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honestfutures · 5 years

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i dont have a fic for you but if i may i can offer a word picture of cameron, hanging out in donna's pool just wearing big sunglasses and a pair of boxer briefs bc she doesn't own a bathing suit yet, and also donna's on her way out she was just making them both some mojitos, and the neighbours are like :/ but sunbathing topless is perfectly legal in california sooooo

#halt and catch fire #cameron howe #donna emerson

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honestfutures · 5 years

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somewhere in california right now donna emerson and cameron howe are both appreciating some female-presenting nipples

#text post

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honestfutures · 6 years

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first time cameron comes along for a parent event at haley's school

donna: okay honey now this is really important. i know these moms can be judgy but i need to you to really try and keep cool if someone acts rude. remember im with you

cam: hey don't worry! i promise i'll be good

pta mom: wow donna i see you brought your................................... friend

donna, already shoving aside bake sale tables, :

#halt and catch fire #cameron howe #donna clark #camdonna

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honestfutures · 6 years

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skill and creation in hacf

I’ve seen a lot about who’s the “smartest” or “most creative” in HACF (often paired with Donna hate…), and while of course it’s always more complicated than simple character stats, I thought it might be fun to look at the various ways the characters are skilled and how they differ. So let’s break down these characters like Pokemon, shall we?

Hard skills: by this I basically mean strictly technical proficiency and knowledge. This is what most people think when they consider the characters’ “intelligence”.

Donna: Based solely on what’s plainly stated in dialogue, Donna is a skilled engineer with a computer science degree. In terms of “hard” skills, she has at minimum THE SAME credentials as Gordon. Like I’m tired of hearing about this.

Gordon: He has the same degree as Donna. I mean, there’s not much to say here because it’s sort of matter-of-fact, he is evidently good at what he does and I would say it’s by far his strongest area out of the 3 I’m looking at.

Cam: Cameron is more slippery to pin down, but we’re meant to understand her as exceptionally bright, a prodigy, in the sort of nebulous good-at-everything way TV likes to depict prodigies.

Joe: He has other skills, more specifically he is good at selling, influencing, and encouraging, but he is not knowledgeable about computers by his own admission, and as evidenced repeatedly. He’s the least technically skilled of the group.

Something to consider is how in this one area, the skills of the characters go against the typical distribution of tech skills in media, gender role-wise: both women are very talented re: hard skills, and the least talented person is a man, who in other ways, small and large, is an outsider and goes against typical gender norms. Someone who is not me write an essay on this. Anyway, moving on...

Soft skills: Soft skills encompass things like organization, time management, communicating with others, etc. Unlike hard skills they’re harder to teach or quantify, because they’re usually not considered job skills, just someone’s personality, or, in a more unspoken way, “feminine” skills.

Donna: She’s skilled at these because she needs to be, as a mother and wife, and because she is by default the only person who really has these skills at Mutiny and is therefore forced to step into that role- to deal with the power company, to prevent coders from attacking each other, to organize, etc. She’s the most classic example of someone with good soft skills.

Gordon: He sucks at this. He’s got some brain stuff going on, but mostly he’s a man in the 1980’s who has never developed these skills because he’s never needed to; he’s got Donna. Of note is the fact that even in season 1, Donna is performing these duties for Gordon at home with no pay. YMMV on how much of that is normal in a relationship, but the fact is the Giant project would never have gotten off the ground if Gordon had to take on 50% of childcare, event planning and other household responsibilities, and this is true of many families.

Cameron: Bless her heart, she is also garbage at these, in a more overt way than Gordon. Part trauma, part possible autism/adhd/other neurodivergence, part “is literally 19 at the start of the series”.

Joe: This is tricky. He is very skilled, but in a restricted and relatively short term way, that is to say he burns bridges as fast as he can build them. This is one of the areas he learns to improve over time.

Though you might not consider these things when comparing the characters’ smarts or talents, they’re definitely part of that equation. These are all skills that are undervalued but that in real life are crucial, and no project can succeed without them; if you can’t talk to people you can’t work in a team, secure funding, etc. They may not be impressive skills like coding, but they are crucial, and this is where most of the tension between Cam and Donna comes from in season 2 and 3: Cameron doesn’t understand this and feels judged, and Donna resents being made to fill that role. If you don’t consider soft skills as valuable, time-consuming and challenging, most of Donna’s character development and personal struggles will be lost on you.

Creativity: This is a little more difficult to define. It’s not just ideas, and as anyone in a creative field will tell you, everyone hates the “idea guy”; typically a dude, who thinks his ideas are great, but has no concept of how to follow through on them. Creativity implies an understanding of how your idea can be implemented, if not the personal know-how to do it.

Cameron: She is of course the main creative: the friendly OS, Mutiny, Space Bike, etc. She can both imagine her ideas, and has the know-how to execute these ideas personally.

Donna: Her main idea in the series is Community, and again, she both imagines the idea AND knows how to implement it and develop it further as the concept grows. She is building on the Mutiny concept, of course, in the same way Cameron’s Mutiny concept was building on the existing framework of phone lines. Aside from that, Donna, creatively, is the one most likely to come up with fixes for specific problems (think the piggybacked layout of the Giant and the trick to convince Joe they had ported Mutiny to UNIX), which is interesting considering that’s her role in the plot socially as well.

Joe: At the outset, he is absolutely, 100%, the Idea Guy. Possibly the best example is the scene in season 1 where he writes 2x faster, 2x cheaper on the whiteboard and expects Cam and Gordon to reverse engineer that into reality. In real life this kind of behavior doesn’t impress anyone. Like, anyone, really anyone, can do that. I can tell you I have an idea for an app that lets you talk to your cat, but if my whole idea is “an app that lets you talk to your cat”, I’m very clearly full of shit and my idea is pointless. So while Joe is outwardly creative he is, creatively, the least useful. Again, Joe evolves here, as the writers realized “Mad Men clone” was a bad look for their show, and as he naturally learns more about the industry his ideas get more grounded.

Gordon: He has… some ideas, notably Sonaris and his garage-based computer business, but both flop badly and immediately and he lacks the vision to polish them into something functional. I would say Gordon is the least “creative” of the main four, but this brings me to another thing:

Gordon and Joe: They typically arrive at ideas together, the Giant most prominently (Cam’s OS is almost entirely separate from the Joe/Gordon back and forth on the hardware), their business in season 4, and I would argue Sonaris/MacMillan Utility. Joe suggests an idea with no technical basis, and Gordon is the one who figures out the execution, or vice versa: Gordon invents unsellable, impractical software, and Joe figures out how to use and sell it.

This is crucial: I can’t count Joe’s Giant concept as an independent idea, because he himself has no clue how something like that would work, whereas it's not fully Gordon’s because he’s not capable of that kind of initial creative drive. Their ideas only really reach fruition when both are involved. What’s fascinating is seeing how he and Gordon mesh together as partners, both equally crucial. There’s tension there, but ultimately they're uniquely well-matched and rarely work without the other. Even when Joe starts his company without Gordon, he’s using his software. Comparatively, Cam and Donna do work together but can create independently; it's less meshed at that creative level because they are individually more well-rounded.

In conclusion I guess, while all these nuances are definitely explored in a way that many shows don’t do, HACF definitely falls into that trap of attributing ideas and achievements to individuals rather than teams, and specifically those individuals who have skills understood as valuable in a capitalist, white man-centric culture. Here that means coders and engineers, with other disciplines that Cardiff or Mutiny would definitely need, like visual and sound artists, HR staff and yeah, janitorial staff, happening automatically in the background.

Part of this is because of the obvious fact that you need central characters to root for, but it’s worth keeping in mind because this is definitely a mindset that affects the workforce particularly for lower-paid, majority female and nonwhite jobs. Appreciate these people!

Thanks for reading!

#halt and catch fire #cameron howe #joe macmillan #Donna Clark #Gordon Clark #is this a meta blog now??

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honestfutures · 6 years

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gordon, the boring nerd guy with an office job and joe, the sexy confident destructive guy, have a kinda homoerotic tyler durden/narrator relationship that allows them to work extremely well together in ways they never could alone send tweet

#halt and catch fire

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honestfutures · 6 years

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I do think what Donna did had greater emotional impact, largely because of the trust involved, and I’m definitely not saying it’s a 1 to 1 comparison- but I want to push back primarily on the idea that Joe’s decision was exclusively business. I think his speech about the Giant after removing the OS is pretty explicitly a comment on Cameron as well, and it continues the on again off again power struggle that’s been going on all season.

What are you really asking for? Something special? Give me something warm, something fuzzy? This is a machine. It's not your friend, it's your employee. It works for you. And the way it should be evaluated is thus "How well and how fast does it do the things I ask?" Answer "Instantly." Anything less is a waste of your time. "What is the margin of error?" Answer "Zero. " Anything more and you've failed. Here's another word, one that's infinitely more important than "unique" will ever be. "speed. " Let's cut through the bullshit and act like adults. [...] You want a buddy? Buy a dog. You want to chase rainbows, tilt the room? Walk outside. There are a hundred casinos out there built for delusional people like you who think their world is gonna change so easily. You wanna get something done, buy one of these.

The reason we are less shocked by Joe’s betrayal isn’t because it’s more logical or because it’s less mean, it’s because it’s just what he always does. Hell, even the fact that he hired a “young and inexperienced” coder with whom he both had sex and pulled rank on a whim isn’t accidental and irl would earn him a mention in a #MeToo hashtag. Donna’s push to go with the IPO has the underlying emotional context you outlined, but Joe’s has the context of always wanting to be in control with Cam, business-wise and romantically, while she pushes back. He’s also not Cameron’s business partner, sure, but at this point in the plot he is her significant other which if anything should carry more weight in terms of trust and equal power dynamics. It’s not a neutral decision at all.

In many ways, Donna’s betrayal hurts more because Joe did the same thing before; because Cameron never wanted to go through that again and thought she wouldn't have to with someone like Donna. So, yes, it hurt much more with Donna, but this comparison is part of understanding just why that’s the case. It hurts because Donna is not Joe.

(It’s also with mentioning that in neither case was Cameron voted out or pushed out. She’s the one who, for better or for worse, refused to go forward with a decision she disagreed with, and for most of the season up until the very last minute, Donna was vocal in her desire to keep working with Cameron AND go forward with the IPO.)

An aside on the Mac: what’s relevant is they did what Joe didn’t have the nerve to do- risk trying to sell a slower yet more unique computer. We don’t know if Cam’s OS would have been revolutionary because that risk was never taken. The actual ways the Giant and Mac were unique isn’t really important here, it’s the quote unquote “soul” of the machine which is intentionally compared. The victory is a commercial victory, but it’s bittersweet, as evidenced by the silent, morose celebration between Joe, Donna and Gordon at Comdex. In 1984 (the episode), Joe is himself dissatisfied with the Giant, unsuccessfully trying to find some app or feature that can redeem it. He fixates on the Mac advertisement because the Giant represents the drab status quo it aims to dismantle. “People will buy the Giant, but will they remember it?” In early season 2, Gordon also speaks about how the Giant and Giant Pro were mediocre- which yes, it was: middling, average, unimpressive. What I’m saying is, commercially you can count the Giant as a success, but from the point of view of the main characters, who more than anything want to make a mark and push the limits, it’s at best okay, at worst a creative failure.

last i’m going to say about this Donna vs Joe thing but it’s unbelievably wild to me how some people will defend Joe while hating Donna for The Mutiny Betrayal, because what it most closely mirrors is Joe’s betrayal of Cameron at the end of season one, when he goes ahead and sells the Giant without the OS. in both cases:

-Joe/Donna makes what they honestly perceive is the right decision.

-the other characters support the decision because it’s rational from a business standpoint.

-Cameron has a panic attack as a reaction to this betrayal- for her this business decision is personal and emotional.*

-Joe/Donna belittles Cameron for not recognizing their side of things.

-This causes a major schism and Cameron does not forgive Joe/Donna for many years and most of a full season.

-the decision is ultimately proven wrong, and Cameron is proven right. the Giant is a mediocre product overshadowed by the more “human” Macintosh, and Mutiny stays afloat for a while but eventually fizzles out. failure, and growing from it, is a running theme in HACF even beyond these two projects.

-Cameron forgives Joe/Donna because both she and they have grown and are now in a different place in life.

So if you can forgive Joe for this, like the plot and the other characters do, you should also forgive Donna. thanks for coming to my TED Talk

*As an aside, while we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Cameron is right, and therefore cheer her on, her emotional involvement in all her business ventures is likely a result of her personal trauma, and is both an irrational way to run a business and ultimately damaging to herself and others. It should go without saying that the other characters have major flaws as well- but I appreciate the care with which HACF dismantles the “damaged eccentric genius/artist” trope and shows the unsustainable nature of living and working this way.

#sorry this is getting long lol #also of note- cam had advance notice of donna's decision and the decision was made by a group of people not just donna #which is a point i think gets buried #not that your post did that im just thinking of that now

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