BFrank

Really disappointed about the turn this thread took and the tone from the folks in charge. Feel free to delete my account, I won't be back.

That line would be more 'oh snap' if he'd said censorship.

All great points, all agreed. And FWIW, I feel a little bad that I picked today to dog her on a forum for purely intellectual stuff. I really and truly hope the people who've threatened her see severe legal consequences. Death threats should be taken seriously and I hope in the future that we see more cops knocking on doors in response to these situations.

Like I said, she clears the low bar very easily. She cleared it in the first 10 minutes of her first video. I mean, if you're saying 'she's making these videos for babies who need 8 hours of content to be persuaded of the most obvious thing ever', then that's fine. Depressing, kinda, that people would be championing it. But if that's all she's shooting for, she got my agreement right away. I suspect she's hoping for more than that. I just don't think she's insightful enough to get there.

Couldn't possibly quantify that, it's just my overall sense. She was clearing the low bar ('there's some gross, sexist shit in video games') very easily, but most of her attempts to say anything beyond that rested on what seemed to me to be very iffy readings of the games in question. Sometimes she strikes me as being more in the mold of a Salon.com essay on 'How to Win the Debate at the Thanksgiving Table'. It's not really there to convince anyone who isn't already convinced, it's a catalog of ammo for an argument with douchebags.

As someone who continues to have this problem with her (and I hope her popularity leads to someone better coming along to pick up the torch), I'd argue that the charge of cherry picking is much, much more relevant in art/cultural criticism than it is in politics. At least in politics and economics you've got some hard, objective facts to work with. In criticism, you have to build the case that you're creating the best possible context in which to understand something. So you absolutely can't cherry pick, you can't just throw out 30 examples of a phenomenon when 7 of them are being mislabeled or fudged in some way. You have to be intellectually honest to a much higher degree because you need the reader/viewer to trust your judgement and trust that you're playing fair. I can't talk about Gertrude Stein in the same way I talk about the prison population or the minimum wage, there aren't facts and figures that will get me very far. Basically, criticism requires an insanely high hit to miss ratio. Cultural critics can come to all kinds of conclusions that I'm not on board with and I'll still enjoy reading what they've written, but when the process of getting there seems haphazard or lawyerly ('look at all this evidence, it speaks for itself'), the whole thing comes to a dead stop.

I was trying to say that it's a bad way to engage in a discussion. I don't want to derail a big thread over a minor point, but it rubbed me the wrong way and I said so in the least provocative way I could think of.

Done and done. Sincerely. Which isn't to say I endorse all of it (at all). But it seemed on topic and fair game, as far as those concepts go.

This question, re: forums, is turtles all the way down.

I had a brain fart and searched fruitlessly for variations on 'The Rekternational' yesterday.

No, thank you!

Maybe it's just because I heard a WoT ad on Marc Maron's podcast this week, but I don't think you guys should have qualms about it. The ad is clearly an ad, it's not ambiguous in the flow of the show, and the product isn't some disgusting ripoff that you'd normally steer people away from.

Really? I'd say more than half the Dota games I'm in have no voice chat (on my side) at all. I assume some of that is because you get matched up with a party who are all on mumble/skype together.

I think the message has gotten out among pubsters (like me) that using the voice comms for 'missing' and 'such and such power is on cooldown for 15 seconds' work a whole lot better than using your mic. The same thing has happened in TF2 over the years. The voice chat ends up being used for socializing more than coordinating, and tactical elements like 'sentry ahead'/'uber'/'spy' are better communicated using the in-game prompts. I suspect that half the Dota people I play with auto-mute everyone, which is an impulse I understand. I'm sure the dynamic is different when you queue with a regular group.

IMO, Dota2's gotten significantly friendlier in the last year or so. I'm convinced that the introduction of ranked mode self-segregated a bunch of the hotheads and has resulted in a much more relaxed pub atmosphere. It's still an intimate game where your teammates can cause frustration, but at least I'm not running out of reports every week.