Real Life is Just like that game I just played

So if you haven’t played the game Pandemic, you should check it out.  My sister made a surprise visit to the states from London last week and brought it over.  (I know, Surprise visit!)  It’s this beautiful little board game where everybody playing works together against a common enemy: disease.  What you have to do is save the world.  Simple.  To do it, you have to cure all 4 of the diseases that are running rampant across the earth.  You also have to run around the world putting out fires because if an epidemic threatens any specific city or area, that disease could blow up the whole world.  So essentially it’s a time bomb ticking away, and the players have to work together using the skills that each character has and also their own negotiating skills (i know, a game within a game! see – it’s the coolest) and then either you kill off all the bad guys or all of humanity is decimated.

 

Then I read this article “Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists.”  The article is about how some dumb fuck on Wikipedia decided that the “American Novelists” category was too big and decided to make a sub-category called “American Female Novelists”.  That is just wrong on so many levels, the primary one being that if there is a sub-category called “American Female Novelists” then there should be another one called “American Male Novelists.”  And the article talks about how it’s really hard to get noticed as a writer (seriously hard) in general.  To split this category up by gender will make it even harder for people to find out about your books.  Since the article was written, it looks like the wrong has been righted on Wikipedia.  At the end of the article, the author mentions that there was a firestorm of response when she shared that info with her writer friends, so that’s good!

 

That game is just like that article.  Bear with me.  We’re fighting to ‘rid’ the world of sexism here, and every little fire that one person puts out, every time one person calls out a dumb sexist move, that is helping us get closer to equality.  Not to mention the fact that seeing actual change actually occur really helps with morale.  the article is depressing, because some dumb people do dumb stuff (in public places that actually affect a lot of people), but it’s heartening too.  that’s all.