So, Mattel releases a book called Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer, in which Barbie designs a game and gets her male friends to program it for her. In the process, she also gets both her and her sister's (a girl hilariously called Skipper) laptops infected with viruses, which, once more, she needs the boys to fix for her.
The reaction was pretty much what you would expect – justified outrage. One of the really fun, creative outcomes of the whole debacle, however, was a website allowing users to submit their own rewrites of the more problematic pages. The main idea is to rewrite the pages so Barbie does her own programming, but you can of course also use it for all sorts of silliness, which I've been doing all over Twitter.Some highlights:
The last one is a little more towards the intended use-case.Some others I found amusing:
>install Google Ultron as well
Make one! It's fun!
I honestly can't believe this exists… Like how stupid can they be?
@nap: The whole thing is almost surreal in its ludicrous sexism. And it could have been fine with a few minor tweaks – like, if they're going to have Barbie do the design work and let her friends write the code (not inherently a unrespectable position), maybe don't call it "I Can Be a Computer Engineer", and spending most of the story having Barbie muck up her and her sister's PCs and then needing outside help to fix them isn't really encouraging to any young girl interested in computers.
@CyrusRoberto: Thanks, I had a lot of fun making them. I'm responsible for some more SCRUM-related humour over at Just IS Things.I've seen a couple of these. Pretty funny.