#conference-booking-software

[clearevent]

Event Management Solution - Clearevent

What are the 5 elements of event management?

The five essential elements of event management are foundational components that guide the successful planning and execution of any event. These are often referred to as the 5 Cs of Event Management:

1. Concept

This is the initial stage where the idea or purpose of the event is developed. It involves answering questions like:

What is the goal of the event? (e.g., marketing, education, entertainment)

Who is the target audience?

What type of event will it be? (conference, workshop, gala, etc.)

This phase sets the tone and theme of the event, ensuring alignment with objectives.

2. Coordination

This involves detailed planning and organization:

Budget creation and management.

Securing a venue.

Managing resources (staff, equipment, materials).

Creating a timeline and ensuring all tasks are assigned and tracked.

Coordination ensures that every aspect of the event is well-structured and runs smoothly.

3. Control

Monitoring the progress and execution of the event plan:

Ensuring adherence to timelines, budgets, and deliverables.

Risk management and troubleshooting.

Quality control to meet the desired standards.

It’s about staying on top of logistics and resolving issues promptly.

4. Culmination

This is the actual execution of the event:

Ensuring the event unfolds as planned.

Overseeing live operations, guest experiences, and vendor management.

Responding to real-time challenges or unexpected situations.

It’s the moment when all prior efforts come to fruition.

5. Closeout

Post-event wrap-up and evaluation:

Conducting a debrief with the team and stakeholders.

Analyzing event performance against goals (e.g., attendee feedback, ROI).

Settling financials (payments, refunds).

Documenting lessons learned for future events.

This phase ensures a professional finish and continuous improvement for future events.

Would you like tips or tools for managing any of these stages?

[hurricane-eggbeater]

my brother has been talking about working in florida for the winter and my family is collectively reacting as if he announced he’s moving to khartoum

[dawnfelagund]

My Open-Source Tolkien Studies Data Sets

One of the best parts of being an independent scholar is that I get to be generous with my research. I am not counting on it for a job, and frankly, between teaching at a small rural school and running the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, I will likely never be able to do all that I want to do with the data that I collect and so love the idea that someone might do something with it.

Because I do love making sets of data. Everything from the mind-numbing copy/paste data entry to learning new spreadsheet formulas is enjoyable to me. I'm an introvert in a very extraverted profession, and after a day of being all on for my students, turning everything into numbers is like a cup of tea under a warm blanket with a Golden Retriever at my feet.

So please use these data sets if they interest you. Play with them. Write about and share what you notice. Expand and build on them. Publish using them. If you use my data or work, credit Dawn Walls-Thumma and link to my website, dawnfelagund.com, if possible. I'd also love if you'd let me know if you share anything using them.

Consolidated Timelines. I made this back in 2013. I was trying to arrange all of Tolkien's timelines side by side. I did some weird things with numbers that I'm not sure I fully understand now, but maybe you can make sense of this or maybe you just want everything Tolkien said about timelines in one handy document. (Make a copy of the Consolidated Timelines.)

Fanfiction Archive Timeline. Made for the 2023 Fan Studies Network North America conference, this timeline-on-a-spreadsheet shows archives in the Tolkien and Harry Potter fandoms, multifandom archives, and social networks and when they came online, were active, became inactive, and went offline, along with data about affiliated communities, software, and rescue efforts. I update this timeline annually with that year's data and will continue to add new archives when I have enough data to do so. (Make a copy of the Fanfiction Archive Timeline spreadsheet.)

References to Sources in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. In this document, I record each time a narrator's source is mentioned or alluded to. Ideally, this will one day include The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as well! For now, it is just The Silmarillion for the selfish reason that I'm predominantly a Silmarillion researcher. (Make a copy of the References to Sources.)

Silmarillion Characters. A list of all of the characters in The Silmarillion, demographic data about them, the number of times they are mentioned, various aliases, and which "books" of The Silmarillion they appear in. The latter part is a work-in-progress. (Make a copy of Silmarillion Characters.)

Silmarillion Death Scenes (spreadsheet | document). For last year's Tolkien at UVM and Oxonmoot conferences, I collected every death scene in the Quenta Silmarillion and recorded various details about character demographics, cause of death, and grief and mourning rituals. (Make a copy of the spreadsheet. Make a copy of the document.)

The Silmarillion: Who Speaks? This is my newest project, which I hope to complete by the end of the year, documenting which characters get to speak actual words, the number of words they speak, and demographics about the speaking characters. Eventually, I would like to include as well characters who are mentioned as having spoken without being given actual dialogue, but one step at a time. Again, this is a work-in-progress. I have just started working on it. Come back in 2025 and, hopefully, there will be interesting stuff to see.

[cyberstudious]

✨ 📖 ✏️ studyblr masterpost jam ✏️ 📖 ✨

📌 what is this?

this is a masterpost jam, like a game jam or a hackathon or a writing challenge, but for creating masterposts! the goal is to share knowledge and resources, as well as connect with other cool folks on tumblr! this challenge was born out of the studyblr community, but anyone who loves learning is welcome to participate. each day, share a masterpost following the prompts below and tag your posts with the hashtag #studyblrmasterpostjam so we can all reblog them and share the love <3

🗓️ when is this happening?

the main challenge will run August 12th through August 18th, although you're welcome to participate on your own timeline :)

✨ everyone is encouraged to participate in whatever way is comfortable!

you don't have to be an academic or a professional! tell us about your special interest, a favorite hobby or craft, or something else that you like learning about!

even if you're a beginner, you still have a valuable perspective that's worth sharing (and writing posts for this challenge is a great way to do some research and learn!).

you don't have to do all of the days or share posts on the "right" day! pick and choose your faves if you want, combine things, and take as long as you need to put them together.

you don't have to make super long posts! if you have a single resource or tip to share, please do and we will appreciate it all the same <3

if you don't want to write any posts, you can still participate by reading posts that other people make and reblogging them so we can all learn from each other!

please feel free to interpret the prompts below in your own way and expand upon them! there are so many different topics out there and the questions I've written probably don't make sense for some of them, so take what makes sense and use the rest as inspiration!

✏️ prompts

[monday, august 12th] an intro to your topic or field of study

how would you describe this topic to someone who has never heard of it? what careers are available? what professional organizations/conferences are big? what journals do academics publish in? what are the big questions, goals, or challenges? what are the sub-fields/sub-topics/areas of specialization? what are some resources for learning about the field itself?

2. [tuesday, august 13th] books

textbooks, fiction that relates to the field, inspiring memoirs, biographies, art books, graphic novels, audiobooks… anything that you think is relevant to your topic and helpful!

3. [wednesday, august 14th] free resources

online things! resources that you might be able to get from your library! and and all ways to learn/study/practice that don't require money - feel free to get creative here and come up with some cool ideas beyond just links to websites!

4. [thursday, august 15th] notable figures

who has made important contributions to the field? is there anyone who made big contributions in the past that are now outdated or incorrect? who has done great things but been overlooked because of racism/sexism/ableism/etc.? who is making interesting contributions today? is there anyone in the field that you look up to? this is a great time to do some research if you don't already have some notable figures in mind!

5. [friday, august 16th] study tips

what are your favorite tips and ways to study this topic? are there lots of things you need to memorize or tricky concepts that are hard to understand at first? is there a skill that requires lots of practice? tell us about it and how you approach it!

6. [saturday, august 17th] tools of the trade

do you work with software? lab equipment? art supplies? your favorite pen and notebook? certain analysis frameworks or processes? tell us about them!

7. [sunday, august 18th] beginner's guide

what resources were most helpful when you were a beginner? what are the important concepts/techniques to start with? are there any prerequisite skills? also, include links to your previous masterposts!

remember to tag your posts with #studyblrmasterpostjam! if you want to participate, feel free to reblog this to spread the word. I'll see y'all on August 12th for the first masterpost!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

They're handing out patents for "inventions" that don't exist

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

Patent trolls produce nothing except lawsuits. Unlike real capitalist enterprises, a patent troll does not “practice” the art in its patent portfolio — it seeks out productive enterprises that are making things that real people use, and then uses legal threats to extract rents from them.

One of the most prolific patent trolls of the twenty-first century is Landmark Technology, whose U.S. Patent №7,010,508 nominally covers virtually anything you might do in the course of operating an online business: having a homepage, letting a customer login to your site, or having pages where customers can view and order products.

Landmark shook down more than a thousand productive businesses for $65,000 license-fees it demanded on threat of a patent lawsuit.

But that reign of terror is almost certainly over. When Landmark tried to get $65,000 out of Binders.com, the victim’s owner, NAPCO, went to court to invalidate Landmark’s patent, which never should have issued.

A North Carolina court agreed, and killed Landmark’s patent. Landmark faces further punishments in Washington State, where the attorney general has sued the company for violating state consumer protection laws in a case that has been removed to federal court.

Landmark’s patent contains “means-plus-function” claims. These a rentier’s superweapon, in which a patent can lay a claim over an invention without inventing or describing it. These claims are almost entirely used in software patents, something that has been blessed by the Federal Circuit, America’s most authoritative patent court.

A means-plus-function patent lets an “inventor” patent something they don’t know how to do. If these patents applied to pharma, a company could get a patent on “an arrangement of atoms that cure cancer,” without specifying that arrangement of atoms. Anyone who actually did cure cancer would have to pay rent to the patent-holder.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[krissiefox]

Here's a collection of sites where you can get sound effects and ambience for your projects!

https://freesound.org/ Freesound is a great resource for royalty free and copyright free sounds. Each sound comes with a creative commons license, some of which require credit, so make sure to check those!

https://www.sounds-resource.com/ Sounds resource is an archive of sounds from various video games and PC games, so while they can't be used for anything commercial, you may be able to use them for things like videos or fan games.

https://www.humblebundle.com/software Humble bundle regularly hosts fundraiser bundles of software and game design assets, including sound effects and ambience. You can also put money from your purchase forward the bundles charity. Sadly, humble bundle also puts out bundles of AI books, though, so it's up to you if you think the good outweighs the bad here.

Unreal Marketplace If your project is an Unreal Engine 4/5 game, check out what the Unreal marketplace has to offer! They offer both free and paid sound effect packs for your games. Some you can download as wav files without Unreal Engine installed, as well!

https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/ Another nice resource of free and royalty free sound effects! Attribution is not required, but appreciated!

https://www.youtube.com/ Youtube can be a great place to find copyright free/royalty free sounds too! To get the sounds form the videos, you can use a tool such as mediahuman's youtube-to-mp3 converter.

https://www.gamedevmarket.net/category/audio/sound-fx A paid store where you can find all sorts of sounds and ambience for your video game projects! Humble bundle seems to do bundles with them pretty often so you may want to look into that to save some money here, too.

https://sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc An archive of free and copyright free sound effect packs from the Game Developers Conference! A new pack seems to be added every year, too. :)

https://getsoundly.com/ Soundly is a program more than website, but I have tried it myself and you can get free sound effects from it, and you can get additional sounds if you pay for the pro version as well.

https://www.boomlibrary.com/ While this sound effect site is primarily a paid one, you can get a free monthly bundle of sound effects if you subscribe to their mailing list!

https://blipsounds.com/community-library/ Another great library of free sounds from the Blip Studios community!

https://www.zapsplat.com/ They require you to make an account before downloading anything, but this is another site with lots of free sound effects for your projects!

Itch Io Itch Io is another great resource for both free and paid sound effects!

[anarcho-physicist]

i helped* write a new physics textbook and it has a cool (and free) website: softmatterbook.online

*a little bit. The vast majority of the book was written by van Saarloos, Vitelli, and Zeravcic, but a whole bunch of people contributed little bits of writing (myself included) and are credited in the preface.

This book is an accumulation of some of the most fundamental results in soft matter physics, many of which were first discovered or derived very recently. The website hosts a bunch of extra resources (videos, notes, demos, etc.) sorted by the chapters of the book:

Fluid Dynamics

Elasticity

Brownian Motion

Colloids

Polymers

Liquid Crystals

Interfaces, Surfaces, & Membranes

Pattern Formation out of Equilibrium

Active Matter

From Designing Matter to Mimicking Life

It also lists a whole bunch of labs all around the world that are studying the sorts of systems described in the book, as well as mailing lists you can sign up for, conferences, workshops, youtube channels, and software packages. I'm absolutely biased (see below) but I think it's a really great resource for anybody interested in soft matter!

I spent the first year of my PhD helping to put this thing together. I translated research papers into problems, hunted for typos, and wrote most of the solutions in the instructor's manual. I don't make any money off the book sales (my PI told me they made it available for as cheap of a price as the publisher would allow), but my PhD stipend was funded for the year to work on this thing instead of having to TA.

I was ridiculously lucky to get the chance to work on this thing, even if at times it felt like learning how the academic sausage gets made.

[cee-grice]

writing accountability, day 33

OKAY so this is yesterday's post, actually - I finished writing super late (for me) and did not have the energy to make a post about it lol. but yeah idk I'm kinda at that place where I'm decently into a draft and am unsure how I should connect the beginning to the end lol. the dreaded middle, if you will 😩 decided I ought to try making a comprehensive timeline, so I'm experimenting with different software programs now to perhaps find something which would make the process easier? idk

word count: 1081/800

we're getting more into a science student's life, and I'm kinda using my knowledge of medical courses to plot out a vague roadmap for that lol. still discovering new aspects of the characters, which is fun:D ahhhh I already wanna write the second draft lol

snippet:

“It’s almost ten,” Florin said gently, and this, too, was new. Quilin had yet to decide how he felt about it. “These journals will be here tomorrow, too.” Quilin exhaled a sharp breath. “I told her I’d at the very least get a list to her before the weekend. I’m not yet trusted enough to write the overview on my own,” he muttered, “which will not change if I don’t prove I’m reliable.” “Quil. You’re literally a second year. You don’t need all this,” Florin said, gesturing to the books around Quilin. “There will be plenty of time to obsess over articles and conferences later.” Quilin bit into his lip, unable to meet Florin’s eyes. Later. Later. With Florin, ‘later’ was not an idea of a future. It was a reminder he may not, in fact, live long enough to see it.

ah, to live every day in constant fear of death. could not be me guys lol

see yaaa later today I think:DD

[blubberquark]

Are Game Blogs Uniquely Lost?

All this started with my looking for the old devlog of Storyteller. I know at some point it was linked from the blogroll on the Braid devlog. Then I tried to look at on old devlog of another game that is still available. The domain for Storyteller is still active. The devblog is gone.

I tried an old bookmark from an old PC (5 PCs ago, I think). It was a web site linked to pixel art and programming tutorials. Instead of linking to the pages directly, some links link led to a twitter threads by authors that collected their work posted on different sites. Some twitter threads are gone because the users were were suspended, or had deleted their accounts voluntarily. Others had deleted old tweets. There was no archive. I have often seen links accompanied by "Here's a thread where $AUTHOR lists all his writing on $TOPIC". I wonder if the sites are still there, and only the tweets are gone.

A lot of "games studies" around 2010 happened on blogs, not in journals. Games studies was online-first, HTML-first, with trackbacks, tags, RSS and comment sections. The work that was published in PDF form in journals and conference proceedings is still there. The blogs are gone. The comment sections are gone. Kill screen daily is gone.

I followed a link from critical-distance.com to a blog post. That blog is gone. The domain is for sale. In the Wayback Machine, I found the link. It pointed to the comment section of another blog. The other blog has removed its comment sections and excluded itself from the Wayback Machine.

I wonder if games stuff is uniquely lost. Many links to game reviews at big sites lead to "page not found", but when I search the game's name, I can find the review from back in 2004. The content is still there, the content management systems have been changed multiple times.

At least my favourite tumblr about game design has been saved in the Wayback Machine: Game Design Tips.

To make my point I could list more sites, more links, 404 but archived, or completely lost, but when I look at small sites, personal sites, blogs, or even forums, I wonder if this is just confirmation bias. There must be all this other content, all these other blogs and personal sites. I don't know about tutorials for knitting, travel blogs, stamp collecting, or recipe blogs. I usually save a print version of recipes to my Download folder.

Another big community is fan fiction. They are like modding, but for books, I think. I don't know if a lot of fan fiction is lost to bit rot and link rot either. What is on AO3 will probably endure, but a lot might have gone missing when communities fandom moved from livejournal to tumblr to twitter, or when blogs moved from Wordpress to Medium to Substack.

I have identified some risk factors:

Personal home pages made from static HTML can stay up for while if the owner meticulously catalogues and links to all their writing on other sites, and if the site covers a variety of interests and topics.

Personal blogs or content management systems are likely to lose content in a software upgrade or migration to a different host.

Writing is more likely to me lost when it's for-pay writing for a smaller for-profit outlet.

A cause for sudden "mass extinction" of content is the move between social networks, or the death of a whole platform. Links to MySpace, Google+, Diaspora, and LiveJournal give me mostly or entirely 404 pages.

In the gaming space, career changes or business closures often mean old content gets deleted. If an indie game is wildly successful, the intellectual property might ge acquired. If it flops, the domain will lapse. When development is finished, maybe the devlog is deleted. When somebody reviews games at first on Steam, then on a blog, and then for a big gaming mag, the Steam reviews might stay up, but the personal site is much more likely to get cleaned up. The same goes for blogging in general, and academia. The most stable kind of content is after hours hobbyist writing by somebody who has a stable and high-paying job outside of media, academia, or journalism.

The biggest risk factor for targeted deletion is controversy. Controversial, highly-discussed and disseminated posts are more likely to be deleted than purely informative ones, and their deletion is more likely to be noticed. If somebody starts a discussion, and then later there are hundreds of links all pointing back to the start, the deletion will hurt more and be more noticeable. The most at-risk posts are those that are supposed to be controversial within a small group, but go viral outside it, or the posts that are controversial within a small group, but then the author says something about politics that draws the attention of the Internet at large to their other writings.

The second biggest risk factor for deletion is probably usefulness combined with hosting costs. This could also be the streetlight effect at work, like in the paragraph above, but the more traffic something gets, the higher the hosting costs. Certain types of content are either hard to monetise, and cost a lot of money, or they can be monetised, so the free version is deliberately deleted.

The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to link between different sites, abandon a blogging platform or social network for the next thing, try to consolidate their writings by deleting their old stuff and setting up their own site, only to let the domain lapse. The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to mess with the HTML of their templates or try out different blogging software.

If content is spread between multiple sites, or if links link to social network posts that link to blog post with a comment that links to a reddit comment that links to a geocities page, any link could break. If content is consolidated in a forum, maybe Archive team could save all of it with some advance notice.

All this could mean that indie games/game design theory/pixel art resources are uniquely lost, and games studies/theory of games criticism/literary criticism applied to games are especially affected by link rot. The semi-professional, semi-hobbyist indie dev, the writer straddling the line between academic and reviewer, they seem the most affected. Artists who start out just doodling and posting their work, who then get hired to work on a game, their posts are deleted. GameFAQs stay online, Steam reviews stay online, but dev logs, forums and blog comment sections are lost.

Or maybe it's only confirmation bias. If I was into restoring old cars, or knitting, or collecting stamps, or any other thing I'd think that particular community is uniquely affected by link rot, and I'd have the bookmarks to prove it.

Figuring this out is important if we want to make predictions about the future of the small web, and about the viability of different efforts to get more people to contribute. We can't figure it out now, because we can't measure the ground truth of web sites that are already gone. Right now, the small web is mostly about the small web, not about stamp collecting or knitting. If we really manage to revitalise the small web, will it be like the small web of today except bigger, the web-1.0 of old, or will certain topics and communities be lost again?

[eponymous-rose]

It's another busy week, so I'm gonna do one of these again because it genuinely helps me keep track. Today in a nutshell!

Worked on some e-mails over breakfast - mostly coordinating for dinner tonight (I 100% did not forget to make the reservation, I promise, I just uhhhhhhhhhhh definitely didn't forget, that's for sure, and thank goodness for no particular reason that they happened to have one table left at 6PM), happily agreeing to write some reference letters for my PhD student's postdoc applications, rescheduling some meetings, setting new meetings, meetings meetings meetings. Oh, and booking tables for a couple of card shows this month! Off to work!

I get in a little later than I'd like and rush downstairs to the lounge to make my mug of tea pre-class, where I run into a student who just defended his PhD last week. I'm on his reading committee, so we agree to set up a time to go over my (honestly quite minor) comments on his dissertation. I also run into our incredible facilities guy, who follows up on some technical issues my students ran into over the weekend, hopefully resolved - I have five groups of three undergraduate students running their own weather stations all across the metro area of our city!

No time to enjoy the tea, so I leave it to steep a hilariously long time and rush back downstairs to teach my class! This year's students are truly exceptional - apparently over the weekend they all discovered that the Mac version of the data collection software for their weather stations is no longer supported, and they all independently coordinated to get PCs into the hands of all 5 groups. Let me tell you, when you're expecting to have to spend the first 20 minutes of the class troubleshooting and are instead greeted by a quiet, expectant two rows of faces, it's a great feeling.

Today's lecture is a topic I'm really passionate about - teaching students the "why" behind a lot of the statistical methods they've learned in the past (these are college seniors) and working on building a pipeline for exploratory data analysis. This isn't explicitly part of the syllabus, but my gosh, the quality of the final reports has improved sharply once I introduced these lectures. The students participated a bunch and happily launched into think-pair-share groups without my having to coordinate them. This is my sixth time teaching this class, and these students are far and away the best I've encountered. I am also very, very bad with names (and have a lot of anxiety about calling someone by the wrong name) but managed to successfully use an example in class in which I rattled off four students' names in a row, no effort needed. Phew.

As a side note, this has always been far and away my least-favorite class to teach, and this was the year I was gonna change that - I brought it to a curriculum development workshop last year and even presented on it at an education conference last week. But... dang, having strong students truly makes it effortless to enjoy teaching this class.

Back to my office, which smells like the double-spiced chai that has been steeping so long it's probably quadruple-spiced by now. Delicious. I have an hour until my next commitment, so I try to get ahead on grading the homework assignment my students handed in on Friday (all 15 of them handed it in on time!!!!). I also realize that this is my last block of free time until dinner, so I run downstairs to heat up my soup for lunch.

After getting through four of the assignments, it's time for a weather briefing (we have a team for a national forecasting competition), which means it's mostly just time for technical difficulties, but we make it through in the end and wrap up a bit early - back to grading! Students are doing great on this assignment overall, which is gratifying, but I make a note of a topic some of them are struggling on so I can mention it during Wednesday's class.

Weekly hour-long meeting with one of my Master's students! He talked about how he's taking a course on pedagogy to help with his work as a teaching assistant this quarter (!!) and he's been working through my first round of revisions of his very first first-author scientific journal article and had a few clarifying questions. I recommended some off-the-wall papers in the communications literature that I think would dovetail well with some of the discussion in his paper, and he was really jazzed to get to explore those. We also decided to get him set up with a million core-hours on a supercomputer so he can start on the next phase of his research - he promised to have the paper ready for the next set of revisions by the end of the week, so while I'm working on that, he can get familiar with the new system. I am also reminded that I really need to come up with some more substantial funding for him - currently he's working on a fellowship, but that runs out after three years.

After he heads out (a few minutes early, more grading time!) I get an e-mail from a scientist in Switzerland - she and I are working on getting her out here for a two-year postdoc job studying lightning with me. She's made revisions on her application for funding, so that's another thing for me to read over this week. I'm also reminded that I have to get back to an Italian grad student who wants to come visit my group for a year. Still figuring out the logistics on that one...

I also need to get back to a forestry service colleague of mine about getting the university my share of the funds for our fast-approaching field work using brand-new radar tech to study wildfire smoke plumes. I really, really need to get back to him this week - I think we're planning on flying out in April to start.

ALSO also this week, I have some pretty intense revisions of my own to deal with - I've been given this opportunity to write a huge review article, and I finally got it done back in December... only to learn that they want it to be about half that length. I'm going to take a swing at carving 5,000 words out of that behemoth.

AND a colleague and I are working on a resubmission of a grant to study thunderstorms in really unusual places, and I promised her I'd have a complete draft for her to read by the 7th. Phew. Good thing my week is only front-loaded with meetings.

Whoops, no more time to grade/read e-mails and schedule in my head. We have someone here today interviewing for a job on our faculty, and I'm one of the search committee members! Better dash downstairs to catch the candidate's talk. We have five two-day interviews planned for the next four weeks. Ouch.

Awesome talk by the candidate (we're very lucky to be spoiled for choice even in our very specialized field - we've whittled 86 qualified candidates down to five), and I launch straight from that into a student's PhD entrance exam. At this stage I should mention how much I genuinely loathe our PhD entrance exam, which is a pedagogical and logistical nightmare all around. This was a very popular opinion, which is why we as the faculty voted unanimously to completely change the process last year. Why are there students still taking this horrible exam???? Fuck if I know, man. At this point, it's voluntary to opt into it, and I am baffled and deeply frustrated at how many faculty members apparently encouraged their students to take it. Anyway, the student does a great job and we muddle through somehow, and now it's back up to my office to do some cramming on small-talk topics before a colleague and I host the faculty candidate for dinner!

A delightful dinner all around - my colleague is someone I was initially intimidated by (she's a giant in the field) but with whom I have since bonded, so we had some fun banter in the car and I think it helped the job candidate relax a little. We had some fun big-picture talk (and some less-fun big picture talk about news that dropped as we were eating) but mostly just talked about how much we love this part of the world. Good food, drink, and conversation. On the car ride home, I managed to troubleshoot a problem my undergrad research assistant was having with getting access to the supercomputer he needs for his project. Phew.

That's a long day, but good stuff all around!

[meg2md]

Operation: Trying To Get My Shit Together

It's my last week of nights, but like I said before, even though it's ass and I'm constantly in a state of existential dread, the hours are considerably better than normal day shift hours and I actually have a relative ton of free time as long as the floor isn't on fire and I'm not expecting transports. I read through all 41 volumes of Berserk in the past 3 weeks and have (almost) recovered from the emotional trauma it inflicted on me, and now I have one week left and no hyperfixations that call me too strongly. So I guess I can work on getting my life together lol.

Academic responsibilities:

M&M - draft due Tues, about half done

CREOG - test in January

ACOG - need to make AROM demos and borrow some amnihooks/FSEs, e-mail about borrowing CE demos, end of Oct

M3 surgical skills - submit simulation center form!!!!, next month

Urogyn - prepare for surgical cases next block by reading/watching videos, next week

Conferences: book hotels, flights; schedule reimbursement - this month

Research: meet about SDOH study paper; log into Athena to prep for data collection for Sedation project; touch base with JC about if AI study going anywhere

Fellowship: app in May, the biggest things are figuring out when/how to ask for LOR and drafting a personal statement. And then hoping my extracurriculars and research are enough :( also potentially an away rotation for end of March/early April - need to meet with MIGS ppl next week to discuss next steps

But the most stressful thing that's been weighing on me for MONTHS is my finances and disorganized spending. This week I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to get my budget it order. I can't even imagine how much my stress levels will improve if I don't have this crushing dread about my finances hanging over my head. This includes

Figuring out loans and how/when to pay them back

Budgeting software (I used YNAB previously)

Paying back my friend who lent me money for vet bills

Calling insurance to see why therapy costs so freaking much

My spending has been out of control!!!! It is like, the absolute worst, most damaging symptom of my ADHD that I don't have a good handle on yet, especially when I'm so dysregulated from nights. I thought I could work on it over the weekend but alllllll my limited, limited energy was spent on basic self-care (laundry, dishes, cleaning floor) and I had NOTHING left.

Anyway. Today is for starting on the budget journey and working on M&M. Maybe I'll log into YNAB and reset some things and just start over. ho hum

I'm just..... so beaten down, so tired. I have so much existential angst. Like idk that I'd want to do anything other than medicine in my life, but like..... what's the point of living ? Lol. Is this all there is? I don't have a partner, I don't have many friends near here. I don't want to not be alive but I like, need a reason to live

:')

[eretzyisrael]

Good News From Israel

In the 20th Sep 23 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include:

Israeli AI system identifies thousands of new effective combination cancer therapies.

Two examples of Israel’s inclusive army.

Israelis are helping survivors of the earthquake in Morocco.

More Israeli breakthroughs to prevent global hunger.

Israel is “on the global map” for trade links, electricity, and (we hope) peace.

Israeli innovations will protect the vulnerable in Oklahoma and Japan.

The “People of the Book” has a new National library.

Muslims and Jews pray together at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Read More: Good News From Israel

The Jewish New Year is a very appropriate time to celebrate more new exciting Israeli life-changing innovations and activities. These include new ways to combine cancer treatments to increase effectiveness with less side-effects. And a new Israeli treatment for MS is now available on-line. The US FDA have approved new Israeli software to guide cancer surgery and a new Israeli ultrasound-guided device to take biopsies. Meanwhile, Europe is funding trials of a new Israeli formula for feeding premature newborns. There's a new sign-language tour of Jerusalem's Tower of David; a new home for lone soldiers; the first visit to Israel by the UK's latest Foreign Minister; and the first official Israeli delegation to a conference in Saudi Arabia. Israelis have found new ways to communicate with plants; new ways to extract milk proteins from mushrooms and to generate new proteins using biotechnology; new ways to motivate children at school; and new protective fireproof uniforms. Recent diplomatic announcements opens up the prospect of a new age where Israel provides natural gas and electricity to Europe and becomes the center of a new trade route linking Europe, the Middle East and India. Meanwhile, numerous new business ventures have just been launched by Israeli startups. Jerusalem, the eternal city, continues to be renewed as the rebuilt Tiferet synagogue nears completion. Finally, visitors to the Kotel (Western Wall) had a new experience - the sight of Jews and Muslims praying together. It brings new hope for the New Year. The photo (TY Sharon) is of the inside of Jerusalem's new National Library of Israel, which will be opening in October.  Wishing those that celebrate it a peaceful and meaningful Yom Kippur and a very happy Sukkot / Tabernacles

[ettawritesnstudies]

9 people I'd like to know better tag

Thanks for the tag @moondust-bard!

current book: I'm about to start reading White Oaks by Jordan King for my indie author interviews/book reviews on my blog, and listening to The Weaver and the Witch Queen by Genevieve Gornichec because I have a road trip to a work conference tomorrow and so I'm going to put that on in the car.

Current fic: I'm not actively reading or writing anything right now, but I have an old friend in the Newsies fandom who's continuing to put out chapters of a 300K+ fic that I love called Something Worth Winning and so I've been meaning to catch up on that. PJean over on ff.net and I think she's got an AO3 now? It's been a while...

Currently watching: Twelve's run in Doctor Who and the Clone wars in rotation.

Next on my watchlist: I'm about the start the new Fallout show tonight! Eric's been playing through the games recently but we've put off watching the show until my edit was done.

Current hyperfixation: I had Rolling With Difficulty as a hyperfixation until I got buried in Runaways writing, so I lost interest for a little bit while I shifted focus onto my work, but I'm hoping to get back into it!

Favorite color: Greens of all sorts!

Sweet, spicy, or savory: sweet, I joke I'm basically a hummingbird in human form.

Relationship status: I just got engaged over Easter! I don't talk a lot about him here because he values his privacy, but my fiance, Eric, has been such a wonderful support through all of my writing and publishing endeavors. We're in the middle of wedding planning right now, and if all goes according to plan, we'll get married next summer, which is right in the middle of all the promotion and distribution work for putting out Runaways in October. It's going to be such a busy (and expensive) year, and I was like "I can push the book release out, I guess :I" but he refused to let me do that because he knows how important it is to me and encouraged me to plan a Kickstarter for the spring like an absolute madman. Yesterday I complained that the formatting programming software I like is only available for Macs but fuck apple and he started looking up how to install a virtual machine without a second's hesitation. He's so wonderful and I don't know what I'd do without him.

Last song: The Old Witch Sleep and Good Man Grace by the Amazing Devil

Last thing I googled: Stegosaurus dinosaur

Skill I’d like to learn: oh god so many. Top of the list right now is songwriting. I've got dozens of lyrics cluttering up my notes app and I'm dreadful at turning them into complete songs. Also Animation!

Best advice: Recently, I've seen a lot of people in my life struggling with the 20-something capitalist-hellscape 1st-world-problem flavor of existentialist-depression and look, it gets to me too, but you guy have got to relearn the virtue of gratitude. On one hand, toxic positivity sucks and you're allowed to bitch and moan about your situation, but doomerism feels infectious and there is so much to be thankful for when you stop and take the time to appreciate what you've been given.

I'm turning into my mom.

[danniswrites]

My writing turned totally around in Jan 2022. I was editing my latest NaNoWriMo project, and decided to check out a resource I found on nanowrimo.org to help me. Basically, I wanted help to write a dynamite blurb, or tagline. When I create a new story, I use a LibreOffice template I created to put my title page, copyright page with a sentence describing what the story's about, TOC, and a dummy first paragraph with my first dummy paragraph heading.

I wanted to know how to write better taglines.

So I read the article above and the light bulb went on! Simple. Elegant. Plotting.

I had always been a pantser. Never planned any part of my stories, and I have about 650 of 'em, half not even to the first draft. Dedicated pantser. In my teen years, I hated English literature in 8th grade even though I knew I needed to know how to plot, but all the analysis of the books we read [and I enjoyed reading them] just made me feel like, 'I'm too stupid to learn all this.'

Now, I'm reading these 10 steps and had an epiphany!

So, I broke down Step 1 and made it into my worksheet for coming up with taglines.

Here's how I think about those 15 max words to get it done:

One Sentence Summary: Adj.+Noun+Verb+Obj [Worker] [Action] [Effect] in 15 words or less Character With Most To Lose: What They Want:

So, for Adia, Scientist, here's what I came up with:

Discouraged scientist must discover a new fuel so her colony can escape from war.

I write science fiction and I loved chemistry in college, so, hey, I like formulas. I don't want my writing to sound like it came from a formula, but if you look at a lot of genres, there is one.

If you read enough romances, like my sister did, you figure out there's a pattern you can follow as a writer. I was there when she did. She went on to become famous and actually got an award presented to her in New York from her idol, Barbara Cartland at a writer's conference.

I--uh, I'm the non-famous sister who self-publishes on Amazon. But I enjoy my writing life, and though I do love to put romance in my books, romance writing is not my thing.

However, if you're like me and you want to improve your writing, Snowflake Method does work for a lot of us. And, if you buy one of Randy Ingermanson's very entertaining books, you get a free copy of his Snowflake Pro software, which walks you through each step and lets you see what you wrote in the previous step.

I don't do all 10 steps. Let's face it, I'm a plantser now. I'm not that meticuolous and organized. But, I do most of them, because Steps 1-5 give me a nice head start. And, Steps 3, 5 and 7 concentrate on your characters. Characters make your story. If you don't have a character that grabs your reader from the first chapter, why will they want to read your story? You have to have someone to care about and they have to have something happening that attracts the reader.

Now that I had a loose framework for my stories, I needed to [finally] learn something about plot structure more than the beginning, 3 disasters, and an ending. Randy does an excellent job of simplifying 3 act structure [though there are other methods such as PlotDot or Save The Cat that also work with Snowflake Method].

Another resource I found while exploring resources in the Now What? Revision pages on nanowrimo.org was K. M. Weiland's wonderful site:

This lady puts 3 act structure into terms that I can understand, and she has a vast database of books and movies that she's analyzed for us. If you think 3 act structure is complicated and boring, try reading a little of your favorite on this list:

I love the Marvel movies, so here's how she summarized The Avengers.

And she even mentions how what works in this movie would not, in a book. This is something I read time and time again about science fiction writing. Science fiction movies are not 'true' science fiction, for the most part. Star Wars is fantasy set on other planets. Star Trek has science in it, but again, is science fantasy.

In science fiction, science drives the story more than characters or plot. Though, to make my science fiction more accessible to a wider audience, I choose to concentrate on psychology, particularly interpersonal relationships. I do make sure that my science is feasible and believable, and explain it simply. And, I do my research.

So, when writing a book, it's good to see analyses like this of movies, but remember, it's different for books.

A friend who was also a producer told me, for a two-hour movie, you have to choose about two chapters for your script. The director has to insert some points to connect the dots. That's why many movies 'aren't like the book' they're based upon. It's an art to take a book and condense it like that so it still makes sense and absorbs the viewer.

But, we writers can learn much from movies about character development and how to get our readers involved with them, and with our stories.

[cyberstudious]

A Beginner's Guide to Learning Cybersecurity

I created this post for the Studyblr Masterpost Jam, check out the tag for more cool masterposts from folks in the studyblr community!

(Side note: this post is aimed towards the technical side of security, rather than the governance/management side, because the tech stuff is what I'm familiar with.)

Where do I start?

Cybersecurity is a specialization of general tech & therefore builds on some concepts that you'll need to know before you can dive deep into security. It's good to have a background in and understand:

how computers & operating systems work

how to use Linux

computer networking & basic protocols

If you're serious about learning cybersecurity, it can be helpful to look at certifications. Even if you don't want to get certified or take the exam (they can get expensive), they provide you with a list of topics that you can use to guide your self-study. And if you want to find a job, a certification is practically required for getting your foot in the door.

I personally recommend the CompTIA series of certifications, because they're well-recognized and I think they expose you to a good breadth and depth of material to get you started. Start with the A+ certification if you have zero tech background. Start with the Network+ certification if you've never taken a networking course. Once you get your basic computer and networking knowledge down, then you can jump into security. The Security+ is a good starting point.

Do I need to know how to code?

No, but it would be really really helpful. You don't have to be a skilled software engineer, but understanding the basics and being able to write small scripts will give you a solid foundation.

From Daniel Miessler's post How to Build a Cybersecurity Career:

You can get a job without being a programmer. You can even get a good job. And you can even get promoted to management. But you won’t ever hit the elite levels of infosec if you cannot build things. Websites. Tools. Proofs of concept. Etc. If you can’t code, you’ll always be dependent on those who can.

How do I gain skills?

Play Capture the Flag (CTF) games.

Stay up to date with security news via an RSS reader, podcasts, or whatever works for you. Research terms that you're unfamiliar with.

Watch conference talks that get uploaded to YouTube.

Spin up a VM to practice working with tools and experiment on your own computer.

There are lots of brilliant, generous people in cybersecurity who share their knowledge and advice for free. Find their blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels. Look for local meetups in your area.

I'm still relatively new to the field, but I have a general knowledge of lots of different things, so feel free to send me an ask and I can probably help point you to some resources. We're all in this together!

Previous Cybersecurity Masterposts

An Introduction to Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity Book Masterpost

Free Cybersecurity Learning Resources Masterpost

Masterpost of Study Tips for Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity Tools Masterpost

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in the #StudyblrMasterpostJam this week! It was wonderful to see what other studyblr folks are passionate about. The jam technically ends today but there are no official rules, so if you've been thinking about writing a masterpost, this is your sign!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Unity's feudal gambit as class struggle between rentiers and capitalists

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The outcome of this struggle is what determines whether the digital society is capitalist or feudalistic. Think of the recent grab by games toolsmith Unity, who have long extracted rents from the capitalists who used their tools to make games. Unity is “software as a service,” which means that you have to buy again it every month, for so long as your capitalist enterprise is in business.

The capitalists who rent Unity’s tools had resigned themselves to this, but then Unity went one step further, and demanded a royalty (a word with decidedly feudal origins!) every time a game made with Unity’s tools was distributed. The outcry was ferocious, and Unity eventually backed down, but even as they did, company executives insisted that they would continue to pursue a “sustainable system” for “shared success.”

“Shared success” is a pure expression of feudalism. Unity was not proposing a joint venture, where they would supply the capital to produce games and share the risk of that capital being competed away by a better games-maker.

Instead, Unity wants a rentier’s bargain: if the capitalist it rents do does well, so does Unity. But if the capitalist does badly — if a games-maker loses out to a competitor who is also a tenant of Unity’s IP — then unity also does well. Heads capitalists lose, tails the rentier wins.

When Unity speaks of this system being “sustainable,” they mean that they will seek to maximize the total amount of profits made by capitalists who rent its tools. Because the higher the total profits are, the more rent it can extract.

Profits are highest where competition is lowest. It’s in Unity’s interest for a single company — or a cartel of companies — to control entire genres or modes of games, and to be protected from innovators who might enter the market with better offers. Unity wants to pick some winners and bind them to its fields.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!