Friday Reading S02E06

It’s my weekly list of some interesting things I’ve read which I think you might find interesting too.

“How A Hate Crime Changed My Life” – Hilal Isler

“I don’t remember falling asleep that night, but when I woke up the following morning, I found the front of my door had been vandalized. I was stunned and embarrassed. ‘Go home, you fucking sand-nigger’ was perhaps the most illuminating of the messages, in that it offered a directive, while simultaneously pointing the finger.”

Read.

Some notes on funding 65daysofstatic just received

“The idea of 65daysofstatic being held up in any way as evidence that this hyper-Dickensian, fucking nightmare of a Tory government is apparently supporting the arts, when in actual fact they are destroying any kind of infrastructure for future creativity at the grassroots level and plunging the most vulnerable parts of society into further misery, leaves a bad taste in our mouths. So here are some notes from us, just for the record”

Read this awesome rant which featured this amazing gif…

“Why We’re Not Photographing the Foo Fighters” – Steve Cavendish

“The great irony of all of this is that there will be tens of thousands of cameras in the audience [for Foo Fighters] at RFK in the form of smartphones, something that the band and its overzealous management company can’t police. If you take a great photo of the show, send it to us at editor@washingtoncitypaper.com or tweet it @WCP. If we run it in next week’s print edition, we’ll pay you for it. And we won’t ask you to sign over the copyright or your first born, either.”

ZING!

“How does a country ‘leave the euro’? What is involved? How long might it take? Here are the likely key steps.”

“The cult of Vice” – Chris Ip

“Vice’s attraction for its valuable millennial audience is predicated on the notion that it is real and raw, not plastic and prepackaged like the rest of the mainstream media world. But it may be truer to say that Vice simply packages itself more deftly than almost any other big media company.”

Read.

“The readers we ignore and the news they want” – Damon Kiesow

“By ceding ‘things that happen online’ to Internet blogs and digital news start-ups we have washed our hands of a huge swath of human existence. And, we have done so for reasons that are as much due to structure and vision as resources.”

Read.

So much this: 18 VHS Struggles That Today’s Teens Will Never Understand

“What was it like to be in Gander, Newfoundland during and after 9/11?”

The retelling of people’s unrepeatable childhood experiences are endlessly fascinating somehow. Read it on Quora YES I KNOW QUORA IN INTERESTING CONTENT SHOCKER WHO KNEW?

Bless Gary Neville being this nervous about playing a guitar in front of people.

“The Tube strikers are trying to help you, and you spit poison in their faces. You don’t deserve this strike.”

“Brianna Wu: ‘The video games industry has a problem, and it’s not the players’” – John Kennedy

“I confess to Wu that prior to October 2014 I didn’t know who she was, but that month as I read about the rape and death threats and specifically about Wu and her husband having to leave their own home, it was clear something was rotten in the state of the games industry.”

Read.

This Industry is Fucked

“Ever since I started speaking at conferences and contributing to open source projects I have been endlessly harassed. I’ve gotten hundreds of private messages on IRC and emails about sex, rape, and death threats. People emailing me saying they jerked off to my conference talk video (you’re welcome btw) is mild in comparison to sending photoshopped pictures of me covered in blood.”

Read.

“Stop Acting So Surprised: How Microaggressions Enforce Stereotypes in Tech” – Livio De La Cruz

“We’ve been excluding all sorts of people from our field, not just women. For instance, according to the stereotype, if you learned to program at a young age, then that’s indicative of a ‘natural’ affinity towards the field. But it’s actually just indicative of having grown up in a household with expensive devices, reliable internet access, parents/guardians who didn’t actively discourage high usage of technology, enough luck to have even been exposed to the concept of programming, and a ton of free time to tinker with it all.”

Read.