Dealing with impostor syndromeisn'tfun, but playing Dungeons & Dragons is! Here's a quick little 5e spell combining the two:
Impostor syndrome
5th-level enchantment
Casting Time: 1 action Range: 60 feet Components: V, S Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
You create an overwhelming sense of doubt in the mind of a creature that you can see within range. The target must make a Wisdom saving throw. On a success, the spell ends. On a failed save, the target firmly believes it is less talented than it actually is, and its Intelligence score is reduced by 2 until this spell ends. Additionally, the target becomes very anxious, and any Constitution saving throws made to maintain concentration are made with disadvantage until this spell ends.
While a target is affected by this spell, the target rationalizes all previous accomplishments as luck and deeply fears its magic will fail and reveal it as a fraud.
On each of your turns for the duration, you can use your action to deal 4d8 psychic damage to the target. You do not need to be able to see the target or continue to be within range to deal this damage.
At the end of each of the affected target's turns, it can make a Wisdom saving throw. If you can no longer see the target, it has advantage on this saving throw. On a successful save, this spell ends.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a 6th-level spell slot, the target's Intelligence score is reduced by 3 on a failed save. When you use a spell slot of 7th level or higher, its Intelligence score is reduced by 4 on a failed save.
Available to classes: Bard, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard
But she wasn't just the fearless young woman standing up to capitalism she seems to be. A plaque was placed next to her that read:
Know the power of women in leadership
SHE makes a difference.
State Street Global Advisors
The plaque said "State Street Global Advisors" and emphasized the word "SHE" because Fearless Girl was commissioned by State Street Global Advisors as an advertisement for their SHE index ETF. A lot of people, including the bull's artist, are upset because Fearless Girl's origins are partially related to an advertisement.
Interestingly, Fearless Girl and its plaque were rather ineffective as an ad. (The plaque has now been taken down.) It certainly looks weird to have something that says "State Street Global Advisors" on it by the statue, but it's not at all obvious that this is a reference to the SHE ticker. When I asked people who saw it in person, most of them told me they saw a strong young woman standing up against capitalism. When I myself moved closer and saw the plaque, I felt my eyes roll because it felt like a poor effort on behalf of a finance company to promote women. I didn't recognize it as a publicity stunt for a ticker, and I work in finance. The average visitor is probably much less likely to realize "SHE" meant the ticker. I actually only know a few people who recognized the reference to State Street's ticker, and they all specifically pay attention to new financial products as part of their job. It took the internet to explain the ad to the masses, and it seemed to have gone viral in a way that didn't benefit State Street unless you really, truly believe that all press is good press.
Honestly, I don't love that this otherwise wonderful statue started as an ad; I'd love it a little bit more if it weren't one. However, public art is incredibly expensive to create - Arturo Di Modica spent $350,000 of his own money to create Charging Bull. Not everyone is independently wealthy enough to have a whopping 350 thousand dollars in 1989, which is roughly 700 thousand dollars today, around to drop on a statue that they don't even expect to see returns on. If we believe that "true" art is self-funded, we let art only be the domain of the rich and lose the viewpoints of everyone who doesn't have that kind of privilege. That isn't right.
Di Modica is upset not just because Fearless Girl was in part an advertisement: he is also upset that people are misinterpreting his Charging Bull. He says his statue is about "the strength and power of the American people" and does not like that people view it differently. Specifically, he does not like that some people interpret the bull as the strength and power of capitalism or men in the United States. But once you release your art into the world, your intentions as the artist no longer comprise the only valid interpretation of your art. You cannot control how people react to your art, nor should you be allowed to.
Fearless Girl also changes the meaning of Charging Bull. Instead of being a symbol of "the strength and power of the American people" as Di Modica intended, it's now seen as an aggressive threat to women and girls — a symbol of patriarchal oppression.
Fallis notes that Fearless Girl highlighted the interpretation of Charging Bull as "a symbol of patriarchal oppression" as a valid interpretation. He shows that he understands that authorial intent isn't everything. He continues:
In effect, Fearless Girl has appropriated the strength and power of Charging Bull. Of course Di Modica is outraged by that. A global investment firm has used a global advertising firm to create a faux work of guerrilla art to subvert and change the meaning of his actual work of guerrilla art. That would piss off any artist.
See? It's not as simple as it seems on the surface. It's especially complicated for somebody (like me, for example) who appreciates the notion of appropriation in art. I've engaged in a wee bit of appropriation my ownself. Appropriation art is, almost by definition, subversive - and subversion is (also almost by definition) usually the province of marginalized populations attempting to undermine the social order maintained by tradition and the establishments of power. In the case of Fearless Girl, however, the subversion is being done by global corporatists as part of a marketing campaign. That makes it hard to cheer them on. There's some serious irony here.
Fallis's belief that subverting Charging Bull as "a symbol of patriarchal oppression" should solely be the "province of marginalized populations attempting to undermine the social order maintained by tradition and the establishments of power" leaves no room for works funded for corporate interests. Specifically, he states that the "global corporatists" who funded Fearless Girl as "part of a marketing campaign" invalidates it as subversive art. He implies that it only disrespects Di Modica's statue because it has, as Fallis later states, "hijacked the meaning of his work" under false pretenses.
What Fallis is really saying is that it's valid to see Charging Bull in lenses other than Di Modica's authorial intent, but Fearless Girl will always primarily be marred by its associations to State Street's SHE index ETF. Not only does this imply that some concept of authorial intent has to be the primary interpretation of Fearless Girl, but that the authorial intent of Fearless Girl is solely the province of State Street and is thus completely disconnected from its creator, Kristen Visbal.
"But I made sure to keep her features soft; she's not defiant, she's brave, proud and strong, not belligerent."
She made a deliberate choice as to who the girl should represent:
The sculptor based her work on two Delaware children - a friend's daughter she said had "great style and a great stance, and I told her to pretend she was facing a bull." The second was a "beautiful Latina girl, so everyone could relate to the Fearless Girl."
Removing Visbal's creativity from an examination of the authorial intent behind Fearless Girl just doesn't make sense. Whatever value authorial intent holds aside, her creative decisions undoubtedly influenced why I relate to a girl proud to face capitalism and take on Wall Street.
Later in his piece, Fallis focuses even more on State Street's intentions when trying to evaluate the merits of Fearless Girl:
And yet, there she is, the Fearless Girl. I love the little statue of the girl in the Peter Pan pose. And I resent that she's a marketing tool. I love that she actually IS inspiring to young women and girls. And I resent that she's a fraud. I love that she exists. And I resent the reasons she was created.
On its surface, this paragraph sounds like an understandable set of mixed feelings on the piece that I largely agree with, but Fallis hides something much, much more insidious - the idea that Fearless Girl is a "fraud" because State Street funded her creation.
Calling the girl a "fraud" has deeper underpinnings than only the unjust idea that getting funding invalidates art mentioned above. Women's ideas have been erased by men who restate their ideas, take get credit for them, and successfully erase women's involvement in them - much as Visbal's creative decisions are being erased because State Street funded her sculpture. Women's contributions have been consistently devalued because they have been supported by the money of others, usually men who collectively hold the keys to significantly more money than women do - much like how Di Modica's self-funded $350,000 work is considered true guerilla art while Visbal's has no such value because she didn't pay for it herself. Finally, as much as it pains me to say it, women's progress often depends on the approval of men and their willingness to take up their cause - much as State Street chose to fund Visbal's work.
Do I think we should stop thinking critically about Fearless Girl? Absolutely not, but I definitely think we can't consider the context surrounding how the statues were funded and their authorial intents in a vacuum - they are fundamentally intertwined with the patriarchy.
Until today, my website was fragmented across a number of static pages and two WordPress instances. To simplify my life, I decided to unify them into one content management system instead of keeping that somewhat unwieldly mess around.
I had never really put a lot of thought into picking platforms before, hence the mess. For many years, my "homepage" was a single static page, which was easy enough since I've been writing HTML and CSS for about fifteen years. It later grew to five pages, but with some extremely simple scripting, it was just as easy to maintain my five static pages instead of just the one. My (modern) blog had always been a WordPress instance. I separated my food blog posts from my other posts for probably imprudent reasons a couple years ago, and I didn't think to do anything besides split it into two WordPress instances.
Eight years ago, I picked WordPress for a few reasons:
WordPress is a relatively simple system to operate.
Lots of people use WordPress, so you can usually find the answers to your questions with some quick internet searches. (Sadly, their own docs are, or at least were, kind of sad.)
The themes are highly customizable with HTML and CSS, and WordPress theme syntax isn't too hard to pick up.
I was hosting it on SIPB's scripts.mit.edu and installing WordPress was a breeze and free. As a SIPB member, I knew the maintainers well, so I felt like I could safely host my site there with less machine maintenance.
I wanted some fancy plugins at the time, and WordPress had them. (I don't use them anymore.)
You create the site through an online system. I hate web interfaces. I hate clicking to create things.
You need to constantly update WordPress itself (and its plugins) to keep up with security issues.
Dynamic websites don't load quickly. I barely used the dynamic features: an unnecessary Twitter module and comments I never really wanted aren't enough to justify that cost.
Since I wasn't really using any WordPress specific features or any dynamic features, I decided to move to a static website system instead. I could still have good control over my theming through HTML and CSS, eliminate a source of security vulnerabilities, improve loading speed, and stop using PHP and MySQL. There were a lot of additional upsides for me, too:
It's easy to keep my website under version control - both the files to generate the site and the generated site.
It's easy to move my website around different hosting options.
Comment integration is significantly more complicated, so the completely misguided temptation to allow comments is basically removed.
There are many static site generators around; I chose Pelican. Some specific reasons include:
While I can continue to directly use HTML like I have for years, I could opt to learn and use the simpler Markdown later.
I can organize my raw content conveniently - files can be put in whatever folder or subfolder I want, and it can generate my website's hierarchy according to other rules.
People have already written some convenient plugins, specifically the neighbors plugin I use to add chronological navigation between articles.
But I can't say that Pelican is without flaws; I encountered some pretty big ones in my switch:
The Pelican dev team made a big mistake in choosing the AGPL for the project's license. Themes by the dev team may also fall under Pelican's AGPL, and if that's the case, sites generated with those themes - and thus their content - may also be covered by the AGPL. I learned a bunch of Jinja because I had to create this theme without looking at any existing Pelican themes so that my site would avoid these licensing issues. I am working on a less personalized Pelican theme to release under the MIT license so that others can also have a simple theme to use without having to worry that the Pelican dev team might enforce the AGPL over their content.
Pelican doesn't believe in multiple categories. I converted all of my categories to tags, but it doesn't feel quite right. At some point, I'm going to break down and fork the project to add this functionality.
Putting double quotes in article titles doesn't work. Even if you use " instead of ", Pelican will convert them to plain "s when inserted into link titles. This generates invalid HTML. I'll probably patch this when I get some time, but for now, I've just changed all the double quotes in my article titles to single quotes.
The WordPress importer didn't work so well for me. Maybe this had something to do with my having multiple categories for many of my posts? Honestly, I don't know because I wrote a hacky shell script instead of digging into it.
So yeah! My site's in Pelican now, so I'm slowly making progress to finishing my website revamp! :)
Communication is hard, yet it is the most fundamental thing we do as human beings. We've spent tens of thousands of hours talking to customers and adapting Slack to find the grooves that match all those human quirks.
I found those tweets in a couple minutes, and you can easily find more. I'm not sure when Slack first heard users wanted blocking and muting, but they definitely did almost two years ago:
@NJDG Not at the moment, but as we continue to host different sizes and kinds of teams, this may be something we'll add.
The ways Thiel fails to value diversity matter: his beliefs are not just a matter of intellectual debate but a very real threat to my safety. They are particularly transparent during the 2016 election season. I don't support the bigoted, sexist candidate that is Donald Trump like Thiel openly and aggressively does for a host of reasons. One of the most important is that I feel directly threatened by having someone who freely admits to committing sexual assault hold the highest office in my country - I feel especially, intimately endangered as a survivor of sexual assault myself. That's just one of the numerous reasons a Trump presidency would devastating be for women, people of color, LGBTQIA+, and other oppressed groups.
However, Thiel's harmful views on diversity and elections reach much farther than his open, aggressive support of Donald Trump in this election. Thiel believes that women like me should be stripped of their right to vote - not just because of the diversity concern regarding how he clearly doesn't care about women, but because women happen to disagree with his political views and actually hold the power to prevent the outcome he desires. The voter suppression he espouses directly eliminates free speech, something Facebook claims to be incredibly important.
Kick Peter Thiel off Facebook's board. Kick him off because he discourages diversity. Kick him off because people like me don't feel safe with him on it. Kick him off because he doesn't believe in free speech.
