Bjorn

I kept reading that and thinking it couldn't possibly get worse, or more absurd. And then it did, and did, and did. I agree with everything you said. I also find the way these "gamers" speak for the entire community to be both hilarious and depressing. It's literally impossible for them to imagine the gaming community including anyone who isn't like them. Everyone else is clearly an outsider trying to tear them down. The asshole who wrote that isn't finished, he can't wait to bring even more research and truthbombs down on Quinn on his podcast tomorrow. Fucking yah. That piece did send me down some weird rabbit holes though. So YouPorn is planning on sponsoring a Dota 2 team. Link is to a Reddit AMA that is lacking in interesting Dota questions. In the comments of that NG article, there was also a person claiming that Quinn single-handedly orchestrated (image of a now deleted Reddit post) a conspiracy to try and bring down a women focused game jam. That led me to the FineYoungCapitalists and this audio explanation. The whole thing screams scam to me. It's not a game jam, it's a contest with 5 anonymous people we are told are women. We are told that it has to be a contest, and not a game jam, because Canadian law would prevent a women only games jam but not a women only contest. Wut? The women won't be making games, because they have no experience, because women with no experience making games were recruited. They'll just be providing ideas to the people who actually know how to make games. The women will own the work, but will only be allowed to keep 8 percent of the profits, and the rest must be donated to charity, all of that after the professional designers are paid, of course. There's an indiegogo to fund the making of the game. And of course, if the game never turns a profit, no money will go to charity and the winning designer (if she exists) will never see a dime. Apparently Quinn was calling shenanigans on them, and now they've jumped on the bandwagon of attacking her in various places, giving all the haters another bullet point to add to their ever expanding list of proof of how evil she is. The more I learn about Quinn, the more I realized how badass she is. She's like a Bond villain. She has a super lair somewhere in the world, in it "gamers" are flayed alive and forced to compete to the death with shitty Wii games. Anita Sarkeesian watches, eating gluten free pita wafers dipped in John Romero's tears, which flow endlessly as he mourns the death of gaming.

Is that an actual, serious thing he's presented? I'm not at all familiar with his work, I rarely visit Vox. I liked the piece for writing about crime in the same way that the earlier linked piece wrote about Ferguson as though it happened in another country. It reveals the prejudices and assumptions built into how our media reports on certain subjects.

The ex's post is terrifying, I can't remember if it's actually been described in here or not. The text is something like 8,000 words long. It has additional screencapped multi-thousand word chat-logs with photoshopped annotations and explanation. There are pictures and a video. There's an 800+ word TLDR. It's a multimedia dissection of an 8ish month relationship in novella form. Can you imagine someone you've known for less than a year sitting down to produce a document like this? If it happened to me, I'd be filing restraining orders. I'd be fucking scared of that person.

The epidemic of white-on-white crime.

Played Spelunky for the first time in months last night, did it co-op with my wife. It's funny, we have never made it as far together as we have individually playing solo (I've beat Hell and she's beat Olmec, but never made it to Hell). We're lucky if we can get out of the jungle together. It usually rapidly descends into a comedy of errors where one of us makes a split second reaction to something that spirals out of control getting us both killed. Our best run last night we were successfully robbing the black market and only had a single shop keeper left to kill to get the Ankh. Slapped a sticky bomb on him, and the next thing we knew he had jumped out of the pit and was in the middle of us exploding before either of us could get out of the way. There were also several shotgun and boomerang incidents that ended runs before that. So much fun though, we always end with giggle fits when it goes so wrong. Oh! And for everything that I thought I knew about this game, I still discovered something new last night.

Jeebus, another area cop has been relieved of duty after a video was found of him ranting about the dangers of women, blacks, gays, Muslims, Obama, pretty much everyone who isn't a white, male Christian. You can watch it here if you want. It's...freaking disturbing (I'm not going to embed it here). I only got about 5 minutes into it and couldn't take more of it. Also, not as much coverage, but protests are still ongoing in Ferguson. I'm hoping the HuffPo plan of having regular coverage for the next year from a local journalist works out, even as I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the structure of it. There are going to be a lot of important and interesting stories out of Ferguson once the protests leave the spotlight, and we need to hear them, so I'm glad that someone is planning that coverage now. I'm uncomfortable with this because HuffPo is asking readers to pay the salary of their citizen journalist there. $40,000 is not a significant amount of money to HuffPo. The content is going to be "open source" (what does that mean for journalist works?). I'd like to know if that is HuffPo's idea, or the reporter's idea. Because if HuffPo isn't paying her, she should be able to own the output if she wants. I love the idea of people paying individual journalists for their work, or to cover a beat, through something like Patreon or Beacon. I'm just skeptical when a media organization with a reported $100+ million revenue does something like this.

I feel exactly the same way about it. I also sometimes wonder just how easy it is to sell these people shit. Like, would I really feel bad making a living selling useless things to batshit conspiracy theorists. Then I try to imagine interacting with these people on a regular basis.

Spider-butt, spider-butt, does whatever a...wait, wut? Goddammit Marvel. Classy new page post!

Well, that seems to gel generally with my experiences. Whenever I replace a phone, I tend to go on an app binge of updating stuff and finding new apps, and then don't look at the app store again forever. Though, the sheer raw numbers of phones out there means that the heavy app downloaders, ~11 percent for 4+ a month, still account for a user base of some 20 million you can appeal to in just the US domestic market. Last stats I saw said between half and two-thirds of Americans had smartphones.

I have never been able to stand gin, it's the only alcohol I feel that way about. I have a friend who insists that I just haven't had the right drink with it yet, and occasionally mixes me something new, or uses different brands of gin. It's all still awful.

Bunch of 2K games are on sale this weekend as well, including the phenomenal Xcom Enemy Within expansion at $9.89, which I cannot endorse enough. The Bureau is also on sale for $4 again. It wasn't the worst thing I played this year. Actually, wait, it might have been. But it was a fascinating train wreck.

Yeah, I thought about ordering the HD remasters, then read some reviews of them and decided that tracking down, ahem, the original PC version of SH2 would be for the best.

Ha! It's a beautiful dream Clyde, but lets not give dreams to dickbags.

I'm as angry as all of you about the treatment of Quinn, her friends, her associates and anyone who has tried to defend her. But I also fear what kind of suppressing effect this is having. The piece sarah linked to talked about why would women even want to make themselves the target by being in the games industry and speaking up. We know that there are women games journalists (and probably devs I don't know of) who just quietly disappeared over the last few years. Went on to other things. It wasn't worth it. I worry that the valuable voices we have right now might be gone in a couple of years, processed through the meat grinder (I think it was Mattie Brice who warned about this in a piece, but I can't find which one it was). I worry about the industry preserving who it has, and fostering the next generation. And none of that is happening.

Seriously? Holy crap.

My wife kind of got into with one of her old friends on Facebook this morning who dropped the "we don't know all the facts and so shouldn't comment on it" line. She ended up writing this as a kind of general response to everyone about why she cares, and why we shouldn't be silent.

After expressing my frustration earlier in this thread with my real life friends about their relative ignorance and silence on Ferguson, I ended up getting several private messages this week from people saying that they appreciated the variety of things I had been posting, even if they disagreed with some of what I was saying. One of them is a teacher, and he hadn't said anything publicly because he was worried about it affecting him in some way at school. Others have racist relatives, and don't want to get into a shitty, racist debate with their family on Facebook. In part, I understand their reasons, but I'm still frustrated with them. I also recognize my own privileges at work here too. I'm self employed, I can't get shit from a boss or coworkers for what I say. I have no financial dependence on any of my family, so I don't care if I piss the racist ones off and they stop talking to me. One thing you can do is not be silent about it. You don't have to write essays, or post everyday, but share good pieces on your social networks. Don't let the people in your life ignore it as easily as they might want to. Particularly share the words of people of color who have been affected.

I sent in $10 as a pay-what-you want for DQ (which is fabulous and worth playing, see my thoughts in the Twine thread). I agree that backing the Patreon is the best, but I honestly haven't been able to bring myself to back anyone through Patreon yet. There are many worthy people I could back, and I can't afford to back them all, so I back none. Which is shitty too.

I've never seen a collection of links. That seems like a thread we ought to have.

Ha! He is supposed to be looking for a job. He seems to be as qualified to be a professional games critic as much as anyone.

When I was a kid, we had to trudge through a snow storm, crawl through duct work, and go up two massive elevators (both ways!) just to get to a furnace! Oh wait, no, I'm just remembering MGS.

I try to withhold it for things so egregious that I would hope most reasonable people would have seen the racism/sexism/whatever inherent to what I am referring, just so I don't water down the usage of it for myself. This is amusing, if you want to see someone take the phrase way to seriously, and a bunch of commenters do the same. I googled "intent is magic" just to see how common it was, and it was one of the first things that popped up. The defense, in this case, is farcical to me because editorial cartoons have a long history of problems with race. The traditional style relies on heavy exaggeration to drive home unsubtle commentary. Guess what else relies on heavy exaggeration to drive home unsubtle points? All the racist, sexist, homophobic and every-other-type-of-shitty-stereotype people have used to dehumanize other humans. You don't make it out of journalism school without knowing about this shit. Or if you didn't go to j-school, you don't spend more than a couple of years in the business without running into it.

I like horror for a lot of reasons, and being scared is only one of them. But on that specifically, it's not so much being scared for me, as it is this collection of emotional and mental reactions that are clustered around fear, including both stress and panic. It's maybe a little sick, but I like feeling those things sometimes. Sometimes what I want is to tap into that panic, that stress, that gut wrench. And good horror is a way visit that emotional place.

"promo code: Mints"

Missouri newspaper editor insists that there was no racist intent in the spoilered image, because we all know that intent is magic.