I just released my first Chrome extension! It's called Jailbreak the Patriarchy, and if you're running Chrome, you can head over here to install it.

What does it do?

Jailbreak the Patriarchy genderswaps the world for you. When it's installed, everything you read in Chrome (except for gmail, so far) loads with pronouns and a reasonably thorough set of other gendered words swapped. For example: "he loved his mother very much" would read as "she loved her father very much", "the patriarchy also hurts men" would read as "the matriarchy also hurts women", that sort of thing.

This makes reading stuff on the internet a pretty fascinating and eye-opening experience, I must say. What would the world be like if we reversed the way we speak about women and men? Well, now you can find out!

What if you need to read something on the web exactly as it was written?

Running this extension will not trap you outside the asylum. When you install Jailbreak the Patriarchy, you'll see that there's a new button in the top right corner of your browser. It looks like this:

When you click that button, it basically toggles the patriarchy. If Jailbreak the Patriarchy is active when you click, it pauses the extension and reloads your current tab back into reality. If the extension is already paused when you click the button, it unpauses the extension and reloads your current tab back into genderswapped-land.

Just to be clear, only your current tab will reload automatically, but the pause/unpause is browser-wide and persists until you toggle the button again. It's easy to tell when the extension is paused, because the button in the browser will get a big red OFF tag, like so:

I found it helpful to pause the extension while writing this post, for instance, and intend to unpause it as soon as I'm done. No big deal, with that toggle button right in the browser at all times.

Why create such a thing?

I was having dinner with the incomparable Jess Hammer a couple weeks ago, when the topic of ebooks came around. I made an offhand comment about how someone really ought to make an app that toggles male/female characters' genders in ebooks, and promptly started thinking about what I was really looking for along those lines.

I'm not much an ebook reader myself, so a Chrome extension feels much more useful to me. But it absolutely genderswaps html-formatted Project Gutenberg books, if that's what tickles your fancy.

Running Jailbreak the Patriarchy for the past few days has already changed my perspective on the world in a way that I find interesting, enjoyable, and valuable. I'm very curious to hear how other folks feel about the experience! So please give it a try, and let me know whether and how it affects your perspective!

Are there any bugs?

There is a known bug with the English language itself that I'm dealing with imperfectly at the moment. See, sometimes "her" should translate to "him", and sometimes it should translate to "his". There are a lot of tricky edge cases here.

I have a set of rules that recognize the most common cases where "her" always or usually should translate to "him", and then a rule that translates all remaining instances of "her" to "his" instead. It's a decent system, but not yet thorough enough. (Better than it was when I started, though. Extra thanks to Molly Tomlinson and Xtina Schelin for helping me get this as close to accurate as it is already!) This is very much a work-in-progress.

What this ultimately means is that sometimes you're going to see "his" where you really ought to see "him" instead, or vice-versa. You can help fix that! You don't need to know Javascript to help - just knowing English is more than good enough! If you come up with any simple rules on when "her" ought to go to "him" but currently doesn't, let me know, and I'll update the extension to take care of those cases as well.

Beyond that, so far I know that Jailbreak the Patriarchy doesn't affect gmail (which is very important to me), but I haven't tested it on any other email sites. It works on twitter, greader, and facebook, but I haven't tested it on dynamic content sites beyond that. Please let me know if you find any problems, and I'll figure out how to deal with them and push an update through.

Other Notes

Although Jailbreak the Patriarchy does swap gendered terms beyond pronouns, I've undoubtedly missed some that I'd be happy to add in as we notice them.

That said, I've decided so far not to genderswap some categories of gendered terms, like certain popular slurs. I reserve the right to change my mind and am open to hearing feedback on this decision.

I've also decided not to genderswap people's names, despite having some great theories on how to make that work if I wanted to. I have three reasons for this decision: I wanted to release this so we could play with it ASAP and figured I could always add that feature in later if I so choose; I think that although name-swapping would be great for an app that only affected works of fiction, changing people's names all over the web would blur reality to the point of inconvenience; and last, I'm really just charmed by the way it makes the entire world feel a bit more genderqueer to me.

Ports and spin-offs created by other coders:

• Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale ported Jailbreak to work for Safari
• sinxpi ported Jailbreak to a Greasemonkey script for Firefox
• Marianna Kreidler released a gender-neutral version of Jailbreak </i>

On my way to the train one morning a couple weeks ago, I saw this marvelous flock of pigeons on top of a gorgeous brownstone.

And here are some folks I saw on the subway over the past few weeks:

And more subway folks:

Still more subway folks, but these were done with a fountain brush pen:

Really cute kid I saw on the subway a few weeks ago:

(Hero M86 fountain pen with Noodler's Kiowa Pecan ink; watercolors from my bestest little altoid tin palette)

Actually, on that note, this is the travel palette I built that I use nowadays:

I used hot glue to create 9 separate compartments in a teensy tiny mini Altoids tin, which I hot glued to a rectangle of cardboard.

(I also glued in a bit of scrap dry-erase board stuff left over from when we redid the upstairs hallway for mixing, but I don't think that part is strictly necessary.)

I have a cool trio of primary colors (lemon yellow, scarlet lake, ultramarine), a warm trio of primary colors (indian yellow, permanent rose, and phthalo blue), and at the bottom as extras I have indigo and a bit of titanium white goache.

I keep a waterbrush in my pen case, and that's it, easy and tiny.

It works basically like this, with the other end of the cardboard stuck between journal pages to hold the palette very conveniently in place for me:

View from The Elevated Acre at 55 Water St., NY, NY. With helicopters!

View when returning to the street from The Elevated Acre:

A lovely building just north of Union Square:

I did this sketch with a Pilot Varsity fountain pen at the Old Port (Old City?) in Montreal when I was there to shoot a friend's wedding, and finished it up with watercolor and a teensy bit of white jelly roll pen for the words:

I flew into Burlington, Vermont and then took greyhound to Berri-Uqam station in the middle of Montreal, on my friend's recommendation. When I got to the station, I found this guy sleeping behind a row of benches. People sat in front of him, totally ignoring him. He looked more like a backpacker than a bum.

(Drawn in ink on a sketchbook page I'd pre-splattered with coffee.)

I sketched this next guy in the airport while waiting for my plane to fly back home yesterday, which was crazy delayed. A TSA agent leaned over to look at sketchbook and complimented me profusely, which was a delightful change from my usual TSA interactions.

(Sketched with a pilot varsity fountain pen and noodler's heart of darkness ink, watercolor to finish, over a lightly pre-splattered page.)

I took a walk back on September 18th on my way to grab groceries, and sketched bits of the three churches on 7th Ave fairly close to my apartment. I really love how they turned out, especially when I used the waterbrush wash technique only for the windows in finishing them up!

Grace United Methodist Church

Old First Reformed Church

(My absolute favorite bit here is the birds who were hanging out in the window, where I did the wash around them to highlight them.)

Memorial Presbyterian Church

God, I'm so in love with my $13 Hero M86 fountain pen, and the fraction of my $1.50 sample of Noodler's Kiowa Pecan ink that I stuck in there. I have a favorite sketching implement, all right! It's such a weird, nifty little tool.

You have to understand, I just don’t know how to convey this to you. I want to, I’m trying to, I’m giving it all I’ve got. But we thought we were going to see dull geysers, still stumbling around cranky and exhausted from freezing-cold-camping-induced sleep deprivation the night before, and somehow we stumbled into seeing this sort of thing.

Bleary. Getting sunburnt around the edges of our layers. Mike in a hoodie, as you see. But astonished at what we’d found.

As Lisel Mueller wrote, “I tell you it has taken me all my life… to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being… What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames?”

And then, then, let us go to one of the deep green places of the world.

I kept wondering why so many trees were down, everywhere we looked. I later learned part of the complex answer - huge fires, blowdowns, pine beetles, the way forests change over time. But not the whole story.

The best is yet to come.

We walked a long, curved road through icy winds and hot steam towards the Grand Prismatic Spring. It felt like the hot springs in Costa Rica, where I spent a day alternating between searing my skin under a pounding hot waterfall and standing out under a light, stinging shower of cold rain. Like alternating between a hot sauna and a cold pool. The walk itself was a luscious physical sensation. Even now, the thought of it fills me with a deep sense of peace and joy.

And as we approached the spring, it certainly didn’t hurt that when the winds blew the thick mists away, we saw this:

It looked like a watercolor painting in real life, too.

One of the most incredible places I have ever seen. And yes, those colors were real, right in front of my eyes.

Mists and mists and ORANGE! and mists and mists and GLORIOUS WATERS.

Layer upon layer.

Can you see the blue in the mists over the center of the spring? When you look at it from above, you can see that color in that section of the waters. But even from the side, the color rose up.

And then we left. The rest of the world seems drab in comparison, sometimes.

(That’s when it’s time to get the paints out, or turn on the torch!)