THE GEARS OF INDUSTRY

You know what's really throwing me right the fuck off?
All of these cunts
theeeeeese Dreamwidth white wahms saying "all of the things".
"YOU'LL MISS ALL OF THE THINGS" said one in regards to a book that if you don't read carefully you'll miss all the subtlety.
First of all I can't imagine you land whales know the definition of subtly and second of all did you just tell me it's good to read a book carefully or you might miss something you cow?
Christ all mighty.
So my goal was to find one of these blogs where the phrase "all of the things" didn't appear.
I started this little project at 2:15 PM on Wednesday, June 26 in the Year of Our Lord two thousand and thirteen.
It is now 3:14 PM on the same day and I am surrendering to the wheel of fate.
It can't be done.
Also I thought I was going crazy these past few days because I kept hearing this weird chanting in my head.
Then I realized in EVE Online if you don't have music very loud over it there is a really quiet weird chanting.
Why the fuck would they program that into the game?
I need to have sounds on so I can hear buzzers when something attacks.
Muting the weird chanting also mutes that.
I THOUGHT I WAS GOING FUCKING CRAZY.
Are the Amarr so religious they have chanting in the vacuum of space?
That's pretty fucking space Christianity/Islam (I still can't figure their religion out)
Between that and going into Space Africa space and thinking I exploded because space there looks like an explosion my heart can't take much more of this shit.
Some people might argue I shouldn't be in a religious cesspit and Africa respectively if I want to avoid this shit to which I say to you how else am I going to make the mad cash?

We had ISSUES yesterday involving TEARS and RECRIMINATIONS because Niko wanted to paint but didn’t want to clean up his toys first, which I set as a requirement…

You named your kid Niko?
NIKO
COUSIN
I just want you people to know if Niko comes up a lot you better play Grand Theft Auto 4 before finishing this entry because it's going to be nonstop NIKO
MY CAAHSIN
SOON WE WILL SMELL OF TITTIES nonstop

He eventually came around and we Cleaned All The Things but he’d lost the urge to paint.

See? It's even a cunting proper noun now.
Goddamn people.

I really need to video Niko painting because he narrates what’s going on while he creates. This is the sky and this is sand down here and here’s a Mamenchisaurus with its RIDICULOUSLY LONG NECK and its really big feet and here is a Diplodocus with its long neck and long tail and its spikes on its back and now here are its really big feet. And these are its footprints! And here are some clouds, because it’s going to rain and it’s going to rain on them and here are some rain drops falling on them and they’re falling on the ground and over here on the sea. This is the sea. And here’s a baby! It hatched out of this egg and here’s some other eggs in a nest.
It’s wonderful and adorable and he got very covered in paint. I had to scrub it out of his ear and one arm pit. TOTALLY WORTH IT.

NIKO
CAAHSIN
LET'S GO BOWLING
because nothing says "grand theft auto" like taking your cousin on a bro date.
Thanks Rockstar Games.
You made a game
where the main characters are Eastern European and part of the Russian mafia
and that's the gameplay feature you decided the series needed?
Okay it's your series.

It was interesting. The staff made 2 basic assumptions about our family, based largely on the neighborhood: 1) that we’re on state insurance (which is true, and we might continue to be on it (albeit paying for it) when Nesko’s eligible for insurance through work, we’ll see) and 2) that we don’t speak English at home (which would be true if my FIL had his way). Most kids coming into that school take a language fluency exam to determine which level of ESL classroom they’ll be in, but Niko’s really fluent in English (it’s his primary language) so he’ll just be in the English speaking class.

NIKO
MY CAAHSIN
HOW ARE YOU FINDING AMERICA?

Trina, I love you SO MUCH, thanks for helping us stretch Niko’s brain.

ANY NEWS FROM THE OLD COUNTRY, CAAHSIN?

Which is a refreshing change from when he just insists on wearing pyjamas all the time, and the only reason it’s refreshing is because if someone drops by unexpected at noon at least one of us will be dressed and I won’t look like a TOTAL slackass. I, afterall, have a very important excuse as to why I wear all cotton jammies all the time if I can (a skin condition that I will one day, most likely, have to go on SSDI because of) (fun times).

A skin condition that only exists in my head but if I whine enough they'll eventually relent and give me social security for it!

Years ago, when I was in college, my university required all students to take cultural sensitivity classes. Not specific check-your-privilege type stuff, but we were required to take X amount of credit hours in classes dedicated to literature of a marginalized group or groups. Virtually all the students, myself included, actively resented this. It felt like a ploy to require us to take, and pay for, extra credit hours. 

CHECK YOUR FUCKING PRIVILEGE CIS WHINE BAGS
also that's exactly what it is.

I sullenly took a class on Hispanic-American authors and was surprised at how awesome it was, exposed to a lot of really great literature. So obviously, it ultimately paid off. But why weren’t any of those short stories, novels, or poems taught in “regular” English classes? When I took an English class on American Short Stories, every single author was White and Male. 

Fuck The Odyssey.
Borderlands is clearly what we should be reading instead.
A book barely coherent but it was written by a GLORIOUS POC WOMYN
Oh shit where was I
ended up watching Youtube for a half hour.
Youtube tells you there's a Girls' Generation video you should watch and who can say no to that?
Certainly not me.

I joked about how testosterone-filled the class was, me and another woman student joked about growing penises just from sitting in the class. Sure, we could have taken classes that covered women and only women, but we would have had to pay extra for that class/classes and at the time it might not have counted as a requirement for higher level general English classes, but toward womens studies classes (this may well have changed).
At that time, in the late 90s/early 00s, it was very firmly established that (white) men were authors and anyone who was a woman, was not white, was other. Not real. Not authentic. After all, if they were REAL authors, they’d be in with the STANDARD authors (who were white and male) and not shunted off to the side in specialty classes taken only by people studying minority authors or required to to satisfy cultural competency requirements. 

I guess fuck Mary Shelley and Harper Lee, then, because they managed to find a place in the canon.
And also fuck Alexander Dumas while I'm at it because he is a black man and yet found a place in the canon as well.
And he did it by being actually one of the greatest writers ever, not just because he was incidentally black and the canon must be multicultural.

It’s over ten years later, and Wikipedia currently has editors sorting American and Haitian novelists into “authors” and “women authors.” Male, you see, is the default.

Because most of the best authors are male.
If women want to be the default maybe they should outproduce men on great novels instead of whining they aren't included.

Wikipedia’s page on American Novelists notes that due to the vast number of novelists grouping like novelists together is a good thing. But surely every single novelist could be included in one or more group. Right now there’s genre classifications, but you could also add gender; geographical region lived in and/or written about (CF Southern Gothic); arbitrary chunks of time (5 years, 10 years, 15 years); historical epochs (writing pre-WWI, writing WWI-WWII); etc. Or you could just be all WHELP LET’S SEGREGATE THE WOMEN.

 ARE YOU SURE IT'S NOT SEGREGATED INTO CRAP YOU NEED TO READ VS. CRAP YOU DON'T?
HUH HUH HUH

As Abigail Grace Murdy notes:

    Within the Wikipedia community, women make up only 15% of contributors and only 9% of editors, so this unfortunate reshuffling hardly comes as a surprise. Within the publishing community, it comes as more of the same sore thing. Women writers are consistently underrepresented, their work receiving much less attention than that of their male counterparts. In 2012 the New York Review of Books reviewed only 40 female authors, as opposed to 215 male authors.

    The subcategory “American women novelists” simply reflects a widespread and belittling perception of women writers that already exists. But in reflecting that perception, Wikipedia perpetuates it, and the sexism marches on.

So
It's free to edit Wikipedia
anyone can do it
go edit Wikipedia you dumb sluts.
Don't just whine about it.
One day
I have a dream.
One day
women will learn if you do something about a problem you have something gets done about the problem you have. Sitting here whining about it does nothing.
You say it's a problem women aren't more included I say if you want to be included more be more than 15% of the contribution.
That tells me men make up 85% of the contribution to Wikipedia and are therefore allowed, by virtue that they produce 85% of the content, to say whatever they please.
Only whinging about gender equality until there's work to be done, eh?
I don't mean to put too fine a point on this but on a forum I was browsing recently there was a debate: why aren't women in video games but whine incessantly about sexism in video games?
Someone made a chart of women in video games and 90% of the chart was Japanese women.
Why was that?
I imagine that dialogue occurred in Japan and here's what happened:
"women aren't represented in video games enough"
"so get a job making video games"
"yeah you're right"
AND LO.
I AM SURE
BY SHEER COINCIDENCE
IT'S THE FIRST JAPANESE RPG TO FEATURE A FEMALE LEAD.
Same Asian wahm went on to produce and design some of the best video games there are.
If you had, say, thirty of these women there wouldn't be a debate about sexism in video games. The work would be clearly divided.
But oh, that was the 1980s when video games were unproven as an industry.
Now they're proven and suddenly women want a seat saved for them?
Where were you when this was starting?
You act like there's some grand conspiracy against women.
Maybe be a lead level designer on Sonic the Hedgehog and design the entirety of Phantasy Star 1-4 and then when you want to become a director at Sega you will be.
I doubt seriously anyone went "well we would give her the job but she is a woman" I bet that conversation went more like "well she helped make Sonic the Hedgehog and basically invented Phantasy Star so I see no one more qualified--"
Men are sexist, I'll grant, but at the end of the day I'm sure the Sega directors saw dollar signs instead of the fact they were hiring a woman.
If you can produce the money will always, always win out.
So getting back to my point: you want women to be included in college English classes?
Encourage them to produce something besides 50 Shades of Grey and Harry Potter and Twilight and instead something like The Count of Monte Cristo and I'm sure she'd be right in when her time came in 300 years.
Oh but that's really hard and might not make you 11 billion dollars.
Well then you picked your path and you can't bitch about it.
I'd argue a good author could do both because I sure don't see William Gibson hurting for cash but then again telling a good story is really, really hard.

Remember in 2011 when gosh golly wow Wikipedia just couldn’t figure out why there weren’t more women contributing to/editing Wikipedia and ‘reached out to women’ by complaining how uninvolved they were?

According to the American Novelist talk page the majority of the editing was done by a lone person. As one contributor points out:

It’s worth noting that a single user, Johnpacklambert is responsible for the vast majority of these edits. He has made thousands of edits, removing African Americans from the category “American Television Actors”, and erroneously placing female authors of young adult fiction into the American Girl Authors category (intended for books in the American Girl series).

Discussion on the talk page ranges from vilifying Filipacchi for “being a drive by columnist” who “doesn’t understand how Wikipedia works” to people who recognize there’s a problem and want to solve it, to people who don’t see anything wrong at all with consigning women authors to the fringes, on totally separate pages, because gosh! They’re WOMEN authors! What do you want?

So there you go.
Bullied out by one basement dwelling neckbeard.
No spine.
Can't help you.

Coverage of the issue, obviously, uses the word “sexist” a lot and those involved are quick to say that woah, wait, they aren’t sexist! They don’t, like, beat women or refuse to hire them or think they should be chained barefoot to ovens all day or anything! They’re nice people! How DARE you call them sexist? And, you know, I don’t think there’s a secret cabal of wikipedia editors sitting in a dark room smoking cigars and plotting how to Keep Women Down. But this sort of thing is an accurate reflection of the constant slow grind of male supremacy, of patriarchal society. This is oppression. Men create things, women are a subcategory.

I told you what you can do about it.
The problem is what I suggested you do is actually difficult and requires dedication and talent.
Whining, I think as we all know, takes no effort.
FUCKING GODDAMN IT I LOVE BLOGS.