Henroid

I'm so glad I saw this before going into work. Day made. And it just started!

Sadly I'm not convinced any of them will listen. I've directly pointed out things like the errors in claims about the IGF award, links and all, and they still charge on the same point despite being wrong. It's like all these people who didn't live highschool normally, not getting immersed in gossip (and thus learning how to manage it / react to it), are getting to it late in life. Only their actions are fucking extreme in comparison. These people just didn't grow up normally and that sucks because you can't really fix it beyond a certain point. And for all we know, they could actually be highschoolers.

So Sunday. The Raiders played the Chargers (NFL). Oakland has a new coach, and while we still lost there was a huge difference in performance. We still need to work on receptions and penalty bullshit, but I can see positive growth in the near future. It was bad luck that we had to play the team with the top-rated defense in the league this season, but at least we gave them a run for their money (it was a REALLY close game). Plus, their whole deal of not allowing any points in the 4th quarter for four straight games was broken by the Raiders. Next week will be interesting.

In the wake of what's happened today, a hashtag is top trending on Twitter. #StopGamerGate2014 Among the tweets that have been coming up, this one just showed up in my feed and is fucking terrifying in what it reveals. https://twitter.com/CranBoonitz/status/522217535497043968

Always glad to see other fans of this show. I watched it when I was in gradeschool in the early / mid 90s, and I even joined the fan club. I remember getting the news letter and everything. Even sent in a drawing I made of the cast. It's probably the most effort I put into being a fan of something.

FREEDUMBS!

And so, terrible things are going on. Anita Sarkeesian only just tweeted about it, but earlier this afternoon the news was out that a lecture / talk she was to give at USU (Utah University) was postponed. It is now just outright canceled. The university received a threat from someone claiming to be a student, who had very specific things to say in the threat. Including it being the biggest school shooting, and how feminists "ruined" his life and he wanted to take revenge. Problem is, this is about to become a gun control issue because Utah makes it illegal to bar carrying concealed weapons (as in, you can legally hide a gun and nobody can stop you from doing it). That detail changed the postponement to outright canceling. And I don't blame Anita for that decision.

Well at least the host didn't have his head up his ass. But it seems the owner of 8chan is doing what he can to skirt responsibility. I dunno how long that's gonna last to be honest. I do know some website / forum administrators that have had to deal with law enforcement before. It happens more frequently than you'd think.

GamerGate is like watching the Tea Party (recent American politics) happen in fast-forward. That said it's still frustrating. I go from feeling "meh" about their importance to fucking infuriated, the latter usually coming up when someone has to leave their home due to specific threats. I really hope the capture and prosecution rate of the people attempting to anonymously deliver these threats is high (or perfect), because honestly some time spent in federal "fuck me in the ass" prison would terrify the internet tough guys out of pulling this crap. It's gonna take some examples to be made first. There's definitely this haughty, "I'm anons on the internet, you can't get me~" crap going on. Meanwhile there's stories every week about "Hey remember that time that one company got hacked a few months back? They just arrested the little shit(s) that did it."

I don't even know what to fucking do with myself anymore. I just cannot win. I've spent the entire year looking for work and finally found it. I just wrapped up the first week, and it was fantastic. The pay is better than anything I've gotten in my life, my coworkers and bosses already like me, I like them, the job is easy compared to others I've worked in the past. It feels perfect. So what's the goddamn problem? My brothers and I look over my grandmother. It was three of us leaving here, but the eldest is moving out to his girlfriend's (which is nearby, so he's still around to do some of the 'heavy lifting' in watching over our grandmother). It's down to the two of us now, the youngest of all the grandchildren. We're capable of everything she needs, barring the language barrier (we never learned nor were taught Portuguese). My brother does the cooking and cleaning and I handle special tasks like the work in the garden (except daily watering). We've long since fallen into this pattern. The problem is my grandmother refuses to cooperate with caretaking in any way possible. She isn't crazy or anything. All her health problems are just stuff like weak knees, general strength loss, digestion problems, etc. She's more than mentally capable. The problem is, she's a bully and often a fucking jerk. She treats my brother, who does the daily care stuff, like total shit because of his hearing problems (and emotional issues). She thinks he's lying about it all or something and isn't even thankful for his day to day efforts. It's like she takes it for granted. But the biggest issue of all that is me. I'm my grandmother's godchild. My grandmother is from the poor country. The Azores, the Portuguese islands in the Atlantic. Heavily Roman Catholic, and they didn't get electricity until the mid 80s (though my family came to America in the late 60s / early 70s). My grandmother thinks science is a load of shit, etc. She thinks I am a fucking prince, meant to be cared for moreso than her. She harasses my brother about daily needs for me, which is absurd. She freaks out about what am I going to eat day to day, even though we have tons of food often. But she doesn't want me to choose my own meals or prepare them. She expects it to be done for me. Things have gotten worse now that I've started working. In her thinking, it's a fucking travesty that I have to work for a living. Which is the norm in America and who gives a fuck. But no, that I have to work isn't right. Even if I want to work. It isn't just normal complaining; she is physically stressing out over this kind of shit. Her health actually improved when I moved in over here. Before then, she was flipping out at whoever she could call about how I was eating, etc. It's a fucked up obsession. So now I'm confronted with this; I'm working for a living at last, content and aiming for a goal of moving out. It's what's needed. The problem is, working toward the goal, PLANNING It even, is literally doing my grandmother harm. But if I stop for her sake, things actually get harder around here regarding funds for food, etc. Not to mention, god forbid should she pass, I end up fucked on funds and a place to stay. It is so stressful to just be in this environment. I got a preliminary diagnosis of "Adjustment Reaction" (the name has changed since) as the cause of the ulcer I developed in my teens (entirely stress driven; no smoking or overabundance of soda / coffee). My trigger for that stress is my family. The more I'm away from them, the better it is on me. But now I'm aware of the extent that my grandmother has her freaking stress issues, and if I'm away, it's doing it to her. So one of us has to fucking suffer and it's ridiculous. The easiest answer would be her just going "Oh right that's okay that you work." But y'know, almost 90, she's set in her fucking ways. This post probably reads as jargon because I'm jumping all over the place. But I just need a place to vent at the moment. I don't want this positive thing I've gained in my life to become shit arbitrarily.

I'm not gonna bring this sorta thing up to her on Twitter or here on the forum, and nobody else really should either. It'd be unfair and too pressuring.

Super Smash Brothers: First Blood It's over Luigi. IT'S OVER. NOTHING IS OVER!

The bigger crime is him saying that non-GG folks are "seeking reasons to get angry." I would say that women (or people they know) being driven from their homes due to threats received is pretty worthy of getting pissed off. Of course then he does the "what about ME" shit, which infuriates me on a personal level (which I won't get into; I have a shitty family member and I'll leave it at that).

Last night I directly engaged GG for the first time in a couple weeks on Twitter. It was almost nearly a big mistake. I couldn't find anyone for a LONG time willing to discuss what was going on in good faith. Most of the replies were ridiculous defensive shit, including one guy who told me to stop "harassing" him because I was replying to him (not even close to aggressively). My favorite though was a guy who just kept using talking points at me. I gave him a pretty long set of tweets that were evenly worded about misunderstandings and such, and I just got preaching in return. Then fiiiiiiinally one GGer actually spoke to me. We talked about the idea of GG starting a website they can manage and police to show people they're serious about condemning harassment and such. He argued it'd be an echo chamber at first, but I told him it'd start that way certainly but would catch notice if it was policed into being a positive discussion zone. The only thing he had over on me was that if it was a small site startup it'd be prone to DDoS and other kinds of attacks, which have been going on during this shit. It still feels like the decent people have abandoned trying to make the GG tag legit. And when I say decent people, I mean they're still mistaken / wrong about shit going on.

She's right about Phil Fish being right. This is fucking bullshit and fuck all those adult-baby GGers.

The point of bringing it up to GamerGate isn't to say it's them doing it. It's to say "THIS Is what Leigh Alexander and others have been saying is shit." And yet GG still reacts with "stop saying it's me doing it waaaaaaaaaah"

And then this happened, close to the world of video games. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/10/09/354964666/microsoft-ceo-backtracks-on-suggestion-that-women-shouldnt-ask-for-raises That was his original statement. He did backtrack it with a tweet, but y'know.

That's still a bad sign for them for two reasons. First, it demonstrates how disconnected this "grass roots movement" is. They can't even coordinate to do anything until they're shamed on it in some fashion. Second, there's no way to tell how many of those clicks are being generated by some people putting effort into faking the numbers out. And actually that leads to a third - if it really is a petition style site more than anything, the numbers mean jack shit.

YouTube channel operators have been present for a while, but it seems like 2014 is the year where people are paying attention to them. Not as audience members though - it's a new facet to the video game industry as a business (or rather, a new means to an already existing sub-business; promotion) and deserves to be under a watchful eye for shenanigans. Such as what's going on above. Edit - A friend just pointed out that the game is getting positive press on its own merits anyway. So in a sense I feel like that means the publisher is getting punished, because they unnecessarily flushed money in the form of bribes down the toilet. They would've gotten free positive press. Which you tend to get when you make a great game. But the YouTubers still get to eat their cake and have it, etc. I mean it's not like they're necessarily -wrong- about praising what they praise, but they probably would've done so without money being waved in their faces. That said, do we know which YTers took the bribe?

I just want to say that in the film, Casino, a member of the mob is gunned down by cops. It was meant to be a hilarious scene where they realize he was holding a hoagie / hero sandwich. So when I heard that story yesterday, I was like, "Hey, I thought that kinda shit was fiction-only." The world sucks.

I hate to drag this back to the shit-well, but this popped up on my Twitter feed a moment ago.

This Halloween just got extra spookier! Have to link it. https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/7870163200/hFB214B0F/

So business news surrounding video games. Like, actual business. http://gamasutra.com/blogs/PatrickFoot/20141003/226987/Is_2014_the_year_that_investors_finally_take_video_games_seriously.php 2014 kinda turned perceptions of the video game industry on its head, when it comes to investors / the stock market. Essentially what's going on is that this year saw mobile app developers seeing losses in stock value. Meanwhile, companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Activision are all seeing rising stock value due to the Twitch acquisition, Mojang acquisition, and Destiny's launch. Even Facebook's acquisition of Oculus has resulted in a permanent boost to their stock value (and also it's kind of a support for traditional PC gaming). So basically anyone that said mobiles games would be the end of 'traditional' games is full of shit. It's not that mobiles aren't allowed or are going away. It's that everything will exist and take turns at thriving over the other.

I came here to go, "Hey the themes are the first substantial 3DS update since I've come to own one," but now I'm just gonna be like, "I want more screenshots like this." I want more screenshots like this.

I thought it was filmed on the grassy knoll?