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[ensignau]

So.. it's been months since I opened up Photo Booth and realized these are the last three photos I took. 

#doctor who #spelunky #star trek

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So lovely

Korra Book 3 finale is online right now!   These are some backgrounds from this season and some comps from the finale.  I did the paint. layout was most likely either Angela Sung or William Niu.

#legend of korra

[ensignau]

Sometimes I forget how old Buffy is and then I see a laptop.

#buffy the vampire slayer

[ensignau]

A Letter I wrote to the TSA in 2008

Way back in December 2008, I was traveling back to Wisconsin after Christmas break, and did that stupid thing where you shove all your Christmas presents into your checked bags because you don't feel like carrying them.

Unsurprisingly, when I went to pick up my bags from the baggage carousel, they were plastered with those stickers that say some TSA agent has dug around in them. I also discovered that anything of perceived value had been stolen out of my bags, including a shitty pair of shoes, a video camera, and some scifi DVDs. I wasn't upset about shitty shoes or the camera, but I was pretty sad about those DVDs. 

Like any good citizen, rather than waste time filling out pointless forms to recover cost of goods stolen, I wrote this letter to the TSA. 

Dear Transportation Security Administration:

In this post-9/11 world, I understand the great lengths to which this noble country must go to protect the freedoms that too many of us take for granted on a daily basis. I, personally, realize that these freedoms come at a price, a price too high to tally or itemize. In fact, to try to even quantify the cost of freedom would be crass, vulgar, and disrespectful to the memories of those who have paid with their lives for the freedom of not only Americans, Iraqis, and Afghanis, but really, everyone everywhere since the dawn of time. 

It is for this reason that I do not fault you for my recent losses while traveling across our great nation. In fact, I believe that it is in the service of freedom that the TSA reappropriated my Battlestar Galactica: Razor DVD and Star Trek: Captain’s Log DVD. For this honor, I am eternally grateful, and am glad to have done my part to secure the freedom of the world, nay, the universe! For I believe that my DVD’s were recommissioned in order to help train military assets in your top-secret “Operation Intergalactic Freedom” program. 

I have long suspected that while our freedom on this earthly plane has remained secure, we are daily threatened by invisible, intergalactic beings who can only have the most sinister designs for America, and Earth at large. While I believe the training simulations run at prison camps like Abu Ghraib represent an effective start on how to deal with Alien invasions, truly, such training becomes elementary when compared to the undoubtedly advanced technology of the alien hordes who lurk just outside our galaxy’s borders. 

It is for this reason that I believe our soldiers need the wisdom and counsel of great future leaders like Captain Kirk, Captain Picard, and yes, even Captain Janeway. The diplomatic expertise of these collective leaders demonstrates the type of intellect, savvy, and sensuality necessary for making first contact with hostile alien forces. Soldiers must learn that before we resort to violence, we must present the guise of diplomacy, and lure the hostile aliens into thinking that Earth’s domination is, for lack of a better phrase, a sure thing. Just think of Janeway’s ingenius defeat of the Borg. She willingly ignored the sanctity of the temporal prime directive in order to achieve a greater good—the safety of humankind, and the safe return of her ship to the Alpha quadrant. Or consider Picard, whose intellectual curiosity and charming accent helped smooth over many a diplomatic nightmare with hostile species like the Cardassians and the Romulans. Once we have lured the alien forces into the comfort of our loins of freedom, we can then use the great military experiences of Admiral Adama as a guiding light for how to ultimately bring democracy to the universe. 

As you of course know, Adama’s universe was once foolish enough to assume that their Cylon neighbors were no longer a threat. Lulled into a comfortable freedom coma, Adama’s world was nearly completely annihilated by an unexpected Cylon invasion. Cylons, with their complete lack of compassion, would not hesitate to behead a baby if it meant there would be one less human on Caprica. What did we learn from all this? We have learned that aliens cannot be trusted, no matter how physically attractive they might seem, and that ultimately, the only thing that can save our humanity is the continued dissemination of democracy across the universe. 

In order to do this, we must first secure the borders of the Milky Way. Whether this means building a giant, energy barrier around the giant swirl we are proud to call home, or sending an army of drone aircraft to patrol our borders, we must make intergalactic freedom our highest priority. I, for one, am firmly behind Operation Intergalactic Freedom 100%, and indeed, if you should ever need my expertise in military strategy, I willingly volunteer my humble services. 

And truly, TSA, should you ever need to borrow more of my military training videos, all you have to do is ask. I’ll even bring popcorn. 

Sincerely, Cindy Au

They never responded. 

#2008 #TSA

[ensignau]

Wow! A fan history of Veronica Mars, featuring Rob Thomas and some of the fans who helped him make a movie!

Happy worldwide release of the Veronica Mars Movie day! Our editorial team put together this exclusive fan history, featuring interviews with backers, Rob Thomas, Jason Dohring, and more.

#Veronica Mars #kickstarter

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Whoa! Over $1 billion has been pledged to projects on Kickstarter

Here's to all our backers, creators, and the tens of thousands of projects we've come together to create. Couldn't have done it without you :)

#Kickstarter

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Raise your hand if you are answering emails while listening to this right now. 

#skyrim

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Apparently 9 people have now read part of my dissertation

A few weeks ago, I threw my entire dissertation onto Medium. 

I did this mostly because I'd been trying to find some old teaching materials in gmail and realized that the only digital copy of my dissertation was also sitting in gmail. As a Word doc attachment. 

Since that Word doc did represent, oh, about 5 years of work, I thought it might be sad if somehow gmail died (unlikely) or that old Word doc became radically incompatible with all known file formats (more likely) or the basement of the UW-Library where the hard copy is kept burned to the ground (possible?). In a desperate act of historical preservation, I thought it might be smart to keep a copy of it somewhere else.

I decided to put it into Medium because Medium makes everything look nice, and I was curious if my dissertation might seem more readable if it looked like an attractive long article instead of a Word doc. Here are the stats from the last 30 days:

Since 2010, only 4 people have ever read my dissertation, all professors on my committee. And come to think of it, I don't actually know if they really read it. I mean if you had a bunch of grad students you were advising and they each had 200-300 pages of dissertation, don't you think you'd be tempted to skim some of it?

I have no idea if these new 9 people read the whole thing. But even if they only read part of it, it is extremely thrilling and strange to imagine that in a mere 30 days I've more than doubled my dissertation readership. Progress! 

Anyways, whoever you 9 people are, somehow knowing that you even glanced at this thing has made me feel like maybe the 5 years I put into those thoughts weren't totally lost to the void. (Also I suspect you 9 people might actually be my mother) 

I have often found academic writing to be mostly unreadable. It's likely this is because the only people reading it is other academics, who are used to reading things that are highly unreadable. And in fact, the more unreadable the academic gibberish, the more commendable! 

It's all quite silly, and Word docs certainly don't help.

Grad students/dissertators/academics, you should try putting your writing into Medium (or anywhere public, really). We should get those thoughts out into the public sphere, and get that writing to a place where more people can understand what it is you are trying to say. Otherwise, why do it at all?

#academia #writing #dissertation #education #medium

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Respect ought to mean you can set aside the roles you play every day and indulge in perverse, silly, exciting, transgressive consensual acts, whatever they may be. Anyone who finds that dampening to the sexual spirit doesn’t sound quite ready for equality. So next time you read a little stat like, “The risk of divorce is lowest when the husband does 40 percent of the housework and the wife earns 40 percent of the income,” you shouldn’t think, wow, equality is really killing my boner. You should think, wow, we’ve still got a long way to go.

From What if Equality is the Biggest Boner Killer of All? by Tracy Moore of Jezebel. In response to the stupid Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex? by Lori Gottlieb, who wrote this book btw Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. (via lcucinotta)

#marriage #sex

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Whiteness was never about skin color or a natural inclination to stand with one’s own; it was designed to racialize power and conveniently dehumanize outsiders and the enslaved. It has always been a calculated game with very real economic motivations and benefits.

Mary-Alice Daniel, "The history white people need to learn."

#black history month #whiteness #race #class

[ensignau]

I like this Jim Guthrie song. 

#Indie Game: The Movie #Jim Guthrie

[ensignau]

Like many thrilling things women do – fucking or hitchhiking, being demonically ambitious or telling an asshole to stick a chainsaw in his eye – society tells us that growing up leads to ruin. Yes, you get older, but you can also grow tougher, kinder, braver. You can claw out the life you wanted. But as you age, the world will tell you you're less worthy, even if you know that's a lie. If there's one thing society won't stand for, it's for a woman to be content.

Molly Crabapple, on what it's like to turn 30.

#women #molly crabapple

[ensignau]

Amazing. 

#tng #star trek

[ensignau]

Martin Luther King, Jr. and COINTELPRO

Today, many will write tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr. and remind us of the work and sacrifice he and other civil rights activists poured into making our country whole. 

Today, we should also remember that our government surveilled Martin Luther King, Jr. for most of his career, and actively strategized methods to undermine his and other activist's legitimacy in the eyes of the public. We should remember that King's civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was labeled a hate group by the FBI. 

 What the FBI/COINTELPRO was up to back in the 60s:

  3/4/68

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROGRAM BLACK NATIONALIST - HATE GROUPS RACIAL INTELLIGENCE                                              

GOALS

~~~~~

For maximum effectiveness of the Counterintelligence Program, and to prevent wasted effort, long-range goals are being set.

1.  Prevent the COALITION of militant black nationalist groups.  In unity there is strength; a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness.  An effective coalition of black nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real "Mau Mau" [Black revolutionary army] in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.

2.  Prevent the RISE OF A "MESSIAH" who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.  Malcolm X might have been such a "messiah;" he is the martyr of the movement today.  Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position.  Elijah Muhammed is less of a threat because of his age.  King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed "obedience" to "white, liberal doctrines" (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism.  Carmichael has the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.

3.  Prevent VIOLENCE on the part of black nationalist groups.  This is of primary importance, and is, of course, a goal of our investigative activity; it should also be a goal of the Counterintelligence Program to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence.

4.  Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community.  The goal of discrediting black nationalists must be handled tactically in three ways.  You must discredit those groups and individuals to, first, the responsible Negro community.  Second, they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to "liberals" who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalist [sic] simply because they are Negroes.  Third, these groups must be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement. This last area requires entirely different tactics from the first two. Publicity about violent tendencies and radical statements merely enhances black nationalists to the last group; it adds "respectability" in a different way.

5.  A final goal should be to prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth.  Specific tactics to prevent these groups from converting young people must be developed. [...]

TARGETS

~~~~~~~

Primary targets of the Counterintelligence Program, Black Nationalist-Hate Groups, should be the most violent and radical groups and their leaders.  We should emphasize those leaders and organizations that are nationwide in scope and are most capable of disrupting this country.

These targets, members, and followers of the:

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM)

NATION OF ISLAM  (NOI)  

Offices handling these cases and those of Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, H. Rap Brown of SNCC, Martin Luther King of SCLC, Maxwell Stanford ofRAM, and Elijah Muhammed of NOI, should be alert for counterintelligence suggestions.  [...]

Excerpted from The COINTELPRO Papers by Ward Churchill. Full text available here)

#martin luther king #civil rights #history #cointelpro #surveillance #fbi

[ensignau]

I'm a Doctor.

I'm a Doctor.

People sometimes ask how I managed to complete a doctoral degree in literature, despite knowing that I wouldn’t be pursuing an academic career or using it for anything.

My response usually goes something like this (it doesn't, but let's pretend it does):

I picture myself, an 89-year-old woman, sitting in a wheelchair and staring out over a field of wheat. I reflect back on my life, what I have achieved, what happened, who I loved, who I had been, and who I had become. I think back on that glorious period of life when I thought I’d become a scholar, a thinker, and a teacher. And I wonder after all these years why I didn’t just finish it. What was so hard back then that I couldn’t just write a few more words down on a page? It didn’t matter then, but as I stare out onto that empty field, it matters. 

The camera pans in toward my withered face, moving closer and closer until my flesh blurs into pale blotches of light. As I fade back into focus, you see my body pristinely frozen inside of a cryogenic chamber, and realize that this whole thing is the creation of my aging consciousness, buffering around in a virtual retirement community, so fixated on mistakes of the past that I fail to take this marvelous opportunity to dream up an all-you-can-eat pie buffet on the Starship Enterprise.  

But I digress.

Whatever the reasons (and there were oh so many reasons), I went ahead and finished a goddamn doctoral degree in English Literature, which serves mostly now to punctuate mundane office chatter with the occasional "Doctor Au" joke. Get it?

It has been just about four years since I earned that distinction, the ability to technically be called Doctor Au. I never use the title, nor would I because it seems a bit absurd, doesn't it?

Doctors save lives. They study the origins of the Universe. They travel through space and time! Doctors do not bury their heads in books for eight to ten years and then emerge with theories of how those books might be related to ideas about things that may or may not be important to humans. 

Ah, but they do. We do. 

I occasionally meet other doctors of the liberal arts variety. When we discover this shared secret, conversation quickly moves onto, "How did you get out?" which is a polite way of asking, "How did you ever convince anyone that you're fit to work in this world, given your torrid academic past?" 

"I killed someone with only a bachelors degree and stole their identity!" 

In reality, moving beyond academia started with acknowledging once and for all that the promised future -- a stable career where one can steadily climb the tenure-track ladder and build a body of scholarship whilst teaching and inspiring a new generation of thinkers -- just wasn't really there. 

Part of it involved years of slowly learning how the machine of higher education works. It's one of the most enduring institutions we have, filled with antiquated traditions, inefficiencies, devotion to hierarchy, and worst of all, an extreme imbalance in supply and demand. For every 100 Lit PhDs out there, it seemed there was one job opening (usually non-tenure track, low-paying, and somewhere remote). And we were competing not just with other new PhDs for those jobs, but junior professors with a few years under their belts from other institutions looking to make a move. 

I remember talking to one of my colleagues, one of the few who'd actually been offered a tenure-track job somewhere, and he mentioned that he'd be making $26,000 to start. This was 2007. My first shit-job out of college paid $24,000, and that was in 2000. None of us were doing this for money, clearly, but I calculated that I could waitress full-time for $40,000 a year. The numbers just didn't add up.

About five years into my program, I decided I had to move on. At that point I was already over 60% to a PhD, so I figured I'd just finish it.

Three years later, I did.

Post-PhD, I moved to New York City and did what so many do when they move here: start over. To make ends meet, I took a job teaching writing at the College of Staten Island (in hindsight I wish I'd known how far Staten Island is from everything...), did some unpaid freelance writing, and dreamt of a future where I might have health insurance. I started pumping out content for my blog in earnest, and had this bold plan where I would become a writer for io9 or go work for the Syfy channel (home of my favorite series at the time, Battlestar Galactica). 

My second week living in NYC, I went to an io9 meetup at The Magician on the LES and did that embarrassing thing where you approach someone you follow on the internet (in this case Editor-in-Chief Annalee Newitz) and showed her my blog on my phone. I walked home over the Williamsburg Bridge that night on cloud nine, thinking to myself, holy shit, what if this vague dream I have of writing about science fiction for the internet could actually become real?

The very next day I emailed Annalee with a few story pitches, and never heard back from her. 

Cut to one glorious sunny fall day in 2009. I'm walking through Soho for maybe the second time in my life, marveling at what appears to be lost supermodels ambling about in high heels, and loving the old iron-faced buildings and cobblestone roads. 

I pass by one of a million cute buildings and see that it's a Le Pain Quotidien, a chain of restaurants that resemble the classy version of Panera. Replace You-Pick-Two with overpriced tartines, and underneath they're pretty much the same thing. 

In the window is a little paper sign indicating that they're hiring servers. I could work there, I think. In fact, I liked waiting tables, and kind of missed it. Compared to all this writing for free and teaching for close to nothing, the thought of making a good hourly wage was titillating. I could earn that $40,000 a year and still write and do all the other things I wanted to do. 

My career at Le Pain Quotidien never got started, because while browsing Tumblr in the middle of the night I saw a Kickstarter project for the first time (a project to make mail-order fig bars), immediately went to their jobs page to see if there was anything I could pretend to be qualified for ("community"), and applied. 

I didn't need a PhD to work at Kickstarter, just like I wouldn't have needed a PhD to wait tables (though it adds color to both). In truth, nobody needs a PhD. Ok technically you need one to be a college professor, but it is not an indicator of whether you will be a good college professor. Only that you have a certain level of stick-to-it-ness. 

It's been four years since I finished and defended my dissertation, and I am still uncertain what it means to be a Doctor. At various moments I'll think, "Toiling at something I didn't even really want for eight years builds character!" or "I'm a better writer!" or "I know some things about dead people!" I even kind of enjoy the Doctor Au jokes. (A good pun lasts forever). 

Mostly I look back and recognize that the PhD for me was like any person in their 20s trying to figure out what the hell they're supposed to be doing. I still am not sure what I want to be when I grow up, but I do know that when future cryogenically-frozen me virtually gazes upon the field of wheat, I can remember that at the very least I was a goddamn Doctor. 

#writing #phds

[ensignau]

Party Bus

starfleet: we're glad you're home

starfleet: we've been reviewing your records

janeway: k when is my promotion

starfleet: what makes you think you're getting a promotion

janeway: my future self told me all about it when she broke the temporal prime directive and brought me stolen future technology

starfleet: yeah so in that vein there are some things we need to discuss

janeway: if there's a problem with the paperwork blame chakotay

janeway: i don't do forms i do holographic irish bartenders and former borg drones

starfleet:

doctor: i can assure you that while in the delta quadrant we conducted ourselves with grace and dignity according to the highest principles of starfleet

b'elanna: yeah step off our balls you weren't there you don't know

tom: yeah you weren't there that time we stole a keg of omega molecules from some douchebag aliens who were going to blow up the quadrant

harry: or that time we played space nascar and ended up in the center of a terrorist plot

tom: or that time we were all super horny and built a fake irish city so that we could get drunk and laid

harry: or when we tied that guy to a chair and waited for the aliens to eat him because he wouldn't tell us what we wanted to know

tom: oh shit remember that time i got 30 days for ignoring the wishes of some foreign government and destroying their mining operation

harry: that was almost as crazy as the time you restored that old shuttle but then it fell in love with you and tried to kill b'elanna

b'elanna: speaking of which remember when that bomb i made for the maquis came back and tried to kill us

chakotay: that reminds me of when seska stole my dna and tried to impregnate herself with my child

tom: nothing will ever compare to the time me and the captain had kids and left them on that planet

janeway: we were young and innocent then

tom: how many lizard years to a human year i feel like i should send a birthday card

janeway: like 6

tom: you don't even know you're just saying that

janeway: you should talk you're such an absent father

tom: oh no you didn't

janeway: i didn't even want kids

starfleet:

starfleet: is there a reason you stenciled PARTY BUS on the side of voyager

tom:

harry:

b'elanna:

doctor:

janeway: is there a reason i shouldn't have

#star trek

[ensignau]

One person recognized our co-op Spelunky costume last night!

Happy Halloween!

#halloween #spelunky