Earlier this year, while running through my usual patrol duties of online harassment discussions, I began to notice a conversational pattern. Usually there are several similar branches of conversation within this topic, particularly visually apparent in actual indented threads. (ex: reddit) I noticed that one branch of the discussion often seemed to be trimmed in the same place. Right around here:Thus, taking a cue from Godwin's Law:As a discussion about online harassment and bullying grows longer, the probability of a commenter linking to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory approaches 1.Of course, this version doesn't preclude Godwin's Law within the discussion itself. But one other similarity between linking the GIFT comic law and Godwin's Law is part of one of the latter's established corollaries: once Godwin's Law has been fulfilled, the discussion is finished. Or at least, that branch of it.The GIFT is used as a convenient explanation for why...

One of the best Computing Science courses I took in university was actually more of a writing course. It focused on some of the well-known disastrous case studies of our field. It warned us against both technological utopianism and the idea that technology is somehow neutral in our society. It served us well by reminding us who our products work for: the users. People. Society. Humanity.I was indirectly reminded of this years later while working for a company in the hotel industry. Our dev team was being led and assisted by a few outside consultants. Along with architecture, processes, and best practices, part of their job was to change the dev team's culture. One teaching that has stuck with me is to actively fight the urge to develop an Us vs. Them mentality across teams. Dev vs. QA. Dev vs. Sales. Dev vs. Marketing. Dev vs. Management. The fact is,...

Alright it's been long enough that it's time for me to just acknowledge that and get on with it. So this is me just trying to get this recap out of the way. I need to clear my mental pathways, so let's do dis. I know for sure that I want to explore at least one topic separately in a later post, but perhaps I'll reflect on others at a later date as well. Apparently I have some sort of superhuman capacity for delayed gratification, because it took me months to finally buy and build a gaming PC. With a friend to help pick out the parts, I started to purchase them as they came on sale after Christmas, completing the full set of purchases weeks later. Having a gaming rig is pretty great! I'm really enjoying the Firefall beta. It's nice to feel myself getting better at shooters. My...

Click for 2011-12-04 update.From the very beginning I've been examining almost every scrap of traffic we get to Fat, Ugly or Slutty. I've tried to determine the context of the discussion that brought us a visitor and understand if people are interpreting FUoS as a positive or a negative beast. Over and over and over again, the same themes emerged in forums, blog comments, articles, etc. I discussed several of these in the bit-gamer.net article and linked to them within as a little bit of "proof" of each theme. For a long time now, one of the major pieces of "common-sense" advice given to the harassed has been bugging me, and I'm starting to see evidence that I'm not the only one.To back it up a little, let's be clear about what happened to FUoS. We started a dumb little joke site for us and our friends -- a laughter...