Bjorn

Happy Birthday AC (slightly belated)!

And therein lies my discomfort with the type of shit that was going on yesterday with James. I know there are valid criticisms of 50 Shades, but the generally gleeful meanness of a lot of it compared with the kind of criticism that other authors get just irks me. I checked out of the Dresden Files forums quite awhile back, as even relatively mild criticism of his bumbling, insulting handling of homosexuality was met with rabid counterattacks.

I'm not sure that matters, even if that hate was just the kind of normal, average hate James or any popular hashtag attracts, I think it's still weird for otherwise progressive people to revel in a dogpile on someone, but particularly a woman. I think we are more or less on the same page here. I've never read them, but the lady has (and seen the movie). She's unabashedly a fan of smut and genre fiction. Her opinion is that the quality is not significantly different than the early works of many other authors in those fields, that the primary difference is the popularity of 50 Shades versus other books. She also didn't find the content particularly out of line with other smut, or even with the writings you might find on BDSM sites. She's pointed out to friends that they have "Loved" short pieces of fiction on FetLife that are more violent and contain less consent than 50 Shades, but then those same people have turned around and lambasted James. Similar to your comparison with violent video games, her experience even with the kink community has been one where people have just set completely different, and seemingly arbitrary, standards for 50 Shades that other media are not held to. The fascinating thing is the variety of directions that the criticisms of James have come from. She has very few allies or defenders outside of her fan base.

Was looking around for some other reactions to this, and found a series of responses from other erotic writers about the spectacle of the Twitter Q&A. I find myself agreeing with a lot of what they had to say:

I didn't do an exacting search, but I did take the hashtag and searched within it for common things like cunt, bitch, whore, fat, ugly, etc., and the kind of hate you expect a woman to get on Twitter is definitely there (along with lots of uses of those words that are not directed at James, but at her fans, or her detractors, or her characters). And lord fucking knows what kinds of DMs people are trying to send her. How big of a percentage is is of the overall volume? Fuck if I know. But it's there, and no one celebrating the snark is talking about that at all. I also have some pretty ambiguous feelings about the hate the Grey books get in general. We can explore that if you'd like, I'm not sure if we've ever tackled that in this thread or not. But I honestly suspect that a lot of the criticism and hate that James gets is both unfair and significantly out of proportion of what similar media creators have received. And I think the reason behind that is that she is a woman (and not conventionally attractive) who is writing about sex for an audience that is mostly middle aged women. I have a lot of skepticism about the criticism she gets.

Tauriq Moosa has dumped Twitter, apparently because of the sustained harassment following his Witcher 3 criticism.

So the Internet, even the progressive thoughtful elements of it, are being all sorts of self-congratulatory about taking the wood to EL James on Twitter. Fine, some people hate the Grey books and they deserve to be criticized. But just under the veneer of witty snark is the typical cesspool of hate that coalesces around any successful woman on Twitter, with the misogynistic slurs and seething hate men have for outspoken women. By celebrating the snark, it seems that people are also silently endorsing the rabid hate that came along with it. Congratulations witty, hipster feminists, for one day you've found something you can ally with the misogynists over. Hating another woman. This shit is all fucking over my Facebook feed, and most of it being posted by the most rabid feminists I know. It's kinda fucked and got me a bit irritated.

It kind of flabbergasts me that this was enough to turn some people off from the game. Pretty sure the vast majority of it just washed over me without me even noticing it. It was a blast in co-op, had a few bullshit moments (the hardest of the platforming sections were a crazy difficulty spike compared to the rest of the game), but was still better than the majority of other similar games you could get on Steam at the time.

That article is kind of a mess. It uses a lot of wiggle words and ambiguity as it tries to address the scope of the issues, which is always a giant red flag that the data doesn't exist, doesn't say what the reporter wanted or the reporter didn't do the research in the first place. It's also just so....both focused and blind. It would be easy to walk away from that article and think that a lot of the racism in America is rolling out of 4chan first, and Reddit second. And that's hardly true. There's an entire culture of racism, and at the top of that heap are powerful politicians and Fox News. Not to say that 4Chan and Reddit don't play a role, but it's way more complex than that and I question the amount of weight and power that article hands to them while not even mentioning the dozens of other powerful sources of hate in our culture.

accidentally

I would generally advise against the next entry (Warriors of the North). It's mostly more of the same, with a few changes, but it's even more bloated than the previous 2 entries. I finally quit when I hit a point that re-populated a couple of maps I had already cleared, forcing me to go back through them. It was just the worst kind of extra bullshit content to extend how long a game takes. Steam says I was over 100 hours when I quit, and I don't know how far from the end I was. I think that includes restarting once fairly early on, and probably some wasted time paused, but still, it's a massive game. I love the KB series, but I wish they were tighter, more focused games.

First spoiler - for now, yes, but many, many hours from now, remember that there is one big ass door here you couldn't open Third spoiler - There are something like almost 20 Fragrant Branches of Yore in the game. There are one or two more branches than there are statues. You'll find them naturally or for sale as you progress through the game, though they will be fairly rare for awhile. I think the pyromancer is the only statue that straight up gates off a big chunk of the game. The rest are blocking secrets, treasure or in one case an optional boss. From this point on, I would always try to keep one on you to depetrify statues that look like they may unlock something interesting like a secret path, but if you have more than one, go ahead and de-petrify stuff that just looks like it's guarding a single treasure (some of the statues are just in front of a chest or body). Some depetrified enemies drop unique loot. A few of the branches are pretty missable, if you've got a ways into the game and you have a bunch of statues you haven't been able to depetrify, you might ask where to look.

Super 3D Noah's Ark got released on Steam. It truly is a sign of the end times.

That sounds about perfect, able to get through it in just one or two evenings.

I've only been skimming this thread to avoid spoilers. How long would you guys say this takes to play through? I'm assuming it's not terribly long (which I consider a big plus if that's the case).

This could so easily end up as J Allard. Please let that happen at some point, Googlebot.

The lady's family has been extra difficult lately, coming very close to basically driving her out of their lives forever, which has been extremely trying. My family has been a dysfunctional mess for a long time, I've never really known any different. With her family, they're the traditional, big, united American family. Sure, there have been problems and stuff, but generally pretty awesome. And then the lady revealed what her next intended career path is and all hell erupted (she's working on opening up a progressive sex toy store, a dream she's had for years). We've already run one successful business for the last decade, so it's not like this is a pipe dream, it's more likely than not to get off the ground, which I think is one of the things that freak the family out. They've attacked her character, choices, business competency, morality, etc. Sooner rather than later, she's also going to come out as bisexual and reveal some aspects of our life that no one in the family knows about, because they are things that are going to end up public anyways because of the store. We know we're facing multiple more rounds of this bullshit with them. And in the bizarro world we live in, my family has been supporting, interested and loving in their reactions.

Mean as fuck is what it is. It's a secret that you luckily randomly stumbled across. If you want to know more, increasingly bigger spoilers:

http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/how-society-treats-consent/?utm_source=nar.al&utm_medium=urlshortener&utm_campaign=FB

I've been thinking about this since I read it last night, and just haven't been able to figure out what to say. It makes me want to reach through the internet and give you a hug. My family has never disowned me, though an early lesson was that you can't trust that family won't stab you in the back, that the family you grow up with is functionally meaningless, except it's never that easy, because they're you're fucking family, so some part of them is always around, either genetically, emotionally, whatever. I still don't know what to say, but you're awesome and deserve better than the family you were born with. I hope you find those people who become your adopted family, the ones you choose, if you already haven't.

There's an art/film festival going on in Lawrence right now, and we watched Bobcat Goldthwait's new documentary Call Me Lucky about his old friend Barry Crimmins, a major figure of the 70s/80s comedy scene around Boston. I knew absolutely nothing about it before going, some friends invited us, and we just went on the spur of the moment. Holy shit, I was not ready for how intense or moving this was. It's not actually about comedy, it's about child abuse and rape. Crimmins' brand of comedy was dark, angry and intensely focused on politics and social justice. This was far outside of the norm in the mid-80s. He spent basically every night chain smoking and drinking in clubs around Boston for more than a decade. Until one night when, instead of a comedy routine, he delivered a monologue detailing that as a young child he had been regularly, brutally raped by his babysitter's stepfather. He then completely shifted gears, became a hermit for awhile before becoming what was probably the first crusader against child porn on the Internet at a time when most people hadn't even heard of the Internet yet. So you know, he pretty graphically recounts the abuse and attacks he suffered. If you can handle that kind of content, I highly recommend watching it.

This is a myth.

Also, people do have to exist in a capitalist society on a day-to-day basis, and one thing marginalized people want is the ability to live day-to-day without being made to feel weird, abnormal or like an outsider. Macy's advertising His&His and Her&Her wedding supplies is the kind of thing that's a step in achieving that, that a gay couple can just go shop for the same wedding crap that a straight couple has and waste ridiculous money on a mementos that will sit on the top shelf of a closet for years to come. It is absolutely capitalizing on this specific moment to get attention, basically turning it into a crass advertising opportunity. Except for those companies who have been solidly pro-gay for quite awhile before now.

One thing that also worries me is that this could go the way of abortion, where pro-choice people looked at Roe v Wade as the end of the fight, and the anti-choicers saw it as the beginning of a war, a war they have continued to wage as the rest of America looks away. Society as a whole has been more accepting of gay couples than it ever has been of abortion, but I expect the rhetoric and legal fights will continue for a long time. Sorry I'm being a bummer about this. I'm thrilled, like everyone else is, but some of the best spoken activists I know really put a reality check on a bunch of this this morning. Also, once again, the dissent on this is fucking weird as hell and fascinating. For at least the second time this year, you have a Justice arguing that the Supreme Court literally does not have the power to do its job. Like, that's literally your job. Courts are facing cases both for and against marriage equality on a yearly basis, and need guidance on the constitutionality of whether same sex marriage is a constitutional right or not. It's your job to decide that. You could use that passage as a rebuttal to every single decision the court makes. Scalia doubled down on disempowering the Court with his part of the dissent, but then also declared that the decision was a violent attempt to overthrow the American government (using the word "putcsch") and represented a threat to American democracy. Letting gay people marry = overthrowing the government. FFS. He also had the audacity to describe the Court as unrepresentative of America. NO FUCKING SHIT ASSHOLE! That applies to a lot more cases than this one though. Thomas rambled about dignity and made comparisons to slavery, internment camps and welfare. I have no idea what he was trying to say. Alito presented what I'm calling the Bigot's Lament, worrying that all gay hating people will now have to restrict themselves to saying hateful things about gay people in private, lest they face social repercussions for being hateful bigots. He also pined for the days when women were property and baby making machines. He also ignores that lesbians exist. All their dissents are just complete fucking trainwrecks.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through this, and I'm floored by how good, rich and complex it is. I can't believe it hasn't done one of those indie things where it totally dominates gaming for awhile because of all the wacky, strange and interesting things that happen. You can't go 10 minutes without something interesting happening. And it's one of those things where I'm hesitant to even talk about the little moments, because I think spoiling those is really spoiling the core joy of the game, all these little discoveries. As an example, the last time I played... The game is has regular misogynistic and homophobic content, with references to rape and sexual assault. But they all feel natural to the world, because this is a world without women, where society has collapsed because the men know that they are the end of the line for humanity and are bitter, angry, afraid and without hope. There are SOOOO many recruitable characters for your party, at least a couple of dozen I would say? Which makes sense, because the game is willing to kill off your allies at the drop of a hat, permanently. It's constantly throwing new characters at you, because you could easily be steadily losing them to attrition. The Painful mode with its limited saves makes a lot more sense to me now that I'm a ways through it. It's one of the few ways to seriously combat save scumming without using a constant auto-save feature.