Irene Zhang

I’ve been keeping an eye on recent car releases as one of our cars is 24 years old and the other is a deeply impractical #miata The Acura Integra is suuuper interesting especially at the price but the type S only comes in a manual (that bizarrely comes with cruise control and auto steering, so basically is about as self driving as a Tesla). However, it’s really hard to justify another fully gas car, let alone another manual. Anyone have obscure car recommendations for a hybrid or electric but fun to drive car??

Wow, I have not been this seethingly angry in a while. So yesterday was the National Figure Skating championship where the women skaters set some amazing world records. My skating club director sent out an email saying that we could all watch in the Kraken sports bar above the rink. When the kids from the club got there, the bar REFUSED to switch from the football game to the competition, saying “We are a sports bar, we have to show sports”. SO THE BAR ABOVE MY SKATING RINK SAYS SKATING IS NOT A SPORT. Someone better get fired and apologize for this. #seattle #kraken

Men, have you read any books about feminism or the patriarchy? They must be a full-length book at least 100 pages. Audio books are fine but they must be 1+ hour.

Would folks be interested if I ran an angry feminist reading group? Allies definitely welcome. I want to read Entitled with some folks but thought it might be a good community building exercise to do it over Zoom.

It’s Pixel’s (our smolest cat) birthday today! She celebrated by taking a nap by herself in the middle of our king-sized bed. #cats #catsofmastodon #tuxedocat #caturday

“There’s often a sense that women in the tech world make a big deal out of small events. But the myriad ways in which they are told their presence is illegitimate, that tells them that they don’t belong, is a constant pressure pushing them towards leaving technology (and game journalism, and the public sphere). In particular, when women in technology also have public voices, as with Anita Sarkeesian or Brianna Wu or Kathy Sierra, the pressure can be — is often intended to be — crushing.” - I guess 2025 is the year that I found my voice.

Saturation

Deb Chachra (@debcha@saturation.social)

Tomorrow is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada. I wrote about the precipitating event, and its role in ...

Because of my new nonprofit, I’ve been digging into local food chains and food insecurity and it’s been an interesting area for me to learn about because I love food and nerding out about it but also because I look at a through an engineering lens and most of the people that work in the industry are not engineers. I thought folks here might be interested too so I’ll write as I explore but I’m also thinking of writing something later.

The belly isn’t a trap. #cats #catsofmastodon

I just learned today that UW quietly graduated one of the harassers, Pratyush Patel, who had committed serious academic misconduct in addition to harassing women. Specifically he has a pattern of emotionally manipulating and abusing women to get them to write his code and papers. It’s unclear that anything in his thesis was either his idea or his work and yet UW has decided to give him a PhD, on a thesis committee led by my advisor, Arvind Krishnamurthy. This is deeply disappointing and disgusting as no one should be able to profit off of the emotional abuse of women but also because it devalues all other PhD degrees from UW, including mine. In contrast, many of the women have dropped out of academia/decided to not get their PhDs because of sexual harassment and bullying, so we can see who the university is valuing and not. The HR investigator was given significant evidence of his abuse in the form of text messages, emails and interviews, including from other universities, and chose not to include it in the report as it was “out of scope”. Despite the fact that he clearly targeted women and used them to perpetrate significant academic fraud.