Is it just me, or is the title an allusion to the Biblical name 'Methusaleh' (meaning, when he dies, the flood comes)
The title is a reference to the song "Rebel Girl" by the seminal Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill.
When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming
111–120 of 148 posts
Re: When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming
#112i liked this maybe can help my talented but apathetic teenage sister want to pick up coding.
Re: When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe innovation is the next logical step to widening your appeal. You make new and interesting advances when the work you're doing is for a different type of person or project.
I'm not sure what you're saying, and even less sure of how it relates to the question at hand.
What's not to understand? When you work on something new, or take a new perspective, you make new advances. That seems pretty straight-forward.
Re: When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe innovation is the next logical step to widening your appeal. You make new and interesting advances when the work you're doing is for a different type of person or project.
How are women different?
They are few and far-between in a lot of the tech industry.
Re: When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a female friend who enjoys the Mario series. That doesn't mean it's not gender-specific; it means there exist some women to which that game appeals. Super Mario is extremely gender-specific: the main characters are male attempting to save princesses. Pac-Man was less specific aside from his name, but even then, Ms Pac-Man was a hyper-gendered incarnation of her male counterpart. Take a look: Pac-Man logo: http…
It seems to me that you're arguing only for the sake of it. In my original reply I addressed the perceived cause and effect of why women are under-represented in the videogame industry. I disagreed with the quick and easy finger pointing toward game designers as the original culprit. I redirected attention to historic games that were gender neutral and that were shunned by the female gender, due most likely to social…
> I redirected attention to historic games that were gender neutral and that were shunned by the female gender, due most likely to social prejudices, that videogames are a guy thing. You replied to my arguments by implicitly inferring that the games I cited as examples were somewhat gender biased. I added some arguments to the contrary. Now you use Ms Pac-man's logo as the basis of your argument about the genderization in the game?
Is the advertising/packaging somehow exempt from scrutiny in gender discussions? I don't see why I can't point to the packaging of Ms Pac-Man as a reason it's gendered. You do realize you're arguing against the notion that advertising intends to capture a specific audience, correct?
> The last thing I remember from any of them was the packaging.
That's great. Many people remember the packaging, and it's a huge factor in purchases.
> Mario could have been after the golden treasure, or the secret chamber, or delivering the princess, or whatever, it made absolutely no difference to game play.
But it wasn't, and until you can see that it wasn't, you'll never understand why gender discrimination is such an issue.
> The 2 games that you cited Arkham City and DC New 52, I've never heard of, so I won't dispute your claims. I would however underline the fact that they're recent releases and bear no weight in our current discussion.
I only used those because I assumed you had prior knowledge of them. DC New 52 isn't even a game; it's a reboot of the original DC comic characters but made more "modern" which equates to all the female characters becoming slutty. I used them to prove my point that video games have rarely been female-friendly or had women in mind. Lara Croft? Appealed to young men with her chest and short-shorts. Samus Aran? Did you see what she looked like at the end of the first game? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Samus_at_the_end_of_Metroi... That's on the NES!
Please, take the time to put yourself in a woman's shoes. How would you feel if every major video game ever made had either a male or male-fantasy female main character?
Re: When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at the three games you listed. Pac- Man , Super Mario , Goonies (a game about young men ).
In that case, games with non-gendered characters should be popular among women. For example, Galaga, Mechwarrior, Metroid, etc. Similarly, games with male and female characters such as Golden Axe (clad in a mankini and bikini, respectively) should be equally popular. Does reality agree with this?
Metroid is gendered. Using this from another comment, here Samus is at the end of the first game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Samus_at_the_end_of_Metroi... Do you think that appeals to women?
Do you have stats on the popularity of those games compared to other, gendered games? I'd be more than happy to look over them.
Re: When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you assumed I was offended by his post, you're far off. I'm only disappointed. The evidence is this blog post and the countless ones like it saying how tough it is for a woman to get into programming without being bombarded with negative attention just because of their gender. As I said in the other reply, there is no way to perfectly measure discrimination. If you don't trust the various testimonies by women in t…
Your first link does not show evidence of discrimination. It claims that women are not present in computing because women are different from men in ways that make them poorly suited to a role in computing: "CS education works best for people who already know how to code before they begin. CS teaches the theory behind a practice in which they assume you already have some skill..." "CS education also focuses a lot of e…
You should have read the entire article.
"I believe CS and Web Development currently select for certain masculine qualities that are largely unrelated to someone’s prowess as a coder. I believe it is these tangential code-cowboy qualities women are unable or unwilling to emulate, and not their skill or capacity for abstraction, problem solving, creative thinking, or communication — All of which actually make them better developers."
"Scholarships like the one Google proposes aren’t meant to give women of lower merit something they don’t deserve, they are meant to circumvent the discrimination that extremely talented women still face."
You also pulled your quotes completely out of context.
Re: When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
The writing definitely struck me as pretty meandering. I was pretty sure I was going to read about what the class was like and what she learned at first, but then it just kind of veered off into debating whether or not it was a feminist organization with no real direction. It's only tangentially about learning to use WordPress.
You're missing the point of the article. It's not about getting you introduced to the class; it's about discussing why this class is dedicated to women but not identifying as "feminist".
Because if it identified as feminist they'd have to spend the first two hours of the class installing a custom version of Linux that had politically correct terminology in the the interface, instead of teaching people how to use wordpress.
eg. womyn pages instead of man pages.
Re: When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have plenty of evidence in the form of experience by women. I don't have a "discrimination-measuring machine", though. You'd be hard-pressed to find one of those. I know this isn't what a lot of HNers like to hear, but discrimination exists whether you can measure it with a ruler or not. This is one of those things where you have to piece together anecdotal evidence with an empirical lack of women to get the answer…
Is discrimination the only possible explanation for the empirical lack of women? If you're sure it is, and you're actually interested in these questions, investigating discrimination in tech when you could be investigating discrimination in higher mathematics is like studying swedish-norwegian racism when you could be studying black-white racism. You don't need personal experience, just casually google it for a while…
Of course it's not the only possible explanation; however, it's the most realistic explanation given the number of women who have expressed disgust at the level of discrimination present in the tech industry.
Your analogy doesn't make sense to me because, again, I'm not familiar with higher mathematics. I can't say, "Yes, higher mathematics relates to the tech industry like racism against Norwegians relates to racism against black people."
Re: When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming
#120unlol. Trolling with intent to kill...
although to get back to the lulz, it's Trolling with Intent to Bikini Kill ;)