Friday Flash - Variations on a Theme

Last week the good folk at the writing support/guidance/social networking group Literary+ (to be found on the Google + Social network site) ran a weekly Flash assignment: writers' addictions. The request was specifically for lighthearted, fun things; notebooks, pens, and chocolate rather than heroin, whisky, or illicit sex. Black as my soul is, I'd perhaps preferred a touch of darkness but chose to, for once, play more-or-less by the rules. I played a bit with mood and form, sketching a writer's addiction to writing in second-person present tense. Not my deepest or most interesting flash piece, but I liked the first paragraph. Perhaps it's a set of ideas I'll revisit at some point in more depth.

I played this one pretty straight, but I appear to have one of the higher quirkiness levels in this particular group. For the workspace photo contest, for example, most people showed cozy desks littered with pens, ink, pulp, and electronic devices. My photo (honorably mentioned as the most creative)? The very place where I'm writing these words: the 7 Train, westbound towards Manhattan. (Photo is at the Queensborough Plaza station. One stop east of "my" stop at Court Square, but sometimes I hop off early to get in a few blocks of walking).

Your Two Addictions to Writing

You awaken before dawn, to the LCD light of the alarm clock, yellow sodium light filtered through carelessly half-closed curtains, rhythmic breathing from the bed beside you. Take the pen from your notebook, quietly stride in the half-light to the door, gently pull shut behind you. Black coffee. The cat rubbing against your feet. Shards of last nights tangled with yesterday's plans jangle in your head, grinding, streaking, screaming at you. A sip of bitter black coffee quickens your heartbeat as your fingers dance across the keyboard, words and pictures and ideas flowing as the dawn comes, unseen and unnoticed.


You race home early, to the mailbox. Sounds of traffic, your neighbor's dog, the kids across the street all fade very far away. Your breath, your heart pause as fingers rifle through envelopes, for that one SASE even as you flip open on your phone one more time, checking for another review, a blog comment, cheers, applause, attacks. What did they say? Did anyone get it? Will they buy it? Then, to the keyboard, unpaid bills and advertisements and magazines sit discarded and forgotten for the moment. Now will come answers, now will come replies and, maybe, the next piece to send off into the world.


Which are you? Addicted to process, to the flow of words, the alchemy of ideas and experience and coffee and good gin? Or to the result - to human contact, to the feeling of reaching someone, touching someone, changing the world?

Addicted to writing, or addicted to having written?


Interestingly,  Tressa Green mined a similar vein, but relied more heavily on metahphor. You can see her effort (and check out the rest of her blog) here. My first paragraph has almost the same message as her piece, but in vastly different form to dramatically different effect. Does one work better for you?

Next week, I promise a technology post! Until then, thanks for listening. 

A Slight Change in Aethetics - Guest Post!

I'll be stepping away for the day to give writer Len Berry the reigns of the blog for one day only. Len is the author of the recently published Vitamin F, available for your Amazon Kindle or Nook

A Slight Change In Aesthetics

Writing is not always the simplest art form, especially when you do something that goes against the expectations of most readers.

I had to break a lot of those expectations with my dystopian novel, Vitamin F. This wasn’t because I was trying to be experimental, but because the setting demanded it. In Vitamin F, after a genetic crash, the population has become 88% female. Because of that, most people walking around are female, the world has shifted to a female mindset.

We don’t live in this sort of world, so I had to figure out how to show the differences between Vitamin F and modern society.

The first step is to look at the people in the world. Where a crowd typically means a random mix of people to us, in Vitamin F, it means something more specific. Half of the people in a crowd can’t be men, in fact, if men are around at all, they’re in small numbers.

It goes further than that.

Any time stock people go by—cops, guards, students—most, if not all of them are women. Our minds, shaped by society, don’t see specific groups as being a mix of men and women. We instinctively assign masculine gender roles onto doctors, firefighters, soldiers, virtually every group. True, we might use gender-neutral labels or even feminine labels, but, in our male-centric society, we default to seeing men in basic roles. It’s only when we describe things with greater detail, do we break from these molds.

For this to work, I had to take extra steps. Sometimes describing the shape of a single person would be enough, so long as I related that body shape to the others in the group as well. Other times, I used dialog to have the characters in a scene define gender for me.

After all, why do extra work when you can get characters to do it for you?

Something else I had to address was the sorts of events that happened in social settings. I could still use trips to bars, but I thought most aggressive sports felt like they’d be too much. Action movies seemed like something that wouldn’t necessarily go away, but would need to change into a more emotional experience. I kept poetry readings, but, since I don’t care for most poetry, my lead characters share my disdain.

I found myself changing things so they might continue on. Some things were little, like referring to Tarzan as a woman, not a man. (There was still a Jane.) Especially since I take the lead characters, Bridgett and Penelope, on a trip through normal life, I made use of a sorority they both deal with. I framed the sorority from a lot of my dealings with college friends who were in those groups, but also from what I know about fraternities. Changing things to adapt to a different proportion for each gender became a small, but important task for selling the reality of Vitamin F.

The biggest shift I had to make to accommodate the story resulted in using one word in place of another. Most of the time, we talk about men and women in modern society. In Vitamin F, men are rare, a commodity, and socially second class. Because of this, I use the word “male” a lot more than I would in normal conversation.

In a way, this change is used by the Office of Genetic Security to make sure men are separate from women, not only distinct, but also not equal. While men are part of regular society, they have to undertake regular physical exams and make an annual sperm donation. It’s the sort of little word shift that Orwell talked about in 1984, so I thought it best to apply it in Vitamin F as well.

In crafting a story, it’s important to keep in mind the complete structure of the setting and the characters. The more unusual and distinct the world, the more it will require description and deliberation on how to approach even the smallest of elements. It doesn’t just paint a more vivid word picture, it also details the story and the plight of the characters trapped in its pages.

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Len Berry a lifelong resident of Missouri studied biology before turning his imagination toward writing. In his spare time, Len enjoys drawing, watching anime, and playing an occasional video game. He is the author of the dystopian e-book Vitamin F, now available for Nook and Kindle. Since Len is an active blogger, you can find out more about him and his projects at his blog, Reflections of a Writer.

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Thank you Len! I appreciate the perspective, and urge all of you to check out Len's blog and his book. His blog tour will continue tomorrow, and I'll take the reigns back for a Friday Flash and some other upcoming posts.

Political Correctness, Body Shaming, and Breakfast Food

I'll follow up my last AV-ish related post with a writing-ish related post. This week I'll give my take on one of those discussions I can't believe we still need to have: the crazed furor of what I call the "anti-PC police" with their odd insistence that any efforts to avoid offensive and harmful language is the first step on the slippery slope to an Orwellian dystopia.

What does my breakfast have to do with this post?
Read on!

One of the latest forays into free-speech absolutism came from a freelance game-writer and blogger named James Desborough with a post charmingly titled "In Defense of Rape as a Storytelling Device". Now, let me say right of the bat that Mr. Desborough is not a sociopath; he was not defending the act of rape but arguing, for reasons which I don't comprehend, against the idea that careful consideration should be taken  in fictional portrayals of rape and sexual assault. Part of his defense was the same thing I often hear from those who I think of as the anti-PC police; it's a free country, and he has freedom of speech. This is, of course true. The counterargument, of course, is that sexual assault victims have the right to not be re-traumatized by halfwits using rape imagery as a cheap way of creating dramatic tension. (As an aside, it's also true that an inflammatory title is a good way to get attention, but only if your first-grade teacher neglected to teach you the difference between good attention and bad attention).

How far will people go with this kind of thing? As far as we'll let them. At a recent comedy show, professional comedian and amateur knuckle-dragging semi-evolved ape-creature Daniel Tosh joked about how funny it would be if a female audience member were gang-raped right there at his show for saying that rape jokes aren't funny. But hey - he has free speech, right? Need we really be such free-speech absolutists to not think there should be a consequence for someone opining that a woman should be raped because it would be funny? There have been plenty of missing-the-point defenses of Tosh, including this one here, which references George Carlin. The difference is that Carlin knew what Tosh seems to either not know or not care about; that comedy, like all other artistic expression, can communicate deeper messages than making people laugh. He used comedy to attack rape culture; Tosh used comedy to normalize it.


In fact, all of the arguments in favor of so-called "political correctness" follow a similar formula;

• Using "gay" as  a pejorative accustoms people to thinking of homosexuals as inferior
• Using "retarded" to mean stupid marginalizes the developmentally delayed and perpetuates the stereotype that they can't be productive members of society.
• Using "girly" to denigrate a man (as when baseball player Vincente Padilla recently told former teammate Mark Teixera that he should play a woman's sport) reinforces gender stereotypes of  both men and women, with men as unemotional, tough and stoic and women nurturing and gentle but weak. It tells every boy that he shouldn't display emotions and tells every girl that she shouldn't be strong and competitive.

The above, of course, are blatant, obvious examples of poorly-chosen words being hurtful. What about more subtle ones? There are scores to choose from, but today we'll take on an issue close to my heart in female body images. As fellow blogger Katje Van Loon recently pointed out, all of Disney's "princesses" are skinny. In fact, the Sea-Witch Ursula is the only overweight female character I can think of in any of Disney's stories (Van Loon has a tangential point that plus-sized women don't get to be glamorous; you should read her post after you finish mine). Recent endeavors have been better, but many of the "classics" (Cinderella, to pick the most blatant example) use physical attractiveness as shorthand for virtue and physical ugliness for evil. Does the fact that the titular character is beautiful as well as good while her antagonists are ugly subtly steer girls towards tying their sense of self-worth to their appearance? Of course it can. It also leads boys to learn that joking about ugly people is OK.

Which one here is the virtuous one? You can tell by her cute nose!

Which brings me to my last example of the day: The Oatmeal (you didn't really think I was talking about breakfast food, did you?In addition to being part of a nice breakfast, The Oatmeal is a reliably funny online comic strip. When creator Matthew Inman was faced with a spurious legal attack, he responded with this charity fundraiser. Inman deserves all the credit in the world for defending himself in a way that was funny and ended up giving over two hundred thousand dollars to charity, but check out that last bit: the "drawing of your mother seducing a Kodiak bear". 








Not only is a "your mother" joke one of the lowest forms of humor, but drawing her as an unattractive, overweight woman trying to be sexy strikes me as the same kind of "lets ridicule the fat woman" as this classic from adultery-oriented personal ad site Ashley Madison: it's the idea that a "fat" woman trying to be sexy is absurd and should be laughed at. Never mind that a growing proportion of the population actually is overweight and some of them presumably want an active, enjoyable sex life. Let's all laugh at the fat girl who thinks she's sexy. Only skinny girls get to be sexy! We see the wrongness when it's part of a message we're already primed to disagree with (you should cheat on your wife), but should recognize that packaging it with a "good" message (philanthropy > douchebaggery, to use Inman's phrasing) is, if anything, even worse as it normalizes the message of fat-shaming.






"Political Correctness" is not  a set of shackles. It's the idea that we should be cognizant of the messages we are sending and stop sending bad ones.

Summer Projects

It's been a quiet few weeks here on the blog, mainly because it's been a loud few weeks in real life. Some news on what's to follow:

1) Flash Fiction Fridays - each Friday I'll post a short or super-short here, in this very space. Some might follow a theme, some might stand alone.

2) Technology/AV  - I've finished all of the training requirements for my new Project Engineer position. Hooray! Expect another AV post next week, and bi-weekly from there.

3) Literary+ -- this is a group of writers on the Google+ social network. They share encouragement, writing tips, cross-promotion of work, and even little projects and excersizes. I'll be participating in a serial with them, and will likely write something for an upcoming anthology (theme: The Stranger. I already have an idea or two).

3a) Literary+ Serial. Smoke and Shadows. Start following now. I promise I'll be along soon!

4) Blog-hop collaborative story - Remember Riley's story, co-written with Carrie K Sorenstein, Nicole Pyle? We're starting another one, this time with additional participants. First part is already upon Carrie's blog  here. I'll keep you posted.

There's also going to be at least one special guest poster here this summer! Stay tuned.

Summer Collaboration Challenge!

My more personal summer project isn't going to be on the blog; Chloe and I are working on a shared story together. They've just been learning to write stories in kindergarten, and I wand to give her the chance to practice over the summer so first grade won't be a complete "starting over". Her big passion at the moment is drawing, while mine is writing. So, to step each of us out of our comfort zones, I promised to illustrate each of my pages if she'll write a line on each of hers. The story so far - about a princess and her friend the dragon, is starting to take on a kind of meandering charm. Last night at bedtime when I asked her to name one thing about herself that makes her proud, she said that she's creative. Hopefully we can nurture that feeling.


Tomorrow I'll be back with a post about language, feminism, and breakfast food.

See you then.

Women in AV (and everywhere else)

"Daddy, do any girls work with you," -- Chloe, age 5 on the eve of Take Your Children to Work day (see  earlier blog post)

I work, as you know, in the wonderful world of commercial AV, spreading the joys of audio-visual technology throughout the land. I've worked for two different integrators, worked for scores of clients including Fortune 100 companies with their own internal AV support staff.

Of team with whom I currently work?
Installation technicians - all male.
Service technicians - all male
Project engineers - all male.
Design engineers and sales engineers - all male.
Programmers - all male.
Project specialists (testing and verification technicians) - all male.
CAD technician - female.

That's right. Of the twentysome people in various technical positions in our local office, there is exactly one female in a technical role.

Scenes from a day of AV Training

Lest you think this a local problem in the past six months alone I've taken part in vendor training from Biamp, ClearOne, Extron, Crestron, AVI-SPL's in-house AV Project Management training, Crestron again, and Meyer sound. Those training classes alone represent contact with somewhere between a hundred and a hundred fifty of my fellow AV professionals.

Of those, exactly one was a woman.

At Extron Training - this was the highest female/male ratio of
any training I attended this year

Why do I see this as a problem? The quote with which I lead is the first hint; inequalities like this create a self-perpetuating division between "women's jobs" and "men's jobs". Your psychologist, your kids' schoolteachers, and the receptionist in the last office you visited are probably women. Your car mechanic, your computer programmer and, yes, your AV technician are probably men. This drives young people to specific industries by an idea of where they'd "fit in" and what's "appropriate" for them rather than what their natural talents and interests would lead them; if you're a young man and all of the psychologists you encounter are women, then it's hard for "psychologist" to be an aspirational position for you. If you're a young women and all of the technical people you encounter are men, it becomes a role in which it's harder to see yourself. If you're a teacher and have a promising young female student, she likely doesn't look like a potential engineer to you, even if you never consciously recognize this bias.

The second problem is one for the industry; we rob ourselves of half the potential talent available by closing the door to half the population. This is a truism for all industries; greater diversity of candidates breeds greater diversity of viewpoints and, in the long term, better results.

So what do do about it? The good news is that the culture is changing, from greater acceptance to less of a "boys' club" atmosphere.  For example, most AV professionals today are reluctant to use sexually suggestive test media when commissioning a system. It is worth noting that at least two of AVI-SPL's local offices are being run by women. I'm very proud that the Women in AV group (an industry group of some very talented and successful people working towards mentoring and promotion of women in the industry) chose one of our account managers (Alexis LaBroi from the Atlanta office) for their inaugural mentoring award. Having women not only in leadership positions in the industry but using those positions to help others follow in their footsteps is one step towards a more inclusive industry. It's the slow, organic way to grow.

Are there wider, better solutions possible? That's very hard for  me to say. I suspect it would take an overall change in how we look at men and women for the AV industry - or any technology industry - to become truly gender blind. It's still an ideal worth fighting for and one towards which we're currently - albeit it slowly - working.

Blog Hop: the penultimate installment of Riley's Story

For those who just joined, this is my last contribution to a collaborative pass-the-story game with Carrie Sorenstein and Nicole Pyles. Carrie stared it off a month ago now, and we're now up to the fifth and final installment.

If you need a reminder, we started here:

Riley's Story, Part one at Chasing Revery (Carrie K Sorensen)
Part 2 - Fate Calls at World of My Imagination (Nicole Pyles)
Part 3 - The Hands of Fate. Right here, by me!
Part 4 - Unexpected Fate at Chasing Revery



"Abandoned Fate"

Saturday morning and I needed a break. From Fate and Kate and all this. It had started off as a lark, but what if it was real? Like I told Kate, I knew some of their stories. Not much of it, but enough to know one thing. You can't cheat fate. The storybooks - and maybe the history books - are littered with the broken fragments of people who thought they could. The problem is I didn't know what Fate wanted. Or what I wanted. For the fifteenth or twentieth or hundredth time I shuffled through the stack instructions torn off Fate's notebook. For the fifteenth or twentieth or hundredth time they made no damn sense to me. What does Fate even need an assistant for? I was jolted from my study by the sudden and unexpected ringing of the doorbell.

It was Caleb, and he  had that look. The one where the muscles on his face tighten up just a bit, like he's about to cry or hit someone. The first time I'd seen that look I'd asked what was wrong, got nothing but an angry glare and a defiantly muttered "nothing". So, I learned. The look means he doesn't want to talk. Not about anything real. Not that he ever does.

"Hey Riley. I was around. Thought I'd join you, maybe play X-box, maybe a beer?" The last hopefully, almost a question.

I stepped back to let him in. "uh...sure. My folks're out and..." he brushed past me, up the stairs.
  
It went the way I'd expect. Caleb sitting next to me at the edge of the bed, leaning toward the TV, the game controller tightly clenched between to fists, grimly slaughtering virtual legions of space marines, soldiers, aliens. He'd leave a half-finished beer sitting on the side-table half forgotten, then suddenly grab it and take a deep pull.

Something else was wrong. He smelled. Caleb's never been the most impeccably groomed kid, but this was something different than usual - a faint but definite body odor, as if he'd gone a day or more without showering. I glanced sidelong at him, saw the tightness in his jaw and neck, then turned back to the TV,  content with the companionable silence of gunfire and explosions for the time being. I was sure he'd open up eventually. It's fate, right?

The buzz of my phone jolted me out of the game-trance. Caleb flinched away from me as he felt the phone buzz, dropped his game controller to the floor. I didn't have to look. I knew who it was.

Caleb knew too. He dropped the controller to the floor, stood up with a quick, jerky movement. "That job again." He looked me in the eye for about a half second, then looked out the door. " I guess I'll go."

I got up, took the phone out of my pocket. The same no-number number as always. I took a deep breath, silenced the phone and tossed it back onto the bed. "No. I ... I deserve a day off." I grabbed his empty beer bottle. "Lemme get you a another."

Caleb nodded, sank back down to the bed. He muttered something under his breath that might have been "thanks". I trekked down to the kitchen, grabbed a couple of beers, carried them back slowly, willing the muscles in my gut to unclench. I'd just abandoned Fate, but if felt like the right thing to do. I hoped it wouldn't end badly.

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This has been an interesting experience. The story didn't take the shape I expected from the beginning, nor did any succeeding chapter follow the previous in the way I expected - and that includes mine! My favorite part thus far was Carrie's opening chapter, and I clearly circled back there in an attempt to draw Caleb back into the story. None of this is what I would have written on my own, but I think we got something interesting out of the endeavor and am very glad to have taken part.  Next week Nicole Pyles will close it out. Stay tuned!

Digital Media Certifcation

For those who just joined us here  - or who have been here from the first but forgot - I'm currently on a journey from an AV Project Manager role to an AV Project Engineer role. De facto, I'm almost exclusively doing PE work, but before I get to change the  title on my business card I need to collect all of AVI-SPL's official requirements. Along the way, I'm picking up the skills and knowledge to better be able to handle the work.

This week I finished another step - Crestron's three-day Digital Media Certified Engineer training class.This was sometimes interesting, sometimes humbling, and an excellent addition to my AV education.
Digital Media was introduced seven years ago (it doesn't seem like that long!) when digital video was still primarily associated with consumer applications. The idea was that you could take various video formats (S-Video, VGA, composite video, HDMI), convert them to a digital signal and send them over a single cable to your display. The original solution (which we now call "DM Copper" to distinguish from newer versions) included transmitters at source locations, switches, and receivers at the destination. All of these were connected with Crestron's proprietary Digital Media cable. This cable,  about the diameter of a garden hose, contains three individually jacketed cables - an 8 conductor UTP which looks just like a Cat5, an 8 conductor STP (this carries everything but audio and video) with a rigid spline down the center to separate the pairs (this carries audio and video), and a 4-conductor control cable for communication and power of the transmitters and receivers. Since then, they've added "DM 8G" which uses a single shielded twisted pair (regular Cat5e or 6 works), as well as multimode fiber solutions. It's an important technology to be comfortable with, as Crestron has recently sold their 50,000th DM switch, and shows no signs of slowing down.

What was the DMC-E class like? It's a combination of Creston's other two DM classes - DMC-D (Designer) and DMC-T (Technician). The goal was that, at the end of three days, I'd be able to lay out a DM system, put it together (including cable terminations), test and commission it. It was quite a bit to pack in to three days!


We started with the "D" part, reviewing the alphabet soup that goes with digital video - HDMI, HDCP, EDID, CEC, TMDS, and even a brief mention of SDI. It's all stuff that I mostly have by now, but did add a couple of details about, for example, exactly how CEC works and how we could use it in the unlikely case that we found a reason to do so. For those who don't know, CEC is an absurdly slow control protocol embedded in HDMI video. The idea is that any bit of equipment can trade control signals with any other. So, if you turn on your Sony Blu-ray player, it can automatically switch on your Panasonic TV and flip it to the right input. The problem is that many manufacturers don't want to make it too easy to use competitors' gear, so they use their own proprietary codes as part of the "extended" command set. In the commercial world, of course, we just turn these things off.

Day 1 ended with a fairly detailed review of the capabilities and limitations (most frustrating limitation - that DM systems only support USB 1.0, while many interactive touchscreens require USB 2.x. There seem to be no plans to improve upon this) available digital media hardware, some applications exercises, and a test. This was a fairly easy day for me, and relatively fun.
Day 2 covered the "T" part of the certification. This was, for me, the humbling part. In my project manager role, I'd become often handed a drawing set to a team of technicians and taken for granted that they'd fly through it, quickly and accurately terminating and connecting all manner of cables. While I can put together a standard or even shielded RJ45 connector if given enough time, the multi part DM connectors quite honestly gave me fits. I'd not wrap enough braid around the inner jacket and leave the cable loose. Or leave the conductors too long so the strain relief didn't grip the outer jacket. Or just plain wear out the little teeth inside the connector from having to open and close it too many times after putting one pair in backwards. I'm sure that if I did this kind of work every day I'd get better at it. I also know that after a half day of working on one connector, I discovered new respect for the people who do it everyday and can even manage more than one termination per hour. Frustration notwithstanding, I did manage to head home at the end of Day 2 leaving working DM Copper and 8G cables behind.

We also got to try our hands at a fiber terminations, which was half safety lesson and half actual work. Fiber safety is pretty simple; it's made of glass. You don't want to eat glass, you don't want glass in your eyes, and you don't want glass splinters. So wear goggles, don't eat where you're working on fiber, and if you break a piece off clean it up and throw it away. Putting the connector on a fiber-optic cable is a step-by-step process that feels as if it should be happening in a laboratory. Mark it with the measuring card, strip the outer jacket, strip the inner jacket, wipe clean, cleave with the cleaving tool, realize that you forgot to put the little boot over the cable, swear at yourself while you try to carefully slide it past the now naked fiber without breaking it, slip the end into the connector, screw it together.

Day 3 was the putting it together and testing day - back to my comfort zone. We hooked up all those cables we made to a DM switcher, transmitters, receivers, controller, and a couple of monitors and then got to play with it. I must confess that it did take some of the sting out of the ours toiling over connectors to get to hook them up and see them work.  The theory is fine, but there really is nothing to compare with actually logging into a system and seeing just what you can make it do to confirm that you actually have learned something.
At the end of the day we took a test, showed the instructor that we got our system to work, and got our official certificates. And that is our technology post for this week. Tune in next week for the penultimate installment of the blog-hopping "Riley's Story" .