- Book Riot has started a series on reading diversely–it’s good stuff. Here are the first two posts.
- The War Nerd: Getting “Women Warriors” wrong. I thought this was really fascinating and it’s a good reminder to remember that cultural context is important.
- And then there was this post about dating one’s father and confusing the Tudors for the Hapsburgs. Friends, this post lead me down such a rabbit hole. Not only to this article about a family in Spain with the Hapsburg jaw (here’s the paper, with pictures–including an amazing one of a sculpture of Carlos el Hechizado) but also to a color-coded family tree. The color-coding is to denote degrees of relatedness. And the comments on initial link lead me to this: What It’s Like to Date a Horse. Not safe for life. And it seems to be a different guy than the “His ‘wife’? A horse” guy. I weep, for I remember watching that particular situation go down and lo, it was–and is–one for the ages.
- Genevieve Valentine’s annual Miss Universe costume post.
- Cicada: Solving the Web’s Deepest Mystery I’m pretty sure this was the plot of an episode of Elementary. Except people ended up dead.
- In Defence of Waiting: SimCity BuildIt and Two Dots Can Last Forever
- How People You’ve Never Heard of Got To Be the Most Powerful Users on Pinterest
- Easy for you to say, your heart has never been broken, your pride has never been stolen This is, I think, a must read post from Jamie Lee Moyer.
- The Invisible Woman: A Conversation With Björk “Women are the glue. It’s invisible, what women do. It’s not rewarded as much.”
- Gender gap: Women welcome in ‘hard working’ fields, but ‘genius’ fields are male-dominated, study finds
- Ice Balls I thought this was an illuminating read, too.
- The Weird Science of Naming New Products
- Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia
- At 90, She’s Designing Tech For Aging Boomers
- Gamergate Target Zoe Quinn Launches Anti-Harassment Support Network This looks like it could become an amazing resource. Direct link: Crash Override Network
- C is Manly, Python is for “n00bs”: How False Stereotypes Turn Into Technical “Truths”
And with that link to a great article at Model View Culture, we move into a complicated and hard thing that is happening in tech right now (lots of content warnings for the links). Late last week, Shanley Kane (co-founder of MVC) was doxxed after calling out Linus Torvalds for being (understatement) a jerk. Then Nero wrote a thing with lots of quotes from weev that I’m not going to link to because Nero and weev. Here’s Shanley Kane’s statement. I read this and was sickened and tweeted in support, which caused my block button to get a mild workout.
Then, this morning, I read this post from Amelia Greenhall which discusses Kane’s verbal and emotional abuse of her while she was working with her on MVC. Kane’s subsequent erasure of Greenhall’s significant contributions to MVC is also quite upsetting, to say the least.
Harassment is not okay. Abuse is not okay. Harassment and abuse in the name of diversity is not okay.
Instead of trying to articulate my thoughts–which are mainly along the lines of this being complicated and hard–I’m going to link to some posts that I found interesting reading. I don’t necessarily agree with everything I’m linking, but did find something of value in each item.
- Trolling is Trolling even When It’s Feminism
- On the matter of Weev vs. Kane
- Holding our heroes accountable
- The Trouble With Heroes
- An Apology and Eight Other Things
One of my personal goals this year is to work harder to be less black and white in my thinking; people are complicated and no one is all one thing or another. This is the part of Haibel’s post which I found most resonant and which I’m going to be thinking about for a long time:
In coming forward, Amelia Greenhall calls for a path of greys — for a path where we acknowledge that people can do good work and also do harm, for a path of nuance, for a path where respectful disagreements are possible.
