_(Attention conservation notice: rambling Diary-like post that I felt like writing anyway for psychological reasons; likely not worth your time.)_
+<em>(Also, it turns out that I got my Blerp-d9aa89fd commit bit a few weeks later, which makes me think I shouldn't publish this one—even when everything is pseudonymified, it would feel like a betrayal to publish something that could be read as a petty snipe-attack on my/the group. As a writing exercise, it may still be worth continuing to draft it, so that I can so that I can go back and extract any insights into some yet-untitled future post on women-and-trans-and-SJW-in-tech phenomena that <strong>isn't</strong> written in the boring/petty Diary anecdote genre.)</em>
+
+<em>(I could imagine someone arguing that the fact that I make the Git repository public means that committing the draft <strong>is</strong> publishing, but I think the distinction between "posts on the blog itself, displayed proudly for all to see" and "slush text that my one or two most devoted readers might find if they notice the tiny 'Site source' link in the footer and bother rummaging through the drafts/ folder" is pretty significant. Any hypothetical adversary who wants to mine the blog for the biggest socially-unjust gaffe in a targeted attempt to destroy my real-life reputation is just going to have a field day with March 2017's ["Smart"](/2017/Mar/smart/).)</em>
+
I took half a week of vacation from my dayjob recently to crash with a friend in another city and attend the conference associated with an open-source technology I've been pretty involved with lately! It was really fun and inspiring, getting to hear all the talks and putting faces to usernames! I thought I might write a blog post about the experience and all the exciting technical things I learned!
This is not that post. By cowardice and convention, this is someone else's story on someone else's blog, about "Taylor Saotome-Westlake" visiting his friend "Jerrica" in "San Francisco" to attend the conference about this software called "[Blerp](https://xkcd.com/1692/)-d9aa89fd".
At the same time, I can't wear the _she/her/hers_ sticker. And I think there's a sense in which _can't_ really is a better choice of words than _don't want to_. It's not that I don't enjoy being refered to as _she_ in a context where that makes sense, like when I'm [crossplaying at a fandom convention](/tag/cosplay/), or in the Secret Blanchardian Conspiracy Chatroom, or in the ironic last sentence of the preceding paragraph. It's that, in real life, when I'm not playing dress-up and I can't hide my face behind the fog of net, _people are going to notice_ that I'm male and habitually use the English language pronoun for males on such occasions that they need to refer to me in the third person. I _could_ attach a sticker to my badge instructing them otherwise, but only in the same sense that I could tell them that black is white and cats are dogs—that is, probably not with a straight face.
-But none of this really matters: if you don't want to wear a sticker, you can just not wear one, and get on with enjoying the conference and meeting all sorts of interesting people with exciting technical things to say!
+But none of this really matters: if you don't want to wear a sticker, you can just not wear one, with no discernible social consequences. (At least, not this year!)
+
+I did get asked for my pronouns once (the first day, by someone who I think was not yet aware of the stickers)—the only time I've been asked for
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+-------
+
+and get on with enjoying the conference and meeting all sorts of interesting people with exciting technical things to say!
On the first day, between training sessions, I sat down at the table of someone who was eloquently denouncing the hideously overcomplicated code they encountered in the "Quux-f1deb75f" community—which made sense, they explained, because the people who wrote those libraries were Trump supporters and Nazis and libertarians.
Oh, that's interesting, I said. Do you think there's a big correlation between political views and code quality? With a good linter to operationalize _quality_, this is potentially amenable to empirical study ...
+At some point, the conversation paused to introduce ourselves. I gave my name as "Mark" ... and then the person asked, "What are your pronouns?"
+
[...]
-Obviously, I would have no objection if the presentation had _harshly criticized_ Eric Raymond for some specific bad thing that he said, or if the authors had chosen to quote some author they liked rather than an author they didn't like, or if they had decided that the "itch-scratching" metaphor was sufficiently widespread as to be part of the commons and not worth
+Obviously, I would have no objection if the presentation had _harshly criticized_ Eric Raymond for some specific bad thing that he said, or if the authors had chosen to quote some author they liked rather than an author they didn't like, or if they had decided that the "itch-scratching" metaphor was sufficiently widespread as to be part of the commons and not worth attributing to anyone. But to verbatim quote
[...]
https://www.nateliason.com/blog/social-disobedience
singular they for named individuals with an Anglosphere name or a beard in their profile photo
+
+I interrupted a woman, trying to finish her sentence
+
+heritability of politics actually makes sense: the moral foundations are the "true" trait, but in a particular country, that could predictably mean being a democrat
+
+https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/landscapes/
+
+"Politics of Process Defense" http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8120
+
+https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-are-shifting-the-rest-of-their-identity-to-match-their-politics/
+
+Damore lawsuit also quotes an instance of "40-something white men" (p. 43)
+
+https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff