Argobot

Sorry, but I don't care how many journalists you may or may not have slept with; no combination of sexual activity and status should result in someone's personal life being put out for all to gawk at. These supposed ethical violations that has everyone so concerned honestly sound like bullshit to me. I'm sure that in the entire History of Journalism, sex has been used as a coercive tool, but not to such a degree that anyone needs to feel alarmed about. It's entirely different to use money to exploit a journalists favor or bribery than to use a personal relationship. One is an actual ethical issue, the other is salacious gossip. Continuing this discussion is just giving more fuel to idea that women (because let's be honest, it's usually women we imagine in this role) are master manipulators who use sex to control everyone around them. As an aside, infidelity is only relevant to the people directly involved. No one else but those people have right to cast any kind of moral judgement.

Whoops. Double post.

Christ. I have nothing more to say than how disgusted I am by all of this. It's terrifying to know that someone who was once close to you could violate your trust and privacy in such a malicious and pathetic way and have the support of many people while they do it.

Yes, because wanting to sound smart and actually understanding how language works are two entirely different things. Using jargon or the thesaurus to artificially pump up your speech ends up weakening it instead. If you don't know what a word means, it's probably best not to use it.

Slate has a good article about jargon and how it hurts writing http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/08/writing_clearly_in_student_papers_the_right_click_thesaurus_and_rogeting.html

Ugh, that's even WOЯSE

It's not reductive because nothing is being lost. A disembodied penis or phallus stand-in is still active, whereas the woman's body is the object that just receives the action. One has agency the other doesn't. But it's good to point out that a lot of porn paints men as being aggressively sexual and women as being passive gatekeepers, which is obviously not the case and reinforces a weak idea of what sexuality is.

I'm dangerously close to accomplishing something I've never done -- read all of the books that I own. Usually I buy books at roughly the same rate as I read them, so there's always a huge stack of unread books waiting for me. Part of me enjoys that because books are the only things I like owning and collecting It's just nice to see a fully stocked bookcase (I don't actually own a bookcase so for me it's really a fully stocked counter space). But lately I haven't bought any new books, at least not at the rate I normally would. That means I'm reading books that I bought over a year ago. As of today, I have 5 unread books left. It's a strange experience, but I'm kind of looking forward to the moment when I can say that I've read every book I own.

I wanted to highlight this part because it's not the actual creation of pornography that I find exploitative, it's the content. Most porn actors are consenting participants. It's not the same as sex trafficking where women or men are forced against their will to perform sexual acts. Sure there are safety and health concerns that come with making porn and some companies are better than others at protecting their employees, but calling porn actors desperate women is a bit unfair and doesn't really map to reality.

Most porn that is made with real people is just as fabricated and unrealistic as the animated version. They both have equal amounts of devaluing or over idealizing certain aspects of the human body (usually female bodies). What I find most objectionable about porn -- animated or not -- is who it's servicing. Most often it's straight men and it creates this social expectation of straight male sexual desire being superior to what anyone else might feel. There's a mini cottage industry of articles written by young women in relationships with men whose only concept of sex comes from what they've seen in porn and how it leads to unsatisfying, sometimes degrading situations.

Yes, but jargon makes language less expressive, not more. These words are either too highly specialized or too opaque to mean anything to anyone but a very specific group of people.

I think it's just a case of a trope that originally was exclusive to women, but in modern time has undergone a kind of retro-sexism reversal where men are the ones being slapped but with the subtext of "this is funny because a man is acting hysterical like a women and he got slapped." At least that's how I often read it when it's used for humor. (This is so widely off-topic from what is being discussed, sorry)

Yeah, obviously more disclosure is always preferable to less. The lack of robust disclosure is one of the reasons I can't take crowd funding seriously as a sustainable supporter of writing.

I don't know if I buy the idea that game journalists are any more (or less) ethical than journalists in other fields, but I do agree that this fear of bias is much more of a boogeyman than an actual threat. Semi-related: Is there a consensus on how Patreon should be handled with games writing? As in, are there any standards yet about what needs disclosing when a writer reviews a game made by their Patreon contributor?

Obviously everyone can choose to support or not support whoever they want for whatever reason, but I'm not really sure how this bit is relevant to the larger issue. No one associated with Idle Thumbs actually wrote this particular episode (as far as I'm aware) and were definitely not part of the interview that is being criticized.

Yeah! It's also worth pointing out that this blockbuster movie has two competent female characters who are allowed to contribute to the plot in interesting ways. Most movies of this type barely give you one woman. Also, Idris Elba. Oh wow, I completely forgot he was in this movie.

My initial reaction after walking out of the theater was a lot harsher as well. Like Gormongous said, Prometheus really suffers from the "have their cake and eat it too" attitude of making an Alien prequel without directly calling the film a prequel. I assume Ridley Scott wanted to avoid all of the baggage that comes along with the word prequel, but ended up exacerbating the baggage that inevitably comes with rebooting a beloved nerd franchise. I rewatched the movie maybe a year after it came out and found that my reaction to it was much more positive. I'm hoping for a similar experience with Alien 3 (I tried to watch it two years ago and actually turned off the movie halfway through because I was so baffled by what I was seeing.

http://grantland.com/features/prometheus-ridley-scott-blockbuster-alien-franchise/ For all its faults, I can't hate Prometheus. I actually kind of enjoy it. The first 45 minutes especially, when it's all tense setup and beautifully shot scenes.

Oh sorry, I meant that the followers are bots. I do know that people make a ton of fake accounts for the sole purpose of sending harrassig tweets. For all the good that Twitter does it has a terribly inefficient way of protecting its users from that stuff.

Funnily enough, one of the few times I've got a gross response on twitter happened because Danielle retweeted something I said about not assigning numerical scores to women's looks. I'm generally in favor of using the retweet to raise awareness about online harassment, but sometimes it can veer into this weird place when a woman with 20k followers is retweeting a gross dude who only has 20 (and most of those are bots). It can sometimes lead to this pile on that I never feel is productive. (Disclaimer: I recognize that I can say this because I thankfully rarely ever deal with harassment online. If it were a more constant occurrence I'm sure my view on this would be different.)

Haha owned. I'll admit it, I wanted to play Spelunky so I could make this beautiful tweet a reality: https://twitter.com/sarahargodale/status/400445767136980992

In my defense (because I believe SAM is referring to me here) this game was one of the few things actually installed on the SO's computer and I was just super curious to play it. So far I've only made it to the Ice Caves, but I find this game so rewarding to play. Maybe one day I'll have enough confidence to play a Daily.

"In Chapter 22 of The Pale King, the father of a character, ‘Irrelevant Chris Fogel,’ quotes from “Ozymandias” when he catches Chris smoking pot. " I believe that the rest of that chapter is about Chris Fogel changing his to become a more responsible person (by studying to become a tax adjuster). I call it the Ozymandius chapter because of that scene. A Supposedly Fun Thing is the one with the David Lynch essay, right? God that's another good bit of writing.

The Ozymandius chapter in The Pale King is one my favorite pieces of writing from DFW.

No, but Boyhood has a few scenes where the kids does Harry Potter-related things over the years and all of them made me feel strange.