Pinboard

A number of these suggestions are easy steps that we can take today to Marginalize the vile misogynist voices in gaming.

I actually don't agree with this, in that I like the label "gamer", but I agree that the culture needs a massive cleanup.

Brief overview of the recent terrible misogyny from some gamer circles, and the tendency to be hyperdefensive.

Good metaphor, one that speaks to my experience.

Sarkeesian gets all sorts of attacks, and basically all of them are baseless.

I liked his point until it turned into an ad for his company. I don't see any advertorial warnings though. In my own field, annotation is seen as boring, but it's crucial to have high quality, consistent human annotation to train new models.

The service and community aspects are a great way to avoid excessive force.

What's happened to Sarkeesian and Quinn, among many other women, is terrible. We need to fix our toxic male-dominated gaming culture, and soon.

Interesting story of a garbage collection startup in Bamako.

This is like that awesome sand demo at the science museum, only better.

Creepy, but very cool. looks like they had to use tracking dots in the makeup.

This kind of subtle bias is exactly the sort of thing that accumulates over time and makes it harder for women to advance in the tech industry.

Another hard one to watch. Pervasive background violence is par for the course in modern shooters and open world games.

Another reason to oppose the 1033 program: no one is really tracking what happens to the transferred weapons and equipment.

I think this kind of ignores how influential Apple was in forcing the switch to USB, by highlighting their "loss" with FireWire (once again, a better technology losing the network effect battle). Also fails to note how easy it is to write software that talks serial or parallel, since you're just pushing raw bytes - but that's moot because everyone just uses library code. I suspect hardware classes probably don't use those old ports anymore like mine did.

This follow-up to Clay Shirky's piece goes after my key concern: who is covering state and local politics when the local papers die?

A brutally honest take on what journalists can do on their sinking ships, though it ignores the public service aspect of reporting.

Excellent point about how a black victim must be perfect to be allowed justice.

This narrative of black criminality is a big part of these "stand your ground" defenses. A black person is somehow inherently threatening, even when unarmed - and we need to erase that attitude.

I can't speak to the violent confrontation part, but I will have to explain this to Theo someday.

White Americans are extremely self-segregated. I probably would be worse if it weren't for various institutions' commitments to diversity.

Right in the feels. Theo will never have to worry about this, and I won't have to worry about him.

I participated in this Twitter discussion

The right-wing punditocracy is a huge part of the problem - they have every right to express their opinions, but their opinions are I believe damaging to civil society.

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It makes me so sad that this remains where we are in the US. I mostly feel powerless to do anything about it.

It's been a long road, and remains a long road ahead. We need Officer Wilson to be charged, so this can get catharsis through the courts.

Good overview. I was unaware of most of this because I was never part of the online community, just playing with friends and buying my books from chain bookstores.

I certainly recognize my own deference in this.

I can figure out the Chinese quotes from context, mostly. Good, sad story about parental acceptance.