I went to a nice event on Capitol Hill this evening to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the American Association of University Women lobby corps. I volunteered on the lobby corps for almost three years. It was one of those things that I didn’t have a lot of fun doing, but I was really glad I did it for the learning experience of how things work on Capitol Hill and how service organizations interact with Congress.
I hadn’t seen several of the AAUW members in awhile. But it was good to discuss Budget Justified with them and offer to give a talk about it at their meetings in the fall.
I went to the Virginia Film Alliance annual networking event in Northern Virginia. I had a spot at a table to display the trailer of Budget Justified.
I told several people that I was creating a theater within an online game to show my movie clips, build a fan base, and experiment with a role playing game about Budget Justified where people can pretend to be the overbearing boss, the lazy coworker, the shy coworker, the guy who tries to get sex in the office, etc. One guy said, “You should try Second Life.” Well, that happened to be the game that I was referring to. We exchanged user names, so I plan to show him my Second Life movie theater next time we’re online together.
A lot of people said they’d check my web site to watch the trailer. We’ll see if anyone checks the web site. But will anyone tell their friends about the web site?
I went to a panel discussion at George Washington University put on by the American Association of University Women. AAUW just published a report on research they had done about how stereotypes affect girls’ and women’s performance in engineering and math. Girls do worse on math tests if you tell them beforehand that girls aren’t good at math.
April of Girls Inc., has a problem with moms who tell their kids “I’ve never been good at math. Go ask your dad.”
One point that was brought up several times was that women who are seen as competent are seen as unlikable. Therefore girls and women are given the message that they have to dumb themselves down in order for people to want to interact with them. Personally, if someone only wants to hang around with me if I’m dumb, then that’s not a someone I want to waste my time on.
Another point that was made – and this gets harped on all the time without asking the right question – is that women need flexible work places so they can sit home and take care of babies. Why doesn’t anyone ever ask why the men refuse to sit home and take care of babies?
I mentioned this to one woman. Her response was that men aren’t any good at it. Well, how the hell are we supposed to get rid of the women-aren’t-competent-in-their-jobs stereotype when we’re refusing to get rid of the men-can’t-take-care-of-babies stereotype?
Jill Foster invited me, along with five other people, to help out with DC Media Makers. We had a little pre-meeting before the DC Media Makers talk at NPR headquarters tonight. It seems like a pretty good group, so I think it would be a good idea to get more involved.
Dave Saunders gave a talk about Samurai. He is an engaging speaker. He was involved in developing the internet in 1990 and worked with the people who invented the 56k modem. But he doesn’t care about connecting computers. It’s about connecting people.
A few people talked about their experiences at the South by Southwest conference last week. One person said it used to be a great creative atmosphere, but this year it had become too corporate. Someone else noted that Yelp is a great tool for stalking someone.
I went to a talk given by Kurt Klaus, an entertainment attorney. I hadn’t been to one in awhile because I haven’t found any other new talks that I hadn’t already been to.
I learned a few new things that I hadn’t already heard, such as problems with using footage of book covers, different kinds of production insurance, and that it’s more than likely not a problem to have wallpaper that somebody designed in the background. And if you want to use a popular song in your movie, you’ll probably have to pay several different parties a total of more that forty thousand dollars for the rights to use the song for ten years.
That means that for my high school movie, I’ll have the pom line do the pom routine I learned in high school, but dub in different music later. It’ll look bad, but that will be more realistic. Because our pom line wasn’t very good.
I went to a press conference about a study on woman entrepreneurs this morning. The main address was given by Nell Merlino, Founder and CEO of Count Me In, a not-for-profit entity that provides resources for women to grow their microbusinesses into multimillion dollar enterprises.
The thrust of the press conference was that women business owners are reluctant to hire. I stood to ask a question and summarized my business in three sentences. I asked if the women were contracting work out instead of hiring. Merlino said that contractors were included as hiring staff.
I also went to a talk about government transparency at the Brookings Institute. The speaker was Cass Sunstein, the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Unfortunately, he made it sound as though he thought everything was perfect, and didn’t seem very transparent.
On Saturday I gave a talk at the Podcasters Alliance meetup about Budget Justified. I showed the trailer and the first episode. I was pretty upbeat during the talk and it seemed like I held their attention.
For the most part, the audience was friendly, although the guy who always says that the video clips didn’t make him want to see more said so to me also. I told him that he probably wasn’t my intended audience.
In fact, I didn’t think most of them would be too receptive to my topic – yet another woman complaining that men are pigs. But I didn’t make that the focus of my talk and the tone was not whiny. I even said that the movie was more about how the management treated everyone poorly.
I mentioned a few of the things I’ve been doing in Second Life. Then the Washington Post had an article about making money in Second Life on the front page Monday morning. I mentioned it before the Post does – makes it look like I’m on top of my game.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/07/AR2010030703524.html?sub=AR
I’m giving a talk at the Podcasters Alliance tomorrow. I designed the talk to be about the process of creating Budget Justified, as opposed to the talk for women’s groups, which is about what happened while I worked in the FAA offices.
So today I’m working on the presentation slides.
At a meeting this week, I chatted with a woman about Budget Justified. http://BudgetJustified.com She asked what contractor I had worked for. I told her I didn’t want to tell people which contractor was involved. Good thing I didn’t tell her because the next woman who walked up said she had worked there. And didn’t like it either.
