Merus

Teg keeps nagging me to buy this, and I've got PAX this weekend, so I went to buy it. Not out in Australia! And neither is Risky's Revenge! I played it on iOS, which I'm pretty sure is not the reason I didn't care for it.

And also PressFartToContinue has been involved prettttty much since the start so it took him two months to notice.

Kill la Kill definitely counts: Anyway, if Kill la Kill isn't this trope, we need to define the trope more precisely.

Late contender for post of the year

The Dark Enlightenment are shitty enough that I'm swiping them for villains in a campaign one of these days.

I watched that scene recently, and the reporter who's been tracking down Rosebud through the entire movie spells it out:

yeaaaaaaaaah, I know but I keep thinking about Zoe Quinn's twitter and how obviously terrified she is, and I feel like I should be able to do something

Oh so we let them be radicalised great

I think you're discounting that this has happened before. We're recovering from the decision to market computers and computer games exclusively to boys, when in the 70s computer games were seen as an extension of D&D, which had a significant female audience. Infocom had little difficulty attracting a female audience, and many early computer game pioneers were women. What happened, by and large, is that women thought they were wrong to have liked games, that there was something wrong with them, and stopped.

And if this goes on for years? Which it will because reactionaries, generally, don't wake up one day and go 'oh, my entire life is a lie'. The amount of people who have already left the industry, who've already decided not to get involved, is inevitably going to hurt all those 'good things' you talk about. They only exist because of an environment of diversity, and we've already seen that Gamergate doesn't care who they'll hurt if it means crushing diversity, voices calling for diversity, and voices calling for anything other than for the industry to go back to the intellectually bankrupt period of the PS2 era. Why be involved in video games if that's what the audience is?

So Newsweek ran some analysis of all the Gamergate tweets and pretty much proved that it's about harassment. In the New York Times, Chris Suellentrop is afraid the gaming medium isn't going to survive this, that this is the end of the golden age. I think he's right.

There really is a joy in going into a story without any preconceptions of what it's about. I went to see Argo on a recommendation, with absolutely no idea what it was about. Didn't see a trailer, didn't even see the poster. I bought a ticket to Argo, sat down, and tried to keep up. It was delightful; I think I enjoyed it much more than I would have had I know what to expect.

I am skeptical of Peaky Blinders because the name is just the most twee Cockney name I think I've ever heard. I was hoping it wouldn't end up being good because I just can't take that name seriously.

You might be familiar with Numenera because they're basing the new Torment game in that setting. Also it's a game that I frequently spell incorrectly.

Oh boy, this guy is fascinating. Wouldn't be surprised if he was almost single-handedly responsible for the reputation furries developed, especially since at the time most men on the internet didn't really notice creeps. (I think there's similarities between Dennis creeping on cartoon animals and the more mainstream creeps that creep on women.) I think we pretty much all could, Dennis. edit: oh my god. So because Tiny Toons was popular, it had a lot of merchandise. And so the adult fans of the show would joke about Tiny Toon Bar Soap, until they worked out that meant they could and suddenly the merchandising didn't seem so bad. Oh god this is going to get worse before it gets better isn't it. edit 2: what the fuck this story involves the guy my friends and I had to cut off because he kept creeping on friends of ours

Yeah, I didn't particularly want to run straight fantasy - at the very least, we'd do something like Eberron or something strange from my head. That's also why I suggested Numanera and Eclipse Phase. Numanera's a game by the designer of D&D 3rd ed, set in the distant future where weird technology has become a kind of magic. You find weird devices and can finagle them to use against your enemies. It does combat, but it's not the focus - you get XP for discoveries, and for allowing the GM to make your day worse. The trick is that the rules to Numanera aren't freely available so we'd need to work around that. Eclipse Phase is a transhumanist sci-fi game. You play as transhumans working for secret freelance spies fighting existential threats to transhumanity, because we've spread far enough that vast, unknowable forces have noticed us and they do not want us here. Combat's not a focus in Eclipse Phase, and honestly it's kind of clunky. Eclipse Phase's rules are freely available, but it's further off the reservation than D&D 5 or Numanera.

So apparently JonTron has gotten kinda suspicious over how little Gamergate seems to actually care about ethics, which tells you how much the justifications have melted away to expose the misogynistic core of this thing.

"She's really 700 years old" seems related to Booty Backstory

Yeah no it's gamergate, it's been getting me down enough that my mum's worried I might be in serious danger. I'd be exercising my privilege and quitting Twitter entirely, but PAX Aus use it for status updates so I've got at least a week of this

this sounds like a challenge

By the transitive property, yeah, I also see common elements between men's rights group and these evangelical/charismatic cults. There's a shared commitment to their own version of reality and a ready willingness to dehumanise outsiders that leads nowhere good.

So with all the terrible news going on in the world, here's a distraction: puppies!

I'm seeing some similarities between this situation and what we have going on in this industry.

I should also ask what people are looking to get out of the game and what sort of thing appeals to them about roleplaying (and even what kinds of fun they respond to); that lets me know whether to plan a one-shot game with pre-made characters, or a campaign, and what sort of things we'll so. An urban mystery would appeal to different players than a kick-in-the-door dungeon raid.