Announcing the release of the Interactive Feminist Bingo Card
The animation is there for a few reasons: one, because this project was partially a lab space for us to push the boundaries of our code knowledge, and I haven’t gotten a chance to mess around with CSS animations and transitions and whatnot at work much; two, because animation on a web site, unless very discreet, is the kind of stuff that gets disparaged as the realm of amateurs*, the kind of thing you would have seen on a Geocities site, the sort of visual flourish which would only appeal to (and imagine this said in a tone of deep contempt) girls. Obviously, we regard this as bullshit. Animation is a key part of a lot of things that are not seen as girly — where, for example, would video games be without animation? So we wanted to juxtapose the very femininely-styled text, in a feminist context, against the kind of powerful effects which are either sneered at as unsubtle when it’s in a context coded as female or lauded as creative and daring when in a context coded as male. How well we succeeded, well, that’s for the audience to decide. The code is available on github, after all, and if you hate the animations, you can fork it and strip the CSS.
(Also, I really like the zoomy effect. VROOM VROOM FEMINISM.)
In general, we strongly encourage people to fork the project! One of our design goals was ensuring that the content-source files, particularly, would be easy to edit — hopefully, even easy to edit for the less technical. We hope that other people will add to our list of trollish comments & rebuttals, and perhaps even that our code can provide an engine for other anti-oppression bingo cards. (While we’d love to see, for example, anti-racist or anti-cissexist bingo cards, we felt that as white cis women from privileged economic backgrounds we would not be the right people to make them.)
Good luck never getting bingo, and if you have to, we hope the kitten video (oh, did we mention that if you win, you get a kitten video? Thanks to Skud and Emily for that idea.) helps balm your soul.
* See, for example, Vitaly Friedman’s article, in which he remarks, “designers of CSS-based websites tend to avoid extreme interactivity and instead use subtle, refined effects sparingly”. And yet Anthony Calzadilla‘s Spiderman animation, later linked in Friedman’s Smashing Magazine as an example of CSS3 animation, is about as in-your-face as it can get.
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Mary:
September 18th, 2012 at 3:42 pm
(Note: I am the editor who put the guest post up! And I like the project.)
Just a curmudgeonly note: the No Commercial clauses aren’t really considered open source, well, at least not by me (note, I am not Queen of Open Source), or the Open Source Initiative. By the open source definition they discriminate against persons or groups, and against fields of endeavour.
There are some arguments against using them at all: The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License and Why “non-commercial” is a “non-good” idea for your project might be worth looking at if you’re interested. But mostly I’m more narrowly trying to make the point that if you choose to use them, calling the result “open source” is potentially a problem.
Leah L.:
September 18th, 2012 at 6:09 pm
I’m going to fork this and link it to Derailing for Dummies entries.
Stay tuned.
Leah L.:
September 18th, 2012 at 6:10 pm
Actually, I’m going to fork it and finish the To Do. ^_^ Then I’ll add some nice jq and as above.
Elizabeth Yalkut:
September 19th, 2012 at 6:05 am
Oh MAN that is exciting! I look forward to seeing what awesome you create.
Betsy Haibel:
September 19th, 2012 at 9:43 am
Without speaking for Elizabeth – you’ve raised a few points here that I hadn’t personally considered; thank you for doing so.
Interactive Feminist Bingo! « Wise Grrrl:
September 20th, 2012 at 5:30 am
[...] I am happy to fall in like with this project that helps you deal with sexist trolls. It’s quite fun. It’s Interactive Feminist Bingo! [...]
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Bullshit-Bingo, Graphic Novels & mehr – Linkspam:
September 21st, 2012 at 5:00 am
[...] Auf geekfeminism.org wurde die Veröffentlichung der ersten interaktiven Bingo-Card verkündet [...]
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LC:
September 22nd, 2012 at 9:03 pm
Ooh, I would love to see a Derailing for Dummies version.