This history is also available as a PDF or EPUB, which may be more pleasant for reading.

The argument goes like this.

Kink, leather, and BDSM do not belong at Pride. First, they aren’t actually LGBTQ: kink is also practiced by straight people (Baker-Jordan, 2021). Moreover, those queer people who do display kink at Pride expose vulnerable people to harmful symbols and acts. They wear pup hoods and rubber bodices, they dress in studded codpieces and leather harnesses, they sport floggers, handcuffs, and nipple clamps (lesbiansofpower, 2021; stellar_seabass, 2021). Some demonstrate kinky acts: they crack whips in the parade and chain themselves up on floats. Some have sex in public (kidpiratez, 2021).

These displays harm three classes of people. Children (and the larger class of minors, e.g. those under 18 or 21) are innocent and lack the sophistication to process what they are seeing: exposure to kink might frighten them or distort their normal development (Angel, 2021; Barrie, 2021). Asexual people, especially those who are sex-repulsed, may suffer emotional harm by being confronted with overt displays of sexuality (Dusty, 2021; roseburgmelissa, 2021). Finally, those with trauma may be triggered by these displays (stymstem, 2021). These hazards exclude vulnerable people from attending Pride: kink is therefore a barrier to accessibility (RiLo_10, 2021; Vaush, 2021).

Consent is key to healthy BDSM practice, but the public did not consent to seeing these sexual displays (Baker-Jordan, 2021; busytoebeans, 2021; prettycringey, 2021). By wearing leather harnesses and chaining each other up in broad daylight, kinksters have unethically involved non-consenting bystanders in a BDSM scene for their own (likely sexual) gratification (anemersi, 2021; Bartosch, 2020; Xavier’s Online, 2021a, 2021b). The lack of consent to these sexual displays constitutes a form of sexual assault (PencilApocalyps, 2021). At worst, the fact that children may be present in the crowd makes these displays pedophilia (Rose, 2021), and (if one is so inclined) exemplifies the moral degeneracy of the entire LGBTQ community and impending collapse of civilization (Dreher, 2021; Keki, 2019)¹.

Not everyone holds all of these views, or holds them to this degree; this is a synthesis of one pole in a diverse and vigorous debate. Nevertheless, calls to ban kink at Pride remain a mainstay of Twitter and Tumblr every June. To some extent this position is advanced by anti-gay reactionaries on 4chan and Telegram channels (Piper, 2021), but this is not the whole story: many opposed to kink at Pride identify themselves as queer, or at least queer-friendly (Mahale, 2021).

Previously: Rewriting the Technical Interview.

Aisha’s hands rattle you. They float gently in front of her shoulders, wrists cocked back. One sways cheerfully as she banters with the hiring manager—her lacquered nails a cyan mosaic over ochre palms. They flit, then hover momentarily as the two women arrange lunch. When the door closes, Aisha slaps her fingertips eagerly on the pine-veneer tabletop. Where have you seen them before?

Previously: Typing the Technical Interview.

Update, November 2023: here are the full term rewrite and language macros which formed the seed of this story. These files include OO notation as well as the basic Algol syntax shown here. There is also a sketch of an object-oriented language with classes and inheritance, implemented as a Clojure macro. I do not remember writing it. It looks terrifying.

Previously: Debugging.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss some of Clojure’s mechanisms for polymorphism: writing programs that do different things depending on what kind of inputs they receive. We’ll show ways to write open functions, which can be extended to new conditions later on, without changing their original definitions. Along the way, we’ll investigate Clojure’s type system in more detail–discussing interfaces, protocols, how to construct our own datatypes, and the relationships between types which let us write flexible programs.

Inspired by Peter Watts’ The Freeze-Frame Revolution and The Island.

Each birth is violent in the same way.

Previously: Hexing the technical interview.

In the formless days, long before the rise of the Church, all spells were woven of pure causality, all actions were permitted, and death was common. Many witches were disfigured by their magicks, found crumpled at the center of a circle of twisted, glass-eaten trees, and stones which burned unceasing in the pooling water; some disappeared entirely, or wandered along the ridgetops: feet never touching earth, breath never warming air.

Previously: Reversing the technical interview.

Long ago, on Svalbard, when you were a young witch of forty-three, your mother took your unscarred wrists in her hands, and spoke:

If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have shifted during the night–the incorporeal equivalent of rummaging through that drawer in the back of the kitchen where we stash odd flanges, screwdrivers, and the strangely specific plastic bits: the accessories, those long-estranged black sheep of the families of our household appliances, their original purpose now forgotten, perhaps never known, but which we are bound to care for nonetheless. I’d like to walk you through a common interview question: reversing a linked list.

First, we need a linked list. Clear your workspace of unwanted xterms, sprinkle salt into the protective form of two parentheses, and recurse. Summon a list from the void.

In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay on the pitfalls of English prose, describing what he considered to be the common mistakes made in modern writing. Politics and the English Language identified dead metaphors, over-used phrases, and vague diction as habits to be eliminated from writing, for they tire the reader, confuse the meaning, and destroy the specifics of one's intended message. Whether purposeful or accidental, such errors have not yet been eliminated from the English language: 60 years later we still make the same mistakes, albeit in slightly different forms. While most writers keep their prose admirably clear of such obstructions, passive, vacuous, and needlessly complex sentences cloak the modern world of bureaucracy and politics in a haze of pretentiously irrelevant verbosity.

Take the first of Orwell's charges: the dying metaphor. Some of his examples of have now faded from use, like "ring the charges on" or "take up the cudgels for." After all, few people fight with cudgels nowadays. However, some of these phrases remain in circulation. "Toe the line" has become embedded in our vocabulary to the extent that it fails to arouse any trace of visual imagery. One has only to examine any political statement to encounter these tired phrases being trotted out once again for display. We speak of "cutting off ties" with other nations, or refer to America as "a shining beacon" of democracy, and no one thinks anew. The problem of dying metaphors hasn't gone away, but merely shifted to a new collection of unimaginative analogies.