Bjorn

Ah, the next few episodes after The Way We Weren't were exactly what were we wanting from the show for a bit. It was great to see Chiana and Rigel get a chance to helm an episode in Dream a Little Dream (S2E8). And the idea of a planet that is 90 percent made of lawyers is a very Douglas Adams type story to explore. Ultimately it's actually not a great episode, it lacks the focus of the best, but I still like seeing the two most selfish characters have a chance to contribute. Then there's Out of Their Minds (S2E9), which is the funniest episode so far. Mind swapping stories are always good for some goofiness, but the Farscape crew really pulled it off well. Almost every single scene has something terrific in it. I suppose I'll spoiler this stuff, just in case someone else who hasn't seen these reads through here eventually: After these more standalone episodes, definitely feel like we're ready for the show to delve back into the main storyline again.

Over the last week or so, I have really been trying to dial back the rage, and give at least the claimed moderates some empathy (even if I still think they are bullshit enablers). But the entrance of Mike the lawyer and Roosh of RoK changes that. If any claimed moderate doesn't look at them, and see them for the pure poison and danger they are, fuck 'em. This is who showed up to champion their cause. This is who they supported, even if it was by their silence. Good job gg, this is who you are.

Thankfully someone got an archive of it before it was deleted. Quinn's feed following that is fucking heartbreaking. Seriously, the mob is bad enough, but a fucking lawyer with a PI going after you, just to whip the mob up more? Fucking hell. Apparently people began throwing her nudes around again to use that to harass her, and trying to shame her for having done porn work. This exchange between Quinn and a couple of other women is interesting. It's not the first time I've heard a woman say that she was treated better doing sex work than she was in other industries. Not to say there aren't negative experiences, but that there can also be positive ones.

Another thing with the Royals, they actually won more games on the road this season than they won at home, which is another reason that going into SF for three games tied at 1-1 isn't too worrisome. The only team that won more away games than us were the Dodgers.

The Mary Sue had an interesting interview with two of the writers for the Pre-Sequel. I started quite like Anthony Burch after following him on Twitter around the start of gg.

Yep, they've blown right past it and are now easily hitting their early stretch goals with a little under 48 hours to go.

Are all your friends Nick Breckon?

Chris Kluwe is doing an AMA in KiA right now, titled I am Mike Cernovich's Raging Bile Erection. AMA! I don't have time to sort through a 1,000+ comments right now, but the highlights should be interesting later.

KC's defense has been phenomenal through the post season, like routine mind-bending defensive plays every game. Until the WS. We do seem a little flat footed in the last two games, though the latter half of last night's game they were looking better. And you can't play perfect forever, some of the earlier post-season defensive plays were honestly pretty lucky. They missed multiple on the run catches over the last two games that they would have caught in earlier games. KC is one of the biggest parks in the game though, there's a ton of acreage for balls to drop into. While AT&T is still above average in raw size, it's still smaller than the K, so our outfielders should have an advantage on fly balls. But, AT&T is also one of the hardest parks to hit homeruns in, which tends to be a factor that favors the Royals.

Yeah, I wasn't really sure which direction you were going. But Twin Peaks always makes me think of the oddities of small towns anyways, which is usually compounded by the fact that everyone knows everything about everyone (or at least think they do).

The real MRAs have decided it's time to wade into the swamp. Return of Kings is looking for a regular correspondent to write a weekly column about gg and SJWs in games. It also wrote a big piece on gamergate. RoK admits it doesn't write about games much, and highlights the few pieces it has ran: Yes, you read that right. Those are their "neutral" pieces. Other recent fine writing examples include an essay on why you shouldn't date single mothers; why Malala Yousafzai is a coward for not going back to Pakistan to get killed; not one, but two pieces on how women with tattoos are slutty and mentally ill (one of these actually uses a picture of Quinn in it, without naming her); and a piece that says video games are addictive and holding you back as a man. Mike the lawyer is a fan of RoK and links to it. So yeah. This is an example of something to use to judge what it is that pro-gg folks are actually after. RoK has one interest, and one interest only: destroying feminism. They have no problems throwing around gay slurs, calling women bitches and sluts, labeling people retards, body shaming language (land whales), and using pictures stolen from the Internet of actual people to label with such language. In the KiA thread on this, some people don't want RoK involved, others welcome it, some are ambivalent. The important thing to note is that many (by my reading of the thread) of the people who oppose RoK coming on board are worried about it because of gg's image. They are not concerned about whether or not RoK engages in the kind of behavior that they have condemned from others. There is also a strong vein of, "Well, we can't stop them, so I guess if they want to write about it they can." What-in-the-actual-fuck. If you can't stop an outlet from writing about something, then why the organized crusades against Gamasutra and Gawker? This is one of the things that shows the truth about gg. The criteria they use for their actions are just justifications they've found allowing themselves to go after the people they already didn't like. They won't organize against someone else, doing the exact same thing, even someone who is trying to co-opt gg from them. Because the target comes first, and the reasoning second. One particularly insightful redditor did note that the pro-gg side does have women in it, and failing to condemn RoK is a de facto support for the way that RoK approaches women. So at least that one person could draw two dots together.

I was going to be quite cross with you if that had happened.

I played about 30 minutes last night, and while good, it didn't hook me. I'm used to DF games opening in incredibly strong ways, and making me want to go deeper into their worlds. And MC kind of opens on a whimper. Hopefully that's just because they've focused on the mechanics of it, which do look intriguing the bit of tutorial stuff I did.

That's specifically one of my concerns (and I'm assuming others) that it won't end in a satisfying way. Not that it won't be an interesting and well produced story, but that instead of reaching a conclusion, they're eventually just going to have explored it as much as possible and it will end.

1-1 going to San Franscisco for the next 3 games. I can live with that, the odds of us actually sweeping a third post season series in a row was pretty slim. Also, apparently the Royals were addicted to Clash of Clans during the summer.

Small towns can be surprisingly weird. Weird enough that the Ghostwood deal doesn't stand out to me as being unbelievable. I grew up in a small town in the middle of no where Kansas, and I've got countless odd or unexpected stories you wouldn't expect from a place like that. Like Kevin Costner was an investor in a local business for awhile (I think because of it's work on developing buffalo herds). Unless you just meant that it's weird to want to tear down a sawmill to build a golf course community.

I've actually avoided getting worked up about much with gg for awhile, but this (and the gg response on KiA) makes me want to simultaneously cry and break something. Archive.today link to the tumblr that "tracks" harassment. When I looked, the top example is what appears to be a fake tweet by Leigh Alexander. A bit further down is someone asking why the proven fake tweet by Brianna Wu is still listed, and the person running the tumblr basically replies fuck off, it's not his job to verify if things are real or not. Another thing being passed around the pro-gg crowd proving that Quinn doxxed someone is her tweeting a link to a blog post about one of the newest gg members. It's the Mike guy who's a lawyer and been chest thumping all over the place. He's shared some excerpts from the restraining order Quinn has against her ex, has threatened to post more, is threatening legal action and has been harassing people (there's a link of him going off about gamergate on someone with absolutely no relation to gaming or journalism earlier in this thread). The blog post just outlines this guy's legal experience, and looked up his professional listing in a lawyer's directory and posted a picture of his "office" (which appears to be a condo). Mike went ahead and tweeted out the streetview image himself (twice) once he became aware of the post. And posted a link to the blog post himself. Meh. That's gg's definition of doxxing one of their own. Looking them up in a professional directory when they constantly throw their profession in people's faces.

Holy crap, so the coda to that 'Noid story is that the mascot disappeared for many years, until Dominoes brought him back for a brief, one-week promotion to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his creation. The promotion: a Facebook game called "The Noid's Super Pizza Shootout." Not. Fucking. Kidding. 22 years after the Noid was abandoned because a paranoid, schizophrenic man took Dominoes pizza employees hostage in a store, someone in marketing decided to release a Facebook game about shooting shit in a pizza place to stop the 'Noid. You can see a video promoting it here.

I wholeheartedly agree, there's a different energy when Nick's on and talking. Not that the other casts aren't great, but it's a refreshing change when he's on.

Earlier you pointed to KiA as being an example of a place to look for examples of what it is that gg wants to achieve, and I'll agree that compared to something like 8chan, KiA is the reserved and calm place to go. But as for understanding motives and desires, I'd like to point you towards the mod team that runs KiA. We Hunted the Mammoth pointed out that one of the mods of KiA also mods another subreddit that is dedicated to rape and bdsm fantasies featuring the conquest and humiliation of feminists, including Sarkeesian specifically. That same mod seems to run a Tumblr (that I won't link to) that features additional porn aimed at the humiliation and punishment of women. Now I'm someone who is super sex-positive, and quite supportive of people who incorporate BDSM into their sex lives. But I'm also well aware of the differences between people who practice it consensually for mutual enjoyment, and the people who...don't. For whom the fantasy is actual rape and domination. And a pretty major fucking line is crossed when you're making up rape fantasies and photoshopped porn specifically targeting individual feminists. Two other KiA mods are also mods at a subreddit dedicated to sharing and mocking pictures of "ugly" feminists. Obviously #notallgamergaters, but even for the theoretical "good" ones, it's hard to take them seriously when they don't see a problem having a mod for one of their biggest public forums who also mods a forum that MAKES hateporn about Sarkeesian. Because really it's all about ethics, and journalism.

We didn't! We're a few episodes into Season 2 now, and I'm really glad we went all the way through 1. I agree that there is a lot of unevenness there, but there's a ton of character development that I think would ultimately be lost without going through it. Does the show return to some silliness going forward? Starting around Durka Returns (S1E15) through The Way We Weren't (S2E5), there's a whole ton of dark, serious stuff going on. There are some great episodes, many of the best so far, but at the same time binge watching this, it's like I need the show to dial back a bit into some fun and goofiness a bit more to provide some breathing room. I didn't realize until most of the way through S1 that Pilot's voice is the same actor who plays Crais. Which is pretty freaking incredible. Out of S2 so far, I've particularly enjoyed The Way We Weren't, as it firmly establishes Pilot as a full fledged member of the crew, someone who is as broken and fucked up as the rest of them. "Taking the Stone" (S2E3) is probably one of the worst episodes for me so far, but I still love how it subverts the structure of what could have been a classic Star Trek episode. In general, a ton of episodes so far feel like they've taken the structure of classic sci-fi TV, and then done something quite different with it.

I saw some pro-gg folks sharing this piece around as "proof" that Wu, Sarkeesian and Quinn are making up the threats against them. Which completely misses the point. This guy harvested 20 hours of twitter mentions for the three, 1500 total tweets, of which 99 were positive and the rest he classified as negative (just no death or rape threats). About 23 negative tweets an hour, or a negative message every 2.5 minutes. That's assuming a fairly even distribution between the three, which may not be accurate, but still probably good for an estimate. And that's just the publicly available Twitter. Doesn't count direct messages, emails, Facebook page posts, iOs reviews, Steam reviews, etc. During the busy times, it must add up to hundreds of shitty messages an hour. Obviously you have to ignore a lot of it, but you can't ignore everything. I just don't fucking know how they do it. But remember, ETHICS! Obviously that is a piece of perfectly ethical work produced by a fine journalist. And making clickbait is a sin second only to doxxing, and that piece has clearly used a well crafted headline that communicates only solid, incontrovertible facts.

Thread link to Reddit's reaction to the Clickhole piece (through archive.today) if anyone wants to see it in all the glory. Also, remember, this is totally, and completely about ethics (archive link to the Ralph Retort) and has nothing to do with Quinn or any kind of obsession with her and her sex life. Lastly, the SPLC linked to a gamergate article in one of its Hatewatch posts. Pro-gg folks enter the comments with links to the Ralph Retort and Breitbart as "proof" the SPLC is wrong.

I didn't realize how much I was missing the weird Rust stories. That's amazing.

Gamergate is a diverse collection that includes not just centaurs, but mermaids, mermen, fauns, minotaurs, satyrs, sphinxes and anthropomorphic hedgehogs. #notyourfantasyshield