Gamer Girls

Cory Doctorow's got a new short up at Salon.com - about gamer girls and kicking ass. Highly recommended read:

Anda didn't really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was 12, and up until then, she'd played a boy-elf, because her parents had sternly warned her that if you played a girl you were an instant perv-magnet. None of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the only girls she'd ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You could tell, cos they were shaped like a boy's idea of what a girl looked like: hooge buzwabs and long legs all barely contained in tiny, pointless leather bikini-armour. Bintware, she called it.

But when Anda was 12, she met Liza the Organiza, whose avatar was female, but had sensible tits and sensible armour and a bloody great sword that she was clearly very good with.

Watch him go with this one - sugarfree zones around the schools, book and meal tokens, school weigh-ins, unionizing gamers... I love this guy.

Not Pissed Off Enough to Rant, Today

So, I'm not pissed off enough to rant today.

Saw a mediocre production of Equus last night (It's such a great script that it's difficult to imagine a truly *bad* production of this show) that didn't really piss me off. Got a bunch of crap on book one finished, and today I've just got one last Roh chapter to lengthen, and then I'll have fit in all the new plot elements I wanted to add to clean up the pacing. Today I'll be working on Jihad, which is so behind it's not even amusing. I really want to have another finished book in hand next year that I can start peddling. I need to pick up the pace.

Expressed interest in some volunteer positions at Planned Parenthood yesterday, and also applied to the local city college (automatic admission) where I'll signing up for a French class on Tues/Thurs, all willing. Gotta keep busy...

So - unless I find something amusing to share, I'll see you all tomorrow.

Snapshots From my Worklife, 5

Got an e-mail circular from the lead A/E guy here at the Workplace of Silliness - looks like we're going to get 2 proposals we've currently got out that are closing up right now. One of our clients also just gave a glowing review of our A/E guy working in Iraq, so we've got kudos with them.

More document formatting, less writing for me. Ha.

Along with said e-mail, we were forwarded a snipped and scanned PDF of this lovely trite piece of crap about how evil it is to "foster a negative attitude."

Us? Negative? Hell, I'm the least cynical person here... Like all Americans, we deal really well with conflict resolution.