Back home today after an intense, amazing, mind-expanding, soul-filling, heart-warming long weekend at BurlyCon 2011 in Seattle, and boy is my mind racing!  The first two days were great, but Saturday and Sunday were simply magical. I’ve had so many amazing conversations with so many amazing people, I can hardly make sense of it all.

But I’ll try.

1) Despite Neo-Burlesque’s feminist, all-sizes-welcome ideology, big-bodied burlesquers don’t always feel the love from their smaller sisters. They get booked as “token” plus-size performers — a fact brought home when the only two in a show find themselves performing back-to-back, over and over and over. They have to listen to thinner sisters express their own insecurities and body issues in phrases like “uck, I feel so fat today”. They don’t get booked as often as thinner dancers. And people feel licensed to talk about their bodies much more than they do with slimmer women. So here’s the deal: y’all gotta get some self-awareness up in ya. Pay attention to what you say, how you act, and who you book. Because big gals enrich this community. Anyone who witnessed Rubenesque Burlesque’s off-the-hook performance during peer review can attest to that.

2) Speaking of license and bodies: one surprising statement from the panel on sex work and burlesque was that burlesque audiences take far more liberties with the bodies of performers than the audiences and patrons of other sex workers. Does this mean that, like strip clubs, burlesque theaters need bouncers? Or is there a code of etiquette that we as a community can spread and enforce ourselves? Grabbing someone’s boob uninvited is a violation — maybe we need to speak up more when someone crosses that line.

3) Invited boob-grabbing is still A-OK.

4) People could use some help using the web and social tools to promote themselves and their events. I’ve got a bunch of material I’m going to adapt for burlesquers — look for it on the Burlesque Hall of Fame site in weeks and months to come.

5) The burlesque community is filled with amazing, thoughtful, generous people. So many of the people I talked to at BurlyCon said simply this: “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” People offered to fly to Vegas on their own dime and work, they offered to carry exhibition material around the country, they offered their time and money and bodies to do whatever it takes to make the museum great.

And I definitely plan to take them up on that!

6) The burlesque world is full of brilliant, beautiful geeks. I knew they were beautiful, I knew they were brilliant, but man are they some geeks! I had more profound intellectual conversations at BurlyCon than I had at the last American Anthropological Association conference — and with better fashion sense.

7) Last but not least, I learned that I might be the only guy in the country who could spend 4 days at a stripper convention and somehow manage to interact almost exclusively with married women and lesbians. It’s like I forgot to be straight! I’m pretty sure that says something about me — and I’m not so sure I want to know what…

So that’s what I learned at BurlyCon 2011. I have a ton of stuff still buzzing around my head that I have to process, but that will come in the days and weeks to come. Right now, I’m just kind of basking in the neon afterglow of a weekend among one of the strongest and most caring communities it has ever been my privilege to be a part of.

Only 360 days or so until BurlyCon 2012!

Image by misteraitch via Flickr

Sometimes I get fed up. It seems like every day companies are acting more and more cavalier with my time and attention, wasting an ever-increasing part of my day to accomplish absolutely nothing.

Last night I reached into my mailbox to find a plain white envelope, probably five inches by eight, no logo, no return address, just an expanse of white with my address slightly off-center. Out of the mailbox and whoosh! straight into the trash. I know what it was — a Cox cable ad. The third one I’ve gotten in the last week or so, packaged exactly the same, ostensibly so I wouldn’t know it was a Cox cable ad. Even Cox knows I don’t want to see a Cox cable ad.

The thing is, I already get Cox cable — it’s provided by my HOA. Which is nice, it means my TiVO can record The Daily Show and the occasional movie on TCM. So I’m not going to pay again for service I already get. Meanwhile, Cox is spending what, a buck or two a month, sometimes more, to send me mailings that will never entice me to buy. If I wanted cable, of course I’d call them — who else is there?

Anyway, it got me thinking about the myriad ways companies waste my time, and the money they spend to earn my ill will. Here then, in no particular order, is a list of 10 things companies just shouldn’t do.

1. Send repeated email or (worse) junk mail come-ons. Especially for products I have no intention of buying, like services they know I already get or products I have repeatedly not bought in the past. Smith’s supermarket just sent me coupons for dog food, even though I haven’t bought dog food in nearly 3 years. Which they know, because the same database that told them I once bought dog food in their store certainly tells them I haven’t since.
2. Clutter my inbox with a constant stream of email ads masquerading as “newsletters”. Frankly, if you’re emailing me more than once a month, it’s too much, but if that lesson isn’t going to sink in, at least make it worth my while to open the damn things. You know how easy it is to delete email? Especially when the last dozen or two dozen or 812 emails have been devoid of anything useful?
3. Ask me to enter barely legible codes into a website to earn points or prizes. Come up with something, anything, different, soda companies. I drink a ton of soda, I’m definitely the kind of customer you want to keep in the fold — so ask yourself why you have no record of me in your “Cola Points” database or whatever bullshit program you’re running.
4. Ask me to nag my friends and betray my integrity by posting your stupid come-ons into my social network stream. I like to think that the things I post on Facebook, Twitter, my blogs, or elsewhere are meaningful expressions of who I am. Asking me to shill your product so that I can win a contest, well, that just sucks.
5. Ask my state in your web forms. I just entered my zip code — you know what state I live in. Why are you wasting my time — and why are you making yourself look like an idiot. In the handful of cases where a zip code straddles a state line, you could have a state drop-down appear — Christ, folks, it’s just programming!
6. Require me to check which credit card I’m using. Again, as soon as I enter the number, you know. Mastercards start with “5″, Visas with “4″ — like zip codes, it’s just programming!
7. Ask me more than once if I’m sure I want to cancel a service. I know, you have a skilled retention team and sometimes they can resolve problems and prevent a cancellation. Surely offering once is enough — don’t make me feel like a jerk for canceling a service I don’t want!
8. Make me call to cancel a service I signed up for online. The whole point of signing up online was to avoid having to deal with a lengthy phone call (have you read that most adults hate making phone calls? It’s research, look into it.) Oh, I get it — you can use that resistance to making the call to squeeze a few extra months out of me. Which makes you look better… how, again?
9. Hide the price of stuff. Software company websites are notorious for this — often the only way to find out what something costs is to click the “Buy” button. Purely ridiculous! You understand how people use the web, right? We compare a lot of products, look at prices, skip around from site to site — you’re not making your site “sticky” be refusing to show me the price, you’re making your site dismissible.
10. Make me watch a video to find out what your product does. Really, jackoffs? You’re so freaking bad at writing you can’t even post s simple bulleted list of what the hell your product does? I’m supposed to sit though your insufferable royalty-free music and your insufferable droney voice going on and on and on just so I can get to the one sentence that says what the hell your product is supposed to be? Well, I’m sure you can see how positive this makes me feel about your lame excuse for a company.

Look, companies, by doing this shit you’re making life harder, not easier. I know some of this stuff works, at least from a revenue perspective. If I put off canceling a subscription, you make a few extra bucks. And I know few people stop the ordering process because they’re asked for their state. But come on, this is the 21st century. We’re in a freaking recession, we work longer hours than we have in generations, we spend almost no time socializing because we’re too overworked and underpaid and just too damn tired and you’re wasting our time. Stand up, be a mensch for goodness sake. STOP IT.

Click here to download:

NOLA_Street_Jazz.wmv (55273 KB)

Posted via email from Dustin M. Wax

Image via Wikipedia

I started blogging on November 2nd of 2000 with a carefully crafted analysis of supreme court nominations by previous presidents, in response to anti-Nader campaigning that promised Nader supporters that their support would spell the end of abortion rights in the US. That post has been lost to history (and a bad webhosting service); the oldest post I still have (Sierra Club Goes Anti-Green) was written the following day, again as a defense of the Nader campaign.

2000 was the very dawn of the blogging era — as far as I know (or knew at the time), there was not yet such a thing as “blogging software”, and certainly nothing as elegant as WordPress. Over the years, this blog (originally called “One Man’s Opinion” until that issue with the bad webhosting service allowed my domain to slip away from me) has moved from a collection of hand-coded HTML pages (what a PAIN!) to Bloxsom to Pivot to Drupal and finally to WordPress as of earlier this year. From the beginning, it’s been not just a place to express myself but also a way to explore the latest web technologies, from early third-party commenting and blogrolling services to today’s Twitter integration and WordPress themes and plug-ins. Along the way I’ve learned basic web design principles, a smattering of Javascript and PHP, and of course HTML 4 and CSS.

By 2007 I was blogging professionally, first at Lifehack.org and then for a number of big sites as either a some-time contributor or a guest writer. In 2005 I teamed up with a bunch of other young anthropologists to launch one of the first anthropology-focused blogs, Savage Minds, which has become a major destination for anthropology on the Web. In 2008 I launched The Writer’s Technology Companion, still a proud accomplishment although I haven’t kept it up as well as I had originally hoped. But it is this blog — including all the original content (except that very first post) from One Man’s Opinion and from my sex and gender blog ThinkNaughty (also lost in the aforementioned bad webhost incident) — that has remained my main blog, even when — as has definitely been the case this year — I’ve been too busy and/or distracted to post.

This year has seen tremendous changes for me. First, my freelance writing career took off in a way I’d never expected — and I discovered that I really wasn’t cut out for the demands of a successful freelance writing career. Then, just when it seemed I couldn’t bear it any more, I was offered my current position as the registrar of the UNLV Barrick Museum, allowing me to give up the freelancing entirely and return to two things I’m deeply passionate about: anthropology and museums. What that means for my future blogging I still haven’t determined — on one hand, I should (in theory) have a lot more time to post; on the other, I haven’t quite figured out what to post about.

But after 10 years, I’ve learned that if I wait long enough, there’s always something I feel strongly enough about to get me posting again. So, here’s looking forward to the next decade of blogging!

Image via Wikipedia

• @BrandyBell Not at all — it was a blast. Maybe next time we’ll have a conversation where we can actually hear each other. in reply to BrandyBell #
• The coolest part? Kevin Smith flies SW! RT @johnnykats: Kevin Smith thrown off plane for being ‘too big for seat’ http://bit.ly/dkZNwZ #
• Office 2010 will have a $99 version of it’s Pro pkg for students and educators, different from Home and Student http://bit.ly/dlldxE #
• The White Deer of Wisconsin’s forests — amazingly beautiful animals! http://bit.ly/aqfaL6v (6min video) #
• The legendary Tactile Pro keyboard — with individual switches for each key — returns. Loud like the Past. I want one! http://bit.ly/dahNN3 #
• Grant-writing workshop at my uni is $600. How could a poor adjunct like me raise $600… #
• @ojmason Fair enough, but no grant proposals = no grants, which can rather limit your research. Not the best system, but it’s the system. in reply to ojmason #
• Fascinating, horrifying insider’s look at US Army’s Human Terrain program http://post.ly/O1Xx #
• @ojmason In academic terms, maybe, but not economic terms. Where would funding come from for massive longitudinal studies? Millions of $$ in reply to ojmason #
• I’m not sure how I am getting retweeted for a test of “eight intelligences”, since it’s not something I’m likely to care about. #
• Just drove 20 mins to the community college for my night class. Then remebered school is closed today for President’s Day. #
• @AgingBackwards @CynSieWil @lasvegasloopy I dress up for class, so now I’m literally all dressed up w/ nowhere to go! in reply to AgingBackwards #
• @Sara_Mooney It slouches out of shame, right? in reply to Sara_Mooney #
• @iheartbeans Tragedy is when you slip on the ice and twist your ankle. Comedy is when someone else slips on the ice and breaks their back. in reply to iheartbeans #
• @Sara_Mooney The black-and-white image as opposed to the grayscale one. That’s why it’s smaller, right? in reply to Sara_Mooney #
• Reporter-types out there (and up late): do you follow your sources on Twitter/LinkedIn/etc.? What about PR folks who connect you w/ sources. #
• Seems there are no tools for the kind of contact mgmt I need. 3 kinds of contacts: sources, their PR agents, editors. Tagged w/ expertise. #
• @alanna_shaikh I wonder which comes first – they follow you and see you’d be a good source, or want to use you as a source so they follow? in reply to alanna_shaikh #
• @alanna_shaikh Trying to work out the etiquette between wanting to connect and wanting to intrude… in reply to alanna_shaikh #
• @leslieajoy GIst looks interesting, thanks! in reply to leslieajoy #
• I feel so shriven. #
• Gibbon’s budget plan released: http://bit.ly/chtvp7 Not as bad as it could be, but not all that good, either. 6% paycuts for everyone! #
• @PokerVixen That’s what *I’M* talking about! Phones are soooo 19th century. in reply to PokerVixen #
• Crashed hard after @lvdrsketchys – fell asleep on couch for 2 hrs! @chachavelour super-nursey about minimal drawing skills. Thank you! #
• @PjPerez Did you hire two other dudes to talk about stuff for two hours? in reply to PjPerez #
• Writing about fashion tips for men – anyone got a tip for the stylistically-challenged modern male? #
• @BrandyBell They make capris for men?! Ugh! I thought suit coat only went w/ suit pants; isn’t a blazer or sports coat better for jeans? in reply to BrandyBell #
• Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection (8d72b20b-76db-4eef-9fde-6ef44a73de66 – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7) http://ff.im/-g8fVP #
• @wilsonsteve Might do a follow-up on body types — that’s a whole other bag of cats! in reply to wilsonsteve #
• Is there #bnblv tonight (Thursday)? Where at? #
• Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-Up Men http://ff.im/-g9fmL #
• Wow, my post on men’s basic fashion at Lifehack has gotten a ton of comments; didn’t expect such a hunger for this! http://bit.ly/cCnIrT #
• @BrandyBell Thanks. I wouldn’t say I’ve taken an “interest” in fashion, more like an interest in not looking like a moron all the time :-) in reply to BrandyBell #
• Am I the only one who finds Google Buzz nearly impossible to use? Can’t all those comments be folded under the main post, like Friendfeed? #
• @Sara_Mooney It’s too bad you can’t just wrap yourself up in a blanket when you’re out partying… in reply to Sara_Mooney #
• By the way, #snugcrawl -ers, I bought 1 of those wretched things, I’m trying to be a good sport. What an awful, hideous thing a Snuggie is! #
• Could there be MORE static in a Snuggie? Or would they have to make it even uglier first? #snugcrawl #
• @armano Not entirely true. 404 comments on his Smodcast episode covering SW story http://bit.ly/96LDYQ Plus, Twitter is *all* comments. in reply to armano #
• @PjPerez Definit’n of a geek: Someone who won’t admit an idea is crazy or impossible, only that we don’t have the right tech to pull it off. in reply to PjPerez #
• RT @missrogue: RT @StephenTiano: It’s time we see tax protests as UNpatriotic. This isn’t the 1700s. We’re not fighting a royal oppressor. #
• Since I updated @tweetdeck this morning, links no longer open in my browser. That makes me sad. #
• This is awesome – Typekit allows you to use a wide range of non-standard fonts, easily and legally, on any webite! http://bit.ly/9EZ02k #
• @richardbarley THanks, that half-helped. I can get links to open in Chrome now, but can’t set them back to Firefox. Weird, but usable. in reply to richardbarley #
• RT @zaibatsu: High School Used Laptop Webcams To SPY On Students At Home http://bit.ly/aMsDJ6 #security #privacy #
• @mikeyvegas @pjperez Why must I face the day without any awesome? #pocketfulofawesome #
• My Lifehack about men’s fashion has been INSANELY popular! Who knew there was such a demand for basic fashion info? http://bit.ly/ahXMk4 #
• @cdearment88 Why thank you kindly! I bought an awesome retro-style, magnet-backed metal-and-enamel countdown timer at Pier 1 for $8. in reply to cdearment88 #
• @VegasBill Elvii in reply to VegasBill #
• How come everyone I know is at VIia Elvis tonight and I didn’t even know it was opening? #
• @SeahorseTat Me too! I guess I’m totally out of touch with reality…. in reply to SeahorseTat #
• Happy bday @mikeyvegas. Finally you can leave the short pants and beanie behind and wear some grown-up pants. #
• Happy bday @tinch too! #
• I’m at Las Vegas Roller Hockey Center (953 E Sahara Ave, Las Vegas) w/ 5 others. http://4sq.com/8F5BKC #
• Half-time at LV Roller Derby. (Finally made it out @alruggs – think you cld do me a favor and win a little?) #
• This is what roller derby looks like to me. http://post.ly/OvsS #
• @aprilcore That’s not a cry you can hear at night! in reply to aprilcore #
• @EpicSelf We don’t normally do one-off guest posts but maybe can work s/th out. Email me at dustin@lifehack.org and we’ll talk. in reply to EpicSelf #
• So I’m getting into 4square late in the game – who should I follow/friend/4-stalk/whatever? And why do ppl I don’t know keep friending me? #