Canada celebrates Thanksgiving several weeks before the US. This is because historically our growing season is shorter, though this may change due to a combination of improved plant breeds and global warming.
While most people do the Sunday dinner thing, we end up doing it Monday. Why? Because of the annual "It's Thanksgiving weekend so I'm gonna renovate something in the house" that my brother-in-law does. So I spent Saturday and Sunday helping with a wall and laying new flooring in the basement. And am I sore! But that's okay, this evening's Thanksgiving supper will make up for it.
One of my nephews is bringing his new girlfriend, and since everyone who will be in attendance insists on continuing to misgender me and call my by my old name even after all these years, it'll be amusing. I'll just explain the situation, how they can't seem to accept it but that they're family, so what the heck, and watch what happens.
And I'm sure that they'll be delighted* to find out I'm publishing my bio later this year, where I'll write frankly about growing up hiding what I was, the first murder and the resulting ptsd, the sexual assault which made it worse, what it was like transitioning and all the other fun stuff.
And I'll probably hear "why can't you just be gay" AGAIN! Family - gotta love 'em.
(to the tune "This Old Man")
I'm stuck with them,
they're stuck with me,
we're a dysfunctional fa-mi-ly
but that's okay 'cuz life is never dull,
so I'm gonna go and eat until I'm full.
Normal is SO over-rated nowadays.
(.*for values of "delighted" equivalent to "If you do that I'm going to change my name so nobody knows we're related")
I was looking back at my old "Gender Education" series. Can't believe it will be NINE YEARS in December. Wow.
It was good for its' time, but it's dated, and isn't the approach I would take today. The world has changed, I have changed, yadda yadda yadda. So, I'm going to revisit the topic, inserting it into my workflow before my other stuff. Should make a good free ebook.
Just in case this doesn't make it to the front page, I'm throwing my two cents in here.
Should Twitter Suspend LGBT Engineer Accused Of Raping Her Wife?
Getting rape prosecuted has long provided its own set of deeply frustrating difficulties, from belligerent questioning of accusers to blatant refusal to investigate claims.
It is also not particularly surprisingâ"but still extremely upsettingâ"that the alleged rapist in this case has insinuated the accuser made her claim for monetary gains. Nor is it surprising that the employer of the accused has neither fired the alleged perpetrator nor denounced the trial.
What is surprising is that the alleged rapist is a well-regarded feminist and LGBT advocate, Dana McCallum, a transgender woman who was named by Business Insider as the fifth-most important LGBT person in the tech world. She is a senior engineer for Twitter, which stated "We don't comment on employeesâ(TM) personal mattersâ when McCallum was charged with five felonies earlier this years: three counts of spousal rape, one count of false imprisonment and one count of domestic violence.
McCallum ultimately pleaded guilty on Tuesday to two misdemeanors: one count of domestic violence with corporal injury to the spouse and one count of false imprisonment. The District Attorney's office insisted on a guilty plea when she attempted to enter no contest. From a legal standpoint, the case is resolved, but the aftershocks in the way we think about rape and assault will reverberate for a long time.
Or at least they should. Unfortunately, the relative silence around McCallumâ(TM)s trial, let alone the issue of woman-on-woman rape and sexual assault, is deafening and disturbing.
Dana McCallum, having pled guilty, should be demoted, not just suspended. This is someone who has demonstrated a serious lack of the people skills necessary to be a senior anything - as someone who needs a period of reflection, and then supervision. As Reuters reports, this is a senior engineer who now needs to take a year's worth of domestic violence classes.
Oct 7 (Reuters) - A senior Twitter engineer hailed as one of the most important gay or transgender people in the tech industry was sentenced on Tuesday to three years probation after pleading guilty to false imprisonment and domestic violence charges, San Francisco prosecutors said.
Dana Contreras, known professionally as Dana McCallum, was also ordered to attend 52 weeks of domestic violence classes and stay away from her wife, the victim in the case, as part of a plea deal with prosecutors.
Under that agreement prosecutors agreed to drop more serious rape charges against Contreras, 33, who was arrested in January after the attack, said Max Szabo, a spokesman for the San Francisco District Attorney's Office.
In addition to her job as an engineer for Twitter, Contreras, who is transgendered, has advocated for gay, women's and transgender rights.
In December of 2013, the tech website Business Insider ranked Contreras No. 5 on its list of the 31 most important LGBT people in tech, calling her "one of the geniuses behind Twitter."
[sarcasm] Way to go, genius. [/sarcasm]
The rule is simple - if you're prominent, you will be held to a higher standard, if only because your screw-ups will cause more damage. And that's fair. After all, you're reaping the benefits of prominence, so you should also expect the responsibilities that go with it. We don't see that happen often enough (just look at Toronto mayor Rob Ford), but we're starting to see it in, of all places, the world of sports, where domestic violence (players) and bigotry (owners) have consequences far beyond the courtroom.
I am now officially registered with the government as a publisher, with my own ISBN publishers pefix. That's pretty fast (1-day) service. Gotta love Kanuckistan
The idea of "one career for a lifetime" is getting more and more outdated. It's not just that change is now the only constant when it comes to jobs, but also because people are living longer.
When 80% of the population worked on farms, and people died at an average age of 47, the idea of a "lifelong career" was taken for granted. Then again, so was "lifelong marriage", and "following in your folks footsteps."
That last option is impossible for many, because the jobs their parents had just don't exist any more - and this means that the "work culture" they were exposed to second-hand at home also is no longer a useful reference.
Think of how many jobs the post-WW2 technological revolution has created and now is killing off. TV repairmen? Not too many left. VCR and DVD repairs? Forget it. When's the last time your car needed an "electronic tune-up?" Or, thanks to long-life, self-lubricating materials, to have a "chassis lube?" Points changed? Physical newspapers and books? Even Saturday morning cartoons can't compete with "teh innert00bs."
My situation - at a crossroads
After a couple of years away from the keyboard because of damage to my retinas, I was really relieved to find that I could program again. But something has changed. Me. I found myself asking "Do I really want to get back into *that* rat-race again? The crappy hours, impossible demands, sleazy management, and over-the-top hype, the much ado about nothing that seems to accompany everything in the software industry today?"
After I transitioned, I got to see how women are not treated equally first-hand. We'd be sitting in meetings and end up just rolling our eyes as the men went off on yet another pissing contest, totally ignoring our input, even though in many cases I was the programmer who had to fix the problems their virtual circle jerks caused. And people wonder why women drop out of tech after an average of 10 years in the field???
I loved creating software, so it became my career. Do what you enjoy doing, right? But more and more, I cringe at the thought of the poison that accompanies today's "development culture" - the bogus deadlines, the "ship it then (never) fix it" mentality, the juvenile "pissing contests". I have my development environment all set up, and I find myself doing anything but
I've been toying with an idea
Every few years, someone comes along and tells me I should write a book. Sure, I can write, and I've got lots I've always wanted to write, but "life gets in the way." I was thinking of going back into programming to pay the bills, and do the writing on the side, but that's not the entrepreneurial spirit that got me into starting my first business, or into programming. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I can either devote all my energies to one or another - or do a crappy job at both by trying to do both. It's true, just as you can only serve one master, you can only follow your own muse.
And I really should follow my muse.
So, I did my research, did some more thinking, and at this time, for me, changing careers is the right thing to do. I've registered with the government as a publisher, and will be receiving my first batch of ISBNs in the next little while. As you can see from a previous post, I'm not going to engage in the more and more lame "I have an idea for a book/game/software - everybody give me money and I'll create it" crowdsourcing model. It's time to let the internet work for me for a bit, and not vice versa.
Part of the problem with sites like Google Books is that there's no "it's free, unless you want to pay for it" option.
And putting two copies of the same book, one free and one with a price, will look like you're spamming the store.
However, after a bit of investigation, IF the publications have different ISBN numbers, and you add some extra content (I'm thinking cover art, photos, diagrams, etc., that don't result in the free edition being the book version of "crippleware"), it should meet Google's guidelines, because each ISBN number is treated as a separate entity, as opposed to books that don't have an ISBN.
Thoughts?
I'd like to talk about Slashdot. We all remember that old troll, Netcraft confirms it, only these days you don't need pagerank to see the decline in comments and community involvement. It's a problem. And facing that truth is the first step in finding solutions. But before I begin, a bit of meta about this journal entry:
First of all, while I've submitted to the editorial queue I don't expect front page placement. I know this kind of navel gazing isn't FP worthy. The intended readership is editors and those interested in
Secondly, this journal is not a bitch session. I don't want to talk about which editors suck, why the beta should or shouldn't be tossed, or how much better things were when Malda ran the shop. All that is gazing into a rear view mirror. And you can't drive a car based on what's already passed by. Success requires looking out the front window at oncoming obstacles and steering clear. Otherwise, you tumble off-road and crash and burn.
Thirdly, I like Slashdot. I want it to succeed. And I think there are exploitable opportunities to regain audience. So this diary is about grasping opportunity for renewed success. I want to offer hopeful suggestions. For there is no point in promoting defeatism and failure.
To begin, let's look at what's wrong. Most of it is inertia following an old model that was once wildly successful. The editorial policy still focuses on short blurbs about off site articles. Yet these days a well written subject line conveys everything one needs. That's why Twitter is so successful.
The next problem is slow turn-around for material already publiziced by competitors. It might take a half-day to a day between submission to front page. Which were editors carefully selecting from a vast deluge of stories might make sense, particularly if most of them were somehow folded within the Slashdot umbrella and not already publicized. But right now, that's not the case.
There's a competitor that's taken over link aggregation. We all know who it is. Reddit. The once Smiling Alien has become a Ravenous Gorilla, eating everything and everyone in its path. Reddit has already eaten Slashdot's lunch. Now it's taking seconds and thirds from the nerd site's breakfast and dinner plates.
In particular,
Combine these two, redundant write ups of old news already popular elsewhere and you get decline. In link aggregation, Reddit won and Slashdot lost. Get over it. Because Slashdot lost that war long before Reddit even came on the scene. The question is why. Answer that and it's a first step toward putting Alien Kong on a much needed diet.
Sometimes examining history is a helpful lens through which to understand the present. Slashdot has always been a community driven site. That is, back in its founding, Malda et all took users seriously and tried to meet their needs. On occasion this led to site editorial policy contorting itself around conflicting community demands. And was that community demanding. It's as if Slashdot's success seemed to have knit together too many groups with differing interests. It seemed impossible to please everyone.
By the end of the 1990s, there was recognition the site couldn't rely entirely on externally generated content. That link aggregation was only a partial means to drive audience. Should the site promote user submitted content or hire professional writers? On the one hand, community submissions engage the core audience. On the other hand, professional writers produce professional content. Some users expected professionally copyedited submissions given the site dominated 'Net tech discussion. Others wanted to retain its amateur community charm.
The downfall of Jon Katz as Slashdot professional writer and editorial staffer said more about this community divide than it did about his competence. Even if he did screw up. A real editorial process would have caught his mistakes before publication. And he is a good writer. Even if only marginally competent with tech news. But that community breach - not Jon Katz but the divide between amateur community and professional - provided opportunity for competition.
One dev took advantage of dissatisfaction on Slashdot and developed a community driven competitor, Kuro5hin. Its unique claim was that users could vote on story submissions rather than the site's press being controlled by a central editorial body. It offered a private submission queue where community members could propose editorial changes prior to publication. Then a story 'election' stage where voting would decide success or failure. Those stories that succeeded made it to the front page. A community voting model was tried many times before Reddit took the reigns as self-proclaimed "Front Page of the Internet."
This led to a debate on Slashdot over whether community managed or centrally managed models should win out. Slashdot was the market gorilla then and Kuro5hin a semi-popular upstart. Slashdot continued their traditional editorial approach, with editors who selected community submitted content. They continued publishing Jon Katz. And ran on the inertia of success.
Kuro5hin challenged Slashdot by letting the community write, edit, and choose stories by popularity. And in this challenge the site became very popular very quickly. Not as big as Slashdot, but big enough to gain real attention. And Kuro5hin did this by at first slicing away a noticeable portion of the Slashdot community. But people stayed because the system allowed successful contributors to build notoriety, creating a symbiosis between writers, community, and publisher. Something Slashdot only partially embraced with open submissions.
But there's a reason why few remember Kuro5hin today. It had a slow-burn downfall. The more popular it became the more valuable was front page real estate. Just like with Slashdot, community members began to split off into different groups each with their own vested interest. And here was where the story voting queue transitioned from an enticing unique feature to its Achilles Heel.
Soon the queue became gamed by those groups, organized around parochial interests particular to each. Some were trolls, others political ideologues, and still others wanted a pure focus on tech. None could share a communal printing press. And the owner, in his infinite folly, decided to step away and not interfere with community choice. It was a community driven site, right? Let the community decide! Idiot.
People began to leave. Over a couple years that trickle of departures became a rush. Then a scandal or two and a huge migration cleaved the community in two. The site imploded. Finally, a focus on trolling for click-throughs left it publishing such insightful fare as Fuck Natalee Holloway, attracting eyeballs by impugning some girl who'd disappeared and became a media sensation.
Controversial stories like that can generate lots of short-term clickthroughs by an angry and indignant public. Hey, it's an advertising model. Click-bait. Before Gawker there was Kuro5hin. But it didn't last. Because it tarnished the brand for a bit of short-term gain. Kuro5hin lived off googlesearch results to old controversial stories for a time. But now it's a ghost town of 'Net-tumbleweeds and World Wide Cobwebs where a once vibrant community once stood.
The decline of Kuro5hin might have convinced Slashdot's editors they had made the right choice. It's demise is instructive. Centralized editors can prevent organized trolls and political insurgencies from taking control of a site's press. But as Kuro5hin devolved to infighting over an increasingly less relevant front page, another community driven site emerged. And this one would beat Slashdot at its own game in every way imaginable.
Digg. For those who remember its spectacular implosion the name evokes sneers of derision. But there was a time when Digg overtook not just scrappy media startup Slashdot with its little focus on 'news for nerds'. Using Slashdot's link aggregation model, Digg took over 'Net everywhere. Newspapers, magazines, music, film, television... promoting everything media. It became a powerhouse portal relevant to every press outlet and publisher, discussed on television, courted by public relations specialists, ultimately becoming worth billions of dollars on paper.
Contrasting Kuro5hin and Digg against Slashdot, one might call the founding of Kuro5hin a writer's dream of what community publishing could be; content, written by local authors and democratically selected for promotion by the community itself. Digg, on the other hand, represented a marketeer's fantasy of how to aggregate audience without doing the hard work of content creation. While Slashdot sat somewhere in the middle, promoting a little bit of community content on the front page and a whole lot of professional content published elsewhere.
Digg won. Its devs took Slashdot's model, transformed their editorial focus away from nerds to the general public, and reaped vast rewards in audience share. Then, like a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, it spectacularly died in a bloody 'Net mess. And, curiously, for much the same reason as Kuro5hin before it. Internal infighting. Corrupt vote rigging. A public scandal that destroyed credibility.
For a site that had prided itself on community content selection, ultimately a kind of payola system infected Digg. Perhaps not with money changing hands, but the power over a vast audience engendered a corrupt system of power users who self-coordinated to rig the selection process. Digg became Rigg, so to speak. Thereby undermining its entire raison d'etre for existence. Goodbye Digg.
Digg has changed hands and - like Kuro5hin - exists as a shell of its former self. They've even transitioned to a centrally managed editorial model, just like Slashdot. But it mostly remains dead. Reddit reaped their userbase and walked away with The Grand Prize. And to this day Reddit remains Alien King Kong, a giant gorilla eating everything off of everyone else's plate. Including Slashdot's.
So now we've seen two examples of site implosion by internal corruption. Perhaps there's a cyclic lesson to be learned here. A point I'll return to after discussing what I think is wrong with Slashdot's community partnership model. Now, I want to shift focus away from link aggregation to content production. Because today original content is king. There is no link aggregation without content. And what was once a vast diversity of publication houses and outlets has consolidated into a paltry few. Forcing content creators to either partner with corporate leaches or else die in obscurity.
Let's start with an old-timer, Dailykos. It's been around since Kuro5hin. Almost as long as Slashdot. And it's still highly popular with large audience share.
Forget about Dailykos' political leanings. The site is openly partisan, left leaning, and exists to promote Democratic candidates. And that's not why Dailykos is interesting. The site is interesting because it's old and yet still successful. Therefore Kos is doing something worth learning from. However, partisanship is not the lesson here. That's never been a viable model for Slashdot.
Instead, the lesson to learn is how a central editorial body sustains audience through community content generation. That's what Slashdot needs to foster. Because in this era, as long as Slashdot is focused on promoting material produced elsewhere the Giant Alien Gorilla will eat its lunch.
Diaries, not comments, are what drive community involvement at Dkos. That diary system creates a symbiosis between community and publisher. True, most diaries suck. But that's the case with all content. Most everything sucks. So what matters is not that sucky diaries are published but that quality filters exist to pick out diamonds in the rough.
There are two levels. Dkos has a voting system that publicizes the titles of popular diaries in a side box to the main page. If someone writes a recommended diary, it can generate thousands of page views and hundreds of "Recommended" upvotes. From there some diaries are chosen for promotion to the main page. Now you're talking tens or hundreds of thousands of page views for a story. That's real name recognition for a writer. And very well received diarists might get an offer to write for the front page regularly. Talk about incentive.
This mix of content by official site writers and promoted diary entries creates a path of upward mobility for lower ranks of creators and contributors to aspire to. It is these aspirations that sustain a community. Because getting noticed isn't merely some popularity content. Several writers have wound up landing professional gigs. What dkos gets from in content by diarists the site returns to writers with increased notoriety and even potential employment opportunities. Symbiosis.
All while the site publisher retains control over their press. Kos doesn't let trolls and other organized groups direct editorial policy. Slashdot editors should take note.
This model has been copied with more recent successful web startups. For example, Medium and Vice are sites that attract high quality content by providing an easy means for new contributors to get a foothold while retaining editorial control to weed out crap. The 1% rule is relevant here. The trick with a viable community model is to pair the interests of creators and contributors with the publisher. Rob Malda knew this from the beginning. But somewhere along the line that symbiosis between contributor and publisher on Slashdot broke down.
It's not as if Slashdot didn't try. There's a Journal system that was intended to replicate diaries on dkos. But it doesn't work. The place is a ghetto. Mostly because the promotion system is broken. On the one hand, only friends see new journal entries. On the other, journal entries can be submitted as stories to the Slashdot submission queue. But this creates a dead area in between. Journals on their own can't be used to build audience.
If you want to submit, there's little reason to write a journal entry. If you want to write a long form journal entry, there's cultural baggage opposing self-promotion. You might as well publish on your own blog and find some way to pass it around competitors and Slashdot. Which only diminishes its value as a potential Slashdot submission. You've got a negative feedback loop going here with Slashdot's most important potential community asset.
Earlier, after finishing up the history of Kuro5hin's and Digg's respective implosions, I said I'd discuss a special opportunity emerging that Slashdot could perhaps exploit. Implying that such an event might happen again. And I definitely think that's the case. However, there is a big difference between then and today.
When Kuro5hin died it wasn't even a leader in its field. There was significant competition not just from Slashdot but numerous other sites as well. Similarly, Digg imploded with Reddit standing by ready to fill that market gap. But today Reddit is a last site standing. They hold an effective monopoly on link aggregation. As they say, they're the "Front Page of the Internet." And these days they are. This makes Reddit sticky in a way prior sites weren't.
However, like Kuro5hin and Digg, there are serious problems with a perception of submission queue rigging and censorship by Reddit moderators. And it's pervasive across the large subreddits.
For example, back in October of last year it became clear that moderators in
Then, a few months later in February 2014, a new scandal emerged whereby the mods in
Just recently, a web developer was banned from for submitting a project of his own. He created a video, asking:
Has Reddit become a place for celebrities and big brands benefit from free advertising while the average Redditor who wants to share a personal project gets shoed away?
In the video he then spoke to why this is a bad thing for community relations and how this experience has impacted his trust in the site. At least discussion of his experience hasn't been censored on
Regardless, the issue here isn't about this guy's trouble. There have been so many other examples of this kind of manipulation a pervasive expectation of community exploitation by Reddit admins and mods has developed. The community knows - or at least believes - they're being actively censored for Public Relations purposes. Which is exactly what happened at Digg right before implosion. And Kuro5hin before it, for slightly different reasons.
That means there's market pressure building for a free-as-in-speech competitor to appear. That's called opportunity.
Slashdot? This situation is exploitable. The publisher and editors should take this opportunity to punch that Alien Gorilla in the face and give Reddit a well deserved bloody nose. You can't get everything. But if you're aggressive you could cleave off a chunk of audience at
This is YOUR OLD NERD AUDIENCE. Bring these people back to the fold by offering them what they want. An open community portal.
After these messes at Reddit and before that Digg perhaps they'll remember you fondly. Slashdot may have been incompetent but it was never corrupt. Not like that. At least nobody thought so. In contrast, that Big Bad Alien Gorilla wants it all so badly they've grown complacent to competition and arrogant to their community. Reclaim your community by promoting Slashdot as the free speech alternative to a now corrupt competitor. Just like Reddit did to Digg.
Combine that with fresh community content creation and you've got a strong means to rebuild your brand anew. With real community involvement and original content hosted locally. You'll know you're hitting them hard when Slashdot comment forums begin competing with Reddit in new comment numbers and page views. You'll know you're winning when Slashdot stories starts popping up in the Reddit new submissions queue.
In summary, it's my belief that Slashdot should change focus away from link aggregation to publishing professional and semi-professional original content. It should do this with community involvement by tweaking journal promotion to focus on community-publisher symbiosis. Dailykos is a model for process, Medium and Vice standards of quality. But most of all, you've got to change direction. The old model doesn't work any more. And recognizing that truth is the first step to change for the better.
I hope this has been an interesting read for
So, to sum up: it is likely that members of the Obama administration committed federal crimes by illegally sharing confidential taxpayer information with the White House for political purposes. With luck, we will find out for sure before our next president is inaugurated. The alternative is that a high-ranking White House official fabricated a baseless smear against the administrationâ(TM)s political opponents and passed it on to reporters to further the administrationâ(TM)s political agenda. Any way you look at it, this is a shameful episode in the already bleak history of the Obama administration.
Come on, defend it like it was the targeting of the Tea Parties, and collecting taxes is just what the IRS does, or something. Every time you use the Nuremberg Defense, down in Hell, Satan has a chuckle. Losers.
This file will self-destruct in five minutes.
