A week ago, I quit my job.

For a number of reasons this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: I’d been burning out on a 2-hour each way commute from Philadelphia where I live(d), nominally. The boyfriend in New York City, didn’t make things easier. And while, I really liked a lot of things about my job, I knew that it was getting to be time to move on. My last day was Friday.

I spent the intervening time packing all of the stuff that’s going to New York into my car, and driving it to New York. For the rest of the week, I get to donate a bunch of my stuff that I’ve been dragging from place to place for the last 2 plus years. Add in some car maintenance, a few dinners and visits with friends, and a visit with my mother. She has awesomely agreed to drive said car back to the Midwest where it will be infinitely more useful. And I’m trying to get some writing done, and readjust my brain and body to a different work/life schedule.

Next week, there is settling in, more adjustment, waiting for deliveries, and more writing. The adjustment thing is tough: no matter how late I manage to stay up I wake up feeling rested and like I’ve slept in luxuriously. And then I look at the clock and see that it’s 6am. Time to get up and start writing, I guess.

The new job, is in many ways much like the old one. Different technology, different customers, different kind of writing, different sorts of problems, but I’m really excited. When I started my last job, I was not a very confident writer, and the experience of writing professionally for the last two years has increased my confidence as a writer and the strength of my identity as such.

I think being forced to not only write something regularly for a couple of years, but also be responsible for maintaining and improving that text can be very eye opening. If nothing else, I’ve become very aware of how my writing has changed and improved.¹ While it’s still occasionally surprising that other people want to pay me to write things for them, I’ve gotten better at recognizing the tangible value of my work and abilities. Somewhere along the line, I stumbled into one of these “career” things and it suits me. Who would have guessed?

I don’t tend to write very much about what I do for my day job for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that I want this blog to be my own. Having said that, what I’m doing at work undeniably influences and shapes my thinking and writing here, and I don’t expect this to change. In the mean time, this whole “changing jobs and moving to New York,” moment in my life has a pretty significant impact in how I think about the future of my career, my writing, and possible graduate school trajectories. I think I’ll be writing a series of posts on the blog over the next couple of weeks on this topic. You’ve been warned.

Onward and Upward!

I wish there was a good way, in the context of a blog post or some other convenient digital media, to regularly say: “I’ve done some things, you may be interested in them,” and “I’d like to do some things, here are some notes of what I think I’d like to be working on in the next little bit.” I’ve yet to find a good way to get in the habit of writing this kind of post.

My instinct is to have something that I can template and automate pretty strongly so that I can mostly focus on doing things rather than writing blog posts about doing things. Or as is presently the case, blog posts blog posts about doing things. Oy. Ideas and suggestions on this topic would be most appreciated.

So what have I been up to? Well…

• I got back into writing fiction this week after several weeks away. I was in a difficult part of the story and life got very… full… and I stopped writing regularly. These things happen, but it’s good to be back at least some.

  After the work I did just last night, I realize that I’m much closer to the end of this novel than I had thought. Even if things go very slowly for the next few months, I think I’ll be able to get this thing done by the end of May. I just have to write about a thousand words to finish Chapter 11, and there are three to four little vignettes in chat per 12 to wrap the whole thing up. And it’s going to be awesome.

  I’m super excited to be done with this project and to be able to spend some time cleaning it up and making it an awesome text, but also being able to work on making other things I’ve written better, and to be able to write new things, with my undivided attention.

• I’ve updated the /posts/anti-rodentia and the associated discussion page with some changes that I think make the system work much better.

• I’ve upgraded to Firefox 4, which I really like a lot: it’s much faster, it’s much more minimal (visually) which is great. Also all of my plugins and extensions work without issue. Good job!

• I went through a blast from my past when I pulled together the queer theories page, which does some--at this point utterly redundant--definitional work about what it means to be queer, and potential limitations on queer identity/politics in the era of a broadly defined queer.

• I’ve started adding recurring tasks to keep me on track with writing and posting entries to this post. This means I don’t end up posting things months after I write them. As was the case with Mutt Sucks Less, a post I wrote many months ago and posted with some revisions last week.

• I made a folk page for frequent comm enter and discourse participant Matt Lundin that includes a snippet which makes a list (and RSS feed!) of all pages that link to “madalu” or are tagged with “madalu” (his handle). You can see this by editing the page, and use it when making your own folk pages. Which you should totally do.

Have a good weekend!

I realized that I made a lot of changes to the way my websites were arranged and worked recently, and I thought that it would be good to write a few about the hottest new thing, and my rationale for messing everything up. Again.

Basically, I took the CriticalFutures.com site, and turned it into the posts section here, moving a bunch of content back to tychoish.com that used to be here. This time, everything is powered by ikiwiki, and while I callously dropped all comments¹, I think the move is one of general and overall improvement.

At the same time, I think there are challenges. Rather than comment pages, there’s now a “discourse” link at the top left of the pages, which lets you sign in and create a new page for discussion related to the page you’re currently viewing. I liked the name “discourse” rather than “discussion,” but I fear there may be some confusion. I can change it over back without much issue, if any one feels strongly.

Mostly, it’s still the same blog that it’s always been, and I’m having fun with it. The essay/rhizome divide may turn out to be tenuous in the long term, and it might disappear, but for now it makes sense. I’ve not been doing as many wiki-based things, though I have worked on a queer theories page, and the technical writing section is something that I’m pleased with. Wikis are much more difficult to use and produce than one would initially guess. The concept is simple, the software is simple, and the work is remarkably time consuming and difficult to do right. And then there’s the problem of contributors.

I don’t know how it’s going to sort out, but I look forward to hearing from you, and making stuff on this domain.

It’s sometimes easy to forget all of the little things that I do during the week, and how they add up to something of note. In the moment--any moment--most things seem much smaller and much less important than they do with a little bit of perspective and when viewed out of context with coordinating achievements. So here’s the highlights from last week:

I gave up on the “having two sites to maintain thing,” and have merged Critical Futures into the tychoish.com blog/wiki. I really like this, and it gave me some time to get elbows deep into the wiki system, which means things work better, the display is a bit cleaner, my life is easier, and I’m very happy with it. Also, as part of this process I’ve been revising the index page, and I think it is in a state that I’m really pleased with.

Some dancing friends on Facebook said “wouldn’t it be nice if there was a wiki for contra dancers.” Now there is. Contra Dance Wiki is there for you all if you want it. I’ve done some preparatory work on the index page, and I’ll continue to add things as I can.

The work I’ve been doing in the last few weeks with ikiwiki, both for tychoish and now for the CDW means that I’m really close to being able to share all of the assorted templates and configuration files I use to make this work. It’s all in the git repository for tychoish, but I’m going to pull together a more generic version so people can get started easier. It might also make sense to write a deployment script of sorts. We’ll see.

I meant to post this on Friday, but posted my review of maple morris, because I didn’t want that to linger. In any case, I had a brilliant weekend singing (and dancing) in Western Massachusetts. It has however left me a bit under the weather, so I’m spending a day recovering and doing some writing. Good stuff there. I’ll write about WMSHC soon.

Welcome to this new little blog/wiki project. I made a post to the ‘blog about reorganizing the way I did my blog comments and blogging called a modest blogging proposal.

I wrote this post a few weeks ago. I was so inspired by the prospect of reorganizing the blog, and also so frustrated by the less-than-useful structure of my blogging that, I did the “big reorganization” of the blog the very same day that I published the post that started it all.

This proves, it seems, the neccessity of these changes, which are:

• Moving the “dialectical futurism” blog to my “Critical Futures” domain, as an “essay” blog. I’m planning to post a new essay here every Tuesday. I might also add a second day a week for some other feature (podcast? contributed essay?)
• Move the “wikish” wiki that I’d been hosting on the “tychoish.com” domain to be tychoish.com, and add a more short-form blog to the “blog/wiki.” I’m calling it “Rhizomatics,” and this is the first post. I’ll be writing here pretty regularly, and with less intense posts.
• Do all of the above in a way that doesn’t break all of the existing links.

And I think I’ve done it all. I’ll be doing some tweaking in the next few days and weeks to make it all work a bit better, but suggestions are always welcome.

Stay tuned!

Ok, a confession: I totally ran out of my usual backlog of blog posts, that keeps these pages humming with the signs of life despite the fact that I don’t have time to write a post every day, and often don’t have reliable weekend time to write blog posts. This hasn’t happened in a few months, so it’s sort of disconcerting. One of the reasons why I ran out, is that I’ve been busy doing non-writing things for a few weekends, but a third (or forth?) weekend away from home was too much for my backlog to bear, so here we are.

Here’s a brief overview of what I’ve been up to and the kinds of projects I’m working on, and what the near future holds:

• I’m going to Dance Flury in a couple of weeks. I’ve not done the usual dance weekend thing before, aside from the Morris Dance gathering I’ve been going to for years. I’m really looking forward to it.
• I’m trying to get a better handle on the blog. I do this binge cycle thing with my blog posts, that leads to situations like the one that I’m currently experiencing, but also doesn’t actually mean that I have spare time to write fiction in a way that I might like.
• I’m working a bunch, and while every day is some kind of learning experience, I think I’ve figured out (largely) how to do what I do in a way that doesn’t have me leaving every night feeling like a fraud. There will be more learning curves, for sure, but it’s nice to not feel like I know what I’m doing.
• I’ve been throwing around the idea of writing poetry (hynms) vaguely in the tradition of the sacred harp. I’m not much of a poet, and the project I have in mind is a little bit peculiar (but then, this is me we’re talking about, so lets not be too surprised.) At the same time I’m irrationally interested in this project, and we’ll see how it goes.
• I switched to using Chromium as my primary browser. There are still a few plug-ins that I really liked on Firefox that aren’t quite as awesome or comfortable in their Chrome-equivalents, but it’s close and I’m sure it’ll get there. I’ve been looking for a viable non-Mac WebKit browser for a while, and am pretty happy with the Chrome.
• Check out git for writers, wiki page that I’ve been working on over at wikish to try and explore how writers use and might use the git version control system to manage their writing. Contribute if you like.
• This weekend (yay! snowpocolypse) I hooked up my laptop to my desktop rig, and have basically abandoned my desktop as a machine that I will interact with directly. (I’m a server guy, so it’ll get used.) This means I’m using xrandr with StumpWM (pretty swank,) and I must say that I love it. While I adore my laptop, and I really like only having to manage one computer, having this “desktop” setup makes it really perfect: I’m often most comfortable in desk chairs and I like the bigger screen and a real keyboard. So it works well. At some point I’ll write up a more thorough account of how I hacked this together.

Ok, this document has been open on my desktop for a few day and I don’t have anything new to add to it, so lets call it done.

Onward and Upward!

A while back, lets say, in August or so¹, I redid the design of this site and added a new subtitle: “Dialectical Futurism.” The dweeby, philosophy geek in me really enjoys this, just as an idea. As it’s sat at the top of the page, I’ve also thought more and more that the subtitle is actually a pretty good summary of what I’m trying to accomplish here. This post is an attempt to do two things:

1. Concisely summarize my “blogging project” and thus explain what dialectical futurism means.

2. To do a bit of a status update on the blog, as a sort of “self report,” of what I think seems to be working and what doesn’t.

Part One: What “Dialectical Futurism” Meas In Practice.

It’s always risky, I think for a self-claimed “Science Fiction” writer, to declare themselves a “Futurist” of any sort. Because of the genre’s link to the future, I think there the danger that people might think that we’re putting forth our stories as works of prediction.

While I think my interest in futurism comes from a similar place as the interests that drive my fiction, the practice of futurism (in the form of this blog) and the practice of fiction are very different. Ultimately, both are historical endeavors and futurism is tends to be much more tightly focused on the recent history. At least for me.

Dialectical futurism, is about a conversation between me, and the past, and me and the possible future, it’s an attempt to synthesize a pragmatic view of what will happen, with an optimistic view of what I would like to happen. It’s about putting all of the topics I blog about like Open Source, Free Software, Cooperative structure, Economics, and the “New Media” in conversation with each other and seeing what kind of cool innovative things happen.

Part Two: The Status of the Project

The project of being a writer is one of constant self improvement, I think. One thing that I didn’t mention in that post is that no matter how awesome you are as a writer, you’re always trying to get better at writing. There’s always some improvement to make, some short-falling in your ability to communicate that you’re working at improving.

I have the sense that I am getting better, if that’s a meaningful judgment. One improves as a writer, I’m convinced, by writing, and writing a lot, and as I write a bunch for this site and a bunch for work, and a bunch for other projects, I think I’m starting to get better. Also, I get a lot of feedback from coworkers on my writing, which I think has been helpful. Editors are a good thing indeed.

I think I’ve gotten better at figuring out how to write good blog entries--it still takes time, but I get into the grove more quickly. I’m getting better feedback, and I’m reasonably happy with where the traffic is. I mean, there’s always room for improvement, but things are headed in the right direction.

My short term goals are two fold:

1. To focus my energies on reading and improving my background knowledge in a number of areas. I want to be more contextually grounded in existing conversations regarding economics, anthropology, and cyborg-related materials.
2. To spend a lot more time on fiction writing. This means developing new habits, adjusting priorities, and spending some serious time making fiction projects work. So there.

We’ll see how this goes, and thanks as always for reading and putting up with me.

I just wanted to post something to point out that I’ve updated my about page and I think you might enjoy having a look. I always do enjoy reading other peoples’. Also another question:

How are you all feeling about the archives of this site? I’ve been slow on the uptake with regards to updating tychoish.com’s new archive system. Which makes it sound as if I have something in the works, when really all I did was grep through the archives and got lists of posts that seemed relevant to a couple of key topics.

I’m not terribly keen on just throwing up an archive with links to everything, becuase there are probably getting close to 1400 entries, and I think not all of them are particularly relevant or interesting. So I guess the question is: what do you find most useful in terms of website archives, and what format works the best for you? What do you want me to do?

Also, I think we’re slowly creeping up on 600,000 words in the blog, only a month or two more, I think.

Cheers, tycho

• Monday morning, before I left St. Louis, the trash truck or something took out the phone line behind the house. The phone line which carries the internet. Sigh. So while I’ve been driving and have been somewhat out of touch, by the nature of this whole process, the fact that the internet died didn’t help things. Sorry for the lack of posts.
• The midwest (particular the northern and parts that I’m most familiar) is, on the whole, incredibly boring to drive through. Not stunningly boring, but not that bad. By the time you get to eastern Ohio, however, things start to get interesting. The miles and miles of corn fields interspersed with the lone standing tree and occasional soybean crop--you know you’re in trouble when soybeans come as a refreshing change of pace--were replaced with rolling hills, mountains, and the like.

To make up for this, however, it did seem that they were doing a lot of construction/road repair for very little improvement. Parts of the eastern edge of the turnpike were actually pretty good: modern, pretty wide, in good repair; other parts, not so much.

Although, to be sure, heading east was much better than heading west. Better to get the bland out of the way first, and have something interesting at the end.

• I met Chris for the first time, in the flesh. Dude. This requires it’s own sublist:

1. I think the common perception is that things that happen in meatspace are somehow more authentic, and meaningful, and “real” than conversations that happen on line, and often I’d agree. While I’m certainly not complaining about the real-life experience, I do think that there are some distinct disadvantages:

   It’s hard to share links in meatspace, and so “hey I was reading this thing, here’s a link, and I thought that it was nifty and has implications for ____” becomes, not a stepping stone for another thought, but an exercise in “hell, I read something not that long ago and thought it seemed relevant.

   Chris and I tend to have these interleaved conversations where we’ll sort of drift through a few topics at once, and because at least in an ephemeral sort of way chats are logged, it’s hard to interrupt the other person, even if there are a couple of threads of quasi-related material on the table at once. Without the benefit of a running transcript you have to remember more and that’s weird, or at least it feels weird in this context. I’ll adjust I’m sure.

2. On the whole, he is (and the occasion was) pretty much what I expected. I’ve had this theory about “how people turn out to really be in reality versus how they seem online,” which is that after enough time (months/years) it’s pretty hard to maintain any sort of ruse or false facade. Sure, people lie, and people lie in real life, but those amount to little surprises. Big surprises? Unlikely. That held true.

   The cats have been reasonably cooperative. They’re sort of scared of the outside, and were made nervous by the whole experience. Thankfully their response was to cower/sleep in the carrier and not make a lot of noise. I’m leaving them with M.N. in Philadelphia for a night or two while I secure digs for us in New Jersey.

   M.N. and I will have a couple of opportunities this weekend to do shape note singing. Woot!

   It’s nice to know that summer, even early summer, isn’t quite as brutal everywhere as it is in St. Louis (or the other places where I’ve (semi)recently spent my summers: Kansas City, Nashville, and St. Louis of course.) Between that and the Wisconsin winter tolerance, which hasn’t yet worn off, I think I have a freakishly broad temperature tolerance.

   Eastern time is weird. Though, at least for a little while, I like it because it sort of means that my body doesn’t quite get that it’s daylight savings time. And there are very few things that I hate more than daylight savings time.

And I think, that’s all the news that’s fit to print.

Edited to add: I’m going to continue such musing regarding my current state over on my live journal which seems the more appropriate venue for this kind of blathering. Real post tomorrow. I swear.

Deep Breath.

I have news for you all which I hope will explain my absence for the past 10 or 15 days. Actually I’m surprised that it’s only been 10 or 15 days, as it feels so much longer. Anyway, enough suspense:

I’ve accepted a position with Linode to work on (primarily) a really cool technical writing project. You can see the announcement here.

This is really awesome because:

• It’s a job. Writing. About Linux, and Web Servers, and Free Software/Open Source.
• Linode rocks. I applied for the job somewhat before I bought a linode, and I’ve been nothing but pleased with the service which has worked flawlessly for me so far. The best part, is I think that Linode’s approach to technology, to using and developing technology, really fits in with the kinds of values and approaches that I hold.
• Did I mention it’s a writing job where I get to work with Linux and free software?
• It puts me on the east coast, near Philadelphia, where the largest concentration of my non-College friends are located, which has me unbelievably excited. I’ll be able to gossip and dance with M.N. more than once a year; I’ll be able to hang out and with my emergency-backup-big-sister (H.C.) more often; it’ll be feasible to hang out with Chris you know ever and more. I’m so psyched.
• Did I mention it’s a writing job where I get to work with Linux and free software?

The astute among you will thus, notice that:

• New job elsewhere means relocation. Which means.
• I’ve been busy doing all of the relocation things: packing, doing this and that’s, more packing, getting paperwork in order, even more packing, and so forth that I’ve not been really good at keeping on top of the blog. I have a couple of entries stashed, but my rhythm is all off kilter.
• The job announcement has my real name in it. I have an abandoned a post or two about the whole tycho/sam thing. I should perhaps restart it. I think what I really need is this highly mythologized about page that talks about tycho and sam in different voices.

The truth is, that while I don’t think my reasons for using “tycho garen” these days is the same as it was 2.5 or 3 years ago, but I really like what I’ve done with the whole tycho thing, and I can’t really imagine not using it.

• In a lot of ways, I think, writing this blog for so long is a lot of the reason why I was able to get this job, both because through the experience of writing about technology for the blog gave me the confidence/knowledge/skills that make this tech-writing thing I do possible, and also the blog I think served to demonstrate that I was for real.

This is related to another train of thought that I hope to follow up on in the next few months somewhere, but it strikes me that this, if anything is a marker of success that we’re not particularly prone to attending too. We notice successful blogs that get millions of visits a month and can support their authors on advertising revenue and invited speaking engagements. I think that I’ve achieved some kind of success here, and there are other kinds of success to be had. I want to think about what this means. But first I want to sit with this.

I’ll be in touch, and I look forward to continuing this blog in this “next part” of my journey.

Cheers!