Let's have a salon

[jenett]

Several years ago, I ran a series of weekly salon posts, where I'd post a topic to get us started, people would show up in the comments, and conversation would ensue. Now seems a good time to try them again!

(You should not feel restrained to keep on this topic! Start other topics! Encourage topic drift! That's part of the point. Feel free to ask random questions, there's a chance someone might know about the thing.)

This week's question

What are you learning right now that you're really interested by? (That might be a project for work, for personal stuff, a gaming geekery thing, a book you're reading, a podcast you're listening to, the fact you're learning a lot about Dreamwidth and how it works this week, or anything else.)

What do you like about it? What are you finding more challenging?

Things currently contemplating

I'm currently reading Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones, which is well-researched and has a really interesting structure where he's looking at different pieces of it through small slices (individual people, towns, situations) and tracing back to the origins as much as possible. I really like books where the information part is well done, but the structure creates connections between pieces of information in helpful and new ways.

Notes:

* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.
* If this works this week, I'll do an updated FAQ and continue.
* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)
* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[jenett]

So, my own thing that I'm learning right now is mostly copyright. As people who've been reading my journal for a bit know, I'm currently in the next to last week of the CopyrightX class.

There's a Harvard Law class (that meets twice a week) and they have run an online version for more than five years now that has the same lectures, some of the same readings (we skip the ones not available online, basically) and have an online sectional with a teaching fellow (a 3L student).

My section (probably because it's a Thursday afternoon slot in my time zone) is mostly people in Europe or Asia, about 2/3 of whom are lawyers or law students.

I'm finding it deeply interesting and very useful in filling in a bunch of gaps in 'why is that copyright thing like that' knowledge, but it's also been very brain consuming. It takes me somewhere between 1.5 and 3 hours to get through notetaking on the lectures, and that requires high-quality brain time, which is sometimes in short supply (especially after work.)

I expect to be talking about my thoughts on it (and who else might be interested) when I'm done, but everything except the sectionals themselves is available for free online for individual review at the copyx.org website.

[dejla]

Fascinating! I'm a part of the sixties boom, so I have been in Star Trek and then Star Wars fandom since I was in college and grad school. The kind of open knowledge of fanfiction and such was such a threat in those days, when everyone knew you had to hide it -- and some jerks didn't bother to hide it.