Synnah

I also found it similarly cathartic! I'm always down for creative swearing, too. So, Return of Kings, an MRA/PUA website is looking for a #GamerGate correspondent. By their own admission, they have no interest in gaming, and they're upfront about being critical of it in the past. So this is entirely a power play, a means of furthering their fight against 'SJW's, all of which they state. It's highly unlikely that #GameGate will turn this opportunity down, in spite of their claims of not being a misogynistic movement. Which is depressing.

All of their figureheads (Baldwin, Milo Yiannopoulous, Christina Hoff Sommers, and now Mike Cernovich) have little to no interest in games, and Milo and Cernovich have been quoted as having made fun of gamers in the past. The hypocrisy is staggering! On the subject of Mike Cernovich, Matt Binder did a pretty thorough investigation and takedown of him yesterday. The guy is kind of a massive slime!

I saw a list of GamerGaters who had been 'doxxed and threatened' a while back, and was going to post it here, but I didn't want to go through TotalBiscuit's tweets to find it. Anyway, I just did (It wasn't that hard to find in the end), so here's the tweet, and the list: So the reason I wanted to bring this up originally was because of the whole 'there are extremists on both sides' argument, which makes me uncomfortable. The sceptical side of me is all too aware that GamerGate's definition of 'doxxing and harassment' is wildly different depending on whether the person being doxxed and harassed is on their side or not (And the dissemination of misinformation as fact is something they do a lot), so I wonder how many of these are just 'oh someone posted the state that JonTron lives in and then someone else called him a dickhead'. Part of me also can't help wondering whether any of these were actually carried out by the Channers behind GG, because for all of their accusations of Anita's, Zoe's and Brianna's harassment as being False Flags, no-one is more likely to carry out that kind of thing than they are. That kind of thinking is paranoid and unhelpful, though. Mostly I just force myself to take it all at face value, and wonder that if the people who are doing this kind of thing are doing it in the name of 'Social Justice', what can we do to stop them? We investigated this a few pages back, and discovered that this guy (Who is on the list above) actually made a takeover bid for his company public, which was probably the main reason he lost his job, with the GamerGate stuff having very little to do with it. Also InternetArtistocrat is such a tool.

Edit: Double Post

This track is amazing; such a good collaboration! And as good a reason as any to link to this track from El-P's old label-mate Aesop Rock's side project, Hail Mary Mallon: I'm kind of obsessed with S.Maharba's new EP at the moment. Dirty-sounding electronica with lots of tape/vinyl noise, dreamy melodics, and echo-y sampled vocals. https://cleaningtapes.bandcamp.com/album/memorial For Someone (Abandonment) is particularly special.

Because depicting sex is equal to sexism? Who the fuck knows. Sounds like someone attempting to adopt the 'language of the SJW' without having a clue what any of it means. Looks like people were badgering Anthony Clark (Of Nedroid) into weighing in on GamerGate too. Hint: The guy who created Beartato isn't going to support your shitty hate movement.

Yeah, in this case the fallacy they were arguing (That Anita being mean about 'Gaters is just giving them more fuel to be angry at her) was refuted several times, and they still kept saying the same thing. It's okay to not understand the nuance of a situation, but if people explain it to you and you just keep repeating a fallacy, then it starts to look like you're just wasting their time. Even if you disagree, there's got to be something more you can say to expound on why you disagree.

How dare you say mean things about me! It's a breach of Forum Ethics! #ForumGate Self-reflection is a wonderful thing.

My writing quirk when I was younger was to Arbitrarily Capitalise certain words in my Sentences. I don't really have any idea why I did it; like, I was aware of it, and that it was an incorrect and odd thing to do, but I still did it anyway. One day I just looked at it and thought, "This is dumb, why am I doing this," and stopped. And yeah, that person was definitely not arguing in good faith. Their arguments were going around in circles and they were ignoring basically everything that was said except whatever they could launch an argument off.

Here are a few. Does this count as passing the Turing test?

This really needs to be read in the style of a '50s Public Information film. Zoe Quinn carried out an AMA on Reddit last night. I imagine she had some pretty serious moderator backup; it all seems to have been pretty civil and constructive, which is awesome. And there was this, which sort of drives home the reality of her situation in quite a brutal way.

There was a significant overlap in the development of DmC and Enslaved, actually; the game was announced at TGS in September of 2010, shortly before Enslaved was released, and the game had been in development for at least a year at that point. Enslaved's lack of a sequel was due to mediocre sales and Namco being in a pretty poor financial position at that point, but DmC was very much in the bag for NT, so there wasn't really a question of falling back on it to save the company. The trademark stuff is garbage though! The logo on the title screen has a ™ symbol after Enslaved, but not after Odyssey to the West. There's a line of copyright text at the bottom of the screen that has ™s on both of them though, so it seems like Namco were really trying to strengthen the brand or something.

Okay yeah, I would say those are pretty good grounds for dismissal, especially if the deal fell through because of it. His boss being told about the GamerGate stuff probably didn't help (And was a shitty thing to have happened), but it seems highly unlikely that it was the cause, and he's trading on this as if the story is 'SJWs Got Me Fired From My Job', which is pretty wide of the mark. Jesus, that manifesto. It reads like the work of FartToContinue, but with slightly bigger words, and only one font.

The Twitlonger post just seems to imply that his boss was unhappy with him, and kind of a dick about it. Looking at the original tweet, he said that an 'SJW' slandered him to his boss, but further down the thread there are the following tweets: I'm not sure what stream they're referring to, or what the circumstances were behind him sharing a work-related email, but it kind of sounds like his dismissal might have been on grounds of unprofessional conduct, and not because an SJW slandered him. But of course it's a better story if you imply that that was the reason!

Props on the sealion! The Polygon article is fine, but way too distanced. At this point I just want them to go full-on Social Justice Warrior, because GamerGate already assumes that they are; not doing this just comes across as trying to mitigate damages. It's surprising that Kotaku, a site that I will probably always associate with coverage of Japanese games where you touch girls' boobs, is the one to actually step up and do this, but then I guess they've been at the centre of this shitstorm since the start.

This Tumblr, cataloguing anti-GamerGate harassment, was linked to in one of the comments on this open letter to #GamerGate that Rab Florence wrote recently (Incidentally, a Tumblr of harassment coming from GamerGate was linked to in another comment. Compare and contrast the two!). There's a massive anti-feminist screed in the middle of it, which can fuck right off, but aside from that there are two types of 'harassment' that stand out: Gaters claiming they've had people contact their employers to try to get them fired (Maybe this was the guy you were thinking of, BigJKO?), or people making broad, and often jokey statements about how they want to kill all Gaters. The later forms of 'harassment' tends to look like this: Two people wondering if Gaters have gone back to school; Mike Sacco calling Gaters 'goddamn impressionable children'; A guy joking about punching a hypothetical person. And here's FartToContinue thinking 'rich white man-children' is racism. Seriously, this guy.

Hover gets it!

I once worked in a QA department where we had a room to ourselves, about 8-10 people. Shortly after I started, IT for some reason gave us all our own PC speakers, so the room turned into a cacophony of everyone playing their own music (Or that one guy who played that one Massive Attack album over and over [And not even Mezzanine]). It never occurred to me how odd this was at the time, but I was perfectly happy to listen to Kate Bush or the ICO soundtrack or whatever. I wouldn't dream of doing that these days! Maybe your co-worker is playing music in the bathroom to cover up other noises, though...

I heard she was solely responsible for Superman 64 getting released!

A good article, though when reading it I couldn't help but pick out things that Gaters would dismiss it for; It's pretty critical of them ('ad hominem, therefore it's irrelevant'); It's posted on a socialist blog (And it's clear at this point that they have a pretty strong conservative lean); It's got some pretty academic language and ideas. But I guess the point of an article like that isn't to try to show them the error of their ways, but to clarify what's been happening to those on the outside of this whole shitstorm. On a similar note, then, this post by Jon Stone has been doing the rounds today. It's a pretty comprehensive catalogue of their argument tactics and their shittiness.

I was hoping someone would pick up on that!

That's me in The Wizard.

So amazing!

Oh yes, it was you that I saw on Twitter! They say things like that as if they're some kind of organisation, but the fact is that GamerGate has always been a decentralised movement, and the only things they seem to be able to organise are harassment campaigns and psy-ops. When they try to organise something that would actually make a difference, everyone involved quickly loses interest.

There's a kind of general air of 'this is a problem, but we'll tackle it after GamerGate has achieved its goals'. I think I actually saw someone say that in response to Leigh Alexander's list of actual ethical concerns in the games industry. Like they honestly believe that if they get Gamasutra shut down and hound Leigh out of the industry that they'll then all sit down around a table and discuss the problem of weapons manufacturers funding games or cloning on the App Store. Also fuck Intel and their soft-pedalling bollocks. If you genuinely believe that men and women should be treated the same why would you serve the purposes of a movement that absolutely does not believe that? Why is this so hard for people?