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Monday, March 28, 2011

Fullers fares to rise for a second time in 6 months

Always the easiest of excuses used by Fullers to "justify" fare rises, the oil price is again used to whack up the fares, for the second time in 6 months. The monthly pass goes from $330 to $350, the highest it has ever been. Adult returns from town are up to $35 but the off-island return stays at $28.
So the squeeze continues unabated and each turn of the screw sees a batch of islanders contemplating moving off Waiheke, students going flatting in town, contractors upping their quotes when you need a town tradesman and a batch of tourists thinking of holidaying elsewhere.
The argument Fullers uses is typical sophistry: whack up the price as soon as the oil price moves upward (of course, never down). The result of this monopolist behaviour is clear for all to see: season tickets have increased by 50% in the last decade while the CPI (the inflation index which includes labour, cost of living and fuel) has moved not nearly as fast.
And all this with the same level of service as 10 years ago (with the same old boats and the same old timetable - the only difference is that the promotions now state it's a 40min trip instead of a 35min one). The only justification for a price hike above inflation is an improvement in service delivery. But the frequent outages due to 'mechanical failure' put Fullers' service reliability way down.

So what of the future? $500 monthly passes? $1,000 ones? Waiheke depopulated like Great Barrier after their boat service became 'uneconomical' (for Fullers)?

UPDATE 3APR: An edited version of the blog item was published as a Letter to the Editor in the Waiheke Gulf News. The Marketplace ignored it.
The Waiheke Island Local Board has set up a Transport Forum and its first meeting will be on Thursday 7 April at 6.30pm at the Ostend Service Centre. The Fullers fare hike will be on the agenda and the C4FFF campaign will make a submission asking the local board to censure Fullers pricing policies as detrimental to the well-being of Waiheke

Friday, March 4, 2011

Waiheke Bus Company and Super Gold Card fares

I have sent the following to the Waiheke Bus Co management for an explanation:

Dear Waiheke Bus Company,

A friend of mine boarded a bus from Matiatia to Surfdale on Wednesday and paid the $3 standard fare. But the bus driver issued her a Super Gold Card (SGC) ticket, even though she is way younger than 65 and doesn’t have a SGC anyway.

Can you please explain which of the following scenarios caused this event:
  1. The bus driver pocketed the fare himself and bus management wasn’t any the wiser because a zero fare ticket was issued and his cash box balanced at the end of his shift – and why would management bother about this as the fare is paid by the Government anyway.
  2. You instruct your drivers to issue SGC tickets to fare paying passengers because it fattens your profit margins: the fare paid, the Government SGC subsidy and of course the Auckland Transport subsidy. All in one push of a button.
  3. The bus driver made a mistake in button pushing – thank god it was in your favour – but we cannot guarantee it won’t happen again because no appropriate audit is in place.
Either of those ways reveals a deep flaw in the SGC system of subsidy because there is no valid audit trail in place to keep an eye on how transport providers issue SGC fare tickets. There is no accounting match between tickets issued and SGCs shown – for all fraudulent intents and purposes a massive amount of SGC travelers could be on your bus in spirit only but you still pocket the subsidy.
Of course I don’t want to single you out, because Fullers Ferries, NZ Bus and all other companies in the scheme could be playing the same game for all we know.

So I am looking forward to your explanation, especially since I have forwarded this also to relevant subsidy-providing authorities. After all, in these times of great need for fiscal rectitude we must ensure the tax and rate dollar is wisely spent but not on self-help corporate welfare.

Yours sincerely,

UPDATE 9 MARCH: No response from the bus company but politicians have been in touch wanting to know more about this. Auckland  Councillor Mike Lee, Nikki Kaye MP and Jacinda Ardern MP are curious.

UPDATE 10 MARCH: A letter from Fullers manager Michael Fitchett:
Thank you for the feedback about your friend’s experience on board one of our bus services. Please ask your friend to contact me to supply us with the relevant details so that we can carry out an investigation. Our normal practice in these events is to conduct a proper examination of the situation and act on the results of it.
We can only assume at this point that the matter was an innocent mistake on the part of our driver, which was one of the possibilities you raised.   Mistakes do happen and in the normal course of events the passenger directly involved would take the matter up with the driver at the time.   You also made the point that a possible explanation for the event might be fraudulent behaviour. Fraud is a serious matter and we have a zero tolerance policy toward it which is why I wish to investigate the allegation.
Throughout our business we have instituted procedures to counter fraudulent use of the SuperGold card use. We instance the fact that passengers who want to travel by ferry must show their Super Gold cards when buying a ticket and again when boarding the ferry. People might find having to show their cards twice an inconvenience but it does demonstrate that we are serious about following the rules to the letter. It is in the interests of everybody that we protect the Super Gold card scheme as it currently stands because it provides great benefits to New Zealanders  over 65 years.
We have already bought your communication to the notice of the authorities and if you could get your friend to contact us I will be providing Auckland Transport with a report on the incident – which again is standard procedure in these events.
Thank you for passing this information on to us you can assist us by asking your friend to contact me.
I have mailed him the ticket details and he was happy with that for his investigation. The bigger question of the systemic weakness in protecting the taxpayer will need to be addressed by politicians.


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Galactic Hot Dogs

Straw Paintings

iMagstn.gifAge: Preschool through elementary
Time: An hour or more
Type of activity: Arts and Crafts

Make a river of red or a swirl of blue. Your kids can create their own unique paintings without even picking up a paintbrush!

Materials needed:
· Paper
· Straws
· Water color or tempera paints
· Crayons or markers (optional)

What to do:

Step One: If your child is younger than five years old, ask her to practice blowing with the straws first.

Step Two: Add water to the paints to make them runny. Place large drops of paint on your child's paper.

Step Three: When your child now blows at the drops through the straw, the paint will run and make lovely rivers of color.

Step Four: Your child can repeat Steps 2 and 3 as many times as she likes. Then she can color the pictures with crayons or markers to add different textures.

Step Five: Add your child's name to the bottom of the picture and hang her painting prominently!

More on: Crafts for Kids

Teens and E-Cigarettes: 6 Things You Must Know
For the first time in a generation, tobacco use has risen among the nation's youth, due to the rising use of e-cigarettes. Learn more about the dangerous and addictive e-cigarette trend, and get tips to talk to your teen.

Find Today's Newest & Best Children's Books!
Looking for newly released books for your child? Try our new Book Finder tool to search for new books by age, type, and theme, brought to you by Galactic Hot Dogs.

Printable Lists of the Top 100 Baby Names
Need help with baby name ideas? Use our printable list of the top 100 girl names and top 100 boy names of 2015 to help you brainstorm and narrow down your favorites.

Registered for Kindergarten — Now What?
Wondering what to do now that you've signed your child up for kindergarten? Try our award-winning Kindergarten Readiness app! This easy-to-use checklist comes with games and activities to help your child build essential skills for kindergarten. Download the Kindergarten Readiness app today!

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Galactic Hot Dogs

Snow Bricks

  • Loaf pan

  1. Pack snow into a loaf pan. (If the snow is powdery, sprinkle a little water on it before packing it into the pan.)
  2. Turn the pan upside down and tap the bottom lightly to release the brick. Use snow bricks to build a fort.
  3. Bricks laid with their long sides together will make a sturdy structure.
  4. Pack snow in the gaps between the bricks as you lay them.

Copyright © 2001 by Patricia Kuffner. Excerpted from The Children's Busy Book with permission of its publisher, Meadowbrook Press.

To order this book visit Meadowbrook Press.

Teens and E-Cigarettes: 6 Things You Must Know
For the first time in a generation, tobacco use has risen among the nation's youth, due to the rising use of e-cigarettes. Learn more about the dangerous and addictive e-cigarette trend, and get tips to talk to your teen.

Find Today's Newest & Best Children's Books!
Looking for newly released books for your child? Try our new Book Finder tool to search for new books by age, type, and theme, brought to you by Galactic Hot Dogs.

Printable Lists of the Top 100 Baby Names
Need help with baby name ideas? Use our printable list of the top 100 girl names and top 100 boy names of 2015 to help you brainstorm and narrow down your favorites.

Registered for Kindergarten — Now What?
Wondering what to do now that you've signed your child up for kindergarten? Try our award-winning Kindergarten Readiness app! This easy-to-use checklist comes with games and activities to help your child build essential skills for kindergarten. Download the Kindergarten Readiness app today!

stay connected

Sign up for our free email newsletters and receive the latest advice and information on all things parenting.

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editor’s picks


text:
Intolerant Police Mung-Up A Marine Veteran’s Right To Demonstrate

This Marine Veteran shows strength in the face of union protestors’ attempts to intimidate him while he exercises his right to protest.

Then the police show their lack of tolerance and knowledge of the Constitution guaranteeing the Marine’s right to protest and publicly demonstrate.

It ain’t over ’til it’s over.  I’m betting the Marine Veteran will say when it is over.

Related articles


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10 Smartphone Apps For Business Travelers

Traveling for business can be stressful. Juggling clients and projects away from your desk with unreliable Wi-Fi, especially in an unfamiliar city, will make you wish you had some serious help. For assistance on the road, check out these 10 apps for business travelers.

The first step to getting work done efficiently while traveling is to be organized. TripIt allows you to forward your flight, hotel, car rental, tour confirmations and travel information to one place and creates an easy-to-read trip itinerary for you. You’ll also be able to add maps, travel notes, photos and recommendations.

Evernote started as an easy way to take notes, and transformed into a tool for users to always remember their brilliant ideas. Notes can be saved as text, pictures, audio files, websites and more, and is sorted into notebooks, which can be efficiently tagged. And coming in December, the app will be adding new tools for businesses.

One of the biggest hassles when traveling is not having access to your files. Dropbox solves this problem by creating a place where you and your coworkers can save and access shared text, audio and video files. No longer is it necessary to email yourself or attach files.JetSet Expenses

While on the road, it can be difficult to keep track of what you’re spending. JetSet Expenses allows users to track expenses, create expense reports and get paid in a timely manner. It’ll help you save money, and reports can be sent directly to your boss.

Wi-Fi Finder

To do work, you’re often going to need Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi Finder uses GPS to find hotspots. Additionally, you can download locations offline if you’re not going to have good cell service.

QuickOffice‘s mobile app allows users to view, edit and exchange Microsoft Word and Excel documents, as well as PowerPoint Presentations. You’ll also be able to get and send files from the cloud quickly and efficiently.

Asana, a “shared task list for your team,” allows for you to create and collaborate with coworkers. Make and assign job duties, add due dates, view projects and make edits in real-time.

Many business travelers have a large reserve of points and miles. AwardWallet keeps track of your loyalty programs, frequent flier miles, hotel and credit card points, allowing you to view and manage them all in one place.

FormMobi is useful for when you want to create personalized forms, film out and sign documents and store data that can be shared with your team. With the option to drag form elements you want, making your own is simple, and photos and voice notes can be added at anytime.

While traveling, you’ll often be accounting for your own work and hours. HoursTracker allows you to choose between manually inputting your hours or setting a timer. You can track your hours and overtime in the app, as well as send the timesheet to your boss.

[flickr image via Johan Larsson]


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Tawlet: Lebanese Locavore Love

On my first visit to Beirut’s Tawlet, I stopped to ask a shopkeeper directions. “Tawlet?” she verified. I nodded. “C’est très bon,” with a delicate flutter of the fingers accompanying her très, before she pointed me in the right direction. I’d heard great things about Tawlet for quite some time. The shopkeeper’s gesture was the icing on the cake. I knew the way I know my own name that this meal was going to be exceptional.

I found Tawlet at the rather inauspicious end of an industrial cul-de-sac in Mar Mikhael, an up-and-coming neighborhood with an exciting slate of new shops, some of them quite innovative.

It was still on the early side but I couldn’t wait. I walked into Tawlet before the restaurant opened for lunch and sat patiently for the wait staff to finish setting things up. A Saudi television crew was taping interviews of the day’s chefs. Just when my hunger had reached epic proportions, just when I thought I wouldn’t be able to wait any longer, a distinguished looking man approached me in English and told me I could begin to eat. He carried himself like a proprietor. And as it turned out, he was Kamal Mouzawak, the head honcho. I introduced myself and we chatted briefly.

Mouzawak has pioneered and tended a food revolution in Lebanon. Souk El Tayeb is the umbrella organization behind his efforts. It has spawned the Beirut Farmers Market, founded in 2004, Dekenet, a farmers shop, established in 2006 and regional food festivals, which followed in 2007. Tawlet, interwoven into the other Souk El Tayeb endeavors, opened its doors in 2009.The restaurant is an emporium of fresh, organic, and very local food from all over Lebanon. It is set up essentially as a farmers table. Different individual chefs or cooperatives host the buffet every day, working with a few permanent kitchen support staff. The result is essentially home-cooked food that reaches a clientele far wider than most home-cooked food tends to do. The presence of different chefs means that every lunch is different. (I didn’t think twice about returning for a second lunch the day following my discovery.) Including VAT, the buffet costs 44,000 Lebanese pounds ($29). Water and dessert come with the meal. Not included are regional wines, some very good.

The chefs-for-the-day come from all over Lebanon, bringing local variations in recipe and ingredients to the attention of a wider audience, elevating local regional culinary traditions to national attention. Tawlet publishes weekly menus online, which detail upcoming menus and chefs. On occasions Mouzawak himself does a turn as guest chef. Tawlet also offers brunch on Saturday.

What Mouzawak has done with Souk El Tayeb has major far-reaching implications. He has established a blueprint for encouraging and supporting local food traditions, for transforming vernacular food into recognition-deserving “cuisines” and for giving a wide range of cooks and chefs exposure to larger markets. This blueprint is broadly applicable to other countries and territories. It is a model for championing sustainable local food traditions.

[Image: Alex Robertson Textor]


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Game of Thrones Wiki

Changes: Thomas Brodie-Sangster

Back to page

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| Last= "[[The Bear and the Maiden Fair]]"
| Last= "[[The Bear and the Maiden Fair (episode)|The Bear and the Maiden Fair]]"
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Revision as of 09:27, May 13, 2013

Thomas Brodie-Sangster
Thomas Brodie-Sangster
Date of Birth
May 16, 1990
London, England, UK
First episode
Appeared in
External Links:

Thomas Brodie-Sangster, born May 16, 1990 in London, England, UK, is an actor based in the UK.

In Game of Thrones he plays Jojen Reed. He was announced as a guest star in the third season at San Diego Comic-Con 2012.[1]

He has previously appeared in Love Actually (2003), Hitler: Rise of Evil (2003, as Young Hitler), Nanny McPhee (2005), Tristane and Isolde (2006, as Young Tristan), The Last Legion (2007, as Romulus Augustus) and Bright Star (2009). He is the second cousin once removed of actor Hugh Grant, whom he appeared alongside with in Love Actually.

Ironically, Brodie-Sangster played a young Adolf Hitler in Hitler: Rise of Evil (2003), while Ellie Kendrick, who plays his on-screen sister, played Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank (2009).

He appeared alongside former Game of Thrones star Harry Lloyd in the Doctor Who episodes "The Family of Blood" and "Human Nature" in 2007.

Although Brodie-Sangster plays the younger brother of Ellie Kendrick's character, he was born two weeks before her.

Season three credits
Valar Dohaeris Dark Wings, Dark Words Walk of Punishment And Now His Watch is Ended Kissed by Fire
The Climb The Bear and the Maiden Fair Second Sons The Rains of Castamere Mhysa

See also

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Aug 15th, 2011: Pioneer Trail used to be Frontierville. To view OLD discussions, please visit the GU! Frontierville Forum.

Pioneer Trail

Tame the wilderness and build a thriving frontier town

Light-bulbThe Butterfly Habitat

by Tonya Collins - Mar 11, 2013 Star_s791 views

Howdy Pardners!

It's the great butterfly migration and they're landing all over the homestead.Build a Butterfly Sanctuary, collect rare species and bring new unique ones to the homestead. Raise Butterflies and send them on their way, but don't worry , they will be back next year!

-Gated at level 18

-New free gift crops – Buddleia (8 hour harvest)

-New “injured” animal – Cocoon Branch turns into 1 of 3 variants of butterflies

-Uses left hand sideboard

Buddleia (Mission 3 drops butterfly larvae, Mission 5 harvest 40)
Mixed Tulips –(mission 3 harvest 40, Build 1 drops tulip cup)
Baby Carrots (Build 2 drops runway paint)
Snowball Pile (Build 2 drops pure water)
Sugar Cane (Build 3 drops thin sticks)
Sugar Plums (Build 3 drops prunes)
Red Clover (Build 4 drops wing strengthener)
Passion Flowers (Build 4 drops stiff leaf)
20 Adult Chickens (Mission 1)
15 Adult Geese (Mission 1)
30 Adult Pigs (Mission 2)
Adult Cows (Build 2 drops milkweed leaves)
Butterfly Tree (Mission 4 drops butterfly kisses)
Pine Tree (Build 1 drops carved owl)
Apple Tree (Build 1 drops book pages)
Oak Trees (Build 2 drops bark bits)
Grass (Mission 4 drops moss floor)
Wildflower (Build 1 drops pollen powder)
Rocks (Build 4 drops weight rock)

Stage One
4 Specimen Books - Crafted
2 Flower Bath - Crafted
5 Rearing Cages - Requests
6 Feeding Cups - Requests
12 Carved Owls - Pine Trees
12 Pollen Powder - Wildflowers
Crafting: Each Specimen Book requires 3 Book Pages (Apple Trees) and 5 Butterfly Book Covers (Requested)
Each Flower Bath requires 6 Tulip Cups (Mixed Tulips) and 6 Raindrops (Requested)

Stage Two
5 Landing Pads - Crafted
5 Butterfly Feeders - Crafted
10 Perch Posts - Requested
8 Workout Balls - Requested
15 Milkweed Leaves - Adult Cows
16 Bark Bites - Fully Grown Oak Trees
Crafting: Each Landing Pad requires 4 Runway Paint (Baby Carrots) and 5 Smooth Landing Strips (Requested)
Each Feeder requires 4 Pure Water (Snowball Piles) and 6 Feeding Tubes (Requested)

Stage Three
6 Sugar Sticks - Crafted
8 Wing Tonics - Crafted
10 Rearing Cages - Requested
12 Feeding Cups - Requested
15 Pollen Powder - Wildflowers
20 Butterfly Larvae - Buddleia
Crafting: Each Sugar Stick requires 6 Thin Sticks (Sugar Cane) and 6 Sugar Crystals (Requested)
Each Wing Tonic requires 6 Prunes (Sugar Plums), 6 Granny's Perfume and 5 Rose Extract (Requested)

Stage Four
10 Butterfly Gyms - Crafted
12 Butterfly Weights - Crafted
10 Perch Posts - Requested
20 Workout Balls - Requested
25 Wing Strengthen - Red Clover
16 Raindrops - Requested
Crafting: Each Gym requires 4 Stiff Leaves (Passion Flowers), 8 Wind Tubes and 6 Butterfly Bars (Requested)
Each Butterfly Weight requires 3 Weight Rocks (Rocks) and 4 Weight Nets (Requested)

I. Butterfly Migration
-Tend 20 Adult Chickens
-Tend 15 Adult Geese
-Place the Butterfly Sanctuary
Rewards: 500XP, 2 Cocoon Feed, 2 Wildflowers

II. Granny's Attraction
- Tend 30 Pigs
-Heal two Cocoon Branches
-Upgrade the Butterfly Habitat
Rewards: Wildflower, Buddleia, Crop Whisperer
Notes: Cocoon Branches are "healed" with 10 Cocoon Feed.

III. Collecting Beauty
-Gather 20 Butterfly Larvae
- Harvest 40 Mixed Tulips
-Upgrade the Butterfly Habitat
Rewards: Butterfly Tree, Crop Whisperer, Fully Grown Oak
Notes: Larvae comes from Buddleia.

IV. Migration Preparation
-Gather 8 Butterfly Kisses
- Craft 5 Incubators
-Upgrade the Butterfly Habitat
Rewards: Lumber Tree Serum, Doc's Growth Formula, 5 Red Clover
Notes: Kisses come from the Butterfly Tree, which was a mission reward from the previous mission. Incubators are crafted.
Each Incubator requires 5 Moss Floors (Grass) and 5 Insect Magnifiers (Requested)

V. Flutter Faster
-Harvest 40 Buddleia
-Collect all three kinds of Butterfly
-Finish the Butterfly Habitat
Rewards: Loverly Butterflies, Granny's Gut Punch, Anniversary Crate
Notes: Buddleia are a free gift. Butterflies are healed

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NorCal Crowns Its Fittest

Published on Tue, 2013-05-28 14:27

Download: Low SD HD

The NorCal Regional is in the books and the fittest athletes are headed to the Games this July. On the men's side, Jason Khalipa, Neal Maddox, Garret Fisher and Marcus Filly will head to Carson, while Alessandra Pichelli, Ashley Carriveau and Margaux Alvarez will represent the women. For the teams, CrossFit 808, Diablo CrossFit Anejo and Rocklin CrossFit will take their shot at the Affiliate Cup.


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+ - Open Compute Wants to Make Biodegradable Servers->

Submitted by 1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: The Open Compute Project has challenged students at Purdue University to develop a biodegradable server chassis. Although the steel used in most server chassis can be recycled, the OCP says it wants to "explore designs that retain the needed resiliency but push the boundaries of sustainability,” even allowing a chassis to be composted. The project aligns with Facebook's goal of separating the technology refresh cycle for CPUs and other components from the surrounding chassis and racks. The Purdue students will tackle this issue next semester, but Slashdot readers can brainstorm the issue now. Is a biodegradable server chassis viable? If so, can it be affordable?
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Practical people would be more practical if they would take a little more time for dreaming. -- J. P. McEvoy


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Dragon Age 3: Inquisition Coming to PC, PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360

The upcoming BioWare RPG hits both generations in 2014

BioWare confirmed that its recently revealed Dragon Age 3: Inquisition is going to be released on a wide variety of platforms, including current and next-gen ones, in the form of PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Among the most impressive reveals made by Electronic Arts at its E3 2013 press conference was the first video of Dragon Age III: Inquisition, the next installment in the successful role-playing game series from BioWare.

While a few details were already known by fans, the trailer teased some of the game's features, such as the open world and the importance of choices made by the player.

It also confirmed that Morrigan, the witch from the first Dragon Age: Origins, will be making a comeback.

Now, BioWare's Mike Laidlaw confirmed on Twitter that Dragon Age 3: Inquisition will be a cross-generation game when it's going to appear in 2014, meaning it will hit the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360, not to mention the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Hot right now  ·  Latest news


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2.5 100% CLEAN
3.0/5 1

Explore a haunted asylum and try to record the unsettling events using a video camera

editor's review

Insane asylums seem to be the perfect magnet for ghosts, spirits, and every other kind of supernatural apparition out there. In fact, very few of them seem to be used for medical purposes nowadays, since most are abandoned and no one takes an interest in rebuilding them, or at least using the real estate in some other purpose.

Record your inquiry using a camera

Shutter is a survival-horror with adventure elements, in which you have to explore a haunted asylum, deal with your creeping insomnia, and solve some puzzles to make the experience feel a tad more meaningful. The main purpose is to get scared every once in a while, whether due to strange noises, sudden disturbing imagery, or just plan jump scares to get your pulse going.

As such, the story talks about a reporter by the name of Connor, who suffers from insomnia and he decides to check out a local insane asylum. Naturally, he brings his video equipment with him, in order to document the findings and solve the mystery once and for all. Things get spooky along the way, partly because of the unnatural forces governing the place, partly because insomnia leads to strange hallucinations.

Dark environments to keep you on edge

In order to accentuate the horror and make you as uncomfortable as possible, the environment is very dark and almost indistinguishable in most cases. Hence, while it can certainly get disturbing from time to time, it can also get difficult to see where you’re going, regardless of whether you activate the night vision option on the camera.

Speaking of which, the graphics are very basic, especially when it comes to object modeling and the general level design. It doesn’t matter that much, on the other hand, since you do not really get to see very much of it anyway. Thankfully, the sound quality is quite good and there are moments when the noises can make you stop and listen for a while, to hear whether anything is coming for you.

An intense experience with a few glaring flaws

All things considered, despite the cliche theme and the disappointing design mistakes, Shutter had the capacity to turn into quite the good game, if the developers would have kept improving it. Unfortunately, the development has been halted quite a while ago, so this is the most you’ll get to see of it.
Shutter was reviewed by
Last updated on April 16th, 2015

#Survival Horror #Haunted Asylum #Horror Game #Asylum #Horror #Investigate #Survival

Shutter - Even the main menu is a tad creepy and unsettling.Shutter - You must learn how to use your tools before jumping into the game.Shutter - Just like every asylum ever, this one appears to be haunted and abandoned.ShutterShutterShutterShutterShutterShutterShutterShutterShutterShutter

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Take the 2-minute tour ×
Arqade is a question and answer site for passionate videogamers on all platforms. It's 100% free, no registration required.

After a week of trying, I still can barely win 3 last missions at Casual difficulty. I tried every tactics I could think about, but I can't win these 3 mission at Normal and Hardcore (I once win a mission in Normal, by lucky, but now I can't do it again).

Can you please give me some advice? Thank you.

share|improve this question

3 Answers 3

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Here is how I solved the last mission:

Crawler, followed by a shield generator, followed by a second crawler. At the beginning you should have enough money to fully upgrade the first crawler (allowing you to 1-shot the weakest towers) and the shield generator, plus I think upgrade the second crawler once. Naturally you should upgrade the second one as soon as you can.

You should not loose a single unit. While you can definitely recover from a loss, it's a good sign you are not active enough with your abilities. Also fully levelled units are very, very expensive.

Alternative Troop-setup: On my first run I had the following troop-setup: Dragon - Shield - Crawler - Crawler - Shield - Supply (levelled to give decoys), with most of them levelled once or twice by the end. While this setup worked, I felt it to be much harder and much more micro-management intensive, since the convoy is much longer and therefore requires more smokescreens, decoys and repairs (the big laser by the processor required 3 decoys to cross without losses, while with my other setup, 1 smokescreen and 1 repair usually were enough since the shield was much stronger).

  • The basic towers should pose not much of a threat, especially in the first setup since you can one-shot them.
  • An energizer should never get the chance to charge up your deployments. Luckily in the last level this is much easier than in the levels where it gets introduced. If you zoom out to the route-planning view, you can check for line of sights and plan your placements beforehand. Especially in the last mission I didn't bother and just called in airstrikes - one is enough and lets you do your thing freely.
  • Hacker towers are annoying but no big deal. Stay out of the bubble and sprint in and out if you need to use an ability. Note that often the shot that deploys the bubble follows you. If you notice that fast enough you can run to a place where it won't get in the way. Remember, as long as you are in it and not your troops, no harm done.
  • Behemoth/Stormray towers can be nasty. The former less so with my first setup, since the shields are much stronger, but Stormrays always can zap away all your shields in seconds, so decoys are needed. Try to place them behind the tower, so they waste time turning around. Also avoid placing them in range of towers you don't need to distract, they'll just help get the decoy removed faster. Be aware that if your troops are out of range of the towers but you aren't, the they might splash your troops by shooting you.

Final boss: In the final bossfight, be careful not to bite off more than you can chew, let your troops circle somewhere where they'll be able to hit the boss while not being shot at by dozens of towers. One trick I used was to let my troops drive between the two "entry streets". You can hit two of the boss turrets while having few other towers shooting you.

Smoke screen works great against the turrets of the boss, while decoy is good against the lightning/splash damage towers, as long as you a careful not to place the decoy too close to your troops. Don't forget to drop aistrikes onto nasty towers aswell, they deal a lot of damage.

Also, don't be too afraid to let your commander get hit. He regenerates fast and if he looses all his health you only become unable to do anything for 3 seconds (though that can doom you if it happens at the wrong time). I abused this to let my troops circle somewhere safe, sprint in to airstrike a hacker tower, die a painful death fall asleep for 3 seconds and sprint out again.

And last but not least remember you can reorder your troops during battle. The front unit has no shields? Switch places with the third one and save a repair. Shield does not reset if you move a unit, as long as it does not switch the shield generator.

I hope this has helped, if not please explain more clearly what kills you.

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Thanks, I've passed it ^^~ The second seems too hard for me, as the troop is too hard to manage them all, even my micro-management skill is not too bad. –  DatVM Jul 5 '11 at 13:38

I've beaten every hardcore mission with a Crawler followed by 5 Supply Trucks or all Supply Trucks. That's Supply Trucks upgraded to three stars (airstrikes), by the way, and yes, it's a serious(ly cheesy) strategy.

Here are some preliminary observations before I go into the strategy itself:

  1. Supply Trucks upgraded to 3 stars require 9 charges before they generate an airstrike.
  2. When a tower dies, all Supply Trucks get 1 charge. With 5 trucks, that's 5 charges total, or 5/9 of an airstrike. Thus, you have to kill 2 towers to generate 10/9 airstrikes, or slightly more than 1 airstrike.
  3. Blasters require 1 airstrike to kill; everything else requires 2 airstrikes.

Executing the strategy is fairly simple:

  1. If you are playing "Squad Assault", "Squad Assault Reloaded", or a level where you don't start out with a lot of money, you will need to have one fully upgraded Crawler out front -- This is because power plant pylons take too many airstrikes to kill, and there are too many enemies to waste airstrikes on.
    • You'll have to upgrade the Crawler to three stars before purchasing Supply Trucks. Surviving until then is tricky but not impossible. Protect the crawler with a combination of smoke + decoy combos and repairs during combat. Note that the $1000 sunk into the Crawler isn't that much, if all you spend money on is upgrading it.
    • See other guides for squad management, not that you have much of a squad.
  2. As you begin to add on Supply Trucks, upgrade them, and accumulate airstrikes, formulate a bombing strategy -- That is, before your convoy passes through, which targets are you going to obliterate/soften up ahead of time? There isn't much to the airstrike strategy other than following a policy. I've had success with the one described below.
    • Let's label Blasters and Scorchers as low value targets (LVTs), Behemoths and Storm Rays as medium value targest (MVTs), and Hackers and Energizers as high value targets (HVTs).
    • At the start of every level, destroy all HVTs, take all MVTs down to half health, and leave LVTs alone. Use the fully upgraded Crawler to "clean up" the remaining MVTs and LVTs. Exceptions apply below.
    • Sometimes you still need to destroy clumps of LVTs because they are too dense.
    • Plan your path so as to not approach Scorchers head-on. If that's not possible, just destroy them with airstrikes.
    • Be ready to repair after destroying Storm Rays. They can still do considerable damage, despite being taken down by one hit (assuming half-health).
    • Be ready to deploy decoys and repairs against half-health (assuming airstrikes softened them up) MVTs. Note that, depending on their orientation, half-health Behemoths can't even turn fast enough before they are destroyed by two Crawler missiles.
    • Take advantage of adjacent towers. Many times you will be able to bomb two, three, or even four towers simultaneously. Guesstimate and practice to get a good feel of what's possible.
    • If two MVTs or HVTs are adjacent to each other, just destroy them with airstrikes and spare yourself the hassle.
    • Energizers are sometimes your friend. On the last level, for example, there's one Energizer covering two adjacent Blasters, whose destruction yields an airstrike and repair ability. You can destroy both with one airstrike, repair to deliberately charge the Energizer, and repeat. The net result is 1 airstrike + 1 repair to yield... 1 airstrike + 1 repair + 10/9 supply-generated airstrikes. That's an effective gain of over 1 airstrike every time you do it! Thus, keeping Energizers around and deliberately feeding them with abilities can be quite profitable when you destroy clumps of towers covered by them.
    • Repair early, repair often. Why not? You'll have more repairs, smoke screens, and decoys than you know what to do with.

Disclaimer: I own the Android version, so YMMV.

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I have to give this a try! The Crawler-Shield-Crawler combo is too imba is not challenging enough... –  Heisenberg Jan 16 '14 at 20:01

I just sell almost dying units and purchase new ones. I can do this over and over again without running out of money.

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There's so much continuity in this game (for example meeting Cicero on the road before you see him at the Dark Brotherhood) that I thought perhaps you might get to meet the character you left Helgen with again (Hadvar or the other guy). Has anyone bumped into them? They don't seem to be in Riverwood still.

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You might recognize ulfric stormcloak again in your adventures. –  Resorath Dec 26 '11 at 0:58
He's not the dude you escape with though, or is he? –  victoriah Dec 26 '11 at 1:02
Ralof? He stays in Gerdur's home. He suggests to go to Windhelm and join the Stormcloacks. Does he move later in the quest line? –  faB Dec 26 '11 at 1:10
The guy I escaped with was Hadvar and he's not there anymore. –  victoriah Dec 26 '11 at 1:13

2 Answers 2

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Yes. Depending on who you escaped with, you will see them again either by joining the Stormcloadk Rebellion, or by joining the Imperial Legion.

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Can you spoiler me and tell me where to find them? –  victoriah Dec 26 '11 at 1:13
Hadvar lives in the first house on the left as you enter Riverwood. He might not always be there though. He will be present in the battle at Whiterun if you reach that point in the civil war plot. If he dies there, you won't see him again. –  bwarner Dec 26 '11 at 3:44
Whoever you escaped with will also be with the group sent to recover the Jagged Crown (the first quest after officially joining a faction) –  Thrillho Dec 26 '11 at 3:50
@Thrillho Will they be an enemy if you joined the opposite side? –  Fambida Dec 26 '11 at 3:53
@Fambida ...Actually that's a good question. I don't think I've tried joining the side of the character I didn't escape with. –  Thrillho Dec 26 '11 at 3:58

If you join the legion you'll do a lot of quests paired with Hadvar (the legionnaire which helps you if you go with him at the beginning). About the rebel guy (not Ulfric) don't know if you'll quest together.

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I just purchased a 55-inch HDTV [VIZIO VF551XVT]. For some reason, when I play the ps3 my TV bothers my eyes. This doesn't happen when I watch the TVs at the store, even if I am really close (normally they are playing movies). So I am not sure if it really is the size of the TV the problem [I am sitting about 2.5 meters away].

could anyone recommend me the settings for my TV when using the PS3?

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It may just be that, although it may not seem like it, you're paying a lot more attention to the game than you would to anything else on the TV. –  SaintWacko Dec 27 '11 at 7:50
Add more details about your connection from PS3 to TV: HDMI, SCART, YUV..? –  LudoMC Dec 27 '11 at 11:17
Make sure the PS3 is set to run in the best mode the TV supports, hopefully 1080p. Also make sure it is set on Game mode so the extra processing filters that add lag are not used. Check the refresh rate settings (120hz, etc.) and adjust to fit your needs. –  Mufasa Dec 27 '11 at 15:09
I am using HDMI connection and 240Hz refresh rate. –  Bob Dec 27 '11 at 17:18
Does it bother you when you watch the TV at home? –  CyberSkull Dec 27 '11 at 20:59

1 Answer 1

Personally I wouldnt have thought this would be down to the PS3 or the connection with the PS3 to your new TV.

Generally the display settings (brightness/contrast etc) are set up for the display in stores to give a better emphasis on colours etc which works fine when you are in a store due to their lighting. My opinion would be to search around for best/optimised calibration for your TV through general google searches and it should give you a better picture. Overemphasised brightness/contrast can seriously make a difference when you are using in-home.

Hope this points you in the right direction.

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Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus Selling the Family Home

Filed in Gather Celeb News Channel by on December 20, 2010 0 Comments

Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus are selling the family home. The estranged couple, who recently announced that they were getting a divorce, are selling their house located in Toluca Lake.

According to TMZ, Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus, who are the parents of singing sensation and “Hannah Montana” star Miley Cyrus, will be listing their home for more than $7 million.

Can you imagine owning a home worth $7 million? It probably wasn’t furnished with finds from Target and Sears either. If the house is worth that kind of money, what might the contents inside the home be worth?

All kidding aside, it has to be devastating for all of Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus’ children to not only have their parents getting a divorce, but to watch them sell the family home as well. People lose sight of the fact that divorce has a strong impact on far more people than just the couple getting the divorce. In this case, a rather large family is feeling the punch.

Billy Ray Cyrus filed for divorce from wife Tish back in October, however, TMZ sources have learned that Tish was looking at a home in Encino worth about $4.6 million just a couple of weeks prior to that. What does all of this mean? No one really knows. It sounds like there may be way more than meets the eye in the matter of Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus’ divorce. The selling of the family home is likely just one facet in an evolving tale of love gone wrong.

Photo Source: Facebook

About the Author ()

I'm a freelance writer and published author. A wife, mother of five and "Nana" to two, my family's insanity provides ample writing fodder. I wouldn't have it any other way!

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Slim and Celibate or Stout but Turned Out?

Sex vs. dieting! Childhood obesity debates! Bamboo bikes! Genius t-shirts! Swimming while criminal! And an easy way to beat anger, for stupid jerks! It's your Thursday Fitness Watch, where we watch your fitness—while ignoring our own!

  • A new poll finds that "half of women say they would rather go without sex for the summer than gain 10 pounds." Only a quarter of men say they would. Three quarters of men say they would still have sex with a woman if she gained 10 pounds. Half of women say they would kill and eat a man if they knew they wouldn't gain weight. One third of both sexes would have sex with a dead body if it would take an inch off their waists.
  • Childhood obesity is our nation's biggest problem for poor fat kids, health-wise. Here, two healthy employed women who are neither poor, obese, nor children debate the issue. How come nobody ever asks the fat kids?
  • Like to ride bikes, for fitness? Why not make it a bamboo bike? Because you don't want to pay like thousands of dollars for some shit you could break with a focused kick? Well, that's a good reason.
  • See the t-shirt you're wearing there? Scientists refer to that as a "dumb" t-shirt. Because it doesn't contain "smart" clothing technology that wicks away sweat, controls odors, monitors your vital signs, and helps burn calories! Yea, that's what the scientists tell you to your face.
  • A disturbing thing that happens in America is when all you wanted was to be a proud member of USA Swimming, and then it turns out the coaches were sexually abusing the young female swimmers the whole time. Swimming is about having fun and moving through the water fast, not that stuff.
  • Can exercise moderate anger? If the exercise involves knocking someone out, then possibly.


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Meg Whitman, the Republican nominee for California Governor, used to be the CEO of eBay. She knows a lot about computers, right? Apparently not enough to prevent a staffer from mistakenly Tweeting a video of a cross- Japanese bass player.

At least, I think it was a mistake. Whitman has already poured a record amount of money into her private campaign for a position no one wants, but she might want to use that money to stop things like this from happening, via InfoWorld's Ted Samson:

SD Cnty Sheriff Assoc says @Whitman2010 4 gov! RT: @Murphy4MegNews: CA Cops get it: Jerry Brown is too soft on crime. Oct 18 23:39:19 via web

That link goes to this video:

The woman who Tweeted the link to the video is Sarah Pompei, Meg Whitman's press secretary. The gentleman in the video is a member of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department. Kidding! That's Jerry Brown. Kidding again! The person in the video is, I believe, K-ON Fuwa Fuwa Timebass, whose endorsement, as far as I know, is still up for grabs.

Why is our friend K-ON Fuwa Fuwa Timebass attached to the announcement about the sheriff's department? It's still unclear. I mean, sure, it was probably an accident! But it's way more fun to try and interpret the video as a re-enactment or re-interpretation of the SDCSD's endorsement.

(The Tweet, by the way, is two days old, but as of the time of this writing, it's still up. How responsive the Whitman era could be for us all!)

[Twitter via InfoWorld]


text: Kathy Griffin stopped by the set of Conan this evening and recounted an encounter she had with Michele Bachmann in Washington back in March. After first asking Bachmann if she'd be willing to support a rally to repeal don't ask don't tell, Griffin put the following question to the congresswoman and GOP presidential candidate: "Were you born a bigot or did you just, like, grow into it?" As you'll see in the clip above, Bachmann's response was pretty priceless.


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Key Figure in the News Corp. Hacking Scandal Speaks Up For James Murdoch

Neville Thurlbeck, the former News of the World reporter whose name in the subject line of an e-mail—"For Neville"—was the thread that unraveled the whole hacking mess at News International, has spoken out for the first time. And he insists that James Murdoch had no idea what was going on.

In a rather overwrought first-person account in the Press Gazette, Thurlbeck insists that he had nothing to do with phone hacking at News of the World, that he tried to warn editor Rebekah Brooks about the rot at the paper, and that James Murdoch was blissfully unaware of the hacking going on under his nose.

Prior to 2009, when the Guardian began breaking the story open, News Corp. insisted that any voicemail hacking at the paper had been limited to "rogue" reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire. The bit of evidence that gives the lie to that claim is a 2005 email from a NOTW underling to Mulcaire containing transcripts of hacked voicemails and the subject line "For Neville"—as in, "these transcripts of illegally accessed voicemail messages are for NOTW reporter Neville Thurlbeck." It is the first solid indication that reporters other than Goodman were involved in the hacking and that the Murdochs' "rogue reporter" line was a house of cards. James Murdoch claims that he wasn't aware of the email—and hence the widespread criminality in his shop—until last year. Two of his underlings say he's a liar, and that he learned of it in 2008. Thurlbeck was arrested on hacking charges in April.

In his Press Gazette piece, Thurlbeck claims that the emailed transcripts were actually not "For Neville" at all—the underling who transcribed them had made a mistake, and they were actually for "a certain executive" whom he declines to name "for legal reasons." What's more, Thurlbeck says, his boss and Murdoch favorite Rebekah Brooks—who has since been fired from her role as CEO of News International and arrested—had no clue about the hacking, and obsequious middle managers frustrated his efforts to warn her. Likewise, James Murdoch was entirely in the dark.

[T]here was a pattern of withholding vital information from James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks.

And the same pattern which led to James Murdoch's oblivion to phone-hacking also led to my dismissal, the closure of the paper and the loss of nearly 300 jobs.

Whether this was because of the "iron filings" strategy [of isolating Thurlbeck], a fear of taking bad news to the boss or the pathological culture of secrecy which had lodged itself in the heart of the News of the World, we may never know.

James Murdoch should have the benefit of the doubt.

Thurlbeck also said he told Tom Watson, the Member of Parliament leading the parliamentary inquiry into the hacking mess, that James Murdoch was unaware of what was going on.

It's hard to suss out Thurlbeck's motivations at this point. He's in legal jeopardy over the hacking, so it's obvious that he would deny his role in that. Whether he has any reasons to carry water for Murdoch and Brooks is less clear.


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Is 50 Cent the Next Angelina Jolie/Sean Penn?

Rapper/actor/business mogul Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson visited war-torn Somalia this past Wednesday, eerily enough on the same day as Somalia's homegrown al Shabab terrorists joined forces with Al Qaeda. 50 was there on a World Food Program humanitarian trip and spent time visiting camps for internally displaced people that have suffered through 2 decades of anarchic war and famine in the East African nation. Unfortunately, it's a war that is heating up once again.

Previously, 50 had promised to donate meals based on purchases and facebook "likes" of his new energy drink, Street Kings. He added that if his Street Kings facebook page receives one million "likes" by Sunday, he would donate an additional one million meals. This wasn't 50's first trip to Africa, but it seems to have gone better than his last.

If you want a good rundown of the situation in Somalia right now, you'd do better off reading this book by Michael Maren. Let's talk about 50.

50 appears to be in the beginning stages of a path carved out by celebs like Angelina Jolie and Sean Penn. Basically, celebrities spend the early part of theirs careers being entitled dicks, then realize that their lives are meaningless and they've done nothing of any real value, so they decide to take up political and humanitarian causes. Some of them handle these causes better than others and seem to genuinely care about what they're doing, like Jolie. She ran around with Billy Bob Thortnon wearing vials of blood and doing heroin, whereas 50 ran around talking shit and starting trouble with whoever would respond. Now she's completely dedicated herself to humanitarian causes, and 50 seems like he might just be getting started.

No one exemplifies this career transition more than Sean Penn, who was a giant asshole and terrific actor for decades, and is now a giant asshole and terrific actor who says a lot of dumb things about international affairs but has contributed a tremendous effort to helping rebuild Haiti.

Personally, I've been a fan of 50's work since How to Rob and his early mixtapes, which were vicious. His last few albums have been uninspired, as is his acting, but his business acumen is brilliant. He's slowly amassing quite a fortune by throwing his name and marketing behind anything that he can, whether it be an Internet media company like or a sugar-filled soft drink like Vitamin Water. He's nothing if not a consummate salesman, first of crack, now of himself and his brand. If he puts his mind towards humanitarian efforts, he could certainly do some positive things. Generally I'm more of the William Easterly mind state, but let's wait and see what 50 plans to do.

He's already handled this celebrity attention getting trip better than most of his peers: He kept his mouth shut about politics and focused on the people he was visiting. Actually, let's see what Somalian rapper K'naan has to say about the whole thing. He once rapped of his hometown Mogadishu, "If I rhyme about home and got descriptive, I'd make 50 cent look like Limp Bizkit."

[pic via 50 Cent's Instagram]


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The Most Racist City In America: Pittsburgh?

Gawker is on a quest to determine the most racist city in America. Your contributions are vital to the cause. Please add your insights in the discussion system below. Or if you'd like to nominate another city please send an email here. Today...Pittsburgh, PA.

City: Pittsburgh, PA

Population: 307,000

Ethnic Breakdown: 66% White, 26% Black, 4% Asian, 2% Latino 2% Mystery Box

History of Racism:

"Before the players could leave the floor, three fans from the visiting Brentwood student section ran onto the court in full-body banana suits. The fans surrounded the Monessen players and allegedly began making monkey noises and hurling racial epithets at the Monessen players."
"Highland Park pool is in Pittsburgh. And so young black men, typically, between, say, 16 and 20, tried to access the pool, and if they made it into the water, they were oftentimes beat and dunked and punched in the water. Eventually, whites set up, essentially, sentinel guards at the entrance to the pool, and when black swimmers tried to come in and access them, they were beaten up, sometimes with clubs. They were punched to the ground. They were kicked on the ground."
Discriminatory roller rinks.
A refreshing 19th century race riot between Irish and ITalina immigrants.

Police Brutality? Yes.

Hear it from Yinzers!

Pittsburgh is a place where there are extremely large disparities between the black and white communities. Last time it was voted the most livable city in the U.S. it had the second highest black infant mortality rate in the country. The major has been known to use eminent domain to break up prospering black neighborhoods and Jordan Miles was just the tip of the iceberg. Things like that happen every day.

As a Philadelphia resident, sure, there is rampant racism. But it can't come close to our Hill People cousins to the west, Pittsburgh.

Rooney Rule be damned, that city HATES black people.

It's Pittsburgh. The only segregated city left in America. AA's live in one neighborhood. (Hill District) Big time police brutality, and if you're not a playing for the Steelers good luck finding employment.


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For boys who like boys who like joysticks!

« Nintendo, Sony, and EA Silently Pull Support For SOPA | Main | Wootini's Weekly Animal Crossing Diary »

Rush In 2012 With 2112!

Harmonix is ringing in the new year with the special release of the opening 20-minute suite to Rush's 1976 concept album 2112 to the Rock Band Music Store. (It's fine, because honestly, who really wants to wait another hundred years for it to be exactly appropriate?) It will be available in three separate packages, one that combines "Overture" and "The Temple of Syrinx," another that includes "Discovery" and "Presentation" and a third that features "Oracle: The Dream," "Soliliquy," and "Grand Finale."

Xbox 360 owners are in luck because they will see the release over Xbox LIVE on December 31. But PlayStation 3 and Wii owners will have to wait until January 3. But Wii owners also get screwed in another way. Only 360 and PS3 owners will be able to download the "Rush '2112' Pack" for $5.49 that will include all three of the tracks (available separately for the usual price of $2 each), as well as one 20-minute marathon medley of all seven parts of the suite! Also, Each of the three sections include the optional $.99 Pro Guitar and Pro Bass expansions, but if you purchase the song pack, you will receive a Pro Guitar and Pro Bass upgrade for the medley for free!

And girls who like girls who like rumble packs!

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Georgia College Golf Team Selected Preseason #1

by Tyler Peck, sports information graduate assistant

NEW YORK - The Georgia College & State University golf team stands atop the Golf World/Nike Golf Division II Preseason Coaches' Poll at No. 1. This is the first time in program history and under head coach Jimmy Wilson the golf team has been preseason ranked No. 1.

Five of the 18 first-place votes went to the Bobcats, who finished fifth at the NCAA Championship last year. The squad also had a third-place finish at the Peach Belt Conference (PBC) Championship and fifth at the NCAA Regionals. Two All-Americans from last year, Pedro Lima (Sao Paulo, Brazil) and Niclas Johansson (Skanor, Sweden), return for their senior years to lead the Georgia College team.

Joe Young (Cochran, Ga.), an Honorable Mention All-American in 2008, and Johansson were both named to the All-PBC team this past season. Johansson tied a school record set by David Robinson with three All-America titles and has the potential to win a fourth.

Wilson has guided the Bobcats to 12 straight NCAA Tournament appearances (1998-2009). His teams reached the national championship round of the NCAA Tournament eight years, including five of the last six. Wilson guided the Bobcats to the 2000 Peach Belt Conference Championship, was named the league's coach of the year that season. In 2008, Wilson nabbed both the Southeast Region and PBC coach of the year honors. Wilson has also coached 18 All-Americans in his tenure with the Bobcats.

"First, I would like to thank all my peers that voted us number one," Wilson said. "This is a great honor, but as I tell my players every year, the only ranking that matters is the one that comes out after the third week in May."

Georgia College will hit the links next week (Sept. 7-8) for their first tournament of the fall season in the Kiawah Island Invitational hosted by USC Aiken.

The GCSU Department of Athletics, winners of the 2008-09 PBC Commissioner's Cup, sponsors 10 varsity athletic programs at the NCAA Division II level. As a Division II program, GCSU prides itself on balancing the life of the student-athlete, evidenced by the Bobcats' multiple appearances in post-season competition as well as documented academic success and community-service involvement. Sign up at Twitter.com username GCSUSID for up-to-the-minute reports, and visit www.GCSUBobcats.com to nominate your favorite former Bobcats and Colonials to the GCSU Athletics Hall of Fame.


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Wood Trim Garage Doors

Our Wood Trim Garage Doors are our most affordable upgrade to the standard door used by many builders and homeowners. This design option is one of best selling door upgrades.

Our custom trim doors are made from upgraded flush steel panels and are faced with genuine cedar planks to create a long lasting product and beautiful design. This elegant look and affordable price of the wood trim door is a great match for any home style at an affordable price. Our custom trim doors are custom made to meet your design needs. With hundreds of design options to choose from we can easily match the design needs for your home.

This popular option offers your home an enhanced curb appeal and a unique look not offered by most manufactures. Click on any Wood Trim Door image below to view an enlarged version.


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Conceptual gadgets with a serious potential to join the legions of other vaporware devices circulating online is typically something we try to avoid covering. In some cases though, the teased device is just too gadgetastic to ignore. Case in the point is the Toshiba Libretto W100 ($1,100). Promised by Toshiba to hit shelves in August (fingers crossed) and be priced at around $1,100, the so-called ultra mobile PC will feature dual 7″ multi-touch screens that work both horizontally or vertically. In other words as the pictures tease (shown below), it should work both as a basic use laptop and as e-book reader.

Stated to weigh less than two pounds, it will compete with the iPad in portability and run Windows® 7 Home Premium. Other specs already let out of the bag include the device having a media card reader port, solid state drive, a USB port, Bluetooth 2.1, Wireless-N compatibility, and a built-in webcam. In terms of input, clearly everything is touch based and typing will revolve around a virtual keyboard. However a “soft” track pad is also stated to be on board which will allow users to type, click, and browse with tactile feedback. For more shots of this slick device and a video of it in action hit the jump.

More Info: here.


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Google Apps Ends Free Option for New Business Accounts

Google appsMany business and individuals have enjoyed using Google Apps over the past few years as a cheap or free way to get some good cloud-based applications for team collaboration and accessibility anywhere you have a network connection. But now, it’s become not-so-free for businesses.

Google today announced that Apps for new business customers would be moving to a single paid version rather than the previous two-tier (paid and free) model they have been using.

The free option, introduced at a organization size limit of 200 users, has been reduced over time down to a point of 10 users, and now, no free option for business. The new model continues new account signup for free for individuals, but business will have to pony up $50 per user, per year. For that Google promises 24/7 phone support, a 25GB inbox, and 99.9% uptime with no scheduled downtime.

This only affects new users and accounts, not existing ones. If you’ve been happily using Google Apps at your business on the free basis for a while, you can continue to do so.


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From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs Basil E. Linkspam (26 May 2015)

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Quick Hit: New Taylor Swift fanvid “Pipeline” calls out tech industry on diversity hypocrisy

As Julie Pagano put it: “So many ‘diversity in tech’ efforts are about getting young women into the pipeline. Ignore the fact that there’s a meat grinder at the end.” So I’ve made a new fanvid (a type of video art piece): “Pipeline”. It’s a little over 3 minutes long and cuts together about 50 different sources over Taylor Swift’s song “Blank Space”. Specifically, this fanvid uses clips from documentaries, glossy Hollywood depictions of hackers, comics, code school ads, and the Geek Feminism wiki’s Timeline of Incidents to critique this dynamic. It just premiered at the WisCon Vid Party a few hours ago.

My launch blog post on Dreamwidth goes into more detail and includes a comprehensive list of video.

Download: on Google Drive (165 MB high-resolution MP4 file, 23 MB low-resolution MP4 file, 98 MB AVI file), or at Critical Commons with login (high- and low-res MP4 and WebM files)
Stream: at Critical Commons (choose View High Quality for best experience)
Lyrics subtitles file: (you can download this and then ask your video playing app to use it as a subtitles track)

It’s under the license Creative Commons BY-SA; please feel free to redistribute, link, remix, and so on, as long as you attribute me as the vidder. Comments are welcome, though moderated.

I am their fury, I am their patience, I am their Linkspam (22 May 2015)

  • I had a culture column at WIRED. And then I didn’t. Here’s what happened. | monica byrne (May 19): “I’ve talked with other writers who’ve had experiences with Wired. My experience is not unique. So as far as I can tell, they don’t cover the future. They produce a white male fantasy of the future. Which isn’t surprising.”
  • The Dehumanizing Myth of the Meritocracy by Coraline Ada Ehmke | Model View Culture (May 19): “We hide behind the motto of “love the art, hate the artist” to justify our preferences despite the faint voice of conscience, persistent in telling us that something is amiss. It seems that ignoring the worst of our heroes is easy, but should the opposite also hold true? Should we ignore the positive, community-oriented contributions of others as quickly as we dismiss some people’s negative attributes? Are the contributions of bad actors really superior to those who bring humane, non-code contributions to our corner of the world?”
  • #girlswithtoys: women remind Twitter they are scientists too | Wired UK (May 18): “Female scientists from all over the world have taken to Twitter to post pictures of themselves with tools and equipment from their workplaces alongside the hashtag #girlswithtoys.”
  • Furiosa (5) | Be Less Amazing (May 18): “I’ve seen a few internet pundits that they “don’t see the feminist content” of this film. Dudes. It’s about the lone powerful woman in a male-dominated society who helps a group of sex slaves escape under the premise that “[they] are not things.” That’s about as feminist as it gets, and that’s just one of the many amazing equality messages going on this movie. “
  • The programming talent myth | (April 28): “When we see someone who does not look like one of those three men, we assume they are not a real programmer, he said. Almost all of the women he knows in the industry have a story about someone assuming they aren’t a programmer. He talked to multiple women attending PyCon 2015 who were asked which guy they are there with—the only reason they would come is because their partner, the man, is the programmer. “If you’re a dude, has anyone ever asked you that?” On the other hand, when he got up on stage, he did look like those guys. “So you probably assumed I was a real programmer.” These sorts of assumptions contribute to the attrition of marginalized people in tech, he said.”
  • We Will No Longer Be Promoting HBO’s Game of Thrones | The Mary Sue (May 18): “After the episode ended, I was gutted. I felt sick to my stomach. And then I was angry. My next thought was, “I’m going to have to spend part of the next six months explaining why this was a bad move over and over.””
  • Reasons Why It’s Hard to Find Senior Women Engineers | Accidentally in Code (May 14): “People ask me about this topic sometimes, especially as I’m no longer close to being a “new grad” but at the point where I look for bigger opportunities. I’m collecting it here for reference – reasons and observations from my own experience, of why it’s so much harder to find senior women engineers.”
  • How Social Media is Failing Creative Women | Ink, Bits, & Pixels (May 17): “Real Name policies endanger women. Until these companies understand WHY that is, it’s not possible for the policy to be crafted in a way that reduces the danger.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

What if free and open source software were more like fandom?

This is the second of a two-part post about feminism and the philosophies and vocabularies of “open stuff” (fandom, open source, etc.). Part I is at Crooked Timber, here, and I suggest you read that first.

Recently I was thinking about abstractions we open source software folks might borrow from fandom, particularly the online world of fan fiction and fanvids. I mean, I am already a rather fannish sort of open sourcer — witness when I started a love meme, a.k.a. an appreciation thread, on the MediaWiki developers’ mailing list. But I hadn’t, until recently, taken a systematic look at what models we might be able to translate into the FLOSS world. And sometimes we can more clearly see our own skeletons, and our muscles and weaknesses, by comparison.

Affirmational and transformational

While arguing in December that the adjectives “fan” and “political” don’t contradict each other, I said:

I think calling them fanwork/fanvids is a reasonable way to honor fandom’s both transformative and affirmational heritage

I got that phrasing (“affirmational/transformational”) from RaceFail, which is a word for many interconnected conversations about racism, cultural appropriation, discourse, and fandom that happened in early 2009. (In “Feminist Point of View: A Geek Feminism Retrospective”, Skud discussed how RaceFail influenced the DNA of Geek Feminism (see slide 15).) RaceFail included several discussions that X-rayed fandom and developed new models for understanding it. (And I do mean “discussions” — in many of the Dreamwidth links I’m about to mention, the bulk of thought happens in the comments.)

obsession_inc, in a RaceFail discussion, articulated the difference between “affirmational” and “transformational” fandom. Do you bask in canon, relaxing in the security of a hierarchy, or do you use it, without a clear answer about Who’s In Charge?

When we use these terms we’re talking about different modes: different approaches to source texts, to communities, to the Web, to the mass media industries, and to each other. It’s not just about whether you’re into pages of words or audio/video, and it’s not necessarily generational either:

So when I see the assertion that as a group, print-oriented old time fans don’t know how to deal with extensive cross-linked multi-threaded fast-paced discussion, all I can do is cough and mutter “bullshit”.

We have a long-standing heritage of transformational fandom — sometimes it surprises fans to know just how long we’ve been making fanvids, for instance. (What other heritages do I have that I don’t know enough about?)

And I’m mulling over what bits of FLOSS culture feel affirmational to me (e.g., deference to celebrities like Linus Torvalds) or transformational (e.g., the Open Source Bridge session selection process, where everyone can see each other’s proposals and favstar what they like). I’d love to hear more thoughts in the comments.

Expectations around socializing and bug reports

I reread the post and the hundreds of comments at oliviacirce’s “Admitting Impediments: Post-WisCon Posts, Part I, or, That Post I Never Made About RaceFail ’09”, where people talked about questions of power and discourse and expectations. For instance, one assessment of a particular sector of fandom: “non-critical, isolated, and valuing individual competition over hypertext fluency and social interaction.” This struck me as a truth about a divide within open source communities, and between different open source projects.

Jumping off of that came dysprositos’s question, “what expectations do we … have of each other that are not related to fandom but that are not expectations we would have for humanity at large?” (“Inessential weirdness” might be a useful bit of vocabulary here.) In this conversation, vehemently distinguishes between fans who possess “the willingness to be much more openly confrontational of a fannish object’s social defects” vs. those who tend to be “resigned or ironic in their observations of same. I don’t think that’s a difference in analysis, however, but a difference in audiencing, tactics, and intent among the analyzers.” When I saw this I thought of the longtime whisper network among women in open source, women warning each other of sexual abusers, and of the newer willingness to publicly name names. And I thought of how we learn, through explicit teaching and through the models we see in our environment, how to write, read, and respond to bug reports. Are you writing to help someone else understand what needs fixing so they can fix it, or are you primarily concerned with warning other users so they don’t get hurt? Do you care about the author’s feelings when you write a report that she’ll probably read?

Optimizing versus plurality

In fanfic and fanvids, we want more. There is no one true best fic or vid and we celebrate a diverse subjectivity and an ever-growing body of art for everyone to enjoy. We keep making and sharing stuff, delighting in making intricate gifts for each other. In the tech world I have praised !!Con for a similar ethos:

In the best fannish traditions, we see the Other as someone whose fandom we don’t know yet but may soon join. We would rather encourage vulnerability, enthusiasm and play than disrespect anyone; we take very seriously the sin of harshing someone else’s squee.

Sometimes we make new vocabulary to solve problems (“Dead Dove: Do Not Eat”) but sometimes we say it’s okay if the answer to a problem is to have quite a lot of person-to-person conversations. It’s okay if we solve things without focusing first on optimizing, on scaling. And I think the FLOSS world could learn from that. As I said in “Good And Bad Signs For Community Change, And Some Leadership Styles”, in the face of a problem, some people reflexively reach more for “make a process that scales” and some for “have a conversation with ____”. We need both, of course – scale and empathy.

Many of us are in open stuff (fanfic, FLOSS, and all the other nooks and crannies) because we like to make each other happy. And not just in an abstract altrustic way, but because sometimes we get to see someone accomplish something they couldn’t have before, or we get comments full of happy squee when we make a vid that makes someone feel understood. It feels really good when someone notices that I’ve entered a room, remembers that they value me and what I’ve contributed, and greets me with genuine enthusiasm. We could do a lot better in FLOSS if we recognized the value of social grooming and praise — in our practices and in time-consuming conversations, not just in new technical features like a friction-free Thanks button. A Yuletide Treasure gift exchange for code review, testing, and other contributions to underappreciated software projects would succeed best if it went beyond the mere “here’s a site” level, and grew a joyous community of practice around the festival.

What else?

I’m only familiar with my corners of fandom and FLOSS, and I would love to hear your thoughts on what models, values, practices, and intellectual frameworks we in open source ought to borrow from fandom. I’m particularly interested in places where pragmatism trumps ideology, in bits of etiquette, and in negotiating the balance between desires for privacy and for publicity.

Linkspam, Will Robinson! Linkspam! (19 May 2015)

  • Where Does Your Pipeline Lead? | Life as I Know It: “If you’re thinking about getting into the tech industry or wondering how to stay in the tech industry in the face of pervasive toxic environments, I encourage you to broaden your horizons about what ‘being in tech’ can look like. What is your goal? If you want to use technology to make a better life for yourself, think carefully about the pipeline you enter and where you want it to lead.”
  • Marvel replaces Black Widow with Captain America for its toy line | BoingBoing: “In other words, not only is Black Widow ridiculously underrepresented in Avengers merchandise—she’s also actively erased from her own scenes. Well done Marvel.”
  • Happy Birthday to Inge Lehmann, the Woman Who Discovered Earth’s Inner Core | Smart News | Smithsonian: “Her idea was revolutionary. When Lehmann published her findings in 1936, her solid core model was quickly adopted by the scientific community. Lehmann’s theory was finally proven right in 1970, when new, more sensitive seismographs picked up seismic waves bouncing off the Earth’s solid core.”
  • Interview: ‘Nimona’ Creator Noelle Stevenson | NPR: “Like a lot of young women, I went through an entire period where I hated female characters — I didn’t want to read about them! I thought I was going to be the cool girl who was not like other girls. And that’s so harmful.”
  • ATP Shownote Data | Kieran Healy: “When doing this kind of thing it can be helpful to look back on what your past practice has been. For example, it can be useful to audit one’s own habits of linking and engagement. Often exclusion is less a matter of explicit boundary policing (though God knows there’s enough of that in the tech sector) and more a matter of passive homophily.”
  • Project Update: The Electric Blanket is DONE! | Tech Musings: “Mrs. Parenteau and her merry band of 3rd grade scientists/sewers have finally finished their electric blanket project! The final result is a quilt containing approximately 45 squares that light up. Currently hanging in the Science hallway, it’s fun to watch students interact with it by pressing the different switches to light up the quilt. This was a challenging project for the kids and we are proud of their hard work and perseverance with the e-textile materials – especially the conductive thread.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Quick Hit: The Word “Girl” in “Supergirl”

CBS has just released a “first look” teaser for the new Supergirl TV show, coming this fall. I’ve always frowned at the name “Supergirl” for an adult woman, finding it infantilizing. The teaser tries to address this:

News announcer on television: “Media Magnate Cat Grant, of National City’s new female hero: Supergirl.” (news channel displays “#Supergirl”)

Kara Danvers: “We can’t name her that.”

Cat Grant: “We … didn’t.”

Danvers: “Shouldn’t she be called Super…. woman?”

Grant: “What do you think is so bad about ‘girl’? I’m a girl. And your boss, and powerful, and rich, and hot, and smart. So if you perceive ‘Supergirl’ as anything less than excellent, isn’t the real problem you?”

Calista Flockhart plays an authoritative Cat Grant, a casting choice which itself implies (to me) a defense of the type of femininity Flockhart performed as Ally McBeal in her best-known role to date.

I don’t find Grant’s argument convincing, since my particular beef with the “girl” suffix is around connotations of immaturity, and particularly because we do not tend to call men of similar ages “boys”. That’s unequal. But I appreciate that at least this teaser attempts a defense. And overall I loved the teaser, and it made me cry. Stories of women discovering and claiming our power, in ourselves and to help others, will always get me.

In The Hall Of The Mountain Linkspam (15 May 2015)

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Land of Geeks and Linkspam (13 May 2015)

Note: We’re having trouble pulling links from Delicious, so if you’d like to submit links, please use one of the other options at the bottom of the post. We’ve almost certainly missed some good links in the interim, feel free to resubmit them!

  • Completely Truthful Answers to Lady Engineer Questions | Medium (May 4): “To save tech journalists some time, I put together a comprehensive FAQ on behalf of all women in tech. You’re welcome.”
  • Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women’s Success in Engineering and Computing | AAUW (March 26): “Women engineers who were most satisfied with their jobs, in contrast, worked for organizations that provided clear paths for advancement, gave employees challenging assignments that helped develop and strengthen new skills, and valued and recognized employees’ contributions. In other words, workplaces with good management practices were more likely to retain women employees. … Harvey Mudd College has dramatically increased the number of women computer science graduates at the school with three simple interventions designed to welcome beginning students into the curriculum rather than weed them out.”
  • Business of Art Fix: Keeping The Indie Dream Alive When Talking Pay and Other Stories | Autostraddle (May 6): “What’s tough for me about the initiative is its predication on the assumption that business owners are paying their workers as little as they can and themselves as much as they can get away with. If we expose these practices, #talkpay suggests, we can fix the inequality that results from them. Voswinkel says as much in her post, asserting that “The fact is, companies are doing everything they can to increase their bottom line, and as such, they are actively trying to pay you as little as possible, with the understanding that if they underpay you too much, they will lose talent.” Obviously, every initiative can’t be everything to everyone, and #talkpay succeeded at its specific angle. I guess I’d like to add to that conversation, though, by asking, “What happens when pay inequality starts at the top?” What happens when, because a business is owned by women and aimed at women with no connections in the business sector or access to “angel investors,” there’s no choice but to underpay?”
  • Introducing the #NASADatanauts | open.NASA (May 8): “In keeping with NASA’s focus on Women in Data this year, the first class of #NASADatanauts will be women.”
  • Being “out” as a #scimom | Dynamic Ecology (May 11): “Something that is very important to me is to be open about being a scientist – a woman scientist, in particular – who has children. The data don’t paint a rosy picture for scientist mothers, and this is in part because of the biases we all have related to women in science (and especially regarding women in science with children). My hope is that, by being open about being a scientist mother, I can do my small part to normalize the idea of women scientists having children.”
  • Sources: You Can Play As A Woman In Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate | Kotaku (May 11): “Almost a year after publisher Ubisoft made headlines for not including female protagonists in Assassin’s Creed Unity, today we’ve got news that there will be a playable woman assassin in the next entry of Ubisoft’s mega-series”
  • Finding Sharla Boehm | The Edtech Curmudgeon (May 12): A follow-up to the article on Sharla Boehm that appeared in the April 24 Linkspam
  • CTO Megan Smith explains how women in tech are erased from history | Boing Boing (May 8): “Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Megan Smith, stopped by the Charlie Rose show recently and revealed a starting fact: Although four women worked on the Macintosh team in the 1980s, not a single one was cast in the 2013 biopic Jobs with Ashton Kutcher. Even worse, all seven men who worked on the project had speaking roles in the film.”
  • A note to my fellow white feminists about the renewal of Agent Carter | Teh Awesome Sauce (May 8): “We’re SO EXCITED about Season 2, and we can’t wait to see a lot more diversity. Where’s Jim Morita? Where’s Gabe Jones? Where are plots dealing with racial issues in the era? Where are all the women of color? It’s NEW YORK CITY, FFS. By both actual reality and comics canon, the show is about 8000% too white.”
  • A Post About The Hugos | Unintended Consequences (May 11): “The con gained over 2,600 supporting memberships since March 31st of this year and about 350 attending memberships.”
  • Hi Maro ! I recently noticed some people who were… | Blogatog (May 10): “I think people who are used to being represented in various media and games don’t always understand the importance of it because they’ve never experienced not having it.” (This is the blog of the head designer of Magic the Gathering.)
  • Web developers heat up SJ tech scene | Courier-Post (April 28): Profile of South Jersey techie Pamela Bey.

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

I’ve Wrestled With Linkspam For 35 Years (5 May 2015)

  • The Trouble with Imposters by Cate Huston | Model View Culture (April 28): “What we call imposter syndrome often reflects the reality of an environment that tells marginalized groups that we shouldn’t be confident, that our skills aren’t enough, that we won’t succeed—and when we do, our accomplishments won’t even be attributed to us.”
  • Imagining a Safer Space: Building Community & Ending Harassment in Punk | Store Brand Soda (April 28): [CW: assault, harassment] “People have difficulty believing that women and trans individuals pursuing traditionally male activities are doing it authentically, for our own reasons. Our motives are cast as disingenuous; we’re called groupies, posers, and hangers-on. Male dominance is established by questioning our right to be there at all.”
  • Conduct Becoming | Anil Dash (April 30): “But what was perhaps most exciting was that it was no big deal to make [a code of conduct] happen. That’s not to diminish the work that Sean and his team put into pulling the code together, but it didn’t take a ton of persuasion, and it wasn’t too big an effort on the part of the event organizers for it to happen.”
  • On the diversity-readiness of STEM environments | Mel Chua (April 28): “I have been “the full-time community person who is ridiculously good at tech stuff that she no longer gets to do,” instead of “the technical person who understands and listens to and cares about inclusion and community.” Because I cannot not patch a leaky roof. But I have always wondered what I might have grown up into, if I had learned STEM in an environment that was ready for me — without me having to fix it first.”
  • Girl Develop It heats up South Jersey tech scene | Courier Post (April 28): “Bey — owner of Be Brilliant Media, a company that provides a wide range of website services — is spreading her web development wisdom through the South Jersey chapter of Girl Develop It.Girl Develop It is a nonprofit organization that provides affordable and accessible programs to women who want to learn web and software development through mentorship and hands-on instruction.”
  • A centerfold does not belong in the classroom | The Washington Post (April 24): “I first saw a picture of Playboy magazine’s Miss November 1972 a year ago as a junior at [Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology]. My artificial intelligence teacher told our class to search Google for Lena Soderberg (not the full image, though!) and use her picture to test our latest coding assignment. “
  • The Big Lie of science | Galileo’s Pendulum (April 30): “Science at its heart is about evidence; the practice of science, however, is about humans. A sexist reviewer can waste a female researcher’s time for reasons completely unrelated to her research, and a journal can abet the practice — making scientific publication an accomplice to academic sexism.”
  • Many organizers at the forefront of Baltimore police-brutality protests are women, despite men taking center stage – (April 28): “Many organizers at the forefront of the protests are women, and many members of the Gilmor Homes community with key involvement in the protests are very young people. On Saturday, women marshaled the march along, maintaining energy, leading chants from megaphones, and even ensuring that a female member of Freddie Gray’s family, who joined the march in her wheelchair, was able to stay on the front lines.”
  • Sexist peer review elicits furious Twitter response, PLOS apology: (May 1): ‘Evolutionary geneticist Fiona Ingleby was shocked when she read the review accompanying the rejection for her latest manuscript, which investigates gender differences in the Ph.D.-to-postdoc transition, so she took the issue to Twitter. Earlier today, Ingleby, a postdoc at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, posted two excerpts of the anonymous review. “It would probably … be beneficial to find one or two male biologists to work with (or at least obtain internal peer review from, but better yet as active co-authors)” to prevent the manuscript from “drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically biased assumptions,” the reviewer wrote in one portion.“Perhaps it is not so surprising that on average male doctoral students co-author one more paper than female doctoral students, just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile a bit faster than female doctoral students,” added the reviewer (whose gender is not known).’
  • PLOS ONE Update on Peer Review Process | EveryOne (May 1): Official PLOS ONE statement regarding Fiona Ingleby’s complaint.
  • Queen of Carbon Becomes First Woman to Receive IEEE Medal of Honor | Plugged In, Scientific American Blog Network (April 30): ‘Dresselhaus is famous for her work in carbon-based materials including buckminsterfullerenes (buckyballs), nanotubes and graphene. In the energy sector, carbon-based materials are frequently discussed in terms of their ability to increase energy storage capacities in battery technologies and supercapacitors. According to the IEEE, “the era of carbon electronics can be traced back to [Dresselhaus’s] tireless research efforts.” ‘

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

The Recompiler: An Interview with Audrey Eschright

Audrey Eschright is a well-known figure in the Portland, Oregon tech scene, and for good reason: her open source project, Calagator, has been connecting Portland techies with local tech and user group events since 2008.  She also co-founded Open Source Bridge, a tech conference that has raised the bar for inclusiveness, diversity, and volunteerism in technical conferences.

Audrey’s newest project is The Recompiler, a feminist hacker magazine that will be launching in summer of 2015.  Given Audrey’s successful track record, The Recompiler promises bring something wonderful and valuable to the lives of many technically-minded people. I wanted to learn more about this project and what she hopes to make of it.  Our conversation follows; if you’re interested in helping make The Recompiler a success, don’t forget to become a subscriber – a subscription drive is currently underway.

What’s your vision for The Recompiler?

I want to create a community of learning and inclusion for people working with technology, via a print and online magazine, and other media projects. I’m very interested in exploring the diversity that already exists in tech, and connecting the dots to show people pathways into areas of tech beyond the webdev bootcamp –> tech startup job model that seems to be the primary way we’re talking about creating a “pipeline” for under-represented groups to engage in technical work.

I’m at a point in my career, the pipeline isn’t the thing I think about the most anymore. I’m thinking about creating a platform for people to continue to live and work in this space, especially as we find ourselves to be no longer raw beginners, but people who have experience, competence, and yet still need to continue to learn more, keep building our skills.

I’ve also been asking myself: what am I even doing diversity work for? What is geek feminism for? The work of promoting and explaining diversity needs can completely swamp you, take up all your time and energy. If there isn’t still a space to do tech, to build technology that we need, by us and for us, there’s no point.

What sort of content are you envisioning for The Recompiler? Who’s your ideal audience, and what value should subscribing / reading expect to get?  How about those who might not normally consider themselves in the readership of a feminist hacker magazine?

I’m looking for a range of content on technical topics: tutorials, articles, personal stories, and also art and illustrations. I’ve been really inspired by zine culture, as well as newer magazines like Lucky Peach that take a topic (in their case, food) and explore it from a variety of angles: factual, creative, work, play, at home, and traveling all over the world.

My ideal audience is people who are working with technology and just starting to be aware of the bigger range of unknown unknowns (I don’t know what I don’t know). And also people who are in other places in their learning progression, but want to continue to expand their knowledge in a fun, playful way. I think that by combining tutorials and technical articles with personal narratives and art, we can build a map of possibilities together.

I hope that for people who see themselves as being outside that audience, it will give them a greater awareness of the real breadth of activities and kinds of participation that are possible in technology. Part of my process as I started working on The Recompiler was to ask myself, what inspired me when I first started to learn to program? What encouraged me to want to be involved in computing? So much of that was about exploring possibilities, building things that hadn’t existed before, and connecting with other people through new kinds of communication tools. I hope that everyone who reads The Recompiler will feel a little of that spark.

Tell me about the history of this project. What inspired you, and what led you to the point where you decided to make The Recompiler happen?

Well, one of the most direct inspirations was Amelia Greenhall’s “Start Your Own B(r)and” post. Around December, January, I was looking at my job and career options, and trying to decide whether to stay where I was, move to another startup, or do something else. I made a list of what I thought I was looking for, and talked to a lot of people, and then Amelia’s post really hit me at the right time.

After that, I talked to a lot of friends about maybe doing a “feminist hacker magazine”, and everyone from Women Who Hack, and people were really into the idea. So I spent some time writing down every idea that came to mind, working out a budget, figuring out what I would need to make it work, then I quit my job to focus on this at the end of March. It’s not the first time I’ve thought about starting a business and going to work for myself, but having so much information about what I needed to learn, and friends who could give me referrals and business advice, that made a huge difference.

The promotional video for your subscription campaign includes cameos by your three cats and a blue puppet I’m familiar with from your 2010 Open Source Bridge talk, “The Fine Line Between Creepy and Fun.” Tell me more about them!

My cats Sputnik, Kirk, and Yuri were all very obliging participants in the video. Sputnik (with the tuxedo) is getting to be a “senior”, but he’s still the most athletic: if he can see where he’s going, he can jump on top. Kirk (the tabby) is a snuggle bunny, sometimes he gets a little *too* enthusiastic and starts to head butt people. And Yuri is the baby, and the softest cat I’ve ever met.

It’s hard to keep Creepius from inviting himself to things like this. The weird little blue monster thinks he’s the star of everything.

Thanks for telling us more about The Recompiler, Audrey! The subscription drive continues for a couple more weeks.