[astrange]

I seem to remember multiple incidents where Rails programmers complained that everyone at the conference they went to was playing Werewolf instead of sticking to the topic. It made me wonder what kind of community would lead to that.

As for _why, there is nothing special about him. If you need an overly precious twee white guy, we have a natural source of them called the city of Portland. You can go find another ten of them there. They have waxed mustaches and are running combination coffee bars and thrift stores.

[joshbert]

> As for _why, there is nothing special about him

That sounds patently false to me considering we're still talking about him almost 20 years after his flagship work was published.

Minimizing _why because of a tired, narrow-minded focus on identity politics seems disingenuous and like a missed opportunity to learn

[astrange]

That's because the rest of them are working in other fields (combination coffee bars, thrift stores and barber shops.) I am proposing hiring them as tech writers instead.

Also, I don't think identity politics particularly have anything to do with it. (Japanese people are even more hipster than Portlanders and of course invented Ruby, so you could probably find some of them too for diversity. The aesthetic would be different though because of cultural differences.)

[fknorangesite]

> They have waxed mustaches and are running combination coffee bars and thrift stores.

Ah, has Portland moved on from keeping alive the Dream Of The 90s to the Dream Of The Late 2000s?

[bdowling]

For reference,

https://youtu.be/TZt-pOc3moc

[wyclif]

I don't think that's true at all. If you go back and read his stuff, it ages pretty well in my estimation, largely because _why was apolitical. And he was way more informed by good humanities sources than any average Portland woke hipster.

[krainboltgreene]

> largely because _why was apolitical

ahahahahahha

[steveklabnik]

> largely because _why was apolitical.

I mean, he is pretty expressly anticapitalist in this work. The name "why the lucky stiff" is found in Rand. _why was regularly political, though it wasn't always a focus of his.