Bjorn

Yeas ago I got a box at a UPS Store for the handful of times a year when I knew I won't be home to get a package. Since then I've begun using it exclusively to have my packages shipped to. I think it's about $60 a year, and totally worth it for me. Also super useful to have a second physical address I can use when I don't want to give out my home address. Thanks to it and Google Voice, there are retailers I've bought a lot of stuff from who have never seen my actual home address or home/cell number.

Their actions in the McAfee case were just weird and unethical all the way around, getting him arrested is just the cherry on top of shit-sundae. I like some of the work Vice has done, I also find some of it to be reprehensible even as I think it might be valuable (like their livestreams from Ferguson).

When you stare into the abyss [at 100MB] the abyss [downloads] your soul at [speeds approaching 100MB].

So I actually logged into my Twitter account for the first time in forever, and realized my handle probably makes me look like one of the gaters: @thetheorist. At the time, it was a pun on my Shoestring Theory blog, which was about doing shit on a shoestring budget (like starting a business or remodeling a house), though it never really panned out due to the intermittent attention I paid to it. I feel like there's probably some fun I could have with that handle, but not sure it's worth the time.

@Tegan, I'm crying from laughing at that.

That's infuriating, his first (that I know of) public comment is to brag about his Twitter blocklist? To not have it occur to you at all that this might be a bad idea to lump several people's lists together?

That was my reaction to Killer Bunnies. I played it once at a party, thought it was cool, and went to buy it. Only to discover that it already had like 7 or 8 expansions, and I just brain locked. I don't know if it's a collector's compulsion, or fear of missing out on some component, or what. But when I see that much additional content has already been released, I totally kills my desire for the base game. I did buy 2 expansions for Arkham, and swore to never buy any more. They just make the game more unwieldy, but the additional characters and location cards are nice to have.

Good summary of the Quinn stuff, but leaves out that the fever pitch was really kicked into overdrive by the timing of the latest Sarkeesian video (it's proof of the conspiracy!) and the exiting of people like Bryce and Frank from games writing, which are all important parts of the story. I only mention that because I've actually been trying to find something that does a good job of explaining this whole fiasco without requiring a shit ton of pre-existing background knowledge, and haven't really run across anything like that. I've got some real life friends who play video games, but who pay very little attention to blogs or greater online gamer culture, so they are really clueless about this. I'd like to have a clear rundown of this thing just to send to people, and have started to write one up a couple of times myself, but it's so ridiculously convoluted at this point once you try to include all the different parts of it.

A wizard does not set his camera's settings, his cameras settings are simply properly set when he is ready for a picture.

FWIW, while the size of the hands did jump out at me the first time I saw it, they don't bother me at all. I actually like them. I'm a bigger guy, with kinda meaty sausage fingers, and the perspective of the size of those hands feels pretty close to my own. Going back and taking a second look at the video, there's several shots shot of Henry holding a walkie-talkie. If I had a similar sized walkie-talkie, I think I could almost duplicate that shot and the size difference between my hand and the walkie-talkier wouldn't be much different than the size difference between Henry's and his, his are just on the cartooney side.

That's an interesting comment. I've played The Maw, 'Splosion Man and Gunstringer, and can't remember anything particularly tasteless. I will say I don't have the strongest memories of any of those games, but do remember enjoying each of them when they came out. I never actually finished the Gunstringer, but it and Dance Central were the only two Kinect games that I ever thought were good enough to play more than once.

Probably late to this conversation, but went and saw Guardians of the Galaxy last night. That was great! It might be my favorite of the Marvel movies so far, probably in part because I have no familiarity with any of the characters, so no preconceived notions. It's also just really fun, which is actually what I want out of the Marvel Universe movies. The Nolan Batman trilogy kind of stomped my interest in "serious" superhero movies into the ground for awhile. Oh yeah, and end credits spoiler:

Wat?! Had to look, I had no idea. I've enjoyed the TP games I've played quite a bit, the initial negative reviews of it on Xbox turned me off from checking it out when it eventually released on the 360. But I may have to check it out after your thoughts on it.

I haven't watched the Simpson's much since around the late 90s (nothing to do with the Simpson's, but that's about the time that I quit watching non-sports television in general, which I didn't return to until the last 5 years or so and the ability to binge watch great shows through Netflix). That said, thanks for that link! I really enjoyed reading through the first half of it as I steadfastly avoided watching my Chiefs blumber through the motions of pretending to be a professional football team. If nothing else, it was an interesting reminder of what role television played in my life in the 80s and 90s, and what it was like then compared to now.

I'm wondering if there shouldn't be another fallacy as well (or maybe this falls more accurately in an existing one and I'm not making the connection). But I think of it as the "everyone's a victim" argument. The Daily Beast ran an article with the eye catching title "Men Are Harassed More Than Women Online", which if properly headlined, would have read, "Some well known Brit males harassed more than some well known Brit females under certain, strict criteria". This argument inevitably tries to show that everyone really has the same experience, some people just whine or complain about it more. Which I think it's important to ask questions like, "Is our perception of this thing accurately born out by data?" Because we're humans, and we're fallible. But it's usually obvious when someone is simply desperate to divert attention away from something, like that Daily Beast writer was. Like it's interesting that the comparison chosen for Sarkeesian is Jack Thompson, a man who attempted to get legislation passed actually endorsing government censorship of games and was ultimately disbarred for committing dozens of violations as a lawyer. Sure, no one should have been threatening to kill him, but to compare him to Sarkeesian seems to be trying to make a connection between their actions as well. You see the "everyone's a victim" argument pop up often enough. Anytime a black, unarmed man is killed, inevitably there will be comments on the story about how white people get killed to, sometimes by black people! The argument is really that everyone's experience is identical, and anyone claiming otherwise has some ulterior motive.

That disclosure is amazing.

Junior Mints had a nice piece on Polygon recently about the history of female revolutionaries. That's also linked in the Ethics thread with a punch of people talking about it if you want to see what the IT forums thoughts on it are.

Silence, I feel, ultimately favors the harassers not the harassed. So while I understand that fear, I'm also a bit more heartless about it when it comes to the big sites. If you want to call yourself a journalist, and most of the writers for the big sites do, then you don't get to sideline yourself when shit like this goes down. There's always the option of writing a staff post as well, so no individual writer takes the heat for it.

Or that generalist newspapers published clear, unambiguous op-eds from writers taking a stance on the issue. I'm particularly annoyed at the near total silence from Joystiq and (I think?) Polygon, the two sites I am most likely to read. I've seen one post from the 'stiq. I haven't been on Polygon much through this, but it doesn't seem like they have written much. Justin McElroy has been talking about it on Twitter, as has Ludwig Kietzman. But I haven't seen anything out of Chris Grant. Before Idle Thumbs, those are the guys and their fans who got me to care about games journalism and brought me into online gaming communities as a participant. It's beyond disappointing that none of them appear to be writing professionally about this (unless I've missed something, in which case I retract my disappointment).

It may not help, but at least we can always point back to this to show the level of organization that some of the 4chan folks are willing to go through to fuck with a handful of people.

Somehow that seems incredibly fitting given the nature of this game. Did you cancel the pledge?

That fucking trailer. Jesus. I mean...Jesus loves you. And me.

The Kickstarter is live, and apparently there are a lot of people who want this. It's already over $118,000, and I think that's all within the first day. RPS also has a nice long interview with Ice Pick Lodge. I love this bit:

Thanks for all the screenshots, and for actually taking the time to go watch what some of them are saying. I had hoped that was the case last night, but no, it's looking like he's dead serious. He's replied a few more times to clarify his position.

This email just gave me the giggles this morning. Slipknot: One step above buying your cat a bowtie.