Status Update

Feeling exceptionally bitter this afternoon, and since I missed last week, you get a double-dose of doom this time around.

Browsing

Lots of good writing about GamerGate and trolling since last I posted:

• The best overall thing comes from Deadspin, of all places: The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It’s Gamergate, which explains why GamerGate should matter to non-gamers.
• Michael Handler takes that idea further with The Paranoid Style in Gaming Misogyny
• Aaron Sankin comes to the dismal conclusion that GamerGate’s trolls are winning’ because they are successfully scaring women away from the game industry, and real journalists are even less likely to take games seriously as a beat, leaving the industry in the hands of what Tim Maly has called the enthusiast press (Remember, as many others has have pointed out, GamerGate not only isn’t about ethics in journalism, it’s actively hostile to honest journalism).
• I haven’t read it yet but Pew has a thing out about online harassment.

And at least a couple answers to the question of what to do about it:

• The Least Twitter Could Do
• BlockTogether helps out with one part of that.
• And in the UK: Internet trolls face up to two years in jail under new laws

I don’t know really know what this and this are satirizing, but I found them funny anyway.

In local news: Oregon’s governor is corrupt and/or incompetent, but the Willamette Week makes a strong case that he’s still better than the alternative. Meanwhile, Rick Turoczy points out that Portland is becoming a marketing technology hub. Which makes sense since Webtrends is our one big tech startup success story (since SurveyMonkey moved away and Jive, which also moved, isn’t necessarily a success), and Wieden + Kennedy is a real anchor-company for the city. It also occurs to me that thinking of Portland as an ad agency town helps explain much of the city’s transformation over the past few years. Elsewhere, The Baffler editor John Summers said “When you’re in Portland and you don’t own your own house—if they’re bringing in tech people, you should just pack your bags.” And it’s not just tech bros coming. It’s ad tech bros. *shudder*

Meanwhile:

• More on why medicine is still a horrible profession.
• More Cities Are Making It Illegal To Hand Out Food To The Homeless (because homeless people are bad for the property values of the homed)
• My computer says that my cat doesn’t love me.

Oh, and the Washington Post reports that the Siberian Mystery Crater might have been created by thawing methane gas, and if that’s the case then we’re proper fucked.

A lot of people like this piece where Quinn Norton tries to find some hope in a doomed world, but I’m sorry, I just couldn’t get through it. But maybe you’ll find some comfort there? If not, perhaps Drunk Jeff Goldblum will cheer you up:

Watching

I rewatched Funky Forest and it gets better with every viewing. It’s pure mad genius. No, it doesn’t make any more narrative sense on rewatching, but it starts to make its own sort of internal sense, the way the most absurd of dreams make sense while you’re dreaming them.

Reading

The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things by Bruce Sterling

Listening

But I feel like I’m about to go through another doom metal phase.