{"id":5266,"date":"2014-02-15T12:22:50","date_gmt":"2014-02-15T17:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5266"},"modified":"2014-03-04T20:54:56","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T01:54:56","slug":"namedropping-esr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5266","title":{"rendered":"Namedropping &#8220;ESR&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For at least fifteen years my name and its tri-letterization has been something with which you could conjure up a lot of attention among hackers and other sorts of geek. This fact presented the more clueful of my personal friends with a delicate problem: under what circumstances would it be proper for them to invoke this instrument?<\/p>\n<p>I have actually been asked for guidance about this more than once.  I developed some guidelines more than a decade ago.  To the best my knowledge my friends have been pretty good about applying them.  I present them here for your amusement.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>1. Please do not drop my name to score cheap social-status points.  That&#8217;s crass and I don&#8217;t like it.<\/p>\n<p>2. Do drop my name if by doing so you can achieve some mission objective of which I would approve.  Examples that have come up: encouraging people to design in accordance with the Unix philosophy, or settling a dispute about hacker slang, or explaining why it&#8217;s important for everyone&#8217;s freedom for the hacker community to hang together and not get bogged down in internal doctrinal disputes.<\/p>\n<p>3. Do drop my name if by doing it you can rock someone&#8217;s world in a positive way. A case of this that comes up fairly often is encouraging a young proto-hacker.<\/p>\n<p>4. Do drop my name if doing so would be <em>funny<\/em>.  Funny is even an acceptable excuse for scoring social-status points with it &#8211; if you think I&#8217;ll laugh when I hear the story, go right ahead.<\/p>\n<p>And yes, I apply these rules (or obvious analogs thereof) to myself.  I think it&#8217;s vulgar to wave my fame around in contexts where it&#8217;s irrelevant.  It can be very amusing, if you&#8217;re clued in, to watch what happens when somebody in a group of programmers (or gamers or SF fans or any other population that oversamples programmers) that hasn&#8217;t met me before twigs to The Presence.<\/p>\n<p>If this attitude seems odd to you, understand that fame is exhausting and psychologically dangerous (I have a lot more sympathy for rock stars who fuck themselves up with drugs than before I felt the pressure myself). Ironic detachment from one&#8217;s own celebrity is, I have found, an effective coping strategy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For at least fifteen years my name and its tri-letterization has been something with which you could conjure up a lot of attention among hackers and other sorts of geek. This fact presented the more clueful of my personal friends with a delicate problem: under what circumstances would it be proper for them to invoke&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5266\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Namedropping &#8220;ESR&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-5266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mr-famous-guy","tag-esr","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5267,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5266\/revisions\/5267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}