A rising tide lifts all linkspams (19th January, 2011)

• Russell Coker writes about conferences designed for people on the autism spectrum. In summary NTs seem to think that Autism Spectrum Disorders are only about socialisation, not realising that for many people on the Spectrum it’s sensory issues that are their main problem. Social problems are exacerbated by sensory issues and other causes of stress, so I think it’s worth considering ways in which conferences can be planned to be less stressful for people on the Autism Spectrum…
• Lots of discussion of privilege and intellectual property following from Twitter and then Karen Healey’s A Brief Pause for Some Rage. There’s a roundup at On piracy and copyright. If you’re very interested in ebook and intellectual property issues, check the Mobileread forums too.
• Not social justice from where I’m standing: The upshot here is that asexual people get hit particularly hard as being repressed or messed up, standing in the way of a singular social justice narrative around sexuality.
• How young is too young? (for kids to get into computers)
• My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer: Something that frustrates me about the field of computer science is that there are a lot of jerks who think that just because they’ve mastered some programming language or know some obscure unix commands, they are gods and you are nothing.
• Cass Cain Counts: A campaign has been launched to bring Cassandra Cain back back fulltime to the DC Comics universe… Cassandra Cain served as the titular heroine of the first ongoing Batgirl comic book series. Of Asian descent, she is also the first non-white member of the Batman family and has remained one of the most prominent non-white superheroes…
• Cyberfucking While Feminist: For a number of us, erotic roleplaying is a double-edged sword. It is, for some, a path to sexual freedom and a means of enacting another significant dimension of a roleplayed character’s life. But it is also an exercise fraught with a myriad of pitfalls created by the institutional sexism that still haunts many gaming and geek spaces.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the geekfeminism tag on delicious or the #geekfeminism tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.