Shacknews LoL

These kinds of threads are going to keep happening. No one enjoys them. But they are going to keep happening FOR-EV-ER because so many of you hit full stop and are unwilling to consider what is a straightforward rhetorical argument.

Everyone here knows and agrees that this dude's awesome, terrible, joke of a shirt is just a shirt. And everyone here ALSO knows and understands why that shirt is regarded as inappropriate for a professional environment.

No one arguing against the presence of that silly shirt is implying ridiculous simplifications like "a shirt kept me from my life's dream of being an engineer" or "I'm offended by everything ever always!" Literally no one. That's who you're talking about and making fun of. No one.

That painfully straightforward rhetorical argument is that the crappy shirt speaks to the boys club environment of the STEM fields. So what do people want? To talk about the boys club environment of the STEM fields so that more minds (women) are included. That's it.

Don't get it? It's like this:

1. A "boys club" systematically and by definition keeps women out. This is done by both large and overt attacks, as well as subtle even unintentional actions. This is simple sociology.
2. The STEM fields are dominated by men, with very few women. Women who were pushed out of STEM share their experiences with the boys club of the STEM field. Which is why...
3. This dumb shirt resonated with a lot of women (not "some crazy rando on tumblr" or "some faceless commenter on Jezebel," but real human women with minds and lives just like you) because it is a clear example of the myriad of little things that tell women, each day, in STEM and other male-dominated fields, "this is a boys' club, you're not welcome."

That's it. The context of why the man wore the shirt (his friend, a known girl, made it for him) is largely irrelevant. That's right. It's irrelevant. Because the argument is not whether or not the man wearing the shirt is in the wrong or "evil." Because the argument is not about him. It never was.

It's about having a discussion. And until y'all are willing to either ignore (you can collapse these threads at any time) or consider the actual discussion and actually discuss it, these disaster threads will keep happening. For-ev-er. Replying with "who cares" or "that's stupid and whoever thinks that is stupid" guarantees that while we're all trying to talk about video games on the Shack, the conversation will come back around again, because whether you want to admit it or not, it's a real problem that affects real people. It's a real problem. It's real. Deal with it. If you don't, this will be us:

http://i.imgur.com/dD5PHiz.gif

Again. And again. Forever. Until you die.

[deleted]

Hi Shack. Remember me? No, that's okay.

I have a personal request for you guys: can we calm down with the reactions to the porn banning discussions? I'm not only talking about the new threads, but also the replies that drag the discussion into unrelated threads. I am reading a few posts here where this behavior is making your fellow shackers not want to visit the chatty anymore. Let's just be the awesome community that we are and move on for now.

In the hope that you consider this personal request, I offer the following points to clarify a few things:

1. There is no current rule banning pornography. I repeat: THERE IS NO CURRENT RULE BANNING PORNOGRAPHY. Any statement from any moderator implying there is a rule in place does not mean there is one. If we make a rule change, you will hear about it from an official post, not some reply in a NWS subthread.
2. We have been discussing this topic internally for months now (this is not something that just started a few days or even weeks ago) and nothing has been firmly decided on what to do about pornography.
3. We started this discussion all on our own. The new site owners did not have anything to do with it.
4. Not all the moderators are in favor of banning pornography, which is why it is still being discussed.

I'm making this post because I want you guys to know that our goal as moderators is to make the chatty a better place to visit. As such, we internally discuss ways to improve it and sometimes we come up with good ideas, sometimes we come up with bad ideas, and sometimes we come up with crazy ideas. When we institute new rules, it is generally after a long discussion and not something we decide to do for the heck of it. In this case, the discussions became public, but there is no need to start acting like a decision has already been made. It hasn't.

So let's just calm down for now and try to go back to normal.

Just to be clear, there will no tolerance of that silly shit in the comments here. I don't care if none of those guys ever read the comments, any of that LET ME SEE UR TITS garbage will be nuked with escalating bans.

Just wanna say I appreciate you doing these threads, while news sources here in the UK are largely decent-ish when covering this, they have failed to really break it down, especially day by day.

UPDATE!!!!

I just got this back:

oops! Sorry. You will be pleased to know that we have re-visited this request after your comments and got approval to authorise holidays.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Best wishes,

[deleted]

Two years later, he proposed to me and asked me to be his wife. It may come as a surprise to you all, but he is the cheesiest romantic person ever and I love that about him. We got married in Hawaii, nothing too flashy, just a courthouse wedding and a few close friends (we were there for another friend's renewal of vows). I'd never seen him so happy.

We just celebrated our fifth anniversary this past July. Although this year started off great (trip to Japan/Korea and then Las Vegas), we started to hit some rough times. My work essentially forced me to quit due to a change in management and toxicity, which took my confidence down quite a bit. He saw this and was absolutely amazing and supportive through it all. He was angry for me, but also reminded me that I was awesome and that we would be ok.

To summarize who he was is such a challenge because he was so many things for me. A great supporter (my number one fan!), always encouraging me to do better. He was my best friend, other than going to work, we did almost everything together. We always went to bed at the same time. He loved making me a coffee every morning. Regardless of where we were, I loved that he took ANY moment to pull me into his arms, hug me, kiss me, tell me he thinks I'm beautiful or amazing, or thank me for being an awesome wife.

I miss him so much. I miss him when he's not even in the same fucking room. It's been strange to be in our place, seeing his things scattered around, dirty clothes that he's left for me to wash, and his gadgets (of which there are many!) peppered everywhere in our home. We developed such a deep love for each other, one that I will always cherish. He was one-of-a-kind, he treated everyone with respect and was not afraid to call bullshit. I could go on and talk about him for hours...

So after three years I've announced that I'm launching my indie game in October.

For those that don't know, it's called The Axis Unseen, it's a heavy metal horror game where you hunt monsters from folklore. It's been a wild ride from being a Shacker in the 90s (!?), going to QuakeCon to meet Shackers in 2000, to shipping Skyrim... to now this indie ride haha

Hope you all like it!
https://youtu.be/0tZmeiR7v6M?feature=shared

ShackBrowse v7.0.11 is updating on the Play Store now. To enable push notifications, go into Settings -> Notifications. Enable Notifications, and then:
- Turn on Replies for notifications when someone replies to a post of yours.
- Turn on Vanity (i.e. Mentions) for notifications when someone posts and includes your username in the post. This is a case insensitive match and we've tried to match the whole word for this, but tricky characters may trip things up here.
- Add some Keywords to get notified when someone posts with a word on your keyword list. Same whole word matching as a Vanity/Mention.

A huge thanks to boarder2 here, we have extended the Werd Push Notification server to support Android/Firebase Cloud Messaging. So if you want to throw some hosted dollars anywhere, throw it boarder2's way.

This was a fairly big effort to get done, but this is the last key functionality area that I wanted to fix up. I'm happy to have finally completed it. One minor UI change is that LOL tags are now laid out below the post content and then the Reply/Share/etc. buttons below that so they don't overlap each other.

Let me know if you see anything horribly broken, but I was using it for a few days and didn't see anything. Here's the Play Store link if anyone needs it again https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.swigglesoft.shackbrowse