Gormongous

Or rewards/supports the livelihood of an abuser/sexist/racist. But we've had this conversation before in this very thread and mostly decided that it's up to each of us to decide what we can live with.

At this point, it's all I can do not to make fun of people who think that being friends with someone could be such an egregious violation of an ethical code. I'll just say that it's not surprising that they have the time to spend on the internet making over-researched photoshops of the various conspiracies out there.

I was just going to post the same thing from the source article at USA Today. In the interest of fairness, archaeology's long been a discipline where lots of conjecture is needed for even the most basic conclusions, but this small study shows that at least some of that conjecture is predicated on outdated and/or inaccurate cultural assumptions. Also, it's really nice to have something that directly contradicts the sizable minority of Norse scholars (I was going to type "Nordicists," but apparently that's a white supremacy term) who have insisted that shieldmaidens are an entirely fictional invention of the skalds. Really nice.

The only reason I paired a Tower Shield with my Greatsword in my strength build was to make invaders look at me and think of me as an inexperienced newbie with poor equipment management who's going to keep his shield up too much. Then they start fishing for backstabs and I get at least half their health with the shield-bash AoE. It was a nice trick to have up my sleeve, but yeah, I barely use my shield otherwise.

I'm really curious about the fixation on sex. Is it because fictional media has taught them that corruption manifests itself primarily through sex, because they are inexperienced with sex and therefore mistrust it, because it's one of the easiest things to allege but one of the harder things to prove, or because of some other cause I haven't imagined? Actually, I'm sure it's any combination of the aforesaid for any one person.

If they're dating, they'll form the same opinions and publish the same articles. They might even be sources for each other's stories. That's how dating works, you become a weird half-person permanently fused to and partially controlled by your mate. It's a net loss for the journalistic community. I'm only half serious, which is all I've ever been in this thread, apparently.

I hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised. It's not enough now to consider journalism by its actual content. We have to use the data glut of the internet to go digging around individual journalists' backgrounds to determine their relative merits, because hidden motives and payola are everywhere these days and impossible to detect otherwise, right? Please everyone, tell me explicitly if you like or dislike the person about whom you are writing, on the basis of which I will believe or disbelieve your article. If you're quick about it, you'll save me the effort of even having to read it!

This is what I mentioned in a couple other threads. There's an obsession in certain parts of the internet, mostly the part that's incensed by the popularity of social justice, with finding contradictions and hypocrisy in everything. It seems as though it's their primary mode of interaction with other people. To them, anything that is not a hundred percent consistent is at best a confused mess that can't possibly be right and at worst a coverup for something darker underneath. It reminds me a lot of how I was back in high school, when I felt much more discomfited and isolated by the paucity of absolute truths in social interactions, and moreover it explains how some people are inclined to interpret friendliness between different parts of the games industry and the criticism of discrete thematic elements in video games as the total corruption of one and a calamitous attack on the other.

Okay, I've put a couple nights into this game, in sandbox mode as the Dumnones, and I have to agree with the podcast's assessment of the AI. Nine times out of ten, it is shockingly passive, especially when it has to respond to raids past its front lines. I had united Cornwall, Exeter, and Dorset, which put me up against the Atrebates in the southeast and the Catuvellauni in the northeast, both of similar strength. I did some light skirmishing, but had trouble with stone walls, because I didn't know about siege towers yet, so instead I built four units of cavalry and ran them through every single resource point of both factions, capturing slaves and then burning everything else. Not only did the huge influx of free labor rocket my economy to the top, but the AI took almost a year to capture all the resource points back, which meant the vast majority of their towns and troops starved that winter. Both factions entered a death spiral, and I was able to siege five towns the next year with minimal interference. The only pushback was the repeated sally of two half-strength units against an irrelevant fort on the south shore. At this point, three years into the sandbox, the entire island is mine and I have triple the strength of any faction on the other side of the channel. Hegemony Gold this ain't, at least in terms of spot difficultly. Don't get me wrong, I love being able to conduct razzias late in autumn to cripple my enemy, but I wish that Longbow had managed to keep the AI as sharp as it was in its previous games without compromising the other improvements.

I don't have much to say about liking or disliking JonTron, except that it reminds me of about a year ago, when we were talking what boycotting PAX accomplishes versus trying to change it from within. I think both approaches have their merits, but people need to do what's good for them, and I'm personally trying to get better at not censuring someone for not seeing the same as I do the solution to a problem that we both see. I do really wonder what my own response would be if I were a YouTube celebrity who woke up one morning and discovered my audience was on the wrong side of a major social issue. I know which side my bread's buttered on, so do I endanger my livelihood to take a stand for progress? Do I try to moderate my audience by setting myself up as a "reasonable" voice for their concerns? Do I ride the hate wave wherever it takes me? Do I stay silent and hope that everyone takes my lack of involvement to mean agreement with whatever their own personal views are? There have been people who have taken all of these routes in the last few weeks. I know that the high ground is what I've always gone for, even if it means weathering assholes and being unpopular, but then I've never been successful enough for here to be anything more at stake than my ability to sleep at night. I'd like to think I'd always do the right thing, but as we've seen, we live in a culture (and subculture) where conspicuous acts of hate are the "easy way out" oftentimes.

Side note, but even during the Sparrows arc of the later Game of Thrones books, vanishingly few of the series' characters actually have faith in the religion itself. Rather, they use it for political gain and disdain those who don't or can't idiots. The few who don't do this, like the High Sparrow himself, are painted as delusional if not outright insane. I know Martin's doing other things elsewhere, but I get really bored of the Borgia papacy being the only paradigm for centralized religious authority in fantasy. Hence, I don't feel too bad for thinking of it as lazy, although my complaints are more against the people reading Game of Thrones who defend ubiquitous sexual violence but not sincere religious feeling as necessary for the fiction. In reality, both are entirely the author's choice and up to him to justify through their intelligent use. Actually, to go on an even further side note, the character in Game of Thrones who best approximates an authentically medieval religious outlook is Stannis. His devotion to the Lord of the Light is stubborn but honest, only that's how he is with everything, so it's not really anything special. And, let's not forget, every single person around him who's not personally profiting from his belief in the Lord of the Light constantly criticizes him (if only in internal monologue) for being silly and credulous, because what's the point of believing in God otherwise, right?

Just to add some more force (again) to your excellent point, I am a professional historian specializing in medieval Europe and this exact phenomenon drives me nuts sometimes. Religious feeling was maybe the single most important cultural factor in Western Europe between the coronation of Charlemagne and the coming of the Black Death. The noble family I study, which has been typically viewed as one of the more pragmatic and cynical ones, spent millions every generation donating to monasteries and churches. Especially earlier in the tenth and eleventh centuries, many other families disinherited their children and grandchildren in order to give all their property to the church upon death. Even the worst raiders and rapists of the bunch, like James d'Avenes, gave amply, attended mass, and went on crusade both before and after their evil deeds. These were people who honestly believed that Christ was coming any day now and that he was going to judge everybody by the same rule, so there was absolutely no way for religion to remain just a private matter, like it is in most fantasy. So yeah, sometimes I really can't stand the fact that the Church of the Seven exists in Game of Thrones mainly to provide swear words and to show that a character who believes in it is gullible. It's incredibly inauthentic but conforms very easily to the hard-bitten agnosticism that a twenty first-century Western audience expects from people living through hard times. That's what "neo-medievalism" is all about, really. We create a new (albeit consciously fictionalized) version of the past, where no one believes in God unless he gives you magical powers personally, in order to flatter what we see as the right order of the world today. The fact that sexual violence against women figures so prominently in our current vision of an "authentic" past should speak volumes.

It was only upon the second reading of your post that I realized this wasn't intentional satire by their opponents. How could they be so out of touch with the consequences of their actions?

I just got home from a board game day, put all my games on my bed, got a glass of water, then came back and sat down full-weight on the rarest and most out-of-print of those games. An hour later, I'm (really not) done being mad at myself, but it's really interesting how the feeling of cardboard being crushed under my ass codified all these vague feelings I came home having into the realization that I've had a really bad day for no good reason.

I think one of the most powerful critical lenses through which people can view any and all entertainment is that of human experience as a whole. The fact that video games often enjoy their own little critical bubble that isn't as beholden to mainstream cultural awareness is one of the reasons for the echo chamber among some of their more "hardcore" fans. Do you think tegan is really arguing that anyone plays Assassin's Creed II and goes, "Fuck yeah, expendable pawns," when this dude runs through the city infinitely holding women hostage? The issue with sexism, privilege, the patriarchy, and so on is that no one needs to believe it in any active sense for it to be perpetuated. It just needs not to be challenged, which I know I didn't when I played that specific sequence, but probably would have if it had been men being repeatedly accosted and executed for tutorialization purposes.

I actually wanted to post that I really enjoyed the theme and elevator music being more intrusive into the podcast content proper. It reminded me of the "Salacious Thumb" glory days of Chris' crazy Python-esque editing, which I know is too much work nowadays but was always really fascinating for me.

All I can say is that, if you've fought Duke's Dear Freja before fighting that boss, you've progressed really far down a path to the neglect of other easier routes. Not that there's a right way, but all the way through to Brightstone Cove Tseldora is something. Personally, I didn't have any trouble either with my mage build or my strength build with any mob boss except Royal Rat Vanguard. The NPC summon took care of the spiders in Freja and the Skeleton Council just needs to be taken slowly to keep all the trash from spawning at once. Prowling Magus and Congregation was hardly even a boss fight, but I've been over SL100 both times I've gotten there so maybe it's just me. Sure, none of the boss fights really inspire me this time around, but I think it's just because I'm used to the Dark Souls formula and can easily spot repeats in boss design now.

I don't think anyone has argued that in this thread. If your point is that we shouldn't go too far or be too deep in our mockery, then I think we actually agree. Mockery is not an end in and of itself, but that isn't the purpose it's been serving here anyway. I am just very leery of telling an oppressed group, as an outsider, that their cause would be helped by more politeness towards their oppressors. Those women have every right to be angry. I don't know that love is always the answer there.

That's one of the things that makes me feel the most nonplussed about all of this. There are these large organized attempts to gaslight popular women in gaming culture in order to sink those women's credibility, but certain elements are so overzealous that they end up providing proof for what they say doesn't exist. The people who doxed Quinn tried to hide the evidence that they'd done it so that they could claim she was making it up, proving that she was just desperate for attention, but of course that didn't work, so they ended up proving what they were trying to disprove. It's just so strange for me to think that some of these people are so convinced that Quinn is an attention-seeking phony and that the hate for Sarkeesian isn't misogyny, but they aren't willing just to wait and let those things play themselves out. They feel driven to go out and create the circumstances they believe already exist yet aren't obvious to most people. I guess it's just striking to me, the arrogance and insecurity that must be at play for someone to feel the need to fake evidence for what they believe is already happening in truth.

A discourse where everyone has expertise is a discourse where no one has expertise. The fact that critical media studies in video games is seen simply as the act of capturing a dozen minutes of game footage and talking about whatever while it plays is a huge barrier to Sarkeesian's work being taken seriously by the gaming-literate public at large (although, sadly, not as huge a barrier as the fact that she's a woman talking about gender) and to other people following her example. Many of her critics make their own videos that just mimic her presentation and format, without really seeming to understand the work Sarkeesian has actually done to make her analysis effective and credible. It's all part of the same problem. I know it sounds like I'm just carping from my ivory tower, but speaking from experience, it is very frustrating for hardworking scholars when there is no effort in the broader discourse to distinguish between their hard work and no work at all.

I'm the fastest feminist in the West! Anyway, your explanation is shorter and clearer.

I thought that for a second too, but I think they mean that it's impossible for the threat of rape for a man to mean the same spectrum of things, even to that man, as the threat of rape for a woman, because one has millennia of violence and oppression backing it up and the other is just an unspeakably terrible act one human being does to another. So yeah, both are bad, but only one gender has to live in fear of it, so yeah.

I have a robust group here in St. Louis, but I still feel lonely a lot because I've picked a fairly isolating line of work, even once I get my PhD. Not to mention, I'm very conscious that my friends are people I know 1) through my program or 2) through my ex-girlfriend and her brother, and either are apt to disappear in a moment if the common thread is gone. I'd love to hang out with any of you, but I'm incredibly shy and not too good with strangers, so I'm sure I'd be a narf. Also, I've burned out hard on video games after beating Dark Souls 2 a second time, so I've got no elite skills to show off right now.

There's also just the general problem in the humanities (and really, in non-STEM disciplines in general) that specialist knowledge is viewed as just common knowledge dressed up with jargon. So many people with non-misogynist problems with Tropes vs. Women complain that it's mostly just a list of obviously sexist clips from different games put together in one long video, as if the basic act of finding them, putting them all together, and explaining exactly what they are doesn't take an incredible strength of head and heart, more than most of us have.

I'm halfway through and being driven up the wall by the uneven tone. The setting is very sober and realistic, but then it's populated with a glut of over-the-top badasses that I can't take seriously at all. It feels like the anime was conceived by one very clever writer, complete with the businessman-turned-pirate protagonist, and then other lesser writers filled out all the supporting characters with broadly similar goofy-yet-hardcore cliches. The amount of time spent wanking over the ex-Spetsnaz Russian boss and the jolly Chinese boss was what really started pulling me out of it, and then when they introduced nuns with guns after already having introduced a maid with a gun, I just couldn't stay on board. Roberta's great, but she'd be so much better if she wasn't just one in a long lineup of action-movie caricatures. Basically, they ought to have decided whether they were making Macross or Gurren Lagann, but they tried to have both instead. I feel like this happened a lot in post-Cowboy Bebop anime, and Black Lagoon is not nearly as bad as Gungrave, but it was still a very common problem, fitting larger-than-life characters in an ultra-realistic setting.