February 8, 2024

s17e08: Infinite Canvas; A Stand-Up Deployment?; The Omelas Cinematic Universe; Taxonomies and Online Community

0.0 Context Setting

It’s around 9:30am on Thursday, 8 February, in Portland, Oregon. Everyone here has just had, is having, or is about to have, a winter cold, because those happen again now.

0.1 Hallway Track News

Hallway Track 009: Self-Publishing, and You Can, Too is on Thursday, 15 February, at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, and 7pm London.

Registration opens at ~12:30pm PT today, Thursday 8 February 2024.

Our guests will be:

• Lucy Bellwood, Professional Adventure Cartoonist, tall ship sailor, author of 100 Demon Dialogues, co-author of Tell the Turning, and owner of both PO and voicemail boxes.
• Mike Monteiro, author of Design is a Job, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It, and The Collected Angers, and co-founder and Design Director of Mule.
• Kat Vellos, author of We Should Get Together, creator of Better than Small Talk, and founder and former community leader of Bay Area Black Designers.

Here’s the blurb:

Self-publishing! It’s a legitimate path to not just making your work available, but being compensated for it, too. It’s understandable, and hopefully after this Hallway Track, a little bit more accessible.

Come to this Hallway Track if you want to chat with three wonderful people and their adventures in self-publishing about things like:

• getting your book back and turning it into a zine;
• the potentially personally horrifying but necessary concept and practice of “marketing”;
• why you’d even want to self publish in the first place;
• why you shouldn’t;
• the usual about what’s involved, from people who’ve done it; and
• maybe some new, different topics, too.

What’s Hallway Track, if you’ve forgotten or I never told you?

Hallway Track is a series of free, ad-hoc gatherings, where we pretend to be in the hallway chatting with each other after a great conference session. It’s for small groups of only 25 people so it’s not too big people can’t talk and not too small there’s dead air; they run for 90 minutes; they’re not recorded, to encourage free conversation.

Register for Hallway Track 009: Self-Publishing, and You Can, Too and find out more.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

Just a few short things today. Promise.

1.1 Infinite Canvas

Chuck Jordan wrote about the Apple Vision Pro in the context of what it was like when the Mac came out¹, and now he’s written about his experience with the embryonic purported next stage of computing².

Caught my attention because: the first piece was a wonderful bit of writing about the feel of potential. The second piece is a nuanced perspective (ha) (not like you need any more?) from someone who’s done a bunch of VR work. And for whom Personas just didn’t work at all.

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1.2 A stand-up deployment, or just another bug hunt?

One of two things I remembered I wrote:

After surviving a horrific encounter with a new development methodology that left her entire development team dead, RIPLEY is on her way to MASLOW’S HOPE.

Have you ever wanted to read a software development parody of James Camerons’ Aliens? Are there parts of that film you can quote? If you’re subscribed to this newsletter then that chance is greater than zero!

Anyway, I randomly remembered this this morning and it put a much-needed smile on my face: A stand-up deployment, or just another bug hunt?³

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1.3 The Omelas Cinematic Universe

With the addition of Isabel J. Kim’s Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole (Kim, 2024), the Ursula K Le Guin Omelas Cinematic Universe oeuvre is now:

• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Le Guin, 1973)
• The Ones Who Stay and Fight (Jemisin, 2020)
• The Odyssey Problem (Willrich, 2022)
• Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole (Kim, 2024)

While dicking about in Medium after re-discovering my Aliens/Agile Development nightmare fic, I also rediscovered The Ones Who Advocated for a Casus Belli Intervention in Omelas, and Nineteen More (me, 2022).

I have no idea what caused me to write that listicle. I am sorry.

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1.4 Taxonomies and online community

1. Elizabeth Lopatto’s Unified Taxonomy of Text-based Social Media Use⁴ is great and you should read it.
2. I would be remiss in also linking you to perennial favorite, the Bartle taxonomy of player types⁵
3. You should also read quite possibly the best piece of writing on online community management ever, which is the Improbable Island Code of Conduct⁶ and two associated messages of the day from 2020⁷

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OK that’s it. I’ve got today’s Hallway Track to prepare for. How’ve you been? I still need to finish part two of that How To Steal An Open Social Network heist bit.

Best,

Dan

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