Student organizers who successfully fought for the divestment say Columbia is the first American university to pull its investments from the private prison industry.
Warning, this article contains spoilers for Arkham Knight. So stop reading now if you don’t want to know the plot!
Making a multi-platform triple-A title is hard, it’s complex and involves a lot of people. I’m wondering though why more of those people weren’t women? According to the wiki all of the writers on this game were men. I can’t say I was surprised by this as it goes some way to explaining how women are treated throughout this game.
Yesterday Batman: Arkham Knight was released for the XBox One, PS4 and PC. It garnered a lot of praise before its release but now that it’s out, speedy completers are discussing some major story problems. The unlucky ones don’t even get much story, they get more of a slideshow. PC players are reporting that on some configurations Arkham Knight is barely playable.
I’m not one of the people who completed this game so early; I just don’t have the time for that, so I’m discussing this based on other people’s discoveries. This means that errors are possible of course. Even if you are not a big gamer it’s likely you’ve heard of the Batman game franchise; they have sold by the bucketload. I have the older Bat-games on Steam and suffered through the disaster of ‘Games For Windows Live’ *shudder*. They are technically solid and visually strong but they were not without problems (Ivy has never had clothes and sexist dialogue can be frequent).
Over time the quality of the series has deteriorated, and that leads us to Arkham Knght, as the spine of the official guide misspells it, and who are we to argue with the official guide? Arkham Knght suffers due to its treatment of women; one of the big problems is damseling, as it happens multiple times.
Poison Ivy needs rescuing by Bats, damsel offence one. Catwoman needs rescuing by Bats, damel offence two. This in itself is bad enough, it’s like an 80s action movie. Wait, or is that 90s. Or 2000s. Well, OK, it’s like a lot of really bad action movies where the woman is the prize, the object to be saved. It’s lazy, pathetic and I hoped we’d moved past that. We are slowly *cough*Fury Road*cough*, but Rocksteady’s male writers didn’t get the memo.
The worst treatment is handed out to Oracle and Poison Ivy. Players were wondering why Arkham Knght was rated M for Mongoose Mature and the reason is mostly the sickeningly disturbing scene involving Oracle. The videos are on YouTube, go search for them if you’d like but I won’t link to them here as I’m not kidding when I say they are disturbing.
Firstly, Arkham Knght goes back to the well of disgust that is The Killing Joke and you get to listen to a shot Barbara suffer for about 30 seconds. After that it gets even worse; the player doesn’t know that Bats has been gassed by the Scarecrow, and is forced to watch Oracle get gassed to the point where she puts a pistol to her head and fires. It turns out she’s not dead and the game celebrates this by having her wheelchair pushed off a high building.
Bats saves her, damsel three. Finally we reach Poison Ivy, who throughout the game seems to be wearing a shawl and moss panties. Yes really, that’s it. She gets pulled from Arkham to do Bat’s bidding against her will and her reward is fridging. OK, she saves Gotham, but she dies in the process. Women can die in games or movies, really, it’s all about how.
You need multiple women in either the movie or game to provide balance and representation. Women with story arcs, agency and enough lines that they really matter. In Arkham Knght the women don’t matter. They are plot pieces, eye candy or prizes, usually all three at once. The woman in Arkham Knght have been nerfed, none of them have a good story arc or character building, they are merely puppets.
This is the last Batman game by Rocksteady in this style and it has been damaged by lazy storytelling, having no women writers on the team, and ingrained misogyny. We can have better games than this; ones that work on launch, and have women in real roles. A game without fridging and where women are not prizes for the player to collect. This won’t break gaming; we’ll have better games because they’ll be written better, and isn’t that what we want? Better games?
Marcy (@marcyjcook) is an immigrant trans woman and writer. This includes Transcanuck.com, a website dedicated to informing and helping trans Canadians. She also has a nerd job, too many cats, is a part time volunteer sex educator and has an ongoing sordid love affair with Lego. Those last two are not related… probably.
State workers take down a Confederate national flag on the grounds of the state Capitol on Wednesday in Montgomery, Ala.
Martin Swant/AP
The Confederate battle flag and three other symbols of the Confederacy were taken down Wednesday from the Capitol grounds in Montgomery, Ala., after their removal was ordered by Gov. Robert Bentley amid a growing backlash against the symbols following last week's racially motivated mass shooting at a black church in South Carolina.
Two workers walked out of the Capitol building and took the flag down shortly after 8 a.m. without any fanfare. Bentley told AL.com it was his decision to bring the flag down, calling it "the right thing to do." AL.com adds:
"Bentley said before he made the final decision he checked to see if there were any impediments in the law or state policy that would prevent him from taking down the flag and found none, so he acted."
Dan Carsen of member station WBHM in Birmingham tells our Newscast unit that Bentley said he didn't want the flags to become a distractionas Alabama grapples with issues including a massive budget deficit. Dan adds:
"The four flags removed from the memorial were the first, second and third national confederate flags, and the better-known battle flag. They were put up in the early '90s after then-Gov. Jim Folsom removed the battle flag from the state Capitol."
Reporter MacKenzie Bates of Alabama Public Radio notes Montgomery was named the first capital of the Confederate States of America in 1861 before the capital was moved to Richmond, Va. The first White House of the Confederacy sits across the street from the Capitol.
The move comes a day after the South Carolina House voted to allow debate on removing the battle flag from outside the Statehouse. Any changes to the flag in that state requires a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate.
Efforts to remove symbols of the Confederacy are also underway in Mississippi, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and other parts of the former Confederacy.
The shock might have been quickly supplanted by certain other more shocking shocks, but Sony opened its E3 press conference with the reemergence of a beloved project many assumed dead: The Last Guardian. Directed by Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow Of The Colossus), Guardian’s story about a boy and his giant half-bird half-cat friend was first shown at E3 2009, then again at the 2010 Tokyo Game Show, and then one last time to press in 2011. After that, it disappeared and went from constant hot-button issue to constant butt of (secretly optimistic) jokes. Now, it’s been moved from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4, and Sony is hoping it finally ships in 2016.
One of the questions plaguing Guardian’s development has been the fluctuating involvement of Ueda and his status as a Sony employee. He left the company in December of 2011 but was reportedly signed to see ...
InHear This,A.V. Clubwriters sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re featuring our favorite songs that only appeared on soundtracks.
Josie And The Pussycats, “Spin Around” (2001)
The Josie And The Pussycats movie is bananas. It’s a subversive jab at consumerism disguised as a subversive jab at consumerism. The plot fuses the cartoon’s barebones outline of three brassy girls becoming rock stars to an unhinged plot involving an evil music mogul (Parker Posey) inserting subliminal messages into popular music. It’s beyond frothy, with a hyperactive pacing and script full of lines so clunky it would be easy to mistake for a hack-job mess.
But something unusual happens: The film is so overtly laden with product placement, and so intentionally on-the-nose with every line and scene (all while possessing a supposedly idealistic message about being true to yourself) that it ...
With more than 4.8 million articles, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource, whether you’re throwing a term paper together at the last minute, or snickering at pictures that look dirty. We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 4,888,888-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
What it’s about: The ancient Romans had a slew of gods and goddesses—212 by Wikipedia’s count—and there was a deity on hand for just about every occasion. One of the lesser-known gods was Fascinus, who represented sacred “masculine generative power,” and whose symbol was a phallus. (Latin distinguishes between a phallus—a representation of a penis—and the male organ itself.) Fascinus was worshipped by wearing or carrying a phallic amulet or charm, also called a fascinus. (Thanks to reader Evel Kareebel for this week’s subject suggestion.)
I think — provisionally — that there are three types of news readers. (Am I missing any?)
1. Casual Newspaper
This category includes Flipboard, Zite (sadly defunct), the upcoming Apple News, and others. These tend to have the richest user interfaces of all news readers, with lots of pictures, animations, and interesting layouts.
Typically you pick some categories that interest you and perhaps some sites. You may also add RSS feeds and you might have it pull links from your Twitter and Facebook feeds.
These tend to have significant server backends that not only read various feeds and sites but also assemble (via algorithms and curation) a set of articles personalized for each user.
These are casual because, as with an actual newspaper, there’s no expectation that you’ll read everything. These tend not to have unread counts, for instance.
2. Productivity App
This category includes apps like Reeder, NetNewsWire, Google Reader (now gone), Feedly, Fever, and others. Their user interface often resembles a Usenet reader or email app. These apps often have things like unread counts and power-user features such as extensive keyboard shortcuts.
These tend to be RSS readers specifically, though not necessarily entirely so.
They don’t always do anything about relevance or personalization — personalization is entirely in the hands of the user, who picks which feeds to read. Some do include relevance features, but in general these apps are for people who want the control in their own hands, who don’t trust algorithms or curators, who don’t want to miss something that might be important.
There are two subcategories of productivity apps: browser-based server apps and native apps. Interestingly, the native apps often provide syncing by connecting to a server app (which may be made by a developer who’s not the same as the native-app developer).
3. River of News
These are reverse-chronological streams with optional titles and a short amount of text — often just a summary or excerpt of the linked-to story. (See Dave Winer on What is a River of News aggregator?)
These are also somewhat casual in that there are generally no unread counts and there’s no pressure to read everything. You read by scrolling, and you scroll as far as you want to.
There are two subcategories: RSS (or RSS mostly) and social network feeds. Twitter and Facebook could both be considered news rivers. (The RSS variety came first by many years, of course.)
Rivers sometimes have relevance algorithms behind them — as with Facebook, for instance — and sometimes not. They may be stand-alone, without any form of syncing, or they might have giant server back-ends — or something in between.
In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission on Monday, the San Diego-based Commercial Network Services (CNS) claims that it's being charged unjust rates to deliver its streaming Web cam video to consumers.
'Case in point: Dr. Ellen Stofan serves as the chief scientist of NASA. Deborah Diaz is NASA's chief technology officer for IT. Teresa Vanhooser runs one of NASA’s largest facilities in the U.S. responsible for building rockets.
Dr. Tara Ruttley manages the science programs aboard the International Space Station. For the first time, half of an astronaut class consists of women. And now, through the convening of a new user community called Datanaut Corps, NASA is unlocking opportunities for women entrepreneurs in the tech and maker communities to use the agency’s infinite gigabytes of open data to pioneer space-inspired data science. ... To kick off the founding class, the Open Innovation team gathered top NASA executives to share their stories about the twists and turns in their careers.
"The lesson we wanted to pass on is that the future simply doesn’t exist until we create it," shares Beck. "The future is bright for the founding class of Datanauts, and I’m excited to see where they take us as they create their future in this new world of data and making."
Diaz says it’s the communication skills of women that may be their strongest asset when working with open data. "Women are poised to significantly enhance the data science field with their innate ability to strategically analyze and communicate," says Diaz. "While it is helpful they have a strong technical and leadership background, in my experience it is a woman's ability to collaborate, provide positive energy toward new thought processes, and her desire to share that will significantly enhance this field. The next generation of women must be versed in creating new data visualizations and have an ability to translate or story-tell the meaning of this data."'
The notorious lack of women in leadership roles in STEM seems to run rampant everywhere — everywhere except NASA, an administration that not only puts women at the helm, but continually gives them a platform to drive the larger conversation around the need for more women in the sciences. Their next frontier is big data.
The original foundry was started in 1925 in the North of France, in Fresnoy-le-Grand, and is still making cookware today the same way they’ve been doing it for nearly a hundred years. The factory isn’t open to the public, because it’s an actual working foundry and isn’t set up for visitors.
Originally established as the Buffalo Braves in 1970 then moving west and known as the San Diego Clippers in 1978, the Los Angeles Clippers (where they settled in 1984) are an NBA team playing in the Pacific Division of the Western Conference. They have always been an up-and-down team with decent and terrible seasons going only as far as the second round in the playoffs a handful of times. These past two seasons have been their best, finishing with strong records thanks to the trio of Blake Griffin, Chris Paul, and DeAndre Jordan. Unfortunately, the Clippers are best known recently for its owner's — Don Sterling — racist remarks, which led to Microsoft's ex CEO, Steve Ballmer, to purchasing the team in 2014. Looking to establish a new era for the Clippers, Ballmer has been very public in the introduction of the team's new logo (which suffered plenty of of leaks in the past year) and was officially unveiled last week. No design credit given.
Logo explanation.Logo detail.Logo introduction. Epic in the NBA sort of way.Logo sheet. (Source).
The previous logo was a classic by default, simply because it's been around for so long. It still has that vintage NBA patina that most teams have lost. It's not a great logo by any means but it has its good share of nostalgia. (Interlude: The name of the team refers to a kind of very fast ship known as a Clipper.) The new logo is a mash-up of various concepts as seen in the top image, from the horizon of the ocean to the shape of the basketball court; all of them valid, none of them transcendental. They just kind of threw different styles and executions at it to see what stuck and this was it. The best element of the logo is the "CLA" monogram that has the proportion of a basketball court and makes for a cool bit of typography but everything around it is fairly boring and random. The basketball outline has no graphic relationship with the letters; the red and blue ribbons relate to the thickness of the basketball but their curvature are aleatory; and then the CLIPPERS wordmark is another style altogether with its extra tight letter-spacing and barely there highlight. It's almost surprising that they stopped at four-or-five elements and didn't keep going with a script typeface showing the year established.
New uniform. (With worst drop shadows ever).The uniforms on display. (Source).
The uniforms aren't much better and they are also a little confused in what they want to achieve. The white uni is more classic with the centered name and number while the red uni is justified (I guess) with the monogram and large number on the same line. In theory, the latter should be cool, but it's not really.
Cap.Will it embroider?
The caps are kinda cool.
The #GearUpLa campaign, where the team gave out t-shirts and caps all through Los Angeles, including at LAX and an American Airlines flight.
Funny or Die logo introduction. Mostly funny because of Blake Griffin.
The one aspect where the Clippers get credit is in their effort to get the logo out to the fans and get some positive traction going. Owner Steve Ballmer went on Conan, did a Funny or Die spot, and was in a few locations throughout LA as the team gave out t-shirts to a bunch of people. It doesn't make the logo better — especially not at the gigantic size they printed them on the t-shirts — but it makes it part of the city and that's what makes a sports logo successful: how much it feels as it belongs and embraced by fans.
'2. Consumers are bringing too many items to recycling centers, and with inadequate sorting.
3. Larger bins have encouraged indiscriminate contributions: “Residents have also begun experimenting, perhaps with good intentions, tossing into recycling bins almost anything rubber, metal or plastic: garden hoses, clothes hangers, shopping bags, shoes, Christmas lights.” A lot of people simply put in their garbage.
4. Many small problems are accumulating in the user contributions to recycling, such as consumers no longer breaking down their cardboard boxes as they used to.'
Once a profitable business for cities and private employers alike, recycling in recent years has become a money-sucking enterprise. The District, Baltimore and many counties in between are contributing millions annually to prop up one of the nation’s busiest facilities here in Elkridge, Md. — but it is still losing money. In fact, almost every facility like it in the country is running in the red. And Waste Management and other recyclers say that more than 2,000 municipalities are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around.
But why? According to Davis:
1. “A storm of falling oil prices, a strong dollar and a weakened economy in China have sent prices for American recyclables plummeting worldwide.”
2. Consumers are bringing too many items to recycling centers, and with inadequate sorting.
3. Larger bins have encouraged indiscriminate contributions: “Residents have also begun experimenting, perhaps with good intentions, tossing into recycling bins almost anything rubber, metal or plastic: garden hoses, clothes hangers, shopping bags, shoes, Christmas lights.” A lot of people simply put in their garbage.
4. Many small problems are accumulating in the user contributions to recycling, such as consumers no longer breaking down their cardboard boxes as they used to.
5. The value of recycled newsprint and glass just isn’t that high right now.
Previously I had simply assumed that recycling technologies would scale rather easily and effortlessly, but maybe that isn’t the case:
“If people feel that recycling is important — and I think they do, increasingly — then we are talking about a nationwide crisis,” said David Steiner, chief executive of Waste Management, the nation’s largest recycler…
Jon Ronson’s new book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is another example of this shame spiral at work. Ronson fetishizes the shaming of his subjects, then attempts to redeem or humanize them, without really getting into the question of whether these people actually did something wrong. His book is a bestseller in part because there is nothing more seductive than reliving someone’s shame, then pulling back to shame the shamers, without ever making a judgement about the supposed misdeeds (or, indeed, actual acts of villainy) that set the cycle off in the first place.
No matter how Hunt finally got deposed, we can’t ignore the facts. His comments were unacceptable. A man who says that he can’t work with women because he might fall in love with them should not be allowed to have professional power over women. Or anyone really.
When you listen to the forces of counter-shame in this debate, or any other one, keep in mind what they are really saying. In the case of Tim Hunt, they think the scientist should be put back in his old job because it’s OK for him to declare publicly that he discriminates against an entire class of his colleagues, at a professional event being held in those colleagues’ honor. But none of those colleagues should be allowed to make fun of him on the internet, nor demand that he step down.
That’s why shame spirals are a fine way to start wars. They are about perpetuating conflict instead of getting to the root of our problems.
…When people use “Wish fulfillment” as a criticism of an RPG. Because god knows, when you’re playing a game of “let’s pretend” with your friends, -the last thing you should expect to happen is things you want or enjoy, I guess.
Boing Boing.
Martin Swant/AP
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