BadHat

Speaking of vapid and ineffectual female characters! I got around to finishing Zankyou no Terror after dropping it for weeks (did I mention I'm very bad at sticking to shows that I start? (also at posting to forums on a regular basis apparently)). Man... what the hell happened with those last two episodes? What a hot fucking mess. I guess I shouldn't have expected more from a show about secret government programs to engineer super-human children (the show was so well-handled for the majority of its run that it barely even occurred to me how overdone that narrative trope is), but man it was just so shlocky. Still well-directed, well-stylised shlock, but maaaaaan. The pacing was so frantic it seemed like they ran over budget and had to trim it from a 13-ep show to 11. Maybe I'm being too harsh but... MAN. It was a really promising if not super enrapturing show up until that point. Wait, what was I going to post about again? Oh yeah! What was the fucking point of Lisa? Like, at all? Her story isn't even given the slightest amount of closure. All that stuff with her mum? And then Guuhhhh. Okay, I'm done. Someone recommend me an anime with a worthwhile ending.

This guy is a really great guitarist with a really playful style. He's showy but he doesn't take the virtuoso thing to boring excess.

Cara Ellison continues to be one of my favourite people in games. https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/2w8n12/cara_ellison_setting_things_straight_on_twitter/ Edit: As a sidenote, I think I need to stop visiting ghazi. I used to bounce between there and KiA to see how either end of the spectrum were reacting to the Latest Thing, then I stopped visiting KiA because it was doing nothing for me except maybe raising my blood pressure a little (I tend to have that reaction to exposing myself to viscerally bigoted or short-sighted bullshit). After that I kind of just kept visiting ghazi habitually as a bit of a popcorn thing... which is a little horrible and brings to mind Mattie Brice's words on the matter - http://www.mattiebrice.com/more-than-my-pain/ I guess I'm just torn between the urge to keep abreast of things and engage with this stuff emotionally and intellectually, and how much it's beginning to seem like more of a spectator sport as this thing dies down. Or if not dies down, then at least it seems like we're well past the point of productive conversation. Not because those conversations never took place, but because they already fucking happened in abundance, and the core of GG regularly displayed how little tolerance they have for anything that didn't amount to outright flattery and pandering. Then people like Ken blunder in like "why can't we talk about this," which only displays how ignorant he is to people who have actually been following the whole thing. Which also kind of sums up my feelings on that petition! Also: "anti-gamer rhetoric" is still fucking hilarious to me in this light, as someone who was at prime forum-ranting age when the Jack Thompson stuff took place.

Yeah, the party line is that 8chan/baph doesn't represent gamergate. Which... explains why they'll bend over backwards providing justifications for CP...

That interview reads like John drew on the energy of every angry forum nerd who's ever called Molyneux a hack like Goku forming a fucking spirit bomb. Like christ, I've heard the term "hit piece" thrown back and forth a lot during the controversy, but if anything truly qualifies, it's that. So... this is a few days old now as I was behind on the thread and only just bothered catching up. Brianna Wu wrote this article condemning gamergate (so far, so ordinary). In it she calls upon Reddit CEO Ellen Pao to call /r/kotakuinaction to task for being a "hate group" (which I don't find entirely disagreeable, but... given Reddit's libertarian approach to leaving objectionable subs up in the past this seems like a bit of a pipe dream), and the Obama administration to arrest the owner of 8chan (wait, what?). So, while I didn't take issue with most of the article, I had some questions coming out of it, and posted them to the ghazi thread I'd found it on. I wake up the next morning and there's a KiA post about the article with enough upvotes to make it to the front page of /r/all, and my post is quoted in the top comment (I'm #1). So... yeah, that's not condescending at all. Thanks, random shitheel! Also worth noting that they still don't grasp what "listen and believe" is meant to mean.

Pretty cool! That Blonde Redhead song is also one of the coolest bits of Rick and Morty (spoilers).

Ahh, now you've done it. Time to dump some more FFXIV screens (I'm constantly screenshotting in this game because it looks so nice, be glad I'm only posting a few). Waiting for a friend's wedding to start. My private house (probably time to take out those festive decorations). Chilling with the girls.~~~ The worst outfit in the game, bar none. Wish you were here.

Just created an account so I can follow a bunch of interesting people. Don't exactly have a lot of money to throw around at the moment, unfortunately. Nothing to do with games but Every Frame a Painting is an excellent movie analysis channel. Edit: Also just gonna give a shout-out to this person, if only because they made the bizarre and wonderful Crypt Worlds.

Mother of god that is some speedy farming. That alone makes me way more interested than any Harvest Moon in recent memory. The tedium always wears me down eventually, no matter how much I enjoy them conceptually.

I haven't used the phrase "cognitive dissonance" in a while but I'm gonna have to dust it off for this one. The person who vocally supported gamergate, ladies and gentlemen.

Was gonna chuck this in the random thought thread but I figured it might be a useful topic to have around. So, I was talking to someone about Sleep is Death and it reminded me of a game I'd seen that was somewhat similar in nature. From what I remember it was based on a story playing out on a 3-panel comic, and you had a list of words/objects you could insert into each frame that would change the outcome. Like, a character's loved one could die in frame 2 and it'd show them mourning in frame 3. I think it must have been single player but I don't really recall. Pretty sure it was on kickstarter or something similar, no clue if it's been funded/released. Ring a bell with anyone?

Garden of Words is so pretty.

Lot of drama happening right now surrounding these tweets by Brianna Wu: I can kind of sympathize with how people might be balking at this considering Wu's position when she was still being heavily targeted (assuming she still isn't?), but so much of the blowback is completely unproductive. It's all hurt feelings and bruised egos and it doesn't look like there's any potential for it to go in a remotely positive direction. I don't for one second think that anyone still being harassed over this shit is bringing it on themselves or whatever, but I don't know that it's fair to demand support from Wu after everything she's been through. Then again, maybe it's not totally unfair to expect her to use her visibility in a responsible way? Really it's hard to discern what to take away from this through all the personal drama, or if I should even be paying attention to this in the first place. It's getting to a place where it feels less informative and more perverse, especially when places like kotakuinaction are already quotemining it, trying to dissect everything and divide it into neat little boxes, never mindful of the actual flesh and blood people caught in all this machinery. Also: trying to play "gotcha" with Dan because he might have vaguely implicated himself (but not really, for anyone with reading comprehension). These people are literal children.

They just don't fucking get it, do they? Or they do and they're willingly spreading misinformation. I never know whether to pity them or think they're scum.

Every time they say "get hype" my will to keep watching diminishes a little. >_> But seriously some amazing runs going on. That Tetris block was insanity.

Where's that series of tweets about how arguing from canon is worthless because canon is just made up by people. I find it so frequently useful.

He's away of the issue, at least. http://patrickklepek.tumblr.com/post/107273470614/so-patrickklepek-dot-kinja-dot-com-has-just-your

Without going into her interpretation of the comic itself, the term sealioning itself doesn't seem that problematic to me? The way it's taken on seems to be completely in the original spirit of the comic, to the point where (as far as I know) GGers haven't attempted to co-opt it in the way she suggests but instead champion the term because they find its interpretation of harassment frivolous (as well as every other interpretation of harassment). This has been the header image of kotakuinaction for the past several weeks: In other words, they're owning it because they don't see the problem with hounding people incessantly with their "logical arguments." Two quick things about the comic, though: I get her concern with the substitution of another group of broadly defined people, since "sealion" is a completely arbitrary group, and the original comment in the comic could be taken as baseless bigotry against that group. Lacking context, this could be an unfortunate connotation if one were to take it literally enough, but I think it deserves to be said that the use of "sealions" as the offenders in question is clearly farcical. The fact that it's an entire species of a random animal for which no real political biases exist (at least not in a typical, social sense) is clearly meant to suggest that the group has no existing disadvantages. In other words: GGers, or self-identifying "gamers" who think their culture is under attack by social justice. Second thing: even taking her example of marginalized people behaving this way against someone making bigoted remarks in public, it can still be demonstrative of shitty behaviour (albeit by a less outwardly shitty group with much less shitty grievances). The comic depicts someone making dismissive remarks in "public," but the actual setting is a conversation over a meal between two people. With a minimal amount of context we can assume this is meant to imply a twitter conversation between two friends, which, although public, is not meant to be considered by anyone and everyone that comes across it. So, apply this to a random person saying some bigoted crap on twitter - would that justify hounding them day and night, across any platform you can find them on (I might be wrong but my interpretation of the sealion finding her in her house is meant to imply digging up other accounts or forums to harass people in), when they are clearly unwilling to engage with you? The only context I can imagine this being somewhat excusable is if the person in question was a public figure with a large following, and even then I don't think that would excuse you from basic etiquette, and in any case that's clearly not the scenario the comic is painting. (Okay, I guess I did go into her interpretation of the comic... but I think she's totally entitled to her own and I don't mean to erase a marginalised voice at all by disagreeing.) The only real objection I have is that "sealioning" sounds fucking stupid, but I'm not gonna complain too much. This is the same community that substitutes GG for "garble grunts" or whatever silly thing they think up at the time. Having a bit of levity about these things is important sometimes. Speaking of, here's me stabbing this thing in the face, because... no reason. >_>

The only vaporwave song I ever came across and actually liked was this.

^ Was about to link that as I just read it yesterday (or should I say; got around to it in my tab backlog). Weird. I'm pretty interested in the game she talks about in that article. Wonder how joining Fullbright will affect that.

I was playing Jackbox Party Pack and had to draw "feminism."

Patrick posted on his tumblr that he'd continue Worth Reading over at Kotaku (reason enough to check in on him), and that he'd keep streaming horror games directly to twitch. So, assuming he has a partner account, I guess you'd just catch up with VODs... if they don't all get muted.

Patrick Klepek linked a great GG post-mortem on his blog. http://blogs.houstonpress.com/artattack/2015/01/why_gamergate_failed_a_look_back_at_2014s_most_ridiculous_movement.php Nothing exciting or new here, but it does a really good job of expressing how ridiculous the controversy was (is), and more importantly how it failed to gain any favourable coverage. Near the end the author links to a google doc which is the skeleton of a crowd-sourced book that GGers are writing about themselves, I guess? Loads of placeholders, not much actually written. I had to skim most of it because the writing is hilariously aggrandizing, but this caught my eye (warning: bunch of slurs and dumb racism/sexism, nothing explicit). Jesus christ.

Holy cow, this guy really has the whole heavily layered/looped one man band thing down. Sounds so huge.

I honestly love the way he does that "fuuuuuuuuuuuuck... YOU!" every time he does something really satisfying in a game. Also, maybe it's just me, but I think by condemning Dan for enjoying violent content you're also implicitly condemning the content itself? Which is fine, I actually think that kind of criticism is pretty healthy, but isn't that also kind of illuminating? Like, Dan is basically the most un-pretentious person you could ask to give you an impression of something (not to be confused with "most objective"), so I totally see how people would disregard his criticism as shallow or whatever, but doesn't that have some value in itself? In many ways Dan might actually represent the target audience for these games better than your average games journalist coverage person. Maybe it's not the worst thing to be exposed to those raw reactions to violent, indulgent content more often.