Merus

I'm half-way through the Bioluminescent set; I've got three Carapace pieces left to buy and I need achievements for two of them. I'm also slowly gathering stuff for a legendary; still need T6, a whole bunch of Honor of the Waves runs and a lot of lodestones. I've got pretty much everything else I need. (Engineers kind of get a bum deal with legendaries; Quip isn't particularly appealing, Flameseeker Prophecies is very much guardian-themed and Predator is a cool sniper rifle that looks dumb in our hands because we shoot rifles from the hip. So I'm crafting Frenzy! Although apparently engineers are getting hammers, which means we'll get Juggernaut and Juggernaut is cool, if ridiculously expensive. It looks like you've done way more PvP than I have, I'm mostly trying to unlock the region tracks.

I detect some Bowie influence in the theme song now there's an interesting special episode: convince David Bowie to sing the Idle Thumbs theme song

So in more "supposed allies are being cockheels" news, Maddy Myers is getting attacked on Twitter for having a dim view on the 'anti-Gamergate' subreddit, GamerGhazi. In case you needed any more proof that thinking Gamergate is terrible doesn't make you any more righteous.

Yeah, I'm surprised how often DidYouKnowGaming manage to find out things that I've never heard of. Whoever does their research is super talented.

"Firing, or letting people go, is just horrible. You talk to anyone in this business, it's just... it's just bad." Really? Really? Because it seems like most of the industry is pretty comfortable with just firing a whole bunch of staff. I mean, if it was really horrible you'd expect that studios would be agitating for a different way of doing things but it really doesn't seem like they do! guys guys you know that other industries have solved the problem of overly ruthless working conditions you'll never guess what they did

Honestly I'm less worried about Blurred Lines and more worried about the cases where producers have ripped off emerging artists like chiptune artists or unsigned musicians and got away scott free because these artists have no practical legal recourse. I still remember Timbaland having ripped off a chiptune track, and Glee stole Jonathan Coulton's arrangement of Baby Got Back then told him that he should be grateful. Copyright largely doesn't model the process of inspiration and evolution that many creative works go through. Since I Left You by The Avalanches is kind of an extreme example: incredibly creative, and very few of the samples are, individually, materially important to the work, and yet all those people gots ta get paid. (I think this problem would be largely solved by reducing the length of copyright significantly. Mickey Mouse is a trademark, no-one except Disney is going to get away with using him.)

This is a well-known and long-lived problem in MMOs, it's not just Destiny.

Gravity Falls: Cliffhangers are just the worst; they're borne out of commercial reality (as is, for that matter, a lot of what we think of as 'good' storytelling, where heroes are easily identifiable, villains are beaten and stories have definite, tidy resolutions) but they stop working the minute you can put the two stories one after the other. Edit:

Yeah, I think you are. This is the problem: it's treating arriving at this point or not as one event rather than the end result of countless dependent and independent events. All the dictatorships that didn't happen; all the great kings and queens stabbed in the back before they could take the power they'd use well; the discoveries lost; the wars not fought. The possibility space of where we could be is truly massive, but over those events we can get a sense of what the probabilities actually lie. They're not zero, by no means. Odds are good that some of the countries we know now won't exist in the future due to societal collapse. For those people, the world's ended. But we're not postponing our inevitable self-destruction as a species either, because if that was truly on the cards, the amount of events we've run, the amount of times we were capable of it, the odds of that happening have to be fairly low for it to have not happened yet.

This doesn't actually address my point, you realise.

The appeal is those Apple computers that are very well made PCs at about the same price as a premium PC.

Yeah, somewhere between the long long run and the short run, things improve. If they didn't, if the deck wasn't so stacked in favour of co-operation and collective understanding, we wouldn't have survived to get to this point. If things were more even, at some point we would have backslid far enough to ensure the extinction of the species, and the fact that we have the society we do wouldn't make any sense.

This is also true, and I mean to say only that it's a complicated issue and a gambit that has done both good and ill. This medium has been a commercial one for almost all of its existence, and that does shape how people are willing to see it, but I also note that we've had artists like Tale of Tales working in this medium for a while now, and the 'industry' has grown to include them. Their next work feels more commercial than what they've done in the past, I think, but I also think some of their earlier works wouldn't be out of place in the 'industry' now. It might come as a surprise to some of us that the view of progress only ever going forward and making things better is a false one. Progress has been lost, and things get worse; it's worth remembering, however, that it's not just happening in games, and that, in the long run, the forces of good win out. What happens in the next few years, as it becomes clear just how fucking terrified people are over how fragile and hostile capitalism is, as it becomes easier and easier for the vulnerable to be heard and to see the system rise up to strike them down, as we see how little power we actually have despite the constant assurances that our vote and voice "matter", is not going to be pretty. That fight might be lost - but it will be fought again, and again, until it is finally won for good.

So I saw Citizenfour. It's really interesting, in that it's a story that the filmmaker had exclusive, inside access to as it happened and that really shapes how it comes across. It almost feels like a found-footage movie, which is a weird, disorienting effect when it's intercut with long, steady establishing shots, testimony, and text on screen. It is literally about what was happening in the room as Edward Snowden was handing over one of the biggest stories of the decade and its aftermath. It reminds you of exactly what was important about Snowden's revelations: the idea that this is being collected to protect against terrorism is a crock of shit, because what it was actually used for was advancing American corporate agendas and suppressing dissent. One of the people giving testimony at the EU hearings declares that what we, or rather Americans used to call liberty, we now mostly refer to as privacy. If privacy is dead, then it follows that liberty is dead.

I think that pretension to industry has done a lot of good for video games as a respectable medium, actually; I noticed a solid uptick in respect given to games when the industry started making money hand over fist in a way that the very good, artistic games that we've seen over the past few years never inspired.

The panel I went to is up on YouTube:

This reminds me that during her talk, Anita Sarkeesian shared that moot had gone to one of her talks and she didn't know, which made the bit where she advised no-one to ever go to 4chan because it's a breeding ground for hate groups really awkward after the fact.

Zero Mission is a good one, yes. It's got some weird bits but it does a lot right.

There's definitely both paid security staff and paid convention centre staff at PAX Aus, and Australia tends to get awfully suspicious of volunteers who turn up to help profit-focused organisations, so technically Enforcers are also paid.

I think it's more of a differentiation. The panel talked about 'rebranding', actually; they pointed out that suffragette was a term of derision, as was 'women's libbers', so rebranding feminism takes away some of its cultural power to avoid the structural backlash that'll happen no matter what you call it. Tara Moss noted that when she performs talks about feminism, she gets few hands from her audience from people identifying as feminist, but most of the room agrees with feminism's goals. Anita Sarkeesian put forward the notion that just privately agreeing with the importance of women's rights isn't really enough. Advocacy is needed, and that appears to be the sticking point.

Yeah, they manage that because your 'world' is mostly just a suggestion of which copy of a map you should be put in. If you're on Blackgate, for instance, each map will have a copy of it that it tries to put Blackgate players, but also, say, Dragonbrand and Sea of Sorrows players, until it thinks that there'll be enough going on in the map. It's super-clever; World of Warcraft does something similar but more limited, whereas Guild Wars 2 lets you jump from copy to copy as needed (which causes its own problems, admittedly).

Alright, you should all have guild invites (hit 'G'). Gwardinen, you're not showing up, let me know if it didn't go through and send me a mail in-game.

The thing with Germaine Greer is that she's a second-wave feminist back when that was daring and they called it 'women's liberation'. She wrote The Female Eunuch back in the 70s, so that's four decades of being a prominent feminist in Australia. Her views on trans people, and on other things, makes her a bit like a racist uncle; like, yes, we recognise that her views on this are terrible, but on the other hand they're part of the fabric and they come from a different time. A friend of mine described her as a feminist she disagrees with almost half the time, and that's probably true; at best, there's a lot of times she's talking crap, but she's excellent at shit-stirring, and when she was most active, that was a very useful skill for an Australian feminist to have. In a lot of ways she's been overtaken by later waves, which I know upsets her because she had Thoughts about the suggestion she should be replaced by the younger model at the panel, but on the other hand most of the younger feminists don't make the same mistakes because they've been listening first. It's an interesting question: throwing second-wave feminism under the bus is a silencing tactic - they still have the capacity to challenge the system and have experience at not giving a shit what gets thrown at them - but they're often on the wrong side of the battles that later waves want to fight. For instance, Greer described feminists as people who identify as women first before race or creed, which... is trying to be more inclusive than previous comments, but still pretty exclusionary? My apologies; I thought that would be approaching the line, but it's clear I've overshot it. I've edited it to be less provocative.

So I went to a couple of talks at All About Women at the Opera House. Some random thoughts: A panel of Australian and international feminists had significant reservations claiming that things for women have actually improved since second-wave feminism. If the same fights are being had, is anything actually different? Germaine Greer is interesting because she is ready at a moment's notice to challenge other people's assumptions, and also because what she will talk about does not necessarily have very much to do with the question she is apparently answering. This will not stop the media from reporting only Germaine Greer's comments during the panel. Speaking of, aged care is not a feminist issue that gets a lot of play but is one that's very much worth considering. Women tend to live longer, so they're over-represented in aged care, which tends to be a little infantilising in ways that should get people's hackles up when they remember how infantilised women often are. Also speaking of, when people refer to 'equality', what exactly are people fighting for women to be equal to? Equal to men under patriarchy? Men currently get away with a lot of shit they shouldn't. Germaine Greer's fun, as long as you're carrying a bucket of salt with which to take her arguments. Anita Sarkeesian was the only panelist who had a prepared answer. I choose to read this as conclusive proof she's a fellow nerd. The argument about 'women in the West aren't oppressed, women in the Middle East are oppressed' contains a threatening undercurrent alongside the racism and reductivism: we could be treating you like we believe women in the Middle East are treated, and you should be grateful. I can't remember if I've heard of Roxane Gay before. Also: realised I didn't know if abortions are legal in Australia. (They are in some states; in NSW "unlawful" abortions are illegal but what makes an abortion "lawful" is fairly broad, which is a problem.) Anita Sarkeesian's Facebook page automatically blocks the word 'kitchen' and five different spellings of 'sandwich'. The big lesson from Gamergate is that laws around online stalking, gendered harassment, and sexual privacy need vast improvement. I wish I'd gotten a photo of the slide. From the Botanical Gardens, the Opera House looks like the turrets from Portal. Okay, this is conclusive proof she's a nerd. Apparently some people think that Katamari Damacy and Portal aren't 'real' games. These people especially need a punch in the face. More as I think of them.

Which is weird, because the best thing for this industry is when we stopped assuming that developers should be coding their own engines instead of focusing on their core competencies. We're at a point now where designers that are good at design and writing can use Twine to make a game that's pure writing and design, and we get good games quicker. I remember in the early 2000s reading a blog post by a popular tech blogger wondering why many video game companies spent so much time writing their own engines when there were only a handful of companies for whom their engine was a selling point. Also apparently PAX is handling the Brianna Wu thing, but she was only there for 30 minutes and a Gator still manages to find her. WTF.