Right, so the day job is making me pull my hair out right now (SAP implementation gone pear-shaped, lolsob), so here’s some links.
- Black Girls Are Being Pushed Out of School
- Here’s an utterly amazing speech by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves given as he sentenced three white murderers.
- Planning your weekend getaway to Jason Nation (It’s HUGE!)
- “Games deserve better than the games industry.”
- Let’s Call Female Online Harassment What It Really Is: Terrorism
- There’s No Morality in Exercise: I’m a Fat Person Who Made a Successful Fitness App (note: there’s an animated GIF at the top of this piece) I’ve been playing one of the games developed by Naomi Alderman and Six to Start (The Walk) and it just makes me happy to know that this is their attitude towards exercise and that one of the developers is fat. That really means a lot to me. More than I can put into words, really.
- Why the rhetoric surrounding Beyoncé and Beck annoys me “Let’s work to avoid falling into the trap of demonizing collaboration, women, and traditions that don’t fit perfectly into the individual, musical genius narrative that excludes so many cultural and artistic traditions.”
- The Fight for Masculinity in Science Fiction The gift that keeps on giving, yo.
- Black, queer, feminist, erased from history: Meet the most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of
- How Etsy Alienated Its Crafters and Lost Its Soul Yep.
- Kameron Hurley on Trigger Warnings and Neil Gaiman For me, this is the heart of Hurley’s argument: “What kind of a world do we live in where other professionals, other creators, fear the social power of another creator to such an extent that they can’t even have professional disagreements? And if other creators won’t say anything, what about the people in our society that these sorts of warnings were designed to protect? Why would any of them say, ‘Hey, that’s not cool?’ and risk the pile-on?”
- Damage This is a powerful and painful piece. The subject is female genital mutilation.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates remembers David Carr.
- A Century After Being Cast into the River Thames, a Celebrated Typeface Reemerges
- If raiding guilds were actually honest I’m pretty sure I’ve run into this actual guild a few times.
Have a delightfully 80’s video. With dinosaurs.
I love how Matthew Foster reverses the old “if you want stories with more X, write them yourself.”
@Beth: Yes! 😀
No comment on the links yet, as I haven’t read that far. Is there any SAP implementation at any corp that hasn’t gone pear-shaped? I think that could make for fascinating spec fic. Or not, as the case may be, perhaps just deadly dull and full with finger pointing.
@Trish: Point. This one has, perhaps, gone pear-ier than usual due to some epicly terrible leadership in my particular workstream.
Heh, yeah. Was once in a ONE year implementation project in charge of the payroll modules, which actually had ties to every flipping piece of the company’s business, most of which nobody in the company knew existed prior to said project. How do you get a LAN id? Dunno, just happens. (Magic happens to be done by an admin using a 20 yr old DOS based app who got an email from HR and passed it back to HR, fed to other systems via email, etc. etc, ad infinitum.) That LAN id then kicked off everything from PeopleSoft to Exchange account creation, etc. This was at a large Fortune MumbleCrapNumber company – doing outsourced IT support.
Let’s just say that throwing more PMs at the problem didn’t help. Lean Six Sigma didn’t help because it was too F’ing late to fix the process and keep that deadline.
Oh, and it was PMs all the way down, passing the buck at each and every turn. Don’t ask me about the time I got an expense report denied because I went over the per diem for food because I had to sleep at the f’ing airport. Guess what, keeping enough Starbucks lattes in you to stay awake and sugared still costs less than a hotel room!
Er, no I’m not bitter. No, not at all.
Signed PMP, LSSBB, ITIL, MSCD, and stuff
@TrishB: You know the adage that you can have two of the followingthree: fast, cheap, good? Guess what they picked? I’m in PS, which pulls data from RTP, FI, and PM and requires a strong advocate with those groups and, well, we didn’t have one. Was on a call a couple weeks ago where the man leading up our workstream blamed the end users for not making sure that everyone had access to the new system at go-live when he literally refused to help anyone get access to the system. All I can think is that thank God we’re basically moving from one SAP box to another so we at least KNOW what isn’t working and what is incorrect in the data loads so we know what needs to be fixed.
Natalie, I do want to apologize for my rant in the previous comment. Sorry to abuse your time and your place. Please delete if you find it necessary.
The link to Kameron Hurley’s article should have a trigger warning for Will Shetterly’s comments. Heh.