Hi, my name is Rachael. I am a mac and iOS software developer, who likes talking about my feelings, my life, and my struggles with life. Occasionally tech stuff will pop up, but it’s not the primary purpose of the site. You are welcome to tell me what you think on twitter, as well as be subjected to pictures of my cats, and the office dogs.

I’ve been thinking about how to get myself off of tumblr, and on to a real Big Kid website. I have been feeling like being on tumblr, although it is very easy, doesn’t quite give the right impression. Hosting personal commentary on feminism and tech along side a bunch of smarmy joke images and porn just didn’t feel right. I had a couple requirements, when looking for a new place to put my words:

(note: none of these are currently true, to my knowledge) If I fall asleep on a plane, they won’t wake me up when we get where we’re going, and will just fly off again with me on-board, specifically, to Denver, Colorado. Soreness in my arm means that I am having a severe allergic reaction to my tetanus/whooping cough booster shot, and my arm is about to fall off. A co-worker will never speak to me again, because my husband annoyed him.

I’ve always been pretty down on holidays. Buying things for people and hoping they’ll like them because you see them once every year or two and have no idea what the hell they’re into these days. Travel, plus winter weather. That weird conversation with your family where you tell them you don’t want any wine, or beer, or spiked egg nog, but no, you’re not pregnant, and please will they just leave you and you god damn Coke Zero alone?

Shadow of Mordor has a serious lady problem. The game is missing having much in the way of lady characters at all, and when they do, they’re dissatisfying, to say the least. As a way to avoid doing a lot of explaining, here’s an article about the representation of women in the game, and here’s one discussing what they did about it. So, here’s where we are. We have a game where the first woman you see is a character who only exists to be brutally murdered on-screen along with her child, as a way to motivate the main character.

I got stuck at the end of Never Alone, and was sobbing into twitter in hopes of some help. What I got instead was… well. Names of the innocent have been changed – aka no one’s. SHAMEEEE! Me: …Help! I’m stuck in Never Alone! the damn tree won’t go! Greg: Just tell it to leave… Me: boo, sir. Just… boo. Greg: yew were pine-ing for an answer so I just thought I’d sequoia what I could do…

I wanted to write a post about feminism in tech. I wanted to talk about how you, my overwhelmingly male friends and co-workers, can help make my and other women’s lives easier, and how you may be making our lives harder without knowing it. I wrote out a HUGE post, about my credentials as a woman and a software professional, about what I see as the problems that a woman in tech faces, and about what kinds of things you can do to help.

So, I don’t drink anymore, more or less. I had a couple of whiskey and cokes at a concert last year, and that’s it for the last 2 or 3 years. I’ve got some varied reasons for that, medications, formative experiences as a kid and later as an adult, varying states of mental health, and a general philosophy that I have just as much fun without drinking. Normally this would not be a problem, except I’m a tech professional.

I spent the weekend doing almost nothing but reading. My husband teased me about my impending bedsores, even. It’s been amazingly luxurious, but also somewhat frustrating, thanks to some recent changes that iBooks has made, lately. Firstly, though, let me start on a note of appreciation. Thank you, thank you, thank you for dark-mode in the bookshelf view. It is a gift and a joy for insomnia sufferers who run out of book, as too often happens to me.

I got a PS Vita recently. Brianna Wu has been talking up Danganronpa 2 so much I genuinely couldn’t resist, and a co-worker has been praising the console for ages. Right now I’m playing Persona 4 Golden, although Danganronpa 1 is waiting for me on my coffee table. I’ve been aware of the Persona series, and Atlas games in general, through a friend who speaks Japanese and has a deep and abiding love for RPGs, so when I went to buy my Vita and Danganronpa, I also threw Persona 4 Golden into my cart.