Protagonist at Large

I'm Kaia Dekker: Tuck grad, data junkie, frequent flier, erstwhile physicist, and media/tech geek. I think a lot about how to make great products and bring them to market.

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Nóirín, go lonraí solas suthain orthu

Nóirín at times had more charisma than anyone.

Read the post on Medium

(For what it’s worth, I’d be quite OK with waiting decades before I next have to eulogize a friend.  Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated.)

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On Typing

Some time ago, I stepped away from corporate life to work on designing better computer keyboards with my husband. People ask “Why keyboards?”, and I tell them: the best keyboards out there weren’t all that good, so we set out to make the product we wished we could buy (and eventually, we did). This is true but hardly sufficient. This is my attempt at explaining the parts of “why” that don’t fit into a soundbite.

(Read the post on Medium)

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Some thoughts on the 2015 Mystery Hunt (part 1 of ?)

I’ve spent the last year as one of a hundred or so people actively involved in writing the 2015 MIT Mystery Hunt: 20,000 Puzzles Under the Sea.  For the uninitiated, Mystery Hunt is the crown jewel of the annual puzzle calendar: 100+ interlocking puzzles of every type, presented without instruction. It’s a multi-day, all-hours interactive art event.  It's what happens if you take a scavenger hunt and stuff it full of logic puzzles, and put the result on steroids.  It’s a particularly delicious incremental game.  It’s by turns intensely competitive and utterly ridiculous.  And it’s rollicking good fun. 

The tradition is that each year, the winning team gets stuck writing the whole thing for the next year.  The last few years I’ve been fortunate enough to hunt with the Random Hall (& friends) team, also known as One Fish Two Fish Random Fish Blue Fish.  Writing has been a blast – playfulness, hard work, and tears can forge new friendships and strengthen old ones like nothing else.   And at the end of the day, we kicked ass.  I’m really proud of what we’ve done, even as I’m full of thoughts about how it could be done even better next time. 

I don’t know this year’s winning team, Luck, very well, but based on my interactions with them and based on their 2010 Hunt, they are a class act with a puzzle aesthetic I quite approve of. While I’m sad to pass the torch (well, half-sad and half-gleeful) I am looking forward to getting to solve again.

I have rather a lot to say about the Hunt.  After all, my life in the past year has largely consisted of working on my startup and working on hunt, and while people get tired of hearing me talk about the former I haven’t even been allowed to talk about the latter.  Until now.

I wrote a fair number of puzzles that made it into Hunt this year.  Roughly from easiest to most tricky:

Three’s the Charm

This is what happens when Lanthe asks you to write a puzzle to a specific answer given another puzzle failed in testsolving.  Good coffee-break puzzle: simple conceit and not too taxing.

Spittle Loon

One of my favorites amongst those I've written.  I wrote it in two sittings and it sailed through testsolving with no revisions.  My subconscious really wanted me to write this. 

A Toast

The point of this puzzle was to make a certain demographic of solvers giddily happy, and in that goal it succeeded.  Teams who didn’t get the “aha” until extraction didn’t like it so well; I’m fine with that.

Wordsearches are a Piece of Cake

Initially, the “piece” of cake did not have the 8x8 grid on it.  I burnt through so many testsolvers and so many different titles trying to get one of them to make the aha that there were 64 letters left after the first step, and that 64 is a square number.  Nobody got it, so the editors made me make it easier.  In its final form, it was almost certainly the easiest “regular” puzzle in the 2015 Mystery Hunt.  This did mean it got the most solves of any regular puzzle (52, tied with Dr. Nautilus’s Duplicated Quest, a much trickier but more engaging puzzle).  It was actually one of the more time-consuming puzzles to write as I kept having to redraft it as red herrings were discovered.  (Did you know "tree cake" is a thing? Now I do.)

The Acerbic Sixteen

One of two 16-player tournament grids in the Hunt, neither one of which was really a sports puzzle. The closest we got was a horse racing puzzle (oddly enough, I’d written a horse racing puzzle too, but it didn’t make it into hunt.  What is it about ponies?).  I threw in some baseball trivia in the event I wrote in partial recompense for the utter lack of mainstream sports.

FJF,S

This was originally supposed to be a full-sized puzzle with some additional tricks to it, but in its first testsolve Charles solved it in 10 minutes.  Actually, originally it was supposed to get the answer word that was later assigned to the 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid.  Think how much easier that round would have been!  Anyway, 10 minutes was far too short, so rather than adding in a tedious work step we simplified it a little bit and threw it in the fish round.

Nope!

Halftime came up with the concept, Yi-Hsin wrote the cluephrase, and I did the drawings.  I don’t know that I can say more without spoilers?  It was really fun to write.

Knit Square

You could say that I wrote this puzzle out of a dadaist impulse, as a tangible metaphor of the tremendous  effort (10,000 or so hours) that goes into creating an event that lasts for less than 72 hours.  Or you could say I just like to troll people.  Regardless, creating physical puzzles is quite fun.

Jack and Jill or Janet

The first puzzle I wrote for this Hunt, and one of my favorites.  It’s clean and requires just the right amount of cleverness from solvers.  It’s mostly standard wordplay so I doubt it’s my most memorable – but I still think you should solve it.

A Case of the Monday Crosswords

John had the initial idea, but he was an editor and had many things going on, so I adopted it.  It only rated mediocre fun in testsolving, so I was uneasy about it making it into hunt.  However, survey feedback from Hunt itself was quite high – maybe crossword fans self-assorted into solving it, which wasn’t possible with our deathmarch of testsolving in December and January?

Smiling Vessel

One of my absolute favorites in concept.  The germ of the idea was a discarded meta, and the idea grew into its final form during one of the weekly brainstorming lunches at Dropbox HQ.  The “aha” is definitely on the harder side, which combined with the intrinsic trickiness of cryptics makes is one of the least accessible of my puzzles. It is the puzzle where I got to be minimally competent at cryptics – it turns out the trick is to write lots of terrible ones and have people tell you how they’re bad! Not too different from learning how to code or how to do much of anything else, really.

Welcome to Dead Waters

I am terrible at solving straight cryptograms, much less ones with a twist.  So writing one was a bit scary for me.  However, I understand the rough principles at work when you write a cryptogram: do a Shannon calculation and multiply by at least two, make especially sure critical letters appear multiple times, follow (or introduce) conventions to provide an entry point for the solver, and make sure that solvers can tell they’re on the right track.  The puzzle itself ended up quite challenging even with no challenging "ahas" required.

Event / “You Had to Be There” Puzzles

Constraint Chef

It’s tradition for every Mystery Hunt to have at least one “make us food” puzzle.  This year a bunch of us wrote one that was loosely based around cooking constraints you might have at sea.  And of course, bad puns based thereupon: “sea cucumber” was worth three points, but “regular cucumber” was worth one. We expected that we’d end up eating a lot of blue hardtack, but in general stuff teams put together was actually pretty tasty.   

Blub Blub Trivia (no link yet)

The Friday night event puzzle.  In my head, it’s called “you can take the girl out of Dartmouth, but you can’t take the Dartmouth out of the girl.”  The conceit was pirate chessboxing: pirate-y pub trivia questions that gave you a handicap for a subsequent game of (water) pong.  Testsolvers loved the trivia and thought the pong was too tacked-on.  In practice, the pong and the easy trivia rounds were the best part and I wish we’d cut the hard stuff altogether.  The reason for the harder trivia was that the event puzzle yielded an answer word, and we wanted the answer word to be extractable from the trivia answer sheet.  This was a stupid constraint – why not give teams the answer just for showing up and participating?  When testsolving the extraction, one of the comments was “the only skill you needed was having ever solved a Mystery Hunt puzzle before”, which I took as a sign to just ship it as a trivial solve.  If I’d been more on the ball, I would have remembered that event puzzles are the things that every team should be able to solve, especially those who haven’t solved a Mystery Hunt puzzle before.  Perhaps the best course of action would have been to give an extraction key to solvers as part of the answer sheet – the mechanics of extraction (look at first letters, index into answer words, index into the alphabet) are very standard puzzle conventions and I missed an opportunity to teach them.  Still, the number of people who came up to me in awe at seeing so many nerds play pong at once made the whole thing worth it.

Perception 

One of five endgame challenges, this involved identifying puzzle titles based on “snippets” of either the puzzle page or an intermediate solving step.  This challenge was designed specifically to reward forward solves and to encourage participation by newer solvers, who unlike the veterans may well have stared at a puzzle long enough to let it burn into their brains.  I was nervous about getting the difficulty of this right as it was impossible to test, but I think I did OK. Death and Mayhem, the first team to get it, solved it in about 20 minutes while later teams took about an hour.  This actually matches pretty well with my understanding of how much forward (vs back) solving the various teams did.  A++ would include in a runaround again, though in a shortened/faster version. 

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CupcakeJesusPhone

Metaphors are powerful things. They are mental shortcuts.  Metaphors literally change how you think.

That’s why I bought myself a tangible metaphor:

 For those keeping track at home, this iPhone case contains:

faux icing everywhere

a Hello Kitty bow

a blinged-out cross

Disney

roses

a cupcake

rhinestones

I imagine the design thought process went something like this: “Baked goods on a phone case? Sweet! Oh, and florals are in this year: let’s do roses. Focus groups show people who like roses also like Disney.  And who doesn't like Jesus?”  

(I know this design process, because I fight it every day.)

I am working on building a product that I love. I want to shoehorn it full of wonderfulness. Every time I cut a feature, my gut twinges.  Yet I cut features all the same, because CupcakeJesusPhone.

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Aaron, may his memory be a blessing

We weren't close.  We were never close.   Even at the beginning, he was political and an idealist and I fell short. I was too corporate, too willing to pour my soul into the willing hands of a professional services firm that didn't stand for anything.  At the end I rarely saw him. Our friendship had been in many ways an artifact of his living in Cambridge (and by then he lived in Brooklyn) and my friendship with his lover (and by then he loved someone new, whom I never met).

I miss him even so.

**

Aaron thought deeply and seriously, to an extent that could be off-putting.  He was more brilliant than I was, and he labored with his thoughts more than most people. He was so unassuming about his brilliance, but it shone through everything he did.  The first time we met we talked about transhumanism, a familiar college bull session topic in my crowd.  I was taken aback by both the swiftness of the connections he made and the vehemence of his disagreement with my sloppily-made points. Later I realized he was like that with everyone. He had little regard for status differentials, credentials, or mealy-mouthing.  He assumed everyone was a peer, a fellow-traveler in search of the truth.

He was infuriating, impossible to like sometimes, but easy to love.  He would disappear at social events to dive into a book and re-emerge only with coaxing, or not even then. It was OK.  We all somehow understood that the rules were different for him.  When he emerged he was most often playful.  He loved to tease people, but never meanly.  He would smile so big and bright and guilelessly that you wanted to give him everything, everything, everything.

I can remember how he smiled, and I can remember his voice.  I can remember how he grasped himself as he stood, as if not quite sure what to do with his gangly arms.

I have forgotten the scent of him.

Aaron was famous and I am not.  His relationship with fame was uneasy. When I met him in the early fall of 2006 he was proud of building Reddit, but mainly for the story of sleeping in the cupboard in the apartment he shared with the founders.  A month or two later Conde Nast bought his startup, and he stopped talking about Reddit unprompted.

I was self-conscious claiming relation to an internet superstar.  That didn't stop me from name-dropping him with shy pride.  After he moved to New York he left some stuff in my house for safekeeping, including an office chair and some fancy quadcopters.  The quadcopters stayed in our trunk for a long time, and more than once after he was arrested I got laughs with the line: “Better not get pulled over - I have Aaron Swartz’s UAVs in my car.”  (This was before everyone called them drones.  A whole internet era ago.)

By the time of the grand jury things were darker.  He stayed with Quinn in a spare room at our house for a while, scared to be in his own apartment.  We had visions of midnight raids, of faceless men with guns demanding our computers. Work had relocated me to Melbourne, so updates came after I had gone to sleep.  The strangeness of the situation, combined with the time difference, made it feel dreamlike.  I didn’t know what to do from half a world away, but I could sense dread growing within him like blooms of ink in water.

To me on the fringes, a narrative I didn’t understand was barreling forward.  I knew he would be acquitted in the end, though I worried it would take an appeal or two.  The law was wrong and he was the golden boy – how could it be otherwise?  The bewildering weight of the months and years of not knowing, of motion after countermotion, never fell on me.

**

There’s still a dent in my car from where Aaron and his girlfriend drove it into a tree on Larry Lessig’s lawn.  I’m probably not getting that fixed.

The knife block in my kitchen is missing a blade.  Aaron had thrown it out with a (plain) pizza box. I’m probably not getting that fixed, either.

He wrote me an email once, after the indictment, asking if his lawyers could live in our house. I talked it over with my husband, and we felt awkward about it – strangers in our house, for months? We didn't reply to that email, and he never asked again. 

That, I know will never be fixed.

**

He had a filthy mind. I had a CD by Bobby Lounge, full of dark jokes around sex and sin crooned in a New Orleans baritone, and Aaron loved it.  I still haven’t removed his number from my phone. The twinned A’s of “Aaron” keeps it at the top of my address book, so I sometimes find that my phone has called his by accident.  I smile at the off-color ribbing I am sure to get for “butt dialing” him, and then I remember.

I don’t know who has his number now. For all I know, his line is still being paid by some bank account of his in escrow. I picture his phone sealed in a Ziploc in an evidence bin somewhere, and I want to cry.

I had loved the name, Aaron, and hoped that one day I might give a son that name, even if it made things with Aaron Swartz awkward.  No more.

**

He wasn't great at self-care.  We had to push him into eating vegetables, eating anything, buying shoes. When he was in a black mood he didn't want to leave his room, and when he was in a good mood he didn't want to waste precious time on frivolity. There was a whole world to shape and explore.

His politics changed over the years, but he always had terrible haircuts.

**

I still see Aaron around Cambridge.  Every time I see a skinny boy with a shock of black hair walking while reading a book, I think it is him.  Going to MIT is worst of all.  I don’t see his body out of the corner of my eye so much as I see his face on everyone.  Everywhere there are students wearing that look of curiosity and insouciance.

When I was a student there, MIT celebrated the transgression of stupid boundaries. We would labor for weeks to construct bits of art. Then we would smuggle ladders and break through “DO NOT ENTER” doors, and put the art in funny places. The administration winked at these and called them “hacks”. Admissions plastered hack photos in their mailers, using them to encourage families to entrust their children to the Institute.

Using free WiFi, spoofing a MAC address – these things are not even illegal, and they feel so trivial. The administration called them hacks, too, but they meant something different.

I used to volunteer to take groups of freshmen through MIT’s secret places.  We would huddle together atop the pyramids overlooking Killian Court and the Charles River.  My breath white against the cool summer air, I would tell them old stories.  This is what it is to belong here, the stories said. One of my favorites told of a luckless student who got caught with a prank device. The campus police found the batteries he was carrying suspicious.  An MIT dean came to the rescue with batteries in his coat pocket: “All tech men carry batteries”, he said. We will be here for you, the story said.

I don’t tell that story any more.

**

Aaron never told me why he downloaded the JSTOR files, but I can guess. He did it because he could. Because taken together the files held data that could expose corruption. Because whether he released it or not, having so much public information locked away by a for-profit company was wrong.

He never told me why he did it because he was scared.  If he talked to us, what he said was discoverable.  It was better to be lonely and let his thoughts and his fear putrefy inside of him.

This was the same boy who had shared with impish glee the tales of his adventures on the web.  The same boy who had FOIA'd his FBI file after the PACER incident, and who had posted it on his blog. The FBI couldn't even figure out where I lived, he said, and we laughed about it.  They were stodgy and old and foolish, and he was the trickster always one step ahead. 

He loved democracy. He was passionate about democracy.  He despised the apparatus our democracy had grown.  Sometimes he seemed bewildered that other people did not fight the way that he did.  For Aaron the golden boy, even the lumbering machine of power would yield. He worked against SOPA and PIPA, and he won.

He fought them because they were wrong, but also because he hated what they were doing.  He hated corruption.  He hated sexism and racism.  He hated bullies.

He was not the same boy, in the end though. The bullies finally got him.

**

He loved Ada.  He loved her fiercely, like a brother.  He got into tickle fights with her and taught her the difference between “computer pirates” and “boat pirates”.  He loved her even after his relationship with her mother fell to tatters.  The last time I spoke to him was in December.  He wanted to know if he could use our house as base camp for taking Taren and Ada vacationing in the New England winter.  I was holidaying abroad, so I didn't see him then.  I don’t remember the last time I saw him.

It was Ada I thought of, first, when I woke up to that terrible news on Twitter.  I sobbed and punched my pillow, and immediately after “How could you do this?” my cry was “How could you do this to her?”

**

He is a martyr. I railed against this, once. Against his name turning into a hashtag. Against the relentless grinding of human grist in the internet’s mill, turning human meat into stories and symbols and causes.  Now I know that it was inevitable.  He is a martyr.

But once, he was a person.  

[protagonistforhire]

Nativity pentominoes

Remember pentominoes?  They’re the simple geometric figures made up of five squares , sort of like Tetris pieces on steroids.  You arrange them to form classic shapes or fun designs. 

While I was flipping through the work of the amazing Japanese jigsaw artist Saburo Oguro I realized I could fit a Nativity scene pretty nicely into a pentomino set.  I’ve always been drawn to religious art, not out of any particularly pious impulse, but because it’s the visual vocabulary for Western art.  You could almost say that it’s the jazz standard of images.

It wasn’t too tricky:

I designed the pieces in Inkscape.  It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get used to it, Inkscape is remarkably slick!

I used birch plywood leftover from Keyboard.IO prototyping

Jesse laser-cut them for me at the local storefront laser-cutting shop (I have to say that again. Local storefront laser-cutting shop. Isn’t living in the future amazing?)  wanted to print them on our 3D printer, but it caught on fire and hadn’t come back from repairs.

I sanded, stained, and sealed them by hand in our 1950s vintage basement workshop.

I’ve put a few sets up on Etsy.

If you’d rather laser-cut them yourself (or print a paper version), you can grab the design from Google Drive.

Merry Christmas!

[protagonistforhire]

Verso

When you learn a language they warn you about cognates. They call them false friends, and teach you not to order soap at the dinner table.

What they don't tell you is that the new words are knotted up in tight little families all their own, cleaving in friendships of new flavors.

In Spanish, for instance, llorar, to cry, and llover, to rain, are just a stroke or two different —       siblings — as though the sky itself is not immune to weeping, or as though our sorrows (pesar) that weigh on us (pesar, again) are of meteorological significance;

or, how the still breath of waiting — esperar — is mother to hope, which tumbles forth from it: esperanza;

or, how the word that means 'I wait and see' — espero is so very close to the word for mirror in which I see myself reflected: espejo.

The bright and dubious nature of friends like these are why I don't look to etymologies.

Sometimes, I prefer to stay closed up to let the imagined connections hold together safe from breezes, like a cobweb in a Wunderkammer.

Machinaria and illusions are beautiful too. Why else would you guide your tongue away from asking those questions? It's why you have measured yourself by the clicks of a thousand fingers. It's why you manage your presentation with all the care of a groom currycombing a horse (peinarse, the act of combing, is a false friend.)

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Groddle theme music

Once upon a time, there was a lovely and preposterous little world called Ur, dreamed alive by giants and the players of this MMO Glitch.  

For those who loved it, Glitch was special in part because of the care that went into crafting a coherent yet diverse immersive world.  For example, you'd hear a particular melody played on banjo in the zone with sunshine and flowers, and then the same slowed down Inception-style on strings and creepy plinky piano on a home street with a dark forest theme.

"Groddle", aka "that fucking banjo music", was the melody heard most often, but strangely enough I couldn't find sheet music or tabs of it online.  So here's my attempt at transcribing it.  I've put the tabs in ukulele C-tuning format (GCEA), since that's what I play most of the time.  The Groddle music works really well with clawhammer-style if that's your thing. 

C G F G

0-0-3-----0----------- ------3-3---1-1---1-3- ----------------2----- ----------------------

C G F G

0-0-3-----0------- ------3-3---1---3- --------------2--- ------------------

Dm Am F G7 --------------------0--- 3-3-1-3-3-1-3-3-1-3----- ------------------------ ------------------------

C F G ------------ 1-1---1----- ----2---2-0- ------------

There’s also a secondary little riff that goes like this: 0-3-----------0-----0-3-------0------- ----3-3-1-3-1-----------3-3-1---1----- ----------------------------------0--- --------------------------------------

(Piggy gif is owned by Tiny Speck, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

[protagonistforhire]

On XOXO and diversity, or, I swear this is not (just) a listicle

I had the privilege of attending XOXO, a young indie arts and tech conference, earlier this month. There’s an awful lot I have to say about the event, but half of it has already been said better by others and half is still ruminating deep within me. This post isn't my last word, just the word I could write at this point.

Looking around the room or at the stage at XOXO, it was clear that there were disproportionately few women and disproportionately few people of color*. (In other words, my inner snark says, it was a tech conference.)

I want to give Andy Baio and Andy McMillan (hence: the Andys) credit where credit is due. XOXO was miles more diverse on both race and gender than almost any other technology or business conference I have been to. Just as importantly, the conference put on stage people who talked about race, gender, and class. Molly Crabapple, Christina Xu, Mike Rugnetta, and Jay Smooth each dedicated significant time to the topic. And these speakers didn’t pander: they spoke unsettling truths and asked uncomfortable questions.

I also give the Andys credit for curating a literally awesome selection of people, onstage and off. Every single person I spoke to was thoughtful, excited, and creative, and my biggest regret was not breaking off from my usual social set more to meet more of these wonderful new people. XOXO is clearly made up of things and people that the Andys love. The unity of vision is part of what keeps XOXO from being just-another-tech-conference, and that voice is part of what makes it so joyful to attend. As Andy Baio put it last year:

Curation is the most important factor of a great event. A clear editorial voice, a coherent theme, and who you invite to participate changes everything that comes after it — good curation brings great attendees, generates word-of-mouth, great press, and opens all kinds of doors.

I also give Andy Baio credit for admitting on stage that XOXO isn’t representative along race, gender, or class lines and that some of that lack of diversity is because XOXO represents his taste and his experiences – which as an indie-minded tech guy, are disproportionately white and male. I can empathize: like most of the audience, I laughed in self-recognition when Marco Arment flashed the indie/tech-y/"stuff white people like" stereotypes slide, and despite my self-assured cosmopolitanism, I often discover that I've been living in social or media echo chambers.

How do you manage the tension between wanting a particular viewpoint and aesthetic and wanting to avoid having a room of people who look like you? I think it’s a deep question that deserves more than a facile answer. Luckily for this blog post, I think XOXO can do a lot just in reaching out more to the people in other communities who already fit its viewpoint.

Here’s my wishlist of eleven men of color and women that I would love to see at XOXO next year, or really, see at any tech/arts/maker conference I go to. To narrow the field a little bit, I’m limiting this to people who weren't at XOXO in 2012 or 2013 and who came readily to mind (i.e., no targeted searches). Some of these people are friends or former colleagues; some are famous. All are personal heroes of mine in some way. All are people who fall pretty squarely within my XOXO-compatible tastes, and people whose projects are worth knowing about and following. In other words, this isn't tokenism.

Asheesh Laroia is a coder and co-founder of Open Hatch, an organization that helps people learn to create and contribute to open source and collaborative software projects.

Eleanor Saitta is one of the best voices to follow if you follow security; she speaks powerfully about the connection between technology and the social fabric. Her talents range from writing protocols to painting artwork to building space robots to hacking the Icelandic constitution to founding a makerspace.

Issa Rae is a smart and wickedly funny entertainer who leans into her vulnerabilities. After years distributing her work on the internet via a hit indie YouTube series, she’s recently gotten to see how the Big Content half lives, working on projects with Shonda Rhimes and HBO.

Kate Beaton has always had a touch of Old School about her, and I don’t just mean the history themes that frequently pop up on Hark! A Vagrant. Her first webcomics were created in MS Paint while at her day job, based in part on requests from her Livejournal followers.

Kenyatta Cheese is a self-described "professional internet enthusiast" who revels in, shares, and critiques web culture. My own love affair with web culture is a bit off-and-on, so his Know Your Meme project (know owned by Cheezburger Network and I can’t believe I have to type that as a company name) has saved me loads of times.

Limor Fried’s intro electronics hacking projects and kits were a gateway drug for many a maker, and her company Adafruit is one of the preeminent sources for hardware hackers today.

Liz Henry is a technologist (Mozilla, BlogHer), maker (founder of legendary hackerspace Noisebridge’s Anarchafeminist Hackerhive), and a poet, because some people get all the talent.

Quinn Norton would bring a dose of the acerb to temper the cloying others complained of at XOXO. She writes hard, meticulous technology journalism that is raw and true. She’ll pull your heart out and change your worldview by the time her words are done with you. Incidentally, her blog post on counting was what inspired me to write this list of people up, rather than keeping it to myself.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an autodidact of the best sort and my favorite American public intellectual. He writes as deeply about football, Warcraft, hip-hop, and superhero comics as he does about politics, literature, race, history, and sociology – and I have a feeling he would chide me for implying there was real separation between those camps. His career took off through his blogging and he still uses his blog as an ongoing conversation of ideas.

Tan Le is the founder of Emotiv. Their consumer-targeted EEG headset was the second-most funded project in the design category on Kickstarter, ever. As a human-computer interfaces geek, I am cautious but excited to see what developers will build that can use the Emotiv’s output.

Thao Nguyen. I wish I were a music critic, because I’m not really sure how to make slightly breathy singing and danceable electric banjo/guitar beats sound like something more than "quirky folk pop-rock". I guess it is that, but her music has depth and resonance too: injustice, ambiguous choices, sadness and longing.

To make a living doing what you love independently on the internet, you need to take risks and to have a cushion. This fact of our society disproportionately favors the privileged, the wealthy, the native-born, the able-bodied, and the "unmarked" – the straight, white, unaccented-English-speaking male. At XOXO, I would guess most attendees would decry this fact. Yet we reproduce this pattern in the societies we make, like samizdat presses mindlessly reprinting the party doctrine.

I had been looking forward to having my first real conversation with one of the people on the above list and had thought they would be at XOXO. When I asked a mutual friend if the person was coming, I was told they hadn't received sufficient assurances that the venue would be accessible to their wheelchair, and so they didn't try to come. (Can an XOXO patron specifically try to cover accessibility access next year? Could we all forgo that last drink at one of the many open bar events if it meant the elevators had an attendant to make them accessible to wheelchair users?)

At least one of the other people on this list would not have been able to come up with the $500 or even $300 for a ticket. They’re making a living following their calling on the web, but in the US, that "living" doesn't include niceties like health insurance, never mind plane fare, hotel, and conference tickets. (This year, No Show Conf let people buy "sponsor someone!" tickets that were redistributed to not-rich awesome people. I want XOXO to do this. If they do, I promise to sponsor at least one attendee next year, whether or not I get to attend myself.)

And I’m sure there are loads of people I haven’t listed who didn’t come because they aren't ensconced in the indie/tech echo chamber. This is a harder problem, the knotty identity-policing problem I waved off earlier. Why do I cringe at the hypothetical idea of a Mommy Blogger on stage at XOXO – isn’t she an "independent creator using the Internet to do what [she] love[s]"? I idly wondered to a friend at the conference what would happen if the fanfic authors from WisCon and of XOXO were to be thrown together in a room, and he predicted angry words and scuffles. There are communities out there with similar values to ours that we don’t know how to talk to because their aesthetic is different. How do we build a broader community where we can learn from each other?

* On Day One of the conference someone (a white dude) tweeted: "By my count, half of the #xoxofest speakers are women." Actually, it was 6 out of 22, or 27%, not counting Andy Baio (organizer), Andy McMillan (organizer), or Glenn Fleishman (panel moderator). The studies I've heard of peg most men as perceiving equal gender representation at only 17% though, so I guess this guy was ahead of the curve?

[protagonistforhire]

XOXO makes a book

Kickstarter came to XOXO and together we made a book! For my page, I threw together a Mystery-hunt style puzzle, and with luck I made the cluing overt enough that everyone at the event could solve it.

As I was putting it together, I realized I managed to cram an impressive number of my favorite things in one image:

Crypto (bad crypto, security is hard!)

Drawing things while listening to presentations

Cephalopods, plural

Ocean stuff in general

Dinosaurs (OK, not technically, but a related sauropsid)

Fanfic of real-life people, in a sort of twee way

History

Moby-Dick

My friend Paul Fenwick has brilliant personal cards where the back consists of a checklist of potential shared interests and contexts. Until I get around to doing the same, this will have to do.