Links: a mish mash

Being Edited

Em Short on editing in interactive fiction. I’m generally interested in interactive fiction, especially as it becomes a bigger form, nowadays. I’ve only used beta readers on mine, though I have tried a sort of exit survey for them. But because I’ve mostly done IF for fun, I wouldn’t dream of asking someone to do anything like a normal story critique. I’d like to, but it’s a lot harder.

‘Body Hacking’ Movement Rises Ahead Of Moral Answers

This is fascinating and I think a lot about transhumanism and body hacking, but clearly I have a line because the guy described at the end of the article creeps me the heck out. Like, the photo of him makes my scalp itch. However, I do like the line “The philosophers, he said, are letting us down.”

Innovation for What? The Politics of Inequality in Higher Education | Dissent Magazine

What it means to move innovation into the academic sphere (spoiler: Nothing that great) and how it fails students. I want to quote the whole article, but will settle on this:

“A 2015 Pell Institute report demonstrates that the past three decades have seen drastically widening gaps between rich and poor students in attendance and completion rates. And Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton show in their 2013 book Paying for the Party how higher education reinforces inequality not only in numbers but in ways that permeate people’s lives and opportunities, from where they live to whom they socialize with. Those results might be fine for a country living under an aristocracy, but not for a democracy. And they have snowballed under the banner of innovation.”

Who Cares for Feminism?

Melissa Gira Grant in Pacific Standard laying down some historical truths very plainly. Feminism needs to exist for poor women and non-white women, women demeaned by capitalism and attacked by racism.

“Women took the women’s movement to mean their progress up the capitalist ladder,” James said. “Nothing has changed but the gender of those who exploit us.”

Emphasis added.

How Gallaudet University’s Architects Are Redefining Deaf Space

Accessible design is so fascinating to me. “Now 10 years old, DeafSpace is an architectural approach that springs from the particular ways Deaf people perceive and inhabit space. …That share is likely to rise as tens of millions of Baby Boomers reach their seventies and eighties. Why should the places designed for them take hearing as a given?”