Mathbabe observes that she gets a large number of nasty comments any time one of her pieces makes it high up on Hacker News.

Surprise me this does not. Most of the folks there are entitled, privileged-but-unaware-of-it geeks with a deep streak of misogyny.

In other words, seeing an intelligent woman demolish many ideas they hold sacred put them into a mite of a tizzy, don’t you know.

At one point I was a well-known and high-ranked user of that site. I got fed up with it and asked for my ID to be deleted altogether. Though there is no formal deletion process, it was deleted by the site owner himself. Now though I read the site from time to time I rarely look at the comments as they are a cesspool of uninformed speculation (engineeritis), thoroughly-disproven theories and oh yeah, misogyny.

Good reason to avoid all of that.

As I often say, Oh, bullshit.

I know exactly what having a child would be like, and it would be horrible.

It is a rational decision, contrary to this deeply stupid article dressed up nicely in academic language to conceal its inanity.

I hate hassles, and having a child is nothing but a hassle. I would do extremely poorly at every task to do with the little shit, and would hate it every minute. I have absolutely no paternal instinct at all and am not family-oriented in any way.

Also, since I hate or at least have strong animosity to most humans, why would I feel any differently about a random child, even if that child were mine?

Shit, I don’t have pets for a reason. Having a child would be like having a pet you can’t even legally get rid of easily.

This article is really no different than all the assclowns who’ve said to me over the years, “Oh, just wait, you’ll meet the right girl one day and then everything will change and you’ll both want kids so bad!”

Well, no. The “right girl” would get an abortion ASAP if she ever got pregnant, as she hates children more than I do (which is barely possible, but still true).

Just because most other people become blubbering fucknuts around children don’t mean all people do.

I am so unaccustomed to seeing advertising anymore that when I see one, I often don’t even understand what I am looking at or what it’s supposed to be telling me.

How do people live like this?

When I was about four or five years old, I figured out that when adults said, “You’ll understand when you grow up,” 99% of the time it meant that they were doing something stupid that they didn’t want to be called out for.

My distrust of adults started out early. I was not I think a pleasant kid to be around for adults, for a whole host of reasons.

In Florida, everything eats you. In fact, sometimes the earth itself opens up and devours you.

The craziness here extends to the very rock beneath (temporarily) your feet.

People who treat service employees poorly should be deported to Somalia. Or rather, “expatriated” would be the more correct term, it’s just that “deport” has a better ring to it.

Either way, send them all to Somalia. No great loss.

I’ve read this article about three times now since it was published, which is rare for me. It is damn great.

Fantasy does not have to be hamstrung by the social conventions of the past. If you want those social conventions in place for other story reasons then you can get around that too by bringing women into the story. Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment has a lot to say about the different kinds of women you might find on a battlefield, and the many different reasons why they might be there despite restrictive social mores. Or, you know, you could read some actual history, because for all its patriarchal leanings, you will find that women’s roles in war were a lot more varied than many people expect.

I’ve never, ever understood the reason that fantasy and sf insists on being restricted to replicating 1950s social roles and mores. It is just completely senseless.