January 20, 2020
What we still haven’t learned from Gamergate
Gamergate should have armed us against bad actors and bad-faith arguments. It didn’t. It’s natural to assess what sociocultural lessons we’ve learned from the previous decade, now that we’ve entered a new one — and whether they’re the kinds that might help us make the 2020s a better era. No honest attempt at such an assessment can be complete without grappling with the messy human dramas and the increasing trend toward polarized, incendiary conversations that emerged in the latter half of the 2010s. And that means contending with the unlikely, unpleasant, and far-reaching watershed movement that was Gamergate...Six years later, here’s a look at some of the lessons we still need to learn from Gamergate in order to keep its victims safe — and in order to keep the next decade from producing a movement that’s even worse. [more inside]
I have no idea how this pianist got their cat wedged into a piano or why
A World Without Pain
It is rare, but there are people who are born without the ability to feel pain. Joanne Cameron has never experience pain, but she is unique in that she also has never experienced the extremes of rage, dread, grief, anxiety, or fear.
The hours spent staring into the dark, looping around our own personal grand prix of anxieties, are not a waste of time but a fundamental expression of our humanity. And so on. To be a person is to suffer. But what if our worst feelings are just vestigial garbage? ... Pain is what makes joy, gratitude, mercy, hilarity, and empathy so precious. Unless it isn’t.
(SLNYer)
I can't remember where I left my library card
How to Make Sense of an Undrowned Town
How to Thermal Your RC Glider
Content Moderation is Unending Warfare
“I worried about that a lot when it was in the initial stages. The reality is that any app, such as a hookup app, can be used to manipulate and hurt others, primarily women. I figured, isn’t it better to try to foster human connection than not?” ... The woman stares into the pools of bottomless remorse and empathy that are the rapist’s girlfriend’s eyes. She is utterly sincere; the woman can tell. The rapist’s girlfriend truly believes that she and the rapist are making the world a better place." From You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South [The New Yorker] [CW: pretty much everything. Rape, gun violence, cannibalism, San Francisco real estate, venture capital, &c. ] [more inside]
To understand Martin Luther King Jr., don't rely on the highlights reel
Reducing King to a teddy bear of a civil rights figure robs him of how much he risked and makes it easier to vilify modern activists, experts said. Perspective on Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy including links to several seminal speeches. [more inside]
loving and hating and loving and fighting each other
Queering Shakespeare: Tessa Gratton on Lady Hotspur and her adaptation of Henry IV, Part I. Source material: Project Gutenberg, youtube (edited version).
the leech triumphantly oozed its way back into the hospital
The modern medical leech is not a myth, or a homeopathy you can only find behind the counter at a store selling healing crystals. Indeed, these toothy worms are serious tools for the 21st-century doctor. At Duke and in prominent hospitals around the country, from Johns Hopkins to the Mayo Clinic, leeches have found particular utility in the post-surgical ward doing what they do best: draining blood... “The patients always get a huge kick out of it when we say we’re going to use leeches on something,” says Shammas. “They think it’s the coolest thing in the world.” Bradley Allf writes for Atlas Obscura on The Leech's Journey.
Sabbath-sanctioned Sips
🙋🏿🎮🕹️
The state of blackness in games [Eurogamer] “Seeing a black person in a game is still a strange experience more often than not. For the longest time, black characters seemed to fall precisely into two categories, scary and...funky: Your average scary black character is at first glance like so many other men in games. He's buff, and he has a gun. What you need to take into account however, is how this stereotype has affected black men in real life: many people still readily draw the conclusion that a black man who looks a certain way is likely to have a history that includes a council house upbringing and a brush or two with the law. [...] The funky black guy either sports an afro, says "yo" a lot, wears sunglasses indoors, or all three. He's also usually loud, and claims to be a "free spirit" or anything else that makes people think of Chris Rock or Dennis Rodman. He's often a quest-giver, or someone who appears in the background for laughs, such as in Persona 4 or Ni no Kuni 2. There's often at least one character of this type in every fighting game, including Tekken and Dead or Alive.” [Previously.] [more inside]
"What's a Smilin' Face When the Whole State's Racist?"
In 1991, rap group Public Enemy released 'By the Time I Get to Arizona,' a song about Arizona's failure to recognize Martin Luther King Day as a holiday. [more inside]
Of Twenty-Two North American Birds
From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, What bird are you most like?
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