Quickies
Quickies: Gamergate, spiders, and consciousness
- Man who sparked gamergate says the movement is “for the best” despite harassment – Sure is easy to say that when you’re not the one being harassed!
- Brianna Wu on the threats she’s received because of Gamergate – “They threatened the wrong woman this time. I am the Godzilla of bitches. I have a backbone of pure adamantium, and I’m sick of seeing them abuse my friends.”
- No, a spider did not burrow under a man’s skin and live there for days – Good news for arachnaphobes.
- New algorithms search for signs of consciousness in brain injury patients – “They used EEG electrodes to record the patients’ brain activity at rest, and used a branch of mathematics called graph theory to analyze those signals and assess the strength of connections within various networks of brain regions.”
- Cute Animal Friday! Cats meeting puppies for the first time. Look at the ears on this tiny ocelot kitten.
My own experience that even sweet, lovable kittens go into attack mode when they meet innocent puppies.
“If Zoe [Quinn] had been a man, the blog would have been laughed off as the work of a jilted lover.”
I think that pretty much sums it up.
I missed the “Quickes:” part and assumed that spiders were being blamed for gaining consciousness and creating Gamergate. My first thought was that it was unusually plausible for a news story about spiders.
If spiders could burrow through human flesh, you guys wouldn’t be smashing them all the time. Stop, by the way.
Oh god. Misogynistic spiders are my new worst nightmare.
Not to worry! Most spiders are the penultimate misandrists, second only to preying mantises.
Oh, I don’t know. What happens to male honeybees after they mate is pretty heinous too.
excuse me, not all spiders.
I think you mean #NotAllSpiders.
Hilariously enough, in Lakota culture, a negative role model (who isn’t always the bad guy, but so goes) is Iktomi, whose name literally means spider. In a lot of stories, Iktomi is trying to get laid. In others, he comes up with Rube Goldberg plans.
In one story, he challenges a white man to see who’s the better cheater. “But I have to go home and get my cheating magic first. I’ll need your horse. I’ll also need your clothes so the horse thinks I’m you.”