Published!

It's been a good week. For the last year I've been working as a guest editor on a special double anniversary edition of Amphora, the journal of the Alcuin Society, and on Monday it was printed. I'm looking forward to it arriving in the mail in the next week or so, inclusive in my introduction, which you could say is my first published article.

I've also recently submitted a review of John Scalzi's Questions for a Soldier to Escape Pod, and it was accepted, so I've now got to record it and send it in. How exciting! If you haven't listed to Escape od, it's a paying market for short speculative fiction, and they publish short stories, many by recognized authors, with comparable quality to stories you'll find in major sci-fi mags, like Asimov's. Even if you don't think you're interested in sci-fi, I think you should check it out. Hearing some good sci-fi might just change your mind.

Hopefully, these small publications will lead to bigger and better things: I've got two more articles in the planning phase, one on copyright issues for book collectors for Amphora and one for a library publication like CLA's Feliciter or the BCLA Reporter on digital rights management (DRM) and the library open source tradition. I've also got some short-stories in the tubes. If any of these turn out well enough I might look into getting them published. In any case, I'll make everything of interest available on my website proper shortly, as soon as I finish considering the pros and cons of blog anonymity...

NSG

In keeping in the same vein as my last post, recently I've discovered I love all these on line quizzes that assign you a type based on something from pop culture. They're a lot like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, but without the pretense to scientific accuracy. I must say, I'm pleased that on the "Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in" quiz, that my crew is that of Serenity, but I'm not quite sure what to think about being most like the Green Lantern, according to the "Which superhero are you" quiz.

Of course, these things are fun when you take them for what they're worth, but I heard a story on the weekend from a friend of mine that illustrates how quizzes of little more value can be taken too far. This friend works for a large financial institution where all of their employees have undergone some type indicator test, and now they must list their type in all emails that they send so that colleagues will know how to respond to them. What the hell? I doesn't take a genius to see that these quizzes operate using binary axises that don't account for human complexity and ambiguity, and are based on self perception and even wishful thinking. In the case of a test administered by an employer, I know I would "cheat" by skewing my answers toward the qualities that my employer would find most attractive. First you put people in a literal box, and then a categorical box... That must do wonders for morale.

In any case, this is just a small bit of the consultant driven madness that he has to deal with. Of course, he's got to sort out his own problems and escape the cubicle farm on his own. As someone who has, to use Douglas Coupland's term, escaped the "veal fattening pens," I'd like to show my support for my friend, so for the rest of today I'm going to attach the acronym NSG to the subject line of all my emails: Nerd / Serenity / Green Lantern.

Nerd, Geek or Dork?

According to this highly scientific test, it's as I feared... I'm a nerd:

Pure Nerd
78 % Nerd, 47% Geek, 26% Dork

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.

A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.

A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

I scored better than half in Nerd, earning me the title of: Pure Nerd.


The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the "dork." No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.

The test tracked 3 variables: How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 89% on nerdiness You scored higher than 68% on geekosity You scored higher than 37% on dork points

By the way, I fond the link to this test on this livejoural site.