samvara

Born out of many happy hours playing Skyrim before ESO launched in April. Initial exposure waszorana's fault, closely followed by maharetr  who also got into Skyrim and brother J. who pointed out ESO was about to go live and enthused at me over the Beta.

BEST THING: The thing that blows me away the most is that I have now become accustomed to constantly seeing female non player characters of every race performing all the roles. It took me over 200 hours of gameplay to start taking the abundance of female characters for granted. That’s over 200 hours that I spent feeling surprised and delighted every time I met a new female NPC. Now I just get the odd burst when I encounter another married same-sex couple engaged in gay activities like fighting pirates, memorialising their long, happy life together, or dealing with the health issues associated with being a secret werewolf.

NEXT BEST THING: gaming group with maharetr, ascetic_hedony and A. after we all realised we were more invested in roleplaying Khajiit then we were in optimising for racial bonuses. We meet once or twice a week and Do All The Quests or run around Cyrodiil (the player killing map) screaming and dying together. There is no situation that cannot be improved by a fireball trebuchet.

WORST THING: No ‘reason’ field when you add a character to your ignore list. It’s not essential, but it’s an excellent indicator a complaint is accurate if an account has a lot of ignores and comments like ‘gold farmer’ ‘sexist jerk’ or ‘troll’ associated with them. Having said that, the chat tone is surprisingly good and I've seen some nuanced social policing going on.

• Puppybowl VIII
• What Actually Changed in Google’s Privacy Policy

• Volunteer burnout (conscious molding of organisational culture so important, clearly defined roles, balanced task design, being a culture that allows people to say no)
• Imposter syndrome (techniques for managing, importance of support networks and being open about it both as a management technique and as awareness raising)
• Pathways into open source for women (as many pathways as there are women in tech it seems)
• Open everything - Source, Culture, Technology, Government, Data etc. (similarities, philosophies)
• Role/task hierarchy in open source - this was interesting because I'm used to woman-majority open source and I experience a tendency to value some tasks over other tasks eg, coders over documenters in terms of status. I was unsurprised to hear people confirming that these are also gendered divisions.
• and two other sessions that I can't remember right now because it has all blurred in my brain