My party and I are about to face the Devourer (black pudding). DM literally represents it as chocolate pudding.
Me, the Cleric: I cast Spiritual Weapon in the form of a giant spoon
DM: I had this coming didn’t I
Susan Fowler Rigetti, a former engineer at Uber, describes in a blog post her experience in a workplace where sexual harassment takes place with impunity, and people who are abused at work are further abused by the organization for which they work.
Readers recently saved the hemovanadin article from Wikipedia’s ongoing extinction event through extraordinary measures, but that’s just one of over 2 million stub articles deleted or at risk of deletion by Wikipedia’s entrenched bureaucrats. Today’s example is Chickenhead, a notable hip-hop song killed by deletionists in 2015.
Let me say at the onset that the content from Chickenhead will be restored thanks to this article, but I do not have the capability to write an additional 2 million more articles in my lifetime to save the remaining 2 million stubs from deletionists like RHaworth, the hemovanadin killer whose itchy deletion finger was noted by a commenter in my previous article as directly responsible for that editor’s abandoning the project.
In Wikipedia parlance, a stub is an article that needs to be expanded. Almost every article started as a stub. Here’s the stub for United States, started days before 9/11, itself an unreferenced stub days later.
Chickenhead was a well-sourced stub about a hip-hop song featuring notable artists Project Pat and La Chat. It was the breakout single on a notable album. It’s been discussed by a number of academics. It’s also important because it was disambiguated from several articles of the same name, including one on sexual slang, and one on a play of the same name. It was deleted for the same reason hundreds of thousands of stubs have already been deleted: misuse of Wikipedia’s deletion policies. The European play remains but the hip-hop song got killed.
Here’s what typically happens:
1. An editor, usually a woman or a minority group member, writes a stub for a requested article, including references and assertion of notability. 2. That editor leaves the project, typically because of harassment or because someone deleted one of their articles. 3. A deletionist marks the article for deletion. 4. With no one left to get notifications and defend the stub, it gets railroaded through deletion, or worse, speedy deletion. 5. All edit history about the article is removed, a violation of Wikipedia’s transparency mandate. 6. Repeat two million times.
What kinds of stubs are most at risk from deletionists? Articles written by young people, about generational interests, or pop culture, or something outside the experience of the primarily older white male deletionists who consider themselves arbiters of “acceptable” encyclopedic content. While the most obscure steam locomotive or public transportation station deserves a detailed article in their world, things of interest to others, especially young people, women, and minorities, like Kate Middleton’s wedding dress, or a hip-hop battle of the sexes that charted with millions in sales, is a target by these same deletionists.
Two things annoyed me about the responses to the previous piece. Some people said, “It’s restored now, so Wikipedia obviously works.” Wrong. The only reason there is a hemovanadin article is because I took the time to point out the deletion, and readers took action. If I’d been hit by a bus last week, that article would have stayed killed indefinitely, like hundreds of thousands of recently killed articles. Other people said, “These periodic articles about the death of Wikipedia are silly.” Wrong. I am not saying Wikipedia is dying or going extinct. I am saying that Wikipedia as an ecosystem is in the midst of a major extinction event. As the extinction event article states, this means there is a “sharp change in diversity” within an ecosystem. Deletionists can be characterized by a number of attributes, where they favor things of interest to them, like trains, anime, video games, female porn stars, coding, weapons, and so on. Look up a random female porn star and a random female scientist from those categories, and you’ll see what deletionists prioritize. The Pokemon Bulbasaur gets 1800 words, hemovanadin gets speedily deleted, and Chickenhead gets prodded and deleted without challenge, because editors writing science stubs and hip-hop stubs have been driven away by deletionists.
Do you have a story of abuse of speedy deletion? Was an article you meticulously created destroyed without due process? Those of us who believe in open culture want to hear from you. Leave a comment on this article or contact me directly via my website.
Ireland’s abortion laws are among the most barbaric in the world – among its many deficits, it forces women to carry unviable fetuses to term, making them labor to deliver babies who live short hours in extreme pain before dying before them.
The ban also provides for 14 year prison sentences for women who import pharmaceuticals used to induce abortion.
An “ad-hoc, non-affiliated group of activists, academics, artists and trade unionists” calling itself Strike4Repeal are set to strike on March 8 – International Women’s Day, also the Day Without a Woman protests in America – if the government doesn’t call for a referendum on the abortion law before then.
The Polish and Irish abortion laws are similarly overbroad, and share a similar origin: conservative Catholic lobbyists, with Church backing, who use the faith’s enormous cash reserves to forge alliances with misogynist elements in the far-right movement to craft these anti-woman policies.
Lee Jae-yong is nominally “vice-chairman” of Samsung, but his father, Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, is considered to be a mere figurehead, with Lee Jae-yong as the true boss of the company.
On Friday morning, Korean police placed Lee Jae-yong in custody at the Seoul Detention Centre, acting on a Seoul Central District Court arrest warrant for charges of bribery, perjury and embezzlement. The charges are part of a larger scandal that is rocking South Korea from the top down, whose most high-profile feature so far was the 2016 impeachment of President Park Geun-hye.
The prosecutors allege that Lee Jae-yong paid $37m in bribes to cult organizations affiliated with Choi Soon-sil, who was also arrested in 2016 – and who has been characterized as a kind of Rasputin figure in the Park Geun-hye administration, carrying on the work of her father, the Shamanistic-Evangelical cult leader, Choi Tae-min.
Until today, no Samsung executive had ever been the subject of criminal charges.
I can’t tell you what to do, or how to feel in those situations. I can only tell you what I would do.
I would talk to the DM right away, and I wouldn’t apologize for my feelings. This is one of those things that I think is pretty binary: rape jokes aren’t okay, and I don’t want to be around anyone who thinks that they are. If the DM makes excuses or isn’t willing to take your concerns seriously, I would tear my character sheet up right there and leave the group.
The problem isn’t just that this guy thought it was okay to make that joke, but that everyone at the table didn’t have a problem with it. I don’t know how far you want to take it, and what your personal red line is, but I’d talk to the DM first, and then I would ask for a moment at the beginning of the next session to address the group about it.
I would say something like, “I really enjoy this campaign, and I like being part of this group. But the last time we played, I felt really uncomfortable when a rape joke was made at the table, and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. If I’m going to continue to be part of this group, I want you to know that I’m not okay with that. Maybe you don’t know that 1 in 4 women has been sexually assaulted or raped, and maybe you don’t know that when you make those jokes or go along with those jokes, you’re communicating to the women around you that you don’t take it seriously, and that you’re subtly communicating to the men around you that rape and assault isn’t a big deal. Literally every woman I know has been sexually harassed at some point in their lives. More than half have been sexually assaulted, and I know several rape survivors. Rape jokes aren’t funny to me.
“I hope that this was a thing that was just sort of blurted out, that wasn’t considered, that doesn’t reflect your values or who you are. Like I said, I’m having a really good time being part of this campaign, but if this sort of thing is not a problem for you, I can’t be part of this, and I’m ready to leave right now if that’s the case.”
Or something like that. I think you get the gist of what I’m going for. If they minimize your feelings, get up and leave. There will always be other games to play in. If they want to deflect it minimize it, because they’re embarrassed, give them a moment to react, and see if you can engage in dialog about the realities of sexual assault for women.
I always believe that it’s worth making the effort to educate and enlighten someone, but that’s not the only way to deal with these things, but that’s absolutely not your responsibility. Their feelings aren’t your responsibility. What I’m suggesting is that you make it clear that this isn’t funny or acceptable, and that if they think it is, you’re not going to be part of the group. In a perfect world, they’ll sincerely apologize. In a perfect world, they will realize that they hadn’t seriously considered the reality of sexual assault, and they’ll own their actions.
I know that a lot of gamers read this Tumblr, and I know that a lot of women read this Tumblr. Maybe someone else has advice or experience they’d care to share with you.
I’m sorry that you have to deal with this, and I hope that it’s resolved in a way that lets you continue to play in the campaign, and helps these dudes grow a level in humanity.
