Trip to Wisconsin
Back from the trip to Wisconsin. I carpooled with Jen (, roughly translated from Lojban as "the committee of fools"). I met Jen at a Penguicon presentation I gave on Lojban two years ago, and ever since, she's been attending the local Lojban group that I host. Her car is a stick-shift, so this trip was reminiscent of my previous trip to Philcon with a friend named Bruce, who is also from the Lojban Michigan group and his car is also a stick shift. They both were patient teachers. They are both very good at using stick-shift and Linux, and they say these facts are related. In both cases they sometimes operated the gearshift while I operated the clutch. We should have been wearing aviator helmets and goggles. "Engage clutch!" "Clutch is engaged, Captain!" "Warp 4, release clutch!"
We spent Friday evening driving the seven-hour trip. She is a veritable cornucopia of knowledge on Linux advice and the philosophy of religion. I have a whole list of links to email her, about the Penguicon recorded panel on Brain As Computer Interface, Eric Raymond's Political History of SF, Mur Lafferty's short story I Look Forward To Remembering You, George Hrab's drunk episode of the Geologic Podcast, Paul Graham's essay on How To Do Philosophy, and lolcode.
Saturday was spent at Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention. We didn't attend any programming, but my best description of the environment I saw was "mannerly", "restrained", and "nurturing". They even have an Accessibility staff member whose job is to make sure everyone's needs are met. Now I know why there are some people in every feedback session who seem to think that a concom can be responsible for every idiosyncratic specialized need in the known universe. Every other convention I've attended seems like a feral manchild by comparison. Not that it's a bad thing either way. I've often described Penguicon as "high energy" and "an anarchic hotbed", and it's so true. It fits our audience.
Guess who was there? The Big-Name-Fan lady who made an ass of herself in Penguicon's feedback session. I saw her marching in a beeline down the hall, straight toward the Penguicon promotional table where Jen and I spent most of Saturday. But when she got there, she just wanted to know if we had seen a book she had lost nearby.
I made this table stand sign listing female guests and Nifties. We had a lot of great conversations about women in technology, and handed out flyers and Ubuntu Linux software. In the next room was a mesh network of XOs (One Laptop Per Child). I had an interesting conversation about scheduling technology with a Wiscon staffer, who told me "never replace a complex relational database with text files and Bourne scripts." I had a conversation with a guy who works for Second Life, about my idea to hook up Penguicon's Chaos Machine to a rear-projection screen and have half of it in the virtual world. We'll see. There was a bi-weekly farmer's market and art fair going on in the city streets outside, where Jen saw a saxophone quartet named Quatro Formaggio, which plays 8-bit video game music. Apparently four saxophones can emulate the exact same kinds of effects. I went looking for them, but they were gone.
In their response to the Open Source Boobs Project that a few people enacted at Penguicon, the attendees of Wiscon demonstrated a sense of humor by wearing badge ribbons that read "Proprietary Boobs". I had a bunch of leftover ribbons reading "Icebergs In The Pool" and didn't have any use to which to put them. So I handed them out as a random gift to anyone wearing the ribbons, as an opportunity to introduce myself, and talked about our Liquid Nitrogen pool dumps. This seemed to go over well and led to many good discussions.
The finale of the OSBP damage control and tamping down moral hysteria took place in the bar. I was sitting with the other Escape Artists staff. They and their friends were discussing sexual harassment at conventions. They asked me about the poorly-named OSBP. mentioned that it was brought up in a panel he was on. I got an opportunity to set the record straight on some of the facts. I also stressed strongly that Penguicon is not a grope-fest. Enough of us are clueful, so it's a good environment. There are well-established simple lessons of how to make Linux User Groups, Lojban groups, and other geek hobbies into environments where women feel comfortable (without turning it into a prudish anti-sex moral panic either). There are different ways to exert appropriate, measured influences on those who don't implement those lessons. There is a distinction between unethical moral choices and clumsy breaches of etiquette. The response to impolite cluelessness is for a clueful person to quietly say, for instance, "dude! You're staring", in a way meant to educate rather than rebuke. That's my opinion. Your mileage may vary.
All of this discussion of inappropriate asking was a little frustrating, because what has been on my mind a lot lately, is the question of what is appropriate asking. Not about public groping of course (duh), but about how to take it out of the platonic zone. My policy has been to err on the side of caution, but I used to take that to extremes. I'm no longer as hesitant as all that. One really is not faced with a mind-reading dilemma in which etiquette requires a man to figure out the answer in advance before asking. So long as you get to know someone based on shared interests, then when she knows you, it's actually perfectly fine to go ahead and inquire as to the possibilities. Generally if a woman knows you respect and admire her, and if you've proven yourself capable of taking "no" for an answer, the worst case scenario is that the friendship would survive either way. The best case scenario is, well, the best, hence the name.
Saturday evening came the reason I went to Wiscon, which was the restaurant dinner for Escape Artists Inc staff-- Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and Podcastle. All the staff brought guests, but we made sure for the staff to all sit within earshot of each other so we could get facetime. Most of us had never met before. I believe face-to-face is vitally important in any organization. This was a lot of fun. I enjoyed meeting Ben Phillips of Pseudopod. On the show he uses a voice of enthusiastically grim sadism, perfect and very fun for a horror podcast, but he is cheerful in person and I really enjoyed talking to him. Our new accountant is also very cool. A lot of the people there actually asked me to give them a rundown of what Penguicon is! Well, I won't say no to that!
Exploring the Saturday night room parties, I saw a guy playing a set of Star-Trek style 3D chess which he had built himself. I saw immediately that he had modified the design of the equipment. As they played, it was clear that he had modified his version of the rules in order to make it a superior game. Very cool.
In the hallway, a seemingly random stranger recognized me by my name tag. Awesome! It turned out he's a Lojban enthusiast who had not yet introduced himself on the mailing lists.
Sunday afternoon and evening was the drive back to Michigan. On the way I read to Jen from "Reasons To Be Cheerful" by Greg Egan, which is an incredibly powerful story about the relationship of preferences to identity. We didn't finish because he packs so many concepts into any short story, that there's a lot to talk about after every few pages. We made it back in time for Blasted Bill's bonfire. In summary, it was a wonderful weekend.
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