I Am Amused

So, I am sitting on the couch with my father. The TV is on. He is reading the news. And I am too.



On my laptop.

Wherein I Get Sucked Into the LOLCATS Phenom

Kitteh has broken an axle.

(no, none of these are mine, they just cracked me up.)



going to chambr of sekrets brb





pow pow power wheels





poysin mouses





align right

(sigh)

And People Look Down On Me For Not Reading This Shit

“We found that how people use chargers is very different,” she said. “For her, she wants it to be instantly understandable.”

from a NYT article on women and technology. (via Shrub)

Yeah, because all the guys I know are looking for any excuse to do more work.



Oh, wait, was she instead implying that women are stupid?

/sarcasm

Since the paragraph immediately preceding this little gem was:

....the $20 Easy Charger, is aimed at women, who usually end up managing the household’s batteries....Large light-emitting-diode readouts spell out what the countertop charger is doing at every phase of the charging cycle. Focus-group testing indicated that men were turned off by the Easy Charger, especially in how its readouts appeared to tell them what they thought they already knew, said Mandy Iswarienko, the brand manger for rechargeable products.

Not only would that appear that she was indeed implying that women are stupid*, but it also looks as though she may be right.

Or it would, if it wasn't for the little bit that Marriott (the author of the article) managed to mention without bothering to note that it had any significance.

Let's read that first line again.

...the $20 Easy Charger, is aimed at women, who usually end up managing the household’s batteries.

(emphasis mine)

So, let me get this straight, men don't need all those 'readouts [that appear] to tell them what they thought they already knew" - but it's women who manage the apparently tricky task of managing household batteries?

(ps - how do the men think they know what phase of the cycle the charger is in without a readout - psychic energy?)

Here's the charger in question, by the way.



Note how the "readouts" are vastly different from half the chargers I've ever used, what with the words "done" and "charging" printed right on the two light covers and everything, rather than a changing picture of a battery. That's just....revolutionary!

In all seriousness, I do think it's a pretty smart design choice, but I fail to see how printing words on the little lights suddenly means that the charger is "spell[ing] out" what phase it's in. Except in the literal sense of actually using letters, of course, but I don't think "spell it out" was meant literally in this case.

Although mostly I'm still gawping at the idea that they spell out "every phase of the cycle." There's two "phases" - "charging" and "not charging." It's not, um, like a dishwasher or a washer/dryer, which actually do have several phases.

For comparison, here's the "guy" charger, the Dock and Go:



So, they did technically "spell it out" in the sense that the "guy" charger has just a light, no words. Presumably the light changes color and/or blinks. Which means that "spell it out" really means "you don't need to know some special code to figure out if it's done or not." (The phone chargers at work do this, and I can never remember what is supposed to mean what. Except that red means that nothing is working.)

So really, it's not that guys like stuff to be hard, it's that 1) the guys they tested like to pretend stuff is harder than it is and 2) the women they tested were less likely to be familiar with the semi-standard flashing light code that many chargers use.

Which reminds me of the time I wanted to recently smack some sense into a co-worker...but that's a story for another day. Or the next post anyway.

In any case, this is pretty typical for the article.

“If a man brings home a big whooper of a television, the woman is going to say, ‘That’s stupid; it’s too big for the wall,’ ” he said.

Mr. Brady said that men and women tended to have radically different approaches to televisions in the home. “Men want the TV to dominate the room,” he said “Women look more at the TV to not be the centerpiece of the room, but more of an accent piece.”

Um, maybe it's just me, but I think my Dad's and my brother's big screen TVs are stupid because the are too big for the room in the sense that the rooms they are in are not big enough to let you sit far enough away to be comfortable, not that they visually dominate the room. (And I have excellent peripheral vision. And I love architecture.)

That, plus the fact that they are way too high a quality for a lot of my older DVD box sets, which end up looking supremely crappy on them. (Yes, I'm talking about you, Buffy Season 1.) It's like the time the whole family went to go see Fantasia 2000 at an IMAX theatre (yes, I'm serious. and yes, you can stop laughing now.) I could totally see the pixels on all the computer animation. Bigger is not always better.

The combo TV-DVD players, which usually cost $800 to $1,000, are equipped with auto wake, permitting users to turn the television on by simply slipping a DVD into it. Knowing that one does not have to fumble with a multi-button remote control becomes a subtle signal to buy.

Plus there's that little bit about not having to go searching for the magically disappearing remote just to watch a damn movie. Now if only they'd stop being idiots and go back to putting all the basic buttons onto the actual TV/DVD player as well as the remote, I'd be so much happier.

“Women are busier than men,” she said. “I don’t love technology enough to sit down and spend two hours with a manual like it’s some great puzzle. Men get great gratification out of that. I’d rather read a book.”

Again, you think maybe it's not so much the men liking it more, but the men being less likely to be stuck doing it when it is no longer fun? Seeing as how it's "women, who usually end up managing the household batteries" and "women [who] are busier than men" and all.

But alas, how quickly we forget the humorous anecdotes of Dad going not so quietly ballistic late into the night on Christmas Eve - when his tinkering is made less fun by the practicalities of actually having to get shit done.

*possibly the writer was, but that drivel sounded like it came straight from some idiotic marketing/PR press release.

An Apology to All Female Gamers

I'm afraid I managed to reinforce some of the not so nice stereotypes about girls and games over the last few nights.

I didn't mean to, I swear!

See, here's how it happened:

YALSA came up with the idea to start a new annual teen event called Teen Tech Week and being a YA librarian and all (yeah, yeah, I'm technically just a "library assistant") it was my job to come up with stuff for the teens to do. Besides, I thought it was a pretty cool idea anyway.

However, since I was never cool even when I was a teenager, and since I'm still getting to know the teens from my area, I put out a survey asking them to rate some ideas that I had...well, ok, some ideas I got from YALSA's wiki and site.

The overwhelming winner was...well, it was actually a movie night, but we couldn't get the license in time, so we opted for a Teen Game Night, which came in a pretty strong second. So, I borrowed my brother's Playstation, hauled my teeny tiny TV up the mountain, ordered some pizza, and told the the kids they were welcome to bring any of their own games and game systems. Several brought in games and handhelds, and we left the computers on and provided board games as well, so there was plenty for everyone to do. One of the teens actually brought in a big huge TV*, so we were able to set up another station with yet another kid's XBox.

Overall it was a HUGE success. I saw lots of faces I had yet to see ever in my entire four months working there and I know several of the kids came in because their friends told them about it. Dude, I'm getting word of mouth advertising!

However, I haven't played anything other than puzzle games on my computer for, well, several years. Not since my brother and I shared an apartment and a Playstation, I'm ashamed to say. (A different brother and Playsation.) So...I sucked. Plus, I was only half paying attention to the game (for the whole two minutes I played any) because it was my job to keep an eye on things.

It also didn't help that I was all nostalgic about all the old games, or that I had to keep asking "so how do we do this?", or that I just tried laughing my miserable failure off as if it were a joke.

Grrrr...

Well, I may be able to keep the Playstation for a while, so I might see about practising some so I am less of an embarrassment to my gender the next time around.

Of course, that probably means I should pick something up besides Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2....


*yeah, so, there's lots of obvious potential problems with letting them do this, but the kid who brought the TV in is 17 and is leaving for Boot Camp and then Iraq in less than 6 months, so I kinda figured he was old enough to make his own decisions about such things. And all the other kids had carrying cases for their gear and games, so it was quite obvious that they do this often, and that their parents know they do.

Since When

do Thin Mints come wrapped in foil tubes instead of plastic ones?

And why is this bothering me so much?




Oh...yes, because after spending two evenings in a row hosting a teen game night, I really don't need anymore reminders of how old I am.


"Nintendo Gameboy Color! I remember when this was the coolest thing ever!"

"Super Mario Bros.! I remember when we got our first Nintendo!"


Yeah...I think I'll shut-up right about now.



(the game nights were super cool, though)

This is Just Too Perfect and Too Sad

at the same time.

From She's Such a Geek, we get the discovery that when you put

biologist OR physicist OR scientist “she says”

into google news search, google responds with

Did you mean: biologist OR physicist OR scientist “he says”

It does not do the same if you replace "biologist OR physicist OR scientist" with "teacher OR nurse OR housekeeper."

I also tried searching with

teacher OR nurse OR housekeeper “he says”

and I didn't get anything back but the search pages I asked for.

Now, I generally dismiss conspiracy theories based on Occam's razor, and this is no exception. I don't think this bit of sexism was purposely built into google. The most likely possibility is that it's simply a result of the combination of search algorithims, the number of instances in which female scientists, physicists, and biologists are quoted, and the number of times that people search for such quotes.

But that's what makes it all the more interesting. It's such a perfect example of how prevailing biases in one area, and the absence of activisim in another, can combine to turn even something that wasn't meant to be sexist into a tool of sexism.

It's such a perfect rebuttal to the idea that lack of action in a culture were such biases exist means that one is being neutral.

After all, if you add negative 1 to 0, you've still got negative 1.