Merus

Where are you, Twig?

I generally trust David Futrelle's nose for such things, and he seemed pretty convinced there wasn't much difference between Roosh and the culture that birthed Gamergate.

I can DM. I'd like to do 5th edition D&D and have access to the Player's Handbook to support more interesting characters than just the ones included in the free rules, but I can run Numanera and probably Eclipse Phase as well. Scheduling will probably be an issue, though, as I'm in a very different timezone to most of you.

Yeah, one of Gamergate's goals, in practice, is to try and keep up a persistent climate of fear that they control around women participating in games. I'd imagine that ethics discussion will happen organically if Gamergate finally dies because, as far as I can see, gaming journalists are intensely aware of how close they are to being third-party PR, and how there's a gap between that and what they'd hope and imagine game journalism to be.

Honestly I wasn't blown away by the last Shantae. Unless this is a massive step up I'm probably going to pass. I don't need mediocre metroidvanias and scantily-clad cartoon girls at the same time, usually, and if I do I can arrange that for myself.

Wait, hang on. Marek Dance?

Knowing Failbetter, there's probably a story to the 'z' affectation that's either drawing from history, or is a clue to something terrible in the backstory. I don't recall how they came to that place whether the Song of the Bazaar appears much in Sunless Sea, so there might not be a lot of crossover between London stories and Unterzee stories, but this fragment of writing that documents the adoption of 'zailors' points to Mahogany Hall - which, for an experienced Fallen London player, points through the mirrors to the marshlands beyond. Which is not a good sign. That said, there's plenty of stories in Fallen London that rely on details across the Zee, particularly the far north and south. This setting is weird.

So Mike Cernovich is going to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. I have no words. I have no words. I can't believe this has gotten so low. How can we stop this?

I don't know, I think there's something to the idea that they don't seem to care if their concerns are accurate.

I'm referring to all of his previous plagiarism, Rob Cantor seems pretty cool.

It seems like 'sea lioning' is named because of that comic, because it's describing a tactic that was familiar but didn't have a good name. That video is super great, I came here to post it. Best line: I also love how it unpacks that attitude SAM talks about, where they see their identity as being under 'assault' from outsiders. It's a misplaced, but real, sense of anger and grievance. I think I've got that same anger, directed at what I feel is a more accurate place: the early 80s push to sell home computers and games as being 'for boys', despite the D&D-inspired games of the 70s attracting a substantial female audience.

I can't believe Shrek the Third and Shrek Forever After are so high on this list. Hell, Shrek 2 made Lion King kind of money. (I'd guess that The Lego Movie didn't do as well as expected in part because the distributors encouraged piracy with a staggered release. After spending about six months blaming consumers, they eventually worked out they'd fucked up. Village Roadshow everybody: the reason we don't have good internet movie streaming in Australia.)

One of the tricks here is that Qantas operates a low-cost carrier, Jetstar, and there's a theory going around that Qantas management has been diverting resources to the more profitable Jetstar in order to rustle up government assistance. Obviously I'm not claiming that price competition doesn't happen, this is capitalism, but there seems to be somewhat higher expectations for what you get for your ticket. (I know that the ACCC has had concerns about 'additional' fees in the airline industry for a while now; I'd imagine that, like the mobile phone industry, eventually it's going to end up with Qantas and Virgin dobbing on each other to the ACCC.)

Apparently some of them do, because they're sure that it's one of their detractors that doxxed Felicia Day. As if there's not enough reasons to condemn Gamergate.

No, he still plagiarised someone else's writing and thought he'd get away with it That Jim Carrey interview is hilarious, except didn't he marry a woman who believes vaccines cause autism? There's a small part of me that wonders 'how much of this madness is for jokes?'

I presume they had a story outline back at the start of the year; I'd imagine a lot of that writing was fairly easy and some of Vella's side needed some work.

I find Fallen London's energy system much more tolerable since they made it 20 actions instead of 10 (because you'll likely blow up to 6 actions on cards), but yeah, it's an energy system. I haven't actually played much of Sunless Sea, I think because I had the same Mt. Palmerston problem. At this point I think it qualifies as feedback that the first/second quest in the game probably shouldn't be sending you somewhere you have no hope of reaching.

Apparently it had as much to do with the writers unthinkingly using Australian English, so it felt like a deliberate design decision rather than temp dialogue. It's weird hearing the 'archaic' slang from Planescape because some of it's current Australian English.

I think that's what I find so weird, that in America basically everyone buys airfare based solely on price. I guess it's because in Australia we have Qantas, and there's a little bit of pride in Qantas' quality and safety record. I know Tiger, a very low cost airline in Australia, nearly went under because its safety record deteriorated to the point where people didn't want to fly them.

I can't imagine Serial's going to have a satisfying conclusion, which is why I'm holding off.

I think it's probably these two.

Uh, this just feels like a throwaway crowd scene joke. I'm not seeing how this is The Nadir of The Simpsons. The anime family feels like they have different designs because they have more than a pan's worth of screentime and enter the scene one after the other. I mean, Two and a Half Men would kill to have a joke that had thought behind it like this. Is this what people complain about when they complain about zombie Simpsons? Is it that petty? So I guess I ask with renewed vigour, are we going to keep doing this every time The Simpsons has an off episode?

Ah, right, in Australia only shitty airlines have been brave enough to make you pay for checked luggage. I don't mean 'low-cost' airlines, I mean the ones that people say 'don't fly with them, just get a bus instead'.

These are just the ones to which you give credence, though. It's important to be aware of your biases. GG being a reactionary movement is important, because reactionary movements routinely lie about what they want. By trying to draw links between something they think society values, like ethics, bullying, improving the economy, good music, what have you, they try to link that to what they actually care about, which they (usually correctly) feel society is rejecting, like patriarchy, systemic racism, or homophobia. Those individual points might be of varying relevance, but if other people didn't stop and go, 'hmm, that seems like a good point', they'd drop it fairly quickly. Like the Boston Globe journalist pointed out, if you look at the front page of GG hangouts they're dominated by attacks on specific women. Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu are not journalists. If GG was 'about' nepotism in journalism, or liberal media control of journalism, or reviews, or lack of disclosure, then why are they even remotely relevant months later? This is setting aside that games journalism is an inherently compromised field, being a field started as a PR move, and even today beholden to PR departments for information. Given that, games journalism's doing pretty well comparatively, with a reasonable effort to separate reviewers from PR influence and a strong belief in a divide between advertising and editorial. It's unrealistic to expect people to not become friends in a small industry, or even in a large one; that'll influence coverage, but then the games that people are interested in isn't a meritocratic process either. And as I think has been proven, objective game reviews aren't very useful as a decision-making process because beyond 'does the game work' assessing its quality means deciding on a heuristic for assessing that quality, which will inevitably be subjective. Which kind of fun is this game trying to invoke? Is that the kind of fun it should be invoking? Impossible to answer in an objective or systematic fashion.

The idea that you don't just check all your bags is bizarre to me. Apparently American carriers regularly lose bags? You'd think 'we never lose bags' would be a cunning marketing tactic.