Tag: technology

A happy ending

It’s always nice to see a happy ending where the SJW ends up unemployed, bitter, and alone. Perhaps more SJWs should consider looking into that diversity they cherish and reading up on the concept of “karma” and “minding your own business”. You may recall how Adria Richards got a programmer fired at a tech conference, but what you may not know is that the story had a just and happy ending. From The Guardian:

On 17 March 2013, Hank was in the audience at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, California, when a stupid joke popped into his head, which he murmured to his friend, Alex.

“What was the joke?” I asked.

“It was so bad I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “It was about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle – a ridiculous dongle. We were giggling about that. It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”

A few moments earlier, Hank and Alex had been giggling over some other tech in-joke about “forking someone’s repo”. “We’d decided it was a new form of flattery,” Hank explained. “A guy had been on stage presenting his new project, and Alex said, ‘I would fork that guy’s repo.’” (In tech jargon, to “fork” means to take a copy of another person’s software so you can work on it independently. Another word for software is “repository”. Just in case you wanted to know.)

Moments after making the dongle joke, Hank half-noticed the woman sitting in front of them stand up, turn around and take a photograph. Ten minutes later, a conference organiser came down the aisle and said to Hank and Alex, “Can you come with me?” They were taken into an office and told there’d been a complaint about sexual comments.

“I immediately apologised,” Hank said. “I knew exactly what they were talking about. I told them what we’d said, and that we didn’t mean for it to come across as a sexual comment, and that we were sorry if someone overheard and was offended. They were like, ‘OK. I see what happened.’”

And that was that. The incident passed. Hank and Alex were shaken up – “We’re nerdy guys, and confrontation isn’t something we handle well” – so they decided to leave the conference early. They were on their way to the airport when they started to wonder exactly how someone had conveyed the complaint to the conference organisers. The nightmarish possibility was that it had been communicated in the form of a public tweet. And so, with apprehension, they had a look.

They found a tweet from a woman, called Adria Richards, with a photo of them: “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles. Right behind me #pycon”.

Anxious, Hank quickly scanned her replies, but there was nothing much – just the odd congratulation from a few of her 9,209 followers for the way she’d “educated” the men behind her. He noticed ruefully that a few days earlier Adria Richards had herself tweeted a stupid penis joke. She’d suggested to a friend that he should put socks down his pants to bewilder security agents at the airport. Hank relaxed a little.

A day later, Hank was called into his boss’s office and fired.

“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” Hank said, “then I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears but…” Hank paused. “When I got in the car with my wife, I just… I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”

That night, Hank made his only public statement. He posted a short message on the discussion board Hacker News: “Hi, I’m the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I’d like to say I’m sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. [But] as a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have three kids and I really liked that job. She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.”

Ten months later, I was sitting opposite Adria Richards in a cafe at San Francisco airport. She seemed introverted and delicate, just the way Hank had come across over Google Hangout. She told me about the moment she overheard the comment about the big dongle. “Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.

“You felt fear?” I asked.

“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”

Which was why, she said, even though she’d never before complained about sexual harassment, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos”. She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.”

“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might…?”

“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”

    ‘He’s a white male,’ Adria said. ‘I’m a black Jewish female. He said things that could be inferred as offensive to me’

I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been at a tech conference with 2,000 bystanders.

“Sure,” she replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”

“Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired, but you must have felt pretty bad.”

“Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different… I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”

On the evening Hank posted his statement on Hacker News, outsiders began to involve themselves in his and Adria’s story. Hank started to receive messages of support, and then insults, from men’s rights bloggers. He didn’t respond to any of them. At the same time, Adria discovered she was getting discussed on a famous meeting place for trolls: 4chan/b/. “A father of three is out of a job because a silly joke he was telling a friend was overheard by someone with more power than sense. Let’s crucify this cunt.” “Kill her.” “Cut out her uterus with an xacto knife.”

Someone sent Adria a photograph of a beheaded woman with tape over her mouth. Adria’s face was superimposed on to the bodies of porn actors. Next, her employer’s website went down. Someone launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if she was fired. Within hours, she was fired.

‘‘SendGrid threw me under the bus,” she later emailed me. “I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.’’

The death threats and rape threats and racist insults continued even after she was fired.

“Things got very bad for her,” Hank told me. “She had to disappear for six months. Her entire life was being evaluated by the internet. It was not a good situation for her at all.”

“Have you met her since?” I asked him.

“No,” he replied.

Ten months had passed since the day Adria took that photograph, so I asked what he thought of her now. “I think that nobody deserves what she went through,” he replied.

“Maybe it was [Hank] who started all of this,” Adria told me in the cafe at San Francisco airport. “No one would have known he got fired until he complained… Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired. Maybe he secretly seeded the hate groups. Right?”

I was so taken aback by this suggestion that at the time I didn’t say anything in defence of Hank. But later I felt bad that I hadn’t stuck up for him. So I emailed Adria. I told her what he had told me – how he’d refused to engage with any of the bloggers or trolls who sent him messages of support. I added that I felt Hank was within his rights to post the message on Hacker News, revealing he’d been fired.

Adria replied that she was happy to hear that Hank “wasn’t active in driving their interests to mount the raid attack”, but that she held him responsible for it anyway. It was “his own actions that resulted in his own firing, yet he framed it in a way to blame me… If I had a spouse and two kids to support, I certainly would not be telling ‘jokes’ like he was doing at a conference. Oh, but wait, I have compassion, empathy, morals and ethics to guide my daily life choices. I often wonder how people like Hank make it through life seemingly unaware of how ‘the other’ lives in the same world he does, but with countless fewer opportunities.”

I asked Hank if he found himself behaving differently since the incident. Had it altered how he lived his life? “I distance myself from female developers a little bit now,” he replied. “I’m not as friendly. There’s humour, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate.”

“Give me an example,” I said. “So you’re in your new workplace [Hank was offered another job right away] and you’re talking to a female developer. In what way do you act differently towards her?’

“Well,” Hank said, “we don’t have any female developers at the place I’m working at now. So.”

“You’ve got a new job now, right?” I said to Adria.

“No,” she said.

Credentializing comments

No wonder the mainstream media fears comments. This may also explain why so many trolls consider themselves to be self-appointed blog police. Although I doubt they have much effect here:

Ionnis Kareklas, Darrel D. Muehling, and TJ Weber, all of Washington State University, found that the comments on a public-service announcement about vaccination affected readers’ attitudes as strongly as the P.S.A. itself did. When commenters were identified by their level of expertise with the subject (i.e. as doctors), their comments were more influential than the P.S.A.s.

Online readers may put a lot of stock in comments because they view commenters “as kind of similar to themselves,” said Mr. Weber — “they’re reading the same thing, commenting on the same thing.” And, he added, many readers, especially those who are less Internet-savvy, assume commenters “know something about the subject, because otherwise they wouldn’t be commenting on it.” The mere act of commenting, then, can confer an unearned aura of credibility.

That news may be especially disturbing to those already skeptical of comments’ overall quality. Dr. Kareklas and his team were inspired by Popular Science’s decision to get rid of the comments sections on its website; other publications, like Pacific Standard, have done the same. And Tauriq Moosa memorably wrote at The Guardian that the comments section “sits there like an ugly growth beneath articles, bloated and throbbing with vitriol.”

If only those nasty online peasants would shut up, stop interfering with the flow of propaganda, and recognize that communication is supposed to go one way!

The article appears to ignore the obvious fact that most sites permitting comments are communities of a sort, and commenters, being members of that community, are often familiar with the other commenters and therefore know how much stock to put in the credibility of another commenter. I put stock in a commenter for the same reason I put stock in a media site, which is to say, his past performance. Why wouldn’t one trust a known expert, with whom one is familiar, more than a public service announcement from an institution known to be corrupt?

Abolishing the Air Force

Jerry Pournelle wants to get rid of the Air Force:

I also intend to do an essay on why we should abolish the Air Force
and return to an Army Air Force which is not a separate service. The
purpose of military forces is to win wars. The purpose of the Air Force
is—well, they no longer know. When we had SAC we knew – “Our profession
is peace” was not just a slogan – but that too is neglected in the
Modern Air Force. Deterrence and maintenance of nuclear weapons, being
ready to use weapons when your fondest wish is that they will never be
used – that does require a different kind of military. We once had that
in SAC but the end of the Cold War was the end of SAC, and the nuclear
deterrence force is, well not what it once was. It is subject to the
Iron Law now.

As to the rest of the Air Force, it is more interested in the Air
Force than winning wars, and considers supporting the field army as
beneath contempt. A slow old Warthog does a much better job, but there
is no glory in that. Best to use fast jets… which of course are
imprecise and cause a lot of collateral damage. Everyone knows that a
force of propeller driven P-47 fighters of WWII would be more effective
for supporting the field army than what we use. And the Army must be
crippled, not allowed to have effective air power in taking territory.
You must use modern jets at high speed.

Now the Air Force has a mission that the Army at present does not
have: Air Supremacy. And that is a different mission from supporting the
field army. It involves engagements with Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs)
as well as strikes against the enemy base of operations. The glory is
in air to air combat, but that is not the effective way to air
supremacy.

That is the main argument for an “Independent Air Force” and the
bitter fights that ended with creation of USAF. It is true, ground army
commanders tend to select the wrong targets to sortie against, and
endanger air supremacy; thus the argument for independence, which USAAF
eventually won (before SAC existed or any but a few knew would be
needed.) Hiroshima ended the debate. But now the Cold War ended and USAF
killed SAC as not glamorous – not career building any longer. As to the
Warthogs, give them to the National Guard! Real pilots don’t need them!

Sure, I exaggerate but not much: the Air Force keeps trying to get
rid of the Warthogs, but never by giving them (and the ground support
mission) to the War Department. Better that GI’s die than USAF give up a
mission even though it does not want it.

Drones will change all this, but why wait?

Actually, as Eric S. Raymond demonstrated in both “Sucker Punch” and “Battlefield Lasers”, the Air Force is very close to obsolete anyhow. My expectation is that they’ll try to survive by moving their mission upward, to space, in order to compensate for the vanishing ability of their planes to survive in the atmosphere.

Rumblings of tech war

This article is amusingly incoherent concerning the growing fears of US technology companies concerning Europe:

One message so far from the corridors around the World Economic Forum
in Davos: U.S. technology companies are very worried about the backlash
they are now facing in Europe. From their standpoint, Europe
risks shooting itself in the foot by rejecting the cutting-edge
technologies they have brought to the continent. But they would say that, wouldn’t they? Look at it from the European point of view.

Europe
once led the world in mobile technology: The Global System for Mobile
Communications, developed in Europe, became the global standard. But
that was a long time ago. Now, most innovation in information and
communications technology comes in waves from across the Atlantic.

With America’s vibrant capital markets giving them billions of dollars in risk capital, they can absorb the successful European tech enterprises—look at Skype Technologies, swallowed by Microsoft Corp.

These U.S. companies— Google, Facebook , Amazon and others—are disrupting industry after industry. Publishing, telecoms and retailing have already been convulsed. Now, the companies, and Google in particular, are turning their gaze from consumer-oriented to business-oriented platforms.

That is a big deal for growth-starved Europe and for its biggest economy, Germany, which leads the world in high-quality engineering. Europe’s car industry is a leading employer, its suppliers reach through the continent, and it is one of the biggest spenders on research and development. Germany’s machine-tool manufacturers are deservedly renowned.

But much of the future profit for these industries won’t flow from punching metal but from the networks they will use to manage information—for example, taking the cars where they want to go, catering to passengers with entertainment and retail experiences as they travel—and it’s a strategic question who owns them.

Isn’t it good of those US technology executives to worry so much about Europe shooting themselves in the foot? They must have tremendous empathy! Or could it be that they are not telling the truth and it is something else that worries them?

Such as, perhaps, the possibility that they will be legally locked out of Europe due to their enabling of US goverment espionage and their continued disinclination to show any respect for various European privacy laws?

Mailvox: Kindle Unlimited

Will Best wonders if I’ve changed my mind:

I was interested if VD has changed his opinion on Kindle Unlimited since his July post? The NYT via drudge seemed to put it in a pretty negative light, and its concern as it relates to distorting story length does seem legitimate.

Well, I suppose I should find out what my opinion was back in July, as I don’t rightly recall the details. Let’s see, I wrote:

  • My initial impression is that this is excellent for serious readers.
  • Casual readers, book collectors, and fans of particular authors aren’t likely to be too fussed about it.
  • It is horrific for the Big Five publishers and their writers, as their unwillingness to participate indicates.
  • It’s neutral to modestly positive for independent publishers, their writers, and self-publishers.  

Now let’s compare it to the New York Times story:

  • It may bring in readers, but the writers say they earn less. 
  • The author H.M. Ward says she left Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program after two months when her income dropped 75 percent.
  • “Your rabid romance reader who was buying $100 worth of books a week and
    funneling $5,200 into Amazon per year is now generating less than $120 a
    year,” she said. 
  • Amazon
    usually gives self-published writers 70 percent of what a book earns,
    which means a novel selling for $4.99 yields $3.50…. But
    Kindle Unlimited is less generous, paying a fluctuating amount. In
    July, the fee for a digital “borrow” was $1.80. It fell to $1.33 in
    October before rebounding slightly to $1.39 in November.

It appears I was correct about the first three points and wrong about the last one. I wasn’t aware of the relevant math, but it is entirely clear that $120 < $5,200 and $1.33 < $3.50. The math doesn’t work for the writer. I don’t see how the math works for Amazon either.

I have to confess that Kindle Unlimited hasn’t really been on my radar because Castalia House withdrew nearly all of our books from the Kindle Select program in order to be able to sell them from the Castalia House store. We never considered Kindle Unlimited at all. So, besides that initial post, I haven’t given it any thought. But the more I look at the math, the more I wonder if Amazon hasn’t made a serious mistake here based on the false assumption that every author has to be on Amazon. It looks to me like a classic corporate overplaying of a strong hand.

Everyone wanted to be on Amazon because that has been where they were able to earn the most money. But already, both we, and perhaps more importantly, our associates, are seeing that Castalia can sell between 10 percent and 20 percent of Amazon’s sales of a newly released book. And since the author makes more money on each Castalia sale, that’s the equivalent of up to 28 percent of the revenue derived from Amazon. The math still favored Amazon, obviously, but if one then reduces the Amazon revenue by 62 percent, suddenly the total Amazon revenue is only 35 percent more even when the unit sales are 400 percent higher. This means that with Kindle Unlimited, Amazon is rendering themselves considerably less relevant to writers, which strikes me as a counterproductive long term strategy.

So, my revised conclusion is that Kindle Unlimited is likely to prove massively unpopular among successful self-published writers, of no interest to independent publishers and their writers, and off-limits to mainstream published writers. Barring significant changes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon ended up discontinuing it within two or three years. If they don’t, Kindle Unlimited will likely become a digital books ghetto filled with little more than romance, porn, and conspiracy theory written by unknown authors who can’t draw interest from independent publishers.

The only writers to whom I think it might be useful are those new writers who don’t have an audience and simply want to throw stuff out there in the hopes that one will find them. But even there, you’re probably better off going with Select than with Unlimited.

Some things never change

Now I understand why Jerry Pournelle laughed when I explained to him exactly why I’d been kicked out of SFWA:

How Jerry Pournelle Got Kicked Off the ARPANET

Back in the old days, computer scientists funded by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Administration (DARPA) worried greatly about how their proto-internet, the Advanced Research Projects Administration Network (ARPANET) might appear as a frivolous gossip-fest to accountants, inspector generals, and legislators anxious to show that they were flint-eyed custodians of the public purse. Hence they strongly requested that people, especially people with guest accounts, not mention ARPANET in non-Department of Defense contexts.

And that was how in 1985 science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle got himself kicked off the ARPANET:

Wed, 29 May 85 06:16:01 EST From: Leigh L. Klotz KLOTZ@MIT-MC.ARPA To: POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA cc: USER-ACCOUNTS@MIT-MC.ARPA

    You used the word “ARPANET” in your June Byte column three times. You even said

    “I gave Alex the local ARPANET access number to record for the 1200-baud modem and inadvertently transposed two numbers.”

    I don’t care if Alex IS a computer–you may soon find your accounts on MC decremented by gov’t order.

Thu, 30 May 85 03:57:38 EST From: Jerry E. Pournelle To: KLOTZ at MIT-MC.ARPA

    thank you. if left to you I suppose I cewrtainly will find my accounts terminated. Your nice private message appreciated. seppuku follows.. maybe you ought to have me dumped off the net and be done with it? or must you work through someone else? J. E. Pournelle

Thu, 30 May 85 11:23:26 EST From: David Vinayak Wallace To: KLOTZ at MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: Surprise!

    Date: Wed, 29 May 85 07:04:16 EST From: Leigh L. Klotz

        Do you think I chastised jerry pournelle too much for talking about his use of the arpanet in byte?

    Yes. It’s embarrassing to send a message to someone like that when a message in OFF POURNE would have done as well!

    And now you’ve sent the message out I’ll have to go and find out why he had to mention it in the first place!

Thu, 30 May 85 18:44:42 EST From: Leigh L. Klotz KLOTZ@MIT-MC.ARPA To: POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA cc: GUMBY@MIT-MC.ARPA

    Date: Thu, 30 May 85 03:57:38 EST From: Jerry E. Pournelle To: KLOTZ at MIT-MC.ARPA

        thank you. if left to you I suppose I cewrtainly will find my accounts terminated. Your nice private message appreciated. seppuku follows.. maybe you ought to have me dumped off the net and be done with it? or must you work through someone else? J. E. Pournelle

    USER-A is the mailing list created explicitly for dealing with these sorts of issues. It is the appropriate forum for discussion. There are eight people on user-a. You probably know better than I do, but last I heard about 100,000 times as many people read BYTE. Thus, the issue of privacy is the last one you should raise.

    I don’t particularly want to force you into ritual disembowelment; rather, I’m interested — and I’m not the only one — in why you find it necessary to flaunt your use of the arpanet. The more attention you (and other people) draw to non-blow-em-up use of the arpanet the more likely some Proxmire type is to start inquiring into its operations.

Fri, 31 May 85 01:11:16 EST From: Jerry E. Pournelle POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA To: KLOTZ@MIT-MC.ARPA cc: GUMBY@MIT-MC.ARPA

    I find this thoroughly distasteful. If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone.

31 MAY 1985 0225 EST From: GSB at MIT-MC.ARPA (Glenn S. Burke) To: KLOTZ at MIT-MC.ARPA

    i guess i haven’t been paying enough attention to realize that he knew there was any heckling going on at all. I’m almost tempted to let him take his marbles and floppy disks and go home.

Fri, 31 May 85 09:39 EDT From: Kent M Pitman To: CStacy at MIT-MC.ARPA cc: Klotz at MIT-MC.ARPA, KMP at SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA, Gumby at MIT-MC.ARPA

    Subject: Pourne Date: Fri, 31 May 85 01:11:16 EST From: Jerry E. Pournelle POURNE@MIT-MC.ARPA To: KLOTZ@MIT-MC.ARPA

        I find this thoroughly distasteful. If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone.

    Personally, I’d just turn off his account. It’s not like it’s the first time, and he not only flaunts his use of our machines but stabs us in the back with grumblings about why he doesn’t like this or that program of ours when he gets a chance. (Am thinking particularly of an article he wrote which condemned Lisp for reasons amounting to little more than his ignorance, but which cited Teach-Lisp in a not-friendly light… The man has learned nothing from his presence on MC and sets a bad example of what people might potentially accomplish there. I’d rather recycle his account for some bright 12-yr-old…)

Date: Fri, 31 May 85 11:02:27 EST From: John G. Aspinall To: KLOTZ at MIT-MC.ARPA, GSB at MIT-MC.ARPA Subject: just think of it…

        MIT Maximum Confusion PDP-10 MC ITS.1488. PWORD.2632. TTY 57 16. Lusers, Fair Share = 86%

        :login pourne

        That account has been temporarily turned off.

        Reason: Think of it as evolution in action.

        Any questions may be directed to USER-ACCOUNTS

    I don’t know whether you guys have read Niven and Pournelle’s Oathof_Fealty_, but “Think of it as evolution in action.” is their thinly disguised rallying cry for do-it-yourself social Darwinism. It would be so, so sweet to shove it back in his face.

Isn’t it fascinating how the petty control freaks always make matters worse for themselves because they can’t bear the thought of not throwing their insignificant weight around? I mean, if you truly want to avoid drawing attention to yourself, perhaps you might want to consider not going out of your way to annoy one of the most important tech columnists in the world, no matter how irritating you might find his politics. It’s also informative to see how they think of an organization or a technology over which they have influence as somehow belonging to them.

That’s why you must always KEEP THE RABBITS OUT. They absolutely live for the bureaucracy and the thrill that bureaucratic control gives them. And once they have sufficient influence and know you’re a not-rabbit, they will be looking to kick you out at the earliest opportunity. As both the ARPANET and SFWA examples show, they will utilize any excuse, however flimsy, even when it isn’t an actual violation of any organizational rule.

In any event, neither lefty comp-sci nerds nor a stroke could keep Dr. Pournelle off the Internet for long.

Monday Dec. 25, I had a stroke.   I think my head is all right, and I am recovering.  Alas I used to be a touch typist and I am now learning to be a two finger typist.  At present I am a one finger typist.  Call it 1.1 finger, but after today’s therapy , maybe 1.2; I am learning. I just made the Spock sign.

Here is to hoping Jerry makes a full recovery in short order, and enjoy more years confusing and confounding the anklebiters.

The Top Gaming Blogs

As one of their Game and Book experts, one of the things Recommend has asked me to do is to identify and vett various other experts, particularly in fields I am qualified to do so. One of the first experts I recruited was the indefatigable Jeffro Johnson of Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog, who is also one of the two star bloggers at Castalia House, because there are very, very few people who know as much about role-playing games as he does.

Jeffro immediately grasped the utility of the Recommend system, so much so that I have already had to urge him to slow down and pace himself. But among the score of recos he has already posted, he has created an interesting list entitled The Top Gaming Blogs of 2014, which is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in games. Lewis Pulsipher is on there, of course, but there are a number of other sites with which I was previously unfamiliar.

The other new Recommend expert is less known for his excellent game design than for the fact that he is Archon of The Escapist, but regardless, he qualifies as a Game Expert twice over. He’s got his first reco up and it’s a good one on the classic X-Com: UFO Defense.

If you’re not on Recommend yet, or if you’re on it but haven’t really started using it yet, I’d encourage you to give it a go. They haven’t even officially “come to America” yet; but have already achieved pretty solid penetration in their native France. I don’t know if it is going to grow into something Twitter-big once they enter the US next year, but it is going to be significant. They’ve now got the five-rating system in place, which was a needed improvement, and they’ll have the Android app out in the near future. And, in due time, a proper game-style Achievements and Leveling system.

They’re also working on the expansion of the categories; there will be gun categories, among others, and I will be looking for experts in a variety of new categories soon. But we’re only looking for serious and proven expertise, not merely serious interest. For example, Jeffro, Archon, and I are all able to rapidly post recos because we have large quantities of our own previous writings on the subject from which we can draw. But that’s merely an indicator, it’s not an absolute requirement. In any case, if you think you’ve got that kind of expertise in something, then by all means, make your case in the comments here.

Jeffro demonstrates his depth of knowledge in this post, in which he wonders why so many of today’s gamers and game designers are not merely ignorant, but don’t even know they’re ignorant:

Why is it that Gygax had a diet of fiction that spanned more than half a century, but the designers that followed him and the younger generation of gamers that played his stuff did not for the most part? What kinds of things do we fail to see simply because we’ve never bothered to survey the past…? And what the heck happened during the seventies to turn everything upside down? Something happened. The fact of it doesn’t require a conspiracy theory to explain it, but it does make me wonder about what all’s gone on since.

Remember: people that haven’t read from the Appendix N list tend to assume that Gary Gygax was a weirdo for using the term “Fighting-Men” instead of something like “Warrior.” They will even go so far as to say that the reasons for his word choice there are unknowable. It’s a small thing, sure… but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. These people are not only ignorant, but they don’t even know they are ignorant. They are simply not equipped to make an intelligent critique of classic D&D, much less assess Gygax’s contribution to gaming.

That “Wisconsin Shoe Salesmen” precipitated a watershed moment in gaming history. His influence is not confined to tabletop games, but spills over into computer gaming and fantasy in general. While many tropes of classic D&D have by now become ubiquitous, the literature that inspired them has since dropped into obscurity. This is interesting and bears further investigation. 

The customer is not always right

Or desired. This is an interesting technological development in customer relations:

Travelers are often asked to review their hotel, restaurant and car service. But increasingly, it goes both ways.

Drivers for Uber and Lyft, for example, rate their passengers from one to five stars at the end of each ride. If a rider receives three stars or fewer, the driver and passenger will not be paired up again. And at OpenTable, the restaurant booking system, customers are banned if they do not show for a reservation too many times.

These are among the ways that sophisticated rating systems can turn on the customer, identifying the best and worst among them.

I wonder how long it will take for this to go ideological. After all, if we know one thing about SJWs, they politicize absolutely everything and they aren’t shy about cutting off their nose to spite their face. It won’t surprise me if we see customers being banned from various establishments and services because their patronage is unwanted due to politics. Which is, of course, an unprotected right, or at least it is until Christians start using it as an effective proxy to deny services to those whose behavior they believe to be abomination.

I’ve lost one job and three book contracts due to corporate correctness to date. Which I always enjoy pointing out to those who claim bakers have to bake cakes they do not wish to bake and permit bed-and-breakfast guests they do not wish to have. As always, the SJWs seek to establish laws that only bite in one direction.

Of course, the costs of corporate correctness can be blessings in disguise. I’d much rather be publishing books through Castalia House than have published Media Whores and The Red Hand of Government with Thomas Nelson and A Throne of Bones with Lion Hudson.

Bubblicious

They’re partying like it’s 1999:

Many of the “users” on social media sites aren’t real people at all – they’re celebrity staff tweeting on behalf of their employer, or PRs promoting a company, or even fake accounts for people that don’t exist at all. In fact, half of all Twitter accounts created in 2013 have already been deleted.

These fake accounts are often created by unscrupulous firms that will beef up your follower count in return for cold hard cash. “Twitter is in the centre of public interest and politicians or companies are often ranked by number of followers or re-tweets or the like – so, there is a whole “web optimisation” industry offering services to make you look better on Twitter – everybody can buy 10,000 followers for $5,” Pfeffer said.

Emphasis added. I’ve been using Twitter more over the last few weeks thanks to GamerGate, and while it’s a useful tool, its utility is strictly limited. I’m a little surprised Google hasn’t launched a competitor yet, but the problem with Twitter is the same as it is with all self-expression platforms: most people simply don’t have all that much to say.

We all know why the stock market bubble exists; all that Fed money has to go somewhere. But an economy based on the value of companies making it possible to pass very short virtual texts around strikes me as one of the few things dumber than simply making leaves legal tender.