Female employees working at Apple will soon be offered a fertility benefit of up to $20,000 to put toward freezing their eggs, which advocates say gives women the freedom to seek career advancement without worrying about future family plans.
via Apple to pay female employees up to $20,000 for new egg freezing fertility benefit.
I almost wish I were tech blogging right now, just so I could title my coverage of this story ab ovo usque ad mala.
Nescafe and Hello Kitty next to my computer.
I wrote a new script a few weeks ago, to teach our students about Ada Lovelace Day. Here’s what I decided not to include.
Today is Ada Lovelace day, which is not her birthday or any date significant to her life. An unassuming date in the middle of October was chosen because it was a considerate date without major conflicts, because when we are honoring women who’ve been ignored in tech for decades, let’s be considerate and thoughtful and choose a date that’s convenient for others, ok? Ugh. Maybe I should include that, it’s a pretty good metaphor for women’s experiences in STEM fields!
Ada Lovelace is the daughter of Lord Byron, the writer who was known for — never mind, kids, you’re too young. Let’s just call him a famous writer!
The Analytical Engine, designed by Charles Babbage, was the forerunner to the Difference Engine, and WHAT? What is this? Turns out Charles Babbage never actually built the Difference Engine, although he managed to receive over 17,000 pounds from the British government to do so. Huh. Kinda the patron saint of those project-delay emails from funded Kickstarters, now that I think about it. Also, pretty cool metaphor for certain parts of startup culture.
This is getting really long. Our students are aspiring developers, so I’ll focus on the invention of the computer and the creation of computer programming. That means deleting the last three paragraphs on how Ada Lovelace was one of the earliest tech bloggers, by looking at emerging technology, envisioning all the potential uses, and then writing her thoughts and publishing to share with her mathematician friends.
My scripts are always read and performed by a man, which is usually more than with me (I hate listening to my recorded voice and I have extremely conflicted feelings on becoming more visible) but it feels weird to be invisible on this particular topic.
Ada Lovelace died at 36. She invented programming in that time, and I’m basically the same age, and I’ve… um… I wrote some things that weren’t completely dreadful. Sometimes.
My actual post for our students went on a company blog, and the related Ada Lovelace Day video has been very well-received by our audience of 8-year-olds.
Basically every day, I wear jeans with a plaid flannel shirt buttoned over a t-shirt from a game or app promo. I mean, I usually wears earrings and eye makeup and nail polish, too, but it’s the same outfit.
That’s what I wear to work every day, which is fine because this is also what all the men in my studio wear to work every day. Well, maybe not the cosmetics.
When I lost weight a few years ago, I looked forward to choosing and wearing cute things every day, instead of selecting from my least-unflattering outfits. (Whenever I write about this, someone always comments to tell me that people can be healthy and happy at any size, and I definitely don’t mean to imply that one must be a certain size in order to wear nice things. But for me, being terribly depressed for about a year directly correlated to being overweight for about a year. Not my favorite year, all things considered.) Now, I have an embarrassing amount of clothes that I never seem to wear, and I’ve decided to branch out from jeans-and-flannel every day. There are so many other things to wear! So many clothes to choose from!
So… should I wear my grey miniskirt and black sweater, or my black miniskirt and grey sweater tomorrow?
This entire post from Kathy Sierra is an honest and thoughtful look at the internet attacks on women in tech and games. The whole thing is worth reading, discussing the backlash women face when we do things like make videogames, have opinions on games, or basically exist in the public space.
There is only one reliably useful weapon for the trolls to stop the danger you pose and/or to get max lulz: discredit you. The disinformation follows a pattern so predictable today it’s almost dull: first, you obviously “f*cked” your way into whatever role enabled your undeserved visibility. I mean..duh. A woman. In tech. Not that there aren’t a few deserving women and why can’t you be more like THEM but no, you are NOT one of them.
You are, they claim, CLEARLY “a whore”. But not the sex-worker kind, no, you are the Bad Kind of Whore. Actually TWO kinds: an Attention/Fame Whore and an Actual Have Sex In Exchange For Jobs, Good Reviews, Book Deals Whore. I mean, could there be ANY other explanation for your visibility? But the sex-not-merit meme is just their warm-up, the lowest-hanging-fruit in a discredit/disinfo campaign.
Because what the haters MOST want the world to know is this: what you’re serving your audience? It’s NOT EVEN ACTUAL KOOLAID. “Snake oil”, the trolls insist. You’re a “proven liar”. Or, as I was referred to yet again just yesterday by my favorite troll/hater/harasser: “a charlatan”. And there is “evidence”. There is always “evidence”. (there isn’t, of course, but let’s not let that get in the way.)
And then:
A particularly robust troll-crafted hot button meme today is that some women are out to destroy video games (shoutout to #gamergaters). Another is that they are taking jobs from men. Men who are, I mean obviously, more deserving. “If women/minorities/any oppressed group are given special treatment, that’s not equality,” they argue “I guess you don’t believe in equality, feminists.” Quickly followed by, “wait, did I say ‘oppressed group’? There’s no such thing as an oppressed group I just meant Professional Victims Who Pretend To Be Oppressed And Serve Social Justice Warrior Koolaid.”
Life for women in tech, today, is often better the less visible they are.
I spent a bit of time this summer explaining to my App Design students that when you call your game Broccoli Avenger or Astro Kitty, those words are now a title, and therefore a proper noun, and need to be capitalized. Useful life skills, my friends.
One of the many things I miss about Beijing is having delicious dumplings all the time. There’s a pretty heated debate about which dough it the best, and which filling, and whether the best dumplings are steamed or fried or boiled, but I don’t care, all dumplings are tasty!
One of the many, many things I miss about New York is the Rickshaw dumpling truck. Delicious dumplings, without the possibility that I misspoke and ordered something wrong, like that time I accidentally ordered a whole chicken. (Chinese is hard, ok?)
North Carolina is not the greatest place for dumplings, unless you mean the floury kind with chicken, so whenever I cross paths with the Chirba Chirba truck, even if I’m not particularly hungry, I stop and get dumplings.
Smiling baozi!
Chirba Chirba parks near my office sometimes, which is about as good as it gets in North Carolina. They have a rotating selection of dumplings, including a Beijing-duck kind and a pork and chives kind. There’s always at least one vegetarian option, which is more likely to be a tasty mushroom dumpling than a token salad.
Delicious jiaozi!
Chirba has other things, like edamame and tea eggs, which I guess you could have if you didn’t want dumplings. But are you sure you don’t want dumplings?
Mashable’s Chris Taylor describes my feelings on Ello perfectly:
There isn’t a working search function. I can’t find my friends, which is about a basic a function as a social network needs to have. I have to login every time I use it. My Ello feed (I’m @futureboy, naturally) has nothing but a list of people accepting my invites. There’s another part of the feed called “noise,” which basically looks like a cut-rate Pinterest.
I mean, I got an invite, made an Ello account (@simpsonsparadox, obviously) and checked it all out in early-adopter glee, but unless I’m missing something major, Ello’s a social network without features or content.
via Facebook’s ‘Real Names’ Policy Could Turn it Into Friendster.
I’m doing some new things at work, and I’m quite pleased that my role is becoming more creative and more essential. I’ve been at Youth Digital a little over a year now, making this the most successful 8-week contract I’ve ever taken.
My new role is closer to the company’s main goal of educating all the babynerds in the whole world in caring and innovative ways (I think others might employ slightly different phrasing for this), and will end up being closer to one of my long-term goals of supporting and encouraging female developers. These female developers are around 10 years old, which isn’t quite where I thought this goal would take me, but I’ve already made the women-in-games presentation at conferences and already written editorials, and that didn’t change the industry. Maybe all we can really do is create a new generation of game developers, where doing terrible things to female developers seems like a bizarre historical footnote.
But right now, there’s that learning curve where I realize it’s taking just as long for someone to explain to me what needs to be done, and set me up to do it, and answer my questions, and then look over what I’ve done, than it would take to just do it properly.
The other day, I submitted some stuff to a colleague for the almost inevitable discovery that I’ve done things that way, when actually everyone else does it this way. Ugh.
“I noticed your titles.” My colleague said, “Very clever.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ve actually had some practice naming game reviews.”
(With apologies to my editors who’ve tried to coax clever titles out of me, or at least tried to improve on my usual Stuff I Noticed While Playing This Game or Some Reasons I Didn’t Particularly Care For This Game. )
One of the many life skills that everyone but me has mastered is eating. Mostly I screw it up by forgetting to eat. This sounds really convenient, like I’m going to tell you the secret to magically losing ten pounds, but mostly it just means that I don’t realize I am hungry, while I start to realize that everyone around me is extremely annoying. And stupid. And that I can’t concentrate. And that the last time I thought everyone around me was super annoying, it meant that I’d forgotten to feed myself.
Also I will realize that it’s time to eat, and do about an hour of one-more-thing, just finish this quickly, etc., before I go to eat.
This was fine in New York, where there are about a thousand food options at any time of the day. I could have a sandwich or a salad or a diner meal whenever I felt hungry, even if it wasn’t a proper meal time. (Also, when I was in Manhattan, I worked with Chip a lot, so only one of us had to remember that food is essential.) Actually, if you want dumplings or curry or fried chicken at any time, you can get it in Manhattan.
North Carolina, though, isn’t really into 24-hour access to anything. (One of the nail salons near me is open nine to five, which blows my mind every single time I try to go there and find it’s closed. Is there really no overlap between people who visit a salon, and people who have jobs?)
Hungry at 3:30? Should have thought of that last night, and packed a snack! That’s 3:30 PM, by the way, I’m complaining about my inability to get a late lunch, not wishing for a midnight meal. It’s easy to forget that human bodies require nutrition, but I never forget that I’m not in the city anymore.
Around Harold’s office, there’s a collection of lovely breakfast and brunch places, which are all closed by 3. There’s also a collection of bars, which seem to open around 6. Which means if you are looking for something to eat before meeting Harold after work, YOU CAN NOT EAT.
It’s not the end of the world, of course, I’m capable of packing an apple or a granola bar, and I’m sure if I keep looking, there’s someplace I can drive to where I can get a three o’clock sandwich. But looking hungrily at a half a dozen closed restaurants is a pretty clear object lesson in how I simply don’t get it here, how I want things no one else wants, and how I’m overall just Doing It Wrong.
