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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 93245" data-attributes="member: 259">Re: rebutting Lord of the HackersJust curious -- which woman was that? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />(Not that I mind people getting my gender wrong -- happens all the time; but if you're going to decry someone's lack of research and misunderstanding of gender in our hobby, you may want to correct this pronoun.  Unless, of course, you were making fun of me for getting her gender wrong in the first post, in which all bets are off <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />)Honestly, I don't think the article is terrible; I don't think it's really propagandistic.  But I think she also doesn't really know what she's talking about when it comes to fantasy and its relationship to computers.  In fact, I don't think she understands literary history worth a hill of beans.While a lot of fantasy writing is binary (orcs bad, humans good), a lot is not (Ged problematic, Atuan problematic).  And a lot of other literature contains binary concepts, as she puts it:  The Bible, Norse mythology, many wartime news stories, cowboy movies, and even Oprah Book-of-the-Month-club selections.  The good-vs-evil is a solid thread in our culture, not one that's promoted by programmers.Lord of the Rings, remember, was also real popular among sixties peace activists, psychedelic artists, and other countercultural elements.  Hardly folks you'd call binary thinkers.In some ways, she's onto something:  there is a correlation between computer programmers and fantasy buffs, and there's a correlation between computer programmers and males, and there's a correlation between fantasy buffs and gamers, and there's a correlation between gamers and males.  But her thesis -- "[The computer] culture has a particular way of using the computer to think about the world, a binary perspective that is appealing but problematic" -- is, I believe, deeply flawed.Next post, I'll tear apart some of her individual points.DanielAs someone pointed out, the computer error message is "Abort, Retry, Fail?"; I'm wondering if she wants to retry.</blockquote>

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