no mean feat

It was no mean feat what Nicky and I did for the online communities paper. A toast to the both of us is in order, I think. We did an all-nighter Monday night at Klaus and finished the paper. It ran into exactly fifty pages. The length alone made it a sight to behold, as persons with a less-than-pure imagination will be able to attest. We stuffed it assiduously with quotes from our interviews so that it didn't fall short of the minimum page count, which was 20, I believe; but what we got was more than we had bargained for. I don't think I ever mentioned that we were researching FanFiction.Net as an online community. It was hilarious. We were supposed to do a total of nine interviews with participants. Nicky and I interviewed each other, and I interviewed mentalparticipant and vanerz. It was a decent experience overall. On a hortatory note, I must remind Nicky that her real name and info are still up on FFn for all to see, so she'd do well to change that sooner rather than later.

Yo Mama did nothing for the project, of course, once she had finished her three admittedly decent interviews. We gave her a ball of yarn to play with early on, and she remained preoccupied with it throughout. This arrangement was favorable to both Nicky and me, who had recognized early on that Yo Mama would be useless - disastrous, even - if entrusted with any kind of work. She did not disappoint. We had given her a couple of slides in the intro to present, since everyone had to present. Yo Mama let her imagination step in where her conscious mind ended, which was almost the second she opened the floodgates that were her vocal cords, and that set the tone for the rest of the presentation: flustered and confused. I was grappling with my traditional dislike of public speaking when my turn came. On top of that, we were running out of time, and Yo Mama had insinuated that writing fan fiction was "difficult for me," and therefore something that the rest of the group had to "help me out with." Keen readers of my blog will have noticed that I have finally succumbed and started putting punctuation within quotation marks. That's because that was a practice that I had to engage in on the paper, and fifty pages later, it's the only thing that makes sense to me. Maybe it will pass - just like the common cold or AITS (my FIITJEE friends are snickering with dignity into their handkerchiefs at this point).

We bombed the presentation, of course, but it's worth only five percent. Amy was nicer than she had been before, which was nice. It did not escape her that I was no fan of public speaking. At one point, I was taking a question, and began answering with my usual tendency to cram as many sentences as I could within the space of a second. Amy, with no little amusement, said, "[Kaiser]. Stop. Slow down. You have something interesting to say, and we want to hear it... We all like you... Now go." Or words to that effect. It was all very amusing. Speaking is not an activity that I engage in in public with the slightest measure of delight. Ask me to play the piano before an audience or mime something outrageous, and I will do it without questioning - or at the very least without seeing Sartre rise up before my eyes over the heads of my bored audience, in all his grotesque ugliness. But the presentation is over, and we have now reached the last stretch of the course, with only a design paper and a couple of reading reflexions due. I have, as I had predicted, already begun feeling bad for having said some of the things about Amy that I have said over the semester. Please recognize me as a person with a heart. I will be thrilled.

Online communities has taken a back seat. It is lying sated on its back, as it were, having completed the physical act, belly heaving with a grotesque rhythm. (For some reason the concept of a "heaving belly" evokes only images of Verma.) That isn't to say that I'm free now. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Garp seems to have become possessed by a desire to do everything he didn't do in the second OS project, and is working me like a slave driver. I think he thinks the project is due this Friday rather than next. I have to get up early, whereas that goddamned worthless piece of human refuse is probably lying in bed drooling on his pillow till late in the afternoon. What an odious beast of a person. As for me, I'm just glad I will never have to work with him again. Also lab work. We're aiming to publish a paper at the OSDI conference in three weeks, which seems an insuperably daunting task at this point. We shall probably overcome.