pstack

Let me preface this by saying that I'm frustrated on a regular basis by the claim that everything is sexist, because labeling someone who isn't with that word can be just as harmful. Especially in the tech industry and gaming and geekery. Even more, I'm put off by the almost constant misuse of the word "misogyny". It is never used for what the word really means. It just sounds good, so people throw it around.

However, as thick headed and unapologetically thick-skinned I assert myself to be and expect others to be, I can absolutely see why women would have a problem with this in this particular environment.

Let me present a really shoddy analogy (but it's all I've got at the moment):

I am obese. I attend a tech conference full of professionals in my industry. Friends, colleagues, potential connections, people I admire. Someone then comes on stage and does a presentation about fat people. It's an app that focuses on how fat people are. For humor. And they attempt to make a lot of humor about it. And the audience around me is laughing.

Now, I'm super fat. I'm more than aware of that. I know that people around me are, too. I have a good sense of humor. I'm even happy to make myself the ass-end of a joke about my weight. However, when I am in a huge room full of people laughing at a presentation making light of people like me, I suddenly feel incredibly awkward, self-aware, embarrassed, and like I'm not wanted there. Maybe that I don't even belong there. So, I stop going. I stop supporting. I stop participating.

It's all about context and having a little tact. These guys used pretty poor judgement. I don't think they should be strung up or driven out of town for it. They should just be an example of how people with no ill-intentions can end up making other people really uncomfortable and how that is something you need to be sensitive to when acting in any professionally related capacity.

Medium makes me laugh the same way showing up at an open-mic night full of amateur "poets" at the coffee shop makes me laugh.

Oh man, girls would never eat any of that food, am I right guys? Eh?

Seriously though, I might make one or two of these.

With the degree to which the US government threatens, coerces, or infiltrates tech businesses, I don't have any real trust for any VPN service, whatsoever. I pay for one (proxpn - it was the only one that didn't seem completely shady at the time) and use it, but I certainly don't trust it.

Additionally, finding one is the first part. Being able to pay for it, is another, apparently. (I was paid up for awhile ahead of time with my service before the credit card companies stated they'd no longer process transactions paid to VPN services outside the US).

Oh, no. Now how will we discern the regular shitty content from the new fusioned shitty content?

No, because I'm aware of when my photo is taken and I am not friends with people who would splash up photos of myself and neither would my family (who I don't even know if are on facebook or other social networks, because I don't have friends or family on social networks, because I can just call or email or visit them in real life).

It is a bit challenging to fully control some aspects of information about you, but it's disheartening to see the attitude (especially among geeks and techies) that "well, gosh, there's nothing you can do about it, so let's jump right in!".

Right, why give your child a leg-up on all those kids that have had every second of their life broadcast online, when you can milk it for the next dozen years and let it be their problem, in the future?

But son.... all the other parents are doing it!

I think the emphasis on Facebook is simply because that is what readers are familiar with, currently. Of course they will have to be aware of and active in protecting identities on other future networks, platforms, and services, too.

At least, that is how I interpreted the references to "Facebook" every five words.

Congratulations, but your exception does not disprove my observed generalization. People are, unfortunately, not usually as discreet as you state you are.

In which case, they really should just stick with the original. If they really want to change their imaging a bit, they need to go hire Hardgay.

Hardgay goes to Yahoo!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSD8edviajE

Seriously, I might use Yahoo! for something or another for the first time in fifteen years, if they lead their imaging campaign with him.

Yes, but can we be assured that Hyperloop will involve the same level of payola and corporate/government corruption that building a bullet-train (which American's have someone been convinced is a necessity) would?

Unfortunately, I believe Facebook toed over that critical mass that has moved it into a long-term dominator of social networking. It has long since passed the point where it's going to just go away and be replaced by something else, like Myspace and other past social sites were. They may not be around forever, but it seems unlikely they'll be unseated any time soon. We are no longer in an age where a bunch of geeks moving on to something new changes the dynamic of the internet. We are now in a time when the average Joe Sixpack and his grandmother don't look for new things, don't try new things, and don't care about new things. They will stick with Facebook indefinitely, the same way a lot of people still stick with the big three over the air networks for their sole television entertainment.

It isn't odd, at all.

It's great to see someone treat their child's privacy with some value, instead of using them as a way to endear themselves to virtual friends or get laughs and votes on reddit, while putting photos and information out there about their kid, without the kid's permission, that will be there forever. The rest of us had the opportunity to come to the internet in a time when someone wasn't putting our information out there.

Reserving accounts at places on their behalf, as well as domains, is also a smart choice. It isn't placing importance on anything. It is simply giving their child the option to have these things in the future. Hopefully, facebook won't exist when this kid grows up. But there's a chance it might. And if it does, then this kid doesn't have to compete with someone else taking the name. More importantly, it prevents someone else from pretending to be you.

I have to do this with my name, too. I have an account on Facebook, though I despise it. Same with the other big social networks and other things I don't use. I have been on the receiving end of someone who was upset with me (one a user I banned from my site after defrauding other users) and did things like make an account under my name and put awful stuff out there as "me". That would be more difficult to do if I'd already staked my claim to that identity (even if I didn't use it).

What these parents are doing is simply investing in retaining the tools with which their child will someday be able to safeguard their privacy and - if necessary - build their professional or other identity. It's worthwhile, today. It'll be even more worthwhile in the future.

Really, I fail to see how anyone can have any problem with this.

I assumed this, as soon as I realized they were using a branded dessert instead of a generic one.

I like to think of it as a modified version of the thing where businesses start out doing shady stuff and then suddenly go legit and everything is just okay. Think Napster, for example. They built their audience and popularity and business on facilitating the sharing of other people's copyright and then they go legitimate. They would never have been able to build their business being legitimate from the start, though. And once you go legitimate, everyone forgets that you essentially built your "Ford dealership" by stealing the Ford's from the other Ford dealerships in your town, until you could make enough money off their products to go legitimate and open up your own honest Ford dealership.

Granted, this isn't that extreme, but it reminds me of it.

If they're so technologically advanced in 2013, why do they need mom to help them get funding to go attend a camp where they are taught how to do something that they can learn freely online? Kids with none of these resources learned on their own against all sorts of adversity and lack of resources in the 80s and 90s. If you really have a passion to do something -- do it. You don't need a camp or an instructor or a mentor to guide you through it. You just do it, because it becomes a constant obsession.

I don't think this kickstarter is a scam (though it is certainly presented like one -- scammy projects usually don't have video of the people behind it and keep promising things that are never delivered, which goes for this one too since the mom keeps promising a video to show that they're real people and not some guy in his basement using google images of some lady and little kid for his scam).

I just think that it's a little unnecessary and is becoming really ridiculous and I'm tired of seeing stuff from parents all over the place posting things like "my kid wants to be a game developer, how do I get them started?". If your kid REALLY wants to do something like that, they aren't going to come to you and ask you to help them. They're going to get online and start googling, reading forums, reading books, downloading free programs and learning to code or design games on their own. If kids could do this in the 80s and 90s, they can do it today.

As for a publicity stunt? I don't know. It sure smells like a stunt for her mom's "give women money to do whatever" website. She'll go on from this project to claim herself an expert in crowd-funding and women's issues. She'll write a book. Become a consultant. Popularize her website. Give a few interviews.

$20k.

And still no meaningful update: Re, a video proving these are real people and not some guy in his basement using images he found on google. Also no discussion whatsoever as to what they intend to do with the additional funding (with physical goods, the funding would generally scale up with the cost while in other projects, the greater funding generally allows for a scaled-up project. I don't expect that's reasonable for a 9 year old who has never programmed or designed a thing, so I'm really interested to find what will be done with the extra $19k and how it will adhere to Kickstarter's policies).

What a vapid article. There are a couple interesting people on the list, but there is still no true justification for why I'd want to waste my mental real-estate on them on a regular basis. For example, I really like Guy Kawasaki, but not enough that I want to follow everything he has to say about everything every single day. And having Scoble in your list is a good way to be the recipient of an unending flood of content. And why you would give Dane Cook or Ashton Kutcher three second of time, combined, I have no idea.

In fact, this "article" seems counter-intuitive to the entire point behind Google+.

This would mean that the value of one of these cheap tiny houses is about the price of three years worth of income. In America, a house (including land) averages around $200k to $250k in a fairly populated area (Denver, Portland, Seattle, etc - you can forget about SF) which comes in at around three years or four years of income. It would seem kind of weird to be marketing a $200k home as a "cheap solution" for the poor.

I've never heard of being laid off as being looked down upon. Firing, sure, but not laid off. That's beyond your control and is a business decision. If your company wipes out an entire product because of some acquisition or poor executive "vision" and decides they need to wipe out two thirds of your division, that's hardly your fault. And if they have a habit of favoring seniority, then it's even less a comment on you.

IM is always running in the background. Facebook requires going to the website and logging in and monitoring it. And being "available" to a huge swath of people. Not to mention, all of my colleagues and co-workers are on IM. I'm not going to reach out to a colleague to ask about a client via facebook chat and I'm not going to communicate with a client via facebook, instead of IM.

In short, Facebook likely contains everyone you've ever met or dealt with in person or online and "friended" that can potentially chat with you -- IM likely contains only the people you actually need to chat with.

"Everyone is there" is becoming an increasingly poor reason to justify selling your soul to a particular social network (as an individual or a business).

I don't see any products, there. I just see a couple of lame features. Skype and group chat. Skype already does Skype, so I'm not sure why I'd load up Facebook just so I could skype through a webpage, instead. My IM client has done group chat for years, so I'm not sure why I'd load up facebook just so I could chat with a group of those people, either.

This kind of falls in line with my confusion as to why people ruin their websites with all these components and hooks into Facebook. They claim that they need Facebook Likes and Logins and Discussions in their websites, because Facebook drives traffic. Even if they hate it, they have to succumb to it. You know, for generating traffic. My question remains - why do you want to try appealing to a group of people to whom Facebook is "the internet" and who do everything through Facebook? Those people aren't going to make a point of going to your website again, unless someone links them to it a second time down the road. It seems like a lot of resources (not to mention website screen real-estate) given up for very little desirable return.

As I said, it's not exactly the same thing, but I was responding more to the notion of the too-common extreme the poster above me seemed to elude to; not necessarily directly in response to your content. Other than perhaps this individual posting of yours, I don't think you're in the same ballpark as the more common and extreme examples I discussed. (I was going to post the URL of the most recent example of this game that we played, but it strikes me as bordering on mean-spirited.)

Also, I'm not sure why you would take particular note of the "whore" part of the phrase "attention whore". One who seeks attention through deliberately meaningless or provocative tactics. Meaningless seems inaccurate, but provocative is appropriate and clearly intentional. And, again, I'm talking more about the pattern in the industry of attention-whoring rather than your specific instance. You know, like someone who has a hundred thousand twitter followers and the first thing you find on google when searching on the name of these "journalists" are bikini photoshoots for men's magazines.

It probably will. I feel crude pointing this out, but it has become an annoyance to me in the past year. I consume a lot of technology and videogame journalism, so my comment is mostly derived from experiences there. (The person posting this blog/request is more related to what I'm about to say in spirit than in actual example).

In particular, I've come to enjoy playing a sad little game called "content creator or attention whore" where I predict what a journalist's website will be like before I actually visit it.

I am very good at this game. It helps to illustrate the difference between people who care about and are knowledgeable in videogames or technology versus those who just want to get their name and voice and face out there and are just using whatever they can get to springboard into having a sit-com on NBC or hosting Entertainment Tonight or something. These are the people who make me feel icky, because either they are misleading the audience and the reader by pretending to give a damn about something that is just part of their path to fame or they have so little faith in the reader that they can't win them over with words.

So, you have your Jeff Gerstmans, Veronica Belmonts, Scobles, Pogues, Sarah Lanes, Ngai Croals, Justin Mcelroys, Ryan Davis. These are people who clearly care about the things they cover and the focus of their sites are their content. Yeah, you might catch a series of goofy candid photos from Scoble now and then, but when you visit their sites, the primary focus is content.

Then you visit the site of some other people who supposedly do the same thing and their sites are just massive walls of devotion to themselves. They're filled not so much with -- you know, content -- as they are with headshots and glamor shots.

The most recent example of this game being played was when I listened to a gaming podcast where someone was a guest that mentioned they have about four shows that they do. Video podcasts, audio podcasts, producing content and so on. I just knew what I was going to find when I went to the website they mentioned. Sure enough, the site had a list of all the shows they do that was dwarfed by the 70% of every page that was consumed by multiple enormous headshots of themselves.

That seems a little insane. How about a "we stop subsidizing breeders" policy? The rest of society no longer subsidizes and cares for your mistakes and desperate need to hump without a rubber and if you want to have a kid (just like if you want to own a car or a boat or a home or a pool table), you have to be able to afford it.

I'm not for government involvement in things, so I'm hesitant to suggest they be taxed additionally for having children, but it's certainly reasonable to stop encouraging them to breed when they can't even afford rent as it is.

Fail to mention what to the government? That they got married? I'm pretty sure that's impossible to hide from the government. Especially when tax time comes around.

I agree that not everyone is an attention whore, but if they have enough people that they need to use social networking with that they have to bulk-load them, then they probably are. My contact book is enormous, but I don't need a social network for most of those people. I don't need to update my coworkers on anything outside of work and I doubt businesses are using social networks for their employees to conduct business with. I certainly don't need to do social networking with someone I might have had a meal with while on a trip oversea, either. Keep them in my address book. Drop them a note sometime. Sure. But the number of people a non-attention-whore needs to interact with on a basis frequent enough to justify being part of an actual social networking application surely must be well below the "bulk loading" number?

The step of categorizing your social networking broadcast channels into proper groups has been years overdue. That's a great feature. I'm just saying that maybe people should pause and take a minute to actually do with Google+ what they originally intended to do with Facebook. You know, four or five years ago when the whole world switched over to Facebook, because it was the place you only "friended" people that you actually knew as opposed to "everyone with a pulse" that you friended on MySpace? Seems like everyone let that get away from them (and they frequently complain about how exactly that has happened to them). So instead of rushing back into the same situation, it's a great time to rethink how we're using such a service.

The problem is that you never know when someone is just talking, just seeking attention, or is serious. Often, the most serious don't talk about it. They just do it. But even attempting it is bad enough and while many might make light of someone's threats about it as nothing more than lame attempts at milking attention, that alone denotes a fairly serious concern. There are several levels before the point of actually attempting or committing the act which are deserving of serious notice.

I haven't known anyone who went through with it, either (though I know many who know those who have). I'll tell you, however, that I'd sure rather know someone that made threats that I took serious and tried to get help for than know someone I didn't take serious and will regret not taking serious for the rest of my life.

I could understand if it were just a little user icon off in the corner, but to have a huge 200x300 photo in the article is a little obnoxious, though probably not intentionally crude. If it's an automated function of the site that puts it there for, then maybe a more tasteful choice of photo is called for when one posts several articles about working with suicide patients.

I should edit this to add that the author being an attractive young women is irrelevant and that a similar photo with a male author would be as unfortunately distasteful. And as the other poster mentioned, they thoughtfully changed their photo. Maybe it's just a cruddy way the site automates the use of people's photos in a sort of template?

It's important to pause now and then to recall what a glorious time we live in, where we are alive at the same moment as so many other great human beings. Some in technology. Some in humanitarian works. Some in music. Even if they're near the end of their time here, that you and I existed on this ball of rock at the same time they walked it is pretty fantastic.

My best to Mr. Morris and his family and friends.