firehose

chickwithmonkey:

drst:

msdistress:

teapotsahoy:

pearlo:

teabq:

trixiebobixie:

hamstermastersamster:

egriz:

hamstermastersamster:

emchelle:

So this is the associate editor for the new The Mary Sue. Awesome.

Yep. Totally happy this charmer has a senior position on my favourite girl geek site. Straw feminism, breakfast of champions!

Woah what the hell is this

It’s a disaster :[

Over the weekend and with no notice to The Mary Sue community, the site merged with an ailing general geek blog called Geekosystem under the Abrams Media banner. This has resulted in the following changes:

• The site's been given a very generic-looking overhaul that has too much white space
• All explicit mention of feminism and female-identifying geeks in the site’s About pages and tagline (which was previously A Guide To Girl Geek Culture) have been either removed entirely or replaced with very generic “for geeks” taglines and “we’re inclusive - everyone welcome!”.
• Geekosystem’s writers have joined TMS. They aren’t all women, which isn’t in itself a bad thing, but kinda contrary to TMS’s old mission (“We’re going to talk about geek girls, and we’re going to let geek girls talk”). Despite reassurances that they were feminist allies, associate editor Glen Tickle in particular decided to respond to the community’s valid concerns about the site’s new direction with the above tweets.
• He was also extremely mansplainy in the reddit AMA (best place ever for a feminist community to have an AMA amirite) about the merger, even at one point attempting to derail the concerns about removing female branding from the site by saying “Did you know 55% of the readership for TMS last month was male?”.
• Even if true (source of statistics unconfirmed), this does nothing but cast doubt on why the female branding needs to be removed from the site. It was obviously attracting the right kind of male readership with its unique lady geek focus.
• Both the original TMS crew and the Geekosystem crew have all so far completely failed to address his problematic behaviour. They ignore any attempts by community members to get it addressed.
• The comments on articles since the merger have basically been sexist derailment bingo like you’d get on any other site, including but not limited to “but what about the menssss”, “why is this important when there’s war in the middle east” (sadly deleted, what a gem), “it’s your responsibility to handle online harassment”, and “I’ve never seen any harassment of a female during my 240 hours of playing XYZ”.

In short, the site is fucked as a feminist fun/safe space if the new leadership don’t take some kind of responsibility and get a grip on the situation toot sweet.

This is such a bummer.

Ugh. The AMA alone is enough to make me want to stop following TMS on Tumblr and Twitter. What a shame.

i keep forgetting and going back to the site and being like “why is it suddenly so much worse”

:((((

Ugh, did not know this.

Way to alienate your potential and existing customers/members/fanbase: Taking over and making drastic changes to an existing (business) model which the current members have considered a safe space, and dismissing questions and concern from your members in an off-hand and patronizing way. Bonus points for misogyny, entitlement and general douchebaggery.

The new establishment is busy making changes and destroying all defining characteristics of original site. I’m certain that the current members will stick around for a while just to see if things will improve, but when the PTB have managed to turn The Mary Sue into yet another bland pop-culture/geek site aimed at 20-35 year males, I’m predicting a mass exodus.

I’m stunned anyone was reading TMS at all, given how it was launched by a mansplaining white dude.

the mary sue used to be a good site - like 90+% written by women and critical of dude-centric fandom stuff. they also talked about intersectionality especially disability issues a lot. then everything changed when the fire nation attacked glen tickle showed up and started posting about the fleshlight ipad case (without acknowledging that it was made for people with penises nor that lots of people have issues with the exploitative porn industry) and how he didn’t really care that facebook tried to manipulate the emotions of its users (without acknowledging that the experiment most likely wasn’t approved by an irb before it was implemented). glen tickle might not be the only reason tms has started to alienate readers, but all of the shittiest articles have been written by him.

the-solitary-witch:

nd-ndn:

Captain Native America by Chad BrownEagle.

THIS IS LITERALLY THE BEST THING.

A filing cabinet is following people around the Royal College of Art to remind us our data is everywhere—and it will follow us everywhere.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is Jaap de Maat's final year project, the finale to a two-year-long MA in Information Experience Design. And anyone visiting the RCA this weekend will certainly get a dose of that design experience, as the clunky metal cabinet trundles towards them, stalking their every move.

"We hit some people, but that's just bruises," de Maat tells us. "Because it's funny, people just accept it." There's probably a whole other dissertation in this statement—our acceptance of pain in the face of hilarity. But for now de Maat's focus has been on themes of loss and the void. In the last chapter of his dissertation on these themes, Additive Subtraction, he debates online data storage. For so long, de Maat was fixated on the appearance of the digital world, as a graphic designer. But throughout his career he has grown preoccupied with what we can't see: "the spaces between the letters".