My elementary school was pretty cutting edge - we had computers at all. They backed the wrong horse, however, as what we had to start with were TI 99-4/a computers. The idea was sound, but there weren't enough for an entire classroom, so it was a case of privileged students being given computer time as a reward for good work and/or behavior, which was then mostly spent on games. I think that they might have changed to something else by the time I left, but I don't remember whether it was Commodore, Atari or Apple, since I had unlimited access to similar machines at home.
We had to take a keyboarding/word processing course in junior high; first, we learned to type on electric typewriters, and then learned word processing in MS Works. In high school, I had a programming class that was in qBasic on 286 machines. There was a theoretical follow on class that didn't have enough interest to happen that would have, I believe, been a Pascal class.
There are several problems there, but I don't think I'd say any of them are because they're both programmers.
1) Romance within a team is fraught with peril
2) Er, she tried to two-time her boyfriend? She lied a lot?
I'm female programmer (oh, shut up) and my ex-husband is a male programmer turned "entrepreneur" or small business owner. Our marriage didn't end because we had too much in common, it ended because of our differences, none of which had to do with work, but with differences in our fundamental goals for the future. I'm dating a man who has a degree in art, and we are together because of how well we relate together, not because "opposites attract" - I may be more left-brained than he is, but we are in no way opposites.
Glad to know I'm not the only one - I read all of the Xanth books out (through Golem, I think) as a kid, and then moved on to his less humor based work, and then came to a grinding halt after some of the Mode books, Shade of the Tree and the second half of the Adept series made me seriously question the morals of the person I was reading. Particularly mortifying given his apparent attitudes toward teenage girls while I _was_ a teenage girl. Ick.
I can safely say that's not true in Dragon Age, in which there are romantic options for male-female, female-female and male-male choices - there are four romantic choices, Alistair the hetero male, Morrigan the hetero female, Zevran the bi male and Leliana the bi female. I believe that Mass Effect has similar options, even if the videos they chose to promote would suggest otherwise.
Anne was one of the first female authors that I managed to find in the SF&F field. She was one of the first authors I read that had really great, strong female characters. She helped teach me that you don't have to be a man to be smart, strong, successful, that you don't have to be a man to be a hero. Her fiction helped shape my perspective, along with authors like Andre Norton and eventually (scoff if you will) Mercedes Lackey. Thank you, Anne McCaffrey.
And my first thought was: I'm a geek who happens to be female, please don't lump me with a demo by gender!
But really, I suppose that's true of most geeks. I suspect, for example, that the interest in sports of the average Slashdot reader is somewhat lower than "normal". Etc.
It's amazing the differences, working on a long term project. How long term? Our first released version was in the mid-nineties - and yes, we're doing more than just maintenance, even now. It's a defense project.
I'm on a team (within the larger project, which is 70-100 people) of seven people. Four are over forty, in some cases by a lot, one is about to turn forty, I'm thirty-three, and then we have our one, shiny just out of college person. We're pretty representative of the project as a whole, with the UI team trending younger than the others. The idea that older people don't know what they're doing, even on new languages, is pretty silly to me.
It seems to be there must be a very narrow band in amount of plot for a conversion of game to movie to be successful. First person shooters (ala Doom) very seldom have enough plot, so it's really an action (or action-horror) movie with a thin veneer of the game laid on top of it, because they had to make too much up.
Conversely, some games have too much plot to be made into movies. With the announcement of a (direct to DVD, anime style) Dragon Age movie, the fan community I belong to when crazy. In a negative fashion. Why? We knew they would never make the choices we made. Heck, it's a mainly female community and we started with the cynical observation that they would surely pick a male hero.
So: you need a game that has a recognizable plot line to it, but not one that allows much impactful choices by the player.
I was going to contradict you, but I was a good girl and checked things. Vernor Vinge's True Names didn't use the term cyberspace, just the concept.
Thought I'd share just because it is still interesting.
I read Neuromancer in the mid-90's, and still found it an interesting read, though I did have the urge to through a bucket of soapy water over everything, with the dark and gritty descriptions.
Combining what you're saying with the blanket statements being responded to, you're saying that you believe that most feminists are man-hating sexists, to the point that it is fair to say that all of them are.
I disagree with that statement quite vehemently. I suspect that you would object if I claimed that the majority of men are misogynists who just want women to do traditional feminine things like child-rearing and cooking.
I also respectfully disagree with your statement that feminism views things from the perspective of a single gender. In general, the ones that associate with are concerned with examining multiple perspectives.
As one of those rare female posters here on slashdot, thank you for this post. People on one of the feminist geek sites I go to (www.girl-wonder.org) like to point out that people are different even when they claim a particular group name. People disagree. We see this all the time with people on the fringes of political parties and religion, so why not feminism?
I recommend Dreamships by Melissa Scott for a SF book on that subject that feels pretty believable to me, though it's not a Twenty Minutes in the Future kind of book - the AI in question is one designed to guide ships through the other space used for FTL.
Despite having approval on the novels (at least, that's what I've heard), Lucas let a lot of things go into the novels that he later contradicted with the prequels. I feel tremendous sympathy for these novelists scrambling to reconcile what has been written and things that are now, for good or ill, considered canon.
Re: GP's comments about the MMO, I got the impression that Bioware and the Old Republic era works have a much better odor among fans. I know that my husband, who is a much bigger fan than I am, is chomping at the bit for TOR to come out. (And I assure you, he is definitely anti-prequel. He's currently running a D6 WEG Star Wars tabletop game in which he has repeatedly hammered home to the players that the events of the prequels are NOT what happened in his game.)
Because of the cultural perception that romance Isn't Manly, we've developed such low expectations that one to four days (throw in anniversary and birthday) seems great. I will say that the geeky males I've dated seem to be better at it than the average, though.:)
(And I'm from Michigan and I've heard of Sweetest Day.)
Dragon Age: Origins is one of the few CRPGs I've played that seems to cater to female gamers. It's great.:) (Although you may get tired of hearing about Alistair, the main female love interest...;))
Anyway, I think it's great to hear about all of these customized gifts - they really are the heart of romance.
I admit, my data is a little stale - I graduated HS/College in 95/99.
I work at a defense contractor. There's a little bit of sexism that seems to be primarily from older former military types, where I think it's less that I'm a female programmer than I'm a female programmer working on artillery software. And the one time that I overheard a co-worker who got passed over for promotion in favor of me comment that to get his promotion he would have to change his gender.
In college, I was in the first class of women that they admitted. (It was an all engineering and science university.) To placate people, they accepted additional students equal to the number of women so that no one would whine that they could have gotten in, if it weren't for those girls. The most sexism I had to put up with was actually from my Psych prof, of all people. Other than that, I think the divide was more between the merely-geeky-enough-to-go-there and the ubergeek types. Anyway, they opened up their pool of applicants and the average GPA went up quite a bit.
I was very lucky; we had conversations about this in college, given our environment. I knew someone who's own father didn't want her to go to college because "you'll just get married and waste all that learning". We all had to deal with teasing in high school, etc, but it's difficult to tell if it's the same as what other geeks went through, or worse for women. Personal experiences are difficult to compare.
I suppose technically you were allowed there, but not in normal game play. For those who have never played it, Adventure was a rudimentary CRPG - there were two or three castles depending on difficulty and up to three dragons, assorted magic items like the spear and passwall, and your goal was to find the chalice and return it to the gold castle.
In one of the castles, there was a set of catacombs, and in the catacombs there was a magic item with no other purpose than this, usually referred to as the Dot or Grey Dot. It was one pixel and embedded in the wall in an area that you needed the passwall to get to. Then you brought that and other magic items to a certain area and you could go through a wall to a secret room that read 'Created by Warren Robinett'.
In addition, I used to be a volunteer guide in Everquest and occasionally had to help people who had fallen under the world.:)
I also realized that the missions were getting somewhat repetitive.
I am, however, really looking forward to the upcoming Star Trek and Star Wars games. Or, rather, I look forward to finding out whether they suck or not.:)
I was enjoying EVE to start with, but I eventually realized I was playing a fundamentally wrong game for me. This realization came when a couple of dozen people blew up my battlecruiser and podded me when I was simply jumping into an area to do a mission. (Podding, for the uninitiated, is destroying your lifeboat; you lose all of your implants and potentially some "experience".)
And then I realized that I wasn't interested in a game where I spent a substantial amount of time reading a book while traveling and/or mining.
(shill)But hey, my husband at Dragonfire Lasercrafts has the images licensed, so he can make merchandise for the game, and continues to enjoy playing. (/shill) These days, I'm playing Pirates of the Burning Sea.
I love my 9/80 schedule, and my company has been doing it for longer than I've been here (and I hired on in 1999). I work at a company that has a history of discouraging 'casual' overtime (we get paid for OT! We just need eight hours of it first. It's better than nothing.), so unless something has really gone veryvery bad, we're not coming in on that Friday.
Everyone knows which Fridays are 9/80 ones, so typically very few meetings get scheduled on them.
I find it's great for getting things done, particularly for scheduling doctor appointments.
I'm a female software engineer, and I was slightly more fortunate, but certainly remember some of the same things:
I was given Barbie dolls. I made them pants and put them on my model horses to rescue other toys from the evil wizard. I used to play demolition derby on big wheels with male friends. I wanted to learn how to wood carve. I _did_ learn how to fish. My mom made me pick between flute and clarinet because they were "girls' intstruments". When I got to pick later for marching band, I started playing the trumpet, like my dad.
I've never had my nails done, waxed my eyebrows (or another else), etc, either.
Anyway, I was lucky: even though my mom has never quite understood, my parents have supported my education and career choices.
(Now, if I could get my mom off my back about kids... I'm 31 and eight years married and "still" have no children.)
I cannot comment too much on how the powers thing will work out. I'm cautiously opposed.
The skill thing irritates me to no end, though. One of the things I mentioned to sell people on 3.x vs 2nd ed was that ranks meant you could be good at something, and someone else could be good at something, at yet not identical. (ie, I am an angler, my dad is an angler. My dad is a MUCH better fisherman than I am, though.) And that's gone, except in regard to one of you being higher level.
I'm a woman. I admit, the first game I ever ran was an Amber Diceless Campaign (coincidentally the first game I ever played, as well), but we do exist. In fact, in some campaigns, there are a decent amount of us, like Living Arcanis, or the non-D&D game from the same company, Witchhunter. Or anything White Wolf.
I'll just throw in, to be slightly more on topic, that Living Arcanis is closing out it's current story arc with 3.5, and then starting out the new one with it's own system. So that's another fantasy game system coming out for those that don't care for 4th ed.
Slashdot Mirror
My elementary school was pretty cutting edge - we had computers at all. They backed the wrong horse, however, as what we had to start with were TI 99-4/a computers. The idea was sound, but there weren't enough for an entire classroom, so it was a case of privileged students being given computer time as a reward for good work and/or behavior, which was then mostly spent on games. I think that they might have changed to something else by the time I left, but I don't remember whether it was Commodore, Atari or Apple, since I had unlimited access to similar machines at home. We had to take a keyboarding/word processing course in junior high; first, we learned to type on electric typewriters, and then learned word processing in MS Works. In high school, I had a programming class that was in qBasic on 286 machines. There was a theoretical follow on class that didn't have enough interest to happen that would have, I believe, been a Pascal class.
There are several problems there, but I don't think I'd say any of them are because they're both programmers. 1) Romance within a team is fraught with peril 2) Er, she tried to two-time her boyfriend? She lied a lot? I'm female programmer (oh, shut up) and my ex-husband is a male programmer turned "entrepreneur" or small business owner. Our marriage didn't end because we had too much in common, it ended because of our differences, none of which had to do with work, but with differences in our fundamental goals for the future. I'm dating a man who has a degree in art, and we are together because of how well we relate together, not because "opposites attract" - I may be more left-brained than he is, but we are in no way opposites.
Glad to know I'm not the only one - I read all of the Xanth books out (through Golem, I think) as a kid, and then moved on to his less humor based work, and then came to a grinding halt after some of the Mode books, Shade of the Tree and the second half of the Adept series made me seriously question the morals of the person I was reading. Particularly mortifying given his apparent attitudes toward teenage girls while I _was_ a teenage girl. Ick.
I can safely say that's not true in Dragon Age, in which there are romantic options for male-female, female-female and male-male choices - there are four romantic choices, Alistair the hetero male, Morrigan the hetero female, Zevran the bi male and Leliana the bi female. I believe that Mass Effect has similar options, even if the videos they chose to promote would suggest otherwise.
Anne was one of the first female authors that I managed to find in the SF&F field. She was one of the first authors I read that had really great, strong female characters. She helped teach me that you don't have to be a man to be smart, strong, successful, that you don't have to be a man to be a hero. Her fiction helped shape my perspective, along with authors like Andre Norton and eventually (scoff if you will) Mercedes Lackey. Thank you, Anne McCaffrey.
And my first thought was: I'm a geek who happens to be female, please don't lump me with a demo by gender! But really, I suppose that's true of most geeks. I suspect, for example, that the interest in sports of the average Slashdot reader is somewhat lower than "normal". Etc.
It's amazing the differences, working on a long term project. How long term? Our first released version was in the mid-nineties - and yes, we're doing more than just maintenance, even now. It's a defense project.
I'm on a team (within the larger project, which is 70-100 people) of seven people. Four are over forty, in some cases by a lot, one is about to turn forty, I'm thirty-three, and then we have our one, shiny just out of college person. We're pretty representative of the project as a whole, with the UI team trending younger than the others. The idea that older people don't know what they're doing, even on new languages, is pretty silly to me.
Conversely, some games have too much plot to be made into movies. With the announcement of a (direct to DVD, anime style) Dragon Age movie, the fan community I belong to when crazy. In a negative fashion. Why? We knew they would never make the choices we made. Heck, it's a mainly female community and we started with the cynical observation that they would surely pick a male hero.
So: you need a game that has a recognizable plot line to it, but not one that allows much impactful choices by the player.
I was going to contradict you, but I was a good girl and checked things. Vernor Vinge's True Names didn't use the term cyberspace, just the concept.
Thought I'd share just because it is still interesting.
I read Neuromancer in the mid-90's, and still found it an interesting read, though I did have the urge to through a bucket of soapy water over everything, with the dark and gritty descriptions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill I'm only willing to point that out because I'm not from Indiana, I just live here.
Combining what you're saying with the blanket statements being responded to, you're saying that you believe that most feminists are man-hating sexists, to the point that it is fair to say that all of them are. I disagree with that statement quite vehemently. I suspect that you would object if I claimed that the majority of men are misogynists who just want women to do traditional feminine things like child-rearing and cooking. I also respectfully disagree with your statement that feminism views things from the perspective of a single gender. In general, the ones that associate with are concerned with examining multiple perspectives.
As one of those rare female posters here on slashdot, thank you for this post. People on one of the feminist geek sites I go to (www.girl-wonder.org) like to point out that people are different even when they claim a particular group name. People disagree. We see this all the time with people on the fringes of political parties and religion, so why not feminism?
I recommend Dreamships by Melissa Scott for a SF book on that subject that feels pretty believable to me, though it's not a Twenty Minutes in the Future kind of book - the AI in question is one designed to guide ships through the other space used for FTL.
Despite having approval on the novels (at least, that's what I've heard), Lucas let a lot of things go into the novels that he later contradicted with the prequels. I feel tremendous sympathy for these novelists scrambling to reconcile what has been written and things that are now, for good or ill, considered canon.
Re: GP's comments about the MMO, I got the impression that Bioware and the Old Republic era works have a much better odor among fans. I know that my husband, who is a much bigger fan than I am, is chomping at the bit for TOR to come out. (And I assure you, he is definitely anti-prequel. He's currently running a D6 WEG Star Wars tabletop game in which he has repeatedly hammered home to the players that the events of the prequels are NOT what happened in his game.)
Because of the cultural perception that romance Isn't Manly, we've developed such low expectations that one to four days (throw in anniversary and birthday) seems great. I will say that the geeky males I've dated seem to be better at it than the average, though. :)
(And I'm from Michigan and I've heard of Sweetest Day.)
Dragon Age: Origins is one of the few CRPGs I've played that seems to cater to female gamers. It's great. :) (Although you may get tired of hearing about Alistair, the main female love interest... ;))
Anyway, I think it's great to hear about all of these customized gifts - they really are the heart of romance.
I admit, my data is a little stale - I graduated HS/College in 95/99.
I work at a defense contractor. There's a little bit of sexism that seems to be primarily from older former military types, where I think it's less that I'm a female programmer than I'm a female programmer working on artillery software. And the one time that I overheard a co-worker who got passed over for promotion in favor of me comment that to get his promotion he would have to change his gender.
In college, I was in the first class of women that they admitted. (It was an all engineering and science university.) To placate people, they accepted additional students equal to the number of women so that no one would whine that they could have gotten in, if it weren't for those girls. The most sexism I had to put up with was actually from my Psych prof, of all people. Other than that, I think the divide was more between the merely-geeky-enough-to-go-there and the ubergeek types. Anyway, they opened up their pool of applicants and the average GPA went up quite a bit.
I was very lucky; we had conversations about this in college, given our environment. I knew someone who's own father didn't want her to go to college because "you'll just get married and waste all that learning". We all had to deal with teasing in high school, etc, but it's difficult to tell if it's the same as what other geeks went through, or worse for women. Personal experiences are difficult to compare.
I suppose technically you were allowed there, but not in normal game play. For those who have never played it, Adventure was a rudimentary CRPG - there were two or three castles depending on difficulty and up to three dragons, assorted magic items like the spear and passwall, and your goal was to find the chalice and return it to the gold castle.
In one of the castles, there was a set of catacombs, and in the catacombs there was a magic item with no other purpose than this, usually referred to as the Dot or Grey Dot. It was one pixel and embedded in the wall in an area that you needed the passwall to get to. Then you brought that and other magic items to a certain area and you could go through a wall to a secret room that read 'Created by Warren Robinett'.
In addition, I used to be a volunteer guide in Everquest and occasionally had to help people who had fallen under the world. :)
I also realized that the missions were getting somewhat repetitive.
I am, however, really looking forward to the upcoming Star Trek and Star Wars games. Or, rather, I look forward to finding out whether they suck or not. :)
I was enjoying EVE to start with, but I eventually realized I was playing a fundamentally wrong game for me. This realization came when a couple of dozen people blew up my battlecruiser and podded me when I was simply jumping into an area to do a mission. (Podding, for the uninitiated, is destroying your lifeboat; you lose all of your implants and potentially some "experience".)
And then I realized that I wasn't interested in a game where I spent a substantial amount of time reading a book while traveling and/or mining.
(shill)But hey, my husband at Dragonfire Lasercrafts has the images licensed, so he can make merchandise for the game, and continues to enjoy playing. (/shill) These days, I'm playing Pirates of the Burning Sea.
(extreme vibrato)Frodo of the Nine Fingers... and the Ring of Doom!(/extreme vibrato)
I love my 9/80 schedule, and my company has been doing it for longer than I've been here (and I hired on in 1999). I work at a company that has a history of discouraging 'casual' overtime (we get paid for OT! We just need eight hours of it first. It's better than nothing.), so unless something has really gone veryvery bad, we're not coming in on that Friday.
Everyone knows which Fridays are 9/80 ones, so typically very few meetings get scheduled on them.
I find it's great for getting things done, particularly for scheduling doctor appointments.
Congratulations on the degree and job. :)
I'm a female software engineer, and I was slightly more fortunate, but certainly remember some of the same things:
I was given Barbie dolls. I made them pants and put them on my model horses to rescue other toys from the evil wizard. I used to play demolition derby on big wheels with male friends. I wanted to learn how to wood carve. I _did_ learn how to fish. My mom made me pick between flute and clarinet because they were "girls' intstruments". When I got to pick later for marching band, I started playing the trumpet, like my dad.
I've never had my nails done, waxed my eyebrows (or another else), etc, either.
Anyway, I was lucky: even though my mom has never quite understood, my parents have supported my education and career choices.
(Now, if I could get my mom off my back about kids... I'm 31 and eight years married and "still" have no children.)
I cannot comment too much on how the powers thing will work out. I'm cautiously opposed.
The skill thing irritates me to no end, though. One of the things I mentioned to sell people on 3.x vs 2nd ed was that ranks meant you could be good at something, and someone else could be good at something, at yet not identical. (ie, I am an angler, my dad is an angler. My dad is a MUCH better fisherman than I am, though.) And that's gone, except in regard to one of you being higher level.
I'm a woman. I admit, the first game I ever ran was an Amber Diceless Campaign (coincidentally the first game I ever played, as well), but we do exist. In fact, in some campaigns, there are a decent amount of us, like Living Arcanis, or the non-D&D game from the same company, Witchhunter. Or anything White Wolf.
I'll just throw in, to be slightly more on topic, that Living Arcanis is closing out it's current story arc with 3.5, and then starting out the new one with it's own system. So that's another fantasy game system coming out for those that don't care for 4th ed.