"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."
"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." Continue reading Good reads→
Amazon.com: Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer: Kitchen & Dining – Another marvelous instance of reviews matching the seriousness of the product on Amazon. I'm really impressed at Hutzler not blasting away all these joke reviews.
xkcd: Epsilon and Zeta – I don't link to XKCD much, in part because I don't read it much, and in part because everyone else in the world does. That said, this one uses real-deal National Hurricane Center advisories in it, and is really good.
Ann Aguirre’s Blog – Authors Against Bullying: Blog Hop – "Things were bad. People made fun of me daily. They picked on my appearance, my weight, my geeky interests. Sometimes I hid in the bathroom rather than face a cafeteria full of people who didn’t like me."
Utah Game Developer Jailed for Not Paying Wages – ABC News – "Hunter lasted two years before calling it quits, hanging onto promises of paychecks that appeared only erratically, with Rushton sometimes handing out checks selectively and demanding confidentiality while blaming companies that licensed games for being slow to pay for their development or royalties."
Beyond Minecraft: Notch On Fame, Pressure, Sequels | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – A bizarre thing for there to have been contention over: "Sometimes the fans are right, too. Like ladders. I did not want ladders in Minecraft at all. Ladders are never fun. They’re not fun in Minecraft either. But they’re a very good utility. It’s an easy way to get straight up without having stairs going back and forth."
On Labeling Women “Crazy” | Paging Dr. NerdLove – "I started realizing that when my friends and I would talk about our crazy exes or what-have-you, more often than not, we weren’t talking about ex girlfriends or random dates who exhibited signs of genuine mental health issues. […] For the most part, crazy meant 'acting in a way I didn’t like.'"
Slavery By Another Name – I heard this on my local NPR station the other night, and was glad to hear the injustices of the prison system be spoken for all to hear, but in a calm and reasonable voice.
What’s Wrong with the IGF « The Rotting Cartridge – "Eight (8) judges were assigned to Kale In Dinoland. Of those judges, 1 didn’t install the game or respond to any of our invitations (which we had to send multiple times before judges joined). 3 judges didn’t play the game. Of the remaining 5 judges that played the game, 3 played it very close to the IGF deadline, which was December 5th. […] Excluding the outlier, on average each judge – including the 3 that didn’t play it – played the game for almost 5 minutes’ time. […] So we’re talking almost 4 minutes for each judge of actual game time."
And now for a vibeo:
A little dated at this point, but wonderfully funny. I like Jay Smooth on politics.
Some Quick Thoughts on "Until Abortion Ends" – YouTube – More Jay Smooth: "But the underlying logic of this protest is baffling. They seem to be hoping that women who’ve decided to seek an abortion will visit this site and say 'wow, if you feel strongly enough about this that you’re making the irrevocable life-changing decision of giving up Dr. Pepper, maybe I should reconsider having a child that I can’t support!'"
What I learned from watching people watching Notch – O! Mr Speaker! – "No one was delving on the irony of spending an hour or so arguing about which language is better for games, without noticing that an actual game was unfolding before their eyes. If only games were flamewar powered!"
Not, of course, limited to Wednesdays. Today just happens to be one. …Barely.
I shall open with a video of Nayna, my belly dance instructor, from a couple of months ago:
I’m somewhere off to the left, wishing I’d brought my own camera. This was after class, so I don’t feel bad about watching my instructor dance instead of dancing myself.
