Christopher
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Posts posted by Christopher
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they're at more than 9000 clicks
What's at over 9000 clicks? I don't understand.
The Thunderclap is still at 3716. The number does not go up. The site is like Kickstarter, but for coordinating social media. So, basically, you set a minimum number (in this case, 500) and if you meet the minimum number of supporters, Thunderclap will automate a simultaneous tweet by all 500+ supporters. So, basically, today 3716 people simultaneous tweeted some gooberglerp support simultaneously, and that's it. The Thunderclap is over. The number can't be increased, because the campaign ended and the coordinated social message already happened.
They were hyping it up pretty seriously as some kind of a game changer amongst themselves and pressuring people to sign up for the past week, so I think 3716 is probably a pretty good estimate of their core support.
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This means it's time to write them again. I just did.
Anyone with time to read and post in this thread also has time to send another letter to Intel. Do that first!
They claim that they don't want to take sides, but their official publicity arms @IntelUSA and @IntelGaming are still both actively courting gaters. This is corporate doublespeak at its worst. If they wanted to stay out of it, they should have continued their previous course of action and continued the ad campaign. They've already made an active choice to support a side with their ad removal and their PR interactions on twitter, and this apology doesn't change that.
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The @IntelGaming twitter account is actively courting gaters tonight. Here's an imgur album of some of their tweets.
URLs are/were here, here, and here, although one of these sets was deleted, so maybe the others will be deleted as well. I bet it's probably a rogue idiot. Even if you already wrote once, it might be a good idea to write again specifically about this.
In the first conversation in the gallery, they passive aggressively include Gamasutra in mentions. In the next, they jump in to a conversation with someone who celebrates Intel's decision with an image of Phil Fish, who was doxxed by gaters.
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Anyone know the origin/reasoning behind the drawing of the redhaired girl that so many of the gamergate people seem to use? I know that someone who uses a panel from the Doom comic book as his pic shouldn't really judge but any time I see someone using that red haired girl drawing or some anime character I find myself thinking "blech."
She was created as a mascot character for 4chan's image board /v/ at the start of the gater movement. Her names is Vivian James, which they think sounds kind of like "vidya games." She was made explicitly so /v/ could have a female mascot in order to deflect criticism, and they suggested that the TFYC project use her. Her color scheme comes from an image meme of Piccolo raping Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z. Yes, really.
She's basically the image meme equivalent of #notyourshield, in that she is literally a shield for gaters, but she's also so disingenuous that she contains a rape joke in her basic design.
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I suppose I don't agree that sexism in games normalizes sexism for many. I think it's a problem because it's too prominent, but you have to think of all of the men who grew up with games employing these tropes and aren't sexist.
Those men don't exist. Everyone has some degree of internalized sexism, both men and women. This is at least in part because of the cultural representations that taught them about gender roles, not limited to but definitely including games. Some people are just more aware of their internal biases than others.
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I agree with the discussion of both too much sexual abuse and not enough of the church in fantasy literature that's ostensibly historically inspired. At the same time, I think A Song of Ice and Fire (the book series) is not a good example of fantasy stories doing this badly.
(1) A major theme in the King's Landing story of the most recent two books is the role of church power in the state. It used to have power, but it was suppressed after a political struggle precisely because the state was frustrated by exactly the kind of religious control over policy that you mention. As a result of the political turmoil within state institutions that the books depict, the church is gradually regaining its power over the state and the general populace.
(2) There are definitely problematic issues with its depiction of sexual abuse, but within the context of genre fiction it's better than most. (A low bar, I know.) It provides the perspectives a number of women (not first person, but with a narrative voice closely aligned with them using free indirect discourse) to examine the diversity of strategies they employ to deal with their low social status. Additionally, he depicts societies with relatively more gender equality and also provides perspectives from women living in those situations.
A lot of these issues are explored in the most recent two books, the ones that many people say are not as good or poorly paced. In my opinion, part of the reason for this negative reactions is precisely because he's complicating comfortable and satisfying fantasy tropes. I think the two more recent books are probably the best, because they take seriously major criticisms of the fantasy genre regarding both of these issues (sexuality and religion) and also another issue that hasn't come up here yet: noble savages and their white savior.
I'm not saying that there's nothing problematic in these books. There are a ton of aspects of its depiction of women and sexuality that I find questionable. But I think it's worth getting outside of a binary between (1) "Martin doesn't need to be a social critic--it's based in history" and (2) "but he can create histories." In fact, in ASoIaF Martin is being a social critic, and he is creating his own history. It's not one flat world where all women are oppressed, regardless of what a lot of Martin's defenders and detractors try to reduce it to be.
(The TV show is a totally different issue altogether and frequently a total mess about some of the bad fantasy tropes the book is working against, so these comments are limited only to the books.)
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Ghibli isn't closing. They're ending their production arm which had their full time animation staff, and a lot of bad English reporting treated that like the end of the studio due to a telephone game of bad translations and clickbait headline inflation. In reality, Ghibli's full time animation staff was an anomaly among Japanese animation studios. Switching to a production model based on free lancers instead of a full time staff is more about adapting to larger economic trends than an end to Ghibli, and it mostly just reflects their shifting to standard industry practice. It's definitely the end of an era at Ghibli, but the studio isn't closing.
The other day, Chris Remo reacted to stories about Ghibli closing (which were incorrect, but that's not his fault) with a tweet that it was probably better to close than to become a zombie IP brand. I think he's right. But, in reality, his bad scenario that closing would avoid is exactly what is happening: Ghibli will continue as a zombie IP band, and its animation studio will follow standard Japanese animation industry practices of freelancers and outsourcing on a by project basis rather than the full time staff that made them special.
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...or a byproduct of translation, or some combination of the three.
I enjoyed The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as the first thing I read by Murakami, but then I tried to read 1Q84 and found it just infuriating. I really have no idea if the character of the prose that put me off is intentional, or due to translation, or what, but reading hundreds and hundreds of pages in that stilted, affected style was too much for me and I stopped halfway through.
I registered to this forum just to tell you that it's not a translation issue. I've read all of Murakami's novels and a lot of his short stories in Japanese, and 1Q84 is just one of his worst books. His English translators are really skillful and know what they're doing, but in this case the source material is just not that great. If it reads poorly, that's probably actually a mark of their restraint and as translators and fidelity to the original text. It was probably very tempting for them to act as editors, and it sounds like they didn't.
If I were to recommend another Murakami book to someone who liked Wind-Up Bird, it would probably be Sputnik Sweetheart. It's very tightly constructed and provides the best parts of the Murakami experience without the bloat.
"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"
in Idle Banter
Posted
8chan has a raid forum where Zoe Quinn's personal information, including phone numbers of her family, are posted. This information has been up for months. The administrator of the raid board refuses to remove the personal information and instead will sticky any personal information posted for the purpose of harassment:
The administrator of 8chan also refuses to do anything about it:
(this one is not my screencap, i didn't favorite/retweet this)