Link blog: emotion, computers, mindfulness, sudo

What We Can Learn from the Paris Attacks (Without Ignoring the Elephant in the Room)
Yep, this is more or less what I think.
(tags: paris terrorism islam islamism religion politics)
What is emotional labor?
A term that once described jobs where being friendly and cheerful was seen as part of the job has apparently been co-opted to mean “someone expects me to do something”.
(tags: emotion labour work relationships)
Guide to software developer job advertisements: andrewducker
Seems legit.
(tags: software software-engineering jobs adverts careers)
My first 10 day Vipassana retreat
Not *my* retreat. Some bloke’s. It’s an interesting article about the experience though.
(tags: meditation buddhism mindfulness retreat)
An alias for when you really need it done…
I’m totally setting this up.
(tags: funny computers unix sudo)
The Deadlock Empire
A nice little web game where you try to break a threaded program by executing a critical section in two threads at once. It’s pretty neat.
(tags: programming threads concurrency locks game)

2 Comments on "Link blog: emotion, computers, mindfulness, sudo"


  1. Mmm. I’ve been underwhelmed myself by the recent Internet discussions about emotional labour, for another reason relating to its definition: nobody ever stated the definition. Even the people who were making posts actively trying to introduce people who didn’t already know it to this fabulous new concept – or at least the ones of those I encountered – tended to start by saying “Hey, look at this enormous Metafilter thread”, and give a link that jumped in half way through a discussion so that your first exposure to the concept was some musing along the lines of “… and another intriguing nuance of emotional labour is [something that makes no sense at all if you don’t already know what it is in the first place]”.

    In the year or so (or however long it’s been) since it kicked off, I’ve kind of osmosed a good enough definition to be able to make vague sense of things I see people say about it in passing. Having to spend a year doing that has left me in no mood to be charitable to the concept – but even so, I think “somebody expects me to do something” really is an excessive caricature. My general impression is that “emotional labour” means something along the lines of “anything where a major part of the work involves { caring about / anticipating / managing } how other people feel”. Which is a definition that does make some sense in the context of actual jobs like the service industry, and also covers some of the recent Internet usages to describe (for example) all the less visible aspects of the work done by the stay-at-home member of a couple.

    Reply

    1. I think the expansion of the term from “that thing where service staff are expected to be happy/friendly/flirtly” to “being expected to look after sending the Christmas cards to your partner’s family and blamed if they are not sent” is fair enough.

      Unreasonable uses: broadening that to refer to answering questions made using Tumblr’s Ask feature is a bit much (though I’m not sure how common that is).

      Your partner expecting your support is too broad on it’s own: why shouldn’t they? If it’s one-sided, you have a problem which you might describe as “I’m doing all the emotional labour in this relationship”, if you then wanted to spent half-an-hour explaining what that means ;-).

      Reply

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