Good reads

It’s been a loooong time since I posted some good reading.

5 Things I Learned as the Internet’s Most Hated Person | Cracked.com

"I watched every avenue of social media suddenly blow up with messages of abject hatred from thousands of strangers. For the first five days, I couldn't sleep. Every time I would start to doze off, I'd be shocked awake from half-asleep nightmares about everyone I love buying into the mob's bullshit and abandoning me. The ceaseless barrage of random people sending you disgusting shit is initially impossible to drown out — it was constant, loud, and it became my life."

They Are Not Trolls. They Are Men. | Make Me a Sammich

"By calling these people “trolls,” we are basically letting them off the hook. It’s a lot like the “boys will be boys” mentality that helps to keep rape culture thriving, but it’s also different, because boys are expected to be human. By calling these people “trolls,” we relegate them to non-human status, and we make it clear that we don’t expect them to live up to the same behavioral standards as human beings."

50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice – The Chronicle of Higher Education

"What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses."

A Gentlemen’s Guide To Rape Culture — Human Parts — Medium

"If rape culture is so important to me I needed to find out for my self what it is. No woman owes me her time just because I want to know about something she inherently understands. No woman should feel she has to explain rape culture to me just because I want to know what it is. No woman owes me shit. I saw how my desire for a woman to satisfy me ran deep. Even my curiosity, a trait that always made me proud, was marred with the same sort of male-centric presumption that fuels rape culture. I expected to be satisfied. That attitude is the problem."

Words Aren’t Magic | Geek Feminism Blog

"Sometimes, the people who employ these words as magic incantations mistake other people’s refusal to engage for a victory–they must have successfully turned social justice sorcerers’ magic words against us, because we won’t argue with them anymore. […] The truth is more mundane: most of us are not interested in teaching reading comprehension to people whose comprehension is willfully limited to concepts that support their privilege."

Ayn Rand’s Capitalist Paradise Is Now a Greedy Land-Grabbing Shitstorm

The title covers this one pretty well.

The Brutalization of Women in Video Games, and its Apologists

"In modern civilization there is simply no excuse for manufacturing entertainment that holds up the brutalization of women as virtuous and worthy of reward. None."

honest toddler: The Four Facebook Statuses of Parents

"LIFE. *crying*"

Scarlett Johansson on sexism

"the shitty part is that once scarlett called them out on their fucking bullshit, she automatically became coined a bitch. a bitch. for being brave enough to publicly tell them what was so annoying about a still continuing problem for women in media"

The Horrors of Self-Promotion | The Weeklings

"Yes, nothing rivals the ennui and impotence that comes with the very real possibility that a week after your book is published, (the culmination of years of obsessive scribbling, mental wreckage, familial damage, and quivering vulnerability) it will be quickly forgotten, widely ignored, aggressively un-reviewed, pulled from shelves, and thoroughly remaindered. In writing there is no safety net, no structure below, just an Amazon ranking and the mystery of Internet buzz. There is the kindness of friends and the randomness of reviews, but they pale in the face of rote indifference." True of game development as well, of course. Self-promotion is hard and boring and very challenging. How do you do it without utterly alienating everyone you know who will, eventually, get sick of you pushing your wares?

CSS Architecture — Philip Walton

"All of the above bad practices share one similarity, they place far too much of the styling burden on the CSS."

The Myth of Willpower and "Eat Less, Move More" – Musings of a Dick

"You see, The Biggest Loser gives people the perception that exercising until you vomit, starving yourself, and being hardcore are all necessary means to fitness success. But this leads to an unsustainable feedback loop. An enormous amount of fitness pain is inflicted, when only a fraction of that amount is needed to lose weight. Maybe that’s why 85-90 percent of participants regain their original weight, as explained in this eye-opening piece by my friend, Dr. Yoni Freedhoff."

Star Maps: The Only Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram for Rap Beefs You Will Ever Need «

"Kanye West vs. 50 Cent: The two released albums the same week in 2007 and so they were arguing over who was going to sell more. 50 was like, 'If Kanye outsells me, I’ll retire.' Kanye outsold him by more than 200,000 units. 50 was like, 'LOL I’m just kidding I’m not retiring.'" Fiddy ended up taking a break from 2009 to 2014 anyway. Sorta a retirement.

The Injustice Engine: Cruelty And Murder In DayZ | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

"If I wanted to justify what we were doing, I would say: ‘Well, if DayZ is going to be the game everybody wants it to be, then there has to be people like us. Marauders, bandits, torturers. The game NEEDS us.’ And the design of DayZ itself is truly aware of this philosophy. Without the threat of ‘bad’ players, the kindness of ‘good’ players has absolutely no value. Without horror there can be no respite, no relief. Of course, there are no good or bad players in DayZ – just survivors."

Brandon Dennis | Developer Shaming

"At what point do we say this is too far? When it targets women and PoC? It should never get to that point. Treat people like they matter, from the beginning. Why don't we just act like the professionals that we say we are?"

Surprise, mofo!

I made the mistake of watching the vine videos at the end of the post. …And lost an entire weekend of evenings to vine videos. It's awesome how funny people can be in 6 seconds.

Surprise.

I made the mistake of watching the vine videos at the end of the post. …And lost an entire weekend of evenings to vine videos. It's awesome how funny people can be in 6 seconds.

CEO Archetypes: #7 Joan of Arc, by Nancy Householder Hauge | Model View Culture

"[M]y shy, sensitive husband looked Kevin right in the eye and replied, 'Kevin, you pay Nancy a lot of money to deal with Sun's sexism, but you could not pay me enough to watch it ever again, so I will not be attending another Sun function.' Kevin actually choked on his pork chop."

Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

"You had no idea where to click, but hell that didn't really matter anyway because we had developed cursor effects (you haven't lived until your mouse had a trail of twelve fireballs behind it)."

The Perils of the Lady Gamer – Shaenon K. Garrity

I hadn't known that "The Landlord's Game"/"Monopoly" was created by a woman. Also note those Josh Mattingly (http://kotaku.com/reporter-apologizes-for-crude-sexual-comments-to-female-1505393796) and Penny Arcade (http://debacle.tumblr.com/post/3041940865/the-pratfall-of-penny-arcade-a-timeline) references. Zing.

Washington Redskins nickname: Why Slate will stop referring to the NFL team as the Redskins.

"Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others."

14 Fucks I Refuse to Give in 2014 — Life Tips. — Medium

"Welcome to my Fuck It list. Fourteen things I’m going to stop giving a fuck about in 2014. Because, as important as it is to push yourself to be a healthier, more compassionate person, that can be downright impossible. Refusing to give a fuck, however, isn’t just easy?—?it’s kind of awesome."

Unraveling Morality, Hypocrisy, Faith And Sin In Ossuary – Indie Statik

^_^

Conservatives See the Light on High Deductibles – Bloomberg

"It isn’t hard to think that conservatives’ newfound concern over high deductibles has more to do with their views on Obamacare than anything else. But what matters is that concern is justified. High-deductible plans were never a very good idea."

Study Shows No Harmful Impact From Gaming On Children | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

"It found that while they could measure an extremely small difference when it came to more time spent in front of the television, perhaps surprisingly, the same wasn’t shown to be true of gaming."

18 Products you probably have been using wrong | SnarkEcards

Some of this blew my mind.

What Happens To A YouTube Video After You Re-Upload It 1,000 Times – Digg

This is *incredibly* creepy.

What to do if someone asks you for money in exchange for a game review…

Don't forget to read the linked articles!

If ‘Space Jam’ Had Been Real – Digg

The commentary on Foghorn's death was particularly well done.

Don’t mistake expressing contempt for taking offense

"I’m not offended by those words. I’m contemptuous of those words, and I’m letting you know that using them just made me think less of you – less admiration, less trust, less enjoyment in your company. I don’t hold you personally in the same contempt as I do the words that you just used, at least not yet. Whether I end up doing that depends on how you react to having your word choices challenged."

Shakesville: Rape Culture 101

"It is not a definition for which they're looking; not really. It's a description. It's something substantive enough to reach out and touch, in all its ugly, heaving, menacing grotesquery."

Women Are Not Guys | UNRAVELING THE KNOT

"But then there are things that are stranger still because we know they aren’t true even as we act as though they are. I am referring, of course, to the practice of calling women ‘guys’."