Greg Brown

Letter to Jim Franklin, CEO of SendGrid

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:43:05 -0400

I just sent a letter to Jim Franklin, CEO of SendGrid, as invited to on his blog. I figured it would be worth also sharing online, just so others can better understand why his actions were categorically wrong.

Confused? Catch up by reading the original event, follow-up, and the most recent turn.

Hi Jim,

I was saddened to hear of your recent actions following the PyCon events on Sunday, principally you terminating Adria Richards. Quite simply, the two stated causes for termination—dividing the community and “public shaming”—are flimsy reasons at best, and totally ignore the real experience of women in the tech industry.

As a male, I won’t pretend any special knowledge about the harassment and pressure those women face on a daily basis. I imagine you’re getting a fusillade of anecdotes, statistics, and other damning information in your inbox as I write. However, I think I can speak to the online behaviors I’ve seen, both in this case and in previous ones.

Simply put, what you call “public shaming” is an important community role in recognizing troubling behavior and talking through its consequences. I’ll take those attendees’ behavior on good faith, that they didn’t mean anything exclusionary to women by their behavior. But that is a large part of the problem, that we engage in these kinds of behaviors without recognizing their consequences.

Public dialogues are how we talk through these issues, and educate others about why we find them disturbing. Twitter particularly is important because there are several strong, supportive feminist communities. It’s why I’m sharing this letter online with others right after I send it, in fact.

But why call them out specifically? Because, quite frankly, all too often these kinds of things are swept under the rug. The picture didn’t personally identify the culprits and didn’t ask that they be terminated for their actions, only showing that misogynists look just like everyone else. And if the community did go to far in getting them terminated, that is in no way a reflection on Adria herself.

As for dividing the community, I’m amazed that you would even try to make this argument. Take a look at some of the online dialogue criticizing Adria’s reaction—are you seriously concerned about losing the business of virulent misogynists? The same people who are DDOSing your service and trying to get her fired are the ones that you don’t want as your banner customers.

More importantly, you’re sending a chilling message to all your current employees as well as other women working in the tech industry: speak up about wrongful actions, and you’ll lose your livelihood. Again, you don’t want to be a part of that shameful tradition of intimidating women in male-dominated workplaces.

Even if you still disagreed with her actions after considering all that, you could have pointed out to her detractors that the tweet came from her personal account, and didn’t relate to her professional role at SendGrid. (I think that argument’s pretty dubious given her interest in ensuring a welcoming developer community, but let’s play this out.) At that point, it was not necessarily a SendGrid issue.

But now that you’ve terminated her, now that you’ve lashed SendGrid to one side in a fight that you’ve admitted divides the community, now there’s no question that your company’s involved—and on the wrong side. You can still reinstate Adria Richards, and admit that it was an overreaction from DDOS and other pressure. Or, you can cast your lot with the misogynists and hope that your morals net enough proceeds as you sell them in front of millions. The choice is still yours to make.

-Greg Brown

My 2012 in Reading

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 20:38:56 -0500

My 2012 in Reading:

In 2012—as in 2011—I aimed to read 52 books in a year. I got closer than I did in 2011, reading 37 books overall, but was eventually undone by a summer busy with wedding and honeymoon and moving, followed by a football in the fall, which cuts my reading opportunities roughly in half. Still, though, a really impressive pace.

Even though my reading spanned a wider variety than ever before, I’ll probably end up remembering this year as one revolving around two big accomplishments: reading two volumes of Caro’s LBJ biography, and finally reading Infinite Jest. Both had been on my list of reading landmarks for years, and it was nice to sit down and actually plow through them during the pockets of calm I could find. And more importantly, both were so great that I didn’t even care about the length.

And beyond those big two, there were some author voices I discovered I enjoyed—Elif Batuman in The Possessed, Walter Benjamin in Illuminations, bell hooks in Feminism is for Everybody, Gretel Ehrlich in The Solace of Open Spaces. I found some fun works that pushed the bounds of genre in Warlock by Oakley Hall, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John LeCarré, and Inverted World by Christopher Priest.

Sure, there were some disappointments too:Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan failed to live up to its outsized praise, Pale Fire by Nabokov was too calculated and clever, and Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon was such a fucking mess. But by and large, I really enjoyed most of what I read for the first time in 2012, and returned to a few favorites of the past like Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware, Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson, River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit, and The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason—a book that’s quietly becoming one of my favorites ever.

Thanks to my parents and wife colluding on presents, I was able to close off 2012 by reading Building Stories by Chris Ware, a truly remarkable collection of graphic fiction that loves its characters like Infinite Jest but encompasses them like The Known World. I’ll have to revisit it later to be sure, but it feels as sure to be a masterpiece as Caro or DFW’s best. More than a giddy delight to read, it’s a nice reminder that in 2012 the art of fiction remains as alive and evolving as ever, and that true surprise is still possible out there. See you in 2013.

Seven Steps to Improve your Game Criticism

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:03:00 -0500

Trying to explain why you think a video game is good or bad? Try answering these seven items to clarify what you mean, and why you mean it!

What do you think the game was trying to do? What clues did you use to figure that out?
How does its purpose relate to other games? To outside cultural forces?
Given 2, is the game’s aim a substantial one? What kinds of purposes do you consider worthwhile, and why?
How did the game make you feel while you were playing it? More specifically, what about the subset of feelings relating to the purpose we identified before?
Given all this, do you think the game succeeded at its purpose? Why or why not? Were there any other successes outside of the main purpose?
What could have been done differently to make the game better at that purpose? Can you imagine why the developers chose to not make those changes? Are there any similar examples of media you thought were more successful (or less successful) at addressing the purpose?
Are there any alternative purposes that would have been a better fit for the game? Why? What does that say about the game?

This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list or a constraint for all criticism—merely a tool to make sure you’re thinking down all the avenues out there. And if you don’t like the assumptions carried in the questions, feel free to write about why you think they’re wrong too!

"I have killed another one, being too quick on the draw… I had swore I would never do that..."

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 00:54:00 -0500

“I have killed another one, being too quick on the draw… I had swore I would never do that again.”

- Clay Blaisedell, in Oakley Hall’s Warlock (p. 257)

What does Clay mean when he says that, in the wake of yet another showdown?

One’s first estimate is that he was too quick to judge, gunning down another man based off facts that he now believes to be untrue. And true, that had happened before, with Blaisedell’s sponsors banning a man wrongly accused… who then re-entered town to show his toughness. It was a killing he later grew to regret, turning himself in and leaving the role of marshal. For a man who sets himself as a vigilante force for good—paid by the capital-holders of a city, but not recognized as its formal law—he must always be right, because even a single wrong step would destroy any claim to legitimate authority, and especially when that wrong step takes a life.

But this first reading may be wrong. At this point in the novel, even our occasional-narrator will admit that these showdowns have become public executions. Clay is simply faster, more accurate, better than any of his opponents. He is seemingly indestructible, freed from the fears of other men. It is this quality that sets him apart and makes him ideal for his role as marshal—but it is also this quality that shelters him from the entropy of frontier life.

What if he isn’t speaking metaphorically, and he is too good at what he does? What if the chance to die in a showdown is the West’s only real justice, its way of stamping down any man who would set himself against too many other men? Is that what justice looks like in this place, where guilt and responsibility are clouded beyond recognition? And what kind of man would set himself apart from that justice, but an evil one?

bestofnanowrimo: what can I even say about this

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:46:58 -0500

bestofnanowrimo:

what can I even say about this

Thanks Huffington Post. Thuffington Post.

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 11:24:00 -0400

Thanks Huffington Post. Thuffington Post.

Books and Beer Episode 6The Corrections by Jonathan...

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 22:14:51 -0400

Books and Beer Episode 6
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

We’re back! After a long break, we discuss Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Does it hold up ten years later?

We’ve moved across the country—from Chicago to Raleigh—and an happy side-effect is that the podcast should now sound a lot better. Our lives finally slowed down enough that we could coordinate our reading again, and will start producing episodes again at a decent clip.

Books Mentioned:

The Corrections and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Wildly excited to see The Master in September.

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 22:04:10 -0400

Wildly excited to see The Master in September.

First preseason game is August 5th, and the season proper starts...

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 21:49:52 -0400

First preseason game is August 5th, and the season proper starts September 5th. Can’t wait.

storyboard: Girls to ‘Magic Mike’: Less Heart, More Flesh The...

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 09:36:59 -0400

storyboard:

Girls to ‘Magic Mike’: Less Heart, More Flesh

The thong GIF hit my email inbox on the morning of July 4. In it, six men with chiseled chests pull off six pairs of tear-away army fatigues, revealing six packages wrapped in red, white, and blue thongs. An American flag falls from the sky. Repeat.

It was a scene from Magic Mike — the Steven Soderbergh film that crossed the $100 box office mark last month — and when I copied the link to my Tumblr, it exploded with a kind of orgasmic fury. Within a matter of minutes, hundreds of women had reblogged the image, many of them too young to even buy tickets to the R-rated film. The puns on “America the Beautiful” were obligatory. (“From seam to shining seam!”) “Why has no one made the [GIF] of Channing Tatum walking away butt naked yet?” one girl cried. Another joked, “my ovaries passed away due to explosion from watching Magic Mike. R.I.P.”

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Or, “ugh I went to a Steven Soderbergh movie and it turned out to be a Steven Soderbergh movie. Also, I’m obtusely claiming the high moral ground for some flimsy reason.” Tumblr you are the worst.

Weird things about Hawaii they don't tell you

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 19:32:00 -0400

Everything is more expensive. Everything. This one I’d actually been warned about in advance, but it still shocked me how much it was true. And since it’s based off weight more than production costs, it’s the cheap stuff that kills you since it’s all bumped up by the same amount. I bought cereal and a 12-pack of coke at the grocery store, and my bill came to $17.
The roads are curiously good for two reasons: no winters, and very few trucks (with 0 semi-trailer trucks). The former means essentially 0 potholes or cracks in the road, and the latter means whatever wear happens to the roads happens much more slowly.
There are so many different environments on the big island. Since the Kona airport is on the opposite end of the island as the Volcanos National Park, we ended up circumnavigating it heading too and from there. In between was a staggering variety of climates, with as little as a few minutes separating literal rainforests and deserts. Why? Hawaii is really a series of tall mountains in the face of fairly invariant wind, which means that rain tends to fall on the same side, always. And since a half-dozen volcanoes make up the big island, this means there are all these little pockets of varying temperature, rainfall, and lava-freshness. Travel through the national park and around the island, and you’ll see it all.

The varieties of Kickstarter experience

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 22:26:32 -0400

I started writing a grumpy post about Penny Arcade’s Kickstarter this morning, reconsidered it, and then ended up saying essentially the same things on another forum tonight—so I thought I’d post it here as well with a dorky title!

The thing that worries me about the PA kickstarter is how it’s essentially ditching the “project” requirement of Kickstarter—and Kickstarter approving it because they’re getting a 5% slice of what’s bound to be a big project.

Kickstarter is already in this weird place where they’ve cultivated the idea of it as a pre-order QVC, but without any of the protections you have when dealing with any other merchant. They’ve created this expectation at their peril, because eventually one of these projects is going to blow up and damage their reputation.

Now, on top of that, you have PA’s venture which seems to skim by on being a project just by virtue of having an arbitrary end-point of one year (something that I imagine was added in their back-and-forth with Kickstarter to get it approved, along with some of the ancillary stuff). And while they’re promising some additional content if several beyond-the-requirement funding figures are met, they’re tacked-on and not the core concern of the project: removing ads.

A good way to ask yourself whether this qualifies as a “project” under the Kickstarter guidelines is to ask if anything would not be created if they didn’t breach the number they’re asking for; as PA admits themselves on the Kickstarter page, “things stay how they are now.” And all the ancillary add-ons are ancillary: the clear thrust of the project is in simply removing ads— and an empty ad slot doesn’t count under any conventional idea of something that’s “created”.

How big PA is or the snarky tone of the rewards are asinine—who would expect anything else from the creators of dickwolves?—but they’re beside the point in that this is a proposal that should never have made it onto Kickstarter. This should have been handled on their own site or elsewhere, and I’m sure they would have still made plenty of money there.

Enjoying lovely Hawaii this week—my first vacation in a very...

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 16:46:03 -0400

Enjoying lovely Hawaii this week—my first vacation in a very long time. Bringing Infinite Jest along was the best decision.

Microsoft Surface, and having it both ways

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 17:05:04 -0400

Microsoft unveiled their new tablet this week, and the reaction revealed how bifurcated the tech press is becoming. On one side, you had the Apple-centric press which quickly pointed out its similarity to the iPad introduction. Really, you don’t say? Two events introducing tablets being similar?

Unfortunately, most competitors to Apple are in a bit of a squeeze, PR-wise: Apple did a lot of really great things with the iPad, and not doing them too means you’re quickly criticized as inferior. But do some of the same things as the iPad, and you’re characterized as being another copy.

It’s a no-win situation that both incentivizes doing things differently just to be stupid, and ignores the very real benefits that can come from doing the same things but better. Polish competitive features enough, and they become strengths.

On the other side, the Apple unenthusiasts applauded the cover as keyboard. Finally, a company willing to make a no-compromise tablet. It’s like Microsoft heard all those stubborn forum-users who busily theory-crafted their perfect hardware—USB ports, an included keyboard, support for non-tablet apps—and gave it to them. Finally, a piece of hardware that won’t make us choose between a tablet and a laptop.

But here too, there are problems. Nobody’s been able to touch the keyboards yet and tell us if they’re any good. And will allowing mediocre-on-tablet windows apps to run on the tablet lead to a healthy ecosystem of high expectations for quality? Maybe, maybe not.

Every argument for Apple’s focused iPad approach still holds today, and won’t be tested by reality until the Surface hits market. And in the meantime, you can use a keyboard with your existing iPad perfectly well—using either the standard bluetooth keyboard like I do, or with Logitech’s Ultrathin Keyboard Cover.

A lot of the big questions about the Surface—developer uptake, app economics, etc.—are still unanswered. We know more about it now that the announcement has come and gone, but it’s still an idea that allows all parties to have it both ways.

love u twitter

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 20:34:56 -0400

love u twitter

A plea to give Battleship a chance

Sun, 20 May 2012 17:19:00 -0400

Battleship is a movie that surprisingly very few people will see in theaters, having had the misfortune of coming out so soon after The Avengers titanic success. So this probably sounds crazy, but in my estimation it bests The Avengers in every category but fan-service: more action, genuinely fascinating antagonists, minimalist world-building in service of mystery, actual emotional arcs for characters, and a plot that actually coheres for more than five minutes at a time. I was very worried going in—enough to get drunk beforehand with two friends—but exited the movie genuinely elated at how good it had been.

One of the things Battleship does strangely well—better than any other film of its kind—is capture how essentially inscrutable first contact would be. After the very opening skirmish, there’s a strange détente, neither side willing to move against the other as they try and guess their motives and plan out their next goals. Berg even shows us glimpses of their faces through the helmets, imbuing them with just enough difference to be alien, but enough humanity to make us constantly search their faces for clues of emotion. It’s like they’re warring against an enemy barely on the good side of the uncanny valley, and it weirdly works.

And that’s the thing: we never really get any solid clues that the bad guys are really all that bad! They zap in from space, lose a ship because we have tons of space junk, almost immediately get fired at, try to set up a shield to keep shit from getting too crazy, and try to call home so that someone can come and pick them up. They even have IFF-systems more advanced and discriminating than any of our drone weaponry can claim, which the movie takes care to visually show you all the time.

But at the same time, the movie uses all the typical language of action films to set you in the usual moral stance: disaster striking cities and suburbs, rallying around shared convictions of honor and duty, elision of the atrocities in previous wars, even a damsel in distress. It is so serious and incidentally self-parodying that it’s hard to tell how far the director meant for it to go.

(I’m inclined to give Berg more credit than most because he directed the aggressively genre-breaking Hancock who most would at least agree had a fairly great premise and first act. In Battleship, in addition to liberal zooming around in space, he also pulls from a popular YouTube video. It all feels like a more thoughful, controlled, and deliberately-unpredictable version of the dominant Michael Bay aesthetic that you see shoveled into most action films.)

It’s hard to talk much more about it without spoiling the film—and delight at how strange the movie allows itself to become adds to the fantastic first-watch experience—but the film manges to brush up against a bunch of topics that you’d never expect to see in an alien-invasion film like this. For example, one of the main characters is a double-amputee veteran who is an odd reminder for a genre who tends to uncritically advocate solving problems militarily.

For another example that’s more of a reach, they start the movie engaged in exercises between over a dozen nations—principally among them the US and Japan—but end it deploying the same WWII weaponry against this entirely novel foe. It adds to the unease of casually deploying this hardware against an enemy they barely understand, when you step back to consider that the Allies did some deeply fucked-up shit during WWII (like firebombing hundreds of Japanese cities, and eventually dropping two nuclear weapons). The movie deftly sidesteps an overt raising of the issue by having the main character and his Japanese counterpart in a bro-partnership for most of the film, but it’s still weirdly there.

Some of these you can certainly disagree with, but there are a lot of examples—the unease with and ultimate uselessness of technology, alien technology that’s read The Power Broker and regards military bases and major freeways as the only dangers worth destroying in Hawaii, etc. All of these point to a deeper subtext to the film than there’s any right to be, and a subtext that’s more interesting and respected than The Avengers casual acceptance of a surveillance state manned by individuals of unparalleled power, and simple dismissal of trying to repliate that same sort of power under an institution more amenable to democracy.

And on top of all that, the scene where they essentially play the game Battleship against the aliens is one of the most gripping and effective scenes in the entire film. What’s not to like about that?

Can’t come across this video and not immediately share it...

Fri, 11 May 2012 22:40:26 -0400

Can’t come across this video and not immediately share it with everyone, from your closest friends to strangers on the street. The finest bit of YouTube weirdness I’ve ever seen.

The Avengers sucked

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:56:00 -0400

I mean, really, it sucked far beyond where the RT score and previous Marvel movies had led me to believe.

Pacing was awful, resulting in an end battle that was utterly exhausting and filled with only the vaguest of plot coherence. Tons of weird little turns of whatever that you’d think might go somewhere (Thor gets stabbed with a pointy key fob?) never really pan out.

Cinematography was boring at best. The directing actually got in the way as awful at key points, like every time Whedon decided that a dutch angle might be best to beat the viewer over the head, or when he decided to stage one shot in the reflection of a rear-view mirror for no real reason. Also in the age of CGI, long-shots have kind of lost ther magic as every director can do them for the most trivial of reasons.

So much of the movie showed the seams, like when one character made an incongruous line of dialogue that was just designed to set up a quippy quip 30 seconds later. Or as a friend pointed out, the scene where some filmmaker must have been “You know it would be really cool if Scarlett Johannsen jumped on one of the alien jet skis and flew it around! OR WAIT, IF SHE DIDN’T FLY IT DIRECTLY BUT FLEW THEY GUY FLYING THE JET SKI! BRILLIANT PRINT IT.”

The pacing and seams—and the fanservice dripping over evey part of the film—made me wonder if “best” these days has come more to mean “most”. Example: “The Avengers was the most comic-book movie so far.” See, that statement works. I can sit back and go “yeah there was lots of fighting and contrived ways for even the heroes to fight each other for silly reasons so I can see that!”

But best comic-book movie? Even if you exempt Nolan’s attempts, I’d still place IM1 above, IM2just barely above and Thor in this weird position where half of the movie was way better and the other half way worse. I guess basic narrative coherence and fan-service and five full-length advertisements beforehand is all it takes to get a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes?

And I’m just evaluating it here as a popcorn movie; there’s a lot of troubling (and hilarious in turn) undercurrents to the film that should give us pause too. Blasting through the same sort of surveillence scheme that almost leads a major character to quit in The Dark Knight? Check. Nuclear weaponry (and analogous guns) that’s bad until it’s good? Check. A villain who wants to cause the greatest, most public amount of destruction possible, placing their motives perilously close to that of the filmmakers themselves? Lol check. The Avengers is an entire film that uses quippy intertextual reference as a pancea for actual self-consciousness, all to avoid becoming horrified.

Also really disappointed they deleted the scene where Captain America calls Nick Fury “boy.”

Photo

Tue, 01 May 2012 12:46:11 -0400

Books & Beer: Episode 5 YA Literature and From...

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 21:16:00 -0400

Books & Beer: Episode 5 YA Literature and From Hell

Clarissa and I debated YA Literature: Clarissa on the pro side, myself on the con. But we took a break from fighting to both praise the graphic novel From Hell.

Finally, a long-overdue new episode! We could blame travel and health stuff as usual, but the real reason is because I’m a real laggard about my assigned reading. Also I got a bit more inebriated and vindictive than usual this episode, so lol?

Books Mentioned:

The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins
The Fault in our Stars by John Green
A bunch of other YA books by Madeline L’Engle, Lois Lowry, and others
From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

Pages Mentioned: