0wnz0red
Dozens upon dozens of things to post, not nearly enough time. I'll begin with this one: a Cory Doctorow story, "0wnz0red," published in Salon back in August; I somehow managed to miss it at the time. I'm not done reading it yet, but had to quote this bit even though it contains spoilers for the first page (for those who don't know, my day job is as a tech writer):
[They were making him become a] tech writer. Why not just break his goddamned fingers and poke his eyes out? Never write another line of code, never make the machine buck and hum and make his will real in the abstract beauty of silicon? Tech writers were coders' janitors, documenting the plainly self-evident logic of APIs and code-structures, niggling over punctuation and grammar and frigging stylebooks, like any of it mattered—human beings could parse English, even if it wasn't well-formed, even if you had a comma-splice or a dangling participle.
Them's fightin' words, boyo. But funny fightin' words.
I'm reminded in passing that there was a very cool sf story posted on Salon a few weeks ago that I intended to link to every day, but it was only available for a couple weeks, and I kept forgetting. Sigh.