This is a comment in reply to this open letter and this dent and the shenanigans that are claiming Mark Shuttleworth said “Explaining to girls what we actually do.” or something similar, which implies women don’t know technology. I hope Skud at http://geekfeminism.org approved my comment.
My Comment:
I’m not trying to start a flame fest. And really don’t feel like posting and tweeting to everyone that posts about this.
But the context you are assuming is not there. I watched the live stream. When Mark said try to explain to girls, he was not talking about women not understanding technology. He was talking about how hard the design work is to do, and that if things were designed poorly or had low usability, he would not know how to explain them to girls (my translation). The tone of his voice suggested sarcastic embarrassment, which implies he would prefer to impress girls. So he could have said the same thing about his father. Or better yet. If he was gay, he would have said “guys” not “girls”.
Also note that he was talking about design when he said it. So the argument that he thinks women are not hard core coders or programmers is moot. And yes he does say “guys” all the time. No one says “gals” by itself, because it sounds sexist. And saying “guys and gals” is as pain in the butt as saying gnu/linux. Everyone says “guys” when they mean “people”.
This incident really is like wild fire erupting before my eyes. All the tweets, re-tweets, and blog posts are echoing the same sentence fragment, and disintegrating into primal noises. Primates can also re-articulate the same sounds they heard someone else make, or wave a flag. Humans on the other hand can think critically, about what they heard.
Wouldn’t it make sense to see the video before claiming it is sexist? Or perhaps even know the context of what he was talking about? Or even the minimalist thing, of getting the actual quote?
Please for the love of reason. When the video or transcript is released, form your opinion. Don’t just re-quote rumors as yours. I respect the work feminists are doing. But this was a knee jerk reaction. Hear the guy in is own words.
I really hope Mark does not let rumors re-create the context of what he said.
I have been a huge fan of the Metal Gear games for almost 10 years now. A few months ago I noticed a fan made film in the works called Metal Gear Outer Heaven. I read up on it, and waited, but it seemed to never actually release. But now its out.
So in the spirit of the Metal Gear goodness, I decided to do a quick run-through of my favourite fan-made films. Here are my top 10:
This is probably my lest favourite. It is still good, but just not as good. It just has too many knee jerk, inconsequential, dirty jokes. That combined with the sloppy animation knocks it down a few rankings.
This is a new one for me. It is much better than the other fan-drawn ones. Because it does not completely fall down the toilet into humour, only little kids would laugh at. Nice animation technique too.
This was a bit cheesy. And lacking many scenes, that are filled in with story boards. But it was a relatively large undertaking to make this long beast. I like how the actor they have play Snake, is much more agile than the usual brutes I see.
This is a parody of the original Lupin III into, but made to match the MGS characters. Very cool. And very good artwork. It must have taken a while to animate.
This was one of my favourite fan films for a while. It is cheesy as hell. But has some very clever humour. I especially liked the Albert Wesker joke, and the Monopoly game.
My Faveorite. Very clever concept. You can see details from many of the MG games. Including Metal Gear Acid, and the original Metal Gear. Nice costumes too.
