I need to open this entry with a trigger warning. It isn’t possible to talk about defending against harassment without being exposed to it.

That said, here we go.

I strongly believe that I have a duty to try to prevent harm from coming to those who choose to use the things I design. This means that I need to think about the bad parts of the system, which often isn’t very pleasant.

I want to talk about Anita Sarkeesian and the horrible things that have been happening to her over the past years but first I feel like I need to establish some street credentials.

Back in the year 2011, several employees of the Wikimedia Foundation were put up on the site’s yearly fundraising banners. I was one of these people. I was a very successful banner candidate. I’ve written about this experience before but I wasn’t very expansive about the darker side.

Whenever my banner went up for a test run, I could literally feel the internet turn its attention to me like the fucking Eye of Sauron. Hundreds of tweets, LinkedIn views, Facebook posts. Pow, pow, pow. Lots of it was fun and exciting. Some of it was . . . not.

It’s a bit of a bummer to be told by random strangers that you look like a pedophile. Almost especially when they don’t know anything about you.

Back to Anita.

I don’t want to write about Gamergate or the state of the art of misogyny on the internet but I need to provide some context.

Anita Sarkeesian is a feminist game critic. She produces a series of educational videos about how sexism pervades the game industry. She does not, in any way, call for censorship or banning of topics or anything like that. She really only says, “just be aware of what’s happening here and maybe try to do better.”

For these statements, she has been continually bombarded with harassment through every possible means available to trolls on the internet.

In early 2015, she posted a blog entry detailing a single week’s worth of harassment. Scrolling through it is an inexhaustible stream of sewage and hatred. Some of it is ironically self-aware.

Let’s scroll through a miniscule amount of Anita’s harassment.

I dare you to click over and scroll through the full list. See if you can get through Monday.

Anita gets thousands of times more hatred than I ever did. I almost buckled under the weight of the sewage directed at me. I can’t imagine how strong she must be to keep going.

I’ve not been very scientific in my investigations but it appears that only about half of these accounts have been suspended or blocked. Not that such action matters much: these shit-goblins simply create a new anonymous account and let the good times roll again.

This is the face of evil. Beelzebub with the thousand eyes and mouths.

It’s a true failure on Twitter’s part. One they have acknowledged in public but (at the time of this writing) have done nothing to address.

When you design a product without understanding how it will be used for evil, you are designing poorly.

On Trolls

Let’s take a moment to understand the basic mindset of internet trolls. There are, as near as I can tell, three primary motivations that any one troll will have at a time.

Understanding these things will help you defend your users against them.

To Defeat the System

These trolls want to break the system just to break it. To do it for the lulz or the thrill of doing it. The desire to defeat systems (hacking or cracking them) is a deep part of hacker psyche. They aren’t necessarily motivated by evil but they often will open the door for others who are.

These people will find holes in your systems. They do it just to find them. But once they’ve found them, they nearly always share these holes with others.

To Subvert the System

Trolls who subvert a system intend to use it against the spirit of the system. This is often for laughs but sometimes it has very, very dark results.

In 2008, Christopher Poole was elected as the most influential person of 2008 by Time Magazine, beating out Barack Obama, because users of 4chan figured out how to game the voting software. This year’s Hugo Awards have been hijacked because someone figured out how to bend the rules to their favor. No big deal, right? No one is getting hurt, right?

Some horrible people use Secret to disseminate revenge and child porn. Secret’s not a great way to do bulk distribution of child porn, though. Embedding zip archives of this stuff into svg files and uploading them to a site like Flickr or the Wikimedia Commons may be, however. Maybe as large attachments in un-sent emails on any one of a thousand free-to-use web mailers.

To Weaponize the System

This is when your system or design is being used against you or another person in a hostile, damaging manner. This nearly always happens because of “Not Thinking It Through”.

This may not always happen directly in your product, mind. Data leakage may lead to someone being doxxed on another site, which may then lead to a swatting. Or worse.

Consider the proud young parent posting photos of their child at play to Facebook with open privacy settings. Are there things in that photo where a predator could identify the location?

Mitigation Strategies

How can you prevent your product or design or system from being abused? How can you deal with it?

Well, there’s no silver bullet on this. There are a series of strategies you can employ, though. Many will not apply. You will probably need to use multiple ones, each at differing degrees of strength or opacity.

Some of these strategies suck, but I’ll include them for completeness’ sake.

Ignore Everything

Just do jack and shit about it.

This is the worst strategy. You can do it – and some companies appear to remain successful while doing so. This is the way that car companies handle recalls: only deal when there’s sufficient blood on the pavement to affect the bottom line.

I personally find this to be odious and unethical.

Shut it Down

Just prevent anyone from doing it at all. This typically means shutting down your application entirely. It’s often a last-resort solution.

PostSecret had a short-lived application that allowed users to post their own photos and captions. It was pulled when people starting posting porn and gore because there were no features to limit this and there was insufficient moderation to work at scale.

This is not a good mitigation strategy because everyone loses.

Troll Personas

This is a strategy for understanding your weakness. Many design teams create personas for the users they want to service. The customers they want to have. Good personas are often an excellent tool for helping to understand the business needs of your product or market. These personas are almost universally nice, however, and always assume good faith on the part of the persona.

I say to you thus: you must always make at least one “troll” persona. You must learn to think like your enemy. Think about their motivations and how they will subvert your product to aid them.

Limit Feature Strength

This is reducing or intentionally crippling your product in order to protect your users.

Years ago I worked on a site that was intended as a social and games site for children. They wanted to have a chat system. Obviously, we wanted to make sure that foul language wasn’t a part of it.

It would be easy to write a series of regular expressions so that the chat catches and censors Carlin’s magic seven and all variations. It’s not so easy to catch “Hello, little girl, what time do you get out of school?” or “I am going to put you in a wood chipper.”

This is why Nintendo’s chat systems only allow you to pick from canned statements.

Banning Wrongdoers

Very simple. Have a very strong code-of-conduct and brook exactly zero violations. You must be merciless. You must not allow for rules-lawyering. Identify bad-actors and get rid of them.

Wikipedia has some editors who are simply horrible, toxic individuals. The way they conduct themselves and talk to new users drives new users away forever. They are allowed to remain because there is always some bullshit reason why the latest round of bad behavior is “okay”.

This is the type of behavior that creates gender gaps.

Educate Users

You can educate users as to the bad things that could potentially happen and things to prevent risk.

The biggest problem here is that no one wants to read a bunch of snooze-fest documentation. I didn’t join Facebook to have to take a class about it. Sometimes you can put up interstitial dialogs (like an end-user license agreement) but are you ever really sure that the user understands this?

Does the proud parent really understand that the photo of their daughter’s recital they just uploaded is geo-tagged? Did they think about the fact that they took it at the school? Do they really understand what “Friends of friends can see this” means?

Deny Anonymity

Simply prevent people from posting or using the service completely anonymously. Allowing pseudonymity is fine and even great (and recommended). Just make sure that there is a way to tie any activity back to a specific user.

Purely anonymous culture is fairly toxic so you don’t want that anywhere near you. There’s a reason moot stepped down from running 4chan. But you don’t want to force “real names”, either, because that will probably open you up to other scenarios (like dead-naming transexual people).

Access Control Systems

Give users controls over who can contact them and how. This nearly always requires both white and black lists to work along side a default setting.

Livejournal does this very well: my private posts are only readable by those I’ve set as “friends”, and I can even write elaborate rules about posting only to groups, or to specific people.

Facebook has this kind of fine control, too, but it falls apart very quickly. There are too many options and degrees of visibility and the lack of any serious group support makes managing access difficulty.

It should be terribly easy to add someone to a block list. Press-and-hold on a tweet and I can block it in one tap. Blocking someone on Secret, however, requires me to first read the offending secret (which usually contains a photo of gore or revenge porn), report it, and then I can block the user.

Shadow Reputation Systems

This is a great method but it requires a lot of research and technology. You’ll need to instrument everything in your product and identify several patterns of behavior used by your bad actors.

When your system sees someone engaging in these behaviors, you silently and secretly drop them off into the bucket. This is called shadow-banning or hell-banning.

For example, say your product is one that allows your users to rent out extra rooms in their apartments for short-term stays. If a new user joins your site and then their first several actions are to browse exclusively female profiles, you might be able to determine that they really aren’t there for the rooms but instead to creep on women. The system could then silently prevent messages they sent from arriving at their targets and they themselves may never appear in searches.

In order for shadow-bans to work, you cannot allow anonymous access to your site. You must sit behind a log-in wall. The reason is that if the banned user can see that their comments are not being seen, that they are invisible, they will know that they’ve been shadow-banned.

Ask Questions

When all is said and done, when you’ve set your ideas to paper, you have to sit down and ask yourself a very specific question:

How could this feature be exploited to harm someone?

Now, replace the word “could” with the word “will.”

How will this feature be exploited to harm someone?

You have to ask that question. You have to be unflinching about the answers, too.

Because if you don’t, someone else will.

A “first-world problem” is a difficulty which is really only felt by the privileged in this world. First-world “problems” are, in theory, issues that any citizen of a second- or third-world country will never encounter due to rank poverty or other issues due to societal infrastructure. Complaining about a first-world problems is like complaining about how much tax you have to pay: it’s a problem you want to have.

There are no “first-world problems.” There are just “problems” and their contexts.

Its usage bugs the fuck out of me and I’m going to tell you why.

First, let’s talk about how the phrase is used and the implied meanings.

Consider this exchange:

Me: “It sucks that there’s a new Starbucks opening on the block! It’s going to put my local coffee shop out of business.”
You: “Isn’t that a first-world problem?”

What you are really saying this: “There are poor people in the world who don’t even have coffee shops, or even the dream of them, so shut the fuck up and quit whining! Don’t you feel guilty for being privileged enough to even have a coffee shop?”

If I describe an issue I’m having, and you respond with “that’s a first world problem,” you are not responding in any meaningful way to the statement. You are saying instead, “what you want to talk about is stupid and we should instead consider this other thing that I want to talk about.” It is a fundamentally selfish thing to say, slathered in self-righteousness.

I am being told to shut up. It takes my (possibly very real, possibly very serious) problem and removes it from its local context, and puts it up on a much bigger stage. Suddenly my problem isn’t that serious.

It is true that, when weighed against the Grand Scale of Human Suffering, a chain coffee shop’s opening does not move the needle. I will not argue this.

I will argue that such a comparison is irrelevant.

No matter how great the tragedy, a comparison to the Holocaust will make it seem minor. Consider the above conversation, only with the volume turned up:

Me: “230,000 people were killed in the 2004 Indonesian tsunami.”
You: “Yeah, well, over six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.”

Some day the heat death of the universe is going to happen. We don’t have conversations within the context that someday everything is going to end.

When compared to the millions of starving children or people in Syria being attacked with Sarin gas, the importance of nearly every problem shrinks. That doesn’t make these problems any less real or relevant.

When insurance doesn’t pay for your child’s occupational therapy, that’s a problem we only have in the first world. It’s still a problem. The context is localized. It isn’t productive to move it out of that context.

There is a more subtle and sinister effect to the use of the phrase. It happens when we self-deprecate our own statements and ultimately harms the overall issue of recognizing privilege.

When I say, “I know this is a first-world problem but I can’t decide if I want to buy the new XBox,” I am short-circuiting a conversation about my privilege. It’s a weak nod to the fact that my problem only exists because I have enough privilege for it to be a problem.

I believe conversations about privilege are important and we should definitely be having them more often and with greater sincerity and perspective. However, the power of such a discussion lies with it not becoming trivialized.

If I handwave an acknowledgement of my privilege, am I really recognizing it? I was born in the USA, I’m male, and I’m (by all appearances) white. All of my problems are “first-world;” there is no way around this. I recognize this and I’d like to think I’m doing what I can to flatten the privilege curve but the fact is that it exists.

If we are forced to recognize privilege with every conversation it becomes rote catechism – ultimately meaningless, exercised without empathy – which is the exact opposite of what should be happening.

So we should stop using the phrase. Just stop. The key to recognizing and remembering your privilege is to not make it trivial, which is what the phrase does.

(I want to point out that ranting about this is absolutely a first-world problem. I am fully aware of the irony. It does not, however, negate my point.)

I’m also spoiling other stuff: The Sopranos, Lost, Hamlet. This is rant about story consistency.

Then I explain how ME3 should have ended.

Short review: If you liked the previous games, pick this one up. Play it, get enraged at the ending, and then come back here. I have candy for you.

Spoilers from here on.

The ending of Mass Effect 3 has been called “controversial” in a lot of places because, frankly, nearly everyone hates it. These people are gamers who have invested possibly hundreds of hours into the storyline of the universe and the trilogy – a fact that speaks to the overall awesomeness and engagement of the world and the story (thus far).

The background and events approach Tolkien-level obsession to depth and detail. The developers crafted a grand space opera:

In the future, humanity discovers it is not alone. The galaxy is riddled with alien species, and, for the most part, the various species co-operate with each other, despite histories of war and tension.

All of these alien races are inheritors of grand, almost magical technology that was left behind by a long-dead spacefaring empire. This empire, the Protheans, were wiped out some 50,000 years ago by the Reapers, who are basically the Borg as imagined by H.P. Lovecraft.

The overall arc of the trilogy is this: the Reapers have returned. They are destroying everything. They are taking all living creatures and turning them into borg zombies. They are “glassing” planets. We don’t know why: it’s one of the great mysteries.

There are several factions with different ideas as to what we should do but basically there’s the Alliance (which wants to fight the Reapers) and then there’s Cerberus, which is a kind of shadowy, human-centered (and racist) cabal who think that the Reapers should be controlled. Cerberus is led by the Illusive Man (read: Martin Sheen).

The primary theme of Mass Effect’s storyline is that of tolerance. All the species learn to tolerate each other, to make peace, to work together to raise the floor of all societies.

The primary theme of Mass Effect’s gameplay is that of player choice. Decisions you make in the first or second game radically alter the story in later games. Characters may be killed. Your choices – even from the first game – have an effect on everything.

One of the reasons I played ME2 so many times was because I wanted to see what different choices led to. The ending of that game was heavily dependant upon the choices I made as a player.

Not so much with Mass Effect 3.

Without going too much into the minor changes that can happen, there are really only three endings, all of which are a choice that happens in the last 10 minutes:

1) You decide to control the Reapers, or
2) You decide to destroy the Reapers (and all synthetic life, including your AI friends), or
3) You decide to create some sort of synthesis beteween organic life and synthetic life.

Regardless of which choice you make, the following things happen:

1) Your character, Shepard, dies, and
2) The Mass Effect relays are all destroyed, ending any kind of galactic travel, and
3) Trillions of people die (because of said relay destruction)

To make matters worse, the ending is sewn up in the most awful way possible: we are introduced to a new character, some sort of god-like alien, who controls the Reapers. This alien takes the form of a little human boy to communicate with you (we aren’t even given the stupid cliche from Contact where the alien says “I chose a familiar form to speak to you with”).

This alien tells you why he sics the Reapers (a synthetic lifeform) on the galaxy every 50,000 years or so and it makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever. Here’s his reasoning:

After a certain point, every galactic society creates artificial intelligence that rebels against its creators and causes wars. That, in its mind, is a bad thing. What’s its solution? To send a fleet of artificially intelligent, synthetic constructs to annihilate everyone. So that they don’t get destroyed by synthetic lifeforms.

Yo dawg! I put some world-eating synthetic lifeforms in your galaxy so you can be destroyed by world-eating synthetic lifeforms while you get destroyed by world-eating synthetic lifeforms!

Now, I’ve got no problems with uncompromisingly bleak endings. Especially if they are consistent with the story as it has been told.

For example, the ending to The Sopranos has Tony Soprano, the main character, presumably getting shot in the back of the head while eating dinner at a restaurant with his family. We see him smiling and laughing with his family while Journey plays on the jukebox. In the background, there’s a man wearing a Members Only jacket – a subtle nod to a previous episode about mob killings.

Suddenly, the screen goes black and the audio cuts out, mid-song. We get the blackness for a long, long time until finally the credits roll.

That ending? Perfect. It’s exactly how Tony lived. It’s completely consistent with all the storytelling that they had done. It was uncompromising and brutal but that’s what The Sopranos was about.

Some will argue: “Well, who killed Tony? That’s unresolved.” Those people miss the point entirely: Tony killed Tony. That was the major theme throughout the entire show: that Tony’s lifestyle was self-destructive.

Compare that to the ending of Lost, which was just a muddled mess of conflicting, under-edited ideas. Further, new concepts were introduced at the end, concepts that are brand new, things that we, as an audience, should probably have been aware of before (I wrote a thing about this previously).

The only person who has been able to introduce characters in the final act and have it work was Shakespeare when he wrote Hamlet, and that was essential because we need someone to explain what happened because everybody dies. Pro tip: If your name is not, in fact, “William Shakespeare”, you should probably try to avoid this storytelling trick.

So, adding a new alien species at the end of the Mass Effect trilogy is cheap and amateurish. There are better ways. There are always better ways than hail-mary deus ex machina plots. It felt tacked on because they ran out of ideas.

BEGIN TANGENT

Here are other things that don’t make sense:

First, the “synthesis” ending is just fucking stupid. Seriously? A pulse of energy can suddenly add circuitry to all living creatures? Are you shitting me?

Second, how the fuck did all those characters who I just saw on the planet Earth not five minutes ago get aboard a starship that crashes on an alien planet? I know that they wanted me to see that those characters survived but let’s not break the story with Fridge Logic. Show them celebrating on Earth.

Third, now that the Mass Relays are destroyed, well. Whupz? All those aliens are now stranded in the Earth solar system. They probably didn’t bring enough food to eat (you know, alien biologies and all), nor did they probably bring the stuff to settle planets with, so, uh, good luck?

That’s to say nothing about the trillions of people stuck in other star systems that depend on shipments of things from other star systems to survive. Scarcity of resource creates war, so I guess the entire “trying to save the galaxy from war” bit gets thrown out, too.

END TANGENT

So, here’s my “rewrite” of the ending:

Make it all about the Illusive Man. He was set up as the bad guy from very early on. An ambiguous bad guy, a complex bad guy. A bad guy who had a motivation: he wanted the human race to be the top dog. He nominally wanted to protect humanity, which is why he sought to control the Reapers.

Make the Reapers just what they were: Borg-like things who just rove the universe. Every 50,000 years they make their way back to the Milky Way. That’s fine. They don’t need deep motivations.

But then let’s say that the endgame has it that the Illusive Man has succeeded: he figured out how to control the Reapers (presumably during the time between ME2 and ME3). Rather than ordering the Reapers to fly themselves into a star, though, the Illusive Man decides to use them as a weapon to eliminate all other advanced species from the galaxy.

He has to elminate the current human alliance, of course, because they won’t understand and they traffick with aliens too much. Thus, the Illusive Man is a threat to everyone.

The final showdown is then about him, and how corrupt he’s gotten, and how wrong he is. The overall theme of the story remains about tolerance and growth, about co-operation and sacrifice. It remains consistent.

So that’s how I’m going to say it went down in my mind.

Here is the Manifesto of the Antidouchebagitarian Party. I am still working on some of the language and finer points. Feel free to comment.

1) Don’t Be a Douchebag. This should be self-explanatory, but for the morons in the crowd we’ll spell it out: leave me the fuck alone. The government should only be involved in the lives of its citizens where specific issues affect the society and not the individual. In other words, unless you have a specific legal reason to be sticking your fucking schnoz into my diapers, get the fuck away.

1a) End Governmental Recognition of Marriage. The word “marriage” is not a secular term; it has deep religious connotations and the government isn’t in the business of managing people’s belief in a wizard in the sky (or lack thereof). The government should recognize “civil partnerships” and afford the rights of what we call “marriage” to those unions; those are legal partnerships. It shouldn’t care what those partnerships are for.

1b) Women Get to Choose to be Pregnant or Not. A crazy idea, I know, but we don’t live in the middle ages anymore. Terminating pregnancies is a very personal choice, and one that the government has no right talking about.

1c) Fuck Off With Criminalized Prostitution and Marijuana Use. The taxes we could get from the decriminalization of these two things alone would be gangbusters. Plus, we could regulate two industries which are high-crime (and, in the case of prostitution, possible health threats). This also reduces police and court work load.

2) Science Makes the World Better. Ever wonder why no one you know is crippled from polio? Science. Ever wonder why smallpox doesn’t kill hundreds of thousands every year? Science. Ever wonder why cancer isn’t a death sentence? Science. As a species, we have one biological advantage that allowed us to get out of the trees and stop eating a diet that consists only of bananas: our fuckin’ brains. Let’s use ’em.

2a) Fund Research. This isn’t just about medical research, but scientific research in general. Research brings in all sorts of happy stuff to our lives. We had no real practical reason to go to the moon but because of the research into that we got ball point pens and Tang. Practical science is secondary to research science; it’s a result, not a cause. Smart people understand that general research will always make a society stronger (which leads to bullet point 3).

3) Be Selfish and Greedy. Don’t take more of my money than you need. However, we are aware that when our whole society is stronger, we are stronger as individuals (since we are members of that society). So the laws of selfishness dictate that we want to enable the bulk of society to be productive, educatated, and protected. This may mean taking a lot of my money, but I also recognize I’ll get the value back in other ways.

3a) Universal Health Care is a Must Have. Why? Because if everyone has even basic wellness check-ups, we will reduce our vulnerability, as a society, to interesting things like, oh, epidemics and bacteriological terrorism. Why is this greedy and selfish? Because if you don’t get sick, you can’t infect me with your cooties, dumbass.

3b) Education Spending Should Be Paramount. Why? Because if the populace is smarter, we do smarter things as a group. That means not passing dumbass laws based on the ten commandments, for example, which makes life better for everyone. It’s selfish because a smarter populace ensures my job stability – which, in turn, ensures yours.

3c) Municipal Organization Spending Should Also Be High on the List. I’m talking cops and firemen and paramedics. We need to spend more money on the police force. I don’t mean throwing more cops at crime; I mean throwing more money to make better cops (also maybe more cops). A handful of smarter police and fire departments with modern equipment will go further than a mass of poorly trained thugs.

3d) Infrastructure Spending Should Also Be High on the List. Sitting in traffic sucks. It makes my life less fun. Let’s make my life more fun. This may require spending money. Bridges, roads, tunnels, trains, planes. Transportation is very important, but so also are things like clean water and power.

4) Lead Through Example and Not Fear. We should want to be our leaders, not fear them or the boogymen they purport to protect us from. This sort of ties into bullet point 1. Actually, it really ties into bullet point one. But I leave it as its own point because we shouldn’t be doing shit like torturing people or starting wars over oil.

4a) With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. If some group in the Congo decides to start butchering another group in the Congo, and we can stop it, we should. Because we can do it, even if others can’t. We have a moral imperative to not let people get raped and butchered. This speaks to a global society. I’d like to say we should be isolationist but I can’t: we are a global power.

4b) All For One and One For All. Civitas Romanae. This sounds stupid to say under point 4, but here goes: Fucking with one of us is fucking with all of us. This should be our foreign policy. I’m not talking about legal mumbo jumbo; I’m saying that if some stupid crew of fundies in the world decides to declare war on a citizen of our fair society, that we should step up to the plate and lay down the hammer.

4c) Don’t be Obstructionist. We are for the people. The people may not often want what we think is best for them (something we can theoretically cure with better education). Be loud, be aggressive, be inflammatory, but ultimately bend to the will of society.

Here is why:

One of the film’s subjects, Chuck Yeager, is probably the baddest motherfucker still living today. In fact, he’s probably in line for being one of the Baddest Motherfuckers In the Fucking Universe. And few people know who he is.

I know, I know. It’s a big thing to say that it’s actually Chuck Norris is the baddest dude walking, but that guy, for all his karate, sushi, kung-pow, and other Asian words, is a pale fucking shadow to Chuck Yeager.

First off, Chuck Norris can’t fly a plane. Second, Chuck Norris never really did shit except get his ass kicked by Bruce in Fury of the Dragon, star in a bunch of films where he wished he was Chuck Yeager, and inspire a bunch of young kids to take Tae Kwon Do for a few months before giving it up.

Also: Who fights in cowboy boots?

Now. Back to Yeager, since we’ve established that Norris is just a figment.

First off, okay, Yeager Broke the Fucking Sound Barrier. He is widely regarded as the greatest pilot of all time. Seriously: the best pilot who has ever lived, ever. Aside from his post-war test pilot accomplishments, during World War II he proved himself to be a total fucking bad ass by scoring an Ace in a Day – that is, shooting down five enemy aircraft in one day.

He did this before he turned twenty-two.

But wait, there’s more!

He got shot down over France. This happens. But did he let that keep him down?

Hell no. The motherfucker’s from West Virginia. Oh no; he joined the fucking Maquis and built bombs (which his dad taught him to make) to fuck up the Germans.

Later, and hand to $DEITY, this is the baddest ass thing ever, he carried another dude (who had lost his foot) over the Pyrenees mountains, evading German gunfire, in the snow, while barefoot.

When downed pilots were attempting to home, they were sent in pairs to a series of safehouses over the mountains. Yeager and his partner were in a safehouse in the mountains and his partner (rather stupidly) hung his socks out to dry in the crisp winter air.

A passing German patrol saw the socks, realized the cabin was not abandoned, and opened fire into it with machine guns. The assault blew off his partner’s foot just below the knee.

Chuck grabbed him, made a makeshift tourniquet, threw him over his shoulders, and ran out the back. He did not take time to grab shoes or socks.

When he returned, he was one of the few people allowed back into air combat (policy was that pilots who had previously been shot down were not allowed back into air combat, in case they were captured, tortured, and could give up Maquis intelligence.)

Okay, so post-war. We all know that he broke the sound barrier in the X-1. (and if you don’t know this, you should write a stern letter to the education department in your home state, because you are seriously fucking lacking in history).

Did you know that he did this with several broken ribs? He had been thrown from a horse two days previous and hid the injury from the Air Force so that they wouldn’t ground him.

He was passed over for the astronaut program, despite being more qualified than anyone else, because he didn’t have a college degree.

The motherfucker landed a plane in the streets of Hamlin, WV, just to see his lover. He could (and did) pilot on a dime and they turned him out for lack of a piece of paper.

One day, he took out an experimental plane (which would become the F-104 Starfighter) and shit went bad. He flew it into space. In hindsight, probably not a great move. It stalled, died, and went into a tailspin. So he ejected.

The ejection seat (which is on fire at the bottom, because it’s got a jet on it) spun around and hit him in the face of his helmet, breaking it. This had the added effect of setting the rubber in his helmet on fire. So here he is, plummeting from 30,000 feet with his fucking face on fire.

He landed safely and they took him to the hospital where, for the next several months, he underwent an “extremely painful and experimental” procedure where they peeled any scabs that grew off his face in order to avoid burn scarring.

Oh, but we’re not done.

After this, he took command of an Air Force base during the Vietnam conflict and by 1970 he had been promoted to the rank of Brigadier General. Yeah. A fucking star, bitches (he was later promoted to Major General in a post-retirement promotion).

And he never got a fucking New York City ticker tape parade.

Why do I know this? Because he’s from fucking West Virginia.

And that’s how we roll.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the phenomenon of inadvertent assholes/i>. That is, the inability for many people I know (mostly nerds and geeks) to observe basic manners and, well, interact well with others. This is a long post, and I write it with self-awareness of my own shortcomings (historical and otherwise).