THE CARRIER_ BAG THEOR_YOF FICTION

@nevilleseabridge4615 6 years ago She needs help. Completely bonkers. Show less Read more Like 19 Dislike Reply @ratedg5039 2 months ago When they have nothing to do, they find things to whine and complain about. It gets pretty rodiculous. She's just a victim.

@JFabree 5 years ago You should do a full analysis on all gender disparities. This is very biased which is bad in statistics. Men are 4 times more likely to commit suicide. Men are more likely to have alcohol and drug addiction issues. Men are more likely to die in war. Men are more likely to die at work (i.e. police officers, miners, firefighters). Men are more likely to suffer from homelessness. Men serve more jail time than women for the same offenses and also make up a majority of prisoner population. Men have a lower life expectancy than women. Men are more likely to be a victim of homicide. I am not negating your facts, but you are ignoring many issues that face men therefore your issues sampling is extremely selective. You should address all human issues, not just one sides.

@Lancelote. 10 months ago men die more in car crashes than women die, so accomodating women's need at the expense of men's seem absurd, the alternative is to create a "woman car", which have already been attempted at ford if im not mistaken, but ended up not being very useful.

@aaroncostello8812 1 year ago Let me guess...at the end of the book it is revealed that "everything can be blamed on men".

@rickycheese5879 5 years ago Alice E I read the book to try and understand. It really feels like petty self victimisation. History wasn’t kind for MOST people. 99% of society has been oppressed for all of history, not just women. And it is still that way. Please try to explain cos I still dont understand why this comment is ignorant.

@DrBustenHalter 5 years ago (edited) Men built the world. Women could have done but they were too busy complaining. It still needs some improvement but thanks for the feedback. Nowadays we have powertools so women COULD learn a trade and build bathrooms for themselves but they don't. Because apparently it's not sexy to be covered in sawdust and plaster. Or covered in tarmac from digging roads. Or covered in shit from cleaning sewers. An awful lot of them don't work at all, or just want to work in media, fashion or HR. So men will have to keep building things wrong until we get new requirements from our slave masters. Damn the patriarchy! And who is invisible?

@DrBustenHalter 5 years ago (edited) Men built the world. Women could have done but they were too busy complaining. It still needs some improvement but thanks for the feedback. Nowadays we have powertools so women COULD learn a trade and build bathrooms for themselves but they don't. Because apparently it's not sexy to be covered in sawdust and plaster. Or covered in tarmac from digging roads. Or covered in shit from cleaning sewers. An awful lot of them don't work at all, or just want to work in media, fashion or HR. So men will have to keep building things wrong until we get new requirements from our slave masters. Damn the patriarchy! And who is invisible?

@Calais_Reno

The death toll in South Korea, a country of 52 million people, stands at 1,693.

It had the capacity to test only in hospitals. The government's formal test-and-trace programme was launched in May.

When coronavirus hit, officials were able to flatten the epidemic curve quickly, without closing businesses or implementing stricter stay-at-home restrictions nationally.

the Mers outbreak b

21 March 2021

Ongoing lessons from a long pandemic

A broader measure of progress could reshape the way we choose to organize society by validating the valuable work that counts for little, or nothing, in our current system.

Online traffic is as much as 30 percent higher in some regions since the beginning of the pandemic, and households in lockdown are spending many more hours on the unpaid domestic work of cooking, cleaning and child care.Women seem to be disproportionately bearing the extra burden. In addition to their doing more of the unpaid work at home, their economically valuable work outside the home is suffering, as they are forced to substitute unpaid work for paid work — reversing a decades-long trend. Women have been the main providers of child care while schools have been closed, and mothers working from home are almost twice as likely as men to have reduced their working hours, with the biggest decline in hours found among college-educated women.

Similarly, many free online products — like TikToks, Wikipedia entries and social media posts — are substitutes for purchased equivalents in the media and entertainment. Millions of us donate our work to amuse or inform others, in a parallel economy in which others pay with their attention.

When I use online banking to deposit a check or when I book my own hotel room, I am crossing the production boundary, substituting my own unpaid work for the paid work of bank tellers or travel agents. None of this unpaid work is counted directly in gross domestic product.

The question of what counts in “the economy” is no longer posed only by feminist scholars; it is being examined by economists in general, including those who define the statistics used to measure growth. That’s because digital technology is changing the boundary between what we pay for in the market and what we do free in the home — for men as well as women.

But while the growth in consumer spending thanks to working women is well documented, there is another part of this story that has been largely ignored by economists: the persistence of unpaid work done by women. Even as more women have gone out to work over time, they have continued to do the “second shift.” Women take on more of the domestic labor and volunteering in the community than men, and they have less leisure time. In fact, women who work in paid jobs outside the home spend more time each week on chores at home than do men who do not go out to work.

In recent decades, the work of feminist economics has shown how the methods of calculating GDP render much of women’s labour invisible. Meanwhile, surveys and time-use studies show the toll this has taken on women’s lives, particularly in the Global South. One recent report found that hundreds of millions of women worldwide have to walk more than a 30-minute round-trip to reach clean water for their families.

Time, she explained, was “the one investment we all have to make”. Drawing on research she conducted in rural Kenya, she argued that time-use surveys would demonstrate “which sex gets the menial, boring, low-status, and unpaid invisible work”. Such surveys would show how targeted interventions, like access to clean water and efficient cooking stoves, could alleviate the drudgery of domestic labour and allow billions of women to gain greater freedom in how they spend their days.

Italian-born philosopher Silvia Federici, who taught for many years in Nigeria, argued that male “economic” production was impossible without women’s uncompensated “non-economic” labour. For instance, without a wife to tend to the children and the home, how would a male factory labourer have the time or the energy to fulfil his stereotypical role as the breadwinner?

She argued that it was “illogical” to exclude the economic value of preparing and cooking food and collecting firewood. She contended that such kinds of labour had historically been excluded because they were commonly viewed as women’s work.

In so many narratives, heterosexual love is the “happy ending.”

In this way, no fun is also a challenge: a challenge to the status quo and a challenge to ourselves. Let us play boredom. Let us play anger. Let us play what hurts. Let us play in ways that are just as different and just as queer as we are as players. And let us take that hurt, modeled by the embodiment of gameplay, and carry it with us, driving us to find other playful, powerful, and overlooked sites of counter-affective potential in our lives both on-screen and off.

A queer video game like those described through the language of empathy may last only a few minutes. By contrast, to feel as a queer subject truly feels, one must live the full, long length of a queer life, with every moment of its joys and its pains. That is not to say that straight, cisgender players should not play these queer games. Instead, we need an adjustment of affective expectation from empathy (an appropriation of queer experience) to compassion (an increased awareness of and sensitivity toward queer experience)

This work, as queer games scholar Diana Mari Pozo has argued, “show[s] how framing queer game design in terms of empathy risks displacing queer, particularly transgender women, game designers and their fans from their own movement, foregrounding instead the emotional edification of cisgender and/or straight audiences.”

“What if you really could walk a mile in someone’s shoes? Shared perspective breeds understanding.”

A Wired article titled “Is Virtual Reality the Ultimate Empathy Machine?,” for example, follows a common formula.

“People who aren’t on the inside of the game world often tell me they fear that games numb players to other people, stifling empathy and creating a generation of isolated, antisocial loners,” she writes. However, argues Isbister, “Games can actually play a powerful role in creating empathy and other strong, positive emotional experiences.”

A quick Google image search, for example, suggests that hegemonic media culture envisions negative emotions like anger and boredom as potentially acceptable responses for white male game players, but not for non-men or players of color. In instances like this one, Google image search, although far from comprehensive or objective as a scholarly tool, serves as a useful window into our culture’s visual shorthands for slippery concepts. Searching for “boys playing video games,” or simply “playing video games,” turns up scores of images of white, male children with controllers in their hands, expressing everything from ecstasy to confusion to rage. Searching for girls and people of color playing games turns up all happy, smiling faces. Players who fall outside of the stereotypical gamer norm are only acceptable as visible subjects when they are having fun.

We also shut out of sight all of those games we have picked up and played for only a few hours, even a few minutes, and never played again because we found them boring, frustrating, or bad. These too are meaningful experiences, meaningful games, games worthy of attention, not because they are good but because their badness is itself a rich site of meaning.

Why is it important to challenge game designers, players, and commentators to reimagine the relationship between fun and video games? As much as it is a personal matter, no fun is also a matter of diversity. Fun as a monolithic principle silences the voices of marginalized gamers and promotes reactionary, territorial behavior from within privileged spaces of games culture. Moving beyond fun, by contrast, opens up whole genres of possibilities, many of them queer. The spirit of no-fun is the spirit of alternatives, of disruptions, of difference.

Nausea, for one, comes with real implications for dynamics of gender within digital cultures. Both official studies, including work by danah boyd, and a significant number of anecdotal reports have shown that women are more likely than men to experience nausea when playing VR games.

Eyestrain, dizziness, and increased heart rates have also all been reported by users of early generations of the Oculus Rift after only a few minutes of gameplay.

Yet I would posit that simply knowing that the game is offensive does not suffice to make sense of the uncomfortable feelings it inspires. It is equally, if not more, important to experience the alarm that comes with playing—that worrying sense that a player is complicit when they maneuver the cowboy toward his abhorrent goa

Players who feel bored when playing are getting the message—even if they do not realize they are getting it—and the message is that leading the life of the marginalized and underprivileged person is no fun.

The game’s controls are unforgiving, failure happens often, and after every mistake players must watch an animation of their monkey flying off into space.

But the map is confusing, the controls are glitchy, andthe basic collection mechanic is tedious. Compared to the drama of Spielberg’s movie, the gameplay is laughably underwhelming.

These are games that seem to promise excitement yet fail to live up to expectations

The difficult moments that such games bring to life should not be dismissed as trivial or incidental.

They imagine the status quo as an institution whose very foundation can be shaken through play and playfulness. In this way, “no fun” models a type of queer world-making built on the liberating logics of masochism, which dictates that pleasure and its meaning cannot be bounded by the normative, and that new worlds of meaning are created in the moment that we embrace new worlds of experience.

meets a player in combat and wins. Fun also fails to capture the nuance of happier moments: wonder at the sight of stunningly rendered terrain, elation upon mastering the perfect series of moves, the sublime release of relinquishing one’s sense of self to ludic immersion

all the moments that “fun” fails to capture: disappointment at an accidental fall from a treacherous platform, distress at the sight of an approaching enemy, a flash of bile when an opponent

This is an important question. Fun as a focus for video games is problematic in part because fun itself is not a universal and invariable experience. It is culturally specific and personal. Asking this question (whose fun?) is, in fact, an ethical imperative for all games designers. For example, as Mohini Dutta has pointed out, in arguing for the value of participatory design, what is fun in America is not necessarily fun all over the world.1

Elsewhere in this book, I describe playing queer as a way of doing in a game: whether to win or to fail, to move through space and time too quickly or too slowly, or to halt and refuse to act.

Yet who would demand that all films be fun—or even beautiful? Think of all the films that would have to be cut from the canon of cinema if the moving image always had to be, in the most mainstream sense, entertaining. Those are the video games, many of them yet to be imagined, that we cast aside when we insist on fun.

What new insights could be uncovered by supplementing this structural approach with a phenomenological perspective—by analyzing games for their affective rhetoric: the language of the feelings they invoke, how they communicate emotions to their players, how designing affect is interwoven in the art of game design? Like any art form, video games can and do engender a wide range of feelings. The traditional and often myopic focus on fun forecloses a rich array of difficult or “negative” emotions that can in fact shape a game’s message as much as (if not more than) its content and mechanics.

Couched within such vitriol, it is easy to see how an insistence on fun can breed unanticipated social dangers.

Fun is central to the discourse of the online, anti-feminist harassment campaign #GamerGate. In anonymous forums and on social media, reactionary gamers have organized around, among other complaints, the principle (discussed in chapter 2) that video games should not be subject to socially engaged critique. Rather, they should remain “just for fun.”

Between the lines of the authors’ argument is the implication that the hegemony of play represents a significantly limited view of what experiences players might want out of their games. In this sense, the hegemony of play is a hegemony of feeling as much as a hegemony of design. The authors propose to push back against this hegemony by calling for change within the games industry. I would argue that players themselves can also resist the affective elements of the hegemony of play—e.g., fun—by playing video games in ways that defy normative expectations and instead reflect their own queer or otherwise counterhegemonic feelings.

like many Esports players today, take gameplaying so seriously that it seems to many they have stripped the fun out of video games

Thus, despite the proliferation of emotional experiences that games can engender, video-game affect and its implications have been understood within relatively limited terms.

and that the “right” way to play, the normal way to play, is to maximize normative enjoyment.

fun that brings into question what “fun” even means

Each time my driver respawns, I do it again. A kind of ecstasy takes over—the ecstasy of self-destruction—and I repeat my feat of defiance until all my lives are lost.

I want to feel frustration, annoyance, disappointment, domination, and pain.

After only nine seconds of gameplay, I crash into a wall. “Game over,” intones a pitiless announcer, followed quickly by the imperative: “Again.” And I do play again, and I die again. Seven seconds, ten seconds, six seconds. Game over, game over, game over. For a player like me, this is not training. I am not improving. Honestly, I am just not very good.

many (or perhaps all) video games include some of the elements that characterize the no-fun experience, such as annoyance, boredom, disappointment, sadness, or alarm.

Most often, when people think of video games that are no fun, they imagine games that tackle hard topics, games that seek to educate or enact “social change,

much of the reactionary discourse that is being used to resist the diversification of video games hinges on the notion that games should be “just for fun.”

which is simultaneously being used to obfuscate the capitalist, neoliberal instrumentalization of affect

It also demonstrates how players can make space within the prescribed boundaries of seemingly “straight” video games for strategies of resistance and for remaking the (game) world through their own queer affect.

by “playing to lose,”

This chapter represents the second of three that looks to how queerness can be brought to video games by their players.

aturalInferiority o

Mary Astell​

The Symplectic ‘Elements’ package will give faculty authors more control over their online representation and also increase the ease with which they can upload manuscripts in those frequent cases where the publication contract only allows the archiving of the author's final submitted manuscript rather than the final published version.8

the Duke faculty has shown a willingness to experiment and adapt to new methods of disseminating research in a digital environment, and to lead the way in changing the way scholarly communications takes place.

Open access is an expanding movement and a growing commitment.

the policy stops short of being an absolute mandate.

it meant their research would show up in a Google search on their names ahead of their ‘Rate My Professor’ pages

mediated deposit is labor-intensive but far more successful than relying on true ‘self-archiving’.”

Faced with a fait accompli that had cost them no effort and which did not endanger their relationship with their publisher, since it took into account the policies of those publishers, every single author accepted what had been done.

whenever possible without the need for the author to do anything at all; they would be contacted only after the ‘harvest’ so that they could either approve what had been done or ask for a waiver of the policy

s to ‘self-archive’. These retained rights were added into author contracts by the publishers themselves, so exercising those rights could not be seen as a threat to these traditional models of publication.

there was a good deal of concern about the impact of open access policies on traditional publishers, especially on small scholarly societies. Second, we heard concern about whether a University-wide policy was the appropriate way to support open access, especially in light of the differences in publishing expectations and opportunities across different disciplines. The third broad area of concern, and perhaps the one that engendered the most conversation, involved how the policy would be implemented.

one significant change was to ask that articles be deposited promptly in DukeSpace even when the faculty author wished to delay open access or even to opt out of such access entirely. This ability to ‘embargo’ access, and to collect preservation copies of articles even when they would not be made public

he role of the library in archiving materials is increasingly important. While faculty maintain that the library’s most important function is as the buyer of resources they need, they are finding the library’s ability to serve as a repository of resources increasingly important.

Faculty are skeptical about the value of using learning analytics tools

There is substantial interest in use of open educational resources for instructional practices, particularly from younger faculty members. About six in ten respondents are very interested in using open educational resources (OER), and roughly half strongly agreed that they would like to adopt new instructional approaches with OER.

However, only four in ten faculty indicate open access characteristics of journals as highly influential in publication decisions.

Faculty members increasingly prefer to manage and preserve their data using cloud-based storage services. Sin

Discovery starting points are shifting towards Google Scholar and other general search engines. While specific scholarly databases remain the most frequent starting point for research, faculty are increasingly beginning their exploration of scholarly literature with Google Scholar and other general-purpose search engines.

olicy, infrastructure and resources, and advocacy and awareness

MITshouldadvocateforgreaterrecognitionofandcredittoresearcherswhosharedata,includingthosewhopreparedataforsharing

-out provision.

underscore the urgency

ir international competition and America’s strategic and commercial interests,” we must resist the urge “to try to double-lock all our doors

ork with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges.

The six core principles o

publishers are paid for the services valued by authors and readers, such as curation and peer-review management.

aims to ensure that scholarly research outputs are openly and equitably available to the broadest possible audience.

that control of scholarship and its dissemination should reside with scholars and their institutions,

departments

t’s one thing to worry that your canon isn’t sufficiently inclusive, or broad,or representative. It’s another thing

Screwing Around

Hermeneutics

ndra's Web

Chapter n Mary Shelley I.Victor Frankenstein The Men, by thi:nki.ng us incapable of improving our intellects, have enti.re!JI thrown us out qf all the advantages qf education; and thereby contributed as much as possilile to make us the senseless creatures thgi represent us. So that,far want qf education, we are render'd subject to all the follies thl!)I dislike in us:, and are loaded with their ill treatment for faults qf their own creating.

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