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So apparently there’s a hidden folder in Windows called “system volume information” which stores information related to restoring the system if needed. But here’s the thing: it does not come with any default limit on how big it can get. So my year-old 120-gig hard drive, on which I’d put 30 gigs of stuff, was showing that it only had a few megs of space every couple of days. And this folder is, let me repeat, hidden and admin-only, which meant that the disk analysis utilities I was using didn’t see it/couldn’t tell how big it was! TreeSize Free did tell me that it had been denied access to several folders, including system volume information, and through the power of xkcd-style tech support (that is, I googled the term) I found out that I should use the command line prompt in administrator mode to determine its size. Answer: 80 gigs. A few commands later, I suddenly have 80 gigs free again. Every step of this has been resoundingly stupid: stupid that there’s no programmed constraint on the size of this folder; stupid that it’s then hidden; stupid that it can only be fixed from the command line. Windows tablet PC, I wish I knew how to quit you.
Benjamin Nugent, American Nerd: The Story of My People: I will point you to the Learned Fangirl’s review for more detail. Like her, I was struck by how male “my” people were. When he does notice women as other than girlfriends providing lunch to SCA attendees, he treats them with the welcome-to-the-zoo attitude he he fights for male nerds. “[T]here are a lot of nerds out there,” he reports, “who read romance novels the same way people read Hundred Years War-between-France-and-England-only-with-dragons novels.” Actually, they’re often the same people! This inability to see female nerds/fans I think actually has something to do with the otherwise puzzling repeated reference to Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series without the name. It’s like he senses that she’s sitting there, with the rest of us, at the intersection of fantasy about dragons and fantasy about hot man-on-man action, but he still can’t really see us and so we are (she is) unnameable. Aside from the media fan stuff, the same thing happens with his coverage of policy debate. He even notes that policy debate tournaments are hotbeds of heterosexual mating rituals, which logically necessitates that there are also girls there! I was one of them! Yes, it’s a peculiarly and nerdily masculinized subculture, but that doesn’t mean there are no girls. What did he think we were doing there? It surely wasn’t figuring out how to negotiate masculinity as identity, at least not in anything like the way he talks about.
Benjamin Nugent, American Nerd: The Story of My People: I will point you to the Learned Fangirl’s review for more detail. Like her, I was struck by how male “my” people were. When he does notice women as other than girlfriends providing lunch to SCA attendees, he treats them with the welcome-to-the-zoo attitude he he fights for male nerds. “[T]here are a lot of nerds out there,” he reports, “who read romance novels the same way people read Hundred Years War-between-France-and-England-only-with-dragons novels.” Actually, they’re often the same people! This inability to see female nerds/fans I think actually has something to do with the otherwise puzzling repeated reference to Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series without the name. It’s like he senses that she’s sitting there, with the rest of us, at the intersection of fantasy about dragons and fantasy about hot man-on-man action, but he still can’t really see us and so we are (she is) unnameable. Aside from the media fan stuff, the same thing happens with his coverage of policy debate. He even notes that policy debate tournaments are hotbeds of heterosexual mating rituals, which logically necessitates that there are also girls there! I was one of them! Yes, it’s a peculiarly and nerdily masculinized subculture, but that doesn’t mean there are no girls. What did he think we were doing there? It surely wasn’t figuring out how to negotiate masculinity as identity, at least not in anything like the way he talks about.
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