My own ultimate dicking-around moment came when I got the flu a couple of years ago and decided to learn how to write text-adventure games so I could write one based on the 1799 American novel Edgar Huntly. It was really fun and the novel is particularly suited to such a thing, but I found, whenever I shared it with anyone, the response was, "Christ, AWB. When did you do this? Why?" And, additionally, no one ever finished playing the game, which has a spectacular ending.
Where do we go to get this game, AWB?
It helps if you've read Edgar Huntly, unfortunately, and I haven't edited it in two years, but I'll be happy to post it if anyone has some server space to host it!
This post wasn't about what I thought it was going to be about.
Maybe this'll tide people over until AWB can post her game.
(Yes, I know I've linked to it before, but it's just that great.)
1 is awesome.
I am in general a fan of doing as many stupid things as possible, but I don't do much dicking around in a way that is related to my career.
I have read a bunch of textbooks on the theory that It would help me at work sometime in the future, even when that possibility is highly unlikely.
That looks like a pretty interesting book, joeo.
I should mention, to anyone who might be interested in hosting it, that the game file is about 155KB, but you also have to download the TADS playkit from here.
oh, yes. I learned international humanitarian law this way.
This seems to be a large % of professors' jobs.
The linked post makes a lot of sense to me, although I'm not sure I buy point 3. Dicking around tends to be a fairly solitary activity (in my experience, anyway), and I'm having a hard time imagining that people cocking an eyebrow at a person's dicking-around activities would really discourage them that much. But maybe.
Also: AWB, allow me to join in congratulating you on your awesome. So geeky.
12: The saddest part about the game is how unbelievably detailed it is. You can look at the windows and through them, from the inside and the outside, and it yields actual content relevant to the game. Looking at a book or letter is different from reading it, etc. Unfortunately, there are also failures, like when you try to look at the pens you're told are on the desk, it says, "You don't need the desk!" So it's kind of insane, but since the novel is rambling and weird and fever-induced, maybe that's okay.
Hey AWB, did you know about how you're invited to a meetup day after tomorrow?
And, does it say "you don't need the desk" because the desk is not something you can pick up and use in later interactions? Or for some other reason?
15: Yes, and I haven't responded yet because it's also the night of a going-away party for an old student of mine who is moving to Amsterdam! I am torn, because I'd know more people and prob have more fun with you guys, but he invited me first, etc. Not sure what the right thing to do is.
16: Yes, or because I didn't have any weighty nightmarish descriptive detail to add.
14: Stop teasing and post the game already. Edgar Huntly! You should burn it onto CDs and make us buy it from you.
11: It only becomes a big part of professors' jobs *after tenure* one of the biggest mistakes untenured and contingent faculty make is to start dicking around before they have their official dicking around pass.
Spending too much time dicking around in this sense is one possible explanation for why I am not tenure track, although not my preferred one.
How about this: until someone volunteers to host it, I'll happily email it to anyone who asks. If you don't want to put your address up here, email me at istherenosininit at gmail. Meanwhile, go to the site I linked to above and set up either the TADS Playkit (Windows) or Aquatads (Mac).
not my preferred one
...Which is of course, government mind-control rays?
1 is awesome.
I don't know if it counts to consider what one does in "free time" as a child/adolescent as this category of dicking around, since "play" is a semi-sanctioned thing to do with such time. It's definitely what got me into computer stuff, and by the time I was studying it in college, what I did with it in my free time definitely did fit this category.
Oddly, getting paid to do this kind of work has substantially cut down on my desire to do that *specific* kind of dicking around - probably a hazard of being paid to work on open source stuff.
I can host it, AWB. Email me and I'll put it up somewhere.
I should mention that the novel is about a guy who pokes into and around everything he comes in contact with, exploring places that he is not suggested to explore, randomly running into people who talk at length about stuff he has no business knowing, so, if you're not told you can't do something or go somewhere, try doing it, and when you run into someone chatty, just hit Z until they're done.
I am sadly inhibited about dicking around -- I can justify lying around reading novels on the grounds that I'm too tired to do anything productive. But actually working on something makes it obvious that there are more important things I should be doing instead.
I can make the case that patriarchical gender roles prevented me from dicking around in math from childhood through part of college, and which later contributed to me losing nterest in research midway through grad school, and deciding not to go research-track when applying for jobs. Thus becoming another statistic in the leaky pipe why-are-there-no-tenured-women-at-research-institutions problem.
For example, I was told - and I agreed - that calculus would be too hard for me in high school.
I can make the case, but it makes me cranky.
28: LB, are you joking? I know you make a lot of humorous remarks about your day job subsidizing what you do here, but to me the amount of time and energy you put into blogging is a wonderful example of noodling around in its best sense. Whoever said (a few weeks back) that your writing here is the stepping-stone to your next career phase was right on.
One of the reasons that I'm good at my job, but not a superstar, is that I no longer have any interest in doing heavy-duty dicking around. Like Vance in comments at AWB's, I had to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't going to be the next Whoever because while I'm more or less content to do work while at work, I have almost no interest in, say, writing a new Java web development framework at home.
Non-work-field-related dicking around is much more enjoyable to me.
Much of my dicking around involves inventing new ways to make cake, especially when I have a major deadline looming.
IT'S SNOWING! IT'S SNOWING! IT'S SNOWING!
(runs around room waving hands in the air)
WOOOOOOOOOO!!!
32: I often wonder what defines the limits of work-related dicking around for academics. Even for tenured professors, cooking, working on your lawn or dealing with children do not count as work-related dicking around. But plenty of other things that might well be as unrelated to your training are legitimate pursuits. Elaine Scarry can obsessively investigate the crash of Flight 800. I colleague of mine in the English department can decide to learn Chinese and become a Confucius scholar. (*)
Some public/private stuff has to be a work here. Nothing that is traditionally though of as women's work or housework could be legitimate dicking around for an academic.
This leads to some interesting hard cases, though. An acquaintance of mine who does environmental ethics spends a huge amount of time gardening--to the extent that it is really small scale organic farming. Given the importance of agricultural ethics for environmental ethics and the emphasis on practical knowledge in the field, she could plausible call this work related dicking-around. Also, she's tenured. I don't know if other people will grant it to her, though.
(*) And I know of at least one trained Confucian scholar who is not at all pleased with the work he has done.
It's very reassuring to hear it put this way. The concept of dilletante has been looming ever since a teacher wrote the word in a report at thirteen. (And I wish to god that my mother had never looked it up in a dictionary.) Dicking around, on the other hand, carries the suggestion that maybe the point of life is, in fact, to dick around; and better than that, the dicking around could even be useful. Subversive stuff.
Obviously I dick around most of the time, and a lot of it is work related.
since a teacher wrote the word in a report at thirteen
OMG -- was s/he struck by lightening? That's breath-takingly horrible. I've had to struggle against that concept well enough without concrete reinforcement from any authority figures thanks very much.
Speaking of dicking around: I was very pleased last night to make my first in-the-wild sighting of a Bridgeplate, in the NJTransit station in Summit. I didn't have a camera with me but will be sure to photograph it next time I'm over there, it will pair up very nicely with the Horizontal Standpipe in the 33rd St. PATH station.
Another obvious hard case for what counts as work related dicking around for an academic:
some rules for what counts as legitimate work related dicking around for an academic:
1. Any political cause is always fair game, no matter what your specialty.
2. Things that are thought of as housework or women's work are never fair game.
3. Things that too many other people do already--like play pick up basketball or play in a garage rock band--are going to be hard to pull off because everyone else who does it will say "hey, I want to be able to spend 40 hours a week on my band and call it work!"
4. The more obscure and difficult a project is, the more likely it can count as work related dicking around for an academic.
5. It always helps if you can write a book about it.
39 comments and nobody has mentioned blogging in the context of dicking around at work.
39: I actually had a link to Bitch, Ph.D. in my last comment, as an example of a hard case for academics (right after the colon in the first sentence) but it seems to have been eaten by the internet
So, do you guys think blogging/reading blogs counts as dicking around? I guess it would depend on your field, eh. I'm not quite sure what qualifies as dicking around for my field or even for lawyers generally, but I guess doing extra writing can't hurt.
Well, 30, in that I complain about being inhibited about dicking around, and then got busted for blogging all day (95% of the time I spend online is at work).
I suppose what I meant is that I'm inhibited about getting attached to projects in my free time, as opposed to time I pilfer from my employers. Any energy I have in my free time feels as though it really should be spent on my kids or housework or something useful; this doesn't mean that I actually do all that much when I'm not at work, but I tend to lie on the couch with a book, implying to myself that I'm not being useful because I'm simply too tired, rather than having the energy to do something but not actually wanting to spend it on making papermache with the kids or scrubbing the tub.
LB: I can't believe you don't see housework, including all DIY projects, as null time. Is it different for women, or for mothers?
I had some house guests over the holidays and - amazingly - they complained about the dirt. Now I reckon my place is fairly clean. Were my guests paragons of cleanliness? No; it's just that they wanted it to be their filth. Monkeys.
the complained about the dirt
Wha?
Is "null time" meant as not-qualifying-as-dicking-around? Because I think DIY projects totally qualify.
Yeah, I hope you injured them severely. Complaining about the dirt in someone else's house deserves crippling.
Actually, perhaps better to think of 'donative' and 'retentive' time instead of 'null' time. In the modern world, both are addressed by means of machinery. So, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, food mixers, etc. to help you retain time, which you can then donate to the use of other machinery, such as computers, recording devices, pianos, etc. Sewing machines are ambiguous, perhaps, but surely no one wants to spend more time doing laundry?
There was a nice essay on this by the art / architecture historian Robin Evans.
Hmm... But DIY projects are almost by definition donative -- if you are a citizen of a developed western nation and you don't want to spend your time on say, baking bread, you will buy bread; similarly if you don't want to spend your time on, say, building a bookcase, you will buy a bookcase from IKEA or the local equivalent.
44, 46: Well, I did feed them plenty of saturated fat. Does that count?
If you combine this with Kotsko's recent messiness post, you have the story of my life. Except that I do the dicking around part without the career part.
These are really quite major issues. For example, I've always had a strong distrust of scholars who only did official scholarly work asspecifica mandated by their position, classification, and paradigm, even if they were very diligent and productive. The exploratory peripheral part really seems essential to keeping people from becoming tunnel-vision apparatchicks.
And from a feminist point of view, a lot of women do seem to feel guilty about either messiness or unproductive time. Women seem indoctrinated against selfishness. (This relates a lot to my anti-relationship philosophy; dicking around when something needs to be done is resented by partners of almost any kind).
You also have a certai number of people who have a series of short unrelated careers and are more or less successful in several of them, because they're too restless to stick to one thing. Often they keep converting hobbies to careers.
There's a kind of freedom people don't have much any more, involving being able to fill your time as you wish. Supposedly the market makes you free, but the market is very demanding and ends to take over people's lives. Supposedly academia frees people up for free exploration, but far too many academics (I started off saying "most") seem hagridden by professional and methodological imperatives and demands that they don't always understand and about which they never had any choice.
Blogging (reading, in my case) isn't really dicking around in the linked sense in my field (software engineering). I suppose a bit of what I read is in my field - things like Lambda the Ultimate, Joel on Software, and maybe DailyWTF - but the vast majority is political and social stuff.
(A gray area is projects like re-tiling your kitchen, which you maybe don't want to do but don't have the money to hire a contractor and feel like it needs to get done somehow.)
Isn't "dicking around" basically having a hobby? Some of it of course overlaps with work because you're in fields that you're actually interested in.
48: Only if you like carpentry. But I suspect that mostly what is wanted is books-to-hand-when-you-need-them, to which shelves are only a means. So the decision to make shelves is not unlike the decision to make your own washing machine.
(A gray area is projects like re-tiling your kitchen, which you maybe don't want to do but don't have the money to hire a contractor and feel like it needs to get done somehow.)
This is called being poor. Well, not poverty stricken, but too poor to hire professionals. And I feel your pain. I've spent a the last few weeks painting and cutting a new doorway between our dining room and living room, and after that my wife wants to re-tile the bathrooms.
I dick around a lot, but it never has anything to do with either work or school. Unless working in Photoshop to mess with pictures I've taken counts, which I guess it could peripherally, but I'd rather be trying to figure out how to cure sausage. make quality liquor at home, or figure out how to make bread that is not the NYT no-knead recipe (answer: follow directions very carefully).
54 -- but that's what I'm saying: it would be perverse to make your own bookcase if you did not enjoy carpentry, since for a price that is equivalent to or a bit lower than the price of raw materials for a bookcase you can buy one from IKEA.
Unless IKEA-quality items make you unhappy, and you feel the need to have solid walnut bookshelves, in which case one can save money. (Says the guy whose house has an unusually large number of bookshelves from IKEA and Target.)
Dilettante; lightning; apparatchik.
Apparatchicks would be a good band name though.
I tell myself it's OK to mis-spell dilletante because it's a foreign word. But thanks.
However, at 35, I'm starting to get homonyms muddled up. This is a new thing, and I don't like it one bit.
surely no one wants to spend more time doing laundry?
See, this is a good example of how subjective this is. I find folding laundry to be one of the most soothing, relaxing activities imaginable. The motor skills involved make it the same as a walk around the block -- it frees up my mind to wander and I often start off daydreaming and end up with a solution to the proposal I've been trying to write or the survey I'm designing. Or I have an entirely new thought connecting some random thing I read with a person I should introduce it to.
It's tactile as well. I was well-known in my last office for sitting on the floor to do my editing.
in my last office
Does the current one frown upon such antics?
31 -- I tend to think of myself this way as well but, when I reflect upon it, I am honestly unable to determine whether I am too much of a dillitante or too obsessive.
I tend to not dick around with work related stuff outside of work, but when I am working on something I can't let go of it. I definitely think about work problems outside of work.
I find it disturbing to not be able to tell because it reveals how bad I am at judging what should be considered normal.
dil(l)et(t)ante
I prefer "generalist."
Would learning to read Italian when the only possible justification for doing so would be to make minor corrections to translations of Agamben count as "dicking around"?
I prefer "generalist."
"Lightweight" works, too.
I think about work problems when not at work, though I need that dicking-around time with non-work subjects to make it happen. I mentally back-burner it (or, more accurately, huck it into the INFJ murky subconscious) and then go to the gym or do a Sudoku or something else that puts my brain on "coast." When it's done, it'll float to the top.
69 is an interesting point. Sometimes I task my unconscious to think about work stuff but I usually have it working over non-work related things.
I sure the people who do best at work are those unconscious is on the job 24-7.
There's a lot I could say about this. I'm surprised that none if it is coming to mind.