Argobot

I'd say that socioeconomic status still plays a huge part in who gets what references, just in different ways. Now it has less to do with education and more to do with class in the form of people who can afford to invest the money and the time into pop culture. It's certainly less insidious than it's been in the past, because larger parts of the population have access to those resources than ever before, but it's still prevalent enough not to discount. (Not that I think you were discounting it. It's just something that's been on my mind today with all the Internet chatter over the Game of Thrones premiere.) Edit: Oh, I missed all the other responses. Nevermind!

There is still an element of elitism and gatekeeping in modern pop culture references though. Failing to recognize a reference can often prohibit you from being allowed into social communities. The education barriers are lower and it's certainly a lot easier to get information on those references today than it would have been hundreds of years ago, but that elitism still exists in some form. References to earlier, influential works will probably always be a part of our culture. They're a fast, easy way to remind a wide audience that we all have some shared understanding and cultural knowledge. It's only a problem when a reference is used in replace of actually saying something with meaning. Or when making a reference is used as a stand in for making an actual joke.

I think a creator intent is hugely important, even after a work is completed. To suggest otherwise gives too much power to the audience. I do agree that there is a balance between the creator being honest and the audience thoughtful examining that creation, but part of being a thoughtful audience is to not completely divorce a creator from their work. It strikes me as a dishonest way to approach writing or anything. If an audience fails to understand the point of a work that can be because of a failure in the creator, the audience, or both. It is frustrating to read people like the Far Cry 3 creator disparaging their audience for their failure to "get the point," but sometimes I really do believe that the audience is at fault. With satirical output like South Park or the Colbert Report, the blame for not getting the joke more often falls on the audience, for failing to honestly consider the creator's intent and letting their own interpretation dominate all other considerations.

Super relevant article about Archie Bunker

A few years ago when "Slut Walks" were a popular organizing event there was a lot of really interesting writing on the desire to reappropriate terms like "slut" and if it's even possible to disassociate those words from their negative connotation. For anyone who is interested, Feminist Frequency has a great roundup on the issue: http://www.feministfrequency.com/2011/05/link-round-up-feminist-critiques-of-slutwalk/ I personally don't see any value in reclaiming the word slut. It's a useful word to toss out as a way to shock your audience and get them to pay attention, but I don't think using that word will majorly change how female sexuality is viewed by the public.

Danielle is great! I hope she plays the South Park game and comes back to talk about her reaction.

That just sounds like a cop out to me -- just because a story is fantastical doesn't mean it can ignore social issues. The writers are under no obligation to directly confront those issues, but they also shouldn't be allowed to disregard real world concerns because their stories aren't grounded in reality. It's a bizarre hypocrisy that I see a lot in genre writing; the authors want their stories to be taken seriously, but the second anyone examines the story with any amount of intellectual rigor, everyone throws up their hands and shouts "it's not real, it's fantasy!" as a defense. You can't have it both ways.

My problem with this, and in general how this game is being described (I haven't played it, but here's my opinion anyway), is that it creates a hard dichotomy that just doesn't reflect reality. Plenty of nice or good people use gendered swears, the last few pages of this forum are evidence of that. Saying the word "bitch" doesn't automatically you a bad person and creating a world where only the bad guys use words like that obfuscates how pervasive these attitudes are in society. It's like when someone is presented as having cartoonishly racist attitudes; it allows people to ignore the more systemic racial problems because hey, at least they're not going around using awful slurs like the real racists that are often shown in media. It's been mentioned before, but this kind of writing feels so lazy and uninteresting. Having a random thug in a video game call a woman a "bitch" or threaten her with rape is so overused at that this point that it no longer shocks me, it just makes me bored and angry. Whenever I see a prominent female character in a game, I count the minutes until something like this happens and am never disappointed. Batman doesn't sound like the worst example, but it is another addition to the garbage pile of lazy writing that plagues female characters in games (and tv and movies).

Burial at Sea Episode 2 is a distilled version of what I was hoping Infinite would be -- a few hours of exploring a gorgeous environment with minimal combat that is entirely avoidable. I haven't seen a Bioshock game since Infinite was first released, so it was a real pleasure to go back to the Bioshock environments. For all the faults of this game, its visuals and sounds are still incredible to witness. It was a fun experience and Elizabeth's narrative was actually pretty good right up until the last 10 minutes, when the game takes the retconning too far to the point of unnecessary nonsense. Everything that happens before that though was pretty fun and I'm glad that I got to see it. Side bar: I'll be really happy when genre stories finally drop the trope of having an older woman go to great lengths to protect a young girl because of "motherly" instincts. I know Aliens kind of kicked that whole trend off, but at least that movie has a fictional justification for why Ripley would be fanatic about protecting Newt no matter the cost (she feels guilty about her own daughter). Burial at Sea has more justification than most of these stories for why Elizabeth would go to such lengths to save one little girl, but it still felt like the game was implicitly relying on Elizabeth's gender to justify most of her actions. It didn't detract from the experience for me, but I think the game would have been more interesting if they'd come up with literally any other motivation for Elizabeth. What did detract from my experience:

For those of you who are interested -- the Slate Audio Book Club on Slaughterhouse-Five is now up http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/the_audio_book_club/2014/03/slaughterhouse_five_by_kurt_vonnegut_discussion_podcast_and_book_club_guide.html

Yeah!! http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/the_audio_book_club/2013/09/rachel_kushner_s_the_flamethrowers_discussion_podcast_and_book_club_guide.html I read all the Ender books when I was 8 or 9 and cannot remember anything about them except that they taught me the word "hegemony." http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/the_audio_book_club/2013/10/ender_s_game_book_club_podcast_orson_scott_card_s_sci_fi_book_reviewed.html (Sorry Idle Book Club. You are missed.)

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) is happening in Seattle right now, so the Slate Audie Book Club decided to come here and do a live recording of their podcast. I was fortunate enough to attend the recording, where they discussed Slaughterhouse-Five. The last time I read that book was as a freshman in high school. Revisiting it as an adult really showed how much my relationship to fiction has changed over the past decade. I remember that I liked it as a kid, but I'm sure what I related to in the book then was completely different to what I related to as an adult. For one, this book is so much sadder than I remembered it being. It's still very funny, but the fatalism of Billy Pilgrim really struck me more as an adult. The specter of Vonnegut's real life depression was also much more present the second time I read it. The podcast discussion itself was really great and I'd encourage anyone who has read this book (or any Vonnegut) to listen whenever Slate makes it available. This is the second time a book podcast has gotten me to reread a book that I first read in high school (the other time was when the Idle Book Club picked The Great Gatsby) and I'm seriously thinking of going back to other novels that I read at that age to see how my opinion on them may have changed over a decade.

I'm glad you're liking it! Munro is really a master at describing people. Her fiction is just leagues beyond anything else I've ever read.

Swamplandia! is such a great book, really excellent choice for a book club.

I had a lot of problems with that Laura Penny article. I am also a woman with short hair and I've never once thought of my hair as a political statement. I cut it short because I think it looks good and I've gotten a ton of compliments from women AND men about it. Declaring that short hair is some kind of a middle finger to the patriarchy is a little misguided because it plays into the whole "I don't care what other people think about my appearance," which is something that plenty of straight men fetishize, almost as much as they fetishize more standardly attractive women. Cut your hair if you want, but don't pretend that it's a subversive, feminist act. I'm really sorry that Felicia Day is getting all of these dumb comments, but I'm also kind of glad. They're causing to her to actually speak out against some of the stupider aspects of being a woman instead of keeping silent about them. The Daily Dot article has a quote of her basically saying "I'm a gamer first, a woman second," which is a nice sentiment but it's so far removed from actual reality. The truth is that society will alway see you as a woman first and make judgements based on that. Acting like you can just ignore that is implicitly supporting a system that puts all kind of weird pressure on women to perform in certain ways. I don't expect Day to become a feminist crusader, but she definitely has a large platform to draw attention to these issues and I would hope in the future that she doesn't shy away from them.

Maybe, but I imagine that it's easier for most people to have an advanced warning so they can make a decision to keep reading or not versus being completely blindsided by their trauma. Slightly unrelated but here's an article that looks at how "trigger warning" has been misappropriated over the years. http://www.theawl.com/2012/05/when-trigger-warning-lost-all-its-meaning

Still am really, really proud of this one: https://twitter.com/sarahargodale/status/413552971826200576 (And Subbes, I'm really sorry about your cat. Hopefully everything turns out okay.)

I'm glad you liked it! Now you can read the essay where Smith discusses the two paths for the novel http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/?pagination=false NW is a synthesis of the two distinct paths she outlines, which is one of many reasons it is such great (and I think important) book.

Oh these are always so frustrating for me. In no particular order, here are the books that I feel have most influenced my literary development: The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky NW, Zadie Smith The Pale King, David Foster Wallace Dear Life, Alice Munro The Group, Mary McCarthy Stoner, John Williams Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood The Third Eye, Lois Duncan The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen Agreed. If you've only read Hateship, then I'd recommend literally any other Munro collection. Otherwise: Serena by Ron Rash.

Ah, amazing!

As much as I loved The Flamethrowers, I can admit that the book is flawed in a lot of unfortunate ways. It still has one of the more relatable and realistic depictions of what being a young woman feels like, and that's what I personally found so compelling about the book. (And although I haven't read The Good Lord Bird and I'm sure it's a wonderful book, I am still a little miffed that it beat The Flamethrowers for the 2013 National Book Award.)

I have a really limited experience with short story collections, but most of the ones that I have read had a consistent tone or theme. Alice Munro is really great at doing this in her collections, but my favorite example is DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Some people call this a novel, but I've always seen it as a string of short stories that are connected by the same idea (men are terrible).

I've also only read Tenth of December, but I don't remember the prose being particularly challenging. Certainly not the kind of learning curve you face the first time you read Pynchon or DFW.

Microsoft is a giant corporation that responds to what it thinks gamer culture wants. Penny Arcade actively helps to create gamer culture. That's why PA seems like much more of a target. And plenty of games journalist did call for a boycott of E3, or they've certainly been more public in saying how worthless E3 has become in representing the games community. If you agree that PA is in the wrong, then I don't understand what the argument is here. You want people to be as passionate when Microsoft messes up as they are when PA does? Well, that already happens.

Yeah, pretty sure that people are aware of (and angry about) all the issues you listed. PA isn't a scapegoat and the attention/criticism they get is reasonable given their huge influence and gross conduct.