’ve mostly been thinking about building and breaking. I’ve decided to build a small database at work to hold a spreadsheet project that’s spiraled a bit out of control; it may end up becoming a SharePoint site or being fed into a larger database, but I’m learning things and that’s good. Part of the learning process for me is hitting things with sticks to see what works and what doesn’t. This means that when I try to learn new things–like building a relational database–instead of going about it systematically, I start googling. I’m really not good at sitting through the “hello world” phase of learning anything. I like to jump into the deep end.

But the way I go about this stuff feels weirdly idiosyncratic–I have an idea of what my end product is going to be and then I wander in the dark forest for a while, looking under rocks and inside trees, until I make my way through and I have something that more or less works. But because coding isn’t something I do a whole lot of, I often forget how I’ve managed to do the thing (good thing I comment my code).

There probably won’t be a links post next week: I’m going to Saginaw, MI for work and I have plans most evenings with family, friends, and coworkers. I’m looking forward to the evening plans, I’m not so much looking forward to the 8 hours a day I’ll be shadowing someone during regression testing.

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Links Roundup: 27 April 2018

This week I’m all about paper and the tools we use to write on it. I’ve become so busy at work that even when it’s slow, my to do list overflows with various side projects–learning Tableau, doing some coding, and trying to figure out the best way to mash up three very different data sets into a coherent whole. I have so many paper lists it’s not even funny anymore: I have my weekly list in my bullet journal, I have a list scribbled on my white board, and I have a daily top three and time blocking list.

And, amazingly enough, I am really enjoying my job now. I’m busy as hell, but I’m doing good work, learning new things, and helping to build a new company that I hope will have a really great culture and that will do great things for the world.

In other news, the description of the merger between Red King Consolidated and Heartstone in Max Gladstone’s Two Serpents Rise is surprisingly accurate. We don’t have any sentient walking skeletons at the office or serpents sleeping in volcanoes (or do we?), but the way the complexity of the deal is described and the competing agendas of the various involved parties? Oh yeah. That part’s right.

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My Favorite Podcasts

I listen to a lot of podcasts but mainly when I’m driving, traveling, or walking–I can’t listen to them while I’m working (either at work or while writing at home), so I’m perpetually behind since I have a strong preference for longer podcasts and my commute’s only about 30 minutes each way at most.

My podcast listening app of choice is Overcast; its killer feature, imo, is the ability to not just create playlists but to create playlists where you can rearrange the episodes. The last app I was using had a playlist feature but it would order everything by date or by podcast, no option for a custom order. And since I’m perpetually behind and since my mood is highly variable when I’m listening, I like to be able to rearrange episodes based on my mood so I can just start the app in my car and then not have to mess with it because I don’t wish to become one of those dumbasses who dies due to fucking around with their phone while driving. Anyhow. Overcast. I like it. You might, too.

  • Hurry Slowly (hosted by Jocelyn K. Glei)
    I’ve really been enjoying Hurry Slowly since it launched last October; it’s one of the few podcasts that I’m fully caught up on. Glei asks a lot of really great questions of her guests about how they get work done, how they spend their attention, and other aspects of productivity. The production values are fantastic and it’s obvious that Glei puts the show together with a lot of care. She also has a really great newsletter that comes out every week–I almost always learn something from it (and the podcast!).
  • Heaven’s Gate (hosted by Glynn Washington)
    This one will break your heart. It’s about the Heaven’s Gate cult and I learned so much from it. Heaven’s Gate seems to be one of the few cults where the members weren’t abused and exploited for the benefit of the leaders and right to the end, they are a family. Washington is the perfect reporter for this subject, as he grew up in a cult, and the series is full of interviews with surviving family members and former members. It’s full of compassion for not only the families and former members, but for everyone in the cult, too.
  • Ologies (hosted by Alie Ward)
    Alie Ward has long, fascinating conversations with people whose jobs end in -ology. Mostly science types. This is definitely geared to the interested layperson (as that’s what Ward is) and Ward inserts conversational asides to expand upon different points. This one tends to run long, so it’s good for long car drives or walks (it’s often my companion during my lunchtime walk at work).
  • Productivity Alchemy (hosted by Keven Sonney)
    This one’s a lot of fun, if you’re a nerd about productivity tools and planners. Keven Sonney and Ursula Vernon try out different planners and ways of managing their time, talk about how their weeks went, and Ursula usually yells about something. The second half of the show is interviews with various people, mostly people from the SFF field and how they stay organized and productive.
  • Storytelling with Data (hosted by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic)
    I also find this one to be a lot of fun but mainly because one of my happy places at work is making data visualizations. Nussbaumer Knaflic has a long-running blog and a book of the same title, and if you’re interested in learning about best practices in dataviz, this is a good place to start. I’ve seen the graphs and charts that I put together at work as storytelling for a long time, so it was really validating to see it codified–and I learned a lot about new ways to simplify and improve my graphs and charts.
  • What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law (hosted by Roman Mars)
    This is the only political podcast I listen to and it’s not one I listen to regularly (I’m quite a ways behind). I’ve learned a lot about constitutional law and the various limits on the powers of the different branches of government and it’s helped me to contextualize our national shitshow. Also, Roman Mars has the most soothing voice which is basically what you want when listening to this subject.
  • Disgraceland (hosted by Jake Brennan)
    I just started listening to this podcast about musicians who commit crimes and, in some cases, get away with them. It’s a new podcast and as I’m only a couple episodes in, I’m not sure I’m going to keep listening to it, but I want to give it a chance to gain its footing.
  • Ask a Manager (hosted by Alison Green)
    I’m kind of addicted to Green’s blog, Ask a Manager, because I am so here for workplace drama and really sensible answers. I’ve actually learned a lot from Green’s answers to some truly bizarre questions, and I was excited to learn that she was launching a podcast in the lead up to the release of her first book (which I’ve totally pre-ordered). The podcast features a listener question and then some dialogue with Green about the situation and compassionate, well-thought through advice for the situation. Green also provides transcripts.
  • Design Matters with Debbie Millman
    This is a really long running podcast–well over a decade–and much like Hurry Slowly, it’s an interview show with a single person each episode. Millman also asks really great questions of her guests and while the general topic is creativity and design, the conversations go all over the place. This is another one that runs long and is great for long car rides.
  • Dexter Guff is Smarter Than You (And You Can Be Too)
    And finally, the lone comedy podcast in my subscription list. As I think most people know, I have a weird obsession with internet marketing and how people set themselves up as “thought leaders” when they’re really looking to sell their audience stuff–well, this podcast is making fun of that in a ridiculously over the top way and I can only listen in small doses because, honestly, it’s too real. Also, I have to be in just the right mood to listen to funny.

I’m always looking for new podcasts to listen to–what are some of your favorites?

Links Roundup: 20 April 2018

I’ve been thinking a lot about Jeremy Bentham’s concept of a panopticon over the past few weeks, as the revelations from Facebook/Cambridge Analytica show just how little those particular corporations value our privacy and how the lack of diversity at the highest levels in Silicon Valley tech firms means that the tools we have come to rely upon for so many things were created by people who aren’t vulnerable in the same way that women, people of color, queer people, and other marginalized communities are.

One of the first things I did when I got online around 1994 was to start exploring with gopher. It was through gopher that I managed to make my way to a small bbs that a guy was running out of his dorm room. I’m actually still friendly with a handful of the people I met there, but most of the people were pretty gross in what they thought of and how they treated women and other marginalized people. I know that some of those people went on to work in the tech industry.

I think about that a lot and about how whenever I spoke up about it I was told that I just shouldn’t be online–and how people are still told that when they complain about abuse online. Even though you need to be online to do an awful lot of things these days, so the suggestion that getting offline altogether is the answer is, essentially, a suggestion that you remove yourself from public life. And that’s unacceptable.

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