Linkspam, fire, and dangerous things (19 October 2014)

Gamergate and online harassment

• [Trigger Warning: explicit, violent threats] IT HAPPENED TO ME: I’ve Been Forced Out Of My Home And Am Living In Constant Fear Because Of Relentless Death Threats From Gamergate | Brianna Wu at XOJane (October 16): “They threatened the wrong woman this time. I am the Godzilla of bitches. I have a backbone of pure adamantium, and I’m sick of seeing them abuse my friends. “
• Rolling Stone interviews Anita Sarkeesian | Rolling Stone (October 17): “How a video game fan weathered a misogynist backlash to become pop culture’s most valuable critic” (warning: unmoderated comment section)
• [Trigger Warning: explicit, acts of violence and hate-crimes] The Bad Apples Of #GamerGate | Poopsock Holmes at Medium (October 17): “In this piece, I’m going to show that a significant number of GamerGate supporters, both prominent and non, have histories of harassment, hatred and abuse.”
• The battle against internet trolls shows that a compelling story will always beat cold, hard facts | New Statesman (October 15): “This is why, even if you loathe and forswear the internet, you should care about trolling – because it is fundamentally about the dangerous gravity of a compelling narrative. No religious patriarch in history thought he was burning sinners or stoning adulterers to preserve his own power or fulfil his sadistic desires. It was always for a higher cause.”

Other Stuff

Ada Lovelace, a Computer Programmer Ahead of Her Time | Mashable (October 15): Read more about the life of the “enchantress of numbers”

Ways Men In Tech Are Unintentionally Sexist | this is not a pattern (October 14): “These are little things. Things that many people do without thinking about them and certainly without intending anything by them. Things that individually are meaningless, but in aggregate set the tone of an entire community.”

The Malala you won’t hear about | The People’s Record (October 16): “This is the Malala the Western corporate media doesn’t like to quote. This is the Malala whose politics do not fit neatly into the neocolonialist, cookie-cutter frame of presentation. This is the Malala who recognizes that true liberation will take more than just education, that it will take the establishment of not just bourgeois political “democracy,” but ofeconomic democracy, of socialism.”

Where’s Thor When You Need Her? Women In Comics Fight An Uphill Battle | NPR (October 10): “On Facebook, women make up just under half of all self-identified comics fans. But even as the female audience grows, female creators for DC and Marvel, colloquially known as “the Big Two,” are still in the minority.”

Internal Memo: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sets new diversity plan after ‘humbling’ experience | GeekWire (October 15): “The memo, sent prior to a regular monthly Q&A session with employees, went on to outline a series of steps that Nadella says the company will be taking to improve diversity and inclusion across the company, including the company’s engineering and senior leadership teams.”

FiveThirtyEight Turns the Lidless Eye of Data Crunching to Gender Disparity in Superhero Comics Characters | The Mary Sue (October 15): “Hanley has been crunching the numbers on the gender make up of the folks who work on Marvel and DC comics for years, but FiveThirtyEight wanted to take a slightly different tack by looking at the characters who make up those comics in the first place.”

Mary Berners-Lee: Ada Lovelace Day Hero | equalitism (October 19): “Tim Berners-Lee’s mom, Mary Lee Woods was a badass mathematician/computer scientist before he was. Both of Tim’s parents worked on a team that developed programs in the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers.”

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