Jekyll2022-04-04T15:07:12-05:00http://garbled.benhamill.com/feed.xml203 Non-Authoritative InformationThe occasional blatherings of Ben Hamill.Ben HamillSometimes, something is so unimportant that you should spend a bunch of time on it.2022-04-04T13:00:00-05:002022-04-04T13:00:00-05:00http://garbled.benhamill.com/2022/04/04/work-on-unimportant-things<p><em>This post was originally written for the internal engineering blog at my
current employer, <a href="https://auctane.com/about-us/">Auctane</a>, and was published on
2021-10-18. It has been edited for clarity to an outside audience.</em></p>
<p>Often it is a good idea for a group of people working on something together to
focus most on the thing that sets them apart. A business should often focus
effort on the things in their domain. A team shouldn’t get distracted dealing
with things outside their area of responsibility, etc. Sometimes, however, there
are things that are outside everyone’s domain and everyone needs to pay
attention to them. Before we get into a tangent about caring for the commons
and, like, climate change or something, let’s talk about software teams.</p>
<p>I’ve never been on an engineering team where I would say our core remit was
“deployment” or “tests”. Neither have I ever been on an engineering team that
could entirely ignore those kinds of concerns. What I <em>have</em> seen a lot is
engineering teams that understand those things to be outside their appropriate
realm of focus, but then construe that to mean that those things are unimportant
and so only pay as much attention to them as they have to to make some immediate
pain go away. Over the medium term, this ends up meaning that those things
unexpectedly steal time from them and interrupt things the team <em>should</em> be
focused on.</p>
<p>I think that’s a mistake. Every time deployment breaks and you don’t know how to
fix it (having to get someone else to do so) or puts production in a weird state
(worse: causes an incident or data inconsistencies) or even just gives you
confusing output or silently fails or… <em>any</em> of that. Dealing with that is time
working on something unplanned. If you always just kick the can down the road,
it’s just going to come up again (maybe exploding in someone else’s face).</p>
<p>Instead, I think we should try to remember that ownership includes a
responsibility for the dependencies we add to our code whether direct (like an
HTTP library or the service we’re calling using it) or indirect (like your
deployment infrastructure or production execution environment). In order to
achieve true quality of service (both for users <em>and</em> owners), we have to
address those responsibilities.</p>
<h2 id="switching-costs">Switching costs.</h2>
<p>One might ask what the big deal is if it takes 10 minutes to fix the build every
so often. We’re all familiar with <a href="https://xkcd.com/1205/">that one XKCD comic about the cost/benefit
analysis of automating things</a> right? And I think many
folks have sort of taken it as shorthand that automating things that save a
little time is <em>never</em> worth it.</p>
<p>On the one hand, the comic is making a more subtle point (if you can save 5
minutes weekly, it makes sense to spend <em>several</em> working days automating a
task). On the other hand, it’s just a comic made for laughs. <a href="http://catb.org/jargon/html/O/on-the-gripping-hand.html">On the gripping
hand</a>, it leaves out a
critical time cost: task switching.</p>
<p>Say your deploy process is made mostly of duct tape and bailing wire, and
written by someone else so no one on your team deeply understands it. If you
spend time writing code to fix a bug but then the build breaks when you make
your PR now you have to do a bunch of context switching.</p>
<p>You have to stop thinking about your bug, find and/or load up context about the
build and how it works, figure out how to fix it, then if you’ve broken any
tests or get any substantive PR comments, you have to load your bug context back
up to make those changes. So the cost wasn’t just the time it took to fix the
build itself, but all the context loading and unloading.</p>
<p>This holds for all the little things around our technical artifacts that we
ignore until they cause us pain and then only do enough work to make the pain go
away.</p>
<h2 id="confidence-in-code">Confidence in code.</h2>
<p>Switching costs are a pretty immediate, tactical cost. I also think there’s a
more long term cost we pay being responsible for things that are unreliable in
terms of stress or uncertainty or debugging. Say a service’s database goes down
and this causes the service to get into a bad state that will need manual
intervention once the database is healthy again. That’s just one more thing to
remember and do when you’re already responding to a stressful incident. Spending
the time up front to ensure the service recovers on its own lifts that burden.</p>
<p>If you make a habit of taking care of details like this you end up shortening
the time it takes to find and fix bugs and incidents alike. Especially for
services, which inherently exist in the complex world that is a distributed
system, it can be very useful to have confidence around the sort of “basic”
things like resiliency and communication between services when there is a
problem with the interaction between more than one system, especially if owned
by more than one team.</p>
<h2 id="in-practice">In practice.</h2>
<p>Just to belabor the point some more, let’s take another couple of short examples
of what this sort of thing might look like in practice.</p>
<p>Take a backend service publishing Kafka messages that other backend services
will consume when some business object is persisted in a database. It bears
asking, “what if the Kafka broker is down?”. Is it OK to drop messages in that
case? Should you look into a dead-letter queue or similar tool? What guarantees
are you making about the consistency of your database and the messages you
produce? If you are mindful in approaching these sorts of topics you can decide
when to spend the time making it so that you won’t have to go hunting down “I
saved this record, but it’s not showing up in analytics” sorts of questions at
some unexpected future date.</p>
<p>Or consider a single page application powered by React. It bears asking, “what
if the user is on an iffy network?”. Is it OK to have the site fail to work? Do
we need to show the user some concrete notification that things are weird? Are
retries good enough to cover the problem? Can we rely on local storage to store
state until things are more reliable? How valuable is the ability to mask
service outages from our users? If you begin with this kind of question, it can
save you a lot of time later compared to bolting offline support onto an
existing application.</p>
<p>These sorts of questions apply to a wide variety of common situations from the
afore-mentioned CD and CI examples to making synchronous HTTP requests between
services, the shape of our API request and response bodies, accessibility
concerns or dealing with a variety of viewport sizes from users.</p>
<p>The core value, here, is that the things that your systems rely on which are
outside your team’s domain, which are “boring” and incidental to the business
domain should actually <em>be boring</em>. Strive for them never to page the on-call
engineer, never to be the source of lost or inconsistent data, never frustrate a
user. This may mean spending quite a bit of time on them up front, but the thing
you buy with that is not having to think about them again for a considerable
amount of time.</p>
<p><em>Thanks to Dawn Hammond for sharing her front-end perspective on these topics.</em></p>Ben HamillThis post was originally written for the internal engineering blog at my current employer, Auctane, and was published on 2021-10-18. It has been edited for clarity to an outside audience.Individuals don’t own things; teams do.2021-09-24T13:56:42-05:002021-09-24T13:56:42-05:00http://garbled.benhamill.com/2021/09/24/teams-own-things<p><em>This post was originally written for the internal engineering blog at my
current employer, <a href="https://auctane.com/about-us/">Auctane</a>, and was published on
2021-07-01. It has been edited for clarity to an outside audience.</em></p>
<p>In mid-June 2021, one of our engineering leaders shared a link to an article
titled ‘<a href="https://www.sicpers.info/2021/06/there-is-no-us-in-team/">There is no “us” in
team</a>’. It links to a
previous, related article by the same author, which I also recommend. They both
address a topic I’ve thought a lot about over the years: Teams that aren’t
teams.</p>
<h2 id="lets-review">Let’s review.</h2>
<p>You should really go read both
<a href="https://www.sicpers.info/2021/06/there-is-no-us-in-team/">other</a>
<a href="https://www.sicpers.info/2021/03/one-person-per-task/">articles</a>, but in case
you have and it’s been a while, let’s review the high level assertion: The most
common way we map work-to-be-done onto software teams causes problems. The 1:1
locking of tasks:developers seems like it means all human resources are
maximally utilized at all times, but it creates information and ownership silos
within a team, which means people do skimmy, “LGTM” code reviews, work
priorities get mixed up with capacity, people develop fiefdoms within codebases,
etc. The assertion is that these problems all stem from treating each software
engineer as a lane of work, rather than a member of a holistic team.</p>
<h2 id="a-maxim">A maxim.</h2>
<p>Assuming you’re bought in on the above problem, what do we do about it? What
does it look like, in practice, to have solved this problem. For this, I’ve been
using this maxim:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Individuals don’t own things; teams do.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Maxims, however, are terrible and great. They’re great because they’re pithy and
can help you remember what they mean, but they’re terrible because if you don’t
already know what they mean they do nothing to explain it to you. So let’s break
it down a bit.</p>
<p>First, let’s read “own” as broadly as possible. This doesn’t just mean “own” in
the sense of understanding a certain section of the codebase, say, or even the
broader ownership of operating something in production. It’s meant to encompass
the <em>even broader</em> ownership of a subdomain of the business. It means ownership
in a technical sense <em>and</em> a business sense (and design, and security, and… it’s
all-encompassing). It should be clear how monumental of a task this ownership
is.</p>
<p>So now we can turn to the rest of the maxim. With such a wide scope of
ownership, <em>of course</em> no one individual can own all that. But all of those
things do need to be owned together or else you find things falling through the
cracks and not being taken care of. Which leads to the idea that a group of
people need to own all that together.</p>
<p>The word “together” is doing a lot of work in that previous sentence, so let’s
examine that a bit more. If you arrive at a place where Alice owns some parts of
your system, Bob owns other parts and Chiwetel owns yet another part, etc. then
you’ve not changed anything. This “together” assumes that everyone will be
involved in and expected to know a bit about everything. Ideally this includes
topics like design, security, product goals, etc.</p>
<p>This means that you don’t want teams where individuals are focused on what their
next task is, but where the whole team is focused on a single, larger objective
and discusses internally how best to break up the work to meet that objective.
One objective per team at a time also means that the order of work will be based
on dependency between work, not business priority (often a gut check) of wildly
differing tasks.</p>
<h2 id="what-it-looks-like">What it looks like.</h2>
<p>What does it look like when a team is truly working and owning things together?
What behaviors are evident? A lot of us have some similar habits because they’re
so endemic in the industry. Here are some of the habits I’ve had to untrain (or
still struggle to untrain) in myself and what I’ve tried to replace them with on
teams that have achieved this kind of unity. There may be others. All of them
fall out of two overall goals: <strong>seek shared understanding across the whole
team</strong> and <strong>focus the whole team on a single goal at a time</strong>.</p>
<p>Previously I would focus on the tickets dropped into a sprint: what they meant,
how to do them, how hard they were, who would work them, how important they were
relative to each other. The replacement behavior is to question each item of
work you’re presented with (whether tickets or not, whether in a sprint
framework or not). Drive conversations towards the team’s current, single goal
and focus work on that goal. Now your work items should largely have a single
business priority because they all serve the same goal. Now everyone’s work is
moving in the same direction, so everyone should be invested in what everyone
else is working on.</p>
<p>Another habit I try to avoid is a preference to work on things I’m already
familiar with, whether an area of a codebase or a type of work. Sometimes, we
need to play to our weaknesses. If we don’t, we end up creating single points of
failure on every team where only one person is a subject matter expert on any
given part of the codebase. It’s OK (even for really experienced engineers!) to
ask for help or to go slower than you’re used to. Spreading the knowledge and
understanding across the team is more important for long term velocity than how
quickly this one ticket ships.</p>
<p>It’s also very common to focus on shipping the current work item as fast as
possible. Instead, it’s important to have a longer-term view of how the work
fits into the overall objective and the way the current objective fits into the
team’s holistic ownership story. Slowing down to do something the right way
often saves time and headache later on, which is more important for a team’s
productivity (and happiness in my experience). This may include slowing down to
<em>figure out</em> what the right way is and having a team-wide discussion about it
before you can even approach the code. I like two sayings on this topic: “You
can save hours and hours of discussion with just a few short weeks of work,” and
“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”.</p>
<p>It can be tempting to avoid reviewing pull requests for things I don’t
understand well or give cursory PRs to things I’m not involved with. If the
whole team is focused on a single goal at a time, you’ve now minimized the
number of PRs for things you’re not involved with. The next part takes a certain
grit: Focus on this code you don’t know well and how it changes. Ask questions
before making recommendations. I think “I don’t understand what this is doing”
is a reasonable PR comment and an important one for the PRs-as-knowledge-sharing
benefit of PRs.</p>
<p>I try to avoid almost all 1:1 communication, honestly. Instead, more and more, I
prefer to address groups, rather than individuals. Internally, this might mean
that if Chiwetel was the last one to touch a module that I have questions about,
rather than DMing him, I’d ask in our team channel. This way Alice can at least
overhear if not weigh in with an opinion or further questions. Externally, this
means doing things like rotating which team member represents the team in
meetings. Ideally, every member of the team should have the knowledge needed to
report on the team’s progress against their current goal (skill in communicating
it is a separate matter, of course).</p>
<p>In general, develop and express an opinion on what the team should be working
on. What things are most important. Ideally, you can build a sense of team
beyond just engineering and involve product folks in discussions of technical
debt that exists or how your deployment pipeline needs to improve. If you listen
to the needs of others and express your own, the team succeeds together
predictably.</p>Ben HamillThis post was originally written for the internal engineering blog at my current employer, Auctane, and was published on 2021-07-01. It has been edited for clarity to an outside audience.2020 Reading in Review2021-01-26T10:00:00-06:002021-01-26T10:00:00-06:00http://garbled.benhamill.com/2021/01/26/2020-reading-in-review<p>Welp. <em>That</em> was certainly… a year. Let’s talk about books! I read <em>way</em> fewer
things this year than I did <a href="/2020/01/06/2019-reading-in-review">last year</a>, for
reasons that I’m sure many of us did way less of shit in 2020 than they
expected.</p>
<p>As a reminder: I keep a one-line entry in a journal and record the title, author
and date that I finish each thing. I don’t include comics or childrens’ books.</p>
<h2 id="the-numbers">The Numbers</h2>
<p>Let’s do some numbers, even thought they don’t mean a ton. The parenthetical
numbers are 2019’s stats.</p>
<p><strong>Number of Things Read:</strong> 16 (47)</p>
<p><strong>Reading Time</strong> (in days including weekends, during which I generally don’t
read):</p>
<ul>
<li>Maximum: 174* days (<em>The Phoenix Princess</em>)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median">Median</a>: 11 days (<em>Jacobin 35</em> and
<em>Catalyst Vol. 3 No. 3</em>)</li>
<li>Minimum: 1† day (<em>The Five Dysfunctions of a Team</em>)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics)">Mode</a>: 4 days (<em>The
Consuming Fire</em>, <em>Books and Bone</em> and <em>Obsidio</em>)</li>
</ul>
<p>* This maximum is in error. Because I don’t record the starting date for books,
if there’s a gap, it gets added to the next book I read. Normally that’s not a
big problem because gaps are a few days at most. In April 2020, however, I was
part way through <em>Who Fears Death</em> by Nnedi Okorofor when I realized I’d been
“reading” it for weeks and I probably wasn’t in the right emotional place for
such an intense book. So I picked up <em>How to Talk so Kids Will Listen & Listen
so Kids Will Talk</em> by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish because my mom gifted it to
me. That proved too dry for the emotional and mental state I was in. So
eventually, I picked up <em>The Phoenix Princess</em> and absolutely blazed through it.
I just have no idea how fast I read it, so I can’t correct the numbers. Also,
FWIW, I <em>do</em> intend to return to those other books. Just… later.</p>
<p>† I think this minimum is also probably in error. I do remember that the first,
maybe two thirds of the book were incredibly fast to read, but I think the last
third took me at least another day? I think it’s likely that I was reading this
concurrently with <em>Jacobin No. 35</em> for some reason.</p>
<h2 id="things-i-read-in-2020">Things I Read in 2020</h2>
<h3 id="spinning-silver-by-naomi-novik-2020-01-19"><em>Spinning Silver</em> by Naomi Novik (2020-01-19)</h3>
<p>After reading this, I have beef with Novik as a writer. I like her writing style
a lot and her world building and main characters are great. And in <em>Uprooted</em>, I
excused some pretty yikes stuff as, like, a one-off problem. But this book shows
that it’s a pattern and so I’m almost certainly done with her as an author. The
deal is that she makes love stories about young women who meet shitty,
borderline (or not-so-borderline) abusive men and then has these women come into
their own power and solve the problems and do all the things you’d hope a
protagonist would… and somehow ending up with these shitty, abusive dudes is
part of the reward she gets? In some ways, there are abortive, incomplete
redemptions arcs for the men, but for the most part, they’re given excuses for
their behavior and not asked to atone or improve in any way before riding off
into the sunset with the heroines. Just… yuck.</p>
<h3 id="jacobin-35-from-socialism-to-populism-and-back-2020-01-29"><em>Jacobin 35: From Socialism to Populism and Back</em> (2020-01-29)</h3>
<p>To be honest, I had to look this one up. You’ll notice that after March, I
didn’t read any political stuff of enough length to warrant logging it. Another
thing I just couldn’t handle during all of everything else. I do remember that
there was a piece of what the word “populism” means and what its origins were
and whether it was worth continuing to use it in any way, but I don’t remember
the conclusions at all.</p>
<h3 id="the-five-dysfunctions-of-a-team-by-patrick-lencioni-2020-01-30"><em>The Five Dysfunctions of a Team</em> by Patrick Lencioni (2020-01-30)</h3>
<p>This is a business book about teams. It breaks down a framework for how to think
about the things a team needs in order to perform at all. It’s a bit more
detailed than “psychological safety”, drawing a hierarchy of things (sort of
like Maslow’s). I’d have to go back to it to remember what the five dysfunctions
are by name (and their remedies), but at the time, for a few months after, I
remember many work conversations about why some interaction with an outside team
was hard or frictioney turning back to the book and realizing that the
relationship was missing one of the things from the list of five. It was also a
super fast read (but see the note above), which makes it good bang for
time-buck. I recommend it.</p>
<h3 id="the-broken-heavens-by-kameron-hurley-2020-02-12"><em>The Broken Heavens</em> by Kameron Hurley (2020-02-12)</h3>
<p>This is the conclusion to Hurley’s Worldbreaker Saga. I like Hurley and her
weird magic and weird technology and such. If you liked the first two books,
you’ll like this one. I found the ending sort of surprising in terms of where it
left the world, but I liked the decision.</p>
<h3 id="tiamats-wrath-by-james-sa-corey-2020-02-21"><em>Tiamat’s Wrath</em> by James S.A. Corey (2020-02-21)</h3>
<p>I really like the <em>Expanse</em> books and this is one of them. Without going into
spoilers it’s a bit hard to talk about what I liked about this one as distinct
from the previous entries, but it introduced some new themes around the main
characters getting older that I liked. There wasn’t as much Amos as I’d’ve liked
(which is basically always more Amos, please) and I wasn’t super pleased with
how they stuck the landing on the conclusion of his character arc for the book,
but overall I liked the book.</p>
<h3 id="catalyst-vol-3-no-3-2020-03-04"><em>Catalyst Vol. 3 No. 3</em> (2020-03-04)</h3>
<p>I had to look this one up, too. It looks like there was a piece about family
that I remember being interesting and having new-to-me ideas and a piece about
the economic forces driving the prison-industrial complex. But even as I write
this I don’t have the mental energy to summarize what was memorable about them.
Sorry.</p>
<h3 id="the-consuming-fire-by-john-scalzi-2020-03-08"><em>The Consuming Fire</em> by John Scalzi (2020-03-08)</h3>
<p>Scalzi is always easy to read. I find I don’t love him as much as I used to (I
discovered him in, I think, late high school, so over two decades ago!), but
he’s comforting and fun, generally. This is the second book in his series called
<em>The Interdependency</em>. It has witty characters doing space adventure things and
winning because they’re clever, which I like.</p>
<h3 id="to-be-taught-if-fortunate-by-becky-chambers-2020-03-23"><em>To Be Taught If Fortunate</em> by Becky Chambers (2020-03-23)</h3>
<p>Chambers is among my favorite authors. This is the first of hers I’ve read
outside of <em>The Wayfarers</em> series. It is about why humans explore, how we should
decide what to do, what it means to be incredibly far from home. It’s sad, it’s
hopeful, it’s got wonder and grief and confusion and… In the end, I guess the
overriding emotion for me was bittersweetness. The title is a reference to a
message on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record">the Golden
Record</a> and it is a very
fitting title.</p>
<h3 id="star-wars-phasma-by-delilah-s-dawson-2020-04-10"><em>Star Wars: Phasma</em> by Delilah S. Dawson (2020-04-10)</h3>
<p>This is the origin story of Phasma (the silver shiny Stormtrooper commander lady
from <em>The Force Awakens</em> and <em>The Last Jedi</em>). It humanizes her interestingly
and is a fun read. It’s a Star Wars book, so I didn’t expect a ton of depth
going in, but it was pretty good for what it is.</p>
<h3 id="books-and-bone-by-victoria-corva-2020-04-14"><em>Books and Bone</em> by Victoria Corva (2020-04-14)</h3>
<p>This is by a newish author. It’s about necromancers and a young woman raised
among them who wants to take a different path. It discusses themes of fitting in
or not (and deciding such actively); finding the grit to stick to your guns; the
risks or going out on your own. I really liked it and plan on reading the next
in the series. It’s a bit of a pity because I remember after reading it having a
lot more thoughts on the book and specific nuances I wanted to communicate, but
I didn’t write them down and so here we are.</p>
<h3 id="obsidio-by-amy-kaufman--jay-kristoff-2020-04-18"><em>Obsidio</em> by Amy Kaufman & Jay Kristoff (2020-04-18)</h3>
<p>This is the third book in its series. They’re all a connected story that
features a new pair of young men and women who are and/or fall in love and fight
to bring light to an unfolding capitalist atrocity. By the end of the series, I
sort of got the idea; the third book didn’t have a lot new to say compared to
the first two, but I wanted to finish the story and also… I like stories about
young people falling in love and doing adventures, so it still gave me that.</p>
<h3 id="the-phoenix-princess-by-k-arsenault-rivera-2020-10-09"><em>The Phoenix Princess</em> by K Arsenault Rivera (2020-10-09)</h3>
<p>This book sort of saved me, in a way. I hadn’t really read anything for months
and was not doing adequate self-care to keep my mental state from just spiraling
down. It wasn’t, like, <em>dire</em>, but it was headed in the wrong direction for
several months before I picked this book up. It’s the sequel to <em>The Tiger’s
Daughter</em> and is a fantasy story about two women in love who do badass sword
things and are generally more epic than the world can handle. And being that
epic causes them a lot of pain both physical and emotional, to be honest. But
their love is healing in many ways. It’s not a bright, sunny book, but I love
them and I love it, so… it reminded me why reading is good to do when I needed
that.</p>
<h3 id="infomocracy-by-malka-older-2020-10-15"><em>Infomocracy</em> by Malka Older (2020-10-15)</h3>
<p>This book was super weird to read because it is a story tied all up in this
scifi democracy and someone trying to steal an election and all sorts of shitty
political actors and, like, at the time, we were <em>neck deep</em> in the same shit
here in the US. But rather than be, like, Too Real™ and adding stress to my life
(a new metric I try to gauge about a book before I embark on it), it was oddly
cathartic because the main characters are smart and capable and though the
problems are huge and unwieldy, they are tractable to them in a way that real
world problems are not to me. I’m undecided whether I’ll pick up the next in the
series not because this one was bad or anything, but because there are so many
other things that promise to be <em>awesome</em>.</p>
<h3 id="vicious-by-ve-schwab-2020-10-23"><em>Vicious</em> by V.E. Schwab (2020-10-23)</h3>
<p>This one is a bit of a different take than I’ve seen before on the idea of
“powered” people living in an otherwise normal world. Secret super heroes, as it
were, but no one is really a hero. It’s full of grey areas and personal BS
distracts everyone from getting into world-threatening or world-saving
territory. The next one in the series is already in my to-read pile.</p>
<p>Side note: The above was the last book in my to-read pile that didn’t either
feel too emotionally or mentally taxing for me to handle this year, so I placed
an order through the local book shop, but then had to wait several weeks to get
any of them because they were getting super slammed by holiday sales and their
shipping/curbside set up is all new (like most non-restaurant places). No shade
on them, it just explains the big gap in the dates here.</p>
<h3 id="gideon-the-ninth-by-tamsyn-muir-2020-12-28"><em>Gideon the Ninth</em> by Tamsyn Muir (2020-12-28)</h3>
<p>Possibly my favorite of the year. I generally don’t like to pick favorite
things, but this book was so good. It’s about a sword lesbian who has no time
for the shit of necromancers (some of whom are also lesbians) and they’re <em>in
space</em>. The main point-of-view character, Gideon, is sassy and tough and
irreverent (she wears aviator shades over her ceremonial skull face paint) and I
love her. The other characters all feel real and there’s all this history
between them that’s messed up and drives them to want and do messed up things.
Bad things happen to good people, then bad things happen to bad people. And it’s
all just very wonderful. I’m sad I bought this in paperback because the second
book is already out in hardback, but I want things to look nice on the shelf, so
I won’t buy it. The paperback doesn’t come out until <em>September</em> or something.
Clearly the greatest travesty of 2020. (This is sarcasm; obviously there were
<em>actual</em> horrific events in 2020).</p>
<h3 id="beowulf-translated-by-maria-dahvana-headley-2021-01-04"><em>Beowulf</em> translated by Maria Dahvana Headley (2021-01-04)</h3>
<p>This one gets counted as 2020 because I read <em>most</em> of it in 2020. This is the
second translation I’ve read. I think the first was in college and has the Old
English and the Modern English translation on facing pages. Anyway, this new one
is done from a feminist perspective, which is neat. And translates it not just
into Modern English, but into ultra-modern vernacular. It’s sort of a thing
amongst Beowulf scholars (of which I am <em>not</em> one) to debate how to translate
the first word of the poem. She translates it as “Bros!” which is a wonderful
decision. She keeps much of the alliteration all throughout but mixes esoteric
words, and the compounding of the original (e.g. whale-road) while also using
very recently coined turns of phrase like “black-out drunk” or “stanning”. A
great translation. However, I’d forgotten how boring the last bit of <em>Beowulf</em>
is. That’s no fault of Headley’s, of course. It’s just that in many ways, the
style of the poem is to say the same thing in several different ways all the
time and after Beowulf defeats Grendel and his mother, he returns home and
repeats the tale to his king and then 30 years later before he goes to fight the
dragon, he repeats it again and… everything about the dragon is also sort of
repeated… it drags on at the end, is what I’m saying. But the translation is
delightful.</p>
<p><em>Thanks to Joshua for helping edit this post.</em></p>Ben HamillWelp. That was certainly… a year. Let’s talk about books! I read way fewer things this year than I did last year, for reasons that I’m sure many of us did way less of shit in 2020 than they expected.2019 Reading in Review2020-01-06T09:30:00-06:002020-01-06T09:30:00-06:00http://garbled.benhamill.com/2020/01/06/2019-reading-in-review<p>I used to review books on <a href="https://wandering.shop/@benhamill">a dedicated Mastodon
account</a>, but I’ve since wanted to be able to
show them to people outside the context of the fediverse. This was also spurred
by the fact that, after moving, I read a ton of books without keeping up with
the reviews, so I’d intended to do bunch of catch-up reviews… and that was in
October 2018.</p>
<p>So what’s <em>actually</em> transpired is that I’ve kept a one-line entry for every
book I’ve read including the title, author and finish date except for the stuff
I read right at the end of 2018 and the start of 2019. So I’m going to share
that list here and maybe talk about some of them a bit and see how I feel.</p>
<p>Also, I want to point out that this list doesn’t include comics, which I mostly
read in trade paperback form, or stuff I read with my kids, which is mostly very
short but has begun to include some chapter books. Many of those things have
been lovely and totally worth recommending or talking about, but I figure I have
to limit scope somehow and I didn’t happen to think to put those into my
journal.</p>
<h2 id="the-numbers">The Numbers</h2>
<p>Let’s do some stats, shall we? Obviously I have to exclude some stuff from the
duration stats on the basis of not knowing when I read it.</p>
<p><strong>Number of Things Read:</strong> 47</p>
<p><strong>Reading Time</strong> (in days including weekends, during which I generally don’t
read):</p>
<ul>
<li>Maximum: 21 days (<em>Jacobin 33</em> and <em>The Prey of Gods</em>)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median">Median</a>: 8 days (<em>A Conjuring of Light</em>
and <em>Jacobin 34</em>)</li>
<li>Minimum: less than a day (<em>Artificial Condition</em>, <em>Exit Strategy</em>, <em>Capitalism & the
State</em>)</li>
<li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(statistics)">Mode</a>: 13 days (<em>Washington
Black</em>, <em>The Body Keeps the Score</em>, <em>Broken Stars</em> and <em>The City of Brass</em>)</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="things-i-read-in-2019">Things I Read in 2019</h2>
<h3 id="after-on-by-rob-reid-"><em>After On</em> by Rob Reid (???)</h3>
<p>I remember liking this book for the most part and a lot of the ideas were quite
interesting, but it had a fondness and adulation for Silicon Valley start-up
culture that I really couldn’t stand and the resolution to the main conflict
boiled down to what a lot of authoritarian fiction (like super hero stories)
does: A small number of smart/good/brave/powerful/special individuals should
stand between everyone else and the problem. Bleh.</p>
<h3 id="temper-by-nicky-drayden-"><em>Temper</em> by Nicky Drayden (???)</h3>
<p>Drayden is a local author, which I like. The book is her first, as far as I
know, and it sort of shows. But it has some neat ideas and, being fantasy set in
modern Africa, had some angles and features not often seen in the genre.</p>
<h3 id="akata-warrior-by-nnedi-okorafor-"><em>Akata Warrior</em> by Nnedi Okorafor (???)</h3>
<p>Okorafor is an author I like to return to. Her <em>Binti</em> series is delightful.
The <em>Akata</em> stuff is, like <em>Temper</em>, fantasy set in modern Africa, but a
different region and culture (Igboland). I love the way she writes, especially
around themes of finding your identity and making a place for yourself when you
aren’t sure how you fit into the society around you. Which this book has plenty
of. It’s also an exciting adventure.</p>
<h3 id="parable-of-the-sower-and-parable-of-the-talents-by-octavia-butler-"><em>Parable of the Sower</em> and <em>Parable of the Talents</em> by Octavia Butler (???)</h3>
<p>I read these back-to-back (and in the wrong order without realizing it, so read
these in the other order, I think). They were incredibly good and incredibly
hard, emotionally. They should be required reading for, uh, humans living in the
US, I guess? Possibly other places? Especially for white folks (or people with
other kinds of priviledge), it’s important to understand that the horrible
events depicted in these books are extrapolations from things that are <em>already
happenning in this country</em> to populations that mostly lack privilege.</p>
<h3 id="ridley-walker-by-russel-hoban-"><em>Ridley Walker</em> by Russel Hoban (???)</h3>
<p>I’d read this in, I think, Jr. High. So this constitutes one of, like, 10 books
that I’ve read more than once. I reread it because I recalled that by dad has
said it blew his mind when he’d originally read it. I found it… fine. The story
isn’t that interesting and it’s not clear to me what the author was trying to
say or what themes were really under discussion. After I’d reread it, I asked my
dad what had been so interesting about it and to him it was the language it was
written in. It’s written in what Hoban imagined English might become if society
fell and education evaporated and such. It’s hard to understand at first, but
you get it pretty quickly. However, now that I know a fair amount about language
change… this was really bothersome to me because the language change is more
like if someone were very drunk than how language actually changes. Ah well.</p>
<h3 id="the-long-way-to-a-small-angry-planet-by-becky-chambers-"><em>The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet</em> by Becky Chambers (???)</h3>
<p>The best way I can talk about this book is to say that it is everything that
fans of <em>Firefly</em> think <em>Firefly</em> is (where it is actually not very those
things). It is about found families and acceptance and healing and it takes
place on a spaceship that is also a home. It’s so lovely.</p>
<h3 id="jacobin-31-breaking-bank-"><em>Jacobin 31: Breaking Bank</em> (???)</h3>
<p>This is a quarterly socialist magazine. I have a note that this volume was about
economics. Skimming through the table of contents just now, none of the pieces
jump out at me as being amazing, but I do recall that it helped me understand
what “the neoliberalization of economies” means and how it negatively impacts
working people.</p>
<h3 id="apocalypse-nyx-by-kameron-hurley-2019-02-06"><em>Apocalypse Nyx</em> by Kameron Hurley (2019-02-06)</h3>
<p>I’ve read all the novels in the <em>Bel Dame Apocrypha</em> and liked them. They’re all
a buggy, gross, magical, self-destructive scifi mess in the best way. This book
is a collection of short stories in that continuity that doesn’t dissapoint. I
think they were largely published only digitally originally, which is why I’d
missed them. I tend to prefer dead tree reading, so it was nice for them to be
collected such.</p>
<h3 id="washington-black-by-esi-edugyan-2019-02-19"><em>Washington Black</em> by Esi Edugyan (2019-02-19)</h3>
<p>My wife bought this for me after hearing a review of it on, I think, NPR. My
impression is that she thought it would be more science fiction than it was. It
ended up not being much at all, but I still enjoyed it all the way up until the
end. I just incredibly did not understand what the author was trying to do or
say with the ending.</p>
<h3 id="the-abcs-of-capitalism-by-vivek-chibber-2019-02-21"><em>The ABCs of Capitalism</em> by Vivek Chibber (2019-02-21)</h3>
<p>This is actually three pamphlets published by Jacobin: <em>A: Understanding
Capitalism</em>, <em>B: Capitalism & the State</em> and <em>C: Capitalism & Class Struggle</em>.
I’ve since loaned these out to a few people and I wish more folks would read
them. The <em>B</em> volume in particular does a great job drawing a connection from
capitalism on a fundemental structural level to injustice and explaining why the
one increasingly causes the other over time. I think they also do a good job of
making the point that there is only so far we can get to achieve justice for all
without overthrowing capitalism and, thus, the limits we’re generally under if
we constrain our efforts to electoral politics.</p>
<h3 id="star-wars-last-shot-by-daniel-josé-older-2019-03-04"><em>Star Wars: Last Shot</em> by Daniel José Older (2019-03-04)</h3>
<p>I think this is a story about Lando and Han? There’s a non-binary character in
it who was pretty cool, I think? And maybe it hopped between eras of, like,
older Han and Lando, younger Han after getting <em>The Falcon</em> and younger Lando
before even meeting Han. Which would imply L3 is in it, but… TBH, I don’t
remember this book very well.</p>
<h3 id="catalyst-vol-2-no-3-2019-03-14"><em>Catalyst Vol. 2 No. 3</em> (2019-03-14)</h3>
<p>This is a quarterly, semi-academic journal published by the Jacobin (and edited
by Chibber, above). It includes two pieces I liked a lot: <a href="https://catalyst-journal.com/vol2/no3/socialism-for-realists"><em>Socialism for
Realists</em> by Sam
Gindin</a> and <a href="https://catalyst-journal.com/vol2/no3/the-strike-as-the-ultimate-structure-test"><em>The
Strike as the Ultimate Structure Test</em> by Jane
McAlevey</a>.
Both were really informative and gave me a lot to think about.</p>
<h3 id="a-darker-shade-of-magic-by-ve-schwab-2019-03-21"><em>A Darker Shade of Magic</em> by V.E. Schwab (2019-03-21)</h3>
<p>The first in a trilogy (the others appear below) that I quite enjoyed. It’s dark
without being needlessly grim. The depiction of magic is interesting. The
characters are likeable when they should be and believably flawed. I was pleased
with the whole run.</p>
<h3 id="leia-princess-of-alerderaan-by-claudia-gray-2019-03-27"><em>Leia: Princess of Alerderaan</em> by Claudia Gray (2019-03-27)</h3>
<p>Gray writes really amazing Star Wars books, y’all. And she really seems to <em>get</em>
Leia as a character. This book shows us Leia before her heavy involement in the
Alliance to Restore the Republic and what it means to grow up as the princess of
Alderaan. So good.</p>
<h3 id="jacobin-32-a-true-story-of-the-future-2019-03-30"><em>Jacobin 32: A True Story of the Future</em> (2019-03-30)</h3>
<p>This one’s got a cover that makes it seem like it’s just Bernie Sanders fanfic,
which is frustrating. I went in with low expectations, but was pleasantly
surprised. It has pieces discussing the possible for left progress within the
constraints of electoral politics and also what some of those limits are. I do
think this issue in particular reflected Jacobin’s general emphasis on electoral
politics over other avenues of change. Personally, I think we have to consider
electoral politics as one tool among many, not the sole or even primary arena of
action.</p>
<h3 id="artificial-condition-rogue-protocol--exit-strategy-by-martha-wells-2019-03-30-2019-03-31-2019-03-31"><em>Artificial Condition</em>, <em>Rogue Protocol</em> & <em>Exit Strategy</em> by Martha Wells (2019-03-30, 2019-03-31, 2019-03-31)</h3>
<p>These are all novellas in Wells’s <em>The Murderbot Diaries</em> series and follow the
initial novella, <em>All Systems Red</em>. Murderbot is delightful and I love the way
Wells writes them. I hear there’s a novel out or out soon or something and I’m
looking forward to it. These are books about defining who you are for yourself, the
drive to protect yourself based on past traumas, letting people past those
defenses and, like much scifi that addresses AI and robots, what it means to be
a person who is not human.</p>
<h3 id="kindred-by-octavia-butler-2019-04-05"><em>Kindred</em> by Octavia Butler (2019-04-05)</h3>
<p>This book was brutal to read (a theme in Butler’s work, I guess). It’s about a
Black woman living in the 70’s who is married to a white man and spontaneously
develops to “ability” to travel back in time to the antebellum US South. It’s
not really an ability, though, because she can’t control it. I don’t want to say
much more because I don’t want to have spoilers in this post. I really liked the
book, but it definitely took emotional effort to read.</p>
<h3 id="a-gathering-of-shadows-by-ve-schwab-2019-04-12"><em>A Gathering of Shadows</em> by V.E. Schwab (2019-04-12)</h3>
<p>See above about <em>A Darker Shade of Magic</em>.</p>
<h3 id="the-8-hour-sleep-paradox-by-dr-mark-burhenne-2019-04-16"><em>The 8-Hour Sleep Paradox</em> by Dr. Mark Burhenne (2019-04-16)</h3>
<p>A friend lent this to me more than a year before I actually read it after I
complained about sleep. I learned that the idea of “a healthy 8 hours of sleep”
is sort of a broken myth. If you don’t sleep <em>well</em> it doesn’t matter a ton if
you get 6 or 8 or 12 hours of sleep so much and if you <em>are</em> sleeping well, 8
might be more than you need. There was a bunch of information about apnea and
other sleeping difficulties. Add it to the long list of stuff I should be doing
as an adult that I don’t because of all the other things I should be doing as an
adult (read: in our society we work too much to actually take care of all our
responsibilities).</p>
<h3 id="the-will-to-battle-by-ada-palmer-2019-04-30"><em>The Will to Battle</em> by Ada Palmer (2019-04-30)</h3>
<p>This is book three in a series (start with <em>Too Like the Lightning</em>). I really
love this series, but I understand why it’s not for everyone. In particular, the
society depicted has some <em>fucked up</em> ideas about gender and related topics. I
find them to be an interesting way to hold a mirror up to the ways in which our
society’s ideas about gender are differently fucked up, but I think it’s
entirely reasonable for it to be too uncomfortable for others to read. I feel
like the world building is very skillfully done in that theirs is a world so
different from ours that it is surprising how things work, but the book does a
good job of making sure you know what you need to know about how things work
before they become plot-critical. Also each book begins with an in-universe
content warning, which is pretty rad.</p>
<h3 id="a-conjuring-of-light-by-ve-schwab-2019-05-08"><em>A Conjuring of Light</em> by V.E. Schwab (2019-05-08)</h3>
<p>See above about <em>A Darker Shade of Magic</em>.</p>
<h3 id="storm-of-locusts-by-rebecca-roanhorse-2019-05-23"><em>Storm of Locusts</em> by Rebecca Roanhorse (2019-05-23)</h3>
<p>I found this book in my efforts to read more books by people who are not white
men. It is a post-apocalytic novel by a Native American woman about a Native
American woman. She’s writing about a tribe other than her own, but to my
outsider’s eyes it seems to be written with care and kindness nonetheless. I
like the main characrter and the mythology it draws on is new to me, so that
novelty is nice to see. Some of the characters, including the love interest, are
kinda meh, but I’ll probably read the next book she writes.</p>
<h3 id="jacobin-33-home-improvement-2019-06-13"><em>Jacobin 33: Home Improvement</em> (2019-06-13)</h3>
<p>This whole issue is about housing. It helped me form opinions about public
housing and understand the awful effects that having
having-access-to-a-place-to-live be subject to the market has. It also had some
great historical context about housing costs, housing justice movements and that
sort of thing.</p>
<h3 id="the-body-keeps-the-score-by-dr-bessel-van-der-kolk-2019-06-26"><em>The Body Keeps the Score</em> by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (2019-06-26)</h3>
<p>This is a book about the long term physiological effect that traumatic events
have on the human body. It was <em>very</em> interesting and had a lot of information I
hadn’t been exposed to before. It made me think about my own life and my own
reactions to certain things and whether I’m in as much control of those
reactions as we all like to tell ourselves. After reading it, I had a
conversation online with someone that pointed out that the author’s tone was
pretty othering towards people who live with, say, PTSD, which I think is a vlid
criticism.</p>
<h3 id="the-wolf-road-by-beth-lewis-2019-07-03"><em>The Wolf Road</em> by Beth Lewis (2019-07-03)</h3>
<p>TBH, every time I see this book’s title I confuse it with <em>The Power</em> for a
moment, realize that’s not right and it takes me a bit to remember what it is.
I liked the story fine while I was reading it, but five months on, it doesn’t
stand out in particular.</p>
<h3 id="how-to-make-white-people-laugh-by-negin-farsad-2019-07-09"><em>How to Make White People Laugh</em> by Negin Farsad (2019-07-09)</h3>
<p>This book is amusing and has some great perspective about growing up in an
immigrant (to the US) family. It has some uncomfortable (and, thus, good-to-hear
as a white person) things to say about race. It also has some vaguely
anti-semitic sections (in the form of stereotypes about Jewish folks) that were
uncomfortable in a different way.</p>
<h3 id="the-power-by-naomi-alderman-2019-07-18"><em>The Power</em> by Naomi Alderman (2019-07-18)</h3>
<p>This book gets compared to <em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em> often because it has a similar
framing device of academics dicsussing the historical events depicted in the
book from the distant future. However, I feel like the framing device in <em>The
Power</em> is much more integrated into the story in a thematic sense. Also, other
than the framing device, the books have little else in common other than being,
like, feminist fiction, I guess? <em>The Power</em> is fun and interesting and
challenging. My favorite bit is that there’s a casual take-down of evolutionary
psychology that just sort of drifts past and is <em>devestating</em>.</p>
<h3 id="catalyst-vol-3-no-1-2019-07-30"><em>Catalyst Vol. 3 No. 1</em> (2019-07-30)</h3>
<p>I <em>think</em> I read the fourth issue of volume 2, but I can’t find my paper copy
and it’s not in my list, so who knows. This issue had <a href="https://catalyst-journal.com/vol3/no1/there-are-reasons-for-optimism">an interesting interview
with Noam
Chomsky</a>,
but I don’t remember any of the other pieces in particular.</p>
<h3 id="lost-stars-by-claudia-gray-2019-08-04"><em>Lost Stars</em> by Claudia Gray (2019-08-04)</h3>
<p>Another Star Wars book by Gray. This one doesn’t have Leia, but it <em>does</em> have
this wonderful star-crossed friendship-into-romance plotline and really
humanizes (some) Imperials. Like… it shows what sorts of values and priorities
which are not, on their face, evil might lead someone to still join and remain
loyal to the Galactic Empire even in the face of their obvious evils. Given that
most people come to Star Wars books to see the characters from the movies doing
stuff, I think it was bold to choose to focus on original characters almost
exclusively and I think it super worked.</p>
<h3 id="the-raven-tower-by-ann-leckie-2019-08-08"><em>The Raven Tower</em> by Ann Leckie (2019-08-08)</h3>
<p>I loved Leckie’s <em>Ancillary</em> series of scifi books and this is her first foray
into fantasy. She blew me away. It is one of those rare books that makes being
in the second person work. Her take on gods and magic in that world was utterly
new to me, which is great. The characters were interesting and I constantly
couldn’t wait to see how things would develop next. Like the <em>Ancillary</em> series,
I sort of expect people to talk about the gender stuff going on in this book
more than the rest of it. And <em>also</em> just like the <em>Ancillary</em> serires, that’ll
be a pity if true. While the gender stuff is cool and interesting, there’s so
much more about this book that makes it great.</p>
<h3 id="broken-stars-edited-by-ken-liu-2019-08-21"><em>Broken Stars</em> edited by Ken Liu (2019-08-21)</h3>
<p>Liu translated the first and third volume of the <em>Rememberance of Earth’s Past</em>
series (the first book of which is <em>The Three Body Problem</em>). He has a passion
for Chinese science fiction and so has edited several collections thereof. And
this is one of those. It has a <em>lot</em> of very weird stories in it, which is
great. Some of them didn’t really work for me in a way that I think has more to
do with cultural differences more than the quality of the writing. Regardless,
I think it’s valuable to look outside the boundary of English from time to time
to expose yourself to things you otherwise wouldn’t.</p>
<h3 id="the-city-of-brass-by-sa-chakraborty-2019-09-03"><em>The City of Brass</em> by S.A. Chakraborty (2019-09-03)</h3>
<p>This is fantasy set in an Arabia-inspired past. I don’t remember if there are
any real-world locations off the top of my head, but there are definitely plenty
of fantastical ones. It’s got a cool take on myths about Djinn and associated
beings and the sense of the history of the hidden magical world they inhabit
with political forces and past wars and such was great. The main character sort
of runs face-first into political waters deeper than she’s prepared for and it’s
good fun.</p>
<h3 id="jacobin-43-war-is-a-racket-2019-09-11"><em>Jacobin 43: War is a Racket</em> (2019-09-11)</h3>
<p>This issue is about the military industrial complex, the role the military plays
in systemic racism and classism and the lasting negative effects that being a
soldier has on many. It also has a piece on the GI Bill and related soldiers’
benefits and how they show how wider social programs might work and a piece on
armed leftist resistance that’s going on in Rojava. In general, I feel like it
covered a pretty broad range of topics; specifically ones I don’t have a lot of
personal experience with.</p>
<h3 id="a-closed-and-common-orbit-by-becky-chambers-2019-09-16"><em>A Closed and Common Orbit</em> by Becky Chambers (2019-09-16)</h3>
<p>Set in the same universe as <em>The Long Way</em> but with only slight narrative ties,
this book is again full of heart and love. It’s about discovering and deciding
who you are and who you want to be. It talks about the pain of having to hide
who you are from those around you. It talks about the ethics and quandires of
self-modification. All the people feel real and relatable and the cultures
readers are introduced to are interesting and treated with respect. Chambers
has quickly become one of my favorites.</p>
<h3 id="acceleratre-by-nicole-forsgren-et-al-2019-08-22"><em>Acceleratre</em> by Nicole Forsgren et. al. (2019-08-22)</h3>
<p>This is a “business book”, I guess. It’s about what things in common
organizations that are good at meeting their goals with software have. I say it
that way because they tried to be broader than just, like, “make a profit”,
though that’s a goal most organizations that make software have. They talk about
4 key metris to track and establish that if these are all going up, you’re going
to meet your goals. This is all backed by scientific research. They were
surprised to find that many things software professionals often consider of high
importance are not actually related to meeting organizational goals. I think the
identification of these four metrics is great and awful at once. Great because
they are easy to understand and compare to yourself over time. However, I’ve
heard others that read the book over-focus on them and miss that in order to
make those numbers go up, it probably takes real organizational change—it’s not
something that an engineering organization alone can fix by just doing
engineering harder.</p>
<h3 id="native-tongue-by-suzette-haden-elgin-2019-10-04"><em>Native Tongue</em> by Suzette Haden Elgin (2019-10-04)</h3>
<p>This is feminist scifi about linguistics, so… I loved it? Honestly, the
characters could have been more whole and in many ways it shows it’s age (it was
published in 1984) in things like the dialog. There’s a constructed language in
the book that Elgin separately published and it has some ideas about encoding
certain things into the language grammatically that I quite like. I keep meaning
to look more into it. There’s also apparently another two books in the series,
but I’m not sure if I’ll pick them up or not.</p>
<h3 id="the-bone-season-by-samantha-shannon-2019-10-15"><em>The Bone Season</em> by Samantha Shannon (2019-10-15)</h3>
<p>I picked this up because I was at The Book People and saw a staff pick that if
you liked whatever book I was reading at that time and really enjoying, you
might like <em>The Priory of the Orange Tree</em> also by Shannon. But <em>The Priory</em> was
hardback only, enormously thick and fairly expensive, so I decided to pick up
something else by the same author. And I quite liked it. It’s got a neat magic
system and a relatable main character. I plan to pick up the other two in the
trilogy and then circle back for <em>The Priory</em>, for sure.</p>
<h3 id="the-tigers-daughter-by-k-arsenault-rivera-2019-11-08"><em>The Tiger’s Daughter</em> by K. Arsenault Rivera (2019-11-08)</h3>
<p>This is epic, martial arts fantasy about two women in love from an early age.
It’s told mostly as a series of letters from one to the other recounting events
they were both largely present for, but just kind of… in order to recount them
to her. It makes more sense than that makes it sound. I just really love these
women and their relationship and how epic they are. This is the third, though,
fantasy book with a lesbian romance in it where one of the women has a reading
problem (she has some kind of dyslexia that only affects the character-based
writing system of one of their culture’s), which is an odd, to me, trend. I
don’t know what about the modern lesbian experience that might be an allegory
for or what. Anyway, I’m definitely going to read more from this author.</p>
<h3 id="catalyst-vol-3-no-2-2019-11-22"><em>Catalyst Vol. 3 No. 2</em> (2019-11-22)</h3>
<p>I think this whole issue is behind a paywall, but I’m going to link to things in
the hopes that it’s a timed paywall and that eventually these links will be
useful. This issue has <a href="https://catalyst-journal.com/vol3/no2/a-socialist-party-in-our-time"><em>A Socialist Party in Our Time?</em> by Jared Abbott and
Dustin
Guastella</a>,
which is about the party politics of the Democratic Party and the forces acting
on socialist or other left candidates. I have thought a lot about it since
reading it. Also included is <a href="https://catalyst-journal.com/vol3/no2/the-mass-politics-of-antislavery"><em>The Mass Politics of Antislavery</em> by Matt
Karp</a>
about the abolition movement in the US North before our Civil War and how it
formed and operated, and what problems it had, etc.</p>
<h3 id="the-prey-of-gods-by-nicky-drayden-2019-12-13"><em>The Prey of Gods</em> by Nicky Drayden (2019-12-13)</h3>
<p>Drayden’s second book, this one’s also set in Africa (specifically South
Africa). It takes place in a future where miniature personal robots have more or
less taken over the role that smartphones have in today’s society. And then some
ancient magical/god stuff happens. It was a fun read, but not super deep. Which
I don’t mean to be damning. I hear her third book is out and on the strength of
this and <em>Temper</em> plan on picking it up.</p>
<h3 id="velocity-weapon-by-megan-e-okeefe-2019-12-29"><em>Velocity Weapon</em> by Megan E. O’Keefe (2019-12-29)</h3>
<p>I think I picked this up because someone told me it reminded them of the
<em>Ancillary</em> series. It has some similarities for sure (one of the characters is
a ship-board AI), but I don’t think that’s a super strong comparison. I did,
however, enjoy it. There’s hints of a larger something going on that I believe
may become a statement about coroporations or capitalism or something, but this
first book is about politics in a specific star system and keeping secrets and
manipulating people. One of the main characters is this military lady and she’s
real fun to have as a point-of-view character. I believe this is the start of a
series and I entirely intend to read more.</p>
<h3 id="pinko-no-1-2020-01-03"><em>Pinko No. 1</em> (2020-01-03)</h3>
<p>If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that I actually finished this one in
2020, but I read most of it in 2019 and also I just wanna talk about it some.
<a href="https://pinko.online/">Pinko</a> is a zine about gay communism. I really liked it.
In particular, it had a piece about how the phrase “gay communism” does meant
“communism in which gay sex/people is/are
present/omnipresent/celebrated/centered” but something wider. I’m still trying
to wrap my head around it, but it definitely makes the idea of “fully automated
luxury gay space communism in this life” (FALGSCITL; pronounced like “flag
skittle” with the first L and A swapped) much more appealing to me.</p>
<p><em>Thanks to Alex and Bradford for helping edit this post.</em></p>Ben HamillI used to review books on a dedicated Mastodon account, but I’ve since wanted to be able to show them to people outside the context of the fediverse. This was also spurred by the fact that, after moving, I read a ton of books without keeping up with the reviews, so I’d intended to do bunch of catch-up reviews… and that was in October 2018.Batman Fanfic, Apparently2019-12-10T09:59:45-06:002019-12-10T09:59:45-06:00http://garbled.benhamill.com/2019/12/10/batman-fanfic-apparently<p>I think this is, like, the third fanfic I’ve ever written? I don’t remember if I
ever put the others anywhere anyone else could read, but I’m putting this one
here. Like my most of the fiction I’ve ever written, this is very short and
sprung more or less fully imagined into my head all at once.</p>
<p>It sprung from thinking about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harley_Quinn">Harley
Quinn</a> and the evolution of her
portrayal over time. And, of course, about Mark Hamill’s amazing Joker Laugh.</p>
<p>This is adapted from <a href="https://cybre.space/@benhamill/103283900534879366">a thread on Mastodon where I originally posted
this</a>, but I wanted it
somewhere less ephemeral. The thing is, most more modern portrayals of Harley
(and probably most folks’ mental image of her because of video games and movies)
is very sexy and fairly objectified. But for me, the quintessential version of
Harley is the one from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_The_Animated_Series"><em>Batman: The Animated
Series</em></a>, which is
apparently also where she showed up first.</p>
<p>Latter portrayals have tried to adapt her for more “adult” audiences by making
her outfit skimpier, but that’s a miss. As I wrote on Mastodon, “[in] order to make
Harley Quinn more adult, more mature, don’t dress her in skimpier clothing. Make
her a real character. Show us that the Joker is a capricious (psychological)
abuser and that she’s desperate for his attention and approval. Show us how
she’s a victim and a creator of victims. Show us how she’s weak. Show us how
she’s powerful. Show us how she’s flawed.”</p>
<p>So, yeah. The fiction, then. <strong>Content Warning: Psychological abuse.</strong> Try, if
you can, to hear the voices as performed by Mark Hamill and Tara Strong.</p>
<h2 id="something-i-could-do">Something I Could Do</h2>
<p>Harley surveyed her wardrobe. It wasn’t really a wardrobe on account of her and
Mr. J were currently holed up in an abandoned toy factory. In fact, it was a
steel pipe suspended from two steel poles held up by car wheels.</p>
<p>But that was fine by her because it was all the best clothes: every single item
was a red and black jumpsuit, fitted just a tad at the waist with a bit of lace
at the ankles and wrists, and a wide, spiky collar like a jester at the throat.</p>
<p>She’d already painted her face, so she slipped into her costume, donned her
jester hat (for a while she’d pinned up her hair, but now she kept it short and
it was <em>so</em> much less hassle), slapped on her domino mask and left her room with
a spring in her step.</p>
<p>Outside, Mr. J was lounging and scheming in one of his great purple and green
suits. He was scheming, she could tell: his long, lanky legs were up on the
table, he was tipped back in a chair and he absently sucked on a lollipop with a
distant look in his eyes and a slight smirk.</p>
<p>“Mornin’, Mista J,” Harley said and went to grab a bowl of cereal. Mr. J didn’t
reply. Holding the empty bowl and box, her heart fell. She put them down and
walked around to him.</p>
<p>“Mista J,” she said more loudly to get his attention, “Is… is there somethin’ I
could do? Somethin’ I could change to… uh…” She faltered, not wanting to beg him
out loud to love her. “Maybe if I dressed differently? Showed a little… ah?” She
pointed at her chest and upper thigh, “Or grew my hair out? Pig tails? Like a…
like a naughty school girl?”</p>
<p>“Oh, Harley,” Mr. J said in his joyful lilting voice, swinging her into his lap
with an avuncular chuckle and cupping her face gently in his hand, “There’s
nothing you could do to make me love you <em>more!</em>”</p>
<p>Then his mood turned. She spotted it in his eyes the moment before he squeezed
her face too hard and smeared her perfect flat white paint. “On the other hand,”
he said much lower and like gravel, almost as an aside rather than to Harley,
“There’s <em>nothing</em> you could do to make me love you more.” He pushed her face
away and stood up, nearly dumping her straight on the floor. He strolled off to
do something else entirely, cackling to himself.</p>
<p>“Oh,” Harley said to the empty room, “OK.”</p>Ben HamillI think this is, like, the third fanfic I’ve ever written? I don’t remember if I ever put the others anywhere anyone else could read, but I’m putting this one here. Like my most of the fiction I’ve ever written, this is very short and sprung more or less fully imagined into my head all at once.Hill Hill Hill2019-02-06T11:00:00-06:002019-02-06T11:00:00-06:00http://garbled.benhamill.com/2019/02/06/linguistics-minute-hill-hill-hill<p><em>This was originally published in my work Slack on 2018-12-19, but I’ve since
been convinced that more people than just those few who can even read it there
might be interested. I’ve edited it for clarity and correctness. I’m going to
migrate all my Linguistics Minutes over to my blog and probably post future ones
here.</em></p>
<p>This is a short one. This is a list of redundant hill names in England (or other
places with English-the-place names). I just stole it <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_redundant_place_names#Mountains_and_hills">from
Wikipedia</a>
and culled the list to be more targeted.</p>
<ul>
<li>Barrhill, barr is an old Celtic word for a flat topped hill.</li>
<li>Bredon Hill, England (Hill Hill Hill – Brythonic/Old English/Modern English);
compare Bredon and Breedon on the Hill (Hill Hill on the Hill –
Brythonic/Saxon/Modern English).</li>
<li>Brill, England (Hill Hill – Brythonic/Saxon) – also once known in documents as
Brill-super-montem (Hill Hill on the Hill – Brythonic/Saxon/Latin).</li>
<li>Brincliffe Edge, Sheffield, UK (Burning Hill Hill Welsh/English).</li>
<li>Bryn Glas Hill, Wales (Blue Hill Hill – Welsh/English).</li>
<li>Brynhill, Wales (Hill Hill – Welsh/English).</li>
<li>Pendle Hill, Lancashire, England. (Hill Hill Hill) – “Pen” -(Cumbric language)
“Pendle” by epenthesis and elision from “Pen Hyll”, the latter word being Old
English for “hill”.</li>
<li>Pendleton, near Pendle Hill, Lancashire, England. (Hill Hill Town) or,
possibly (Hill Hill Hill), taking the -ton as deriving from Old English dun as
opposed to Old English tun.</li>
<li>Pendleton Hill, North Stonington, Connecticut. (Hill Hill Town Hill) or,
possibly, (Hill Hill Hill Hill).</li>
<li>Penhill, North Yorkshire, England: Pen (Brittonic) and hyll (Old English),
both meaning “hill”.</li>
<li>Pen Hill, Somerset England: Pen (Brittonic) and hyll (Old English), both
meaning “hill”.</li>
<li>Pen Hill, Dorset, England: Pen (Brittonic) and hyll (Old English), both
meaning “hill”.</li>
<li>Portsdown Hill (Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK) Port’s Hill (dún; Anglosaxon) Hill.</li>
</ul>Ben HamillThis was originally published in my work Slack on 2018-12-19, but I’ve since been convinced that more people than just those few who can even read it there might be interested. I’ve edited it for clarity and correctness. I’m going to migrate all my Linguistics Minutes over to my blog and probably post future ones here.Starboard & Port2019-02-04T12:00:00-06:002019-02-04T12:00:00-06:00http://garbled.benhamill.com/2019/02/04/linguistics-minute-starboard-port<p><em>This was originally published in my work Slack on 2016-12-20, but I’ve since
been convinced that more people than just those few who can even read it there
might be interested. I’ve edited it for clarity and correctness. I’m going to
migrate all my Linguistics Minutes over to my blog and probably post future ones
here.</em></p>
<p>The way I have always remembered which is which on a boat is that it used to be
“starboard and <strong>larboard</strong>” and that <em>larboard</em> and <em>left</em> both start with “L”.
Here’s the story of these three words.</p>
<p>The Angles and Saxons were big seafarers, so they had a lot of words for
boat-related stuff. The Old English word <em>bord</em> meant “the side of the boat”.
Linguists disagree about whether this is related to modern <em>board</em> meaning “a
plank of wood” and if so how.</p>
<p>On these boats, they had a really long oar that they’d put in the water to help
direct the boat: sort of a precursor to a rudder. They called this oar a <em>steor</em>
(pronounced like “steer” and, yes, related to modern <em>steer</em> meaning “to guide
the course of a vehicle”). Generally, maybe because right handed people are more
common, the steor hung off the right side of the boat. Or the right bord. So the
side of the boat with the rudder oar was called the steorbord and later sound
shifts rendered modern <em>starboard</em>.</p>
<p>So when these boats with the big, long steors pulled up to the dock, they had to
do so with the other side facing the dock because otherwise the hull would trap
the steor against the dock and snap it as the sea swelled. So the <strong>other</strong> bord
was called the ladde bord. That word <em>ladde</em> is pronounced like modern <em>ladder</em>
with the final -r off, so it had two syllables. It means “loading” and shares a
root with that modern word. So the laddebord was the “loading side (of the
ship)”. Because humans are lazy, the medial -dd- eventually sort of vanished and
the word became <em>laerbord</em>. That medial -r- appeared because of the influence of
<em>steorbord</em>.</p>
<p>But when you’re on the high seas in the middle of a storm trying to steer around
rocks or whatever and you’re at the front of the boat yelling back to the person
crewing the steor, they can have a hard time differentiating you yelling,
“Laerbord!” from, “Steorbord!” since they share so many sounds. Being a
practical sort who don’t like drowning in shipwrecks, sailors began to call the
left-hand side of the ship the port side since, you know, that’s the side the
port was on when they parked their boat.</p>
<p>Thus, modern <em>starboard</em> and <em>port</em> and the somewhat archaic <em>larboard</em>.</p>Ben HamillThis was originally published in my work Slack on 2016-12-20, but I’ve since been convinced that more people than just those few who can even read it there might be interested. I’ve edited it for clarity and correctness. I’m going to migrate all my Linguistics Minutes over to my blog and probably post future ones here.Mark it Zero, Dude2019-01-31T11:00:00-06:002019-01-31T11:00:00-06:00http://garbled.benhamill.com/2019/01/31/linguistics-minute-mark-it-zero-dude<p><em>This was originally published in my work Slack on 2016-11-11, but I’ve since
been convinced that more people than just those few who can even read it there
might be interested. I’ve edited it for clarity and correctness. I’m going to
migrate all my Linguistics Minutes over to my blog and probably post future ones
here.</em></p>
<p>So the word <em>mark</em> means (at least in one of its meanings) “to make an area of
some surface a different color than the surrounding area”. As in, “making a mark
on a page.” This is a pretty old word in English, but it originally had a
different meaning.</p>
<p>Old English <em>merc</em> or <em>mearc</em> (different dialects) meant “a border or boundary”
and came from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European <em>*merg-</em> with the same
meaning. Because it meant “border”, people would use it to refer to the regions
near the edge of a kingdom. When cartography became a thing, then, people would
draw a line to deliniate the mark between two kingdoms. Thence, <em>mark</em> started
to refer to the line drawn to illustrate the border and then broadened to mean
any line or symbol put on a surface. With this in mind, it makes sense that
Denmark is the country where the Danes live.</p>
<p>As a bit of an asside: French (not a Germanic language) inherited a related word
from Frankish (a Germanic language) that ended up as <em>marcher</em> “to march, walk”
and that became modern English’s <em>march</em> after the Norman invasion in 1066.</p>
<p>The way this got from “border region” to “to walk” is that border regions of
kingdoms were often mostly rural, so “the marches” started to refer to the
countryside generally. And, of course, wars and fighting are more common on your
borders than your interior, so armies spent a lot of time in the marches. They
verbed the noun so that it meant, “to go be an army and do army things in the
countryside” and marching around from place to place is a thing armies do, well,
a <strong>lot</strong>, so the meaning narrowed to reflect that mode of travel by armies.</p>
<p>A lot of the words English borrowed from French after 1066 are words to do with
war, which is a strong statement about the relationship between the Normans and
the English at that time.</p>
<h2 id="appendix-a-tolkien-nerddom">Appendix A: Tolkien nerddom</h2>
<p>In <em>The Two Towers</em>, Aragorn asks Éomer for “news from the Riddermark”. He’s
referring, here, to Rohan (the kingdom Éomer is from). This is a
pseudo-Old-English word that Tolkien constructed because Old English stands in
for the language of the Rohirrim (for <strong>super</strong> nerdy reasons, which I will tell
you if you ask, but be wary, I may not shut up for a long time thereafter). The
word basically means “the borderland of the riders”.</p>
<p>It seems like a weird thing to refer to a whole country as a borderland, but
it’s because Aragorn is culturally very close to Gondor and originally Rohan was
just a province of Gondor. It was their northern-most border province, in fact.
And after the Horse Lords came to Gondor’s aid in some war or other, they were
granted the province to live in as a sovereign nation.</p>
<p>They used this line in the movie without explaining it at all (and the
explanation in the books is cursory) and I bet most people were just like, “Oh.
Another name I don’t know. Why does every person and thing have a million names
in this damn story and ʜᴏᴡ ʟᴏɴɢ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ ʙᴇᴇɴ ᴡᴀʟᴋɪɴɢ ғᴏʀ?!?!” Which is
reasonable. But… now you know.</p>Ben HamillThis was originally published in my work Slack on 2016-11-11, but I’ve since been convinced that more people than just those few who can even read it there might be interested. I’ve edited it for clarity and correctness. I’m going to migrate all my Linguistics Minutes over to my blog and probably post future ones here.Spelling is Weird2019-01-30T11:00:00-06:002019-01-30T11:00:00-06:00http://garbled.benhamill.com/2019/01/30/linguistics-minute-spelling-is-weird<p><em>This was originally published in my work Slack on 2016-10-19, but I’ve since
been convinced that more people than just those few who can even read it there
might be interested. I’ve edited it for clarity and correctness. I’m going to
migrate all my Linguistics Minutes over to my blog and probably post future ones
here.</em></p>
<p>This one’s more fun than factual, but 🤷🏻♂️.</p>
<p>Look at this collection of characters: “ghoti”. Based on your understanding of
English spelling how do you expect that’s pronounced?</p>
<p>The “correct” answer (scare quotes because this is a joke) is that it’s
pronounced the same as <em>fish</em>. It’s to illustrate some of the ways that English
spells certain sounds that we don’t often think of.</p>
<p>Let’s break it down a bit. It’s the “gh” as in <em>enough</em> (IPA /f/), the “o” as in
<em>women</em> (IPA /ɪ/) and the “ti” as in <em>fiction</em> (IPA /ʃ/). First, this just shows
that we don’t often think of /f/ as being spelled “gh”, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4iX5D9Z64">like,
ever</a>. Nor do we think about /ʃ/
being spelled “ti”. It also shows how context-dependent certain things are.</p>
<p>You probably intuit that you can’t start an English word with “ng” (IPA /ŋ/).
There are a lot of sounds in English that are only allowed in certain placements
or next to certain other sounds. But our spelling is similar in that certain
letter combinations only signify certain sounds when surrounded by other
letters.</p>
<p>For instance, that “gh” only sounds like /f/ when it follows “ou” (with maybe a
few exceptions?) and that “ti” only sounds like /ʃ/ when followed by “on” or
“al”. So in the context presented by “ghoti” it’s absurd to assert it would be
pronounced /fɪʃ/. But, you know, a lot about English spelling is absurd, so…</p>Ben HamillThis was originally published in my work Slack on 2016-10-19, but I’ve since been convinced that more people than just those few who can even read it there might be interested. I’ve edited it for clarity and correctness. I’m going to migrate all my Linguistics Minutes over to my blog and probably post future ones here.An English teacher, a urologist and an MVP walk into a bar.2019-01-29T11:00:00-06:002019-01-29T11:00:00-06:00http://garbled.benhamill.com/2019/01/29/linguistics-minute-an-english-teacher-a-urologist-and-an-mvp-walk-into-a-bar<p><em>This was originally published in my work Slack on 2016-10-18, but I’ve since
been convinced that more people than just those few who can even read it there
might be interested. I’ve edited it for clarity and correctness. I’m going to
migrate all my Linguistics Minutes over to my blog and probably post future ones
here.</em></p>
<p><em>This one also requires a little foreword for those who don’t work with me.
Below, there are some initialisms that aren’t defined. They aren’t super
important to understanding the post, but if you’re curious, “MMF” stands for
MapMyFitness, a product my part of Under Armour works on and “UACF” stands for
Under Armour Connected Fitness, which was the name of my part of Under Armour at
the time of this writing.</em></p>
<p>This one’s a reader request (even I didn’t know I took requests 😜):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I want to know why we type out “an MMF user” but “a UACF user” when they
taught us otherwise in school.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When you were in school, you were probably taught that we “use <em>a</em> in front of
words starting with a consonant and <em>an</em> in front of words starting with a
vowel.” Here’s a thing about English teachers, though: They love to tell you
about rules you should be following, but that’s not really how language works.
They’re also charged with getting those rules to stick in the minds of
distracted, uninsterested 7-year-olds, so they simplify things greatly and
often.</p>
<p>Do you know what the vowels of the English language are? You might think they’re
“a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, “u” (and sometimes “y”). This is the list we’re often taught
as kids. Those, however, are letters. Vowels, on the other hand, are <strong>sounds</strong>.
English has way more than five vowel sounds and they show up in a lot of
different places. Similarly, consonants aren’t letters, but sounds.</p>
<p>Before we look at some examples, let’s talk about <strong>why</strong> we have two different
forms of this word. <em>A/an</em> is what’s called an “indefinite article” in Linguistics
jargon (<em>the</em> is the “definite article”). It appears routinely in a lot of
different phonetic environments and is very closely tied, semantically, with the
word that follows (because word order is so important in English, it always
preceeds the nouns it applies to).</p>
<p>Because of this close association and commonality, it’s important to be easy to
say (or, rather, it is said so often that it naturally changed to become easy,
since people are lazy). Saying two vowel sounds in a row is sort of hard. You
either end up mooshing them together into a diphthong, dropping one or adding
some kind of consonant. Depending on which sounds predeed or follow a
constonant, some are harder to say than others, but /n/ has the nice property of
being kind of in the middle of the mouth, voiced (so it plays well next to
vowels) and sonorant (you can say it for a long time, if you like). This makes
is a particularly alluring consonant to slip in there. It’s basically lubricant
between vowel sounds.</p>
<p>Oll korrect. Examples, right? Just… one more thing. Since I’m going to be
talking about sounds, I’m going to trot out the International Phonetic Alphabet
(the IPA). It’s an alphabet invented by linguists to accurately describe the
sounds humans make when speaking instead of relying on the spelling native to
the language. You can <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet">read more about the IPA on
Wikipedia</a>, if
you like.</p>
<p>I’m not going to use it to the full extent that’s possible, since it can get
pretty hairy, but in a mode that’s meant to describe the general <strong>idea</strong> of a
sound, rather than the specific sound made by a speaker in a particular
utterance. The notation for this is to enclose the characters in slashes. For
instance, my first name might be transcribed as /bɛn/.</p>
<p>So. Take the word <em>umbrella</em>. Most English speakers pronounce this word
something like /umbɹɜlə/ and would probably construct “an umbrella”. This is not
because the word is spelled starting with “u”, but because the word <strong>sounds</strong>
starting with /u/.</p>
<p>However, the word in the title of this post, <em>urologist</em>, also starts with “u”,
but most folks pronounce it something like /jəɹɑləd͡ʒəst/ (we use a lot of /ə/ in
English, almost exclusively in unstressed syllables). The /j/ is a consonant
sound that is mostly spelled “y” in English (e.g. <em>yes</em> is /jɛs/), so even
though it’s not spelled explicitly in this word and it <strong>looks</strong> like it starts
with a vowel, this word actually starts with a consonant.</p>
<p>This brings us to the specific words in question: <em>MMF</em> and <em>UACF</em>. These words
are abbreviations, which means the spelling is often very divorced from the
pronunciation since you’re meant to say the letter names, not make the letter
sounds (as opposed to acronyms, where you are meant to pronounce the sounds e.g.
<em>SCUBA</em>). So <em>MMF</em> is /ɛm ɛm ɛf/ and <em>UACF</em> is /jʊ ɛj si ɛf/. When you look at
the IPA notation for those words, you start to see that even though <em>MMF</em> starts
with the letter “M”, it starts with the vowel sound /ɛ/ and while <em>UACF</em> starts
with the letter “U”, it starts with the consonant sound /j/.</p>
<p>So that’s the deal: It’s about sounds, not letters. And when you’re speaking,
you probably hardly ever think about it.</p>
<p>Interesting side note, when we are focusing on <em>a</em> and <em>an</em> in speech, we often
pronounce them like /ɛj/ and /æn/, but in normal speech, because they’re not
words that contribute to the core meaning of a sentence, they usually get
minimized to /ə/ and /ən/.</p>Ben HamillThis was originally published in my work Slack on 2016-10-18, but I’ve since been convinced that more people than just those few who can even read it there might be interested. I’ve edited it for clarity and correctness. I’m going to migrate all my Linguistics Minutes over to my blog and probably post future ones here.