Given the size of smartphones, one is reduced to using one or two digits to create a message (compared to the ability to use all ten digits when using a laptop/keyboard). That probably explains the increase in the use of pictograms: touching a happy face from a menu of emoticons is easier than inputting the …
Category: popular culture
Jul 15 2022
The Evil of Touchpads: Menus
I recently rented a cottage on the Bruce Peninsula and found myself infuriated by the tiny device to control the smart tv: to search for a specific movie in Netflix, you had to swipe across and across and across, back and forth, to move the cursor along the alphabet arranged in a long 26-characterer single …
Jun 10 2022
IT, AI, and Us
Like thousands of people, I recently received a message from Google: On May 30, you may lose access to apps that are using less secure sign-in technology To help keep your account secure, Google will no longer support the use of third-party apps or devices which ask you to sign in to your Google Account …
Dec 01 2021
The Authority Gap, Mary Ann Sieghart – A MUST READ
As I was reading this book, I realized right away I wanted to post about it, so I started making a list of bits to mention, but very quickly there were just too many!! So – A MUST READ. This book is FULL of all the stats you ever wanted to support your personal experience: …
Dec 18 2020
Why the fuck are ATVs, jetskis, snowmobiles still legal?
“By 2050 at the latest, and ideally before 2040, we must have stopped emitting more greenhouse gases [typically caused by the burning of fossil fuels] into the atmosphere than Earth can naturally absorb through its ecosystems (a balance known as net-zero emissions or carbon neutrality). In order to get to this scientifically established goal, our …
Nov 24 2019
History, the News, Men, Women, Life, Death, Joy, Pain
History, many say, is nothing but violence, war, death … Yes, because men write it. If women wrote history, maybe we’d put something else center stage. Maybe themselves. And maybe if all that violence didn’t make the front page, there’d be less of it. And if men became unimportant, then what they did would become …
May 23 2019
Why Pornography Matters … Andrea Dworkin
My god, there’s something placard-worthy in every paragraph!! “Why Pornography Matters to Feminists” from Letters from a War Zone, Andrea Dworkin: Pornography is a n essential issue because pornography says that women want to be hurt, forced, and abused; pornography says women want to be raped, battered, kidnapped, maimed; pornography says women want to be …
Sep 12 2018
Women Writing Science Fiction as Men — why bother?
I’ve just finished reading Mike Resnick’s collections Women Writing Science Fiction as Men and Men Writing Science Fiction as Women. There were two rules for submissions to the anthologies: “First, each story had to be told in the first person of a man [woman]; and second, if changing the narrator from Victor to Victoria [or …
Aug 29 2018
Gretel, by Chris Wind
Gretel, by Chris Wind (from Snow White Gets Her Say) www.chriswind.net We read fables in school to teach us a lesson. And we read fairy tales at bedtime to put us asleep. And indeed they do: especially those of us, a full half of the human species, who are lulled lower and lower into a …
Aug 24 2018
13 Reasons Why: How to Make a Movie (and maybe Write a Novel *) without acknowledging the Elephant in the Room
So I’ve just finished watching 13 Reasons Why (Netflix) and am struck by the completely unacknowledged elephant in the room. Not one character acknowledges that almost all of the problems leading to Hannah’s suicide stem from sexism and its many tumours – misogyny, male entitlement, male privilege, hypersexualization, objectification, the rape culture, etc., etc., etc. …
fiction
