I Got Yer Oscar Nominations RIGHT HERE

TL;DR: I care about the Academy Awards and I care about data reporting.

This year's Oscar nominations (honoring films released in 2016) were announced on January 24th, and ever since then I've been checking Oscars.org periodically to see if they've published the "view by film" tab on the nominations list. Several news outlets reported on the numbers of nominations different films received, but usually the Academy posts a full list of nominations for each film.

Well, that tab still hasn't appeared as of this writing, but on a whim, I back-hacked the URL based on last year's site, and you know what? The data's actually there. It doesn't appear to be fully cleaned up (the original song nominees are sorted incorrectly), but it's better than nothing:

https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/2017?qt-honorees=1#qt-honorees

However, I had already compiled my own list from the per-category nominations page, so I'm posting that information here for everyone else's handy reference. Please note that I'm only listing films with more than one nomination below. For everything else, please refer to the broke-ass page linked above.

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La La Land – 14 nominations
Best Picture - Fred Berger, Jordan Horowitz and Marc Platt, Producers
Directing - Damien Chazelle
Actor in a Leading Role - Ryan Gosling
Actress in a Leading Role - Emma Stone
Writing (Original Screenplay) - Damien Chazelle
Cinematography - Linus Sandgren
Costume Design - Mary Zophres
Film Editing - Tom Cross
Music (Original Score) - Justin Hurwitz
Music (Original Song) - "Audition (The Fools Who Dream)"
Music (Original Song) - "City of Stars"
Production Design - David Wasco; Set Decoration: Sandy Reynolds-Wasco
Sound Editing - Ai-Ling Lee and Mildred Iatrou Morgan
Sound Mixing - Andy Nelson, Ai-Ling Lee and Steve A. Morrow

Arrival – 8 nominations
Best Picture - Shawn Levy, Dan Levine, Aaron Ryder and David Linde, Producers
Directing - Denis Villeneuve
Writing (Adapted Screenplay) - Eric Heisserer
Cinematography - Bradford Young
Film Editing - Joe Walker
Production Design - Patrice Vermette; Set Decoration: Paul Hotte
Sound Editing - Sylvain Bellemare
Sound Mixing - Bernard Gariépy Strobl and Claude La Haye

Moonlight – 8 nominations
Best Picture - Adele Romanski, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, Producers
Directing - Barry Jenkins
Actor in a Supporting Role - Mahershala Ali
Actress in a Supporting Role - Naomie Harris
Writing (Adapted Screenplay) - Barry Jenkins; Story by Tarell Alvin McCraney
Cinematography - James Laxton
Film Editing - Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon
Music (Original Score) - Nicholas Britell

Hacksaw Ridge – 6 nominations
Best Picture - Bill Mechanic and David Permut, Producers
Directing - Mel Gibson
Actor in a Leading Role - Andrew Garfield
Film Editing - John Gilbert
Sound Editing - Robert Mackenzie and Andy Wright
Sound Mixing - Kevin O’Connell, Andy Wright, Robert Mackenzie and Peter Grace

Lion – 6 nominations
Best Picture - Emile Sherman, Iain Canning and Angie Fielder, Producers
Actor in a Supporting Role - Dev Patel
Actress in a Supporting Role - Nicole Kidman
Writing (Adapted Screenplay) - Luke Davies
Cinematography - Greig Fraser
Music (Original Score) - Dustin O'Halloran and Hauschka

Manchester By The Sea – 6 nominations
Best Picture - Matt Damon, Kimberly Steward, Chris Moore, Lauren Beck and Kevin J. Walsh, Producers
Directing - Kenneth Lonergan
Actor in a Leading Role - Casey Affleck
Actor in a Supporting Role - Lucas Hedges
Actress in a Supporting Role - Michelle Williams
Writing (Original Screenplay) - Kenneth Lonergan

Fences – 4 nominations
Best Picture - Scott Rudin, Denzel Washington and Todd Black, Producers
Actor in a Leading Role - Denzel Washington
Actress in a Supporting Role - Viola Davis
Writing (Adapted Screenplay) - August Wilson

Hell Or High Water – 4 nominations
Best Picture - Carla Hacken and Julie Yorn, Producers
Actor in a Supporting Role - Jeff Bridges
Writing (Original Screenplay) - Taylor Sheridan
Film Editing - Jake Roberts

Hidden Figures – 3 nominations
Best Picture - Donna Gigliotti, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, Pharrell Williams and Theodore Melfi, Producers
Actress in a Supporting Role - Octavia Spencer
Writing (Adapted Screenplay) - Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi

Jackie – 3 nominations
Actress in a Leading Role - Natalie Portman
Costume Design - Madeline Fontaine
Music (Original Score) - Mica Levi

Deepwater Horizon – 2 nominations
Sound Editing - Wylie Stateman and Renée Tondelli
Visual Effects - Craig Hammack, Jason Snell, Jason Billington and Burt Dalton

Fantastic Beasts And Where to Find Them – 2 nominations
Costume Design - Colleen Atwood
Production Design - Stuart Craig; Set Decoration: Anna Pinnock

Florence Foster Jenkins – 2 nominations
Costume Design - Consolata Boyle
Actress in a Leading Role - Meryl Streep

Kubo And The Two Strings – 2 nominations
Animated Feature Film - Travis Knight and Arianne Sutner
Visual Effects - Steve Emerson, Oliver Jones, Brian McLean and Brad Schiff

A Man Called Ove – 2 nominations
Foreign Language Film (Sweden)
Makeup and Hairstyling - Eva von Bahr and Love Larson

Moana – 2 nominations
Music (Original Song) - Music and Lyric by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Animated Feature Film - John Musker, Ron Clements and Osnat Shurer

Passengers – 2 nominations
Music (Original Score) - Thomas Newman
Production Design - Guy Hendrix Dyas; Set Decoration: Gene Serdena

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – 2 nominations
Sound Mixing - David Parker, Christopher Scarabosio and Stuart Wilson
Visual Effects - John Knoll, Mohen Leo, Hal Hickel and Neil Corbould

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If you're in the Portland, Oregon area, you're welcome to join us at our Oscar Party on February 26th. (Message me for details if you haven't already received an invite, and apologies for the oversight!)

Finally, everyone on the Internet is welcome to follow me on Twitter for #OscarTrivia that day. (Teaser: you'll find out which one of this year's nominees I worked with on a project back in 2011! Feel free to speculate in the comments.)

Schrödinger Sessions II Debrief

One month ago, I was fortunate enough to attend the Schrödinger Sessions II (SS2), a "science for science fiction writers" workshop at the University of Maryland (UMD), organized by the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) and focusing on quantum physics. The workshop was free, including lodging in a UMD dormitory and breakfast and lunch every day, and it was totally worth paying for my travel there and back.

I first got interested in quantum mechanics (QM) back in high school, when I'd had enough math and science education to grasp how subatomic physics actually worked. Well, that's what I thought. Quantum phenomena are super weird, you guys. But they are incontrovertibly real, even if they seem non-intuitive; as several of our SS2 lecturers mentioned, QM is possibly the most well-tested experimental science, and the results are reproducible and undeniable. We don't know why the universe works this way, but we know that it does.

#jqi

A video posted by Curtis Chen (@sparckl) on Jul 30, 2016 at 9:14am PDT

If you want to try deciphering my notes, here they are in one massive Google Doc.

This may actually be the best explanation of antimatter I have encountered to date. #jqi pic.twitter.com/zzxBDPs2nI

— Curtis C. Chen 陳致宇 (@curtiscchen) July 29, 2016

And here are some excerpts from others' blog posts:

"JQI is what they call low energy quantum mechanics. This involves quantum computation, low temperatures, superconductivity-- all of those sorts of things we can do in a relatively small lab. High energy quantum mechanics and physics, those things done at the Large Hadron Collider and supernovas, aren't done at JQI. That didn't prevent us from asking about it."
— Steven Popkes (day 2, day 3)

"And lest any of the participants leave the U Md (College Park) campus without their brain having exploded, we also covered -- bonus material -- some cosmological speculations and the recent first detection of gravitational waves."
— Ed Lerner

"FYI: Next year, 2017, JQI plans to offer a similar seminar for a different professoinal group, Physics for Journalists, and then, pending funding, re-offer this same session as I attended, Physics for Sci-Fi Writers, in the summer of 2018."
— Sally Ember (2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

BTW, the gravitational waves Ed mentions above were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which is pretty freakin' awesome. That evening lecture by Peter Shawhan was also where I learned about "squeezed light," and like most things during SS2—laser cooling, ultra-cold Bose-Einstein condensates, and quantum computing algorithms, to name just a few—it legitimately blew my mind.

Looking forward to more of this today. #jqi #staywoke pic.twitter.com/XUPYlJ6KcS

— Curtis C. Chen 陳致宇 (@curtiscchen) July 29, 2016

I am definitely, as one person put it, "confused at a higher level" now. And I'm glad to know that even trained physicists continue to argue about the philosophical interpretations of QM. Nothing out of SS2 directly informs anything I'm currently working on, but I look forward to seeing what my subconscious does with it after a few months or years.

OH: "Why don't you just use the variance of the two quadratures?" #jqi #LunchBreak

— Curtis C. Chen 陳致宇 (@curtiscchen) July 29, 2016

Some of the other awesome writers who attended SS2:

• Carolyn Ives Gilman (a past Hugo and Nebula nominee!)
• Christine Taylor-Butler
• Dominica Phetteplace (YES HER)
• Greg Scheckler
• Guang Ming Whitley (who celebrated a birthday during the workshop)
• Heather Bouwman
• Jen Foehner Wells (who has the best Twitter handle)
• Jennifer Povey
• Kate Gorman (who creates locative fiction)
• Kristen Miller
• Kristina Yee (creator of the award-winning animated short Miss Todd)
• Sarah McCarry
• Terri Hughes Burton (now working on The 100)

Apologies to anyone I've forgotten to mention. You're all fantastic and I'm glad I got to hang out with you for a few days!

#jqi pic.twitter.com/WtYpgHO3Ft

— Curtis C. Chen 陳致宇 (@curtiscchen) July 30, 2016

EPILOGUE:

On the way home from the workshop, Southwest cancelled my Saturday night flight (unclear whether due to weather or computer meltdown) and the earliest rebooking was Tuesday morning. Fortunately, my high school pal Tony lives in the area, so I was able to stay with him, catch up on the last eight years of our lives, check out the Udvar-Hazy Center, and also meet up with some DC area Sea Monkeys for lunch.

Life finds a way.

BritPics

So the British Library has over one million public domain illustrations on Flickr, organized into albums for easier browsing. I've only made it through six pages of the "Fauna" collection so far but have already found some real gems:


An otter eating a fish.


Possibly an aardvark?


Side-eye dog.


Devious cat.


Demanding kittens.

Anyway, lots of images, free to use, no copyright restrictions. Enjoy!

I Am Not Any of These Other People

I recently finished listening to Judy Greer's audiobook of her memoir I Don't Know What You Know Me From (which is delightful, by the way: my favorite chapter is "My Stupid Trip (Alone) to Spain" but they're all great).

Now, I'm nowhere near as well-known as Judy Greer, but I also get the "where do I know you from" thing quite a bit. I also don't know why this happens. (Remind me to tell you sometime about the first time I met Kim Stanley Robinson.)

Anyway, here is a brief list of people I have been told I look like.

1. Ted Chiang


Photo © 2014 by Folly Blaine

We are not the same person, as you can see... I'M THE ONE ON THE RIGHT OKAY.

That said, if someone mistakenly invites me onto a movie set and wants to introduce me to Amy Adams, I'm not going to say no.

2. A Native American


(That's Chief Joseph)

This according to a homeless man in San Francisco. He was perhaps not an authority on comparative phenotypic analysis.

3. The character shown on the cover of China Mountain Zhang (Tor, 1992)


Cover art by Wayne Barlowe

Okay, that's actually a fair cop. Here's a close-up from the 1997 Orb edition, which remixes the original artwork:



And here's a picture of me from this year's Readercon:


Photo by Christopher M. Cevasco

You win this round, Dan Trefethen!

Anyway. I won't be offended if you come up to me and insist that you know me from somewhere else, even if it's the first time we've ever met. Just don't turn it into a weird interminable guessing game and we'll be cool.

I volunteered at Open Source Bridge today

And sat in on these great talks:

• "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Pelican: A Comparison of Static Site Generators" with Lucy Wyman
• "Hosting Events that the Whole Community Loves" with Meg Hartley
• "Teaching and managing for technologists" with Lennon Day-Reynolds
• "Universal Web Design: How to create an awesome experience for *every* user" with David Newton

...which actually represent a pretty good cross-section of my personal interests.

In related news, there's nothing like talking to a seventeen-year-old high school student who's coding his own distributed database system to make a prehistoric Perl hacker feel old. HASHTAG BASED ON A TRUE STORY.

That is all.

I have another deadline this week

Which means I don't have the time/brainpower for a thoughtful, well-researched blog post today. So instead, here's a roundup of some interesting stuff I tweeted or retweeted in the past week:

My pals @TheDoubleclicks are making a new album: PRESIDENT SNAKES! Back their @Kickstarter : http://t.co/JAsOFux5UV pic.twitter.com/pDED235Qsm

— Curtis 小說作家 Chen (@sparCKL) May 8, 2015

#DiversifyAgentCarter because black people had, in fact, been invented. pic.twitter.com/o8Sh0XBDLh

— Sunil Patel (@ghostwritingcow) May 8, 2015

Yay! Today's video is up! "Avengers Age of Ultron: All Snarked Up" https://t.co/7vfBI1X1hS

— snarke (@snarke) May 10, 2015

"Drawing on empirical research, eight principles to get more happiness from money" [pdf] http://t.co/OMTo6erxty pic.twitter.com/8ev5qUXA7U

— Chris Dixon (@cdixon) May 11, 2015

No YOU'RE weeping openly during the entire last minute of that Supergirl trailer SHUT UP https://t.co/bT7uyMWY4w

— Curtis 小說作家 Chen (@sparCKL) May 14, 2015

And before you ask, yes, I do have a goddamn Tumblr. But I don't use it that much, because I am not actually a twelve-year-old girl. It just seems that way.

I Have Rendered Unto Caesar

And this year, my wife and I--both of us being essentially freelancers--will be filing quarterly estimated taxes. It's the first year we've really needed to do it, now that we're (A) no longer full-time employees and (B) actually making enough annual income that it matters (i.e., no longer just living off our savings--which, BTW, is a weird loophole in pretty much all US finance regulation, but that's another story).

Chances are you've never cared about estimated taxes, because you're a W-2 wage earner whose paycheck includes automatic withholdings for various taxes (Social Security, Medicare, etc.). Well, when you're a freelancer, those things don't get automatically withheld when clients or customers pay you, but the IRS wants their money all the same. And, as Scalzi says in his excellent "Unasked-For Advice to New Writers About Money" blog post, "the government quite sensibly doesn't trust freelancers to pay their taxes in one lump sum."

So how does it work? Well, I'm sure not qualified to explain it to you, so I'll let my friend Nicole tell you in her well-researched "Surefire Tax Estimating Process for Freelancers" article on The Billfold. And after you absorb all that great information, follow up with The Billfold's other articles on estimated taxes.

It's not actually that much more work, especially since the system is designed to make it easy for you to plan for the coming year when you file your previous year's tax returns; though it's "quarterly," the first deadline of the year is actually April 15th, the same as your federal and state returns. So you can do all the math in one fell swoop, which is what my wife and I did this week. (It helps that she actually enjoys doing taxes, and we live in Washington state, which doesn't collect state income tax.)

Finally, the Treasury Department offers an Electronic Federal Tax Payment System (EFTPS) which lets you pay your taxes online without going through a fee-charging third-party payment service. And for more info on estimated taxes from the horse's mouth, see the IRS's Estimated Tax FAQs and Publication 505: Tax Withholding and Estimated Tax.

I Am Not Canadian

I recently came across this post on Weibo, China's Twitter-like "microblogging" service:

http://weibo.com/1654694194/BnIEU7RQ6

What do you mean, you don't read Chinese? Fine. Here's Google's auto-translation:

To be fair, I can see how someone in China might be confused, since I do live in "Vancouver." Speaking of which, I keep meaning to pick up one of these t-shirts:

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/12/06/us/06vancouver_CA0.html

Anyway. In related news, two other bloggers also posted very nice reviews of "Zugzwang:"

"The story was excellently crafted. The plot had tension and several layers of things going on, yet no word seemed redundant and all of the sentences were simple-yet-varied."
 — Natso, "A Cool Sci-Fi Short Story, A Question That Sprouted From It," 20 Sep 2014

"This story could’ve been bleak, but instead it made me happy and hopeful."
 — Sara Norja, "Sunday recs: Fairytale, memory loss, alien chess," 28 Sep 2014

Finally: I'm going to be at #SiWC this weekend, along with at least two other VP alums. It's my first time attending this particular conference. Excitement!

I Kinda Wish I Had Seen This Sooner

TL;DR: Don't buy Western Digital or Seagate hard drives.

"Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014" from the Backblaze blog

Setting up new external HDD, hope this one lasts more than 2 years, should probably just shell out for RAID/NAS next, wheeeeeeee

— Curtis 雪國列車 Chen (@sparCKL) September 5, 2014

I Don't Worry Too Much about Piracy and Here's Why

TL;DR: oh, just go read Cecilia Tan's blog post instead.

This summer, my friend Katrina Archer self-published her YA fantasy novel Untalented (previously a 2009 ABNA quarterfinalist):

This week, she discovered that the eBook version had been pirated:

If I think that a file on a "paid" download site is my work being illegally downloaded, how do I verify w/o joining site and paying fee?

— Katrina Archer (@katrinaarcher) September 8, 2014

And that started a long Facebook discussion (not shown here) of how much authors should worry about online piracy. I threw in my two cents, but we haven't had computers and the Internet long enough to see how all this shakes out long-term, so everybody's arguing from ideology more than evidence.

With that in mind, here's my "mix tape" argument for not spending your time worrying about how to prevent or fight piracy. I'm focusing my own efforts on making cool stuff, finding an audience, and being nice to paying customers.

By the way, have I mentioned that my own book,
THURSDAY'S CHILDREN: Flash Fiction from 512 Words or Fewer,
is available as a free download (PDF or TXT)?
:)



(And now back to our program.)

NOTA BENE: the excerpts below are totally cherry-picked, heavily edited, and completely biased. YMMV.

I'll begin with Tim O'Reilly's seminal "Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution" (11 Dec 2002), from which I often quote:

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

Cory Doctorow elaborates on this in "Liability vs. leverage: How writers lose when 'piracy' gets harder" (14 Jan 2013):

[A]lthough it’s hard to turn fame into money in the arts, it’s impossible to turn obscurity into money in the arts. It doesn’t matter how you plan on making your money — selling books or downloads, selling ads, getting sponsorship, getting crowdfunded, getting commissions, licensing to someone else who’s figured out how to make money — you won’t get the chance unless people have heard of your stuff.

But let's talk about books specifically. Since books are made of text, and plain text is pretty much the easiest form of data to copy and share over the Internet (by design), online piracy is an obvious concern for professional writers. However, John Scalzi makes a very logical argument in "The Stupidity of Worrying About Piracy" (13 May 2005):

Let's ask: Who are pirates? They are people who won't pay for things (i.e., dickheads), or they're people who can't pay for things (i.e., cash-strapped college students and others). The dickheads have ever been with us; they wouldn't pay even if they had the money. I don't worry about them, I just hope they fall down an abandoned well...

I don't know anyone who can pay for a book or a CD or a DVD or whatever who doesn't... I don't see the people who can't pay as pirates. I see them as people who will pay, once they can. Until then, I think of it as I'm floating them a loan. Nor is it an entirely selfless act. I'm cultivating a reader -- someone who thinks of books as a legitimate form of entertainment -- and since I want to be a writer until I croak, that's a good investment for me...

Yes, there's an investment risk... [but] I believe that fundamentally, most people aren't thieving dickheads; they're people who if they like your writing will want to support your career... Treat readers like they can't be trusted and there's no reason for them not to live down to your expectations. Make it clear to them that they're integral to your continued success, and they will help you succeed. Treat them like human beings, for God's sake.

This is not a new sentiment. In fact, Eric Flint said pretty much the same thing in "Introducing the Baen Free Library" (11 Oct 2000):

[Publisher] Jim Baen is fond of pointing out: most people would rather be honest than dishonest.

He's absolutely right about that. One of the things about the online debate over e-piracy that particularly galled me was the blithe assumption by some of my opponents that the human race is a pack of slavering would-be thieves held (barely) in check by the fear of prison sentences...

[T]he truth is that most people are no more tempted to steal a few dollars than they are to spend their lunch hour panhandling for money on the streets. Partly because they don't need to, but mostly because it's beneath their dignity and self-respect.

The only time that mass scale petty thievery becomes a problem is when the perception spreads, among broad layers of the population, that a given product is priced artificially high due to monopolistic practices and/or draconian legislation designed to protect those practices. But so long as the "gap" between the price of a legal product and a stolen one remains both small and, in the eyes of most people, a legitimate cost rather than gouging, 99% of them will prefer the legal product.

Of course, none of this philosophizing assuages the gut feeling of "OMG they're stealing my stuff!" Cecilia Tan breaks it down for us in "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Ebook Piracy" (23 May 2011):

[A]uthors who see 100,000 downloads of their book as equivalent to 100,000 lost sales are deluding themselves. Please trust me when I say that 100,000 downloads is not the equivalent of 100,000 copies shoplifted. It’s actually the equivalent of 100,000 people thumbing through the book while standing in the bookstore or library, deciding whether to invest the time in reading it...

Of those 100,000 who downloaded your book, most of them aren’t reading it anyway. 90,000 probably never open the file. Of the 10,000 who do, you just got the equivalent of them opening a copy of the book on the shelf at a bookstore to see if they like it. Most traditional authors would have KILLED to have such great placement in the bookstores as to attract 10,000 browsers to pick up the book and look in it. Out of those 10K, say 3 out of 4 decide the book is not their cup of tea. So now we’re down to 2500 who are genuinely interested. In the brick and mortar world, retail rule of thumb says 500 of them would have a good chance of buying it...

Giving stuff away helps. Having it for easy sale also helps. In fact, despite all our “new media” chatter about publicity in the digital age, about blog tours and Twitter contests and Facebook pages, these two things seem to be the only two things that actually make a measurable impact on sales. Give stuff away to increase your customer base, and then have it for easy sale to sift money out of those who are eager to pay. That’s it.

There's more great stuff in Tan's post, including a link to Jeff Vogel's highly entertaining "might as well have just made a big pile of money and set it on fire" cautionary tales. If any of these issues interest you, I encourage you to spend a few minutes reading through her full article.

Back to Untalented. Since the pirate site in question appears to be behind a paywall, and Kat's already filed a successful DMCA takedown notice against them, I'm not too concerned for her—why would any reasonable person pay to access a shady download site instead of just buying the eBook from Amazon?

Last but not least, until September 30th, US readers have the chance to win a paperback copy of Untalented through this GoodReads giveaway! You have literally nothing to lose. Of course, if you can't wait—or don't want to take your chances—you can also buy the eBook right now. (Full disclosure: yes, that is an affiliate link.)

I Am Home

It's been less than a week since my Clarion West (CW) adventure concluded, and I'm still readjusting to normal life and catching up on all the e-mails I've been ignoring for six weeks or more. I'm almost done clearing out my inbox, and then I'll dive into the novel rewrites that this guy is patiently waiting for.

I didn't blog much about CW while I was there, though I did tweet quite a bit. You should go check out these other blogs by my classmates Folly, Marlee, Mike, and Michael.

Also: while I was searching to verify those blog links, I found K.C. Ball's "Missing Mike." Which, you know, fuck cancer. But it also made me wonder about who in my CW class I would lose track of over the next few years.

Something similar happened after I attended Viable Paradise (VP) in 2008: a few people had early successes, some hit it big later on, some don't do much writing any more (for various reasons), and some I've never heard from again. I gather that's pretty normal for most writing workshops, especially those who make an effort to emphasize diversity. That's not just gender or racial diversity; age and personal background are also huge factors. People arrive at CW and VP with varying levels of experience, both professional and personal. And the group dynamic is always changing, and depends on individual people to steer it toward something positive.

I had a great time at both VP and CW, though I understand it's not always great for everyone. Some people work better in less stressful environments, and sometimes social groups coalesce better than at other times. I feel like the folks running VP and CW do the best they can, and it's up to the students to meet each other in the middle.

Look, I know I'm not the right guy to be talking about this. As I discussed with one of my CW instructors in our one-on-one meeting, I am aware that I personally occupy a weird position of partial privilege: I am a tall, normal-looking male, and though I'm obviously non-white, I belong to a "model minority" group to which many people automatically assign certain positive traits. And hell, I signed an agent while I was at CW; I am the poster child for "results not typical."

All I can say is that I had an amazing CW experience. It was exactly what I expected, and also a whole lot more. Good things happened, interesting things happened, and now we'll see what happens next.

I Followed the Oregon Trail to Find Terry, Who Apparently Has Very Poor Impulse Control

A few days ago, I noticed several of my Twitter-friends retweeting this:

You meet a man on the Oregon Trail. His name is Terry. You tell him: “Thats a girl’s name!” Terry shoots you You have died of dissin Terry

— 4.0 (@JimmyBatchler) March 24, 2014

At the time, that post had already garnered well over 500 retweets. But looking through the same account's other tweets, this one didn't quite fit. No disrespect to Jimmy, but it clearly wasn't his voice. Had he heard the joke from someone else?

It's not uncommon for bons mots to appear on the Internet without proper attribution. And in most cases, it's not important who coined a particular turn of phrase or who first photoshopped a particular meme—but it is interesting, to me anyway.

And so, as I have done in the past, I started a research spiral to see if I could identify the original wit. (Spoiler alert: I did.)

First, I went for the low-hanging fruit: previous tweets that included the same joke (I focused on the pun "dissin' Terry"). And I was able to find three independent posts, the earliest from February of 2011—over three years ago.

‎"You meet a man on the Oregon Trail named Terry.. You laugh “That’s a girl’s name!” Terry shoots you. You have died of dissin’ Terry."

— Gnomesayin (@XDG_Gnome) January 31, 2013

You have died of dissin' Terry.

— Thot Leader (@moonpolysoft) September 20, 2012

You have died of dissing Terry: http://nbyt.es/fiMUCj

— Roberto Villarreal (@iamrobertv) February 7, 2011

(Note that the two older tweets don't introduce the full context of the Oregon Trail video game, and the link in the 2011 tweet is now defunct.)

That was the end of the trail, so to speak, until I tried a full-web search on "dissing Terry" (no contraction). And that led me to the jackpot—the "Terry made it to Oregon" installment of webcomic Hello With Cheese, published by Darren J. Gendron and Obsidian Abnormal on November 1st, 2010:

http://www.dernwerks.com/HWC/?p=1074

(For the sake of completeness, here's the chain that got me there: a Google search for "dissing Terry" turned up an archived post on webcomictweets.com, which linked to a t-shirt that no longer exists on Swag Shark. But even though the product web page returned a 404, searching for the URL itself turned up a backlink on Dern's tumblr, which in turn pointed me back to dernwerks.com, where I was able to track down the original comic and get more details about its creators.)

So why did a random tweet from a high school student in Texas get so much traction on Twitter, when the original piece—created three and a half years ago by an accomplished creative duo—didn't? Who knows. The Internet is as the Internet does. Memes are random and unpredictable. It's The Bacon Cat Law of Internet Popularity.

I can only hope that Hello With Cheese gains a few more fans because of this blog post. They've definitely earned it. (Maybe they'll even re-issue that t-shirt.)

In related news, did you know that you can play the original Apple II version of Oregon Trail right in your web browser, using an emulator plug-in? It's true! I spent a few minutes reliving my childhood, and even though I survived to the end, the results weren't pretty:

Yeah. I think I'll stick to the writing thing.

I Hear Your Voice

Disclaimer/Disclosure: images below are Amazon.com affiliate links.

On Monday night, DeeAnn and I watched the Veronica Mars movie at home (which was awesome, and I can't wait for the day when all TV shows and movies are distributed on-demand, but that's another blog post). I was happy that the movie continued the TV series' judicious use of in-character voiceover narration, especially during that scene in the car with Logan. You know the one. We could have guessed what Veronica was thinking at that moment, but the words added important depth. And the show's practice of juxtaposing the mostly-delivered-straight VO with its trademark snarky dialogue is also great, but again, that's another blog post.



I tweeted about this, which started Twitter and Facebook threads, and that got me to thinking about the different kinds of voiceover a show might have. It could be an announcer, who is explicitly addressing the audience outside the context of the story; a narrator, who may or may not be one of the characters but is clearly within the world of the story; or a character like Veronica Mars, offering commentary in real time or not, possibly unreliable, and ideally providing some counterpoint to what we can already see and hear taking place. (There can, of course, be many variations on and hybrids of the three types, but I'd argue those are the basics.)

There's an old saw in Hollywood about voiceovers being the laziest possible way for a screenwriter to do exposition. (Not true, by the way: it's actually title cards.) People always point to the Robert McKee scene from Adaptation, or Harrison Ford's uninspired VO performance in the original theatrical version of Blade Runner. I suspect the sentiment continues to propagate because "film" has always aspired to be more than television—another cliché I hear a lot is TV denigrated as "radio with pictures."

There's nothing wrong with making words and images work together. You just have to know why and how you're using each element. Comic book and graphic novel creators know this, and I am continually dazzled by the things that people are doing in those formats, from Chris Ware's insanely detailed designs to Jim Williams' gorgeous Batwoman layouts. Seriously, man, if you're not reading comics these days, you are missing out on some great art.

But I digress. We were talking about voiceovers.

In October of 2005, Entertainment Weekly ran a piece titled "What's with all the TV voiceovers?," where Gary Susman pointed out seven new shows debuting that fall—including How I Met Your Mother—which "use voiceover narration or feature a character who breaks the fourth wall to address the audience." I'm not sure 7 out of 354 constitutes "a plague," but whatever. He remarked that "the rise in voiceovers has coincided with the rise of single-camera sitcoms...filmed and edited in such a way that there was no room for a laugh track" and concluded that "if self-consciously clever voiceover narration was the price I had to pay to get rid of laugh tracks, maybe it was worth it." (All I'll say to that is: How I Met Your Mother. Laugh track. Nine seasons and a spin-off.)



In June of 2010, the more upbeat Chicago Tribune article "Voice-overs rule TV" proclaimed that "we're in a Golden Age of Voice-Overs...because they're being used with more artistry, eloquence and flair than ever before, to set moods and tones, to deepen and sharpen characterizations, to mystify and beguile as well as to explain and elucidate. The voice-over is now a distinctive—even crucial—feature in many popular series." Writer Julia Keller calls out In Plain Sight, Burn Notice, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, and Dexter for using "voice-over as a dazzling creative device, fit for far more than mere exposition."

Speaking of Burn Notice, did you know there's a web site which has organized all of Michael Westen's spycraft voiceovers by topic? It's pretty groovy.



Finally, there's the recent news that starting with this year's Primetime Emmy Awards, the Television Academy has split the "Outstanding Voice-Over Performance" category into two different awards: "Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance" and "Outstanding Narrator" (my emphasis). I suspect this actually happened as a catty attempt to keep that particular statuette from going to animated series nearly 80% of the time, but let's hope it also has the civilizing influence of recognizing different artistic applications of the same storytelling tool.

I Less Than Three Portland

(Today's "The I in MEAT" blog post is brought to you by the perfect texture, The Doubleclicks, and the Twitter.)

Back in 2007, DeeAnn and I went all in on what we called "the writer move." In particular, we decided to stretch our savings by moving out of the San Francisco Bay Area to a more affordable city--meaning we had most of North America to choose from.

Some places we ruled out right away, for various reasons. Seattle was also too expensive (and still is). Canada would require proof of rabies vaccination for our cats, which in itself wasn't a problem, but we didn't want to risk losing them to international quarantine or for some other obscure medical reason. And flying the cats anywhere also seemed like asking for trouble. But that still left forty-eight of the United States to choose from.

To narrow down the wide field of candidates, we created a big spreadsheet and researched data which were important to our lifestyle. Some of those properties included:

• Winter comfort (January windchill and annual snowfall)
• Summer comfort (July heat index and average rainfall)
• Cost of living estimate, averaged from five different sources
• Distance to nearest airport
• Distance to nearest VA hospital
• Number of Trader Joe's stores within 15 miles
• Number of Thai restaurants within 5 miles
• Percentage of population identifying as religious
• Percentage of population identifying as Democratic

Here's a link to the full spreadsheet, if you're curious about the details. Note that we gathered this data seven years ago, and much of it will be out of date now:


http://goo.gl/p3tl1O

We took trips to visit our top two out-of-state candidate cities, shown in black text on that spreadsheet: Cary, North Carolina (in the Research Triangle) and Portland, Oregon. (Our fallback was Sacramento, California, which area we were already familiar with from all our Hogwarts Game scouting in 2006.) Cary had a fantastic farmer's market, but the neighborhoods weren't remotely walkable. And Portland... well, we live here now.

It took us a little while to adjust, but now we couldn't be happier with our home. (And no, I am not saying that ironically.) The move also inspired me to ask for 37 Postcards back in 2010, and that was pretty amazing, too.

If you're thinking about relocating, and you have some latitude in your selection criteria, Internet research is an excellent place to start. We started with information from Sperling's Best Places, then supplemented and corroborated that with data from various other online sources which we judged reliable and relevant. Your mileage may vary.

I Hate the Word "Tribe"

Just to be clear: this is not a rant against Seth Godin. I actually think he's got some pretty great ideas about leadership, as shown in his TED talk from 2009 (worth watching for the vintage Kindle 1 prop, if nothing else).

My problem is with the word "tribe" and all it implies: exclusion, small-mindedness, and bigotry.

I know. You're probably thinking that tribe is a positive concept, as Godin argues in his book; that it signals connection and camaraderie, often across great distances; that it can be a lifeline for those who feel isolated by their unusual interests. And that is all true and good, ideologically speaking. My specific problem is with terminology, and the unfortunate etymological baggage that comes with calling something a "tribe."

Try this. Do a Google Image Search for the word "tribe." I'm guessing your entire first page of results will be photos of primitive-looking, possibly aboriginal peoples:



And that, I believe, is the first thing that comes to mind when anyone says the word "tribe:" it's not some noble grassroots movement petitioning for political change, and not some far-flung collective which has self-organized over the Internet. No. It's a bunch of crudely dressed people of color standing around a jungle, forest, or other wilderness. In a word: savages.

I know how people want to use the word, as a rallying point--perhaps even subverting that prejudicial, historical meaning--but it's difficult for me to get beyond it. Because the concept of "tribe" is explicitly discriminatory. People talk about "finding their tribe" in a good way, but I'm always painfully aware of the flip side: that by identifying yourself with one group, you are also willfully segregating yourself from others. If only a select group are "your people," then everyone else in the world is, by definition, not your brethren. And that puts you one step closer to thinking of them as your enemy.

Even if you don't go that far, one could argue that these tribal distinctions are necessary and unavoidable. We could talk about the Rule of 150 (a.k.a. Dunbar's number), but it's more fun to discuss...

...the Monkeysphere!

Because, you know, monkeys.

If you haven't yet, go and read "What is the Monkeysphere?" by David Wong. Yes, it's on Cracked.com, but don't let that fool you--the tone may be flippant, but the issues it addresses are serious, and his conclusions are sound.

(BTW, "David Wong" is the pen name of Jason Pargin, executive editor of Cracked.com; he's also written two comic horror novels, John Dies at the End and This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It. I did not make up any of this.)

Wong's basic argument is the same as Dunbar's, Gladwell's, and any number of other social scientists: that there is an upper limit to human beings' cognitive ability to maintain stable social relationships, and that limit is about a hundred and fifty people. But Wong distinguishes himself on page 2 of his article, where he offers this advice:

[R]eject [the] binary thinking of "good vs. bad" or "us vs. them." Know problems cannot be solved with clever slogans and over-simplified step-by-step programs... take the amount you think you know, reduce it by 99.999%, and then you'll have an idea of how much you actually know regarding things outside your Monkeysphere.

It's not about denying our biological deficiencies. It's about acknowledging and accepting those limits, and finding ways to overcome or bypass them. Can't run fast enough to chase down that prey animal? Try riding a horse, or domesticating dogs, or inventing projectile weapons. Not sure when it's going to get cold again or when's a good time to plant crops? Invent the calendar and keep track of annual weather cycles. The history of human civilization is all about us giving Mother Nature the middle finger and saying "screw this, we can do better."

In this case, however, it's not about science or technology or engineering; it's about changing the way we think of ourselves and others, and that is a tough, long-term, cultural conundrum. It's not something we can cure with a pill or a device or legislation or even a good story. It's something that has to happen to every person, individually, as he or she grows up. You've got to be carefully taught and all that.

I hate the word "tribe" because it implies we're still restricted by that cognitive limit, and we can't get beyond it. And that's just not true. Maybe I don't personally know every single one of the hundreds of people I'm connected to through Twitter or Facebook or other social media, but I know a little bit about each of them. And every small piece of information makes those names and tiny pictures more human to me.

It's not about who's in which tribe, or whether I share all (or any) of their likes or dislikes or political views. It's about people, and understanding that diversity is good. I want to be friends with smart people who disagree with me (as long as they're not jerks about it)!

The thing I'm really interested in is community. (I know some people don't like that word either, and I can understand where they're coming from: again, it's all about usage and intent. Prefixing anything with "the" can assign it an undeserved weight--for example, consider the difference between one show called "Following," versus another called "The Following".)

To me, "community" implies openness and a willingness to embrace new members. Fandom is a community. The Internet is chock-full of meeting places for all sorts of virtual communities, new cultures whose only entrance requirement is a shared interest in something. Create an account and you can immediately start posting and commenting and participating.

You might still have to kiss some frogs, but keep trying and you will find a place where you belong. And if that's taking too long? Start your own community. Plant the seed and see what happens. You have nothing to lose but your loneliness.

Important Data Visualization of the Day

Because I know you've been wondering:

That is all.

SnoutCast #197: Think, Think, Think

In which we do not tell knock-knock jokes. Not a single one. Nope. Zero.

[ Download mp3 - 23 MB ]

00:59 - "cerebral"
23:17 - The End

Linkage

• Curtis' Ignite Portland 12 talk: "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
• 2010 Stanford study: "Decoding Temporal Structure in Music and Speech Relies on Shared Brain Resources but Elicits Different Fine-Scale Spatial Patterns"
• 2009 UCLA study: "The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief"
• 2012 University of Iowa study: "A neuropsychological test of belief and doubt: damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex increases credulity for misleading advertising"
• Puzzled Pint has debuted in London and is coming to OMSI After Dark!
• It's the off-season on Puzzle Hunt Calendar

It's been four years! Should we continue podcasting? E-mail podcast@snout.org or post a comment at www.snout.org/podcast to tell us what you think!

Music: instrumentals from "Code Monkey" and "I Feel Fantastic" by Jonathan Coulton

[ Subscribe to SnoutCast / iTunes link ]

 

My 40th Birthday Survey Results

TL;DR: Despite an unfair advantage, my sister still wins. :)

Back in September, I asked people (by e-mail and social media) to fill out a quick survey describing how long we've known each other, where we met, and their first impressions of me in five words or fewer. It turned out to be the second best birthday present ever! (The best was, of course, The Double Secret Game.) Below are the results of this completely unscientific study.

I received 110 total responses, the first on September 4th (DeeAnn, testing the form) and the last on October 2nd, the day after my actual birthday. The majority of the responses--71 people, or just over 65%--came in during "opening weekend" (Thursday, September 5th, through Sunday, September 9th).

Mmm... pie chart...

Not surprisingly, the biggest segment of responders was in the 2-5 year range (2008-2010). We moved to our current home area--Portland, Oregon--in late 2008, and about a year later started making a real effort to get out of the house and meet people. There's another big cluster of responses in the 1-2 year range (2011-2012), which includes several Sea Monkeys and more awesome Portlanders.

The second biggest segment was the 10-20 year range (1992-2002), which includes some college friends, my wife, and other people we know from living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over a decade. Many of those are Gamers, and all of them are fantastically creative and generous, because that's how we met them: through doing cool stuff for fun!

My favorite part, though, is the five-word first impressions. Here's the word cloud (minus seven people who opted out of this public analysis):

"IN NO MORE THAN FIVE(5) WORDS: what was your FIRST IMPRESSION of me?"

Of course, some of those individual words don't make much sense out of context. In no particular order, here are a few of my favorite five-word first impressions:

• "Tall guy likes Star Trek"
• "quiet, tall, and hungry"
• "Quiet, but lots in there."
• "Kind of mopey, I think."
• "inclusive trekkie asian ambitious nice"
• "Guy interviewing me" (from a former co-worker)
• "He looks like Mr. Spock."
• "He likes everything I like!"
• "Intriguing -not normal"
• "still waters run deep"
• "someone I'd like to meet"
• "Clever non-aardvark Bastard"

But honestly, it's the entire collection of responses that is most striking. You can see some of that in the word cloud--I am clearly known far and wide for my love of Star Trek, and also for being tall and quiet. I guess I knew a lot of this already, but it's nice to have actual data. You know, science and all that.

I also provided a form field labeled "Anything else you'd like to tell me?" in case five words wasn't enough. Some of those responses were pretty great, too:

• "Yes, but I had a stroke so I can't write it."
• "Don't make a fucking W with your fingers.
  
  It's been great getting to know you over the years through games, social events, and those crimes we agreed never to discuss. Here's looking forward to another 9 years! Cheers!
  
  Corby"
• "Dude, if I could remember things that happened years ago, I wouldn't have got into the habit of writing stuff down. So, uhm, don't trust that memory of your first impression too far. Oh, wait, I write stuff down, so I don't have to remember: Here's the earliest mention of you on my site: http://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/anecdotal/hunt/5/05.html#happybirthday"
• "Funny, the 'how long have we known each other' question was surprisingly difficult to answer. I played in your Hogwarts Game in 2006, but don't really think that counts - I was looking for some kind of definitive 'social' connection. I decided to go with what I could mine from Gmail:
  
  Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:23:59 -0700
  To: Jeff Phillips
  From: Facebook
  Reply-to: noreply
  Subject: Curtis C. Chen confirmed you as a friend on Facebook...
  
  ~Jeff"
• "I like you. I don't want to punch you in the face."
• "Your creativity inspires me!"
• "I think it's a very good reflection on my taste in friends that many of them are able to reinvent themselves, take chances, create new amazing things, and involve others in their projects. You can do all that (and more), and it is for that reason you're my friend."
• "Thanks for introducing me to Larry Niven!" (his books, not personally)
• "The first time we met, I totally profiled you.
  
  Our section of the airport was nearly empty. We were both waiting for our connecting flight to Martha's Vineyard to attend Viable Paradise. I saw you working on a laptop that had a bunch of stickers on it. Laptop and stickers somehow screamed 'science fiction nerd' even though I couldn't see what the stickers were exactly. I consulted my own machine, saw that there were two distinctly Asian names on the VP student list. You looked more like a Chen than a Ha (though of course you could've easily been a Terhune, Johnson, or Kloos). I approached cautiously, half-expecting you to explode: 'What? So you see an Asian guy in an airport and just assume we all write science fiction??!' To my perhaps visible relief, you just smiled and shook my hand.
  
  Happy 40th, Curtis!" (from a VPXII classmate)
• "You introduced me to the Hollywood Bowl. I've been following classical music ever since." (from a high school friend)
• "It was my third date with Wei-Hwa and I remember him inviting us along to dinner with you guys. It was a great time."
• "You know the line from the theme from the movie Shaft that goes 'who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks? Shaft!'
  
  Well, if you were black, and a detective, and hugely promiscuous, and your name were Shaft instead of Curtis, I would think that song would apply perfectly to you.
  
  And even though you are none of those things, I think the song applies to you anyway.
  
  Happy birthday, Mr. Not an Aardvark!"
• "I heard 'I'm an Aardvark' on my kid's Sesame Street playlist just last week!"
• "Welcome to the old-timers club, sonny."
• "You have only two years to plan your next birthday project. 42. It is the number after all."

But all that said, I think this is my single favorite overall response (from my younger sister):

Thank you to everyone who participated, and thanks for reading all of this rambling analysis! Those interested can view all the public raw data and do the math yourself. Feel free to share your own conclusions in a comment below. :)