I don't understand the rational basis behind people's opposition to Anita Sarkeesian's work, if indeed there is any.

I grant that I haven't plumbed the depths of Reddit, 4chan, and sundry gaming forums looking for reasoned argument, because those places are fucking gross. But what I have found seems to be naught more than a paranoid chorus of "she's out to get our games!"

Some self-identified "gamers" seem to think that Sarkeesian's saying "Stop making games". She's not. She's saying "Games can be better than this. Make better games."

The myriad cries of "censorship!" and "political correctness!" suggest the perceived danger is that games will change as a result of Sarkeesian's critique—that the amount of abuse and misogyny will decrease, and that the number of female characters with agency and development will increase. This makes the rallying cry of "she's out to get our games!" sound more like "she's out to emasculate our games!"

I have news for you, gamer dudes. If gratuitous misogyny and violence is how you define masculinity, then you've got a big fucking problem.

While clearing out my stash of old writing/blogging, I found this lengthy comment that I wrote back in November. It's a reply to the 2.39x10¹⁴th round of clueless dudes opining on why there are so few women in STEM without bothering to have done even the most preliminary of research.

Might as well save this reply for posterity; dollars to doughnuts says I'll have the chance to roll it out again all too soon.

Here's an archived version of Mika Schiller's post, if for some reason you are wont to subject yourself to it.
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A friend on twitter asked us to recommend interesting conferences, so I looked through my notes to see what I had. One event that I'd made a note to check out further was KalamazooX. The focus of the event is on "soft skills", so I was kind of surprised when I couldn't find a Code of Conduct on the site. The "What people are saying" section, on the other hand, made me raise an eyebrow:

"I've discovered @kalamazoox is a hidden gem. Today was like a braver, more profane set of dev-oriented TED talks. Lots of passion and humor."

"In a time where organizers are censoring speakers and their content, @mjeaton and @kalamazoox is a bastion of freedom. He is a luminary."

"@mjeaton @kalamazoox believes in the open exchange of ideas, however uncomfortable, and trusts humans to think, collaborate and create."

To be sure, though, I asked the organizers if they had a Code of Conduct via twitter, and got this reply:

@shadowspar We do not have a published code of conduct. Our entire conference is about communication, respect and passion.

I parse this as

We don't feel as though we need a code of conduct, because we have a "culture of respect".

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When I see a comment I feel is slamming me personally, here's how I deal with it.

I identify the problematic behaviour that's being called out.

I try to honestly and searchingly reflect on how much I manifest that behaviour.

If I do evince that behaviour, then I think about what I can do to improve.

If I can honestly say that I've substantially banished that behaviour from my life, then the comment doesn't apply to me, and I let it pass.

Audrey Tang is far and away the most awesome hacker I've ever had the privilege to have worked with. She's best known for creating Pugs, a perl6 implementation in Haskell. Though it's now semi-retired in favour of the newer implementations that it had a role in inspiring, it represented a huge leap forward and a quantum shift in Perl6 development at a time when enthusiasm around Perl6 was sorely flagging. She was the first CPAN contributor to have uploaded 100 modules. She's the key figure behind Perl 5's internationalization, as well as the i18n of many, many other individual pieces of software. She was part of the committee that designed the Haskell 2010 standard, and has made innumerable other contributions to the open source community.

I never got seriously involved with Pugs, but many of the things Audrey did with it shaped my thinking around open source, community, and how we should collaborate. First was the idea that a project should be optimized for fun (-Ofun¹), not for control, or strict adherence to the founder's vision, or anything else. Second, whereas many open source projects keep a very tight rein on who has commit access and make getting a commit bit an arduous process, Audrey aggressively gave out commit bits to anybody who happened to wander by in the general vicinity of Pugs. Got a great idea? Here's a commit bit, go implement it. Notice something missing in the docs? Here's a commit bit; go add it. Ranting in IRC that something's not working? Here's a commit bit; go fix it. Extending this trust makes people feel welcome and want to contribute. It fosters an air of community instead of making prospective new participants feel as though they are looking at climbing (or worse, building) a pyramid.

Audrey would likely demur at my calling her brilliant, but it's a fitting descriptor for her. She has a unique and penetrating insight into code and an uncanny knack for encouraging the people who write it. I count myself as fortunate to have been able to work with her and to be part of a few of the communities she's had such a profound impact on.

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¹ -Ofun: -O is the compiler option that tells it how you want your code optimized. Audrey's presentation on -Ofun [pdf] talks more about how to maximize the amount of fun in your software project.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging about women in science and technology. You can find more information at the Finding Ada website.

Douglas Crockford whines that people have baggage.

Isn't it kind of hypocritical, or at least wilfully ignorant, to build a social media website -- something of which people are a central component, and getting them in the door key to its success -- and then complain that these damned people don't behave deterministically and don't fit neatly into the system like nice little cubes?

Well, surprise! People are mushy bags of mostly edge cases, and if you're building social software, you're going to bloody well have to deal with it.

Damn users, getting to have opinions about software, instead of just using it or not!

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⁰: Self-loading cargo: airline industry slang for passengers.

Dr AnnMaria DeMars, former judo world champion and hardcore statistics geek, who I've followed on twitter seemingly forever:

• DrAnnMaria: If you're following me hoping to hear about business, statistics or programming you want @annmariastat
• DrAnnMaria: I have two twitter accounts because most programmers don't care about conditioning for martial arts or matwork.
• DrAnnMaria: On the other hand, with all the sexual harassment problems at conferences #OSCON maybe those programmers ARE following me here on purpose

So Julian Assange has turned himself into the police and been arrested.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, a spokesman for WikiLeaks, said Assange's arrest is an attack on media freedom...

Uh, no it's not. It's an attempt to bring an individual to trial for criminal acts he's alleged to have committed -- rape and sexual assault, in this case. The charges predate Wikileaks' release of US diplomatic cables, FWIW.

I don't understand all the hand-wringing over this, like the media is trying to make out whether to drape Assange in a hero's cape or a villain's one. People do good things; those same people do bad things, and they should be praised for the former and held to account for the latter. The cells of Torquemada's prisons were apparently "large, airy, clean and with good windows admitting the sun....far superior to the civil prisons of that day", but you don't see anyone holding him up as a wholesome personage to emulate, and rightly so.

We can give Assange credit for his work with Wikileaks without letting him off the hook for his other behaviour. It's that simple.

Dudes are always wringing their hands and saying stuff like

I AM COMPLETELY BEWILDERED BY THE FACT THAT THERE ARE SO FEW WOMEN IN TECHNOLOGY

or

I CANNOT FATHOM WHY MORE WOMEN DO NOT GET INVOLVED IN STARTUPS
CLEARLY, AN IMPENETRABLE MYSTERY!

and then they post or retweet stuff like this:

<startupnorth> RT @hnshah: 5 ways engineers are like hot chicks http://kiss.ly/cfVvO8

Gee there, dudebros, I wonder whatever could be the problem?