Merus

this thread is going to be revived every time there's a bad Simpsons episode isn't it

I suspect I'll end up buying this just to support the local industry.

An FAQ says there's an unlockable super-hard mode, so.

I have a 3DS XL, and it goes several days without a charge.

I feel like avoiding 'gater' isn't much of a problem, as we're still able to refer to Gamergate as a movement without much loss in meaning. It's a minor inconvenience to ensure that we don't run the risk of dehumanising, and I think that's fair enough.

I want to know what the greatest political and legal disses in history were. Winston Churchill's got a few, but I think my personal favourite is Gough Whitlam's interjection into Sir Winton Turnbull's speech. Turnbull represented a large rural electorate as a member of the Country party, and as part of that speech, declared "I am a Country member". Whitlam interjected "I remember". It brought the house down, apparently.

Yeah, that's a great point; dehumanisation leads a lot of places and none of them are good. Those opposed to Gamergate don't have dehumanising nicknames for specific people in the movement, but we object to Gamergate, not to the people separate from the horrid things they believe.

Sorry to ruin it, teg. It's not true.

I have a backpack, but yeah it lives in there and I get hella Streetpasses.

So I guess The Pokemon Company's decided they're done with delighting generations of children and want to branch out into traumatising them

Yeah? I find myself a little unenthused because it feels like I've mostly seen what it has to offer after only a few hours. I think part of my problem is that it feels like there's a huge skill gap between the medium and the hard mode, so medium's too easy but hard just fucks me over. Maybe it's because I've only done a few of the harder ones and there's a progression there I haven't worked out, like how I Love Rock and Roll on hard's not too much more difficult than the top tier medium songs in Guitar Hero. I guess there is a 'final boss', as it were, if I get 20,000 rhythmia, which I'm not far off from at this point.

The best approach I'm aware of is a three-stage approach, used to try and get young, impressionable kids out of cults: discuss abusive groups and what they look like (framing it in such a way that they can easily say 'well obviously Gamergate isn't that); then once they've bought into what abusive groups look like, show them how Gamergate actually acts; then, once their confidence is shaken, point them towards someone who's left the group that can talk about their experiences and what it was like for them when they left, to make it easier for the current member to choose to reject. Which is why I keep saying someone needs to interview that guy on NeoGAF.

It's worth talking about Australia's approach specifically here, because we handle it a bit differently to other countries that just ban it (apparently). People can submit notices of hate speech and it's considered a 'civil wrong', and is unlawful - a civil matter - rather than an offense - a criminal matter. Just the idea that the line exists seems to be enough of a comfort for minority groups in Australia, but I haven't heard of a lot of incidents overseas where people have been jailed for hate speech that I'd consider an abuse of free speech. (Joke threats, absolutely.) That said it's not going to get past the Classification Board in Australia anyway.

I can confirm that there's at least one #GamerGater that is neurodivergent. We had to cut him out of our circle of friends because he had delusions that other people were harassing the people he had crushes on (including me, excitingly).

I'm pretty sure this qualifies as hate speech, and so I'd be happy to see it banned. I think there's a real risk in treating hate speech as just being like any other kind of speech, because its harm is not in people believing it but people expressing it. (One of the many reasons why the marketplace of ideas is full of shit - ideas spread, they're not bought.) I think, though, the best thing to do is to just not give it coverage, like all those dodgy erotic games that get made.

Also people digging into the 4chan anti-feminist side of Gamergate keep seeing the same names over and over again. Some of the 'doxxing' may have come from known troll sockpuppets; usually anti-feminists are the only ones fooled by trolls pretending to be feminists.

I'm seeing a lot of anger on Twitter about Polygon's statement, but that might be Cine retweets. Yeah, no, that's Cine retweets. Of the three, I like this one the most - I'm not thrilled about it, but 'we had no idea how to not make this worse and we feared for our actual lives if we made the wrong choice' strikes me as a thousand times more honest than anything either in this statement, or Giant Bomb's or Gamespot's.

Given the amount of MRA language I've seen from Gamergate, I'd bet actual money the real grievance is that gaming has tolerated the presence of people who think that women are evil, because it never came up and there wasn't much reason to change. As gaming has become mainstream, there's been a move to change that, which genuinely does threaten gaming for them as a place where they can safely believe that women are evil and not be challenged. Let me tell you, it's frustrating reading these statements and seeing thoughtless reparroting that Gamergate might well be a movement about ethics in journalism. It never was. It's a smokescreen. We have proof of this. They made it up and we have the IRC logs from when they made it up. All of this information is available. Did they just not look hard enough? Also frustrating: Giant Bomb and others saying 'silence doesn't imply complicity'. You might want that to be true, writer, but we know both perpetrators and victims don't believe it. We know that abusive people justify their abuse because they're the vocal part of a silent majority. We know that victims respond in outsize ways to statements of support, even fairly banal ones (I've been there, I've personally experienced it). And I don't think statements saying 'don't harass people' mean anything because Gamergate doesn't believe it's harassing. It believes it's delivering justice and finally doing something about these evil women trying to take this safe space away from them. Which is why they can be "against harassment" but when someone suggests to prove it by donating to Zoe, Anita and Brianna, they recoil in horror. Also why has no-one interviewed that one guy on NeoGAF who realised Gamergate was a hate group?

An unfoldable umbrella with gutters!

This is a really readable book about why Western Europe came to dominate the globe. I'd definitely check it out.

What am I, chopped liver? Though honestly I agree; it was a gross idea, I didn't watch the trailer, and now it's clear it's being made by a poisonous ideology I don't see any difference between it and anything else that comes out of a poisonous ideology.

I think your experience here is why I don't stream; no-one will show up, and I get weird when I realise I have an audience.

Everyone who thought that it was a nauseating power fantasy, step up and claim your no-prize! Hatred's being made by neo-Nazis.

They've done this in Australia since the iPhone 1 because you can't sell phones permanently locked to carriers in Australia. They are bundling up something they've always done in countries with adequate consumer protection and touting it as a feature. With an incredibly stupid name!