Bjorn

Somehow I missed the news about cheerleaders around the league suing NFL teams to be paid as employees. I've always thought it was horseshit that cheerleaders don't get paid, it's part of the long tradition of devaluing the work that women do versus the work that men do. But This American Life's first half delves into the lives of professional cheerleaders and the super shitty nature of the handbooks that govern their lives. Like instructing them on tampon use, vagina washing and how to converse in ways that men enjoy (Don't whine! Don't have opinions a man might disagree with!). I know that male athletes' handbooks can get ridiculous, but I'm trying to imagine someone lecturing Ray Lewis on how to properly wash his ass.

So I know next to nothing about this guy. His message is obviously a good one. Yes, we need a more diverse set of voices talking in the gaming space. I don't know that there's much else to say about that video otherwise. I'm reading about him and his history over the last few years, and its fascinating. You can see the different levels of memory and condemnation circling around, depending on who is being judged. To some extent, I'm reminded of a local media controversy. I wish I could find an article that didn't center around his on air resignation, but a few years ago my local public radio station replaced a veritable local legend (Walt Bodine) with Jabulani Leffall. Leffall sounded different, had a different tone, did subjects that were different. There was a lot of love and a lot of criticism for the new host, but in the criticism you could just see people struggling to not just be overtly racist. So they used a lot of wiggle words, like different. And then Leffall quit in a spectacular fashion, and there were rumors of addiction and mental health issues, and again the criticisms against him skirted right up to being blatantly racist, but public radio listeners are too nice of people, too proper, to think of themselves as being racist. But some of them reveled in the confirmation that a black man just wasn't appropriate for their radio station. There are a lot of people that struggle with hearing a black man speak to them from a place of authority, and someone like Leffall on the radio or seeing HHG at big gaming events brings out the worst in them.

I'm not arguing that conversation is impossible, I'm arguing that the conversation exists in a sexist framework and may also be sexist, intended or not. As such, I do not believe that it is ever a requisite that someone engage in conversation, and that their choice not to engage has no bearing on the validity of their experience. Your argument feels like it's undermining to people's experiences if they aren't willing to engage in that conversation. To imply that a conversation ought to happen is to mandate part of a woman's reaction to something sexist, and that's not something that anyone gets to do. I'm sometimes hesitant to jump into an ongoing conversation (even if it doesn't seem that way!), as I don't want to unintentionally take it different direction or misconstrue someone else's argument simply by participating. I think we know what would happen, and it would just confirm what we can already see. Take a look at how people reacted when I Fucking Love Science was revealed to be the passion project of a woman. She never even pretended to be a man, everyone just assumed a girl wouldn't run the most popular science feed on FB. Then there's digby, an anonymous political blogger who revealed herself to be a woman when she accepted an award in person, and her comments section went into the shitter for awhile afterwards. And here's the story of a professional writer who continues to write under a male pseudonym because of the problems of writing under her real name. And that's not even dipping our toes into the long history of women writing professionally as males because of the sexism baked into our culture. An experiment in the gaming sphere would be interesting, but somehow I doubt that it would end up changing many minds. It might actually have the opposite effect. Shitheads would probably insist that they always thought there was something off about Writer X, how their misogyny sense tingled whenever a new post went up even though it had a man's name on it.

It's worth linking here that Samantha Allen piece, where she argues that the harassment is getting worse over time, that it is more organized, entrenched and easier than ever. The problem isn't even moderation. There's infinite unmoderated space for this toxic shit to brew in. I wonder, is it hard for women to encourage other women to enter gaming as a career (whether its development or journalism)? Would a woman hesitate, even if it's just for a moment, to encourage a bright-eyed 12-year-old from pursuing a gaming career? I meandered in my previous post, but part of my point is that if the discussion is taking place in a male defined space (which is the society we live in), then aren't the experiences of women potentially undervalued or lessened by the conversation itself? Is expecting that conversation potentially sexist in and of itself? Is that getting into the territory of "Please explain sexism/feminism to me because I don't understand it?" By insisting that a person's feelings are the beginning of a conversation, are you insisting that a woman has to deliver a "sales pitch" to justify her experience, not just accepting her experience for what it is?

Please note, parts of this are me thinking out loud through the arguments that have been presented, and don't represent hard and fast opinions I hold, more like me walking myself through a new logic path I hadn't considered before. I'm happy with where I ended up, but not sure I'm satisfied with all the turns it took to get there. This should probably apply to every post I make in this thread. Having read through this, I feel like you're (probably completely unintentionally), doing the internet argument thing where you're really drilling down into one thing so hard that you're losing track of the bigger picture and trying to make very hard, distinct lines in a conversation that is dominated by fuzziness. Women, by and large, do get to define sexism. Because it's them that it happens too. I can recognize inequality. I can recognize mistreatment. But I can't recognize all the subtle and built in elements that create a sexist society, because I'm on the wrong side of the divide. I want to emphasize that I don't want to put words in your mouth, nor do I want to misrepresent what you just wrote. But part of what I see in your critique is an unwillingness to let sexism be solely defined by women. That there has to be a purely objective way to measure it, or that men have to be in on defining and judging what sexism is. Let's take this as an example: You've assumed in this example that the item being described as orange is not orange. But what if it is, and you're wrong. What if, because of your position in society, the way you've been taught, the ways that you've been sculpted to view the world, you see it one way, and that way is wrong. Objective, provable, immutable facts rarely exist. But by assuming in this example that you stand on the side of fact, and the other observer is just seeing their "experience", you've validated your own experience as being the true one, the experience that is not to be questioned. And that element of society is often what helps perpetuate things like sexism, racism, etc. Your color example is particularly interesting, since men are many times more likely to be color blind and it may be more likely that women have the ability to see a wider range of color. I find it interesting that color is the example you went with, since perceived color is almost entirely a subjective social construct that we all agree on, not a fixed, immutable quality of the object in question. It's particularly interesting that you chose orange, since there is some evidence that many women actually perceive the red-orange spectrum better than men. A man literally cannot see orange the same way a woman can. And in the same way, a man literally cannot see sexism the same way that a woman can. If a male dominated society has defined orange, then a woman's experience will always be wrong even though her observation is more accurate. If you insist on defining sexism objectively for a male dominated society, than a woman's experience will again always be wrong for the same reasons. I, in many ways, agree with the first thing I quoted by you in this post. It makes me uncomfortable to define sexism that way. But it makes me equally uncomfortable to say that there is an objective definition of sexism, or that men need to be involved in defining or judging what sexism is.

This is my new favorite thing, followed by all the other things in this thread. Dude, I hope things get better soon.

Finished this last night, turns out I wasn't really all that far from the end once I hit the tweest. Part of me wants to bash the game, and it would be really easy. The story trips all over itself. The gameplay is okay, but starts wearing thin about half way through. But I actually had fun playing through it. It's the rare game for me that hits that B-Movie sweet spot of being bad enough to have fun laughing at it, but competent enough to not be annoying. It's a shame really, there are some bloody good ideas in there. You can see how the game is rather bolted together, with ideas from multiple teams/leads sticking around after the direction has changed. It was obviously at one point built around the idea of a secret black ops organization. But for some reason they blew it up to a several month long global war rampaging across multiple continents, with unknown thousands dead, aliens running around, ships flying all over the place, pure madness. And yet the fiction inside the game never stops pretending that they've got everything under control, no one knows outside XCOM, and they can brush this all under the rug once the war is over. For anyone curious about the ending and the tweest:

Whatever happened to N'Gai Croal? All I can find are vague references to him starting his own consulting company. Cine, I'll give it a watch tomorrow.

That's beautifully nonsensical!

What I love are learning these phrases from other cultures and languages. In Central American Spanish, the equivalent to "I'd give an arm and a leg for that" is "I'd give my right eye for that." And today I learned the Russian equivalent to the "Grass is greener on the other side" is something about how the goat on the other side of the fence is better.

And 10-15 years ago, I would have been willing to draw the line between those two camps. Back then, I'd have loved this song! But the experiences with my family has convinced me that those two camps don't exist, or even if they do, an outside observer is unable to differentiate between them. So any belittling humor at either camp's expense is de facto humor at both camps. And, again, that doesn't even get into the class/race issues that prescriptive grammar humor has baked into it. And again, I think you can make grammar jokes! I think there's a lot of grammar humor that does not put down people who struggle with proper English. Around 1 in 5 people (60+ million people) in the US have a learning disability of some sort, the most common of which is dyslexia. 20+ million people live in deep poverty, and we know how that affects education. I'm no longer comfortable saying that all the people who write poorly online do so because they are lazy or not willing to improve their writing skills. You can leave the discussion if you want, that's always your prerogative. But I'll try to point out what's wrong with a couple of parts: If you can't write in the proper way If you don't know how to conjugate Maybe you flunked that class And maybe now you find That people mock you online That's not making fun of people who write "u r 2 kewl". That's making fun of kids who struggled in school. Those lines are accurate representations of the lives of both my wife and daughter. They failed tests and classes because of their dyslexia and they limit their written online activities because they don't want to be made fun of. I hate these word crimes You really need a Full time proofreader You dumb mouth-breather Well, you should hire Some cunning linguist To help you distinguish What is proper English I am my wife's proofreader. Anytime she needs to send a long email or post anything online that's more than a few sentences long, she asks me to read over it. Because there will be spelling errors. There will be grammar errors. In college, she had to have friends or the English lab read over everything she turned in, just to clean up the routine spelling and grammar errors in her writing. Not because she's dumb, not because she's uneducated. Because her brain does not link sound to symbol in the same way as other people. She was just going into high school when she was finally diagnosed with dyslexia, at a time when schools were still resistant to recognizing dyslexics as just as intelligent as everyone else, they just learned differently. Multiple times they tried to remove her from regular classrooms, "for her own good", which would have resulted in her having a fraction of the education she has now. She went on to earn two degrees from universities, but still remembers a junior high teacher telling her she was dumb and didn't belong in that class because she struggled to read. Her mastery of the written language as an adult would be much better if she hadn't have had teachers and administrators actively sabotaging her education as a kid, because they didn't understand how she learned. The things in that song are accurate representations of what dyslexics deal with, and Weird Al's response to them is that they are dumb, moronic mouthbreathers. The kinds of insults they grew up with, so it's still part of the literal reality of their life (I keep using that word since he made sure the had to get that in there as well).

He is, quite literally, making fun of dyslexics, people with other learning disabilities, people from impoverished backgrounds, etc. Regardless of what his intent was. Take a look at the lyrics, and tell me it's about making fun of the "u r 2 kewl" crowd: I know that there is danger in taking parody too seriously, but I don't see any parody here. It's not parodying Blurred Lines, and Weird Al's history of having a bunch of grammar pet peeves goes back years and looks to be as much him as it is the character of Weird Al. It's the series of insults that take this from being anything remotely funny to insulting and degrading. Because that is literally what people with learning disabilities deal with throughout their lives.

Okay, so I apologize if this is a derail, or puts a damper on people's enjoyment of Weird Al's new album, but I kinda hate Word Crimes. I'm a grammar Nazi, no question. My education is in journalism, and I made my living for awhile off writing and editing, it's hard not to be that way after years of dedication to the written word. But I've lost all taste for humor that depends on mastery of the English language. Between 5 and 17 percent of the population has some degree of dyslexia. It's really hard to know how many people are, because a lot of people are never tested. They learn to compensate on their own, struggle through school, cheat, skate by or drop out. Fuck, the more I think about this the angrier I am at Weird Al. Look at the fucking words he uses: Moron Dumb Mouth Breather You write like a spastic Get out of the gene pool. Try your best to not drool. These are the kinds of words that silence people. The words that keep them from being engaged in class. That keep them off forums. That keep them from posting on Facebook. Interesting, intelligent people with something of value to say choose to stay quiet every single day because of a history of hearing words like that. My wife, my daughter and (more than likely) my father-in-law are all dyslexic. Going through junior high with a dyslexic kid is fucking heart breaking. The level of frustration, anger and humiliation she could feel just because she didn't learn like other kids. My wife doesn't like making text posts to social media because she's still self-conscious about her spelling and grammar, because every once in awhile some clever asshole just has to correct a misspelled word, or grammar, or something. Those are the kinds of things that were said to people I love, the kinds of things said to millions of people because they were born slightly different, because the written word and sound doesn't match up the same to them. It's like making fun of the kid with leg braces because he's not as fast as captain of the track team. Real fucking clever. Go ahead and make fun of the black kid for having big lips next. Maybe work in a Jewish nose joke while you're at it. I mean, those should be fair game as well, right? They were just born that way. And that's not even getting into the territory of the problems with our education system, underfunded and understaffed schools, the problems that inner city schools have, etc. Everything about grammar elitism is rooted in being shitty to other people without bothering to consider why that person is the way they are.

I got to the tweeest last night!

The Kicktraq chart for it tells a story all its own:

I thought it was Zeus that was obsessed with gaming towels? And the dress looks great on you Vosslerlarry!

I will buy this if it is ever released. Because I will be compelled to. Also, he totally just wants the money so he can buy a van to live in:

Thank you for linking this, I did a dramatized reading of it as my wife and I were driving across the state today, had us both in stitches and soaked up a good hour of the drive.

Up to a hundred HIV researchers may have been on that plane headed for an Australian conference. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/aids-conference-says-100-researchers-may-have-been-on-board-crashed-plane

It's like we're on the Internet! I don't like Manny's face, though I love everything else about the GF one.

Abyss Odyssey is still on sale for $9.99 through the Humble Store for the next 3 days if anyone is interested in picking it up. The release date discount is already over on Steam for it. I was also checking out its description, and had no idea of this feature:

Merus, what's your concern with Hyper Light Drifter? I haven't followed it much, but what I have seen had seemed to be rather positive and they aren't that old of a project. I just had to log into KS to remember what all I had even backed over the last couple of years (10, as it turns out). There are only 3 I think were potentially risky. But all of those are ones that I pledged to because I wanted to support the creator, not because I was pre-ordering something. So even if they don't pan out, my intent was to help someone have a shot and that was fulfilled no matter what.

I got giddy with excitement for a moment when I thought that THAT House was in the Criterion Collection. I couldn't wait to see the justification for its inclusion.

OMG, it all makes sense now.

I can't believe you all got through a discussion imagining a time traveling Spelunky, and no one mentioned its inspiration Spelunker. It's obviously not the mind blowing experience that Spelunky would have been in the late 80s, but worth bringing up that Spelunky's direct progenitor is from that era. Edited to add: Spelunker did inspire the same level of obsession of Spelunky for some people. They guy who owned my local video rental store couldn't stop playing it, even though he didn't even get past the first room most of the time. I used my allowance most weeks to rent one game for the weekend. For months every time I went in, if the store was dead, he would be playing Spelunker on the little TV he kept behind the counter.