“SO. MANY. PUNS” — Monika’s Slant on Slant
Monika spearheads the mod team at Slant, and she does a great job of it. Half-Sherlock Holmes half-flamethrower (essentially all-Batman), the efficiency with which Monika can weed out and eradicate spam is truly remarkable. Under Monika’s watch, nothing slips by. Donning her “giraffe and palm tree” mask, she is the hero that Slant needs.
If you’ve ever been on Slant, you’ve likely seen this avatar. The person behind it, however, is a bit tougher to learn. Behind a wall of recommendations, Monika is quick-witted and detail obsessive, two things that have translated easily to her modding. Setting out to answer hard hitting questions like why she doesn’t want to talk about books, I asked Monika for an interview.
I want to start with something fun, so question #1: If you were the answer to a Slant-style “what are the best” question, what would the question be?
“Who is the best at laughing at their own jokes?” — I’d be a badged “THE BEST” there, and “who is the best at obsessively searching for an answer to a detail in a question that no one else cares about?” — also close to the top.
For the first one the Top Pro would be “Frequently after telling a joke (puns mostly) declares “I’m hilarious!” to anyone that’s close by.” And that’s completely true.
What would the Top Con be?
“SO. MANY. PUNS.”
Have you always obsessed over details?
Yup, since childhood. I was a very avid reader from a very early age, and I could spend an evening trying to find something in an encyclopedia, for example. Which was difficult, because sometimes I kinda knew what I wanted to know, but didn’t know what it was called, and encyclopedias are kind of alphabetical. You can imagine my excitement when the Internet showed up… Guess what was my first visited web page?
Wikipedia?
Oh, no. I’m older than that — I found the internet in 1997 or so. No Wikipedia yet, and no Google. But there was AskJeeves.com.
Jeeves did a lot of fetching for you?
Yeah, I loved having my own butler for knowledge! In a way, I think that’s what Slant is and why I like it here. Except here the knowledge is actually useful.
Was there any topic that dominated your web searches back then?
Huh, good question. Can’t really remember, but I was 13, so it must have been something stupid, I’m sure. At about 14 I realized that all that reading I did always ended up back at the science fiction and fantasy, so that was a big subject. And Formula-1, was a fan for quite a while. Then I started writing about it for some newspapers and magazines, hobby turned to work, and that ended my love for the only sport I was ever interested in. Except brain sports, of course.
Do you follow any brain sports currently?
I watch quiz shows a lot, the ones where you need not only to know facts, but to think about the question and how the clues in it come together. Also I unintentionally high-jacked a pub quiz team and have been a captain for the last 3 or 4 years. Here in Lithuania we love brain games, so no wonder there’s a ton of pub quiz leagues. We compete in the hardest one, with about 200 other teams. Also there’s individual championships, like the annual World quizzing championship or its National version… Got my Quiz Master title this year in the World championship, finally!
And yes, I realize how that sounds.
That’s awesome! How’d you unintentionally high-jack the team?
I got invited to play. And that’s pretty much all it takes, because I have a way of saying things very assertively as if they were scientific facts, even though I might not really know what I’m talking about. People tend to believe me, and after a while just assume that I know everything. I actually had a bet with my husband — how long will it take for someone in my last workplace before Slant to say “Monika, you know everything, can you tell me…” Took them about 2 months, I think. Of course, the fact that I’m pretty often right does help. But it’s usually just lucky coincidences, anticipating the information that’s gonna be needed, and a capability to put two and two together. I like looking for patterns and I see them, so it might seem that I’m very knowledgeable from afar, but not necessarily when you come closer. My spirit animal is the Demon Cat from Adventure Time, the one who says “I have approximate knowledge of many things.”
Has anyone here told you you know everything yet? And do you think your approximate knowledge of many things has helped at Slant?
Oh no, I have no idea how most of the stuff works here, and that shows. And it’s also harder with remote work, in real life there are much more opportunities to talk and thus have an answer for something. I don’t think I’ll ever get that phrase here, no.
But I think this approximate knowledge trick helps, especially when a user asks something — maybe I don’t know the topic well, but it’s a safe bet I heard something about it and I know the approximate direction in which to look for an answer. Couple that with the obsessive attention to details, and you have a good moderator!
A great one, even. You have uncanny modding abilities. Is there anything you wish you could yell at people, though? Something that makes your life harder?
…You don’t want me yelling. It’s more like growling, and my throat hurts afterwards. But it would be nice if some people didn’t think mods are blind and try to pass spam for useful content. My physical eyesight might not be the best (or even good, tbh), but I see you. Yes, you know who you are.
Any words for people who downvote “The Witcher?”
Oh I’m all for the freedom of opinion. To illustrate — my husband didn’t like Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods”, which is the best book ever written, and we’re not even divorced… Yet. Because he quite liked the TV series.
Just don’t go around bad-mouthing the White Wolf and his swords too much, and we’ll be okay.
I must beg to differ about “American Gods.” “Good Omens” is the best book ever written, “American Gods” is a close second.
Oh, that’s unfair.
How so?
You can’t take a book written by my two favorite authors ever and challenge my love for “American Gods” with it. They are different. I barely can choose between Gods, Sandman, and the whole of Discworld as it is.
Fair. Is this why you don’t want to be in charge of books at Slant?
Yeah, I have no idea how to compare books. There are SO MANY great ones, and I might get mad that there can’t be, like, 25 “The Best” ones, and that’s only when you look at the series, if you try to pick the best book of some series, that’s even worse.
That’s reasonable. I do think there’s a lot of space where it could be useful, though. If I ask “What is the best Harry Potter book?” I’m looking for an argument. But “What are the best urban fantasy books?” could create a good reading list.
I know, I know…
^That’s an easy one — Dresden Files. Not for me, but for most people.
What’s the best urban fantasy for you? Are we counting American Gods?
No, AG is something else… a glimpse to the behind-the-scenes of the world. Best urban fantasy is, of course, Neverwhere. I’m a total fangirl, sorry. Never had any idols, too cynical for that, but when I met Neil Gaiman I found I can’t walk away because my legs were actually suddenly too weak. Found out what people mean by “starstruck” that day.
Small break as we talk about how great Neil Gaiman is. After a little discussion, we get on the following topic.
Are you creative at all?
Huh, my inner censor is too strict to let me create stuff. Though I managed to slip one SF short story past him and somehow got in the “Best Lithuanian SF&F 2003–2006” anthology.
You wrote about Formula-1, though? Do you consider reporting and content writing creative?
Not the kind I did. It was mostly regurgitating news, no analysis or anything. The most creative part of that work was photo reports of GPs, because I was the one to choose the photos and write the captions. That’s were I got to be moderately funny, so I liked that one. Always tried to create something like a comic strip, if you imagine the strip being 4 pages long, but it wouldn’t always get through my editor. But it was also the hardest part because of some photographers. The magazine had subscriptions to a few photo banks that specialized in autosport, and to find 12–14 good pics you had to comb through all of them. Problem was, one of the photographers always had about 300 pics of the GP weekend, and 280 of them would be various parts of grid girls.
Gotta love stock photographers.
Yeah, that one was particularly eww.
Did you enjoy that type of work?
At first, yeah. Later it just became routine, and I needed to watch watch the race, not because I wanted, but to note any moments that could be good to write about and should have good pictures. And, well, I had a great dislike for Sebastian Vettel, so when he started winning constantly, it got boring.
Was that your first job? How’d you get into it?
No, my first job was in a call center, of all places. Still hate talking on the phone though. I got that F1 gig through my friend from fandom — he worked there as news editor, knew that I loved F1 and that I was not bad at writing, and they needed a reporter. It was a 5-hour/week remote job, quite well-paid for the time, actually. I lasted for about 3 years, and it ended with the crisis of 2009, the media group went bankrupt.
Sounds like an alright gig. Where’d you go from that? What was the journey to Slant mod?
Oh, where haven’t I gone… This was always a side gig, I had normal day-jobs at the time too. Worked in a few travel agencies/tour operators, then made a sudden turn and got a job as an administrator/nurse in an eye clinic — it was kind of a family business, a nurse left suddenly, they needed someone to temporarily cover the position, and I had just left my previous workplace. So I put the drops in people’s eyes and tortured them with kerato-refracto tonometers and fundus cameras for 3 years.
I am not a people-person in real life — I find it difficult to interact with them, and have a hard time with high-pitched noises of which there was aplenty because it was one of the best eye clinics for children. I am quite surprised I lasted as long as I did. But there was a reason life wanted me to work and learn things there. (dun-Dun-DUN! Foreshadowing!)
After leaving the clinic I spent a couple years trying to find my own thing to do, had an idea about a private recreational park for dogs, looked for some land and investors, but it didn’t pan out. In between that I worked some odd jobs from home, a translation here, some data entry there. In 2015 the finances got tight, so I needed to find a more stable position, and I became an office administrator for a film production house.
Oh?
Yeah, unexpected turn of events, but I figured if I could deal with a bunch of screaming 3-year-olds at the clinic, I can handle the film industry starlets.
Shouldn’t be much of a difference, really.
One production manager once told me it was always very satisfying when after the project some hipster-y cameraman or someone from art department would come in to sign the last papers and stuff, and I always without fail asked them for their name. The industry is tiny and so everyone feels like people know them, and here’s someone who has no idea who they are.
That was actually because I’m quite bad at remembering faces, and they all looked the same — huge reddish beard, plaid shirt, glasses, you know the type.
That manager said he could actually see all the hot air whistle out of those guys every time.
The funniest one was when I met a person, we talked, later I drafted a contract for him to sign and saw that he lived in an apartment two floors above me. He’s been living there for 10 years, that’s how bad I am with meeting and recognizing people.
Amazing.
So.
It wasn’t my dream job for various reasons, though I did it well, but I’m very glad I got to be there, because I met a new best friend there. Making new real friends is difficult when you’re 30+, and for someone like me almost impossible. Yet we became friends from the first email exchange, somehow.
So, last spring I worked on one of our projects, and it was a hard day — I had to lift and move a bunch of very heavy stuff. At the end of the day I went to take out my contacts (I have a very bad eyesight) and saw a shimmering curtain on the side of one eye. Had I not been a nurse at an eye clinic, I would have just thought it’s some irritation or inflammation from contacts and let it be for a few days.
But since I had learned a lot there (because hey, a new interesting area, right?), I self-diagnosed a retinal detachment. High-tailed it to the clinic the very next morning, it turned out it’s not just a detachment, it’s a big one, and it’s a Thursday, and all retinal surgeons except one in the whole country have gone to Italy for the next 5 days for a big conference. And that one who hadn’t gone to Italy, is leaving tomorrow morning and not coming back for a month, and I have a huge detachment microns away from the macula. Basically, it moves — I’m most probably blind in one eye.
There were some other obstacles, as in every good fairy tale, but in the end I got under the laser the next morning and that doctor sprinted from the operating room to the airplane. He made it, and I made it too.
Well, I’m glad.
There was 3 months of only looking down and sleeping face down, there was a tiny area that looked like it wanted to detach again, but during the assessment a year later the doctor was very surprised by the outcome, because apparently cases like this don’t get that good of an outcome.
Right now, I still have my -12D with astigmatism in one eye, a new lens in the one that was operated on which is about -1D (imagine the glasses!), not a very good vision in the dark, but almost no loss to the peripheral vision, which is pretty incredible with what happened.
But, of course, I couldn’t come back to my old job. I was forbidden to exert or strain myself, bend down or lift things heavier than 3 kg, and there was a lot of that in the production house.
My sick leave was coming to an end, I had no idea what I should do — there were offers, but I warned everyone about no-lifting (and there was another small surgery waiting in a few months), and somehow no one wanted to risk it.
And then literally two days after I officially quit and said good bye, Andris showed up in my inbox, offering me to do something that I’ve always done whenever I was interested in some product.
So, to wrap things up, how do you like being a mod here? What’s your favorite part of it? Anything about Slant you would change?
Being a mod is being a one part fact checker, one part editor, one part detective, and one part THE WRATH OF GOD when you find a spammer, so I love it, of course.
The favorite part is probably when you see the community starting to grow — threads of comments, users helping each other. As a mod you’re close to everything and anything that happens on site, so you get to see these conversations evolving.
And as for what I would change… Some work-in-progress technical stuff aside, mostly I’d love to see more people coming and sticking around, asking, getting advice, and in turn advising others. It’s such a nice feeling when you actually help someone decide on whatever their conundrum is, why wouldn’t anyone want to be a part of that?
