# 11 Dec 2020, 05:50PM: Two Upcoming Sumana-Talks-At-You Events: Most urgently: You have just over 24 hours to back the Mermaids Monthly project on Kickstarter, supporting a fun, independent speculative fiction magazine for 2021. If you back at the $100 “Subscription, Pin, and Poetry” pledge level, you'll get invited to a special Zoom party where I'll perform stand-up comedy.

And: in late January, I'll speak for the first time at Linux.Conf.Au, on "How To Get A Project Unstuck -- And Fixing The Skill Gaps That Got Us Here". You'll come away from this talk with steps you can take, in the short term and in the long run, to address this for projects you care about. Ticket sales are now open for LCA (which will of course be a virtual convention). Buy a ticket if you'd like to see my talk live and participate in questions-and-answers!

This talk will draw from the same material as the book I'm writing on getting open source projects unstuck. I aim to teach the skills open source software maintainers need, aimed at working scientists and other contributors who have never managed public-facing projects before. And I hope to have more news about that project soon!

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# 11 Dec 2020, 12:17PM: On Realizing There Was Still Some American Exceptionalism Lurking In My Brain: One of the most valuable things I treasure about the Internet is that I can have a glimpse into the lives of people who live a very different life from mine. I regularly read the blogs/journals of people who live in Israel, Singapore, India, the UK, Australia, Malaysia, and more, not to mention other parts of my own country. The people whose lives I follow include clergy, therapists, parents, medical workers, students, lawyers, and more. I attempt to read at least a little by people I disagree with, or I'm not sure I agree with, or who hold jobs that in a better world might not exist; Granola Shotgun, Patrick Skinner (context), and LadyLovesTaft are thought-provoking, entertaining, edifying. And I appreciate getting geographical breadth in my feed.

Because of this mix, some of my info feed includes blogs by people who live in countries that have effectively controlled COVID-19. Reading one of their "what I did this week" posts is like reading a blog by someone who is rich, or by a man going on a long solitary hike as a fun vacation (while women get advised to never go alone). Their world and mine have diverged; the sphere of my capability is as a marble next to their planet.

We talk so much about the Constitution but our constitution was so weak.

I am a patriot but I thought I was a thoughtful one. This year has brought home to me how much American exceptionalism was still lurking in the corners of my head.

The bigotry I can notice in myself always has this fuzzy shadowy aspect -- it's in the gaps, the moments where I subconsciously think that I don't have to take [person, news, idea, work, etc.] properly seriously, the assumptions I make about what categories someone or some country's going to fit. Or, I learn individual facts -- that trains are cheaper and more frequent and more convenient in many countries I've visited, that my colleague in Norway has used easy electronic transfers to receive and pay money all his life and has never seen a paper check, that folks in Melbourne just call an ambulance for a stranger in trouble and don't worry about cost, that a bunch of people I know in Europe or Australia make their livings working part-time and don't have to figure out how to pay for health insurance -- but I have a mental block stopping me from adding up that two and two are four.

For several years, in conversation, whenever a foreigner complained about some aspect of the US, I would jump in, get ahead of them, get the crowd cracking up by reciting a litany of my country's deficiencies, apologizing for them on behalf of us all. Our utterly insufficient transit network, imperial measurements, all our paper money is the same size and shape and color, the health care disaster, the wars ... I've lost track, it's been a little while since I've given the spiel, since this sort of thing was usually something I said to tourists. But, I realize now, on some level it was always superficial and I did not take to heart how deeply my country was behind, was worse.

"We're number one!" No, we're not. To claim superiority without first assessing whether you're right, or on flimsy grounds, is arrogance. We are arrogant. I am arrogant. Wish I could say "was" but this is not the Rumpelstiltskin story and naming the problem does not make it vanish.

I am not a man and I am not white, but I think the particular bouquet of feelings I am feeling is like feelings a thoughtful white person or man might feel -- thinking that I knew that I was not the center of the world, but stumbling and noticing, in my disorientation, that clearly I had not yet decolonized my mind as thoroughly as I'd thought.

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# 07 Dec 2020, 08:55AM: Reflecting on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: The other night I watched two films in a row: Knock Down The House, the documentary about four progressive candidates running to unseat Democratic incumbents in the 2018 US election, and Douglas, Hannah Gadsby's comedy special.

They're both very interesting, and afterwards I read and thought a bunch in particular about what's striking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's political career.*

Making expectations explicit

In Douglas, Gadsby starts the show with a lengthy table of contents, telling you what she is going to do, saying that she would like for everyone to have their expectations properly set. She calls her shot.

In Knock Down the House I noticed a related thing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did -- talking explicitly about expectations. When Crowley tried to tie her to scandalous local politician Hiram Monserrate, her retort included an explicit refutation of the de facto way that "women tend to be made responsible for the actions of every man in the room". She brings to light an implicit expectation that underlies the smear, which makes it possible for her to explicitly refuse to meet it.

In this exchange Ocasio-Cortez demonstrates one of the skills that makes her an aspirational figure, a role model for so many marginalized people: live and in the moment, she can notice an unfair or misleading criticism coming her way, refute the specific criticism, and then name and categorize what's illegitimate about the criticism so as to defuse it and get the upper hand (and point out the problem to all watching).

This is such a powerful skill. I see it in Ocasio-Cortez, in Sarah Taber, in Rep. Katie Porter, in Alexandra Erin, in Tressie McMillan Cottom, in siderea, and in some other public intellectuals and activists and politicians (often women) who are unapologetic and sharp in their fast-paced analysis of illegitimate criticism. It's like they don't just deflect the object coming their way, but they also X-ray it and show everyone the schematics so we can build our own shields too.

I don't think I have this skill. I think it really helps to have gone through the school of hard knocks, which they have way more than I have. And it helps to have a ton of practice in fast-paced live oral argument, which I've probably atrophied in recent years since so much of my work is in written conversation.

But, in organic conversation, when conflicts crop up, I think I do a tolerable job of stepping back and asking (to myself or out loud): what mismatch of expectations brought us here? Which is definitely useful.

Analytical and organizing skill

You can watch the part of Knock Down the House where Ocasio-Cortez analyzes the difference between two campaign mailers and predicts their effectiveness. This is an example of the level of skill in analysis and organizing that Ocasio-Cortez brings to her job. Which is less surprising when you remember not only that she was a promising researcher as early as high school, and that she worked as an organizer for the Sanders campaign in 2016 and got a bunch of experience in on-the-ground political work.*** The skill she demonstrates in articulating progressive arguments in compelling ways is not just a general gift of gab; it comes hand-in-hand with wonky behind-the-scenes research and thinking that brought her to those positions, and deep and specific expertise in what disengaged voters need to hear to get them to turn out at the polls.

Ocasio-Cortez's college peers remember her as brilliant and driven, often calling her "the smartest person I know" -- which reminds me of similar phrases frequently popping up in people's recollections of Hillary Rodham. The first time Elizabeth Warren met Hillary Clinton (in May 1998) she had a similar experience.

Back in October 2008 I wrote about Obama's success and noted: "people used to think the Clinton machine was the best there was. But with the right tools, investment in time, and leadership, a networked/egalitarian group will beat a linear, top-down group." Hillary Rodham went to law school instead of taking a job with Saul Alinsky's new training institute. What if she'd leaned harder into the organizing model? I think with Ocasio-Cortez you get a glimpse of what kind of independent political force she might have been.

Beauty

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is conventionally beautiful. She is not only pretty, she frequently deconstructs beauty standards, and she has choice words for haters who think she is only pretty, but, as Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, you need to acknowledge her beauty to understand some of the dynamics around her place in politics:

I believe the right’s attacks on AOC (and a few of the left’s to be honest) are a visceral reaction to their inability to control what they see is her only legitimate source of power.....

We also feel icky about pointing out that someone is attractive and that is a certain kind of power because powerful women make us squeamish. And beauty as power makes us deeply afraid for our own self-worth.

Gadsby would probably agree with something Ocasio-Cortez says in the Vogue video (hat tip to kristi for highlighting it):

Our culture is so predicated on diminishing women and preying on our self-esteem, and so it's quite a radical act - and it's almost like a mini protest - to love yourself in a society that's always telling you you're not the right weight, you're not the right color, you're not the right, you know, whatever it is ... When you stand up and say, 'You know what? You don't make that decision. I make that decision,' it's very powerful. But that doesn’t mean we can't have fun.

Trusting one's own judgment

And, to reinforce that point about figuring out what expectations of you are legitimate, and tying that to authenticity, the Vogue article continues:

Just over two years ago, after defeating a 20-year incumbent and winning what was seen as the biggest upset of the 2018 midterm election primaries, Ocasio-Cortez was thrust into the spotlight at just 28 years old. "I went from working in a restaurant to being on cable news all the time," she recalls. "I initially really struggled with that. At a certain point, I just learned that you cannot get your feelings of beauty and confidence from anyone but yourself ... If I'm going to spend an hour in the morning doing my glam, it's not going to be because I'm afraid of what some Republican photo is going to look like ... It's because I feel like it," she says with a smile. Here, she picks up Fenty Beauty's Contour Stick, which she glides lightly down her cheekbones, over her forehead, and around her jawline. "I'm not trying to change my features or shape-shift -- I'm just trying to accentuate my existing features," she says as she adds a touch of the cream-to-powder pigment to her nose. "I'm not trying to make it look bigger. I'm not trying to make it look smaller ... I'm just trying to show people what I got."

When I get past reticence to advertise my company's services, to realistically say "I am one of the world's experts on [thing]," I too am just trying to show people what I've got. I remember N.K. Jemisin's articulation, for fiction writers:

...care better. I think the shift from extrinsic to intrinsic valuation .... is a fundamental part of the transition from amateur to professional, perhaps even more than pay rates and book deals and awards and such. .... How do you know your judgment of yourself is sound? .... But for pro writers -- and I include aspiring pros along with established ones in this designation -- it's an absolutely necessary transition. Otherwise you spend all your time caring about the wrong things.

The incentives you can see, the appealing and obvious ones, will often try to make you care about the wrong things. This means that integrity comes with inherent discomfort -- but by demonstrating integrity in public you can reduce the difficulty others run into when following your path. We've only gotten to see Ocasio-Cortez's integrity in action for a few years of public service so far. I look forward to seeing who follows her path.

* I have a caveat for Knock Down The House; it seems like the filmmakers made some misleading choices in the sequence of scenes in the NY-14 primary race.

In particular: The film makes it seem like Crowley fails to show up for a candidate forum in the Bronx (instead sending Councilwoman Palma as a surrogate), and then, maybe weeks later, he calls the Ocasio-Cortez campaign and agrees to appear on a TV debate with her. The implication is that her growing popularity, and news attention to his surrogate gaffe, have possibly shamed or scared him into agreeing to a fresh debate.

But in actual fact, the TV debate was on June 15th, and the in-person debate that Crowley skipped was a few days later, on June 18th. Here's the order things happened in, as far as I can reconstruct**:

This is particularly difficult to reconcile with a bit of audio the filmmaker uses, where Ocasio-Cortez wryly says (just after we are shown footage of a Pride event from June 17th) that Crowley didn't show up to a 100-person event, but now wants to debate her on NY1.

The way I can sort of square the circle is if the filmmakers are using audio recorded before June 15th, and the skipped debate Ocasio-Cortez is referring to is the first debate that Crowley skipped (and which the filmmakers have no footage of).

In any case, the filmmakers are compressing and reordering stuff to strongly imply a particular narrative that is not congruent with the chronological record, and once I come across a discrepancy like this I gotta wonder what else in the film I should question.

** Twitter's advanced search options are helpful here, especially daterange search. Here's a search to get all of Ocasio-Cortez's tweets between May 1st and May 31st of 2018.

As long as I'm talking about the research I ended up doing for this post: Reddit user lpetrich seems to be a solid contributor to the world of AOC fandom. Thank you for your posts, lpetrich!

*** When and how did she choose to run? There's a little confusion on this point. In college she took an interest in politics as an intern for Senator Kennedy but then, as she put it, switched to more work that would have a more direct impact. She never thought she would get back into politics or policy again. So, what's the sequence of her brother nominating her to Brand New Congress, BNC's six-month vetting process, and her deciding to take that nomination? Did she hear from BNC before her road trip, or after?

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# 02 Dec 2020, 06:35PM: Ashwatthama (The Elephant): I read the comic book version of the Mahabharata as a kid (thank you, Amar Chitra Katha!) and many of its stories stayed with me. As I recollected in a newspaper column in 2005:

Yudhisthira is an incredibly virtuous man, and is in fact the son of the god of dharma (righteousness and duty).

Yudhisthira has never spoken a lie. The gods so smile upon him that his chariot floats an inch above the ground, never touching the dust.

But, as the days of war drag on, he knows that he must get a psychological edge on his opponent. So Yudhisthira has an elephant bought and named Ashwattama, the name of his opponent's beloved son. Yudhisthira has the elephant killed so that he can honestly say, with his opponent listening, "Ashwattama is dead."

As planned, this breaks the other warrior's heart, and he recedes from the battle.

But because he lied, Yudhisthira's chariot falls upon the ground, never to float again.

In the comic book version (Issue 36, "The Battle At Midnight", page 29):

So now, he replied: "Ashwatthama is dead." Adding in an inaudible aside -- "Ashwatthama the elephant." As soon as the lie was uttered Yudhisthira's chariot touched the ground.* [We see Yudhisthira standing in a chariot in the background, and Drona in the foreground, visibly overcome.]

Hearing the news from Yudhisthira, Drona fainted. Dhrishtadyumna rushed toward him. When Drona gained consciousness, he could not gain his earlier strength. Yet he killed Dhrishtadyumna's horses. [We see him take aim at some horses with his bow and arrow.]

* Because of his righteous conduct Yudhisthira's chariot was always four fingers' breadth above the ground.

It surprised me to see this, going back to the comic, because I honestly remembered the speech bubble looking like:

ASHWATTHAMA the elephant IS DEAD.

Anyway, now you know one particular reason why Four Seasons Total Landscaping reverberates inside my being like a perfect joke outside of time.

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# 02 Dec 2020, 05:24PM: Getting Autoconf Unstuck: For most of this year, Zack Weinberg and I have been working on a pretty ambitious project:

1. to make a fresh release of GNU Autoconf, a crucial free and open source build tool that hadn't had a new release since 2012
2. to get paid for that
3. to help put Autoconf on a more sustainable footing so it doesn't have to get rescued again a little while down the road

Autoconf 2.70 is due out this month; if you use Autoconf, check out the 2.69e beta and test it soon since Zack aims to make the release on December 8th.

If you hear "Autoconf" and think "I don't even know what that is or why it is important", you can read my LWN story about the rejuvenation & what's next.

(I am proud that a person said "That's one of the best pieces of technical writing that I've read in a long time." about my article.)

Several companies use/depend on Autoconf internally and would like for Autoconf and the entire Autotools toolchain to get back on track. There's lots of code out there already depending on autoconf. Converting it would be risky and expensive. Plus, competing build systems don't cover all the edge cases Autoconf does. If this makes you nod, check out the 2.69e beta and test it.

But also, the funding we got has run out, so we're trying to get some corporate sponsorship to make 2.71 even better (including building out a robust continuous integration system), and get the project on a sustainable footing. We'd like to:

• test Autoconf with complicated autoconf scripts and find and fix more regressions
• set up proper CI so we can find regressions on lots of OSes
• get the hundreds of disorganized patches and bug reports filed, so we can prioritize and assess our backlog

Even a donation as small as USD $5,000 could help make substantial progress. If you want to directly pay Changeset to work on this, email me and let's talk. Or: the Free Software Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, collects donations on behalf of the GNU Toolchain (see their list of Working Together for Free Software Fund project areas), and your organization can make a tax-deductible donation to the FSF targeted at GNU Toolchain maintenance.

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# 01 Dec 2020, 03:15PM: Frances, Thanksgiving, And Potatoes: Because it's World AIDS Day, today I want to tell you a story about Thanksgiving, food, breaking and remaking tradition, and family. Caution: death because of AIDS.

Back in 2005, when my now-spouse Leonard and I lived in San Francisco, one year a bunch of Leonard's family drove north from Bakersfield for Thanksgiving. I was Leonard's girlfriend and they always tried to make me feel welcome at these things.

We were all going to have Thanksgiving at Uncle L's place in SF, hosted by Uncle L and his partner J, another man. Leonard's mom, Frances, was a Mormon, but a feminist one; the fact that her brother was gay was a complete non-issue.

J ran his kitchen and finished cooking and didn't let any of us help; L played Trivial Pursuit with us. And then we sat down to a heaping table of Thanksgiving goodies. Including a kugel J had made! But....

THERE WERE NO POTATOES.

Mashed? Scalloped? Roasted? Fried? Au gratin? Baked-from-frozen tater tots? Zip, nada, zero. No potatoes of any kind.

Of course we had asked ahead of time about what we could bring. Martinelli's apple cider, rolls, dessert maybe. There had been no mention of this fundamental lacuna, this chasm of carbs.

Someone delicately mentioned/asked about the taterlessness, and we were redirected to the kugel. The kugel was fine! But many of us shared a glance.

Frances's contemporaneous blog post does not mince words: "We had a lovely Thanksgiving, but there was no mashed potatoes and gravy, which horrified me."

And on the ride back to Leonard's place, Leonard, his sisters, his mom, and his brother-in-law began to plan the next day's meal. Which would include potatoes. It was early in a new tradition: Backup Thanksgiving.

Leonard delicately wrote (later): "In recent years I made Backup Thanksgiving because I was learning to cook, or because of the absence of certain foods from the official Thanksgiving table." (By now you know what "certain foods" means.)

I'm glad we had both those Thanksgivings with Frances in 2005. That was her last Thanksgiving. She died of AIDS in May 2006. In her last days others took over updating her blog.

Today Leonard made Backup Thanksgiving food, including some fantastic scalloped potatoes. I loved Frances and I miss her. My government's failed at containing a pandemic. So many people Thanksgave apart this year to increase the odds we can come together next year. I'm emotional.

I wish I could tell Frances that I'm writing a book, that the new pip just came out, that Leonard's book got a great review. I wish I could have had more than a few weeks of being her daughter-in-law. She was only 54.

If you broke your traditions this year to keep everyone safer, to reduce the number of people who will feel the way I do fifteen years from now, thank you so much. I hope the Backup Thanksgivings you have in mid-2021 are fantastic and joyous.

Frances saw what was important. The love is essential and the nourishment is essential. I wish you love and nourishment.

(Especially potatoes, if you love potatoes.)

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# (2) 01 Dec 2020, 11:36AM: Potomac Jokes: When my spouse Leonard was young, his mother told him a joke about President Richard Nixon:

Nixon fell into the Potomac River and was in danger of drowning. A local kid jumped in to save him.

Nixon, grateful, said, "Is there anything I can do for you? A tour of the White House? An official commendation?"

The kid said: "When I die, can you make sure I get buried in Arlington National Cemetery?"

Nixon said: "I think so, but why is that on your mind? You have your whole life ahead of you!"

The kid replied: "But when my mom find out I saved you, she's gonna kill me!"

This is a great joke but it is not specific enough for my taste; it is a joke template into which you could insert the name of any particularly hated President. As a comedian I find it enticingly inadequate to my desires.

Our household owns a copy of a decades-old edition of Scholastic's 101 President Jokes For Kids. I went through it a few days ago and found perhaps 3 Potomac jokes, none of which were particularly funny or felt President-specific.

I do not have time for another project* but it would be neat to try to write a bespoke Potomac joke for each US President. Gerald Ford tripping, fallling into the Potomac, and dealing with a mermaid who's angry at him about the Nixon pardon. Millard Fillmore trying to use the Union Wagon as some sort of amphibious vehicle. I've already come up with one FDR joke and two Biden jokes. Ask me about them if we're chatting. Or share a joke in the comments. Child-friendly, please!

* but I may do it anyway

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# 25 Nov 2020, 12:55PM: Situation Normal Giveaway, Preview, and Pre-order:

My spouse Leonard Richardson has written a second novel, Situation Normal! Publishing house Candlemark & Gleam will publish it on December 14th, 2020. You can preorder it now in ebook (Kobo, Nook, Chapters Indigo, Kindle) or in paperback (Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble)! And there's a worldwide giveaway right now, till December 13th, for a free ebook copy!

Leonard says:

My elevator pitch for Situation Normal is "the Coen brothers do Star Trek". It's a military SF story where no one is incompetent but everything goes wrong.

Situation Normal is a direct sequel to Leonard's short story "Four Kinds of Cargo", published in Strange Horizons eight years ago. Leonard's now posted a retconned version of "Four Kinds of Cargo" to make everything line up with the sequel. He notes:

but the crew of the smuggling starship Sour Candy is now only one thread of a plot that includes weaponized marketing, sentient parasites, horny alien teenagers, and cosplaying monks.

Kobo and Indigo have a free preview up, so you can see the content notes and start to meet Becky, Hiroko, Myrus, Churryhoof, Dwap-Jac-Dac, Arun, and the Chief.

"The Fist of Joy," said Dad. Just the name took him back to the previous war.

"Nuh-uh. An Outreach Light Combat Platform. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka."

"That's us, Jiankang," said Dad. "They're the good guys. Why are we running? This is insane."

"Who knows what they want," said the mayor in a tone that was either flat or full of adult emotions Myrus didn't understand. "They've been sending us urgent messages, but the Navy drafted our comm tech last month, so we're not that good at decrypting."

"Who made this decision?" said Dad. "Why wasn't the council consulted before we committed treason?"

Cory Doctorow likes Situation Normal even better than he liked Leonard's first novel, Constellation Games, which he called "an underappreciated masterpiece" and "one of the best political books I've ever read, an account of the poison chalice of societies based on coercion that puts great works of anarchist fiction to shame". Doctorow calls Situation Normal:

A triumph: madcap and trenchant, dancing on the precise meridian between funny and weird, with a wild, imaginative boldness that reinvents space-opera from the gravity well up.

And the American Library Association's Booklist gave Situation Normal a starred review, calling it "A fast-paced romp reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut channeled through the wild inventiveness of Charles Stross and the irreverent political attitude of Cory Doctorow" - again with the Cory comparisons.

Enter the giveaway today, or preorder in ebook (Kobo, Nook, Chapters Indigo, Kindle) or in paperback (Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble)!

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# 19 Nov 2020, 11:45AM: Thank You: Today I finally fiddled with the Universal Access settings in GNOME to:

• make the mouse cursor bigger, and add a contrasting outline, so it's easier to see where it is
• add a visible alert every time there's a sound/audio alert
• increase default text size everywhere

It took maybe 90 seconds total and was really easy. I went through some internalized ageism and ableism as I did this. Now I've done it and my computer is easier to use, and I am grateful to all the people who came before me and laid this path to make it easier for me to use. Thank you to everyone who has ever worked on desktop usability and accessibility.

# 13 Nov 2020, 11:52AM: It Goes On One At A Time: I want to tell you a story. It's about this year's election results, and it's about hope.

Just a few days after Election Day last week, with only 58% of the vote total reported, the New York Times was already comfortable projecting that Democratic incumbent Jerry McNerney will hold his seat in California's 9th Congressional District.

I used to live in that district, in the 1990s. I spent my early teen years in Stockton, an agricultural and shipping city. And that seat was Republican, Norman Shumway holding it 1978-1992 and then Richard Pombo winning and holding it after that.

In the mid-90s I came across an ad recruiting volunteers in the local alternative newspaper. I was a young teen and I was intrigued by the ad that said even people as young as 13 could volunteer for 2 hours per week, Wednesday afternoons, to do camerawork at a local cable access TV show. That's how I started volunteering with the Peace & Justice Network of San Joaquin County.

I met folks who had gotten in serious trouble for protesting the Vietnam War, for anti-nuke actions at Livermore Lab, and for various other acts of conscience. I ran the camera, then served as tech director, as a philosophy professor-turned-carpenter interviewed activists, journalists, politicians, scientists, poets, teachers, clergy, old folks with interesting stories to tell.

Every Congressional cycle they organized to try to beat Pombo. He seemed glued to that seat.

Then, years after I left, in 2004, someone ran unopposed as a write-in candidate for the Democratic nomination, and got 39% of the vote in the general election.

Then, in the 2006 election -- which I will always associate with this witty, angry, upsetting, didactic political music video set to "Freedom! '90" (content note for images from Abu Ghraib, Hurricane Katrina, and the 9/11 attacks) -- he WON! Jerry McNerney, who literally used to run a wind energy company and has a Ph.D. in math, won against a guy who was one of the worst politicians in America on environmental issues. Didn't hurt that by now Pombo was tied to the Abramoff corruption scandals.

My friends helped. They helped elect McNerney in 2006, and I think they had helped lay the groundwork, with decades of on-the-ground organizing, huge Rolodexes, media and fundraising experience.... All those years, trying and trying again, growing their networks. It's like Marge Piercy said. And now McNerney has been re-elected over and over, as a solid Democrat, and again this year.

There are candidates who lost last year and won this year. Activists, teachers, clergy. There are seats and chambers we came close to flipping this year, laying the groundwork for future efforts. Whatever those efforts need to be, whatever tomorrow brings.

(originally posted as a comment on MetaFilter)

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# 13 Nov 2020, 11:05AM: Inclines and Declinations: A while ago, a friend of mine who lives in Manhattan contacted me to say that she and her spouse would have some time off this week, and suggested that they come to visit us in Queens. We would of course be outdoors and masked and physically distant. We made plans.

And then we canceled them and did a Jitsi videocall instead. Because my friend had just spent half a day in a hospital for various tests, because they'd have to take a cab or subway trip to get here and back, because the COVID case numbers are going up. Everyone understood -- there's no shame or blame attaching to anyone here, just trying to mitigate risks.

We had a great chat about Star Trek: The Next Generation (which they just started watching several months ago), about adaptations and abridgements and what they elide, about writing and publishing and writer's block, about where we were on Saturday when jubilation erupted in response to the announcement of Biden's victory.

I will not be going anywhere for Diwali, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. I will be taking care of my friends and family by keeping them safe -- by doing my bit to keep them safe.

Maybe you have friends or family in pandemic-affected areas who don't really listen to legitimate statistics and are inclined to (disastrously) follow their own intuitions and personal anecdotes when deciding that they're fine with unmasked, indoor get-togethers. People who don't listen to your reasoned arguments.

I once learned -- of course via disabled folks swapping tips on social media -- that doctors often look askance at a patient saying "I did some research and these peer-reviewed papers suggest [x] diagnosis/treatment might be applicable" but are very open to a patient saying "a friend of mine had these problems and [x] helped -- could we check that?" There's something there, I suppose, about how the dominant person in the room is willing to humor you, as a parent does a child, as long as you aren't stepping onto their turf, challenging their expertise. You're acting like a normal, social person, more familiar with your friends' worries than with how your own body works, grasping for the concrete rather than abstractly reasoning.

So I wonder whether a similar approach might work this year, with some of the folks to whom "but it's Christmas" and "don't you want to see your family?" are imperviable rejoinders. Say that your friend is really worried about what'll happen if you go (I can serve as your friend for this purpose). Tell them about your friend-of-a-friend who caught COVID six months ago and still hasn't recovered (I have at least one friend in this category).

And, readers in countries where the pandemic is under control and you can live a reasonably standard life: I'm glad y'all have been sensible. Someday we'll join you. I hope.

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# 12 Nov 2020, 11:54AM: Plain Language Choices: Pro Publica published a story in a few translations, including plain language, for accessibility reasons. It's interesting to read the default and plain language English versions of the stories, and to reflect on my own sometimes-negative immediate reactions when reading a plain-language piece: are they condescending to me? What are they hiding from me? but also how refreshing it is to see writers explicitly call things "bad".

I tried to write the Sunsetting Python 2 FAQ in very accessible English, because some audiences don't read English very well, or are executives who get scared off by programmer jargon. I saw some reactions that applauded this choice, and some that found that the effect was condescending, scolding, or otherwise offputting. Then, this year, I scripted the video we made about the changes coming to pip, using a somewhat similar plain-language approach -- but it's a video, with smiling people telling you these things, and it's far more about a change than about an ending (specifically "you should give up this thing you are used to"), so it affects the viewer differently.

And of course -- who are the audiences? What should we assume and what should we try to find out first? This connects back to the concision-nuance tradeoff in one-to-many documents which is, like so many other contested spectra, a ground churned over with centuries of thought and argument.

(Pro Publica news via Jason Kottke)

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# 09 Nov 2020, 11:06AM: Quite A Weekend: All the news networks and newspapers have analyzed the ballots counted so far and predicted that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have won the US Presidential election. We have so much work ahead, yes, but the RELIEF of this result is tremendous. Those spontaneous jubilant gatherings in the streets would have been much larger if it weren't for COVID (I stayed home and I'm guessing a ton of other rejoicers did too). As a friend said, it's like we juuuuuust made the last offramp.

My citizenship is safer (I'm the daughter of immigrants). My property is safer. My health is safer. My neighbors are safer. It's easier to make plans and have them feel meaningful. To feel purpose.

As I've seen some folks point out on social media: there are no red states, only voter suppression states. One of the corollaries here is: states that you think of as reliably Democratic would and could turn Republican if bad actors suppress enough of the vote. Great user experience for voter registration, voter notification, citizen engagement and turnout, and voting matter everywhere. If you want to see how this could work, read America, Inc. by Andrea Phillips -- it's a near-future science fiction novel with a lot of design thinking about US elections. And then if you want to start getting involved in those issues in your area, adults of all genders are welcome to help out with the League of Women Voters.

Leonard finished reading Vikram Seth's monumental novel A Suitable Boy and we talked about it at some length. Soon we'll probably start watching the BBC adaptation. It's such a generous and loving book, so many people doing so many human things. Shoemaking! Electoral politics! Music! Love! Poetry, farming, sex work, riots, parenting, teaching, healing, gardening, romance.... and did I mention the shoe manufacturing?!?!?! I'm so glad he's read it now so it's a part of both our internal worlds, together.

Alex Trebek died. I am sad about this; I grew up watching Jeopardy! and the older I get the more I appreciate all the little rituals and institutions that, together, make a culture.

The brilliant leaves on the trees outside are so gorgeous and, in their own way, lush.

I kept on adding at least 400 words per day to the git repository where I work on my book. It's like a hike. I look up at an intimidatingly high peak in the morning, and then I walk a step at a time for long enough, and then it's lunchtime at the vista. The height is a kind of mirage. What's important is the path.

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# 01 Nov 2020, 12:05AM: Nonfiction Book Writing in November, and Daily Wordcount Posting: I am writing a book about open source maintainership. I had planned to get the book to editors/agents by the end of this year; I have made very little progress on it this year so now my goal is to have a small self-published early version of the book available by the end of the year.

Recently I wrote up a blog post about how the hobby writing project I did Sept-Oct felt doable for me, and how to apply those lessons to my book project I've been procrastinating on. Having a little writing prompt every day feels like it will help. I'm also planning on blogging stuff as I write it, or posting it publicly somewhere. Maybe a GitLab repo to start?

November -- there's NaNoWriMo. It's for novels. I saw that there are some rebels who use it for nonfiction, but I don't want to deliberately contravene the goals of NaNoWriMo so I'm not signing up for it formally, but I am committing to writing each day in November as a way to accumulate a lot of progress and momentum for the book.

Today I sat down with Leonard and he helped me restore my faith in my current outline, and I developed a template for each chapter which will make it easier for me to write them, and I wrote seven writing prompts so now I have writing exercises/chapters to start for each day in the coming week.

I also signed up for a daily words community on Dreamwidth to give myself people I am accountable to. I will also tell y'all: I want to write 400 words per day in November, as a minimal goal. On good days I know I will blow way past that! But just -- every day I want to write at least 400 words.

Any of you doing daily writing in November? If you're posting daily "I wrote [number] words!" then where are you doing that? I'd like to join in.

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# 28 Oct 2020, 05:29PM: Short Story Recommendations, And Hobby Project Lessons: Recommending short fiction is important for discovery, and to help us talk about things we like (and not just criticize things we don't).

Recently I've been posting to MetaFilter each day to recommend short stories, mostly scifi/fantasy but not always. For example, I pointed to Brishti Guha's translation of a (wacky, in my opinion) 11th-century Sanskrit piece by Kshemendra about language misunderstandings and an angry scholar. "...the reason the meat was so poor was because hunters couldn’t get hold of any well-fed animals. All the animals wanted to listen to Gunadhya’s story even more than they wanted to eat!" I enjoyed this fragment so much that I called my mom and read it aloud to her, and she told me cool stuff about the Sanskrit in-jokes in the story.

Other MetaFilter participants said nice things about how much they like the series which is nice to hear. Lots of people have said, in comments in that thread or on individual posts or in private mail to me, that they value getting these recommendations, that they are eager for links to good short fiction to help them read great stuff instead of getting sucked into the whirlpool of reading distressing news. Similarly, I have found it nice to have a wee research project, and to have a little template for bite-size things to write and publish that people enjoy. And I've discovered some cool magazines I hadn't known about before, such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cossmass Infinities.

I started posting these in late August. I decided that I'll stop at the end of this month, and suggested sources for folks who want to keep going.

And I've learned some things about what I found motivating about this project, and am working on adapting those lessons to my book project so I can get more traction.

• Leverage a pre-existing audience
• People comment and say thank you, especially with specific praise/compliments
• Daily action with a bit of a deadline, but externally enforced limit that I can only post once per day (because of MetaFilter's rules)
• Separation between writing and posting (prewriting is asynchronous; I have a little private queue of posts to publish)
• Each chunk of work is short (often 50-100 words, with extended lengths primarily being quotes from others; often takes under 10 minutes for me to read and do research; I'm mostly reading and synthesizing what past folks have already made)
• A clear specification/template/writing prompt for what that little chunk of work is supposed to be
• Leverage and lifting up other people with hyperlinks

Overall, I seem to benefit from having consistent frequent but delayed publication/gratification (which suggests a drip marketing approach as Julia Evans has just blogged about), having a clear vision for what each little chunk of work is supposed to be like (which suggests I need to bear down on outlining work), and external validation from eager readers (which suggests I should set up a few oral conversations sometime soon with people who need a book about brownfield maintainership).

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# 19 Oct 2020, 12:25PM: "Useful Music": The content management platform Cargo makes Soundcloud mixes of "Useful Music": "Mixes to support your production(s)." These generally have no English lyrics and I've been finding them pretty chill and nice as work background.

I think they may be using some kind of natural language generator to write their blog. Or they've hired George Lazenby.

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# 08 Oct 2020, 08:43AM: Dappling: The light through the window is still beautiful.

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# 07 Oct 2020, 06:55PM: Autumn and Reckoning: In late September, I took a one-week vacation. Which is to say, I took several days off from my client work, and I did a lot of biking around to different New York City parks. I contacted a few friends I hadn't seen in a super long time and we met and talked (distanced, masked except for short periods while someone was eating -- and I kept my mask on while my friends were eating, and vice versa) in parks in Queens and Brooklyn. Or I sat on a bench and sketched while listening to a podcast, or I lay down on a picnic blanket (a staff gift from when I worked at Wikimedia) and I read. (I've just started Laurie J. Marks's Elemental Logic fantasy quartet and I like it a lot.) The weather was dry and crisp-to-warm and I had a very nice time. It was amazing to see and chat with multiple non-Leonard people in a week. By Friday afternoon my brain felt freshly full in a way that reminded me of going to in-person conferences.

I had read guidance on COVID-19 transmission and how to prevent it, and I reasoned (and my friends did too, of course) that it was safe enough to do this. On Saturday a few days ago I repeated this and went to Brooklyn to see two other friends this way.

Recently the plateau of safety has been eroding. The case count in New York City is trending up. Just now I checked New York City's COVID-19 milestones/goals page and the New York Times's NYC COVID case count tracker. New cases started rising in September and are still going up. The NYT reports: "Over the past week, there have been an average of 553 cases per day, an increase of 59 percent from the average two weeks earlier."

I talked with Leonard briefly. Given the stats, we ought to cut down on the risky things we're doing. But .... there's nearly nothing to cut.

I recognize that anyone can say "we have been cautious" and you have no way of checking their actual discipline level against your standards without fairly extensive surveillance and logging, but perhaps these broad strokes help you assess our assiduity. There's a growing consensus that it's key to reduce exposure to aerosol transmission -- but we were already wearing cloth masks at all times outside the apartment, avoiding crowds and unmasked people, and avoiding indoors spaces as much as possible (our local corner shop for 5 minutes once a week or so; the in-building laundromat, early in the morning, about every 5 weeks; in-and-out of the local post office to check my PO Box every few weeks). We've bought an air purifier. We have not eaten in a restaurant, indoors or outdoors, since March.

But there is one thing I can cut. This "seeing friends" thing, even though it's always outdoors. I can be stricter if I see friends -- stricter on distance (more like 10 feet, and using a measuring tape to make sure), no eating (and thus no mask removal), shorter durations. And I could limit the number of households I see to just one, going into a proper pod. Or we could just dial it all the way down to zero. Figuring that out.

I have been trying out different ways to motivate myself to exercise, and I found "you get to see a friend!" pretty motivating for the bike rides (sometimes about 90-120 minutes each way). And I got to see my friends and talk with them, learn new stuff, explore things through that digressive figuring-things-out kind of conversation. I know researchers for ages have been looking into in-person conversation and how to make online stuff a better simulacrum of it, and a zillion more people became citizen scientists in this field this year, especially in work and education. My experience right now is: there exists no replacement for in-person socializing, for me, that gives me all the same stuff that I value, that I think I need.

My sadness at losing this is just one of the many sadnesses of this pandemic. It's a small one, comparatively. But it's there.

It's autumn here, a season of transformation and of reckoning with the growing darkness. In many faith traditions, sometime soon we'll get to the rituals about bringing the sun back. I suppose that's something we're doing already, donning our masks, waving at our friends instead of hugging, stewarding our own little flames.

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# 30 Sep 2020, 12:24PM: Changes Coming To Pip In October 2020: People who deal with Python: Changes are coming to pip, Python's package installation tool, in October 2020. Please share this migration guide and our video with your circles.

SHORT VERSION:

I'm working on improving the Python packaging toolchain, foundational work that will (in the long run) make the whole Python experience way less confusing. In the short term this may mess with some people's workflows, so we want lots of people to hear about it now.

The pip team made a 2-minute video to explain what's up:

We are also doing user experience studies, and want you to sign up if you ever do anything with Python (whatever your level of skill/experience).

Please boost this toot or retweet this tweet if you want to help us get the word out.

MORE DETAILS:

Computers need to know the right order to install pieces of software ("to install x, you need to install y first"). So, when Python programmers share software, like when they publish packages on the Python Package Index or internally in large companies, they have to precisely describe those installation prerequisites. And then pip needs to navigate tricky situations when it gets conflicting instructions.

Up until now, pip's been very inconsistent in handling this stuff, which makes it easy for your Python environment to get messed up. That's why we successfully applied for $407K in funding from Mozilla and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to finish and roll out a proper dependency resolver for pip. The goal is that pip will get better at handling that tricky logic, and easier for you to use and troubleshoot.

You can test the new behavior (in beta) right now by using an optional flag in pip 20.2. And in pip 20.3, coming in October, the new behavior will be the default.

Once you're using the new resolver, pip is going to be stricter and more consistent. So things won't mysteriously break as much, and we can add more features that lots of people want.

But! Right now, a ton of people unknowingly have Jenga towers of wobbly dependencies in their environments and will run into pain when we make the resolver stricter and more consistent. And this may lead to you getting stuck in troubleshooting, assuming that pip caused the problem, when actually the deeper cause is conflicts among how your upstreams specify requirements (TensorFlow just fixed a related thing, for example).

So: We're trying to get Python users to try out the beta of the new resolver that's available in the current stable release of pip (20.2), fix your own environments, report bugs in your upstreams in advance, and report bugs to us so we can fix them in the next couple weeks. We started spreading the word about this a few months ago. And now: video! People watch videos, I hear? I hope this helps.

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# 20 Sep 2020, 04:22PM: Availability This Week: Heads-up about availability: I'm attempting to take this week (Sept 21-25) off from client/Changeset work, doing lots of biking and reading and writing. Letting you know in case you email me about anything.

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# 17 Sep 2020, 12:36PM: Some Followups From LibrePlanet 2017: I see that back in March 2017, I made a draft of some followup notes for my LibrePlanet 2017 keynote "Lessons, Myths, and Lenses: What I Wish I'd Known in 1998" (schedule description, video, in-progress transcript). I'm going to barely annotate/format this and post it as more of a found artifact and less of a designed communications instrument.

Wampanoag people

The Infinite Wrench

Mel Chua, Alex Bayley, Ashe Dryden, Christie Koehler

Open Source Bridge 2012

Kevin Gorman & Chip Deubner

Geek Feminism

Hans Reiser

Jupyter, Library Simplified, Zulip & zulipbot & good code review, Software Carpentry (save a day of work a week for the rest of their working lives), Dreamwidth and dw-dev, Beautiful Soup, Archive of Our Own, GNU Mailman and what's new in Mailman 3

Seth Schoen

Yudhisthira

Joseph Reagle

Kannada

Vajra Chandrasekera

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# 17 Sep 2020, 11:13AM: Guitars And Rock Climbing, But As Analogies For Less Glamorous And Immediately Appealing Actitivies: I was explaining to a friend a few days ago the thing I mention in my RC & MetaFilter post, about how I'm trying to avoid saying "community" when I might mean "constituency" or "group" or similar. And perhaps we should say "society" sometimes -- a group that shares some norms and heritage and places to talk with each other, but doesn't necessarily take responsibility for anything. And how the phrase "the open source community" is laughable.

But wait, they said, noting that in open source everyone has to operate by some shared rules, right?

Well, kinda, yes, I said, in that everyone's working with openly available code that's under an OSI-approved license. But they're in such different situations, and paid vs. unpaid is just part of it! Think about people who play the guitar. A rock star, a session musician, a music teacher, a member of a garage band, someone putting videos on YouTube as a kind of audition for stardom, a beginning student .... they all might be playing the same sheet music or tab, but they're really doing different things.

[The field guide to open source project archetypes that Open Tech Strategies and Mozilla are developing (PDF of the first edition) is an excellent framework for thinking about these different situations and how they structure open source projects' capabilities, who's in charge, and what you can expect.]

Then, yesterday, I was reading, then skimming, a deeeeeeeply domain-specific, detail-heavy blog post about how to implement something of particular interest to the author. And at the end, of course, they say that they're starting an open-source implementation, a prototype. And I felt as though I could see into the future -- this person creating a bit of an application, other people loving it, the project growing in popularity and importance to others, the creator wanting to step away and explore other stuff. And there the timeline fractures, depending on whether anyone took steps to get it under someone else's care, get a company to steward it or grow a vibrant collective around it.

There are a bunch of developers who want to do hard things the same way that mountain climbers want to climb hard mountains. And as a side effect of this sometimes they emit some open source artifacts, as pitons sunk into the mountainside, and if you want to follow the way they went, very closely, you can reuse those pitons. Which is great and useful.

But that is only a first step towards infrastructure -- towards robust, comfortable, safe, scalable systems. And I am the millionth person to complain on her blog about the asymmetry and fragility and just inherent ridiculousness of how much really important, widely-depended-on infrastructure in our industry is basically "reuse the leftover pitons from past explorers". But it is still complainworthy. I hereby complain. Complain! And there's a reason so many of us are doing things about it (as in my case recently and for the last five years).

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# (1) 16 Sep 2020, 07:13AM: I Miss You, Friends And Strangers: I met you in a storytelling workshop taught by someone later discredited.

I met you in the front-row fandom for a now-defunct sketch comedy troupe.

I met you at a women's networking event where you were the only person I talked with who wasn't tedious.

I met you -- you remember that it was a Redditors' meetup, but it must have been cross-pollinated with something else, maybe a scifi thing?

I met you through work -- we were remote colleagues who saw each other several times a year, and then you moved to New York.

I met you through a meditation workshop you led.

I found your blog through a link from a friend, then met you at a scifi thing, maybe a Tor.com party or a Cory Doctorow reading.

You, I first met at a Tor.com party, I'm sure.

I met you at WisCon.

I met you through a friend I went to middle school with.

I met you when a colleague let me regularly cowork at the nonprofit where he and you worked.

I met you when we were at Recurse Center together.

We probably first met at an Electronic Frontier Foundation thing, maybe here, maybe in San Francisco.

I met you through your girlfriend, now wife.

I can't quite remember how we first met because we're connected in a few ways.

We met on the MTA when one of us recognized the other's stickers/t-shirt.

I met you through someone I met at WisCon.

I met you through Leonard's writing group.

I met you because we volunteer on Python packaging tools together.

I met you at the now-ended Open Source Bridge conferences.

I met you in a local political activism group.

I think I met you in a friend's storyreading circle.

I met you through fandom on Dreamwidth, and then invited you to a meal.

I met you through fandom on Dreamwidth, and then you recognized me at an N.K. Jemisin reading.

I met you at PyCon or Open Source Bridge, I think.

I met you through a Wikimedian friend.

I met you when we were undergraduate students together, twenty years ago.

I met you through the business you run.

I met you through the nonprofit you ran.

I met you through the ex you're now estranged from.

And so on.*

I have lived in New York City for ~15 years, and over that time I've grown several local friendships, some lighter and some stronger. I miss seeing you.

I was a kind of isolated teenager who had very few friends. I'll amend that. When I was in high school, I had one friend at the "talk on the phone about something other than homework" level. I invited people to come see a movie with me** for a birthday and no one came.

Over the decades since, I've become much more accustomed to making, having, and regularly seeing friends. In a September week last year I had breakfast with one friend and lunches with two friends, not counting the folks I saw at various clubs, groups, and events.

Every few weeks I contact some friends and arrange phone or videocalls. Some of you I haven't talked with in way too long and we're more acquaintances now. And I talk with people in other places a lot -- I have friends spread out so far. If my New York-area friends may as well be in other countries, a friend in Asheville may as well be in another solar system, for how impossible it feels to imagine that we'll see each other again.

For the past few months, my friend Mike Pirnat DJed a radio show on his old college radio station. His usual outro is Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" (don't know where, don't know when). I've listened to it dozens of times now and only today am I realizing how I could read it as not descriptive but prescriptive.

Right now I am doggy-paddling to keep myself above water, and part of that is keeping up with the friends I have made, especially the local friends. But someday I want to meet a stranger and make friends with them again. That's a vision to look forward to.

* Sorry if I missed you - I'm sure that as soon as I hit Post I'll think of three more to add, and then three more....

**In retrospect, Beyond Rangoon was not the most appealing selection for most teens.

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# 09 Sep 2020, 08:37PM: Cool Music Rec: Abundance: Last year, via a BBC Gaelic and Celtic music show, I discovered a rockin' instrumental tune with horns and strings. It is so rockin' that I wanted to know more! Despite not knowing Scottish Gaelic, I worked out that the song's "The Kelburn Brewer", and is a collaboration involving Natalie Haas and Alasdair Fraser and closes their CD "Abundance". Here's "The Kelburn Brewer" as a YouTube track. Gets going around 0:34, then picks up further about a minute in, then increases its jammin'-ness as it goes. Enjoy! You can also buy "Abundance" as unencumbered MP3s and I recommend this because you get a bunch of cheery instrumental music by indie artists on an indie label! And the instruments include kalimba! I had never heard of kalimba before!

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