Are You A Woman Who's Been Harrassed On Twitter?

Well, first off, I'm very sorry about that. Second, it appears you may have something to fight back with. You would think that something like Twitter's harassment policy would be enough for that kind of thing, but it turns out not so much. Twitter has been derided as slow to respond to harassment complaints, and even when they take action, it's a pretty simple matter for the harasser to just make a new account and keep harassing.

So what Twitter is doing is working with a group called Women, Action and the Media, or WAM. (That acronym cannot have been a coincidence, for the record.) What's going to happen is, they'll be taking over monitoring of gender-based harassment to a degree. (And that gender, of course, is almost always going to be women being harassed by men.) What's being requested is that, if you find you've been harassed on Twitter due to your gender, you go here and fill out the form that you'll find on the other side of the link. WAM will then refer what they get off that form to Twitter, and monitor how well Twitter responds to the reports. WAM will be referring what they get ('escalating' is the word being used, because they do first have to filter out any non-legit complaints) to Twitter in no more than 24 hours, and they aim to be a lot faster on the draw than that.

This is Twitter's reporting form; you can see that WAM's is considerably more detailed. That's by design. The idea here is to track things that Twitter currently is not, so that after a trial run of using WAM's forms, they'll be able to see certain patterns in abuse that Twitter is unable to pick up right now, and in time, Twitter will be able to see them too so they can more effectively act.

This does raise the question, though, of why Twitter doesn't just host the WAM form itself and not make people go hunting for it. And it has been raised. The potential worry here is that the partnership with WAM amounts to little more than a gesture and won't actually lead to true change, and it's on Twitter to show they're serious about this.

Of course, the people who do the harassing could also help out by not being the kind of jagoffs who harass solely based on gender in the first place. But I suppose that's too much to ask of them, isn't it?

Desert Bus In One Week

It is one week until Desert Bus For Hope 8, which kicks off next Friday at 10 AM Pacific. With whatever amount of depressing and frightening and unnerving stuff you may have seen the past week or so, really, consider this a pick-me-up. I know I've mentioned it before, I probably have here, but seriously, Child's Play is a great cause to donate to. They supply children's hospitals and domestic violence shelters with toys and games so the children there can basically just get their minds off situations they may not be able to, and shouldn't have to, deal with.


Or if you want to hear them explain it...



The basic deal is, if you need a refresher or don't know, you donate money, and the more you donate, the longer the telethon runs. The first hour costs $1.00, and each additional hour costs 7% more than the previous hour (because it gets harder to keep going as the telethon wears on, and also they have to cut it off at some point). So the second hour would cost $1.07. So early on it's cheap to buy hours, but as things progress, eventually you're asking thousands of dollars to buy that next hour. Along the way they auction things off, hold what are essentially raffles, and being a comedy troupe that does a lot of improv, they'll take requests to do just about whatever a potential donor asks of them.

'Whatever', for the record, involves things like this, occurring at 4:30 in the morning.



Or this.



Or this. (Watch the donation ticker.)



Honestly, hope you'll show up for that.

Internal Programming Note

I think I may finally be making actual progress concerning that soccer podcast, yaaaaaaaaay! I was able to get a Skype conversation going with my co-host last night, he walked me through how to A, hear us both and B, have Audacity record us both, so that's straightened out. There's a bit of lag time between responses because we don't have QUITE the same equipment, but that shouldn't take too long to sort out, and once I manage to then handle the issues of uploading an audio file and hosting said audio file, we should be good to go.

So, fingers crossed that that might happen soon.

Why Did You Not Vote?

So remember how I told you to go vote? Dammit all to hell, people.

I believe you have now seen and will soon experience the punishment for your apathy, and I strongly suggest you take that into consideration next time around, and by next time I mean every little piddling election that comes down the pike on down to school board elections. As a reminder, let us look at highways for a second:

The federal officials can allocate highway funds to your state.
The state officials can decide if the highway goes through your town.
The city officials can decide if the highway goes through your house.

Get me? Vote next time. And every time. Don't let this happen again.

Vote.

It is Election Day 2014 today. As is my custom, on election days I provide no content other than an admonishment to vote. That isn't about to change today.

So go vote. If you haven't already done so like I have. I know that there's a decent chance you don't know how you're going to get heard in this one. I know there's a decent chance you don't think you'll get a 'win' out of this or that anything's going to be better or some other kind of apathetic garbage.

You may not get a win out of this election from your vote, sure. But not voting is a guaranteed way to lose. Get yourself to the polls. Move.

Daylight Savings Tonight

This is the 'fall back' one, meaning you set the clocks back an hour at 2 AM local. (In the US. It gets kind of weird trying to internationalize that statement.)

So why not spend the extra hour you have reading articles complaining about the extra hour you have? That sure seems like a wise use of the time.

This Week In Space

So space has been particularly dangerous this week for us humans. Never mind my little jab last night at snagging an asteroid. Big-time ambitions like that are all well and good, and if we can actually pull them off, awesome. But this week has presented a harsh reminder that even the most basic aspects of going to space, simply traveling there, or existing there, have always and continue to be fraught with extreme danger.

Six seconds after launch on Tuesday, an unmanned Antares rocket blew up on the launchpad at Wallops Island, Virginia, intended to deliver supplies, as well as a group of assorted experiments, to the International Space Station. Nobody was injured there. However, three days later on Friday, a test flight in the Mojave Desert went awry, resulting in the crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, killing one pilot and seriously wounding another (the names have not yet been released). SpaceShipTwo was a craft that was intended, when operational, to carry tourists- many of them celebrities- on 15-minute joyrides for $250,000 each. Roughly 700 people had already paid for the trip.

This is far from a rare occurrence. All of the little half-funny gags people make about a plane being a pressurized metal tube blasting through the skies by way of jet fuel? They are very much not jokes when you bring spacecraft into the discussion, and everything powering that plane that also applies to spacecraft is amplified to the point of lunacy. Nothing is easy; every stage of the journey can bring things to a sudden and catastrophic end. The problem is, though, because that is true, every time that catastrophe happens, calls inevitably arise to stop. To cut the funding. To abandon this space silliness and focus on problems on Earth. Sometimes that funding does get cut... leading to cut corners on the next mission in order to stay within a slashed budget... leading to another potential catastrophe.

I hope that doesn't happen. In the grand scheme of things, we haven't been in space that long. We're still in every sense of the word trying to figure out how to make space travel merely a thing that is unlikely to kill people that attempt it. The Age of Exploration saw this same thing with ships; often, crews attempting particularly long voyages, such as circumnavigations, weren't told by their captains that they would be doing such a thing until they were well into the actual trip, because if they had been told beforehand, it would have been nearly impossible to cobble a crew together. But if we were ever going to get to the point we are now, where nautical circumnavigations are less about if you'll come back alive than they are about how many extra pounds you'll be sporting when you do, those early, danger-laden trips into the unknown had to come first. Those lasted for hundreds of years before the danger went away.

Will it take hundreds of years for us to get there with space travel? Since Yuri Gagarin's inaugural flight, it's taken at least 53. This week has proven once again that the end to that wait is not yet in sight. Catastrophes will happen. Spacecrafts will be lost. Lives will be lost. But this planet isn't going to sustain us forever, even if we maintain it perfectly. Eventually, we have to go see what else is out there. And in order to get to the point where we can go see what's out there, we first have to make sure we can reliably get off this planet in the first place, and safely dock at our intended ports of call.

Nobody ever said space was easy.