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Sissy Shaming

I still see this sissy-shaming happening in my daughter’s classes. She’s a fast runner and was just saying yesterday that when she beat everyone in the class in a running race the first boy across the line was teased that a girl beat him, and that she was wearing sandals. Sure on the sandals part, but does it matter that it was a girl that beat him?

Much of male socialization hurts men as much as it hurts women later when men are assholes to women.

Things Used to Work

I cannot think of a single piece of personal technology that I expect to be able to give to my grandchildren in working order. Some cars fit this bill, because there is an expectation and infrastructure of ongoing repairs. But in terms of smaller items? Apple, to give the devil his due, is probably the closest.

This is an excellent essay on how stuff used to work for a long time, in fact the gadget in question has seen 3 generations. This goes further than [[planned obsolescence]] and to the fact that a knob used to physically turn something on instead of connecting to a computer that then turns that thing on.

This note is for future me

I never really know when a note I am writing today will be used in the future or why, but it will be used, and I can be kind to myself by providing my future self with information that will be helpful in that future encounter.

I adopt this practice of writing notes for future “dumber” me all the time, especially in my coding career. I’ll write a note saying that the code I’m writing is dumb, but it needed to work and I was on deadline. I’ll document a function, then document some lines inside a function then write documentation for the whole thing in our company Obsidian vault so that when I need to do the same thing in 6 months I can look back at prior work and not have to repeat my learning.

Writing notes for a future you that doesn’t know what you’re talking about is one of the best things I’ve adopted in my career and note-taking practice.