firehose

Nike has suspended its endorsement contract with Adrian Peterson.

The fallout from the Adrian Peterson child abuse case continues to build. Wednesday afternoon Nike announced that it has suspended its endorsement contract with Adrian Peterson.

BREAKING: Nike has suspended its endorsement contract with Adrian Peterson pic.twitter.com/Oq87qNxLYb

— darren rovell (@darrenrovell) September 17, 2014

Nike is the second company to end an endorsement contract with Peterson, joining Castrol Oil, who announced on Tuesday that they have ended their relationship with the Vikings running back.

Peterson was placed on the exempt/commissioner's permission list by the team early Wednesday morning until he sorts out his legal trouble.

The only thing I identify with less than The Cure’s music is people who identify with The Cure’s music.

There’s always been something inherently lame about being a Cure fan and the culture that comes with it—the melodramatic sorrow, the introspective misery, the special pain. But clearly, there’s something to it since everyone has that one friend who is really into The Cure. Maybe the problem is on me—there’s something I’m overlooking or not understanding. So this weekend at Riot Fest in Chicago, I decided to throw myself into the fire that is The Cure. I was going to force myself to watch The Cure’s entire set. All two hours and 15 minutes of it, from 7:45 to 10 PM.

Up against The Cure during this headlining timeslot at other stages were Primus, which was easy to pass up since it’s not 1996 and I’m not Trey Parker or Matt Stone, and Bring Me The Horizon, which was also easy to pass up since I am not an idiot tween. The only difficult pill to swallow was that right smack in the middle of The Cure’s set was Weezer at 8:40 PM. Normally, I wouldn’t care about seeing them play their Raditude material, or whatever they’ve been up to over the last 15 years, but on this particular evening, Weezer was scheduled to play The Blue Album in full. That’s a tough one to skip. Say what you will about the path Weezer has taken over the last few years, but seeing their classic debut performed live is a tough option to pass up. But I told myself I would. I had to. I was intent on understanding The Cure.

Just before 7:45, I walk over to The Cure’s stage and squeeze into a section on the side that had previously been a prime viewing spot for the weekend, but was now completely overcrowded to a borderline dangerous degree. Over the course of the weekend, I’d seen dozens of bands play at Riot Fest—Wu-Tang Clan, Die Antwoord, the Flaming Lips—but The Cure is, by far, the most crowded I’ve seen a stage. Their audience size, and their set time, dwarfed all other performers (typical headliners played for about 60 to 75 minutes).

I’m able to jam myself between a row of stoked Cure fans and a fence. Please God, don’t let me die watching The Cure, I say to myself. I start to think about the possibility of meeting my demise right there in Humboldt Park. I can only hope that my family will lie at my funeral, telling my friends and loved ones that I died doing something decidedly more badass than watching The Cure, like choking on a rice cake in my underwear, for example.

It’s a quarter to eight and The Cure is about to start. Here I go. The next 135 consecutive minutes of my life will be devoted exclusively to The Cure. May God have mercy on my soul.

Let the good times roll.

After waiting for about three minutes for The Cure to start, I realize something: they’ve already started. The band has been playing for three whole minutes and I couldn’t tell because they just sort of noodled their way into their first song—somewhere in the midst of a giant cloud of smoke and bright lights, the atmospheric sounds they were making were music. I genuinely thought they were soundchecking.

The Cure then begins their second song and the band has made a HUGE mistake. They’ve started the first song over again by accident. That’s what I think anyway, since it sounds exactly like the first one. But apparently, according to the applause of the massive crowd, I am mistaken. It is a new, completely different song.

Speaking of the crowd, they are reacting with the excitement of people who’ve been sitting in the middle of a gas leak all day, just sort of slumped there like they've just been dumped. But despite their misleading morose and bored demeanor, these people, I learn, LOVE The Cure. The guy in front of me sounds like he's watching Jesus perform a miracle. “Wow. How do you get a voice like that? How does that happen?” he asks about Robert Smith to no one in particular. Yeah, I think, how does someone manage to sound like they’re on the verge of crying into a pillow all the time?

All of Smith’s lyrics sound the same to me. He sounds like a child who ran into his parents’ bedroom to tell on his brother for pushing him. Through some miracle, I am able to make out the lyric “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” and realize what amazing alternatives both sleep and death sound like.

I start thinking about movies I like that are shorter than two hours and 15 minutes and start playing one in my head. Today's selection is A League of Their Own. Ha, "there's no crying in baseball." Classic Hanks.

Just look at that view!

Three songs in and I’m finally able to get a glimpse of Robert Smith although it may be Liza Minnelli. I google “is liz minnelli still alive?” She is. So it’s a possibility but probably not likely. Smith looks like he stumbled out of a closet and on to the stage. I’m beginning to understand why the band did not allow photographers during their set and why they’re cranking the backing lights and fog machines up to full blast. Between that, the million people, and the giant scaffolding obstructing my view, I’m just getting occasional random flashes of the stage. The Cure’s performance has all the joys of watching the scrambled Playboy channel but without the possibility of seeing something good.

The Cure did not allow photographers so here is a drawing I did from memory in my hotel room.

8:12. Almost a half-hour in and I finally recognize a song. It’s “In Between Days.” Only knowing three other Cure songs—“Boys Don’t Cry,” “Close to Me,” and “Friday I’m In Love”—at this rate, I should hear them all some time before 2015’s Riot Fest.

After another 10 minutes of checking my phone for the time, I see this notification from the Riot Fest app:

While the siren call of The Blue Album is tempting, it’s also inconvenient. To get to Weezer's stage, I’d have to hike it over there through thousands of Weezer and Cure fans just to find a halfway decent spot to watch. Just look at this map:

At this point in the story, I would like to tell you that I ignore the notification, stand there and watch The Cure for another hour-plus, and it stirs some groundbreaking epiphany inside me where I walk away with a newfound appreciation of The Cure. I start leading a new life where I dress all in black and do my hair like a Tim Burton character. I wish I could tell you that, but I can’t. I bail. Opting to see Weezer instead of The Cure fills me with the same sense of self-disappointment as when I go to a new restaurant and instead of trying something exotic, I just order a burger to avoid potential disappointment. 

I start trudging through the horde of sad bastards to post up somewhere for Weezer. To give you an idea of how difficult this is, please look at this shot of the crowd, as taken by my friend Mark and his drone camera.

Photo by Mark Beemer of Shirts for a Cure

I get a good spot right behind a tree approximately 300 miles from the stage and Weezer is about to start. Man oh man. I am excited about music again. Fuck The Cure and their jangly music for dorks, I think, I made the right choice.

The crowd goes nuts as Weezer comes on stage. Here it comes, that guitar intro to “My Name Is Jonas” …bew niw niw niw bew niw niw niw bew niw niw neeeeeew… here it comes, boys, bring it on…

No. Instead, they play “Back to the Shack,” a song off their forthcoming album. Here everyone thought they were getting The Blue Album but instead got blue balls.

But OK, they’ve got a new album to promote. I get it. Now the song is over. Certainly here comes the “My Name Is Jonas” intro… bew niw niw niw bew niw niw niw bew niw niw neeeeeew. Here we go!

No. Instead, they play a song I don’t recognize. Here everyone thought they were getting The Blue Album, not the album that blew.

Third time’s a charm. Here comes the damn “My Name Is Whoever the Fuck” intro. COME. ON.

No. Another song I’ve never heard. At this point, my vision of the band is obscured, not only by a tree and the sheer distance from the stage, but also by the sight of people leaving en masse.

Look how happy they look!

Weezer then plays “Hash Pipe” followed by “Island in the Sun” at which point I hear the guy next to me ask his friend, “Why are they playing Sugar Ray songs?” I don’t know, dude. I don’t know why they’re playing Sugar Ray songs.

At 9:10, 30 minutes in to Weezer’s set, Rivers Cuomo finally addresses the blue elephant in the room: “Before we go back to ’94, we’d be remiss if we didn’t make a brief stop in ’96” before launching into “El Scorcho.” Still not The Blue Album, but I’ll take any excuse to not hear a song off that album with the guy from Lost on the cover.

Here is my friend Brendan consoling me about the fact that I may never hear "My Name Is Jonas."

After “El Scorcho,” they take a break and leave the stage. I’m assuming. I can’t even see the stage, let alone what’s happening on it but there’s an incredibly awkward and long silence going on. All I know is, it’s 9:15 and they have 40 minutes left to play a 41-minute album.

Eventually, Weezer comes back out and finally, FINALLY, kick off the intro to “My Name Is Jonas” and it’s everything I hoped it’d be—a sonically inferior version of a song I like, as listened to while strangers are brushing past me non-stop!

This is what Weezer looks like, apparently. Couldn't tell ya.

Somewhere around “The Sweater Song,” my social anxiety takes over and I realize that this is not the most enjoyable way to experience an album I hold dear to my heart. It’s not Weezer’s fault. I’m sure if there weren't 50 acres of people between me and them, I'd be stoked. I bail on Weezer and walk away dejected.

I pass by The Cure’s stage and they are still performing. Whatever decades-old melancholy song they’re playing perfectly soundtracks the bummer mood I’m in as I leave the festival and head back to my hotel. I put all of my hopes into Weezer and I was let down. I had my heart broken. I had something I loved taken away from me and replaced with disappointment and OH MY GOD. Hold on. Wait a minute. I think… I think I finally understand The Cure.

Dan Ozzi got so bored he shivered like a child. Follow him on Twitter - @danozzi

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Beware the end of the escalator, our mothers always said—if you don’t hop off quickly, your shoe will get caught.

Most of us figured this was some kind of urban (or suburban shopping mall) myth. If you’re wearing wingtip shoes or even sneakers, it would be hard for the escalator teeth to grab those hard materials. And who knew anyone to whom that had actually happened?

Turns out, it’s happened to plenty of folks, many of them children and many of them wearing the ubiquitous rubber clog known as Crocs.

Crocs was started in 2002, in Boulder, Colorado, to sell foam rubber boat shoes (they’re named after crocodiles, comfortable on land and in water). Nine years later, the brand reached $1 billion in sales. They have more than 200 styles, sold in 90 countries.

Parents love Crocs for the ease with which they come on and off, their durability and easiness to clean and of course the rainbow of colors in which they are available. Yet some have found out the hard way that in addition to being affordable and adorable, they can potentially be dangerous.

The lawsuits claiming as much are many. In 2012 a couple from Westminster, California, sued the company for $2 million when their four-year-old daughter’s pink Croc was caught in the side of the escalator; she lost her little toe. A Pennsylvania woman sued in 2008 for $7.5 million. Crocs has settled many of them, including one for a boy injured in the Atlanta airport in 2008; he will receive payments (the amount was not disclosed) once he turns 18. Andrew Laskin, an attorney with Robinson and Yablon, P.C., a Manhattan law firm, says his firm has handled 20 such cases; all but one have been settled.

Many of the suits go beyond personal injury suits, claiming negligence on the part of the company. Crocs, they assert, knew that the rubber clogs were dangerous in escalators and did nothing. One court case found that Crocs had contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission, acknowledging that the company had fielded 186 complaints about escalator injuries regarding children and done nothing.

These parents do have at least some evidence on their sides. A 2010 study in The Journal of Pediatric Orthopedics looked at 17 children with escalator-related foot industries in one hospital over two years; 13 of those were wearing rubber clogs. One of those had “an unsalvageable traumatic amputation of the great toe at the level of the interphalangeal joint,” and others had fractures, lacerations and cut tendons. The study’s conclusion: “Escalator-related foot injuries involving rubber clogs can result in severe crushing of the foot and even traumatic amputation.”

Crocs, of course, disagrees. “There is no evidence Crocs’ shoes are more likely to become entrapped in escalators than other soft-soled shoes,” a spokesman for the company told Quartz in an email. “Even so, Crocs launched an escalator safety awareness initiative, which included the implementation of educational hang tags on Crocs’ products worldwide. We did this because Crocs cares about the safety, comfort, and satisfaction of consumers and the popularity of our shoes give us an opportunity to educate millions of our customers on the importance of escalator safety. The most important safety factors for escalators and moving walkways are rider behavior and proper maintenance of escalators.” In other words: they may be more dangerous than wingtips and sneakers, but they are no more dangerous than any other soft-soled shoe, of which there are many.

Earlier this year, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit found Crocs wasn’t liable (pdf) in another personal injury case, ruling that “we cannot tell whether CROCS present a heightened risk of escalator entrapment. What we can tell, however, is that the plaintiff has failed to adduce significantly probative evidence to that effect.”

Meanwhile, the company has changed its image to stay relevant. Perhaps because of the growth in the aging boomer population, Crocs, like comfort brands Birkenstock and Dansko, has tried to keep the comfort but add some style. In addition to the so commonly seen clogs (wide enough for an ogre) with large ventilation holes, there are wedge sandals, loafers, boots and Mary Janes.

Lawsuits, even those that are won, aren’t definitive proof of poor design and certainly not of negligence—even those who are the most cynical about capitalism don’t believe that footwear company would knowingly design dangerous shoes. Perhaps one reason for the rash of lawsuits is the popularity of the shoes: Crocs has sold more than 200 million pairs of them over the last decade. It doesn’t mean they’re actually defective. It mostly means it’s harder to sue the company of the flip-flops you got at the dollar store, with no manufacturers name to be found. And flip-flops are just as dangerous. The CPSC noted 77 such injuries over two years, noting that “Soft-sided shoes are the most likely to get stuck and pose the possibility of injury to the rider.” That’s any soft-soled shoe, not just the one you know the name of.

Parents, how about this: if you’re bringing your kid on an escalator in anything other than an army boot, pay careful attention to them…just like your mother told you.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

Considering Portland as a potential new home? Consider the effect of over hunting an animal : extinction. Please don't move here, Portland is full. Our city is quickly losing it's appeal thanks to the band wagon of consumers who saw the t.v. show (commercial) and decided to buy. The young, part-time workers who enjoy the relaxed and somewhat affordable lifestyle will be run out because the cost of living will soon displace all but the rich, creating a completely different, unpleasant climate. Yes, I am bitter. Because it is sad. Do something weird in your own town.

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Courtney shared this story from Geek Feminism Blog.

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In 2012, Geek Feminism founder Alex Skud Bayley founded Growstuff, a website and multi-purpose database for food-growers to track what they have planted and harvested and connect with other growers in their local area. Growstuff is now two years old and has launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund API development, which will help outside developers of tools like a harvesting calculator to show you how much money you save by growing food or emailed planting tips and reminders based on your location and climate.

Skud uses open source software and related technologies to effect social and environmental change. She lives in Ballarat, Victoria, where she works on a variety of open tech projects for social justice and sustainability. Skud and I have talked in the past about how Growstuff is among the projects that Geek Feminism contributors have built on principles we brought to and out of Geek Feminism, and I’m kicking off the second week of Growstuff’s fundraiser by asking her more about this.

Q. Which communities is Growstuff modelled on, and what principles has it inherited from them? In particular, how have Geek Feminism and other social justice communities and your work within them influenced Growstuff?

Skud: When I started Growstuff, I’d been running Geek Feminism for about 3–4 years, and involved in a few other “women in open source” groups before that. This had led me to watch really closely as different open source communities worked on how to be welcoming and supportive, and to attract participants from different backgrounds and demographics. One thing I saw was that projects founded by women attracted women — no big surprise there I suppose! And, unsurprisingly, Growstuff has attracted a lot of women as developers: roughly half of the 40ish people who’ve made code contributions have been women, and we have lots who’ve volunteered for things like testing and data wrangling as well.

Initially we modeled Growstuff quite heavily on Dreamwidth, which has a majority of women. (Dreamwidth was one of the projects I focused on in my 2009 OSCON keynote, Standing Out in the Crowd.) I also took inspiration from the Agile software development movement.

Extreme Programming, which is the variant of Agile I grew up on, had a lot to say about having real conversations with people involved in the project, working at a sustainable pace, and using introspection to think about the process. I think some of the more recent versions of agile (like Scrum) have made it more business-friendly and, dare I say, macho. But to me, developing software the agile way is about working on the things that are most important, and about honouring each participant’s expertise and their time and energy they bring to the project. So Growstuff has a policy of working closely with our members, getting them involved in the project, and in some ways blurring the lines between tech/non-tech roles. Our choice not to use the term “users” is part of this; we use “members” instead because we feel like “users” distances the people who use Growstuff from the people building the code, and treats them more as consumers rather than collaborators.

Agile development methodologies are probably not what you were thinking about when you asked about social justice movements, but to me, my feminism and the way I work on projects are closely connected. I certainly find agile development (which I do with clients as well as on Growstuff) to be a more egalitarian way of working together than traditional/non-agile approaches.

Q. Your crowdfunding campaign will pay a developer, Frances Hocutt, to work on Growstuff’s API? Why is Growstuff moving towards a paid development model, at least in this case?

So far, Growstuff’s been built by volunteers. My work on other projects (mostly doing tech contracting for sustainability non-profits) has funded my work on Growstuff, and other volunteers have generally been funded by their own day jobs. Unfortunately, requiring people to volunteer their time not only means you’re relying on their rather variable availability, but those who are likely to have the most availability are generally relatively privileged. That means that the contributor pool will be demographically tilted towards those who happen to be the most affluent and time-rich. In the feminist tech community, we’ve been talking for a while now about labor issues in open source: Ashe Dryden’s The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community is important reading on the subject.

As a matter of principle, I want to be able to pay people to work on Growstuff. Maybe not all people all the time — it’s still an open source project, and our volunteer community is important to us — but I want our contributors to know that they’re not expected to go to extraordinary lengths without remuneration. That includes myself! I guess like many women I find it hard to ask for money for my own work, especially work for a “social good” that is so often undervalued and unpaid. It’s easier for me to ask for money on other people’s behalf.

Frances is exactly the sort of developer I want to work with on Growstuff. She’s come from a career in organic chemistry and switched to open tech. I got to know her through her co-founding Seattle Attic (a feminist hackerspace in Seattle, Washington), and through her Outreach Program for Women internship at the Wikimedia Foundation. By the time I met her I already knew she was a developer with a strong interest in community and collaborative projects, with the right combination of high level thinking, code, documentation and outreach. Her work developing “gold standards” for Wikimedia’s APIs (including the Wikidata API) seemed like a perfect lead-in to working on improving Growstuff’s APIs and helping people build things with them. When I heard she was looking for a short-term contract, I jumped at the chance to see if we could raise the money to pay her to work on Growstuff for a bit.

What principles and techniques could other software projects adopt from Growstuff? And how does Growstuff fit in — or rather, not fit in — to the current venture funded hypergrowth model of software companies?

We’re still trying to figure that out. Growstuff is structured as a sort of hybrid business/social enterprise: the website’s direct expenses are funded by memberships, while my work as Growstuff’s lead developer and organiser is funded indirectly by consulting on other projects. We don’t have any outside investment though we have received a couple of small grants and some support from a government startup program. We’re not seeking traditional VC investment, which makes us rather at odds with most of the “startup scene”, but I would much rather that Growstuff as a whole were funded by the community it serves, than by an external party or parties (investors, advertisers, etc) whose goals and values might be at odds with ours.

The bigger-picture answer, I guess, is that 21st century western-style capitalism increases inequality. The rich get phenomenally richer, and the rest of us get screwed over. If someone offered me the chance to get super rich off Growstuff at the expense of our members and community, I sincerely hope that I’d be able to resist that temptation. Though to be honest, I think Growstuff’s insistence on copyleft licensing and other choices we made early on (such as not to serve ads) mean that nobody’s likely to make that offer anyway. I’ve intentionally set Growstuff up to be more cooperative than capitalist. The trick is to figure out how to fairly support our workers under that model.

I think it depends a lot on our members: people are used to getting online services “for free” in return for their personal information and marketing data, which is used to make a handful of people very rich indeed. Are they going to be willing to resist that easy, attractive evil and become more equal partners in supporting and developing an online service for their/our mutual good? That’s what we still have to find out.

How is food gardening a part of your feminism? (Or feminism part of your food gardening?)

I think the connection, for me, is through the idea of DIY — doing it yourself. My feminism is closely tied to my dubiousness about our current capitalist system. As I said, a system that concentrates wealth in a small segment of the population increases inequality. As businesses get bigger, our choices are fewer. I think growing your own food, even in a small way, is an important area of resistance: every pot of herbs on your windowsill means one less thing you buy from a giant supermarket chain. Incidentally, I feel the same way about building our own software and online communities! And I think that those who are least well served by the mainstream capitalist system — women, for instance, who are constantly bombarded by really screwed up messages about what we eat and how we feed our families, trying to sell us highly processed foods that ultimately benefit the companies that design and package them far more than they benefit us — have the most to gain from this.

How can Geek Feminism readers contribute to or support Growstuff?

Well, of course we have the crowdfunding campaign going on at present, to support Frances and myself as we work on Growstuff’s open API.

We’re always looking for people to join our community as contributors: testers, data mavens, coders, designers, writers, and more. Even just diving in to our discussions and weighing in on some of the ideas there helps us a lot — we’re always keen to hear from food-growers (including aspiring/potential ones) about what they’re looking for in Growstuff and how we can improve, or from people who’d like to use our data, to discuss what they have in mind and how we can support them.

Apart from that, just help us spread the word :)

More about Growstuff

You can learn more about Growstuff and its philosophy in the pitch video for the crowdfunding campaign (audio transcript follows):

Hi, I’m Alex Bayley. I write software and I grow vegetables in my backyard. I founded Growstuff in 2012.

More and more people are taking up veggie gardening all over the developed world, especially in cities. That means millions of new gardeners trying to eat and live more sustainably. People are growing food in their backyards, on balconies and in community gardens.

I started to grow my own food because I want to know where it comes from and that it hasn’t been grown with environmentally damaging fertilisers and pesticides. Like a lot of people these days, I worry about food that’s not local. The costs of transportation and the waste from overpackaged food are huge. I think it’s important that we have alternatives to the big supermarkets. And of course homegrown food just tastes so much better and it’s so much better for you.

Like most gardeners, I’m always searching online for information. Most of the growing advice I find isn’t suitable for my climate. I need local information, not something from halfway around the world.

Growstuff started when I met a guy called Federico from Mexico. He’s also a software developer and a permaculturist and he has trouble finding growing information for his local area. So he asked me if I knew of any open databases that had planting information about where to plant any kind of crop anywhere in the world.

We looked around and we couldn’t find anything. Some governments release open data, but it’s usually aimed at big farms. The stuff aimed at home gardeners was usually either just for one region or else the websites had really restrictive rules about what you could use the data for.

I’m a software developer so when I look at data I want to build things. If that data’s locked up where no one can use it that stifles innovation. Growstuff crowdsources information from veggie gardeners around the world. We gather data on what they plant, when and where they plant it, and how to grow it. We use this information to provide local planting advice back to our members and anyone who visits our site.

Growstuff is 100% open source and our data is also open. You can download it straight from our website and use it for any purpose, even commercially. But we want more people to use our data. We’re raising funds to improve our API which lets third party developers use Growstuff to build apps, mashups, tools, or to do research.

With your help, we’ll be creating a new version of our API with more features, building demos, and running workshops for developers. I’ve been working with open data since about 2007 and I think making food growing information freely available is one of the most important things we can do.

Whether you’re a gardener or a software developer or you just care about sustainable food please support Growstuff’s crowdfunding campaign.

Disclosures: in addition to working with Skud on the Geek Feminism project, I’ve worked with her when she was an advisor to the Ada Initiative, an AdaCamp staffer, and in several other capacities over many years.

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Skateboarding through 5000 balloons looks like a whole lot of fun | Via

WASHINGTON—Ensuring that business owners’ basic freedoms remain adequately protected, a new health insurance law passed Wednesday allows employers to refuse to pay for contraceptives if they are morally opposed to women. The Corporate Conscien...

breelifts:

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Protesters from across St Louis turned up and turned out for the first St Louis County Council Meeting since Mike Brown’s Death. (Part I)

The St Louis County Council wasn’t as bad as Ferguson’s Council, but still very few answers and virtually no accountability from the folks who unleashed unholy hell on the residents of Ferguson, following Brown’s murder. #staywoke #farfromover

KEEP POSTING I NEED TO KNOW! DONT STOP POSTING ABOUT THIS. IT IS NOT OVER!

Three little mini-piglets learn how to sit upon command with the encouragement of their human at Petpiggies and a bunch of yummy apple slices.

Mini pigs are highly intelligent and can learn many commands faster than dogs. The pet pigs in the video were having their very first lesson, learning to sit down if they want to have some treats.

This piglet triplet has been very busy as of late. In addition to learning how to sit, they have been taking showers, getting belly rubs and falling over with delight from a feather duster.

image via Petpiggies

You know what the Internet doesn’t have enough of? People trying to tell feminists that they’re overreacting. Good thing the American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers was on hand to delve into the world of hardcore gaming, and come up with the conclusion that its critics must just be “hipsters with degrees in cultural studies.” Which she, of course, says with a mocking tone, because what do people with degrees in cultural studies know about culture?

You can probably guess how you’ll feel about the video by the 24 second mark, when Sommers asks, “Has the gentle sex taken over video games?” The gentle sex? The gentle sex? We’ll show you gentle sex!

Sommers goes on to criticize a recent study that showed that half of all gamers were women, and adult women outnumbered teenage boys in gaming. She gets bogged down in trying to categorize gamers by what kind of games they play, which is frankly an argument I’m tired of hearing, despite the fact that I personally fall into the “hardcore” category that usually likes to to start the argument in the first place. Playing a certain kind of game doesn’t make you more of a “gamer” than someone else, and the idea that it does has its own gatekeeping problems.

But the real problem with Sommers’ argument is that she starts going on about data that shows women spend less time playing games and play less of these “hardcore games” than men.

Gee. I wonder

why

that

is.

Seriously, that’s the entire problem: women like games and want to be more involved in both playing and making them, but the industry keeps ignoring them in favor of aiming at the same demographic. Men may not feel like every single game is aimed at them, either (right? There must be at least a game that’s not blatantly aimed at dudes), but they never have to deal with feeling objectified and alienated by how their gender is portrayed.

It’s perfectly fine to have games that are aimed at a male audience. What critics want is an increase in games aimed at women and a little less blatant objectification in the ones aimed at men. Just because violent video games don’t make normal people into violent killers doesn’t mean that sexist depictions in video games don’t perpetuate ingrained societal sexism. Everyone knows shooting people is wrong and something not to be imitated in real life, but the same can’t be said of sexism.

When people criticize someone like Anita Sarkeesian, they’re overlooking the fact that, yes, some of the things she criticizes may be innocuous in themselves and would be fine if the bulk of games had a better gender balance; but that’s not the world we live in. Nitpicking individual cases doesn’t mean that feminist critics are wrong for asking for better representation of women from gaming as a whole. There is no reason to ask anyone to “stand down” as Sommers does at the end of the video. If you don’t like what critics have to say, just don’t listen to them.

This is no different from people who complain about the “PC police.” These people act like critics are wielding some kind of power and forcing their will on others by calling them “police,” when the reality is that we’re all free to ignore criticism and do as we please. If there’s really nothing wrong with games, then the people who feel that way should just go about their business and ignore their critics, and nothing will ever come of it. If people stop buying games over misogyny to the point where it’s destroying those games, then a much larger portion of society than “hipsters with degrees in cultural studies” has decided there’s a problem.

No one is trying to throw out anyone’s copy of Grand Theft Auto over sexism. If men want to keep making, buying, and playing games that objectify women, no one has the power to stop them. No one is trying to destroy men or gaming, and that line of thinking is the real “false victimhood.” Games for men aren’t going anywhere, and if “male gamer culture” does eventually disappear, it’ll be because it’s turned into just “gamer culture” and includes men and women equally, which only someone sexist could see as a bad thing.

If you’ve got an issue with this video that I didn’t address, because there’s no way anyone could possibly find time to cover it all, feel free to discuss it in the comments below.

(via Polygon)

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Richard III was the last king of England to die in battle. But as a new forensic analysis of his remains shows, he didn't just die in battle — he had the living tar beat out of him. Here's how this king met his maker on that fateful day in 1485.

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Sometimes, gold can stay: according to the the BBC, a beloved 10-year-old pet goldfish named George was recently saved from euthanasia after undergoing successful “high risk” brain surgery to remove a massive brain tumor. Says George, “Who? You did what? What’s this wall doing here? Where am I? Huh? What’s this wall doing here?”

In a radio interview describing the delicate procedure, veterinarian Dr. Tristan Rich of Australia’s Lort Smith Animal Hospital says his ten-year-old patient is now “up and about and swimming around” after “having a [...]  quite large tumour on the top of his head that was growing slowly, and [...] beginning to affect his quality of life.” According to Dr. Rich, the durable little fish could now easily live to see thirty.

The Lort Smith Animal Hospital took to Facebook to outline George’s operation:

Dr Tristan Rich, head of Lort Smith’s exotic and wildlife vet team, set up three buckets – one with a knock out dose of anaesthetic, one with a maintenance level of anaesthetic, and one with clean water as the recovery unit.

Once George was asleep, Dr Tristan ran a tube from the maintenance bucket which was being oxygenated, into George’s mouth, so that the water with the maintenance dose of anaesthetic washed over his gills.

Dr Tristan worked quickly to remove the large tumour, although the size of it meant that he had to use a gelatine sponge to control the bleeding during surgery. The size of the wound meant it was difficult to seal, so Dr Tristan put in four sutures then sealed the rest of the wound with tissue glue.

Once that had set, George was placed in the recovery unit and given oxygen. He was given injections with long acting pain relief and antibiotics. Soon afterwards he took a couple of breaths on his own and started swimming around.

The entire 45-minutes procedure (described by Dr. Rich as “fiddly!’) cost George’s person just $200–a fair price considering she now has two more decades to bask in her pet’s blank stares and total ambivalence. On that note, if you’re one of the inevitable algae-eaters who think George didn’t deserve a life-saving operation just because he’s not as cuddly as the typical candidate for veterinary surgery, then get flushed! Fish are friends, not fodder for your self-righteous pragmatism!

Someday goldfish may be operating on us (once we use our surgical skills to imbue them with super-intelligence, that is). I shall hope they show the same extreme professionalism as Dr. Rich, patron saint of easily-disposable pets everywhere.

(via io9)

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WASHINGTON—In an effort to provide the general public with critical safety information in a timely manner, sources confirmed Wednesday that an increasing number of U.S.

Next month, Sotheby's London will offer for sale T.E. Lawrence's hand-drawn, annotated map of northern Arabia, detailing the route he followed in the days preceding the capture of the Red Sea port of Aqaba in 1917—a victory that would prove decisive in the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

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MINNEAPOLIS—Following mounting allegations of child abuse against the six-time Pro Bowl running back, sources confirmed Wednesday that Minnesota Vikings star Adrian Peterson has been officially deactivated by his family.

Honorary space cowboy Dirk Loechel has just completed a mind-blowingly comprehensive 4,268 x 5,690-pixel chart that demonstrates the comparative size of virtually every beloved ship in all of sci-fi. The mad genius explains,

For real this time: This is the final major content update, though if there are issues I’ll still fix them. I also haven’t forgotten I wanted to vectorize the writing. It’s still on the radar. But content-wise, I think that is about all I can put in.

Also, I added the ISS. For scale. It’s on top, with a yellow frame so it’s relatively easy to find.

Part of what I love so much about this chart is it appears to be a collaboratively nerdy effort; if you can think of any vessel Loechel might have forgotten, you can head over to DeviantArt to suggest some updates. Careful, though: studies show that the more fascinating the infographic, the more likely you are to be caught mouth-open at your desk, cursor hovering eternally in the Stargate quadrant.

(via Sploid)

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Florida State has suspended starting quarterback Jameis Winston for the first half of Saturday's game against No. 22 Clemson a day after Winston shouted a sexually explicit phrase in the middle of the student union on Tuesday.

The New York based Satanic Temple announced in a press release Monday that they plan to distribute “The Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities” to Florida students. The Satanic Temple pamphlet is designed to be appealing to kids, featuring a colorful, cartoonish cover showing children wearing satanic symbols on jewelry and clothing. It contains coloring pages, jumble words, word searches, mazes, and other children’s activities with Satanist themes, such as a page that says, “Damian is showing his class the way to make an inverted pentagram. Connect the dots to make one yourself.”