Things that would make the Facebook Profile Way More Fun

I find the Facebook profile horribly restricting and boring. Here's a few things that should change...

• Current Location & Hometown - The ability to type a location and not have it autocomplete from a list of "only cities which google maps can find." For example, if you try to give your current location as "Earth," and your hometown as "Saturn," it autocompletes your location as "Earth, Texas" and your hometown as "Saint-Saturnin-lès-Avignon" in France.
  
  And, really, I don't want to get more specific about my location than "Earth."
  
  
• Gender - Only two choices? What is this, a doctor's office, trying to eliminate uterine cancer as the reason our abdomens hurt? A medical insurance form trying to calculate medical risks and likely age of death by sociological variables?? NO! This is Facebook, a website for *social* connections and relationships. What is relevant in how we relate to others socially isn't necessarily our biological gender, but how we perceive and identify our gender. Why is there not another option - even if it's just a third option, "Other"?
  
  (If there was a free-text option, I'd probably enter "Yes.")
  
  
• Interested in: Men/Women - While I do appreciate that you can select both genders, I always want there to be a text field option for this one, so I could answer "Intelligent Freethinking Geeky Adults With Cute Bottoms." It would be the most accurate response.
  
  
• Relationships - I do like that options like "civil partnership" and "open relationship" have been added. However, you can only select one partner in an open relationship - so "It's complicated" is still the only option for a long term poly triad or a girl with two boyfriends.
  
  
• Speaking of relationships - Why isn't there a section here, or anywhere, for pets?
  
  
• Employer - This field is very limiting for the self-employed, since your answer appears in your Profile or Wall as "Works at." For business owners, actors, writers, artists, and other self-employed people, then, their Wall and Profile says that they "Works at: Self." Don't we all?
  
  
• University/Secondary School - Since there is an "Add School" feature to use if the school you start typing doesn't yet have other alumni on Facebook, these two are fantastic JUST THE WAY THEY ARE. You can be a graduate of Pyrdonian Academy, Hogwarts School of Magic and Witchcraft, the School of Hard Knocks, and Starfleet Academy, if you so choose, and if you don't want anyone to know what school you actually did go to.
  
  
• Religion/Politics - I love that one can enter anything one wishes to enter in this field, but there is only room for one entry in each. I entered the Flying Spaghetti Monster (of the carbonara sect) for "religion," but I also wanted to include Church of St. Looney Up the Cream Bun and Jam because it is possibly the most innuendo laden made-up religion ever. And I'm equally loyal to both philosophies.
  
  All joking aside, I do know people who can describe their religious beliefs with something like "Jesus-loving buddhist pagan," and have one friend whose religion entry just reads "It's Complicated."
  
  That said, since both options are free text, so you *can* write in "Jesus-loving Buddhist Pagan," or that you are a member of "The Silly Party" or the "Libertarian National Socialist Green Party" - but sadly not both - and there is a "description" field, so that when we read your profile, we can know that by "Christian," you actually really mean that Christmas is your favorite holiday, and you're pretty sure Jesus existed and was a pretty bitchin' dude to party with.

A little bit non-fictiony

I've noticed, recently, that I'm in one of my non-fiction-y moods.

I can tell when I'm in a non-fiction moods the third or fourth time someone suggests a movie/tv series/novel that I'd normally be at least mildly curious about, and the voice in my head says, "meh." (Sometimes, the voice in my head says that out loud, and I feel very bad about it)

That's not to say I don't still enjoy a handful of established favorites - but I'm just as happy to have a gap between Doctor Who and Torchwood as to be watching it, and the news about the 2012/2013 DW season isn't terribly upsetting. I'm sure I'll be in a fiction mood again by then. Probably.

It's just that I don't have much bandwidth these days... any fiction which requires commitment, like whole novels, or a tv series that I'm more than an episode behind on, or a movie - especially one at a theater, where its too dark to knit or draw and I have to *sit still* - is more of a stress than a relaxation.

I recall an interview with John deLancie in the early 90s, who said he couldn't really watch tv and turn off the professional actor, and to relax he listened to music, except that didn't always work because his father was a conductor and oboist, so most of the times he read. I can kind of relate, now.

It's alright though. It's not as if I'm at a loss for reading or viewing material. I just turn on a documentary, or a Ted Talk lecture, instead of a movie. I pick up "Physics of the Impossible" over any of the five novels I started in 2010 and still haven't finished. And I've read "Comics and Sequential Art" from cover to cover (and have "Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative" next in the queue).

(And, hey, Dirty Jobs, Mythbusters, and Top Gear are totally not fiction!)

The One Best Book

The Guardian book blog has an article on the “shrinking” presence of women SF writers, a response to an analysis of an earlier Guardian books reader’s favorites poll: when asked to list favorites, out of some 500 responses only ~20 were works written by women (about 4%).

I’m not entirely sure that the female presence can be called “shrinking” in a year where the majority of Nebula nominees, across all categories, were women. If anything, their presence is expanding, and women writers are receiving recognition both critically (with awards) and in sales (at least among the under 40 SFF writers in my acquaintance, women are kicking ass with sales figures and multi-book deals, whether writing traditionally “female” genres like paranormal romance, or male dominated genres like horror and speculative war fiction).

Merits of the title aside – headlines in journalism are often misleading, inaccurate, or exaggerated – there is the question of the poll. Does a poll of “best books” with 4% representation of works by women, represent sexism?

The original poll-taker suggested a bias towards classic SF – the older the work, the more likely the writer is to be male – while Nicola Griffith’s analysis and Guardian response David Barnett considered both industry sexism (clearly not the case) and sexism in the fanbase.

I don’t think either considered the limitations of the poll itself; the poll asked readers to name the best SF book – the best, which is one book – and explain why it was the best. It did not ask readers list their 5 or 10 or 20 favorites (though some did in comments).

If I were to name my top 10 or 20 or 100, my list – forever changing as I find new works and new authors – would most definitely include a variety of writers – women, men, my partner, friends and acquaintances who I meet at conventions, podcasters who’ve gone pro, people I’ll never meet, young people, people long dead, people of color, people from countries I’ve never seen.

Yet, no matter the books in the rest of my list of favorites, no matter the genders, races, gender identities, sexual orientations, countries of origins of the writers in that list – and no matter how many of my closest friends’ books hit the NYT bestseller list – if I were asked to name only one book? My favorite book would be the one book that I’ve read, listened to, and watched a hundred times, and probably will a few thousand more. It’s clever, witty, funny, irreverent, imminently quotable, and 30 years later still insightful. My one favorite will always, always be Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*.

I suspect that for many respondents, their response comes from the same place: it’s the book that’s affected them the most, the book that they re-read over and over, the book they’d take to a desert island or take into space (if they couldn’t take an ebook), the book that was profound at a key point in their lives, their *first* favorite book, and the book that they still love, after all this time.

The Guardian poll doesn’t mean that 96% of SFF’s reading list or that 96% SFF fans overall favorite books are written by men – it’s that for 96% of the respondents, the ultimate, one best book ever happens to be written by a man.

And that’s not a bad or awful or sexist thing.

*Omnibus edition… otherwise a dead, white, straight, Englishman will take up the first 6 spots in my top ten list (5 volumes of HHGTTG and the first Dirk Gently). Can’t have that, can we?

Maker's Fair

Last Sunday, on a wonderfully overcast day, I shoved my phone and wallet in my cargo pants, and went to my first Maker's Fair, to the mother of all Maker's Fairs in San Mateo.

Maker's Fair, if you are not familiar with it, is like county fair for the DIY crowd. Except the musical shows are powered by bicycles and the "rides" are a life-sized mousetrap, trilobytes, and a child-powered, uh... whatever this thing is at 2:32. And, damn, the kids were *lining up* to do that thing.

And by "DIY" I mean everything from converting old t-shirts into a purse/child's dress/hat to woodworking projects to home robotics and build-your-own-3d-printers.

I arrived early afternoon to San Mateo, and went through 3 of the 7 parking lots before I could park. The line to the shuttle was long, and I considered walking, but it was over a freeway and I didn't know the area well enough to find a non-freeway backroad. I think I finally got to the event at 2 p.m., but there were interesting people in line to talk to, so I was good.

Since I didn't check the program and didn't get there early enough, I missed both Mike Rowe and Adam Savage, and thus, missed Adam Savage doing a cage dance to Doctor Who in a faraday cage. Thank goodness for YouTube.

In fact, I missed all of the talks and live demonstrations, and yet ONLY going to the booths and outdoor exhibits for four hours, I still felt like I'd missed some of those. There is a lot going on at Maker's Fair. A lot. Next year, I will go early, go on Saturday, and come back Sunday if there are any awesome speakers.

I'd meant to go Saturday, mostly because Saturday runs longer and Sunday is family pass day, which generally means overrun with children, but life got busy and it just wasn't possible to go Saturday. The children were quite well behaved, if a little underfoot, and all in all it was kind of awesome to see kids so engrossed in all the play equipment and demonstrations and activities, and to see how many science-y toys and activities are out now for kids.

One thing I'm going to recommend to all parents (and librarians) is 50 Dangerous Thing You Should Encourage Your Children To Do. It's kind of an interactive applied science and how not to be afraid of everything and have fun book.

I almost got it for myself (and might later), but decided this was more immediately applicable - Absinthe and Flamethrowers is part insane backyard science projects, part applied philosophy of intelligent risk-taking.

Other things I almost picked up was Gurstelle's first book, Backyard Ballistics, which is all insane backyard science, a hundred other project-centered books whose titles I forget (on cheesemaking, creative recycling of dead computers... ), and an Arduino ADX starter kit, as I may have been bitten by the robotics bug. (Ok, I was bitten in high school; I just didn't have time for the acid etching processors we had back then. Now that there are programmable microprocessors for $35 and open source software? The hobby is totally accessible)

Highlights: Fire-breathing scrap-metal dragons. 20 foot, 3-seater penny-farthing. Being chased by an electric shark. The robotic descendent of the spirograph. Very small, strange vehicles. Robots of all sorts. Finding out that the Utilikilt people still do mini-kilts. Talking to a guy who does printing press art. Discovering arduino.

Libraries, Earmarked Funding, and Schadenfreude

With a rare free afternoon during the week, I went to our community's beautiful new architectural masterpiece of a library for the first time, paid a way overdue library fine, and checked out a couple of books on writing comic books. One of which I almost bought from Amazon, and am glad I didn't because its way, way thinner than I expected for the price.

Its a very spacious library, but it could use more books. In the sad and weird way that public funding works, the new building and the lovely, ecology friendly landscaping outside were funded by means of a community measure via special election a few years back. And the funding was generous. The books and media and day to day budget, though, are still funded by the general county library system, which are determined by county and city government councils slicing up a limited pie of money.

(Earmarked funding is the boon and bane of all government funded enterprises - from schools to public libraries to DOE science labs to military research. It's also the answer to 90% of all confusing budgetary questions, like "why can the military afford to fund state of the art computerized AI smart bomber robot things, but our soldiers have no ammo?" Earmarked funding. On the other hand, many cool new things, like gorgeous new public libraries, wouldn't happen without it)

Still, its a lovely library, and I'm just the tiniest bit pleased, in a schadenfreude sort of way, that the gorgeous architecture these days goes to libraries and museums. The eco-friendly landscaping outside is turning into a lovely park, the sort you can have a lovely picnic in the shade while enjoying your library books.