ellie's quote collection

Inspired by @feministlib, this is a place to collect quotes from stuff I've been reading.

[feministgamingmatters]

Concept: A text-replacer extension which corrects “pandering to [group]” to “being enjoyable for people who are not me.”

[feministgamingmatters]

This was actually the best idea:

[kateordie]

That last one reads like horse_ebooks but also it’s my everyday life

[mxbees]

i’m seeing a few posts about how to ‘fact check’ things you see on tumblr, as well as several inducements to not spread misinformation.

while i can understand where these people are coming from, there are few issues i have with how they are framing this issue.

in my field this is the sort of thing we call 'information literacy’ (which is broader than just being able to discern and judge the veracity and quality of information). like many other kinds of literacy, info lit is a skill that must learned and it isn’t necessarily easy.

and while it isn’t a bad idea for people, in general, to beef up their info lit skills, i take issue with the overall framing.

the actual problem, here, isn’t that people can’t tell the difference between a fact and a lie OR a credible from a disreputable resources, but that people are intentionally propogating falsehoods. or maybe they’re doing it accidentally based on some other intentionally false source. either way, the result is the same.

the solution, of course, would be that people stop posting lies. above all: these people who do it intentionally (for the sake of clicks and ad revenue or whatever) are the ones responsible and are the ones who ought to correct their behaviour.

since this is unlikely, working on our info lit skills is a generally good idea.

but this is also an unfair demand, in some cases, since telling people to fact check adds an additional cognitive load to their online activities. blaiming people for their illiteracy is also just a shitty thing to do.

as for info lit, these posts also dangerously simplify the problem of trying to discern good and bad information. even within professionals, this is a problem. since many of the strategies for verifying and deducing veracity really just depend on a fallacy (appeals to authority).

they’ll say “news is more credible if posted by the bbc or ny times”, but this is a fallacious assumption. it relies more on the authority of the organizations than any real substantive strategy for distinguishing truths from falsehoods. it creates a false expectation that authoritative resources are de facto trustworthy ones.

which is a problem when you can have a textbook that calls enslaved Africans 'workers’. or a government claiming that there is evidence of weapons of mass destruction. are these actually more credible than, say, a descendent of an enslaved African telling you that, no, they were slaves not workers? or the people actually in the country denying the existence of the weapons?

in short: authority does not imply credibility. credibility does not imply truthfulness. conflating all of these things with some simple, reductive strategies doesn’t actually help anyone at all.

[mxbees]

Email isn’t the problem

The Atlantic recently posted another thinkpiece about email. The centrail question is: is email evil or are we?

The problem with this, and most other thinkpieces about email, is the conflation of two distinct questions or problems. First is a technological one and the other is a human one. Many of the articles that decry the use of email focus on how it impacts us as human beings: the stress, the anxiety, the time spent with email, people’s poor email etiquette, and so on. They then go one to discuss the technological merits of email and the rise of many ‘solutions’ to the problem.

This is what companies like Slack want (or at least the hype surrounding it). They want to sell a technological solution to a human problem, which is great and all for their business but it doesn’t actually solve any real problem. Or at least not in the way that they want. Because, ultimately, the problem with email isn’t about technology. In fact, there are many good reasons to think email is a great technology (and one better than the solutions like Slack). In the end, it is really about what ideological commitments you have about technology (e.g., preference for open protocols or nice looking closed ecosystems).

One article claims that “60% of smartphone-using professionals spend a mind-boggling 72 hours a week (including weekends) connected to their jobs via email check-ins. For most of us, this is 32 hours more than we’re being paid for”. This certainly sounds like a dismal state of affairs. But here’s one claim about Slack’s user engagement, “engagement is of the charts, with users spending nearly 10 hours logged into the app everyday”. So, multiply this by seven days in a week and you’re at 70 hours a week that you’re connected to your job via Slack. Is this really an improvement?

Yes, one could argue that regardless of the time spent, it is undeniable that people find email stressful and, so far, we haven’t heard nearly the same frustration with using Slack (or whatever email killers people are attempting to use). So, even if this doesn’t actually reduce the amount of time we spend connected to our jobs, at least its reducing the psychological stress of dealing with email.

Which is only true if you think that the stress caused by email is inherent with the technology (as in, email itself causes stress, rather than the context in which we use it): “Even if email’s not outright evil, it does seem to be broken in some way. And if we’re the ones who broke it, it will be up to us to fix it, too.” (link to source). Again, even the article that at least partially claims that we are the evil ones, not email, ultimately grounds the problem with email in technology.

But this actually isn’t a technological problem. It’s only fairly recently in email’s long history that we’ve reached this point where people consider it 'evil’. And it’s pretty easy to see that there is a correlation with these discussions about email being 'evil’ and its connection to the workplace. One begins to wonder if, perhaps, it is the workplace that is actually to be blamed for the evils of email.

From what I can tell, it is our workplace culture and capitalism as a whole that is to blame for the downfall of email. Looking above, it isn’t hard to imagine why people have come to hate email if it tacks on an extra 30 hours of uncompensated labour to our weeks. But this is exactly the same reason why people will come to hate Slack, since it has this exact same fault.

In a recent New Republic article about Zappos, I heard the concept of 'work-life integration’ for the first time and got a chill down my spine, “Zapponians, as the employees call one another, like to talk about "work-life integration” rather than work-life balance". And while the situation at Zappos sounds like a dystopian hellscape for me, I guess this sort of thing is considered 'progress’ and the future of labour:

In today’s ever-updating, ever-mobile workforces, a professional’s time is precious, and he or she wants to optimize it as effectively as possible. Professionals in all industries are casting out the notions of work-life balance in order to build better work-life integration practices—where work and life are intertwined—by leveraging technology to make it happen.

Of which Zappos appears to be the apotheosis of this exact principle:

Work was fun, which is good, because people never really stopped working. Meetings might be scheduled at 10 p.m. on a Sunday, in the middle of what appeared to be a party but was really just an extension of the all-encompassing Zappos corporate culture.

It is a place where you live where you work and there is no real meaningful seperation between your work and your life. They are fully integrated.

I find myself unsurprised to see this gaining traction within the business world, since it turns something many people hated (workplace intrusions into personal time) into a desirable virtue. It creates a situation where labouring for an extra 30 hours a week without compensation is actually an aspirational goal and a sign of being successful. This is, perhaps, the most desirable end goal for late capitalism. As with Zappos, we’ll become tribalised based on which corporation we work for. And that, more than anything else, will become our primary 'ethnic’ identity. We’ll live and we’ll work there. And every minute of our day will be labour converted to capital.

Ultimately, this is what is wrong with email. It has been one step towards the future we appear to be heading towards. Before, when in person meetings and landlines were really the only way to contact people, this required your physical presence. You could not get work-related phone calls at home, because your work phone was at a fixed, unmoveable location. Email isn’t the only thing that has enabled worker mobility (cell phones, laptops, video calls, etc). All the things that allow for a geographically and temporally distributed workforce.

Email sucks and is evil because it has come to represent the expectation that we labour under capitalism without compensation. Slack and similar attempts to kill email don’t solve this basic problem. Having a more 'convenient’ or centralized tool demanding your uncompensated labour isn’t a helpful solution. And while this notion of work-life integration is a solution of a kind – since it probably does eliminate the harm caused by uncompensated labour via transforming this into a desirable virtue – it certainly isn’t the solution I’d want for myself.

Personally, I don’t even think that work-life balance is substantively better than integration. It suggests that capitalism’s ability to exploit my labour should have an equal (or greater) consideration to the parts of my life that aren’t currently exploitable. A suggestion I also reject.

I’m not quite sure what a good solution for any of this is (beyond dismantling capitalism as a whole). I think, at the very least, if everyone simply refused to work without compensation we’d come to hate email (and whatever else) just a little less.

[chrysantheb0mb]

if yr sick of our entire culture taking cheap shots at young girls, raise yr hand sword

store || art blog || commission info please do not remove credit!

[ellieheartsreads]

It has been referred to as the Casual American Caste System, Delicate Apartheid, Gentle Oppression, or what I like to call it after a few drinks: Chad Crow, the super chill grandson of Jim Crow.

[ellieheartsreads]

Parents are thus encouraged to think of the act of reproduction as above all a personal economic choice.

[ellieheartsreads]

The language of “poverty” keeps us from questioning and critiquing our economic system in a way that “wealth inequality” and “class disparity” — or class war — does not.

[ellieheartsreads]

51% of faculty surveyed rated “instruction of students in information literacy” as a Very Essential service, while 34% of faculty rated it as Essential. How was this not one of the leading stats in the survey result summary??!?!

[ellieheartsreads]

Library Feminism and Library Women’s History: Activism and Scholarship, Equity and Culture - Suzanne Hildenbrand

[ellieheartsreads]

Today I hope to persuade you that the same thing that happened to aviation is happening with the Internet. Here we are, fifty years into the computer revolution, at what feels like our moment of greatest progress. The outlines of the future are clear, and oh boy is it futuristic. But we're running into physical and economic barriers that aren't worth crossing. We're starting to see that putting everything online has real and troubling social costs. And the devices we use are becoming 'good enough', to the point where we can focus on making them cheaper, more efficient, and accessible to everyone. So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today. Unless we screw it up. And I want to convince you that this is the best possible news for you as designers, and for us as people.

http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

[sad-queer]

non-ableist alternatives for insulting people or things!

please do not say “lame”

cruddy

annoying

disappointing

lousy

no good

crummy

rubbish

junky

rotten

cheesy

corny

tacky

please do not say “dumb” or “stupid”

illogical

foolish

silly

nonsensical

obtuse

sophomoric

ignorant

incomprehensible

irrational

senseless

vapid

please do not say “crazy,” “psycho,” or “insane”

ridiculous

unfathomable

erratic 

illogical

unbelievable

unreasonable

absurd

wacky

eccentric

out of control

unpredictable

wild

preposterous

ludicrous

outlandish

feel free to add on or correct anything (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

[markrosewater]

38%

Some people are questioning the statistic I’ve used about how many Magic players are female. I believe this is pulling focus from the actual issue – we all want to make more players, including women, feel more comfortable and welcome at Magic events no matter what – but I sense it won’t go away until addressed.

It’s important for our business to understand who our audience is, so from time to time, we do what is called a “deep dive”where we seek out an outside expert to gather global data about who exactly our audience is. As part of the most recent “deep dive” survey, the question was asked “Do you play Magic?” defined as playing with physical paper cards, in any place or format, or digitally through Magic Online or Magic Duels. Of all the people who answered “yes” to that question, 38% were female.

With that out of the way, let’s please turn our attention back to the actual topic of discussion: the number of female players is up (and I believe everyone in this debate acknowledges this), yet is not represented at equal numbers in organized play. Why is this? Please share your experiences.

Thank you.

[ellieheartsreads]

The conclusion that working mothers help raise patriarchy-subverting children is great news if you want to subvert the patriarchy.

A new study gives us another reason to celebrate working mothers - Vox

[markrosewater]

I'm not sure how much you may want to debate this topic, but I found Jim Davis' article about women in magic spot on. As a male/white person who plays magic, when exactly is the focus placed on just being a mature, caring person in general?

Here’s the issue. When things are set up in a way that they benefit you, it’s hard sometimes to recognize that they don’t benefit everyone. 

Imagine for example, you go play in a new store that you’ve never played at before. When you start round one, your opponent starts with 40 life. When you correct him, he tells you that at this store, if you live within a 5-mile radius of the store, you get to start at 40 life. 

You say that that’s unfair, but he says that that’s how they’ve played in this store since Magic first came out in 1993 and that no one in the store has any issues with it. To them, that is the status quo. It’s how they learned to play and it’s just accepted as the way things are.

Now them seeing it acceptable and fair doesn’t make it any unless fair for you. The problem is at this store you’re the minority who doesn’t like the status quo. Things aren’t going to change if you’re the only voice who says it’s wrong. Some of the regulars at the store, some of the ones who get 40 life, have to also stand up and go, “You know what? This isn’t right. We need to change this.”

That’s what this conversation is about. Women make up 38% of Magic players yet this isn’t remotely reflected in in store play. Why? What factors are causing this to be so? And if it’s going to change, it requires those of us in the majority to stand up and say, “You know what? This isn’t right. We need to change this.”

[offcenterwriting]

Yes, Sir, I am calling in sick because my people are dying on their knees with their hands in the air, praying to a god who prefers white skin; - and the last time we went to church, we found our pastor’s blood in the communion wine but unlike God he did not turn into bread; - and the last time we dipped our hands in holy water, an officer shoved us in and choked us under until the water turned black; - and the last time we tried to breathe, an arm clamped around our neck and forced us to the ground so we could hear our lungs explode in our collapsing chest; - and the last time we tried to stand up straight, our spine snapped in two, and when we tried to run, our back ate four bullets, our heart ate one, and when we asked to be buried in that same little town, a pale-skinned terrorist carried out the will of God; - and maybe, maybe I could make it to work, but I’m afraid to leave my house because corpses hang from every tree: corpses from a hundred years ago, corpses from a hundred years from now, corpses from this morning, stripped of their names, swinging in a stale white wind; - and you expect me to act normal, to smile wide and assure you that my people are just exaggerating about our own bullet wounds, but even Uncle Tom died at his master’s feet; - so, Sir, I am incredibly sorry to inconvenience you, but my people are dead and my heart is sick, and I’ll need a lifetime just to cut down these trees.

When Life Cannot Go On As Normal. Mourning the souls who are still your soul. Remember to practice lots of self-care, everyone, and to take time to mourn or cry or scream or write or dance or whatever you need to do.  Don’t let anyone tell you how you should feel. (via offcenterwriting)

[ellieheartsreads]

Today, many of our new students experience academic culture shock and they struggle, not because they cannot do the intellectual work, but because they cannot quickly enough acclimate to a foreign academic culture.

[xuhulk]

When I express any shred of doubt about whether I deserve or am qualified for something, people often try to reassure me that I am just experiencing impostor syndrome. About 10% of the time, it’s true. Amelia Greenhall’s excellent piece, however, has inspired me to clear up a big misconception...