So Barbenheimer, huh?

I watched both movies with hubs a couple of weeks ago, and enjoyed them both. Some mild spoilers ahead.

Barbie is visually stunning, very funny and very clever, and yes, quite feminist. The main Ken (the one played by Ryan Gosling, whose job is beach) is excellent as a dim yet eerily realistic villain. He has no issues crushing everything Barbie holds dear out of aggrieved entitlement masquerading as heartache.  Never has the song “Push” by Matchbox Twenty been used more literally and to a more resonant effect than in the beach campfire scene. The sage Weird Barbie is as awesome and crazy as anything that Kate McKinnon ever plays. Margot Robbie is otherworldly pretty as Stereotypical Barbie, who gets hit with a realization of how shit the real world still is for women. America Ferrera delivers a poignant soliloquy that has been circulating on social media.

Ryan Gosling’s skin looks just like shiny plastic, a marvel of makeup art. Excellent side characters like Alan (played by Michael Cera) and various other Barbies and Kens enhanced the movie. And yes, that last sentence in the movie is hilarious.

Overall, well worth viewing.

**

I was dreading Oppenheimer because of its three-hour runtime. I am happy to report that the movie was exquisitely done, so I didn’t feel bored or restless for even a moment. The combination of flashbacks on Oppenheimer’s career with ‘current’ events covering the hearings that led to him being stripped of security clearance were done quite effectively, keeping the tension high and the narrative moving at a good clip.

I’ve always thought Cillian Murphy was creepy, and his creepiness, exacerbated by the era-appropriate accent and his emaciated frame, made him an excellent vessel for the portrayal of a self-absorbed, chain-smoking, skirt-chasing, brilliant, arrogant, tortured mid-twentieth-century father of the atomic bomb. Emily Blunt, whom I would watch if she were reading her shopping list aloud, did a lot with a relatively small role of Oppenheimer’s smart, unconventional, alcoholic wife Kitty, with whom he shared a strong if somewhat nonstereotypical bond. To me, the most exciting part of the movie were the portrayals of all the physicists (many of them theorists, *swoon*) whose names are found in textbooks and on letterheads of national labs. Oppenheimer brought quantum mechanics to the US, and the postwar physics boom in the country was largely due to the success and brainpower influx associated with Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. I loved seeing the big names ‘in the flesh’ and witnessing their very human interactions and often fraught relationships. Robert Downey Jr was excellent as the scheming Lewis Strauss, and Matt Damon did a solid job as a General Groves.

Overall, it was an excellent movie. I am very glad I saw it.

What say you, blogosphere? Did you see either movie? Both? What did you think? 

The sequel to Academaze is coming to your favorite online-shopping behemoth soon:

Adrian Medina of Fabled Beast Design killed it with the cover, which you will see in its full glory in a few weeks. For now, imagine weapons-grade whimsy, and think about whether you want to request an advance review copy, for I will be putting up a sign-up form soon.

As I work on the sequel to Academaze (it’s going to be so good!), I dip into and out of the original, and here’s a goofy poem that always makes me smile. Very appropriate for the get-papers-written-and-submitted-before-the-fall-semester-starts mad scramble we all know and love.

I started, nearly finished, then abandoned two posts. I will get to them later, I promise. They were nice and meaty and thoughtful, maybe a little too thoughtful for comfort, so I just didn’t feel it was a good time to post them. They still need to marinate some. I think this might be what people call maturity. It’s annoying, honestly.

In the meantime, I thought you folks might appreciate some details on the progress toward the second collection.

The first step was to download all the posts, 2016 and onward. That was about 230,000 words, already excluding the posts that were mostly links and such. Yep, it’s a lot of words.

I organized all the posts into several Google Docs, one for each year. Then I created a Google Sheet, one sheet for each year within a single Google Sheet file devoted to the project. For each year, I created a table of contents in the Google Doc and pasted the TOC into the corresponding Google Sheet. Then I quickly read through each year’s posts and tagged them in the corresponding sheet with a few tags that  will serve to help organize posts into chapters. I also marked each post title in the sheet as hell no (crossed out so marked for deletion), maybe but probably not (changed font to gray), probably yes (black normal font), and hell yes (hot pink font).

After deleting those marked for deletion (again, this is all at the level of titles in the Google Sheet after a cursory read of the text from the Doc), I probably have about 2/3 of the titles left, which is still far too many. I am shooting for somewhere around 80k in the end, which is the size of a decent novel and the size of Academaze, IIRC. There are currently 50 hot pink titles, which alone probably gives me roughly 50k good words, given that my average post is circa 1k words. I will gather another 30k or so from the solid but not must-have posts, and the book will be lean and mean. A vast majority of those posts marked as maybe-but -probably-not will likely all be deleted; some that might survive will be there to flesh out a potentially skinny chapter.

By the way, I did a much less labor-intensive version of this process when I assembled my short-fiction collection a couple of weeks ago, and it was done in no time at all. I highly recommend it: use a Google Sheet or similar to tag and organize while working with titles alone, and only handle large amounts of text once you know the overall structure. There is a clear parallel here with moving furniture while redecorating.

The plan is to have the full draft ready in another week, then edit so it’s ready to work on the full wrap by the week of August 7th, when I am on schedule with the wonderful @UglyByProxy of Fabled Beast Design. I will be putting up a form to sign up for advanced review copies (ARC) around the middle of August. Electronic ARCs will be sent out early September and paperback ARCs mid-September for a November 1st book release.

From Twitter, by way of this @mnitabach tweet embedding a @hormiga tweet:

I’ve decided I will pull the trigger on a sequel to Academaze! I already have a fantastic cover by the lovely graphic designer and human A. A. Medina of Fabled Beast Design (@UglyByProxy on Twitter). I recommend you contact him for all your book-cover-design needs. 

The book will NOT be called Academaze II. But what will it be called, you ask. MWAHAHAHAHA! That’s a secret for now. But it will cover the Best of Xykademiqz 2016 and onward.

The book will tentatively be out November 1. I will need to coordinate with Academaze publisher Annorlunda, so we can give folks some good deals on the two books together.

If you are willing to read and review the book on Goodreads (available before publication) and/or Amazon (available only after publication) and/or anywhere else you usually review (your blog etc.), please let me know. There will be an ARC (advanced review copy) signup Google Form around the end of August. Most ARC will be electronic; there will be a limited number of paperbacks available, with priority given to folks who have reviewed Academaze. ARCs will go out mid-September to early October, so people have time to finish reading before publication in November. 

Given that the lovely publisher of Academaze closed a couple of years ago (edit: closed to new  submissions; it’s still actively selling existing books in its catalog), I will be putting out this book on my own. You can expect it to be less coolly pedagogical and more scorchingly unhinged. MWAHAHAHAHA!

I’m feeling grumpy for a whole bunch of reasons, none of which I’m feeling particularly in the mood to write about, and many of which have to do with work and fiction writing, so instead I give you random Twitter levity (mostly levity, a bit of heavy-ty). More substantive posts soon.

https://twitter.com/_ElizabethMay/status/1671110181315280896?s=20

https://twitter.com/SjamaanN/status/1667069576910176256?s=20

https://twitter.com/mudron/status/1665158796765974528?s=20

I had a nice exchange with a writer friend on Twitter about choosing an idea to pursue for longer works, such as novels.

When writing short stories, the time investment is low, so you don’t have to triage ideas. You can, in principle, pursue most of them because the investment is something like 1-3k words per story. However, when we get to the realm of a novel, the commitment is much greater; a typical novel is about 90k words; horror and category romance tend to be shorter, 70-80k, while secondary-world fantasy can be longer, 100-120k words, with higher word counts allowed for established authors while newbies are expected to keep it lean. Many people say and I concur that you can have a full draft of a novel in three months (about 1k words per day, which is the length of a good letter of reference; it’s not an onerous word count). I drafted about 65% of the novel last summer; over winter break, I wrote the remaining 35% and did two comprehensive edits; I went through three additional edits before I actually started querying in late April/early May. I am not one to write 1k words/day; it’s more like 2.5, 3, 3.2, 1.2, 0, 0.4, 2.4, 2.2, 3.7, 0 in thousands of words per day. As you can see, I can hit 8-10k per week, but the daily allotments are all over the place and I definitely take breaks. I don’t write every day, because work, life, internet, boredom, etc. I also like to binge-write when I can, and I can’t when the semester is in session, plus binging isn’t sustainable for longer than two or three weeks at a time (ask me how I know).

My first novel is done and currently out with agents; so far, I’ve received one request for a partial manuscript, and still waiting to hear back. The whole querying business is pretty disheartening, but my skin has been thickened by decades of applying for grants, so I’m pretty sure I’ll live. Also, I have Plans B through Z if Plan A (for agent) doesn’t pan out.

Anyhoo, I was DM-ing with this writer friend, who asked how to pick the right idea to pursue for a novel. Like most creative people, he has far more ideas than he can pursue, and I am the same. Those of us who write short fiction sometimes get told by readers that a certain short story would be great if expanded into a novel, but there are still at least half a dozen of those at any given point in time.

How do you pick which idea to pursue for longer work?

I shared my philosophy (backed by personal experience), which is that it almost doesn’t matter which idea you pick. As long as the idea is halfway decent, it is the execution of the idea that creates value in the  novel. You can get a great book from a bare-bones plot but with enough texture from characterization, interpersonal conflict, setting, etc. Or you can ruin a clever and original plot by lackluster writing.

I completely understand the anxiety over making sure you’ve picked the right idea, but I believe it’s the enemy of improvement and achievement.

Here is the tale of how my first novel came to be. I originally had an idea for a completely different novel, and it was great, and serious, and fleshed out in terms of secondary and tertiary subplots, and everyone to whom I showed the outline said it would be great… And then I kept dragging my feet. I was scared to start, scared because that novel needed an author I definitely wasn’t and probably still am not. I made it into such a huge deal in my head that I was completely blocked.

So I said f*ck it and wrote a completely different novel instead.

Of course, I didn’t start the second one as a novel. I basically picked a throwaway idea that seemed lighter and easier to write, and I said I would try to write a novella. Not as long, not as serious, much lower stakes (for me). I started writing, and in the process of writing the characters and the conflicts deepened, and a whole tapestry unfurled. Before I knew it, I had a novel. Is it the world’s most original novel? I am sure it’s not. But I really think it’s good, and so do a bunch of other people. It did what it needed to do. I finished it, and learned a ton doing it, and I don’t even hate it. I am also in much better shape to write harder stuff now because I am more aware of what I can and cannot do.

So my advice is to pick any idea that seems kind of cool and makes you excited (as opposed to terrified) to write, and just run with it. Whatever it becomes, it becomes.

Another bit of wisdom, and, again, I don’t think I’m alone in this, is to not write the stuff you dread writing. A boring chapter bookended by two great chapters? You can probably omit it and trust the reader to fill in the blanks. A scary/difficult/off-putting chapter? Maybe you don’t know enough about your characters or conflict yet; skip it for now and get to it later, once you truly know what needs to go there.

There is a chapter about halfway through my book that is the last thing I wrote. It was an important chapter resolving a huge gridlock, and I wasn’t able to come up with a satisfactory way to do it until I finished the whole book. Only then, in hindsight, it was clear what had to have happened, and when I wrote it, it came out perfect.

Why I am writing about this for an academic audience? First, I think some people might enjoy these craft notes. I know I am always a sucker for craft notes, even if it’s not my craft. Second, there are parallels to technical writing and academic science.

Some of my best technical work didn’t come from the shiniest ideas. It came because we picked a matte (as opposed to shiny) problem and did really good, deep, thoughtful work on it. The resulting papers were much better and more insightful and more impactful than one could’ve imagined when we first started out.

And when you are stuck on a technical problem, you should ignore it for a while and go do something else. Sometimes it works itself out in your subconscious. Other times, in the process of moving on to other stuff, you learn enough new skills that you’re able to tackle the problem much more efficiently and successfully than before.

In science, as in art, you can’t force things. You have to allow for things to fall into place, and you have to trust your gut (the mouthpiece of your subconscious) that things don’t fit or that they aren’t where or when they should be. Always listen to the gut.

How’ve you been, blogosphere? How is summer treating you?

There is something that happened with a colleague and, as always, I fear I am overreacting or imaging things (welcome to being a woman), but my gut tells me I’m not and that I should stick to my guns.

There is a colleague with whom I’ve collaborated on and off for years. He and another colleague are experimentalists and go after money together, but when they work together with me, they always seem to expect I will come with my own funds and do the work that’s beneficial to them. I brought this issue up a bunch of times, but this never changes. They basically want me to fund my own work, and since our interests are often aligned, that often works out, but still. Another colleague says he often collaborates with others without going for join money, and honestly that’s great, but I don’t have five grants on similar topics. Generally, the technical distance among my active projects can and usually is fairly large, and being a theorist I am usually less flush than experimentalists, so my people are already double booked for stuff I have funding for, without me siphoning their time from funded projects for something a colleague thinks would be unfunded fun to do.

Anyway, I’ve always considered this colleague to be among the nicer ones around, but I’m not so sure anymore, honestly.

This is what happened, and you can tell me, blogosphere, if I am overreacting.

There is a popular class of techniques, let’s call them Triangle , that have been utilized everywhere in the last few years, in particular to address the class of problems I will call Apple, among other applications. Apple are a class of problems of interest to many in my broad area of work, but I am not interested in them. In any case, applying Triangle to Apple is not particularly novel at this point. People interested in related problems, such as Orange or Peach, are also looking into applying Triangle to their problems, which is understandable and reasonable. To summarize, this is common now:

However, the problems I am interested in are fairly far removed from Apple. I will call the problem I am interested in Clover. Now, my group has applied Triangle to Clover and it’s fine, just doesn’t really do what I want to show on Clover.

So we dug and dug, and realized there’s a class of techniques from the same general (broad!) field as Triangle, but still quite different; let’s call it Kapow (for the explosion emoji). It turns out, using Kapow to address Clover is exactly what I wanted and it’s perfect.

My student dug up the fairly esoteric Kapow and applied it to Clover, and has fantastic preliminary data. The use of Kapow is really not widespread at all, and definitely not its use on Clover or anything Clover-adjacent.

Now, that student recently presented their dissertation prospectus. The collaborator from above was on the committee. The collaborator really really liked the use of Kapow, of which he’d never heard before.

He asked immediately after the prospectus defense that I send him the slides so he can go on and apply Kapow on his problem of Onion, which he’d unsuccessfully been trying to address using Triangle.

To summarize, colleague has done this

and now wants me to hand over my Kapow stuff so he can try this:

There was no offer of collaboration or anything. He basically asked that I give him info on my unpublished, very preliminary work that can potentially be a medium-to-big deal, so he can use it on the problem of interest to him. Presumably, this will be done with none of our participation and with no attribution to us.

I was pretty shocked. This is not something he heard at a conference. This is extremely preliminary data that he only had access to through the educational mission of the department. I would never ever ask someone what he asked me.

So at first I ignored him, hoping he would take a hint. No such luck. He accosted me before a faculty meeting, and I had to say no, with other colleagues sitting around and presumably listening in. I said this was preliminary data and not suitable for sharing. He said he “just” wanted the slides because Kapow would work so great on his Onion problem, it would be sooo great, and don’t I think that, too? I said yes, sure, it would, but it’s not for sharing right now. I said I could send him some references or else we could collaborate, but I would not just hand over my stuff. To this he was shocked and dismayed, like incredulous at what I was even implying — that he would scoop us. The thing is he might, for all I know. Right now Kapow+Clover is something no one is expecting, especially because Kapow is pretty obscure. Once the first application papers of Kapow come out, the cat’s out of the bag. I want my group and not my colleague’s to be the ones to release the cat, since it’s our damn cat.

I’m still reeling. The colleague acts like I’m the crazy one for not wanting to share. I am not not sharing. We are not on the same grant. I don’t actually have an obligation to make his life that much easier at a detriment to myself. He does seem a bit desperate, but given that my group has applied Triangle to Clover and gotten fine even if not great results, I am pretty sure he can apply Triangle to Onion and get results that are more than fine, so the issue is likely with the student working on the problem (I know said student) rather than with the actual technique. The colleague and his student could totally get what they need from Triangle because his Onion problem is fairly close to Apple. Kapow might be overkill for what they need, anyway.

I feel so disappointed. The colleague is a collaborator, someone who I counted on being by my side. But I guess there are always limits to loyalty, and the limits appear to be very self-serving.

What say you, blogosphere? Am I imagining things? Or is this clear overreach? 

The spring semester is coming to an end, and it’s a cause for terror, not celebration, because I have to teach in the summer again. I didn’t want to, I said I wouldn’t, and then the person who was supposed to wasn’t able to, and now I’m on the hook again. I also have teaching overload in the fall. This calendar year, like last calendar year, I will end up teaching 2x more than a faculty member with my group size and amount of grant money is supposed to teach. I am getting seriously pissed. Granted, there will be some extra money in it for me because of summer teaching, but it’s not enough. I would really like it if I could get out of some damn service, too.

I $#^%@#$& hate service. Why is everyone constantly being evaluated? JFC, like we’re all some lowlifes in perpetual danger of getting in trouble. Leave people alone to do their job and don’t waste their time with frequent paperwork. It’s enough we’re all our own administrative assistants now and no help is coming (only oversight and restrictions and scolding) in regards to purchasing and travel.

I gave up some of my external service. The demands on my time and sanity could no longer be justified.

Is it me, or is there more bullshit and busy work that’s part of this job than even five years ago, let alone ten? Is it the ballooning administration, mowing down everything in its path? Just more more more more more of mindless work.

Teaching has been less rewarding of late. Since the pandemic, students have been expecting ever more permissible classrooms, boundless flexibility with no questions asked, and all the higher ups do is tell us we should accommodate. Nobody says how, or God forbid offers some resources to aid with all these accommodations, it’s just dumped on faculty. Versions upon versions of the same test for all the people who are supposedly last-minute (the morning of the midterm exam) sick. That was not much of an issue before the pandemic, but is now widespread because many students expect us to take everything at face value, and actually get peeved when an instructor calls them on it, for example, by requiring a doctor’s note for repeated last-minute illnesses in a semester.

Students are also performing notably worse, on average. When compared to even just 5-10 years ago, the averages have dropped significantly, and now there are long tails below 50% on exams, whereas similar-difficulty exams never showed such trends before. We are admitting more students, but most of them seem to be students who really shouldn’t be in this major, yet here they are and we’re all supposed to help them hobble to graduation.

There are persistent issues many students have with math, and this is a math-heavy major. I’m sorry, but a student cannot be successful if they can’t do high-school algebra. Pulling out a common factor from a polynomial. Manipulating fractions, such as figuring out a common denominator or canceling terms on different sides of the fraction line. In this major, students cannot just sort-of know simple stuff like that; they need to be completely fluent, because math of a much higher level underpins the courses in the major.

Many kids show up with gaps in knowledge in subjects other than math. I don’t know if this is also an effect of the pandemic, and  we now have cohort upon cohort whose preparation is deficient in this subject or that.

OK, writing this down is making me feel all murdery (oh, by the way, watch the show “Beef” on Netflix!). Maybe I should stop here and instead ask the academic blogosphere: What have you been up to, bloggy readers? Have you noticed a change in student preparation, and, if yes, what do you think the cause is?

As a treat, some Twitter levity.

https://twitter.com/packysmith/status/1654184195097346048?s=20

https://twitter.com/KarinWeekes/status/1653857334891008000?s=20

https://twitter.com/borbalabranch/status/1653410518453964801?s=20

https://twitter.com/tressiemcphd/status/1649199547510411264?s=20