Oh, look. A terrible news article about a subculture.
So the M&G did an article on ICON, the recent gaming convention up in Jo’burg. It’s about as awful as you would expect, only worse. It makes it sound as if all the women were walking around in revealing outfits with their tits falling out, and that the main attraction of the con to women is the possibility of attracting a horde of desperate nerds no matter how shy or unconventionally attractive they are. Not, you know, participation in any of the games, or the purchase of cool toys; those are for the smelly man-children running around and whacking each other with rubber swords.
Here’s where you can read this wonder of modern journalism in all its glory. Use of latex and bleach is recommended if you have a gentle and sensitive nature or are allergic to fail.
Since I appear to be kind of half maybe possibly not actually logged in to the website, and I have no idea whether it’s eaten my comment, and if it hasn’t eaten my comment it has almost certainly eaten the paragraph breaks in my comment, thus rendering it unreadable, here it is again:
This is yet another “quirky human interest” article written by a clueless mainstream journalist who briefly encounters a subculture and then regurgitates a hopelessly confused mess of whatever they found most memorable. But it’s a lot worse than average.
I came here expecting to get a bit annoyed about the conflation of LARPing with the SCA, or the portrayal of all LARPing as MEAD-style boffer LARPing. But the horrible and sensationalist gender stereotypes on display here kind of eclipse the geeky details.
I disagree that the article helps any of the hobbies it features. It tells men “these subcultures welcome sexist jerks” and tells women “stay far away from here unless you would enjoy wading through a cesspit of sexist jerks”.
I was there, I wore normal clothes (like a lot of other women there, who I guess were not exciting or exotic enough to be mentioned), I had a great geeky time and nobody was rude to me. But if all I knew about ICON came from this article, I would avoid it like the plague.
I know women who dress up at cons, sometimes in revealing outfits, satirically and non-satirically. I know a lot of the women from the T&A RPG team. I may have to agree to disagree with them about the feminist implications of dressing up in revealing outfits at cons, but that’s a whole other post — and on the whole I think they should wear whatever the hell they want and not be assumed to be wearing it for the benefit of dudely eyeballs. Our differences of opinion notwithstanding, I think it’s safe to say that the satirical element went so far over the reporter’s head it may have ended up in that giant football dirigible floating over the city.
(In non-ranty post-ICON news, I have giant blisters on my hands from screwing my giant alien’s legs in, but it was so worth it. It looks totally badass. 
)
P.S. The really annoying thing about this is that in South Africa roleplaying isn’t that male-dominated anymore. OK, maybe the nationwide roleplaying diaspora — all those tiny cells of friends who have played AD&D all by themselves since high school and never talk to other roleplayers — is male-dominated, but the larger communities centered on e.g. ICON or CLAWs at UCT are full of women and have been for over a decade. And they’re not just “girlfriends and sisters”; they write LARPs and modules and organise things and come to conventions every year. Anyone who doesn’t recognise that is seriously misrepresenting the community.
Forever Bubble
Finished all the levels in the default Frozen Bubble levelset? Run out of custom levels from the interwebs? Random levels too boring? Making levels too hard? Sounds like you need Forever Bubble — what I made on Tuesday night instead of working.
Randomly generate pretty levels — for ever! Run it with --help to see all the options. You need the argparse and networkx python modules, and obviously python. It should work on any *NIX. The Frozen Bubble levels directory needs to exist if you want to save there. Patches, ports and comments welcome. If you generate a particularly awesome level, paste it into a comment; maybe I’ll compile a “greatest hits” levelset.
Unserious post is unserious
There’s too much Serious Business on my front page! Something must be done.
You should buy Machinarium; it is an awesome indie point-and-click adventure game about robots. It has really pretty art, and versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. (It’s written in flash, and the standalone flash player for Linux is really grotty, but everything worked for me after I followed some helpful instructions on the forum. Run the executable with G_SLICE=always-malloc … to prevent random segfaults, and turn off full screen mode straight away or mouse control will go wonky.) You can play a demo at the site to see if you like it. The full version is a 350MB download. It’s only $20 for at least a day’s worth of playing (if you’re the kind of person who will stay up until 4AM obsessively trying to finish it), and comes with absolutely no DRM — which I think is worth supporting.
A thought experiment
Suppose that you host a party at which you serve soup. The soup consists almost entirely of vegetables, but you add a small amount of chicken stock. During the party, a few of your guests complain that they are vegetarians, and thus find your soup unpalatable.
Assuming that you don’t have some kind of personal vendetta against vegetarians, which of these do you consider to be the more reasonable response?
A. Apologise; offer some kind of assurance that you will remember that some of your friends are vegetarians the next time you make soup.
B. Complain bitterly that the vegetarians are hurting your feelings by making you out to be some kind of horrible anti-vegetarian bigot, when you clearly didn’t intend to offend them, and when everyone knows that you have absolutely nothing against vegetarians and treat everyone equally whether they are an omnivore, herbivore or insectivore. Complain that you couldn’t possibly have been expected to remember the vegetarians, since there are so few of them. (Go off on a tangent in which you contemplate why so few vegetarians come to your parties; conclude that they must have some genetic reason to dislike you.) Complain that the vegetarians are being oversensitive — it’s just a little bit of chicken stock; it’s not like you slaughtered a cow on the table in front of them — and tell them that they should have just shut up and eaten the soup.
Show your working.
Addendum, with actual photos
After a lot of compiling, digikam is working again. Here are the photos from Conclave at Charybdis. And here are some Egyptian geese, if you like that sort of thing.
Better late than never
I’m about to upload my photos of our Dragonfire LARP, which happened only two months ago. This is still less laggy than Hodgestar’s birthday party. In order to upload the photos I am upgrading digikam, so that I can use a non-faily flickr upload plugin. In order to upgrade digikam I need to upgrade the rest of KDE from the kubuntu-backports PPA — this is currently chugging away in the background.
I have embarked on an epic sewing project — making myself and Hodgestar medieval Japanese outfits for Here Be Dragons, the annual SCA away weekend event which is about a month away. I’m making this (except with a maroon hakama because the shop had no red linen) and this kind of thing (except black, because that’s the colour of the hakama Hodgestar already has).
The nice thing about Japanese clothing is that it’s mostly a whole lot of rectangles. The only tricky part of the kimono-type garment is the collar. I think I’ve been having problems because my seams are tiny and all the instructions on the interwebs assume that you’re going to leave enormous seam allowances — so my collars are too wide and too high up on the body and need to be re-sewn. I need to test this theory out on the two very nearly finished kosode I’ve just made. The reason I’m writing a rambly blog post and not sewing right now is that V:TES players have taken over the lounge table.
After a very long wait, my kalahari.net book order arrived, and here is my loot:
- The Never Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack — it’s a DS9 tie-in novel; don’t judge me. I first read Una McCormack’s fanfiction during one of my previous love affairs with Deep Space Nine, and her pro fiction is just as good. This is a stand-alone story about a minor canon character.
- Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Cardassia and Andor (purchased for the Cardassia half, also by Una McCormack; I’m leaving the other half for later) — also good, but (obviously) shorter.
- Kimono: Fashioning Culture by Lisa Dalby — a well-regarded reference book about the history of kimono.
- Seed to Harvest by Octavia E. Butler — a collected edition of the entire Patternist series, except for one instalment Butler really didn’t like. Haven’t read it yet.
- Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany — currently reading. It’s slow going, because of the unusual language, but I’m enjoying it.
- Zombies Calling by Faith Erin Hicks — a fun, short zombie comic. Not much to the plot, but I really like Hicks’ art. (If she sounds familiar, it’s because she did Demonology 101.)
Recently discovered webcomics:
The upgrade has become unexpectedly exciting — I’ve hit some kind of packaging bug. I guess the photos will have to wait a bit longer. :/
How not to offend me
I am not offended by jokes about sex. I make them all the time. I can think of many women who I’m pretty sure would say the same.
There is a long-running debate about sexism within the FOSS community and the IT field in general (the most recent notable incidents are RMS’s emacs virgins joke and the infamous Ruby porn presentation, but similar issues have come up in the past).
To categorise this debate as a clash between prudish, delicate flowers who disapprove of sex and porn (and who are usually contrasted with hip, younger women who are more sex-positive), and “the guys”, who are used to talking freely about sex with other guys, is to completely miss the point.
I do not speak for all women. I’m sure that some women feel uncomfortable whenever sex is mentioned at all in a professional environment, and that some women don’t find sexist humour to be a big deal, or even personally find it funny. This is my individual take, in response to recent posts on CLUG Park.
For me, this has never been about porn or jokes about sex being inherently offensive to women. It’s about speech and behaviour which belittles or degrades women. This is often the case with jokes which some men make about sex — because, quite frankly, our society is fucked up when it comes to that particular subject. A lot of mainstream porn features rather ugly and insulting caricatures of submissive, slutty women and dominant, abusive men, and I personally would not like to have those stereotypes waved at me in the middle of a tech conference. I don’t care what gets anyone’s rocks off, but it disturbs me when people introduce their creepy porn into their normal interactions with people in a non-sexual context.
But it doesn’t have to be explicitly about sex. Jokes about women not knowing what they want, having to be cajoled into sex because they don’t really like it, being stupid, being ignorant of technology, liking pink stuff, liking chocolate, wanting their boyfriends to talk about their feelings, saying they want honesty and not really meaning it, being bad drivers, wanting chivalry and equality at the same time, being on the rag, always being attracted to jerks and never Nice Guys, wanting to trap their boyfriends into pregnancy or marriage, being welcomed in a male-dominated field or hobby because now the men can get dates, not liking comics or computers or sci-fi, not understanding things their boyfriends like, not existing (because there are no real women on the internet), being fashion-conscious, taking an hour to get ready, being gold-diggers, or just generally being mysterious and unfathomable creatures entirely unlike normal people (read: men) really piss me off.
This kind of commentary is harmful not because of the seriousness of any individual incident, but because of the cumulative effect. Some of those things may not seem like a big deal to you — they shouldn’t be, and they wouldn’t be if I only encountered those stereotypes rarely. The reason they’re in my list is that I encounter them all the time. It is impossible to read the comments on any major internet forum which is mostly frequented by men without wading hip-deep in this crap (which is why I very seldom read comments on sites like Reddit, Digg or Slashdot anymore). I used to reply to these comments. Then I stopped, because arguing with half the internet is frustrating and pointless.
(Yes, I feel the same way about stupid jokes about men being immature, having uncontrollable sexual urges, obsessing about Star Wars, obsessing about boobs, obsessing about sport, being unable to cook or do shopping or tie their own shoelaces, being hypochondriacs, not asking for directions, being unable to talk about their feelings, being promiscuous, fearing commitment, etc., etc..)
On the whole, I have observed the worst such behaviour on US-centric websites, and most of the complaints about sexism that I have encountered online were written by American women. In my limited and subjective experience I think the South Africans I know are considerably more progressive. I have found my local Linux community to be welcoming and friendly. I don’t think this is because anyone is making a special effort not to offend me.
Do you think that not being sexist means singling out women for special treatment? Sexist behaviour is what singles women out. Treating someone as your equal includes not continually telling jokes about the ways in which people like them are inferior.
ETA:
I am not going to provide a forum on this blog for blog-post-length comments from persons with whom I have no interest in entering into a dialogue, based on bitter past experience of attempting to do so. Those persons are most welcome to post their responses within their own internet spaces.
Road trip! LARPage!
I have put up selected photos from my road trip to Grahamstown and ICON with Hodgestar and drnlm.
Also, the LARP which I’m supposed to be writing right now has a playtest on Sat 1st and will run at Dragonfire on Sat 8th.
It’s a science fiction LARP set in the same universe as Appointment at Atropos. While Atropos is all about the epic inter-species politics, Charybdis is intended to be more gritty and low-level space opera: belt miners, traders and pirates other traders.
Roleplayers — let me know if you’re interested in playing in either upcoming run.
Goodbye, Cobweb
I knew her for more than a decade — Hodgestar got her a year before we met. She was a beautiful, clever and graceful cat, and we will both miss her.
To Boldly Go Where Someone Has Kind Of Gone Before
When I first heard about the new Star Trek movie, I was highly sceptical. I was concerned that after the lack of enthusiasm over Voyager and the horrible failure of Enterprise (itself a reboot attempt) most of the original franchise would be considered an unprofitable dead end. I feared that a “re-imagining” would throw most of it away, dilute the high-tech space opera elements until they were barely visible, and produce a mainstream-friendly near-future BSG-alike barely recognisable as Star Trek. But I didn’t have that much emotional investment in the original series (Picard and Sisko are my captains!), and the first reviews I heard were positive, so I was cautiously optimistic when I went to see the movie tonight.
It was wonderful — I loved every moment of it. Even the time travel managed not to be obnoxious. I don’t know what a non-Trekkie would make of it, but I don’t think fans of Star Trek will be disappointed. The remake stays close to the spirit of the original — it strips away the sixties cheese, and leaves behind the best parts. The special effects are updated, but the technology is the same. The characters are recognisably the same characters. The dialogue is good. There’s something interesting happening in every scene and there is no dead weight, but the movie does not feel rushed or badly cut. There are lots of cute little references for Trek fans to pick up on, but there’s no excessive reliance on familiarity with the canon. The main plot neatly sets the stage for a remake which can go in completely unexpected directions not limited by the original canon history: it’s the same universe, but a different timeline.
On the way back in the car Hodgestar and I discussed how a remake TV series could be sustained successfully, and do interesting new things in the Star Trek universe without straying too far away to remain Star Trek. I think the answer lies in revisiting old concepts and redoing them in ways which were previously impossible because of inadequate special effects. We can now do aliens and alien worlds properly — a remake would have the opportunity to explore alien-heavy storylines and do the visuals justice. No more bumpy-foreheaded dudes in pastel pyjamas on interchangeable dusty desert lots.
I would love a new TV series, but I’ll settle for a few more movies like this.
Buy someone a cow
Recent Tweets
- This stuff is totally awesome and has cheap international shipping! https://sugru.com
- I think the success of the Alien franchise in spite of some terrible sequels is a victory for art. It survives because the alien is awesome.
- @firstfallen I can report that the new sugru is much better; works exactly as advertised. I think I'll make models out of the old stuff.
- @khoi_boi Yar, I see now Triceratops gets to keep the name.
- @maxbarners Baby oil and baby lotion are extracted with fractional distillation. The residue is freeze-dried and ground into baby powder.
- So they probably didn't headbutt; the crests were all for show.
- The torosaurus had a bit of an Alien Queen thing going. http://tinyurl.com/39wlsmn
- The triceratops may just have been a juvenile torosaurus. http://tinyurl.com/2w4ocww (BoingBoing)
- Hey, we might actually get a good RPG sourcebook for African cyberpunk: https://afrocyberpunk.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/update/
