Tag Archives: women

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." Continue reading Good reads →

Links! Dat Social Justice

I’ve been (relatively) all over the twitter space lately on the social justice tip. I’ve started following some new and amazing folks in the last couple months, including Ashe Dryden, Julie Pagano, and Justine Arreche, who are probably the first folks I’ve followed who are specifically interested in social justice within the tech community/industry.

Mutual following of these folks led to some fun discussions with a former colleague on considerations like, “How often can I call my colleagues out on *ist behavior and still get invites out to lunch? Once in three occurrences?”

After all, no one likes a feminazi.

The first two links come from Pagano’s “101 off limits” piece, and all are great reference articles to pass around.

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."
The Male Privilege Checklist
A very… gently-written article on example of male privilege in our culture.

People, Systems, and the Game of Monopoly

A very accessible description and discussion of the system of white privilege. Love it.

From that speaker’s blog:

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’."

Love it, especially Thought Experiment #2.

Last but not least, how I feel after a trying day of biting my tongue:

Links On Uncomfortable Realities

A short one this week as I’m struggling to catch up on/skim 1400+ unread items in Feedly.

  • “She Must Have Deserved It”: An Uncomfortable Reality About Abuse, And Reporting It | Ferrett Steinmetz – "And the good news that emerges from this particular bad response is that most people would never hit their partner. When told, “He hit her,” most people run this information through a I-am-the-world filter…" and "[If] you’re a victim of abuse, you need to be very careful as to who you date. Children of abusing parents are fifteen times – fifteen times! – as likely to wind up married to an abuser as so-called “normal” people, which means that your abuser broke some vital instincts within you."
  • You can say no if you change your mind – Maybe this is more freeing than uncomfortable. It was an uncomfortable realization for me, though.
  • Legacy Code Preservation: How Do We Manage This? – I run into similar code and life-work preservation issues at work now. It can be quite frustrating. Common thing to hear: "No, no, no, I'm not attached to that code. It's just code. …But really, it doesn't matter very much that it doesn't meet all the new standards or is hard to work with: the damned thing works perfectly, without a hitch. Never needs maintenance."

Tons of Videos!

Actually, like 3 videos. But they’re good ones! Plus a few miscellaneous links.

First, a video:

My question: Why can’t he pull out a chair? Turns out, home skillet has a bad back.

To offset that, a bit of cuteness: Maximumble – comic #594 – Ship. Mew.

Continue reading Tons of Videos! →

Winkage!

Winks, links, they’re all the same.

  • 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.'"