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OH GUYS

SOMEONE POKE THE QUEEN, SHE'S FALLING ASLEEP

I didn't intend to get up for the wedding, but I woke up at about ten past so I thought I'd put it on while I went about my morning. Nice they let William and Kate sit down, but I'm not sure in HM's case a comfy chair was wise. On the other hand, if you can't have a nap during the torturously long wedding of your own grandson, as queen, where can you get some sleep?

Actually I really like this sermon or introduction or whatever the heck it is. Joy and celebration are the right things to speak on when people are gettin' hitched.

This men's choir is getting an awful lot of airtime for people who aren't getting married.

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Well, with the obligatory wedding post out of the way, it's time for a FRIDAY PHOTO POST.

No icons this week, because I'm a slacker, but lots and lots of pictures. I did a lot of stuff this week, really.

The Art Institute has a new ad campaign...sit on your very own throne, on the El.

University of Chicago! The sculpture in the foreground is a monument to some very important atomic thing which happened there in the thirties. I do not think it's coincidence that it looks like a) a mushroom cloud and b) a football helmet, because the very important atomic thing happened in a lab under what was the sports stadium at the time. The dome in the background is the entrance to the new UNDERGROUND LIBRARY they're building.

Academia says haaaaay. Don't mock him either -- there are dragons nearby, possibly to protect from thieves.

Inside the Harper Library there are wacky staircases and heads on the wall.

Captain Jack visits the Chernobyl Exhibit.

The Oriental Institute Museum has the best Open Sign ever. Inside there's a giant Lamassu and a Great Big Bull. You can't really tell the scale of the bull, but those windows are about eight feet, I think.

Lunch at Medici. Their fries make me happy in ways I can't even explain.

I didn't actually visit the Smart Museum of Art for the standing collection, but this new piece, composed of broken vases, was oddly satisfying.

And then there was THE TUBE OF EGGS.

I talked a little bit about this earlier -- an artist named Erwin Wurm hung a sweater so it looked like a urinal, and then encouraged others to make their own. Mine is...not as skilled, but I was nervous.

FROZEN CUSTARD. It's really basically like gelato. Speaking of dessert, these are the cookies they gave out in the cafeteria on Good Friday.

When I went to the Money Museum I got a bag of Fed Shreds, shredded money they give out in sample packs. You asked...here it is.

Not the clearest picture, but this is the "life cycle of a dollar bill" device.

The Money Museum seemed to specialise in "wartime" currency. For example, after Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1942, the government issued bills printed with Hawaii on them, I'm still not entirely sure why. Apparently the residents weren't either, and "resisted" the new currency strongly. Another example is the postage bill, which was issued during the civil war when people began hoarding coins. It was supposed to only be good for stamps, but was used like currency, as in the case of this Ten Cent Bill. It's a lovely piece of engraving, anyway.

And then there was the million dollar cube, filled with a million in one-dollar bills.

Now THAT is a street sign.

I ride past this graffiti twice a day, on my way to and from work, and it always makes me smile in confusion. It's so whimsical, and yet BAFFLING. (The caption reads "goose on the loose".)

I love it when library books have random margin scribbles.

This past week, Tim DeKay used Jeff Eastin's twitter to run a caption contest. My interpretation of the photo was, well, different. Then someone sent me a photo of Benedict Cumberbatch holding a rubiks cube, and I decided to give it the White Collar treatment. It was not universally popular...but this one was. (I don't know who the woman is, but that's James Gandolfino's hand, I think.)

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I really need to come up with a better way to document my reading habits than the "book reviews" tag. Maybe I need to actually use my goodreads account or something. Because sometimes you just don't want to do a review!

But I will. The theme of this review: Lawrence Block's "Telling Lies For Fun And Profit" is a perfectly decent book except for two things.

a) This is stuff I learned when I was nineteen. This kind of book was once necessary, before the web, but now everyone and their brother blogs about the harrowing process of writing and publishing fiction. And the thing is, it's basically just a collection of well-arranged columns he wrote for a magazine, so it's not a lot of new ground even when it was first published.

b) He doesn't apparently know about fanfic, and he bases a lot of his teaching on the idea that writing isn't fun or something anyone would ever do for free. Which...bzuh?

In chapter eight or nine he said that it's a good idea to stop reading books that you don't enjoy or aren't getting anything from. So I stopped reading. And that sounds so catty, but I don't need to be told "read a lot" or "make other people read your work" or "don't get discouraged when someone criticises your work". I know these things.

Actually that bit did get me thinking. Are we all familiar with the Table Of Praise And Criticism?

When I was seven I had a teacher who had a really high opinion of the cognitive reasoning skills of seven year olds (to be fair I was pretty bright). He taught us about the Table Of Praise And Criticism, which I think is the bedrock upon which my ability to accept criticism is based:

I'm not sure if "unhelpful" was the term, but it's less stigmatised than "useless" which is what I suspect my teacher used.

There are four forms of feedback: Constructive Praise ("I liked the way you described the tree on page five"), Constructive Criticism ("I think your storyline gets lost in chapter four"), Unhelpful Praise ("This was great!"), and Unhelpful Criticism ("You suck"). This is nicely organised and appeals to me.

We spent a lot of time in class learning to identify and separate Constructive from Unhelpful, which gets more and more complicated the older you get. The nice thing about the table is that it minimizes the value judgment placed on the artist, because it's focused on evaluating the feedback and the person providing the feedback.

Unhelpful Praise is not necessarily a bad thing. Everyone likes to be told they're awesome. If it doesn't contribute to the development of the artist, it doesn't actively hurt them, either. On the other hand, there was no greater sin as a seven year old than committing Unhelpful Criticism. Because unhelpful criticism reflects badly on you as a person, that all you can think of to do is be mean.

The point is, really, that while you do put yourself into your work, criticism of the work is not criticism of the person, and the only valuable criticism is specific, direct, and aimed at improving the work rather than denigrating it (because that's Unhelpful Criticism).

Um, so it's easy to say "Don't listen to the haters", but it's much more helpful to give people a way to separate useful from hateful, and a framework within which to defend themselves.

Well, that came out not at all like a book review.

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Photo from the 2010 San Diego Comic Con.

Sam: It's hard to be ashamed of RPS when it basically writes itself.
Junie: "Dammit, Bomer! Not in front of the fangirls!"
Sam: "Well, yes, I'd love to try it out, but I'm not sure I'm that flexible."
Junie: "But where are we going to get a Playstation vibrator peripheral and a set of nipple clamps? Wait, what am I saying? I forgot where I was for a second."
Sam: "I'll get the action figures."
Junie: And scene.

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Jesus Christ, how do I get roped into these things...

So, Claire was reading some fanfic and got all "PUT PORN IN, FANDOM!" and I was like "If you wrote it, then you shoulda put some porn in it." and then Foxy was all, "I smell a song parody."

And apparently I'm like some kind of wind-up toy, when someone tells me to do something I just bumble off and do it.

So Foxy and Claire and Anya and I wrote a song. This chick named Beyonce helped.

DISCLAIMER: We still love the gen! This isn't meant to be like, a polemic or something. It's just a filk about porn.

( To the tune of Single Ladies... )