Avenging our image as, well, you know.
As a middle-aged mom, I’m contractually obligated to spend 10% of my week repinning things on Pinterest. Librarian Avengers has benefited, since there are plenty of librarians running around posting cool stuff that I can point at. It’s certainly simpler than actually creating original content.
Therefore, in support of the gender-disproportionate ladynerds at Pinterest’s main headquarters up the road, enjoy my Librarian Avengers board:
I work in the video game industry, so I tend to think of life in these terms. For example, when I was pregnant with my daughter, I realized that pregnancy is essentially a really immersive resource-conservation RPG. I was always asking myself questions like: “Do I pick up this stuff on the floor, or do I save my Bending Over points for later?”
Recently several of my coworkers became parents, so in celebration of my fecund and nerdy cohort, here’s a description of my last week written entirely in video game terms:
Warrior (Battle baroque parental leave laws)
Wizard (Create nutritious meals for baby using own body)
Rogue (Sneak around to accomplish things while the baby sleeps)
Paladin (The power of the Coffee God will protect your party)Read Kid Wrangling
Find outfits for upcoming family photo. Avoid decade-indicating fashion or hairstyles.
Raffi song stuck in head for more than four days.
How long can you deflect drool from your work clothes? GO!
Child can now turn pages of a book. Good work!
Improve your long-term memory by adding minutes of sleep during train commute
Enter “Up up down down left right start” in the deductions section of your tax form
Above is a photo of me undergoing a brief moment of Muppetface onstage. Last week I spoke at OSCON Ignite, the evening entertainment bit of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference and the Google Awards.
Talks took the traditional Ignite format of five minutes, 20 slides. Slides auto-advance after 15 seconds, ready or not.
Speakers were encouraged to address their personal brand of geekery. I chose to talk about the Librarian Avengers Film Rating System, which addresses some movie metadata I’d like to see. Things like “This film contains a Creepy child Singing” and “Warning! Sylvester Stallone!”
OSCON Ignite is online at blip.tv here
My bit starts around (44:45), but stick around for the whole thing. Make sure to check out Kirrily’s talk on Geeky Things you can Do with Textiles, and Liz Henry talking about the barriers to wheelchair hacking.
The format kept everyone pithy, and although I had to speak before the amazing Damian Conway, I didn’t throw up from stage fright once!
This is causing great joy among our phone support people at work. New technology can be so troublesome!
Who needs the bathroom mirror when you’ve got a built in camera on your laptop?
.
.
A lovely fellow from The Austin Chronicle wrote to my fellow South by Southwest panelists asking for a definition of our enigmatically titled presentation. He wanted to know what a “Funologist” was, and rather than sadden him with the news that our moderator made it up, we all took a shot at defining it for him.
The full article is available here: How to Speak Geek – SXSW Interactive has landed. Can you talk the talk?
I’m quoted about halfway down. Fame!
Greetings from an ethnic librarian working in the games industry!
I’m posting this review of my experience last year at GDC (the Game Developers Conference) held every year here in San Francisco. It was originally part of a letter to my team here at Linden Lab, but I thought you librarians might be interested/amused, considering the gender ratio at most library conferences.
-Erica
Hi guys –
I went to the Game Developers Conference last year and found it to be of dubious value.
The best part of the conference for me was the Expo room, which proved to be a valuable source of alternative employment opportunities. I learned that if I want to move to Las Vegas and design slot machine interfaces, I can more than double my salary, which I’m keeping in mind for when I have a stroke and develop an unquenchable desire for polyester and/or chicken wings. I enjoyed scanning the various game interfaces set up to demo motion graphics products, and filed away a few ideas from the Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG.
For me, however, the most memorable moment was riding the escalator of the Moscone center and gazing across a sea of black-clad gamed developers among whom I was the only woman.
As a Person of Estrogen and part of a numeric majority in this world, I’m used to seeing many female developers, operations experts, and release managers at work.
This isn’t the 1970s. Nerdy women exist and thrive. San Francisco is a welcoming place.
GDC. Was. Not.
I get the feeling that all is not well with an operation that returns such a limited array.
The scene: riding the escalator, about five years too old but still worried about being mistaken for a boothbabe.
Behold my personal benchmark for outsider discomfort.
In summary: meh to the GDC.
Borrow someone’s pass and check out the Expo. Cruise the demo games. If you really care about a session, read the person’s book or website instead. And if you really care about making better games, spend the three days watching user observation videos.
Happy news! I was invited to be a panelist at the South by Southwest Interactive conference next month, as part of their ScreenBurn track. 
I’m on a panel called “Funologists live and in person: Guerilla Game Research.”
I’ll share my experience starting some low-budget user research cycles for Second Life, and my work translating those frustrating observations into shippable engineering requirements.
There will be pretty pictures, and possibly cake.
The cake is a lie, but you should stop by anyway. There could be cake.
There certainly won’t be cake and not cake. Not at the same time, I can assure you.
