Merus

I thought about removing the censor, and then decided it was funnier the way it was. Here is Scalzi recounting the madness he unleashed: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/10/12/*********pizzagate/

Huh. I use a torrent server these days because it's integrated with our media server, so I had no idea uTorrent had fallen down a well.

So some fun news: John Scalzi, battle-hardened from years of dealing with abuse from Vox Day and his followers, decided he'd had enough of Gamergate (he's friends with Brianna Wu), and concluded his comments with an assertion that he was going to order pizza. ********* pizza. Thanks to his followers, #*********PizzaGate was trending a couple of hours later.

Ho, wow, he made a takeover bid public. It takes time to do those negotiations, but 'the company is available for sale' is very valuable information in the hands of the market, and that changes the negotiating position enormously. The other company would be justified in calling off the takeover thanks to bad faith negotiations. I've had a formal warning because I told a customer the shop I was working at was being readied for sale. I am being a little dishonest because I feel like Kotaku's biggest problem is mostly that they have some terrible posters from the early days working alongside actual journalists who do great work. Brian Ashcraft is almost single-handedly responsible for the skeevy reputation Kotaku has, although Luke Plunkett is also pretty rubbish.

Polygon and Kotaku both reported the story. Kotaku's is significantly better than Polygon's, which is a turnup for the books. How shitty must you be if you can't even clear Kotaku's low bar?

Oh yeah, I know #17 straight off the bat.

Danielle's not allowed to punch colleagues, is she.

Well, #14 is apparently while #15 is You kind of gave away too much there, atte.

I knew I liked you

You know, now that I think about the marketplace of ideas, I think that's my problem more than free speech. I think you can be very much in favour of free speech, which is a human right, while simultaneously believing that the 'marketplace of ideas' is full of shit.

#11: which means that the game from 2003 has to be... #21:

I tend to read the same things I always do because I usually remember where I'm up to.

If only The Escapist actually meant that all the other people they interviewed were collegial with Villena, even though many of them are clearly just as bad.

I was expecting this series to turn up at some point as an earworm I simply couldn't place.

#4: A closer look at the answer page made that one pretty clear, I'll admit.

Listen, I'd recommend it but I recognise it's too expensive for someone in the position you've told us you're in. I'll probably use it for a personal site next time I get the urge to have a personal site and have a proper job.

See, I'm thinking about this, and wondering what this says about the marketplace of ideas and the conviction that the truth will prevail if given the opportunity. Because apparently I'm feeling foolish today, wanting to talk about free speech on the internet.

It is a damn shame because I really like Bob Chipman and Jim Sterling's good for an occasional watch. The thing about Godwin's Law is, well, the Nazis were a reactionary movement so there are a lot of things they say they believed that they jettisoned as soon as it was no longer useful to them. (Also that it's a lot easier to make comparisons between GamerGate and Nazis now that weev, who is an actual neonazi with a swastika tattooed on his chest, is involved) See: this is the problem with not wanting politics in games. When an actual political movement turns up, you make mistakes you wouldn't have to make if you had been paying attention to politics.

I really do wish people would read into reactionary movements. One of the core parts of reactionary movements is that they always seem to be making good points but never really following through, because the whole point of the movement is to find anything and everything to justify their rage at their loss of power. They can't follow through on any of the ethics questions they've raised because the reason they raised them is to give themselves a veneer of respectability. The lunatic right fringe of American politics don't give a shit about what went on in Benghazi other than how it proves that they were right about what happens when you let a black Democrat in the White House. Mussolini supported unions! Luddites started unions! The Dark Enlightenment want diversity in news! None of these people thought this was the most important part of their work. Brianna Wu being threatened out of her house is bullshit, though. It's being driven, basically, by The Escapist deciding that gamergaters needed their story aired, and published two articles, with 7 anonymous female developers under the headline 'Female Game Developers on Gamergate' and a dozen gamergaters under pseudonyms under the headline 'Game Developers on Gamergate'. It got worse, somehow: it turns out half the people they interviewed were in the #burgersandfries channel saying shitty shitty things about Zoe Quinn.

I've basically finished all 4 Streetpass games - I have 6 plaza tickets left to get, and 3 of them are in Galaxy. I'll almost certainly get the last plaza ticket for Battle at PAX, and I might get pretty close to the top of Mansion (although I'm a little worried I won't get puzzle boxes at a convention, which is what I actually need). I'm way off getting the tickets for Galaxy (you have to clear levels 120 times, which I just could not be arsed doing).

I hold down R and everyone speeds up - part of my dislike for Streetpass Battle is that it responds to R inconsistently. After 20 flowers the game gets a lot less chatty, which is really how it should have been at the start.

Squarespace is expensive, but I wasn't going to tell Teg to just go do what I would do because 1) I haven't actually and 2) her tolerance for cobbling together a website is likely a lot lower than the average professional computer person, which is why blogs and now Squarespace exist in the first place. I wasn't going to say anything because 'Squarespace is sort of expensive buuuuuuuut you can be done with it today and not have to worry' wasn't useful, but now it is!

I guess you're not like me because you can paint it only took me one episode to decide I didn't like it.

A minor dissent: I think Streetpass Battle/Warrior's Way gets older a lot quicker than Streetpass Garden/Flower Town. Flower Town feels simplistic but there's a lot going on under the surface. Warrior's Way seems like it has more gameplay to it but it wears out its welcome fairly quickly. I concur that of the four DLC Streetpass games, Streetpass Mansion/Monster Manor is by far the best, and Streetpass Galaxy/Mii Force quickly feels like a chore.

Number 6 is .