I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true

Some of those animated gifs I've run across today:

You wanna say...

This is a move called...

I got it from...

A quick reminder that my main blog is hosted elsewhere; I have posted recently about books I read, what systems administrators do, watching Roots, a bunch of organizations that are hiring, my entry into calling myself a software developer, and more.

I dent and tweet but do not tumbl, book faces, pin, plus, buzz, and probably other things I have forgotten.

A vid for "Whip It".

....Out of the sky comes the Constellation: a swarm of anarchist anthropologists, exploring our seas, cataloguing our plants, editing our wikis and eating our Twinkies. No one knows how to respond--except for nerds like Ariel who've been reading, role-playing and wargaming first-contact scenarios their entire lives. Ariel sees the aliens' computers, and he knows that wherever there are computers, there are video games.

Ariel just wants to start a business translating alien games so they can be played on human computers. But a simple cultural exchange turns up ancient secrets, government conspiracies, and unconventional anthropology techniques that threaten humanity as we know it. If Ariel wants his species to have a future, he's going to have to take the step that nothing on Earth could make him take.

He'll have to grow up.

Constellation Games is a novel by my spouse, Leonard Richardson, "about space aliens and video games and love and computer programming." You can read the first two chapters for free. It's available for purchase as a serial -- for USD$5, total, you'll get access to the 28 chapters posted so far, then a chapter in your email every week till it finishes in August, and then an all-in-one ebook at the end. If you pay a little more, you'll get a print paperback right now, bonus stories and a phrasebook in August, and so on. And for free, anyone can read the author's commentary, Twitter feed, &c.

This is a great book. There are chapter titles like "Their First Contact Was Better." There are instant messenger conversations and blog entries like:

ABlum: who can i thank for translating this?

________________________


Curic: I will send you an achievement graph.

________________________


ABlum: no your achievement graphs have 10 million nodes
i don't want to thank the whole damn constellation
just tell me the name of one person who i can buy a beer

________________________


Curic: If you looked at the graph you would see a distinctive bottleneck: the Small Batch Data Cleanup Overlay, who translated between old versions of SAME and various human languages at the request of the History of Life Overlay.

________________________


ABlum: ok who is in charge of the data cleanup overlay?

________________________


Curic: That's not a real question.

ANYHOW, I offer big thanks to a randomly selected member of the Small Batch Data Cleanup Overlay. That'd be Jeroen Vivekananda of Peregrini Ring, Ring City. I would buy you a beer, Jeroen, but your body heat would vaporize the beer before you could swallow it. So, instead, accept this mention on my blog.

Other people are comparing it to Douglas Adams, Kelly Link, Neal Stephenson, and Douglas Coupland. You should try it out. I encourage you to read those sample chapters and I hope you'll decide to subscribe.

I want to buy a smartphone. Help me decide.

I care about:

• Freedom (I want root on my phone without having to jailbreak it)
  
• Hardware quality
  
• Operating system quality (random crashiness is not acceptable)
  
• Operating system longevity & upgradability (Maemo and Meego went away pretty fast, and I don't want to buy a device that will never see another OS upgrade)
  

I'd rather have a physical keyboard, either in addition to or instead of a touchscreen, but I can stand not having one. And I have basically no hope that I could get a device made under fair labor practices and with any attentiveness to the environmental impacts of its manufacture, but am willing to be surprised.

I really do not care how many apps are available for a phone -- I'll be fine if it browses the web, makes and received phone calls, and it would be lovely if it takes mediocre photos and plays music. And it can be big and heavy and ugly and I don't mind as long as the hardware is robust.

I am planning on buying a device, that is, buying an unlocked one separately from getting a data/voice plan from a carrier (see again: my interest in freedom). I acknowledge that I am being picky here so I'm fine with spending commensurately. And I live in the US but am willing to purchase devices from abroad. For example, if multiple people have tried the Geeksphone Zero and can recommend it, I'm willing to pony up.

Recommendations?

(Crosspost from Ask MetaFilter.)

I disagree with this post about the dangers of Wikimedia/Wikipedia, but am glad I read it, if only to remind myself that yes, I can stand reading unfair attacks on my organization and on me.[0]

"So in what follows I describe Wikipedia as a problematic monopoly. I don't ignore its positive sides, but they don't play any role in this text."

Then there's really no point in critiquing it, is there? The point of such a rant is not to be fair or to point a way forward, but to present a bunch of assertions without having to back them up.

I'll argue about this if people want to hear my thoughts on some particular point.

[0] I say "and on me" in that the author argues that, since unpaid volunteers make Wikimedia's content and maintain its community processes, it is wrong to pay Foundation and Chapter workers: it is "the payment to some 100 people that makes the unpaid work of every other contributor so shameful [sic] abusive".

As I mentioned at my main blog: I'm in San Francisco next week, Portland, Oregon the week after.  Perhaps we could say hello!

Blogged about history of technology & WikiLeaks the other day.

The request: if you have a smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device, will you test our new Wikipedia mobile gateway on it?  Thanks.

I will be at WisCon!  I'm a short woman, US accent, Indian descent.  I'm loud, I wear glasses, I have short black hair.  My userpics are close enough that you could probably recognize me from them.

I respond to variants on "Sumana" and am not terribly bothered by variant mispronunciations.  I prefer handshakes to hugs usually; if we've never met before, I probably don't want to hug you, and ask first.

Please invite me to things, tell me about room parties, etc.  I'll try to keep on top of my personal email at sumanah [at] panix [dot!] com, and Twitter & Identi.ca, where I am @brainwane.  I blog a lot at Cogito, Ergo Sumana.

I'm on a few panels:

1. Imaginary Book Club, Saturday morning at 10am
2. Sciency Fiction, Sunday morning at 10am
3. I Don't Know Why I'm On This Panel, Sunday afternoon at 4pm

Every single one of those I share with Ellen Klages, which is odd.

Questions?

Me: How's your day going?

Coworking guy: Pretty good, and you?

Me: It's getting better!  I'm seeing you, aren't I?

CG: (big smile & giggle) Flattery will get you EVERYWHERE!  That's what's missing from my life, more consistent flattery.

Me: Careful what you wish for: the consistency might increase, but the texture might not be what you'd like.

CG: Wow, that was well-put-together.  I'm gonna take that to my desk to think about.