Bjorn

That reply to KiA is incredible. I've been thinking about the process of dehumanizing someone, and the role that plays in all this. They use SJW essentially as a slur, much in the same way we use gater. I haven't read much on the process of dehumanizing, so I went looking tonight and came across this essay (plus some other stuff, but that particular piece really sums it up well). It's pretty easy to see the dehumanizing process going on (emphasis mine): I'm sure there's a fascinating breakdown that could be done in regards to #gamergate and how it uses dehumanization throughout the course of the campaign. But the things that got me really thinking about it is the rise of LW (which is noted in that reddit reply Rubix linked). This first time I saw this, it really through me for a loop, as my only association with LW is Letter Writer (often used in comments sections of romance advice columns...one of my secret shameful loves). If you haven't encountered it, many in #gamergate have taken to using the term Literally Who to refer to Quinn, Sarkeesian and Wu. I'm not entirely sure how that started, and don't particularly want to go down the rabbit hole to figure it out. But it intentionally conflates all three women, making it easy to confuse which you're talking about and delivering the message that they're all really the same. Opportunistic, dangerous, lying women. You don't even need to know their names. Like it matters, they're practically interchangeable. They're not individuals, they are a symbol. A symbol of everything you hate and fear. My final thought on this is I'm going to try and stop using gater as a noun. While less severe than the language that gamergate supporters have used, I still feel like it's a step on the path to dehumanizing them. And as wrong as I believe they are, and as dangerous as I think some of them are, they're still human.

That's super exciting! I would have just taken more Dark Souls, but hearing it is getting some welcome refinements is good news.

If you're digging combat, try the multiplayer! There's still a fair number of active players on PC, at least there were a month or two ago, last time we played.

Just to address this specific part, I know that for a lot of stuff I shared, I tried to make sure they were things that were being echoed heavily (retweeted a lot, active reddit threads, fair number of replies, etc). It is really easy to take a single asshole and try to use him as a ass-paintrbrush, but I think by and large we've tried to avoid that. As for trying to get some of these people out of it, sadly, I doubt there is a lot online that we can do. I would tend to suspect that someone needs to intervene in person with them. I think that parent article that was shared earlier was particularly important for showing how parents are trying to intervene in the lives of the teens who are involved.

This is getting a bit far afield, but a few of the big blockbusters have also been using variable aspect ratios (switching back and forth between 2.35 and 16:9), which was really distracting the first time I noticed it, but I've come around to quite liking it as each ratio does a better job of conveying scale or emotion in certain scenes. Dark Knight and Tron Legacy are two off the top of my head that do it.

Got through some more episodes last night. The AV Club's stuff pointed me to this transcript for the DVD commentary of what is apparently considered the absolute worst of all the Farscape episodes (Jeremiah Crichton). The transcript is pretty amusing to read through. I'm also super enjoying the attitudes that Farscape takes towards sexuality, gender, and sex in general. It's a refreshing attitude to see out of a TV show. I'm realizing just how little of Farscape I must have seen, because I so far haven't recognized a single episode, and generally only have the vaguest memories of most of the characters.

A Canadian AM radio station is running interviews with some of women harassed by gaters (Wu, Quinn and Allaway). The gaters response is to harass the station and go after advertisers.

I was super angry after having read the Giant Bomb piece yesterday, and having calmed down a bit, I want to address a part of that. To me, this pairs right up with the "Silence isn't complicity" line a bit further down. Of course there are things you can do. You can visibly support the most vulnerable members of the community. Invite Sarkeesian, Wu, Quinn or Frank on to the show. You don't even have to dedicate that time to their harassment. As the Thumbs showed with Sarkeesian, you can just have them on to talk about games. Do a video about Quinn's work, or one of Revolution 60 (Spacekat's new game). I can't think of a good reason to NOT do a Quick Look of Rev60. This is going into its third goddamned month. 60+ days of bullshit for the people targeted. It's been covered repeatedly by national and international news outlets. I find it to be a laughable defense, when a bunch of dudes whose job it is to be opinionated and who run one of the more popular gaming sites in the US can't manage to think of a single thing they can do, and so revert to silence.

Weapon degradation probably isn't as noticeable if you never played a console version to see the difference (it's huge). I only had serious issues with it with whips, particularly the Old Whip, which is already made of tissue paper to begin with.

I'm just quoting this again, even though it's not necessary, because it nails everything I wanted to say. I actually had to step away from this tonight, lest I say something particularly angrier than I would have wanted to about the Giant Bomb statement, or any of the "but there are a few people with reasonable concerns in gg" statements, or the "there are extremists on the anti-gg" side. One of the only actual, honest to god claims that the gg crowd has made about one of their own getting harassed was a guy who got fired and claimed it was because anti-gg folks called his boss.

Actually he and she! Oglaf is the work of two people as far as I know.

Oh yeah, I completely understood you and agree with that exactly.

The gaters are apparently trying to find any respected creative types who will back them now. Some of them were surprised when the co-creator of Oglaf wasn't a supporter (super awesome NSFW webcomic if you go googling it).

That makes me want to have a Darth Ma and Darth Pa:

Chris and Adrian (the author of the Tumblr post) had the most polite Twitter conversation ever that started with a disagreement.

I don't know if this has been linked anywhere on the boards yet or not. Joan Chen actually left TP because of those exact reasons, and it is now something she regrets (at least in part because the project she left for was a total disaster). Which, I can see how many years later you could regret leaving something that was so unique even if your place in it was problematic because of how the character was written.

Yeah, if I was a developer who hadn't ever listed to the Thumbs, but was told that three developers and a journalist spent a bit talking about my game on their podcast, I could easily see myself having some wrong expectations about what I would hear when I tuned in. He also lacks any history with the Thumbs and their personal preferences in gaming, which are super informative when it comes to understanding how they feel about games (a tendency to favor mechanically interesting games over narratively driven games). Honestly, when the Thumbs talk about certain types of games (particularly narratively heavy stuff), I take their thoughts with a grain of salt. Not because I think they're wrong, but because I know that my gaming preferences diverge from theirs sometimes. Just like McElroy's love of the Sherlock games doesn't mean that Sean's going to end up falling in love with one. It's interesting though that the wrong expectations that the developer had about the Thumbs is in direct parallel to the wrong expectations that the Thumbs had about Ethan Carter (they talk about going into it not realizing there would be weird or supernatural elements, it's not the audience's fault that they didn't get the marketing message to forewarn them). FWIW, he pretty badly misquotes (or it's a bad typo) the Thumbs too, they say the character has a "dime store novel" name, not a "dumpster novel name." Which if he heard dumpster, that would sound super insulting and may have framed the rest of the conversation for him. Paul Prospero DOES sound like an old dime novel detective. It's got the alliteration of Sam Spade. And, if I'm remembering right, Phillip Marlowe's name is in part a reference to Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare. So it's not like using literary references for a detective is something particularly unique. It feels like he took that pretty personally, when it sounded like a very accurate description to me. Well, I guess that get pretty jokey and call it dumb, so that part of the conversation could be insulting. But still, also accurate. He's obviously been on the forums, I'd love it if he popped in and chatted about it. There's an interesting question there of when does a supernatural element work in fiction, and when doesn't it?

The discussion about an airport game is hilarious, and the idea of playing the airport is brilliant. It does remind me of Douglas Adams' first game Bureaucracy. Also: "You'd have to call the game gamergate." Fucking crying laughing.

The gaters really do attract the most quality supporters (archive.today link to RS McCain's blog).

Frog Fractions 3 - The infinite frog

That's an interesting point, I wonder how well these work if you have a bunch of people in a crowd who all have them.

Episode 10 (“They've Got A Secret”) really helped explain the events of Episode 9 (“DNA Mad Scientist”). I was somewhat uncomfortable with 9 and whether characters were acting in ways that were out-of-character for them, but 10 fills in the big missing piece there. It's probably good that it's structured that way. I think Farscape is trying to make the viewer uncomfortable at times, and filling in some character details retroactively lets the show get away with that.

Umbrella 2.0 - Behold the magic

Bonus! It has local co-op. But holy shit it's $25 on Steam. That seems...expensive for it.

~$10 is probably as cheap as Enemy Within has been so far (its current sale price), it's been out less than a year. It's worth every penny of that if you enjoy Xcom. I also like the Slingshot Mission, it freshens up a campaign a bit if you've already played multiple, though I feel like once you've been through it a couple of times it makes the game easier because everything regarding it is fixed, not random.